Posts from Mobile device

Last night the Gotham Gal and I went to one of our favorite local spots, sat at the bar, had a glass of wine and a nicely cooked mediterranean seabass. As we sat down, I checked in on foursquare and was alerted that there was a special. Spend $10 or more and get $5 off. So I clicked on the special, loaded it to my card with one click, and when we paid our bill, we got the $5 discount on our credit card bill.

It was simple.

Mobile commerce is simple. Because you have your payment credentials stored in the web service (in this case foursquare). But the same thing could have happened with a direct checkout in the Etsy mobile app. Or in the eBay mobile app.

According to this post on AllThingsD, both eBay and PayPal will transact over $10bn this year on mobile devices. That's a 100% increase over last year.

I've been talking a lot about mobile here at AVC lately. That's because I am seeing the same kinds of things in our portfolio companies that eBay is seeing. Mobile is exploding. And that doesn't just mean mobile browsing, mobile gaming, mobile social networking. It also means mobile commerce.

If you are a transaction driven company, a marketplace, a retailer, or some other transaction oriented business, you had better be investing big time in mobile. Because if you aren't, your competitors surely will be.

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've long thought that the mobile devices we have in our home (tablets, iTouch, phones) would be our remotes. In fact, we use them everyday for that now. We use the Sonos app on the iPad to control the music in our house. We use the Boxee remote on the iTouch to control our TV. We all have apps on our androids and iPhones that control various devices in our home.

But as we were driving out to our beach house on friday afternoon, I realized that there is an alternative scenario. The mobile devices could be our primary content consumption devices and we will simply connect them to whatever device we want them to "play to."

That's how we and surely many others use the audio in our cars. We connect one of our many mobile devices to our auxiliary input in our car audio system and then play music. We play rdio, rhapsody, mog, fredwilson.fm, hypem, and sometimes local files on our mobile device and use the car audio system for the amplification and speakers throughout the car. We sometimes use the am/fm and siriusxm radio we have in the car. But the vast majority of listening happens on the mobile devices connected via the auxiliary input. We have the various subscription and free internet audio services on our mobile devices, not in our car dashboard.

That's how we use the telephone in our car too. Our mobile phones are connected via bluetooth to the car speakers and microphone. Our address books are on our mobile phones, not in the car dashboard. Our connections to the voice networks are on our mobile devices, not the car dashboard.

And we are quickly seeing video services show up on tablets. My friend Jimmy was at our beach house in long island on friday night. He showed me the Cablevision iPad app. If you can simply "play" the video on the iPad on the TV via a technology like Apple's Airplay, then the iPad becomes more than the remote. It becomes the set top box replacement.

The implications of this alternative scenario are profound. The subscription services might be on the mobile devices, not the displays. If your friend has an MLB.com subscription on his or her tablet and they come over to your house, you could watch the game on your TV via your friend's tablet.

That's how it works with audio today. My kids' friends come over and connect their phones and iTouch devices to our audio system and play their music on it. It seems highly possible that this model will continue to develop and include video as well. And if this becomes the dominant model then the video and audio systems will remain "dumb" and the smarts will be in the mobile devices.

I think its a bit too early to know which way the market will evolve. The auto industry and the consumer electronics industry have been pushing to get smart processers, operating systems, and internet connections into their products. There's a lot of energy going into that approach right now. But consumers are moving even faster than the manufacturers right now and the market may evolve in a different direction before the manufacturers can catch up. It will be interesting to watch how this plays out.

Last week I blogged about mobile notifications which I think is a big game changer. There are a few other aspects of the mobile experience that I think present great opportunity. Another one is the always logged in experience.

On the web, you may or may not have a web app open in a tab in your browser and you may or may not be logged into it. But on your mobile, you are permanently logged into every app you have on your device. When you get a notification, you click on it and are taken right to the exact part of the mobile app you want to engage with. No log in is required. That in and of itself is a big deal.

But there is something more interesting. Think about OAuth and Facebook Connect and Sign In With Twitter and other similar techniques for signing into and connecting to apps. When you have lots of apps on your mobile device and you are permanently logged into them, there are a host of opportunities that open up which are harder to execute in the current web app paradigm.

Imagine you are building a mobile app that connects to the Facebook platform, the Twitter platform, the Foursquare platform, and the Google Maps platform. Assuming your users have all of those apps on their mobile, you can quickly and easily do the connections directly on the mobile device. And then you can pull data from those apps to create new experiences for the mobile users. You can create cross app notifications and other data driven experiences for users.

Like with mobile notifications, I have not done a deep dive on where we are with all of this stuff. Is there a mobile implementation of oauth that doesn't require a browser session to do the auth? Can one app deliver notifications that take the user to another app?

When I was at the music hackday a few weekends ago, I noticed that it was easy to build something interesting by simply snapping together a few web apps and then building some light glue between them. I suspect it will be even easier to do that on mobile and the era of "meta apps" that deliver functionality across multiple apps is upon us. And I think that has the potential to create some new startup opportunities.