Moonwatcher

iPhone Line Watch: Austin

You know, I'm really not a big enough geek to actually drive around town and check out the lines at various AT&T stores. I'm not. Really. But my coffee maker is broken, so I needed to make a Starbuck's run anyway (Cafe Med is too far away for a quick cup, and I was just there yesterday anyway) so I decided to swing by a couple of retail outlets to get an idea of the wait I'll face later today.

As it turns out, the line at Starbuck's was longer than the line at either AT&T store I drove by. Yes, I'll be visiting one of them later this afternoon. No, I'm not going to tell you which one. The rest of you Apple Hajjis can just go get in line at the Apple Store.

Mmm... iPhone.

Speaking of which, a friend recently asked me if I was really going to buy a $600 cell phone, to which I dryly replied, "You're talking to someone who paid $700 for a Newton." End of conversation.

What I've Learned from Facebook So Far

I have to admit I'm a little embarrassed about being on Facebook. I'm too old, too busy, and frankly just not cool enough to feel comfortable on a site clearly built for people almost twenty years my junior. But I'm glad I joined. Facebook has helped me better recognize a design pattern that seems to be extremely successful and is shared by Google, all social networking sites, and a startup you'll be hearing more about from me in the future.

The basic idea of this pattern is to manage not objects (web pages, college students, places, companies, stocks, whatever), but to provide an application that allows people to define the relationships between those objects—relationships that are otherwise tacit, implicit, and undocumented—and then create a graph of those relationships on which to hang a business.

When Mark Zuckerberg talks about Facebook's "social graph" being his company's secret sauce he's exactly right. FaceBook is so explosive because it has not one graph (like LinkedIn), but many. Facebook's social graph tracks not only explicit "friend" relationships between people but also implicit relationships based on school, company, city, and arbitrary groups. As soon as you sign in you're barraged with questions about yourself so the system can start connecting you in as many graphs as possible. The more connections, the more vectors for viral spread of, well, anything, including information, applications, and money.

Similarly, PageRank allows Google to build a huge graph of the web, which provides a fertile latticework on which to grow an unbelievable search—and by extension—advertising business. Google Maps uses coordinates on a map (graph) of physical space to relate location-based data (like where the nearest Starbucks is) to other location-based data (like where I am). It's a more familiar graph which makes it easier to navigate, but also a better-documented one—there are lots of ways for me to figure out where the nearest Starbuck's is—and so of relatively lower value. I can't imagine the depth of value in the graph Google is building by analyzing not only with whom you exchange emails but also the content of those Gmail emails.

I think too many people get distracted by the "social" aspect of networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, but at the same time I readily admit that social relationships are among the strongest and least well-documented that exist, so they're ripe for the picking. But there are others. The companies that figure out which graphs are the most valuable might just be the home runs of the current era of business.

Unanswered (and Unasked) Questions about iPhone

T-Minus 70 hours and some obvious iPhone questions remain unasked and unanswered:

1. Does iPhone support the A2DP Bluetooth profile that allows high-quality stereo sound to be streamed over Bluetooth? Many phones don't. It seems absurd that an iPod with Bluetooth wouldn't—but absurdity has never stood in Apple's way before.

   Answered! Engadget answers this one: no A2DP support. Dude!

2. Will I be able to use my iPhone as a Bluetooth modem with my Mac, thereby providing always-available (albeit pokey) wireless connectivity through my $20 all-I-can-eat AT&T data plan? (For those unfamiliar with the concept, see this article on how to do this with a Blackberry Pearl.)

   Answered! The New York Times has the answer: No.

3. Will iPhone be able to pair with an external Bluetooth GPS receiver to become location-aware? That would be groovy, especially since I happen to own an external Bluetooth GPS receiver.

   Answered? The New York Times seems to say no.

4. When I download my POP3 mail with my iPhone, it will be marked as downloaded at the server, and my desktop mail client won't receive it when it asks for new messages. Is there a reasonable solution to this, or will Mail.app on my MacBook Pro really need to download the last 30 days' worth of email by using the recent: prefix each time it checks for new messages? (A Gmail-specific solution would be fine by me.)

   ?

5. How long will it take iPhone users to completely swamp the AT&T EDGE network with YouTube downloads, thereby forcing AT&T to first beg customers to stop downloading so much stuff and then either (a) further upgrade their network, (b) impose bandwidth limitations on individual customers, or (c) reprice their unlimited data plans?

   ?

I suppose we'll know soon enough.

How to Make a Million Dollars (The New Way)

Seth Godin, whom I greatly respect, recently wrote How to make a million dollars, which is totally wrong. He writes (emphasis mine):

One popular method is to make a dollar in profit from each of a million people. Or a penny from a hundred million. This is the China strategy. It almost never works.

It almost never works because the challenge of reaching that many people is just too great. It's too risky and too expensive. Doesn't matter that you're only hoping for a dollar or a penny. The price isn't the challenge, it's the difficulty in spreading your idea.

Far easier to make a thousand dollars from each of a thousand people, or even $10,000 from a hundred organizations.

I'm confused by Seth's assertion that, "the challenge of reaching that many people is just too great." On the contrary, never before has it been easier to reach people—over a billion people. The trick is saying something interesting enough that they'll listen and selling something compelling enough that they'll buy.

