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I'd Rather Watch Instagram Than A Movie
Jan 23, 8:01AM
Last week a friend of mine asked me at brunch, innocently enough, "What's Instagram, and why do you use it?" I meekly offered the answer, "It's a way to share photos via the iPhone," and then, feeling like I hadn't done it enough justice, went on the defensive and was like, "Oh but it's really simple and that's what makes it emotional. Like in one click, I can view all these interwoven stories." It turns out he used Instagram himself, and just wanted to hear someone describe its appeal. The appeal of Instagram is, for lack of a better word. simple; the world is moving too damn fast and we don't want the cognitive load of figuring out what we're looking at -- we just want to see simple pretty things. This simplicity is what makes services like Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest a joy versus other entertainment offerings.SOPA Spring
Jan 23, 5:10AM
It's not so much that the world has changed as that the speed with which events evolve has telescoped. The rise of social analytics and realtime feedback loops means that business processes are now transformed on the fly by the velocity with which the impact of a product or idea or strategy is folded back into the process flow. Products become services, interactive streams of data and influence metadata where who thinks what about it when changes the service elastically. That explains why our leaders are having so much trouble with realtime. Their expertise is in the politics of yesterday, where all the PI used to live. What's happening? Look at the last election's data. Meanwhile this year's voters are getting Twitter push notifications with links to the most up-to-date attitude from a cloud-curated stream of instant influentials. Translated: the news is delivered on a whispernet by those we trust with follows and engage with @mentions.RIM's New Playbook: The CEO Sneak
Jan 23, 4:53AM
It was a big day for football fans, with both the AFC and NFC Championships taking place this afternoon and this evening. The games grab more than a few eyeballs every year -- last year's championships grabbed 54.8 million and 51.9 million viewers, respectively. While the numbers aren't out yet for today's games, the viewership is expected to be equally as enormous. That's why so many in the Twittersphere have been so quick to point out that, nestled quietly behind a hotly contested NFC Championship between the New York Giants and the San Francisco 49ers, and an equally great game over in the AFC, was a fairly huge announcement for the maker of BlackBerry, Research In Motion. During Championship Sunday, RIM quietly released a statement saying that its co-CEOs, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, are stepping down and will be replaced by current COO for products and sales, Thorsten Hein.RIM Co-CEOs To Step Down; COO To Take The Reins
Jan 23, 2:32AM
I suppose some might have seen this coming. In December, Research In Motion (RIM) released their third quarter earnings, which were yet another disappointment for the struggling maker of BlackBerry. RIM Co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis announced subsequently that they would only draw yearly salaries of $1 to help combat the company's financial woes. Today, it seems the pressure has become too great, and a management shuffle is under way. The Globe has reported that the co-CEOs, after a year of pressure from investors and stockholders, have stepped down from the position. Company insider and current COO Thorsten Heins will be replacing them as the new chief executive.Weight Watchers For Small Business: Silver Lining Helps You Set Financial Goals (And Actually Meet Them)
Jan 23, 2:07AM
Owning a small business is tough. Carissa Reiniger has been working in small business development for over seven years and says she's seen countless entrepreneurs and small business owners run into what she calls the "cash flow catch 22": If I had more money, I could make more time -- and vice versa. What's more, the large majority of startups and small businesses that fail, she believes, don't hit the deadpool because their ideas were terrible, but instead because their owners' health declined, or their spouses were fed up with them working 80 hours a week, or they didn't have the stamina or resources to push on. That's why Carissa founded Silver Lining -- to help small business owners make enough money so that they can keep doing what they love. To help jack up the success rates of SMBs, she and her team created "The Slap", or the Silver Lining Action PLan.TCTV Debate: What SOPA & PIPA 2.0 Should Look Like
Jan 23, 12:12AM
