Category: The Internet

I Still Believe in Patch

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AOL released their earnings last week and the market did a collective vomit-in-their-mouth over the results and their market cap dropped by one third.

Lots of the criticism came from AOL’s expenses in producing content and skepticism that they will ever make enough money on the content they are producing.  It also came out that they are spending $160 million a year on Patch which equals about $150k a year on each site.  One analyst (Robert Peck at Quasar Capita) said about AOL, “If you sell lemonade for $1 and it costs $800 to make it, that’s not a great business.”

Personally, I think AOL should continue to focus and pursue Patch. What’s their alternative?  Since Tim Armstrong has taken over, AOL has gone down the path of being an online content company.  That’s their strategy.  To abandon it would mean to become something completely different – something they have no vision or focus on.  Web companies don’t succeed and don’t create value by copying existing incumbents. They do it by innovating and building new distinct and unique offerings.  A hyperlocal site that covers and reports local news, that has local advertising and other deals tied in will exist.  The world is asking for it. AOL is uniquely positioned to build and provide it.  The newspaper is dead, and in 10 years online/mobile outlets are going to be the primary way news is found and read.

Of course, there is a question of whether they are structuring it correctly.  $150,000 a year seems steep for each site.  Could they do it more efficiently? I’m sure they can.  And, even people working there are admitting that their current attemps at revenue have been bad. But to call for them to stop doing it is just dumb.  I’m bullish and still believe in Patch and i think it’s a bold and interesting strategy for AOL and their only chance of being a relevant company in the web space.  I hope they make it work.


Speaking my Blog Post

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I get tired of remembering and also tired of writing.

My new desire is to just speak stuff and have it appear.  Twitter was easier than blogging but talking is even easier than that.

Henry James dictated his novels to his secretaries and it seemed to work out ok for him.  I was always hesitant of voice recognition but it’s now so good in fact that I just dictated this entire blog post via the Dragon app on my iPhone. It was a total joy.  I’m able to talk at 300 words a minute but I can only type and 50. It’s actually a no-brainer and I’m now wishing there’s a version of Dragon I can just leave running all day and have a text archives of my conversations in the office. I want everything I talk about be captured.

The web is already filled with tons of useless babble – and it’s about to be filled with a lot more of it. 


Why Turntable is Kicking Ass

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I have a new love in the office and it’s called Turntable.fm.  If you haven’t heard about this web application, it’s a website where you can go and play music.  Except it’s not just you playing music, it’s a table where you and up to 4 other friends each rotate playing music.  So, you play a song, then your friend, then another friend and then back to you (if only 3 people in the room).  If you’ve in an office where music playing is public or you want to get music suggestions from friends, this is the perfect application.

 

There have been a million music applications built in the past 5 years, so the question is: why is turntable successful where the other ones weren’t. Here’s why:

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Making Progress

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You can read all over the internet how hard it is to build a company from scratch.  There’s customer development which leads to product/market fit which leads to revenue which leads to profitability.  And that’s only if everything goes right.  It’s a challenge.

The analogy i always have in my head is a walk in the woods.  When you start a business, it’s like walking through a dense jungle.  You have a machete, hacking your way through the brush, and talking to whoever you can, trying to find a path.  Once you get a product and a sense of direction, you find a path, the walk becomes a little bit easier but, as they say, you’re not out of the woods.

As you talk to more customers and continue to develop your product, that path becomes wider and eventually turns into a dirt road.  Improving the sales and dev process plus hiring more help turns that road into a paved road and eventually, if everything goes right, it becomes a highway.

Each step of the way is exciting.  Right now at Kapost we’ve built a path and we’re working hard to turn that into a road.  It’s hard and challenging but it’s also damn fun.  We have a great team of folks and the daily progress we’re making is impressive.



Foursquare vs. Quora: which would you invest in?

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I had an interesting debate at lunch the other day with Toby about which company we’re more bullish on between Foursquare and Quora. To paraphrase Hansel, both are “so hot right now.” Both raised money at a very high valuation (Foursquare raised $20 on $95 million and Quora  11 on 86), yet both provide reasons to be skeptical.

With Foursquare you have an extremely popular mobile location app.  However, most people don’t “get it” – as in they don’t see reasons for checking in everywhere they go, don’t live in a dense-enough location where it serendipidous run-ins are possible, nor do they want to share that information.