We sell Spanning Sync using what Seth calls "the China strategy". Our marketing budget is effectively zero dollars¹. We don't do any advertising. Instead, we rely word-of-mouth, third-party reviews, and customer referrals. Yet we have thousands of customers in dozens of countries, each of whom has paid either $25 or $65 (for a one-year or lifetime subscription).

We also have corporate and educational customers who have purchased hundreds of licenses for thousands of dollars at a time, but given the frictionless way in which we can process individual transactions it's actually easier and cheaper for us to sell 1,000 $25 licenses than do a single $25,000 deal.

So how to make a million dollars? Create something that can leverage the Internet to drive your transaction costs to near zero and is interesting enough that other people will promote it for you for free and compelling enough that people will pay for it.

---

¹ In fact, our marketing budget consists of a TypePad blog ($15/month), two t-shirts ($30 total) and a stack of business cards ($73, including overnight shipping).

What Happens When Technology Accelerates, Cost Evaporates, and Consumer Technology Infiltrates IT?

John Hagel has written a magnum blog post titled Unanswered Questions at Supernova 2007 outlining the questions he'll be exploring in his new gig as co-chairman of a new Valley-based research center for Deloitte & Touche.

All of his questions relate directly to innovation in business, but several stand out as particularly interesting to me. Specifically:

1. What if there is no equilibrium?
   Technology continues to advance exponentially. What institutional architectures are required to excel in a constantly accelerating environment? (And is there a useful analogy to be made between the "constantly accelerating" technology environment and the "free-fall" sensation of weightlessness in space?)
2. Can the firm survive as the action flows to the edges?
   Coase defined the firm as the result of optimizing resources given non-zero transaction costs. When those costs approach zero, what does that mean for the traditional corporation? (This one is my favorite, and may in fact become the focus of this blog.)
3. Is adaptation all there is?
   Is the best a company can hope for to adapt, or does constant change create new kinds of opportunities? What are those opportunities, and what kind of companies will be able to capitalize on them? (Facebook, anyone?)
4. What is the next generation of IT architecture?
   (To which I answer without irony, "iPhone.")

Hagel elaborates on these questions in his post and asks many more. Fascinating stuff.

It's Not an iPhone...

Spanning Sync on MacVoices

Last week I spoke with Chuck Joiner at MacVoices about Spanning Sync. The interview is now up on the site. Here's the synopsis:

Charlie Wood of Spanning Sync outlines how his organization’s software allows Mac users to enjoy the best of two calendaring worlds: Apple’s iCal and Google Calendar. With the ability to sync the two applications in both directions, Mac users can take advantage of the advanced sharing and notification features of Google Calendar without losing the familiarity or convenience of iCal. Charlie explains how his “nano company” addresses the ever-present issue of security, delivers personal tech support and more in this look at a new breed of desktop-internet application. Spanning Sync has been recognized by Google as a shining example of the type of software springing up around their online applications and Charlie talks about how they plan to keep it that way.

Click here to download the MP3

Nobody's Perfect: PayPal Experiences Outage

I've recently criticized salesforce.com for their frequent scheduled downtime and used PayPal as an example of a reliable Internet service.

Today Googler Matt Cutts notes that PayPal was down late last night.

The eBay System Status Board also notes the outage and shows that even PayPal has scheduled downtime.

Mindquarry Focuses on Small Teams

Yesterday I got a demo of Mindquarry, a collaboration system targeted at small teams. Both the product and company are refreshing in their simplicity and focus. The system allows management of teams, files, tasks, and wikis through an elegant AJAX interface.

Mindquarry is available as a free, open source download, but more interestingly is now available as an on-demand service powered by Amazon S3 and EC2.

The Disconnect Between Enterprise 2.0 and Mobililty

Yesterday I attended a session titled Integrating the Mobile Worker and was disappointd by what I heard from the panelists representing Nokia, Motorola, RIM, and Antenna Software. To them, "mobility" apparently means "voice, email, and client/server applications". Thud.

To me, "Enterprise 2.0" means "Web 2.0 in the enterprise". Enterprise applications vendors have spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars web-enabling their applications and are now hard at work further enhancing them with Web 2.0 technologies and concepts. But mobile devices are notoriously awful web clients, and the notion of trying to fix that, let alone making them viable Web 2.0 devices, didn't even come up in the session yesterday.

Virtually every application I use in my business is web-based. I want to be able to access those applications from my mobile device in exactly the same way I do from my laptop. Apparently Motorola, RIM, and Nokia won't help me do that. Luckily though, Apple will:

Apple today announced that its revolutionary iPhone will run applications created with Web 2.0 Internet standards when it begins shipping on June 29. Developers can create Web 2.0 applications which look and behave just like the applications built into iPhone, and which can seamlessly access iPhone’s services, including making a phone call, sending an email and displaying a location in Google Maps. Third-party applications created using Web 2.0 standards can extend iPhone’s capabilities without compromising its reliability or security.

It's no small irony that Apple—a consumer-oriented company—may wind up being the leader in Enterprise 2.0 mobility.