Posts from Web/Tech

I’m not much for the rear view mirror. I like to look forward, not back. I guess that’s why I’m in the line of work I’m in.

But I’m going to force myself to look back at 2014 and explain what just happened. Doing that will help me look forward (tomorrow?) and explain what is going to happen.

This is not an attempt to be comprehensive, or accurate, or anything else. This is what I think happened in 2014:

1/ the social media phase of the Internet ended. this may have happened a few years ago actually but i felt it strongly this year. entrepreneurs and developers still build social applications. we still use them. but there isn’t much innovation here anymore. the big platforms are mature. their place is secure.

2/ messaging is the new social media. this may be part of what is going on in 1/. families use whatsapp groups instead of facebook. kids use snapchat instead of instagram. facebook’s acquisition of whatsapp in february of this year was the transaction that defined this trend.

3/ the “sharing economy” was outed as the “rental economy.” nobody is sharing anything. people are making money, plain and simple. technology has made renting things (even in real time) as simple as it made buying things a decade ago. Uber and Airbnb are the big winners in this category but there are and will be others.

4/ the capital markets have moved to the internet. we call it crowdfunding but what is really going on is raising money is a great application of a global platform that connects billions of people in real time. i don’t know the total amount of capital that was raised on the internet across all sectors (equity, debt, creative projects, charity, helping a person in need, real estate, energy, etc, etc) in 2014 but i am sure it is in the tens of billions.

5/ mobile OS has become a stable duopoly around the world. but android is splintering into google android and non google android and that may lead to new large players. 2014 was a big coming out party for xiaomi. if and when they come to the US, things will get interesting. they are the new (and better) samsung.

6/ mobile and messaging has started to impact the enterprise. slack is the poster boy for this trend in 2014.

7/ youtube became a monster. it always has been. but in 2014 youtube emerged as the place for entertainment consumption for anyone under 16. and these youngsters are going to grow up quickly. watching The Interview on YouTube was a fitting end to an amazing year for the king (and queen and joker too) of Internet video.

8/ we finally got rid of files. dropbox, google drive, soundcloud, spotify, netflix, hbogo, youtube, wattpad, kindle, and a host of other cloud based services finally killed off three letter filenames like mp3, mov, doc and xls. spending a week in the caribbean with young adults and bad internet was the tell on this one for me. they don’t even have mp3s on their iphones anymore!

9/ the net neutrality debate emerged as a national political issue with Obama’s endorsement of Title II regulation of the last mile of the internet. it is unclear how this issue will resolve itself but the public has spoken loudly and clearly and politicians understand that the internet needs to remain open for innovation and we can’t let the monopoly carriers and cable companies mess that up.

10/ cyberwarfare, cybercrime, cyberhacking, and cybersecurity was by far the dominant theme of 2014. if anyone had their head in the sand on this one before this year, they don’t anymore. this is our new normal. the US takedown of North Korea’s internet last week, and the state department official’s comment that “i guess accidents can happen” is a moment to remember as we head out of 2014 and into our future.

so that’s what happened in 2014 according to me. i am sure i left out many important things. you can add them in the comments. hopefully i’ll write a whats going to happen in 2015 tomorrow. i tried hard to keep this post backward looking and had to edit out a lot of forward looking statements as i wrote it.

happy new year everyone.

We spent the Christmas week on the beach with family and friends. Our friends John and Diana were with us and we talked about a lot of the things that are in the news at the intersection of tech and society. John asked me to take that conversation onto his TV show, With All Due Respect, and I did that yesterday. Here is the segment.

I watched a friend of my son sign up to Twitter this past week and get completely smitten within minutes. There’s something about Twitter. It sort of reminds me of the 1998 Farrelly Brothers comedy featuring Cameron Diaz, Ben Stiller, Matt Dillon, and Brett Favre and Jonathan Richman! Any film that features Jonathan Richman is a winner in my book. But I digress.

Almost every male character in this film falls in love with Mary. Each for a different reason and at a different time. But they all fall for her.

I fell for Twitter in April 2007. Josh’s friend fell for Twitter this past week. His use case is very different from mine but the experience is similar. He has 22 followers and I have a lot more than that. But there’s something about being able to have a public conversation with friends and strangers in real time. There’s something about the follower thing. There’s something about the hashtag thing. There’s something about the humor that works on Twitter. There’s something about the behavior that happens on Twitter. Twitter is fun.

I know that Twitter is not for everyone. Someone called it “niche” recently in a comment thread I read somewhere. If “niche” is 300mm logged in monthly users around the world, then I would agree. It is most certainly not for everyone the way Facebook is. But it is also not boring the way Facebook is. Twitter has edge. It has attitude. People get into real fistfights because of Twitter.

