February 2012
1 post
Hanging out at Google+
It turns out that most of my daily posts are going to Google+. If you’re interested in what I’m up to day-to-day, you can follow me here.
Thanks
December 2011
4 posts
The Awesome
Any product going against entrenched competition needs “The Awesome” - that one set of features that make it head and shoulders above them. Driving back from a gig last night, I was talking with friend Mike (former Apple engineer) about the webphone. We discussed what would be “The Awesome” of a new phone platform, a feature that would make a new product stand out. I use the term “feature”...
Wholesale Carrier
Because of Verizon Wireless’ recent boneheaded move, I feel it’s time to turn either Sprint or T-Mobile into a wholesale carrier. This would make their MVNO business into their primary revenue maker and enable likes of Google, Microsoft, and anyone else brave enough to develop a phone platform to deliver a great product without being second guessed or blocked by the wireless service...
Don’t tie me up with a contract
Small talk sometimes yields an insightful gem of an idea. Today I had one of those encounters where someone asked what I did for work. The best I could come up with that early in the morning was “I’m trying to build a new kind of cell phone.” “Well, make it so I’m locked in a contract for two years” she said. I must have looked confused so she went on. “It took me $500 to get out of my AT&T...
AT&T/T-Mobile was all about the subscribers
When an internal AT&T email said they could build out their network for $3.9 billion, it’s no wonder the Department of Justice and the FCC barfed all a $39 billion merger. This deal was all about 1) AT&T paying $1,000 per T-Mobile subscriber to get future contract revenue, and 2) Deutsche Telekom trying to get out of a US market that’s too competitive. Why AT&T thought this was a...
November 2011
1 post
Prepaid subscribers are holding up the numbers of...
T-Mobile’s Q3 Earnings continued to show that prepaid subscribers are growing and contract subscribers are shrinking. T-Mobile’s prepaid subscribers grew by 312,000, offsetting a loss of 186,000 contract customers, bring a net overall gain of 126,000. Compared to the top two carriers, Verizon and AT&T, this net gain is essentially breakeven. Prepaid subscribers are of increasing importance...
October 2011
3 posts
Partners are your 1st investment round
The angel/seed/first-round investment isn’t the most important pitch you have to make, it’s finding the people that will help you create your idea and be in it for the 2-4 years to make it happen. So I have to write a 1-2 pager to some people outlining what I think is the Next Big Thing®. Having done this exercise a lot (at these guys will attest) it’s probably the hardest 250-500 words I’ll ever...
On Design and Steve Jobs
Before I had heard of Steve Job’s death yesterday, I had looked up the announcement date of the original iPhone (Jan. 2007). The iPhone has defined the look, feel, and function of all subsequent smartphones for the last five years. Whether it’s Android, Windows Mobile, WebOS or any other platform, they’re all measured against the basic actions people experience from that original phone. Five...
@Twilio, @Heroku, @Phonegap - Selling pick axes to...
Twilio, Heroku, Phonegap and others will be remembered as the companies that sold the pick axes to the plethora of me-too startups mining for liquidity-event gold. When the next shakeout of seed funded company starts in the next six months, we’re going to igure out why all those “Air bnb - for cats” startups didn’t make it to the next level of growth and why the infrastructure businesses survived....
September 2011
4 posts
Trip Report - Using Mobile Web Apps for the...
I spent the weekend just mobile web apps for my online activities. My goal was to see the current state of these apps and determine what might need improvement. My phone is an LG Optimus V (Android 2.2) on Virgin Mobile. Here’s what I found out: Using mobile web apps with current mobile browsers can result in serious performance problems on the phone. If I had three or more ‘windows’ open in the...
WebPhone Weekend - Sep 23-25
Here are the rules: On Friday afternoon (Sep 23), I’ll only use my phone for email, news, Twitter, etc., and not a desktop or laptop.
I’m only going to use mobile web versions of the services for which I have apps installed. No use of native platform apps.
If most of the world will be using a phone to access Internet services, then I might as well live in their shoes for a weekend to...
Carriers must drive WebPhone sales
I’ve noticed more interest in building apps for phones using HTML5 instead of the native platforms. As I mentioned previously, the Mobile OS realm is getting more complicated and a lot of startups with promising services are starting to rethink the best way to get their offerings to a customer’s small screen. Carriers, especially those in emerging markets have a lot to gain from this transition....
The Mozilla Phone
Mozilla Corp. is working on two new projects that could provide opportunities for smart phone growth in emerging markets. With the acquisition of Motorola, the turmoil at RIM, and Nokia floundering, there’s not a better time to create a new phone platform. As much as I hate to use the word ‘platform’, Mozilla is credibly doing that through two new projects; WebAPI and Boot to Gecko (B2G). WebAPI...
