Bad News: Your Start-Up Is Not Unique

Every start-up founder wants to believe their start-up is unique.  The truth is: most are not.  Lots of people have similar original ideas at the same time.  And in many cases they do similar but not identical jobs of execution.  For reasons of luck and timing and execution quality, some take off like rockets and other languish.

That doesn't mean that #2-20 players have to have an unhappy ending.  They are fodder for the acquisition machine - technology and skills to be integrated into larger organizations that want a competitive product without paying a super-premium price.

Smart shoppers in silicon valley can buy good products and fill gaps quickly at very reasonable prices.  Take Google's acquisition this week of fflick - a twitter-based movie review and sentiment site.  There are literally dozens of movie recommendation engines out there.

If Google wants to start directing traffic in the movie business, buying any one of them and integrating them into their service will make it an overnight contender.  And, at $10 million, fflick was cheap compared to the cost of spinning up an internal team of people passionate about movies and then building a product.

From TechCrunch

Side note: what's the bigger play here for Google?  More power in movie recommendations.  Right now the negotiation between Hollywood and Google is quite one sided.  Hollywood has content and from their perspective, Google has squat.  If Google becomes the number one source of movie recommendations, that might just bring the studios to the table with more reasonable terms.

And more cuteness. Oliver and Grandma.

The birthday boy having pizza in north beach.

Unlimited Data: Just So Hard To Kill

Everyone says they want to do it.  They keep trying - but competition keeps rearing it's ugly head.  If only we could have cartels here.

Link.

"It's yours to lose" - translation is not "it's an easy win" but "I'm going to blame you when you lose."

If The New York Times Can Do It...So Can I...

The New York Times has a really miserable article imagining the World Economic Forum in 2020.  As the attendees swelter due to Global Warming, China gloats as it overtakes the US in economic power.  It's depressing reading and fits with the mood of the era, but I can't say I agree with it.  (Read the whole gloomy thing here)

Too gloomy for me....

If I had to predict the WEF of 2020, it might look more like this:

• China will overtake the US in total economic size, but the leadership there won't feel in a celebratory mood.  Growth will be slowing and like many economies in Asia, China will be facing a big challenge: how to make the transition from middle-income manufacturing-based economy to innovation-driven service economy.

I predict in a decade we'll be talking about the Asian Growth Plateau - the flat space that many tigers seems to hit as they mature.  They remain great places to manufacture stuff, but they are unable to grow a big, innovation economy and consequently seem stuck at GDP per capita levels of between 60-75% of the US.

• India will finally be seeing the torrential growth rates that China has long enjoyed.  As a democracy, economic reforms will be slow and come in fits and starts, but India will keep accelerating from 5-6% growth to consistent 10-12% growth.

• We'll be seeing our first African Tigers - perhaps Nigeria or Kenya will start to show serious, significant, and sustainable year-on-year growth and begin to attract serious foreign investment in basic manufacturing industries - always the first step on the path to long term prosperity.

• America will still be a mess, but a very successful mess.  Social security, medicare, and entitlements will all be unsolved, but panic about America's position in the world will have receded.  The American economy will keep surprising everyone with how quickly it keeps growing, driven by technology-based productivity and high levels of innovation.  Growth, ultimately, will overwhelm tax policies and spending cuts to close the fiscal gap.  The budget won't be balanced, but it might be pretty close.

• People will again be wondering if states really can go bankrupt.  In Europe, Greece will look like it's heading for another collapse, something German voters won't fund, and in Asia, Japan will be in financial melt-down, trapped an ugly cycle of debt, aging demographics with a dose of paralyzed politics.

For a lot of reasons, it's hard for me to get too pessimistic about America.  We have our up and down cycles, but competitive market capitalism and democracy are self-correcting systems of government and economics and overall US openness to immigration means a much more modest impact from an aging population.

The early 1990s seemed bleak for the US - hardly a taste of the bubble to come.

United gets its painting on.

Linked In Labs Presents InMaps - A Visual View of Your Network

Use your linked-in ID to create a visual map of your business network - a very interesting.  I love whole "center of the universe" thing going on here, (who says online systems make you egocentric?).  It's just interesting to see how they cluster your relationships.  I labeled mine roughly but you can make out clear clusters of people from my McKinsey network to my IBM and others.

The full picture is here.  The summary is below.

ACLU Mid Peninsula (where I am on the board) condemns the torture of Bradley Manning. america is better than this.

