Building a company on top of an existing platform – yes, no, maybe?

There has been a lot of chatter about platforms as of late and their moves have mostly been to the detriment of platform developers (Facebook forcing Zynga to use their credit system; Twitter banning third-party apps from inserting in-stream ads or Apple changing their developer agreement to ban use of third-party analytics and services). As […]

Google getting into the people search business in a bigger way?

People search must account for a significant portion of Google search traffic and it is interesting to see that they are now trying to grab a larger market but asking people to store essential information in a Google profile. If this takes off, this would not be great news to Facebook, LinkedIn and specialized people […]

Thoughts on the “studio-ization” of the application business

2 years after its launch the Facebook platform can almost be considered mature and the new belle in application town is Twitter (with apparently already over 11K applications). Due to the very low barriers to entry both platforms have become very crowded in a short period of time so it is time to ask the […]