Doom and gloom drives action

Remember the infamous Seqouia RIP slides... well it seems the company CEOs took it to heart. GigaOM has posted a table of layoffs by Sequoia-funded firms including 40 at Adbrite and 25 at Aliph (makers of the uber-cool Jawbone).

It totally makes sense to cut some fat and focus on the core business. Besides, these numbers pale in comparison to the Wall Street and City numbers (or the layoffs from 2001).

Techcruunch does one better and has a layoff tracker graph.

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Pedro Aspe at Wharton

An interesting speech from Pedro Aspe, former Mexican Finace Secretary during the last massive Mexican crisis, now Chairman of Evercore Partners speaking at Wharton.

He uses his experience and background in "financial messes" to eavluate the "mess" in the "neighbor of the North."

Ad market to grown (ONLY) 6%

Doug Anmuth at Barclay's says that ad spend will grown 6%... That's 6% more than many would have expected.

PaidContent did a nice roundup of the forecasts with Nielsen seeing a 5.6% drop in first quarters of 2008.

EMarketer (anslyst of the analysts) forecasts 8.9% increase.


My assesment.... who the hell knows... With Ponzi schemes left and right, even Goldman doing layoffs and everyone being VERY cautious going into 2009, I would not bet my job on any growth percentage.

The new browser wars: FacebookConnect vs FriendConnect

It's a year ending in 8... there are two technology titans standing in opposite corners of what is to become the stuff of tech legends... At stake is the underlying communications platform that will define the next evolution of the internet... It's not Netscape versus Microsoft... It's Facebook vs Google, Facebook Connect versus Friend Connect and the fight for the platform that will power the social graph and interconnectivity across sites, people and content.

CNET tips the current round to Facebook while the guys at AlFacebook keep tabs on the Facebook Connect implementations.

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Pains of entrepreneurship in Europe

Martin Varsavsky, Argentine-Spanish-entrepreneur-excellence and the poster child for European founders just posted an insightful - but depressing - piece about the challenges facing entrepreneurs in Europe.

It focuses on cultural attitudes towards risk and failure

"USA has a lenient view of failure. Failure in America is not seen as a lifelong chronic disease but as a test of character. VCs in the States look for people who have had a combination of successes and failures as they are more prepared to deal with the tough realities of business life. In Europe however failure is seen as just that, failure, a stigma that stays with you for the rest of your life."

and the legal nightmares faces by founders (who become personally liable)
"In Europe going bankrupt is the same as firing all the employees and you as the founder, PERSONALLY owe the money that has to be paid to the employees for letting them go even if the business has done nothing wrong. "

Add to this the challenges of scaling a business across many countries and languages (incremental cost not faced by US start-ups) and legal issues of cross border transfers, capital repatriation, and "worker rights" (see french ability to manipulate this clause) and it does prove that building a globally-competitive start-up from Europe seems to have the cards stacked against the entrepreneur.

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Google Adwords supports iPhone and Android

Today Google's mobile team announced the ability for all of our Adwords advertisers to target their desktop ads to high-end (Android and iPhone) devices.

There is a lot of speculation about how many advertisers Adwords has. The point, however, is that what is arguably the front end for the broadest online advertising platform now enables all of its advertisers to deliver appropriate ads (and deliver associated ROI).

I believe that one of the primary issues with mobile advertising has been the challenge of educating broad-based advertisers about how to discover the medium, create appropriate ads for the medium and track said ads' performance. That all goes away... Think about the implication of 10+ million iphones with Google ads and 30x the search usage of a typical device across many, many advertisers...

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iPhone surpasses Windows Mobile

Endgadget reports that iPhone has surpassed Windows Mobile sales.

Back in May, 2007 Ballmer stated "the future of the mobile handset business will primarily depend on software influence rather than hardware."

Android, RIM, Nokia open sourcing Symbian...I am not sure the world of dollars-a-pop mobile OSs supports Ballmers assessment.

