The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Hatch Labs CEO Dinesh Moorjani On What Makes A Successful Incubator
- A Brave New World: Too Much (Online) TV
- Thumb Offers A Reality Test For SXSW Winners
- Robert Scoble Talks Startups And The Changing Face Of SXSW [TCTV]
- The Real SXSW “Winner” Is The Mophie Juice Pack
- DIY SEO Startup BrandYourself Has Nearly 6,000 Sign-Ups
- Fear And Loathing In Online Video
- Mike Daisey Says His Show Is “True” Even If It’s Not True
- Up Next For Brit Morin’s Geek-Chic Lifestyle Brand: Custom Apps [TCTV]
- Pair Programming Considered Extremely Beneficial
- Rejoice, Twitter Power Users: “Next Generation” Tweetdeck Apps Coming For Android And iOS
- Why Mobile Operators Are Becoming Mad Men
- Gillmor Gang: TV or Not TV
| Hatch Labs CEO Dinesh Moorjani On What Makes A Successful Incubator Posted: 18 Mar 2012 09:01 AM PDT  15-month-old Hatch Labs is but a baby compared to incubators like YCombinator, but CEO Dinesh Moorjani has a very different idea on what an incubator should look like. The “sandbox”, as Moorjani would call it, is a joint venture between IAC and Xtreme Labs, and aims to grow mobile startups that are scalable and move beyond being minimally viable, and actually offer the user a sense of delight. How very Microsoft of them. Moorjani says what makes Hatch really different from other incubators is that it finds the middle ground between seed funding/accelerators and VC. On the accelerator side, says Moorjani, there is a significant problem being solved. Programs accept talented entrepreneurs for three to four months and help get the product off the ground. We can all agree this is necessary. But Moorjani says that of the usual $25,000 in seed funding exchanged for up to a 10 percent material stake in the company, most of it goes to office space, bandwidth, a community of entrepreneurs and access to mentors. On the venture capital end of the spectrum, entrepreneurs typically have to bootstrap their money. VCs weed out entrepreneurs because some may have a family or not be in a position to afford financing a new company. They have to finance themselves from anywhere between $25,000 to $500,000 through friends, family, and their own finances, and may end up in a Series A if they’re fortunate enough, according to Moorjani. “We think there is a big hole in the market where entrepreneurs who are proven, who are repeat entrepreneurs, who are extremely talented and want downside risk protection and equity in what their building, can come and build something great,” said Moorjani. “We believe that the hardest problems to solve are around building product and marketing,” which is what Hatch Labs funding is centered around. He says this model helps entrepreneurs who haven’t been addressed by accelerators or venture capital. The secret sauce is that each startup has equity in Hatch Labs as well as their own product, so each individual is encouraged to help grow the success of Hatch as a whole. Hatch wants its startups to focus on two areas: improving mobility with existing products and transformation. Improving current mobile technology is pretty self-explanatory. Hatch takes technology that may be a decade old, and turns it into something that meets consumer expectations for mobile products. Transformation, on the other hand, is a bit more cryptic. So what did Moorjani mean by that? “We take a bet on a hypothesis and it’s unclear if users will engage with it or whether or the ecosystem will build around it, but we’re actually trying to transform the experience to be more fun, more innovative, and make our lives more convenient,” explained Moorjani. “And that’s about transforming mobility.” Expect at least six startups to come out of Hatch before the end of 2012.
