Matthaus Krzykowski

Shoe Design & Launch Marketing

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 18:23:28 +0100

Related to “My passion is to help creative people, be it for example software engineers or designers, succeed.” The shoes mentioned in the link were designed by my sister’s boyfriend (the dude with the back to us on the first FILA logo picture) … we had a fascinating conversation over Christmas on product creation and marketing. Turns out all these fashion brands are even more challenged to deal with marketing in the digital age than the newspapers etc of this world are.

Amazon says its Android Appstore tripled customers in the fourth quarter

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 17:01:50 +0100

Amazon says its Android Appstore tripled customers in the fourth quarter:

The new king of Android tablet monetisation enters the room.

U.S. Carriers Don’t Want Stock Android Phones

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 23:48:42 +0100

U.S. Carriers Don’t Want Stock Android Phones:

These analogies like this one by John Gruber are just stupid/misinformed. They are boring. I am tired of them. Unfortunately they are a majority opinion in the Valley in my view. Android always was meant as a toolbox. Don’t act surprised it is not. Don’t be surprised that Microsoft needs to react to mobile computing and pays moolah to catch up. There’s no news in this. Move on. Talk about something which is new. Talk about something which is relevant to startups. Or platforms.

Moblyng’s Shutdown: Enthusiasm For HTML5 Gaming is Still a Little Premature

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 12:56:00 +0100

Moblyng’s Shutdown: Enthusiasm For HTML5 Gaming is Still a Little Premature:

For those among you who don’t buy into each self-serving hype promoted by the SV digital mafia (and its current lead Facebook) Kim-Mai Cutler gives an update why HTML5 mobile gaming sucks in the moment. The killer line is “Secondly, many of the HTML5-based games that debuted on Facebook’s mobile platform had usability and latency issues. Even the HTML5-based version of Zynga’s Words With Friends wasn’t so responsive when we tested it.”

HTML5 on carrier networks will need a loooooong time to become a viable option for users of mid-range games and “apps.”

Predictions for 2012 by Asymco's Horace Dediu: None

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 16:45:12 +0100

Predictions for 2012 by Asymco's Horace Dediu: None:

I can only applaud that stance.

I also agree on his take regarding Wall Street analysts & tech.

In my professional experience it’s been amazing to see how this group as a whole is uninformed about technology and its drivers. Now when I watch Bloomberg etc my basic assumption is that I watch Disneyland.

HTML5 cross-platform game company Moblyng shuts down (exclusive)

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 16:38:01 +0100

HTML5 cross-platform game company Moblyng shuts down (exclusive):

HTML5 and mobile gaming won’t fly for a long time. Despite the hype from Facebook/Google circles and the VCs related to them.

Poll: What Does Android "Clopen" Mean, Really?

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 16:35:42 +0100

Poll: What Does Android "Clopen" Mean, Really?:

Dan from RWW gives an update on the boring, because usually ill-informed, debate around Android’s level of “openness.”

Journalist truths: "One of these days you’re going to fuck them over"

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 14:32:26 +0100

I am not sure you guys noticed, but VentureBeat’s traffic has risen by a multiple this year. There’s many elements of success behind this, one is the editor-in-chief’s Dylan Tweeney’s management of the writers. In my limited time I have I still open up my VentureBeat emails to read Dylan’s weekly goal/vision/bootcamp emails. There’s so much to learn from him. Here’s an example, a memo from one of the VB bootcamps. It actually points out in plain English that relationship between journalists are their sources is antagonistic in the end. Here’s the learning for startups - even if tech blogs hype you up, don’t take it seriously. Ride it, but don’t mistake it for reality. As Tom Petty says: what brings you up will bring you down.

“One of these days you’re going to fuck them over, and you need to make that clear up front.” - a veteran legal reporter

Some weeks ago Dylan had a veteran legal reporter (VLR) come in to chat with us. He was all kinds of awesome. Here are some highlights from my notes. (I’ll ask him for some links to big stories he’s done and send those around later.)

Interviewing:
Don’t start an interview by accusing or confronting your subject. You want to get people on base, not just hit a home run right away. Start by talking about the topic, ask questions you already know the answers to, make incorrect statements to get them to respond. If you ask a straightforward question, they can just say no. If you make statements, they will want to interject, correct you and give the right answers.

