I read Maureen Dowd's piece yesterday on a website that is covering local news in Pasadena California using stringers in India and I thought the whole idea was really nutty. How is it possible that people living half way across the world could know much about what's going on in my neighborhood?

As Mark Josephson, CEO of our portfolio company, Outside.in, said in his post on the topic yesterday:

But why is everyone focused on trying to make the old model of newspapers and reporting survive as opposed to innovating and embracing new forms of news, like participatory journalism or hyperlocal bloggers?

The unfortunate events in Mumbai showed that witnesses can be a great source of news.  And, you don’t have to look any further than our weekly Blogiology 101 posts to see that there is incredible coverage happening at the hyperlocal level.

These are new forms of news gathering and they cost a heck of a lot less than even offshore operations.  News organizations should embrace their community of readers to find new ways to help cover their news. Use your brand, traffic and salesforce to drive traffic and revenue to new groups of people who are already writing about their own communities.  Hey, they already live there and actually really care about it too!

I am convinced that the future of local news is on the web, not on paper, and I am equally convinced it will be written largely by the people who are making the news or experiencing the news first hand and not by traditional journalists or their replacements somewhere where cheaper labor can be found.

any case, i'm not sure what comscore is counting, but most other measurements services give youtube roughly 65 million *unique* visitors per month

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/youtube.com/?m...

by contrast, the CBS network alone amalgamates nearly 200 million viewers -- in just one week, and just in the three evening hours of prime time!

http://tv.zap2it.com/tveditorial/tve_main/1,100...

i've never seen nielsen de-duplicate viewers numbers within a network, but let's say 50% of those 200MM are duplicated. heck, lets say 75%

regardless, just one network, CBS, equals or betters youtube's entire monthly audience in just 21 hours (one week of three hour slots)

That caused me to go back to comscore get the exact numbers. YouTube's monthly worldwide audience was 344mm in October according to comscore and 55mm visited each day. I don't know what the weekly numbers are but I bet that they are about what CBS gets.

But this post is not about rebutting Steve. His comments are spot on and contributed to the discussion, which is a very good one.

What I hadn't realized when I wrote the post yesterday is how large YouTube's global audience is and how much of it is outside of the US. Here's the raw stats:

YouTube's audience maps pretty closely to the web's audience around the world. It's most popular (on a relative basis to worldwide audience) in europe and slightly less popular (on a relative basis) in asia and latin america. But it is signficant to note that YouTube's audience in asia-pacific is roughly the same as it is in the US.

Unlike the CBS network, YouTube is a global media property and it reaches every corner of this planet. While many of the videos are in english, a growing number are in other languages.

What is also true about YouTube is that the size of the audiences for individual shows can be as large as a network TV show. CSI was viewed by 18.5mm viewers last week. YouTube has five pages of videos (20 videos per page) that have been viewed more than 25mm times.

I am not arguing here that network style television (long form, story driven) is not a superior form of entertainment. I think the succcess of Hulu to date proves that is. And we know that Hulu will be a much more attractive venue for advertisers for at least a few more years.

But I am amazed at the scale and reach of YouTube and what it tells us about video entertainment delivered over the Internet. If CBS wants CSI to reach 100mm viewers instead of 20mm each week, it can do that on the Internet with worldwide distribution. And I am sure that's going to happen someday, hopefully soon.

It's a great line and an even better observation. But I think it's inevitable and it's going to happen no matter how hard they try to avoid it.

Analog and digital, it turns out, are polar opposites. Analog has physical costs which lead to scarcity driven business models. Digital has zero marginal cost (or near zero) which leads to ubiquity driven business models.

In the world that Jeff grew up in, a studio created a TV show, let's say Friends, and then a network bought the show and ran it once a week at a scheduled time where millions of people would make time, all at the same time, to watch it. That drove high CPMs and a great business model.

In the world we live in now, it's completely different. Jeff's network produced a hilarious SNL skit but did not air it last weekend. The skit featured Andy Samberg as Rahm Emanuel, and NBC has made it available via it's JV with News Corp, Hulu. I watched early last week on Hulu. And since then, I've shown it (physically shown it) to at least a dozen people at various places and times, including last night at a friend's house on his friend's laptop. Hulu doesn't show how many views this skit got, but Samberg's Lazy Sunday clip was viewed over 5mm times before NBC had it pulled from YouTube and put it up on SNL's website. That experience certainly was formative in the creation of Hulu.

