Timothy Chen

Since the measure of a technology’s success is how invisible it becomes, the best long-term strategy is to develop products and services that can be ignored. (source)

Visibility – short term success – marketing

Invisibility – long term success – core value

The strategy you’re pursuing is visibility or invisibility?

If you’re a manger or founder, would you rather make yourself more invisible than visible within an organization?

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(source)

Don’t waste your time. Most of us are floating at the center of the chart, and tend to drive to the upper left side when thinking about innovation. Stupidity and innovation is a double sided blade.

For marketing guys, they have little, if not none, control of product development, their efforts always lie on the horizon of pricing war. Remember the 4P’s and The Lord of the Rings? After all, you’re reluctant to admit it’s One P to rules them all. And that’s Price.

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Here is the comment I left on Mr.6’s post:

Web 2.0這周末被宣告死亡！建議所有網路創業家準備自學寫程式

Overall, I believe it’s difficult to change WEB2.0 bulls’ mind set even though they are witnessing what’s happening everyday. I call it Stubborn2.0.

But before we go further, let’s have a delicious appetizer first: (Disclosure: I’m in fact bullish, too. I’d absolutely like to see the global stock markets go way up and up.)

And the comment I posted with a little bit modifications:

The real problem: Economy downturn -> Advertisers cut marketing budgets (including online media plans) -> WEB2.0 sites revenues decrease (if there’s any revenue at all)

 

If your WEB2.0 sites are not counting on onsite ads to survive, then congrats! Lucky you.

 

Let’s face the reality. Ask yourself practical questions - “what’s my business model?”, “how’s my company’s burn-rate?”, “when will my company break-even?”, “where should I start the expense cuts?”

 

It’s time to focus on cash flows, rather then user growth.

 

Business is business. Your cost-effective-socially-connected-user-generated-content-software-as-a-service-crowd-wisdom-leveraged-light-weighted-programing-cloud-computing-permanently-Beta-widgetized-and-portable-and-opened-platform-ed-WEB2.0-dreaming may be no longer a sustainable business model during recession. Just keep dreaming big, when everyone is willing to spend.

 

Bonus reading : Sequoia Capital’s warnings & call-for-actions for their portfolio companies:

http://timothychen.info/2008/10/10/bye-the-good-old-time/

 

- Tim

Nothing could be better than being ended with Michael Arrington’s quote-of-the-day and the infamous Cyprus video:

Goodbye, Web 2.0. I hope I never have to type those words again. Now can we please get back to work? There’s still a ton left to do before we get to Matrix-style virtual reality, the Singularity, and mobile phones with batteries that last a whole day. (source)

 

Tags: Cyprus短片, WEB2.0泡沫

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I often ask myself questions to keep things clear in my mind. One good one to ask yourself is “What am I pretending not to see?” That can bring blind spots to the surface quickly. (source)

 

Interesting to see Mr. Trump talked about “pretending-not-to-see” today. I wonder worldwide real estate investors like him are doing such an exercise, or not. Better to face the realities.

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Here it is:

RSS is a little like radio. Every blog and many news services ‘broadcast’ a tiny little signal that you can’t hear, but your RSS reader can. (It’s like a radio tuner). You tell the RSS reader which blogs and news feeds you like, and whenever it senses that signal, it goes out and grabs the post for you. Quick and free. With a good reader, you can easily keep up with 100 blogs in less than an hour. (source)

 

I’m not sure how tech-savvy Seth Godin is, but the metaphor of radio broadcasting for RSS feeds subscription sounds quite fresh. To facilitate communications, every marketer should learn how to transform a complex term, process or technical details into some sort of tangible objects that target audiences are familiar with.

After all, the crowd are way more lazy, stupid and time-deprived than what you could imagine.

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If there is only one thing that enterprises ought to learn about Web 2.0, it’s this one: building information systems that allow you to adjust in real time based on interaction with your customers is the true mark of a networked enterprise. (source)

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Finally, a technology executive willing to tell the truth about cloud computing.  Speaking at Oracle OpenWorld, Larry Ellison said that the computer industry is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion and cloud computing is simply the latest fashion. (source)

 

This quote reminds me the “Hype Cycle” of 2005 - 2008.

I was looking for the chart of 2008 published by Gartner for my personal study, but soon I found there are Hype Cycles of 2005, 2006 and 2007 circulating on the Internet as well. It’s fun to compare them all at once.

Here you go:

Definition of the 5 phases of a Hype Cycle -

http://www.gartner.com/pages/story.php.id.8795.s.8.jsp#2

2008 Hype Cycle (Hottest Buzzword: Green IT)

2007 Hype Cycle (Hottest Buzzwords: Gesture Recognition, Mashup, Virtual Worlds )

2006 Hype Cycle (Hottest Buzzword: Web2.0)

2005 Hype Cycle (Hottest Buzzwords: Biometric Identity Documents & BPM)

1995 Hype Cycle (the first version released by Gartner)

Will Cloud Computing reach the peak of hype next year?

Tags: cloud computing, Hype Cycle, Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, Larry Ellison

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While particular systems may come and go, how youth engage through social network sites today provides long-lasting insights into identity formation, status negotiation, and peer-to-peer sociality…I argue that social network sites are a type of networked public with four properties that are not typically present in face-to-face public life: persistence, searchability, exact copyability, and invisible audiences. These properties fundamentally alter social dynamics, complicating the ways in which people interact. I conclude by reflecting on the social developments that have prompted youth to seek out networked publics, and considering the changing role that publics have in young people’s lives. (source)

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• In 2008, China’s number of Internet users, 216 million, only represents 16.2% of total population

• 595 million mobile users in 2008, 800 million mobile user in 2012

• 1.4 billion online advertising spending in 2008, 5 billion online advertising spending in 2012 (37% increase per year)

Source: eMarketer, Sept., 2008

However something inside my mind believes that the numbers are exaggerated.

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