The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Throw Out Your Business Cards, Hashable’s iPhone App Is Now Live
- No, It’s Not A Facebook Profile. It’s Picasso (well, almost).
- You Too Can Be Julian Assange In ‘WikiLeaks: The Game’
- Navy’s “Mach 7″ Railgun Fires A Round At 33,000 Megajoules
- From The Infinity Ventures Summit In Kyoto, Japan: 14 Demos From Japanese Startups
- DreamForce Kinect
- CityVille Hits 6 Million Daily Active Users In 8 Days
- Electric Composters Don’t Say “Holiday,” Where To Buy Green Tech Gifts Online
- Hey, Steve, Mark, Biz or Ron – Want To Speak At TechCrunch Moscow? #TCMoscow
- TechCrunch Giveaway: Five Google Chrome Cr-48 Notebooks
- TC Teardown: Who Is Best Positioned To Win The $20 Billion Brand Advertising Prize?
- Did Those Yahoo Layoffs Hit Early?
- Gillmor Gang 12.11.10 (TCTV)
- Speaking of… Using Your Medium with Reason’s Nick Gillespie (TCTV)
- French Fund ISAI Brings Together 70 Entrepreneurs to Invest in Commerce Guys
- The 5 Myths Of Building A Great Mobile Team
| Throw Out Your Business Cards, Hashable’s iPhone App Is Now Live Posted: 12 Dec 2010 08:50 AM PST
If you’ve been waiting for an #intro to Hashable—the only way up until now that you could get into the semi-private business networking service that keeps tracks of your connections through Twitter and email—you can now invite yourself by downloading Hashable’s iPhone app (iTunes link). It just went live on iTunes this weekend. Hashable makes it super-easy to introduce two people via Twitter or email, or keep track of people you #justmet or had #lunch with or showed a #demo to. Up until now, you had to remember to Tweet out the correct hashtag and the Twitter handle of the person you connected with so that Hashable could record it. That was fine for early adopters, but once you have the iPhone app, there is no going back to the Twitter and email hacks. Even better, Hashable can replace the need to swap business cards, which end up in a drawer that you can never find when you try to remember who that contact was 8 months later. When you make an #intro via #Hashable or record a connection with a person, each person gets a link back to each other’s profile page and those connections become searchable by hashtag.
The Hashable iPhone app ingests your contacts from the address book on your phone, Twitter, and Gmail and combines them together. (Although, you end up getting a lot of duplicate entries—it would be better if the app collapsed every contact with the same name into one entry). The iPhone app lets you introduce any two people in your address book(s), or record a connection that you make with a person (#justmet, #beers, #meeting, #thanks). The more you use Hashable, the more it turns your address book into a relationship books which is searchable by tags (assuming you recorded the connection). Want to see everyone you’ve met in the past 8 months? Just search #justmet. Can’t remember the name of that guy who had a metting with last week? Search #meeting. Connections can be recorded privately or shared publicly on Hashable and Twitter. As you follow more people on Hashable, you can see all the connections they are making in your stream. And the more you use Hashable, the more Hashcred you get, which moves you up the leaderboard for your city or among your network. If you go to the website, you can see which contacts you connect with the most because Hashable measures the strength of each relationship.        
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| No, It’s Not A Facebook Profile. It’s Picasso (well, almost). Posted: 12 Dec 2010 08:31 AM PST  If Pablo Picasso or Belgian surrealist, René Magritte, were alive and on Facebook, their profiles would probably be a terrific work of art. Yes, that's right, Magritte is the one who did this painting. With a little inspiration from the Treachery of Images, I bet he'd also write something along the lines of "This is not a Facebook profile" or "Ceci n'est pas un profil Facebook" somewhere on his Facebook page. Yet, while Picasso and Magritte may not be around to wow us with a little contemporary Facebook art, the profile of French artist Alexandre Oudin is probably the next best thing. 
