Andrew Chen Archives

Leadgen blog
For those of you guys who are interested in Offerpal and Super Rewards, and want to learn more about the leadgen industry, I couldn’t recommend Jay Weintraub’s blog more.

Here are a couple of my favorite articles:

• The Mobile Subscription Services (aka Ringtone) Ecosystem
• Incentivized Marketing – An Updated Look
• New Strategies in Incentivized Marketing (B2C)
• Lead Generation – Quality over Quantity
• State of Remnant Advertising
• Direct Response In A Behavioral Marketing World

Jay also doesn’t write nearly enough, but perhaps this will send a torrent of traffic his way that will encourage him to spend more time blogging :)

Also, a great preso
Most recently, Jay published an amazing presentation “You Give Leads A Bad Name” on leadgen dynamics including topics like:

• history of leadgen
• ad creative
• user flows
• mobile services
• leadgen
• scammy tactics
• … and finally, the evolution of leadgen into more sophisticated sites (that give users value)

Watch for the slides on Mint.com and Billshrink.com, in particular, which are valley darlings (and are mentioned very favorably).

You should probably watch in full screen!

You Give Leads A Bad Name

Quantitative marketing in politics
There was recently an article in Slate on the topic of the effective of robo-calling versus text messages, and discusses in some detail the ways that A/B testing is used in the political world. I previously wrote about a similar topic in my blog post Obama and McCain: How political marketing has evolved from offline to online.

Why look at political marketing strategies?
I find the world of political marketing very interesting, as it requires marketers to maneuver without significantly their product (their candidate), but rather only changing the messaging and story. It’s a pure marketing pitch. Compare this to tech marketers who often depend on new features to compete. It’s sort of like asking the question:

How would you sell bottled water?

That is, given a completely commodity product like water, companies like Evian, Fiji, Voss, Arrowhead, and others manage to sell a product using a fundamental pillar of branding: STORY.

I find politics interesting for the same reason, because it’s all about storytelling and narrative. I wanted to point everyone to a recent story in the New York Times on the difficulties in establishing a narrative for McCain, in the article titled The Making and Remaking of McCain. Worth reading.

Robo-calling in the Slate article
Now the article in Slate had some interesting passages that I wanted to highlight, on cost per acquisition, split testing to encourage voter turnout, and other fundamental ideas that every quantitative marketer should have in their toolbox.

On the cost of robo-calling:

Robo-calls are the pyrotechnics of politics: They create a big disturbance, but they don’t have a prolonged effect. Numerous studies of robo-call campaigns show that they’re ineffective both as tools of mobilization and persuasion—they don’t convince voters to go to the polls (or to stay away), and they don’t change people’s minds about which way to vote. So why do campaigns run robo-calls? Because they’re cheap and easy. Telemarketing firms charge politicians between 2 and 5 cents per completed robo-call; that’s as low as $20,000 to reach 1 million voters right in their homes.

On using split testing to test political marketing strategies:

[…] Text messaging is different: We pay attention to short messages that pop up on our phones. These conclusions arise out of work by Donald Green and Alan Gerber, two political scientists at Yale whose book, Get Out the Vote: How To Increase Voter Turnout, is considered the bible of voter mobilization efforts. Green and Gerber are the product of a wave of empiricism that has washed over political science during the past decade. Rather than merely theorizing about how campaigns might get people to vote, Green, Gerber, and their colleagues favor randomized field experiments to test how different techniques work during real elections. Their method has much in common with double-blind pharmaceutical studies: With the cooperation of political campaigns (often at the state and local level), researchers randomly divide voters into two categories, a treatment group and a control group. They subject the treatment group to a given tactic—robo-calls, e-mail, direct mail, door-to-door canvassing, etc. Then they use statistical analysis to determine whether voters in the treatment group behaved differently from voters in the control group.

