Hark back to the year 2008; do you remember what was different then? Sure, the world economy was collapsing, we were in a heated political battle between McCain and Obama; things were uncertain, including something we take for granted today: the penetration of mobile.

I’m sure we’ve all seen Mary Meeker’s chart of the growth of mobile versus other internet-based technologies, so no need to rehash here. However, I remember starting on an iPhone app in 2008, and I remember my dad asking me if I thought that the iPhone would take off. Today, that seems like the most ridiculous question. But in 2008, we didn’t have any handsets that weren’t under the direct control of the carriers.

Fast forward three short years, and apps have become a sweet spot in this dismal economy. Mobile ad spends are approaching multiple billions of dollars per year; it seems like every day a new mobile startup is starting, growing, and being bought by some major player. Meanwhile, a whole class of mobile developers has ridden the wave up.

Now I’m not talking about the Zynga, Rovio, or the Instagram crews. I’m not talking about the terrible apps that are never downloaded more than once (probably on the developer’s mom’s phone). I’m referring to the middle class of mobile developers. The developers with decent skills and decent ideas, but who can not cut through all the noise to make enough revenue off their apps full-time.

Its this group of developers that will likely be squeezed the most. Its companies that serve this cohort of developers with easy-to-use tools and provide end results with dollars attached that will thrive.

This mobile patent war is getting ridiculous. Its more dramatic than All My Children. I guess it took them 40 something years to get rid of that nuisance as well. Damn, 40 years of this crazy IP WMD business, and we’ll all be fucked.

Major props to those only on the receiving end, particularly Google. They didn’t have many patents, because they didn’t want to have to play this game. So much for that, I suppose…

Since I’m on a Facebook tear right now, along with the rest of the world I suppose, it would be prudent to lay down some of my thoughts regarding the newest it-thing in the Facebook ecosystem: Zynga.

The game company’s recently filed S-1 reveals how important the social graph (and the largest creator of it) is to Zynga. The S-1 filing mentioned Facebook over 200 times (source). This may not be surprising to those who understand Zynga to be the creator of FarmVille and MafiaWars (two very popular Facebook games). But Zynga has also branched out from just the Facebook platform, producing the ever-popular Words with Friends mobile application. Yet, the bulk of the company’s future success remains correlated with Facebook.

But it is not an unrequited relationship: it was recently noted that almost 10% of Facebook’s revenues came from the fees paid by Zynga. This seems to also be born out by the speculations in financial markets, valuing Facebook at $100 billion and Zynga at approximately $10 billion. To have 10% of revenue come from a single company seems to be somewhat risky.

With regards to Zynga, I’m still having trouble accepting that they got millions of people to spend real dollars on digital cows and corn. But it is clear that they’re really onto something and it will be really exciting to watch it’s trek through the IPO and onto the markets.

OR my Chromebook experience

Last week I boarded a plane from SF to Chicago. I suppose the airline is important for the story: I flew Virgin America. It was probably the most enjoyable flight I’ve had in… forever?

But what blew everything else away was the awesome Chromebook I got to test out. In the terminal, there was a kiosk of Chomexperts lending Chromebooks. All I had to do was give them my credit card so I can’t steal the device.

The boot-up time was insane. Literally 8 seconds. My MacBook does a pretty decent job with Lion but you can tell that some engineers spent a long time shaving precious time off the startup.

But there were also some interesting aspects of the keyboard. For instance, the Caps Lock was replaced with a search button that automatically puts the focus on a search query. And there were a bunch more keys that clearly only a computer that ran in a browser would need. For instance, a dedicated key for refreshing a page, as well as keys for traversing the browsing history. You could also make a tab full screen and have no other distractions with a simple button.

And you access the device with your standard Google account. It brings in all of your services in the expected way. That was a disappoint feature, to tell you the truth, because I would have expected some of the applications to have Chromebook specific behavior. The only one in the standard suite that did was Google Talk, which worked very much like Facebook chat if it wasn’t isolated to the browser window.

So a Chromebook is useless without the internet, after all the point Google is making with Chrome OS is that we utilize the Cloud for so many of our services, that the OS becomes obsolete. And to that end, Virgin America hooked it up with free WiFi at 36,000 feet.

Now its not blazingly fast, but I sat in a chair in the SKY surfing the internet and chatting in real time with my friends far below me. To be fair, YouTube couldn’t really load any videos and I couldn’t consume streaming media but I’m not sure that was the fault of the Chromebook. I would assume that its the internet on the PLANE! (Sorry, I can’t get over that little fact).

The Chromebook itself, seemed fast enough to handle all the processes I was trying to do. The trackpad has some funky interactions, but I think that’s because I hand-mumble as I use a trackpad.

