The latest from TechCrunch
- Goodnight, Swoopo: The Pay-Per-Bid Auction Site Is Dead
- Mobile Messaging March Madness
- What Bill Gates Could Learn from Chris Rock
| Goodnight, Swoopo: The Pay-Per-Bid Auction Site Is Dead | Top |
| When I first wrote about Swoopo back in 2008 I found it abhorrent. It was, in short, a form of gambling masquerading as an auction site. You paid for bids – the more bids you bought the better the chance that you’d be able to pay a reduced price for a certain item. The real money came from the suckers who ran up the price. All those previous bids, at $1, were junked in the process. They called it entertainment shopping. Now, however, I call it dead. The company filed for bankruptcy in Germany on the 23rd and although the site appears to be down due to “technical difficulties,” I think the difficulties are more financial. Technologizer has found that the company is finding a liquidator to divest its assets and all bidders with current balances with the company are SOLwoopo. Some of Swoopo’s competitors are still around (I feel I must refrain from linking to them except in excoriation and so I’ll avoid that here) but hopefully they will suffer the same fate. Fools and their money, as they say, are soon parted. It becomes immoral when the ones doing the parting have stacked the deck in their absolute favor. CrunchBase Information Swoopo Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Mobile Messaging March Madness | Top |
| Editor's note : Guest author Semil Shah is an entrepreneur interested in digital media, consumer Internet, and social networks. He is based in Palo Alto and you can follow him on twitter @semilshah . On Thursday, I used Yobongo all day, which helped me find a new lunch spot, run into an old friend, and meet a Yobongo co-founder. That afternoon, I thought it would be a good time to write about the new group and mobile messaging wars for TechCrunch. A few hours later, Color Labs launched, to put it mildly. And, as I was editing this post on Friday night, Disco appeared, the new group messaging client from Google. Along with SxSW and the NCAA basketball tournament, this is surely March Madness. What does this explosion in mobile social apps mean. We're witnessing an entirely new class of companies that are being built primarily for the mobile phone and tablet experience, not PCs or laptops. These companies are using basic social activities and leveraging smartphone capabilities to provide consumers with cooler features in exchange for the chance to construct more intimate networks. Just within the last year, larger forces like Facebook and Foursquare have released new mobile features to allow users to combine check-ins with location-based picture-sharing. Perhaps messaging, broadly defined, is converging toward more context-specific communications that leverage and combine bits of information our mobile devices already are aware of. Only within the last year have things started to really gather steam. The first wave of these apps leveraged the mobile device's camera , which produced apps like Instagram, PicPlz, and Path, services that combined the basic social activity of snapping and sharing pictures to build a different kind of pyramid and, perhaps, a different kind of network. Location services have done the same with GPS sensors. Videosharing has proved tougher, though companies like uStream and SocialCam show promise. SoundCloud enables users to capture and share sounds from their daily lives, and IntoNow recognizes audio waves from television shows and movies (and maybe commercials?), like Shazam, to connect users around favorites shows. The accelerometer has been leveraged by Bump Technologies ' sharing service, and Apple, which has already entered living rooms with Apple TV and designs for convergence, may turn the phone into a joystick . Simultaneously, others began building mobile messaging applications, some with social ambitions in mind. These new tools enable more intimate communication platforms, as users continue to fight for Inbox Zero and doggy-paddle within the huge Facebook ocean. As Dave McClure argues , Facebook doesn't "get intimacy." Today's dominant social networks are established enough to provide authentication, but are too big to offer granularity. In the mobile messaging world, these are the short text messages we send to our companions, buddies, classmates, kids, and our parents that never reach the level of a status update or tweet. No company better captured the mood around this intimacy tension than Beluga , whose users were anthropomorphically transformed into "pods" of whales, dancing across oceans in search of new waters. Of course, Beluga was then harpooned by Facebook. It's early days for this new class of mobile messaging upstarts. Currently, the space is organized around four types of activity: group chat, SMS replacements, randomized/localized discovery, and relays. In the "group chat" category, there's GroupMe (SMS group messaging with push), Fast Society (geared to young, ephemeral groups), Rabbly (anchored through Facebook connect), Whatsapp (free SMS with multimedia), among others. Those designed to supplant SMS with group functionality are Kik , textPlus , and the aforementioned Beluga. A new Y Combinator company Convore recently launched a new take on real-time Internet relay chatting around interests. There are also international successes, most notably SMSGupShup from India. These companies acquire network effects through people that users already know. On the other side, there are services built around the notion of acquiring new networks through more random connections. Perhaps the most controversial applications are those that enable discovery and chat with new people, or strangers (the "Chatroullete Derivatives") such as MessageParty (YC alum), Matt Hunter's company TextSlide (featured in the The New York Times ), Yobongo, and of course, Color Labs. Most of us have already either connected or reconnected with all the folks we know online, and the next evolution is for services to help us discover new connections. This element of discovery drives these services to help us build smaller networks around our core groups of friends and family, or to build newer networks with folks we don't know yet but who have similar interests or location patterns. While using Yobongo for an entire day during slack time between meetings, there was something primal and immediate about the experience, filling the niche for hyper-local communication that