Hi Nate, we need to work up to real personalization. Per greg's comment below (hi greg!), people's feelings on this stuff varies widely and doesn't correlate well with transit agency performance data.
We currently work with Nokia on street imagery. We also have a bunch of (we hope) interesting facebook integration including photos that will start to build our own library over time.
We're legally HQ'd in Singapore and funded by Joi Ito, so SG and TYO are near-term as should be london, sydney, toronto, and vancouver. I hope to be 2k+ cities this time next year. what's important to you?
Hi Mike, yup. Our Android app is behind for now. We busted our butts to make the iOS 6 launch and that's what dropped. We are hiring a dedicated android dev, hopefully for our Singapore office if you know someone who wants it.
Treat the 'explicit assurances' like politicians' campaign promises. If they lose, the promises are irrelevant. If they win, those promises had better align with the new incumbent's larger aims or they were just marketing.
The risk is not very hard to assess. It's pretty binary per startup opportunity. Do the relevant incumbents' revenue models, distribution models, or inherent cultural limitations prevent them from competing with you. @paulsutter covered the first two well early in this discussion. For the last, Apple has great difficulty with social, Facebook hasn't figured out Touch, Google is excessively focused on those two competitors, etc.
Facebook has muscled in on literally everything but games, other than their ex poste facto 30% revenue share, and during their earnings report they intimated that they may get into games directly.
And, I'm shocked at your statement about the older platforms. I don't know if your entire background is on your LinkedIn page, but what you say is simply not true of Windows, DOS, the Mac, and is very tough to credit to Sun or SGI in their heydays. Those vendors cherry picked their ISVs all the time and with no more rhetorical consistency, stewardship, or charity than Dalton describes. They did so because they had market share in their segments and could.
That's why I specifically included this in my post: Playing naive to that reality went out the window in the mid-1980s with PC software and has been reproven by the platforms at least every 24 months since.
Everyone from RedHat to BeOS to Sega who behaved (somewhat) better did so because they needed their ecologies to grow. If they'd succeeded in building market share, I'm pretty sure I could predict their changes in policy.
I fully understand breaking the rice pots and burning the boats, and I hope that you are right. However, his implementation doesn't create the developer education that you suggest. As they well should, young founders look up to guys like Dalton and may well take him at this word that Facebook's negotiating tactics are surprising. FB's stance on these issues are so ruthlessly consistent and well known that it's hard to even consider the specific tactics described as unethical.
I feel a responsibility to make it clear that such things are the norm and need to be accommodated in business planning and risk assessment from the beginning. Please note that I failed to do so the first time I dealt with Facebook, but that doesn't make it their fault -- rafer.net/post/168541483/lookeryupdate
Please also note, that I'd be damn excited for app.net's current iteration to take off and will go out of my way to use it if I can. I'd love a dev program that had ongoing stewardship built in, but no for-profit platform provider has ever made such a thing work over time.
IMO $1B for that kind of risk-free traction isn't significantly expensive to FB. Especially as FB desperately needed a volume of photos available outside the social graph in order to stay competitive.
I don't see it as crystal ball reading. The question that needs to be asked is, "If my new new thing takes off, what prevents the platform from cloning me, turning me off, and/or buying me cheap?"
In Zynga's case for instance, FB was pretty darn dependent on the advertising $$ Zynga paid them (among other factors). In Instagram's case, I believe that Facebook wished to avoid pumping up mobile app traffic that quickly. Etc.
Obviously, YMMV. The strength of the answers varies wildly, and startups often lose the bet -- even when the bet was calculated well. C'est la vie, et c'est la guerre.
It was lazy of me to inherit Dalton's term 'bully.' It should have been his expectation to only be compensated for EVA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_value_added) and not count on Facebook's stewardship of its developers.
And, when I don't like the tone of a meeting, I politely leave. Facebook's offices are physically difficult to enter, not leave.
Like any other resource or dependency that you build into your business, using a platform requires an ROI calculation of some sort. The distribution advantage needs to be worth the risk.
I suspect that the Facebook App Center is different than the iTunes App Store in an analogous way and will do nicely competing against it once Facebook chooses to do so.
I'm applying it differently, and to the business before his pivot. I'm talking about his conversation with Facebook and his accusation that Facebook was underhanded. He didn't do a proper job of disrupting FB's economics, distribution, or organizational limitations, so he's got no grounds to complain that they 'bullied' him. That should have been his expectation.
Exactly. Normal cannibalization. New businesses are built all the time by giving away what the incumbent charges for. Skype's an easy one. They don't charge all for normal calls, only for certain premiums. Innovator's Dilemma, etc., etc.
If @daltonc's app.net doesn't massively undercut FB's App Center revenue plan (or overwhelm it's distribution plan) somehow, what's the point?