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News From The Social Robot

2012-01-31T07:34:00.001-04:00

News From The Social Robot

Gang Members Keep in Touch With Social Media

Posted: 30 Jan 2012 01:50 PM PST

Growing up as a white girl in rural Kansas, my knowledge of gangs was very limited. Yes, I'm part Italian, but it's not like we're born with a copy of "Mobbing 101." Somewhere down the line, I probably have a distant relative that slung handguns or laundered cash, a respectable living in the eyes of the mob. But seeing as they don't like talking about their highly illegal professions, I got all of my drug trafficking facts from the media; rap songs and Hollywood literally taught me everything I knew about gangs.

From the section of Goodfellas I didn't sleep through, I learned three distinct features about mob members: they had nervous habits, no qualms about cheating on their wives, and they are super organized. Extensive measures were taken to ensure fluidity and well-executed plans. There were calling trees (this was before email) to keep everyone informed, code words for security, driving routes. And most everyone had a specific job, like it was a union. If these men had been looking for a business front to exploit, they would have been great professional organizers.

Gangs Update with the Times

But as the years passed and rotary dial phones were no longer the preferred way of communication, the gangs improved their contact methods. Email is now ready in virtually any place with an Internet connection, and social media can be accessed by anyone who has the ability to lie about their age – an act of fraud that I'm betting is no cause for concern within a mob.

According to a book based on organized crime, gangs have been taking notice to all the available technology. Street gangs, especially in Chicago, use social media accounts to make plans, recruit new members, and bully others. The text, The Gang Book, by The Chicago Crime Commission – an organization dedicated to exposing preventing Chicago-area crimes – tells how elaborate and sophisticated the methods have become. (You didn't think it'd be obvious, right? Like invites to an event labeled "Weekly Mob Mixer" or tweets saying "Meet me at the bank at 1 a.m. don't forget your Glock, silencer, and ski mask." Ok, good.)

Because law enforcement has a hard time keeping track of the constant updates to social media and electronic equipment, it's relatively easy for gang members to communicate online. For example, users can have multiple profiles and aliases, making it virtually impossible to track whose linked to which accounts. Throw in a series of code words and plausible-sounding life facts, and police may never be the wiser to these fake profiles. Unfortunately, there's not a section that deciphers law-abiding Facebook users from chin-deep mob bosses.

Preventative Measures

The Gang Book, according to the commission's president, Jody Weis, was created to help prevent the spread of gangs and its crimes. Investigators can use the book as a reference point in investigations. While parents can use the book to teach their children about the dangers and warning signs of gang activity.

To find out more, head to CBSnews.com. And The Gang Book can be found on Amazon, or at select libraries.

Screen shot taken 1-20-12.

The Latest from TechCrunch

2012-01-30T13:20:00.001-04:00

The Latest from TechCrunch

Mobile Shopping App CheckPoints Rebrands As InMarket To Broaden Focus
Zynga Accused Of Ripping Off Another Competitor’s Game
Clio Grabs $6 Million To Help Bring Small Legal Practices To The Cloud
In Partnership With Microsoft, RIM Launches BlackBerry Business Cloud Services
$300 Samsung Galaxy Note Will Hit AT&T On February 19
Pew: More Than Half Of Adults Used Cell Phones In Stores For Purchasing Decisions During The Holidays
Yahoo Shuts Down 10 Mobile Apps, Says Its Going “Mobile First” (?)
Flying People Spotted Over New York City…Film At Nine
Tablet Shipments To Reach 383.3 Million By 2017, 46% In Emerging Markets
With Funds Frozen & Bills Due, Megaupload’s Servers May Be Wiped As Soon As Thursday
WiGig: Panasonic Tablet Wirelessly Transmits A Full DVD Video In 60 Seconds (Video)
nanox: High-Quality iPod nano Watch Conversion Kit
Future Simple Releases First Full-blown CRM Android App For Small Businesses
Glooko Raises $3.5M To Connect Glucose Meters To iPhones For Tracking Diabetes
Kayak Redesigns Travel Search Portal ; Now Consistent With Mobile UI
Podio Adds New Languages As It Scales Internationally
GetHired Nabs $1.75 Million To Launch Its Video-Centric Recruiting Platform & Job Board
DMARC Promises A World Of Less Phishing
Gadgets Week in Review: Take Flight
After Leo DiCaprio Invests, Lance Armstrong Races To Promote, Advise Mobli

Mobile Shopping App CheckPoints Rebrands As InMarket To Broaden Focus

Posted: 30 Jan 2012 09:00 AM PST

CheckPoints, a mobile shopping app that launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2010, is rebranding today as InMarket.

CheckPoints takes a more product centric approach to its shopping app. When you walk into a store, the app will show you featured products that you can scan with the built-in barcode reader. After scanning, you’ll receive an interactive game that a marketer has made for that brand, allowing marketers to actually directly connect with consumers at the point of sale. As opposed to partnering with stores, CheckPoints focused on brands.

Consumers are incentivized to scan products because it earns them "checkpoints" which can be redeemed for discounts and products once you have enough. For example, Frito-Lay has used CheckPoints to advertise a promo for their Tostitos Artisan Recipes. When consumers scan a Frito-Lay product, they will earn points and receive holiday recipe ideas and exclusive music content from Frito-Lay.

Today, CheckPoints has expanded to become inMarket, a mobile network focused on reaching shoppers as they make retail purchasing decisions. The CheckPoints rewards app will be one of the shopping apps included in the InMarket network, and inMarket's new SDK developer platform, which is set for release in coming weeks.

As founder and president Todd Dipaola explains, InMarket’s goal is to become the go-to platform for developers and advertisers to reach mobile-enabled shoppers. A number of app developers are using InMarket already to gain reach, including ShopSavvy.

Dipaola says the inMarket Shopper Network currently has the capability to reach over 20 million consumers across multiple channels and says that purchase intent has increased by up to 400% by engaging with a shopper via mobile technologies while holding a product. “Mobile is the most powerful in the commerce cycle when consumers are making purchasing decision,” says Dipaola.

Basically, InMarket provides brands with “pay-per-click” advertising in the physical retail setting. Advertisers can target a particular chain, a region, or even an individual store. And the platform gives developers the ability to integrate an SDK to integrate product incentives into shopping apps.

“The loyalty app itself is not whole enchilada of mobile shopping,” says Dipaola,”Expanding beyond to additional apps that help shoppers do what they want to do in stores and at home will help advertisers expand brands beyond a single app.”

Currently, InMarket is cash flow positive, and not looking to raise any additional funds at the moment. Dipaola says that in the coming year, the startup will be looking at a number of acquisitions.

Zynga Accused Of Ripping Off Another Competitor’s Game

Posted: 30 Jan 2012 08:48 AM PST

Last week, the developers at NimbleBit (makers of iOS Game of the Year, Tiny Tower) accused Zynga of copying them with its new game, Dream Heights. Now, it’s happening again. This time, the accusation comes from Buffalo Studios, which says that the gaming giant copied its flagship title Bingo Blitz with its launch of Zynga Bingo.

The news, reported first by VentureBeat, involves accusations from Buffalo Studios that Zynga’s newest title involves “striking similarities” in terms of its graphics, layout and game play with its own Bingo Blitz. The company also released an infographic which (sarcastically) began: ”Hello Zynga. We are moved that your new game was so inspired by our innovative product, BINGO Blitz…,” before continuing on with a serious of screenshots showing examples of the similarities in question.

However, unlike the situation with NimbleBit, it doesn’t appear that Zynga first attempted to acquire Buffalo Studios prior to the launch of the new title.

Bingo Blitz claims to have over one million daily active users, according to the infographic, and has been “liked” nearly 2.5 million times.

While it’s notable that the high-profile Zynga is the company being targeted here in terms of stealing its “inspiration,” (especially since Zynga itself once targeted its own copycats via lawsuits), game developers ripping off each others’ work seems to be the new normal for the industry. Lawyers, start your engines. If a company as large as Zynga is playing dirty, there’s bound to be lawsuits aplenty ahead.

