Introducing Tastr.me, Something You Can’t Use

I know that I haven’t been posting frequently, and I’m sorry, but it has been for a good reason. In an attempt to find a market ripe for innovation, I’ve spent a lot of my time doing research. After some time, I realized that it would be best to start in the area that I know best, and that’s commerce. There are many flaws with the current retail structure — like price markups, for instance — and I think I have a few tricks up my sleeve to introduce true innovation. That’s where I’m going to start. 

I don’t have any specifics to disclose regarding exactly what I’m building, but you can subscribe for updates at http://www.tastr.me. The one-sentence description is very vague and ambigious; that’ll change as time goes on. 

Google Wallet Expanding To 10 More Sprint Devices This Year

I’ve actually used the service several times with my old Nexus S. It’s really cool for what it does, but probably won’t see adoption. 

parislemon:

Bringing the total to what, 11?

Serious question: has anyone ever — and I do mean ever — seen anyone use Google Wallet in the wild? I live in the technology capital of the world and have not.

[via TM]

Source: parislemon

Dropbox Is A Feature, Not A Product

Dropbox has always been a service that interest’s me. It’s hard for me to decide if I should use it as a simple file-sync/storage service, or as a backup service - just in case something happens to my precious Macbook Air. I can understand why some people love it, but it just doesn’t seem to fit into my toolkit of services and applications. I’m either using my Macbook Air or my iPhone. That’s about it. With the recent launch of Apple’s iCloud service, I’m starting to question whether or not Dropbox has a viable business. 

Storage is a commodity - something that can be bought and sold - that is becoming cheaper by the day. In the grand scheme of things, it’s quite cheap for tech giants like Google and Apple. On the other hand, it’s much more expensive for a small company like Dropbox. This is where the biggest problem for the future of Dropbox as a company in the file storage business lies. Giants like Google - with it’s cloud applications like Gmail and Docs - and Apple are catching on to this growing trend of cloud storage and cross-device syncing, and they’re going to jump on it. 

Google already offers 7GB of cloud storage free to every user of its online services, compared to the 2GB of storage that Dropbox offers for free. It’s rumored “GDrive” service is expected to offer even more free storage and competitively priced tiered options. Apple’s iCloud option offers 5GB of cloud storage for free, and it’s baked into all Macintosh and iOS devices. If you’d like to bump that up to 50GB, it costs just as much as Dropbox’s 50GB tier does. Again, you get 5GB for free from Apple to start off; 2GB from Dropbox. Apple also has cheaper tiers that Dropbox doesn’t offer. I can go through the numbers all night, but what I’m trying to say is that the fate of Dropbox’s business doesn’t look good. It’s easily imitated and the tech giants can offer it for much less. 

Not only is Dropbox’s business model in question, but its actual product is in question. The company offers a third-party application - they don’t offer any sort of platform or operating system. If Apple and Microsoft are readying their own services that will be baked directly into OS X and Windows, where does that put Dropbox? We’re already seeing this transition happen with the deep integration of iCloud in OS X Mountain and SkyDrive in Windows 8. It’s also very likely that Google’s rumored service will be baked into its Android mobile OS. 

The bigger picture here is that the end-of-life for the filesystem is closer than some may believe. OS X Mountain Lion and iCloud auto-sync all of your documents and files between iOS devices, and iMessage automatically updates on every iOS device that you own. Google’s online suite of applications simply save in the cloud, so you just open the application you’d like to use and are put back right where you left off. Applications are king and combined with integrated cloud services makes for a potentially sad ending for Dropbox. 

I’m afraid that Dropbox can continue to innovate, but they can only go so far on their own. Their product is already being imitated and improved on by the likes of Apple, Microsoft, and Google. The future of the operating system is a closed ecosystem that automatically syncs activity, not just files, between each device. Dropbox simply doesn’t have the firepower to fight that off. Steve Jobs was right, Dropbox is a feature. 

