Wow. First, computers were these gigantic machines that took up all the space in a single room (or more!), made for the government and big corporations. Then prices dropped, technology improved (Moore’s law), and the computer was personalized, and today everybody practically carries one in their pocket.
When I had to first decide what to major in when in college, I did want to major in something to do with robotics. Robotics however, wasn’t exactly a popular or major discipline that was easily available anywhere. Fast forward to today .. we have personalized robots.
And alright .. enough of toys. How about a real world application? Here’s a robot that uses GPS and other sensors to steer a 30,000 lbs beast of a machine for a farmer – to harvest soybeans!
Can’t wait for the robotic revolution!
If you are interested in getting started with learning Arduino, here’s a quick link to the books recommended by the official Arduino site.
We procrastinate because we are afraid. We’re afraid it’s too much work and that it will drain us. We’re afraid we’ll screw it up and get in trouble. We’re afraid we don’t know how to do it. We’re afraid because, well, we’ve been putting it off forever and every time we put it off it seems a little more fearsome in our minds. That’s why not putting things off is so liberating. We’re forced to confront our fears, not let them grow bigger by repeatedly running away. And when we confront them, we find they’re not so scary after all.
So good I’m RB’ing (re-blogging) it. Just in case the original ever gets taken down.
#1: Be Narrow
Focus on the smallest possible problem you could solve that would potentially be useful. Most companies start out trying to do too many things, which makes life difficult and turns you into a me-too. Focusing on a small niche has so many advantages: With much less work, you can be the best at what you do. Small things, like a microscopic world, almost always turn out to be bigger than you think when you zoom in. You can much more easily position and market yourself when more focused. And when it comes to partnering, or being acquired, there’s less chance for conflict. This is all so logical and, yet, there’s a resistance to focusing. I think it comes from a fear of being trivial. Just remember: If you get to be #1 in your category, but your category is too small, then you can broaden your scope—and you can do so with leverage.
#2: Be Different
Ideas are in the air. There are lots of people thinking about—and probably working on—the same thing you are. And one of them is Google. Deal with it. How? First of all, realize that no sufficiently interesting space will be limited to one player. In a sense, competition actually is good—especially to legitimize new markets. Second, see #1—the specialist will almost always kick the generalist’s ass. Third, consider doing something that’s not so cutting edge. Many highly successful companies—the aforementioned big G being one—have thrived by taking on areas that everyone thought were done and redoing them right. Also? Get a good, non-generic name. Easier said than done, granted. But the most common mistake in naming is trying to be too descriptive, which leads to lots of hard-to-distinguish names. How many blogging companies have “blog” in their name, RSS companies “feed,” or podcasting companies “pod” or “cast”? Rarely are they the ones that stand out. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s a very consistent pattern in this business that collectively as a society and as individuals we all suffer from what I call macro-myopia. A pattern where our hopes and our expectations or our fears about the threatened impact of some new technology causes us to overestimate its short-term impacts and reality always fails to meet those inflated expectations. And as a result our disappointment then leads us to turn around and underestimate the long-term implications and I can guarantee you this time will be no different. The short-term impact of this stuff [the Internet] will be less than the hype would suggest but the long-term implications will be vastly larger than we can possibly imagine today.
—Paul Saffo, 6/12/1995 Interview with PBS in Palo Alto, CA
The following screenshots are taken from a presentation deck of 92 slides. Some of the details are irrelevant to Web / mobile entrepreneurs & startups (e.g. carrier-side of things), and thus I save you the pain from having to read the whole thing. The Mobile Internet Report Setup is part 1 (of 3) of Morgan Stanley’s annual data dump covering the mobile + web industry.
(Click for larger image)
If you’re an entrepreneur in this space, now is the time to *not* fall asleep.
Smartphone market share is growing globally.
It’s the era of co-creation, nobody succeeds at it alone. A thriving 3rd-party application market place is key in a platform-play.
Counterintuitively, Internet usage on smartphones does not grow linearly to shipments of handsets (it’s much greater).
The Facebook + Apple combo = poster child for the future of mobile + web apps. Apple focuses on the handset superiority (hardware, app distribution), while Facebook focuses on the application software layer, user experience .. which in this case the mobile app strategically complements it’s core app (the actual Facebook desktop Web site). Facebook focuses on the viral network effects of its app, which itself is also a platform.
Facebook’s Web platform is also thriving.
Old news, but voice revenues are dropping and data is becoming more and more valuable for end users, and to carriers (to compensate for voice revenues).
Smartphones do make a difference in enabling users to really consume the mobile Web and apps. Feature-phones just can’t handle it.
Yet further proof that in this era, the democratized Internet will prevail. Iron-fisted dictatorships (*cough* Apple *cough*) will not win in the long run (my prediction anyways).
The rest of the world (ROW)’s mobile market usually lag what we see in Japan by a few years. Japan’s social networking trends shows us that social networking apps are increasingly being accessed from mobile at the expense of desktop.
8 years. ROW lags Japan by 8 years.
Stay tuned for my summary of the other two slide decks .. those are some 600+ and 400+ slides long.
Google just publicly unveiled this Labs project today called Google Goggles. The project is still in its infancy but you can already see some preliminary results that show what a game changer this application will be (see the video).
Excerpt from the announcement:
A New Era of Computing
Mobile devices straddle the intersection of three significant industry trends: computing (or Moore’s Law), connectivity, and the cloud. Simply put:
Phones get more powerful and less expensive all the time
They’re connected to the Internet more often, from more places; and
They tap into computational power that’s available in datacenters around the world
These “Cs” aren’t new: we’ve discussed them in isolation for over 40 years. But today’s smartphones — for the first time — combine all three into a personal, handheld experience. We’ve only begun to appreciate the impact of these converged devices, but we’re pretty sure about one thing: we’ve moved past the PC-only era, into a world where search is forever changed.
