Now seems like a good time to remind you that you can’t ride on your past accomplishments for very long.  If you aren’t working to stay ahead of the curve, your company is going to be left behind.
Years ago I was bemoaning to a friend about how I had missed the opportunity to invest in BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM).  They were on top of the world.  Now app developers are leaving them, and everyone believes they are dead.
This shouldn’t be shocking, especially to those people that study and …

I think the best businesses are ones where the business model is so ingrained into the product or service that you can’t think about the business and business model separately.  That is not always the case – most businesses are built first and they try to answer their business model question later.
My broad definition of a business model is “How do you separate customers from their money”?  Business models aren’t only about your pricing model; it’s about the entire process, from how a customer finds out about you, to how …

I’ve just co-founded a new consumer Internet company called BrainCredits (www.BrainCredits.com) that we think has huge potential.
Without getting into the details yet of the new business (we hope to release a beta version in a few months), one of the most important steps in the development of our business model was creating what I’ll call our “User Life Cycle” – how a user ultimately becomes engaged with our service.  

Facebook’s sometime-in-the-future IPO is one of the most anticipated stock offerings of all time, and with good reason: in a short time the company has become the de facto standard social network with over 500 million users and a private-company market capitalization of somewhere over $20 billion.  You can even bet on their IPO date on Bodog if you’d like.
But I think that Facebook going public is a bad idea, and here’s why:  a public Facebook will be under pressure to continually increase earnings, putting it in an escalating conflict …

When I was growing up, running a lemonade stand was easy.  You picked a hot day, made sure you had a good location, priced it right, and provided a quality product.
But in the Web 2.0 world we live in, that just isn’t enough.  Everyone knows that it takes much less capital to start a business then it did 20 years ago, so everyone in your neighborhood is probably thinking about starting a lemonade stand too.  How will you ever be able to beat the competition?  Here is your guide to …

IKEA came up with an innovative way to market their new store in Malmo, Sweden.  (Original story from Mashable.)
They setup a Facebook page for their store manager and then uploaded showroom pictures over a period of 2 weeks.  The first people that “tagged” themselves to a product in the pictures won the product.
The beauty of this idea was its use of an existing Facebook feature – photo tagging – which served to automatically post the picture to each user’s Facebook page, broadcasting it to all of their friends.  Simple idea …