Here’s a common problem: you notice an awesome article, video, or song in the Facebook news feed but there’s no easy way to save it for later. So while Facebook only bought the talent and not the tech behind Spool, a content caching service, I bet within a few months they’ll help Facebook launch a news feed button for saving external content to the web and your mobile device.
It could even be the basis for a standalone Facebook news feed app. Here’s how FaceSpool could work. → Read More
“Center for Digital Archaeology,” said the banner above one of the startups at the Funders and Founders Life 3.0 demo show, and for a moment I got excited, thinking of Vernor Vinge‘s software archaeologists. It wasn’t quite that. Instead, Codifi was a “solution for turning cultural heritage datasets and rich media into web- and mobile-ready interactive experiences.”
Which is cool, and worthwhile, but more a niche market than a world-shaker. As were a lot of the startups there. TennisRound: “find a tennis partner.” DreamBoard: an app for dream tracking and analysis Plus, of course, the usual panoply of social marketplaces, socialsourced services, gamified giving, “Instagram for Products,” etc etc yadda yadda.
I apologize for being jaded. But Michael Church’s scathing essay “Don’t waste your time in crappy startup jobs“–go read it–was still ringing in my ears, and I couldn’t help but wonder how many of these startups were founded more for the sake of founding a startup than because the founders had an idea that wouldn’t let them go.
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It takes a lifetime to build up social capital, but now it’s easier than ever to burn it all to earn some discounts via new ecommerce discovery site affiliate programs. But why should Fab, or The Fancy, or other Pinter-esque services care? They’re not the ones getting spammed. It’s Facebook and Twitter’s problem.
But that’s bullshit.
By incentivizing aggressive sharing with monetary discounts — not a spot on some leaderboard, or (gasp!) a sense of altruism, these ecommerce sites are growing and making money at the expense of financially-strapped users and the social networks they frequent. → Read More
Tagged photos are Facebook’s lifeblood, and it would be happy to suck them out of other apps. That’s why I suspect Facebook will resurrect Face.com’s facial recognition API, even though it just shut it down less than a month after acquiring the Israeli company.
Reopening the API will let other apps’ users easily tag their Facebook friends in photos…which can then be shared back to Facebook where they generate notifications, return visits, and engagement the social network can monetize with ads.
It’s all part of Facebook’s on-going quest to become the Omni-news feed, collecting content from everywhere for data-mining and display. → Read More
No buzzwords are more prominent in today’s Silicon Valley lexicon than social and mobile. They’re so big that they have their own love-child buzzword, SoLoMo (social-local-mobile, the nerd equivalent of Brangelina). Sadly for buzzwordians: mobile is not really social, in the consumption context anyway. Building for mobile requires us to dig deeper into the role it fills in our life.
When we gather around a movie, TV or even use a desktop, we are carving out time and personally allocating our focus. Mobile does not get the same luxury. Mobile fills the gap of 2 minutes when your date leaves the dinner table; it fills the gap when we have brief moments of downtime. → Read More
I have spent a lot of time in Brazil, working on my startup Colingo, about a month ago I was in Sao Paulo for Dave McClure’s Geeks on A Plane. Brazil is a hot market with many firms like Accel and the famed Sequoia capital searching for opportunities. Many of these investors are looking to fund “copycat,” business that emulate successful American startups. Businesses like Peixe Urbano (Groupon), Elo7 ( Etsy), Kekanto (Yelp), and Shoes4You (Shoedazzle).
Whenever I come back to the Valley, I often hear whining that clones are the work of unimaginative thieves — not real innovators. Genuine innovation requires brand new ideas, and is typically the work of a Stanford dropout (or at least Harvard).
This is bullshit. → Read More
Colleges are starting to become startup incubators by offering a variety of classes and programs in order to help students pursue their entrepreneurial ambitions. This is good news for students because employers feel that they should gain entrepreneurship experience before graduating. Many professors are current or former entrepreneurs who act as mentors to students and teach them critical marketing, sales, and operation skills. The Kaufman Foundation estimates that more than 2,000 colleges and universities in the US, two thirds of the total, offer a course in entrepreneurship. There are now approximately 5,000 courses on entrepreneurship, up from 250 back in 1985. There are a few famous college dropouts, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, that didn’t need a business curriculum to start their companies, and a few lucky students who were selected as part of Peter Thiel’s “Thiel Fellowship” program, but they are outliers. Zuckerberg was in the right place at the right time and most students don’t get into Thiel’s program. Many students could use the education, network and support of an entrepreneurial institution. → Read More
It looked like the X Games, but it was the most significant product launch of the decade so far. For the first time, Google did what Apple has done thrice, with the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Granted, Apple announces products that ship immediately, while Google merely allowed a few thousand I/O attendees to pre-order a beta version that wouldn’t ship until next year; but don’t let the mechanics distract you from the heart of the matter. Google Glass isn’t just a new product, it’s a whole new product category, and it has every chance of being every bit as revolutionary as Apple’s Big Three.
