Repost: Mobile Auction Tweets

I'm reposting a post I made for my friend Kevin at http://astartupaday.wordpress.com/. He's trying to come up with a startup idea for each of Paul Graham's 30 ideas that he'd like to fund for YCombinator [post].

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Hi, my name is Charles Ju and I'm answering Kevin's call for help. I am also an unabashed fan of Y Combinator (submitting a plan this year), and thought that I'd share some of my ideas with the community.

Please visit my blog at www.charlesju.com. If you want feedback on your ideas, a review of your startup, or just to meet a new friend feel free to e-mail me at charlesju[at]gmail[dot]com.

10. Auctions. They are a major foundation of internet revenue, eBay posted $7.5 billion USD in revenue last year. While this is not all from auctions, I think it's fair to say that a large portion of it is. With the inclusion of sites like Craigslist and FB marketplace, it becomes clear that finding a new way to monetize this market will be enormously profitable.

My Idea - Mobile Auction Tweets

The pain with auctions is that it is not tailored for the casual user. If you want to auction off an item on eBay, for example, you need to take a picture of it, find a description, and make the page attractive. This takes too long.

My idea is to create a mobile application, preferably starting on the iPhone to streamline the auction process. Similar to the concept of microblogging, auctions need to be simplified. All it will take to create an auction using my application would be a picture from the camera of the iPhone (or video), a short description, starting bid, and duration of the auction. This application will exponentially decrease the amount of time it takes to auction off casual items. Ideally this application will be able to plug into different auction sites; Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, eBay, etc.

There are a couple of benefits to this business model:

1. There is an actual business model. Each user will be a paying user and you won't have to fight the constant battle to make sure your ads are paying more than your server costs. By selling an actual product with a price you'll be cash flow positive from day 1.

2. Mobile auctions are already a big thing in Japan. So this model has been proven to work. http://www.dena.jp/en/work/mobile.html. Having a proof of concept in a foreign country will greatly decrease the inherent risk in starting the venture.

3. Avoids the problem of critical mass. Normally when you start any site that depends on the interaction of users you'll have the critical mass problem. You need users to get people to use your site but no one will use your site until you get users. By tapping into existing networks like eBay and Craigslist, you'll already have a full set of users ready to go.

Some risks off the top of my head to look out for are that big auction sites will not allow your application to use their API, a big auction site might take your idea and do it themselves, and there will be no demand for casual auctions.

Web 2.0 Microfinance Roundup

Microfinancing has been revolutionizing the way we help the poor. It is best laid out by the father of the concept, Muhammad Yunas (a Nobel Prize winner), in his book, A Banker To The Poor. In short, Muhammad Yunas established a bank (Grameen) in Bangladesh to help the extremely poor - those in the bottom 50% of an already impoverished nation. Lending them money in small amounts (tens to hundreds USD) with real interest rates (upwards of 15%), and making money for the community, lender, and most importantly, the bank. Microfinancing is not a charity, it's a for-profit business, and it works.

Many of us in the developed world have the stigma that the poor in both our own country and those around the world are stupid and unable to do anything for themselves. I think that's why we push hard for charities to throw money at problems that we want to solve. While this helps sometimes, a lot of the time it further entrenches the poor in their impoverished state since charity leaves the poor dependent on handouts.

Microfinancing and social entrepreneurship in general has taken another approach, in my opinion, a better approach, which is to take that leap of faith in the poor to trust that they have ideas on how to make money. It is from this basic notion of human respect that many, millions, of poor people around the world have been able to increase their standard of living. Microfinancing is a gift that keeps on giving.

I can go on and on with accolade, but in short, microfinancing works. Now, I'm a poor entrepreneur trying to make my way in the world, but I thought I'd offer some ways to get involved in this fantastic process from the comforts of your own home.

There are two major options online right now:

1. Kiva.org



Kiva is a nonprofit charity that allows donors to choose individuals to donate to. Each recipient gives a small description of what they are going to do with the money, and you can use PayPal to send money to Kiva which will then send the money to the local microfinance institution coordinating the transaction. They get about 100,000 unique visitors a month.

While the business model works as a nonprofit charity, it doesn't properly leverage the power of social entrepreneurialism. Without asking the poor to return the money with interest it doesn't give them the incentive to strive to break their own boundaries. Handouts belittle the intelligence and human worth of those in need of help.

Read/Write web had a good blog post on Kiva.

2. MicroPlace.com



MicroPlace is a for-profit subsidiary of eBay. It runs on the same concept as peer-to-peer lending. Investors get a return on investment with maturity dates ranging from 1 to 3 years. The return isn't huge, but they can guarantee 1-3%.

While admirable, these return rates need to be higher. Right now, investors still lose money with inflation adjusted. The bank by Muhammad Yunus has proven that upwards to 15% is the going rate of loans to the poor and at a default rate of less than 5% it seems to me that promising 4-5% is quite reasonable. This is important because by hitting the 4% mark you get to the same level as CDs and Money Market accounts which will make microfinancing a legitimate option for diversifying a portfolio, and that's where the real money is.

