@jatinshah

The monetization & distribution conundrum for content creators

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 01:31:00 -0500

The monetization & distribution conundrum for content creators:

Explaining the failure of The Daily, M G Siegler touches upon an interesting conundrum for content creators looking for distribution & monetization on internet & mobile:

The other element at play here is the (lack of) maturation of the distribution model…Such goals [500 million subscribers] shouldn’t be unreasonable for a popular and well-run publication, but there has to be an ecosystem that works together to make it happen. Several blogs like this one took off because other blogs would link to it and vice versa. An ecosystem formed. Perhaps Apple and other tablet makers need better syntax and tools for one tablet publication to reference another.

And:

The advertising model works for some content, but for a lot of it, it basically sucks. And the direct payment layers aren’t anywhere near as seamless as they need to be on the standard web. Paywalls are called “walls” for a reason.

There should be an easy, quick way to directly pay a reasonable rate for content you appreciate. Apple has created that layer, but the publishers have whiffed badly when it comes to using it.

Put simply: If you build smartphone & tablet apps, you get great monetization, but poor distribution. On the other hand, plain web offers great distribution but no real path to sustainable monetization.

Ted Weschler

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 12:00:17 -0500

Ted Weschler:

Excellent profile of Berkshire-Hathway’s portfolio manager in Bloomberg

Apple's price action

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 03:40:45 -0500

Apple's price action:

Best & likely the most accurate explanation of Apple’s price action:

Suppose you were a mutual fund manager and your strategic models allowed for a maximum 8% allocation in any individual stock. What would have happened to your Apple holdings in 2012? As of September 21st, Apple was up 74.9% year-to-date. Apple allocations at the largest mutual funds had grown to between 13% and 15% of total holdings with the fiscal year end approaching on October 31st. Because of Apple’s strength, because it was such an outlier when compared to the rest of the market, these money managers were forced to re-balance their portfolios in order to comply with their risk models. The Apple slingshots, or in other words the deeper than unexpected selloffs, are caused by systematic institutional re-balancing. This is the unintended consequence of Apple’s status as the most widely held stock of most hedge funds, indexes, pension funds and mutual funds. Apple’s slingshot selloffs occur because of its strength, not because of its weakness. Apple is an outlier.

Always focus on building shareholder value

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 01:25:54 -0500

Always focus on building shareholder value

Taleb on designing anti-fragile systems

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 03:53:42 -0500

Taleb on designing anti-fragile systems:

Brilliant as usual, especially on the topic of technological development:

Tinkering by trial and error has traditionally played a larger role than directed science in Western invention and innovation. Indeed, advances in theoretical science have most often emerged from technological development, which is closely tied to entrepreneurship. Just think of the number of famous college dropouts in the computer industry.

But I don’t mean just any version of trial and error. There is a crucial requirement to achieve antifragility: The potential cost of errors needs to remain small; the potential gain should be large. It is the asymmetry between upside and downside that allows antifragile tinkering to benefit from disorder and uncertainty.

And:

Consider Britain, whose historic rise during the Industrial Revolution came from tinkerers who gave us innovations like iron making, the steam engine and textile manufacturing. The great names of the golden years of English science were hobbyists, not academics: Charles Darwin, Henry Cavendish, William Parsons, the Rev. Thomas Bayes. Britain saw its decline when it switched to the model of bureaucracy-driven science.

America has emulated this earlier model, in the invention of everything from cybernetics to the pricing formulas for derivatives. They were developed by practitioners in trial-and-error mode, drawing continuous feedback from reality. To promote antifragility, we must recognize that there is an inverse relationship between the amount of formal education that a culture supports and its volume of trial-and-error by tinkering. Innovation doesn’t require theoretical instruction, what I like to compare to “lecturing birds on how to fly.”

Danny DeVito explains Value Investing

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 23:04:04 -0500

Danny DeVito explains Value Investing

Start small

Sun, 11 Nov 2012 03:19:07 -0500

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.”

- Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail by John Gall

Startup Exits by Mark Suster

Sat, 10 Nov 2012 09:01:55 -0500

Startup Exits by Mark Suster

Andy Zaky compares Apple & Google

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 11:06:00 -0500

Andy Zaky compares Apple & Google:

And nails it once again:

Here is another way to think about all of this. If an investor had $1 trillion in her bank account and had the ability to buy Apple or Google outright in cash at their current market capitalizations, only someone who didn’t care about money would buy Google for $223.5 billion over Apple at $571.7 billion. The reason? Given that Apple not only already has $130 billion of that market cap in cash (as of this Friday’s report), Apple’s return on equity is much larger than Google’s.

Next year Apple will return 14.5% of its entire net market capitalization while Google will return 9.4%. That means if both companies stopped growing, it would only take Apple about six and a half years to completely pay off its entire net market capitalization while it would take Google more than 11-years to accomplish the same feat.

“What do you want to run for this year, Joe?” “Treasurer” “But you...

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 13:50:38 -0500

“What do you want to run for this year, Joe?”
“Treasurer”
“But you cannot even add!”
“I did not say I wanted to run for assistant treasurer.”

Eddy Cue

Sat, 03 Nov 2012 12:00:28 -0400

Eddy Cue:

Excellent profile of Eddy Cue (h/t Daring Fireball). My favorite part is the quote by Chris Castle (an attorney involved in the negotiations for music labels):

“You haven’t lived until Steve Jobs has called you a primitive thinker.”

Apple TV might be a billion dollar business

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 12:00:24 -0400

Apple TV might be a billion dollar business:

Five million Apple TVs per year is a half-billion dollar hobby. As such it quintupled from the first year (calendar 2007).

The value for hardware is, of course, only a part of the story. It is accounted for as part of peripherals revenue and amounts to 18% of total peripherals revenues. Last May I estimated that the installed base of Apple TVs was 10 million. I’d estimate current total to be closer to 12 million. Assuming $10/month in content sales per Apple TV results in $1.4 billion of which 30% might be retained by Apple as revenue (agency fee).

The yearly revenue thus could be as high as $900 million. Therefore it seems plausible that Apple TV is on the verge of being a billion dollar business.

What would be considered as a huge success and a successful franchise for another company is just a hobby for Apple.

Pinterest-ization of e-commerce

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 12:00:19 -0400

Pinterest-ization of e-commerce:

Om Malik quoting Michael Williams of the influential menswear blog, A Continuous Lean:

“Online shopping continues to become more of a rich experience, and the structure and set up of Tumblr and Pinterest lend themselves well to the development of shopping sites. I also think that customers are more open to a visual shopping experience, and it seems like the back end technology can better support those types of experiences at this point.”

Amazon has some very expensive acquisitions in its future.

Apple’s (awesome) Design Team

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 12:00:32 -0400

Apple’s (awesome) Design Team

Corrected comparison of Amazon Kindle HD with iPad mini (by Rene...

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 12:00:32 -0400

Corrected comparison of Amazon Kindle HD with iPad mini (by Rene Ritchie)

Amazon compares iPad mini with Kindle HD. Quite misleading on...

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 12:00:27 -0400

Amazon compares iPad mini with Kindle HD. Quite misleading on their part to not mention that iPad mini supports LTE, but not Kindle HD. And deliberately so.

Great South Korean investment ideas from Chan Lee of Petra...

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 03:59:37 -0400

Great South Korean investment ideas from Chan Lee of Petra Capital Management.

Indiana Jones denied tenure at Marshall College

Sun, 28 Oct 2012 08:55:00 -0400

Indiana Jones denied tenure at Marshall College:

Shocking! Universities never change.

Steve Jobs in an old BBC program about NeXT: “More...

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 12:00:09 -0400

Steve Jobs in an old BBC program about NeXT:

“More important than building a product, we are in the process of architecting a company that will hopefully be much more incredible than sum of its parts. And the cumulative effort of approximately 20,000 decisions that we are all going to make over next 2 years are going to define what our company is.

And one of the things that made Apple great is that from early days it was built from the heart, not by somebody who came in and said I know how to build a company. It was built from the heart. Now unfortunately, we did not always use our heads. Now we can do better in many respects because we are wiser and smarter. And one my largest wishes is that we build NeXT from our heart. And people who are coming to work for us, buying our products or want to sell us things feel that. That we are doing this because we have a passion about it. We are doing this because we really care about the higher education process.”

Unlock the 007 in you…in 70 seconds!

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 12:00:21 -0400

Unlock the 007 in you…in 70 seconds!