iPhone App Idea (a.k.a., random stuff that pops into my head in the middle of the night)

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 together:

• Obama has a *huge* following among tech-savvy young people (i.e., likely iPhone owners)
  
• He's an inspiring speaker with a beautiful grasp of language
  
• There's a ton of public domain content about him - including transcripts and audio recordings of his speeches, etc.
• Given the above, it would be pretty easy to build a "Hope Machine" that serves up inspirational audio and/or text snippets from his speeches, accompanied by photos.
• The primary interaction mode would be random - shake the phone to get a randomly selected "dose of hope" - but you could also browse by topic or keyword.
  
• Since apps fall out of fashion quickly, and Obama speaks often, you could extend the franchise by doing serialized editions: e.g., Campaign 2008, First 100 Days, etc.
• It would help to partner up with the DNC or some other organizing / fundraising body to get marketing air cover - and some portion of the app proceeds should go to the cause to tie the marketing story together.

I just did a quick search and there are around 10 existing Obama apps, but none of them offer this combination of entertainment and inspiration. Maybe someone should build it...

Nice piece from Fred Wilson on online aggregators

I just came across this mini-rant by Fred Wilson in my feed reader and couldn't agree more. His key point:

"Aggregation is the central element of distributing content on the web. It's not going to get shut down by calling these services names, suing them, or even worse taking your content out of them. The best and only thing media companies can do is join the aggregation parade, celebrate it, and get good at it."

Maybe I've been on the Web too long, but anyone who can attack "online aggregation" with a straight face strikes me as completely nuts. From big players like Google and Amazon to vertical aggregators like Hype Machine (in music) or Kayak (in travel), the Web companies that deliver the greatest consumer utility are - at bottom - aggregators. And pretty much every other online business - from retailers and content publishers to social networks - depends on the aggregators to help them acquire customers and promote their offerings.

Show me an online content category occupied by hundreds or thousands of sites competing for attention and customers and I'll show you a vertical that's ripe for aggregation. And if enough of these competing sites earn good money doing what they do, that market is probably also a good fit for online lead generation.

Several of our investments at Founders Co-op (including Cooler Planet and Frugal Mechanic) are running a version of this playbook, and I'm currently working on a prototype (more on that soon) that's doing the same. These businesses work not by replacing or competing with the sites they aggregate, but by making them accessible and intelligible as a class, a service that ultimately increases the flow of visitors and buyers to the underlying sites.

Great Deck on User Behavior: "Discovery is the New Cocaine"

Just discovered this deck (thanks for the tip iseff) - great current take on personalized intermittent reinforcement in social media. If you're designing a social site and want to create user addiction, this is a great refresh on the levers to pull.

Calling all iPhone Developers

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 have 100 valid survey responses I'll publish the highlights here on Crash Dev.

Thanks in advance, and please spread the word!

Book Review: The Post-American World

I just put down Fareed Zakaria's The Post-American World and couldn't leave the house without knocking out a quick endorsement. If you're even the least bit interested in the changing role of America in the world it's a must-read. Zakaria's analysis of China and India as societies, economies and political actors is concise, lucid and free of political cant. Similarly, his assessment of America's challenges and opportunities is both well-researched and entirely convincing in both its conclusions and prescriptions.

The crux of his argument is that our changing role has less to do with our "failures" as a nation than it does with the growing success of others, particularly India and China. In his analysis, this shift in relative roles has real and serious implications for us as a nation, but shouldn't be viewed as an inevitable brake on our our continued prosperity and influence. That doesn't mean we don't have real work to do to maintain the health of our society, economy and influence, but those challenges are independent of the "rise of the rest".

The book was published before both the outcome of the 2008 presidential election and the current economic downturn had come to pass, and the most satisfying aspect of the book (for me, at least) was the extent to which the current attitudes and actions of the Obama administration embody the principles and ethics Zakaria asserts as essential to our continued relevance. In his view, as our relative power is diminished, our greatest strength continues to be the idea of America as a free, fair, open and ethical society. In his words:

"There is still a strong market for American power, for both geopolitical and economic reasons. But even more centrally, there remains a strong ideological demand for it... what the world really wants from America is not that it offer a concession on trade here and there, but that it affirm its own ideals."

As encouraging as the example of the Obama administration is, the response of the Congress to his policies offers stark proof of what Zakaria asserts is the greatest risk we face as a nation: our politics:

"As it enters the twenty-first century, the United States is not fundamentally a weak country, or a decadent society. But it has developed a highly dysfunctional politics... captured by money, special interests, a sensationalist media and ideological attack groups... Those who advocate sensible solutions and compromise legislation find themselves marginalized by the party's leadership, losing funds from special-interest groups, and being constantly attacked by their "side" on television and radio."

If you followed his own party's reaction to Obama's recent budget draft, you have seen the truth of this assessment in stark relief. Even the most unassailably sensible proposals - like those to cut spending on failed weapons systems or agricultural entitlements - fell under attack by the Democratic leadership (the Republican response goes without saying). With real battles looming on heath care and pension entitlements, this early data suggests that the prospect of meaningful reform is dim.

I have never been more proud to be an American than I was on the day Obama won the presidency, and The Post-American World suggests there is good cause for continued optimism about our society and our role in a changing world. I have total faith in our economy to right itself no matter what fiscal interventions are (or are not) thrown at it. My greatest hope is that just enough of the idealism and ethics of the Obama administration trickles down through the body politic to enable the concessions and compromise required to ensure that optimistic future.

