The Upper Westside Journal

The Lorne's Work

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 30 Sep 2013 17:07:00 +0000

What “Saturday Night Live” and startups have in common (via Pando Daily)

By Tom Limongello On September 30, 2013How excited are you for the new season of SNL? No, I’m not smoking eMeth, and actually… don’t answer that just yet. More than a million of us recently watched actor Kevin Spacey talk intelligently about how…

Comments Appreciated

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 11 Sep 2013 00:30:00 +0000

Why we need to rethink comments (via Pando Daily)

By Tom Limongello On September 9, 2013When is disruptive innovation just too disruptive? The most basic of features, commenting on digital media, has evolved slowly in the 30 years of the internet. User-generated information is still an important part…

Foursquare is more than maps with faces

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 08 Jul 2013 16:41:00 +0000

Foursquare, because of its API, is much more than “maps with people in them” (via Pando Daily)

By Tom Limongello On July 8, 2013Fred Wilson, at a recent PandoMonthly, called Foursquare “Maps with people in them.” Maybe if this were 2009 it would be. But I’m forced to disagree with the iconic venture capitalist. Foursquare is, or rather…

The Japanese Art of Monetization via PandoDaily

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 16:07:00 +0000

The Japanese art of monetization (via Pando Daily)

By Tom Limongello On March 7, 2013You can learn a lot about your company from usage behavior in Japan. Just like the Japanese language has a system for incorporating foreign words, when Japan latches onto particular Internet services like it did with Yahoo and Twitter, they become so important and…

The Mime and the Cannibal

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 06:13:00 +0000

Tonight I had dinner at my favorite neighborhood place, The Cannibal. They really know their beer, to the point that I get a bigger hangover looking into the depths of their beer fridges imagining the complexity of the map of all the breweries that they get their lagers, stouts, ipas and other strange elixirs than I do from actually drinking their beers.

Recently I've noticed how on top of things they are, in addition to their beer selection. Sure they have their iPad POS system, and they package their own Beef Jerky and they stream Netflix over two TVs at the bar using Google TV and a logitech keyboard. Yeah, that's a bit overkill, Roku would do the trick but I appreciate the effort at a bar.

In the past I nodded in approval of the Cannibal's Netflix viewing selection, which consisted of cheesy 80s novelties like Rad or Miami Vice, but tonight for the first time I saw something I could watch Metropolis. When I say something I could watch, I mean literally something that I could watch end to end and understand fully. Before NYC I lived in Chicago and one thing I hated was that Lincoln park's bars were all filled with flatscreens showing sports and unlike when I lived in Somerville, MA, I had no place to bring a book and study in public. I also noticed that it was pretty strange that I was getting very little information from these TVs in sports bars. Over the years ESPN has done a great job of keeping screens filled with text and icons for information, but you can't do that with most TV or films. But tonight was different; you see Metropolis is a silent movie from 1927.

Ironically the movie is about the struggle between man and machine, and the explicit message is that the head and the hand can only be mediated by the heart. In my case the ear can only be assuaged by the text on the screen and the physical acting style of silent films which makes it ok to watch while eating dinner at a bar while they are playing a consistent rotation of the Ramones and Johnny Cash. I asked one of the bartenders that I see regularly in there how people were taking to silent movies. "We usually put on sports or Netflix, but this is one of the first times we've done silent films, actually there's a ton of Buster Keaton in the instant queue and those are really enjoyable."

I kept ordering food and dessert even though I was still shivering and sniffling from my frigid LIRR train ride from East Hampton and could easily have headed home. There was something even more intriguing than even watching physical comedy with this film, Metropolis. I really felt like I was able to catch most of the point of this movie even though it was not clear at all times, and I enjoyed trying my best to keep pace even though I noticed I was straying a little to my phone and then when that died to my iPad. What was interesting was that it was more difficult than watching movies with sound and every time I lost what was going on that actually kept me from looking at my iPhone and iPad, which is generally pretty tough for me to do for 2 hours. When movies have sound I can cheat, I remember being so bored watching Gone with the Wind growing up that I actually only listened and drew in my sketchpad the entire time and never actually looked at the screen.

It helps when silent movies are done well. I really liked the Artist this past year because it felt fast paced. Metropolis was not fast paced but it was a groundbreaking film in it's day, and I can actually see a little of Blade Runner's inspiration coming from this movie if I'm correct. Apart from the brilliantly crafted sets, the voices in Metropolis are better represented visually than any I've seen. The visual effects in Metropolis even bled into the text cards that are slotted after spoken words to catch the audience up when it is absolutely necessary to use language. During a dream sequence, light spots were used to blur and wobble the text to create a feeling of dementia. What shocked me was that I had just watched Mission Impossible 4 and thought that the one clever thing done in that movie was when Tom Cruise, after barely surviving an explosion, listens to Russian TV and the English subtitles on the movie screen flip into place over the course of a few seconds to show him struggle to regain his comprehension.

In fact, I think we've lost a lot of the creative visual techniques from early films because technology has gotten too good and we have had whole generations of creators who did not need to solve for sound. However, much of our busy mobile, desktop and tablet world does not enable sound. Fortunately we can now watch a lot of these movies instantly and see the visual tricks used to make viewer feel that the movie is actually happening to them. It's also likely that all conceivable tricks were done back then in silent movies and we can get the hang of them quickly, just like they say that all possible guitar riffs were likely done by Chuck Berry at one point or another and there's no need to spend a lot of time experimenting to figure them out, just listen to the classics.

I did struggle a little trying to figure out how I would share this silent media with others. Metropolis might be an anomaly because you can see from these pretty much random photos I took of the screen at the bar that even if you don't get a sense of the movie, it's always visually stunning and may be timeless in its appeal. It's clear that the director, Fritz Lang did do a lot of work experimenting with the UI of the silver screen to fit as many social elements possible onscreen at any one time to create the feeling that an entire city was in front of you. That reminds me of a lot of the way we try to ape the real world when we show people what's going on in our pictures on photo-sharing apps like Instagram. There are tons of new apps out there like picframe, that help you add additional frames to a single photo so that when you share to social networks you get more of a filmstrip of poses and actions, and ones that add text to photos like TinyPost and of course the one that makes me think of our hipster love of the roaring twenties the most with its often eery partial animations Cinemagr.am.

Will more silent techniques find their way into new film and TV?

To me, there's something very interesting about finding the perfect place for silent film viewing, but there could be something more to it than that. It could be that we're finally finding some of our old mojo in the way we use sight and motion to make up for a lack of sound control in public spaces.

If you don't have the heart to ask for the remote to turn up the sound on the TV, notice when text and visual effects are done well how much more those scenes play to your head. Sometimes you might even forget you have other devices in your hands.

No more Tech Blogs, I'd like a Startup Blog

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 05:06:00 +0000

I've read far too many posts about mobile addressbook permissions, a red herring in a privacy debate that I firmly believe readers of tech blogs do not care about at all. What's funny is that it's still refreshing to see coverage of startups rather than public companies on tech blogs, no matter how inane the posts may be.

The current state of tech blogging reminds me of the most recent available episode of Downton Abbey, in which Thomas loses all of his money on the black market and it changes his attitude from snarky to earnest. This is something that I see happening in the world of tech blogging soon.

Why do I think that? Well to me the current unravelling in the tech blogosphere is not a matter of bloggers being suddenly too concerned about page views, because frankly it's been about page views since before the Aol acquisition of TechCrunch. MG Siegler had it right, the scope of what tech bloggers are writing about today as compared with a few years ago is far too broad. I like the Pando Daily credo, that they are the journal of record for Silicon Valley. That mission is a tigher scope than any other tech blog out there right now, but I'd actually appreciate an even tighter scope. A geographic focus is nice, but I'd like to see the main focus to be about technology startups only. I know of no blogs anymore whose stated mission is to write only about startups. Correct me if I'm wrong, but what we have in the market is a set of blogs that all try to cover everything vaguely resembling 'technology'.

