Summation

Coca-Cola needs math tutoring

Coca-Cola (NYSE:KO) might need a little math help on their calorie counts.

A standard 12-ounce can of coke, according to the can, has 140 calories.

but the 8-ounce bite size cans say they have just 100 calories.

one of the cans has to be wrong. either the 12-ounce actually has 150 calories or the 8-ounce has wee bit more than 93 calories.

all this SAT math failures hasn't affected Coke's stock price which has skyrocketed in the last year ... making Mr. Buffet still a happy man.

Implicit is the New Explicit

There are more opportunities to take advantage of content then to create it yourself

Taking advantage of existing user generated content (UGC) can be more far-reaching and impactful than trying to generate new UGC from scratch.

There are a lot of new startups that coin themselves as "Web 2.0" and are focused on creating user generated content. These companies try to get people to come to their site and create content in order to create a community, as well as to increase page views and uniques which invariably capitalizes on their advertising business model. There are impressive players in the explicit UGC space, including brands we all know like Facebook, Digg, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Flickr, Slide, and RockYou. Some of these sites are really good at linking people (e.g. Facebook), helping you find UGC through search (e.g. YouTube), and search engine optimizations (e.g. Digg, Yelp).

All these sites written up on TechCrunch have essentially the same mission – obtain a ton of users to come to the site to create original content that cannot be found elsewhere. Think of a Web 2.0 company and there is a high likelihood it fits the description above.

But (and this is a HUGE 'but') these companies are not taking enough advantage of the content that already exists on other sites. Given the trend towards openness of data, this content obtained from other sites is implicit information that can be easily indexed (across thousands of these sites) and then be compiled.

Moreover, there is a growing amount of content being created on niche sites like forums, blogs (and blog comments), and discussion boards. While few of these niche sites will become big businesses, in aggregate they contain a lot of valuable content that can be mined and processed.

Zillow, Trulia, and real-estate aggregators focus and rely on implicit information and data. Travel search (e.g. SideStep) is also implicit-based. And the most dominant player on the Internet, Google, is implicit – search engines don’t create their own content but instead rely on the content of others.

In order for traditional companies that focus on explicit UGC to be effective, they often need to build a walled garden. Because the content is proprietary to their site, they lose out if users are leaving their site. They don’t want to make things open. Some explicit new wave companies (e.g. Twitter, Flickr) have bucked that trend by being open, but most are closed in Web 0.6 Prodigy-style.

Let’s take a look at one of my favorite sites: Yelp. Yelp is awesome and has done a great job encouraging people to write explicit reviews on their site. If I was going to build a competitor to Yelp, I would not compete with them on gathering explicit reviews but would instead gather implicit information on local restaurants. You can gather this information from other review sites like the San Francisco Chronicle, government agencies that rate the cleanliness, legal databases that document lawsuits, and more. And restaurants and other brick and mortars have great identifiers - phone number and address - that are usually unique and therefore easy to find and collect information.

The other problem for companies collecting explicit UGC is that they encounter a huge marketing problem and therefore must have a gargantuan budget. This is why all these explicit companies are raising large capital rounds (often over $25 million) right now. They also require a real skill at viral tuning, street marketing, or search engine optimization (and often all three). If you are really good at marketing, then you should create a company dedicated to getting users and having them generate content.

Implicit companies, by contrast, encounter a huge technology problem and their budget is focused on building out that technology. If you are a technologist then you should be opting to take advantage of content on other sites. That is, of course, what makes Google so successful.

If you’re neither the marketing guru nor the technologist, you might want to sit this new technology wave out and watch from the sidelines as implicit companies will benefit from and give benefit to its explicit counterparts.

James Beldock is my new favorite data cruncher

James Beldock has a deep but fairly unnoticed trend data (age and school) from Facebook: Age *DOES* Matter: On the Demographics of Social Networks

(well worth reading)

Abraham Lincoln was the only U.S. President to hold a patent

A small useless fact ...

book: gang leader for a day [read it]

Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets: Sudhir Venkatesh

This is a great book. If you read Freakonomics, you might remember Sudhir Venkatesh's collaboration with Steven Levitt on the gang leader's books. Venkatesh got the books after spending six years in the worst Chicago projects working with the Black Kings gang.

This is a story that shows the vicious circle many of our youth are trapped in. and the self-reflection of Venkatesh -- at the time a poor sociology grad student.

Marc Andreessen suggested I read this book. I bought it 100% due to his recommendation and now I heartedly endorse it to others.

How to Disagree and always shooting the messenger

I love reading Paul Graham … I've read pretty much everything he has written and while I don’t always agree, I always come away from his articles with a new thought. In fact, I think he has most insightful blog/column out there.

 
Graham writes a new one entitled How to Disagree:

http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

this is well worth reading. Many people have trouble disagreeing and the most common way to discredit an argument is to go after the messenger. Graham points out this is a really a poor argument as to why the messenger's point is bad.

but most humans give too much weight to the messenger and not enough weight to the message. That makes sense from a purely evolutionary point of view. If Stephen Hawking says something about physics, you might want to listen. But if Britney Spears starts discussing string theory, you might think she's talking about bikinis and not theoretical physics. This reasoning works most of the time as usually Hawking has interesting things to say about science and Spears is known for other talents.

