If I weren't so passionate about the ways that mobile devices are changing the world, I'd be spending my time in one of the following three areas:  Crypto currencies like Bitcoin, the commercialization of drones, and the rise of 3D printing.

The crowd in 2005 vs. 2013 when the new pope was announced.

Yeah, mobile is totally just a fad.

Today at the Mobile Marketing Association's NYC Forum, the CMO of The Home Depot, Trish Mueller, gave a gangbusters presentation on the impact mobile has had to her company.

As she was showing off what The Home Depot's mobile app can do, she mentioned that users of the app can literally place a physical bolt onto the screen of an app to correctly size the bolt, making it easier to find the bolt in the store:

You can find more fascinating stats from Trish's presentation below, but to zoom out and be more macro for a bit: The app's bolt functionality is an awesome example of something that my co-founder Isaac and I have been discussing a lot recently:

That's Barg wearing Google Glass above and also below

A DC-based startup called dSky9 is creating some super interesting apps for Google Glass.  At yesterday's Mobile Outlook 2013 event, the founders Barg & Greg showed off a Glass Simulator they've created to develop apps for Google Glass.

A few interesting things about Glass:

Paul Sherman, the editor of Pototmac Tech Wire, puts on an awesome Mobile Outlook panel every year.  I participated in 2010 and 2011 and again this year at USA Today's Gannett HQ in McLean, VA.  It's funny to go back and watch the older panels when we asked for a show of hands -- back then, everyone was using Blackberry phones and only a few early adopters had Android phones.  Oh, how quickly things change -- at this year's panel the ratio was reversed.  And interestingly, nobody was using a WindowsPhone device.

As I get into angel investing, I'm creating a framework with which to evaluate potential opportunities, which I presented as a keynote at the event.  My main message:  Find the good ideas that are masquerading as bad ideas -- therein lie the billion dollar exits.  This is a tip I picked up from Paul Graham's excellent Black Swan Farming essay.  Here's a Venn diagram of what these "good ideas in hiding" look like:

This is super counter-intuitive, because we all tend to look for the good ideas, both as entrepreneurs and as investors.  In the slides below, you'll see that the framework I'm developing focuses on teams that can prototype & iterate quickly, are doing something in a meaningfully large market, and can "dump the poop," or pivot quickly when it turns out that a bad idea is actually just that:  A bad idea, and not a good idea in hiding.

Priceonomics just posted a fascinating story mulling over the future of journalism.  Here's one eye opening stat from the story:

Jazz Tigan, the creator of Hugalopes (a "fuzzy Mr. Potato Head" plush toy) and I sat down to discuss entrepreneurism, knowledge sharing, hyper efficiency on a computer, the Socialize acquisition and many other topics in this wide ranging chat.

But the most incredible moment of our talk happened in the last 10 minutes.