Airbnb is supposed to disrupt the Hotel industry. Who will disrupt Airbnb? Because there is a lot to disrupt in this service that has a very poor conception from the user/renter point of view

Yes, i know. Airbnb is super successful so there is nothing wrong about it…wrong!

Behind the growth there are so many huge design and conceptionmistakes the service makes that i am not sure it can keep on being so bad. I mark my words

It all starts with the browsing experience which i find so tedious. For example you have to relog every time you come back to the website (usually once a day when you search) and Airbnb does not remember your last search query which you have to type every time. Smart!

The page result is terrible!

As you scroll the results the side column for filtering is staying still. you have to position the mouse on the left column to access all the filters

Picture previews could be easily zoomed in, without the back and forth to the page detail view

There is no sorting by Price, New listing. you have to find your own way..

But now here is the worst part of Airbnbroken

Most of the flats listed for a given date are NOT AVAILABLE

How do you know that? by contacting the hosts. Airbnb apparently give very little incentive, maybe on purpose (so you get the illusion of choice) to owners to update the calendar availability (assuming there is one)

The results? Hours and hours of browsing, searching, exchanging…and not finding

Inefficiency and "fraud"

Adding to that, there is also some "fraud" going on Airbnb: where the owner will take your order. But then will decide later to rent it to someone else, maybe not on airbnb because he gets more money. And even though the owner is getting penalized (says the site), he won t care because he gets more money somewhere else.

Lots of those apartments are not owned by the "host" but just represented by some agent or third party. Making the listing results more confusing.

Airbnb should clearly displays if the appartment is listed by a- the owner b-the renter (who sub rents) c- a third party

Finally Airbnb should reward owners who list Airbnb in Exclusive mode and should display that on their site

Every or nearly every single new service coming out to consumer has some sort of social layer where you need to "follow" people or topics in order to get fresh content updated all the time.

That's how the web works today. It's not just about a frame and static content but a content stream of news and information coming your way: Facebook, twitter, pinterest, Flipboard, Pulse,…obviously but also all the new generation of games with social integration.

Show me who you follow and i will tell you who you are.

There is a major problem though: all the follow mechanisms in place are just dumb pipes with little intelligence. They present you a set a people (longer and longer as our graph grows) and you have to make a decision on who to follow at a moment where you don't even know yet the service

How many times after joining a service you thought to yourself "Man, i have no idea who to follow here. ok let's follow all. or let's skip for now!" 

All those services actually DO NOT help you making the right decision on following the right persons.

The first reason is because they are painful to browse: you have to scroll through long lists of people (long means > 50) and wonder who you should follow. The short solution >  follow everyone. And that brings usually a mess later on: not mentioning the fact you're spamming your contacts

Instead why no one has built an intelligent way to find followers by adding more context

1. Sorting: instead of presenting an alphabetic lists which make little sense why not let users sort list of who to follow by other criteria: KLOUT SCORE, recently talked with, present in other social networks, has interest in the topic of the service you are considering joining (e.g. games…) All this data is available online. 

2. Contextual publishing: every time i want to follow someone i'd like a little more background of what he has done so far in the current service (show me his last twits, pictures, ranks,….) and allow me to see who is active or just a ghost. Pinteret has a hint in the right direction but it is too light and not informative enough (do we have the same tastes for e.g.?)

3.Follow as a CRM mechanism: all follow mechanisms in place happen ONLY at registration. You can always find a way to add more friends but no one will naturally think about it IF you do not push this a little. Facebook and twitter have a way to doing that by integrating some modules on their website. But on the mobile there is no space for this. What is required is a proper CRM mechanism that will push intelligently and non intrusively topics or people to follow as you use the app (using in app notification or push or email)

4. Easy unfollow: every service should have a way to easily unfollow things that do not matter. I do not mean by just adding a "unfollow button" somewhere but by creating intelligent rules to spot who should be unfollowed (the less active, the less interaction with, the most spammy,…). But it is obvious why Social services do not want to go this way. They want to keep as many connection in place as possible

5. Annotation: many times i would love to add a small note about why i decide to follow such person (met at this event, liked this status just published, has the same name as me..) So i can recall easily why i am following who i am following

6. Transparency on recommendation: some services like twitter "will recommend" you someone to follow. that's a great first step (most services don't even get there). But why not let me understand a little more why a service is recommending me someone: i mean there are rules behind it, so instead of hiding them, tell me a little more. See that example from Spotify and how poor it is to help me make a decision

Obviously this has to be wrapped up in a simple user experience and not overwhelm the user. But from my observation we are far from  this level of sophistication and we will still have to deal with dumb follow mechanism for a while

This may seems like a non critical thing today. But over time, specially with the new generation of internet users having easily and rapidly thousands of people around them following each other this will become more critical.

