In my previous gig we used to spend single-digit millions/year, and saw all metrics falling down like OP did, and we had a team of 6 experts with tons of experience in AdWords.
Not sure about this vertical, but in other (much more lucrative) ones such as travel, Google is pushing its own solutions at the expense of other websites.
For example, try looking for a hotel in new york and you will see Google Hotel Finder results, Google Map (which feeds from Google Hotel Finder), Google Places for Business, etc. Google Map will even stay fixed meaning that as you scroll down the ads are hidden by it.
There's much less value in positions that used to be profitable, especially 4+ (right-hand side ads).
Seeing similar in home-services. Plumbing, electrical, etc.. have steadily risen over the last few years. We have highly optimized ads pointing to highly optimized sites (better than 30% conversion to phone calls). In the end we're rapidly being priced out.
We saw it coming, thankfully, and have been moving to a broader advertising strategy which is working well.
I use encrypted folders on my laptops for sensitive stuff. I auto log into single user mode just for this risk. My ssh server inits on startup, and my webserver mails me whenever my daily crons run with the current IP included.
Thanks for the comment. Well, it's an experiment for now. I asked few HRs, and their reaction was positive ( of course this doesn't have to mean anything ).
Beside emails, I think to offer blogs as well, something like john.besthi.re so we will see how it will go.
Some business models only work at scale. Scale can be users, data, traffic, partnerships, distribution or a variety of things.
This is a bet that Foursquare will find a business model as they become the location service everything builds on, or something else, that only works at scale.
In the scheme of private equity financings, this is a rather small deal and makes perfect sense for Foursquare.
And in fact, buying equipment is one of the worst things to do with cash. If you have the cash, then you should leverage that to finance or lease the equipment. :-)
My issue with this is that history teaches us that you don't need big money to reach scale, you only need the cash to support scaling up from a technical POV. Look at FB early days, Twitter, etc.
Unless they're going to pay users to join them, I don't see how raising so much money is going to solve their problems.
Your examples are not just wrong, but the opposite is true. Twitter and FB needed crazy cash early on, and twitter still might. FB has a business model now, but they didn't for a long time. But they went from low millions to nearly a billion "over night" long after they had spent hundreds of millions of dollars.
Twitter is just now building a revenue business but has raised nearly a billion dollars.
Google is a decent exception to that rule, but only because they turned their revenue engine on just in time and it was an oil well of cash. Otherwise they would have had major cash issues as they scaled their infrastructure.
If you are available maybe we can do something together in Turkey. We will be very happy to get customers there and our product works perfectly for the type of customers you're describing (small and mid-size, shitty tech solution to manage their property, tech-savyy employees)
For us "launch" means the date that we can start charging money for our product.
We did the part of telling our friends/family when we had the closed beta ready, but there is a big difference for us between the closed (free) beta and an open beta that can accept paying customers.
For technical reasons. We're waiting for a deal with a strategic partner to close, we can't technically start charging money or distribute our app before that.
Can't go into specific at this stage but imagine we're building an iOS app and waiting for Apple to approve it (not our case but close enough)
I was going to suggest the same thing. Something like this combined with the Occulus Rift would be very entertaining and a step towards the idea of the Oasis. Not all the way through the book, but so far a great read and the technology described seems doable (for the most part).
We are a small team based out of Barcelona, Spain.
This tool is a public beta for our cloud-based hotel management software. We're trying to help the long tail of hotels to better manage their properties at lower cost.
The tool is built on Django for backend and Backbone.js/Bootstrap for frontend.
Upgraded the day it was released, last few days I feel that you could cook an egg on my MBP after 2 hours of working (nothing fancy, IDE and browsers open - no heavy GPU usage). Do more people feel that 10.8.x overheats the machine?
This has been a huge issue on my mid-2010 MBP and others have reported the same on Apple forums. My MBP has been overheating, throwing up artifacts all over the screen and freezing requiring a hard reboot. So far so good though... fingers crossed.
I posted something a while back with a crazy idea for Google - charge me $5/month for Search and remove all ads/your products unless I opt-in.