Odeo Should Have Stuck Around

The logo used by Apple to represent Podcasting (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I say bring back Odeo.

An Insider's History Of How A Podcasting Startup Pivoted To Become Twitter

it started out in 2005 as Odeo, a podcasting company founded by Evan Williams. When Apple iTunes moved into podcasting, Odeo found itself going nowhere fast, and so it needed to pivot..... Noah Glass, who came up with the name Twttr .... Odeo's team pivoted to fully embrace the 140-character side project. The rest, as they say, is history (in progress).

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Secretive Apple

Image by marcopako  via FlickrApple's ways are so different from Google's and yet they go neck and neck. It is a study in contrasts. No free lunch? Come on.

Fortune: The secrets Apple keeps

Undercover meetings! Stealth product developments! The world's most successful company is obsessed with privacy. ..... for a corporation so frequently discussed, Apple is poorly understood. Its products are ubiquitous, but information about the institution is scarce -- which is exactly how Apple wants it ..... The business world keeps nattering on about the importance of corporate transparency, yet the most successful company in the world is beyond opaque. ...... Apple employees know something big is afoot when the carpenters appear in their office building. New walls are quickly erected. Doors are added and new security protocols put into place. Windows that once were transparent are now frosted. Other rooms have no windows at all. They are called lockdown rooms: No information goes in or out without a reason. ...... If it hasn't been disclosed to you, then it's literally none of your business. ...... the link between secrecy and productivity is one way that Apple (AAPL) challenges long-held management truths and the notion of transparency as a corporate virtue. ...... at Apple everything is a secret. .... loose-lips-sink-ships mentality: A T‑shirt for sale in the company store, which is open to the public at 1 Infinite Loop, reads: I VISITED THE APPLE CAMPUS. BUT THAT'S ALL I'M ALLOWED TO SAY. ....... Apple's airy physical surroundings belie its secretive core. ..... Unlike Google's famously and ridiculously named "Googleplex," where a visitor can roam the inner courtyards and slip into an open door as employees come and go, Apple's buildings are airtight. Employees can be spotted on the volleyball courts from time to time. More typically, visitors gaping into the courtyard will see a campus in constant motion. Apple employees scurry from building to building for meetings that start and end on time. ...... "And half the folks can't tell you what they're doing, because it's a secret project that they've gotten hired for." ....... Outside, Apple is revered. Inside, it is cultish ...... "There's only one free lunch at Apple, and it's on your first day" ...... the rationale is that when Apple launches a product, if it's been a secret up until the launch, the amount of press and coverage and buzz that you get is hugely valuable to the company. 'It's worth millions of dollars' ...... Apple's powerful senior vice president of product marketing, has been known to compare an Apple product launch to a blockbuster Hollywood movie opening weekend. ...... Apple fanboys camp out in front of Apple stores in anticipation of new Apple product releases in a way that is reminiscent of the lines that once greeted a new installment in the Lord of the Rings or Star Wars franchises ..... so they don't steal the thunder from existing products. If consumers know exactly what's coming, they may hold off on a purchase for fear it will be superseded by the next generation. .......... announcing products before they are ready gives the competition time to respond, raises customer expectations, and opens a company up to the carping of critics who are bashing an idea rather than an actual product. ...... Unfathomably, HP later "pre-announced" the sale of its PC business, inflicting immeasurable damage on a unit that accounted for nearly a third of its sales. (HP's board fired its CEO, Léo Apotheker, shortly after the announcement about the PC unit.) ....... Valley engineers love to swap stories about their work, but Apple engineers have a reputation for keeping to themselves. ..... "It's best in general not to talk about work." The mentality makes Apple stand out in the tech world. ..... People working on launch events will be given watermarked paper copies of a booklet called Rules of the Road that details every milestone leading up to launch day. In the booklet is a legal statement whose message is clear: If this copy ends up in the wrong hands, the responsible party will be fired. ...... You had to sign extra-special agreements acknowledging that you were working on a super-secret project and you wouldn't talk about it to anyone -- not your wife, not your kids. ...... "He'd say, 'Anything disclosed from this meeting will result not just in termination but in the prosecution to the fullest extent that our lawyers can.' This made me very uncomfortable. You have to watch everything you do. I'd have nightmares." ....... Company lore holds that plainclothes Apple security agents lurk near the bar at BJ's and that employees have been fired for loose talk there. It doesn't matter if the yarn is true or apocryphal. The fact that employees repeat it serves the purpose. ...... the Apple way is to mind one's own business. This has a side benefit that is striking in its simplicity: Employees prevented from butting into one another's affairs will have more time to focus on their own work. Below a certain level, it is difficult to play politics at Apple, because the average employee doesn't have enough information to get into the game. Like a horse fitted with blinders, the Apple employee charges forward to the exclusion of all else. ...... "We have cells, like a terrorist organization ... Everything is on a need‑to‑know basis." ...... Organization charts, typical fare at most big companies, don't exist at Apple. That is information employees don't need and outsiders shouldn't have. ...... the internal Apple Directory. This electronic guide lists each employee's name, group, manager, location, e-mail, and phone number, and might include a photograph. ..... The executive team, a small council of advisers to the CEO, runs the company, assisted by a cadre of fewer than 100 vice presidents. But rank doesn't always confer status at Apple. Everyone is aware of an unwritten caste system. The industrial designers are untouchable, as were, until his death, the cadre of engineers who had worked with Steve Jobs for years, some dating to his first stint at Apple. A small group of engineers carries the title of DEST, distinguished engineer/scientist, technologist. These are individual contributors with clout in the organization but no management responsibilities. ..... In terms of corporate coolness, functions such as sales, human resources, and customer service wouldn't even rate. ..... it isn't uncommon for employees to go places their boss cannot. ...... By and large, Apple is a collaborative and cooperative environment, devoid of overt politicking. The reason for the cooperation, according to former insiders, is the command-and-control structure. ...... Apple's culture may be cooperative, but it isn't usually nice, and it's almost never relaxed. ...... "The fighting can get personal and ugly. There's a mentality that it's okay to shred somebody in the spirit of making the best products." ...... "It's a culture of excellence," this person noted. "You don't want to be the weak link. There is an intense desire to not let the company down." ...... Apple's culture is the polar opposite of Google's, where fliers announcing extracurricular activities -- from ski outings to a high-profile author series -- hang everywhere. At Apple, the iTunes team sponsors the occasional band, and there is a company gym (which isn't free), but by and large Apple people come to work to work. "At meetings, there is no discussion about the lake house where you just spent the weekend," recalled a senior engineer. "You get right down to business." ...... "There is not a culture of recognizing and celebrating success. It's very much about work." Said another: "If you're a die-hard Apple geek, it's magical. It's also a really tough place to work." ..... Apple pays salaries that are competitive with the marketplace -- but no better. A senior director might make an annual salary of $200,000, with bonuses in good years amounting to 50% of the base. Talking about money is frowned upon at Apple. ..... "Sitting in a bar and seeing that 90% of the people there are using devices that your company made -- there is something cool about that, and you can't put a dollar value on it."

