Apple has issued an iOS update for iPhone 4S owners to fix a problem with the iOS 6.1 update that had reportedly caused network connectivity problems on some European carriers’ networks. It’s unclear why the problems only affected the iPhone 4S, and whether other regions were also affected.

An Apple spokeswoman confirmed update 6.1.1 is now out for iPhone 4S owners. Apple’s update note for iOS 6.1.1 reads: “This update fixes an issue that could impact cellular performance and reliability for iPhone 4S.”

The 6.1.1 update was issued after some European carriers warned iPhone 4S customers against updating to iOS 6.1.

Prior to Apple’s fix, a spokesman for Vodafone UK told TechCrunch: “We’re aware of an issue caused by Apple iPhone 4s handsets that have been upgraded to iOS 6.1 which impacts performance on 3G. Some customers may occasionally experience difficulty in connecting to the network to make or receive calls or texts or to connect to the Internet.

“Apple is working on a solution to their software issue. These connection problems are intermittent. While Apple’s investigations continue, we would recommend that anyone who has not yet installed iOS 6.1 on their iPhone 4s should delay doing so until Apple has confirmed that the problem has been fixed.”

According to Gigaom, Three Austria had also reportedly told iPhone 4S owners not to update to iOS 6.1.

The original iOS 6.1 update was released late last month.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

After a year of online protests and fierce political battles between the D.C. taxi commission and popular smartphone sedan service, Uber, a new technology may bring the two factions together: UberTaxi. “I love it,” gushes one D.C. cab driver, who says he feels safer and is making more money with Uber’s new smartphone-enabled service for licensed taxi drivers.

The taxi comission’s feud with Uber reached a boiling point last year after D.C. lawmakers nearly snuck through a minimum price for their smartphone car service. News outlets and an Internet flash lobby erupted in anger, ultimately stopping the bill and paving the way for a more collaborative solution. Rather than ram through more competition, Uber made the diplomatic move to offer a GPS-enabled smartphone option for D.C. cabs, which rolled out this month.

“It solved all the problems we had as drivers and as passengers,” says another driver, referencing the notoriously bad D.C. cab service. Whenever I visit our nation’s capital, it’s not uncommon for me to wait 10+ minutes as a series of cabs reject me for either paying with credit card or asking to be driven to a unprofitable location.

after spending 20 minutes being rejected by cabs in dc, i called an @uber cc @travisk #reformneeded

—
Greg Ferenstein (@ferenstein) November 28, 2012

Two of the four cab drivers we interviewed said they’re making more money as a result of the on-demand “e-hail” service. “We’ve always been friends of taxi drivers, because the drivers are making more pay,” said Uber CEO, Travis Kalanick, in an interview with the chair of the Internet Caucus, Congressman Bob Goodlatte (who used Uber for the first time to get to the conference and is, apparently, now a fan).

More than the money, all four drivers liked the increased safety of an identifiable passenger. Just last November, a teenage passenger fatally shot a female cab driver. “As long as I’m safe, that’s what’s important,” says another driver.

The app is all sunshine and roses. The GPS, however, could use some fine-tuning. Earlier today, I mistakenly sent an UberTaxi across the street. While talking to me on the phone, he had to deal with angry, honking drivers as I scrambled to find out where he was (though, i’m told that this was an exception).

Secondly, for now, Uber charges a mandatory 20 percent tip. One driver, disregarding his own self-interest argued that “it would benefit the passenger to pay whatever you’re satisfied with.”

Gripes aside, UberTaxi is a delightful solution to the nightmare that is cab service in D.C. In my experience, other smartphone solutions, such as TaxiMagic, have been more of headache than they’re worth.

Perhaps unions and Uber aren’t locked in an existential battle. All of the infighting may have been avoided if unions would have worked with startups to design them a technological solution to the problems we all recognize they have.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

With a lot of people in the United States off for the national holiday, Twitter appears to be buckling under the pressure. Right now, the service is experiencing issues, including the inability to connect to any of its official apps. As is usually the case, the problems are intermittent and don’t affect all users.

