April 30, 2011
When you get a little press
Oh, to be famous. Surely being in the newspaper makes it so. But would that it were!
OK, back from the Coleridge -- if you get ink, it's a good thing. But your company will hardly be transformed by it.
Even a bunch of article do little more than start the public consciousness moving.
Believe me - I know! Peek got more inches of premium journalism than virtually any gadget I can think of (Apple stuff excluded).
But that initial blitz put us in the 5-7% national awareness range. 15 million savvy tech types, sure. But a drop in the ocean.
So if your silly little iPhone app or documentary gets a little press, focus entirely on how you will orchestrate the Day 2 story, then the trend piece, then the controversy, the XYZ Revolution, the "sign of the times", the High Society, the did you know?, and so on.
Because a little press is only good for getting a lot of press.
Sent on the go from my Peek
Gadget idea: velib in a box
An invention: bicycle rental in cities (already exists)
It works like this: you walk up to an ubiquitous bike parking station, put in your credit card, get a bike, and park it again wherever. Small charge for time used, and large charge for not returning. The station & bike have electronics to check the bike's health, and wireless to process transactions or call for help. Sturdy design minimizes maintenance, but there are crews who visit the stations often.
Paris (called Velib') and other cities have this. It is awesome.
Here is my invention: a box kit that let's a small group turn their bikes into a mini velib'.
- Bike lock that can be unlocked wirelessly, and it transmits its location often, is charged by wheels turning
- Smartphone app that:
- locates the bikes in your group or public group
- lets you checkout a bike
- lets you pay for the time, for loss, or for annoying one-way trip
- lets you friend others and add bikelocks to the group
I think that's all you need!
And then you/friends can create your own bike network.
So that lock needs inventing....
Sent on the go from my Peek
April 23, 2011
Startup phase = wartime CEO time
That said:
Being a startup means it's wartime
April 21, 2011
Where's Roubini now?
Hating on China capital asset bubble, of course.
Sent from a Peek-like device
April 20, 2011
Bubble pressure
All the US chitchat about bubbles in tech is a laugh.
Here in China region it is INSANE.
$40mm, $20mm for series A ideas. A groupon clone that launched 70 cities at once with TV marketing campaigns. A mobile app maker that raised 10mm from Sequoia and another based on bogus user data.
The US stuff does not compare. Sure there are some hot companies that are really big -- we they make money and there have been zero IPOs in 7 years. That's why. China however looks like 1999 more than anything.
One place that does NOT look like China is India. Why is capital so scarce relatively there?
Sent on the go from my Peek
April 19, 2011
April 18, 2011
Where is Singapore?
Believe it or not, nowhere near Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau etc etc. At
least it is safe from Chinese domination...
Asia here I come
Or should I say Tokyo, Tapei, Shanghai, Shenzhen here I come!
Or should I say Tokyo, Tapei, Shanghai, Shenzhen here I come!
Reading list the last few years
Thanks to my Kindle, here is a list of many of my readings in the last couple of years (about 60 books in all it tells me)
Life - Keith Richards
Just Kids - Patti Smith
Slouching towards Bethlehem - Joan Didion
13 things that don't make sense - Michael Brooks
The Social Animal - David Brooks
Four Laws that Drive the universe - Peter Atkins
You are not a gadget - jaron Lanier
Common Sense - Thomas Paine
Huckleberry Finn - Twain
Crisis Economics - Nouriel Roubini
Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
Art of strategy - Nalebuff
Against the Gods - Peter Bernstein
Buyology - Martin Lindstrom
The Next 100 Years - George Friedman
Getting to Plan B - John Mullins and Randy Komisar
The Return of Depression Economics - Paul Krugman
The Economic Consequences of the Peace - J M Keynes
Lords of Finance - L Ahamed
Leadership on the Line - Martin Linsky
Superfreakonomics and Freakonomics - Levitt and Dubner
Blue Ocean Strategy - Kim and Mauborge
The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness - N N Taleb
The Post American World - Zakaria
Mythical Man Month - Frederick Brooks
The Audacity of Hope - Obama
Snowball - Schroeder
How to win friends... - Dale Carnegie
Piloting Palm - A Butter and David Pogue
The Ascent of Money - Niall Ferguson
Ten Faces of Innovation - J Littman
Wow, this is getting tedious. I'll add the science and humanities and literature later.
Sent from a Peek-like device
Locker room comportment
There is a pretty interesting book I have read about called Drunken Comportment, showing how many cultures have very different drunken behaviors. It's not chemical that American get loud for example.
