Feb 4

Some of you may already have heard – Boundless has a new VP of Marketing, and I’m happy to say it’s me, Healy Jones! I came on board earlier in January, and am really I’m excited to help advance the Boundless mission – making textbooks and education more affordable and better.

Prior to joining I spoke with college students, who universally expressed frustration at the cost of textbooks, the poor quality of the traditional publishers’ ebook offerings and endless cycle of “new” editions created by publishers for the sake of making used books worthless.

The traditional textbook publishing industry is staring at a huge tidal wave of change, just as the encyclopedia industry did a few years ago. Textbooks must evolve into something that better suits students’ learning habits and pocketbooks. Boundless is really exciting since I get to be part of the solution.

Since I’ve officially joined we’ve released free textbooks in 18 subjects. And Boundless was covered in TechCrunch and USA Today, and had great blog posts about the  Boundless open textbooks on the Creative Commons blog and Semantic Web. AND, our semester is off to a great start with thousands upon thousands of college students electing to try Boundless free versions of popular books like Campbell’s Biology, Meyer’s Psychology and Principles of Microeconomics. If this is what changing the world feels like, I’m loving it.

healy jones boundless

I’m excited to be part of the Boundless revolution and look forward to helping students save some money!!

Dec 3

I’ve been making an effort to share more on Twitter (Follow Healy Jones on Twitter if you want.) Some of these tweets have been popular:

Not too surprising that a lot of the clicks are on VC/seed investing topics. I’m happy that people seem to like mobile as well – I probably spend half my day thinking/doing mobile related marketing, so it’s good to know that my tweeps are aligned with my interests that way as well.

Nov 12

A friend of mine, William Sulinski, has recently started a cool new project called From Holden. The concept is pretty basic – Will like to wear quality clothes (he’s way more fashionable than me!) but he, like me, is on a startup person’s budget. So he’s decided to start a verticalized men’s clothing company focusing on high quality shirts. It’s a cool concept, and I like the style of the shirts that he’s working on.

From Holden V Neck T Shirt

from holden v-neck t shirt

From Holden V-Neck T-Shirt

Will is on the cusp of a new trend in internet retailing, which combines manufacturing/sourcing with internet distribution in the goal of driving down the cost to the end consumer. I like the concept and will be asking for a few shirts for my birthday…

He talks more about what he’s trying to accomplish in a video on his Kickstarter campaign.

 

Please check out the From Holden Kickstarter campaign and, if you like the shirts, help Will out!

Sep 14

OfficeDrop recently got some great press on the most recent update of our Android app. It’s really awesome how device specific blogs can drive lots and lots of new downloads and users. I guess the major takeaway for app developers is that serious updates to apps offer tremendous PR potential. And that PR isn’t dead – if you’re selling apps then you need to use the media to drive new people to your store listings. Anyways, this piece of press was really awesome for spiking new users of OfficeDrop’s Android smartphone scanner app, so I thought I would share it.

Android Central Reviews OfficeDrop’s Updated Android App

 

Android Central, an authority in the Android app space, just reviewed the most recent update of the OfficeDrop Android app – and we are really happy that they liked it!

You can read the Android Central review of the OfficeDrop Android app here.

From the review: “The premise is simple but has plenty of potential. Whenever you have a document or something important that you’d like to keep electronic record of, you can open the OfficeDrop app and scan in the document, which is then uploaded to your account. With the latest version, document scanning has improved, with proper trimming and improved image quality.”

If you don’t have the updated app yet, you should get it! This app includes major image enhancement improvements + auto-cropping of mobile scans. we’ve just released a major improvement to our Android scanner app. This update actually improves the quality of the photo you take for you scans! So your mobile smartphone scanning just got better, easier and faster, and is part of our commitment to giving you the ability to get the best cloud scanning software possible. And it’s all designed to make using our file search better than ever – from the web or from your mobile device.

Get the OfficeDrop Android App in Google’s Play marketplace by clicking the button below on your Android device.

