Posts tagged writing
Why a Prepaid Credit Card Company Bought Loopt
The Next Web reports, “Low cost banking company Green Dot Acquires Loopt For $43.3 Million In Cash”:
Green Dot, which provides low-cost banking and payment solutions to U.S. consumers, is putting $43.4 million in cash on the table for the company, which includes roughly $9.8 million to be set aside as a retention pool for ‘key’ Loopt employees.
Green Dot expects the transaction to close by the end of this month. It seems like an unlikely buyer for a company like Loopt, but Green Dot says it expects to put its products to good use, to improve customer acquisition and retention, drive the adoption of new banking and payment products and to become a leader in mobile wallets, rewards and payment solutions at retailers nationwide.
Seems like an odd move, but it’s a canny purchase. Green Dot acquires an experienced mobile team with expertise in a low-income market.
Keep in mind: Loopt’s main engine of growth for years was integration on Sprint and Nextel’s network. As a result, Loopt became an often touted feature among a number of prepaid cell services which ran atop these networks: Boost (most notably), Virgin, etc.
Despite a Keynote unveiling for Loopt’s iOS app, Loopt is notably absent from the location app wars on smartphone platforms. Only rarely is it mentioned in the same breadth FourSquare, Google Latitude, Facebook, Path, or even Gowalla. But Loopt has plugged along, fueled by low-cost prepaid network promotion. These networks like Loopt because locking a customer’s phone to an account decreases churn, the #1 concern in pay-as-you-go land.
To illustrate this core audience (because if you head to Loopt’s site, they’re still plugging the iOS app, which we can only assume was bait for buyers) head over to Quantcast and check out Loopt’s demographics. True, the webpage has low volume (since it’s a mobile service), but those are not the demographics of Foursquare or other early adopter markets: Loopt’s is a very young, low income, no college (which, yes, is affected by their young age), and multicultural audience.
Green Dot got a bargain. They get a proven mobile product team with experience working with their core audience through iOS, Android, and feature phones. On its own, such a pitch-perfect team is nearly worth the $43 million. But Loopt also has very close ties with low-end cellular carriers, with whom Green Dot would kill for the privilege of being bundled on their devices. Throw in some patents and an active user base, and Green Dot made out like bandits.
Where is Premium Email?
Developers: please think twice before building small, niche services atop existing, entrenched, ad-supported platforms and consider creating premium versions of the functions said platforms provide. When users are spooked by successive privacy news stories, ask them how much their privacy and data is worth. Answer with your product.
For example: I’d like to see a start up set out to become the world’s best email service. For $40-$100 a year, customers would have unlimited storage, a powerful (ad free) interface, and rock solid reliability. Such a service would be combine of the best parts of Gmail and ifttt.
Users could write and share plug-ins or scripts for aggregating or filtering in-boxes. This service would also connect to other services (Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Instapaper, etc) so that users could email links or writing to their inbox with a specific subject line and have it processed into a post, link, or whatever. Email could become one’s own private, flexible API, handling notes, articles, actions, and other events.
Perhaps this service exists and I’m simply unaware (if so, please help me here), but this opportunity isn’t limited to email. Dropbox and SquareSpace are two great examples of companies who took a small, taken for granted component of the internet (shared storage and website) and made it absurdly easy, tailored for actual users (not just the tech adept), and charged for it. What about an RSS manager to replace a creaky Google Reader? Or a photo manager to absorb the jittery population of Flickr and grow it to everyone who would pay to protect their photos, privately? Or let’s just start with email.
NFC Payment Systems are Just Another CueCat
NFC payment systems, like Google Wallet, remind me of the CueCat.
Launched in 1999, the CueCat was a little plastic cat (really) that let you scan proprietary barcodes on magazine advertisements or other printed material. Scanning a “cue” launched launched an advertiser’s webpage. Despite $185 million invested , the CueCat was a spectacular failure.
