Tuesday, August 31, 2010

My Gmail Prayers Heard: Multiple Inboxes

Image representing Gmail as depicted in CrunchBaseImage via CrunchBasePeople kept saying, but you can already do that. You can set up filters and all. To that I said, Geocities allowed for a lot of what Blogger allows for, but you needed a Blogger to come along. Simplification gets in the crowds. Your average user wants multiple inboxes, not complex filters that you have to keep tweaking like you were some kind of a software programmer.

Real Time Search: Where Google Can "Get" Social
Reimagining The Inbox The Simple Way

And now we have it. It is here. Multiple inboxes are here in Gmail. This is my idea of Google "getting" social. Before this the inbox had become scary to many people. Now the inbox is back with a vengeance. Email is the original social application.

The Official Gmail Blog: Email Overload? Try Priority Inbox

At this rate I am going to be sitting on the Google Board some day. I'd love to.


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Monday, August 30, 2010

FoodSpotting Is The Next FourSquare


I am very proud of this blog post of mine: Fractals: Apple, Windows 95, Netscape, Google, Facebook, Twitter. It is one of my popular posts. It keeps getting page hits from showing up on search results.

What I missed out on was FourSquare. I erred in thinking Google Wave was the next big thing after Twitter. (Whatever Happened To Google Wave?, Craig Newmark, Dennis Crowley, Jennifer 8 Lee: Koreatown)

I was there in the hall when FourSquare presented at the NY Tech MeetUp, and I totally did not see the promise that day. The idea of checking in felt just so lame. And over time I have realized that checking in is so fundamental to the mobile web.

I was not the first person to say FourSquare is the next Twitter.

I erred again in thinking maybe Venmo is the next big thing after FourSquare. (Could 2011 Be Venmo's Year?)

I have not done a background check on this yet, and maybe someone else has said it already, but I am today saying it loud and clear, I think FoodSpotting is the next FourSquare. (Soraya Darabi)

Calling FoodSpotting the next FourSquare totally fits into my original fractals talk. The math just feels right. FoodSpotting has hinted at going into other verticals as well, and I can't wait to see what those might be.

I think I am one of the very first to state it so very explicitly, although others have said FoodSpotting is like FourSquare. There is a check in feel to how the app works.

Tweet 1
Tweet 2


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Sunday, August 29, 2010

Mike Arrington Is A Sexist Pig: Say PeeeeG!

SUNNYVALE, CA - APRIL 27:  Yahoo! CEO Carol Ba...Image by Getty Images via @daylifeThe father of Quantum Mechanics Max Planck said once, people don't change their ideas, they die with them. When I think of Mike Arrington of TechCrunch and gender relations, I get reminded of that Max Planck quote. This guy will never "get" it. That's the impression I get. Like Hillary says in her autobiography, how her father was still homophobic all the way to his deathbed. Gays are just wrong. I feel sorry for Mike Arrington. This guy is missing the forest, he is missing the trees. Those who manage to cross over get to experience the richness that women bring to work and to organizations and to excellence that the sexist pigs miss out on. It is like they are color blind or something. They just can't see. It is almost biological. It is as if Mike Arrington was born with a tail and there is no surgery for it.

When Mike Arrington humiliated the female CEO of Yahoo on a public stage in New York City a few months back, I literally cringed. Sexism is the only word that describes the experience. The Yahoo CEO is older, much more accomplished, she is a role model to women. There are so few women CEOs out there that you become a role model whether or not you want to, and Carol Bartz strikes me as someone who really does not want to. But what you gonna do? You are a woman. So put on the pin. You are a role model now.

Months before that Mike Arrington hounded Anu Shukla who has been a trailblazer. Some of her cutting edge company's work is equivalent to the ongoing click fraud with Google's AdWords, but that does not change the fact that Google's money minting machine is a revolutionary product. (Anu Shukla Has Found The New Frontier In Advertising)

Mike Arrington is dripping with sexism.

And I actually like the fact that the guy is the founder of the top tech blog in the world. That tells me the only reason at least half of the excellent work done out there has not been done by women is sexism. I dig it that this dude's product is so very visible. On a non sexist planet, the founder of TechCrunch would have been some Maya Arrington.

