The Network Garden - Mark Sigal's Blog

PC 1.0, iPhone 3.0 and the Woz: Everything Old is New Again

This is a post on how the iPhone 3.0 is destined to accessorize our mobile future. 

But first, a little context is needed.

My old business partner, James Blaisdell (then: CTO/Co-Founder @ Rapid Logic; now: CTO/Co-Founder @ Mocana) lent me a really awesome book of stories about the early days of startups called ‘Founders at Work.’

The book, which is essentially a series of interviews, captures the lessons learned and the seminal moments in the birthing and maturation of companies like PayPay (Max Levchin), Hotmail (Sabeer Bhatia), Apple (Steve Wozniak) and a couple dozen others.

Because Jessica Livingston, the author of the book, is one of the founding partners of seed stage venture fund, Y Combinator, the framing and focus of the narrative is much more applied than a typical tell-all book. The nuggets contained within are insightful and actionable, and the reading is immensely enjoyable.

In any event, last night I was reading Jessica’s interview with Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak. 

Serendipitously, my wife and I are regular 'Dancing with the Stars' viewers, giving us a chance to see another angle of the man known as the Woz, who is one of the Celebrity Dance Performers this season.

Reading Woz’s story, I was transported back.  To a time many years ago, when my brother and I were regulars at the Byte Shop in Santa Monica, one of the first personal computer stores; a time when the essence of a PC – smallish form factor, keyboard, monitor, graphics, storage/input mechanism (back then, a cassette recorder) had not yet been fashioned. 

When I first encountered what was to become the PC (circa 1977), companies like Altair and IMSI were beginning to bring computing to the realm of hobbyists, but frankly, it was an abstraction until I saw the Apple II. (Side note: We ultimately got a TRS-80, affectionately known as the “Trash 80”).

The Wozniak interview is a window into a time when the industry was completely and utterly dependent upon hardware innovation; before it became such a commodity at the hardware layer that the software could only be so differentiated.

That is, until iPod and iPhone.  More on that in a minute.

But first, consider this excerpt, which frames Woz’s decision to support 8 hardware expansion slots in the Apple II, a prescient decision, which enabled the advent of the floppy disk, printer and modem connections, graphics support and local area networking expansion:

Wozniak: We had a real argument over slots…I had designed a clever system on the suggestion of a friend—Allen Baum again— that decoded 8 slots you could plug little computer boards into. Each board had the ability to have its own programs on it running in its own addresses, and it didn't have to have all the normal chips to decide, "Well, if the addresses are such and such, I will respond to them." That was done on the main board…Every computer I'd ever seen, some of its greatest things came because of boards plugged into it…We had to have 8 slots. And it turns out that it was very important; it was very beneficial. Because we came out with a floppy disk. Not only that, other people came out with cards that put 80 columns of text on the screen so you could see more. People came out with extra memory cards, people came out with other languages in cards, people came out with cards that had CPM. People came out with cards to connect all kinds of equipment in the world, to operate your house over your power lines. It was just a world of cards. Many people had their Apple IIs filled up with cards, every single slot.

Read the entire interview with Steve Wozniak HERE, as Woz’s thoughts and experiences are beautifully articulated.

iPhone 3.0: Accessorizing our Mobile Future

Flash-forward, if you follow this blog, you know that I have written extensively on the iPhone/iPod touch platforms, most recently separate posts on:

1. The interplay of the App Store and the underlying developer platform with Apple’s ecosystem cultivation play in the success of iPhone/iPod touch (FACTOID: App Store is approaching a $1B run rate business for Apple);
2. An analysis of the iPhone OS 3.0 Developer Preview a week or so ago.

From my perspective, one thing that may not have gotten enough attention related to the iPhone 3.0 Preview was Apple’s opening up of the 30-pin connector at the base of the device for third-party hardware accessories (and applications that take programmatic advantage of the inter-connect).

Why do I say not enough attention? Well, the iPod accessory business itself is already a $2B market, and there has really been no such thing as “software value-add” to the hardware accessory itself. 

With iPhone 3.0, this changes.

Soon, a medical device manufacturer can build a blood pressure gauge accessory and associated software application that plugs into your iPhone or iPod touch and tracks your blood pressure over time, comparing it to a network of people with similar age/body/health types to give you a relative Wellness Score and underlying data in real time.

Could it be fashioned into an enabling engine for a Healthy Living Movement or a National Health Monitoring Service (ANALOG: Nielsen for Health)?

Similarly, a universal remote vendor can build a hardware accessory that generates the necessary signals to allow you to control your home entertainment center, home alarm AND interactive programming guide in one.

And why couldn’t some vendor build police enforcement agencies a handheld fingerprinting and optical scanning device that captures biometric data, cross-comparing the acquired information with a real-time central database?

I am just pulling a few different examples out of the air, but across the medical, sports, automobile, controller, data acquisition, playback, entertainment and finance segments, it sure feels like the accessories play for iPhone OS 3.0 is going to render the $2B iPod accessory number laughably small in comparison.

What is compelling is that this opens the door to all sort of interesting hardware innovations that, oh by the way, have built-in leverage across a large installed base (30M devices) and a potent developer ecosystem (25,000 applications, 800M downloads).

Bringing the Old Back to the New

I want to close by underlining a comment made by Woz that has been a cornerstone of my thinking throughout my entrepreneurial career.

When you solve the “right problem” a whole mess of unexpected advantages and upside surprises fall right into your lap.  Amen to that.

Related Posts:

1. ANALYSIS - iPhone 3.0 Developer Preview: Block the Kick Strategy
2. iPhones, App Stores, Ecosystems: On Recipes for Successful Developer Platforms
3. "Right Here Now" services: weaving a real-time web around status
4. iPhone 2.0: What it Means to be Mobile
5. What it Means to be a "Social" Media Center: Boxee, Apple TV and Square Connect

Juxtapositions

“Obama has a very fine line to walk, between navigating political will, consumer angst, relying on the self-dealing breakers of the financial system to be the fixers of it, an accelerating economic slow down, bank crisis, auto crisis, Iraq and Afghanistan wars, an absence of uniformity of opinion on the “right” solution, and huge vested interests in protecting the status quo, not to mention the Byzantine complexity of the crisis’ global, interconnected and international footprint.”

