So I’ll admit that I’ve been out of touch with Twitter for the past couple of months. I signed up for an account a few months ago and had maybe like 20 tweets to my name.
I thought I might give it another go and here’s what I get:
Read the rest...
arthurfreydin on October 10th, 2008
There has been quite a bit of chatter going on about the market meltdown and its effect on the startups of Silicon Valley. Funding will be increasingly hard to come by, especially from venture capitalists that are affected by the public market such as Sequoia Capital (they invested in Google, Apple, etc.). A number of venture capital firms have released presentations and emails of doom to their portfolio companies urging them to buckle down and control burn rates. They also advise to sell if the opportunity presents itself, even if it’s at a loss. The outlook has been grim, especially to those startups with light, or no revenue streams whatsoever.
It’s scary out there, especially to anyone that has been considering launching their own startup. I hold a different view on things. I think that this is going to be a time that will weed out nonsense and promote actual companies that actually add value and generate revenue. Anyone can launch a social network, but it takes a certain kind of entrepreneur to actually launch successfully and fulfill an actual need. Fulfilling a need is where it’s at for a while – it’s no longer enough to present a service that a user may just want. This paves the way for startups that make our everyday tasks easier, more productive, and more efficient. Those are the startups to keep an eye on.
Now is the time for great ideas to flourish while all the dumb ventures get flushed down the drain. Who needs social networks when all they do is weaken your productivity? Now is the time for companies that you simply can’t do without.
arthurfreydin on October 8th, 2008
A buddy of mine called me up the other day and asked me to help him purchase a PC. He stated that he didn’t need anything extravagant and all he used his now defunct PC for is trading in the stock market and surfing the net. His sole requirement was that the computer needed to have a decent amount of RAM to support 2 monitors and a few resource hungry applications running at the same time. No problem.
I accompanied him to our local Best Buy to look at his options, and man did he have options! We were confronted with a sea of black & grey boxes from HP, Acer, Gateway, and Compaq. Here’s the revelation. Neither of us cared what the brand was; as long as the PC had a minimum of 2GB of RAM, he was fine. There are no differentiating factors between any of the PCs aside from price, configuration, and whether or not Best Buy had it in stock.
This brings me to why I never really loved my PC.
The Looks
It’s so hard to love something that is so indistinguishable from everything else. If you had stacked hundreds of PC towers next to each other in a line and through mine into the mix, it would take close inspection to actually pick mine out of the pack. There is only so much a PC manufacturer can do to stand out - manufacturing a cleverly hidden media card reader or replacing a side panel with see-through glass is not innovation. It’s a lame attempt at punching a customer hard enough for them to give their box a passing look.
The Operating System
I can probably reuse the above example in describing the operating system. Windows XP is not exciting, it suffices a need that doesn’t over-deliver. It looks identical on every machine, no matter who manufacturers it (Sony’s desktops may look a bit different on a first boot thanks to all the bloatware). After you boot into XP, you forget what brand your PC is until you reach for the power button to turn it back off. And let’s not forget Windows Vista here. Sure, Windows Vista looks a bit different than Windows XP but is it really worth it? In fact, Microsoft has been consistently extending Windows XP expiration dates because of how much users hate Vista!
The Community
When was the last time that someone referred to an HP community? How many times have you heard people exclaiming that they loved their Acer? People don’t love their PCs. How could you love something if you don’t know its name? There is not a single PC manufacturer that differentiates themselves enough from the pack that would enable a user to justify their admiration. Their HP does exactly the same thing as their neighbor’s Dell.
The Buying Experience
I’ll go back to my opening story for this one. My buddy and I decided to approach a salesman to discuss some options. Keep in mind here that Best Buy salespeople make no commission whatsoever so his recommendations were less biased. In suggesting a PC, he paid no mention to the manufacturer and solely focused on finding one that had at least 2GB of RAM and was in stock. He had found a few contenders and then begun to narrow them down by which one had the best offer and came with a decent monitor. When asked what differentiated the computers from each other, he proceeded to read from the specs sheet in front of the PC.
The Conclusion
PC’s are just not that exciting. You get one when you need it and it fullfills a need. You never learn its name, find out where it came from, or how it gets along with your family. It’s very difficult on the first date(s), doesn’t pay for itself, and never kisses you back. How is it that we can have so many manufacturers using the same exact skin (operating system) that have not figured out a way to differentiate themselves from everyone else?
Let’s take Windows Mobile as a quick example. Manufacturers do all they can to differentiate themselves by releasing handsome hardware and some have truly succeeded! However, one manufacturer took that one step farther. Not only did they create some of the sexiest handsets we have ever seen, but they also reskinned the operating system in a much sleeker presentation. It’s no secret why HTC sells so many damn Windows Mobile phones - it’s different from the rest!
Why is the iMac so damn successful? Well, let’s see: it’s beautiful, easy, and it’s not Windows XP! Here we have an alternative to an otherwise drab set of look-alikes. It’s no wonder why people that want a Mac will settle for nothing but. In cellphones, HTC has carved a name for itself by differentiating its hardware and skinning Microsoft’s software. What PC manufacturer has the balls to do it on a PC?
arthurfreydin on September 22nd, 2008
Stay with me folks, I don’t think I’m too crazy with that title.
