Miles To Go.

Fred w phone. No unlimited data plan just yet...

There is a yawning gap emerging in the world and I think this gap will define the advancement of societies, the creation of jobs,  and even the happiness of populations in the decades to come: it is access to mobile data and I call it Flintstones vs. Jetsons. (shout out to April Rudin for the headline).

• Generation segue: Some of us remember Fred Flintstone. Worked in a quarry, drove a foot pedal car. Loved to bowl and eat steaks. Life was simple, and there was not a lot of reason to innovate. Pebbles and BamBam didn’t seem to be a big generational culture gap. A loveable guy in the Jackie Gleason vein.
• And his cartoon counterpart, George Jetson. Worked are Spacely, drove an automated space scooter. Astro walked himself, Rosie the Robot did the chores. Skyped with the office, used the tele-puter on his wrist. Loveable knucklehead is in a fast-moving world, but he kept adapting and he kept pace.

So my point, my belief, is that we have arrived at a crucial inflection point in our history, where people, countries, leaders (and entire industries) are choosing to go Flintsone or Jetson. And the catalyst for this decision is, clearly, the smart phone and the data it generates. The Flintstone are content with how things are. They have found ways to live until now without technology, and they resolved they would coast from here on in, whether in their carreers or their lives. Financial planners are on the list. So is much of the financial services (non retail) industry. Traditional media has hated the transition. KONY is no fan. Nor is Assad, or Mubarak. People of a certain age (but not all!). There are lots more.

Meanwhile, the Jetsons accelerate. The gap has not even yet begun to present itself.

mOcean at Mobile World Congress

If you have any doubt of how quickly this industry has grown, check out the Mojiva/Mocean (I am an investor) booth at The Mobile World Congress. MWC was, five years ago, just a bunch of suits from Nordic and Asian countries wielding flip phones for voice and text. Today, MWC is heralded as the biggest and the best mobile technology event in the world. According to conference organizer the GSMA, this year’s event played host to a record number of attendees, topping out at 67,000 visitors from 205 countries; an 11% increase over the 2011 show. The four-day conference and exhibition attracted mobile operators, software companies, equipment providers, Internet companies and media and entertainment organizations, as well as government delegations from across the globe. More than 50 percent of this year’s attendees hold C-level positions, including more than 3,500 CEOs.

Most telling perhaps, CEO’s were wearing jeans, T’s and blazers…

So here’s the shocker datapoint from cisco: 40% of the worlds smartphone data is consumed by… 1% of the world population. That means a small group of people are gaining an unfair (perhaps) advantage because of their access to information

• The subways are down: take the bus.
• This new place is overcrowded: here’s another local option.
• Gas prices are skyrocketing, but discounted in NJ this weekend.
• This client has spent xxx seconds on the site and is ready to take the next buying step
• Yo Twitter! The rally to unseat the government has been moved to the following sidestreet!

The examples go on and on. A few minutes saved. A better solution for the moment. A bit more background before the interview. A better way, on the way. Compound that millions of times over billions of people and guess what: you have a new gap between the haves and the have-nots. Food for thought before you make your choice between Flintstone or Jetson!

You should be arrested for using a flip phone in 2012

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) came out with a shocker this week; urging a Cellphone Ban for Drivers. I support the NTSB’s cellphone ban for the following reason: anyone still using that word probably still calls a “car” a “horseless carriage”.

Beside the story in the New York times, there was a stock photo of a freaking Razor flip phone. It made me laugh.

As per usual, a Government Agency trying to protect its public actually just misses the point, in this case by a couple of generations. Here’s why

1. The moniker “Cellphone” was actually based on analog cellular technology, where signals were splits into cells when a tower was overloaded or a signal was passed from one tower to another. With Voice requests. So last century. But the whole history is here.
2. The rest of the world began with digital installations and so calls their devices mobile phones, or mobiles (said Mo-Biles). Early last decade.
3. The “SmartPhone” ushered in the proliferation of data (texting, Social Media, Mobile Web, etc.). It was smart, and it drove the phone feature to the background. Mid Decade.
4. The new name is still being fumbled with, just as Horseless carriage was eventually replaced with the automobile. As noted five  years ago by digital sooth-sayer Phil Leigh in an Inside Digital Media video  podcast, the device is more accurately labeled a “teleputer”.  George Gilder originated  the concept about twenty years ago when he envisioned a hand-held unit  providing convenient wireless access to a global computer network. It was  kind-of the evolutionary destination implied by a popular computer industry  slogan at the time, to wit, “the network is the computer.”

