Experience > features
“The era of competing over technical specifications is over. Users want better experiences from devices, applications, websites, and the offline services they enable.”
It’s not a question of being in favor or against or how you define marriage. It’s just from a civil point of view, government should not get involved with who you love, who you live with, who you marry. And I was pleased to see the president enunciate the similar view, and my hope would be that Governor Romney also evolves and understands that in this country there are people who are violently opposed to it.
I Like Mike
Michael Bloomberg (via capitalnewyork)
(via fred-wilson)
YouTube
There have been a bunch of very successful exits for companies that have built businesses on top of AdWords and AdSense. I’m predicting that we’ll see a lot of the same for companies that build on top of YouTube. It opens up all kinds of new signals, content, and monetization opportunities and it’s rapidly becoming the major content destination online. And, better yet, no one has realized this yet.
Urban Airship and Geolocation
This is a great read. It’s also interesting to see how the rhetoric around what this enables parallels much of what is said around various display advertising targeting strategies. It’s interesting to contemplate a future where you’re demographic profile is not inferred by where you go online, but where you go in real life. Kinda creepy, but immensely powerful.
Lots of wise words from Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures on the state of the industry. He has a lot of interesting things to say about SMBs, scaling online and local businesses, and the differences between this boom and the last. If you have 45 minutes, check out this interview.
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Angry Birds Lunchboxes
There is a tremendous amount of focus on what is changing for movies, music, and TV. Their distribution models have been upended over the past 10 years and they’re all adapting now. However, it’s important to understand the ecosystems that spring up around popular brands that originate on those platforms. I remember having t-shirts, action figures, you name it, for my favorite cartoon characters. There’s a lot of money in that industry, and a lot of complicated power dynamics between content owners and manufacturers. This article on Pandodaily highlights how that whole ecosystem is changing when content brands start inside of an app like Angry Birds or Cut the Rope. It’s a very important read.
