jamtoday.org

Farmville Meets Mint.com

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 18:32:20 -0400

Unlike other games (educational and otherwise) that use virtual currency, Zindagi will use real money. “The concept is really simple - instead of trying to make games more life-like, Zindagi makes use of the fact that real-life is already one big game.” As kids master concepts like budgeting and saving, they accrue financial rewards themselves. The ultimate goal of the game will be to help kids start their own businesses.

— via RWW

"Having two OSes is confusing. You need coherence."

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 02:57:56 -0400

“Having two OSes is confusing. You need coherence.”

- Steve Ballmer, criticizing Google’s Android and Chrome OSes. Balmer is the man behind Windows Starter, Windows Home Basic, Windows Home Premium, Windows Professional, Windows Enterprise, Windows Ultimate, Windows N Editions, Window Mobile Classic, Windows Mobile Standard, Windows Mobile Professional, Windows Embedded CE, Windows Server Standard, Windows Server Enterprise, Windows Server Datacenter, Windows HPC Server, Windows Web Server, Windows Storage Server, Windows Small Business Server, Windows Essential Business Server, Windows Server Itanium, Windows Server Foundation and whatever the hell they have running on the Kin. (via ericmortensen)

For your health

Sun, 30 May 2010 03:17:00 -0400

Last week, in what may be the biggest medical breakthrough of its kind in years, a group of scientists published results in The Lancet describing a completely new type of anti-viral treatment that appears to cure Ebola. They report a 100% success rate, although admittedly the test group was very small, just 4 rhesus monkeys.

This is a breakthrough not only because it may give us a cure for an uncurable, incredibly nasty virus, but also because the same method might work for other viruses, and because we have woefully few effective antiviral treatments.

via fieldofscience.com

Noticed: The Privacy Arms Race

Sun, 25 Apr 2010 01:23:24 -0400

Charlotte Kaye, who went to the Brearley School in Manhattan, did not take any chances. To avoid detection, Ms. Kaye, now a freshman at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, said she and others began changing their names on Facebook beginning in their junior year of high school.

New spellings are standard: Amy is now Aim E, and Ms. Kaye became Charlotte K. A nickname will also do. At the Ramaz School in Manhattan, Amanda Uziel changed her Facebook name to Uzi Shmuzi. Puns and wordplay are held in higher esteem.

At the Collegiate School in Manhattan, Al Isin Wonderland is also known as Albert F. Mendia, a senior; at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, Audri Augenbraum, a senior, is Audri Eyebrows, the translation of her German surname. And at the Spence School in Manhattan, Haley Markbreiter, a senior, is Haley Go Lightly.

At the Fieldston School in the Bronx, a class on Tolstoy resulted in some students adding Russian patronymics like -ovich and -ovna to their names.

via nytimes.com

There’s clearly a latent demand for students to manage their academic and personal identities. Look for a mandatory facebook profile url field on next year’s college applications.

WTFID

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 03:40:55 -0400

I find it endlessly intriguing that Facebook, a company I think of as cautious and conservative in many respects, would choose RFID over the more obvious choices for its LBS technology.

Columbia University will soon offer a combined engineering and journalism degree

Wed, 07 Apr 2010 22:03:36 -0400

Columbia University will soon offer a combined engineering and journalism degree. It’s a unique program the Ivy League institution hopes will produce cross-disciplinary ninjas prepared to develop the newsrooms of the future.

The Columbia program, which will accept its first 15 students (tops) in the Fall of 2011, seeks to attack the barrier between journalists and the increasingly important IT professionals whose web and digital savvy are crucial to any form of news gathering, reporting and delivery. The problem: Users really don’t know what to ask developers for (or how), and developers have no real idea what their software will need to do in the hands of the users.

via wired

For all the talk about the digital divide...

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 06:55:34 -0400

For all the talk about the digital divide, a lot of educators work hard to keep computers out of the classroom at an early age, to help kids develop skills without them.

