Sam Altman, tomorrow’s Mark Zuckerberg?
Over $5 billion jump in valuation in one month, even though none of their highest valued investments has yet had an exit? At this rate, Sam’s startup club may start putting Facebook to shame
The contest for your living room gathers Steam
Apple TV, Google TV and let’s not forget Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft or Sony. Here at the iij, our money is on someone else.
Humanoid, moi? We’re all Stepford wives now
It’s 1996: students experiment with being cyborgs. That strange circuitry covering one eye? People imagine they’re disabled, offer them chairs. Nowadays you’d need to pry our ubiquitous connections to the borg collective (er, sorry: ‘cloud’) out of our cold, dead hands. So are we there yet?
20 Percent Time 2.0
We pay your wages, but the IP rights for anything you create in your 20% time are 100% yours
Startups below zero
So I’m calling it: the margin of costs beyond a founder’s living expenses is now officially zero. What next?
Are ‘hopeless’ startups our best hope for sustainable jobs?
A startup only has to take one person out of unemployment to make a net contribution to job growth. Instead of ‘Jobseekers Allowance’ why not ‘Business Model Seekers Allowance’?
What will Google do now search is suddenly dying?
Investment legend Roger McNamee says mobile has already killed search. Smartphone users hardly use search. Is Google no longer the gatekeeper to the web, business, the world? Will Google+ put them back in the money? Does today’s ‘Facebook for business’ launch roll the dice once again?
Myths and truths of customer loyalty in online communities
Free workforce? Marketing substitute? Unpaid website content generators? If you’re hoping for a way to ‘exploit the well-proven willingness of loyal customers to contribute tirelessly to your online promotion, generating enormous traffic and business, and asking for nothing in return’ you need help
Put it all on Jack?
Twitter? Maybe he just got lucky. Square, the way to pay with your phone? Others may beat him to it. Square, the way to turn the rest of us into merchantpreneurs? Mr Dorsey may yet live to rule our world
Giants like PepsiCo, Time Warner and Pfizer talk candidly about how Social Media impacts them
When things go wrong, you could sometimes be forgiven for imagining that big institutions are indifferent to the effects of social media. This video should clear that up, at least for these household names, which seem fully engaged
Over your shoulder, TechCrunch
You’ve been top of the TechMeme leaderboard for quite a while. Here comes Business Insider
Why startup is a crazy term
Steve Blank and Eric Ries each have different definitions of a startup to ours. None of us nail it
The philosophical assumptions of social media
Platforms such as FaceBook have come under criticism for not offering ways to differentiate ‘types of friends’, and as such, not being ‘truly social’. Whilst this may be true, philosophers, sociologists and cultural anthropologists would argue that fixing this may introduce just as many problems as it solves
Investment banking students morph into urban mushroom farming phenomenon
Even if you find the average recycling innovation story boringly predictable, this one, as it gathers momentum with one ludicrously lucky sustainability discovery after another, will have you cheering along with the audience
Extreme uncertainty over startups as a solution to everything
Startups attempt innovation under conditions of extreme uncertainty. Is it possible that we can find new ways to solve the world’s biggest problems using ‘extreme uncertainty’?
Maybe Scoble got it wrong and Convofy isn’t just the future of work
Robert’s insight into Adobe’s next OS was probably right, perhaps he just didn’t take it far enough
The iij Top Twenty Upcoming Social Media Books
What is the range of subject matter in our ‘spring collection’ of (weighty and in some cases expensive) Social Media volumes? Integration, culture, storytelling, journalism, transmedia, immersion, law, enterprise, strategy, teaching, meaning, creativity, identity, invention and belonging
Are some things just too personal to share?
Your most private functions may soon not be quite so private