Below is my presentation from the NY Video 2.0 meetup in October. I go on about 2 minutes in. At the end of the meetup we were voted best demo of the night with 46% of the votes. Thanks NY Video!

The NY Times today ran an article by Jenna Wortham on mobile apps, and mentioned FourSquare, one of the iPhone apps I enjoy using the most. While Jenna’s article is very comprehensive and well-written, I find that when it comes to FourSquare, she did not point out some of the truly revolutionary aspects of the service.

Disclosure: I’ve been a regular user of Four Square from day one, met their founders in various NYC tech events and at SXSW, and am a member of their ‘SuperUser’ club. In short, FourSquare lets you share with your friends the places you go to: restaurants, bars, and entertainment venues, and gives you intangible rewards, or ‘badges’, the more things you do. Any time you go somewhere, you “Check In” through the app. The app then typically will identify your location and show a list of nearby places to choose from. The basic cool thing about FourSquare (FS) is that you can keep up with your friends: you can meet them if they’re nearby, and you discover new places through them (this is how I learned about the new UWS Shake Shack for example). Also, the intangible rewards make it fun since you never know what prize you’ll uncover (I recently got the “Far, Far Away Badge” for venturing above 59th st – kinda funny actually given that I live on 58th street).

Some people often have a knee-jerk reaction to location based services (LBS), worrying about sharing their whereabouts with others, but I find that in a world where we all twitter, blog, facebook, flickr, and YouTube our every move, this has become a non-issue. The best solution for that is simply to not check in if you don’t want to be found (which is another great part of FourSquare that you won’t find on some other LBS’ like Google Latitude, which broadcasts your location constantly for good or bad. Ultimately, our lives become much richer with every new social sharing app, and I would even say that people who are not active ‘sharers’ will find themselves living pretty isolated lives very soon. But I digress.

So sharing with friends and getting badges is all good and fun, but not really why FourSquare is such an immensely powerful idea. The most valuable part of FourSqaure is the fact that you can now see what are the actual hotspots in each city and area through your friends and others. Unlike directories such as Yelp, CitySearch, and UrbanSpoon that will give you a ton of listings with reviews by complete strangers, on FourSquare you see where your friends are actually going, and FourSquare knows how many times people actually went there. In aggregate, this info is huge: FourSquare can easily know what the most popular haunts are in each area and recommend them to users, not based on reviews but on actual visits.

So that whenever I go to an unknown area or city, all I need to do is open FourSquare and see all the best spots there. Not only this, but FourSquare also has a tips area, so you can easily and quickly know what to order, when is the happy hour, which bouncer to grease, or whatever other critical info you may need. Like any other review site, at some point FS may become a target for system-gaming of agencies that will try to make some places seem more popular than they really are. This will likely not happen till there is a critical mass of users however, and hopefully FS will have some protections in place by then.

I can’t wait to see a FourSquare ‘most popular spots’ rankings by category across the US or the world (which could be accessible online as well, not just via mobile apps). It would be like Michelin or Zagat, but of the people, for the people, and by the people.

Very insightful post yesterday on TechCrunch by Bo Wang, one of the creators of the Galaxy Impact (GI) game for the iPhone. Bo talks about the economics of their iPhone app and the revenue they generated both from ads and from a short foray into a paid application. The better news: this is the kind of post I like — with lots of real numbers that you can crunch and get your own insights.  The bad news: there’s not a whole lot of ad money right now in iPhone apps, at least not in free casual video game apps it seems.

So in the month of January, Galaxy Impact served 766,708 ad impressions, and generated a total of $175.45 CPC revenue on those ads (on a user base of about 130,000 ad-supported apps, based on my guestimate). If you translate this to CPM (i.e. divide total number of ad impressions by total revenue), you get an ad rate of 22 cents CPM. Pretty bad, or as one of my heavy-hitter online ad friends says: “bottom of the barrel”.

