Proctor and Gamble (P&G), one of the world’s largest consumer packaged goods companies, announced last week that it was rethinking its Facebook advertising strategy. Specifically, the company has concluded that Facebook’s advanced targeting capabilities, e.g. Moms in the South who drive Japanese minivans, aren’t more effective for its brands than more generic targeting, e.g. Women 25-49. […]
No place on Earth has preserved the Gilded Age’s opulence more than Newport, Rhode Island. With its temperate climate and sandy beaches, it has attracted summer visitors for two centuries. The most famous of its residents were some of the country’s wealthiest families. They made their fortunes in the 18th and 19th centuries, predominantly in natural resources, transportation, and trade. […]
Google’s/Alphabet’s 16th quarter as a publicly traded company came in Q3 2008. Facebook just passed that milestone at the end of June. I’ve been fascinated at just how each of them has grown top-line revenues. Their results over this time span have been eerily similar, with Facebook demonstrating more pronounced seasonality in Q4 than its search rival. You can […]
At several times over the last 10 years, I’ve seriously considered taking online courses in coding and programming. It happened for the first time when the economy took a nosedive in 2008. The notion struck again as Nokia starting shedding enough jobs to fill a few professional basketball arenas. I felt it in 2012 while on board […]
One of the most gratifying rewards of an 17-year career in business is recognizing when things I’ve experienced in the past repeat themselves. Trend-spotting builds confidence. I mention this because I had a front row seat for Pokémon’s first act and I’ve launched three augmented reality mobile apps, so I know the category pretty well. Put the […]
I think Tesla is in trouble. The company has permitted market confusion about what its Autopilot feature can and cannot do. Following the death of a Tesla owner who perished when his car crashed while in Autopilot mode, this confusion gives lawyers the grist they need to take Tesla to the cleaners. It’s not hard to […]
The success of Uber, Airbnb, Amazon, and many others has created a massive incentive for entrepreneurs to leverage mobile devices and computing horsepower from the cloud to remove friction from many industries. That’s why it’s so surprising to find products and services that still have not adapted to a mobile-first paradigm. These five hold-outs illustrate […]
In his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, author Jared Diamond argues that the reason Europeans colonized South America and Africa, and not the other way around, can be traced to built-in environmental benefits that helped expedite the transformation from nomadic to agrarian societies. Social groups that happened to live near places where grains naturally occurred […]
Remember when Microsoft bought Skype ($8.5 billion)? That was the key to Microsoft’s mobile strategy. How about the time Microsoft bought Mojang, the creator of Minecraft ($2.5 billion)? The title’s loyal, premium-paying following and cross-generational appeal was the key to Microsoft’s mobile strategy. Then Microsoft bought Nokia’s smartphone business ($9.465 billion). Now THAT was the engine […]
If you work in tech, when was the last time you thought about or even uttered the words “killer app?” It wasn’t that long ago when every consumer-facing ecosystem obsessed over them. Just as the first-person shooter Halo single-handedly drove sales of the Xbox game console, a killer mobile app makes consumers lust for the hardware that supports […]
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