Category: Media/Tech Business Models

NewCo Cincinnati Is Next Week. Here Are The Companies I’m Getting Inside

NewCoCincyI know I rave about all the NewCo cities, but once again I am picking my companies from a new festival lineup – and once again, I’m blown away. Next week is NewCo Cincinnati, and wow – what a stellar group of companies to chose from. Our partner Cintrifuse has really killed it – an impressive list of sponsors (P&G, SnapChat, BuzzFeed, Google!) and an even more impressive list of host companies. From arts to private/public partnerships to tech startups to food (and beer!), who knew Cincinnati was such a hub of NewCo innovation? Check out my picks for NewCo Cincy:

Weds, July 22, 6:30 pm: VIP Kickoff – @84.51 – Ill be there with the Mayor and the founders, movers, and shakers behind Cincy’s more than 80 NewCos (as well as the conductor of Cincy’s own symphony!). The program also features Nestle bigwig Pete Blackshaw, who left P&G more than a decade ago to start a company in what was a pretty bad area of town (but is now a hotbed of NewCo activity).

Thursday, July 23

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Get Out, And Get Into Silicon Valley: SurveyMonkey, Google, GoPro, FlipBoard, & So Many More

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Brian and I on SurveyMonkey’s rooftop last year.

New York is in the can (what a great event!) and next up, for those of us in the US anyway, is NewCo Silicon Valley. I won’t be able to actually attend NewCo SV, as I’ll be on the road visiting NewCo Amsterdam and NewCo Istanbul. But If I could go to Silicon Valley, these are the companies I’d pick to attend:

Day 1 – Monday June 8th

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Uber, The Rashomon.

Uber Women Promo

Our industry loves a rashomon, and in the past year or two, our collective subject of debate has been Uber. Perhaps the fastest growing company in history (its numbers aren’t public, but we’ll get to some estimates shortly), Uber has become a vector for some of the most wide-ranging arguments I’ve ever had regarding the tech industry’s impact on society at large.

It’s not that Google, Facebook, Apple, or Microsoft didn’t evoke great debate, but all those companies came of age in an era where tech was still relegated to a sideshow in the broader cultural conversation. Microsoft was taking over the computer industry in the 1990s, Google the Internet in the early 2000s, Facebook and Apple the mobile and social world in the late 2000s. But Uber? Uber is about a very real and entirely new approach to our economy, a stand in for the wealth divide festering in the US and beyond, an existential rorschach testing your values around the role of government, the social contract, and the kind of society we want to become.

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Integrations (and Metaservices) For The Win

GBoard
A GeckoBoard sample dashboard, integrating half a dozen separate data services.

What makes for a truly NewCo business? I’ve been giving this question a lot of thought the past six or so months, leading to posts like Maybe The Best Way To Change the World Is To Start a Company, Living Systems and The Information First Company, What Makes a NewCo, and posts on NewCos like MetroMile and Jack.

But lately I’ve noticed a strong theme running through a number of interesting and successful businesses: Integrations. From Acxiom and sovrn (where I am a board member) to Slack, Gecko and Zapier (where I am a happy customer), these companies are thriving because they have built a platform based on the integration of many different products and services. At NewCo, we call this “being platform’d” – an inelegant but apt descriptor.

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A Few Questions For Publishers Contemplating Facebook As A Platform

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Well, it’s happening. According to no less authoritative source than The New York Times, The New York Times is preparing to plant a taproot right inside the highly walled garden that is Facebook.

As Times’ executives contemplate moving The Grey Lady squarely under the rather constrictive confines of Facebook’s terms of service, they may be comforting themselves with a few palliative pretty-much-truths:

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With Meridian, Sovrn Levels the Playing Field For Publishers

meridian-logo-invA long, strange, and ultimately rewarding trip, that’s what many involved in the past ten years at Federated Media, Lijit, and now sovrn Holdings might say. One year ago, give or take, we sold FM’s assets to LIN Media, and created sovrn Holdings, a programmatic data business focused on one mission: to foster an ecosystem where independent and influential publishers can thrive.

Sovrn has had an extraordinary year. It’s led the way in the fight against fraud, and has one of the cleanest networks in the industry. It’s a profitable, fast-growing business, and it’s more than quadrupled its network CPM – an amazing feat that is a testament to both eliminating fraud, as well as focusing on data science – understanding the reams of data the network throws off each day, and putting it to work for its 20,000+ publishers. And it’s that focus on data science that has led to sovrn’s latest crowning achievement: The launch of meridian, sovrn’s completely rethought publisher platform.