Twitter is getting a lot of negativity these days, particularly from the investor community. Maybe they thought it was the next Facebook. If so, they are wrong about that. Twitter is something entirely different. And I love it today the way I loved it in the spring of 2007 when I first fell for it.

Full Disclosure: Our family is very long Twitter. We have a material financial interest in its success. This post is not about that or in reaction to that. But it may be yet another reason I love Twitter.

I posted about The Interview last Thursday and the next morning I woke to a message from Facebook:

I can’t imagine the login attempt on my Facebook was in reaction to my blog post about The Interview, but as Andy Grove famously said “only the paranoid survive” and so I spent some time changing passwords that morning.

I don’t want to get too much into my personal security setup but I will say this. I try out a bunch of services every week and many of them ask me to create a login. I use a fairly basic login for those services. But for anything that is serious, I like strong passwords that are unique for each service.

I find a password manager to be helpful in managing all of them. The big issue with a password manager is you are creating a single point of failure by using one. But if the alternative is easy to guess passwords that you use frequently, I think going with a password manager is the better alternative. A couple popular ones are Dashlane and 1Password.

I also use two-factor authentication on services that offer it and, as I have posted here, I like using the Authy app to generate the tokens for me on my phone.

One thing I have decided to change in the wake of that Facebook login attempt is to treat social media services differently. I used to think that social media services weren’t “serious security issues” and did not worry too much about them. I’ve decided that isn’t right and I now treat social media services similarly to banking and productivity services (like email and cloud storage).

But even if you lock down your own services tightly, you still have to be worried about what you put into email and other messaging apps because the person you send the messages to you may not be as secure as you are. That’s one of the many lessons from the Sony hack. A friend of mine told me she only puts into email things she is prepared to have read on the nightly news. That’s a high standard and one that I am going to strive for myself. Given the nature of my work, it’s going to be a hard one to reach.

I think we can expect hacking and other forms of attacks on our personal data and systems to increase significantly in the next five years. If you are looking for a good new year’s resolution, I think taking security more seriously, and specifically using unique strong passwords and two-factor auth on all of your important services would be a good one. I already do that but I am always looking to do more of this sort of thing. Andy Grove’s mantra is a good one in this regard.

We’ve talked about this stuff before, but not lately. The promise of the Internet is you can connect a server to the Internet anywhere in the world and reach users anywhere in the world. You can login to the Internet anywhere in the world and reach services anywhere in the world. In reality it doesn’t work like that in many places for many services.

We are in the caribbean this week celebrating the year end holiday with friends and family. Yesterday we installed a VPN client so that the Gotham Gal could do some online shopping on a website that only sells to users in the US. We also installed a bittorrent client so that a friend of my son could watch films he had rented on iTunes before he came down here.

The latter experience was particularly frustrating. My son’s friend rented the films on iTunes in NYC, flew down here, then when he tried to play them, they would not play because of IP blocking, but the rental clock (24 hours) started ticking anyway and he lost the rental rights he had paid for.

So we installed a bittorrent client, downloaded the films, and watched them. We figured that my son’s friend had paid for them so we might as well watch them.

I’m not really down with spoofing my IP address or pirating films. I would way rather do things on the up and up on the Internet. But when companies break the Internet to enforce some random geography restriction, and when there are easy to use workarounds, it’s human nature to use them.

The worst thing about all of this, as I’ve blogged before, is that these restrictions teach us the workarounds. The Gotham Gal had never used a VPN before. My son’s friend didn’t have a bittorrent client on his computer. Now they are well versed in these technologies. That’s life on the Internet in late 2014. I’m hoping someday it won’t be like that.

So Sony has decided to pull the plug on The Interview after the major theater chains decided against showing the film.

This is a fascinating story on so many levels. It is not clear  to me who was behind the hacking attack on Sony, but there are some obvious candidates. We are witnessing cyber warfare in real time. And there are real costs involved. Who knows how much Sony has lost or will lose as a result of the hacking incident and all the repercussions. But we do know that The Interview cost $42mm to make and there were “tens of millions” of marketing and distribution costs already spent as well. All of that comes from the article I linked to at the start of this post.

How will this impact the entertainment business going forward? Will they now harden all of their systems? Yes. Will the cybersecurity industry get a boost from this incident? Yes. Will it change how they think about making films and other entertainment? I would have to imagine the answer to that question is yes.

And what of the film itself? Should we allow censorship of this form to exist in our society? Should the film get released in some form?

