Disqus - Latest Comments for agawley

Re: Ten Thoughts On The President's Speech Last Night

agawley — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:36:21 -0000

I love the image of the auto cos as (failing) portfolio companies. Obama sure does have a big ol' fund and I think he could do a lot worse than applying a bit of venture logic to his investment choices.

Re: louisgray.com: Is Requiring a Firefox Plug-in Akin to Designing for IE Only?

agawley — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 13:01:38 -0000

Hey Fraser. I see where you are coming from, but because I use a combination of FF, Safari and Chrome (no evil IE for me :-)) I just can't really get hooked to a service that ties me to one of them.

Maybe being an FF extension will give you guys a great playground for working out all of this semantic / social stuff, but I'd be surprised if it was where you ended up hitting the big time.

That said, it's a tough problem to crack for your kind of service. A bookmarklet is neither rich enough in functionality nor able to deliver the 'push' experience you need. A code snippet for website owners doesn't get you coverage as fast as you'd like (especially on amazon etc).

In the end I suspect you'll use all of these approaches and more, but for now (sadly) I have totake a back seat.

Re: louisgray.com: Is Requiring a Firefox Plug-in Akin to Designing for IE Only?

agawley — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 06:03:44 -0000

Fully agreed. Extensions should be aboit exteding the functionality of the browser (think foxclocks), not extending the functionality of your website. Have avoided firefox extension dependent services too (glue is the latest example for me of a cool service I just can't get excited about). Bookmarklets FTW! However, it might be nice if browsers developed (together) a few open standards that help bookmarklet development. All of that character escaping and monstrous single lines of code drive me nuts.

Re: Twit This?

agawley — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 13:10:24 -0000

Strange that you have to log in to Twit This. I would have thought they could do this with simple redirects to Twitter. I hate giving out my Twitter password all the time :-(

Re: louisgray.com: Some Things Are Worth Paying for Online and Others are Not

agawley — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 10:21:03 -0000

One additional thought. I wonder how efficient (in the economic sense) the app store market is. My experience is that it is hard to discover good apps and that in particular there is not a _lot_ of direct competition for each app. When / As these two things start to change I wonder if prices will start to fall?

Re: louisgray.com: Some Things Are Worth Paying for Online and Others are Not

agawley — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 09:32:31 -0000

This is a great post Louis. Really well thought out and structured. Made me think, so thanks.

I think there are a bunch of other reasons that the App Store is successful but a big one (actually enabled by the locked down nature of the platform) is ease of purchase. The safe, seamless and simple way to purchase apps on the iPhone is great. The iTunes wallet asset (generated over the last few years on the desktop) is going to be massive for Apple in the Mobile space. Combine that with 99c purchase prices and you made parting with my money for software easier than it's ever been before.

Compare the buying experience on an iPhone to the buyong experience you ever had for web-downloaded PC/Mac software and you'll see what I mean. Not one iPhone app asked me for a registration key yet :-)

Re: Fred Wilson Dot VC

agawley — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 07:41:11 -0000

i don't get why this is such a big deal either. mcain during the debate seemed to suggest that conversation == endorsement which is absolutely wrong. right now, not speaking to Achmadinijad probably gives him more power than speaking to him...

Re: Fire Eagle - Where's The Mobile App?

agawley — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 08:17:24 -0000

The app should be a single icon. When you hit it, it gets your location from the best available source (gps or cell tower triangulation) and sends it to fire eagle. If your feeling open you could confidure it to do this automatically every x hours. That would be sweet.

Re: Fred Wilson Dot VC

agawley — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 11:23:30 -0000

"We're sorry. This album is unavailable for download in your country (United Kingdom) at this time. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause."

This happens way too often... That's why I'm going to have to cancel my emusic subscription (which is sad)

i hope you have previous spiritualised in your collection Fred. Pure Phase and Ladies and Gentlemen are majestic albums...

Re: A Secondary Market For Private Company Stock

agawley — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 04:49:48 -0000

Interesting to hear about these facebook transactions.