In hindsight, the CueCat’s fate is hardly surprising. But at the time the potential benefits for incumbent companies overshadowed the fact that no one would ever want to use a CueCat. Rather than examining the CueCat’s use case (and realizing it’s absurd), investors focused on the possible outcome: that magazine advertisements and other businesses based on printed material would not only survive the rise of the internet, but thrive by using the web to provide data regarding audience engagement (a brass ring for advertisers if there ever was one). The billion dollar print industry would be saved and everything would remain the same for the media incumbents.
Of course none of this came to fruition. No one used the CueCat1 and Digital Convergence, the company behind the system, folded.
NFC payment systems remind me of the CueCat because they provide very few benefits for users but promise their investors protection from digital disruption. The allure of such protection is sufficient to spur investment, PR, and partnerships. Media companies backed the CueCat in an effort to preserve print and now financial transaction companies are funding NFC systems in an attempt to save point of sale systems and the counters they reside upon.
What “Big Data” can Learn from Dubai’s Skyscrapers & Sewage System
Suddenly, we love data. It’s the hero in our TV shows, saves our baseball teams, generates our art, and is the topic of the moment at Davos. Our obsession borders on religion: we believe data is infallible, containing a single, emergent truth (the Guardian’s Datablog’s subtitle is “Facts are Sacred”). If our businesses or institutions are failing we say they need more data.
But when we embrace “Big Data” we neglect the operations and environments we hope the data will improve. Which is unfortunate because data’s value is determined by how well we capitalize on the intelligence it produces. If a film studio identifies a new trend they’re limited by how long a film takes to produce. If a retail outlet discovers that peanut butter buyers can also be sold bananas, they’re limited by how quickly employees can rearrange shelves.
Adding more data to the mix doesn’t help if infrastructures aren’t upgraded. If we ignore the systems we aim to improve, the data we crave is worth only a fraction of its potential value.
For those of us investing in or producing data, the bottleneck is our users, culture, and infrastructure. We’d be wise to learn from examples in other fields and scenarios. Take Dubai, for instance, where skyscrapers sprung up while sewage systems stagnated.
No One Wants their Name on a Sewer
Dubai’s record-setting skyline emerged over the last decades, fueled by rising fuel prices. Wikipedia lists 195 skyscrapers built or under construction in the once quiet city, whose population has more than quintupled in the last 30 years.
But all is not rosy: while the skyline was funded the sewage system was ignored. In 2008, The Wall Street Journal wrote, “By one estimate, some $300 billion in new projects are going up in Dubai in the next 10 years… But Dubai’s single, 30-year-old sewage-treatment plant isn’t keeping up. Sewage output here is rising by 25% a year.” The 160-floor Burj Khalifa alone was designed to house 25,000 people, nearly a 10th of Dubai’s total population when their sewage treatment plant was built.
“Content” Creep
Publishers have stopped referring to their products as journalism, writing, literature, photography, or art. Today, everything is simply “content”.
Those working in media, especially digital media, can attest to the word’s popularity. Quantitatively we can observe this trend in the chart above: over the last ten years, annual financial reports from The New York Times have leaned more and more heavily on the word “content” when describing their business. The share of “journalism” has remained relatively flat.
The NYT and other publishers rely on the word “content” to help them understand the breadth of their output. But by reducing their writing, photography, videos and more to a single, nondescript term they’re setting themselves up for failure.
The Rise of “Content”
“Content” emerged with the rise of the Internet, which detached pieces of work from their primary media. Before the web, we referred to works by the media format which delivered them: as newspapers, magazines, paintings, photographs, records, CDs, and so on. As digital representations grew in popularity these monikers became increasingly awkward. Is a newspaper still a “paper” when the majority of its readers view it on screens? To abate this awkwardness, we began to search for a more apt term. We landed on “content”, a bucket term which we ask to describe anything a publisher could publish, from the most revelatory art to the most hackneyed rags.
At this point, “content” was an innocent, sloppy fix. A stopgap until the Internet settled down and a proper term could be coined. Unfortunately, the pace of innovation quickened and today language is unable to keep pace with rapidly emerging new ideas, art1, and businesses.