I believe there is an opportunity to build the bricks that will make this possible. Beyond just connectors like Janrain or Gigya something smarter can and will be built. At the time i started a service called Topify which was bringing context to twitter follower but the real need is cross service and has to be built natively not a side commodity like Wefollow just "acquired" by About.me [which has some good ideas by the way] 

I don't know if those private valuations are right or not. But they should be an approximate ballpark and i focused only on the rock stars.

it s likely those companies get acquired at some point. What this means is that in the next 5 years the amount of "near certain" exit volume in the internet space should be superior to 15 Bn$

airbnb - 3bn$

Twitter - 5bn$

Uber - 1bn$

Spotify - 1.5Bn$

Etsy - 1Bn$

Evernote - 1Bn$

Whatsapp - 1Bn$

Dropbox - 2Bn$

Deezer - 1Bn$

That's a lot of money

note: i purposefully ignored all the new games corporations because their trajectory is still uncertain as we saw with Zynga

I have a lot of bluetooth devices connected to my iPhone and iPad. Mostly headsets, speakers or keyboards.

They are getting really good these days. For example i love my logitech slim keyboard for the iPad or my new Parrot Zik headset.

No Wire, No Fire...

The problem is simple though.

Once you have paired a bluetooth device to more than 1 destination device (let's say your iPhone and then your iPad or your iPhone, your wife's Phone and your computer), you can't easily decide and control which of those 2 or more devices are going to get connected first. For example my i will turn on my headset and i will not know if it will connect for sure to my iPhone first or iPad first.

The Only real way to turn bluetooth devices you don t want to get connected and then turn on your Bluetooth  device with the destination device left.

Bad experience

Some have brought a solution by creating patterns to switch from one device to another (by example by double click on a button). But

1. you have to remember which button/pattern

2. it does not guarantee you that the next device you will connect is the one you want (e.g. if you have 3 devices connected like 2 iPhones and a Mac which will be the next one?)

The only good way i found so far was created by Logitech on this Wireless Keyboard which has 1 click access to 3 different devices: 1 button for each 3 device. You press #1 you are connected to device 1, #2 you switch to device 2 and #3 switch to device 3

And i guess this is how this should be solved, until it is cheap enough to build for each bluetooth device a digital display which will enable that elegantly (maybe by touch or swipe)

Someone listening?

Fred Wilson has a terrific post on how the face of the Web, as a business is changing. It is harder to build mega web properties today than it used to be. And VC money is flocking more to new verticals like enterprise (long time forgotten) and even hardware related businesses. It's a Cycle thing. 

But

That is far saying that it is not possible to build today a very healthy, non VC backed consumer business. Why? because the web, as a business has become so large that it opens the door for thousands of very profitable consumer facing businesses.

You don't need any more VC money to fund a nice consumer business (meaning doing 1 to 10 million USD a year in annual revenue). Very quickly you can manage to get to break even or even pre fund your business (thanks to services like IndieGogo or Kickstarter)

The most important channel/ecosystem (and fastest growing one) to build a non VC backed profitable business is to create a mobile app.

App Stores have empowered ten of thousands of people to create their own decent business

Not all of them are successful (Fred talks about the difficulty of being successful in mobile). But thousands make over 100k of revenues a year. 

The new face of consumer internet is precisely a wide range of mobile apps that do not have to be funded by VCs, because enough people are educated to buy content. And this trend will only go up

Update: this is worse than i thought. now when you have one waiting message, you have to click twice to eraze it. One in your feed and once in your inbox. Totally stupid. 

Every new version of yammer app for iPhone is getting worse. But the latest one is hitting a milestone in terms of uselessness which is for me a pointer to yammer near death

They introduced an "inbox" that populates all the messages addressed to you. Ok. Why Not

But the problem is that they mark most of your history as unread. It breaks totally the badge count that usually appears on the app icon

The badge count is critical because it is the indicator something new is waiting for you

But here you have from the get go 99 unread message. Thank god they stop at 99. But go find them !

So i tried to delete them. Impossible you have to read all your messages one by one again. Even from the website where of course the number of unread message is there totally different (!!!)

No mass delete feature. Who built that app? An intern of what?

So I decided to write to their feedback from the app. Surprise ! The email comes back with a delivery error

Bottom line: useless update. Feedback inoperative. This is after a 1bn$ acquisition by Microsoft

Yammer are you dead or what? Is this how you see a golden future?

