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For years, many of us have imagined a world where a computer would sit in your family room and bring connectivity to your big screen, television.

I believe that is going to happen. And I’ve put my money where my mouth is with our investment in Boxee.

That computer is going to live inside of settops, blu-ray players, game consoles or connected tvs and other devices. It will have smart, social software and it’s bring the open web to our lives in new ways. All on the big screen and a remote control. 

There is another way two way streams are going to come into your family room and that’s on your mobile device - either smartphone or tablets. 

The reality is that second screen apps have actually been happening for a long time now. Twitter is a killer second screen application.

Here’s a graph that the Twitter folks posted after last super bowl.

(full size image)

The horizontal axis is time. The vertical axis is a percentage: the blue line is the percentage of tweets, relative to the total worldwide tweet volume, that were about the Super Bowl each minute, while the red line is the percentage of tweets that were about brands or commercials. 

There are other startups bringing the second screen to life including Miso, Hot Potato and Boxee is working on an iPad app as well. 

Thanks to the iPad and upcoming Android powered tablets we are going to see a lot more of these second screen applications this year.

In a world where the software and user interface on our cable and telco boxes have been closed & stuck, I’m very happy to see the second screen take off. 

It’s easy to kick someone when they are having trouble I guess. Ning announced a significant layoff and the critics pounced.

I guess I wasn’t surprised at this point. But the thing that surprised me was the negativity about freemium.

Just because some companies struggle with freemium doesn’t mean the model doesn’t work. In my mind that would be like writing off the entire search space because pre-google it wasn’t a big business or writing off ecommerce because a bunch of startups aren’t successful in the category or writing off any category frankly.

There are plenty of reasons companies in every category struggle or fail. Their decision to go with freemium may not have been a natural fit for their products or services. Or maybe the product struggled regardless of business model. Too many variables to blame freemium.

I believe this with all of my heart. There are just too many large companies (google, craigslist, etc) and young companies (xobni, dropbox, zynga, pandora, etc) that are nailing the freemium model along with amazing products.

Of course I’m biased here to be sure. I am thrilled that our portfolio companies are thinking through creative ideas on revenue. Tumblr has launched unique revenue products and so has Twitter.

But let’s not be too hasty to judge an entire category when some companies struggle. This is the startup business. Many companies won’t work out - we know that up front.

But a number will create figure it out. They will build something so special and incredibly important. Thankfully.

I was at Chirp, Twitter’s developer conference, yesterday in San Francisco. 

First, let me say I fully recognize the tireless effort the folks at Twitter put into making such a great event. It showed in so many ways. 

The team announced a number of things like some metrics and the new ad platform. 

It was great to meet so many developers at once and in one place like that. The diversity of applications and creativity was inspiring. And so was the energy level. 

I’m most excited about where the platform is going and all of the new capabilities of the platform, namely Places, Annotations, User Streams and @anywhere. These are all important things that will give developers a more exciting canvas to build highly differentiated applications and richer user experiences. 

We have a number of portfolio companies that build stuff on the Twitter API. I’m looking forward to see what they will come up next. 

I’m also looking forward to investing in new startups that have a vision for new apps based on Annotations. So drop me a line if that’s what you are doing! 

My original plan was to wait and buy the 3g iPad which ships at the end of the month.

But yesterday, after our partners meeting yesterday, Todd, Mo and I somehow ended up at the Apple Store down the street. And we each bought one.

After less than a full day of usuage, here are my initial thoughts in no particular order:

1. It’s heavier than I thought. My friend Antonio sums up this point nicely:

This almost doesn’t bear mentioning, but it is nice to see that even Apple can not escape the laws of the physical world. If I had to guess, I’d say 40% of the weight is the battery, and an additional 30% is glass, which gives you an idea of what can come out of it in future versions (and what won’t)

2. Browsing the web on the iPad is a joy

3. Viewing photos is amazing. The screen is stunning.

4. I loaded my iPad up with an exact copy of music I have on my iphone. But today, I listen to music in one of three places - on the go with the iPhone, at home with Sonos, or on the web with my mac. I don’t know where the iPad fits in - especially since it doesn’t support flash and won’t stream from favorite music blogs or services like Hype Machine, We Are Hunted, Daytrotter, etc.

