Typically I leave this Apple fan boy banter to others. To me the “found iPhone” saga is about as interesting as an afternoon of pontificating my navel. Yawn. It was dumb (legally) for GIZMODO to pay money for a lost/stolen device (although they definitely made back the $5k they paid for it). And Apple will always have problems with “the press” revealing their secrets, this isn’t the first or the last time that this will happen.

What’s more interesting to me is the shift from the Apple that we knew and loved…you know the trendy hipster guy that wears vans and t-shirts…to the Apple that attacks the very nerds that CRAVE their products so dearly (see gizmodo editor ejaculating over lost phone.) My thought is that this event was hugely beneficial to both parties. Obviously GIZMODO killed it with 8.6 million + hits on the release post, and Apple’s product will seemingly always kill it whether leaked early (new iphone) or kept relatively quiet until the release day (iPad).

What I’m most curious to see is something we presumably won’t know until looking back on these series of events, whether Apple’s shift from the startup friendly, open-ish platform, F’ the man mentality, towards the Microsoft-esk corporate persona will hurt their overall brand and thus their dominance on the very market they are fighting to control. There has been so much talk about this topic. One interesting perspective is from Jason Calacanis, a tech entrepreneur who is extremely opinionated about such topics. He writes…

Years and years after Microsoft’s antitrust headlines, Apple is now the anti-competitive monster that Jobs rallied us against in the infamous 1984 commercial. Steve Jobs is the oppressive man on the jumbotron and the Olympian carrying the hammer is the open-source movement…

…Steve Jobs is on the cusp of devolving from the visionary radical we all love to a sad, old hypocrite and control freak–a sellout of epic proportions.

Side note: I was 1 yrs old when that commercial first aired. I only know of it because of Youtube.

So with these events that have now proven that Apple is a control freak…

• forcing you to upgrade to a worse version of iTunes
• not letting any other mp3 device sync w/ iTunes
• cutting an exclusive iPhone deal with AT&T (which sucks)
• overly strict app store approval processes (I’m in this right now with UberCab…nightmare)
• closing off competitive apps
  • not allowing Google voice to have a native app
  • until very recently keeping Opera mini a great mobile browser out

…my guess is that in order to keep it’s dominance they will become the big corporate company they fought of in their early days, the corporate, closed, company that nobody wants them to become. The reality is, they may have to become that to keep their lead for a longer period of time. That’s the blessing and curse of huge growth and success in a capitalistic world. In order to keep their success they have to fight for it and that very fighting is what is killing them. It’s like a drowning child in a swimming pool. The very flailing to stay above water is what causes her to drown. Sad, but true.

For now I’ll continue to love and evangelize their products, just like the early Windows users did. I’m sure, eventually that will change.

That sounds familiar doesn’t it. It’s because Google just launched a service called Buzz that tries to do the same thing, turn an email social network into a twitter-friendfeed-flickr-facebook-ish type of social network. They’re going to need to do some serious pruning in order to get that product fun and usable. But in the mean time, there’s Flowtown’s social emails for social marketing. And these guys mean business.

Do know the amount of money that businesses pay for an individuals occupation, location, or even just name and age? A lot. Flowtown can get that information with a click of a button, and the collection process is only the start for them. The analytics that can be executed on the data that Flowtown will collect are really interesting. For example, this screen shot shows my most influential friends on Twitter:

Another thing I like about Flowtown is that they charge real money for the service, many web businesses don’t, and they’re able to do that because they provide real value. Dan Martell & Ethan Block are solid entrepreneurs that know what the hell they’re doing. I spoke with Ethan on ActionTalk way back and his passion is obvious & very contagious.

You can test it out and upload a few hundred contacts but in order get the masses you have to pay-to-play. As it should be. This may not be for Joe Twitter User but for anyone in the marketing space this tool will become a must have.

Lastly, if you haven’t read there blog, there are some hilarious social media and blogging comparisons; you’re missing some good stuff…

How to Blog like Rambo!

11 Things Tyra Banks can teach us about video blogging

Zagat

Mashable reports:

Zagat is calling the partnership “Foodie Love,” and there’s even a new accompanying foodie badge. Zagat.com is extending the partnership beyond Foursquare and starting a “Meet the Mayor” online interview series that will feature discussions with prominent Foursquare mayors.

Foursquare’s relationship with Zagat is clearly an answer to Yelp’s introduction of check-ins, especially given the trusted and prestigious nature of Zagat content.

Warner Bros.

You’ve all had a blast playing foursquare, and now the entertainment continues. Chris Dixon said that the next big thing would look like a toy, and take my advice here, Dixon knows what he’s talking about. No a game is becoming a way for movies and tv programs to bring the story off the screen and directly into the lives of viewers.

Through the promo’s & tips that these brands are offering, users/viewers can live vicariously through the characters. I’m so pumped on this. Of course, it wouldn’t be Foursquare without a badge to go with the campaign.

