Crash Dev

W00t! AppStoreHQ named best services startup at MobileBeat 2009

2009-07-16T23:07:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago VentureBeat emailed to tell me that AppStoreHQ had been selected as one of seven finalists for the Best Services Startup competition at their upcoming MobileBeat show. More than 100 companies had applied for the competition, so I was stoked to get picked but had no real expectation of winning. We just started AppStoreHQ this spring, and we were stacked up against much more established (and better funded) entrants. But I figured it would be good exposure for us, so I bought a plane ticket and threw together a deck (embedded below).

The format for the competition was a two-minute pitch, followed by questions from a five-member expert panel. At the end of the seven pitches, the panelists would confer and vote on a winner. The panel included Bob Borchers (Opus Capital), Anand Iyer (Microsoft), Stephan Noll (T-Mobile Ventures), Nagraj Kashyap (Qualcomm Ventures), and Greg Tarr (Cross Pacific Capital). I hadn't fully grokked how short two minutes of talk time was until the flight down, when I first had a chance to practice. I felt like I had hardly opened my mouth when I got the time signal and had to wrap up.

My personal pick for the winning pitch was Urban Airship, a platform provider for push and in-app transaction services enabled by the v3.0 iPhone SDK. They had timed their release perfectly with the launch of 3.0, releasing in association with a few leading iPhone app publishers. So I was amazed when Matt Marshall announced AppStoreHQ as the judges' pick.

Unfortunately, there was no cash prize for winning, but the show was a great experience and the win was a nice surprise. Partly as a result of the win, AppStoreHQ has a small but influential group of new admirers, and I have renewed faith in the power of just showing up.

AppStoreHQ makes the New York Times

2009-07-14T20:24:00.000-07:00

I love the New York Times - it's one of the only publications I still read in paper form (every day, no less), so it's always a good day when one of my projects gets a mention in the Gray Lady.

Today was that day for AppStoreHQ. Roy Furchgott gave us a nice shout-out in his Gadgetwise piece on App Store shortcomings titled "Apple's 1.5 Billion Wake Up Call":

"Of course, there is another option. Give consumers better tools to sort through the stores themselves. One stab at that is found at the Web site App Store HQ. In addition to being more organized and informative than the iTunes App Store... it also has a sortable search. So instead of just choosing from 1693 apps categorized under music, you can then choose only those rated four stars and up (158 apps) then narrow it to those that cost 99 cents (38 apps). Still not perfect, but a step in the right direction."

Thanks for the shout-out, Roy - you made my day.

Introducing SeeYourImpact - a micro-giving platform for global 501c(3)s

2009-06-29T15:59:00.000-07:00

A few months back a friend here in Seattle asked if I'd like to help out with a new non-profit idea he'd been cooking up. My friend - Digvijay Chauhan - had worked in the U.S. for years, first at Microsoft and later as co-founder and CTO of AskMe. But he was born and raised in India, and was all-too familiar both with that country's crushing poverty, and the inefficiency and corruption that often prevented help from reaching those most in need.

Dig's idea was simple: to create a platform that allows first-world donors to make small contributions directly to those in need, and to receive direct feedback in the form of images and stories about the impact their gift had made on the recipient's life. Because of his personal connection to India the idea would be piloted there, but if successful the platform could be made available to any qualified 501c(3) that could support the model of small gifts + personal impact stories. In keeping with its focus the organization was named SeeYourImpact (http://seeyourimpact.org)

Thanks to Dig's vision and persistence, the project quickly moved from idea to reality, hugely assisted by the commitment and support of Scott Oki (another Microsoft alum and committed philanthropist). A basic software platform was wired up (using WordPress for content management and PayPal for transaction processing), and we were just planning the first phases of donor outreach when the Seattle Times got wind of the effort and put together a story that ran today profiling SeeYourImpact and another local effort with similar roots called Jolkona.

We had hoped to tie up a few more loose ends before spreading the word, but the site is live and the Times story is out there, so SeeYourImpact is officially open for business. It's a little different from most of the startups I work with, but we have the same basic needs: customers and feedback. So if you have a few dollars to spare please come by and consider making a gift. Not only will it help us test the platform, you might just change someone's life...

