Is someone at HBS reading this blog?

A few years back I proposed (and only partly in jest) a "Hippocratic oath for business." This morning I read in the New York Times that a group of students at Harvard Business School had publicly made a similar pledge. I don't really expect this to sweep the business world by storm, but I applaud these students and the spirit in which they offered this pledge. The world needs more of this...

Android update: 2009 will be a big year after all

A while back I made a prediction that 2009 would be a breakout year for Google's Android project. With the mid-year mark approaching and no new devices shipped that bet was looking a little shaky, but today's announcements from the Google I/O conference put a little more weight behind my bullish view (phew).

There's been a ton of blog coverage, but this piece from the New York Times does a nice job of explaining both the handset picture and Google's rules / incentives for making their core services (mail, docs, etc.) the on-deck defaults. The bottom line:

• 18 new Android phones in market by year-end
• 5 or 6 of those will offer the full "Google experience"
• 12 to 14 will include some level of Google app integration

The next hurdle is to see how many of these phones ship - not just in the U.S., but particularly in some of the more exciting global markets (e.g., China, India).

iPhone app search and browse: there's a new one-eyed man in town...

"In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." - Anonymous

We just shipped a major upgrade to our search and browse functions at AppStoreHQ. It sounds crazy to say it, but as far as we can tell we now offer hands-down the most useful iPhone app discovery experience on the Web (not to mention the phone itself).

Want to know how many apps there are in the 'fart' category? Turns out a whopping 165 (!) apps match that keyword. What do they cost? Most (118) are priced between $0.01 and $0.99. How good are they (whatever that means)? Well, only four have a rating of 4 stars or more.

If you're curious about the iPhone app phenomenon and are looking for a way to slice and dice the data, AppStoreHQ is now the place to start. And if you know of a site that does it better, please leave a comment setting us straight.

P.S. - If you run an iPhone-centric blog or site and want to offer this same search experience on your domain, just give us a shout - we'd like to help.

Presentation (with updated data) on iPhone App Marketing

The guys at Madrona invited me to present the results of our iPhone developer survey on app marketing at a lunch today (thanks again, guys). Lots of great commentary & feedback in the session, and I promised to put the whole thing online...



If you're reading this in a feed reader and can't see the deck above, here's a direct link to the source presentation on Google Docs.

Startups, agility and the power of the franchise player

Ian and I have been having a ton of fun with AppStoreHQ - our mobile web app + developer discovery engine. We haven't been at it all that long, and at the moment it's just the two of us. But the other day we were reviewing our roadmap and backlog (which we track on two tabs of a Google spreadsheet) and Ian remarked:

"I think I've shipped more code in the past month than I did in three years at Amazon."

There are good reasons why big enterprises with lots to lose have to proceed cautiously with their development process. And moving fast and running lean can definitely cause trouble down the road, as hasty architecture decisions today cascade into time-consuming and risky fixes after complexity and load have scaled. But the sheer amount of software that one skilled dev can ship (especially with the help of a framework like Ruby on Rails) is truly astounding.

Last week we heard a great story from Urbanspoon on Tuesday and Ian turned it into a product by Thursday. Then the guys at Cooler Planet shared a tip on Friday and Ian shipped a riff on the idea today (if you don't want to follow the link, just check the widget below). And these opportunistic projects are on top of the usual load of core data, search and presentation work.

What's exciting to me about this model isn't raw speed-to-feature (no one ever won a competitive fight on features alone). It's the power of one agile developer who's comfortable working at any layer of the stack to turn ideas into working code almost as fast as you can come up with them. Because getting fresh code in the hands of customers is the most powerful way I know of to test ideas and figure out what works.

Given the scale of investments we make at Founders Co-op, we can't afford a lot of expensive specialists on our founding teams. We like to say we're looking for "franchise players" - guys (and girls) who have the skills, resourcefulness and confidence to make the product and business happen without asking anyone for permission. We have more projects like AppStoreHQ up our sleeves, so if you like to ship code early and often and have an interest in the startup life, give us a shout.