So we’ve stuck with “content”.
The Assumptions & Allure of Content
To achieve its representative breadth, the word “content” makes two assumptions:
- Each piece of “content” is equal and is therefore interchangeable: As stated earlier, “content” is used to represent a wide breadth of works. A Pulitzer winning report and a Business Insider slideshow are both single instances of “content.” The word must remain formless, devoid of emotion, and of indefinite form and quality. Any characteristic which might differentiate two works must be ignored. This rhetoric categorization gives rise to the second assumption.
- “Content” production is trivial: Since each bit of “content” is interchangeable, “content” is only as hard to create as the easiest instance.
Publishers buy into these two assumptions because “content” allows them to easily measure and analyze their output. Messy qualitative measures are hidden so output fits neatly within Excel cells. This is the allure of “content”: it allows comforting, structured data which simplifies the complexity of a large business and makes decisions less intimidating. Executives aren’t making qualitative picks regarding art or an artist, they’re merely signing off on whichever “content” produces more valuable metrics.
At The New York Times it’s conceivable that editors and executives have a handle on their output. But businesses with strategies dependent on massive levels of “content” production cannot know the quality of everything that ships. Think YouTube, where users upload more than an hour of video every hour. Or content farms like Demand Media, which claims to have created 2 million articles and 200,000 videos as of June 2010.
The New Grid
Figure 1
Upon returning to Apple in 1997, Jobs toured the company in an attempt to understand its products and how they fit together. He found a dozen versions of the Mac, each with a confusing name and built without perspective for what other teams were building. After many meetings, and many cut products, it all snapped into place. Isaacson writes:
“Stop!” he shouted at one big product strategy session. “This is crazy.” He grabbed a magic marker, padded to a whiteboard, and drew a horizontal and vertical line to make a four-squared chart. “Here’s what we need,” he continued. Atop the two columns he wrote “Consumer” and “Pro”; he labeled the two rows “Desktop” and “Portable.” Their job, he said, was to make four great products, one for each quadrant. “The room was in dumb silence,” Schiller recalled.
…
The result was that the Apple engineers and managers suddenly became sharply focused on just four areas. For the professional desktop quadrant, they would work on making the Power Macintosh G3. For the professional portable, there would be the PowerBook G3. For the consumer desktop, work would begin on what became the iMac. And for the consumer portable, they would focus on what would become the iBook. (pp. 337-338).
Figure 2
12 years later, The Grid held true. Along with ‘the computer as a hub for your digital life’, the Grid strategy helped lead Apple to become the 2nd largest company in the world.
The Grid’s brilliance is its simplicity and that it gives the Consumer equal billing with the Professional. Each quadrand was crucial and each product was to be taken seriously.
At the time, this tactic was radical. Companies like Dell and Compaq employed a trickle down strategy when it came to consumer PCs: features from enthusiast and professional models trickled down into consumer wares as they fell below a certain cost. This strategy hamstrung consumer efforts. Consumer innovation wasn’t synicated across additional product lines so it was seen as being less valuable.
With Job’s Grid, consumer machines were taken seriously. Design resources, technical innovations, and component procurement took place in all quadrants. With the Grid came a point of view: computing is for everyone, so we’ll design PCs for everyone. Besides building Better consumer machines, the Grid created two flows of innovation as each column was able to inform the other.
12 years later, this is the last revision of The Grid in its original form.
Figure 3
This is a projection, but one which seems unavoidable.
Apple stopped selling the MacBook last July, though it’s still available to educational institutes (a twilight if there ever was one). Without the MacBook in the consumer quadrant the Air, which never really fit within the original grid, shifts into the consumer spot. And it’s a nice1 fit: Air sales now make up 28% of Apple laptop sales, up from 8% prior to the shift.