The ability to watch a TV show or TV clip anytime anyplace is naturally going to lead to a lot more viewers than any individual show can get in the traditional TV viewing approach. The biggest weekly TV shows get around 20mm viewers. YouTube has over 300mm montly visitors according to comScore. Hulu is just getting started, but if it ever goes international (and I sure hope it does and soon), then it will eventually reach similar numbers of viewers.

The fact is there is so much internet inventory, particularly when you count the various social networks cropping up all over the world, that the $20 CPM may be a thing of the past. I know that some Internet inventory is sold at prices above $20 CPM, in fact some banners have even been sold on this blog at those kinds of prices. But I don't think those prices are sustainable.

The Economist has an article running this week about online advertising (where I was reminded of the Jeff Zucker quote) that suggests that online advertising will be unscathed during the downturn. The article quotes a report by eMarketer that suggests online advertising will continue to grow at good clip next year:

eMarketer, a market-research firm, predicted that online-advertising spending in America, which makes up about half the global total, will increase by 8.9% in 2009, rather than the 14.5% it had forecast in August. The firm thinks search advertising will grow by 14.9% and rich-media ads by 7.5%, whereas display ads will grow by 6.6%. In short, online advertising will continue to expand in the recession—just not as quickly as previously expected.

I hope eMarketer is right but even if they are not, this downturn will accelerate the conversion of analog dollars to digital pennies because you can buy online inventory for a fraction of the cost of analog inventory, you can target it, you can measure it, and you can even create your own media if you want. And you can do this at a scale that traditional media can never create with its scarcity driven orientation.

That's it for now. I am going hunting for a few digital pennies now.

I've been using one blackberry or another since the original pager style Blackberry that I got in 1997. I've made a few detours along the way. I've tried the iPhone twice, the Sidekick (which I really liked), a windows mobile phone (which I really hated), and the Android-based G1. But I keep coming back to Blackberry, largely for the keyboard which I am addicted to.

I didn't even think about getting a Blackberry Storm. David Pogue's comment about the Storm is exactly how I feel about it.

Hello? Isn’t the thumb keyboard the defining feature of a BlackBerry? A BlackBerry without a keyboard is like an iPod without a scroll wheel. A Prius with terrible mileage. Cracker Jack without a prize inside.

If I wanted a touch screen phone, I'd get an iPhone. I certainly don't want a touch screen Blackberry.

My Blackberry Curve recently died on me and instead of getting a Bold, I got another Curve. I think the Blackberry Curve is the perfect phone for me. Other than the lack of a decent twitter client for Blackberry, it does everything I need.

So when I saw the news today that there's going to be a new Curve coming soon, called the Blackberry 8900 (fka the Javelin), I got very excited.

It's basically my beloved Curve with a faster processor, a better screen, and a better camera. I'm getting one of these as soon as they are available on T-Mobile. Until then, my curve will do me fine.

This shows the Dow from 1924 to 1939 and the Nasdaq from 1995 to September 2008 (two months ago). It's too bad that the red line doesn't go all the way to this week because it would be even more striking. That's because the Nasdaq traded all the way down to 1300 as of last friday and is now at 1500. It's not exactly tracing the 1929-1939 Dow, but it sure is damn close.

So the obvious question is where did the Dow go from the early 1938 bottom?

Here's a chart that I found on the woodshedder blog:

From 1938 through the end of the war in 1945, the Dow was locked in a narrow trading range between 100 and 150 and it retested the 1938 lows in early 1942.

If the Nasdaq is the new Dow, and it sure seems like it is on many levels, then this would mean the Nasdaq will trade in the range of 1300 to 2000 for the next seven years and will retest last friday's lows at least once more before starting a slow but steady climb sometime around 2012.

It also means that the Nasdaq isn't going much lower from here.

Now I want to say that while history does repeat itself, it's dangerous to take too much from exercises like this. They are fun and amazing at some level. But I wouldn't bet the farm based on an analysis like this.

