PayPhones As WiFi Spots: How Smart

NEW YORK, NY - JUNE 09: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg speaks during a news conference, with the CEO of AT&T Randall Stephenson, to announce the installation of free Wi-Fi service this summer in 20 New York City parks on June 9, 2011 in New York City. AT&T, which will maintain the service for a five-year period, plans to complete all the locations by the Fall. The 26 wireless internet hot spots in 20 parks will cover all the five boroughs. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

New York starts turning payphones into free Wi-fi hotspots

The hotspots are initially coming to ten payphones in three of the boroughs and will be open to the public to access for free.

10 is not enough, all I got to say. Okay to run ads. Just get it out to every single payphone booth out there. This will encourage people to ditch their careers in some cases. They will simply walk over to the nearest payphone stall to make a call over wifi.

10 is only not enough, it is misleading. People might get the news and walk over to some payphone booth only to realize there is no wifi. How inappropriate!

Related articles

• Free Wi-Fi Hotspots Coming To Payphone Kiosks

  ---

• NYC is turning payphones into free WiFi hotspots: 10 kiosks launch today

  ---

• New York starts turning payphones into free Wi-fi hotspots

  ---

• WiFi: Getting the Most Out of Your Smartphone

  ---

Declaration of Internet Freedom

The Big Data Landscape

Source: Forbes

Search --> Social --> Mobile --> Big Data

Image via CrunchBase

Google won search. Facebook won social. Android is going to win mobile. Who will win Big Data? Is Big Data the next big thing on par with search, social and mobile? I take it for granted it is. In fact, I take that already to be the industry wisdom.

Fred Wilson: Mobile Is Where The Growth Is: In technology the more things change, the more they stay the same. You cannot ever rest. Because the big change that is going to upset your nice apple cart is right around the corner. Today that is mobile. Tomorrow, who knows? I am trying like hell to figure out what that will be and jump on it. Because that's how you play this game.

Considering Google+ has tremendous momentum. And Google is already hard at work on Big Data, Google as a company ends up looking really, really good.

I have long been a Google fanboy, like people are Apple fanboys.

Netizen Has Arrived: A Link From AVC

Related articles

• Google explains how Compute Engine fits in big data pipeline - ZDNet (blog)

  ---

• Big data can enable world-changing apps, says LinkedIn co-founder

  ---

• How the 'Big-Data' Era is Changing the Practice of Online Marketing

  ---

• Big Data -- a big deal for small business

  ---

• How Big Data Gets Real

  ---

• What is the big deal about BIG DATA?

  ---

• Google Now: Bringing Big Data to the Little People

  ---

• The Big Data Landscape

  ---

• 7 Tutorials on Big Data in the Cloud

  ---

• A Quick Introduction to Big Data

  ---

Fully Filling Out My LinkedIn Profile

Image via CrunchBase

I signed up for LinkedIn not long after it was launched because I read about it in the news. But I have never been much of a user. Two days back I decided to add many more details. For the first time I might have a full profile. Although it has technically been full the entire time.

Chris Dixon once said people thought he had a "strange" resume. I might have one of those. Omitting details makes it stranger. So I decided to add details going back as far as I could.

My LinkedIn Profile

LinkedIn has been defying gravity as a post IPO company. Good old fashioned revenue helps. Their revenues have doubled every quarter since they went IPO. And that is why they still have an outlandish P/E ratio. At LinkedIn corporate salespeople are considered as important as engineers. Most of their money comes from charging big money to recruiters. LinkedIn is recruiting on steroids.

While you are at it, go read this article.

Related articles

• The 3 LinkedIn Etiquette Rules You Should Never Break

  ---

• How LinkedIn Had Turned Your Resume Into A Cash Machine

  ---

• LinkedIn: Who Needs Ads? How The Anti-Facebook Makes Money (VIDEO) - Forbes

  ---

• 7 Things You May Be Getting Wrong on LinkedIn

  ---

• Head of the class: the 10 most popular companies among students

  ---

Why Is The Google Phone Expensive?

Image via CrunchBase

Google is about to hit the tablet market with something priced around $200. That'd be an explicit competition with Amazon, not Apple, but you get the point.

I have always been surprised as to why the best Android phones were the same price as the iPhone. The Android operating system is free, the iPhone operating system is not free. So why are not the Android phones cheaper?

If the iPhones are going to be $200, the Google Phone has to be more like $100. That is where I come from.

Related articles

• Google's Motorola Reportedly To Exit Feature Phones

  ---

• iPhone update has 200 new features

  ---

• The Original Google Phone

  ---

• The Original Google Phone Was Almost A Blackberry Clone

  ---

• Google Revamps Google+ for iPhone: Android OS Gets Cold Shoulder - PCWorld

  ---

The Facebook IPO Fiasco

NEW YORK, NY - MAY 18: The Nasdaq board in Times Square advertises Facebook which is set to debut on the Nasdaq Stock Market today on May 18, 2012 in New York, United States. The social network site is set to begin trading at roughly 11:00 a.m. ET and on Thursday priced 421 million shares at $38 each. Facebook, a Menlo Park, California based company, will have a valuation exceeding $100 billion. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

To start at $38 and end up at $27 is a fiasco to the tune of about 40 billion dollars. To climb back up to $32 is good news. Maybe Facebook is not all hat no cattle. Maybe something is going on. I was not aware of the Nasdaq technical glitch of day one. I was thinking that one, America is nowhere close to going back to a 5% unemployment rate, the structural damages done to the economy have not been fixed yet, and two, the market does not think of dot coms as darlings that deserve P/Es of 100. It wants P/Es that are more like 20 or 50.

But then LinkedIn kept defying gravity at P/Es in the 900 range. Facebook hammered Zynga and other sexies like GroupOn but not LinkedIn. What gives? LinkedIn earnings have doubled every quarter since it went IPO. But is that sustainable? For how long? You can watch me move at two miles per hour. Then I can do four miles per hour. But how far can you extrapolate that?

Before the Facebook IPO I said the company will hit $200 billion in market cap in less than five years. A week after the IPO I said it might go in the $20-25 range before starting a slow climb up. I am glad it did not hit 25.

Even Paul Graham was saying the time for lofty valuations for tech startups was over. The Facebook fiasco was reflecting upon the entire industry. Good thing the blip lasted only a few weeks. I am standing by my $200 billion statement.

Funny, Pinterest is going into ecommerce before Facebook is. Facebook is very well positioned to do payments. It could give serious competition to PayPal. What will it acquire next? Dwolla?