The company’s future depends on finding just the right balance between the privacy expectations of its users and the quality of the social marketing data it can serve to its business partners.

For many people, Facebook is the first stop in any Web surfing session. It has developed into a highly engaging combination of online bulletin board, personal scrapbook, and group communication network. But did you ever wonder why, being all those things, Facebook is free?
Well, it really isn’t. Facebook offers its service in exchange for the right to capture …

How generous of the nice people of 37Signal to share with the world the amazing artwork from their most recent REWORK book. The book is a MUST read for everyone with a pulse, the artwork is eye candy for who believes that :
business–>art–life–>business (again)
Links:

REWORK Illustration flickr stream
Slideshow
Buy REWORK (the book) at Amazon.com
37signal

The new book Rework tells you how.

Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson are two of my favorite guys in the tech industry. That’s mainly because they have little in common with everyone else in the tech industry. Their 10-year-old company, 37signals, makes Web software for businesses. These products are universally hailed as simple, elegant, and useful—not to mention extremely popular and profitable. Yet 37signals’ software often seems like a byproduct of a larger mission. On Signal vs. Noise, their entertaining company blog, and in lectures and classes all over …

The new book Rework tells you how.

Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson are two of my favorite guys in the tech industry. That’s mainly because they have little in common with everyone else in the tech industry. Their 10-year-old company, 37signals, makes Web software for businesses. These products are universally hailed as simple, elegant, and useful—not to mention extremely popular and profitable. Yet 37signals’ software often seems like a byproduct of a larger mission. On Signal vs. Noise, their entertaining company blog, and in lectures and classes all over …

Here at The Economist Innovation Conference in Berkeley, California, hundreds of thought leaders have gathered to discuss the process, politics and economics of innovation.
How do you create an innovative technology? How do you balance innovation and economics? What fosters great ideas? On stage earlier today was Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios, who spoke to a lot of these points. He was interviewed by Economist correspondent Martin Giles; He also answered question from the audience.
Here’s a small sampling of his thoughts on how innovation and …

I’m hardly qualified to dash off authoritative articles on the theological bona fides of African critters. But one recent evening, I made $15 for writing tips on hard-disc data recovery, another $15 for telling people how to repair burnt carpet and $7.50 for teasing out the answer to that most pressing of questions: Is a giraffe sacred?
The reason for my nighttime writing adventure was to see what life is like on a massive content farm. I was working for Demand Media, the content-provider start-up that has quickly become the …

Katie Benghauser had no concept of all the forces that combined to bring the box of pills to the bottom shelf of her medicine cabinet. All she knew was that three years ago she went in for a routine checkup and her doctor told her it was time for her to take a test.
Not that there was anything in particular about Benghauser that suggested sickness. At 54 she exercised every day and could outrun most 20-year-olds. She was a model of health.
Still, because Benghauser was thin, white, female, in …

Chrysler was in dire straits earlier this year, and while bankruptcy is now behind the Pentastar, the battle that looms ahead will prove if Chrysler can truly remain a viable company. Chrysler’s hope rests with Fiat, the Italian car comglomerate who took a 30% stake in Chrysler as part of the bankruptcy proceedings. While we’ve heard much and seen little thus far in regards to the future Chrysler lineup, the Detroit International Auto Show should give some hint as to the direction of Chrysler/Fiat.
One such car sure to make …

I’d be wishing everyone a happier New Year if it were easier to mail out greeting cards to friends on Facebook and colleagues on LinkedIn. I’d like to use knx.to, our free, real-time social address book, but their ‘privacy’ policies prevent us from downloading contact information, even for my own friends.
At least those Terms of Service (ToS) that force us to copy addresses and phone numbers one-by-one also prevent scoundrels from stealing our identity; reselling our friends to marketers; and linking our life online to the real world. Right?
Wrong. …

