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Startup Mentality

What keeps me up at night

Finally, a way for us schmucks to make money in social media!July 9

Verbs 2.0 — tweeting, digging, blogging, emailing (ok, that one is 1.0) — can now make you some extra change for doing what you do already. All you need to get is a Google AdSense account and add it to your MessageDance profile. Send YouTube videos, Songza songs, Digg articles, Amazon product recs, and emails to Twitter (and any of your other social networks) and when people click through to your message detail on MessageDance.com, your AdSense ads will show on the right side bar. The impressions and clicks are all yours!

Imagine, when you tweet about how you just ate a bowl of Wheaties for breakfast, you might make someone realize it would be cool to order a box of Wheaties with their face on the cover. And you”ll make some money off that weirdness (maybe $0.02, but hey it adds up).

But seriously, why not? Set it up once and see what happens. We at MessageDance are constantly surprised by the traffic we get on our users content. It”s your content, so someone should make money off of it. Why not you?

Here”s how you set it up.

A backseat economist’s view on how the Oil Bubble will burstJune 23

I’ve been thinking a lot about oil lately, not surprisingly. I’m convinced its price is approaching bubble status but based on the reasons for its rise, it may not have quite reached the point of popping. Some analysis has almost 50% of oil’s price increase solely based on the depreciation of the dollar, so this among other reasons, there are fundamental reasons for a price rise independent of speculation. This said, bubbles are believed to be psychological creations and a seminal event typically causes it to burst with consumer and investment sentiment turning on a dime. I’m looking for this event now.

I remember the moment the Internet Bubble of the late 90’s burst. It started with an unlikely player — Microsoft. When a finding-of-fact came against them in their anti-trust case, it sparked a sell-off in the NASDAQ that didn’t stop for a couple of years. Microsoft wasn’t a high-flying dot-com, but being tied to technology in general, investors ran for the hills when it appeared tha

I clicked on a web ad today!June 13

It's probably been over two years, but I actually clicked on one today. Because Gmail thinks I'm a spammer, I've been getting tons of delivery failure messages. Gmail served up an ad for help (for a price) for getting email accounts off spamming blacklists. Geez, talk about a perfect revenue scheme for Google. Practically shut down a user's account and then serve an ad for a vendor to help you fix it. Righteous business model. Not evil?

Despite Google's AdSense victory over me today, it has been a very, very long time since I clicked on an ad. Honestly, when was the last time you clicked on AdSense or a banner ad with the intention of possibly buying something? Seems to me that today's web ads (read adwords/adsense) could be built on a house of cards. I worked at Ask Jeeves when the banner ad business collapsed. It wasn't pretty — and it wasn't until Google devised contextual ads (with a large enough base of ads to allow specific targeting) that online ads became (a very good) business again. However, revenue for online ads is declining again, signaling the need for a disruptive ad model to spur new and robust growth.

The next generation of ad products will not only need to be contextual and targeted, but will n

Apple Store is GeniusMay 30

I will admit I thought the Apple Store was a bad idea when they first opened. I saw them going into high-end shopping centers like the store in Walnut Creek, CA located next door to a Tiffany store. How could a traditionally low-margin business justify expensive-as-hell retail locations? I figured Apple expected these to be just cost-of-sale demo centers / brand-builders and never expect the stores to be profitable. Again, I admit I was wrong. When Apple choses a location, they do so with the requirement that it be profitable within a year.

“It was very simple. The Mac faithful will drive to a destination, right? They’ll drive somewhere special just to do that. But people who own Windows - we want to convert them to Mac. They will not drive somewhere special. They don’t think they want a Mac. They will not take the risk of a 20-minute drive in case they don’t like it. But if we put our store in a mall or on a street that they’re walking by, and we reduce that risk from a 20-minute drive to 20 footsteps, then they’re more likely to go in because there’s really no risk. So we decided to put our stores in high-traffic locations. And it works.” - Steve Jobs

The aspect of the stores I believe to be the

I don’t need a special UI for my iPhone, thanksMay 23

With the Safari browser and the iPhone’s sweet touch screen functionality, I can look at any web page and do what I would do on a laptop. Granted, browsing on the AT&T Edge network can try your patience, but when connected to wi-fi (and soon 3G), the browsing speed is perfectly reasonable.

So, it bothers me somewhat when I land on a site and they serve up an “optimized” UI for mobile devices (try MSNBC from your phone). Typically, there is less functionality available to you and in the MSNBC’s case, it won’t let you switch to the standard UI from a mobile device. I have the same issue with Twitter where the mobile UI doesn’t have the functions and details seen on the standard UI such as Reply, Delete, and how it was sent (Twirl, MessageDance, etc.).

If I choose the “Standard” UI option for Twitter on my iPhone, it works perfectly fine. Sure, maybe it’s small but two quick taps on the screen and it zooms in.

There was a lot of buzz yesterday about the availability of FF to Go which is an optimized FriendFeed UI for mobile devices. It lacks several of the features found in the standard UI, most notably search. Stan