Reporters' Roundtable Podcast

Presenting Rafe Needleman's Outie Awards

Rafe Needleman — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 06:00:00 PDT

Reporter's Roundtable Ep. 128: Rafe's Outie Awards

It has been a fantastic run, but it's time for me to try something new, so I'm leaving CNET. This is my last post for this great company, at least in my current role as Editor at Large.

Instead of boring everyone with the usual departure platitudes or a history of illustrious achievements, I thought I'd give out a few awards to companies, products, and ideas that I covered for CNET, ideas that have stayed with me long after I wrote about them. So here they are: The Rafe Needleman I'm Outta Here Awards. The Outies. There are 10, of course.

If you're wondering where to find me next: Evernote. I'm going to be a developer advocate for this great company, which, if you've followed my work over the years, you know I really believe in. I'll also be writing -- with editorial independence, they tell me -- about new tech concepts that I see, best ideas for entrepreneurs (from my new vantage point), and productivity. Read more on the Evernote blog. You can e-mail me at rafe@evernote.com, and follow me on Twitter, or Facebook, or Google+.

And now, for the first -- and hopefully last -- time ever...

1. Best customer experience: Apple
I am not a fanboy. I am not a fanboy. I am not a fanboy. Maybe if I say it enough you'll eventually believe it. But even when the Apple products I buy fail me completely (which is often), I still love the company, because its customer service and repair experience is so painless. That's right: Apple hardware is horribly unreliable. And I keep buying it. Good job, Apple. I hate myself.

Read: From Dell Hell to Genius Bar

2. Best online retailer: Everyone's refurb and outlet store
Unless you like paying for packaging, you don't have to pay full price for many tech hardware items: laptops, TVs, DVRs, you name it. Buy refurbished units. Usually they're just as good as brand-new items, look just as shiny, and come with the same warranty. They might be half a spec out of date. It's worth it.

Read: How to save money with refurb laptops

3. Worst pervasive technology: 3D TV
These are my awards, so I get to throw darts as I want, and 3D is one bubble I'd like to pop. Yes, it's amazing. For most of you. But for some of us, all 3D TV and movies do is give us headaches.

On the plus side, the non-3D showings of 3D movies are hardly ever crowded.

Read: TV industry turns blind eye to non-3D viewers

4. Best new idea for e-mail: Self-deleting messages
Unread e-mails are barnacles. They stick around in your in-box, just clogging things up, taking up space, and possibly slowing things down. And many e-mails, especially commercial messages from companies you do business with, are pointless after a short period of time. So why do they stick around? They don't have to.

Read: E-mail innovator pitches self-deleting e-mails

5. The simplicity award: Trello
Simple wins. Sure, there are apps and services and gadgets that do everything. But we are all busy. We are overloaded with multiple ways to do things, options to consider, and other cognitive noise. That's why the most successful products these days strip down the cruft and focus on the elemental experience. I can think of many examples: Sparrow (recently acquired by Google); Path; Instagram; Groupiter (my review). But one Web app -- still relatively unknown -- sticks with me as having a brilliantly simple and fluid interface for what is usually a cluttered and unpleasant thing to deal with: Task management. The app is Trello. I recommend it.

Read: The best lesson from Disrupt: Simplify

6. Most anticipated product (by me): Space Monkey
Sometimes, bizarrely, complicated solutions to simple problems do have a certain elegance. Especially when this complexity leads to increased robustness. Want an example? Evolution.

My favorite example of a complex solution to a simple problem is Space Monkey, an upcoming product that will offer cloud storage with more speed than Dropbox, dramatically better prices, and potentially more data safety -- or so the founders say. How? By creating a mesh of storage access points, with some of the points being hardware that resides on customers' local networks. Intellectually, I love the idea behind this product. I am eager to see if it really delivers.