JUXTAPOSE THESE MOVING PARTS; TELL ME WHAT YOU SEE:

1. On Government Intervention:  The lessons of history are clear. In times of economic crisis, the role of government intervention in creating liquidity, stimulus and stability is paramount to catalyzing recovery.
2. On Bipartisanship: Deeply embedded in Obama’s promise to Americans is a shift away from partisan politics as usual.  But, the moral of the story from the stimulus debate is that when you are giving away 400 billion dollars worth of tax cuts to Republicans to get them to vote on your stimulus package, and they still won’t vote for it, this does not bode well for bipartisanship. Whether Obama makes that kind of offer again in the future will be one of interesting tells of what he learned about governance from the process, especially knowing that, in theory, getting people to vote for giving away money via tax cuts and spending is the easy part; imagine when it is a topic for which there is organized opposition.
3. On The Budget Deficit Conundrum: We are sitting at $11 trillion dollars of acknowledged debt, and under the Obama budget that grows to $20 trillion, much of it held by sovereign nations, like Saudi Arabia and China. This is seemingly at odds with our national security interests, and potentially at risk to our long-term economic stability.
4. On Universal Health Care and the Demographic Tsunami: We have three cornerstone long-term entitlement programs – Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.  Medicare and Medicaid alone represent ~5% of our GDP, but with the aging of baby boomers that number will grow to 20% of GDP so to those who say Obama should focus on the crisis at hand, the argument is that all of the other numbers are almost a footnote relative to getting the rate of growth associated with health care costs under control.  While the simple net-out is that service-levels either go down or taxes go up to provide universal health care, the more reasoned conclusion is that we need a systemic assessment of current health care protocols, after-care health/recovery statistics and the surrounding cost structure of same.  Viewed outside the box, what would Google do; what would Apple do if they were re-inventing health care?
5. On Pain, Taxes and Truth: It is hard enough to sell a message of pain to the American people, inasmuch as they are generationally removed from real sacrifice. This truth is even more so when people are scared.  That said, it doesn’t take a genius to see that nothing is free, and that if we are going to get real, taxes are going to go up, not just on the wealthy few.
6. On AIG’s Role in Derailing of the Financial System: Patient Zero of the global economic meltdown — was one Joseph Cassano, the head of a tiny, 400-person unit within the company called AIG Financial Products, or AIGFP, whose group sold over $500B worth of CDS protection.  "It's all about the regulatory environment," says a government source involved with the AIG bailout. "These guys look for holes in the system, for ways they can do trades without government interference. Whatever is unregulated, all the action is going to pile into that."  CDS’ in effect, beyond the optics of risk mitigation, had a more fundamental benefit.  Because CDS’ were blessed by the credit ratings agencies as AAA “safe” (i.e., near zero credit risk), regulated banks and financial institutions were successful in persuading regulators that they should be able to shift the risk of the CDO’s they were selling off of their balance sheet and onto AIG’s, which had the net effect of enabling these institution to exponentialize their leverage relative to capital reserves.
7. On AIG as a Window into the Bailout: "If AIG went down," he says, "there was a good chance Goldman would not be able to collect." The AIG bailout, in effect, was Goldman (alums) bailing out Goldman.
8. On AIG Bonus Fallout: while human nature is to throw the baby out with the bath water and paint all participants in the collapse of AIG with one broad brush stroke, Jake DeSantis' AIG resignation letter provides some gray to a black/white debate.  
9. On Perceptions that Financial Rescue is a Doubling-Down: Nonetheless, the lion's share of the bailout money has gone to the larger, so-called "systemically important" banks. "It's like Treasury is picking winners and losers," says one state banking official who asked not to be identified. Which, of course, is exactly the opposite of what should be happening, since small, regional banks are far less guilty of the kinds of predatory lending that sank the economy. "They're not giving out subprime loans or easy credit," says Wheeless. "At the community level, it's much more bread-and-butter banking."  This itself is a hugely important political development. In essence, the bailout accelerated the decline of regional community lenders by boosting the political power of their giant national competitors. Which, when you think about it, is insane: What had brought us to the brink of collapse in the first place was this relentless instinct for building ever-larger mega-companies, passing deregulatory measures to gradually feed all the little fish in the sea to an ever-shrinking pool of Bigger Fish. To fix this problem, the government should have slowly liquidated these monster, too-big-to-fail firms and broken them down to smaller, more manageable companies. Instead, federal regulators closed ranks and used an almost completely secret bailout process to double down on the same faulty, merger-happy thinking that got us here in the first place, creating a constellation of mega-firms under government control that are even bigger, more unwieldy and more crammed to the gills with systemic risk.  One simple example is US government Repurchase Agreements, or Repos, which have gone from a $25B liquidity generating entity to a $115B  one to…zero!   How?  The reason the number has dropped to nothing is that the Fed had simply stopped using relatively transparent devices like repurchase agreements to pump its money into the hands of private companies.

(The above assertions are shaped by and excerpted from: Fred Wilson’s post (and especially the comment fodder) ‘Financial McCarthyism’ on the populist revolt against Wall Street and the financial sector; FRONTLINE’s expose on the federal deficit ‘Ten Trillion and Counting’; and Rolling Stone’s ‘The Big Takeover’ on how AIG literally grafted a hedge fund on top of a conservative insurance company, the duplicitous role of the Wall Street titans in metastasizing the AIG engine into the collapse we are now dealing with and why the end-game offers a feast for conspiracy theorists.)

Related Posts:

1. Getting Back Our Sense of National We-Ness: On Heroic Acts, Shape Shifting and Small Business Stimulus.
2. Getting Real: On Doomsday, the Demise of So-Called Experts and the New Arbitrage.
3. Black Swans and Bank Runs: Why the financial crisis was predictable.

Anatomy of a Post: Breadcrumbs, Tweets and Call Home Functions

Some time back, I wrote a post called 'Social Media - It's About Breadcrumbs and Conversations' that was an attempt to show how mastered content (think: videos, blog posts, pictures) could become viral by being used as comment fodder in responding to other people's posts, discussion group threads and within social networks.

I built upon those concepts in a post called 'Why I Blog: It’s about Brand, not Bread' where I attempted to spotlight how blogging for most is less of a monetary source than a brand, identity, online visibility and conversational flow cultivation tool -- assuming that you have something substantive to say.

Now, thanks to URL shortening services, like bit.ly, you can get analytics visibility on which breadcrumbs generate what clicks (sidebar: I call a comment made in the comment section of another person's post that references a post you wrote, including the URL and a call to action, a breadcrumb).

With that as a backdrop, consider a post that I wrote last week called 'ANALYSIS - iPhone 3.0 Developer Preview: Block the Kick Strategy' which, as the title suggests, is an analysis of the iPhone 3.0 Developer Preview.

