I read a lot. I’d love to find a way to share the best of what I read on my blog. This is my first attempt.
Bob Lefsetz latest letter about Spotify and the larger music economy is a must-read. I’ve been sharing “Spotify Rules” with a lot of my music industry friends, but anyone that consumes music would find it insightful. Lefsetz predicts the MP3 will be extinct by 2018 and that streaming data will be the new first-week sales report. There’s more in it, though. Definitely give it a read.
Secret just raised $25 million in it’s second round of funding. Don’t tell anyone. In all seriousness, can anonymity apps make money? No one from Secret or their rival app Whisper have publicly discussed they can/will monetize. This is something definitely worth keeping an eye on, especially since Secret and Whisper are both raising serious dough.
Fred Wilson expects continuing fragmentation in the mobile messaging app marketplace. In other words, there won’t be one go-to app for communicating with friends. Instead we will use a variety of messaging apps to communicate with different people for different reasons. That’s good news for Klique. We’re the only app with group-to-group chat messaging.
Tom Tunguz‘s “An Exceptional Story with Exceptional Data” talks about how data isn’t just for companies to make money. It can also be used for telling better stories. Storytelling is what makes us human, right? so this is another way we are becoming more cyborg like.
Glu Mobile shares are up 44% since the June 25th release of Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, a free-to-play game available in Apple’s US App Store.
‘Thirty is the new twenty.’ New Nielsen data indicates that no one uses more than 30 apps in any given month.
Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom says that for every new Instagram sign-up in the United States, there are 4-5 new signups overseas. Systrom also says 45 million people use Instagram’s private messenger each month. I don’t know any of those people, though. Do you?
‘People, not users.’ Mark Zuckerberg wants Facebook employees to start referring to Facebook users as people, not users. Jack Dorsey said something similar on his tumblr blog last year. Makes sense to me.
Finally, I found a really useful blog post by Andrew Parker on the input methods of our favorite web applications.