Social media is lifting all boats

Yesterday I talked about how anticipating the market is critically important in creating highly successful product.  One example is social media.  It's not Facebook driving the social media trend.  Instead it's younger generation and mobile workers who are driving the market.  Facebook was in the market at the right time as the most compelling product to become the biggest platform.

This social media trend is lifting all boats.  MySpace, the early winner in social media market, has been in decline for the past few years.  But with new ownership and focus on niche market, it's now starting to grow again.  It's the case of market growing and more people demanding contextual network where people can share information with like-minded people.

As I wrote earlier, I expect more social media sites to become larger and social network sites to be even more fragmented.  Social media market will continue to grow, and this will force enterprise to adopt the social media.  We are yet to see this big disruption in enterprise, and it will create a huge market for existing collaboration tools and social media companies.

AngelList: HotOrNot For Startups

After seeing about 20 tweets talking about 'angellist', I couldn't help but look. For a moment I thought it was yet another fallout from angelgate that I wrote about last year. It sounded like a leaked document outlining shady angel investment practices...

Got Killer Idea But No Seed Money?
AngelList Might Get You The Other Wing You Need...

In reality it was not. AngelList is a craigslist-like service for startups, but with a touch of crowd sourcing. In Hollywood executive pitch, I would call it HotOrNot for startups; connecting entrepreneurs with angel investors.

That seemed straight forward, but there have been lots of tweets about what we might be losing and what we might be gaining because of AngelList. Some praised it as break-through in venture funding (as Dave McClure wrote on his 500 Startup blog) while others cautioned the indiscriminate use of it citing increasing signs of overblown hightech startup bubble (as Mark Suster wrote on TechCrunch).

Which is it? Is AngelList a boon to angel investment and startup community or a failed experiment because of decreasing signal-to-noise ratio?

It's Not About Content; It's All About Communication

Google is all about content; Facebook is all about communication.

- Kailash Ambwani CEO of FaceTime Communications

Today I want to share a few articles that I found over last month or so. All these articles talk about non-intuitive observation. They all point to importance of communication, and how enabling communication is really the key to harness the explosive network effect of social network. Contrary to popular belief, they all talk about content, as we know them, is not the king.