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Top mobile searches

AOL and Yahoo released information on the top mobile searches of the year and as I've stated publicly before, many of them are "directional" queries using a search box to reach a destination...in these cases social networks as a destination.

Moconews summarized the news and highlighted AOL's top queries as being MySpace, AIM, iPhone, MocoSpace and Facebook.

Yahoo's top queries were MySpace, Facebook, Craigslist, "movies" and "weather."

What does this teach us?
1) That mobile users want to find not browse
2) That people want to get their pokes, PMs and winks from their social graphs on their phone (see success of new 3 phone with facebook)
3) That I spend way too much time reading news about mobile....

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Apple app store most downloaded apps

Moconews reports that Apple released a list of the top iPhone app store apps... Happy to report that Lightsaber made it to the top. A great example of the self-selection of geeks who are actually buying and using the iPhone!

Nokia N97

Earlier this week some Nokia exec told TechCrunch that the internet was not ready for what was about to be announced...

And then they came out with the N97 instead...




I think that the real announcement, however, is the definition of a new word. It seems there is humankind and now...mobilekind.

I love my finnish friends and their mul-ti-media com-pu-ters!

Mobile advertising piece in Venturebeat

Venturebeat put together an interesting post on mobile advertising and the effects of the downturn.
Their point is that the iPhone is driving growth (as Admob, Google and other have touted publicly), and that advertisers are transitioning from "testing" the medium to actually planning spend against it.

Having interacted with dozens of agencies and advertisers over the past year, I continue to feel that mobile is seen as "experimental" for now, but with everyone eyeing iPhone, Android and other "true-web" phones to see how quickly they get a significant install base.

If you can have 100 million devices that leverage the technology (banner ads, tracking, analytics, targetting) of the web AND provide location based targetting and a deep personal attachment for users, then we have a compelling medium.

As always, I am very bullish on mobile and I am glad to see others begin to agree.

Google mobile app with voice

In case you have been hiding under a technology rock you might not have noticed that this week Google launched an update to its Google Mobile App for the iPhone with voice support.

This is what Fortune said: "For tech bloggers, this was bigger than Obama."

To summarize what this is: Install app on your iPhone, click on nice blu Google logo, bring iPhone up to your ear, speak query, marvel as Google brings the result back to you.

What is happening behind the scenes: Using the accelerometer it determines that you are bringing the phone to your ear, and starts listening for your query. It takes your query (with some fairy dust to take into account the noise around you) and brings back results in the usual web-based format.

The media went mad on this. The NYT had a big article on it on Friday (before it launched) and bloggers picked it up

Google's iPhone app gets a voice: Yours
Google. iPhone. Voice search. Awesome. (If it works.)

As the application did not launch on the Apple store some even started speculating on some conspiracy:
Google Speech recognition app for iPhone delayed by Apple?
Even Google Gets Shafted By Apple's Ridiculous App-Approval Process

And then Monday, all was well as Apple made the app available and we posted our official post about the app along with a video by the Product Manager that built it, Mike LeBeau who is now world famous and has his own Facebook fan club:

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Mobile browser test

If you have heard anything from Google on mobile over the past year, it has probably centered on the importance of the browser (and unlimited data plans) in driving true mobile internet adoption.

Gizmodo just did a great test on the major Smartphone browsers side by side. In summary, the iPhone gets a not-undexpected A- with the Android G1 coming in second with a B+. Nokia rounds out the Webkit browsers with a B-. I was surprised by his B-/C+ for the BB Bold (no way!) but highly supportive of the big fat F for pocket Internet Explorer.

SGN ifun app - links mobile/social apps

I am in tech geekdom heaven... I just installed and played with SGN's new application for the iPhone (iFun Golf). To the consumer, this simple iphone app allows you to use your iPhone much like a Wii controller to swing a golf club. The difference is that you are using your iphone to control a game on your PC screen.

On the backend, it's social network apps (SGN's) meets social paltforms (Facebook Connect) meets iPhone apps. Throw in a few ads (powered by Admob) and an ability to buy games and new courses (via Paypal from the device) and it's a VC's social network monetization dream!