Sexism is like communism, it is like Islamofascism, it is an ideology, it is a worldview. And Mike Arrington is dripping with it.

Tech, Women, Diversity
Mike Arrington: Too Few Women In Tech? Stop Blaming The Men.
Fred Wilson: Women In Tech and Women Entrepreneurs Discussion
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Finally TechCrunch "Gets" Disqus

Image representing IntenseDebate as depicted i...Image via CrunchBaseI just noticed that now TechCrunch has Disqus served up in its comments sections. At first it had the in house thing. Then they had IntenseDebate, then they went back to the in-house thing, and now finally they got Disqus. This "outsourcing" is a smart move. Now I am much more likely to read more TechCrunch articles and to comment on them and to share my comments over Twitter.

Mashable has always had Disqus. My blog has Disqus.

Smart move, TechCrunch. Let us all welcome the latecomer.

On Disqus And Disqussions
Content, Microcontent, Blogging, Microblogging
Real Time Search: Where Google Can "Get" Social
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Saturday, August 28, 2010

Real Time Search: Where Google Can "Get" Social


Google has heard my prayers. Recently I blogged saying Google does not need social envy, what it needs is a really good blog search engine, and super Twitter results. (A Ridiculously Good Blog Search Engine, Google Does Not Need Social Envy) And Google has delivered. It is work in progress, but it is a good start.

I love Google the way some people love Apple. Google gives me goose bumps. Google gives me that you ain't seen nothing yet feeling.
Official Google Blog: Google Realtime Search: A New Home With New Tools: giving real-time information its own home and more powerful tools ...... www.google.com/realtime .... you can use geographic refinements to find updates and news near you, or in a region you specify. ..... we’ve added a conversations view, making it easy to follow a discussion on the real-time web. Often a single tweet sparks a larger conversation of re-tweets and other replies, but to put it together you have to click through a bunch of links and figure it out yourself. With the new “full conversation” feature, you can browse the entire conversation in a single glance.


Google has done what I asked Twitter to do: to offer tweets as conversations, threads like in Gmail. (Towards Threaded Conversations On Twitter)
Blogger Buzz: Improvements To Realtime Search: The blogosphere is a dynamic environment that changes almost as quickly as the world that we live in..... richer and fresher results than ever before.... search live updates, recently-published blog posts, and news from around the web in brand new ways. Now you can restrict your search to include just updates from a specific geographic region or just nearby you. You can also check out complete conversations from Twitter. You can also now set up custom alerts for Realtime updates to be sent directly to your inbox once a day or week, or as soon as they happen for instant blog post fodder.
Google still has a lot of work to do in terms of presenting results. You can't expect people to read every tweet. You want to give them the option to read thousands, perhaps millions of tweets at once. It is called visualization. Make it fun to dig through the Twitter archives. (Twitter Visualization: Reading Many Tweets At Once)
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Friday, August 27, 2010

Paying For Phone Calls Was Always Ridiculous

This is icon for social networking website. Th...Image via Wikipedia
David Pogue: New York Times: Google Shakes It Up Again With Free Phone Calls: Google .. shook up Web searching and advertising. It shook up free, Web-based e-mail services .... shook up the way companies go public. .... Calls to American and Canadian phone numbers are free ..... Calls to other countries are very cheap ...... If you have a free Google Voice account too, then you can get incoming calls, too. ..... it’s increasingly clear that one day, the Internet, not the outrageous cellphone companies, will connect our calls. The ultimate, of course, would be free calls from a phone, to a phone ...... even closer to the “free calls from a phone, to a phone” ideal. Now it’s free calls “from a computer, to a phone.” .... What if Google released an app like that for Android phones, or the iPhone? .... for the first time in history, make unlimited free phone-to-phone calls.... It would completely change the game .... the Internet-as-phone-company paradise that almost certainly awaits us.
Paying for phone calls was always ridiculous. And it still is. Now that we have computer to phone free calls, Google should go ahead and stop pretending, and I know it already has the technology. Get this ported to the smartphones, and we already have it.

