Naveed Lalani

The problem with Groupon « Rashmi’s blog

Article about Groupon from a user’s point of view. Points out some core problems, and overlooks the hype. Will Groupon be able to sustain?

Web Services as Governments - Union Square Ventures

Looking at web services as governments to predict what they will do: 

If you accept the analogy of web services as governments, the example of Craigslist offers a couple of insights. First, it’s possible to be fabulously profitable as a restrained government, but perhaps at the expense of top line revenue (or the government’s share of total GDP). And second, that no web service is an island. Web services will compete with each other for the time and attention of their users and for investment from the private sector (applications developers), but they will do this in the context of their host government’s who are also competing for tax revenues and private sector investment.

So as you watch the large web services evolve, think about how they are balancing the relationship between the state and the private sector? What does Facebook’s introduction of Facebook Credits say about its monetary policy? What is Apples foreign policy? Do they act unilaterally promoting their own proprietary standards or do they act multilaterally embracing international standards? What is Twitter’s industrial policy? Do they invest in state owned services or encourage decentralized economic development? The choices these platforms make reveal a lot about who they are, and ultimately how well they serve the companies operating in their economies and the citizens who live there.