Location lookup from iphones

Does anyone know how AT&T encodes the location of their ip addresses. I just hit my domain and all the ip based geolocator tools I know about reported me as being in Berkeley. Which is kinda, sorta, completely wrong at the time of the fetch, but totally correct 6 hours ago. Is there any rhyme, pattern or reason to this?

TripIt

My position includes a few rotations into portfolio companies, effectively giving me a management consulting gig in start ups. This has been a pretty rewarding experience. I just finished a stint with TripIt; a company Tim O'Reilly blogged about recently on the Radar blog. These guys are doing pretty great work in the area of organizing, aggregating and augmenting your travel data in a way that really thinks about your trip holistically.

It's run by some really great people that constitute the mellowist start up experience I've ever had - it's great to see huge amount of work done by people who still get to see their children every evening.

TripIt isn't ready to go public yet, but when they do, I highly recommend that you give them a try and see if you like what they are offering.

coming up

I haven't been posting for a while both due to some personal stress in the last week and a half as well as a move towards combining my shorter posts with some longer ones where I'll try to work out some of the details of what I've been seeing going on in Silicon Valley business wise. I'm not quite sure where all this will go, but I'm fairly sure I'll be writing on at least:

• Freemium Pricing


• Web X.0


• Viral Marketing


• Network Effects

That is all.

Rob Webb

Fellow fake grad school graduate Rob Webb launched his new venture Analyst's Edge today and did so in style by coming up with a new low in development costs for an online venture (someone really should keep tabs on these things, I can't really confirm that it's a low). Total costs are $1,937.97, though Rob's a lawyer, so presumably he saved a few bucks on those fees and he didn't go nuts on domain name fees. Analyst's Edge is something like a user generated news crawl site for the hedge fund crowd, and knowing Rob, is sure to develop into something really interesting. If you've got a financial bent to your interests you should check it out. There's more information available on Rob's blog.

I'm in yr womb - messing with yr baby

Cross-species baby? Franken-baby? Silicon rubber bionic baby? You be the judge. JP created piggy baby and now tells you how to make one on Instructables. I can't wait until piggy babies are the new lolcats or cabbage patch kids. At any rate, all your animal part, to baby doll prosthetic questions have now finally been answered. I personally want a crawling baby with four pigs feet myself.

freemium

There's nothing you haven't read before here. And it will probably change.

Freemium is everyone's new favorite business model and for good reason. With freemium you allow anyone to use your product for free, albeit with limitations, and you lift these restrictions as consumers agree to pay more than nothing for the service you are providing. It's interesting that this works, and what's more interesting about this is that freemium is the exact same business model we all made a ton of fun of during the .com days as completely non-functional. In interested in why is it that this time around freemium isn't just not suicidal pricing plan, but in fact, is the preferred way, in many cases, to deliver your services to your customers.

At its heart, the freemium plan is a simple price discrimination plan where you drastically lower the admission price for the service while charging substantially higher costs for other additional benefits. Think admissions to fun parks, and then additional charges for the tickets to rides. Some consumers (parents) would only be willing to pay the lower fees associated with getting into the park, whereas other consumers (kids) are willing to pay the much high cost for taking a lot of rides. Price discriminating plans like the freemium model allow the service vendor to collect money from both demographics in a natural way that doesn't rely on bizarre restrictions and satisifies each group (on the margin) exactly as much as they end up paying. It's a much more efficient way to run a business.

But what happens when the admissions price is free? That's where some of the problems leading to .com nonsense started. Becauase as Josh Kopelman from First Round reminds us in his pricing post, the linearity in the demand curve simply doesn't exist as you get closer to free. In fact, I'll take this further and say that as the price approaches zero you'll get near infinite demand (there's always some frictional costs that you would have to pay someone to avoid). Fantastic right? Well, lotsa sites thought so but you're left with the problem of figuring out how to afford delivering your fantastic service to the masses. That's where we start looking for even more fantastic features for our service that some people (the vast minority) might be ready to pay for.