This gives a rough idea of what you might expect in ad revenue from an iPhone app, though a few caveats:

1. this is a casual game — so doesn’t necessarily attract a targeted, highly-coveted audience, and might generate lots of repetitive page/ad views, over a relatively small number of unique users. Also, the post doesn’t tell us what percentage of users are frequent, and what percentage is occasional (i.e. the ad impressions could have been served repeatedly to a small number of active users (bad), rather than to a large number of occasional users (better)). And indeed, GI shows lower rates than some other app benchmarks. The 130K ad-capable Galaxy Impact users might have other usage patterns on other apps (more frequent overall usage, or more ad clicks for example).
2. Functionality can have an impact: where and how you display the ad, as well as how engaging and interesting it is, could change how people would interact with it.
3. iPhone ads are still not a proven ad platform. Even the web at large is still struggling in finding the right ad models (with some saying the model isn’t there to begin with). As a result, advertisers are still not hitching their wagons to this platform so supply is limited. Also, since GI is using an ad network, they get lower rates than apps who have their own dedicated ad sales teams (like the New York Times for example).

The good news is that apps can attract fairly large numbers of users with minimal marketing expenditure as the post mentions, and some ads are being clicked on, which shows future potential.

In the case of Galaxy Impact, even if they had 2 Million users  (i.e. equivalent to Pandora, the most popular free app as of December 2008), when using the same value per user, we’d get roughly $2,700 a month,  which is very low even for a small shop (i.e. one person), unless you have a whole portfolio of these. If the NY Times had two million iPhone users, and assuming they can command $2 CPM (currently the high end for iPhone ads), and under the same usage patterns of GI (not a good assumption, but we’ll use it for now), they would generate about $24,000 a month (based on 9 times higher CPM). Still not exactly what would replace the print edition revenues.

So currently the model for new apps has to be either to use the iPhone to support other business models, or create paid apps that can command a premium. Keep in mind the challenge in attracting paying users however (when Galaxy Impact switched from free to paid they dropped from thousands of downloads per day to barely dozens). Personally, for example, I tend to ignore paid apps unless I have a pressing need/desire for them.

And one final thought: with Galaxy Impact, only one third of the users bothered to upgrade to the latest version (i.e. the version that can serve ads), which shows that whenever possible, you should have key functionality (like ad serving) in place when you launch publicly. While this goes against the concept of ‘launch fast and cheap’ to prove your concept and get feedback, sometimes it can pay to hold off a bit and get your key pieces in place.

Zappos CEP Tony Hsieh's Keynote at SXSW

I’m currently at SXSWi hanging out with the entire internet. One of the absolute highlights of the event so far was the keynote by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh.

Quick Zappos overview: since launching in 1999 the company has grown from zero revenue to over $1Bn in 2008, and became synonymous with great customer service for selling shoes and other items online. It was ranked 23rd on Fortune’s best 100 companies to work for in 2009, has great search and other online presence, and was recently a sponsor of the Celebrity Apprentice.  Also,  Zappos is currently doing a promotion with Magnify.net in showing videos of how people react to their newly arrived Zappos white box (disclosure: my friend Ari Greenberg of Magnify was one of the key contributors in launching this initiative). I also chatted with Tony at one of the other events and he invited me to visit their HQ in Vegas next time I’m in town, which I’ll definitely do.

Tony’s talk was great. In a nutshell, he tried to show what separates Zappos from others, and you have to admire the guts and commitment by Tony and other Zappos leadership for taking the more demanding path to success. This is the kind of one-in-a-million culture that business schools love writing cases about.

