Category: Media/Tech Business Models

Predictions 2015: Uber, Google, Apple, Beacons, Health, Nest, China, Adtech…

1-nostradamus2015. My eleventh year of making predictions. Seems everyone’s gotten onto this particular bus, and I’m now late to the party – I never get around to writing till the weekend – when I have open hours in front of me, and plenty of time to contemplate That Which May Come.

There are several keys to getting predictions right. First, you need to pay attention to long term secular trends – big changes that have been in the works for a while. Second, you need to call the timing – will those trends break into the mainstream this coming year? Last year, for example, I predicted that 2014 would be the year that the Internet would “adopt the planet as its cause.” I think I was right on the secular trend, but utterly wrong on the timing.

Third, you need to pay attention to patterns that have yet to emerge, but have a high probability of breaking out in the near term. A good example of this is my declaring that Twitter would become a major media platform three years ago.

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My Predictions for 2014: How’d I Do?

2014Each year around this time I look back at the predictions I made 12 months ago, and I score myself with some combination of objectivity and defensiveness. And each year I do pretty well, batting somewhere between .500 and .750, depending on how you keep score.

This past year was different. First off, my predictions were unusually sparse. I started the year in a funk – I was depressed by our industry’s collective ignorance of climate change, and it showed in my writing. I called 2014 “A Difficult Year to See,” because my vision had been clouded by a deep anxiety over why tech hasn’t tackled what seemed to me to be the world’s most pressing problem.

One year later I find myself in a more patient stance. But given the goal of this post is to review how I did, and not how I feel today, let’s get to the score card.

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What Will Search Look Like In Mobile? A Visit With Jack

I’ve come across any number of interesting startups in my ongoing grok of the mobile world (related posts: 1, 2, 3).  And the pace has quickened as founders have begun to reach out to me to share their work. As you might expect, there’s a large group of folks building ambitious stuff – services that assume the current hegemony in mobile won’t stand for much longer. These I find fascinating – and worthy of deeper dives.

First up is Jack Mobile, a stealthy search startup founded a year or so ago by Charles Jolley, previously at Facebook and Apple, and Mike Hanson, a senior engineer at Mozilla and Cisco who early in his career wrote version 1.0 of the Sherlock search app for Apple. Jack was funded early this year by Greylock, where Mike was an EIR.

I’d link to something about Jack – but there’s pretty much nothing save a single page asking “What Is Jack?” Now that Charles and Mike have given me a peek into what Jack is in fact all about, I can report that it’s fascinating stuff, and at its heart is the problem of search in a post web world, followed quite directly by the problem of search’s UI overall. Whn you break free from the assumptions of sitting at a desk in front of a PC, what might search look like? What is search when your device is a phone, or a watch, or embedded in your clothing or the air around you?

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What Media Must Do To Succeed

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Wired Founder Louis Rossetto at work in the early days.

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Man, there’s been a ton of hand wringing over “the media” of late, from all the fuss over First Look and the New Republic to questions about whether a publication can survive if it’s not at 20-30mm uniques and growing – like current darlings Vox, BuzzFeed, and Vice.

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Google: The Information-First Conglomerate

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Larry Page on the cover of Fortune, Nov. 13 2014

Last week Google CEO Larry Page got the Fortune magazine cover treatment, the latest of many such pieces attempting to quantify Google’ sprawling business. The business press is obsessed with answering the question of whether we’ve reached “Peak Google.” (Clearly Fortune’s opinion is that we have not, given they named him “Businessperson of the Year.”)

“Peak Google” is what I like to call a “contagious misconception” – it seems to make sense, and therefore is worthy of consideration. After all, we’ve seen IBM, Microsoft, and other companies hit their peaks, only to drop back as they face the innovator’s dilemma.  Search is past its prime, Google is a search company, ergo – Peak Google.