More significantly, (following P from Phil Leigh) iPhone users are progressively learning that computer applications are becoming  the unit’s raison d’etre.  In short, the phone’s digital capabilities such as photography, geo-location, audio & video playback, and  especially Internet access, are the defining characteristics. Applications like  Skype and FaceTime portend an era when cellular telephony per se, becomes irrelevant  to iPhone owners. Long way of getting to the point that, it’s not a phone anymore. And people use voice as a diminishing percentage of their device time.

And Deborah Hersman, chairwoman of the N.T.S.B., an independent federal agency responsible for promoting traffic safety and investigating accidents, said the concern was heightened by increasingly powerful phones that people can use to e-mail, watch movies and play games. “Every year, new devices are being released,” she said. “People are tempted to update their Facebook page, they are tempted to tweet, as if sitting at a desk. But they are driving a car.”

Nine states now ban the use of hand-held phones, and 35 states ban texting by drivers, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association, which represents state traffic agencies. Many mobile phone companies dropped their opposition over the last decade to any restrictions on the use of phones in cars, and have in recent years joined calls to ban texting while driving. In a statement, CTIA, the cellular telephone industry trade group, said it deferred to states about whether to enforce such bans.  Which underscores the point that carriers care less and less about voice: it’s about the data stupid. Most of the money will be made off of the advertisements served to these devices- a subject that is near and dear to my heart.

A complete ban on phone use by drivers would have enormous impact on many car makers that are offering integrated hands-free, voice-activated systems that allow drivers to talk and do other tasks, like calling up their phone directory.  The Alliance for Automobile Manufacturers, a trade group for the industry, said in a statement that it was reviewing the N.T.S.B. recommendations. But it also defended the integrated systems, saying they allow drivers to keep their hands on the wheel and eyes on the road while they remain connected.

No way we are going to get people to put away their devices, at dinner or on the road. Best we can hope for is to educate them on the dangers (socail or physical) to what feature is to be used when. “What we do know is that digital technology has created a connected culture in the United States and it’s forever changed our society:  consumers always expect to have access to technology; so managing technology is the solution,” the alliance said in a statement.

That, and updating the lingo so people know what the hell you are talking about…

Mobile Global: Click 2 see cool pic

I work hard to get lucky.

1. The Carriers used to think they were content curators. Seriously, there was no other way to get distribution than to program in bizarre carrier languages (BREW, etc) and pay them through the nose to be “on deck”. Hey, they got the idea from the old AOL days. But these people did not realize the comic effect of managing content on a 2″x2″ screen. Plenty of money was wasted getting on those decks, and getting the content optimized. At one point, I counted an easy $500MM of venture money was poured down that rabbit hole.
2. Eyeballs began to shift. First it was getting email and text on phones. Then a few games and stock quotes. But the iPhone and its 250,000 apps out the gate brought all manner of information and entertainment to the mobile screen. The PC reached a plateau.
3. People were no more willing to pay for apps than they were to pay for the “old fashioned” internet. It should be free, man continued as the digital credo. And except for very few exceptions (iTunes being one), the entire mobile revolution has been driven to date with ads.
4. Tablets followed shortly, and guess what: they’re mobile too. Meaning all the ad serving technology, all the geo-location and device data was much more like a mobile phone than a PC.

With a little knowledge as an angel/board member with digital yield optimizer operative (now Operative One) and some domain expertise from Cellufun, I went on to start mobile ad network/ad server Mojiva with co-founders Krish and Dan.  And I have since been founding angel in mobile powered projects like MyBailiwick (crowdsourcing too early!), TrustCloud (trust in the sharing economy getting hotter now) and WellAware (mobile health and wellness platform). I think my bets in mobile media have been pretty lucky, and i will continue to make them for all the basic reasons above (and many more that are regularly laid out by tech guru Mary Meeker).

I just never knew where the tipping point was.

I do now. High five.

Tweet'Quake has different effects on different people

New York has been sandwiched this week between a) a quake that had people on the streets all afternoon Wednesday checking in on their phones, and b) the impending havoc promised by Hurricane Irene sometime this weekend.

All the while, I’ve been working on a previously planned disaster recovery plan with Mojiva HR to protect and inform our nearly 100 workers spread from London to LA. What struck me was the difference between last year’s plan and this year’s.