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| You Too Can Be Julian Assange In ‘WikiLeaks: The Game’ Posted: 12 Dec 2010 08:06 AM PST
Perpetually outpacing the movie industry, the story has already hit home with the gaming community. Indie game developers have created the WikiLeaks Stories collective in order to turn some of the actual stories revealed in the WikiLeaks cables into games. Dutch developer Sebastiaan Moeys has directly tapped into the zeitgeist and spent a week creating “WikiLeaks: The Game” where, in a bit of creative fiction, you can play Assange stealing private documents himself. At least one other WikiLeaks inspired game (“Uncle Sam Vs. WikiLeaks” also exists). In Moeys’ “WikiLeaks: The Game,” your objective is to wait until President Obama is asleep and then try to download 300K secret files from his laptop with a USB. Just like governmental attempts to quash WikiLeaks, the game is harder than it looks, I’ve played it five times and I still haven’t won. You can try your luck here.        
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| Navy’s “Mach 7″ Railgun Fires A Round At 33,000 Megajoules Posted: 12 Dec 2010 07:19 AM PST
       
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| From The Infinity Ventures Summit In Kyoto, Japan: 14 Demos From Japanese Startups Posted: 12 Dec 2010 05:21 AM PST
Here are thumbnail sketches of all the products that were shown at the event’s launchpad. The winner and four runners-up
The best of the rest of the IVS launchpadHere's a list of the nine other products that didn't make the cut:
The Infinity Ventures Summit is an invitation-only event that takes place twice a year. Click here for my coverage of the spring 2010 event. Credit for picture on top of this post: Yuji Kumagai        
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| Posted: 11 Dec 2010 05:32 PM PST
So Marc called an audible and brought Stevie onstage for an extraordinary conversation interrupted only when Clinton reached the auditorium. I had forgotten how incredibly intelligent and equally verbose Bill could be, but his gentle embrace of Stevie Wonder spoke across the generations and cultures. And later that night we sat in awe as Neil Young sang to the ages, every strum having a reason to be there. The message of serendipity, hope, living a life of service mixed with compassion, all those things we yearn for privately but laugh off in the public moment, on display and alive 30 years to the day John Lennon was killed. The day Lennon died I sat in the pool room at the Band's Shangri-La studio in Malibu, watching Monday Night football. Howard Cosell brought the news in that time's version of Twitter, instantaneously changing our assumptions. If this could happen, anything was possible. But in the worst of ways. No longer was this about a group breaking up — a producer in the room sloughed it off with "he's just a guitar player" as tears came and the numbness set in. I left the room and walked down the beach to a friend's house and never went back. It was a long time before we could summon the courage to believe in life's possibilities after that. I say we because I know it to be true, that thing summoned in the Sixties against a stacked deck that time and time again proved more powerful than we actually believed. Strangely, Nixon and his henchmen proved more understanding of Lennon's power, just as today we understand more of Nixon's power to bring change in monetary policy, opening China, setting a standard of political analysis unequalled even in today's loud, confident cable posturing. We were blinded by our passions, but not our intuition. Slowly we recovered yet again from the wounds of war, the defeat of respect, the emptiness of lost trust. We drank our fill of the 80's, stumbling out of Save the Robots at 7AM reaching for sunglasses as we swam upstream against people on their way to work. We escaped the City, raised our children, watched Jobs and Gates and the others bootstrap the space program to reinvent our tools and toys, and did what we could to learn to believe in something, anything. It wasn't the same, but just as we become our parents, we learned to reinvest in our souls. Recently something began to change, probably not a big deal on the surface but palpable nonetheless. The iPhone had some of it, but the iPad confirmed it. Here was this thing that we were told was not useful, that was good for status updates but not real work, that didn't run Flash because of a personal vendetta rather than the fact that it held our souls back. Don't believe, don't smile, don't revel in the freedom to put any combination of words or bits or ideas in whatever order we dream. And forget what we've learned: that no matter how painful the moment might be, it's in that moment that the beauty and the hope of life is reborn. Lennon was a guitar player, probably the greatest rhythm guitar player of his time. Listen to the feel of A Hard Day's Night, throbbing with that extra thing that we don't understand but immediately believe in. And hear it today in PokerFace, as Lady Gaga drives the magic bus on our Xbox Kinect. Like Stevie Wonder walking down the hall, my wife asked a Target salesperson if she had any of the 250 gigabyte ones, the ones you can't get anywhere, not even with fading pull at the Microsoft store. She says yes, there's one in back, came in last night. And sure enough, like Stevie walking down the hall, she was right. What is this Kinect thing anyway? It scans your face, the silence in the room, the level of the music you play back with, the rhythm of your dancing, all the while feeding back reinforcement as you learn the moves and find yourself inside the track looking out. When Neil Young played those opening power chords — tin soldiers and Nixon bombing, we're finally on our own, this summer I hear the drumming, four dead in Ohio. This is not a game we're playing, this is a living and breathing thing, something new that has all of us children with a shining light in our eyes. You can return to your cynicism and trending terms if you must. We understand that it's part of the process of relearning a reason to believe. As Steve Wonder said in that timeless conversation with Marc, the one that only happened because Bill was on the longest flight from east to west of his life, the one where he spoke of his mother coming to him in a dream after she passed away, the one where he talks of how thankful he is for the blessing of being blind. "It's allowed me to have a very objective point of view — this whole color thing." Sometimes it's just as hard to end a post. But not this time. Microsoft has something really big here with Kinect, a machine we can learn to love. Spend a night on the couch watching your kids play inside the music, rafting and jumping, or sit in a sea of iPads in a Dreamforce keynote and surf the chatterstream in the hall and over the Net. When Neil Young thanked the benefit audience for contributing 3 million dollars to the UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital, he was acknowledging the collaborative nature of his artistry and our willingness to believe once again. Of course, we already know he has a heart of gold.        
