April 30th, 2012



Text it to Me – My Favorite Sleeper Feature

The emergence of O2O startups (the lazy person’s acronym for online-to-offline) has created a much-needed bridge for the wealth of digital information into the real world.

But from a product perspective, the interaction between online and offline is not yet seamless. You find a new coffee shop you want to try, but then how do you get the address to your phone? Maybe you save it somewhere, but it’s usually like 5 clicks into an app. There’s a deal you want to buy, but your credit card isn’t saved with this particular daily deals app. You buy a bus ticket, but then have to search in your email to actually pull up the ticket to show the driver. You see an article about some new app you want to download, but then promptly forget about it.

It’s clunky.

My favorite solution currently is the “text-it-to-me” feature. For example, check out the OnSports website. While I don’t know the numbers on this, I bet a ton of people use this feature (especially since it’s really the only thing you can do on their website). The user gets an easy way to interact with the service on his/her phone, and the owner/developer/entrepreneur is able to collect mobile phone numbers for people interested in the product.

Most people use their mobile phones for just-in-time information – where is this place I am going to right now, what emails have I received in the last hour, etc. and the usage numbers around SMS are insane. Some of the most successful startups have figured out how to leverage existing communication mechanisms to build an active user base, and while SMS has been used in the past for this sort of thing, I can’t help thinking that it has been under-utilized and there’s so many creative ways to take advantage of SMS that have not yet been explored.

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April 29th, 2012



The Art of the Playlist

Something really missing in social music right now is a great, sublime, amazing playlist experience. I use playlists primarily as a way to discover new artists or to assign a soundtrack to a certain mood. While usually I make my own (was a huge maker of mix CDs back in the day), I do like to listen to playlists made by others. That said, so far it has been extremely tough to find the gems because the bulk of playlists are mostly bad or lame. Perhaps the best example of a sweet playlist is the Hype Machine Zeitgeist, which unfortunately only comes out once a year.

Want to point out, though, that applying blanket “social filtering” is not the answer (point echoed by Hunter Walk over the weekend). While social filtering is helpful, I am not sure it is the “killer app” in this harder-than-we-though playlist challenge.

This challenge made me think of Muxtape, the NYC-based mixtape startup from 2008 (a small remnant is still available here). Currently playlists are a feature within the major music services, and it made me think about whether a stand-alone service built only around playlists is still a relevant request in 2012. Do we have room in our lives for yet another music service? Muxtape was amazing in a pre-Spotify/Rdio world, and I think its simplicity is more relevant than ever.

That said, there is still the question of filtering, search and curation. Now that the content has mostly become free (not free as in $0, free like a bird…a big change since 2001 and even 2008), I am hoping to see a lot of cool advances in the world of music filtering over the next few years.

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April 28th, 2012



An Overheard

A short one for you on this fine Saturday.

From a friend: “A lot of people hate on Microsoft but they are the only software company to ever make *two* products with over a billion users.”

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April 27th, 2012



Innovation Spaces

This thought starts with a cheeky, shortened version of online-to-offline, which will now be referred to on this blog as O2O (like H20, but not).

Online innovation is a space with massive growth potential and a large future in front of it. But perhaps even more exciting is the future of O2O-type businesses and initiatives that bring the digital thought process into offline endeavors.

This means innovative spaces. I have been wondering about this – the major scholars, some examples, the design process, and general thoughts around how to make a space innovation-friendly. It’s not simply just getting a bunch of sweet electronics and pimping it out that way, though that would be fun on its own, but rather the process itself. Or even simply the idea that a space on its own CAN be considered innovative. It’s easy to see why Steve Jobs had such trouble committing himself to furniture.

Spacial decisions aren’t like pixels – you can’t change and shift and fix and iterate until you’re happy. Nonetheless, it’s a new area of interest for me and if you have any resources – whether just some strong opinions, essays, or cool architecture porn, please feel free to send them my way (ap at amandapeyton.com).

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April 26th, 2012



The “Burner” Button

I am very curious to see what, if anything, happens with the Gawker “Burner” button that was announced today. While part of me is incredibly curious and excited – I am a huge supporter of anonymity and identity control within online communities – I also wonder what sort of dark stories and rumors and libel will be set free as a result.

And that’s just the thing – I think there’s this hesitation to really embrace anonymity as a crucial part of our growing digital community. There’s a time and a place for “the real you”, and it’s not everywhere, all the time.