Image credit: Buffalo Studios, via VentureBeat

Clio Grabs $6 Million To Help Bring Small Legal Practices To The Cloud

Posted: 30 Jan 2012 08:00 AM PST

Lawyers have long been the punchline for jokes, whether it be for their ambulance chasing ways, or for having a penchant for greed and chaos, or charging an armload for their services. However, there are a number of services out there that are trying to make the legal profession’s web presences less of a laughing matter. While there’s a perception that most lawyers work in big law firms, 80 percent of the legal market is comprised of solo practitioners or small firms. With meager support staffs and no IT departments to speak of, these solo practitioners and small firms quickly become over-burdened with the administrative side of their business.

That’s where services like Clio come in. Clio is a web-based management tool for the legal industry, providing lawyers with collaborative and secure ways to manage their practice and interact with clients.

Today, the cloud-based management service is announcing that it has raised $6 million in series B financing from Acton Capital Partners, a Munich-based growth equity fund and Point Nine Capital, an early-stage VC firm based in Berlin. This brings Clio’s total funding to $7 million. The company will use this new infusion of capital to push product and feature development around its technology, add support for its growing customer base, and expand internationally. Currently, the U.S. represents 95 percent of Clio’s customer base, and Founder and CEO Jack Newton says that he wants to change that and is eyeing Europe, Canada, and Australia.

While the legal industry has been largely perceived as being slow to adopt modern technologies, Clio’s opportunity lies in helping transition the many small practices out there to the cloud. Like MyCase and Rocket Matter, Clio wants to make it easy for lawyers to manage their practices from a cloud-backed web management system. The service enables lawyers to keep lawyerin’ by tracking notes, time, and client information for all of their cases.

Maintaining a diary of all one’s cases is essential for most litigators, and Clio helps small practices keep tabs on upcoming court dates and deadlines all in one place, enabling them to add a slew of individual cases into one task list, all without having to hire a support staff. Integrating with Google Apps, too, helps lawyers sync their schedules with Google Calendar as well as sync contacts and take advantage of a single sign-on.

Beyond case and billing management, Clio also enables small practices to take advantage of trust accounting and detailed reporting, and offers a secure portal for exchanging information and collaborating with clients, in addition to an offline time-capture application. As with so many other industries, legal practices are moving to the cloud, and Clio has been one of the pioneers in helping the industry move forward. With $6 million in new funding, expect that legal train to keep on rolling.

For more, check out Clio at home here.

In Partnership With Microsoft, RIM Launches BlackBerry Business Cloud Services

Posted: 30 Jan 2012 07:54 AM PST

Microsoft and BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM) are teaming up today on the public release of BlackBerry Business Cloud Services for Microsoft Office 365, a name which surely Microsoft itself had a hand in creating. The new service will allow corporate customers to manage their deployed BlackBerry devices using Exchange Online, the hosted version of Microsoft’s messaging platform.

The addition comes at no extra cost to current subscribers of the Office 365 suite or the standalone Exchange Online offering, and supports any BlackBerry devices, whether on a business or consumer data plan.

Once enabled, the managed BlackBerry smartphones will be able to sync with Microsoft Exchange Online email, calendar and organizer data. BlackBerry Balance, a new technology that helps admins manage the corporate data on the device, while leaving personal data untouched, will also be available with this new offering. I.T. will be able to manage the phones using a web-based console, but employees will have access to self-service tools for password and device resets, remote lock and remote wipe functions.

BlackBerry Business Cloud Services is live now in 50 countries. More info is here.

Partnerships like this are one of the reasons why some mobile industry insiders believe that RIM could be a viable acquisition target for Microsoft. The companies are already working so closely together to integrate their technologies, and both share a similar end user customer base: the enterprise market. Reports that RIM has even engaged in takeover talks with Microsoft emerged in December, but nothing has yet to come of that. Instead, the company’s recent moves like the co-CEO step-down and (misguided) statements from new CEO Thorsten Heins ("I don't think any drastic change is needed") imply that company is attempting a turnaround, not putting itself on the auction block. At least for now.

$300 Samsung Galaxy Note Will Hit AT&T On February 19

Posted: 30 Jan 2012 07:46 AM PST

Samsung isn’t the first company to break into the phablet space, but those of you waiting for a (more than) worthy successor to devices like the Dell Streak 5 won’t have much longer to wait. AT&T has just announced that their pocket-busting Galaxy Note will be hitting their sales channels on February 19, complete with a $300 price tag.

Most of the device’s details — 5.3-inch HD Super AMOLED display, LTE radio, and handwriting support thanks to the included S-Pen — were revealed or reiterated at this year’s CES, but now the question is whether or not people will take the plunge on a device that’s not quite a phone and not quite a tablet.

AT&T hasn’t exactly priced the Galaxy Note to move, but they’re not alone on that front. We’ve seen Verizon adopt the $300 price tag for most of their recent high-end smartphone releases, though AT&T has typically shied away from pricing their smartphones so steeply. They’re probably hoping that the novelty of a device that hovers somewhere between being phone and a tablet will be enticing enough to justify the price, but we’ll soon see how the public at large takes to Samsung’s fabulous phablet.

If you’re the type who likes getting things before everyone else (and really, who isn’t?), you may want to wake up bright and early on the February 5th. AT&T is pushing their pre-order process with the promise of a Galaxy Note in your hands a full two days before it makes its way to store shelves, and I can imagine more than few phablet fans using that 48-hour window to rub their new purchase in other people’s faces.

Pew: More Than Half Of Adults Used Cell Phones In Stores For Purchasing Decisions During The Holidays

Posted: 30 Jan 2012 07:14 AM PST

The Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project is releasing a new study today that provides further evidence of the growing trend of consumers using mobile phones in stores for purchasing decisions. Pew says that more than half of adult cell phone owners used their cell phones while they were in a store to seek help with purchasing decisions this past holiday shopping season.

According to the report, 38% of cell owners used their phone to call a friend while they were in a store for advice about a purchase they were considering making And 24% of cell owners used their phone to look up reviews of a product online while they were in a store, with 25% of adult cell owners using their phones to look up the price of a product online while they were in a store, to see if they could get a better price somewhere else.

One third (33%) used their phone specifically for online information while inside a physical store—either product reviews or pricing information. In fact, one in five "mobile price matchers" ultimately made their most recent purchase from an online store, rather than a physical location.

This is interesting considering Amazon’s move over the holidays to offer discounts to consumers on any product purchased via its price comparison mobile app. This was a huge blow to physical retailers, who called the move unfair.

Pew reports that cell owners ages 18-49 are significantly more likely to use their phones for online product reviews than are cell owners ages 50 and older. Cell owners ages 65 and older are especially unlikely to use their phones to look up information in stores—just 4% did so this holiday season.

In terms of other demographics, urban and suburban cell owners are roughly twice as likely as rural cell owners to have recently used their phone to look up online reviews of a product they found in a physical store.

Unsurprisingly, online price matching and looking up online reviews frequently go hand in hand. Overall, of the 33% of cell owners who used their phone recently in a store to look up either product reviews or prices online, roughly half (representing 17% of all cell owners) used their phones to engage in both of these activities.

When asked what happened on the most recent occasion where they used their phone to look up the price online of a product they found in a store, mobile price matchers point to a range of outcomes: 37% decided to not purchase the product at all, 35% purchased the product at that store, 19% purchased the product online and 8% purchased the product at another store.

While we’ve been witnessing the fact that mobile is becoming a significant part of the in-store and online shopping experience, the Pew report’s data only emphasizes this trend. And although consumers tend to shop at increased levels during the holiday season, there’s no doubt that mobile is going to be an important engagement platform for both online and brick and mortar retailers throughout the year.

Yahoo Shuts Down 10 Mobile Apps, Says Its Going “Mobile First” (?)

Posted: 30 Jan 2012 07:12 AM PST

Yahoo is moving forward with a “mobile first” mindset, the company stated via blog post late last week, then incongruously announced it would be shuttering 10 of its mobile applications. The list, which contains a mix of iPhone, Android and BlackBerry apps, includes an odd, and somewhat surprising group of underperforming properties. Yahoo Deals, News, Shopping, Finance and Movies, were included among the shutdowns, for example.

Yahoo isn’t cutting all of its News and Finance apps, however – only those on platforms it hasn’t found to be worth the effort to support, it appears. Also, Yahoo’s bread-and-butter apps like Mail and Messenger are safe, as well as newer apps like its TV companion IntoNow and its iPad mag Livestand.

As for Sketch-a-Search and AppSpot, the apps’ technologies won’t be abandoned, but will rather be incorporated into Yahoo’s main search app.

