i promise deep thinking. about digital media.
With every passing day, it seems like prominent media sites/sources are publishing rumors news about Groupon's strategy for entering the large, chinese local advertising and ecommerce markets. First, Techcrunch reported that Groupon was using a significant portion of its recent $950mm round to hire dozens/hundreds of Harvard MBAs and China McKinsey management consultants to build out a local presence themselves in China. Given Groupon's business model, and hiring practices in the US, it is questionable at best why...
i will be concise, and not even link out to various stories/blogposts that have quoted these stats, but i absolutely hate it when the media take anecdotal metrics literally and publish them to define business scale or business model viability. recently, several online game publishers have converted previously paid subscription games to free to play. these games then claim to see their "revenues double". that can mean many things, including: 1) total revenue derived from the game post conversion = total revenue...
im one of those people who like to take pictures of what they eat. and i love to look at pictures of food to decide what to eat. so @foodspotting is an awesome app in my book. especially helpful since i can really "see" what food is nearby vs. getting a less useful list. additionally, foodspotting lets me check into the restaurant on foursquare. since i eat food more often than i watch movies, flixster has been bumped to page 2.
hat tip to mr takahashi over at venturebeat for pointing out a new DFC Intelligence report on the projected market size for free to play online games. after publishing an earlier report that pegged the overall global market size at $7bn in 2015, they have now predicted that the market in English language markets will be $2bn by 2015. I am not quite sure if this is a North American estimate, or North America + UK, but last time I checked, many other growing online gaming markets are English language as well (including...
anyone else look at Inside Social Games weekly fastest growing FB games by MAU list, and think that this is a reflection of how much revenues FB is deriving from game publishers? and little else? i mean, in all seriousness, when this list isn't filled with Zynga games, i feel like it is a down week in terms of ad revenues on FB. it looks like Playdom, with their new Disney balance sheet, is now spending the big bucks "acquiring" MAUs, aka paying for users to build initial crowd of players on their games. i am very...
in all seriousness, they definitely need to implement video replay if the call in question is whether or not a GOAL is scored. i am all for tradition but this is pretty ludicrous, especially in events that occur once every four years, when every right and wrong call can be analyzed by millions around the world instantaneously.
the yogurt craze is here. in LA, it is primarily Pinkberry and Yogurtland, in nyc there are literally dozens of knock-offs lining every neighborhood. i think it has a little something to do with Americans wanting to be healthier, and these chains supposedly providing fat free sugar free frozen treats (that is, before you pile fat and sugar filled candies and fruits on your yogurt). in any case, this blog isn't about nutrition, it is about digital media. and there is much to learn from Pinkberry and Yogurtland when...
Not to be lost among the countless other big announcements on day 0 of the 2010 E3 Expo here in Los Angeles, Microsoft & ABC made a pretty big announcement. ESPN3 (ESPN's broadband sports network which streams thousands of live sporting events) will stream for free to all Xbox Live Gold subscribers ($50/month annual). That's right - the only remaining reason to pay a cableco (seriously, these have to be some of the most hated companies not named BP or AT&T), is about to come to a close for many people in a target...
just made the connection that the startup that placed runner-up at TC Disrupt last month in NYC is one and the same as the German startup founded by non other than Pharrell Williams and Hans Zimmer (yes THAT Hans Zimmer). super excited to see just how this platform develops.
Hello. My name is Jason, and here you will find some thoughts on the all things digital media, but with a focus on a couple of things i love: movies, music and games. I used to be a VC at FirstMark Capital in NYC, and now lead the International Publishing efforts at online game publisher/developer Riot Games in LA. It goes without saying, but all opinions found on this site are not representative of opinions of either FirstMark Capital or Riot Games. They are my own personal random rants.
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