Content Matters: Social Media

March 30, 2011

Amazon Cloud Player – Good for the Market but Could Have Been Much More

Yesterday, Amazon (AMZN) announced the launch of its Cloud Drive and accompanying Cloud Player.

The launch is significant in many ways, while underwhelming in others. Overall, I think it’s a net positive for the market and for consumers but a bit of a speedbump on where I think they need to go.

Cloud Drive is a “music locker”. In other words, it’s a cloud-based storage system that allows users to store music they own in the cloud. In that sense, it’s very different from either iTunes (local storage) or streaming music apps like Rhapsody, Spotify, Rdio or even Pandora.

Music Lockers are hardly new. MP3.com launched back in 1997 and there have been other efforts since. The music industry sued (after all litigation takes less effort than innovation) and the small companies were destined to fail as a result.

With this new effort, the music locker model for the first time has a deep pocketed sponsor behind it, with Google and Apple (begrudgingly) likely to follow suit.

First the good news:

Amazon has placed a stake in the ground saying that they do not need permission from music publishers to enable users to store and access their music in the cloud. That’s a good thing for consumers and for the market as a whole. With Google and Apple likely to follow, this makes for a more competitive landscape for music.

Amazon digital downloads are DRM-free, so you’re not locked into any one provider. It will also put pressure on Apple to make all of their content DRM-free. This is something the record companies will fight (after all, in the past they’d gotten me to purchase vinyl and CD versions of Blonde on Blonde and would want me to keep doing so every time my music system changes) but it has to happen.

Amazon gives you 5 GB of storage for free and will bump that to 20 GB free for the first year if you buy any digital music through Amazon. That’s a smart move. Amazon has done a lot to try to break through in this space, offering a free daily download of holiday songs during December, as well as other promotions along the way. But it still is more difficult to use than iTunes. I buy most of my music via Amazon but my daughter mostly uses iTunes and my wife just asks me to get her what she wants.

Now the Bad:

To start, I’m not a fan of the music locker model at all today. It seems that streaming is a much more compelling solution for consumers AND the music industry. More on that below. But first, a few specific points about the Amazon solution:

It’s obvious that this is an effort to make Amazon a more viable competitor to iTunes. And that’s a good thing. I already buy most of my digital downloads through Amazon. But 5 GB (or even 20 GB) is hardly going to hold my music collection. I’d need the 100 GB plan, which costs $100 per year. That’s nearly the cost of a year’s worth of Rhapsody Premier.

I’ve got about 25 GB worth of Amazon digital downloads already. But there doesn’t seem to be any way to automatically have that music show up in my digital locker. It seems that I have to upload those files back to Amazon. That’s a lot of work for me (and doesn’t seem an effective use of Amazon’s bandwidth, as they could easily move it around on their own servers).

The functionality of the Cloud Player itself is meh. Gee, I can pick by artist, album, song or genre, or build a playlist. Hey, it’s the identical functionality that came in my iPod. My first iPod. Nearly ten years ago. Where’s the innovation, Amazon? Where are the social and music discovery aspects that I find in basic services like Spotify, last.fm, Grooveshark or Pandora, not to mention things like Listening Room, Imeem or other new apps? I’m a believer in Reid Hoffman’s rule #6 – “launch early enough that you are embarrassed by your first release” but not in a mature market like this. If Amazon wants to displace iTunes, it needs to show innovation (or at least show the ability to copy the innovation of others).

But back to the key point

Whether or not Amazon delivered on some of the functionality I’ve outlined above, the key point is that they missed the model. I’m not that keen on the idea of music lockers at all. A music locker is basically just a continuation of the model we’ve had for music for 100 years. Whether buying vinyl, 8 track, cassette, CD or downloadable digital tracks, the model remains the same. I purchase music to own, rather than paying a subscription fee to access music. That model just doesn’t make a lot of sense in a digitally connected world. Why should I have to make a “commitment” to an album just because I want to hear it now? There’s just as much money to be made in a well-managed streaming service and it’s much more consumer friendly in the long run.

I’m still hoping for a meaningful Spotify US release. I use them extensively when I travel and would gladly pay for a Spotify service here. In the meantime, I’ll continue to use a hybrid of Amazon digital downloads on my iPhone and a mix of Rhapsody and Pandora for streaming.