Frugal Mechanic continues to rock it

2009-06-24T16:03:00.000-07:00

Just a quick update for those of you following our investment in Frugal Mechanic: Eric and Tim don't make much noise but they're quietly dominating the world of auto parts price comparison. That may not sound like a big market, but DIY auto parts is actually a $19B market in the U.S. alone, and none of the big price comparison guys has shown the stomach for the extremely messy data work required to get it right.

They have a great destination site at http://FrugalMechanic.com, but the real story is in their white label auto parts search tabs for major auto-related media properties. They just inked a new deal with High Gear Media to run micro-targeted parts search across 38 of their online properties. And this is just the latest in a string of deals covering some of the best-known brands in the business.

I'm proud of the team at Frugal and fully expect them to run the table in this vertical, and maybe knock over a few other verticals with similar characteristics once they've taken care of auto. Keep up the great work guys...

'VC is Broken', Royalty Based Finance and 'Class R' Stock

2009-06-18T11:08:00.000-07:00

Since last fall's economic downturn, dozens of pundits of various stripes have announced the death of venture capital as an asset class. And it's true (as Paul Kedrosky and the Kauffman Foundation have convincingly argued) that the class is grossly overcapitalized and will have to shrink radically to produce the kinds of returns investors rightfully demand for the type of risk being taken.

But if you look beyond the billion-dollar funds and their challenges, the early-stage investment environment isn't just surviving, it's thriving. Checks are being written, great new companies are getting funded, and entrepreneurs are getting the cash and support they need to grow.

Perhaps most exciting, with the persistent drought in public offerings and an equally sharp slowdown in corporate M&A activity, new investment methods are emerging that better align the interests of entrepreneurs and early-stage investors around the core metrics of success for any real business: revenue and operating margins.

A few weeks back a friend shared a recent HBS paper by Clayton Christensen (among others), applying his "disruptive innovation" framework to the venture capital business. Most of the paper covered the familiar ground of overcapitalization in a context of declining costs of technological innovation. But the part that caught our attention was the description of Royalty Based Financing (RBF), with the specific example of a firm called Royalty Capital Management, created in 1992 by an investor named Arthur Fox. In its simplest form, RBF is secured lending, but rather than requiring a fixed coupon and repayment period, the lender obtains a claim on a fixed percentage of gross revenues until an agreed-upon multiple of invested capital (typically 3 - 5x) is returned. RBF investors trade steeper default, timing and rate of return risk for richer potential returns than those offered by traditional business lending.

Just today, GigaOm ran a thought piece by Brian McConnell titled "Class R (Revenue) Stock: A New Class of Investment" that essentially reprises the strategy practiced by Royalty Capital, but with a hybrid debt-equity model geared to earlier-stage bets than traditional RBF lenders would typically take on:

"Let’s say for rough numbers that a group of angels invest $500,000 for a 10 percent stake in an early-stage company and 5 percent of gross revenues with a 5X cap (total payout: $2.5 million). The company does OK and turns into a nice small business with revenues of $2-$3 million dollars a year. Happy with that, the owners decide not to sell or try to grow much bigger. The investors in this situation will be receiving $100,000-$150,000 per year (off $2-$3 million/year in revenue), which is not a bad annual return, and will get up to $2.5 million over the life of the agreement. In other words, everyone wins — the entrepreneur is rewarded for creating a viable business, and the investors do well without having to force a sale."

The innovation here lies in bringing the RBF approach to riskier, earlier-stage investing, where investors retain an equity position as an option on a future liquidity event, while receiving a portion of the expected return in the form of cash flows. And the fact is, most well-run businesses look more like the firm in this example - growing, profitable, but not a shoot-the-moon success - than like the Google and Amazon.com rocket rides that the traditional venture industry is geared around.

We haven't yet done a deal like this at Founders Co-op, but we're trying it on for size, and - at least for some of our investments - this model may wind up being a better fit than the traditional venture approach. Most of all, we love the idea of breaking the mold in our industry - early-stage investing - in the same way we hope our companies shake up the status quo in theirs.

'Fire + Motion' at AppStoreHQ

2009-06-01T14:40:00.000-07:00

Last week Ian reminded me about Joel Spolsky's famous blog post on "Fire and Motion" - here's a key excerpt:

"When I was an Israeli paratrooper a general stopped by to give us a little speech about strategy. In infantry battles, he told us, there is only one strategy: Fire and Motion. You move towards the enemy while firing your weapon."
This pretty much sums up our strategy at AppStoreHQ. With such a small team and such a big and fast-moving opportunity, our best approach is to pick a target from one of three critical areas - Content, Distribution and Monetization - release a burst of fire in that direction, and then sprint upfield to the next piece of ground and fire again.

