I would not consider myself a power user of Pinterest, but I do find the product really fascinating. And I’m really intrigued by how broad Pinterest usage is within my network – a lot of my friends from high school in Michigan and others who are not super active on Facebook or Twitter are very active on Pinterest. But you’ve read that before.

I’m particularly interested in where Pinterest goes as a business. When I first heard about and played with Pinterest, I really thought that the big opportunity was in affiliate referrals. But the more I think about it, the less convincing I find that approach. The real question is whether Pinterest will head down the road of being a commerce company (intermediating transactions and connecting buyers and sellers) or being more of a media company (providing exposure and audience to advertisers and brands). In my limited experience using Pinterest, I’ve come to believe that the big opportunity is in the media space, not the commerce space. There are a few potentially interesting business models I can envision for Pinterest:

“Pinwords” Contextual Advertising on Pinterest Pages – The one business model that makes a lot of sense to me is the idea of using Pinterest pins as explicit signals of my interest. For example, I have been pinning a lot of office furniture for an upcoming office move. A friend of mine, who is a very active pinner, reached out to me and sent me an email commenting on my furniture choices and recommending another site to check out. This is the type of activity that Pinterest could enable at the platform level. They see what I’m pinning and the time density of pins. If I pin a bunch of office furniture in a short period of time, chances are that I’m thinking about buying furniture. Would I be open to seeing other items that I should consider for purchase? For example, if I’m pinning a lot of items that are couches (and I believe that Pinterest could know that given the metadata about the items I’m pinning), why not show me other couches or brands that I might find interesting or relevant? This would not be intrusive or creepy – it would be useful. And it could easily be accomplished with some kind of second-price auction system a la AdWords where advertisers could bid to have their products or offerings shown when people create boards with relevant content.

Sponsored Pins- A second model that I can envision for Pinterest is a model where they offer something along the lines of sponsored pins available for bid on the homepage or on other pages. This would be a less targeted approach than the “Pinwords” model I mentioned above. But in the same way that some video advertisers are willing to spend money to have their TV show, movie, or other form of video content put in front of all visitors to the YouTube homepage, the same could be true of Pinterest. For this level of spray-and-pray advertising to work, there would have to be even more traffic and usage on the core Pinterest site.

Affiliate links for e-commerce revenue share – This was the model that originally jumped out at me as obvious. Anecdotally, Pinterest sends a lot of traffic to sites whose content is regularly pinned. So it’s not a hard logical leap to see Pinterest leveraging this ability to direct traffic to an e-commerce affiliate relationship with downstream traffic recipients. The problem with this model, though, is that Pinterest only really gets paid on conversion. There are likely tons of content categories where there isn’t any conversion event. And, at typical single-digit affiliate payout rates, this isn’t an attractive business. I think it’s far business for Pinterest to be in the business of referring traffic to sites and allowing those sites to bid for traffic (similar to Google with AdWords) than it is to get into the conversion loop.

I’m curious to hear what others think – feel free to leave a comment here or send me your thoughts on Twitter @chudson.

LinkedIn is still my de facto place for storing information about professional connections. But right now I mostly use it like a database – I go there when I need to look up someone or find a connection. I sometimes wonder why LinkedIn hasn’t launched more products and services that pull me back into the application and make it a hub where I really keep track not only of the people I know but my interactions with them and ways I can help them.

I still think there’s an opportunity to build a product that makes me a better participant in my social network. I like to help people when I can, and there are 3 areas of professional interaction that I don’t feel are well-addressed by existing tools:

1. When I need help, route my asks to the people who are in the best position to help
2. Nudge me to follow up with people who are important to me when I’ve been out of touch
3. Make me aware of people in my network who have needs where I am in a position to help

Making such a system work requires that you a) have some sense for my professional social graph, including strength of connection and b) have the smarts to figure out what to surface, to whom, and when. Not an easy task, but valuable if done correctly.

