Markets with network effects tend to have explosive growth, and part of the excitement driving LinkedIn’s IPO last week comes from investors associating social media with that principle. But assessing the competitive positions of social media companies depends on knowing which network effects are actually present. Read More »
Tech
Intel Capital is loading up on its social gaming bet with a new investment in top Facebook game developer CrowdStar, which is taking $23 million in its first major funding round. The investment underscores the growing momentum in social gaming as it expands to mobile devices.… Read More »
Mark Zuckerberg gets a lot of attention for founding Facebook, but if it were up to him, his employees would be joining him on more of the magazine covers. At a recent conference, Zuckerberg said lavishing credit on a successful company’s founder is a big mistake. Read More »
No one knows what the future– and the NYSE–have in store for LinkedIn following its debut. But venture capitalists like Benchmark Capital’s Bill Gurley believe the $9 billion IPO will finally trigger the end of Silicon Valley’s long-running apathy toward IPO’s–aka, “The Zuckerberg Effect.” Read More »
LinkedIn went public on Thursday in one of the most eagerly-awaited stock offerings in years, and the shares doubled almost instantly, giving the company a market value of more than $9-billion. While the service is clearly a good business, is it really worth $9 billion? Read More »
New York Times executive editor Bill Keller says he is concerned that Twitter is decreasing our attention spans and generally making us stupid — but he misses the crucial point that Twitter and other social media are just tools, and that their benefits outweigh their disadvantages. Read More »
The Drudge Report drives more traffic to news sites than Facebook and Twitter combined, according to a Pew Research Center report. Maybe it’s time to acknowledge Matt Drudge not only as a powerful media presence but also as a great web entrepreneur. Read More »
Just like the media industry, the legal system is being disrupted by social media and the democratization of information distribution — in the latest example, a British court has issued an injunction that bans any mention of the details of a case on Twitter or Facebook. Read More »
The American Society of News Editors has come out with a report looking at social-media policies at major media organizations, and while there is some positive advice, the report continues to tell media outlets that journalists should not be human beings when they are online. Read More »
Large companies hiring PR firms to plant negative stories about their competitors isn’t a new phenomenon, but Facebook’s attempt to do this about Google and privacy isn’t just ironic, it’s a sign of how scared the social network really is about competition from the web giant. Read More »
Applications represent a gigantic leap forward in terms of mobile functionality. They have opened up new ways of accessing data, connecting to services, and interacting with people. Why, though, are mobile applications so dumb as to what is going on in the rest of your phone? Read More »
Remember when social media was going to reinvent the entertainment business? Though past efforts made little headway in the social-entertainment space, announcements from Warner Home Entertainment and News Corp. suggest the space is far from dead. Here’s what companies looking to capitalize on it can learn. Read More »
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