Social Media Statistics

HTML5 Ads

Jonny F — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 19:34:00 +0000

Some really interesting stuff is about to happen in the display ads market. Check out Boston based http://www.html5ads.com

Will Apple’s Market Cap Now Surpass Microsoft Plus Google?

Jonny F — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 18:16:38 +0000

It wasn’t long ago that AAPL surpassed MSFT in market cap which was a huge shift in power in tech. However Apple is still on a tear and after an incredible earnings call yesterday where Apple reported 24 billion in sales for the quarter, their stock is flying high today given them a market cap of 323 billion. With MSFT flat over recent years they are now at 213 billion and Google is hovering around 168 billion, Apple maybe on a pace where its market cap will surpass the sum of Google and Microsoft put together.

The big curveball will come next year in tech when Facebook goes public as I’m not sure if the market knows how to value a company like Facebook. It will be fun to watch for sure.

The Business Owners Trifecta for Success. Search, Social & Mobile

Jonny F — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 14:56:33 +0000

If you run a business, these are the three things you need to be on top of from a marketing perspective in today’s world. If you’re not monitoring search at this point, you’ve got to get on that. For many it is the most impactful. Make sure your business can be found in Google and other search engines and if you are a local business, make sure you come up in local search. Augment SEO with some paid search but search is still where many start. Even when people know the name of a place, the google it vs entering the URL. Make sure you are listed.

Social encompasses a lot but get on Facebook and Twitter with frequent but not SPAMMY updates. Also look into things like Yelp, Groupon / Living Social, Foursquare, etc. Use a blog as a way to tell your story and work the blog-o-sphere to get mentioned by others.

Mobile. This is key. More and more people are relying on their smartphones for everything. How will mobile impact your business. You may benefit from an app you may not. Depends on your business. But make sure you come up in mobile search, make sure your site is usable on iPhone, Android, Blackberry and other mobile browsers. You might consider a simple mobile site that directs users to a simple page that offers your phone number, address, basic info, etc. if they come from a mobile browser. You can still provide access to the full site but too many times I hit a restaurant site that is in Flash and can’t get to the basic info. Make sure you’re thinking about mobile as part of your web strategy.

Search, Social, Mobile.

TweetAlarm Sends its 1 Millionth Alert

Jonny F — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 17:22:36 +0000

TweetAlarm.com is a web site I whipped up one weekend to send me email alerts when someone tweets about my company and other things of interest. It is like Google Alerts for Twitter. I wrote it in about 2 hours and put it online, its been covered by a handful of key tech blogs including Lifehacker and Mashable but I’ve never actively promoted it. Yet thanks to the power of the web, it has grown every day on its own since its launch in 2009 and it just sent its 1 millionth email alert. Pretty amazing for something that took about 2 hours to create. I did later invest a little bit in having a designer make it look nice but other than that, it was some simple coding and providing some utility that is of interest to many web site owner, entrepreneurs and marketeers. Congrats to the TweetAlarm team, oh wait that’s me.

The PC is Still the Leader in Content Creation, but Losing In Content Consumption

Jonny F — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 15:53:11 +0000

I love my iPad and iPhone and use them both every day. However, I still bring my laptop everywhere. Why? Just in case I need to create or edit content. That maybe source code, it maybe an article or a presentation so I keep it on standby. I take it out of the bag a lot less than I used to but I still need it with me. The tablet is not yet a viable solution for writing long documents, editing documents, creating and editing source code, doing pixel level artwork, animations and complex video editing. Content creation is still done on the PC. And with more and more people falling into the camp of content creators with millions of hackers writing code, millions of video editors putting videos out on YouTube and millions of bloggers, it is hard to think that the post PC era is here. Sure you can do a quick post on your iPad or make quick changes to a presentation, photo or video on your tablet or even your phone but I find it hard to believe that is used for anything more than the quick changes and quick posts and source code on your iPad, even with an attached keyboard, is no easy task. We may get there but I don’t think we are there yet.

