Zatz Not Funny! writes about a new partnership between Domino’s and TiVo. Late last night, broadband-connected TiVo Series2/3/HD owners may have stumbled upon the new Domino’s widget. While we first caught wind of this in regards to the Austrailian TiVo service, US TiVo subscribers are first to tap into Domino’s online ordering system – requesting [...]
Archives for Product Management
Smaller Teams Work – Amen to That
37signals wrote “Big business learning that smaller teams can rekindle the creative spark.” The message: Keep teams small, give employees freedom and a sense of ownership, don’t focus too much on the competition, create a culture of experimentation, and use technology to enable remote teams. They quoted the NY Times as saying: By breaking huge [...]
Early Adopters are not the Mass Market
Dare Obasanjo posted a great article on how “Early Adopters are not the Mass Market”. If you work in the technology industry it pays to be familiar with the ideas from Geoffrey Moore’s insightful book Crossing the Chasm. In the book he takes a look at the classic marketing bell curve that segments customers into [...]
This Was Dumb When It Was Cue Cat and It’s Dumb Now
The Kelsey Group wrote about something that was best left dead: the CueCat. In Quick Response Bar Codes Invade Yellow Pages the concept is that small bar codes can be inserted into print ads and scanned by mobile phones to link users to information over the Internet. The problem is that this has been tried [...]
“Conscious Incompetence”
The Slow Leadership blog has a great post on “Conscious Incompetence.” If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly first. In the real world, doing something new almost always means doing it poorly the first few times. Improvising never produces a polished result, but it’s nearly always the first step towards creating something [...]
Where are you TiVo? Please Talk to Opera and Get with the Sofa Web
Om Malik at GigaOM discusses the new game consoles and the contribution they might make to Internet browsing. He refers to it as the “sofa web.” It’s good reading. He also discusses how Opera has been good at recognizing opportunities in the mobile market and is now going after the game console market. As much as I [...]
Offline Behavior Drives Online Usage – Lessons for Business Development
Startup Review wrote a great case study on Facebook. The main takeaway for me is that offline behavior drives online usage. Other examples of community sites that fit this bill are Gay.com, BlackPlanet.com, and iVillage, all of which are successful sites that were created to serve an existing community. They were not communities created online from [...]
Business Development 2.0 is BS 1.0
Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures wrote a piece about Business Development 2.0 which he pretty much defines as biz dev via APIs. It sounds good, but isn’t a viable long-term solution. Using the strategy put forth by the author, a start-up would be building a business around content and traffic from third parties and monetizing everything via [...]
Verizon SuperPages.com Rolls Out Pay for Calls
It’s a sweet product and I’m proud to have worked on it. It has a unique distribution mechanism – both online and offline. The ads are also integrated with SuperPages’ PPC ads which means that it launched with significant distribution built in. Very cool.
Randy Weber is a 16-year Internet marketing veteran and MBA specializing in business development and product management based in San Francisco...
