Come for the Ride…

I’ve read a multitude of blogs out there in the last day about how people were incredibly disappointed in what was actually shown at the 2008 WWDC yesterday. Whereas I can understand the disappointment for things like dual cameras for conferencing on the phone, I also understand that most wireless networks do not yet have the infrastructure to handle this sort of bandwidth. Let’s say you start selling 5-10MM more iPhones around the world and these people start to take advantage of this feature on a daily basis, whereas in the US we might be able to ramp up the necessary bandwidth, I hardly believe Denmark, Malta, Peru or Madagascar could handle this out of the box. Out of the box, everything works is Apple’s bread and butter. They understand that people will suffer with a few less features for a user experience not plagued with slow of buggy features (the Windows Mobile Task Manager is a perfect example of the sort of hack Apple has a knack for avoiding).

With all that said, what was shown was absolutely mind blowing. The developers who demoed their products simply blew me out of the water. I recall developing games in Microsoft’s MFC development environment in high school and simply being stonewalled at the obscurity and limiting nature of a development environment. I then look at a combination of what’s in the SDK (I downloaded it shortly after watching the Keynote video) and what was shown and I’m almost ready to delve into trying to create an iPhone app TODAY. The 3D game shown was nothing short of astonishing. The music app, Band, sold me when they got to the “Blues Music Keyboard” and seeing all the Modality Apps made me want to become a doctor. It may sound dumb to you, but this device is more than Apple’s next big money making scheme, this device really can enable the dreams of others (to quote Randy Pausch) by allowing greater flexibility in their day to day life. From presenting information never available to the public in such a rich manner (again, Modality apps) to keeping track of all your information in a centralized location with no fear of losing the data (MobileMe) to sharing your life  and everyday adventures with the easy of taking pictures and blogging through the iPhone 3G, I’m floored and almost ready to be one of the idiots in line on day one for these phones.

This phone is right now for the bleeding edge customer. The power user. We know what we’re doing and we use all features of the iPhone on a daily basis. However, the average user like my Mom, my Dad, my Fiancee and my Brother are simply going to be overwhelmed by a phone with many more features than it has. Apple is slowly allowing people to test and try the iPhone and get used to a PDA that works for the average person. Society as a whole is still getting used to the mobile enabled citizen and if they’re going to release a product that lives up to what we expect from Apple (ie. Perfection), they’re going to need more time to ensure that both the product works flawlessly and people are able to use this in such a way that their cited 90% satisfaction rate isn’t tarnished.

But that’s just my take on it, and though I always want more, I also want time to learn some of these features from a developer’s perspective before some more of these great jumps in mobile awesomeness.

I know I usually write about entrepreneurial stuff and in this case, the fact the new iPhone 2.0 software will support enterprise mail will be something very useful for startups and corporate users - Not to mention the iPhone in itself is pretty innovative which is why I’m a fan. However, somethings felt like they were missing from yesterday’s WWDC announcements… somethings that left me leaving unimpressed. Here are the top 4 things that should have been included.

1. Camera upgrade/Front facing camera. A number of people have mentioned that other phones in the industry carry a 5 mega pixel camera as the standard for their phones. If the iPhone 3G is supposed to the be the new standard, and if Reuters is adding an app that lets you submit news directly to them - then why are we still stuck with a toy camera? Maybe the pre-event hype got to me, but having two cameras on the phone, one for pics and the other for video chat should be the new standard. Having two cameras is not even something that’s really new, but allowing people to video chat over their phone would be a huge WOW factor. Also, most cameras have a mini mirror for people who like to take self portraits. Can we at least get the convexed Apple logo put on or something?

2. More storage! If various iPods are already hitting the 80+ gig mark and if the iPod Touch already has one at 32 gigs, why are we still stuck with a 16gig model as the top end model? If this truly is supposed to be a phone that will last us between now and the end of the Apple Care warranty, wouldn’t you want to offer a larger option especially if we’re now supposed to be installing apps, GPS stuff, possibly record video through apps, etc? Why make the mistake that Microsoft did with the Xbox 360 by only putting out 20gig harddrives to start? It just doesn’t make any sense.

3. Gimme some more for the $10 data plan hike! Okay, so it has been whispered that despite the cheaper purchase price for the iPhone 3G, people will end up paying for it through other means, like the mandatory 3G data plan which costs $30/month instead of $20/month. Seriously, yikes! First off, now that I think about it, I’m not even sure why I’m paying $20 for the existing data plan. EDGE is painfully slow which means I probably transmit all of less than 2mb a month on the at&t network. The majority of my browsing has been under the wifi umbrella which I already pay for through other means. So now that we may actually tramsmit data through the at&t network, we have to pay another $10 a month? If you want your users to pay for the network upgrades you’ve been working on, at least throw in unlimited texting into the plan or something to wow us. While we’re all fans of Apple, a lot of people are still holding out because the phone is tied to at&t. Maybe this change of heart will turn some people around - I know it’ll make me feel better about signing another 2 year contract.

