Robi Ganguly’s Big Ideas

I’ve been heads down, fighting the calendar as I try to push out progress across 5+ projects. It’s pretty easy to get caught up in actions without spending time to reflect and write. I’m taking a few minutes this Sunday to share some things that I’ve read and that have made me think the past few weeks, particularly around the topic of digital communications and “social”, along with my thoughts:

• Howard Lindzon and Stocktwits are creating the “Social Finance Graph”: I love watching Howard build Stocktwits, it’s incredibly useful from a learning perspective and exciting as someone who likes the markets and investing. If you’re similarly inclined, you should be on Stocktwits and paying attention and even if you’re not, you should heed this comment:
  • “Mark Zuckerberg believes that he owns the social graph. I think there will be MANY social graphs – especially as social networks form around verticals such as finance.

I would add to this that I think this idea of “ownership” of the social graph is largely an invention in order to make the concept more simple and easy to discuss for pundits/journalists etc. The reality is that ownership of the social data is ours. As participants, we’re providing the largest amount of data, through our connections and actions. There will be winners who enable and host that data and build utility for us, but there is very little likelihood that any one company ends up “owning” all of our data. I believe that the nature of human dynamics makes it basically impossible for any one company to end up “owning” this data. I know that “Facebook is building a social platform” but so are Twitter, our telecoms carriers, our ISPs, Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, Cisco, eBay, Skype and hundreds of others – there’s simply too much opportunity here for any one company to “own” it.

• Derek Sivers wrote something simple and excellent: Obvious to you. Amazing to others. If you’re looking to create, stop thinking about why your creative ideas aren’t novel enough and just focus on the creating. Put your ideas and work out there, share it. You might just find that others are blown away by what you think is obvious.
• Joshua Brown (the Reformed Broker) writes about the value of knowing and telling your story. He’s right, it’s important to be able to clearly communicate who you are, what you’re doing and how you can be of help to others. It’s the first step in helping them out, really.
• A number of folks tweeted this out: Playboy released an interview with Steve Jobs from the 80’s. His analogy about the difference between the telephone and telegraph is excellent and it’s incredible to see, in retrospect, his vision for the future and his understanding of the business. It’s a long but worthwhile read. For example, a quote from him about building a product:
  • “Actually, making an insanely great product has a lot to do with the process of making the product, how you learn things and adopt new ideas and throw out old ideas.”
• With the release of Facebook’s take on email, there’s been a resurgence of discussion about the nature of our digital inboxes and this piece from Alexia Tsotsis at TechCrunch does a good job of highlighting the inbox overload most of us are facing. I’ve been thinking about this problem so long that I often find myself falling victim to the problem that Derek Sivers wrote about: this all seems so obvious. As a person, I am faced with wayyyy too many digital communications channels to choose from. Not only do I have to choose which ones work for me, I have to try and guess about the channels that the people I’m trying to reach out to are using. It’s no shock that I often choose incorrectly. We’ve got a deteriorating situation and as far as I can tell, none of the current approaches is looking at solving the entire range of problems.
  • For some more interesting conversation on this topic, take a look at Howard Lindzon and the CEO of ReturnPath, an email deliverability company. If you want to understand the business of email and why it’s got nowhere but up to go, you HAVE to watch this: http://www.stocktwits.tv/stocktwits-with-howard-lindzon-102010/ 
• I’ve been really enjoying this series from a designer on Social Software. Some really great thoughts on the design of social software and actions that people take in various contexts. The level of detail and level of thinking is extraordinary.
• Finally, I enjoyed Dave McClure’s take on competing with Facebook. He makes 3 key assertions that I think are an elegant way of breaking down how social works for people and how there are big obvious gaps between how people work and what Facebook is building.
  • Assertion #1: Facebook doesn’t get Intimacy.
  • ASSERTION #2: The stuff that’s really valuable in my social graph tends to the extremes — very public (ex: Twitter) or very private (ex: email).
  • ASSERTION #3: Intimacy depends on Context, Connection, & Continuity…  which determine Closeness… and ultimately, drive Commerce.
  • Finally, he closes it with “Because Facebook has chosen to emphasize growth over monetization these past few years, they have de-prioritized close, meaningful connections over broadly relevant ones with a larger group of friends.  While this will help them get to a billion users faster, and increase their share of brand spend on advertising (where Facebook is really killing it these days), it may create vulnerability to another social network player who focuses on a more tightly-defined social graph with only a few, specific & meaningful Intimate relationships.”

