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Posts Tagged ‘Gerbsman Partners’

Foursquare Grows Up and Beyond the Check-In

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, tagged , , , , , , , , , on March 9, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from GigaOm.

“Originally, Foursquare was designed with the goal of “making cities easier to use.” But along the way, it became synonymous with check-ins and the game mechanics behind it. That was a good thing when it was new, unique and fun. But the world has moved on, and so have location competitors, who are looking beyond simple games to expanded deals, bigger competition and recommendations of places. Foursquare is now taking a big leap ahead in its story with version 3.0 as it matures into a much more complete and polished location-based service capable of tackling its original vision.

Founder and CEO Dennis Crowley said in a blog post that the service is now closing in on 7.5 million users after adding about 7 million since last year’s annual South By Southwest event. Users checked in almost half a billion times in the last year. That’s a lot of check-ins, but Crowley rightly understands that the check-in is just a starting place. Now with Foursquare 3.0, available tonight on iPhone and Android, the company has made strides on a number of fronts that should keep it at the front of the location pack.

Interestingly, many of the updates put the focus back on check-ins, but infuse the action with much more meaning. Now users have more reasons to check in to places, instead of just broadcasting their location. Here’s a look at the improvements:

Discovery. Foursquare has been talking about offering recommendation services, just like many competitors, and now with a new Explore tab, users can get suggestions on where to go. The recommendations factor in a bunch of signals, from the places a user and their friends visit and favorite, to the categories and types of places they frequent. Interestingly, Foursquare said it will also tailor suggestions based on the day of the week or time of day. Crowley said the recommendation engine will shine with both basic and quirky inquiries. This is likely why the company was casting about for a data scientist a little while back: so it could build a recommendation engine that made use of all of its data. The Explore feature brings Foursquare up to par with many competitors, though as we’re learning, there are many ways to do recommendations. The Explore feature also puts more emphasis on the check-in, because it helps provide Foursquare with more data to build its recommendations.

Rewards. Foursquare was out early with its game mechanics, but the system has become stale for some time. Now, Foursquare is revamping its leaderboard, awarding points for a wider range of activities. Users can get points for trying a new type of restaurant, visiting a new place, traveling to new cities, getting friends together and many other actions. The leaderboard is now limited to the last seven days. This again re-emphasizes check-ins, because the system rewards a lot of different activities. And the week-long time frame encourages people to keep trying out new things and remaining active. There are still mayorships, which are increasingly hard to get. But with a revamped leaderboard, users have more ways to compete and get recognized for their efforts.

Loyalty. Keeping users engaged is paramount for a service like Foursquare, which can burn through new users if it doesn’t give them a reason to stick around. Now the site is expanding its specials deals for mayors to more sets of people, enabling merchants to engage with customers in a lot more ways. Merchants can now extend specials to swarms, groups of friends, regular visitors, new customers, mayors or to everyone. This is an important element, because it gives people some tangible benefits of participating. Points and mayorships only work for more motivated users, but deals are always attractive.

Foursquare got out early in the location game, but in many ways, it was in need of improvements befitting its status. Crowley said many upgrades didn’t take place as fast as he’d like, because the company had to deal with a lot of internal growth as it increased its headcount to about 40 people. Now, finally, Foursquare’s larger vision is starting to take shape, and it’s a good thing. The company is showing no signs of slowing growth, but the name of the game is engagement, not just downloads. I have no insight into Foursquare’s churn, but it’s a definite concern for any app with a large following like this. Now with some key improvements, Foursquare has a chance to keep those users engaged and grow into something more useful than a real-world game.

UPDATE: Foursquare has provided more information about its updated specials program, which now allows merchants to instantly set up special deals at multiple locations for users and get additional insight into user engagement through a new dashboard. Early partners include Sports Authority, Applebee’s, Radio Shack, Barnes & Noble, Chili’s, Whole Foods, Toys R Us and others.”

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Apple, Google’s mobile rivals must play catch-up

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Business models, FaceBook, google, internet, Investments, Java, Market research, Microsoft, Mobile, mobile 2.0, Mobile Phone Usage, Social Networks, Strategy, Technology, Venture Capital, Web 2.0, Wireless, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 27, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from SFGate.

“It’s been a big couple of weeks in mobile. Verizon Wireless finally got the iPhone. Hewlett-Packard unveiled the first fruits of its Palm purchase last year. Nokia, the world’s biggest maker of handsets, abandoned its once-dominant Symbian mobile software system and demoted itself to a kind of glorified contract manufacturer of Microsoft-powered devices.