On the analysis of “funnels” in converting contacted people into voting:

Having campaign volunteers visit voters door-to-door is the “gold standard” of voter mobilization efforts, Green and Gerber write. On average, the tactic produces one vote for every 14 people contacted. The next-most-effective way to reach voters is to have live, human volunteers call them on the phone to chat: This tactic produces one new vote for every 38 people contacted. Other efforts are nearly worthless. Paying human telemarketers to call voters produces one vote for every 180 people contacted. Sending people nonpartisan get-out-the-vote mailers will yield one vote per 200 contacts. (A partisan mailer is even less effective.)

Anyway, I won’t quote the entire article, but I personally found it pretty fascinating.

Underlying metrics
Anyway, the coolest part to me in all of this is the interplay between the soft stuff and the hard stuff. The soft stuff is the candidate, including brand, the speeches, the fashion, the messages, etc. The hard stuff is figuring out, once you have the candidate that you’re meant to market, how to break everything down into Dollar per Vote (which sounds kind of sinister when you put it tha way). Or perhaps, you could even calculate it down to Dollar per Electoral Vote.

Really this is a measure of the efficiency in which a well-run campaign is able to put the donations raised into the raw results tha they want.

Anyway, if anyone’s read other interesting perspectives on quantitative marketing in the political realm, I’d be interested in hearing about it.

Here are all the links I’ve twittered over the last week – If you want to grab these in real time, you can follow me on Twitter at @andrew_chen.

• inside the creative process at The Onion, it takes 600 headlines to generate 18 good ones: http://bit.ly/3GzXKZ
• twitter analytics, neat! I twitter the most mornings early in the week (mondays especially): http://xefer.com/twitter/andrew_chen
• pretty cute flash game: http://tinyurl.com/4uee65
• distribution of income versus distribution of taxes: http://bit.ly/1xLxT5
• lol, i’m using qwitter to figure out when people unfollow me, turns out it’s when i write a personal status message! http://useqwitter.com/
• dino run really is a great flash game: http://www.pixeljam.com/dinorun/
• luxury consumption index in free-fall: http://tinyurl.com/59a9jp
• cultural differences between games and web people, from adam martin (ex-NCsoft) http://bit.ly/16Sm4S
• venturehacks on lean startups: http://tinyurl.com/5bfr6d
• leveraged sellout is much less funny now that bankers don’t seem so baller anymore: http://www.leveragedsellout.com
• crowdsourcing sex: http://tinyurl.com/6d5ggu
• the facebook platform is dead! declares @rafer: http://tinyurl.com/6oqk54

A/B testing is fun ;-)
Generating candidates for A/B testing can be a great source of entertainment for your team. It’s easy and fun to generate dozens of potential candidates for a new headline, subtitle, picture, or other element of an important page. It’s also a great exercise in both the qualitative, consumer psychology skillsets required, as well as the quantitative set.

I’ve gather a couple rules of thumb in helping you generate good candidates for A/B testing below:

• Brainstorm the RIGHT way
• Dive down into potential customer motivation
• Go for high variariance approaches
• Test big things first, smaller things later

Let’s dive into each of these…

Brainstorm the RIGHT way
First off, not all brainstorming is created equal – you want to make sure you are going for lots of quantity, that the most senior person in the room doesn’t “run” the whiteboard, and a bunch of other guidelines that you can find in this article on IDEO’s brainstorming techniques. I generally find that after brainstorming individually on dozens of candidates, you can build on very interesting themes and start to coalesce the entire process.

Dive down into potential customer motivation
One important issue is that every product and every page within your product likely caters to multiple needs. Influence, the classic book on persuasion by Robert Cialdini, enumerates many of them. Is it:

• Reciprocation
• Commitment and consistency
• Social proof
• Liking
• Authority
• Scarcity
• etc?

Or alternatively, you may have specific ideas about value propositions or user emotions – for example, a social network like MySpace could be marketed around:

• Customizing profiles
• Socializing and friends
• Media content
• Photos and blogs
• etc.

Who knows which feature is king? The point is, each one of these potential customer motivations and values probably deserves at least one, if not several, test candidates in your A/B test. The fundamental emotions driving your product have a huge likelihood chance of altering the outcomes of your split tests.

