Adam Smith And The Inbox Space

Image via CrunchBase

This guy Adam Smith popped up in my inbox today. Responding to an urge by Fred Wilson a few days ago, I signed up for the Venture Hacks mailing list, and today they sent me Adam Smith. It has been a cool find. Although I remember getting amused by the inbox spelled backwards thing from a few years back, in passing, (I remember watching that Bill Gates video that Adam inserts in his presentation in the video below, and I might be off on the time stamp) I am learning the guy's name for the first time today.

Venture Hacks Daily Newsletter

My interest in Adam Smith is that I have been giving some thought to the inbox space here at my blog recently.

Reimagining The Inbox The Simple Way
2010: Location, Random Connections, The Inbox, Frictionless Payments

I like it how he says no he has not solved the inbox problem, that problem is too big, he has not even attempted to solve the inbox problem. More than humility, it is a matter of fact. There is much work that can be done in the inbox space. Could you make the inbox sexy again?

@asmith
@dharmesh



Adam Smith's blog. (founder of Xobni) "We make email software that makes it easier for people to manage relationships and find information in their email......included in the MIT Technology Review's list of Top 35 Innovators Under 35, and Inc Magazine's Top 30 Entrepreneurs Under 30."

From Zero to a Million Users - Dropbox and Xobni lessons learned
Amazon S3’s Pricing Model is Arbitragable, and the Future of Cloud Storage
The Market Opportunity to Undercut Sonos Let me know if you’re interested. There are a couple of other interesting product and marketing angles that we could jam on, and I might want to put some money in.
The Great Q& A Wars of 2009 ~ 2014 The major players are now Quora, StackOverflow, and Hunch..... Aardvark had about 40 bytes of information about me. They knew I was into startups, programming, and San Francisco. ....“everyone on the SO team works remotely from home” ..... dreaming about the company's problems at night, not talking at too many conferences, or doing other fake CEO stuff.
Magic in the software -- what the point and shoot camera industry needs I take pictures on my iphone using the Dropbox app. Pictures I take are immediately copied to all of my computers. .... There are a ton of apps that remain out of reach to point and shoots. ..... The magic is in the software.
Seven Major Websites that Send Passwords Unprotected, and State Sponsored Deep Packet Inspection Seven of the 36 sites I tested sent passwords in the clear, available for an Internet Service Provider to read. .... 50% of the Chinese websites I tested were offenders. .... There are well known, easily implementable techniques for securing passwords sent back to a server.
Technology to circumvent online copyright enforcement “Why it might become civil disobedience to serve up random data.” .... Any given copyrighted work could be expressed across 10 random-looking files.
How to Find and Hire Amazing People, Part 4
How to Find and Hire Amazing People, Part 3
How to Find and Hire Amazing People, Part 2
How to Find and Hire Amazing People, Part 1
My Startup Bootcamp Talk
How To Find A Market For Your New Company, Family Edition
How MIT Didn't Prepare Me For a Startup, Part 1
13 Ways Acting Classes Improved My Public Speaking Skillz
MIT Students Send Cameras Into Stratosphere, Very Cool!
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Paul Carr's Frank Talk On Race

I believe in having frank discussions on race, although the guy who I supported mightily in the presidential race, Barack Obama, proved a polar opposite approach can work wonders. He has done as much for race relations as anyone in history and he has done so by not bothering to have fluffy discussions on race.

Paul Carr, in this TechCrunch post, talks frankly about race, and that is of interest to me. "If I am wrong enough to think it, I am wrong enough to say it," Eminem once said in defense of his homophobic lyrics. What I like in addition to the frankness is Carr's exploration of the online medium and how that impacts the social discourses on that touchy topic: race.

