Posts from Android

One of the things we try to avoid in our investments is gatekeepers. We would prefer that a company has easy access to end users and doesn't need to navigate through a gatekeeper or a series of gatekeepers to get into the market.

Mobile internet investing has been tricky for as long as I have been doing Internet investing. Initially it was the carriers and handet manufacturers who controlled access to the end user. If you wanted to be in the mobile internet business, you spent your time working with carriers and handset manufacturers to get distribution. We didn't like that business and didn't invest in it.

With the advent of the iOS app store model, we saw a change in the market and changed our stance. To date, we have at least a dozen investments where mobile apps represent an important part of the user base.

But in the past ten days, I have seen three different situations, not just in our portfolio but with companies I've met with or know well, where the company's app was either not approved or pulled from the market. This is not limited to the iOS app store. It has also happened in the Android marketplace. And of course, we have seen RIM's removal of a Blackberry app create great harm to a portfolio company.

These actions are always taken in attempt to enforce terms of service and to protect end users. I am not complaining about the actions or saying they are unfair. They are what they are. But the mobile Internet is not the open web and may never be.

Welcome to the new boss. Same as the old boss.

At some point yesterday, I was in the chrome browser (which is basically my OS these days) and I hit Edit, Copy URL, and I realized that I must do that dozens of times a day. Grabbing links and sharing links is possibly the most common thing I do from day to day.

And now with the latest build of Android, when you hold your finger over the address bar in the android browser, you are given the option to Copy URL. Since discovering this feature recently, I do it on my phone dozens of times a day as well.

Android also has the "share page" feature which will let you send the URL of the page you are on into any app on your phone that can take a URL (Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Kik, gmail, text, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc).

This isn't an advertisement for Chrome and Android. I'm sure most modern browsers offer this feature. And I suspect that iOS supports this feature too (although I don't believe it offers the "share page" feature that android has).

This is just a recognition that URLs/links are the lingua franca of the web and every app, web or mobile, should make capturing them and working with them as drop dead simple as possible. I certainly appreciate this feature and I suspect all of you do as well.

It was the Nth time I've had this conversation in a board meeting, "We can't figure out how to get on the leaderboards. The app stores aren't working for us as a distribution channel."

To which I replied "All the app stores use a leaderboard model which makes the rich richer and everyone else poorer. We are in the 99%, wishing we were in the 1%. It makes me want to find a park inside the iTunes store and camp out there in protest."

All joking aside (and #OWS is not a joke), this is a serious issue for the mobile application market. There have been multiple attempts to build alternative app marketplaces but none of them have developed much traction. For the most part iOS and Android users go to the app stores to discover and download mobile applications. And unless you know what you want, you are shown leaderboards to pick from. Search is a horrible experience. Discovery is worse. Of course, Apple and Google could change this, but they haven't. It makes me wonder if they even want to. It makes me angry. It makes me want to protest.

Just because an app was the most popular six months ago, doesn't mean it should be the most popular now. But a leaderboard model is a self reinforcing action. The most popular stay the most popular. The new upstart doesn't stand a chance at unseating the aging category leader.

There are promoted download offerings from the likes of our portfolio company Flurry and others like TapJoy that can be used to stimulate downloads and impact your leaderboard position such that you can attempt to join the 1%, but Apple took actions earlier this year to limit the usefulness of those approaches, which weren't that great anyway.

There are app discovery services like Appolicious, Appsfire, and several others of note. They have great promise as alternative discovery channels for apps. But to my knowledge, they have not yet captured much of the market and most smartphone users head to the native app stores when they want apps.

Centralized control of an ecosytem never offers as much opportunity and diversity as a decentralized system. And in the leaderboard driven app store model, we have centralized control. Let's rise up and protest against this model. It's not healthy for anyone, most certainly not healthy for small developers of the kind we like to work with.

It's getting colder in NYC. Instead of walking home yesterday evening, I ducked into the Union Square subway station. I pulled out my android phone, launched the Rdio app, and looked through my collection for music to listen to. There is no wifi in the Union Square subway station, but that wasn't a problem. Because I have sync'd much of my Rdio collection to my mobile phone. I put on Keep Shelly In Athens and headed home.

