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The Economics Of Abundance

Chris F. Masse — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 06:33:17 +0000

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The Organic Marketing Manifesto

Chris F. Masse — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 12:31:08 +0000

The natural search opportunity:

* Search, as an industry, is growing from a $12B industry in 2007 to a $25B industry in 2011—100% growth in just 4 years (SEMPO).
* CPC costs are on the rise—Google’s average CPC rose 15% last year.
* Consumers click on natural listings 85% of the time according to research (from Forrester).
* Meanwhile, marketers spend 85% of their search budgets on paid search (according to Marketing Sherpa).
* 56% of Google queries have 0 paid ads placed (each of those queries present 10 “non-paid” or natural search results (or for the forward thinking, “ads”) on the results page) (according to comScore).

That is why I advocate what I call the “organic marketing“.

Michael Masnick – NARM 2009 State Of The Industry

Chris F. Masse — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 23:09:47 +0000

NARM 2009 State Of The Industry: Michael Masnick from NARM on Vimeo.

Chris Anderson visits Google to present his book, “Free”.

Chris F. Masse — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 22:40:22 +0000

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) versus Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Chris F. Masse — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 13:04:22 +0000

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) versus Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Jeff Bezos (Amazon and Zappos) about the 3 keys to success

Chris F. Masse — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 12:54:27 +0000

Video from Jeff Bezos about Amazon and Zappos

Copyright laws threaten our Internet freedom.

Chris F. Masse — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 08:04:13 +0000

Op-Ed in the Financial Times against excessive copyright laws by the Pirate party’s member of the European parliament.

And, of course, I am “pirating” the article of the Financial Times.

Copyright laws threaten our online freedom.

By Christian Engström

Published: July 7 2009 18:10 | Last updated: July 7 2009 18:10

If you search for Elvis Presley in Wikipedia, you will find a lot of text and a few pictures that have been cleared for distribution. But you will find no music and no film clips, due to copyright restrictions. What we think of as our common cultural heritage is not “ours” at all.

On MySpace and YouTube, creative people post audio and video remixes for others to enjoy, until they are replaced by take-down notices handed out by big film and record companies. Technology opens up possibilities; copyright law shuts them down.

This was never the intent. Copyright was meant to encourage culture, not restrict it. This is reason enough for reform. But the current regime has even more damaging effects. In order to uphold copyright laws, governments are beginning to restrict our right to communicate with each other in private, without being monitored.

File-sharing occurs whenever one individual sends a file to another. The only way to even try to limit this process is to monitor all communication between ordinary people. Despite the crackdown on Napster, Kazaa and other peer-to-peer services over the past decade, the volume of file-sharing has grown exponentially. Even if the authorities closed down all other possibilities, people could still send copyrighted files as attachments to e-mails or through private networks. If people start doing that, should we give the government the right to monitor all mail and all encrypted networks? Whenever there are ways of communicating in private, they will be used to share copyrighted material. If you want to stop people doing this, you must remove the right to communicate in private. There is no other option. Society has to make a choice.

The world is at a crossroads. The Internet and new information technologies are so powerful that no matter what we do, society will change. But the direction has not been decided.

The technology could be used to create a Big Brother society beyond our nightmares, where governments and corporations monitor every detail of our lives. In the former East Germany, the government needed tens of thousands of employees to keep track of the citizens using typewriters, pencils and index cards. Today a computer can do the same thing a million times faster, at the push of a button. There are many politicians who want to push that button.

The same technology could instead be used to create a society that embraces spontaneity, collaboration and diversity. Where the citizens are no longer passive consumers being fed information and culture through one-way media, but are instead active participants collaborating on a journey into the future.

The Internet it still in its infancy, but already we see fantastic things appearing as if by magic. Take Linux, the free computer operating system, or Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Witness the participatory culture of MySpace and YouTube, or the growth of the Pirate Bay, which makes the world’s culture easily available to anybody with an Internet connection. But where technology opens up new possibilities, our intellectual property laws do their best to restrict them. Linux is held back by patents, the rest of the examples by copyright.

The public increasingly recognizes the need for reform. That was why Piratpartiet – the Pirate party – won 7.1 per cent of the popular vote in Sweden in the European Union elections. This gave us a seat in the European parliament for the first time.

Our manifesto is to reform copyright laws and gradually abolish the patent system. We oppose mass surveillance and censorship on the net, as in the rest of society. We want to make the EU more democratic and transparent. This is our entire platform.

We intend to devote all our time and energy to protecting the fundamental civil liberties on the net and elsewhere. Seven per cent of Swedish voters agreed with us that it makes sense to put other political differences aside in order to ensure this.

Political decisions taken over the next five years are likely to set the course we take into the information society, and will affect the lives of millions for many years into the future. Will we let our fears lead us towards a dystopian Big Brother state, or will we have the courage and wisdom to choose an exciting future in a free and open society?

The information revolution is happening here and now. It is up to us to decide what future we want.

“The writer is the Pirate party’s member of the European parliament.”

Excellent.

How to create a successful startup

Chris F. Masse — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 09:28:37 +0000

Marc Andreesen:

Above all else, we are looking for the brilliant and motivated entrepreneur or entrepreneurial team with a clear vision of what they want to build and how they will create or attack a big market. We cannot substitute for entrepreneurial vision and drive, but we can help such entrepreneurs build great companies around their ideas.

We are hugely in favor of the technical founder. We will generally focus on companies started by strong technologists who know exactly what they want to build and how they are going to build it.

We are hugely in favor of the founder who intends to be CEO. Not all founders can become great CEOs, but most of the great companies in our industry were run by a founder for a long period of time, often decades, and we believe that pattern will continue. We cannot guarantee that a founder can be a great CEO, but we can help that founder develop the skills necessary to reach his or her full CEO potential.

We believe that the product is the heart of any technology company. The company gets built around the product. Therefore, we believe it is critical that we as investors understand the product. We are ourselves computer scientists and information technologists by experience and training; therefore, we plan to focus on products in the domain of computer science and information technology.

Addendum: Don’t listen to anyone making Web 3.0 predictions.

Malcolm Gladwell tries to debunk Chris Anderson’s FREE.

Chris F. Masse — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 20:40:43 +0000

But Malcolm Gladwell fails to convince me, because I sense that he gets his facts wrong.

… But the Wall Street Journal has found that more than a million subscribers are quite happy to pay for the privilege of reading online. …

… Apple may soon make more money selling iPhone downloads (ideas) than it does from the iPhone itself (stuff). …

- The Wall Street Journal gives away popular stories that other news sites could paraphrase, but sell some deep business stories. See the Alan Murray interview.

- I don’t think that iPhone downloads are that big:

But even at $100 million, the App Store would still be a small drop in Apple’s bucket when it comes to revenue.

I don’t think that Mister Tipping Point gets his facts right. Chris Aderson still rules.

UPDATE: Chris Anderson responds brillantly to Malcolm Gladwell.

UPDATE: Seth Godin says that Malcom Gladwell is WRONG.

UPDATE: Mike Masnick at TechDirt debunks Malcom Gladwell’s criticism of FREE.

UPDATE: Google debunks Malcom Gladwell’s take on YouTube.

Google’s marketing explained by Marissa Mayer

Chris F. Masse — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 22:35:09 +0000

Listen when she explains how Google tests different versions of its website on different test groups… Interesting.