July 2011
2 posts
So done with Email
OK - I haven’t deleted my Gmail account, and I still love getting emails from you all, but I’m done thinking about integrating it into any new services. Once upon a time, email was the way you got in touch with your customers. You spent a lot of time integrating into your web service, managing mail spools automajically and figure out how to parse replies out of a stream of X-headers. And after...
HTML5 v. Mobile Apps - again
A mobile web site will get you 80% of the feature set you’d get with an application, but is faster and easier to develop. I recently talked with a local city manager wanting to promote activities and wondered if a mobile app for iOS and Android would make sense to do. After listening to her requirements, I recommended against a native phone application and suggested creating a mobile web site...
May 2011
1 post
QR Codes best for a one to many communications
A recent trip to Fenway Park made me think about QR Codes and best way to get a link to information into a phone
Last Friday I went to see the Red Sox play the Mariners. I decided to enter the park via Yawkey Way and in the hubbub of souvenirs and sausages, someone handed me a business card sized handout asking me to participate in a survey.
As I got to my seat in the center field bleachers,...
April 2011
3 posts
Adjusting Pitch
I consider myself lucky that I get to hang out with a group of great musicians. While Pitch has a couple of meanings, in today’s post they have a similar requirement.
When singing you need to be able to listen to yourself, or have someone who’s opinion you trust, listen to you. When necessary, you make adjustments to a number of parameters (breathing, stance, etc.) so you make the...
Feed The Meter - my entry in the MassChallenge
The cat is out of the bag. The project that I’ve been working on is (currently) called Feed The Meter, and it’ll let you pay for your street parking (like at a parking meter) with your smart phone.
Parking, according to Donald Shoup of UCLA, is the aspect of urban planning that gets ignored. Left mostly to guesswork, we’re either left with asphalt deserts surrounding...
Micropayments not so much
Micropayment clearing fees are still too high for the service I’m working on. Both Amazon and PayPal and want 10% plus 5-cents for transactions less than $10 and $12 respectively. With an average transaction of $1 for my service, I’m loosing 10% just to get my money that I need to then extract my percentage before paying my customer. Yikes!
I figured out a better solution for the...
March 2011
7 posts
Group messaging is a feature, not a product.
My apologies if this post has the taste of sour grapes but the recent rise of Group Messaging Startups are an example of low barrier of entry.
About the time Padpaw was shutdown, Twilio, an innovative telecommunications company, started offering SMS services to developers. Using a straightforward REST API, any web site could send and receive text messages to US carrier cell phones. Before...
The number of cities and towns in the US are...
In case you were wondering how many cities and towns are in the US, I was able to get a tab-delimited text file from the US Census that has the count at 29,514. I don’t know the populations of each, but I’ll be filling that in over the next couple of weeks. Also for you stat-fans; the number of cities with a population of over 100,000 people is 282.
The reason this post is that many...
I decided to resurrect that idea from last week.
Remember that angsty post I made about ‘circling back’? Well I seem to have jumped the gun a bit. Turns out the invinsible company in the market I’m investigating isn’t such a big deal after all. In fact some of their ‘successes’ are just pilots projects and not full blown implementations.
I realize that they’re doing pilot deployments and I’m just...
I sideloaded Amazon App Store today.
Sideloading is one of the big reasons I prefer Android on my phone. It lets me load applications that don’t reside in the Android Market. This is useful for applications that are a work in progress and not ready for distribution. It’s also useful for companies like Amazon to market and distribute their own applications.
If you go to the Amazon App Store for Android you’ll be...
Trip report from yesterday's OpenCoffee
Had a great OpenCoffee yesterday with Christine Sierra of Carlton PR & Marketing and Anurag Wakhlu of Coloci. Coloci is a location based service that tells your friends where you’re going to be in the future so they can plan to meet you.
Be sure to come to our next action-packed OpenCoffee at Brew’d Awakening in Lowell this coming Tuesday starting at 8:30 AM. More info here.
Circling back on assumptions kills pitch but saves...
So I was in process of developing a pitch for a new idea and as I’ve done so many times in the past, I laid out the major bullets on market size, business plan, etc. When I got to listing competitors I thought it would be a good idea to check their progress. It must have been a while since I last checked because the major competitor branched out enough in their existing service to cover the...
Great OpenCoffee Lowell Today
If you’re in the Merrimack Valley area, please stop by OpenCoffee Lowell. It happens every Tuesday morning at 8:30 and its a great place to meet area entrepreneurs and find out what’s going on in local start-ups.
Today I met Roberto of Junk Culture who sells retro and vintage goods. I also met Jon Bell who runs The Space which offers musicians rehearsal space and recording...
