Jeff Stibel's Blog, page 4
February 28, 2014
The Most Important Decision You Need To Make When Building A Network – Interview with Jeff Stibel
Lane Wood was about to turn 30, and he was in a full-on identity crisis. He had recently left charity: water where he worked directly with the founder, Scott Harrison, and A-list celebrities to bring clean drinking water across the planet.
It had been an amazing, life-changing experience; especially for a former pastor from rural Oklahoma.
However, on a winter night in 2011 at a Union Square cafe in New York City, he confided in a close friend and nervously wondered, “What happens when my email doesn’t end in charitywater.org? Have I built real relationships or have I just increased my social media follower number?”
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Which relationships do we deepen, and which ones do we let fizzle or never form?
…
For Jeff Stibel, a 40-year-old brain scientist, the Chairman and CEO of Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp., and the author of Breakpoint, the answer lies in other types of networks that share similar properties.
In Jeff’s words, “The goods news is that we can look to biology and biological networks such as ants, bees, and even termites to tell us what happens in networks as a whole. We can see that there are very consistent, predictable cycles. Those cycles drive not just biological networks but business networks, economic networks, and social networks.”
Read the whole article on Forbes where it originally appeared.
The post The Most Important Decision You Need To Make When Building A Network – Interview with Jeff Stibel appeared first on Breakpoint Book.
February 24, 2014
The Logic Behind Facebook’s Recent Moves – By Jeff Stibel
Recently, two Princeton graduate students released a study predicting the demise of Facebook by 2017, using concepts from epidemiology. No quicker had the media reported the results of the study than numerous rebuttals were posted. A few Facebook data scientists had great fun by posting their analyses showing that Princeton University would run out of students by 2021 and that the Earth would run out of air by 2060.
Read the whole article where is originally appeared.
The post The Logic Behind Facebook’s Recent Moves – By Jeff Stibel appeared first on Breakpoint Book.
February 13, 2014
Is Twitter in Trouble? – By Jeff Stibel
Last week, Twitter’s stock took a big tumble after it released its first quarterly earnings report. The report showed that revenue is up (and better than expected), but user growth is slowing and engagement is down. Declining user growth is not an issue in itself, and actually can be a great thing for a network (in fact, I wrote a whole book on this topic). Lack of engagement, on the other hand, is something different.
Read the whole article where it originally appeared.
Image Credit:Matt Hamm, Flickr
The post Is Twitter in Trouble? – By Jeff Stibel appeared first on Breakpoint Book.
February 5, 2014
Google Is Already in Our Nests – By Jeff Stibel
Last month, Google bought Nest Labs, a company that makes smart home thermostats and smoke detectors. While a few applauded the acquisition (mostly geeks and tech investors), much of the reporting centered on privacy fears and predictions of doomsday advertising scenarios. It’s just the latest story exploiting our collective fear of the growing “internet of things” and distrust of the companies who leverage it.
Read the whole article where it originally appeared.
Photo Credit:plantronicsgermany, Flickr
The post Google Is Already in Our Nests – By Jeff Stibel appeared first on Breakpoint Book.
January 30, 2014
Hidden Dangers: Business Identity Theft & Other Types of Business Fraud | By Jeff Stibel
We tend to hear quite a bit about credit card fraud and stolen identities. The issue was again brought to the nation’s attention at the end of last year, when hackers sent a virus which infected the point-of-sale terminals at Target, capturing credit and debit card numbers and corresponding PIN data. The hackers also broke into the retail giant’s databases to steal customer information including names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses. Officials currently estimate that 40 million credit and debit cards as well as the personal information from 70 million additional customers were compromised, making it the largest such hack in history.
Read the whole article where it originally appeared.
Photo Credit:Wonderlane, Flickr
The post Hidden Dangers: Business Identity Theft & Other Types of Business Fraud | By Jeff Stibel appeared first on Breakpoint Book.
January 27, 2014
The Future of Facebook and the Internet | Interview with Jeff Stibel
Breakpoint author Jeff Stibel speaks with Rick Van Cise of KOMO radio about the how the world’s largest social network, Facebook, can take proactive measures to reach equilibrium after its breakpoint instead of following the likes of Friendster and Myspace into obscurity.
Furthermore, he notes that though the internet is not going anywhere, how we access and use it will. Our relationship with the internet has already begun to change, thanks largely to the popularity of apps, and will only continue to as technology progresses.
http://breakpointbook.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Facebook-future-invw.mp3
For reference, How Facebook Can Avoid a Slow, Painful Death is the Wired article mentioned during the interview.
The post The Future of Facebook and the Internet | Interview with Jeff Stibel appeared first on Breakpoint Book.
January 23, 2014
When Teams Prevent Greatness – By Jeff Stibel
Our society reveres individual greatness. We root for the Kobe Bryants and Peyton Mannings of the world, we are mesmerized by the likes of Meryl Streep and Steven Spielberg, we follow every move made by Warren Buffet and Elon Musk. Individuals have a special place in our world, and we attribute much of society’s success to unique people—Einstein, Newton, Da Vinci, Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr.—instead of the teams and movements behind them. It goes without saying that there is often an army of people that drive an individual to success. But individuals, acting alone, can do extraordinary things.
Read the whole article where it originally appeared.
The post When Teams Prevent Greatness – By Jeff Stibel appeared first on Breakpoint Book.
January 10, 2014
This Is The Best Way To Process Failure
After you fail, sometimes it helps to read the writing on the wall.
That’s what Jeff Stibel, chairman and CEO of Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corporation — a California company not affiliated with the more famous Dun & Bradstreet on the East Coast — came to realize.
About two years ago, Stibel and his assistant snuck into the office at night and created what they called a Failure Wall. The point was to…Read the full article on Business Insider where it originally appeared.
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December 11, 2013
Two Years of Failure – by Jeff Stibel
A little over two years ago, my assistant and I snuck into the office after hours and painted quotes of famous people’s thoughts about failure, from Winston Churchill (“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm”) to Sofia Loren (“Mistakes are part of the dues one pays for a full life”). After my assistant left, I took a Sharpie marker and wrote some of my most humbling failures on the wall.
The wall was met with a mixture of excitement and apprehension, both by employees and by the press who quickly caught wind of it. Over time, employees, partners, even family members came by to add their remarks until the wall was littered with failures. It was received favorably by…
Read the full article where it originally appeared on LinkedIn.
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November 25, 2013
The boom in the money hunt for start-up capital, by Jeff Stibel – Excerpt from CNBC
Entrepreneurs, by definition, are passionate about the new product or service that they’re working to bring to market. Nothing is more threatening to that passion than the realities of financing a business. And the truth is, financing is both the No. 1 thing entrepreneurs worry about and the last thing they should be worrying about. Their main focus should be growing their business and providing the best possible product. Of course, capital is a necessary evil.
In conjunction with Pepperdine University, my company just released the Pepperdine Private Capital Access Index, Fourth Quarter 2013 study, which showed that there has been a 5 percent rise…
Read the whole article on CNBC where it originally appeared.
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