Barry Graubart on March 30, 2011 in Content Business, General Business, Mobile, Music, Social Media, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: Amazon, cloud drive, cloud player, streaming music

March 21, 2011

Twitter Turns Five; Time to Hire an Ombudsman

Twitter turns five today. The company has grown at a rate that most can only envy. Critical to that growth has been the development of an ecosystem around it. But Twitter’s relationship with its ecosystem has always been a bit shaky.

Concerns about the future of the Twitter ecosystem began last spring when Twitter acquired Tweetie and began to launch its own mobile applications. Later, Twitter enhanced its website in an effort to drive more usage through the site, as opposed to third party apps. A month ago, third party Twitter apps UberTwitter and Twitdroyd had their access to the Twitter API suspended as a result of a trademark debate and other “policy violations”.

Last week, the debate hit a tipping point when Platform lead Ryan Sarver shared that developers should not “build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience”. In other words, don’t bother building new client apps like Tweetdeck or UberTwitter.

Ecosystems are critical for the growth of platforms. Google is the obvious example, but Salesforce.com has its Dreamforce program, Facebook has cultivated an ecosystem, while traditional software companies like Microsoft or SAP could not have grown as quickly without the systems integrators and third party applications that sprung up around them. But ecosystems cannot thrive on their own. As in the biological world, they require nurturing and cultivation. For technology companies, that means ongoing communications and behavior consistent with that message.

As a developer, becoming part of the ecosystem has its benefits but also many negatives. The obvious risk is that your success is tied to that of the underlying platform. Beyond that, you run the risk that the platform will see your functionality as a critical part of the core, and embed those capabilities into their own applications or APIs. Of course, the platform could even shut off your API access, or more subtly, remove data you depend on from those APIs.

Investors are even more cautious, wanting to be certain they are funding a real company, and not simply a cool feature that will eventually be embedded into the platform.

For the platform, cultivating an ecosystem is not easy. Inside the company there are always many arguments against it. It often seems like a zero-sum game, where every dollar (or ad impression) that goes to a partner is one that the platform does not receive. Developers often believe they know what’s best for the user and that third party apps may not present the underlying platform as well as they would. But a thriving ecosystem helps drive adoption and creates much greater barriers to entry for others. And while your platform developers may have some ideas on how people will use the platform, it’s much more likely that other use cases will spring forth from having many 3rd party apps.

So, what does Twitter need to do?

First, it needs to build a stronger relationship with the developers in its ecosystem. And a starting point would be to have a single point-person focused on that. When I first tweeted the idea that Twitter needed an ombudsman, I got an @reply from Dick Costolo, Twitter COO. Dick’s a great guy and I was thrilled to know that he was listening, but he is clearly focused on the advertising side of the business and has enough fallout from the so-called #dickbar that he can’t be the key contact. Ryan Sarver owns the APIs and is a great technologist, but he’s not focused on communications. I think they would be well-served having a point-person focused on the ecosystem, much in the way that Matt Cutts is the key Google spokesperson on SEO-related issues.

The next key thing would be to meet with some of the developers and based on those conversations, share the basic philosophy of how Twitter plans to work with the members of its ecosystem.

A platform has a lot of flexibility in determining how they want their ecosystem to grow. They can have a very open approach or a more closed one as Apple does. But the key is strong and consistent communications, no surprises and keeping the API open so that new features available on the core platform are all exposed through the API.

I’m optimistic about Twitter’s future. I don’t see the latest ripples as a death knell, as Alexandra Samuel suggested in her well-thought out HBR post last week. But I think it critical that Twitter begin to engage its developer community on a much more active level to ensure that success.

Barry Graubart on March 21, 2011 in Social Media, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: ecosystem, Twitter

March 14, 2011

Twitter by the numbers: What I'd Really Like to See

Twitter today reported some usage numbers in conjunction with their fifth birthday. The numbers are hugely impressive:

One billion tweets per week (it took over 3 years for them to reach the first billion tweets)
140 million tweets per day (up from 50m a year ago)
460,000 new accounts created per day

The hockey stick growth Twitter has experienced to-date is the kind that most of us can only dream of. That said, the published numbers don't tell a lot of the story.

The true measure of Twitter growth is not the number of new signups, it's the level of engagement.

Yes, 460k new accounts per day is huge, but there are days I feel like I get that many Twitter spammers (ok, I'm exaggerating a bit). What I'd like to know is how many engaged Twitter users there are.

