“Platform” risk

Smart take on from Eugene Wei on Twitter’s recent limiting of access to Meerkat and the larger platform risks startups face when building off the graphs of other services.   He’s spot on about the address book being perhaps the most important such platform. 

Phone numbers were the previous generation’s most accessible and widespread key for identity and the social graph, and Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android operating systems and the rise of the smartphone suddenly opened a gateway to that graph. Many messaging apps bootstrapped alternative or parallel social graphs just that way. I doubt the telcos were looking that many moves ahead on the chess board, and even if they had, I’m not sure they would have had much recourse even if they had wanted to prevent it from happening.

How to Be an Expert in a Changing World

Brilliant essay from Paul Graham on How to Be an Expert in a Changing World.  A few choice quotes below:

When experts are wrong, it’s often because they’re experts on an earlier version of the world.

Though the nature of future discoveries is hard to predict, I’ve found I can predict quite well what sort of people will make them. Good new ideas come from earnest, energetic, independent-minded people.

It’s hard enough already not to become the prisoner of your own expertise, but it will only get harder, because change is accelerating. That’s not a recent trend; change has been accelerating since the paleolithic era. Ideas beget ideas. I don’t expect that to change. But I could be wrong.

It’s a good read that applies not only to startups and their investors but to large corporations who many times seem hellbent on being experts on an earlier version of the world. 

Bearing Down on Data Upstarts

While devices and apps get most of the attention, data storage is every bit as important, particularly as objects like phones, tablets, cars and thermostats become appendages of the Internet. Throw in trends like collaboration and big data analysis, and all those bits of data become more dynamic than something in a file cabinet. They are fluid and being entered and retrieved from many points.

Illah Nourbakhsh on the Future of Robotics

Social commentators prognosticating about Google’s acquisition of robot companies note that, having conquered the digital realm, businesses are increasingly turning their attention to the remaining physical frontier. I see a more radical direction: Today’s corporations aren’t simply colonizing the physical world with robotic products—the move toward the so-called Internet of Things. These corporate actors are going to synchronize the digital and physical worlds into a single, fused matrix. Every physical action you take will have a digital consequence, and every digital act will push back on the physical world.

Shift from Telecom-Centric to Application-Focused Investments

Rutberg’s June Wireless Industry Newsletter uses Uber to frame it well:

Uber’s massive $1.2 billion fundraise represents the largest venture capital investment in mobile and wireless of all time. It displaces Clearwire’s $900 million fundraise in July 2006 at the top of the lead tables. It also evidences the dramatic shift from telecom-centric investments to application-focused investments since the launch of the iPhone in 2007.

But the core of the site is strong and scathing, with a clear point of view: that a large segment of online media has nothing interesting to say, but many creative ways to get you to read it. While it’s too smart to state this explicitly, the point of almost every story is that the purveyors of such online news think you’re incredibly stupid.
The Latest News That Isn’t: John Oliver and Clickhole Take Fake News in Opposite Directions

Auto-Autonomy: Cars Are Racing Toward Disruption

Steve Sinofsky on the inevitable disruption coming to the auto industry.  It’s well worth a read.  But it is highly urban centric - meaning that most of the benefits that he describes (things like ride sharing, shared ownership, avoiding parking hassles, etc.) accrue primarily to those in urban centers. In fact, he makes the shift away from suburbia a central driver in his case.  I do wonder how the economics and use cases of autonomous cars play out in areas without the centrality, concentration and density of urban centers.  

But others push themselves into the rotting institutions they want to reinvent. If you are looking for people who are going to be creative in the current climate, I’d look for people who are disillusioned with politics even as they go into it; who are disenchanted with contemporary worship, even as they join the church; who are disgusted by finance even as they work in finance. These people believe in the goals of their systems but detest how they function. They contain the anxious contradictions between disillusionment and hope.
David Brooks on The Creative Climate

Google Invests In Satellites: A Sign Of Decay In Old Line Telecom Players?

From Google Invests in Satellites: A Sign of Decay in Old Line Telecom Players?

Summary

  • Google satellite venture is a shot across the bow to traditional telecom companies.
  • Satellite and telecommunications technology today is much improved compared to prior satellite efforts.
  • Old line telecommunication are starting to cede considerable ground with their inability to come up with innovative solutions.

….

What differentiates Google from telecommunication players like AT&T is the lack of imagination.

100 Years of Commercial Flight

The first commercial flight took place Jan 1, 1914 in Florida and lasted 23 minutes as it carried passengers from St. Petersburg to Tampa.

Fast forward 100 years and the airline industry expects to move 3.3 billion passengers and 50 million tons of cargo over 50,000 routes this year.  

That kind of progress must have seemed absolutely ludicrous, perhaps unimaginable, to people at the time. Serves as inspiration that radically different futures are possible and worth working towards.