Probably everyone who cares about technology trends has read thought provoking post by Fred Wilson. Things have changed, yet again. It’s a great post and you must read it. Thought of adding my 2 cents on this particular point –

the consumer is moving from desktop/web to mobile/app. we’ve talked about this transition ad naseum on this blog. it is the single biggest megatrend in the consumer internet space right now. most new consumer internet startups need to build for iOS, Android, and web at the same time. it is making the startup more expensive and time consuming. distribution is much harder on mobile than web and we see a lot of mobile first startups getting stuck in the transition from successful product to large user base. strong product market fit is no longer enough to get to a large user base. you need to master the “download app, use app, keep using app, put it on your home screen” flow and that is a hard one to master

It is by far the biggest megatrend of our time and we are in very early stages of it. How early? Lets look at these numbers –

We have close to 550 million websites, 1.2 billion smart phone users and roughly 1 million iOS apps in app store (maybe close to 2 million apps once we include all available app stores). Massive action and opportunity between these two numbers – 2 million apps and 550 million websites.

So if we go back to ‘download app, use app, keep using app, put it on your home screen’ cycle, Download (discovery), use and keep (retention) are definitely problems to be addressed but they don’t matter that much for app entrepreneurs. Discovering the right business model for mobile apps is a bigger problem. Finding the right business model is going to help majority of startups to sustain and comfortably pay their bills.

It is not about consumer sector versus enterprise market. Both are easy to manage or can be pain in the ass, it always comes down to your leverage and runway. Keep it simple. Follow where users are going and follow efficient(read cheap) distribution channels, app stores are clearly proving to be a destination where future trends are converging. App stores are only going to get better. Soon it will be very hard to differentiate between Google Search and Google Play. For all the praise Dropbox, Box.net type of services are getting, I can bet most of their new enterprise customers come via app stores. Workday and Yammers of tomorrow will start from app store and that’s how they will keep sales cost dramatically low, compared to conventional 6 odd months long sales cycle in the enterprise market.

Bigger pain point lies in the long wait time every app publisher has to go before they find their own business model. Most of the business models we discovered during web era are not that effective on mobile. Fred also wrote a very useful post about business models and linked to Hackpad resource, glance through it here – all the business models applicable to tech startups. Very few of them have come after the app store revolution. In-app purchase is probably the only one which qualifies as a first class business model citizen of app world. We need to get more such mobile native business models. Business model discovery on mobile front is in early stage. Give it some time.

If you are a startup (here I am talking to myself!), it’s important that you are buying time to figure this out. Staying small is a virtue in this case. Market is still growing. For majority of users, smart phone is going to be their first access device. I can’t even imagine what will be the new definition of enterprise market when that large section (mostly non-US) of new knowledge workers start doing business with their smart phones. We are yet to get into that cycle.

Pace yourself. Business fundamentals haven’t changed. Where to shoot and where to hide has definitely changed.

Passbook feature is different. It’s a new app and with that Apple has planted a very powerful seed here.

From Apple website:

Your boarding passes, movie tickets, retail coupons, loyalty cards, and more are now all in one place. With Passbook, you can scan your iPhone or iPod touch to check in for a flight, get into a movie, and redeem a coupon. You can also see when your coupons expire, where your concert seats are, and the balance left on that all-important coffee bar card. Wake your iPhone or iPod touch, and passes appear on your Lock screen at the appropriate time and place — like when you reach the airport or walk into the store to redeem your gift card or coupon. And if your gate changes after you’ve checked in for your flight, Passbook will even alert you to make sure you’re not relaxing in the wrong terminal.

Read between the lines – Passbook covers mobile commerce, service fulfillment AND customer support. And it’s ‘Time and Location Based’ so that completes SoLoMo stack for you.

It will come with Apple’s famous integrated experience. I hope it doesn’t go down as Ping where Apple failed to generate sufficient jump start environment.

Something to look forward to.

Native app versus mobile web debate is on. Lot of people have written about it and considering the high stakes involved in mobile market debate is hardly objective.

Instead of this debate being about distribution and experience it invariably gets dragged down into platform positioning. Right way to frame this debate is to anchor it around distribution, user experience and economics. I think that is what is missing from Jason Pontin’s otherwise thoughtful piece.

