Chris Dixon with a smart post on when to shift focus:
Ask yourself: if you started over today, would you build the same product? If not, consider significant changes to what you are building. […] You aren’t throwing away what you’ve learned or the good things you’ve built. You are keeping your strong leg grounded and adjusting your weak leg to move in a new direction.
Almost every company I was involved with adjusted the focus of their business model. Keep this in mind.
Tomorrow: last day at DuMont Venture.
Wednesday: First day at Seedcamp, at Mini Seedcamp Berlin.
Thursday: Farewell beers at Wohngemeinschaft, Cologne.
Friday: Not for you
Saturday: Off to London, welcome beers somewhere?
So, Apple introduced “facetime” with the new iPhone. A lot of critics came out swinging after the keynote, ridiculing Jobs for adding something to a phone that was never used for several years on basically every other device on the market.
I felt the same. Video calling? Only on Apple devices? Only via wifi? Thanks, Steve, that’s awesome.
Today I realized that it’s probably something else. It’s not only about using your phone for video calls, rather, it’s about establishing a new standard for voice/video chats. Just as Apple introduced bonjour in 10.4 to make computers communicate (and using it as a backbone for iChat), it is now trying to establish facetime as the actual chat protocol to allow for a deeper video/audio/chat/collaboration experience. According to a rather short wikipedia article, the facetime protocol is based on a couple of open standards that made me scratch my head:
- H.264 and AAC – video and audio codecs respectively
- SIP – IETF signaling protocol for VoIP
- STUN, TURN and ICE – IETF technologies for traversing firewalls and NAT
- RTP and SRTP – IETF standards for delivering media streams for VoIP
Source: Wikipedia
Audio and video make total sense. SIP as a voice protocol is pretty straightforward as well, but the last two are the most revealing: technology to traverse firewalls and technology to deliver media streams via VOIP. Through this, screen sharing should be in there at some point, probably tightly integrated into OSX. Overall, Apple wants to eclipse Skype, which is one of the most used chat and VOIP apps on Macs. The main point is the usual Apple way of going into new markets: making stuff simple and easy to use (traversing firewalls is pretty important in this case).
Of course Apple is also keeping everything close to its chest by orchestrating the open source development. This is probably going to look a lot like Chrome/Android, where Google makes the best implementation themselves and adds to the OS project in a major way.
So, there you go. The cheesy video is just for fun, the big stuff comes later. Let’s see if I am right in a couple of months.
One of the greater perks of working at DuMont Venture was being responsible for our investment in popula.de, which in turn meant working closely with a really motivated and creative team of awesome people. While there were some hiccups along the way that involved a relaunch and other niceties, the product and company are on track to become a leader in the German event space.
David and Philipp, the two founders, are by now great friends, far beyond a “work” relationship. They have assembled a team that is well equipped to deal with the problems of making it easier to find and promote events – as diverse and comitted as a startup team should be. Apart from singing songs about their company (getting Mike Arrington to write about them), innovating with html5 and cracking the nut that is collaborating with big media companies, they are also big fun to work with. I mean, how could they not?
Leaving Cologne means leaving popula, which is sad. Nevertheless, some cool things are happening that make me very optimistic about the future of this company. I am a fan, popula, je t’aime.
Daily reads
I use the Postalicious plugin to sync notable bookmarks. Comments are welcome.
Daily reads
I use the Postalicious plugin to sync notable bookmarks. Comments are welcome.
So, this is the new “recommended” pricavy setting in Facebook. Not sure if I agree with all this – especially “photos” should be private/friends only, I think.