It seems to me that LinkedIn could be something more like what CRM systems are supposed to be – repositories of relevant information about people that can provide valuable insight and action. Given LinkedIn’s collection of assets, I believe they must be working on something along these lines and it would be awesome if they could make it a reality – the new iPad app and their mobile UI in general suggests to me that they are moving more toward needs discovery and interactivity and away from being just a searchable database. A few reasons why I can see this working:

1.LinkedIn has a lot of structured data about people’s professional lives – One key ingredient to most CRM or structured data systems is the presence (or ability to create) structured data. LinkedIn has a wealth of structured data about a given individual’s work history, educational history, business connections, and other important information. This is valuable data for seeding such a system.

2.LinkedIn gets strong signals about what people are doing in my network – hiring needs, job changes, etc. Some of this data is explicit – people post jobs, use their status updates to announce needs, update their profiles when they change companies, and other explicit actions on the site. But there is also tons of implicit data that LinkedIn sees – a given user’s search queries, the pages in the site the user is visiting, frequency of visit, requests for recommendations, etc that are all probably indicative of a given user’s state of mind. For example, if I type in the word “game designer” and search through 4 pages of results, odds are good that I’m looking for a game designer for some reason or another.

3. LinkedIn has made a handful of acquisitions, namely ConnectedHQ and Rapportive, that suggest that they are heading in that general direction. LinkedIn has acquired a few companies that all have competency around CRM or surfacing interesting information about people. Rapportive is particularly interesting because it not only surfaces interesting information about people but it lives in the email stream and gives LinkedIn a persistence they don’t have with most users.

As always, comments are open or you can tweet feedback to me @chudson.

Awhile back I posted a question on Quora about the opportunity to do a roll-up or consolidation play in the mobile SMB loyalty and rewards space. I’ve seen a number of interesting companies working on this problem but none has broken out as the leader. In my neighborhood it seems like every restaurant, cafe, or small business has settled on a different loyalty and rewards system. I take the prevalence of solutions to mean that consumers and merchants find the concept interesting. But the amount of fragmentation I’ve seen doesn’t seem sustainable.

At this point, it feels to me that this is really much more of a sales and marketing challenge (merchant and consumer acquisition) as opposed to a technology challenge. Almost every system I’ve seen in the market today has the three core requirements that any good system should have:

1. Ability to order ahead (when applicable) – I have been using Tapviva and I’ve seen signs for OrderAhead as well. There is also a large number of web-based food ordering solutions as well, but most of those don’t appear to be as focused on the total loyalty solution as their mobile brethren. The ability to order ahead is a nice feature for places where you know you’re likely to have to wait in line. Some services use a separate queue for these orders and some do not – either way I think it’s valuable to consumers.

2. Ability to track loyalty / return visits – Every system I’ve seen in this space has some concept of loyalty. Some of them are designed with rewards in place while others are designed to simply track visits over time to identify top customers. This seems like a must have and I’d say that it’s well-understood by most vendors how to provide this functionality. I’ve seen tons of solutions here, including Tagtile (acquired by Facebook), BadgeIn, Belly, Stampt, Punchd (acquired by Google), Perkville and a host of others.

3. Support for popular consumer mobile devices (iPhone and Android) – Last but not least, it seems like every credible system I’ve seen in the space works on mobile phones as a native app or HTML5 app on popular platforms.

That seems like the core set of must-have features for serving the loyalty are well known and can be built. It just feels to me like there are just a ton of companies that are still at the embryonic phase and that we’re entering a phase where there’s a real opportunity for consolidation and for someone to really own this space. I’m really curious to see whether any of the startups or larger companies in the space is the one to grab the prize – it just feels like the level of fragmentation we see today is not sustainable.

As always, comments are open or you can send me feedback on Twitter @chudson.

I’ve had a few blog posts in the past about managing contact information and the various tools I’ve tried (you can read them here and here. I continue to look for a unified contact management system to keep track of the many people I meet. I’m looking for a unified system that can perform two core functions for me:

1. Capture all of the people I meet and all of the interactions I have with known people, regardless of channel (in-person, email, phone, events, etc) and store a record of that interaction. I call this the “people interaction log” for short.

2. Capture relevant contact information about those people and put it into a system where other services and applications can digest it – basically put it into a structured format so it remains useful to other applications and systems I use. I think of this as the “clean data about people API” that would be a really useful base service for lots of other apps I use.

