…That’s one way to get your pitch spam noticed.
Posted in My musings
Posted in Uncategorized
Because you know you’d play a game where Mario got to carry around the gun from Portal. I can see Super Mario Portal destroying gaming records.
via Hacker News
Posted in Uncategorized
Where were you when you learned about Steve Jobs resigning from his CEO role?
I wasn’t at my desk, blogging (otherwise I would have been the one to break the story). No, I was actually on ABC7 Live, the lifestyle show for the ABC Bay Area channel.
Actually, the resignation hit the wires during the middle of my interview, where I was discussing Facebook’s new privacy settings. The host, Lizzie Bermudez, shocked the hell out of me when she said asked me about it. Her producers told her through her earpiece in the middle of our segment.
Right after that, ABC asked me to go on air for their news program to react to resignation news. I’ve embedded that video below.
You have to keep on your toes in television, because you never know what is going to happen. My best wishes to Steve and to the Apple team as they go through this transition and Steve focuses on his personal issues.
Video below:
Update: Here’s my interview with Lizzie Bermudez.
I was sent this video earlier this morning and felt like sharing it. In it, Young Money rapper and singer Nicki Minaj speaks about how if Lil Wayne comes into a photo shoot or a recording session with demands, he is a “boss”, while if she does the same thing, she is a “bitch.”
This double standard applies to practically every industry. There are deep-seeded perception problems of how a man and a woman should act in the workplace. It’s perception problem that affects both men and women.
For what it’s worth, I’m thrilled to hire the “bitch” that gets things done. My entrepreneurial endeavors are better for it.
Posted in My musings
Rob Wheeler at Harvard Business Review has a must-read piece on the health of the Groupon business model.
An excerpt:
“Groupon’s fundamental problem is that it has not yet discovered a viable business model. The company asserts that it will be profitable once it reaches scale but there is little reason to believe this. The financial results of Groupon’s traditional business continue to deteriorate, especially in mature markets, and new ventures such as Groupon Now also have failed to drive profits.
And unlike the very few successful companies that scaled before they were profitable (think Facebook or Amazon), Groupon’s business model does not benefit from significant network effects. The company’s product is not more valuable to users as more people adopt the platform. If anything, the fact that Groupon is witnessing decreasing revenue per merchant and fewer Groupon purchases per subscriber in its maturing markets suggests that growth may actually decrease Groupon’s value to its customers. Yet, Groupon maintains a blind faith that growth will be its salvation. As Pets.com learned in the last bubble, such a strategy works just fine until you run out of other people’s money to spend on growth.”
Being compared to Pets.com? Ouch.
I’ll be honest: I’m rooting for Groupon. Its success or failure will define the Chicago tech scene for years to come, and Chicago is my home city. But right now, I just can’t find the business model.
Posted in Tech