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| A Brave New World: Too Much (Online) TV Posted: 18 Mar 2012 08:00 AM PDT  [Editor's Note: This guest post is written by Jesse Stay, the author of Google+ For Dummies, Facebook Application Development For Dummies, and the currently in-progress book, Google+ Marketing For Dummies. Jesse consults with organizations big and small on social media technologies, marketing, and design philosophies.] “When the TV is on One of my favorite books growing up, and one I like to read regularly to my children, is Stan and Jan Berenstain’s “The Berenstain Bears and Too Much TV“. The book starts out with Mama Bear preparing a snack for the Cubs, Brother and Sister Bear rushing in from school, grabbing the snack, and immediately sitting in front of the TV without hesitation. It continues when Papa Bear comes home from work and does the same. “There’s no question about it, those cubs are watching too much TV!” she says in the book repeatedly as she observes their condition. Just a couple weeks after the death of Jan Berenstain, I thought it quite appropriate that as I considered the topic for my weekly column on TechCrunch, I was seeing the same thing from her book in my family, only in modern proportions. Let me explain the technologies available in our house: In our basement we have a Windows Media Center PC that really serves as the live entertainment hub for the whole house. It is connected to 3 TV tuners, all connected into a single over-the-air antenna that receives HD TV from local TV stations. This then gets streamed up to 3 different Xbox 360s in rooms throughout our house. On top of that, each TV room has an Apple TV which receives iTunes music (our entire music library), and now movies we have purchased through Apple’s new service, iCloud. In our main entertainment area we have a 65″ big screen TV with the Xbox, Apple TV, but also a Oppo BDP-93 3D Blu-ray player, a Roku Box, as well as a Google TV. We also have a Nintendo Wii so we can get in our Mario Kart action. Our main, TX-NR609 Onkyo stereo receiver receives Spotify, but also a host of other radio services like Last.fm and Pandora. On the Blu-ray, as well as the Xbox, the Wii, the Roku, and the Apple TV, we have Netflix for playing streaming video and movies. To add to that, on the Roku and Google TV I also have Amazon Prime Instant Streaming available to us. The Apple TV provides additional online Movie and TV rentals, as does the Xbox 360. On the Xbox and Roku I also have Hulu Plus, and I can also get it through PlayOn, a service that streams from our central Windows media hub in the basement. On any given day you can find at least one of our kids sitting down in front of at least one of these devices (and I have five kids!). The crazy thing is this is only the tip of the iceberg for our family. I realize I’m an edge case. As a somewhat early adopter, I like to try things out before others do, but I can only imagine the confusion other families are going through, and the new immersion in new TV technologies each family now has at their fingertips for a very small fraction of the cost of a typical cable bill. The truth is, in our family cable isn’t even a question – we already have too much TV at our hands to even think of adding another entertainment source to our lineup. Of course, I haven’t even mentioned the availability of a host of other possibilities through YouTube and other online sources. The fact is, even reducing our lineup we already have too many entertainment options to make cable even a consideration. I think all parents can sympathize with me when I say we’re overwhelmed with how much TV our kids now have access to in this Brave New World. It’s only getting worse, and when you add to that the host of things our kids are having to consume through social media and other online entertainment sources, it’s already pretty bad. Just yesterday I cancelled our Netflix subscription. My kids had the same reaction Brother and Sister Bear gave as they were told they had to go without TV for awhile. “But Dad!” “How will I watch my Disney shows?” “Where’s my Phineas and Ferb?” I’ve heard it all. I feel at peace with the decision though. I may even cancel other services to cut down our options to just a select number of devices and services. This will force us to watch less movies, and less TV and focus on more productive things to do around us. I have a feeling this is the start to a growing trend amongst parents as they start to realize their kids have more and more entertainment options at their fingertips. As for our family, we’re going to go camping this summer. We’re going to get out and enjoy nature more. We’re going to reduce all the entertainment sensations at their fingertips, and help them focus on the world that’s really around them. I’ve gotta go — I’m missing “The Apprentice”.