The full list of apps being shut down includes:

Yahoo! Meme (iPad and iPhone)
Yahoo! Mim (iPad)
Yahoo! Answers (Android)
Yahoo! AppSpot (Android and iPhone)
Yahoo! Deals (iPhone)
Yahoo! Finance (BlackBerry)
Yahoo! Movies (Android)
Yahoo! News (Android)
Yahoo! Shopping (iPhone)
Yahoo! Sketch-a-Search (iPad and iPhone)

I’ll be honest – I don’t remember hearing of Meme or Mim, so those won’t be missed, I’ll wager. However, it’s a little surprising to see Finance dumped from BlackBerry – after all, who still rocks a ‘berry, but those busy banker/corporate types who constantly check headlines and stock quotes? And neither Yahoo Shopping nor Deals apps could survive on the phones preferred by those with disposable incomes (that is, the iPhone)? Crazy.

Given the news, it was kind of funny to read Yahoo’s declaration of its “mobile first” ambitions, but what the company means is that it’s going to spend time on its more innovative and popular apps, and less on these general purpose (read: boring) creations.

Flying People Spotted Over New York City…Film At Nine

Posted: 30 Jan 2012 06:46 AM PST

In a recent publicity venture for their new movie “Chronicle”, 20th Century Fox enlisted the help of viral marketing agency Thinkmodo to design and execute a rather unique campaign element that surely caused several doubletakes over the New York City skyline.

If you thought you saw some flying humans in the sky over parts of New York City and New Jersey in the last couple of weeks you are, in fact, not crazy. You were merely exposed to a new kind of avant garde marketing technique brought to you by the same folks that unleashed the iPad Head Girl a few months back.

Michael Krivicka from Thinkmodo explains:

“Since the three main characters of the movie have the ability to fly, we came up with the idea of staging a few “flying people” sightings around NYC. We achieved that illusion by having 3 custom-made aircraft (which were shaped like human beings) fly above designated areas in NYC and NJ.”

Here’s a quick video documenting the concept and the flights.

I personally think it’s a ballsy, creative and unique advertising tactic, yet I struggle with wondering how a person would tie the two things together — the movie and the freaky sightings.

In my mind, I guess the optimal scenario would be that a person who had already seen the movie trailer, would later see flying people and then make the connection. Or a person might connect the dots after a sighting, when seeing an additional advertisement for the film. If you never see the trailer at all, you might just end up calling the police or your local Area 51 support group for advice.

Whatever the effect, I am still a proponent of these kinds of marketing exercises and I don’t think this is money spent in vain. This was only a single component of a larger campaign so it’s not like the whole movie is riding on it. Plus, the word of mouth generated by events like this can be powerful.

Even if it’s only realized after the fact, an event like this can bring a smile to the face of a consumer and bring some cool cred to 20th Century Fox for being gutsy and reaching a local area with a unique message. That ephemeral “oh, now I get it” moment can be extremely valuable even if the number of people experiencing it measures only in the hundreds.

Bravo!

Tablet Shipments To Reach 383.3 Million By 2017, 46% In Emerging Markets

Posted: 30 Jan 2012 06:36 AM PST

Post-PC era? Here we come: According to new data from NPD, tablet PC shipments are expected to grow from 72.7 million units in 2011 to 383.3 million units by 2017. For comparison purposes, worldwide PC shipments for 2011 were 352.8 million, after seeing a 6% decline in Q4.

While those numbers are remarkable enough on their own, what’s really interesting is where much of the growth will come from: the emerging market.

Emerging markets are expected to account for up to 46% of worldwide shipments by 2017, up from the 36% share in 2011.

“The emerging market opportunity for tablets has been flying under the radar mainly because the device brands aren't household names and there are concerns regarding the sustainability of the market,” says NPD Senior Analyst Richard Shim. But the firm believes that won’t always be the case. “We are beginning to see investments by some of the better known brands in developing regions, and we expect this to not only continue, but to flourish as competition improves,” he notes.

The tablet surge won’t be courtesy of the iPad alone, especially in these emerging markets. Specifically, the report cited the introduction of new brands like Aakash in India, for example, as well as older brands like Dell, as contributing the overall tablet growth.

China and the Asia Pacific regions are leading in terms of tablet penetration rates in emerging markets at present, but Brazil, India, Russia and other countries are also becoming bigger forces, says NPD. And the key to unlocking this growth comes low-power processors and tablets with price points under $100.

In addition to the growth in emerging markets, NPD also believes that other growth will come as the tablet platform itself evolves through technological advances. That evolution comes first from higher pixel densities, then later from higher performance. The changes will segment the market into “premium” and “value” category tablets. (Any guess where iPad will be?)

Believe it or not, it even sounds like Microsoft might still be in the running as a tablet competitor, if NPD’s related survey data is to be believed. According to a survey of U.S. commercial tablet owners, 39% indicated that having a Windows OS option as a part of their next tablet purchase was “very important” to them. But let’s wait to see which tablet they end up buying – saying and doing are often very different things.

With Funds Frozen & Bills Due, Megaupload’s Servers May Be Wiped As Soon As Thursday

Posted: 30 Jan 2012 06:33 AM PST

First the US Justice Department raided Kim Dotcom’s sprawling New Zealand estate and seized random items from cars to Predator statues. Then they shut down the massive website, froze their assets and threw seven men into a New Zealand jail pending an extradition trial.

Dotcom and his cronies weren’t the only ones felling the pinch, though. Megaupload’s 180 million reported users were left locked out, unable to access their files. Now those files might be deleted forever as soon as Thursday.

The word comes from a letter to Megaupload from the US Attorney indicating that since the Justice Dept. already executed their search warrants, they were done with the servers. Because of past due bills, the management was delegated to the storage hosting companies, Carpathia Hosting Inc. and Cogent Communications Group Inc, who can start wiping the servers as soon as this Thursday, February 2, 2012.

Megaupload’s legal team is actively seeking the help of the prosecutors to prevent the data genocide.

Upon filing the charges against Megaupload, the company’s funds were frozen. Without cash Megaupload cannot pay the past-due bills to turn the servers back on. However, Megaupload’s lawyers are arguing that the company needs its servers and the files they contain for the company’s legal defense. Hopefully, if the this tactic is successful, users will once again gain at least read-only access to their files.

"Megaupload's assets were frozen by the United States. Mega needs funds unfrozen to pay for bandwidth, hosting, and systems administration in order to allow consumers to get access to their data stored in the Mega cloud and to back up the same for safekeeping." MegaUpload lawyer Ira Rothken told TorrentFreak.

Megaupload might be gone forever. Many of its users probably learned their lesson to entrust critic data to the cloud. But won’t someone please think of the innocent files? Someone?!

WiGig: Panasonic Tablet Wirelessly Transmits A Full DVD Video In 60 Seconds (Video)

Posted: 30 Jan 2012 06:06 AM PST

WiGig, a multi-gigabit speed wireless communications technology, was first announced back in 2009, but it’s taking companies like Panasonic quite a while to come up with applications that make use of it. Via WiGig, devices can communicate with each other at multi-gigabit speeds using the 60 GHz frequency band.

Panasonic has developed a prototype system, in which WiGig is embedded in a tablet that can wirelessly transmit data like photos or videos to displays mounted in the passenger seats of a car. That car has to be nearby: while Wi-Fi typically has a transmission range of about 30m, WiGig’s range is just 1-3m (Bluetooth: around 10m).

The tablet you can see in the video embedded below transmits a “full DVD video” in 60 seconds, according to Diginfo TV (which shot the video). WiGig, in the 1.1 specification, boasts a data transmission rate of up to 7 Gbit/s.

Panasonic is currently in the process of developing WiGig SD cards that are supposed to be commercialized in summer next year. WiGig-compatible phones are apparently on their way, too.

Here’s the video (in English):

nanox: High-Quality iPod nano Watch Conversion Kit

Posted: 30 Jan 2012 05:37 AM PST

Do you own the latest version of the iPod nano (sixth generation)? Do you look for a way to turn it into a watch? If yes, then this watch conversion kit might be the right solution for you. Dubbed nanox, the kit just went on sale in a total of 39 countries via Amazon (US, UK, Japan), and it’s probably the one with the highest quality out there (Facebook page).

Made from aircraft-grade anodized aluminum, the nanox is available in the seven colors Apple offers the iPod nano itself in. The kit, which doesn’t require using tools or screws, comes with 2mm thin straps made of 100% silicone and an anti-glare sheet for the nano display.