Then there’s Quora.  It has some obsessed users who are contributing very original and valuable content.  The online Q&A industry is a great segment of the web but there are questions of whether the site ever get attention from mainstream users.

For me, my money is on Foursquare.  It’s one of the few mobile apps that capitalize on a user’s geopgraphic location.  It’s fun to use and has a lot of untapped potential.  The integration with gas stations and Starwood hotels are just the tip of the iceberg for them.  I do feel that only 10 or 5 percent of users who register end up regularly using the service but as they continue to get good deals to entice not only new user acquisition but engagement they will grow and be successful.   One criticism i have heard is that Facebook places will take out Foursquare.  I don’t think so and ironically actually wrote a response of why on Quora.  In fact, you can see from this graph how FS’s growth has increased since then.

That’s not to say that i’m anti-Quora. I’m not.  I think it’s one of the best web UI’s I’ve ever seen and I do find it useful.  I just wonder about it’s mainstream appeal.  So, if both had a $100 million valuation and i had to put my cash on one, I’d place it on Foursquare.  What about you?


The Machines are Coming! (at least in publishing)

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Last week I spoke at the NYC Hacks/Hackers conference which was a pretty great gettogether of journalists and technology folks. I spoke about all the editorial tools that Kapost provides and got a pretty good response.

One other company that was there was a company called Narrative Science and they sort of blew my mind. This company takes formatted data – think of a baseball box score or census results – and algorithmically turns that data into a news story. So, a boxscore that used to just be 9 innings with numbers in it becomes this:

Michigan held off Iowa for a 7-5 win on Saturday. The Hawkeyes (16-21) were unable to overcome a four-run sixth inning deficit. The Hawkeyes clawed back in the eighth inning, putting up one run.

Whoa.

They are doing 1000 stories a week, and now that they have the template for baseball nailed, they are going into census data, crime information and other avenues that typically just produce data. It’s only a matter of time before SkyNet appears.

SXSW Review

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Granted i was only in Austin for 2 days of the South by Soutwest festival, but here’s my take on it.

SXSW has now become a Spring Break for nerds. Similar to if you went to Daytona Beach for a real spring break and how you’d get sick of tequila and dance music, people at SXSW get overdosed of Apps, Twitter and the words “social” and “media”. With so many people shouting in your face, it had to tell what anyone is saying.

That said, here are some highlights:

  1. The group messaging apps were out in full effect.  GroupMe, Beluga and others were there.  These are fun apps.  My favorite is GroupMe and if you haven’t tried it – i recommend you do.  It’s a good way to keep in touch with people.   Here’s a good roundup of all the group messaging apps.
  2. Uber Cabs were everywhere.  They were the big winners of the show.  It was impossible to attend this year’s event and not hear of Uber.    Fantastic marketing job done by them.
  3. The gaming Keynote by Scavengr CEO was the talk of the weekend.  it’s nice to see a talk that’s well put-together and stimulating.  Gaming is in lots of apps, and with good reason.  If you can find the video of this, you should watch it (and tell me where it is so i can see it too).

The “Better-Nevers” of Technology

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I was thinking about my life and the web the other day and talking to some friends over lunch about how I love that i’m married to a woman who enjoys the web and has intellectual curiosity about it. I was then approached by a woman in a restaurant who was eavesdropping on my conversation. She called me over and then went on for 10 minutes telling me how my love of technology is what’s making the world so horrible. How my blind devotion to electricity is polluting the lakes and ruining the planet. I’ll spare you the “conversation” but let’s just say, i left wishing she hadn’t felt a need to share and that my friends were quicker to pull me away.

So, for her and her hatred of technology, I’d like to share a quote i just read:

“When department stores had Christmas window with clockwork puppets, the world was going to pieces; when the city streets were filled with horse-drawn carriages running by bright-colored posters, you could no longer tell the real from the simulated; when people were listening to shellac 78’s and looking at color newspaper supplements, the world had become a kaleidoscope of disassociated imagery; and when the broadcast air was filled with droning black-and-white images of men in suits reading news, all of life had become indistinguishable from your fantasies of it. It was Marx, not Steve Jobs, who said that the character of modern life is that everything falls apart”

History repeats itself. The world is changing and that change frightens people and computers are thus responsible for the problems. This isn’t the case. It’s not the web making the world a worse place. Relax people.

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