Rakesh Agrawal's Blog — Founder, Investor, Houstonian

Sooo Google announced their living room product strategy — Google TV.

Seems to me like a sound strategy with the right pieces in place:

– Android platform that 3rd parties can develop against, adapted for the TV -check!
– Google less-than-free business model (ie they’ll pay cable or satellite providers a nice cut of their ad revenues in Google search, maps, etc) -check! (See bgurley post on the “less than free” business model concept)
– deals with hardware makers (Sony, Intel, Logitech) -check!
– deal with a TV provider (Dish Networks) to provide initial go to market beachhead -check!

So I think all the pieces are there for Google to try and get the TV-as-a-platform party started. Apple lead the smartphone party with the iPhone, but they might end up being the follower on this one (though maybe not if this strategic leak from Apple about the next generation Apple TV is to be believed).

And as I see it, all of this is good news for the “DIY HTPC” enthusiasts, the people that were the lifeblood of our Beyond TV product at SnapStream when we were focused on the consumer market. These are the same enthusiasts that turned to companies/products like SageTV, Meedio, MediaPortal, Windows Media Center Edition (longest name in the bunch… has to be Microsoft’s product!) and GB-PVR to turbo-charge their home entertainment systems.

Why’s this good news for HTPC enthusiasts?

Well, to all those 3rd party developers that built Beyond Media plug-ins, that built plugins/extensions for SageTV… you always wondered whether it was worthwhile to build on our piddly “platform”… it wasn’t, at least not beyond impressing your friends.

At SnapStream, we always had our hands full building our own applications, and never had time (or, truth be told, the expertise or experience) to make a real attempt to build a platform with a complete ecosystem of hardware, content, services and 3rd party developer tools. If you look at the other products mentioned above, you’ll find that the same is true.

Now, with Google TV, and likely with a future competing platform from Apple, 3rd party developers (both enthusiasts and professional developers) will have an incentive to build applications for the living room– there’s a platform that will have real users, real market traction and growth, and real methods for monetizing users.

I, for one, can’t wait to see how some of the creativity that we saw amongst SnapStream developer enthusiasts will flourish on these new upcoming TV platforms. Some of the TV apps that people developed at one time for SnapStream:

– DVD Library — jukebox for all your ripped DVDs — like Kaleidescape or Real’s RealDVD product (both of which were sued)
– Caller ID — see who’s calling on the big screen while you’re watching TV
– Internet Radio (on your big-screen TV)
– Stocks (on your big-screen TV)

And this is only the tip of the iceberg of innovation that we’ll see come to the big-screen in the living room. It’ll be a “gold rush” for developers building apps for the television!

Oh and one other thing. What about Roku? They make the popular $99 box for your TV. IMO they’re the closest thing to a Google TV competitor. They have a solid hardware product, a growing number of content providers delivering content to it, and even something of a platform for 3rd party developers. It would seem that they’re a direct competitor to Google TV! But Roku won’t be able to compete with Google’s “less than free” advertising subsidized business model. So if I were Roku, I wouldn’t want to end up as the Symbian or Palm WebOS of the TV space. I’d drop my own platform and throw everything I have into becoming _the_ hardware platform for Google TV. I’d want to be to Google TV what HTC is to Android. Yes Google’s announced Sony as their hardware partner, but Roku’s scrappier and seems less likely to screw up a Google TV hardware device.

I write this as I slog through the complexity and confusion that is eBay’s “eBay Selling” app for the iPhone (selling my Dad’s old Palm Pre)– at this moment, I’m literally waiting for eBay’s app to upload photographs, my 5th attempt to get the Palm Pre listed on eBay through this iPhone app!!

Someone needs to do an auction website + app for the iPhone that’s dead simple — like Posterous does for blogging.

Posterous’s tagline on their frontpage is “the dead simple place to post everything” and I want to see “the dead simple place to sell anything.”

Let me pre-fill my preferences and what-not on their website.

Then point my iPhone’s camera at what I want to sell and take some photos. Give me a really simple app on the iPhone. Kill most of the options that eBay’s throws in the way of getting an item listed. Let the photographs do the selling.

It took me about 20 minutes to get this item posted for sale on eBay. I should have been able to list it in 5 minutes.

I’ve got about 10 other things in my home office that I really want to get rid of but that’s 10×20 = 200 minutes = 3+ hours… and that isn’t time I want to spend.

