I saw history in the making today.
For some reason, I was lucky enough to be in San Francisco for the Facebook f8 Platform launch event. This announcement was at least an 8.0 on the Richter scale. It was a whopper.
I'm a huge fan of Quantcast. I've blogged before that it may be the best free tool for online marketers.
And now it's even better.
Two weeks someone showed me that whenever you are looking at a web site, to see how much traffic it has, that there are two arrows that PREVIOUS and NEXT, so if you are looking at the 100th most popular web site, you can click on NEXT and see the 101st most popular.
World Vital Records most popular international search page is our German Genealogy Search page. According to Overture, there were 1045 searches on the Yahoo Network last month for "german genealogy" and 292 for "germany genealogy."
If I were an active investor in internet stocks, I would read everything that Bambi Francisco has to say, especially about the large internet companies. She has amazing prescience. I've been reading her for columns for years. Today she has an excellent post at AlwaysOn.
Josh Kopelman has a great post about Domino Rally business models that are so complicated and involve so many "ifs" that the chance for success is extremely low. It's much better to have a Two Domino business model, where you know that if you do two things really well, you will be profitable.
Some stats matter and some are rather meaningless. Like time of possession at college football games. It doesn't matter much. At least you can't determine the winner of a game by looking at that stat.
I grew up watching BYU football in the glory days of Marc Wilson, Gifford Nielsen, Jim McMahon, Steve Young, Robbie Bosco, and Ty Detmer. The passing attack was the best in the nation for many years.
I wrote an article for Connect Magazine's September issue about skating to where the puck is going, not to where it has been, and I specifically addressed online video. I encourage companies to rush into online video, to take advantage of this new trend, and gain a competitive advantage by being an early adopter.
In May 2005 Fraser Bullock, one of Utah's brightest lights in the financial world (formerly with Bain Capital, now runs Sorenson Capital, helped with the 2002 Olympics turn-around), spoke at the Edison Conference in Salt Lake City.
Fortunately, I had my blackberry and I took extensive notes. Here are my notes from the middle part of his talk:
Management has to be adaptable. 1990 someone brought him into run home shopping network, pre-internet. Challenge was to get consumers to buy. They had a patent. Decided they had assets, what could they build that might be of worth. Built transaction processing engine for remote banking. Sold it to Visa International in 1994.
In fast moving tech environment, if I didn't step back every 3-6 months to fundamentally re-assess our assets and the environment, I might be missing a paradigm shift. You need the discipline to step back.
My friend Tim Hunt, a venture-backed entrepreneur whose company Lingotek is located at the Novell Open Source Incubator in Provo, called me the other day and said they have a new job opening for someone in internet marketing and sales.
If you run a business with an internet strategy, hopefully you've started thinking about a mobile strategy as well. You need to skate where the puck is going and not where it has been.
IDC estimates that 24 million US mobile phone users will pay for some kind of TV/Video content or services by 2010, up from 7 million this year. That is a sizeable market share. And it will only get bigger.
