Netizen

Friday, July 13, 2012

SMS: Nowhere Close To Done

SMS Flickr Dene Voss (Photo credit: katielips)

SMS is great for communication. The message is short. Chances are it is being sent to someone you know well. It will get read. It is instant delivery. It is efficient. It is natural to how you talk to people. You don't talk in paragraphs.

But it is more. I think of SMS as command. Before GUI (Graphical User Interface) you had to input commands. After the cursor came the touch. There is gesture, there is 3D. I think SMS is going to emerge something cutting edge like that. You should be able to talk to the most complex of your machines through the simplest of your phones.

Power To The Cloud: Twilio Takes Its SMS Messaging API Global, Adds Dozens Of New Languages, 150+ Countries

Brewster: Is It Green?

One day while Dropio was still a company - before it got bought and put to rest by Facebook (Dropio entered the space before Dropbox) - I tweeted everyone working at Dropio with a twitter account. Only one of them tweeted back, some dude called Steve Greenwood. A few days later I found myself in front of him at the final Social Media Week party, it was a fancy party. (That was two years before I snatched the crown.) I was just standing there, he had walked over. I thought it was random, now I think not. I said hello, then I found out he worked at Dropio. Obviously I had not connected the dots. He startled me by talking of Dropio as "a trillion dollar opportunity." This was way before Google hit 600 billion, or wherever they are at right now.

The last time I met Steve Greenwood was a year and a half ago at the Barack Obama State Of The Union Watch party. I did not have the faintest idea both Greenwood and I had a mutual friend in the organizer of the event.

In between one day I met Greenwood at a New York Tech MeetUp after party. It was minutes after some random dude never seen before and after called me Sean Parker.

We are not close. We don't have each other's phone numbers. We have not exchanged emails. His first tweet was his last to me. But he has been one of those undefined guys in the New York tech ecosystem. Someone with obvious raw potential, but you did not know if you did not know.

And now the dude reveals himself. It is entirely possible I never made it to his spreadsheet.

Fred Wilson: Brewster
Jenna Wortham: New York Times: Brewster, a Mobile App, Wants to Transform Your Address Book
Life Hacker: Brewster Is an Address Book That Pools Together All Your Social Contacts and Organizes Them Automatically
All Things D: Q&A: Behind Brewster, the Buzzy New Modern Address Book
Brewster Blog
Charlie O'Donnell: Fall in love with the problem, not the product

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Will Amazon Deliver Pizza?

Image representing Amazon as depicted in Crunc...

Image via CrunchBase

I Want It Today: How Amazon’s ambitious new push for same-day delivery will destroy local retail.

There was a company in the late 1990s called Kozmo.com. It delivered DVDs and pizza. Amazon's next day delivery is on its way to becoming same day delivery, looks like. This is Amazon competing with Walmart. And it could go into big cities like Walmart has not been allowed to.

Retail is one of the oldest of industries. A lot of small shops might feel the pain.

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

The First To Be Sharing Bachchan's Tumblog Posts

Indian idol Amitabh Bachchan (Photo credit: net_efekt)

I think I am the first person to be sharing Amitabh Bachchan's tumblog posts on platforms like Google Plus, Facebook, possibly also Twitter. That is the honor of a lifetime.

Bachchan Moves His Blog To Tumblr

Cover of Amitabh Bachchan

My birthday is not mine. My official birthday is the actual birthday of Amitabh Bachchan. I grew up watching this guy. I am an evergreen fan.

If I were Tumblr I'd declare a public holiday on this piece of news.

Does Geography Matter?

Image representing Mark Suster as depicted in ...

Image by GRP Partners via CrunchBase

I was just reading this blog post by Mark Suster - who I like to call the most visible VC in Los Angeles; the guy has a well read blog, does he not! He is commenting on something that I also noted a few days back, that Pinterest is moving to San Fran.

San Francisco is considered the number one place for tech startups in the country today. New York City is number two. Does geography matter? Will the exact same startup fare better in San Fran than in New York? What does it mean to be number one? And what does San Fran have that Silicon Valley, only tens of miles to the south, does not have? What, you might ask, is going on?

I think geography matters, but number two is a very good place to be, especially if your startup does not depend on having the best of the best engineers, more of which might be out there in the Bay Area. If yours is a high touch startup, NYC might be good too.

San Francisco is a city like Palto Alto is not. But then, by that count, New York City is the mother of all cities, as Saddam Hussein might have said.

The suggestion seems to be first decide where you want to live. For many that place is New York.

It’s not that young people wanted to live in Mountain View in the past. In fact, so many DID NOT that companies like Google & Yahoo! had free buses with wifi from San Francisco to their Palo Alto and Sunnyvale headquarters.

You know the story. You get older. You get married. You have a kid. Then another. Suddenly you feel the pull for a backyard and nearby parks. And a bigger house wouldn’t hurt so that when your mother-in-law is in town for 3 weeks it doesn’t feel like you see her quite so much.

So you move outside the city – even though you feel a strong pull to stay. It’s why many of the older executives at San Francisco startups live in Marine County and commute in. Or they do so from Burlingame, San Ramon or even Palo Alto.