Go for high variariance approaches
Similarly, life is too short for the safe stuff. Because of the fact that you throw away all the bad candidates and keep the good ones, it’s in your best interest to try to make the good ones as good as possible! As a result, make sure you try to go for extremely polarizing, high-variance approaches.

For example, make sure you try candidates that:

• … are aggressive and in your face
• … use different graphical elements like videos versus text versus audio
• … are varied in length, like very very long or very short
• … may offend certain subsets of your audience
• … are commanding and direct the user

Typically, in an A/B test I will usually have a control, then a candidate that incrementally improves on the control, and then a couple candidates from left-field. As you try out more candidates and learn from the process, then often times you will start going with more incremental stuff to finish your optimization.

But early on in your experimentation process, remember to go wild!

Test big things first, smaller things later
Similarly, make sure that you prioritize the your tests so that you aren’t testing subtitles and paragraph copy when you could be trying out even more extreme stuff. Things like the user flow, the layout, “hero shots,” and other factors are usually much more important than smaller things like icons or specific sub-labels for forms.

As a result, oftentimes the best thing to do is to rush out some forms to test, then make things prettier and more finalized from there.

Anyway, I hope this was helpful, and if you have more ideas, please comment and suggest more ideas!

Eric Ries recently wrote a great blog called Three decisions to make on virtual goods, detailing the major issues IMVU had to deal with during its growth:

• User-generated content (UGC) or first-party content?
• Subscription or a la carte payments?
• Merchandising or gameplay?

The first question is particularly interesting, and Charles Hudson (formerly of Gaia, now at Serious Business) exchanged a couple emails with me on the topic.

He gave me permission to share his email below – note that this convo happened in December of 2007, so it’s a bit dated, but I think it’s still quite applicable:

from    Charles Edward Hudson
to    Andrew Chen
date    Tue, Dec 11, 2007 at 9:55 AM
subject    Re: question on virtual goods

The question you bring up is a big one and it’s really hard for me to be succinct (but I’ll try). There are a ton of advantages and disadvantages to each approach. I’ll tell you my thoughts (others at Gaia might feel differently) on why the user-generated model is riskier but potentially a bigger opportunity if you can reach scale. Below are my quick thoughts on the 3 biggest drawbacks to a UGC/DIY model as a starting point:

-You need to have users actually create stuff to make the UGC model work (DIY vs DIFM) – If you decide to go in the “do-it-yourself” model from day one (as opposed to “do-it-for-me”), you’re making a really big bet about the type of users you’ll attract. You’re going to need power users and creators who build lots of stuff to make your world or community feel vibrant. Instead of being constrained by your own ability to generate assets, you’re constrained by the creative cycles of your user base. I’m of the opinion that it’s actually better to assume the DIFM use case first and then slowly offer users DIY activities once you’ve figured out what it is that they want to customize or do within your environment.

-You need to provide users with the tools to actually create and manage those assets if you go the UGC/DIY route – You have to make a meaningful investment in tools (or at least expose the tools and systems you have) very early on if you want users to create stuff for you. And the type of tools you expose will dictate who builds. If you make really simple tools, you’ll get wide participation. Expert tools will likely narrow who produces content for you. I’d rather work on building a really great end-user experience than building great tools, but that’s just me.

-You have a lot less control over the world and economy when you don’t control the process of creation – To your point, it’s really hard to manage an economy or any system if you can’t control the inputs. It’s not so much about monopoly pricing as it is about being able to manage the economy – price controls, inflation, etc. You also don’t have to deal with all of the property rights issues and user-to-user copyright issues that emerge when you allow users to create and then resell their own goods.

I think the real challenge for someone like Second Life is finding enough people to create the world to the point where non-creators can simply join and have a great experience. I think that’s why they’re having a hard time growing. If you look at their community, they have a fairly small but really dedicated group of people. Those people are bearing a pretty serious creative burden to get the world and the experience to the point where it’s useful to and usable by a wider variety of people.

