Paramount studios announced today that they’ve severed ties with Tom Cruise after a 13 year relationship due to his “unacceptable” behavior. Strangely, Cruise’s agents claim that they terminated negotiations with Paramount after turning to a pair of hedge funds to finance Cruise’s future projects. Clearly, there’s more to this story: as my […]

Business Models, investing | 8 Comments »

Umair at Bubblegeneration recently wrote a great note on the “post-network” economy–the main idea being that bland strategy is increasingly a commodity, and that in mind, the next great shift in value creation will come from creativity.
But what is creativity?
The best answer I’ve recently heard comes from Sir Ken Robinson. If […]

Business Models | 6 Comments »

Kiko, the online calendar I picked as my favorite Ajax application back in September 2005, is now for sale on eBay. The starting bid is $49,999.99, with no takers yet.
While Kiko’s functionality was solid (and improving, especially with recent releases), the team apparently wasn’t able to develop a viable business model […]

Web 2.0, Business Models | 8 Comments »

For the early adopter crowd: Microsoft has released browser-based trial versions of Office 2007 (including Word, Powerpoint, Access, Excel, etc). Unfortunately, the demos won’t allow you to save documents to a local hard drive, but they’re still interesting if you’re looking to see what functional and GUI changes/improvements are in store (Jensen Harris, […]

Enterprise software, Business Models | 1 Comment »

I’m a fan of Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory–recent controversey notwithstanding. Still, I was surprised by the following chart from Wikipedia’s statistics page:

The chart shows that 416,139 “wikipedians” have made 29,580,205 edits to various articles (there are currently 1,306,883 articles in total). That’s a lot of edits, but what’s more interesting […]

Business Models | 3 Comments »