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 […]
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 […]
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”
The world of mobile messaging has really taken off in the last few years, with products like WhatsApp, MesssageMe, Kakao, LINE, WeChat, Facebook Messenger, Kik, Viber, and others building large and growing user networks. I think many of these companies are really interesting and many of them are building really interesting businesses in their own […]
Read More “Mobile Messaging Won’t Be a Winner-Take-All Market (And That’s Okay)”
A decent chunk of my blog posts are inspired by things that other people tweet that catch my eye. Recently @hunterwalk tweeted out about how Evernote or Twitter should buy my favorite read it later service, Pocket: As Pinterest adds "read it later/bookmark" features I'm waiting for Twitter or Evernote to buy Pocket — Hunter […]
About three years ago there were a handful of companies that set out to build Android-first or Android-only startups. All of those, including the one that I co-founded, had a thesis on why focusing on Android first or exclusively was a wise strategy. With a few exceptions, most of those companies, including mine, have not […]
Read More “4 Reasons Why Android-First Strategies Haven’t Worked (Yet)”