I much prefer to think about fundamentals. The best companies in the Nasdaq, like GOOG, AAPL, AMZN, CRM, ABDE, and others reached levels last week that strike me as big time bargains.

GOOG traded as low as $250/share on Monday. That's a market cap of $78bn and an enterprise value of $64bn. That's for a company that had operating cash flow last quarter of $2bn and certainly has the ability to earn $8bn per year of cash flow even if revenues flatten out or decline slightly. When one of the top companies in the world trades at 7.5x cash flows, that's a signal that it's time to start buying. Think of it this way. If you had the money and you could buy all of Google (I don't and you can't), you could lay out the $64bn and wait 7.5 years to get your money back and then you'd own the whole company forever after that. That's a steal in my book.

So my gut tells me we may have seen the worst of the selling in the Nasdaq for now. But it's also instructive to think about the kind of patience you'll need to have with these stocks if you buy them in here. If the crystal ball of the Dow from 1929-1945 is accurate, then at best these stocks will go up around 50% in the next seven years. That's an annual return of around 6% for the next seven years. If you are good at trading (I'm not) then of course you can do way better than that.

And of course, as I pointed out in this blog post from last week, an index is not representative of what can happen with individual stocks in it. I don't know how invidual Dow stocks did from 1938 to 1945, but I am sure there were some that did way better than up 50%. My bet is companies like Google, Apple, and Amazon will outperform the Nasdaq as a whole from here on out. They are leaders in their markets, have dominant franchises, have strong balance sheets, and positive cash flow that I believe will survive the downturn intact. That's why I've been buying them and have stepped up my purchases in the past couple weeks.

I'm battered like everyone else and have not been spared the losses that most have taken for the past year. But I am optimistic and thinking about how to make money going forward. Because as my friend Fred said to a large gathering a few weeks ago, you can't leave cash under a mattress. You have to invest capital to make money. And that's what I am doing with my stock market investments, my real estate and hedge fund investments, and most importantly, with our venture capital investments.

I saw this chart in a presentation by a leading hedge fund manager. This is a Bloomberg chart that anyone with access to a Bloomberg terminal can recreate and I apologize for the grainy quality and somewhat out of date nature of this.

This is a chart that goes back to January 1994 and charts the S&P vs the rest of the world (minus Japan). Apparently taking out Japan doesn't change this chart much but it's cleaner without it.

This shows that for seven years from 1994 to 9/11, the US outperformed the rest of the world by a lot. And from 9/11 to the end of last year, the rest of the world outperformed the US by the exact same amount. It was one big round trip. And that round trip ended in a mess.

I am not going to try to explain why this round trip ended in a global financial meltdown, but it mostly has to do with massive leverage and liquidity and we finally hit the breaking point.

You'll notice that in the past several months, the US has started to outperform again. This is probably due to positions around the world being unwound and dollars coming home (or something like that). I don't know if you can make too much of the recent time period.

But the big question is where do we go from here? As we start think about how to position ourselves collectively for the next move up (whenever that comes and it could be a long while), I think this chart is worth paying attention to.

And if you haven't read it yet, I suggest everyone read Fareed Zakaria's The Post-American World. It gives an interesting context to this whole issue. Here's my blog post that I wrote this summer after I finished it.

comScore’s forecast is that holiday online retail spending for the November – December period will be flat versus year ago, significantly lower than last year’s growth rate of 19 percent and below the retail e-commerce growth rate of 9 percent that has been observed for 2008 year-to-date.

That got me thinking. Flat year over year growth is pretty bad news for an industry that has been growing at 20% per year. But at least it's not negative. Flat is the new up 20% I guess.

But on a more serious note, I've been meaning to post some data that I am privy to by virtue of our role as board members on a bunch of privately held companies. Not all of our companies are generating revenue but quite a few are at this point and the numbers we are seeing out of them are actually pretty promising.

I am not going to cite any confidential information and I am not going to identify any companies by name in this post. But I'll give you all some anecdotal evidence that things may not be as bad as everyone thinks.

