How iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry users stack up. Plus, 33% of Americans would rather go without sex than their smartphones.

This is a fascinating infographic on how addicted Americans are to their smartphones, as well as the differences b/w iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry users.  My favorite stats:

• In favor of the appeal of Android's hardware diversity: 50% of Android users think their phone reflects their personal sense of style, versus only 35% of iPhone users and 43% of BB users.
• In favor of the appeal of the iPhone to developers: Only 38% and 37% of Android and BlackBerry users have ever paid more than $1 for an app, vs 55% for iPhone users.  The dig on Android that users don't pay for apps might have some truth to it.
• In favor of BlackBerry: nothing really.  Sorry RIM.

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Notes on the August New York Tech Meetup (#NYTM)

I finally got to go to the NYTM yesterday, for the first time since December.  I can't quite remember the format from last time, but I really liked this one: domes were done in groups of three, making it easier to remember your questions; big companies were allowed to present their tech innovations (although the focus remained on startups, as it should); the event featured a really fun hack demo of a web-controlled helicopter (that was not allowed to go higher than 10 feet to avoid setting off the sprinkler systems, which apparently cannot differentiate helicopters from fires); and the happy hour was held in a hall on site, which allowed presenting companies to set up "booths" for interested members of the public, and avoided the loss of people that shifting venues inevitably entails.  

Here are my notes on the presenters, taking in real time on my dinky little QuickOffice app on my Android phone.  Audience questions were jotted down and have the presenters answers in the same bullet point, following the end of the question.  I may edit and/or add more thoughts later if I have time:

And it seems that just yesterday Microsoft IE was accused of having a monopoly

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Why Facebook May Really Be Worth $100Bn

I wrote my last post about how Facebook was a bubble, so now I am going to eat my words and explain why I think Facebook might be worth its price after all.  

I have long been a FB-apostate when it came to seeing the platform’s monetization potential: big, yes, but $100Bn big?  Now however I’m starting to see the light.  And it's not because of advertising.

I believe that Facebook has won the online identity war, and the spoils will be enormous.

Companies like MSFT and GOOG have forever been trying to create a single identity for users to use across the web, from MSN Passport cum Windows Live, to the simply titled Google Account (or is it Google Profile?) cum Google+.  Other, parallel efforts have focused on being a one-stop destination for all things online, from the Yahoo! Portal to iGoogle. But FB has actually done it, and not as a bolt-on afterthought but as their core competency (granted the portal was Yahoo's core competency, they just weren't very competent at it).  Because identity is a natural monopoly, this makes FB’s dominance of this space difficult to challenge.  

More Proof that Facebook is a Bubble

(Note: this is largely a summary of Social Media Ad Revenues Will Reach $8.3 Billion by 2015 by Erik Sass at MediaPost)

In a post yesterday, Erik Sass noted that BIA/Kelsey predicted that the Social Media ad spending - a decent proxy for Facebook revenue, as they seem to be earning almost all of it - will quadruple from ~$2Bn/yr to $8.3Bn/yr.  This is a healthy 32% growth rate, "reminiscent of the first surge of Internet advertising in its glory years from 1997-2000 and then again from 2003-2008."

Image via Wikipedia


Facebook, as recently as January, was claiming run rates of $2Bn annually while selling through Goldman Sachs at ~$50Bn EV, or 25x revenue.  That's already quite bubblish, but check this out.  On Monday, the WSJ reported an implied IPO valuation of $100Bn for Facebook assuming a Spring 2012 IPO.  Assuming little cash or debt on the books (i.e. Market Cap approximates EV), and assuming that Facebook gets 100% of social media ad spend, this implies ratio of 12x for 2012 EV to 2015 revenue.  That doesn't give Facebook IPO investors very far (anywhere?) to go over those 3-4 years and get any returns.  That's practically the definition of a bubble - when future success is already baked into current prices - and then some!

Where Are the Women in Tech ... Karaoke?

Folks who know me know that I like women, tech, and business, and perhaps with some connection between the topics spend more than statistically average thinking about why there are not more women in tech and business and discussing said topic w/ friends and associates.

Thus, when I read MG Siegler's post entitled There Will Be Karaoke: SXSW RVIP Goes East Coast Vs. West Coast Vs. Press Vs. Investors, I couldn't help notice that among seven singers representing four constituencies, that it was all dudes.

Now I realize that most of the reasons for the lack of women in tech and business are systemic (dearth of women in engineering, MBA programs, finance, senior executive positions across the Fortune 500, etc. etc.), and also that there is a lot of backlash that asking about the number of women in tech is the wrong question.

But seriously folks.  This is karaoke.  Can anyone seriously say anything in defense of a karaoke event being all dudes?  

How about looking at it from another perspective: when was the last time you went to a karaoke event that was all dudes, anywhere? (other than a fraternity or one of those fraternity-equivalent-finals-club-thingies in The Social Network)  Talk about low-hanging fruit for having women visibly involved on the tech scene (and for the haters, I'm hardly suggesting that karaoke should be a woman's place or goal in tech, but if you look at who the other participants are you'll see this is hardly about fluff)

Besides the sheer mind-numbing obviousness of it from a PR point of view (at least to me), let's look at the self-interest involved.  I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that maybe, juuust maybe, a guy and a girl together could sing a broader range of songs than two guys alone, and that maybe, just maaaybe, that would be an advantage in a karaoke competition?  To paraphrase MG Siegler's "There Will Be Karaoke" title, where there is karaoke, There Will Be Celine Dion.

Twitter and the Danger of Listening Out of Context

You know that guy that overhears a line of your conversation and jumps in, with the completely wrong context?  With Twitter we are all That Guy - or least the barrier to being That Guy is dropped waaaay lower.

I was just reviewing @christinacaci's tweetstream to decide whether to follow her (I did), when I read this one:

@arainert I also saw a few parks trending on Foursquare this afternoon, which seems a solid indication of springtime.

1 Mar via web Favorite Retweet Reply

from Union Square, New York

I was about to give her shit a la "you know you're in a social media bubble when you use Foursquare to tell the weather"- b/c seriously, who uses Foursquare to tell the weather? b/c I was feeling snarky after finding a time to catch up with her had involved more reschedules than a NY airport in a Xmas blizzard, although in her defense I've been guilty for a couple of the reschedules and she's been incredibly gracious about it - until I saw the context of the conversation and noted that the person she was talking to was a) the head of product at Foursquare, and b) had just made a comment ending in "Screw you Winter!"  Suddenly her tweet made so much more sense, was so much more nuanced than originally perceived to be, and wiped away all snarkiness to the point I felt bad about even the mildly-ribbing tweet I'd made about 4Sq having a new use case - telling the weather.

11:26PM, March 2, 2010.  Note to self: you're already pretty good at being That Guy; be double careful on Twitter!