To promote it, I did a couple of separate tweets, posted a copy of the post on my O'Reilly blog, responded to articles on the Apple event with comments on 15+ blogs and major media pubs, referenced my post in status updates on LinkedIn and Facebook, and referenced the post in the comment sections of two different mobile discussion groups within LinkedIn.

What is interesting is that the majority of general purpose tech blogs generated less than 3% of the clicks; LinkedIn was about double (the groups were a big factor there); and the Apple-centric blogs, as expected, drove the biggest traffic kick.

Somewhat surprisingly, WSJ's All Things Digital generated almost as much traffic as the Apple-centric blogs.  Facebook and Twitter yielded me very little click goodness based on the data.

You can view the actual analytics data here: http://bit.ly/info/ANdMz or just check out graphic below.

Crash-Proofing the Economy: On Pre-Cogs, Black Swans and Scenario Plans

In Minority Report (an excellent Tom Cruise sci-fi thriller based on a Philip K. Dick story of the same name), crime is virtually eliminated in the future, thanks to an elite law-enforcing "Precrime" squad that uses three genetically altered humans (called "Pre-Cogs") with special powers to see into the future and predict crimes beforehand.

Now, staring at the rubble from our financial system meltdown, imagine putting the stimulus bill (or the bank rescue) through a massive computerized model of the economy to test out how the plan will play out in the future – before it hits the market, and our pocketbooks.

As Portfolio Magazine shows in ‘The Crash-Test Solution,’ mathematicians, scientists, and other experts in ecosystems and weather are at work developing such a model around the premise that the systemic equivalent of Pre-Cogs can do better than human intuition at ensuring that the boom/bust cycle of the past 25 years never happens again.

Here is an Excerpt: The idea is that by studying so-called complex systems—traffic flow, ecosystems, organisms, weather—we can begin to make sense of an increasingly unpredictable economic world. Didier Sornette, for instance, is a world expert on earthquakes. Now he’s heading up a lab in Zurich called the Financial Crisis Observatory, examining how frothy markets show the same signs of stress that the earth shows before an earthquake. Sornette’s group is trying to develop the ability to provide economic warnings, in part by monitoring the stocks of the 500 largest U.S. companies.

Two thoughts.  One is that the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry, a pithy quote perfectly underscored by Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “black swan” construct, which is an argument that it’s not the normal, mundane “white swan” events that drive socioeconomic history, but rather the magnificent outliers, the completely unexpected “black swans.”

In other words, no model, now matter how complete or anticipatory of all of the probabilistic scenarios, can predict (and thus prevent) the unpredictable. 

To think otherwise is to ignore the lessons of history.

Two is that, regardless of the inevitability of random chaos, there is a strong case for scenario planning; namely, building up models for anticipating the “type of outcomes” that might play out and delineating their implications from a (scenario) focus perspective to drive better planning and response optimization/mitigation strategy.

For example, what if the government built up a massive database of (near) real-time fiscal scenarios, underlying assumptions, probabilities of different outcomes and impacts from same, and made that data transparent, public and extend-able.

Is it reasonable to expect that the added transparency of data and the depth of analysis available in the public domain would provide a moderating function to our financial system?

What if there was a ‘prediction market’ overlay to the system (ala Intrade Prediction Markets) to enable amateurs and professionals to transparently put their money where their mouth is?  Would the visibility of such data act as a throttle on market volatility?

Interesting stuff, as I am both an advocate of formalized scenario planning methodology (read 'The Art of the Long View' for more on this topic) and a big fan of Taleb (although 'Fooled by Randomness,' his predecessor to Black Swan, is a better read).

Related Posts:

1. Getting Real: On Doomsday, the Demise of So-Called Experts and the New Arbitrage
2. Black Swans and Bank Runs: Why the financial crisis was predictable
3. Prediction Markets: Predictions, Markets and the Wisdom of Crowds

vSocial’s Virtual Roundtable Solution: Re-Inventing the Press Junket

Once upon a time, when the movie studios would come out with a new movie release, they would build advance buzz for the film by doing a Press Junket. 

Back then, this meant renting out conference rooms in major cities across the US to screen (some or all of) the movie; catering an expensive lunch for the press; and flying the movie’s talent far and wide for Q&A sessions with the media.

But, times are a-changing.  For one thing, what it means to be a member of the "press" is murkier than ever.  Correspondents often operate remotely from their mother publication, print media's well-chronicled struggles are changing the underlying news product itself, and the web is catalyzing a myriad of long-tail oriented new media models. 

More fundamentally, though, marketing budgets just aint what they used to be, and many movies (and virtually all DVD releases) just don’t warrant the marketing spend for a traditional Press Junket.

Enter the The Virtual Roundtable, an on-demand hosted solution that enables media operators to host and manage virtual media press junkets online.  

Powered by my social media platform company, vSocial, The Virtual Roundtable has now successfully been deployed across more than 20 virtual media junkets for DVD releases (distributed by vSocial client, Disney), such as Wall-E, There Will Be Blood, Lost, Sleeping Beauty, BOLT and Pirates of the Caribbean.

How The Virtual Roundtable Works

The way the solution works is that it features a role-based system with simple and intuitive management interfaces for Press, Talent, Moderators and Publicists to:

1. Present/watch video reels of any length (even full movies);
2. Participate in Question and Answer sessions;
3. Moderate Q&A between the Press and the Talent granularly and easily;
4. Do so securely, robustly and reliably.

The service automatically captures, shares and archives a transcript of all of the questions and answers between the press and the creator/producer/distributor of the media, maximizing retention and dissemination of the conversational flow of the junket.

Best of all, it’s inexpensive, customizable from a branding perspective and can be deployed very rapidly (such is the beauty of Software-as-a-Service).

For more information on The Virtual Roundable solution,visit vSocial on the web by clicking HERE.

Related Posts:

1. Social Media, Koans and Virtual Theaters
2. The Serial Killer, Gustave and Creative Marketing
3. Social Media - It's About Breadcrumbs and Conversations

ANALYSIS - iPhone 3.0 Developer Preview: Block the Kick Strategy

First off, let me begin with the end.  The fact that Apple is stepping on the gas pedal and pushing 3.0 NOW, while the new kids on the block (read: Android and Palm Pre) are barely 1.0 suggests that they have learned the lessons taught them (oh so painfully) by Microsoft in the PC wars; namely, that he who wins the hearts and minds of developers, wins the war.