The reason I care about this problem more today than I used to is that almost every new social service I use asks me to auth using some other existing data store or service such as Google, Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn so they can get at my collection of friends and make it easy for me to share that service with them. It’s hard to spread the word when my contacts are scattered over tons of different services.

The one thing I”m unwilling to do is to just put everyone in one system. I am not willing to be friends with everyone on Facebook. I don’t want to add them all to LinkedIn. And I’ve tried a bunch of more structured data systems like traditional CRM tools and it feels like the effort to reward ratio is really out of whack. This seems like a problem that could be solved using today’s tools. A few thoughts on the tools I use today and where I think they fall short:

LinkedIn – I use LinkedIn to connect with people I meet in a professional context. Not everyone I know in a professional contact is a LinkedIn connection of mine, though – I haven’t gone through and added every past colleague or person I’ve met to LinkedIn. Plus, not everyone in my network is an active LinkedIn user.

Facebook – I used to use Facebook for just friends and then it became friends and co-workers and now it’s just turned into a real hodgepodge of friends, colleagues, people I know through work, and other folks I’ve met socially once or twice. But I generally don’t add people on Facebook that I don’t actually know personally – it doesn’t seem like the right vehicle for everyone I know.

Google Contacts – I do a lot on email, so Google Contacts is actually a superset of all of the people about whom I care. I do have an email relationship with just about everyone of importance to me. But Google Contacts as a raw data source isn’t that useful – it includes people and services that email regularly but do not get responses from me. And Google contacts doesn’t always do a great job of collapsing multiple email addresses into a single entity.

Highlight – As I’ve written about before, I like Highlight. It has the ability to provide some good ambient information about who I’m around on a regular basis. As more people use it, I suspect it will become an interesting data source for my people log. But it’s still the early days.

ConnectedHQ – I have been a fan of ConnectedHQ since the beginning and up to now (it’s now a part of LinkedIn). I think it’s one of the better, more intuitive CRM-light tools I’ve used. But it’s still a standalone application and destination that I need to visit to get access to the data. I want the data that’s stored in ConnectedHQ to be available to more of the other social applications and systems I use.

Rapportive / Xobni – These are two great tools for getting a sense for who the people are who are emailing you. Both are email sidebars that make it easy to have more context about the person on the other end of that email thread. And Rapportive in particular makes it super simple for me to add people to LinkedIn, follow them on Twitter, etc from right inside my email client. But Rapportive doesn’t work on mobile and the data isn’t easy to get to outside of email.

Smartr – One of the best tools I’ve found of late is Smartr from Xobni. It’s great for on the go contact data retrieval – you just type in someone’s name and it uses the intersection of its index and services to which you are connected to find people you want. I find myself using it to recall people I know I’ve met before but where I can’t recall everything about him or her. It’s also great for a quick lookup prior to meeting someone for the first time – it works great on mobile.

Evernote Hello – I had high hopes for this product but I think the UI is just a bit awkward. But I do rely on Evernote to keep track of all of my notes and it would be nice to use Evernote as a people logger in addition to a notes logger.

So, at the end of the day I want a universal address book that aggregates all of the information about the people I know and meet that works on the web and my phone. And I want that system to be able to spit that data out in a way that other social and data services can consume it as an input for my social stream.

As always, feel free to leave comments below or send me a message on Twitter @chudson.

About 3 years ago I wrote a short post about why Twitter was probably not a good platform for game developers to target. This was in the early days of Spymaster and other games that tried to use the Twitter graph in many of the same ways that social game developers were using the Facebook graph at the time. A lot has changed in that time – Twitter has grown quite a bit and Facebook has developed as well. I thought it was worthwhile to revisit the thesis about using Twitter as a social graph for game development.

Because it’s still a fundamentally asymmetric graph, trying to build a game that assumes that Twitter followers are equivalent to Facebook friends still feels like a flawed premise to me – As we’ve seen in many other domains, Facebook and Twitter are not the same platform. One of the really nice things about Twitter is that the follower model is asymmetric while the Facebook model is still (largely) rooted in the concept of symmetric friendships (as in to be “friends” we both have to agree vs a follower model). I just don’t think that assuming all (or a large portion) of a given person’s Twitter followers are interested in playing games with that individual still doesn’t seem like a reasonable assumption.