There’s a lot you can write about the Zappos culture and strategy, but here are some key points that really stuck with me. It’s a bit of a long list, but I feel all of these are relevant when you try to understand the Zappos culture. Practically all of them cost Zappos a lot of extra time, money, and effort, but make it so unique and ultimately build long-term value:

• Surprise upgrades to overnight shipping : despite the high costs, Zappos occasionally surprises its customers with free overnight shipping, to achieve what Tony calls the ‘wow’ factor.
• Recommend other stores when they’re out of/not carrying a certain item, to make sure their customers always find what they need.
• Phone number everywhere: once again, instead of trying to keep down call center costs by making it harder for people to reach a live person, Zappos has its phone numbers on every single page. And they answer the phone very quickly, I checked.
• Zappos gave up its send-thru biz (having other vendors sell products through Zappos.com), despite the fact that it contributed 25% of their top line revenue at the time. This tough decision enabled the company to focus on their core strategy of creating a great customer experience.
• No up-sell at call center: Zappos employees do not try to upsell clients over the phone, they just give good customer service.
• Return policy: customers can return items up to 365 days after their purchase, and they are encouraged to order several sizes and colors, and return the ones that didn’t fit or they didn’t like.
• Free shipping and return shipping on all orders.
• Sharing their inventory info with vendors: despite the risk of having their data leaked to competitors, Zappos shows vendors the inventory status of their products. This helps put several more eyeballs on inventory changes, allows the vendor to take more responsibility on the inventory of their products on Zappos, and therefore helps Zappos stay well-stocked and cash-in on upcoming trends, while keeping management costs down.
• Training and quitting bonus: At Zappos, every new employee (even in corporate) is trained in all the key functions like customer service and warehousing, and then gets $2,000 offer to leave (on top of the salary earned during training, to encourage those who are a bad fit to leave early).
• Twitter: of the 700 Zappos employees in Las Vegas 400 are on twitter, with the blessing and encouragement of the company, so they can socialize with each other and allow customers to learn more about Zappos. Also, Zappos offers open access to journalists to interview any employee. As Tony puts it, today every company is transparent even if they don’t yet realize it, since any disgruntled employee or customer can instantly get an audience of millions. Why not just embrace it and be open about everything.

These are pretty unique practices that many other companies would cringe to even think about. That’s why Tony’s long-term thinking is so refreshing. Instead of looking at the symptoms that influence profitability, Zappos takes a holistic approach that tries to create a company that is healthy and strong at its core — where vision and culture come first (and the profits then naturally follow).

Anyone here in SXSW can see a huge contrast with some other companies, for example the complete AT&T fail in Austin, where 3G, edge, and even voice and SMS reception are spotty at best.

Live illustrations drawn during the keynote

Tony also recommended to the audience do what truly makes you happy. He suggests to ask yourself what would you be happy doing for next 10 years even if you wouldn’t make a dime. That should be your career choice. And finally, great point about luck:

According to Tony, luck is partly the result of open-mindedness and looking beyond what’s right in front of you. He mentions a study that asked subjects if they considered themselves lucky or unlucky, and then paid them to count the number of ads in a newspaper. Some of the ‘articles’ in the paper clearly laid out the answers in the text and gave subjects other bonuses for noticing. The subjects who in the preceding survey described themselves as unlucky mostly didn’t notice the info in the articles. They just counted ads and reported their findings. Those who considered themselves as lucky happened to also be more curious, paid attention to the articles, and therefore noticed the answers and got better compensated. So according to Tony, if you keep your eyes and mind open, luck will have an easier time finding you.

As someone who has witnessed some great and some lacking business cultures over the years, and as someone who is now raising a little Jack Russell Terrier puppy (one of the most demanding and stubborn dog breeds), I completely agree with Tony’s philosophy. There are no shortcuts in life. If you do what’s right over what’s easy, and take the thorough and more demanding route, ultimately you’ll achieve long lasting success. Rock on guys!

I’m happy to report that I’ll be one of the panelists at Baruch College’s Viral Marketing Conference on April 27. I’ll be speaking along side people like PR guru Steve Rubel, my friend and and long-time social media strategist Howard Greenstein, PodCamp NYC lead organizer and BlogTalk Radio VP John Havens, and President of Flatiron Communications Peter Himler. The moderator of the panel is Les Blatt, my former colleague at Business Wire. I guess John and I will be representing the tech/startup contingency in the discussion.

