Web Services in the Mist
More and more, the entrepreneurs we see present their business in the context of an ecosystem. This is a healthy development because it acknowledges the complexity of the environments within which start-ups operate today. Technology generally and web services in [...] Read more
A Delicious Eight Months
On April 14th, we closed an investment in Delicious. We wrote about our initial investment here. Eight months later, Delicious has been sold to Yahoo!. The news is on the Delicious blog.We are thrilled to see Joshua Schachter, one of [...] Read more
Sessions Top Ten Insights – Eight – Putting A String On Data
Our sessions event happened almost a month ago and it is starting to fade into my memory.But there is at least one phrase that came out of Sessions that we are still using with regularlity at Union Square Ventures. And [...] Read more
Sessions Top Ten Insights – Seven – Less Control Can Create More Value
There was a lot of discussion about the relationship between web service providers and consumers. This relationship is obviously especially important in services where the consumers are also the producers of the service. One thread of this discussion was about [...] Read more
Sessions Top Ten Insights – Six Reputations Are Not Portable
There was a lot of talk at Sessions about trust. The word appears 33 times in the transcript. Jeff Jarvis mentioned it 11 times himself. Here, Jeff makes the point that value is shifting from content to trust. “And so [...] Read more
Sessions Top Ten Insights – Five
One of the insights from our Sessions event was from Yochai Benkler who said the following about peer production: we do have very good research on how adding money undermines social motivations depending on contentsI am not sure how to [...] Read more
Sessions Top Ten Insights – Four
Here are some more of the insights that we gained from our Sessions discussion...Michael Parekh makes the point that all peers are not created equal…“Another thing, the term peer to peer, one of the things that's implicit, unfortunately, is that [...] Read more
Sessions Top Ten Insights – Three
Umair Haque said something (or actually quoted someone) at our Sessions event that has been rattling around my brain for the past week.Umair said: Herbert Simon said it in 1971, which is that "What does an abundance of information create?" [...] Read more
Sessions Top Ten Insights – Two
Social production systems seem to deliver a much higher portion of the economic value created to the consumers than traditional production systems do. As Tim O’Reilly says,"if you look at … Ebay or Google, even though they're very, very successful [...] Read more