Here’s to the Crazy Ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world – are the ones who do.

I believe the next big API target is music. With services like Pandora, Last.fm, Rdio and Spotify, there are no shortages of companies who see the potential in social music. The beauty is that sharing music is something people have been doing for decades, through mix tapes, going to concerts and loaning CDs to each other. The behavior doesn’t need to change in order for it to work; rather, the technology needs to catch up with how consumers expect to discover new tracks.Spotify and Rdio are on the right path realizing that the way to grow is by enabling API access to their music. This allows 3rd party developers to take music from them and use it in a completely different application, one that uses music to enhance another experience. Because music is often a background activity not requiring our full attention, this opens up a number of new avenues such as adding music to a whole slew of apps that are complementary.

I’m pretty excited to see some mobile apps that integrate these APIs in a smart way. Mobile music is a very natural behavior and seeing how this develops using SoLoMo (social location mobile) principles will change the way music is experienced. Imagine walking through a city and getting playlists based on where you are or listening to music from your nearby network. Or checking into a bar on Foursquare and instantly knowing what music is playing and seeing what their patrons’ favorite music is. I’m confident that the next great music experience is yet to be created. But I bet it’ll be an elegant combination of 2-3 key features that strike a chord.

The figures will vary from campaigns to platforms and clients but the principles presented here are key. Remember, ROI is return on investment and investing properly requires investing in the right things over the appropriate time period.

If you had asked me whether or not the big cable companies would ever allow streaming content to anything other than through their tightly controlled cable boxes, I would have been skeptical. They’ve shown time and time again that they’re extremely conservative about adopting new distribution channels that could potentially disrupt their existing business models. While I don’t necessarily agree with that thinking, it’s a mentality that hampers innovation and ultimately puts your company in a non-competitive position. A few years ago, that thinking would have been fine, but not anymore.

With more and more alternative sources of entertainment coming from streaming video companies like Netflix accounting for over 20% of prime time internet traffic and YouTube and Netflix going as far as investing in video production, the dynamics of competition have shifted. No longer are the alternatives just distributors but now originators of content. This expands their competitive arsenal into arenas that haven’t seen innovation like this in over a decade. For starters, both Netflix and YouTube are available on practically every IP-enabled platform you can find whereas cable companies have been loathe to enable native streaming to anything but their closed set top boxes. Consumers everywhere started getting their content elsewhere.

Recently, both Comcast and Time Warner Cable released iPad apps that allow streaming of a limited set of content to users via their home-based networks. I was pretty excited to see this as it was completely free to download and there were no additional monthly fees. It is a very welcome, overdue tactical move that was badly needed. For the cable co’s, it’s a bold move that would otherwise have meant charging consumers for a separate box. Whether this is a simply a short-term babystep or a giant leap forward towards a consumer-centric philosophy remains to be seen.

But a new and arguably simpler way of targeting ads using the social graph based your personal connections is proving to be more effective. Facebook has not only taken over Google’s lead in visitor traffic, but has very quickly become  fertile ground for advertisers to reach switched on prospects. In addition, they’ve been able to undercut other sites’ CPMs, going as low as $0.60 (compared with $2.50-$10 for competitors) making it even more attractive from an advertiser’s perspective.Google has been caught flat-footed in the social marketing space. Not only have they been unable to launch — and maintain — a social network, they seem to have adopted a build it and they will come approach to social computing. Their previous attempts (Orkut, Dodgeball, Jaiku, Wave, Buzz, Aardvark, etc.) have all fallen spectacularly short for myriad reasons. The one thing these failures have in common is a lack of real innovative utility that people actually care about. They were all either developed or acquired as “me too” approaches that lacked a specific Google point of view that resonated with regular people. Their latest “+1″ program looks to compete with Facebook “Like” button. Again, another me too approach that doesn’t significantly differentiate.

To help refocus the company, new CEO Larry Page announced that all Google employees’ bonuses would be directly linked to their success in social strategy. To some, this was a sign that Google has grown too big and lost its ability to deliver meaningful innovation. To me, it’s a carrot that they will be chasing for some time to come.

4/10/2011 Edit: Looks like Google’s Yelp competitor, Hotpot has just been rolled into Google Places. A -1 for Google.

It used to be that a product’s success depended upon how well it differentiated itself on the basis of what it was able to do. In the world of software, that generally meant the more features something had, the better off it was deemed. For the hundreds of features Microsoft Office has, it turns out that the vast majority of customers only used 10% of the total features, leaving 90% to a very small, very long tail of users.

Reductionism took hold in recent years, with Apple’s approach to music players. While competitors took the tack of adding FM tuners, video codec support and other ancillary features, Apple focused on simplicity of operation and music acquisition. The rest is history.

As the software market evolves and integrates social media and mobile expectations, we’re seeing a similar phenomenon where the best apps are those that focus on feature quality rather than feature quantity. One of the hot new apps is Instagr.am, the mobile photo sharing network. Combining funky photo filters (like Hipstamatic) and enabling sharing and discovery, the developers have created an overnight sensation with now over 3 million users in just 6 months. The experience couldn’t be simpler. The bare-bones functionality forces users to get creative in its application, just as Twitter’s 140-character limit encouraged brevity and efficiency. Just as Twitter is known for microblogging current trends, Instagr.am has now become known for photo storytelling. Whereas most photo apps focused on the image transformation aspect, Instagr.am made images look great, made them instantly shareable and made it fast. They never set out to do so, but by focusing on doing a handful of key elements well, founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger have managed to create not just an app, but an personal experience that defines their brand.

This is a fantastic breakdown of smartphone market share in the U.S. from Nielsen.The first thing that jumps out at me are the large blocks covered by Apple and RIM, which collectively have 54%. We also see long, tall columns for HP/webOS and Symbian (which despite its weak showing in N.America, is quite strong in other regions).

Where things get interesting is how Android and Windows Mobile split out between vendors. HTC made smart bets and leads Android. Motorola has made a comeback of sorts, carving out a healthy 10% of the market and Samsung has also made clear its future is with Android. Whether or not either of these companies will try to expand share by adopting Windows Phone remains to be seen. From what I’ve read, Motorola is betting on Android, though Samsung may adopt WP7 in the near future.

The last piece is whether or not HP has the clout to make webOS a real contender. I’ve always felt that their deep experience in the healthcare and imaging space would be a great place to dominate, and it seems ripe with opportunity. Imagine a complete vertical vendor for health care professionals from back office to medical imaging and communication.

I’d love to see this same graphic a year from now, as each of the players stakes their positions. Moreover, once the tablet wars begin in earnest, I imagine this landscape could start to make some interesting shifts.