Disruption: David Pakman's Blog

My friend and former colleague Greg Scholl sent me an article this week and a provocative quote jumped out of it. Here is the view of Irwin Gotlieb, CEO of one the largest global advertising agencies on the planet, as he shared his view on this year’s CES. Given last week’s SOPA/PIPA debate, I thought Mr. Gotlieb’s [...]

I’m a huge user of Twitter and spend more time staring at a Twitter feed than pretty much any other online/PC/mobile utility. Collectively, literally more than an hour or two a day, my eyes glance at a feed delivered to me on top of Twitter. In terms of time spent, maybe my email client is [...]

Facebook, at over 500M users, has transformed the web, and indeed the planet, by connecting us all in ways we weren’t before. At their current growth rates, they will finish this year at around 600M users and will be larger than Google by the end of next year (if they aren’t already, see here). (As [...]

I very much agree with Fred Wilson and Albert Wenger that we construct various social networks, not just one, to suit various needs. One’s Facebook social graph is often the group of people with whom you are comfortable sharing light-hearted info and photos. One’s Foursquare graph is often more limited: the group of people whom [...]

With one-quarter of a cup of coffee left, my fingers are jumpy as my mind turns to next year. In my first full year as a VC, I have been humbled by the great entrepreneurs I have met (and those I haven’t!), the brilliant colleagues of mine who help guide me, and the powerful teams [...]

As comScore and others have reported, we are spending far more time on social networking sites than on any other sites or web activities today. From eMarketer today: Time spent on social networking sites is increasing steadily, taking users’ attention away from sites such as portals. According to comScore, the top 20% of social network users [...]

My friend and fellow VC Raj Kapoor at Mayfield Fund has an insightful post about monetizing social networks. He believes social networks’ value is in the data, not in the inventory and I completely agree. In fact, this realization is the basis for our investment in Media 6 Degrees, who, so far, is the only [...]

ROI. Get used to it, Madison Avenue. In the past 15 years, the hyper-growth of interactive media has presented the advertising world with some of its most pressing challenges; since it is so easy to measure performance online, advertisers would like to better measure the performance of non-interactive media (print, radio, outdoor, TV). Spurred on [...]