4. More colors? Alright, I know this item is pretty weak. In all honesty, the iPhone 3G is pretty great and if certain features are missing, I’m sure a lot of it can be made up through software updates and applications. However, instead of treating the iPhone 3G as a computer and limiting it to the Mac black and white, why not treat it like the rest of the iPod’s and give users choices in colors? Again, not a huge change, but just enough to wow.

Even if we don’t get any of the upgrades mentioned above for another year or more, I’m hoping someone who has a lot of clout will at least push for a petition to get unlimited texting in the new data plan. While I am certainly not one close to hitting the texting limit, I just don’t like to feel like I’m being taxed every time I use it.

If you’ve been following this blog for awhile, you’d probably remember my experience at the Atlanta Startup Weekend where a group of Atlanta entrepreneurs created Skribit in 54 hours.  The experience was really rewarding and it opened up my personal network within the local community.  Not only did I meet a number of like-minded individuals, I still keep in touch with a number of them today.

Well, Startup Weekend is now looking to hop to more cities and they are allowing you to cast your vote to show your interest.  If you’d like to get the same awesome experience in your current location, go and vote!

Entrepreneurs in Atlanta, make sure you cast your vote for Startup Weekend 2!

Things have been super busy here for the EasyAutoSales team - so busy that we skipped our April update. However, the good news is that we’re finally starting to see some fruition from our hours and hours of hard work.

Top 5 Highlights for the Month:

- We squashed about 99.5% of all major bugs on the system. We have scoured and removed dead links from the website. The data displayed on the website should be correct barring any fancy marketing tricks from dealers sending us extremely high or low prices to get special attention.

- SEO and XML efforts are finally paying off. Right now we average about 5,000 to 7,000 visits a day with the majority of our traffic coming from two primary sources. While this is great news compared to no traffic, it is also pretty scary. If any one of the sources decide to stop working, our business would crumble pretty quickly. It is my goal to eventually even this out so we don’t rely on any one particular source for more than 15% of our total traffic - Google included.

- More SEO and more expansion! At my previous startup, I paid for the majority of my traffic due to my inability to change asp.net code to fix our SEO. Even though my old budget was only $2,000 a month, we still managed to make a viable business out of the few referrals we did get. Unfortunately while good money was made, Google Adwords ended up getting most of it.

Our current efforts in SEO has propelled the website to get a LOT of free traffic from a few sources. Current projections are at 200,000 visits in the next 30 days (and growing!) Thanks to our team’s hard work, I feel like I’m actually getting a refund from Google through Adsense. Our goal now is to see how far we can push our SEO efforts to get free traffic before dropping another dime for paid traffic. I guess not having money for marketing has its benefits. Instead of just throwing money at the problem, we’re definitely using our noodle more and learning a lot more about optimization which is helping with our bottom line.

- We can cover our hosting now! We’re not ready to throw any profitability parties just yet but at least we can now pay for our own hosting without needing to dig deeper into our own pockets. We started this venture on the assumption that photo hosting should be cheap or free for our sellers. While we’re still keeping the motto, it’s really not as cheap as I had hoped. Even using Amazon’s S3, our AWS bill for this month was over $700. Yikes! On the bright side, we can now afford to pay it without selling our bodies.

- Partnerships! We’re now working with a couple of famous brands like CARFAX to help make our results more relevant. Not only can you search for the car of your dreams, you can also make sure it’s safe to take home. We plan on doing a few more of these deals to help make our results more useful and relevant.

In June, we will finally be able to start tackling some more fun stuff instead of just fixing bugs and making sure mundane features work. I’m actually looking forward to some of the cool integrations we have in planned with a number of popular web 2.0 websites to get our name out there. Our goal is to move the needle up to 350,000 monthly visits so I look forward to seeing how things play out.

I don’t have the stats to verify whether Google’s having a bad day or if something we did on our end changed the way referrals are ranked. However, it’s scary to know that a huge chunk of your business depends on referrals and rely on just one source.

Google had a bad day today (at least for us). Across the board on Google Base, organic referrals and search network referrals, everything was down to the point of WTF. Seeing how referrals from other sites maintained their average, it would be great to find out why our referrals on Google dropped suddenly. Maybe (Hopefully) it’s only a one day mix up. I wish I had more data points…