On the other hand, content consumption, that is shifting quickly to post PC. Photos, videos, news and social updates are not only easy to consume on mobile devices in many ways those things are more powerful and more fun to do on the post PC devices. I love watching video and flipping through photos on my iPad. Its more engaging and more fun than on a PC. I love reading books on my iPad and am often reading blog posts and other news on the browser and with dedicated apps. I am likely to consume more content this year on mobile devices than on my PC but not likely to create much content on anything but my trusty laptop.

Why Young Entrepreneurs Are A Great Bet

Jonny F — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 15:49:48 +0000

When you’re 20, you have fewer bills and can take more risk. When you get to be 40 you are likely to have a mortgage, a spouse, kids, a dog and other responsibilities that require a steady check. But more importantly when you’re 20 you have no idea how hard it is to sell a solution to a large company or get lots of consumers to buy something or create a media network large enough to attract advertisers. Your naivety is an asset. You’re so focused and passionate about whatever it is you’re doing you can’t imagine the hurdles so you just go after it and when you hit a hurdle you climb over it. Once you’ve been in business for 20 years you start to realize how hard it is to make changes. You are aware of the hurdles, you run from them as you know how high they can be. Your experience can become a liability. Investors, especially on the east coast, focus on experience. In many cases they are missing the boat as they did with Facebook. My point, naivety can be a good thing if the passion is strong enough to overcome the hurdles that are blinded by that inexperience.

With AT&T Buying T-Mobile USA, When Does Verizon Try to Buy Sprint

Jonny F — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 01:59:28 +0000

Sprint’s market cap today is about 15 billion, Verizon has about 22 billion in current assets and a market cap of 101 billion. It is certainly doable. Let’s see what happens assuming the ATT deal gets passed the SEC

When is the SecondMarket Class Action Suit Coming?

Jonny F — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 18:05:55 +0000

I don’t wish bad on SecondMarket and other secondary stock markets and in fact I think they bring many positives to the ecosystem, letting founders take some money off the table without selling out and without having the burden of being a public company. Certainly its fun to watch some of these hot young companies fly in their SecondMarket valuations. However, it seems that all this massive trading with little information is going to inevitably lead to a lawsuit. In general I am a free marketeer and support lean government but there is a reason there are stringent rules for public companies. While this may not work perfectly, the idea is everyone is trading based on the same information and that they are trading with some consistent metrics used across all companies. With these private company stock auctions where lots of people are trading on little information it seems the risk is high that someone is trading with less information than others and trading with insufficient information. When a private investor makes an investment they go through a due diligence process and take a calculated risk based on that research. With these auctions, investors don’t have that opportunity and so are trading blind. This is a case where the government oversight and stringent rules makes sense. I hope that Facebook goes public both because they are becoming so important in the Internet ecosystem that it will be useful to know their financials with certainty and also to avoid a legal mess with these private sales which I fear is inevitable.

Facebook Browser

Jonny F — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 18:05:27 +0000

With the pervasiveness of Facebook and now Facebook Connect on so many web sites, it maybe time for Facebook to launch its own browser. Does the world need another web browser, probably not but they could use Webkit as the rendering engine and then add social layers to the browser. This would allow you as a user to stay on Facebook chat as you moved around the web, would make it easier to share links and “check in” to web sites and of course for Facebook would give them invaluable data on mapping your social graph to your favorite sites to provide a much richer ad experience. If they could get users to adopt such a browser, they could quickly start to attack Google in search and discovery.

No More Patent Trolls

Jonny F — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 12:13:03 +0000

It seems every day I read about another law suit filed by a shell company who has licensed patents from inventors with no other purpose but to sue companies. They can sue with essentially no risk to themselves but even if the patent turns out to be invalid or the company is found not to infringe the costs to the defendant can be crippling. The patent office has many flaws as far as I can see. They approve too many patents that are too close to one another and they take far too long to act in their supposed effort to protect industries that come and go in that same time span. It seems there is more incentive to file hundreds of patents and put together a company of lawyers to sit back and sue companies who are actually trying to bring products and services to market. We need patent reform as start-ups, the companies that are supposed to be protected under this system are the ones being hurt. It has to stop as its not good for the economy when only lawyers make money.

Adding on4/4/2011…well played by Google

Official Google Blog: Patents and innovation