There are many ways to measure engagement, but here's a simple 5-point scale I just made up:

Level 0: I signed up to follow Charlie Sheen (or Oprah, Ashton or Justin Bieber). I don't really tweet myself (except I occasionally will RT something my celebrity idol has tweeted);

Level 1: I follow at least a few dozen people and have a few dozen followers myself. I tweet occasionally but often can go a week or two between tweets. I'm still not quite sure what all the excitement is about, but since a few of my friends are on Twitter, I don't want to be left out. I follow back everyone who follows me (though some of them are bots).

Level 2: I tweet several times per week and have used both the RT and @reply functions. I'm starting to find Twitter to be a useful way to find interesting information I may have otherwise missed. I rarely if ever see an "I just farted" tweet in my stream.

Level 3: I tweet regularly and have begun to engage via Twitter with others. I retweet interesting tweets, reply to others regularly and have *met* people in my industry via Twitter whom I would not have otherwise met. I am careful about whom I follow. My follower:follows ratio is at least 2:1 if not higher. Twitter has become an important part of my news stream.

Level 4: I use Twitter on both desktop and mobile. Twitter was the first place that I turned for insight on the Egyptian uprising and the Japanese earthquake and tsunamis. A day rarely passes where I am not retweeted or have a conversation on Twitter. I know my @klout score and view Twitter as my primary source of real-time information.

Level 5: my name is Robert Scoble.

These might not be the ideal measures of Twitter usage, but they're a starting point. I'm sure the team at Klout could provide more perspective. But seeing usage stats on the growth of Twitter using this classification would be significantly more useful than what Twitter have released today.

Barry Graubart on March 14, 2011 in Social Media, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: analytics, social, Twitter

February 18, 2011

Can Klout Become a Verb?

OK, grammatically, that's not going to happen, but can Klout become the generic term to be used for measuring online influence, much in the way that Google has become a verb meaning to search.

Quantifying online influence, and, more specifically, social media influence, has become a hot area. There are a number of companies in the space, including Twitalyzer and Twitter Grader but the one that's getting the most attention right now is Klout.

Klout attempts to measure online influence using 35 attributes across both Facebook and Twitter. They generate an overall score, along with individual measurements for Reach and Amplification.

Klout has gained more, ummm, clout, recently. This widely linked to WSJ article, focused on how the Canadian government and cabinet minister Tony Clement, in particular, references his Klout score:

During the past two weeks, his Klout score — a measure of Twitter influence — has shot up 10 points to around 72, only a few points behind Sarah Palin.

And yesterday, Klout introduced a new feature, designed to integrate it into users' workflow. The Chrome browser extension for Klout automatically displays a user's klout score next to their name. It's particularly useful when looking at Twitter lists, where you may not know everyone on the list as well as you might those you follow directly.

Klout seems well-positioned to be the dominant player in measuring social influence. They were smart in keeping their brand generic, rather than a platform-specific name like Twitalyzer. Now, with the Chrome extension, they can begin to insert themselves into the every day workflow of users. And with a little luck it won't be too long before we hear people asking "did you check their Klout?" when doing research on someone.

You can install the Klout Chrome extension here (if you're using Chrome, of course). Or simply check your Klout score or follow Klout at @klout.

Barry Graubart on February 18, 2011 in Emerging Content Technologies, Social Media | Permalink | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: klout, twitalyzer

February 07, 2011

Why AOL – HuffPo is a Smart Deal

The big media news this morning was the AOL (AOL) acquisition of the Huffington Post. HuffPo had long been considered the diamond of the alternative media world. The only online newspaper site with more traffic than HuffPo is NYTimes.com.

Many argue that it may be too little, too late for AOL, but I’m not so sure. Content may not be King (platforms like Facebook, Google and Twitter have proven that), but traffic can still be monetized. By adding HuffPo, along with Engadget and TechCrunch, AOL positions itself strongly in the upper and middle segments in terms of quality content, while it already covers the lower end with its Seed platform.

The acquisition strengthens their position in local news, augmenting their existing Patch platform. And, HuffPo gives AOL much greater potential reach for Wow, it’s daily deal/Groupon clone. And the large AOL sales force should be able to generate much higher revenues from the Huffington Post.

Key to the deal is Arianna, who will bring a clear voice to their disparate content properties. As Felix Salmon writes:

It’s smart, and bold, to put Arianna in charge of all AOL’s editorial content, since she is one of the precious few people who has managed to create a mass-market general-interest online publication which isn’t bland and which has an instantly identifiable personality. That’s a rare skill and one which AOL desperately needs to apply to its broad yet inchoate suite of websites.

