In this past election, I did something I now really regret:  I voted 'yes' to Proposition 30.

Uber, a San Francisco startup, is ruffling lots of regulatory feathers, as reported recently in the New York Times.  I also wrote about my experience with Uber back in 2010.

I'll be the first to agree that car sharing services like Uber and Lyft present difficult problems for regulators.  But that's not what this post is about.

My problem is with a statement made by Matthew Daus, the former chairman of NYC's taxi & limousine commission.  He said, "New Yorkers deserve an apology from Uber for price-gouging them during the hurricane."  Besides having a hopeless conflict of interest as the former commissioner, he's throwing out the bully phrase "price-gouging" as if basic supply & demand economics didn't apply to him or his industry.

If Uber doubling its rates (or more) after hurricane Sandy to adjust supply with demand is price-gouging, then I'd like to coin an equally demeaning term:  "time-gouging." 

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.

As CEO of my startup, I sometimes have to be in sales mode.  (Well, every owner of a company is always in some sort of sales mode, but in this case I mean prospecting for customers of new product offerings).

I recently wrote about what it takes to create an effective sales team.  But here I just want to share one pro-tip, and see if I can find a few other interested people to beta-test a new tool with me.

We have a new product that we're piloting, and so I'm in sales mode for a bit testing the waters.  I always like to do the initial sales myself, so I can tweak it and figure out what's working and what's not, before I pass it over to a sales team.  Plus, hearing the inevitable "no's" from prospects is a great way to get honest feedback about the product so we can iterate on it quickly.

If you haven't seen the hilarious viral honey badger youtube video, check it out before you read this.

I just read this awesome passage from TheNextWeb from Jeff Bezos when he was starting Amazon:

I just ordered Advil and yogurt for our office using Instacart, an incredibly awesome new service that delivers groceries to your door in under three hours.

Instacart has been in the news a lot lately, and is billing itself as 'Amazon for groceries with 3 hour delivery'.  The great thing is that it actually works.

I knew I was going to be sitting down with Instacart's CEO Apoorva Mehta, so I placed an Instacart order before-hand (something Apoorva says happens to him all the time, especially at VC pitches).  And viola, fifty minutes later Liz showed up with my Advil and yogurt order.  Watch the video above to see it in action.

Instacart is currently only live in San Francisco and the South Bay area but Apoorva hopes to expand into other markets in the coming year.

Buy three (or more) flight pass codes for $6.50 each, and sell them for more to passengers on the flight.

I like little exercises like this (like when I hacked a Vegas cab line), because being a salesperson is uncomfortable.  Creating value can be a scary, anxiety ridden process.  You have to talk to people you don't know, who aren't expecting to talk to you, and often whose first reaction isn't welcoming.  You have to overcome all these obstacles and get them to see the value you're bringing.

That's why while making $20 off a couple of passes isn't a material amount of money, it's very material in the skills you need to use and hone to sell other, more expensive services or goods.

I'm here at Google Ventures in Mountain View, CA where Bambi Francisco is interviewing Aaron, the CTO of LivingSocial.  Aaron is discussing shipping product at massive scale, JSIO (watch the video to learn what it means) and what it's like to move from DC to SF, where he's now spinning up a team.  Coincidentally, since LivingSocial is based in DC, I also wrote a post & video of the CEO Tim two years ago when I was still in DC.

Here also is a video I took of Balaji, the CEO of DabKick, a company that had a table at the Vator event.  Their very cool photo sharing app is available to try now.  Here's a video:

Here in San Francisco, almost everyone I know has iPhones.  But there are a whole lotta people somewhere in the world with Android devices.

According to this article from ExtremeTech, Android shipments are up from 700,000 total in 2008, to 550,000,000 in 2012.  Yes, five hundred and fifty million devices shipped worldwide running Android, with 136 million in Q3 2012 alone.

With Blackberry's penetration cut in half, and Symbian's even worse, it's now a two horse race between Android and iOS [1].  And although in the Valley all you hear about is the iPhone, and everyone's building apps for the iPhone, a peek beyond to the rest of the world showcases the dominance of Android worldwide [2].

=================