Thus, Silicon Valley.

" Thus, Silicon Valley." Yes, that's a complete sentence and I find that fascinating.

For more context head over to Caterina's blog, the sentence is about half way into the post.

Build what you cannot afford to buy...

My previous company's product was a sync and backup consumer product SugarSync.

With SugarSync we wrangled constantly with our cost of storage as we launched the service, designed incentives for referrals, tried to figure out optimal duration for free trial and so on.

So I was delighted to see a post on how another start-up is dealing with this issue. It is fantastic that they are able and willing to share their solution in such detail on ther blog.

Short list of lessons from Jeff Bezos

Short list of 3 items (full video here):

• Obsess over customers - Pay attention to competition but remember customers first.
• Invent - Listen to customer, invent for them, innovation is panacea.
  
• Think long term - Critical. 5-7 years time frame perspective. Be willing to be misunderstood. Be willing to change on feedback.

Bonus item:

• It is always day 1. Always, opportunity exists to innovate/obsess over customers.
  

Seth's blog on dashboards

I found some gem's in Seth Godin's blog post on dashboards/metric and their relevance to marketing.

"Building good dashboards isn't difficult, but it's an excellent marketing strategy. A few brainstorms:

1. If you can add a digital dashboard to your service, do it.
2. If you can make the dashboard public, it gets more powerful.
3. Highlight data that changes behavior.
4. Allow the user to highlight the information that matters to them."

In my experience, the last two points are often not even articulated clearly much less thought through and implemented in products.

How are folks discovering apps for their iPhone?

We are trying to understand how are people discovering apps for their iPhone. If you have 2 min to take a short 6 question survey, that would help us out. Just follow the link below

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=nfKMk6P9qNg4VWmIcS7NzQ_3d_3d

The survey is anonymous but do remember to add your email address at the end - we will do a lucky draw on May 1st for $25 Amazon gift certificate and announce the winner on the company blog at http://appletics.blogspot.com

Thanks!

Scary stuff...

The amount of data about us out there is simply phenomenal!

I have barely used Twitter. I have less than a dozen tweets, have a few dozen friends who follow me and a few dozen who I follow and yet this is what TwitterSheep can tell about me:



I have been marginally more active on Facebook (again primarily accepting friend requests or sending out friend request, pretty lame - I know). And see how well TouchGraph can describe me and my network.



With so much information about each of us and how we are connected, what we like/dislike, our political views, our brand preference, institutions we are affiliated with, places we have worked, lived and travelled to and a long list of other things... it is only a matter of time before Facebook, Twitter and other figure out how to monetize it.

Don't you think?

Highly recommend: Predictably irrational

Highly recommend reading "Predictably irrational".

Some random notes I made while reading the book

• Influencing choice: A and B being arbitrary options, creating and providing an additional option A' which is closer but inferior to A, influences people to chose A more often.
  
• First impression: First impressions count, initial anchors are persistent.
• Endowment effect: People value what they have more while selling, they focus on loosing ownership rather than gaining cash.
• Power of free: Free has great power and appeal. Free falls in a different mental account and is an order of magnitude more powerful than giving away something for cents.

E.g. iPhone Application store: Releasing lite/paid app pair results in higher revenue via paid app download and conversion from free to paid over revenue generated from releasing only paid application.

• Market vs. Social norms: Social norms and market norms often collide, market norm wins.

• Social norms: Social norms are very powerful and can be used instead of market norms in many situations to much better effect in less costly way.

E.g. Motivating employees bonus versus promoting culture of hard work by giving plaques to most hardworking employee.