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June 04, 2005
BREW2005 Recap
First of all, the Hawaiian Tropic girl was very hot. How do I compete with that? I pulled up my pant leg a little bit to show some leg in an effort to attract more attention to our booth, but everyone was still looking at her if you can believe it. I honestly can’t tell you what company she was representing, though, which is kind of funny.
Qualcomm had their best BREW Developers Conference ever this year. It was well-attended and had some great sessions. Nothing ground-breaking was announced, but it was nice to hear John Stratton at Verizon Wireless declare that this is the year for LBS. Location-based applications will be the big thing next year.
Some guy in the audience at our LBS panel made a good point. He asked how big the market really was for LBS applications, because despite all the hype he has never seen any information showing any kind of explosive growth of applications or revenue. Joe Astroth from Autodesk had a great response, I thought, when he said that there aren’t really any LBS “applications” rather LBS will get baked into applications and essentially be invisible to the user. He’s right about that. A truly paradigm-shifting technology like LBS should be indiscernable from magic to the user.
Huey Lewis put on a great show. You don’t think you are a Huey Lewis fan until you realize you know all of the words to all of his songs. Remember in American Psycho when Bateman is killing Owen with an axe?
“In 1987 Huey released this, Fore!, their most accomplished album. I think their undisputed masterpiece is ‘Hip To Be Square,’ a song so catchy that most people probably don't listen to the lyrics. But they should because it's not just about the pleasures of conformity and the importance of trends. It's also a personal statement about the band itself.”
So true.
The Rabble, She Is Launch?
A guy from South America saw a product demo and got all excited and wanted to make sure we weren’t selling vapor. “The Rabble, she is launch?” Yes. She is launch. Rabble soft-launched on 11 handsets on Verizon Wireless. Next week we will add the balance of the 22 we support on Verizon Wireless right now. Then the following week we'll put out a press release. We’ll add other new handsets as they become available. There is demand for mobile blogging, btw: In the first 48 hours Rabble has been up without any announcement, we are averaging a new paying customer about once every five minutes. The early adopters of this product are so incredibly super-cool I can’t believe it. I got a message from one user: “Thanks for creating yet another addictive mobile phone product. lol. I’ve been subscribed for what, less than a week and i’m already hooked. lol. This is great.” I was Rabbling in our booth yesterday and found this post on another Channel: “Of my various addictions –lol- blogging is my favorite. I dont know who came up with this idea, but it beats the hell out of other apps I’ve tried.”
The definition of Rabble is “The lowest or coarsest class of people.” We chose it because to us it signifies the edge of the network. It’s meant to be ironic, like, “Yeah, I’m just the Rabble of the world, so go ahead and discount me. Then watch me and a billion others like me organize and completely disrupt the status quo.” So far, I like what I see. This is going to get really interesting when we have broader distribution and a larger number of users.
We admittedly have to shake out some kinks with the database, and many of the users have been very helpful providing feedback and just helping out in general. Rabble has some UI quirks and behavioral issues, but nothing major and people don’t seem to notice anyway. Maybe it’s just my critical eye. We have a lot of ideas for improvements already for 2.0. If you have suggestions, please feel free to let me know. Frankly, some of the issues are just do to the programming environment. This isn’t the web. Every handset is unique in it’s own beautiful way, causing various challenges and requiring you to basically maintain a hundred unique code bases, all a little different from each other. Mobile application development is not for the faint of heart. All things considered, (not the least of which is our boot-strap budget) I am very proud of Rabble and I am glad our small but quickly growing community of users likes it, too.
We had some great meetings with a bunch of other carriers in the U.S. and around the world, and many agreed to offer Rabble to their subscribers. Everyone else said they wanted it, but carrier business development can be a bit slow. It was a great reception overall, and we will be announcing the availability of Rabble on other carriers very shortly. I would also like to thank Verizon Wireless for embracing this product and showing the vision to promote user-generated content through Rabble.