Everyone Loves the MacBook Air - Could That Cause People To Trade Up?

Months after it's introduction, the praise keeps flowing in.  The MBAs are priced higher than your average PC, but an iPod was much more expensive that a tape player.  When something is so much better, will it change people's minds about how much to spend?

Read this little ode to the MacBook Air...Gizmodo

Deregulation Works Better With Smart Regulators: Case In Point - Airlines

It's recent death of Alfred Kahn, the overseer or airline deregulation has brought up a lot of retrospectives.  Service may not be what it used to be, but airfares are about 70-80% less than they used to be, adjusted for inflation.  And since incomes have gone up, the overall affordability of air travel is understated just by the price level alone.

We've been through some bad times since deregulation.  The 1980s and the rise of the hub and spoke system resulted in the creation of ugly and idiotic restrictions that persist.  The booming 1990s led to terrible labor problems. (Remember the unions at United with CHAOS - Create Havoc Around Our System?).  And after 9/11, we had a period of removing just about every amenity not nailed down.

So we should pause today and reflect on a couple of things (1) it's really not so bad and (2) it's better here in the US than anywhere else.  Let me make the case for both.  First, on the side of it's not so bad.  The reality is that, despite some teething troubles as the industry has scaled up, the travel experience is not terrible.  More than 75% of all flights arrive on time.

Secondly, service is good and its getting better.  There was a time post-deregulation through 9/11 when airlines employees felt a long-simmering rage.  Many of the people you're flying with joined up at a time when expectations for pay and job security were much better.  The bankruptcies of the last decade gave airlines a chance to wipe the slate clean and employees the chance to move on.  Finally the last folks who worked under regulation or joined just afterwards are retiring, and with them will go the expectations that came with empty planes and genteel business travelers.

More important than a change in generation has been the standard set by the competition.  The no-frills companies that have come to shake up the airline industry have been built on model of service that sets a very high standard.  Southwest, jetBlue, and Virgin all have shown legacy carriers just how much work needs to be done to improve their own standard of service.

Free Food. Free WiFi.  More Legroom. Good Service.  Things really do suck, don't they?  (Photo from  mrkathica)

The result has been salutary: better food (even if you have to pay for it) and less 'tude even on the "full service" carriers.  If only they felt compelled to match Southwest by avoiding those huge change fees, deregulation could be considered an absolute triumph.  I've been flying a lot for most of my life, and things are better now than at any time I can remember.

And travel is better in the US than anywhere else.  While Europe and Asia have elements of deregulation, they're limited.  In Europe, especially, deregulation has somehow ended up as a sad farce rather than a real force for change.  Europe now has a parallel air transport system:  discount carriers in Europe operate from different airports avoiding head-to-head competition with mainline carriers at their hubs.  And, far from setting a high standard of service, Europe's discounters have worked to outdo each other in the creation of new and more horrific ways of treating their passengers.

Whats different here is that the US DOT has systematically forced Southwest and jetBlue into even the most congested airports as part of merger approval deals (Delta, United) and other changes. In Europe, major carriers continue to enjoy their fortress hubs at slot controlled airports.  Combine that with the fact EU deregulation covers a far smaller portion of the major carriers networks and you get a result that shouldn't surprise anyone: not much improvement.  Sure, Europeans still enjoy meals on short flights.  And fares 3-5x the US level as well.  That's one expensive cookie.

That deregulation in the US worked well is not an accident, smart regulators - including those who oversaw the period of regulation - architected a system that maximized competition.  30 years after deregulation in the US, though there are fewer major airlines, the big carriers are more likely than ever to face competition from a high service / low fare carrier on their routes - a huge achievement brought about by a "deregulation" that was handled very carefully by a smart, thoughtful deregulator.

Needy children prevented me from getting some quality time with my new xbox this weekend. And now, back to work!

Google number port completed after 24 hours, but SMS messages just started arriving.

Today is Bandwidth Freedom Day

I blew through my 5GB standard data allowance on T-Mobile last month in about 4 days.  Mostly thanks to tethering and T-Mobile's blazing fast HSPA network.  Once throttled back to EDGE, I found the usability of my laptop on a tethered connection nearly unbearable.  Despite that throttling, though, I'm finishing out the month having consumed about 8 GB total.

