Posts from Android

My all-time favorite feature on Android is the way sharing works. I like this feature so much I am concerned that this might be a repeat of a prior Feature Friday post. But I searched on gawk.it and did not find any posts so maybe I haven't done a Feature Friday on this. Hard to believe.

When you are looking at content in Android, a web page, a blog post, a picture, a video, a venue in foursquare, a tweet, etc, etc, you simply hit the share button and all the apps that are installed on the phone that can take an object like that show up.

This is what the screen looks like on my phone when I share out an AVC post:

This is not the entire list of apps that are available to share the blog post with, this is just the first set of apps. You can scroll down to see more but I could not capture that with a screen shot.

This sharing feature is available to any app that is built for Android. Foursquare has implemented it for its venue pages with a "send to a friend" call to action. (this screen shot is from the USV venue page):

This ability to share data between apps is super useful. I would like to see Google and Android developers do even more with this. Think about the way bookmarklets work on the web. If web bookmarklet functionality (like the Tumblr share bookmarklet for example) could be replicated on mobile devices, that would be a huge step forward for mobile.

In any case, this is probably the number one reason I use an Android phone and if you haven't experienced the joy that this feature provides, I suggest you get your hands on an Android phone and check it out.

I still think of a 7" as a vinyl record for EPs and singles.

But 7" is going to start to mean someting else as I believe it is an ideal form factor for tablets.

I moved from a Kindle to an iPad for reading a couple years ago. I wrote about that at the time and explained that I preferred the backlighting and the ability to uses maps and wikipedia and such to jump out of the book and drill down on something in the book that sparks my curiosity.

Then the Kindle Fire came along and I immediately grabbed one of them. I've been reading on a Kindle Fire since it came out. I love it for reading books. But it is not a true Android tablet. It is really a Kindle with some extra stuff like a browser and some apps.

Some friends at Google sent me a Nexus 7" last week. I set it up yesterday and I've been using it for about 24 hours. So these are preliminary thoughts on it.

There is something very comforting about logging into a device with my Android/Google credentials and getting all my apps downloaded to it automatically. There is also something very comforting about getting a clean build of the most recent version of Android on a device. The Nexus 7" provides both of those comforts right out of the box.

I put a bunch of my favorite apps on the home screen:

If you look at the bottom of the home screen you'll see a yellow icon next to the Chrome browser. That is Bria, a SIP client that I have been using on my android phone. With Bria, the Nexus 7" can be a phone and I used it yesterday to make a few calls. It works great but if I really wanted to use this device as a phone, I'd want a bluetooth headphone because a 7" tablet is not ideal for talking into.

The three apps that I use a lot that aren't on my Nexus 7" home screen are Instagram, Tumblr and Kik. Instagram and Tumblr are not available on the Nexus 7". I hope these companies fix that because I would use these two apps a lot on this device to follow folks on Instagram and Tumblr. Kik only works on one device at a time so if I put it on the Nexus 7", it would stop working on my phone. So it's not on my tablet.

But the main thing I use the Nexus 7" for is reading, primarily on the Kindle app.

Reading on the Kindle App on the Nexus 7" is a lot like reading on the Kindle Fire. But the Kindle Android app is not quite as responsive as the Kindle Fire. I find that I have to be a bit more assertive with my swipes for the next page. That might be a transition thing or it could be annoying. I don't know yet. I think the features are slightly different too. But I haven't noticed anything super different between the two reading experiences.

The bottom line is that I think the 7" tablet is a great form factor and I prefer it to the iPad for a bunch of reasons. It is more mobile. It is lighter and more comfortable being held in one hand. And I like the amount of a page that is rendered on the 7" screen. It allows me to read more quickly.

The good news for iPad/iOS fans is that Apple is apparently going to come out with a 7" iPad soon. So you don't have to go Android to get the 7" experience. But if you want to try Android or you want to try a 7" experience right now, you might give the Nexus 7" a try. It's available for pre-order for $199. I don't know when it will broadly available but I suspect soon.

Sometimes an app can be a feature that is missing from the OS, or a feature that isn't well implemented in the OS. Flashlight apps are a great example.

Another example are apps that track mobile data usage. If you have unlimited mobile data, you might not care how much mobile data you are using. That's my behavior when I am at home.

