Charles Hudson's Blog

I recently took a look back at a lot of the companies that I found really interesting, regardless of whether I invested or not, and tried to group them. It turns out that there is a large cluster in one theme – city living. While San Francisco is not as dense as New York or Tokyo, it does have sufficient density to unlock some really interesting businesses that maybe wouldn’t work as well in a more sparsely-populated area.

This is a quick full blog post that is a follow up to a question I posted on Quora. One thing I’ve been thinking about is whether the battle between Spotify, Deezer, Rdio, Beats Music, and the various other competitors from Google, Amazon, and others will result in a winner-take-all scenario. I have a few […]

Read More “On-Demand Music Streaming is Winner-Take-All, Right?”

In the past few months I’ve looked at quite a few commerce marketplaces and social networks. One thing I’ve been trying to understand more deeply is the set of circumstances when commerce networks tip toward winner-take-all outcomes, with one dominant network accounting for the bulk of transactional activity. This blog post is very much a […]

Read More “Commerce Marketplaces, Network Effects, and Winner-Take-All Outcomes”

A few days ago I was trying to find two new-ish apps, Jelly and Secret and I went to the App Store and just tried to find them via search. The results were not encouraging. I got a lot of results that were not at all what I was looking for. It turns out that […]

Read More “Only Apple Can Fix Its App Store Search”

In the past three years I have had the pleasure of meeting many marketplace companies looking for seed funding. I have also had the privilege of investing in quite and continue to learn along the way. One of the things I spend a lot of time thinking about and exploring is what drives “leakage” and […]

Read More “Marketplaces, Rating Systems, and Leakage”

I’ve been wearing and using my Pebble a lot more since they announced support for a broader framework of notifications with the release of iOS 7. I was excited to learn that I’d be able to get notifications from a broader set of applications as I thought it would make the watch more useful and […]

Read More “iOS7 and the Need for Smart Notifications for the Pebble”

I’ve written a few posts about how I think about location sharing and location sharing applications, the latest of which is this one. One of the most interesting experiences I’ve had of late is trying to activate my network to start using Twist. For those who are unfamiliar, Twist is a mobile app that allows […]

Read More “Lessons Learned from Sharing Twist With My Network”

One area where I’ve been spending some time meeting companies and learning is in the broad area of Android UI customization. I’ve started to see a handful of companies providing interesting approaches to customizing the Android home screen UI as well as taking over the lockscreen to provide consumers with information or entertainment. It’s not […]

Read More “Context, Commerce, and Content Will Battle for the Android Lockscreen”

I wanted to write a quick blog post based on a tweet I shared recently: I continue to believe that Kickstarter campaigns tell me more about category demand than demand for a given company's actual offering. — Charles Hudson (@chudson) November 1, 2013 Overall, I continue to believe that Kickstarter (and IndieGoGo and self-starter) campaigns […]

Read More “Kickstarter Campaigns and Product vs Category Demand”