I would rather work on one-sided network business models. It’s much easier if you just have to worry about the chicken OR the egg.Advertising is pricing attention in the inverse. That’s essentially what advertising is: interruption economics

Some people I’ve chatted to already know about this, but in two weeks I’ll be leaving Consorte Media to start my own company. It was a very difficult decision since I love (and have helped build) the Consorte team, and the company is executing well and continuing to build a great deal of value. It’s ultimately the right decision for me, though. I will remain as an advisor to the firm, providing assistance whenever I can. I am and have always been an entrepreneur, and while my roles over the past several years have had an increasingly entrepreneurial flavor to them, I need to be out starting something totally from scratch with my own vision. I’ll be reaching out to a lot of people over the coming months to share ideas and bounce things around, might blog a bit more than before and will probably take a couple of consulting gigs here and there while I get things spun up.

Keep in touch with me via LinkedIn or Facebook — and I’ll share news of the New Thing when I can here.

Microsoft snapped up ADECN for an undisclosed amount. I actually missed the news and found out when I got a call from the company’s COO, Jeff Green. We’ve done some testing with ADECN, and I’ve found their UI to be quite good - I can’t really comment on the quality of traffic opportunities just yet as they still seem to be fairly small from most of the stuff I hear out there, but it’s a decent technology base with some customers. The acquisition would obviously not be anywhere near aQuantive or RightMedia valuation-wise…

It sounds like the Doubleclick offering will end up being more of a branded ad network than a true exchange - which leaves me thinking that there really is still room in this market for someone to build something big, the real question is getting traction. For now though, the GOOG-MSFT-YHOO lines seem drawn up, with MSFT lagging a bit. I still think right now Google is best positioned and would be in a much better position were they more focused on the display ad play .. but undoubtedly they’re there within 6 months.

Some companies purposefully make it difficult for you to cancel your service with them. This has been a longtime Netflix tactic, for example — where you can basically administer your account very easily online in all respects but one - namely cancellation.

I needed a cheap dial-up account since I was going to be in an area with no high-speed access, (and also because my free AOL “overhead” dialup account no longer works and they no longer give them out to advertisers any more), and now that the need has passed I want to cancel the service I signed up for, PeoplePC.

I clicked the “change my service” link they have on their site which, surprise surprise doesn’t seem to work! It times out for me, and one time gave an “unexpected error” which error message also had their 866-number therein. Hmmmm, I found this thread discussing how they are running a scam and how their customer service is impossible. I hate this kind of stuff so much — but do this enough times and those $5.95 charges add up for them; it’s a “business model” I can’t abide. We’ll see how long it takes me to cancel….

UPDATE: I emailed customer service on 2/22 at 9pm asking to cancel my account. I assumed they would tell me to call them, which they did at 9.04am on 2/23:

Thank you for writing to PeoplePC Online.

Regarding your concern, we appreciate the opportunity to assist you. Unfortunately, this request cannot be handled via email. To cancel your membership, please contact us at 1-866-PPC-MBRS (1-866-772-6277). Our Customer Service department is available Monday through Friday from 9 A.M. to 9 P.M. EST.

Please note that this email is NOT a confirmation of your cancellation request.

I decided to email back and ask them why I couldn’t cancel online — a very simple email, just literally “Why can’t I cancel my account via email”. After the autoreply, at 11.44pm on 2/23 I got this reply:

Thank you for writing to PeoplePC Online.

We appreciate the opportunity to assist you. Unfortunately, this request cannot be handled via email. As suggested in the previous correspondence to cancel your membership, please contact us at 1-866-PPC-MBRS (1-866-772-6277). Our Customer Service department is available Monday through Friday from 9 A.M. to 9 P.M. EST.

Right now it’s obviously after 9pm EST on a Friday evening, so I’m kinda cheesed and want to have this dealt with, I have enough things to think about next week let alone remember to cancel this thing during the week… so I email back again, slightly more pissed off ending with emphasis:

What is the reason that you cannot cancel the account via email?

I see you have just answered the question with the same statement, but there is not a reason. Can you please provide me with a reason why you cannot make this change over email??

Also, if you are there now, why shouldn’t I be able to cancel my membership on the weekend??? I would like someone to HELP ME THIS WEEKEND TO CANCEL MY MEMBERSHIP IMMEDIATELY.

I got an email then from “Philip” at 8.45am this morning, 2/24 saying they changed their mind and have indeed cancelled my account. It’s hard to know if I got to the right support person by luck, or if this is how they handle it, get pissed twice over email and they’ll cancel it for you vs. having to stay on hold with them for 20 minutes…:

Thank you for writing to PeoplePC Online.

Regarding your concern, as you requested, your PeoplePC account has been canceled. Your cancellation confirmation number is “xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx” [digits removed, a very long string of digits].

We’re sorry to see you leave PeoplePC, but hope to have the opportunity to provide you with excellent Internet service in the future.