But when you need speed, it's miserable not to get it.  And so I've been doing some diagnosis of how to better optimize my connection.  Whether it's through the tethered connection or when I'm in flight using GoGo, I'm finding that my MacBook consumes insane quantities of data.  What's sucking up all that data: it's lots of stuff that goes on in the background such as my continuous online backup and synchronization software including Plaxo, Evernote, and Dropbox.

That's all fine at home with my 50MB broadband connection or in an office with high speed internet, but it's killing me on the road.  So today I've invested in a little piece of software (Badly named "Little Snitch" that can selectively strangle your data consumption by application and port).

You can set rules by application and port and they can be shut off when you shut down the application.

Even after just 3 hours of using it on my flight from JFK to SFO, I've found it to be very effective.  The things I care about in real-time - web pages loading and e-mail sending - happen much faster.  Once I get home, I just quit the application and it un-throttles all the back-up and sync services that normally consume so much bandwidth.

If you move around a lot between good connections and bad ones, I highly recommend it.

The job flood continues: anyone want to be an account exec for hot SCM start-up? Position is in London, co. is in Boston. Ping me.

Initiated number porting from T-Mobile to Google Voice. Tomorrow is wireless carrier freedom day!

Another gr8 job I heard about: assoc. prntnr expert in sales force mgmt & x-form. Bay area. Gr8 pay...ping me if you know right person Thx

Everyone Else Is Doing It, So I Guess I Will Too...(Parse Apple's earning announcement)

Most of the focus is going on the iPad and iPhone segments, which are going extremely well for Apple, but what is also very interesting is the surge for the Mac segment.  Tim Cook specifically called out in the earnings meeting (transcript) that this surge is being driven by the MacBook Air.

This is very important to the broader PC industry for a couple of reasons.  First, MacBooks are now among the highest performing Windows PCs if you want a windows PC.  Second, they are the most aggressively priced laptops in the market.  They are cheaper than almost any other similarly configured PC available, in many cases hundreds of dollars cheaper.

It's not clear yet if or how this aggressive pricing is being delivered.  Apple's margins were slightly lower in the last quarter, but not by much.  That means that so far, Apple may be doing this mostly with leverage from it's enormous volume purchases of flash memory.  When you combine iPods, iPhones, and iPads, all of which dwarf MacBook Air sales, the result is a level of flash memory consumption far in excess of any other company in the world.

While it hasn't affected Apple's premium image at all, there could be far reaching impacts across the PC industry from such aggressive pricing.  For the first time ever, a MacBook is cheaper than all its main competitors and if Apple lets prices drop even a bit on the lowest end MacBooks over time - say down to $800 or $700 - the upper end of the iPad line - it could start taking away big chunks of market-share.

Even at $700, Apple's MacBook Air would at the base entry would be more costly than most Dell or HP consumer laptops - but that might not matter.  Limited storage levels are easily offset with growing online backup for big things like Photos and videos and the enormous performance boost from using an SSD could persuade people to trade up.

Apple already took about 20% of the US consumer PC market and the company has over 90% of the market for PCs above $1,000.  Total market share is nearing 10%.  Though it's still a long way off, if that share reaches 30%, it could represent a tipping point for Microsoft and the PC industry and lead to a runaway transition away from Windows.

Up Up And Away: MacBook Air sales power Mac market share.

Just heard about a VP-level job in Business Process Outsourcing - mainly call centers and service. Know someone who is interested? Ping me.

In The Battle To Go Paperless, Let Postful Do Your Mailing

One of the things I hate most about companies is when they provide you with a PDF form that you can fill out online and then - oh yeah - print and mail.  I spent a lot of time away from home traveling for work and I don't like to spend my time at home doing things that could be done in other locations.

I've already been doing a good job of getting things electronically or scanning them.  These days, I tend to receive my mail, scan it, and shred it.  But when I need to print things out or submit forms, it's still a lot of hassle.

I recently had to submit a reimbursement form to Kaiser Permanente for my son's ER visit.  To get it done and mailed, I go to through the following hoops to keep it all online:

• Annotate it using Apple's Preview application.
• Sign it using AnnotatePDF on my iPad
• Merge it with the scanned receipts using CombinePDF on my Mac
• Mail it using Postful

If someone could just combine all these applications into one, that would be very powerful.  Postful is one of the most exciting applications.  You can send them PDF files as an attachment with an address in the subject line.  They will print and mail your document for you.