The knock against streaming media services is "what happens when you don't have internet access?" It's a good question. But fortunately most of the streaming music services have "sync to mobile" enabled. When you add a song or album to your collection in Rdio (my favorite of the streaming music services), you simply check the "sync to mobile" option and your phone will pull that down onto your phone for offline listening. I have my Rdio app set to only sync to mobile when it is on a wifi connection, but you can set it to sync to mobile anytime it has an internet connection.

Someday we'll have wifi in the Union Square subway station. We've got it on the L train from 6th avenue to 8th avenue now. The list of places you don't have internet is getting smaller by the day. But until the day when we have internet everywhere, sync to mobile is a killer feature for streaming services. And that is why it is the feature of the day today.

A few weeks ago I ran into Dennis Crowley in the USV offices. He whipped out his iPhone like the excited kid he still is and showed me Radar running on his phone. He was running a pre-release of iOS5 and a pre-release of the new Foursquare app. His phone alerted him, just like getting a text message, that he was at USV and he ought to check in there.

I said, “Dennis, this is the feature we’ve all been waiting for. This is what I’ve wanted Foursquare to do since the day I put it on my phone.”

There are features and then there are game changing features. Foursquare’s Radar is a game changing feature. Radar will prompt me to checkin more frequently, to use lists more actively, and to find people and places I need to know about while I’m out and about. Radar is one more bit of the big Foursquare vision being rolled out.

Here’s Foursquare’s post about Radar and another with answers to some frequently asked questions. It’s interesting to see that Radar is leveraging some new technology in iOS5 to make it work without draining the battery:

Radar uses a very battery-friendly location-finding mode that is totally new to iOS 5, the same one Apple’s own Reminders app uses.

Now, can we get Radar on Android and Blackberry please??

I've got some great news to share with all of you. MBA Mondays is now available in audio form. The coolest part is how it happened.

A few months ago, I met Tyrone Rubin in a room on turntable.fm. He was DJing and chatting. Because that's what you do on turntable. We got to talking and now we are friends. We haven't met but I'm sure we will at some point.

A few weeks ago, Tyrone emailed me and told me he wanted to do voice recordings of all the MBA Mondays. He has a friend Raph who is an actor and does voice work and they wanted to do it as a "labor of love." I listened to the first few and dug the South African accent. Tyrone and Raph are both South African and live in Cape Town.

So we created a SoundCloud account and they are recording and uploading. The've done 20 so far. They will get all 87 done in a month or two. And then they'll add a new one each week.

So if you are in a car or at the gym and want to listen to MBA Mondays, you can do that now. You'll miss a bit without the images and the links. But I've listened to many of these episodes and I have to say they are a pretty good substitute for reading the blog.

Here's the SoundCloud account. Here's the RSS feed. Here's the podcast on iTunes. You can also get the SoundCloud app for Android or iPhone and listen with that.

I was really impressed with how good of a podcasting platform SoundCloud is. It's a breeze to setup the account and start uploading. Getting an RSS feed and submitting to iTunes is also easy. And since SoundCloud is building out apps for all the popular mobile devices, you can listen pretty much anywhere on anything. Yet another USV portfolio company kicking ass. Well done SoundCloud. And most of all, well done Tyrone and Raph. Thanks for doing this.

Last fall I wrote a blog post saying that I had seen a few super slick HTML5 mobile web apps and it got me thinking that the era of apps in a browser was closer than I had previously thought.

This week I saw a couple more that really blew me away.

Kindle in a browser has arrived and it is sweet. Here's our library in safari on our kitchen iPad:

And here is what the reading experience looks like on the same tablet:

Basically identical to the Kindle app experience. And it also supports offline reading by storing the books on the device. Very sweet.

And our friends at Etsy have rolled out item pages in HTML5 on Android. Here's an item page on my phone:

And checking out via HTML5 is a breeze:

So I'm even more encouraged today than I was last fall. HTML5 mobile web apps are taking us back to the web on mobile, where you can follow a link, go from service to service, don't need to download anything, and get shit done. That's a world I want to live in.

