The New York Times has an article about eBay’s struggle to reinvigorate their stock price. They focus on John Donahoe, president of one of eBay’s most important divisions, and gives a sampling of what an online company needs to do move the needle. It involves a relentless focus on customer experience. An interesting example: He… Continue reading A Relentless Focus on Customer Experience
Month: February 2007
Your Online Identity
OpenID is a ‘framework’ that is gaining traction online, allowing people to carry a single online identity across the web. Digg just announced that they are adopting OpenID. This is an area to watch as our offline lives become more integrated in our online lives.
A Newspaper Thrives Online
The International Herald Tribune and the New York Times each report on one Norwegian newspaper that is thriving in the new publishing world: No profit warnings here: Earnings rose 28 percent in the fourth quarter. Online operations will generate about 20 percent of the company’s revenue this year… Perhaps more important, at least for investors,… Continue reading A Newspaper Thrives Online
Yahoo! Pipes: A New Way to Manipulate the Web
Alex Iskold and Richard MacManus describe Yahoo! Pipes as “the first GUI builder for the biggest database in the world, the Web iself. It empowers developers to remix the building blocks of the web in a whole new way. And it does it with remarkable simplicity.” If you haven’t checked out Pipes yet, I urge… Continue reading Yahoo! Pipes: A New Way to Manipulate the Web
What the ‘Social Web’ Thinks of You
Remember how concerned you were in high school about what people thought of you? Well, Read/Write Web checks out what the ‘social web’ thinks of them, by checking out their appreances on Digg, del.icio.us, and their own comments. An interesting how-to guide, with their conclusion: “Using social information to measure user information is an effective… Continue reading What the ‘Social Web’ Thinks of You
Improvements to Alexa
The free traffic ranking tool Alexa has made some improvements to their system: Addition of geography of users. A site’s traffic rank in other countries. Modification to their ‘reach’ data.
Working for Free: User-Generated Media
As user-generated media becomes a prime force in the cultural and business worlds, Time asks ‘how much work will people will do for free?’ The power of volunteer-generated media has hit some important milestones: “Argue about its inaccuracies all you want, but the volunteer-authored online encyclopedia is on its way to becoming (if it isn’t… Continue reading Working for Free: User-Generated Media
Where New Ideas Come From
Robert Scoble has an interesting post about how innovation happens. His theory, is that it doens’t happen much within established companies – that they prefer to have others test it and establish it’s value first. “Big companies (even ones like Google) will rarely execute on totally novel new ideas. Why? Committees and not invented here… Continue reading Where New Ideas Come From
Meet the New Media Moguls
The Wall Street Journal profiles the “users” behind sites such as Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, and StumbleUpon, who help decide what is popular online. “The opinions of these key users have implications for advertisers shelling out money for Internet ads, trend watchers trying to understand what’s cool among young people, and companies whose products or services… Continue reading Meet the New Media Moguls
Sooner Than You Thought: The Death of Print
IDG is no longer a print media company. The state of things, according to IDG SVP of Online Colin Crawford: “The brutal reality that we’re facing today is the costly process of dismantling and replacing legacy operations and cultures and business models with ones with new and yet to be fully proven business models. However,… Continue reading Sooner Than You Thought: The Death of Print