Brad Feld

Tag: iphone

Another TechStars company has been acquired.  Well – part of it has been acquired.  Today it was announced that eBay has acquired the RedLaser product from Occipital. The Occipital guys tell the story in their post titled Arrival at the Launchpad.

Occipital’s founders – Jeff and Vikas – are the epitome of bootstrap entrepreneurs.  Every TechStars class seems to have one and Occipital wins the bootstrapper of TechStars Boulder 2008 award.  At the end of the program they had a few chances to raise money but weren’t happy with the valuations so decided to hunker down and just bootstrap things.  They reinvented themselves several times until they launched RedLaser which has been a runaway hit (over two million copies sold to date.)  As RedLaser took off, they had another set of interesting investment offers but no longer have any need for outside capital.

While they were on their way to creating an interesting mobile ecommerce company, they wanted to work on a much bigger set of technical challenges than RedLaser in computer vision and augmented reality, their areas of passion and technical expertise.  In their travels they had a few inquires for an acquisition of the company, but really only wanted to sell the RedLaser product, not the entire company.  Fortunately, eBay was very interested in the RedLaser product and the match worked extremely well for both parties.

Given this sale, I expect Occipital is now a long way from ever raising outside capital.  Jeff and Vikas are now extremely well funded, are scaling up a very interesting team, and going after a huge vision. Oh – and RedLaser is now free in the iPhone AppStore.  Congrats to Occipital, Vikas and Jeff!


Google gave all 5000 Google I/O attendees an HTC EVO (I guess it’s a Sprint EVO) running Android.  For the past two years I’ve been using an iPhone and have become increasingly disgusted by AT&T’s service which is horrible (and deteriorating) in the cities I frequent – most notably Boulder, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, NY, and Boston.  So – I decided to give the EVO+Android a real shot and use it for a week as my permanent phone. 

When I wrote my post Open Android vs. Closed iPhone right after Google I/O a few folks took shots at me for pimping a free phone that I got at a conference.  Given the amount of money I regularly shell out to screw around on hardware and software (I’m one of those guys who happily buys things just to try them out) I shrugged this off but figured it was worth pre-empting since I’m sure this nonsense will come around again.  So – there’s the disclaimer – I got this phone for free (although I did sit on two panels and spent a day and a half talking to people at Google I/O.)

While there has been plenty of fan boy and anti-fan boy chatter about this phone, I can only find one thing to complain about – the battery life.  It’s still running Android 2.1 so I expect there will be plenty of battery tune up in Android 2.2, but out of the box the battery only lasts about six hours.  I’ve tuned my settings so I can get a full day out of it, but am still carrying my USB cord to grab some juice from time to time.  There a few tricks (like charge it with it turned off) that help a lot, but it feels like the iPhone 3G did when it first came out where I was always paying attention to how much charge I had left.  Fortunately this will get better with software (quickly) and – since the battery is removable, I can just carry a spare around.

Ok – that’s literally the only thing I don’t like.  The screen is phenomenal.  All of the apps I run on my iPhone are available on Android – I even found a few new ones.  The camera is killer.  The email client is much better than the iPhone.  Search for anything is lightening fast.  Voice recognition – er – recognizes my voice.  I have a phone that tethers and – if I want – I have a hotspot (bye bye MiFi.)  My applications remember their state and come up instantly because they are still running in the background.  The browser is fast.  Google Maps + Navigation is incredible, especially for someone who can’t read a map to save his life.  I can dial a phone number, look up an address, and get directions from within the calendar.  The weather app knows where I am.  Google Voice works great and is tightly integrated.

And – for the payoff – I can make a fucking telephone call on this thing.  I can’t remember the last time I looked back after a day and thought “wow – I didn’t drop a single call today.”  Now the only dropped calls I’ve had are when I’m talking to someone on an iPhone and they drop.

I’m looking forward to iPhone 4.0 coming out so I can see how it compares.  My guess is that I’ll get the Android 2.2 upgrade at about the same time so I’ll have both to play around with in June and July.  The real result will be to see which phone I’m using when I get back from Alaska in August.  In the mean time, the HTC EVO is a winner and – as a result – the smart phone thing is going to get interesting now that Apple has some real competition and can no longer just walk all over Microsoft and Palm.

Did I mention that I can’t wait to get my hands on an Android Tablet?


I’ve always loved computer games.  My Apple II screen had burn marks in it from Olympic Decathlon, Choplifter, Castle Wolfenstein, and Ultima.  Recently, I’ve become addicted to several of Zynga’s games online, especially Mafia Wars (I’m level 52 – friend me on Facebook and join my Mafia) and Scramble (I think I’m better than I actually am so it’s endlessly frustrating.)

