I’ll share my findings here.

Why can’t this sort of thing be done at the waste facility where it ends up anyway?  Why should the only folks sorting through trash be the homeless and why can’t this be institutionalized?  A premium is being put on garbage sorting – and I’m paying it.  It’s not the 5 bucks that I care about – it’s the extra time being lost that I value.

In a perfect world (one that we attempt to be aiming for by having recycling programs in the first place), we wouldn’t have to think too much about recycling because it would be done “invisibly”.  I throw stuff in the garbage, it leaves my house ends up somewhere where things just happen (robots or humans or some combination find the recyclable elements and pluck them out) and all is well.  We sort of do this with sewage already and just flush shit out (pun intended) and expect that some treatment facility will do the magic for us.

It’s funny because in India, recycling happens passively.  People throw garbage out the window and it lands on the street where somebody (usually the misfortuned) picks it up and does something “useful” with it – cans, plastic bags, etc do get picked up by the smart few who know where to take it and earn money to sustain themselves through the night.  It really is a “one man’s junk is another’s treasure” system and while it’s not *completely* optimized (there’s plenty of garbage that is *noone’s* treasure), it works out pretty well since there aren’t mountains of garbage to navigate around.

I suspect that this isn’t being done here in the US due to the “eeew” factor – as in, “eeeew, after a can hits the trash bag and gets mushed around with all that other garbage, i don’t want to touch it!”  Surely, there are people who love their planet enough to want to solve this pretty small problem.  I’ve never been to a landfill myself but I would gladly pay another $10/month (with the CRV fees pulled off) to do my own part in funding this problem and I think others wouldn’t mind paying a small fee as well if it meant that throwing the garbage out wasn’t so guilt-causing.

When I think of Yelp, the first word that comes to mind is – reviews.  When I think of Foursquare, the word is “check-in” (a close second is “badges”).  The reality is that Yelp is a reference tool primarily which a rich set of reviews posted by aficionados (usually after they are back from a meal).  This specifically applies to the *mobile* version of Yelp (which is important to discern).  Foursquare on the other hand is a narcissistic tool to broadcast the cool places you are visiting (and earning badges in the process).  I personally have yet to use Foursquare as a discovery tool (and Yelp as a check-in app due to the feature missing on the Android version).

The implication of the keyword stigma is that the check-in feature on Yelp had little impact on Foursquare’s growth trajectory.  The feature isn’t being used because it just doesn’t make sense the same way that it does for Foursquare.

Incidentally, I’m currently reading The Narcissism Epidemic which discusses our evolving narcissistic society in “the age of entitlement” and it seems that this theme is bound to have an impact on which of these companies “wins” in the near future.

I picked it up at a local Barnes and Nobles (the fact that I could play with one before purchasing and that they were in stock was in itself awesome) and took it with me on my recent trip to Bangalore.  It felt great and durable, was fairly responsive (you can only expect ePaper to be so responsive), and was compact (much better than carrying 400+ page tomes in a carry-on).

Some might argue that the screen is too small – I’d argue that it’s just right.  It’s replacing the form factor of a average paperback/hardcover and you only read on this device.  Too large and it feels clunky.

What’s missing?  Not that I care *too* much about this but I wouldn’t mind the ability to tweet and post to Facebook what I’m reading.  It probably would be a feature more valuable to others and so something “the Nobe” should be thinking about seriously.

I’m not sure I can blame Google for trying to wrap a beast of a product into a simple interface and I’m sure they’ve tried their best.  But, man oh man one wrong checkbox and you could get screwed. 

You might say “well, that’s why you have daily budgets!”  That would be true except that when you have a small budget paired with ads being shown evenly through the day, you have a different sort of problem. 

Excuse me while I go heal myself.

And therein lies the rub… See, the mobile subscriber has 30 days upon receipt of his mobile bill to actually make the payment.  He may or may not contest the charge depending on who actually made the transaction – her husband, child, friend, or dog maybe?  Regardless and if the payment is actually made, the phone company (Verizon, AT&T, etc) has to then figure out which merchant the payment should go to (and make sure they take their “fee” for facilitating the transaction through their platform).  This process takes another 30 days or so and the money usually ends up in the hands of a party known in the mobile marketing world as the “aggregator” – termed this way because they aggregate connections across the two handful of major carriers out there.  The aggregator then takes their fee and pays out the actual company providing the service to the various charities and NGOs of the world.  Wow, that was a mouthful (forgive me for not using separate paragraphs).

If you do the math and add up the time periods as money changes hands, you end up with a cumulative term of about 75-90 days before the money ends up where it ought to.  Compare this with credit card transactions which moves money in a matter of 24-48 hours on average.  Add to this that a grand total of about 35-40% in fees is racked up through the literally “trickle-down” process, and the $10 transaction evaporates pretty quickly.

