The 4 waves of the PC era - what's coming next?

I have been noodling for a while over this post by Om Malik: http://bit.ly/bNwuUP

WHAT’S HAPPENED? WHAT’S COMING?

I wanted to throw my own oar into the pond on this one, as it’s a topic I’ve been thinking a lot about over the last year or two, as we’ve turned our vague ideas about where “Apps” were going into a beta-product allied to a bold vision for the future.

You can slice and dice trends in many ways. The truth is there’s something fractal about the nature of trends - the closer you look at them the more they splinter into smaller and smaller fibres of subtrends, movements, products etc. People are eager to jump from the neatly titled Web 2.0 into something they can call Web 3.0 while labeling the dot.com boom some sort of Web 1.0. This is fundamentally wrong because the web was only part of why so many people suddenly wanted the Internet - indeed for most just getting an email address was the initial intent. All schemas to describe the complexity of technological progress are inherently flawed in their omission and simplification, but I have found it helpful is to think of four waves.

Yahoo! Mail - can it be saved?

It pains me to see Yahoo! becoming the butt of jokes in the start-up community, particularly as for so many of us they were an inspiration, once upon a time.  But, sadly, common wisdom round these parts is that they’re walking dead, losers, a place good companies go to die.  I sincerely hope they can claw back from that.

Like almost everyone who’s been online for more than a decade (two decades for me) I have a Yahoo! Mail account.  But I hate using it.  It stays alive as the repository for old messages I don’t want to lose and as a place where various signups and memberships still contact me.  Indeed I use it still as an address for signups I fear may be spammy.

I was wondering how Yahoo! Mail could win me back as a user.  It won’t replace GMAIL but maybe they could still be a genuine secondary mail account for me.  The conclusion I came to is simple.  If they provided a good tool to easily sort through and file old messages, weed out spam or unwanted membership communications, it could regain utility.  I don’t mean wading through page after page and trying to sort and select and delete.  There must be a better way to do that.

I cannot be the only person who looks at 17,000 unread emails and closes down again thinking it’s not worth fighting with.

Live blogging Startup Lessons Learned Conference #sllconf

Good breakfast done. Eric Reis up on stage….

…great opening - Eric Reis dismantling all of the myths and misconceptions around lean startup

• lean startup is about learning
• lean startup doesn’t mean small
• lean startup doesn’t mean cheap
• lean startup doesn’t mean bootstrapped
• lean startup does mean disruptive

All serious entrepreneurs should apply for Open Angel Forum

It’s been a while with our heads down at Team AppWhirl, with no time for blogging as we got the product out the door.  But there couldn’t be a better time to get back to blogging the startup than when reflecting on Friday night’s Open Angel Forum Silicon Valley.

As a regular listener to This Week In Startups, and as supporters of Jason Calacanis’ drive against pay-to-pitch (some would say exploitative) investment forums we have followed the Open Angel Forum.  We applied to present to the OAF Silicon Valley.  After being shortlisted we interviewed with Tyler and were accepted in.  It was a very efficient process and respectful of Founders’ time.  We were thrilled.

Why the games industry has less to fear than the music & TV industries, in moving online

I was intrigued by the title of this article - skeptical of gaming following other media online.  But I think it doesn’t follow that because the TV & Music industries have done so badly that gaming will struggle to find their feet too.

The reason gaming will work in a move online is that it’s gaming developers themselves doing it, the creative is moving online.  With TV and music big intermediaries sat between the creative and the consumer.  This made them slower to respond, more brittle.  They broke.  They were too slow to respond to customer demand and ended up losing control of the consumer (in music’s case to either piracy or Apple).

The Lady Gaga Post

I love Lady Gaga.  I didn’t want to at first.  I was expecting another frothy pop bimbette. But I was wrong. Lady Gaga is a performance artist the likes we haven’t seen since perhaps Madonna in her most creative phase.

She understands her audience to an unparalleled degree - you’re not telling me the refrain “I’ll follow you until you love me, papa” is a lyrical accident in Paparazzi, appealing as it does on a subliminal level to a broad swathe of fans with difficult parental relationships.  The blatant sexuality of Poker Face is in line with the attitudes of these times, as is the ten minute soft core lesbian porn that is the Telephone video.  (Again, a groundbreaking masterpiece of pop art.)

Entrepreneurs Collapse The Wave Function

I’ve come to a satisfying analogy when it comes to an important core-skill of entrepreneurs.  True entrepreneurs collapse the wave function.

I am a physicist by training.  But long before I ever studied Physics at the University of Leeds I was gripped by quantum mechanics.  The picture of the world painted by quantum mechanics, and verified to incredible levels of precision, is famously counter-intuitive.

In quantum mechanics everything exists in all possible states at the same time.  One represents everything, even the reader, by a “wave function” which takes into account all of these possible states.  It’s only when one takes a measurement that anything takes on a single observable value.  This observation itself “collapses the wave function” from a particle being in all possible states simultaneously into being in one specific observable state.  The example ofSchrodinger’s cat is often trotted out here, the poor beast trapped in a box, subjected to a random event that can either kill or not kill the cat, causing it to exist in a peculiar limbo until the box is open and the dead/notdead cat is observed.