At the end of the day, I’m of the mind that the best way to become a platform is to build a great application. If you’re successful, other people will want to build on top of you and you’ll become a platform whether you want to (a la Facebook) or not (a la MySpace). Setting out to be a platform from day one (and that’s what I think Linden and others have done) is just a much harder road. But it you make it work, you avoid all of the retrofit problems that happen when applications need to rework themselves to be platforms.

So to summarize, according to Charles you face a number of issues:

• You need more creative users in your world, to author the UGC
• (Related to above, you need to lower the bar for participation in creation)
• You need to build an ecosystem of tools to help the authors
• You need to accept that it’s harder to manage the economy – pricing, inflation, etc.

Anyway, I found these points quite insightful – they should be useful for anyone looking to chose between first party and UGC virtual items.

Found on YouTube: Mario and Luigi’s insightful commentary on MySpace top friends

Cultural differences are always interesting!
I got interested in the games world first as a consumer of video games, but after I worked on an unsuccessful project to monetize MySpace using ads, I got interested in the monetization potential of virtual items in social products. For the last 2 years, I’ve been wandering around on the edges of the games industry to try to cross-pollinate some of the best ideas with what I knew from the web world.

Early on, after attending the Game Developer Conference and speaking with folks from many of the top publishers and studios, it became clear that there were lots of interesting cultural differences between web folks and games folks. I wrote some of these points down a while back and I thought I’d share them.

I want to caveat that these are purely anecdotal and my own experiences, and I’m sure that I’m overgeneralizing ;-) I also think that people that come from the casual games world (and in particular flash games) are much more similar to web entrepreneurs – the aliens I talk about are mostly big packaged games people. So please share your opinions in the comments if you disagree or have another perspective.

But here are the major ones:

1. Eyeball worship vs. Game genre worship
2. Distribution vs. Content
3. Utility vs. Experience
4. Open vs. Content gating

Let’s drill into each of these…

Eyeball worship vs. Game genre worship
First off, one of the big surprises for me was that many of the folks working at big games companies like EA have a very specific type of game they want to work on. Many of the folks I talked to wanted to make so-called “hardcore games” – very rich, deep, FPS/RTS/RPG/etc packaged games that sell at Walmart, and were completely uninterested in anything else.

While I excited about building simple Web-distributed games that could be played by millions of people, for many of these folks, if it didn’t look like a game, didn’t have monsters and guns, it was uninteresting. In fact, there was a pretty derisive view of folks who make so-called casual games as lower in the food chain.

This reminds me of a project I worked on a long time ago in the video space, pre-YouTube. I had interviewed a bunch of art students at Unviersity of Washington to talk to them about publishing their videos online, and they were very uninterested. For these art students, they had such a romantic sense of what it would be like to show your work in a theater, at Cannes, that the idea of millions of people watching a 400×415 pixel player seemed completely uninteresting. Perhaps the hardcore games folks I talked to felt the same way about their work.

The analogous concept in the web world is probably that a lot of entrepreneurs only want to work on “cool” startups involving fancy technology. They are less likely to think along the edges for products targeted at different (possibly more mainstream demographics). I also think that web folks get more excited about the eyeballs factor than anything else. The more simple, stupid, and widely used something is, the better!

Distribution vs. Content
Another interesting difference was the perspectives around content. For many of the games people I met, the content is everything. How good your game is perceived to dictate its ultimate success. I think this makes sense in an industry where distribution is essentially commoditized! The big publishers have many of the same relationships, and games developers in general have been outsourcing their distribution expertise out to the publishers for the past couple decades. As a result, it seems clear that the only place to compete is in the content of the game, rather than in the distribution.

Compare this to the web entrepreneurs who have to deal with the constantly changing landscape of distribution. Many of the top Facebook apps were simpler, dumber, and better distributed than their competition, and distribution in itself can be a competitive advantage. Eric Ries recently wrote about the distribution techniques that have recently been found for the iPhone App Store – these techniques include a primitive version of SEO via the App Store search function, as well as folks who constantly release updates to their app to try to get on the New and Hot list.