To date, most of our bursts of fire have been aimed at Content (app + developer info, related blog posts, enhanced search, etc.) and distribution (widgets for iPhone owners, app developers and iPhone bloggers). We figured Monetization was too far away to get a clean shot, and that our Content and Distribution battles would put us in range eventually...

...but developers kept pinging us saying: "Great site. Can I advertise my app on it?" And we got tired of saying 'no'. In the spirit of Fire + Motion, we didn't want to blow a lot of ammunition on what seemed like a distant target. So we loaded up the smallest burst of fire that we thought would (a) satisfy the developer appetite for app promotion, while (b) delivering the most relevant and least-intrusive experience to iPhone owners searching for new apps.

Ian spent about a day and a half on this, a lot of which was brain-damagey stuff having to do with PayPal and SSL. But with that small investment we now have a basic app advertising program available on AppStoreHQ. The price is cheap and the rules are simple:

The only "Ad" format available is premium placement for an app listing - the kind of thing our users are already looking for.
Ads appear only when visitors are browsing or searching for apps by category
Only one ad will appear on the page at any time (in randomized rotation with no more than two others per category)
Only published iPhone app developers can play
You can only promote apps currently for sale in the App Store (i.e., no “teaser” ads)

If developers like this and the inventory sells through, we'll have a nice (little) revenue line and a new source of relationship capital and feedback with our developer customers. If no slots sell we'll have invested a day and a half in some market intelligence. And if the result lies somewhere in between, we'll take what we learn, move up the field and squeeze off a few more rounds in a different direction.

Is someone at HBS reading this blog?

2009-05-30T14:04:00.000-07:00

A few years back I proposed (and only partly in jest) a "Hippocratic oath for business." This morning I read in the New York Times that a group of students at Harvard Business School had publicly made a similar pledge. I don't really expect this to sweep the business world by storm, but I applaud these students and the spirit in which they offered this pledge. The world needs more of this...

Android update: 2009 will be a big year after all

2009-05-27T17:01:00.000-07:00

A while back I made a prediction that 2009 would be a breakout year for Google's Android project. With the mid-year mark approaching and no new devices shipped that bet was looking a little shaky, but today's announcements from the Google I/O conference put a little more weight behind my bullish view (phew).

There's been a ton of blog coverage, but this piece from the New York Times does a nice job of explaining both the handset picture and Google's rules / incentives for making their core services (mail, docs, etc.) the on-deck defaults. The bottom line:

18 new Android phones in market by year-end
5 or 6 of those will offer the full "Google experience"
12 to 14 will include some level of Google app integration

The next hurdle is to see how many of these phones ship - not just in the U.S., but particularly in some of the more exciting global markets (e.g., China, India).

iPhone app search and browse: there's a new one-eyed man in town...

2009-05-21T16:01:00.000-07:00

"In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." - Anonymous

We just shipped a major upgrade to our search and browse functions at AppStoreHQ. It sounds crazy to say it, but as far as we can tell we now offer hands-down the most useful iPhone app discovery experience on the Web (not to mention the phone itself).

Want to know how many apps there are in the 'fart' category? Turns out a whopping 165 (!) apps match that keyword. What do they cost? Most (118) are priced between $0.01 and $0.99. How good are they (whatever that means)? Well, only four have a rating of 4 stars or more.

If you're curious about the iPhone app phenomenon and are looking for a way to slice and dice the data, AppStoreHQ is now the place to start. And if you know of a site that does it better, please leave a comment setting us straight.

P.S. - If you run an iPhone-centric blog or site and want to offer this same search experience on your domain, just give us a shout - we'd like to help.

Presentation (with updated data) on iPhone App Marketing

2009-05-14T16:58:00.000-07:00

The guys at Madrona invited me to present the results of our iPhone developer survey on app marketing at a lunch today (thanks again, guys). Lots of great commentary & feedback in the session, and I promised to put the whole thing online...

If you're reading this in a feed reader and can't see the deck above, here's a direct link to the source presentation on Google Docs.

