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You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders - The most famous of which is “never get involved in a land war in Asia”

There is a land war being fought on the web and it’s for files and filesystems. Incumbents and startups alike are duking it out. And things are really starting to get interesting.

The startups, Dropbox and Evernote, reinvented the file system as a synchronized, cross platform file system abstracting the hardware and the data. Now they are moving up the stack. Dropbox’s acquisition of Mailbox and renewed focus on photographs and attachments and Evernote’s every growing battery of point applications like Skitch, Food, Hello and Peek aim to drive further file creation and user engagement within their notebooks.

An entrepreneur shared this quote with me a few weeks ago.

The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.
William Gibson, quoted in The Economist, December 4, 2003

I remembered it this morning when I drove past a Google self-driving car and then again a few minutes later when a Tesla whipped past me and a third time during the same commute when I dictated an email to my mobile phone. Sometimes living in the Bay Area does feel like the living in future.

Steve Sinofsky, executive at Microsoft for 24 years penned an insightful post on the five data biases plaguing product decisions. It can be easy for any founder, product manager, marketer or engineer accept a data point at face value as the rationale behind a decision.

But understanding the nuances and biases of the data, questioning the data, is often just as important as the result. The corollary point argued in his post is data isn’t strategy - data can’t be blindly used to inform product design and decision making because the data might be “lies, damned lies and statistics”.

In social media, like the real world, there’s quite a lot of gossip going on behind your back. At least on the Internet, you can measure it.

Dubbed dark social, this “invisible” sharing brings 40% of the visitors to my blog and similar amounts of traffic to other content sites. The Atlantic Monthly, which receives 5M monthly uniques, reports 60% of traffic from dark social

Like its distant cousin dark energy, dark social is a massive and to date little understood force despite its importance. Dark social clicks originate from instant messages, emails containing links and links embedded in tweets opened in TweetDeck among other sources.

During the life of a startup, the question of outsourcing can arise frequently whether for PR, marketing, product design, sales or engineering.

Outsourcing can be very attractive: consultants bring new points of view, relevant experience and (potentially) immediate results. Of course, consultants charge high fees and after their contract expires they leave with their knowledge and insights in tow.

Founders may be challenged when deciding when and what to outsource. To simplify the decision, reflect on your startup’s key competencies needed to win your market. Like people, startups must focus on a few key skills to be successful. Typically, startups win share by focusing on their strength: product design, sales effectiveness, marketing deft or technology advantages.

In a world of socially curated news, there is no place for RSS. I wrote last year:

Social streams solve the problem most RSS readers faced: the inbox with 1000+ items to read and no way to sift through them.

Socially curated news syndicated through social networks (Facebook, Twitter) and content networks (LinkedIn, Quibb, HackerNews) solves the relevance problem that RSS never could address.

Brian Shih, former Google Reader PM, wrote an excellent, passionate post-mortem on the product on Quora, where he underscores the importance of the social forces at play on Google Reader.

How much is the most valuable brand in the world, Coca-Cola worth? $77.8B. That’s 45% of the company’s market cap.

Often times, winners create advantages in a market through brands. These brands evoke emotions within consumers: feelings of trust (Visa), of aspiration (Nike), of adventure (RedBull). And if the brand is strong enough, it replaces the generic term: tissues/Kleenex, internet search/Google, glass cleaner/Windex.

In Silicon Valley, we tend to believe that better products win markets. It’s atypical to overhear a conversation at Blue Bottle Coffee or at YCombinator about brand building - brand attributes, values, positioning. Instead, our exchanges focus more on technology and more recently, design.

I believe machine learning will drive the next big wave of innovation in consumer web services. The very same technologies that power Google’s search and Netflix video recommendation engine will become far more common and useful, perhaps even predominant in the consumer web.

Every great consumer product has a little bit of magic. Apple employs static software and hardware design to anticipate user needs - to create that magic.

Compared to user experience design and forethought, intelligence, when it works, is far more compelling and impressive. Most of the time though, it’s easy to be disappointed. If you’re anything like me, the first time you played with Siri, you tried to find places where it failed. We expect and to a degree have been trained to expect the technology to fail. Like Dorothy, we all look behind the curtain to find the little man making the magic, the Mechanical Turk.

Among my friends in college, a frequent response to the question, “How’s it going?” was “Strikes and gutters.” In other words, really well and really poorly - at the same time.

Five years into the venture business, I think that expression is much better suited to the day-to-day swings a startup experiences than the life of a college student.

It’s hard to imagine these two diametric feelings at the same time, but for entrepreneurs it’s a daily occurrence. Launch a new great product feature but lose a big customer. Grow really fast but struggle with fund raising. Get a lot of great press but fire an under-performer.

I often wonder about how to measure the success of this blog. While there are many tools to measure page views and visitors, the absolute number of readers is probably the worst measure because it’s a false idol. Feedburner subscribers, retweets, time on site aren’t much better because they don’t measure the true performance of a blog - what fraction of an audience the blog reaches.

In order for content marketing and blogs to be effective, the writing must have a target audience in mind. By focusing on that audience, bloggers build a brand in a scalable and cost-effective way. So engaging the very highest fractions of that audience possible is the best metric of success.