This week our start-up presented at TechCrunch Disrupt, a conference about how emerging technologies and bootstrapping start-ups are disrupting the media business. It was held at 570 Washington Street, a former Merrill Lynch data center in New York City's far West Village. The place was stodgy and off the beaten path, surrounded by warehouses and Holland Tunnel seediness. But the venue was somehow fitting and played a role key in an engaging experience. It had character and soul, and it stood out. That matters a lot in a successful conference. The whole experience got me thinking more about conference venues....

Largely as a result of Internet-driven disruption, the business cards that we use today at Simulmedia cost 1/10 as much as the cards that we used at Real Media in 1995, and they are better cards. As I look across the entire cost structure of operating Simulmedia, I find a number of similar examples of the Internet-driven economy driving down the cost of running a business. Here are a few:

The real battle for "TV" is raging. We saw the first major shot this past week with the announcements around Google TV.

I received a call the other day from an organization struggling with their public reputation. "We're just getting slammed," they said. "Bloggers are being mean to us. How can we make them stop?" My question was the obvious one: I wanted to know why the bloggers were being mean. "Well," came the answer, "they keep finding out about all the naughty things we do, and then they report on them.

Even discussing the concept of "career path" used to be a much more straightforward conversation, in general. For most of us, there's something very corporate, very "HR," in its root. Thinking about and planning for your career path was once more about formal processes for promotion, pay grades and check-ins with your managers over time. Yes, we all know that regimen has changed in the business world at large. But, within media, as we travel our own paths, if we stop and really take a look at how things play today -- wow, is it different.

For the most part, growing email adoption by businesses is a good thing. However, one unfortunate side effect is that email etiquette and spam compliance are falling through the cracks -- at the same time that overall volume is growing. I would like to remind everyone of four simple principles that all businesses should work very hard to follow.

This has not been a good week for building trust between Internet companies and public policymakers around the world. Both Google and Facebook are confronting crises around privacy that, if not handled properly -- and handled quickly -- could have devastating long-term impacts on how governments around the world regulate Internet companies.

In the "olden days" of the media business, TV referred to broadcast on network television. That expanded to include cable, and most recently it expanded even further to encompass online video when said video existed as an extension of network or cable programming on sites like Hulu. These days media buyers are looking at mobile video, digital out-of-home and numerous other aspects of video as extensions of "TV," so how do you plan accordingly? In the media business today there's a movement to just call it what it is: digital broadcast.

I have a DVR. I record every program I view regularly, so I can watch uninterrupted by commercials. If I want to see a show the same night it is on, I wait until at least 20 minutes of the program have passed before starting to watch, so that I can view it without interruption. This has been the case for a couple years for me, and most of my peers. So you can imagine my surprise when a story hit my news feed titled "Duke study: TiVo doesn't hurt TV advertising" My first thought was, "Maybe I'm the only …

During a recent session on demand-side platforms (DSPs) I found myself extending the concept of "velocity" in my own mind to address the marketer's holy grail of "engagement." In a world where we can avail ourselves of full-service data management, bidding, multivariate testing and optimization tool sets (and not just DSPs), we are able to strive for engagement with greater and reasonable expectations for more immediate gratification. I