But when I travel, I am either using a prepaid mobile data card (which is what I am doing now – 1GB for 48 krone/$8US), or using a mobile roaming package from my US carrier (my wife and kids are on a 800MB roaming plan from ATT Mobile).

In either case, it is critical to know how much mobile data you are consuming, per day, per week, per trip, and per plan term.

My favorite app to do this is called My Data Manager and it is free and available for iOS and for Android.

My Data Manager has three tabs to show you how much data you are consuming on your carriers's mobile data network, how much data you are consuming by roaming on other networks, and how much data your are consuming on wifi. It also shows you what apps are consuming the most data for each tab.

You can set up your mobile plans in the app so you can see how you are doing for the current plan term.

I have been in europe since Monday morning (four days now) and I have consumed 128MB on my prepaid 1GB danish sim and I have consumed 155MB on wifi. I haven't had to roam since I have a local data sim. My wife and kids have similar data usage except that they are all roaming on other data networks and are well within their 800MB cap.

If you have a cap on your mobile data usage or if you are roaming on other data networks, I highly recommend getting My Data Manager to keep track. Mobile data is expensive when you go off plan or above plan. Keeping track gives you peace of mind and that's a valuable thing.

Related articles

• Three launches £5 per day unlimited Euro data roaming (itproportal.com)
• T-Mobile slashes data roaming prices for EU (guardian.co.uk)

I had an epiphany today. I was in Storm, a cool store in Copenhagen, and I checked into Foursquare. In the result screen of that checkin, I saw a tip that there was another design store right around the corner called Hay. And that my friend Naveen had recommended Hay on his Copenhagen list.

I immediately saved Naveen's list to my phone and then saved a few other Copenhagen lists that were recommended to me.

Now every time I checkin somewhere in Copenhagen, I get a tip for another place that is nearby on one of the lists that I saved. No more thinking about where to go next. Foursquare will tell me based on suggestions from my friends and the lists I've saved.

I've tried every kind of travel guide out there. Some are great, like the Luxe guides and the Wallpaper guides. But an interactive, real time, geolocated travel guide built by my friends and likeminded travelers is way better.

So I'm going to create lists on Foursquare from now on so that others can benefit the same way that I am right now. Here's my list so far from a day or so in Copenhagen.

It's feature friday and today I want to talk about our portfolio company Foursquare, which put out a completely redone app this week on iOS and Android. Blackberry is coming shortly.

I've got a few simple frameworks for thinking about things. In social media, one of my main ones is the tenet that 1% of the users will create content, 10% will curate it, and the rest will consume it.

Foursquare has, for most of its life, focused on the 1% who want to checkin to places and share those chekins and related data like tips and to dos, with their friends. They have close to 10mm people who do that actively. That's a lot if you think about it in the context of the 1% rule.

About six months ago, Foursquare launched explore which was a consumption experience. Users who don't want to checkin can get value by exploring cities using the data created by the 1% who are checking in.

But what about the 10%? How do users curate Foursquare without checking in?

Enter the like button. It seems so trivial. It seems like every social app I use has a like button. But in the past 24 hours, I have gotten something like a dozen likes on the four or five checkins I have done since the new app launched. That's new meta data that is being created on my checkins by other people. It's a way for people who will use the app largely for consumption to create important data signals without having to checkin.

Sometimes it is the littlest things that are the biggest things. In the new Foursquare app, which is really really good, I think it is the like button that will be the biggest game changer.

I was on the panel of judges yesterday at TechCrunch Disrupt to select the top startup of the conference. The finalists were a very impressive group:

gTar, OpenGarden, UberConference, Ark, Babelverse and Sunglass.

The winner was UberConference. gTar came in a close second. Both of those companies are impressive and I support the wisdom of the judges:

Fred Wilson, Roelof Botha, Marissa Mayer, Mike Arrington, Chris Dixon, Eric Eldon and Chi-Hua Chien

The choice of the winner and the runner up was almost unanimous except for a lone nutjob who liked a different one.

My favorite was Open Garden. By a long shot. Because what they are doing is the most worthy of the conference name, Disrupt.

Open Garden is a free app for windows, mac, android, and soon iOS. What is does is connect all of your data services on your various devices (and your friends and family's devices) into a single network that all of the devices can access at the same time.

It allows you to create your own mesh network and provision it to the people you want on it.

