Tech
Netflix is pushing into Latin America and the strategy is interesting: it’s trying to acquire content such as soap operas to stream them into customers’ homes. It’s good to imagine the trade-off playing in the Media companies’ strategy sessions – between the fear of cannibalizing sales and the need to partner with this strange ally now, while they’re still offering decent terms. We’re glad to sit on the sidelines.
From the “business models we must understand” series, group buying in Brazil is moving fast with two deals/ funding rounds announced in the last 2 days. We have a collection of links with these moves and to our previous posts on the subject.
The web is making it easier to fund/ develop companies that aren’t web-based at all, and actually make tangible products. In the words of an MIT professor, “The situation resembles the way that anyone with a laptop and an Internet connection can now start a Web-based company” – and we all know what innovation and wealth creation can come out of that “mold”.
We’ve stumbled upon a series of videos by Bloomberg Television on Game Changers, and the first episode we saw is fantastic and profiles Steve Jobs. There are many interesting moments and lessons, but one that stuck with us concerns the power of ideas and the inspiration/ motivation they bring – not just to potential customers but, in Apple’s case at a time when morale was at the lowest point, also internally. That’s when the team finally “awoke” and all that brilliance in engineering/ product design/ marketing was brought together to create, as a VC says in the video, “the greatest comeback in corporate history”.
Two quick notes. One: IBM’s “Watson” computer beating humans at Jeopardy has people yearning to use the technology in Finance. Really?? Two: South Koreans may get one gigabit per second Internet in every household by 2012. Any Brazilian paying almost US$ 100 for half-decent connections is certainly thinking about how much time this country has lost…
We often find relevant articles related to subjects we’ve already discussed at Buysiders.com, and we post them as updates while linking to the original post(s). While each update should be interesting on its own, the idea is to read the whole “thread”, especially as time goes by and we develop a sense of history. In IP’s case, our Intranet dates back to 2003 and back then we made an effort to find older articles about companies and sectors we were studying. Being able to tap into this rich history is quite valuable and we hope to build the same wealth of links at Buysiders.com. In today’s piece we’re posting two updates about different subjects: crowdsourcing and e-publishing/ the “Web is dead” debate.
We’ve all heard about the Social Network movie, but a better time allocation is the Web2.0 Summit interview with the man himself, The Time Magazine Person of The Year, Mark Zuckerberg. Before we poke some fun at Facebook, here’s a thought: we do make fun of what’s relevant to us the more mainstream it gets, yet it doesn’t necessarily mark the end of an era. Think of Microsoft Windows, the OS we all have loved to hate for the last 25 years or so and it’s still there. The “winner takes all” aspect of the network effect in Facebook’s case is a fragile argument – what network are we talking about, and why will we have to interact with it the Facebook way? Just because we can’t see today what could topple Facebook, it doesn’t mean something – or likely a combination of “things” – won’t.
We’ve discussed the Netflix challenge in detail at Buysiders.com, and the “analytics”/ “data capturing and processing” theme is very important in our research. But we hadn’t posted about examples in Brazil! This Exame magazine article (in portuguese) solves this and mentions a few companies, including Saraiva. As people may guess even before reading the article, yes, the people behind this Brazilian “recommendation software” company did participate in the original Netflix contest.
An article called “Why the iPad should rival the Web” is another entry in the “The web is dead/ long live the Internet” debate. It’s a pretty interesting look at iPad magazines allowing immersion that web sites can only dream of. That people actually spend 45 minutes in an iPad magazine makes us envious in terms of the Buysiders readers’ experiences – which are not unlike that of other blogs – with its average of 1.96 pages per visit and average time on site of 2:50… But there’s more on the subject.
What took it so long? Now people can get an internationally-accredited MBA using the same platform they’re already so used to. The people behind this initiative claim that it didn’t take a lot of capex $$ to port their Moodle-based e-learning solution to an Facebook app. We’ve studied online education and while it is definitely not just about the underlying tech, going to Facebook can potentially help some schools leapfrog other schools’ sunken investments in proprietary technologies.
