Posts from App Store

Mobile Gatekeepers

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.

#Web/Tech

The Power Of Instant Approval

Back in the early days of web video, it wasn't clear who would win the competition for video upload to the web. There was YouTube, Vimeo, and the big dog was Google Video. I tried all of them. YouTube was by far and away the best experience.

Google Video required you to wait for days to see the video you uploaded. It was so annoying that I wrote this post exactly four years ago today (how's that for a coincidence?). This line sort of sums it up:

Posting stuff to the Internet has to be instantaneous.  What if wrote
this post on Tyeppad and it took me 10 minutes to see the result?  What
if I posted a photo to Flickr and it took a day to see it?

I was reminded of that post when I was reading Bijan's post on mobile apps this morning. Bijan makes the same point about developers and the iPhone app store:

Developers are getting extremely frustrated with the Apple App Store
(understatement). I’m hearing it can take developers 4 weeks to get an
update released. That’s dysfunctional.

The argument Apple makes about approving every app is similar to the argument Google made about approving every video. They want to make sure only quality stuff gets into their service. And I suppose it is even more important when we are talking about software running on your phone.

I'm not going to argue with the logic of those points of view, but I'll make this observation. Instant gratification is a very powerful force, for both consumers and developers. The web is full of success stories that have embraced the power of instant gratification and also full of failures that made people wait too long.

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#VC & Technology