Posted inBusinessTech

GAAP is so Web 0.0

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 […]

Posted inBusinessMediaTech

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 inBusinessLifestyleTech

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 inBusinessMediaTech

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 inBusinessTech

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 inBusinessMediaTech

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 […]