As successful as Pure Digital has been with their Flip line of video cameras - selling $150 million worth of them last year - they face a new type of threat that they can’t defeat. The video capable iPhone, and video mobile phones in general, will make them irrelevant in the next couple of years.
There really isn’t much to say here beyond what are being reported as the facts. Apparently, Steve Jobs had a liver transplant two months ago, the Wall Street Journal reports tonight. When you read that, it’s pretty shocking but not that surprising.
In a world where most startups choose gaining users over making money, Animoto is an odd exception: It’s doing both. Since launching in August 2007, the company has signed up some 750,000 users, and some 10% of those are paying customers. And that’s allowed the company to run cash-flow positive since December of last year, CEO Brad Jefferson tells us. And it could keep going on like that, but like most startups that taste success, it wants to do more.
Last reports I saw had Facebook at over 200
million active worldwide unique users (and growing) and an estimated
$200m-plus in annual revenue in 2008. Pretty kooky to claim it’ll be a failure, eh? Let me start by saying that social networking itself is a utility that
is not routinely differentiated by any particular protectable
intellectual property. It’s a utility that demonstrates a better way
for the online and mobile web audience at-large to connect with each
other. But it’s also a utility that ultimately threatens to be its own
worst enemy. Read the rest of this entry »