Read: Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house

See also another wacky storage play: Bitcasa

7. Best thing the government has done for startups: The JOBS Act
For the most part, the U.S. government has kept its hands off the Internet and out of technology. The bigger the tech economy gets, though, the more intervention we get. And sometimes it's actually in the right direction. The JOBS Act makes it easier for startups to raise money from the general public ("crowdfunding"), not just from rich tech investors. I covered the story in some depth and am aware of the imperfections in its new laws, but overall it's a very positive step that could help small teams with creative ideas get them off the ground.

Read: The JOBS Act: 5 things to look forward to

What I'm waiting for now: A legal revolution that really makes sense of patents. Not holding my breath on that one.

8. Government overreach award: California's smartphone sales tax
With tax rules like this, how is it possible California is in the revenue hole it is? Here's what I'm talking about: When you buy a smartphone in this state, even if it's subsidized by the mobile carrier down to zero dollars, you have to pay sales tax for the full retail sales price, a price you cannot negotiate for or control. I had some tax wonks try to explain to me why that's fair, but it still sounds like state-sponsored robbery.

Read: Taxation without negotiation for Calif. smartphone buyers

9. Best bargain app: Pretty much all of them
You have to be insane to pay $50 for a simple utility for OS X, right? The whole operating system costs less than that. But Sharemouse, which just lets you share a keyboard and a mouse between two side-by-side computers, is actually not overpriced, even at $24.95 per computer (and you need at least two licenses for it to work). True, I still won't buy it, but the economics of software are unique. What I was forced to learn after an argument with the creator of this little utility is that software pricing is perfectly elastic: Charge more, you sell fewer licenses. Charge less, sell more. Total sales revenue: Constant. That's just cool.

However, sell more units and you have to support more users, and that gets expensive. Those $1.99 apps we like can kill their publishers. It can actually make better business sense to price some consumers out of your product, even if, as it is with software, the cost of distributing the app to each new user is nearly zero. The sad conclusion, for everyone except for economics professors? Read the story I wrote.

Read: We're not paying enough for apps

Finally,
10. The boy was he wrong award: Rafe Needleman
Right before the iPad came out, in 2009, I wrote what I thought was a logical and realistic treatise on why tablets wouldn't sell. Oops. To make matters worse, I predicted that the CrunchPad (later called the JooJoo, and after that just "the lovely glass serving tray in Rafe's office") could actually sell better than an Apple tablet if it undercut Apple's price by a few hundred bucks.

I am not proud of this prediction. I just hope the arguments I put forth were thought-provoking and entertaining.

I'm also delighted I was wrong, because the iPad is a staggeringly great product. For me, this tablet has changed my relationship with media and games, much for the better. It's also leading yet another revolution in technology design. It's great to watch. And write about. But smartly, next time.

Read: Why consumers won't buy tablets

So thanks, CNET, for a fun ride. Thanks, readers, for reading. It's all a writer wants. For now, I'm outta here.

Originally posted at News - Internet & Media

Flying drones getting smaller, smarter, cheaper, and scarier

Rafe Needleman — Sat, 14 Jul 2012 06:00:00 PDT

Droning on about drones. Left to right: Rafe Needleman, Daniel Suarez, and Chris Anderson.

(Credit: Stephen Beacham/CNET)

A little more than a year ago, we did a Roundtable episode on aerial drones and UAVs. The discussion mostly focused on how remote-controlled and robotic vehicles were getting bigger, more capable, and more scary. Since then, a funny thing happened. The drone revolution downsized. Today we're talking about cheap and small drones. Today, perhaps, a collection of a hundred $1,000 drones can be just as capable -- and just as scary -- as a $100,000 drone.

Friend or foe?

(Credit: DIY Drones)

It's not all Skynet doom-and-gloom, though. Small robotic flying vehicles can be used to save lives, keep repressive governments in check, do environmental monitoring, and perform business functions like surveying land.