But there’s a dark side to free speech that is really hard to defend. People can be assholes sometimes and even more so when hiding behind a computer screen and armed with a keyboard and a “Burner Button”. The Gawker crew has far more experience with the nuances of asshole-on-the-internet and this particularly bold move could result in a new type of insightful and useful commentary. Or there will be a surge in profanity, or probably both.

What we forget when we experience these trollish, disgusting, hurtful, dark-side-of-humanity moments is that they too represent a core societal value that we at least in theory all believe in. But it’s important to remember that while it sucks that people are mean, that is a problem with people, not the internet.

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April 25th, 2012



Twitter Gem: Everyone is a Publisher

I wish there was a better way to organize and view your favorite tweets. The feature is mostly hidden, and only a few people I know use it with any sort of frequency. And yet, there are so many gems. So many discussion starters, controversy, passion, h8, and humor.

This one comes from @bradfordcross from back in January, and to me it was an insightful and pithy way to summarize this “creation revolution” that is going to characterize the next few years in technology. More people making, saying, writing, commenting, photographing and creating.

I wonder how this truly fundamental shift will affect that standard sharing numbers across the web. The hard-and-fast rule was always that, in any system, 1% are the true creators, 19% passively create (press the like button, add a comment, post a few things), and the other 80% only consume. For more reading about this, check out Brad Feld’s post from back in 2006. Creepy to think that these numbers are nearly six years old.

Helping to find and shape a digital voice for creators is extremely non-trivial, and even if the creator ratio goes up to 5% or even 10%, that represents a MASSIVE MASSIVE shift in terms of pure numbers.

Git ready.

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April 24th, 2012



Mechanical Turk Adventures: Favorite Mobile Apps

I have been obsessed with Mechanical Turk since hearing about Aaron Koblin’s Sheep Market project. While these days crowdfunding might be hotter than crowdsourcing, the idea of a massive mob of remote workers to me will always be fascinating.

Mechanical Turk is part of Amazon and launched in 2005 and represents one of Amazon’s “inside out” businesses where they took a tool they used internally and turned it into a monetizable, publicly-accessible product. Amazon Web Services is perhaps the best example, though MTurk is a close second.

So today’s post is going to be an MTurk experiment. I posted a simple question: “What is your favorite mobile phone app and why?” hoping to collect a tiny, anecdotal sample of global thoughts around mobile phone applications. MTurk workers are all over the world, so I also asked the workers to list their handset.

You should know that the reward for each of these answers was $0.10 and I collected approximately 125 replies, ultimately rejecting around 10% because they were nonsense or didn’t answer the question. This study is *in no way* scientific. I was mostly looking for knee-jerk replies, and think I achieved that. Here are my 10 favorites verbatim and then some more general thoughts.

Answers have not been edited except for spelling.

1. I love my flashlight app, It is convenient and quick to function. The illumination is bright as well. (droid X)

2. My favorite mobile phone application is Bluetooth. I like this application because it is the best cordless data transfer technology between mobile phones irrespective of network connectivity. (Nokia 3500 Classic)

[note: Bluetooth? Really?]

3. I like the Pinterest App because I can use it when I’m waiting in line to keep me from getting bored and agitated from waiting. (Apple iPhone).

4. Tiny Tower is my favorite app, because it takes awhile to build up your income and if you want to max faster without cheating you have to setup a system to profit. I also like it because I don’t have to spend too much time on it, just check it once or twice a day after my building is high enough, one of my all time favorite game. (Apple iPhone)

5. My favorite mobile phone app is calculator as it help me to calculate when and where if it is necessary (Nokia c2).

6. My favorite app is ‘Draw Something’. It is my favorite app because it is simple, fun, and free. (HTC EVO)

7. My favorite mobile app is The Creeps. The simplistic Tower Defense game is intuitively controlled and pretty fun for a free price point. (Apple iPhone)

8. I enjoy the app Dismount on my phone. I can aim and throw my ragdoll character off of/into things one handed, it’s a nice little mindless game to pass the time while I’m feeding my kid with the other arm.

9. My favorite mobile phone app is Reddit is Fun. It allows me to browse Reddit, which has huge amounts of content and can keep me busy for hours on end (LG Optimus V).

10. My favorite mobile phone app is Star Walk. I love being able to pull up the sky anywhere in the world at that moment and see what is up there, especially at night. (Apple iPhone)

Lessons learned:

1. People LOVE Reddit. Approximately 10% of the replies listed some sort of Reddit app as the favorite. Perhaps this is related to the types of people that hang out on Mechanical Turk all day, though who knows.

