Category: Tech news

There’s a growing debate in Silicon Valley as to whether the rise in angel investors coupled with robust deal activity (from the likes of Google, Facebook, Zynga, etc.) is fostering an unhealthy environment for the industry.

It’s not that founders aren’t making money (indeed many are cashing out early) the real issue, as posited by our editor, Michael Arrington, is if this new dynamic is stifling the next Zuckerberg or Brin—- the entrepreneur that doesn’t just want to sell to Google, but wants to be Google. On Thursday, we explored this issue further, inviting David Hornik and Howard Hartenbaum of August Capital to sit down with Arrington on TechCrunch TV, to discuss the state of investing and why once-bold tech warriors seem to be giving up. See full video above (click on this link to jump to their discussion on angel investing).

The group also discussed the rise of Skype (Hartenbaum was an early investor), whether Foursquare has the legs to beat Facebook, where they are looking to invest today (Hornik is betting on Enterprise 2.0) and the best investments they passed on.

It appears that Foursquare hit the three million user mark sometime over the weekend. The location based social network has been adding users at impressive rates, and only hit 2 million users in early July. It took a year to reach one million; three months to hit 2 million, and a month and a half to hit 3 million.

Some thought Foursquare was doomed when Facebook rolled out its location-based feature, Places, a few weeks ago. In turns out that via the Places API, the feature serves as a platform for services like Foursquare and Gowalla. But Foursquare’s co-founder Dennis Crowley reported that Foursquare had its biggest day of signups following Facebook’s announcement. And Crowley told the LA Times recently that the startup is growing at about 180,000 users every 10 days.

To expand upon this growth Foursquare recently raised $20 million in funding at a $95 million pre-money valuation, led Andreessen Horowitz with existing investors Union Square Ventures and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures participating. The new funding is being used to hire additional staff, for product development and a new office space. And we know that Foursquare has some interesting ideas to incorporate gaming with check-ins. The company is also opening a San Francisco office.

While Foursquare appears to be growing faster than its main competitor Gowalla, other location-based social networks have already hit the 3 million mark. MyTown, another location-based network hit that number earlier this month, and Loopt passed 4 million users in July.

Of course, with massive billboards in Times Square are certainly going to help Foursquare possibly reach 4 million users in the next month. Plus, we hear a new version of the service will be unveiled soon.

For any entrepreneur, the challenge of taking an idea to launch can be a daunting and expensive journey. Fortunately, Adeo Ressi, founder of TheFunded and startup accelerator, Founder Institute, has a ten step plan.

While there is no foolproof recipe for every launch, Ressi says his template will help any tech entrepreneur get a business off the ground for less than $2,000. The program, which Ressi recently presented at the Founder Institute’s Boston location, is a bare bones guide to securing your startup’s online identity, enhancing your appearance of legitimacy (through low-cost but well designed logos and marketing materials), understanding your startup’s priorities and target consumer, and finally, getting it to the point of a rough web launch.

Given that the presentation occasionally offers very specific advice (for example, step 3 centers on the use of 99designs for your logo), the ten step plan will hardly work for everyone. However, I imagine many young entrepreneurs can mine this tip sheet for some valuable advice on how to save a few extra pennies here and there on the road to launch — pennies that can later mean the difference between success and failure.

Below is a bullet point summary of Ressi’s ten steps to launch. The video above significantly elaborates on these points.

1. Get your domain and e-mail working: “When you register your name, you should register the misspellings as a .com, you should register the primary and the .net or .org or it will be sold back to you for thousands of dollars later…”
Approximate cost: $160

2. Produce some mock-ups: “You want to show the key functionality that you’re trying to bring to the marketplace…You just need three sort of pivotal experience screens that will demonstrate your core idea or three…mock-ups of the physical product…you’re trying to capture how it will be done.”
Approximate cost: Free

3. Logo and materials: “Get a good looking logo so at least you look legitimate…” says Ressi who recommends 99designs. After you pick the winning design, “you contact him [the designer] offline, you say I want you to do my business cards, I want you to do my Power Point backup and I want you to do my mock-ups. Now for not so much money you’re getting everything you need to appear somewhat legitimate to the world.”
Approximate cost: $750

4. Pitch deck: “You always want to have a pitch deck, even if it’s bad…you need something to start with to go on that refining path.”
Approximate cost: Free

5. Create a landing page: Ressi recommends Unbounce.com, which is a drag and drop landing page.
Approximate cost: $60/year after free trial

6. Create a company blog: “I recommend doing blog.yourcompany.com…it keeps it in a consistent place as your company scales…You want to be posting on your blog, at this phase, one or two times a week.”
Approximate cost: Free

7. Test marketing: “First thing I strongly recommend is immediately test marketing using Facebook and Google ads. Not so much for the value of driving people to your bullsh*t website, but to understand what messages resonate with your target audience and then so you can then refine your marketing messages.”
Approximate cost: $250

8. Survey customers: “So now you’ve got these leads coming in, survey them… you want to understand, the demographics, who are they. You want to clarify what the pain points, like why did they sign up, were they just stupid and duped into it or did they really feel that something was valuable and what was it that they find most valuable.”
Approximate cost: $200

9. Create a sticky note roadmap: Write all of your company’s features on separate sticky notes and then group them in logical buckets. “What I do, is I put on the left side I put the most important group and then at the top, the most important features. So on the top left is the most important thing I have to do…When you have that roadmap in front of you, you can sort of visualize the one thing that flows through everything and usually there’s an unknown around that.”
Approximate cost: $100

10. Ghetto launch. Test the unknown. “Whatever you can find that can test out your core stuff that’s free…Identify the metrics, collect the data and validate…”
Approximate cost: $250

Below are two more Founder Institute videos, the first one is on establishing your startup’s vision and the second explores the challenge of researching your idea. If you would like to officially enroll in the Ressi academy (aka his startup accelerator, Founder Institute) you can apply for one of eight locations online.