Trendwatch: Mobile + cloud + personal information management

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 supplanted by open-source operating systems (e.g., Android) and independent software vendors (ISVs). In her words:

"...Google used WebKit to separate the software from the machine. If others do the same, that makes it more feasible to use cheaper chips and open-source operating systems to build out mobile computers in a variety of shapes and sizes...

"As consumers become more comfortable accessing programs in the cloud and storing their documents there, the familiarity of the Windows operating system becomes less relevant for the consumer, and developers can instead build programs designed to run in the cloud...

"... for application developers it means they could build an app without paying over a chunk of their revenue to an app store or going through an approval process."

This is an exciting trend for anyone who loves to see the marketplace of ideas triumph over centrally-controlled models of innovation - the iPhone developer gold rush will become just the tip of the iceberg if this future plays out as projected. But the trend will also add urgency to the problem of personal data mining, or what folks in the storage industry call Information Lifecycle Management (ILM).

As consumers come to rely on an increasingly fragmented array of web-based services to run their personal and professional lives, they'll need smarter "glue" for pulling all those disparate data stores and transaction histories into a unified view that they can mine for information. The Decho approach assumes that most of this data currently resides on the PC desktop, but rumored services like Google's MyStuff idea (particularly in its latest iteration) seem like a more logical solution: a meta-index of personal content scattered across the Web that can be analyzed and queried as if it were a unified whole.

I often have to remind myself that the future never arrives as soon as I expect it to, but these intertwined trends feel like they have real momentum, owing largely to Apple's runaway success with the iPhone, iPod Touch and AppStore. Every web bigco, device maker, mobile carrier and ISV wants a piece of the mobile web opportunity that Apple has blown wide open, and the battle has barely begun.

Interesting teaser from Mike Arrington re: Personal Data Mining

This mention of a possible revival of Google's MyStuff idea caught my eye. I've been interested in the idea of a persistent personal data archive for a while now, and Google's a natural for it. I was initially optimistic about EMC's plans for Decho (their combined acquisitions of Mozy + PI Corp), but if so they're keeping the project under pretty tight wraps.

The most encouraging thing about Arrington's take (which is still just a rumor, not a confirmed product announcement) is that Google is now thinking of this as an aggregator for files stored across the Web (vs. requiring the user to store all files with Google). That's a much more sellable value proposition to users as it has the potential to deliver significant value with minimal behavior change.

Keeping an eye on this one...

The Mobile Web: Echoes of Web 1.0?

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 examples (and I'd love to hear more from anyone out there):

• Apps = Websites. In Web 1.0, the website was the unit of currency; today it's iPhone apps. Tech-savvy folks build them, early adopters share and collect them, and businesses pop up to help both groups play their role more effectively.
  
  
• Build / Ship Friction Falls. The first days of the Web was a hand-coder's world, with virtually no packaged software or developer toolkits available for what was then a tiny market. As the economic potential of the market became apparent, new services and software players emerged with the net effect of driving barriers to entry toward zero.
  
  
• Distribution Friction Rises. As the number of / diversity of available websites exploded, progressive layers of discovery tools emerged and failed, only to be replaced by the next-most scalable solution: from volunteer / amateur directories (e.g., DMOZ) to commercial directories (e.g., Yahoo) to search (e.g., AltaVista, Google), to ??.
  
  
• Brands Rush In. In the late '90s it suddenly dawned on a broad swath of incumbent brands (retailers, manufacturers, etc.) that their customers were looking for them online. To anyone in the Web application development business (as I was at the time), customers were everywhere and billing rates were whatever the market could bear. I haven't yet seen the flood of brands hit the iPhone, but early adopters are there and I'll be very surprised if the same cycle doesn't play out here.
  
  
• Customer Acquisition is The Hard Part. Google is a great business precisely because the Web is such a sprawling mess. There are too many websites chasing the same customers' attention for anyone to decisively "win" online, so the business that controls the firehose of customer demand can extract maximum rents for pointing it in a specific direction.
  
  Right now the App Store holds that slot for the mobile Web, but Apple is a deeply conflicted party (Google's bright line separation between discovery - search - and promotion - ads - is at the heart of their continued dominance in Web search) and developer frustration at Apple's many-headed role is growing daily.

The analogy isn't perfect, and the line between mobile apps and websites will continue to blur (as it has in the PC software vs. web applications world), but it's fascinating to observe the parallels and try to pick the vectors worth betting on. I'm particularly interested to see how things change when all the competing smartphone platforms + app stores (e.g., Android, BlackBerry, Palm, Symbian, WinMo) come on line and the smartphone device footprint expands meaningfully beyond iPhone. Bring it on!

Website 4 Sale! EZ Monee! Work From Home!

If you've been following the Askablogr saga, this is the final chapter. I've had a ton of fun with the project and it was a useful conversation-started in the early days of Founders Co-op, but I've gotten too busy to give it much love and don't think about it except once a month when I get the hosting bill.

So Craig and I have decided to complete the cycle and put the site up for sale on eBay. If you're in need of a blog Q&A widget service - and you know you are - come on down and make a bid!

P.S. - the title is a *joke* (it is April Fools, after all) but the auction is 100% for real. In the interest of full disclosure, the site generates about $2/mo in AdSense revenue and costs $34 in hosting fees, for a net monthly deficit of $32.