February 2011
6 posts
Facebook on a SIM and the Middle East
I’ve been captivated with the events in Egypt and Libya. It’s been incredible how citizens have organized and gotten information out of their countries despite the huge efforts of state security. Even the shutdown of border routers didn’t stop online communications. As entrenched regimes are being toppled, thoughts now turn to what will happen next. Will democracy bloom or will a power vacuum...
Mobile apps that appear 'consumer' but are really...
I installed an app yesterday that I thought would give me a measure of convenience, but stumbled onto a gold mine for retail businesses.
Example: CardStar is an app that get’s all the retail loyalty (tracking?) barcoded widgets stored on your keychain onto your phone. I installed it yesterday and was able to scan some of the widgets and store them. Later, I used one at the drugstore with no...
Review of Virgin Mobile Optimus V
The Optimus V is a great phone for $150 and no contract. It certainly gets the job done whether I’m playing Angry Birds, checking my mail, or calling someone (you know, talking?). Phone performance is excellent with great sound which I need (somewhat hard of hearing). I’m still getting used to Swype for text entry but time will tell whether I can truly live without a real keyboard on...
#mcb4 - Skating to where the puck is going
MobileCampBoston4 was a huge success. Thanks to all the people that helped organize it, and to our sponsor Nokia.
What I was impressed with was the level of discussion taking place in the sessions. They were all filled with people that are up to speed and ready to get more in-depth information. My favorite presentation was from Localytics where they shared real data that their application...
You’ve got one year to get your startup off the...
It starts after Launch - your initial announcement of your product/service that gets you that fantastic bump in publicity. In that year you have to reach for your company’s lifestyle, which means “we make money by providing X to Y market.” While it doesn’t require you to be cash flow positive from operations, it should clear (i.e. if we hire two more sales reps) on how to get there. As obvious as...
Everyone will have a smart phone in 2011, Why?...
Recently I bought a new phone from Virgin Mobile (LG Optimus V) for $150 and signed up for a $40/month plan (1200 minutes, all-you-can-eat data). I could have spent $50 more and gotten a Google Nexus S, but I would have been locked in T-Mobile for two more years. I’d also have missed out on a opportunity to really understand US consumers. Let me explain: During the Econopocalypse, many US...
October 2010
3 posts
Unlock Newspapers with QR Codes
More from the White Paper
The obvious goal of any newspaper, AltWeekly or otherwise, is to get more readers. Today these readers have to get the value of the ‘paper’ (articles, reviews, features) from the newsstand or online. By providing a bridge for a mobile reader of the newspaper to the comment and sharing functions it creates a virtuous circle bringing in more readers. The bridge between...
Newspaper as Vector for Mobile News
A newspaper the perfect vector for a mobile news strategy. This section outlines the readers experience with AltNewsweeklies. As always, feedback welcome:
Reader Experience (RX)
While some technologists envisioned an iPadian future of tablets delivering newspaper subscriptions, the reality is that most people will have a phone in their pocket and the tablet in their living room. Until prices for...
AltNewsweeklies - State of Business and Mobile...
More from my whitepaper that is currently in review:
State of AltWeekly Business AltWeeklies, like other newspapers, haven’t been spared from the decline in readership. According to the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (AAN), the combined circulation of weekly papers dropped by nearly 5% in 2008 and 7% in 2009#. Using the current AAN member directory data shows a total decline of over...
September 2010
1 post
Abstract: Mobile Strategies for Alternative...
Here’s an abstract of a white paper I’m writing. Any feedback would be appreciated. As I write more sections, I’ll publish them here. This white paper will outline the unique opportunities that alternative weekly newspapers (AltWeeklies) have in reaching new and existing readers through their smart phones. While the AltWeeklies haven’t been immune from the decline in print...
July 2010
27 posts
kerskine: RT @padpaw: Padpaw is shutting down -... →
kerskine: @BostonOperaColl Bravi Tutti on a great... →
kerskine: Marriage of Figaro (@ Massachusetts... →
kerskine: Imagine how cool it would be if a huge... →
kerskine: I <3'd Kodachome 25 =(. RT @GadgetLab... →
kerskine: On the lawn I watched a thunderstorm... →
kerskine: On the lawn listening to Mahler 3. Go... →
kerskine: Making pasta for salad in a coffee... →
kerskine: I'm coming to a conclusion that for my... →
kerskine: Unions and non-profits need to hire... →
kerskine: Duct tape, is there anything you can't... →
kerskine: Gee - off to The 'Wood on Wed.. Lots to... →
kerskine: Anyone in New World have an update on... →
kerskine: Really getting sick of all the flopping... →