Success in Silicon Valley, most would agree, is more merit driven than almost any other place in the world. It doesn’t matter how old you are, what sex you are, what politics you support or what color you are. If your idea rocks and you can execute, you can change the world and/or get really, stinking rich.

For the most part I’ve sat on the sidelines over the years during the endless debates about how we need to do more to encourage more women to start companies. What I mean by “sat on the sidelines” is this – until today I haven’t really said what I felt. Now I’m going to.

Here’s why. Yet another article, this time in the Wall Street Journal, takes a shot at us and others for not doing enough to help women in tech. Says Rachel Sklar, a perennial TechCrunch critic:

“Part of changing the ratio is just changing awareness, so that the next time Techcrunch is planning a Techcrunch Disrupt, they won’t be able to not see the overwhelming maleness of it,” said Ms. Sklar, referring to the influential tech conference.

Yeah ok, whatever Rachel. Every damn time we have a conference we fret over how we can find women to fill speaking slots. We ask our friends and contacts for suggestions. We beg women to come and speak. Where do we end up? With about 10% of our speakers as women.

We won’t put women on stage just because they’re women – that’s not fair to the audience who’ve paid thousands of dollars each to be there. But we do spend an extraordinary amount of time finding those qualified women and asking them to speak.

And you know what? A lot of the time they say no. Because they are literally hounded to speak at every single tech event in the world because they are all trying so hard to find qualified women to speak at their conference.

What’s The Real Problem?

I could, like others (see all the links in that Fred Wilson post too), write pandering but meaningless posts agonizing over the problem and suggesting creative ways that we (men) could do more to help women. I could point out that the CEO of TechCrunch is a woman, as are two of our four senior editors (I’m one of the four). And how we seek out women focused events and startups and cover them to death.

But I’m not going to do that. Instead I’m going to tell it like it is. And what it is is this: statistically speaking women have a huge advantage as entrepreneurs, because the press is dying to write about them, and venture capitalists are dying to fund them. Just so no one will point the accusing finger of discrimination at them.

That WSJ article also criticizes Y Combinator for having just 14 female founders out of their 208 startups to date. But I know that Y Combinator wants – really, really wants – female founders and that there just aren’t very many of them. I know this because Y Combinator cofounder Jessica Livingston has told me how excited they are to get applications from women, and that they want to do everything they can to get more female applicants. What they probably won’t admit, but I suspect is true anyway, is that the rate of acceptance for female applicants is far higher than for male applicants.

The problem isn’t that Silicon Valley is keeping women down, or not doing enough to encourage female entrepreneurs. The opposite is true. No, the problem is that not enough women want to become entrepreneurs.

Why? I was asked that question as part of a New York Times interview earlier this year. I dodged it completely, and referred them to Cyan Banister, the founder of Zivity, instead:

Q. Do you anticipate that there will be more companies led by women at the TC50 and Disrupt this year?

A. Women are really tough. I have no idea why. We invited a team founded by a woman to Disrupt. But they canceled. There just aren’t a lot of female tech entrepreneurs out there relative to the number of men, I think. We celebrate the ones we find whenever we find them. There’s a chance we’ll write about what they’re doing, simply because they’re a fairly rare thing in our world. But it is really hard to find female entrepreneurs in tech, in my experience. I really think this is an industry-wide problem.

Q. How do the female tech entrepreneurs and investors in your community feel about this situation?

A. There’s a fascinating company, Zivity, it’s a venture-funded, adult photography community — yes, they put up pictures of naked women online — it was co-founded and is run by a woman, Cyan Banister. She wrote me in response to a post about women who are entrepreneurs, saying, basically, though these are not her exact words, women [stink] as entrepreneurs a lot of the time because they are nurturing and not risk-taking enough by nature. She also said when men roll the dice and take risks, that society doesn’t punish them at all, and it’s in their nature to take stupid risks.

I didn’t respond to that. I didn’t want to jump into that debate. And I guess I still don’t.

Is Cyan right? I don’t know, I’m from Mars, not Venus and I cannot speak intelligently about the nurturing and risk tolerance needs of women. But I will say this. The next time you women want to start pointing the finger at me when discussing the problem of too few women in tech, just stop. Look in the mirror. And realize this – there are women like Sklar who complain about how there are too few women in tech, and then there are women just who go out and start companies (like this one). Let’s have less of the former and more of the latter, please. And when you do start your company, we’ll cover it. Promise.

In terms of brand recognition, it’s hard to top a huge live display billboard in Las Vegas. But Foursquare has managed to do it. As you can see above, they now have a massive, multi-level and multi-angle display practically screaming about the service to all those in Times Square in New York City.

“Check in, find your friends, unlock your city,” the ad reads. In smaller print at the bottom it talks about checking in to American Eagle for some kind of special. Foursquare head of business development Tristan Walker confirms that American Eagle is behind the ad, which he says is the “largest digital billboard in Times Square.”

