innonate

I’m a bit biased here (I used to consult with NewsHour through my work with National Public Media) — and I’ll write more about effectively using Twitter in forthcoming blog posts — but I wanted to point people to this recent tweet by @NewsHour.

Most media organizations do two things wrong on Twitter.

They use their Twitter accounts to only to broadcast links to their stories.

They act like the Twitter account is somehow the voice of the outlet itself, rather than the voice of a real employee (who, in turn, is a real person).

From the start, NewsHour has done the right thing on Twitter. Not only do they tell people to watch other outlets when it’s best for their followers (see above referral to CSPAN, as well as this referral to NPR) but they also tweet with a human voice.

I still remember this tweet from the Democratic Convention, when Online NewsHour Anna Shoup went on the convention floor (shortly after I had been hanging out with the NewsHour crew in one of the media tents (photo right).

floor access closed unless you have a seat. I don’t. Outside rim s till packed

That was Anna talking. Not some bot.

That’s “getting” Twitter.

Silicon Alley Insider recently issued a challenge:

Despite strong traffic and passionate users, Digg’s revenues blow. During the first three quarters of 2008, Digg saw about $6.4 million on 30 million monthly uniques and lost $2 million. Yuck.

Today we’re launching the Fix Digg’s Miserable Business Contest.

The winning submission will ideally include steps to implement the plan, revenue projections based on real numbers, helpful visuals (like a deck) and clean prose. We’ll judge submissions based on their creativity, clarity and plausibility.

The prize? … We’ll personally pass the winners’ plan and resume to our friends at Digg: CEO Jay Adelson and founder Kevin Rose.

Contest? I love contests! (I also love proposing really smart revenue models.)

Anyway, today was the deadline to submit, so I took an hour and I threw up some ideas I’ve been thinking about in an intentionally cheesy-looking Power Point (see above or here).

Lo and behold, my deck was one of the top five selected by Alley Insider today.

Now, I don’t generally try to sound too headstrong, but my idea is really the only reasonable one up there; so, when you vote (click through to vote), do Digg a favor and vote for my deck (#1).

But in all seriousness, my idea for Digg — to sell in-line “Sponsored Article” listings on a CPC or eCPM basis — is a really good one: not because it’s my idea (I refer to it as the “Techmeme Model,” so clearly I don’t think it’s my idea) or because I don’t think Digg hasn’t thought of it (how could they not), but because I think it’s the right thing to do, not only for Digg their bottom line, but also for Digg’s users!

Going back aways, my friend Charlie posted a idea for a service to “Grease This Post.” In the article, he wrote:

How great would it be if, right next to the publish button, there was another button that said, “Do you want to invest $10 in driving relevant traffic to this post?”  The money could be used to not only do search placement, but sponsored placement as “Suggested sponsored links” in front of bloggers talking about the same things.

Amen, Charlie.

If Digg allowed brands, publishers, and indy bloggers to “grease” their posts and press releases, it would not only command super-high eCPMs for Digg, but also provide a new tool for Digg’s users.

And Digg doesn’t have to allianate their users in the process!

Back at FOWA Miami 2008, Matt Mullenweg of Wordpress explained that Wordpress does put advertising on its publishers’ pages, but because they only target infrequent visitors, most users never see them.

With Digg, one could assume that only 10% of pageviews come from registered users, and only 1% from hardcore power users (90/10/1 is a common ratio for User Generated Content (UCG) sites like Digg).

What’s special about Digg, is that while that fat 90% of visitors isn’t necessarily registered, they are there to discover new content.

This puts Digg is a great position to power paid discovery for publishers and brands and reach a huge majority of users (visitors) without alienating the notoriously Digg-is-a-temple set of power users.

Anyway, I think it’s a great model. To start, Digg would have to build a simple tool for folks to create and target ads with. It should be self-service to begin with and Digg should experiment with CPM and CPC models to see what works best for the advertisers.

