Breaking Glass by Rishi Dean

Note: I was live at Facebook’s f8 developer conference yesterday, and posted this originally to the Nanigans blog, and also to BostInnovation. I’ve made some minor grammar updates here, to correct for my speed-blogging.

We’re at f8 in San Francisco today, with the keynote speeches just concluding. After an entertaining opening with comedian Andy Samberg masquerading as Mark Zuckerberg, the real “Zuck Dawg” (as Samberg called him) took the stage to deliver the true keynote. Facebook’s CTO Bret Taylor and VP Product Chris Cox followed, along with brief cameo CEO appearances from Spotify’s Daniel Ek and Netflix’s Reed Hastings. 

Overview of Announcements

Two major announcements were made at f8: (1) introduction of the Timeline and (2) development of the Open Graph.

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Summary: Groupon, and its “group buying” counterparts, have been all the rage in e-commerce, but is it right for your product? Here we’ll look at the types of products and strategies where these platforms do, and do not, make economic sense for merchants. E-mail. Tweet. http://rdean.me/f0miOb

With all of the recent hype around the spurned $6B acquisition offer of Groupon by Google, and the holiday shopping season upon us, I thought I’d share our experience at Lime Tree Cove, with promoting our products through group buying.

In considering, researching, and executing our campaign we learned a lot, and wanted to share our experiences and views of what types of products / services are best suited, and which are not.

First, a breakdown of group buying economics

By “group buying”, I’m referring to the numerous services that showcase discounted products and services; usually done with a minimum number of people accepting, in a “deal a day” model that targets specific local markets. While there are a host of sites offering this service, such as Groupon, Eversave, Living Social, BuyWithMe, Woot, getsugar, Tippr, and more, there may be subtle differences, but the general model works as follows:

• The consumer receives a 50% discount on the list price of the product
• Of the remaining 50%, 50% of that goes to the site
• So effectively, you’re selling your product at a 75% discount

For more information you can go here, but for all intents and purposes, you can expect to give a pretty steep discount, and not all types of products and business models can stomach this. So let’s look at who, and when, this type of promotion works best and worst…
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Summary: We often talk about undertaking an initiative in order to create “competitive advantage”, but what does that really mean? What are things you can, and should be doing? Here we examine, the five sources of durable competitive advantage. E-mail. Tweet.

There have been some pithy posts (for example here, and here written on creating durable, or sustainable, competitive advantage; however, the best I’ve ever seen was buried deep in the footnotes of a deck by Khosla Ventures.

In this deck it outlines five major sources of durable competitive advantage:

1. “Special Access” to Scarce Supply
2. High Switching Costs
3. Fixed Cost Leverage
4. Real-Time Business Process Advantage
5. Ownable Network Effect

While the footnotes of the deck don’t go into much more detail, I’ll do my best to provide some explanation, and practical examples, on each of these.

Click here to learn more about each of these factors

In predicting how your new product idea may take off, you should consider the 1962 work by Everett M. Rogers called Diffusion of Innovations. Rogers also describes the S-shaped growth curve of innovations, and is also known for coining the term “early adopter” – a term familiar to those of you who have read Geoffrey Moore’s famous book, Crossing the Chasm.

Rogers outlines the following seven attributes that determine the rate at which an innovation diffuses in the marketplace. These can serve as a good rule of thumb for forecasting the speed at which a new product or technology will be adopted.
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Came across this TechCrunch post yesterday entitled: “Firefox 3.5 not playing nicely with Twitter”. This seems pretty innocuous at first — “ok, so what if app X doesn’t work in some new browser”; however, looking a bit deeper the choice of words here is actually pretty interesting. This post implies that it’s Firefox’s “fault” for not “playing nicely” with  Twitter – not the other way around.

It wasn’t too long ago that I remember our teams wildly running around to enable our application to support “browser x” (do you know major companies still use IE6?). The browser was always the top dog, and you (the app developer) had to support it.

When did the rules change? When did the browser become the tail, and the applications become the top dog?

More generally: how or when does a power shift occur from the platform itself, to the ecosystem around it? I believe it inevitably happens in “open” ecosystems (i.e. platforms are open) such as browsers. Exactly how, is a function of two conditions:

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