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| Thumb Offers A Reality Test For SXSW Winners Posted: 17 Mar 2012 08:16 PM PDT  Every year, before, during, and after South by Southwest, everyone’s eager declare someone the winner of the conference. Then comes the inevitable backlash, with questions about whether Popular App X will ever catch on with “regular people” — or if it’s just useful to techies who are constantly checking their iPhones in search of the next party. For the second year in a row, mobile Q&A app Thumb (formerly known as Opinionaided) is offering its own take. It made a list of the apps that seemed to be getting buzz at the conference, then polled its users on whether they actually used the apps. The results (there were 4,700 responses total, with at least 220 for each question) are being pitched as an answer to the question, “Which SXSW Apps Do Real Americans Actually Use?” Now, you could make a list of caveats to the results that’s longer than this post. For starters: Do we really think Thumb’s userbase is fully representative of “Real Americans”? And doesn’t the survey’s definition of “SXSW App” seem a bit arbitrary? But I have to admit, I was still curious about the results, so here they are. The most-used app seems to be Instagram (22 percent of respondents said they used it), followed by Spotify (14 percent), Waze (12 percent), and Foursquare (12 percent). Highlight, the app that many predicted would be this year’s big hit, was used by 5 percent of respondents. Instagram’s victory is no surprise, given the rapid growth the company announced on-stage at SXSW. But if you want to argue about winners, it’s too bad Thumb didn’t ask about the Mophie juice pack.
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| Robert Scoble Talks Startups And The Changing Face Of SXSW [TCTV] Posted: 17 Mar 2012 06:30 PM PDT 
Watch the video above to hear Scoble’s thoughts on how SxSWi has grown over the past decade from a few “geeks off in the corner” to a massive gathering, what technology he’s most excited about right now (Highlight gets a mention), his time on the StartupBus, why he’s still bullish on Google+, the kind of startup pitch he’s sick of hearing, and lots more.
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| The Real SXSW “Winner” Is The Mophie Juice Pack Posted: 17 Mar 2012 05:54 PM PDT  So Highlight didn’t “win” SXSW, as some tech bloggers had hypothesized, for many reasons. It did however have a close relationship to what eventually ended up winning, as its background GPS turns out to significantly strain iPhone battery life. Even before SXSW, users were reporting notable reduction in battery charge when using Highlight, on average going from two days to one day of use per full charge while the app is running. In the mobile app battleground that is SXSW Interactive, the battery drain was even more pronounced. People crowded round the charging stations some startups had set up. “ABC: Always be charging,” was a running joke amongst techies. At some point I even saw a woman at a restaurant using a charger as a scrunchie. While I didn’t uninstall Highlight for the sake of my battery life like some, I did turn off its location (Settings > General > Location Services) and resorted to plain old text messaging and Foursquare to navigate Austin. In fact, Highlight actually worked really well for me the moment I left Texas, pinging me when I was randomly near David Tisch and Lockhart Steele (two people I wanted to connect with) in the East Village in New York, and leading me to believe that the app is best suited for user sparsity and NOT density. Other bloggers with Highlight and other battery-heavy apps installed (we were all trying to figure out who would “win”!) experienced this drain too, and as bloggers are wont to do, wrote about it. Specifically calling out Highlight, AllThingsD’s Liz Gannes brought up the battery life issue in a sharp post about how apps are extending our phones’ technological capacities, “App developers push the possibilities of how to use our smartphones' location awareness and reach well beyond what our mobile data plans and battery lives seem to be able to support,” Gannes wrote, “especially in densely populated spaces.” MG Siegler wrote, “My single biggest takeaway from SXSW was all the talk about battery life. Every single person. All the time. People changing plans because they needed to recharge their phones. People walking around with chargers. People who were chargers. Mophies galore.” Yes Mophies, the slip on battery packs that double your iPhone’s battery life (8 hours of talk time, 6 hours of internet on 3g, Apple claims), were indeed ubiquitous in Austin. In the case of phones over-using location-based apps, the Mophie actually restored battery life to normal. After a number of tips about this miraculous Juice Pack, I ended up trying one out, and feel about it the same way I do about the iPhone: Owning a Mophie at SXSW is like being part of a different species. Sure strapping on any case to the sleek iPhone sort of feels like you’re degrading from its beauty or putting a diaper or a condom on it or whatever. But it’s totally worth it (and $100) to be part of a species that isn’t addicted to wall outlets or pleading with waiters to let them charge their phones. A species that doesn’t wear phone chargers in its hair. It’s so revolutionary Apple should buy it. “The first company—whether it's an incumbent phone maker or Ph.D.-laden start-up in a garage—that figures out how to solve the smartphone battery problem will see enormous gains,” Farhad Manjoo wrote today on PandoDaily. Ladies and gentlemen, the Mophie. H/T @HunterWalk