Twitter is (to me) a great broadcast and publishing platform – Twitter is potentially a great channel for discovery and new player acquisition. I have a few thousand followers on Twitter and I continue to believe that the Twitter channel is more tolerant of broadcast pronouncement and messages than Facebook. I think it’s just the nature of the medium – Twitter feels like it was designed primarily as a platform for one-to-many broadcast where as I still think of Facebook as less of a pure broadcast medium. And I see many of the most popular games, namely Draw Something and Words with Friends, making heavy use of Twitter as a way to a) broadcast player usernames to discover people with whom you could play but might not be in your Facebook graph and b) to publish achievements and accomplishments in game.

So, I think I’ve come around to thinking that Twitter could be a really useful channel for games that are designed to target really large mass-market audiences given the broadcast nature of Twitter. Thoughts? Feel free to leave a comment or send me a message @chudson.

Application developers are spending tons of money on customer acquisition and marketing. Lots of developers continue to complain about how hard application discovery is and I’ve written some thoughts about why application discovery is a developer problem. I have a really basic question – why aren’t the application stores themselves creating in-store advertising inventory to meet what is clearly developer demand?

This is basically what happens today in the world of application marketing (for a lot of folks, at least):

1. Developers spend money on bots, burst marketing campaigns, cross-promo, and other marketing expenditures to drive installs and awareness of their application.

2. The goal of a lot of this spend is to get to a target chart position that gets the application in front of lots of eyeballs. It’s not a crazy strategy – it’s a good way to get feedback on whether consumers like your application enough for you to continue investing in the application. There’s also a certain amount of ad spend used to maintain existing chart position, but that’s a topic for another day.

So, at the end of the day a lot of advertising dollars and energy are flowing to 3rd parties (many of whom are good and deliver value) with the end goal of trying to influence chart position. Why not just allow application developers to spend money directly with the app stores themselves and get rid of some of the indirection that happens today? I have 3 thoughts for how this could work:

1. Auction off chart position – This is probably the most radical idea. Simply run an auction (daily, weekly, or with whatever frequency makes sense) that allows people to bid for certain (not all) chart positions based on willingness to pay for an install. Make it an AdWords-style second price auction or something else clever.

2. Create a “sponsored apps” tab or categor – It’s clear that end users surf the top charts (new and noteworthy, top grossing, top free, etc) to find new things to download and try. Why not just create a “sponsored apps” chart where people could pay for inclusion. If you can buy sponsored links on Google against keyword search, why can’t you do the same thing for application search or application charts?

3. Create ad units that live natively in the application store – There is a lot of search and browse activity in the app store. Why not create ad units that live natively in the store? As I mentioned above, sponsored apps against keywords make sense to me. As do having some interstitial or other ad formats that users encounter when leafing through the store. Not all of these need to be made for sale but some should.

As always, you can leave a comment below or message me on Twitter @chudson.

Like a lot of people, I think subscription commerce is one of the more interesting business model developments in the past few years. We’ve already seen a few interesting companies created, with more in the works. In looking at a number of interesting companies in the space as both a consumer and an investor, I have a few core questions about the space:

1. How much of the market will Amazon devour with Subscribe and Save? I am a very happy Amazon Prime subscriber. Amazon Prime has basically eaten into my price sensitivity around products that I can order using that channel. With Amazon’s Subscribe and Save offering, I find myself ordering a lot of consumer staple products (things I use on a very predictable basis from brands I know and trust) via Amazon. How large is the opportunity for replenishment of known-brand consumer staples outside of what Amazon can cover? For the essentials like mouthwash, toothpaste, deoderant, etc., Amazon has a pretty good offering that meets most of my needs. Seems to me that Amazon could and should be a really formidable competitor in the branded staples replenishment world.