American Eagle or not, this is clearly a huge ad (and a huge win) for Foursquare itself. Walker thanks Foursquare’s designer Mari Sheibley for designing the thing. And hints that a version 2 is coming.

The phrase “you can’t buy this kind of publicity” comes to mind — probably because Foursquare, while well-funded, undoubtedly couldn’t buy this type of ad. (American Eagle owns the billboard, Walker tells us.) And yet there it is.

This also managed to one-up the big branding rival Gowalla got in New York City earlier this year when they were a part of a massive billboard that loomed large over Madison Square Garden.

This Times Square billboard is just about the opposite of a check in off the grid for the service.

[photo via WillMcD on Flickr and Twitter]

This is a guest post by Hunter Walk (@hunterwalk) who conducted a survey of 500 Foursquare users to better understand their check in behaviors and motivations. His obsession with Foursquare is unrelated to his day job leading the consumer product team at YouTube, although he did at one point hold the Mayorship of their San Bruno headquarters.

Have you noticed “Off the Grid” [OTG] appearing in your Foursquare feed recently? No, it’s not the latest trendy West Hollywood club or SF food cart. OTG is Foursquare’s “privacy” feature where you check in to a location but don’t disclose it to your friends (while gaining any applicable points, badges, etc). What purpose does it serve to notify your friends that you’re out on the town but to hide the location? And what does it tell us about the future of location-based services & privacy? This was the question I set out to answer by surveying nearly 500 Foursquare users.

The answers point to some ways that Foursquare can fend off Facebook Places by being an experience, not just a utility. It’s clear that the check in will be a commodity — there will be any number of services which allow you to push a geotag and location to your social stream of choice. That’s a utility. However, as I wrote earlier this year, Foursquare’s future is tied to its ability to be an experience, providing value on top of the check in. Here’s the data and four things learned:

1) Even Very Public People Have Private Moments [“Did I need to tell everyone I was getting a Brazilian wax job? but I wanted the points!!!”]

The single largest reason for OTG was hiding from friends [46%]. People gave a variety of motivations [examples: buying a gift for girlfriend, on a date, avoiding someone in particular, hiding one’s poor eating habits from friends, and seeing a doctor.]

Whether protecting their own location, or doing it out of respect for their host [21%], it’s clear that public people have private moments that fully public check in systems can’t fully respect. But why check in if you don’t want people to know where you are? That’s learning #2…

2) Foursquare as “My Local History” Is High Potential (And Underdeveloped)

Why check in off the grid? 60% of respondents cited the desire to keep track of where they’ve been for their own future reference. Currently, your Foursquare History is a flat set of your check ins but the user interest here points to the opportunity for a much more robust feature. One just needs to look at visualization tools such as WeePlaces to imagine how much more dynamic your Foursquare history could be presented. Let alone the possibilities of letting users annotate, organize and communicate with previous check in locations. Shouldn’t Foursquare be giving me the ability to create ongoing relationships with the venues I visit? I’ve been acquired as a customer so the ongoing remarketing costs are minimal. This is where I’m most bullish about Foursquare as a business — loyalty programs and offers; customer acquisition and retention instruments.

3) A Leaderboard Could Cost You Your Job [“Interviewing in another city, didn’t want current employer to know”]

Would you put your job at risk just to earn virtual points? 34% of respondents used OTG to check into a location that could have been considered confidential or sensitive to their job. And people wonder why social engineering works so well as a hacking tactic? A third of OTG check ins are some big honeypot of information about potential partnerships, acquisitions, job interviews and so on. Now THAT could be Foursquare’s killer business model – paid access to view private check ins 😉

4) Don’t Hate the Playa, Hate the Game [“I want to be mayor of my office so I check in off the grid so my rival (competing with me for mayor) won’t realize! :)”]

Mayor stalking was the surprise motivation for many OTG check ins since they count towards mayorships but don’t display your name associated with the venue. This didn’t come up at all in my pre-survey discussions (I guess my Silicon Valley friends aren’t into mayorships — or were hiding their secrets!) but several respondents gave this as their reason. In fact, 60% of respondents overall noted that the points/mayorships are what motivate them to register OTG as opposed to skipping the check in altogether.

Other miscellaneous product thoughts:

• Events: As part of personal history, I would expect Foursquare to support “events” — limited time named instances at a particular venue — so that people can create temporal locations to check into without creating duplicate location entries.
• Check-out: Only 15% of users report using OTG to signal a “check out” — leaving a venue and not wanting to publish location out of concern friends will arrive to find you departed. There had been some speculation that Foursquare would build a check out feature. I think it’s more likely that Foursquare will auto check you out based on pinging your location in the background, and that this will be an opt-out feature.
• Suppress Notifications on Duplicate Check Ins: 26% of people utilize OTG for repeat check ins at a location over the course of a few days (such as a hotel). These could easily be public but collapsed into a single line. Or subsequent check ins might be public, but not published as alerts.

What does this mean for Foursquare vs Facebook Places?

Foursquare has a window of opportunity to build an experience on top of geolocation. The game mechanics are unlikely to be pursued by Facebook who have already allowed social gaming to be a third party business on their platform. The ability to have a personal location diary combining public and private check ins is also unlikely to be duplicated by Facebook given Mark Zuckerberg’s declarations about the importance of public sharing. They likely both have designs on loyalty programs and offers but Foursquare has the pure play focus.