The event is organized by Michael Lissauer, my former boss and one of the people I feel most fortunate to have ever worked with. Michael is an irreverent and outspoken leader (and a great communicator at that), who embraces change and made a big push at Business Wire to rethink some age-old industry practices. After an accomplished career in PR, Michael joined Baruch College as a board member and professor, where he also initiated a student-run consulting company (aptly named Park Bench Marketing Group, after Bernard Baruch who used to conduct business while sitting on park benches in NYC and DC).

A few months ago Michael invited me to speak to his students who were working on an online marketing campaign for a real-world client. One of the things I’ve learned from Michael about Baruch which I really like is that its student body is largely made up of first generation college students, and first generation Americans. While I speak at several schools fairly regularly these days, it’s always great to see the sparkle in the eye among Baruch students — which is why I’m always happy to take part in the school’s events.

Should be a fun time on the panel. Feel free to check out the the event page on Gary’s Guide and the embedded pdf below. Admission is free so save the date! (April 27, 1pm)


Baruch College Viral Marketing Conference Ad


Following my recent B2B marketing post, here is the follow-up post on attracting a critical mass of end-users to your web service. Below are some basic practices you can use to increase the chances of your web offering taking off, and possibly attaining that elusive viral traction everyone wants so badly. Some of these items may seem obvious or common-sensesical. However, in my experience, it is exactly those things that seem the simplest which are in fact the most difficult to implement, or where companies cut corners the most:

1. Build a great and simple product: ultimately, it is your product that will attract users before anything else. Throwing good dollars to try to market a bad product is like putting lipstick on a pig, as the saying goes. However, that doesn’t mean your product needs to do everything for everyone (lest, as the other expression goes, you become nothing to no one). A good product has a few main features that it does really well and strongly appeal to users. Everything else builds on that. For Google it was search that actually works and a simple yet powerful way to monetize it. For Facebook it was the revolutionary news feed, friend photo tagging, and general clean design that ultimately helped it take off the way it did. For Twitter it was the 140 character limit and the brilliant concept of not having to mutually follow each other. For Wordpress it’s the simplicity and user-friendliness of managing your blog. Find those killer features, refine them, and let them shine.
2. Make it easy to understand: everything about your product should be as straight-forward as possible to understand and join. Your homepage, marketing materials, and PR should immediately let potential users understand what you do:
   • Keep your homepage clean and simple, with a brief, clear, and visible description of what you offer. Your description is your 5-second elevator pitch; within a few sentences the user must understand all the key information about your product: what it does, why it’s useful, who it’s useful for, what’s the deal (free or not, etc.), and how to sign up.
   • Make the joining process simple and fool-proof, i.e limit the options to a minimum and keep it short. Your homepage should be dedicated to converting visitors to users or buyers. If users aren’t hooked within a few seconds they’ll drop out.
3. Educate Users: beyond the simplicity of your message and homepage, you need to make sure users can find all the info they might need about more complex features — otherwise they may get frustrated and choose your competitors. Use easy-to-understand descriptions, help buttons, tutorials, videos, FAQ’s, and images. Don’t leave any room for assumptions, and show step-by-step info that anyone can follow.
4. SEO: make sure people and search engines can easily find you. Follow instructions by search engines on friendly site design, site maps, and URLs; continuously analyze the keywords that users are most likely to search when looking for services like yours; properly title and tag all your content in a descriptive manner; encourage link-backs through engaging bloggers and partner sites (more later), and consider paid search ads if there’s a clear ROI measurement potential (i.e. don’t directly pay for traffic if you still can’t generate revenue from your users).
5. Make it easy to share: allow your users to easily recommend your service to others via email, social networks, social news sites, and more. Options also include creating facebook apps that will go on your user’s news feeds so all their friends can see, sharing on Twitter, direct access to iPhone address book, and more.
6. PR: there are lots of ways to get free PR for your web service: write to tech bloggers and relevant journalists about your new features and initiatives (but keep your language at eye-level — avoid mumbo-jumbo PR-Speak), get out there to conferences and meetups to show your wares; blog, twitter, YouTube, and Flickr about them; and, if relevant, publish case studies, white papers, and other research to become a quotable authority.
7. User-engagement: find ways to engage users through special events, competitions, user-generated content, surveys, and newsletters. There is an incredible number of people out there who will gladly contribute content, dedicate their time to participate in different initiatives, give you priceless yet free feedback –  and then tell their friends, thus increasing your exposure.
8. Partnerships: in some cases, you can find strategic partners that together your companies could add value to both your users, as well as achieve greater awareness. Sometimes startup-to-startup partnerships make sense, and in other cases a larger, more established media or tech partner can help gain traction. This may not be relevant in cases where your entire model relies on disinternediating those other companies, or if your concept is so new or different that these companies won’t even look your way (that is, till you’re big enough that they can’t ignore you anymore). However, if you can find the right partners in the right timing it can become a great stepping stone.