Sadly, when the service goes down like this, there isn’t an explanation like there used to be. Remember the fail whale? We haven’t seen that guy in quite some time. Now when the site is down, we end up getting a white screen in our browsers.

The company added this message to its status site:

Some users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter.

Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue.

Currently, the site is up and down, and you also get error messages when clicking a tweet button on a website:

This is the second “site issue” that Twitter has had in the past four days, and the company doesn’t go into any detail on what the problem was or is. As a communication platform, it’s key for Twitter to be up as much as possible. While it’s understandable that every service has downtime issues, it seems to be a dirty little issue that has followed Twitter since it launched in 2006.

Why can’t the service stay up and what are the problems that they’re experiencing? These are questions that are hard to answer, even when we ask. What I do know is that when a site goes down and there is little or no communication to its users about it, hours are spent asking one another “Is Twitter down or is it just me?” In a word, it’s annoying for everyone involved.

Complex issues face every company at this type of scale, including Facebook and Google. The issue with Twitter is that it’s the leader in real-time communication, therefore its users experience all of these problems in real-time as well. This is similar to something happening with AT&T and you not being able to fire off a text message and not knowing why. While Twitter is free, it does have an obligation to communicate with its users, since its intent is to be the “pulse of the planet.” It’s kind of hard to be that when you tend to flatline at random moments.

If we’re supposed to trust Twitter when we’re trying to follow things like the President’s inauguration, there needs to be more of an explanation when things go wrong. The company has raised $1.16B to date, has major marketing, partnership and advertising initiatives happening, while also trying to make a real run at going public we hear, so these questions do need to be answered.

So why are you going down, Twitter?

UPDATE: Twitter is still down but have no more details to share. Well, because their status site hasn’t been available at times, either.

This is developing.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

I’m going to let you in on a little secret: most of the reviews you read online are performed in a manner that you, as an intelligent consumer, would find abhorrent. I’m not naming names nor am I pointing fingers, but aside from a few very specific cases, your vision of a highly-experienced tech journalist sitting down at a workbench next to a Faraday cage and a drop test station is pretty much fiction.

This is a little bit of inside baseball, so bear with me or skip reading this.

First, I want to talk a little bit about the reviews cycle. This is the plan PR people have when sending out items for review. For years, that plan was simple: you fly to New York, drop off a few devices, fly back. All the print media there would futz with things and the go to press. This gave reviewers a month lead time, if not longer. I used to write for Laptop magazine and we had lead times of three months. Now, with the always-on Internet, reviews go up as quickly as possible. In fact, when you see a bunch of reviews go up at exactly the same time its because the company set an embargo for that date. Rather than risk looking slow, all the major sites pop up their reviews in unison. But almost everyone gets a few days before the review embargo is up.

If you’re a MAJOR MEDIA TECHNOLOGY WRITER at any MAJOR OLD AND NEW MEDIA PROPERTY you’re beholden to this for a few reasons. The primary reason is because it’s a holdover from the old days of embargoed news that had to be physically sent by mail out to the frontier lands by Pony Express. The second reason is that it lets the oldsters have plenty of time with a device before they cough up a review. I’m only being partially tongue-in-cheek about this.

So I’ll use the iPhone 5 as an example, although almost any major device follows this pattern. First, the announcement is made. In this case, the announcement was two weeks ago but announcements can happen at CES and devices can take months to appear or they can appear without warning – although some tech press still gets them early.

In the case of the iPhone 5, the cream of the tech press (MG, Mossberg, oddly not Topolsky UPDATE: Topolsky held his review to create frisson! How novel!) got early review units with express instructions not to show the device off to anyone. If there hadn’t been an announcement/handout event, the cream of the tech press would get the device a week or so early anyway, via FedEx or a “deskside meeting” with express instructions not to publish until (and this is increasingly not the case) either Thursday and/or the day of the official unveiling boozeathon that they usually hold in a major city. Why Thursday? Because that’s when Pogue and Mossberg publish their columns and in the world of PR having the NYT or WSJ to slip casually into your client’s clips file is like printing money. With the advent of the Internet, Pogue and Mossberg can now publish whenever but, like some sort of weekly Feast Day, Thursday was traditionally the Day Of Reviews.

