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:

Continue reading “Why Turntable is Kicking Ass” →

Funniest show on TV right now? Easy, it’s “Children’s Hospital”

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There’s a program that has only 10 minute-long episodes that’s on only at midnight once a week on the channel Adult Swim.  It may be random, but man is it glorious.  I challenge you not to love this show.  Check out this quick episode:

The show is created by Rob Corddry – who most of you know from Comedy Central – and the storyline centers on the staff of Childrens Hospital, a hospital for children, named after a doctor named Arthur Childrens. The hospital sporadically (and usually without reason) is mentioned as being located within Brazil, despite making virtually no effort to conceal that the series is shot in Los Angeles, California. Corddry is part of an amazing ensemble cast portraying the doctors, which includes Rob Hubel, Ken Marino (Party Down), Megan Mullaly (also from Party Down), Malin Akerman, Henry Winkler and many other commedians you probably know such as Michael Cera who does the intercom annoucements in the hospital.

The show is now in it’s third season.  I personally think the 3rd season has been the funniest so i would jump directly there if you can.  Enjoy my friends.  It’s aways such a treat to find such awesomeness.



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).

So, what do you do again?

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I’ve been asked this question a bit lately.  I remember a funny Friends episode where the gang played a trivia game about how well each person knows the other friends.  The final winner-take-all question asked to the group was, “What does Chandler do for work?”  To which nobody, not even his wife, could answer.  Well, it seems that I’m the Chandler Bing of my friends.

I’m not too surprised by this as the startup that Toby, Nader and I started last year, named Kapost, has shifted (aka “pivoted”) three times in the past 18 months so I frequently end up describing my work in different ways to the same person.  I could see where the confusion comes from.   Luckily, describing my job just got a little bit easier today when we launched a new commercial describing Kapost.   What we do is build software to help Editors of websites manage their users and the content they want to publish.   Watch the commercial below to get a more fun and colorful explanation of this.

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