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| CityVille Hits 6 Million Daily Active Users In 8 Days Posted: 11 Dec 2010 05:10 PM PST
Zynga’s newest game, CityVille, is the fastest growing game in the company’s history. But we already knew that. It had nearly 300,000 players in the first 24 hours, and 3 million daily active users in its first week. But it’s growth ramp keeps on going crazy. Now, not quite two days after it hit the 3-million user mark, it is already at 6 million daily active users, we’ve learned from the company. To put that in perspective, that is four times faster than it took FrontierVille to get to 6 million daily active users, and more than five time faster than it took FarmVille. Time It Took To Get To 6 Million Daily Active Users FarmVille: 46 days How did CityVille, a social city-building game, grow so fast? It was the first time Zynga did an international launch in five languages (English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian), with a big marketing push and localized games in different countries. It also leveraged Zynga’s other existing games to kickstart CityVille. With Zynga, every new game seems bigger than the last. It’s kind of scary.        
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| Electric Composters Don’t Say “Holiday,” Where To Buy Green Tech Gifts Online Posted: 11 Dec 2010 01:57 PM PST
Why? It’s easy to find green gifts in the beauty, fashion, home or kids category. Many retail websites, however, bury their great green electronics pages rather than highlighting them, and making them easy to find from the homepage. We’re looking at you, Target, Walmart, Sears and BestBuy, sites that don’t have green tech or eco-friendly sections or search filters that make it easy to find the water-saving, solar, LED and more earth friendly tech items they carry. Maybe big retailers don’t want to come off too specialized, or maybe they’re worried about implying other products they sell, outside of a special “eco” section, are somehow environmentally wasteful.
Gift shoppers can’t rely on the media’s picks entirely, either. Several guides have recommended stuff this season that’s either utilitarian, or expensive enough to wilt mistletoe. Treehugger suggested a $670 eMeter that measures a users’ energy consumption at home. Inhabitat suggested a water clock that duplicates time-keeping features of a basic mobile phone— but hey, it runs on lemon water so it’s “eco.” The biggest stinker was NetworkWorld’s recommendation to give automatic, electric composter as a gift. Who’s naughty enough to get that one? (It’s not even solar-powered!) The most environmentally friendly gifts one can give are probably not things — shipped from far away, delivered by diesel trucks, destined for the landfill — but digital goods, like a must-read e-book or a membership to a streaming video site. We know. Digital goods lack that whole je ne sais quoi of handing a loved one something they can tear open. Hopefully, it’s wrapped in 100% recycled and recyclable paper. We suggest using the comics section— save a tree and a little piece of the print news business. Here at TechCrunch, we found a six-pack of sites that either specialize in, or have designated sections and great search filters for what we call green tech. These should help you find sustainable gifts for tech heads that are actually worth coveting, and should arrive in time for Christmas if ordered on or before December 15th.