But there’s a problem. One person spending one week with a device is a pretty small sample size. Whereas the proud men and women of the tech press pride themselves on working quickly, succinctly, and with a fervor for the facts that would make Mr. Murrow proud, they still only have a week to mess with this stuff. So you miss a lot. And I mean a lot. You miss Maps sucking, purple flaring, scratches, static. Considering how many iPhones were shipped and how many eyeballs ended up inspecting every cranny of the new device, it’s not surprising that these problems cropped up.

I would also posit that every other phone out there has similar problems. However, because this is the iPhone and everyone is staring at their iPhones at dinner, the problems are writ large. The early reviewers miss the problems because they’re enamored with the device. They don’t have it long enough to really see the problems (if any) or nit-pick on perceived problems. Now imagine this is for a less popular phone. The reviewers for those are far less thorough, which is why we stopped reviewing incidental Android phones: the temptation to give these phones a 6 out of 10 and call it a day is too great. The reader receives no value.

Readers will also yell that the writers just want to suck up to Apple/Google/Microsoft and so they won’t give anything a bad review. This is false. Most writers won’t write about bad stuff. I’ve seen so much garbage roll through my attic office that I could build my own little mini landfill. I’ve seen phones and tablets that were about as exciting as a block of concrete and devices with no earthly purpose. If we reviewed them all – like CNET does – we’d probably all go crazy. I’m happy to let CNET have the Google juice for a four year old HP inkjet printer. I have my pride.

More to the point, however, is that we can’t really trust early reviews. I always recommend caution when it comes to buying products that have just launched and I rarely take my own advice. Many devices only begin to exhibit problems after lots of use and many faulty devices pop up only after the first batch of highly scrutinized devices runs out.

So now you know a little bit about how the reviews process works and why you shouldn’t (or should) be mad at tech writers for singing encomiums about the latest and greatest: the problems you’re facing aren’t the problems they faced. They didn’t sit with the device for very long. Their review, while presumably thorough, was written over a few days and aims to paint a picture of the particular device in a way that offers a minimum of consternation. After all, they’re the lucky ducks who got this stuff early.

In the end, the real reviews are the ones that percolate up out of the forums and blogosphere. Devin wrote about this earlier, as well. In short, in the great drama of tech journalism, the players in the play mean well, and they are often right. But the plebeian chorus, in the end, always has the last laugh.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Ben Horowitz is co-founder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz. He was a co-founder and CEO of Opsware (formerly Loudcloud), which was acquired by HP, and ran several product divisions at Netscape. He serves on the board of companies such as Capriza, Foursquare, Jawbone, Lytro, Magnet, NationBuilder, Nicira, Okta, SnapLogic and Tidemark, and blogs at http://bhorowitz.com/.

“Don’t admit that your faith is weak
Don’t say that you feel like dying
Life’s hard then it feels like diamonds
Your home’s just far too gone
Much too late to even feel like trying
Can’t understand what I’m saying
Can’t figure out what I’m implying
If you feel you don’t wanna be alive
You feel just how I am”
—Lupe Fiasco, Beautiful Lasers

Every entrepreneur starts her company with a clear vision for success. You will create an amazing environment and hire the smartest people to join you. Together you will build a beautiful product that delights customers and makes the world just a little bit better. It’s going to be absolutely awesome.

Then, after working night and day to make your vision reality, you wake up to find that things did not go as planned. Your company did not unfold like the Jack Dorsey keynote that you listened to when you started. Your product has issues that will be very hard to fix. The market isn’t quite where it was supposed to be. Your employees are losing confidence and some of them have quit. Some of the ones that quit were quite smart and have the remaining ones wondering if staying makes sense. You are running low on cash and your venture capitalist tells you that it will be difficult to raise money given the impending European catastrophe. You lose a competitive battle. You lose a loyal customer. You lose a great employee. The walls start closing in. Where did you go wrong? Why didn’t your company perform as envisioned? Are you good enough to do this? As your dreams turn into nightmares, you find yourself in The Struggle.

