The Network Garden - Mark Sigal's Blog

Unicorn Shots gets a really great write-up in The New York Times

In a blink, time washes away. I can recall vividly the moment 17 years ago when I forked from a career in real estate to the tech industry and specifically, the Internet, pre-web. 

Flashing back, I can see record stores, book stores, video stores and consumer electronic stores. 

Blockbuster and Barnes and Noble, in this place in time, are unassailable. 

I spend many a night carousing the aisles of Music Plus. The Yellow Pages is perennial, and seemingly, always will be.

I remember the daily paper just "being," and the printed newspaper having what investor Warren Buffett calls a Toll Road, via its Classified Ad business.

Unicorn Shots gets Write-up in The New York Times

The above premises why it still holds special meaning to see my company, Unicorn Labs, get its Unicorn Shots product written up by The New York Times.

Bob Tedeschi, who writes the App Smart segment for the paper, said this about Unicorn Shots in both online and print (August 26 on page B6): 

“If you want something more ridiculous than sublime, Unicorn Shots is a far better call.” 

Description: Take a shot of someone you love and overlay the image with huge eyeballs, fake eyelashes and other effects from your recent Caricatures 101 course. Drag your finger around the screen and the person’s eyes follow. 

He closes by encouraging prospective users to "try not to entertain existential thoughts about how you just spent the last two minutes of your life. Better still, hand the app to your children when they face their next existential crisis."

Amen to that, Bob. Thanks a bunch. :-)

Check out the full article HERE. It was a pretty popular read (see below).

 

When and What is "Good Enough"

(Excerpt from 'Rabbit and Turtle's Amazing Adventure')

We are at the eleventh hour of building two products in my company, Unicorn Labs.  As a result, I have two inter-related threads running in my head.

One is the axiom that it is more important to focus on doing the "right things" than on having to do everything "perfectly right." 

In terms of daily practice, this falls into the bucket of exercising practical intelligence by neither Over-building nor Under-building the runway.

By that, I mean that takeoff, landing and transport vehicle are all synchronized in directed awareness of the above precepts. Sidebar: I am a buddhist at heart.

But, the other thread that is running in my head is a truth that was codified for me one incredible night a couple of months back when the Los Angeles Lakers beat the Boston Celtics in Game Seven of a tough, but ultimately, redemptive NBA Championship Series.

It's the axiom that every player who achieves success early in their careers, such as winning a championship or leading their company to SUCCESS, assumes that winning is how it will always be for them in the road ahead.

But, many a veteran, staring at the final hours of their careers, can tell you that this is a fallacy. 

More commonly, injuries, trades, superior competition or other unexpected setbacks lead to unrealized potential, and an unfortunate truth manifests that there was no tomorrow.

Therefore, one should commit to reconciling the paradoxical fuzziness between doing the right things and actually securing the unrealized potential.  

That junction is the point of "Good Enough."

Related Posts

1. Don't confuse a bunch of chicken parts for a chicken
2. "Strategic" versus "Win-able": The 1.0/3.0 Paradox
3. Start in the Middle: Jobs, Outcomes and Constraints approach to Product Management

Guest Column @ Forbes: The Facebook Double Whammy

 Sub-text: We don't trust the social network, but we're using it more and more. The article looks at the reasons why. Read the full piece HERE.

This is my first piece for Forbes so would love to hear what you think.

Riddle Me This: Aren't the Rumors of a $99 Apple TV a "tell"?

 

I think that I am safe at this point in generalizing that Apple, as a Company, is dedicated to delivering real, sustainable value to its base of users. All of the economics and first-hand customer experience bear this point out.

That is why I can’t reconcile an iOS-based Apple TV device reboot with the rumored $99 price. 

Why? iOS’s existing library of Games (and the developer base behind it) presents an obvious and fundamental beachhead into disrupting the video game console segment, which is currently dominated by Xbox (40M+ units), PlayStation (36M units) and Wii (70M+ units).

Simply stated, Apple is holding a good hand, and this time they are NOT going to deliver an Apple TV that struggles for relevance.  

The new Apple TV - rumored to be called iTV (yeah, yeah, I know, lawsuits are standing by) - at its most basic, will be a dialing up of the iOS App Delivery Truck to a new type of environment - big screen living room TVs.

Quantifying things a bit, simply adding up the installed base of the video game console market's leaders shows a target of 150M* potential users -- a massive opportunity.

That is, of course, parallel to the existing 100M iPod touch, iPhone and iPad owners for whom such a device is not only not a hard sell, but strangely now is a no-brainer.

Now, back to $99. To me, this implies one of three paths for Apple TV. 

One is the Limited Storage, cloud dependency path.  The thinking here is that Apple is growing new datacenters, which could be commensurately timed with such a launch. 

