Living in Boulder, Colorado, I am surrounded by entrepreneurs and startups, but we don't have a lot of national brands based in our small town. There are two that you've heard of, however: Celestial Seasonings and Crocs.
The former makes tea. Really good tea. The latter? They make those ubiquitous rubber shoes with the holes punched in 'em, and a whole lot more.
Every year we suffer through the so-called "Black Friday", the day immediately after Thanksgiving that's supposed to kick off the Christmas shopping season and is also traditionally the single biggest shopping day of the year. This means it's a very important day for retailers, of course, but if you dig into the numbers, Black Friday is one of the worst days for retail establishments, not one of the best. Let me explain...
As an investor and citizen, I have been following with increasing concern the shenanigans in the financial market.
What started out as a pleasant chat with someone who was writing some iPhone applications has rapidly blossomed into an extraordinary outpouring of interest from the iPhone developer community. As a result, I've decided to run a series of developer spotlights, probably 20 or more, over the next few weeks. It'll offer you insight into the time involved, complexity and rewards of developing a game or utility for one of the most interesting software sales environments on the planet: the Apple iPhone. I hope you enjoy the series!
One of the highlights of The Aloha Summit a few months ago in Hawaii was having Andy Sernovitz beam in electronically and join us for an hour of discussion and insight. Andy should be a familiar name, he's the author of Word of Mouth Marketing.
Reading the latest issue of Consumer Electronics publication TWICE I came across their list of the top 100 Major Appliance Retailers and was struck by how there are no online companies on the list.
In the age of video on demand, advertisements touting that Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX) has rented over two billion movies, the pervasiveness of peer to peer (p2p) networks, and the general drum-beat of the demise of video rental, today's earnings report from Blockbuster (NYSE: BBI) is a shocker:
If the idea of spending a day with a few hundred entrepreneurs sounds great, then you really should join us at the Colorado Capital Conference later this month. We have two keynote speakers, Simon Leung and Marc Silverman, and have eight workshops that day, along with eleven companies pitching and hoping for a funding event. The workshops are going to be terrific:
The Wall Street Journal this morning is reporting that Blockbuster (NYSE: BBI) is trying to buy beleaguered consumer electronics retailer Circuit City (NYSE: CC), which the market is not to thrilled about: Blockbuster stock dropped precipitously in early trading while Circuit City stock jumped up.
The acquisition of Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) by Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) has been something that's frankly made sense for years. Microsoft has a lot of strengths, but it just hasn't been able to crack the nut of content creation (does it even own a property that has any meaningful content prior to this acquisition?), particularly the semi-mythic user-generated content, and its attempts at competing with Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) in the advertising space have also proven disappointing.