About The Struggle

“Life is struggle.”
—Karl Marx

The Struggle is when you wonder why you started the company in the first place.

The Struggle is when people ask you why you don’t quit and you don’t know the answer.

The Struggle is when your employees think you are lying and you think they may be right.

The Struggle is when food loses its taste.

The Struggle is when you don’t believe you should be CEO of your company. The Struggle is when you know that you are in over your head and you know that you cannot be replaced. The Struggle is when everybody thinks you are an idiot, but nobody will fire you. The Struggle is where self-doubt becomes self-hatred.

The Struggle is when you are having a conversation with someone and you can’t hear a word that they are saying because all you can hear is The Struggle.

The Struggle is when you want the pain to stop. The Struggle is unhappiness.

The Struggle is when you go on vacation to feel better and you feel worse.

The Struggle is when you are surrounded by people and you are all alone. The Struggle has no mercy.

The Struggle is the land of broken promises and crushed dreams. The Struggle is a cold sweat. The Struggle is where your guts boil so much that you feel like you are going to spit blood.

The Struggle is not failure, but it causes failure. Especially if you are weak. Always if you are weak.

Most people are not strong enough.

Every great entrepreneur from Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg went through The Struggle and struggle they did, so you are not alone. But that does not mean that you will make it. You may not make it. That is why it is The Struggle.

The Struggle is where greatness comes from.

Some stuff that may or may not help

There is no answer to The Struggle, but here are some things that helped me:

Don’t put it all on your shoulders – It is easy to think that the things that bother you will upset your people more. That’s not true. The opposite is true. Nobody takes the losses harder than the person most responsible. Nobody feels it more than you. You won’t be able to share every burden, but share every burden that you can. Get the maximum number of brains on the problems even if the problems represent existential threats.

When I ran Opsware and we were losing too many competitive deals, I called an all-hands and told the whole company that we were getting our asses kicked, and if we didn’t stop the bleeding, we were going to die. Nobody blinked. The team rallied, built a winning product and saved my sorry ass.

This is not checkers; this is mutherfuckin’ chess – Technology businesses tend to be extremely complex. The underlying technology moves, the competition moves, the market moves, the people move. As a result, like playing three-dimensional chess on Star Trek, there is always a move. You think you have no moves? How about taking your company public with $2M in trailing revenue and 340 employees, with a plan to do $75M in revenue the next year? I made that move. I made it in 2001, widely regarded as the worst time ever for a technology company to go public. I made it with six weeks of cash left. There is always a move.

Focus on the road – When they teach you how to drive a racecar, they tell you to focus on the road when you go around a turn. They tell you that because if you focus on the wall, then you will drive straight into the wall. If you focus on how you might fail, then you will fail. Even if you only have one bullet left in the gun and you have to hit the target, focus on the target. You might not hit it, but you definitely won’t hit if you focus on other things.

Play long enough and you might get lucky – In the technology game, tomorrow looks nothing like today. If you survive long enough to see tomorrow, it may bring you the answer that seems so impossible today.
Don’t take it personally – The predicament that you are in is probably all your fault. You hired the people. You made the decisions.

But you knew the job was dangerous when you took it. Everybody makes mistakes. Every CEO makes thousands of mistakes. Evaluating yourself and giving yourself an “F” doesn’t help.

Remember that this is what separates the women from the girls. If you want to be great, this is the challenge. If you don’t want to be great, then you never should have started a company.

The end

When you are in The Struggle, nothing is easy and nothing feels right. You have dropped into the abyss and you may never get out. In my own experience, but for some unexpected luck and help, I would have been lost.

So to all of you in it, may you find strength and may you find peace.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Apple CEO Tim Cook talked about the company’s TV plans tonight at the D10 conference. His comments were all pretty vague, but if nothing else, he hinted strongly that Apple does in fact have plans for future TV products.

When interviewers Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher pressed Cook on whether he thinks the current Apple TV product is good enough, he said, “We’re going to keep pulling this string and see where it takes us.” Mossberg then suggested that the current version of Apple TV doesn’t solve all of the problems with TV watching, to which Cook replied, “I agree” — but he didn’t want to talk about it further. Of course, a full-fledged Apple TV (one that includes an actual TV) has been rumored for a long time now, and this isn’t the first time the company’s executives have suggested that big plans in this area — but if nothing else, Cook’s comments should chase any lingering doubts away.