Decision to publish native apps should be about which markets and distribution channels you want your business to participate in. And whether you have sufficient budget and patience to wait out. Back in dotcom days, pretty much all retailers had poor ROI on their initial web development investments. Companies like Razorfish used to charge quarter million dollars to design and develop fancy websites. We all witnessed biggest wealth transfer of our time. Some justified some not. Lot of bad blood and bad memories. Not to the same extent but similar wealth and value transfer is happening right in front of our eyes in mobile space. We are also witnessing big budget failures. Just like what happened after dotcom days, in this cycle also you will witness new winners. By not participating in the app economy, publishers run the risk of shutting themselves out of lot of emerging opportunities.

Let’s take the case of distribution. 4 out of 5 minutes are now going into mobile apps. Let’s see what are the top apps on two leading platforms –

iTunes and Google Play are number 1 app on Apple and Android store respectively. Guess what – probability of millions of users finding Financial Times or Technology Review on these apps is zero. These publishers have premium brands and they refused to participate in this dynamic – though chaotic – discovery mechanism.

Personally I want publishers to win on app stores. They have great content which deserves better distribution and discovery. At the same time I know the dynamics of some of these organizations. They are letting new age media property not only gain distribution power but slowly get into content creation business as well. This is how we get our news and content now –

Surprised? Time and again traditional businesses have failed to adapt quickly and ended up giving advantage to new upstarts.

In the end businesses which can experiment faster and cheaper to provide better experience to end users will win. And I am not sure why shutting yourself out of the biggest and most dynamic distribution channel of our time is the right way to go.

Headline pretty much sums up my frustration with lot of parents – yes including my own household. Kids need to learn mythology. They need to know our culture. Culture of bygone days. Days so far away from today that our sanitized sensibilities cannot see the bad, cannot see the class layers, cannot see the caste layers and definitely cannot see the shoes wore in those days – seriously what kind of shoes people used to wear in those days? Let’s take Mahabharatha for example. Ask your kid this question? Have you thought about that? Leather or fabric? If fabric then how come they survived brutal North Indian winter? If leather then who made those shoes? And were they made from cow hide or buffalo hide? Disturbing questions right!

Enough rant.

Point is why Indian parents are fascinated with mythology? Having seen lot of parenting in US, I can say that this almost checklist obsession with mythology is very unique with Indian parents. Go to any book shop it’s right there. Carefully edited, illustrated, packaged – in some cases with audio – mythology book sitting on bookshelf. Ready to be lifted by dewy-eyed parent. I mean you cannot go wrong in picking books on Bhima or Yudhishtar right? Grand parents will think we are teaching good values and our mythology. Never mind the difficult question of explaining to 5 year old – why are 5 brothers sharing one mummy? Hush hush… fast forward. You skip few pages and few questions. Sanctity of good old mythology restored and protected. We go to next book.

I am suggesting we go for some balance. How about adding little bit of mythology of tomorrow?

Where do you go to take your kid on a journey of tomorrow. World where kids will be bottling value system in their lunch box, maybe bartering good values as points. Points which they can use to buy thrill time in the yet-to-be discovered chill zone. Who knows what is there in the future. In our time we have a company where people happily feed pigs and that company is valued many times more than the companies making life saving drugs. Future conflicts, new forms of friendship, new landscape to imagine. Can we please get some books for that world. World which we will need to create without getting all doomday-ish on it. Where is Devdutt Pattanaik of science fiction? No disrespect to Mr Patnaik but he is sitting happy selling mythology. Formula to mythology is simple. Parents are stuck in funny rat race, lets drop Shiva and Krishna here and there, drop in few spiritual messages, crank up parent’s guilt factor. That’s enough to satisfy big publishing house marketing team. Which usually results in more mythology books and more paid lectures on role of mythology.

What about folks on other side of the time spectrum. I am sure there are good authors who are doing good sci-fi work. Imagining new world and new possibilities. I want to tell stories where Bangalore gets air lifted – complete landmass – and replaced with city of Karachi. Just to explain how bunch of kids did it because they wanted to teach their political masters a new lesson. Geo-political prank sort of thing. Literature where we are pushing new possibilities. I wish there were more authors writing about the world of tomorrow.

Mythology is a safe bet whereas writing about tomorrow is risky. Possibilities are at best only half right so it’s easy to pass value judgement on them. Woman dancing in front of king is culture, singer singing on radio is also OK, young kids on TV competing for top singer slot is grudgingly accepted but kids going direct on Youtube using iPad is a no no. Future is not to mess with it. Let someone else jump first.

Here is what I would request parents to do – look at your book shelf or toy store and ask this question. How much of this literature relates to past and how much is there as a cognitive food for the world of tomorrow. Maybe it’s time to shake up your bookshelf.

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.