Secondly, I am going to call today’s announcement a "block the kick" strategic announcement. 

What’s a block the kick?  It is an effort to do such a good job of persuading your core constituency (in this case, developers, consumers, carriers) that any perceived momentum of the competition pales in comparison to your own, thereby blocking the competition’s nascent momentum in its infancy.

This explains the “Why Now?” aspect of the announcement, inasmuch as it’s not like the iPhone/iPod touch (feature quibbles aside) is losing the game in any way, shape or form. 

In fact, regardless of the metric that you choose to measure Apple’s success in this realm (developers, downloads, dollars, margins or consumer engagement), the platform engine and ecosystem was already humming on all cylinders.

To put a bow around this one, today was the first time they broke out the combined device footprint of iPhone + iPod touch units, designating the bucket "multi-touch handhelds," no doubt in anticipation of releasing other form factors, and in recognition that the iPhone Platform naming schema occludes the import and momentum of iPod touch devices.

In any event, the iPhone + iPod touch bucket of multi-touch handhelds is now 30 million units strong, generating over 800 million apps downloaded to date, a serious growth rate over the 500 million downloads reported just a few weeks ago.

Hence, today’s event is more about running up the score before the competition finds its footing, a footing that is HUGELY dependent upon developer attention, something that I blogged about yesterday in, ‘iPhones, App Stores, Ecosystems.’

Also, note that while the BETA version of iPhone 3.0 SDK is available today, the actual 3.0 version of iPhone OS will ship this summer. It is free for iPhone 3G owners, and $9.95 for iPod touch owners.

With that as a backdrop, let me spotlight the key announcements for developers and consumers, and why they are a big deal:

UPDATED FUNCTIONALITY FOR DEVELOPERS

1. Multi-Tier Pricing Support within App Store: Developers will be able to partition free, premium, super premium tiers within apps (e.g., purchase the next 10 levels, add advanced weaponry, etc.).  This is great news for developers, who now have the economic and systemic wherewithal to experiment and segment their product offerings without creating N different download variants of the application, as well as maintaining the instant gratification element of "buy, download and enjoy" that is so powerful in the platform.  Example: you mean that if I had a rocket launcher I can just blow off the door versus scaling the wall, and it only costs 99 cents to grab it?  I am SO there.
2. Proprietary "Accessory" Support within the Platform: Developers will now be able to create apps that work directly with their proprietary accessories, which is something that was previously not supported. Examples given: an FM transmitter extension with an app for changing stations; a blood pressure gauge with app for tracking, organizing, charting blood pressure data.
3. Exposing Maps Functionality via an API:  This will enable developers to map-ify apps down to street level views (e.g., embed proprietary mapping functionality within the application), and create sophisticated navigation apps for things like turn-by-turn directions, although in the latter case Apple did not license this functionality from Google so the developer would have to provide their own maps.  The best way to look at this one is that as powerful as Google Map APIs have proven to be for third party sites on the web, this could be equally so for enabling a multitude of custom mobile applications.
4. Discovery and Locative Services: Apple is adding Bonjour-based discovery for the "within the same room" crowd, enabling social gaming apps, without the overhead of Wi-Fi; they are also opening up rich GPS APIs, although per my blog on “Right Here Now” services, I wish that they were embracing Google’s Latitude locative service.
5. Push Notification: This is way later than the September ‘08 timeframe previously announced, but then again, asynchronous messaging is incredibly complex once scale, concurrency, message queuing, battery constraints and multi-carrier support are factored in.  Hence, my knee jerk is that I am glad that they are taking the time to (hopefully) get it right.  This is a critical feature to enabling event-driven apps like IM or the aforementioned Right Here Now services, where the designated app may not be running all the time.  Features supported in the service include: ability to push badges, text, and sounds. It will be supported in all 80 countries where the iPhone is available.
6. Media API Enhancements:  Apple is adding a new API for enabling applications that stream audio/video; an API for in-game voice/audio; and another API for enabling applications that access the iPod library.  These enhancements open the door to TV 2.0 apps, social gaming where audio communications are involved and applications that leverage your media library. This last one is so huge – Apple has previously treated iPod media libraries as a castle separated by a moat, that I am going to hold my excitement until I see the details.  For example, can apps transparently access/launch songs within the proprietary app itself or do they have to externally launch?

UPDATED FUNCTIONALITY FOR CONSUMERS

1. Cut/Copy/Paste: It arrives before my grandchildren do (my kids are barely out of diapers so sarcasm underscored).  Long overdue so nothing to add.
2. New Messages App: It supports MMS, meaning that you can send files, such as contact cards, audio files, locations, pictures, etc.
3. New Voice Memos App: This supports the built-in microphone, and allows you to edit, trim and share your voice memos. Not sure if any APIs are exposed to enable apps where “social shout outs” are supported.

Needless to say, the focus today is on the developer, who will in turn, ratchet up the goodness for the consumer. That said, thank you Apple for finally adding Copy/Paste.

UPDATE 1:  Great analysis by blogger, Kontra, in the post 'iPhone OS 3: The moat strategy vs. features-fetishism.' It provides some clear thinking on the "outcome buckets" Apple focused on in this release (monetization, accessories, games, media), how they fit within overall competitive/road map thinking and some further further "onion peel-back" on the accessories piece of the strategy, where developers get device-control API access to the 30-pin port (which earlier created a multi-billion dollar ecosystem for the iPod).  Good stuff, and a must-read.

Related Posts:

1. iPhones, App Stores, Ecosystems: On Recipes for Successful Developer Platforms.
2. PC 1.0, iPhone 3.0 and the Woz: Everything Old is New Again
3. "Right Here Now" services: weaving a real-time web around status
4. iPhone 2.0: What it Means to be Mobile
5. Apple's Mobile Gaming Gold Rush: why the iPhone/iPod touch is a legitimate threat to the handheld gaming console establishment.
6. Guest Post for GigaOM - Android vs. iPhone: Why Openness May Not Be Best

iPhones, App Stores and Ecosystems

According to the prognosticators, Google Android is “destined” to overtake the iPhone by 2012, and Palm Pre, which hasn’t even shipped yet, is already being touted as a “compelling alternative” to iPhone. 

Plus, now that Apple’s App Store is nearing a $1B business pace just nine months after launching, the competition (Google, Palm, RIM, Microsoft, Nokia) is so totally getting themselves one of them App Store “thingys.”

But can the competition outflank Apple, and what is an App Store anyway? 