Jul 3

Recently there have been a few interesting posts on the Boston internet startup scene. This genre of posts seems to come back every 18 months or so, and I thought I would revisit a piece I did a while ago called “Keeping startups in Boston.” I wrote the post in 2010, and the purpose of my points was:

I’ll try to elaborate on a few of the problems I see in Boston – problems that make it less desirable for startup founders to want to found/keep their companies here. My point of view is colored by the years I spent living in San Francisco and by the fact that I am not originally from New England. Also, please keep in mind that as a guy helping run a startup in Cambridge I actually do think this is a great place to found a technology company.

Anyways, I mentioned the following points:

1) Lack of funding sources to take a risk on less experienced founders. Sometimes I feel like this is starting to get better, sometimes not. I”m seeing a lot more seed rounds being done in Boston, but we’ll see how they translate to Series A or successful outcomes.

2) Little investor willingness to roll up the sleeves and mentor/help other companies. I see some serious improvement here, coupled with a real improvement with point #3 as well. Programs like TechStars have brought mentors out hiding and made it cool to help get small companies off the ground. This makes me happy.

3) Very few here-is-how-you-grow-your-company events. Totally getting better, with incubators leading the way + organized events at the CIC, MSFT Nerd and a few other places gaining steam.

4) Very little national, customer driving press. This is still a huge problem. A really huge problem. I don’t see it getting better soon, although Bostinno is trying hard to become a real East Coast tech reporting machine. I see them making real progress, but this will just take time.

5) It is hard to feel welcome as a “non-native” in Boston. Still a problem that most non-natives don’t get, nor do I expect them to.

So, there is some serious improvement on the “what ills” Boston startups since my post a few years ago… but has there been any progress on making better consumer startup/internet companies here? Yeah, I’d think so, just based on the number of companies I see actually growing and doing well, like RunKeeper or Boundless or CustomMade.

Only time will tell though. There needs to be a big company that becomes a tech spawner, where a bunch of engineers make a lot of $ and then go and start other companies. Maybe Hubspot will fulfill that role.

Finally, here are the articles that got me thinking about this, one by a reporter named Jim Kerstetter and one by Rob Go.

Mar 30
tablet sales to surpass pc sales

Tablet Sales to Surpass PC Sales

Check out the interesting piece on Business Insider.

Mar 29
The internet is real
icon1 Healy Jones | icon2 Innovation | icon4 03 29th, 2012| icon31 Comment »

BCG has just released a report explaining that the internet “industry” is 4.7% of the US economy. (Read about it on CNN here.)

The internet now contributed $684 billion to the US economy – more than the federal government, agriculture, etc. It also continues to rapidly grow, and this had implications for other sectors.

For example, the report also talks about the value of internet to small enterprises.”In multiple countries—including China, Germany, Turkey, and France—small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that have engaged actively with consumers on the Internet also have experienced three-year sales growth rates up to 22 percentage points higher than those of companies with low or no Internet presence, according to the report.” (Read this here.)

Go internet go!

Sep 29

As Amazon announced their new tablets they also mentioned a new browser they had built – Amazon Silk. Silk promises to be the fastest browser ever, especially on a mobile device, because it uses Amazon’s cloud services to do a lot of the backend computing. In other words, your little tablet won’t have to do a lot of requests over the network and then work some computationally (sort of) difficult stuff to render web pages as you browse using Silk.

It’s an interesting idea, and one that is described pretty well in this video by Amazon:

Amazon Silk Video

What Silk Means

So why is Amazon, a company that now sells devices, trying to make the workload on your device less? I mean, shouldn’t they want to follow Apple’s iCloud strategy and push the compute to the device so people feel like they need to buy a new one every year as it gets slower and slower?? Why pay all that money for compute costs in the cloud (OK, it’s not that expensive for Amazon since they own the cloud, but still, it’s not free)?

