technological advances dramatically lowered the financial bar for starting a new company, but the courage bar for building a great company remains as high as it has ever been

Rocky Balboa said it best:

.. But it ain’t about how hard ya hit. It’s about how hard you can get it and keep moving forward

The post-PC era is characterized by an explosion of ideas and application of new talent to software. It’s an era of immediate gratification and painless, one click distribution. App production is a cottage industry not something entrusted to only a few experts or those who can raise venture capital. It allows the small to distribute widely and get a shot at stardom. It has been (thankfully) avoided by enterprise buyers. The result is an explosion of apps: well over half a million new apps have been built in three years on three platforms that did not exist three years ago.

His blog is a must-read for anybody trying to make sense of the ongoing mobile revolution!

The law that said there’s this exponential growth in the number of transistors that go on an integrated circuit. We found that every year on average, the amount of stuff that a person is sharing will about double. And it’s different things each year. So one day, let’s say you’re sharing 5 things a day right now. Maybe you post a status update and you like two things and you write a comment, then statistically if this trend continues, then that means that next year you’re probably going to be sharing 10 things, and the year after that you’ll be sharing 20 things a day and the year after that 40. And the way that the exponential math works out, is that 5 years from now, if that stays true, then people will be sharing 32 times as much stuff as they are today. And 10 years from now they’ll be sharing 1024 times as many things — maybe not exactly 1,024 but 1,000 times more things as you are today.

Social sharing will percolate down to pretty much all internet experience. Much of the interface will shift to mobile and that’s where we are going to see dominant social platforms (Facebook, Twitter etc) fight with mobile platforms (Apple, Google etc).

This means that you’ll be able to sign in to your Twitter account once and then tweet with a single tap from Twitter-enabled apps, including Apple’s apps—Camera, Photos, Safari, Contacts, YouTube, and Maps. And developers of all of your favorite apps can easily take advantage of the single sign-on capability, letting you tweet directly from their apps too.

That is a huge boost to Twitter popularity and will end up making Twitter default choice for sharing. You can expect this percent of sharing traffic to change in coming months.

Apple also introduced Blackberry BBM competitor – iMessage. Lot of collateral damage with this announcement – WhatsApp, GroupMe, Kik and possibly more. Messaging is a platform feature and it should help in making iOS devices become good social crm client. It has all the ingredients now – Twitter integration, smart messaging, good contact management, cloud integration and location/notification center. We can expect more enterprise market interest due to these features.

Lot of folks are naturally pissed off with Apple. There is a post listing all the start-ups getting affected by today’s announcement. If Twitter’s new developer policy is any indication then we can imagine a memo to all mobile developers:

Stay away from platform features. Platform owners will eventually get there.

Most of these startups are run by smart guys, they must have factored in many of these competitive moves. While world is polluting Twitter timeline with hate, these guys are already thinking their next move. Next move on Apple AppStore. That’s a key difference! They are not going to leave this store. To leave this store will mean leaving user base. Why would anybody do that.

Personally I don’t buy into points made by lot of blog posts that Groupon model is unethical and it’s essentially a new age ponzi scheme. Building efficient sales execution machine is a huge challenge. They have made few assumptions and those are largely based on huge capital infusion.

(size of local deals market)

I don’t know much about the local deal market. Market size seems to be pretty big. Though I am still trying to learn and understand if there is any fundamental user behavior shift going on. I am not sure about that. Though I followed for some time to understand how they are using email and that’s about it. There is a huge difference between social commerce ( think social graph) and local deal (think nicely crafted email campaign). Email makes Groupon model extremely simple to understand and act on.

I read DHH’s post, read Yipit’s indepth review, and read Andrew Chen’s post to understand overall marketing context in which Groupon is operating. All this intense scrutiny will make this IPO most watched in recent history.

What we don’t know is how much importance we need to give to time to market in this sector. If Groupon model is hard to build and in turn defensible then they are next Amazon. On that front I am not sure they are on solid ground. Groupon runs on email. They have pumped in huge amount of money to gain subscribers and those are mainly email addresses.

So who else has lot of email addresses and sales team motivated to sell deals? That list is long – Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook and in global terms there are many more players. Any architecture, which Groupon designs, for defensibility has to involve email innovation. If they have figured that out then they will continue to win.

