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- July 2023
- Supplement
Honeycomb (B): Jumping on The Generative AI Bandwagon?
By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang and Kumba Sennaar
Honeycomb, an audio app enabling users to record stories and save family memories, considers pivoting to embrace generative AI. What should the co-founders business model look like if they pursued this new direction? View Details
- July 13, 2023
- Article
Threads Foreshadows a Big—and Surprising—Shift in Social Media
By: Scott Duke Kominers and Liang Wu
Threads, Meta’s Twitter competitor, has become the fastest downloaded app in history. One of the reasons for this is because it allows users to port over their profiles and follows from the already popular social media platform Instagram, also owned by Meta—a feature... View Details
- June 2023
- Case
ByteDance: TikTok and the Trials of Going Viral in 2023
By: William C. Kirby, Noah B. Truwit and John P. McHugh
In March 2023, Chew, with an army of well-paid U.S. lobbyists and TikTok creators, descended on Washington. In his testimony, he planned to highlight the 150 million daily active American users on TikTok and how the platform had benefitted small business owners and... View Details
- June 19, 2023
- Article
Should You Start a Generative AI Company?
Many entrepreneurs are considering starting companies that leverage the latest generative AI technology, but they must ask themselves whether they have what it takes to compete on increasingly commoditized foundational models, or whether they should instead... View Details
- April 2023 (Revised February 2024)
- Case
AI Wars
By: Andy Wu, Matt Higgins, Miaomiao Zhang and Hang Jiang
In February 2024, the world was looking to Google to see what the search giant and long-time putative technical leader in artificial intelligence (AI) would do to compete in the massively hyped technology of generative AI. Over a year ago, OpenAI released ChatGPT, a... View Details
- March 2023 (Revised June 2023)
- Case
Metaverse Wars
By: Andy Wu, David B. Yoffie and Matt Higgins
In 2023, the term metaverse — a combination of “meta” and “universe” — had become a catch-all for a diverse set of expectations about online virtual worlds and the future of the internet. To some, the metaverse conjured images of a massive participatory videogame... View Details
- February 2023 (Revised March 2023)
- Case
Hey, Insta & YouTube, Are You Watching TikTok?
In early 2023, the entertainment app TikTok reached close to 1 billion users globally, placing it 4th behind the leading social networks of Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. Featuring a sophisticated recommendation engine, TikTok mastered the art of keeping users... View Details
- January 2023 (Revised December 2023)
- Case
OhmConnect: Energizing the Future
By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Jennifer Fonstad and Nicole Tempest Keller
Founded in 2013, OhmConnect was a free consumer web app that alerted customers about peak hours of electricity demand, and paid them to lower their energy use at home during these periods. The company sold the aggregated reductions generated by thousands of households... View Details
Keywords: App Development; Renewable Energy; Electricity Usage; Regulations; VC; Technology; Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC); Scalability; Applications and Software; Growth and Development Strategy; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Business Model; Venture Capital; Energy Industry; United States; California; Texas; Europe
- January 2023
- Supplement
Apple: Privacy vs. Safety (B)
By: Henry McGee, Nien-hê Hsieh and Christian Godwin
In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe, Apple and Google partnered to develop a contact tracing application that would collect information about users infected with the disease and notify those who they had been in contact with. While Apple/Google’s... View Details
Keywords: Iphone; Encryption; Data Privacy; Customers; Customer Focus and Relationships; Decision Making; Ethics; Values and Beliefs; Globalized Firms and Management; Government and Politics; Health; Health Pandemics; Leadership; Markets; Safety; Social Issues; Information Technology; Telecommunications Industry; Technology Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Electronics Industry; Health Industry; United States; Europe
- January 2023 (Revised June 2023)
- Case
Replika: Embodying AI