Once again, many of the above may seem obvious, but I’ve witnessed way too many products that continually overlook them. Implemeting these the right way can put you on the path to reaching critical mass.

Apple is one of the companies I‘ve been most impressed with in recent years. While I’ve yet to encounter a ‘perfect’ Apple product, and there are numerous things I would improve in each of the Apple products I own (such as my iPhone, Macbook Air, and iPod), I think the company has taken personal technology to a whole new level, way beyond any of its respective competitors.

Apple products are elegant, efficient, innovative, and mostly user-friendly. From my experience, innovation and attention to detail of this kind has to be abundant in two directions: both upstream and downstream. Upstream, you must have creative, competent, and motivated employees who will build and suggest amazing products. However, no matter how great and smart your employees are, if innovation and clear vision are not coming from the top, you will not make truly spectacular products. You might make good products, even great ones occasionally, but never spectacular.

A leader like Steve Jobs knows exactly what they want, does not take ‘no’ or ‘impossible’ for an answer — no matter how challenging the task at hand, and is willing to take huge risks (like dedicating $150MM and almost 3 years to develop a product they had no experience with, in a highly competitive and saturated market).

When senior leadership isn’t fanatic about building amazing products, it sets the stage for various ailments that plague mediocre products, for example design-by-committee, or making decisions based on how things currently work in the industry instead of how they should be working in a better world.

Steve Jobs’ announcement today that he’s taking a medical leave until June (which can easily become longer) can spell very bad news for Apple if no other visionary ‘buck-stops-here’ kind of leader takes over the company.  I truly hope the company can maintain it’s vision and excellence. Too bad however that unlike apples, Steve Jobses don’t grow on trees.

1.  Have a clear product offering and value proposition: if your product is too complicated to explain, offers too many things to too many customers, or fails to explain why it’s really needed, the odds of another company buying it become lower.  At the ground-level of your sales and marketing strategy, you need to package your product or service in a way that is easy to understand very quickly: does it save your client money and time? does it help them generate new revenue?  does it simplify or improve a previously cumbersome process? what exactly are they paying for? There has to be a clear value proposition.  Also, your client must easily understand why your offering is better than your competitors’ and than free products in the market; and from the worse enemy of all: why it’s better than “Do Nothing”.

Once you have a clear value proposition, you can move on to actually attracting clients:

2. Direct Approach: the most obvious way to reach B2B clients is direct approach: identify companies that would likely benefit from your product or service, and then find the executives within those organizations who have the decision-making power or influence to close a deal with your company.  This can be done through your personal and LinkedIn network, attending conferences, or looking for executive quotes in relevant articles and press releases.

