Category: Happygood Funny Blog

10 YOUNG entrepreneurs to watch

From ContentNext, with link to same

Warning: If you have more than 20 years already invested in your career, this is going to make you very tired and at least a little bit scared. Here, from ContentNext.com are 10 young entrepreneurs to watch. By young, they mean really young — no older than their 20s.

What’s most instructive and startling is the transformational nature of what these kid are doing. Their businesses are, largely, based on ideas that couldn’t even have existed 5 or 10 years ago.

If you have any questions about the power of the Internet to foster change; or if you have any doubt that the next generation does things very differently than you’re used to, then you ought to spend 10 minutes scanning this article. Then resist the temptation to take a nap.

The difference between liberals and conservatives is … genetic?

Nicholas Kristoff writes in the New York Times that your political leaning isn’t your fault.

Liberals and conservatives not only think differently, he writes, they feel differently. Which means that when a person accuses you of a horrible misunderstanding about the way the world works, an argument doesn’t have to ensue.

First, you should know that this poor confrontational soul has been trained from the day he or she was born — and maybe even programmed in the womb — to disagree with you on pretty much anything that matters.

This is important to a whole bunch of folks, like those at Civilpolitics.org who seem to think that we ought to be able to discuss our differences without calling each other idiots and nitwits.

That’s just crazy talk.

We should care precisely because polite dialogue is a waste of time that we don’t have. Anyone who uses this knowledge to increase the amount of talk should be sent to Guantanamo. The rest of us will use this insight can be used to get right to the heart of the matter ASAP. We can finally settle the critical issues of our time: abortion, gay marriage, access to health care and whether the Constitution is a living, breathing document.

What we need to do is conduct more research into the workings of the political mind. This could get costly, so the government might need to subsidize it. But it would be one area of study that we can all agree is worth the price. Am I not right?

Soon we will know with certainty which end of the political spectrum is not a choice, but rather an unfortunate disability. Once we know that, it’s an easy step to an infrastructure of subsidized treatment centers offering therapy, behavior modification, enhanced cognition techniques and, eventually, carefully monitored release of individuals back into society.

Which side would get this assistance and care? Liberals or conservatives?

It’s obvious already. And if you have to ask, fill out the form below; your plastic bracelet will arrive in the mail in a few days.

Facebook: eyeballs, China and deja vu

Is it possible to have two deja vus at the same time? Or is that simply schizophrenia?

According to Venturebeat, Facebook is raising money to buy back stock from its employees. It hopes to borrow $150 million to buy back 15 million shares at $10 each. These shares have been given to employees of the private company xiaonei-blueover the past few years, and those employees have the right to sell up to 20% of their holdings, according to the article.

And now that the market for IPOs is so rotten, this is apparently the only way the company can help them cash in anytime soon.

That’s where the first case of deja vu comes in. Just 10 years ago, during the first Internet boom, people couldn’t cash in quickly enough on their foundation-free stock. Yes, Facebook has an astounding number of users, but I’m not so sure about its business plan. The company will undoubtedly go public some day, but I simply don’t believe it’s monetizable to the same extent as Amazon, eBay and Google.

Facebook really has only one asset: a bigazillion eyeballs. Which is impressive in itself, and there ought to be a way to make money from it. But with ad markets drying up and Facebook’s genuine incompetence when it comes to figuring out how to let businesses participate in a way justifies their spending money,  I don’t know what the company is going to do to pay back this next $150 million that it borrows — let alone the previous $460 million it’s raised, according to PaidContent.org.

Facebook is undoubtedly an 800-pound gorilla in the white-hot social networking arena. But there were  scores of 800-pound gorillas a decade ago, whose names I can no longer recall, that went bust because they couldn’t figure out how to turn eyeballs into cash.

I’m not predicting Facebook is going to go under anytime soon. In fact, I’m sure it will be around to cash in on an improved IPO market sometime next year. But if I were an employee and could get $10 a share for stock that I hadn’t paid for, I would sell as much as I was allowed at the first possible moment.

Here’s another deja vu-inducing part of the story: Facebook can’t get the money from its usual investors, so according to the reports already cited above, some portion of the money is coming from Asia. I remember when Japanese investors bought (and overpaid for) Rockefeller Center in the late ’80s. At the time, it was assumed to be a disheartening sign that U.S. economic dominance was ending.

It’s clear to me that, no matter how strong and innovative the U.S. may be, the world is becoming a more competitive place; any perception that we are falling probably has more to do with the fact that others are rising. Still, do we need to make it easy for them?

It’s always bothered me when people complain that we’re losing our mojo as a world power, but they don’t seem to make a conneciton between that observation and our willingness to let Asia — China in particular — lend us the money to finance our foreign wars and deficit spending.

If China comes to own a third or more of Facebook, do you think these people will notice? Do you think they’ll care?

How fast can one company lose customers?

According to Shelly Palmer at imediabytes, Sirius/Xm Radio lost $36 million in Q1. And that’s nothing. It lost 400,000 customers — which I’m thinking is more customers than Johnson & Johnson lost back in the 1980s when someone started putting cyanide in its Tylenol products. siriusxm_siriusI mean, 400,000 is a mid-size city. It’s a lot of customers. I’m not sure you could get rid of customers that fast if you paid telemarketers to call them up at dinner time and swear at them.

