LAUNCH Mobile & Wearables is Approaching!

We’re just about two weeks away from the @LAUNCH Mobile & Wearables summit (Sept 30 and Oct 1, at the Metreon in San Francisco), and here’s some of what we have in store... 

1) 67 Incredible Speakers in 2 Awesome Formats:

Fireside Chats on the Main Stage

Here are some of the really great people who will be joining @jason onstage for fireside chats:

Dave Morin | Cofounder, CEO, Path (Oct 1)
Sean Rad | Founder, CEO, Tinder (Sept 30)
Tom Conrad | CTO, Pandora (Oct 1)
Chamath Palihapitiya | Founder, Managing Partner, Social + Capital Partnership (Oct 1)
Eric Migicovsky | Founder, CEO, Pebble (Sept 30)
Manish Jha | General Manager - Mobile, NFL (Oct 1)
Robert Occhialini | VP - Products, NBA Digital (Oct 1)

...and 22 more (see the full list here)

Power Lunches
Focused roundtable discussions, led by visionaries in the mobile space, including:

Jocelyn Mangan | VP, Consumer Product Management, OpenTable (Oct 1)
Dave Enberg | CTO Evernote (Sept 30)
Hicham Ratnani | Founder, CFO, Frank & Oak (Sept 30)

Alisa Gould-Simon | Cofounder, Pose (Sept 30)

Jeremy Wacksman | VP, Marketing & Mobile, Zillow (Oct 1)

Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen | Head of Mobile, Dropbox (Sept 30)
Michael Cerda | SVP, Product & Technology, VEVO (Oct 1)
...and 31 more (see the full list here)

2) Company and Product Debuts
10 companies will be launching brand new products on the main stage, with the opportunity to win a $100k investment prize from The LAUNCH Fund.

3) Continue the Conversation:

Dinner and cocktails, and a nightly poker tournament!

4) Thanks to our gracious partners helping us make this event happen:

* Xtreme Labs (http://xtremelabs.com)

* DYN (http://dyn.com)

* Expedia (http://expedia.com)

* Factual (http://factual.com)

* New Relic (http://newrelic.com)

* Tandem (http://tandemcap.com/)

There are still 2 partner spots remaining -- email partners@launch.co for more info.

There’s still time to get your ticket. Use the code ‘mobilerocks’ and receive a 20% discount on registration. Register here.

More info about the event on our website: http://mobile.launch.co

Advice for Microsoft’s new CEO: Go All-in with Apps

Lumia
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tl;dr: Microsoft’s new CEO must make mobile work, and since Android and iOS have a huge lead, the best strategy is to buy the top 100+ apps on competing platforms while making Windows Phones zero margin like the Kindle.
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Microsoft dominated desktop computing by relentless iteration.

Word, Excel and Windows were far behind WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3 and the Mac when they launched. But Microsoft grinded it over twenty years from the mid eighties until the 2000s.

And they won. Big time.

It’s time for Microsoft to grind it out again, and there is a clear analogy here: people don’t buy operating systems, they buy the apps that run on them.

For a time, typically early in a technology cycle, people are obsessed with hardware. But when hardware parity is reached – as it is today in smartphones – folks tend to focus again on apps.

In the ‘80s and ‘90s, people bought PCs based on their hard disk space, memory and CPUs. People actually knew the names and speed of their CPUs!

Now folks buy based on color.

On. Color.

Nokia was a great purchase for Microsoft because they got it at half price (they used offshore money that would have been taxed to all hell if repatriated), and they got a really sexy phone line in the Lumia.

Lumia phones blow the hardware profile of the iPhone out of the water, what with wireless charging and Carl Zeiss lenses.

Carl. Zeiss. Lenses.

Wireless. Charging.

They’ve had these awesome features for well over a year. They are stunning.

But they trail Samsung’s and iPhone’s by a significant margin.

Why?

It’s the apps.

Microsoft needs to drop everything and buy the top 100 apps on their competitors’ platforms. So, whatever the top apps are on Android and iOS, snap them up!

After you do, you keep building them for iOS and Android.

Things like Evernote, Sunrise and Tinder come to mind.

Why?

