Startable – Healy Jones’ & Prasad Thammineni’s Blog

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!

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:

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.

Wow, Google is ready to move people to updated browsers! This is great for the online world, and will hopefully get people off of ancient browsers like IE6 and whatnot.

According to multiple Google blogs:

For web applications to spring even farther ahead of traditional software, our teams need to make use of new capabilities available in modern browsers… Older browsers just don’t have the chops to provide you with the same high-quality experience.
For this reason, soon Google Apps will only support modern browsers. Beginning August 1st, we’ll support the current and prior major release of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari on a rolling basis. Each time a new version is released, we’ll begin supporting the update and stop supporting the third-oldest version.
As of August 1st, we will discontinue support for the following browsers and their predecessors: Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 7, and Safari 3. In these older browsers you may have trouble using certain features in Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs and Google Sites, and eventually these apps may stop working entirely.

This is pretty kick butt. It’s time to get people off of older browsers. Supporting old school browsers is a tremendous pain for online services like OfficeDrop. Hopefully the 80 billion users of Google products will upgrade. I wonder what percent of Google users are early adopters who are already using the most updated versions vs the general internet population using outdated browsers. Only 2% of OfficeDrops cloud content management visitors are on IE6, for example. I wonder what it is for the GOOG.

There are two reports out today, one about RIMs recent disappointing quarter and one predicting that Apple will have a billion-quintillion dollars in revenue in a couple of years.

I think the difference boils down to apps. Apple like apps. RIM doesn’t think they are the future.

But it doesn’t really matter what the companies want, what matters is what consumers want. And consumers want apps. The Yankee Group’s research says “We now expect that U.S. consumers will download almost 1.6 billion apps in 2010, and that those numbers will swell to more than 6 billion by 2014. Even more impressive, paid app revenue will swell from $1.6 billion this year to more than $11 billion in 2014.”

I still think Wired was right, the web is dead. Apps are the way to go.

I was recently quoted in a couple of places on how OfficeDrop treats customers, and also about how we made some mistakes when we first started the OfficeDrop Document Management Blog. It’s fun to speak with other bloggers and let them know some of the things I’m learning at OfficeDrop as we grow the business here! I can’t believe how much more effective I am today than I was just one year ago.

Ways to Keep Your Long-Term Customers Happy by Zendesk – For SaaS businesses, existing paying customer retention id critical, and OfficeDrop tries hard to keep our existing customers happy with our service. The Zendesk blog post talks about how we ask “best customers for advice and involves them in big decisions.” And also “OfficeDrop also involves existing customers in new product development, in the form of beta testing. “They are excited to see the new stuff that we are cooking up, and it is fun and exciting for them to be the very first people to try new things.””

Top 5 Mistakes to Avoid on Your Company’s Blog on Mashable – This is a great post on Mashable about simple mistakes company’s make when they start blogging. We are quoted about how we originally did not effectively link back to the OfficeDrop main site when we first started blogging, but there are some other great tips on here about how to be a better blogger.

I keep meaning to publish a big post on everything that I learned at SXSW… but I’m way too busy trying to cope with the integration ideas we got from potential partners to write!  So I guess that’s a sign of SXSW success!

Anyway, one of the great things that came out of the event was hanging with a lot of great startupers from all over the nation – and getting to talk about what I’ve been working on. Here is a cool video shot by Chase from Bostinnovation on OfficeDrop’s ScanDrop Software:

I recently posted a piece on OnStartups on the topic of growing an internet company outside of Silicon Valley. I truly believe that this is possible, but recent history shows that a huge percentage of internet companies are based in the San Francisco Bay Area. This bums me out, as an internet guy out here in Boston… Here is my 8 tips for growing an internet company NOT in San Francisco.

I’m very pleased to announce that OfficeDrop has launched our first app in the new Mac App Store. ScanDrop Mac Scanner Software connects your Mac’s scanner directly with popular cloud storage provides like Google Docs, Evernote and OfficeDrop’s own cloud filing system. I’ll keep you updated as to how this new distribution channel does for us, especially since this is a paid download. Go to our listing here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/scandrop/id412518240?mt=12

We are launching the app for $1.99 in the app store, although we “pre-released” ScanDrop with a great piece of press from Lifehacker last Friday. You can also learn more about ScanDrop on our Mac Scanner Software page.

Building a startup is hard. I’m very lucky to have a solid group of entrepreneurs who I get to hang out with and share trials, tribulations, war stories and triumphs.

One of those peers, Brian Balfour, has just written a great blog post on the importance of peer groups for startup executives. Check it out!