Let’s start with what it is not.  An App Store is not simply an e-wallet or marketplace that you bolt on to your (pick one):

1. Hardware device business;
2. Open source smartphone software play;
3. Next generation mobile service provider.

Sure, it includes elements of the above, but fundamentally, a cash register ringing App Store is the manifestation, not the root cause, of having built a thriving developer platform and “ecosystem.”

So what is the root cause?  Number one, is having a good toolset (known as a software developers kit, or SDK) that is compelling to developers.  Why is this integral?  Because it’s the developers who ultimately make or break a platform by embracing it (or not).

If your eyes are glazing over, it’s understandable, but know this: executing a tools and ecosystem initiative is REALLY hard because there are a lot of pieces that have to go right for the platform to take root.  But when you get it right, it’s a game changer. 

In fact, it is unarguably one of the top 2-3 reasons that Microsoft became the PC gorilla in the desktop computing wars.  They built a thriving developer ecosystem, and Apple didn’t (or at least not on a par with Microsoft).

In the mobile realm, this implies a platform that is synchronized across hardware, software and service layers. This synchronization is necessary to deliver a superior user experience, which is what consumers now expect post iPhone (I cover this topic in more detail in my guest post for GigaOM, ‘Android vs. iPhone: Why Openness Might Not Be Best’).

As a result, for the competition, who may only control one or two of these pieces (e.g., hardware and system software but not the actual mobile service, or in the case of Android, software only), the reality is that this means that they will be solving a different problem than Apple’s end-to-end solution, which integrates these disparate layers and then makes them extensible and programmable via the iPhone SDK.

And let’s be clear, regardless of the metric that you choose to measure Apple’s success in this realm (developers, downloads, dollars, margins or consumer engagement), the platform engine and ecosystem is unquestionably humming on all cylinders. 

Beyond the $1B business momentum for App Store; AND beyond the fact that iPhone has already emerged as the number two smartphone maker (behind only Nokia/Symbian, whose market position is at best, tenuous); AND beyond the fact that the device unit numbers don’t even include iPod touches (which run virtually the identical software, sans the phone); AND beyond the fact that there are over 25,000 applications available right now on iPhone/iPod touch (yielding over 500 million downloads to date), there is one “unfair advantage” I haven’t even mentioned.

That is the iTunes media/content piece of Apple’s strategy, which no one else offers, which in itself is over 65M users strong, which has made Apple the number one seller of music on the planet (larger than Wal-Mart) and which integrates into the same user experience, workflow and marketplace function set as App Store. 

So, as a developer, who can ride on top of the iTunes media freight train; write applications that reach into one device and device software form-factor across all global carriers that sell the iPhone; and reach the carrier-free segment vis-à-vis the iPod touch, that is a lot of leverage to build upon.

Two parting thoughts. One is that the bar (for the competition) is about to get even higher, as on Tuesday, March 17 Apple will be holding a developer event to preview the 3.0 version of iPhone software. 

Will it provide visibility into the next hardware refresh of the iPhone and iPod touch?  Will it be the point when they introduce new form factors of devices powered by the platform, such as a tablet/netbook sized iPod Touch HD?  Perhaps it’s the moment, when they will begin supercharging Apple TV with the iPhone’s platform and ecosystem goodness. 

Or maybe, it’s something entirely different.  What if Apple decided to reinvent the digital camera as a smart, connected, programmable device?  It would certainly sync up with some of the features they have recently baked into iLife, such as facial recognition and geocoding of photos.

Finally, when you listen to the analysts prognosticating the good, bad and ugly of Apple as an investment, keep in the back of your mind that the financial market really hasn't a clue on the economic and competitive impact of the App Store.  When they finally figure that one out, I expect Apple’s stock to see a positive pop.

The bigger deal is that I don’t believe that most of the competition really has a firm grasp on what App Store means from a platform perspective.

Now, that's a story that is yet to be written.

Related Posts:

1. ANALYSIS - iPhone 3.0 Developer Preview: Block the Kick Strategy
2. PC 1.0, iPhone 3.0 and the Woz: Everything Old is New Again
3. iPhone 2.0: What it Means to be Mobile
4. 65 Million Reasons to be bullish on Apple
5. Apple's Mobile Gaming Gold Rush
6. Guest Post for GigaOM - Android vs. iPhone: Why Openness May Not Be Best

MUST SEE THIS VIDEO: Stewart Skewers Cramer on The Daily Show

You may have heard the quip (delivered only partially in jest) that the only place you get real investigative journalism anymore is on a pretend news show (i.e., The Daily Show).  

EXHIBIT A: Jon Stewart delivered a searing indictment of Jim Cramer and the financial news business in general when he interviewed Cramer on The Daily Show.

See the eight minute video.  Stewart pasted Cramer as "Selling Snake Oil as Vitamin Tonic." Give Jim Cramer credit for taking it head-on.  His professional nuts are on the slab, and he acts like he knows it.

And there was no light handling from Stewart.  He was incisive, surgical and basically accused CNBC as knowing the game that was being played and negligently shirking its duties.

What can I say.  It was cathartic.  We are all in the same boat, some better, some worse.  There is something to be said for shining a light on piggish behavior, and this fits the bill.

WATCH IT (below)!  Full episode online @ The Daily Show (also, here is link to Jon Stewart's original response to CNBC/Rich Santelli Rant, which is awesome).

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Pt. 2

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

"Right Here Now" services: weaving a real-time web around status

I just had an AHA moment.

Fred Wilson of A VC wrote an intriguing post, ‘Hasn't It Always Been About Status?’   In it, he asserts that the “status update” has become the ultimate social gesture (think: Twitter tweets, Facebook status updates, LinkedIn updates).

I read this post when it originally ran, and pretty much agreed with Fred’s points, but then moved on.  Intuitive, but not earth shattering.  Or so I thought.

But then, I activated a feature within Facebook that allowed my Twitter tweets to update my Facebook status automatically, in the process notifying everyone in my social network. 

(Ironically enough, this one feature add materially increased the utility value for me of Facebook, which has done a good job of finding the balance between being an optimized, integrated walled garden and an open platform.)

That was the AHA moment when I started to see how you could bi-furcate a personal, brand or community messaging strategy between global broadcasts and targeted narrowcasts, and how all sorts of new status clients will emerge to make this process manageable.

Reduction as a Powerful Generator of Focused Activity

In Wilson’s post, he presents a three-legged stool to explain both the import and destiny of status updating.

On one leg is the premise (articulated by Joshua Schachter) that reducing services to the simplest user experience possible is a powerful generator of focused activity. 