For those of you with a strong enough attention span to make all the way down here, I’d like you to give me your answer to a question I have, just leave it in the comments:

What is your favorite communications channel and what is your most frequent communications channel? If they’re different, why are they different?

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Hilarious video of what happens when a brand really dominates a consumer’s brain.

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An excellent presentation on what CEOs should be thinking about when it comes to design. Some excellent points in here about focusing on user flows, getting out in the field and “design thinking”. To quote from the preso, design thinking is:

The essential ability to combine empathy, creativity and rationality to meet user needs and drive business success.

Take a few moments and step through this, I guarantee you’ll find some helpful and thought-provoking nuggets.

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Some great humor, some snarky Jay Leno comments and some fantastic insights from a man who’s built a massive personal brand and now understands his ability to continue growing it online

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In the past few weeks we’ve seen something new from Steve Jobs: an interest in communicating with “the commoners” using digital communications channels like email and blogging. First, it was the email he sent in reply to a developer about the iPhone OS 4.0 release and then last week it was a letter on the corporate website, talking about Flash. Now, I haven’t looked into this extensively, but it seems to me that he’s taking a bit more of an open stance towards communicating with the world at large about Apple decision-making.

Importantly, the letter on the Adobe issue was indicative of his interest in communicating with developers about what’s going on behind the scenes. The Jobs who lost the PC developer war to Microsoft refused to do this. It looks like he might have learned a few things. I highly recommend reading the entire letter from Jobs, but in particular, this paragraph is highly informative. For those of you looking to understand the strategy Apple’s employing and how they think about their business, here it is, quite concisely (emphasis on the devices piece is mine):

Our motivation is simple – we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever seen. We want to continually enhance the platform so developers can create even more amazing, powerful, fun and useful applications. Everyone wins – we sell more devices because we have the best apps, developers reach a wider and wider audience and customer base, and users are continually delighted by the best and broadest selection of apps on any platform.

And just for a bit of fun, if I was on the team at Apple really focused on the developer platform and its adoption, this might be my theme song right about now:

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I love it when investors, of any ilk, recognize that they have an area that makes sense to them and that they focus on it. Many investors try to be good at too many strategies and too many industries (I’ve been guilty of taking this approach, myself) and as a result, really dilute their efficacy and ultimately, their returs.

Mike Maples Jr., seems to have his approach well understood and in this video, from the Future of Funding event, he elaborates on why he looks for, “Thunder Lizards”, what they are and why the market matters more than the team.

Thunder Lizard by Mike Maples Jr. from Adeo Ressi on Vimeo.

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On the heels of their lead singer’s Op-Ed in the New York Times, Ok Go’s new video is predictably awesome. And look, it’s embeddable! I’m guessing there was some orchestration here on the part of the label and the band, but whatever the case may be, it’s damned entertaining, isn’t it?

UPDATE: Here’s a Wired piece on how the video and the “Rube Goldberg” machine came together. Tons of work, lots of planning.

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I know, I know, this is my second lengthy video in a row, but this is also a really great piece of video that I’ve been meaning to share out.

I’ve been following Gary V. for about a year now, seeing how he markets himself and his business. I’ve been impressed with his energy, enthusiasm and his really impressive grasp of how to use the Internet to communicate with people and build an audience. The theories in my head often play out, in the real world, through his actions. Watching him gets me fired up to go get more real shit done, so hopefully watching this interview might have the same impact on you

(PS: By the way, he’s not bullshitting about his work ethic and getting through his email. I emailed him recently and heard back within a day, it was pretty shocking.)

