Startups' Divide-and-Conquer Strategy - businessweek
Piece "For small outfits, splitting off a flagging business unit may help the division regain the attention, focus, and resources it needs
It may be time to split your business into two. Or three. Over the past year, I have watched several of my clients spin off portions of their business as separate divisions -- and I've been amazed at the positive results. Each of these companies followed a similar progression, which got me thinking about the nature of startups and the lost art of spin-offs.
Most startups begin by taking business that nobody else wants. Entrepreneurs lack the capital to make big investments, the clout to garner attention, and the buying power to compete on price. So they get by on the scraps left behind by larger firms -- tiny, unexploited niches, customers with nonstandard needs, and other oddball opportunities. Startups that make it through this stage (and only a fraction do) survive largely on their relentlessness and flexibility. If a deal can be done, they'll find a way to do it. "
Web 2.0: Data, Metadata and Interface - rashmisinha
Piece "Amazon, in its early days, owned the data (the catalogs), the metadata (the associated keywords, where in the structure the item fit in), and the interface. Amazon has gradually evolved to the point where most of the metadata (e.g., ratings/reviews) comes from its users, developers can use API's to build their own interfaces, and it also shows data from other vendors (e.g., the second hand sellers).
Flickr is the quintessential Web 2.0 application. Its data and metadata is contributed by its users; while the interface is its own. Its API's are used by developers who tend to use its data, but not the interface (such as Mappr, Color Pickr).
HousingMaps marries data from two streams (Google Maps and Craigslist). Its interface is mostly that of Google Maps, but it adds in the housing information on top of the Google Maps interface.
Del.icio.us does not have any data of its own. It exists as a metadata aggregator, for data on various sites, tagged by users."
Registration-Required Feeds - globelogger
Piece "Publishers want to maximize their RSS advertising revenue and users want full-content feeds. Registration-required feeds may help them meet in the middle. I've had several requests from clients to create a service that would allow feed publishers to require users to register in order to get full-content feeds. Publishers want higher advertising rates and a better idea of their audience, and users want full-content feeds. (The publishers I'm working with plan to also provide summary-only feeds which won't require registration.)
This move comes in response to an issue described in a recent BusinessWeek article on The Future of the New York Times (registration, uh, required):
The New York Times, like all print publications, faces a quandary. A majority of the paper's readership now views the paper online, but the company still derives 90% of its revenues from newspapering. "The business model that seems to justify the expense of producing quality journalism is the one that isn't growing, and the one that is growing — the Internet — isn't producing enough revenue to produce journalism of the same quality," says John Battelle, a co-founder of Wired and other magazines and Web sites."
Piece "I stepped back from it all yesterday and did an inventory of the various data I’m measuring on a daily basis. Following is the list of the services I’m using:
FeedBurner: Core RSS feed and page view metrics
AWStats: Core page view metrics
Google AdSense: Page views by channel, ad click throughs
Amazon: Online purchase metrics
Bloglet: Email subscribers
MyBlogLog: Outbound link tracking
MeasureMap: Inbound / outbound link tracking (in alpha)
Technorati: More link tracking
Feedster: Even more link tracking
I’m also using a number of these services to enhance my blog, all which collect (or generate) other stats.
Amazon: Reading Now, Read Recently, Toy of the Month
Jinzora: Listening Now
Word of Blog: Promoting Now
MyBlogLog: Outbound link tooltip
FeedBurner: FeedCount (subscriber count), BuzzBoost (republish Mobius PR feed)
NewsGator: Subscribe button
Bloglet: Email subscribers
Google: Search on blog
Page Two: My random page where I play with stuff until I put it in production"
Microsoft’s Answer to Adobe - redherring
Piece "Edging into the competitive space dominated by publishing software giant Adobe, Microsoft has released the second preview of its graphic design tool, Acrylic.
Acrylic is the codename for Microsoft’s illustration and graphics design product that is currently under development.
The product is based on the software that Microsoft acquired in 2003 when it bought Creature House, a Hong Kong-based company that developed digital illustration and painting software. Creature House’s product, Expression, was in the market for nearly seven years before Microsoft acquired it and turned it into Acrylic.
Microsoft released the first preview of Acrylic to developers in June. The second release was announced Monday."
IBM’s Middleware Medley - redherring
Piece "IBM said Tuesday it is very much in the hunt for middleware companies, despite its acquisition of 25 software companies in the last four years, all of which it considers middleware vendors.
Big Blue’s appetite for middleware is shifting the industry’s focus to a segment of the software industry that was once a catchall for any software product not classified as an application or an operating system.
Today middleware, the layer of software that facilitates communications among other software components across a network, has become a highly competitive market dominated by IBM and a collection of smaller players.
In its information management unit alone, IBM has made 13 acquisitions in the past four years, including PureEdge Solutions, a company that markets electronic forms to assist users in the capture, storage, and display of business data.
Four months earlier, in March 2005, IBM acquired Ascential, a company that provides data integration software that helps build enterprise data warehouses, for $1.1 billion. The company’s mainframe systems management unit and its application development unit have also absorbed a number of acquisitions."
