SpectatorBytes

Digital media organizations that think in terms of “building vs. buying” will struggle to compete in the marketplace going forward, especially when the answer tends to be “build.”
Over the past couple of years, it’s clear that one of the reasons why large digital businesses struggle to sustain growth is that they fail to maintain [...]

Upon learning of Facebook’s acquisition of Friendfeed, very few industry people (myself included) were surprised that Facebook needed to acquire a company to bring in talent to compete with Twitter. However, if one takes a step back, this news should have at least raised an eyebrow. Currently, Facebook is one of the hottest digital [...]

Recent events such as the Microsoft and Yahoo search deal, Facebook’s efforts to move from a private network to one that is public, and AOL’s imminent spin-off illustrate the challenging nature of consumer digital businesses. The constantly evolving nature of Web businesses continues to challenge most business leaders and corporations. The lack of “rules [...]

Over the past few months, I have noticed a rise in large images are increasingly dominating the user interface of content websites, particularly news sites.  The Huffington Post front page illustrates this trend. Here is a comparison of the current front page (below left) versus the version when the site was launched in 2006 (below [...]

Last week, I attended Techcrunch’s Real-Time Crunchup. The event brought together many members of the Twitter ecosystem to showcase their products and several key investors to discuss their views of the Twitter phenomenon. This event helped me crystallize my view on Twitter, which is that Twitter is facilitating the creation of a new database [...]

Starting in early 2004 during my tenure at AOL, I with others began to advocate opening up the AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) platform. The goal was to accelerate product development by using third party developers who could work with the open platform. We had seen the valuable ecosystem of third party applications and sites [...]

A few months back, I wrote about the emergence of the real-time Web and the impact it would have on content publishing. In recent weeks, the news coverage on the Web of the fallout from the election in Iran and the death of Michael Jackson have crystallized for me the impact of the real-time [...]

Other than the interesting presentations by current industry newsmakers and catching up with industry friends, one of the most valuable things that I took away from Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg’s D7 conference was a Flip Mino HD camera that I received as part of my gift bag. This simple yet  sophisticated video camera [...]

While ownership of digital content in recent years has been en vogue thanks to the likes of iTunes and Amazon, the increasing ubiquity of full or “quasi-broadband” wireless access is likely to make streaming content more dominant over time.
The recent aggressive push by cable and wireless operators to provide fast Internet access to the [...]

For many years now, I have written off “software clients” or “desktop applications” as viable consumer experiences. To me, the web browser paradigm is much more user-friendly and convenient. However, there are signs that suggest that “clients”/ “applications” are poised to make a comeback with users.
As a consumer, I have never been a big [...]

The art of developing strategies for digital media businesses has become increasingly difficult. The dynamics of the Web continue to evolve at such rapid pace that media companies struggle to stay ahead of the curve. Changes in the marketplace force digital media players to focus on constant reinvention of their businesses. This is the [...]

The growing number of social tools that have emerged over the past few years (MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Wordpress, and Twitter among others) are contributing to the emergence of new type of users which I call “social leaders.” After all, in a world where we are increasingly “following” our friends, acquaintances, colleagues and celebrities, [...]

As web services and open platforms become more popular, the opportunity to change the ways Internet businesses operate is dramatic. Amazon and eBay (among the large players) pioneered these efforts starting in 2003. Today, with open source initiatives such as Wordpress and Open X, more and more companies are leveraging “openness” to enable rapid [...]

Digital media companies would benefit from embracing technological innovation and taking proactive measures to avoid falling victim to the innovator’s dilemma. The Innovator’s Dilemma is the title of a book by Clayton Christensen in which he studies why successful market leading companies fail when faced with disruptive-innovations (i.e., simpler, cheaper, less functional products/services) in [...]

Over the past few years, we have witnessed the transformational impact of digital technologies on traditional media. The music industry was the first to be overwhelmed. Currently, the digital spotlight is on the newspaper and magazine industries whose business models are under intense pressure. The television business appears to be next in line as [...]