Make it so dead simple that a celebrity with a cell phone can sell their stuff to the celebrity mongering public. After all, part of what’s made twitter so successful is making it so dead simple that people who otherwise had no time or interest, are suddenly engaged by the medium.

[Note: I’m a Salesforce user at two companies — my software company, SnapStream, and a manufacturing company, Piping Technology. So I’ve spent a fair bit of time inside of Salesforce as a user.]

Marc Benioff wrote: “A true paradigm shift occurs when the barriers of entry are removed for everyone.” Ironically, Salesforce’s pricing is a barrier to entry that they’ll need to knock down to succeed. They’ve built their business being less expensive than the competition (Siebel, etc), but that’s not inexpensive enough to compete with Google and others. Consider the relative value of Google Apps Premier at $50 / user / year vs. Salesforce at $800 / year! And they announced Salesforce Chatter pricing at $50 / user / month! Nuts, if you ask me… pricing from another era.

And they’ve always had one foot in and one foot out of the 3rd party app market (Salesforce AppExchange?). As a Salesforce user, I’ve often been attracted to the idea of 3rd party plug-ins — for a better solution to creating and sending customers quotations for example. But then I discovered that 3rd party plug-ins only work for customeres that pay for API access. Even after paying the few thousand $$ for API access (have to buy it for every account!), getting 3rd apps to work was complex and confusing. Google’s App’s Marketplace, in general comparison, makes it point and click simple to deploy 3rd party services.

And as far as all this talk about streams and enterprise activity feeds, I have yet to see or use Chatter, but if I have to add everyone else at my company onto Salesforce or Chatter at $50-65 / user / month, forget it! I already use Google Apps and when they roll out Buzz for Google Apps account, I’m thinking that it’ll do most or all of what Chatter promises to do for users.

So at the very least, Salesforce has their work cut out for them in this space! I’m not betting on their winning — they have an existing business they’d have to cannibalize. And that existing business has never struck me as very nimble, given the pace of their software updates and how they seem to provision customers across discrete servers/server farms vs. in a truly distributed fashion.

I got mine in the mail earlier this week. There’s not much to it, but it’s pretty slick.

(click the photo above to see more photographs of the Google Nexus One dock on my Flickr account… photos taken with my iPhone 🙂 )

Every so often, people remember the Apple TV and ask, “What’s Apple doing in the living room?”. The latest is a TiPb post, “Should Apple TV Switch to the iPhone OS?“.

My take: it’s obvious to me that eventually Apple is going to make a strong play in the living room. Eventually what we’ve seen happen for phones, what we’re about to see happen in “tablet PCs” (with the iPad) will repeat itself in the living room.

Great hardware + base OS with great usability + platform for 3rd party app dev & distribution

At SnapStream, it was the absence of this platform + device for the living room that lead us away from our consumer PC DVR software and lead us to, instead, focus on our TV search solution for businessess/organizations.

Our thinking was, Until such a platform exists in the living room (and for a little while, we thought Microsoft’s Media Center Edition would be this platform, but IMO it never got there), it doesn’t make sense for us to try and build “apps” for the living room. Incidentally, creating this platform and device is what Boxee is trying to do.

Anyways, another question to consider is “when?” of this living room platform.

With smartphones, Apple released the iPhone in June 2007. The 1st Android phone (the G1) came out in October 2008 –16 months later.

Apple iPhone ————–time=16 months————-> Android*

(*Tmobile G1)

The iPad comes out in April 2010. I’m betting that Google, either through Android or Google Chrome, will release an iPad competitor in 2010, ie within 8 months of the iPad. IMO Google can’t afford to lose the kind of time they lost with the iPhone with “tablet computing” — time during which lots of people got hooked on the iPhone’s way of doing things.

iPad —time=~8 months —-> Google Tablet**

(**Android or Chrome OS)

So if the question is “When will Apple make an iPhone-like platform+device play in the living room?”, I think the trend above will continue, so I think we’ll see Apple and Google release their living room platforms close together — maybe Google will even beat Apple on this one.

I visited Guggenheim in New York today for the first time (every time I’ve meant to visit in the past, I’ve been caught by their early weekday closing time of 5:45pm). Designed by US architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, the building looks kind of like a fanciful parking garage from the outside (my fellow Houstonians will know what I mean) and inside, you get from floor to floor via a continuous ramp that spirals upwards. What a cool building!