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| DIY SEO Startup BrandYourself Has Nearly 6,000 Sign-Ups Posted: 17 Mar 2012 05:30 PM PDT  BrandYourself made the famous startup pivot earlier this month, and now it’s sharing some data about the initial results. The company started out as a way for people to control the impression they made online, both through search results and on social networks. It even recommended articles that you could read and share in your chosen subject area. Co-founder and CEO Patrick Ambron says his team eventually realized that the approach was “too much,” and that “the one BIG thing people loved about us was helping them improve their search results.” So the new version of BrandYourself pares away all the other features, focusing exclusively on your personal search results. In both cases, BrandYourself pitches itself as a more affordable, DIY alternative to a service like Reputation.com. Instead of hiring someone to improve your results and paying them thousands of dollars, you can just log in to the BrandYourself dashboard, submit the links that you want to show up more prominently in your results, and get recommendations on how to improve their placement (for example, it recommended that I connect my personal website to a BrandYourself profile page, and also include my name in the text of the website). BrandYourself also tracks whenever the rankings change. You can get free recommendations on three links — after that you have to pay for premium membership, with pricing that starts at $9.99 per month. Ambron says the new version of BrandYourself launched on March 8, and that 5,870 people have signed up since then. And of those sign-ups, 154 of them became paying members. Oh, and this isn’t a business win, but it’s nice recognition: BrandYourself won the Best Bootstrapped Startup award at the South by Southwest Startup Accelerator earlier this week.
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| Fear And Loathing In Online Video Posted: 17 Mar 2012 04:00 PM PDT  Editor’s note: Jay Fulcher is CEO of video technology company Ooyala. Follow him on Twitter @jbfulcher. The story of Hollywood's relationship with technology reads like an on-again-off-again soap opera romance: initial feelings of fear, panic and jealousy followed by amity and intense attraction, followed, in turn, by more fear, jealousy and heated exchanges. Back in the early 1980s, MPAA President Jack Valenti went before Congress and asked them to outlaw the VCR. His graphic language infamously went so far as to compare new TV tech to the Boston Strangler.
After the Supreme Court ruled that personal recording devices were, in fact, legal, Hollywood discovered that people enjoyed watching movies in their own home — just as they enjoyed going to the cinema. Rather than destroying the movie business, the VCR gave people new ways to watch their favorite content. It also brought in billions in new revenue for the entertainment industry. But this love affair wasn't meant to last. Hollywood's feelings toward technology quickly soured. They sued to block the DVR. Then they sued to shut down cloud-based DVRs. Now they are suing Barry Diller's cloud-based DVR. Like a heroine in a romantic comedy, Hollywood is typically disgusted by new technology before they can learn to love it. Take online video, for example. The rise of tablets and mobile connected screens means there are more ways than ever before to engage viewers and profit from professional content. This is truly an historic opportunity. But instead of embracing streaming media and new distribution opportunities, many in the entertainment industry continue to resist change. Instead of focusing on building great viewing experiences across all screens, Hollywood crafted SOPA, a piece of legislation so controversial that the entire Internet protested against it. (This was also the only time in recorded history when everyone on the Internet agreed on something.) Hollywood deserves to make money from its content. And studios certainly deserve to protect their property online. But in order to excel in the digital age, the decision makers in L.A. should spend less time fearing the future and more time building innovative experiences that will delight their fans. Here are three things that Hollywood can do to profit with online video.
