I have for some time pointed out the negative impact on innovation of the appstore duopoly. Things are getting worse though. With the latest releases of iOS and Android the ability of third party developers to create great experiences are being further curtailed in the name of privacy and battery life. That might be OK if Apple and Google didn’t have their own apps that compete for usage such as maps or transportation, but they do. Apple and Google are using the same playbook that Microsoft a...

In 2011 I gave a talk at conference that The Media Kitchen had organized about the impact of mobile on marketing. While everyone else presenting was talking about how to make mobile ads work, I was openly critical of advertising on mobile platforms altogether arguing that ads were (a) mostly annoying given the small screen size and (b) likely to be replaced by direct commerce. I just tried to find my slides from that talk but unfortunately came up empty. I was reminded of the talk when I read...

A big part of our investing at Union Square Ventures is to find businesses that have network effects. Marketplaces fit with that because participating in a marketplace tends to become more valuable as the marketplace grows (that’s assuming the marketplace does a good job spreading liquidity among participants). The reason to be interested in network effects from an investor perspective is that they offer a source of defensible competitive advantage. That in return implies that a company that ...

The shift to mobile computing is fully underway. Over time everyone in the world will have a smartphone and data speeds will go up (and hopefully prices for data plans will come down). So the race is on to find the natively mobile versions of many (all?) existing businesses. There is, however, a major hurdle to that innovation here in the US and many other parts of the world: the control of Apple and Google over their respective app stores. Many people have pointed to the amazing commerce int...

Chris Dixon recently wrote a post about the decline of the mobile web and the shift to apps and how that is hurting innovation. Fred expanded on that theme in his post on the mobile downturn. So it is worth thinking about what we need to get to a model of permissionless innovation in mobile. Here are some changes that might make senseAn unencumbered open source mobile operating system (Android is not that due to the control exercised by Google) Ability to side load apps / have competing app m...

So earlier this week while in SF, I was trying to get some work done on my way from the city to Sand Hill road. As per usual I turned on tethering on my Android phone and started up my laptop. Within seconds my wifi had connected to the hotspot, I fired up a browser and …. nothing. No connection. Open up terminal, ping google.com and times out. Huh? Turn off the phone, wifi, etc and restart just to clear out any wonkiness. Still nothing. Then I remembered that between my last tether and now I...

No Tech Tuesday today as I am pondering the big news that Microsoft is acquiring Nokia’s devices and services business. From glancing at the deal terms it is not clear to me whether this was really an offensive move (as Microsoft is positioning it) or a rushed defensive rescue of a failing company that was the only one making Windows phones at meaningful volume. Here is one line from the press release that suggests that it may have been an emergency: “Microsoft will also immediately make avai...

Yesterday Facebook announced “Home,” a homescreen takeover application for Android that makes Facebook your phones primary interaction surface. Here are my initial reactions. First, this is a smart move by Facebook as an attempt to counter the threat of unbundling that is posed by apps. Competing apps unbundle different pieces of functionality (Twitter for status, Instagram for photos, Foursquare for location, Kik for messaging, etc). Facebook has rightly recognized that whenever you have unb...

Yesterday I posted about how the current Do Not Track debate is muddling the underlying issues. I got a great reply from Mike Yang on Twitter that rightly pointed out at P3P had been a mess in part because Microsoft jumped the gun on it. That got me to think about an even broader context here which is the shift to mobile. A do not track battle on the web only is even more absurd in the context of a rapid shift in where people spend time and can be tracked even better (at least in the new iOS)...

There is a rumor that Amazon today will announce an Android based smartphone tomorrow. And despite repeated denials there is also a persistent rumor of a Facebook phone that might be Android based. In China there are already several custom phones based on Android, such as the one by Xiaomi. Some people are seeing this as further evidence that Android will fragment to a point where it will be no longer be a single platform. While that’s is a possibility, I actually think that it speaks to the ...