Four reasons:

1. Because if you buy them, you’ve instantly infected the iOS and Android ecosystems!

2. They’re proven.

3. You get talented people on your team who can build the next generations of apps.

4. You can start releasing new features first on Windows and get the halo effect for your platform.

Now, this is a five-year strategy, with the first two years buying and the last three exploiting.

If you have the brass to spend $7b on hardware that’s largely commoditized, you better have the brassier ones to double that on apps.

Apps are what matter.

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Advice for Building a Startup Inside Someone Else's Ecosystem: Don’t


"The cave is collapsing!" -- Leia Organa
 
"This is no cave." -- Han Solo

Here’s a composite of a three discussions I’ve had with whip-smart founders over the past couple of months about building companies on the backs of existing ecosystems like YouTube and Facebook.

“Jason, I’m building a startup around the @Youtube ecosystem -- which I know from your writing that you’ve got some issues with -- we want you to invest!” said the founder.

“That’s an awesome set of tools you’ve built there. Clever indeed. However, if any of them work, you know YouTube is going to copy them and make them free, right?” I replied.

“But YouTube is going to be 10x bigger than it is in the next five years... and you said if it was a stand-alone company it would be worth $50b!” he replied.

“I did say that, and that’s even more reason for you to be worried. As they get bigger and more powerful, they will have even more resources and rationale to rebuild your ideas -- and they will have an even bigger firehouse to spit it out to customers,” I said.

“But look at all the examples of huge companies built off of large ecosystems: Norton Antivirus on Windows is a Fortune 500 company, Hootsuite exploded on the back of Twitter and it has a $1b valuation, Buddy Media rocked Facebook and sold for $800M,” he said.

“You left out PayPal... built off the back of Ebay for billions and now the most valuable piece of the company,” I added.

Then I said, “Now, while all of the examples above are true, they are a small, small percentage of founders who were able to get escape velocity from the exogorth, the space slug in Star Wars that almost ate the Millennium Falcon.”  

Ironically, as I was having this discussion, I found out that YouTube had built a tool that did EXACTLY what one of the founders in the above composite had built: a tool to help you connect with your top YouTube fans!
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Why Jeff Bezos Bought the Washington Post--Six Theories

[ Jeff Bezos was TIME's Person of the Year in 1999. ]

Spectacular news broke yesterday that Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post.

Why WaPo was sold is obvious: running a newspaper sucks.

It really, really, really sucks. Let’s count the ways:

1. Craigslist took all your classifieds
2. Niche sites took your audience and your top journalists
3. No one wants dead trees on their doorstep
4. News breaks, is processed and largely resolved in the same day on Twitter
5. Some of the country’s last unions are grinding down already ground-down newspapers  

It’s just a huge headache with little payoff.

Which leads us to wonder, ‘Why did Jeff do it?’

Also for that matter, why has Warren Buffett been buying dozens of small papers up over the past couple of years, and why did Red Sox owner John Henry just buy the Boston Globe?

Here are the six leading theories and what I think of each:


1. EGO: Newspapers are the new sports teams for the billionaire set

There is probably some truth to this. At some point, rich folks realize they’re gonna die with a bunch of money in the bank they never deployed in service of either their legacy, fun, society’s benefit or straight-up ego.  

And it’s not just old dudes like Buffett and Sam Zell.

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Stretch Goals Are Important (Or WizzyWig Won $100k in 48 Hours at a Hackathon)

[ Summary: Stretch goals are important, and the ones we set for the first LAUNCH Hackathon this past March resulted in a team of three unknown 20-somethings from Pittsburgh building a killer product in 48 hours, landing over $100k in investment on the spot and later earning a slot at a prestigious accelerator. On November 8-10 we host LAUNCH Hackathon 2 with stretch goals of 1k *actual* developers, $250k in investment prizes and five teams funded or accepted to accelerators. ]   

At some point 10 years ago I overheard the buzzword ‘stretch goals’ and it stuck in my brain.

It might have been from an ex who was at Harvard Business School, or from reading Jack Welch.

Stretch goals, as far as I understand them, are lofty goals that you set even though you have no idea how to reach them at the time.