I think the Internet, which was the source of so much harm to Sony, should also provide the answer to what happens to this film. If I were Sony, I would put the film out on BiTorrent, and any other Internet services that want it. Give it to Netflix if they want it. Give it to iTunes if they want it. Give it to HBO if they want it. Give it to Showtime if they want it. Essentially give the film to the world and let the world, via the Internet, decide what they want to do with it.

Of course this is about money to Sony. $42mm is a lot of money to write off. And it is a lot more than that given all the extra costs. But keeping the film locked away in a vault is also a cost. Both to Sony and to society. It says that the attack worked. I think the best thing Sony can do at this point is give the world the film and let us all decide what we think about it. We should not let cyberterrorist censorship have its way.

Our portfolio company Kik launched hashtags yesterday. Kik is a mobile messenger so in Kik’s model hashtags are private or public group chats.

If I send a hashtag to a friend in Kik that says let’s chat about tonight’s knicks game at #knickskik, then that becomes a private group between me and that friend (and any others who we invite). I’ve done that so the #knickskik hashtag is now private on Kik.

But hashtags can also be public. If you have the latest version of Kik on your phone (came out yesterday), type #avckikgroup into a chat and then click on that link. Up to 50 of us can be in that group.

The cool thing about Kik is that it doesn’t use phone numbers like other messengers. It uses usernames and is not tied to your phone number or Facebook username. And so Kik, unlike other messengers, is used for both chatting with people you know (like other messengers) and people you don’t know.

That makes Kik an ideal platform for these public (and searchable) group chats. You can meet people in these public chatrooms and then take your conversations private in a one to one chat in Kik.

Ted Livingston, Kik’s founder and CEO, called this “hashtags as social networks” in a blog post yesterday.  I agree with Ted that Facebook’s model of the one network to rule them all has not really worked and that many of us are using messengers as defacto social networks. My friend Kirk told me that his wife’s family uses a group in WhatsApp like their personal family facebook feed. I think that’s the phase of social networking we are now into and so Kik’s hashtag as social network model makes a ton of sense to me.

This is a line from a blog post written by my brother in law Jerry Solomon. He is talking about film production, specifically short form videos. But the point is true of all projects, from designing a building, a home, a film, an art project, a hardware project, a software project, or whatever.

The design process is relatively inexpensive. The build process is not.

In the kinds of companies we invest in the “development” work comes from the product organization. The “production” work comes from the engineering team.

I have seen engineering teams spin their wheels and burn through countless hours of writing code that ends up getting tossed out just because the design process was not right or not specific enough or not thought through enough.

While we might think these issues and challenges are unique to the world of tech, software, internet, and mobile, the truth is these issues pervade everywhere you are making something.

This is not so applicable to a startup trying to find product market fit. But it becomes very relevant once your company starts to scale. A commitment to thinking things through, getting it right at the start, and being efficient in the “production” process is something all great companies figure out how to do. It’s really important.

Yet another mainstream media site took down comments this week. In the post explaining the move, Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher explained that “as social media has continued its robust growth, the bulk of discussion of our stories is increasingly taking place there, making onsite comments less and less used and less and less useful.”

That led to a fair bit of discussion around the notion that “commenting is dead.” And like many things that are “dead”, the truth is that they are flourishing elsewhere.

Just this week we had a post here at AVC with 880 comments, which is not a record but is damn close to one. Commenting activity has been fairly steady here at AVC over the past two years with comments down a bit and voting on comments up a bit:

But let’s look elsewhere on the web.

Let’s take Reddit where comments are the center of activity. They are growing faster than pretty much any site out there and are now #38 globally and #10 in the US according to Alexa. And the time spent on site is a whopping 17mins.

Let’s look at Buzzfeed, another super fast growing content site. Buzzfeed uses Facebook comments as they drive a lot of traffic from Facebook to Buzzfeed. But the comment activity at Buzzfeed is strong and some posts, like this one, get over 1000 comments. Buzzfeed is a top 30 site in the US and is a top 100 site globally.

Here are some stats from Disqus, a USV portfolio company that powers the comments here at AVC (from their about page):

– 20 million comments a month

– 80 million votes on comments a month

– 1 bn visits to disqus comments a month

– 2mm new commenter sign ups a month

And although they don’t show trends on their about page (they should), all of these numbers are up and to the right year after year after year.

Commenting is alive and well on the web and mobile. It’s just dead on sites that would prefer to have the conversation happen elsewhere. AVC is not one of those places, and even though I sometimes find the discussions hard to take here, I am committed to making this a two way experience for everyone who wants it to be.