Persistence:
Ask the same question over and over again in different ways. It’s amazing what people will tell you if you ask the right questions, are persistent, and continue to call back. Send a ton of emails, call a million times. Even if you can’t call someone or go see them, send actual notes. On paper. [VLR then told a story about the time he wrote Ted Kaczynski a handwritten letter, and Ted wrote back. Creepy.]

Relationships with Sources:
People should know that you are friendly, and they should also know that you are not fucking around. The reporter is in a position of power and authority, so it’s important that you put on a professional game face, know what you are talking about, and don’t ramble.

Never make it sound like you’re their friend or you’re on their side. One of these days you’re going to fuck them over and you need to make that clear up front.

Stay in Touch:
Stay in touch with people. Keep track of people. Contact your sources, even when you aren’t working on an article. Call them up out of the blue and ask them, What’ve you got cooking? Always call the subject of an article up afterwards, even if the piece was unflattering. What’s amazing is that they will usually tell you even more shit.

Get Color:
A story of lots of facts isn’t a good read. You need to add color. His example was a big story about a Ford recall, and the human element was a woman’s story of how her husband died when his car was hit by a train because the car malfunctioned on train tracks. [Did I hear this story right? Sounds like something that only happens in movies.]

Staying Hungry/Avoiding Boredom:
We all gotta feed the beast. Not everything that we feed to it is that tasty. There’s no fucking around, you just gotta spit it out at times. But you always have to have stuff going up on that you’re interested in. Always be working on longer, important pieces in addition to the daily rigamarole. If you don’t, you’ll get bored. It’s one thing to be busy, and it’s another thing to be excited and have all this stuff up your sleeve and be excited about what you do.

You gotta have a drive. Instead of being content flipping pancakes all day long, you have to want to make chocolate cake too.

On Pandering:
We’re supposed to tell people what they need to know, not what they want to know. You can’t lose sight of that. If you’re writing about something that’s important, people won’t always read it. But you have to keep feeding people smart stuff.

Organization:
VLR recently started using Evernote to keep track of his interviews and notes and legal briefs. But he claims to actually be a disorganized mess, which I found comforting.

Collect Contacts:
“All contacts are gold.” VLR names, titles, and contact info from unsolicited emails, PR pitches, and anything else and puts them into Google Contacts with appropriate keywords. Then, one day down the line when he needs to find a contact, he can search the keywords and find great sources.

Writing the Article:
A story will only take you long to write if you don’t understand it or if there are holes in the reporting. If you have it all the information, it writes itself.

Building products from improvised user behaviors - the cynical CMO view

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 13:33:00 +0100

Building products from improvised user behaviors - the cynical CMO view:

There’s tons of wisdom in this post by Chris Dixon. Quick add-on from a marketing view: when you do your business planning, you should also check out where these existing communities are in the digital universe and come up with a bottom-up estimate of their numbers. in conversations with startup CMOs or with CEOs - whenever they can not give me these numbers or can’t tell me who the key figures of these communities are I know their marketing and the numbers they sold to their investors are a hail mary.

Chris’ original post: For a long time, there were niche communities of “lo-fi” camera enthusiasts: people who shared photos taken on old cameras that had interesting ways of filtering shots. The iPhone app Hipstamatic popularized lo-fi filters, selling over 1M copies …

MG Siegler Special on Android's Openness

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 19:21:00 +0100

There’s good posts arguing Android’s “Openness” like the post Andreas from Visionmobile did back in 2010 where he asked “is Android evil?” Then there’s MG Siegler’s constant tirades which are super speculative and most of them times don’t get the most basic facts on the issue. I like and respect my part-time VentureBeat ex-colleague MG, but on this one he’s very much off. Hence I invite him to some cliff notes courtesy of Rich Miner on Android’s Openness. Even some shots against Apple are included, for example “if you are forced in a business model then it’s not open” ! They also go well with Rich’s 2007 Stanford lecture on Android which I have repeatedly referenced already.

2009 2 19 Rich Miner, Open Your Open Your Network

View more presentations from Matthäus Krzykowski

Going through some of the end of year posts by some of my...