We have two companies in our portfolio that are setting record revenues every day or two. We have a company that is having it's best booking quarter ever. We have an advertising based company that is having its best ad sales season ever. We are also seeing search advertising holding up remarkably well in the face of this downturn.

The fact is that we are not really seeing any signs of major meltdown in any of our portfolio companies yet. Its important to recognize we are only a month or two into this mess and that we won't see the real impact of the downturn until we hit 2009 spending budgets.

It's also important to note that these are all small companies by any measure and they are selling new things in new ways. They are probably less economically sensitive than big established companies. It's hard to imagine companies like Cisco and IBM being as immune to the downturn as small startups.

But amidst all the doom and gloom, I want to be sure to point out that disaster hasn't struck everywhere just yet. If comScore is right that e-commerce this holiday season will be flat, that's not a total disaster either. With the best tech/online/e-commerce stocks trading at values that expect declining profits and cash flow year over year, I think it's worth noting that this could turn out differently than conventional wisdom. In fact, it always does.

Now the folks at Boxee have done something to help me out. There's a page at Boxee for friends of this blog. Please go here and enter your email address and I promise you'll get an invite within 24 hours.

Those tickers are now hotlinked to stocktwits. This gets me excited. Because someone could do so much more with this idea. We have a few companies that are trying to extract meaning out of content on the web. Adaptive Blue recognizes pages about things (books, music, film, stocks, wine, people, etc). Outside.in recognizes posts and articles about places (neighborhoods, schools, parks, etc). And Zemanta recognizes concepts in blog posts and recommends content to add to your post.

What if they and others put out similar extensions? Then twitter would get smarter. The links that people send around on twitter are one of the best things about the service. It's like a live collaborative RSS reader. But if every tweet had links in that were added semantically, then we'd really have something.

Also, I've been inundated with requests for Boxee invites and I've been sending them as fast as I can. We are going to set up a special page on Boxee to get invites from me and that should make things easier. I'll post the details as soon as we have that invite page working.

Just over a year ago, I wrote a post explaining that Techmeme was moving from highlighting the work of individual tech bloggers to the work of professionally produced tech blogs. In that post, I bemoaned the fact that I had been knocked off of the techmeme leaderboard along with most other individual tech bloggers.

Then something changed. Maybe it was me writing more for Techmeme (by reading the top stories and then blogging about them and linking to them). Or maybe Gabe changed the algorithm. But in any case, by this summer, the AVC blog had risen to #20 on the Techmeme leaderboard.

I don't actually care about being on the leaderboard itself but I care a lot about being part of the conversation at Techmeme. Over 300,000 monthly readers visit techmeme to participate in the conversation according to Compete:

These are 300,000 of the kinds of people I'd like to be in the conversation with every day. So I want the posts I write here at AVC to show up on Techmeme. It's important to me.

But in the past couple months, something interesting has happened. As I've started writing more about politics and stocks and the financial markets, my readership has started growing again. For the past three or four years, this blog has been stuck at about 150,000 monthly readers (blog and feed). Last month, it was closer to 200,000. And this month, it appears to be headed even higher.

Yet, as the audience for this blog grows, the amount of traffic coming from Techmeme has declined. Here is the google analytics traffic sources log from August, which shows how important techmeme was this summer:

And here is the data for the past 30 days.

The biggest drivers are direct and google, but within the services that cater specifically to the tech audience I want to reach and be part of (techmeme, hacker news, twitter, friendfeed), there has been a noticeable move up by hacker news (news.ycombinator.com) and twitter and a noticeable move down by techmeme.

The dropoff from techmeme makes sense because posts I've written on this blog have been there a lot less recently. But I think the move up on hacker news and twitter are also worth noting. If the same people who were finding my posts on techmeme can now find them on twitter or hacker news, then I can still participate in the conversation with them.

I think what's happening is techmeme is catering more and more to the professionally produced tech blogs. Whatever Gabe's algorithm does, it seems to point mostly to TechCrunch, VentureBeat, NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Gizmodo and that ilk. Nothing wrong with that. But as of this morning, the only individual bloggers I see on the leaderboard are Nick Carr, Mark Cuban, and my good friend Tom Evslin.

