Comment on The sweet spot for mobile apps by Technology Gadgets
Backlink: http://gigaom.com/2011/07/28/mobile-app-usage-time-of-day/#comment-643231
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Comment on The sweet spot for mobile apps by Technology Gadgets
I did not even know there was a survey to actually let us know what time are apps being used the most.. Very interesting information
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
The One Technology Google Is Holding Back (GOOG)
Google has been known for ambitiously developing technology that seems more science fiction than Silicon Valley, such as self-driving cars, but former Google CEO Eric Schmidt shared one technology he says is the only one Google has ever built, then withheld: facial recognition.
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See Also:
- Google Wallet: Handicapping Why It Will (And Won't) Work
- INSIDE GOOGLE: "In The Plex" Author Steven Levy Tells Us Everything
- Google Starts Including A Bunch Of Useless Flight Data In Search Results
The One Technology Google Is Holding Back (GOOG)
Friday, April 29, 2011
The Story Of The Greatest Shopping Technology That Never Was
Note: All information contained in this post is based on my best understanding and perception of what transpired. I have confirmed with the founders that none of the information contained herein is deemed confidential and is therefore fair game for me to share in this post.
In April 2008, I was introduced to Ugmode, Inc. (thanks to my advisor Terry Winograd). The founders of the company — Arlo Faria and AJ Shankar — were PhD students in Computer Science at UC Berkeley. Arlo and AJ had built a stunning new way of doing product discovery for soft goods. I define soft goods as the category of goods where you’re shopping based on the appearance of the goods (for example, shoes, clothing, sunglasses, watches, jewelery and furniture) rather than the specifications (most consumer electronics fall into this category). So far, almost every shopping website shows products either in an endless list of “Next Page” links (hint hint Amazon — you have so much room for improvement!), or by using keyword search, which doesn’t really cut it. Arlo and AJ had devised a way to use shape and color as the two axes that helped to discover soft goods.
Their site — Modista.com — started out with shoes. When you arrived on the site you saw a diverse set of shoes. You picked the one that was closest to what you wanted (for example beach flip flops vs. dress shoes) and then Modista used that shoe as the seed for showing you a new collection of shoes, sorted by color on one axes and shape on the other. The site automatically adjusted to any display size (anywhere from the iPhone to a 26″ widescreen display) to show you the maximum number of shoes possible. Each time you clicked on which one you liked and the site refined its selection of shoes based on your input.
It created a fabulous experience for browsing soft good inventory based on what you’re visually looking for. In the user’s mind he or she would be thinking, I want a red shoe, with high heels, but you don’t need to translate that into keywords, you just click on what you like till you get closer and closer to what you like. Progressive refinement at its best.
On the back-end Modista was doing some heavy duty computer vision and image similarity comparisons to produce these results in near real-time. As a two-person team Arlo and AJ built out the whole site and the back-end technology — and built it to scale — at one point they did a A/B test on Zappos and were easily able to handle all the traffic coming to the Zappos test site while being able to show results from the enormous Zappos inventory.
Modista was the perfect fit for K9. It was a team of two sharp Computer Science PhDs, they had core new technology in the form of the algorithms they ran in the back-end, and also core new technology when it came to the display of information. Their business model was to provide retailers with a new interface for shopping for soft goods — something that hasn’t changed a whole lot since Web 1.0. Modista had built Shopping 2.0.
I closely watched the company’s progress over several months and was in awe of the quality of the founders and their execution. On multiple occasions I expressed my interest to invest in the company. The first time I asked them what they needed, they said they just need to crank out code. And crank it out they did. On future occasions, whenever I expressed an interest to invest, the founders came back and told me that they had an acquisition offer on the table! This happened not just once, but multiple times. Every big company in the online retail space wanted to buy them at some point along the way.
One occurrence of this was in Q1/Q2 2009. Modista was in talks for being acquired by a major player in the retail space – Zappos.com. While Zappos was doing diligence on Modista, the issue was brought up that one of other companies in this space — Like.com, founded by Munjal Shah — had filed for some IP in this area. Modista had been forewarned that Like.com had a “history of being litigious”. While I cannot be certain of what the actual reasons were, my speculation is that Zappos didn’t want to rock the boat by going through with the Modista acquisition, because concurrently with their discussions to acquire Modista, they themselves were engaged in discussions to be bought by the 800-pound gorilla in the space — Amazon.com.