On Friday The House withdrew the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) from being put to a vote and the Senate postponed voting on its version of the bill, the Protect IP Act (PIPA). As the debate continues over the best way to shield copyrighted material from being pirated, we invited David Sohn, General Counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology and Viacom's General Counsel, Michael Fricklas to discuss language that should be included in any future SOPA/PIPA legislation.Six Lessons in Entrepreneurship
Jan 22, 11:15PM
As much as we all strive to build sustainable and stand-alone companies, we're living in a period of massive transformation and thus, consolidation and acquisition. As a result, many entrepreneurs build their businesses with potential acquirers in mind, choosing to grow at any cost instead of actually building a sustainable business that is solvent and profitable. GRP VC Mark Suster (and occasional Techcrunch contributor) published an article on this theme recently. The very short version of the post is: "Most companies (98+%) in the world (even tech startups) should be very profit focused. Being profitable allows you degrees of freedom you don't have when you rely upon other people's money."The Uphill Battle Of Social Event Sharing: A Post-Mortem for Plancast
Jan 22, 9:17PM
Nearly three years ago, I left my position at TechCrunch to start my own Internet business, with the idea of creating a web application that'd help people get together in real-life rather than simply helping them connect online as most social networking applications had done. Alas, our efforts began to stall after several months post-launch, and we were never able to scale beyond a small early adopter community and into critical, mainstream usage. While the initial launch and traction proved extremely exciting, it misled us into believing there was a larger market ready to adopt our product. This post-mortem is an attempt to describe the fundamental flaws in our product model and, in particular, the difficulties presented by events as a content type.Weekend Watch Update
Jan 22, 8:38PM
For the third time in a row Tag Heuer has once again released the worlds most precise mechanical chronograph watch. The oddly named Mikrogirder 2000 watch measures time with 5/10,000th of a second precision (and flair). The best German luxury brand A. Lange & Sohne releases a watch that sincere watch connoisseurs will go ga-ga over. It is the new Lange 1 Tourbillon Perpetual Calendar timepiece.Data And Privacy Rears Its Head At DLD
Jan 22, 5:51PM
It's only day one of DLD, the annual TED-like conference in Munich thrown by German media giant Burda, and already we have a few misunderstandings brewing. Amid the furore surrounding the SOPA protests and lobbying form media companies, at the other end of the debate-spectrum, the European Commission, in the shape of EC vice-president Viviane Reding, has been looking at harmonising privacy and personal data in Europe.OK Go And Eytan And The Embassy Rockers Talk About Their New App: inBloom
Jan 22, 5:36PM
Today two musicians sat down with me to have a chat: Andy Ross of OK Go, and Eytan Oren of Eytan and the Embassy. But we weren't there to talk music. The dynamic duo actually built an iPhone app called InBloom — a Yelp-style application that offers up sustainable businesses and eco-friendly/dietary food retailers based on location — and sat down with me to tell us how it came to be, and what it's all about.DLD 2012 – @Jack Dorsey: "Twitter Has A Business Model That Works"
Jan 22, 4:56PM
Earlier this fine Sunday afternoon, Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey took the stage at the DLD Conference, the annual pre-Davos meeting of minds held in Munich, Germany. In an interview with not one but two journalists (Holger Schmidt from FOCUS Magazine and Techonomy's David Kirkpatrick), Dorsey talked a great deal about Twitter and a little bit about Square. Dorsey didn't reveal anything spectacular about either company, emphasizing once more how Twitter is not your traditional social network (here's my counterpoint) and that its business model works, thanks very much for asking.Box's Next Frontier: Cloud Storage For The Federal Government
Jan 22, 4:46PM
For Box, 2011 was a huge year in terms of customer acquisition. Box ended the year with 77% of the Fortune 500 using the company's cloud storage offerings. Procter and Gamble marked one of Box's largest deployments for the year. While Box is still continuing to focus on cloud solutions for the enterprise in 2012, the company has set its sights on a potentially huge fish for the year—the federal government. Box CEO and co-founder Aaron Levie tells me that there is a huge opportunity for Box in procuring cloud storage options for government agencies. "There's going to be a big shift in public sector using cloud services this year," Levie explains. "With so many agencies having to collaborate with public and other organizations, it's more efficient to do this in the cloud."Apple Just Incentivized Every College Kid To Get An iPad. As For High Schoolers…