The analogy goes like this: tech blogs have been dealing in a black market, better known as the stock market. In my mind, covering public companies is the surest way to lose focus on what matters in the technology startup space. The lure of focusing more on public companies is not a growing pain of Web 2.0 just at the point where it is having a few IPO successes, it came a couple of years ago from the success of the Business Insider. That blog literally started including $GOOG and $AAPL in their posts to catch investor eyeballs. The Business Insider's focus on public companies rather than startups was a differentiation at first, but it became the drug that tech blogs could not resist, and so our TechCrunch, GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat set increased their amount of posts to make sure they were writing as much about public companies as they were about startups.

Here's a wishlist mission statement that I'd like from a true tech startup blog:
1) No posts that generally cover the content of earnings calls
2) No posts on patent infringement lawsuits
3) No posts about dividends, buybacks, balance sheets or mergers of two public companies

I'd also appreciate: since Engadget, Gizmodo and the Verve cover gadgets just fine, you can stop writing about every Android device as it comes out. Sure, if you want to cover an OS feature that might impact app startups fine, but please leave out the wholesale unboxing of every gadget that hits the market.

Finally, a true tech startup blog would not have writers who are tasked with writing about public companies, even if that company is Apple. Yes, some public companies create ecosystems that shepherd a lot of startup activity, but the stories you write should not be about the public company that created the ecosystem, but about the startups in the ecosystem. How is Tim Cook going to use Apple's cash? I don't know, you don't know and I don't care about your speculation. I'm not saying tech bloggers shouldn't listen to the earnings calls, but it's not my job to read their obligatory posts even if there's nothing relevant in those calls.

To me the public markets are to bloggers what the black market was to Thomas in Downton Abbey. The bloggers who realize the folly of trying to write about everything that an investor would care about should learn from Thomas. Once he realized he was bankrupted by the black market he went back to his core competence in order to survive.

I believe that tech bloggers will find their way soon. Until then, keep calm and carry on.

Mad Men Breeds Vandalism

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 22:53:00 +0000

Since I don't have the courage to vandalize like the pros who've created scenes to fill the void in the new Mad Men Falling Man posters, I have resorted to Instagramming their work.

MadMen peril on Park Ave

And then I found out that there are even better ones on the internet already that pose playful backdrops in addition to the monstrous shown here.

What's holding back greater participation from the general public in this burgeoning meme in which we show our disposition toward MadMen's return?

AMC has already given users the ability to put a landscape version of this poster on your facebook timeline, but without letting us draw on the image it's kind of hard to expect that this will create a lot of earned media.

So here you go, I'm giving you a real world example of the MadMen poster in the wild, enhanced by Camera+ to remove the glare and give it a whiteboard feel. Now you can have both the thrill of vandalism with the detachment of the internet to create your masterpiece in personalized MadMen advertising.

Go ahead, make Don Draper and DraftFCB proud!

1) Download, 2) deface, 3) share & 4) enjoy:

Mobile Version
Vandal's tools:

1) Adobe Ideas (iPhone)

2) Skitch for Evernote (Android)

Desktop Version
Vandal's tools:
Skitch, Photoshop, Aviary etc.

h/t to Laughingsquid (I edited this one with Photoshop)

TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 04:12:00 +0000

Back in January we heard that TechCrunch was going to run its first international Disrupt show in Beijing. Since then there has been no news, but after a few calls over the past couple of weeks I've learned that there are still plans to have TC Disrupt Beijing and I've been invited to help with the planning!

I'm told that the date will be set as soon as this week, so be on the lookout for the announcement. China friends, feel free to comment or tweet me here if you'd like to chat more once the date for the show is set. I'll be sending out emails soon to many of you to discuss how to make sure that the best startups from all over China and the region know about the timing and details for how to submit for the Hackathon and a chance to be in the Startup Battlefield.

This summer is proving to be big for tech startups in China. I'm sure that Innovation Works which has just announced its recruiting companies again and the new ChinaAccelerator will both be well represented at TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing. Also, this Friday is the beginning of Geek Week in Shanghai. Let's see if that momentum builds as we get ready for TC Disrupt this Fall.

Even when we get the details about the show, many questions will remain unanswered for me, in particular:

Who is planning to be in Beijing for TC Disrupt from the US and Europe?
Will the winner be from Beijing?
Will the new A Fund and its Android app launches crowd out iPhone and iPad?
How many of the startups will *not* focus on the US/EU markets, social nets etc?

I'll be excited to see this show take shape in the next few months. See you there!

The 2011 SXSW guide to Interactive

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 03:19:00 +0000

SXSW 2011 is upon us and in no particular order I have lumped together what I think are the apps that will fight for my thumbs from Thursday 3/10 to Tuesday 3/15.

I have left out the photosharing apps here like facebook, instagram, picplz, tumblr, and I have also left out the best reference, the Sched.org mobile website where I have picked out a panel and party agenda (official parties only) and plancast but these posterity pic-ers and schedule gatherers are not the focus of SXSWi for me. For me, the fun is in the hunt. The hunt that I'm talking about is the hunt for the best of everything in Austin, and these apps are most likely how I will find them. More accurately these apps will help me cheat off of those SXSW A-listers who have arrived before I have.

The 2011 SXSWi apps:

bump, hashable, yobongo, foodspotting, beluga, groupme, ditto!, LoKast, rdio, foursquare, twitter and HeyTell are going to be my signals. Will I be as excited about them on 3/15 as I am now? Definitely not, hence the precarious 'x's. Why have I chosen these above all others? If you are wondering why constrain myself at all, you're right Fred Wilson had a great post about mobile notifications on 3/1 which shows Android's superior notifications architecture for letting you have more and more engagement apps on without relying on them all to be on your home screen. But with 144 apps on my phone post cleanup this week (I had 6.6 gb of apps, was getting close to my limit on 16gb iPhone 4), I felt it was time to focus on what could fit in a folder (12), and since on top of that there's a tremendous amount of overlap in this group, here is my reasoning for why each of them gets a spot in the SXSWi folder. (for the record I hate iOS folders :) )

bump, intros, sharing contacts, sharing apps, sharing music, chat with contacts

hashable, intros

yobongo, meeting new people when chatting about panels / parties, deciding on things

foodspotting, figuring out the best bbq!

beluga, chatting with housemates, prepping with panel participants

groupme, finding friends, chatting, sharing links / photos to make people laugh

ditto!, deciding on things, crowdsourcing plans for the day / evening, pushing serrendipity

LoKast, sharing songs, photos with people nearby

rdio, searching for and downloading music, checking out what friends at SXSW are listening to

foursquare, finding out what's next, being findable, posting photos, finding addresses

twitter commenting on everything, seeing what's trending, sharing with people back home

HeyTell chatting with housemates like I'm on a Sprint Nextell / Boost phone or walkie talkie!

Those 12 Angry Apps are not the whole story. There are a class of apps that are invisible, they are API services that are plugging into one of those above apps, most likely Foursquare or Twitter.

These aftermarket, app-boosting services are going to be providing more than their share of the fun at SXSWi. These are clearly extra credit apps, but if you have time to set these up you might be surprised at how funny make your social experience:

Tweetgrabber, a friend, Matt Newberg who I met at SXSWi last year just launched this ingenious service which helps you follow specifically someone's Favorites on Twitter and lets you store them in your unread Instapaper. This is a wormhole into the psyche of those you'd like to follow on twitter, so much more revealing than reading what they choose to tell you on Twitter.

Assisted Serendipity, another brilliantly devised and simple service that hooks into Foursquare and emails you based on the 10 venues that you think will most likely have desirables of the opposite sex in attendance. The way to set up this service is you put the number of the Foursquare number (which comes after the 'venue/' in the 4sq URL) and set the female : male ratio (or vice versa) to your liking and wait for assisted serendity to send you an email with those profiles so you can decide whether or not to go.

Don't Eat.at This service as the picture shows can be hilarious if mixed with other food apps like foodspotting. Basically, if you are going to use this app, make sure that you check-in before you foodspot! However, I mentioned this only because it was funny, in truth, this is currently a NYC only app, so I guess donteat.at won't spoil your fun in Austin!