In August/September 2009, the founders and I agreed to work together to raise a round of financing for the company. I helped introduce the company to various angels and lead the effort to form a syndicate for their fund-raising round. We pulled together about $600K of commitments and interest, for a $500K-target financing round.
As I mentioned, Modista’s closest big competitor in the space was Like.com. Like.com was already aware of Modista, and, (I believe) was also aware of the fact that Arlo and AJ were out trying to raise money. The day before we were supposed to sign the term sheet for the investment, Like.com sued Ugmode (the parent company of Modista.com) for patent infringement. Apparently, Like.com had a patent (‘610 patent) issued about two months before in the broad area of using computer vision for product search.
In my opinion, this is a patent that should never have issued in the first place since there is a lot of prior art in the space, including a lot of academic literature that should have (again, in my personal opinion) invalidated the Like.com patent to begin with.
To Arlo and AJ’s credit, as soon as they got served, they called to let me know what was going on. The lawsuit completely killed the financing prospects for Ugmode. The estimate for resolving a patent infringement dispute was about $1M in legal costs and the process could potentially take at least 2 years. Regardless of how much I liked the founders of the company, I could not in good conscience invest my LPs’ money in a company where a significant amount of the proceeds of the financing, if not all, would go straight to lawyers. The reaction from all the other committed investors was also appropriate and unanimous: “We love these guys, and it sucks to see this happen to them, but we can’t sign up for a lawsuit.”
At this stage, the team had had no prior financing. They had a small amount of cash in the bank from having won two business plan competitions that they used to finance the company to date. To put in bluntly, Modista didn’t even have the cash to be able to hire a patent litigator to defend them in this frivolous (in my opinion) lawsuit brought about by a company to simply try and reinforce its patent position against bigger players.
Modista had only had modest revenue to date (~5K) and had by no means gotten to the point where it was having an impact on the revenues of Like.com. However, it was clear to me, and probably to Like.com as well, that even as a two-person team Arlo and AJ were technically far superior to anything Like.com could ever produce and hence were in the long term probably a threat to Like.com. (Note: Like.com never asked for any damages in the lawsuit and only wanted an injunction against Modista)
Arlo and AJ are way too nice to go around slinging mud at anybody. And it’s been with their guidance that I have refrained from telling this story publicly before. They prepared a fairly long dossier of information which showed that the Like.com patent should have never been issued by the PTO and also dissected the patent sufficiently to show that even if the patent was upheld, they weren’t doing exactly what was in the patent anyway. However, even though as Computer Scientists they could examine and explain this to any other person who was a Computer Scientist, explaining it to a judge and to a jury would probably be a different ballgame altogether. That falls into the realm of hiring and paying for high priced litigators who can twist and turn words for an audience that isn’t an expert in the subject.
Apparently in a meeting with Like.com’s founder and CEO, Munjal Shah, they were essentially told that they should give up their own startup, and just come work for Like.com. I don’t know about you, but as an entrepreneur if someone threatened me that way I’d tell them exactly where to put their words and their smart-ass idea.
Apparently a corporation can only be represented by an attorney in a litigation and cannot be represented by the founders or officers, even if the company cannot afford counsel. Long story short, the lawsuit torpedoed Modista’s financing. And since they didn’t have the money to hire lawyers to defend themselves, they had to accept a default judgment against the company, which forced them to shutdown Modista.com.
A few months later, when I heard that Google was acquiring Like.com, I was only more disappointed. Google so far has played nice with startups and has had a positive impact on the startup eco-system (especially for exits, less so for hiring!) Google now owns the patent that caused Modista.com to be shut down. I sincerely hope the folks at Google read this post, so that they know what they bought.
The Valley thrives on innovation and creativity. Arlo and AJ demonstrated their innovation and their creativity in what they created with Modista. It is really sad to see two sharp young entrepreneurs spend more of their time learning about the intricacies of the legal process, rather than getting to spend time on building their product and their company. It is even more sad to see companies such as Like.com that prey on small young startup founders before they’ve even gotten out of the gate.
I’m all for competition and for a fair fight. Fight on the basis of a better product, a better user experience, fight on pricing, fight on things that show that you are better. But using your big VC dollars to put fledging startups out of business, that’s just in bad taste. To that effect, it’s probably good to also mention that Like.com was backed by First Round Capital, BlueRun Ventures, Bay Partners, Leapfrog Ventures, Menlo Ventures and Crosslink Capital to the tune of $47.3M, according to Crunchbase.