Twitter is too big to cater to. This isn't to say Yobongo or others will succeed, but they are pushing the boundaries in this arena, and I suspect we'll see more incarnations of this concept for some time to come. Mobile and group messaging is attractive to investors, entrepreneurs, and users alike. If designed well, they could leverage network effects to amplify participation and enable the application of proven revenue models. This is a new class of social company, built entirely with mobility in mind from Day One. They are designed within a post-PC/laptop mindset. These companies will begin by drafting behind the lead cars in the social networking race. The most recent entrant into this red ocean — Color Labs — may have just made the waters a bit more red . We oftentimes take for granted that all of the established social networks will persist over time and satisfy most of our needs. Some realize building seamless, easy-to-use systems will create significant value for larger players because they weren't originally built with mobility in mind. And some will perhaps break through and create their own lasting social experience. Photo credit: Flickr/ kidperez CrunchBase Information Yobongo GroupMe Instagram Color Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| What Bill Gates Could Learn from Chris Rock | Top |
| Editor's note : The following guest post is by bestselling author and former venture capitalist Peter Sims . His next book is Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries . He can be found on Twitter @petersims . In his recent article on TechCrunch, " Engineering vs. Liberal Arts: Who's Right—Bill or Steve? ," Vivek Wadhwa sparked a national debate about education that raises important questions for us all. If you haven't read the article yet, Wadhwa , a professor at Berkeley and Duke University, surveyed 652 chief executive officers and heads of product engineering at 502 U.S. technology companies and found that only 37% held engineering or computer technology degrees, and just 2% held mathematics degrees. The rest had a wide range of degrees, from business to the humanities. Yet in industry and education circles, STEM – teaching science, technology, engineering, and mathematics – has gained cult-like status as the primary solution to our national innovation challenges. Earlier this year, President Obama announced a $250 million public-private initiative to recruit and train 10,000 more STEM teachers. Bill Gates is one of the leading proponents of STEM while, as Wadhwa notes, implying that other educational investments, such as the liberal arts, should be curtailed. But while investment in STEM is critical, it alone neglects the development of the types of skills that actually lead to discovery, creativity, and innovation. So, for instance, when comedian Chris Rock performs on HBO, the work is widely considered brilliantly creative, yet his routines, as with all stand-up comedians, are the output of what he has learned from thousands of little bets in small clubs, nearly all of which initially fail. (As Stanford Professor Bob Sutton notes, writers for The Onion , known for its hilarious headlines, propose roughly six hundred possibilities for eighteen headlines each week, a 3 percent success rate.) Rock must persistently tinker using an iterative approach to discover and develop fresh material. And the cycle repeats, day in, day out. Similarly, as I described in my last TC guest post , despite the myths, most successful entrepreneurs don't begin with brilliant ideas, they discover them. It's an approach that can be learned and taught, but rarely is in today's schools. That's because our educational system emphasizes spoon-feeding us knowledge, such as scientific tables or historical information, and then testing us in order to measure how much we've retained about that body of knowledge, rather than teaching us how to create knowledge . Utilizing existing knowledge works perfectly well for many situations, but not when doing something new, creative, or original. We are given very little opportunity, for instance, to perform our own original experiments, and there is also little or no margin for failure or mistakes. We are judged primarily on getting answers right. There is much less emphasis on developing our creative thinking abilities, our abilities to let our minds run imaginatively and to discover things on our own. This must change. In an extensive, six-year study about the way creative business executives think, Professors Jeffrey Dyer of Brigham Young University and Hal Gregersen of INSEAD, surveyed over three thousand executives and interviewed five hundred people who had either started innovative companies or invented new products, including the likes of Steve Jobs, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, and VMware's Diane Greene. They found several "discovery skills" that distinguished the innovators from the non-innovators, including experimenting, observing, questioning, and networking with people from diverse backgrounds. As Gregersen summed up their findings: "You might summarize all of the skills we've noted in one word: 'inquisitiveness.'" When Barbara Walters interviewed Larry Page and Sergei Brin , rather than crediting their computer science degrees as the driving factor behind their success, they pointed to their early Montessori education. (The Montessori learning method, founded by Maria Montessori, emphasizes self-directed learning, tinkering, and discovery, particularly for young children.) "We both went to Montessori school," Page said, "And I think it was part of that training of not following rules and orders, and being self-motivated, questioning what's going on in the world, doing things a little bit differently." These findings raise critical questions for us all. Specifically, what is the purpose of education? Is it to convey knowledge, as the current system is weighted, or it to inspire and nurture the ability to constantly learn? Even though it's too late for most of us to attend Montessori, we can change the way we've been trained to think. That begins in small, achievable ways, with increased experimentation and inquisitiveness. Those who work with Jeff Bezos, for example, find his ability to ask "why not?" or "what if?" as much as "why?" to be one of his most advantageous qualities. That's why, borrowing a phrase from Ryan Jacoby , an associate partner at IDEO : questions are the new answers. | |
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