New Rules for the New Internet Bubble. Carpe Diem We’re now in the second Internet bubble. The signals are loud and clear: seed and late stage valuations are getting frothy and wacky, and hiring talent in Silicon Valley is the toughest it has been since the dot.com bubble. The rules for making money are different in a bubble than in normal times. What are they, how do they differ and what can a startup do to take advantage of them? First, to understand where we’re going, it’s important to know where we’ve been. Paths to Liquidity: a quick history of the four waves of startup investing. (If you can’t see the slide presentation above, click here.) If you “saw the movie” or know your startup history, and want to skip ahead click here. 1970 – 1995: The Golden AgeVC’s worked with entrepreneurs to build profitable and scalable businesses, with increasing revenue and consistent profitability – quarter after quarter.
Startups needed millions of dollars of funding just to get their first product out the door to customers. Lessons Learned. iPhone Tracks Your Every Move, and There’s a Map for That | Gadget Lab. An unencrypted file stored in iPhones and iPads constantly records location data. An open source application was used to plot the location data from an iPhone belonging to a Wired.com reporter. Update 4 p.m. PT, Thursday: Wired.com has obtained a letter from Apple explaining how and why iOS devices store geo data and transmit it to Apple. Your iPhone or 3G-equipped iPad has been secretly recording your location for the past 10 months. Wired.com can confirm that fact: The screengrab above shows a map containing drop pins of everywhere yours truly has been in the past year. Software hackers Peter Warden and Alasdair Allen discovered an unencrypted file inside Apple’s iOS 4 software, storing a long list of locations accompanied with time stamps.
The file is labeled “consolidated.db.” “Ever since iOS 4 arrived, your device has been storing a long list of locations and time stamps,” Warden and Allen wrote. Apple did not immediately respond to a request for a comment. See Also: App Store subscription policy could send apps packing while drawing lawyers. A day after Apple (AAPL) released its new policy for subscription-based apps to operate in the iTunes App Store and on iOS, there’s a bit of an air of panic floating around. Bounce around the Internet and you can read scary words from several doomsayers regarding the new restrictions. Rhapsody, it appears, isn’t going to be playing ball.
Fear surrounds what could happen to streaming content from Hulu and Netflix (NFLX). E-book prices are expected to rise from Amazon (AMZN) and other booksellers. And the Wall Street Journal is already speculating that the federal government might decide to get involved. Some services see that as asking a lot. A legal response Rhapsody is one such provider: it sells streaming music services to several different kinds of devices for a monthly subscription fee, and it already has to make its subscription prices higher on mobile devices because of licensing fees.
Wait a second -- a legal response? Content providers in the crosshairs. A deeper dive into Do-Not-Track. You may also download this file. Running time: 59:54 The FTC has released a new online privacy report that could reshape advertising, media and business on the Internet. A key element of the report is the FTC endorsement of a “Do-Not-Track” mechanism for web browsers. Yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission’s new technologist, Princeton University computer scientist Ed Felten, talked about the basic idea for Do-Not-Track in a call with the media. Unedited audio of that call is embedded above, featuring extensive remarks from chairman Jon Leibowitz, Jessica Rich, deputy director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection, and Felten. When reached for further comment after the call, Felten elaborated on what Do-Not-Track might look like: The basic idea of Do Not Track, as discussed in the report, is to have an opt-out mechanism for tracking.
The idea of Do-Not-Track has been explored in several places online, including at DoNotTrack.us. It’s really in our report. Felten: Related: CRM Daily. 2011 Trends: Content Marketing Is Critical. Next year, marketers will need to rethink their approach to advertising and marketing and intensify their focus on creating magnetic content that will naturally attract consumers, rather than relying solely on the interruption model of advertising, which consumers are responding to less and less. Think pull vs. push. Magnetic content can include anything created on behalf of a brand—be it an ad, YouTube video, online game, Facebook page, Twitter promo or mobile app—that consumers genuinely want to engage with and pass along to others.
This content entertains, amuses, informs, serves a function or satisfies a consumer need. It’s welcome instead of annoying or interruptive. Marketers, especially those working in social media, have seen the proven value of branded content, sometimes also referred to as “earned media.” Creating effective, breakthrough advertising has always been a challenge for marketers, as well as for the agencies charged with the task. Is the content unique? Delicious mass exodus. The App Market Is Heading For An App Store Showdown: Tech News and Analysis « Independent, off-deck, app stores will become the major driver of mobile app downloads by 2015, eclipsing on-deck app store. That’s the word of a new report from research firm MarketsandMarkets, which forecasts the growth of the mobile app market. The report estimates the global market will be worth $25 billion by 2015, with Apple’s App Store accounting for 20.5 percent of total revenues.
While on-deck stores like Android Market and the App Store represent 3/4 of app revenues, off-deck application downloads are expected to grow faster through independent stores like GetJar and others and will ultimately eclipse on-deck stores by 2015. This is consistent with another report by Chetan Sharma Consulting last year, which forecast that off-deck mobile app sales will eclipse on-deck, operator-managed mobile app sales by 2012. That report was commissioned by GetJar, but the latest forecast by MarketsandMarkets validates that conclusion. Related research on GigaOM Pro (sub. req’d):
Amazon.com lets you play with an Android virtual machine, try apps before you buy them. Comcast internet down in the midwest, DNS servers to blame again. Which Apps Are Threatened by Apple's Upgrades? Beck Diefenbach/ReutersAmong the updates to Apple’s OS X operating system was a Safari reading list that works much like Instapaper. How do you know if you’ve created a really great, useful iPhone app? Apple tries to put you out of business. That may be overstating it, but a number of new features for Apple’s operating systems that it announced at its Worldwide Developers Conference have been available through existing apps and services for some time.
Some of those apps are quite popular, and have been lucrative for the people who developed them. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the services and applications that will be living in a changed world thanks to Apple’s new operating systems for Macs and iPhones: Instapaper and Read It Later: Safari’s new Read Later feature allows you to access Web pages that you have saved for later across multiple iOS devices.
Readability: The new Reader mode in Apple’s Safari browser strips down online articles to images and a rolling column of text. Milestone: The Web (Finally) Surpasses Newspapers As Source for Americans' News. Although digital technologies have been changing the face of the news for at least the last decade, we have finally reached a important milestone: more people now get their news from online sources than they do from physical newspapers. That's according to the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, which has just released its latest report on the "State of the Media.
" The study finds that, "By several measures, the state of the American news media improved in 2010," but that improvement did not extend to one important sector - newspapers - which continued to see a decline in revenues, readership and newsroom jobs. According to the survey, 46% of people now say they get their news online at least three times a week, surpassing newspapers (40%) for the first time. Only local television is more popular among Americans, with 50% indicating that's their regular source for news. Photo credits: Flickr user Daniel Blume. Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality. Tim O'Reilly: Cynical but accurate: New...