Ignore the Consumer At Your Own Risk: The death of Kodak

The latest tombstone in the “old media” cemetery is Kodak. Once the most powerful name in photography, Kodak stands out as a company that took too long to understand what its real purpose was. It wasn’t to make film, it was to take “pictures” that allow their customers to preserve images. If Kodak understood that [...]

SOPA: We Can Fix This

The problem with the fight over SOPA is that no one is playing by the same rules.  In fact, there are no rules and frequently people on the same side are fighting for completely different reasons.  In the media world, we have journalistically-minded companies who have spent a lifetime defending freedom of speech and fighting [...]

Move over Gilt, Hautlook etc. Here Comes vente-privee

It’s not widely known here that most of the highly-discounted fashion sites in the US, like Gilt,  HauteLook, Beyond The Rack, Rue La La,  Fab.com and others are really copies of a site that began in France almost a decade ago,  called vente-privee. A fascinating company with nearly a billion dollars in revenue,  vente-privee began [...]

Yahoo’s Choice

The choice of Scott Thompson is another roll of the dice by the Yahoo Board, which hasn’t been winning a lot at the craps table lately. But to be fair to Pay Pal’s extremely successful boss Scott Thompson, everyone deserves a chance to rise to the occasion, The problem is that Yahoos board continues to [...]

Watch out Comcast, I’ve Got Choices

It was a great New Year’s gift. I was at our home in California this week and looking forward to watching my alma mater, Syracuse, play DePaul in basketball on New Years Day. The Orange are undefeated and the number one team in the country this year, and despite my brutal travel schedule and the [...]