The impending Age Of Abundance was prophecied in the scriptures thousands of years ago.
Image via WikipediaVinod Khosla: TechCrunch: The “Unhyped” New Areas in Internet and Mobilea whole new world of platforms, a post-PC era, which I’d more aptly describe as the always/everywhere era, finally, and that means a whole new set of opportunities ..... the cost of experimentation has gone down dramatically ..... raw computing power is taken for granted. ..... What else new has the potential (nothing is certain!) to be truly disruptive or establish a new category in the domain of consumer Internet/mobile/services (which to me are fast becoming interchangeable)? ...... AirBnB and Instagram would be examples of companies whose categories existed prior to their entry, but they are meaningfully different. ...... I call them the “unhyped dozen” (to go with my energy investing activities, which I call the “clean dozen”) ...... (1) Data Reduction or Filters (Siri) (2) Big data or Analytics ... There will be countless new types of data streams .... Much has been written about big data and it and may be getting past the unhyped label! (3) Emotion (Foodspotting, Ness, Instagram) (4) Education 2.0 (Khan Academy) ... “Education models that dramatically reduce the cost and increase the availability of quality learning.” The puzzling question is why education has not already changed. (5) TV 2.0 (6) Social Next (7) Interest-based networks (Twitter) (8) Health 2.0 (9) Internet of Things/Universal ID/NFC/Smart sensors.... The network of things is supposedly growing faster than any other network, social or otherwise. (10) Personal Collaborative Publishing (Pinterest, Tumblr) ... Self-publishing on Amazon is becoming real, removing the gateway of traditional editors and the tax of traditional business models. Where will this lead? Books, especially non-fiction, can become more interactive, crowdsourced (ck12.org), social and collaborative. (11) Utility Apps (Siri) (12) Marketplaces & Disintermediation (Etsy) .... Why does Tom Freidman need The New York Times to get readers ................. We as investors have seen Square take off at an unprecedented rate (so far) for a payments startup, but in terms of relative scale, even Square is dwarfed by Mpesa — it is 20% of Kenya’s GDP already (using a totally different model than Square). Meanwhile in India, their UID system could remake the concept of “cash”....... Tools and services that used to be inaccessible to all but large manufacturers are now available to everyone. Foreign factories that were impenetrable before are now an email away. Design software costing thousands of dollars per seat is freely available (or very cheap). Hackers are mixing all of these elements together and re-imagining entire industries from the ground up. ..... the next industrial revolution ...... “The under 25” who don’t know what they don’t know, mostly have not worked at what traditionalists would call a “real job” and are not afraid to try new things ..... the rate of change is accelerating and the possibilities are endless!The Clean Dozen
Image via WikipediaIf Google Plus has 90 million users now, that was achieved in half a year. So even at that growth rate it should have 270 million users by the end of 2012. But it is most likely the growth will accelerate. Say it ends up with 350 million users by December. Those are rad numbers. I see no fog between 90 million and 500 million. As in, there is no stopping Google Plus from hitting 500 million users. I just don't know how long that will take. "I have some amazing data to share there for the first time: +users are very engaged with our products — over 60% of them engage daily, and over 80% weekly."
Image by Getty Images via @daylifeSOPA Is So Going Down The tide began to turn this weekend when a hearing scheduled for today was canceled and the White House pushed back on some of the more controversial portions ..... Already, a couple of co-sponsors of the bill are pulling their support. Representative Ben Quayle (R-Ariz.) is no longer a co-sponsor, and Representative Lee Terry (R-Neb.) is also planning to remove his name from the co-sponsor list, according to Politico. One Congressman, Representative Justin Amash (R-Mich.) is even joining the protest movement.
Image via CrunchBaseTechCrunch: "No one knows what the future holds, but I can guarantee you the world will look be different – again – at the end of next year." 
Mike Arrington: Uncrunched: Embattled Evite Clones Startup Paperless Post In Quest For Survival: For the last few years, though, a small startup called Paperless Post has emerged that lets people create beautiful event invitations online. Paperless Post isn’t free. In fact, that seems to be part of the attraction....... There’s been very little tech press about Paperless Post ...... The company has sent some 50 million invitations, has raised $6.3 million in funding and is break even with 35 employees in New York and San Francisco. Marissa Mayer uses Paperless Post for her events. Metropolitan Museum of Art, The White House executive branch, The National Gallery and even The Prince of Wales have all used the premium invitation service. ...... It’s a fascinating case study against the notion that people will always choose free over for pay online services. ..... an outright rip off of Paperless Post’s business. Evite’s Postmark hasn’t officially launched yet, but they promote it on the evite home page and people have noticed it. ...... “Evite’s Postmark looks like someone hired a programmer and told them to copy every aspect of Paperless Post,” says the person who pointed it out to me. And that’s true. The business model is identical – charge for every invitation sent, plus optional fees for specialized designs and other customizations. The pricing is nearly identical. ...... Evite has also copied the exact look and feel of a number of the Paperless Post invitations as well. ...... I particularly like the line they use at the bottom of the Postmark website – “The comfort from knowing that Evite Postmark is as reliable, effective and innovative as Evite.” .... Innovative, indeed....... And I certainly don’t weep for Paperless Post. In fact, this is great for their business. As much as Postmark has retreated from the stain of the evite brand on its website, most people will still understand where this service came from and remember the years of horror using the evite service.What is happening to Paperless Post now has happened to FourSquare several times over, and they are stronger than ever before. Paperless Post knows this space, and Evite is just imitating. It feels like a total copy and paste. When you did that with term papers at college, you got into trouble.
