Drwn News

If Twitter is better when it's mobile, why doesn't anyone use it that way?

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 22:50:55 -0500

Twitter is amazing, but it's better when it's mobile. When the tweets you are reading are being reported from the show or the party or the cafe or just wherever the stuff is happening. And they are more interesting when the reach you right then, wherever you are. So the chart above is a big problem with Twitter -- the vast majority of tweets come from people sitting at a web browser, and a huge swath come from people running apps on their computer. Less than 15% are mobile. Of the top 100 Twitter users, about 1/3 only tweet from PCs -- never mobile. Crazy. If Twitter is better when it's mobile, why doesn't anyone use it that way?

Childhood deception

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 16:04:08 -0500

Pascale has had numerous experiences so far with intentionally telling untruths -- most of them playful imagination, others barely perceptible games of hide-and-seek. But today I caught her! At naptime, poking her head out of the bedroom, and hiding again when she saw me coming! She was sneaking around! She's 2 years and 10 months now, so one would expect this kind of thing. Other recent achievements: - swimming reasonably well with floaties - writing CAT, and writing PASCALE (except all out of order) - typing words on her computer (an XO) and having it read her words like MOMMY - she put on her winter coat by herself, using the "lay it on the floor first" method - she's an occasional potty user - she's graduated to a bed with railings Next big thing, I suppose, is probably to be fully potty trained. Maybe skipping the naptime. Not really sure -- I guess we're open to suggestions.

Who Google kills with Droid

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 18:18:44 -0500

The new Droid buzz is exciting -- a challenger with gusto for the arrogant, invincible iPhone. Or is it?

It's a strategically crucial launch for Android, which has had little impact on the smartphone market so far. It's made mobile operating systems 'cheaper' (free) but not too many people are in that business these days (except Symbian, also free, and MSFT). The real players make gadgets -- Apple, RIMM, Palm.

If -- if -- if this phone is a major hit (e.g., 1 million sold by Q2), it's a win for Google. But not at the expense of Apple. Rather, the likely loser is -- Palm. Those guys have the most to lose as they battle for a distinction. Dev community? Android's bigger. Fast 3G network? Verizon's better. Hardware slickness? Moto's thinner. Touch? Check. Open source/Linux? Check. Apple already brought Palm to its knees, by hoovering up the consumer non-enterprise part of the smartphone market. For the remaining share, why choose Palm over Android?

It's a pattern that Google's rear-view mirror makes clear. Search? Killed Yahoo, not Evil Empire MSFT. Mail? More arrows in Yahoo and AOL's back? Maps? AOL's Mapquest and Yahoo again. Who suffers as Chrome grows? Mozilla. Or Google Docs? Folks like Zoho and OpenOffice.

Not that Google only picks on upstarts or weaklings, it just doesn't really tackle the Microsofts and Ciscos and Apples and AT&Ts and Verizons and Comcasts and Facebooks etc etc. If the Droid is a winner the loser will not be a goliath like those; it will be the almost-comeback-kid Palm.

The secret to success? Google takes the hindmost.

Sent by Peek from http://me.drwn.com

Posted from my Peek through email

Why is nook toast? Third to market, first to the grave.