Zynga just launched a phone version of its Live Poker game also connecting the iPhone user to players using the app via social networks.

Geekdom, web 2.0ish heaven indeed!

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AA launches mobile boarding pass

FINALLY... American Airlines is introducing mobile boarding passes

Mobile panel at Monaco Media Forum

Last weekend at the Monaco Media Forum Rich Wong from Accel hosted a panel on mobile. Very interesting discussion on whether 2009 is the year of mobile (again). Same themes come out - iPhone, flat rate data plan.

Panelists: Alvin Wang Graylin, CEO, minfo;Omar Hamoui, CEO, AdMob; Alexandre Mars, CEO, Phonevalley and Head of Mobile, Publicis Groupe; Federico Pisani Massamormile,CEO, Hanzo; and Jon Medved, CEO, Vringo; Moderator: Rich Wong, Accel Partners.




Nikesh Arora also spoke at the event and served as co-chair.

Obama Mosaic

An amazing mosaic of Obama made up by the covers of newspapers around the world following his election. Zoomable version here and high res version here

New facebook UI's impact on Apps

Everyone, not least of all the Facebook app developers and the VCs that invest insane amounts of money into them, has been wondering the impact of the Facebook redesign on applications. Obviously finding and accessing apps has become a lot harder (in my view) but it seems facebook's core intent to increase usage, has been met. Stats by App from Developer Analytics below:

Facebook redesign impact on apps

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: platform developer)

Google Flu tool

And a little something for Flu season...

A trends graph showing flu related searches as an indicator of the Flu, by state in the US

Flu Trends

What Obama did right

An insightful blog post from The Atlantic on what Obama did right...

1. Practice what you preach. The preach: the neighborhood precinct captains are the linchpins of the ground effort. The practice: let them do the job. Staff didn't talk to voters. They were, in fact, two steps removed from voters. Responsibility was vested in tens of thousands of precinct captains and volunteer leaders; they identified volunteers, supervised canvasses, and reported back to field offices. The Obama campaign had ways of verifying the data that was come in, but in most cases it was accurate; the supervolunteers and precinct captains were empowered and incentivized to do their jobs, and they did them. (Note: the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign used this same model, as did the McCain-Palin '08 model, but the big difference was...)

2. Scale / Force Of Numbers: No matter how you measure this election, the Obama campaign was able to do so much because it had so much. What ifs abound. What if they were limited to the federal match? What if they weren't able to raise as much money? What if they didn't spend more than $150 million on field? Can this possibly be replicated? Can the Democrats ever again have hundreds of paid staff in states like Ohio weeks before election day? Can they ever find two million active volunteers?

3. Win Bigger / Lose Smaller. That was an Obama field mantra. The campaign opened up a field office in Warren Co., Ohio, where George W. Bush won by nearly 50 points in 2004. Well, Obama lost Warren County... but by 37 points. That's a big improvement. Losing by smaller margins in those smaller counties is how Barack Obama won Ohio. (His margin in Cuyahoga County: 243,000; Kerry's was 221,000...not a big enough difference.)

4. African Americans and the early vote. Problem: black voters habitually, historically distrusted in-person early voting. The solution: fix the problem. Contact black voters early and often about early voting. Spend money to habituate this demographic to early voting.

5. Finding new voters; this one's obvious, but the campaign spent its entire summer finding out who wasn't registered and registering them, and then compiling reams of data about these voters in order to figure out how to target them.

6. Technology (and Google): beyond the obvious, beyond MyBarackObama.com, it was the advances in technology that increased the efficiency of Democratic turnout efforts. For example: the campaign's VoteBuilder software had a turf-cutting tool. Look at a map. Draw a polygon around a neighborhood. And, boom: you could instantly print a "walk list" of voters. This year's version was based on Google Maps which made it infinitely easier to use than the previous versions...