Aside from these minor points of contention, I'm sure both Kiva and MicroPlace are trying their best to change the world (which is a lot more than I can say for myself), and I wish them the best of luck. Please visit both sites when you get a chance.

Android And Symbian Might Merge; iPhone Still Best

According to VentureBeat Android and Symbian, two open source mobile operating systems, might merge. Symbian has been around since 1998 and has been deployed to over 200 million phones, as opposed to a mere 8 million iPhones.

The status quo in the mobile programming community is made of a couple of major platforms or soon to be major platforms. RIM has its own operating system built around a JAVA framework, Nokia has Symbian, Sony and a couple others use Windows Mobile, Android, and of course the iPhone. Each framework has its own quirks and style, porting a single application to more than a couple of these frameworks is a grueling and annoying process.

I contend that the iPhone is by far the most advanced platform with the best hardware. The two major disadvantages to a mobile phone as an internet communication device are (1) screen size and (2) control. There is no other form factor or design that is better at maximizing screen size and control than the iPhone.

With that in mind, I must disagree with the VCs that have said that the proper strategy in the mobile revolution is to hedge your bets and deploy across multiple platforms. I think a smart bet is not wasting time on trying to create a watered down mobile application to spread across multiple neanderthal platforms but rather creating an awesome application for the iPhone and port over slowly to phones that enter the same realm of excellence.

There are a couple of advantages to this strategy; (1) you can spend more time developing your application as opposed to learning stupid frameworks that'll probably be insignificant in 5 years and (2) it allows you to create better applications to leverage the screen size, 3G, GPS, and touch-screen on the iPhone.

8 DS Games To Port To iPhone

Gizmodo had an insightful post about the realistic feasibility of the iPhone as a gaming platform [here]. It concludes that the iPhone has amazing rendering capabilities, almost on par with the PSP, but fails as a gaming console because games are too hard to control.

I cordially disagree. The trick to gaming on the iPhone is not adapting old gaming mechanisms to fit in the iPhone (ie. controllers, d-pads, etc.), rather games need to be evolve to work with a touch screen and accelerator.

This might seem difficult at first glance, but the Nintendo DS has been making games based on pure touch screen controls for the last 4 years. Here are the top 8 games that should be ported over to the iPhone:

1. Advance Wars.

Not just advance wars, but strategy board games in general. These are optimal for the iPhone because they require very little control of the units. This game focuses on strategy and tactics, and was rated #3 by gamerankings.com [link].



Some more games in this category: Fire Emblem and FF Tactics.

2. Brain Age

Simple math and memory games.




3. Wario Ware

Stupid little games that are actually SUPER addicting.



4. Elite Beat Agents

This is Tap Tap Revenge, on crack. All touch screen based music beat matching game.



5. Nintendog

Have a pet dog, take care of it. Simple controls, easy to make, kids love it.



6. Worms/Gunbound

An internet sensation, Gunbound is a simple game dealing with characters that shot projectiles at each other. It consists of two controls, moving the shot up and down and selecting how powerful to shoot the projectile. Incredibly addicting.



7. Pinball

Same thing as the stuff my Dad played 20 years ago.



8. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney

An adventure crime solving game. Interesting game design; combining both story and gaming.

5 Reasons Why Jailbroken iPhone Apps Suck

There has been a recent uproar in the tech blogger community lately about how much the iPhone SDK sucks. While I agree that there are still a couple of problems with the SDK; a FUCKING NDA, lack of control over native apps like iTunes or Safari, and background processes (a more complete list was posted on Gizmodo yesterday), I want to dedicate this post to pointing out the critical flaws to jailbreaking and the jailbreaking community.

1. Apple might crackdown.

Prior to the App Store Apple had no vested interest in combating the jailbreaking community, but now each jailbroken iPhone is a loss of revenue for Apple. As soon as they figure this out, they will get a lot stricter.

2. No "real" companies will program jailbroken apps

Aside from the legal ambiguities from making money from programming for a hacked OS, there simply will never be enough users to justify any serious attempt at creating grandiose applications for the jailbroken SDK. To further justify this point, big VC funds are throwing down hundreds of millions for the official SDK. Simple supply and demand will move all the good developers to the official SDK, and we can see this starting with apps like Tap Tap Revenge being brought under the wing of Tapulous.

3. No great games.

There can never be any great games. While the first generation of gaming on the iPhone included pretty fun creations like Tap Tap Revenge, they will never have the traction to achieve critical mass. Additionally, in conjunction with reason #2, you will never get the big players (ie. EA) to port their games to the jailbroken SDK.

