While I should be studying for finals right now, I just had to write a quick post about the Google Apps Marketplace. As you might be able to tell from my last post, I’m getting more interested in the ecosystems behind application marketplaces (mobile or otherwise). I previously interned at salesforce.com working on their force.com platform, so I think Google’s foray into the B2B application market is particularly interesting.

What I like a lot is that Google has favorable terms for developers (they take only 20% revenue) and that it plays nice with apps that aren’t built on the Google App Engine. This means that far more companies will be able to get their products into the marketplace and reach Google’s 25 million Google Apps users. In turn, Google should benefit from having more apps in their ecosystem. Salesforce, by contrast, is not nearly as open as it requires applications to be built on the force.com platform. Additionally, in the earlier days of the force.com platform, applications could only be deployed within the salesforce ecosystem. It took a while until salesforce started allowing applications built with force.com to be deployed elsewhere.

Techcrunch hints that Google may release a more consumer facing marketplace in the future…could be pretty interesting. I plan to keep following the Google Apps Marketplace to see how it does.

Notably, I’ve come across a number of projections that indicate Google will overtake Apple with its Android market. Gartner predicts that Android will capture 18% of the smartphone market by being on 76 million units sold (second only to Symbian OS which will have 39% marketshare and 203 million phones). Android’s marketplace may currently rake in far less monthly revenue now as compared to Apple ($5M to $200M respectively); however, Google should become the dominant platform with its less opaque review process, the backing of Google search, and Google’s up-and-coming consumer and enterprise products.  While estimates on the current number of applications on Android vary (Androlib has it around 30,000 currently), Techcrunch forecasts 50,000 apps on Android by Q2 2010.

Here’s the current landscape in terms of total number of applications:

source: http://www.rimarkable.com/rim-has-simply-got-to-do-better-when-it-comes-to-blackberry-applications

What’s amazing to me is that both Blackberry and Nokia phones have captured way more of the market than iPhones or Android phones, yet have so far failed to create a rich marketplace.  It seems that RIM is struggling in particular with its BlackBerry App World, in part because its developer tools are difficult to use.

I’ve been seeing a lot of projections about the worldwide app download market just skyrocketing in the next few years.  Techcrunch broke this story about how research2guidance forecasts that the market will grow from about $2B in 2009 to $15B in 2013 with the proliferation of smartphones entering the global market.

Because of the competition and the huge potential of the application marketplace, each platform wants to ensure high quality of the applications its marketplace.  Apple, for example, is trying to cut out “cookie-cutter” apps which are basically just glorified RSS feeds that don’t provide much value.

We’ll see how all of this plays out, but I think there is some opportunity in helping these companies enhance their marketplaces…

2. Unlearn your MBA.  Perhaps most relevant to me as someone who is getting a master’s in Management Science and Engineering.  In school, we are focused on writing business plans, diagnosing the competitive landscape with Porter’s 5 forces, and using other frameworks to impress professors.  The customer does not care about your frameworks.  They care about a product which satisfies their needs.

3.Be profit-margin focused. Hannsson criticized Salesforce.com for having very low margins, citing them at 5.4% per account. Hansson called Salesforce a “stupid” company, which I personally disagree with, but he makes a decent point on the margins.  He said it doesn’t matter if you have lower market share (by product), as long as you have good margins.  He pointed to Apple having a relatively small marketshare with the iPhone but having huge margins…

4. You don’t have work an 80 hour week to be a successful entrepreneur. Working less forces you to prioritize your tasks and keeps you well rested to maximize your working potential.

Here’s a .mp3 file of the talk:

I had a talk with Tristan Walker of Foursquare a week ago, and I’ll post on that experience soon.

This success story—combining impressive numbers with a good cause—is an example of a new phenomenon: using the Internet not just to aggregate and access computing power, but also to find and direct brainpower. Invoking the current mania around cloud computing, where things your computer used to do now happen online, a new class of companies are promoting cloud labor. “Get fast turnaround times for jobs computers can’t do,” says one site. “Spool up thousands of people without picking up the phone.” This new form of labor has begun to catch on in the post-financial-crisis world. It could create efficiencies and opportunities that economists hitherto could only dream of.

full article here:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/225629

Companies, government, and other agencies can disguise farmed-out work as games or other mediums. What happens when we spend hours a week on platforms like Mechanical Turk and we don’t know what the data is being used for? What happens on the other end when we use data from these sources to inform us?