There is both a hopeful upside and a terrifying dark side to the rapid advances in small, cheap drones. We covered both on this episode of Reporters' Roundtable. Our guests: Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine and the founder of the DIY Drones community site (and its retail arm, 3D Robotics); and Daniel Suarez, author or the new geek thriller, Kill Decision, which features swarms of drones gone bad. Very bad.

As Anderson points out, many of the toy remote-controlled airplanes out there are "just one box away from becoming drones." Not coincidentally, Anderson's company, 3D Robotics, makes such a box, the ArduPilot Mega. It's a $200 controller that, "allows the user to turn any fixed, rotary wing or multirotor vehicle into a fully autonomous vehicle."

It's the ubiquity of this technology that was one of the inspirations for Suarez's book, which is in part about, "the miniaturization of war," as he says. Our own military is now, in fact, developing an air-fired missile specifically to launch from drones.

There's only a slight overlap between the hobbyist drone and the war drone, Suarez says.

Reporters' Roundtable Ep. 127: Attack of the drones

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Anderson, who's part of a community of drone builders, maintains that the aircraft are being used in plenty of nonaggressive applications, such as filming (like in car commercials) and environmental monitoring. These products give people, "anytime, anywhere access to the sky," he says.

There are very few drones over our cities. Commercial interests are not allowed to fly overhead. Nor most local governments. Hobbyists can, if they keep their drones under 400 feet. And the skies will eventually open up to everyone. "Ironically, my 9-year-old can fly drones, but the police department can't." Anderson says.

The problem is that our airspace is governed by a policy called sense-and-avoid. Flying vehicle control systems -- be they people or computers -- are ultimately responsible for avoiding other vehicles. And today's drones, as a rule, have no facility to make them aware of other aircraft.

Anderson says there is still a long way to go when it comes to autonomous vehicles. The videos we've seen of quadcopters flying through tiny slits or playing instruments are taken in highly controlled environments, he says.

Out in the real world, GPS and wind leads to much less precise positioning.

Suarez, in his book -- which is fiction, mind you -- added a new tool to the drone developer: Stigmergy, or a drone's capability to lay down a marker that other drones can read as a reinforcer to their behavior (in the case of the book Kill Decision, that's generally the order to attack someone). He's aware that he took poetic license, but he does believe this idea could be "just over the horizon." He also posits that autonomous drones can be built so cheaply and with so many off-the-shelf components that they can be built as untrackable, leading to "anonymous conflict."

The fact that a drone can serve a person, or group, without ratting them out has huge benefits, though. Suarez points out that while it is legal to videotape the police as they perform their jobs, citizens still do get harassed and arrested when they do so. When the videotaping is being done by an autonomous bot with no obvious controller, there's no one to arrest.

Anderson says we can credit the smartphone for the rise of drones. He believes a smartphone -- with its numerous sensors, communications links, and its computing power -- is essentially everything you need for a drone minus the propulsion system. "By coattailing on the smartphone industry," he says, the control system for a drone will become, "ultimately disposable."

"It's going to get pretty weird," Suarez says, as civil groups begin to have conflicts over drones. He says the police forces could begin to try to jam drones; less-restrained groups might simply shoot them out of the sky. Anderson also points out that popping "a flying lawnmower with spinning blades over the head of a crowd, possibly operated by amateurs, is a really bad idea."

Anderson says it's unlikely that we will soon have "Occupy Wall Street with their air force, and the police with theirs, drones battling in the skies... that would be kind of dangerous."

Watch the video interview with Anderson and Suarez for full details on all these topics.

Unbreakable: Mesh networks are in your smartphone's future

Rafe Needleman — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 05:00:00 PDT

It's not that we're running out of mobile bandwidth. It's just that it's poorly distributed.

If you're in your home next to a Wi-Fi router, you might have a clean signal and access to a 12-megabit connection. Meanwhile, someone outside your door could have a smartphone that's struggling to hold onto a slow connection to a cellular tower a mile away. But mesh networking might make things better for everyone.