The exhibit I enjoyed the most was the “Contemplating the Void” exhibit (NYTimes review), where 200 artists and creative types came up with concepts on how to use the central “void” space of the Guggenheim museum… the open area at the center of the building that the inside ramp swirls up around. There were all kinds of wacky ideas in this exhibit. One of my favorites was the idea of an “art trap” where people would be able to climb into the walls surrounding the inside ramp of the building. There, they’d be held in openings in the wall that resembled medieval stocks, becoming part of the building, an art spectacle (a bunch of people in the walls, flailing their arms and legs!).

I wish Monty Python had been invited to submit a design. I’m thinking of the architect sketch.

The exhibit signage/copy (which I admit, I actually read) opened the exhibit describing the central void space of the building as original, bold and “threatening”. I felt like this was all a bit much. A building constructed around a large open space? They’ve been doing those in India* for a very long time — they’re called aangans.

The other exhibit that I enjoyed was Anish Kapoor’s Memory (Guggenheim museum website link). It’s an installation piece from the guy who did the shiny, mirrory silver you’re-not-allowed-to-photograph-it object in Chicago. The piece basically tries to say, “Think of memory like the story of the blind men and the elephant**.” At least that’s what I took away from it. Yeah, just go see it.

* Note: while this statement makes me sound like the archetypal everything-was-invented-in-India Uncle (“Beta, do you know where algebra was invented? That’s right…”), I assure you that I have not become that Uncle. Not yet anyways.

** Come to think of it, didn’t the story of the blind men and the elephant originate in India?

This photograph is over 10 years old now. My sister, Arti, and I caught a ride up to Tsongo Lake a little ways from Gangtok. It was a holiday in Gangtok so the driver (who we had hired) asked if it was OK to bring his nephew along. Great! we said.

I stuck my camera (a Nikon film camera) out the window of the Maruti/Suzuki van we were ascending the mountain in to take this photograph. That’s the drivers nephew sipping a coke looking down as we climb the mountain. What a great adverisement for Coke!

I’m in India right now and I’m using this trip to really test out the Nexus One I bought a few weeks ago. The quick summary, so far: the Nexus One is a great phone, I can do almost everything I can do on my iPhone with this thing.

The few times I had used used the Nexus One in the States, I never got past the differences between it and the iPhone. Plus I’m married to my AT&T phone number in the States. But now that I’m kind of forced to use it (the iPhone is a hassle to unlock and use in India), I’m pretty happy with it. Even the battery life isn’t that bad. Anyways, more on this later.

I wanted to document one setting thing I had to do to get data working on my Nexus One with my local provider (Airtel) in case it saves someone else some time. First of all it didn’t just work. So I went digging and found this thread where someone mentioned:

The N1 (and presumably Android) cannot handle a SIM card with multiple GPRS/data access points – which is what Airtel has – Mobile Office and Live!

So I manually setup an APN in Android (Settings -> Wireless -> Mobile -> APN) with the following settings:

Name: Airtel (I think you can put anything you want in here!)
APN: airtelgprs.com
Username: 123456

(And then the MCC and MNC were automatically set to 404 and 10 respectively, and the Authentication Type was set to “None” — I guess these were successfully read off of the SIM. Everything else was ““)

I’ve been using the TED5000 home energy monitoring system to measure my energy consumption since October 2009.

The bottom line: I highly recommend the TED5000. What you don’t measure, can’t be managed… and so it goes with electricity consumption. What the TED5000 has done for us:

1) pushed me to replace every incandescent bulb in our house with CFLs (CFLs use about 1/8th of the electricity and provide more light!)

2) has me and my wife making sure we have lights, TV, etc. turned off when we leave the house.

3) it’s lead to a lot of great conversations with family, friends, and my eldest daughter (5 years old) about energy consumption.

4) Net-net: our electricity bill for November was HALF of that in October and we’ve consistently averaged 30-40% lower monthly bills.

What to buy: If you have one breaker box in your house, you need their TED5000-C kit — it costs $239.99. More info on the TED5000 on their website.

More details on my setup, including photographs of the TED5000 components and the whole setup process below:

(you might prefer to view this album directly on picasaweb)

(since once person I told about the TED5000 asked me, let me state: I have no financial interest in the makers of the TED5000. I’d just like to see more people have their eyes opened by real-time energy monitoring!)

Update (2/8/2010): While she didn’t talk a lot about the details, Purva Patel at the Houston Chronicle has a bit about my setup in this article about home energy monitoring.