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 01:24:58 -0500

Barnes & Noble's nook seems really cool. But when you're third to market, life is harder. 1. Every single mention of your product is also PR for the #1 - Amazon's Kindle - most vividly in the form of a matrix of "nook has" vs. "Kindle has". Check out their site - they have their own. Think what it's like when you read a review of Zune or Replay TV or Blockbuster Online or a Ford Focus Hybrid or Ted by United. This is worse because there was all this halo out there when Mr. #1 launched -- all the "will it work?" "Oprah likes it" "there is something new out there!" "how innovative..." articles -- that went exclusively to Mr. #1. 2. "Ecosystem" has started running away from you. See how many Amazon titles are on Kindle - 350K, and publishers like the NY Times. You don't see mention of those on B&N's site. You see 500K old books, which is neat but it's not what people read. Those licenses are hard for Amazon to get, they have been wielding tons of bookselling clout for 3 years to get them, and I promise you that B&N will not get them on the same terms. iTunes store is not a commodity. They get the best stuff first. Same for Netflix streaming. 3. You reach for slightly crazy stuff to impress. That color touchscreen is nifty, and Amazon's "it's wireless", "now we have a big one", "now we have a GSM one" is kind of boring really, but Amazon is obviously designing to real user needs and covering the gameboard. B&N is fiddling around with goofy stuff that might just be crazy enough to work. Think of those beautiful pictures on Bing.com or M$'s cashback program. There is no felt need in search for nicer wallpapers. Or, to pick on Apple, the video-in-iPod-nanos thing is another example of using goofy stuff to add sizzle to something un-different (in this case they are competing against last year's 100% excellent iPod nano models) 4. Price - ouch. B&N launched nook at $259. I betcha they weren't planning that till Amazon goosed the price on Kindle last week down to $259. But that screen (the touch LCD!) and the wifi and the low initial volumes...those things are expensive. Looking at the gadget I am certain they lose money every time they sell one, and they will lose oodles if they manage to get it into a third-party channel/retailer (b/c they have to pay margins). Mobile devices with much smaller, more conventional screens that run Android have bill-of-materials-cost north of $259. This bad boy is likely worse. 5. Channel space is scarce by the time you arrive. You know who the #1 online electronics/gadgets retailer is? Not Barnes & Noble. And Best Buy appears to be giving room to Sony (Mr. #2) this fall. So where is B&N's gadget going to be? Book stores? Perhaps this sounds logical to you, but we did a little research at Peek on who buys what. And "the literate" is not the target market for e-book readers. In this case, the unlucky nook is not from a mighty cosmic power like Google or Microsoft where you might say "well, they can overcome anything" (though they can't), so the verdict is especially clear in this gadget guy's book: nook is toast. Sony's got a better shot of making it for a while.

Smart people = fail?

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 21:46:59 -0500

Great observation by Calvin Trillin on what went wrong with Wall Street -- basically, it used to be Ivy League, good family C-earners that filled banks (smart people became judges or professors), but as the money got nuts and the cost of college got nuttier, the smartest kids started going for Wall St instead of PhDs. Where they invented dangerously complex things that the top guys (a generation of C-earners) didn't understand. Disaster ensued. I wonder if startup land is filled with the "best and the brightest". I don't think it is actually -- folks I know of that ilk have always seemed to favor safer things. Even in 1998, when I graduated from Columbia, most of the really smart kids were trying to go to Wall St jobs at Goldman Sachs, not to startup like Netscape or Google. So maybe that's good for the startup economy.

iPhone to kill Garmin? No way

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 02:47:38 -0500

Reviews like this of the navigation app selection for smartphones should make people re-think the whole "smartphones will replace GPS" thing. Rather, this looks like yet another case like cameras -- "fast and casual" vs. "when it has to work great". Cell phone cameras are great and you take more pictures as a result. They are OK at best but hey, you have one. But they suck for parties or travel or most occasions when you would normally "have a camera" -- and luckily a real camera is great as a camera. Better in low light, has a flash, more data stored, actual focus, etc. In fact, people like me have two cameras -- a point and shoot and an SLR. Because sometimes I want to take really great pictures, and sometimes merely OK pictures. So what about maps? Well, maps for your cell phone are totally cool. Handy no end. I love Google Maps on every phone where I've used it (usually a smartphone - not yet ready for feature phones I guess). But it's absurd to try to turn your smartphone into a car-mounted GPS. Apparently you need to drop about $200 on software plus mounts anyway -- which more than a lovely Garmin would cost you. And don't forget that it will still suck -- crashy app, limited map database, and horrible battery life impact (how will you call for directions when your map app crashes?). Industry folks tell me about 10% of US cars have navigation built into them at this point. That's amazingly low -- every car should have this stuff in there; it's totally obvious. So here's my prediction: Garmin/TomTom gear gets cheaper and cheaper, it's integrated into every single last car either at factory or aftermarket in the next 15 years, and they sell about 600 million more units in the US + 1,500 million more ex-US (assuming replacement every 5 years). Assuming they earn about $20/unit (which is about 1/5th of what they earn per unit today), that's about $45 billion of profit between them, or about $3 bn per year for a long time. Oh yeah, copy-and-paste these issues for ebook readers (Kindle vs. Kindle App vs. regular books) and even for our humble mobile messenger, Peek.

