MADE IN DETROIT

The No-Reply Email

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 12:45:00 -0400

Why do startups insist on sending mail from a “no-reply” email address?

I’ve sent a lot of email (first at the admissions office at UChicago, next on the Automated Email team at Amazon, and now at AppStoreHQ) and the only time I think it was justified was in Amazon’s marketing mail. Their volume is so large that it’d be very, very difficult to sift through the noise.

For everyone else, though, I see no reason for no-reply email addresses. Make it easy for your users and customers to contact you, especially after you’ve just reached out to them. Allow — even invite — them to respond to your message with a simple click of Reply.

I know you don’t want to have to deal with the bounces (you should really be handling these anyways) and the Out of Offices, but those are so easy to ignore with a couple filters.

If you want to provide the absolute best possible customer experience, email is a great place to start. Make it easy to do so.

AppStoreHQ Blog: Yowza. Guess we struck a nerve with that iOS vs. Android post...

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 20:04:10 -0400

AppStoreHQ Blog: Yowza. Guess we struck a nerve with that iOS vs. Android post...:

Last week we published a report on the current state of the ‘superphone’ developer ecosystem, shining a light on the 1,400+ developers currently shipping apps for both iOS and Android (plus the Top 100 Cross-Platform Developers).

In restrospect it was pretty stupid to put this story…

Our post last week on the relative sizes of iOS and Android app developer communities got picked up all over the place, including Mashable, Engadget, TUAW, and VentureBeat. Very awesome!

appstorehq: Ian was the guest on This Week in Mobile last week,...

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 11:37:37 -0400

appstorehq:

Ian was the guest on This Week in Mobile last week, talking about mobile web (HTML5) apps. (The interview starts at 41:30.)

"Midway through the second half, while watching Howard rush the ball toward his mates, I thought..."

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 12:38:48 -0400

“Midway through the second half, while watching Howard rush the ball toward his mates, I thought about something Alexi Lalas told me more than a decade ago when he was playing for Calcio Padova in the Italian Serie A. Some players on that weak team would give up if they fell a goal behind on the road, Lalas said, but American athletes would never give up.”

- George Vecsey, NYTimes: A Foreign Game Looks Very American. If you missed my post yesterday about The American Spirit, read it now and you’ll see both Alexi and I learned the same thing about Americans.

The American Spirit

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 14:45:00 -0400

Fresh off his awesome 91st minute goal in the World Cup after another disallowed goal, Landon Donovan said to the ESPN reporter, “This team embodies what the American spirit is about. We had a goal disallowed the other night, We had another good goal disallowed tonight. But we just keep going. And I think that’s what people admire so much about Americans. And I’m damn proud.” Indeed, that is The American Spirit.

When I was young, I played a lot of soccer. I was decent (admittedly, the older I get, the better I was) and had the opportunity to play all across the country and the world. When I was 11 or 12 years old, I went on my first overseas soccer trip. A team of Americans — coached by a Dutch living in the US — spent two weeks in Holland playing mid-level youth teams (not the Ajax’s, but not bad teams either). Looking back on it, this trip taught me a lot about the US and The American Spirit.

One story in particular taught me a lot about America and what it really means to be American. It goes like this:

It was our first game, and we’re all very excited to be playing. So are the Dutch, our opponents. Unfortunately, the Dutch seemed to be more well-prepared for the game, as they took an early lead about 10 minutes into the game.

As they scored, my dad audibly groaned. Our coach heard him, turned, and replied “what are you upset about? Now we’re going to win 5-1.” He continued, “Watch. Our boys will get each other up for the game now, and it’ll be 1-1 within a few minutes. It’s just the way American kids work.”

Sure enough, we started rallying each other to get back in the game and just like that, it was 1-1.

Then our coach turned to my dad and said, “Now watch, the Dutch will be deflated, the Americans will smell blood, and it’s all over.” Within a few minutes, it was 2-1 and the final score ended up exceeding our coach’s prediction at 6-1.

This type of story continued the entire trip. Games that were close — even scoreless — until the last 10 minutes or so would end up being won 4-0 by our team because we never gave up and once we saw an opening, we pounced.

The American Spirit is something really special. Never giving up and competing at 110% until the absolute final moment is what we’re all about, in sport and in life. Our team taught me this first-hand when I was young. Landon Donovan and the rest of Team USA re-taught me this today.

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos delivers graduation speech at...

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 22:33:25 -0400

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos delivers graduation speech at Princeton University. (full text)

Case Study: Selling a paid mobile web app (fortysquires)

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 14:09:00 -0400

I just made a large comment on Hacker News, in response to a post by Eric Meyer about App shopping and the potential for mobile web apps. I thought the comment warranted it’s own post as a quick case study in selling a mobile web app, so here it is.