The second path is getting to $99 via Subsidy, as is the case with iPhone. This path has the dual benefit that it delivers an end-consumer $99 price point and supports a higher bill-of-materials cost, thereby enabling a more powerful device.

Regarding the second path, I just don't see it happening anytime soon, given the large affiliate fees that could be compromised under such a model and the general intransigence of the satellite and cable services providers.

In terms of the first path, knowing the process of building apps on the iOS Platform (my company, Unicorn Labs, has built photo, music, game and ebook apps), I am gonna go out on a limb and say that the rebooted device will need to have ample local storage and processing power to be at least as good as iPad is.

Now that we know the capabilities of a bigger-screen iOS device (i.e., iPad), Apple isn't gonna deliver a solution that yields a worse user experience than a predecessor product. That's just not how they roll.

In other words, the $99 case where most of the cost runs in the cloud, is shaky, at best.

That's not to say that Apple won't have the iOS version of Apple TV able to take advantage of an iPad as a Fat Client (and perhaps, even as a Thin Server).

But, fundamentally my money is on the third path; namely, running on top of the Mac Mini as a $99 software add-on, with the user being able to choose between a $69 Magic Trackpad, a $200 iPod touch, a $99 iPhone or $500 iPad as the controller.

I guess, the point that I am making is that the $99 Apple TV rumor, which Apple has done nothing to dissuade, is a "tell" about where this product is headed. What do you think?

Related

1. Check Mate: Understanding Apple's iPad
2. Apple, TV and the Smart, Connected Living Room
3. What it Means to be a "Social" Media Center

Heroes Come in All Sizes: Rabbit and Turtle's Amazing Race is Coming Soon (the first eBook by Unicorn Labs)

via Unicorn Labs

 

Lipstick on a Pig - Google and Verizon espouse Net Neutrality "compromise"

Hmm, let's do the math on this one. Verizon, a company whose predominant line of business is mobile, reached a compromise with Google, whose most important initiative right now (Android) is also in mobile. Google's most important partner in growing its mobile foothold?  The one and same mega-carrier, Verizon.

So what did these two companies agree upon?  Namely, that network neutrality should remain enforceable on wireline networks, without extending the same to wireless. 

What the frack?  Isn't this like a doctor and pharmaceutical company agreeing that dentists should be regulated as before, while affirming that the same regulations aren't necessary for doctors?  

Oh, and the language carves out a nebulous bucket for broadband operators to offer "managed services," which in the addition by subtraction scheme of things, could translate to something as basic as Google placing its content caches in said carriers networks, so as to provide a better experience than the competition (without such edge-based advantages) can offer.

And this completely sidesteps the darker cases where said managed services end up with the carrier playing the old Microsoft hand of "embracing, extending and extinguishing" competitive offerings -- perhaps by using lots of FREE (as of yet unannounced) Google software!  

After all, as Microsoft proved during the PC and Internet era, and Android is proving again in mobile, when you can bundle something for free that heretofore was a premium offering, that is a great way to secure market share while squeezing off the oxygen of your competitor.

To be clear, none of this is inherently wrong in my opinion. It's what big companies do, so as to establish superior market position and all of the leverage that it entails.  And today's announcement pushes for transparency and plain english for both wireline and wireless providers when communicating the intent to implement such new services - albeit, with ample room for self-interested parties to interpret what transparency actually means.

But, and this is the key. When a company is as sanctimonious as Google about being "open" and "doing no evil," and then: 

A) Finds itself under the uncomfortable glare of doing back-room, fishy smelling deals with Verizon, hardly a champion of open;

B) Which follows similar efforts to align with Adobe in Flash, hardly a champion of open media formats;

C) Which also follows similar fuzzy-ness in its dealings in China (we still don't know if Google's Apps infrastructure was compromised and if so, what customer data was lifted; a truth that is at odds with the Google 'All Cloud Everywhere' credo);

It's raises more troubling questions than provides satisfactory answers. Along those lines, GigaOM's Stacey Higginbotham has some good analysis on today's announcement, and is also firmly in the skeptical bucket.  

A note aside, it bears watching in the coming months how the terms "broadband," "wireline," "wireless" and "Internet" are re-factored by the parties in the Net Neutrality debate, as that is where these non-binding resolutions will suddenly shift meaning when it comes to implementation details.  

For example, does broadband equate to wireline in an age of wireless broadband? Is Google committing itself to digging its heals in with Comcast when they balk at this? Or, for the sake of expediency, will-Google convey disappointment, but nonetheless support Comcast when it comes time to roll out Android based tablets?

Open Google is once again acting Open-ish, and today's announcement is nothing more than lipstick on a pig.

Related

1. Open "ish": The meaning of open, according to Google