This is a topic we think about a lot in my home. We have a 9-year-old son who uses his computer for all kinds of stuff — games and sport fantasy leagues, yes, but also reading the news and looking up whatever his brain latches onto: volcanoes, Hitler, left-handed presidents, etc. He also happens to read a lot of books — but would he read more if there were no computer in the house? And would there be a great benefit in that? And will his computer literacy yield greater unforeseen benefits down the road?

via the Freakonomics Blog

Water Reminder (my first StickyBits app)

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 07:00:00 -0400

When I registered last week at SXSW, the most intriguing item I found in the customary goodie bag o’ shwag I was given was a postcard from a startup called StickyBits attached to a stack of barcode stickers.

Bar code scanning and object hyperlinking aren’t new ideas. Just as microblogging wasn’t by any measure a new idea when Twitter was created. But what instantly intrigued me about StickyBits was that like products such as Twitter that have successfully crossed the chasm to mainstream adoption, StickyBits isn’t pitching features. It’s pitching an easy way to “tag your world” with a playful and inspired design.

In fact, one of the few flat-out complaints I have about the simple StickyBits app in the Android Marketplace is the unfortunately phrased “you have no friends” message that is presumably shown to all new users:

(Hint: never tell your users that they don’t have any friends!)

Twitter for the Real World

Just like Twitter was able to blossom from a simple app asking “what are you doing?” into a massive coral reef of users and use-cases, StickyBits has the potential to become the Twitter for the real-world, allowing us to add discussion, insight, analytics, and incentives to our interaction with a broad assortment of real objects.

But the Twitter comparison will only go so far, since apps that help us interface with the real-world are much more than analogues to their purely digital counterparts. Search engines for barcode content are bound to have some unique traits, as are social networking functionality for barcodes. When designing these apps, we might be able to take some cues from Tokyo’s barcode-savvy culture or draw from known UX best practices, but there’s bound to be many competing and complementary ideas and approaches. I’m fairly sure that there are a number of killer apps for barcodes that will challenge our intuitions and expectations, and that’s what should make the StickyBits developer community a fun, rewarding place to be.

Water Reminder

On several occasions during this year’s SXSW Music Festival, I saw concert-goers collapsing from dehydration. By Friday, bands were reminding their audiences to drink plenty of water.

On my plane ride back to the Bay Area, it occurred to me that it might be interesting to build a “water reminder” that could serve as a minimum viable product for a health-activity service built on StickyBits. The health-activity market is quickly growing, led by the success of Nike+ and the “Calorie Tracker” niche of mobile apps. Most purchased food and beverage products have barcodes, and you could perhaps barcode your containers for whole and bulk foods, making StickyBits an appealing platform for nutrition-tracking services. After all, if you can tell when someone sleeps by analyzing their tweeting patterns, you can probably infer a great deal more information by analyzing your nutritional consumption patterns.

The Water Reminder is a mobile-device compatible webapp with the simple utility of reminding you to drink water. Call the Water Reminder hotline (provided courtesy of Twilio), and choose the number of days you’d like to subscribe to the Water Reminder. From the hours of 11am-6pm, if you don’t scan a purchased or refilled bottle of water for more than two hours, an SMS message is sent reminding you to get a drink of water. If an additional half hour passes without a water check-in, you’re sent a phone-call reminder.

Water Reminder was mostly written at 30,000 ft. and needs to be integrated with the still-unreleased StickyBits API. But it seems to be working pretty well after just a couple hours of work, and the core application functionality is implemented in just over 100 lines of code.

Here’s the main view for incoming calls:

(see the Twilio documentation for details on the request arguments)

My first attempt at scheduling checks for subscribers via App Engine’s Task Queues was ridiculously inefficient. The solution for my predicament was the task object’s “eta” property, allowing the task creator to specify an absolute time for a task to be executed.

How I’d Like to Improve the Water Reminder

Here is my list of ponies for Water Reminder:

Scan your other drinks (a sports drink, a coffee, etc.) to re-calibrate your expected current hydration level.
Instead of subscribing for a set number of days, users can configure a temperature threshold. For example, the Water Reminder could be configured to activate on days where the user’s location exceeds a local temperature of 90 degrees.
Access to the right StickyBits API endpoints. I think it’s only a matter of weeks (or days?) until a limited API is made available, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the first API release will make it relatively easy to disambiguate product information from a commercial barcode so that I can easily tell which barcode scans are associated with bottles of water.
Leverage the ability to share and view comments and multimedia attached to barcodes. I’ve thought of some gimmicky uses of this feature, such as adding a promo for charity:water. An integration of comments should ideally enhance the app’s core functionality of helping people stay hydrated.