And of course, ad networks, affiliates, and leadgen companies represent the logical extreme in the distribution equation. Because they are selling other peoples’ products, they focus exclusively on distribution and differentitation via novel techniques and analytics.

It’s clear that both communities have a lot to learn from each other on this one, but because of the fact that distribution is extraordinarily important in the new social network ecosystem, I think this is why we’ve seen the top games coming from Web teams rather than Games teams. (With the possible exception of Playfish!)

Utility vs. Storytelling experience
One of my favorite cultural differences is the way web folks think about the role of their products in peoples’ lives. There’s often talk about making your product as “useful” as possible, or “social utility.” In the world of utility, oftentimes the main factors that are discussed involve terms like:

• pain points
• efficiency
• productivity
• ROI
• maximizing
• etc

These terms are great, and the world is better off for having products that make us all better worker bees!

Compare this to many games discussions, like the ones I sat through at GDC, which involved concepts like:

• characters
• plots and storytelling
• mood
• music
• fun
• etc

Now, I think that the productivity-inclined have their claim to the world, as does the fun/entertainment games people. But the intersection of this, in web media, is where the fun happens. For example, is the fact that Facebook has such an efficient newsfeed system a good thing, or a bad thing? I think it depends on whether or not you feel like the process of exploring peoples’ profiles and clicking through things as a good thing or not? In the MySpace world, given the degree of customization, you might argue that it’s more game-like in the way that it encourages people to click around and explore, whereas Facebook is clearly more efficiency-oriented.

Both approaches have their advantages, of course – and there are times where I use Facebook as a utility and times when I’m using it for time-wasting. The tradeoff between the two approaches are definitely interested to think about as your product is being constructed.

Open vs. Content gating
Related to the efficiency versus experience distinction, web products are very likely to make things very open and give the users all the features upfront. It’s very rare that you constrain what the user can do, and as a result, there’s no concept of leveling or grinding. As a result, oftentimes the experience that you get at the beginning is the same as the experience you have later on.

Games, on the other hand, have a clear concept of advancement and otherwise “content gating” their users. By withholding levels, powerups, weapons, trophies, etc., it creates motivation from the user to keep on playing. They say, “just… one… more… game…!!”

The Wikipedia article on this is instructive:

The most common form of level treadmill is the practice of killing monsters for experience points. The player constantly chases after the next level in order to be able to defeat the next slightly stronger monster. The outcome of MMORPG combat tends to depend more on the character’s numerical statistics than the player’s skill. Thus there is usually little for a player to do beyond clicking an attack button until he or she wins, or is forced to flee when nearing death. So whether fighting small rats or large demons, the player is performing essentially the same actions, the only difference being the larger numbers in his or her character and the monster’s attributes. In the eyes of players, the player is essentially running forward while going nowhere, as on an exercise treadmill.

As a result of this treadmill, there is a constant pressure for players to stay engaged and retained as customers. But the flipside of this is that it’s not enough to build one product – instead you build 70 product variations, and call each one a level!

Other observations?
I’d love to hear other thoughts on this issue, and any places where I’m overgeneralizing :) Comment away!

If you liked this article, check out my other essays here.

UPDATE: Adam Martin (formerly of NCsoft) writes up his views here, from the perspective of a games guy.

Turns out it’s harder than you think to build a vertical social network for Star Wars fans

Are you trying to build a vertical social product?
One of the most common questions I get on viral marketing is structured as the following:

I’m trying to build a social network targeted at X. How do I make successful with viral marketing?

Typically, the product in question will be some sort of subset of a general social network, such as:

• parents
• sales professionals
• fans of a TV show
• car lovers
• etc

and in fact, to generalize, a vertical social product might also include products like:

• a sci-fi themed MMORPG
• social products aimed at the Twitter audience
• products for a certain demographic
• people with webcams
• etc

Catch my drift? Well, let’s get even more specific about what it means to be vertical versus horizontal.