Startups, agility and the power of the franchise player

2009-05-12T21:37:00.000-07:00

Ian and I have been having a ton of fun with AppStoreHQ - our mobile web app + developer discovery engine. We haven't been at it all that long, and at the moment it's just the two of us. But the other day we were reviewing our roadmap and backlog (which we track on two tabs of a Google spreadsheet) and Ian remarked:

"I think I've shipped more code in the past month than I did in three years at Amazon."

There are good reasons why big enterprises with lots to lose have to proceed cautiously with their development process. And moving fast and running lean can definitely cause trouble down the road, as hasty architecture decisions today cascade into time-consuming and risky fixes after complexity and load have scaled. But the sheer amount of software that one skilled dev can ship (especially with the help of a framework like Ruby on Rails) is truly astounding.

Last week we heard a great story from Urbanspoon on Tuesday and Ian turned it into a product by Thursday. Then the guys at Cooler Planet shared a tip on Friday and Ian shipped a riff on the idea today (if you don't want to follow the link, just check the widget below). And these opportunistic projects are on top of the usual load of core data, search and presentation work.

What's exciting to me about this model isn't raw speed-to-feature (no one ever won a competitive fight on features alone). It's the power of one agile developer who's comfortable working at any layer of the stack to turn ideas into working code almost as fast as you can come up with them. Because getting fresh code in the hands of customers is the most powerful way I know of to test ideas and figure out what works.

Given the scale of investments we make at Founders Co-op, we can't afford a lot of expensive specialists on our founding teams. We like to say we're looking for "franchise players" - guys (and girls) who have the skills, resourcefulness and confidence to make the product and business happen without asking anyone for permission. We have more projects like AppStoreHQ up our sleeves, so if you like to ship code early and often and have an interest in the startup life, give us a shout.

Find iPhone apps at AppStoreHQ

Learning from the best: Urbanspoon teaches AppStoreHQ a lesson

2009-05-07T10:42:00.000-07:00

Find iPhone apps at AppStoreHQ
Two-thirds of the Urbanspoon team dropped by Founders Co-op for our weekly all-hands lunch this week, fresh on the heels of their acquisition by IAC. They shared the story of their journey from struggling Facebook app developer to iPhone app superstars, including some of the best (and worst) decisions they made along the way.

Urbanspoon did a *lot* of things right, but one in particular stuck in my head as relevant to our latest company: AppStoreHQ. Long story short, Urbanspoon made it possible for any blogger to get their restaurant reviews featured on Urbanspoon just by including a little widget they called a "Spoonback". The presence of a Spoonback allowed Urbanspoon to sift through the sea of food-related blog content and zero in on just those posts relevant to the restaurant in question. Urbanspoon got the benefit of including the freshest and most original review content on their site, while participating bloggers got exposure, traffic and links from one of the hottest restaurant review sites on the web.

We just completed an iPhone developer survey and one of the most-requested kinds of marketing advice sought by developers was how to get their app reviewed by influential bloggers. As soon as I heard the story of the Spoonback, I realized that we could help iPhone developers get reviews by creating a similar value proposition for bloggers who review iPhone apps. I sat down with Ian after lunch, and late yesterday he sent me a link to this page - our version of the Spoonback, but for iPhone apps instead of restaurants (you can see the badge in action at the top of this post).

Congratulations to the Urbanspoon guys on a great outcome for all their hard work and innovation, and thanks for sharing the story of the Spoonback.

Introducing AppStoreHQ - the 'Hype Machine' of mobile applications

2009-05-04T16:09:00.000-07:00

As a die-hard music fan, I love The Hype Machine. For those that don't know it, The Hype Machine indexes the most influential music bloggers to identify which artists and songs are currently being discussed the most, and it's an amazing way to discover new music by tapping into the zeitgeist of some of the most thoughtful and passionate listeners out there.