Mesh networks let devices share their connections with other users. If one user has a clean network connection and another nearby user does not, the second user can piggyback on the first's, automatically. If there's a collection of many people, their machines can all cooperate to make connections -- to each other and to the global Internet. In advanced mesh networks, connections and data can hop among devices, creating ad hoc bucket-brigade paths for communication.

The concept of mesh networking is not new. Many military systems rely on mesh networking, since forces in the field cannot rely on communications infrastructures. Utilities also use mesh networks for collecting data from equipment, like smart meters.

On this Reporters' Roundtable, I interview two innovators in mesh networking. They're both trying to bring this liberating (they say) and bandwidth-saving (ditto) technology to the masses.

Reporters' Roundtable Ep. 126: Mesh Networks

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Micha Benoliel's company, Open Garden, makes a mesh networking utility for Android smartphones and for Windows and Mac laptops (support for iOS is coming). It's a free app that turns your device into a mobile hot spot. No matter how you're connected to the Net (Wi-Fi or cellular), it makes that connection shareable (over Bluetooth) to other Open Garden users. Likewise, if you're running the product but don't have a connection to the Net, and you're near a user who does, this service seamlessly gets you online.

Benoliel says that, for the most part, carriers and ISPs welcome technologies that improve bandwidth for customers and that also lower power requirements (connecting to a nearby hot spot over Bluetooth takes a lot less power than linking to a cell tower). "The only way to improve the wireless networks is to increase the density of microcells or hot spots. I think carriers really understand that," he says. His pitch: "We turn every device into a hot spot... and we improve the network itself."

Sri Srikrishna was the founding CTO of the mesh networking company Tropos (recently acquired by ABB), and is now working on bringing mesh technologies to populations where today's standard wireless networking technologies are insufficient, or are blocked. See his paper, "SocialMesh: Can Networks of Meshed Smartphones Ensure Public Access to Twitter During an Attack?"

Srikrisha says it's time to do two things for people who don't have reliable means to connect to the global net. First of all, we can make better, more frequency-agile radios. Second: Mesh them together.

Hooking users together through mesh networks can also democratize communications and make them, he believes, more robust in the face of repressive regimes that might want to shut down the capability to reach the outside world. With a mesh network, a very small number of users who happen to have a connection can share that with other users who don't. "If you have a large number of these devices, no government will be able to stop it," he says.

Srikrishna and Benoliel both claim that the global growth of smartphones -- all are handheld computers easily capable of supporting mesh networking stacks -- should lead to a global infrastructure shift, in which these handsets become a bigger part of the infrastructure itself, not just clients on it.

"Can you build a network that's indestructible?" asks Srikrishna. He says it's worth doing. "A lot of the problems in the world can be solved if you can have UStream everywhere in the world, without being blocked."

Watch the full, geeky discussion in the video here.

Next on Roundtable: Unjammable networks and aerial drones

Rafe Needleman — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 11:04:29 PDT

Don't miss Wired editor Chris Anderson, geek-thriller author Daniel Suarez, and experts in emerging mesh technologies on these upcoming shows.

Google I/O dissected on Reporters' Roundtable

Rafe Needleman — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 14:29:33 PDT

We're recording this Roundtable on the final day of the Google developers conference, Google I/O. From my perspective as a jaded and grumpy tech journalist, it has been a pretty cool conference. Google launched its own 7-inch Android tablet, a new living room entertainment streaming appliance called the Q, Chrome for Apple's iOS, a competitor to Evite called Google+ Events... and that's just the shipping products. We also saw wing-suit skydivers wearing Google glasses jump out of an airship hovering over Mosone Center and glide to a landing on the convention center roof.

So there's a lot to talk about, and I've got two great guests to run down the important topics that came out of the Google I/O conference:

In the studio: Stephen Shankland, CNET News senior writer and alpha geek.
Via Skype: Esther Dyson. Dyson is an investor in Internet startups in the U.S. and elsewhere, on the board of Airship Ventures (the company that took the Google wing-suit jumpers up), and former chair of the Electronic Fronteir Foundation and of ICANN.