Horizontal versus vertical products
Basically, the definition how vertical or horizontal something is depends on what % of people are likely to use it in some form. The most horizontal products become core features of the internet, such as:

• browsers
• search
• email
• mobile
• video
• etc.

For this reason, products centered around communication or content are often considered very horizontal because a lot of people are likely to use them. These end up being the most viral products, for a number of reasons we’ll discuss later.

Compare this to more specific products or features, such as content on cars, or a sci-fi themed video game. These are things where if you were to select a random group of 100 internet users, you’d find many of them have no interest in using that site.

The place that becomes important is the “branching factor” of your viral invite strategy.

How vertical products drive down branching factor
In tree data structures, the branching factor is determined by the number of children that a node has. It can be represented as the variable “num_friends” in the following equation:

users * num_friends * conversion % = new users

If you think of a viral loop as generations upon generations of users inviting each other, it’s very important that each user has a big branching factor, thus inviting enough of their friends to propagate the viral process. (With the usual caveat that you must balance your viral incentives against your user retention goals!)

The problem with vertical products is that it automatically impedes the # of invitees that a typical inviter might reach out to. The % of those invitees that get excited about the product upon their first use of it might be quite low, and if they leave prematurely without inviting their group of friends, then your viral process may peter out. It adds an extra term here, % targeted, which can significantly drive down this process:

users * % targeted * num_friends * conversion % = new users

So as a result, the more vertical a product is, and the lower the % of invitees that may be interested, the harder it will become viral. And in a world of shrinking possibilities on Facebook/Open Social, overcoming a big quantitative hurdle.

But don’t worry, it might still be OK!
I’ll close out this blog with two thoughts on this subject, first on scenarios where vertical products can still work, and also situations where you don’t care about being completely viral.

Vertical products can still work because of the fact that some target audiences are very concentrated amongst each other. The business world is often like this, or teenage girls, also! If you build a product targeted at them, the networks are dense enough and interconnected enough that you’ll get some degree of virality that eventually peters out as you hit this network’s edges, but it works in the meantime. I think that Linkedin is a great example of a site that provides great value, and because peoples’ Outlook contact lists are populated with large target-rich lists of like-minded professionals, this can work quite well.

As a related note, products like Ning, mailing lists, Yahoo Groups, etc. also do an interesting variation of this where maybe you came in via a “for Moms” invitation but then you end up making your own “for pet fanatics” group. This basically converts vertical traffic into horizontal traffic, neat!

Similarly, it’s not required that a site become viral to succeed. Oftentimes, a more specific audience is able to generate key context which provides high advertising revenues and/or leadgen/CPA opportunities. Because of this, these sites can often buy significant amounts of traffic which are then amplified by some degree of viral marketing but is not completely driven by it. In this way, the viral marketing is just a “kicker” that drives down the cost per acquisition without pushing it down to zero.

Both cases can be successes – I’d encourage everyone to check out Dogster, Linkedin, IMVU, and Puzzle Pirates as three examples of vertical products that worked out their acquisition strategies.

If you liked this article, you can check out my related essays here.

I wanted to quickly give some linklove to Furqan Nazeeri, a former EIR from Softbank who’s been writing some great stuff on raising money. His blog is at Altgate.com, and the RSS feed is here.

He recently made a list of his popular posts which I’ll list below here:

Raising Capital:

• 5 Reasons Convertible Debt Sucks HOT
• 10 Tips On Negotiating With VCs NEW
• Dating…er…Fundraising Etiquette
• The Science & Art of Term Sheet Negotiation HOT
• How Liquidation Preferences Work HOT
• How Much Money Should I Raise? NEW
• How To Get Introduced to VCs
• How To Pitch To VCs
• Killer VC Pitch Deck NEW
• Top 10 Tips For Entrepreneurs Pitching VCs
• Top 10 VC Objections (And How To Overcome Them) NEW
• Triage NEW
• Venture Debt For Startups HOT
• What To Expect In Due Diligence HOT
• Why Dividends Matter HOT

Startups:

• ‘Tis The Season To Change The CEO
• 10 Things To Consider Before Joining a Startup
• 10 Web 2.0 Tips: $75 HOT
• All-Hands Team Meeting NEW
• Board Management Tips For Startup CEOs
• Customer Support 2.0
• Financial Modeling Tips For Early-Stage Startups NEW
• Hiring Your First Salesperson
• How To Demo Your Startup NEW
• How To Pitch The Press
• Interview with Professor Noam Wasserman
• Sales Learning Curve
• Startup Compensation HOT
• Startup Entertainment
• Strategies For Two-Sided Markets
• What To Include In A Board Package

I have been very lazy about updating this! Sorry!

