Netizen

Monday, January 07, 2013

What After Mobile?

Image representing Fred Wilson as depicted in ...

Fred Wilson: Putting 2012 To Bed

My venture investing career has three phases all roughly 6-8 years long. The first, at Euclid, was software to internet. The second, at Flatiron was internet to bubble. And the third, at USV, has been web 2 to mobile. I have always used a new firm to denote a new investment phase for me. Throw away the old. Start with the new.

One way to look at mobile is that it is the touch interface, successor to the GUI, Graphical User Interface. When you come from that angle, the question what after mobile has an easy answer.

Natural User Interface, NUI, with all its software and hardware implications.

Paul Graham's Black Swans

Black Swan Farming

the best ideas look initially like bad ideas ..... The total value of the companies we've funded is around 10 billion, give or take a few. But just two companies, Dropbox and Airbnb, account for about three quarters of it. ..... we are just not prepared for the 1000x variation in outcomes that one finds in startup investing. .... in purely financial terms, there is probably at most one company in each YC batch that will have a significant effect on our returns, and the rest are just a cost of doing business. ...... You need to do what you know intellectually to be right, even though it feels wrong. .... the best startup ideas seem at first like bad ideas. I've written about this before: if a good idea were obviously good, someone else would already have done it. So the most successful founders tend to work on ideas that few beside them realize are good ..... the vast majority of ideas that seem bad are bad. ..... The fact that the best ideas seem like bad ideas makes it even harder to recognize the big winners. ..... how lame Facebook sounded to me when I first heard about it. A site for college students to waste time? It seemed the perfect bad idea: a site (1) for a niche market (2) with no money (3) to do something that didn't matter. ..... When you pick a big winner, you won't know it for two years. .... fundraising is not merely a useless metric, but positively misleading. ..... We can afford to take at least 10x as much risk as Demo Day investors. ..... The best we can hope for is that when we interview a group and find ourselves thinking "they seem like good founders, but what are investors going to think of this crazy idea?" we'll continue to be able to say "who cares what investors think?" That's what we thought about Airbnb ..... if you're flying through clouds you can't tell what the attitude of the aircraft is. You could feel like you're flying straight and level while in fact you're descending in a spiral. The solution is to ignore what your body is telling you and listen only to your instruments. But it turns out to be very hard to ignore what your body is telling you. Every pilot knows about this problem and yet it is still a leading cause of accidents...... The reason Google seemed a bad idea was that there were already lots of search engines and there didn't seem to be room for another. ..... I was genuinely worried that Airbnb, for example, would not be able to raise money after Demo Day. I couldn't convince Fred Wilson to fund them

Sunday, January 06, 2013

Monetizing A Blog

English: Red Pinterest logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Here's a good one.

How I monetized a blog in 30 days: what worked, and what didn't

The Pinterest Gods

I help my mom run a cooking blog called The Yummy Life. She writes all the content, and I make sure the site actually works. We've been at it for almost two years, and until recently there wasn't much reason to worry about monetizing it because there was never enough traffic for it to matter. Then one day the Pinterest gods decided that we deserved better and in a frantic storm of pinning, our traffic shot up to about 25,000 visitors per day...... Before the spike we were getting ~4k visitors per day. The peak of the spike brought ~67k. It then fell to about 20-25k and it's stayed there ever since. There hasn't been any downward trend in the past three weeks, and almost all of the traffic is still coming from Pinterest.

Tips

#1 - Remove as much crap as possible from the sidebar (Good, Bad)
#2 - Use affiliate links to customize the ads for each post .... create her own ads for each post. Each ad links to a product on Amazon through an affiliate link. .... the Amazon affiliate links are generating almost twice as much revenue per visitor as the AdSense ads (~$5 RPM from Amazon, ~$2.50 RPM from AdSense).
#3 - Have the ads scroll with the page
.... steps #1 and #3 combined to increase our AdSense CTR (click-through-rate) by a factor of 33 (.03% to 1%).

Bad Ideas

Google AdSense text ads
Amazon pre-made banner ads
Amazon aStore .... This month we've had 3,288 orders placed through our on-page ads. We've had exactly zero placed through the aStore.
$0.99 eBook
Publishing networks

I Like To Read, I Like To Take Pictures

Nexus 4: My First Smartphone
Nexus 4 Is Way Too Cool

I have been playing with my Nexus 4 for days now. It is such a joy.

I have downloaded and organized a whole bunch of apps. I have discovered that I really like to read. Some of my favorite apps help me read. I also seem to like to take pictures. I have discovered. These are not revelations to me. More like confirmations. But confirmations I am happy about.

I really like to read. Pocket is a good one. It beats Flipboard in my book. I like the idea of saving in Pocket on my laptop to read later on the phone. My private homepage on my laptop already has an excellent curation of read destinations.

Amazon Kindle is awesome and easily my favorite app on my seven inch tablet. I am glad to have the Wikipedia app on the phone. Wikipedia is an awesome aspect of the Internet.

I have tried and loved several game apps. I played for hours, one of them overnight, it seemed like. But I did not find myself going back to them the following day. Chess I have gone back to. That is a good classic game in which to want to climb levels.

Path pictures are good, as Instagram pictures. The smartphone is such a poor camera that it has to make up for through filters and effects.

It is a treat to be able to download apps for your phone while sitting in front of a laptop.

Kurzweil Has Found A Home

Singularity: I Am Not Convinced

Singularity is not a concept I have bought into. But anyone who proposes it is a bold thinker. And in attempts at singularity many great things will happen. I want those great things.

Google’s New Director Of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil, Is Building Your ‘Cybernetic Friend’

World-renowned artificial intelligence expert and Google’s new Director of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil, wants to build a search engine so sophisticated that it could act like a ‘cybernetic friend,’ who knows users better than they know themselves. “I envision in some years that the majority of search queries will be answered without you actually asking,” he said at an intimate gathering at Singularity University’s NASA campus. ..... Language, Kurzweil argues, is the window to creating a genuine artificial brain, that can understand the meaning of ideas and concepts. “If you write a blog post, you’re not just creating a bag of words, you’re creating some meaningful sentences.” For now, search engines have brute-force algorithms that pick out key words in popular pages and hope that the results, on average, will yield the best information. ...... “semantic” search parses the meaning and intentions behind words. Semantic search aims to solve the ‘hotdog’ problem, as explained by Google’s Chairman, Eric Schmidt, “Is it a ‘hot dog’ or a ‘hotdog.’ And, if you knew something about whether the person had dogs, or whether the person was a vegetarian, you’d have a very different potential answer to that question.” ..... Google has access to the “things you read, what you write, in your emails or blog posts, and so on, even your conversations, what you hear, what you say.” .... Google can combine the personalized recommendations of a friend (who often know us better than we know ourselves) with the sum of all human knowledge, creating a sort of super best friend. ....... Kurzweil was quick to dispel the myth he was given “unlimited” funds, but humbly suggests that Google is giving him “sufficient resources for a very important project.”