A 0 to 1 startup involves low financial costs but low non-financial costs too. You’ll at least learn a lot and probably will be better for the effort. A 1 to n startup, though, has especially low financial costs, but higher non-financial costs. If you try to do Groupon for Madagascar and it fails, it’s not clear where exactly you are. But it’s not good… The path from 0 to 1 might start with asking and answering three questions. First, what is valuable? Second, what can I do? And third, what is nobody else doing?

A chap named Blake Masters is taking Peter Thiel’s class on startups at Stanford. He’s posting all of his notes on his Tumblr. Startup people can obviously learn a lot from them. But a lot of it applies to pretty much any person who wants to make things – whether it’s a interweb startup, an ad, a new bike shop, or a new piece of music.

This piece was originally in AdNews.

Dennis K Berman, marketplace editor for The Wall Street Journal, summed it up with a single tweet: “Remember this day. 551-day-old Instagram is worth $1 billion. 116-year-old New York Times Co.: $967 million.” While the rest of us were scoffing down our Easter eggs, Mark Zuckerberg splashed out $1 billion to buy a mobile app that makes your photos look like they were taken in the ’70s.

The numbers are mind boggling. Instagram had less than 100,000 users in October 2010. By December, 1 million. Three months later, 2 million. By the start of November 2011 photos around the world were being vignetted and overshared by 12 million iPhone users. On April 3 this year Instagram launched its Android app, and picked up a lazy 1 million new users in a day. By the time founder Kevin Systrom was calling Zuckerberg “boss”, the app was being used by over 35 million people. To give that number some perspective, Instagram was installed on 1 in 10 iPhones in the world.

Unsurprisingly, in the last week there’s been a wave of speculation around why Facebook acquired Instagram. For advertisers, there are three key motives worth paying some attention to. And it’s not necessarily because they paint a rosy future for mobile and brands.

Firstly, and most obviously, Instagram was beginning to pose a real threat to Facebook. While even 50 million users is a fraction of Facebook’s audience, Instagram had grown its user base fast. Even more importantly was how it had grown it: photos. Facebook knows first hand how powerful photos can be in building a social platform. It was the addition of photo tagging that saw one of the biggest spikes in user growth in Facebook’s history. Partner this with the fact that Instagram has perfected the “content graph” – the ability to identify and recommend photos based on the photos you take and the tags you use – and it’s understandable that Zuckerberg was getting twitchy. On the Thursday before Easter, Instagram secured a $50 million round of funding, at a $500 million valuation. Cue complete twitch out.

Secondly, Zuckerberg wants to diversify. While Facebook will go public in the back half of this year, the founder still controls 57% of the company’s voting rights. In a letter to would-be investors in March he stated he wouldn’t be listening to “whiny short-term public shareholders”. Zuckerberg clearly doesn’t think that just adding new features for users or advertisers is the future for Facebook. He needs to diversify, and he’s willing to make some long-term bets in doing so. Looked at from this angle, the Instagram acquisition looks and feels a lot like Google’s $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube in 2009.

Finally, and most importantly for advertisers, Facebook just hasn’t been able to nail mobile. Last year its revenue climbed 69% to US$3.1 billion. In Australia, 2011 SMI data reports over $26 million was invested in advertising on the platform. But not one dollar of this came from mobile. Facebook doesn’t often talk publicly about mobile for this very reason – it even listed the lack of mobile advertising as a risk in its IPO filing. But the platform’s growth in mobile, like mobile itself, has been stratospheric – in December 2010 it saw 432 million people accessing the site via mobile, up 76% from 12 months earlier.

In its acquisition of Instagram, Facebook has picked up arguably the hottest mobile-focused development team in the world. While Instagram will continue to operate as a separate product, you can bet that those developers have now been tasked with creating a scalable, user friendly, content-aware solution to get brands investing in ads on Facebook’s mobile platform. Once it’s cracked that, it will move on to creating an offering for any app developer to integrate advertising that utilises Facebook’s Open Graph. Facebook doesn’t just want to get mobile advertising right, it wants to become the biggest mobile advertising network in the world.

