Fred just announced Etsy’s new COO, Maria Thomas, a friend of mine.  I met Maria at NPR where she headed up their online efforts.  She is a dynamo and I have no doubt she’ll take Etsy to the next level.  Way to go Fred & Etsy and good luck Maria!

Russell Beattie of Mowser decided to throw in the towel after concluding that the Mobile Web is dead.  Justin Siegel of Mocospace (a mobile social network whose Advisory Board I’m on), begs to differ.  Obviously we’re biased, but tt’s a good read.  Some choice passages:

• Still, I’m surprised by how jaded his view of the mobile Internet is
  given the early success of many companies he’s familiar with such as Admob, Getjar, MyWaves, Radar, yours truly (MocoSpace).  Each of these sites are  generating 10’s of millions, and in MocoSpace’s case over 1 billion
  page views per month off of a unique audience in the low millions.
  Those numbers may not stack up well to the Web…yet, but the trend
  certainly appears to be our friend.
• People will expect, and they will get different content, formats,
  features, etc. for different devices.  Unless you expect the wired Web
  to stop improving and taking advantage of the horsepower that desktops
  and flatpanels deliver, I don’t get how someone could ever think there
  will be a unified Internet experience across such a range of
  capabilities. In my opinion, the bottom line is that people are and
  will continue to develop new sites, services, applications, etc.
  specifically for mobile devices, and they will be different than those
  browsed on machines with 5-10x larger screens and orders of magnitude
  more power and bandwith.  Just as Walmart had to build a website as a
  distinct experience from its bricks and mortar experience, it will
  build a mobile site.
• For Russell and all fellow entrepreneurs, I end with one of my favorite quotes from Theodore Roosevelt:

  • It is not the critic who
    counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or
    where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs
    to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust
    and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short
    again and again; because there is not effort without error and
    shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows
    the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a
    worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high
    achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while
    daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and
    timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

I was having a drink with a well known digital media executive this evening and the topic turned to, what else, social networks.  The question was how big of an industry is social networking?  I’m talking about the ‘pure’ social networks such as MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, Tagged, LinkedIn, etc.  What would the aggregate revenues be of these sites?  Our guess was low single digit billions of dollars a year, if that, with the top few generating most of the revenues.

That’s the headline from Silicon Alley Insider paraphrasing a Nokia exec.   While he was referring to broadcast mobile TV (via DVB-H) vs. downloaded content, I don’t think mobile video will be a huge market in the next 5 years and am skeptical that mobile video will be more than a niche application.  Why?  Well, leaving aside the fact that the carrier networks aren’t yet there and so they can’t offer ad-supported video, making the consumer-pays model a hard one to scale; there are only so many use cases for mobile video.  I can think of a few:

• Video snacking when traveling.  I’d love to watch daily show clips at the airport to pass the time.
• Sports highlights when out and about.  I was out to dinner the other night and would love to have see the Arsenal/Liverpool highlights instead of having to wait.
• Clips of my friends that they’d share with me from their mobile
• Live or quasi-live feeds of weather and traffic conditions

I’ve read how some companies are doing longer-form streaming or they have unrealistic projections on mobile video consumption.  The thing is, when you’re walking down the street, it’s better to watch where you’re going than what’s on the screen!  I get that it’s huge in South Korea, but maybe that’s the exception that proves the rule given carrier network capacity, format standardization and population density.

That’s not to say other rich media applications aren’t viable on mobile.  I’m bullish on mobile audio/music, picture sharing and social networking