The reason you should not call someone or not talk to them long is because you don't have time, not because you don't have money.

Google Voice Blog: Make And Receive Calls In Gmail

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Sunday, August 22, 2010

I Was In Chicago? Facebook Places Messing Up


I wanted to set the record straight. I have not been in Chicago this past day. I have been happily camped out in New York City. Although there is a check in on my behalf that shows I was in Chicago. I think I just got my personal introduction to Facebook places.

Dennis Crowley, Facebook, And The Location Ecosystem
Facebook Doing Location Is Like Google Doing Social, Almost
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Dennis Crowley, Facebook, And The Location Ecosystem

Image representing Dennis Crowley as depicted ...Image via CrunchBase
TechCrunch: Foursquare’s Crowley: The Giants Are “Generic,” We Are Fun. I Wonder Who He’s Referring To…: Crowley discussed the opportunity for places, outlined his plan for the next iteration of Foursquare and knocked Google for its social awkwardness. .... Crowley’s painting the picture of Facebook as a generic-borderline-boring service, versus Foursquare, the hip, edgy, playful alternative .... Facebook is so huge (500 million large versus Foursquare’s 2.8 million) that its check-in service has to be simple and minimal to accommodate such a huge and diverse group— anything too quirky or outlandish runs the risk of alienating factions. While Foursquare cannot dream to compete with Facebook’s installed base, the startup can certainly differentiate itself by offering a creative, more dynamic product that is less utilitarian and more personality-driven ...... he does believe that Facebook has a major role to play in the location ecosystem. Facebook can aggregate check-ins from different services and introduce new users (millions upon millions of them) to the world of check-ins. Thus, if Facebook stays in its corner, the relationship could be a very symbiotic one for Foursquare, which saw a record number of sign-ups on Thursday. ...... when it comes to creating the most engaging, valuable location experience, Crowley is ready for a fight. ..... We’ve been thinking for awhile, what’s act two for us? And act two is OK let’s take all this information about what people are doing, what people want to do, and let’s build this back into the app in a way that’s manageable for people and easy to share.” ..... Our social graph is more representative of the people that you meet in the real world ..... Facebook is literally everyone I’ve ever shaken hands with at a conference or kissed on the cheek at Easter. Twitter seems to be everyone I am entertained by or I wish to meet some day. Foursquare seems to be everyone I run into on a regular basis.



Not surprisingly, Dennis Crowley is on the spot on Facebook's entry into his space. He is not threatened. He should not be. Instead he seems all set to ride the Facebook wave.

Facebook Doing Location Is Like Google Doing Social, Almost
This Is Not Happening: King Dennis

I might be one of the first to talk publicly in terms of a FourSquare IPO. I am a fan of the company. When FourSquare goes IPO in a few years, New York City will have finally arrived on the tech scene. You don't get credit for other forms of exits, not in my book, not for a city this big and glamorous.

If search is the starting point of your big screen web experience, and I love Google like some people love Apple, then Google is your company. For many people social is that experience.

The thing is FourSquare is not a big screen web company. Location is such an obvious starting point when you are out and about that the simple nugget is a genius idea. I almost feel stupid saying that. Because, I mean, what is so revolutionary about location? There have been places since times immemorial. There are so many places mentioned in the Bible, for example. Jesus was checking in.

You could argue there is only re-invention, there is no invention. Einstein was not the first to ponder about time, but it is like he added a whole new dimension to the world of physics. Suddenly we started thinking about time just like we had been thinking about space.

(Sweet disclaimer: I have never thought of Dennis (@dens) and Naveen (@naveen) as Einsteins. They are both smart guys, but genius is a whole different ballgame.)

Dennis is a born entrepreneur. How do you know that? You just have to look at his hair. The same applies to his Michael Jackson co-founder.