And if you’re the folks at Sirius/XM, it’s the kind of number that puts you into a full-blown panic attack. When you lose 400,00 customers in 3 months, you start asking questions like, “Are we doing the right thing here?” and “WTF?”

My personal experience is that I had been a subscriber for 2 years when I got a note from Sirius/XM in February siriusxm_xmwarning me that I would no longer be able to access programming for free on my computer unless I paid for the full year in advance right away.

It annoyed me, and I immediately assumed it was a cash-grab. But I bought the 12-month subscription because I thought it was important to me. Two weeks later I lost my job, and a week after that, in an effort to cut all unnecessary costs — and because I was irritated at being leveraged in the first palce, I called to cancel my subscription.

Their response? The nice lady with a Punjabi accent asked if they could keep me as a customer if they reduced the annual subscription rate by 50%. Now I was really mad, realizing that all along I’d been paying twice what they were willing to take. I told her no.

A month later, I got a direct-mail piece asking me to come back at 4.99 a month for six months — 38% of the original price. I suppose this was supposed to entice me. But it made me feel even more stupid for having paid $12.99 in the first place.

There’s one other thing: All along, Sirius/XM has advertised that it’s commercial-free radio, which should be worth paying for. But it’s not true. If you listen to any syndicated programming that’s re-broadcast via satellite, you’ll get the same amount of commercial time as you would on commercial radio.

And if you listen to their original programming — some of which is really pretty good — you still get advertising. And it’s the most irritating kind: low-budget stuff for whole-body cleanses and businesses that you can run from home without any skills or experience required.

I originally bought my XM subscription because I didn’t want to be my own DJ; I’d rather have someone else do it for me. But these are hard times, you know. Worst times since the Great Depression. So now, when I get in my car, I plug in my i-pod or put in an old CD. I still don’t want to be my own DJ. But I’m guessing that 399,999 other people agree with me that it’s not all that bad a job.

Quote of the day

From Richard Mitchele, who just won a contest from Sailing Anarchy (without a doubt the best blog, forum and e-newsletter on earth devoted to racing sailboats). His prize was a ride-along on the Puma entrant in the Volvo Ocean Race during the closed-course races sailed in Boston as part of the round-the-world race’s only North American stopover.sailing-anarchy-swag

“You could have knocked me over with a feather when I found out that I’d won the contest on SA. I was kind of thinking maybe I’d score a T-shirt or some other Puma swag. It was as if Jessica Alba called to say that the restraining order had been lifted, that she and Uma Thurman had talked it over and wanted to give my idea a try.”

Are magazines really that important?

Folio:, a trade magazine for the publishing industry, reports that Entrepreneur magazine is being sued for $178 million by a group of 87 investors who claim the magazine promoted a business that turned out to be a giant Ponzi scheme. (Here’s the article.)

ent-mag-cover-may-08In the suit, they claim the magazine “deliberately, willfully and recklessly failed to exercise due diligence in publishing information” about Agape World, according to the Folio: article. That information was contained in a May 2008 ranking of the “Hot 100” fast-growth businesses. Agape World was ranked 73rd, but early this year its owner was arrested and charged with mail fraud to the tune of $375 million+. The company has  been retroactively removed from the Hot 100 list.

This sounds to me like a bunch of crybaby investors looking for someone to blame because they didn’t do their due diligence. And I have little sympathy for them. The investors, according to the article, are also going to sue Dunn & Bradstreet, which apparently provided some of the information Entrepreneur used.

But it also peels back the blanket on one of publishing’s most worrisome and quietly kept problems. Magazine people claim that, despite the advertising/revenue crisis they currently face, they will remain viable over the long-run because their content is so important to readers.

For instance, here’s what Gordon Hughes, president of American Business Media (trade magazine association) said just a few weeks ago, in another Folio: article about the 26% declinein ad sales in 2009’s Q1: “What our industry does, and has always done, is provide information that makes business better and stronger. We will come through this period as a stronger industry, a more creative industry, and maybe even a more dedicated industry.”

He should have included the word “smaller.” Because the great good that he claims the industry performs is more exception than rule.

Take Entrepreneur‘s example. Its Hot 100 list is repurposed information from public databases. OK, somebody has to crunch the data. And I’m not saying there isn’t any original reporting; but even the magazine’s CEO says there isn’t a lot.

Here’s what Entrepreneur‘s COE Peter Shea told Folio: “Given the limited information provided about each company, it was certainly not Entrepreneur’s intention to evaluate or predict a specific company’s investment potential nor expectation that anyone would rely on such information to make investment decisions.”

What a terrible position: In order to defend his product against this lawsuit, he has to make the case that the content is really just trivia.

I don’t mean to condemn all magazines. Many do fine work, which I read and admire. But most of what passes for such is a little bit of data and a lot of promotion. For every magazine that is earning its way by producing content that readers really won’t live without, there are probably dozens that face a real comeuppance.

Advertisers are dropping out of magazines to create their own content, and magazines must finally (they’ve been talking about it for years) get readers to pay a larger share of the actual cost to produce the information they provide. As they do, many will face a truth they probably already know: Their content isn’t all that important.