As regular readers know, I'm also fascinated by what's happening with the mobile web: the rapid simultaneous revolution in device design, operating systems and mobile applications epitomized (but by no means limited to) Apple's iPhone and App Store. And if you squint a little it's not hard to find parallels between the popular music business and what's starting to happen with the App Store:

Everyone wants to be a rock star (developer) - In one stroke Apple has broken the long-standing carrier monopoly on mobile software, and any competent developer can now create and (with Apple's blessing) distribute their app on the App Store. A lucky few have become the "rock stars" of mobile applications, making serious money and seeing their name in lights. Thousands more are hard at work, hoping to break into the big time. Most of these won't make it, but the dream is powerful.
Consumers rely on tastemakers to know what to buy - There are too many apps from too many developers for consumers to easily find apps they're likely to enjoy. Apple is the uber-DJ, powering sales for an anointed few via their advertising, PR and hot lists within the App Store. But Apple's less-is-more approach to branding and UE means that most apps have to look for spins elsewhere on the radio dial.
It takes more than great product to succeed - Because so many developers want to be rock stars and the App Store is currently the only place they can do it, the eye of the needle has gotten very small, very fast. Even the best rock bands need distribution and promotion to hit the big time, and that's now true for mobile apps as well.

Once I started seeing mobile apps through a music lens, the opportunity to create a 'Hype Machine for iPhone apps' was impossible to ignore. And since creating new companies is what we do here at Founders Co-op, we enlisted one of our developer friends as a co-founder and put together a working draft of that idea at AppStoreHQ. We've barely scratched the surface of our vision with the current product, but we're very excited about how much we've accomplished in a very short time and felt like it was time to start spreading the word.

So if you're an iPhone owner with an appetite for apps, take us for a spin and let us know if we helped you find something new. And if you're an iPhone developer with at least one app in the App Store, take a minute to fill out your profile (it's free) and let your app buyers discover a little more about the artist behind the music.

UPDATE: AppStoreHQ received a nice writeup this morning from John Cook at TechFlash - thanks for the shout-out, John.

iPhone App Idea (a.k.a., random stuff that pops into my head in the middle of the night)

2009-04-30T09:17:00.000-07:00

My kids were restless last night, which means I spent a decent chunk of the night half-awake. As I was falling back asleep for the fourth time an idea popped into my head for an iPhone app that I have no intention of building, but that I think might actually sell. Here's how it came together:

Obama has a *huge* following among tech-savvy young people (i.e., likely iPhone owners)
He's an inspiring speaker with a beautiful grasp of language
There's a ton of public domain content about him - including transcripts and audio recordings of his speeches, etc.
Given the above, it would be pretty easy to build a "Hope Machine" that serves up inspirational audio and/or text snippets from his speeches, accompanied by photos.
The primary interaction mode would be random - shake the phone to get a randomly selected "dose of hope" - but you could also browse by topic or keyword.
Since apps fall out of fashion quickly, and Obama speaks often, you could extend the franchise by doing serialized editions: e.g., Campaign 2008, First 100 Days, etc.
It would help to partner up with the DNC or some other organizing / fundraising body to get marketing air cover - and some portion of the app proceeds should go to the cause to tie the marketing story together.

I just did a quick search and there are around 10 existing Obama apps, but none of them offer this combination of entertainment and inspiration. Maybe someone should build it...

Nice piece from Fred Wilson on online aggregators

2009-04-27T14:39:00.000-07:00

I just came across this mini-rant by Fred Wilson in my feed reader and couldn't agree more. His key point:

"Aggregation is the central element of distributing content on the web. It's not going to get shut down by calling these services names, suing them, or even worse taking your content out of them. The best and only thing media companies can do is join the aggregation parade, celebrate it, and get good at it."

Maybe I've been on the Web too long, but anyone who can attack "online aggregation" with a straight face strikes me as completely nuts. From big players like Google and Amazon to vertical aggregators like Hype Machine (in music) or Kayak (in travel), the Web companies that deliver the greatest consumer utility are - at bottom - aggregators. And pretty much every other online business - from retailers and content publishers to social networks - depends on the aggregators to help them acquire customers and promote their offerings.

Show me an online content category occupied by hundreds or thousands of sites competing for attention and customers and I'll show you a vertical that's ripe for aggregation. And if enough of these competing sites earn good money doing what they do, that market is probably also a good fit for online lead generation.

Several of our investments at Founders Co-op (including Cooler Planet and Frugal Mechanic) are running a version of this playbook, and I'm currently working on a prototype (more on that soon) that's doing the same. These businesses work not by replacing or competing with the sites they aggregate, but by making them accessible and intelligible as a class, a service that ultimately increases the flow of visitors and buyers to the underlying sites.

