948 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2021
    1. But the inverse trajectory, from which this essay takes its name, is now equally viable: “come for the network, pay for the tool.” Just as built-in social networks are a moat for information products, customized tooling is a moat for social networks.1 This entrenchment effect provides a realistic business case for bespoke social networks. Running a bespoke social network means you’re basically in the same business as Slack, but for a focused community and with tailored features. This is a great business to be in for the same reasons Slack is: low customer acquisition costs and long lifetime value. The more tools, content, and social space are tied together, the more they take on the qualities of being infrastructure for one’s life.

      An interesting value proposition and way of looking at the space that isn't advertising specific.

    2. Most business writing lacks a meaningful engagement with the question of whether the strategies, tactics, and trends on offer are good, in a larger and longer term sense. It is negligent not to address these questions.

      Very few businesses consider the long term effects of their work...

    3. A new business type here is the paid community: a direct subscription to join in. Today, most paid communities live on the outskirts of existing social platforms. But as they become normalized, paid communities are becoming a viable business model for smaller-scale social networks aiming to be both profitable and socially sustainable.

      paid communities

    1. It turns out that creating and using Free Software is not just good to individuals, but for businesses as well, for example by building upon publicly available components and by collaborating shared software. The term Open Source is a business-friendly rebranding of the Free Software concept. This line of thought was also widely successful, e.g. Firefox/Mozilla was an open sourcing of Netscape software.
    1. So what's the worst part? Well, if you're like most entrepreneurs, marketers, and salespeople... it's finding your potential clients' email addresses to reach them out. (Yawn... I almost fall asleep just writing about it.) You see, it's boring and time-consuming, you wish you could skip this part and go straight to the sales process.
  2. Jan 2021
    1. They oversaw the development of playbooks and operating models and revamped corporate processes around such principles as agile funding and mission-oriented initiatives. At that point, everyone on a mission shared the same targets and worked collaboratively in two-week sprints. The organization began to deliver results much faster.

      Results of business agility implementation

    2. Second, the leaders must drive agile behaviors broadly into the organization. This requires authentic belief in the behavioral changes required, as well as playbooks, processes, and support to enable the organization to work in a cross-functional, mission-oriented way.

      Business Agility driving change of behavior within companies, reaching out the overall goal

    1. There is very little academic and statistical study of Wal-Mart’s impact on the health of its suppliers and virtually nothing in the last decade, when Wal-Mart’s size has increased by a factor of five. This while the retail industry has become much more concentrated. In large part, that’s because it’s nearly impossible to get meaningful data that would allow researchers to track the influence of Wal-Mart’s business on companies over time. You’d need cooperation from the vendor companies or Wal-Mart or both–and neither Wal-Mart nor its suppliers are interested in sharing such intimate detail.
      • Difficult to study Wal-Mart because suppliers and partners won't talk.
      • Difficult to track predatory practices because of these tight-lipped partners.
    2. “Everyone from the forklift driver on up to me, the CEO, knew we had to deliver [to Wal-Mart] on time. Not 10 minutes late. And not 45 minutes early, either,” says Robin Prever, who was CEO of Saratoga Beverage Group from 1992 to 2000, and made private-label water sold at Wal-Mart. “The message came through clearly: You have this 30-second delivery window. Either you’re there, or you’re out. With a customer like that, it changes your organization. For the better. It wakes everybody up. And all our customers benefited. We changed our whole approach to doing business.
      • Wal-Mart argues that doing business with their strict standards makes the company better.
      • Delivery has a 30-second window!! Crazy
    3. Vlasic got to take it down to just over half a gallon of pickles, for $2.79. Not long after that, in January 2001, Vlasic filed for bankruptcy–although the gallon jar of pickles, everyone agrees, wasn’t a critical factor.

      Vlasic got into Walmart and was very popular.

      Wal-Mart forced Vlasic to sell their gallon of pickles of $2.97.

      Wal-Mart makes up so much of Vlasic's revenue that they have to comply.

      Vlasic eventually sells at that price but has difficulty keeping up with demand.

      Vlasic asks Wal-Mart if they can sell for $3.49 which can help so much. Wal-Mart declines.