“Visit and check-in on Foursquare at any of the locations on our Valentine’s Day inspired list of the most romantic places in New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles and Boston to get a Valentine’s Day badge! Then go see the movie, in theaters on February 12!”

HBO

Now HBO’s new show “How to Make it in America” that has been compared to a New York based entourage, will also run promo’s through Foursquare. With 4SQ’s huge NYC presence I guarantee this blows the show up! What if the Jersey Shore guys gave tips? I guess nobody wants to live vicariously through them…

Foursquare‘s first direct relationship of note was with the Brooklyn Museum. The museum saw the obvious value of visibility into who checked-in and decided to embrace the opportunity to directly provide it’s visitors with tips and tricks around the museum. The created an interactive experience and essentially a personally guided tour! Awesome. Other institutions saw the obvious value in this type of partnership and wanted in, as I said before, the people who get in early will benefit the most. Tristan is killing it in driving these partnerships and infusing compelling reasons for users to checkin and amplifying the value of the checkin.

Our next announcement was that Harvard University got on board by populating over 30 tips for both students and visitors all around campus. The cheeky headlines read, “Foursquare goes to school” and they were right. With Harvard U. on board Foursquare was learning that the potential for these partnerships were reDONKulous. Harvard used the Foursquare platform to populate a virtual tour guide with tips like…

@ Harvard Hall: In 1764, Harvard Hall burned down in a nor’easter, taking with it almost the entire College library & John Harvard’s book collection. (December 9, 2009)

@ Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage: An American landmark since 1960 & voted best burgers in America! Try “The American Idol” burger w/ bacon, cheese, mushrooms and onions. (December 8, 2009) [Link]

Can you imagine the potential of the worlds best location based social network and the worlds best restaurant guide teaming up? Exclusive tips from Zagat about the highest rated restaurants in major cities like Chicago, New York, and San Francisco becomes very interesting for the foodies out there. Did someone say Foursquare Foodie badge? I think so!

Oh snap, with a Foursquare/Bravo partnership 4SQ enters 90 million American living rooms and hits mainstream big timeness. BravoTV’s experts and celebs give tips about the venues they love so that when you check in, you’ll see their exclusive tips integrating your checkins with that of the BravoTV shows. Everything from Michael Cohen of Miami Social, to Patti Stranger from Millionaire Matchmaker…know you’ll be in the know like never before, and you can live vicariously through the shows and their stars.

@ Joe Allen: This is where the understated in-crowd always dines. You actually need reservations because the food and This is where the understated in-crowd always dines. The menu changes often but for lunch, the La Scala salad is so good!  Their fish selections are also notable. -Michael Cohen, Miami Social (1 day ago)

@ Dave and Buster’s – Hollywood: Sports bars attract hotties. That’s why I love the wings at Dave & Busters. -Patti Stanger, Millionaire Matchmaker (1 day ago)

The institutional partnerships are taking things to a whole new level. Foursquare was always praised for being a game that provided real world, offline value, but with these partnerships that value was just amplified.

Last week Mashable ran a poll to find out which location based service YOU like the most (I say YOU because I’ve learned that the folks that read this blog are likely the type to also peruse Mashable on a regular basis). I was very please to see the result here, obviously, and I’ve been giving the battle for best location service a lot of thought. What does each service have, not have, and have the potential for?

I decided to use something that is very easy to analyze, a car, to explain what I think each service offers…or doesn’t. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Gowalla is too gamie. The feedback I’ve gotten from all of my friends who use Gowalla is that it’s so tough to figure out. There might be free iphones and tshirts hidden around town but those gimmicks fade quickly. Because of it’s overly gimmicky nature, like the PT Cruiser, I think it’s shelf life is very short. Where other services will beat Gowalla, and likely already have, is that they’re useful, they’re a service and people only play games for so long. There’s got to be user utility otherwise I’m out.

Yelps recent entrance to the location services game is on the surface appealing. They do have a lot of venues to work with but it’s clunky, not social, and ultimately not fun. Although mini vans are super effective cars, they fit kids, surf boards, Christmas trees and almost anything else, but they’re not fun to drive at all. Trust me I drove one all through high school, and although I was awesome (or so I thought), my ride was not. :) Yelp is too much on the service side, the game mechanics that other services bring to the table will win out in the end. Phin Barnes of FRC recently wrote about how gaming mechanics will be critical to all social applications in the future and this is where yelp fails, no community.

Ultimately Foursquare has the best combination of social and utility. It may not be the smoothest ride (yet), but it gets the job done better than anyone else and it’s fun, a powerful combo. The foursquare app can fit your friends and your fun into one ride. Like an SUV foursquare is enjoyable, you can be proud of what you’re driving because the community is a strong one, and your friends will think your cool :)

Although I’ve used all three of these applications, foursquare still blows the others out of the water. Yes, I’m biased (disclosure, I’m working w/ foursquare) but, I don’t see how the others are going to cross the chasm into true social utility. Because foursquare was built for that purpose from the ground up it will win.

