There’s a lot of debate in Washington over the current approach to auctioning off spectrum to carriers who operate closed networks with it. Thankfully there’s a growing recognition that this approach is wrong and hampers innovation in this country to our detriment.
Our friend Jason Devitt went to Washington last week and testified before Congress on this subject. This is what Jason had to say.
This one appears to work and requires a forged SIM card. While that’s progress, I honestly would like to see a more elegant solution. Hopefully a firmware/software solution isn’t too far away.
I realize that’s a big statement and that its not entirely true.
But more and more, I find myself texting instead of emailing
And I see it with my kids, my wife (the gotham gal), the woman next to me on the train right now, and people walking down the street.
Texting is fast, relatively noise free (for now), and with the advent of better phones, its getting easier and easier to do.
Texting lacks many of the tools that have grown up around email, its not archivable (unless you use twitter to text), and it’s plain text, no attachments, no graphics (unless you use mms).
I see that as a big opportunity.
Dick Costolo wrote a post on his fabulous "Ask The Wizard" blog about how much you should raise in your first round of venture capital. In the process, he tackes Marc Andreessen’s "raise as much as you can advice" and also get some of his math wrong.
But Ask The Wizard is not about getting anything perfect. Like Dick, it’s about getting it mostly right. And in my opinion that’s exactly what Dick does in this post. If you are an entrepreneur raising your first round of venture capital, I think this is a must read.
I’ve been reading Kurt Andersen’s Heyday on this trip to Greece. It’s about life in the US in the middle of the 19th Century (the heyday of the US?). There’s this scene early in the book where one of the main characters, Skaggs, who lives in NYC sends a friend a telegram letting him know that John Jacob Astor, the hated landlord of NYC, had finally died. His friend sends him a telegraph back letting him know that Niagra Falls had just frozen over and was no longer a waterfall. Skaggs runs uptown to the newspapers and tries to sell the news but nobody believes him until the news arrives via official channels the next day.
As I was reading that part of the book, I got a twitter message on my phone from Dave Winer that Barry Bonds had just tied Hank Aaron’s record with a blast in San Diego.
The irony was not lost on me. Both telegrams and twitter messages are short messaging systems. Twitter by design. Telegraph because the cost of sending a message was so high. But a lot can be conveyed in a short burst of text. Clearly we’ve been getting our news forever from a mix of personal and official news channels. I think with the advent of mobile broadcast messaging systems like Twitter, we’ll be getting more, not less, of our news from "citizen journalists".
Mark Pincus is the first internet entrepreneur I backed (along with his partner Sunil Paul), in late ’95 with Freeloader. He talks a bit about Freeloader in this Wallstrip weekend chat with Howard, but my favorite part is the end (of course) where he talks about Facebook. The whole thing is about 3 minutes long.
Good interview with Toni Schneider on Wallstrip. His long/short calls at the end are particularly interesting.
Bob argues for a file trading license in this post which is a good idea and I know that many have tried this model but nobody has made it work yet. I personally think a $10/month subscription that gets me an "on demand" listening service like Rhapsody plus a license to trade on the p2p networks is a great model.
I think sampling music on the p2p networks sucks because it still takes time to download and with all the spoofing on the networks, it’s a pain to deal with them. And you can’t get all the music you want on the p2p networks so easily.
So sample on Rhapsody, or Napster, or Yahoo Music, or some other streaming service. And if you want the mp3, get it on the p2p.
All for the price of $10/month. I agree with Bob that this might be a very popular offering.
We’ve got social networks with lots of users, like MySpace, Beebo, Facebook, etc, and we’ve got open social networks like Marc Canter’s People Aggregator and Marc Andreessen’s Ning. But we really don’t yet have an open social network with a lot of users.
Facebook took a step in that direction when they opened their platform, but it’s not totally open. I can’t update my Facebook status message with Twitter the way I’d like to. And Netvibes’ cool new widget that runs my Facebook profile inside of Netvibes doesn’t import my Facebook news feed into Netvibes.
Dave Winer has been thinking about the state of the platform this week and here’s his take on Facebook.
To all vendors who are tuned in, look for ways you’re keeping
your users from managing their own data. The users are getting
educated, fast. Better to be on the right side of this one.Facebook could easily be the place where the dam
breaks. It’s attracting so many users, who may at some point realize
that they want control of the data that’s locked up inside Facebook.
Then vendors who have been on the right side of this issue will be the
heroes.
I wish it were so, but most of Facebook’s traditional users (like my two daughters) don’t care that their data is locked up in Facebook. I’ll show them my Facebook running in Netvibes when they wake up this morning and they’ll say "that’s nice dad but why would you want to do that?".
I don’t see a Facebook rebellion happening anytime soon. The Techcrunch 50,000 might leave when they realize that they can do most, if not everything, that they do in Facebook on the web on a platform they control. But that won’t make a dent in Facebook’s core audience.
But it may make a dent in where the web development steam is directed. Right now there’s a ton of development effort focused on Facebook. Will that effort stay there? That’s a different question and one I can’t answer right now. But it’s something I am watching closely.
I like to invest in the services we use and I like the use the services we invest in. I find it’s better to start out as a user and become an investor.
So when I started using outside.in, I wanted to get the posts I was doing about places into the service. And I wanted the Gotham Gal to be able to do the same. I submitted our blogs feeds to outside.in and tagged them with a zip code. And then realized that everything we were posting was going to get geotagged and posted to outside.in
So right then and there, well before we invested in the company, I saw a big problem with the service, but also a big opportunity. I urged the company to figure out a way to allow "part time placebloggers" to use outside.in
Most bloggers are not full time placebloggers like curbed or brownstoner. Most of us blog mostly about music, or technology, or politics, or knitting, or whatever. But we all live in places. We all visit places. And we all post at times about places. And the idea behind outside.in is to make all of this blogging about places discoverable, to facilitate the conversation about places the way techmeme gets conversations going in the tech world.
So it’s critical that part-time placebloggers get picked up in outside.in or any local oriented service that intends to cover a place or a set of places.
The Gotham Gal and I have been using a service from outside.in that solves this "part time placeblogger" problem for the past month or two and it has worked like a charm. Today the company has announced it’s availability to anyone who posts occasionally about places.
Here’s how it works.
1 – become a neighbor (ie register) at outside.in
2 – tell outside.in that you are a "part time placeblogger" and give them your blog’s URL
3 – put a google map link in any place post you write, or tag it with a zipcode in the post’s tag field, or just type where:10010 (or whatever is the correct zipcode) right into the blog post.
That’s it. Steven Johnson has a good description of how this works and why its a big step on his blog (and also at the outside.in blog).
If you occasionally blog about places, give it a try. It takes a little time for the post to show up in outside.in but it will be there in at least an hour or two and given all the distribution deals outside.in is working on, it will probably show up in a lot of other places on the web that are about the place you blog about.