Maker emonster says the nanox is produced at the same factory as other Apple devices (it’s made of the same aluminum 6061 alloy Apple uses for its products). The kit was designed by acclaimed Japanese designer Noriaki Miyata.

And quality has its price: the nanox costs US$125.99 in the US Amazon store (£79.99 in the UK, Yen 9,800 in Japan).

Future Simple Releases First Full-blown CRM Android App For Small Businesses

Posted: 30 Jan 2012 05:35 AM PST

Chicago-based but Israeli-founded Future Simple, a startup that creates products aimed at small businesses, has released an Android app which hooks into their small business CRM. It’s the first Small Business CRM with a true full native Android app and appears to be the first CRM in the Android Market. They already had an iPhone app.

Glooko Raises $3.5M To Connect Glucose Meters To iPhones For Tracking Diabetes

Posted: 30 Jan 2012 05:00 AM PST

Glooko, the developer of a unique hardware device and mobile app solution for people with diabetes, has raised $3.5 million in Series A funding led by The Social+Capital Partnership, with participation from existing investors, including Bill Campbell, Vint Cerf, Judy Estrin and Andy Hertzfeld, Venky Harinarayan, Russell Hirsch and Xtreme Labs. Chamath Palihapitiya, Founder and Managing Partner of The Social+Capital Partnership will be joining Glooko’s board.

Launched last year, Glooko is a digital logbook for people with diabetes who have to check their blood sugar every day. There are dozens of glucose logbooks in iTunes, but almost all of them require manual entry. What makes Glooko different is that the company designed a $40 cable (sold separately) that works with seven of the top glucose meters. You just plug it into both devices and it downloads your daily readings.

The app itself is free. The digital log book allows users to review daily blood sugar levels, annotate them and share the results with their physician. It lets you mark whether the reading was done before or after a meal, add notes, and email or fax a 14-day summary to your doctor. The company charges for the cable.

Glooko today released a new version of the Glooko Logbook app that supports the Bayer’s Breeze 2 meter, including a real-time food database, a 30-day logbook, and provides availability in Canada.

There are currently 25 million people living with diabetes in the U.S. today, and Yogen Dalal, Glooko co-founder and chairman, said that people with blood sugar meters couldn’t do anything but read results on the meter itself, making logging results a visualizing this data cumbersome. While there have been a number of digital readers that have emerged on the market over the past year which plug into smartphones, the beauty of Glooko is that it works with the top seven devices on the market. So users don’t need to purchase and learn how to use a whole new measurement device.

"Proactive and ongoing self-management of one's health can now be a reality using mobile devices and well-designed software," said Palihapitiya. "Glooko has made important progress in helping individuals better manage one of the most pervasive diseases of our generation."

There is also future potential in actually analyzing the data collected from users. Parsing and plotting these data points on a graph requires FDA clearance, explains Dalal.

Dalal says Glooko currently has 1,000 plus users, and the response has been overwhlemingly positive. He adds that Android integration is on the horizon. The new funding will be used to expand to other platforms and for user acquisition.

Kayak Redesigns Travel Search Portal ; Now Consistent With Mobile UI

Posted: 30 Jan 2012 05:00 AM PST

After redesigning its iPad app and consolidating the app with its iPhone cousin, travel search company Kayak is updating the UI for its web search portal today. The aim with the redesign is to create a more universal and comprehensive consumer experience across all Kayak platforms: web, mobile web and apps.

One of the biggest changes users will see is that there is considerable more white space on the search results page. Kayak is also using bold fonts less often. As co-founder and CTO, Paul English explains to us, the company studies what users are clicking on and realized that putting less information on the page would provide a better user experience for consumers.

Kayak will now be showing people fewer results by default, says English. For example, with flight search, Kayak will show a smaller set of results that give the greatest set of options for users. And there are fewer filters that are shown by default as well. For example, with hotels the filters that will be shown in results by default include star rating, price, brand and location. By clicking on a link, users can add more filters such as amenities, type of property and more.

English says that Kayak will also be more strict about which display ads will be shown to users. The aim is for ads to be more aesthetically consistent with the site to improve the user experience.

We know that Kayak has been eyeing a public offering for over a year now, filing its S-1 in 2010. As AllThingsD reported in September, the company put its IPO on hold until market conditions improved. In a recent S-1 filing, the company revealed that revenue and profits are up. One obstacle that could stunt Kayak’s growth is Google’s entry in the space with it its flight bookings and search portal.

Updating mobile offerings as well as cleaning up the web product and search to create a better user experience could be one factor in helping Kayak remain competitive in the long term.

Here are before and after pictures of the redesign:

BEFORE

AFTER

Podio Adds New Languages As It Scales Internationally

Posted: 30 Jan 2012 04:56 AM PST

We first reviewed online workspace startup Podio on its launch in March last year, and it looked pretty promising. A little like Box.net or 37Signals, Podio is closer to a more sophisticated Yammer, with lots of customising possible via its own internal ‘app’ store. Today it launches in two new language, Brazilian Portuguese and Italian, adding to its existing English, German, French, Danish and Spanish translations. Spilt between San Francisco and Copenhagen offices, Podio is now in use in 170 countries so, as CEO Tommy Ahlers says, the translations now make a lot of sense. Though you would think Chinese might also be a good addition?

GetHired Nabs $1.75 Million To Launch Its Video-Centric Recruiting Platform & Job Board

Posted: 30 Jan 2012 01:46 AM PST

Paper resumes are — or should be — going out of style. They rarely give employers a complete profile of a potential hire, they’re filled with abbreviated bunches of value-less buzzwords (or in my case, action verbs), and the thought of them makes trees cry. You don’t want to make trees cry, do you? No, you don’t. So many companies are turning to alternative, technological means to find the right candidates for job openings, some using algorithms, ranking systems, SaaS solutions like Taleo’s, and more. In fact, one in six are now finding jobs on social networks.

What kind of user generated content is often found posted to social networks? Video. Facebook was, for a time, the number three video site in the U.S. Furthermore, we’re telecommuting more and more frequently, using Skype, Google Hangouts, Facebook video — you name it. Videos are helping startups to explain their products and goals. So, when applied to the hiring process, it would make sense, then, that job videos can enhance the process, for both sides, right?

This is the bet being made by a young startup, founded this year and based in Palo Alto, called GetHired. The startup is today launching a video-based, social recruiting platform and job board that is looking to empower job seekers — allowing them to set themselves apart from the competition — by creating video and audio profiles to accompany their resumes. On the flip side of the boardroom table, GetHired believes that its platform will help employers more effectively discover and manage their applicant pools.

To help it along in its mission, accompanying the launch of the platform, GetHired is today announcing that it has raised $1.75 million in seed funding from a host of angel investors, including CEO of the Global Environment Fund, Jeffrey Leonard, former CEO of Discovery Communications and the former Under Secretary of State For Public Diplomacy And Affairs, Judith McHale, CEO of LegalZoom.com, John Suh, and Mack Capital CEO, Ralph Mack.

With its seed round in tow, GetHired is looking to be the first job board to really focus seriously on video by enabling users to embed video and audio capabilities directly into the platform so that users can replace stale cover letters with more personal, dynamic responses to employers’ pre-screening questions that kick off every hiring process.

GetHired thus allows employers to, at no cost, post open positions online in conjunction with existing job boards, ask pre-screening questions for specific postions, and hopefully search for and pre-screen candidates more efficiently, while starting and finishing the interview process online, in realtime. With video, employers can turn a static pile of resumes into real, human candidates.

And addressing the same issue StartWire is looking to disrupt, GetHired allows job seekers to access realtime updates on the status of their applications, alerting them when an employer shows interest, all the way through until the opening is filled. Applicants hate when they spend hours filling out job applications, only to never hear back — and because this is a notorious problem — many don’t waste time going overboard on their applications. With video and a more multimedia-focused approach to applications, applicants may just be encouraged to spend that extra time.

As for job seekers, GetHired enables them to create a personal video introduction to accompany their resume, or create a public video to use as a form-intro when applying to multiple positions, follow their favorite companies so that they can get updates on any new jobs posted, or upload their interview availability in realtime, so that employers can hop on the early birds — and schedule meetings and interviews in realtime with GetHired’s scheduling features. From video resumes to video interviews, it takes the paper resume and phone interview to the next logical step.