It’s definitely going to be a feature dogfight in the nearterm as Foursquare makes their bets and decides what, if any, relationship they should have with Places. I expect many geo services to leverage the Places API for pushing check ins to Facebook (as SCVNGR just announced). One could certainly imagine a future where Foursquare places value on building an experience on top of the check in but cares less about owning the social graph (or even places directory) outright, deciding instead to focus on game mechanics, reviews/recommended places, and merchant offers/loyalty programs. I bet this is a hotly debated topic amongst CEO Dennis Crowley & team who last said they were still deciding how to work with Places.

Below, find the survey results.

Survey: Why did you decide to hide your location from your friends? [respondents could select more than one answer]

Survey: Given that the location was kept secret, why did you check-in at all? [respondents could select more than one answer]

We’ve written about Fanvibe (formerly FanPulse) a few times because they do a nice job mixing some of the hottest elements of the web these days (tweets, check-ins, gaming elements) with sports. And now we’re about to enter the peak time for sports in the U.S. with the NFL season about to kickoff. With that in mind, the guys behind Fanvibe have come up with a new football-specific iPhone app called TweetQB.

The idea is as simple as can be: you load up the app and you see a list of all the current NFL games. If the games are currently in progress, you see an up-to-date score. If they have yet to start, you’ll see when they do. Clicking on any of these matchups takes you to a screen filled with tweets about that specific game. From here, you can respond to any of these tweets, or start tweeting yourself.

Okay, on the surface, it may seem like there is not much here. But here’s why this works: trash-talking. Any good football fan knows that trash-talking is an essential part of the game. There is always some know-it-all fan of the team you hate running his or her mouth on Twitter about such-and-such, so TweetQB gives you fast and easy access to try and shut him or her up.

TweetQB is populating these realtime tweets by looking for specific team hashtags or tweets from accounts known to be associated with those specific teams.

When you tweet or respond to any tweet from within TweetQB, on Twitter, people will see it with a link back to the Fanvibe page for that specific game. To be clear, this is separate from the Fanvibe app itself, TweetQB is just a simple way encourage trash-talking and spread the Fanvibe links. Again, it’s super-simple, which is what I like about it. It’s up-to-date NFL scores, it’s trash-talking tweets.

The app is $0.99 in the App Store. Sadly, the beer is not included.

Update: As co-founder Vishwas Prabhakara notes in the comment, they’re giving away 25 copies of the app. Simply email techcrunch [at] fanvibe.com.

It’s no secret that Google, Apple and even RIM want a piece of the $1 billion-and-growing mobile advertising market. The fight over share of ad dollars is even resulting in possible anti-competitive practices. Apple’s developer licensing agreement update in June basically says it reserves the right to block Google’s AdMob from serving ads on the iPhone and iPad, allowing only “independent” ad-serving companies to serve ads on the devices. But in July, AdMob founder Omar Hamoui said that Apple had not yet enforced the policy, allowing Google to continue to serve ads on Apple devices. Perhaps the FTC’s recent interest in Apple’s ad policies delayed the blockade, but multiple industry sources take it as a foregone conclusion that it’s only a matter of time before Apple prevents Google completely from serving ads. If and when that does eventually happen, the mobile ad space could change irrevocably.

Clearly, there is a very real danger that Apple will create a domino effect across the mobile advertising industry if it turns off the switch for AdMob. Let’s just think this through. If Apple were to block Google’s ad network from serving ads on iPhone and iPads, which make up the lions share of OS ad requests according to Millennial’s latest data (55 percent), Google would be forced to focus on the Android market. Android devices are no doubt growing fast, and even overtaking RIM’s share of ad requests according to some reports. Advertisers are no doubt going to want to spend money on targeting Android users. And Google, who develops and distributes the Android platform, would need to make up for the loss of the Apple ecosystem from AdMob’s mobile ad network by generating more revenue through Android.

Of course, Google would be stupid to explicitly close their ecosystem like Apple, but if the company wants to financially capitalize on the growth of the Android platform, it might make sense to favor its own ad network above others.

It’s not just Apple and Android that want their own ad networks. RIM is also reportedly looking to buy an ad network, hoping to take a part in the wireless advertising industry. The BlackBerry manufacturer was reportedly sniffing around Millennial Media, a company that has also stated its intention to IPO in the next year.

So in the coming year, we could see the top three smartphone device makers all have their own mobile ad networks. And RIM’s ad network could also be prohibited from serving ads on the iPhone with Apple’s policies. The result of this would be a more device-centric, fragmented, mobile advertising market. Already Steve Jobs is promoting Apple’s iAds as a revolutionary ad format optimized for the iPhone and iPad. RIM and Google could be forced to develop and tout their device-centric ad formats.

And thus, advertisers would be encouraged to go to each device manufacturer for the ad formats that promise the best clickthrough rates. It would be a nightmare however for advertisers and agencies to have to split their spending between all the different networks. Advertisers hate fragmentation. They love scale: buy once, plaster everywhere.

Currently, advertisers can go to a mobile ad network like Millennial, AdMob or Jumptap, and be able to target Blackberry, iPhone and Android users. Developers will of course go where the money is. This would be disastrous for the remaining independent ad networks, who would all still be able to advertise on the iPhone, but would face a world where they are fighting with the world’s largest technology companies over mindshare and inventory.

A device-centric mobile advertising world would deviate radically from the way the web’s advertising networks operate today. It would be as if Dell, Apple, HP and other laptop manufacturers decided to buy ad networks to control a piece of the ad dollars spent to reach people on their computers. Or if browser developers such as Microsoft, Firefox and Chrome decided to only allow publishers to serve ads through their ad networks. It sounds completely absurd.

