Habits Are The New Viral: Why Startups Must Be Behavior Experts. Editor’s Note: This guest post is written by Nir Eyal, a founder of two startups and an advisor to several Bay Area incubators. Nir blogs about technology and behavior design at nirandfar.com. Face it; you’re hooked. It’s your uncontrollable urge to check for email notifications on your phone. It’s your compulsion to visit Facebook or Twitter for just a few minutes, but somehow find yourself still scrolling after an hour. It’s the fact that if I recommended a book to purchase, your mind would flash “Amazon” like a gaudy neon sign. In an online world of ever-increasing distractions, habits matter.
Turning Habits Into Cash Ever since the creation of the first online media companies at the dawn of Web 1.0, businesses have made money from their users’ behaviors. Such self-assurance left them vulnerable to attack from social media companies, which plundered their user base as the web evolved. Viral Is Nice, But Habits Are Required Relying too heavily on viral growth is also bad for business. HTML5 Is An Oncoming Train, But Native App Development Is An Oncoming Rocket Ship. HTML5 versus native apps.
It’s a debate as old as — well, at least three years ago. And pretty much since the beginning of that debate, there has been a general underlying current among the geek community that HTML5 is good and native is bad. Native is what we have to deal with as we wait for HTML5 to prevail. But what if that never happens? Let’s be honest: right now, most HTML-based mobile apps are a joke when compared to their native counterparts. It’s not even remotely close. Developers often state their love of HTML5 and their commitment to it going forward. These days, if you’re going to do native apps, you at least have to support iOS and Android.
Talking to developers, this is the single biggest pain point on the mobile side of things. But the fact that very few, if any, choose to go HTML5-only is telling. Let’s look at the debate from the perspective of the three hottest technology companies right now: Apple, Google, and Facebook. Apple is basically all-in on native apps. 16 Disruptive Technologies. Stowe Boyd • Pilcrows And Flows: The Fragmentation Of Media In A Web Of Flow. A pilcrow is a typographic term for the paragraph marker that many publishers use, such as the New York Times. It looks like this: ‘¶’. This has come into recent prominence since the NY Times has implemented anchors on every paragraph of its news stories, so that every paragraph has a distinct URL. To access the URL you can double tap the shift key when viewing a NY Times page in a browser, and pilcrows appear at the head of every paragraph, serving as the place to copy the paragraph specific URL. This allows a simple way to direct someone to a specific paragraph in a news story, instead of qualifying a URL to the story’s page by saying ‘3/4ths down the page, he writes…’.
This techniques is also called Winerlinks by some in recognition of Dave Winer’s use of these anchors, and the NY Times is referring to them as Deep Links. Here’s one: Or one that highlights a specific sentence in a specific paragraph: Deep Packet Inspection Circles Back for a Second Look: Tech News « Deep packet inspection, a creepy and invasive targeting technology, is looking to make a comeback, this time armed with opt-in consent and incentives for users.
The technology, which involves scanning data packets for information on where they come from and what they contain, fell out of favor a few years ago following consumer uproar and congressional hearings, after ISPs tried to use it to target subscribers with ads based on where consumers surfed online. But the Wall Street Journal says two major operators – Kindsight and Phorm – are ramping up their efforts, working with Internet service providers to deploy the technology. Kindsight, which is owned by Alcatel-Lucent SA, said six ISPs in the U.S., Canada and Europe are testing its service though no ad targeting is underway. Phorm, which touched off a firestorm in Britain, is actively working the market in Brazil, where it’s signed deals with two ISPs and is looking to expand to the U.S. and South Korea. The Algorithm + the Crowd are Not Enough. The Age of the Mobile Mash-Up. By Lars Erik Holmquist of the Mobile Life Centre, Kista, Sweden The rate of innovation in mobile services is just about to take a quantum leap.
We are going from a divergent and messy ecosystem, where every new concept has to be made into a specialized ”app” that works only on a small sub-set of mobile handsets (even the mighty iPhone only has around 3% of the global mobile phone market), to an environment much more like the web. Today, new services can easily be composed out of existing components and run on a common platform – the browser. We are entering an age where the creation of a new mobile service – taking advantage of such features as the user’s location, social network, personal data, and even phone-specific functions such as the camera and accelerometer – can be mashed-up and put on-line just as easily as Web 2.0 services have been for several years already. So what does this mean? Today, of course, we could have done the same as an app and reached many more users. The “Unhyped” New Areas in Internet and Mobile. Editor’s note: Legendary investor Vinod Khosla is the founder of Khosla Ventures.
You can follow him on Twitter at @vkhosla. All Khosla Ventures investments, as well as ventures related to Vinod Khosla, are italicized. We are in a whole new world of platforms, a post-PC era, which I’d more aptly describe as the always/everywhere era, finally, and that means a whole new set of opportunities. Add to it the fact that because of a variety of factors too numerous to cover here, the cost of experimentation has gone down dramatically (one can start a web startup or write an Android app with no more than a student credit card!) And raw computing power is taken for granted. What you get as a result are the recent successes in the Internet/mobile space like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Zynga, Groupon and others, all of which have reenergized both entrepreneurs and investors. A few will be successful, many will fail, some will be acquired for a piece of technology or for the team (acqui-hires).