How My Grandfather Became Mayor The First Time


In The News

New York Times: Roommates Who Click:theirs was a match made on URoomSurf.com, a Web site that does for dormitory life what eHarmony and Match.com have long done for romance .... “My sister woke up her first night of college and drunk people were poking her, asking where her roommate was.... “The ones who choose their own roommate tend to stay together

BBC: Swedish Rape Warrant For Wikileaks' Assange Cancelled: Mr Assange, said the appearance of the allegations "at this moment is deeply disturbing"..... The current whereabouts of Mr Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, are unclear.... there were two separate allegations against Mr Assange, one of rape and the other of molestation

New York Times: Facebook Feels Unfriendly Toward Film It Inspired: the filmmakers, who portray Facebook as founded on a series of betrayals, then fueled by the unappeasable craving of almost everyone for “friends” — the Facebook term for those who connect on its online pages — that they will never really have..... “It’s crazy because all of a sudden Mark becomes this person who created Facebook to get girls or to gain power,” said Chris Hughes, a Facebook co-founder who left in 2007 to join the Obama presidential campaign. “That’s not what was going on. It was a little more boring and quotidian than that.” .... “it’s a sign of Facebook’s impact that we’re the subject of a movie — even one that’s fiction.” .... Ben Mezrich’s book, “The Accidental Billionaires,” and on the legal protection provided to free speech .... “The Social Network” appears to be mostly about emptiness.... much of the film, including many of the details of Mr. Zuckerberg’s personal life, are made up and “horrifically unfair.”

TechCrunch: Facebook Kept Thousands Of Check-Ins On Lockdown For Months. Impressive
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Saturday, August 21, 2010

Esther Dyson On The Future Of Search

Esther's been a member of our board for some t...Image via WikipediaProject Syndicate: Esther Dyson: The Future Of Internet Search
You don't get what you actually want to finish your task; you get a list of pages that might lead you to it. ..... search is getting interesting again. ..... Larry Page’s innovative ranking of Web pages not just by their content, but also by the quantity and quality of other pages that link to them ...... To “map” travel properly, the software needs to understand such things as time zones, flight duration, layovers, and the like, along with concepts such as coach or first class, deluxe and standard rooms, double vs. single, and so on. That is why there is a whole separate vertical market for travel ..... For a long time Google didn’t need to do much to remain the leader in Internet search ..... Medstory has a deep understanding of health care, including the relationships between diseases and treatments, drugs and symptoms, and side effects. Powerset, a tool for creating and defining such relationships in any sphere of interest, is broader but less deep. ..... around that time, Bill Gates uttered one of the smartest things he has ever said: “The future of search is verbs.” ..... They want to book a flight, reserve a table, buy a product, cure a hangover, take a class, fix a leak, resolve an argument, or occasionally find a person ..... Most resellers, a little nervous about Bing’s tool that sends users to book directly with airlines and hotels, are even more concerned about what Google might be up to. ..... last month, Google acquired Metaweb and its user-generated database Freebase. .....Most things don’t exist in isolation. They have complex relationships to other things, and by representing that information using verbs – for example, “the company that Google acquired” vs. “the company that Google competes with” – we can represent the world more accurately.
Here is Esther Dyson getting excited about Google's recent acquisition of Metaweb. Esther is the most famous person I have had the chance to meet at the NY Tech MeetUp. I find her tremendously exciting as a person. She is one of those visionary types. And she is such a simple, approachable person.

Google's Metaweb Acquisition
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Wednesday, August 18, 2010

The Web Not Yet Ready For The Video Format

LAS VEGAS - JANUARY 07:  An image of football ...Image by Getty Images via @daylife
Los Angeles Times: Google TV Plan Is Causing Jitters In Hollywood: Many worry that Silicon Valley will upend the entertainment industry just like the Internet ravaged the music and newspaper industries. .... Google revolutionized the way people access information. Now it wants to transform how people get entertainment. .... enabling viewers to watch TV shows and movies unshackled from the broadcast networks or cable channels on which they air ....entertainment industry executives fear Google TV will encourage consumers to ditch their $70 monthly cable and satellite subscriptions in favor of watching video free via the Internet. ... Google doesn't yet know how it will make money on Google TV ....for the movie studios and television networks to use the limitless storage capacity of the Web to make their libraries of programs available whenever someone wants to watch .... Google touted the software as presenting a new opportunity to make more money from TV shows distributed online.... In demonstrations with network executives, Google TV confused one network's shows for a rival's. On another occasion, it listed the several ways a popular prime-time show could be watched online and on TV — except on the network's own website.