Of course, like every revolution, it brought the nattering nabobs of negativity out in force. “We struggle to imagine Google Glasses reconciled with normal life,” carps Gizmodo. That line’s going to sound as embarrassingly tone-deaf in five years as these hilarious quotes from iPhone naysayers do today. Wearable computing, in one form or another, is the future. How extraordinary is it going to be? Some people suggest it could actually save Research In Motion. Now that’s amazing.
But a company that took most of a year to build an email app for the PlayBook isn’t going to lead the way. This category is so new that Google’s fail-fast, permanent-beta, make-it-up-as-you-go ethos is really the only viable direction. And we’re only in its infancy; has anyone else noticed that those big thick glasses look a lot like Neurosky’s brainwave sensors? Thought-controlled heads-up displays, anyone?
Do I sound excited? Well, sure, yeah, I am–but I’m also kind of terrified. → Read More
Yahoo and Facebook signed a contract today that says they cannot sue each other over patents. Yet Yahoo may be trying to convince investors that Facebook would still pay to buy or license some Yahoo intellectual property. But according to a source familiar with the exact wording of the Yahoo-Facebook contract, the two companies have rights to each other’s entire patent portfolios, so Yahoo would have no leverage to extort money or value from Facebook.
I smell something fishy. Let’s investigate. → Read More
We’re on the cusp of a global conflict that will see the three most powerful consumer Internet companies fighting to win control of interpersonal communication. The war will pit Facebook’s unified Chat / Messages / Email vs Apple’s cross-device iMessage system vs. Google’s Gmail / GChat / Hangouts. If one emerges as the definitive victor, it could sway the future of digital human interaction.
Read on as we survey the battlefield, review the weaponry of each company, and assess who could win the epic message war and the fortune that comes with it. → Read More
The enterprise software market has been uncharacteristically turbulent of late. Beyond several hefty funding rounds and well-performing IPOs, the ecosystem has experienced some major consolidation with SAP’s purchase of SuccessFactors and Ariba, Oracle’s acquisition of RightNow and Taleo, and even IBM’s multiple cloud additions. All totaled, we’ve seen more than $10 billion in enterprise cloud consolidation over the past three quarters.
But Microsoft’s $1.2 billion acquisition of Yammer is a little different. Not just because it underscores the importance of social in the enterprise and cements Yammer’s rapid rise to more than a billion dollars in value. Rather, it’s different because it signals the severity of the disruption occurring in enterprise software – disruption that will make it very difficult for incumbent vendors to hold on, and disruption that’s coming from entirely new places and in new ways. → Read More
Over the past ten years, publishers have continued to monetize their sites with banners and pre-roll ads, and advertisers have continued to pump billions into these formats, in spite of tanking performance and near- universal disdain. While click-through rates on display ads started out at around 9% in 2000, they now hover around 0.2% – which means 99.8% of banner ads are completely ignored. Meanwhile, led by YouTube and Hulu, the pre-roll ad market is only shifting in one direction: towards “skippable prerolls,” not forced interruption. And preroll skip rates are only moving in one direction (hint: when you give users the ability to skip annoying ads, they usually do). → Read More
Last week I wrote about television; this week I’ve been thinking about Hollywood. Not least because a screenwriter with a pretty good track record recently attached himself to my squirrel book1 and is hoping to adapt it into a big animated movie. But it often takes five years or more to go from script to screen, so I can’t help wondering–will Hollywood as we know it still be around by then?
Internet hero Cory Doctorow doesn’t think so. A few years ago he wrote an essay predicting the death of big-budget movies: “The specific, rarefied animal that is the gigantic film spectacle demands a technological reality that has ceased to exist: just enough technology to distribute the films everywhere, but not so much technology that the audience gets to overrule your distribution decisions.”
So far, perhaps surprisingly, he’s been dead wrong. Theater attendance is down 20% in the USA over the last decade, but actual box-office income is flat, thanks to higher ticket prices. Home-entertainment spending–DVDs, rentals, Netflix, etc–is overall down almost 30% in constant dollars since 2005, but that’s counteracted by the huge rise in ‘foreign’ box office over the same period. Hollywood seems to be fighting the Internet to a standstill.