In his post, Eric writes:

Except that’s only true because until now, nobody has launched an alternate store that offers web stack applications (WSAs). Maybe that’s because nobody is really building WSAs yet, at least not in numbers large enough to justify building a store to sell them. But then, maybe developers aren’t building WSAs because there’s no central place to sell them. The centralization of stores is at least as attractive to sellers as to shoppers.

We’ve done a poor job of raising awareness about this (I promise we’re trying to do better), but we’ve been quietly testing out using our store, AppStoreHQ, as a mobile web app store (what Eric calls WSAs). We also promote native iPhone and Android apps. I could go on and on about what we’re doing, why it’s cool, and how it helps developers, but Eric does a relatively good job of explaining that.

Instead, I’ll just give you a tidbit of information about how we’re _actually_ seeing this work in the wild: In short, it works. I developed — as the first test app available for purchase on our mobile web app platform — an app I named fortysquires. Fortysquires is just an HTML5 frontend to foursquare’s API. I open sourced it so developers could see just how simple it is to integrate with us.

What’s amazing about fortysquires is that I really didn’t expect to sell more than a few copies. It was built just to be a reference app. Remember, this is a paid ($0.99) app that competes against free, better-featured native apps for Android, iPhone, and BlackBerry. There’s also a mobile web version of foursquare (but it’s not HTML5 and doesn’t include geolocation, etc, like fortysquires does). I really thought I’d sell maybe two or three copies to developers looking to test out the workflow.

Yet, what I’m seeing is that real users are purchasing this app, everyday. Everyday, I sell at least one — but typically more like 3-4 — “copies” of the app. It’s not a gold mine, of course, but it far surpasses my expectations.

These are users from all over the world on all sorts of different devices. iPhone usage is >50%, but Android is close to 20%, and Symbian, Windows Mobile, Palm, and Samsung all make the cut. And 50% of visitors are from the US, 25% from western Europe, and the rest is divided between many, many countries like Canada, Australia, Israel, Russia, many Asian countries, Costa Rica, Maldives, Camaroon, Kyrgyzstan, etc. In all, more than 70 different countries have checked out fortysquires!

We have a lot of work to be done to build a great platform for mobile web app developers to sell their apps (read: we need to make distribution even better for developers, and the purchasing workflow even more frictionless for users, among many other things), but I think we’re well on our way to doing so. Mobile web apps may never compete head-to-head with native apps in certain categories (Games), but I think we’re proving that they can compete — and even win — when the ability to discover and purchase the apps is easy and the apps are great.

"6:52PM Walt: So last year we had a company called Siri, a search company… Steve: I..."

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 23:44:30 -0400

“

6:52PM Walt: So last year we had a company called Siri, a search company…

Steve: I wouldn’t call them a search company…

Walt: Well you bought this search…

Steve: They’re not a search company. They’re an AI company. We have no plans to go into the search business. We don’t care about it — other people do it well.

”

- Walt Mossberg interviews Steve Jobs at D8.

Apple will launch a search engine sometime in 2010-2011. You heard it here first.

"The CEO must set the context that every employee operates within. This context gives meaning to the..."

Mon, 31 May 2010 12:35:55 -0400

“The CEO must set the context that every employee operates within. This context gives meaning to the specific work that people do, aligns interests, enables decision-making and provides motivation. Well-structured goals and objectives contribute to the context, but they do not provide the whole story. More to the point, goals and objectives are not the story. The story of the company goes beyond quarterly or annual goals and gets to the hardcore question of why? Why should I join this company? Why should I be excited to work here? Why should I buy your product? Why should I invest in the company? Why is the world better off as a result of this company’s existence?”

- How Andreessen Horowitz Evaluates CEOs

"Princess is our staging environment. So why didn’t we just call it “staging”? Partly, that’s just..."

Thu, 20 May 2010 17:42:30 -0400

“Princess is our staging environment. So why didn’t we just call it “staging”? Partly, that’s just how we roll. We used to have an environment called “Staging” that was the last stop before code went live to everyone. However, it was not ideally set up; the first time your code would interact with actual production hardware was when you deployed. Princess uses production data stores, our production network and production hardware. In order to make a clean mental break from the old way, one of our rad engineers, Eric Fixler, came up with “Princess”.”

- Etsy Code As Craft: Quantum of Deployment

Funny, I was just telling our team today about how I don’t like staging servers. Instead, I prefer what Amazon called “pre-prod” — a collection of servers that touched production data, but weren’t visible to actual users.

Apparently Etsy believes the same.

Google Previews Chrome Web Store — An App Store For The Web

Wed, 19 May 2010 15:39:38 -0400

Google Previews Chrome Web Store — An App Store For The Web:

Google is readying a web app store. Web apps are the future, both on the desktop and on mobile.

