Many startups use venture debt to extend their runway beyond the capital that they raised from venture capital investments directly into the company. David Hornik wrote a good overview of venture debt a few years ago, all of which is still relevant today. Some things have changed since then however. [...]
Amazon announced Thursday that its Elastic Block Store (EBS) feature is now available to all of its EC2 Web service customers. This is a big deal. The move rounds out Amazon's offering and provides a full storage suite that is delivered as a service. S3 and EC2 previously combined to [...]
Yesterday's WSJ noted that retailers and manufacturers were increasingly selling their branded virtual goods inside virtual worlds: Retailer Kohl's Corp. this month launched a new line of apparel, but the plaid skirts and printed T-shirts won't be sold in its 957 stores. Instead, it's selling them on Stardoll.com, a virtual [...]
For a long time I've been calling for standards in social media advertising. Today if an advertiser wants to make a social media buy across multiple social sites, they will need to build different creative for each of the different social media advertising products on each of the major companies, [...]
Worlds in Motion interviews Vindicia's Gene Hoffman about the science of MMO fraud, but the lessons apply to any virtual goods business. Hoffman notes: The first question about MMO fraud is whether there is a real currency resale market. If there is a way to create cash directly or over [...]
Paid Content summarizes some key comments from the NewsCorp earnings call yesterday: - On MySpace: “We’re actually quite pleased with the momentum at MySpace… (for Q1) we’re pacing well against internal expectations.” He noted a “dramatic” increase in branded display advertising, with several categories up over 100 percent year over [...]
In the past I've written about encapsulating your business plan for potential investors in an executive summary, or even more succinctly as a high concept startup pitch. This is helpful for communicating to angel investors and VCs, but it doesn't help you communicate to new and potential users of your [...]
A recent post on KZero, asks, "Will luxury brands drive the growth of virtual goods?": … tweens and teens (KT&T) will play a big part in the growth. This group has ‘less of an issue’ paying real money for virtual goods - their decision-making process does not take into account [...]
Inside Facebook has a good post about how to not screw up your A:B testing that is a useful reminder about how many tests you need to run before you know that the results are statistically significant. The author notes: How many [tests] do we need to declare a statistically [...]
Monitor110 recently shut down after raising $20m over three rounds. One of the co-founders wrote a portmortem of Monitor110, highlighting 7 mistakes that the company made: 1. The lack of a single, "the buck stops here" leader until too late in the game 2. No separation between the technology organization [...]
There has been much handwringing about how silly facebook apps are, and how it would be so much better if they were more useful. But Facebook users have voted with their mouse buttons, as the O'Reilly report in May showed: According to a Medialets survey, it seems that iPhone users [...]
The NY Times has a great article this Sunday about how habits may be good for you. It is ostensibly about how Dr Val Curtis turned to Proctor and Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive and Unilever to help create a new habit in Ghana, washing hands with soap, thereby reducing the death rate [...]