It's not just business models that seem to be struggling. The very first bottleneck is speed. Even with broadband it takes several seconds to load a static webpage. That is too slow. We need speeds that are 100X, perhaps 1000X.

There has been immense downward pressure on the prices of hardware and software. Software has become free for the most part. Hardware prices have come down drastically. But the ISP busines is so archaic, there the prices have been sticky. Capitalism is dysfunctional in the ISP business. Speeds don't go up, prices stay where they are. That is some major dysfunction.

I urge my president to please look into this.

Hulu Still Struggling With Business Model
Saavn's Great Business Model For Movies

In The News

1Up: Google Shows The Future Of Browser Games
TechCrunch: Chrome Web Store Slated For October Launch, Google Taking A Mere 5% Cut Of Revenue:developers now have a strong incentive to develop and promote the web versions of their applications over their native counterparts
TechCrunch: Confirmed: Facebook Rolling Out A New Slimmer, Sexier Like Button


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Tuesday, August 17, 2010

The Web Lifestyle And Company Cultures

Image representing Mark Zuckerberg as depicted...Image via CrunchBaseThese three articles below are great reads on the web lifestyle and the company cultures of Google and Facebook.
BBC: Cult Of Less: Living Out Of A Hard Drive: Chris Yurista, a Washington, DC resident who lives out of a backpack, claims digital technology has replaced the need for his home and his possessions ..... Mr Sutton sold or gave away most of his assets, apart from his iPad, Kindle, laptop and a few other items ..... a "few" articles of clothing and bed sheets for a mattress that was left in his newly rented apartment. ..... credits his external hard drives and online services like iTunes, Hulu, Flickr, Facebook, Skype and Google Maps for allowing him to lead a minimalist life. ..... the internet has replaced my need for an address ...... Yurista has taken to the streets with a backpack full of designer clothing, a laptop, an external hard drive, a small piano keyboard and a bicycle - an armful of goods that totals over $3,000 (£1,890) in value ...... spends much of his time basking in the glow emanating from his Macbook, earns a significant income at his full-time job as a travel agent and believes his new life on the digital grid is less cluttered than his old life on the physical one. ...... he no longer has to worry about dusting, organising and cleaning his possessions ...... his new intangible goods can continue to live on indefinitely with little maintenance. ...... replaced his bed with friends' couches, paper bills with online banking ...... "you never know where you will sleep". ...... And like a house fire that rips through a family's prized possessions, when someone loses their digital goods to a computer crash, they can be devastated. ...... some people have gone as far as to threaten suicide over their lost digital possessions and data. ..... He says if a complete map of our brains was uploaded to a computer and a conscious, digital replica of ourselves was created, we could, in theory, continue to live forever on a hard drive along with our MP3s and e-books.
GigaOm: The Early Facebook Employee Exodus:Employees who leave are often emboldened by their work on such an influential and widely used product, and want to start their own companies. Others are burned out. Still others feel stifled by the company’s management structure......And just last week Ruchi Sanghvi, the company’s first female engineer who wrote the blog post announcing the then-radical Facebook news feed back in 2006 (and in doing so became the target of subsequent user outrage), left as well. ....... Others are getting engaged and married (sometimes to each other) and starting to have kids. They’re far removed from the early days of Facebook Proms ...... One frustration of early employees is that they’ve had limited upward mobility as Facebook has matured. With the exception of VP of Product Chris Cox, Mark Zuckerberg’s management team consists of outside hires, a good number of them from Google. ...... receiving avid investor interest in their new projects ..... Some leave to found startups that are related to Facebook, but aren’t priorities internally ..... examples of Facebook employees leaving to work at Google and Twitter ...... Facebook has chosen a distinctive method of regenerating the young startup mojo that it may be losing in this early employee exodus: buying young startups. ..... efreshes the company’s stable of 4-year stock option vesting cycles, along with delivering a fresh dose of entrepreneurial chutzpah.
GigaOm: Google Is From Mars and Facebook Is From Venus:The search company is like graduate school, filled with big brains working on complicated problems, while the social network doesn’t think as much about the deep implications of things; it just does them......Google is more technically focused, in that staffers there “value working on hard problems, and doing them right… things are often done because they are technically hard or impressive [and] on most projects, the engineers make the calls.” ....... when projects are undertaken at the search company, “the code is usually solid, and the systems are designed for scale from the very beginning. There are many experts around and review processes set up for systems designs.” ..... engineers and technical specs rule the day at Google ..... Zuck [CEO Mark Zuckerberg] spends a lot of time looking at product mocks, and is involved pretty deeply with the site’s look and feel
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A Ridiculously Good Blog Search Engine

