RT @rachelsklar: RT @shervin: AT&T could have bought Skype and Twitter and changed itself forever. This is what happens when there's no vision at the top.
"Fred, this nails it for me.....Awesome summary. I don't agree with those who want to replace marketing with advertising. The starting proposition was - startups should not have marketing budgets, not that they should not have marketing.... Marketing is core to any startup, it is HOW you get your adoption. But marketing now takes the forms Fred mentioned.
I do think marketing starts with the product. Does it fit the users you are targeting? Do they love it. Is it better than all the alternatives at nailing the users needs/desires? Can they dump other things they do and use it to accomplish existing tasks? Will they want to?
This marketing happens before a user has even seen the product. Its close to sociology and cognitive science and psychology as a discipline. Not to forget art and design. Get this wrong and Fred's other advice won't save you...Get it right, and you still have to excel at the other stuff."
- Keith Teare
"Omnibox is exactly what we did at RealNames together with Microsoft back in 1999-2002. We even had prefixes like "Fedex trackingcode" or "NASDAQ tickersymbol". If we had a keyword it navigated, if we had none it searched, or if you typed a url it used the dns."
- Keith Teare
"I think your argument is flawed Jason. Lets do a TCTV piece on it. My 2c. Apple has built a distribution channel for media, apps and other content. Anybody can get anything into the channel via open web apps and HTML5. For free, without sharing.
Apple has also built a store. The store is convenient and people use it more than they use web apps, at least for now. It seems totally reasonable that a store owner should take a cut, just as newsagents do in real stores.
I don't really see the issue.
If people stop going to the store the publishers will stop distributing through it, so the onus is on Apple to maintain high levels of distribution.
In many ways its a god send to the publishers, even at the price."
- Keith Teare
"Fred I think you might be missing a point here. The 25% iPhone users are demographically very different, and from a use-case pov are also much more likely to adopt smart phone software. Android could have large shares of handsets but low shares of app users. Instinctively that feels like the case to me. So Apple's share of handsets significantly under-measures its software footprint.
To put the same thing another way (and this is a sociological point) Android is the equivalent of Symbian. Its free, hand set makers will embrace it, but the users who get the phones will not be early stage software users. If you want to make a real impact IoS is the clear front runner and the first to focus on as a developer. Android is a nice-to-have. HTML5 is a good way to go for some apps but if you need to be native and porting doesn't cut it for your app, do iPhone first."
- Keith Teare