Remember SideKicks? QWERTY keyboard, often referred to as “the brick”? The magic behind these phones, besides rescuing you from using T9 day in and day out, was that every person I knew who had one at one point thought they had lost it, but miraculously always got it back. Exhibit A: my younger brother took his SideKick to an Eagles game (and if you’ve ever been to a Philadelphia sporting event or know anything about Philadelphia fans, you know what kind of mayhem goes down in those stadiums) and dropped it on his way to the concession stands. Two days later, the phone was still missing. Resolving to get a new SideKick off EBay, he made a “i lost my phone need numbers” FaceBook group and started browsing for cheap replacements. It came as a shock to all of us when he received a call that good-hearted Eagles fan had found his phone.

Exhibit B: A close friend of mine was cabbing home from the West Village in Manhattan one Sunday morning around dawn. When she got back to her apartment, she realized that her phone was no longer in her purse, although she clearly remembers (or so she says…) making a call while in the taxi. A seasoned New Yorker, she immediately began arranging for a new phone. Less than 24 hours later, I got a call from an unknown number explaining that my friend’s SideKick had been found, and asking for a good meeting place to return the lost phone.

If LG has put a chip in SideKicks to make the finders of these lost devices generous, well-intentioned strangers (usually not the case with the finders of abandoned valuables), we should clearly all invest in SideKicks. Unfortunately for us, “the brick” is now an outdated, pre-smartphone piece of crap.

So how do we avoid:
1) losing our phones in the first place,
2) the stress of replacing a lost phone, and
3) having to return missed calls and text messages in the fortunate event that you recover your phone in these post-SideKick times?

Here at Phone Halo we make it simple. Invest in one of our devices. It’ll save you a lot of grief, especially if you’ve ever had to create one of those headache i-lost-my-phone FaceBook groups. It’s sure helped out this beautiful piece of man meat.

-Gabrielle

Thoughts on Facebook | entrepreneurship

I just saw Jason Calcanis letter to Mark Zuckerberg concerning Facebook’s current business practices.  Like everyone else in the Tech industry, we all have our 2 cents and I’m not any different.  My thoughts on Jason’s points:

1. Being able to export everything – I do believe this feature would be nice to have, however this is an aspect of Facebook’s sustainable competitive advantage.  They’ve created an ecosystem where there is a huge cost to switch to a competitor.  If a competitor that was everything facebook but 10x better, it would be hard for them to convert users away from Facebook.  Facebook is where all the content is and by enabling users to export their content creaks the door open for competitors.  And no, Facebook is not too big to worry about 5 kids in garage.
2. Universal Like Button – People are not doing open source without strategy behind it.  Having an open source system is to create a standard and quickly capture the market.  Bluetooth radio standard is free to use and license.  Bluetooth did this model in order to accomplish the interoperability between devices and quickly gain market share versus competitors such as Zigbee.  However there is no need to do this when your company is the standard.
3. Currency – 100% behind you there.
4. Remind users of privacy settings – This sounds annoying.  The truth is that everyone sub 30 doesn’t have much problem with sharing everything.  Your open letter is a sign of this.  Mark probably would have appreciated a direct letter to him and would have read it just the same.  Sharing more information and creating a search index for more than just sites is the future of web 2.0.  Without displaying certain information to the public, it is impossible to create the internet of people.
5. Partner more – This way of partnering sounds like a lot of Barney relationships.  If the partnership saves time, money, and creates value Facebook (like most companies) partner or purchase the startup.  But partnering just because it’s the good thing to do in the valley does not sound reasonable.

Those are my thoughts on the letter.

Few obvious points on me:

• Yes, I am a fan of Facebook
• As a young entrepreneur, I do look up to what Mark Zuckerberg is doing now
• I am a lot dumber than Jason Calcanis and my knowledge cannot compare to his

-Chris

Over the course of the last month, the repeated accusations and frustrations that social media networks are violating our privacy have been hard to ignore. Facebook undoubtedly leads the industry in consumer complaints, but in the latest scandal MySpace is part of the bundle. The Wallstreet Journal reported this morning that a few sites including these network giants have been dishing out user information to advertising companies like DoubleClick and RightMedia. The weirdest part about all of this is that the receiving companies claim that they never asked for the data. Why would Facebook (et. al.) volunteer confidential information about their users, a clear breech of the terms & conditions we all agree to before signing up? Not cool, Facebook.