Image representing Blogger as depicted in Crun...Image via CrunchBaseI have said Google does not need social envy, instead what it needs is a ridiculously good blog search engine and ridiculously good Twitter search results. (Google Does Not Need Social Envy) What would a ridiculously good blog search engine look like?

First, it can not look like the regular Google search engine. It has to be inherently a personal experience. I should not need a separate blogroll. The blog search engine should be so good at managing my blogroll, it should be that good.

Just like Gmail took the concept of email to a whole new level, the Google blog search engine should take the concept of a blogroll to a whole new level. Following blogs on Blogger is not it. Google Reader is not it. All three have to be integrated to offer a more seamless, much more beautiful of an experience.

Blogging is a social activity. Blogs are not just information. Perhaps Google should go ahead and buy Disqus and integrate it firmly into Blogger.

And there has to be an autosearch feature. The engine is constantly searching for blog posts on topics of interest to me and serving them in beautiful ways.

Good old search where you type in words into that blank box, that is so, well, Google. That is the starting point of the current Google blog search engine, and that is so bogus.
ReadWriteWeb: Google CEO Suggests You Change Your Name to Escape His Permanent Record:teenagers should be entitled to change their names upon reaching adulthood in order to separate themselves from the Google record of their youthful indiscretions ..... the dominance of search will give way to recommendation technology ..... requires a lot of targeting and artificial intelligence ..... the CEO of history's greatest privacy-killing machine.
Wall Street Journal: Google and the Search for the Future: Where once everything seemed to go the company's way, along came Apple's iPhone, launching a new wave of Web growth on a platform that largely bypassed the browser and Google's search box..... 200,000 Android smartphones were being activated daily ..... a doubling in just three months ...... coming soon is Chrome OS, which Google hopes will do in tablets and netbooks what Android is doing in smartphones, i.e., give Google a commanding share of the future and leave, in this case, Microsoft in the dust...... how to preserve Google's franchise in Web advertising, the source of almost all its profits, when "search" is outmoded..... more and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type ...... "The thing that makes newspapers so fundamentally fascinating—that serendipity—can be calculated now. We can actually produce it electronically" ..... "The power of individual targeting—the technology will be so good it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them." ..... "As you go from the search box [to the next phase of Google], you really want to go from syntax to semantics, from what you typed to what you meant. And that's basically the role of [Artificial Intelligence]. I think we will be the world leader in that for a long time." ...... the sheer impracticality of net neutrality on mobile networks where demand is likely to outstrip capacity for the foreseeable future. ..... make sure its every move is "good for consumers" and "fair" to competitors. ....... regulation is unnecessary because Google faces such strong incentives to treat its users right ...... Schmidt awards Facebook his highest accolade, calling it a "company of consequence." ..... Google captured the search wave and shows every sign of positioning itself successfully for the mobile wave. As for the waves after that, your guess may be as good as Mr. Schmidt's.
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Facebook Doing Location Is Like Google Doing Social, Almost

Facebook logoImage via WikipediaChecking in is not the starting point of your Facebook experience, and that is why Facebook is not a threat to FourSquare in the location space. If Facebook is smart, it will just help its users more closely integrate FourSquare into their Facebook experience. One thing I would like is to have the option to have a much greater control over who I share my check-ins with.