7. Catalist. More on that in my next post, but this Democratic data consortium was a major behind-the-scenes force... UPDATE: Upon further review, I think the DNC's VoteBuilder program also deserves lots of credit, too. More later.

Mobile destinations

Last May Opera has put out some data on where people are browsing to on their mobile phones. I came across it recently and feel the stats are still applicable and relevant as we think about what people are doing on their mobile phones. Opera publishes this State of the Mobile Web report on a monthly basis and its a quick read of what people are doing in different countries.

They state that 63% of US traffic is to social network sites... and that is evidenced from the list of the Top 10 sites below:

Top 10 sites in the U.S.

1. www.myspace.com
2. www.google.com
3. www.mocospace.com
4. www.yahoo.com
5. www.facebook.com
6. www.live.com
7. www.hi5.com
8. www.wikipedia.org
9. www.itsmy.com
10. www.ebay.com

Mary Meeker at Web 2.0 2008

[Dying to post some thoughts about the election results... but it will have to wait...instead here is a video of Mary Meeker at the Web 2.0 Summit 2008]




Also here is the link to the PDF and a web version of the slides

I do wish she had spent as much time telling us all how over-hyped the market was LAST time she gave this presentation... As always, she continues to be bullish on Mobile with some interesting stats on Opera.

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Great tool for election night

Great little widget to track the election results state by state... What a historic night!

Watching Google watching world - Go Sumit!

My Google mobile colleague and friend Sumit Agarwal seems to have brought down the house at a recent Informa event as evidenced by this post by David Wood, CTO of Symbian.

David's source of awe was both the content of Sumit's talk (summarized below) combined with his usual flair in demos (Steve Jobs has a long way to go!)

"Interspersed among the demos and the statistics, Sumit described elements of Google's underlying philosophy for success with mobile services:

• "Ignore the limitations of today": don't allow your thinking to be constrained by the shortcomings of present-day devices and networks;
• "Navigate to where the puck will be": have the confidence to prepare services that will flourish once the devices and networks improve;
• "Arm users with the data to make decisions": instead of limiting what users are allowed to do on their devices, provide them with information about what various applications and services will do, and leave it to the users to decide whether they will install and use individual applications;
• "Dare to delight" the user, rather than always seeking to ensure order and predictability at all times;
• "Accept downside", when experiments occasionally go wrong."

A video of Sumit showing off his wares to Scoble on FastTV is below

Social media marketing examples

In his blog, Peter Kim (ex Forrester analyst , ex Razorfish marketer) posts a great (and growing) list of how brands are usig online media (blogs, Facebook, Twitter) to extend their reach. Some of the examples were great for both the simplicity of the communication channel and the ability for community engagement.

Some of my favorite:

AMC's Mad Men. Microblogging: Fake Twitter accounts. [CHG: extend the life of your characters! brilliant]
BMW. Social networks: Facebook 1-Series Road Trip application. Rampenfest fan page.
Heinz. Online video: YouTube contest.
Motorola. Wikis: MOTO Q Wiki with how-tos on using the phone [CHG: because its so darn hard to use?]
United States House of Representatives. Microblogging: Twitter account. [CHG: really?]
Securities and Exchange Commission. Microblogging: Twitter account. [CHG: highly practical for hedge fund bankers to be alerter for upcoming regulation]
Virgin America. Microblogging: Twitter accounts for information and sales. [CHG: question is...any sales come out of this?]

Impact of new Facebook design on app usage

There is enough emotional sentiment out there against the new Facebook UI with thousands signing petitions against it. From the business side of it, with Facebook app developers like SGN, Zynga, Playfish and others receiving millions from VCs, there has been some concern that the new UI will lower adoption and use of the apps (and eventual/possible/hypothetical monetization).

The guys at All Facebook have gone out and crunched numbers to determine the impact. Their full analysis posted here. The most alarming metric: "The average monthly active users for the top 1500 applications has dropped 15.6 percent from its peak toward the end of September."


