Contributor Steve Cheney is currently Head of Business Development at GroupMe, and formerly an engineer and programmer with a rich technology background across consumer, mobile, infrastructure and web industries.
A Silicon Valley native, Steve spent the majority of his career at Integrated Device Technology, marketing hardware and software to Apple, Cisco, Intel, Google, Nokia, Foxconn and hundreds of other OEMs/ODMs worldwide.
Steve has also worked as an M&A investment banker at Morgan Stanley and in educational roles both independently and at Kaplan. During college he founded an independent software business which developed custom productivity solutions for construction and law firms, and co-founded a ten-person construction firm which grew to serve thousands of residential clients.
He has a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of California at Santa Barbara and an MBA from Columbia University with an emphasis in finance and strategy.
On Thanksgiving, Pinterest’s co-founder Ben Silbermann sent an email to his entire user base saying thanks. It was fitting, as Pinterest was born two years ago on Thanksgiving day 2009. Ben had been working on a website with a few friends, and his girlfriend came up with the name while they were watching TV. Pinterest officially launched to the world 4 months later.
Some startups go crazy with hype and users right after launch. And some don’t. I don’t know the founders, but I thought I’d take apart Pinterest’s story to discuss growth and virality in consumer web startups. Pinterest was not an overnight success. On the contrary, its growth was surprisingly modest after Turkey Day 2009.
Take a look at Pinterest’s one-year traffic on Compete from Oct 2010 to Oct 2011, which is the picture in this post, and shows Pinterest rising from 40,000 to 3.2 million monthly unique visitors. I took both ends of this chart and estimated monthly compounded growth over Pinterest’s lifetime, then interpolated the curve using constant growth and put the results in this Google Spreadsheet. → Read More
Lately it seems like there is endless news around messaging, VoIP and video calling. Apple recently announced they’d added FaceTime support for the Mac, and had shipped 19 million FaceTime-enabled iOS devices since June. Google Voice also made headlines last week for an outage, but I think the bigger news associated with that downtime is how fast they’ve been growing. And there’s been a flurry of startup activity around messaging and communication as well, such as the super innovative GroupMe releasing an Android App.
The resounding theme from all these seemingly disparate announcements is that messaging, voice, video, and chatting applications are on fire. Sure, we all use social media, but it sure hasn’t dampened people’s affinity for texting or making a call. → Read More
During the Back to the Mac event, Steve Jobs made a particularly witty remark that made the audience giddy with laughter:
“We asked ourselves, what would happen if a MacBook and an iPad hooked up? Well, this is the result, we think it’s the future of notebooks.”
There is always a deep strategic intent with the things that Apple does, especially when it comes from Steve Jobs. The first phase in “hooking up” that took place between the MacBook Air and iPad foretells a deeply converged future on many levels. → Read More
Last week we saw the carriers’ growth numbers for Q3 2010, and AT&T completely blew away Verizon with new subscribers. Despite mass availability of Android phones, Verizon only added 1 million subscribers in Q3, its lowest total in years. AT&T added 2.6 million.
It’s now completely clear why Verizon has finally capitulated and cozied up with Apple—even with tons of Android models, Verizon simply can’t compete with AT&T in terms of new subscriber growth.
Right now the question du jour among iPhone aficionados is how many net subscribers will leave AT&T and switch to Verizon once the iPhone becomes a reality in January 2011. That number is going to be a lot larger than people think for a series of compounding reasons. → Read More
Back in August I broke the news that Apple was lining up a component purchase of several million chipsets from Qualcomm for a CDMA-powered Verizon iPhone due in January. Last week, over two months later, the Wall Street Journal confirmed this story.
Now that folks are finally celebrating the iPhone’s imminent arrival to Verizon, speculation has shifted to whether the January model will take advantage of Verizon’s “4G” network. 4G (not to be confused with iPhone 4) refers to the fourth generation of cellular standards, and both Verizon and AT&T have publicly released launch plans for 4G networks based on LTE in 2011.
This impending shift from 3G to 4G presents a major inflection point in the reign of the iPhone franchise. Does Apple move to 4G right away, or do they wait for the network to mature? As these questions become front and center, I have some very interesting news to share about Apple’s plans. → Read More
Intel’s recent acquisition binge has been enormous—they’ve spent almost $10 billion in the past month on TI’s cable modem division, security software maker McAfee, and Infineon’s Wireless Solutions (WLS) business.
At last week’s Intel Developer Forum, CEO Paul Otellini talked about this massive acquisition spree like it’s predestined to succeed. But if we peel the onion back on time, Intel’s pitiful M&A track record suggests this couldn’t be further from the truth.
Between 1999-2003, Intel spent over $11 billion buying about 40 companies, and the vast majority of these acquisitions failed. In fact, of the 15 largest acquisitions in its history, Intel has shut down or sold off the acquired products in every single case (aside from Wind River which is too recent to include). → Read More
As I was writing this, news of the HP / Dell bidding war for 3PAR broke on the front page of Yahoo. This made me laugh, as it typified just how crazy this story has become—few things outside of a bidding war will make a storage acquisition sexy enough to make mainstream news.
At $30, HP’s current offer is the sixth bid, a 200 percent premium over 3PAR’s previous $10 share price. Not only is this insane, but it’s also nearly unprecedented in M&A history. And since 3PAR is trading above $32 the market thinks Dell will bid even higher. → Read More
Updating your location in the background on mobile apps is gaining momentum as a use-case, most recently with an app allowing you to Check-In On Foursquare Without Taking Your Phone Out Of Your Pocket.
Problem is—though this sounds really amazing—such uses of background location services are bound by hardware / software limitations and aren’t quite ready for primetime. The Future Checkin app (which is obviously an innovative example of using Foursquare’s API) reveals why: this app specifies a 300 meter check-in radius, which is equivalent to about four city blocks.
Imagine being in Union Square in New York and the app deciding to “check in”—to where exactly? You could be close to 10-20 places you’ve already checked into in the past. → Read More
Apple’s earnings and revenue growth in mobile have been awe-inspiring to witness. From zero presence three years ago, Apple is now the most profitable cell phone maker in the world.
Apple’s success in this compressed period has helped it become an enormous buyer of components. In fact iSuppli projects that next year Apple will become the second-largest semiconductor buyer worldwide and may edge out HP in 2012 to become the world’s largest.
Though this scale presents Apple with enormous bargaining power, it also begs the question: Should Apple own its own wireless chip development? → Read More