But that is the way things could shake out. There are only two things holding Apple back right now: the FTC and the ire of advertisers. The first is not much of a deterrent, but the second should give Apple pause. Making life more difficult for advertisers is no way to start a relationship.

Photo Credit/Flickr/AussieGal

Editor’s note: The following guest post is by Nikhyl Singhal, the co-founder and CEO of voice-application startup SayNow.

Is it conceivable that one of our greatest inventions, the phone number, is about to face extinction?

Just ask Mark Zuckerberg. Earlier this year, when asked if Facebook would be around in 100 years, as long as Ma Bell has been around, Zuckerberg responded, “I don’t know. But I don’t know how long telephones will be around for.”  Will they be around for ten more years? I’ll go even further. It may not even take 5 years for the phone service, as we know it, to meet its demise.

Who’s going to lead the charge?  Voice on Gmail and Skype are just the beginning.  What are Facebook, Apple, Yahoo, and Microsoft doing?  As AT&T, Verizon, Apple and Google spent this summer hashing out plans for world domination, it seems that Facebook is best positioned to strike the fatal blow against our beloved carriers.  And it starts with those phone digits.

I’m certain my grandkids will never dial a phone number, or even have one. It’s time to say goodbye to ten digits along with the world’s oldest social network.  While we’re at it, let’s kill phone-tree mazes, do-not-call lists…everything associated with phone numbers.

Don’t misconstrue what I’m saying. This isn’t the demise of phone calls.  Far from it.  People will still talk on their phones.  They just want the service to be simple and fun, which won’t entail punching digits into a device to start a conversation.

Why put phone numbers on deathwatch?  Consider a few facts:

1. No control. Anyone can dial your 10 digits, including your ex-girlfriend, a political campaign worker, or a solicitor.  Unlisted numbers, Caller ID and do-not-call lists all tried to solve this problem, but these solutions still don’t prevent unwanted calls.
2. Phone numbers are tied to a device, not to you. Everyone has multiple numbers, yet your home line is shared, leaving callers guessing the best way to reach you.
3. User experience is very limited. The phone was designed as a utility—dial a number, have a conversation. It’s remained this way since its inception.  It’s not optimized for other experiences, which is why voicemail and conference calls are tedious, and why checking flight status is worse than a root canal.

Compare this to your social networks.  You have control over who accesses your information; you have one username and profile that you use at all times; and applications fill in the holes and extend the network’s capabilities to communicate, play games and meet people on your own terms.

On any Facebook page, I can “send a message”, even if we aren’t friends. And I can choose to receive messages from non-friends. The key thing is the network sets up a policy, and I as a user can change this. We don’t have this choice on the phone network today. Anyone can dial my number, and I can’t control it—but I do control my interaction on a social network.

Google, Skype, and others try to resolve telephony problems by stuffing the phone system into the web.  Personally, I’ve spent five years at SayNow trying to eke more out of the digit-based phone system too.  We’ve built dozens of applications that enable brands, celebrities and millions of users to use the phone in an entirely new way.  But we’ve all hit the limits of what we can accomplish.  Instead of replicating the antiquated phone network inside the web, let’s instead dramatically simplify telephony by adding voice on top of our social networks.

If given a choice between Ma Bell and Zuckerbell as our operator, we should choose Zuck.  Despite criticisms about Facebook’s privacy settings, the site gives us far more control over our interactions than we have on the telephone.  Since our contacts live in the network, we already belong to the world’s largest white pages.  And with more businesses moving to social networks, throw in the global yellow pages, too.  So say goodbye to lost phone numbers, moving contacts between devices and even 411.  More importantly, just as you determine who can see your bachelor party photos, you will soon have complete control over who has access to call you and who doesn’t. As I write this I already hear my wife saying, “Honey, why can’t my mom call us anymore?”

Also relevant here are the creative smartphone applications that developers churn out daily.  None of these leverage the primary reason these mobile devices exist: voice.  Once smartphone platforms allow developers to initiate conversations and voice messages, you can bet voice will finally become flexible and fun.

Speaking of which, I was at a Lady Gaga concert recently, and the good people at Virgin Mobile arranged for Gaga to “surprise” a fan with a phone call that upgraded her seats.  Great idea, but we all know the entire activity was scripted and carefully orchestrated.  But what if it wasn’t?  Lady Gaga should be able to open her iPhone, see her Facebook, Twitter, or MySpace fans, choose someone checked in at the venue, and…. (cue drumroll), call them.  Call one of them.  Some of them.  All of them.  And whether you have 5 million friends or just 5, phone calls should be just that easy.  So enjoy punching those digits while they are still around.

Are any of you intending to rock? Well then I salute you and offer one of two You Rock Guitars from InspiredInstruments. This $199 git-fiddle is actually a MIDI guitar that connects with either the Wii or the PS3 and can be used to play games like Guitar Hero, Band Hero, Rock Band, Klezmer Hero, and Konami’s upcoming Big Band Hero featuring a 28 piece orchestra for you and your friends. You get to be Django Reinhardt!

It seems to do an amazing amount of stuff including:

Is a real MIDI guitar that plugs into an amp
• Acts as a cross-platform videogame controller for all Guitar Hero and Rock Band games
• Plugs into an iPhone/iPad, you can record music on it
• Can be uploaded to your computer and share with friends
• So much more.

So much more, indeed. But how do you win?