2. How many products really work well with a subscription model? I’ve been a Netflix subscriber on and off for the past 10 years. Whenever those red packages pile up on my kitchen table, I usually unsubscribe – I just realize I’m not consuming enough of the product to warrant being a subscriber. In contrast, I’ll probably never cancel Xbox Live – I can’t imagine living life without XBL because there isn’t any real substitute for the product. Overall, I have a lot of questions about how many product categories there are out there where a subscription provides a superior customer experience over traditional retail. There are certainly opportunities for “discovery” and introducing me to new products and those are interesting. But once I’ve discovered a new brand that I like, does the allure of discovering additional brands still hold? Maybe some of those discovery-oriented services are better off striking a balance between using the monthly subscription to introduce new products but having a more traditional ecommerce storefront for replenishment or repeat purchases.

3. Is it better to be the brand or be a retail outlet for someone else’s brand? Last, I wonder how the market will shake out between companies who are retailers offering other people’s branded products will fare relative to those who sell their own branded items. The advantage of selling your own product is clear – if you are the exclusive channel and control the supply chain, you can blunt cross-channel price comparison and reap the benefits of supply chain efficiency. On the other hand, selling other people’s products and brands, especially if they are well known, is a good way to get consumers who are looking for those products in a more convenient or possibly more cost-effective way.

Curious to hear other people’s thoughts on the matter. Feel free to leave a comment below or message me on Twitter @chudson.

Yesterday someone asked me the ubiquitous “what’s working in mobile social games?” question and I thought it was worth pointing out that a lot of the most popular games today outside of the physics genre (by reach and revenue) are social mobile versions of known popular board and parlor games adapted for asynchronous play on mobile devices. Four good examples below:

-Hanging with Friends (Zynga) –> Similar to Hangman (currently a top 10 free game in the US iOS store)
-Draw Something (OMGPOP) –> Similar to Pictionary (currently #1 on free games and top grossing in the US iOS store)
-Words with Friends (Zynga) –> Similar to Scrabble (now Zynga’s largest game with 9 million DAU and a definite money maker)
-Scramble with Friends (Zynga) –> Similar to Boggle (lower profile than the others, but the game has a solid following and is routinely in the top charts for free iOS games)

Oh, and there’s always poker, which I didn’t include here. Browse the top 25 charts in iOS and Android and you’ll see lots of games that are familiar childhood classics or parlor / party games.

I believe the moral of the story is that simple asynchronous games where players know the rules or basic game construct beforehand makes them accessible to a large audience and can be quite sticky. Makes it much easier to engage the casual or mass-market player when there aren’t new rules or mechanics to learn.

Comments are open and you can follow me on Twitter @chudson.

Earlier this week I gave a short talk for Yetizen on how VCs think about the games market. One of the more interesting things that happened at the meetup was that one of the folks from Google gave a few quick tips on how to be more effective on the Google Android Market. That chat, combined with the announcement that Apple was buying Chomp, I’ve been thinking a lot about the differences between the iOS and Google Android Market experiences and three main questions jumped out to me:

1. Why does the Google Android Market cover all categories versus just applications?

Our company, Bionic Panda Games, has been building for the Google Android Market for over a year. In that time, the Google Android Market has undergone a number of UI / UX iterations. The current iteration is interesting and perplexing to me – take a look at the following two screenshots comparing the Apple App Store UI versus what you see on Android:

Google Android Market

Apple iTunes Market

When you compare these two UI experiences, one thing really jumps out at me. The Google Android Market is extremely cluttered in terms of UI and presentation. Whereas the Apple App Store is focused just on apps, leaving music, video, and books to other apps and experiences, the Google Android Market jams all of those verticals into one consumer experience. The one nice thing about the Apple experience is that when you want to find apps for your phone, you’re immediately into the apps experience – other important and interesting content verticals are given their own separate applications.

2. When will Google push Google+ or some other social signals into the Google Android Market?

Google’s management has been very clear that social, and particularly Google+, is going to be woven into every element of the company’s product and services. We’ve seen it in Google Games, Search, Voice, and a handful of other properties. One can only assume that Google+ will eventually end up in Google Android Market. It’s not hard to imagine how this would work. You can imagine getting recommendations based on applications that your Google+ network is using, the ability to use your Google+ social network as a social layer for games and apps built on Android, and the ability to share your app preferences and usage back with your network. It’s hard for me to imagine that Google wouldn’t at least run this experiment and run it soon.

