/* EOF */

Enough with the revisionist history — Steve Jobs asserted no one wants/needs a stylus.

Steve was wrong — he wanted everyone to believe they didn’t want to use a tablet as a digital pen/paper replacement. It is perhaps the most seminal failure of the iPhad.  He even had a wheelbarrow of technology in the space — later generations of the Newton had it right, but he didn’t create it, and he killed it.  Worse — the limitations of the crappy capacitive display technology he settled for are solvable with software, but someone had a “better” idea: tell them they don’t want it.  Apple could have pushed tablets out that were more than glorified eReader/game slates a decade before the iPhad.  #mistake

People, colors, apps, mobile, social, pivot — people love that shit.  Add a founding dream team (Lala, LinkedIn, PhotoBucket), a limited supply of 16.7 MM colors, and a dash of Ashton Kutcher’s favorite color — what do you get?  $41 MM — Sequoia Capital invested more in an idea from Silicon Valley pre-launch startup, Color Labs, than they dropped on Google.

Ok, ok — had you for a second, eh?  The Color Labs deck (not the $41 MM) is a parody produced by New Work City.  Nonetheless, I’m not kidding — this is what a captivating pitch deck looks like.  Short, clever and ballsy.  Not unlike my own approach to fundraising as a wee 20-something before Bubble 1.0.  If you can’t pull this off, bring your napkin.

Download the parody pitch deck here

Learn more about Color on TechCrunch

Sequoia’s press release

One more reason to ditch my iPhone… just waiting for one more iteration of hardware.  Nokia, please kick it into high gear — if anyone can give Apple some competition in glass and metal fabrication, the Finnish can — their wares kick ass over the plastic crap running Android.

This is really great news. As a fellow MIT colleague points out, most of the world doesn’t have duo-core or better CPUs, and most consumers in China and India still run Pentium 4s — even there the performance improvement is dramatic.

On the subject of doing more with less — MSFT has totally knocked it out of the park with MSE (Microsoft Security Essentials).  Every* antivirus solution I have used — both paid and free varieties — has proven to be massive resource hogs.  MSE is genuinely magical — it’s so unobtrusive I don’t even know it’s there until it quarantines a Trojan.  Why, it’s practically a Mac user’s security experience (minus the spinning beach ball) — all without slowing my machine whatsoever.  And it’s free.

Four NYU/Courant students are busy correcting a disturbance in The Force.

Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer, and Ilya Zhitomirskiy stopped talking about the privacy shenanigans of dominant social networks and started building a better decentralized solution: Diaspora.

Their timing couldn’t be more prescient — The Social Network, a Scott Rudin/Kevin Spacey produced movie (IMDb) releasing in October based on Ben Mezrich’s 2009 book The Accidental Billionaires, sheds light on the real genesis of Facebook — and it ain’t pretty:

There’s your deadline, Diaspora.

Charlie O’Donnell from First Round Capital offers an intriguing path forward.  Ping me if you need bitchin IP strategy/defense — I’ve yet to lose an IP battle and for your cause I’ll do it for free.

• Full-screen browsing (see settings)
• Dial-pad start page for quickly opening sites
• Find-in-page searching
• Site compression (a band-aid solution for AT&T’s crap 3G network)

I’ve run across many first-time users complaining about the default Opera interface and all of its flourishes, but I’m guessing they didn’t bother to poke around to discover the unique features the app offers.  A simple tweak in the browser’s settings (the crescent wrench button) allows toggling full-screen browsing!  For that alone, I’ll discard Safari, but there’s more…

Browsed pages are compressed by Opera servers before being sent to your phone for decompressed display, thus achieving faster browsing — it appears notably faster than using Safari over 3G and Opera reports an average compression of 63.6% (peaking at 90%).

Opera’s server-side compression system is mentioned as a feature of both WinMo Mobile and Mini, but implemented differently — Mini uses compression automatically and Mobile requires the Opera Turbo Add-on:

Using Opera to browse the Web with your mobile phone can save you money on your phone bills, by reducing your data usage substantially. Opera Mini uses only a tenth of the bandwidth of other browsers, compressing Web pages by up to 90%. On Opera Mobile, turning on Opera Turbo compresses data up to 80% or leave Opera Turbo off to get full Web site data, as you would on a PC.

Opera Turbo Add-on:
http://www.opera.com/business/solutions/turbo/

Opera Flash Add-on: psych!

See ya in Trash Bin Hell Safari.

One of my earliest Ingk Labs SaaS spinoffs was sold this week. InstantService was acquired by Nasdaq: ARTG and will be merged with their growing suite of enterprise e-commerce services.  UPDATE 10/21 — The acquisition catapulted ATG to its leadership position in the live-help market, powering e-commerce sites with the highest annual combined web sales of $40.2 billion.

Upon debuting InstantService, I recall AT&T, IBM and Motorola asserting, “We believe our customers prefer to [disconnect from what was then mostly dial-up and] call us in our call centers. And chatting is free.” ~ [ palmface ]

My how times change — they are all customers today and InstantService continued to grow through the dot-com collapse and our ongoing recession. As it turns out, customer support is among the last services that corporations consider on the recession chopping block. Sony reduced phone use by 50% and achieved over 90% customer approval. McAfee now handles 80% of all support through InstantService chat, cutting average wait time from 25 minutes to 40 seconds and reducing support costs by 86%.

At Ingk Labs, we call this an experiment in recession-proof technology. The exit will further fuel Ingk Labs investments supporting New York entrepreneurs.

http://bit.ly/isartg2

Posted via email from Damion’s posterous