The Water Reminder concept doesn’t do a great job of taking advantage of the content-attaching component of StickyBits, so once I have access to the API I plan on making a few more open-source apps demonstrating the range of uses for the StickyBits platform.

Do you have any other ideas for how I could enhance Water Reminder, or suggestions for StickyBits apps I could work on? Leave ‘em in the comments!

StalkBox Wins a Droid at the SXSW Google Hackathon

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 15:37:00 -0400

StalkBox, my Startup Bus project with @broadcrawford, was a featured project at the SXSW Google Hackathon. The idea was simple enough, and relevant to the VIP-filled SXSW environment: real-time celebrity maps. If there’s a half dozen parties to choose from, see where the celebs are going to be before you make your choice.

I guess the Google judges liked our simple pitch, because we won a Droid!

Teachers counter education reform ideas on tests, pay

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 20:24:32 -0500

Teachers counter education reform ideas on tests, pay:

ericmortensen:

(via jacobjoaquin)

This is a big deal. Scholastic and The Gates Foundation surveyed a truly massive number of teachers. The resulting mass of data paints a picture that simply wasn’t possible to paint before.

•Only 10% say tenure — a kind of job-for-life security based on a few years of satisfactory job evaluations — is a “very accurate” indicator of teacher quality;
•71% say paying teachers more for improved student performance would have only a “moderate” impact or no impact at all.
•97% say supportive leadership is an “absolutely essential” or “somewhat important” factor in teacher retention, while only 25% say the same about pay tied to performance.
•And while most teachers say that traditional textbooks help student achievement, fewer than half say textbooks “engage my students in learning.”

Jesse Schell Describes The Future of Games

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 18:08:06 -0500

School is a game, right? You go, you get scores. You come out, there’s a leaderboard.

He (Lee Sheldon) doesn’t give out grades for each assignment. He gives out experience points. And you level up through the class. So class attendance is up. Class participation is up. Homework is turned in better. Because it’s a better structure. It’s a better system.

— via fury.com

Thoughts on RightSide Capital

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 00:52:00 -0500

MobileCrunch reports that David Lambert, Kevin Dick and John Lee are starting RightSide Capital, a new seed-stage fund that will make 100-200 investments per year

Entrepreneurs looking for funding won’t have to go the traditional route of begging for a meeting and then having a second meeting and then waiting 3 months for traction until finally closing a deal. Instead, they will fill out an application – similar to applying to College – and receive a response in 2 weeks.

I have mixed feelings about whether or not RightSide has a good model. On one hand, I do somewhat agree with the HN commenter who wants “our capital markets to look more like our mortgage markets: you get your history read by a computer, numbers get crunched, and you get a take-it-or-leave-it offer presented to you by a junior employee of the firm.” Or at the very least, our capital markets could look like this at the most accessible, lowest-common-denominator stage. And for millions of people, this would be wonderful.

But for those of us really trying to change the world, what we need most is time with experienced mentors, and not just a little bit of cash. If RightSide can find a way to scale mentoring to a few hundred founders per year without sacrificing quality, they really could shake up the angel market.

I’ll be eager to see whether they can do it.

One Person Profitable

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 19:44:00 -0500

Ideally you want between two and four founders. It would be hard to start with just one. One person would find the moral weight of starting a company hard to bear. Even Bill Gates, who seems to be able to bear a good deal of moral weight, had to have a co-founder

— Paul Graham, How to Start a Startup

What Is One Person Profitable?

There’s a lot of single founders out there, and an increasing number of them are managing to get their startups or micro-ISVs ramen profitable while maintaining 100% equity and incurring no debt. I’ve picked up the habit of calling this milestone “One Person Profitable”.

I’ve found the origin story of Admobs to be a particularly inspiring example of how a one-person shop was funded by Sequoia, quickly grew, and was recently acquired by Google. I’ve also found that there are plenty of Hacker News readers who have successfully bootstrapped as a single founder.