2. GoGreenSolar.com is a specialty store with products to please home improvement and gardening enthusiasts, from a solar power generating system that doubles as a back yard cabana (about $10,000) to solar-powered LED grow lights for budding botanists ($30 and up). 3. Amazon.com has a special Amazon Green section. It’s not featured in home page navigation, but a quick search on the word “green” leads users there. The special section’s Green Electronics category features everything from energy-efficient laptops and netbooks to information on recycling the old to make way for the new. 4. The Overstock.com electronics section includes quick links to “Made in the U.S.A.” gadgets, and “Refurbished” items. Refurbishing is recycling, which makes it automatically green. Buying locally produced anything tends to eliminate emissions generated in shipping from far away. The United States also has stricter environmental regulations than China and other exporters. 5. 21st Century Goods, a specialty retailer focused on “off-the-grid” lifestyles, offers plenty of cute eco-friendly gadgets, from hand-cranked mini-USB device chargers ($14) to solar-powered flag pole lights that would make a good present for a proud patriot ($60-$130). 6. Dont’ let the yoga mats scare you at Gaiam. The sustainable web store also sells: recyclable water filters for home chefs and health nuts who crave pure hydration; energy-efficient hair dryers for the style addicted, and for the outdoor adventurer, a hand-operated, snake bite and insect poison extractor (a weird and inspiring stocking stuffer). Also worth noting:
For gift givers across the pond, this site delivers eco-gadgets to the Euro-paying market: EthicalSuperStore.com. For a guide to what’s hot in tech in general this season, visit Crunchgear’s 2010 holiday gift guide. Beer can wreath image via Krupp Charlie Brown-style Christmas Tree image via Listen2ds        
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| Hey, Steve, Mark, Biz or Ron – Want To Speak At TechCrunch Moscow? #TCMoscow Posted: 11 Dec 2010 12:53 PM PST
But we also decided that it would be awesome to have some Silicon Valley players attend virtually, either by video feed or via the telepresence equipment kindly provided by Cisco from their Valley offices. It beats traveling from the US. So this is an unashamed appeal: if you are Mark Zuckerburg, Steve Jobs or someone of that elite level, then we’d love you to appear on stage via video link. Let’s build some links between Russia and the Valley. Maybe Ron Conway or Evan Williams / Biz Stone is available? We don’t know – that’s why we’re making this appeal. So, Ron, Biz, Steve or Mark – if you’re free, then contact TechCrunch Europe Editor Mike Butcher (mikebutcher AT techcrunch.com). Thanks.        
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| TechCrunch Giveaway: Five Google Chrome Cr-48 Notebooks Posted: 11 Dec 2010 12:26 PM PST
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| TC Teardown: Who Is Best Positioned To Win The $20 Billion Brand Advertising Prize? Posted: 11 Dec 2010 12:26 PM PST
Editor’s note: Brand dollars are still the biggest unclaimed prize on the interent. Guest author Steven Carpenter handicaps the players who are most likely to get them. One of the biggest business opportunities in the consumer Internet space is to create products and services that attract a share of the billions of dollars in held-up brand marketing that has yet to find its way onto the web. With the explosion of various kinds of content and the innovative ways advertisers can segment and track users, why are marketers so reluctant to open up the floodgates? Quite simply, because the current online solutions—search, lead generation, display, video—do not provide a high enough return for these kinds of categories and are not consistent with the image these brands have invested so heavily to achieve. Commensurate with the potential riches, there is an enormous amount of startup energy and experimentation going on in this area. In this installment of the TechCrunch Teardown, I will look at the four leaders—Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Groupon—and how their new interactions—"like", "follow", "friend/check-in", "group coupon"—are fairing with brand advertisers. The $20 Billion Opportunity
According to Ad Age, the Top 100 Global Advertisers spent over $100 billion in 2009 across the various print, television, radio, outdoor, and Internet channels; based on data from the previous year, 39 of the 100 had budgets of $1 billion or more (see table 1, click to enlarge). Procter & Gamble, manufacturer of 50 leading brands (such as Tide, Dawn, Pampers, Gillette, and Crest), of which 23 generate $1 billion or more in sales, is the world's largest advertiser, spending close to $9 billion annually. It should follow, then, that the Internet economy as a whole is effected by how the brand managers at these companies decide to allocate their funds online. As you can see from the last column in the table at right, the leading marketers are only spending $1.8 billion, or 2.6% of their total budgets, online, despite the fact that consumers are spending close to 30% of their time on the Internet. Of the top marketers, only General Motors, Disney, Bank of America, and News Corp. allocated more than $100 million to the web.