For those of you who have not been to SXSW interactive before, then here's my advice for gearing up.

This is a picture of my pre-SXSW stockup. I'm going to be staying up by UT Austin at a house that we've named HxSW II, casa chalupa, so I have rented a bike, and am bringing the New York Lock by Kryptonite with a deterrent that goes to '11'. I'm also bringing a Mophie Juice Pack: Boost which is the largest charger available that plugs into the bottom of an iPhone. It gives ~1 full charge but is still pretty discreet even when attached to the phone in your front pocket and has a carabiner for carrying on a belt loop / back pocket when you're not using it.

Also, on my trip to Barcelona for Mobile World Congress I bought a Monster Power Outlets to Go 3 with USB. For times when you have plugs near you (like near the stage at Stubbs!) this small outlet strip will come in handy to power up more than 1 device at a time. Actually, I had even grander power plans but waited too long to get one of these solar panels from Voltaic for my backpack.

I agree with Fashism's post that bringing regular running sneakers are not necessary at SXSW, but, I would disagree about bringing sneakers in general. There's a ton of walking going on at SXSWi and the daily fashion show that I've seen for the past 3 years has been about cool t-shirts and kicks, so remember to bring yours! Also, although it's pretty dry in Texas, many of the best events day or night have an outdoor component to them, like an outdoor courtyard (remember the rainy 4sq party last year?) or roofdeck so there's a very good chance you'll get caught in the rain at some point. Try to stash a rain jacket somewhere on you when rain threatens.

Remember to come and see Check-in 2 Check-out: Mobile Audience Engagement in 2011 on Tuesday 3/15 at 9:30 at the Hyatt! Let us... @jakemintz, @foolazy, @ladylexy, @BB_iojbegun and @tomlimongello ...know when you've checked in on Sitby.us

and now for the uberlink with all the links from this post and beyond that might be useful to you in Austin.

You know I'd love to, but I can't make...The Trip

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 20:04:00 +0000

I want to watch a BBC 2 show called the Trip. These are the dark ages of internet broadcasting. As free as I am in the US to stream what I wish, I cannot legally watch the best shows and movies in the world. In these post-Chappelle times where great comedy is scarce, I like to look east to Europe. But the UK and many other mainland broadcasters and content aggregators block their content such that content or are forced to block because of rights issues that lag behind demand.

We are to blame too, I can't let my friends in Europe or Asia watch Saturday Night Live, and as a result they will likely go on not knowing what a 'dick in a box' is nor will they understand how easy it is to look like a millionaire if they'd just put a CHANDELIER in every room of their houses.

I've been thinking about this problem for a while. If you have a Sling Box and have a friend who can plant it in the country with best content you're set. Or maybe if you've got someone who'd like to watch a show with you in the country of origin you can ask them to share their screen over Skype then you've got it solved. Skype screen sharing is very romantic, and far slung Sling boxes are ideal, but not really for everyone and may even be considered to be stretching your rights. And it's not just streaming services like Hulu, Netflix and Amazon on Demand that are bound by broadcast rules to not share our most precious diplomatic assets of regionally generated comedy, but Apple's iTunes does not properly service the EU and Asia (or the rest of the world). And usually the sites that sell digital and physical formats like Holland's Bol.com don't take US credit cards or don't deliver to the US and the same is true in reverse of the US online stores.

Since I don't know if broadcasters will ever fully open up internationally on a single release date I think there needs to be a different model for sharing. I think two potential options instead of free 'sharing' that might work could be:

1) Trading

2) Gifting

I would like to see a trading mechanism in place where I could 1-for-1 trade a SNL clip for a clip of the Trip. The same could work for episodes or full length films. However I think that there would need to be some form of royalties payment otherwise the broadcasters and studios would 'get very loud indeed' (see the clip from the Trip below for the reference).

How would it work? Would there need to be a fee charged to both parties using real or virtual currency (gifting)? Let me know if you'd like to figure out the details and potential legal roadblocks! I've put up a question on Quora if you have ideas that you'd like to share about this topic.

Question on Quora

Airplane Mode

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 03:40:00 +0000

I've just returned from a trip to Croatia and after reading Albert Wenger's post '5 days and nights without my Blackberry' I thought I'd share my own thoughts on how I use my iPhone when I'm disconnected.

Unlike Albert's, my SIM card was fine, stuck in the middle of my iPhone 4 this time rather than on top where it was in previous iPhones. That meant I was less scientific in my experiment. Albert had no networking capabilities at all, not voice, SMS nor data, while I was just without data because outside of the US it's generally $19.97/MB, a price that invites only the direst need for data. As a result I think I was more annoyed about the lack of data because I was still using my phone for a bunch more things beyond using it as a watch. Here's my usage behavior in ascending order with respect to time.

~No Email: Albert said he would check for phantom emails, which keeps him in high correlation with BB user behavior. I did this as well on the iPhone, but with a twist. After a day at the apt I had unlearned the email checking habit, but if I was on the move the 'could not activate cellular data' notification that I received instigated a new habit. I would constantly turn the WiFi setting on and off as if to literally sniff for WiFi networks, even though my nose was several inches from the glass. Once in the port of Rovinj I actually found a free WiFi hotspot and I stood there long enough to pull down 3 days worth of emails, but no longer. Taking in those emails made me feel like the Escapist taking a breath of air after being tied in a sack, thrown into the river and having to undo chains and ropes and such.

Some Phone: I did use my phone as a phone...I had voice coverage in Hrvatska (Hrvatska means 'Croatia' in Croatian) on their HR VIP network and although price was a bit of a deterrent I had no dropped calls, even though I hadn't received my bumper yet, so I probably stayed on longer than I should have. I would take the calls from mom and the occasional one from work that I recognized as important, but for questions I tried to have family text me rather than leave voicemails. Calling voicemail from the iPhone seems wrong anyway, but especially so when there are international rates associated.

More SMS: Beyond that I also used it for both personal and social SMS: the SMS command line came in handy for telling mom and sis' I was ok, and for updating Foursquare by SMS so I could both tell friends and bookmark for myself what places and restaurants I had visited. I noticed that I had much less patience for entering in address details in a foreign country, moreover I was actually satisfied in some cases just to put in the name of the city. When I arrived '.@porec' I gladly peeked back at my phone seconds later to see the rather expensive text confirmation 'Ok we've got you at Porec!' from 50500.

Music: But the most important difference was that most of my apps were perfectly useless without a data connection. The only ones that were used a lot were the iPod and Rdio apps - Rdio works great offline if you spend the time to sync your music to mobile (look for the orange checkmarks).

Camera: I used the camera app more than the music apps, and here are some photos of what I saw each day that I thought were a bit out of the ordinary.

The biggest time-sink - Games: Throughout seasons 1-4 of the iPhone saga you would never have seen more than a few games on mine, and right now I only have one that I had just downloaded before leaving. The one I had was more than enough, Angry Birds which is #1 paid app in Croatia (and 59 other countries) is so for a reason.

The fact that I used a game more than any other feature on my iPhone really stuck with me. Maybe that's why in China and other countries where data is generally not an unlimited resource games are the biggest mobile pastime. Maybe that's also why even Apple is starting to drive patents for games

I'm a little embarrassed but I think I've played 150 levels now of Angry Birds, destroying increasingly organized and reinforced structures to get to the thieving pigs. I did this while I sitting idle on airplanes, on buses, on the beach, in bed and pretty much everywhere. Rovio, the game's creator does a very good job making it look like you have beaten the game a few times before it unlocks more levels and you realize that there's nearly no end to the little piggies. I'd suggest to try playing with that Beatles song on, I find it helps performance, as does anything by Biggie Smalls :)

Notorious B.I.G. via last.fm

"Doma, is an iPad ok?"

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 02:29:00 +0000

The next iPad commercial should be set in a coffee shop like Doma.

I'm not one to fight with coffee shops on their policies. I understand when the owner is looking to manage the clientele from hogging seats and sipping one coffee over a long period while browsing the web. But my favorite coffee shop in the city is D oma and they have decided to ban computers past 6pm so that they can usher in more lounge-y people who are more likely to take advantage of their new simplified menu in the evenings.

