Posts from iPhone

I was at a USV event last week in SF and I bumped into Sung Hu Kim, a product manager at Twitter who handles mobile stuff. We got to talking about things I'd love the Twitter Android product to do. I mentioned that my daugther tweets a fair bit but I often miss them because I follow 735 people, many of them prolific tweeters. I do have a family list but I only get around to checking it every few days and I often miss opportunities to @reply to Emily.

Sung pointed me to the mobile notifications settings and we turned on notifications for Emily on my Android. Game changer! Now I get a notification every time she tweets and I can immediately favorite it, retweet it, or reply to it. I turned on notifications for about ten others including of course my wife.

Here's how to you do it (I assume this works on Twitter for iPhone too but I don't know for sure).

1) Navigate to someone's profile. You can do that by clicking on their avatar in a tweet. Here is my friend Bijan's profile on my phone.

2) Do you see that little image of a head under the block that says "tweets" on the middle left? You click that. And you get this dialog box.

Click on "turn on notifications". That's all you have to do.

3) Then you get notifications at the top of your home screen whenever someone you've added to mobile notifications tweets. Those notifications look like this (look at the very top of the home screen):

For those that are curious, that is Gilligan on my home screen. My friend Josh Harris painted that Gilligan and the original hangs in my office at USV. The Gotham Gal also has a Gilligan in her office. For those that know Josh and his obsessions, it has great meaning. It represents the crazy web 1.0 era in NYC in my mind. It is one of my favorite art pieces we own.

4) When you pull down the notifications tray on Android, you actually can see part of the tweet. And you can click on it to go to the tweet. Here's a notification of a tweet from Bijan (who I've added to my mobile notifications as well).

I have had this feature active on my phone for the past week and it has significantly increased my usage of twitter as I am now seeing in real time the tweets from the folks I care most about. I love it.

When I come to SF, I generally don't rent a car. I've used cabs and more recently Uber to get around. But many times I just walk from meeting to meeting around SOMA where most of the tech companies are.

This week I tried something different. The Gotham Gal is a seed investor in a company called Scoot Networks who has launched a service that is best described as "zipcar for scooters." My colleague Nick and I rented scooters yesterday and used them to get back and forth to our meetings. I have my scooter until tonight when I am going to return it.

Here's a photo of me on a Scoot:

The scooter is electric and very light. It is only 50 cc. It has enough speed and acceleration to get around SOMA easily. It is not as powerful as the 150 cc Vespa I ride around NYC, but I was totally comfortable on it and it worked great for me yesterday.

Your phone is your "key". You join Scoot Networks and use their web app (native apps are coming). You place your phone in a bracket on the handlebar and connect an iPhone or USB connector and that turns the bike on and off.

Then you can drive around from meeting to meeting, parking the bike on the street.

Scoot Networks is currently only operating in San Francisco, but they are planning a larger rollout in the future once they get San Francisco working well. If you like to ride a scooter and travel to SF frequently, I suggest you give it a try. I am really enjoying it.

Related articles

Scoot Launches Electric Scooter-Sharing Program in San Francisco!

S.F. startup offers scooter rentals

"Zipcar For Scooters" Startup Scoot Networks Launches To The Public In San Francisco

World's 1st 'Shared Electric Scooter Fleet' Unveiled In San Francisco

The Zipcar of electric scooters launches to the public

Smartphones + Shared Electric Scooters in San Francisco

First we'll take care of some logistics and then we'll get to the post of the week in my Skillshare Class on sustainability in business.

Office hours will take place at 6pm eastern today. The link to the hangout is here. I don't like the way office hours worked last week and so I am changing them up. I will start by asking people to post questions in this discussions section. Then I will review a few business model canvas projects live for everyone to see. Then I'll finish up the 30 minute session by answering as many questions as possible while time lasts.

There are roughly 80 business model canvas projects posted so far. You can see them here. Since I will only be able to review a few of them today in office hours, it would be great for anyone who is taking this class to stop by and pick a few to give comments on.