At FOWA London, Mark Zuckerber, addressed the platform, the new UI and the impact on the apps ecosystem. His general comment was that applications that relied on long term engagement and sharing have grown while the ones that relied on a box in the profile will have seen a drop. (Also interesting comments on monetization and mobile and location).

Saul Klein of Index on European startups

Saul Klein, Index Venture Partner, Seedcamp founder and Skype lucky-dog exiter, did a presentation on European startups and VC in Berlin last week. Fred Wilson posted it on his blog.

Some interesting insights around

- Three of top $1B+ markets for VC now in Europe
- Some pretty famous (and wealthy) firms were started in downturns (Apple, Microsoft, Skype, MySQL)
- Bootstrap as much as you can
- Use free resources (Gears, App Engine, Seedcamp)

Thoughts on European Start Ups

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: startups vc)

European VC (and European startups) still face several challenges around the cost to expand (localization, infrastructure, feet on the ground) across the region, the return from VCs (and therefore the funds flowing into it), and the public markets. That being said... Seedcamp and Saul's efforts are some of the best efforts going on to build up the next Skype.

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The World of Marvel explained

File this one under geeky, yet cool.

Mucking around with Marvel site I came across the Marvel Universe Connections app which blends years or Marvel character intertwinings with Web technology to finally explain the connection between Thor and Wolverine... (they were both part of the Avengers although apparently its not really Thor but rather the body of Thor with the soul of a mortal...). Anyways... hours of procrastination await on this site..

G1 launches, the Market business model, and hour-long lines in SF

I don't think Andy Rubin and team had this in mind when they chose the date, but the T-Mobile G1 launch yesterday coincided with my birthday (wohoo!)

And so the day is finally here: The first Android device is out in the wild (aparently some folks who pre-ordered got it 2 days early). I have pasted some reviews at the bottom of the post.

Apparently the scene at the SF T-Mobile store was electric as people waited in line and had entertainment in tow.

In parallel news, Google announced the commercial model for the Market... fully open, Google gets none of the revenue, and the users vote for the best apps with their thumbs!

Review of the G1.
Gizmodo
Engadget
TechCrunch
Giga Om
Washington Post
Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal

Admob raises $15.7M from Sequoia and Accel

Talk about a strong statement... A few weeks after Sequoia told its CEOs to buckle up for a tough ride, it turns around and invests $15.7M along with Accel in Admob. This raises Admob's total funding to $34.3 million...

And in all the excitement, they let it be known that they have turned cash-positive and are serving over 5B ads... How is that for a nice middle finger to the doom sayers!

I must admit I love what Admob is doing and how they are doing it. Their mobile metrics provides great insight into the growing trends in mobile advertising (even if it is very skewed towards the US and some emerging markets) and Omar Hamoui (CEO), Russell Buckley (MD Europe) and the team are ever-present in the mobile ecosystem (disclosure: I serve with Russell on the Board of the Mobile Marketing Association).

In any case, a great piece of news in this otherwise dire market...

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Android now Open Source

Android is now open sourced as promised...

This is huge. The concept of an end to end mobile OS stack, run time engine, Webkit browser, etc ALL open sourced.

For those not in the industry, what this means is that hopefully the Android effort and investments will enable handset makers to leapfrog into a best-of-breed high end mobile OS FOR FREE (as compared to paying Nokia or Microsoft on a per-license basis). Lets hope that savings is reinvested into innovation on top of the platform.

A video outlining the launch of the Open Source code is below:

Social networks global reach

Oxyweb has a graph and post on social networks and reach. MySpace still leads in the US and local players (Skyrock in France, VKontakte in Russia, Orkut in Brazil and India :) their local positions.

Social times also had a post on this.

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VC investments down [Shocker!]

The PWC MoneyTree Q2 report has come out and shows a slowing down in VC investments. With a 16% QoQ drop.Techcrunch's post on the subject highlights that the $7.1 BILLION might be the first quarter of decline in investments since the dot-com implosion.

