Drew Cogbill | Thesis Blog

The “One Internet Village, Divided” article in today’s NYTimes is about the problems that poplular internet sites (YouTube, Facebook, MySpace) are facing with creating revenue from traffic in emerging markets.

The video site Veho has gone so far as to block users from Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Eastern Europe.  MySpace is creating a default low bandwidth profile for users in India, and Facebook is focusing on member acquisition before worrying about monetizing.  YouTube had been developing localized versions of its service in Brazil, India, and Poland but has now switched to trying to make money with reports that it may lose around $470 million this year.

This news confirms my instinct that I should be exploring a business model for Pigeon that is not ad supported.  How can Internet companies balance the obviously huge demand for content and a need to monetize?  How can web-like services tap into the demand for content and be sustainable?

My fellow DTer Erik Burke is in the New York Times for a mural he did in Bushwick!

NYTimes “What Your Global Neighbors Are Buying” Map has interesting information and great design.  What makes this map particularly effective for me is the way the rectangles shrink and grow between tabs.

I wonder if mobile phones fall under electronics, household goods, or recreation, or, really, maybe I wonder where they should fall.

The New York Times had an article about the emerging environment of mobile phone innovation in Nairobi a few days ago: “Inside Nairobi, the Next Palo Alto?“.  I’ve read elsewhere that the article came out of the journalist attending BarCamp Nairobi, which I mentioned in a previous post.

It also mentions Google’s Nairobi office.  Google must certainly be interested in Kenya, and Africa, as an enormous future market for services, or they wouldn’t be investing in infrastructure and research there.

Google and the other software developers in Nairobi are primarily focused on expanding what it is to interact with the internet.  In emerging markets where mobile phones will vastly outnumber traditional computers for the foreseeable future, the mobile phone has the real possibility of being the most often used way to interface with the web on Earth.