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 19:09:00 +0100

Going through some of the end of year posts by some of my favourite pundits as I am spending some very limited time to figure out what the big trends affecting my work will be. One big take away: Nobody in the media still understands the workings of the Open Handset Alliance (OHA) which stands behind the Android project and comes up with tons of bullshit arguments.

I remember talking to Carolyn Penner, then the PR lead for the Android team, now the comms director for Twitter back in August 2009 on how OHA works and communicates. Summarised, Google NEVER NEVER intends to talk for OHA. Now compare that with how tech pundits view OHA. Particulary in the last couple of weeks journalists tried to have make a point of arguing that “running a mobile OS (read Android) by committee can be very hard” and try to make an argument out that no Google spokespeople comment on it. So I repeat: Google NEVER NEVER intends to talk for OHA and will never comment on it. Specifically, Android is so designed that NO PARTY, even Google, can not control the platform. Rule by committee is exactly what is not happening - any other announcements are lip service. Additionally, Android IS BUILT to be used by each OHA member in a way he likes. The supposed weaknesses folks write about are keys to its success.

If you want to hear any comments on this issue, then you need to look for very early commentary, like the video from 2007 I just have referenced above. Anyone, please view minutes 5-20 where Rich Miner walks you through the motivation behind Android. Thank you.

Strong Opinions @marksbirch: Ownership and Middlemen in a Digital Age

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 21:44:30 +0100

Strong Opinions @marksbirch: Ownership and Middlemen in a Digital Age:

Let me go contrarian on this and say the following: there’s middlemen and there’s tools or platforms to organise markets. Think of websites. In the early days it was all Altavista, AOL, Yahoo - hierarchic arrangements. Only a few winners benefited - those with ties to these middlemen. Then came search - and the long tail became much bigger. This is something we think and prototype a lot around over at Xyologic.

marksbirch:

What does ownership mean in an age when any piece of art or information is simply an arrangement of orderly bits? There was a time when we thought the question of ownership seemed clear cut. While the general public could buy the medium, it was artists and/or middlemen that controlled the…

Quick Update, Back from SF

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 07:32:00 +0100

Just back in Berlin from a trip to SF. Still heads down. However, there’s a tons of exciting updates which I will likely start post on from next week on or so.

iOS vs Android: hvilke brukere tjener du penger på? I had a...

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 09:13:00 +0100

iOS vs Android: hvilke brukere tjener du penger på?

I had a keynote at Mobile 2011 in Oslo on iOS vs Android - which users earn more money last week, thanks to @portart. It was lots of fun. My key theses:

making money is really hard - an app is not a business model
the conventional wisdom and data points to iOS
however it your business model is about usage, then it’s Android & iOS

I also shared some of my views what I would do if I were a Norwegian indie developer. You can see the slide to my presentation here.

The Passion Of Creation

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 18:21:00 +0100

As you see in the “about me” of the website I have “a passion is to help creative people, be it for example software engineers or designers, succeed.”

When we are young, our energy is raw and our passion seems limitless. As we grow older and “more professional” we become more conscious of the creative energy within us. If our job has creative parts to it, we need to find a way how to tap into this energy at the blink of an eye and create “results.” Our profession demands it.

This, in fact, is already hard to do so for yourself, day by day, and achieve excellent results. It is even harder to do so in teams. I remember, back in 2008, being inspired by a presentation by Adaptive Path on the Management of a Creative Environment. Some of the lessons in here - like cross-train the entire team - is something I have been implementing ever since in my teams.

But back to the inspiration to this post. A couple of minutes ago I heard that Lamb will be coming to town for a concert. I bought tickets within the next 10 minutes. In moments like this I wish I had the eloquence of a John Peel to express my feelings about some of the music out there.

Lou Rhodes, the singer, is the only public figure I had ever a crush on. Back in 1999, in my days as a wannabe music journalist, I set up an interview with her. Midway through, as I even did not pretend to hide my blushing anymore and clearly everyone in the room was seeing we were waaaayyyy off topic, she changed the topic of the interview herself. She started to talk about her feelings, her passion for creating music and how this is a source of energy she needs every day. An epic day in my life.

Anyways, happy to see her again on stage. If you haven’t ever listened to it when you were young in the 90s, the Re-Birth of the Cool series is just awesome. Back in high school in Swaziland (96-98) this was one of the albums I heard most frequently with my buddies.