This dovetails extremely nicely into what we’re doing with AppStoreHQ and our mobile web app store (see an example with fortysquires, an HTML5 frontend to foursquare). I don’t think this is a killer of what we’re doing, rather a validation of it. This seems to be focused more on desktop web apps, while we’re focused solely on mobile web apps.

Attended Notre Dame’s graduation yesterday, where Brian...

Mon, 17 May 2010 09:37:31 -0400

Attended Notre Dame’s graduation yesterday, where Brian Williams gave a commencement address. He was fantastic: funny, serious, and inspiring. Watch it.

foursquare: A redesigned app gallery

Wed, 12 May 2010 23:18:10 -0400

foursquare: A redesigned app gallery:

One of our goals since our API first launched was to create a space where we could feature your apps and make them easy for users to find. We did this with the first version of our app gallery, but soon realized that it wasn’t flexible enough for you.

With that in mind, we went back and…

Neat little app directory from foursquare. I added fortysquires.

mobilehtml5: CBS has confirmed that they plan to bring all...

Sat, 08 May 2010 17:08:54 -0400

mobilehtml5:

CBS has confirmed that they plan to bring all CBS.com video content to iPad via HTML5 format by the fall television season.

When we were looking at the iPad as a separate device, it had a lot more similarities to a PC in our mind…So for us, we wanted to make sure that video was available through HTML5 on the iPad first.

Via TiPB, via NewTeeVee.

"In my almost 92 years on this Earth, the good Lord has blessed me with this journey. And the blessed..."

Tue, 04 May 2010 21:46:59 -0400

“In my almost 92 years on this Earth, the good Lord has blessed me with this journey. And the blessed part of this journey is it’s going to end here in the great state of Michigan. I deeply appreciate the people of Michigan. I love their grit. I love the way they face life. I love the family values they have. And you Tigers fans are the greatest fans of all, no question about that.”

- Thank you, Ernie.

RIP, Ernie Harwell. You will forever be the voice of the Tigers...

Tue, 04 May 2010 21:25:21 -0400

RIP, Ernie Harwell. You will forever be the voice of the Tigers to me and our memories will last a lifetime. But more than just a broadcaster, you were an all around classy Detroiter and Michigander. My thoughts and prayers are with you and your family.

KISSMetrics running an AdSense ad that is just an iFrame for...

Mon, 03 May 2010 13:42:26 -0400

KISSMetrics running an AdSense ad that is just an iFrame for their Facebook Like Page… very interesting.

@hiten — let us know how this goes.

Working away from work?

Mon, 03 May 2010 13:17:00 -0400

go:

If you are gainfully employed, typically there is an office that goes along with your job. A place you show up and drink the coffee, and talk at the water cooler, check emails, and generally get a myriad of tasks done.

It’s a brave new world and some are choosing (either personally or their companies are asking them) to telecommute. With mobile tech and the beauty of Wi-Fi, almost any cafe can become a work space. Perhaps you set up shop in a nearby cafe and get work done there. You could even make a new public place your office each day.

It gets us to thinking: Do you feel you get more done outside of your office? Do you prefer to work in public places like coffeehouses? Also, give us the good stuff: Where’s the best cafe to work in? Other public venue? Tell us about it on Tumblr or email us at go@latimes.com

Photo: Working outside the office. Laptop owner uses Wi-Fi at a cafe in Pasadena. Credit: Lori Kozlowski / Los Angeles Times

For the last year or so I’ve been working almost exclusively from home in LA. There are massive differences between working in an office and working from home, but I’ve found I can be very productive once I get in the groove.

In LA, I’ve found the most dependable cafes to work at are Coffee Beans. They’re commerical which is meh, but they’re less commercial than Starbucks at least. They always have good wifi and they usually have a good amount of outlets.

Aside from cafes and creating a good space in your own home, I think one of the most overlooked spots to work from is the library. I spend a good chunk of time at the Los Feliz branch of the LA Library and at the Santa Monica Library.

A couple questions on Facebook ads: Do they work? More...

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 16:10:26 -0400

A couple questions on Facebook ads:

Do they work?
More specifically, do they work for jobs? Because I’m seeing lots of those.
Is there really no way to check for past employment (assuming these folks are just seeing me in the Amazon network, but I thought FB did away with networks?)?

Inside Founder’s Co-op: Whiskey, dogs and...

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 14:29:06 -0400

Inside Founder’s Co-op: Whiskey, dogs and entrepreneurs

Free shot of Maker’s Mark to first person who can tell from the quick snap of me what t-shirt I’m wearing (void if you were around me that day). ;)