Ramen profitability is always a milestone, but it’s another thing altogether if you can achieve One Person Profitable. If someone has pulled it off, I want to see it on their resume or bio in clear, unambiguous terms. In fact, if you’re building webapps or mobile apps and you have the technical chops to do all the development yourself, there’s usually no reason why you can’t reach profitability as a single founder.

The Multiple Founder Arguments

So why are incubators implicitly or explicitly requiring teams to have multiple founders? Here are two main arguments that come to mind:

There’s Too Much Work (or Moral Weight) For One Person

This is the most easily debunked argument. If developing an MVP for your startup idea is too much work for one person, maybe you’re just doing it wrong. I still remember the amazement I had while sharing an office with Disqus at how their two-person co-founder team managed to be incredibly productive by making quick decisions and being able to frequently say “no”. Even just one of them could probably pull off ramen profitability as a single founder.

Of course Disqus, Tumblr, and all the other successful two-people startups out there have all had the added benefit of a two-person labor division. But like Paul Graham says, the most important role of your co-founder is to help you navigate through the rough patches. The moral weight has proven time and time again to be too much for one person.

My only rebuttal to this is that the faster you can become one person profitable, the less likely you are to feel the full pressure of being a single-founder. If you reach one person profitability and then bring on four co-founders the next week, you’ve still achieved the one person profitable milestone.

Your Co-Founders Are Your Biggest Investors

This argument can’t be debunked because it’s true that having solid co-founders and advisors is always a positive indicator. Co-founders and early employees make the biggest investment of any stakeholder, and if you can’t sell your vision to co-founders or employees, then how are you going to be able to sell to customers and follow-up investors?

Conclusion

I find the co-founder as investor argument somewhat troubling only when I consider that investors have no reason to encourage you to reach ramen profitability as a single-founder. You’re more prone to failing or selling at an “acquhire” price, while startups that are five-founders deep at launch time can’t usually be successful unless they’re the type of huge success that investors desire.

Single founders tend to end up with a lot more control of their venture once it does become successful. And control, from what I understand, tends to be the most valuable asset to founders who really care about their ventures. Owning all your equity is just about as pro-founder as it gets, and while good seed-stage investors and incubators are pro-founder, I’m not so sure they are pro-founder enough to enthusiastically support the One Person Profitable approach.

I think it’ll be worthwhile to explore the idea of One Person Profitable further. If we really want entrepreneurship to be as accessible as more traditional career choices, I think it makes sense that there should be at least one decent resource advocating the advantages of being a single founder.

The E-Book Pricing War Heats Up

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 17:52:29 -0500

Publishing is made out of pipes. Traditionally the supply chain ran: author -> publisher -> wholesaler -> bookstore -> consumer. Then the internet came along, a communications medium the main effect of which is to disintermediate indirect relationships, for example by collapsing supply chains with lots of middle-men.

From the point of view of the public, to whom they sell, Amazon is a bookstore. From the point of view of the publishers, from whom they buy, Amazon is a wholesaler. From the point of view of Jeff Bezos’ bank account, Amazon is the entire supply chain and should take that share of the cake that formerly went to both wholesalers and booksellers. They do this by buying wholesale and selling retail, taking up to a 70% discount from the publishers and selling for whatever they can get. Their stalking horse for this is the Kindle publishing platform; they’re trying to in-source the publisher by asserting contractual terms that mean the publisher isn’t merely selling them books wholesale, but is sublicencing the works to be republished via the Kindle publishing platform. Publishers sublicensing rights is SOP in the industry, but not normally handled this way — and it allows Amazon to grab another chunk of the supply chain if they get away with it, turning the traditional publishers into vestigial editing/marketing appendages.

The agency model Apple proposed — and that publishers like Macmillan enthusiastically endorse — collapses the supply chain in a different direction, so it looks like: author -> publisher -> fixed-price distributor -> reader. In this model Amazon is shoved back into the box labelled ‘fixed-price distributor’ and get to take the retail cut only. Meanwhile: fewer supply chain links mean lower overheads and, ultimately, cheaper books without cutting into the authors or publishers profits.

Amazon are going to fight this one ruthlessly because if the publishers win, it destroys the profitability of their business and pushes prices down.

