MySpace, which has been steadily losing ground to Facebook over the last year like a cartoon character that’s run off a cliff, has just announced today that it’s strategy against its fierce and formidable competitor is . . . to give up. As reported in today’s Financial Times, CEO Owen Van Natta has decided that [...]

Busted
Conveniently, this word means both “broken,” as in, “doesn’t work,” and “broke,” as in, “out of money,” demonstrated in spades as California goes bust because, well, the government’s busted. Businesses all around the state start receiving IOU’s from Sacramento, but, unfortunately, the IOU’s are not allowed to flow in the other direction.
Crap
In a radical move, [...]

It sure sucks to be MySpace right now.
MySpace, the social networking site owned by News Corporation, is reversing a strategy of international expansion in an attempt to slash costs and improve profits amid a global advertising slump.
The company on Tuesday said about 300 of 450 employees in offices outside of the US would lose their [...]

Broadband just keeps on bulldozing.
Broadband adoption by U.S. adults increased to 63 percent in April, up 8 percent from a year earlier, according to the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. . . .
A rise in the cost of high-speed connections, at a time when many people are struggling financially, doesn’t appear to [...]

When is an indie house not an indie house?
New Line has been surprising those who thought the rump operation — it has only about 50 employees, down from nearly 600 before Warner absorbed it — would be crushed by corporate politics and the sheer weight of Warner’s own, blockbuster-oriented moviemaking machinery. . . .
Mr. Emmerich [...]

As social networking — particularly Twitter and similar short-form messaging services — becomes more and more important to disseminating product and service information across a wide audience, we’ve seen an explosive growth of “URL shorteners,” services that are intended to take those long http-colon-slash-slash-tonsofgobbledeygookydogpilesfromyourcontentmanagementsystem and make them short-form friendly. Since we’re adding an entire section [...]

I love this story which landed in my email box from Michael Josephson over at CHARACTER COUNTS! this morning. He’ll probably sue me from here to Thursday (he is, after all, a lawyer), but it’s worth sharing in its entirety. I have a much different take on it than Mr. Josephson — I see it [...]

Two recent articles in The New York Times deserve every entrepreneur’s close attention, the first dealing with small businesses caught up in the fireworks when their lenders go under and the second dealing with the impending bankruptcy of General Growth Properties, the second-largest owner of shopping malls in the country and the first major commercial [...]

You see, the trick is in telling the difference.
In discussing the delicate line that regulators must walk, he said: “The challenge faced by regulators is to strike the right balance: to strive for the highest standards of consumer protection without eliminating the beneficial effects of responsible innovation on consumer choice and access to credit.”. . [...]

What happens when your bank fails? Your overextended small biz loan becomes toxic.
Clashes like this are increasingly taking place across the country, as banks struggle through their worst crisis in a generation. And Mr. Williamson is part of a niche industry that buys at bargain-basement prices the hard-to-collect commercial loans that the Federal Deposit Insurance [...]

Today is tax day! April 15! My wife and I received our refunds months ago, but people all over the country are celebrating tax day with Fox News-sponsored Tea Parties. Teabaggers from Beverly Hills to Greenwich Village are protesting tax hikes that have not in fact occurred, making Tea Parties the first protest in history [...]

This is officially the definition of “deflation,” but, thankfully, without the “spiral” part.
Consumer prices fell 0.4 per cent over the year to March, the labour department said yesterday, and dipped 0.1 per cent last month from February owing to weak energy and food prices. The drop in prices has lessened pressure on consumers who have [...]

How fast things move! Our book, Shoestring Venture is about to celebrate its fourth month and already our section on Web advertising is a bit out of date. The book helps you out with networks such as AdSense, Yahoo!, and Ask, but our section on Microsoft LiveOffice is now officially a dinosaur as the second [...]

I hadn’t really thought of lickable newspapers before, but will that save The Boston Globe?
Just as retailers stuff American newspapers with coupons and sales promotions, the idea is to get food and drink companies to attach a sealed pouch, containing a flavour sample, to front-page newspaper advertisements for their products. Consumers can then take them [...]

One great glaring fault of the mainstream business media and the business blogosphere is its knee-jerk focus on tech news. We’re so tuned to the tech world, that all this tech noise drowns out incredibly valuable start-up news and business success in transistor-challenged businesses. And in what is perhaps one of the most processor-free businesses [...]

In part three of our startup strategy primer, we discussed the crucial difference between industry analysis and business strategy. Substituting industry analysis for business strategy is the most common — and most fatal — mistake entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, and online “strategy experts” make. The one and only purpose of industry analysis is to determine the “attractiveness” [...]

We shoulda said “so long” so long ago.
Top bankers have been leaving Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and others in rising numbers to join banks that do not face tighter regulation, including foreign banks, or start-up companies eager to build themselves into tomorrow’s financial powerhouses. Others are leaving because of culture clashes at merging companies, [...]

As the U.S. contemplates bailing out the carmakers, Europe contemplates bailing out the banks, Japan has its eye on Pokemon.
Included in a giant stimulus package he unveiled on Friday was a target of raising exports from the “content” sector to about 18 percent of exports from less than 2 percent now. . . .
“Unfortunately, this [...]

In this, our third blog about business strategy, we try to unravel the easily confused difference between the attractiveness of an industry and what I believe to be the foundation of strategy, competitive advantage. You see, what typically passes for business strategy in the lion’s share of business proposals that come my way are industry [...]

The second edition of our foundation book, Shoestring Venture, is nearing completion and we have just added a section on getting paid through Twitter. While this market was dominated by TipIt, a decidedly problematic solution, TipJoy has just released an API for asynchronous payments through Twitter. Right now, the application is most suited to people [...]