Netizen

Thursday, May 06, 2010

Venmo Could Make Moves

Peer to peer payments can be thought of as a great first step for Venmo, but staying there will not bring it hockey stick growth. How often to you pay money to your friends? On the other hand, how often do you pay money at a bar? Or a restaurant?

One place to start might be at the bar where the NY Tech MeetUp hosts its after party. The NY Tech MeetUp crowd would be a great crowd to get hold of.

Another stop on the way might be the 2,000 vendors on FourSquare that have been identified as merchants that might qualify for merchant accounts. I believe they now have the option to call up FourSquare, verify ownership of their spaces, and activate their merchant accounts. That would give them options to better track all those who do check into their establishments.

Venmo might want to partner up with FourSquare to give those 2,000 establishments a heads up on the Venmo way of accepting payments. People likely to check in using FourSquare are also more likely than most to be the early believers in the idea of paying for your drink with a text message. Pay Drink Bar $6 for beer. That might take less time and effort than pulling out the wallet to dole out cash, wait for change, perhaps wait to sign a credit card receipt.

In FourSquare I see a partnership opportunity for Venmo.

Wednesday, May 05, 2010

Adam Smith And The Inbox Space

Image representing Adam Smith as depicted in C...

Image via CrunchBase

This guy Adam Smith popped up in my inbox today. Responding to an urge by Fred Wilson a few days ago, I signed up for the Venture Hacks mailing list, and today they sent me Adam Smith. It has been a cool find. Although I remember getting amused by the inbox spelled backwards thing from a few years back, in passing, (I remember watching that Bill Gates video that Adam inserts in his presentation in the video below, and I might be off on the time stamp) I am learning the guy's name for the first time today.

Venture Hacks Daily Newsletter

My interest in Adam Smith is that I have been giving some thought to the inbox space here at my blog recently.

Reimagining The Inbox The Simple Way
2010: Location, Random Connections, The Inbox, Frictionless Payments

I like it how he says no he has not solved the inbox problem, that problem is too big, he has not even attempted to solve the inbox problem. More than humility, it is a matter of fact. There is much work that can be done in the inbox space. Could you make the inbox sexy again?

@asmith
@dharmesh

Adam Smith's blog. (founder of Xobni) "We make email software that makes it easier for people to manage relationships and find information in their email......included in the MIT Technology Review's list of Top 35 Innovators Under 35, and Inc Magazine's Top 30 Entrepreneurs Under 30."

From Zero to a Million Users - Dropbox and Xobni lessons learned
Amazon S3’s Pricing Model is Arbitragable, and the Future of Cloud Storage
The Market Opportunity to Undercut Sonos Let me know if you’re interested. There are a couple of other interesting product and marketing angles that we could jam on, and I might want to put some money in.
The Great Q& A Wars of 2009 ~ 2014 The major players are now Quora, StackOverflow, and Hunch..... Aardvark had about 40 bytes of information about me. They knew I was into startups, programming, and San Francisco. ....“everyone on the SO team works remotely from home” ..... dreaming about the company's problems at night, not talking at too many conferences, or doing other fake CEO stuff.
Magic in the software -- what the point and shoot camera industry needs I take pictures on my iphone using the Dropbox app. Pictures I take are immediately copied to all of my computers. .... There are a ton of apps that remain out of reach to point and shoots. ..... The magic is in the software.
Seven Major Websites that Send Passwords Unprotected, and State Sponsored Deep Packet Inspection Seven of the 36 sites I tested sent passwords in the clear, available for an Internet Service Provider to read. .... 50% of the Chinese websites I tested were offenders. .... There are well known, easily implementable techniques for securing passwords sent back to a server.
Technology to circumvent online copyright enforcement “Why it might become civil disobedience to serve up random data.” .... Any given copyrighted work could be expressed across 10 random-looking files.
How to Find and Hire Amazing People, Part 4
How to Find and Hire Amazing People, Part 3
How to Find and Hire Amazing People, Part 2
How to Find and Hire Amazing People, Part 1
My Startup Bootcamp Talk
How To Find A Market For Your New Company, Family Edition
How MIT Didn't Prepare Me For a Startup, Part 1
13 Ways Acting Classes Improved My Public Speaking Skillz
MIT Students Send Cameras Into Stratosphere, Very Cool!
Some Thoughts: the Online Backpacking Travel Industry

Paul Carr's Frank Talk On Race

I believe in having frank discussions on race, although the guy who I supported mightily in the presidential race, Barack Obama, proved a polar opposite approach can work wonders. He has done as much for race relations as anyone in history and he has done so by not bothering to have fluffy discussions on race.

Paul Carr, in this TechCrunch post, talks frankly about race, and that is of interest to me. "If I am wrong enough to think it, I am wrong enough to say it," Eminem once said in defense of his homophobic lyrics. What I like in addition to the frankness is Carr's exploration of the online medium and how that impacts the social discourses on that touchy topic: race.

TechCrunch: NSFW: #Ebony and #Ivory – The Brave New World of Online Self-Segregation

......the more recent story of a British holidaymaker who demanded that a hotel in Florida keep all “people of color” (or those with “foreign accents”) away from him and his family.......“black people represent 25% of Twitter users, roughly twice their share of the population in general” ......Twitter feels like one of the whitest sites in the world to me: full as it is with self-important middle-class hipster kids retweeting New York Times stories and the fact that they’re having sushi for lunch.....If apartheid or the new laws in Arizona represent the 1984 future, then there’s a real possibility that the Internet – and social media specifically – will eventually lead us into an even more terrifying Brave New World future. A future where the tools that once promised to help us meet people with different backgrounds and ideologies from our own actually end up being used, quite unintentionally, to segregate us from those same people......

Since when did having sushi become a white thing to do? This world is becoming cosmopolitan by the day.

I am a Third World guy. For me race talk has to go way beyond fluff to make sense. If you want my attention, talk to me about Kiva, for example.

Paul Carr: Bringing Nothing To The Party