Netflix to kill cable? Right on @wired

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 22:47:42 -0500

Was hanging at Wired today and got their latest issue which includes a really great writeup on their road to killing cable. (Unless Comcast buys them first.)

Sent by Peek from http://me.drwn.com

Posted from my Peek through email

Is your startup an indie or a studio?

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 11:46:39 -0500

The Nobels in Economics today recognize some of the social science contributions outside the normal "markets work!" analysis that hold the core doctrines of the dismal science. There is a fascinating branch led by the hero William Baumol and more recent contributors like Tyler Cowen that studies another surprising realm: arts and culture. The basic insight is that economics applies here too. Technology and market structure can totally change the products we see. Think Model T or Toyota Corolla or the Prius or Hummer. Tastes alone don't dictate industrial production thought it's an ingredient. The most striking upshot of analyzing opera and poetry and movies and pop songs this way: when the product is 'cheap to make' the winners in the category rarely get rich and instead call themselves artists (poetry, novels, paintings); when it is expensive to make OR TO DISTRIBUTE then it's a business where people get rich, raise tons of capital, crush hapless new entrants. Think Hollywood (CGI, special effects, locations, huge crews, stars, marketing budgets, national theatrical release). Some of these are fading (digital is cheaper than film) but they are enough for Hollywood to stay rich for now. Pop songs on the other hand, I would say it's nearly over -- no more stores, no more reliable stars, easy to record/produce, cheap to distribute via mp3/iTunes, etc. Startups fall into these categories. In some cases they need some meaningful dosh to build up a few of these business assets even while they disrupt others -- Peek is one such startup. In other cases they are very cheap to make and really fun -- like Foursquare and even Twitter (initially). And they are therefore very hard to get rich from. Though Tivo and Flip are 'one in a hundred' VC-funded gadget startups to succeed and be worth a billion dollars, Twitter and Myspace are one in a million. Sent from my Peek. See where at http://me.drwn.com

Sidekick: all your database are belong to us

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 22:12:04 -0500

The cloud is looking pretty flakey lately, between Gmail outages and today's striking Sidekick data loss. The genius of Danger's pre-iPhone superphone was partly the cloud: everything on the device was *always* synced to some stuff in the cloud -- the call list, the emails, text, pictures, apps you downloaded, everything. You can even log into a web page and see all the stuff on your phone anytime. Way before anyone else even thought of this, they had the "iTunes for your phone" thing down. An early casualty was the Paris Hilton incident when someone used her dog's name to guess her password and start browsing her call list. Worse, apparently, somebody hit "drop table" in the SQL terminal, because they blew away all the data in the whole cloud in the last day or two. The consequence is that the "master" -- which is the cloud copy -- is gone, and if your device resets or battery drains, it will sync back to the blank server. Ouchie momma. Peek doesn't work this way, partly because all that 2-way data synching is insanely network intensive and partly because your device is "where" your stuff should be. It's a client and has its data on it. Of course, one aspect that Sidekick, Blackberry and Peek all share is the reliance on a master application up in the cloud for making the whole thing work well. Blackberry and Peek both use that app to gather and deliver mails quickly and in a mobile-ready way. Since Windows and iPhone and other smartphone apps don't work that way, they use WAY more data and pound the heck out of networks. And the relatively wimpy storage/processors on the devices get chewed up doing the transactions. By avoiding this, we are able to make the Peek device itself much lighter-weight and cheap. Hurray for us.