If you are looking for a web-based tool to build and share your business model canvas, this thread mentions several of them.

OK. Now that we are done with the logistics, I will move on to my second post in this series.

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Last week we talked about long term thinking vs short term thinking. But sometimes, no matter how long term you are thinking, things happen that you didn't plan for and they can impact your business. Actually, this always happens. And that is when you need to adapt.

You will not stay in business forever if you don't adapt to changing market conditions. This doesn't mean adopting the "business model of the hour" model and this doesn't mean pivoting either. What I am talking about is the once every few years "oh shit moment" when you realize that the path you are on isn't going to work in a year or two and that you need to make some changes.

This is a frustrating realization. I have a good friend who has been running a business for more than a decade. He told me a few weeks ago that he thinks the market he has been operating in is changing and it is starting to impact his business. And just when he had everything firing on all cylinders.

That's how it is in business. Just as you are taking the victory lap for the kickass execution you and the team have delivered, the track takes a tilt and things start getting harder. Businesses don't operate in a vacuum. They operate in a dynamic ever changing market that is going to make things difficult for you, especially if you want to be in business forever.

I think some examples will help. The one that comes to mind front and center is Microsoft. By the middle of the 1990s, Microsoft had it all. They had a dominant share in desktop operating systems and a dominant share in desktop apps. They were literally printing money. Then the commerical internet happened. Netscape showed up. And Microsoft's market changed, forever.

Microsoft did adapt. They built Internet Explorer in reaction to Netscape and then used their desktop dominance to push it into the market, hurting Netscape so badly that it had to sell to AOL. That got Microsoft into trouble with the Justice Department and they were investigated as a result.

But what Microsoft didn't see in 1995 was Google because it didn't exist. And they didn't see the emergence of cloud based productivity apps because they didn't exist. In hindsight, it is pretty easy to see how fundamentally transformed Microsoft's business has been by the Internet and it is also pretty easy to see that they have not been able to adapt sufficiently to maintain any semblance of the dominance they had in the mid 90s. This stock chart tells you everything you need to know about what the Internet did to Microsoft. They may be surviving but they are certainly not thriving.

Another great example is RIM. I don't even need to tell this story. Everyone knows that the dismissive tone and stance that RIM's management took toward the iPhone and what it represented was essentially the death knell of a great company. I suspect they wish their stock chart looked like Microsoft's.

But let's look at a more positive example. As Ron Ashkenas points out in this HBR article, IBM saw that the hardware market was changing and their competitive position in it was changing with it. They sold their PC hardware business in 2005 to Lenovo and doubled down on consulting and related services. Their stock chart tells the rest of this story.

Adapting doesn't always mean exiting a business that you decide has issues. You can also retool, reshape, and refocus the business. A company that I've worked with for more than a decade saw the industry it services go through some painful transitions in the 2008/2009 downturn. They built an entirely new line of products that service the growth part of the industry while working to maintain the older products through an orderly and gradual decline. It's been a difficult transition because it has meant that the company's top line hasn't grown during this transition. But the company is still in business and the new products are growing quite nicely.

Every situation is different and I don't have some "silver bullet" to help you all think about how to figure out when to adapt and when to stay the course. But I do have some observations. The comfort of a strong balance sheet (and a nice looking stock chart) is often your enemy not your friend in these situations. The most agressive CEOs I've seen in these situations are often the ones with less than a year of cash in the bank and survival instinct in full on mode.

Another observation is that getting your organization to adapt is harder than you might think. Organizations have inertia. The bigger they are the more inertia they have. If you think you need to adapt your business quickly, you will need to figure who is in the boat with you and who is not and make the changes you need, particularly on your senior team, to align the team with mission and get going.

Finally, you cannot be in adaptation mode all the time. If you map out long living successful businesses, you will see they go through periods of great stability followed by periods of great change and then move back into stability mode. You have to know when to get into which mode and you need to see each one through to its logical conclusion.

