Damla's Profile

Interesting post! I still do frequently see “copied” posts where the list has been pulled directly from another website. I think the confusing part is that the posts have the name and photo of a “Writer” or “Contributor” at the top, which is almost equivalent to making a claim of original content. Scrolling down quickly shows many displeased comments. BuzzFeed has to become more transparent as to its sourcing, or label such posts differently, as to not attract so much negative publicity.

Thanks for the interesting post! Sift Science seems to have a clear value creation and capture strategy. If I was a potential customer, one of my concerns would be whether Sift is likely to be acquired relatively soon. It’s growing, provides great anti-fraud technology, and can be an attractive target for a giant e-commerce company like Amazon. In that case, will the other customers still be provided with the same level of service and privacy protection, or will it serve Amazon’s needs and wean off other customers over time? As a potential customer, I wouldn’t want to grow to rely completely on Sift, as it would be hard to replace afterwards.

Interesting post! One of the issues that Counsyl will need to focus on is communication with the would-be parents. When the results say both people are carriers, does it mean the child will definitely have the disease? What are potential treatments? How would it affect quality of life? I imagine reading the test results is a very emotional experience. How Counsyl “counsels” at that moment will determine whether it will be able to travel through word-of-mouth or be part of a tragic experience. Privacy is another concern that Counsyl will need to invest in to protect – a leak can be quite damaging to the brand.

Interesting post! I hadn’t heard of VerbalizeIt until now either. Their pivot from one-off tourist customer to repeat business customer seems like a no-brainer, but capturing market share in the business space might be harder than anticipated. The gatekeepers are different in businesses – the consequences of trying a new translation service, getting a translation with an important mistake, and then making a business decision relying on that translation might prove to be a high risk for many businesses. VerbalizeIt’s first customers such as TripAdvisor and Vimeo can serve as valuable references, but I predict it will take longer than expected for VerbalizeIt to truly scale.

Interesting post! Perhaps it is just as important to pick the right crowd as well as the right crowdsourcing contest. For a company with paid members/users, crowdsourcing names or similar relatively low value-add contests might turn out better, as these users will take the contest seriously as they will end up paying for and using the product themselves. In the case of NASA, the submitters had nothing to lose by making a mockery out of the contest. I am quite impressed, though, with how NASA turned around the situation with naming the treadmill and connected with the fans. If they were seeking engagement – they certainly got it, which leads to your point that perhaps bad publicity can still be good publicity.

I would argue that one of the reasons Yelp captured so much marketshare and became a verb (“Let’s yelp it”) is the simplicity of the search. I only need to enter place and a description (“restaurant” or “brunch”) and voila. I can filter by location, price and cuisine, and see the number of reviewers, which gives me a general idea of popularity within the Yelp community. I might not agree exactly with the reviewer profile but I know that a 4+ star restaurant will generally be good, and can then look at the restaurant website, menu, and maybe a couple comments to make my decision. The ease and accessibility of the site is what works really well for its network effects, and I think they took the wise route to make it so.

Thank you for the post. I would also add Expedia,Orbitz and Booking.com to the list of competitors, following the release of TripAdvisor’s Instant Booking feature. The combination of network effects resulting from the pending merger of Expedia and Orbitz can really threaten TripAdvisor’s offering. So far Expedia has been taking lower commissions from hotels as compared to Booking.com to gain market share, but the tendency to multi-home is high (hotels like to list/advertise as to many eyeballs as possible as long as it’s profitable) so the outcome for Expedia as well as TripAdvisor will be interesting to watch.

Thank you for the post. Your point about perverse network effects are particularly interesting – as they shut off small hospitals from Epic, they open the path for other competitors to sweep in, such as Meditech. Meditech’s focuses on smaller practices that have tight budgets and only need a comprehensive, “good enough” service. With a low cost, low price strategy, Meditech can afford to monetize this market that Epic has so far not focused on. Should Meditech or other similar competitors get government funding to provide their service, or should EHR systems standardize more as you suggest, the competitive dynamics can push to have Epic compete directly with these companies as well.

Interesting take on Handy. I was looking into a cleaning firm this summer and they had so many negative reviews on Yelp – administrative issues, automatic charges that weren’t properly cancelled, untrained contractors. I think this is a common risk when you are trying to scale extremely rapidly to take advantage of network effects – you may not be able to manage the growth properly and might have to give on customer experience, which in turn contradicts your efforts to scale, as users like myself can look up reviews on sites like Yelp. Thank you for the post!

It’s really interesting to see that the non-profit nature of the company allowed them to experiment – the common perception is that non-profits are slower to move and adapt than for-profits because they don’t face the same market pressures. In this case, that turned out to be a blessing, but I also wonder whether that is a translatable lesson to other non-profits. The brand power of National Geographic probably played a large role in making the transition effective and tangible to consumers – I’m a big fan!

Great post; I’m also interested in the defensibility of Viber’s CVP, as Starfish23 mentions above. I think there is a huge first mover advantage here as you only need one app, really, to make free calls over wifi, and you’ll only download and use the app that your friends and family have. For example, a friend of mine recently heard of Viber and wanted to try it at home in Turkey, and found it really difficult to spread – all her friends and family had Skype and WhatsApp and felt Viber was redundant. Especially as conference calling and group messaging become more popular, the critical mass of the people using the app becomes a critical advantage. I’m curious to see how this market share battle will play out…

Great post; I’d also be curious to know how they managed to make this transition from essentially a design and manufacturing company (a maker of shoes and clothes!) to a software company. As we have discussed in class, the product cycle times are quite different; the innovation required is different; your competitors are different. What is most impressive to me is that Nike managed to make this change without making its pains obvious to the consumer – as a fellow Nike fan, I didn’t notice the challenge Nike had to conquer and could simply lay back (or run!) and enjoy the results.