Charles Hudson's Weblog

I’ve been thinking a bit about how I use social networks and how it continues to evolve. Increasingly, I find myself wanting to consume Facebook’s myriad set of products and services as discrete applications, especially on mobile devices. The core Facebook UI is burdened with having to do a lot. It has to be able [...]

In my dual roles as a Venture Partner at SoftTech VC and Co-Founder of Bionic Panda Games, I’ve met with a bunch of companies and teams who are focusing on trying to solve the problem of mobile application discovery. Simply put, the problem (as articulated by people trying to solve it) is that there are [...]

I have been trying to wrap my head around the New York Times new digital subscriber plans. I have been happily paying for the NYT on my Kindle as well as reading it for free from time to time on my iPad(s) and mobile phones. I just don’t get their new pricing scheme. It’s not [...]

Just a quick thought that’s been on my mind of late. I’m trying to figure out how two major changes I see in social and mobile games will be reconciled: 1. Many social games developers are gradually beginning to embrace deeper integrations of Facebook Credits into their on-Facebook social games. In a number of cases, [...]

I have been playing with the Facebook app on my Blackberry a lot lately and I really do like it. If you’ve been reading this blog for awhile, you know I’m obsessed with address books and email, particularly the concept of the evergreen address book. To date, the best solution I have is to treat [...]

I was on a plane earlier today sitting next to someone with an iPhone. One of the things I’ve been wondering a lot lately is whether RIM made a mistake by not investing more research and energy in making a better web browsing experience for the last few versions of the Blackberry. Whenever I talk [...]

I read this article (apparently I was late to the blogosphere party on this one) Mobile Web: So Close Yet So Far – New York Times in the Sunday NYT and I wasn’t really sure why this was news. As far as I can tell, the basic thrust of the article is that the mobile [...]

I spent a good chunk of my last Saturday at the >play conference at Berkeley. Overall, I thought it was a well-produced show and the team behind it should be proud of what they pulled together. Mobile Advertising is Neither Well-Defined nor Understood. The conference session I attended called “The Co-Evolution of Marketing and New [...]

Today, getting a mobile phone service agreement is a real pain. To me, it’s kind of like buying a used car — no matter what you pay, there’s always that nagging feeling that you’re getting ripped off or not getting the best deal possible. When you add in the fact that it feels like every [...]

With the public closure of Yahoo’s Mixd and various press articles about Twitter, Dodgeball, Loopt and other products that incorporate some kind of social networking or group communications for mobile phones, I have been doing some thinking about why mobile social networking and group communications haven’t taken off in the United States. The easy answer [...]