“More important than anything else is the look on people’s faces when you cross paths with them in the street, or in the store, or in the grocery line. You can always tell that you were—maybe still are, maybe always will be—a part of their family. Movies have this thing where it’s an event. You get dressed up, you go to dinner, and you go to the movies. You’re outside of your element. But with television, people are watching you in bed, at their kitchen table eating. You’re in their house.”
–Matt LeBlanc

Vanity Fair has this great longread “With Friends Like These” about the history of the Thursday night Juggernaut Friends. The pilot is nearly 20 years old, which is bananas. It’s a great read though, and more than anything shows the value of creating an open, creativity-encouraged environment and the difficulty and balance required in any sort of ensemble-affair.

Cherry *IS* fascinating.

For those unfamiliar, Cherry is a come-to-you car wash mobile app. The app marks your location and you send in a request. $30 later and your car is washed for you, tip included.

While what the business does is pretty cool (for all you car lovers), I think what it represents is actually more interesting. To me, Cherry has become the poster child for the Service Layer of the web. This “service-layer” exists above the application layer, and powers the person-to-person economy that has been growing slowly and is about to explode. How do I know it is going to explode? Just watch the money — Fiverr (announced last week), TaskRabbit, Zaarly, and Uber have all raised eight-figure venture rounds in the past 12 months. To me it’s a bit reminiscent of the mid-2000s social-networking boom, when everyone seemed to know that one was going to explode but it was unclear exactly which one.

While Cherry might not become the largest of these service-layer businesses, it is my favorite because of its elegance and simplicity. It does one thing in a large market really, really well (car wash market is $6b according to quick Google search).

What’s interesting is that I am not sure a business like this would have worked even as recently as 2009. Smart phones are getting faster and easier to use and as a result, these service-oriented businesses will have a much easier time getting to critical mass.

Additionally, the underplayed aspect of all these businesses is that the require pretty significant behavior change. It took *years* for ebay and craigslist to really take off because there was such an understanding gap about how the platforms could be used. Some of the more generalist platforms like TaskRabbit and Zaarly might run into this problem, but Cherry will likely not because it is so specific.

Although these service businesses will be harder to scale because of the very arduous and potentially messy offline component, that is exactly why they present huge opportunities.

Ultimately, there are incredible inefficiencies in the offline distribution of human capital. That is something we learned the first time around with the massive growth of web businesses, and something that we are going to learn all over again with mobile.

Now, if only they would come to Brooklyn and wash my car.

please enjoy this photo of a sudsy kuwait-based lambo (via googs).

The conclusion that I reached yesterday is that, despite the fact that a magazine is a magazine, I now believe that a stand-alone magazine and a magazine subscription are actually two different products with a different set of substitutes, creating a different mental model and perception of price around the exact same product.

Let me explain. Yesterday I went to a bodega and spent $26 on magazines to read without a second thought. While some of the mags I bought offer subscriptions for like $10/year, I wouldn’t consider subscribing. Am I going to buy more than two $6 magazines in a year? For sure, so economically it’s better for me to subscribe rather than binge buy.

But buying a bunch of magazines to sit and read on a Saturday is an activity, and the substitutes are expensive. Going out to brunch/dinner, seeing a movie, going to a museum, etc. All the obvious substitutes are in the above-$20 range.

Subscribing, though, isn’t really an activity as much as it is a media choice. The substitues there are significantly less expensive and sometimes even free. If you are making the choice to align with a specific publication, why wouldn’t you just read their website instead? There’s also the non-trivial guilt that comes with not keeping up with your issues, especially with weekly publications.

As a leisure product, the willingness to pay is much higher, even for the same product. As much as this is a cop-out, I don’t think we are ever going to find the best and most-optimized way to price media because the product itself is so malleable that we must be content to keep trying.

From what I understand, Scumbag Steve was just your average wannabe white rapper with a MySpace page and an unfortunate photo. A reddit user finds the photo, adds some funny captions, and all of a sudden Scumbag Steve was on a tear across the internets.

He was the wannabe rapper who comes to your parties draped in fake bling, drinks all your beer, and steals your friend’s wallet on the way out. Everyone knows a Scumbag Steve. Everyone.

Normally this would end up just like any other meme story – the actual real person from the photo might be somewhat traumatized and then would fade away. But not Scumbag Steve. He embraced the meme personality even though Scumbag Steve is a complete asshole. He took to educating other meme victims and has developed a little bit of wisdom in a space where there’s really none. He writes to Annoying Facebook Girl:

“Now don’t have your folks look for a meme support group for you, cuz there isn’t one. We’re out here by ourselves. You may feel hurt and embarrassed that somehow one of your friends or foes took that godawful picture of you (we know you really don’t look like that all the time, right?) and put it where the internet meme makers dwell. 4chan. Don’t go there, especially if your parents are looking….Now, if you do see a pic of me, try not to go all wifey on me but (scumbag joke, these memes can get inside your head) that too was a pic of me a little younger, looking like a scumbag. Let’s face it. The pics look pretty true to form.”

And in an ironic twist of internet wonderful, yesterday he releases an actual rap video and after a day it has crossed a million views. The meme becomes reality. Is there such a thing as a reverse meme, or has Scumbag Steve has just pwned the entire internet?

I am wondering when some dessert-related alcohol is going to come in strong with some inescapable Sriracha-like branding and just blow our collective minds. We’ll see it everywhere and begin ordering it with increased frequency. Like Merlot or Chardonnay, it will be a meme for a while and then disappear.

The consumer product market trends are incredible in the way they spread: greek yogurt, coconut water, 5 Hour Energy, etc. Nowhere and then everywhere. Dessert wine is ready – it’s an ignored category ripe for disruption and a part of the meal that people mostly ignore.

Random thoughts for random nights.

Also, happy early birthday Liz.

Couple that with the news today that a full 1/3 of the visitors to fab.com are on mobile devices and that Instagram has passed 50 million users and you can’t help but see the future of consumption-based businesses over the next 5-10 years.

The impromptu Mechanical Turk survey I put together last week made this even clearer — this idea that people mostly use their mobile devices for short bursts of consumption. The apps that have done the best on mobile so far – reddit, games, photo-related apps, Twitter, all are designed around passive consumption.

In this way perhaps the future of mobile is like the early days of television – just sit back and watch and you’ll be entertained. This idea of curation vs. creation is perplexing because I can’t decide if they are necessarily at odds, though I can’t help but wonder if, because it is hard to be an awesome creator on mobile, does it mean then that we about to enter into a period of hyper-consumption ushered in by our mobile devices? TBD.

Badoo is a treasure trove of weird/interesting product insights (click for some thoughts from 2010) and now they are advertising in the subway. It is on.

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.

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.