So what might this future TV product look like? Not surprisingly, Cook had no details to offer on a product that he’s not quite ready to admit exists. He was willing to speak generally, dsaying that Apple is always looking for to control the “key technology” and “make a significant contribution beyond what others have done in this area.” He also said that Apple doesn’t have any plans to rethink its plans for acquiring content, because getting content hasn’t been an issue.

As for the current model of the Apple TV, Cook said sales are picking — Apple sold 2.8 million last year, and has already sold 2.7 this year.

[I'm not the TechCrunch reporter at D this year, so thanks to AllThingsD, Engadget, and Twitter for keeping me up to speed.]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

This morning at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012, Chris Dixon, co-founder and partner at Founder’s Collective (and co-founder of SiteAdvisor and Hunch, acquired by McAfee and eBay, respectively), sat down with ZocDoc CEO Cyrus Massoumi to talk about ZocDoc’s road to success. The company, for those unfamiliar, is a professional booking platform for doctors. Users go online to search, find and book a doctor, dentist or other health care professional, and can even make same-day appointments thanks to ZocDoc’s real-time access to doctors’ schedules.

Although ZocDoc has now raised $95 million in funding to date, it didn’t necessarily have many early believers.

For a reminder of the kind of nay-saying that ZocDoc faced back in the beginning, this video from TechCrunch 40 several years ago should strike a chord with any entrepreneur who’s had their vision dismissed outright from industry notables. “Honestly, it would just never occur to me to go to any site to pick a doctor,” proclaimed Guy Kawasaki at the time. (Oops.)

ZocDoc didn’t win the TechCrunch competition – that was the year that Mint.com won, and perhaps deservedly so. But ZocDoc is proof that not winning doesn’t translate into failure by any means. And neither does bad press, as it turns out. Massoumi noted that while there were many great articles about ZocDoc post-launch, there were some negative ones, too. He recalled in particular when press called out ZocDoc for not getting a doctor search quite right. Why is it showing me doctors on the lower east side of New York, when I did a search on the upper east side?, people said. Meanwhile, recalls Massoumi, others said ZocDoc was ”overly ambitious to think it could change the way people access healthcare in America.” (Ouch).

But the company kept their heads down, he says, and kept being persistent. Trying to grow their business during a poor economic environment also forced them to stay very lean. They raised a little money from another startup competition which helped them to finally launch in their first markets outside of New York (D.C. and San Francisco), thereby proving wrong those who said that ZocDoc wouldn’t really work outside of the city.

Massoumi also shared some tips he learned over the years in terms of growing the business. For starters, he said that it really helps to have people in the city they’re rolling out to. While not all startups have a large enough staff to do that, doing so cut the time to market in half, he said. Getting the right people in place to manage the roll-outs was very important, too. In fact, he advised startup founders to be especially conscious of the first twenty people they hire, as they set the tone for the business.

ZocDoc, now 260 people, up from 100 a year ago, puts an incredible emphasis on the hiring process. The entire management team spends half their time interviewing, said Massoumi, and he admitted he probably even spends more than that himself. And those hires have come from some surprising places, he added, recalling how ZocDoc has hired people they met on the plane while travelling and once, they even found an incredible waitress in Chicago and moved her out to New York. ZocDoc employees are also encouraged to refer people to the company and are rewarded with a new iPad if those people are hired.

Another focus for this morning’s chat had to do with why there aren’t many startups working in the healthcare space. “Most people don’t realize that healthcare is a $2.7 trillion dollar industry in the U.S.,” said Massoumi, but it’s been under-represented by startups. This is probably because many people have been burned in the past – likely due to a greater emphasis in solving problems for the patients instead of the doctors, he said. Having grown up around doctors, he remembers dinner conversations about the problems doctors faced in trying to deliver great care while also running an efficient business. It’s increasingly difficult for doctors to have a profitable business, he said.