The struggle for mobile dominance has entered a new phase. Why would Nokia throw out Symbian, with its 37 percent market share, in favor of software with less than one-seventh of that? Because recently hired Chief Executive Officer Stephen Elop is convinced that Microsoft has better odds of going up against the four other mobile powers – Apple, Google, Research In Motion, and HP – and making its new Windows Phone 7 software a center of gravity for the world’s programmers, manufacturers, and consumers.

“The game has changed from a battle of devices to a war of ecosystems,” Elop told investors at a recent London news conference.

Actually, it’s the same game that created the most valuable franchises in tech history, from IBM to Microsoft to Facebook. All successfully established themselves as “platforms,” in which countless entrepreneurs and programmers developed products and applications that gave value to customers and profitability to shareholders – sucking oxygen away from rivals all the while.

Platform leaders

In the 1960s, IBM trounced Sperry and other mainframe manufacturers by creating a soup-to-nuts stack of hardware, software and services.

In PCs, Microsoft erased Apple’s early lead by signing up hardwaremakers to create cheap machines, and software companies to develop Windows versions of everything from word processors to Tetris.

Facebook vanquished social networks such as MySpace by repositioning itself as a platform – a decision that led to the creation of gamemaker Zynga and other app companies that keep Facebook’s 500 million users hanging around.

What’s different this time is scale.

“Mobile is the biggest platform war ever,” said Bill Whyman, an analyst with International Strategy & Investment. More smart phones were sold than PCs in the fourth quarter, and sales should reach $120 billion this year. That doesn’t count billions more in mobile services, ads, and e-commerce.

This war will probably last for some time, too. Unlike with PCs, where the unquestioned victor – Microsoft – quickly emerged and enjoyed years of near monopoly, no one has a divine right to dominance in mobile. Microsoft crushed its competition by forcing people to make a choice. There were far more software applications for PCs, and most didn’t work on Macs. The more Microsoft-powered machines out there, the more people wrote software for them, the more people bought them, and the bigger the whole system became. Economists have a name for that phenomenon: “network effects.”

Appealing products

All cell phones can talk to each other and handle the same websites and e-mail systems, so winning means making products that function more effectively and appealingly. That sums up Apple’s success.

Steve Jobs figured out long ago that when people spend their own money, they’ll pay for something a lot nicer than the unsexy gear the cheapskates in corporate procurement choose. While others competed on price, Apple focused on making its products reliable and easy to use. Once customers buy an iPhone and start investing in iTunes songs and apps, they tend to stick with the system and keep buying – even though there’s no proprietary lock on the proverbial door.

Apple’s huge sales volume makes carriers and suppliers more likely to agree to its terms. The software that powers everything Apple makes – all variations of the Mac operating system OS X – is as intuitive to developers as Angry Birds is to app shoppers.

The result is economic leverage of staggering power. To create a blockbuster, Apple doesn’t need to spend billions on a start-from-scratch moon-shot of a development project. It just needs to tweak a previous hit.

Take the iPad, which is in many ways a large iPod touch. Apple won’t say how much the iPad cost to develop. Consider these numbers, though: In the year that ended Sept. 30, during which Apple introduced the iPad and the iPhone 4, the company spent $1.8 billion on research and development. Over the same period, Apple’s revenue increased by $22.3 billion. Nokia spent three times as much as Apple on R&D – $5.86 billion – and increased revenue by just $1.5 billion. No wonder that Apple, whose share of total global mobile-phone sales is only 4.2 percent, gets more than half the profit generated by the industry, according to research firm Asymco.

Fast-growing Android

Even Google, Apple’s mightiest rival, got only a $5 billion increase in sales on its $3.4 billion R&D budget. It does have plenty to show for its efforts, though: Its Android platform is growing at a blistering pace. In the fourth quarter, according to research firm Canalys, twice as many Android devices shipped as iPhones.

“Google is being far more aggressive in building its platform than Microsoft ever was,” says Bill Gurley, a partner at Benchmark Capital.

Barring big surprises, the other contenders – RIM, HP, and Microsoft – are in for a slog: too dependent on mobile devices to give up, yet lacking the tools to make much progress. All lost market share in 2010 and have far fewer apps available for their devices.”

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How Google Can Beat Facebook: No, Its Not on the Web

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Business models, FaceBook, google, Investments, Market research, Strategy, Technology, Web 2.0, Wireless 2.0, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 21, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from GigaOm.

“A few years ago, Jeff Jarvis, a good friend of mine, published a book called What Would Google Do? When he wrote that book, Google had an aura of invincibility. Fast forward to today: Thanks to Facebook, it doesn’t seem so invincible. The new social web has passed it by. So, the question today is: What should Google do?

I’ve always maintained Google has to play to its strengths – that is, tap into its DNA of being an engineering-driven culture that can leverage its immense infrastructure. It also needs to leverage its existing assets even more, instead of chasing rainbows. In other words, it needs to look at Android and see if it can build a layer of services that get to the very essence of social experience: communication.

