SortiPreneur

The Future of Media: The Flipboard Edition

In 2005, Fred Wilson authored a blog post titled "The Future of Media".  It remains extremely relevant and insightful, 5 years after its publishing, and has been proven right throughout a few major waves of innovation, such as Facebook and the iPhone. In Fred's words, the future of media has 4 major components:

1 - Microchunk it - Reduce the content to its simplest form. Thanks Umair.
2 - Free it - Put it out there without walls around it or strings on it. Thanks Stewart.
3 - Syndicate it - Let anyone take it and run with it.  Thanks Dave.
4 - Monetize it - Put the monetization and tracking systems into the microchunk. Thanks Feedburner.

Today, I saw a new innovation that is feeding on the above points, but is also extremely good at the interface level:  The Flipboard.  And, yes, please add me to the fanboy list.  And please see the video below for Mike McCue's demo of the Flipboard.  It's really difficult to describe.

App Inventor

Google recently announced App Inventor for Android, which allows non-programmers to easily build applications for Android phones. The idea is not a new one, and as Google explains, it's been built on the efforts of many other initiatives.

However, it is critical that this is a development framework for a mass-market platform.  Imagine what kind of creativity we would have seen if the iPhone has a similar consumer-oriented app builder.  I think this is very cool.

No Conflict, No Interest

Angel investor Naval Ravikant has a good post on the Venture Hacks blog, focusing on the potential conflicts of interest when an entrepreneur is engaged with an investor.  This is an issue that comes up frequently in my experience, so I think it would be useful to note here.

Naval's post lays out a good framework to think of the issue, and he sums it up by what I think is the key take-away:

Consequently, the best entrepreneurs display a lot of chutzpah. They aren’t fazed by the competition, nor do they see shadows in every corner. They are their own biggest competition.

I could not agree more. 

PS. The title of this post is a quote I hear attributed to John Doerr.  I always read it as "where there's no conflict, there's not interest".  I am not sure that it makes sense to me but I figured it makes a catchy post title.