On Friday, February 3, at the lovely Delancey St. Theater in San Francisco, ReadWriteWeb and our new home company, SAY Media, co-hosted a release party for Adam Lashinsky's new book, Inside Apple: How America's Most Admired - And Secretive - Company Really Works. It was our first joint event since we joined SAY in December. RWW and SAY are working together to figure out the future of media, so a gathering to discuss a book about Apple was a great place to start.
Apple lives at the center of the worldwide technological transformation that's underway, and Lashinsky's new book sheds light on how the enigmatic company works. It profiles Apple's leaders and their various styles and talents, it describes how the organization is woven around them, and it tells the stories of Apple insiders and outsiders at all levels.
Foursquare, about to celebrate its third birthday, is big but not huge. It has signed up 15 million users, hired over 100 employees and now boasts several million check-ins per day. That is impressive work for three years, but it must keep growing.
To do so, Foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley says the company is in the process of redesigning its mobile app for a broader audience, disassembling it and trying to put its features back together in a way that's more useful and interesting. It has also launched new features on its Web site, such as the neat and powerful "Explore" tool, which can help you find cool places to visit in your neighborhood or in an entirely new city.
As Twitter realized a few years ago, Crowley says Foursquare is seeing a big chunk of its growth from people who want to use parts of Foursquare, but not necessarily broadcast to the world. That means building a service that's useful to more casual users, and not just early Foursquare diehards.
I recently sat down with Crowley at the company's brand new, roomy headquarters in New York City, for an idea of what's next. Here's a lightly edited transcript of our chat.
Paul Berry, the Huffington Post's CTO since 2007, is one of the best regarded tech leaders in New York. After helping build one of the biggest news sites in the world, Berry announced this week that he's leaving AOL soon to focus on two new ventures: A social startup called Rebel Mouse and an incubator called SoHo Tech Lab to goof around with a bunch of different ideas and see what works.
I caught up with Berry this week to learn more about his experience growing HuffPost and what he's planning for his new projects. Following is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.
The word "bookmark," referring to a saved Web link, is starting to sound old. "Bookmark" has this connotation of turn-of-the-century Web browsers, when there weren't Web-based services for saving things. Your local bookmarks folder was where you kept links you wanted to go back to. These days, we're browsing on multiple devices, and links aren't necessarily "sites," "pages" or "articles" anymore.
Links can point to all kinds of things. Most of the time, we'll probably never need to visit a link again. But there are plenty of links we want to keep, even if it's just to remember them. How do we keep track of saved links? Where do we put them? I talked to Jori Lallo, developer of Grove.io and a link-saving side project called Kippt, to learn about the future of the bookmark.
MMMmmmm. Thanksgiving. The most delicious American holiday. What did you have? Macaroni and cheese? Pumpkin pie? White meat or dark meat? Doesn't matter, because @FAKEGRIMLOCK, a giant robot dinosaur, is sneaking up behind you, and he has very diverse tastes. Tomorrow is NO EAT FRIDAY. Will you survive?
You may recognize that metallic crunching sound from the comments section on ReadWriteWeb or many of the other big blogs, or perhaps out in the wild on Twitter. FAKEGRIMLOCK stomps around the Web, thriving on code, coffee, beer, bacon and the bones of stupid human bloggers and commenters. Mostly out of fear of becoming his NO EAT FRIDAY meal, I sat down with FAKEGRIMLOCK to ask him what he wants. After devouring everyone else at the table, he turned to me and said, "HERE INTERVIEW. OR ELSE."
People didn't understand the iPad immediately. No one believed in the form factor. "Just a big iPhone," people called it. But it caught on, it took off, and now consumers can't let go of their tablets. The intimate, intuitive interface has created its own use case. People curl up with the device and they read.
Publishers and app developers have provided a bonanza of ways to read on the iPad and iPhone. Some are free, some cost money, some require monthly subscriptions. All of them are vying for your attention in that new, valuable hour or two of tablet time in the evenings. But one app, Instapaper, sits in the iPad Hall of Fame on iTunes, pushing forward reader behavior just like the iPad itself. Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper, answered some questions for us about where this is all heading.
Contrary to the beliefs of some Internet entrepreneurs, local news and advertising is not dying. If advertising professionals can be believed, targeted local advertising is one of their primary goals, with the market expected to grow to $35 billion by 2014.
Local news aggregator Topix held a "State of Local Online Advertising" survey with some of the top U.S. advertising agencies. The survey shows that 60% of advertisers believe geo-targeted ads deliver stronger return on investment, with 33% of advertisers seeing double-digit gains. In an interview, Topix CEO Chris Tolles said advertisers and publishers do not need to be "hyperlocal" to make money in local markets.
How do people use web apps in this new, device-saturated era of the Web? In Part 3 of our interview with Evernote CEO Phil Libin, we look at the usage patterns of its users. One interesting data point is that 80% of Evernote users say they use the product both at home and at work.
Evernote is a smart phone app that epitomizes the current era of web apps. It is used over a variety of devices, it syncs easily between those devices, it augments your daily life in ways not possible before the mobile web, it can be used equally at work or home. For a more in-depth look at these and other web app usage trends, read on...
In Part 1 of our interview with Evernote CEO Phil Libin, we explored the history of Evernote - including its link to the Apple Newton. In Part 2, we look ahead to the future of Evernote. The company has ambitious plans to be your secondary brain. Literally. As Libin told me, "You will just have a chip in your head, or something. You'll just think about it and there's your external brain; and you'll get things that way."
Will consumers want to access a web app like Evernote via a chip in their head? Before you make up your mind, find out what Evernote has in store for the next 20 years...
Evernote is a smart phone app that epitomizes the modern day web service. It is used over a variety of devices, it syncs easily between those devices, it augments your daily life in ways not possible before the mobile web, it can be used equally at work or home. In an interview with Evernote CEO Phil Libin, I discovered that the genesis of Evernote is tied in with the Apple Newton - the innovative, but ultimately ahead of its time, Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) from Apple from the late 80's to 90's.
In Part 1 of this interview, Phil Libin explains that link to the Newton and how it ultimately led to the "secondary brain" app called Evernote. In Part 2 (to be published tomorrow) we discuss Evernote's ambitious 20-year plan.