4. Viruses and buggy software.

As cute as it might be to have applications able to take over any part of the phone, this creates lots of problem. If a program fails to close properly, you'll have memory leaks, which are avoided on the official SDK because programs are sandboxed so no matter what happens after the program ends the memory is erased. Further, without a monitoring authority like Apple, you might have programs able to steal all your contact information. This happened with one of the official apps, Auora Feint, which got delisted recently for sending its user's entire contact list, unencrypted, to its servers.

5. No cool official Apple apps and updates.

Apple has created a bunch of official apps and updates that are simple awesome and amazing. For example, the iTunes remote. These are inaccessible from a jailbroken phone.

5 Ways To Fix Apple TV

The idea of making an internet and media centered machine has worked for many companies; WebTV in the 90s (sold to MS), TiVo earlier this decade, and XBMC on the hacked XBOX.

Thus begs the question, why is the Apple TV failing?

I think Apple was too accustomed to fan boys instantly humping every new product thrown at them that they were unable to cope with having to try to work for Apple TV's success. Apple. I love you more than any other company in the world, but your Apple TV SUCKS. It's ok though, I'm here to help you, here are 5 ways to save the Apple TV.

1. Leverage alternative video types.

This is so simple. The reason why mp3 players were successful was because they played the most popular audio codec. If you go to piratebay.org, you can see that almost every movie has tens of thousands of seeds, with upwards of hundreds of thousands for popular anime like Naruto or Bleach. This is EXACTLY why XMBC was so popular, it was able to play any video file, streamed from any computer. In order for Apple to facilitate this, they need to open up iTunes to different types of videos, specifically .avi and .mkv files. Further, they have to make it as easy to drag-and-drop new files into the library as mp3s.

From a legal stand point there should be no differentiation between .avi files and .mp3 files. The same case can be brought for both. From a viral standpoint, this is the number one and most important step.

2. Subscription all-you-can-view videos

There was unanimous acclaim for Netflix's new streaming box, Roku. It's priced at $100 and leverages existing subscription fees to allow unlimited access to Netflix's online library. Apple has enough leverage to port the exact same model, and it should.

3. Ads stitched into mainstream movies and videos.

This will mimic Hulu. Even the exact same content is a good start. The inherent problem with watching Hulu is that the quality is sub-par and it's not as comfortable as watching on the TV. These things can be fixed by predownloading videos with stitched in ads. Hollywood and Apple need to understand that viewers are not adverse to ads, we're adverse to shitty content and having good content isolated in a very limited viewing window.

4. Opening up the Apple TV platform and power

The Apple TV is basically a full-fledged Mac OSX machine. They should leverage that and allow the Apple TV to run in OSX mode. Then they can merge the Mac Mini and the Apple TV into a single product. This should sell well to developers and consumers on a tighter budget. If that is too cannibalistic, I would suggest at least porting a couple of the more popular applications to Apple TV. Specifically, Safari and Preview.

5. Enable Timemachine

Apple TV has pretty good size HDD. Some people might not want to store hundreds of videos at a time. It seems to me that if Timemachine were enabled, it would make the Apple TV exponentially more useful.

Best of luck Apple, either way, I'll love you forever (pending you release a new Macbook Pro by the end of the month).

New Facebook Layout Is Smart

In case you haven't seen it, there is a new layout for Facebook coming out soon. You can preview it at www.new.facebook.com. A lot of people are going to hate it when it first comes out. It is inevitable that there will be hundreds of groups protesting its existence, congregating together to shut it down ... on the network itself. But I, on the other hand, think that the new layout is great!

Here is why:

1. It's shifts Facebook from a directory of profiles to an interactive hub for social communication. This is done through an emphasis on feeds by placing them on both the front of the home page and the profile page. While this might be new to some, it is the current trend in the web 2.0 space with life stream services like www.friendfeed.com that aggregate a user's data from different web services into a single website.

2. Better utilization of space. Most of the boxes are bigger because they freed up space on the left and the right. That means that on the same real estate we can see a much clearer update from each user. And if you notice carefully, they've even taken out ads on the front page (update: except the sponsored posts inside the main feed), but upgraded the ads to the top of the profile page on the right hand side. Since I'm more entrepreneur than Facebook user, this is exciting news because it means that my ads will get better exposure per $ and higher click-through rates.

3. They moved annoying applications out of the main profile page. This gives a chance for those users that like to use applications to still use them, yet allowing those without the need to be constantly bombarded by annoying boxes to avoid them. Excellent decision.

My First Post

I have tried to start blogging, on and off again, for the last couple of years. This time, I hope it will stick. I'm interested in all things on the forefront of technology, but more specifically, I'm dedicating this blog to tech startups. While there are many blogs out there on this subject, I hope to keep this blog different in the following three ways:

1. Keeping posts short. No one likes reading long posts.

2. Being honest and fair. I refuse to sugarcoat my opinions.

3. Numbering my ideas. It's much easier to read and understand.