BlogSat

Last week pictures of Microsoft's coming App Store leaked. The line that stood out for me in this TechCrunch commentary was It looks almost as if Microsoft is ripping off Google ripping off Apple The commentary is both accurate and a little unfair . On the surface, the claims seems valid. You could probably throw the Amazon App Store for Android into the mix as well. The stores have similar elements. A rotating, image-rich banner on the top to promote new/notable/preferred/interesting apps. Lists and modules to show the right slices of apps - a mix of curated and generated collections Individual detailed pages for the apps. The ability to dive into categories Most have reviews and ratings Some support evangelizing/sharing (i.e. tweet/share on facebook etc.) The differences right now are mostly cosmetic (icon design, font sizes, banner designs, graphic elements, consistency with existing products etc.) The comparison that keeps coming to my mind is the similarity to stores in the...

Since I was in Mountain View, I decided to check out the Mobile Monday meetup. Raw notes below. I'll digest this have more to say later. :) Highlights : Om Malik (GigoOM) and Rich Wong (Accel Partners) were particularly insightful/interesting. Some interesting predictions in Mobile : "Amazon will be big in payment". "Facebook story on mobile is under-reported", "Revolution on mobile advertising yet to come." 2011 predictions: Android growth, Samsung winnning, LTE is a story, major security issue on mobile will cause a stink. The US is finally leading in mobile innovation (after nearly ~15 years) Favorite quote: "If you've played the mobile version of Angry Birds on Android with the ads, you know why they're angry."" Mario Tapia: Mobile Monday co-ordinator/GetJar Topic : 2010: year in review, 2011: predictions Panelists: - Om Malik (GigaOM) - Rich Wong (Accel) - Matt Fix (Vodafone Venture) - Joe Jasin (DNA Partners) - John Mallo...

I wrote most of this 4 weeks ago, but came back and hit "Publish" on it today, so its a little raw...its been that kinda month. :) The long weekend allowed me to catch up on the entire " The Web is Dead " series of articles, and the blogosphere brouhaha that followed. Its really great material to think about. Here's the original Wired article(s) from Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff. My favorite analysis and conclusion was this one from Jason Fry at Niemanlab.org Also great: a related series of articles, are from last week's Economist. This is a summary re: the balkanization of the Internet . Fred Wilson has a really clear take on it as well. The series forced me to think a little longer about what's motivating this behavior from the companies and individuals driving this change, and analyze my own behavior as well. Eventually though, the line from this Richter Scale's song (" In the Valley ") is what stayed with me: "Open or close...

A long, long time ago as an 19-ish-year old undergraduate student looking for sponsorship from companies for an event we were putting on, I was wrapping up a conversation with a Marketing Head from a local software company. They were going to be a sponsor the event, and as part of that have a recruiting/marketing booth that a few students were going to volunteer at. His parting comment; he looked me straight in the eye and said "Let's make sure there are a couple of pretty girls at our booth." I was caught by surprise, and was simultaneously annoyed (for obvious reasons) and grudgingly admiring (the man knew his audience.) There's nothing new or even novel about this. From time immemorial, its a tactic that's been applied to most obviously to cars, guns .... basically anything that you want us guys to buy. Internet banner advertising is all about trying to find a way to get the users attention through great copy and content/images/flash; and in a sad commentary o...

If you're in the Internet space, or care about it, you've likely heard about Digital Sky Technologies , and almost certainly know about Tencent . If you're based in the USA, my guess is its less likely that you've heard of Naspers . That's why this great article in the Economist was an eye-opener. These companies aren't just growing and building an incredible investment portfolio, but are very closely aligned. Here's the article's summary on these firms: "The websites of Digital Sky Technologies (DST) account for more than 70% of page-views on the Russian-language internet. Naspers is Africa’s biggest media group, both offline and online. And Tencent is China’s largest internet company by market capitalisation—and the third-largest in the world." This is great, but here's where things get interesting: "...they are financially intertwined. Naspers owns part of mail.ru and was an early investor in Tencent, of which it now holds 35%. I...

