David Hornik over at Venture Blog has a marvelous post up called “Venture Capitalist At Your Service”. He recognizes that his LPs are his customers, yet he also recognizes that: “The executives of my portfolio companies are my clients. But all entrepreneurs are potential clients. And I need to behave accordingly.” Easily said, right? The lovely thing about David is …
Startup Lessons: Don’t Be Afraid to Lose
I recently discovered Mark Suster’s blog Both Sides of the Table, and have really enjoyed his posts on entrepreneurship. He has a good post called “Embrace Losing” that talks about closing sales and learning from mistakes. I’d like to piggyback on the post with two of my own anecdotes that can be summed up with the simple thought: don’t be …
Traction vs Value
David Pakman has an excellent post up called “Confusing Traction with Value“, pointing to the “distressed exit of iLike” and then pointing out a few Web 2.0 aberrations in valuation. For those of you who experienced Web 1.0’s up and down, this is a bit “been there, done that”. Web 1.0 was about startups far outstripping the available audience. Web …
Swan Song for IT?
Randall Stross over at the NYTimes recently wrote about Thomas Siebel’s contention that Information Technology’s “glory days are past — long past, having ended in 2000.” According to Siebel, from 1980 to 2000, “All you had to do was show up and not goof it up… All ships were rising.” That is, of course, an absurd statement. Those 20 years …
PC Game Digital Distribution Growth Strong
While the sales of new games in retail have struggled recently, Gamasutra recently reported that the digital download services continue to see strong growth: Valve’s Steam service revealed a 97% increase in download sales, year-over-year IGN’s own direct download service, Direct2Drive, has also surged year on year, according to the company, posting gains of 56% compared to twelve months previously. …
Casual games companies and the transition to Facebook
My last post commented on GamesBeat’s articles from Casual Connect, which touched on the challenges old casual game leaders are having with the new world of social games / social networks. Inside Social Games just posted about PopCap bringing Zuma to Facebook (as well as letting players use Facebook Connect on their own site). A quick look and you can …
Social Gaming Expands as Casual Gaming Gets Nervous
Casual Connect just took place in Seattle and Dean Takahashi over at GamesBeat has done a great job capturing some of the trends in this part of the games world: Part 1 and Part 2. Some of the most interesting quotes: Social games might hit a half billion in revenues this year. In 2007, before a price war began, casual …
Links & Attention
There have been a lot of posts around lately about whether blogging is dead, because short form is the new shiny. Of course, new media types never kill off old media types (or at least not quickly), but the topic is really moot because long form and short form are apples and oranges — two different value propositions. One thing …
U.S. Online Gaming Grows 22%
Conventional wisdom is that in down economies, entertainment is counter-cyclical. In the console space, the sales of new games has come under pressure in the poor economy, but the sales of used games is way up as well as subscriptions to mail-based video game rental programs (see Nielsen report). Now Comscore has tallied up US visitors to online gaming sites …
Socnet Advertising, where art thou?
A few months ago, I listened to a panel organized by Battery Ventures called “Monetizing Social Media”. Perhaps not surprisingly for a New York-based event, the panel spent 99% of the time talking about advertising. Still, I was surprised to see both the Facebook and MySpace representatives brush off microtransaction business models as niche and not worth discussing. The total …