Sunday mix of articles

Chris Dixon: Embrace the medium. "An obvious but surprisingly under-practiced design principle is to "embrace the medium." Applied to software, this means building applications that take advantage of the strengths of the platform instead of trying to mimic the strengths of another platform."

Reaction Wheel: The 300%-500% Lift Meme. "I even heard a story of a VC, after being pitched on a more reasonable lift, say "your approach is interesting, but we need to see you deliver a 300%-500% lift to be competitive in the market." (I looked at this VC's website and found no ad targeting companies in his portfolio.)

Sometimes upon hearing this, I drift into a daydream about combining behavioral targeting, social targeting, retargeting, creative optimization, rich media, distribution optimization, contextual targeting and offer optimization technologies into one super-arbitrage strategy. The resulting 328,050% - 19,531,250% lift would allow me to buy $0.50 CPMs and pretty much overnight control the US economy*."

A VC: Swinging For The Fences. "These entrepreneurs usually have enough money in the bank that they are not looking for a payday. They don't build their companies to flip. They build their companies to go all the way. They are doing it for money, but they are also doing it for the thrill of the game, for ego, and to build a legacy. Those are very powerful motivators, much more powerful than money if you ask me."

VentureBeat: MySpace and Facebook are officially talking. But it probably doesn't look like this. Pretty funny actually.

Jardenberg: Planeto: EPIC WIN. "Martin has kindly asked me to join him in his quest for world domination, an offer impossible to resist. My mission will be, as acting CMO, to help Planeto reach the masses and get the attention it deserves. Our determination to make Planeto an epic #win knows no limits." Jocke Jardenberg joins Martin Walfisz' (Massive Entertainment) new startup Planeto.

Fred Destin: The Ignorant VC as counterpart to the Ignorant Entrepreneur. "I think that Europe usually fails on the third category: we tend to undercapitalise the businesses that are doing well. And this is where we get a competitive disadvantage to the US. They have a tendency to overcapitalise early, but when they scale they scale well because they are able to raise repeat large rounds of money to really capture an opportunity."