REI offers an online counterpart for non-iPhone users who still want to access Bike Your Drive’s informative content at http://www.rei.com/bikeyourdrive. The resource offers “how to” videos, calculators for the C̘ offset, calorie expenditure and money savings of biking instead of driving, and recommended cycling gear.

Bike Your Drive is not REI’s first mobile application, its Ski and Snow Report is already one of the most popular applications in the Application Store’s weather category. Ski and Snow Report offers current conditions and weather forecasts at different mountains and resorts.

As I mentioned in our Multichannel 2.0 webinar, a mobile application doesn’t have to be transactional to be valuable. REI’s reaping many branding benefits from offering apps with real utility and “fun factor.” In fact, making an application commercial could hinder its popularity. But I came across a Bike Your Ride user who loves the application, but wishes it was a little more commercial:

Why wouldn’t REI show you the location of the nearest store? Put a button in there to press and when I want to buy bike parts, clothing, anything..there is the nearest store.

Thousands of daily bike commuters are in Seattle, Denver, Salt Lake and many other cities. It would be good to know how close you are to REI while riding to or from work.

REI, you’ve provided this application for free and its a very good idea. My applause. Now, please tie-this back to selling merchandise. Offer store locations. Encourage these commuters to visit your store. We won’t mind.

We want you to continue to prosper so you can do more of this.

The question is: is Paul Kirwin just one voice crying in the wilderness, or do more Bike Your Drive customers feel the same? Would adding a GPS-enabled store locator or otherwise tying the app back to the REI store drive sales or drive users away? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

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Original post by Linda Bustos

Original post by Om Malik

But it isn’t catching on.

Rackspace’s President, Lew Moorman, and I have been having an interesting debate. He even wrote up his thesis: that FriendFeed should just become a great Twitter client to become relevant.

I have got to be honest: it’s worse than that.

FriendFeed has done some remarkable things in a short period of time with a far smaller team than works at Facebook (FriendFeed has 13 employees, if my count is accurate, while Facebook has 800+ and Twitter has 40+).

What have they done?

1. Built a real-time interface for having conversations that can be bundled together and linked to from this blog, unlike on Twitter or Facebook.
2. Given me a way to manage my users into groups. Twitter has promised that for two years but hasn’t delivered yet.
3. Delivered a much better direct messaging functionality than Facebook or Twitter.
4. Shipped true real-time search that not only is more powerful, but searches all web data types, not just 140-character messages. Famous search engine pundit Danny Sullivan wrote up the real time search space and gave FriendFeed high marks.
5. Built a strong community that is already my #3 driver of traffic.
6. Built private group functionality that demonstrates powerful aggregation of feeds and other features.

But yet it continues to fall flat. Today, as the real time industry gathers at TechCrunch I wanted to honestly access why it is failing to take off. Here’s the reasons I’ve discerned:

1. While they recently added skins, the UI still is too geeky and sparse and not controllable enough. You can’t display the front page with comments hidden, for instance, which is the reason that Tim O’Reilly gave me for disliking the site. Why? Because he doesn’t have time to engage with all the comments, he just wants a news page to see a river of news. For him Twitter is “good enough” and he doesn’t need more features.
2. The real time search is, while very cool and much better than Twitter, isn’t nearly good enough to be usable for many people. Way too much duplication. Way too hard to use. The search industry has a dirty secret: 99% of people don’t click on advanced search, yet FriendFeed requires you to click on that button to use it in any useful way.
3. The noise problem. Twitter is noisy. FriendFeed is noisier because of the comments. Noise on Twitter goes away quickly. Noise on FriendFeed becomes louder due to engagement. I see this when people post cute cat photos. They get tons of engagement (who doesn’t like a cat photo) but that engagement spreads it, and pops it back up to the top of the page. Noise amplification pisses people off. Except for weirdos like me that love seeing noise.
4. The Scoble problem. I have tens of thousands more followers on FriendFeed for a variety of reasons. First, I’ve pushed it over and over again to my Twitter and blog followers, but second, I put a lot of original content into my stream there and I also read tens of thousands of feeds there and “like” the best, which puts me into a lot of people’s view. I’m also on the suggested user list there, which gets me lots of followers. But that means I overly dominate FriendFeed to the point that many people wonder if I’m paid by FriendFeed (I’m not) or have investment in FriendFeed (I don’t). Worse, if you are into something not tech, like quilting, I keep popping onto your screen because your friends probably are engaging with one of my items. That means more noise and frustration.
5. Facebook keeps cloning FriendFeed. FriendFeed hasn’t found a real differentiator yet except for real time search and Facebook has already told the press that it will copy that feature soon. FriendFeed needs a real thing that differentiates it from other services, but also needs to get easier to use. That’s a tough engineering problem, especially for a small team, because they must both shave the splinters off of their service (make it easier to use) as well as add features that will differentiate it (adding features often makes systems more complex).
6. No brand, no hype. Brands tell me all the time that if they can’t display their brands, they won’t use this system. Think about a celebrity like Oprah, or a brand like Nike. In FriendFeed they look like everyone else. On Twitter? At least they can have their own image on their background. Celebrities won’t hype up FriendFeed until they are able to better control their image.
7. Most people do not yet need an aggregator. I needed an aggregator because, well, I am a freak who uses a ton of web services. How many people blog? Not many. How many people are on Twitter? Not many. How many people are on Flickr? Not many. Now how many are on all of those? Very few. So FriendFeed’s main user base is small.
8. Publishers don’t see a way to monetize. Heck, TechCrunch even deleted his account on FriendFeed (because he was tired of dealing with FriendFeed’s community, which often behaves like a mob) but he wouldn’t have deleted that account if there were a way to make money with it. Me? I don’t care about that, because I’m not paid per page view the way TechCrunch is. But it sure does keep professional bloggers and content producers unexcited by the site, especially when they have other choices. Facebook has far more people, which is why publishers support it, and Twitter has better mobile, more hype, and an easier-to-use and easier-to-develop for system which gets professional content publishers hot and bothered.
9. Mobile. FriendFeed sucks on most mobile systems. Twitter and Facebook don’t. Enough said.
10. API too hard to use and not enough incentive for developers. Developers like Seesmic, TweetDeck, Tweetie, PeopleBrowsr, etc are driving Twitter’s growth. But they haven’t yet figured out why they would build a FriendFeed client. Until they do FriendFeed will remain a second-class citizen.

Will I leave FriendFeed? Stop talking about it so much? No and no. Why? Because it lets me differentiate what I do from other bloggers and it has helped me build an innovative media platform that is paying me and Rackspace dividends. Lots of people at the TechCrunch event in Europe say they like reading me there, which demonstrates to me that I’m reaching the audience I wanted to, even if FriendFeed hasn’t reached its own potential yet.

Original post by Robert Scoble

It was a point of regional pride that even though Silicon Valley and Microsoft had thoroughly run away with the technology industry that Europe still had one industry that they could point to and say “you can’t take it all.”

Today that no longer is true and, worse, Europe is stuck in a texting rut.

What happened? Europe started buying its own hype and today its citizens are stuck using phones that are way behind those from Google, Apple, and Palm.

Now, today, I’m going to be visiting Nokia’s research lab in Cambridge, England, and I must disclose that Nokia is one of the sponsors of the Traveling Geeks tour that I’m on. I’ve been at the recent Nokia World where Nokia announced the N97, which is now shipping in Europe, but the N97 isn’t getting London’s cool kids hot and bothered like the N95 did.

At last night’s TechCrunch Europa Awards, I took stock of the devices that the coolest developers were supporting. Look at Marko Balabanovic as an example of the kind of geeks I saw. He’s a London-based developer who showed me one of the coolest iPhone apps I’ve ever seen. You aim your iPhone around the street and it tells you about places near you using the iPhone’s compass. It will ship “soon” and his app already ships on the Google Android phones. No, it does not support Europe’s own phones.

These are the kinds of developers who used to taunt me with their European-designed phones.