Google Apps isn't getting there. Where are they winning (besides search ads?)

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 16:25:07 -0500

Link: NYT: Google Apps: A Long Road Ahead

Comcast should buy Netflix instead of NBC Universal

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 16:23:09 -0500

Many big service providers make all their money from the connection they sell you -- it's what you pay for, where their near-monopoly makes it hard for you to switch, and what is so costly for competitors to replicate. Comcast delivers cable TV to 30ish million homes and that's a huge business. Interestingly, the broadband world has been a whole new line of business for these guys over the same wires. Even though they are not meaningful players online (does it matter that they are a top 5 email host, if they don't run any of the moneymaking or strategically crucial franchises?), they have driven up average revenue per user meaningfully. About half or 2/3 of their users get broadband from them -- an extra $20-40. So why waste time buying hit-driven, unreliable content creators? Yes, there is a cost to the NBC content that Comcast delivers and one imagines that 'vertically integrating' would save Comcast some bucks. Like oil-wells-to-gas-stations Standard Oil. But you don't see Apple buying EMI. Hit content is like oil in some ways -- you never know where you'll find it and a gusher is worth *something*. But the money's all in the delivery mechanism, the part you can control. iTunes not EMI, cable not the shows. What Comcast should be buying is Netflix. It's pretty clear that TVs are about to start getting smarter, incorporating a lot of what set-top-boxes used to do. And as the premiere 'stream movies' brand with 10 million or so paying customers, putting Netflix in your TV will help you sell more TVs. So there will be loads of TVs in non-Comcast households ready to go. With their paid-programming delivery service getting hooked into so many TVs all over the place, irrespective of the broadband wires/wireless under the hood, those Netflix guys are going to soon have the kind of franchise that you really want if you're Comcast. And whoever the media champs are will have to go through them to find a big audience. PS Netflix's market cap is now 10x Blockbusters, as of today. How long before it exceeds Comcast's? Sent by Peek from http://me.drwn.com

Android = Java 2.0

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 18:58:25 -0500

Android is just mobile Java 2.0 says Sean Ryan -- he's right! Mobile Open Cheap Easy to dev for Yields: - Widespread "adoption" - Weak cohesive ecosystem - Expensive to develop for across all those platforms - Carrier control all the coin - can't make money selling j2me apps, sorry! - Little benefit for customers ultimately

My experiment with Postbox is over. Back to Thunderbird

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 10:23:43 -0500

My dalliance with Postbox is over. Why? It's not much better than Thunderbird, worse in a few key ways, and it costs money. Worse: search isn't real time, doesn't plug into Google Desktop, has an annoyingly worse filtering UI that requires more clicks. Not better: search isn't actually better than using Google Desktop, and the social stuff isn't really worth anything.

Pascale writes!

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 17:21:41 -0500

She's done it. She wrote a word. Here is Pascale posing with her trophy -- the word "cat", down at the bottom of the page there. And Ursula too!

Peeks for schools - get your schools to write us

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 16:03:25 -0500

In the year since we launched Peek we've seen lots of different ways that people use Peek. For the most part, when people really depend on email, it's for work -- the stuff they need to get done, on time, and in collaboration with others. But there is this really cool vein of people using Peeks at schools -- teachers in K-12, students, professors, college kids. Peek is affordable enough for anyone to stay on top of their emails, and we see people actively seeking it out for their schools. So if you are in a school or work in one or have kids in one, get your principal to write to us with a proposal for how or why your school should be part of our Peek for Schools program. I'm going to personally hand out tons of Peeks for school teachers and administrators, on a school by school basis. My only ask is -- tell us about your school, how you see the Peeks helping the school, kids, and parents achieve their objectives better. And tell us how many you need. I'll review what we hear and then send out batches of free Peeks to schools each month. So start your engines on the October entries. Email amol at getpeek dot com. Amol