Posted by Jeff Lu on July 13, 2010
I love this stuff; the persistence part is the part that I like. It’s actually not fun when it’s happening, but you know it makes a difference because 99.9 percent of the people give up. And Vinod gave me that lesson in spades. I think I would have given up with Netscape. I wouldn’t have known what to do. I wouldn’t have had the chutzpah to just say, “No, we haven’t lost, we’re still negotiating, aren’t we?” And treating it as if I didn’t hear their “no.” It was very unfamiliar to me originally.
Posted by Jeff Lu on
Livingston: Web-based email was one of those big ideas that was waiting right under people’s noses. Why did you and Jack come up with the idea first?
Bhatia: I don’t know why. Let me tell you one other thing about the Internet: there are thousands of such ideas under our noses even as we speak. Why things happen, I just don’t know. Maybe somebody has a need and, in our case, we had a need. That’s what triggered the idea. Sometimes ideas are born out of necessity: you solve a problem for yourself, and you hopefully solve it for a number of other people too.
Posted by Jeff Lu on April 12, 2010
I am an evangelist that the Internet will be used as a platform to disrupt ALL incumbent business models. 2 verticals that I would like to see more disruption is financial services and education. I was playing with the iPad the other day and I couldn’t help but wonder about the possibilities to hack education with this multimedia friendly platform.
*What I’m about to propose is very hypothetical and what would mean a major text book seller would have the vision and the balls to change the way they do business and possibly make less money via the experiment.
I would love to see a major text book publisher have the vision to move all their text books to the iPad and charge a subscription for usage. Apple will wave their 30% cut of all revenues because this announcement would help Apple get an iPad on every student’s desks. The major text book publisher (TBP) would charge a yearly subscription based on the number and length of access to books so something like ($50 for 1, $90 for 2, $130 for 3, $200 for unlimited) for 6 months access.
I remember spending $700-$1,000 on books a year in college so collecting only $400 over the same period of time is a losing proposition for TBP?
Not necessarily. If TBP can build a truly innovative and collaborative eBooks platform that’s closed off to only their own books, they can corner a huge market, reduce the overall size of the pie but become the largest slice. Here’s how they can be more profitable with this business model:
- Create a collaborative platform where users can comment on the margins, add links to other sources (like wikipedia, youtube, 5min video, etc.), and even make suggestions for editing in future editions. Create a near open source text book experience would help TBP create the best multimedia text books in the market.
- First mover advantage on a closed but editable platform will create a stickiness factor to TBP’s text books. For the most part, I find text books largely the same, with the teachers making the most difference in my education. If TBP has a larger community of collaborators on their text books, I would be more likely to be apart of the the community and stay with TBP.
- Cut print and distribution costs while an active community makes edits for you for each edition. TBP will still be able to sell print editions but editions will be community edited so content should be better and more up to date.
- I may have spent $700-$1000 on text books in a year but maybe only $200-$400 was from the same publisher. Under the subscription model, teachers and students would both be more likely to opt for the cheaper option, not to mention the better product. Your unsuspecting competition will be cut down at the knees.
It’s definitely a risky move for TBP but I think it would be worth it. There are definitely more concerns that I’m missing but that’s the idea in a nutshell. The funny thing is, the major roadblock to this type of innovation is Apple itself. They are so concerned about controlling the eCommerce that occurs on its platform that I think it will come a time where it will stifle game changing innovation that would otherwise help grow the iPhone and iPad platform.
Posted by Jeff Lu on
According to Mary Meeker’s report issued today, the mobile Internet usage will overtake desktop usage in 5 years. It caught me off guard when I read it but after thinking about the speed of innovation and adoption that’s occurred in IT the last 50 years, 5 years sounds reasonable. Knowing that mobile is the next boom cycle for technology, what are the implications?
Mobile eCommerce
Josh Kopelman of FRC has recently written some thoughts about innovation in eCommerce. In summary, Josh talked about how 10 years ago, most of the most highly trafficked Internet sites did not exist, however, of the top 15 most highly trafficked eCommerce sites, only 1 of them (NewEgg) is a new comer.
There has been a lot of interest in companies like Gilt and Groupon changing the eCommerce ecosystem by discovering alternative high growth eCommerce business models. I think there are even larger opportunities for companies like them to use the mobile platform to drive a higher adoption and purchase rate.
The report goes into greater detail than I care with this post but I’d like to review some of the main inherant advantages of mobile eCommerce.
