Archive for the 'Business' category
Sunday, June 24th, 2007
What is an idea worth?
What is the value of consulting services?
If you say nothing and everything - you'd be exactly right.
One of Paul Graham's startup essays explains the difference:
Suppose YouTube's founders had gone to Google in 2005 and told them "Google Video is badly designed. Give us $10 million and we'll tell you all the mistakes you made." They would have gotten the royal raspberry. Eighteen months later Google paid $1.6 billion for the same lesson, partly because they could then tell themselves that they were buying a phenomenon, or a community, or some vague thing like that.
The significance here is that they went and created and shipped and evangelised the idea.
On the other hand, had Google had their finger close enough on the pulse, they could have made that acquisition many months earlier for a tiny fraction of the valuation.
Or had Google put the right people on their project - Google Video - they could have stolen YouTube's fire before it lit.
Unfortunately normally we don't know the failures, only the success stories. Kiko, the eBay auctioned calendar software, lost to Google Calendar (a fine invention and one you should try if you haven't used it before - we run our entire office schedule on it, and it's a huge improvement over maintaining phpCalendar ourselves or trying to WebDav sync iCal).
So does one aim to be the ones advising Google for a few hundred k/per year - the dilemma with consulting services, is that it's still your life against the clock, whatever the payoff. Effectually, you are a mercenary. When you tire of fighting the Punic wars, you go home and all you take is what you can carry away on your back and your armour.
Obviously startups are the way to go. But it's damn hard work.
Creating a startup is the hardest thing I've ever done in my life and it's cost me dearly.
Am I ready to give up?
No.
When trying to pick what idea to go after, Paul Graham writes:
It seems like the best problems to solve are ones that affect you personally. Apple happened because Steve Wozniak wanted a computer, Google because Larry and Sergey couldn't find stuff online, Hotmail because Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith couldn't exchange email at work.
I agree wholeheartedly with that. The issue which I am trying to solve is one which causes me stress everyday.
By Alec
Business |
Thursday, May 31st, 2007
Is it possible for the medium sized guys to make money?
You bet.
Network Solutions, bought for $20 million in 2003, was just sold for $800 million three years later.
And amazingly enough, this deal was done by a Persian - Iranian American Jahm Najafi.
So do the Iranians know how to play a poker hand?
It certainly looks like yes. No wonder the Israelis want the Americans to bomb the Iranians to smithereens. Competition isn't fun.
Anyway here's Najafi's story:
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By Alec
Business |
Wednesday, May 30th, 2007
Philip Dow's Journler
Philip Dow is the developer of the very well received Mac PIM (personal information manager) Journler about donationware. His application Journler had an open donation policy for personal use. Contribute whatever you like. A single commercial use license was/is $25.
Phil is going full-time as a developer now and is starting to feel the pain - lots of downloads and good press, but not a lot of revenue rolling in.
Out of 580 registered users, Phil had received an average donation of $17. That makes a total of about $9800. But in the end, Phil feels that some are abusing the donation system.
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By Alec
Business, WordPress |
Monday, May 21st, 2007
Some gentlemen search colleagues are thunderstruck by the acquisition of 24/7 Real Media by advertising holding company WPP for $649 million (a tidy sum it is - congratulations 24/7 - although I've always hated your technology). Raycam wonders why more ad agencies aren't snapping up the smaller search houses.
It's simple. All the assets go down the elevator every night (David Ogilvy is reputed the first to coin this phrase).
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By Alec
SEO, Business |
Tuesday, April 17th, 2007
The web is undergoing another major shift right now.
The first shift was from direct navigation and directories to search.
SEO was all the rage and we are Foliovision were and are very good at it.
The next stage now is Online Communities or The Social Web.
Manifestations of online communities:
- social websites like MySpace and LiveJournal (perhaps the more exotic AdultFriendFinder could be included in this group)
- forums (countless, for every industry there are usually a few big ones: one of the originals was slashdot)
- social bookmarking sites (delicious and digg spring to mind)
- specialty topic sites like WikiPedia or Squidoo
What's bad about this is that all the black hat search guys are coming up with ways to pollute these communities. At one webmaster forum there are hundreds of paid forum posters available to go out and sign up accounts and start spewing out whatever you want in mainly broken English for literally pennies per post. These guys are harder to catch than the black hat forum and comment bots so the human version must be considered worse.
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By Alec
Internet Marketing, Business |
Friday, April 6th, 2007
A very interesting discussion on Aaron Wall's SEOBook about whether Google is contributing to web spam. The best part is in the comments (sorry Aaron!) where two readers to the numbers on AdWords for relatively high priced PPC words.
Basically they just don't add up.
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By Alec
Internet Marketing, SEO, Business |
Thursday, April 5th, 2007
We've been contending with a pricing model for our clients at Foliovision. As Foliovision has grown outside its old bounds as a single person company doing relatively contained projects, our rates have had to rise.
It's not such a problem as we are a lot more productive.
There are two primary models: flat fee and pay-per-hour.
In principle, flat-fee is more profitable (if you charge $1000 but through automatisation can get your time to render the project down to 2 hours from 12 hours you've just made $500/hour instead of $80/hour.
On the other hand, we mainly do made-to-measure work. There is rarely the opportunity to automatise to that extent. We get exponentially better results in our markets than the competition so made-to-measure clearly works.
With made-to-measure work one can spend more time quoting and negotiating spec back and forth than working.