Given how hard all of this is, you might wonder if you really want to stay in business forever. The answer may be no. But even if it is no, you had better plan for and act like you do. Because I am certain that if you don't, you won't.

Our policy at USV is that all of our devices need to have lock screens. So I have one on all my phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops. I don't mind it very much. Except when I want to take a quick picture or video of something that is happening in real-time. In that situation, seconds can make the difference.

The folks I know who use iPhones can put their camera in front of the lock screen. I am not sure how they do that, but I know they do. For the life of me, I cannot figure out how to do this on Android.

This is a cool feature. I'd like to call it out as something every mobile OS should have. If anyone knows how to make an Android device do this, please leave it in the comments. If it is not possible, then this post is a feature request to the Android team to make it happen in the next build.

I've written a fair bit about how we are using technologies like Bluetooth and Airplay in our homes and cars to connect our tablets and phones to our cars and home entertainment systems.

I've thought Airplay was the winning model because Apple is pushing it hard and integrating it into their product line across the board. Plus Airplay supports higher bandwidth applications like video and covers greater distances.

But an experience I had this week makes me take pause on that assumption. Our newest car has excellent bluetooth audio capabilities. Everyone's phones are paired to it and anytime anyone wants to take control of the car audio with their phone (iPhone or Android), they can play any audio app they want on their phone and the music plays in our car. This is true of most of the cars coming off the factory floors these days.

My son is particularly fond of taking control of the audio in the car and DJing. Yesterday he asked me why he couldn't do the same thing with our home entertainment system, which is built on Sonos. We have an airport express in the line-in on the Sonos and we can Airplay from iTunes. But that doesn't support Android phones and not all third party mobile apps support Airplay. Airplay is not ubiquitous in the way that Bluetooth is.

So I just bought this logitech bluetooth audio adapter and am going to swap out the airport express for this bluetooth adapter and see how my family reacts to that. I am betting that by replicating the experience they have in the car in our home, they will take control of our home music system with their phones in the same way they do in our car.

This shows the power of an open protocol like Bluetooth vs a proprietary protocol like Airplay. Airplay is a superior technology but it's lack of ubiquity may mean that it doesn't win the market in the end. We will see.

Twenty years into the personal technology revolution and we are still using address books that work pretty much like physical address books. It makes no sense. The mobile address book should be hyperconnected to our digital life, informed by it, and responsive to it.

I remember back in early 2011, Steve Greenwood walked into our old offices on the 14th floor and told us that he intended to build that hyperconnected mobile address book. He showed us a spreadsheet he had been personally using for the past five or so years to manage all of his relationships. I had never seen anything like it. He was obsessed with relationships and managing them. That's what we are always looking for, someone who just can't sleep because they want to fix something that isn't working in their world and have been trying for a long time to fix it.

Steve had built a prototype that ran on the web and the vision was all there. An address book that knows what you are doing, where you are, who you are most engaged with at any time, and is search and context driven as opposed to a directory of names and addresses.

But Steve knew that he had to launch this as a mobile app that will eventually replace your current address book and he knew he had a lot of hard technical problems to solve in order to do it right and do it at scale. So he asked us for the seed capital to build a team and build that product. We said yes.

Today, Steve and the amazing team he put together are launching Brewster, initially as an iOS app. If you have an iPhone, you can download it from the iOS app store and check it out. The NY Times has a good post on Brewster today.

Here's how Brewster works. You download the app. You connect it to google apps, facebook, twitter, foursquare, linkedin, and soon a bunch more services. Brewster builds you a new address book that runs on your phone and also in the cloud.

This new address book is smart because it knows a lot more things about your relationships than you have ever entered into your address book and it is adapting in real-time to all of this data. It knows who you probably want to talk to right now and it also knows who you are losing touch with and displays all of this data in a feed. Your Brewster address book is also de-duped and hot linked to all the social activities you want to do from calling, texting, facebooking, or whatever.

This is an address book that can handle a search query like "knicks game" or "sushi tonight" or "band of horses concert". We are always querying our brain with questions like that. Now we can ask our address books those kinds of questions.