The interesting thing about this approach is that Google+ is only one of several potential social streams Google could integrate. They could integrate Twitter, Facebook, your phone contacts, or just about any other social network. Google+, like Twitter, is an asymmetric follow model. I wonder whether those kinds of networks can give as much meaningful signal as symmetric follow models like Facebook. That will be interesting to see.

3. What is the right paradigm for application search results?

I don’t really know if this is a UE problem, but I continue to wonder if any app store has gotten the model for application search results right. I think all of us in the industry are still trying to learn what user intent means in the world of application search. For example, if I type in the word “poker” I probably want to see poker applications. But what about more generic application terms or keywords. Should a good application search engine return terms based on keyword term frequency in the application description? Application name? Some smart filter on what an application is actually “about” and does? In many ways, it feels like web search in the early days – there are a lot of brute-force tactics and simple things being used to determine search results relevance. But it still doesn’t feel like search works as well as it could.

As always, you can leave comments below or follow me on Twitter @chudson.

It has been almost a month since I published my first ebook on the Kindle platform. It has been a really interesting experience and I wanted to post a few of my initial thoughts. Overall, I think it’s a really interesting experience and I’m likely to try to write another one sometime in the near future.

First, I just wanted to provide a bit of context on the book. Over the past few years I’ve gotten a lot of questions from people in the conference and events business about how to scale and how to get started. I realized that I ended up telling everyone the same set of tips and lessons learned from my experience. So rather than repeating that conversation and limiting myself to the folks in my network, I thought it would be an interesting experience to “productize” those conversations into something that would be accessible to more people. One of my New Year’s resolutions for the year was to try to take some of the content I find myself repeating regularly and write it down. It was too much for a blog, so doing it as an ebook seemed to make more sense. Here are a few interesting things I’ve learned thus far:

1. Publishing on the Kindle platform is extraordinarily easy – The production process for the book was really easy. I wrote the entire book in Google Docs and then exported it to Word. I had a copy editor review the final version and had the cover art done on Crowdspring. It took me about 8 weeks to produce the book (it’s about 60 pages double-spaced in Microsoft Word) and another week or so for review and editing. I didn’t need any special software or tools – I was able to upload the Word document to Kindle and it converted with very minimal edits. I was surprised how easy it was to go from Word doc to ebook.

2. I enrolled in Kindle Select and I find it fascinating – My goal in writing the book was not to make money but rather to learn more about what it’s like to publish on Kindle. I decided I’d go all in and enroll the book in the Kindle Select Fund program via Kindle Direct Publishing. The deal is pretty simple – Amazon gives you 5 days of promotion during a 90-day window and a share of the pot of Kindle Lending Library fees based on how many lends / shares your book receives. The catch is that you cannot publish the book on any other platform, including your own hosted blog or store. I’m not sure this is the right long term strategy for every publisher – I’m seeing 90 sales for every lend / borrow thus far. I think it’s a pretty clever move by Amazon to focus on getting amateurs like me focused on publishing exclusively for Kindle.

3. As a web stats junkie, I’m totally in the dark about what’s driving sales in the Kindle store – My one big surprise about selling an ebook via Kindle has been the total opacity of what drives sales. I don’t have anything like a dashboard that tells me how people are finding my book (search, social shares, recommendations from related texts, etc), how often people are visiting the page and not buying, or anything that gives me a sense for traffic. True, I get royalty and sales data, but that’s a small part of the picture. I’d really like to know more about how people are finding my book.

This hardly merits a bullet, but I think many ebook buyers are price sensitive. Every time I drop my price, I sell more units and total revenue goes up. I’d be curious to see how having a hardback / paperback version of the book would impact price sensitivity.

If you’ve published on Kindle and have thoughts on your experience, I’d love to hear from you. As always, comments are open.

You can see the book live on Amazon here.

Follow me on Twitter – I’m @chudson