Facebook Buys Instagram

How to think about this : 

1) Facebook is in the face recognition business. (They run algorithms on all the photos posted to them)

2) Facebook (as all the big social network are) is in the "find where people are" business. ("locative services")

You don't even have to go conspiracy theorist (Facebook part owned by the CIA) to see that Instagram gives Facebook another massive injection of photo data about who is where with who and when. And that this can be mined for all sorts of valuable information and patterns.

FB can discover relationships between people and places that no-one has explicitly told them about. They can tell advertisers where you like to hang-out socially. And who with. You think they aren't trying "sentiment analysis" to try to figure out whether people in photos are happy or sad? What's it worth to FB to know which bars in London have the happiest customers? Or which companies have the most drunken
employees? Or that you like motorcycles?

Google are after this data too. That's why they just brought out  wearable "glasses" that can tell Google what you're looking at. Instagram might very well be Facebook's response in the "grab" for rich visual data streams.

Some people are noting the potential threat to FB from Pinterest too and saying this is a defensive move. Today is a great day for Pinterest. Someone will be trying to snap that up soon.

Groupon's Troubles

Problematic business model :

“Groupon’s problem is similar to the subprime lending problem,” he said. “Groupon is saying we will give a restaurant cash now, but it doesn’t have to deliver a product. The businesses that sign up for Groupon are desperate, and when they go out of business, Groupon has to pay a refund.”

A Post-App World

Mobile apps. "must die" and be replaced by ... something more like web-pages?

It's an interesting idea. The problem with apps. is the "download, install and manage" part of things. As the number of apps. proliferates it becomes unmanageable.

What you want is the functionality of the app. popping up where it's appropriate (and wanted). In a sense, I guess the apps will have to be attached to things in your locality rather than a traditional web-address. Places like "in front of me" or "belonging to the institution I just entered", "by my left hand" etc.