Reporter's Roundtable Ep. 125: Google I/O dissected on Reporters' Roundtable

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Show notes

[0:00] Topic and guests introduced

[2:15] What did Google accomplish at Google I/O?

[5:00] How important are Google's hardware products?

[7:45] Do these new products mean Google is becoming a hardware company?

[9:00] Google glasses: What will this project look like in a few years?

[11:15] Aren't these glasses going to be incredibly disruptive, socially?

[15:00] How does Google move forward in a world where mobile devices blow up the traditional search and advertising models?

[17:30] Why the autonomous car matters so much to Google

[19:20] Is the mobile handset a transitional technology?

[21:00] Google as media powerhouse: How well can it compete with Amazon and Apple?

[23:30] The social sphere: Does Google get social networking, and the way people really want to interact with each other?

[29:00] Google and Apple: Frenemies or what?

[32:00] Esther on Airship Ventures

[34:30] Wrap-up

Should you buy Facebook stock? Roundtable panelists discuss

Rafe Needleman — Fri, 18 May 2012 15:21:58 PDT

As Facebook was trading as a public company for the first time today, we assembled a group of tech and finance experts to talk about the new stock. Is it worth buying? What will it do for technology overall? Can Facebook compete on mobile? Our panelists to debate these and related topics:

Jill Schlesinger from CBS MoneyWatch.com. Jill can help us sort out the pros and cons for investors interested in buying into this mega IPO.
Andy Rachleff, CEO of Wealthfront, an Internet-era investment advice service. Andy's a venture capitalist at Benchmark Capital. He also teaches entrepreneurship at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He wrote about Facebook's IPO on CNET News in February.
Tom Merritt, host of Tech News Today on the TWiT network. Tom takes the pulse of the tech world every day on his show.
Paul Sloan, the main guy covering the Facebook IPO at CNET News.

Facebook IPO

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Show notes

[0:15] Intro video

[1:10] Guests introduced.

[2:15] The Facebook stock weather report. First hint of bankers' panic.

[3:20] Who's making money on this stock today?

[4:00] What does it mean for retail investors when a stock rises on the first day?

[4:30] How do Internet stocks generally do right after IPO?

[5:45] Why is the Facebook IPO such a benchmark deal?

[6:45] What's wrong with a stock that doesn't pop up when it goes public?

[9:00] Andy explains why stock pops are valuable marketing events.

[10:00] How hands-on is CEO Mark Zuckerberg in dealing with financial minutiae?

[11:30] How will Facebook change, now that it's public?

[12:40] Why did Zynga stock crash when Facebook opened?

[13:45] How do you manage newly rich employees at a company like Facebook?

[17:30] And now we're going to see a lot of Facebook money funneled into new tech startups, right?

[19:30] How will Facebook tackle the mobile imperative?

[20:45] How about global growth? Are all users actually consumers?

[22:00] Andy discusses the power of Facebook's log-in system, Facebook Connect.

[23:00] Finally: How can Facebook improve its advertising business?

[23:45] Is Facebook a truly disruptive business?

[24:30] Jill's stock advice vis-a-vis Facebook: Chill out.

[25:30] Wrapping up: the panelists pitch their day jobs.

Live: Reporters' Roundtable on Facebook IPO

Rafe Needleman — Fri, 18 May 2012 09:15:00 PDT

It's happened. Facebook is a public company. Should you invest in this massive offering? Join us live at 9:30 a.m. Pacific/12:30 p.m. Eastern to talk about the IPO and what it means for you. And also how it might change the economics of technology forever.

