I usually take weekends off from blogging, but this one is just too good to pass up: Shapeways and Soundcloud have teamed up to bring out “the Vibe” an iPhone case which comes with a completely custom waveform as its back. I love this because it shows off the power of the platforms that Shapeways and Soundcloud have created. It also represents a completely unexpected use case for a sound file. And it is a completely organic, API-enabled collaboration between two of our portfolio companies. Al...

I have previously written about non-linearity and how it messes with our reasoning. In business non-linearity abounds. One example that has been discussed a lot is the change between going from a price of 2 cents to 1 cent compared to the change with going from 1 cent to free. Twitter wouldn’t be twitter if it had charged just 1 cent per tweet. One area where this is also true but more subtle and less well understood is product simplicity. Steve Jobs is clearly on to something very powerful b...

So thanks to Google, since Thursday I have been playing around with an HTC EVO on the Sprint network. I have come away impressed and it has nothing to do with the EVO theoretically supporting 4G. I have mostly had 4G turned off - apparently it is a huge battery hog and the few times I did turn it on, I did not seem to be in a 4G coverage area. In any case, 3G speed has been fine for me on my new BlackBerry Bold on T-Mobile (my old one got wet). The first reason I am impressed is that the EVO ...

The big news of course isn’t multitasking, or unified inbox, but iAds and GameCenter. These are aimed squarely at making the iPhone (and iPad) a monetizable and viral platform to rival Facebook. Still this strategy seems flawed by being tied entirely to Apple Hardware. What percentage penetration of the handset market can Apple possibly achieve? Facebook on the other hand can reach any user on any device. Well … any device other than the iPhones (and iPads), where Apple can of course exercise...

“ The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger. I hate it. ” - Tim Bray in his post on joining Google

Over the last few days, Apple has removed a number of apps from the app store that have, as the New York Times’s Jenna Wortham put it “sexually suggestive” material. There is plenty of speculation on the motives, such as VentureBeat’s idea that this is about winning over educators to the iPad. I think the actual explanation is likely to be simpler. Browsing and discovery are broken in the app store. If these were working well, then there would be no need to remove apps like this (for any reas...

Recently, someone (I believe it was Nicholas Carlson) said to me: “what most people forget about the iPhone is that it is also a very capable iPod." This was said in the context of a discussion of how successful Android will be this year. Now this is an interesting alternative view to Bill Gurley’s assertion that the head-on comparison is wrong because Android aims at the much broader market of folks who have feature phones today. But: for everyone who wants to upgrade from a feature phone an...

As a teenager, I was a die-hard Apple fanboy. The boy part is obvious. The fan part was the result of having and hacking an Apple II. Naturally, I was hugely excited about the arrival of first the Lisa (remember those?) and then the Macintosh. While I enjoyed programming the Macintosh – all the way through college – I was frustrated with its unfriendliness towards hackers. My Apple II had been heavily modded with all sorts of extras. This was easily possible because the lid of the computer wa...

Yesterday I went to T-Mobile to get a new Blackberry 8900 for Susan, who wanted to switch back from the iPhone. There were a bunch of things she did not like about the iPhone. She never got used to typing on the glass keyboard and wanted to have a real keyboard again. She also was super unhappy when we were in Europe this summer that I was using my Blackberry with abandon due to T-Mobile’s excellent international email roaming, while she was afraid of even touching her iPhone due to all the h...

Andrew Parker and I recently wrote a post on the USV blog about “The Mobile Challenge” – looking for apps that make use of the unique capabilities of the latest (smart)phones to deliver experiences that were previously impossible. Since writing that post, I have become fascinated with augmented reality apps, such as Wikitude by Mobilizy (Austria), Layar by sprxmobile (Netherlands) and Sekai Camera by Tonchidot (Japan). I have no idea how well any of these actually perform, having only experie...