Slide makes fun little widgets. They recently did a round of investment raising $50 million at a $500 million valuation. Max says that they will make money from these applications through selling advertising and direct to consumer sales. Max just returned from Asia where he sees virtual goods selling in the billions of dollars.

Max says that the widgets Slide makes are very engaging. They engage users in a way like Television and in some cases even more deeply. He describes how Juno the movie used Slide’s Super Poke application to do a Pregnancy Test action that 370,000 people voluntarily used the action.

Max describes how they are obsessed with collecting and analyzing data. Charlene asks about privacy. Max describes how their data analysis from the user level up. They aggregate the users into segments of like activities. However, they don’t know the user id or email because that’s not provided by the social networks that host their applications.

Charlene asks about the risks from the social network hosts. Max describes how once consumer finds something they like and actively seek it out. He uses the Adobe /MS to show how if you focus on something that is of real value, with lock in you have a protectable business.

What about application spam? Stop throwing sheep at me. Max says that this is one of the most challenging issues. The power of these networks is the ability to spread things at an incredible rate and the temptation to expand is quite strong.

He says that the spam problem breaks into to different types of problems. The first is, abusive users who spam people. That part will get handled as other abusive activity gets handled. The harder part is the genuine use by heavy users. It can be perceived as spam by light users. Max says they thing that the path ahead is giving the users control and filters to help them decide how they will participate.

What’s the secret sauce of success? Max’s first four startups failed, but the fifth did well and the Slide is the sixth. He says that one of the things he has learned is the importance of drive when hiring people. He says that the two things he watches are the number of people who embrace the applications world wide and the number of employees who will be millionaires on a IPO. He says that his one last piece of advice is from Winston Churchill – Never, never, never give up.

Here’s the video:

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