Hacker News is peer produced, like Digg. But the community there is very startup ecosystem focused and it's a great source of readership for this blog. There is no leaderboard for Hacker News (that I know of) but I get the sense that the links on hacker news are more varied and less predictable than Techmeme.

And Twitter. Well what can I say about Twitter? Tim O'Reilly recently tweeted that:

Twitter is my main source of news. Never use RSS reader any more                       

I've never used an RSS reader. I've used services like Techmeme and Hacker News to surface interesting posts for me. I still do. I visit each of them about five or six times a day. They are my RSS readers for tech news. Twitter does the same thing for me, but I also get stock news, political news, family/friend news, and some humor too. It's like reading a custom built newspaper.

But enough about Twitter. This post is about Techmeme. I've been obsessed with Techmeme for the past couple years. And I think that obsession is coming to an end. I still plan to visit it as much every day. But I think I'll stop jonesing for my posts to get picked up there. The conversation is happening all over the place anyway and I don't think any one service will ever be able to host it all anyway.

At the end of 1999 the Dow was around 11,400. Today the Dow is at 8,400, which means the index has fallen some 26%, a decline of almost 3% per year. With just one year left in this decade - even if 2009 is a humdinger - it is increasingly likely that first 10 years of this century will be one big washout for investors. A lost decade.

I've been thinking about that since I read it midweek. A lost decade in which if you owned the Dow, you'd have lost money on stocks.

But there's a problem with indexes and that is the average doesn't really tell you that much. So I want to look at the Dow stocks and figure out which ones were big winners this decade and which ones were big losers.

Here's a list of the 30 current Dow stocks. Let's take a look at six of them;

3M
Citigroup
GM
Intel
J&J
United Technologies

3M is up a bit in the "lost decade" about $10 or a 20% gain in almost 9 years. Nothing to get too excited about but not a loser.

As most everyone knows, Citigroup is fighting for its life right now and is down at least 90% since the start of the "lost decade". But for most of this decade, it was flat. The drop has all come in the past year.

GM's chart looks quite a bit like Citigroups and it should. It is also fighting for its survival. One difference though is that GM has been in slow decline all decade and then dropped off a cliff this year.

Intel's chart is interesting. It's a loser this decade as well, down almost 80% in the decade. But all of its decline happened in the first three years of the decade reflecting the technology meltdown in the first part of this decade. Since then, it's bounced around a lot but isn't down much more.

Finally a real winner. Johnson and Johnson has made a slow and steady climb all decade, and is up (even with the recent market meltdown) by about 33% over the past nine years. Even so, that's less than 4% per year.

I'm glad to see we found a good chart before this exercise was over. United Technologies is down 40% in the past year but is up around 60% for the decade so far.

So what this shows is the Dow is a mixed bag. A few disasters (GM, Citigroup, Intel), a bunch of so so stocks (like 3M) and a some winners (like J&J and United Technologies).

I looked at a few other stocks as I was doing those charts and there's a lot of yuck in the Dow. IBM, HP, and Wal-Mart are all down for the decade. It's not really clear to me how the Dow has enough positive energy to withstand the blowups in AIG, Citigroup, and GM. As a group, the Dow looks pretty tired to me.

The point I was trying to make with this post is that the decade we are in has not been lost for everyone. We may have to go outside the Dow to find the best examples. Lets look at two of my favorite stocks; Apple and Google.

Apple has taken two big hits this decade (the tech meltdown in the early part and the recent market bust) and is still up 3.5x in nine years. The run Apple has had from early 2003 to late 2007 is one of the most impressive runs I've seen.

Apple's run mirrors Google's run. If you had only owned two stocks this decade, Apple and Google, you'd be a happy investor. Google stock has completely blown up in the past year (down 60%) but it is still up 2.5x from its IPO in mid 2004.

When I think about what's really going on in this "lost decade" it occurs to me that we are finally witnessing the impact of the end of the industrial era and the emergence of the information era. That's not to say every "information stock" has done well. Intel and Microsoft have been a disaster. IBM and HP are down for the decade to date. But we also have to realize that the late 90s drove all information stocks up to crazy levels in anticipation of exactly this shift taking place. The market got it right, but as usual it overshot.