In a word: twitter. A year ago, we were still stuck on All-email, a DR sharepoint site, and some redundancies with text, etc. This year, we can do a lot of it with a tweet. The benefits to all that, far as I can tell:

1. Twitter naturally appeals to social groups that communicate heavily via mobile and SMS; the teens and twenties. It is fundamentally an SMS bulletin board that you can post to and read directly on anything from a Mac to a mobile phone. You can even post to it and read it from FaceBook.
2. For the same reason, it appeals to anyone who wants to establish an affinity group and listen in. As you can follow anyone (except those who deliberately opt for select privacy) it’s reasonably easy to set up any kind of group and follow it.
3. Twitter can quickly become an impromptu info-sharing point, as happened in the California fires and the Chinese earthquake. Worked pretty well in Cairo Damascus, Tripoli and London. Hell, twitter works.
4. You can use it as a real-time news feed because a number of News providers, including the BBC and CNN issue News bulletins as tweets.
5. Finally you can aggregate everything relevant to a group or topic and quickly see and entire stream of whats going on in one page- online or mobile. It also works well with SMS/text.

The few drawbacks, far as I can see:

1. Everything is out there. You own your mistakes later, but hey don’t we anyways.
2. There’s plenty of irrelevant tweets out there that add no value. You just have to learn how to filter them.
3. People (beyond early adopter geek types) are just starting to learn how to use the tool (see #2 above)

A few months ago, I wondered how any company could survive when most of its content was self-absorbed streams of consciousness. Two disasters in one week and I have realized twitter is a heck of a tool. for exchanging useful, fluid information. Bonus: it can also be pretty funny.

I tip my hat. Did not ever think I would.

Mobile has and will transform our lives like no other phenom, bringing knowledge and data to our fingertips that no 20th (or 1st) century genius could match. It will enrich our life experiences in ways we have only just begun to fathom. Mobile is perhaps the greatest technology of our lifetimes, and its effect will outlive us. The impact of new technology is hard to overstate, but here is an yet another example of how it can change the understanding of an entire era:

(Excerpt Phil Leigh) Mathew Brady compiled a photographic portfolio during the American Civil War that forever changed the way people remembered loved ones through a rather new technology of the time: photography. The war remains vivid in our visual understanding because it was so well photographed. Thousands of soldiers stood before the camera on their way to serve. Many were photographed in death, including a solemn series of photographs Brady exhibited in New York City just after a Maryland battle that turned back Robert E. Lee’s first Confederate invasion. Their graphic power overwhelmed cynical New Yorkers of the day. At last, someone had captured ‘the terrible reality and earnestness of war.’ The photographs by his colleagues of the dead at Gettysburg will never lose their power.

Such is the impact of a new technology as it transitions from early adopters into the mainstream. And so, video records are at a similar evolutionary threshold and Mobile will play a part in the shift again.

I never met my deceased great grandparents, or other older relatives, and are curious to know what they were like. I’ve spent countless hours on Ancestry.com trackng them down to coals mines in PA, battlefields of France and the backwoods of Northamptonshire. So far, we have a Purple heart, a Son of the American revolution, and one prolific Spencer that fathered the last of 24 kids when he was 74.  Both the facts and the legends were hard to find, and harder to verify.

The practice is new and it remains to be seen if it morphs into widespread use. But I would say the impact of mobile on our lives and beyond is a dead certainty.

Start by taking the “QR Memorial Poll” here 

Krish, Dan and Miles make the Mojiva napkin

News of Mojiva closing a $25M round just a few years after starting up brought a rush of high five from peers, rounds of drinks from friends, and more than a few calls from unknowns trying to sell me things I never knew I needed. The ride so far has been amazing, and not a day goes by that I am not grateful for the courage of my co-founders Krish and Dan, the expertise of our CEO Dave, and the dedication of rest of the team. And with all the skill in the room, I am still also respectful of how much luck and timing have to do with the entire equation.

When she heard of the news, one of my Board members from KFAC had a pretty simple question: what does it really  mean? I had the benefit of some time away to reflect on that while doing my annual cultural lap through southern France and came up with no less than the following.

Mobile is now, and will be, among the most profound effects on our society and civilization of our lifetime. Its impact will be right up there with space exploration (cancelled), HIV (still nasty), Middle East Peace (as if), The Internet (still going), Reality TV (why Snookie why!) and the Fall of the Berlin Wall (still down).

Phil Leigh sums it up artfully:

Today we interact with digital t media nearly as routinely we checked our wristwatches to read time-of-day fifteen years ago. While the conversion might seem radical to consumers from 1996, the advent of portable connected devices such as smartphones and tablet computers implies an even more fundamental change in the future. In short, all media shall become interactive – not just Internet media.

Significantly, app-enabled mobile devices are empowering traditional media to adapt to such a transformation because the portable units are evolving into cognitive prosthetics. Much as experienced amputees routinely use mechanical prosthetics as artificial limb extensions, habitual smartphone and tablet owners are starting to use the devices as convenient intelligence aids. They help users gain more information that would otherwise be unavailable, or difficult to obtain. For example smartphones can find price comparisons merely by scanning barcodes and other implanted signals off shelf merchandise labels. Specifically, a price-comparison app reads the barcode or embedded signal to (1) identify the merchandise and (2) display a website where up-to-date prices for the item from all merchants are complied.