All of Topsy’s current employees had previously worked with at least one of the founders, and it’s obvious that they respect and admire the founders’ leadership and technical abilities immensely. A few employees told me how lucky I am to be mentored by such luminaries. It seems that in addition to believing in Topsy’s position at the forefront of a major shift in the internet, the employees are at Topsy because of the strength of the founding team. Topsy has hired a few employees since I have started my internship, and I imagine another selling point to new employees is the amount of VC money Topsy has raised ($15M) to date.

I haven’t had the opportunity to talk much with other employees about the expectations for the company’s future, but I have had conversations with the founders on the topic. When I first interviewed with Topsy, I framed one of my questions around the built-to-flip vs. built-to-last mentality and how the founders viewed Topsy. I imagined that the founders might look to be acquired (by twitter, google, or facebook, perhaps), but our CEO, Vipul Prakash, assured me that Topsy was a built-to-last company. At this point, Prakash spoke about real-time streams, Topsy’s place in the future of the internet, and how the company had spent three years in R&D before launching. With so much time spent in R&D (for an internet startup) and the level of passion the founders have about their work, Topsy is definitely a built-to-last company.

All of that being said, I believe there will be acquisition offers made for Topsy. It seems to me that Topsy is one of the few real-time search companies trying to balance chronology and relevance. On top of that, I believe Topsy’s initiative to attribute influence to people (rather than documents) leaves them in a field of their own. Will Microsoft (Bing?) make an offer? Maybe.

BTL BTF:

In regard to the built-to-last vs. built-to-flip debate, I see no problem with both types of companies existing in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Built-to-flip companies have certainly contributed to major technological innovations by being acquired by larger companies who have the resources to turn the work a built-to-flip company has done into built-to-last value. Larger companies sometimes cannot afford to be more entrepreneurial and sometimes can only foster major innovation by acquiring smaller companies. I would argue that a built-to-flip company is providing value if it is acquired or if people are purchasing the product/service.

My mentor also told me that if he could do it all over again, he would have started at least six companies before Topsy. His view was that one can gain valuable experience working on smaller, built-to-flip companies, which will help entrepreneurs ultimately succeed with their built-to-last companies down the line.

The web was abuzz yesterday about the Facebook acquiring FriendFeed. Some pundits claim it to be a huge blow to Twitter in the real-time war–others think the acquisition was not as important as the rest of the web claims.

To me, this is huge, and I think that this could potentially be a massive blow to Twitter search. Real-time search is going to be lucrative, and one thing facebook is lacking is powerful search functionality (new facebook search was announced moments after the acquisition news). Friendfeed had an exceptional search experience (the only problem was that it its index was limited to the few friendfeed users out there). This team and the core FriendFeed search technology can really help facebook ramp up their search offering. Just think: a real time, social search engine where all of your friends are. To me this is really the way to actually monetize for facebook. I really don’t think twitter search is that great right now, especially because only ~40 of my real friends are on twitter (although I do like seeing what shaq has to say). I’d love to get more socially relevant search results based on my friends’ activity, and that’s what facebook can now provide (since all of my friends are on it) with a good search offering.

Working at a small startup which sits at the intersection of real-time and social search, I was a little concerned about Topsy’s prospects for the future after the acquisition news. After all, if Facebook can now offer a much improved search experience–one where users can find links, photos, videos, news articles that their friends are talking about–it’s going to be tough for other social search companies to compete since everyone is already on Facebook. One thing that keeps me positive about Topsy’s prospects is that the company has been in 3 years of R&D to develop authority based pagerank. That is to say, part of the algorithm to determine pagerank in Topsy is based on how influential people are who talk about various topics you search for. So, if I search for “Obama” in Facebook, I’ll get a lot of hits, but I won’t know which ones are important or meaningful results. Topsy serves you the most important links as deemed by the Twitter community. I think as Topsy begins to expand its index to Disqus, Yelp, Amazon Reviews, and eventually all of the conversation streams on the web, it will be in a unique position with its author based search. After all, Facebook and Twitter search are limited to searching their index of users (although they can received some activity from outside sites, e.g. through FB Connect), but Topsy is attempting to index everything. Things should get exciting in the next 6 months…

Back to the acquisition, everyone agrees that the FriendFeed team is great, and they certainly were the beloved by bloggers and developers alike for their culture of openness and their APIs. We will see what happens to them at Facebook, but my guess is that FriendFeed’s culture of openness will give way to that walled garden of facebook which is a bummer. I’ve read that they plan to keep the FF API the same, but we’ll see.

Here’s a story from Mashable highlighting Facebook as a major search contender.

Here’s one from Techcrunch.