Disqus - Latest Comments for phclouin

Re: Amazon trademarks comparison shopping tool, '1-Click Compare'

Pierre Henri Clouin — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 12:41:05 -0000

This trademark application is a great find!

The trademark description seems to cast a wider net than just price comparison. Amazon reviews have started aggregating reviews not just at the product level, but also for key product attributes (e.g. camera's attributes like picture quality, lens quality, and ease of use). You could see 1-click compare becoming a contextual conduit for this very relevant data. Fascinating...

Re: Why Comments Matter

Pierre Henri Clouin — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 12:48:34 -0000

I'm surprised someone would even make the argument that newspapers shouldn't be engaging a community of readers, especially in times when readers' loyalty is so critical (and regardless of spam and trolls).

Comments are particularly important for the segments of the news industry that will emerge stronger from the current downturn, such as local/hyper-local news and niche publications.

Re: What’s The Most Underhyped Twitter App That You’re Using?

Pierre Henri Clouin — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:43:43 -0000

Tweetie for Mac is the cleanest Mac desktop twitter client, despite less functionality than tweetdeck or seesmic

I also like twt.fm a lot. Very clean and simple app for #MusicMondays!

Re: Give Bing A Chance

Pierre Henri Clouin — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 21:32:52 -0000

You (and a few other bloggers) convinced me to give it a try.

Here's a side by side comparison of Google and Bing on a simple product search on the Palm Pre.

http://img.ly/XO

Let's say it's rather illuminating!

Re: Mobile Retail – Coming to any Store near You

Pierre Henri Clouin — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 16:04:54 -0000

This is a terrific idea for brick-and-mortar retailers to at least capture some affiliate fees rather than nothing. It is an excellent case in point showing the potentially dramatic disruptions to retailers' traditional business model. I am not sure though that retailers would welcome becoming only a "showroom". In any case, that might be a way for Amazon to expand its associate program into brick-and-mortar retail.

Re: iPhone App Store Secrets

Pierre Henri Clouin — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 15:04:55 -0000

This presentation by pinchmedia on the iPhone Appstore is fantastic and a must-read for anyone currently working in the space.

The Apple Appstore's shortcomings on app discovery and the overall shopping experience appear blatantly throughout the presentation. I blogged on this topic a couple of months ago and highlighted a few low-hanging fruits to unlock the Appstore's untapped potential.

More importantly, the presentation shows that the current limited options to monetize apps are hurting the iPhone apps' ecosystem. By expanding the range of options to monetize apps, from one-off purchases and/or ads to multiple options like subscriptions or virtual gifts (which are now commonplace in gaming environments for instance), Apple could dramatically boost the appeal of its app ecosystem.

Re: Why Hulu Should Embrace Boxee

Pierre Henri Clouin — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 01:11:36 -0000

Hulu withdrawing from Boxee seems like a lost opportunity for content providers. The current economy must be weighing very heavily on their revenue, for them not to tolerate any experimentation or potential channel conflict.

Has Boxee explored the opportunity to share some attention data or user preferences with sites and content providers to entice them with added value and bring them back to the negotiation table?

Re: Mobile Retail - Coming to any Store near You

Pierre Henri Clouin — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 00:02:07 -0000

The current environment will slow down more than one mobile commerce experiments. By the same token, smart retailers like Amazon will leverage technology to grab market share from other retailers.

The market for mobile commerce might still be relatively small, but the impact of mobile apps and services in the hands of a critical mass of smart phone users will be felt by retailers in the 2009 Holiday season.

Re: Using CommunityWay to save a local community service in San Francisco

Pierre Henri Clouin — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 02:24:26 -0000

This use case about Access TV stations is a real practical case about how micro-currencies could play a decisive role to support social services and local economies in troubled times.

Re: Andrew Keen Sees Troubles In Paris

Pierre Henri Clouin — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 19:25:43 -0000

I am surprised that the Silicon Valley vs. ROW topic still manages to attract so much controversy and so much "cafe counter" psychology and prejudices.

As highlighted in a blog post responding to John Markoff's equally controversial NY Times article two years ago, Silicon Valley has three key advantages:

- The largest addressable market: the US market remains the largest domestic market in terms of consumer dollars and lack of language barriers; the main roadblock to rapid expansion in Europe is languages and localization issues;

- A tight-knit cluster of high education, entrepreneurs, large companies, and VCs; despite the massive improvement in communication, it still seems that face-to-face interaction is hard to beat;

- A visionary VC community that already has a global reach: look no further than DFJ’s exits late 2005: Baidu and Skype.

Re: GamerDNA launches way to discover games that fit your tastes

Pierre Henri Clouin — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 22:09:15 -0000

Improved games discovery and recommendation are much needed, especially for the non-core gamer audience.

As highlighted in a recent post about the Apple App Store, improved discovery is much needed to generate demand for the 5,000+ games currently on the App Store - and if Apple expects the price points on some of these games to increase.

Re: You Can't Get Different Results Doing The Same Thing

Pierre Henri Clouin — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 18:23:01 -0000

Any decent turn around plan should aim at cutting costs by shutting down unnecessary distribution points. Hopefully, removing unnecessarily protective state regulations could bring back enough competition into the system and allow more efficient distribution models to emerge.