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Whither the Public Commons? Enter The Private Corporation

uber-protests-europe

(image) From time to time a piece reminds us that we are in a slow, poorly articulated struggle over what we hold as a public commons. That was the case with Vanity Fair’s Man and Uber Man, a profile of Uber’s Travis Kalanick by Kara Swisher. Swisher deftly captures Kalanick’s combative approach in prosecuting what he calls Uber’s “political campaign” to beat established regulated markets in transportation, a campaign he believes he must win “98 to 2” – because the candidate is a product, not a politician. In short, Uber can’t afford to win by a simple majority – this is a winner takes all scenario.

This gives me pause, and I sense I’m not alone. On the one hand, we praise Uber for identifying a huge market encumbered by slow moving bureaucracy, and creating a service markedly better than its alternatives. That’s what I’ve called an “Information First” company.  On the other hand, we worry about what it means when something that was once held in public commons – the right to transportation – is increasingly pushed aside in favor of private alternatives. Messy as it may be, our public transportation system is egalitarian in its approach, non-profit at its core, and truly public – as in, bound to the public commons through government regulation.

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My NewCo Los Angeles Picks

I love LA. There, I said it. Yes, I made my entire career and life up here in the Bay Area, and the Dodgers bother me immensely. But I was born in LA, I grew up there, and every time I get back, I get homesick for the light, the warm air, the heady nonsense, and – lately – the extraordinary business culture that’s been brewing these past five or ten years.

That culture will be well on display at NewCo LA this year – our first festival in Los Angeles, and our eighth and final festival of the year (holy shit, right?!).

More than 60 companies are opening their doors in LA, but there are only six time slots, which means I have to pick well. Here’s where I will be on November 19th. I hope to see you there as well!

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Around The Kitchen Table, a Better Way To Finance “Secondaries” Is Born

FCCapitalNearly a decade ago I was two years into starting a new company, one that was growing quickly, but at the same time struggling with all the classic problems of a startup. We needed to raise more capital, we needed to hire more of the right people, and we needed to retain and motivate the people we already had brought onboard.

But more than anything, I was personally struggling with whether I could keep up the pace. This was my fourth startup, and I’d been at if for nearly 20 years. At that point in my career, I had serious questions about whether it was worth the time and energy, given that the pay was low (gotta keep burn down) and the hours were insane. I had three young children, all in expensive schools, and a mortgage to worry about. I wasn’t making enough to cover our monthly nut, and I wasn’t certain that the upside of any startup – even one I believed in with all my heart – was worth potentially failing my obligations to my family. After all, I was reasonably established, and I could always go get a higher-paying, more stable job.

So one morning at my kitchen table, I poured out my concerns and dreams to a close friend, Chris Albinson, who just happened to be a venture capitalist. I explained my dilemma – my responsibilities as a father and husband were in direct conflict with my career as a startup founder. I remember Chris asking what I’d need to keep my focus on my startup. At that moment, the reality was, I needed cash. I needed to be able to look my wife in the eye and say “Don’t worry, if this doesn’t work out, we’ll have enough to cover living expenses while I look for another job.”

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“Peak Google”? Maybe, But Is “Native” The Reason?

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From Thompson’s “Peak Google” post.

I love Ben Thompson’s Stratechery site, so much in fact that I’m writing a response to his recent “Peak Google” post, even though these days most of us limit our bloggy commentary to the 140-character windows of Twitter.

I’m responding to Thompson’s post for a couple of reasons. First of all, the headline alone was enough to get me interested, and judging from the retweets, I was not alone. But I try not to retweet stuff I haven’t actually read (which, as Chartbeat has shown us, is not the case with most of us). I waited until this morning to read Ben’s post, which compares Google with IBM and Microsoft, each of which once could claim king of the mountain status in tech, but have since been eclipsed.

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Else 10.13.14: Smiling Happy Facebook People (Not Teens, Though)

Facebook Atlas
Now you can buy real, smiling, happy shiny people all over the web, courtesy Facebook.

Today’s summary covers the past two weeks of worthy reads, with a strong dose of the Internet’s twin titans Facebook and Google. I’ve also been busy writing on Searchblog, so you’ll find three of my own pieces highlighted below.

Facebook’s new Atlas is a real threat to Google display dominance — Gigaom

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