The Spotify Event Was Great

Image via WikipediaThe Spotify CTO Talk

Spotify is in the same building as Google. I show up and there is Melissa. She is with Barnes & Noble. They are also in the same building. I did not know. I met her at a NY Tech MeetUp after party a few months back.

Free pizza is a great start to an event, I think. Good thing I don't drink beer. Otherwise they had plenty of those too.

The CTO Oskar Stal - who I got to talk to at great length after the formal event was over - started the talks. It was amazing to me how he was obsessed with company culture. He wanted Spotify's engineers to feel like there were many small team startups inside of Spotify. That seemed to be his number one concern.

Later I asked during the question answer session: "Should you not have the Chief Culture Officer title instead?" He said he did culture and many other things.

Henrik Landren gave a great talk - replete with great slides - on all the immense data Spotify collects. I got to see a side of Spotify I had not seen before. Artists get to see where their fans are. That would really help them plan their tours. Magic. Hadoop came in handy.

That made me think. Otherwise I told Oskar, I feel like Spotify is a finished product. What is there to add except more songs and more countries? He is like, oh no no no. There is so much to do.

Sean Parker's 2009 Email To Spotify

Image via WikipediaImage via CrunchBase
----- Original Message -----
From: Sean Parker
To: Daniel Ek; Shakil Khan
Sent: Tue Aug 25 13:49:35 2009
Subject: thoughts

Daniel/Shakil,

I've been playing around with Spotify. You've built an amazing experience. As you saw, Zuck really likes it too. I've been trying to get him to understand your model for a while now but I think he just needed to see it for himself.

Facebook has been in partnership discussions with various companies to fullyintegrate music download with the Facebook profile. Most of these deals would have resulted in the wrong user experience and I've done my best to stop them where they didn't make sense. In particular, there's no way that iTunes could enable the right experience on Facebook. Business development teams have a bias for working with the top player in a given market, especially when they don't understand that market. Unfortunately, partnering with iTunes would not only have created the wrong user experience, it would have had disastrous consequences for the emerging digital music industry.

I'm looking forward to meeting you guys sometime in early September, though I'm pretty excited about what you've done and I can't resist sharing some of my thoughts with you here first.

Your design is clean, elegant, tight, and fast. While it's clearly lacking some important features (the social stuff you alluded to, etc), I think you've done a great job with sequencing. You nailed the core experience around which everything else can later be built.

Steve Jobs' Departure

Image via WikipediaIt is not exactly a departure. He will still be Chairperson. But then the Chairperson does not do day to day. He is leaving for health reasons, but he is also leaving at a time when the app looks like might be displaced by HTML5. So he gets to leave while still at the peak.

How Steve Jobs Gets Things Done
An Ode To Steve jobs
Steve Jobs Should Never Have Been Fired
Sculley: Scum
Apple: Remarkable

The New Yorker

Steve Jobs' Power: As a technology journalist, I’ve often found Jobs utterly maddening. He’s controlling and manipulative. He doesn’t like the press, and, perhaps because of that, he has long had us under his big toe. (Criticize Apple too much and you and your colleagues can lose access to the company and its products.) His ethos has always been that he knows best, and that he, not you, should have maximum control of the products you buy. The ethos of software idealists has always been something of the opposite. ...... And yet, the man is undoubtedly a genius. He built Apple, was forced out, and then, in 1997, returned to resuscitate it. He invented the iPhone and the iPad. I’ve often thought of Apple as something like Singapore. It’s closed, restrictive, and authoritarian. And there’d deserve to be insurrection if things just didn’t work so damn well. ...... Steve Jobs built a cult of personality that gave him power...... Jobs had a power that Cook could not possibly have here, just because he was Jobs. He could summon anyone he wanted to meet with him; he could get journalists to write whatever he wanted them to write; and, if he and Apple threatened to screw you over, you had to believe them.

Searching For Steve Jobs: rarely spent more than ten minutes with a reporter ....... No Hollywood studio chief, no captain of industry, and probably no recent American politician, had a more visible impact on people’s lives. ..... I had just written a story about Google, and the folks at Apple clearly felt that they deserved as much publicity as some upstart search company run by two kids from Stanford. I had to agree...... They suggested that I tell the story of the Apple store. I told them that I had no interest in writing about real estate. They said they would get back to me. ....... the pattern never changed; Jobs turned out astounding new products like popcorn: new iMacs, then MacBooks, and eventually the iPhone and the iPad ....... Jobs’s 2007 introductory keynote for the iPhone was, to the digerati, the equivalent of the Grateful Dead’s 1977 Hartford performance, or Dylan at Newport. When Jobs explained that in order to navigate this mysterious new product, “I just take my finger, and I scroll,” it was at least as exciting to the geeks assembled in the Moscone Center as Lauren Bacall’s explanation to Humphrey Bogart that, to whistle, “Just put your lips together and blow.” (My editor at The New Yorker watched the announcement live on his office computer. Before Jobs was even done describing the new phone, he called me and said, “He had me at multi-touch, widescreen iPod.”) ....... By then I had given up on Steve Jobs as a profile subject. He just didn’t give a damn.