— via antipope.org

The e-book pricing conflict has been around for a while, but it has now reached an unprecedented intensity. This is an issue that, like the Google Books settlement, could actually have fairly wide-reaching consequences. Let’s say that the publishers just aren’t willing to budge, but Amazon and Apple still want a way to maintain acceptable margins on book sales. The result might resemble the unfortunate “minimum advertised pricing” rules that end up making shoppers have to jump through hoops in order to view how much an item will cost.

But ebook shoppers would refuse to support such annoyances. Maybe I’ll put a $300 digital camera in my shopping cart so I can see if I get 10% or 15% off retail price, but for a book with a hardcover price of $15? Fuggedaboutit.

I bet there are some more creative, innovation solutions here to please the publishers, vendors, shoppers, and even the authors. And I’m sure the publishers may need some help to come up with them.

How about opening up the playing field by offering your inventory via a flexible digital content affiliate platform? Even with the agency model - especially with the agency model - let the developers run wild with this stuff, and come up with 1,000 new ideas that will rejuvenate the publishing industry. After all, wouldn’t it be a shame to waste this perfect storm of an opportunity?

Metagaming

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 05:50:00 -0500

Achievements — system-level awards for certain gameplay goals — are explicit metagames. Many players find that they are substantially less rewarding than the metagames they create for themselves.

After all, part of the fun of a meta-game is not knowing if it’s even technically possible to accomplish your goal.

It’s “Jump the van over the river: 30 points” vs. “Can I get this beat-up van with a popped tire to go fast enough to jump over that river? Let’s find out!” One is follow ing instructions, the other is invention.

— Sleepover, San Francisco (via marco)

Rumors Of An Apple Affiliate Platform

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 04:47:00 -0500

I was pleased to hear the circulating rumor that Apple will announce a powerful affiliate platform on its January 27th press conference. Perhaps this platform will be not just for marketing, but also for selling items directly. And since these sales will likely lead to paid content downloads in a seamless real-time experience, it has the makings of yet another Cupertino game-changer.

Sure, there is already an iTunes affiliate marketing program, just like there’s already a popular affiliate marketing program for Amazon’s web-based store.

But these affiliate marketing models have more or less remained the same for the last 10 years. I think it’s about time for a change.

The Platform Opportunity

A new market is going to soon pop out of thin air, just like it did in 2008 with the iPhone. And just like in 2008, there’ll be a market vacuum. One of the new questions many people will be asking themselves is “how can I get good stuff for my tablet?”

This new question is a big opportunity for developers such as myself (and presumably, as the analytics suggest, my readers.) Of course, there will be an official store, just as there is now. And certainly the iPhone App Store and iTunes are both a pleasure to visit. As is Amazon.com. And owning the store itself is the simplest, most obvious way for Apple and Amazon to both control the user experience and generate revenue from a cloud-based content platform.

And yet, these stores must always be one-size-fits-all, and that’s not enough for me. “Pants on the Ground” would not have happened if Apple had some devious way of controlling all the internet memes through its own official gateway. And neither would Ushahidi. Yes, “the wisdom of the crowds” may be so very 2006, or whatever, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

The Example of Local News

iTunes has done a phenomenal job getting high-quality educational podcasts into the iTunes store. But YouTube EDU also has fantastic content, and so does does Academic Earth. And I don’t doubt for a second that publications like the New York Times would fit very well into the iTunes model, and perhaps even farther down the long tail. It works great for music, after all. Why not for news?

Because news, in our age, proliferates in mysterious ways. If you look at the process of selling news as a funnel, it is complex and individualized. I suspect that people will never again all go to one place to find (and buy) their news, and that there’ll never be another Evening News with Walter Cronkite.

Medill and NYU and Berkman and CUNY and Columbia and heaps of others have all drastically overhauled their curriculum to confront this sea change. In a new post titled “Information Finds a Way, but Does Revenue?”, David Cohn does a great job of encapsulating t

In this age of experimentation, which we all agree is happening, there are certain assumptions we make that steer the direction of our thought.

One of those assumptions, and I claim this all the time, is that there will always be a market for news and information. That marketplace is in flux and hard to pin down at the moment, but people want accurate and thorough news and information. If this assumption is true, then journalism will be sustainable once we figure out the marketplace again and how to “sell” the news.