The question I didn't think to ask the people who run Doma until showertime today was 'What if I only use an iPad?' To some substituting an iPad may seem like a sneaky way of just getting around the new Doma code of conduct, but others might think this is a legitimate excuse. After all, as a Doma customer you have a very good chance you have iPhone in your pocket, and an iPhone shares the same operating system as the iPad, and likely all the same content, just in a smaller form. Also, it would be quite weird if a place like Doma did anything but encourage you to bring a magazine or a book, and one way of bringing those reading materials is certainly to via iPad.

In fact while I was getting the PC boot from one of the owners I happened to be responding to an email from a family friend about whether he should ditch his laptop for an iPad. And although I told him to hold off because of the lack of file storing capabilities, it got me thinking that with the limitations of an iPad, it is easier to start to break out modes of behavior when interacting with the device. Some behavior, like sending email on an iPad, to me is just as good a behavior in a coffeeshop as staring at someone across the room. Then again, iPads can show movies, which could even make Starbucks think about imposing term limits on tables if there were no policy in place against media devices.

If everyone has a smartphone, then policies that ban any devices may be insufficient for helping Doma, or any business that looks to attract customers to seats for any period of time. They just can limit 'devices' because they want to curb free-rider behavior. Now that devices like the iPad exist, it seems we need to think of more clever ways to day-part customer profiles. And in fact, if planned correctly there could easily be 4 or more legitimate day-parts to any simple coffee shop.

An Apple commercial could show local businesses how a place like Doma can put up a category badge (physical or digital) every 4 hours as a sign to encourage different ambient behavior. Maybe coffee is only the main attraction early morning and coffee behavior like email and newspaper reading only occupies the first 4hrs of the day. Then by mid-day the fare has changed to tea and vitamin water and clients are encouraged to browse magazines and books. After 6 we switch to cocktails, IMDB and Scrabble and then late night it's time for beers, movies and TV.

If all of those customers are different people in a single day, then Doma achieves their goal of serving different customers different food and drink, and potentially different services (like WiFi for the watching the movie) at different parts of the day. Simply put, they are bringing in classes of uncorrelated asses and mitigating risk.

The SXSW Interactive Mobile Thriving Guide (iPhone)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 02:10:00 +0000

The snow today is making me really look forward to SXSW Interactive in Austin. 2010 will be my 3^rd time attending so I wanted to write up all of the mobile services that I will be leaning on to schedule, network and keep my battery going all week…and I do mean *all* week.

Rules

SXSW is a game. It’s about doing everything you want but not wasting your time planning and confirming, getting everything done, meeting up with everyone you wanted to see. Potentially you won’t remember any of it, but you’ll have lots of new connections and warm feelings for people who are showing up in your stream all year as a result.

Austin is your playground. It’s where all the new mobile services that help us accomplish our SXSW plans.

There are 3 areas which you must master if you are to fully free yourself of your laptop @ SXSWi:

Advance Scheduling: It is imperative to look at the schedules and try to comprehend everything that is going on so you don’t feel the dread of missing out on anything. This plan will fail miserably, but these tools will make the experience better for you and better for those who follow your example.

1) Tungle Tungle lets you schedule with people without a lot of back and forth. It looks at your outlook or ical powered calendar and lets you paint your availability, or even shake to schedule from it’s iPhone app. This is for real meetings with people that you cannot miss.

Here is the tungle demo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VOQ9O4Rycc

SXSW calendar [No], Social Features [Some], Requires Download [Yes], Mobile Website/App [Yes] Mobile Speed [Fast]

2) Plancast http://plancast.com/toms I’ve been told I use this too much already, but I’ve been very excited about it’s potential for spreading the word about your particular panel or workshop at SXSW. They've created a SXSW splash page with a suggested follower list and useful SXSW channel profiles to follow like "Badgeless SXSW" which tells you all the events you can attend without a SXSW Badge. BTW @Leahculver please skip the Owen Van Natta party and finish up the iPhone app b4 SXSWi, drinks on me, kthxbai.

SXSW calendar [Yes, via profiles], Social Features [Yes], Requires Download [No] Mobile Website/App [No?] Mobile Speed [Slow]

3) My.SXSW iPhone Application This official app loads all of the event schedules at once (which takes a good amt of time the 1^st time) and is integrated with the my.sxsw.com schedules and your official SXSW profile, which on the iPhone app is easier to set up than on the desktop. You can upload your photo and add social networks. However, this app is not connected for sharing panel links on social networks or even via email.

SXSW calendar [Yes], Social Features [No], Requires Download [No] Mobile Website/App [No?] Mobile Speed [Fast]

4) Sched.org http://sxsw2010.sched.org This was the best mobile web calendar last year with full description of panels and great use of JavaScript overlays to minimize page loads, still a bit heavy for AT&T

SXSW calendar [Yes], Social Features [No], Requires Download [No], Mobile Website/App [Yes] Mobile Speed [Medium]

5) Sitby.us http://sitby.us This may replace Sched.org for me this year. A quick loading mobile website with really easy navigation for the full SXSWi calendar and ability to check-in and share on twitter WHERE YOU ARE SITTING in a particular panel! How’s that for real-time? Really well done.

SXSW calendar [Yes], Social Features [Yes], Mobile Website/App [Yes], Requires Download [No]

Contingency Planning: Planning The panels, movies, drinkups and music in Austin start out like spores and grow based on community distribution of event details and checkins from attendees. The battlefield of SXSW will look nothing like your pretty calendar. So SXSW has already tested Twitter and Foursquare in this capacity, but there is a new entrant to the fray and it is specifically designed to facilitate conversation at an event without junking up the feeds of people who are not attending, and it’s called HotPotato. All panels at SXSWi 2010 should start by pointing their audiences to the associated HotPotato event.

1) Twitter and Twitter Connect Sites/Apps Status updates and hashtags still rule the day, it will be interesting to see if that changes in 2010. Tweetie 2 is my choice of app, and its seamless ability to manage more than one account is quite helpful when on the go. Sitby.us like many other apps lets you Tweet

Reach [High], Immediacy [High], Local relevance [Low], Event features [Hashtags], Noise [High]

2) Facebook and Facebook Connect Sites/Apps Facebook events are underlying a lot of the Plancast links and is currently the glue behind HotPotato

Reach [Medium], Immediacy [Low], Local relevance [Low], Event features [Full Service], Noise [High]

3) Foursquare Foursquare has picked up where Twitter left off, as now people find out which party to go to based on the stream of Foursquare check-ins. Badges specifically designed for SXSW were a hit last year, e.g. the Porky badge for checking in at Stubbs. Too crazy for you?... Check-in off the grid like tiger w. be

Reach [Low], Immediacy [High], Local relevance [High], Event features [People Tab], Noise [Medium]

4) HotPotato HotPotato lets you attend, watch or follow events based on your proximity and makes the chatter in each event relevant by 1) defining the event 2) offering more than just commenting e.g. posting photos and links for making references and analogies to the event 3) giving you a view to whom within your network (currently powered by Facebook Connect) is commenting on what events 4) tuning your feed based on location

Reach [Medium], Immediacy [High], Local relevance [High], Event features [Full Service], Noise [Low]

Battery Life!

What I will bring to stay connected 24/7 from Thurs-Wed.

1) Just Mobile | Gum Pro: this little power grenade from Just Mobile is supposed to carry 2-5x iPhone charges and power up fast, 90% in an hour, and it uses both a 5-pin camera cord power up and and the iPhone cord to charge the iPhone, with a switch to turn off the juice if it is not being used.

How people will make fun of you: “Why do you have an iPhone cord coming out of your pocket? Are you plugged in right now?”

2) Griffin Tune Juice: the un-green little AAA battery pack that takes 4 batteries and charges without requiring a wall socket. Which means you don’t have to stand under the stage at Stubbs or hit on hostesses to have them charge your phone if you forgot to charge your extra battery pack.

How people will make fun of you: “batteries? srsly?”