People will pay for these services too. Converstion rates can be as high as 3%. This can add up to some serious money over time, with very little staffing. Build your product correctly and these incoming streams essentially become annuities that you can use to fund further growth. You might really be able to limit your need for external investments. Sure worked for 37signals.


So what went wrong then, and why can this model work now? I'm pretty sure that the solution to this has to do with network effects. In Web 1.0 (are we really calling it that), users' experiences were pretty much silos, so users that aren't paying just put a drag on your system, costing you tons of money. Now when you don't have commodity choices for delivering your webservice you can get into a lot of trouble and hosting fees can kill you. Certainaly the cheapening of bandwidth and server costs post .com crash helps with these issues, but that only gets you so far. Hit sites still pay tons of money to deliver their services to their users. So what else changed?

I'm guessing that the addition of social and community components to online services have raised the prices the paying are willing to pay in order to use these services (or increased the number of users willing to pay at a given rate -- same difference). In fact, with social components, each new user to the system creates additional value for the users already on board. That's not to say that all communal services can make a mint. If your network effects are restricted by grouping functions and other logical barriers that limit users ability to interact with your other users, then you've contructed mega-silos that contrain incremental value building into buckets.Salesforce.com doesn't really let you stay a user after the first month (free CRM doesn't really offer the functionality of the Salesforce.com platform).

So what types of services should look at this pricing model? Social networks are the obvious candidate. Tools that produce propriatary formats are great for this too, as it gets easier to use these tools are more people adopt them. But a lot of web sites get good traction, but won't reach phenomemal, or scalable, growth using this technique because they product simply doesn't map well to the pricing model.


Services likely do to well with this model: LinkedIn, Facebook, AIR

Services likely not to scale with this model: Pownce, 37Signals

Austan Goolsbee

I don't think I can say enough great things about Austan Goolsbee. But other than my affection for the fact that he teaches the single most relevant and entertaining class at fake grad school, and wrote a really outstanding paper on price insensitivity of web consumers in Amazon and Barnes & Nobles why should you care about him? For one thing, he's Obama's economic advisor, which puts him in a pretty influential role in developing the next eight years of economic policy, whether Obama wins or not; for another he writes a pretty entertaining column in the New York Times, and finally, he's written the only intelligent review and rejection of Micheal Moore's new movie Sicko that I've seen so far. I'm sure his position (let the market handle it -- with tweaks) isn't even remotely tolerated in a great many circles and that might be fair, but it would be a mistake to consider his view dogmatic, unconcerned, or unprincipled - his answer is the standard response from the University of Chicago Economics department. But don't forget he's the economic advisor to what's probably the most liberal Democratic presidential candidate in play while still working at the University of Chicago -- the guy might not be liberal in the regulatory sense of the word, but he's not in the business of being an apologist to big industry -- he's just concerned that we get what we pay for with our regulations.

iPhone Safari the first commercial multiscale browser?

At FooCamp Blaise Aguera y Arcas presented some amazing work being done at Microsoft (he presented this at TED too, so I don't feel I'm violating any of the Foo Blogging Guidelines here) involving multiscale graphics. It was an incredibly mindblowing presentation of combining tons of graphics information at differing resolutions and scales such that they can seemlessly be navigated together. It's incredibly hard to describe, but you can see it here. Or you can just boot up Safari in the iPhone, because that's what's happening there. Safari shows you the site at a one scale, let's you zoom into another scale to see something better, adn you can keep going smaller until the content stops. Given how overwelming the effect of near infinite zooming of multiscale graphics, perhaps content providers should experiment with embeddeding smaller and smaller elements in their divs that will be seem by iPhone browsers when they zoom further in. If, of course, they can get all that content down the pokey puppy EDGE pipe.

Twitter

I've joined the twittering masses, you can find my latest updates on the right there. It's butt ugly, but I haven't really starting making the stylesheets here nice yet, and didn't want to start with customizing a twitter page. That will come later. Or maybe I'll take this down -- I'm not sure how I feel about it. At any rate now all my loyal readers can follow the even more mundane thoughts in my life. All two of you.