Prices are not super-cheap, but for the ever-decreasing number of forms that actually need to be printed and mailed, it's hard to beat.

A Postful Confirmation

UA303 back home. Roads were not sheets of ice in New York so a much easier drive than I expected, even if it was at 4am.

So That's Why Everyone Hates Me

Behavioral economists are the most dismal of the dismal scientists.  They've done a lot to destroy the efficient market hypothesis in economics.  Thanks to both clever experiments in real life and by observing behavior in the brain using MRI machines, they've also managed to prove that people are remarkably stupid in many important ways:

• We are terrible at judging risk. We're more afraid of flying driving despite all the data to the contrary.
• We don't really understand the time value of money.
• Language can trigger emotional responses that seem to shut down the rational part of the brain

But what about those of us who don't want to spend our lives being stupid.  What about those of us want to fly safely into old age, raise happy families, and give up our Starbucks latte today for a financially secure future? 

In fact, all this new research has done a lot to show how we're bad at doing things and how we can be manipulated, but it's not very good at giving us advice that we can actually use.  In the last week, though, I think I might have found something quite insightful in the book "The Man Who Lied To His Computer."

The book looks at how humans behavior towards each other, but it uses interactions with computers as a way to test ideas.  Sounds strange, but it makes a lot of sense.  People are inifinitely variably, but computers can all be the same.  And yes, you can five a computer a personality - or at least facets of one.

I'm only part way through the book, but I've already learned a lot about how people react to criticism and praise.  In any leadership role, you're expected to dole out a lot of criticism and praise.  The only management thinking I ever learned on that came from my mother, who warned me that I should criticize in private and praise in public.  I think that holds true, but some other stuff does not.

Available from Amazon.com in paper and electronically.

One thing the book refutes is the idea that you should praise then criticize and then praise.  This is so common that whenever I get praise I usually tense up in anticipation of the "meat" of this sandwich.  In any case, it turns out that nobody remembers the praise because they're so focused on the criticism.  The book doesn't come out and say it, but I think the take-away here is: (1) get the criticism out first and (2) if you want people to remember the praise, make sure you dish it out in a multiple of the volume of the criticism.

Even more interesting is the idea of what makes people likeable.  Here, I'm not so satisfied with results.  According to the experiment results, if you criticize people, you're considered clever, but a jerk.  If you're nice, people are likely to think you're a bit stupid.  Except if you criticize yourself, in which case people will think you're nice and stupid.

And here I have a two problems because I don't like those choices.  First, I was taught by managers who cared about me and advanced my career that the people who really care for you are the ones who will be honest and critical, because that takes time and effort - something I have always appreciated.  And second, despite giving out a pretty large amount of brutally honest criticism, I receive remarkably few death threats.  In fact, there are quite a few people who like working with me for just that reason.

I think perhaps for quick and casual interactions this can be true, but for lasting and meaningful relationships, the combination of a mutual respect and admiration with real honesty can be far more powerful..

 

Monday Morning Quarterbacking: The Revolution Will Be Twittered

Tunisia. Iran.  There's a big debate on whether or not the Internet and technologies like Facebook and Twitter are having any measurable impact on the level of democracy in the world (or lack there-of).  There's been some good argument lately that maybe the Internet isn't really anything special and that, if anything, it's the crack of the masses (TV being the opiate).

I think, however, if you step back and look not at twitter or facebook by themselves but at the Internet as just one more example of the collapsing cost of communication a different picture could emerge.  Every technology revolution has reduced the cost of communications.  First the printing press, then radio, then TV, then cable TV and digital video recording, and now the Internet.

And in each case, it's become possible for more and more information to circulate the globe.  Most of it is crap.  Any by crap I mean reality TV.  But even the worst reality TV and most banal twitter message contains lots of clues and context about the lives that people are leading around the world.

And there's been a very big increase in the level of democracy in this world at the same time as the cost of communications has come down.  Correlation - yes.  Causation?  Harder to tell.  Certainly, non-democratic governments today seem to be focused on making their case - that they can deliver faster economic growth and better living standards through quick decision-making.  I can't imagine the King of France, 500 years ago, bothering to even explain why he was a better alternative to democracy.

Just for the record, this is too many pillows.

Massive Tablet Attack, Price War Ahead

Last week was a bonanza for the tablet business.  There were already a lot of bits of circulating crappy tablets, but last week we saw the fully unleashed fury of the consumer electronics industry.  Tablets were already big at CES last year, but when Apple unveiled the iPad it sent everyone back to the drawing board.  The result: an impressive crop of much more refined and competitive priced offerings this year.

