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Charles Hudson's Weblog

This is my personal website for posting my views on the world of technology and gadgets.

Why Isn’t there a Google Version of MobileMe for the iPhone?August 6

As a very proud and happy iPhone 3G owner, I’ve been surprised how much I like the device, especially after owning a Blackberry for 6 years. When I first heard about MobileMe, I was intrigued by the service. I passed at launch, not because I thought there would be tons of hiccups (which there were) but because I don’t use Apple as my primary mail or calendar store and I wasn’t willing to sign up for a service that doesn’t support my main email address and usage patterns. Like a lot of tech folks I know, I live on Gmail and Google Calendar for my personal life and I have found some simple ways to use the Google Sync for Blackberry agent to get it working with my Zimbra work calendar as well.

As a former Googler, I’m perplexed by Google’s absence on the iPhone platform as it pertains to core PIM services. The core requirements for a great iPhone sync app are pretty easy to identify - I’ve taken a stab at doing so below:

-The ability to silently sync PIM data in the background (they’ve demonstrated they can do this with the Google Sync tool for Blackberry - if you’re a Blackberry user who also uses Google Calendar you should download and install it immediately)
-A good web / desktop calendar product (Google Calendar qualifies here)
-A great mail application on the web / desktop (I love Gmail and can’t imagine life without it)
-A great address book management tool

Ah, that’s it I suppose - Google has yet to release

What Will We Do When Growth is No Longer the “In Thing” Anymore? (Web Startups)July 22

I was reading Scoble’s post and another post in Hank Williams’ blog, both of which touch (in different ways) on what’s happening in the world of technology startups. Scoble focuses on the shift in talking more about business and less about tech innovation. Hank talks about why we don’t have any IPOs. As is the case with many posts I write, reading those two posts helped me connect the dots with some of the things I’ve been thinking about lately.

I get this sense that we’re nearing the end of the growth-at-any-cost phase of the most recent epoch of the consumer Internet and some real changes are afoot. It’s part of the symbiotic relationship between investors and companies:

Companies and investors are symbiotic organisms. When investors reward growth, companies want to show growth to get attention and funding. When something else (revenue, profits, etc) becomes what gets rewarded, companies will focus on driving the metric that matters most to investors.

I’ve been wondering whether we’re entering the tail end of the “growth at any cost” or “growth for growth’s sake” period of what’s known as the web 2.0 consumer Internet epoch. Some stats show that the In

The Tech Generalist Dilemma - Are You a New or a True Generalist?June 25

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With MBA graduation upon us and a number of other folks I know looking to make career / industry transitions, I’ve had a few folks ask my thoughts on how to approach new jobs in the tech industry. Many of my friends come from a generalist background. What makes someone a generalist? Well, the simple answer is that you’re not a specialist. In technology, I think there are a lot of people who fall into the generalist category - if you don’t write code, aren’t a finance expert, or don’t do sales, you are probably in the generalist pool. Most generalists I know are interested in a mix of business development, product management, and marketing in their ideal job. They also want some “general management experience”, which I take to be a euphemism for figuring out how to work with others to get stuff done.

At the end of the day, I don’t think all generalists are created equal. In fact, I think there are two distinct types. I’ll outline the basics below:

“True” generalist - Someone who has both the experience base and the personality type that lends itself t

Three Blog Posts In Progress - Advice for Generalists, Why Marketplaces Rule, and Why Video is ToughJune 3

I’ve been really busy and sadly derelict in my blogging. I’m working on 3 posts that I’ll preview - if you have thoughts or info to contribute, let me know. Hope to get all three of them out in the next week or so:

1. Are you a “true” or a “new” tech generalist? It’s MBA recruiting season (for those with a more entrepreneurial bent, at least) and a bunch of folks have been pinging me with questions about the right entry-point (role, size of company, etc) for new MBA grads. I’ve done some new thinking about this and have been giving out slightly different answers if you’re a “new generalist” (new to a tech operating role in general) or a “true generalist” (someone who has excelled in generalist roles in tech in the past).

2. Why aren’t more people bemoaning the prospects for online video? If the largest video site on the Internet isn’t projected to do more than $100 million or so in revenue in 2008 with dominant traffic and leadership, shouldn’t we all be really concerned? Check out this brief article on how the head of monetization at YouTube just stepped down.

3. The marketplace is the best business model for the Internet. If you can become a marketplace, you should. Most of the biggest Internet companies out there are marketplaces (Google is an ad marketplace masquerading as a search engine. It’s also like a yellow pages

Solving the Twitter Business Model Problem - Your Guess is Probably Better than MineMay 24

I’ve been fascinated by the blogosphere’s musings on Twitter’s downtime. I, for one, am relatively sympathetic toward their plight - there’s nothing tougher than trying to scale a system that’s growing quickly and has a very unpredictable, bursty traffic profile. And as much as I like and enjoy Twitter, it’s not a life-or-death kind of service for me.

While most people seem to be making off-hand remarks along the lines of “aside from uptime, they need to figure out the whole business model thing” I think it’s more complex than that.

*Twitter users have an expectation that the service will be free. My favorite article on this point is this one from Dan Farber at CNet.
*According to most estimates, a large volume of Twitter traffic comes from 3rd party services (I’ve heard estimates as high as 90%)

Combining these two points, I think the real challenge for Twitter will be that whatever business model they look to deploy will have to accept these two realities. Once you’ve set a service expectation with users, it’s hard to change it. For a non-technology example, look at the hue and cry over American Airlines assessing a baggage fee to fliers who want to check a bag. People who travel view the ability to check a bag as part of the service. Regardless of whether the $15 fee is fair, it feels like a violation of the contract between fliers and airlines. Similarly,