Apple: What Happens Now?: most C.E.O.s could be easily replaced, if not by your average Joe, then by your average executive vice-president. ..... created industries out of whole cloth. And Apple did this not by inventing products that had never been seen before—there were mp3 players before the iPod, smartphones before the iPhone, tablets before the iPad—but rather by making products that were so much better—superior design, more powerful, easier to use—that everyone wanted them....... he had no interest in listening to consumers—he was famously dismissive of market research—yet nonetheless had an amazing sense of what consumers actually wanted. ........ one of Jobs’s most important feats was building a deep management and design team—instead of centralizing power in his own hands, he gave a tremendous amount of responsibility to the executives who worked with him, including most obviously the designer Jonathan Ive and the operational whiz Tim Cook, who ran the company during Jobs’s previous medical leaves and who will now take over as C.E.O. Apple’s enormous profitability in recent years wasn’t just a function of coming up with great ideas. It was also a function of having an organization that was exceptionally good at turning those ideas into products, and doing so in an efficient and relentless manner. And that organization is not going to vanish now that Jobs has stepped down.

Apple After Steve Jobs: The news that Steve Jobs is stepping down as chief executive officer of Apple is rippling through the media, just as yesterday’s earthquake traveled up the East Coast. ....... Apple partisans explain their loyalty with rational arguments about elegant design and freedom from viruses, but their devotion runs as deep as sports fandom or religious faith, and they hang on Jobs’s every word....... Can Apple thrive without Jobs? It almost didn’t the first time around, and shares have plunged this evening......... journalists, bloggers, and fans have been parsing his every utterance, from W.W.D.C. keynotes to purported e-mails to members of the public, the way Moscow reporters used to watch the Kremlin. Apple is in much better financial shape than the Soviet Union was at the end, so I’m not counting on a period of glasnost, at least not yet........ I spend almost all of my waking hours looking at, listening to, touching, or carrying an Apple device, except when I am taking a shower or have been chided for neglecting the children. Sometimes, I’m using more than one at once, listening on my iPhone while reading on the iPad. ...... The iPad has been around for a little more than a year, and so far no other tablet has been able to establish itself as a viable alternative, and laptops and netbooks have lost their appeal. ..... its iCloud initiative suggests a further retreat from the open Web into a closed universe of apps ...... next wave of tablets anticipates the full flowering of HTML5, which will bring Web pages sophisticated enough to behave like apps. Jobs will not be the general leading the battle between apps and the Web, between open and closed systems, but he was the military strategist. And some of those who supported Apple for years will be hoping Jobs’s successors lose this campaign.

The Steve Jobs Sound: the most effective and influential music executive of the decade was Steve Jobs ...... Jobs knew that music fans, like other consumers, don’t hate paying for stuff: they—we—call that shopping, and we love it, so long as there’s something worth buying. ..... the iPod nano is now about the size of a postage stamp, with a touch screen, and it holds enough music to play for a week straight. (It can also do things many iPhones still can’t, like sync with multiple computers, or tune into terrestrial radio.) ...... under his watch, a company known for sleek design helped usher in an era of frothy pop maximalism.

The Wizard Of Apple: —the Mac, the mouse, the laptop, Pixar, iTunes, iPod, iPhone, iPad— ..... Jobs battled with Microsoft, and Silicon Valley companies, and music and publishing and Hollywood companies. He was disrupting their comfortable business models. Yet as irate as Bill Gates and others got with Jobs, they knew he set a standard they could not ignore. They scoffed at first when he said Apple would produce both software and hardware, and now they follow. They scoffed when he insisted on consumer friendly products that needed no elaborate instructions written as if by a committee of engineers, and now they try to follow. They scoffed when he opened Apple stores, noting that Disney and Sony and others had failed at this, and now they follow. They scoffed that he was impossible to partner with because he was dictatorial, and then they clamored to partner with Apple....... Steve Jobs could be arrogant and unpleasant, a brutal man a sane person would not want to work for. But the products he created will be his monuments. And so will the memory of how he created those products.