The long tail is famously good news for two classes of people; a few lucky aggregators, such as Amazon and Netflix, and 6 billion consumers. Of those two, I think consumers earn the greater reward from the wealth hidden in infinite niches.
But the long tail is a decidedly mixed blessing for creators. Individual artists, producers, inventors and makers are overlooked in the equation. The long tail does not raise the sales of creators much, but it does add massive competition and endless downward pressure on prices. Unless artists become …

In the last post I beat you to death about ditching your business plan but failed to provide an alternative.
Okay okay, “Planning = Bad,” but the supposed benefits of planning are still important: designing for profitability, understanding your customers and competitors, focusing your attention, deciding what’s worth doing next, changing directions, and ensuring the founders agree on important issues.
To help you, I’m stealing a trick from therapists.
Therapists don’t tell you what to do. Rather, they ask probing questions that get you to discover for yourself what is true for …

“You need a business plan” is the mantra of MBA types.
As they say, businesses don’t plan to fail, they fail to plan! Who could argue with such a clever turn of phrase?
Let’s do some quotes:

“Without a business plan, how will you know whether you can make a profit?” (source)
“A complete business plan should include five-year financial projections. These projections will assist investors with making decisions about your business and help you to know how much funding you will need to get things rolling.” (source)
“Many businesses fail due to poor …

Let’s call it the “Paranormal Effect” initiative.
Clearly dazzled by the fact that it could gross more than $100 million on a movie that barely cost $15,000 to make, Paramount Pictures is set to launch a new production wing devoted to films budgeted at less than $100,000. As my colleague John Horn reported today:

“The as-yet-unnamed division’s initial plan is to finance as many as 20 ‘micro-budget’ movies annually starting in 2010… Funds for the movies — about $1 million annually — will be part of Paramount’s existing production budget….Some of …

This morning we broke the news that Canopy Financial, no. 12 on this year’s Inc. 500 list of fastest growing companies, is a complete sham.
And it’s no surprise that today, everyone is trying to point the finger at everyone else.
The company’s investment bank, Financial Technology Partners, which has represented Canopy Financial through at least two separate rounds of fraudulent fundraising, emailed to say:

“Hi there, I’d respectfully ask for some consideration here and would like to have our information / logos / screenshots taken off of your Canopy Financial posts. …

For Plymouth Rock team, money woes, questions crowding out hopes

David P. Kirkpatrick seemed to relish the role of big-shot Hollywood insider as he briefed state development officials about his bold plan to challenge Tinseltown at its own game.

And the former head of Paramount Motion Pictures certainly sounded like the right man to build a huge movie and TV studio in Massachusetts. He talked about how he helped bring “Forrest Gump’’ to life. He casually referred to Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston …

Facebook is the biggest social network in the world, so it may come as a surprise to some that up until early 2008, it didn’t offer any localized versions of the site at all. The company managed to jumpstart its international presence with an application fittingly called Translations, which took the time-consuming and costly task of translating the site and crowd-sourced it, asking the network’s millions of users to lend a hand. The process proved to be very efficient: Facebook launched a Spanish site in Feburary 2008, only a …

From: NetflixPrize.com

This is Neil Hunt, Chief Product Officer at Netflix.
To everyone who participated in the Netflix Prize: You’ve made this a truly remarkable contest and you’ve brought great innovation to the field. We applaud you for your contributions and we hope you’ve enjoyed the journey. We look forward to announcing a winner of the $1M Grand Prize in late September.
And, like so many great movies, there will be a sequel.
The advances spurred by the Netflix Prize have so impressed us that we’re planning …

Times and Sun readers to pay as loss-making Murdoch declares end to free-for-all

The billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch suffered the indignity of seeing his global empire make a huge financial loss yesterday and promptly pledged to shake up the newspaper industry by introducing charges for access to all his news websites, including the Times, the Sun and the News of the World, by next summer.
Stung by a collapse in advertising revenue as the recession shredded Fleet Street’s traditional business model, Murdoch declared that the era of a free-for-all in …

customAdart.com reinvents the business model of photography market, reversing the model and crowdsourcing it.
A MUSt try for any innovative business and free agent.
http://www.customadart.com/
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