• Lesson 1

April 28, 2009

• “Be Yourself; everyone else is already taken.”

April 29, 2009

• CEDT@Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore launches business incubator in partnership with HeadStart Foundation

April 29, 2009

We’ve reported in the past on how Apple has not only been late on payments to iPhone app developers, but has also neglected to pay some developers for their app sales at the store entirely. We thought that perhaps our post might call Apple’s attention to the problem. Apparently, developers complaints have gone unheard at Apple and now they are so upset that some of them are threatening to sue Apple for breach of contract.

As we wrote earlier, Apple’s delay in payments is affecting some developers but not all of them. Some are being paid but other developers are claiming no payment from Apple for sales and continued poor customer support from Apple. You can read the complaints on the developer forums here and here.

Apple’s contract, which is embedded below, says that payment will be made to developers within 45 days of the end of the month. Developers are claiming that there are massive delays in payments for as early as last fall and are not being paid the amount of money that the developers are in fact due from sales. One developer, who hasn’t been paid since November 2008, forwarded us an email chain between Apple’s App Store finance team and himself. An Apple employee, who was responding to the developers complaints, wrote that the developer’s continued emails about the late payments was “bordering on harassment,” and claimed that the finance team receives thousands of emails a day and couldn’t get to his right away. Another developer on the forum says that he hasn’t been paid since September and is owed close to $7000 for sales.

It’s not clear how serious these threats are. After all, it is a forum and it’s a lot easier to vent and make empty legal threats in an anonymous forum. But it appears that despite the media reports, developer complaints, emails, and calls surrounding the delays in payments, Apple has not corrected its system at all. It’s definitely cause to wonder what is going on with Apple. Didn’t Apple just post its best second quarter earnings in the history of the company? We also recently wrote about Apple’s seemingly unfair refund policy, which puts developers at a clear disadvantage. And Apple owes a lot to iPhone app developers-the App store just reached 1 billion app downloads thanks to those very same savvy developers who have created useful and creative apps.

As we wrote in the past, Apple is in danger of alienating developers and giving them reasons why they shouldn’t be developing for the iPhone (on the forums, a few developers said they may even give up on the App store)—namely, they’re at the mercy of Apple, which is making a habit of taking its developers for granted.

iPhone app contract – Get more Information Technology

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

“Be Yourself; everyone else is already taken.”

– Oscar Wilde

• Geocities

April 29, 2009

• Why contextual analysis kicks behavioral’s butt on content

April 29, 2009

• Geocities

April 29, 2009

• Why contextual analysis kicks behavioral’s butt on content

April 29, 2009

I learned a lot from that deal. I learned that the Internet is all about people expressing themselves on pages they own and control. I learned that a business deal made over dinner and a handshake can turn into hundreds of millions of dollars, I learned that good partners are worth every penny of returns you give up to get them, and I learned that selling too soon is not too painful as long as you don’t sell too much. And most of all I learned that you can make 100 times your investment every once in a while. And when you do, it’s something special.

My last post here on VentureWoods dwelt on the problems that early stage companies face in India and their requirements. One comment made on the post reminded me that all we are doing is analysis and seldom anything else (well, to be fair, HeadStart does quite a bit, it hosted 60 Startup Saturdays since last year and over 10k people have engaged in a variety of ways).

Well, here is something we also have done -I worked out a business incubator set up at the Centre for Electronics Development and Technology (CEDT) at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore in partnership with the HeadStart Foundation.

The focus is very much on application areas  where CEDT has expertise, applications where engineering and research requires investments in labs (that are provided free by CEDT) and expert project staff, and where we could engage prospective customers early on during incubation. The application areas are

1. Personal area networks: Multimedia delivery, Home security, Personal guidance systems, Authentication and Access control, Healthcare, Information synchronization

2. Automotive systems: Guidance and driving assistance, Entertainment, Traffic control and C2C (car to car) systems

3. Low cost embedded computing: Communications, Access control, Transactional systems (eg, ATMs)

4. Environmental monitoring: Energy management, Safety and Security, HVAC systems, Forestry and Farm management, Disaster management systems

5. Clean energy systems: Phantom power reduction, Distributed clean energy generation, Energy management and reduction

The incubator will admit its first batch of companies from June 2009 and it is hosted online on HeadStart’s collaboration portal here. Do pass on this information to people you know who can benefit from this initiative.

Prof Jamadagni, Chairman of CEDT, Jagannath Rao, advisor to CEDT and formerly Director of Motorola India’s mobile handsets business will help manage the incubator (I will be there as well) assisted by selected people from industry.

You can expect more such initiatives this year around establishing business incubators, industry linkages and investment support.

Why contextual analysis kicks behavioral’s butt on content

For the past year, we at Sphere have been waging a polite and respectful war on our cousins in the space, powering related content using behavioral analysis.  We’ve believed and maintained that behavioral analysis (ie: forming relationships based on repeat user connections) cannot compare to contextual analysis of the content, mainly because readers don’t always group their reading so systematically by topic.  I blogged about this last year and our opinions/learnings haven’t much changed.  We think behavioral matching is a cool technology and extremely valuable in other applications – such as commerce.  I love the feature on Amazon.com where it tells me that 64% of users bought the item I’m looking at, 24% bought another one and still, 14% bought a third.  It makes my shopping experience more informed and leaves me feeling better about my purchases.  Likewise, it’s helpful, when buying an iPhone, for instance, to know that most previous purchasers also bought the charger set and plastic case.  Content, though, is a different story.

I don’t consume content in the same organized way that I buy stuff.  My topics of particular interest right now, in no particular order, are: politics, economics, the stock market, technology, digital media, Pitt basketball, Duke basketball, convergence, Apple products, Israel, venture capital, Brooklyn and indie music.  On any given day, I’ll peruse my rss feeds in Google reader and surf from site to site gathering news on these topics of interest.  I might read an article about Duke’s upcoming matchup against UNC, followed by an article on the stimulus bill.  Knowing my friends and their interests, there’s a good chance that many of them follow the same patterns.  The problem, for behavioral, is that these two topics have no obvious relationship to one another, yet there is no way to decipher it.  This was illustrated beautifully today in an article that appeared on our partner Time.com.  In this article about the Israeli election, like all Time articles, our contextually related links show up side-by-side with those powered by Loomia, who use behavioral analysis.  The first time I read this article, this is what I saw.  Beneath door #2, Sphere is powering related stories based on contextual analysis of this article versus Time’s archive.  All three stories seem to fit nicely into the sphere (lower case) of Israeli politics…way to go team!  Behind door #3, Loomia is powering results based on behavioral analysis (ie: users who read this also read….).   While all three stories are interesting – particularly the one about Israeli model Bar Refaeli – none of them have any real connection to Israeli politics or specifically, the Israeli election.  What’s more, when I returned to the article later in the day, I saw different behavioral results.  Since it’s based on surfing and reading habits, not on contextual analysis of the content, behavioral is especially likely to return articles that are popular that moment, but may not be later in the day after their newness has worn off and a new flavor of the moment has surfaced.  Here is what I saw the second time around.  Sphere’s results under door #2 are identical as before, as you’d expect unless a new article was published on very similar topics bumping one of these three out.  Behind door #3, there are three completely different stories, arguably even less relevant than the previous results, though Ron Jeremy can usually be counted on for a few clicks.

While this is only one example, it’s quite illustrative of our view in that it provides an opportunity to compare behavioral and contextual performance on content side-by-side.  If you’re a publisher considering the pro’s and con’s of behavioral versus contextual content recommendations, please get in touch and we’ll help you explore the the options and achieve the best performance for your site.

Sphere: Related Content