Read more…

Editor’s note: The following guest post is by Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, the CEO of WatchMojo, a producer and distributor of premium video content. Follow him on Twitter @ashkan or @WatchMojo

Last week, Erick posted an article on TechCrunch titled “Industry Insiders Say Online Video Advertising Is Reaching A ‘Frenzy Point.’” It was a surefire way to get online video entrepreneurs excited, right? Not so fast.

The article quoted two CEOs of large online video businesses—namely Keith Richman of Break Media and Jason Glickman of Tremor Media—whose basic argument was as follows:

It very well may just be the big ad networks and properties like Hulu that are seeing the vast majority of new ad dollars.

“If you are not in the top 10 on comScore you will have a tough time” notes Break CEO Keith Richman, “money goes to the guys who are big,”

That led Erick to summarize and wonder:

Video is definitely shaping up to be a large and growing business for the bigger players and ad networks, but will those advertising dollars trickle down to the smaller guys as well?

While one might think that the top 10 firms in a given industry will prevail, it’s important to think of legendary General Electric CEO Jack Welch’s rule that a company should be either No. 1 or No. 2 in a particular industry, or else leave it completely.

Online video frequently draws comparisons to search, which today has become a two-horse race between Google and Microsoft. Considering that the high-profile and defunct Veoh was a perennial top-10 competitor in video, one wonders: is anything other than No. 1 or No. 2 in video really a winning a strategy?

It depends.

Size vs. Quality

Indeed, as with everything, size matters.  But seeing how history repeats itself, it’s helpful to think of how the frenzy around large ad networks on the web fizzled and made room for something else: quality.

Increasingly, marketers have grown wary of focusing solely on size (as measured by reach).  A few years ago, marketers would pick up the phone and place one or two orders allowing them to reach 100 million uniques while paying rock-bottom CPMs.

Today, many are paying more attention to where the ad placements reside (and how the ad views are being counted).  This is why after the acquisitions of ad networks Right Media and Blue Lithium, the frenzy around online ad networks has waned a bit, and some ad networks (namely AdConion and Valueclick) have even begun to diversify to boost their offerings of quality (via content).

Without a doubt, CEOs Glickman and Richman are right that size is a major consideration. But that doesn’t mean that smaller or mid-sized video companies will fail, especially if they can play the quality card and leverage those who have size.

The Four Pillars of Online Video

In fact, while both men have built strong and valuable businesses, in their prognosis, they omit a major strategic consideration.  While online video companies tend to specialize in one of seven areas, ultimately they end up choosing one of four: Technology, Distribution, Advertising or Content.

While incomplete and not a definitive breakdown or categorization of where each company focuses on, the following table is useful to understand who is doing what in the online video space:

CONTENT DECA, DBG, Eqal, Fora.tv, Funny or Die, Generate, Howcast, Katalyst Media, Machinima, Mania TV, Next New Networks, Revision3, VideoJug, WatchMojo.	TECHNOLOGY Adobe, Apple, Avid, JumpCut, Sorensen, On2, blip.tv, Brightcove, Feedroom, Justin.tv, KIT Digital, Livestream/Mogulus, Ooyala, Maven, Permission TV, Qik, uStream, StudioNow, VMIX, Akamai, BitGravity, Edgecast, Grid Networks, Limelight Networks, Panther Express.
ADVERTISING Adap.tv, Auditude, Brightroll, Broadband Enterprises, Freewheel, Overlay.tv, Panache, Scanscout, Tidal TV, Tremor Media, Video Egg, Yume.	DISTRIBUTION 5Min, AOL, Break, DailyMotion, Hulu, Kaltura, MSN, Metacafe, Nabbr, Revver, Vimeo, Yahoo!, YouTube, Blinkx, Cast TV, Clicker, Clipblast, Dabble, Everyzing, Google, Mefeedia, Pixsy, Truveo.

While Technology, Distribution and Advertising firms have a binary, winner-takes-all, zero-sum outcome, Content firms can leverage others in those three segments.  Thinking back to Jack Welch’s mantra, I’d argue that you have to be #1 or 2 in Technology, Distribution and Advertising (think of the search engine industry) but not necessarily so in Content (hence, the four TV networks, for example).

Enter YouTube

Of course, talking about all of this without mentioning the eight-hundred pound gorilla is foolish.

Today, YouTube retains 44% of the online video audience.  Its parent Google accounts for the lion’s share—roughly 65% market share—of the search market, which in turn garners 40% of the online advertising pie. It then uses its $30 billion war chest to fund forays into new tech and media areas.

As a result of this major reality, companies who operate in the Technology, Distribution and Advertising spheres are handicapped because they are fighting for 56% of the total online video market (less, when you consider that the No. 2 player in the market, Hulu, is equally protective of its domain and doesn’t let just any company operate in its sandbox).

In other words, without Google’s blessing,

• a video Advertising or Technology firm’s product cannot gain traction on YouTube;
• and a Distribution video company is competing head-on with the No. 1 and No. 2 search destinations online (with YouTube being the second largest search engine) and the No. 1 video site online.

One can cling to the fact that unless you’re a Top 10 player according to comScore you’re doomed, but I would argue that if you operate in Technology, Distribution or Advertising, unless you’re name is Google or YouTube, you might not be spared, either.