Why?  It’s the antidote to the truism that when you raise the bar a half inch, you lose 90% of the audience.

On the second leg is the status message itself, a construct that is at once completely ad hoc and at the same time gaining structure (think: handles, transformers and payloads). 

Owing in large part to Twitter’s exposition of rich APIs, we are seeing all sorts of interesting service integrations (e.g., the above Facebook example and video tweeting services, such as Twiddeo, an effort by my company, vSocial), plus client side application innovation across Mac, Blackberry, iPhone, iPod touch and PC device environments.

This is the third leg of the stool, and Wilson concludes that the emergence of status as the ultimate social gesture is destined to be “very good for third party Twitter clients who will now be able to become status clients.”

He concludes that “we are going to see continued innovation in and around the status message; (namely because) we can use filtering, semantics, identity, social graphs, and a host of other important technologies to weave a real-time web around status.”

I think that he is right, and to frame this one, the rest of the post focuses on one such innovation example.

Right Here Now Services: Status Meets Location with Context

Form follows function.  A few weeks back, my friend (and former business partner) Steve Lee, who runs product management on Google Mobile Maps, took me through a demo of their new locative status service, Latitude.

He showed me how they had thought through things like visibility control and privacy (they did a REALLY good job here – kudos!), and even plugged in status updating.

The basic idea behind Latitude is two fold.  One is that most people don’t use GPS, and besides it’s deeply inefficient from a power utilization perspective.  Battery life is everything on mobile devices. 

Two is that because of this, mechanisms to share location status with family and friends are unreliable, not to mention, lacking in privacy controls.

With Latitude, Google has come up with a systematized approach to making location visibility work both effortlessly and securely so you can share your locative status in real-time with those that matter in your social network, across cellular and Wi-Fi networks, in a carrier independent and battery efficient fashion.

Now, imagine Status and Location as social application ingredients that can be combined together to create new application compounds using additional ingredients, like People, Places, Localities, Times, Topics and Events.

The composite that results is what I call "Right Here Now" services.

Here are some examples:

1. You are hanging out near South of Market (in San Francisco) on a Saturday night and you want to see if any friends from school (or work) are nearby and want to grab a beer. 
2. You are listening to a compelling speaker at a trade show and in parallel, kibitzing virtually with others in the room (and those who couldn’t be there but are engaged nonetheless).
3. You are watching the Lakers play the Celtics on TNT, high-fiving with other Laker fans and trash-talking with Celts fans who are also watching the event, some in their living rooms, others at sports bars, still others physically at the game.
4. You just heard about a disaster in Anytown, USA, and want to reach out to people physically located right now where the disaster happened to get news from ground zero.
5. Or, as pathetic as it sounds, you are single, looking to mingle and doing what my friend calls the “lookup and hookup,” which of course brings new meaning to the (twitter) term Direct Message.

Similarly, it is easy to see how such mechanisms might become tune-able to filter down communication channels based on delimiters such as specific interests, trust, and even thresholds, such as audience size and "friend of a friend" degrees of separation.

The Medium Truly is the Message

Marshall McLuhan famously once said that, “The Medium is the Message,” suggesting that the medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived.

In the case of status update messages, they are becoming a medium in their own right, increasingly containing much more informational goodness than simple text. 

Specifically, they are gaining structured actions that allow you to compress long URLs into  TinyURLs/Bit.lys; handles to enable auto-recognition of links to pictures, songs, videos and other media; categorization support so that you can add those you are following to groups; save favorite items of interest; and to archive referenced links for offline browsing, which is ideal for mobile/mobility devices.

Moreover, status clients are gaining search and trending functions, and newfangled status overlay services, like StockTwits, are building their own smart codes using hashtags (#NAME) and other symbols to identify things like stock symbols ($AAPL) and to frame recurring conversational topics of interest (#Watchmen).

Today, a lot of this nascent structure is ad hoc, which has the benefit of being organic and community defined, and thus, authentic. Plus it sticks to Schachter’s axiom about simple user experiences generating lots of focused activity.

But what it doesn’t provide is a reliable, predictable framing mechanism for easily plugging into conversational threads and persisting contexts beyond the HERE and NOW. 

But, that is a topic for another day.  Rome wasn't built in a single day.

(follow my rants on the real-time web via Twitter @ http://twitter.com/netgarden.)

Related Posts:

1. Twitter-Nomics: Structured Tweets (and a Business Model for Twitter).
2. Envisioning the Social Map-lication: An application that systematically connect the dots between me, my content and my network.
3. vSocial launches Twiddeo:  Twitter meets video, and vice-versa.
4. Why Openness May Not Be Best: Android versus iPhone (a Guest Post I wrote for GigaOM).
5. Mega brands, online communities and “three walled” gardens

Getting Back Our Sense of National We-Ness: On Heroic Acts, Shape Shifting and Small Business Stimulus

“Once again, its astringent distillation of life and death is desperately needed to help strip away ‘layers and layers of nonsense’ so Americans can remember who we are — and how lost we got in the boom before our bust,” channels Frank Rich of The New York Times in an Op-Ed piece allegorizing Thornton’s Wilder’s ‘Our Town’ to the present times.

Particularly poignant is a reference to a moment (in the play) where a visit to the town cemetery reveals scores of Civil War veterans who gave their lives because they “had a notion that the Union ought to be kept together, though they’d never seen more than 50 miles of it themselves. All they knew was the name — the United States of America. And they went and died about it.”

Rich notes that “It’s a trace memory of an American faith we soiled and buried with all our own nonsense in the first decade of our new century, suggesting that retrieving that faith now requires extraordinary patience and optimism, as we work our way through the aftershocks of the orgy of irresponsibility and greed that brought America to this nadir.”

I have blogged on this theme in ‘Getting Real: On Doomsday, the Demise of So-Called Experts and the New Arbitrage,’ but specifically, we shouldn’t let the opportunity pass to wonder and appreciate the strange twist (as Andy Rooney put it on ’60 Minutes’ recently) that it is in times of war (read: civilization at its supposed worst) that men/women perform more selfless acts of heroism than at any other time.  Any student of World War II can certainly attest to the efficacy of this point. 

Put another another way, if we re-framed this moment in time as the ‘Great War on our National Identity,’ what types of heroic acts might we perform as individuals, small businesses and enterprises (and as a government exercising leadership) that we otherwise wouldn’t think of doing in a time of peace?