What will now keep Zuckerberg awake at night is the fear that he’s actually hunting a unicorn. Outside of paid search, no media company has been able to mobilise its existing advertising revenue successfully and meaningfully. While Instagram had outlined plans to create advertising revenue, it was still a long way off implementation. If Facebook can’t get mobile right, the bad news for brands is that they will continue to be excluded from what is now the fastest growing media channel in Australia. And it’s highly unlikely that any consumers will miss them.

This post originally appeared in Technology Spectator.

After years of talking about “the internet of things”, it seems that the world of physical computing is finally surfacing as serious business, not just an oddball hobby.

Today’s world belongs to a new brand of geeks and unlike the ones that emerged in the late 90s to build Amazon, Google, MySpace, PayPal and Facebook, this lot is wielding soldering irons.

They build circuit boards and wire up new inventions that flash lights, whirr motors, and sense the world around them. They explore the world of 3D printing and hack their microwaves, and they do far more with their Xbox than just play games.

The first mainstream coverage of physical computing came with Twine.  After Apple released the iPhone4S with its “Siri” voice control function, Australian Marcus Scheppi made headlinesaround the world by controlling lights in his house by talking to his iPhone.

Marcus has recently put his main business on the back burner to focus on commercialising what started as an iPhone hack – and already has over $100,000 of funding through crowd funding site Kickstarter.

Meanwhile, the majority of floor space at geek convention Maker Faire is now taken up with 3D Printing. According to Cornell’s Professor Hod Lipson, there are now more open source, desktop 3D printers in the world than “serious” commercial ones.

The 3D printing movement is big enough now that The Pirate Bay has created a whole category on their site for 3D Printing objects – called Physibles.

And if printing your world doesn’t float your boat, maybe ultra-cheap tiny computing is your thing. The first release of the $25 Raspberry Pi, the educational “computer on a single chip”,sold out in a matter of minutes.

This new world of tiny boxes connected to the internet is interesting in another way. All these things are talking to each other. After the 2011 earthquake and tsunami and Japan, there are now 2337 radiation detectors, setup by the public, feeding data in to Pachube – a crowd sourced platform that “gives people the power to share, collaborate, and make use of information generated from the world around them.”

The new digital revolution

While many businesses and brands try to come to grips with the mobile enabled, tablet waving, globally connected consumer, there’s a new digital revolution going on. This new digital revolution is questioning the role of off-the-shelf products and global brands. This time the geeks are wiring up the whole world, not just the screens and keyboards on their desks.

Brands should be concerned. Sites like Kickstarter mean that if your idea actually has mass appeal, you have the same access to a global market that Samsung, Unilever or Nike do. With this new toolset of low-cost sensors, easily programmable Arduinos and 3D printers, almost anything you can dream of can be built at home. And it’s usually cheaper than you could find it in the stores (if you could actually find it).

The ‘Maker Movement’ has arrived and while this is not a new trend it’s more relevant today than ever before. The followers of  this movement will have more impact on our culture in the next decade than anyone else in the technology world. Somewhere out there a couple geeks are creating next Amazon, the next Google, and the next Paypal.

But they’re not coding websites, they’re coding new products. And just like last time, these geeks are likely to rewire business as we know it.

Sometimes the professional outloook can become a disadvantage, preventing the very people who have most at stake – the professionals themselves – from understanding major changes to the structure of their profession.

It is easier to understand that you face competition than obsolescence.

I just came across this highlight from Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody (2008). In the afterglow of winning Agency and Network of the year for the second year in a row last week, it’s a nice reminder of what we’re here for. Advertising, and particularly  the creative side of things, has become insular, self referential, and voraciously self-judging.

It’s when this happens that the big changes will be missed. One thing that awards do is ensure that we’re so busy looking inwards that we don’t see what’s going on outside our windows.

The erosion of the middle class may well accelerate, as the divide widens between a relatively small group of extraordinarily wealthy people – the digital elite – and a very large set of people who face eroding fortunes. In the YouTube economy, everyone is free to play, but only a few reap the rewards. – Nicholas Carr, The Big Switch (2008)

Given we’re likely hours away from the announcement of Facebook’s IPO, I couldn’t help but post this. Interestingly I’d say that if you suggested to Nicholas Carr back in 2008 that four years later a website would hold a $5billion IPO, even he would have thought that was ridiculous. But here we are, a few hundred Facebook employees are about to enter the digital elite.

The big question though, is whether the investors in this IPO will be the “very large set of people who face eroding fortunes”.