3) Kensington Mini: This bottom feeder is good for a small charge at the end of the day, light, small, no extra cords while carrying. Charges with a 5-pin camera cord into USB. The fact that it plugs into the bottom could be a problem if you put it in your front pocket and sit down. L

How people will make fun of you: “gee you have a really long phone.”

4) The Mophie Pack: Mophie gets a colbertian wag of the finger. Once my battery pack of choice, until the weird jack that plugs in a weird non 5-pin cord broken into the device and has rendered the Mophie pack useless.

How people will make fun of you: “is that really an iPhone, it looks so big and bulky.”

It will be a showdown for sure, but at least I’ll be prepared.

What I’ll be doing:

http://plancast.com/a/if1 Moderating UX of Mobile Panel, Friday March 12^th @ 11am with Kyle Outlaw (Razorfish), Scott Jenson (Google) and Barbara Ballard (Little Springs Design)

http://plancast.com/a/11r0 Organizing HTML5 vs. Flash Discussion, Monday March 15^th @ 11:00am with Richard Ting (R/GA)

http://plancast.com/a/if3 Organizing the Mobile Advertising Workshop, Tuesday March 16^th @ 3:30pm with Dennis Crowley (Foursquare) and Justin Siegel (MocoSpace)

http://plancast.com/a/if4 Organizing the Mobile Social Workshop, Tuesday March 16^th @ 2:00pm with Michael Sharon (Facebook) and Justin Shaffer (HotPotato)

http://plancast.com/a/if5 Organizing the Mobile Commerce Workshop, Tuesday March 16^th @ 5:00pm with Francesco Rovetta (PayPal)

Is anyone writing up a guide for Android?

Ping me @ SXSWi on your service of choice.

The iPad and the Blue Lego

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 02:41:00 +0000

You've read a lot this week about the iPad, but I wanted to share what I've seen on twitter as a mounting protest in the past couple of hours.

It begins with the Blue Lego. For anyone that has used an iPhone to surf the web in mobile safari, it is likely that they've come across the Blue Lego of Flash-less-ness. When you go to the NyTimes' regular website on an iPhone you will see a webkit standard 32x32 pixel blue lego in the middle of the Video section.

John Biggs says that the iPad might run flash because the Apple iPad demo video had a NYT restaurant section show up instead of the Blue Lego, but demos can be deceiving. Update: Wired says the screenshots were fake.

Joe Hewitt pointed out that Adobe looked pretty defensive with this recent blog post, because they predicted that the Blue Lego will be everywhere when the iPad launches. Lee Brimelow photoshopped the Blue Lego (aka the NullPlugin...thanks Chris Messina) onto many of the sites and web games that we hold dear, assuming that the Blue Lego will be used to comfort iPad users in the same way it has served iPhone users. What will be the response? Will Steve Jobs lobby the webkit standards bureau to make the icon a 64x64 pixel square?

Already, Keith Peters has started joking around and has replaced his Twitter avatar with the Blue Lego, and flash developers are starting to rally. And, update: Kendall Helmstetter posted a response on Flickr, and Ryan Cooley posted to Twitpic to fan the blue flame war with 15,700+ views.

So, for me this started last night just before I left the office. I asked my Twitter following if they knew how to find a high resolution version of the ubiquitous, yet tiny 32x32 pixel Blue Lego Icon. I have to send a big thanks to Yiying Lu who I worked with to make the Failwhale big back in 2008. She sent me her enlarged Blue Lego design before I could even ask her!

And here it is, your SXSW 2010 t-shirt, the Blue Lego!

Banned by Lego on Zazzle :(

http://thebluelego.spreadshirt.com/

Also, a big thanks to Lee Brimelow the platform evangelist and blogger from Adobe whom I metioned earlier - he has already retweeted the zazzle link!

Update: There's now a Chrome extension that shows you the web on the flashless iPad! https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/ilejdkfldemlafkeebadjppfhdiimbfd?hl=en-US

Google China: no servers, big mobile aspirations

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 03:51:00 +0000

I learned three very important things from my trip to China last May when I accompanied Sarah Lacy and met with startups and VC and lots of old friends in Beijing. Her post earlier this evening that second guessed the motives for Google's proposed exit, and whether or not human rights concerns played a significant role made me rethink what was going on, particularly in the mobile industry in China.

1) Google does not host personal data on servers in China. UPDATE: I initially thought Google had no servers in China, learning from Yahoo, who was first in China subject to Chinese jurisdiction and forced to hand over information from dissidents. But I've learned from a more credible source on China, Jeremy Goldkorn from his Guardian Post that Google apps like Gmail are specifically the ones not hosted in China because they carry personal data which if they were on Chinese equipment would be subject to confiscation at the whim of the Chinese government.

2) Google's strategy for music streaming partnerships in China pre-dates the recent launch in the US. In October '09, US Google users gained access to streaming Lala and MySpace tracks in popups from song title searches. After meeting with Gary Chen of Top100.cn (part of Orca Digital) I saw that Google's attempt to not be evil and continue to compete pushed them to use 3rd party hosters who had Chinese servers and therefore the Chinese 'rights' to serve up questionable content like free music. This strange relationship was the precursor to the US, cloud-based, music partnership strategy, because in China, Google needed mp3 search to effectively compete with Baidu. The reason the fight between Google and Baidu over mp3's was so much bigger than Google and Apple's (and Apple's purchase of Lala) in the US over cloud-based music access is that all of the tracks accessed on Baidu or google.cn in China are free to download, so this was one of the main battlefields for China's biggest search engine - not for biggest music licensing market share.

3) Google spent something like 2-3 years negotiating to become China Mobile's default search engine on mobile phones. I thought initially that Google could have opened up g.cn for mobile phones to include mp3 search, and thereby create a huge advantage over Baidu. I thought Google Listen + Android would let users download free songs like they do on the desktop. However, Google was interested in keeping the China Mobile search deal, and they now had a way to keep China Mobile happy, by giving them a free, customizable mobile operating system in Android that would let China mobile charge for mobile music downloads (see my coverage in Business Insider here).

I have no idea how the mobile landscape will change without Google in China. Android is at the precipice of taking off in China, but is there a way for those devices to still win market share without Google apps? Will Baidu get Google's China mobile search deal by default?

Also, and more importantly, is Google giving up the good fight? Will human rights be best served if mobile devices, already a great liberator of tyranny in Africa and the best hope for clearing up the opacity of governance in Iran, lose their default search and software provider, Google in China?

Twitter and Mobile Web

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 02:46:00 +0000

Twitter just released a preview to it's own, improved mobile website and I couldn't be happier. At a time when it seems like mobile web is the like the whale that everyone's forgotten @leland 's preview site is a happy reminder that while apps are cool, web is core.

Mobile web grows quickly and steadily every day but for a while there it seemed like Google was the only company that cared.

Up to now my two favorite mobile websites that leveraged the Twitter API have been:
1) dabr.co.uk dead simple interface that has support for lists but not optimized for touch screens
2) hahlo.com which was on fire, snuffed out on mobile web and then flew out of the ashes via the app store

When Twitter cuts over permanently from the beta URL http://mobile.twitter.com and redirects all mobile traffic to the new preview style, I'd assume we'll see support for lists. But for all the Lisztomania, what I'm even more excited about is seeing a mobile website that supports Geolocation (adhem..Ryan, meet Leland, Leland meet Ryan).

O Safari, I have a question. Even though you've just woken up, I know you can recognize location, and I'm not talking about Google Latitude's persistent Location, rather I'm talking about the more useful points in time (which is what Foursquare and Dodgeball have taught us) where comments, pictures, videos and hashtags are being posted for the spiders to crawl all over. Is there a specific value for having a mobile web interface that lets people tag the location of what's happening? Well Safari hasn't made a sound yet, so I'll keep thinking it over.

And did I mention Leland's attention to detail is impressive?