Jan 22, 1:13AM
As I watched Apple's iBooks event in New York City last week, my mind began to race about the ramifications of such announcements. Everyone had a pretty good idea for weeks (or months if you read the Steve Jobs biography) that textbooks would be a focal point for Apple, but there wasn't much thought given to what this would mean. During the event itself, I just kept thinking, "wow, Apple just incentivized every college student to get an iPad". Except, they didn't. Not yet.SOPA Debate Part II: Viacom & CDT Square Off Over "Due Process"
Jan 21, 11:15PM
Before SOPA was pulled from the House yesterday, opponents of the bill argued (among other things) that sites accused of making copyrighted material available could be shut down without being given full, adverserial, due process. Was this an accurate assessment? Viacom's General Counsel and EVP Michael Fricklas and David Sohn, General Counsel and Director of the Center for Democracy and Technology defend their respective positions in part II of TCTV's SOPA/PIPA debate.Summify Shutdown Means Big Gains for News.me
Jan 21, 9:47PM
When social news startup Summify announced Thursday that it was being acquired by Twitter, it looked like the Summify's existing users were out-of-luck — the company said the current version of the service would be shut down. Enter News.me. The company is best-known for its iPad newsreading app (which was developed at The New York Times, then commercialized by incubator betaworks) but it also offers an email digest of news from your Twitter stream, similar to Summify. It sounds like jilted Summify users jumped on News.me as an alternative, so the company published a blog post telling Summify users, "We're here for you," outlining upcoming features like Facebook integration, and asking for feedback.Cowen: Google's Mobile Ad Revenues Could Surge To $5.8 Billion In 2012
Jan 21, 8:58PM
How much does Google make in advertising from mobile? Cowen analyst Jim Friedland estimates that Google is generating $7 per year from each smartphone (and tablet). This includes both search and display advertising in mobile apps on both Android and iOS (iPhones and iPads). Thanks to the rapid growth in smart mobile devices from an estimated 509 million last year to nearly double that in 2012 to an estimated 914 million, Google's mobile ad revenues are expected to more than double from an estimated $2.5 billion last year to $5.8 billion in 2012 (see chart).14 Steps To Successful SEO For Startups
Jan 21, 7:00PM
This is a guest post by Ryan Spoon (@ryanspoon), a principal at Polaris Ventures. Read more about Ryan on his blog at ryanspoon.com. For startups, it is dangerous to entirely separate product and marketing – both strategically and organizationally. A great product isn't overly useful without an audience. And a great marketing strategy can't save a poor product. Product and marketing have to coexist.Dave McClure Isn't Worried About The "Series A Crunch"
Jan 21, 6:56PM
In recent months, there's been some hand-wringing about a "Series A Crunch" — namely, a glut of startups raising seed and angel funding, then struggling once they need to raise a proper Series A. But in a recent interview, 500 Startups founder Dave McClure said the complaints are misguided.Steal This Book!
Jan 21, 6:11PM
Nobody wants to be told that their business model is obsolete. Ask Kodak. Or Hollywood. And the publishing industry is slower on its feet than most. Bookstores don't want to believe that they'll ultimately lose 75% of their pre-e-book business to that scourge plus Amazon delivery. (I'm assuming e-book market share will eventually plateau somewhere north of 50%.) Meanwhile, publishers cling to the model wherein readers purchase books individually, usually before they've been read: a model so entrenched that many seem to find it literally impossible to believe that alternatives might exist. I've been lamenting that paucity of imagination in my columns here for some time now. It's why publishers have lashed out so ineptly at any suggestion of a subscription model. But I've also been saying for five years that publishing's business model will ultimately become even less restrictive than that. In the end, lo these many decades from now, most books--and all novels--will be free to read, and their readers will decide whether and how much to pay for them after reading them. I know, big talk, no action, right? So:If at any time you'd like to stop receiving these messages, just send an email to feeds_feedburner_com_techcrunch+unsubscribe-hmdtechnology=gmail.com@mail.feed2email.net.
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