Musings of a VC in NYC

S4 Running Stock Android

Google announced so many things yesterday that it makes my head spin. Goodness all around in Google land.

But there is one thing that really caught my eye. Google will start selling a Galaxy S4 running "stock android" in the Play store on June 26th.

When folks ask me what Android phone to buy, I am always torn between the S4 which I believe to be the best Android handset in the market right now and the Nexus 4 which runs stock android but has no LTE support (the phone I currently use).

Now, or at least in a month or so, I will have a good answer. Get the S4 running stock android. If you can afford it. It's $650 unlocked.

A Day Late And A Dollar Short

So RIM has decided that it is time to make Blackberry Messenger (BBM) cross platform. They announced yesterday that by this summer BBM will be available on iOS and Android.

The time to do this was in 2008/2009 when BBM was huge and everyone was on it. The core users were beginning to leave for iOS and eventually Android and if RIM would have let them take BBM with them, they would now own the biggest cross platform messenger out there. BBM is great and everyone knew how to use it and was comfortable with it.

But RIM execs waited four years to make this move. When BBM hits iOS and Android this summer, they will face dozens of cross platform apps that people use to message each other, one of which is in the USV portfolio. My bet is this won't help RIM or BBM much at this point.

This is a classic case of the innovator's dillemma. RIM felt that letting BBM out in the open would make it easier for Blackberry users to leave. So they kept it proprietary. For way too long. Now they no longer have a dominant smartphone franchise or a dominant mobile messenger franchise.

You cannot fight innovation and opening markets. You have to go with the flow and adapt to the new reality.

Feature Friday: Hack Your Home Screen

I was hanging with Gabriel Weinberg, founder and CEO of our portfolio company DuckDuckGo yesterday. I was lamenting that I could not replace the Google search widget at the top of my android home screen with the DuckDuckGo search widget. Gabe said "you can use Nova Launcher to do that."

I had not heard of Nova Launcher but immediately downloaded it (and the premium upgrade too). Gabe showed me how to replace the standard google launcher with Nova Launcher. He started to show me all kinds of cool things you can do with Nova (like create new gestures) but I waved him off because my head was already spinning with all the cool stuff that Nova lets you do.

For now, I have just used it to hack my home screen. I have changed the grid so I get one more column and one more row. And I have replaced Google at the top with DuckDuckGo:

If you want to customize your android experience a bit more than Google allows, get Nova Launcher. I am going to learn to do all the stuff Gabe does with it and may report back again. I might even turn my phone into a drone :)

Evidence On Our Smartphones

This line in the New York Times this morning is interesting:

investigators scrutinized scores of videos and photographs from surveillance cameras from nearby businesses, as well as from marathon spectators’ smartphones and television crews that were filming the Boston Marathon

It made me think of this image from the inaugural ball:

At any major event, people are going to have their smartphones out capturing the moment. They might be taking photos and posting them to social media, they might be taking videos and doing the same thing. Or the images and videos might just stay on their phones.

Who knows whether all this crowdsourced footage will prove to be useful to law enforcement professionals in the marathon bombing case. But the mere fact that footage from spectators smartphones has been collected points to its potential value.

It is also true that communities like Reddit and 4chan are attempting to do this work themselves. Maybe they will source some interesting images that the investigators can use. Maybe not. I don't get too upset about the potential for vigilantism here as I am not sure how they would all rise up and take justice into their own hands.

The rise of computers that we all carry with us everywhere, and their ability to capture what is going on around them, time stamp it, and geotag it, creates a ton of interesting opportunities. Including law enforcement opportunities. And I think that is a good thing.

Bluetooth

I have written about Bluetooth before. I am very bullish on Bluetooth even though its an old protocol that has its challenges. It may not be as potent as Airplay and DLNA but I feel like its ubiquity and familiarity make up for some of that.

I use Bluetooth every day to stream music from my phone to my home entertainment system and my car entertainment system. It works great for that.

And last week, I installed a Bluetooth wireless webcam in the Gotham Gal's office. I was concerned about video quality and latency. And they are both issues, but she using the webcam on her conference table to skype and hangout and it works fine for that. It's actually really cool to think about the power of a webcam without wires. I can imagine a lot of applications for that sort of thing.

And I am seeing more entepreneurs walking into our office these days with new smart uses of Bluetooth technology than ever before. It's the power of a standard at work. It is evolving and being adopted for more and more uses. Which in and of itself makes it stronger and more useful.

