Why Giant Smartphones are Still the New Normal

Ascend MateMarch 2014: The New York Times reports this week that at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the giant smartphone trend is not only continuing, but accelerating. I was just in a meeting the other day with one of those monsters, and I could barely take my eyes off it it. Some kind of a Samsung with a screen well over 5 inches diagonally. By the time you add the heft of its aftermarket silicon rubber case, the thing was about the size and thickness of a 350 page paperback book .(But not the same weight as a book – that Samsung brick is going to really pull down one side of your coat – and forget about your jeans pocket.) Screen was pretty flashy-looking, though.

However, the press continues to miss the point on these things. As I pointed out a year ago, they are not taking off because they are better than phones or tablets, they are taking off because they are cheaper and easier than having to buy both. If you compare them to a tablet, the tablet is better for content consumption and productivity. If you compare them to a smaller phone, the phone is better for portability and, well, being a phone. So if you are willing to pay for and carry both, you’d be better served from a functionality standpoint.  But most people are not willing or able to buy, carry and maintain both.  So they are looking for a single device compromise – as I pointed out below a year ago, this is especially clear when you look at the demographics of initial phablet growth. And now the trend is continuing with a new demographic – the non-techy early mainstream. I called it just over a year ago, and I stand by my original thesis:

Jan 15, 2013: Until a very recent epiphany, I had been observing this trend of growing smartphone screen size with puzzlement. Android smartphones grew to 4 inches. 4.5 inches. 4.8 inches. Then Samsung releases the Galaxy Note at 5.3 inches. And now the Note 2 at 5.5 inches. And now Huawei has just released a a phone with a 6.1 inch screen (the Ascend Mate, pictured above).

Yet Apple was not wrong that good one-handed operation maxed out at a screen size of about 3.5 inches diagonal. And you definitely look a bit odd holding a tablet to your head. And these things are giant in your pocket, if they even fit. So what is driving this? [Read more…]

Cookin’ Without Gas (It’s Official)

Update: Well, it is official. My internal combustion engine car, a trusty companion for the last 14 years, has been sold, and I have a confirmed Vehicle Production Order for a BMW i3. It is supposed to be built on March 12th and arrive with the first US-bound shipment of customer i3s on May 5th (they have been on sale in Europe since November.) My conversion to solar-powered driving should coincide with the arrival of the spring sunshine. Looking forward to it. Below is the story behind the story.  And for some really geeky videos on how this unusual carbon fiber car is actually produced, see this playlist.

[Original Post:] Regular readers know it had been a life-long dream of mine to live in a solar house and also a life-long dream to drive a solar-powered car. I got the roof done. Cars with enough solar panels on their roofs to power themselves will almost certainly never be be practical in my lifetime, nor probably that of my kids. But stationary residential solar arrays already generate more than enough power for transportation use. As I outlined in my post 365 Sunrises, my residential solar array makes about 1,350 kWh in excess of what we need to power our house for a year. Could that be enough to power all my personal transportation needs?

[Read more…]

Why Giant Smartphones are the New Normal

Ascend MateUntil a very recent epiphany, I had been observing this trend of growing smartphone screen size with puzzlement. Android smartphones grew to 4 inches. 4.5 inches. 4.8 inches. Then Samsung releases the Galaxy Note at 5.3 inches. And now the Note 2 at 5.5 inches. And now Huawei has just released a a phone with a 6.1 inch screen (the Ascend Mate, pictured above).

Yet Apple was not wrong that good one-handed operation maxed out at a screen size of about 3.5 inches diagonal. And you definitely look a bit odd holding a tablet to your head. And these things are giant in your pocket, if they even fit. So what is driving this? [Read more…]

Instagram’s Turn for a Face-Palm

Homer - D'Oh!

