How to Generate Money

Chris Andersson, of The Long Tail fame, points to an analysis about how web 2.0 businesses actually make money. The biggest revenue seems to be online advertizing. I would have though biggest source of income is Venture Capital investments.

The original analysis (by Box UK) is both interesting and useful. It shows what has been tried, what is being used, what are related possibilities. For start-ups it can help to (re)define what is their market and business model. Usually one model is not enough, so it's useful to see options where to target next growth sprint.

Analysis is based on data from Webware's "Top 100 web apps for 2008". This gives an enourmous amount of credibility to the analysis. You can see several well know companies, who are actually using these models: Amazon, Google, iPhone, Opera, eBay, !Yahoo, Skype, Twitter, Wikipedia, Facebook, bitTorrent, YouTube.

Some are more successful than others. Something to seriously think about.

Does Innovation and number of Patents correlate?

McKinsey blog What Matters has an article "Building an innovation nation", which they summarized as a graph showing how innovation and US patents are directly related.

The article itself is well-thought, balanced and logical, but the graph gets all attention. One picture is worth ten thousand words.

Is number of patents really the most important evaluation criteria? Do you really measure world-wide innovation with number of patents in USA? Not in the world, but in USA? Only?

The article says USA is slipping in innovation, because many Asian people either return home or don't come at all. Japan and Europe are getting old. New innovations comes from emerging areas, which just might not register patents in USA. India and China we already know, look out for Africa.

Handango Yardstick 2008 Analysis

Simon Judge made a nice short analysis of latest released Handango statistics. Here's my additional comments about the Handango Yardstick of 2008:

Sorry Simon, isn't Android share 0.1% and that 10% belongs to Smartphone Software (Windows Mobile Standard)? Then half of Handango sales is for Windows!

• TOP-5 is utilities and personalization software.
  
• 7% share of Symbian software sales contain both S60 and UIQ.
• Number of new mobile content titles during 2009 is 10000 - but what platform were they made for?
  
• Sales of 51% Windows, 11% Palm, 31% RIM suggests strong USA orientation.
  

Consumer Attitudes Towards Mobile Applications

Brand new research report about how consumers think about mobile software. This free sample contains research objectives, table of contents and intro to creator companies ARCchart and WaveMetrix.

Not much there, for free, but one thing: table of content mentions two applications types separately: Games and Navigation applications.

No Messaging, no Email, no Social Networks, no Mobile-TV, no Video, no Camera, no Web Browsers, no Utilities, no Music Players. Just Games and Navigation. That's something to think about.