Put this one in the “Low-Brow” category…

My friend Naveen’s and my iPhone app, Drunk Dialer, just got named by Yahoo! one of the “Weirdest iPhone apps” (and then got picked up in PSFK). (Hat tip Michael)

Yeah — it’s weird. But it’s also fun (everyone who tries it giggles while trying it, which is a good sign I think). And it’s also a way to learn more about the economics of putting applications in the iPhone application store.

Here’s the back story:

Before I left for the Obama campaign in October, Naveen and I were getting coffee and got to talking about iPhone applications. What fascinated were the applications which put only a very light layer on top of  the iPhone’s APIs to create admittedly stupid apps.

What really fascinated us was that people — including us — were buying them… in droves!

So, Naveen and I started brainstorming, and, when we came up with an idea, we ran back to his apartment, set a two hour timer, and emerged with “Drunk Dialer:” a phone number dialing application where the buttons jump around as you move. The name “Drunk Dialer” refers to the fact that if you’re drunk, it’s probably harder to keep the phone still and hit the key you’re aiming for, thus making it harder for drunk people to make phone calls (which, unless it’s for a cab, they should be doing).

The interesting thing, however, is not so much the applications as much as the economics.

When the application got accepted to the store, I posted a link on my Tumblr account and Naveen sent a message on Twitter saying that it was available.

Since then, before getting press about it today, it had earned about $150.

Not much.

However, we built the application in only a few hours. And, now that it’s in the store, we don’t have to — though we probably will — touch it ever again, and it will still produce revenue for us with zero operating cost.

So what are iPhone application economics? Tough to say so far, but it’s trending towards $40/hr of development, and — after today — it’s only going to get better.

It’s official!

On Wednesday, I’ll be flying to Las Vegas and working with Avner the Boxee team to introduce the world to the love of my living room.

Luckily, I’ll also have some free time to wander the halls, so in the spirit of my “Office Hours” (which I’ll miss this week) I’d like to meet readers of my blog who may be at the show.

If you’ll be at CES (or just happen to be in Vegas) contact me and let’s try to set something up!

People who follow me on Twitter know that most of the links I send have been shortened by Bitly. However, when “Tweeting” a link from my iPhone, it’s generally difficult to get the URL in my Twitter client to share, let alone shorten it.

Here’s how I solved the problem, connecting Bit.ly, Twitter, and my iPhone so I can send the cool links I find while reading mobilly.

For those of you who don’t know, Bit.ly is a NY-based and Betaworks-incubated URL shortening service. Because of it’s rich click-through stats, it’s simply a tool I could not live without (more on why tracking click-throughs in Twitter is important in a forthcoming blog post).

Step 1

Add the bit.ly bookmarklet to Safari

Step 2

Sync your Safari bookmarks with your iPhone (I use MobileMe so it does it automagically, but you can also do this manually on the “Info” tab in iTunes).

Step 3

Go back to the page you want to share in your iPhone’s browser.

Step 4

Go into your bookmarks and click the “bit.ly” bookmark.

Step 5

Congrats! You now have a shortened link.

Step 6

Type your message, click Sign-in/Post (where you’ll have to enter your Twitter credentials).

And there you have it! It’s a great way to use bitly on your iPhone!

Hey folks,

Remember that pitch I did for Boxee?

Now, if I want to go to Vegas, I have to be voted in.

I thought I was done with all these elections!

If you have a second, please head over and vote for me (#3) ASAP (the poll is below all the videos).

Thanks,

Nate

Avner Ronen, CEO and Founder of Boxee, just posted an interesting offer on the Boxee Blog:

we have two locations at CES this year, and 4 of us are going to the show. but we could use some help and thought it may be best to have two users come with us to the show and help us tell people about boxee.

we will:

• take care of your flight + hotel (Jan 7th - 10th) + food/drinks during the show
• equip you with boxee shirts + schwag

you will:

• spend half the day with us giving boxee demos, telling people how boxee rocks, etc.
• spend the other half walking the show and checking out all the cool gadgets

Not a bad deal, eh?

I’d love to go to CES and I love Boxee. So, here’s exactly why I’d shill for Boxee at CES (starting with a brief video tour of the system):

I truly believe that Boxee is the future of media in your living room.

“The future?” you ask. Sure, I know I said the AppleTV was the future of the living room before — and I still believe it was the first, best way to consume user-generated and web-distributed content in a lean-back environment — but for the following reasons, Boxee changes everything, and has the opporunity to become, as Fred Wilson describes it, the Mozilla “Firefox of media center software.”

Lean Back (in your living room), Open (on anything), and Watch (what you want)

Boxee rocks because it’s open source, cross platform, egoless, and in your living room.

Being cross platform is important because it puts the software in your living room to begin with; it’s installed on my AppleTV, but could just as well be on anything else next or attached to your TV: a MacMini, an old Windows machine, a Linux box, or even a Linux embedded display.

Meanwhile, Boxee is an open source application (based on another open source project, called XBMC). Being open source means any developer can jump in and build add-ons for their Boxee installation and create a distribution of the software with their modifications (eventually there will be a marketplace for the individual modules, I imagine). This matters because the Boxee team has limited resources — as does any single entity — but if a niche group wants to modify Boxee to fit their needs, they can; and then they can share those modifications with you, in your living room.

Anyway, with a model like that — providing the platform and getting out of the way — it’s no wonder they were able to put Hulu (hence Fox, CBS, movie studios, etc), CNN, CBS, Comedy Central, and a dozen other top distributers (not to mention the hundreds of thousands of independent podcasts) on their system in record time.

Simply put, Boxee gives me the content I like where I like it; and, because of their open model, they’ll be able to deliver that satisfaction going forward.

Social Discovery = The New Channel Surfing

Lastly, I believe Boxee ushers in a new era of channel surfing.

Since the invention of the remote control, we’d sit our our couches, remote in hand, pressing the up button and down button rapidly to find new content.

With Boxee, social discovery is the new channel surfing, because you can build out your social network and see what interesting content your friend may have recently been viewing. Instead of seeing “what’s on” that your cable package provides, you can see “what’s on” that your friends are viewing. With recomendations, you can even see what your friends think you should see, all from your remote control.

Needless to say, but TechWagCrunch just doen’t get it.

Today, my friend Darren Herman announced the launch of the “Herman blackbook” New Platforms Fund, a new fund for people developing applications on top of platforms like Twitter, the iPhone and Boxee.

As Darren decribes it, “New Platforms Fund investments will range from $1-3,000 each,” which is something TC took a stab at.

But I’m excited.

I see this new fund being just what the doctor ordered for hackers who have stayed up at night, building a cool app on top of these platforms, and needing to put the final touches on their work to take it to market.

It’s a common problem, as I can’t tell you how many of my developer friends I know who have built something and — because they haven’t had a few thousand dollars sitting their to invest in a great design or finishing touches — let it sit in alpha on their harddrive or on their phone.

What more, successfully bringing something to market isn’t something we’ve all done in the past. Darren has.

In short, Darren’s announcement is great for developers, great for New York, and great for the industry. He’s filling an important void, and I can’t wait to see which companies take him up on his services.

Here’s a 2009 predictions post like no other.

Charlie O’Donnell asked a few of his colleagues, including yours truly, to send him 7-second predictions for ‘09.

I’ll write more on this later, but mine was “2009 will be the year of location-based everything” — a theme you’ll see a lot of from me, and the theme of February’s NY Tech Meetup.

There are a ton of other very interesting predictions, so watch the video below (or by clicking through to Charlie’s post above):

Driving from Point Pleasant, Ohio to Felicity, Ohio on Election Day to get out more voters. Clermont Country — the place I grew up and which voted 34% for Barack Obama (up from 29% for John Kerry) — is where I spent the month of October as the Deputy Field Organizer for Barack Obama’s Campaign for Change.