Strategy/The Narrative

Russ on Making Money

Posted on by charlie

A very good lesson in business based on first principles. Together with his other post, gives me pause as to the choices I am working on.

Link: Russell Beattie Notebook � Making Money?.

Okay, extending my thoughts from the last post, I think we should have a conversation about how to make money if you’re a startup. Help educate me if I’m wrong on this: The basic concept is pretty simple, right? I create or obtain something of value, and I exchange that something for money. If the cost of creating or obtaining that something is less than the amount of money I get for it, I make a profit. Pretty straight forward. Everything stems from there, right?

Innovation/Strategy/The Narrative

Russ on ‘Where’s The Ambition?’: about all these new start-ups

Posted on by charlie

A great analysis, mislabeled as a rant. I don’t even consider it opinionated. It’s based on a great intuition for what works in this space, experience, the ability to see through all the present data, and written very well. I don’t mean to fawn, I just get upset when folks think strong statements mean a rant. 😛 to you.

Of course, it warmed my heart when Russ spoke of the dearth of mobile products (below). I can always count on Russ for highlighting this. Unfortunately, most of the folks who commented on mobility are mentally restricting themselves. I’ve met a ton of people, and mobility, while hard in many ways, is bubbling healthily. We just need more.

I highly recommend you read this and all the comments (link below). Great discussion.

He also posted a follow on article (link in my next post) on basic business principles. Go read that, too. Both have given me a different perspective and some things to think about.

Link: Russell Beattie Notebook � Where’s The Ambition?.

And finally, where is the goddamn mobility? This is what most depresses me most about these new sites. Not being able to use my mobile to sign up and use any new site or service that’s launched now is completely inexcusable. I don’t care what you’re doing, you’re wasting your time and the 20 seconds I spent even checking out your site. The future is so obviously in mobiles, why the hell are so many startups still screwing around on the desktop? Morons.

The Narrative

Russ – 500 Million Camera Phones in 2005

Posted on by charlie

Boom. Boom. Boom. Here’s thumpin’ good.

Link: Russell Beattie Notebook � 500 Million Camera Phones in 2005.

Time to thump the drum again.

There’s going to be over 800 million mobile phones sold this year, and over 500 million of them will have cameras, according to this article over at InternetWeek. The numbers are projected to climb to over 90% of the 1 billion phones sold a year in 2009.

Think about it. A half a billion network enabled multimedia handsets sold this year alone. Compare this to the roughly 800 million PC Internet users out there and you start to see what’s happening. Yes, many of these phones are only 2.5/2.75G with 40kbps – 100 kbps data speeds, the phones aren’t very powerful or use closed systems and their users are saddled with expensive cellular data plans. But that’s not going to last for long – in fact, it probably won’t last another 18 months.

Strategy

Is stealth mode overrated?

Posted on by charlie

First person account on choosing stealth mode versus open discussion of a new business.

Thanks for the perspective.

Being part of a huge super secretive company (Nokia), I often wonder if we all need to reassess our secrecy levels. There are so many reasons to maintain secrecy, but I think those reasons change over time. Indeed, I think sometimes, extreme openness can be strategically beneficial to a company, even for some reasons BJ highlights.

Link: BJ Fogg’s Weblog: Stealth mode is overrated.

Strategy

Roland Tanglao- Hello ShoZu, Goodbye Lifeblog

Posted on by charlie

Roland’s actions here point out a problem with making apps for mobile phones. On the one hand, the most recent version of Lifeblog mobile does not work on Roland’s  (not even a year old) phone because the Lifeblog team decided to leave the 7610 behind, since updating every version of the mobile app is insane (there are now at least 3 Lifeblog versions for different groups of phones, sheesh!). Also, following this trend, the next version will likely leave behind current phones (really!). Sigh.

ShoZu has the same problem, but it’s a simpler app (relatively speaking), so they can settle around features that work on most Series 60 (or S60) phones. But, so many cool apps have been dying on my N70 until an update is made (oh, when will Series 60 be a platform?!).

Yes, Roland, ShoZu is cool and is really what you need. Have fun! I liked it too, but didn’t switch to it because I still (barely) and using Lifeblog for easy backup of my phone stuff (barely).

Link: Roland Tanglao’s Weblog: Hello ShoZu, Goodbye Lifeblog.

If you want to upload lots of flickr photos from your Series 60 phone, I highly recommend ShoZu. I have stopped using Lifeblog and will now upload my pictures using Shozu? Why? ShoZu doesn’t have a s*lly "4 photo at a time" upload limit like Lifeblog. ShoZu uploads automagically in the background, detects loss of GPRS and re-connects unlike Lifeblog. In short ShoZu was designed from the ground up for flickr and wasn’t designed with a "mobile phone and Windows PC are the center of my photo universe" mentality which applies maybe to 1 or 2 people 🙂 but not to me!

Strategy

Bloglines makes a few clever tweaks to mobile site

Posted on by charlie

To me, this update to Bloglines Mobile tells me that they have a mobile-savvy person in there who groks how folks want to use a mobile feed reader. And, it reminded me of some other nice little touches they provide, such as image reductions and so on.

Use it!

Link: Bloglines | News.

Do you often find yourself reading Bloglines on your mobile phone with too many feeds and too little time? Well, we’ve got great news. No, we’re not selling you gecko lizard insurance. But we have made it easy for you to create an abbreviated mobile version of your feed list so you don’t have to scroll past dozens of feeds to get to those you have time to read.