We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to call them: Physibles. Data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical. We believe that things like three dimensional printers, scanners and such are just the first step. We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare sparts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years.

And with that, The Pirate Bay created a new category on one of the world’s largest piracy outlets – a category for physical objects. 3D Printers are now under $1000. And while the resolution, size and materials still leave a lot to be desired, it’s worth casting your mind back to your amazement at first seeing a domestic printer spit-out a colour printout that sort of resembled a photograph. Because that was likely less than 20 years ago. A few quick points on this:

• This is the future. I love it when the future actually arrives.
• Any (likely) arguments or discussions around IP are completely pointless. The piracy of objects is well an truly established across the world already. It’s not just fake handbags either, the Chinese have pirated a Rolls Royce. That Eames chair your sitting on is more than likely pirated.
• This will eventually change how we look at products – the free availability of almost any design we want will ultimately lead to people thinking about their needs rather than their wants. Instead just buying what we are told too from the limited range available, we will consider what we need and how that need could be fulfilled through the infinite possibility of design customisation.
• This won’t be a huge challenge for brands – firstly because multi-material 3D printing is still at least 10 years off, so you’ll be waiting a while to print out those Nikes. Secondly because even in a world of downloadable (and piratable) objects, the same fundamentals remain – brands are a heuristic, a shortcut to something we know and are comfortable with. If brands are providing good service, customer-centric customisation, and simplicity, the world of 3D printing is far more of an opportunity than a threat.

In the meantime, if you really can’t wait, your 3D printed shoes are available here.

So what has digital culture brought to the conversational dinner table? Quick-fire and efficient online talk – which is more about exchanging information than emotions – threatens to send the quality of conversation back to the MiddleAges.

I realise the crushing irony of grabbing a snippet out of this brilliant piece by Roman Krznaric at The School of Life, so please head over and read the whole thing.

There has never been a mass market for good journalism in this country. What there used to be was a mass market for print ads, coupled with a mass market for a physical bundle of entertainment, opinion, and information; these were tied to an institutional agreement to subsidize a modicum of real journalism. In that mass market, the opinions of the politically engaged readers didn’t matter much, outnumbered as they were by people checking their horoscopes. This suited advertisers fine; they have always preferred a centrist and distanced political outlook, the better not to alienate potential customers. When the politically engaged readers are also the only paying readers, however, their opinion will come to matter more, and in ways that will sometimes contradict the advertisers’ desires for anodyne coverage.

Clay Shirky – Newspapers, Paywalls, and Core Users

This isn’t the shortest read on the topic, but Clay Shirky dissects the challenges that Newspapers are facing better than anyone. The core problem is that if paywalls are to work (which they must do for classical journalism to survive), newspapers need to acknowledge that their audience has fundamentally shifted (and shrunk).

It’s interesting that Crikey has pretty much nailed this model, and New Matilda is battling hard to make it work. Due to our size, I wouldn’t be surprised if Australia manages to be the first country to emerge with a working model of new journalism.

More and more people are looking to computers to save the world, but the people who run them certainly don’t know how. Nobody’s in charge, not even Google, though everyone in the dot-com world pretends. They’re all too busy with I.P.O.’s and market share, trying to start fads or come up with idiotic names.

via Theodor Holm Nelson – On the Information Superhighway, Destination Unknown – NYTimes.com.

A few people have noticed that this blog has recently become more of place where I’m posting interesting bits that I’ve read, rather than writing long (and dull) articles about media and advertising. There’s a couple reasons for this.

First being that I’m not writing as much for the trade press. There’s a pretty simple explanation for this – the Australian trade press just isn’t as interesting any more. Gone are the original thinkers of the industry, and in their place are the anonymous comments and knee-jerk pieces on social media. I’m still writing the odd piece for Business Spectator / Technology Spectator, so expect the odd long (and dull) article still.

Secondly, we’ve just launched the MediaCom Labs blog (and site). Labs is the home of the MediaCom Innovation & Technology team in Australia. We’ve got big plans over the next couple years, so I’ll be putting a bit more energy into building robots and apps and writing posts over there as well. We’ve just launched our 2012 trends report, so there’s another reason to go have a look.

So that’s about it. I’ll be posting more frequently on here now, but just with little interesting snippets. So please do stick around if your’e finding those interesting.