Every major consumer electronics company has piled into this market with a set of products that are remarkably similar in specifications in the Android space.  The level of physical and software polish is impressive too.  The early videos of Google's Android 3.0 platform look terrific and, like the iPad, the leap from Android phone to Android tablet will be easy for developers.  We can expect a huge and wonderful array of software at the time of launch.

The best tablets out there already look to be the ones from Motorola, Lenovo, and LG.  In addition to those top tier offerings, there are host of competent also-rans that could ring up big sales even if  they don't push the envelope technically - top of that list being the Vizio tablets.

Users opting for the WiFi version, according to TNW Apple

One thing we can also expect in 2011 to a small degree and 2012 to a much larger degree: a vicious price war in the tablet business.  Tablets are not much more costly to make than smartphones, but they are sold in fundamentally different ways.  Tablets are often sold unlocked or in WiFi-only variants - and that makes their pricing much more transparent - when users can compare WiFi and 3G/4G devices side by side and calculate the value being offered by carrier subsidies.

By many accounts, the WiFi iPads are the top selling devices - more than 2/3 seem to be WiFi only - sold without carrier subsidies for prices starting at $500.  And even where carriers want to offer subsidies, their ability to do so is limited by the data plan pricing.  AT&T's tablet data plan is $25 for 2.5GB of data a month.  Even with a 2 year contract, that's $600 in revenue.  If AT&T uses that to buy down by the price of the tablet by $200, that cuts revenue to $400 for exactly the same services.  Given margins, it's not the end of the world, but hardly good for carrier margins.

The end result: transparent pricing + reluctance to subsidize = price war!

MetroPCS Gaining On The Big Guys, But Where Is Critical Mass?

MetroPCS just posted great year-end and quarterly results - subscribers jumping up substantially and churn decreasing as well.  The company is a dwarf compared to the jumbo-sized network operators AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint, but it's growing fast and it's coverage footprint is expanding rapidly.  MetroPCS even beat Verizon and everyone else to the initial deployment of an LTE network in the US.

MetroPCS serves just 8 million customers, compared to about 92 million for AT&T and 93 million for Verizon Wireless.  The smallest of the major network operators, T-Mobile, still has about 33 million customers, nearly four times the size of MetroPCS - but even at this small size, it is close to achieving a critical mass in the marketplace and disrupting a US mobile market that has become one of the most expensive in the world.

Today MetroPCS is known for it's cheap rate plans and even cheaper phones.  But the company is quickly moving up-market, mirroring the spread of smartphones and mobile data consumption across the country.  MetroPCS is now offering Blackberries with unlimited voice, corporate e-mail, and web browsing for $65 - substantially less than the nearest competitive offering from T-Mobile.  Comparable plans from Verizon & AT&T cost well over $100 monthly.

MetroPCS' coverage map showing 90% of the US covered according to their web site.

MetroPCS currently covers about 90% of the US population.  From what I can tell, coverage remains somewhat weak - not strong enough to really disrupt the existing players.  However, at their current rate of growth in coverage and product offerings, the US wireless market could see a new round of price wars in 2012 as MetroPCS becomes a credible alternative to most mass-market subscribers.

After the snow.

Insert Age-Related Cliché Here, But Really Perfectly Happy to be 39

It's my birthday today.  And there'll be no crying, at least none is planned, even if I am free to do so.  In fact, I woke up this morning reflecting on how lucky I am.  I feel like I have more wonderful people in my life and great experiences that I could have ever imagined.

I have always wanted to see the world, and that I have largely done.  I've been to around 100 countries on every continent (save one) and lived and worked in the US, Europe, Africa, and Asia.  Not bad for 39 years old.

I have always loved new electronic gadgets.  Ever since I was a kid, waiting eagerly for a Sony walkman for Christmas.  Now, I have so many and all the ones I want, I got to CES and even I can't think of anything that I really want that I can't have.

But it is the things, or more importantly the relationships, that I never wished for that have proven to be much better than anything my own imagination could have come up with as a kid.   I never appreciated how amazing my parents have been to me, or how many sacrifices they have made so that I could go to good schools and graduate college without debt.  And both my mother and father have been supportive of everything I have done all along the way.