You’d think that these figures would prompt a near-immediate backlash – and you would be right.  In fact, the carriers knew the backlash was imminent and so they were quick to proactively mention that all fees would be waived and the amount transacted in a much shorter period of time.  Good for them considering mobile giving was on pretty much every television station both major and cable network for the “Hope for Haiti” special with celebrities touting the method as the fastest way for watchers to donate.

The problem with this picture is that for all other charities that the company mGive provide mobile giving “solutions” to, the terms are exactly as I describe above (75-90 days with 40% fees).  Most subscribers who will more than likely be familiar with the system will equate the process to the Haiti fundraising initiatives when this will not actually be the case.  It’s estimated that the Haiti earthquake mobile giving initiatives pulled in over $12 million; at 40% fees spread across all facilitating parties involved, this would mean a staggering $4.8 million in fees alone.  Crookish I’d say.

The recent release of the “pinch-and-zoom” functionality to be released as an OTA update serves as a clue as to why it really does make sense for Google to launch a phone.

Google is really banking on public perception of Android for it to be successful.  With the heterogeneous mixture of Android versions out in the wild, this perception is bound to vary.  What Android is depends on what version you’ve seen and on which handset.  Why are there so many versions to begin with and why couldn’t the handset manufacturers just post OTA Updates when Google releases new versions?  Apart from the maintenance and development of fairly sophisticated skins that sit on top like Blur for Motorola and SenseUI for HTC, it really comes down to varying philosophical/political standpoints by each of the carriers (and perhaps just general slowness on part of the handset manufacturers). 

Motorola might generally be fearful of Apple laying down the law with pinch-and-zoom patents and therefore sit tight on this feature – in fact, this is probably why it doesn’t exist on the Droid while is available as a built-in feature of the Droid Eris manufactured by HTC.   Interesting to note is that this device runs Android 1.5 (a relatively ancient version of the OS) but features pinch-zoom functionality across the Browser and Gallery apps.  This is probably due to a lax stance by HTC on pinch-zoom; read: they don’t really give two shits about Apple’s possible litigation.

These varying stances are exactly why Google feels it necessary to jump into the handset action to lay down a vision for what they think ought to be the optimal version of Android out their in the wild getting OTA Updates in timely matters without think red tape getting in their way.  

Today I was talking to someone about their iPhone application product that made generally heavy use of Facebook Connect to publish stories to a user’s feed.  The product posted a story to the user’s feed which when clicked went (and continues to go) to a splash screen askin the user to download the app on their iPhone.  I recommended that they build out for the web and potentially mobile web keeping in mind the fact that users on the receiving end may not click on the story on an iPhone.  His answer: right now we’re iPhone app and iPhone app only.  In fact, caring about other platforms wasn’t in even on the long-term radar for them.

It’s one thing to say “we don’t have the bandwidth for that” but a completely other to disregard the obvious truth that users may not be on their iPhones when reading Facebook stories.  Instead, put *something* of actionable value to the audience so that you get the intended effect of true viralness.  Even if a friend were to have an iPhone, there’d be a good chance that she be on their laptop viewing Facebook.  What then?   A slight imagination could expect her to go back to her iPhone, search for the app in the app store and download it then – or perhaps download from her laptop through iTunes and then sync.  Seriously?

This is the fundamental problem in harnessing the value of Facebook Connect on mobile devices.  You need an all-inclusive strategy covering every platform near and far in order for it to have the intended effect of having the audience do what you need them to do.  Case in point is Twitter – they don’t necessarily have a client for each platform but they make sure that when a user clicks on a twitter profile for any user no matter whether on a laptop or a mobile device, it renders the way it should.   More and more companies are following suit with mobile versions of their website and perform quick browser detection routines and redirecting users accordingly.  I’m waiting for Wordpress to officially accept WPtouch and bake it in as a standard feature considering it renders well on webkit browsers (Android and Safari alike).

But back to the main point: Facebook Connect as a viral technology on iPhone needs serious review and thought by developers who intend to use it in the first place.

Clean and simple to use and generally just works the way it should. To get it just search for wordpress in the App Market.

Update: one small issue I noticed is that you have to refresh the categories the first time you post.

When what you’re building turns into a phenomenon accidentally – you really can’t take too much credit for it’s evolution and must consider yourself more an agent of change.  That’s exactly what the Twitter team is (or was) up until now.  In fact, I’d go out on a limb and say that now that the Twitter folks are riding this bronco of a company, they hardly know what to do with it in it’s current fashion.

Jack Dorsey lends much of his fame to his reign at Twitter – but past success means very little in the valley and many entrepreneurs spend the rest of their lives trying to outdo their first startup which came across as “beginner’s luck”.  Square is a lofty idea and only someone with super grandiose position in the tech world who could generate buzz could launch an idea into the buzz stratosphere.  If not someone then a massive company with dollars to spend on development and marketing and with a stronghold position in an existing market.  I’m talking about Verifone and PAYware.

We’ll have to see who wins in the end (or exactly what winning means) but I suspect that it will take much more than Techcrunch and Mashable articles to get Square adopted by retailers far and wide.  I’ve been surprised before though…