My Three Stretch Goals

Last year I started setting stretch goals for myself and my kick-ass teams.

Three notable ones at LAUNCH:

a) the largest startup technology conference / hit 5k attendees for the 2013 LAUNCH Festival
b) the largest hackathon with 300 *real* participants
c) the largest hackathon prize ever

Well, we had 6k folks come to the LAUNCH Festival in March, resulting in folks coming to me for the past six months saying, ‘That was amazing! It was huge!’ We blew past the stretch goal by 20%. Wow.

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The Unbearable Wearable: Google Glass is Brilliant, Loathsome and Not Inevitable (or "Take Those off before I Punch You in the Face!")

@Scobleizer's infamous Google Glass photo, which his wife took at their home.

I’ve run into several friends wearing Google Glass in the past three months, and I have three words of advice for them:

Take. Them. Off.

First, you look like an idiot.

Second, you’re killing the party.

Third, are you recording me right now?!?
 

First Encounter: “Are You Recording Right Now?”

The first time I ran into these magical devices in the wild was at a conference. A fairly notable person walked up to me wearing them.

I asked, “How do I know if you’re recording me?”  

“You don’t!” he replied before correcting himself. “Well, I wouldn’t do that without telling you.”

“But how do I know? I’m not really comfortable with trusting folks to be recording me or not. I mean, how do we have a real, honest discussion if I don’t know if you’re recording it?” I offered.

“Well, you might be able to see me turn the camera on... See, you have to click to record,” he replied.  

So I’m supposed to just trust every person wearing these that they’re not recording me.
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LAUNCH Education & Kids 2013: Winners, Videos, All Presenting Companies Are Here

[ LAUNCH founder Jason Calacanis's fireside chat with entrepreneur/investor Mitch Kapor before a packed house. Photo by Philip Szeto. ]

We were awed and inspired by the 500+ educators, entrepreneurs and developers who joined us for our 2nd annual LAUNCH Education & Kids event at Microsoft's Mountain View campus June 26-27.

You'll find the startup demos and investor panels on our YouTube channel here.
[ Fireside chats with entrepreneur/investor Mitch Kapor, Lynda Weinman of lynda.com and Daphne Koller of Coursera coming this summer as episodes of "This Week in Startups." ]

All 20 companies (with contact info) are in this spreadsheet. The 2013 agenda is here.

@Jason announced that the new LAUNCH Fund will seek to invest in three startups from this event (pending due diligence): LocoMotive Labs, STEAM Carnival & Kidaptive.  

The 2013 LAUNCH Education & Kids Winners:
- Best in Show (Overall Winner): Kidaptive  (entertaining and adaptive content that helps children learn)
- Most Impactful: CK-12 Foundation  (free, high-quality open content in the STEM subjects)
- Best Presentation: STEAM Carnival  (re-imagining the carnival with robots, fire and lasers)
- Best Hardware [ tie ]: Roominate (wired dollhouse building kit for girls ages 6+) and Linkbots (modular robotic, brings project from idea to working prototype)
- Best Technology: GuitarBots  (makes guitar learning fun and motivating)
- Best Design: LocoMotive Labs  (apps to empower kids with special needs)
- Audience Favorite: STEAM Carnival

Big thanks to this year's LAUNCH Education & Kids lead sponsor Pearson as well as sponsors Mandrill, StudyMode, LittleBits and UCSF.
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HackADay Looking for a New Home


HackADay.com, an awesome maker community, is looking for a new home
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tl;dr: HackADay is a passionate community of hackers doing awesome stuff. It deserves more attention than I can give it right now, as I’m ultra-focused on the launch of Inside.com. So, we’re looking for a caring new owner with a stellar track record of not f@#$ing up brands to take it over.   

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We created HackADay back in 2004 because one of Engadget’s awesome bloggers, Phil Torrone, wanted to do super-geeky projects every day and the Engadget audience wasn’t exactly into that frequency.

In a phone call with PT I said, “So you want to do a hack a day?”

He was like, “Yeah, a hack a day.”

And I was like, “OK, let’s do hackaday.com.”

When we sold Weblogs Inc. to AOL, we took HackADay out of the deal because it was doing stuff that a corporate parent’s legal arm might not feel comfortable with (e.g., hacking cable boxes!).