I never expected to get married or have children, but I find myself married to the best husband in the world.   He's smart, patient, and thoughtful as well.  I'm not sure why he has continued to put up with me, a sure sign of a defect somewhere that I have not been able to locate, but I'm very grateful.

Watching my mother read stories to my kids at bedtime has helped me remember how much I got from her and how lucky I am that she is around to give the same to my own children.  And as for my children, they are the single best choice I have ever made.  Forget yoga or meditation or, for that matter, medication. Nothing makes you feel great like snapping a broken toy back together and watching them giggle, jump for joy and run around.

Everything I have I owe to the kindness of other people in my life.  Job. Kids, Family.  I didn't get any of those things without a lot of help.  I'm a hard worker, but there's no question I have received outsize rewards for my efforts.  I was hired for my very first job sight-unseen after cold-calling the company.  I wanted to work in Africa and I convinced the head of marketing at Nigeria's first cell phone company to take a risk and hire me for the summer and pay my travel costs.  I am sure there were more qualified people he could have hired, but he took a risk and hired me instead.

And stories like that have been continuous in my career, giving me opportunity after opportunity and more than one second chance.  I'd like to think I've learned from my mistakes, but there's no hard proof of that so far.  

I was looking at my list of Facebook friends last night and was amazed at how many of them are real friends, people with whom I have a genuine connection.  I just couldn't even have imaged having more than 20 friends at one point.

My life is not perfect by any means, but overall,  I consider myself extremely lucky.  The Economist says that life's unhappiness peaks at age 46, just about 7 years away.  If that's a mid-life crisis, I am already looking forward to it.

Portable hotspot, unlimited data, and 3G Facetime differentiate VZW iphone, but hampered by VZW's slow data speeds.

The End of the $200-Phone-for-$700 Business Is Here

Thank you Vizio.  At long last, it looks like someone is  going to stick-it to the smartphone business.  Since the iPhone first arrived, it's been no secret, for those who care to take a look, that the cost of the phone is about $185 to make and about $700 to buy it.

Fortunately, at least here in the US, you can get an overpriced wireless carrier to buy-down that price for you down back to around the price of the phone itself.  Of course, you'll need to pay the wireless company a couple of thousand dollars for the privilege.

It looks like Vizio is going to put a stop to that by offering an Android phone at, well, Vizio prices.  Whatever they are, and it's not clear yet what that price will be, it's not going to be expensive.  Right now, other than the size (4") and the CPU (1Ghz) we don't know the standard (GSM or CDMA) or the distribution model, but my expectation would be on Vizio to disrupt the market.  As a result, my bet:

• GSM multi-band phone with HSDPA
• Sold unlocked through electronics retailers
• Price about $300

We'll see as the details come out, but this could knock $100-$250 off most other "unlocked" phones - when you can even get them unlocked.

A Picture of Vizio's new phone, pricing and distribution TBD.

Landed at JFK 45 minutes early. Into the car and aiming to beat the snow to New Jersey.

Facebook e-mail upgraded....looks good but need to figure out the IMAP access...

My guess: The Verizon iPhone won't be available until February because then it'll be too late for you to return any iPhones you got for Christmas!

Go Go Google TV Apps - That's What We Need

Content providers have been reluctant to give Google TV access to the sites where they offer full programs for fear of disrupting their over-the-air and cable TV distribution channels.  This is a lot like the iPad situation of 12 months ago: notwithstanding the lack of Flash, it's likely iPads would have been blocked too.

With Apps, however, the opportunity for paid, authenticated users and a customized experience can be presented.  Hulu Plus is already on so many different devices, adding Google TV seems reasonable - and this will further accelerate the trend for cord-cutting on the cable side of the business.

Beyond that, we have not yet seen the "killer app" for Google TV.  For the iPhone, it turned out to be "Apps" in general, but even more specifically, casual games.  Could the same be true of TV?  We'll find out soon enough.

Samsung recently reported that over a million apps have been downloaded for their TV sets (link) so there's clearly demand for some applications in the installed base, though a million apps is a drop in the bucket given the size of Samsung's TV installed base.

Samsung TV Apps, Flickr CC Photo Link to Brent Payne

Why should we expect Google TV to be different?  Because of the ease and simplicity of development. With GoogleTV, a million small experiments in interactive television will be born by developers around the world.  And when they find the one that really transforms the experience of watching TV or genuinely supplements it, a whole new category will be born.

