The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘foreseeable’

Last August, we wrote about Y Combinator’s latest idea: RFS, or, Requests for Startups. Basically, this allows the incubator to lead entrepreneurs in a certain direction based on trends they think will be hot. Y Combinator then selects the best ideas based around these guidelines to fund. The latest RFS (number 6), throws down a gauntlet, of sorts.

“We think the iPad is meant to be a Windows killer.”

Okay, yes, that’s slightly taken out of context — but it’s still one hell of a way to rile up developers. And to light a fire under some would-be entrepreneur fanboys. Here’s the full statement around the sentence:

Most people think the important thing about the iPad is its form factor: that it’s fundamentally a tablet computer. We think Apple has bigger ambitions. We think the iPad is meant to be a Windows killer. Or more precisely, a Windows transcender. We think Apple foresees a future in which the iPad is the default way people do what they now do with computers (and some other new things).

Following the iPad’s unveiling in January, people seem fairly evenly split about whether the device will be a failure, or the next big thing (I’m on the record as saying I think it will take some time to catch on, but then will quickly rise in popularity towards the future of computing). This is a smart bet for Y Combinator (and the startups that apply for this RFS) to make. If they’re right, and this is the future of computing, these startups getting to work around the time of the iPad launch (it’s still set to ship at the end of this month) should be well positioned to fully take advantage of the device.

And Y Combinator is thinking big for these startups too. It would be easy to tell companies to make apps for the iPad that are basically ports of current mobile apps, but the RFS points to this post by Facebook’s (and FriendFeed co-founder, and Gmail creator) Paul Buchheit, noting the future iPad applications may be unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.

Something else that is interesting to Y Combinator is how you get this new device in the door in businesses. They seem to think you’ll have to trick your company’s IT department:

One particularly interesting subproblem is how to introduce iPads into big companies. This will probably have to be done by stealth initially, as happened with microcomputers. They’ll have to be introduced as something individuals use, and which doesn’t really count as a computer and thus can’t be vetoed by the IT department. Don’t worry about this; it’s just a little tablet computer.

Just as iPhone app development has exploded, and Android developers are finally starting to see some real money, iPad developers are already in demand. Windows-killer or not, this is certainly an area to watch for the foreseeable future.

Village Voice Media has always been about location. Their publications (which include Villiage Voice, SF Weekly, and 12 others) are highly tailored towards specific cities. So it makes some sense that they’d get into the mobile social location space that is getting so hot right now. But you might not have thought it would be with a happy hour app.

But that’s exactly what Village Voice Media is launching tomorrow alongside app developer GoTime. Happy Hours, is an free application for the iPhone, Android, and the mobile web. With it, you get access to some 15,000 happy hours in 30 different cities around the country. You simply load the app up, tell it where you are (which it can know automatically on the iPhone and Android phones), and let it show you happy hours close by.

While happy hour apps are nothing new (here’s another one we covered not too long ago), most are small and based around one city, or a handful of cities. Happy Hours is nationwide, so it’s good for traveling. Also, thanks to the Village Voice association, it has a range of data about establishments such as atmosphere, type of food served, etc — not to mention full reviews, when available.

The app launches tomorrow for the following 30 cities: Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Broward-Palm Beach, Charlotte, Chicago, Cleveland, Columbus, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New Orleans, New York, Orange County, Orlando, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Portland, San Antonio, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, Tampa, Washington DC.

Check out more in the video below.

About three weeks ago, eBay’s electronic payments daughter PayPal suddenly started blocking personal payments going in or coming out of accounts from Indian customers, resulting in a flood of online complaints from the latter that ranged from accusations of racism to sheer amateurism.

Last week, rumors that PayPal was actually forced into halting personal payments by Reserve Bank Of India (RBI) because they did not comply with all relevant regulatory requirements, were confirmed. Last night, PayPal posted a status update on its corporate blog, saying that they anticipate to resume part of its service, namely bank withdrawal abilities, as of Wednesday, March 3rd.

From the blog post:

We have been diligently working with the RBI and our business partners to resume Indian bank withdrawals for the thousands of Indian businesses who use PayPal to sell their goods or services in the global marketplace.

I’m pleased to tell you that the RBI has now allowed us to resume bank withdrawals for settlements for exports of goods and services. We are currently making changes to comply with Indian regulations for settlements for exports of goods and services, and we anticipate that as of Wednesday, March 3rd, we will be able to resume the bank withdrawal service.

As part of the changes, Indian customers will be required to fill out a new field dubbed ‘Export Code’ when they request a withdrawal (here’s how to get one). This information is apparently required under current Indian laws in order to identify the nature of cross-border merchant transactions. PayPal will share specific instructions on how users can move money into bank accounts on Monday, March 1st.

But Reserve Bank Of India has informed the eBay company that it requires specific approvals to allow personal inward remittances to India, which it currently does not have. In other words: PayPal is still forced by law to effectively suspend personal payments going into the accounts of its Indian customers for the foreseeable future, unless they are exporters.

We’ll provide an update when that changes.

Up until now, if you wanted to use the location-based service Gowalla on the go, you had to have an iPhone. Today, that expands to Android. But rather than building an app, Gowalla has extended support to Android using the mobile web. This works because Android’s browser is closely tied to the device and is able to access location information, which is vital for Gowalla. The goal is to extend this mobile web support to BlackBerry and a few other location-aware devices in the next week or so, co-founder Josh Williams tells us.