We have great people to talk about this IPO:

Jill Schlesinger from CBS MoneyWatch.com. Jill can help us sort out the pros and cons for investors interested in buying into this mega IPO.
Andy Rachleff, CEO of Wealthfront, an Internet-era investment advice service. Andy's a venture capitalist at Benchmark Capital. He also teaches entrepreneurship at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He wrote about Facebook's IPO on CNET News in February.
Tom Merritt, host of Tech News Today on the TWiT network. Tom takes the pulse of the tech world every day on his show.
Also joining us between writing stories tomorrow: Paul Sloan, the main guy covering the Facebook IPO at CNET News.

If you've got questions about these topics, please send them along. We'll be taking questions through these channels:

E-mail. Use Roundtable@cnet.com
Twitter: Put my Twitter ID, @rafe, plus the tag #FBipo in a tweet.
And of course, Facebook: Put a comment in the item about the show on the CNET page.

Can't get enough on Facebook? See all our coverage of the Facebook IPO, and join the all-day-long live blog tracking Facebook's first day as a public company.

It's Facebook IPO on Reporters' Roundtable, live on Friday

Rafe Needleman — Thu, 17 May 2012 11:56:34 PDT

Tomorrow at 9:30 a.m. Pacific (12:30 p.m. Eastern), I'll be hosting a special live episode of Reporters' Roundtable with three great guests, to discuss and debate the Facebook IPO.

Joining me tomorrow are:

Jill Schlesinger from CBS MoneyWatch.com. Jill can help us sort out the pros and cons for investors interested in buying into this mega IPO.
Andy Rachleff, CEO of Wealthfront, an Internet-era investment advice service. Andy's a venture capitalist at Benchmark Capital. He also teaches entrepreneurship at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He wrote about Facebook's IPO on CNET News in February.
Tom Merritt, host of Tech News Today on the TWiT network. Tom takes the pulse of the tech world every day on his show.
Also joining us between writing stories tomorrow: Paul Sloan, the main guy covering the Facebook IPO at CNET News.

With this great group, we'll be discussing the IPO performance as it unfolds, and talking about what the IPO means for ordinary schmoes who want in on the action, as well as what it will do to or for technology startups. Plus: What's the next mega IPO?

If you've got questions about these topics, please send them along, either now or during the show. We'll be taking questions through these channels:

Email. Use Roundtable@cnet.com
Twitter: Put my Twitter ID, @rafe, plus the tag #FBipo in a tweet.
And of course, Facebook: Put a comment in the item about the show on the CNET page.

Come back here Friday morning to watch the show:

Evernote CEO Phil Libin talks valuations and bubbles

Rafe Needleman — Mon, 07 May 2012 10:25:58 PDT

I'll disclose this off the top: I'm a big fan of Evernote. I like the app and use it all the time. I even pay for it. I also enjoy talking with Evernote CEO Phil Libin, who I have found to be uncommonly deliberate and transparent for a startup CEO.

With the news around Evernote lately -- the company's recent $70 million funding round and its acquisition of Penultimate -- I thought it'd be good to bring Libin back to the Reporters' Roundtable to discuss the current state of the software economy, and what Silicon Valley looks like from the startup's perspective today.

In this discussion we also talk a little about Libin's "100-year startup" talking point. We don't get too much into the company's global ambitions, though, and I do want to point out that as popular as Evernote is here in the U.S., it's also apparently very big in Japan, and, Libin hopes, will also soon be big in China (subscription to The Wall Street Journal required).

Libin is probably going to become CEO of a public company within a few years. Do you think he'll be able to keep Evernote innovating, figure out how to turn its revenue stream into a flood, and keep investors happy? Watch the video below.

Evernote CEO Phil Libin

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Show notes

[0:15] Rafe admits he loves Evernote. Also: Phil Libin introduced.

[2:00] Are you going to raise more money?

[2:40] What will you do with the money you've raised so far?

[3:00] Libin: We want to be isolated from the bubble.

[4:00] Libin on durable companies.

[5:00] Can you justify a billion-dollar valuation on Evernote? (Libin: You're looking at it wrong)

[7:00] Are we in a bubble?