GetHired has a clear and universal value proposition for both job seekers and employers, and it will be interesting to see if white labels its platform, or turns it into SaaS, though it looks like it’s going to be more of a public-facing Indeed.com with video, at least at the start. Either way, the resume is dead, or at least dying a lengthy, prolonged death, and it’s being replaced by more dynamic approaches to hiring and putting your best foot forward. Employers want to connect with people who are talented, yes, but also who they know they can work with day in and day out. Video is just one piece of the puzzle.

It also helps that, at least initially, GetHired is free both for job seekers and employers. However, the company plans to charge employers to post jobs in the future, starting at around $25 a job. The startup’s sizable round of seed funding enables it to launch as a free service, giving it latitude and some time to scale and attract employers and job seekers. Once it does so, no doubt we’ll see the company’s revenue streams come into play, starting with charging for job postings.

As with so many other startups grabbing early funding, GetHired will use its seed round to ramp up hiring (it currently has 14 employees), specifically of engineers, and going after that essential customer acquisition. Also, worth asking this rhetorical question: Why do so many startups emulate Facebook’s UI? Is that really necessary?

For more, check out GetHired at home here.

DMARC Promises A World Of Less Phishing

Posted: 30 Jan 2012 01:31 AM PST

Some 15 companies, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, PayPal plan to jointly work on a standard for blocking phishing e-mails by verifying that they come from legitimate companies. It seems obvious that trusted, legitimate companies could come together to do this, but it’s only started happening in the last 18 months.

DMARC.org – or the Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance – is a new white-list system will be available for use across the Internet.

The other companies in the DMARC working group are AOL, Bank of America, Fidelity Investments, American Greetings, LinkedIn, and e-mail security providers Agari, Cloudmark, eCert, Return Path, and Trusted Domain Project.

The move follows an announcement in November that Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, and Agari were authenticating emails from Facebook, YouSendIt, and other e-commerce companies and social networks.

DMARC said the anti-phishing initiative has actually been going on for the last 18 months.

According to Google, about 15 percent of all e-mail comes from members of DMARC, but by published their DMARC records, these records can not be domain spoofed. This makes the anti-phising group much more effective at stopping criminal gangs from using phasing to dupe unsuspecting users.

DMARC.org plans to submit the DMARC specification to the Internet Engineering Task Force for standardisation.

So perhaps we’ll start to see the ending of phishing once and for all.

Gadgets Week in Review: Take Flight

Posted: 30 Jan 2012 01:00 AM PST

Here’s a selection of stories from the past week on TechCrunch Gadgets:

App-maker Moonbot Gets An Oscar Nomination

Kickstarter: eye3, An Affordable Aerial Photography Drone

Secret Windows 8 Weapon: Kinect Built Into Your Laptop

Twitter Changes The "Contours" Of Censorship With Country-By-Country Blocking

A Really Nice Flying Ornithopter Video For Your Friday Enjoyment

After Leo DiCaprio Invests, Lance Armstrong Races To Promote, Advise Mobli

Posted: 30 Jan 2012 12:59 AM PST

Mobli, the startup behind the eponymous, much-hyped realtime photo and video sharing service, has struck a partnership with road racing cyclist and cancer survivor Lance Armstrong.

Armstrong, a seven-time Tour de France champion, will be making use of a private Mobli channel to keep his fans and followers up-to-date on his life through videos, photos and whatnot.

The man is also joining the startup’s boards of advisors, not too long after another major celebrity, actor Leonardo DiDCaprio, participated in a $4 million funding round for the company.

Said Armstrong:

“When I was first introduced to Mobli, I immediately thought it was an extraordinary platform and an innovative yet accessible way for different audiences to share their stories. I'm excited to use Mobli as a direct channel for my social media followers to get a personal look at my experiences day to day."

The former pro cycler says he will use Mobli to share moments from his training sessions as well as his work with the Lance Armstrong Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on cancer research and support.

Armstrong is no stranger to social media. At the time of writing, he had about 3.2 million followers on Twitter, while his Facebook page has garnered over 2 million ‘likes’.

Bill Stapleton, founder of Capital Sports & Entertainment and Lance Armstrong’s long-time agent, will also work together with Mobli and has also joined the startup’s advisory board along with Armstrong and Andrew Razeghi, an author and professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

History teaches us that celebrity backers and endorsers can only contribute so much to the chances of success for a startup, but this kind of exposure can certainly help this type of service get some early traction more rapidly than usually. If you’re an early user, tell us what you think.

The Latest from TechCrunch

2012-01-29T13:42:00.001-04:00

The Latest from TechCrunch

The Ecommerce Revolution Is All About You
Google, Facebook, Privacy — And You
Curebit Apologizes for Copying 37Signals: “Stupid, Lazy, and Disrespectful”
Apple Buy Hollywood? That’s A Terrible Idea
FounderSoup: Stanford and Andreessen’s New Startup Generator
Kindle Sales Growing Faster Than The Nook’s
Apple’s Off-The-Charts iPhone And iPad Sales
Let’s Get Personalized: Moving Beyond Recommendations
Gillmor Gang 01.28.12 (TCTV)
10 Ways Your Startup Can Hook Into Facebook, Part I: On The Web
Motorola Droid Razr Maxx Review: 4G LTE With Solid Battery Life Just Got Real
Steve Jobs, Superhero
(Founder Stories) SoftTech VC’s Clavier: How To Avoid The Series A Crunch
iNdustrial Revolutions

The Ecommerce Revolution Is All About You

Posted: 29 Jan 2012 08:55 AM PST

Personal recommendations have always been a part of ecommerce, but there has been little innovation since Amazon introduced retail and product personalization 10 years ago. But with the increasing mountains of data at digital retailers’ fingertips, ecommerce is about to get even more personal.

The fact is that right now there is little iteration from personalized ecommerce beyond what is taking place on Amazon. So you’ll see suggestions of what other shoppers who bought a certain item also purchased, or recommendations to similar items to what you have purchased, but there is a whole world of social data, and even more-in-depth purchase data that can be mined by retailers to help increase sales.

Kleiner Perkins partner Aileen Lee agrees with me, “In the future, the best retail sites will know you much better and show you things that are much more relevant.” Lee has helped lead investments in a number of e-commerce companies including Offermatic, One Kings Lane, Plum District, Rent the Runway, and Trendyol and held operating roles at The Gap and North Face.

“We are just at the beginning of a revolution of e-commerce, and existing retailers are going to have to get better at personalizing the experience for consumers,” Lee says.

“Personalization was really important in enabling Amazon to differentiate itself and grow in past ten years,” David Selinger, CEO and co-founder of RichRelevance. Selinger also was Amazon’s Manager, Consumer Behavior Research and helped build some of the site’s personalization features a number of years ago. “Personalization will be the differentiating factor in e-commerce and digital commerce going forward, especially for multichannel retailers and new entrants online.”

Amazon and Netflix represent the first wave of personalization. I believe that we are going to enter into the next wave of a more personalized e-commerce experience as retailers and e-commerce sites move towards mining data to improve sales and conversions.

It's highly likely that you have helped boost Amazon and Netflix’s conversion rates on movies, books, or other products thanks to personalized suggestions of items that you may like based on your previous purchase data, other consumers' purchase history and more. In fact, it's so seamlessly baked into the user experience for both companies, that I tend to not even notice how impactful personalization is on what I purchase.

That’s not to say that Amazon is the only retailer experimenting with personalization. eBay has also been personalizing the marketplace experience with recommendations of similarly viewed or bought items for some time, and is looking to expand personalization efforts with PayPal. And with the recent acquisition of Hunch, we know eBay is going to ramp up data mining.

Recently, I started to receive emails from Gilt Groupe that suggested similar earring to like those those I had added to my wait-list on the e-commerce site. The company also sends personalized email notifications on sales that are tailored to each customer. Gilt, who declined to comment for this piece, seems to realize that personalization is going to be a key product driver for the site in the future. And brick and mortar retailers like Saks Fifth Avenue, and many others are also starting to jump on the personalized email bandwagon.

The Challenges

The best way begin understanding the opportunity of personalization in the future is to realize the immense challenge that retailers face when approaching personalization. As DJ Patil, Data Scientist in Residence at Greylock Partners, explains, “When you go to Nordstrom you have a shopping assistant helps direct you, basically says ‘I’m here to help, what do you need and here’s where to find this.’ No online retailer has quite nailed that,” he explains.