Meridian is a cooperative data-driven platform. So what does that mean? Publishers integrate with meridian – mainly because of its advertising platform – and when they do, they share their collective audience, advertising, and other data.  Because sovrn has massive scale, we can share back information to publishers that no other platform offers – and we can do it for free.

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Metromile: A FitBit for Your Car

MetroMile staff
The Metromile staff in front of their SF HQ (Preston is in the red shirt in the back right).

Ever since writing Living Systems and The Information First Company last Fall, I’ve been citing Earnest, the financial services startup, as a poster child for what I mean by an “information-first” company. But earlier this month I met with another perfect exemplar: Metromile, a company that is already upending industrial-age assumptions about what “insurance” should be.**

I’m fascinated by the idea of “potential information” – flows of information that are locked away and unused. Potential information flows live in the imagination of every NewCo – once tapped, they create all manner of new potential value. Metromile is a stellar example of a company that has found a vector into a treasure trove of potential information – the automobile – and is busy turning that information into a new kind of customer experience, one that has the potential to completely retool the utility and value of the insurance business.

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Apple and Google: Middle School Mean Girls Having At It

THE-DRAMA-YEARS(image) I’m the father of three children, and two of them are girls. And while my first was a boy, and therefore “broke me in” with extraordinary acts of Running Headlong Into Fence Posts and Drinking Beer Stolen From Dad’s Fridge Yet Forgetting To Hide The Bottles, nothing, NOTHING, prepared me for Girls Behaving Badly To Each Other Whilst In Middle School.

Those of you with girls aged 11-14 know of what I speak: Middle school girls are just flat out BADASSES when it comes to unrepentant cruelty – and they are almost as good at forgetting, often within a day (or an hour) the rationale or cause of their petty behaviors. On one of my daughter’s wall is a note from a middle school friend. It says – and while I may paraphrase, I’m not making this up – “Hey Girl, I’m so glad we’re best friends, because I really hated you before but now we’re best friends right?!” And my daughter *pinned this* to her wall – her ACTUAL wall, in her bedroom!

Anyway, every so often girls in middle school end up squaring off – and the result is an embarrassment of small-minded but astonishingly machiavellian acts of cruelty. Little lies are let loose like sparks on a pile of hay, and soon a fire of social shunning rips through the school. Invitations are made, then retracted vigorously, and in public. Insults are veiled as compliments, and a girl’s emerging character strengths – a penchant for science perhaps, or a love of kittens for God’s sake – are expertly turned against her.

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App Stores Must Go

appstores2014 was the year the industry woke up to the power of mobile app installs, and the advertising platforms that drive them. Facebook’s impressive mobile revenue numbers – 66% of its Q3 2014 revenue and growing  – are a proxy for the mobile economy at large, and while the company doesn’t divulge what percentage of that revenue is app install advertising, estimates range from a third to a half – which means that Facebook made anywhere from $700 million to more than a billion dollars in one quarter on app install advertising. That’s potentially $4 billion+ a year of app installs, just on Facebook. Yow. That kind of growth is reminiscent of search revenues a decade ago.

But as I’ve written before, app installs are only the beginning of an ongoing marketing relationship that an app publisher must have with its consumer. It’s one thing to get your app installed, but quite another to get people to keep opening it, using it, and ultimately, doing things that create revenue for you. The next step after app install revenue is “app re-engagement,” and the battle to win this emerging category is already underway, with all the major platforms (Twitter, Yahoo, Google, Facebook) rolling out products, and a slew of startups vying for share (and M&A glory, I’d wager).

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Predictions 2015: Uber, Google, Apple, Beacons, Health, Nest, China, Adtech…

1-nostradamus2015. My eleventh year of making predictions. Seems everyone’s gotten onto this particular bus, and I’m now late to the party – I never get around to writing till the weekend – when I have open hours in front of me, and plenty of time to contemplate That Which May Come.

There are several keys to getting predictions right. First, you need to pay attention to long term secular trends – big changes that have been in the works for a while. Second, you need to call the timing – will those trends break into the mainstream this coming year? Last year, for example, I predicted that 2014 would be the year that the Internet would “adopt the planet as its cause.” I think I was right on the secular trend, but utterly wrong on the timing.

Third, you need to pay attention to patterns that have yet to emerge, but have a high probability of breaking out in the near term. A good example of this is my declaring that Twitter would become a major media platform three years ago.

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