Strategy Blog: Viget Labs

M. Jackson Wilkinson - Strategist :

From Jeremy Keith's notes on Jared Spool's AEA Boston talk:

You can buy an iPod nano on Apple, Best Buy, etc. for about $149. Amazon sells it for $134. That’s probably cost price. It turns out that Amazon can sell almost everything at cost price and still make a product because of volume. It’s all down to the Negative Operating Cycle. Amazon turns over its inventory every 20 days whereas Best Buy takes 74 days. Standard retail term payments take 45 days. So Best Buy is in debt between day 45 and day 74. Amazon, on the other hand, are sitting on cash between day 20 and day 45. In that time, they can invest that money. That’s where their profit comes from.

Holy smokes. Maybe I'm dense or out of the loop on these things, but while I figured there was a volume advantage to Amazon, I didn't realize that this cycle-based plan was the key to their profits.

Barn and I were talking about this a little over IM today, and this gives a lot of fun fuel with which to speculate about all things Amazon...

Continue reading "Waxing Speculative about Amazon’s Business Model"

M. Jackson Wilkinson - Strategist :

Dear Aspiring Twitter Speculators,

Congratulations on your new idea. You’ve come up with, and perhaps already built, a product that is genuinely useful to almost every Twitter user, filling one of the many feature canyons left open by the Twitter product team. Perhaps you’ve already gathered a respectable following on the interwebs, with a few thousand people using your service on a regular basis. All that, and it only took you a couple weeks to build on the side.

Now you’re waiting for the big moment to happen: the call from Ev or Biz or whomever. You’re sure they’re going to want to purchase your product for loads more money than it took you to build it. It fills a clear gap, after all, and there are already people using it. They bought Summize, right?

Continue reading "An Open Letter to Third-Party Twitter App Founders"

Jackson Fox - User Experience Designer :

It can be an odd experience attending a conference in a recession, and my trip to the 10th Anniversary IA Summit in Memphis, TN, didn’t disappoint in that regard. The event was smaller, tinged with uncertainty, and chock full of people trying to figure out what the future holds for themselves and for their profession. I left feeling both frustrated with the angst, and brimming with new ideas and a deep desire to return next year. It took me a while longer to get all of these thoughts down than I thought it would, about a month longer in fact, but I’ve enjoyed re-visiting my favorite talks in order to share them with others.

Continue reading "IA Summit 2009"

Kara Davis - Project Manager :

Dice, according to the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, are "small cubes of plastic, ivory, bone, or wood, marked on each side with one to six spots, usually used in pairs in games of chance or in gambling."

They also form the basis of online reviews in Norway. Some context:

"...the newspapers next morning, both locals and national seemed to give a careful "thumb's up," most of them landed the dice on four out of six eyes, I guess I was around that too?"
- from a Bob Dylan fan site

"JABULANI receives 5 and 6 on the dice from main newspaper"

I'd never encountered dice as a rating system before, but I have it straight from a good source that it is quite common in Norway, and I've found examples on several sites.

Continue reading "Rating Stuff in Norway"

Laura Dec - Project Manager :

Last month while attending the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City, Twitter was in full effect throughout the conference (as to be expected), however the most interesting use for me was that attendees were encouraged to tag their tweets within each track of the conference to help facilitate Q&A at the end of each session.  Attendees also often “seconded” others’ tweets on a topic they found an important one, which helped the most relevant topics bubble to the top. Speakers could keep an eye on the Twitter backchannel and answer audience members’ questions as the session went on or at the end. 

Similarly, I recently read this great article from academHacK on ways Twitter is being used in Academia to help students stay active and involved in class discussions. Some of the benefits he noted include continuing “class chatter” inside and outside of the classroom, developing a sense of community among classmates, and allowing professors to instantly reach and gather feedback from their students.

Continue reading "Using Twitter as a Tool"