2. Games were often listed as a favorite app. There were many replies that listed something like “…I use it when I am bored, for a few minutes at a time”. This came up over and over. To me, this spoke to the idea that the best mobile apps should require very little commitment time-wise.

3. Handsets were really, really mixed – no dominant brand.

4. Some respondents believed their handset WAS an app. I received around 10 responses that said “my favorite app is Samsung Galaxy” or “my favorite app is Android”. I re-worded the question to say “the brand of your phone is not an app” and that helped significantly.

There are probably more lessons to be learned here, and likely another post or two.

Hit me up on Twitter if you’d like to peep the data set.

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April 23rd, 2012



Will Podcasting Ever Be Huge?

Podcasting has been on the cusp of greatness since the invention of the smart phone and maybe even before.

While the audience is large and growing I wouldn’t say it’s something that is mainstream. Will it ever become huge and a key part of the zeitgeist or if there is something flawed about the platform and format itself?

While I am sure that e-reading will eventually eclipse printed books and digital movies and television will (or maybe have) eclipse DVDs and VHS, I am not sure the same argument can be made for podcasts and radio.

In that respect I would liken it to RSS, which was ultimately eclipsed by Twitters usability and filtering. Obviously in many ways Twitter is very different from RSS, though the intention is the same – help me consume content from my favorite sites in an easy way.

Perhaps the format and experience needs to be tweaked in the slightest of ways to create the watershed moment where we realize that we have been doing it wrong all along, or perhaps audio will never be able to achieve the same groundswell of support offered to videos, photo and text. I can’t say I buy this – people sit at their desks all day and listen to music (whether on the radio or otherwise) – and you don’t need the same kind of full-concentration with audio, making it almost more appealing.

The a-ha moment is coming.

——-
Special thanks to Joe West for help on this post.

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April 22nd, 2012



Data In, Data Out and Foursquare

Foursquare is going to change the text of the center button soon, I can feel it in my gut.

I had this realization today that my in-app behavior has shifted over the past few months. I am checking in less, but using the app more. The real gem of Foursquare in New York City is the “Explore” feature.

“Explore” is a lovely and truly understated technological breakthrough in that it is a recommendation engine that actually works. The more data you put in about yourself, the more spot-on recommendations come back out at you.

Recommendation engines are extrememly tough to pull off, even with dozens of geniuses and millions of dollars. It’s usally “give us a bunch of data and we’ll blow your mind, we promise” sort of sitautions where the hit rate is often pretty low.

Foursquare is one of the only examples that I can think of where it’s actually working really well (“people you may know” on Facebook is perhaps the best example, the more friends you add, the better the friend recommendations). Data in, data out.

So I am making an effort to put in more data and feed the beast. Today I conducted an extremely scientific sandwich poll on twitter and got back over 20 replies which I compiled into a foursquare list.

Hoping to do this a lot more often, and excited about the potential results and recommendations, both IRL and from the engine, that this produces.

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April 21st, 2012



Marketplace Tactics and the Free Airbnb Photo Shoot

I am starting a new type of post called “Inspired by Quora”, where I will write a post based on a Quora question I think is interesting. This particular question was “What are free Airbnb professional photo shoots like?”

First let me say that marketplace businesses/dynamics are absolutely fascinating. I could write like 20 posts on this and probably will since since I made this promise to really for reals write every single day.

I am a firm believer in optimizing for the seller in any marketplace scenario. If you have amazing inventory, buyers will find you. Feel free to rage about this in the comment if you don’t agree.

So in the case of Airbnb, that means they want to cater to those people listing apartments – get them to keep their calendars updated, and offer people considering a listing some carrot to get them to actually list their place. They were right to recognize that there is a certain mental hurdle in listing your apartment, and it is the same mental hurdle that keeps you from selling stuff you don’t need on craigslist, listing all your used books, etc. Listing anything on a marketplace site is a pain and if it doesn’t sell then you are even more frustrated.

The way that Airbnb solved this problem is by offering free photography. Someone literally comes to your apartment/house and you do nothing while they take amazing photos of your spot and upload them directly to Airbnb.

For me it totally worked – having the photos sitting there was enough to get me to complete the description. Ghost/incomplete/crappy listings on marketplaces (ahem ebay) are such a nuisance and a real drag on the user experience. By optimizing around great photos, the secret to lots of hotness right now in the tech world, they were able to create a more appealing marketplace in a market that was already filled with large players.

These small marketplace hacks really make a huge, huge difference for both buyers and sellers alike.


classic Airbnb photo – crisp, clear, enticing (also, not my house)

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