Note that none of these ideas include lawsuits or legislation. The entertainment industry should realize that online video — like the VCR and DVR before it — isn't something to be feared. It is a way to engage your audiences and profit from new sources of revenue. Helping people connect with great movies rather than fighting to keep content away from viewers is right for consumers — and right for Hollywood.
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| Mike Daisey Says His Show Is “True” Even If It’s Not True Posted: 17 Mar 2012 03:30 PM PDT  The episode and transcript of the This American Life episode retracting Mike Daisey’s piece about Apple and Foxconn are now live. If this is an issue you care about, you should listen to the whole thing. As host Ira Glass announced yesterday, the show found “significant fabrications” in the story, to the point where “we can't vouch for its truth.” For example, Daisey admits that he never met a worker who had been poisoned by n-hexane, as he claimed in the episode (which was a version of his one-man show “The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.”) Many other aspects of Daisey’s account, like his meeting with allegedly underage Foxconn workers, were also disputed by his translator, although Daisey still says that they happened. In a blog post, Daisey says he stands by his work, but he regrets allowing TAL to excerpt the show because it’s “not journalism.” One of the most amazing things about the episode was the fact that Mike Daisey is, in fact, an eloquent critic of Mike Daisey. At one point, Marketplace’s Rob Schmitz (who tracked down Daisey’s translator) asks, “Does it matter if the things you've said in this play are untrue?” Daisey replies:
To which I can only say: Yes. Even if “most of what he said was, technically, true” and “his mission to help the oppressed was a good one” (as our own John Biggs put it yesterday), it sounds like Daisey still failed to get the facts right. To borrow his own phrase, he subordinated the truth of what he actually saw to the larger story that he wanted to tell. Daisey seems to be a member of the William Faulkner school, which holds that “the best fiction is far more true than any journalism.” Except he isn’t willing to call his show fiction. When asked if he should label his show a “work of fiction,” Daisey pushes back, arguing that it’s true “in a theatrical context” (at which point I started to think about Bill Clinton dissembling about “the meaning of word ‘is’“). Glass says:
The real tragedy here is it reduces this enormously complex, difficult issue into the story of one man. Luckily, no one seems to be saying, “Okay, well, Mike Daisey’s story was untrue, so I don’t have to think about that stuff anymore!” This American Life closes its retraction with an interview of Charles Duhigg, one of the reporters of an investigative series in The New York Times about Apple. Duhigg goes into a lot of detail about what we know and don’t know about how Foxconn treats its workers, and what Apple is doing about it (again, listen to the whole episode). Ultimately, he says we still need to ask ourselves, “Do you feel comfortable knowing that iPhones and iPads and other products could be manufactured in less harsh conditions, but that these harsh conditions perpetuate because of an economy that you are … supporting with your dollars.” It’s something that people have said before, but it’s something that we need to be reminded of again and again. Which is what Mike Daisey did.
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| Up Next For Brit Morin’s Geek-Chic Lifestyle Brand: Custom Apps [TCTV] Posted: 17 Mar 2012 03:00 PM PDT 
According to Morin, visitor growth on her flagship HelloBrit.com website has been robust, but what a lot of people don’t realize is that’s just the beginning of her plan. She has assembled a small team of three engineers who are currently building custom Brit Media software and apps, the first of which will launch in beta this quarter. Morin did not give us many details about the forthcoming apps, but said they will all fit back into the ‘Brit’ brand. As Alexia Tsotsis reported back in November, Morin had started turning the code written for her own wedding website into an app called “Weduary” that anyone could use to build a wedding site (it seems that building slick apps may be a family affair — Brittany Morin’s husband is Dave Morin, the co-founder and CEO of Path.) Weduary could very well be the first app launched under the Brit brand — but we’ll have to wait and see for sure. Watch the interview above to see Brittany Morin talk in full about the upcoming apps, the latest lifestyle gadget she’s obsessed with, the possibility of raising outside funding, why Silicon Valley needs some “soft-core tech,” and more.