I have really enjoyed being involved with this project over the past year. It fits neatly into many themes I have been writing about and thinking about for years. But mostly I am excited to finally see this product out in the market where folks can use it and experience Steve's vision of how an address book should work in the mobile social world we live in.

Yesterday I traveled from Amsterdam to Berlin and ended my day in Paris. Three countries in one day. And I did it all with just one data only sim card in my phone.

I've been trying out a new data only service called Roamline while I've been in europe. It works great and allows you to roam from country to country in Europe, Canada, and the US with a fixed rate on data.

It works great, but it is not cheap. At .39euro per MB, I feel like its a luxury. It's much more cost effective to buy a sim card in each country. In Denmark, I was able toget a 1gig sim for 48krone which is something like $8US. So that would be .8cents per MB. In london, I paid 20pounds for 1gig of data so that is 3cents per MB. Roamline's cost of .39euro per MB is something like 50cents US per MB.

But what you get in return is convenience. I needed to be in three countries in one day, I wanted data to work on my phone from the moment I landed, and I did not want to be running around looking for a store to buy a local sim card.

Of course the other option is to just use your US phone service and get the biggest data roaming plan you can. With AT&T Mobile, you can get 800MB a month of international roaming for $120. That is 15cents per MB. But after that you pay some crazy number like $20 per MB (at least that's what the AT&T customer service person told me when I called a few weeks ago to inquire about this stuff).

If Roamline were about half the price, somewhere around $0.20per MB, I think it would be an awesome service. And operating in data only mode is not a big deal. I use skype and a sip client called Bria for voice and I use Kik for messaging. Everything else is data.

You'll need an unlocked iPhone or Android to swap out sims like this. But I don't buy locked phones and never have. I think the lock+subsidy is a bad deal and I don't like being told what I can and can't do on my phone.

In any case, I think Roamline is an interesting option for people who do a lot of international business travel in europe, canada, and the US. If they can lower the price by half, then I think its a great option.

I was reading about Judge Posner's decision to throw out Apple's patent case against Motorola on CNN Money and came upon this by Florian Mueller:

Apple's "rip-off" claims are right. Judge Posner's decision doesn't prove that there was no "rip-off". He just cannot see that the patents that were shown to him, and the related infringement allegations and damages theories, substantiated a "rip-off" of the illegal kind.

I went on to read a study of accelerator programs on RRW and came upon this:

Finally he had enough data to come up with a ranking. At the top: TechStars, Y Combinator and Excelerate Labs.

Android is very much a iPhone knockoff. And TechStars and Excelerate Labs are very much YC knockoffs. I've written before that I much prefer the opportunity to invest in the innovator not the knock off. But that doesn't mean I don't appreciate the value of a good knockoff. 

Knockoffs create competition for the innovator and keep them honest. And they provide an opportunity for those that cannot, for some reason, work with the innovator.

Think about the startups that could not get into YC but did get into TechStars or Excelerate and went on to get funded, build a business, and create value for the entrepreneurs. That's a good thing.

Steve Jobs and Paul Graham are the innovators in these two markets and appropriately get the credit for their innovations. Innovators are often outraged when someone rips them off. This is from that CNN Money post on Apple vs Motorola:

This is a useful paragraph because it separates the legal issues at stake from the palpable sense of injustice Steve Jobs felt when he threatened to "go thermonuclear" and told his biographer: "Our lawsuit is saying, 'Google you f***ing ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off."

I have often felt that "palpable sense of injustice" when our firm is an investor in the innovator and a copycat competitor shows up. But there is a difference between being pissed and having a legal claim. If the innovator keeps innovating, as Apple and YC have, they will do fine and will enjoy the spoils that come from creating the category and leading it.

I think it is best to understand that all great innovations will be copied, expect it to happen, and understand that the best response is to go out and out-execute the copycat. Getting stuck in time and money losing litigation may be emotionally satisfying for a while but it often doesn't end well for anyone.

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.