New investment: Empire Avenue, the world’s first influence stock market
Image via CrunchBase With the explosion of social media in the past few years, we now have millions of people broadcasting and curating information on a daily basis, making personal recommendations and endorsements to their friends and followers and creating personal brands on the Internet. But with that explosion of small “media outlets” it is […]
Why Demand Media (and similar models) will succeed
Image via CrunchBase With Demand Media filing for their long-expected IPO last week, the discussion around scalable content generation platforms (or “content farms” as critics of those models prefer to call them) is back in full swing. As an investor in Suite101 (the third-largest platform behind Demand Media and Yahoo‘s Associated Content), I have been […]
Market stage: stop developing features, focus on activating and retaining users
Image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/joi/2659065551/ via CrunchBase I finally got around reading Dave McClure’s investment thesis and agree with almost all he says. There is one especially interesting paragraph when Dave talks about the “market stage” which caught my attention as it has been the topic of discussion with a few of my portfolio companies as of […]
Job opportunities in our portfolio
Some exciting job opportunities that came up in our portfolio companies in recent weeks – please consider applying (and spread the word to your friends) SEO expert This position leads Suite101‘s initiatives to generate traffic and improve monetization for online content: http://www.techvibes.com/job/head-of-seo-and-keyword-research Online Marketing whiz kids Smart, analytical, numbers-driven? Indochino (http://www.techvibes.com/job/pay-per-click-and-search-manager-at-vancouvers-hottest-startup) and Weddingful (http://www.techvibes.com/job/online-marketing-specialist-for-web-20-start-up-in-vancouver) are […]
How to build online communities?
Image via Wikipedia One of the best talks I heard at CasualConnect last week was “Building communities, not just hits” by Max Levchin (founder and CEO of Slide) and Philip Rosedale (founder and CEO of Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life). Creating an online community is extremely hard to do and I have seen […]