Now Microsoft has me wondering what their plans are with RSS! - geeknewscentral
Piece "Update: Talked to Robert Scoble on the phone, and it turns out many of my concerns are unwarranted. When I attended Gnomedx, and Microsoft announced their RSS initiative they also announced the elements that would be added to RSS, additionally we understood that RSS would be integrated into Vista heavily.
So today when I read the ComputerWorld article, from what is supposed to be a fact based news organization I immediately jumped all over the Mike Tores comments, and said to myself are we now seeing a classic bait and switch. Which resulted in the underlying article. It seems that their so called quote is not a quote at all but maybe more like creative writing on someones part."
Symantec to buy Sygate - itnetcentral
Piece "Symantec intends to integrate Sygate Enterprise Protection 5.0, the most recent version of Sygate's flapship software, into Symantec's current endpoint-protection products, which include Symantec Client Security, after the acquisition of Sygate has been completed.
"This will be the primary product area in which we intend to include SEP 5.0," said Brian Foster, Symantec's senior director of product, noting that after combining SEP 5.0 and Symantec Client Security, SEP 5.0 will eventually be phased out.
Foster said SEP 5.0 brings a mix of additional host intrusion-prevention and host control capabilities to the Symantec Client Security desktop software, which includes personal firewall, anti-virus and anti-spyware support.
Fremont, Calif.-based Sygate, a privately held company, was originally founded under the name Sybergen Technologies by Chief Technology Officer Chris Guo with help from venture capital firms that included Trident Capital, Trinity Ventures and MVC Capital. The company name was changed to Sygate five years ago, at the time John DeSantis joined as CEO and president. "
Hewlett-Packard sparking profits - bbc.co.uk
US computer giant Hewlett-Packard posted strong profits despite taking a one-off charge on its foreign earnings.
Microsoft Virus Attacks SBC Communications, CNN, ABC Computers - bloomberg
Piece "A computer virus targeting Microsoft Corp.'s Windows software shut down machines at Time Warner Inc.'s Cable News Network and SBC Communications Inc., and may spread globally, according to antivirus software companies.
The destructive program is a strain of an existing virus known as Zotob affecting computers running the Windows 2000 operating system, according to Stephen Toulouse, security program manager at Microsoft. Trend Micro Inc., Japan's biggest antivirus software maker, and Symantec Corp., the world's biggest, raised their risk ratings on the virus. "
IDC sees healthy IT growth through 2009 - infoworld
Piece ""From an IT industry perspective it's quite good," she said. "There's no longer the double-digit growth they saw before 2000, but this growth rate, for a lot of quite mature technologies, is very healthy."
The government, manufacturing and banking sectors will continue to account for the lion's share of IT spending worldwide, she said. Government initiatives to put more services online for citizens, and efforts such as the U.K.'s costly national identity card initiative, will help to keep that sector buoyant."
Fastest-growing blogs: MSN Spaces, Fark, Blogger, Xanga - blogs.zdnet
Piece "Nielsen//NetRatings, using its Web audience data on US home and work Web users, created a list of top 10 growing blogs and blog networks. Between January 2005 and July 2005, MSN Spaces, Fark.com, Blogger.com and Xanga.com experienced the highest audience growth. The top 50 blogging and blog-related sites grew 31% to 29.3 mln unique visitors during July 2005 as compared to the beginning of this year, comprising nearly 20% of active Internet users.
Fastest growing blogs and blog networks
Unique audience, 000
Blog / Network January 2005 July 2005 Growth
MSN Spaces 311 3,257 947%
fark.com 488 795 63%
Blogger 8,684 12,599 45%
Xanga.com 4,810 6,862 43%
Daily Kos 348 476 37%
The Smoking Gun 1,706 2,243 31%
Gawker 411 531 29%
TypePad 3,557 4,555 28%
engadget 630 787 25%
Boing Boing 506 605 20%
Source: Nielsen//NetRatings"
5% of Web users use desktop RSS aggregators, 6% use Web aggregators - blogs.zdnet
Piece "Nielsen//NetRatings announced that 11% of Weblog readers, blog site visitors who claim to read blogs regularly or occasionally, use RSS to sort through the increasing number of blogs available. Nearly 5% of blog readers use feed aggregation software and more than 6% use a feed aggregating Web site to monitor RSS feeds from blogs. "
8 Tips for Bold Leadership cio
Piece "When Les Duncan was a bold lad of three, a backyard bee-catching expedition ended badly, with him sputtering, "Oh damn! Oh damn! Oh damn!" as he fled from the yard.
The importance of risk mitigation was not lost on Duncan, who developed stealthier bee-catching techniques and, before branching out into snake catching, made sure to find out which snakes were poisonous. Now that he's CIO of Bold 100 honoree Atmos Energy, an upstart utility in Dallas, Duncan has put those early lessons in risk mitigation to good use. When his company acquired a same-size competitor, he had plenty of risk to contend with as he led the integration effort.
Risk mitigation is just one of many strategies that increase the chances that bold gambles will, in fact, pay off. Here's a roundup of bold leadership secrets from five of this year's CIO 100 honorees. "
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