      In 2001 has to file for bankruptcy even after trying to change strategies.

    4. How can it be bad for things to come into the U.S. cheaply? How can it be bad to have a bargain at Wal-Mart?’ Sure, it’s held inflation down, and it’s great to have bargains,” says Dobbins. “But you can’t buy anything if you’re not employed. We are shopping ourselves out of jobs.
      • Wal-Mart can help keep inflation down and give great bargins
      • This comes at the sacrifice of having local and American business go out of business.
      • No employment due to companies going out of business will mean we are "shopping ourselves out of jobs"
  3. Dec 2020
  4. Nov 2020
    1. A better definition I've been using since then, thanks to Jason Hwang, is "fixed output." A company that delivers the same thing to all customers is going to be organized differently than one that does things made-to-order.

      Fixed output companies

      A company that delivers the same thing to all customers. These companies are going to be organized differently than ones that do things bespoke for their customers.

    1. We all know that real business logic does not belong in the presentation layer, but what about simple presentation-oriented things like coloring alternate rows in table or marking the selected option in a <select> dropdown? It seems equally wrong to ask the controller/business logic code to compute these down to simple booleans in order to reduce the logic in the presentation template. This route just lead to polluting the business layer code with presentation-oriented logic.
    1. hub.cards allows you to create and design your next modern business card for free. Our newly developed editor is like no other on the web and makes all your creative dreams come true. If you're not a creative genius, you can choose from thousands of templates to create an appealing card.

      Best free editor for creating business cards. Digital & physical ones.

  5. Oct 2020
    1. Like many other stores, Vroman’s is hosting online events to promote new books, which can attract attendees from all over the country but generally bring in almost no money.

      Maybe they need a book paywall for admission into those events? Buy a book to get the zoom code to get into the event?

      David Dylan Thomas essentially did this for his recent book launch.

    2. Avid Bookshop in Athens, Ga., sends personalized URLs to customers with a list of handpicked recommendations.

      Perhaps if they went the step further to set up domains for their customers, they could ostensibly use them not only as book blogs, but also to replace their social media habits?

      An IndieWeb friendly platform run by your local bookseller might be out of their wheelhouse, but it could potentially help solve their proximal problem while also solving one of society's problems all while helping to build community.

    1. 10 Ways Great Business Leaders Use Technology

      Article discusses the need to be forward thinking in business with regard to technology adoption. Lists characteristics of business leaders that understand the potential of technology to catapult efficiency. These are: (1) not afraid of change (2) capitalize on Cloud technology as time- and cost-saving resources, use mobile strategies, harness social media, integrate tablets, use telecommuting, understand online marketplaces, prioritize security, and automate marketing. Rating 2/10.

    1. That is to say: if the problem has not been the centralized, corporatized control of the individual voice, the individual’s data, but rather a deeper failure of sociality that precedes that control, then merely reclaiming ownership of our voices and our data isn’t enough. If the goal is creating more authentic, more productive forms of online sociality, we need to rethink our platforms, the ways they function, and our relationships to them from the ground up. It’s not just a matter of functionality, or privacy controls, or even of business models. It’s a matter of governance.
    1. Shopify-Ex would offer retailers something they don’t get from Amazon: partnership. Newco would provide merchants a lot of the great taste of Amazon (robust e-commerce tools and fulfillment) without the calories (merchants keep their data, control the customer, branding, no private label launches on backs of merchant data).

      Potentially an IndieWeb-ification for business?

    1. Professional blogging; whether that be funded by advertisers, subscribers, fans – is a big business. What are your thoughts on how Micro.blog helps or ignores people or businesses that may want to use the platform to share their content and earn a living from it?
    1. being able to follow links to “follow a conversation” that is threaded on Twitter.

      This is one of my favorite parts about my website and others supporting Webmention: the conversation is aggregated onto or more closely adjacent to the source. This helps prevent context collapse.

      Has anyone made a browser tool for encouraging lateral reading? I'd love a bookmarklet that I could click to provide some highly relevant lateral reading resources for any particular page I'm on.

    1. Twenty Stories Bookmobile, which left L.A. traffic for Providence, Rhode Island, in 2018

      This makes me think that a mobile bookstore a la the traditional LA roach coach with a well painted/decorated exterior could be a cool thing.