The difference in ambition with the London/Valley folks right...

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 12:12:30 +0200

The difference in ambition with the London/Valley folks right there. Startup Berlin represents.

via getamen:

Introducing the Amen team one by one. Here’s Caitlin Winner, who quite possibly has the best Amen team photo ever.

Find her @caitlinwinner.

“I, Albrecht Durer of Nuremberg portrayed myself in...

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 00:10:15 +0200

“I, Albrecht Durer of Nuremberg portrayed myself in everlasting colours aged twenty-eight years.”

Sorry No Entry for Hipsters from the U.S.

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 17:17:00 +0200

Via Anthony Barba: Sorry No Entry for Hipsters from the U.S.

The cockiness of these notes is really nailing what I am trying to describe Berlin’s energy when I talk to non-Berliners. I’ve got no clue what the beef between Portuguese vs Spanish vs US vs US-looking hipsters is - and I likely would not spot the difference between either. 20 and 30-somethings from all over the world are drawn to this energy and are creating their playgrounds here. There’s nothing comparable going on in London, Paris, San Francisco at this moment. And even the local New Yorker vote is split, based on my circumstantial evidence.

The Best Piece on the iPhone 4S Launch comes from Dean Bubley

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 21:05:00 +0200

Dean Bubley: “The real story of the iPhone 4S is under the hood. It’s all about Apple’s chipset strategy for the next few years.”

“To sum up - in my view, the iPhone 4S is all about the hardware platform shift. Stuff like Siri is window-dressing in comparison, to give the fans at least something visible…

This might be disappointing for some, and could possibly give Microsoft and Nokia an opportunity to profit from a temporary lull in external iPhone evolution, but it’s likely set the scene for continued growth and profitability from Apple’s mobile devices for a few more years.”

One big lesson I learned as I have become part of the Valley tech blogger scene is that, amongst the so-called mobile influencers , there are less than 30 (and yes, this ‘30’ is the result of a popular vote; folks who have a hard time to get on a record aka Google/Apple execs were excluded )who frequently come up with an independent opinion that takes more than the user experience element of the mobile stack into the account. User experience, of course, is what most tech bloggers (and most startups and investors) concentrate on.

Source: Lars Kamp

In contrast, few of the 30 names which came up in my vote are widely heard. I learned, however, they are influential with people who want to get things done.

Back in 2009, as an advisor to my MobileBeat conference, Sprint’s VP of Strategy, Russ Mcguire, pointed me towards Dean as a source for key issues around the network, hardware and phone middleware.

Back at MWC in February I talked to my friends at ARM, Marvel, Nvidia, Qualcomm and asked them what innovation this year will be about, - in plain marketing ghibberish - “distribution to new low level consumer segments” aka the under $100 Android phone as good as an iPhone 3G that will be available by the end of year. The pricing seems familiar ? This is what Apple just announced and is just part of the industry trend. Still, at the same time our notion what we think we can do with superphones will continue to be pushed.

The bottom line for us, who professionally read tech blogs, is that we may have another year or even two of futile iPhone speculation ahead of us:

“It’s also possible that Apple sticks with another iteration of the current 4S platform for another year, before adding in a “perfect” LTE option in 2013. My prediction from June 2010 was that Apple support LTE was most likely in 2012 or 2013 (I’m glad I dodged the bullet on the 5% 2011 chance). An October 2012 launch would make sense - and would also fit in with future timelines of both Qualcomm and Intel (and possibly others like nVidia).”

I cringe at the thought of that.

Box Names Bizmo and TouchDraw as Top Mobile Dev Challenge Winners

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 17:39:00 +0200

Box Names Bizmo and TouchDraw as Top Mobile Dev Challenge Winners

I was judging on this one. Both Bizmo and TouchDraw were my favourites, together with Silolinks. Great insights into what’s going on in enterprise apps and good conversations with some of the fellow judges, too. Most app commentators, including Android Co-Founder Rich Miner believe that enterprise will be where the app money is at. To give you a ball park figure of the opportunity- enterprise was a $5 Billion market for AT&T last year. Just a bummer that I missed out on the Jane’s Addiction party at the Boxworks conference.