So who has found the best marketing value online? Companies that market and sell financial services, insurance, automotive, communications and media, and consumer technology. It makes sense: these are companies with products that can be found easily using search, and whose customers are most likely to be acquired online because they can transact online. To date, Google and vertical content sites such as Yahoo! Finance and Bankrate have been the largest benefactors of these re-allocated dollars.
New Kleiner Perkins partner, and former Morgan Stanley analyst, Mary Meeker, estimates that closing the gap between consumer attention and ad dollars spent on the Internet to be a $50 billion global opportunity. If the Top 100 marketers bring their marketing budgets in alignment with 30% of time spent, I estimate online brand marketing to be a $30 billion global opportunity and $20 billion in the U.S. As evidenced by Google's recent pursuit of Groupon, its traditional CPC and display advertising may not be sufficient enough to meet these marketers' needs. The Four Horsemen There are four Internet companies currently best positioned to work with brands to create innovative marketing solutions that will appeal to millions of consumers—Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Groupon. I acknowledge it is not exactly a fair comparison for two main reasons: 1) Facebook has enjoyed a 3-4 year head start on the field and 2) each product has a different use case and thus attracts a different audience with distinct revenue opportunities. Each company, though, has found its way into the mainstream and now finds itself with an attractive platform for brand experimentation.
I see the four product experiences these companies offer on a continuum of online-to-offline interaction on one axis, and requiring passive-to-active behavior on the other. The Facebook experience, for example, is largely an online one where a user can say something about herself by associating with a particular brand by "liking" it. This is an incredibly passive expression that requires a split-second action with little to no long-term repercussions. She can choose to visit the brand page and see the news feed at her convenience. Twitter, on the other hand, is a personal tool for gathering realtime information—no one knows which feeds the consumer decides to consume or to ignore. While Twitter is similar to Facebook in its largely online-focused consumption, it is a much more "active" medium. Users are constantly reminded when they are following a brands' information stream. As soon as the information becomes unimportant, too frequent, or spammy, she will simply cut off the connection. Groupon (which I wrote about in an earlier teardown) is the lightest application, ironically, even though it is the only one of the four that requires a user to make a purchasing decision. Transactions occur easily online and the offline experience of presenting a coupon is consistent with decades of proven user behavior. As of now, Foursquare asks the most of its users in relation to branded campaigns, but it is also the closest of the four to placing customers in the physical proximity of brands and retailers. How They Are Doing
You can see how the four different interactions 1) naturally lend themselves to different brands and 2) exhibit a large disparity in terms of the sheer number of participants. And this is not necessarily a bad thing: 44,000 passionate luxury fashionistas at NY Fashion Week may be more valuable to Yves Saint Laurent than 5 million fans on Facebook. It should come as no surprise that the biggest brand in the entire social ecosystem is Coca-Cola with 20 million Facebook Fans. Whole Foods is the biggest brand on Twitter with 1.8 million followers and the Gap, having sold 440,000 half-off coupons using Groupon, is that startup's largest brand experiment.
Of the top 50 pages on Facebook, 8 of them are leading advertisers and brands, compared to Twitter which doesn't have a single brand in its top 50 users. Of Facebook's top 50 brand pages, 31 of them are food and beverage companies, while 11 are consumer products such as Converse All-Stars and Victoria's Secret. The most important takeaway is that brands have a far greater following on Facebook than they do on their own sites. Facebook's best move has been to convince brands to market their Facebook pages rather than driving traffic to their own websites. The most interesting finding is that what seems to be popular on Facebook is not so on Twitter. If you click on the table at right an dlook at the top 50 brands on Facebook, the "Follower/Fan Ratio" (the result of dividing the number of Twitter followers to Facebook fans) does not get higher than 8% (Disney). This indicates that Twitter might have a more difficult time than Facebook in attracting overall brand dollars with its current product feature set.