Another biological and cultural topic of interest - the stuff that all male or all female groups discuss.
I wonder how uniform it us globally.
In the west it is shockingly uniform. I wonder if there is a clear evolutionary group advantage and a biological rooting that can be shown.
A reason for all the f-bombs and peacocking and homophobic humor.
Sent from a Peek-like device
April 14, 2011
What to major in
This article nails a deep truth about college education:
Where’s the rigor? Undergraduate business has an image problem. http://nyti.ms/e9HuJF
The truth is that people don't know what education is for and when given choices - like what to major in - they choose poorly.
They choose stuff with short term pop - like vocational training - over stuff with powerful filtering ability (if you survive it you must be fundamentally strong) or generally valuable capability-building (train your most basic faculties and drives and values).
People who major in the non-technical, non-discipline of "business" are the absolute worst.
Attention span, discipline, focus, persistence, creativity, imagination, persuasion, vision, courage, patience, and yes the cognitive qualities of structuring problems, gathering facts, conducting technically challenging analysis and presenting clear results-- these are all things that you learn in the sciences and even long silly English term papers that a little BusinessWeek-skimming on "why did Starbucks raise prices" won't tackle.
So study a real discipline, take it seriously, and say you apply the capabilities you developed daily.
What if it's not too late for Windows Mobile?
Conventional wisdom is that mobile is like PCs: Android-iOS is like Windows-Mac and we are in the Windows 3.1 phase. The Android hardware universe is aligned, the OS is good enough, and the next big rev will actually be better in many ways than iOS. The steam is building in market share as a wide range of prices, form factors, and OEMs introduce tons of phones. And more phones = more apps, the key to this battle. With apps Android will tip all measures in its favor over iOS and sayonara from here on.
Here is a different possibility.
It could be more like Sega Genesis vs. Super Nintendo or the rest of the game console cycles. There, a tech driven hardware platform would launch every so often, a couple of key platforms would win most of the share and attract most of the applications, of which users might own 10-20 on average, and reign supreme for a few years. Then all the lockin would be gone and the next would supercede.
In the time that Microsoft came to dominate the business computing market since 1980, the lords of gaming have been: Atari, Commodore, Nintendo, Nintendo, Sega, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, and again Microsoft.
Could mobile be like this? This is a consumer led war, while PCs was led by IT departments. The lock-in from Office apps and tons of little custom VB apps for companies is not there this time because a) the mobile web is the app platform of choice for custom subscale stuff and b) the phone is a consumer-selected product anyway (users take it with them when they quit).
The hardware drives massive feature revolutions -- bar phones, flip phones, touch screen, 2g, 3g, cameras, music....what's next?
Ask Donkey Kong.
Sent on the go from my Peek
April 5, 2011
New York Times pictorial of the back of my head, my brothers' ears and faces, also mentions eatery M Wells
April 4, 2011
What men think of Gilt
I think this is probably pretty darn close:
"not a huge fan of Gilt b/c its mostly womens stuff and douche bag stuff"
Subject: Airbnb
This is a great discussion of airbnb, before it started working.
http://paulgraham.com/airbnb.html
One way to know you are failing
Say you have a startup idea and you are super excited. You read all the "how to" stuff and get some money from people who believe in you (maybe the idea too) and you get going.
Two things can happen
- everyone says enthusiastically that you have an amazing idea and they want to join you
- people say "cool. I wonder how you deal with issue X" or worse they say "that's dumb google will crush you"
I have been there on both scenarios with the same idea at different times or stages. When Peek was an idea it was the latter; when it was winning awards all over the place, the former; and it has moved back and forth.
So I know people are fickle and one "by the book" reaction would be to stick with your vision, passion, conviction and be contrarian if need be. If you are smart you will convince yourself and many other easily that this is an amazing loophole.
And because times change, you could end up right and with the changing winds eventually.
But here is a way to pick an idea that isn't failing from the outset: change it.
Move on. Modify. Revise.
Why not find the easy market?
This gets harder as you add more money and people so be quick. Find an idea that people go apeshit for.
Sent on the go from my Peek
April 3, 2011
April 1, 2011
What NYC players think of Twitter
Overheard this week among NYC founders and investors:
Twitter is trying to compete with Facebook at the same time as they nuke their ecosystem
Dick C is a jerk and that's his track record
There are no operators at Twitter -- all space cadets like Biz, except for the jerk
Biz is a famously nice and creative but ineffective person
Their APIs are now a huge pain
They are systematically killing the successful app players
The ad platform doesn't work and sucks
Ouch right?
Sent on the go from my Peek