Danmatt

Have to agree with the latter two points - stick with it and look out for the business lessons to be learned.

Excellent reference! Other comments welcome.

Would the film be as big without all the controversy? Early reviews suggest it's not brilliant but it'll still make a fortune.

Wikipedia never claimed to be 100 per cent accurate and is rarely quoted as a source by an authority wanting to prove a 'fact' - but that doesn't mean it isn't brilliant or successful.

It is a useful website for many reasons, all of which come together to prove its worthiness, and it's success.

The advertising model strikes again. Last.fm cost CBS $280m - any predictions when they'll break even?

Thanks

This would have to be implemented in a very sophisticated way. For a start Coke is a business, but then so is a start-up with three employees - are you telling me they should pay the same?

It must be the case that Twitter will offer bells and whistles to big companies and charge for them - otherwise entrepreneurs simply won't use it to build their businesses.

Also you have to think about a company's revenue streams. A car manufacturer, which could conceivably make a sale from a click-through, stands to benefit a lot more than a publisher that gets money through ad revenue.

I can think of about a million other problems too.

new satellite launcher will bring in the bangers, as will selling the spaceships themselves, developing cheaper fuel, and of course the space tourism bit.

Office is better in my view - you can talk to real humans and get honest feedback + there's still a connection (wrongly) between working at home and slacking.

Once a week + the weekend is definitely enough for me.

Some of these points are fairly obvious ways to advertise anything, others - like linking to Twitter from everywhere help Twitter become more popular, not necessarily you.

Lots of web start-ups (inc my own) use Twitter to spread the word - so you want a lot of followers, but how does linking Linked In, Facebook etc to Twitter help?

Most people don't 'downgrade' their shopping tastes, so eBay isn't benefiting from higher-end consumers. People just buy less of the same stuff.

that is too funny

These goals sound very familiar to me - survival being the key one, although we hope to do a bit of growing too...

People are far more discerning in the credit crunch - they're still spending, but not in a spontaneous way. That's what's hitting eBay sales and why some more up market retailers are still doing well.

Sorry - UK Dragons Den investors. They joined yesterday, but haven't quite got the hang of it yet. They're using it like email and arranging their day while everyone else watches - stalkers' paradise!! Someone should say something...

I don't think that's true of the UK version - if you look at the career histories of the people on the most recent series, for example, they're pretty average.

And then there's their performance on the actual show...

Why do people who get kicked out of The Apprentice think they can go on to advise start-up businesses? Coming fifth on a reality game show surely doesn't qualify you??

It has the same problem as all social networking sites, only more so. At least facebook can (claim to) target you with specific ads because it draws data from its users - twitter knows nothing about it's audience so all it has is raw, unquantifiable traffic - which is actually pretty useless.

Companies might follow potential customers or opinion formers for a fee, but how many do they need? 1,000? That's £1,000 - not exactly big money.

Getting individuals to hand over a buck for 'good' followings ruins the whole point of twitter and I can't see people doing it.

Bring back display advertising.