When I asked Quora which tech startups should I interview that I hadn’t interviewed yet, AllMyApps was at the top of the list.
I was pretty rude to them at LeWeb and couldn’t get excited about their new company and new product (usually I get excited about anything new, but thought I owed them an explanation of why I wasn’t excited about this one). First my excuses: Why? Well, I was tired/jetlagged. I had just sat through something like 15 pitches at LeWeb. More about those later. No excuses though, what really happened is my biases showed through.
What are those biases? That I look at, and care about, early adopter behavior. I like shiny new objects. I told the team that I look for things on the list of tech battlefronts (like Android vs. iPhone vs everyone else, or which slates can beat iPad, or which mobile apps are doing best, etc).
So, a new mobile app wins out over one that runs on Windows, I told them. Why? Microsoft Windows just isn’t on a tech battlefront anymore, according to my biases.
Why? And where did those biases come from?
Well, I sit next to people on planes or cafes and I watch their behavior and often I even get brave enough to ask what they have loaded on their machines. I’ve sat next to dozens of people running Windows. In the past year I have yet to find one that’s loaded anything new in the past six months. Compare that to someone who has a new Android or iPhone or a new iPad. Those folks load dozens of apps and are proud of them.
That behavior leads me to some biases. I note that the same biases exist in the tech press overall and I explained to them why their company won’t be as loved as say, Flipboard or Instagram.
Heck, the little PR they got, in Lifehacker, shows how little reaction they got from the marketplace. The first comment in that article? Meh.
Read CrunchBase about AllMyApps and you can see they got a million euros in funding, which is pretty awesome. Investors are still going after the Windows market because it’s so big.
But I just couldn’t pull myself to really care about it. Neither can the rest of the tech press. Compare, for instance, to the press that got written about the Google Chrome App Store.
It seems that not only I have a bias against Windows apps, so does the rest of the tech press. I’m sorry about being direct with the team at LeWeb about this, but thought I owed them a longer explanation of why I wasn’t excited about their company and product the way I usually am about new stuff.
Anyway, onto what else happened at LeWeb last week. First, there’s a great PearlTrees curated widget that points to the good stuff. I recorded a video with that team in their Paris headquarters last week where I get a demo of what they are doing for LeWeb.
Over on my CinchCast page I’ve put up 16 interviews I did at LeWeb. Including some exclusive news, like about Appsfire’s new Android and iPhone/iPad app that helps you discover new apps, and Evernote’s CEO telling me that Android is growing about 10x faster than iPhone usage is.
By the way, all the sessions from LeWeb are now up on YouTube. It’s really great production quality stuff and greatly appreciated when conferences do this (it helps me get more value out of the event because I don’t feel like I have to listen to every talk, which lets me network out in the hall and do things like my CinchCasts).
My two on-stage interviews are now up too. First, the one where I grill MySpace’s CEO. Second, where I ask Mozilla’s chairperson if she can save the web again.
It’s just one of the reasons why I say that LeWeb is the best web conference in the world.
Regarding my roundup, I still have some videos to process, and I’m watching the sessions I missed. Plus, the coolest startups I saw there embargoed me, so you’ll see those companies early next year. LeWeb really is a great conference with 3,000 attendees and one that’ll be even better next year (Loic told me he turned down three offers to sell, and instead will add an extra day in an attempt to make it even more influential).
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