An Uphill Battle

Meanwhile, Content companies can leverage YouTube’s platform as they pose no threat to the GooTube machine.  They augment it by providing professional content for marketers to advertise alongside of within YouTube.  This being said, they are not completely immune either.  So long as Google doesn’t break down individual content producers on YouTube for comScore and Nielsen reporting, most of the content producers will will face an uphill battle convincing marketers that they are worthy of their request for proposals (RFPs) and ad dollars.

So long as this is the reality, then indeed, Content companies are just as much at the mercy of GooTube as Technology, Distribution and Advertising firms are, albeit in a different way.

The Power of the Platform

A couple of years ago, VCs tripped over one another to fund Facebook-ecosystem start-ups.  Facebook itself launched the fbFund, but recently admitted that the fund was dead. Playing in Facebook’s sandbox was challenging at best and daunting at worst.

Yes, Zynga built a powerful company by leveraging Facebook, but diplomacy ran its course.  For every Zynga there are hundreds of companies whose fate turned of a dime.  Take, for example, Offerpal who laid staff off after Facebook threw itself into the arms of a competitor.  Countless others never even made it into the limelight to begin with. It wasn’t just Facebook; Twitter and Foursquare have all been cast as the flavor du jour.

YouTube Remains the Biggest “Platform” of All, Maybe

One company that has been overlooked as a potential platform for other startups to build a business on remains YouTube, which Google acquired for $1.65 billion in 2006.

Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are fundamentally different: developers build apps on Facebook and Twitter’s platform; content producers create videos and distribute them across YouTube – but conceptually, all three provide the backbone that helps monetize the creators’ brainchild.

Why?  One word: Advertising

Video—which is what constitutes YouTube’s DNA—is a natural canvas for advertising to flourish.  It’s important to note that social networking (Twitter, Facebook or Foursquare’s DNA) is the latest form of communication, and communication tools like email, instant messaging (and now tweeting) have rarely proven to be money makers in an ad-supported ecosystem.

Ironically, yet fittingly, the fact that Google owns YouTube has proven to be a larger hindrance to technology companies than media companies.  For media companies, YouTube absorbs expensive bandwidth costs and reduces marketing costs by providing a targeted and captive audience, leaving them only with the third major cost: content production itself.

As such, while it’s true that size and reach are going to be a major hindrance for small and mid-sized video companies, regardless of whether they’re in Content, Technology, Distribution or Advertising, I’d still rather be producing quality content. Whereas the Content firms (small, medium or large) can leverage the strengths of the other three to build valuable businesses, in Technology, Distribution and Advertising, unless you are No. 1 or No. 2, then you won’t have the gunpowder to stay in the game.

Photo credit: Flickr/Paulo Brandão.

One of the big problems with drug and prostitution transactions is that they tend to involve a lot of cash, and cash is hard to launder. Taking credit card payments has never been easier via Square, which lets anyone swipe credit cards with their iPhone.

Sure, it leaves one heck of a paper trail, but you have to wonder if at least a few of those person to person transactions aren’t being done via that sexy startup. I certainly have.

Founder Jack Dorsey has told me that exactly zero drug or prostitution transactions have been completed through Square. I believe he believes that, but I wonder how he really knows for sure.

Anyway, I came across this very funny spoof video by Chris OConnell that just dives right in to exactly what I’ve been saying. Says Chris: “So I got my blow, and I got my 19 year old hooker. Life couldn’t be much better thanks to Square.”

Trust me, you’ll want to watch this:

A unique spin on the concept of co-working space, Sunfire Offices was started three months ago by ex- Google engineering manager Niniane Wang and and ex-Facebook engineering manager Yishan Wong. While there are plenty of other co-working spaces in downtown Mountain View, like Hacker Dojo and Plug In Play,Wong and Wang, not satisfied with the available options, decided to create a co-working space of their own.

They found an office space and got funding from a number of angel investors including Keith Rabois and Justin Calbeck, who completely sponsored Sunfire Offices, meaning that Wong and Wang were then able to offer space rent free to other startups and individuals working on personal projects, “Our goal was to build a co-working space focused on top-tier talent.”
(They shied away from talking about a future business model.)

While it does incorporate incubator type qualities, the two emphasize that invite-only Sunfire Offices is not a incubator,“We’re optimizing for the quality of people, since they’re what really matter in a start-up,” says Wong. They wanted to “avoid the problem often associated with incubators: the theory that stronger startups don’t need an incubator so the startups that apply to incubators tend to be weaker ones, resulting in incubators naturally selecting for poorer startup performance.”

Unlike most incubators, the only obligation at Sunfire is to attend a weekly mixer where one of the sponsors’ portfolio companies does a pitch or demo. This benefits Sunfire sponsors because they end up getting first look at potential companies and Sunfire residents because they get exposure to potential investors and recruiters.

Looking for “aggressively productive individuals” as residents, Wang emphasizes that applicant pedigree doesn’t matter. But the the inevitable Google and Facebook connection is strong, “due to our backgrounds, we are able to source from a very high-quality pool – Niniane knows all the great early engineers at Google, and I know everyone from PayPal and Facebook.”

Aside from free rent, office residents gain the being around intelligent people/environmental aspect of working at a giant company while still maintaining a small scale. “Working in coffee shops or at home can be very lonely and unmotivating,” says Wang.

Wang also brings up the example of a Nextstop engineer who didn’t want to move to Facebook when Facebook acquired Nextstop — preferring to stay at a startup.

“We invited her to come work at Sunfire, during which time she worked on a small project of her own while talking with various companies associated with our sponsors and network. And just last week, she accepted a position at one of those companies as their first full-time engineer.”

