Designed for the 2012 San Diego Apps Challenge, SanDiegoAFC delivers six city data sets as a requirement of the challenge, but we don’t stop there. We built a platform of categories and also added lots of data and resources across several helpful categories. It’s a great way for users of the app to quickly access information and things to do on the go.

Please VOTE FOR US HERE!

We also integrated Openfeint into the app to add game elements, so that users can go out, do things in San Diego, and earn points and achievements while doing so. Golf a lot in San Diego, earn the Golf-Nut badge. Attend a lot of sporting events, earn the Sports-Fan badge. See a lot of live theater, earn the Playbill badge. In all, there are over 20 badges that can be earned.

In all, SanDiegoAFC offers three great features in one app:

1. A curated list of San Diego city resources, data sets, and contact information across eight convenient categories: News, School, Work, Wellness, Get Active, Attractions, Date/Eat/Shop, and Events. We’ve built this app as a platform so that we can quickly add more and more resources and data sets over time.

2. The San Diego Bucket List, the feature that turns San Diego into a game! Earn points, leader-board bragging rights, and achievement badges for going out and exploring America’s Finest City.

3. Diego Daily Deals, an aggregated list of deals just for San Diego.

So if you live in San Diego or are just visiting, grab your Apple device of choice, get the San Diego AFC app HERE, and go out and explore America’s Finest City!

In just its first version, Paleo CCG offers 130 different cards across six different card types, with many more cards under development. You need to defeat 15 different opponents to complete the game, 13 of which are locked. Defeat opponents in the right order to unlock other opponents. And earn or buy gems so that you can buy more cards to do better in your battles. We think the game is quick to learn, but requires deep strategy to master. The game also offers very detailed and helpful tutorials so that you can understand the game and get playing quickly.

But what makes Paleo CCG unique from other CCG’s like Magic the Gathering, is that the battlefield takes place on a 5-by-5 grid. You have to work yourself up the battlefield in order to attack and defeat your opponent. And do that before they defeat you.

And, oh boy, do we have a lot planned for 2012. More cards? Of course! More opponents? Of course! But the biggest reveal will be coming later this Spring. Hint: the 5×5 game is just a game within a bigger game!

Please check out Paleo CCG and give us your feedback. Did we mention it’s free?

Case in point: a recent issue had Eric Ries of Lean Start-Up fame on the cover, with an in-depth article on this philosophy as the feature. And every month, Jason Fried of Rework fame writes his column, Get Real, covering, once again, start-up and young company issues. Every issue is full of great articles, advice and tips for young businesses, and more times than not, with a tech spin. Plus they have a well-integrated digital presence at their website, Inc.com.

Inc is the only print magazine that I still subscribe to, and I typically read it cover-to-cover soon after it hits my door. If you’re a start-up entrepreneur like me, I recommend that you subscribe to it to.

Or get it for Android HERE.

All you need to do is go get either Caloween HERE (for younger kids) or Calloween HERE (a little bit scary, for older kids), and then open that day’s portal to find out what paid app is free for that day. Then go get that app!

Have fun and let us know what you think of these Halloween advent calendars by rating and reviewing them on iTunes.

Or get the Android Caloween HERE or the Android Calloween HERE and please rate and review them too!

When you start either of the apps, you’re presented with the mysterious Caloween / Calloween haunted house with 31 numbered portals (for the 31 days of October, of course). Behind each portal is a creature waiting to be revealed. Caloween takes place during the day time and the creatures revealed are tame ones like birds and bugs.

Calloween takes place during the evening and the creatures revealed are a little bit scarier. Think monsters. And there are five special portals in Calloween, behind which you just might find an attacking monster or spider!

And special bonus — throughout all of October, we’ll be giving away paid apps for free via our Caloween and Calloween apps. After you open each portal, you’ll be presented with that’s day’s promoted app.

So go get Caloween HERE (iPhone/iPad) and Calloween HERE (iPhone/iPad) and get ready for Halloween 2011!