5. “legacy” iphone apps look awful on the ipad except for a few games that my kids enjoy. they don’t seem to mind the scaled up version. apps built for the ipad are the only way to go.

6. Speaking of ipad apps, i’m sure I’m missing some important ones. Right now, I’ve got netflix, mlb, espn, twitteriffic, and instapaper. What else should I get?

7. The ipad comes with a free copy of Winnie the Pooh which I’ll read with the kids. After a few minutes of flipping the “pages” and bookmarking, I know I’ll read a lot on this device. And it’s clear to me the textbook market is going to turn upside down.

8. I bought the Apple case but I don’t know if I’ll keep it. I don’t use a case for my iPhone. It feels like they just get in the way. Maybe there is a better case out there?

9. I like the iPad dock a lot. I have it set up next to my monitor at work. Its nice to be able to easily touch and scan something vs a mouse and keyboard.

10. When I’m not on an open wifi spot, I’ll use the iPad with the MiFi. Curious to see if this combo is good enough or if I’ll end up buying the 3g version.

11. the onscreen keyboard is very good. I can already type pretty fast even in portrait mode on a flat table or in my lap. However, typing standing up with one hand feels awkward.

That’s it for now…

It wasn’t long ago that mobile phones had weak browsers and 3g was a network that the carriers built but without the “killer app”.

Smartphones with amazing browsers changed all of that. The web is the killer app. The browser on iPhone and Android are incredible and only getting better.

So if you are building a consumer web service these days, I highly encourage you to think of the mobile experience right away. Don’t think of mobile as something you’ll get around to doing one day. It has to be a high priority.

That doesn’t mean you have to build a native Android or iPhone app. It really depends on the service. I can’t imagine an app like Bump working without a native app while Techmeme mobile web site is amazing. It often comes down to whether your app requires access to local iphone resources (camera, address book, etc) or not.

At the very least your application/service should be optimized for mobile browsing experience and has an open API.

That’s the minimum these days.

For the past 5 years, I’ve been using a DSLR as my “real camera”. It started when I bought the Canon Rebel and then a few years back I bought the 40d. It’s an amazing camera that is fast & flexible. I have three very different lenses for almost every situation. It takes beautiful pictures.

But there is a problem with the 40d. It’s big & heavy and I end up leaving it home a lot. It’s not easy to carry that thing when I’m running around with three kids.

So the iPhone ends up taking a ton of photos which isn’t great. Sure, it’s excellent for the casual snapshot but I love photography, getting the right light and making pictures. 

My brother has been excited about the micro four thirds system for some time now. He’s a doctor by day and as a hobby runs a micro four thirds message board. He’s been pushing me for the past year. 

A week ago I took the plunge and bought my first micro four thirds camera - the Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF1 (honestly, who names these things).

Quick review: easy, fast, small and takes great pictures. 

My 10 year old daughter took a bunch of shots today. It’s so fast that even in auto mode it didn’t require a flash indoors. 

Here’s a few indoor shots that Sophia took besides this funny self portrait. 

Me / Our dog / James jumping (no flash) 

I absolutely love this camera. It’s light and the 20mm lens that comes with the camera is sweet. Autofocus is fast. It takes HD video. 

Right now the only thing I miss about the 40d for everyday shots is the view finder. The view finder comes in handy on sunny days and some old habits die hard I guess. I’ll probably only use the 40d when I need my telephoto lens - otherwise I’m all about the GF1.

I highly recommend this camera if you are looking for an amazing camera but don’t want to lug around a DSLR, You won’t be disappointed. 

I use eBay from time to time. I buy things that I can’t purchase easily from Amazon or locally, like out of stock items. The perfect use case for me these days is buying vinyl records on eBay. It’s worked like a charm for me every time and I’m buying records across the globe.

Selling on eBay is awful in my experience. I have a lot of gadgets. So recently I decided to list some of them on eBay.

The process to list an item is painful in my opinion but that’s not the bad part.