TechCrunch: NSFW: #Ebony and #Ivory – The Brave New World of Online Self-Segregation

......the more recent story of a British holidaymaker who demanded that a hotel in Florida keep all “people of color” (or those with “foreign accents”) away from him and his family.......“black people represent 25% of Twitter users, roughly twice their share of the population in general” ......Twitter feels like one of the whitest sites in the world to me: full as it is with self-important middle-class hipster kids retweeting New York Times stories and the fact that they’re having sushi for lunch.....If apartheid or the new laws in Arizona represent the 1984 future, then there’s a real possibility that the Internet – and social media specifically – will eventually lead us into an even more terrifying Brave New World future. A future where the tools that once promised to help us meet people with different backgrounds and ideologies from our own actually end up being used, quite unintentionally, to segregate us from those same people......

Since when did having sushi become a white thing to do? This world is becoming cosmopolitan by the day.

I am a Third World guy. For me race talk has to go way beyond fluff to make sense. If you want my attention, talk to me about Kiva, for example.

Paul Carr: Bringing Nothing To The Party

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@anncurry
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@scobleizer





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Who Is Chetan Bhagat? 2010 Time 100

My first name - Paramendra - is extremely rare, so rare I don't think anyone else has it. My parents saw Google coming. My last name - Bhagat - is also very rare. But then you have a Chetan Bhagat listed in the 2010 Time 100 list, I realized earlier today. Who is Chetan Bhagat?

Chetan Bhagat A former investment banker, Chetan, 36, broke out as a writer with his novels One Night @ the Call Center and Five Point Someone, which inspired the film 3 Idiots, the biggest Indian hit in history. His latest book is about his marriage and the obstacles he and his wife faced coming from different regions of India..... He often writes about following your dreams and not bowing to others' expectations. That isn't easy in India, where family opinion matters and some professions are regarded as more serious than others.

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Chetan Bhagat: In NYC.
Me: For real? Can we meet for coffee? I was just blogging about seeing a Bhagat - my last name - on Time 100. I am in NYC.

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Venmo And Frictionless Payments

Could 2011 Be Venmo's Year?
Reimagining The Inbox The Simple Way
The FourSquare Appeal For Me
2010: Location, Random Connections, The Inbox, Frictionless Payments