Great Deck on User Behavior: "Discovery is the New Cocaine"

2009-04-21T16:26:00.001-07:00

Just discovered this deck (thanks for the tip iseff) - great current take on personalized intermittent reinforcement in social media. If you're designing a social site and want to create user addiction, this is a great refresh on the levers to pull.

Calling all iPhone Developers

2009-04-21T13:36:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to get smarter about how new iPhone apps are discovered by users, and what strategies developers are using to promote their apps on and off the App Store. If you're a developer with at least one app in the App Store, please take a minute to complete this survey. As soon as I have 100 valid survey responses I'll publish the highlights here on Crash Dev.

Thanks in advance, and please spread the word!

Book Review: The Post-American World

2009-04-18T15:28:00.000-07:00

I just put down Fareed Zakaria's The Post-American World and couldn't leave the house without knocking out a quick endorsement. If you're even the least bit interested in the changing role of America in the world it's a must-read. Zakaria's analysis of China and India as societies, economies and political actors is concise, lucid and free of political cant. Similarly, his assessment of America's challenges and opportunities is both well-researched and entirely convincing in both its conclusions and prescriptions.

The crux of his argument is that our changing role has less to do with our "failures" as a nation than it does with the growing success of others, particularly India and China. In his analysis, this shift in relative roles has real and serious implications for us as a nation, but shouldn't be viewed as an inevitable brake on our our continued prosperity and influence. That doesn't mean we don't have real work to do to maintain the health of our society, economy and influence, but those challenges are independent of the "rise of the rest".

The book was published before both the outcome of the 2008 presidential election and the current economic downturn had come to pass, and the most satisfying aspect of the book (for me, at least) was the extent to which the current attitudes and actions of the Obama administration embody the principles and ethics Zakaria asserts as essential to our continued relevance. In his view, as our relative power is diminished, our greatest strength continues to be the idea of America as a free, fair, open and ethical society. In his words:

"There is still a strong market for American power, for both geopolitical and economic reasons. But even more centrally, there remains a strong ideological demand for it... what the world really wants from America is not that it offer a concession on trade here and there, but that it affirm its own ideals."

As encouraging as the example of the Obama administration is, the response of the Congress to his policies offers stark proof of what Zakaria asserts is the greatest risk we face as a nation: our politics:

"As it enters the twenty-first century, the United States is not fundamentally a weak country, or a decadent society. But it has developed a highly dysfunctional politics... captured by money, special interests, a sensationalist media and ideological attack groups... Those who advocate sensible solutions and compromise legislation find themselves marginalized by the party's leadership, losing funds from special-interest groups, and being constantly attacked by their "side" on television and radio."

If you followed his own party's reaction to Obama's recent budget draft, you have seen the truth of this assessment in stark relief. Even the most unassailably sensible proposals - like those to cut spending on failed weapons systems or agricultural entitlements - fell under attack by the Democratic leadership (the Republican response goes without saying). With real battles looming on heath care and pension entitlements, this early data suggests that the prospect of meaningful reform is dim.

I have never been more proud to be an American than I was on the day Obama won the presidency, and The Post-American World suggests there is good cause for continued optimism about our society and our role in a changing world. I have total faith in our economy to right itself no matter what fiscal interventions are (or are not) thrown at it. My greatest hope is that just enough of the idealism and ethics of the Obama administration trickles down through the body politic to enable the concessions and compromise required to ensure that optimistic future.

Trendwatch: Mobile + cloud + personal information management

2009-04-13T15:06:00.000-07:00

Nice piece today from Stacey Higginbotham of GigaOm that ties together a number of themes I've been following. Her main point is that paired advances in the browser and web-capable mobile devices have opened the to door to a (near) future in which device manufacturers and carriers lose control of the end-user experience, to be supplanted by open-source operating systems (e.g., Android) and independent software vendors (ISVs). In her words:

"...Google used WebKit to separate the software from the machine. If others do the same, that makes it more feasible to use cheaper chips and open-source operating systems to build out mobile computers in a variety of shapes and sizes...

"As consumers become more comfortable accessing programs in the cloud and storing their documents there, the familiarity of the Windows operating system becomes less relevant for the consumer, and developers can instead build programs designed to run in the cloud...

"... for application developers it means they could build an app without paying over a chunk of their revenue to an app store or going through an approval process."