But chances are Facebook will try and offer a FourSquare substitute. I am looking at Twitter here. Facebook "learned" features from Twitter and FriendFeed. It outright bought FriendFeed. Buying FourSquare is not an option. Copying FourSquare is harder than copying Twitter.

This Is Not Happening: King Dennis

FourSquare is inherently a mobile web thing. You could add blogging features to my Gmail account, but Gmail is a different experience. You could argue Facebook has also thrived in the mobile web environment. But it started as a big screen web native. The mobile version is Facebook Lite. There is no FourSquare Lite. I have felt stupid every time I have visited the FourSquare homepage on the big screen web. It feels like sitting in a bus that is not moving.

I have no idea how Facebook will roll out location. It was inevitable that it was going to, but the details have not been obvious to me personally. It is because there is an inherent conflict in what I think Facebook should be doing in the location space, and what I suspect it might end up doing instead in that space. And so I have decided to just wait and watch.

Facebook could not have stayed away from the location space, but it has the option to do it right.

TechCrunch: As Facebook Location Looms, Has Foursquare Entered The Pantheon Of Services?: it seems highly likely the Facebook is going to take a platform approach to location. That is, they’re more likely to federate other location streams (such as Foursquare’s) while they themselves remain fairly cautious with their own location services..... Facebook likely has a deal in place with Localeze to build out a massive place database that they’ll then populate with all this data they’re federating and creating on their own.....I remember very well when it seemed like just about everything I read on the Internet said that Twitter was the dumbest service ever imagined and it would never go anywhere .....they run the risk of becoming the Friendster of location
AllThingsD: What Will Facebook Be Announcing Wednesday? Location, Location, Location!: Facebook will finally be rolling out its own geo-location offering .... a long time coming, as Facebook has noodled on how to incorporate the hot trend
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Monday, August 16, 2010

Hulu Still Struggling With Business Model

An evil plot to destroy the world. Enjoy! (Log...Image via Wikipedia
New York Times: Hulu Is Said to Be Ready for an I.P.O.: Hulu, the rapidly growing hub for online television and movies ..... the company currently makes little in the way of profit..... plans to add a $9.99-a-month subscription service soon alongside its core advertising-supported business ....rival video-streaming services like Netflix .... its three-year history .... Hulu aimed to be a counterweight to YouTube and other free video sites..... Demand Media, a publisher of articles and video based on search engine inquiries .... features content from most major TV networks .... Hulu’s powerful content providers have pushed the company to offer a more traditional subscription model, concerned that its ad-supported business is not generating enough revenue
Saavn's Great Business Model For Movies

There is something to be said of subscription models, but having to rely on them too much tells me there has not been as much innovation with business models as there has been with technology.

Hulu has attempted to be an answer to the wild west that is YouTube. Although there has been some convergence as YouTube has done a much better job lately of the platform being able to respect copyright, and letting content creators make some money.

Video use will only grow online. And hopefully business innovation will happen. But mind boggling business innovation has not happened yet. We are still in the early stages.

