Bubba Murarka

I was surprised when Apple announced there would be a 20 dollar upgrade fee to get the new sweetness on my iPhone.  I felt like this guy does.

But then I thought about it and started to wonder…

Perhaps this is a test to see market reaction and upgrade rate for charging across all portable Apple devices.  I mean, they get ya with a 100 or so bucks for OS updates on laptops / desktops every year (or two) so why not for ipods and iphones.  I mean have you ever seen a phone get so much better since coming to market?  All that development work ain’t cheap to get done.   

I have no data, but my gut tells me that future upgrades of the iPhone software will no longer be free if no one makes a stink about the iPod touch charge.   Should we start a facebook group to protest?

Fred Wilson, Brad Feld & others just made an investment in Zynga, a social network game network with no destination site.  Fred outlines the thesis on the Union Square Venture Blog. 

It seems like folks are aligning to one of two beliefs for social network apps:

• They are another distribution channel with low cost to build but can result in massive impressions / awareness [e.g. an app is a measurable meme].  Folks like context optional take this thought to the extreme by building branded applications for others as their core business. 
• They are the future of the web and destination sites are thing of the past [e.g. get on board now & grab land before everyone else gets clear / confident].  Folks like Zynga & Mesmo are making this bet and now lots of VCs are now too [seed funds have for a while as a measured risk]. 

I guess there is a third belief that I still hear from time to time: social networks platforms / apps are all bullshit.  But not that often anymore. 

For now, I am the “distribution channel” camp because I have seen the overriding need to build dead simple apps to get any kind of meaningful viral growth.  That coupled with the lack of a meaningful way to make $$$$ makes it hard for me to take the leap of faith.  

How about you?

An old friend of mine and his partner just released a rich IM client that works with your facebook friends list.  It already got written up on Techcrunch and they’ve been making it better and better every hour since!  Check it out at www.social.im when you’ve got a chance! 

I’ve had a mixed experience with my Blackberry Curve (8300) over the past 6 months.  My favorite aspect of the Curve has been the battery life…I end up charging it about once every 3 days!  The keyboard is pretty darn good & the voice quality is legit.  However the browser sucks, the sync software sucks, and the UI was foreign to me.  Worse, I could never get the Facebook Blackberry App to work on it nor could I get the new Google Maps app with cell phone triangulation to install. 

Today I finally got around to checking if there were any firmware upgrades (not an easy task…RIM, get some help with your site design / UX) and hit pay-dirt (hint: you need to download is this file: 8300M_PBr4.2.2_rel301_PL2.4.0.73_A4.2.2.166_AT&T.exe).  And yes, you have to fill out a freaking form before to download and no, it is not clear what to download.  Anyhow, once you make it past all the hoops you can install it the upgrade but it isn’t clear if you can do an update in place or wipe the device. 

I had a brickbreaker game on level 5 with 7 lives already stored up so I was inclined to try to do an update in place.  But, then I realized how much cruft there was on the device and decided to sacrifice the potential high score for a faster, better, slicker device. 

Wait for about an hour for the update to finish and the device to re-boot.  Why it takes so long?  No freaking clue!

Go install the following software:

• Facebook Blackberry App(this links installs installs from a PC via an ActiveX control)
• Google Mobile Software(pick your posins - maps & mail)
• Opera Mini (jury is still out)

Results:  Yahtzee!  3 hours in with this new config is looking good…real good!

Update: I tried embedding the video but it doesn’t seem to work.  Here is the direct link.  

It is long, but at least I now know there are people that like Street Fighter more then me!

Over the past 3 months I’ve been focused on brainstorming and researching different ideas to start a company around.  When I left my job in October without knowing THE idea I was going  after I received a wide variety of reactions.  They boiled down to:

• Yoiks. Are you nuts?
• Wow. That is ballsy / crazy…good luck…let me know how it goes!
• Awesome!  That is the best way to do it. 

Emotionally, I’ve jumped into the first bucket a few times over the past 3 months, but I did what I did because I believe it is the best way for me to actually succeed in my goal.  So in parallel with coming up and researching potential ideas I’ve been trying to codify what makes an idea worth going after.  I admit this is a bit of mental foreplay, but I think it will ultimately help me make a better decision.  Plus it is a great conversation topic with other entrepreneurs that are either a) still defining their idea or b) re-factoring their original idea because it isn’t working (which is not uncommon…one of the reasons I was willing to jump without THE idea). 

I’ve come across a few good blog posts from others on idea criteria that I thought were worth passing along:

• Peter Rip outlines 6 criteria he used with Munjal Shah
• Ev Williams outlines 7 points of evaluation he is kicking around

There are actually a ton of these types of posts a mere search away…all with contradictory opinions!  I’d love to get pointers to any you find particularly interesting as it’ll add to the mental fodder. 

And yes, I’m going to cop out and not write mine out - the links above do a much better job that I could right now.  Happy Holidays!

In my last post I shared raw notes from The Stanford Facebook Class final presentation.  The class got some press when it was announced and the apps built by the class got 16 million installs and ~1M daily active users in 10 weeks.   I cleaned up the previous post a bit more but also wanted to follow up with some takeaways:

• The class was more than facebook apps: it was about metric based software design & iteration.  Folks who have worked on consumer web stuff should be familiar with all of this (instrumentation, a/b testing, etc) but what a great think to learn while still in school
• The class resulted in some quality research: Mike Weiksner shared a taxonomy and analysis of the types of facebooks apps / strategies.  Good read for sure!
• The class was really about entrepreneurship: hopefully other universities will learn from what transpired and create a fast pace class that encourages entrepreneurism. 

I do wish I had a clear takeaway on how to go from a bunch of installs into a lasting business…but hopefully that is what Phase II of the class will explore…and find. 

Updated 12/17: Corrected some typos. Also check out follow up post here.  

I attended the Finals presentation tonight as did ~500 of my closest friends. Seriously, it was amazing scene with gobs of people - mad props to everyone who helped pull the night off. Below are slightly cleaned up  notes from the presentations. I was hoping to live blog, but couldn’t get onto the wi-fi network. Not a bad thing as the info came fast and furious since each team had only 2.5 minutes to present…and they were strict about that. Luckily the presentations there was a bunch of mingling time to talk with the students and other attendees (vcs, entrepreneurs, and big company folk from google, msft, yahoo and of course facebook).

In the interest of sleep, I’ll post some takeways, links to the apps and links to some of the interesting research from PhD student Mike Weiksner on Friday. If you read the below and have questions please leave me a comment and I’ll try to clarify my frantic notes (or issue a mea culpa for miss understanding stuff).  Note, apologize in advance for poor English, formating, and general lossyness of the notes - comments fixing any of these issues would be much appreciated!

Introduction

BJ Fogg -> Persuasion since 1993 @ Stanford
“Facebook is #1 persuasive technology in 2007, ever”
Mass Interpersonal Persuasion
Global/ scalable, everyday people - interacting as friends, subtle dynamics with big powerful effects
Class site: http://captology.stanford.edu

Dave McClure
Metrics philosophy - AARRR!
-acquisition
-activation
-retention
-referral
-revenue

Use a Conversion Dashboard
Design apps by hypothesizing about customer life cycle through AARRR

Class App Stats
Total Installs Across all apps: 16M!
Daily Active Users: 925K!
Top 10 apps ~ $10M according to Adonomics
Conservative valuation $1M (discount for facebook hype)

Overall Class Metrics
Users who came back and session time (deep engagement)

First 5 teams -> engagement wins

PHOTOGRAPH
Photo Viewer
4.1B Photos on Facebook, 40% of click thru on FB
Facebook’s Photo App UI not so good
Wanted to bring collaborative filtering to photo browsing
Users interaction with app, but not viral
New hook is relevant invites (see app)

PICKMEUP
Lay a pick up line to garner a reaction
App is getting strong engagement, but no virility
Tried share your answers with friends -> good boost
Tried UI tweak to tell users to invite but don’t enforce -> big boost
Learnings: Include personal touch & tell how many invites to send

FUNNY IMAGES
Rate Pictures -> had high engagement, but no virility
Changed to send pictures to friends
Learnings: Forcing users to install worked and gave them a huge boast in adoption over last 7 days

GOOD EATS
Social Restaurants Recommendations
Focus on engagement, not viral (7.5 minutes of visit time, 6 ppv)
Deep plug into social graph (add more things to do, stickiness, new content)
Implemented a points system with different icons & leaderboard

LOVE CHILD
Competition to raise best virtual child
Aspirations:
Break into aysnc casual gaming
Custom branded digital goods
Mobile platform integration

Next 5 teams -> changing direction for success (persistence!)

DECLARE WAR to SHARE THE LOVE
Decided to focus on Love or War -> core idea was a gaming platform
Declare war -> simplified, invites only best friends (short attention span / time span, not many opportunities to generates news feeds)
Share the Love -> launched with little more than an invite box, 100K in 5 days, 750K to date
Learnings: keep it simple, appeal to emotion, use one action)

FUTURE MAKER to BLESS YOU
Future maker was like MASH -> too complicated
Bless you simple, with 1 action -> 15-25 visits a user over 30 days, 320K total users
Learnings: Simple, attractive, but not distracting

MATCHMAKER to SQUEEZE ME
Users can create matches between friends and get votes -> failed because feedback loop was broken
Tried to simplify -> 40K installs in first week
Learnings: App users receive and respond to invites in the same day

DODGEBALL to DODGEBALL
It’s nice to poke, but you want to throw blunt objects
Original app -> First class app to 10K users, two step process: had to pick ball than pick people on next screen
Revised app -> after get passed by other apps, dumbed down app because nobody reads rules, cleaner interface with all steps on one pages (long page design), page views from 2.1 to 4.5 (or something like that)
Learning: Tell users what to do increased invites from 4 to 11

WALL OF SHAME to YO MOMMA
Wall of Shame -> Socially linked hatred of objects / things, had pure invite screen without any actions
Yo Mamma is an app wrapped around invite process -> used single long page design
broad distribution in English countries
Learning: be positive, loving, flirtatious

Next 4 teams -> ???

POLLS
Trying to be useful
Found out people are lazy
People polls worked out
(dang, I got distracted by a text and missed a bunch of stuff)

COMPLIMENT BOX
Everyone likes a compliment
High motivation to engage
Learning: enforce virility, sex sells, less is more

SUPER STATUS
Enhanced status to include html, images, and comments on status -> Sharing small bits of information (microblogging)
“is” sucks, facebook should change this, why can’t I view status in better / richer UIs?

SCRIBBLED PHOTOS
Do mashups on top of Facebook photos to amass huge user generated data store
Got very creative submissions
high user engagement (4 mins)
Learning: Short attention span

—————————————————————————————-

Break with Johnny Hwin from Love Child team, AKA the next host of the Tonight Show

—————————————————————————————-

Next 5 teams -> Apps with a purpose (social good)

COLLEGES (w/ Kaplan)
Let’s make something useful -> college admittances feedback
Challenge: get students to input sat, gpa, and interested school
Partnered with Kaplan to get credibility and distribution in exchange for giving them a presence on facebook
Deep engagement (10 mins +)

SOCIAL BUZZ
Explore social context / expertise
Try to build connections through classification
More complex than other apps in class
Learning: optimize first user experience, use profile data, must provide content for user immediately

COMMONALITIES
Find out what you have in common with others -> mine user profiles to find matches
5 APV, 4 mins a user, 8.4 visits per user

GIVING TREE (w/ Kiva)
Microlending -> Really complex idea and tried to explain it to facebook
Learning: Second guess complex ideas

ONE VOICE
Get tv / videos into facebook, users become VJs
Make playlists on youtube and add it to facebook app
Learned: interaction between users, simple as possible, iterate as much as possible, find niche

SAVE THE RAIN FORREST
Test socially conscious app
Word game that takes ad revenue and donates it to save rainforest
8:28 minutes of usage a day
Learning: Users have sense of ownership for profile

BJ Fogg: What makes Facebook Tick - Survey of 80 Students

Convenient & respectable way to:

feel connected to existing friends
stay updates on existing friends
get info about new people
start $ build relationship
express your identity and views

Mike Weiksner: 6 patterns of success for Facebook apps
Analysis of top 100 + classroom learnings

Native patterns:
provoke & retaliate - > 23 of 100
self expression -> 26 of 100
revel & compare -> 26 of 100
group exchange -> 14 of 100

Adapted Patterns:
competition -> 9 of 100
deception

Most apps focus on 1 pattern but incorporate other 5 to some level (neat hex diagram)

Next 4 Apps -> Light weight gaming

GUESS WHO
Like board game
Crazy number of page views, visits per month, time per day
Learned 3 things that mattered:
encourage reciprocity
create shared intimacy
act fast on surprising data

CAR OVERLOAD
Pageviews and users don’t mean nothing
biggest facebook page views are newsfeed, inbox, profile page
vertically segmented facebook applications

COCKTAIL LOUNGE
Apps they spent time on didn’t work, quick to build apps took off
things they did wrong:
don’t make things too complex
not enough focus on reciprocity
using .net with the platform didn’t work well -> re-wrote everything in PHP

TOURNAMENTS
Tournaments are good human behavior hook
Missed light weight interaction
Future:
cater to niches
match madness
tournament style polls

———————————————————————————————————

Amazing Fact: One of the sponsors for the night was the entire class itself (using ad rev from their apps)!

———————————————————————————————————

Last 4 Apps -> fast growing

SEND HOTNESS
5M users in 5 weeks
viral factor = X - conversion rate (percentage of invited user who install the app) * Y - engagement rate (install app + invite 1 friend) * Z - invitation rate (average number of invites sent per engaged user)
Maximizing Z -> create incentives for invites
Learning: Iteration is key, no real secret sauce

KISSME
Kiss: loving /provocative got lots of reactions
First app to cross 1M installs
100K active users a day with World wide distribution
Next: See if viral app can be converted to something useful?
looking for funding

PERFECT MATCH
easter egg: perfect_video
there are no two people who would both want to be with someone else (cs wedding problem)
1.  announce the best results you can on first visit
2. collect info on visits
3. calculate& then announce
Learning: Catchy mini-feed message with picture

HUGS
Built by TAs
3.2 bazillion dollar market
2M users, 15M Hugs sent
every country except north korea
Learning: giving people to connect in easy way…that is the big

Summary from Teaching Team (Yee Lee & Jia Shin):

1. go viral
2. then go deep

Metrics
K-factor: 1.4 - 2.1 is good
User engagement: 5mins a session, double digits visits per month per user are good
11 hours to 2 days of viral loop

Advice
Speed, Speed, Speed
Dev time should be 2-7 days, if not viral fix that first
Spend most time on rig (instrumentation & analytics) -> Cyclotron model for apps

BJ Fogg’s Summary

This stuff is learnable in 10 weeks…
Thanks to all of the sponsors!

I’ve been trying to recover some music previously purchased on iTunes but on a laptop that I no longer have access to.  Turns out this isn’t possible based on this email from Apple support:

Thank you for purchasing music from the iTunes Store. I apologize, but I am unable to place this item back in your download queue.We encourage you to back up your hard disk regularly. If a song needs to be replaced, you can restore your music and other data from the backup and avoid the need to purchase replacement copies of your collection of songs.

You can find instructions on backing up your music below.

Backing up your music files in iTunes
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93033

The iTunes Store Terms of Sale can be found at http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/legal/policies.html.

I am sure this some well known iTunes store issue and acutally the RIAA’s fault for forcing no-re-downloads.  But seriously, WTF?   Best part is the last link in the email takes you to a 404 error (it includes the trailing “.”).  After I figured that out and got to the policy page, I couldn’t even find the fine print in the document that told me about not being able to re-download tunes previoulsy bought. 

The above + the all of the bad itunes meta data because of the whole artist vs. album artist has got me inclined to ditch iTunes for good (but not my iPod Touch…it is wicked cool). 

So I just got my iPod Touch (i know, i know…but I’m on a budget given the whole start up thing) and wanted to christen it with some new music.  I decided to check out a few of the newer music services in lieu of iTunes to see if Steve Jobs had anything to worry about.  Specifically I tried both AmazonMP3 & Lala.com.  In short: I think he does. 

Let’s start with cost of an album. 

I decided to buy (and am currently listening to) the “new” Kanye West album.  Okay, it has been out for 3 months….anyhow, here were the prices for the album:

• Amazon: 7.99 (explicit) & 8.99 (clean)
• Lala: 11.69 (explicit & clean)
• iTunes: 11.99 (explicit & clean)

I have no clue why Amazon has different prices for clean vs. explicit but I’ll take the savings either way and buy a cup of Philz! 

Next up, how easy is it to get da music on to da Touch. 

I didn’t think anything could touch iTunes here, but was thinking Lala.com’s web sync would be a killer feature to enable me to change music while on the go as I don’t keep all of my music on my laptop because of hard drive space.  I downloaded the Lala Sync client, but all it did was put another icon in my system tray.  Every time I clicked the sync button on the Lala site I’d get a message that there was no ipod connected.  I tripled checked and tried with iTunes running and with it turned off.  Bummer man! 

However, it turns out Amazon did a pretty nifty job here.  They have a tiny app / installer that didn’t force me to close all of my browsers like Lala did.  Also, they have a nice file extension hack…their app registers to handle .amz files so when you download / open the music file their app gets called without any browser specific plugin code.  The app automatically places the music in “My Music / Amazon MP3″ and auto adds it to iTunes Library or WMP (defaults to iTunes if it is installed…smart).  My only ding for them is that while downloading an album they show a little system tray notifier that over communicates status with no options to turn it off.  ANNOYING! On the plus, it looks like their system tray app closes itself after doing its work + a timeout…nice! 

Finally, the little stuff that I noticed when trying to do the same thing on these different services:

• When looking at iTunes version of the album I had no clue if the download was DRMed or not. 
• Amazon does not have a link to the MP3 store off its homepage…I got to it by searching for a CD and then clicking a promotional link to the MP3 store. 
• I was hoping more of the music on Lala.com had full song preview by now after reading about Lala in Wired.

Overall,  high marks to Amazon’s experience…especially given it is a beta.  I’ll be checking them first for purchases from now on!  Anywhere else I should check out for buying digital music?