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| Pair Programming Considered Extremely Beneficial Posted: 17 Mar 2012 01:00 PM PDT  Editor’s note: Farhan Thawar is the VP Engineering of Toronto’s Xtreme Labs. Before joining the Xtreme team, Farhan held the positions of Chief Software Architect at I Love Rewards, the Head of Search & MSN Platform for Microsoft Canada and Technical Lead at Trilogy Software. This post is a response to (former Xtremer) Jon Evans’s Pair Programming Considered Harmful?, which outlined some of the pluses and minuses of pair programming. You're in a car driving 100 miles per hour on a dirt road. The turns are 100º hairpins and there are inclines and dips that would make a normal car's shocks fall right off their axles. Lucky for you, you're not alone. You have a partner. Because there are two of you, you can split the responsibilities of getting to the finish line first – in one piece.
This is the basis of pair programming. The deliberate practice of staffing every workstation with two software engineers focused on writing software together. Similar to rally racing, the driver and navigator have the same goal – write high-quality and maintainable code that works. How does it work?
The driver and navigator can often switch roles throughout a programming session (unlike in rally racing):
So why pair program? There are so many reasons, but I'll discuss the top three:
And those are just three reasons. I didn't even talk about the wicked open work environment (yes, you can achieve flow with someone else), the ability to easily add badass engineers to your team to increase velocity or the amazingly high retention rates for awesome engineers. (btw: we're hiring). Both Pivotal Labs and Xtreme Labs enjoy extremely shallow hierarchies and little red tape. Did I mention we have set hours (9-6pm) and no one works from home? The blasphemy. I for one welcome our pair programming overlords! Now, to dispel a few myths:
Guy Steele on pairing with the legendary Richard Stallman: “We sat down one morning,” recalls Steele. “I was at the keyboard, and he was at my elbow,” says Steele. “He was perfectly willing to let me type, but he was also telling me what to type. “The programming session lasted 10 hours. Throughout that entire time, Steele says, neither he nor Stallman took a break or made any small talk. By the end of the session, they had managed to hack the pretty print source code to just under 100 lines. “My fingers were on the keyboard the whole time,” Steele recalls, “but it felt like both of our ideas were flowing onto the screen. He told me what to type, and I typed it.” The length of the session revealed itself when Steele finally left the AI Lab. Standing outside the building at 545 Tech Square, he was surprised to find himself surrounded by nighttime darkness. As a programmer, Steele was used to marathon coding sessions. Still, something about this session was different. Working with Stallman had forced Steele to block out all external stimuli and focus the entirety of his mental energies on the task at hand. Looking back, Steele says he found the Stallman mind-meld both exhilarating and scary at the same time. “My first thought afterward was: it was a great experience, very intense, and that I never wanted to do it again in my life.” Yes, pair programming isn't for everyone or every company. But there’s also pair programming's little-talked-about stepbrother: side-by-side programming. You get some, but not all, of the positives of pairing (if your organization can't handle the shift), but engineers can keep their egos and their own machines. We do this when we're working on routine tasks that don't require a second set of eyes (e.g. inserting design assets into a mobile application). We have floater laptops you can grab to do this, but both engineers can see each others screens. So to recap, you should only pair program when you want intensely focused, effective engineers to write high-quality software, to learn from each other and to share domain knowledge. For everything else, silo program all day… Image credit: Charles Rincheval, Flickr
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| Rejoice, Twitter Power Users: “Next Generation” Tweetdeck Apps Coming For Android And iOS Posted: 17 Mar 2012 12:20 PM PDT  The big Twitter redesign at the end of last year seemed to mean that the company was ditching power users to get more mainstream. The website and the mobile apps added “Connect” and “Discover” pages to help new users find interesting people and topics. But the unified new interface buried direct messages and other features that long-time users had grown to rely on. However, Twitter has not forgotten about its devoted base of hardcore users. You know, the types who like to do things like DM, or make custom lists of other users to track. It’s busy hiring engineers to work on “next generation” mobile apps under the Tweetdeck brand. Here’s a bit more, from a recent job listing that the @Tweetdeck account has been tweeting about in recent weeks. The TweetDeck team, working from London, is looking for new team members to work on our cutting edge Android app. We're building the next generation of a suite of clients that millions of people love and use everyday. You'll work on our small team, own the projects that you work on, and have a great time shipping products which change the way people communicate. Tweetdeck, the client app developer that Twitter acquired last year, has been looking a little neglected. After months of inactivity, it got a web version for the Chrome browser in December, alongside the big redesign, and a new desktop version that switched from AIR to HTML5. But the change included feature loss — it dropped support for other social networks, as well as color and font customizations, keyboard shortcuts, URL shortening options and tweaks to minimize API calls. And, while Twitter pushed new versions of the iOS and Android Tweetdeck apps last September, neither has gotten an update to bring its user interface in-line with the new design. So, thankfully for the direct-messaging, list-making crowd, Twitter has not left us. While there are no job listings for engineers to work on Tweetdeck for iOS, my understanding is that these positions have been filled.
