Posts from January 2007

Alacra, a Flatiron portfolio company based in NYC, is looking for a VP E-Commerce.

I’ve been on the board of Alacra since 1999 and it is a great company that people love to work for.

This is a plum job as it involves leading the company in developing consumer facing services (like The Alacra Store) to compliment their best of breed enterprise solutions.

Alacra is particularly interested in people with deep experience in web analytics and search engine optimization.

If you are interested, please email your resume and salary history to [email protected].

Last week there was a bit of a "dustup" on this blog because I added Snap Preview popups to it.

I was leaning toward removing it but I decided to wait until they did a new release late last week.

In the end I agree with the majority of the commenters that Snap Preview takes away more from the experience than it adds. So I’ve removed Snap Preview from this blog, sort of.

The "sort of" means that the Snap Preview javascript is still in my template and when I want to offer a preview of a specific link, I’ll add a call to Snap Preview in that link.

This page shows how to do that (about 2/3 of the way down).

Last week, via email with one of our portfolio company CEOs, I compared VCs who invest in competitive companies to open marriages.

I’ve elaborated on that analogy on the Union Square Ventures weblog today.

Howard writes in the comments to my last post on Rhapsody vs iTunes:

The masses just could care less about this issue.  Check the stock prices.

It is fun watching you stir this up while we wait and see the end game.

I don’t want to focus on what the masses are doing now. I want to focus on what they will do in five years or even ten years. Everyone was buying SUVs in 2003. It would have been a great time to buy Toyota stock (TM). Hybrids are where its at now.

The iPod, iPhone and iTunes may be where its at in digital music right now. But what will that market look like in 2015? That’s what I want to know.

I am not trying to "stir it up". I am trying to initiate a discussion and debate about where all this goes. And the comments to that post were very helpful. Thanks to everyone who posted one, including Howard!

David, who has written about technology for Fortune Magazine for as long as I’ve been in the technology business, just penned a great column explaining that Rhapsody, not iTunes, is the future of digital music.  David says:

While the iPhone may be the phone of the future, to the degree that it is a music player, it is based on the ideas of the past.

David has had the same experience I’ve had with Rhapsody and Sonos. Rhapsody has always suffered from being a web service, when most people are used to listening to music from a "home stereo" type device. Sonos fixes that problem and if you haven’t used Sonos and Rhapsody, you are missing out.

David explains:

Using Rhapsody in my living room over the Sonos equipment was a
revelation – it was now possible, on a whim, to listen to anything I
wanted – whether it be an individual song (What was that great
Waterboys hit again?) or an album (Sometimes I just want to go all the
way back to high school and hear "Disraeli Gears"). It just streamed
through the Internet. Rhapsody on Sonos shows what’s possible.

Now
Rhapsody is heading to the wireless ether, as it should. At the CES
show this week, Real and partners announced several new ways to get
Rhapsody, including some that are wireless. Reigncom this spring will
start selling an iRiver portable MP3 player that allows you to listen
to a Rhapsody stream over Wi-Fi networks. Nokia’s (Charts)
pocket-sized N800 tablet computer will also be able to receive wireless
Rhapsody starting in February. They won’t allow you to listen
everywhere, but if you can get a good wireless signal you’ll get
Rhapsody.

Yes, this setup is still expensive. Yes, not everyone wants to "rent music". But I agree with David that "music dialtone" is the future of music, not iTunes, iPod, or iPhone.

Jason enjoys the snow, Highlands Bowl
Originally uploaded by www.odysseyexpeditions.org.

We’re in Aspen this weekend and woke up to about a foot of new snow.

Should be a great day.

We are headed to Highlands and I hope to hike the bowl and ski it if the wind and snow aren’t blowing too hard.

I’ve often thought that the most natural way to monetize feeds is to showcase other feeds that you can subscribe to. Use feeds to market other feeds.

So I’ve decided to try that concept out. I’ve made up an ad for this blog’s feed.  It looks like this:

And I am now running it in a number of channels in the FeedBurner ad network. Those of you who use FAN to monetize your feed have probably seen this ad come across your desk for approval this morning. I hope you approved it.

Here’s how I am thinking about it. I make about $1000 per month with FeedBurner. So I am going to use half of that money to market my blog’s feed. What I want to see is how much I can increase my feed subs with that money.

Each blog sub is worth about $0.10/month to me (I have about 10,000 subs). Let’s assume that the average subscriber stays with me for 6 months (I honestly don’t know and I need FeedBurner to give me the tools to figure that out). Then the lifetime value of a sub is $0.60. If I spend $500/month, I’ll need to add 830 subs each month to breakeven.

I don’t know that I will breakeven on the deal. But I’ll learn a lot. I know how many impressions I am getting. I’ll know how many subs I get from the deal. And that will tell me what the right cpm to pay going forward.

I’ll keep you all posted on how this experiment goes.

I found their new blog like I find most blogs, by following links. This time it was the best kind of link, a link to me!

Their new blog is called newcritics and they are Tom Watson and Jason Chervokas. If I am not mistaken, this is their first joint effort since they left @NY back around the time the first bubble broke. Maybe there’s a correlation there. Who knows.

newcritics is  "Web-based criticism in literature, music, television, film, games, theater and art from a diverse group of bloggers". Sounds like a good idea.

I’ve added it to reader and blogroll. You might want to consider doing that too.