Business

Is Apple’s Business Plan Self Destructive?

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ February 18, 2011 / 2 Comments

I have been watching closely, the news coming out of Apple concerning their new subscription and content models. For those of you who haven’t, the basic premise is that Apple will be requiring everyone who sells content within their apps (including subscriptions) to sell their content through iTunes (think of...
Book Review: The Lords of Strategy

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ February 8, 2011 / 2 Comments

I just finished an MBA program, so I expected to know “The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World” (The Subtitle of this book) and I did. Well, I kind of did. I was familiar with the experience curve and the value chain and most of the other models...
Ideas Worth Hundreds, Maybe Even Thousands of Dollars

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ February 2, 2011 / Leave a comment

I have built my career working and playing with technology concepts that can change large parts of the world. Concepts like the one behind my current company, or the ones I write about (FourSquare, Facebook, LivingSocial, GroupOn, etc…) all have the possibility to be worth millions. Not all great ideas...
Perfect Management Isn’t Possible Without Great Metrics

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ January 17, 2011 / Leave a comment

I am a bit of a statistics nerd. It’s one of the reasons that I love Baseball so much. From the time I was very little I would stare at the back of Baseball cards and try to determine whether a particular player’s batting average was trending up or down,...
Groupon’s 950 Million is 900 Million Too Many

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ January 11, 2011 / 3 Comments

Groupon announced yesterday that they have raised $950 Million. Ya, that’s like a billion dollars. Billion. With a B. Groupon is a great company built on a singularly great idea; they found one of the ways that small businesses to harness the power of the new Internet. There name even...
Three Great Pieces on Our Industry Today

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ December 4, 2010 / Leave a comment

I don’t normally do the standard news recaps on this blog. It is what I usually use Twitter and Sauerkraut Sundays for. I normally only post about a story in this space if I have something significant to add to it. However, today there are three pieces that I felt...
Electric Car Growth and the Dependent Build Out

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ December 3, 2010 / Leave a comment

I was extremely excited about the fact that GE is buying 25,000 electric cars. Electric cars are infeasible for most of us. The Chevy Volt, for example, can only get 25-50 miles on batteries only (requiring gasoline to go from there). When I take my car out, it’s usually to...
Who Will Be The “Winning” GroupOn Clone?

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ October 23, 2010 / Leave a comment

I read this morning that Mark Cuban (originally a Lebo grad) entered what TechCrunch is calling the “Daily Deals Space”. I like the name better then “GroupOn Clones”, so I’m stealing it. Whatever you call the space, it’s getting pretty crowded in there. Which lead me to the question, “how...
The Steelers and Good Business Models

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ September 27, 2010 / Leave a comment

I always say that in investing you want to buy stock in a company that has a business that’s so good that an idiot can run it, because sooner or later one will. -Warren Buffet The startup is a wonderful thing, when a company has 3 or 5 or maybe...
Depressions Do Have an Upside

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ September 16, 2010 / Leave a comment

There aren’t many upsides to a depression, but there are a few. I happen to notice one of those things that can turn your frown upside-down Tuesday morning. I don’t normally read the USA Today but it happened to be at my hotel room the other morning, so I saw...