Platform Agnostic Is The Way To Go

Fred Wilson (Photo credit: Lachlan Hardy)

Fred Wilson has revisited his blog post Mobile First, Web Second that was inspired by a blog post of mine.

I think Mobile First, Web Second made perfect sense at the time, but that was an aggression needed to balance out the over emphasis on the Old Web we had seen to that point.

But the truth is it is not web first or mobile first. It is neither. It is user first. And the best applications going forward will be platform agnostic. As long as you use it, it does not matter what platform you use it on. And your behavior, your interactions will be collected in the Big Data world to glean insights on you - not necessarily to serve ads in sneaky ways - that can have huge commercial values. LinkedIn is a great example on that monetization strategy. LinkedIn does not make money because you visit it several times a day. You don't. How many times are you going to look at your own resume? Unless you are unemployed and are anal about that condition.

Mobile First, Web Second - Fred Wilson's most popular and most quoted blog post of 2010 - was right on for 2010. But with hindsight we have to see it was there to counterbalance Web And Web Alone, the thesis that had been ruling the space for more than a decade to that point, more like a decade and a half.

The app of today and tomorrow has to exist on all platforms - the laptop, the tablet, the smartphone - and more platforms than are in vogue today. Think wristwatch, think TV screen, think movie screen. Think platforms made possible by the gesture - NUI, Natural User Interface - going mainstream.

It is not about the platform, it is about the user.

Vibhu Norby misses the point. Although what he has said are points worth considering by those who are thinking monetization in the short run.

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Marissa Mayer's Gameplan

Marissa Mayer is not Steve Jobs, but I think she is very promising.

The words mobile and personalization capture it for me. Mobile is obvious. Personalization means Big Data.

Vague is good at this point. Gives her more wiggle room.

Executive Change at Yahoo Suggests Thirst for Acquisitions

With 700 million users each month, Yahoo remains one of the most visited sites on the Web, but it has been ceding its share of the online display ad market to rivals like Facebook and Google. ..... Yahoo made its name in search but lost that market to Google and then proceeded to miss the boat on every big Internet trend since. It was too focused on reinventing itself as a multimedia company to notice people were migrating to social networks and mobile devices as gateways for information and entertainment. Yahoo’s home page remains cluttered and sorely lacking a brand of its own.

Mayer to Yahoos at Not-So-Radical Confab: Personalization, Mobile, Rule of 100 Million and — Most of All — the Four C’s!

Very broad, as it turned out, and full of corporate bromides ...... Her goals: To grow users and usage, as well as advertisers and talent, using personalization. ..... Mayer needs to probably paint a much more specific plan for investors to get excited about.

Here Is The Plan Marissa Mayer Just Announced To Yahoo Employees

Yahoo will work very hard on personalization and mobile. .... Yahoo will be strong in mobile by 2015.

Marissa Mayer Allegedly Has 10 or 12 Different Priorities for Yahoo
Yahoo — rotten to core? I think so

vague plans at best .... “At Facebook and Google, they know your underwear size before you walk in the door. At Yahoo, it was clear they hadn’t even Googled me,” an entrepreneur who was in acquisition talks with Yahoo

A Sneak Peek At The New Yahoo Home Page Redesign?

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Lethargic Academia, Fast Media

Image via CrunchBase

Doctors are stereotypically smart people. But health care sucks when it comes to use of IT. How do you explain that? That also applies to academia. Academics are even more stereotypically smart than doctors. But they lag behind when it comes to use of IT. That is a disservice. Because service is affected.

Mendeley injects some pace into academia with fast, big data

managing documents online is a pretty busy space right now ... Mendeley .... the site has become a big hit with academics and researchers, signing up nearly 2 million members from universities and institutions all over the world, because it allows them to keep tabs on all the research papers, documents and files ..... “The biggest problem in academia is the long waiting time: it can take three to five years from the time you have done research to get it published — all the decisions you make in an academic career are based around that time lag” ....... Between them, the site’s members have uploaded some 260 million documents, representing around 65 million unique research papers and studies — around 50 percent larger than any of the existing commercial databases. By mining those documents and watching activity around them, Mendeley’s able to help institutions understand the trends as they emerge… not years afterwards. ...... get to life-changing discoveries faster .... ResearchGate ... Digital Science

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119 Billion Google Searches

Image via CrunchBase

I did not know that number. One would think it would approach infinity. But it's only 119 billion. Wait, that's a lot. That's a big, big number.

In many ways those searches are as if not more powerful than updates on Facebook and Twitter. These searches can be mined.

Search queries are real time. Google searches might be the biggest of Big Data.

Your 119 Billion Google Searches Now A Central Bank Tool

the Bank of Israel, which looks to searches like Sugarman’s to assess the state of the nation’s $243 billion economy..... The central bank stands at the forefront of the world’s hunt for new economic indicators, analyzing keyword counts for everything from aerobics classes to refrigerators -- reported by Google almost as soon as the queries take place -- to gauge consumer demand before official statistics are released. The Federal Reserve and the central banks of England, Italy, Spain and Chile have followed up with their own studies to see if search volumes track trends in the economies they oversee. .... “When central bankers were looking at traditional data, they were essentially looking out the rear-view mirror” ..... a 23-page paper he co-wrote in April 2009, demonstrating how data reported on the Google Trends service improved forecasts of auto and home sales and retail spending in the U.S. ...... Google makes its data available one to three days after users perform searches .... Using query volumes in place of government statistics that are not yet available ..... Searches predicted the inflow of British tourists into Spain with a lead of almost one month. ..... a “data revolution.” It’s “an enormous amount of information” that will better help “us understand in very real-time what’s going on.”

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Big Data: It Is About Taking It To The Masses

Image via CrunchBase

GoodData brings in $25M to supply Big Data analytics

GoodData offers operational dashboards, metrics and performance reports, data storage, analytics, and collaboration tools in a single platform. The company focuses on user experience, so all the tricky, technical elements of big data are comprehensible to people outside of IT teams..... dramatic revenue growth of 500% year over year...... It was founded in the Czech Republic in 2007 and is now based in San Francisco. It has 180 employees.

Big Data has always been around. What is about to change is it is about to get to the masses. It is about to become as easy as email. Or as cumbersome, depends on how you look at it.

Your company needs electricity, it needs broadband, it also needs Big Data.

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