For most retailers, the toughest hurdle is to have enough data on an individual to actually help personalize the experience. For the majority of buyers who purchase from a specific site once every few months, or even less frequently, a retailer may have no real sense of direction on how to present similar products.

Getting these data points is the biggest challenge that retailers face. But retailers do have significant data for the small amount of regular, routine customers for an e-commerce site, including clicks, purchase history, shopping cart information, shares and Likes, and more. Retailers face challenges on how to store and organize this data, and then turn this into personal recommendations

And data comes in various forms. There’s implicit data (which is gained from your everyday actions on a retailer’s site) and explicit data (which you offer to sites via surveys or quizzes). While retailers are doing more with the implicit data (i.e. reminding you when you left items in your shopping cart); no one has yet mastered the art of capturing that precious explicit data.

Google’s Boutiques.com tried its hand at this, as a search engine and fashion site which allowed users to receive personalized clothes and accessory recommendations based on preferences and actions. But Google subsequently shut the portal down last September.

Asking for users to fill out surveys of what they love or like perhaps isn’t the ticket to drawing explicit data, such as brands you love, colors, styles and more. As Patil explains, retailers who ask for this information need to present this as more of a conversation as opposed to replicating the feel of a doctor’s appointment where you are filling out your life history via forms.

Getting these signals from consumers is very difficult from a UI and user experience stand point, he says. His advice to retailers is to find a way to replicate how a store owner or shop keeper would engage you in a conversation when walking into a store and looking for something open-ended, such as a birthday gift. One way to do this is to present a personalized item suggestion but ask the consumer (in a Pandora-like fashion) if the recommendation sucks and how they can make the shopper’s life better “People want to help the system and love to correct things,” Patil says.

And similar to Pandora, people become more invested in a platform that knows their preferences and will be more likely to return.

There’s also the issue of finding the balance between providing serendipity in terms of discovery and personalization. Retailers still want their sites to be this Pandora’s box of discovering items, literally, but personalization can cut down on this discovery process. So retailers need to both anticipate what consumers may want to purchase on the site but also provide items that consumers will be able to feel like they ‘discovered’ on the site.

Patil draws an interesting comparison with how grocery stores have been able to structure their layouts to provide serendipity and useful discovery. “When you go to the supermarket, the stores know you are definitely going to milk aisle, so they often put it in the back of the store, so you can find serendipitous stuff on the way. Online retailers need to replicate that on e-commerce sites.” In the end, the goal is to be able to deliver personalization without being predictable.

At a macro level, retailers also face challenges in finding talent to sort this big data. The difference between doing data personalization well are radical shifts financially for retailers, Selinger explains. The engineers who are able to parse these massive amounts of data are hard to come by, and expensive.

Social

Social data (i.e. the Facebook Likes of products, what products people are recommending on Facebook or Twitter) is going to be a big part of personalization for retailers in the future. Already plenty of retailers are using Facebook social plugins and Connect integrations to leverage Facebook data to show visitors what friends bought or shared, what products relate to their Likes, and which friends they might want to invite.

The problem with this data is that much of it is unstructured, and there is really no one who has effectively nailed social personalization in the commerce arena the way Amazon was able to do with data from purchase behavior. Blippy attempted to socialize purchases, but it failed. Amazon also allows you to connect to Facebook to access your friends’ Likes and recommendations but I find this UI to be clunky, and not very useful.

Selinger thinks that mining social data for ecommerce may lose steam before it takes off, drawing the comparison to email. “In 2007, if you were to walk into VC’s office with an idea about ecommerce and email, you would have been sent out the door,” Selinger says. But he explains that while there is an inherent enterprise value in this social data, it will take a long time to take off, similar to the way it took awhile for personalized email and commerce models to enter the market. “When someone figures out how to do it and do it well, it will grow really quickly,” he maintains.

The challenge for retailers is making sense of the Facebook news feed — i.e. streamlining recommendations, attaching brands and tags to this data and then serving this to shoppers in a useful, personalized format. Basically, your social network can become your Consumer Reports.

The challenge for the data mining community, explains Patil, is actually figuring out the intent in much of the unstructured data that is posted about retail products and brands on Facebook. And it’s important to keep in mind that some of this data from Facebook users is private.

This past week, Facebook partnered up with sixty different startups to add their "stories" to Facebook Timeline, through apps that span different verticals from Food, Fashion to Travel. Part of this involved adding new actions (in addition to ‘like’) to Timeline story options. That includes the verbs ‘bought’ and ‘want.’

There is tremendous potential in developers and retailers being able to mine this data from ‘boughts’ and wants’ as opposed to the open-ended ‘like.’ You can see details on what social shopping mall Payvment is doing with the new protocols here, but basically, the ability to add these targeted buttons could be game-changing for social discovery in e-commerce.

Privacy

Echoing Lee’s thoughts, Patil is confident that there will be a new wave of personalization and e-commerce. But without data, there is no personalization. So consumers both on Facebook as well as on retail sites will have to be more willing to give up key data like purchase history, Likes and other social actions, and even location in order to get a more personalized shopping experience on retail sites.

The key will be getting consumers to understand that more data will improve their shopping experience, and making the choice of opting-in a no brainer.

Selinger agrees that privacy is going to be an important issue in the next tranche of personalization innovation. “Now more than ever, consumers are more cognizant of what’s happening with their data,” he says. But what retailers have in the favor is a strong foundation of privacy practices, because these companies have had to protect consumer financial and credit card data for time. Selinger believes that retailers will be very thoughtful about privacy and data sharing going forward.

Perhaps sites like Blippy and Boutiques.com were ahead of their time when it came to consumers willingly handing over the keys to their shopping and payment preferences. I envision a day when there will be an app that reads all of your purchase history via your email account and then serves you recommendations based on this data. There are some companies who are already parsing through receipts in your inbox to organize purchases, so why not take this a step further.

And these personalization strategies that are being adopted by retailers are already trickling down to other kinds of sites beyond e-commerce as well. In the same way that ecommerce sites are trying to maximize sales and profits with this data, content sites are also using social and other data to add relevance to their platforms.

So shoppers, be prepared to give up your data. In the coming year, we’re going to see many more retail sites ramping up data-driven discovery. And e-commerce sites who aren’t thinking about how to mine social and other forms of data are probably going to be left in the dust by the Amazons and Netflix’s of the next wave of personalization.

Google, Facebook, Privacy — And You

Posted: 28 Jan 2012 05:22 PM PST

Editor's note: Guest author Keith Teare is General Partner at his incubator Archimedes Labs and CEO of newly funded just.me. He was a co-founder of TechCrunch.

Like millions of other people, I got an email from Google this morning. It was entitled "Changes to Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service". The first sentence describes the intent of the changes as shortening 60 policies into one, and improving their readability.

Then there is a longer explanation captured in the graphic above.

The email goes on to assert that Google has not changed its privacy policy and will not sell our personal information to third parties – "Our privacy policies remain unchanged". So what is going on here?

Facebook is the shiny object that Larry is focused on.

This is a week where Sheryl Sandberg – Chief Operating Officer at Facebook – spoke at Hubert Burda's DLD conference in Munich and stated that we were in the middle of 3 trends. First, a trend "from anonymity to real identity". Secondly, a trend from "wisdom of crowds to wisdom of friends" and third, a trend "from being receivers of information to broadcasters of information". See the video below for the actual points she made. It was a thoughtful and at the same time a polemical speech, a speech with a strong point of view. In thinking about Google's privacy policy changes it helps to listen to Sheryl's remarks and reflect on the context.

Facebook is saying that the Internet as a pure information retrieval mechanism is dead. That the "readwrite" web that began as long ago as cheap web site hosting in 1998, has entirely replaced the read-only web. That the identifiable author has replaced the anonymous one. We are broadcasting and we are identifiable. That reading what friends say is now dominant in that world. Facebook envisages a future in which we all broadcast almost everything to almost everybody.

Google's problem.

In that world, Google's PageRank algorithm is seriously out of date. It promotes pages based on the number of links to it. Today, pages are no longer the unit of publishing. Far smaller items than a page dominate our senses. And those smaller messages are produced in huge quantity and in real time. So the signals that make something relevant have now changed. Facebook (and Twitter) have oodles of such signals. Google, until recently, had none.

Google's solution.