Overall, awesome experience. Thanks Google & Virgin for making my flight awesome. Its so nice when it actually feels like 2011 :)

The integration between social networking giant Facebook and enterprise giant Microsoft is really astounding. It seems to me that a large part of Microsoft’s future is tied up in the success of Facebook. Perhaps, the Redmond giant ought to change its ticker symbol from $MSFT to $MSFB?

Recently, Facebook announced a new addition to its communication suite: Skype integration with regular ol’ FB chat. This allows all the users of Facebook to see each other in real-time. Now, remember that Skype was just acquired by Microsoft for a cool $8 billion.

On top of this new partnership, Facebook’s search capability has long been powered by Microsoft’s search engine Bing. And furthermore, recently Bing has been airing TV commercials that highlight the social integration with the search engine. Namely, you can see what your Facebook friends have to say about a particular search result.

There is no doubt a strategic partnership to be had, particularly as an affront to search behemoth Google. The company spans many verticals: mobile with Android, (now) social with Google+, enterprise software with Google Apps. Though let’s not kid ourselves, Google Docs is nowhere near Microsoft Word.

But how will the partnership play out? Will there be a dramatic episode as there was between the Apple and Adobe of the late 90’s? Will there eventually be a move to make all of Microsoft’s products social through Facebook? Is such reliance on another company dangerous in the long-term?

I’m not quite sure what the relationship will develop into, though I am quite sure it will leverage the combined audiences of Microsoft (now including that of Skype) and Facebook, and that is massive. Even with Google+ growing at the rate of a million users per day (the same as FB during its rapid acceleration in 2009), the Mountain View company must be hyper vigilant. This is going to get interesting.

There are some truly amazing and smart people in technology, and I’m not sure that the concentration is different from other math, science and engineering-based fields. The attitude, however, is something that I find to be completely unique.

The first aspect of tech start-up culture that I have come to love and appreciate is a complete disregard for the status quo. Allow me to rephrase, a disregard for the status quo when the normal procedure results in frustration. If a pain point exists, the question asked is not “why does it exist?” but “how can we erase it?” The existence of a problem simply means the quest for a solution must begin.

The next question would be, “how can one fix this problem?” In the tech scene of 2011, where the costs of raw components to build amazingly powerful tools have become negligible (an AWS instance, a few smart people and LOTS of coffee) that question can more easily be answered. And its not just being answered conceptually, products are being built that erase pain points everyday.

This attitude translates into intense and frequent optimism; optimism that spills over into many aspects of life. I find it to be why working at a tech startup is so jovial and fun. I believe that there is no better time to work in technology and in San Francisco than today.

Except, maybe tomorrow.

To be honest, I don’t really concern myself with the question of is this a bubble or not. If it isn’t a bubble, it is at least a great boom. And booms are almost always followed by some derivative of bust.

I think the real question is what is the risk of the mania. I define risk as probability-of-occurrence multiplied by an impact coefficient. Thus, even if something is incredibly unlikely (statistically speaking), if the impact is extreme then the situation must at least be given some thought.

Until the recent tech-IPO mania (Groupon, LinkedIn soon-to-be Zynga), a great deal of the risk was borne by institutional investors, by savvy venture capitalists. This was declared to be a departure from the dot-com bubble of the late 90s when the public financial markets exposed many average people’s wealth to the vacillation.

And I agree with that. If many of the current tech companies that have received so much in private capital went bust, the losses would amount to fortunes, but the fortunes of investors who profess to be intelligent and informed.

Though I was just at a recent panel of VCs, one of whom said that this time would be different because now intelligent investors will be the ones buying the securities; the same intelligent investors who bought so many mortgage backed securities. Remember those?

However, now as many investors seek to harness the great IPO climate as an exit strategy, the fortunes of average people become intertwined with the fortunes of these tech companies. And I’m not so sure that’s the greatest thing.

I remember learning about the Civil War in middle school; I know it by that name because I’m from San Francisco, but some of my Southern friends refer to it kindly as the War of Northern Aggression. I remember that the presumption was that the Southern states were fighting a war to retain slavery, to retain their overtly racist way of life; of course I don’t mean to say the Northern residents were necessarily liberal or tolerant, simply that racism just wasn’t codified in statue and culture the way it was in the South. I remember being taught the true version, the narrative of state’s rebelling to retain their rights, their essence. My teachers repeatedly told us, “the Civil War was not about slavery”; but, of course, it was.

And I see the Tea Party now. The party that is up in arms about Obama’s federalist government and its apparently increasing presence (though the Federal work force has actually shrunk to incredibly low levels since 2010). I see them arguing nominally for State’s rights, for localized politics. But I never saw them act with any sort of fervor during the insane expanse of federal government powers during the past EIGHT years of George Bush. There were no massive rallies against the Patriot Act, no massive rallies against warrantless wiretapping, no public outcry from the now-Tea Party over expensive wars across the world. I find it telling that after 96 months of complacency, 18 months was just too much and something just had to be done. But telling of what?