As for the MacBook Pro, rumors and leaks are hinting at 15 inch MacBook Airs for the first quarter of 2012. While these sites wonder if these models are an addition to the Air line or a revision to the Pro model, it’s my belief that we’ll see a unification of the two lines shortly. The performance gap between the two products is closing quickly, optical drives are falling out of favor, and it’s clear Apple sees solid-state as the future of local storage.
Moving up, signs are pointing to the Mac Pro’s impending demise. We won’t delve too deeply into the ‘why’ here, as many have already discussed potential reasons for the line’s demise.
It’s easy to imagine Apple unifying the MacBook Pro and Air lines into a simple MacBook range, moving the iMac to a simple ‘Mac’ moniker, and keeping the Mini as a flexible computer for an aggregate of the niche audiences: developers, home theater hackers, and other technological Lewis & Clarks who explore potential futures prior to mass settlement.
Which leaves us with half a grid.
Which begs the question, why the sudden consolidation after more than a decade? In a nutshell, technological advances allowed us to offloaded components and cultural changes redefined the idea of a ‘professional’, both for products and people.
Computer components are being offloaded to external devices, both local and distant.
Locally, ports shrank and became faster. In the case of Thunderbolt, they became fast enough to externalize internal protocals and house fast, redundant storage externally. Apple even presents “External Thunderbolt Storage” as a configuration option when purchasing a Mac.
Distantly, near-constant broadband connections have made cloud capabilities conceivable. Cloud processing is just beginning in consumer devices: Amazon’s Silk browser handles much of it’s processing in Amazon’s server farms before routing the output to the Kindle Fire. Cloud storage is nearing a tipping point. With the launch of iTunes Match, it feels like my MacBook Air received a storage upgrade. It’s mediocre 128 GB internal storage suddenly feels roomy with most of my music library stashed in the cloud.
Once the kinks are worked out of iCloud backup on the iOS side, I’d wager we’d see similar implimentations on Macs. Future versions of Mac OS X will appear to have infinite storage, which will cache stale files in iCloud and keep local copies of recent items.
Redefining the idea of what it means to be ‘professional’, for devices or people, is a seperate post (or book!) in it of itself. Simply put, there are fewer ‘professionals’ and many, many more professional ‘consumers’.
To me, this idea became apparent only recently, but it coalesces several trends, including improved means of production for the masses2, crowdsourcing, and high unemployment. A perfect example of the dissolution of the ‘professional’ can be seen in CNN’s recent layoffs, which traded staff photographers for citizen journalists.
When computers can be improved by improving a central location and amateur computer users perform professional functions, we can expect the Grid to evolve into a single column of ‘production’ computing.
Figure 4
This is a take on the new normal. It’s imperfect, to be sure, but I think it captures the spirit of where we’re going. ‘Create’ and ‘Consume’ are soft categories here, much in the way that some worked Pros used iMacs and some Consumers used MacBook Pros. There are better words for these columns; drop me a line if you any come to you.
Each quadrant is a different interface for remote stuff: people, files, photos, writing, books, movies, code, companies, and so on. Assuming an omnipresent cloud suggests that device design innovation will take place in two areas: interface design and power, both consumption and storage. These are the main device-bound metrics, the ones we can’t offload to the cloud.
For some, the arrangement of the new Grid might seem obvious, but it contains a bit of genius similar to the original Grid: it takes mobile, lightweight computing seriously.
This viewpoint lead to the iPhone. Rather than wondering how to plus up a phone, Apple imagined a perfect palm computer. If this doesn’t sound disruptive, remember that at launch most saw the iPhone as an evolution of the iPod. Today it’s easier to see it as an evolution of the computer.
Like the old Grid, the new Grid contains a worldview. It takes for granted computing within a network context and treats mobile, lightweight devices as true computers. Further, the new Grid assumes that users have more deeply integrated technology into their lives.
Today we’re rarely without access to the internet and maintain disparate friendships with digital services. Last week, MG Siegler summed up how far we’ve come rather nicely: “What would Facebook look like in the 1980s? Scary as hell.”