This is evident when you look in detail at one CPG company and its portfolio of brands. I did a comparison of the differing success of P&G's top brands using the two platforms (click on table at right to enlarge). In every case except one (Dawn), the branded experience on Facebook is more popular in terms of numbers than on Twitter. In a few cases, there does not appear to be a reason for even having a Twitter presence. It is interesting to note that the most followed P&G Twitter account is the company's own corporate PR team. Facebook still has a lot of work to do and it is far from a foregone conclusion that it has won. While the lightness of its interaction makes getting to scale easier, maintaining enough valuable interactions on the branded pages and engaging long-term customer interest is a huge challenge. For example, according to eMarketer, nearly 1/3 of Facebook users who unsubscribed from a branded page simply were no longer interested in it. And, more to the point, simply because Coke has 20 million Fans does not necessarily mean Coke will pay for the privilege to advertise on Facebook if it cannot see a return.
So what brands seem to be working well on Twitter and far better than on Facebook? Daily deals, such as Dell Outlet, Amazon, and Woot, and companies that place customer service and community at the heart of the brand experience, like Zappos and Etsy, exhibit the most lopsided Follower/Friend ratio. It is important to note that two companies that had horrific customer service challenges over the past few years—JetBlue and Toyota—have fully embraced Twitter as a direct communications channel. The biggest driver of Twitter success as compared to Facebook is the timeliness of the information. Twitter, then, is well positioned to capture marketing dollars from companies optimizing for deals, retailers that have frequent specials, ticketing and events, movie studios, television shows, last minute deals, airlines, and hotels.
It is still early days for both Foursquare and Groupon in terms of working with big brands. Foursquare has seen traction with high-end luxury and media brands, likely as a result of its headquarters being located in New York and early media partnerships. Of course, Foursquare's long-term viability as a stand-alone "check-in" company is still an open question with Facebook Places breathing down its neck. This is a strategic move on Facebook's part to get closer to offline actions, transactions, and local commerce. While Groupon is the defining company of next-generation e-commerce, it has a tougher road in terms of working with brands and large retailers. These companies tend to be more sensitive to heavy discounting as they don't want to train their customers to wait for 50%-off coupons. And, they don't like to be so indiscriminate with their offers. Overall Assessment I evaluated the four companies along the six different types of offers and campaigns that I can see consumer brands wanting to engage in:
Based on my research, while Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Groupon are the best positioned to capture the estimated $20 billion in pent-up consumer marketing dollars, none of the four are currently optimized to execute along all of the necessary dimensions. There are considerable opportunities for startups to innovate and capture share. I look for this to be one of the most attractive areas for entrepreneurs in the consumer internet for years to come. Bugatti teardown photo credit: Flickr/David Villarreal Fernández        
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| Did Those Yahoo Layoffs Hit Early? Posted: 11 Dec 2010 12:22 PM PST
Graves writes, “The number of people carrying boxes out of Yahoo tonight is not surprising, nor the last of it.” It’s unclear from his Tweet where these layoffs are taking place, but it’s just one of many reports that seem to confirm this. Of course, this report is anecdotal, but that fact that it is coming from a Yahoo employee (vs. an anonymous tip) does suggest that layoffs may have already started and are gradually being executed at the company. We’ve contacted Yahoo for comment and will update the post when we receive a statement from the company. UPDATE: Zach Graves contacted us with a response: “I simply made an observation that a handful of my co-workers had made the decision, on their own, to leave the company. In no way did it imply the Yahoo! had started layoffs.” And Yahoo issued this comment, “We don’t comment on rumor or speculation.” Yeah, I guess we’ll continue to hear these “rumors” until Yahoo is ready to actually publicly announce the fact that they are gradually making cuts.        
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| Posted: 11 Dec 2010 12:00 PM PST The Gillmor Gang traveled to Moscone Center for a special live edition at Dreamforce 2010. Salesforce.com's premier conference has ballooned to more than 30,000 registered attendees, and now covers Moscone North, South, and West venues. Regular Gang member and Cloudblogger John Taschek and analyst and ZDNet columnist Phil Wainewright held down the enterprise perspective, joined by new Salesforce chief scientist JP Rangaswami and Forbes associate editor Victoria Barret. Barret focused her recent cover story on Marc Benioff, and particularly the use of Salesforce Chatter as a tool to address the Facebook/Twitter wave and its impact on the culture of business in the realtime age. She had watched the previous day's keynote from him, finding herself surprised it was almost better to mix video and realtime streams from attendees and those watching on the Net. The Gang covered topics including the Death of Office at the hands of realtime streams and the end of email (couldn't happen soon enough). We could barely hear each other over the din of the Expo behind us, which oddly mirrored the siloing that goes on between document-centric productivity applications, and where cc really stands for ass-cover as Rangaswami put it. Those who question the value of realtime collaboration have only to wait for the next Exchange server meltdown.        
