I have been prophesizing that the World Cup will be a booster to digital entertainment.  Rafat’s reporting some figures to the same prophecy.

…the FIFA World Cup will give a boost to mobile TV and video,
contributing $300 milliion of the $1.2 billion revenues from the sector
this year. I’m glad that’s clarified — the rest of the press release
refers to “Mobile TV to generate US$300 million in revenue in the
build-up and duration of the World Cup”, whereas I think most of the
revenue will come from video clips rather than broadcast mobile TV.

Sports is so conducive to sharing and the World Cup, by its nature, separates those who go to the games to watch, and those who stay back.  The need to communicate remains.  And Mobile video and will come to the rescue.

After the PowerHRM presentation by Erol Levent on Monday’s Istanbul NEG meeting, there was a brief discussion on whether an eHarmony-like marketplace for the labor market could be possible, utilizing tests such as DISC or Myers-Briggs.

It turns out that one already exists, and according to the alarm clock, it’s just raised $13m more from Menlo Ventures and NEA. I think it’s a promising model, and with a CEO like Rob McGovern, the former VC and founder of CareerBuilder, and the A-tier VC’s on board, it should become contender in the online recruitment market.

I find it ironic that I disagree with Joseph’s post about gated communities.  He argues that, for the following reasons, the majority of online networks will be gated.

Gated communities have the following characteristics, making them
attractive incubators of ideas and knowledge sharing amongst
individuals that are otherwise skeptical about participating in open,
unfiltered networks:

• Building Trust – closed networks, by
  definition, have some set of criteria or vetting process for granting
  membership. Because each member is guaranteed to be of a certain
  caliber, by virtue of this vetting process, each individual involved in
  the network is more likely to be engaged due to the heightened level of
  trust.
• Fostering Privacy – no external
  search engines, spammers, marketers, or competitors are allowed in,
  making it far less likely for a member’s contributions to be used
  maliciously against them.
• Facilitating Quality Interactions
  – gated communities are usually formed around a common goal or
  affinity, giving participants a springboard for discussions and
  interactions that most members of the community will find interesting
  or have common views about. Recommendations or insights shared in this
  context are likely to be far higher in quality.
• Connections to the Real World
  – again, closed networks form around a belief, affinity, or geographic
  area that affords meeting face to face or collaborating on projects
  offline as well as online. Connections formed in these networks have a
  greater opportunity for developing outside of the online network than
  do random connections formed on large scale open networks.

The irony of my disagreement lies in the fact that I worked with Joseph to create one of the mature and most successful examples of gated social communities at SelectMinds.  I now believe, that for information to flow freely, and for the network to start genuinely benefiting from Metcalfe’s law, the walls have to come down.  Tribe has learned this.  So has Friendster.  MySpace proves it to us every day we look at Alexa rankings.

At SelectMinds, we were required by our clients’ privacy and security concerns, to keep the walls up.  However, I continue to believe, that the greatest promise at SelectMinds would be realized if the client base would begin experimenting with the cross-pollination of their social networks.

Incidentally, Fred’s got a post about the same issue, targeting a small world.

I belong in, what I suspect to be, quite a large group.  We love simplicity.

We love the simple white page of Google.

We love 37 signals.

We commend the Web 2.0 sense of style.

We generally hold out a clean, simple UI to be a key factor for success on the web.  We keep pointing to Google as an example.
Then, comes MySpace, the fastest growing web property.  It is enormously successful.  And, people are spending a ton of time browsing it. They seem to love it.

And the UI is anything but simple. It’s crowded, cluttered.  Lots of colors…

Is MySpace the biggest blow to the cult of simplicity?

See below and decide for yourself.

I love del.icio.us and use it quite a bit.  One of my favorite utilities is the ability to tag content for others using the for:___ tag.

The ¨for:¨ tag, too, has turned into a spam channel.

The user jwp, at the URL http://del.icio.us/jwp has tagged a poker website with a for: tag for me, along with a lot of other people.  That sucks. 

I hope del.icio.us is thinking about this problem, too.  I think it has the potential of pissing many users off.

Fred Wilson, on the USV blog, announced the new offering from their portfolio company Indeed the job search engine.  It’s a cost-per-click ad system targeted to job seekers.

If you are an employer looking to hire someone, your job listing is
most likely already in the Indeed index because Indeed crawls the
Internet everyday looking for job listing at the big job boards, the
niche job boards, and company websites. But if you want to "sponsor"
one or more of your listings, you can go to the Indeed advertiser system,
specify which of your job listings you want to sponsor, and then set a
price you are willing to pay per click. The jobs you want to sponsor
will then also appear on the right side under sponsored listings when
someone does a search that returns your job listing.

I am an advisor to iLab, which owns Kariyer.net, the Monster.com of Turkey.  Last week in a strategy meeting, there was some time spent on new offerings in the online recruitment world and Indeed was a topic.  One of the questions that came up was the revenue model.

So, this new announcement sheds some further light to Indeed’s revenue plans.  I find it very exciting, primarily because the CPC system opens up the labor marketplace to new players beyond the job seeker and job advertiser. Fred gives this example:

Think about selling java programming classes or books for java
developers to people searching for java programming jobs at Indeed.
Given that Indeed processes over 20,000 searches with word Java in it
each month, that’s an interesting advertising opportunity in and of
itself.

Classic Paul Graham:

"We’ve now invested in enough companies that I’ve learned a trick for
determining which points are the counterintuitive ones: they’re the
ones I have to keep repeating."

1. Release Early.
2. Keep Pumping Out Features.
3. Make Users Happy.
4. Fear the Right Things.
5. Commitment Is a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.
6. There Is Always Room.
7. Don’t Get Your Hopes Up.
8. Speed, not Money.

Read the entire essay here.