Sunday links

Mike On Ads: The Plight of the Ad Technology Startup. "As a new company you have two options — start an ad-network and inject yourself directly into the money stream or selling your technology to one of the existing players in the food-chain. Realistically — most agencies and publishers aren’t very tech savvy, so as a cutting edge technology player you are primarily limited to selling to ad-networks. Here's the problem — although running an ad-network can be a highly lucrative business — selling technology to one is not."

Futuristic Play: 5 steps towards building a metrics-driven business. "Given my history blogging about viral marketing, I'm occasionally approached by folks who ask me, "For product X, how would you promote it and make it viral?" I think there's an expectation that there's a playbook which you can directly apply to every situation.

Unfortunately, there's no real answer to this - ultimately, I think any advancements that can be made to your business function based on the fact you make very gradual improvements based on creating goals, measuring subcomponents, making hypotheses, and testing them. There's no better way to do this than to just do it."

Futuristic Play: Data portability: Is the social network data you're hoarding treasure or trash? "As a result, it may not surprise you that data around in-market behaviors (aka Intent) are worth a LOT more than the more watered down stuff (aka Interest), particularly because you can prove to advertisers that the former will make them money."

Martin Spanar!: Visdomsord från en vän. "Återigen poängen - den tid det tar att göra någonting riktigt bra, är inte nödvändigtvis längre än den tid det tar att göra det hafsigt, tillräckligt bra, glida förbi lägsta-nivån. Genom att lägga ribban högt sparar man alltså tid totalt. Dessutom, det som är värt att göras, är värt att göras ordentligt."

Martin Spanar!: LinkedIn - 10 steg till svart bälte. "Klipp-och-klistra inte från ditt CV - Linkedin fungerar i sina bästa stunder som ett sätt för dig att nätverka professionellt och hålla kontakten med vänner i yrkeslivet - men det är ingen HR-avdelning eller rekryteringsrobot du skriver för. Du skulle nog inte dela ut blad med din meritförteckning innan du har introducerat dig för någon så gör det inte här heller. Istället ska du tänka på att beskriva dina erfarenheter och förmågor som du skulle framställa dom för en person du träffar. Tänk på att skriva för datorskärmen - korta textblock som är visuellt attraktiva."

Union Square Ventures: The Weird Economics of Information. "But entrepreneurs don’t just have one conversation, they have hundreds. The more open they are in each of those conversations, the more the person on the other side is likely to engage. They may unconsciously see it is a fair trade, the entrepreneur’s ideas for theirs. The more detailed the conversation the more places for a counterparty to interact. The more they understand about the entrepreneur's plans, the more likely they are to come across other insights from other conversations that would be valuable to the entrepreneur and the more likely they are to pass them along. So an entrepreneur who is aggressively open with his or her ideas builds a very effective network that aggregates data, information, and insights that are immediately relevant to those ideas."