The New York Times announced that they plan to start charging for the online content. This has been a VERY scary thing for the industry and a topic of much debate. As Fred Wilson said back in July, “the newspaper industry is doing a lot of soul searching for the right revenue model”.

So why hasn’t monetizing new content worked well to date? Why hasn’t the ‘freemium’ model worked well for the news industry like it has for so many other industries? In short the answer is, they’ve gone about it in the wrong way, and luckily it seems that NYT is learning from others mistakes. As newspaper readership migrates from print to web they’ve got to be able to monetize the move and it seems the solely advertising model has proven to be an insufficient way to monetize that content.

If a newspaper was to charge you based on how much you consume (per-article) that would be like slapping your most valued customers in the face everyday. So, they had to come up with a model that works in the opposite way… Reward the best customers, retain the exposure to search (Google juice, Bing, Tweets), and use curiosity to drive sales. I think they’ve found a way to do this through their improved ‘freemium’ model (that Financial Times, FT.com, already uses btw). It sounds like, starting in 2011, they will allow a certain amount of “free reads” per month, then after X amount of articles read (likely 10) you’ll get a pop-up asking you to pay a one time fee for unlimited reading for the rest of the month. This allows the casual reader to get their fix and it rewards the valued customers (Super User) to pay a nominal one time fee and have the ability to read like mad.

The term super user derives from computer operating systems and is used to refer to a system administrator account. This means that they have all the access rights possible or needed. This model targets and rewards they’re best customers or super users by keeping prices low relative to the amount of content consumed. Fred Wilson intuitively called this, monetizing the audience, not the content. Newspapers have got to charge something to stay alive, but they are rewarding their super users by keeping the fee minimal and one time.

I personally hope this works well because my forward thinking self :) realizes that without a model that proves profitable, the quality of the news we receive will begin its inevitable decline. I like having quality journalism on a daily basis and would pay my nominal fee for it.

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In a semi unrelated note, I heard that Amazon can charge Kindle users a dollar to subscribe to my blogs RSS feed. They’ve monetize my FREE content. Is anyone paying for this blog (or any other) via Kindle? How do you feel about doing that? Love to hear your thoughts.

image via flickr

Most people know that Google’s precious search algorithm is a secret, sacred, thing that they’ve worked very hard to protect. In fact their behavior around that algorithm has been similar to Golum’s behavior towards his “precious” ring. You know, the one that will ‘rule them all’. This algorithm and others allow Google to provide very focused advertising based on your search terms.

In computing, an algorithm is an effective method for solving a problem using a finite sequence of instructions.

However, the way I see it, their dominance in providing web advertising using the “precious”, all machine, set of instruction won’t last forever. There are human powered systems that can adjust quickly for variables, change over time, and become increasingly “sharp” as they learn. Simply, they can learn better than just a computer. A great example of this type of human powered system is a NYC based startup Hunch. Effectively, they’ve created a system where they can collect an infinite number of decision trees, all generated by humans, and then predict future decisions based on passed decision sequences.

So, what am I getting at? Well, as you know I’ve been working closely in the local advertising space through my work with Foursquare and I can’t stop thinking about how large of an opportunity this is. If a bar or restaurant can advertise directly to the folks driving by as they’re deciding where to eat, that’s better than any billboard, radio spot, newspaper clip, full page magazine add, event sponsorship, Adsense ad in my Gmail or Google search, and I could go on… It’s simply the best possible advert you could get, as an advertiser or a consumer, unless I’m missing something. Here’s an example, when companies spend money on other ‘focused’ internet advertising they pay for say 100 impressions. This means that 100 people saw that ad, and the common click-through rate is about 1/100, even on the ‘focused’ ads. Now, what if you were able to directly reach potential customers who frequent your ‘type’ of establishment, fall within a very specific demographic, and only if they’re walking distance from your location!!! Right now you’re saying, “WTF are you serious…”, and I am.

With the blowing up of location based services like Foursquare, Loopt, Brightkite and a few others, this sort of data is readily available. People are using these services to share their location, their purchase preferences, their unfiltered thoughts about almost everything they do and businesses can learn A LOT from that. Now you see why all these nerds (me) get excited about data; because you can change the world with it. With this data you can turn industries upside down, and the ability to reach consumers in this intimate way is one of those opportunities.

It’s all a matter of who can reach the masses, who can create a product intuitive enough for “Joe the Plumber” to use. Google’s Adsense technology is fairly simple, but still local businesses don’t use it. The potential for human powered mobile, local, advertising is in the words of Austin Powers, “dead sexy”. My mouth is literally watering. I can’t wait to be a part of this movement.

Update: This post is going to be syndicated, and I made some additions/updates for that reason. 1/5/10

More Cupcakes was kind enough to sponsor the event and made some Foursquare branded cupcakes with a Mayor badge. Check out those crowns!