Guy Kawasaki is involved and in love. Michael Arrington is positive they’re a winner and dares us to quote him on that. Mike, Guy - here’s a dare!

FilmLoop is a free photocasting network, or in their words: “Tell your story in a live Loop and broadcast it to all your friends”. Praised by highly respected individuals and with the right mix of photo sharing, user centric, free, web 2.0, personalized…  figured I’d better join the party and try them out. I did… It left me with a sweet and sour taste in my mouth and I wondered why. This morning I finally figured it out.

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A disorder which causes victims to associate the utmost wisdom, wizardry and solid business foresight to any move Google makes. Physical effects of Googlebation include victim’s jaw to grossly expand, white froth to come out the side of their mouth, while mumbling…”did you see what Google just came out with…did you see…did you see!”.

I admit, I had a mild infection but I believe it’s over now. Two recent posts in Techcrunch discussed Google related news items - the CL2 exclusive screen shots (the new Google calendar) and the confirmation of Google’s acquisition of Writely, an online word processor. Of the two, I believe the latter is much more interesting but that will be taken care of in another post. (more…)

      

From a purely technological perspective I guess the answer is simple and short – YES. Then again that’s not our point. We are here to represent users and discuss fundamental issues of the web’s evolution beyond the PC.

The recent post in Techcrunch regarding Google’s new calendar (A.K.A CL2) got me thinking (I Techrunch - therefore I think) about how the folks at Google plan to mobilize their ever increasing plethora of services.

Now a confession, I am three connections away (based on my linkedin network) from being close to any Google insider (boo-hoo) so my review is based on what I know as a regular user. Out of all existing services the one that interests me the most is Gmail Wireless. This is a perfect example of what “can be done” vs. “should be done” when a communication service goes mobile

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I’m sure some of you readers are looking at the title of this post and thinking “Huh? What’s with this? What do these things have to do with one another? It only makes sense that this comes from a guy called Spock”. But there’s a point here, and a story, so bear with me.

Something bothered me while reading Gil’s post about the boat-on-wheels. It took me a few minutes to understand what’s wrong, but finally it hit me:

A boat-on-wheels isn’t that bad of an idea.. (more…)

      

Shozu is a simple, elegant, user centric service. They provide a mobile application which makes mobile picture posting easy. If you use Flickr, Webshots, Buzznet or Text America and if you have a camera phone, Shozu links the two together. Well, almost.

Let’s start with the positive Feedback. Shozu is a user centric service and it shows. Their mobile application is built for end users, does one specific thing and does it in a very insightful way. Their web site is very welcoming and easy to navigate. The help files are simple and effective and the counseling extends beyond the comfortable cocoon of their own application. For example, Shozu provides advise on how to avoid roaming charges and on how to use their application to send picture emails in a very cost effective way. That’s what I call an extra effort that makes a difference. Cool, user centric, effective.

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An interesting new play in the convergence arena are the mobile access companies. The value proposition is focused around on enabling users to access to their PCs using an internet enabled mobile device as long as they are online with their PC at the same time too.

To start with,this is a very welcomed and logical step in the convergence field. If you had told me two years ago that I would be able to surf the net and view my PC content via WAP using my simple mobile phone (Nokia 6230) (…) get out of here!

As it happens, SoonR and Avvenu are companies that are pioneering the way. SoonR got a thorough review on mobilecrunch a few days ago so it got me thinking in the context of our “Fusion” vs. “Boat on Wheels” awards. For the sake of fairness I will focus on Avvenu this time. (more…)

      

We are proud to launch our new campaign. From now on we will do our best to review convergence products and services and give them their share of thumbs up and thumbs down.

For that, we have come up with two distinct certificates – Fusion vs. Boat on Wheels. Fusion is good. It means the product has captured and blended converging elements properly, created synergy and delivered well. Boat on wheels means the product is exactly that – a forced mix of elements that are failing to comprise a stable compound.

We credited Sling Media with a Fusion certificate and have classified MSN TV as a Boat on Wheels. As you can probably tell by now we are opinionated a-holes. This does not mean we are right, only that we have opinions. We’d love to hear yours. Both about products you like us to review or simply about the products themselves.