The purpose of this post isn’t to debate the pros and cons of software patents. If you’re interested in that discussion, my advisor and mentor, Brad Feld has written extensively about software patents on his blog. My friend Daniel Tunkelang has also authored several blog posts on this topic on his blog, some of which are inspired by (and also mention) Modista. To summarize that discussion, the system is broken at many levels. Starting from the overburdened PTO that issues these software patents all the way to the complexity of IP litigation which makes it prohibitively expensive to defend against unwarranted lawsuits.
Like.com has been assimilated by the big G, so we can certainly hope that they won’t be out to get other fledgling startups (and yes, I’ve seen many more startups using computer vision based techniques — something Like.com wanted the world to believe they had a monopoly on). However, the IP climate remains unchanged, and it’s likely that other villains will continue to exploit similar situations.
The Valley is a fascinating place — you hear stories about it every day. But not all the stories in the Valley get told. I didn’t want the story of Modista going untold and so I’m taking it upon myself to share their story — from my perspective.
We all like a story that has a good ending. This one didn’t end well. But, having worked closely with Arlo and AJ through the thick and thin of this journey I have nothing but the utmost regard for them as entrepreneurs. I told them then that “Whatever you do next, I’m ready to back you anytime.” They’ve both since moved on. Arlo is back at Berkeley wrapping up his PhD, and AJ is now working on a new startup, which I’m proud to be already be an investor in.
So here’s a toast to Modista.com — the site that built the best new shopping technology I’d seen in a while, but didn’t survive.
This post originally appeared at K9 Ventures.
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The Story Of The Greatest Shopping Technology That Never Was
Thursday, April 28, 2011
The Ad Technology Industry Is Full Of Walking Dead Companies
Every year, San Francisco is abuzz with hope and opportunity as thousands of ad technology executives pour into a few square blocks around the Moscone Center to try and turn technology dreams into riches. On the inside of the convention center, an odd assortment of e-mail and affiliate marketing tools vie for the jaded eyes of direct marketers. On the outside, more seasoned media technology executives find themselves in and out of luncheons and panel discussions, mostly trying to figure out the real time landscape, and the data surrounding it.
There is a lot of high-risk venture capital fueling the ad technology business, as a very crowded LUMA map can attest. The Kawaja logo vomit slide never seems to shrink, although the dotted red lines indicating acquisitions appear from time to time. Burst Media is probably getting updated on the map as we speak. Its recent acquisition by Blinkx at a 1-time gross revenue valuation is a stinging reminder that not all dreams (even those with scale) turn to gold. Despite reaching some 61% of the US Population, Burst lost $3M in its last year as an independent operation.
At the recent AdWeb 3.0 conference, venture investors Josh Stein of Draper Fisher Jurvetson (Glam, Skype, Baidu, Targetcast, Cafe Mom) and Jon Soberg of Blumberg Capital (Legolas, HootSuite, DoubleVerify) talked about what is getting VCs excited in the space…and those companies that are not. Obviously, mobile is seeing an influx of early stage capital as the stage is just being said for next generation media technology applications.
For Stein, “the engagement in mobile is extreme—you may only be getting 3 minutes [of a consumer’s attention], but its full engagement.” Video is also an area that will see significant investment capital as more and more video content finds its way onto other screens. YouTube’s recent moves with “Next” around original content creation were cited as positive. Also mentioned was the growing area of social curation of video content (using social media technology to make sense of the potentially thousands of “channels” in the ether).
On the other side, Stein questioned the “long term economics” of Groupon and its many clones and also wondered aloud whether “’checking in’ is a long-term, sustainable” business model. An audience member also inquired whether we are currently “in a bubble” in terms of media technology, but the question was quickly dismissed. Unlike real financial bubbles that sweep up pension funds and real estate, “this bubble will likely pop on VCs…not consumers.” I suppose that is refreshing enough for the average consumer, but for many of the technology executives at AdTech, I think there is significant fear of being popped along with their companies.
That leads me to the heart of the conversation: what our venture capital friends thought of the crowded ad technology landscape, and their assessment of the companies within it. Jon Soberg seems to think that there are a lot of “walking dead” companies on the LUMA map: those companies that “can get quickly acquired by Google for $10 or $20 million, but don’t move the needle for venture investors.” Looking at the LUMA map, I think it is hard to argue with Jon.