Zynga’s been cranking on their iPhone apps so most of my Scramble action is now on the iPhone.  However, last night Zynga released Mafia Wars on the iPhone and it has immediately moved to third place on my “things to do on my iPhone other than email and call Amy.”

I got a note from Fred Wilson this morning that he’d beat me to the punch on posting about Mafia Wars on the iPhone.  Yeah Fred – whatever – you are on the east coast and I’m on the west coast today so time was on your side.  Help me neutralize the threat of Fred’s dominance in Mafia Wars by joining my iPhone Mafia – my player ID is 1901 3272 26 – recruit me for your Mafia (I’m level 5 on the iPhone already.)


While you might be interested in a ego vanity iPhone app like the Brad Feld iPhone app, you are probably a lot more interested in an iPhone app for your business.  NewsGator has become an expert at building these and has developed a superb framework for branded iPhone apps.

On March 31st they are having a Webinar titled Gain Revenue & Readership with Branded iPhone Apps – Reed Business Case Study WebinarWalker Fenton from NewsGator and Brien Tate (Reed Business’ CTO) will walk through what they’ve done around the Variety iPhone app including:

  • The differences between iPhone Apps and web applications
  • The benefits of making your content available via an iPhone App
  • How to monetize your iPhone App
  • How to publicize your iPhone App
  • An iPhone App case study featuring Reed Business/Variety.com

NewsGator has learned a huge amount about building, deploying, monetizing, and publicizing iPhone apps.  Attend the webinar to find out more for yourself.


In case you don’t get enough of me, you can now download the Brad Feld iPhone app.  Or – from your iPhone – just do an App Store search on Brad Feld.  As a result of the Brad Feld iPhone app you can easily get the blogs from Feld Thoughts, Ask the VC, Foundry Group, Amy Batchelor, and Stan Feld all in one nifty app on your iPhone. 

While my ego is satiated, at least for a few days, the really cool thing to me is how this came together.  When the iPhone first came out, Brent Simmons created an iPhone version of NetNewsWire which was dynamite.  He iterated quickly on this and realized that it could be the core of an iPhone app business built on top of the NewsGator / NetNewsWire framework.  This has resulted in a new product for NewsGator – the NewsGator iPhone App Framework.

They needed a “test app” to harden the framework and I quickly volunteered (ah – the special privileges of a nerdy early investor.)  The result is the Brad Feld iPhone app, but more importantly a deep iPhone app dev framework.  Brent – who continues to do an amazing job on everything he touches – talks about the why and how along with announcing the deployment of a real iPhone app for Variety (vs just his cheesy investor beta tester.)


Today’s Washington Post article titled Staff Finds White House in the Technological Dark Ages was no big surprise.  However, while I was taking a shower (in a hotel in the Houston suburbs of all places) it occurred to me that this presents an incredible marketing opportunity for Apple.

If I were king of Apple (or say, a board member with deep White House ties), I’d be on the phone with “the appropriate person” with the offer of “a Mac on every desk in the White House along with an iPhone for every White House staffer.”  I’m sure there is some law that prevents Apple from giving this away from free so I’d offer it “at cost” just to Mac-enable the White House.

You can’t buy better PR than “Apple computerizes the Obama Administration, displacing ancient PCs running Windows XP.”  Plus, the leader of the free world then would carry around an iPhone and a MacBook.

In addition, I see an executive order coming that completely changes the stupid, archaic, and limiting rules about archiving communications within the White House.  This is a regular excuse that is used to explain why it’s “hard” to use things like Blackberries if you are president.  Baloney – there are plenty of straightforward approaches that solve for whatever you want to do.  It’s not like someone archived all of Rumsfeld’s Snowflakes (or maybe someone did – if so – egads.)

While we are at it, did anyone notice that Apple reported record revenues and profits in the quarter ending 12/27/08?  Yeah, I guess you did but it’s worth repeating the numbers since all we’ve been hearing is bailouts and losses.  These are quarterly numbers.  Revenue: $10.17 billion.  Net Income: $1.61 billion.  These numbers are lower than reality because of the bullshit GAAP rules that force accounting for the iPhone to be reported ratably over the life of the iPhone contract.  If you actually accounted for this in a way that made sense, Revenue would be $11.8 billion and Net Income would be $2.3 billion.  As every good MBA knows, the key rule is to “follow the cash” which increased by $3.6 billion in the quarter.  It’s worth saying again – $3.6 billion.  Wowza.  Well done Apple.