But does anyone out there really think that can last? → Read More
More and more students are realizing that they can’t pass their degree in for a job upon graduation anymore. The old promise made by our education system was that if you worked really hard in school, you would be almost guaranteed a job as a reward for your efforts. Furthermore, corporations used to hire most of their interns into full-time positions. Both of these promises have been broken due to economic constraints and global competition. Based on a recent report by my company, we found that employers expect students to have at least one internship, yet only half of them are bringing on new interns and few have hired them into full-time positions. The normal path to growing your career is non-existent. In today’s world, you can’t rely on anything or anyone to make you successful – you have to be accountable for your own career and create your own path.
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This is a guest post by Mehrunisa Qayyum, a consultant on the Middle East / North Africa region, founder of PitaPolicy and Huffington Post Blogger.
“Here’s a mobile app that rates the restaurant/bar/club based on the how many attractive women are there,” explained an Arab Net Summit attendee to me in a Hamraa neighborhood hotspot of Beirut. I had to contain myself. Here I was in Lebanon, attending the Arab Net conference, and trying to challenge another blogger’s belief that innovation in Arab countries is limited to localizing the application of existing startups. Clones, in other words. And the conversation had shifted from “who’s hot” rather than “what’s hot”. → Read More
I feel like we’re watching Google TV roll by and off into a nearby ditch. The company doesn’t have much dedication to the platform and, like Apple TV, GTV is failing to gain traction.
As Ryan notes, outside of a few I/O sessions, Google said very little about the Google TV project this year and I’m almost certain it means they’ve scrapped the project but don’t want to tell their partners. They are running seminars on the platform at I/O, but until they’ve officially announced the closure they have to maintain appearances. → Read More
Right now, someone is tinkering with a billion dollar secret — they just don’t know it yet. “What people aren’t telling you,” Peter Thiel taught his class at Stanford, “can very often give you great insight as to where you should be directing your attention.”
Secrets people can’t or don’t want to divulge are a common thread behind Thiel’s most lucrative investments such as Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as several other breakout companies of the past decade. The kinds of truths Thiel discusses — the kinds that create billion dollar businesses in just a few years — are not held exclusively by those with deep corporate pockets. In fact, the person most likely to build the next great tech business will likely be a scrappy entrepreneur with a big dream, a sharp mind, and a valuable secret. → Read More
I wanted to have 100,000 Facebook fans for my blog. I don’t have a product to sell. I’m not trying to get advertisers on my blog. I’m not even trying to get more speaking gigs because of my blog. But I believe in the message of my blog and I enjoy having an audience for it. So I wanted to expand that audience.
We have entered the “Choose Yourself” era. No longer do you have to wait for the big media companies to reach down from the heavens and bless you with a column, a book advance, a TV show, a job, a career, money, or even customers. In 2008 the tide came in, the financial system collapsed, and we saw that the myth of corporate safety was just another example of the brainwashing that we had undergone since we were kids. → Read More
What’s wrong with this picture? It’s 2012, cheap broadband is ubiquitous in the developed world, and TV still isn’t dead. In fact it’s thriving. Sure, for the first time ever, Nielsen says more people watch videos on the Internet than on a TV–albeit barely–but if you look at how much time is spent on the two, there’s no comparison: TV utterly dominates. Which explains why, again according to Nielsen, more money is spent on TV advertising than all other ad platforms combined.
A few doomsayers say the TV industry “may be starting to collapse” and that excessive production costs are its weak spot. Yeah, if only. Television as constituted today makes no sense at all; it’s a kludged-up legacy system that’s enormously painful and expensive to maintain. But TV’s entrenched economic interests and cultural inertia are so pathological that even HBO GO wouldn’t make sense as a standalone app–as HBO confirms–and the rumors of a brand-new Apple TV ecosystem were, alas, dead wrong. Sure, YouTube, Netflix, and Hulu are mighty powers in their own right, but if even nigh-omnipotent Apple has given up, what hope do they have?
Funny you should ask. I just happen to have an answer. → Read More
Because investors sure are. Facebook’s share price jumped up 3.8% to $33.05 today on news that it’s now showing its ads on Zynga.com in a revenue sharing partnership. Most amazingly, neither the press nor users seem to be freaking out that their private, personal data is now being used to target them with ads outside of Facebook.
That means Mark Zuckerberg waited just long enough, proving he’s even smarter than he used to be. → Read More