According to www.chetansharma.com, smartphone sales in the United States crossed the 50% market share threshold for the first time in the first calendar quarter of 2011. That’s nearly double the 27% share of only two years ago. Google’s Eric Schmidt proclaims “the smartphone is the new PC”. Similarly, Yankee Group predicts that over 60 million tablet computers will be in use by 2015. Sharma concludes “…mobile will become the platform of everything. Anything that can be connected will be connected.” Among other functions, such devices will evolve into ubiquitous cognitive prosthetics, nearly always available to help us interact with media in all its forms.

I have blogged about my thoughts of how mobile (plus social and local to quote Mary Meeker) will affect a few places I have interest in: how we might visualize health, coupons, high school sports and even how the trust and reputations that we earn (both online and in the real world- an increasingly blurred distinction) will enable us to build an economy of sharing.

What excites me is the tremendous domain expertise and world view I am given by being involved in a company like Mojiva. It’s a box seat with a great view of everything that will play out on the field of mobile in the next few decades. And those things will have profound effect on how our world evolves.

Lucky, lucky me. Up ’til now at least.

~~

If you have mobile social local ideas that you think will solve big problems or make better our world, bring ‘em on!

Michael Arrington is blunt.

That ouchie brought to you by Michael Arrington at a recent Tech Crunch Disrupt Conference.

It’s not as bad as it seems.

I find myself initially defensive at this comment, made by the headline grabbing (headline making!) founder of TechCrunch. I fall on the other side of thirty. If you check out this graph, which represents 300 responses from startups financed by Ron Conway, repeat founders under the age of 30 get more $500M+ exits. 

So if this is true, are old(er) founders more cautious, prudent, and take earlier, cheaper exits for security? Possibly. Whereas a younger founder will let their company brew for a while, gaining value, or be more tolerant of the risk along the way.

Older founders have also likely seen the game played before, and know how to judge incremental success, while a younger buck is more likely to bet the farm. But what is most interesting to me is which of these personalities match best with todays “2 & 20″ VC dynamic, where small hits don’t clear their preference hurdles. If you need a moonshot to make a buck for your portfolio, by all means go find a kid.

But they are getting less naive every day.

Ok, let's discuss this

Media mogul and best buddy Scott Carlin was in town this week and we went for all things Asian- dinner and discussion. I’ve been working on a JV in China for some time now, and as it winds its way near completion, my friends keep pointing out the cultural differences I’ll have to deal with. I’ve written about them before, but this week’s news certainly makes it worth level setting again.

So, for those that didn’t know it, one of Yahoo’s biggest assets on its book is AliPay. Which isn’t so interesting until someone from AliBaba says “by the way, you don’t own this anymore, and it happened a long time ago, but we can talk about it if you want… ok”?.

Looks like that just happened…

Yahoo, owner of the biggest U.S. Web portal, this week said it wasn’t informed until March 31 about an August 2010 transfer of Alipay equity to a vehicle outside of Alibaba in order to comply with restrictions on foreign ownership of payment services in China, which prompted the reorganization of Alipay, the nation’s biggest online payment service. For his part, Chairman Ma (seriously) said “the spinoff of the Alipay online payment business is “lawful” and “transparent,” after biggest shareholder Yahoo! Inc. claimed it wasn’t consulted on the transfer. “We are always committed to ensure our operations are 100 percent lawful,” Ma said today in Hong Kong. “The matter of Alipay is not settled yet” amid ongoing negotiations with Yahoo and Softbank Corp, Alibaba’s second-biggest shareholder, on the post-transfer commercial arrangements, Ma said. (Source: Bloomberg)

Yeah, I hope not.

Gone are the days of gunboat mercantilism, when British ships rings the harbors in defense of Jardine’s Opium trading. But Silicon Valley has weapons of their own now, not the least of which are direct flights to Hong Kong. I’m surprised Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz was not on a rocket to China the moment she heard the news. Rule of law in the US would have the transaction rescinded in an instant, and shareholder’s pallor cured shortly after. This one is going to play out a little longer, but the leverage is with Chairman Ma for the moment. CEO Bartz doesn’t look so good.

So what’s it mean. Well, China has some interesting ownership laws for one. And China has some fresh new perspectives on business leverage, ethics, and rule of law. But the economy is booming and the price of entry is to figure out ways to deal with a different culture. Really different. The dot.com bubble was similar in some ways. Hey, at least we’re fighting over technology these days, rather than water pipes.

Progress! Now you chan chime in with a poll..