We are about to witness the loud noise and mess that happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object.
The irresistible force is personalization. This is the key to productivity. Personalization technology cuts through the clutter and saves time. The firm that delivers personalized content sits at the top of the attention economy…

There is renewed interest in bootstrapping, if only because lower costs now make this a bit easier and younger entrepreneurs can live more cheaply. Here then is my 10 point bootstrapping primer:
1. It does NOT mean self-funded. The real bootstrappers put in peanuts of their own money. Bootstrapping means funding with customer revenues.
2…

For decades financiers of one type or another have been the “Masters of the Universe”. People who, as Bob Dylan once sang, “make the rules, for the wise men and the fools”.
In the 1970’s, with stagflation and oil crises, it was the commodities traders who ruled the roost. As the 1980s kicked in, the forex traders had…

The Web 2.0 world is looking increasingly like a giant petri dish. There are so many experiments, so much innovation and, as yet, relatively little real revenue. Within this petri dish are a few ideas that will turn into billions of dollars, at which point we will all say “why didn’t I think of that”? There are also lots of “what…

As Dilbert knows, everything is a platform today. The trouble is, some very smart people are trying to figure out the definition of what makes a platform. Although a lot of the discussion has been technical, perhaps the best definition of a successful platform is that it makes real money for their ‚Äúcommunity‚Ä?.
According to a 2005 survey…

Following my post on types of Social Networking sites, I saw a NYT article about sites targeting older people. Two days after that, Techrunch posted an article about massive layoffs at Eons, one of the Baby Boomer sites mentioned in the NYT article. Eons was trying to preserve some of the $32m they’ve raised.
I am over 50, so I looked at Eons…

The desire to network is as old as humanity and online social networking sites do seem to solve
a need that is different from simply using email, chat and blogging tools separately. However the idea that there will be one big social network platform is the purest form of baloney. The Internet is the platform. Period, end of story. The Facebook…

The old joke was that your start-up needed to be no more than one tank of gas away from Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley. Now VCs have to set up shop in Israel, India and other far away places that will do serious damage to their carbon footprint.
This is a significant change. Innovation is going global. Like everything else online, the power is…