I don’t claim to have all the answers about how to solve this problem. But I do have a couple potential answers I’d like to try out. And if there was a simple, extensible affiliate platform that could be woven into the fabric of the web, 10,000 other developers and myself could all experiment and iterate and compete and come up with some great vertical, highly-contextualized ways to sell different kinds of news in different circumstances to different kinds of customers.

I’ll end this post by calling out one of the few people who really may be in the position to influence the course of events, fellow Berkeley resident Dave Winer. Dave recently announced that he’s going to teach at NYU and he’s involved in a secretive NYC-based journalism project:

NYU and Manhattan are going to be very interesting places in the coming months and years, in exactly the areas I’m interested in. There are projects getting underway that I can’t talk about yet, but when you hear about them you’ll probably understand why I had to go.

I don’t know anything about the project he speaks of, but if it involves a platform - and if it’s Dave it almost definitely does - I doubt that it has anything to do with the part of actually selling content and subscriptions. The platform is probably related to distributed microblogging of some kind, and it’ll probably be wonderful for what it does.

[ Update: Judging by the Rebooting the News essay Dave posted this morning, it seems like the project relates to user-generated-advertising. I can see why he’s so excited about it, as it really is a fantastic idea. ]

But will this project help local news organizations find a sustainable business model? Given the conversations I frequently have with colleagues working in world-class newsrooms, and especially given the desperate, grasping-at-straws vibe Times Chairman and Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. seems to give off , I don’t have an excess of confidence.

But this new Apple affiliate platform launch rumor is vindicating. I eagerly await the chance to try it out.

PR vs. CYA

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 20:35:00 -0500

Any organization in the business of certification runs into the problem of having to market the reliability of certification while also covering their bums.

Google’s Qualified Developer Directory

Google just released a new directory for its Qualified Developer program.

This program has been public since last year, but it’s only recently been marketed. A message marketing the program popped into my inbox a couple weeks ago:

Dear Developer, Congratulations on your acceptance into the Google Qualified Gadget Ads Expert program! This program is designed for professionals who are currently developing Gadget Ads. This qualification can provide credibility and help promote your development expertise in Gadget Ads.

For more details on the program, please visit http://code.google.com/qualify/

Achieving and maintaining qualification consist of acquiring points in four areas:

1. Your references

2. Active development examples

3. Community participation

4. Qualification exams

It’s pretty obvious why Google is interested in having a stronger presence in developer certification. They want to make sure that its easier for skilled developers - skilled particularly in Google APIs - to get jobs, because what’s good for the internet job market and internet web application usability is good for Google.

But it’s more illuminative to look at what specific APIs and platforms Google is offering for certification. They’re clearly encouraging qualification for Adsense Gadgets, which are like customizable interactive widgets that usually helps increase CTRs.

I have a hunch - just a wild guess - that the new Developer Directory will get high rankings for any relevant searches, and that Google has a big, shiny, and probably fully achievable vision for their Qualification program. It’s certainly exciting to think of the possibilities. I actually think that Stack Overflow Careers is eating Google’s lunch (with money salad on the menu) as far as useful recruitment data is concerned. Crowdsourced peer validation is tots malots the best form of certification.

But to get back to the point of this post, there’s a conflict that comes up with certification programs of this nature. As usual, HN commenters wittily and succinctly addressed the issue in the discussion thread for the new directory site:

“Qualified Developers are thoroughly vetted by Google … and meet rigorous qualification standards.”

Followed three lines later by…

“Google does not make any representation, endorsement or warranty regarding the services of these developers.”

These statements seem at odds with each other.

Skill certification is one of the more obvious areas where this conflict arises, but it appears surprisingly often. Safety products or products that are potentially dangerous are another example of marketing making strong, unequivocal promises (Our bungee jumps are safe, tots malots) while legally dodging responsibility (If our bungee jumps kill you, your family can’t sue us because we’re warning you that our bungee jumps suck. Caveat emptor, bitch. )

Healthcare and medical services and products also fall into this category, and it’s the area where the PR/CYA paradox is at its most frustrating, as medical malpractice lawsuits have helped aggravate the status quo of draconian healthcare policy.

