Daniel Ek, co-founder of Spotify talks to me about Apple, Android and his service on consumer devices and in cars. More importantly he shares his vision about the company and what he wants it to be when it grows up in a couple of years. Read more »
Skype, the Internet telephony company that is in the process of being acquired by Microsoft has one ambition — get to a billion users – even if it risks the company losing control over its customers. And that just is fine for Facebook. Read more »
Nearly eleven years after Tim Westergen and his colleagues started Pandora, it began trading on the public markets. Westergen has been through hell and back and his story is no different from any entrepreneur who dares to try to capture lightning in a bottle. Read more »
We now have seamless connectivity via mobile devices; people can always be connected. This connectivity offers an opportunity to create a different kind of Internet experience that’s more immersive and interactive. That persistent connection is what allows us to create and experience the Alive Web. Read more »
Google launched the +1 button, a social signaling effort that at first blush seems to be all about publishers and page views. In reality it is about the future of web commerce, where Facebook is becoming even more influential, thanks to it’s near ubiquitous Like button. Read more »
After a brief hiatus, Om Says is back. In the latest edition, I look at the concept of good enough, the Praeto principle and how it applies to today’s company – regardless of its business focus — has to have a much higher metabolic rate. Read more »
Unless media corporations stop defining themselves by their products, they are going to be unable to navigate the big shift that is changing the rules of the game — what I call the “democratization of distribution.” Read more »
It’s not really a surprise that we’re beginning to hear more and more about “incubators.” If you’ve been around the block as many times as I have, you may remember the sharp increase in such experiments about a decade ago. Read more »
For a very long time, technology industry’s future has been determined by the capabilities of tech’s building blocks – chips, memory, storage and networks. With the emergence of social and mobile, it seems technology’s future will be defined by we the people. Read more »
Today, it is increasingly pervasive in our society to have an obsession with metrics and numbers without context. And as modern technology has started to get more complex, these metrics and other numbers have become a crutch for marketing and spin. Read more »
With over 650,000 apps seeking our attention, it is not an easy task for apps to get our attention. In order to be successful and stand out, the mobile apps have to have little friction and in the process overcome smartphone & mobile web’s three limitations. Read more »
If the first phase of e-commerce was the utilitarian hunt for staples, the next phase of e-commerce is about recreational shopping. So it needs to be a more fun and social experience which gives an edge to companies that encourage deeper social experiences. Read more »
The biggest frustration I have with my iPhone is when the phone switches between Wi-Fi and 3G networks and just hangs. In solving this problem, MIT researchers used motion sensors, showing how mobile devices need to become an extension of us. Read more »
The usage of term “cloud” has been hijacked for marketing purposes, thanks to indiscriminate labeling of anything and everything on the Internet. Urs Hölzle, Google’s infrastructure czar tells us what the Cloud really is and what it is supposed to do. Read more »
Many who are developing apps and services for mobile devices don’t pay much attention to the innards of the networks themselves. But we should be paying attention to all the underlying networking technologies, mostly because it helps us think about what these front-end services can do. Read more »
Wwe need to put more weight on one’s demonstrable capabilities than college degrees and “experience” in our resume, thanks to the emergence of Internet as a platform, we are entering a phase where these capabilities will be on full display for others to see. Read more »
Ever wondered how big data, smart grid and cloud computing will impact an average person? Now you can, thanks to Opower, which molds terabytes of data into delightful insights, shares them with many of us, hoping that we will do our bit as willing conservationists. Read more »
These days it seems raising funding gets all the focus. Most of us forget that there is a big difference between raising capital and starting a business and actually building a business. Many of us underestimate how long it takes to build a business. Read more »
The most rewarding part of being a blogger/writer is the generosity with which others share their insights. I have learned and evolved my thinking as a result of this process. Here are three responses to some of my writings from this week that are worth sharing. Read more »
When is a technology company dead? It is something that has been on my mind lately. My definition of a dead tech company has less to do with the company’s numbers and more about its abilities. Of course, that is different from what others think. Read more »