Steve Job's Lesson: The first wave of personal computing was one of the times Apple couldn’t completely control a commodity. P.C.s capitalized on Apple’s high price point, and the Apple operating system gave Microsoft the raw material to create the mass-market Windows OS. Those brutal lessons (and lawsuits) were burned permanently into Apple’s cultural memory; when it came time for a portable mp3 player, the iPod was designed and priced to be relatively accessible, and the constant vigilance of product upgrading gave the iPod and its many-sized children genuine market control. In the smartphone market, the iPhone has not been unseated by Google’s various Android devices, and the introduction of the iPhone 5 will likely bump the company back up into first place. The iPad is by far the most popular tablet, and nothing has come to market that even hints at challenger status. (Without serious competition, the iPad’s upward curve is more iPod than iPhone.) ...... But those are all things, and much of the future of computing will be about functionality: data clouds, subscription music services, a variety of mobile synchronicites. Apple’s new iOS 5 and iCloud service will take on much of this all at once, automatically copying your iTunes library into the cloud and offering a chunk of free storage (and then a very large chunk for a small yearly subscription fee). But Apple has barely any presence in the world of social media, which may be why Twitter is integrated into iOS 5, a rare collaboration between the notoriously proprietary Jobs and another company. Services like Spotify are tiny next to Apple’s terrifying market cap (which now outstrips the G.D.P. of many countries) but Apple can’t be lazy about any competition now. The company caught its second wind because of music—a thing Microsoft has never understood —and it is the iPod and iTunes that shot Apple upwards, before the smartphones and tablets lifted them up yet again...... iTunes is the world’s biggest music retailer, but people are increasingly happy to simply stream music over subscription services like MOG and Spotify—ownership is already an alien concept to younger listeners who use YouTube as their radio. So the iCloud may hoover up all of your goodies, but a chunk of the world has no goodies and sees no need for them. ..... Nobody is not paying attention—and that can’t be a bad way to leave the stage.

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Mindfood And Business Models

Image via CrunchBaseYour Local Library On Kindle

Fred Wilson just put out a post on the music business.

music listening is going to move into the cloud and that the dominant model will be streaming via free ad supported Internet Radio and paid subscription services.

The internet as a technology is best suited for the creation, distribution, and consumption of mindfood: books, movies, music. But we have to get rid of out of date business models first.

For all our emphasis on techies, I think what we need more of is business innovators. We need MBA dropouts who will offer us better business models.

Tim Berners-Lee: Long Live the Web

Scientific American: Tim Berners-Lee: Long Live the Web: The world wide web went live, on my physical desktop in Geneva, Switzerland, in December 1990. It consisted of one Web site and one browser, which happened to be on the same computer. ..... We take it for granted, expecting it to “be there” at any instant, like electricity. ..... Wireless Internet providers are being tempted to slow traffic to sites with which they have not made deals. Governments—totalitarian and democratic alike—are monitoring people’s online habits, endangering important human rights. ....... Why should you care? Because the Web is yours. It is a public resource ...... The Web is now more critical to free speech than any other medium. ...... Yet people seem to think the Web is some sort of piece of nature ..... The Web should be usable by people with disabilities ...... from a silly tweet to a scholarly paper. .... A related danger is that one social-networking site—or one search engine or one browser—gets