And so... Wall Street hit Main Street and has now hit Sand Hill Street. My assumption is a few quarters of slowed down investments with a lot of the $$ going to "inside rounds" leading to an upswing in 2-3 quarters as new valuations drop and " scarcity builds clarity."

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Paul Graham's email: Go ahead, start up that startup

Image via CrunchBasePaul Graham, of Y Combinator, just posted on his blog a message that goes against the negative theme of the Sequoia/ Ron Conway emails and presentations.

Titled "Why to Start a Starup in a Bad Economy" and the main point is that "[an] advantage of bad times is that there's less competition." and a great time to find opportunity while being scrappy!

October 2008

The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid seventies.

When Microsoft and Apple were founded.

As those examples suggest, a recession may not be such a bad time to start a startup. I'm not claiming it's a particularly good time either. The truth is more boring: the state of the economy doesn't matter much either way.

If we've learned one thing from funding so many startups, it's that they succeed or fail based on the qualities of the founders. The economy has some effect, certainly, but as a predictor of success it's rounding error compared to the founders.

Which means that what matters is who you are, not when you do it. If you're the right sort of person, you'll win even in a bad economy. And if you're not, a good economy won't save you. Someone who thinks "I better not start a startup now, because the economy is so bad" is making the same mistake as the people who thought during the Bubble "all I have to do is start a startup, and I'll be rich."

So if you want to improve your chances, you should think far more about who you can recruit as a cofounder than the state of the economy. And if you're worried about threats to the survival of your company, don't look for them in the news. Look in the mirror.

But for any given team of founders, would it not pay to wait till the economy is better before taking the leap? If you're starting a restaurant, maybe, but not if you're working on technology. Technology progresses more or less independently of the stock market. So for any given idea, the payoff for acting fast in a bad economy will be higher than for waiting. Microsoft's first product was a Basic interpreter for the Altair. That was exactly what the world needed in 1975, but if Gates and Allen had decided to wait a few years, it would have been too late.

Of course, the idea you have now won't be the last you have. There are always new ideas. But if you have a specific idea you want to act on, act now.

That doesn't mean you can ignore the economy. Both customers and investors will be feeling pinched. It's not necessarily a problem if customers feel pinched: you may even be able to benefit from it, by making things that save money. Startups often make things cheaper, so in that respect they're better positioned to prosper in a recession than big companies.

Investors are more of a problem. Startups generally need to raise some amount of external funding, and investors tend to be less willing to invest in bad times. They shouldn't be. Everyone knows you're supposed to buy when times are bad and sell when times are good. But of course what makes investing so counterintuitive is that in equity markets, good times are defined as everyone thinking it's time to buy. You have to be a contrarian to be correct, and by definition only a minority of investors can be.

So just as investors in 1999 were tripping over one another trying to buy into lousy startups, investors in 2009 will presumably be reluctant to invest even in good ones.

You'll have to adapt to this. But that's nothing new: startups always have to adapt to the whims of investors. Ask any founder in any economy if they'd describe investors as fickle, and watch the face they make. Last year you had to be prepared to explain how your startup was viral. Next year you'll have to explain how it's recession-proof.

(Those are both good things to be. The mistake investors make is not the criteria they use but that they always tend to focus on one to the exclusion of the rest.)

Fortunately the way to make a startup recession-proof is to do exactly what you should do anyway: run it as cheaply as possible. For years I've been telling founders that the surest route to success is to be the cockroaches of the corporate world. The immediate cause of death in a startup is always running out of money. The cheaper your company is to operate, the harder it is to kill. Fortunately it has gotten very cheap to run a startup, and a recession will if anything make it cheaper still.

If nuclear winter really is here, it may be safer to be a cockroach even than to keep your job. Customers may drop off individually if they can no longer afford you, but you're not going to lose them all at once; markets don't "reduce headcount."