This is an exciting trend for anyone who loves to see the marketplace of ideas triumph over centrally-controlled models of innovation - the iPhone developer gold rush will become just the tip of the iceberg if this future plays out as projected. But the trend will also add urgency to the problem of personal data mining, or what folks in the storage industry call Information Lifecycle Management (ILM).

As consumers come to rely on an increasingly fragmented array of web-based services to run their personal and professional lives, they'll need smarter "glue" for pulling all those disparate data stores and transaction histories into a unified view that they can mine for information. The Decho approach assumes that most of this data currently resides on the PC desktop, but rumored services like Google's MyStuff idea (particularly in its latest iteration) seem like a more logical solution: a meta-index of personal content scattered across the Web that can be analyzed and queried as if it were a unified whole.

I often have to remind myself that the future never arrives as soon as I expect it to, but these intertwined trends feel like they have real momentum, owing largely to Apple's runaway success with the iPhone, iPod Touch and AppStore. Every web bigco, device maker, mobile carrier and ISV wants a piece of the mobile web opportunity that Apple has blown wide open, and the battle has barely begun.

Interesting teaser from Mike Arrington re: Personal Data Mining

2009-04-08T15:46:00.000-07:00

This mention of a possible revival of Google's MyStuff idea caught my eye. I've been interested in the idea of a persistent personal data archive for a while now, and Google's a natural for it. I was initially optimistic about EMC's plans for Decho (their combined acquisitions of Mozy + PI Corp), but if so they're keeping the project under pretty tight wraps.

The most encouraging thing about Arrington's take (which is still just a rumor, not a confirmed product announcement) is that Google is now thinking of this as an aggregator for files stored across the Web (vs. requiring the user to store all files with Google). That's a much more sellable value proposition to users as it has the potential to deliver significant value with minimal behavior change.

Keeping an eye on this one...

The Mobile Web: Echoes of Web 1.0?

2009-04-07T10:53:00.000-07:00

This past Sunday's New York Times triggered a flashback for me with a story (in the Styles section, no less) titled: The iPhone Gold Rush. I was around for the first Internet boom and keep seeing parallels between the current mobile web feeding frenzy and what happened back in the late '90's. A couple of examples (and I'd love to hear more from anyone out there):

Apps = Websites. In Web 1.0, the website was the unit of currency; today it's iPhone apps. Tech-savvy folks build them, early adopters share and collect them, and businesses pop up to help both groups play their role more effectively.
Build / Ship Friction Falls. The first days of the Web was a hand-coder's world, with virtually no packaged software or developer toolkits available for what was then a tiny market. As the economic potential of the market became apparent, new services and software players emerged with the net effect of driving barriers to entry toward zero.
Distribution Friction Rises. As the number of / diversity of available websites exploded, progressive layers of discovery tools emerged and failed, only to be replaced by the next-most scalable solution: from volunteer / amateur directories (e.g., DMOZ) to commercial directories (e.g., Yahoo) to search (e.g., AltaVista, Google), to ??.
Brands Rush In. In the late '90s it suddenly dawned on a broad swath of incumbent brands (retailers, manufacturers, etc.) that their customers were looking for them online. To anyone in the Web application development business (as I was at the time), customers were everywhere and billing rates were whatever the market could bear. I haven't yet seen the flood of brands hit the iPhone, but early adopters are there and I'll be very surprised if the same cycle doesn't play out here.
Customer Acquisition is The Hard Part. Google is a great business precisely because the Web is such a sprawling mess. There are too many websites chasing the same customers' attention for anyone to decisively "win" online, so the business that controls the firehose of customer demand can extract maximum rents for pointing it in a specific direction.

Right now the App Store holds that slot for the mobile Web, but Apple is a deeply conflicted party (Google's bright line separation between discovery - search - and promotion - ads - is at the heart of their continued dominance in Web search) and developer frustration at Apple's many-headed role is growing daily.

The analogy isn't perfect, and the line between mobile apps and websites will continue to blur (as it has in the PC software vs. web applications world), but it's fascinating to observe the parallels and try to pick the vectors worth betting on. I'm particularly interested to see how things change when all the competing smartphone platforms + app stores (e.g., Android, BlackBerry, Palm, Symbian, WinMo) come on line and the smartphone device footprint expands meaningfully beyond iPhone. Bring it on!