Meanwhile, Jeff Jarvis notes:

Content alone isn’t enough for Aol. It has content. Lots. What HuffPo and Arianna bring is a new cultural understanding of media that is built around the value of curation, the power of peers, the link economy, passion as an asset, and celebrity as a currency.

Yet analysts remain cautious about AOL. Macquarie’s Ben Schachter advises clients to “wait on the sidelines”, while Clayton Moran at the Benchmark Company notes that the $315m price tag is “more than 40% of the $802 million in cash that AOL had on hand at the end of last year. The acquisition price is a bit of a stretch.”

There are really only two major online content companies left – AOL and Yahoo. With this acquisition, AOL takes a big step forward. As Keith Rabois points out, with this acquisition, AOL becomes a more attractive acquirer for startups and entrepreneurs than Yahoo.

As newspapers experiment with moving content behind the paywall, it creates additional opportunity for free news sites. With a mix of topical, political and local content, AOL is positioning itself to fill any void. Of course, the proof will come in the months that follow. Will authors look to be paid? Will Patch integrate nicely with HuffPo? Lots of questions yet to be resolved, but this is a smart deal and it has a good chance for success.

Barry Graubart on February 07, 2011 in Blogonomics, blogs, Content Business, M&A, Social Media, user generated content | Permalink | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: AOL, content, Huffington Post, HuffPo, M&A, media

January 05, 2011

Going Viral Does Not Constitute a Community

Last night, for an hour or two, most of our Twitter streams got overwhelmed with a meme called #LessAmbitiousMovies. It started with a tweet by Toronto artist @Rob_McCallum and spread virally, generating tens of thousands of tweets. The “game” was pretty simple – come up with a play on a movie title, and yielded results like Saving Private Benjamin or Last Tango in Parsippany.

That led to a Twitter debate this morning over whether that demonstrated that Twitter was a community, sparked by this All Things D blog post by @lizgannes. Her premise was that the meme Shows Twitter Can Still Be Community, Not Just a Tool".

My answer is that no, going viral does not constitute a community. To me, a community consists of people with a common interest, interacting and/or sharing information around that interest. There are communities on Twitter – StockTwits is one that springs to mind, but there are other communities around health, sports and other areas. More importantly, there are many, many informal communities of users that spring up around numerous topics. But that is quite different than a random group of people interacting around a viral meme.

While there were tens of thousands of tweets, there was only a modest level of retweeting. According to the Liz Gannes post, the most heavily RTd one was the clever Being John Stamos with 225 retweets. More importantly, it seems highly unlikely that any of those people will continue to interact with one another around this or any other meme going forward.

To me, #LessAmbitiousMovies is akin to people watching an awards show or the Super Bowl or all shouting “Happy New Year” at midnight. Or perhaps trying the “Elf Yourself” viral marketing effort from Office Depot. There was common interest in a very general topic (humor) generating a lot of participation but little interaction and no sustained impact. Internet and Twitter memes are interesting but they don’t constitute a community.

Barry Graubart on January 05, 2011 in Current Affairs, Games, General Business, Social Media | Permalink | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: Twitter Meme #LessAmbitiousMovies

December 16, 2010

Yahoo Shuttering Delicious. What to do Next?

Today came news that Yahoo is likely shuttering Del.icio.us, the social bookmarking service acquired from Joshua Schacter in 2005.

Yahoo never did much to nurture and grow Delicious and it remained a niche product with many diehard fans among the tech community.

Delicious was one of the first great cloud apps – users were able to stop managing bookmarks in browsers and could access them from any browser on any PC. For the power user, Delicious was a wonderful data set to mine.

If you’re a delicious fan, you probably are panicking right now, but there are a few simple steps you can take.

First, back up your Delicious bookmarks. You can do that from the Delicious page by clicking settings – export, but I prefer using Automate Excel – a simple tool that pulls all your Delicious bookmarks into a spreadsheet.

OK, so now you’ve got your bookmarks, but they’re not very usable. What tools can you use instead?

The leading contender right now is an app called PinboardIN. Unlike Delicious, PinboardIN is not free. It costs $7.14 to join, or you can pay $25 for an annual license with advanced archiving and search capabilities. For now, I ponied up the $7 to see how good it is before deciding whether to upgrade. And if you’re scoffing at paying $7, remember that the lack of a business model is what required Delicious to sell to Yahoo, who neglected it.

