Posts from iPhone

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.

It's friday, time to talk about something fun. Today I thought I'd talk about mobile games.

I've never been much of a gamer. I reached adulthood just before videogames went mainstream. But I have found the "quick hit" aspect of mobile games to be a good way to add some fun to the day and connect with a friend or family member.

I played our portfolio company Zynga's Words With Friends with my daughter late last year. And I've started playing OMGPOP's Draw Something with a few friends in the past week.

When I play a mobile game, I check in with our portfolio company HeyZap's social gaming service so others can see what game I am playing.

I'm not the only one checking in with HeyZap. Here's a cool maps mashup of HeyZap's data showing live checkins from around the world.

Do you play mobile games on your phone? And if so, which ones?

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.

I wrote about this a while back but I've been refining and sharpening my thinking on the question of which devices will be smart and which devices will be dumb. It's an important question because it gets to what platforms developers should build on.

I believe that cheap devices will be smart and expensive devices will be dumb. Here's why:

Technology is moving very fast these days. Look at the latest iPhone 4s. It has Siri in it. Look at the latest Android Galaxy S II. It has NFC and Bluetooth 3.0 in it. And these phones will be leapfrogged in 12-18 months with something even more amazing. Furthermore, these devices have open marketplaces for apps and APIs and SDKs that allow those app developers to bring new experiences to these devices every day.

Contrast that with cars, boats, refridgerators, air conditioners, TVs, and other devices which we are led to believe will become "smart" in the coming years. These devices are usually owned for somewhere between 3 years and 10 years by most consumers. The upgrade cycle for these devices is too long to allow most consumers to experience the kind of smarts on these devices that they are experiencing on their cheapest devices with shorter upgrade cycles.

And that's why technologies like airplay, DLNA, and similar approaches are so important. When smart and cheap devices can take control of expensive and dumb devices, we will see the dumb devices become smart.

When I got the SoundCloud app on my iPad and I airplayed into my sonos, it was one of those "I get it" moments. Every time I get into my car these days, I want to airplay into my car audio system. The idea of connecting via an aux jack seems so nuts.

I don't expect the makers of expensive devices to accept this idea quickly. It goes against the grain. How can my expensive device be dumb when one of those cheap devices is so smart? But I'm certain that this is the way the market will play out over time.

Bridge technologies will play an important role for a while. As will Apple's licensing strategy for airplay. Airplay could become a standard if it is broadly and cheaply licensed. Otherwise, we will see other technologies in this market. We may anyway because there are other issues that matter, like the ability to connect over a cellular data connection instead of a wifi connection, latency, and a number of other important features.

Regardless of timing and the technologies that get us there, I have no doubt that the way we will make our expensive devices smart will be via our cheap devices. That's how I am viewing the market opportunity these days. It's a very crisp and clear vision. And that's a good thing when you are trying to peer into the future.

It's Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year. But you don't have to get crushed by the crowds stampeding the doors in order to participate in this shopping crazed day.

You can take out your mobile phone and do your holiday shopping while you are sitting in the park, on the beach, or by the pool.

Consider the new Etsy iPhone app, for example. Download it to your iPhone and shop away.

The treasury lists make a great way to shop on mobile. Here's a treasury called "Merry X-mas for him"

And if you find something you like, you can purchase it right on your phone:

So if you want to participate in Black Friday mania from the comfort of your couch watching football games, try shopping on your mobile phone. It works nicely and you aren't likely to get trampled.

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.

I'm a huge fan of the photo checkin on Foursquare. When I see a friend checkin somewhere interesting to me, I always leave a comment on that checkin saying "photo checkin pls" and I usually get one back.

The checkins with the photos are the ones that stand out in the feed on the phone. And for that reason, I put a photo in almost every checkin I do. It just makes Foursquare so much richer.

But the killer move is the "multi photo checkin". Not everyone knows this but you can add more photos to a checkin. If you just open that checkin on your phone, there is a camera button that allows you to add more photos.

Last night my colleague Gary Chou was eating sushi and started doing a multi photo checkin. I begged him to stop as I was starving and hadn't eaten in a long time.

When Christina went down to OccupyWallStreet, she did a twelve photo checkin which I can't seem to find on Foursquare right now or I'd link to it. It's essentially a photo collage of her visit there. It is great. (update: Christina provided this link to her OWS visit in the comments.)

These multi photo checkins remind me of the blog posts Gotham Gal does on her restaurant reviews. In fact Foursquare could make doing a restaurant review on a blog a piece of cake with a slick export checkin feature. Consider that a feature request Alex and Dennis.

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??