      I'm reminded of a used bookstore pop-up I saw recently at the Santa Anita Mall prior to the holidays. Booksellers were traditionally itinerant mongers anyway. Perhaps this could be a more solid model, especially for the lunchtime business crowds.

    1. A common complaint we heard from publishers at all levels is that it’s difficult to build partnerships with social media platforms. They seem to be holding all the cards. Even large publishers often feel in the dark during meetings with large platform companies.

      I'm more curious why all the large media companies/publishers don't pool their resources to build a competing social platform that they own and control so the end value comes to them instead of VC-backed social silos?

  6. Sep 2020
    1. Having worked with researchy vs more product/business driven teams, I found that the best results came when a researchy person took the time to understand the product domain, but many of them believe they're too good for business (in which case you should head back to academia).

      Problem of PhD profiles in business

    2. Imagine what it must be like for the senior leadership of an established company to actually become data-driven. All of a sudden the leadership is going to consent to having all of their strategic and tactical decision-making be questioned by a bunch of relatively new hires from way down the org chart, whose entire basis for questioning all that expertise and business acumen is that they know how to fiddle around with numbers in some program called R? And all the while, they're constantly whining that this same data is junk and unreliable and we need to upend a whole bunch of IT systems just so they can rock the boat even harder? Pffft.

      Reality of becoming a data-driven company

  7. Aug 2020
    1. It’s not that Slack is too distracting and killing individual productivity. It’s that your company’s processes are so dysfunctional you need Slack to be distracting and killing individual productivity.

      Kwok points out that Slack's reputation for being a productivity killer doesn't get at the root of the issue. He argues that resorting to Slack is a symptom of the underlying cause: dysfunctional business processes.

  8. Jul 2020
  9. Jun 2020
    1. Prismatic gets a percentage of the revenue increase that it generates for publishers, while developers pay a flat monthly fee based on usage, Cross says. It’s still working out pricing for hedge fund API usage. (As a point of comparison, the revenue model for the old Prismatic was the same as the current model for publishers. “We just meant for it to be more like Adsense/Adwords where we ran all this in our own consumer products too,” Cross notes.)

      the plague of monetisation

    1. Almost all of the money search engines make (including Google) is based on the keywords you type in, without knowing anything about you, including your search history or the seemingly endless amounts of additional data points they have collected about registered and non-registered users alike. In fact, search advertisers buy search ads by bidding on keywords, not people. It makes intuitive sense, too. If you search for ‘car’, you are more likely to respond to a car ad than something you searched for last week.

      Search engines do most of the business on keywords

    1. Some large tech behemoths could hypothetically shoulder the enormous financial burden of handling hundreds of new lawsuits if they suddenly became responsible for the random things their users say, but it would not be possible for a small nonprofit like Signal to continue to operate within the United States. Tech companies and organizations may be forced to relocate, and new startups may choose to begin in other countries instead.
  10. May 2020
    1. Credit for employer-provided childcare facilities and services (Form 8882).This credit applies to the quali-fied expenses you paid for employee childcare and quali-fied expenses you paid for childcare resource and referral services. For more information, see Form 8882.

      Business Credits

      What are Business Credits?

      You can take business credits if you pay for certain business expenses. Business credits include:

      • Investment credit
      • Low-income housing credit
      • Passive activity credits
      • Disabled access credit
      • Credit for employer pension plan start-up costs
      • Credit for employer-provided child-care facilities and services
      • Indian employment credit
      • Credit for increasing research activities
      • Orphan drug credit
      • New markets credit
      • Renewable electricity production credit
      • Credit for alcohol used as fuel
      • Geothermal energy credit
      • Solar energy credit
      • Microturbine energy credit
      • Advanced coal project ended after August 8, 2005
      • Biofuels credit
      • Low sulfur diesel fuel production credit
      • Nonconventional source fuel credit
      • Alternative fuel vehicle refueling property credit
      • Distilled spirits credit
      • Qualified railroad track maintenance credit
      • Mine rescue team training credit
      • General credits from an electing large partnership
      • General Business Credit carryover