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| Why Mobile Operators Are Becoming Mad Men Posted: 17 Mar 2012 11:15 AM PDT  Editor’s note: Rich LeFurgy is a general partner at Archer Advisors. LeFurgy was Founding Chairman of the IAB and sfBIG, a Venture Capitalist (WaldenVC), head of ad sales at Starwave (ESPN.com) and the Walt Disney Internet Group. Follow him on Twitter @rich_lefurgy. The characters on AMC's television show Mad Men and the real-life mobile operators of today are pretty much the same. Both could enjoy cigars and martinis while business runs as usual, living as kings of their respective business worlds. But in 2012, both Madison Avenue and the mobile carrier world are getting turned on their heads by the likes of Google and Facebook. Both industries are re-inventing themselves as we speak, and the good news is they actually need each other to help them survive and thrive. Mad Men's main character, Don Draper, famously said "Advertising is about one thing: happiness." Earlier this month, we saw one of the most interesting moves in digital media: the mobile operator SingTel purchased mobile ad company Amobee for $321 million in an all-cash deal. Now that's happiness for Amobee. This transaction is one of the largest in the mobile ad space behind AdMob's sale to Google, and Quattro's acquisition by Apple. It also signals a major chapter in the carrier world– they are fighting back against the over-the-top plays by Google and Facebook. The carriers want their fair share of the media pie, and realize now is the time to act. The big question is: Can telcos add the advertising expertise to create a great value proposition for both brands and consumers that makes them both happy? It's a $22 billion question — or roughly, the estimated market size of combining deals, geofence mobile marketing and location-based services. The world's largest carriers – AT&T, Telefonica, SingTel and others – have all created new business units focused on the delivery of digital advertising and mobile payments. Why? They have all recognized their uniquely valuable assets for advertisers: they can locate a user anytime and anywhere, they have a trusted relationship with their subscribers, and they can enable a closed loop, real world transaction. Most urgently, they are realizing that media and payments represent the best opportunity for growth in their own business in the face of rising infrastructure costs, churn and declining margins. What it could look like For consumers, the proposition could be compelling. From enabling hyper-local offers and the ability to pay with your phone, consumers could finally begin to receive media that is truly a valuable service – not intrusive. Consider an opt-in world, where consumers pre-select the categories and types of offers they want to receive: Get an alert from your favorite store about a sale when you are nearby? How about a discounted plan that is subsidized by advertising? Or even a free phone? Or a loyalty app with special deals just for being a subscriber? Link your credit card and pay with your phone? These and many other services are headed our way and, done right, they could transform our phones into highly personal and invaluable instruments of commerce. For advertisers, the proposition is even better. While mobile advertising is taking off with performance-based models (think Tapjoy), brands are still struggling with mobile – look no further than the decline of Apple's brand-centric iAd that had overly complicated pricing. Direct advertising deals are still nascent as proprietary apps often do not achieve scale and they only work when the app is on. Consumer apps require the brand to share their audience with competitors; display ads are small and often not relevant. So what's the solution? By focusing on mobile advertising, carriers can bring brands real relevancy and the reach that has been missing from other mobile initiatives. Tailored offers triggered when a consumer is near a store without an app is a hugely powerful offering from the carriers. Combine it with consumer preferences and a host of anonymized data about subscribers, and brands finally get a tool that they can use at every point of contact. This 'Mad Men