I’m not necessarily saying that Tea Party members are overtly racist and I’m definitely not saying that they want slaves. But I think just as State’s right was a rallying cry for a regressive (particularly with regards to equality) politic during the middle of the 19^thcentruy, Tentherism is serving to unite the same body, and I can’t help but notice the challenge to their worldview that preceded their “revolution”: a non-white, young man in the White House. If the members of the Tea Party want to be taken seriously by the rest of the country, it would behoove them to acquire a little more credibility with regards to their anger.

Those who know me can attest that I’m not one for religious passages, but I think the meek are inheriting the Earth. By the meek, of course, I mean the geek(s).

Those who control the means of economic production always become the ruling class. Historically, the greatest means of production was land, hence the fact that a great deal of the American Founding Fathers was of the landed gentry; hence the fact that throughout history the wealthy have been those with the most land and the most expansive kingdoms. And all through history it was either own land or have to work for somebody who did. It was own (land) or be owned (by land).

But now the greatest means of production is technology. It is being able to control machines and bend them to human will. It is about converting 1 and 0 bits into Facebooks and Googles and the ability to connect with anyone, anywhere, anytime. It is indeed a nerd’s world, where being able to machine-whisper is one of the most valuable skills a person can have.

As the cost of technology goes down, and as it plays a greater and more important role in daily life, the producers of that technology become more and more important. Furthermore, as we use consumer products like the iPad to do tasks that would have used to involve somewhat complex programming, the gap between the skill-set of the techno-elite and the hoi polloi increases. As consumer electronics reduce the need to program or script for the masses, those who build the electronics wield more and more influence.

Seems to me like it is really program or be programmed. Best get started on that PHP book that has been languishing on my shelf.

Really, we’re still talking about the merits of some tax increases?

My quite-recent, massive tirade about my disappointments with Obama aside, I would love to be a fly on the wall in his strategy sessions. With the most recent episode of political battle-of-the-ideologue focused on the debt ceiling, the President was able to rephrase the argument into Republican parlance. He said that no spending should be off the table; including spending in the form of tax cuts. Sure he may have opened up some of the money allocated to social programs like Medicare and Social Security to attacks from spending hawks; but he was also able to open up the attack on tax cuts advocated by afore-mentioned spending hawks.

Tax cuts aren’t usually phrased as spending items. However, take just as a random example, the Bush tax cuts. They were enacted without subsequent reductions in the federal government concurrent payments, meaning they were spending with borrowed money. Spending borrowed money leaves you in debt.

Well that’s funny, aren’t we in massive debt? Oh, and not to beat a dead horse, but didn’t we start the century with a massive projected surplus? And wasn’t a large porition of that surplus spent disproportionally giving lower tax rates to the higher income brackets? Interesting.

With the federal budget completely constrained, no spending can be sacred, and that spending includes the high price we’ve paid for the tax cuts for the upper crust of the taxpayers.

Of course, important subtext of all of this tax debate is some facts. Namely that the bi-partisan debt commission has recommended some tax increases, AND that we had 8 years of higher tax rates on the wealthy in the 90’s and things turned out fine; we had 8 years of lowered tax rates and it was the most abysmal growth in any post War “boom”. So its not the debate is lacking evidence or facts; yet it rages on.

As if we didn’t anecdotally know this already, RIM’s days seem to be number. Living in San Francisco, I can’t remember the last time I saw a Blackberry (important to note, I also don’t work in finance or law).

And my friend Lily (tumbling as pipperipembo) just chose and Android over Blackberry, which is exactly what this recent report shows! While Apple maintains its preeminent position as the smartphone-to-have, Android has been quickly chomping away at the rest of the market, competing on price. The loser of that fight clearly has been the-once-mighty RIM. The ultimate loser will likely be RIM shareholders and the two men who serve as the company’s joint-CEOs. Not to mention all the suit-clad BB users…

So while I may be (slightly) jealous of not being able to BBM from my Droid or iPhone, I’m really excited that my phone’s manufacturer will continue to offer support for the next year. Call me crazy, but I think its going to be hard for RIM to offer Blackberry customer service, when the company has gone under.

This past week I was able to participate in an un-Panel at The Muther! hackathon. The topic was how to make outstanding apps, and the interesting takeaway was that the second of the two major problems in the app economy is finally starting to get some attention. The first one is one that all app developers wrestle with, discoverability: How does one get more downloads? How does one get featured in the App Store?

The second piece of the puzzle is engagement: what does one do once the app has been downloaded 100,000 times? Up until now, this has been the dirty little secret of apps and nobody has really wanted to talk about it. But at the panel, the audience really wanted to talk about engagement, and I think that’s a great thing.

Panel video here - http://vimeo.com/25671288