So, I bought it and kept it safe and warm inside of Mahalo.com for the past couple of years. However, since I’m super focused on the Inside.com launch, I need to find a new home for it.
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WLITF: Private Jets for the Masses -- A Surf Air Review

Surf Air uses the Swiss-made Pilatus PC-12 for its flights [ photo courtesy of Pilatus Aircraft ].


As part of my ‘we live in the future’ series, here’s a review of an unlimited private jet service for everyone.*

*And by jet I mean turboprop, and by everyone I mean upper-middle-class people.

Also, I talk about the 'instant economy' and the concept of 'implied odds' (from poker) as it relates to taking on big challenges like Surf Air is doing (the 'what if it works' section).  

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Took a Surf Air flight today (gratis), as I'm considering a membership to the 'all you can fly' service.

It's day 16 of Surf Air's 'beta.' I’m writing this on my Blackberry Q10. Yeah, the new Blackberry with the keyboard. It’s awesome. Not kidding, I love having a keyboard.
​
Surf Air currently operates between the tiny San Carlos airport in the Bay Area and Burbank in the Los Angeles area. They're going to add a bunch of cities to the membership including Santa Barbara (July 10), San Diego and Lake Tahoe.

It's $1,650 a month for unlimited travel between their cities, plus a $500 one-time initiation fee.

My four to six monthly Southwest flights to the Valley make it almost a 'push' for me, as I pay $199 to $250 each way on average. If I do five flights, 2.5 round trips, I would nearly break even.

Now, as a disclaimer, I don't like small planes. I can handle a small jet, but puddle jumpers and turboprop/regional airlines are not my thing.
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The 20 Companies You'll See at LAUNCH Education & Kids June 26-27, 2013

[ JoyTunes delights the judges at LAUNCH Education & Kids in June 2012. ]

We’re proud to announce the 20 companies that take the stage at LAUNCH Education & Kids this week. Tune in for Jason's fireside chat with Mitch Kapor at 1pm PT on Wednesday, June 26 followed by demos at launch.co/live (and again at 9am PT on June 27, when we kick off with Lynda Weinman of Lynda.com). Our full agenda is here.

CK-12
http://www.ck12.org/student/
https://twitter.com/CK12Foundation
https://angel.co/ck-12-foundation

CK-12 Foundation is a non-profit organization that increases access to high quality educational materials for K-12 students all over the world. They offer free high-quality, standards-aligned, open content in the STEM subjects.

CollegeSnapps
http://mat88.wix.com/snapps2
https://twitter.com/CollegeSnapps
https://angel.co/collegesnapps-1

CollegeSnapps™ is a mobile application that connects students to their academic advisors. Through a series of live and prescribed interactions, it fosters engagement by allowing advisors to monitor a student’s progress and help the student succeed throughout college.

Crowdmark
https://crowdmark.com/
https://twitter.com/Crowdmark
https://angel.co/crowdmark

Crowdmark is a web application, with a paper-to-cloud bridge and a marking workflow that streamlines document assessment on a massive scale. Crowdmark helps teachers grade better.

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A YouTube Creators' Bill of Rights (Or 'A Roadmap for Building a Better YouTube')

In my last piece I explained why I didn’t want to work on YouTube’s farm no more. As promised, in this piece I will follow up on one of the two parts I couldn’t get to in the first piece: 'How Twitter, Hulu, MSN, Yahoo and Facebook -- or a next-gen YouTube startup -- could each take on YouTube effectively.'

My explanation takes the form of a 'YouTube Creators' Bill of Rights,' which can be used as a roadmap for YouTube to build sustainable bridges with their current partners -- or as a roadmap for a competitor to crush YouTube. :-)

In other words, these are the five killer features that could kill YouTube.

If you built a service around these five features, and you had some level of traffic and sales support (think Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, Facebook or my favorite Twitter), you could instantly take the top 500 channels out from under YouTube.

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I ain't gonna work on YouTube's farm no more


Editor's note: Read Jason's followup to this piece, 'A YouTube Creators' Bill of Rights,' here.