Gradually the client can grow to hate your emails demanding expansion of project scope and budget. Generally the (busy) client would prefer to pay more for something delivered with no hassle, complete and working. Then he or she only pays once for the project, instead of twice.
Twice is their time spent micromanaging what ends up costing more or less the same anyway.
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By Alec
Business |
Thursday, April 5th, 2007
Contrarian business advice from Trizle is always a thrill.
For a taste, Why You Need a Chaotic Business:
Order = Bad Advice
The dude’s well-intentioned “let’s-order-everything, cuz-we’re-like-the-world’s-nerdiest-businesspeople” mindset stands as one of the several “bad, bad, bad” advices we received when we started.
Why? The mindset drives you to do nothing. Nada. Standstill. Blah.
- Instead of moving forward, you’re documenting.
- Instead of increasing sales, you’re recording every little detail of your past order.
- Instead of improving employee morale, you’re entering data of past employee feedback.
- Instead of fattening your bottom line online, you’re trying to perfect every freakin’ detail of your freakin’ website that’s going to take a freakin’ looooong time.
I think the Trizle guy has the E-Myth myth guy clearly in his targets. Michael Gerber is obsessed with turning every company into McDonalds, turning every company into a turnkey franchise.
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By Alec
Business |
Wednesday, April 4th, 2007
Sometimes a website can be setup to help one party and instead help another.
For one of my websites, I need to license some photos.
I haven't had the right language for the contract. I looked at the contracts from the stock agencies but they were way too elaborate. I tried to find a local lawyer but none of them were competent in intellectual property. I sent somebody to contact the international law firms but they wanted thousands of dollars.
Thanks to Carolyn Wright, I now have my new contract by piecing together the parts which are supposed to worry photographers.
I did rewrite my contract to make it more fair to the photographer, allowing exhibition and print rights.
My main concern is to ensure that these images don't turn up on other websites.
By Alec
Business |
Thursday, March 22nd, 2007
I ran across the most amazing niche website yesterday - dedicated to the possibility of a crash in house prices in the UK. The sector where we do the most work is real estate.
The crash has already started in the United States, where no down payment financing is now disappearing as the rats lenders flee to shore.
Canada, in particular Toronto, seems to be holding out okay.
In any case, the chart of people's forecasts for property prices at housepricecrash.co.uk is awesome.
Highlights include predictions from The Economist of a 20-25% fall:
Pam Woodall, Economics Editor at The Economist thinks the kind of irrational exuberance that gripped stock markets during the tech boom is alive and well in the housing market and there could be a severe correction around the globe.
and a notable fund manager who foresees a 30 to 40% fall on its way:
Neil Woodford, who manages £12 billion at Invesco Perpetual, is positioning his funds for a sharp decrease in property prices. His forecast for house prices is for "a 30 to 40 per cent fall over the next three to four years", a fall he describes as "a healthy correction". That would bring the average property price from £153,700 today to between £92,200 and £107,600.
There is an issue with all of these predictions which is that many of them were made several years ago. House prices have continued to rise.
Is a correction on its way?
I think finally yes.
By Alec
Business |
Thursday, November 30th, 2006
A very interesting discussion at Slashdot earlier this month about how to stop spam.
There were many suggestions involving images with obscured characters, but that's just not acceptable for business.
A lot of these suggestions are fine for personal sites; but if you're actually in business they aren't practical.We use Javascript. You don't want to make life more difficult for the person trying to correspond - the point is to raise the cost to the spammer. If they have to add a Javascript parser to their spider, it's going to slow them way down. It's not going to make financial sense for them to do a custom solution for each site (and if they do, the "image" methods will break down as well).
What do we do for our own clients to lighten the spam load?
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By Alec
Business |
Thursday, November 9th, 2006
Veerle Pieters lashed out recently at freeloader clients. The client in question would be a big client (city website in Belgium).
That particular city wasn't content with a design mockup alone oh no they even had the audacity to state that the design revisions to that mockup had to be free too. You only got to have the nerve to think that's normal. This pisses me off and I have one clear message to all those freeloaders "stick it where the sun doesn't shine"! I don't work for free! Somebody has to say it out-loud.
Time to put a stop to it
The purpose of creative pitches are to give clients a better understanding of the creative capacity of the selected agencies. To me it is a lame excuse to not browse around in the portfolios and let someone else do the work for free. I wonder what goes on in the mind of the people who write that stuff down, do they expect the freebies in everything else also? From what understand it is not only a Belgian problem but an international one.
So when was the last time that somebody did a day of work for free for you? Think about, let a painter do a few rooms as a proposal and maybe you'll order the rest later. Good luck in finding one that will do so. Those RPF's are 8 to 10 pages if you are lucky and doing everything to the letter it will cost at least a day of work.
From my time working in major advertising agencies, I know we do these things free all the time. We used to call them pitches. The creative department (I was television production) would end up staying all night for a couple of nights doing mockups, phony storyboards, new looks. The account executive types would be putting fat binders of research together.
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By Alec
Business |
Sunday, October 29th, 2006
For the company lunches, I just bought an enormous 10 litre Tescoma home profi soup pot.
I was curious about the company who made this fine piece of stainless steel.
Looking them up Tescoma in Google coughed up this great case study of the company history. It turns out that Tescoma is a about a ten year old company which went from water coolers to cookware, selling tens of millions of dollars of cookware around the world.
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By Alec
Business |
Tuesday, October 24th, 2006
To make the web work for you.
What do we mean by that?
Your website will work to expand and support your business, seamlessly.
By Alec
Business |
