I know you know how excited I am about our new location-based gifting application, called Litr.  We’re still operating in stealth mode, but check out my new post on the Litr blog for some sweet, sweet tease.

For this reason, we like the contrast that Grovo provides. As the company’s CEO and co-founder, Jeff Fernandez, put it to me this week, his company really flips the above methodology on its head. Instead of focusing on the few users leading the way in new internet verticals, Grovo focuses on the many more who have been left behind (small businesses, baby boomers looking to stay connected with their children on facebook, etc.) or who have yet to arrive to the internet. Only about 25% of the world’s population has Internet access and every day nearly 700,000 people get the internet for the first time. Over the next five years, first time internet users are expected to grow at a CAGR of 15% globally.*  If it’s possible for an early-stage technology investor to find a hedge, Grovo would seem to be that for us.

* Yeah, start licking your fingers.  You just noticed the entire second floor of the all you can eat buffet.

The London Times implemented a pay wall for its content and lost 99.5% of its reader base! Check out my good friend Eric Capper’s piece on how UserMover.com offers a potential solution to this ‘paywall dilemma’.

Gauging a mood, unlike plotting a geographical check-in or writing a third-party review, is a deeply introspective endeavor.  As a result, it’s only as useful as it is sincere.  Unlike so many tweets and FourSquare checkins, a mood isn’t easily spun in a positive way to emphasize one’s accomplishments, active lifestyle or celebrity social circle.   Indeed, the more it’s ‘spun’, the less value it has to both the party checking in and his/her prospective audience, which would seem to create a threshold issue for us. If people are generally more willing to share things that make them feel better about themselves, then how do we expect users to utilize our application in any honest fashion when they’re in non-positive moods?

Well, first, I think it’s an oversimplification, and actually a falsehood, to say that people are generally more willing to share when they’re happy than when they’re not. Personally, I know that many of my most memorable conversations with friends stemmed from non-positive, temporal feelings. And, although those conversations may not be ‘social’ in the same public sense as communications on Twitter or Digg, so much of our culture (pop and otherwise) is borne from public and honest expressions (e.g. songs, poems, blog entries) of such emotions….which gets me back to my original point.  Certain characters, lyrics, sidewalk-born slang and news stories enter the public consciousness to such an extent that they come to represent, in short and pseudo-anonymous form, what might otherwise take a number of sentences and a whole lot of potentially uncomfortable candor to communicate.  There aren’t enough hands in this coffee shop to count the amount of times I’ve heard one woman say to another, “to the left, to the left”, with no need for further explanation. And I’m not sure there is a better characterization of feeling ‘unlucky’ than George Costanza.  Targeted use of such cultural constructs can make communication, both for the creator of the message and his/her audience, more efficient.  And because such references are inherently playful, they can actually empower people to share, and to a certain extent, own, emotions or experiences they may otherwise have been reluctant to express. See, for example, #everythingiseverything and #fml.

But, as I think other social messaging sites have responsibly recognized, there is a thin line between a playful use of slang that makes users feel comfortable, or empowered to share, and well…VH1. First, as we experience every election cycle, too much trend-riding can quickly feel like lowest common denominator marketing and come off pandering, inauthentic and annoying.  Just imagine having to religiously acknowledge every one of Mike the Situation’s [occasionally masterful] attempts at wit or every iteration of Lil’ Jon’s  “OK! Yeah! What!” routine in some sort of functionality or message. Second, pop culture is so temporal that wedding a feature or user experience to any specific set of slang terms, fictional characters or ‘current events’ can be foolish. Two years ago, ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ communicated ‘hope’; today, it may be ‘Chilean Miner’. Back in March, Lebron James was the ‘Vincent Chase’ of the NBA; now he’s ‘Pete Campbell’ to Kobe Bryant’s ‘Don Draper’.

Our challenge, as is always the case, is to strike the right balance and provide a set of tools that facilitate playful, but honest, expression.  Social media has tremendous potential to not only connect people but connect them at the right times and in the right contexts. After all, what is a mood but a proxy for future behavior?  Knowing a friend is feeling a bit down, you may wish to send her a pick-me-up song or post a funny photo to her facebook wall.  Knowing she’s in a celebratory mood, you may wish to buy her a drink at a nearby bar (or if she’s tired, a coffee from a nearby Starbucks), which, thanks to services like FourSquare, you can now do from across the country. To paraphrase an intro to one of my favorite videos from this year’s TED Conference, social media is a playroom, and you’re invited, if you promise you’ll share…honestly.

We all know what it’s like to buy into a subscription on an impulse…an article we absolutely must read, a song we desperately need to have, a new collaboration app that we’re sure will finally get our product launched. On any given day, we may hit four to five walls that we think justify the purchase of a low, but recurring, monthly charge.

But, unfortunately, we’re not fortune tellers. You might fall out of contention in your fantasy league, making ESPN insider useless, or have a couple awful dates and give up on the online dating scene. Maybe you get lucky and find a friend with a great music collection and generous spirit and no longer need that Rhapsody subscription. Or perhaps, you’re assigned to research a new industry at work, making that previous trade publication non-essential.

In all these situations, UserMover can help. Unlike classifieds sites such as Craigslist (and even Twitter), or general marketplaces like Ebay, subscription holders who list their subscriptions on our marketplace  will receive immediate value, in the form of UserMover credits, regardless of whether a buyer surfaces.* Those users can then use those credits to buy into subscriptions that others have listed for sale on our marketplace. And, because the exchange of subscriptions can often be a murky process, we take the lead on that as well, unlike current offerings. As a result, we not only facilitate, but also standardize, the transfer of memberships between owners and prospective buyers. In doing so, UserMover will both help consumers unload, and receive value for, unwanted subscriptions, and enable them to pursue new interests in a variety of content and services, without fear of regret. Our hope is to relieve even the ficklest of buyers of their remorse and permit them to continue, if not increase, their experimenting ways.

Usermover will be an online marketplace devoted to exchanging subscriptions and contracts…and it’ll be the first to do it in some key and exciting consumer-facing verticals, as exemplified by the on and offline content and consumer service providers sampled above. Our initial focus will be on these nominal-value subscriptions, which are generally structured as paid-in-full memberships**, and where there is the potential for a high volume of transactions.  And with recent trends in the news and publishing industry suggesting that more content will be made available only with subscriptions, we think consumers will increasingly appreciate the kind of flexibility our secondary marketplace can provide.

If you’re one of the 60 million Americans currently experiencing buyer’s remorse for previous purchases of online and offline subscriptions, we look forward to working with you.

* Subscription values, which depreciate over time, are valued on our marketplace according to our patent-pending (but very intuitive) algorithm.

** As opposed to, for example, a hosting contract where your subscription binds you to make payments in the future.

I’ll be keeping something of a blog on our ventures here, probably about one entry each week. Look forward to sharing more about our notions (and trials and tribulations in bringing them to life) as we go forward.

Thanks!