This is a big idea. And I don't know if they have nailed it. I have just downloaded Open Garden onto my macbook air and my android phone. I will let you know how it goes.

If you want to watch their initial pitch (not the pitch we got yesterday afternoon, I have embedded it below).

 

 

I was going through the board deck of our portfolio company Wattpad this morning. Wattpad is the leading writing/reading community on the web and mobile. Quantcast says over 7.5mm people visit their website each month. And Wattpad is one of the top free "Books" apps in both the iOS an Android apps stores.

Wattpad has a very large mobile user base around the world as a result of the sucess of its mobile apps. And so this slide on geographic distribution of its user base caught my attention:

The iOS user base for Wattpad is about 65% in North America. But Wattpad's Android user base is less than 50% in North America.

More notably is what is going on in Asia and Europe. 24% of Wattpad's Android users are in Asia versus 12% of their iOS users. And 19% of their Android users are in Europe vs 13% of their iOS users.

Some of this data may be representative of Wattpad's user base. Everything on Wattpad is free. Wattpad makes writing and reading books feel like writing and reading blogs. And Wattpad is big in places like Vietnam, Phillipines, and New Zealand. But it is also quite popular in the US, Spain, and the UK. It is a global reading and writing community.

In any case, it was quite interesting to me that in Wattpad's user base, the North American users skew toward iOS but the Asian and European users skew towards Android. I plan to look at more data from our portfolio on this. Could be a trend here that would be useful to understand.

I took a two day trip Thursday and Friday of this past week. When packing for the trip I debated about bringing my laptop (an 11" macbook air) with me. In the end, I decided to bring it.

I didn't use the laptop on the trip except to write yesterday's blog post. I do a lot of cutting and pasting of links, quotes, etc when I blog and I find that it is still pretty inconvenient to do that on a mobile.

But other than that, I used my android phone for everything else over the course of two days and I was fairly productive.

My friend Bijan wrote a similar post recently about his new iPad3. I have not been able to wrap my head around using an iPad outside my home and office. I don't travel with it the way many do.

But regardless of whether its an iPad, an iPhone, or an Android, it is clear that many of us are starting to leave our laptops home when we travel and rely entirely on mobile devices.

It would be interesting to think about the things that are still inconvenient to do on mobile (like long form blogging) and figure out if there were ways to make it more convenient to do that on a mobile device. It seems like there could be some interesting startup opportunities in solving these remaining hurdles to ditching the laptop entirely.

I know its supposed to be Fun Friday, but this is going to be a Fun Feature Friday.

Yesterday our portfolio company Kik launched a new mobile app/platform called Clik.

Clik is really just one simple feature, implemented as a mobile platform that any developer will be able to leverage via a set of tools that are coming soon. And that feature is “point your smartphone at a browser that is showing a QR code and take control of the screen with your phone.” Sounds strange the first time you hear it, but give it a try and you’ll see what I mean. It’s really powerful.

There’s one more aspect of this feature which makes it even more fun. If your friends also have the Clik app on their phones (iPhone and Android to start), they can also take control of the screen and you can play games, play videos, play music, show pictures, etc with each other using your phones as controllers. It’s fun to imagine the new kinds of games that can be built with this platform.

So do me a favor, download Clik onto your smartphone, fire up a web browser, point it to clickthis.com, and then take over your computer with your phone. You’ll see the power of the platform right away.

If you are a developer and want to build something on top of the Clik platform, its really simple. No mobile development required. All web development and pretty easy to boot. If you are interested in learning more, email the Clik Platform team and they will be happy to explain how it works.

Related articles

• Control any screen with a browser: Clik turns your smartphone into the world’s best remote (venturebeat.com)
• Hands on With Clik, YouTube’s New Remote (mashable.com)
• Clik for iPhone and Android: Magically Control Any Web Browser from Your Phone [Apps] (gizmodo.com)
• Clik Smart TV Platform turns your smartphone into the only remote control you’ll ever need (thenextweb.com)
• New platform Clik promises to seamlessly sync screens (lostremote.com)
• Clik turns your phone into a remote for YouTube parties (hands-on) (theverge.com)
• With Clik, Your Smartphone Can Control Screens Everywhere – Anthony Ha via Techcrunch (stoweboyd.com)
• Clik™ – Clik Interactive Inc (itunes.apple.com)
• Clik (thegongshow.tumblr.com)