cyberlaxamana

by Humberto Ayres Peirera (republished from his personal blog ) In our upcoming venture, we at the team of Centroid.it have had the hard task of choosing a "partner platform". Or service relies heavily on venue search, or POI (Point of Interest Search), and naturally we don't think its feasible that we'll build one ourselves. Also, at this point in time where major POI platforms have emerged, asking users of yet another online tool to built the database themselves, the phenomena known as crowd-sourcing, also won't do it. So we set out to find the best one available that would suit our needs. We looked into: Yelp Foursquare Google Hotpot  (a social layer on top of Google Places, these guys are a mess really) Facebook Places Gowalla  and others.. At the start of our search, december 2010, the main choices were Yelp and Foursquare. Google Hotpot/ Places had a semi-functional API with loads of restrictions and usage limits. Facebook Places didn't really have those...

by Private Our class discussion around Foursquare highlighted a strange paradox that I’ve been trying to articulate for a while now. We all agreed that Foursquare follows and is one of the best instances of a lean startup method we’ve seen. They launched with a buggy product, initially did not have too many features, collected consumer feedback on the product and constantly improved. However, the discussion broke down when we turned to their monetization strategy. Yes, Foursquare does have data about location and users that can be broken down in several ways to add value to advertisers, but then all the methods that we discussed involved high touch activities. At first sight there also seems to be a lack of metrics around how the success of advertising campaigns can be made measurable to add value to advertisers.  The discussion highlighted that the lean methodology may not be consistent with all divisions at a startup. Some startups have done a great job implementing the lean me...

by Katharine Nevins (blog:  http://katharinenevins.posterous.com/ ) Last week, half of my LTV classmates declared that they’d short Foursquare stock if they could.  I wonder whether their bearishness is driven by the popular caricature of Foursquare as a tool for urban hipsters to get sloshed together in the trendy bars.  Given that all of my classmates are interested in technology entrepreneurship, I’d like to think we’d have more imagination than that. After all, many normal people still think Twitter is primarily a tool for the self-absorbed to share the minutae of their day. (NB:  This use case actually does exist... in the past half hour as I write, fifteen people tweeted what they had for lunch.  Fortunately, it is far easier to avoid bores on Twitter than it is in the offline world.  But I digress.) There are a number of interesting consumer use cases for Foursquare, of which the “serendipitously meeting friends at bars” scenario is among the least c...

by Trina Spear Imagine a high school football field.   Fall 2009.   Division Championship.   Sean Murphy, starting quarterback at Riverview High, throws the 80-yard touchdown pass to win the most exciting game of his young career.   Sean has been a very successful quarterback exploiting this exact play, the long pass.   As the clock runs up, the team hoists Sean onto their shoulders and carries him around the field.   As he struts through the halls, he feels the eyes on him and grins as people pat him on the back.   He is on top of the world – he is the star on the football team, has earned straight A’s, has recently received football scholarships to Northwestern, Wisconsin and Harvard and to top it all off, his girlfriend was just voted homecoming queen. The following month Sean finds himself in a tough position playing for the Conference Championship: down by 4 points, 45 seconds left in the game, forty yards away from the end zone.   Unlike in ...

…they are in effect social enterprises that are for profit by necessity not by design by Evan Baehr (blog: http://www.evanbaehr.com) "[My aspiration is] to change the world," said Dennis Crowley, cofounder of Foursquare.  "If this turns out to be an amazingly big business at the same time, well, that's an added bonus."  This is hardly what you would expect to hear from a founder who raised $20 million in a Series A from all stars including Andreessen Horowitz.  Aren't these guys supposed to be razor focused on monetization?  In a quixotic way, many founders of revolutionary internet companies begin with visions that have no component on monetization.  How can we explain this irony: some of the "best" and "most innovative" internet companies--and therefore those with the highest valuations--are often founded by visionaries who are supposedly indifferent to--you might even say disinterested in--monetization. Consider Crowley, a dreamer who...

by Ashwin Limaye A recurring theme in many of our class discussions and my conversations with entrepreneurs has been the 'When to monetize' question, which is frequently posed as a 'Monetization v.s. Growth' tradeoff. The thesis here is that in the early stage, tech startup first focuses on product market fit, and seeks to establish a customer base with which it can validate critical assumptions and which is also the seed market that hopefully goes viral and grows into a large user base. While in this stage, spending effort on monetization is likely unproductive. For one, monetization may require the investment of scarce human resources that do not really 'improve' the product but focus on meeting the needs of other constituencies such as advertisers. Indeed, some features may need to be built or introduced that become a nuisance for the product's primary customer. Consequently, it seems logical and sensible to invest in creating the right product first, gr...