The economics of attention is much more ruthless and unforgiving than the real economic underpinning of a product. Just as it is hard for a movie to recover from a bad opening weekend, today’s “apps” lose if they don’t make a good first impression. Read more »
The crowded consumer Internet has made it difficult for startups and services to get attention from the people who really matter: the end users. The question is: How do you get that much-needed attention? Not with VC dollars. Instead it is something less tangible. Read more »
There are obvious opportunities stemming from Wi-Fi Direct and Apple’s Airplay technologies, but how does one look beyond point solutions and hardware products to find the larger opportunity? The answer came to me during a conversation with Urs Hoelzle, Google’s SVP of engineering at Google. Read more »
I wonder about the implications of the big merger announced Sunday: AT&T buying T-Mobile USA for $39 billion, of which $25 billion was in cash. I was hard-pressed to think if there were any winners apart from AT&T and T-Mobile’s parent company, Deutsche Telekom. Read more »
For environmentalist and entrepreneur Bill Liao, a round trip to San Francisco takes three months: He doesn’t fly. It takes a lot of conviction to go against convention like this, but that dedication is necessary if you truly want to have a breakthrough product. Read more »
There is re-definition of the consumer electronics landscape and we are seeing a future for hardware that combines hardware, software and connectivity with specific services. Without the services, the devices may lose our attention and end up at the back of the proverbial drawer. Read more »
FaceTime, Netflix, and Pandora were built for the Wi-Fi network. It’s hard to imagine the phone bill if all this data was streaming over the 3G networks. These services, and others like them, have blossomed, thanks in part to the increasing ubiquity of the Wi-Fi network. Read more »
The very fact that Google has to go through an exercise to codify a process for building managers points to the fact that the company is now focusing all its energies on its biggest challenge: overcoming the curse of size. Read more »
It’s unlikely you missed the big brouhaha between San Francisco-based startup Square and VeriFone, a payment processing services provider. VeriFone accused Square of not being secure and being easily hackable. Dorsey denied. This week’s dust-up makes me wonder if VeriFone quite understands its own business. Read more »
Foursquare released its new version 3.0 application. It is an application that moves beyond check-in, and many ways foretells the future of geo-local services. It might be time for location-aware apps to make an appearance and in the very near future start offering “suggestions.” Read more »
At Twitter and many other startups, most entrepreneurial energies and decisions are seen through one lens: product (and product functionality). But truly successful companies marry a smart product with an innovative business model. Read more »
As the fable goes, when faced with the prospect of being buried alive, donkey finds a way to inch its way out of the well. That is a good lesson for companies big and small. Neil Young, CEO of ngmoco reminded me why. Read more »
Steve Jobs called it magical. Fast-forward to today, and I (and about 15 million others) agree. However, if iPad, the device, is more magical, the applications (apps) for the device are anything but. Where are the apps befitting the device and its hardware capabilities? Read more »
Two and a Half Men lead character Charlie Sheen’s very public meltdown should be a cautionary tale for everyone, especially start-ups. Why? Because spoiled-star syndrome can take down and unravel companies as quickly as hit television shows. And what’s worse – it impacts others. Read more »
One of the biggest mistakes we as a society in general, and industry in specific make is that we mistake medium for the message. Those who can keep their eye on the message — Amazon and Netflix for example – profit handsomely. On the flip-side you have Flickr. Read more »
Oscars always remind us why we love the movies. And while not everyone gets to be Angelina Jolie or even Jesse Eisenberg, we can pretend that we are living inside a movie, thanks to the emergence of platforms and tools that turn our lives into movie-reels. Read more »
I increasingly see companies, both big and small, often focusing too much on their competitors and not focusing on being unique. And if a company spends all its energy trying to be the same as another, it has already lost the game. Read more »
The unbundling of telecom resulted in free-ing of last mile, which in tandem with rise of Internet resulted in destruction of the voice-minute economy. The Media landscape is going through similar unbundling, thanks to the Internet, which takes away controls over distribution networks. Read more »
Brian Chesky, CEO and co-founder of AirBnB, shared the company’s story and the lessons he learned in three years of chasing a dream. One of the most valuable lessons? It’s better to be broke than well-funded. His other tip: Conventional wisdom is overrated + Video Interview Read more »
Of all the smartphone makers whose names are not Apple, HTC is the most impressive. An upstart company from Taiwan, it has done a great job of building iconic hardware using commodity platforms. It has developed branding and messaging that’s edgy, cool and fun. More importantly, […] Read more »