      

I have taken some heat for going somewhat too bald on the user centric theme. One of my new critiques has even advised me to “go to business school, hippie!”, so I guess I should make a key distinction. Yes, there is such a thing as “bad naked”. So-called-user-centric initiatives can go very sour damage users and extinct markets. Kazaa and eMule, for example, are often mistaken for user centric when in fact they are user abusive. Not only because they facilitate collective theft, but because they set the stage for a hectic virus, Trojans and worm exchange as well. User centric does not mean free. It does mean that my personal content is mine, that for other’s content I wish to pay the other, and that I demand to have the full selection and personalized choice.

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Following up on the recent fusion posting, my first nominee for the annual fusion award is Sling Media, provider of Slingbox, an IP box that enables you to watch your TV programming from wherever you are by turning virtually any Internet-connected PC into your personal TV. Sling harnesses the Internet and helps break the artificial physical boundaries of TV broadcasting. Why do I feel such an urge to nominate Sling? Well, let me tell you the sad story of my NBA watching habits.

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All you convergence enthusiasts out there – hold your horses! We’ve got it all wrong! We’ve been fooled to believe convergence is here… well its not… at least true convergence isn’t. You ask why - I’ll start with an analogy. Imagine there are two parallel universes – ‘the water world’ and ‘land world’. Fast forward four billion years of evolution and imagine two parallel cultures have independently developed. Now fast forward additional 2000 years and we’re getting to the reality TV era. Imagine you are now watching a reality contest between two groups – “land” and “water”. Each group is given a challenge (separately) - to invent a means of travel and (oh’ one more detail…they don’t know the other world exists). When it’s time to take a look at the outcome (I’ll skip the emotional drama, group dynamics and commercial breaks) it would be plausible to believe that the ‘water people’ would have invented boats (or something that resembles them) and land people, cars.  Now let’s move on to the next challenge. Acquaint the groups with the other world, water with land and vice versa and tell them their means of transport should work on land AND water. What would you get? That’s right! You would get boats with wheels and cars with buoys! Is that what we were looking for? 

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The Israeli scene has been extremely active as far as web 2.0 is concerned. Some of the activity has been echoes by Michael Arrington who visited Israel and hosted the Techcrunch lunch. Israel has been a telecommunications leader for a while, and if you topple that with growing user centric maturity you get a favorite horse for winning some key convergence races. Interestingly enough, more and more Israeli companies are drifting away from selling “technology enterprise products” and are embracing a user centric approach. Incredimail is one of my favorites in that respect. Incredimail’s founders were not afraid to take on the bully (Microsoft Outlook / Outlook express in their case). They were not afraid to take on a mature killer app (Email) and made it by making it fun and worthwhile for the end users. This, to me, is great inspiration.  

On a related note: My friend Danny Cohen, ex-long time colleague and currently a partner with Gemini, is running Israeli Venture Capital 2.0, a blog about the Israeli 2.0 scene. I have a confession to make: I like Danny and I wish to promote his blog. Seriously, he provides a lot of useful information and I know for a fact that his passion for the subject is genuine.

      

The “how to treat google” question is apparently mind-boggling a lot of innovators….Another important contribution from Spock:

One can only wonder whether Serge and Larry had a similar discussion when they decided to start a search engine in an already mature search market. Yahoo, Altavista, Lycos, Excite - all existed and had search engines, and the two geeks from hell (well we can all admit they are from hell now) didn’t really care. And I can safely assume that there were probably 100 other Laurel and Hardy’s that tried to do the same at the same time. The fact that they had such huge success is probably part luck, part business planning (oh yeah I’m sure some people will claim they had it all figured out from the get go), but mainly a real differentiator that gave them something nobody else had or could easily copy - a really really good search engine. It’s not just that they overcame the technological obstacle - it’s that they recognized that there was room for improvement in an already well established web-based tool.

So yeah, they have seem to gone through the anakin-gone-darth-vader, republic-turned-galactic-empire process, but in the core the Google story should be an inspiration and lesson for entrepeneurs, not the other way around. No single group of people has a monopoly on creativity, innovation or brains.

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