I’m continually surprised at how much interest exists for the quarterly financial results of the online tech powerhouses such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!, as if they’re any indication of value created by the business during those three months. It’s fairly clear to me that AOL and Yahoo! are managing while spending an awful lot […]
Llew Claasen
Llew is the CEO of KeyJam.net, which specialises in corporate training that builds in-house web-commerce competencies and consults around contextualising developments in the web environment and its associated technologies. He was co-founder, head of online marketing and COO of search-engine marketing specialists incuBeta.com. He is currently completing the final dissertation portion of a master's in management of technology and innovation, MSc (MOTI), and keeps his regular blog at www.KeyJam.net.
Posted inBusiness, Lifestyle, Tech
Give me the info, but make it quick
I’ve developed a curious reading disorder and I’ve established that I’m not alone. I hardly read in the strictest sense any longer. I’m stretching if I have to read a piece of more than 500 words without getting to the point. I ignore articles that have vague headlines. Ninety percent of my knowledge of current […]
Posted inBusiness, Lifestyle, Media, Tech
Unpredictions for the SA web in 2008
It’s quite possible that I’m no good at short-term industry predictions and that this post is a ruse to avoid them, but my built-in BS filter (at least partially informed by a healthy serving of Nassim Taleb and Phil Rozenzweig) tells me that if you took a big enough sample of the informed and considered […]
Posted inBusiness, Media, Tech
The cause of the Web 2.0 bubble
Web techies are lazy when it comes to considering the business aspects of their latest Web 2.0 ideas. They spend even less time developing creative revenue models when they see that web businesses with little real revenue can be valued at $15-billion. When Adwords, Google’s paid search-engine advertising program, launched at the beginning of 2003, […]
Posted inBusiness, Media, Tech
Facebook 2: The search engine is coming
It’s tough being Mark Zuckerberg. A few weeks ago, you had your competitors running scared and Microsoft desperately hung on to the front of the queue to do a deal with you that, by some estimates, values your company at $15-billion. Unfortunately, you face these nasty rumours that the clickthrough rate for Facebook display advertising […]
Posted inBusiness, Lifestyle, Media, Tech
What is the meaning of Facebook?
There comes a time in a man’s life when biting another Zombie chump, waiting four days for your growing gift to turn into a money tree or refreshing the page so that you get status updates in your news feed doesn’t get you excited any more. It’s depressing to be so bored with Facebook that […]
Posted inBusiness, Lifestyle, Tech
Google’s Android: About time mobile service providers woke up
My recent mobile internet access experiences with MTN remind me of the internet in South Africa circa 1996: download speeds can barely handle text pages, access can bankrupt you, browsers can’t display pages correctly and my phone is desperately seeking a “blue screen of death” alternative to just plain freeze-reboot. I recently read that both […]
Posted inBusiness, Media, Tech
Web publishing goes (desk)topless
One of my friend Vinny Lingham‘s* latest projects, a revolutionary, browser-based, wysiwyg website builder, Synthasite, launched into beta this week (November 5). I had the good fortune of being able to play around with the latest incarnation just before its public release and I found it simple to use and quite addictive actually. Although all […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics, Tech
New monopoly card for bloggers: No-Libel, Pass Begin, Collect $200
An important international company in the web space recently discovered one of my blog posts and contacted me to tell me that I jeopardised the potential for future cooperation with it by being critical of it in my posts. I didn’t think I was being critical of the company, but it didn’t think so. This […]
Posted inBusiness, Tech
The $15-billion Facebook fallacy
I’m amused by the sniggering in the blogosphere at Microsoft collecting the scraps from the Facebook table when it acquired the rights to sell the platform’s remnant advertising worldwide; ie, that inventory that Facebook doesn’t want to sell itself. Others have scowled at the other part of the transaction: the $15-billion valuation attached to Facebook […]
Posted inBusiness, Media, Tech
eBay: How big can you go?
eBay is a notoriously dominant property in the online auction/marketplaces space, where the market value of an item is uncertain. The most significant element of this dominance is attributed to network effects in its marketplace business. In eBay’s business, the money side of the platform is the marketplace sellers and the subsidy side is the […]
Posted inBusiness, Media, Tech
Google’s cash machine: How sustainable is it really?
Barriers to entry have typically been used by traditional offline players to deter entry into an industry. This has the effect of creating a business environment where healthy profits and sometimes even monopolistic (economic) profits are possible. In the online space, there are few of these barriers to entry, but there is something else that […]