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Finally got around to watching this excellent Charlie Rose interview of Marc Andreessen from February and I highly recommend taking the time to watch it yourself. Shut off your TV and take in some thoughtful discussion about:

• Facebook/Twitter/Ning/LinkedIn and what it means to be socially connected in today’s digital environment
• Why Andy Grove and Jeff Bezos are alike
• Why Marc praises Bill Gates, rather than badmouthing him
• What it means for newspapers that they continue to get 90% of their revenues from print (hint, it’s a big obstacle)

Marc’s a very smart guy who’s been part of much of the Internet’s development and evolution. If you’re at all involved in online business and innovation, I highly recommend the 54 minutes.

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Windows support.

That’s right, they should support Windows – for developers.

Update: While Apple has yet to offer Xcode on Windows, there have been lots of developments to really accelerate the process of application development. From meta app building technologies to incredibly sophisticated development studios, the game has changed and some of my assumptions below have been proven wrong. However, that’s why I’ve started building an iOS feedback system for app developers, with solutions on Mac OS X as well. The world is sprinting towards infinite consumer software and we’re helping developers stand out in the sea of apps .

What Apple is doing with its App Store and the iPhone OS revisions is creating the market for developers who create and sell mobile apps… on Apple’s platform of course. Learning from the PC battles, they’ve quite obviously focused on the idea that more apps = more ways to meet consumer needs and therefore, it should result in more revenue for Apple from their primary customers: Consumers.

Given that dynamic, it makes very little sense that only those with Apple machines (and yes, some folks on Unix/Linux..) can develop iPhone applications. Since the predominant operating system is Windows, doesn’t it make sense that you should support all of the developers who are on Windows? (I know, I know, since when does Apple make sense to anyone but themselves?)

In all of the blogs and reporting covering the lead-up to today’s announcement, I’ve been pretty shocked that this issue hasn’t been turned into a larger piece of the conversation. Apple’s addressable developer market is MUCH smaller than it could be. Ultimately, the other players in the market are all going to be competing for developers alongside Apple.  Although Apple’s device and platform might be much better, if they’re not supporting Windows developers, they won’t be tapping into the largest pool of developers.

What’s really interesting about this glaring lack of Windows support is how easily we can draw parallels between this situation and previous Apple products and their associated growth. If we just pull up the unit sales charts for the iPod and for Mac computers over the past several years we can point to inflection points that coincided with providing support for Windows.

Here, take a look at the iPod sales chart:

On October 16, 2003, Apple announced the release of iTunes for Windows, which meant that Windows PC owners could now purchase and manage their iPods (http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2003/oct/16itms.html).  I’ve highlighted that quarter above and while I won’t say it was the ONLY thing that led to a change in the iPod’s sales trajectory, it certainly would appear to have coincided with a new sales trend. Up until that point in time, the iPod was really just a blip on the MP3 market radar.

Next, let’s take a look at the sale of Mac Computers:

During the first week of April, 2006, Apple announced that it would release a piece of software it called “Bootcamp” on its Intel-powered computers. Bootcamp was meant to enable the use of Microsoft Windows on Macs, a pretty wild idea at the time. I decided to purchase some Apple stock, based on that announcement, hypothesizing that it would increase the addressable market for Apple computers and boost their sales. Taking a look at the absolute growth in units sold, that hypothesis has been proven out nicely ☺ (note, I no longer own that stock).

I want to be clear: I don’t think it’s fair to attribute either iPod or Mac sales growth solely to Windows-related accessibility. Instead, I’d like to suggest that being accessible via Windows is clearly beneficial and could prove to be transformative to Apple’s ultimate goal: iPhone and iPhone-related sales.

As an investor, an iPhone owner and someone who’s working on mobile app development, I look forward to the day when Apple looks at these realities and agrees with me .

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