I'm not sure if identifying pain is the opposite of creating need. The pain here was fast foods need for cheap fish that has a reliable supply. The need was created when he was able to convince these companies that his fish supply chain was their best solution.
If I look at my algorithmically optimized feed, I obviously do not see the things most of my contacts like/share/read/click/dislike/pin/and so on. I see the things the algo decides are fitting for me to optimize for ad-value.
If I could filter the raw feeds of my contacts and could weight them (ideally regarding the topic, as some people are weighted more on privacy matters and lower on food matters), I would be able to use the social knowledge within my contacts to create a curated list of (hopefully) interesting (at least for me) things.
These would be weighted, so that the more time I had, the more I could go down that list.
If then I had a way to tell this curation mechanism, that I did like this piece more then that, and the third one was bullshit, over time, it could learn even better.
And then I would finally end up within my own echo chamber. At least if I would not do the hard work of curating my contacts in a way, that counters this.
This social web might be good for nice pictures of cat, but the more I have to do with it, the less it really seems to deliver on its promises.
A work/travel-program for knowledge professionals to travel the world and work a set number of hours a week on projects to pay their way. Air tickets, budget, airbnbs/apartments all paid for. Then you resell services to clients.
You could probably keep a high enough margin by saving through smart purchasing/renting of travel along and picking lower cost/highly desired destinations (south east asia comes to mind, for example).
the irs would hit any partners you use to transfer funds very quickly with deep audits at the very minimum if this gets even a little traction, i'd think
The goal is to get shut down. Best case, you draw enough attention to the issue to create some real reform in our tax system and bring awareness to the fact that we're hurting innovation by giving big companies far better tax rates than startups.
I'm not trying to be "provocative", but do you have any examples of this ever happening? And by that I mean any examples where a company has purposefully broken a law, was shut down and then laws were changed as a direct result? I've seen it happen the other way (technically no laws against it, shut the company down anyway then passed laws against it) but what you're proposing sounds improbable.
This is a bridge round led by an outside investor. Not uncommon, especially between Series A and B. I don't get much of the hard decision here, seems pretty common. I do appreciate her honesty though.
Reminds me of the advertising executive who acknowledged that 50% of his advertising budget was wasted. The trouble was, he added, he didn't know which half.
I think this misses the point entirely. Zynga is not failing because their products are cheap to recreate. Plenty of companies, in tech and beyond, have easily recreatable products but do just fine. Zynga is "failing" (if you can call it that) because they depended on cheap user traffic from Facebook - both through free virality and later cheap ad buys. Facebook is maturing as a business and ad prices are going up. And Facebook realized that all that game spam was just not worth the 30% vig they charged (probably the hard way - through testing for user engagement). Take away those temporary advantages and Zynga is just like any other gaming company.
This is a right sizing of the company and its revenues to reflect the games they own, once you take away the cheap/free traffic.
I don't know that it's so much Facebook ad prices going up (they haven't gone up much really) as it is Zynga having burned through all of the potential cow clickers. When you run a Facebook ad, the price per user increases as you saturate the market, even if the overall network's prices remain steady, due to clickthroughs dropping.
Zynga games are typically low-RPU, mass appeal, which as you mentioned relies on cheap traffic (mostly from other Zynga games.) You can only keep shuffling people internally from one game to another for so long until they all leave for Candy Crush Saga.
You're probably right, FB prices went up for Zynga more so than others because they saturated their market (which just took longer cause it was bigger). However, anecdotally, I've seen FB prices rise 25 - 35% over the last 18 months.
I don't know if this is really the reason. Moore's Law started with planar photolithographic silicon semiconductor integrated circuit fabrication (aka making chips) around 1958. We're now in year 50 of planar photolithographic silicon semiconductor integrated circuit fabrication, although now we have environmental laws so we can't just dump hydrofluoric acid into the groundwater, and we have to use X-rays instead of ordinary light, and we worry about smaller dust, stuff like that which makes it a lot harder. But basically we've just been scaling stuff down. We have about another ten years before we reach the physical limits of planar photolithographic silicon semiconductor integrated circuit fabrication, which are about two orders of magnitude away. That means we started about 17 orders of magnitude away.
By contrast, we seem to have reached the fundamental limits of carbon-zinc batteries a couple of centuries ago, and the fundamental limits of ordinary electrolytic batteries in 1990 with the invention of the lithium battery. (Or maybe the zinc-air battery.) The fundamental limits on chemical energy density seem to be about two or three orders of magnitude from where we started, not 17.
In both cases it's possible to do better by using fundamentally different approaches: microturbines, tiny fuel cells, or betavoltaic batteries in the case of batteries; diamond, three-dimensional structures, and molecular assembly in the case of electronics. But all of these have substantial engineering obstacles.
I think a fundamental assumption in this article is flawed: "The most popular games are still pretty simple, but mid-core games like strategy simulator War Commander are gaining steam. Some people who used to be content clicking FarmVille crops have moved on to more complicated games."
So called "mid core" games on Facebook are generally male focused war/strategy titles. Most Farmville/Cityville, etc. players are women. They haven't "moved on" to more complicated games. They've just grown tired of the same formula.
