Microsoft and Apple should hate one another right now. I mean, really hate each other. After decades of domination, Microsoft has watched their rival move from death’s door to become the most valuable company in the world — over $200 billion more valuable than Microsoft itself. And it was Microsoft who helped get Apple there, remember, with a timely cash infusion in 1997.
Steve Ballmer laughed off the iPhone, which eventually helped kill off Windows Mobile — and it’s now bigger than all of Microsoft’s businesses combined. And the company shrugged off the iPad, even as it established a category, tablets, which Microsoft itself had been trying to establish for years. → Read More
We are in a whole new world of platforms, a post-PC era, which I’d more aptly describe as the always/everywhere era, finally, and that means a whole new set of opportunities. Add to it the fact that because of a variety of factors too numerous to cover here, the cost of experimentation has gone down dramatically (one can start a web startup or write an Android app with no more than a student credit card!) and raw computing power is taken for granted.
What you get as a result are the recent successes in the Internet/mobile space like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Zynga, Groupon and others, all of which have reenergized both entrepreneurs and investors. Many of these new startups will be the usual poor clones or feature add-ons to Facebook and Twitter, or poor attempts at doing one feature or another better than Zynga, or applying LinkedIn to a small vertical. → Read More
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Everyone is applauding Oracle and SAP’s cloud acquisitions — RightNow, SuccessFactors, and now Taleo. But the biggest cheers are coming from SAP and Oracle’s cloud competitors, salesforce.com and Workday. Because with these acquisitions, Oracle and SAP have effectively validated the cloud and sounded the death knell for ERP (enterprise resource planning).
Why? Because SAP and Oracle are acquiescing to the cloud, yet they have no strategy to get their customers there. If SAP and Oracle were serious about the cloud, where are their big cloud solutions or visions for migrating customers? → Read More
Good questions have been asked lately of tech companies without gender diversity on their boards of directors. While women comprise 51% of the population, they make up only 15.7% of Fortune 500 boards of directors, less than 10% of California tech company boards, and 9.1% of Silicon Valley boards.
Why should we care? For one, women are the power users of many products and it’s just smart business to have an understanding of key customers around the table. Could you imagine a game company without any gamers on the leadership team or board?
If you’re not aware, studies also show companies with gender diversity at the top drive better financial performance on multiple measures. → Read More
This is not a rant against email. There are plenty of those out there. This is a story of hope.
It sounds nuts, but I really enjoy email, though I realize I’m in the tiny minority and that it’s legitimately unmanageable for many, especially those that don’t use interfaces that automatically thread messages by subject or label.
The complaints against email are universal: Lines of lines of emails accumulate with the force of a snowball racing down the side of a mountain during an avalanche, and the business of crafting and answering emails only creates more email. It’s a never-ending cycle, making any “Inbox 0” achievement ephemeral at best. → Read More
With the pending public offering of Facebook anticipated to be the largest tech IPO in history, it’s an interesting time to think about where we go from here. Some say “social is done,” Facebook is all the social media anyone would ever want or need. Unquestionably, as it nears one billion accounts, in the solar system of social media, Facebook is the Sun — the gravitational center around which everything social revolves.
But while some may pronounce that Facebook is all the social we’d ever need, users clearly haven’t gotten the memo. → Read More
I had dinner last week with a senior exec from a global advertising holding company who asked what I often get asked these days, “What’s going on with mobile advertising?” it’s a timely question as last week Apple announced they were lowering the buy-in price for iAds from $500,000 to $100,000 and increasing the publisher revenue share from 60% to 70%. The move seems innocent enough, but with a little inspection is actually very worrying for a segment still struggling to shake off it’s inferiority complex, and potentially chilling for many innovators and entrepreneurs. → Read More
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Last week, Forbes contributor Eric Jackson published a list on the 9 lessons that Jeremy Lin can teach you; number 2 on his list was “Seize the Opportunity”. Lin’s not the first, and he won’t be the last, but his meteoric rise has reminded us once again that anything is possible if you seize the opportunity.
In this article, we’ll expand on that and discuss how you can seize your opportunities. It is, after all, easier said than done. → Read More
They say hindsight is 20/20.
By now, everyone knows about the fastest-growing site on the web. Yet, for a period of time in 2011, despite all the signals pointing toward the phenomena, most in Silicon Valley weren’t able to sniff out the trend even though, looking back, the clues were right under our noses. I wanted to write this post to offer a theory as to why the Valley, at large, missed this trend. Additionally, I want to underscore that this post is less about Pinterest, and more about how even the most focused, attentive audiences can miss the forest for the trees. → Read More
Looking for internships and jobs after college can be exhilarating, especially for people with engineering and other technical expertise. In an otherwise tough job market, demand for software engineers is higher than ever right now. You may find that companies are actually competing to pay you for the knowledge you worked so hard to acquire in school.
But as pumped as I was when I started out, I also felt a lot of stress: the uncertainty of facing an interviewer; the big differences between companies; the difficulty of deciding which company would be best for me. → Read More
A college textbook can cost a staggering $200. Over four years of study, students can easily spend thousands of dollars on books on top of a hefty tuition.
The situation is not much better in public elementary, middle and high schools, where taxpayers pick up the bill. California spends around $100 on every math and science book for its 2 million high school students, for example.
