巴尔默谈云计算
2010年3月6日
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就不说什么了。看吧，前两天在华大的演讲录像。当然，有些成功的顽固的创始人是不愿意买云计算的账的，譬如甲骨文的LE。
分类: 云端
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泡沫时期的群购和广告业
2010年3月6日
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Accompany大概是互联网群购的先驱。当时他们每天在网站上挂几个买卖，让注册用户加入。加入的用户越多，价格越低。每一个买卖上面显示购买人数达到多少价格就能降到多少的曲线，很让人动心。后来改名Mobshop，和它的群购业务更接近一些。后来不知道怎么就突然倒掉了。现在的Mobshop是完全一个新公司了。新近出来的Groupon的理念有一部分和它的很接近，当然Groupon有很多Fatwallet，Slickdeals的东西。
AllAdvantage是拨号上网时代网络条形广告的先驱。1999年3月成立，前后运营了近两年。其间烧钱2亿（VC）。核心业务是这样的：上网用户在自己计算机显示地段挂一个横条的广告，按小时给用户钱。用户可以发展下线用户（可以好几层），并抽取下线用户所得的一部分。这种类似老鼠会的做法获得了极大的成功，一年半内发展了1800万会员，公司网站很快进入20个最受欢迎网站之列。显然这个很容易造假，用户也容易作弊。当时网上就流行注册很多电邮账户自建金字塔，每天上网时间分时段给不同用户。宽大的广告条给很多用户造成不便，当时用来Disable它的广告条的办法也大行其道。2000年它准备IPO，结果因为客户大幅减少广告费用等原因搁浅。2001年2月停止面对用户的业务。关门之前AllAdvantage累计给会员付出1亿6千万美元的报酬。尽管这个公司没有成功，它首创的广告条，还有首次大规模应用的病毒式营销，后来都得到了广泛的应用。
PointClick是个更搞笑的广告公司。它的网站上面就是一堆付费广告，每个广告有一个相应的$价值，让用户去点击。开始的时候一个可能4-5块，甚至10块的都有，很多早起的人起来没事情点点鼠标就捞一大笔，就现在流行的半夜起来“偷菜”一样。后来人多了，也有会用那些脚本软件作弊的，PointClick开始把那些$的标记任意地放在页面上(那个时候没人搞Captcha)，后来又开始限制一个会员每月能拿到的广告费。但是终究还是道高一尺魔高一丈，这个公司很快就关门了。下面是它遇到困难时CEO给某会员的一封信，也算可以进博物馆的了吧。
I appreciate you emailing me direct about the concerns you have. Let me try and explain the situation. The situation that we developed happened because of two main reasons. The first reason is that we have had a great amount of difficulty in collecting revenue from a number of our advertisers. Much of this is due to the concern market conditions that surround the whole etailing sector. Many companies have stretched their payables to 3 or 4 months from the time of an invoice. The real problem is that we pay out our members within an average of 40 days from the time the revenue was generated from those clicks. You can quickly see that when you are talking about millions of dollars over a couple of months the problem became very serious. The second issue was that we have had a large number of "cheaters" on our site generating clicks that we were paying out on that we could not bill out merchants. This amounted to over $1,000,000 over about 75 days. By the time we came up with the solutions we had incurred a significant liability against the company. The solution to the problem is two-fold. We had to go out and raise more money for the company which we are now completing. You can guess that now is not the best time in the world to be asking investors for money considering the current market conditions. The second solution is to work closer with our advertisers in a way that will allow us to collect revenue quicker. Another part of the solution is the current "legend" of placing
every company on a monthly cap and then breaking that down into a daily cap. That is the reason sites disappear from the network. This problem will alleviate as we ad more merchant partners. We have added 45 new sites over the last 2 weeks and plan to ad 100 more over the next 3 weeks. We are working extremely hard to solve this issues. I think the mistake we made was not informing our members about the real business issues we face and letting the problem escalate to this point. I can assure that we have the backing of several very large financial institutions now that will help us weather the current storm. I think you will find us taking a much more pro-active approach over the next few days. I have been spending ALL of my waking hours on trying to raise the additional funds. Now that we are wrapping that up I can focus on solving some of the problems with our members and our image.Thanks again for your patience as we try and climb the mountain we are
facing. We will prevail!
Jody
分类: 以史为鉴
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