Now Nokia and Symbian employees are definitely keeping a stiff upper lip about all this. Nokia, in briefings recently, showed off its mapping and social networking services. They are pretty cool looking demos, but the problem is that their coolness is being overrun by all those pesky developers like Marko who are building far cooler things on the Google and Apple platforms.

It wasn’t lost on me that one of the largest cheers last night in the mobile category was for TweetDeck who has one of the hottest iPhone apps for Twitter (TweetDeck is a company started in London).

Heck, things have gotten so bad for Nokia, third-party developer wise, that in press comparisons of mobile platforms only iPhone and Palm are compared. Why not Nokia? Easy. Even Europe’s own best developers aren’t supporting Nokia/Symbian.

But why are Symbian’s top futurists so confident, as this CNET article reports? (I met a couple of Symbian employees last night at the TechCrunch affair and they were confident, too).

Well, they keep pushing market share, as if that matters to anyone. Nokia does, indeed, own most of the world’s market share for cell phones.

But here’s where my own observations in London’s tube (the subway system here) come in: the UK is stuck on texting. That’s all I see most people do with their phones.

That rut that Europeans are stuck in is going to doom them.

Nokia simply does not understand how important the Web is and it’s because they ride the same subways and see the same behaviors.

In San Francisco and New York we already know that the Web is more important than texting. But that’s partly because we just skipped the whole texting thing because our cell phones sucked so much for so long and because we were ahead of Europe in computer-per-citizen ratios for so long.

I’ve been using a Nokia cell phone here in Europe, and it’s a totally frustrating experience compared to the iPhone. I’m not the only one who’s noticed this. The bleeding edge developers in Europe have noticed it too, and they notice that their fellow citizens are stuck in the texting rut.

What happens when Europe gets out of that rut (and, it will, thanks to the leading edge developers?) Easy to see, in such a world Symbian will simply not matter any more.

So, what should Symbian do?

Listen to the Tower Bridge. It’s showing a “post-iPhone” and “post-Web” world. Huh? The Tower Bridge has a Twitter account. “So?”

Well, think of a world that will be here in about 2012-2015: one where every object in the world has a Twitter account. Won’t we need a new kind of device to deal with that world?

One that has real time search built in? One that has its own Twitter account, as well as give the best Twitter interface to the user of that device?

Palm only pushed the Pre a little bit toward that new world, with its integration of Facebook into its contacts.

Nokia needs to use its leadership in cameras and hardware to really bring a better information experience to its users. The Symbian challenge is to start over and build a UI that needs no clicks to do a bunch of tasks (getting to the Web browser today requires too many frustrating clicks) and to build a new data display that can bring us the real time world that Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed are pushing at us and we haven’t even seen the bulk of the real time innovations yet. At today’s TechCrunch Real Time Crunchup several new companies are shipping that will push this world dramatically further (I’ve gotten pre briefed) and that new world will open the opportunity for European mobile companies to change the game the way Steve Jobs did when he showed the world the iPhone.

Will the Europeans push their way onto the mobile leader table again?

I’m pessimistic. The Europeans who work at the mobile companies just aren’t using the right language with me that would demonstrate that they get it. They don’t have a Steve Jobs or, even, a Steve Ballmer.

Think this doesn’t matter? Well, dozens of times this week I have been asked as part of the Traveling Geeks tour “how does London compare to Silicon Valley?”

I usually am polite and say I’ve seen some stunningly cool companies, like Spotify (who won four TechCrunch Europa awards last night) but in the back of my head I remember how cocky the same entrepreneurs used to be when showing me their cell phones and noting how far ahead of the world they were. That cockiness is done and that has deep implications for entrepreneurs across Europe. They must now visit Cupertino and Mountain View to get access to customer bases.

Oh, Nokia, what are you going to do about this?

Original post by Robert Scoble

I’ll be joined in the Exhibit Hall by our VP of Marketing, Matt Dion, at the Elastic Path booth on Tuesday and Wednesday. On Wednesday the 15th at lunch hour, we’ll be joined by the lovely Julia Freeman of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Store at our lunch hour vendor-retailer case study on Wednesday the 15th. I’m easy to spot, I’m in a red wheelchair.

It would be great to connect with you!

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