Finally, Massoumi advised startups to work as leanly as possible. “Don’t have a crazy burn rate,” he said, be able to “afford to fail and iterate.”

As for ZocDoc itself, this advice has translated into the company’s continued growth. Earlier this month, ZocDoc rolled out to an 18th market in the U.S. (Tampa Bay). And just yesterday, it launched in its 19th market (Denver). With the coming changes to health care under the Obama administration, some 30 million new patients will be coming into the system, which will greatly impact the growing shortage of physicians in the U.S. “Access to healthcare is one of the greatest challenges to our generation,” said Massoumi. It’s a statement which other entrepreneurs could take as a call-to-action to help solve some of the problems in the industry. After all, we have enough photo-sharing apps for the time being.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

According to the Kickstarter API blog, a bug caused 70,000 unlaunched projects to be publicly visible over the weekend, allowing folks to see goals, funding plans, and descriptions on projects that haven’t yet appeared on the site. Of the 70,000, visitors only viewed 48.

The bug exposed no financial information.

Kickstarter fixed the problem on Friday, May 11 at about 2pm. It had been introduced into site code on April 24.

The best thing? A reporter for the WSJ made his own story by discovering and exploiting the bug after sending Kickstarter a note about the problem.

From the blog post:

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Guest author Keith Teare is General Partner at his incubator Archimedes Labs and CEO of just.me. He was a co-founder of TechCrunch. Follow him on Twitter @kteare.

Facebook’s Week In Wall Street Hell

This week Facebook did a virtually unprecedented thing. In the middle of its IPO roadshow it modified its S1 filing in reaction to questions it had been being asked by analysts. The modification I refer to stated that Facebook wanted to acknowledge a trend; that trend is the declining ARPU (average revenue per user) being seen in its current quarter. This trend is being driven, Facebook said, by the growth in its usage on mobile platforms and its inability to monetize those platforms in the same way, or at the same rate, as its desktop/laptop offerings.

The previous iterations of the S1 had all contained the possibility of this trend. Even the likelihood of it. But the actuality of the trend was noted here for the first time in the S1.

The Street Knows The Truth

This is a company about to sell shares at a multiple of earnings that dwarfs companies with massive revenues, profits and growth rates – like Apple’s. Facebook’s multiple is of a size that is traditionally only justified by high growth rates. And now “the street” has picked up on the fact that the rate of revenue growth is declining as traffic migrates to mobile. It is even feasible, if this rate accelerates that revenues could fall in absolute terms, as they did in Facebook’s most recent quarter. The street is not happy.

This is a historic event. A high growth company entering its IPO whilst its revenue growth decelerates amidst a huge and structural change in the usage patterns of its product is not the norm. Especially when it is the biggest IPO in US history.

Amidst the rhetoric that the IPO is over-subscribed, one wonders if the shares can possibly be worth what people are being asked to pay for them. I am not a stock analyst but I think buyer beware is not an unreasonable conclusion to draw from these events and the fact that more than $5 billion of insider money is selling at the IPO price may mean that there are some smart insiders who know the risks.

It isn’t about Facebook, or the IPO, its about Mobile and the future.

Yet, this weeks events are about more than Facebook’s IPO and the issues are far from new. Here on TechCrunch we have documented the impact of the rise of mobile and the end of Web 2.0 for some time, stressing that Web 2.0 era companies, running SAAS like cloud services, will be threatened by Apples success in driving large numbers of us to primarily use mobile devices, in an app-centric, message-centric world. In Google’s case they are contributing to and suffering from the problem simultaneously through the success of Android.

On August 27th 2011, I wrote “Smart Mobile and the Thin Cloud” in which I said that there is a trend in play that:

“…will transform the entire software ecosystem over the next 5 years. The changes will be so dramatic that the current discussions of a bubble will appear silly. Huge companies will fail and even bigger new companies will be formed”.

The article predicted Facebook will be challenged by the growth of mobile devices and the impact of that on the way users interact with data.

