Tag: business models
Don’t Strip-Mine The Sky
More thoughts on what Bluesky’s ultimate business model could look like: A modern take on Craigslist, a company that never exploited its users.
Trip’s Big Interactive Reset
Why 3DO’s true innovation wasn’t its early 3D hardware, but its business model—a model that perfectly matches its founder’s philosophy.
Bye Bye, Buffet?
The all-you-can-eat buffet is unlikely to survive the pandemic in its current form—in part because sanitation already made it somewhat risky.
The Backlink Economy
Businesses want to show up on the front page of a specific search term, and they’re willing to annoy you to get a backlink from you. Please never do this.
The Infomercial Game
From Kevin Trudeau to Miss Cleo, infomercial schemes of the past 40 years have a lot in common with the “dark patterns” of the modern-day app economy.
Delivered To Your Door
The internet made monthly subscription boxes cool, but the roots of this business model can be found in decisions made in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Being called to account: tax considerations for UK-based collectively-funded open access publishers
Making billions of dollars from the federated social web
Diaspora was pretty exciting. A Kickstarter campaign that promised it all: a platform created "for everyone to have full control over their data and to empower people in to become responsible, secure, and social Internet dwellers". They raised over $200,000, which at the time was the largest Kickstarter funding round ever. Neat! Yesterday, Diaspora announced that they were becoming a community project. That means that the wider open source community will be responsible for its direction; the or
Living sustainably in a digital society: is it even possible?
I had an interesting conversation about sustainable lifestyles on Twitter this morning. I believe that climate change is a major threat to our planet, and that we're in danger of reaching a tipping point beyond which there is no return. More generally, because my personal mission statement is to have a positive impact on the world, I'm conscious that I don't want to make an unsustainable amount of waste. Which of course, I do. Although I try to be a good citizen - I consume locally-produced pr
Some lessons from the startups at TechCrunch Disrupt
Be clear. Know what you're selling. Our backdrop set it out plainly: "Send video fast. Make video easy." More than a few journalists said we had the best poster of the day. Build value. If your company allows other companies to build value more efficiently, you're onto a winner. Mostly this has meant creating advertising of one kind or another - display ads, branded video pages, and so on. (The best way to get rich in a gold rush is to sell shovels. Just saying.) Be gorgeous. A slick user inte
Patronism and monetizing the social web
This post is adapted from something I wrote on Google+. There are more comments over there; also see Evan Promodou's riff on the same idea. Google+'s combination of streams and circles works. So here's something I've been mulling over for a while: I really like Patronism's central idea. Rather than buying an album, you subscribe to an artist's feed, and get access to songs, photos etc as they're produced. That makes a lot more sense to me as a 21st century model for music. I also follow a lot
Why you should not build an open source startup
Teambox's post about why you should build an open source startup is doing the rounds right now. It's a great piece, but I thought I'd reply with a few reasons why you might want to think long and hard about it: * Free (as in speech) software has an accounting value of $0. * Professional services typically don't substantially capture value in a company. Don't sell one-to-one services; sell something you can replicate and grow. * Open source ecosystem companies - i.e., firms that use your soft
Making money with open source
If you’re going to do something, do it well I’ve been thinking a lot lately about open source business models. The project I’m most often associated with, Elgg, developed a business some two years after the project itself was founded. Now that I’m considering a new project, I’m exploring what it might mean to create an open source model that has a business model baked in from day one. Not as a loss leader or the engine for a consultancy company, but as the core of a scalable business that turns
Build what you know
I wrote a piece for 24 Ways To Start, the entrepreneur’s advent calendar: The web isn’t just a platform; nor is it a market. It’s a movement. Think of the success stories of the past five years: Twitter, Facebook, Google, GroupOn. Twitter and Facebook changed the way people communicate and made social networking mainstream (Mark Zuckerberg was even just named Time’s Person of the Year for 2010). Google makes it its mission to make the world’s information accessible to all. GroupOn, meanwhile, g
Delicious: not so tasty now
He's dead, Dave. Everybody's dead. Everybody is dead, Dave. It’s the end of the road: Delicious, one of the darlings of the “Web 2.0” movement, is being shelved. The social bookmarking site was famous for its simple interface, which introduced tags and cloud services to the world, not to mention creative use of available domain names, bookmarklets and social networking for a purpose. Its creator, Joshua Schachter, is a smart guy whose opinions about software design are worth taking seriously.
Launch48 Edinburgh: an inspiring start
I was invited to attend Launch48 Edinburgh as both a speaker and a mentor, and can’t imagine a more inspiring way to spend a weekend. My talk – on creating a startup from scratch with no budget and a two-person team, and the lessons I’ve taken away from that experience – was recorded, and I’ll try and post it here when it appears online. However, what I really want to talk about is the event itself, and the incredible teams that participated. Launch48 has a simple, if daunting, premise: build a
File sharing and digital business models
There were some great comments on this weekend’s guest post for Media140 about Lily Allen and sharing, so I’ve written a follow-up, exploring some ideas (and the arguments left in the comments) in a little more detail. However, after at least a decade without tangible participation from the media industries, illegal file sharing has become mainstream. Companies, rights holders, device manufacturers and digital distributors have been engaged in difficult and important conversations for that time