Image via Wikipedia so big that it becomes a monopoly, which tends to limit innovation. ..... many companies spend money to develop extraordinary applications precisely because they are confident the applications will work for anyone, regardless of the computer hardware, operating system or Internet service provider (ISP) they are using—all made possible by the Web’s open standards. ....... The iTunes world is centralized and walled off. You are trapped .... For all the store’s wonderful features, its evolution is limited to what one company thinks up. .... It is better to build a Web app that will also run on smartphone browsers, and the techniques for doing so are getting better all the time. ..... as we saw in the 1990s with the America Online dial-up information system that gave you a restricted subset of the Web, these closed, “walled gardens,” no matter how pleasing, can never compete in diversity, richness and innovation with the mad, throbbing Web market outside their gates. ...... The Web is an application that runs on the Internet, which is an electronic network that transmits packets of information among millions of computers according to a few open protocols. ....... the Web is like a household appliance that runs on the electricity network ..... In 1990 the Web rolled out over the Internet without any changes to the Internet itself, as have all improvements since. And in that time, Internet connections have sped up from 300 bits per second to 300 million bits per second (Mbps) without the Web having to be redesigned to take advantage of the upgrades. ..... A neutral communications medium is the basis of a fair, competitive market economy, of democracy, and of science. .... Although the Internet and Web generally thrive on lack of regulation, some basic values have to be legally preserved. ..... snooping. In 2008 one company, Phorm, devised a way for an ISP to peek inside the packets of information it was sending. The ISP could determine every URI that any customer was browsing. The ISP could then create a profile of the sites the user went to in order to produce targeted advertising. ...... In France a law created in 2009, named Hadopi, allowed a new agency by the same name to disconnect a household from the Internet for a year if someone in the household was alleged by a media company to have ripped off music or video. ..... In the U.K., the Digital Economy Act, hastily passed in April, allows the government to order an ISP to terminate the Internet connection of anyone who appears on a list of individuals suspected of copyright infringement. In September the U.S. Senate introduced the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, which would allow the government to create a blacklist of Web sites—hosted on or off U.S. soil—that are accused of infringement and to pressure or require all ISPs to block access to those sites. ..... In these cases, no due process of law protects people before they are disconnected or their sites are blocked. Given the many ways the Web is crucial to our lives and our work, disconnection is a form of deprivation of liberty. Looking back to the Magna Carta, we should perhaps now affirm: “No person or organization shall be deprived of the ability to connect to others without due process of law and the presumption of innocence.” ...... Finland made broadband access, at 1 Mbps, a legal right for all its citizens. ..... the latest version of HTML, called HTML5, is not just a markup language but a computing platform that will make Web apps even more powerful than they are now. The proliferation of smartphones will make the Web even more central to our lives. Wireless access will be a particular boon to developing countries ...... devising pages that work well on all screens, from huge 3-D displays that cover a wall to wristwatch-size windows. ..... linked data. Today’s Web is quite effective at helping people publish and discover documents, but our computer programs cannot read or manipulate the actual data within those documents. As this problem is solved, the Web will become much more useful, because data about nearly every aspect of our lives are being created at an astonishing rate. Locked within all these data is knowledge about how to cure diseases, foster business value and govern our world more effectively. ...... The information necessary to understand the complex interactions between diseases, biological processes in the human body, and the vast array of chemical agents is spread across the world in a myriad of databases, spreadsheets and documents. ...... They posted
Image via Wikipedia a massive amount of patient information and brain scans as linked data, which they have dipped into many times to advance their research. In a demonstration I witnessed, a scientist asked the question, “What proteins are involved in signal transduction and are related to pyramidal neurons?” When put into Google, the question got 233,000 hits—and not one single answer. Put into the linked databases world, however, it returned a small number of specific proteins that have those properties. ........ The investment and finance sectors can benefit from linked data, too. Profit is generated, in large part, from finding patterns in an increasingly diverse set of information sources. ..... We build it now so that those who come to it later will be able to create things that we cannot ourselves imagine.