Summary: I spent the last year as a funded YouTube partner and was one of the top ~10% of content creators who had their deals renewed in ‘cycle two’ -- and I turned down their money.

In this editorial I explain:

a) Why YouTube is an amazing platform
b) The five reasons I turned down YouTube’s funding
c) Why content owners investing solely in YouTube are investing in their own demise
d) How you can outgame YouTube and suck massive value from the ecosystem
e) Exactly how Twitter, Hulu, MSN, Yahoo and Facebook -- or a next-gen YouTube -- could each take on YouTube


Background
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Just over a year ago, YouTube asked me to pitch them on making shows that would take their service from a UGC (user generated content) juggernaut to a more advertiser-friendly platform.

They needed better-looking content, produced regularly, to get the big advertisers.

Also, to be frank, they needed reliable and appropriate content. Much of YouTube is comedy, and a lot of it isn’t exactly ‘sponsor friendly’ (see Shane Dawson).

They needed folks with experience in this space, so they reached out to people like me who had a track record in web content.

The deal was simple (according to public reports): we give you seven figures to make great shows, we sell the ads, we promote your content and then we split the revenue.

Great deal! What could go wrong, right?
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I Started a Co-working Space in LA

 

I'm thrilled to announce that I’ve started a co-working space here in Los Angeles. Being an entrepreneur is sometimes lonely work, and having a bunch of founders around you makes it a lot easier.

We’re calling it LAUNCH Co-work, and it’s a 10,000+ square-foot, 30-foot ceiling space in Culver City with room for a dozen startups.

We’re looking for awesome collaborators to learn, share and generally change the world with. I might angel invest in some of the startups, have them on “This Week in Startups” or just talk shop in the kitchen.

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Lynda Weinman Is Our Third Fireside Chat for LAUNCH Education & Kids June 26-27


Lynda.com -- with 2.5M members and nearly 100k videos across almost 2k courses -- has more than proven the market for learning software, business and creative skills online. Co-founder and executive chair Lynda Weinman will talk with LAUNCH founder Jason Calacanis in her fireside chat at LAUNCH Education & Kids June 26-27.

But this is not an overnight-success story. Lynda, a special effects animator and faculty member at the Art Center College of Design, founded the company with her husband Bruce Heavin in 1995 (see her full bio here).
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Yahoo + Tumblr = Big Win, But Zuck + Tumblr = Bigger Win

Yahoo is going to buy Tumblr for $1B on Monday according to reports.

I will explain to you why the media is freaking out, why big companies need to make more bets like this, why Yahoo is the perfect home and why Zuckerberg should offer $2B.


Media... Freak Out!

Over 20 years in the industry I’ve learned that when something gets bought for $1B or more, people tend to freak out.

People can comprehend millions of dollars, because we all know folks who have a million or more dollars (or homes worth that). When you start talking about 100s or 1,000s of millions, people get emotional and some start lashing out.

Journalists are one of the first groups to lash out. Why? Because they have no chance of making big money in their jobs, and they have to fight for $5k raises while their pensions are replaced with 401ks. Also, they tend to have covered startups like Tumblr from year one and they can’t reconcile how something that didn’t exist five years ago is now worth $1B -- and that they don’t have to balls to create something.

F@#4k it, Yahoo Should Buy 10 Tumblrs

Here’s the truth: a billion dollars is nothing to a company like Yahoo or Google or Facebook or Apple or Microsoft.

If there were 10 startups like Tumblr, with 100M+ users and $50M-$100M in revenue potential a year, it would actually make sense for Google, Yahoo or Facebook to buy all 10.

At once.

Roll the dice.

Why?

Because those companies have tens to hundreds of billions of dollars in market cap and cash, and if one in 10 of those startups turn into YouTube, it’s worth it.

Read the complete editorial on LinkedIn here.

Sign up for jason’s email list at http://jasonnation.com/

Fireside Chat with Daphne Koller of Coursera at LAUNCH Education & Kids on June 27


If you're talking about technology's impact on education, the conversation always includes MOOCs -- massive open online courses. That's why we're excited Coursera co-founder and Stanford computer science professor Daphne Koller will join LAUNCH founder Jason Calacanis for a fireside chat at LAUNCH Education & Kids June 26-27.