How the Crisis Will Reshape America

Along these lines, Richard Florida of The Atlantic has written a powerful piece, ‘How the Crisis Will Reshape America.’ 

It bookends some gravitational truths (certain geo segments will likely never rebound in their current form; consumption patterns will irrevocably change as we shift from a debt-reliant ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ culture to a savings-minded society) with prescriptive remedies (fund the winners, declare economic disaster areas of the geo losers and rescue/reorganize them, build urban planning policies around same) that are surprisingly fresh.

It concludes with a famous quote from Stanford economist Paul Romer, who said, “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”

The larger point behind the quote is that:

“…the United States, whatever its flaws, has seldom wasted its crises in the past. On the contrary, it has used them, time and again, to reinvent itself, clearing away the old and making way for the new. Throughout U.S. history, adaptability has been perhaps the best and most quintessential of American attributes. Over the course of the 19th century’s Long Depression, the country remade itself from an agricultural power into an industrial one. After the Great Depression, it discovered a new way of living, working, and producing, which contributed to an unprecedented period of mass prosperity. At critical moments, Americans have always looked forward, not back, and surprised the world with our resilience.”

Read the whole piece HERE.  Agree or disagree with the positions articulated within it, it nonetheless offers up a holistic, coherent point of view.

Where’s the Small Business Stimulus?

If anything, the one piece of the recovery story that I haven’t heard anything on is where is the stimulus for small business. 

Specifically, I would love to see stimulus dollars targeted at funding small businesses that are under the radar of being VC-worthy (i.e., not $100M+ business opportunities) but have the potential to grow into real businesses ($10M+ business opportunities).

Why not focus a tranche of dollars on businesses that fit within a transparent underwriting criteria -- including fund raise size and capital efficiency -- AND which uniquely leverage specific national strategic goals as a cornerstone focus driver of their business. 

Broadband, Education, Renewable/Alternative Energy Sources, Health Care and Auto/Transportation are fairly beefy buckets that come to mind.

For those who believe that the long-term growth of the economy hinges in part on small business growth, this is a great way to both provide funding mechanisms to an under-served segment and to cultivate a bunch of entrepreneurial seedlings in sync with our national agenda.

And Now for Something Completely Ridiculous

Lest we forget, the idiocy is never far from the surface:

1. Michael Lewis (of Moneyball fame) captures the global sublime-ness of the global financial crisis in a Vanity Fair article that looks at ‘How Iceland Went Bust’  (on the collapse of Iceland’s economy/financial centers).  His punchline is priceless: "Iceland is no longer a country. It is a hedge fund."  Read the full article HERE.
   
2. You have to watch (see below) Jon Stewart’s takedown of CNBC for shamelessly plugging and hyping their favorite stocks, feeding bubble-driven irrational exuberance, and then having the chutzpah, led by Cramer and Kudlow, to assail the president as a radical saboteur of capitalism, without any irony whatsoever.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

CNBC Gives Financial Advice

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Joke of the Day

Related Posts:

1. Getting Real: On Doomsday, the Demise of So-Called Experts and the New Arbitrage.
2. Warren Buffett for Recovery Czar: Why we need the Wizard of Omaha to step up.
3. Early Report Cards: On Wall Street, Main Street and the White House
4. See 'The War': Ken Burns' potent, life-affirming documentary on World War II.

Flip Video News Network: Crowd-Sourcing meets CNN

In Why TV Lost, Paul Graham of Y Combinator argues that broadcast media is finished, destined to be Darwin-ized by the Internet.

He argues that what used to be the power drivers of TV as a broadcast media device were:

1. Synchronicity: everyone had to watch the same program at the same time.
2. Locality: news and local programming drove a network-affiliate model.

TiVo was the foreshock, but Internet media now lays clear that the days of forced synchronicity are gone forever. 

Moreover, the forced tie to locality is irrevocably broken from a content perspective (but maybe not from an advertising perspective).

In its place is emerging an open, social model that makes media flow cheaply and fluidly. 

Along those lines, I have blogged about services like Boxee and Justin.tv, the hybrid of which is best thought of as a composite of Personal media libraries, the Internet media libraries of both Big Media (CBS, Daily Show) and UGC/Shared Media Networks (YouTube, Flickr), and the Real-Time Web, with a dash of social sauce.

Something that Graham says in his excellent post is the foundation for an idea that I want to present in a moment:

“The other reason networks like live shows is that they're cheaper to produce. There they have the right idea (i.e., cheap production costs), but they haven't followed it to its conclusion. Live content can be way cheaper than networks realize, and the way to take advantage of dramatic decreases in cost is to increase volume. The networks are prevented from seeing this whole line of reasoning because they still think of themselves as being in the broadcast business—as sending one signal to everyone.”

He concludes by saying, “Now would be a good time to start any company that competes with TV networks. That's what a lot of Internet startups are, though they may not have had this as an explicit goal.”

The Idea: "We’re Building a Flip Video News Network"

Imagine CNN for the broadband era. A real time news network with bureaus/beats all around the world. Best of all, we’re building it on the free or cheap.

The concept is fairly simple.  Leverage the universe of Flip Video users as beat reporters.  Why?  Flip Video cameras are cheap, highly mobile, and deliver “good enough” quality to be enjoyed on big screen TVs.

Similarly, "post and host" (the basic upload/encode/watch model popularized by YouTube) works great, enabling a near real-time network to emerge, whereby would-be reporters get a Flip Mino (or Mino HD), sign up to create a segment and commit to specific programming levels.

In tandem, we provide them simple tools to deliver segments that are well-formed in terms of length, live (ala Justin/tv) versus recorded distinctions, reporter status, recurrence and programming metadata.

We then use of all this data to systematically compile programming (most popular, custom list, editor’s choice), filter it down, catalog it, plot it on a social graph and weave it into the real-time web fabric as a inherently social medium.

On top of this, we overlay a custom player specifically designed to take advantage of all of these exposed "programming handles." 

In my specific concept, I focus on a lifestyle theme with five segments (each with static sub-topics, so programmed media "units" are relatively predictable). 

Over time, like MTV and SportsCenter, the goal is to grow from one news program to five news programs, and ultimately, five discreet channels.  (But to be clear, the concept is pretty horizontal in that it could easily support other programming formats.)

While we ultimately let the market dictate what it wants, in the early stage we cultivate two different content universes:

1. Public Access, which is uncensored and unmonitored
2. Brand-Friendly, which reconciles big brand sensibility and its requisite tradeoffs

One can imagine both premium content and private network models emerging as part of a content/audience segmentation play, but fundamentally, the gambit is that you can optimize ad units, target media consumers more richly, and deliver a sufficiently customized experience to enhance viewer engagement levels.