The changes in Google's terms and conditions are primarily focused on providing the company with an integrated set of data capable of feeding it signals about what is and is not relevant to each of us as we search the vast amount of data produced by the second. In that sense it is not only the right strategic move, it is a question of life and death. Google is doing a pivot, in order to remain relevant. It’s hard to disagree that this is necessary. It also seems clear that neither company is being intentionally "evil". However, there is a dilemma for both Google and Facebook as we go down the "we are all broadcasters now" path. How can they gather the signals that feed insight without making decisions for the user about what is private, selectively shared or public?

We, the people!

There is a discernible and growing reaction against both Facebook's new sharing paradigm and Google's policy changes. As implicit sharing, or as Sheryl Sandberg calls it, broadcasting, replaces conscious sharing, many are growing disillusioned with Facebook taking liberties with their behavior. The same instinct is making many people focus on the assumed bad intent behind Google's modifications. Broadcasting our "real identity" is not something anybody wants as a default, and many don't want under any circumstances.

Privacy is becoming a product issue, not only a policy issue.

In the past privacy advocates on the Internet were primarily focused on privacy as a policy issue, and the privacy lobby was mainly made up of policy professionals. In the period since Facebook's 2011 F8 conference, we have seen consumers begin to have strong opinions about the use of their data. The past week has accelerated this trend. Product managers now need to think long and hard about the assumptions built into their products and ensure they are serving consumers not just in words but in fact. Consumers are at a tipping pointy in not tolerating all-inclusive policy decisions by service providers that impact who sees their stuff.

Google and Facebook are between a rock and a hard place.

There is a big structural problem for both Google and Facebook as they contemplate the product consequences of consumer reactions to their product roadmap. In a centralized platform it is incredibly hard to create easy-to-understand controls that give each user the ability to control, at a granular level, what they share and who with. Grand policy shifts, like that which came out of F8 and which we are now seeing from Google, tend to assume all users are the same and will want the same thing.

In reality, users are more complex. I might want to save a private video to a personal storage space one moment, share something with a select group of friends another moment, and broadcast something to the world five minutes later. The web services infrastructure that both Facebook and Google are based on does not easily permit such fine grained control for users without also imposing serious effort. As we all know, that leads users to stick with the default settings most of the time.

So, despite good intent by the teams at both companies, one-size-fits-all decisions are the norm.

Mobile to the rescue?

Structural problems usually require structural solutions. What it seems consumers are asking for is a world in which we all know what we are sharing and who with — but where we don’t have to do a huge amount of work to achieve that. Google Circles seems to be a nod in this direction as are Facebook's groups. But neither is really easy enough or sufficiently integrated into the flow of the products to really solve the problem. Both require a huge management overhead.

As I argued earlier this week in "Google, Look Out Behind You!“, the spread of smartphones may be part of the solution here. Hundreds of millions of consumers are now carrying around connected still and video cameras with lists of contacts in the address book, often already organized into meaningful groups. Decentralized decision-making is very easy when there are decentralized software clients under the unique control of each user. The ability to be private one moment, selectively share the next and then publicly broadcast a few minutes later is easy to achieve in this decentralized software architecture. And service providers can never become bad actors — simply because they do not own our information or the full social graph. The cloud becomes a means of delivering messages to the phones and the place where we store our media. But it’s not the place we need to trust to make decisions about what gets shared and who with.

Software can truly reflect the wishes of each human being in each moment in this world. It couldn't be structurally more different from the past 10 years of centralized web services.

What's Next?

Products will need to become increasingly more human as they become more mobile. Privacy can go away as an issue if that happens. All decisions about where data can travel will be able to be made by the individual, each time they produce data. We will all be able to be private, share selectively or choose to broadcast with relative ease.

We are moving to a period where it will be considered intrusive and unwelcome if our service providers have any point of view about our sharing behavior. "Just trust us" will not be necessary and certainly won't cut it. Capturing moments in one’s life, with the choice of whether to share, and as importantly, who to share it with, will be in the hands of each individual. The service provider will merely execute the user’s wishes. If you think about it, it’s kind of like what email service providers do today. I can't wait.

Curebit Apologizes for Copying 37Signals: “Stupid, Lazy, and Disrespectful”

Posted: 28 Jan 2012 04:38 PM PST

That’s awkward: Just as it was announcing a $1.2 million round of funding, online referral startup Curebit was caught lifting designs and code from 37Signals, the company behind popular collaboration tools Basecamp, Highrise, and others.

The copying was called out on Twitter by 37Signals partner David Heinemeier Hansson, who, after an exchange with Curebit co-founder Allan Grant, called the Curebit team “fucking scumbags.” It probably didn’t help that Grant’s initial responses didn’t seem particularly contrite — he defended the copying as a “quick test” and at one point told Heinemeier Hansson, “Chill dude ” (VentureBeat has a good blow-by-blow account of the initial controversy.)

Now, however, Grant has posted an apology on the company blog — in fact, it attracted so much attention that the blog is crashing. He also published the text on Hacker News:

Recently we launched a site with several pages copied from 37signals’ Highrise. We did more than take inspiration from their design – we actually used html & css code, and hotlinked to images on their site. We apologize to David and 37signals for ripping off their work. It was stupid, lazy, and disrespectful of their creative efforts. It’s particularly painful for us to have done this to 37signals because they are big heroes of ours. We just hope they will accept our apologies.

Grant sent me an email emphasizing his admiration for 37Signals, admitting that he “crossed the line,” and concluding, “I would caution other startups from making such mistakes in an effort to ‘be lean.’”

The controversy attracted particular attention because Curebit was incubated by Y Combinator and raised money from 500 Startups (among others), something that Heinemeier Hansson didn’t hesitate to point out.

It looks like a reader at Hacker News (which is run by Y Combinator) created a post asking for YC co-founder Paul Graham’s opinion. Graham killed the thread, saying that it violated the site’s guideline to “not use posts to ask us questions,” but he also wrote, “I think they shouldn’t have done it, and that they compounded the problem by not taking the initial complaints seriously enough.”

Meanwhile, back on Twitter, 500 Startups founder Dave McClure said he spoke to the Curebit team and “strongly asked them 2 re-evaluate thr policy on design & content; hope they take that 2 heart” and later added, “new founders aren’t children, just inexperienced. furthermore investors aren’t parents, just uncles & aunts. and we all make mistakes.”

Apple Buy Hollywood? That’s A Terrible Idea

Posted: 28 Jan 2012 03:51 PM PST

Editor’s note: Jordan Kurzweil ran AOL’s original programming and video group from 2004-2007, and before that built and Fox Entertainment’s first digital studio (1999-2002). He now runs Independent Content, an agency that helps media companies launch new digital products and businesses.

Apple should not use its $100 billion in cash to buy, or buy into Hollywood. While it would most assuredly (ahem, cough) disrupt the system, it would not spur the kind of creative chaos and innovation that would lead to the Emerald City of any show, on demand, for free, to rent, or buy, or subscribe, and organized by taste or popularity, or you! In fact, Apple buying into Hollywood, would actually kill Hollywood. Here's why:

Time and again, tech companies have proven a keen disability when it comes to marketing and promotion. It is an amazing blind spot, likely born out of tech culture's macro focus on "the platform" and its abundant disregard for the bits that fill it (the content).

From iTunes, to Netflix, to YouTube, and to Yahoo!, AOL and MSN before them, not a single tech company has been able to build and launch a single media brand that connects in any real way with an audience. They have failed time and again to build awareness and excitement for original shows, live events, new content verticals and new apps with audiences remotely approaching mass. The proverbial timeline is littered with a never ending list of momentary memes, flashes in the pan and never cut-throughs: wacky one of a kind animated web shorts, Red vs. Blue, Lonely Girl, Prom Queen, In the Motherhood, The 9, Gold Rush, The Failure Club. And building excitement — at scale — is what unlocks the value of content.

In contrast to the Hollywood marketing machine, tech companies devalue content. Some would say they do this by making movies, TV shows, music and apps ubiquitously available for low cost, or, for OMG free! But really, tech companies devalue media by jamming it into impenetrable noisy troves, stacks and databases filled with other content of equal, better or worse quality making it completely undiscoverable. Look at iTunes, NetFlix, Amazon and YouTube – tell me, where's the good stuff at?

