How to Rule the World (For A Couple Hundred Million Dollars)
The last 20 years have brought an unprecedented level of innovation in consumer electronics. Processing speed has increased 15,000%, standard system memory has gone from 1 megabyte to 4,000 megabytes, and hard disk storage has increased by a factor of 12. However, battery technology has stayed largely the same. The lithium-ion battery, most commonly used in laptops, smartphones, and some automobiles, was invented in 1985 and made commercially available in 1991. Since then, no significant improvements have come to market, save...
read moreWhat’s wrong with LinkedIn? Harvard Students keep trying to re-create it
I recently served as a judge for the Harvard College business plan competition elevator pitch contest, along with prof. Tom Eisenmann, fellow EC Jess Bloomgarden, and two others affiliated with Harvard. We were blown away at the number of pitches (at least 10%) which were effectively re-creations of LinkedIn. One student wanted to give her classmates the ability to upload resumes into a centralized “drop” area. Another student wanted to help connect classmate who had similar interests, and package those groups of students for...
read moreSocial Media is taking over. What’s a boring brand to do?
In my life before business school, I worked as a brand manager on Green Giant vegetables, Yoplait Yogurt, and Hamburger Helper dinner kits. These brands, while familiar and in many ways iconic, were frankly… unsexy. That was deliberate, of course. As a brand marketer, my team worked diligently to maintain a consistent brand image across all of our media touch points. Words like “sexy” or “irreverent” were nowhere to be found on our brand architecture (the document we used to guide all consumer-facing marketing efforts),...
read moreEducation: the last online innovation frontier, but is it impossible to monetize?
We may complain about our healthcare system, but hospitals have come a long way in the last 100 years or so. In the late nineteenth century, record keeping and processes for managing patient flow were poor to non-existent. Your “doctor” was quite possibly an apprentice without a formal college education. And an infection that could have killed you in 1900 would be a trivial matter to the staff at Mass General today. While transportation, communications and virtually every other field of human endeavor have taken similarly large strides in...
read moreThe Harbus: 2011-12
So this year a lot of my time has been dedicated to The Harbus, HBS’s independent student newspaper. We are 100% self funded (other than the fact that we are supplied office space) and survive mostly through advertising sold in the physical newspaper. As most anyone can imagine, ad revenues have taken a nose dive over the last 4 years. With the economic troubles, we seem to have been crowded out of our advertisers’ wallets. This is troubling because The Harbus has a historical dependence on that sole source of revenue. The trends that are...
read moreGrowing web audience and protecting newspaper circulation
Charging for access to a news website may be counterproductive for someone trying to muster a large online audience. Readers asked to punch in credit card numbers to see a news story, even for a relatively small price, are just as likely to surf elsewhere. But so-called paywalls are a fad among newspaper sites, and not just for publishers trying to recover shrinking advertising revenue. Media companies are balancing the need to mobilize web audience, and the online advertising they bring, with the preservation of print readership. Consider the...
read moreFriction money at Zynga
Zynga’s long awaited IPO roadshow is set to start next week. I’d like to talk about something that Pincus & Co aren’t likely to address: how Zynga could be disrupted. Zynga makes money off friction A common misconception is that Zynga makes its money off of advertising. While advertising revenue does power some (mostly mobile) games, like Words with Friends, the vast majority of Zynga revenue comes from in-game purchases. Players can spend real money for in-game currencies like “farm cash” (Farmville) or “crowns”...
read more“Ontornet” to Internet
After returning to Lebanon this past summer, I realized what I appreciated the most about the US was its “online economy!” No more one-click purchases, no more choosing what I wanted to watch on Hulu and Netflix, no more flash sales in Lebanon! Let’s not forget about downloads; movie downloads on iTunes had to be planned days in advance. If I wanted to watch a YouTube video, I opened the video before leaving the house and let it load so I could watch it without interruption when I returned. Google maps could show me roughly where...
read moreThe ethics of business cloning: Need for further protection?
by Derek Poppinga & Germain Chastel 1. A general framework for innovation protection: Advantages and downsides Society, predominately through its legal frameworks, attempts to protect certain types of innovation in order to allow the benefits of the said innovation flow to the innovator. The rationale for this is clear: if innovation was not protected, any idea could be copied and the player with the most resources would consistently win through quick development and commercialization. Legal protection is a way to maintain...
read moreThe limitations of network based businesses in education
At first glance, one might find the public education system an ideal place to build a network-based business. It’s a very large and well-defined customer base (~50 million students and ~3 million teachers) organized into a formal and clearly connected system with shared culture and beliefs. Yet I contend that is nearly impossible to build network-based businesses in this space. Why? The barriers largely outweigh the benefits. To name a few: Regulatory hurdles: As large public entities that deal with children, the public school...
read more