Rabble Envy
Developer conferences are by definition comprised of mostly developers, which creates sort of a weird environment because there is a lot of competitive intelligence being gathered. Mostly we got some great compliments on the look and feel, and just the completeness of the app. I also noticed some negative space, though. Rabble is the first mobile blogging community ever. (Don’t email me with examples like TextAmerica or whatever. While cool, that is not mobile blogging – that is posting to a blog on the web from your phone. I mean a fully mobile-only, self-contained community of mobile content creators and consumers.) The fact that we beat some other, better funded, people to market seems to irritate them. There were a few guys from a company I have never heard of to whom we showed the app and the response was, “Yeah, well, we are working on something that is going to blow this away.” Sheesh. Thanks for stopping by, guys. Please don’t be bitter. Had you not spent all of your money on the matching embroidered shirts, maybe you would be farther along by now. That’s like 100 lines of code you’re wearing.
A friend of ours went to visit the booth of one company (where they still did not have a working application to show) and asked how their product compared to Rabble. He sent me an email from his Blackberry: “they claim they will be launching on all major carriers and their relevant handsets this year, that they have a dramatically advanced app over rabble with many more hours of user-testing and development, and a tech platform that carriers will be adopting and will give them a much better user experience than apps like rabble and dodgeball.”
They are launching on all major carriers? I would be careful about making such bold predictions. I’ll bet there is at least one major carrier to whom that would be news. In the meantime, their “dramatically advanced over rabble” application can sit there in many more hours of user-testing while we build a community of paying subscribers who love Rabble. Betamax was, by all accounts, better than VHS. I’ll bet there were a lot of people at Sony saying their product was “dramatically advanced” over VHS. That didn’t help. What helps is getting a product to market. We call it “3.1.” That was the first version of Microsoft Windows that was actually useful enough to be commercially viable. But had they not shipped 1.0 when they did and instead waited for all the functionality to be fully baked, they would have missed the market entirely.
We are the first to market and currently have no competition, but it will come. When it does, we will compete on the merits of our product and the swiftness of our strategy. Have a better product? Ship it. It will give consumers more choices and force innovation in the marketplace. I am looking forward to seeing other location-based applications, and particularly those focusing on upstream media. Mostly, I think more applications even vaguely similar to Rabble will help to legitimize the LMNO space and will further define it as its own area of opportunity.
Posted by Shawn Conahan at June 4, 2005 10:15 AM
Comments
I congratulate you on the FIRST mobile blogging community YOUR company has ever launched but ...
Rabble is NOT as I quote you "the first mobile blogging community ever" or "fully mobile-only, self-contained community of mobile content creators and consumers" just like NewBay's FoneBlog™, wasn't "the world's first mobile blogging solution" - as they reported in 2002 (http://newbay.com/about_us.php).
Certainly be proud of what you have but please let's keep the ego and hype in check. Besides, further qualifying your statement such as in - the first commercial, BREW-based, fully mobile-only, self-contained community of mobile content creators and consumers, incorporating LBS, launched on the Verizon Network in the US in 2005 - would sound a bit silly. Right?
This is not "Rabble" envy. I like what you guys have put together - but fair is fair. A statement like your's once given "legs" by the media becomes a bit like competing with the Hawaiian Tropic girl you mention in your lead sentence.
Posted by: David Harper at June 5, 2005 05:11 AM
David makes a good point. Claims depend much on definition. Rabble is, as he points out, the first commercial, BREW-based, fully mobile-only, self-contained community of mobile content creators and consumers, incorporating LBS, launched on the Verizon Network in the US in 2005.
Since "mobile blogging" is difficult to define, I make a distinction between carrier-grade solutions, web-based solutions, wap-based solutions, thick client, thin client and one-way publishing platforms.
The better approach, as I am sure David would agree, is to claim we launched a cool application and we hope people like it.
Posted by: Shawn Conahan at June 5, 2005 10:21 AM
Yes, very cool...
... and smartly done. And perhaps, I suffer from a bit of "Rabble" envy after all when it comes to the team Intercasting has put together.
As OB1-Wan Kenobi said, "Many of the truths that we cling to depend on our point of view." I think real gentlemen this Shawn must be.
Posted by: David Harper at June 5, 2005 11:11 AM
Aw, you quoted me. :)
And, by the way, who wouldn't have Rabble envy? It's only the next big thing.
Posted by: -LiberalFury- at June 29, 2005 07:12 PM