Find iPhone apps at AppStoreHQ

Learning from the best: Urbanspoon teaches AppStoreHQ a lesson

Find iPhone apps at AppStoreHQ
Two-thirds of the Urbanspoon team dropped by Founders Co-op for our weekly all-hands lunch this week, fresh on the heels of their acquisition by IAC. They shared the story of their journey from struggling Facebook app developer to iPhone app superstars, including some of the best (and worst) decisions they made along the way.

Urbanspoon did a *lot* of things right, but one in particular stuck in my head as relevant to our latest company: AppStoreHQ. Long story short, Urbanspoon made it possible for any blogger to get their restaurant reviews featured on Urbanspoon just by including a little widget they called a "Spoonback". The presence of a Spoonback allowed Urbanspoon to sift through the sea of food-related blog content and zero in on just those posts relevant to the restaurant in question. Urbanspoon got the benefit of including the freshest and most original review content on their site, while participating bloggers got exposure, traffic and links from one of the hottest restaurant review sites on the web.

We just completed an iPhone developer survey and one of the most-requested kinds of marketing advice sought by developers was how to get their app reviewed by influential bloggers. As soon as I heard the story of the Spoonback, I realized that we could help iPhone developers get reviews by creating a similar value proposition for bloggers who review iPhone apps. I sat down with Ian after lunch, and late yesterday he sent me a link to this page - our version of the Spoonback, but for iPhone apps instead of restaurants (you can see the badge in action at the top of this post).

Congratulations to the Urbanspoon guys on a great outcome for all their hard work and innovation, and thanks for sharing the story of the Spoonback.

Introducing AppStoreHQ - the 'Hype Machine' of mobile applications

As a die-hard music fan, I love The Hype Machine. For those that don't know it, The Hype Machine indexes the most influential music bloggers to identify which artists and songs are currently being discussed the most, and it's an amazing way to discover new music by tapping into the zeitgeist of some of the most thoughtful and passionate listeners out there.

As regular readers know, I'm also fascinated by what's happening with the mobile web: the rapid simultaneous revolution in device design, operating systems and mobile applications epitomized (but by no means limited to) Apple's iPhone and App Store. And if you squint a little it's not hard to find parallels between the popular music business and what's starting to happen with the App Store:

• Everyone wants to be a rock star (developer) - In one stroke Apple has broken the long-standing carrier monopoly on mobile software, and any competent developer can now create and (with Apple's blessing) distribute their app on the App Store. A lucky few have become the "rock stars" of mobile applications, making serious money and seeing their name in lights. Thousands more are hard at work, hoping to break into the big time. Most of these won't make it, but the dream is powerful.
  
  
• Consumers rely on tastemakers to know what to buy - There are too many apps from too many developers for consumers to easily find apps they're likely to enjoy. Apple is the uber-DJ, powering sales for an anointed few via their advertising, PR and hot lists within the App Store. But Apple's less-is-more approach to branding and UE means that most apps have to look for spins elsewhere on the radio dial.
  
  
• It takes more than great product to succeed - Because so many developers want to be rock stars and the App Store is currently the only place they can do it, the eye of the needle has gotten very small, very fast. Even the best rock bands need distribution and promotion to hit the big time, and that's now true for mobile apps as well.

Once I started seeing mobile apps through a music lens, the opportunity to create a 'Hype Machine for iPhone apps' was impossible to ignore. And since creating new companies is what we do here at Founders Co-op, we enlisted one of our developer friends as a co-founder and put together a working draft of that idea at AppStoreHQ. We've barely scratched the surface of our vision with the current product, but we're very excited about how much we've accomplished in a very short time and felt like it was time to start spreading the word.

So if you're an iPhone owner with an appetite for apps, take us for a spin and let us know if we helped you find something new. And if you're an iPhone developer with at least one app in the App Store, take a minute to fill out your profile (it's free) and let your app buyers discover a little more about the artist behind the music.

UPDATE: AppStoreHQ received a nice writeup this morning from John Cook at TechFlash - thanks for the shout-out, John.