I've been on a mission to dramatically reduce the legal costs of a venture financing. Our firm is doing our part. On many of our recent transactions, we've gone without counsel and have signed documents without negotiation. That takes out the investor counsel costs. And we've been pushing company counsel to reduce their costs. But we are still seeing company counsel costs of $15k or more on venture financings even with our "no negotiation" approach. I'd like to see venture financing legal fees get to $5k or less. I don't know why raising a venture round can't be like signing a lease on an apartment with standardized docs and a one page rider for any changes.

As we dig into the costs on the company counsel side, there are areas we feel can be improved and areas that cannot. The entrepreneur still needs an experienced counsel to explain the deal to them. That time and money is valuable to everyone involved. I'm hopeful that Brad and Jason's upcoming book will help reduce the time and money spent educating entrpreneurs on venture financings, but realisitcally the company counsel is still going to have to do some hand holding.

But there are many areas where the company counsel is spending time and money doing things that can and should be automated. Tops on that list is document creation, distribution, change management, and ultimately signing.

We've noticed that some of the new online funding platforms, like Profounder, have managed to totally automate this process online. We wonder why the law firms we work with have not. One of the best hacks of the Disrupt Hackathon last weekend was Docracy. I am going to find out if we can use Docracy on our next venture financing to make things more efficient.

And Bijan posted recently that he is using an iPhone app called EasySign to sign legal documents when he is out and about. After going through torture this weekend at our beach house to sign docs that absolutely had to be signed by yesterday, I'm searching for something similar on my Android. Please EasySign team get me an Android version. I promise I will blog about it when you do.

And in the meantime, if anyone knows of any good mobile signing apps on Android, let me know about them in the comments.

This whole area is so ripe for change. We are documenting financings for cutting edge web startups using technology from the middle ages. That must change and it must change now.

I noticed that 16.2% of the visits to AVC in the past 30 days were from mobile devices so I did a little digging into that number. I opened a spreadsheet and went back in time on google analytics and the result is this chart. If you want to make it larger, click on the chart and load it in its own tab.

I then drew up a couple graphs. Here is total visits from the four most popular devices over time:

But traffic to AVC has been growing pretty rapidly, so then I looked at this chart expressed as a percent of total visits:

So what does all of this tell me? Well first, a lot of people are reading AVC on mobile devices. Total mobile visits to AVC in the past 30 days was just north of 45,000. But the mix is equally interesting.

Probably the most interesting figure is iPad vists per month. In September 2010, AVC had 17,091 visits from iPads. In the past 30 days, iPad visits were 17,219, essentially flat. And on a percentage of total visit basis, the number was 7% of all visits last September and it is 6% of total visits in the last 30 days. That is not what I would have expected. iPad visits to AVC are not growing and are declining on a percent of total traffic basis.

iPhone, on the other hand, continues to grow month after month and now represents 6.7% of all visits. However, it was 5% of all visits in June of 2010 and 6% of all visits in September of 2010. So iPhone visit growth is slowing after a tear in the second half of 2009 and the first half of 2010.

Android is coming up fast. It grew 4x as a percent of visits from March 2010 to March 2011. But Android is not growing fast enough to overtake iPhone and iPad anytime soon. At the current growth rates, that would not happen until late 2012 at the earliest and that assumes continued flattening of iPhone and iPad.

Blackberry trails the other three devices by a lot and Blackberry visits to AVC have not grown in absolute numbers since the middle of last year.

The AVC audience are early adopters and the leading edge of technology users. So these numbers are not likely to be representative of blogs or online media broadly. But it is still very interesting to see them.

The iPad numbers in particular are interesting. I'm wondering if iPad users are reading via applications that Google Analytics does not record as an iPad. That would make sense. If so, the iPad numbers could be significantly higher than the numbers shown above.

But the big message is the early adopters are reading more and more on their mobile devices and at the current growth rates, half of the visits to AVC could be on mobile devices by the end of 2012. That is a megatrend. And it is investable.