      More Information

      • IRS Publication 334 - Tax Guide for Small Business Publication 334 is not included in this TurboTax product, you may request a copy.
  11. Apr 2020
    1. wouldn't let me send a two-line memo to another department without showing it to him before I sent it. John's leadership style was oppressive. He micr0-managed everything. I learned from the hellish experience of working for him that unless somebody wants another set of eyes on their correspondence, it's insulting and a waste of time to micro-manage your team members' email messages.
    1. When Casper filed its S-1 in January, analysts, investors, and business nerds descended on the document like vultures. Not only was it a precarious moment to take a startup public, it was the first time anyone could actually access the raw numbers under the hood of a DTC. “The economics work better if Casper sent you a mattress for free, stuffed with $300,” jabbed NYU Stern marketing professor and tech doomsayer Scott Galloway. “This appears to be Casper’s business,” tweeted number-crunching Atlantic columnist Derek Thompson. “Buy mattress at $400. Sell at $1,000. Refund/return 20% of them. Keep $400, on avg. Then spend $290 of that on ads/marketing and $270 on admin (finance, HR, IT). Lose $160. Repeat.”

      Summary of Casper's business model

  12. Mar 2020
    1. Another nice SQL script paired with CRON jobs was the one that reminded people of carts that was left for more than 48 hours. Select from cart where state is not empty and last date is more than or equal to 48hrs.... Set this as a CRON that fires at 2AM everyday, period with less activity and traffic. People wake up to emails reminding them about their abandoned carts. Then sit watch magic happens. No AI/ML needed here. Just good 'ol SQL + Bash.

      Another example of using SQL + CRON job + Bash to remind customers of cart that was left (again no ML needed here)

    2. I will write a query like select from order table where last shop date is 3 or greater months. When we get this information, we will send a nice "we miss you, come back and here's X Naira voucher" email. The conversation rate for this one was always greater than 50%.

      Sometimes SQL is much more than enough (you don't need ML)

    1. So it’s not surprising that Facebook is so coy about explaining why a certain user on its platform is seeing a specific advert. Because if the huge surveillance operation underpinning the algorithmic decision to serve a particular ad was made clear, the person seeing it might feel manipulated. And then they would probably be less inclined to look favorably upon the brand they were being urged to buy. Or the political opinion they were being pushed to form. And Facebook’s ad tech business stands to suffer.
    1. Rojas-Lozano claimed that the second part of Google’s two-part CAPTCHA feature, which requires users to transcribe and type into a box a distorted image of words, letters or numbers before entering its site, is also used to transcribe words that a computer cannot read to assist with Google’s book digitization service. By not disclosing that, she argued, Google was getting free labor from its users.
    1. First, they chose to find a new home for Tumblr instead of shutting it down. Second, they considered not just how much cash they would get on day one, but also — and especially — what would happen to the team afterward, and how the product and the team would be invested in going forward. Third, they thought about the sort of steward of the community the new owner would be. They didn’t have to do any of that, and I commend them for making all three points a priority.
  13. Feb 2020
    1. no business book can predict what sorts of situations (businesses, market conditions, etc.) the reader will encounter, so instead it offers general, obvious-sounding rules.

