I attended the PE Hub Shindig last night which was organized and led by the well known Dan Primack and sponsored by .406 Ventures, Second Market, Atlas Ventures, Capital Dynamics and Velocity Financial. I had to take a rather circuitous route into Boston because half of the east / west roads around Boston have been flooded out so I showed up a little late.
Read more...With all the talk of the coming tech IPOs and the inclusion of Gilt on most of these lists, I was prompted to reflect on the ecommerce sector on the East Coast. Many of the mega success stories of ecommerce over the past decade are on the West Coast, including such notable pioneers as Amazon, eBay and Netflix. What I find incredibly interesting, however, is the number of big and successful ecommerce companies located in the Northeast. Priceline, Vistaprint, and others were conceived, started and grown by talented East Coast entrepreneurs into multi-billion dollar market leaders.
Read more...I recently attended the very informative and expansive McGraw Hill Media Conference and there was a lot of discussion about the challenges facing the advertising market (both traditional and digital). Certainly there is a secular shift afoot from traditional to digital media and the time spent on digital media relative to the ad dollars flowing there are mismatched. There are many reasons for this that I won’t delve into and I firmly believe the secular shift will continue growing digital media into a much larger industry than it is today. However, one area that I continue to be intrigued by is the subscription model where the consumer pays for the value they derive from spending time with a digital media solution (rather than paying for it by watching ads).
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