Oh, and for your Android users, get Caloween Android HERE and Calloween Android HERE.

I went to this morning’s San Diego Venture Group’s monthly meeting featuring well known VC’s, Bill and Tim Draper. It was a well-attended and solid event, and kudos to the great job that Dave Titus is doing to kindle and market venture activity in our region. I’m happy to hear that the Drapers’ continue to look for investment opportunities anywhere, not just Silicon Valley. And I’m definitely starting to see the activity pick up here locally, even though it’s still scraps compared to the continued fervor in Silicon Valley. Some recent local highlights: MeLLmo raises $30M; TakeLessons raised $6M; and EveryoneCounts raised a round.

And there are a few local, somewhat under the radar companies in the mobile space that are on fire. Mitek, a leader in the mobile-payments space, has seen its stock go through the roof over the last year as they are signing licensing agreements with most major banks. And our friends over at FreeTheApps! just announced that they are being acquired. Congrats, Quoc; well played!

Recent AWESOME discovery – JewelBeat! This is a boon for app developers who want to add music to their apps. For a mere 99 cents per tune, you can get royalty-free music for your project. We’ve already found a perfect theme song for an app we have under development and I have them in mind for another app too.

Technology disruption is alive and well, even in high fashion. Case in point, how Instagram stole the show at Fashion Week.

Speaking of disruption, it was odd and a bit troubling to watch the side show at the recent Techcrunch Disrupt. And that side show was the dismissal of founder, Michael Arrington, and the aftermath which played out on their own blog HERE and HERE (among other places). I’ve always been a fan of Techcrunch, even though it is often biased and inconsistent. But Arrington WAS Techcrunch, and his leaving won’t be a good thing (even though it really isn’t a surprise; how long could he really stay at AOL).

In the article, this point is made by Bob Slapin, executive director of the San Diego Software Industry Council (a solid organization that I used to be very active in): “The challenge is that people outside of San Diego perceive our region as a poor place to build a software career.” While that might very well be the perception outside of San Diego, inside of San Diego I know hundreds of software colleagues who have built impressive and rewarding careers in San Diego. And with sustained job openings over the last 20 years, all of the good developers and designers never stay out of work long. During boom times, then can bounce around a few companies in a couple of years, getting double-digit annual percentage salary increases with each bounce. In slower times, they still find good work. This is all from the view inside.

Regarding the view from outside, my empirical read on things is that San Diego software jobs are seen as dull. You have two primary choices: defense and telecom. Yes, Intuit is hiring too, but, unless you’re part of the progressive Mint-acquired team, what’s the pull to working on Turbo Tax or Quicken? What San Diego lacks are companies like Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, Pandora, Dropbox, etc., etc. You know, the “cool kids”. We had a few “cool” companies over the last decade like CollegeClub, MP3.com, Active.com and Veoh, but these are too few and far between.

To really attract more software professionals to this region, we need more cool companies. And, frankly, I’m surprised that we don’t have more cool companies. I worked in Silicon Valley back in the mid 90’s (at Siebel Systems during my time at Accenture) and, from a quality-of-life standpoint, Silicon Valley has nothing on San Diego (IMHO). But it just comes down to a “follow the money” scenario. The VC’s for software / web / mobile start-ups are congregated in Silicon Valley, and they invariably fund their own. Ron Conway, a famous angel investor, has gone so far as to say that he’d only fund Silicon Valley companies.

How do we get more cool companies here in San Diego? I think we are starting to foster it in a few ways. First, I commend the recent efforts of Dave Titus of the San Diego Venture Group as he tries to lead this organization into attracting more investment dollars here. And I fully commend and support the San Diego Software Industry Council in their efforts to attract more talent and entrepreneurs to this region. It’s also nice to see Y-Incubator-like activity happening with the Ansir Innovation Center.