of mobile' play focuses on the digital purchase funnel that works for driving real-world commerce (web, email, mobile app, proximity). Advertisers who are already using this approach are seeing results incomparable to any other medium: as high as 65% purchase rates for proximity-based mobile marketing. And there is real scale – the carriers I mentioned above represent over a billion consumers in 30+ countries. In markets like the UK, all the major operators are trying to collaborate to make it easy for brands to reach the entire audience of a country with a single ad buy. The potential is substantial: according to analysts, the daily deals market will be $4.2 billion over the next four years (BIA/Kelsey), while mobile proximity marketing could generate another $6 billion (Borrell Associates) and location-based services $12 billion (Juniper). The SoLoMo cocktail 'SoLoMo' stands for social, local and mobile. While it is a ridiculous acronym, I'll use it here for simplicity's sake. The SoLoMo cocktail, when mixed together using the right recipe, is giving operators visions of their own large, tasty hunk of pie. How? The key for operators to unlock this revenue is to add digital advertising expertise to their DNA, thus bringing breakthrough opportunities to advertisers – offerings that they cannot get anywhere else. For example, here's something that operators are in a unique position to offer: the ability to deliver a targeted impression on the web, then possibly on Wi-Fi or in email, then followed by a tailored alert when the consumer is near the store without an app. In addition to transactions like Amobee, these companies are recruiting heavily from the digital technology companies and agencies. They are also opening offices in Silicon Valley and working closely with companies like Bubble Motion and Placecast, which enable operators to get a slice of that $22 billion pie all through a differentiated media offering. (Disclosure: I am a board member at Placecast) The carriers can really succeed here because there is so much more that marketers want from mobile ads that Google, Facebook and Apple won't be able to offer. But carriers must create a differentiated offering based on their unique attributes of user data, real-time location, direct consumer relationships and the ability to close the loop with transactions, and not just try to replicate the current ecosystem. From APIs for developers, to providing rich location context and user data for targeting on both the web and on mobile, carriers could deliver a consumer all the way down the purchase funnel – from awareness to a real-world transaction. It's become clear that brands and agencies want more than what's there today, and carriers are uniquely capable of unlocking mobile marketing at effective scale. Whether this succeeds or not will simply come down to how fast operators embrace their future. If the industry moves towards SingTel and Telefonica, then the former kings of mobile can continue to earn a really big piece of the pie.
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| Posted: 17 Mar 2012 10:00 AM PDT  The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — pretended to care about Hipswitch, er HighLight while unwrapping Christmas in March’s iPad Next. After a somber opening in remembrance of @kevinmarks’ father John Marks and Firesign Theatre co-founder Peter Bergman, the Gang got down to brass pixels, the new breed of designer stalker software, and just what Tim Cook has up his sleeve for Christmas in December. I’m still not convinced of the value of having alarms go off when @scobleizer is within 100 yards of 5,000 of his closest friends, but his argument about Twitter in the early days rings true. What’s a sure thing is how fast we’ll use up iPad 4G’s bandwidth allotment each month. Unlike Facetime, Skype can use all the LTE it can eat, and as a personal hotspot to boot on the Verizon version. WIth hotel WiFi costing 10-15 bucks per device, $80 bucks a month for 10 gigs starts to look like a businessman’s special. @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kevinmarks, @jtaschek Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
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