- Push notification – with smart phones, there is no longer a moment in my life where I am not connected, which is the way I like it. The Push-notification feature allows for incumbent companies like eBay, Gilt, Amazon of offers I may be interested in or tracking. I’ve also blogged extensively on the potential for new companies to use this feature, combined with Location-based services to push relevant, location-based offline offers.
- Location-based services – Don’t want to be redundant here so in a nutshell, convergence of digital and offline identities and offers.
- Content delivery – With the MLB.tv iPhone app, I will now never miss a Red Sox game. With slingbox I can watch all my favorite TV shows on my mobile phone while in transit. It’s going to be real interesting to see how the content game will change as people consume more and more media on their phones. Will the industry be more open to allowing people to pay, a-la cart to consume content on their mobile devices? It will be interesting to see how it will force the hardware of our phones and infrastructure of the carriers to innovate to keep up.
Increase Transparency – This could really crush brick and mortar retailers but consumers can now check prices real time to see how offline retailers compare with eRetailers.
Mobile Apps
Right now, mobile apps are all the rage and it seems like the winner of the app store battle will win the mobile platform war. I do have to wonder though, the mobile browser still has a lot of room to grow. As mobile standards improve and innovation occurs with browsers and language, will we still need/want to download apps in the future? I could be wrong about this but I have to believe in the trend of democratization on the Internet platform. I think that mobile apps will be come less important as our mobile Internet browsing platforms become more sophisticated and UI friendly.
Mobile Enterprise
There’s a huge opportunity here for a SaaS cloud player to develop some game changing mobile applications. The iPad provides a great platform to test this opportunity, giving developers more to work with. Not sure what verticals to address or what the real life application is but one area I have in mind is the medical field; replacing paper charts with interactive iPads that can retrieve a lot more patient information.
As mobile devices become a more frequent and efficient access point to cloud based services, consumers will be more able to work on the go, further freeing them from their desk and desktop. SalesForce has already developed mobile tools to address this premise and I’ll be interested in following their product development.
Gaming
Mobile gaming is one of the areas where I’m most excited about. The business model has been proven with companies like Zynga using the Facebook platform to build highly profitable and addicting games. The same principles can be applied to mobile only apps. The potential for the iPad to become a game changing game delivery platform is all but certain in my mind. The inherent advantages of the mobile platform can be leveraged to increase engagement for Internet games (push notification, constant connection). Online gaming is not really my domain expertise but is an area where I am actively learning more about.
Posted by Jeff Lu on April 6, 2010
An observation from Brad Feld got me thinking about how other Internet companies could use tactics employed by Facebook to get near 100% CTR on their email notifications/campaigns.
In short, Brad noticed that his personal CTR on Facebook emails declaring that he was tagged in a photo was at or near 100%. My experience has been similar.
Why are the Click Throughs so high on emails like this? 2 reasons:
- Information is relevant – Of course it is! If there’s a picture of me floating around the Internet I want to see it to see if I need to find out how to permanently destroy it. If my friends have tagged me in a message or other media content, I would have to reasonably believe that I would be interest in it.
- Information is incomplete – I am only told that I’ve been tagged and by whom. The call to action is simple: click to see what you’ve been tagged in. I’ve only been told enough to pique my curiosity.
Clearly this has been incredibly effective for Facebook, so it got me thinking, how can other existing businesses use this model?
Q&A Forums & Blog Discussions
For as interested as I am in technology companies, I can be quite tech illiterate with the various toys I network together (PS3, laptop, desktop hooked up to the LCD). I’m constantly looking for answers online on Q&A forums to optimize my setup. Often times I see questions posted but no answers yet. It would be great if I could make 1 click to anonymously “follow” the thread in case someone does come along with the answer or if there were new updates to an answer posted previously. Often times, if there is an email notification mechanism, the only way to opt-in would be to comment in the thread. If this “follow” feature was implemented, websites could see a lot more repeat traffic to their site. I would receive an email with the title of the question or thread and a link to read the new post.
The same concept applies to blogs and content sites. I enjoy reading a lot of blogs and the discussion that takes place in the ecosystem. However, I find it frustrating sometimes to have to check-in every once in a while to follow the discussion and each time I check-in there are an overwhelming number of different threads to read. I would participate more fully if I could anonymously “follow” a few select threads, then receive emails throughout the day with a call to action to revisit the website to re-engage in the discussion. At my convenience, I could revisit the select threads I wanted to read more or comment on.
I do like that Disqus sends me a notification email on the responses to my comments but here’s where they can learn from Facebook. They currently send me the entire message via email. If they just notified me that the reply was made, my CTR would increase as I would be curious to read the response.
