Charles Hudson's Weblog

TweetI’ve had a few blog posts in the past about managing contact information and the various tools I’ve tried (you can read them here and here. I continue to look for a unified contact management system to keep track of the many people I meet. I’m looking for a unified system that can perform two [...]

TweetI received a free Samsung Chromebook after attending Google I/O this year and I’ve been trying to use it as my primary weekend computer for the past few weeks. I have a handful of observations about my experience. I’ll sum my thoughts up in a simple sentence: The Samsung Chromebook is not a reasonable substitute [...]

TweetDisclosure: Through my work at SoftTech VC we have a small position in Groupon, I have friends involved with LivingSocial, and friends at foursquare (and I am an active user). This post is based on my views alone and doesn’t include anything other than idle speculation or reasoning on my part. Like a lot of [...]

TweetI’ve been really curious about TaskRabbit ever since I heard about the service. While it has always sounded interesting in practice, I’ve struggled to find a good personal use case for the service. Like a lot of people, I’m busy and have a lot to do. But the idea of trusting tasks I need to [...]

There is a strong case to be made for why Amazon will become a force in the wold of freemium games. Amazon has the three key ingredients – a database of customers who have credit cards, a hardware strategy that will promote customer adoption, and skills as a merchandiser.

TweetIn 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 [...]

TweetI’ve been tracking the progress of Google’s In-App Purchases for awhile. It’s not just academic to me – we’re building Android games over at Bionic Panda Games and the development of that product is pretty important to us. Previously, I worked on the Facebook Platform, which went through its own process in launching Facebook Credits. [...]

TweetI’ve been chatting with a lot of people who are working on mobile games with a strong location component. Almost all of them are trying to do some mashup of a game plus check-in data to do something interesting. At its core, the concept sounds intriguing. To date, I don’t think anyone has really cracked [...]

TweetJust 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, [...]

TweetIn an earlier blog post, I speculated a bit about what Facebook Places might ultimately mean for foursquare. It’s clear to me that Facebook is putting a lot of attention on its Places product, both in terms of the product itself and the business relationship between places and national and local merchants. They seem to [...]