Re: You Can't Get Different Results Doing The Same Thing

Pierre Henri Clouin — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 18:46:19 -0000

According to the New York Times, "Industry experts note that Chevrolet, G.M.’s flagship brand, has about three times as many dealerships as Toyota but sells about the same number of cars. That network is a legacy of the era when G.M. controlled 60 percent of the domestic market, instead of 20 percent or so today." The article goes on to detailing why the dealership networks have become an unsustainable burden for the Big Three. In any case, restructuring Detroit amidst the toughest recession since WWII will have deep social costs.

Re: Soundcloud - Flickr For Musicians

Pierre Henri Clouin — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 18:34:39 -0000

I have recently covered some alternative music discovery and recommendation platforms.

TheNextBigSound's crowdsourced discovery for unsigned musicians strikes me as very complementary to soundcloud's sharing value proposition.

Re: You Can't Get Different Results Doing The Same Thing

Pierre Henri Clouin — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 18:12:30 -0000

There is an awful lot more focus on union contracts than there is on Detroit's utterly outdated and bloated networks of car dealership, which they could have shed a long time ago, save for crippling state regulations. In all fairness, any Detroit bailout package should allow the big three to free themselves from their distribution networks.

Re: The space between Twitter and FriendFeed (Scripting News)

Pierre Henri Clouin — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 18:05:55 -0000

The command line analogy is a great analogy for twitter.

twitter's versatility has pushed its usage beyond status updates and into sharing, even though it is not as full-featured as richer specialized platforms (e.g. delicious or diigo for bookmarks, flickr for pictures, etc.).

FriendFeed brilliantly aggregates all of these online activities in one place/one feed. There will come a time when they will bring to market a tweetdeck-type lifestreaming filter that makes sense of it all.

Re: louisgray.com: Kallow: Literally, A Gift Recommendation No-Brainer

Pierre Henri Clouin — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 17:19:45 -0000

Kallow is an interesting take at taming the tyranny of choice for luddites. It makes you wonder why all these consumer electronics companies release so many different products and try so hard, when they could concentrate all their efforts building one single perfect product. I am also a bit surprised that they did not tackle smartphones - maybe because the iPhone is too obvious a choice?

Re: Clerk Dogs is the know-it-all video store nerd in your browser

Pierre Henri Clouin — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 16:52:32 -0000

Curated recommendations are en vogue these days. TechMeme has adopted it. ClerkDogs comes out the same week the Netflix prize has to concede slowing progress on its algorithm improvement effort.

Scalability remains the key issue with curated recommendations - as highlighted by Pandora's and Last.fm's financial woes.

Re: A slight tweak in the App Store promotes paid apps

Pierre Henri Clouin — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 16:30:05 -0000

The Apple App Store has to take on a much larger share of demand generation to support the App ecosystem. This is somewhat from the user experience initially created for the iTunes Music or Video stores, where demand generation is handled by music labels and movie studios.

It is in Apple's interest to improve app discovery and promotion, because the iPhone apps are a key strategic differentiator - if not a major source of revenue yet. This blogpost highlights quite a few opportunities to improve app discovery, such as improving the shopping experience to adding finer segmentation and filtering .

Re: SXSWi session on the Future of Money

Pierre Henri Clouin — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 20:44:02 -0000

Congratulations for getting on this SXSW panel ! Texting money is as ubiquitous in Africa as bank wire transfers in the US. For some reasons though, mobile payments have yet to achieve wide acceptance in the US.

Two questions:
- Who else will be on the panel?
- Do you plan to look into the convergence of mobile payments and micro finance?

Re: louisgray.com: Pull Your Blog Into FriendFeed and Increase Exposure

Pierre Henri Clouin — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 16:52:46 -0000

Nice post. Thanks for sharing your FriendFeed best practices!

Re: Music discovery services chart new paths for gift recommendations

Pierre Henri Clouin — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 12:40:30 -0000

Thanks for checking in. As you gather more data about people's tastes, it would also be terrific - as a user - to know how close my tastes are to those of the "human" who made a particular recommendation. Good luck!

Re: louisgray.com: Semantic Gifts Mines Social Profiles for the Perfect Present

Pierre Henri Clouin — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 17:14:30 -0000

Semantic Gifts is a very elegant idea. I like the very simple UI and request page. I wasn't entirely convinced by some of the results I saw. The service would gain at harvesting some of the wish/gift list services' data to improve recommendations, such as Giftag or Amazon's wish lists. Additional thoughts on our blog: http://is.gd/9ic4

Re: louisgray.com: Top Resources to Help Stay Informed In a Crazy World

Pierre Henri Clouin — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 22:24:08 -0000

Some economists have been right about the financial meltdown for quite some time now, including Nouriel Roubini (www.rgemonitor.com) and Brad Setser (http://blogs.cfr.org/setser). It's well worth reading, if you can bear with the technicalities.

Re: This year’s IPO market weakest since 1977, and M&As are in the gutter

Pierre Henri Clouin — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 17:57:49 -0000

If 2008 looks pretty bad in terms of exits, 2009 will be even worse. OTOH, buy low and sell high remains the way forward for VCs and investors in general. Just look at what Buffet did in the last week...