It’s the act 2 of Groupon we need to see. I am curious as to what they will do to email as a deal delivery vehicle.

Update: Found few interesting points on Rakesh Agrawal’s Quora post. That post is highly recommended, top quality analysis there by Rakesh. Here are some of the points related to email –

A key metric for me would be email open rates. Groupon damn well better have that metric in house. They might have left it out for competitive reasons, but it might also be because the numbers are declining.

…noticed that the 1-click unsubscribe link on Groupon emails I receive changed to a subscription management link, which requires more work.
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News magazines, magazines that have high frequency and news, are going to be challenged, heavily challenged, not just by the internet but by the whole 24-hour news cycle which has just been getting enhanced. Cable has been really supercharged. So it really impacts magazines like Time and Newsweek and so forth as we can clearly see. And they’re struggling to find what it is they can do in this age.

Magazines that depend on photography, and design, and long reads, and quality stuff, are going to do just fine despite the internet and cable news. Because in those areas there’s a real advantage to getting a print product and having something you can hold and that of course is portable and has a luxurious feeling and is comfortable and immersive and you can spend time with it and it’s organized for you.

In the age of the 24-hour news cycle and the availability of the internet you have to focus on those qualities in your magazine even more. Really you have to deliver quality more than ever. And unless you can deliver something that’s quality and really compelling there’s just too many fucking media choices around now. Unless you’re really good you’re in trouble.

Tablet owners said 30 percent of their time spent with their device was while watching TV compared to 21 percent lying in bed.
Smartphone owners say that 20 percent of the time they use their smartphones is while watching TV, compared to 11 percent lying in bed.
eReader owners indicated only 15 percent of their eReader time was spent watching TV, though they spent a whopping 37 percent of their device usage time in bed.

Few weeks ago boutique consulting firm, FaberNovel, published well researched slide deck on Amazon’s amazing journey. Indeed it’s an hidden empire. Empire which was founded on three fundamental bets –

First one bet is scary for businesses that are in the middle of Amazon and it’s users. Amazon knows more about users, their payment information, buying behavior, gives scary recommendation and much more.

Based on recent announcements it’s fair to say that Amazon has three intentions -

Give clear and direct revenue model to content creators. Once Android strategy is clear, we can expect this to come in full form. This should be available to musicians, writers and video filmmakers. It makes sense. Not many company, except may be Apple, can match user data with content positioning. They can suggest what content to create, as they already know who can buy it. Their algorithmic editorial engine is getting smarter every day.

Get deeper into original content publishing with in-house imprints. This is a logical progression for them. It will not only keep relationship with big six publishers in delicate dance but will also keep Amazon’s cross-platform ambition dynamic. Readers flock to best sellers and having few of your own will help them in platform negotiations (with Google and Apple). With recent launch of mystery genre imprint Thomas & Mercer, it has now taken total imprints to five. Four previous imprints – AmazonEncore, AmazonCrossing, The Domino Project and Montlake Romance are presumably doing decent business. Unlike other publishers, they are data driven and know demand dynamics very well. We can safely expect this imprint number to go up in coming years.

Completely own the supply chain of content creation, distribution and consumption. Now all this doesn’t add up very well for traditional publishers. For every 100 print books sold on Amazon, 105 Kindle eBooks have been sold and that’s a huge shift in distribution power. Publishers are fast losing distribution power. Borders has already declared bankruptcy and that leaves physical distribution play between Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

It will be interesting to watch how big publishers play their cards and approach new force called AAG (Amazon, Apple and Google). AAG in Hindi means fire and as far their survival is concerned they are indeed playing with fire.

eBook is a new entrant in this stack and it’s getting lot of attention lately. It’s fair to assume that Facebook will have strong eBook strategy at some point of time. In post-iPad world, social eBook experience won’t just be restricted to GoodReads type of book recommendation and review service. It will go beyond that. Facebook will aim to facilitate actual reading and buying eBooks. How and when is something to be seen.

Though I am not sure about the reading experience. Squeezing full page magazine experience into 7 inch Samsung Galaxy and that too without pinch-and-zoom? I would love to be proven wrong on this.