A visit to the offices reveals an amazing view and a lot of people hard at work on some secret and not so secret projects including YouTube co-founder Jared Karim, former astronaut and Google Manager Ed Lu, and co-founders of iTeleport Jahanzeb Sherwani and Vishal Kapur.

You can get an invitation to the Sunfire weekly mixer (and maybe even to Sunfire) by contacting office manager (and former Googler) Elaine Yu or tag along vicariously as they eat their way through Castro Street.

I promise this is my last word on the subject.

I had already promised myself, actually, that I wouldn’t write any more about my decision to quit Facebook, Linkedin, Foursquare, Blippy, Yammer, Dopplr and every other social network other than Twitter. But then I added Twitter to the list – deleting my 10,000+ follower account and returning to more traditional blogging – and suddenly all (social media) hell broke loose.

For reasons I can’t quite understand – it’s not like I’ve quit food or oxygen – my inbox has since been flooded with emails. Some are just standard notes of congratulations for cutting the cord while others scream that I’m a Luddite who doesn’t ‘get’ Twitter (by and large these are the same people who describe themselves as “social media ninja”s on their profiles: the modern day equivalent of those “My other car is the Batmobile” bumper stickers).

The majority of messages, though, are from people who are strongly considering following my lead, but are worried that their body or mind might not be able to cope with the shock.  How do I feel since quitting? Can I offer them any advice?

The semi-amusing thing is, this isn’t the first time I’ve experienced this kind of email flood of congratulations, insults and pleas for guidance. It happened last October too: when I finally made the decision to quit drinking. Make of that what you will.

The difference is that, back in October, I completely understood the tsunami of mail. Millions of people struggle with alcohol addiction – and for those who do, it’s a serious problem. Any advice or encouragement could be the difference between life and death. Certainly it was for me.

But giving up Twitter? Seriously? Are there really people who can’t get out of bed in the morning without sending a 140 character update, just to stop their thumbs shaking from the night before? (The RT DTs?). Or addicts who surreptitiously tweet throughout the work day, from a phone hidden in their desk drawer, hoping that their workmates don’t find out? People who are unable to stop at just one “OH:”, sending more and more before they blackout, ready to start the whole Bukowskian cycle again the next day?

Judging by my inbox, the answer is yes, there are.

But, unlike with drink, I don’t feel their pain. In fact, giving up Twitter (and the rest) has been a veritable walk in the park. I’ve barely suffered any withdrawal symptoms, I don’t feel any sense of loss, and I’ve certainly not found it any harder to enjoy parties or talk to women without a phone in my hand (and I say that as someone who not long ago started dating a flight attendant after I tweeted about her on a plane. Seriously: I had a problem.)

I admit, though, it does feel odd. For more than two years I’ve been accustomed to sending half a dozen tweets a day, whenever something even vaguely notable happened. Lunch with a friend? Tweet. See someone nearly get hit by a car? Tweet. Think of a funny (ish) joke? Tweet. Fight with a friend or loved-one? Cryptic tweet. Like a Japanese tourist compulsively photographing everything he sees, it was almost as if something didn’t really happen unless it was captured in 140 characters and shared with the world.

At a stroke, that’s all changed. Now if I see someone nearly getting it by a car, my initial reaction is the same as before – “holy shit! someone just nearly got hit by a car!” – but that reaction remains inside my head. And yet, amazingly, even without my 140 character acts of vital citizen journalism the world has carried on turning. And what of jokes? Is my brain filling up with amusing observations and bons mots that, unless released, will cause it to haemorrhage? No. I just write them down in my notebook to be used later: an act which – and this did surprise me – gives me almost exactly the same satisfaction as sharing them with 10,000 followers.

The only downside, really, is the occasionally jarring sense that something is missing from my enjoyment of an experience. An involuntary twitch as I reach for my phone and realise I don’t do that any more. I imagine anyone who has quit smoking feels a similar way occasionally; particularly in postprandial or post-coital situations. But the feeling soon passes. Maybe I should start chewing gum?

As for the benefits: they’ve been both noticeable and persistent. For one thing I’ve rediscovered the joy of making notes, and then refining those notes – sharpening jokes and tweaking arguments, all using a pen and paper – prior to publication. I’ve also come to re-appreciate sharing thoughts with my actual friends – taking the time to email or text or IM someone who I actually know in the real world, to share something I think they alone would enjoy or appreciate. I’ve remembered what it feels like to laugh loudly at a joke without having to disrupt the flow of conversation for two minutes while I “overhear” it. I’ve become closer to my real friends, and more distant from total strangers. Which seems like the right direction for things to be moving in.

One of the other things I’ve been asked – probably fifty times – if whether I expect to stick to my decision over the long-term or whether, like others who have tried to quit Twitter before me, I’ll come crawling back in a few weeks.

My knee-jerk response is to scream “are you kidding me? I’ve been sober for 312 days. If I don’t miss that shit, then I think I’ll be fine without knowing what Guy Kawasaki thinks about the world.” (SPOILER ALERT: nothing)

My more, uh, sober answer, though, is disturbingly similar to the one I give about returning to the sauce: I don’t know if I’ll go back to it. Certainly my life is noticeably better without it, I have more time, I’m closer to my friends and I’m getting more work done. But who knows how I’ll feel tomorrow?

The only thing I do know is that, in terms of things that are actually hard to live without, I’m far more likely to succumb to the craving for delicious, delicious beer before I surrender to the almost negligible desire to send another fucking tweet.