However, while direct approach can be a very effective and low-cost tool, sometimes there are execs who are harder to track. Also, timing can be an issue if you happen to approach them when they are too busy with other projects, have already committed their budgets, or started working with your competitors. In these cases, here are other ways to help get your message in front of the right eyes, in the right timing for B2B opportunities:

3.  Build a Reseller Program: the companies you are trying to sell to have surely bought something from some company at some point. That means there is a relationship in place between those two companies. Try to find the vendors that offer services or products that are somewhat complimentary to yours, design an attractive incentive plan, and let their sales force do the job for you. If the compensation is good enough, and the offering is easy enough to explain, your resellers should have no problem pitching your product as part of their portfolio.  This is what we did in the web design firm I founded a few years back. Through two such partnerships with companies that sold different products to the same types of clients we were targeting, we got a continuous flow of new major clients for several years (I left the company when I went to business school, but these reseller relationships actually still drive business for the firm to this day).

4.  Google AdWords: in B2B, where there’s almost always money changing hands between two parties, it’s very easy to make the case for a cost-per-click campaign.  Setting up a Google AdWords campaign can make sure you show up when your potential clients look for products like yours. But don’t stop with bidding on keywords that relate only to your product: place AdWords bids against the names and industry terms of the established companies that your product is trying to disrupt (as well as other competitors), and against keywords relating to products complimentary to your own.  Basically, you are trying to hone in on that specific decision-maker, whether they’re looking for a product like yours at that moment, or for something else. Once you’ve selected your keywords and bids, make sure your ad grabs their attention through that clear value proposition we defined earlier.

5.  Establish Authority: make noise out there. Blog about your products and industry, twitter about them, do some free direct PR, and turn your website and blog into a resource center that helps educate your potential clients about everything relating to your product and industry. This will not only help with SEO, but also help establish your position as the company to turn to in your industry.

Then, once you’ve reached potential clients or they found you, make it as easy as possible for them to work with you:

6.  Write the business case for your client: large companies often take time to make decisions, and need someone within those companies to make the case as to why this is a good idea (see Dilbert strip at the top). Especially when you are talking about a new technology that may require new behaviors, there’s a lot for your client to figure out. Help your client by providing them with all the data they need:

a.  Create the financial models for them with the variables relating to your product and to integrating it: i.e. show what kinds of revenues or cost savings they can expect by using your product. That way all they need to do is plug-in their own numbers in the model instead of building one from scratch.

b.  Educate the potential client on the entire process they need to follow to benefit from your product. I.e. not just how to use your product, but how to set all the pieces in place that would enable them to start using your product and benefiting from it. This way you eliminate a lot of the work and uncertainty on their end, and free them up to just sign the contract.

Have you used any of the above? Feel free to comment.

In preparation for Boxee’s anticipated public alpha launch later this week, I thought I’d share a few thoughts. I first became familiar with Boxee right before they launched their private alpha in June of last year. I met their co-founder Gidon Coussin through mutual friends at Flixwagon, was one of the early alpha users, and we even wrote about them on the Flixwagon blog. [more after the fold]

Boxee web content screen. Great web & stored content easily displayed on your TV

Boxee is home entertainment center on steroids, meets social network. It’s an application that allows you to easily navigate through and play any media (video, photos, music), from various sources (locally hosted or online), on your computer — and from it onto your TV — with an extremely user-friendly viewing experience.  Also, you can use a variety of widely available remote controls (such as an Apple remote), which gives you a traditional lean-back viewing experience while offering a substantially enhanced interface and unlimited variety of web content right on your TV. Finally, you can see what media your friends are consuming, either in Boxee itself, or via Twitter and other social network updates, which makes discovery easier and fun.