However, instead of getting bogged down by the old-fashioned notion of communication – phone calls, emails, instant messages and text messages – it needs to think about interactions. In other words, Google needs to think of a world beyond Google Talk, Google Chat and Google Voice.

To me, interactions are synchronous, are highly personal, are location-aware and allow the sharing of experiences, whether it’s photographs, video streams or simply smiley faces. Interactions are supposed to mimic the feeling of actually being there. Interactions are about enmeshing the virtual with the physical.

In a post earlier, I outlined that with the introduction of its unified Inbox, the constantly changing Facebook had shifted its core value proposition from being a plain vanilla social network to a communication company. Here’s a relevant bit from that post.

Facebook imagined email only as a subset of what is in reality communication. SMS, Chat, Facebook messages, status updates and email is how Zuckerberg sees the world. With the address book under its control, Facebook is now looking to become the “interaction hub” of our post-broadband, always-on lives. Having trained nearly 350 million people to use its stream-based, simple inbox, Facebook has reinvented the “communication” experience. …. Facebook as a service is amazingly effective when it focuses all its attention on what is the second order of friends – people you would like to stay in touch with, but just don’t have enough bandwidth (time) to stay in touch with. Those who matter to you the most are infinitely intimate, and as a result you communicate with them via SMS, IM Chat and voice. So far, this intimate communication has eluded Facebook. The launch of the new social inbox is a first step by Facebook to get a grip on this real world intimacy.

In 2007, I had argued that the real social network in our lives was the address book on our mobile phone. Google has access to real-world intimacy – the mobile phone address book – thanks to Android OS. All it has to do is use that as a lever to facilitate interactions.

In order to understand Google’s interaction-driven social future, one doesn’t have to look far: no further than Apple’s iTunes app store.  As you know, I have switched from BlackBerry to the iPhone, and as a result, I’ve been looking for a BBM replacement, and have been playing around with a score of apps.

In the process of searching for this app, I came across an app called Beluga, which essentially allows me to connect to my friends. And then I can create Pods (essentially Groups) with one or more of my friends. Sort of like what I did on BBM. Except, there’s more to Beluga.

It taps into my social graph (Facebook); it leverages my location, and it allows me to share photos as part of the messaging process. It’s a beautifully designed application that’s very inviting – and the experience is less communication, more interaction.

What’s beautiful about Beluga is it’s as personal and private as you want it to be. It’s just ironic that Beluga was co-founded by three Google engineers — Ben Davenport, Lucy Zhang and Jonathan Perlow — and if you see their bios, it is hardly a surprise that they ended up with an interaction-centric product like Beluga.

Yesterday, I was introduced to a new app called Yobongo, and it comes from a San Francisco startup co-founded by alumni of Justin.tv. It’s a good-looking application that leverages your location, allowing you to find people around you and to chat with them. It is at the extreme opposite of Beluga: It’s open, and you can chat with anyone. It is very real-time in nature. Of course, there are other apps like Yobongo: MessageParty, for example!

What’s common between these two apps is their ability for synchronous messaging. This messaging can, in turn, become the under-pinning of what I earlier called interactions.

Ability to interact on an ongoing basis anywhere, any time and sharing everything, from moments to emotions – is what social is all about. From my vantage point, this is what Google should focus on. If not — you know it very well — Facebook will.”

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Amazon works on cloud computing

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 10, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from SFGate.

“Amazon.com Vice President James Hamilton’s schooling in computer-data centers started under the hood of a Lamborghini Countach.

Fixing luxury Italian autos in British Columbia while in his 20s taught Hamilton, 51, valuable lessons in problem solving, forcing him to come up with creative ways to repair cars because replacement parts were hard to find.

“It’s amazing how many things you can pick up in one industry and apply to another,” Hamilton, who also has been a distinguished engineer at Amazon since 2009, said.

Hamilton is putting these skills to use at Amazon, where he’s central to an effort by Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos to make Amazon Web Services, which leases server space and computing power to other companies, as big as the core e-commerce business. He’s charged with finding ways to make data centers work faster and more efficiently while fending off competition from Microsoft Corp. and IBM Corp., his two prior employers, and AT&T Inc.

$56 billion in 2014

Revenue from the kinds of cloud services offered by Amazon is expected to reach $56 billion in 2014, up from more than $16 billion in 2009, according to research firm IDC.

Amazon’s Web services brought in about $500 million in revenue in the past year, according to estimates from Barclays Capital and Lazard Capital Markets, or about 1.5 percent of Amazon’s $34.2 billion in sales. The company doesn’t disclose revenue from Web services, also called cloud computing.