My guess is Postmark will just raise awareness of Paperless Post, and even more people will flock to the service when they want to send a premium event invitation.The day Facebook Places was launched FourSquare had its best day ever. That's there, but I still have a bad taste in my mouth. Somebody explain why! Mikie?
Image via WikipediaSpotify USA, 76 9th Ave., Suite 1110, 11th Floor, New York, NYGigaOm: Republic Wireless to launch $19 unlimited voice, SMS and data service: Republic Wireless ..... will launch a hybrid cellular voice and VoIP service on Nov. 8, 2011. ..... The service, which costs $19 a month, will allow you to make VoIP phone calls over Wi-Fi and will switch to cellular-based calling when a Wi-Fi network is unavailable. Text messages can also be sent via Wi-Fi or cellular networks. The service does require a special Android handset. The plan includes unlimited voice and text messaging. It also includes unlimited data without any bandwidth caps. ...... no different from the Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA)-based service bundled in some T-Mobile BlackBerry devices. T-Mobile also has UMA available on some Android phones. ...... When inside the office or your home or inside a Wi-Fi hot-spot, all phone calls and text messages are sent and received via the Internet. ...... like Kineto Wireless’ UMA that is used by T-Mobile, Republic requires you to buy a special phone that can handle this hybrid calling. The company has built this hardware based on Google’s Android OS. ...... also attractive to those who travel internationally and want to save on calling back to the U.S. ...... the idea of unlimited 3G data with the service for $19 a monthTechCrunch: Republic Wireless: An Android-Powered, VoIP/Cellular Hybrid Carrier That’ll Cut Your Phone Bill In Half
Republic Wireless, a new mobile phone service from Bandwidth.com that will be launching on November 8, and could truly be the phone carrier you’ve always wanted. ...... an alternative to the likes of Verizon and AT&T. ..... Users will not have to manually switch between Wifi and cellular — the phone will figure it out automatically ..... New phones are required because the Hybrid Calling relies on both hardware and software ....... You won’t need to sign up for a contract, so there aren’t any termination fees. No overage fees, either. ..... $19 a month, which will include unlimited voice, text, and data.Also the Galaxy Nexus has been taking too long to show up.
Image via CrunchBaseIn The Market For A Smartphone 
@naveen Oh, very nice. Congrats on the new round!less than a minute ago via HootSuite 
jcn
Image by jdlasica via FlickrMark Zuckerberg is obviously the man to watch. The guy wants nothing less than to own the decade. I am not sure the decade can be owned by any one person, but I have no doubts he will be one of the people who will. TechCrunch: Exposed: Facebook’s Secret iPhone Photo Sharing App (Which Looks Amazing): Path meets Instagram meets Color meets (Path’s new side project) With — with a few cool twists. And obviously, it’s built entirely on top of Facebook’s massive social graph.Behold: Facebook’s Secret Photo Sharing App Facebook, which is by far the largest photo service on the Internet with close to 100 billion photos, to make their own dedicated photo app. ..... Facebook’s focus on mobile photos going forward is very clear. ..... Given their talk of commitment to HTML5, Facebook likely wants to make an app that is as portable as possible. That is, while it may be built first for iOS, it can easily be ported to Android and other platforms with the HTML5 elements in place. ........ Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom was once approached by Mark Zuckerberg about working at Facebook way back in 2004 ...... Systrom declined the invitation, and now Zuckerberg is a Instagram user ....... the location elements, likes and comments, multi-picture mode, filters, multi-user albums, face-tagging, and more
Image via CrunchBaseJust yesterday I was reading this post and found myself shaking my head. TechCrunch: “It Just Works.”: Apple is now going all-in with their cloud strategy. But they’re not doing it by simply tacking on cloud storage to their existing arsenal of products. They’re attempting to redefine what the “cloud” is..... With iCloud, Apple is transforming the cloud from an almost tangible place that you visit to find your stuff, to a place that only exists in the background. It’s never seen. You never interact with it, your apps do — and you never realize it. It’s magic. ....... Amazon, has essentially turned it into one giant server/hard drive that anyone can use for a fee ...... Apple’s belief is clearly that users will not and should not care how the cloud actually works. ...... You’re working on a document in Pages on your iPad, you move over to Pages on your Mac, and there it is. It even remembers where you were last editing. You download a song to your iPhone, you pick up your iPad, there it is. ....... With iPad/iPhone and now OS X Lion, you don’t save documents anymore. They save automatically — but an easier way to think about it is that they just exist, as is, in realtime on all your devices. ....... Files are something Microsoft worries about. Files in the cloud are something Google and Amazon worry about. Apple’s iCloud is about opening an application and the thing you want to access being there. ...... Chrome OS is perhaps the closest thing to Apple’s iCloud vision. When you boot up a Chromebook and enter your password, everything appears. Again, like magic. ...... this is the point where we may really start to see some truly fundamental differences between Google and Apple after the past few years going head-to-head with feature matching. Apple is going after consumers who have absolutely no idea what the cloud is, and don’t care. ........ Apple has rethought and rewritten their apps — including their desktop apps — from the ground up to be woven with iCloud fabric that a user won’t see. ..... And Apple doesn’t believe that Google can match them even if they wanted to because they don’t have complete control of their ecosystem in the same way that Apple does. ...... Apple is now more clearly than ever betting that will not be web software, but native software backed invisibly by the web.Steve Jobs is a living legend, and rightly so. At one point I compared him to Mozart, although it was an impulsive move on my part, I would not do it again. But I have some fundamental philosophical differences with the guy. I am not big on native software and that is why I think HTML5 is such good news.
Image by brjkt via FlickrI said at this blog several years ago that content and search will never go stale. We will come up with new forms of content creation. We will find ever new ways to do search. If you think about it, Facebook is search. Twitter is search. Facebook is content creation and curation. Twitter is content creation and curation. 
Image via CrunchBaseBefore Einstein the world was 3D. There were the three dimensions of space: length, breadth, height, the usual suspects. You could argue Euclid's world was 2D. Well, old man Einstein came along, and added the time dimension to the equation. And that had huge implications, humongous huge. 
Image via CrunchBaseNihal Mehta: Being Mysterious About Local ResponseTechCrunch: Buzzd Rebrands As Local Response; Debuts Social Customer Management Tool For Businesses: combine the element of the check-in he found intriguing with Buzzd and advertising and marketing elements ..... he calls “a culmination of everything he’s done,” of this is Local Response, a new web-based tool that allows local businesses to respond to the “check-in” on social media sites with marketing campaigns to promote transactions. ...... LocalResponse aggregates real-‐time social media check-‐ins from Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, Instagram and dozens of other services to provide a simple interface for local businesses to directly respond to their most influential and valuable customers. What’s compelling about the platform compared to competitors is that it analyzes massive amounts of data in addition to check-ins from the Twitter firehose, photo sharing sites and more to find other forms of check-ins. These could be posting a picture on Instagram of a dish from a restaurant or Tweeting that you are visiting a particular bar. ...... explicitly (i.e. check-ins on Foursquare) and implicitly (by analyzing natural language on Facebook, Twitter, etc.; e.g. “I’m headed to ShakeShack”). Mehta says most check-ins are actual implicit and many social media platforms catered to helping businesses track check-ins miss this key data. ...... Not only does Local Response track all of this data but it allows businesses to respond to these Tweets and messages with a marketing campaign, coupon or advertisement. ...... So Shake Shack could send a Tweet back to someone who had just snapped a photo of a burger with a link to a 10 percent off coupon on the next visit. ...... Local Response has actually creates a number of canned responses which businesses can automatically send. ..... For the past six months, LocalResponse has been running a private beta, with over 2,000 campaigns for local businesses in New York City. The links in the Tweets and messages sent by these local businesses to consumers who “checked-in” to their establishment are averaging a 60 percent click-‐through rate and 15-‐20 percent redemption rates. That’s high and impressive. ...... Mehta says that the platform is so highly-focused in its data collection, that it can send highly targeted Tweets to consumers who are interested in the promotions or campaigns. For example he says that Local Response will run two to three hundred search terms across its data for a particular business. Also, the aim of Local Response is not to overwhelm consumers’ stream with advertisements. Users will never receive more than one message in 7 days ...... a platform for brands and agencies is in the works. ...... closed a $1.5 million in funding this past December from Verizon Ventures, Charles River Ventures, and Metamorphic. ...... plans to raise a new, larger round of funding this Summer ..... For now, Local Response is free for businesses. Eventually the startup plans to go the freemium route and will also charge for the brand-focused application. And Local Response is launching with half a million businesses that are already pre-indexed (with search terms). All they have to do is type in the business name, and they can get started using the platform.A second natural move might be to partner up with the willing players to help them monetize their particular services for cuts, like Google ads help you monetize your particular media site. Because Local Response is not going to have access to the detailed data that those individual services might have.