By: Shikhar Ghosh, Shweta Bagai and Marilyn Morgan Westner
Replika was a virtual AI companion that provided a way for people to process their emotions, build connections in a safe environment, and get through periods of loneliness. The chatbot fulfilled a user's need for a friend, romantic partner, or purely an emotional... View Details
- January 2023
- Case
Proday: Calling the Right Play
By: Lindsay N. Hyde, Thomas R. Eisenmann and Tom Quinn
Sarah Kunst knew the elements of a successful startup from her tenure at venture capital firms. In April 2018, however, her own app – Proday, a home fitness platform featuring exercises filmed by professional sports stars – was floundering. Kunst theorized that... View Details
- November 2022 (Revised March 2024)
- Case
Replika AI: Monetizing a Chatbot
By: Julian De Freitas and Nicole Tempest Keller
In early 2018, Eugenia Kuyda, co-founder and CEO of San Francisco-based chatbot Replika AI, was deciding how to monetize the app she had built. Launched in 2017, Replika was a consumer AI “companion app” developed by a team of AI software engineers originally based in... View Details
- November 2022
- Case
Para: Pay Transparency and Gig Drivers' Rights
By: Christopher Stanton and George Gonzalez
The case presents the founding vision and early days of a young startup that seeks to empower delivery drivers with tools and transparency. The company's flagship mobile app has been taken up by tens of thousands of delivery drivers across major U.S. cities who use it... View Details
- April 2022
- Teaching Note
Banorte Móvil: Data-Driven Mobile Growth
By: Ayelet Israeli and Carla Larangeira
In mid-2019, Carlos Hank was deliberating over the results for Banorte Móvil—the mobile application for Banorte, Mexico’s most profitable and second-largest financial institution. Hank, who had been appointed as Banorte´s Chairman of the Board in January 2015, had... View Details
- March 2022 (Revised February 2023)
- Case
Pakistan Rising: Bazaar's Growth Story (A)
By: Paul A. Gompers and Gamze Yucaoglu
The case opens in September 2021 as Hamza Jawaid and Saad Jangda, co-founders of Bazaar technologies (Bazaar), the Pakistani high growth B2B e-commerce marketplace, are contemplating whether the year-and-a half old startup should also venture into offering financing to... View Details
- February 2022 (Revised February 2023)
- Case
TikTok in 2020: Super App or Supernova? (Abridged)
By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Dan Maher and Dan O'Brien
TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, was launched in 2012 around a simple idea—helping users entertain themselves on their smartphones while on the Beijing Subway. In less than a decade, it had become one of the world’s most valuable private companies, with investors... View Details
- 30 Nov 2021
- Interview
TikTok: Super App or Supernova?
By: Jeffrey F. Rayport and Brian Kenny
TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, was launched in 2012 around the simple idea of helping users entertain themselves on their smartphones while on the Beijing Subway. By May 2020, TikTok operated in 155 countries and had roughly 1 billion monthly active users, placing... View Details
- October 2021
- Case
(180) Days of Quibi
By: David J. Collis and Terrence Shu
Mobile streaming app Quibi was ready to take the entertainment world by storm at its April 2020 launch. Backed by $1.75 billion, influential investors from Hollywood to Wall Street eagerly anticipated early success for this brainchild of Meg Whitman, former CEO of... View Details
- October 2021 (Revised February 2023)
- Case
Ant Group (A)
By: Krishna G. Palepu, Feng Zhu, Susie L. Ma and Kerry Herman
In 2004, Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba created Alipay, an app to facilitate payments on its e-commerce sites. As Alibaba grew, so did Alipay, until Alipay spawned its own ecosystem of financial technology products and services under the name of Ant Group. By 2020,... View Details
- 2021
- Article
Don't Get It or Don't Spread It: Comparing Self-interested versus Prosocial Motivations for COVID-19 Prevention Behaviors
By: Jillian J. Jordan, Erez Yoeli and David Rand
COVID-19 prevention behaviors may be seen as self-interested or prosocial. Using American samples from MTurk and Prolific (total n = 6,850), we investigated which framing is more effective—and motivation is stronger—for fostering prevention behavior intentions. We... View Details