DATA

I was going to spend the time writing up how brilliant this was – but Chris Espinosa has already written it better than I ever could; check out his post on the topic:

The “split browser” notion is that Amazon will use its EC2 back end to pre-cache user web browsing, using its fat back-end pipes to grab all the web content at once so the lightweight Fire-based browser has to only download one simple stream from Amazon’s servers. But what this means is that Amazon will capture and control every Web transaction performed by Fire users. Every page they see, every link they follow, every click they make, every ad they see is going to be intermediated by one of the largest server farms on the planet. People who cringe at the data-mining implications of the Facebook Timeline ought to be just floored by the magnitude of Amazon’s opportunity here. Amazon now has what every storefront lusts for: the knowledge of what other stores your customers are shopping in and what prices they’re being offered there. What’s more, Amazon is getting this not by expensive, proactive scraping the Web, like Google has to do; they’re getting it passively by offering a simple caching service, and letting Fire users do the hard work of crawling the Web. In essence the Fire user base is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, scraping the Web for free and providing Amazon with the most valuable cache of user behavior in existence.

It’s awesome. And for sure worth the expense.

Now they just have to get people using the browser! I’m excited to try it out…

Finally, a funny:

Check out the recommended videos alongside the Amazon Silk Video

If I thought Google was smarter I’d think they’d put there there on purpose!

Aug 24

Tablet growth is going gangbusters! Bizrate Insights has a new report that shows tablet growth at a 51% CAGR for the next few years (I can’t find the piece, just a write up on online marketing trends here.) A slightly more dated chart shows how fast tablets are taking off:

Online Marketing Tends reports that:

“According to a new report by Forrester Research, in partnership with Bizrate Insights, the number of Americans owning tablet devices is forecast to increase at a compound annual growth rate of 51% between 2010 and 2015, while tablet commerce is expected to grow rapidly over the same period. 9% of surveyed online shoppers say they own a tablet device; among them, 78% own a smartphone as well, while 22% of tablet owners (2% of online shoppers) own a tablet only.”

That’s pretty quick. I’m starting to believe that the future will be dominated by tablets, at least as far as small business usage goes. And looks like Prasad Thammenini, my intrepid sometimes co-blogger, agrees. Here he is with a nifty new iPad2 keyboard that he just purchased:

Jul 24

Techcrunch has an article on how Microsoft’s online division has lost money for the past 22 quarters. That’s a long time.

The article takes a pretty negative tone toward Microsoft. The comments seem to indicate that people think Techcrunch is continuing it’s Google and Apple lovefest and is attacking Microsoft because of this bias.

Regardless of TC’s bias towards or against Microsoft, I think the piece could be written about Google – if you replaced “MSFT” with “Google” and replaced the highly profitable “Windows and Office Divisions” with “Adwords” and replaced the loss making “online division” with “everything else at Google.” Basically, Google is still struggling to make money in other divisions that are not search and ad driven.

The battle between Google and Microsoft isn’t a battle for sissies. They aren’t fighting for second place – they are trying to destroy each other. Google doesn’t mind losing money in Chrome (OS or browser), Android, or Docs if it hurts Microsoft where their chief source of cash flow is (i.e. Office and Windows). Microsoft is willing to lose lots of money to try to make Google’s primary source of income, online search/advertising, hurt. They each also understand the importance of the other’s core divisions, and they both want a real piece. Disrupting either is going to be hard and expensive.

That’s the reason each is willing to have their profitable divisions subsidize their losses in the other divisions.

So, is this an opportunity or threat for startups trying to compete in or around these spaces?

Well, it’s a little of each, IMHO. It’s an opportunity, since if you manage to get traction in either area you have two fight-to-the-death potential acquiring companies. But it’s a HUGE threat too, because if you choose to enter one of these areas you are competing with two huge titans who are willing to make economically insane losses to get marketshare. For example – let’s say you are trying to do an email startup (this is just an example). You are competing against two companies that likely have a very different business model than you can afford. They just want users/marketshare of their email services, and the revenue and margins are not particularly relevant. So if your business model requires making money… well, you could be in a really tough spot.

To compete against either you need either an enormously better understanding of the customer, translated into a massively better product… or amazingly deep pockets.

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