SanDisk launched a new line of 1GB microSD cards that will contain high quality (320kbps) DRM-free MP3s of full albums pre-loaded. While this sounds like yet another scam for the music industry to save itself from the decline in cd sales, there may actually be a strategy back there - even if SanDisk doesn’t realize it.
SanDisk will likely entice users to purchase these memory cards by solely highlighting the music on the card itself. This may be the wrong way to approach this. My way would be a bit less invasive and obvious.
- Start distributing these things with the premise that you are getting something that you were already looking for (a memory card for your cellphone or MP3 player for instance) but with a bit of an added bonus.
- Work with wireless cariers to bundle the cards with new phone purchases. Those users that just purchased their multimedia-ready phone may start unpacking the phone before they leave the damn store and will almost definitely shove that MP3 packed memory card into the phone.
- Use the slotMusic name for embeddable MicroSD cards into the cellphones & MP3 players. This has been talked about quite a bit and seems like a logical progression. This would be similar to Nokia’s “Comes With Music” functionality.
- Instead of pre-loading albums on to the memory cards, create categories such as rock, rap, pop, top20, etc. Less and less people are actually downloading albums these days.
With all that said, do I think that in its current implementation slotMusic will fail? Likely - it’s in SanDisk’s hands and let’s be honest, they failed before - not
once, but
twice.
arthurfreydin on September 22nd, 2008
No, not RSS feeds. I’m talking about social feeds like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
Fred Wilson’s post on feeds got me thinking. He talks about letting marketing into social feeds through accessible APIs by the networks. I’m not opposed the idea providing that there is interactive, relevant content associated with the marketing - something that grabs my interest and I might actually want to interact with.
While services like Friendfeed and Plaxo have been aggregating feeds from these social networking services, what about the other side of the coin? Let’s say that I have multiple social networking accounts: Linkedin, Twitter, and Facebook. How do I update my status on all three of these? I’d have to login into each and every one of those and paste my update individually. Time consuming and impractical. What about online mavens that use 6 or 7 services, and all support status updates?
I have accounts on quite a few social networks and I don’t remember more than half of them. I’m sure that I’d be able to leverage them more if I can go to a single service that can send out my status to all of these networks without me actually having to log in to all of them which can take 20-30 minutes.
I think the time has come to think of a solution. Maybe then I’d actually use Twitter.
arthurfreydin on September 9th, 2008
Go get it. My download just finished
arthurfreydin on September 4th, 2008
Ruh, roh. Looks like the one application that I had running all day on Firefox doesn’t like Google Chrome. I use CentralDesktop for collaboration at work so clearly this is an application that I need 100% of the time. I guess my goal of not opening up Firefox all day is no longer a reality.
On a side note, did you see how I referred to CentralDesktop as an application? Before Chrome, I would have just called it a website. Interesting.
arthurfreydin on September 2nd, 2008
I’m writing this post right in Google’s new browser - Chrome. It was officially announced here, via the Google blog. Here are my initial thoughts:
- It’s crazy fast on web applications like Wordpress, Omniture, Gmail, etc.
- More screen real estate devoted to the actual webpage rather than status bar, toolbar, etc.
- Remembers usernames/passwords like a dream - all you have to do is begin to type the username and it automatically fills in the remainder of the username and associated passwords
- Loads Flash animations much quicker
- Gathered all Firefox history, cookies, logins, etc so it’s easy to hit the ground running in a new browser
- Very pleasing design
- Status bar on the bottom only appears when it needs to
- The “omnibar” address bar is awesome!
- No title bar
Overall, I would say that this is a great effort by Google. I’ve been using Firefox forever now and once Google Chrome starts taking off, there is quite a bit of potential here.
arthurfreydin on August 29th, 2008
Was activating my new iPhone (more on this later) in iTunes and saw this gem before syncing my music:
Clearly Apple doesn’t want its users blaming them for not being able to make ringtones out of their purchased songs from the iTunes Store.
arthurfreydin on August 25th, 2008
I usually bypass liveblogging posts from online marketing conferences since most of that info gets covered by day-to-day reads in my RSS reader. I typically go to the conferences for the networking opportunities (or free drinks) unless I come across a really interesting session.
But what about all those other readers that can’t make it to the conferences but know they can benefit from the sessions? Since they can’t make it to the conference, there is really no better alternative but to follow the sessions through livebloggers like Lisa Barone and Lee Oden. The readers count on these livebloggers to provide them with the most updates to almost every session in the conference.
My question is this: How many livebloggers pass the readership metrics back to the conference organizers? Or, let’s rephrase that question: How many conference organizers [politely] ask the livebloggers for this info? Considering that most companies that don’t consider online marketing as a 1st priority, they may not want to shell out almost $1,000 a /day plus air travel to have their employees attend the conference. That means that most attendees may actually be “virtually” attendending these conferences.
I’m sure that conference organizers like Kevin Ryan (although a bit off-the-wall at times) find attendance metrics very useful and determine future sessions based on this data. So why not get the full picture instead of just understanding the paid attendees physically attending?