And there are companies who, although they may not (yet) be getting a lot of buzz, are doing some very interesting things here in San Diego. TakeLessons just raised a round of VC. Bump.com has some cool stuff brewing (and a very cool office in La Jolla). Mitek Systems is leading the mobile-payments wave.

I love seeing all this local entrepreneurial activity and, personally, I’m trying to grow RapDevPro into a leading mobile-apps entertainment studio. All we need is one big break-out success in San Diego in the software / web / mobile space, and more investment dollars will follow. And with those investment dollars, I think we’ll attract more and more “cool” companies, and the software professionals who want to help in their success.

I wrote about Groupon and its competitors in THIS BLOG POST from several weeks ago. In the post, I point out several negative trends I’m seeing in the daily-deals space from the consumer’s point-of-view, including saturation, smaller benefits, and deals that aren’t local enough. In the weeks that have passed since this post, all of these negative trends still hold true and in fact, are getting worse.

And, always loving a deal (as my wife would attest to), I subscribe to lots of daily-deal services, including Groupon, LivingSocial, TheDailySave, BuyWithMe, GroupGolfer, The San Diego Union Daily Deals, and the L.A. Times daily deals. It seems I get about 20 emails every day with various deals. In this economy, I’m sure I’m not the only one who has subscribed to multiple daily-deal services. So, yes, I am very much a consumer of these services and I can talk critically about them.

In addition to what Rob says on the financials side, and to add to what I wrote about earlier, here are three more criticisms of these services, this time from a business-model standpoint. The first is pretty obvious — there is fierce competition in this space because there are literally no barriers to entry and no intellectual-property protection. Anyone with a determined sales force can jump into the fray, and nobody can be protected with IP.

Second, there is no brand loyalty. I could care less if I get a 60% off restaurant deal from Groupon or LivingSocial or whoever. I just want deals that are nearby to where I work or live, and that I KNOW I will use before they expire.

The third and final issue I have with these services’ business models is this — the merchants are getting smarter; and the smart ones are figuring out that there are often better avenues to market their businesses. For example, if I was in the restaurant business today, I would far prefer to offer an outstanding Happy Hour with great deals, and then advertise that heavily via local channels; particularly if I was an established business. If it was a brand new restaurant, then I would do that exact same thing, but also run a Groupon-type ad in my local newspaper’s daily-deal service. By using the local newspaper, I know that I’m getting fantastic reach for my crowd.

I’ll give Groupon one thing — they have become the “Xerox” or “Coke” of our time. Even if I got a daily deal from another service, I’ll still tell my friends, “Let’s go here, I got a Groupon we can use.”

But I really question the viability of this space and I’m fascinated to see what happens with it over the next couple of years.

The breadth of the book is impressive. It’s thick and dense, covering 33 interviews with (mostly) Silicon Valley success stories across famous companies and projects. This list includes Steve Wozniak from Apple, Ray Ozzie of Groove Networks and other ventures, Craig Newmark of Craigslist, and Evan Williams of Blogger.com (and soon thereafter, Twitter) just to name a few. Each of the interviews is long. These aren’t short, surface-level one-pagers; they often go 10 to 15 pages (in small font) and include intimate details of what each founder was thinking at critical junctures of their businesses. There is much to learn here.

And back to the “Pivot” — the thing I found most interesting was that, in the vast majority of the stories shared, most of these entrepreneurs become successful in something derivative from where they started. That’s right – most did a pivot to success. The best example is the company Flickr, as shared in the interview with Caterina Fake. It turns out that the idea for “flickr” started out as a feature to their massively multiplayer online game, Game Neverending. This new feature offered a chat environment and photo sharing, which quickly surpassed the game itself in popularity. Knowing that they were on to something, they put the game on the back burner and made a pivot to Flickr.

And that’s not the only example of a pivot in the book. Of the 33 interviews, I’d guess that about 30 of them involved a pivot of some magnitude to their success. And although the actual word “pivot” has quickly become over-used today, I still think that it’s an arrow that should be in every founder’s quiver.