MG’s right. In barely a decade we’ve integrated computers into our lives while devices have dispersed their components around the world. With these changes The Grid must adjust. Being a well-designed household appliance is no longer a noble goal for a computer. Given an always-on network context and an eagerly digital userbase, computers need to aim for so much more.
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Though this move creates some liguistic awkwardness: Apple is now selling a MacBook Pro and a MacBook Air, but not a MacBook. Initially, there was even a naming system that fit each component of The Grid, which Steve Jobs explained during the introduction of the iBook: “As you know we tend to start our consumer products with the prefix ‘i’ and our pro products with the prefix ‘Power.’ And we tend to end our desktops with ‘Mac’ and we tend to end our portables with ‘Book.’ Since we’re such logical folk, iBook is the name of this product.” ↩
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One could measure this a few ways for each medium, usually based on quality per dollar or quality-device penetration per population. An example of each would be megapixels per dollar and megapixels per person. I prefer the latter view, as it indicates actual adoption. ↩
Siri, Violin Vibratto, and Bing Crosby’s Croon
Will Siri change us or will we change Siri?
Following the announcement of the iPhone 4S and Siri, much has been written about the awkwardness of voice interaction. We’ve documented the clever rebuffs carefully crafted by Apple’s designers. Casey Neistat tested Siri’s ability to answer the questions that really matter. We also discovered Siri can’t really understand thicker accents.
My major question regarding Siri is this: will Siri conform to us, will we conform to Siri, or will Siri fail? In other words, will we adjust our behaviors to meet Siri’s limitations or will Apple’s designers adjust Siri to meet our own. If either of these are not met, we simply won’t use Siri.
![The Idea of a Computer is Diffusing
In the future we won’t buy computers, just interfaces.
While ripping apart Apple’s new Thunderbold Display, the iFixit team was greeted with more components than they expected. Reacting to the discovery, Chris Foresman of Ars Technica quipped, “what they found inside is basically a 27” iMac sans Intel processor and internal storage.”
Because it incorporates the PCI express protocol and sports torrential speeds, Thunderbolt is already starting to externalize various parts of your computer. Apple’s Display sports ethernet, USB, and Firewire chipsets. Two of these previously standard interfaces don’t exist in the MacBook Air. You could say the svelte laptop outsourced them to the monitor.
Clear candidates for motherboard expatriation dot the rest of Apple’s lineup. In the 15 and 17 inch MacBook Pros there exists an additional discrete, power-hungry graphics card for use in desktop situations. In light of iFixit’s find, these components make more sense inside the monitor than inside the computer.
Now consider Amazon’s big announcement today. Amazon has stripped each Kindle of every component they can possibly put in their cloud. Storage is an S3 bucket and processing has started to shift to EC2. Doing this helps them keep their costs ridiculously low and speed up performance for the user. Appropriately, Bezos “portrays [the] Kindle Fire as a service,” according to Bloomberg. Certainly Bezos is referring to the media consumption aspect of the Fire, but it’s an interesting descriptor for the device… I mean, “service.”
As our computers diffuse both locally (in the case of Thunderbolt, which spreads several components across your desk) and afar (in the case of the Fire, which ports components to the cloud) the language we use to talk about technology is going to change. Or at least the way we’ll encounter them. Devices will become services. We’ll buy interfaces, not computers, and hard disks will be treated as caches.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ls953b7Iao1qz95glo1_1280.jpg)
The Idea of a Computer is Diffusing
In the future we won’t buy computers, just interfaces.
While ripping apart Apple’s new Thunderbold Display, the iFixit team was greeted with more components than they expected. Reacting to the discovery, Chris Foresman of Ars Technica quipped, “what they found inside is basically a 27” iMac sans Intel processor and internal storage.”
Because it incorporates the PCI express protocol and sports torrential speeds, Thunderbolt is already starting to externalize various parts of your computer. Apple’s Display sports ethernet, USB, and Firewire chipsets. Two of these previously standard interfaces don’t exist in the MacBook Air. You could say the svelte laptop outsourced them to the monitor.