Coursera, which aims to make the best education accessible online to everyone for free, has more than 3.5M students, 370 courses and 69 institutional partners -- a 5x increase in students and 25x in courses since last summer.

Partners include top US schools like Stanford and Princeton, plus foreign institutions like the University of Tokyo and École Polytechnique. The company raised $22M total from Kleiner Perkins and NEA in mid-2012, less than a year after Daphne and co-founder Andrew Ng developed Stanford's first online education platform.
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Killer Startup Tools: Fast, Cheap and in Control

by @Jason

When I started building companies in the '90s, the only tools designed to help startups grow were "productivity apps" like Microsoft Office and Quickbooks. They were helpful, but they only solved very basic problems like math, bookkeeping and letter writing.

They didn’t address high-level stuff like ideation, analytics, hiring, CRM (customer relationship management), time tracking, project management, customer feedback and—gulp!—employee motivation and feedback. If you wanted software to do those things, you needed to hire three or four people and customize software packages, which typically started in the six-figure-and-up range.

Today? Today you can have all eight of those functions for—wait for it—under $1,000 a month. Most importantly, they can each be set up and learned in under a day, and managed by existing team members—without dedicated staff—in a couple of hours a month.

Insane!
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Mitch Kapor Fireside Chat Set for LAUNCH Education & Kids, June 26 & 27 at Microsoft's SV Campus

We love bringing living legends to our stage, which is why we are thrilled and honored that Mitch Kapor will join LAUNCH founder Jason Calacanis for a fireside chat at LAUNCH Education & Kids. The event, where 20 companies will debut or demo new products, takes place June 26 & 27 at Microsoft's campus in Mountain View.

Mitch is best known as the founder of Lotus Development Corporation and designer of Lotus 1-2-3. Through Kapor Capital, he is active as a seed-stage investor focused on social impact startups, especially in education, healthcare and consumer finance. Mitch is also a director and major funder of the Level Playing Field Institute, which works to increase fairness in education and the workplace by closing the opportunity gap and removing barriers to success (the full bio is here).

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Looking Back at #launch2013: 21k Mentions in Three Days, 6k Attendees

We planned on making the 2013 LAUNCH Festival our biggest, best event ever -- and judging by the crowds, the energy and the awesome demos, panels and firesides, we're pretty sure we did just that.

We asked our friends at Lewis PR to run some numbers on our social presence and package them with some of our other stats -- such as 6k attendees, 500 Hackathon participants -- into one tidy infographic.

Turns out #launch2013 was used nearly 21k times during the event and Twitter-ing folks mentioned @LAUNCH more than 4k times (thanks to @hkwong for tweeting more than us!). Plus, attendees using our crowdfunding app committed more than $12.5M in LAUNCH dollars to the 50 startups that launched on stage.

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Google's Fiber Takeover Plan Expands: Will Kill Cable & Carriers

Last year, on August 1st, I emailed you guys my thoughts about Google Fiber:

Google's Fiber "Proof of Concept" Is Anything But
/blog/googles-fiber-proof-of-concept-is-anything-but.html

In that piece I wrote, “Mark my words: Google Fiber is not a test, it's a takeover plan.”

Last week, Google announced its second Fiber city: Austin. Yes, the nerd/hipster home of SXSW will get fiber in a move clearly designed to blow every techie's mind at SXSW 2014.

This week, Google announced that it had bought fiber provider iProvo to launch a third city: Provo, UT.

They just tripled their cities in 10 days.

‘Noogle’ -- the new Google since Larry Page took over as CEO -- is all about moonshots. Google can’t shut up about moonshots in fact, with Steven Levy winning an interview with Larry for WIRED with the title 'Why moonshots matter.' 

In 10 short months, 30k+ tech, film and music nerds could be walking around Austin hearing locals brag about their free 5-megabit download connections (and 1 gigabit up/down connections that cost $70 a month.)

More importantly, every Google Fiber home will have a public wifi component. In order to get Google Fiber, you’re going to have to agree to put a router in that lets anyone use a portion of your bandwidth.

That’s not announced, but it’s gonna happen.
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