The Gong Show

Apple Becomes World's Biggest Maker of Computers, Thanks to iPad

parislemon:

Cue dozens of people screaming bloody murder: “THE IPAD IS NOT A PC!!!!!!!”

Cue millions of the rest of us laughing at those people.

Just as with the move from desktops to laptops, the transition to tablets (or “pads” as Canalys humorously refers to them) is underway.

“But, but, but… it doesn’t have a keyboard!” Yes it does.

“But, but, but… it doesn’t have a physical keyboard!” How’s that argument working out for RIM?

“But, but, but… it doesn’t run PC software!” Who gives a shit? Clearly not the people buying millions of the devices each quarter.

All you need to know about the “is the iPad a PC?” argument: are people buying them instead of traditional PCs? Sure looks like it. 

Update: Including two tweets (at Anthony Ha’s request):

Lot of response there (as expected). Main point: arguing over definition of “PC” is stupid and totally missing the actual point.

— MG Siegler (@parislemon) January 31, 2012

“PC” is about how people use and interact with computers, not what it looks like. Who cares what it looks like?

— MG Siegler (@parislemon) January 31, 2012

My $0.02: Of course iPads are computers.  Those people who say otherwise probably have not spent more than an hour using an iPad.

But, what’s scary about this milestone is the rate at which people are buying computers that do not come with root access.  And getting root will void your warranty (!). I’m certain in a couple years Apple won’t sell any computers that come with root, and then what will we all really own? 

Timehop

Personal data on the web is growing rapidly. More people are spending a greater percentage of their time social networking (time spent per user on social networking sites has grown over 300% in the last two years). Additionally, there are more people coming online for the first time every day, and, based on current usage statistics, 4 out of 5 of those new users will engage with social networking sites.

Despite (or because of) the fact that social networking data is growing wildly, the shelf life of any piece of social data is remarkably short.  It varies a bit by social site, but in my own personal experience, I find the shelf life of a piece of data on Facebook is about 8-12 hours, on Twitter it’s closer to 1-2 hours, on Tumblr it’s somewhere in between those two extremes, and so on. After a newly contributed piece of social data rolls off of people’s latest feeds, it lives in purgatory of obscurity.  It’s not deleted, but it’s rarely, if ever, referenced again.  Some social data will become SEO honey pots (like the downed USAir flight in the Hudson River posted to Twitter, which was widely circulated), but 99.99% of it will remain in existence, but without a purpose and will never be resurfaced.

This is an opportunity, and it’s one that I’m excited our latest investment at Spark is tackling.  Timehop, founded by Jonathan Wegener and Benny Wong, is a company dedicated to making old personal data relevant again by resurfacing it at opportunistic moments in the future. It’s not just limited to data from social services — users leave data trails everywhere they go, on every device they touch, and all that data is part of the big opportunity here. 

The product Timehop offers is a daily email that shows you what you did 1 year ago today, every morning.  It’s a daily dose of nostalgia that must be experienced first-hand to fully understand.  If you’re on the edge, the press (NYT, Wired) has already done a good job describing this experience, so I won’t retread their steps.

I’ve personally noticed that since using Timehop, I now check-in at venues more often and post more photos to Instagram, knowing that the data exhaust from my actions is being synthesized into a diary I’ll read a year from now.  Each update I make online now feels less fleeting; Timehop has created another reason for me to post.

I first came across Jonathan Wegener and Benny Wong when I saw them present onstage at the New Tech Meetup back in June of 2009. They presented a iPhone app called Exit Strategy, and I was totally enamored with their clean and simple product execution. You can watch them present here. I knew then these guys were extraordinarily talented makers, and I’m delighted now two and a half years later to have the privileged of working with them. I’m also excited that Bryce Roberts of OATV is a co-investor in the company.

If you have not done so already, sign up for Timehop and experience it for yourself.  Let me know what you think after a couple days of emails.

Internet… Oh Wow.

Today, the Internet wins.

First, the PIPA/SOPA blackouts and rallies all over the US produced the following outcome (as reported by the New York Times):

[A] senior Senate Republican leadership aide said the Senate version of the bill was dead in its current form, and bipartisan negotiations had begun to revise it considerably. Senators from both parties want to address the Internet piracy issue, but they acknowledged that issues raised by Google and its online partners would have to be addressed.

This is as good an outcome as I could have expected from a single day of political action.  Lets see how it plays out over the weeks to come and what modified bills are presented going forward.