I was wondering how long it would take for this to happen, and no surprise, some ex-AllAdvantage guys have started up AGLOCO according to this great piece by Matt Marshall. Very clever - they’ve added a co-op type of accumulating ownership scheme to it. Also they’re going to probably have variable payouts for users, check, going to provide “conquest shopping” opportunities to merchant partners and get cut in on affiliate revenues, check, not going hardcore down the vc route, check… Basically looks like AllAdvantage meets Dash.com meets Ebates meets (gosh I am sure there were a couple of communal stock ownership 1.0 startups whose names escape me right now).

I’m sounding skeptical (as I am wont to do) but actually I bet it might actually work this time around as long as they have learned some other lessons and don’t fall prey to the kinds of software apps that used to run on AA that would keep moving the cursor around so you could get paid while you were away from your computer… affiliate commission cuts are an established business model and certainly will work as Ebates has shown (though also shown that model to be a bit of a niche one) and also are much less susceptible to fraud since an actual credit card purchase is needed. You’re going to see a lot of interesting ways people game the system, especially if you’re paying people differentially for time spent surfing ~ perhaps something you might refer to as “demographic impersonation” fraud… should be fun to watch.

This is an excerpt from an email I just got from United Airlines:

Dear Robert Leathern,

We will be launching a new and improved united.com and would like you to come to the BETA site before it is released. The new features are designed to allow flexibility in how you shop for travel. Please use the buttons below to book travel on our BETA site.

….etc.

The way it’s written just screams “this is like nails on a chalkboard to us” — look at the way BETA is capitalized, almost as if it is wrapped in a doggie-doo bag. So now even more mainstream companies are using the beta term and/or giving pre-releases of new websites and features to some of their customers to gather feedback. Certainly a good trend; I guess the test will be if they go ahead and do a full release but still keep the BETA badge for some period of time… now that would be truly “web 2.0″ (sometimes Web 2.0 capital-W feels like what happened when we rightly came up with the name reality TV to indicate a genuinely new genre of drama, then for some reason started calling almost everything that had cameras and no script, reality TV instead of the usually-more-correct term documentary. A lot of “Web 2.0 companies” are the documentaries of reality TV, if that makes any sense…).

One of the big promises of online commerce is the ability to make lots of small transactions count.

Researching the consumer impact of online intermediaries (what we called meta-networks over at Jupiter) I got to think a lot about new types of businesses that could never exist anywhere else but online. The comparison shopping engine is the obvious example. Low costs of moving consumers around from one place to another means that a site can exist and thrive (relatively speaking) charging merchants 40c per click.

By the same token, companies like Google can do even better charging advertisers as little as 10c per click for simple text-link advertising, at scale.

Transferring data between one company and another has become a lot easier - but problems still abound in setting up (and frankly, having enough bodies to be able to set up) these relationships and making sure it goes smoothly.

We still need communications standards to make things run properly — AND also better ways of accounting for these types of new deals (”micro-accounting” if I can coin that term in this context) and as we are able to coalesce around these business standards and accounting/ financial tracking is solidified then we will be able to do all kinds of interesting deals
and partnerships that better align partners’ interests with one another.

Online, firms should be able to craft more complex, mutually-beneficial deals. Despite our progress to date, I think we still have a long way to go to make this a reality.

Root’s New York office is around many art galleries. It got me to thinking about firms that are in the “business of space” (and I don’t mean the Elon Musk et al, leave the Earth’s atmosphere kind of businesses when those become businesses!). A woman I used to work with owned with her husband a plot of land that was being occupied by a McDonalds, and they were making a nice and neat $60,000 a year profit on this. You have to love businesses where you “earn money while sitting on the beach” if you take the advice of a video game executive I worked with who was talking about his subscription revenue model. Now that’s not a pure “space” model since you actually have to have a fair bit of ongoing maintenance and development to maintain the game. And to a certain extent, many of these space businesses do have some maintenance. Like running a parking lot — you have to have a security guard, pay taxes and so forth. But in general, perhaps the way to think about it is the servicing cost % and financing cost as a % of overall revenue for your space business. Financing would include real estate costs. Of course this leads us down a discussion of operating leverage and so on… and all that boring financial modeling stuff (I actually quite like).

But perhaps there are other ways to think about it — in terms of the proportion of revenue-generating space to overall space (’squeezing every ounce out of it’) which of course may horrify the gallery types; or of course dollars per square foot or square metre is a typical. Or perhaps profit per employee, or even better, per employee hour of work (running average)…. I’d love to see numbers for some of the really kick-ass space businesses.

Skype thinks that its biggest issue going forward as part of eBay will be competition with Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft.

Their biggest issue might be customer service, and paying for it. Given my current experience in trying to track down what happened to 10 Euros I had deposited over 6 months ago in my SkypeOut account, I can confidently say that Skype’s customer service is absolutely horrible and to guess, probably a factor that has not been very well taken into account with respect to this deal. [I've waited almost 3 weeks now for a reply, have followed up and received a strange email last week that was 'not a response because they hadn't actually reviewed my issue yet' but saying that they're working on getting to my issue and would give me a real response soon(!)]

Having to run a real customer service operations sucks and is expensive, and as something like Skype moves from novelty to actual communications service, the likelihood of them needing some proper customer service increases. The question is how painful will it be for eBay to handle?