If we go back to Andy's post which got this whole exercise started, he made the following point about what happens after the "lost decade":

at some point stock price returns will revert back up to the mean. In fact, to revert to the mean, stocks will at some point have to exceed the mean, in other words go up more than 8%. I know it could be years off, but you see my logic. It's just math.

And if that does happen, I don't think it will happen in tired stocks like many in the Dow. It will be stocks like Apple, Google, and companies we don't even know about yet that will lead us back out of this downturn. And I bet there will be a bunch of companies from what we used to call the "emerging markets" that will lead us out of this mess. I think I'll call them the "emerged markets" from now on.

I am an optimist, I guess you have to be one to be in my line of work. Even in the midst of the worst downturn in my lifetime, I am thinking about what's next, how we are going to make money in the next run. Because as Andy points out, there will be one and we should be using this downturn to position ourselves well for when it comes.

Boxee, which is now a Union Square Ventures portfolio company, surveyed its users this past week and got over 1100 completed surveys in less than 12 hours. They wanted to know what content people wanted most in Boxee. The results are quite interesting;

Televison Channels:
HBO
Discovery
ABC

Subscription Movies:
Netflix

Video Services:
Joost

Live Video:
Ustream

Streaming Audio:
Pandora

Photo Sharing:
Facebook
.Mac

Keep in mind that Boxee already supports CBS, Hulu, YouTube, Last.fm, Flickr, Picasa and a number of other web services.

Pretty interesting data. Thanks for sharing it Avner.

Anyway, when you listen to Jackson's top 10 Clash songs on MySpace (and you should absolutely do that!), you will notice that the stream stops every four songs until you go back to the myspace music player and click on an ad. That's what I call "hard interruption" and it's very annoying.

While nobody is fan of "interrupt marketing" as Seth Godin calls it, it's particularly annoying if it completely interrupts your experience. I would so much rather see MySpace Music insert a 15 or 30 second spot every four songs that I can listen to without being totally interrupted. I call that "soft interruption" and it's something that I think the internet radio industry needs to start doing more of.

We have a portfolio company called Targetspot whose business is the insertion of audio advertising into internet streams. They do this for dozens of internet radio broadcasters and they can do it for MySpace Music.

I'd urge MySpace music to think about going with the soft interruption mode. I think it's a much better user experience.

In the past week, I've had two different discussions with readers of this blog who wanted in on one of our deals. One reader wanted to invest in Twitter, the other in Boxee. I told them both it wasn't possible. There are all sorts of reasons why it's not possible, but let's start with the qualified investor rule. To invest in the sorts of deals we invest in, you need to be a "qualified investor" in the eyes of the SEC.

It makes total sense that readers of this blog would want to invest in some of our portfolio companies. We've invested in many of our portfolio companies after we became hooked on their products. I am a fan first, an investor second. Not so many people understand our investments when we make them. Certainly not many "qualified investors" do. But the readers of this blog do. That's because you are often users well before I am.

This is a problem. We have a cash crunch emerging. We have the public markets offering quality companies like $GOOG, $AAPL, and $AMZN at less than 10x current cash flow. I realize future cash flow might be less than current cash flow, but still we have public markets investors who don't want to buy any kind of equities. I suspect high quality debt that trades at 60% of face value is more enticing right now.

And yet, there are new technologies and business models and services that are emerging that will be the next Googles, Apples, and Amazons and there is no way to invest in them. Our friend Stuart Ellman at RRE Ventures wrote a great post about this last month in which he said:

RRE has a number of companies that had zero revenues when we invested and which are now doing $100 million or more in revenues and growing very quickly.  These companies have achieved what they needed to achieve, become market leaders, yet they cannot go public or exit under the assumptions that employees or founders assumed when they began.

The only way for the small investor to get a piece of the companies we are investing in is for them to go public, but that's not going to happen any time soon, maybe never again. That's how bearish I am about the public markets right now.

I've written extensively that we need a secondary market for privately held shares of venture backed companies that want or need to stay private. This is already happening with Facebook shares and it's going to happen with the shares of other privately held companies going forward. The public markets have failed to solve this problem so it's going to get solved in some other way.