We Should Pay More For Apps

 Have you ever seen apps, for any platform, that cost more than $20? If you have, I’m sure that you’ve thought to yourself, “this price is ridiculous!” You’re not the only one; it’s a growing trend as app developers must competitively price their apps to attract purchases. The reason why I bring this is up is because a recent article on CNET by Rafe Needleman brings a serious issue to light. In it, he writes about the “absurd” price of an application that he was looking to purchase. Needleman even went the extra mile and contacted the developer to demand a price drop — surprising, right? That’s not the interesting piece — it’s the developers justification of the price that is so interesting. 

 Gunnar Bartels, GM of ShareMouse in Germany, firmly backed up the price of the application in question. According to him, it’s so high because, most obviously, he has developers that need to be paid. He goes on to explain that lowering the price would result in more sales, which would in turn result in more customer support questions in need of answers. What does that mean? More employees to answer those customer support questions. Not only that, but Needleman has spoken to many developers that say the quality of support questions seem to disintegrate as the price goes down. More employees just to answer poor questions? I don’t think so. 

  Finally, in an interview with GeekWire, Steam CEO Gabe Newell had this to say: “We varied the price of one of our products. What we saw was that pricing was perfectly elastic. In other words, our gross revenue would remain constant…” If you reduce the price of your app by 5x, you’re going to see 5x more purchases. 

 Lowering the price of an application would potentially result in not only lower salaries, but also less profit for the companies making the applications. I think it’s time for all of us to start thinking about the people behind these applications that need the money. I’m opening the Mac App Store as we speak to purchase a semi-“expensive” application — you should too. 

Jason Kincaid Jumps The Sinking Ship

Another day, another writer leaves TechCrunch. Arrington just broke the news that Jason Kincaid, one of the first, and best writers for TechCrunch, has left to move on to a new career. Oh, and Sarah Lacy isn’t too happy about Erik Schonfeld’s decision to not post a tribute article for Kincaid — one of their most hard working and dedicated writers — because he believes that respect “is letting someone break their own news.” That’s not really getting the point. After all of those years of hard work and fantastic journalism, all he gets from Schonfeld is a goodbye and the opportunity to write his own explanation. Classy, Erik. 

Hollywood's Next Great Business Model: Praying That Stars Die

parislemon:

When asked why The Bodyguard was pulled from Netflix streaming following Whitney Houston’s death, Dan McDermott got the following response from a Netflix rep:

I just went and talked to my main supervisor as to why the movie had been pulled and the reason it was pulled was the production company pulled the streaming rights from us because all the publicity after Whitney Houston’s passing there was an opportunity to make really a very large amount of money on the DVD sales of her movies. So they’re going to pull all the streaming titles we have of Whitney Houston so they can make more money off the DVD sales of her movies.

What fucking scumbags. Not Netflix, which sadly has no control over situations like this, but the movie studio. 

It seems like Hollywood is eyeing two business models in order to preserve their precious DVD sales (which are tanking more each day):

1) Make it basically impossible to rent a film. It used to be that you could rent a movie the day it came out for sale on DVD. Then it was 30 days later. Now it’s 56 days later. And you can’t even think about renting the films for 28 days.

As a reminder, torrents currently have no such window.

2) Hope and pray that big time stars die to temporarily boost sales. And instead of doing everything in you power to ensure that fans have easy access to remember the stars they cherished, pull all access except for the most expensive and limited variety in order to maximize profits.

Source: parislemon

Apple Wants You To Use One OS

 Apple unveiled a new Mac OS X version today, dubbed “OS X Mountain Lion,” which is available to developers now. Most didn’t see this coming, as the company is known for holding keynotes to show off this kind of thing. I’m actually most surprised that there weren’t even any rumors about a possible new update for OS X on the way. Every tech blog has been so concentrated on the iPad 3 and rumored Apple TV set that this just happened to slip past their sites. Nice one, Apple. 