What a shame

I had a terrible experience trying to import my Facebook contacts to my iPhone. I thought that would improve things. Nope. It did the opposite

Maybe this is related to the fact that i have many contacts. Maybe not. All i know if that i used a popular (apparently well done and rated) app called SmartSync that is supposed to match your contacts in your iPhone with your Facebook contacts and enrich it with photos, numbers and emails you don't have or that are not up to date

This has created a massive mess. Right after i used this app my iPhone was burning hot. Every app was crashing. i suddenly got double the number of contacts with a lot of meaningless "No Name" Contacts. All my contacts are backed up in iCloud. I tried to remove the iCloud settings. Crash.

I tried to reset my iPhone to a previous iCloud back up. that would not work and the iPhone would crash on the way. 

I knew this was because of the contacts. I had to find a way to clean the mess

The good news is that i found 2 great little apps that saved my contact book from duplicates and useless Vcards: Cleanup remove and Deduplicate

I merged the duplicates and erased the empty contacts: i did it from my iPad which is synced via iCloud with my iPhone.  Things got back to normal

So now you know. Avoid the Dumb Sync

So far the very best tool i know to enrich your contact book is by far WriteThatName

I am a huge fan of Dropbox. I have all my personal and professional files on it. I paid for the full hosting plan

But something is broken on Dropbox: link sharing. It is too painful to share links. And i share many many links. Many many times a day.

Today they announced a "new" feature for easier sharing which in nearly no way improves the link sharing experience. As a matter of fact it makes it even more complicated

Let me illustrate

A. On Dropbox site

1. you click on the "link" symbol

2. it then opens a new page. With no indication except a unique link in your browser

3. then you have to point your mouse to the link

4.Then you have to copy the link by right click or by Ctrl+C

That's 4 STEPS to get the link of a file or folder. 4 DAMN STEPS

Why can't Dropbox, just generate the link from step 1, open it in a light box right on this page with an AUTO COPY feature when my mouse gets there. That would be 2 STEPS. It could even be 1 STEP if by Clicking "Link" it was automatically copied with an Confirmation overlay this is copied

WHY CAN'T THEY MAKE IT REALLY SIMPLE?

This is so ridiculously long and painful. What's really surprising is that they used to have on the document page a small box in the page with a short Dropbox link, ready to be auto copied.

WHY DID THEY REMOVE THIS?

B. From The Desktop

This is worse because in addition to A, above, you have to

1. Right click on the document

2. Wait for your browser to open

Then go though 3 and 4

Hey, Dropbox: ever heard of a Desktop Clipboard? We download Dropbox on our desktop, right? Let me right click as you offer from any offer > then auto generate AND auto copy the link to the Clipboard. 

Use Growl or whatever you want to confirm me that this is copied.

That would be 2 steps. That's all

You know how i solve this problem right now? i make a screenshot with Skitch and get the link copied right there. I know this is stupid. But much faster

BOTTOM LINE

Why can't they make this happen? Oh! that's because this is complicated or difficult? Well that's why you raised a Gazillion dollars no?

DROPBOX PLEASE MAKE LINK SHARING REALLY SIMPLE!

Can someone explain why no airline company is offering a trip option from Tel aviv to San Francisco. Israelis travel to the valley every week in hundreds and would fill a plane or more without any problem. 

Instead you have to go through 24h+ travel options with one or two stop overs (either JFK, NEWARK, Atlanta, or London/Frankfurt). this is insane when you think of it. This is so much time wasted for entrepreneurs and their families

• Is this Elal fault?
• is the the ministry of transportation fault?
• lack of competition?

Certainly not the lack of demand. And certainly not a technical limitation (there is a tel aviv> Los Angeles direct)

This just drives me nuts!

update: someone on Facebook just posted me this article a minute ago after having read this blog post. this could be arriving next year with United Airline. At last!!

I recently ranted about the "Copy/Paste" PR attitude in the blogosphere. Yes, there are examples like those everyday. Everyone needs to make page views.

But damn it. This is making the blogosphere a less and less interesting place to be.

Take this news about Apple selling 1 million iphone units of iPhotos in 10 days. Great! Great app. Everyone talks about it. But...

But why this uniformity in treatment? Why do we need 20 titles saying exactly the same thing. Can't anyone dig deeper?

Why?

Yep they sold 1 million apps: but is that surprising really?

• Why no one paid attention to why? Apple has put a massive promotion around this app (default news and noteworthy, In store promo, Videos on the site, youtube,...)
• Why no one asks about how the app is performing in terms of usage, recurring usage,..
• Was it downloaded more on iPhone/iPad? How do they rank compare to each other (both in position, rating and review?)
• Why no one asks how this performs compared to other Apple's native apps (works, pages, keynote,..)

Yes this is a very data point. But copy pasting Apple's PR just won't cut it!

update: Sarah at Techcrunch wrote a "dig deeper" post