Feature Friday: Pick A Song

Our portfolio company Turntable launched their second product yesterday, called Piki. I saw this comment about Piki in a blog post and posted it to my Tumblr:

If you imagine Twitter not for tweets but for songs, you'll arrive at something like Piki.

In Piki parlance, a tweet is a pick. You pick a song and post it to your feed.

Here is my piki feed.

I have been using Piki in private beta for several months and it's quite good. I am listening to Piki right now as I write this post.

Piki is publicly available for iOS and the web app remains in private beta for a few more weeks. Android is next.

And sadly, because the music industry makes it this way for developers who choose to work with them, it is only available in the US right now.

If you are in the US and have an iPhone, give picking a song a try. You can download Piki here.

Feature Friday: Places People Go Next

I'm a data geek. I love data. And I love it when companies do interesting things with data, particularly my data.

So a few weeks ago, I was stunned to be told by Foursquare that the ice cream shop I had just stepped into was the most popular place people go to right after the japanese restaurant I had just left. This is a new feature Foursquare has rolled out on Android and I expect will be in the next iOS build.

I call the feature "places people go next" and I think it is awesome. Here's a screenshot I took of my home screen right after I checked into the Shake Shack on Wednesday at lunchtime.

So after a burger and fries, you are either going to get tea at Argo or a beer at Live Bait. I would imagine it has a lot to do with what time of day it is.

In any case, this is the kind of thing you can do when you have a dataset of billions of checkins from tens of millions of people all over the world. It's not just that you have the data, it's what you do with it, as Om so elegantly says in this post.

With new data driven features like "places people go next" coming out fast and furious these days, I am loving Foursquare more than ever. 

Mobile App Deep Linking

Twitter announced some new functionality in its Twitter Cards platform yesterday. At the top of the list is "mobile app deep linking". Here's how Twitter explains it:

With mobile app deep-linking, users will be able to tap a link to either view content directly in your app, or download your app, depending on whether or not they have your app installed. To enable this feature, you just need to add a new set of markup tags, explained here.

This might not seem like much, but it's a big deal and something I've been encouraging Twitter and others to do for some time. It is particularly helpful for e-commerce apps where sending someone to a mobile web page where they are not logged in pales in comparison to sending them to a mobile app where they are logged in with their payment credentials stored and ready to be used in a transaction.

For many ecommerce and marketplace businesses, this will be a huge help in delivering transactions instead of page views. I am sure there are a host of other application types where getting a logged in user instead of a logged out user will be super helpful.

Kudos for Twitter for getting this out.

Content Marketing Simplified

There is a growing market out there for content marketing. Not the old fashioned kind where magazine companies would create custom magazines for brands, marketers, and retailers. I am talking about the Internet version in which brands, marketers, retailers and other businesses create blogs, twitter accounts, facebook pages, and the like and then spend money filling those pages with content. Many brands have full time employees creating this content. Others use third parties and even freelancers to do it.

In many ways I see this as the future of online marketing. Instead of paying tens of millions of dollars a year (or more) creating banner ads and paying to run them on pages filled with someone else's content, marketers can create their own web and mobile presences and use the most efficient form of advertising, pay per click advertising, to drive traffic to these pages and then engage in a conversation with their customers and potential customers.

I like to think of this as moving the message from a banner to your brand and changing the engagement from a view to a conversation. It also helps that this approach works better on mobile where we are spending more and more of our time every day.

At USV we have quite a few companies engaged in this world of content (or conversational) marketing including Twitter, Tumblr, SoundCloud, Disqus, Zemanta, and GetGlue. Based on what I am seeing from these companies, marketers are responding quickly to the opportunities presented by content marketing and the market is growing rapidly. That makes a lot of sense to me.

If I Had Glass

The Verge has a post up that says the winners of the If I Had Glass campaign are largely Twitter users with big follower counts and links to a list of all winners. Sadly, my twitter account is not on that list. Back on February 20th, I saw the campaign launch and immediately tweeted this out:

#ifihadglass I would wear them on the subway too

— Fred Wilson (@fredwilson) February 20, 2013

I wasn't joking, although it was a reference to Sergey's subway ride. I will wear my glasses on the subway when I get them. If you want to invest in the services that are going to be built for these devices, then you need to own these devices.

Fortunately I know a few winners and I will get my hands on Glass early on. But if anyone at Google is reading this, I'd love to buy a pair of my own.