January 23, 2010

Themes for 2010 and interesting links

The Big Picture: The Economy's Lost Decade. Eye-opening data on US job growth, GDP growth and household net worth in the last decade. A horrible decade if you look at underlying growth.

Paul Kedrosky: Playing "What If" With $10,000 From 12/31/1999 to Today. Gold, raw materials and treasuries did well in the last decade, U.S. stocks and venture capital did not.

VentureBeat: How Jajah, a little phone company, sold for $207M while everyone else got killed. Somewhat of a post-mortem (some success factors and key events) on VOIP company Jajah's life as a startup from launch to being acquired by Telefonica.

VentureBeat: Hulu’s success stats: 43 million users, 924 million streams, 14,000 hours of TV. Online video is growing quickly as TV shows are going online. Hulu is an obvious U.S. example, but local Swedish ones (TV4, Kanal5, TV3, SVT) are growing quickly too.

Fred Wilson: Areas of Interest. Union Square Ventures' areas of interest for 2010: Mobile, Mobile What?, Gaming, New forms of commerce and currency, Cloud based platforms and APIs, Education and the Energy/Environment.

Fred Destin: Investment and innovation themes from the Defrag conference. Making e-mail better, Making lifestreams relevant, Measuring and monetizing influence, Extranets, Selling data, Meaning is the new search, Breaking up the corporate IT environment, Education, Application Marketplaces, Identity Metasystems.

Chris Dixon: Why the web economy will continue growing rapidly. "Right now there are lots of inhibitors to brand advertising dollars flowing onto the web. Among them 1) most of the brand dollars are controlled by ad agencies, who seem far more comfortable with traditional media channels, 2) it is hard to know where your online advertising is appearing and whether it is effective, 3) banner ads seem extremely ineffective and are often poorly targeted, 4) big brand advertisers seem scared of user-generated content, today’s major source of ad inventory growth.

But economic logic suggests these problems will be figured out, because advertisers have no choice but to go where the consumers are."

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