 Either way, this update is interesting for several reasons. It’s an incremental update that focuses on bringing Mac OS X and iOS closer together; an important move for the company. We first started seeing this merge of the two operating systems with the launch of OS X Lion. Gestures and Launchpad made Apple’s intentions quite evident. However, I think at the time nobody knew how fast Apple really wanted to move. Updates to the desktop operating system will now be released on an annual basis, which indicates that they’re quite eager to get this done. 

 Apple knows that we truly are moving into the post-pc era, and they want to be the catalyst of this transition. It’ll be interesting to see what the future holds for Mac OS and iOS. Oh, and Apple actually removed “Mac” from the OS name, so now it’s just “OS X Mountain Lion.” Is this the beginning of the end for the separated operating systems? I have no doubt in my mind that Apple intends to merge OS X and iOS into one seamless experience. 

Clear for iPhone

If you haven’t already heard, the new cool kid on the block is Clear, a task manager for the iPhone. It’s built from the ground up with iOS gestures and is extremely intuitive. The smartphone task management market was in need of a little bit of a shakeup — this should get the others thinking. 
parislemon:

Like seemingly everyone else in the tech blogosphere, I’ve been playing with Clear, a new personal organization app from Realmac Software, for the past few weeks.

Super simple. Slick UI that’s bound to be copied quite a bit. Lovely. 

Macstories, The Next Web, SiliconFilter, and TechCrunch have solid reviews.

(Disclosure: CrunchFund is an investor in Orchestra, a competitor to Clear.)

Source: parislemon

Yahoo Screws Up Asian Deal

 When you thought things couldn’t get worse, they just did. According to sources talking with AllThingsD, both Alibaba Group and Softbank have ended talks with Yahoo regarding the Asia cash-rich split-off. It sounds like Yahoo’s negotiators couldn’t decide what they wanted out of the deal, jumping all over the place. 

 This doesn’t mean that the deal won’t happen at all, but it’s not a good sign nonetheless. The value of Yahoo’s stake in Yahoo! Japan and Alibaba is around $17 billion — money they need very much right now. Not only would it significantly increase the value of the faltering company, but it would give them a cash-cushion to sit on if necessary. Good luck, Yahoo. 

I Understand Twitter’s Vision Now

 Okay, let me clarify some more on yesterday’s post. I said that if Twitter wants to become the place where people go to learn about breaking news, then “it has a long road ahead of it.” I then went on to talk about how the users have made key contributions to the site. My argument was a little vague and misguided. The recent death of Whitney Houston has really illustrated the sheer power of Twitter as a platform for breaking news. According to recent reports, the news of Houston’s death broke on Twitter 27 minutes before it did on mainstream news outlets. Even when media outlets like CNN and FOX broke the news, they were reading tweets live on-air. If Twitter’s goal is to become the place where people go to learn about news as it happens, they’re closer than it seems. 

 Just one hour after the news of Houston’s death broke, over 2.5 million related tweets had been posted. There’s no doubt that people are flocking to the micro-blogging site to learn about and discuss breaking news as it happens. After putting the pieces together, Dorsey’s new vision for the company is beginning to make sense. They definitely won’t be able to get everyone to start actively tweeting, but it’s possible that the average joe will sign up and use it as their news aggregator. This is why it’s important that Twitter gets mentioned through other news outlets like CNN. People will begin to catch on with the fact that the discussion is happening on Twitter, and they’ll sign up. 

  News breaks on Twitter first because it’s a platform that gives everyone a voice. It gives us all the ability to tell the world about what’s happening right now. The Whitney Houston news broke on Twitter first because people at the scene of the event tweeted about it straight from a phone or other device and we were able to see it instantly. Contrary to Blodget’s beliefs, I don’t think that Twitter’s vision is vague at all or in disagreement with the average use of the service. Yes, many (or most) users of Twitter have other discussions that may not be related to current events or news, but that’s not the point. It’s clear that Twitter IS the place to learn about breaking news as it happens, and that’s what Twitter is looking to do. Break news as it happens. It’s a place to discuss what’s happening right now. Twitter is a place for open conversation. I think that I understand the new vision at Twitter now.