AND THEN, I read the following from update from Amit Gupta, posted today:

superamit:

TODAY

… After over 100 drives organized by friends, family, and strangers, celebrity call-outs, a bazillion reblogs (7000+!), tweets, and Facebook posts, press, fundraising and international drives organized by tireless friends, and a couple painful false starts, I’ve got a 10/10 matched donor!

You all literally helped save my life. (And the lives of many others.)

You did it internet… you found Amit a bone marrow donor match.  

What a 1-2 punch.

Stop PIPA/SOPA Protest in NYC — Jan 18th

Join the NY tech community in a rally outside the offices of Senator Charles Schumer and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand tomorrow.  On January 18th at 12:30PM, the NY tech community is meeting up to protest at 780 Third Ave, NYC, and I strongly encourage anyone reading this to join in.

Senators Schumer and Gillibrand are currently supporters of SOPA, which is garbage. SOPA is dangerous to the growth of the internet.  It is censorship, and it shreds due process.  If you are not familiar with SOPA, here is a simple one-page explanation of why SOPA is dangerous.

Internet technology companies are one of the most exciting drivers of high-value job growth in NYC right now, and the fact that NY Senators are proponents of this harmful bill is an affront to their constituents.

Please join this rally.  The more people involved tomorrow, the better.

Privacy in Social Networks

Privacy in social networking is inconsistent and thus confusing.

In private social networks (FB, Path, etc…), the only people that should see your content are the people you explicitly permission as a friend.

But if you write a comment on a friend’s photo, that comment will be seen by all of the photo’s owner’s friends… Which could be tens of thousands of semi-strangers.

Or if your friend comments on your photo, that comment (and corresponding photo) will also reach that friend-of-friend semi-stranger group of people.

If you assume everything you write inside a private social network will be seen by people you don’t know and don’t trust, your content will likely be self-censored and less interesting.

But if private social networks really locked down every gesture and piece of content you make to only your explicitly defined friend network, the serendipity of finding interesting, unknown content to you would be significantly limited.

So private social networks try to walk a compromised line between truly private and semi-public, and the result is an inconsistent mental model for end users about who has permissions to see the stuff you create.

FB at one point tried to solve this problem by creating a mega permission options page with knobs and dials for every type of content that exists in their system. But this is not a solution… It simply pushes responsibility for the problem on to the end user. It is a cop out. It is lazy UX design.

I like the feature in Path where you can see exactly who has seen each piece of content you create. It’s a gentle reminder throughout the user experience how public you are being with the content you’re creating.

But, Path’s solution introduces a new problem… End users aren’t use to having their browsing habits told to their friends. What if I don’t want my friend to know I was browsing their photos on Path, especially if perhaps I have not yet responded to an important email from that same friend. The perception would be that I have time to browse Path but not answer their email?

Reporting my browsing habits inside Path to my friends makes a previously implicit gesture now explicit, which is the same thing FB’s newsfeed did, controversially, 4 or 5 years ago.

There isn’t a clean, simple design solution to the privacy model in social networks. I’m really excited to see how designers tackle this challenge over the coming years.

7thechelon asked: Hit there! I ran across a blog post stating you had a wicked spreadsheet for employee equity. I looked for it but could not locate it. The blog post Employee Equity: How Much? by MBA Mondays. Did you release it to the public or is it for private use?

Fred wrote this blog post that 7thechelon is referring to in this question over a year ago, and ever since then I get one or two requests a month for this spreadsheet.  I answer these requests in email, but I might as well cover the topic on this blog too.

The spreadsheet that Fred is talking about was a lot of fun to build, and I hope it added some value to the USV portfolio, but when I left the firm it was not in safe enough condition to share publicly.  It requires a soild hour of in-person explanation in order to drive it properly, and even then, there’s a good chance that a user could inadvertently break it and get unexpected answers that I fear they might rely on to make equity issuance decisions. That situation would _NOT_BE_GOOD_ (tm).  The spreadsheet is Fred’s property because I built it while at USV, and it’s his decision to do whatever he’d like with it.  I think it’s in the best interest of everyone to not release it in the form that I left it because the odds of using it to shoot yourself in the foot are too high.

Fred perfectly describes the methodology used to issue the appropriate amount of options to new employees in his post, and if you’re really interested in applying this methodology to your own company, he has already handed you everything you need to do so.  The spreadsheet he mentions isn’t going to get you any closer to your goal.