Information on the life insurance industry…

http://simongeo...googlepages.com

@Jaisen, I thought the same thing as well, however, without the “?”.

0. The only way Slide can generate revenue is advertising. Paid or freemium memberships will not work, or at best be a tiny fraction of the gross.

1. You cannot push ads to the user. Nobody is going to be happy to wake up and see that their “best friends” slide show had a “Norbit” background/border pushed on top of it. (No, you can’t solve this by targeting the user’s tastes. You only need to get it wrong once to piss off the user forever.)

2. Going from no. 2, users will have to pull the branded widgets themselves. There are a few problems with this. First, not everyone will do it if it’s opt-in. Remember Beacon? Second, Even those users that will download branded widgets will not update them in a timely fashion. If someone likes The Lord of the Rings, they will use that branding for a long time. Who cares it it’s not the current studio promotion. You could try to implement some sort of branding timeout and suggest alternatives (The Hobbit is coming out), but again, you risk annoying the user. Remember, this is supposed to be personalization.

3. Brand identification. I can see people wanting to brand their stuff with movies and cars, but those will be the bulk. Who is going to add Revlon lipstick to as their branding? Limited ad inventory.

4. Nobody will brand their slide shows with the new Ford Taurus, and marketing Ferraris to 16 year olds is a waste of money. Same thing with other luxury brands – high voluntary adoption, but limited value to the advertiser.

5. Limited market segment. I don’t know what the age breakdown of widget adoption is but I’m willing to bet the bulk of it is under 25. A lucrative market, but a limited one, especially considering the brand identification of this group is way out of their price range. (See #4)

Addendum:

I can see some value with pushing ads to widgets that have been branded with dynamic promotions. Consider music albums. If a user brands their widget with 50 Cents or some other (sigh) artist, than their new album, concert appearance dates, etc. can be pushed to the widget with very little annoyance. This is a very limited, but lucrative domain that Slide can specialize it. I’m afraid though that their high valuation will push them to want to be everything to everybody and not let them focus on their strengths.

Best of luck to them anyway. If Max cashes out big I will only get that sick feeling in my stomach if Slide is dumped on somebody without any revenue sources. If however they manage to make a profitable business out of this, my hat is off.

We’re launching a new personal body lubricating gel to compete with KY. And we’re going to call it…. Slide. Or Slide Lube if you prefer.

Over 6 billion people a year have sex. Of those approximately 33% are prone to “dry spells.” That is where our product comes into play. Imagine if you will that these 2 billion customers each are worth $6, that is only 20 cents more than a MySpace customer and we consider this to be very conservative. We instantly have created a $12B company.

But wait, there is more. Our market research has indicated that our Facebook and MySpace widget customers copulate 3x more frequently than married people. And because they typically do so while intoxicated they require even more of our “Slide” personal lubricant. Now you’re beginning to seeing how this all comes together. We’re brilliantly building and spreading our viral widgets to a market of customers which will use 3x more lubricant than our competitors target market.

Unfortunately there are risks. Just in the past few days MySpace announced some plans to keep some of our best potential customers, off their site. http://www.redh....com/Home/23460 We consider this just a small setback.

Also you heard it here on Tech Crunch first: we plan on providing each investor in our IPO with one free bottle of Slide Lube. We have a feeling you’re going to be needing it.

Respectfully,

Max L.