Chinese artist Bolin has painted himself to blend in with the tire. Look closely!

Liu Bolin just wants to blend in with the crowd. continue reading...

JWT unveils their list of 100 things to look out for in 2011: continue reading...

Yes, Facebook today is an awesome company.  But if you look at the landscape and wreckage, social networking sites failed to deliver on the hype. Social networking and media remains an ever-growing aspect of our lives, but as a business… not so sure to be honest:

- MySpace has all but capitulated on the “social networking” aspect of things and is essentially a great platform for entertainment, namely music. continue reading...

I must say I respect all blog founders: Rafat Ali, Om Malik, Richard MacManus, Henry Blodget and Michael Arrington have all managed to build very promising media companies out of the power of their pen.  As a writer, entrepreneur, media executive, I respect that enormously.  Each one of those individuals has an interesting and unique background.  I’ve commented frequently about each one (both positive and negative depending on the case) and even interviewed one of them for WM Live. 

Michael Arrington is in some ways in a league of his own, simply because of the sheer velocity and scale of what he has accomplished at Tech Crunch: no outside capital to boot (something I can relate to).  Like many, I was very impressed that he was pushing the envelope far more than his brethren not just by showing an interest in diversifying into hardware but actually pursuing it.  He was close, so close he could touch it, until greed and I guess envy got in the way. continue reading...

Via Paid Content, here is former News Corp. COO Peter Chernin’s advice on where to focus investment in media:

In a panel discussion with Gordon Crawford, managing director of The Capital Group Companies, at the USC Annenberg School for Communication, Cherin also offered a warning—not that most investors needed it. “You stay out of the U.S., you stay out of western Europe, and you stay out of broadcast, newspapers and traditional media.” China’s media industry, despite being less affected by the global recession than the West, is no oasis, he said. Offsetting the attractive growth opportunities are massive barriers to entry. “You can pretend to do a lot of things in China, but you can’t really make money there.” He prefers other Asian countries, such as India, Indonesia and the Philippines for doing business. continue reading...

Russia’s answer to Michael Arrington, search engine Quintura’s CEO Yakov Sadchikov comes across some interesting figures on the Russian online advertising market, estimated at $260 million from January to June 2008.  This is up 73% year-over-year, according to a report from MindShare Interaction.  More interestingly is the fact that contextual advertising accounted for $161 million (or 62% of total online advertising spending), while display advertising accounted for $99 million (38%) of total online spending.

The business daily Kommersant breaks down the top 10 online display advertisers in Russia, including: continue reading...

There’s a saying that states: fear is temporary, greed is permanent.  Well, you can add, greed is global, too.

Apparently, after losing their shirts and fleecing their own investors in the North American video market (quick, name me on more successful exit in the space other than YouTube - too late, the elevator’s moved on), VCs are now losing their shirts - and making me lose my lunch - in China, too. continue reading...

Question from reader…

Q: Do you think Microsoft and other investors invested in Facebook at a lower valuation than the reported $15B? continue reading...

Yesterday, BubbleGeneration’s Umair Haque set off a storm by suggesting that tech blog networks are peaking. I agree that the signal-to-noise ratio in the technology blog network space has gone down considerably. While many of these blogs are hiring from traditional media, established publications are firing back with their own blogs and blog networks. CNET for one has been very aggressive, even appointing blogger Dan Farber to become editor in chief at News.com (of course, Farber is so much more than a mere blogger).

In fact, in the past year, many of these technology blogs have gone from being a one-site, one-man operation to a multi-site property hiring large operational and editorial teams. In a few instances, companies have even raised considerable funding. The quest to build an audience and generate ad revenues has pitted many of these sites in a competitive and cooperative dynamic that might indeed suggest that most of these sites have peaked. continue reading...