Just about everyone has tried and failed to transform TV.  Most people just want to sit on their butts and watch.  But we should have little faith in the ingenuity of developers and users incoming up with something - they have successfully enriched every other computing and entertainment platform and TV should be no different.

This year at CES, we can expect to see significant new players in the Google TV business, Vizio taking the opening salvo, and that's going to be exciting.  If Google can release an updated version with apps, then we'll start to see real innovations.

Quora's Q&A Service Skewered on TechCrunch

Check out a very funny (funny because it's at least partially true) interpretation of Quora over on TechCrunch.  Link

What's an Electric Car Worth? About $6,000

The Nissan Leaf is one of the first mass production electric cars and I was wondering, after I did all my analysis on the total cost of ownership on SUVs, what it would cost to own a Leaf and how much I should be willing to pay.

The answer, unfortunately, is that the Leaf still costs a bit more than it should to make a pure Total Cost of Ownership case.  Not that I'm unwilling to fork out more for the "Green street cred" but having just bought another small car (a Honda Fit) 18 months ago, it's a bit premature to justify buying a new car or trading one in.

At about $33,000, the Leaf is about double the price of a Honda fit - a car of similar size.  While the Fit gets about 30 miles to the gallon, on average, the Leaf gets an equivalent of about 120 miles per gallon.  (This is based on reading some notes about converting gas to electric, but it's not necessarily going to be terribly accurate, but a useful approximation.)

The Prius is also quite pricey, but in fairness to the Prius, it's a much larger car.  The best value would be a Nissan Leaf priced at about $21,000.  That would put your estimated total cost of ownership as competitive with the Honda Fit over a 10 year period.

The Endless Money Pit That Is Owning A Car

We've been thinking about getting a new car lately.  A bigger one, with room for the kids to put all their stuff.  Specifically, an SUV.  This has prompted me to dig into the broader business of car cost and return on investment and what we  should or should not be buying.

The bottom line: cars are money pits.  We forget that because they all seem to be sold in little bits and pieces.  The car is separate from gas, insurance, maintenance, and taxes, so each one on it's own seems quite reasonable.

The reality: when you add them all up, the cost of owning a car is like $9,000 to $10,000 per year.  I compared four different mid size SUVs that we were thinking about buying.  First off, I ruled out any hybrid SUV.  Not because I'm green, but because a $10,000 premium for an extra 2-3 miles per gallon is crazy.  SUVs do not yet have anything close to the efficiency gains comparable to cars.

The hands down winner, on paper at any rate, is the Subaru Forrester with a TCO that's a full $10k lower than it's nearest competitor over 10 years - the best measure of total ownership with the car fully depreciated.  The Subaru has both the lowest price and the best mileage of all the smaller SUVs.

The worst offender: the Nissan XTerra, primarily because of it's poor gas mileage, though I liked the look and style of the Xterra along with the Element the most.  The overall conclusion, however, was that buying a car is a $100,000 investment over 10 years when you include the cost of the car, the opportunity cost of the investment, and the running costs - a good rule of thumb is probably to multiply the sticker price by a factor of 4 to get the true cost.

The result: no car purchase, at least not this year if we can avoid it.

Hitting the slopes with great tunes and views.

CES Is Here, Best Place To See It: At Home On Your Laptop

This year, once again, I'm headed to the much-vaunted Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.  I'm going to see clients and chat with colleagues.  I'll also be doing some walking around.  It's nice to get a sense of the power and strength of the industry and the general trend of innovation.

Truth be told, however, you can actually see more of CES from your web browser than you can from walking the show halls.  Thanks to blogs like Engadget and Gizmodo, you get better visibility and more data on new product launches, so I highly recommend that.  You'll also get your questions answered online much faster than anywhere else, thanks to multiple viewpoints and coverage.  I've found that most booth staff are blissfully unaware of the details of their new products.

What you can't get online is a visceral sense of the industry's direction.  The square footage dedicated to iPad covers and cases alone will say  a lot about what the industry thinks is going to happen.  The other thing that's great to see is all the knock-offs.  The booths that feature vendors from China and Taiwan are a powerful reminder of how sophisticated local producers are becoming - the spec sheets of their tablets this year will, no doubt, be very impressive.

And, of course, you can't get that Las Vegas atmosphere on your PC at home.  Many consider that a good thing, however.

