DougJoe

OK, I’m back.

If you read my last post, you saw that I was taking a break from the world of tech. Wagers were placed in plain view of me as to how long I would last, and if my perpetual motion would actually come to a stop.

Well, I’m proud to say that I remain gainfully unemployed as of this writing.

However, being unemployed doesn’t divorce me from the world of tech. If anything, I’m finding myself quickly re-energized as I can once again savor the love of great new innovations in the purest way - as a fan. I don’t have to stress out about why that company is innovating faster than mine, or wonder how I could get a job there, or whatever - I can simply praise great ideas, and try to temper my jealousy at these great ideas that continue to bubble from the never-ending fountain of entrepreneurs I’ve had the privilege to know.

So, with that brief announcement, let’s get to 3 great new products that are currently tickling that special, intimate place on my body:

1) Letter.ly

As you’ll see in most of my future featured products, I tend to gravitate towards products that do one thing really well. I think my brain (as well as the brains of most people) just get confused when someone tries to do too many things or solve too many needs with one product.

That’s why I find Letter.ly so cute I want to hug it. The idea is a small one, to be sure - basically, a tool and marketplace for publishing paid newsletters. The key word here is paid - in a world where everyone publishes free content in the form of blogs, status updates or whatever, there is still a market for folks who’s opinions are actually worth cold, hard cash. 

2) SquareSpace

Many moons ago, I had the pleasure/frustration of working on GeoCities, one of the Web’s top destinations in the late 1990’s. GeoCities was one of the first examples of self-publishing on the web, offering increasingly sophisticated tools for consumers to create their very own home pages on the web, with a dash of community (in the form of “neighborhoods” mixed in).

Where GeoCities went wrong could be the subject of many books, but I think it’s somewhat simple - it’s REALLY HARD to create entire web sites filled with text, photos and a semi-competent design, and most people lack the skill, vision and/or desire to build things from scratch. This led to two things - a) horribly ugly and ultimately abandoned websites all over GeoCities ecosystem, and b) the rise of blogs, Facebook and then Twitter, which gives consumers are VERY small pool to play (read: screw up) in - if you can’t come up with 140 characters to write, then you’re just a complete idiot. See MySpace as an example of what happens when you give a consumer too much rope. 

Flash forward to 2010, and SquareSpace (which has actually been around for a number of years) is rapidly becoming recognized as perhaps GeoCities 2.0 - home pages, but this time with lots of guidance, beautiful templates, and (let’s not forget) a revenue model. What’s great about SquareSpace is that it handles both novices (folks who just want a nice looking website without effort) and experts (full-on code monkeys) with user-intuitive tools and great on-page editing technologies. 

What’s perhaps most remarkable about SquareSpace, however, is less it’s technology and more the fact that it’s succeeding with a generalist product in a world of increasingly specialized products. There’s a zillion companies that will build your (fill in the blank industry) website - doctors, lawyers, whatever - and they’re all fighting it out to create modest-sized businesses with ever-shrinking margins. Meanwhile, SquareSpace invests in the technology so that anyone can create a beautiful site, and succeeds despite it’s lack of vertical focus. More power to them.

3) Tracktor

I just bought a TV. An expensive TV. And when I buy expensive things, I like to know I’m not going to get jacked. I think I’ve gotten pretty good with things like plane tickets because I spend a shitload of time researching them and because I think we all have a decent handle on how plane tickets price at this point. But when it comes to other things - like electronics, for example, I’m in the dark.

Enter Tracktor. These guys scrape Amazon like a hawk and then tell you what’s going on with the products you want to buy. For example, check out their information on the TV I just bought. It started at over $2200, and has rapidly fallen since. It’s a great way to keep your eyes out for stuff that you want but a) want a reference point on pricing, and b) want to wait until you can afford it. Nice and easy. (Oh, and yes, they’ve got an awesome Chrome extension).  

4) Sportstacular (iPhone app)

First, lemme say this - I’m a fair-weather sports fan. I don’t eat, sleep or breathe a particular team, and I try not to clog up my friend’s status updates with stupid comments about whatever game I happen to be watching. That said, I do have a minor amount of testosterone running through my veins, and so I find myself with an unexplained weakness for the San Francisco Giants and the Dallas Cowboys (don’t bother asking any more). 

I’m guessing there are some apps out there that can provide live sports scores, but I honestly don’t know about ‘em. For many years, I relied on 4INFO, the SMS-based information service, but it’s just too slow, very error-prone (no, I wasn’t asking for yellow page listings for Cowboys) and too lame. 

Enter Sportstacular, which, confusingly, looked as if it were actually created by Yahoo (it was created by Citizen Sports, which Yahoo acquired in March), which would be a minor miracle as I haven’t seen anything I’d recommend come out of Yahoo for years. Finally, I can get scores in one easy-to-view place, make bets, and, perhaps best of all, set mobile alerts when something happens in one of the games I’m following. Now I suspect that ESPN has something similar, as this seems like a pretty obvious need for any sports fan, and I don’t care about sports enough to go out and research the whole space, but I do feel that this is one app that will definitely make my home screen.

On that note, it’s worth commenting on the fact that there are certain functions that I now rely on my iPhone, and specifically not the web, for - services such as local weather (Weatherbug), Movie Showtimes (Fandango), Maps (Google), Stock Quotes (Apple’s native app, Bloomberg), Restaurant bookings (Opentable). These are functions that in, say, 2002, I would have been regularly using the web for, and now I simply do not - it’s so much easier on my phone. What does this spell for media/entertainment/information sites (which, not coincidentally, is Yahoo’s biggest remaining strength)?