Now that's how to run a beta :)

Here's Leland's blog post on Twitter:
http://bit.ly/62ULEQ

I saw it, Up in the Air #uita

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 20:04:00 +0000

I hate movie reviews. I'm going to see the movie anyway and all the review will do is possibly delay my chance to see it or spoil some of the good parts. What I love most about movies is the conversation around them, and last weekend instead of just chatting about movies around a table, I boarded the conversation, Up in the Air.

It started on November 10th when Stephanie from American Airlines said I needed to follow her so she could send me an exclusive invitation. After having Direct Message spam issues weeks earlier I was leery, but I went ahead and followed her twitter profile and later received an email that said Paramount and American wanted to fly me to LA so I could watch a sneak preview of Up in the Air.

At a time when we are aching to tell people on the ground that we are connected while flying, 'The story of a man ready to make a connection' makes a lot of sense. For a man that gets miles for firing people, Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) the philosophy is 'The miles are the goal'. While we struggle to put a value on the points we get for checking in, whether we are looking at corporate miles, or weekly foursquare points, or activity in our facebook and twitter streams, it's something that we all have to face as points become a currency to replace human connection, and the more connected you are, the less likely you are to require a human connection.

Our evening up in the air on November 14th however was a time to make human connections. This was an entirely new experience for all of us, and since the plane was only to take 60 people, it was one of those times when it made sense to talk to everyone, roam the aisles and butt-in where the single-serving friends of Fight Club fame would not dream of intruding.

The night before our flight I checked into the 59th street apple store and bought a Kensington auto/air inverter so I would be able to plug in my laptop and iPhone on the plane. Having extra power on a blogger junket that was like being able to pass out bottles of suds in shawshank prison, because I immediately made friends with Just Jared, The Product Guy, and Samantha Ewers from I'm not Obsessed. They have all done great reviews of Paramount and AA's service, the food, the free WiFi from Aircell and even photo-blogged the whole experience from JFK to LAX. Also, Sherri Smith who sat behind me will soon do a proper review of the Bose Noise Canceling QC15's that were supplied to us by Coca-Cola. I've been wearing them around the city all week and feel like I haven't landed yet.

I chose to wear my gnome tee shirt on the flight, which was fortuitous, because Jason Reitman's Up in the Air creates an homage to Amelie's faux-photo gnome-napping meme. Up in the Air added a crowd-sourcing element to it where the cutout of Danny McBride (who you know as kenny powers) and Melanie Lynskey's is scaled across a massive network of nearly notable spots across the US.

I was inspired tonight to post just such a faux-photo where I've added Jody and me in front of the Up in the Air billboard in Times Square.

To make sure we were all seated for landing, they had to cut the blogger interviews down to a minute, so here is my best impression of "Between Two Ferns" with Anna Kendrick, star of Twighlight and now Up in the Air. I'm now a fan of hers because she confessed a love for Karaoke, and in fact fought for her favorite karaoke song, Time After Time by Cyndi Lauper.

and now with English, Dutch and Chinese Subtitles!

The conversations with the movie crew and the AA crew were great, I learned all about the culture of miles, the perks and we discussed the card with Ryan Bingham's #7 that he's awarded in the movie for elite mileage status. I thought that the coolest way to commemorate the movie would be to pass out Ryan Bingham #7 cards that were MiFi enabled. I checked on Linkedin to see if there was anyone offering white label MiFi cards that could be personalized, but seems from the answers like that's a bit too early of a technology to turn into tchotchkes :)

After the movie Sad Brad Smith who performed some of the songs on the soundtrack sung for us. Once that was over we continued to chat in the aisles and I wasn't paying attention and was still standing while we landed, a first for me. It was kind of like surfing. As we headed for the Hilton LAX our gracious AA hosts indulged us as we took photos of everything we saw and did, and I couldn't resist staging this one with the AA cutout and Chris Vary. A big thanks to Chris, as he is the one who helped me get the above interview with Anna from Betamax format to something youtube-able!

Up in the Air debuts December 4th in select cities - go see it and check out the chatter on Jason Reitman's site, Up in the Air Tweets. Or if you're really cool, check in on opening night in HotPotato.

Leland's Huge Talk about Android, Twitter and Mobile User Experience

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 02:07:00 +0000

I just saw a great presentation by @Leland at Huge tonight in a UPA series event called "Put your iPhone down! A Discussion About the State of Mobile Services."

This was the first talk I've been to that looks beyond the iPhone in terms of user experience, and there were some key points that will become clearer as we approach 2010 and since there will be a lot of new android devices in market on sprint, t-mobile and verizon.

Leland Rechis was impressive for two reasons:
1) He worked with Twitter in Japan, which is where they've done intensive mobile testing, and twitter is a platform agnostic service, which treats SMS, Mobile Web and Native Apps all as viable channels for interaction on mobile
2) He worked at Google on the development of the Android platform, which is the most open platform for OS development

Leland explained that Apple has created an architecture that deals very well on AT&T's network, because iPhone economizes energy and data usage by putting activities into app silos. However, Apple pre-sets the activities you can initiate for their apps. The best mobile experience would enable you to take a photo and pull up whichever service has the capability to post. Android can generically say 'share' and pull up any application on the phone that has sharing capabilities (email, MMS, twitter app, facebook, tumblr etc.).

iPhone instead picks static features that you might want to use, e.g. for photos you get 1) email, 2) assign to a contact, 3) use as wallpaper. Android does not pre-bake these features, it offers 'intents' which means anywhere within any application on Android it is possible to call up an activity, rather than fully load up another app. That really makes the picture of the three suggested options of what to do with a photo on iPhone look pretty silly.

I think it's possible that the next wave of mobile behavior will be that the most popular apps from iPhones will make their way to Android, but then those popular apps will be addressable in standard apps like the camera, video player, email, and the mobile browser.

I also think that the framework for Android that Leland explained makes content potentially more viral than it has been on the iPhone 1,2, and 3.0 OS because getting to your preferred apps faster means more sharing of photos, videos and links.

I asked Leland what's next for HTML 5 after Geo-Location, and he said it's 'app store' and clarified, 'not THE app store, but application data storage' for the mobile browser, which is why Apple and Google who initially worked together in their contribution to the webkit standard mobile browser are now competing to create the fastest and best JavaScript engines.

What's Leland's favorite Android app? He seemed pretty fond of Twidget Lite which from a design standpoint is breakthrough, it offers today what the Motorola Cliq seems to be promising, which is an interface where the widget provides information but does not take up the whole screen.

Over the Air Updates...kind of a big deal

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:48:00 +0000

I'm posting an update to my Business Insider piece in July which outlined how subsidies could set China's mobile market on fire, with the launch of Android oPhones on China Mobile.

There are not many weaknesses to combat iPhone world domination. The longer iPhones are on the market and people get used to touch screens, we are left with three glaring issues.

Great, cloud-based music players
Great, cloud-based push-email providers
FOTA or Firmware Over the Air Updates

I had forgotten about #3. Since I've had iPhones for my last 3 phones, I had forgotten that over the air updates were even possible, since Apple does not support them. Although my music purchasing has migrated exclusively to mobile, I've resigned myself to side-loading software updates, via iTunes.

However, I read two corporate posts from Red Bend today, the first of which states that their FOTA software will be shipping with Android phones because of their partnership with Borqs in China so that software upgrades from China Mobile will come over the air. The second post gave background on mobile software updates in general and how Apple has made software upgrades a strategic advantage, at least over RIM and Windows mobile in the US.

Apple however has not made any statements about over the air upgrades. Consider that right now effectively no one uses iTunes in China, and grey iPhones do not even have iTunes or the App store. If Androids enter the market with over the air software updates and iPhones launch with their usual sideloading updates iPhones may not look so cool by comparison. If the user does not have a laptop, they may be in trouble, as their company may not allow an 80mb iTunes download during work hours or at all on a work computer, and maybe mom and dad's computer isn't where you want to back up all of your pics and other mobile media.

Over the Air updates... that's kind of a big deal. The link directly to the left there is for Anyclip beta users only...email me for an invite, as I have 1! Youtube clip below for everyone else :)

Note: I didn't mention multi-tasking as a weakness. I only see that as a short term weakness for Apple. You can quasi-multitask while you iPod is on, I think it's just a matter of time before apple enables that OS enhancement both for it's own and 3rd party apps.

