Posts from Wattpad

Android in Europe and Asia

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:

Geo breakdown
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.

#mobile

In Situ Content

I've been working on a prezi for a talk I'm giving next monday at OMMA Global (here's the high level outline of the talk). It's a work in progress. I started it last weekend. I do a bit more each morning. I hope to have it done before I walk on stage monday at 9:10am.

I like to use visuals when I give a talk. I use them as eye candy for the audience. And they are the cues for me to move through the concepts I want to cover. It's like a visual outline. I don't use notes. I just hit next and I'm reminded about the flow I want to use.

For many years, I used Powerpoint to create the visuals for these talks. Then I'd post the slides to Slideshare and share the visuals on this blog and elsewhere to get feedback. It was a fine system.

But in my effort to move everything I do to the cloud, I've ditched Powerpoint for Prezi and started creating the visuals right on the web. So I can link out to a work in progress without any need to upload anything. And when I walk onto the stage, I pull up a browser, go to a URL, and I'm good to go.

I really like content systems where everything happens "in situ". The more I use systems like this, the more I think they are the future. I alluded to this in my "there will be no files in the cloud" post, but I think this goes beyond files vs no files.

So much of what I do, what I think about, what I am learning is informed by the daily act of writing this blog. I write in a browser. I bring all these web services I'm using right into the post via links, images, embeds, etc. And then I hit publish. You load up a browser, go to AVC.com, and start reading. Using Disqus, we talk about what I've written. I learn, you learn, and then it's tomorrow and a new post. This is all happening in one system (or two connected systems – typepad and disqus). It is all happening in a browser. And we are all connected to each other via the web.

So when I look at doing visual presentations, I want a similar system. Prezi is in situ. Powerpoint isn't.

When I look at creating and publishing audio, SoundCloud is in situ. iTunes insn't.

When I look at creating and publishing novels, Wattpad is in situ. Kindle isn't.

When I look at creating and publishing documents, Google Docs is in situ. Word is not.

When I look at remixing images, Canv.as is in situ. Photoshop is not.

I'll stop there. You get the point by now. There is so much to be gained when content is published and consumed in the same service where engagement is encouraged, measured, and leveraged to improve the experience for everyone. These are the content systems of the future.

In the spirit of full disclosure, Disqus, SoundCloud, Wattpad, and Canv.as are USV portfolio companies. What is the point of learning if you don't leverage what you learn?

#Web/Tech