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| Speaking of… Using Your Medium with Reason’s Nick Gillespie (TCTV) Posted: 11 Dec 2010 09:48 AM PST
So, what would draw me out of San Francisco weather to NY this time of year? The celebration of John Stagliano‘s acquittal presented by the Reason Foundation and hosted by this week’s TCTV guest Nick Gillespie. John Stagliano’s federal obscenity charges, his acquittal and this celebration warrants an entirely different post, so I’m not going to get into it too much here. The event was held at the famous NY’s sexy and edgy “The Box” and the attendees were incredible. We all came out to celebrate something we hold near and dear to our hearts: free speech. Here’s a quote from a piece he wrote with Matt Welch that Gillespie read to us last night:
Nick was the voice of Alyssa Milano for a few years. Even though he was a ghost writer for her, he’s yet to meet her, so if you know someone who knows someone, we should create a meeting between the two. I think it needs to happen. Nick Gillespie is the Editor-in-Chief of Reason.com/tv which he co-created with Drew Carey. Reason.tv is the online video component of Reason magazine and reason.com. Gillespie dedicates much of his life to our liberty, and regardless of what political side you are on, he has some awesome advice on how to use your medium to get your message out. So, this is a special interview for all of you aspiring writers out there. Listen to Nick’s views on net neutrality, being connected, who to write for and more here:        
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| French Fund ISAI Brings Together 70 Entrepreneurs to Invest in Commerce Guys Posted: 11 Dec 2010 09:41 AM PST  The French entrepreneurs' fund, ISAI, has just announced that its investing in Commerce Guys, a Franco-American company that develops open source Drupal e-commerce solutions. This is the third investment for the fund run by some 70 French entrepreneurs from these companies, which previously invested in carpooling platform Covoiturage and the high-class online marketplace, InstantLuxe. And while the transaction amount has not been disclosed, I'll venture a wild guess that it most likely lies between the €500,000 and €1.5 million range - which would be in-line with the rest of ISAI's investments.
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| The 5 Myths Of Building A Great Mobile Team Posted: 11 Dec 2010 09:19 AM PST
Editor’s note: As the Web goes mobile, every Web company needs to build mobile products. Author Elad Gil, director of Geo at Twitter, has a lot of experience in that area. Way before selling his company Mixer Labs to Twitter last year, he kickstarted Google’s mobile efforts back in 2004, when Google’s mobile team “consisted of 1/4 of an engineer dedicated to maintaining an old WAP search server on the brink of collapse.” Gil pulled Google’s first mobile team together, recruited the first engineers, started discussions with carriers, and was involved in Google’s early mobile acquisitions which set the stage for Google Mobile Maps and Android. In this guest post, he shares what he learned. Note that Elad works at Twitter but the following piece reflects his view only and does not represent Twitter’s thoughts or strategy. In the early days of Google’s mobile team, we needed to navigate a series of misunderstandings most people have about consumer mobile app development, and how to build a great consumer mobile team and product. Given the ridiculous growth of mobile today, many companies I know are trying to start their mobile divisions and they are making the same mistakes over and over. Similarly, many mobile consumer startups are making a series of common mistakes. This post draws on my experience building Google’s early mobile team to point out how to overcome the myths people still believe about making super successful mobile applications. Myth 1: You need to hire mobile experts. The natural impulse of someone doing mobile development for the first time is to assume that mobile is somehow different from other software development. This leads to the hiring of mobile “experts”, many of whom lack solid consumer product experience. They may have worked on handset design, SMS based services, or for a large carrier. While mobile client development obviously differs from web development (since you can’t just push a bug fix to all devices), it is very similar to any other form of consumer client development. This means that while people with deep mobile experience may bring knowledge about a specific technology or the limitations of mobile clients, they often lack the deep consumer experience that is actually much more important for the success of your consumer app. Additionally, any specialist knowledge the expert may have had will be learned organically by your team within 6 months. This means the value of a “mobile” person will diminish dramatically over time. As with all roles, I would advocate hiring great consumer generalists to fill the spot, as they will have a much larger positive impact over time. a. Don't hire “mobile engineers” The first thing people want to do is hire an “iPhone engineer” or “Android developer”. The best mobile engineers I have ever worked with were great generalist engineers who picked up iPhone (variant of C) or Android (Java) development. By focusing on hiring great engineers and having them pick up the programming language and platform (including learning its limitations) you will:
