internet
The Dawn of the Enterprise Nomadic Workforce - Work from wherever, whenever
"The leaner you are, the easier it is to change. The more massive an object, the more energy is required to change its direction. It's as true in the business world as it is in the physical world." - 37 Signals
“Competitive Advantage will shift to companies that can master the art of breaking down and recomposing tasks” – McKinsey Quarterly, 8 Business Trends to Watch, Dec 2007
Some buzzwords....
Video conferencing, Telecommuting, Teleconferencing, Virtual Worlds, Social Networking, Wireless Metropolitan Area Networks, Micro blogging, Locational Awareness, Web 2.0, Crowd Sourcing, Software as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service, Friend Feed, Content Syndication and RSS Feeds, Visual Application Development, Open Standards Based APIs, Cloud Computing, Facebook Applications. The list goes on.
The list of recently hyped up innovations is long, wide and converging at an increasing rate. But what do they all mean? Where are they taking us?
FINALLY: Amazon Web Services get Service Level Agreements
Previously, I blogged about the Pros & Cons of the Pay Amazon Web services.
Basically, the biggest con was a lack of service level agreement (SLA). "How can a third party seriously build a profitable application or service on top of something that has no uptime guarantee or refund consequence for severe outages?"
I am now happy to have learned, that Amazon (as of October 1st, 2007) does provide service level agreements for their S3 storage service, which was designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
A big pat on the back for Jeff Bezos. Web companies can now leverage Amazon's offerings with piece of mind.
Heck, it feels good to sleep at night.
Exit Strategy: 2 ways to sell your web application without using ebay
Typically, selling a small web 2.0 startup involved using eBay and alot of promotion (And hopeful coverage by techcrunch and mashable). However, there are a few other options to consider before you go the 7-day auction route.
This is a great news for entrepreneurs, who are finding it easier than ever to sell off failed startups. Many, get enough money to get back their original investment (Which in the web 2.0 world, is typically small).
- web2.0forsale.com
This new website, launched by TechCrunch regular Steve Poland, is the place to buy and sell web 2.0 websites.Web 2.0 will likely welcome this new site with open arms, since other marketplaces do not target this niche directly.
Paid blogging critiqued - Reviewing ReviewMe.com
At first glance, ReviewMe.com looks like a great service. Pay reputable bloggers to post about your product or service and receive feedback good or bad. I decided to take ReviewMe.com for a spin as an advertiser and see if it was worth the dollars.
I decided to purchase some blogging reviews for my fitness site gimme20.com. I selected a number of fitness related blogs with reasonably high PageRanks and Alexa rankings. After all, product feedback only goes so far: It is nice to get a quality link sometimes.
Two fitness blogs responded to my request and decided to write articles on Gimme20.com. The first blog, Self Help Daily, wrote an excellent blog post, outlining negative and positives about our product. The article appeared on the front page (where latest posts usually do), and could easily be found by browsing the helpful menus in the right sidebar.
Tim O'Reilly's Economics of Online Advertising
Tim O'Reilly recently posted an article about the Economics of Online Advertising. Immediately, he cites a Mark Jacobsen article which discusses Three ways to build an online media business to $50m in revenue. Do you really need that much?
Here is the math:
* At the $1 RPM (CPM/CPA/CPC) level achieved by most general sites, you need 4 billion page views/month.
* At the $5 RPM level achieved by demographically targeted sites, you need 800 million/month.
* At the $20 RPM level achieved by highly targeted sites, you need 200 million/month.
Most sites can hope to roll in within the $1 through $5 range. So these are scary figures to get to $50m. (Although, revenue isn't that important. I could get $50m revenue easily enough by selling dollars for 99 cents).
