BlogSat

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...

If you care/read about the Internet/mobile/commerce local spaces, the theme of this year is how the combination of local+mobile+social will rock your world. Every VC firm, every second existing Internet company, and every third startup has an opinion and a bet in place in this space. I've been cautiously skeptical of everything I've seen either out of professional curiosity or as a user; I thought most of what I see is incremental and adds a little, but not that much value. My final real-world use of one of these simultaneously proves and disproves my opinion. I was walking back home, when I saw this sign, so I checked-in via Foursquareat this place, realized I could get a small ice-cream for 2 bucks... and so I did. Yay! The technology worked, the offline commerce worked, the consumer (i.e. me) behaved as expected. Everyone wins...except me finally because I just realized I really didn't want ice-cream then and I really, really don't like tasti D-lite much anyway! Sig...

Om's fond reminiscing over slates , and Bill Gates' comment on what he thought of the iPad, reminded me of my sixth or seventh reaction after the iPad demo: "So where's the pen?" Whatever happened to kill pen computing ? I'm old enough to have bought a Palm Pilot handheld organizer and though it took a while to learn how to "write" on it. I found the note-taking feature kinda cool. Similarly, I glanced enviously at friends with tablet pcs (particularly in b-school) who were able to add notes to their printed documents directly on their devices. For some reason, possibly including the software integration with Word and Image editing tools just not being good enough, the pricing never quite getting there, and the hand-writing recognition not being up-to-scratch, tablet pcs just haven't been the run-away success many expected. Just three days ago, as I was struggling with mocks and trying to take notes in a class, I thought again about just how ...

The other benefit of train travel is that I get to people-watch again. :) I was unsurprised that on the ride home 5 people around me had the familiar while earbuds in their ears. Yes, yes; everyone has an iPod/iPhone and they listen to it on their daily commute. The music takes the pain away. What did surprise me was when one of these people (a rather dour-looking young girl with blue streaks in her hair) pulled out what her earbuds were connected to, I didn't see the shiny device that is apparently the everlasting testament to Steve Job's genius, but the device that I had in my pocket at the time. Clearly she was using her Android phone as her primary music device. I looked at the other 5 people, wishing some of them would pull out the device they were listening to. One did; it was an iPod, and perhaps the others were as well. But I'd like to believe that as Android devices have more adoption, this is an experience that will be much more common! :)

So I signed up for Twitter and Dodgeball this week, in my continuing quest to try new consumer Internet stuff. It's too early for me to have strong opinions on either system, and I don't have enough friends on either to give the features a fair go. But this article over at TechCrunch , sums up what I've learnt about both services so far. This article makes a strong case for why Twitter may be a playing a slightly different game from dodgeball though... Oh, and the name dodgeball reminded me of this incredibly funny/stupid movie .