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{ Monthly Archives } January 2009

Three videos: youth marketing, growing up online, and tying it all together

Two of my favorite sources of web video content are the PBS documentary series Frontline and the unparalleled TED conference videos. This morning, I found myself watching a Frontline report from 2001 called “The Merchants of Cool” about marketing to youth and the beginnings of guerilla marketing.  It’s a great look inside the big media [...]

Social network serendipity

An amazing thing is about to happen – Barack Obama’s inauguration. But a (much smaller) amazing thing just happened to me and perhaps to millions of other Facebook/CNN users. I logged into CNN to watch some live coverage of the Obama inauration….and without doing anything, was logged in automatically to the CNN/Facebook joint inauguration experience. [...]

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The Economist gets it right again

I don’t really have enough time to blog today, but I did notice this article from the Economist, and I think its important enough to post here. The article is particularly timely given the extensive coverage of the drop in US venture funding in the fourth quarter, the generally dismal mood among Israeli VCs, and [...]

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The Xobni breakthrough

  Occasionally, a company will come along with a product that shows us the way forward and prepares a market for a change that is coming. I think Xobni is one of those companies. Why? Because our social interactions on e-mail, social networks, twitter, IM, and mobile phones are rich with data that has yet [...]

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Music sales down 14%, digital track sales up 27%

eMarketer just published some data on US music industry sales from a Nielsen press release. The catalyst was Apple’s overdue announcement that it is shifting to a DRM-free model. Overall album sales are declining by 14%. Some of this is the economy, but most of it is a continuation of a trend that has been [...]

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Ten minutes and one hour on the financial crisis

If you have ten minutes, read Michael Lewis’ fantastic piece from the New York Times today. If you have an hour, listen to this straight-forward episode of This American Life that explains some of the roots of the crisis. I promise its actually quite easy to follow and well worth the time – since it [...]

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Access to music is a commodity. Now what?

Where were you when you first discovered that you could hear (almost) any song on demand for free on YouTube? (And if you haven’t discovered this, where have you been?) From Jackie Wilson to Lady Ga Ga, it’s all pretty much there on YouTube for the taking. Services like MixTube, iPooq, and Veewow allow you [...]

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On the difference between media and content

If content is what you’re consuming; media is where/how you’re consuming it.  Lots of start-ups I’m meeting are taking content from one medium and porting it to another. But is content fungible? Can it be effectively moved from one medium to another? And will it gain or lose value as it moves? Open APIs and [...]

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