I spent some of my Sunday watching v ideos from the Web 2.0 summit ( fun way to spend a Sunday evening, huh?) This video below is marginally interesting, but also incredibly bizarre. The folks who paid however-many-ks to attend the Web 2.0 summit, sit for 35 mins and listen to 5 pretty normal teenagers being interviewed. They listen in rapt attention to answers about "What do you think of Twitter?" and "Do you use Facebook?" and the priceless "When you're 25 you will..." Yikes! There's some interesting stuff there, but really my take-away was that kids aren't really as different from us old people. I'm planning to watch these four (Google/UChicago-affiliated) videos next:

One product et company that I liked and use less of lately, got acquired by the company that builds another that I like and use a lot of. Detailed analysis and speculation will abound over the next day/week, but I think is a pretty slick move on the part of Facebook for many, many reasons. They pick up great talent , an infrastructure that would plug in really well with, and add a lot to the Facebook statuses, and (hopefully) a team that will bring in some instincts for openness and support for the Open Web . Though how much Facebook should care about the last piece is open for debate, especially since this takes their market-share even higher (assuming there is a defined "market" for status updates and sharing social activity :)) Facebook statuses have borrowed a lot of from (oh, sorry been inspired by) Friendfeed over the last year and in the case of users like me this has led to a lot of duplication in my status messages. At the very least hopefully this will help clea...

I had a hallway conversation last week that triggered yet another Twitter / Google analogy for me. Google is like a library, Twitter is like a bar. Searching for something on Twitter e.g. "Michael Jackson dies" results in a lot of very immediate, very shallow, perhaps even inaccurate results but its interesting, has attribution, and satisfies a voyeuristic tendency we all have. The same applies for Facebook status messages. Google is much more like a library: better quality, better sources, but a little more delayed and "stiff" Even controlling for their other uses, libraries tend to be less popular than bars, so that's something I'm sure worries some folks at Google. Possible solution for Google: Library Bar ?:)

Google Reader (possibly the Google Product I use the most in terms of time spent/day for non-work related purposes) added a few social features; one of which allows you to "Like" an article. I've always been a fan of Reader. It's help change how I consume content on the Internet and is one of the foundations of a lot of the social interactions I have on the Web. So I understand the motivation behind this new feature and in a vacuum this is a reasonable, solid feature. I get the difference in semantics between "like" and "share" (a feature already available) and actually think this feedback to the author isn't a bad idea, but c'mon! It is a trifle confusing; especially since clicking on the name of someone who liked an article leads to her shared feed (instead of a feed of things he liked) Perhaps, this will be a successful attempt at building a social graph and encouraging social interaction within Google products, which traditionally...w...

The coolest little Google feature I stumbled upon (which apparently has been around for over 2 years!) was the " Find It in a Library " feature when using Google Book Search . I like reading books, but don't actually want to deal with collecting them, so I rely on public libraries a lot. So this feature is pretty useful to me (even more than the "Buy this book" feature, which I imagine more people care about.) What's even cooler is what seems to really power the feature: a non-profit organization dedicated to helping Libraries the world over get their catalogs online.

I'm reading Mary Meeker's Economy / Internet Trends right now, when this stat just blew me away. Top 10 Emerging Markets to Surpass Top 10 Developed Markets in Internet Users in 2008, where Top 10 emerging markets: China, India, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Turkey, Indonesia, Iran, Poland, and Saudi Arabia; Top 10 developed markets: U.S., Japan, Germany, U.K., France, Italy, Spain, Canada, South Korea, and Australia; and Top 10 Emerging Markets = 2x Top 10 Developed Markets in Mobile Subscribers in 2008 And 2 more interesting nuggets as well, on how much media consumption and ad spend are out of whack the top 15 internet companies.

Ok. I've been shown Google ads for Chrome a bunch of times, even though I use the browser. I think that's a wasted ad, but I understand... However, I feel like being shown an AFV ad for YouTube while watching a video on YouTube (also, I didn't know we were doing ads for YouTube on the GCN . :) ), seems like a waste; Google lost the opportunity to show a better ad there. (Picture below)

A few weeks ago while on the honeymoon, I noticed a person next to me in the hotel's internet business center do something strange as he fnished his Internet session. (Umm...yes I'm strange that way and sometime don't realise that its that rude to notice other people's surfing habits. :) ) As he got up to leave, he clicked on an ad on the page he was reading. Just as the ad started to load, he quickly switched back to the original page, clicked on another ad and then quickly logged out of his Internet session. He left the room without returning his chair under the desk, and with me shaking my head. Why you ask? And what was he doing? It reminded me of this head-shaker of a blog post(Ads are the new online tip jar) (that I read on Seth Godin's blog many months ago. Text below: " If you like what you're reading, click an ad to say thanks. Pretty simple, but not an accepted online protocol, at least not yet. If every time you read a blog post or bit of onlin...