      Business books

  14. Jan 2020
  15. Dec 2019
    1. И если к вам все же попала звезда (настоящая, а не фейковая), трудностей будет много. Во-первых, одна звезда не будет работать за всю команду, вкалывать придется по-прежнему. Во-вторых, звездному сотруднику нужны полномочия и свобода принятия решений, а это понравится не всем. В-третьих, сильному работнику нужно сильное руководство. А есть еще и в-черветрых, и в-пятых. Так что звезда — это, конечно, хорошо, но это точно не волшебная палочка для бренда.
    2. Многие таланты работают настолько ярко, что становятся настоящими звездами. Когда работодатель хочет нанять звездного сотрудника, то чаще всего ищет золотую таблетку, которая поможет от всего и сразу.
    3. Экспертов можно нанять — но это рискованный процесс. Вдруг окажется, что методы работы и ценности такого стороннего эксперта не совпадают с методами и ценностями компании. Будет больно и безрезультатно. Экспертов можно мотивировать. Ведь те, кто работает в компании, эксперты в своем деле (не зря же их наняли), другой вопрос, как их привлечь к формированию HR-бренда. Система мотивации у каждого своя, но не надо бояться использовать бонусы, привилегии, рейтинги и награды.
    1. Many so-called strategies are in fact goals. “We want to be the number one or number two in all the markets in which we operate” is one of those. It does not tell you what you are going to do; all it does is tell you what you hope the outcome will be. But you’ll still need a strategy to achieve it.
  16. Nov 2019
    1. In order for Google to be Google, it has to do evil. This is true for every major technology company. Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Tesla, Microsoft, Sony, Twitter, Samsung, Nintendo, Dell, HP, Toshiba -- every one of these organizations can't compete in the market without engaging in unethical, inhumane and invasive practices. It's a sliding scale: The larger the company, the more integrated it is in our everyday lives, the more evil it can be.
    2. Take Facebook, for example. CEO Mark Zuckerberg will stand onstage at F8 and wax poetic about the beauty of connecting billions of people across the globe, while at the same time patenting technologies to determine users' social classes and enable discrimination in the lending process, and allowing housing advertisers to exclude racial and ethnic groups or families with women and children from their listings.
  17. Oct 2019
    1. The top reasons why a product fails:It’s too complicated – simplicity is kingIt doesn’t spread by word-of-mouthIt doesn’t take advantage of the power of iterationThe founder is too fearful of creating something novelIt’s not launched into a community

      Think about it before developing a commercial product

  18. Sep 2019
    1. In another example, there is a plaza near where I work that has a number of eating options but my preferred is a sandwich place at the far end of the building. When I pull in I often look for parking in front, if there is not I might need to go to the opposite end of the plaza to find parking. While walking to the sandwich shop I pass by 3 other places to eat. I almost never make it to the sandwich shop. I always convince myself to try something different before getting to the front door of my go-to lunch spot

      That's what would happen if your customers would need to take a long walk from the other end of the parking lot

    2. the experience his customers have while visiting him was very important to him and it started when they pulled into the parking lot. In his view, they should have front row parking

      Why to park far away from your own business office

    1. 3 lessons in branding

      3 lessons in branding:

      • “At the end of the day, brands are about trust”
      • All great brands are authentic, credible, and aspirational

        If you check all three of these boxes, there’s no reason why you can’t enter a new product vertical

      • To put your brand on steroids, attach yourself to a celebrity or influencer

  19. Aug 2019
  20. Jul 2019
    1. 8.3.2 Business Function A business function is a collection of business behavior based on a chosen set of criteria (typically required business resources and/or competencies), closely aligned to an organization, but not necessarily explicitly governed by the organization. Just like a business process, a business function also describes internal behavior performed by a business role. However, while a business process groups behavior based on a sequence or flow of activities that is needed to realize a product or service, a business function typically groups behavior based on required business resources, skills, competencies, knowledge, etc. There is a potential many-to-many relation between business processes and business functions. Complex processes in general involve activities that offer various functions. In this sense a business process forms a string of business functions. In general, a business function delivers added value from a business point of view. Organizational units or applications may coincide with business functions due to their specific grouping of business activities. A business function may be triggered by, or trigger, any other business behavior element (business event, business process, business function, or business interaction). A business function may access business objects. A business function may realize one or more business services and may be served by business, application, or technology services. A business role may be assigned to a business function. The name of a business function should clearly indicate a well-defined behavior. Examples are customer management, claims administration, member services, recycling, or payment processing. Figure 57: Business Function Notation

      Definition

  21. May 2019
  22. Apr 2019
    1. In questo articolo Bradley Kuhn di SFC cerca di stabilire cosa sia meglio intendere per "sostenibile" nelle recenti discussioni sulla sostenibilità del FLOSS.

      La necessità sentita di assicurarsi che i progetti FLOSS abbiano le risorse per progredire, retribuendo chi ci lavora, è corretta. Tuttavia allegare a questa intenzione anche il modello di crescita rapida tipico del capitale di ventura male si adatta ad un concetto di sostenibilità che possa essere trasversale a tutto il mondo del software libero.