PinboardIN is pretty compelling. In addition to the Delicious-like features (and yes, you can automatically import your existing delicious bookmarks), PinboardIN can automatically add any links from your Twitter stream , from Instapaper and more.

I’ve just signed up for PinboardIN but it looks good as a starting point.

Another option is to move to Evernote. Evernote does more than Delicious (can post text, images, links, etc) but has no social aspects. I’ve used Evernote on the iPhone, but for me, PinboardIN is closer to the Delicious experience. For those who want to try it, Evernote provides a simple primer on making the transition from Delicious.

Barry Graubart on December 16, 2010 in Social Media, Technology | Permalink | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: del.icio.us, delicious, evernote, pinboard, social bookmarking, Yahoo

November 30, 2010

Paper.li Never before has so much published content been read by so few

If you're active on Twitter, you've no doubt run across paper.li, the app that automatically creates a daily "newspaper" based on links within tweets. The concept behind paper.li is pretty straightforward. Users identify a set of Twitter users and/or hashtag topics you want to follow, and paper.li will automatically create and tweet out a "newspaper" spotlighting the key stories linked to in those tweets.

In order to help promote the service (and, in theory, the user who created that *newspaper*), the auto-tweet mentions the twitter names of the users listed on the "front page".

In theory, this is all fine and good. But in reality, no one ever bothers to read the paper.li content. It's simply Twitter spam. In fact, it's generating blog posts like this Boing Boing Post on How to Kill Paper.Li Mentions on Twitter. and frequent tweets like this one from @timbray:

The problem with Paper.li is not that the idea of aggregating links from Twitter is bad. In fact, that's a really useful thing to do (particularly when combined with Twitter lists). The problem is that a personal "newspaper" should be designed for consumption, not for publication to others.

Some of the iPad news apps get this - products like Flipboard do a great job in aggregating and organizing stories based on Twitter links. But the Flipboard publishers understand that it's about determining what you want to read, not about sharing it with others.

For now, Paper.li just doesn't seem to *get* that and that's why they're just Twitter spam today.

Barry Graubart on November 30, 2010 in Content Business, Social Media, Technology, user generated content | Permalink | TrackBack (0)

January 29, 2009

Five Questions for Fred Wilson

I thought today I'd bring an optimist's view to the Five Questions... series. Fred Wilson is a VC, serving as managing partner of Union Square Ventures and Flatiron Partners (author's note: Flatiron is an investor in Alacra). Fred invests in technology companies and has successfully identified trends, investing in successful early stage companies like Twitter and Etsy, among others. His blog, A VC, is widely read by both the tech and investor community. He's an avid tweeter and can be followed @fredwilson. Fred was atop Silicon Alley Insider's SA100 for 2008, which ranks entrepreneurs, investors and other leaders who impact the New York digital media market. And, he's a big fan of late 70's and early 80's bands like the Replacements, which gives him bonus points in my book.
Having survived (and thrived) in both the Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 bubbles, Fred has a valuable perspective on where we are today and what that means for technology and media companies.

Content Matters: 2009 will certainly have its share of challenges. What do you see for the Tech industry in 2009?

Fred Wilson: In 2009, the strong tech companies like Apple, Google, Salesforce, etc will get stronger and the weak companies will get weaker and some will go out of business. It’s going to be a flight to quality all around, by employees, vendors, customers, investors, and everyone else in the tech business.

CM: Facebook was all the rage in 2007, while Twitter took center stage in 2008. Do you think Twitter has staying power? If so, what’s different about Twitter?

FW: Facebook is having a fantastic year in 2009 already. I think it’s having a second wind, driven by serious adoption (as opposed to just setting up a profile) by the over 40 generation and by significant international adoption. Twitter is different from Facebook and highly complimentary. The two big differences are Twitter is public like blogging and Facebook is private (friends only). Also the relationship models are different. On Twitter you can follow me even though I don’t follow you. On Facebook, the following/friendship has to be mutual. This leads to different use cases and I think we’ll see many people use both services for different purposes.

CM: With generally lower startup costs and more limited “end-games” for successful startups, how does that change the role of venture capital in the tech space?

FW: I think venture capital has to learn how to generate appropriate levels of returns (3x over 7-10 years) on lower investment and lower exits. We decided in 2003 to limit our fund sizes to $100mm to $150mm and that has worked out really well for us. We can return the entire fund on one investment if we own 20% of the company and it sells for $500mm to $750mm. I think it’s very reasonable to expect at least one of our 20-25 companies per fund to do that.

