Netizen

Monday, July 16, 2012

Education For The 99%

Ruchit Garg: Why you need to go to good college?

“What is the value add of a college/school in the era where you have almost everything available on web, free or paid?” Answer is “World works on relationships and there are no better alternatives to learn, experience and make them work for you, than going to meet and interact with real people”.

Forbes: M.I.T. Game-Changer: Free Online Education For All

the success of M.I.T.x, OCW, and Academic Earth may push dramatic technological innovation at for-profits, so that they can maintain a unique selling proposition versus their free competitors .... against this country’s sizable need for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) graduates, M.I.T.x is nothing short of revolutionary. This is especially true if you aren’t a credential freak and, like me, just want to improve your chops in a marketable subject area

I am a big believer. I think online education is the way to go if the masses are to be served.

Google Glass

CNet: How Google is becoming an extension of your mind

an omnipresent digital assistant that figures out what you need and supplies it before you even realize you need it ..... Or Google taking over your car when it concludes based on your steering response time and blink rate that you're no longer fit to drive. Or your Google glasses automatically beaming audio and video to the police when you say a phrase that indicates you're being mugged. ...... some of those sci-fi possibilities I just described could be real within three to five years ...... the more types of work computers do on your behalf to make your life easier, the more access you must grant them to the intimacies of your personal life ...... Brin said Project Glass repackages much of the same technology that's in a mobile phone today ....... Its self-driving cars could give commuters another hour or two a day to be checking e-mail, watching video, and performing searches. ...... Project Glass glasses present a small screen at the top of your ordinary field of view, not a layer between you and whoever you're talking to.

They could make it look less in your face. The frame could go light, super light, thin, ultra thin, and transparent.

Google's Got It All: Phone, Tablet, Laptop

Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...

Image via CrunchBase

The Chromebook is great except for the price point. The Nexus phones have been great from the get go. And now with Nexus 7 Google has nailed the tablet also. Suddenly Motorola Mobility makes so much sense. It goes beyond patents and what have you. A company that has already mastered the three fundamental form factors in hardware deserves to be able to do hardware in house, don't you think? Google making Apple want to play catch up in the hardware space? This has got to be the first time that happened. But it has happened.

Podcasting Should Be Easier

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

It just occurred to me that there are no easy, obvious podcasting tools. For text blogging (and photos) you have platforms like Blogger, Wordpress, Tumblr. Granted you can embed audio files into your tumblog posts, but that is not what I have in mind.

Video blogging is easy. You can use something like YouTube.

And I don't count iTunes. It is a walled garden. I don't consider it part of the web experience.

The last podcasting platform that I used and liked for its ease of use was created by people who brought us Twitter. Too bad they shut it down. They should perhaps revive it.

There is tremendous opportunity with audio. For one, language barriers are less of an issue. It is less pressure than video blogging, and yet there is more emotional connection than in text blogging.

Quora: What Are The Best Podcasting Tools?
Podcasting With SoundCloud
Audacity

I'd have liked the SoundCloud option, if only because it is so easy to embed a SoundCloud file into a blog post. But there seem to be hoops to podcasting on SoundCloud.

Do you know of good options?

English: Mark Zuckerberg, Founder & CEO of Facebook, at the press conference about the e-G8 forum during the 37th G8 summit in Deauville, France. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Fred Wilson: July 1: Mobile Is Where The Growth Is

Mobile does not reward feature richness. It rewards small, application specific, feature light services. I have said this before but I will say it again. The phone is the equivalent of the web application and the mobile apps you have on your home screen(s) are the features.

That is why Facebook should (and it looks like will) break its big monolithic web app into a bunch of small mobile apps. Messenger, Instagram (not yet owned by Facebook), and Camera are the model for Facebook on mobile.

User experience is not the only big change/challenge for companies trying to navigate this transition. Monetization is different too.

Approaches like display advertising don't work as well on mobile as they do on the web. And they don't work that well on the web. ARPUs (avg revenue per user) on mobile are lower for display based revenue models on mobile across the board.

On the other hand, commerce works great on mobile if you have a well integrated (one click) purchase experience. The freemium model (whether it is virtual goods in games, in app upgrades, or something else) works very well on mobile.

Mark Zuckerberg: July 13: Zuckerberg Says Mobile Shift Is His Biggest Challenge

Facebook Inc. (FB) Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said his hardest job right now is figuring out how to adapt the world’s largest social network to mobile devices.

Bringing Facebook’s features to handheld gadgets is difficult because the user experience is so different than on desktop computers......

Urban Walking: 160 Blocks

I walked 160 blocks yesterday afternoon. Felt like it.

Friday, July 13, 2012

A GroupOn Pivot?

groupon (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee)

The CEO’s focus now is on building what Mason calls the “operating system for local commerce”—a suite of software and technology services that would embed Groupon into every facet of every transaction on Main Street. (BusinessWeek)

I was excited about GroupOn early on, and even when it got hammered after IPO, I kept thinking at least it is in the right space. I was strongly opposed to it getting bought by Google. And I feel like they are making the right next steps, at least at the vision level. And I like it that they are in Chicago. Which means New York City is a good place to be for high tech, high touch companies. GroupOn emphasizes writing skills and comedy. I like that also. It employs writers, salespeople.

Karp Cracks Advertising

Image representing David Karp as depicted in C...

Image by Matthew Buchanan / Flickr via CrunchBase

New York Times: Can Tumblr’s David Karp Embrace Ads Without Selling Out?

good design is not just about how a thing looks but rather about how a thing works. But maybe design is also about how a thing feels..... The design of Tumblr, the blogging tool and social network, is guided by feeling. ...... “Tumblr is David.” ...... Karp likes to talk about Tumblr less as a business than as a “platform for creativity.” ....... “Pretty much every large tech company today,” Karp said, is essentially “metrics driven.” ...... Karp chose not to operate that way. ...... He just feels that he sees something everyone else has missed. ..... “There is absolutely no learning curve.” ..... I sat in on the “all team” meeting Karp recently implemented as a Friday-afternoon ritual. I agreed to keep certain details confidential, but it was clear that Karp is thinking pretty hard about profitability. Tumblr has learned to assemble some data that advertisers want (and that it had previously not bothered to collect). ......... In the past year he has become engaged with the challenge of designing not just a product but a business. It’s quite distinct from the Zen experience of solitary problem-solving that is coding, but, he continued, “I’ve really gotten a kick out of trying to make running a company as Zen an experience as it can be.” ...... the kind of creative advertising that is “intended to make you feel something for the brand.” ...... “Can you remember the last Twitter ad you’ve seen, the last Facebook ad?” And so, he concludes, there is a huge, untapped opportunity. ...... Karp has said Tumblr could be “wildly profitable” overnight by simply incorporating conventional online ads into the platform, but he believes that would spoil the community and the creativity that have taken shape there. His proposed solution entails advertisers’ being just as creative and expressive as Tumblr users. For now, that means that a spot on the Tumblr dashboard generally used to highlight the company’s picks for the coolest stuff happening in its network will include occasional content from paid sponsors. The first participants included Adidas, Calvin Klein and the movie “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” generating more than $150,000 in revenue within a month. .......... “But I think I can make a pretty good case for — ” uncharacteristically, he stopped and gazed at the floor. Karp is rarely at a loss for smoothly delivered words, but now he seemed to be searching for something precise. He started and stopped again and then said what it is he believes in: “Following our hearts.”