In our previous startups, my co-founders and I have always had a desire to have a strong "always on" remote connection between offices. Back when we had DC & SF offices a few years ago, we tried setting up what we called "Project Stargate" using Skype. However, the connection would keep dropping, so after a few months we abandoned the effort.

The main lesson we learned from that experience was that reliability matters above all else. The best remote connection setup in the world will fail if it isn't rock solid.

With that in mind, when we sold Socialize to ShareThis, we were suddenly in a situation where our SF office was joined by offices in Palo Alto, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Texas, Boston, and others, so this remote connection issue became even more important to solve.

Luckily, there's a great startup called Sqwiggle that's working to solve this problem. They've taken an innovative approach: Instead of solving the vexing issue of having a reliable "always on" video connection, by default, users are shown in boxes together but as black & white thumbnails that update every 15 seconds or so, meaning the only thing that has to stay "always on" is an old-school web page. This always lets people be "together" while still having privacy, as there's no audio or video unless two or more parties enter into a conversation.

I went to get my car washed today in freezing weather, the day of a massive snow storm about to hit DC. Needless to say, nobody else was there. (Why did I do this? Because the car desperately needed to be waxed + interior cleaned, and I'm not in DC for long). The experience got me thinking about dynamic pricing and customer loyalty.

Businesses typically try to use frequent-purchase tactics to drive loyalty, like a "buy 9 get 1 free" card or, in the case of airlines, frequent flyer miles. But I believe there's a better way to drive deep loyalty while at the same time maximizing the revenue a business gets: Dynamic pricing, with a Hedge. Here's what I mean:

As I mention in the video above, to say it was a slow day at the car wash facility would be putting it nicely -- I must've been one of only a couple dozen customers they would have the entire day. It's expensive to keep a carwash open on a day like today, including paying at least 10 employees to sit around and do nothing.

I've always considered Microsoft's WindowsPhone a darkhorse competitor to iOS & Android. Microsoft has boatloads of cash but has never been able to get a meaningful market share in mobile against iOS & Android.

But when I saw the new iOS 7 screenshots on Matt Gemmell's blog, the first thing I thought to myself was "wow, iOS7 looks a lot like WindowsPhone8." So I dug a little deeper. Here's an example:

The new iOS7 as shown on Matt's blog:

Incoming video call on Skype (which MSFT owns) on WindowsPhone:

I talk to entrepreneurs who have ideas, and very often they ask what they should do first.

I've had the conversation enough now that I'm going to write a blog on it to give a much more detailed answer than I can in a 5 minute convo or a quick email.

The first thing I'd say is congrats, you have an idea. Not to be too crass here, but ideas are like sperm. They're required in order to bring your startup to life, but an idea alone isn't worth much. In fact, my first big piece of feedback is that your idea is for all intents and purposes valueless. Unseasoned entrepreneurs want to protect their ideas and not tell anyone about them. What I always say is this: If you really believe your idea is so valuable, then go try to sell it to someone. See how much anyone will pay you for it. Let the market tell you how valuable your idea is. If you can get $1MM for your idea, then you've just won the startup lottery and saved yourself from the really hard part: Executing on that idea. I'd sell ideas all day long if I could, but I've never been able to sell a single one -- not even for 1 cent (literally).

So just like sperm, ideas are bountiful and required for life, but they don't accomplish much on their own, and in fact from this point onward in this post I'm going to substitute the word 'sperm' for 'idea' just to drive my point home. And just like only a few dozen sperm reach their destination from millions initially, that's how it goes with ideas as you start to execute on them.

The second thing I'd suggest is you (life)hack together a prototype of your sperm. This doesn't mean the prototype has to be software based. For example, when I started a tech-based real estate brokerage in 2003, part of my model was to use technology to be more efficient, allowing me to give rebates to home buyers. My entire business model was based on establishing strong SEO, building a lead-gen CRM, getting a data feed of the MLS homes database, and lots of other things that would take tons of dev work.

Founders: Soon, you'll be able to publicly raise money from accredited investors. But the SEC's proposed rules assume you'll be raising money the way institutions did 20 years ago. This means that you will be required to:

Imagine having to notify the SEC in advance and file documents every time you have a new communication with investors, and include boilerplate with every communication. And if you break these rules? Your startup will be sent to "fundraising prison" -- a one year bar from raising any funds.

It doesn't have to be this way. Tell the SEC why these rules are backwards and kill innovation.