In terms of developing this secondary market, I'm not sure where it would end up sitting. If it remains small (illiquid) and largely accessed only by corporates then I'm not sure how it differs from the current Venture / Buyout markets. If it grows to become more liquid (through increased access) wouldn't it just resemble the public market (and hence all the same regulation and issues that surround that?)

As I was writing that sentence above it occurred to me that one potential area for this secondary market is the Corporate Venture you were talking about recently. That could be a good fit...

Re: The New AVC, Same As The Old AVC

agawley — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 09:13:06 -0000

But is there any difference in CTR between the old layout and the new one?
the ads are a lot further from the action in the new version.

Re: The New AVC, Same As The Old AVC

agawley — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 07:05:19 -0000

sweet . looks good. really like the new clean layout. is most of your advertising cpm? i wonder what it does for ctrs?

Re: You Can't Regulate Just One Industry And Leave The Other Alone

agawley — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 05:08:05 -0000

Hey Fred

<rant>

I heard this story on Radio 4 this morning too. What puzzles me is why the government is involved. Are the (largely american) music & film companies now suddenly a (british) national treasure. This is surely a commercial issue and whichever way it is resolved it should be through a commercial agreement between users and the media cos (maybe the ISPs need to be involved to levy a fee, maybe they don't...).

It is so boring hearing their 'woe is me' story over and over again when they seem incapable of making a single commercial move to take advantage of the massive interest in their products that has been driven by the internet.

</rant>

Alex.

Re: Help Me Welcome Eric To Union Square Ventures

agawley — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 13:25:53 -0000

Good luck Eric. I think you're joining a great team.

Re: Diplomacy By Humor

agawley — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 15:26:46 -0000

Hulu = FAIL

Only video you posted today I can't see from over here in the UK. Given that this thing is actually _run_ by the major studios, how come they can't sort out the international rights? Great example of internal company politics coming before users...

Re: Why would Google Web Services cost $0? (Scripting News)

agawley — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 06:16:05 -0000

Some of the value to Amazon of charging a _nominal_ fee must come in the form of 'Spam' reduction (or whatever the application equivalent of Spam is. Like the listing fee on eBay?

Re: Facebook: The Backlash

agawley — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 13:12:01 -0000

The main difference between beacon / facebook ads and adwords is that adwords was designed (and conceived) from the start as a way to make search better. I guess beacon has some value to users (if they have appropriate control over it), but I have yet to see a single facebook ad that's designed to enhance my experience as a user. The ad programme seems relentlessly focussed on the needs of advertisers (and that is another big difference to google). I still think that facebook is doing a good job of mapping out a big chunk of the graph and they have built a nice little application (that can be pretty helpful) on top of that. Unfortunately they were doing that 6 months ago. So I think users would be a bit more forgiving if there was a better answer to the question 'what have you done for me lately?'

Re: The Biggest Social Graphs

agawley — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 08:59:58 -0000

I don't think we should be thinking of all of these individual graphs. Effectively each one of these services uncovers a little more about what your _real_ underlying social graph is. Email is important because it is both passive (you don't email someone explicitly to 'friend' them) and intimate (emails often contain really important information about the nature of your connection). So when you want to utilise your social graph the information from your inbox adds really important context (but not the be all and end all).

A big other category of this social context is photographs. At the moment this is a limited opportunity because tagging is a pretty inefficient way of identifying who's in what photo and our ability to understand the context / location of a photo is only just emerging. But imagine when you have the perfect storm of face recognition, context identification (party, office, holiday...) and accurate geo-tagging. That's some pretty powerful augmentation of your connections. Once again, it all comes down to combining these sources. Bring on the middleware.

Re: The Social Graph In The Second Inning

agawley — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 08:48:24 -0000

Hey Fred. I agree completely. The idea of a truly unified social graph that is not only comprehensive but can understand (and infer?) context for each of those connections is so compelling that it just has to happen. For some reason though, I don't think facebook is the company that is going to crack it. Right now they have too much of a vested interest in their proprietary network for this to come together. That said, if they are serious about being an engineering led company, then perhaps they'll overcome that.

One thing is for certain, whoever cracks the social middleware problem will generate a stack of value for users (and for themselves!)