The folks at Boxee are doing it right. They offer a great user experience, neat-looking interface, a rapidly growing number of content sources (including Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and many more), did a great job engaging the community and finding avid spokespeople via a CES video competition, and provide excellent customer service via Twitter (though I would personally maintain two separate twitter accounts: one to have dialogue with users, and one reserved only for company news and announcements, so as to keep the signal as clear as possible on the news front). Also, by basing their app on the open source XBMC - an open-source media player originally made for Microsoft’s Xbox game console, they saved a lot of work and benefited from a variety of community resources.

Boxee’s biz model will likely still take shape in the next few years, but the general idea currently is to have fee-based content recommendations (charged to the content owner), sponsored content categories, and plain old ads. These all could make sense. For a producer who could make say $10-50 CPM per ad on a video (depending on the type of content), it may be worth paying a few cents per-view to Boxee to make sure that content is featured on top (this would replace the costs of existing means of distribution. However, for these numbers to work, the producer would need to sell multiple ads, so this would primarily work for long form content – unless online ad rates continue climbing at a fast rate and far exceed TV rates). And given that Boxee has mass-market appeal potential, as well as frequent usage potential, sponsorships and ads are definitely a possibility.

And speaking mass-market appeal, one of the questions that come up is how fast can Boxee grow? While the company reached a spectacular 150,000 alpha user requests in less than 6 months, its market is currently mostly limited to people who are willing and savvy enough to connect their computers to a TV (leaving the social aspect aside for now, since the home media center is the crown jewel of Boxee). Most people I know currently don’t connect computers to TVs for a variety of reasons, mostly because they think it’s too complicated, or find that the experience just isn’t good enough –- pre-Boxee that is). This will likely change and grow over time. One way however to instantly expand that addressable market is by having Boxee available on the machines its code originated from – game consoles. These machines are already attached to TV screens, and their users are thirsty for content and apps. With over 80MM next gen consoles sold worldwide (Xbox 360, PS3, Wii) this has huge potential. However, that doesn’t mean it would be easy. Getting Boxee to officially run on these platforms could require extensive development, reaching agreements with the manufacturers, or just waiting for the hardware to be robust enough (in the case of Wii for example). However, again, this could substantially boost the number of potential users, and a lot of the development may actually be done by the community. It’s very possible that Boxee founders will find themselves exchanging business cards with people from Sony, MS, and Nintendo at CES this year (not to mention with regular home entertainment equipment manufacturers).

Another avenue is to partner with other set-top boxes currently in the home: i.e. Tivo and cable companies. This seems less likely at this point though, for a number of reasons: for one, Boxee sees itself as CableCo killers. They want to become the primary enabler of content in the living room in a few years. Secondly, integration with all the different types of set-top boxes, operating systems, and interfaces out there will require tremendous work and could take years to reach a substantial number of households. Boxee is probably better off focusing on its feature set at this point. However, you never know what might happen. In a couple of years partnerships like that could make sense — or even an acquisition, like in the case of SlingBox and Dish Networks.

At this point, if Boxee can continue improving its product, educating audiences on the value of running Boxee as your home media center, and forging the right kinds of partnerships, both on the content and delivery/distribution side, it can do very well.

Temptation Island on Boxee. Some viewing choices are best kept private.

And finally, if the folks from Boxee are (still) reading, some thoughts on the app functionality. While I do really like the alpha interface, here are some things I would think about for upcoming versions:

• Allow to lock the main navigation sidebar in position: currently the nav sidebar disappears and reappears on hover. I personally would prefer to have an option to lock the nav bar in place so I could always quickly return to it, rather than watch it open and close all the time.

• Easy Exit, Back, and Toggle: Exiting Boxee is currently done either by going back to the nav bar and clicking ‘Exit’, or by using a keyboard shortcut. Toggling away from full screen is done only by keyboard shortcut to the best of my knowledge, and going back is done by hitting Esc or using a remote button. However, memorizing a shortcut (or even reading the tutorial) is something not everyone will do, and when using just a mouse, going back to the main nav bar requires several steps. Having fixed ‘Exit’, ‘Toggle’, and ‘Back’ buttons across the app would make things easier. Also, a ‘Cancel’ button on the Exit screen would be useful in case you don’t want to reach for the ‘Esc’ key when not using a remote.

