All posts tagged: trends

Disney to acquire social-gaming company Playdom

July 28, 2010
by Kanyi
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Essays

“Rumors that The Walt Disney Company would acquire social-gaming conglomerate Playdom have turned out to be true: Disney issued a statement on Tuesday, after the market closed, announcing its intent to acquire Playdom for $563.2 million, plus potential earnouts of up to $200 million.” This is profoundly good for Disney. Creative destruction in industry is determined by difference between the companies who are willing to be bold so as to innovate, and those who aren’t. Disney has […]

On Design in Business

April 10, 2010
by Kanyi
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I was talking to a friend earlier today about how design thinking, and designers in general, are so incredibly critical to addressing the dynamic needs of consumers in a market where we’re getting increasingly inundated with products, not all of which solve new problems. As the iPad has proved – well, is proving – and as I’ve mentioned before, there isn’t necessarily a convergence where a panacea product emerges to solve all of our fire […]

On iPad, ctd.

April 7, 2010
by Kanyi
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John Doerr and some of the KCPB guys have some good thoughts in a Techcrunch guest post. If Bill Joy says lower power is the key to performance, then lower power is the key to performance. Before hearing what Steve Jobs actually thought the confluence was for his company, I would always have called it the intersection of Hardware and Software. The fact that they are revolutionizing design, software, and hardware all in one with […]

On iPad

April 6, 2010
by Kanyi
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My two favorite comments about the much-anticipated launch are tied to each other, and I’d like to take tonight’s entry to briefly explain why. The first comment is from David Pogue, in his New York Times review of the iPad: “Those are some pretty confident critiques of the iPad — considering that their authors have never even tried it."  And then Steve Jobs himself told the audience during his announcement of the iPad: "This is […]

On OKTrends still being best blog on the web.

April 1, 2010
by Kanyi
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Using their wonderfully expansive and rich data set about people’s behaviors and preferences, they come up with some fabulously incisive conclusions. This particular one is about why Democrats tend to be worse at governing (and have been for the last 25 years, at least) than Republicans. Worth reading the whole thing.  http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2010/03/30/the-democrats-are-doomed-or-how-a-big-tent-can-be-too-big/ Money quote: “Like an army, a political party must be coherent and disciplinedto be effective, and these qualities alone can carry the day, even against greater […]

On Quora, Facebook Mafia, and Media Convergence

March 29, 2010
by Kanyi
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First of all, congratulations to the Quora team for their Benchmark investment! http://bit.ly/dDoQ6S Seems as though the era of the “Facebook Mafia” is soon to be upon us, with http://www.asana.com/ raising a super competitive round, http://jumo.com/ soft-launching to a lot of excitement and curiosity (if not much else yet), and the newest from the guys over at Quora. Everybody’s been asking the same question, though: what happens at scale? Are networks, endorsed answers, and the subtleties of anti-anonymity enough […]

On Tumblr Entering the Fashion Game

March 29, 2010
by Kanyi
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Maybe I’m out of the loop, but I was chatting with an investor friend about how it’s surprising how underdeveloped the fashion blogging community seems, considering how young, energetic, influential, and tech-savvy they have become. Tumblr is making a play at it as a static middleman. I like where their head’s at, and I think there’s a lot of interesting technology plays that can be made in the fashion blogging industry, but I don’t think this is […]