My buddy John Gorman told me about Michael Benson and his amazing work, which was done in cooperation with NASA, and I had to post it here, it's so impressive.  You can also learn more about Benson's exhibition, titled Beyond: Visions of Planetary Landscapes.  Rumor is that if you have some disposable income, you can pick up a few large, limited prints... I was afraid to ask what they cost!

My buddy John Gorman told me about Michael Benson and his amazing work, which was done in cooperation with NASA, and I had to post it here, it's so impressive.  You can also learn more about Benson's exhibition, titled Beyond: Visions of Planetary Landscapes.  Rumor is that if you have some disposable income, you can pick up a few large, limited prints... I was afraid to ask what they cost!

We humans are a strange bunch.  Being equipped with the miracle of verbal and written communication, we get a 'pass' on something the rest of the animal kingdom relies on for survival: Speaking and listening in actions, not words.

It's taken me a long time to realize how poorly my action-related communication syncs to my verbal communication.  I grew up believing it was OK to say one thing, but to do another.  Many of us do.  It's easy to fabricate worlds where we say one thing but do something completely contrary, and as a society few people call us out on the disparity.  I'm not sure why this is.  The best reason I've come up with is that few of us are tuned into "listening to actions, not words" enough to notice it.

As I've slowly become aware of the disparity, the main reason I've often failed to achieve parity between my spoken commitments and my actions is that it's a really, really hard skill to master.  It takes meaningful, consistent effort to 'say as you do, and do as you say'.  Life is full of small opportunities to massage the effect of one's actions with a stream of words that cover up the true meaning of the underlying actions.  Our spoken (and written -- but mainly spoken, since it's more extemporaneous) communication acts as a type of elbow grease that makes interactions between humans run more smoothly -- or so we think.

Examples are plentiful and commonplace:  

Henry Blodget of BusinessInsider gave an excellent presentation titled The Future of Digital at a recent Ignition conference.

As you can see from the trendlines in the graphs below, the promise of smartphones is rapidly coming to fruition, with over 50% penetration in the US, and an especially-significant stat that by 2015 the number of broadband connections coming from mobile devices will be over 300% the number coming from fixed (i.e., desktop computer) devices. Translated, that means the promise of blazing-fast broadband on your phone is already here with 4G LTE on many new smartphones, and it's about to become ubiquitious.  And that means that people will just reach for their phone instead of walking over to a desktop computer whenever they want to do anything online.  I wrote about this phenomenon in a post about how the iPhone 5's connectivity has been growing exponentially since its introduction.

Another significant stat shown below is that the time smartphone users spend in apps is 600% greater than mobile web. As TechCrunch reported last October, mobile app downloads are skyrocketing from 2 billion in 2010 to 98 billion in 2015 -- an increase of almost 50x. And as Localytics reports, 26% of users only open an app once after downloading.  Already, engagement is a problem in mobile, and as the number of downloads skyrockets fifty fold, the problem is going to get much worse.  Just think about your own phone:  How many apps are on it that you downloaded, but never use.

Fred Wilson coined the term "30/10/10" to refer to 30% of the download base being MAUs (Monthly Active Users) and 10% of the download base being daily actives.  I believe the engagement stats for many apps are often even worse than that.  Oftentimes, as the Localytics data illustrates, 25% to 50% of users don't even open the app once after downloading it.  In a presentation from PinchMedia (now several years old), the active user rate 90 days after install was well under 5% of the download base.

I had to get back to our new SF office after a meeting, and instead of taking a cab, I decided to try Lyft. One the way over to the meeting, I had taken an Uber car that my colleague Adam ordered from his phone, making it a "taxi-free" day.

This was my first time trying Lyft. I submitted a request for a pickup using the iPhone app and was told "Romeo will arrive in 9 minutes." Funny enough, this was also Romeo's first day as a Lyft driver. So we had a great convo about what the experience was like for both me, and him, as first timers. Lyft drivers are the ones with pink moustaches on their cars. Here's what Romeo's car looks like:

I took a video as I used Lyft for the first time. Here's what my experience was like:

I've always been a fan of audio APIs / mobile SDKs.  For example, if you're watching the Conan O'Brien show and you have the Team Coco app open at the same time, it'll listen to the show and sync up with the show's content, showing the same content or ads on the app as on the TV.  That kind of thing feels like magic to the end user, because there's mystery around how the app is staying sync.

But yesterday, Tim, the founder of ShareThis, showed me something that takes audio APIs to a new level, called Lisnr.  Although it's marketed as a standalone app, my understanding from Tim is that it's also available as an SDK that app publishers can put into its app.