Yep, we’ve stepped on the rake again.  In what is becoming an almost weekly ritual, we’ve had yet another user revolt and PR fiasco because of revised user terms and conditions.  Instagram’s turn this week. The line in the damage control note from Instagram Co-Founder Kevin Systrom today that grabbed me was: “Legal documents are easy to misinterpret.”

This statement is stupid in so many ways.  For starters, [Read more…]

Cookin’ Without Gas

Regular readers know it had been a life-long dream of mine to live in a solar house and also a life-long dream to drive a solar-powered car. I got the roof done. Cars with enough solar panels on their roofs to power themselves will almost certainly never be be practical in my lifetime, nor probably that of my kids. But stationary residential solar arrays already generate more than enough power for transportation use. As I outlined in my post 365 Sunrises, my residential solar array makes about 1,350 kWh in excess of what we need to power our house for a year. Could that be enough to power all my personal transportation needs? [Read more…]

Customer Crowdfunding: Not So Fast, Entrepreneurs

Wil Schroter is the co-founder and CEO of Fundable.com which is a crowdfunding platform for startups, so it is not entirely surprising that he would pen a very pro-crowdfunding piece in GigaOM recently. In the piece, he righty calls out a few of the advantages: customer-sourced funding does allow you to test the market before you build, and it does allow you to fund the product before it is built avoiding the need to amass dilutive capital on a speculative basis, and it does allow you to engage with and build buzz amongst your potential customers even before they are your customers. (The recent hysteria about the Pebble Watch is a good example of this.) But what is totally misleading, even disturbing, about Schroter’s GigaOM article is that it so utterly and completely misses the bigger picture.  [Read more…]

Martin Flusberg – Entrepreneur Video Interview Series

[This post is part of an on-going series of video interviews with members of the start-up community – see a list of links to the full series here.]

Martin Flusberg is a serial entrepreneur with a twist. Not only has he started several companies, he has also been an angel investor for several years as well. This gives him a great perspective on the challenges of getting a company off the ground, communicating with investors to get it financed, and helping it grow. I am a friend and admirer of Martin’s, and an investor in his current company, PowerHouse Dynamics. I am also a very enthusiastic user of the product – for a full discussion of using the PowerHouse Dynamics eMonitor with a net-zero solar system, see this post.) The other thing about Martin that people may not realize [Read more…]

Reinventing Paper and Rock & Roll

Launchpad portfolio companies have been busy this week. We just closed a $1.1M Series A round with JamHub, which they will use to accelerate the rollout of their very cool rock & roll products. They make a family of devices that allow bands to plug in and jam together with incredible and finely controlled sound quality for each player, but without the noise of a traditional amplified rehearsal. Silent and neighborhood-friendly rock & roll that sounds awesome to the musicians, but doesn’t wake the dead. Fantastic team – we are really pleased to be working with them. (Mass High Tech story here.)

And speaking of reinventing long-standing traditions, portfolio company Vizibility has done a radical rethink the humble business card. This week they launched their new line of NFC-enabled business cards to compliment their online identity management platform for professionals. For situations where you want to quickly pull up the contact info, LinkedIn info or Google results on someone you have just met, you no longer need to manually search or scan a QR code with your phone’s camera. One tap of the NFC enabled card will allow you to bring up the information directly. Very cool. TechCrunch wrote about it here, or you can check out the company at vizibilty.com.

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The Long Road to Instant Success

Portfolio company Crocodoc made a huge release this week to great press coverage. The enterprise version of their product has popped out into the world fully-formed and seemingly perfectly-timed. An instant overnight success. Except that it wasn’t overnight. Success almost never is. These guys had to work and work and work and start over numerous times to get where they are now. [Read more…]

What Publishers Just Don’t Get: Why Zite Wins

Publishers will never be able to establish successful mobile platforms. The Zite model of customized content will win. Why? Because publishers think editing means curating their own proprietary content. In the days of the printing press, limited square inches on the broadsheets, slower news cycles and information scarcity rather than information overload, they might have been right. But today, editing means [Read more…]