The bad part is what comes next. Endless requests from people asking if you will end the auction early, or go around ebay, or people bidding & winning an auction and then flaking out. I’m now 0 for 3. I think I’m done.

There has to be a better way. What do you think? Is my experience likes yours or is it much better for everyone else?

With every (venture backed) consumer web startup there is always the question of when to start thinking about monetization.

If the monthly burn is modest, I usually suggest that startups focus on reaching scale first.

It’s not because I don’t care about revenue or because I embrace “hope as a strategy” (which never works).

Rather it’s because:

1 - when your user base is small it really doesn’t matter if you can get advertising, digital goods, subscription revenue going. The base is so small the conversion will be even smaller.

2 - startups need to focus, especially in the the early stage. With limited resources, the company needs to focus on the product and the users. If you start tinkering revenue too early then you suddenly find yourself having to borrow precious team resources to deal with various revenue projects. They always look small and innocent at first but they can snowball and can distract the team.

3. the ultimate revenue model may surprise you. as the product develops and evolves and your community grows, the revenue model is likely to reveal itself in an entirely new way. I’ve seen this happen several times and it’s a powerful reminder each time.

So when I meet a founder and he/she tells me that they are confident that they can monetize their future service with ads or subscription or whatever, I blow by that slide. I want to know about the product and how they are planning on growing the service to reach scale. That’s a leap of faith we both need to take at some level but that’s what I want to talk about vs a 2015 revenue forecast.

p.s.: Congrats to our portfolio company Tumblr for focusing on growth. Last year I remember David Karp, the founder of Tumblr, came to a board mtg. and said he was going to delay his monetization experiments and focus on growth. He had a game plan and told us about it. I’m so glad he did just that.

We’ve been using Sonos for years. In my opinion it’s the best whole house audio system that I’ve ever used and I’ve tried a number of them. (And it’s designed by a startup)

Last year, our Sonos experience became even better when they came out with a new touch remote and an iPhone app. With a touch of a button I have last.fm, rhapsody and our local music library streaming in multiple rooms of our house. We had been using Sonos in three rooms of our house plus the patio.

The pre-requisite with Sonos is that you need speakers in every room where you want audio. Any type of speakers will do. But sometimes setting up speakers is a hassle. Putting two speakers in ideal locations isn’t always convenient so that’s why some of our rooms aren’t available to our Sonos.

That was until I bought the Sonos S5 last week. The S5 is a single amp/speaker system. Plug it in, press a button and it automatically joins your Sonos music network. It just works. I think the audio quality is excellent for an average size room.

I’m so happy with the S5 that I’m absolutely going to get a few more.

I’ve been using Google Chrome as my default browser since the day it was released. I have firefox purely as a backup for the extensions that I count on.

But more of those extensions are coming to Chrome everyday and new ones are actually coming out on Chrome first.

One of my favorite Chrome exensions is Dan Kantour’s Extension.fm. I’ve been playing around with it all afternoon. Note that Extension.fm came out on Chrome first.

For those of you that don’t know, Dan is the creator of Streampad which is a music player that sits on the bottom of my blog. Using Streampad you can easily playback all of the songs that are on bijansabet.com as well as bijan.fm

Anyway, back to Extension.fm. Extension.fm does a few things and does them very well. Once you add the extension to Chrome it will provide an easy mp3 player for all the tracks it finds on a web page. Here’s a screen grab of what it looks like. It also supports last.fm’s audio scrobbler. It’s fantastic to use along with the Tumblr Dashboard.

I was emailing with Dan today and asked him about his experience developing for Chrome vs Firefox. Dan told me that Chrome is easier and better in every way. It’s all html/css/javascript and straightforward with built in tools. And Chrome checks every 30 minutes for updated extensions. Push it to the server and thats it. No restart after the update.

As a user, easy install and no restart are big things. It’s amazing how the Blackberry almost always asks to restart after app installs. Chrome and iPhone don’t.

According to Google Analytics, 22% of the visitors to my blog are using Chrome. It will be interesting to see what that number looks like 6months from now — especially if more developers agree with Dan.