• Privacy: at present, Boxee social sharing is all or nothing. Either your contacts (or the world) get notified on everything you watch, or on nothing. However, some people would want to share certain things, while keeping others private (for example that trash reality show you secretly watch, not to mention some X rated content).  Having a way to indicate which content categories would be shared, or having a “don’t share this” button  alongside content can be very useful. May not be easy (look at how complicated Facebook permissions have become), but still doable in a user-friendly way.

• Include sub-categories in certain channels: currently when you access YouTube via Boxee, you can see the main video categories (Featured, Most Popular, Top Rated). However, there is no sub navigation within each category. So for example, while on YouTube’s site you can view the most popular today, this week, this month, all time etc., currently in Boxee only ‘All Time’ shows up.

• Custom Shortcuts: if I have certain favorite channels, for example a music library, Hulu, or even the TV shows section within Hulu, it would be nice to create a custom shortcut to take me directly there from the home screen.

• Info on settings: Boxee has lots and lots of options in the settings area. However, most of them mean very little to the average user without further explanations. Having an ‘info’  button next to each option will make it easier for users to customize and enhance their experience even if they are not very home-electronics savvy.

• Unified settings: currently the account settings are managed only via the Boxee wesbite and cannot be accessed in the same area as the application settings. Having all settings in one place would make all of them easier to find.

I’m sure Boxee is aware of a lot of these and may have some of them already in planning. Anyways, keep up the good work guys!

My good friend and former classmate Larry Mai of Iron Monkey Ventures just launched a new Twitter mashup called Map My Tweeps. Like the name implies, the app allows you to see where around the world your followers and followees (is that even a word?) are located.  If you input your user name only, you’ll see where the people you follow are on a Google map. If you also insert your password, you’ll see your followers and mutual follows as well (update: this is completely safe, trustworthy, and unrelated to any of the Twitter phishing going on in the past few days).  For personal use, it’s pretty cool to see where your followers are coming from. Once you reach a certain number of followers it’s sometimes hard to keep up and get to know everyone, so having their location on a map is nice. [more after the fold]

Map My Tweeps shows you your followers & Followees on a Google Map. Interesting biz insights can be gained.

For companies, this is a great opportunity to see where your twitter followers are at (globally, or within the country) if you are planning to use Twitter for certain promotions, or if you just want to know at whom to direct your Twitter updates. This is different from seeing where your site visitors are coming from on Google Analytics, since your twitter follower base may be a bit different from your overall site traffic. Also, you can get a glimpse at where your competitors’ followees are, to get an additional competitive insight. Finally, if there are other users that you think appeal to the same target audiences as your product, this is a way to see where are the people these power users follow, as it may make sense for you to target the same.

Which brings me to the next idea I suggested to Larry, to complement Map My Tweeps: maybe his next mashup should show who are the most followed twitter users by your own followers. This will essentially show the biggest influencers within your own network (as opposed to tools like Twinfluence or Twitterholic that attempt to rank overall influence). In this mashup, you’d see a list of users who are followed by several of the people you yourself follow, along with percentages and overall number (i.e. “30% of your followers (75 people) are also following @someone” “22% of your followers (54 people) also follow @CompanyName” etc.). With this info you could know for example if more of your followers prefer to read @TechCrunch, @Mashable, or @GigaOM; if there are any power users you should target with special offers and invite to test your product; or know how close-knit of a community your followers form. This, together with the geographical info of Map My Tweeps, could bring some great insight into your Twitter presence. Larry says he’s already playing around with some similar ideas of his own, so I’ll keep you posted. So check out Map My Tweeps, very cool mashup.