CM: Historically, as the economy comes out of recession, it creates transformation and change. Which segments have the potential for transformation in an eventual recovery?

FW: Every industry that is based on knowledge or information or some other form of non-physical matter (atoms vs bits) is going to fundamentally transform and this downturn will be the darwinian forcing function. Think about energy and power systems, banking, media, education. They all have that aspect to them.

CM: While there’s a lot of gloom and doom about, there are always bright spots. What are you optimistic about in 2009 (professionally or personally)?

FW: I am optimistic that we now have an administration that is pro-technology and gets the internet and the power of tech/web to create new ways of doing things. I am optimistic that our culture in this country is starting to change its orientation away from borrowing and living beyond its means to saving and investment. I am optimistic that many parts of the rest of the world are adopting more open and free governments and economies and developing quickly. I could go on and on. There is a lot to be optimistic about right now.

Thanks, Fred. And for those who missed the Mats in the early 80's, here's a quick clip:

Barry Graubart on January 29, 2009 in Content Business, Five Questions, General Business, Social Media, Technology | Permalink | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: A VC, Five Questions, Fred Wilson

January 27, 2009

SIIA Previews Shows Innovation in the Content Technology Space #SIIA

Yesterday was the Previews Day at the SIIA Information Industry Summit. Previews is always my favorite part of the conference as it showcases early stage companies.

This year, there were ten presenting companies, split into two groups. The first group included more traditional content management and collaboration applications including:

RSuite CMS, a content management platform from Really Strategies, which enables the easy creation, deployment and reuse of xml and other media files.
Arity Corporation, a knowledge management platform for creating and sharing online notebooks.
InsideView, a web 2.0 CRM platform.
MixedInk, a collaboration application leveraging web 2.0 features such as wikis and community ratings.
Prolifiq, allowing enterprise customers to effectively distribute content to clients.

The second group featured the following five companies:

SBTV.com, a video news service focused solely on the small business community.
Adgregate Markets provides an embeddable object enabling ecommerce transactions within a banner ad.
Associated Content is an open content network matching content creators and brands.
Management CV is a content company analyzing and ranking quality of management for CEOs and management teams of publicly-listed companies.
Cell Journalist provides an integrated platform for news providers to connect with citizen journalists.

Among the more interesting presentations were:

Vanessa Scanfield of MixedInk. MixedInk is a collaborative writing tool that leverages wikis and user ratings to collaboratively assemble a document. They've done some work in the political advocacy space, which makes a lot of sense. MixedInk is pretty cool, but it's a niche product that's probably more of a feature of a larger application. There's not a strong ROI attached to this as a standalone application, which may be a challenge, particularly in this market.
InsideView is a customer intelligence application that melds information from sources like Hoover's, ZoomInfo and Jigsaw, combined with social media content from a user's Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. The resulting information is integrated within CRM systems like Salesforce.com. They use a freemium business model and have more than 200 professional customers.
SBTV.com - CEO Susan Wilson Solovic is a former news anchor and her camera presence shows as she presents. SBTV is the only online video service dedicated to the small business user. As demand for video content increases, SBTV is well-positioned for growth.
Management CV - content industry veteran Renny Ponvert has launched this new company, which analyzes CEO and management team performance using a number of quantitative measurements. In essence, they identify the management alpha - what part of a company's performance is attributable to management, as opposed to industry performance.

The highlight of the day (for me, at least) was the closing keynote, offered by Roger Ehrenberg.Roger is Managing Partner of IA Capital Partners and author of the Information Arbitrage blog. Roger's presentation focused on learning from failure, or "how to fail successfully". Those who read his blog are well familiar with Roger's post-mortem on Monitor110, which shuttered its doors this past summer.
His four key takeaways were

The lack of a single leader
Being too internally focused
Too much PR too early
Too much money

In answering the question of "how does one fail successfully?", Roger suggested three key factors:

Humility (the ability to learn from failure)
Insight (having the perspective to extract lessons learned from failure)
Persistence (embodying the toughness to take that knowledge and try again)

Or, formulaically, Failure+Learning+Persistence = Success

Barry Graubart on January 27, 2009 in Content Business, Events, Social Media | Permalink | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: Roger Ehrenberg, SIIA, SIIA Previews

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