Is there a fatal gotcha that I am missing?  Could it be compelling?  Does it scale as a focused, but fluid, network model?

Related Posts:

1. What it Means to be a "Social" Media Center: Boxee, Apple TV and Square Connect
2. Pattern Recognition: Winning Blue Prints, Moneyball (NBA-style) and Justin.tv
3. Gallows Humor: The Media "Business"
4. The Programmable Fan Site: A New Media/Ad Unit Model

Early Report Cards: On Wall Street, Main Street and the White House

"I'm not saying, 'Mr. President, go stare at the Bloomberg quote machine and come to your senses,'" said CNBC's Jim Kramer. "I just want some sign that Obama realizes the market is totally falling apart. And that his agenda has a big hand in that happening."

You have got to respect a president who, in the face of breaking glass and falling skies, nonetheless maintains the conviction to execute his master plan.  Whether it is the right plan is an entirely different matter.

Case in point, I was talking with a friend last night who wanted to get my read on the tri-fecta of stimulus, financial system rescue and the cratering economy. 

Specifically, he wondered if Obama was placing the right dollars on the right priorities and whether in such scary times, we should be spending cycles and dollars trying to re-make education, re-jigger health care and re-engineer the relationship between the federal government and its people.

Therein lies the paradox for Obama & Co.  On the one hand, if not now then when?  His political capital is as high as it may ever get, the dollars are flowing and the present time is tremendously ripe for transformative “creative destruction.” 

In other words, this might be a once in a lifetime opportunity.

The counter is that screw this up, and we end up with an agenda that (as David Brooks puts it) is unexceptional in its parts but that, when taken as a whole, represents a social-engineering experiment that is entirely new – and not necessarily in a good way.

This fork can be seen in the indigestion between Wall Street and Main Street, zero sum battles between Republicans and Democrats (and by inference, conservatives/liberals), and perhaps soon, populists versus centrists/moderates (see upcoming battles in: taxation, immigration, protectionism, gun rights, auto industry bailouts, supreme court judge nominations, etc.).

In a very provocative, but compelling, NYT op-ed, ‘A Moderate Manifesto,’ David Brooks assails the Obama budget (and his governance instincts), saying:

Those of us who consider ourselves moderates — moderate-conservative, in my case — are forced to confront the reality that Barack Obama is not who we thought he was. His words are responsible; his character is inspiring. But his actions betray a transformational liberalism that should put every centrist on notice. As Clive Crook, an Obama admirer, wrote in The Financial Times, the Obama budget “contains no trace of compromise. It makes no gesture, however small, however costless to its larger agenda, of a bipartisan approach to the great questions it addresses. It is a liberal’s dream of a new New Deal.”

Moderates now find themselves betwixt and between. On the left, there is a president who appears to be, as Crook says, “a conviction politician, a bold progressive liberal.” On the right, there are the Rush Limbaugh brigades. The only thing more scary than Obama’s experiment is the thought that it might fail and the political power will swing over to a Republican Party that is currently unfit to wield it.

Read the whole article HERE, because beyond the immediate financial crisis, which will pass, it gets to the nut of what we the people are signing up for; namely a New Deal or a variation of the Same Old Deal (i.e., party and power politics, division over unity).

Now, more than ever, details and nuance matter.

Related Posts:

1. Getting Real: On Doomsday, the Demise of So-Called Experts and the New Arbitrage
2. Engine Failure: When Financial Markets Fail (a good primer on the crisis)
3. Warren Buffett for Recovery Czar: Why we need the Wizard of Omaha to step up

Warren Buffett for Recovery Czar

Fred Wilson of A VC has written an excellent cliff notes version of The Berkshire Hathaway 2008 Annual Letter.

Warren Buffett is the gold standard for sound investing.  He’s the canary in the coalmine that tells you our system is recover-able.

In fact, with that sensibility, I am officially nominating Warren Buffett for Czar of the Recovery. 

Why? As Wilson notes, “All you have to do is read Warren's letter (or even my cliff notes version) to understand why he's the best investor of the past century. Common sense married with a native understanding of markets and value is what produces the returns at the top of this post.”

Read the whole post HERE.  It’s really strong. 

Specifically, there is a reference that Buffett makes to the CEOs of large financial organizations needing to be the Chief Risk Officer as well.  This is sound, essential, and sadly, mostly absent in this debacle.

Case in point, 60 Minutes had a great segment on the Madoff Scandal tonight: The Man Who Figured Out Madoff's Scheme. 

It paints a fully-formed picture of the absence of Chief Risk Officers across the entire scam food chain (from the perpetrators to the victims).

Does any one doubt that Buffett is the Chief Risk Officer in his companies?  Consider Buffetts prescience and understanding of endemic derivatives risk:

10) Derivatives - "Derivatives are dangerous" and "When Berkshire purchashed General Re in 1998, we knew we could not get our minds around the book of 23,218 derivative contracts, made with 884 counterparties. So we decided to close up shop. Though we were under no pressure and we operating in benign markets as we exited, it took us five years and more than $400 million in losses to largely complete the task. Upon leaving, our feelings about the business mirrored a line in a country song: "I liked you better before I got to know you so well."

For all of these reasons, and because this is a time unlike any other (but also a time of great potential for heroic change), I nominate Warren Buffett for Czar of the Recovery. 

After all, he is the gold standard.  Smart, reasoned, clear/understandable and straight.  Been there, done that (I could be wrong, but I thought he played a consultative role in the rescue of Long Term Capital Management – author Roger Lowenstein wrote books on both).

Plus, he is appropriately folksy; he could explain in plain English, be a public face and restore confidence.

Rhetoric matters in times like these.

No less, if he was a face, you bet he would be pretty inscrutable about vetting the process on the government's bailout, rescue and re-boot cycle of the financial markets.  Would you want a guy like Buffett with an official seat at the table?  I would.

Would he do it (be willing to take on the Recovery Czar role)? 

Who knows, and I know what you are thinking.  Buffett already has a full-time gig, Berkshire Hathaway. 

But there is precedent.  Steve Jobs with Pixar and Apple.  That worked out pretty well.

Related Posts:

1. Getting Real: On Doomsday, the Demise of So-Called Experts and the New Arbitrage
2. Engine Failure: When Financial Markets Fail (a good primer on the crisis)
3. Rhetoric: Why it Matters