Hack the… [Insert Industry Here]
What’s hackable these days? Answer: Everything. Every traditional vertical, agency and business line is on the “hacking block” with innovative entrepreneurs and executives trying to reinvent business by disrupting it.
Intrapreneurials are actively competing with their entrepreneurial brethren to breathe live into inefficient companies.
With Facebook making the “hackathon” a regular event, they’re challenging the concept of doing something faster with little devotion to the past. Basically, it’s the corporate-sized version of “pivoting” – or refreshing the process in favor of faster-better-more efficient methods. It’s not downsizing to reduce costs, but super-sizing business or brand thinking to reduce natural inefficiencies Read more >>
Groupon: Start in Physical, Get to Digital
Groupon is on an incredible tear, so we’re not buying the “inevitable fall” question in today’s infographic). We’ve recently started helping the daily deal company navigate the M&E space – and their phenomenal growth is well-timed to reinvigorate social commerce across most verticals. On background: thePoint.com first landed on our ‘social good’ radar at Participant)
With Amazon’s relationship with LivingSocial and xxx hundred copycats (remind any of the early Facebook, niche social network days?), it will be very interesting to see Groupon grow beyond daily emails into other discounted merch models.
One potential trend, companies like Groupon, Netflix and Amazon are smartly rooting themselves in physical goods, but as with Amazon and Netflix, will eventually scale to soft, aka digital, goods: hosting, streaming movies, email packages and the like.
Once you presumably own a category, it then becomes time to optimize customer relationships and these three have established their user experience satisfaction levels well. Simple, easy and physical product-based moves to digital products very easily.
MySpace Facelift, New CEO Owen Van Natta
MySpace’s “loss of face” to Facebook, a rough and tumble economy and a pivotal change of company seats, i.e., Peter Chernin, at News Corp (and MySpace’s own COO and senior technical team’s exodus) has contributed to a major executive facelift of MySpace. While their track record of change with Jeff Berman as President of Sales and Marketing and pitch towards being framed as a “social portal” has helped, the inability to keep up with Facebook’s growth rate and product innovation has forced change at MySpace. With the forthcoming announcement (today) by new CDO Jon Miller of former Facebook COO, Owen Van Natta, to the CEO spot, Fox and Murdoch are betting on social competitiveness to regain position. After the jump, we’ll look at Van Natta, and outside choice, Jason Calacanis’ recommendations. Read more >>