Share Ferris!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 16:04:00 +0000

Movies are universally enjoyed, but not universally remembered. Yet we just love quoting movies. Last week I held a brainstorming session at New Work City to explore how movie quoting could be made shareable. The goal is to use the web so that the effort made quoting movies can more enjoyable, especially for those who have not seen the movie or don't remember the quotes. There were two types of ideas, those that made it easy to share, and those that built on the enjoyment of movie references.

The state of quotable media on the web:
Our favorite day-to-day video sites, youtube and hulu have not developed their search algorithms to be narrow enough to catch quotes effectively. Look on Hulu for SNL clips and you'll notice that you get lots of garbage when you type in a sentence you heard in a skit. Movies do not even have real live database, all we have is curated quotes on IMDB, and a cottage industry of movie fans who curate sites like killerclips.com and others that find the best clips amongst a small set of top movies.

Making it easier to find and share movie clips as you remember them: Many existing sites are just begging to incorporate a useful movie quote API that would enhance their ability to pull content and make it shareable:

1) Shazam

Shazam Integration so you can speak a quote into your phone and get back the clip to tweet.

2) Facebook

Create a Facebook app that can use predictive text to pull movie clips based on what you're looking to post or comment on your friends' walls.

3) Instant Messaging, meebo, trillian, digsby, gtalk, y!, AIM and Skype

The Shazam, Facebook and Instant Messaging examples require an API where you can pull on the fly clips from the whole movies, not just a canned clip arbitrarily posted as a well known funny scene.

One problem with a curated model where only the funniest clips are made available is that there's no incentive to make the whole movie available. The NYT arranged John Hughes movie quotes last week as a memorial, but there's not enough room and these cannot be shared in such a way that they can handle the real time desire for incorporating quotes into web communication. I'm not looking for Tom Cruise's clips in Risky Business, I want to be able to pull Bronson Pinchot Curtis Armstrong and Joe Pantoliano talking about 'wonder woman', the 'trig midterm', or 'I can't go $250 for the artsy fartsy thing', respectively.

That has been the trap we fell into with Wikipedia and IMDB offering 'best of' information repositories. But the social web has provided a new mechanism for movies to enter the dialog. Facebook and Twitter has enabled accounts and fan pages that are truly connected to actors. We should be able to call out to those actors, and they should be able to respond to us in context.

We need a company with a higher purpose. Someone needs to do the groundwork that enables an agnostic catalog of movies tagged in a way that users can generate clips on the fly for their own purpose. For those of us who have seen the canon of hilarious movies more than 10x a piece (I round down to save face) it is not the obvious, canned clips that we want to share.

Enhanced engagement:

1) Automate the Actors on Facebook and Twitter

Automate a way for celebrities I fan or follow to chat back in my conversations with a verified, authoritative, "pardon me guys" comment and associated clip. Say, I'm a fan of Bill Murray on Facebook and I say to a fellow looper 'There won't be any money, but on your deathbed, you'll receive total consciousness' and tag my comment #clip I'll summon the Bill Murray fan page to reply within the thread: 'Which is nice' and the associated video clip from Caddy Shack.

2) Power-up Bloggers, and Traditional Media

Writers could use movie quotes to enhance their writing by enabling a much shorter description of how they see their story about some event happening now to be reminiscent of a movie. If any of the semantic blog services like Zemanta, (pictured below) OpenCalais, Disqus, Apture, or firefox plugins Glue or Juice were to incorporate a useful movie quote search API, they could do a better job than just putting stock photos or links to IMDB, which is generally what they do now.

There are of course two business models here - the studios can get involved for DVD releases where they create buzz around the time when DVD's are about to hit retail, netflix and amazon. And there's an unlimited time period when adverters could sponsor movie quote clips just like they currently sponsor music mixtapes in apps like Pandora. If a contextual advertising engine like Adbrite, AdRoll, Kontera or Vibrant media integrated a movie quote search API, sponsoring clips could be done with only a bit more effort than buying keywords.

If you have the means, I highly recommend...

Inspired By 'IB' references on Twitter

Let twitter users generate IB (inspired by) mentions, maybe use the new RT API to make this happen. If you liked Obama's recent opinion piece in the NYT on healthcare you could comment 'I think you're right', but wouldn't it be more powerful to use a clip from the 35 year old Mel Brooks classic Blazing Saddles? There's a scene when all of the people named Johnson from Rock Ridge rally to fight for their town, so why not tweet " Obama is right! http://bit.ly/13BFfc IB Blazing Saddles http://www.splicd.com/xQY5qoolark/414/443 "

That example above may sound complicated, but our appetite for using movies as a reference to our collective psyche get much more convoluted, take this beautiful mashup of Ferris Bueller and Fight Club that @robertgorell sent me as part of the brainstorm last week from Kottke.org.

Movies are not yet useful on the web, and the dynamic movie quote search API is what we need to merge the Silver and LED screens.

Share Ferris!

This Guy, Deserves a Party - John Hughes Memorial Web Service Brainstorm

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 19:27:00 +0000

Event: 6:30pm, Thursday August 13th

Title: John Hughes Memorial Web Services - Thursday Night Brainstorm
Location: New Work City, 200 Varick Street, NY NY

If you're like me you were saddened by the loss of John Hughes last Thursday. You may also have noticed that unlike the loss of Michael Jackson, which prompts people to make videos of themselves moonwalking, John Hughes inspires a particular type of web conversation as well. At least from my personal streams, there were more quotes on Twitter and longer wall strokes on Facebook / Friendfeed than for any other weekend on web record. But who's making this experience better, and who's using all this data to make things more fun for all of these fans?

I have some interesting ideas on how to make the American tradition of quoting everything you can remember from John Hughes' movies even more fun. There is a new generation of viewers that need to be inspired in the way that Sixteen Candles, Weird Science, Ferris Bueller, The Breakfast Club and Planes Trains and Automobiles did inspired us. There's a new generation of movies, like Superbad, and though the angst may be the same, we need a better way to share the feeling. And I think we can offer the semantic recognition to turn the whole conversation into a game with a beginning and an end.

However, unlike many web services that are built in private, "....with the water running all day..." with the hope of extracting money, this should be a feature driven experiment that does more to unlock clips and give context and broader share-ability and meaning to why we continually bring back those famous scenes in our daily lives, and create a party around it. Because when I think of John Hughes, I hear the echo of Lisa from Weird Science, 'This guy, deserves a party'.

I'm planning to be at New Work City this Thursday 8/13 starting at 6:30pm and use all available whiteboards and discussion space to share our ideas. If it goes well we might use livestream/twitcam to share with the rest of the world. Maybe those who are building services to enable a new way of automating content sharing, especially if they are doing it for movies, will take notice.

You can bring your magazine clippings, and you can wear a bra and your head, but come!

"Do you know if we played by the rules right now we'd be in Gym?"

Fake Push Notifications, infinitely more fun

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 17:13:00 +0000

What's more fun than a Fake Retweet? The Fake Push Notification of course.

Follow these easy steps.

1) You see a friend of yours on Foursquare check in and it says
"Tom L @ [off the grid] ...checked in, but hiding their whereabouts!"

2) Text them IMMEDIATELY saying:

"Foursquare: Congratulations! You've unlocked a special Douchebadge! We know you're at Cipriani and we're telling everyone!!"

or how about...

"Foursquare: Since you're so close to Janet B. at Fette Sau she says "Come over and buy me a drink and my next "check-in" is at your place!"

It's basically impossible to tell the difference between a text and a push notification when it comes to your homescreen, so have fun. Of course it works better if they don't have your number programmed in their phone.

It's been a while since my last post, because I was working on a post about China Mobile that went up on the business insider recently, thanks @fromedome. Also, I never put up the video I received via email from Sarah Lacy after the Beijing trip. I wasn't sure if this video was for public consumption, but the only people who'd mind are Yan and I. Thanks @sarahcuda !