But at the same time, we have to realize that by signing up for Facebook we are taking a risk. At the end of the day, we’re the ones who sign up for Social Media Networks, input our own information, and open our profiles to the invasive nature of the internet. Facebook may re-evaluate their terms & conditions, they may make new ’simpler privacy settings’, however in the end we still need to watch our backs. Sure, they should act in line with the contract, but it would be naive to assume that everyone always follows the rules. Laws get broken–that’s why we have a justice system.

We can blame social media networks all day for dishonesty, privacy violation, etc., but the only way to insure our privacy is to take matters into our own hands. Facebook’s legal issues might not be enough for you to delete your account, but at the very least we should all  reconsider our account settings.

-Gabrielle

You might recognize the people to the left.  The ConnectU team.  Their current claim is that Mark Zuckerberg stole their idea to make facebook.  Their current course of action is to repetitively raise litigation against Zuckerberg and Facebook because they “got screwed”.

Boo Hoo.

The fact is that if we assume all their claims are true and Zuckerberg stole all of ConnectU’s technology (which isn’t very impressive) to make Facebook, I still believe that they do not deserve a penny.  They had all the same technology as Mark and did nothing.  The facts are that until they raised litigation against Facebook, no one in the world knew or cared about ConnectU.  ConnectU was merely a page in the internet history books.

Mark took the technology and was able to proliferate it in a way that not many people can do.  In a way that has changed the very face of the internet (no pun intended). Ideas don’t change the world, people change the world. That’s the truth and the people behind ConnectU are still a bunch of whiny kids trying to steal someone else’s glory.

When we started Phone Halo back in 2008, there were no other competitors.  No other systems that claimed to be the “first wireless leash”  No other systems that talked about using mobile applications to link the physical and mobile worlds in unique ways.  But with any real business opportunity, competitors arise and companies must compete.  Our execution in the business and how we continually try our very best to help our customers will drive us to be #1.

ConnectU team, didn’t you ever play sports?  Go Big or Go Home.  Time for you to go home.

-Chris

And for your viewing pleasure:

Yesterday, Facebook launched a really interesting way to reach Facebook on your mobile phone. 0.Facebook (0.facebook.com) is just like most other mobile-only sites as it is extremely lightweight and made to look halfway decent on a tiny screen. This is all just sounding like Facebook’s primordial mobile-only site, m.facebook.com, but 0.Facebook brings something new to the table — on certain carriers 0.facebook.com is free!

Sounds familiar...

0.Facebook has no data charges except for when you view photos and is available on many different carriers around the world. Unfortunately, if you’re in the US like us, 0.facebook.com isn’t free because our nice mobile providers probably don’t like the idea of their biggest data cash cow suddenly disappearing.

-Brian

One of the up and coming social media players, Foursquare, is growing and growing quickly. It’s sitting at 725 million users as of March 29th and as it gained those last 100 million users in 12 days, Foursquare shows no sign of slowing down.

Foursquare is a location-based social game. When you go to places in your city, you “check-in” to them through the Foursquare app or through text message. As you check-in, you gain badges and points and have the possibility of meeting new people in the form of other Foursquarers at your location. If you have the most check-ins at a certain area, you become the “mayor” of that location. This had led to a lot of interesting promotions and deals for mayors of whatever bar, grill or laundromat you become.

There have been smaller, local discounts and promotions — but today, Starbucks and Foursquare released their first nationwide discount. If you happen to be the mayor of the Starbucks you’re at, you get $1 off their new fancy-blended-sugar-drink. This is powerful move for Foursquare because of Facebook’s pending foray into the location-sharing game.

This past weekend, I have been shocked by the invasive messages sent to consumers through web mediums. I first started thinking about this because of a great article on ReadWriteWeb about Facebook deactivation: the writer explains that when he tried to get rid of his account, a message appeared informing him that his friends would be unable stay in touch if he went through with the deactivation. Pictures pop up of particular people who will “miss you”, and the writer notes that they were all people he knows relatively well. Also, he notes that Facebook will continue to send you emails after deactivation unless you “opt out” of emails.

The manipulation evident from this article is in no way singular; my friend received an email from Urban Outfitters today telling him to call his mother (i.e. “did you forget about Mother’s Day? If so, you can make up for it by buying her something from our store!”). Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all for Mother’s Day. I would just prefer that Urban Outfitters not tell me to call my mom, and that Facebook not guilt trip me for quitting their club.

-Gabrielle