Innovation and entrepreneurship are becoming my two least-favorite words, mostly because they are being appropriated in ways that are neither innovative nor entrepreneurial. Like in today’s New York Times essay by Tom Friedman. Friedman used to be one of my favorite writers. In Beirut to Jerusalem, when he talked about two sheiks on a flight… Read More
Josh Kopelman observed Friday that e-commerce has changed very little since he founded Half.com: more than half the top-15 media companies did not exist in 1999 while all but one of the e-commerce companies did. Josh concludes that “I believe we’ve seen more innovation… in eCommerce in the last 10 months than we have in… Read More
Given the recent coverage of a 15-year old at Morgan Stanley who wrote a report about why teens aren’t using Twitter and the numerous reactions, we thought that we’d jump on the bandwagon and get the perspective of Redfin’s youngest employee, Edward Chang, on the matter. A couple of weeks before starting my marketing internship… Read More
Twitter’s Biz Stone blogged yesteray that Twitter wasn’t interested in banner ads. Undeterred, TechCrunch immediately reported that Twitter would still undoubtedly focus on ads, perhaps of another sort. It was a curious response to what may be a titanic shift in how advertising works. Twitter seems ready to depart from the business model of every… Read More
Over the past few months, Twitterers and TechFlash readers have invented a war between big and small startups, and somehow Redfin has landed on the wrong side of it. I only noticed it last night. The great Josh Petersen of 43 Things compared Adam Doppelt’s fantastic essay on boot-strapping Urbanspoon to a talk Marcelo Calbucci… Read More
As we plunge further into the Great Recession, it’s natural to wonder, like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, what the world will look like when we land. Other bubbles have left behind an excess of infrastructure that would later come in handy: railroad tracks, telegraph lines, Internet fiber. What will we have to show… Read More
Redfin just released a new version of the site. In addition to improving our short sale detection in Orange County and parts of LA and making our neighborhood pages a little more discoverable from the map page, we switched to using Google Maps exclusively instead of a mix of Microsoft Virtual Earth and Google Maps…. Read More
Have you heard? Yammer is Twitter for corporations. On Monday it launched. On Wednesday, it won TechCrunch50′s top prize. By this morning, Yammer was reporting it had signed up 10,000 people from 2,000 companies. This afternoon, the great Dan Fabulich of Redfin asked if we could start using it. Of course, Dan was only being… Read More