Early adopter fail (or why you should obsess over startups you love)

I just got back from the New York Tech Meetup and the actual meetup was great - saw a bunch of awesome demos, including possibly the most useful tool for web designers - notable. But in terms of actual using these products, even as early adopters, we failed. There was a decent amount of chatter on the #nytm hashtag, but at a meetup of around 500 people, I had counted maybe 25 checkins on foursquare. Now for most places 25 checkins on foursquare would have been great, but this was the New York Tech Meetup, the place where foursquare was presented eight months ago. I love foursquare, I probably use it a bit too much (I'm the only person that's checked into my building's gym for example) but it's real usefulness is only apparent when everyone you know uses it (or at least a good number). If there isn't a 50% (a completely arbitrary percentage) adoption rate of people that go out of their way to go to tech conferences/presentations, what are the chances that the general population is going to start using it?


The counter point to this is that startups shouldn't target early adopters as their market for exactly this reason - we should be the low hanging fruit. If regular people are using your product everyday, you can pretty much be assured that the early adopter market is too (or you are big enough that you no longer rely on them to keep your numbers up). Andrew Chen has a great post on his blog about finding your target market and why early adopters are rarely it. But still, as the low hanging fruit, we should pick up and obsess over the startups that we love. Chances are we aren't going to be the marketing or revenue base that they are looking for, but we are the ones that provide the encouragement and suggestions that all startups thrive off of.


This isn't a rag on foursquare at all - far from it. I'm just saying if you like a product a startup has produced go ahead and use it, even before it has reached critical mass. More importantly, tell everyone about it. I don't think my mom or sister will start using foursquare any time soon, but I'm sure they know what it is after this past weekend and maybe as it starts to gain momentum they will end up being one of the earlier adopters. So go ahead and checkin everywhere you go on foursquare, post your checkins to twitter and tell all your friends - if nothing else you can always tell people how much better it was when it was underground.

The Highline

Canon EOS 5D Mark II - 200 mm (EF70-200mm f/4L USM)
f/5.6 @ 1/160 ISO 500

Colors of Fall

Canon EOS 5D Mark II - 87 mm (EF70-200mm f/4L USM)
f/5.6 @ 1/100 ISO 640

Water Towers from the High Line

Canon EOS 5D Mark II - 200 mm (EF70-200mm f/4L USM)
f/5.6 @ 1/160 ISO 160

Digital Strangelove (or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Internet)

Found this over on A VC (which, if you are interested in startups, is worth bookmarking). It's about 10 minutes to get through all of it, but it's a great overview of how the internet has changed the face of business and how much it has remained the same. If you give your customers a product that is all about them they will use it (and more importantly -tell their friends about it). The organic growth of @ replies and # tags on twitter is a great example of this. Originally, twitter had nothing to do with them (which is probably why there is such an uprising about how they want to go with the official retweet function). Users took a product and made it their own. The internet hasn't changed this. What is has changed is how quickly people expect things, because everything gets done sooner rather than later (and if your product isn't doing it, someone else's either will or already is). Take a look through the slideshow as David Gillespie has done a much better job with it than a few lines of text can.

Digital Strangelove (or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Internet)

View more documents from David Gillespie.

Google Voice - Gizmo5 Integration coming sooner than we think?

With Google's recent acquisition of Gizmo5, people have been wondering how long it is going to take before we start to see it integrated with Google Voice - from the looks of things, it might be sooner than we think?

Update: Apparently, I just missed this feature which dates back to when Google Voice was Grand Central. Oops.

Congrats Apple - someone made a mouse less usable than yours

Granted - I haven't tried the newest Apple mouse and I'm sure it's fairly safe to assume that the OpenOfficeMouse is a gimmick designed mostly to poke fun at Apple latest no/one button mouse (if it isn't, CAD/CAM users from the 80s are rejoicing everywhere). I'm still rocking my trusty Logitech MX1000 and probably will be until it dies.

From Gizmodo