Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » John Battelle

Did VCs Avoid Pebble Watch Because Of Fear From Apple?

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 01 May 2012 17:04:50 +0000

Pebble Technology has been one of the most successful projects on Kickstarter by raising over $7 million with 17 days left. Pebble Technology founders attempted to contact venture capitalists, but none of them really responded receptively to their ideas. This is why they turned to Kickstarter. Why were VCs not interested? Federated Media founder and Wired founding editor John Battelle has a theory.

Here’s why. If you watch the video explaining Pebble, it become pretty clear that the watch is, in essence, a new form factor for the iPhone. It’s smaller, it’s more use-case defined, but that’s what it is: A smaller mirror of your iPhone, strapped to you wrist. Pebble uses bluetooth connectivity to access the iPhone’s native capabilities, and then displays data, apps, and services on its high-resolution e-paper screen. It even has its own “app store” and (upcoming) SDK/API so people can write native apps to the device.

In short, Pebble is an iPhone for your wrist. And Apple doesn’t own it.

If we’ve learned anything about Apple over the years, it’s that Apple is driven by its hardware business. It makes its profits by selling hardware – and it’s built a beautiful closed software ecosystem to insure those hardware sales. Pebble forces an interesting question: Does Apple care about new form factors for hardware? Or is it content to build out just the “core” hardware platform, and allow anyone to innovate in new hardware instances? Would Apple be cool with someone building, say, a larger form factor of the iPhone, perhaps tablet-sized, driven by your iPhone?

I agree with Battelle in the sense that Pebble is at risk of Apple cutting them off. That is what make start-ups so great though. They are willing to take high-risk, high-reward chances to do something great. The result: either soar like eagles or crash and burn, then move on to something new.

Web 2.0 Summit Conference Is On Hiatus This Year

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 20:28:32 +0000

The Web 2.0 Summit conference is on hiatus this year according to a blog post by John Battelle. Battelle is finding it difficult to manage the programming on the stage and write a book while creating a pitch-perfect onstage program.

“It takes months and months of hard work to execute a conference like Web 2 (and not just by me). My partners at O’Reilly and UBM TechWeb are full to the brink with other conferences, and after months of discussions about how we might route around this problem, we all agreed there really wasn’t a way to do it. It’s not fun being the guy who stops the party, but in this case, I have to step up and take responsibility,” stated Battelle. This year the conference won’t be around, but there is a chance that we might see it return next year.

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen: “Let The Games Begin”

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 04:11:32 +0000

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen took the stage at the Web 2.0 Summit conference earlier this week for an interview with John Battelle. The theme of the conference is “points of control” and he said that this statement describes what is happening between Adobe and Apple: “There’s a war happening for developers.”

Narayen said that Apple and Adobe are on different sides for points of control. “Apple would like to keep things closed and proprietary,” stated Narayen. On the other hand, Narayen said Adobe wants customers to create content for multiple platforms. “We want to help them express their creativity.”

“Let the games begin, I guess,” added Narayen. Narayen added that HTML5 is not going to be a replacement for Flash. Adobe customers also like HTML5 too.

[TechCrunch]

Super Bowl Ad Leads To 50% Traffic Jump For Hulu

Amit Chowdhry — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 20:21:58 +0000

John Battelle of Federated Media recently interviewed Jason Kilar, CEO of Hulu. Hulu is a joint venture between NBC and FOX. Jason Kilar is an Amazon.com veteran. Battelle asked Jason how effective the ad on the Super Bowl advertisement for Hulu was. It turns out that it was very much worth it.

Although Jason did not answer directly, Battelle was able to obtain a number from a different source. It turns out that Hulu’s traffic jumped by 50%. Considering that about 100 million people tune into the Super Bowl in the U.S., it is no surprise that Hulu’s traffic would see a sudden jump.

[via BI]

Federated Media Explores “Conversational Marketing,” Cuts Traditional Ad Staff, Expanding Strategic Programs

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 22:02:28 +0000

Federated Media has built their reputation for providing blogs and other content websites with high CPM display advertisements. However they have lost several partners through acquisitions or by others leaving voluntarily. Ars Technica was with FM before they got bought out by Wired. GigaOm switched from FM to IDG. And Microsoft even poached an advertising deal with Digg.

In June 2007, Federated Media took some heat for making bloggers recite a Microsoft slogan in several conversational campaigns. Valleywag exploited the bloggers for doing this. Founder of Federated Media John Battelle wrote that he wished all of the blog authors disclosed that they had a relationship with the advertisers. TechCrunch author Michael Arrington wrote that FM Publishing threw bloggers under the bus for writing that statement.

Ever since those times, the U.S. economy has been in a struggling economic state which led FM Publishing to question their current marketing practices. Basically FM Publishing wants to displaying more engaging advertisements rather than just display ads. Even though they are cutting some staff, FM Publishing will be expanding the Strategic Programs and Major Accounts divisions.

[via FM Blog]