On January 26th this year, in “Google, Look out Behind you” I said:

“Apple has a platform that will soon be numbered in the hundreds of millions. Every device has communications built-in, personalization built-in, media capture built-in. And with iCloud, there is now a place to store the output of each device. How relevant is the Facebook hosted social graph in that world? How relevant is the web ecosystem that Facebook connect has helped penetrate? It seems likely that Facebook will have many of the same challenges as Google as it contemplates the rise of Apple, and the rise of mobile.”

A few days later – on February 4th – in “Facebook – Run from the Bulls” I said:

“Google’s present – and Facebook’s future – involves the painful fact that the very success of mobile platforms in helping human beings be productive, on the go, has a negative impact on the desktop-based advertising programs of the past 10 years. Mobile growth impacts web advertising revenues, except of course for Apple who make money from hardware and software and so benefits from these trends. The reason is simple. We do less ad-centric activities on mobile than we did on the web. And we are less likely to click away on an ad when we are focused on a specific goal on a largely single window device.”

Then, on April 15th in “The Mobile Paradox” I wrote:

“I believe what we are seeing here is the start of a secular trend that represents nothing less than the end of the web 2.0 era where we all consumed services through a browser on a computer. Replacing that era is a new, app-based, message-centric mobile Internet. In this new era the essential unit of advertising (a page based ad, whether text, display or anything else) is simply the wrong monetization vehicle. Something new has to emerge.”

Death or Mobile?

Facebook is not alone in being threatened by these trends. Google has missed its “Cost Per Click” numbers two quarters in a row now – for similar reasons.

The real question is whether Facebook and Google understand the scale of the problems and how to address them.

There are only two possible answers.

1. Despite all of the above Facebook (and Google) know well what the problems are and will figure them out in time.

Or

2. Facebook and Google go the way of the Dodo (as predicted in Forbes last week). Just as Web 2.0 killed Yahoo as a growth company –  due to its inability to adapt – so Mobile will kill the Web 2.0 giants

I think 1 is more likely than 2.

Why the belief? Facebook did another thing this week that is highly relevant to this issue. It launched its own app store. Facebook’s app store enables an app developer on either Android or iPhone to use Facebook to trigger users to visit the iPhone app store, or the Google Play app store, and install an app. Facebook becomes possibly the primary way that happens. It may drive millions of app installs across many platforms. These installs are not free, they are pay to play.

I think of the app center as providing Facebook with a new type of advertising format – an ad, with an action (an install), and a price on success.

As Larry Page noted on Google’s earnings call this quarter, mobile demands new types of ad format. He cited “click to call” as an example. Both Facebook and Google will begin to evolve ad units that are a better fit with the user experience on mobile, and ones that reflect the customer goals or the advertiser better. So far, ad formats on mobile have been simply copies of tried and trusted web formats, poorly suited to the new environment.

Option 2 – death of the Web 2.0 giants – only seems to be likely in a scenario where these companies fail to understand that their web pasts count for nothing in this new mobile world. This week, if anything, has served as a huge reminder of that.

Facebook (and Google) will most likely, by building or buying, evolve their monetization strategies to better suite the mobile future. It may take time, it may be painful, they may even fail. But try they will and try they must. Facebook 2.0 will try to kill Facebook 1.0 and Google 2.0 will try to kill Google 1.0. It’s not a good time to be going public, or to be public. But, mobile is the future – they can’t live with it, and they surely can’t live without it.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Here’s a short presentation on how to turn social media into social sales by offering social utility; helping people solve their problems socially and solve their social problems.

Based on a review of social commerce examples in Social Commerce Today, we’ve spotted a pattern – social commerce works when social features offer genuine social utility that comes in three basic flavours.

• Social utility that helps people solve problems socially using their social intelligence (ability to learn from each other and profit from social situations – e.g. collective buying) (Mercedes)
• Social utility that helps people solve the social problem of standing out, by helping them manage their social status by expressing themselves (e.g. fan-first offers that ‘sell’ bragging rights (Burberry)
• Social utility that helps people solve the social problem of fitting in by facilitating social bonding (e.g. social media gift stores (Starbucks, Anton Berg)

So the secret to making social commerce work?  Sell social utility.

Today’s article is sponsored by Milyoni: The Leader in Social Entertainment