Friday, November 04, 2011

Great comments on Groupon's IPO today - comparing it with a fertilizer company that had its IPO today as well. Who has the stronger fertilizer?

Groupon's IPO may have surged today, but like most other big tech IPOs, the chances of it staying at that price are slim.

Rentech Nitrogen Partners L.P., a nitrogen fertilizer company, also launched its IPO at today at $20 per share. It probably has a better chance at sustaining its model than Groupon and subsequent daily deal copycats ever will. Says The Wall Street Journal:

Rentech has a lot of alluring attributes. Its chief competitors' stocks are up 50% for 2011. It's riding a wave of positive cyclical attributes such as high product pricing and low feedstock costs. And it plans to pay out a dividend that could yield between 11% and 12% over its next fiscal year, based on the midpoint of its expected $19 to $21 price range, a great draw for income-starved investors.
Groupon's bling is fake. Says the New Yorker, eloquently:

Most big tech I.P.O.s surge and then drop. And, with its decreasing profit margins, fishy accounting, massive marketing expenses, floundering innovations, massive insider payouts, and surging competitors, Groupon is surely not worth thirteen billion dollars, or whatever its market cap is at this very moment.
If merchants start pulling out of the daily deals space because they're losing money on Groupons, the gold will start chipping away, revealing nothing but a cheap trick, a flimsy tin.

- ReadWrite

Friday, October 07, 2011

The Worst Question a Salesperson Can Ask - Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson - Harvard Business Review

The Worst Question a Salesperson Can Ask - Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson - Harvard Business Review

What if customers don't know what they need? What if customers' single greatest need, ironically, is to figure out exactly what they need? Ironic, Steve Jobs approach to his entire success at Apple and elsewhere.

Sunday, August 21, 2011

Open Source Ecosystem

LinuxCon: Open Source is an Ecosystem, not a Zero Sum Game | TechCrunch

Interesting review of open source ecosystems and the ability to monetize.

Friday, August 05, 2011

A Guide to Open Source Licensing

A Guide to Open Source Licensing: "

If you're working on or launching an open source project, one of the most basic decisions you must make is which license the project will be released under, and choosing the perfect license is more complex than ever. Over the years, we've provided many free guidelines on this topic, but it's a moving target. In this post, you'll find our updeated collection of all the things you need to know to make an informed open source license decision.


The Free Software Foundation is the principal organizer of the GNU Project, and you can find the FSF's guidelines on choosing an open source license in this post. The guidelines cover how to choose an overall license for a project, and also cover making decisions on licensing modified versions of an existing project.


Through the FSF guidelines, you can gain knowledge about what Copyleft is, and it's wise to learn more about the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), and the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL). t's also worth looking into our post on the Software Freedom Law Center's Legal Issue Primer. It contains a very thorough discussion of most popular open source licenses. And you can find much more introductory material on open source licenses in this post.


These posts also provide much good background on licenses:


First, Know They Licenses


The Unlicense: A License For No License


FSFE and GPL-Violations.org on Reporting (and Avoiding) Licensing Issues


Thwarting Threats: Free OSS Legal Primer Boasts Big Authors


One reason to know about open source licenses is to keep things legal, and we have covered a number of legal resources that can help keep open source projects and developers out of harm's way. In this post, you'll find a discussion of a journal focused on open source law called International Free and Open Source Software Law Review. In the journal's archives, you'll find extremely informed discussions of licensing and patent practices, among other topics.


A little bit of homework can mean a lot when evaluating open source licenses. Hopefully some of the guidelines above will be of help to you.


Image courtesy of The International Free and Open Source Software Law Review.










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