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New Post has been published on http://bitcoin.yourdailynews.org/top-investors-explain-bitcoin-a-pandomonthly-mashup

Top investors explain bitcoin: A PandoMonthly mashup

New Post has been published on http://bitcoin.yourdailynews.org/top-investors-explain-bitcoin-a-pandomonthly-mashup

Top investors explain bitcoin: A PandoMonthly mashup

I'm a big fan of products that makes everyday tasks more efficient; work, personal, whatever.  The art of combining multi-step activities into a single step is always a win-win.

As Chris Dixon pointed out in the May PandoMonthly Fireside chat, one of the most impressive and immensely successful recent product examples of this is Instagram. None of what Instagram did was particularly new; you could always

snap high quality digital pics  

pull off the device

apply a different effects to the photo using Photoshop (or similar)

upload online

While there are always people tech savvy enough to script or hack these steps in a slightly more automated fashion, recognizing this commonly repeated use case, and more importantly productizing it, is the simple genius here achieved by Instagram.  

Another recent example of this is from the folks at minbox.  While getting large digital files from person to person has always been achievable (sneakernet, bbs, ftp, to more recently, Skydrive, Dropbox, Box, etc), it's still a multi-step process.  

Upload the file

Once complete (could be seconds, mins, hours), configure share settings / generate link

Copy Link, Send Email

Just like in the Instagram scenario, I'm sure many people hacked together a script to make this a much more automated process.

Minbox did a great job of recognizing that this is a VERY frequent use case; people have a large file(s) and need to get it to someone.  It's simple enough, why should users be forced to retrofit this use case onto a cloud-based file system.  Minbox launched a product that enables you to send a file in 2 seconds; drop file & instruct where it's going.  Simple and Amazing.  The only thing better than the actual product is their product marketing. Usain Bolt!

With more and more people / businesses shifting their everyday activities to the digital world, there is so much more opportunity to make things more efficient.  Software often gets created to support as many use cases as possible (...killing multiple birds / one stone...).  While a necessary evil in some cases, a fatal flaw in many other cases.  

“People don’t necessarily want a job. They want to have money and to have health insurance. In the past, it’s come in the form of a job.” - Chad Dickerson at PandoMonthly

This quote has stuck with me since spoken by Etsy CEO, Chad Dickerson at his recent PandoMonthly interview. Dickerson is referring to two big trends interviewer Sarah Lacy inquired about: the sharing economy and the independent worker economy. The independent worker economy already exists now in the form of freelancers, people who make things for a living, have their own ebay stores, etc. But Lacy's question implied an economy where masses of people make their living in this way and are not tied down to corporations. The sharing economy is applied because the few full-time people at these corporations (possibly only high-up, C-level people) will share these employees, similar to how you share your apartment on airbnb. If you own an apartment that isn't used for long periods of time, it makes sense to put it up on airbnb. If you employ a person who is sitting there twitting their thumbs for multiple hours a day, maybe it makes sense to share them too. 

This idea appeals to me. I love my job, but sometimes I get tired of the grind just like anybody else, the 9-5-ness of it. I do, however, think the accountability a full-time job gives is important. If I stopped coming to work and stopped producing work, people would notice. It would take a very self-motivated person to subsist in this independent worker economy (as is the case with successful freelancers now).