When navigating the crowd, throw your shoulder into the shoving.  Photo from Betsy Weber

The Cloud Phone Has Landed

I'm 30 days post-iPhone now.  I still have my iPad and MacBookAir, but I have long wanted to explore the very hackable world of Android.  And after 30 days I can honestly say: it's not nearly as good as the iPhone.  Nothing in the world comes close.

Look Ma, No Wires.  Photo from Flickr, Creative Commons License (Link to Author)

But it is fun.  If you like hacking (as I do, in the classic sense of an amateur making a complete mess of something), Android phones are fun and friendly.  You can do a lot with them and since I bought a Nexus S and then rooted it, I have the most open and hacker-friendly device on the market.

Now, 30 days later, I have a few key take-aways from my experience.  The most notable is that I never plug my phone into my PC.  There's no physical sync going on at all.  I use WiFi to transfer files and sync music and it all happens without any involvement from myself.  All mail, applications, and all other data flows between the phone and the cloud with no desktop client.

Unlike my iPhone and iPad which must be periodically tethered to a MacBook, no PC is really required at all to have full functionality for an Android phone.  This doesn't mean much right now, but it has big implications in the future for both enterprises and consumers.

For enterprises, the cloud-basis means that configuration and integration can be fully automated remotely.  For consumers, this means that lost phones are easily replaced.  In emerging markets, this could be a bigger deal, as the idea that you have both a phone and a PC is something that is only true in mature industrial economies.

Several times I've had to wipe clean my phone (rooting gone wrong, upgrades gone wrong, stupid hacking tricks gone wrong) and each time, re-assembling my data has proven quite easy.  Google's market-place does a very good job (but not quite complete) of remembering your settings and automatically downloading your applications when you sign-in again on a wiped phone.

I don't see any sign of competitive advantage one way or another here for Google.  Apple can easily close these gaps and, when they do it, it's likely to be done with an elegance and simplicity that exceeds what's available today on Android.  I'd also expect Google's own capabilities in this area to keep getting better.

One group of companies where it does have implications are the makers of Android handsets.  Remote backup services are among the most important features companies like HTC and Motorola have built into their proprietary extensions to Android.  As Google expands this functionality, it will make it harder for hardware makers to differentiate their products.

As for applications, I have been able to replicate all the same ones I relied upon with the iPhone on my Android phone.  I have not noticed any significant decline in quality either - though I have not seen anything in the gaming category at the standard of the Rage HD game for the iPhone and iPad.  Overall, though, the transition to Android has gone smoothly and entirely without the need for a PC.

Greener Supply Chains Ahead for 2011 - But Just Barely

Every year for the last few years at the start of the year I have had a look at the overall prognosis for change in the global supply chain model.  The past couple of years have been rather discouraging.  As prices for oil and gas have come down, companies have had little interest in greening the supply chain. High transport costs have been among the biggest contributors to green supply chain initiatives and so lower transport have reduced investments in those areas.

Coming in 2011, things look more favorable, primarily due to rising gas prices.  In addition to rising gas prices that will once again get companies to look carefully at their far flung global supply chains, there are several trends that are growing in importance that will also help green the supply chain:

• Focus on packaging waste.  This is an increasing trend in Europe where companies are required to use minimally effective packages to protect product.  In the US, Amazon has had some luck as well with their Frustration-Free packaging, though the impact so far has been small.
• Growth of eCommerce.  Buying online is, on the whole, more efficient and "greener" to the supply chain than buying in stores.  The online purchase eliminates stores, overhead, shipping to and from stores as well as customers driving to stores.  While packages are delivered on a one-off basis, parcel companies handle that in a very efficient manner - much more so than individuals driving to and from stores.
• Increased Focus on Buying Locally.  A trend and one limited to Europe and the US so far, but one that could have some impact on the supply chain as it extends globally.
• Increased Focus On Used / Recycled Products as A Green Alternative.  There's a growing recognition that new products - cars, computers, houses - no matter how sustainably designed and built, carry a much bigger foot-print

Overall, 2011 looks good for supply chains - at least from a greening standpoint.  The single biggest driver will be the cost of oil, but at least that is headed in the right direction.

Does your supply chain need a twelve step program towards greener operations?  No apologies are needed, just download the slightly tongue-in-cheek primer I prepared two years ago with my colleague at IBM.

Download 1: The Long Form White Paper
Download 2: The Slick Visual Version