Thoughts from a Bafta nominated Podcaster, Blogger, Writer and Commentator.
Classy footnote from Marco Armenti, as the ‘high sales / low use’ questions around Android tablets continue: I offered to give my Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire to Betaworks in the Instapaper acquisition, but they had so many of both sitting around already that they declined. Tech companies with mobile apps can practically tile walls with outdated Android devices. They’re the new AOL CDs.
Is there anyone in the relevant Silicon Valley circles that’s not aware of Michael Arrington’s Crunch Fund? No? Mischief managed.
There’s going to be lots of suppressing and covering fire over Michael Arrington’s new investment fun, but I’m watching AOL to see who’s chosen as the new TechCrunch editor. Whether they go for an AOL’er to take the chair, an internal promotion, or poach someone from outside, that’s going to tell us a lot about the upcoming direction of one of the tent pole technology sites on the internet.
I hesitate to pass judgment on the advertising’s effectiveness because Patch is clearly still ironing out the wrinkles and my experience is recent and brief. The first salesperson I dealt with oversold the site, claiming five times the unique visitors it actually has, according to stats shown to me by the supervisor who fired her. it’s a ridiculously expensive ad buy at about $100 versus $30 or so for a parallel Google Adwords campaign. The metrics have been abysmal and, after a short run in the middle of the summer doldrums, no inquiries. But I’m hopeful they’ll figure it out
If (when?) CrunchFund is confirmed, there’s going to be a very obvious elephant in the room marked conflict of interest – how do you write about start-ups and invest in start-ups at the same time? Perhaps Arrington’s plan was to have already been "asked to leave" AOL at this point.
AOL’s Tim Armstong: What Amazon is to commerce, and what Google is to search, AOL has to be to content. We’re going to keep investing in taking risks and changes, we’re not going to make incremental moves. Going forward we think there is a big opportunity here. To me this sounds like a company believing it has a right to exist and therefore should be granted the biggest things just because they are there. That’s not how it works, iterate, iterate, iterate is how it works.
