As a startup guy myself and someone who likes to cover startups, I was delighted to find the Innovation Alley at ad:tech San Francisco. It’s no surprise that the exhibit hall and conference sessions are dominated by big brands like Yahoo! (YHOO) and Google (GOOG). They have the resources to buy exposure. But startups struggle for attention everyday. Most don’t deserve any attention but even the ones with innovative new technology and solutions don’t get the buzz they deserve.
So the folks at ad:tech is helping to solve this rather …

Everybody seems to be a “social media guru” these days. Like a real world sausage-fest, the “guru-fest” on Twitter and Facebook where four out of every five members claim to be some sort of ninja, jedi, maven, strategist or expert cannot possibly be a good thing. I exaggerate but echo chambers are not productive. What’s an earnest social media consultant to do?
Before you read on, you should know that I wrote this post only for those folks who are totally committed to the social media “industry” and intend to make a …

The U.S. Army recently mentioned in a report that Twitter, the popular microblogging service, could be used as a tool for terrorists. For example, the report explained how Twitter could potentially be used to detonate explosives and coordinate attacks. The analysts in the intelligence operations are thinking very creatively! Why do they publish these things? It isn’t likely that the Twitter community could recognize or decipher a terrorist conversation.  But now the military just gave the bad guys a new idea if they haven’t already thought of it, or at …

A few months ago I came across a piece by Jeff Nolan, titled Incrementalism and “The New New Thing,” which struck poignantly at a raw nerve. He called attention to the incrementalism gripping Silicon Valley despite the flush amount of capital available for startups. Much of the attention and hype has surrounded social networking and Web 2.0 startups but each new entry is a slight improvement over the previous. But only discontinuous, quantum leap innovations create disproportionate value. So what’s next?
Umair Haque’s An Open Challenge to Silicon Valley put it …

The market takes a breather after several weeks of blistering recovery from last winter’s doldrums. Commodities all around saw amazing advances. Crude oil rose 8.3% last week and has more than doubled over the last year. I remember taking my first car, a Honda (HMC) Civic, out for the first time and pumping gas for about $1.18 per gallon. This was also in the notoriously gas-expensive San Francisco Bay Area. Base commodities and gold continue to follow oil’s lead in going the opposite direction of the U.S. dollar. Will the …

“@kevinrose how do I get you to follow me back???” – anonymous self-proclaimed “social app guru”
This is Part 2 of a series that explores the science of Social Media Measurement. Let me preface this post by saying that this is a lighthearted post trying to come up with a simple measurement regarding a hugely successful social web service.
Previously, I explored the measurement of popularity, novelty, and attention on the very popular crowdsourcing news aggregation site Digg. My post was based on an arcane academic study involving the half-life of popularly …

 
Macro

Economic Indicators site to be shut down by U.S. Department of Commerce: Say goodbye to a very useful online resource due to “budgetary constraints” – lame excuse. The cost of administering a good website has diminished drastically. Enlightened government bureaucrats will still collect the data, but they don’t want to share it with private citizens.

William Ackman’s statement before Congress – The State of the Bond Insurance Industry: Interesting reading courtesy of fund manager who presciently shorted the real estate industry before the sub-prime meltdown became the crisis du jour.

Detroit home …