The big problem with Facebook is that their business isn't defensible in the long term. There have been lots of other social networks come along in the past (AOL, classmates, Friendster, Myspace). The prior ones are all in shambles now, that people have moved on to a new place.
I don't see why another network can't come along in a year or two, and start stealing away visitors from them.
Compare a few publicly traded companies in the range of 50 to 70 billion dollars market cap (all seem to have a pretty strong 'durable competitive advantage', as Warren Buffett notes):
Comcast (63B) - millions of subscribers for phone, internet, and cable services, paying money every month for services.
Amex (55B) - receives a chunk of every payment that their millions of card holders make. Card is accepted at stores and websites around the world.
3M (62B) - sell 20+ billion dollars of "diversified technology" products a year.
When I first heard the Airbnb idea - I was really skeptical. This is one of the cases where the actual implementation of the idea turned out better than the pure idea itself.
I've booked a couple of places through the site when I was traveling in California, and the result in both places was better than I would have expected.
I definitely have no problem paying for a good browser app, if it helps me:
1. do my work faster
2. give me a competitive advantage in my business
3. provide a higher level of service to my few clients
I'm not sure I would specifically pay for an extension to analyze social data. I'd have to see the end results first, and evaluate it based on that.
In terms of pricing, don't limit yourself at the $1 to $3 app level. Evaluate the pricing based on the value provided to the customer. If it helps your customer earn $10,000 more over the course of a year, there's nothing wrong with charging $100 for it, or more.
For the customers not bothered by the transaction cost - there's not much different between $1 and $30 or more.
I'm pretty content with hostway. They have one of the lowest prices for domain names, and have a decent interface. They also don't try to upsell any of their other services when you are going through checkout.
I would stay away from 1and1. They have some pretty sketchy billing practices.
I think culture plays a big role. When I was in China for a while, it seemed like the government wants to build a Chinese copy of other things. Whatever technology exists elsewhere, they seem to want to have their own version of it that's Chinese.
Philippines is another country with a lot of smart people, but I don't feel that the people in power there really have a building culture. Even with their last round of elections, they bought their voting machines from a Venezuelan.
If technology and startups really are in the culture of a country, there are lots of opportunities everywhere, to try and make a difference.
I guess it's better if things can come from the top down, like in the case of China - to jump start things a bit.
The other thing, with Nigeria. It's economy has been growing steadily over the past decade. But, it seems to be primarily driven by foreign oil companies.
Is there any room for doing start ups related to this? Oil exploration definitely requires a lot of capital. It would be hard to imagine what kinds of contributions a lowly Nigerian hacker could make in this area.
Lastly, I know that India benefited quite a bit by having a large community of overseas Indians. People who came to USA for school, and later stayed on and worked here after graduating. As I understand it, these people provided some of the key contacts as the outsourcing boon started.
This is a CEO of a company that wants to get a product out the door. Sometimes that's not easy. He's basically using the tools at his disposal. It sounds like he's given his team a year, and they still haven't delivered. An email like this can sometimes shake out the non-performing team members and lead them to quit. In a company with 7,600 employees - I'm pretty sure not every one is a star performer.
Anyways, I've worked for a CTO who basically was a raving lunatic. Every couple of months there would be some kind of a blow up. But, looking back, we also did some amazing work under him, and created a cutting edge service still used 6 years later.
I don't see why another network can't come along in a year or two, and start stealing away visitors from them.
Compare a few publicly traded companies in the range of 50 to 70 billion dollars market cap (all seem to have a pretty strong 'durable competitive advantage', as Warren Buffett notes):
Comcast (63B) - millions of subscribers for phone, internet, and cable services, paying money every month for services.
Amex (55B) - receives a chunk of every payment that their millions of card holders make. Card is accepted at stores and websites around the world.
3M (62B) - sell 20+ billion dollars of "diversified technology" products a year.