Fred Wilson wrote a great piece this week on the pain and frustration felt by mobile app publishers who rely on iTunes or Android Market as the primary distribution channel for their apps. In Fred’s words: “Centralized control of an ecosytem never offers as much opportunity and diversity as a decentralized system. And in the continue…
I’ve been thinking about the future of work lately, and I keep coming to the same puzzling conclusion: there is a seemingly unbridgeable gap in the market for engineering talent between the elite class of software “makers” and the wealthy enterprise customers who most need their help. The story goes something like this: As Marc continue…
At the end of a call today with a nascent mobile advertising company, the entrepreneurs described me (fairly) as having dumped “a bucket of cold water” on their idea. When I spoke at a local event a few weeks ago on “location-based services and the mobile ecosystem” (slides below), an attendee pointed out that I continue…
NOTE: I started this post before Steve Jobs announced his resignation as Apple’s CEO, but it’s particularly poignant in light of that news… I had a fun, thought-provoking conversation this morning with Darien Brown, CEO and co-founder of YongoPal (a recent 500 Startups grad). The general theme of our conversation was the new kinds of social continue…
A few weeks ago I read a fantastic blog post by Venkat Rao titled “A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100” (hat tip to Paul Kedrosky for the lead). Apart from just being a great read, the macro thesis of the post — that the corporation is no longer the primary locus of commercial innovation continue…
I just finished reading Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From (I know, I’m a little late to the party) and among the many ideas now rattling around in my head is that of the “commonplace book“: a 17th Century habit of maintaing a written personal idea log. As Johnson describes in a related blog continue…
One of Seattle’s best (and least-known) entrepreneurs isn’t in the software business. Dave Lahaie is the President and founder of Evergreen Recycling, a global company that matches industrial waste products from one industry with raw materials supply chains in another. By matching waste outputs with manufacturing inputs, Dave’s company saves millions of tons of material continue…
I’ve had this idea bouncing around in my head for a while now – I’m hoping that writing it down will help me see the pattern more clearly. First, a few facts: DST offers $150K in seed funding on ridiculously friendly terms to *any* Y-Combinator company Salesforce pays $250MM for Heroku (or around 80x rumored sales) continue…
I’ve been spending a ton of time in the mobile world lately, mostly on behalf of Founders Co-op portfolio companies AppStoreHQ and Urban Airship, and the deeper I get in the mobile ecosystem, the more perplexed I am by Apple and Google’s behavior toward the iPhone and Android developer communities. With iPhone (the high-end pioneer) and Android continue…
Fascinating news today from Ford (by way of Mashable’s Christina Warren): the automaker has just released the first version of their SYNC AppLink platform, allowing hands-free voice control of Android and BlackBerry applications to drivers of SYNC-enabled Ford cars. The company is working on an API for developers who want to tie their smartphone app continue…