Someone sent around this list of humorous 404 links . Its an entertaining way to admit to a mistake. The first humorous 404 message I remember is Orkut's " No donut for you. ". It was funny for a while, like the Twitter whale and like all the messages listed above; until I saw it too often. At that point I was just pissed at the site, and the attempt at humor annoyed me even more. Humor works; I'm a big fan of using it as much as possible if its part of the way you think. However a couple of times I've had a rein people in from trying to be funny in an apology email. There are a few reasons for this  No one is ever as funny as they think they are. Sure, humor can make the message more "interesting", but if you're sending an apology there's a chance that people are pissed off,  and I'd like to minimize that chance of the fringe getting marginally more pissed because of an attempt at humor. There's opportunities aplenty to be funny when th...

GigaOm post on TipJoy . Me likey: two powerful ideas I've always been bullish about, and sad no one's done them quite right (or got them to work) yet: Micropayments and Voluntary Payments on the Internet I like their UI and will try their widget if I ever get around to re-doing my blog like I once planned to. :) Do you think this works?

Rediff reports this thingy .:) Its been a while since I've laid my hands on an Indian comic. The kitsch factor on this particular one seems really high, but in a culture that loves its movies and only to a slightly lesser extent its books and comics, this could actually work really well. Hey, I'd pick one up! I actually remember reading an issue or two of the old Amitabh comic , which was surprisingly sophisticated. It'd be really interesting to see if they can make the comic work online as well. I don't see one channel cannibalizing the other and there's definitely a large expat market as well. Indian computer animation ability keeps getting better and better, at this point probably being world-class at a fraction of the price. Also, we're seeing new media houses snap up rights for old Indian comic classics . The Indian penchant for story-telling combined with a creative use of technology could end up producing something that could work really well. I'd ...

Yet another story  about how the Indian courts and laws just don't seem to be ready to deal with user-submitted/generated content.  The most famous example is the Bazee (eBay) case from a few years ago, but clearly both the laws and the courts' interpretation of them really need to catch up if the incredible amount of activity around online media is going to continue to flourish. I'm fairly certain that the laws will mature and catch-up with reality. I just hope it happens fast enough so that not too much innovation is stifled.

I may have to re-consider how I use the social networks I'm active on. The benefits of the network effects can be summed up by that well-worn cliche: "the value of the network increases exponentially with the number of nodes in it." The fact that "value" here applies to the entire network was pretty obvious to me, but a recent personal event reminded me that it applies to the individual nodes as well, and the value increases exponentially and gets particularly high as it reaches near completeness for the node. Let me explain the reason for the gibberish above. I got engaged recently, and wanted to let people know. I did it exactly the wrong way! I happened to switch my status on Facebook (and a little later on Orkut) and was immediately inundated by messages, Wall posts and Scraps. I shot a couple of emails off to people that I knew though it was based more email address accessibility than thoroughness. I then just dealt with the numerous responses from the abo...

Virtual gifts , and virtual goods in general , have been hot...for a while. The case of gold farmers was the first time I recognized the "real" value of virtual goods, and of course more than an year ago there was the case of the first Second-Life millionaire , (and the infamous press conference that followed.) But anyway, this incredibly thoughtful and thorough pos t from Jeremy Liew covers the different use-cases for virtual goods. Why do I suddenly believe though the data to confirm this has been around for a while? Cos I was finally tempted to buy one on Facebook the other day. :) As far as monetizing virtual gifts (as opposed to virtual goods in general) , Facebook is the most successful that I've heard of (to the tune of $15m according to Liew's analysis .) What's even more impressive? Despite the existence of numerous completely free gift applications , which Facebook doesn't seem to be making explicit efforts to inhibit, their own paid gift app (wh...

Another awards ceremony , except the winners here are the"favorite" companies/products of readers of four leading techblogs. I see why everyone is doing this, but still think its silly if this succeeds in the long-run: - The blogs' motivations are clear: they're growing and trying to diversify (conferences, events etc.) and this is part of it. With the sponsors and tickets, they will turn a profit on it, while raising their collective profiles further. - The companies motivations are clear: at least the winners: everyone likes the free marketing. - The audience: .... people like awards ceremonies? people like comparing things? Products should be reviewed and critiqued, and companies should be rewarded on the stock-market. This feel-good award-fest (while it may be fun) is questionable in value at best. Awards for the best CEO? Best business model? c'mon! And what the hell are the acceptance speeches going to be like? Are there people going to be there that actual...