But in politics and business, not listening to the messenger can lead to very bad decisions. Giving a little more weight to a new opinion of someone you like over those that you dislike makes sense. But a good decision maker should only weigh the messenger a little and focus much more on dissecting the message. The boy who cries wolf might be right sometime … you shouldn't just reject the message out of hand.

 

some guy has 24 BILLION friends on MySpace

obviously this is some sort of bug or hack ... but some hacker has 24,334,098,797 (24 billion) friends on MySpace.   

Clinton and Wal-Mart

according to the Wall Street journal today, Hillary Clinton was formerly a board member of Wal-Mart.

that was the first I've heard of this.   i did some digging and, sure enough, Mrs. Clinton serves on the Wal-Mart board of directors from 1986 to 1992 (not long before she became first lady).

During those six years, Wal-Mart was one of the fastest growing companies in the world.   This experience must have been one that us useful to Senator Clinton.

DHS changes F-1 residency from 12 to 29 months

everyone who runs a tech company is cheering this news:

Government Quietly Changes Rules on Foreign Tech Workers

Evite continues to horrify me

here are two good links:

Evite Alternatives
and
Evite Sucks

crazy chess match

Many of you know that I play correspondence chess.

I annotated a recent game of mine that I should have lost but my opponent made a late-game mistake. Here is the game:

http://blog.chess.com/auren/when-you-are-down-fight-out-bue-the-ice-man

read Super Crunchers

Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart

by Ian Ayres

very much enjoyed this book on how to better understand data. I recommend it.

Men are from Video Games, Women are from Social Networks

The gender gap on social media is growing

It’s no shock either that men and women act very different online. The web is an extremely social medium, with Web 2.0 being all about social. Men traditionally are early adopters, especially when it comes to tech, but when it comes to social media, women are at the forefront.

At Rapleaf we conducted a study of 13.2 million people and how they are using social media. While the trends among the sexes indicate they are both massively using social media, women are far outpacing men - here is our hypothesis as to why:

Just the facts, madam 

For those under 30, women and men are just as likely to be members of social networks. Sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Flixster are extraordinarily popular. But we found that young women are much more active on these sites then young men. And for people above 30, men – especially married men – aren’t even joining social networks.. With the notable exception of LinkedIn usage and VCs in the Bay Area friending everyone on Facebook, married men are not hanging out on social networks. Married women, however, are joining social networks in droves. In fact, women between the ages 35-50 are the fastest growing segment on social networks, especially on MySpace.

Looking further into this trend, we believe that young men spend as much time (and sometimes more) in front of a computer than young women. And they have just as much free time, if not more. But we believe the competition for their computer time comes from spending hours playing video games such as World of Warcraft and many first-person action games.

Many men who play casual games tend to like games like poker with betting involved. Since most social networks ban gambling, men find sites (most of them offshore) that allow them to wager when they play. Women on the other hand are large consumers of casual games and most social networks, especially those that are dominated by third party applications, are essentially big casual game networks.  Young women also spend much more time decorating their social network profile pages, making slide shows, and more. Popular sites such as Whateverlife.com exacerbate this effect by offering and catering MySpace layouts to young women.

So while young men and women are signing up for social networks at a similar rate, young women are “throwing more sheep” at people.

Now young men understand that they can’t spend ALL their time playing video games (though some do) as they still need to interact with the opposite sex. Sex is one of the strongest drivers of online usage and many men see social networks as a gateway to potentially filling that desire. Men, in general, tend to look at things more transactionally than women. Once men get married, they see increasingly less value in being on a social network. Which, of course, is why married men dominate LinkedIn - the most transactional social network (with the exception of AdultFriendFinder). LinkedIn is all about getting information and introductions now.

Women, on the other, hand are much more relationship driven and less transactional than men. They spend more time on social networks building relationships, communicating with friends, making new friends, and more. Married women put up pictures of their immediate family on social networks and use their social network profile as a family home page to share with friends and relatives.

With all this happening, we’re witnessing a burgeoning gender gap.

Just take a look at RockYou and Slide, two dominant photo widget sites,  These sites are very clearly targeting young women, down to the fact that they have traditional feminine colors (i.e. purple and pink), glitter text everywhere, and are almost exclusively decorated with pictures of women. They don’t even give men lip service on their site. Both companies do have a few niche Facebook applications that target men, but the fact these applications are hidden and often marketed under different brands proves that that women rule this space.

If you are creating a new Web 2.0 site and you want to go viral, you target women. Young women drive virality and so all the new innovation is targeted towards them. That means that the gender gap on social networks (and increasingly in all of social media) is only going to widen. More and more innovation will be targeted towards women and they will continue to get more engaged. And while we expect men’s adoption to social media to continue to increase, it will likely be slower than the rate of adoption by women.

There may actually be some truth in the old adage that “men are from Mars” and “women are from Venus”, even in the online domain.

 

More: Data from the Rapleaf study

 

Andreessen on psychology of entrepreneurial mngt

This is one of the better blogs for CEOs I have read in a long time:

http://blog.pmarca.com/2008/03/the-psychology.html

read made to stick by the heath brothers

Just finished this on audible (biking to work is great for consuming audio books). Really liked this book about how to make ideas sticky. Highly recommend -- good read and very impressed with the Heath brothers (Chip and Dan).