Can you think of any other product spaces where the legalese and marketing aren’t allowed within a 100 mile radius of each other?

Location Based Networks: Fighting Over the Same Audience and Living On Borrowed Time

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 17:57:52 -0500

dbreunig:

One of these days, location based networks are going to wake up and realize their numbers and games are meaningless once Google or Facebook flips a switch. So far all of these companies keep targeting the early adopter, game-loving, geek crowd. People that will trade privacy for a mayorship.

Until these companies create a product that provides a real value to a niche, active audience, they’re living on borrowed time. The early adopter geek will jump ship for Google in a heartbeat.

Any of the following audiences would love a specialized service. Pick one and build your company. Hell, build it on top of Twitter. You’d be spending almost nothing and devoting most of your time to designing features within the interface:

Bicyclists

Interior designers

Foodies

College kids

Truck drivers/delivery men

Skiers

etc.

The Google.cn Decision Is Not About IP

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 00:34:00 -0500

Journey To The West

Drewbot on Google & China

The excuse given for their previous censorship efforts was that Google plans to adhere to ‘local laws.’ This sidestepped the issue and ignored the big question: do these local laws harm or impede people or their rights.

Only now, when their own intellectual property is threatened, do they act. The fact that Google actively champions itself as the leader of an “Open Source” movement makes this story all the more ironic.

I don’t believe for a second that this really, truly has to do with IP. My own experience with Google as an organization is that it strives to practice its mantra of “Don’t Be Evil”, and as compliance with states like China has shown, sometimes not being evil is tricky indeed.

Google didn’t have to do this. They didn’t have to walk away from many millions of impressionable (pun intended) Chinese people. But they did. And that’s why this is indeed a huge story, with extraordinary possible ramifications of historical scale. The original post used the phrase “we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities”. I wouldn’t be surprised if these authorities consulted went as high up in the authority chain as the Secretary of State.

I’m not knowledgeable enough about this subject to speak at length without turning into a talking asshole, but I do have one point that I believe should be raised.

Was this brute force attack carried out by the Chinese government? I’m sure there’s a good chance it was. But maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was done by savvy dissidents engaging in the Art of War. Perhaps even Google itself, providing itself with an excuse for shareholders and a better position for future negotiations with the Chinese government.

Outside of such groundless speculation, I am resigned to watch this develop, and I’ll be excited to see where it goes from here. Hopefully in a progressive direction, because as Drewbot wrote in his post, “the only losers in this debacle are the Chinese people.”

At the very least, this incident gives us a better subject of collective sympathy than Conan O’Brien.

Update: My speculation was indeed groundless. The Hacker News discussion has come up with a lot of great links and facts about what appears to a be a massive coordinated attack on “the technology infrastructure of major corporations in sectors as diverse as finance, technology, media, and chemical”.

Clear Eyes, Full Hearts

Sat, 02 Jan 2010 03:22:48 -0500

I had the chance today to catch up on some reading I had queued up, and I found Tahdg Kelly’s thoughts on Zynga from a couple weeks ago to be a surprisingly validating read.

Zynga’s coffers are deep, as are Playdom and Playfish’s, but at the heart of their model are some deep weaknesses that are going to let a lot of the air out of their Fast Food business models. The audience expectations are going to shift, the key factors enabling the business model likewise, and while it’s been a great short term success this year, viral gaming doesn’t seem to have any more easy wins left.

Now comes the hard part. Diversification, experimentation and deep design breeding interesting ideas do not grow on trees and companies need to commit to them to see them through. Right now that’s not the Zynga way.

Twelve months from now it will be the companies that have managed to diversify, build strong followings and create real value that will be the new darlings of the scene. Those that do not adapt will still be there but their story will be one of difficulty. As social games come to the end of their beginning, Zynga is increasingly look like an Atari-era publisher leading the charge but unlikely to capitalise in the longer term because they’re too busy thinking they’re in the burger business.

It’s easy to doubt your focus on building rich, meticulously designed products when developing social games these days.

Thank goodness people like Tahdg (and Jason Fried) are there to remind us that the best long position to take is in creating relationships that last.