Facebook Places and Foursquare
I've been using Foursquare for about a year or so now. I'm not really sure why - I guess it's just fun to check in to places and earn badges, mayorships, etc. Not many of my real friends are on Foursquare, with a few exceptions, so it was more of a -- OK, I'll say it -- narcissistic exercise in broadcasting my location to the world. Although I do enjoy having a record of my travels through my entire life, and I've used it to accomplish certain goals - like, for example, keeping track of how many times I visit the gym. Now that Facebook has launched Places, though, I'm not sure I'll use it the same way as I use Foursquare. On Foursquare, I check-in with wanton abandon. I check-in when I stop for gas. When I run into the grocery store. When I drop into Starbucks for a coffee. My check-ins don't go anywhere -- I don't push them to Twitter or Facebook -- so the only people I'm bugging are my Foursquare contacts, most of whom do the same thing and have opted-in to the whole "over-sharing" concept. With Facebook Places, however, all of my check-ins are automatically pushed to my Wall. This is different. This means when I check-in several times throughout a day, my friends' Facebook Walls are all of a sudden cluttered with my crap. In fact, I just did my first Facebook check-in this morning, and within an hour, I received comments on the check-in post from my eighth-grade English teacher, and a few friends in other cities. These people don't use Places, and they probably don't care to see my check-ins every once in a while. But there's no way they would put up with my checking-in at the same frequency I do on Foursquare. It will be interesting to see what happens here. Will I only check-in to cool places on Facebook? Will I continue to check-in to both services whenever I go anywhere? Do you use either service? Do you use them differently? Do you think both are the dumbest things in the world? Give me a holler in the comments.
Did RIM just concede defeat in the smartphone wars?
Fred Wilson has an interesting perspective on RIM's stock buyback announcement yesterday, as if it's almost a concession of defeat from the maker of BlackBerry. Obviously, he says, they have nothing better to do with their money than to return it to their shareholders as a buyback.
So when I saw the headline this morning that RIM was doing a buyback, I was saddened. I've been a Blackberry user since 1997 or 1998. RIM has been a great company that has driven so much innovation in the past fifteen years that has made my life better and the lives of many others better. I have to believe that if they got aggressive, they could find uses for all of that cash they are sitting on. I wish they would do that instead of buying back their stock.via avc.com
Of course, it's probably just a coincidence that they announce this on the day that iPhone 4 goes on sale, to throngs of fans foaming at the mouth, lines down the block, stock-outs, etc. But Fred raises an interesting point about the future of RIM, and I have to agree wholeheartedly. If I were the kind of guy who traded individual securities, I would consider a short position in RIMM.
There are only two things keeping RIM afloat right now:
- Corporate security policies that mandate Blackberry usage
- iPhone's exclusivity on AT&T
Both things will end soon. The iPhone and Android devices continue to become more enterprise-friendly. Users will start to demand that their companies allow them the ability to bring their own devices to the office. For companies to stay competitive, they'll have to let employees use iPhones and Droids. And of course AT&T's exclusive strangle-hold on the iPhone is bound to run its course someday, and once Verizon gets its paws on the device, RIM's market share will drop like a rock.
The only people I know who have Blackberries are people whose companies mandate it, or who refuse to leave Verizon. Nobody has a Blackberry because they're passionate about its cool functions, or its cool apps. This is probably because, as the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, developers hate developing for the Blackberry.
After all, as I said yesterday, when was the last time RIM launched a new Blackberry, and fans were camped out overnight to get it?
UPDATE: Wow, I should have made that trade.
“Just avoid holding it in that way.”
Crazy hipsters with their Tumblr. Still, this is pretty brilliant, in light of Steve's head-scratching decision to tell iPhone users to stop holding their phones by the bottom-left corner (which is precisely what he seems to be doing in this picture).
Entrepreneurs: Are you passionate about your product? Prove it
I enjoy reading about various start-ups on Techcrunch or Mashable, and am always jealous of my friends that leave the cushy workforce to start a cool new company. Many of my HBS classmates have chosen the road less taken and are running their own show at start-ups like Rent the Runway, ThredUp, LearnBoost, and Triangulate. I know the CEOs of all of these companies personally, and I am convinced that they are passionate about their products and literally jump out of bed every morning itching to change the world. It inspires me, frankly.
One of my former colleagues, Greg Pope, started up a company called eRelyx, that will eventually be a place where users can buy and sell used watches online. One of my entrepreneurship professors at school taught us that venture capitalists often invest in the person more than the idea - if this is the case with eRelyx, I have no doubts that Greg is going to get gobs of money. I have never met a guy more obsessed with luxury watches than Greg, and the guy's a walking encyclopedia.
I have taken to testing him. I sent him this picture of White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, and asked him to identify what watch he was wearing.
Greg responded within about five minutes with a link to the black ceramic J12 by Chanel. Amazing.
The best thing about Greg's start-up, though, is following the blog he has been keeping. The guy rarely misses a day without a post, and his posts are usually funny, well-written, and most importantly, they make me want to buy expensive watches. Seriously, I was never a watch guy (picture of my current watch below), but now that I'm reading Greg's blog, I'm starting to get into them. I blame my future bankruptcy on him.
But, by reading his blog, I have no doubt that Greg is absolutely 1,000% committed to eRelyx, and to luxury watches. I have no doubt that luxury watches are probably the first thing he thinks about when he wakes up in the morning, and the last thing he thinks about when he goes to sleep at night. He's a walking, talking luxury watch machine. And that's why I would invest in him.
So entrepreneurs, if you want a tip to impress potential customers? Write a blog. Put something up there every day that makes me realize that you love your product. Even if I'm not a customer, maybe I'll like your blog so much that I'll become one. That's what Greg has done, and that's what more people should do.
Why Posterous Will Win the Blogging Platform Wars
I have had this Posterous account for a while, but I've never really gotten into it. (I blame Dwight Schrute for getting me into it) Mostly I just send e-mails in from my phone with funny pictures of stuff I'm doing, or I post a link to a thought-provoking article I find on a blog or a newspaper.
I recently read, however, about their new "Switch to Posterous" marketing campaign, picking off dissatisfied users from other social networks like Ning (by the way, what the hell is Ning? I'm an early adopter and kind of a geek and even I've never heard of Ning). I think it's brilliant, and in two years, everyone and their grandma (literally) is going to have a Posterous.
Here's the thing: if you buy that lots more people are going to start blogging in the next five years or so, which I do (so does this guy), the experience of blogging is going to have to become way more user friendly. I know that other blog platforms win the big arms races when blogs like Lifehacker tally up the votes, but there's no way my mom (or most of my friends for that matter) are ever going to sign up for Wordpress. That's the genius of Posterous - you don't need anything to start blogging, just an e-mail account. And everyone has one of those.
Now that everyone's carrying around tiny little computers in their pockets all day long, they're going to start to need a place to post their pictures, their observations, and their videos. As soon as they hear about Posterous, I predict they'll dive right in faster than you can say Autopost.
Now, a revenue model for Posterous? That's another question. Still thinking that one through. But these guys seem sharp - I'm guessing they have a plan.
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