As a die-hard music fan, I love The Hype Machine. For those that don’t know it, The Hype Machine indexes the most influential music bloggers to identify which artists and songs are currently being discussed the most, and it’s an amazing way to discover new music by tapping into the zeitgeist of some of the continue…
My kids were restless last night, which means I spent a decent chunk of the night half-awake. As I was falling back asleep for the fourth time an idea popped into my head for an iPhone app that I have no intention of building, but that I think might actually sell. Here’s how it came continue…
I’m trying to get smarter about how new iPhone apps are discovered by users, and what strategies developers are using to promote their apps on and off the App Store. If you’re a developer with at least one app in the App Store, please take a minute to complete this survey. As soon as I continue…
Nice piece today from Stacey Higginbotham of GigaOm that ties together a number of themes I’ve been following. Her main point is that paired advances in the browser and web-capable mobile devices have opened the to door to a (near) future in which device manufacturers and carriers lose control of the end-user experience, to be continue…
This past Sunday’s New York Times triggered a flashback for me with a story (in the Styles section, no less) titled: The iPhone Gold Rush. I was around for the first Internet boom and keep seeing parallels between the current mobile web feeding frenzy and what happened back in the late ’90’s. A couple of continue…
…I’ve just punted on Facebook out of sheer annoyance with the redesign and am going to give Twitter whatever social software love I have to give (which isn’t all that much). Thanks to AJ Vaynerchuk for the quick tutorial on linking Twitter to FB, and to Ralph Zimmerman and Thomas Marban for creating Twidroid, a continue…
Lots of news & commentary today about Google Voice. I got my invite earlier today and, after clicking around a bit, am wondering why more of the analysis (as in none that I’ve read) doesn’t mention the implications for Google Voice when combined with Android. As I noted in a previous post, it’s not hard continue…
Cost-efficient transaction processing for “micropayments” (transactions in amounts less than $10) is one of the many unrealized dreams of the Internet age. Of the literally dozens of venture-backed companies that have attempted to crack the opportunity, only PayPal can claim even modest success (just last October they announced new, lower micropayments pricing designed to capture continue…
Alex Iskold of Read/Write Web has a great post out today on the cultural shift underway in consumer computing. His premise is that the first generation of PC software (and specifically the once-dominant paradigm of Microsoft Windows + Office) made computing tasks too hard to understand, alienating most users. By contrast, the current generation of continue…
An old friend once shared a telling (and slightly off-color) story about working for a Hollywood studio. He didn’t have much money and his car was a shabby older model. One day his boss (a successful producer) took him aside and urged him to upgrade for the sake of his professional image: “In this town,” continue…