What if you quit your job to start a startup that fails, and you can't find another? That could be a problem if you work in sales or marketing. In those fields it can take months to find a new job in a bad economy. But hackers seem to be more liquid. Good hackers can always get some kind of job. It might not be your dream job, but you're not going to starve.

Another advantage of bad times is that there's less competition. Technology trains leave the station at regular intervals. If everyone else is cowering in a corner, you may have a whole car to yourself.

You're an investor too. As a founder, you're buying stock with work: the reason Larry and Sergey are so rich is not so much that they've done work worth tens of billions of dollars, but that they were the first investors in Google. And like any investor you should buy when times are bad.

Were you nodding in agreement, thinking "stupid investors" a few paragraphs ago when I was talking about how investors are reluctant to put money into startups in bad markets, even though that's the time they should rationally be most willing to buy? Well, founders aren't much better. When times get bad, hackers go to grad school. And no doubt that will happen this time too. In fact, what makes the preceding paragraph true is that most readers won't believe it—at least to the extent of acting on it.

So maybe a recession is a good time to start a startup. It's hard to say whether advantages like lack of competition outweigh disadvantages like reluctant investors. But it doesn't matter much either way. It's the people that matter. And for a given set of people working on a given technology, the time to act is always now.

Mobclix and iPhone apps

I came across Mobclix a month ago. They had just succesfuly presented at TechCrunch50 and were selected as finalists for Seedcamp as well

A good idea with brilliant timing, their service enables data analytics for iPhone (and eventually other platforms) applications.

Given that Apple provides such limited information to developers (and the industry in general) their dashboards are like gold. Borrowing from Admob's playbook they are becoming *the* source for insight into Apple apps.

9to5mac has a post on Mobclix as well outlinging the distribution of apps by category:

• Games: 1,027 (31.4%)
• Utilities: 476 (13.5%)
• Entertainment: 407 (12.4%)
• Productivity: 240 (7.3%)
• Education: 213 (6.5%)
• Books: 202 (6.2%)
• Reference: 191 (5.8%)
• Travel: 184 (5.6%)
• Healthcare + Fitness: 176 (5.4%)
• Lifestyle: 158 (4.8%)

I think these guys might be onto something... its no longer enough to know the install base of Symbian vs WinMo vs J2ME enabled handsets... its about the use that each platform will drive.

The Queen at Google

The Queen (as in Elizabeth II of England) came to Google UK today. Apparently she had asked to come visit our offices to find out more about "The Google."

There was a big buzz in the office as her double stretch Bentley pulled up - apparently walking from her place to the office was too much:


View Larger Map

She walked around the office and Prince Phillip was obviously more engaged with the gadgetry than Her Highness. He stopped at several desks, walked into a conference room and interrupted a Video Conference call.

Pictures of the event from the Guardian here.

And a news report on the visit from the Telegraph

Value of the pipe (not the oil one, the data one)

Facinating notion from an Editorial from last July in the New York Times.

"AMERICANS today spend almost as much on bandwidth — the capacity to move information — as we do on energy. A family of four likely spends several hundred dollars a month on cellphones, cable television and Internet connections, which is about what we spend on gas and heating oil.

Just as the industrial revolution depended on oil and other energy sources, the information revolution is fueled by bandwidth. If we aren’t careful, we’re going to repeat the history of the oil industry by creating a bandwidth cartel."

I agree with the dependence of my modern life on connectivity and the annoyance/fear when I loose that connectivity (damn you Tiscali!)

The ironic part is that free bandwidth being freed up in the transition from our analog TV and radio world of the 1950s to the IP based digital world of today... and yet we are not allowed to tap into it -or at least not freely, something that Larry Page seems to feel passionate about.

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Bullish: Tonchidot gets me excited

Despite the doom and gloom of my previous post, I am still amazingly bullish on the potential of mobile.

Tochnidot, a TechCrunch50 finalist, made me smile... THIS is the stuff that gets me excited about the mobile space, about the mobile potential, about what I have been preaching for close to 10 years... Brilliant! As the "pundits" say..this is what we have been dreaming of for years.