… Ecommerce, Internet Security, Economics, and Entrepreneurship

Month: December 2007

Facebook, Executives, College Students and Love

Facebook I was recently invited to join a professional colleague’s Facebook network.  Up until then, I had strictly used LinkedIn as my only social network primarily because a) I have always found LinkedIn to be very useful for business, and b) I perceived Facebook as a playground for college kids.

Well I was wrong.  Facebook is awesome, and many of my professional colleagues were way ahead of me in discovering the network’s value. Its utility becomes very powerful as your network multiplies and matures.  To be quite honest, I now view LinkedIn as a great place to view a professional profile or resume, but that is about it. Facebook provides a scalable method for communicating with your professional network.  The bottom-line is that I am learning to love Facebook. 

Since we are talking about Facebook, I thought you might also enjoy this article about the Facebook phenomenon.

For college students, if it’s Facebook, it’s love | Reuters” 

For the Facebook generation, love now comes with a drop-down menu.

With profiles on the Facebook social networking site (www.facebook.com/) almost de rigueur on college campuses, students can define their relationship status with menu choices ranging from “married” to that perennial favorite, “It’s complicated.”

“It’s complicated” could also describe the emotional calculations people in their late teens and early 20s make as they decide whether their relationships are what they call “Facebook-worthy.” MORE >>

My Social Network Profiles:      
Facebook >>    
LinkedIn >>    
deli.cio.us Bookmarks >>

Daily Roundup for 2007-12-09

  • Happy Holiday for European Web Shops? – eMarketer
    Retail e-commerce continues to grow in the largest Western European economies. 160.6 million European Internet users visited online retail sites in the month of October 2007.  This article provides a number of other interesting facts about European ecommerce.
  • This week PayPal released a new Web widget that lets you embed a virtual storefront onto your blog or any Web site that uses HTML code. The PayPal Storefront Widget allow you to list products, set prices and start selling in an online storefront format.  This Widget has real utility, and so you will want to check it out.

Daily Roundup for 2007-12-08

  • Henry Blodget writes in Silicon Alley Insider that eBay CEO Meg Whitman is "one of the Valley’s most celebrated and admired executives" but thinks it is becoming increasingly clear that Whitman is not the right person for the job. In this blog post, Ina asks the hard questions.
  • A Consumer Reports press statement on the problem of counterfeit items said consumers should be suspicious of third-party websites that offer deep discounts for products that are usually pricey. eBay has become a Market for Lemons in a number of product categories (Tiffany products is just one of many examples), and so this is not surprising.

Core Capital Invests in $20M Round for NextPoint

Core_capital_logo Core Capital Partners, a venture capital firm that has invested in a number communications infrastructure companies particularly focused on the IP and VoIP, announced its participation in a $20 million round of funding for Gaithersburg, MD-based NextPoint Networks, Inc.

According to the investment announcement , NextPoint will be the result of the recently announced merger between NexTone Communications Inc., a software-centric session border controller and session management provider, and Reef Point Systems, Inc., a mobile access universal convergence gateway provider. In addition to Core Capital, other investors in this round include the round lead investor, One Equity Partners, the private equity arm of JP Morgan Chase (NYSE:JPM), as well as American Capital Strategies (NASDAQ:ACAS), Jerusalem Venture Partners, Safeguard Scientifics (NYSE:SFE) and Summerhill Venture Partners.

Read more about Core Capital Partners >>
Read more about NextPoint >>

The eMarket for Lemons and The University of Maryland

Umd Last week, I had the opportunity to speak to a few hundred business school students at the Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland.  Michael Beveridge, buySAFE’s VP of Business Intelligence, joined me in speaking at the invitation of Professors Guodong (Gordon) Gao, Peter Weiss, and Mingfeng Lin.  The students had previously read “buySAFE – Creating and Profiting From the Bonded Seller Advantage“, a case study on buySAFE authored by Wharton professor, Dr. Eric Clemons.  Here is the presentation that Michael and I shared with the students… “eMarket for Lemons – The Economics of an Evolving eCommerce Marketplace“.

As always, it was a terrific experience for me.  The students were extremely prepared, and they had definitely done their homework on buySAFE, information asymmetry, and the ecommerce marketplace in general.  If you ever want to get an excellent sense of how well your marketing efforts are working or how well you are educating the market about your solution, I highly recommend inviting a couple hundred college students to study your product or service and let them give you feedback.  I loved it!

Read more about Dr. Guodong (Gordon) Gao >>

Turning the Risk Discount Into a Trust Premium

This link contains a link to the presentation “Building Buyer Confidence” presented by Steve Woda, founder and senior vice president of strategy, buySAFE, for the MIVA Small Business Conference 2006, 29 August – 1 September 2006, p. 30

Page 2 of 2

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén