Path + Instagram + Color

Image by jdlasica via FlickrMark Zuckerberg is obviously the man to watch. The guy wants nothing less than to own the decade. I am not sure the decade can be owned by any one person, but I have no doubts he will be one of the people who will.

TechCrunch: Exposed: Facebook’s Secret iPhone Photo Sharing App (Which Looks Amazing): Path meets Instagram meets Color meets (Path’s new side project) With — with a few cool twists. And obviously, it’s built entirely on top of Facebook’s massive social graph.

Behold: Facebook’s Secret Photo Sharing App Facebook, which is by far the largest photo service on the Internet with close to 100 billion photos, to make their own dedicated photo app. ..... Facebook’s focus on mobile photos going forward is very clear. ..... Given their talk of commitment to HTML5, Facebook likely wants to make an app that is as portable as possible. That is, while it may be built first for iOS, it can easily be ported to Android and other platforms with the HTML5 elements in place. ........ Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom was once approached by Mark Zuckerberg about working at Facebook way back in 2004 ...... Systrom declined the invitation, and now Zuckerberg is a Instagram user ....... the location elements, likes and comments, multi-picture mode, filters, multi-user albums, face-tagging, and more

What's Up With Pictures?

This is Mark Zuckerberg showing Bill Gates tendencies.

The Twins Were Rowing Boats
Zuckerberg Has Stature
Color Doldrums: Fail Whale?
Instagram Wave

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Microsoft's Second Act?

Image via CrunchBase
(Article first published as Microsoft's Second Act? on Technorati.)

Microsoft buying Skype could still fail, and we will know in a year, but something tells me this purchase that was pushed behind the scenes by Bill Gates himself might help Microsoft become a post PC company, a player also in the smartphone and tablet spaces. Skype's deepest possible integration with the Windows phone just might work wonders.

Bigger than that has been Microsoft's teaming up with Google arch rival Facebook on search. Bing now has access to Facebook stuff that Google simply will not have. Stuff that individual users of Facebook might choose to make public to Everyone would still land in Google's lap, but Bing has been given special treatment. This is big. For the first time Google Search has competition.

Before that Steve Ballmer made some moves in 3D computing. That is another space Microsoft might look good in.



The fog on Microsoft has not dissipated yet. But Microsoft was fast becoming the metaphor for big companies where innovation stops. That might start to wind down now. But it is still early to tell. And companies like Google are no sitting ducks. The immense sizzle in the mobile space is bound to throw up new names with exciting products. But I think it is fair to say Microsoft is now back as a player in the game.

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Watch Out For Steve Ballmer

Image via WikipediaStepping into Bill Gates' shoes was going to be a tough act to follow for anybody. It just was not possible. Bill Gates ruled the industry for a decade and a half. 1995 was the high point. Windows was the only game in town. And then the guy went into philanthropy where he has been as amazing as he was in software. It has been a second career to him.

Microsoft pretty much missed out the smartphone and tablet trains. But then competing with Steve Jobs is as hard as succeeding Bill Gates. Steve Ballmer has had to do both and I feel for the guy. He was an Economics major at college. And there is a cultural bias against fat, bald people. So people end up thinking he is less smart than he actually is. And he is a non coder in a coding business.

There is this story from the mid 1990s. Ballmer returned back to Redmond from one of his trips visiting with customers. And he got a group of his engineers together and said, "I don't know what TCP/IP is, I don't want to know what TCP/IP is. Just make the pain go away." Everywhere he had gone people had been talking about TCP/IP.

Could Skype Be Microsoft's YouTube?

The Skype purchase might still go down the tube, and we will know in a year or less. On the other hand this might be Ballmer's way to finally "get" smartphones and tablets.

And bringing Facebook integration to Bing is a super smart move. Social is the next frontier of search and Mark Zuckerberg still has memories of Google wanting to buy or bury him early on.

ReadWriteWeb: Bing Debuts Social Search with New Facebook Integration: Microsoft's search engine is about to tie its search results to the Facebook social graph in a move that will come as a blow to Google and its +1 initiative. Where Bing will be able to take existing "likes" from friends and integrate them into search, Google +1 has to be added from within search results before someone even clicks on a page. Google's biggest rivals are teaming up to try and make the Mountain View giant irrelevant in the future of social search...... there will be a new Bing Bar with a "universal like button," the first of its kind. Users will now be able to like any page on the Web from anywhere, regardless if that site has a like button installed or not...... Bing search results will now show "liked results, answers and sites" by showing contents that friends have liked. It will also show personalized results by surfacing content that friends have liked from "deep within" search results to the top page. Around 33% of users click on the top link of search results with click-through results dropping precipitously going down the page and to subsequent pages. So, if your friend liked something that was buried on page 89 of the search results, Bing will in theory bring it to the front page...... Bing also apparently will have the ability to crawl Facebook Pages for what brands and companies are posting online. ..... Bing can crawl profiles too. ..... "Now when people search for a specific person, Bing provides a more in-depth bio snapshot, such as location, education and employment details, to help them find the person they're looking for more quickly." ..... Google cannot do this because Facebook does not allow it. ...... Bing gets to integrate Facebook basically as much as it wants. ...... Other features include "shared shopping lists" and flight planners that help friends share ticketing information to look for the best deal. It will also help you find friends in different cities when you are traveling with a function called "friends who live here."

The Twins Were Rowing Boats
Facebook Could Do Well In Search

For the first time Google has competition in search, and the credit goes to Mark Zuckerberg. Nixon went to China. Roosevelt met Stalin.

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How Wal-Mart Got Started

Image via Wikipedia"In 1962, four new retailers were born. One called Kmart was started in Garden City, Michigan, another called Target was started in Minneapolis, another from Woolworth, the big name in retailing at the time, called Woolco was started, and the final one in rural Rogers, Arkansas, called Wal-Mart. Thirty years later, Woolco had met its demise and one of the other two was the largest retailer in the country. Surprisingly, the top retailer was the one from Arkansas."

The Guardian: It all began in a small store in Arkansas...: Four of the world's top 15 billionaires are from one family. ..... retail is a good place to be. Of the top 15 billionaires, nine made their money the old-fashioned way, by selling us clothes, food and furniture ..... together, the clan are nearly as rich as Warren Buffett and Bill Gates (the top two on the list) combined. ....... Sam Walton began his conquest of the world in 1945, with a loan of $20,000 from his father-in-law and a small variety store in Newport, Arkansas, where he established the practices that define present-day Wal-Mart: he kept prices as low as possible, stocked a wide range of goods, and stayed open longer than anyone else. His margins were small, but he sold large quantities, which meant he could bargain for even lower prices from wholesalers - policies that still drive smaller local stores out of business. ....... Even in his later years, when he was worth $24bn, he was famously frugal, opting for $5 haircuts (no tip), and cheap food at his local Wal-Mart. He drove an old pick-up and often borrowed money from his employees. And he was ruthless. "Some people try to turn it into this 'Save the Small-Town Merchants' deal, like they were whales or something that have a right to be protected," he wrote in his autobiography. But he was having none of it. "What happened was as inevitable as the replacement of the buggy by the car." When he died, in 1992, the state got almost nothing in taxes, because he had divided his wealth between his wife Helen, who died in 2007, and his children. ....... Wal-Mart employs more than 2 million people worldwide, meaning it has twice as many men and women in uniform than the US army. ...... A reporter for Fortune, strolling round Bentonville, Arkansas, was hard put to even find the offices from which their fortunes are run. ....... Rob Walton, company chairman (the CEO is a non-Walton, Mike Duke), worked in a small windowless room,
Image via Wikipedia 10ft by 10ft square ..... in fact, anyone who lives in Bentonville probably shops in Wal-mart for food, clothes, furniture and electronics, banks at Arvest, and, until recently, read a Walton-owned paper. They can drive down Walton Boulevard to watch sport at the Walton Arena. They can wander around the Walton Arts Centre, or go to the Wal-Mart Museum, where old Sam's office and pick-up are preserved exactly as they were the day he died. They can study at the Sam Walton business school, or fly from the Alice L Walton terminal of the airport.

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A Social Graph For When Everyone Is Connected

Image via WikipediaBill Gates thinks the world population will stabilize around nine billion people. Let's say he is right. Already two out of six billion people are connected to the internet. Say the penetration goes above 90% by the time world population hits seven billion people. Would that have implications for the social graph? You bet.

The Color Social Graph Might Work Better For Books, Movies, Music

There is an old saying that everyone is connected to everyone else through six degrees of separation. Every random person out there knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows you. That magic number - six - might be lesser if the group size were smaller.

What if your pool is just one country? America? What if you are talking only of people who are fans of Bob Marley? What if you narrow down and are talking only of the 10 million Lady Gaga followers on Twitter? Then is the magic number maybe four? Five perhaps?

That is when you realize the social graph is an universe. There are not only many social graphs, there are many kinds of social graphs. Some are like galaxies, some are like stars, some are like planets.

And if all of humanity is online, and they are constantly voting, you end up with rather dynamic situations. You end up with music charts that change by the minute. Old songs could resurface on the charts because they can.

Kids early on get taught: never talk to strangers. And that will still be good advice for kids. But when you have high speed internet connecting all of humanity, you end up with scenarios where large scale positive group dynamics becomes possible. Big, good things become possible. I once heard a billionaire say there is enough marble just in the state of West Virginia to build a mansion for every family on the planet. But we are not there as humanity, we are not that organized. Once we can get every human being into one internet based social graph, or many, many graphs, maybe we can build a mansion for every family, finally. This social graph thing is very real.

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