      Viene quindi proposto essenzialmente un focus su livelli di retribuzione che consentano uno stile di vita adeguato ai membri del progetto, e la diffusione della consapevolezza che la ricerca di margini di profitto eccessivi per singoli individui o per l'entità che gestisce il progetto si scontrano con la sostenibilità per il progetto stesso.

  23. Mar 2019
    1. This is one of many discussions of Kirkpatrick's four levels of evaluation. More of the page is taken up with decoration and graphics than needs to be the case but this page is included in this list because it offers a printable guide and because the hierarchy of the four levels is clearly shown. The text itself is printed in black on a white background and it is presented as a bulleted list (the bullets are not organized as well as they could be). Nonetheless it is a usable presentation of this model. rating 3/5

  24. Feb 2019
    1. What happened is that Spotify dragged the record labels into a completely new business model that relied on Internet assumptions, instead of fighting them: if duplicating and distributing digital media is free (on a marginal basis), don’t try to make it scarce, but instead make it abundant and charge for the convenience of accessing just about all of it.
  25. Jan 2019
    1. 以太坊社区及以太坊主要开发团队对以太坊的技术纯净性的追求较高,我们无法用工程化融合的方案来看待以太坊的进度,完美的世界计算机和一个全面的区块链工程化应用解决方案在本质上会有性能的个性差异。但相对于看好以太坊的创业者来说,熊市之中,性能较弱的尴尬涉及到了团队的生存问题,以太坊的信仰和共识可能被环境所打败,开发团队转移其他战场。

      <big>评:</big><br/><br/>

      在求变的过程中,总会有两派行动纲领互为对斥的声音站出来相互抨击。例如当人们谈论「本土」和「外域」时,本土原教旨主义者和全球化开放主义者之间的吵闹声总是尖锐刺耳,但恰恰是在这种极端到偏颇的较量之中产生了张力,推动现世朝着互不偏倚的方向演进,避免了演化成所谓的「分叉」(fork)。 <br/><br/> 有趣的是,即使是处在矛盾两端的反义词也可以互相转化,就像「草食男」也可以被视作「性感」一样,清晰的定义为「模糊另面」赋予了合理性。既然如此,那么像商业应用这么中庸且自制的容器也就更没有理由冒天下之大不韪去自立门户。创业者们不应该用工程化融合的方案看待技术,他们应该用这种视角去审视技术背后的人。

  26. Nov 2018
  27. Oct 2018
    1. From reading this I'm left with the impression that the housing boom was just a housing boom, not a general long-term projects boom, as you would expect from the ABCT.

      Why was housiing and just housing the epicenter of the boom and bust? Or wasn't it?

      If it was just housing, couldn't we explain it (or at least conceive of a different hypothetical scenario) without interest rates even changing? Imagine that the government prints money and uses it to pay companies to build houses -- or creates a special lending program just for houses, but don't messes up with the general interest rate -, wouldn't that have basically the same effect?

      If so, perhaps we should start considering a new ABCT version that just talks about new money being created and going to specific sectors, instead of the whole interest/intertemporal adjustments/hayekian triangles talk. Why is this wrong?

    2. It's not that people switched from buying hot dogs to hamburgers; instead they switched from buying "present consumption" to buying "future consumption."

      What if we said that people switched from buying hot dogs to bonds? Not anything "future", just a bond, today.

      If they switched to hamburgers, that would increase investment in the hamburger industry in expense of the hot dog industry.

      In the same way, if they switch to bonds, that will increase the investment in the "bonds industry", which is basically lending money.

    1. Because the capital structure of the economy becomes internally inconsistent, eventually some entrepreneurs must abandon their projects because there are insufficient capital goods to carry them all to completion.

      This argument have confused me my entire life in all explanations of the Austrian Business Cycle Theory. It is the core of the most famous of all, that Mises story about the master builder who doesn't have enough material to finish the house he's building.

      It is misleading and ultimately wrong because economic goods (in the Menger definition) are always insufficient. In simple terms, given the market price, every good can be obtained.

      What happens after the economy realizes it was in a malinvestment boom, prices of capital goods adjust in a way that they can become too expensive for some projects to be completed profitably.