For example, on the early Google mobile team we had a PhD student from Yale with no industry experience, an expert on enterprise Java from BEA, and a research scientist at Google. These people helped form a formidable core for mobile engineering at Google. b. Don't hire “mobile” Product Managers (PMs) Just as you should hire generalist engineers for your mobile team, you should similarly find a great consumer product manager to run it. The worst hiring mistakes I have seen people make is to hire PMs with telecom or handset backgrounds to run their consumer products. You need people who understand that the phone is primarily a social device—for example, people love to take photos and share them with their friends (see Instagr.am, PicPlz, and PicBounce)—and that the screens are still small, so focusing on a few key features or interactions is key. Myth 2: Your mobile codebase is different from regular code. Obviously, developing for a client app that can’t be fixed via a push to AWS has its own challenges. But the mobile codebase should be something any engineer can contribute to at any time—even if it is just to run internal test apps to try out new features. Similarly, don’t let your team use mobile as an excuse to avoid following good software engineering practice. A good release process can apply anywhere. Myth 3: You need carrier or handset deals to distribute a mobile product. When launching a mobile consumer product, many companies make the mistake of focusing on carrier or handset partners for distribution rather then just putting it out there for users to try. a. Focusing on carriers means you will build the wrong product. When dealing with a new consumer app, carriers and handset manufacturers will have all sorts of ideas, some of which may be bad, about how you should change the product before they agree to distribute it. This will likely ruin the consumer experience. They may also ask you to support a wider variety of handsets than makes sense for you to build for. Further, all the time spent negotiating with carriers will also distract you from spending your time building things that will delight users. b. People naturally spread great consumer products. Think of all the consumer apps that have widespread use and adoption from scratch (Angry Birds, Foursquare, Gowalla, Bump). None of these launched with any traditional teleco deals. c. If your app is a big success, carriers will come to you for deals. If your mobile app is being used (or your desktop app has wide enough distribution), carriers will approach you to add your app to their phones. Think Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc…, as well as, back in the day, IM clients. Don’t get me wrong—carriers and handset pre-installs can widen your distribution dramatically. However, as a startup or new mobile effort, you should focus on direct-to-consumer distribution first. Only deal with these intensive partnerships once you have proven traction with your core app experience and want to reach out beyond the relatively large population that discovers apps via the app store and friend recommendations. Myth 4. You must build for all platforms from Day One. One of the big fears when building a mobile property is that only a subset of the market can be addressed via each platform (iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Symbian, XHTML, SMS). These days, the best consumer apps are launching on iPhone or Android only first. This provides enough distribution/addressable devices to see if the app can gain traction. Once it gets traction, other platforms can be supported. A great example of this is Foursquare, which launched exclusively on iOS and grew from there. In part you should choose your platform based on your market and distribution approach. iPhone or Android (as well as increasingly HTML5) are good bets for the US, and increasingly, the rest of the world. You should only build XHTML or SMS based apps if you are focused on the low- to mid-range of developing markets. Myth 5. (Once the app launches) We are mobile geniuses! Congratulations! You got your mobile app out the door and it is growing 50% month over month. There is an old saying that a rising tide floats all boats. The rapid growth in the overall smartphone market may make your mobile efforts look brilliant due to this ongoing, massive market shift. Make sure to challenge your team’s thinking on their mobile choices, and don’t believe the mantra that “mobile is just different”. Focus on building an awesome consumer experience and you really will end up looking like a genius. Mobile is a huge opportunity and will be the primary way many services are accessed in the future. Hopefully as you start a new mobile consumer startup, or build a mobile team for your existing web property, with the tips above you can avoid the mistakes people frequently make for mobile app development. Photo credit: Flickr/JD Hancock        
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