As a small team, Gowalla, like its rival Foursquare, doesn’t have a lot of resources to devote to building apps on all the mobile platforms, so this is a good solution for the time being. Eventually, the plan is to have native apps for all the big platforms, Williams says.

But the most-loved child will remain the iPhone app for the foreseeable future. In fact, version 1.3 of that app has just been submitted to the App Store for approval, we’re told. Williams says that it should alleviate a lot of the check-in and place adding issues that users were experiencing in previously versions, which we touched on here.

Yesterday, Gowalla also added Twitter feeds to venue pages on their web site. This allows you to see what the official Twitter accounts for those places are saying at any given time. They also began appending place’s Twitter names to your tweets when you check into a place on Gowalla. See an example here.

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For the past several months, everyone has been bitching about the lack of availability of Chrome on the Mac. So Google did something about it, and formally released a developer build to the public, making sure to note that it wasn’t really ready for prime-time. Nevertheless, a ton of people downloaded it and then started bitching that it wasn’t ready for prime-time. So today, the lead engineer on Chrome for the Mac took some time to respond to the critics.

“What was the point of releasing at this stage, you might ask? It’s clearly not finished. Clearly. It’s missing a large number of features, some half implemented, others not at all. Why even bother? Doesn’t it just make us look bad?,” Mike Pinkerton (also the man who leads the Camino browser development team for Mozilla) writes today. His answer is basically that they don’t care how it makes them look to release an unfinished product. Part of the development cycle of open source software is to get it in the hands of outside developers and have them help in completing the product.

Makes sense to me.

But Pinkerton goes on to further quote the famous essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” by Eric Raymond:

“When you start community-building, what you need to be able to present is a plausible promise. Your program doesn’t have to work particularly well. It can be crude, buggy, incomplete, and poorly documented. What it must not fail to do is (a) run, and (b) convince potential co-developers that it can be evolved into something really neat in the foreseeable future.”

And he then follows that with another three paragraphs of justifications.

But the post probably could have been two paragraphs — if not shorter. Don’t listen to the haters Mac Chrome team, you’re doing a good job. Yes, it’s taking you a long time, but at least we know when it’s done, it should be a solid product. Hopefully more solid than Safari 4, which Apple officially released yesterday and has been giving myself and quite a few others, fits.

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Insert your favorite cliche or idiom here: Imeem may have dodged a bullet. Or has risen from the ashes. They have nine lives. Or my favorite: they may have pulled a rabbit out of the deadpool.

The point is, they aren’t going to be closing down any time soon, say sources close to the company. And for a free music streaming company, that’s really saying something.

Weeks ago they were on the ropes, near the end of cash and with crushing venture debt obligations threatening to shut them down entirely. No one was interested in buying them or putting in more cash with big music label royalty commitments already past due.

Then we heard whispers that they may have a plan to build a profitable business. And apparently they’ve convinced at least their current investors to back that plan with more capital.

CNET’s Greg Sandoval reported earlier today that the company may have raised new funding (he used the “dodged a bullet” idiom, by the way). We’ve confirmed that the company has raised a new round of financing from existing investors. There’s no word if Sequoia has put new money in, and we’ve been told the amount raised is small, likely in the single digit millions. But it allows iMeem to make payroll and keep the servers running.

More importantly, the company has forged new deals with the music labels, we’ve heard, that help it break away from the crushing pay-per-stream model that’s impossible to cover with advertising.

Imeem has renegotiated its label deals to allow it to focus more on a revenue per user goal than a pay per stream. Revenues from downloads and ringtones will offset streaming rates, which moves the relationship much closer to a revenue share than a pure licensing deal. It may just give iMeem the room it needs to get to sustainability.

The company is also planning on terminating its download deals with Amazon and iTunes, we’ve heard. Downloads will be sold directly by iMeem itself through Snocap, which it acquired last year. Those download sales are very low margin, but it takes money previously being sent to Amazon or Apple and gives it directly to the labels to offset streaming costs.

At least that’s what we’re hearing. Imeem as usual won’t comment. But there’s a chance this company may still be around for the foreseeable future. And they may have redefined how streaming deals are done across the industry.

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Yahoo’s closure of their Jumpcut video service feels like the slow peeling off of a bandaid. In December they announced that no new videos could be uploaded, but that they “will be keeping the Jumpcut site up and running for the foreseeable future.”

Apparently the foreseeable future ends in June, when the site will be shut down. From an email they sent out to users today:

Dear Jumpcut user,

After careful consideration, we will be officially closing the Jumpcut.com site on June 15, 2009. This was a difficult decision to make, but it’s part of the ongoing prioritization efforts at Yahoo!

Very soon, we’ll be releasing a software utility that will allow you to download the movies you created on Jumpcut to your computer. We’ll send instructions to this email address when the download utility is available.

Once you download your movies, you may choose to upload them to another site such as Flickr, which now allows video uploads. You can find out more here: http://www.flickr.com/explore/video/

Thanks for your understanding and thanks for being a part of Jumpcut.

The Jumpcut Team

Yahoo bought Jumpcut, one of the best online video editing tools we’ve seen, back in 2006. It’s a shame to see them die. We’ve added it to the deadpool.

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