Clear candidates for motherboard expatriation dot the rest of Apple’s lineup. In the 15 and 17 inch MacBook Pros there exists an additional discrete, power-hungry graphics card for use in desktop situations. In light of iFixit’s find, these components make more sense inside the monitor than inside the computer.
Now consider Amazon’s big announcement today. Amazon has stripped each Kindle of every component they can possibly put in their cloud. Storage is an S3 bucket and processing has started to shift to EC2. Doing this helps them keep their costs ridiculously low and speed up performance for the user. Appropriately, Bezos “portrays [the] Kindle Fire as a service,” according to Bloomberg. Certainly Bezos is referring to the media consumption aspect of the Fire, but it’s an interesting descriptor for the device… I mean, “service.”
As our computers diffuse both locally (in the case of Thunderbolt, which spreads several components across your desk) and afar (in the case of the Fire, which ports components to the cloud) the language we use to talk about technology is going to change. Or at least the way we’ll encounter them. Devices will become services. We’ll buy interfaces, not computers, and hard disks will be treated as caches.
Questions about Amazon’s Silk browser and the Kindle Fire:
- Will websites that run or partially live within Amazon Web Services see a performance boost in Silk? For example, Tumblr images live in Amazon’s S3. I’d guess that those images will load like lighting on the Kindle Fire, as Amazon’s existing transfer rates between S3 images and EC2 instances are quick and free. Update: In minute three of this video the team implies that AWS sites will see a bump.
- Will technical specification marketing (feature lists) be further minimized when half the device’s storage or performance comes from the cloud? Amazon never listed the Fire’s local storage during their presentation, but we learned afterwards its 8GB. But with infinite storage in the cloud and a smart interface to handle the exchange, wouldn’t it be more apt to call that 8GB a cache? (I can’t wait for this trend to expand…)
- Will Amazon release their own SDK for the Fire that allows developers to easily draw on EC2 and S3 for processing power and storage? Many apps could kill it with such abilities. For example, imagine an app that builds slide shows: the app would send the photos and instructions to an EC2 resource which could render a video in no time. I know this is feasible now, but I’d love to see this function wrapped in a dead-simple API. A developer shouldn’t have to know what type of instance or image to boot up. They should only have to pass a task1.
Will Amazon eventually release Silk for other platforms? I’d use it on my iPhone and my MacBook Air if I was on tepid wifi. The Silk team says it’s exclusive on the Fire for now.
The importance of Silk, and the capabilities Amazon is showing off, cannot be understated. Just as Apple dips it’s toe into cloud storage, Amazon is leaping into cloud processing.
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Apple has been gearing up developers for this shift, but the focus has been on multicore readiness. Grand Central design let’s developers easily break down their functions into asynchronous tasks so that a device ships with a spare core, the software already knows how to take advantage of the new thread. Imagine if Apple integrated EC2 power into Grand Central: if your processor was maxed out but you were on wifi, you could throw off some work to the sky. That’s the tech I want. ↩
Amazon is Now the 2nd Tablet Company
Android had one thing going for it in the mass market: price. And often, they didn’t even had that edge. Sales have been atrocious, nothing has stuck, and the iPad is running wild.
Enter Amazon who now has a tablet for $200 and Kindle’s starting at $79 fueling their funnel. The Kindle is their iPod, a perfect entry product: price wise and offer wise. Do not underestimate a reputable brand and a sub-$100 price tag. Plus, the Kindle Fire has more content built in than any other offering, an existing paying customer-base (with credit cards entered), and Amazon’s impeccable cloud credibility.
And now Bezos just announced a cloud-computing powered browser to make everything speedy and lightweight. They’re killing it.
I’ll write more later today, but on the surface I cannot envision a scenario where licensed Android tablets are even a consideration in the marketplace after what will be Jeff Bezos’ personal holiday season.
