napkintech by andrew meyer

While I haven’t played around with Adobe CS5 yet, the reviews and demos all make it look incredible.  Here’s a pretty good first look at CS5 from Wired’s webmonkey.  As evidenced by the many blog posts on the topic over the last few days, Apple has really created a mess for Adobe with the release of the iPad and OS 4 for the iPhone.  Apple is banning all apps that are built with cross-compilers like Adobe’s Packager for iPhone, and Apple is encouraging developers to make their sites “iPad ready” by removing Flash elements. Here‘s a heated response to Apple’s actions from Adobe’s platform evangelist.

Apple is on a bit of a tear in tightening its grip on developers.  The new Apple developer’s agreement also looks like it won’t allow third party analytics services–although we’ll have to see how this plays out.  Check out this post explaining some of the new stipulations in the agreement which may put analytics companies out of business (if interpreted a certain way).  It will be interesting to see how the new developer agreement shakes out and what will happen in the war between Adobe and Apple.

UPDATE: Interesting counter by John Gruber [via Techcrunch] on why Apple should not allow platforms to be built on top of native app store

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.

I sat in ETL today at Stanford and picked up some nice bullet points on building a software company from David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails and partner at 37Signals. I thought I’d jott them down here:

1. Don’t accept VC money. I’ve heard this from a number of software/internet startup founders, but here is Hansson’s take on it. If your company is operating on your own dime, you will be much more motivated to find a revenue model and implement it much more quickly. Additionally, once you accept VC money, you broadcast a message that you will return 5-10x their investment, which can be a very tall order. It is much easier to create a smaller business (generating, say, $1-3million profit per year) and keep the profit (versus VC’s taking it) than it is to scale a huge company and have a smaller piece of the profit pie.   37Signals has not accepted VC money and remains a smaller company with more control.

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.

Another post about Zittrain. I’m working on a project related to this area:

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