Venmo | Thrillist if you send funds to a Venmo newbie, they'll get a passcode & instructions to set up an account and claim the funds, although unfortunately, without the added benefit of aiding a misunderstood, exiled Nigerian prince ..... deals with a number of University City food trucks (Coup de Taco, HubBub, Don Memo...) to accept Venmo payments, and're currently wrapping up similar arrangements w/ Starr Restaurant Group and Marathon -- who you'd pay through the nose via any method just to never have to run in one.
Venmo: The Future of Payments | innonate many of us have friends and contacts we'd trust enough to take money right out of our wallet! .... where this will get super interesting is when restaurants and other venues get into the mix.
Text your bill to Venmo| The Daily Pennsylvanian The system is intended to replace cash, and will be the future of payments ..... “Our goal is to become the number one payment processor in the country” ...... Kortina and Magdon-Ismail came up with the idea when they were at a concert and could not buy the band’s CD because there was no way for the musician to accept credit card payments. ....... they did not want to create something internet-based just for the iPhone because not everyone has one. “But we liked the simplicity of text messaging” ...... e used to send money to friends for utilities or splitting bills. ..... for sorority and fraternity fundraisers ..... make purchases off of Craigslist. .... useful even for businesses that already accept credit cards but want to better engage their customers. .... “In about a year, everyone on Penn’s campus will be using it,” said Magdon-Ismail. “It’s the future of how we’re all going to pay for things.”
Venmo: Mobile Payment Start-Up | Peter Kafka | MediaMemo | AllThingsD Venmo, a stealthy but buzzy start-up that just closed its first funding round. The four-man team gathered up something in the $300,000 to $400,000 range ..... . Investors include Betaworks, Lerer Media Ventures, and, oddly, given that it’s a modest angel funding round, RRE Ventures. ..... The big difference between Venmo and its much bigger mobile payment competitors–both Boku and Zong, for instance, have millions of venture capital dollars behind them–is that Venmo doesn’t involve the mobile carriers, which can take 30 percent or more of each transaction they process. .... charging commercial users–your local coffee shop or flea market vendor or whatever business sets up an account–a 3.5 percent fee for each transaction. ..... The Venmo team–headed by Betaworks veteran Andrew Kortina and Iqram Magdon-Ismail
Venmo| CrunchBase Profile
Announcing Our Investment in Venmo all transactions are reversible and the exchange of money is capped at $500.
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"We allow people to make cash transactions without the hassle of carrying cash", says Jameel Farruk of Venmo ..... It's the lack of fees that Venmo believes will allow it to become popular..... Currently, it is free to add money to your Venmo account, send money, receive money and even withdraw money to your bank account. There is no minimum to load on your account, send and receive money or to withdraw to your bank account. In the future, Venmo plans to make money by charging users a fee for an expedited transfer to your bank account, which currently takes about the same amount of time as a standard bank transfer. ..... three basic functions of Venmo; Pay, Charge and Trust. ..... the ability to reverse a trusted charge for 24 hours and a maximum transaction of $500 ...... one of the best solutions yet.
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Frictionless Payments - 10 Tech Trends for 2010 - TIME Micropayments were a $1 billion industry in 2009. .... A startup called Venmo 
Friction in online payments | Institute For The Future In a world where almost 4.6 billion people have a cell phone, we should be leveraging cell phones more for payments. .... services like m-Pesa in Africa that enable mobile phone users to transfer money via mobile phones. .... Zong and Boku ... the payment amount is added to the mobile phone bill.
The Future of Money: It's Flexible, Frictionless and (Almost) Free What if people could transfer money over Twitter for next to nothing, simply by typing a username and a dollar amount? ....But now engineers can focus on building applications, while leaving the regulatory and risk-management issues to PayPal. “I can focus on the social side of the business and not on touching money,” as Ivey puts it.
Frictionless - and Almost Free - Payments? tear down the stronghold the banks and credit card companies have built
M-Banking Kiva M stands for mobile and Pesa is Kiswahili for money. ..... a service that Safaricom, the most popular cell phone service in Kenya, offers (Zain, its largest competitor offers a similar service). Touted as a “branchless banking service” M-PESA users can deposit and withdraw money on their phone by utilizing a network of agents stationed throughout the country – mostly airtime vendors and phone salesman. .... weekly group repayment and disbursal meetings instead of home visits, decreases costs significantly ..... having these borrowers repay their loans via mobile might vastly improve efficiency ..... here are only a few other countries/companies that offer this service: Afghanistan, Tanzania, South Africa, a pilot program in Uganda and two very successful services in the Philippines.... there were $93 billion in remittances transferred from abroad to Africa every year.

Venmo's Restful Coolness (rafer.tumblr.com)
Venmo's Simple, Loaded Premise: Pay Your Friends From Your Phone (gigaom.com) Kortina recently left his job at Bit.ly and took a bridge loan from Sam Lessin and other individuals to pursue Venmo full time. ..... you can Venmo someone $3 with the message “grab me a coffee” ...... he casual spectrum of transactions ...... after the major earthquake in Haiti earlier this year, people donated more than $35 million through $5 and $10 text messages
Q&A: The New Digital Cash (blogs.wsj.com) Venmo, a tiny start-up launched in April 2009, has developed a system to let anyone exchange money through a cellphone text message...... About a year ago, [Venmo co-founder] Iqram [Magdon-Ismail] was visiting me in NYC for the weekend and had forgotten his wallet in Philly. He did have his phone, though. I covered him for the entire weekend, and he ended up mailing me a check to pay me back. I don’t think I ever cashed it. ...... a guy with a food truck in West Philly who does not have email, but has a cell phone and accepts Venmo ....... payments that may not have necessarily ever happened before....... A friend of mine tips the bartender *before* arriving at the bar, and has a drink waiting for him when he arrives. ..... I don’t see any reason why you should not be able to use Venmo to pay a Square merchant. ..... . The part of Venmo that is most exciting is Trust...... I get a notification anytime someone I trust charges me and I have the ability to reverse charges ..... you tend to only trust people that you actually trust in real life

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