The State Of Web Development Ripped Apart In 25 Tweets By One Ma. There are few people who know the ins and outs of the web as well as Joe Hewitt. For the past decade, he’s had his hands deep in everything from Netscape, to AOL, to Firefox, to Facebook (where he currently works). Hewitt also knows a thing or two about the iPhone. He’s the one who first built Facebook’s excellent iPhone web app (before there were native apps on the iPhone), and then the native app — which is one of the best apps on the platform. So when he rants about something (as he does from time-to-time), people listen. Following Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ post about Flash this morning, Hewitt went on Twitter and started going off with some of this thoughts. So basically, Hewitt’s take is that Flash (and all plug-ins) only exists because the W3C (the governing body for web standards) is too slow to formalize and approve innovative new technologies. 10 years ago we bullied Microsoft into stopping innovation on IE so the W3C could take over.
The core of Hewitt’s argument. How JavaScript will lead the way to open video. Editor’s note: This story is part of our Microsoft-sponsored series on cutting-edge innovation. Shay David is the vice president of business and community development at Kaltura, a company offering video tools for publishers. The “open Web”, a vision for the future of the Internet that is participatory, collaborative, and free from vendor lock-in is finally coming to fruition. Following Mozilla Firefox’s successful wedge of open Web standards into the browser platform, today we see every browser vendor and every web-enabled device gravitating towards supporting a vendor-neutral platform for rich media web experiences.
Like many contentious agreements, the devil is in the details — and there are a lot of details. This article will highlight how the industry is transitioning away from targeting a single vendor (Adobe Flash) for rich media web experiences to instead targeting multiple rich media web browsers. However, HTML5 requires a transition period. We have been here before. The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators. I keep hearing people throw around the word “curation” at various conferences, most recently at SXSW. The thing is most of the time when I dig into what they are saying they usually have no clue about what curation really is or how it could be applied to the real-time world.
So, over the past few months I’ve been talking to tons of entrepreneurs about the tools that curators actually need and I’ve identified seven things. First, who does curation? Bloggers, of course, but blogging is curation for Web 1.0. Look at this post here, I can link to Tweets, and point out good ones, right? That’s curation. Or I can order my links in a particular order. But NONE of the real time tools/systems like Google Buzz, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, give curators the tools that they need to do their work efficiently. As you read these things they were ordered (curated) in this order for a reason. A curator is an information chemist. So, what are the seven needs of real time curators? 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. The Current State of Web Design: Trends 2010 - Smashing Magazine. Kickstarted: How one company is revolutionizing product development. 172inShare Jump To Close Kickstarter is funding an era of product development uncompromised by focus groups and committees The million dollar idea.
Enter Kickstarter, a thoroughly modern twist on the concepts of commerce and patronage; an approach so alluring that it now counts over one million people who have combined to pledge more than $100 million to fund ideas both big and small, serious and whimsical, since it launched in April of 2009. From the moment of its unveiling on September 1st, 2010, Scott Wilson, a self-described watch fetishist and former Global Creative Director for Nike, felt the desire to build a watch band for the 6th generation iPod nano.
A few months later, Scott took a chance and placed his TikTok + LunaTik project on Kickstarter, earning more than $6,000 in pledges on its first day. What happened next is the stuff of crowd-funding legend. One month later, the project would close with $942,578 pledged by 13,512 backers across 50 countries. So, what's the secret? A TC Teardown: What Makes Groupon Tick. Editor’s note: Group buying sites are growing like mushrooms. In this teardown, guest author Steven Carpenter goes through a detailed teardown of the largest social commerce site, Groupon, and its competitors to see what exactly is going on here.
Carpenter was the founder and CEO of Cake Financial, a TechCrunch40 Finalist that developed a service for mainstream investors to manage their investments, which was sold to E*Trade earlier this year. Before Cake, Steve worked in digital music managing strategy and the day-to-day operations for Rhapsody. He was also the director of business development at financial services startup myCFO, founded by Jim Clark and backed by Kleiner Perkins, and online photo site, Snapfish. Much has been written about the rapid growth and success of Chicago-based local daily deal company, Groupon. The Teardown How Groupon Makes Money Groupon takes the old Entertainment Coupon Books that your mom used to buy and brings it to the social web. Traffic. Chris dixon's blog / The problem with online “local” businesses. One of the most popular areas for startups today is “local.”
I probably see a couple of business plans a week that involve local search, local news, local online advertising, etc. Here’s the biggest challenge with local. Let’s say you create a great service that users love and it gets popular. Yelp has done this. The problem is that, for the most part, these local business either don’t think of the web as an important medium or don’t understand how to use it. People who have been successful monetizing local have done it with outbound call centers. To add insult to injury, local businesses often have very high churn rates. Hopefully this will change in time as local businesses come to see the web as a critical advertising medium and understand how to make it work for them.
. * This is what I hear from industry sources.