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Charles Hudson's Weblog

This is my personal website for posting my views on the world of technology and gadgets.

Update - New Job, Returning to Blogging Soon(ish)November 11

I’m finally emerging from a blogging drought / hiatus. I’ve had a ton of things going on, including starting a new job, wrapping up the Virtual Goods Summit 2008, and various other smaller side projects that demand my time. So now for the update…

About a month ago I left Gaia Online to join Serious Business as the VP of Business Development. Serious Business makes social games for the social web - our flagship game is Friends for Sale and we’ve got some other cool stuff cooking. We’ve got a great team of folks here and I’m now working in San Francisco for the first time in my 10+ years here in the Bay Area.

For those of you who have asked, I’m taking a hiatus from conferences and what not until 2009 - I’ll be back with some new events and some great speakers to keep you informed and entertained after the holidays.

I’m knee deep in a few posts that should roll out soon. I’m also likely to clean up my blog layout so that the pages load faster and it’s generally less cluttered.

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Why a LinkedIn Connection is Worth More than a Facebook FriendSeptember 30

A lot of times I read things that say that LinkedIn is a better business because they cater to professionals while Facebook focuses on personal relationships. I think that’s a really superficial way to look at what is, in fact, a much more nuanced difference. At the end of the day, my impression is that LinkedIn can make (potentially) a much greater amount of money from passive / casual users than Facebook can because expanding the network of users more directly feeds into LinkedIn’s revenue model than it does for Facebook. That’s what makes Facebook a potentially better business today IMHO.

So Why Might a Passive LinkedIn Connection be Valuable?
I think that a LinkedIn connection is worth more than a Facebook friend (as measured in terms of value to each company) based on the business model they’ve chose to employ. LinkedIn makes money from both advertisements and its subscription service. Without access to detailed financials, I’m willing to wager that the subscription side of the house generates the majority of the revenue, even after adjusting for the relatively high CPMs they might get given their audience and traffic. Looking at the latest Compete traffic (U.S. only) shows that Facebook gets a lot more traffic than LinkedIn - that’s not surprising to me at all:

Why Isn’t there a Google Version of MobileMe for the iPhone?August 6

As a very proud and happy iPhone 3G owner, I’ve been surprised how much I like the device, especially after owning a Blackberry for 6 years. When I first heard about MobileMe, I was intrigued by the service. I passed at launch, not because I thought there would be tons of hiccups (which there were) but because I don’t use Apple as my primary mail or calendar store and I wasn’t willing to sign up for a service that doesn’t support my main email address and usage patterns. Like a lot of tech folks I know, I live on Gmail and Google Calendar for my personal life and I have found some simple ways to use the Google Sync for Blackberry agent to get it working with my Zimbra work calendar as well.

As a former Googler, I’m perplexed by Google’s absence on the iPhone platform as it pertains to core PIM services. The core requirements for a great iPhone sync app are pretty easy to identify - I’ve taken a stab at doing so below:

-The ability to silently sync PIM data in the background (they’ve demonstrated they can do this with the Google Sync tool for Blackberry - if you’re a Blackberry user who also uses Google Calendar you should download and install it immediately)
-A good web / desktop calendar product (Google Calendar qualifies here)
-A great mail application on the web / desktop (I love Gmail and can’t imagine life without it)
-A great address book management tool

Ah, that’s it I suppose - Google has yet to release

What Will We Do When Growth is No Longer the “In Thing” Anymore? (Web Startups)July 22

I was reading Scoble’s post and another post in Hank Williams’ blog, both of which touch (in different ways) on what’s happening in the world of technology startups. Scoble focuses on the shift in talking more about business and less about tech innovation. Hank talks about why we don’t have any IPOs. As is the case with many posts I write, reading those two posts helped me connect the dots with some of the things I’ve been thinking about lately.

I get this sense that we’re nearing the end of the growth-at-any-cost phase of the most recent epoch of the consumer Internet and some real changes are afoot. It’s part of the symbiotic relationship between investors and companies:

Companies and investors are symbiotic organisms. When investors reward growth, companies want to show growth to get attention and funding. When something else (revenue, profits, etc) becomes what gets rewarded, companies will focus on driving the metric that matters most to investors.

I’ve been wondering whether we’re entering the tail end of the “growth at any cost” or “growth for growth’s sake” period of what’s known as the web 2.0 consumer Internet epoch. Some stats show that the In

Three Blog Posts In Progress - Advice for Generalists, Why Marketplaces Rule, and Why Video is ToughJune 3

I’ve been really busy and sadly derelict in my blogging. I’m working on 3 posts that I’ll preview - if you have thoughts or info to contribute, let me know. Hope to get all three of them out in the next week or so:

1. Are you a “true” or a “new” tech generalist? It’s MBA recruiting season (for those with a more entrepreneurial bent, at least) and a bunch of folks have been pinging me with questions about the right entry-point (role, size of company, etc) for new MBA grads. I’ve done some new thinking about this and have been giving out slightly different answers if you’re a “new generalist” (new to a tech operating role in general) or a “true generalist” (someone who has excelled in generalist roles in tech in the past).

2. Why aren’t more people bemoaning the prospects for online video? If the largest video site on the Internet isn’t projected to do more than $100 million or so in revenue in 2008 with dominant traffic and leadership, shouldn’t we all be really concerned? Check out this brief article on how the head of monetization at YouTube just stepped down.

3. The marketplace is the best business model for the Internet. If you can become a marketplace, you should. Most of the biggest Internet companies out there are marketplaces (Google is an ad marketplace masquerading as a search engine. It’s also like a yellow pages