There are a lot of hands in the middle of the transaction between advertiser and publisher, and many of the companies therein aren’t adding as much value as they are taking out. The difference between truly valuable and exciting companies can easily be summed up by one word: disruption. In other words, is your company’s technology doing something completely different and revolutionary, or is your company merely adding another incremental improvement or technology layer on an existing process?
It seems like most companies in the middle of the map are the type of companies that are walking dead. “Nice to have” technology rather than “must have” technology that will drive our business forward. So, what advice does the investment company have for the current companies in the space—and those that are looking to raise capital and jump into the crowded ad technology pool?
n Disruption: As Soberg points out, “it’s not about shaving at the margins, it’s about disruption.” For Soberg, the value of facilitating real time media trading is interesting, but is being “squished out,” making it entirely possible for companies to “arbitrage themselves out of existence.” For me, this simply means that being a bolt-on technology for media trading is not the path to riches, only the path to a low-value exit. Your technology must create value with your data, rather than simply creating more of it.
n Publishing: How can technology add value to the media transaction to publishers? This is an area ripe for investment and plenty of high value exit potential. In a world of highly commoditized inventory, where publishers have (foolishly) undervalued and overexposed their inventory, technology has a chance to fix things. How can the recent “app” revolution (where people actually pay for content) “reset” online publishing, and start to create higher value inventory? Glam and Tremor were cited as two companies that “add value in the middle of the transaction.” Technology that enables publishers to “figure out” mobile and video (rather than just helping them sell more remnant inventory) are going to win.
n Creative: One quote that struck me was Josh Steins’ excellent observation that “the Madmen [advertising] model wasn’t efficient…but it was profitable.” In other words, much of the magic and creativity in advertising has been replaced by technology, but technology isn’t what makes advertising effective. It’s ideas. Absolut bottles represented in every way possible…subservient chickens…the things which get and keep our attention. Maybe technology will standardize a good part of the transactional process of advertising, but the real winners in the ad tech space will be those technologies that help agencies put their focus back on creativity, rather than figuring out month-end billing and reconciliation.
It’s a crowded landscape out there, and there are many more red dotted lines to be added to the LUMA map. The ones that offer disruptive technology ideas that start returning value back to the advertisers and publishers, and away from the murky middle, will be the ones that avoid death…or “walking death.”
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See Also:
- Kaltura Sees Upside In Video For Education, Open Source Provider Working With Ivy Leagues
- The Word Bubble
- AOL Is About To Change The Way Advertisers Measure Success
The Ad Technology Industry Is Full Of Walking Dead Companies
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
How To Future-Proof Your Technology
| This content series is sponsored by Best Buy.Technology evolves fast. Now you can keep up. Future-proof your technology with the Buy Back Program! |
Don't let your new gadget become obsolete shortly after you buy it. Make sure it lasts long enough so you won't be running back to the store in a few months.
For the third part of our guide to buying new tech, we have five ways to future-proof your gadgets.
You'll be able to keep your gear going for years while saving money in the process.
Keep your software updated. For smartphones, tablets, and computers, it's essential to keep your software up to date. You'll be able to take advantage of the latest features, while protecting yourself against glitches and viruses.
Upgrade your hardware when possible. If you can, upgrade your hardware. If you find your desktop or laptop slowing down, adding more memory or hard drive space will help speed things along. For TVs, there are a variety of web-enabled set top boxes like Apple TV or Boxee that will add a variety of new features to your old set.
Buy a protection plan. For expensive gadgets that are prone to lots of wear and tear, it may be worth buying a protection plan or extended warranty for your device. This will insure that if a problem does come up a few years down the road, you'll be able to get it fixed at no extra cost.
Backup your data. When buying a new computer, always make sure you have a back up hard drive in case something goes wrong. Both Mac and Windows make it easy to set automatic back ups of your system. That way you won't lose any essential software or files. You can also try an online file storage service like Dropbox to keep your important data stored safely on the web.
Get the right accessories. Batteries don't last forever, so make sure you get extra batteries or a battery booster when you buy a mobile device. You should also be prepared to protect your gadget from wear and tear that could lead to bigger problems. Find the proper case or protectors for your devices to keep them clean and damage-free.
Don't Miss: 5 Traps To Avoid When Buying New Tech
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How To Future-Proof Your Technology
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