I am not worried. I never thought the web was about to die. Apple does not scare me. The iPhone app warlordism does not scare me. The web is part of an ecosystem. It is the biggest fish, but it does not have to be the only fish.

Ping On Twitter Is A Few Tech StartUp Ideas

Image via Wikipedia

TechCrunch: iTunes Ping Actually Goes Social With Full Twitter Integration; Careful, It Will Auto-Tweet: not only will each tweet contain a link back to the song or album on iTunes, but these links will work in New Twitter’s right-side pane. You’ll be able to listen to iTunes previews right from there — a huge feature that should lead to a lot of music buying, especially when the 90-second previews kick-in.

90 seconds is a lot of music. We live in the era of good enough. Perhaps Apple is lucky the Facebook Connect thing did not quite pan out for them. This is a better deal. And now everybody and their cousin will be tweeting everything they have in their private domains.

Apple Trying To "Get" Social Now?

Image via Wikipedia

New York Times: Bits: Apple-Facebook Friction Erupts Over Ping: Apple’s entry into social networking with the iTunes music social network Ping on Wednesday ..... Facebook insists that businesses that send a lot of traffic to its servers first work with the company to make sure those problems can be handled smoothly

Google's efforts at trying to "get" social are legendary. There have been so many failed attempts. Now looks like it is Apple's turn to "get" social. Google and Apple are competing on so many different fronts. Apple is not in search yet, and Google is not into hardware yet, but other than that they are all over each other. And now looks like Apple just got interested in social.

Hotmail was the first web email program. But then everyone started doing their own little email program. Yahoo got one. A few years later Google got one. The inbox did not stay with Hotmail. Social is the same way. Social does not belong to Facebook any more than the inbox belonged to Hotmail.

What happens when both Apple and Facebook try to do social? What happens when Facebook and FourSquare both try to do location? Sometimes friction happens.

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