In The News

New York Times: Dell To Buy Data Storage Company For $1.15 Billion: 3Par
Telegraph: Adobe Chief Shantanu Narayen Believes He Doesn't Need Apple Or The iPad: Apple, the $223bn (£143bn) big-hitter that is the world's second largest company ..... Adobe chief executive Shantanu Narayen began his career at Apple ...... . It's the future of mobile that's at stake here ..... Adobe has cemented its role as a partner to other technology groups in recent years, working with 19 of the world's 20 top mobile phone handset companies, including Motorola, HTC, RIM, Hewlett-Packard WebOS and Google, to bring Flash Player to their mobile devices. ..... Some 23 of the top 25 European companies, as measured by Forbes magazine, use Adobe products, as do 23 of the top 25 global banks and all the top 10 European banking groups. ..... nothing to do with technology and everything to do with business models .... We're mission-critical to the companies we work with." ..... Adobe Systems was this year ranked in the InterBrand survey as one of the top 100 brands in the world for the first time. ..... He grew up in Hyderabad, India ..... he began his career at Apple, then worked as a director of desktop and collaboration products for Silicon Graphics, before co-founding Pictra, a company that pioneered the idea of digital photo-sharing over the internet. ..... his mission is to make Adobe critical to the products of all digital content providers, as technologies converge in the next stage of the internet. Steve Jobs wants that as well, of course. Watching this duo fight it out promises to be fascinating.
Boy Genius Report: Motorola DROID Pro, World Edition And Tablet All Found In Verizon Wireless Systems: Verizon Wireless is gearing up to launch a barrage of Android handsets and devices
VentureBeat: An Atom Bomb Aimed At Intel: Smooth-Stone Raises $48M For Low-Power ARM Server Chips: which consume small amounts of power....data center computers, where energy use has become the biggest expense..... “Our goal is to completely remove power consumption as an issue for the data center. Imagine that change for companies with a large presence on the Internet”
TechCrunch: VCs And Super Angels: The War For The Entrepreneur: Publicly everyone gets along just great...... the disruptive force of a new breed of angel investors ..... Pick the wrong investor and you’ve closed the door on others...... Until very recently there was an established pecking order with venture capitalists. ...... the rise of the cheap startup. ..... Often there’s no need to go past an angel round of funding until it’s time to decide between selling and doing a big marketing push. ..... These angels are fast and nimble and they are hanging out with the entrepreneurs at events, incubators, etc. They are in the fray, while many of the old VCs remain above it all, waiting for the entrepreneurs to come to them, hat in hand. ...... Y Combinator, which has spawned some 200 plus startups in just a few years, could be considered the king of this ecosystem ...... McClure has a $30 million fund. Dixon has a $50 million fund. .... it’s easier for a good idea to attract the cash it needs
TechCrunch: Wireless Is Not Different. You Can’t Be Half-Open:the future of the Internet, the wireless Internet....There is no such thing as being half-open (it’s like being half-pregnant)..... The broad principles should be the same: whenever possible, all bits should be treated equally ..... Google’s and Verizon’s proposed rules ... would prohibit broadband providers on the wired Internet (like DSL, cable, and fiber) from discriminating against any kind of “lawful” Internet content or application over another. They also would prohibit wired broadband providers from taking payments to deliver Internet traffic from one Website faster than anyone else’s. ...... One man’s prioritization is another man’s discrimination.....Net neutrality does not mean that everybody gets to download an unlimited amount of BitTorrent movies onto their cell phones. It simply means that all bits are treated equally, even when they are blocked.
GigaOm: Foursquare’s Future Slowly Takes Shape:Foursquare wants more folks to use its application-programming interface (API), and thus build an ecosystem around Foursquare’s data..... bring a cost-per-action business model to the real world, perhaps either supplanting or complementing traditional forms of advertising. ...... if there is a possibility of retail outlets, such as J.Crew, using Foursquare as a beacon for flash sales. ...... 21st century equivalent of loyalty rewards .... Adding a reward to checking-in turns the somewhat frivolous activity into something more valuable. ..... a growing number of startups that are trying to reinvent what is essentially the coupons business ..... Everyone from Yahoo to Google has viewed local advertising (long the preserve of newspapers and yellow pages) with lustful eyes, with little or no success. ..... By marrying geo-location to behavior targeting and adding commerce on top, one can finally start to see some answers
Fortune: Google's Motives For Abandoning Net Neutrality: Google underestimated the public's desire for true net neutrality over both wireless and wired services ..... Google's PR department, from people I've spoken to, seem to have been taken aback by the reactions. ..... Google has products in development that are going to need even more support, from all carriers. ..... AT&T (T), T-Mobile and Verizon's next generation networks are LTE, which doesn't carry voice separately like traditional 3G networks. The carriers are going to have to use data in the same way that Vonage or Skype currently do, over IP. Packet prioritization is a must in this case. ...... Google will soon be its own ISP as well. ...... So when Google's interests were only in data centers, it was completely beneficial to be net neutral. Now that Google is moving out of the data center into your house with devices and OSes and even wires, the priorities are realigned. It would be realistic to expect their stance on net neutrality to realign as well.

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