If you want to grab these in real time, you can follow me on Twitter at @andrew_chen.

• myspace making $1B a year, 3x more than facebook: http://bit.ly/PJPc2
• wow, what a lineup. John Doerr, Ron Conway, Max Levchin, and more. RecessionBeat event coming up soon: http://bit.ly/790Ci
• email marketing still most effective channel by ROI: http://tinyurl.com/4xqg34
• btw, i blogged about prosper stuff (today in TC http://bit.ly/7c9Z3 (expand)) over a month ago! http://bit.ly/1ccDXG
• Recession-Plagued Nation Demands New Bubble To Invest In http://tinyurl.com/5jgfha
• Retweeting @adachen: OMG BOOMBOT 2 IS OUT!! http://tinyurl.com/3ola4n
• great article in the nyt on amazon vs ebay: http://tinyurl.com/4r3ovc
• peter thiel and pearlstein on charlie rose, via @pkedrosky: http://tinyurl.com/5xjnu8
• remixes of the iconic obama poster, featuring amy winehouse, clinton, luke skywalker: http://www.posterpage.ch/exhib/ex216oba/ex216oba.htm
• jean paul gaultier redesign for evian: http://tinyurl.com/5yemed
• watching the gf play fieldrunners on the iphone for hours and hours. Looks like this: http://tinyurl.com/46dkxq
• testing ppl for their moral philosophies on mechanical turk: http://tinyurl.com/4t924l
• ok that’s cute. augmented reality virtual panda pet: http://bit.ly/1pFSsU
• andrew trader from zynga references maplestory’s $30MM in revenue in 2007: http://bit.ly/10h9bJ
• WSJ article on cans of mackeral becoming the currency of prisons: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122290720439096481.html
• 7 habits of highly ineffective terrorists: http://tinyurl.com/42wrbd
• incredibly fascinating – a list of unusual deaths over the last 100s of years: http://tinyurl.com/8t7oc
• damn it feels good to be a banksta, The Comic: http://tinyurl.com/4zhzwx
• VP debate in autotune with music and beat. UGC video at its best: http://tinyurl.com/49juz9
• P. Diddy + Kim Jong Il collabo: http://tinyurl.com/3vnxgg
• smokinggun page of the day – ohio woman busted wearing cow costume and chasing kids: http://snurl.com/403dp
• vitamin-enhanced, ginseng-fortified, peanut butter-flavored bottled for dogs: http://tinyurl.com/3pwual
• “Results 1 – 9 of about 9 for barrack obama” via @brit http://tinyurl.com/4jpylj
• compete traffic analysis on the personal finance space, seems like mint.com is doing well (via ad buying): http://tinyurl.com/5xftmz
• nyt article from 1999: “Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending” http://tinyurl.com/4ulb87
• getting into fancy nyc restaurants by bribing the maitre d’: http://tinyurl.com/6g3ddn

Blog vacation
Sorry for the blog vacation – I’ve been working hard on presentations for Startonomics and the Virtual Goods Summit, which has taken a lot of creative juice over the last 2 weeks!

Blogger’s block
Anyway, I’m suffering some blogger’s block right now. I’d love some suggestions on areas and topics you guys want to hear about. Click here to suggest something, or write me at voodoo [at] gmail. I’ll get back on the horse soon!

Today, I did a talk at Startonomics on revenue metrics, click to see the text summary. The conference was well put together and a lot of fun. I wanted to share the slides as well as the video of my talk below – enjoy!