Infomediaries–Where Are They?

I have been thinking a lot about “infomediaries.” If you’re not familiar with the term, John Hagel first described it in a 1997 Harvard Business Review article The Coming Battle for Customer Information (with Rayport) and then fleshed out his…

Getting Paid to Drive an Ad-wrapped Car

Do you remember the dot com boom phenomenon of turning cars into mobile billboards? Some great photos here. The model was that advertisers would give drivers a new car (or pay some amount per month) to drive around in a…

Dot EU Approved

ICANN finally approved the .eu domain. When I joined Epinions in February 2000, a board member suggested that one of my top priorities as general counsel should be to secure the epinions.eu domain. Over five years later, does anyone even…

What Ever Happened to DotComGuy?

I had reason to investigate what happened to DotComGuy. You may remember him as the guy who lived in his apartment during all of 2000, ordering all of his needs from the Internet and webcasting his life. In 2004, he…

Seattle Times series on InfoSpace

The Seattle Times did a remarkable multi-part expose of InfoSpace. The series is particularly unflattering to Naveen Jain, InfoSpace’s founder and chief huckster. There’s a thin line among entrepreneurs between visionary and crook, and the Seattle Times marshals plenty of…

Bill Gates, KBE

News item: Queen Elizabeth will tap Bill Gates on the shoulder with a sword. My reaction: he’ll probably enjoy that more than being hit in the face with a pie.

Randall Stross Whines About Spam

Randall Stross writes an article whining about spam as pollution and complaining that the recipient pays for spam. Haven’t we heard this argument before? As a matter of fact, we have. Often. A long time ago (his own article cites…

Is TRUSTe Irrelevant?

TRUSTe pulled its logo from some websites for breaking its rules for the first time in 2 years. The article focuses on TRUSTe’s refusal to specify the rules violation, but this seems to miss the point, and widely. In 1999…