We also really ought to find a way for small investors who know what they are doing to place a small bet on a company they really like. And companies like Boxee and Twitter could really benefit from that too.

This is the year that the banking and brokerage industries have completely let us down. They have failed to invest our money wisely. And the regulators who set the rules, the very regulators who make sure that no reader of this blog can invest in one of our deals, have allowed that to happen.

I am pining for a new regulatory regime. One that values small over big, individual decision making over institutional decision making, and innovation and the future over protecting the past. And a test for that new regulatory regime is whether the people who are participating in the creation of a new technology and industry can actually profit from it without having to do what I do.

Now it turns out there's a whole conference dedicated to discussing this issue. It's called Add-on Con and it takes place on December 11th in Mountain View at the Computer History Museum.

There's a great list of speakers including quite a few of my friends and colleagues in the venture business. And, of course, there will be execs from Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla there to talk about the future of the browser as a platform.

The cost is $150, but readers of this blog can get in for $100 with the discount code "fred".

If you are building a business on the browser, I think it's well worth the time and minimal cost to attend.

Slideshare is doing a contest to pick the top credit contest slideshow. There are a bunch of good ones. Here's my two favorites.

Take yesterday for example. I wrote a longish blog post on the Union Square Ventures blog about our most recent investment, Boxee. That post got picked up on techmeme where it ran for most of the day yesterday. I don't yet know how many people visited that post yesterday but I am sure it was thousands of readers

About 75 of them left comments on the post asking for an invite to Boxee's invite only alpha. I got a bunch more invite requests on this blog where I had linked to the USV blog post yesterday.

So this morning I spent an hour, between 5am and 6am, going through all of those comments, harvesting the email addresses from disqus, and inviting everyone to try out the boxee alpha.

That's about 100 trials. Not that many when you think about it in the context of the 50,000 registered users of boxee.

But the time and energy I've put into this blog for the past five years has built a unique and very sophisticated audience. You are connectors and hubs of influence.

I know that one person out of the 100 I invited this morning will be incredibly impactful for boxee. It could be five people, it could be ten. Who knows?

But in the world of social media, word of mouth and word of link marketing, it is connectors and influencers like all of you that make the difference.

And that's one of the main reasons I keep writing, commenting, discussing, and participating in blogs, tumblr, twitter, disqus, and the social media world at large.

Its about the "realest" work I do.

But for those who aren't going to do that and still want to know what Boxee is, I call it the "firefox of the media center software sector". That's my view anyway. Here's a ~ 2 min video that shows Boxee in action.

quick intro to boxee from boxee on Vimeo.

Andy calculates that a developer who wants to make a living off an iPhone app (at $40k/year) must sell 196 apps per day to do that. He also calculates that at $9.99 per app, you'd need to sell 16 apps per day to do that.

But Andy's best point is this one:

Competing with another application solely on price is a sure fire way to go out of business. Your product should have a selling point other than the price, whether it be more features, better usability, a unique approach to the problem or all of the above.

There will always be students and hobbyists in the market who can sell a competing product for way less than you. They don’t need to make a living off the app, so they’re not trying to. This happens all the time in the Mac market. If you charge enough for your app that you can make living off it, then you can spend all your time improving it. With that extra time you should be able to make a superior product to your lower priced competitors.

People are willing to pay more for superior products. Unfortunately, with the App Store developers haven’t given them the opportunity to do so.

I personally think that the best approach is to have a free and paid app with the free app being enough of a teaser that it gets the loyal users to pay up for the premium product. That is, by the way, the strategy our portfolio company Zynga is taking with their Live Poker app.

A developer would be much better off with 196 apps per day being downloaded with 180 of them free and 16 of them paid than 196 of them at $0.99 because there is no "decision cost" on the free apps.

Josh Kopelman wrote a great post on this a while back called The Penny Gap. Getting someone to pay anything is hard. Once they've made the decision to pay, the difference between $0.99 and $9.99 isn't as big as many think it is.

But the bottom line in all of this is you have to build something really useful to get someone to pay for it. Free apps outsell paid apps in the iTunes store by something like a 10 to 1 ratio. And Andy is right, make something unique and useful and charge real money for it and you'll have a better chance at making a living that way. It's good advice.