But textbooks don’t have to be such a financial burden. → Read More
Does Address-gate have you terrified that your mobile apps are secretly slurping up your address book? AdiOS is a free new Mac program that in seconds detects which of your iOS apps have the ability to access your phone numbers and email contacts. AdiOS doesn’t indicate if or how the apps are transmitting your address book, but you should still delete any that access it.
No. That was a joke. This has all gotten ridiculous. → Read More
I believe the children are the future. (What, too soon?) But in the case of the new FTC report on mobile applications for kids, which references the current data handling practices employed by mobile developers, the children are the future. They’re the future indicators of how our personal information needs to be handled in today’s mobile app ecosystem.
Although the new report makes recommendations specifically for children’s applications, there’s obviously an undercurrent of outrage and violation underway now (thanks mainly to addressgate). People, not just parents, need to control and understand how and why their data is being collected, used, and shared, and what that really means. The question is, how is this done? → Read More
There’s a good reason Apple let Mountain Lion out of its cage this morning with no fanfare or event. Like Lion, the improvements are minor at best and some less than useless. Lion hasn’t sold particularly well, and few of its “improvements” have caught the attention of the public, except when they try to scroll down and it goes up. Personally, I thought being able to resize windows from any edge was worth the price of admission alone, but the rest, not so much.
And now here is Mountain Lion, a collection of iOS apps and features already available elsewhere. And a shady “security” feature that by default prevents you from getting apps from any non-Apple-approved source (the default is not Mac App Store only, as was written earlier). → Read More
“In the Studio” at TechCrunch TV continues this week with a guest who began his career as a venture capitalist at the ripe old age of 18 and today, after eight years as an investor, is now going out on his own with a new e-commerce venture.
As a freshman at Babson College in Massachusetts, Gautam Gupta led his school’s entrepreneurship club and, in the process, fostered connections with a handful of the Boston’s venture capital investors. One of those connections developed into a more professional relationship. General Catalyst, a Cambridge, Mass-headquartered venture capital firm, which has recently opened full offices in Palo Alto, CA and New York City, hired Gupta as an intern during the school years, a full summer internship, and during his senior year, offered him a full-time position in Harvard Square. → Read More
With today’s reveal of the next version of OS X - OS X 10.8, aka Mountain Lion – Apple is more deeply integrating its iCloud service into the operating system itself. No longer will storing your documents in the cloud feel like an extra, value-added feature – it will feel like part of the OS itself. The cloud is just another drive, Apple seems to say, and saving to the cloud should look and feel no different than saving to your Documents folder or your Desktop.
The idea, of course, is not novel. It’s what startups like Dropbox are doing today: making a drive that appears like any other, but that can be accessed from any machine. While on the surface, it’s easy to dub iCloud “Apple’s version of Dropbox,” the truth is actually more complex: it’s about building a new computing paradigm. → Read More
After a week of confused coverage around which mobile app developers access user address books and how they do it, we are finally getting a product-level resolution. Apple says today (in time to beat back some inquiring congressmen) that it will start requiring developers to ask for explicit user permission in order to access these contacts.
The new interface, slated for its next iOS operating system release, will provide a permissions notification to users after they install an app, similar to how it currently requires users to approve location sharing or push notifications. This change will add some arguably unnecessary friction to users of apps that pull address books — and a lot of developers will be affected, as 11% of free iOS apps were accessing address books as of the start of last year, according to one study.
→ Read More
While the hand-wringing over the future of journalism, blogging, the nature of conflicts of interest, yada yada, has been deeply interesting (alongside the personal attacks – we all like a good public fight don’t we?), it’s worth recalling that the furore was kicked off by a fairly pertinent point. To whit: Path was uploading user’s address books without their explicit permission.
Yes it was a rare omission by Nick Bilton to not call out the 50 or so other apps that often do this by default. But his essential point remains correct, and it’s kicked off a wave of excellent reporting into which apps behave like this, and why Apple has allowed this to go on for so long.
But while we continue to point the finger at startups with smartphone apps designed to be social, I’d like to remind Silicon Valley about another business which, despite claims to the contrary, is deeply interested in our private affairs, and is unlikely ever to be as contrite as Dave Morin was just recently.
I speak of the sector known as Deep Packet Inspection. → Read More
An entrepreneur receives lots of contradictory advice from really smart, experienced people. For example, you’ve probably been told to be both persistent and flexible; to have a clear vision you pursue relentlessly, and yet also to change your vision as the market changes. Simple, right?
This same tension pervades career advice. Some will tell you to think about where you want to be in ten years, work backwards, and construct a long-term career plan for realizing your ambitions. Others tell you that firm plans are like a straitjacket; they will blind you to unexpected breakout opportunities. It’s better, they say, to stay nimble and opportunistic. → Read More
Tools cannot judge of their own use. The hammer does not rebel at striking pavement, the brush recoil at distasteful composition. This is true of the internet and its tools as well. What is bittorrent? A way to easily transfer large files between peers. Used by many people in legitimate ways, by pirates for illicit purposes. Bittorrent can’t choose to allow one and deny the other. If it could, it would no longer be a tool.
What is Reddit? A way for millions of people to collaboratively promote links and discuss them more or less anonymously. Used by many people in legitimate ways, and by pedophiles for illicit purposes. Reddit has decided to be more proactive in their policing of the site. If Reddit ever was truly a tool, it isn’t any longer.
Not that this is a bad thing, exactly. It’s just not going to work. To paraphrase Churchill, this was the worst thing Reddit could do, except for every thing they could have done. → Read More
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