April 2009
17 posts
Gameplay is the New Social (Cont'd)
There were several great comments on my post yesterday on gameplay relating to the data generated and the possible issues with keeping folks engaged. I believe the ideal application of gameplay in a site or service recognizes and works for three distinct groups: devotees, casuals and don’t-cares (I am obviously making these up - suggestions for better ones appreciated). Devotees are the ones...
4 tags
Gameplay is the New Social
Yesterday, Techcrunch announced that Mint was adding gameplay to its service in the form of a financial fitness score. The Techcrunch post already pointed to Foursquare as a service that is making very effective use of gameplay to motivate activity and engagement in the system. I have also found this to be true for TheSixtyOne, which awards points for many different kinds of behavior. I...
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Shanzhai Phones and the US Car Industry
The New York Times has a fascinating article today about “shanzai phones” in China. These are knockoffs of existing brands but often come with interesting enhancements, such as support for multiple phone numbers and better cameras. Now one might think of a cell phone as something that is very costly to build and not an area in which one would find knockoffs (unlike, say, designer...
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Identity Gateways Will Be Surprisingly Useful
If you operate a site or service and want to accept identity from large third parties, you encounter a bewildering array of implementations. Some are fairly proprietary, such as Facebook. Others, such as Google, are based on a standard but with a twist. New ones come along, such as Twitter, and present their own versions. This makes building them all a real resource challenge. On top of that...
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Limited Edition Digital Music
This is another post in thinking out loud about the economics of abundant and digital goods. In particular, I am interested in mechanisms that allow producers to recapture some of the consumer surplus even when the price for (a version of) the good is zero. In photography, there is a well established difference between limited edition prints (sometimes a single one) made by the artist and...
6 tags
More Identity Positioning: (Vanity) URLs
The latest salvo in the fight for owning users’ identities revolves around URLs. Google just earlier this week promoted profile search and with it URLs of the form http://www.google.com/profiles/awenger (when I signed up for gmail a long time ago I thought shorter would be better — now wish I had chosen albertwenger, as I have on most other services). Facebook is clearly getting...
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Making Name-Your-Price Work for Digital Goods
In Monday’s post on the Economics of Abundance, I gave “name your price” as an example for how to deal with zero marginal cost. This is a case of voluntary price discrimination, i.e. folks who value something more are more likely to name a higher price. The first question of course is if such a scheme can work at all, that is will anyone pay if paying is entirely voluntary. We...
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Visual Search Delivered (by Google Labs)
A while back I had argued that there was great potential for visual search now that we have a lot of images available. Well now someone has delivered and it is Google Labs with it’s Similar Images prototype. In fact, they did exactly what I had proposed in my original post, which was to make this a refinement to the regular search process, saying:
In fact, Google has had a close analogy...
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Economics of Abundance
A little while ago, I read Cory Doctorow’s “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” (on DailyLit of course). In the book, he has the concept of Whuffie, a reputation-based currency that has replaced traditional money in a world of abundance. Since then I have been thinking about whether we might possibly be headed towards a scenario in which we have so much of everything that we can...
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Caring about Security (and Dental Health)
Caring about the security of your site or service is a bit akin to going to the dentist on a regular basis: It’s not pleasant, doesn’t really get you any visible results and costs time and money. Hence the people who care/go regularly are the ones who have had a bad experience by not doing so. In my own case that is now (sadly) true for both my teeth and security.
My exposure to...
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YouTube Symphony Delivers
Yesterday evening I had the pleasure of attending a wonderful concert at Carnegie Hall: the YouTube Symphony. The YouTube Symphony is an orchestra that was assembled through auditions conducted via — you guessed it — YouTube. As such, the process was open to musicians from around the world which is entirely different from how orchestras (even youth orchestras) are traditionally...
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Google Scores One for Palm's Pre
Just trying out a slightly attention grabbing headline. Of course Google didn’t do anything directly for the Palm Pre, but while I was out on vacation last week (and not blogging), Google did release a significant upgrade to the mobile version of gmail for the iPhone. What makes it significant is that it makes use of the iPhone browser’s local database capabilities (via Javascript)...
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Fighting Words
What you call things matters. There is a reason why “nomen est omen” goes back as far as ancient Rome. They of course believed that a person’s name determines (or at least reveals) fate, but more recently we have seen plenty of evidence of company or product names making a meaningful difference. And anyone who has done user testing will know that what label you put on a button...
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Upfront Hurdles Vs. Ex-Post Filtering (Facebook,...
Twitter had some issues this weekend with folks sneaking Javascript code into profiles to effectively create self-replicating Twitter worms. These worms were exploiting a hole in which Twitter was not doing enough scrubbing of user inputs for the CSS customization of a profile page. While this was clearly a security flaw and had to be fixed, it does result from a basic philosophy which aims at...
6 tags
License FUD
Our portfolio company 10gen has released the core of its MongoDB database under the GNU Affero General Public License (the drivers are licensed under Apache). Some people react to the Affero GPL by saying something along the lines of “that’s a new license which I don’t want to understand or bother with.” I have some sympathy for that initial reaction (who wants to figure...
Don't Optimize For Taxes First
I was reading an article recently about how many college savings plans are totally under water following the plunge in the stock market. These plans theoretically offer significant tax benefits and so look quite attractive. A few years ago my broker was using this as the argument why we should put some money into them. But I had previous bad experience with doing something primarily for tax...
Welcome Google Ventures
Google has finally officially launched their long rumored venture fund. Corporate venture funds have a somewhat spotty history and it will be interesting to see how the google team approaches this. My partner Brad started in Venture Capital with AT&T ventures, which was set up like a real independent fund with a GP/LP structure. That is clearly the way to do it if you want to optimize for...