DaMoon

Hope

marco:

I’ve mostly stopped writing about the dismal App Store approval process and the issues it causes because I’ve felt hopeless. Nothing has changed. Nothing has improved. Despite some token status-reporting “improvement” attempts, nearly everything about the App Store is the same, or worse, than it was a year ago.

The average review time has nearly doubled. There are more undocumented rules being enforced less consistently than ever before. Apple is as just as opaque, unhelpful, and hostile as they’ve been. Unscrupulous publishers are gaming and abusing rankings, search results, and descriptions like crazy. Invalid or off-topic reviews are still rarely removed, and the rate-on-delete dialog still unfairly destroys every app’s average star rating. It’s a mess.

But I like it here.

A lot of things are wrong with my country, too. And my state. But it’s still the only place I want to be, and I’d rather fight to improve it than abandon it.

I don’t want to go to any other mobile platform. The iPhone is still an amazing device with a great hardware and software ecosystem and hundreds of high-quality apps. But app review is a massive problem that’s slowly degrading the platform.

This can only be fixed with a major policy change.

The people at Apple capable of changing this (a very high-level executive at least, but probably only Jobs) couldn’t possibly care less when any single developer leaves the platform or makes a stink, even if it’s Google, because it ultimately doesn’t generate a lot of bad press outside of geek circles.

But they hate bad mainstream press. And the amount of negative attention surrounding app review is finally reaching a level that inspires hope — hope that the shitstorm may finally be large enough to cause a policy change.

Any policy change would require a lot of work, technically. It’s unlike Apple to announce any upcoming changes before their release. If such a policy change happens, the decision will have probably been made at least a few months beforehand.

I suspect that we’re crossing that point now, and the decision is about to be made (or recently has been made) to abolish what we know of today as app review.

I have no idea what would replace it, or whether its replacement would be significantly better. But it’s not like Apple to sit on their hands with such a high-profile part of their product line and do nothing to improve it.

Maybe this is just blind hope. It’s certainly not based on any information. It’s a hunch at best. But I can hope.

Hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope!

Words That We, As An Internet, Have Overused And Are No Longer Permitted To Use

rafer:

marco:

• media
• brand
• trend (as a verb, incl. “trending”)
• invite (as a noun, thanks — “invitation” is permitted)

This is why we can’t have nice things.

Rafer sez:
Don’t forget “content.”

I usually just put “social” in front of all those words and it makes it all better.

(WSJ) Ron Conway Changes His Tune About The Big Apple

mikehudack:

arigreenberg:

Ron Conway fidgeted. He groaned. He called the scenario unfair.

As the mega-angel investor sat onstage during an exclusive event for New York entrepreneurs, a video played of Conway being interviewed for a program at Stanford University in which he’s asked if there’s any place in the world that could replicate the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Silicon Valley.

“Not even close,” Conway quickly replies in the video. “I’m really opinionated on this topic because we have like five investments in New York…they’re great companies but they’re more work than three companies in Silicon Valley.”

With a theater full of proud New York entrepreneurs, it could have been ugly for Conway, a prolific angel investor best known for his early investment in Google Inc. Fortunately, the crowd, and Conway, had a good laugh at his comments on the video, which was filmed nearly two years ago. And, fortunately for these entrepreneurs attending the Startup@Work Founders Speakers Series, Conway said he has changed his tune about business in the Big Apple.

In the past year Conway has invested in 45 start-ups, and 10 of those call New York home. One of those companies is hot social-networking mobile start-up Foursquare Labs Inc. When asked if that company should move to California, Conway responded, “Hell, no.”

He went on to label New York as a hotbed for social media companies that have a great advantage over start-ups in other locales given that New York is the media capital of the world.

Conway was the featured speaker for the third installment of the Startup@Work series organized by Warren Lee, a venture partner at Canaan Partners who interviews the speakers. Lee’s idea behind the invite-only event is to give entrepreneurs the chance to hear straight-talk about the challenges of founding and growing a company. (See our previous story about this event here.)

Conway, who has invested in more than 500 companies over the years, has always rooted for start-ups. He discussed how he left a marketing job at National Semiconductor Corp. in 1979 to join Altos Computer Systems, as a co-founder, president and CEO. Altos went on to be acquired in 1990 by Acer Inc.

Conway has been an active angel investor for more than 15 years. He was the founder and managing partner for the Angel Investors LP funds from 1998 to 2005 whose investments included Google, Ask Jeeves Inc. and PayPal Inc. Notable current investments include Digg Inc., Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc.

He and two other partners and two associates now manage a pool of angel investor money for a firm called SV Angels. The group evaluates about five “quality” deals per day, Conway said, eliminating two to three of them immediately and considering the others.

Investments in New York include Associated Content Inc., Betaworks and Hunch Inc., among about 20 portfolio companies here.

While he’s often called the “Godfather of Silicon Valley,” it seems lately New York is glad to have him as a rich uncle.

(WSJ Link)

More (Too Much?) Free from Google: Turn-By-Turn

continuations:

Yesterday, Google announced something stunning: free turn-by-turn directions for Android 2.0 to be first available shortly on the Droid phones.  It is stunning because the previously cheapest software only alternatives were apps such as Navigon ($89.99) and TomTom ($99.99) for the iPhone (as an aside, stand alone GPS devices with turn-by-turn directions can now be found on Amazon for as little as $139 for a Garmin nuvi 260 and that’s after 2 seconds of looking).  So here we have a case of Google taking something that previously cost nearly $100 per instance and making it free. Obviously, this is awesome news for the Android platform.

Tim O’Reilly greeted the news with the following tweet

Google Shrinks Another Market With Free Turn-By-Turn Navigation http://bit.ly/Oz00q Once again we see the disruptive power of big data.

To which I replied

@timoreilly we could also be seeing the power of something less benign: cross-subsidization

I was not the only one who had that reaction.  For instance, Dare Obasanjo also tweeted more pointedly

timoreilly isn’t that really the disruptive power of monopoly profits? :)

Tim’s two part reply was

@Carnage4Life Nokia has Google scale profits, but couldn’t do free turn by turn despite buying NavTech. It’s more than just money (1/2)

@Carnage4Life It’s also understanding how to use data to create network effects in 2-sided markets (see http://bit.ly/lPemc ) 2/2

This brings up the basic issue: should it be legal for Google to give away a product below cost as part of a strategy of attracting users (and developers) to other services on which it does make money?

The answer to this question is anything but obvious.  I remember well when Microsoft starting pushing Internet Explorer aggressively (and free) to “cut off Netscape’s air supply” (a quote denied by Paul Maritz, but mentioned in the antitrust case against Microsoft).  Microsoft engaged in various forms of bundling, which is what made the strategy illegal.  It could be argued that Google is not bundling and hence it should be legal (the impact on existing providers may be the same in any case with Garmin stock hammered yesterday).  But with tons of free initiatives by Google, such as Chrome, Chrome OS, music in search results, book search, and the list goes on, there comes an eventual question as to whether this will all be good for competition and consumer benefit in the long run (it’s no doubt great in the short run!).

This will be a long discussion which I am sure will play itself out over several years to come in the press and in courts (and in a tiny part on this blog).  So stay tuned for more!

Some excellent thoughts on Google’s ability to launch products for free because of their wonderful money printing machine, Adsense.

Like Albert says, in the short run this is awesome — free turn by turn directions on my phone — but ask the newspaper industry if they are happy about the way things turned out in the long run.