Instagram On The Web

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA - MARCH 28: (EDITOR'S NOTE: Image was shot with an iPhone using Instagram) Justin Han of Australia poses during the adidas 2012 Australian Olympic Games competitor uniform launch at Sydney Olympic Park Sports Centre on March 28, 2012 in Sydney, Australia. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

Instagram For The Web Coming Soon? Online ‘View Profile’ Link Spotted In The Wild

You can’t take a desktop experience and shove it into a 3-by-4-in screen. It’s a very different behavior pattern. It’s a very different browse pattern. People interact with their phones very differently than they do with their PCs and I think that when you design from the ground up with mobile in mind, you create a very different product than going the other way.

Instagram took too much time to get on the Android platform, and it is a mistake it is not on the web already. But better late than never. Mobile is where the action is, but you ignore the web at your peril.

Instagram's attempt to get on the web will be a good way to mesh the service into its now ownner: Facebook. As is well known Facebook struggles in the mobile space.

If Instagram will have a hard time adopting the web, the two services will have a higher chance of melding.

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More Spectrum

NEW YORK, NY - JULY 11: A free Wi-Fi hotspot beams broadband internet from atop a public phone booth on July 11, 2012 in Manhattan, New York City. New York City launched a pilot program Wednesday to provide free public Wi-Fi at public phone booths around the five boroughs. The first ten booths were lit up with Wi-Fi routers attached to the top of existing phone booths, with six booths in Manhattan, two in Brooklyn, and one in Queens. Additional locations, including ones in the Bronx and Staten Island, are to be added soon. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

Bold plan: opening 1,000 MHz of federal spectrum to WiFi-style sharing

the US should identify 1,000 MHz of government-controlled spectrum and share it with private industry to meet the country’s growing need for wireless broadband..... power our future filled with 4G phones and tablets .... already identified more than 200MHz of federal spectrum that can be freed for sharing. Another 195MHz will be identified in a report coming later this year, and the Federal Communications Commission will use incentive auctions "to free up substantially more prime spectrum" .... "For too long, policymakers and industry lobbyists have quarrelled over whether to embrace more exclusive licensing or spectrum sharing as if a gain for one means a loss for the other. We are happy the PCAST report rejects this false choice that has deadlocked our spectrum policy for too long. By embracing sharing while continuing to find clearable spectrum for auction, we can not only ensure an endless supply of cat videos for our smart phones, but also provide enough open spectrum for technological innovation, job creation, and lower connection prices for consumers." .... in response to a 2010 memorandum from Obama that required 500MHz of spectrum to be made available for commercial use over the next ten years. In recommending 1,000MHz of spectrum, PCAST noted that "in just two years, the astonishing growth of mobile information technology—exemplified by smartphones, tablets, and many other devices—has only made the demands on access to spectrum more urgent."

Mobile is not mobile unless there is universal, wireless broadband. It should not be possible to lose connection.

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Free And Paid

Image via CrunchBase

Dalton Caldwell: What Twitter could have been

Perhaps you think that Twitter today is a really cool and powerful company. Well, it is. But that doesn’t mean that it couldn’t have been much, much more. I believe an API-centric Twitter could have enabled an ecosystem far more powerful than what Facebook is today.

Dalton Caldwell: Announcing an audacious proposal

Contemplate for a moment how scary a theoretical purely ad-supported Dropbox would be.

Fred Wilson: In Defense Of Free

This post is in reaction to the idea that services should be paid to ensure that they are appropriately focused on the consumer/user as opposed to the marketer/advertiser/sponsor..... Think about the Super Bowl, the World Cup, the Olympics, the Oscars, the Presidential Debates, the news coverage of important events. These things are ad supported ..... The fact that at its base level TV is free does not mean that all TV has to be free. Free TV does not commoditize paid TV. They co-exist nicely. But we had free TV well before we had paid TV. Free is the foundation that creates a paid tier. ..... Why is over the air radio still the most popular way to listen to music? Because it is free. ..... let's look at servces where the users provide all the value. Wikipedia, Craigslist, YouTube, Flickr, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Wordpress, etc, etc. There is no value to any of these platforms if the users don't create the content. The users create the service, curate it, and make it what it is. I do not believe it makes sense to charge users to create the value. ...... When scale matters, when network effects matter, when your users are creating the content and the value, free is the business model of choice.

Dalton Caldwell: Fred Wilson is wrong about “Free”

Companies like Facebook and Twitter have actively encouraged companies to think of their APIs as “platforms”. They want people to base their businesses on top of them. If you unpack that word, they are saying that you should think of the APIs they provide the same way you think of an operating system like Linux, or a hosting platform like Amazon Web Services, or a programming platform like Ruby on Rails......... Building on top of a platform is a foundational risk, and if your platform decided one day that it doesn’t like what you are doing, or likes what you are doing so much they want to compete with you, it’s Very Bad. ...... My arguments are that platforms should not be ad-supported. I never said that “free” is the wrong business model for everyone. ..... The vast majority of innovations created by digital music startups will be crushed because the labels have a fundamental financial incentive to do so. .... Attempting to create a huge platform business that is at its core about controlling and monetizing “bits” is a fool’s errand..... The propagation of “content” through our pipes is just the side effect of providing an amazingly useful service. In other words, content is not king– it’s just bits passing through our system, at the behest of our customers..... In my view of the world, digital “services” are valuable/easy to monetize, and digital “content” is not. If we think of Twitter and Facebook as communications platforms, rather than media/entertainment sites, it seems that their business models are on the wrong side of history.

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Bad Public Policy And Internet Speeds

Emblem of Hong Kong (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Tokyo, Seoul, and Paris get faster, cheaper broadband than US cities

The most expensive city surveyed was New York, where Verizon charges $154.98 for the cheapest fiber triple-play package...... In contrast, Riga, Seoul, and Paris all offered triple-play packages for less than $40 per month. London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Copenhagen, and Hong Kong all had triple play packages available for under $50. .... The best-performing American city was San Francisco, where Webpass offers a 200Mbps service for $37.50 per month. New Yorkers and Washingtonians can get 25Mbps service for less than $40 per month ...... way behind the world leaders. A Hong Kong service provider offers 500Mbps service for $37.34 per month. Providers in Tokyo, Riga, Seoul, Paris, Bucharest, and Berlin all offer services with 100Mbps download speeds service for less than $40 per month. ..... Residents of Chattanooga, TN, can get gigabit Internet access. Unfortunately, that service costs $317.03 per month. Verizon offers 150Mbps service in New York for $159.95 per month, and Comcast offers 105Mbps service in Washington, DC, for $105.00. ..... In Hong Kong, you can get a gigabit connection for $48.59 per month. Amsterdam offers a half gigabit for $83.33 per month. Tokyo residents can get a symmetrical 200Mbps connection for $26.85 per month. ...... incumbents in the United States don't offer ultra-fast speeds even in urban areas whose high density ought to make them cost-effective ..... broadband policy in recent years has been based on the "really flawed assumption that telephone companies and cable companies are going to compete with each other." Instead, he said, we've gotten a "negotiated truce" in which cable incumbents enjoy a de facto monopoly on high-speed broadband service, while Verizon and AT&T focus primarily on their wireless platforms ..... policymakers should re-evaluate the 2005 decision to abandon line-sharing rules. In many other countries, incumbent firms are required to lease their facilities to competitors at regulated rates. ...... more cities should consider municipal fiber projects.

The two policy prescriptions make tremendous sense. One, incumbents should be required to share their pipes with competitors. Two, cities should lay down fiber optic lines.

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