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.  

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 …

In a recent post I wrote about both the NFL’s and Tennis’s efforts to control the social media surrounding their games.  The NFL is prohibiting anyone involved with their games from posting anything about them to their social media accounts until 90 minutes after the games.  Tennis followed up prohibiting players from tweeting about their matches.
Not to be outdone, Major League Baseball wanted their 15 minutes of shame this week. Jennifer Van Grove at Mashable wrote about the heart-tugging video of a Dad catching a fly ball and handing it …

You can’t stop innovation and the disruption that it inflicts on industries and companies.  Successful companies understand this and either (1) position themselves as the disruptors, or (2) innovate or adapt quickly after someone disrupts them.  You would think that everyone would have figured this out by now given the accelerated pace of change in so many different industries (look no further than the music industry and newspapers.)
And yet, without fail, new stories emerge of companies trying to hold back innovation that threatens their businesses.  I liken it to sticking …