Gustaf Alstromer

A few thoughts about the mobile world

bijan:

It’s been a pretty interesting couple of weeks since Android 2.0 & the Droid came out.

I’ve been meeting with a lot of entrepreneurs, startups and hackers that are working on mobile apps and services.

Sunday night is my night to make dinner for the family so I’m in a bit of a rush (pls excuse any typos). Here’s a few things i’m thinking about in the mobile world

1. I haven’t met any developers or hackers building Palm Pre apps.

2. Developers are getting extremely frustrated with the Apple App Store (understatement). I’m hearing it can take developers 4 weeks to get an update released. That’s dysfunctional.

3. Yet at the same time the quality of iPhone apps are just getting better. I saw a number of new iPhone apps that use the relatively new in app purchase and it’s paying off big time. Google needs to add this to Android.

4. I’m pretty impressed with the Android Market. It’s fast to navigate and find what you need. A number of iPhone developers are creating Android apps. They like Google’s open app store model, all the new hardware and Android 2.0.

There is an issue with the current review system in the Android Market. Some users will say an app is “sluggish” and others will say “best app ever”. I’m finding its mostly dependent on the hardware. That’s quite confusing to users and needs to be addressed somehow.

5. If I was in charge of RIM, I would be 100% focused on getting a world class webkit browser into the Blackberry yesterday. The blackberry browser is just awful compared to the iPhone, Android or Palm Pre.

6. I’ve been thinking a ton about Joe Hewitt’s latest post about mobile apps vs the mobile web.

7. A number of VCs don’t like the mobile world. They don’t like the carrier issues and some of the challenges with the lack of standards, gatekeepers and other stuff. Put me in the other camp. I can’t get enough of it and I’m more excited than ever about the possibilities.

Intent - and how to "Like" it

Hoan Ton-That is one of the smartest people I know. Earlier today we spoke about how the social gaming/virtual goods companies could save the incentivized offer industry which have had a bad week.

The offer industry is built on the concept of product bundling. Andrew Chen wrote a great post about here so wont go into the details.

In search marketing we’ve learned that the magic term “Intent” is the key to how most of the value is being created for someone like Google. By capturing the intent of a person who is out to buy something you have the power of directing traffic of huge value. How do you carry intent over to other sites where we’re not searching? It’s hard but here is an idea:

Amazing has something called “wish-list”, basically a list of books or products that I’ve saved on Amazon that I might buy sometime in the future. There could be many reasons why I’m putting something in my wish-list but one of them is certainly that I might buy it in the future. Compared to any book on Amazon the intent captured in my wish-list has a much higher value for Amazon. Basically Amazon have captured and saved my intent for the future.

In my opinion it’s crazy that this isn’t something that is being used on other sites, especially e-commerce sites . If I was able to “Heart” or “Like” products on any e-commerce site and they were able to save those “intents” for the future they’ve created value for my next return.

The big idea here is to capture someone intent and link it to a specific user. I think there is a huge opportunity with the mysterious Facebook Open Graph API to do just that. And it doesn’t have to be the same thing as with the beacon-fiasco. Imagine I’m on Etsy, I find something pretty and click “Like”. Etsy is connected with facebook and my (possible) intent is shared with my friends. Privacy-issue? Possibly, but the value of sharing something I like to facebook is probably larger for most users.

Value created for Etsy? Duh.

Facebook should start sharing Intent over the social graph and enable the “Like” function for everything on the web.

Here are some stuff I would “Like” if I could:

• http://blog.airbnb.com/stay-in-the-costa-rican-white-house

• http://www.amazon.com/Audacity-Win-Lessons-Historic-Victory/dp/0670021334/ref=wl_it_dp_o?ie=UTF8&coliid=I10NKD5T6CVBIR&colid=BYJ1NXGDESBF

• http://www.myspace.com/kaffibarinnights (great bar in Reykjavik)

Perception of privacy is changing

Had a beer with Britt and his friend Dan at Revolution Cafe and for some reason we started chatting about a favorite topic of mine - Privacy.

The world has changed. And often when it does we don’t really take notice because as humans we’re amazing at adapting. When it comes to privacy it’s easy to fall into the category of people arguing for the slippery slope where less privacy is bad for us. But when you look backwards at what actually have happened in the last 5 years it’s pretty astonishing things.

We used to think it was dangerous to put your photo on the internet, to put your address on the internet. We used nicknames to hide our real identity and interesting discussions online where hiding behind a private email-list. This is really how things where in the early 2000 - it’s easy to forget.

Where the world a better place then?  No. We’re better off now thanks to more openness. And we’ve adapted to the point there things we used to think were privacy intrusions are now signs on people not understanding the context. Doesn’t have a photo on your facebook-page?  People wont associate that with your privacy-concern they will mostly think you’re boring.

They way the world is going is that we think that the bad examples of privacy intrusion actually applies to us. That if I leave my address online then either a paparazzi or a stalker will show up. Don’t worry - they wont. When very few people had a public life we cared. When all private individuals have an equally accessible public life we stopped caring.

The world doesn’t have time to make everyone a celebrity. There simply isn’t that much attention-span available.

Gustaf