Website 4 Sale! EZ Monee! Work From Home!

2009-04-01T15:34:00.000-07:00

If you've been following the Askablogr saga, this is the final chapter. I've had a ton of fun with the project and it was a useful conversation-started in the early days of Founders Co-op, but I've gotten too busy to give it much love and don't think about it except once a month when I get the hosting bill.

So Craig and I have decided to complete the cycle and put the site up for sale on eBay. If you're in need of a blog Q&A widget service - and you know you are - come on down and make a bid!

P.S. - the title is a *joke* (it is April Fools, after all) but the auction is 100% for real. In the interest of full disclosure, the site generates about $2/mo in AdSense revenue and costs $34 in hosting fees, for a net monthly deficit of $32.

Google Contacts - from poor to fair (& hoping for more)

2009-03-31T11:15:00.000-07:00

Since switching to the G1 I've become even more dependent on Google Contacts as my default contact manager (because it now powers my phone contacts automagically). I've never loved the product - it's always been slow, hard to navigate and even harder to edit - and I wasn't excited about increasing my reliance on it.

Thankfully, Google has recently made some tweaks to Contacts that suggest they're aware of the problems. First (thanks to a tip from Read/Write Web) I discovered that there's now a standalone page for Contacts - http://google.com/contacts - that decouples contact management from Gmail. Next, and much more important, Google (a) fixed the conflict rules that prevented two contact records from having the same email address, and (b) introduced a 'Merge contacts' feature that allows multiple records to be combined with two clicks.

These changes move Google Contacts from borderline-unusable to merely adequate, but given my dependence on the product that's an encouraging start. Given their big bets on Android and - more recently - Google Voice, it's a safe bet that more improvement is in the cards.

Book Review: Super Crunchers

2009-03-28T21:51:00.000-07:00

I just finished Ian Ayres Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart. It's very pop / light, along the lines of Freakonomics, but still worth a read for the reminder that (unlike pretty much everyone I interact with in the Web software world) surprisingly few folks are aware of the extent to which statistical analysis now powers business decision-making. In particular, I found the description of statistical applications in the government and medical spaces fascinating - I had no idea that randomized trial had become the default mode by which new human services public policy choices are being made.

The thesis of the book is a logical evolution of the behavioral insights pioneered by folks like Cialdini; it's well-established that human decision-making relies heavily on heuristics and that these analytical shortcuts and biases often lead to bad decisions. It comes as no surprise to anyone who shops at Amazon or uses Google that computers are really amazingly good at coming up with the right answer to a broad range of questions. Ayres just documents the fact that this kind of statistical analysis of large and diverse datasets is winning out over human judgment across an ever-broader spectrum of human endeavor.

The core assertion of the book is that statistical techniques have already replaced many traditionally human functions (with broadly excellent results) and that broad swaths of high-status and/or highly-compensated human "expertise" roles (e.g., medical doctors, teachers, and many different flavors of content analysts) are likely to suffer the same fate. He's careful not to overstep into machine-chauvinism, so much so that I was a little surprised not to find a mention of Nassim Taleb's arguments from The Black Swan (and elsewhere), that over-reliance on models can lead to even more disastrous results than over-reliance on intuition, due to the enormous potential impact of rare but catastrophic outcomes.

If you're a software developer or an experienced online marketer you probably wont find much new in Super Crunchers, but if you're one of the above and are trying to sell your offering in to clients or industries that still place intuition over analysis (e.g., most traditional media / advertising businesses, A&R in music, etc.) you might want to drop this on your clients desks as a warm-up to your next meeting...

I doubt anyone outside the echo chamber will care but...

2009-03-24T15:34:00.000-07:00

...I've just punted on Facebook out of sheer annoyance with the redesign and am going to give Twitter whatever social software love I have to give (which isn't all that much). Thanks to AJ Vaynerchuk for the quick tutorial on linking Twitter to FB, and to Ralph Zimmerman and Thomas Marban for creating Twidroid, a great free Twitter client for Android (still loving my G1, by the way).

I still don't really get Twitter, but I can't see why I'd use a copycat version when I can have the real thing. Somebody please give me a shout when Zuckerberg decides to start listening to his customers...

P.S. - If I'm going to use the damn thing I might as well have some subscribers - if you're interested please follow me on Twitter.