Posted on February 6, 2010 @ 2:32 pm
Last week when the NBCU/Comcast duo testified in Washington on their proposed merger, one of the questions that came up was about Hulu blocking access of its content to Boxee. Shortly after the hearing ended, Boxee’s CEO posted his response, basically claiming that Boxee is just displaying the video as it would be displayed on Hulu, with streaming ads and all. That however, isn’t actually accurate. I left a long-winded response on Avner’s post, explaining why so.
Today the Crunchgear blog played devil’s advocate, trying to see things from Hulu’s persepctive, and basically came up with the same outcome as me. Here’s my argument for Hulu blocking Boxee’s access in simple terms:
- Boxee is intended to replace tv viewing, whereas Hulu is intended to compliment it
- Fragmenting Hulu’s distribution weakens their competitive position (at least for now)
- On Boxee, Hulu loses the ability to advertise around the content (note the occasional small banner on Hulu above the video)
- Hulu’s partners lose attribution (eg. “SNL, Saturday’s at 11:30pm, Presented by NBC”)
- Hulu loses cross-promotion opportunities after an episode ends
I’m a huge Boxee fan and would love to see both companies work this out. The only solution I see is Hulu developing a paid app in Boxee and charging for their content. I would pay a few bucks a month (maybe even more if they increased the content available and included HD streams) — and they can even keep the ads in it…
Posted on February 4, 2010 @ 1:35 pm
Here are the books I’m looking to read by April.
- Competition Demystified
- Getting To YES (for negotiations class)
- The Evolution of Cooperation (from game theory class)
- The Chinese Economy (prep for my trip to Shanghai)
- The Innovators Dilemma (i’m just re-reading this)
This list feels too heavy on the business side. Any new novels or less serious books you’d recommend?
Posted on February 3, 2010 @ 7:10 am
Is this a coincidence or a well-planned attack with Acura sponsoring WSJ.com today and letting everyone read for free while all the headlines and top stories are about the crisis at Toyota?
Posted on February 2, 2010 @ 4:56 pm
Occasionally I take a look at the performance of some of the content partners I worked with when I was at Google. In particular, I was curious to look at legal publishers to see how they’ve been impacted by Google Scholar’s legal search feature.
W.S. Hein, a publisher of law reviews and other legal content, has seen a big spike in visitors since November, as indicated by the charts below.
Compete’s data on heinonline.org:
…and Quantcast…
…but ComScore didn’t have any data available for heinonline.org. It’s frustrating because Compete and Quantcast are free to use, but ComScore obviously isn’t. I’m sure there’s a valid reason for this, such as ComScore not having access to panel information from universities (I’d guess the majority of legal search traffic comes from schools), but it still doesn’t explain why ComScore can’t improve their data sources to be at least as good as the free options.
Posted on January 31, 2010 @ 4:09 pm
I just finished a month long effort to move my blog from Textpattern to Wordpress — and it’s finally live. There are still a few formatting things to fix, but for the most part it looks good and works well. My old urls are redirecting to the new ones, so my search results won’t be lost. For example, here is one of my old urls: http://philtered.com/index.php?id=174
Posted on January 24, 2010 @ 9:43 am
A little over a week ago I organized and co-led Columbia’s Silicon Valley Trip. This was the school’s 13th year heading west to explore career opportunities. We had 40+ students that visited 14 companies over 3 jam packed days. This year’s lineup was pretty spectacular. Here is a recap of the highlights. [Continue Reading...]
Posted on December 20, 2009 @ 1:44 pm
I’ve been using foursquare over the last month and typically like it. I received a few local offers from advertisers and took advantage of one for discounted movie tickets I’d like to see more local business offers within foursquare, but they have to be really useful too (discounts, free samples, etc). To track when the coupons are used, foursquare asks the user to check-in at the location, so they can easily track how a coupon campaign affects the advertiser’s check-ins (and sales). I actually think foursquare has lot in common with Groupon.com, which are both trying to tackle the local couponing opportunity.
In addition to selling ads/coupons to local merchants, Foursquare should recommend businesses to me based on member trends. For example, if a user visits the same coffee shop and grocery store as me, but goes to a chinese restaurant I don’t, foursquare can recommend the place for me to try. Or if that poses a security concern, you could recommend just based on my friends. These recommended places should definitely be listed on the local business pages, such as this one for Carmines Restaurant It also seems odd to me that the local business pages don’t have a rating system (like Yelp).
Posted on December 18, 2009 @ 7:54 pm
In no particular order, these were my favorite albums released this year. When I say favorite albums, it’s because I enjoy listening to the full play list, not just one or two songs off it. [Continue Reading...]