[7:45] Libin: The world economy is unique today...

[8:40] How this bubble (if it is that) is different from the last one.

[9:45] The Instagram discussion.

[11:15] More about the Facebook effect on Silicon Valley startups.

[12:20] How Evernote is following the Facebook path to IPO.

[13:55] Advice: How to keep your head up while companies around you are exiting for hundreds of millions of dollars.

[16:45] Ad break

[17:00] The epochs of technology are getting shorter. How to navigate?

[19:00] Libin: Let's talk about the current epoch. "It's a bubble of awesome."

[21:00] What's next? Libin: Integrated experiences "across your life."

[22:00] What about Big Data?

[23:20] What's next for Evernote?

Wrapp: Giving you free stuff to 'gift' to your Facebook friends

Rafe Needleman — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 17:29:35 PDT

Wrapp partners will spot you gift-card money you can give to your contacts... if they qualify.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Wrapp rolled out in the U.S. today. It's a mobile/Facebook gifting platform, kind of like Karma, which I covered recently and liked quite a lot. I don't think Wrapp is as slick or as fun as Karma, but it's got a devilishly clever business model, and I'm having a hard time seeing how it can go wrong.

See my Reporters' Roundtable interview with Wrapp CEO Hjalmar Winbladh, below, for more. His perspective on the business of gift-giving is interesting, and it might help you come up with ways you can think around the edges of your business.

What Wrapp does that's so clever: It combines gift-giving with targeted marketing with social metrics. The idea is that if you want to gift someone (I guess that's a verb now), Wrapp will look at the person you're thinking of, figure out where they are and how valuable they are to the Wrapp partners, and display for you a number of potential gift card option. For example, if you're looking at getting something for your fashionable girlfriend, you might see a $10 gift card from H&M you can give her -- at no cost to you.

You can add on to the gift card value (and you'd better, you lout), to give her $100 (at a $90 cost). Or you can just cheap out and go for the freebie.

Either way, H&M gets a good potential customer into the store, and for a very reasonable (to H&M) expense of only $10.

Wrapp, of course, takes a fee when the "card," which resides on the recipient's smartphone, is redeemed. The company also helps brands collect data on who's connecting with whom. If the companies working with Wrapp are smart, they're also correlating big data about who's buying what based on their social profiles.

Personally, I'd rather pay for a box of chocolates with cash and give that as a gift; I don't like the thought of an honest gesture being exploited as a datapoint on some product marketing wonk's Powerpoint. But that's because I'm a romantic. Wrapp is a smart business and it really could help more people connect through gifts and gift-like gestures.

Reporter's Roundtable Ep. 122: Free gifts for your Facebook friends, with Wrapp

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Show notes

[0:30] The Wrapp pitch.

[2:00] The qualification angle.

[4:00] You call this a gift?

[5:00] Lessons from the launch in Sweden?

[6:15] The gift card market in the U.S. is $100 billion!

[7:00] Discussion of the mobile angle on Wrapp.

[8:20] Why gift cards are so popular as gifts.

[9:00] Comparison to Karma.

[10:00] Talking about the launch of Wrapp in the U.S

[12:00] How hard or easy is it to sell Wrapp to clients?

[13:30] Is there a Groupon danger with Wrapp gift cards?

[15:30] Wrapp-up (sorry).

Reporters' Roundtable Podcast

Presenting Rafe Needleman's Outie Awards

Reporter's Roundtable Ep. 128: Rafe's Outie Awards

Flying drones getting smaller, smarter, cheaper, and scarier

Reporters' Roundtable Ep. 127: Attack of the drones

Unbreakable: Mesh networks are in your smartphone's future

Reporters' Roundtable Ep. 126: Mesh Networks

Next on Roundtable: Unjammable networks and aerial drones

Google I/O dissected on Reporters' Roundtable

Reporter's Roundtable Ep. 125: Google I/O dissected on Reporters' Roundtable

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