News | PJC - Part 23

Latest Posts

The Next Generation of E-commerce Innovation – East Coast Leadership & Success

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.

Internet Subscription Services / Growing Opportunities in the Recession

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).

Communications Infrastructure – New England Leadership and Success

We all know that The Red Sox, The Patriots, and The Celtics are examples of successful leadership that has arisen from New England, but another New England super star is its Communications Infrastructure sector. The New England entrepreneurial ecosystem has long been identified with communications equipment, storage, life sciences and software. However, a somewhat less visible, but equally robust segment of our innovation fabric is the Communications Infrastructure cluster. These are the companies that build, own and operate the critical communications network infrastructure that enable today’s modern Internet, voice and mobile communications services. These are companies operating everything from wireless towers to cable systems to telephone / data networks to CDNs (content delivery networks).