Twitter bump: Failwhale sightings on land prompt much conversation

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 22:04:00 +0000

Last August I was struck by how many comments Tara Hunt got when she took a picture of herself in her Failwhale T-Shirt. That was 2008 when twitter was for geeks.

Now it's 2009 and on a quiet March evening in London Imogen Heap who is best known for "Let Go"did the same thing with 3x times as many comments in a short period of time. I'm also pretty sure that very few of her 57,939 followers are considered 'in the tech industry'. She racked up 7,982 views to her Twitpic page, which means that 7,982 people clicked from seeing Imogen Heap tweet that she uploaded a picture. And then 23 people could not help but comment about her and the Failwhale she was wearing.

Facebook is making products talk too - I enabled Netflix with Facebook connect today, rated one movie, Midnight Run from 1988 and already I've had 3 comments in 1/2 hour

Here are all Imogen's comments from Twitpic

ginaaaxmarieee on March 27, 2009

hahaha. i love the fail whale too. walk on the streets with that shirt! (:

kimmieeee on March 27, 2009

This is so cute!

davidshepherd on March 27, 2009

Save the whale, its eyes its nose its tail... (John Shuttleworth)

lesliemmuller on March 27, 2009

Immie, I think you have my pajama bottoms--they look better on you. . !

ben_rio on March 27, 2009

That goes quite well actually. Very Sunday morning. Chariots of fire inspirational music, run for the kettle!

Andymy on March 27, 2009

Hehehe Ultra cooooool ^_^

witchlostintime on March 27, 2009

I wish I looked that good mid pj changeover! Loving it!

tec5x5 on March 27, 2009

Nice i dont where pjs i just sleep in my jeans

anonymousangel on March 27, 2009

sweet! lovin the 'do.

whereamigoing on March 27, 2009

You look great,this pic is so cool.

yukimi on March 27, 2009

awww I love the failwhale too! but don't make it a pj! I would happily walk around with one of these shirts! so lovely!!!

lindsayylou on March 27, 2009

Loooovve it!!!

lizzy1e on March 27, 2009

So coooool! Got that error yesterday and thought it was such a cute pic. :D

HeyLetsPogo on March 27, 2009

The t-shirts are for sale here: http://www.zazzle.com/failwhale. And I absolutely agree - you look fab, Immi :)

desvai on March 27, 2009

so cute, i want one!

truett on March 27, 2009

jealousssssssssss

kristwhy on March 27, 2009

it's awesome, you're beautiful as is your music

SidifromDC on March 27, 2009

Imogen...it's beautiful!

LiaisonOnEtsy on March 27, 2009

Who is the vendor Imogen? Where'd you get it??

Talklikeazombie on March 27, 2009

Awesome! And badass pjs Immi xD

georgiaelizabee on March 27, 2009

Win! (:

omnamaste on March 27, 2009

dude. we wants.

uberlab on March 27, 2009

cuuuute :) personally think the "fixing it now cat" was cuter tho

lexi_c on March 27, 2009

I love the shirt! And I love your hair! My goodness, you are gorgeous! :D

"Hey, Ivanka Trump" says Ruben Blades, "Panama it will never leave you"

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 15:29:00 +0000

It is next to impossible to find on the internet, but if you have been in a cab lately Ruben Blades has recommended you visit Panama in the Panama Tourism commercials on NY10taxi TV.

Thanks to John Carney at The Business Insider in his pickup of Latin Business Chronicle Ivanka Trump is now forever linked in his post "Weirdly Smart Ivanka Trump Says its Time to Party in Panama". So now in terms of the web, we're sure that Panama will never leave her.

Unfortunately you cannot find the video of Ruben Blades' commercial anywhere on the web, but it is begging for a mashup and fake summit, romance or otherwise that involves Ruben Blades salsa singing and dancing and courting his newest, all-business spokeswoman, Ivanka Trump. There are, if you must look, much less interesting and lower production quality videos of panama on Youtube and on panama tourism sites.

The commercial is campy and says there are so many birds that you could have an air traffic controller pushing feathers in the rainforest. In the video a bird poops on the air traffic controller's shoulder and Ruben Blades says 'Get that man a hat' (would love to add a link here, BBDO, Ruben?).

Ruben, I must ask you...now that Ivanka Trump is saying that Panama's Real Estate is a bright shining light in her portfolio, doesn't she deserve a hat too?

Pillow Talk with Vlingo and Fennec

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 06:00:00 +0000

Remember this rumor on Gizmodo?

There's a lot of fear that the execution wouldn't work because typing could suck, which is why we were graced with the 'MacWheel' on the Onion News Network recently. You can learn a lot from a spoof, and the MacWheel rightly pointed out that we're not ready yet for touch screen computers, both in terms of usability and popular disposition. But touchscreen netbooks are not far away; the technology is ready, the marketing use cases are not.

There is hope today, in the form of two new browsers. One is a mobile browser that deals well with limited real estate and touch screens, Fennec from Mozilla, and the other, which is much more groundbreaking to me, is vlingo. Vlingo is a 'browser' of sorts but it's really just a layer of control to the web that uses voice to navigate. Here is the AppVee review of Vlingo if you haven't used the app already.
I wasn't much into voice controls, especially in public. What's good about vlingo's interface is that it only uses voice to suggest and pre-populate words so that you can get most of the way there to a search or status update or even a voice dial. You can then use the touch screen to edit what you've said like the google voice search application.

Although this extra layer of voice control does not take away the need for a browser, the voice-to-text interface makes voice the center of your world and lets you input information in a variety of modes.
It's not a surprise that it made TechCrunch's top ten iPhone apps of 2008. There are lots of voice to text companies, SpinVox who's done something similar in the EU as well, and then there's Yap, Voodoovox, Jott and PhoneTag. When touch screen netbooks take off however, it will be interesting to see if vlingo and or these other companies take off with them.

I said in a previous post about ChaCha that I would be embarrassed to use a voice application out in public, but I'm quite comfortable talking to inanimate objects in my house. In fact, if I'm folding my laundry, I'd much rather use voice and then tap a few corrections rather than be stuck walking back and forth to a desktop and finding the typing position at an upright computer or carry around an awkwardly folding laptop.

I think that trend towards nice flat netbooks will soon see the use of vlingo, or like apps working overtime as people sitting in bed start talking out searches and quick notes and editing them before sending them out. Here in an UWS studio, talking is the perfect way to control my media. I love and would not trade my AirMouse + iMac combo, but after a while trying to control Hulu from across the room with my iPhone starts to feel like archery.

With vlingo + netbook, or vlingo + TV there's less typing and that comes much much closer to a universal remote. Most of the work will be about selecting your results and how and where to share the information you have readied for public, private or semi-private consumption.

And this is all using language, there are even voice tools for humming commands, like this drawing done by Ze Frank.

Try the voice drawing tool for yourself...

Since you're saving lots of keystrokes using vlingo, you can now forget those silly keyboard shortcuts. If vlingo brought you to Fennec, you could replace keyboard shortcuts like 'cut' with a little scissor icon and forget about your mouse. Fennec then offers more touchscreen gestures like dragging the screen left or right give you the ability to share, email or browse to deeper content.

The picture below shows Fennec from Mozilla, which has a menu with star, page back and page forward that appear only when you wipe the screen to the left. You'd see your tabs if you wiped the other way, right. Right now the iPhone's Safari slows down your browsing behavior on mobile in the same way that IE did on the desktops in the pre-tab world.

With easy to get to tabs, and the view to what other tabs are open you can multi-task on a smaller screen more easily.

I'm not sure on the form factor, but the new idea from a google engineer could test well - the NIMble looks like a strong prototype for the touch screen, but voice could really make it interesting.

I say voice is the new frontier in technology precisely because it has not yet been made fun of to my knowledge on any comedy show. What should be a much more difficult technological advance, potentially the last piece of the information logistics puzzle would be to give the screen a 3rd dimension, so that what we say could come in as holograms like we saw in the minority report in 2002.

But that has already been spoofed here in a new episode of Lazer Cats on this week's Saturday Night Live. (click through to skip to this spot in the video)