When thinking about the new new thing, it’s quite easy to lose sight of opportunities in older technologies, such as Voice. Voice was obviously the first service to emerge in mobile telephony (that was the only thing you could do with the early phones, Best Beloved) and is still easily the highest revenue earner for [...]
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Clay Shirky on Mobile and Twitter
I’ve been a long time fan of Clay Shirky. For instance, I loved his seminal “Permanet, Nearlynet, and Wireless Data” essay back in 2003 – still a must-read if you haven’t. He’s always great value as a writer and as a speaker, so if you haven’t seen his TED talk on mobile, twitter and a [...]
Omar Hamoui on Communication and A Final Thought
Here’s the final piece based on Omar’s experiences on successfully building a business worth hundreds of millions dollars in just a few years. Today we cover Communication and a final piece of advice that he says is the most important of all. Communication Don’t hide anything It’s not worth the trouble and it will come [...]
Humanity 2.0
Last night, I gave a speech at the American German Business Club about technology and The Singularity, which I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. The audience was very mixed, ranging in technology sophistication hugely, so I pitched it at a fairly tech-lite level, which seemed to work OK. Overall, the talk was very well [...]
Omar Hamoui on Competitive Threats and Team
I hope you’re finding this series of posts interesting – I’ve had great feedback, so I’ll continue with a few more posts. Today, I’ve combined two areas, Competitive Threats and Team. I hope you find them useful. Competitive Threats Ignore the competition If you need to constantly look at what your competition is doing in [...]
Omar Hamoui on Sales and Marketing
Continuing my posts on Omar’s learnings and thoughts, today we do Sales and Marketing. Focus on the second sale If you aren’t going to get a second order from a potential customer, don’t bother getting the first. In order to grow the business you need to be able to build on a solid base of [...]
Omar Hamoui on Deals and Negotiations
Continuing Omar’s thoughts on startups and business, today there’s a small section on deals and negotiations. Understand what you really have to lose (which is usually not much) If you are a person with a laptop and an idea, don’t worry about messing up the 100m dollar business you think you will someday be. Russell [...]
Omar Hamoui on Ideas and Company Launches
As many of you will know, my day job is working for AdMob. I was actually lucky enough to be the first person Omar Hamoui, AdMob’s Founder and CEO, employed 3 years ago and it was mainly through writing this blog that we connected. Over 80 Billion ads and 3 years later, we’ve come along [...]
Twitter Local from the 1930′s
A post over at the excellent Daily Irrelevant reminded me of an old MobHappy post from a few years ago, when Twitter was just starting to scale. Basically, it’s a localised Twitter machine, enabling people to leave personal messages for friends and family. This was a coin operated machine from the 1930’s, where (many years [...]
Shazam Turns the Corner
I’ve always been a big fan of Shazam – it seemed to epitomise Arthur C Clarke’s “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. I can remember demoing it back in 2001 to a bunch of Coca-Cola people and hearing the collective intake of breath as Shazam correctly identified a random track. However, as I [...]
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