Brian Erickson

The first, and I suppose seemingly easiest claim and means to justify your place in the startup world, as someone who has no experience, is to call yourself a product person.

But that claim generally comes with a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to do product. It is not code for a person who doesn’t really know how to do anything but thinks he can boss engineers around. It doesn’t refer to marketing guys who had an idea. Understanding what it means to drive a product means understanding the full scope of the vision of your company. It means understanding your engineering team, their capabilities, and their priorities. It means understanding what your next move is, and what your 6th move is from every angle.

In a move that appears to be another step away from its Flash platform, Adobe has submitted the code for its Flash-based Flex framework to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) to be managed as an independent project.

If their ‘Livestand’ iPad app is truly written using this framework, this could be really promising. One of the first apps I’ve seen (besides Netflix) that presents a compelling UX using web technologies.

there is a wide-open “Blue Ocean” opportunity for companies to step in and service literally hundreds of thousands of SMBs who need to develop a social marketing plan. Business owners don’t have time to get up to speed on all of this — they need a turnkey solution provider who understands their locality and their business, and is affordable. With such demand, it’s surprising to see very few social marketing agencies operating at a local level. The hurdle may be that social media marketing demands smart, local people for hands-on engagement, and the cost of procuring that talent may not scale or be too expensive in the face of small SMB marketing budgets.

What could be even more appealing to local business clients is a new option to reopen deals for customers who best fit their criteria. Groupon will promote the deal to a subscriber in the area, even after the deal has closed, if he or she has hearted the qualities that suggest a good chance of repeat business.

Good move by Groupon, we found that Small Business Owners are not that picky about deals that had already expired (particularly when demand isn’t an issue). In fact, several of them told us they frequently honored Daily Deals after their expiration.

to say it another way, it’s as if the recession induced a coma in all the potential new motorcyclists, and in so many of the already experienced motorcyclists, from which they woke changed, changed utterly, and found themselves standing in line outside an Apple store, patiently waiting to buy the latest greatness.

They are buying a slice of what Apple does — and how it does it — and how it looks doing it. They are buying function but, just as important, they are buying glamour. The device enhances the buyer’s sense of self. It helps the person think and at the same time not think. Once, not so long ago, motorcycles did the same thing.

Beautiful Vintage Norton Nourish 750.

It’s been five years since multi-touch. Is the next “RUI” already here? Is Siri the next RUI?

There are many things going for it:

1. It’s not good enough
2. There are many smart people who are disappointed by it
3. Competitors are dismissive
4. It does not need a traditional, expensive smartphone to run but it uses a combination of local and cloud computing to solve the user’s problem.
5. It is, in a word, asymmetric.

My disruptive hypothesis for Siri is that it shifts the competition from platforms positioned on a device to a “coupled” super-platform deponent on broadband and infrastructural computing.