As they pursue growth, Hamilton and his team will have to ensure that Amazon’s investment in Web services is well spent. Investors pummeled shares of the Seattle e-commerce giant on Jan. 28, the day after the company said it would boost spending on data centers and warehouses, fueling concern that margins will narrow.

Although still relatively small, Amazon Web Services is growing at a faster rate than the company’s core business, and it’s more profitable, said Sandeep Aggarwal, an analyst at Caris & Co. in San Francisco. Web services may generate as much as $900 million in sales this year, and operating margins could be as wide as 23 percent, compared with 5 percent margins in the main business, Aggarwal said.

Hamilton, who has filed almost 50 patents in various technologies, is developing new ideas in cloud computing, which lets companies run their software and infrastructure in remote data centers on an as-needed basis, rather than in a computer room down the hall.

He spends much of his time shuttling between departments, encouraging teams focused on storage, databases, networking and other functions to work together. One aim: devising ways to squeeze costs out of multimillion-dollar data centers and passing those savings on to customers such as Eli Lilly & Co. and Netflix Inc.

Among the challenges Hamilton and his colleagues face is making Amazon flexible enough for customers that want custom services, while overcoming companies’ concerns about storing sensitive information outside their own secure firewalls. They’ve met with early success, with Amazon emerging as the leader in cloud computing among developers, according to consulting and research firm Forrester Research Inc.

Innovation required

Amazon’s Web services unit will have to stay innovative to keep ahead of competition from Rackspace Hosting Inc., which manages applications for businesses. Startups such as Cloud.com also are trying to carve their own niche in cloud computing.

Amazon has been able to stand apart from rivals by introducing unique products, said Jeff Hammond, an analyst at Forrester. For example, the company unveiled a service last month called Elastic Beanstalk, which lets even novices who don’t know how to write computer code plug into Amazon’s computing power.

“These guys continue to innovate in a way that the large traditional companies – the IBMs and the Oracles and the Microsofts of the world – are not doing,” Hammond said.

Last year, Amazon introduced Spot Instances, which took a nontraditional approach to managing underused servers. While many companies pack tasks onto underused servers and unplug the extra ones, Hamilton and his colleagues began auctioning off idle computing capacity. The result: Amazon got revenue rather than an unused server and the customer got a cheaper price than the normal rental rate.

“The trick is to find a steady stream of things like that,” said Hamilton. “We can make such a big difference here on services and server efficiency.”

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Meet the New Mobile Network: It’s a Cloud

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, tagged , , , , , , , , , on February 7, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from GigaOm.

“The crush of smartphones, tablets and laptops all vying for ever more bandwidth intense content, has forced mobile operators to beef up their backhaul, rally for more spectrum and implement new network technologies. It’s also reshaping the way they think and build out their networks. Or it will. Last week, I had outlined the the demand for data combined with more people wanting access to the mobile web are forcing operators to add more diverse network technologies, such as Wi-Fi, picocells and femtocells and of course more base stations, which are all of their effort to build more creative pricing plans.

Essentially the current networks and airwaves are unable to meet the demands of millions of consumers trying to download YouTube ( s goog) videos and Posting pictures to their Facebook profiles. Carriers have already embraced Wi-Fi offload but the thought is even that won’t be enough. Plus adding Wi-Fi, and even smaller base stations such as pico cells or even femtocells adds complexity to the network.

As I said in my previous article: “But multiple networks and more base stations, as well as more demand, are forcing operators to undergo a shift similar to what the data center saw as the demand for computing began to overwhelm the profits and abilities of systems administrators to handle it. For example, when it took one person to manage 10 servers, owning 500 was an investment, but now with corporations owning tens of thousands, such a ratio would constrain demand. So places that required a lot of computing adapted and came up with new architectures and software that helped become the redundant, autonomic and cloud-based computing centers familiar today.That same shift will have to happen in the mobile networks, and Intucell is just one company that will help make this shift a reality.”

My previous article focused on Intucell, a startup that’s pushing a technology to help operators reconfigure their networks in real time. There are other startups aiming to address this space, whether it’s with an all-in-one chip design that can work on multiple radio frequencies inside a base station or companies trying to deliver real-time pricing and billing information to operators. But the big gear makers aren’t oblivious to this trend, and today Alcatel-Lucent announced its lightRadio suite of products that answers many of the needs mobile operators have.

With this launch, Alcatel-Lucent has fundamentally rethought the way cellular networks are built. Instead of the traditional model of multiple radios and antennas cluttering up a large cellular tower with cabinets of electronics connected back to the web via a fiber or hardwired backhaul pipe, it has built smaller antennas attached to a single radio that can send and receive Wireless signals using multiple radio technologies including 4G 3G and some 2G technologies. These are then connected back to the network via microwave backhaul and the processing required to separate and route signals occurs deeper inside the network rather than at the base station.”

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