If I were Steven Spielberg, J.J. Abrams, or Matt and Trey Parker, I would not want you to take my creative baby and drop it willy-nilly into one of the behemoth digital grist mills left to fight against light saber wielding kitties and direct to DVD softcore. The Apple App Store with its hundreds of thousands of apps does not build value for individual apps, or create real revenue for but a select few top players. It builds value for Apple, by achieving scale, so Apple can make bunk loads of cash by taking pennies off of each transaction, and selling more hardware.

What is missing from all digital entertainment services are efficient, effective promotional platforms — and throwing algorithms, ratings and popularity and trending data at the problem, or gobs of display ad inventory are not solutions. Yes, these tactics help sift and sort the databases of content, or game audiences into clicking and trial, but they do not bolster new brands, help them find audiences and build hits. Can the homepage of the iTunes store build mass hysteria for the next Avatar? On a smaller seemingly more achievable scale, can the homepage of YouTube create demand for the next season of Mad Men? No. But if the next season of Mad Men was only available on YouTube, it would certainly make a large group of people go to YouTube to watch (that is if they could find it), because Mad Men already has value.

Netflix, Amazon, iTunes and YouTube need to develop marketing chops, and ways to communicate with audiences on a deep visceral level. They all have a huge and powerful opportunity to move audiences — an intimate, activated, one-to-one relationship with a person sitting just an arms length away from their computer screen; or on their couch with a brand-new jury rigged gadget, invested, motivated and ready to get their socks knocked-off. Instead, users are greeted with a miasma of cover art, lists of titles in all shapes and sizes and a search box — no communication, no connection.

How can digital entertainment services connect with audiences? Three easy steps, and a bonus feature:

People. Tech companies need to hire people to shine a light on the best stuff, and craft the stories that sell it to audiences (at least for now, until computers catch-up and develop wit, emotion, creativity the ability to write with heart). Some people call this curation. Others packaging and promotion.
Design. They need to create interfaces to capture audiences and connect to users. Living, breathing beautiful displays that make you watch, and want to click.
Tools. Tech companies should leverage what their platforms do best — target, track and account — to deliver those stories to interested audiences en masse.

Bonus feature: Marketing money. If companies like Apple plan to get into the first-run business, they need to deploy some of their treasure chest on good old marketing, online and off — TV commercials, movie trailers, billboards, print, PR campaigns, online display, SEM, social, events and so on. And not to market their platforms, to market programming.

Hollywood is right to resist licensing first-run content to the Valley. The platforms aren't there, and there's no discernable path to building value or profit. But once tech companies begin to crack the code of their own networks, develop their promotional muscles, and commit to spending real marketing money to build new media brands, then they will truly be on the path to fuel growth and effect positive change on an industry in search of a future. And they will have the latitude to make advances in how we consume our entertainment.

FounderSoup: Stanford and Andreessen’s New Startup Generator

Posted: 28 Jan 2012 02:25 PM PST

A single entrepreneur alone is vulnerable to shortsightedness, to fatigue. But with a team comes diverse perspective, encouragement, and the wherewithal to push through problems. That’s why a group of Stanford computer science and business students started the Andreessen Horowitz-backed FounderSoup program. It’s designed to give entrepreneurs with an idea or a fledgling company a chance to pitch — not to raise funding, but to recruit co-founders.

At its first full-scale event on Thursday night, I watched as 20 ideas were pitched, and 170 PhD, MBA, and undergraduate students mingled. What I saw was an effective model for fostering startups, and several brilliant ideas in healthtech and energy (reviewed below) that could turn into successful companies.

FounderSoup’s President Mike Dorsey tells me “As a CS student and an MBA, I would constantly get questions from entrepreneurs to connect them to people with coding skills. I’d also get all these coders with great products who needed business co-founders.” Dorsey and some friends started the program to help founders meet, thanks to financial backing from Andreessen Horowitz via partner Ronny Conway (son of Ron).

At the Founder Soup pilot event, 4 teams discovered co-founders and 2 went on to receive funding. Clearly there was potential. For Thursday, 50 founders submitted ideas and 20 were given the chance to pitch for 90 seconds each. Afterwards, each team was stationed around the Stanford d.school and approached by those interested in joining their team. To ease networking, FounderSoup made temporary business cards for all attendees with their contact info and specialties.

Some startup-spawning universities are beginning to set up their own VC funds, accelerators, and incubators, like Harvard’s new Experiment Fund and Stanford’s StartX. Before young companies can take funding or stipends, they need a great team, though. More universities and cities should look to copy the FounderSoup model. It’s simple, cheap, and in a school’s interest. After all, nothing brings in top applicants and alumni donations like producing the next Larry Page, Vinod Khosla, or Jerry Yang.

Here’s a quick look at the most exciting companies from FounderSoup, you can also watch their pitches here

Wello – An online marketplace where fitness professionals can deliver training sessions via live streaming video. Trainers pay to set up a profile, sell one-on-one or group training sessions, and Wello processes the transactions and takes a cut. There’s big potential because many who want to get fit don’t have time to go to a gym, but can easily slot in video sessions while at the home or office. Customers say the webcam-based workouts are effective.

Wello could grab a share of the $21 billion a year onsite fitness services market, in which millions of people already pay for gym memberships and expensive in-person physical trainers. Oxford, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins-educated Co-founder Leslie Silverglide previously co-founded and sold Mixt Greens, a quick-service restaurant group, to Nestle’s investment arm.

D.C. Revolutions - Helix-shaped, 3 foot tall plastic wind turbines that fit on light poles and can produce half the energy the lights need. D.C. Revolutions could sell the turbines to cities or property owners. Eye-catching when they spin, the turbines could change the face of the urban landscape and as founder Durrell Coleman says, “make sustainability sexy”.

CS LabTech’s MuSE - A healthtech company that has developed MuSE, a cell-stretching petri dish medical research device for labs. Currently when labs test cells they’re taken out of the body and are therefore in a static state, different from their dynamic state inside a live body where they stretch while in use. CS LabTech’s vacuum-powered Multi-dimensional Strain Experiment petri dish allows biologists to mimic the dynamic state of heart, lung, muscle, and other cells within the lab. Founded by dynamic cell structure PhD Chelsey Simmons, CS LabTech’s device will be ready for commercial sale next month, and could power advancements in the lucrative fields of drug screening and pharmaceutical development.

Crowd Jewel- A crowdsourced jewelry design and sales company. Designers submit their work through a Facebook app where potential customers then vote and pre-order, and the winners’ designs are commissioned and delivered with CrowdJewel taking 30% cut. Since designers want the exposure and sales that come with winning a contest, they source sales leads for CrowdJewel by encouraging their friends to vote. With a big market and lots of struggling designers, CrowdJewel could attain some of the success of similar businesses like Threadless and BeachMint.

Veebot- A vein puncture medical robot that automatically finds a patient’s vein, inserts the needle, and performs a procedure. Co-founder Richard Harris tells me there are 1.4 billion venipuncture procedures per year in the US alone, and 33% fail to find a vein on their first attempt. This forces doctors to make multiple manual needle pricks that can up the risk of infection and complication, as well is increase costs and delay medical treatment.

Veebot solves the problem using infrared to initially locate a vein, then ultrasound to pinpoint it. Veebot can then draw blood, insert an IV, or administer medicine. Venipuncture is a $30 billion per year global market, and this is a massively disruptive device every hospital in the world could use. While some might be scared of a needle-wielding robot, I’d be happy to submit if it saved me from multiple pricks.

Kindle Sales Growing Faster Than The Nook’s

Posted: 28 Jan 2012 02:23 PM PST

Barnes & Noble may be challenging Amazon’s dominance of the e-book world, but Kindle sales are still growing faster than the Nook’s — at least if you connect the dots between some of the numbers included in a recently-published article by The New York Times.

The article doesn’t hide the fact that Amazon has the vast majority of marketshare, with Barnes & Noble saying it has 27 percent of the market, compared to Amazon’s share of “at least 60 percent.” At the same time, the article writes that “to the delight of publishers” (who see Amazon as a competitor), Barnes & Noble has “grabbed a lot of market share from Amazon.” In response, Amazon told The Times that Kindle sales (a number that includes both the Kindle Fire tablet and Kindle e-readers) grew 177 percent during the nine-week holiday period, compared to the same period in 2010.

How does that stack up against the Nook? The article doesn’t say, but earlier this month, Barnes & Noble actually reported its own holiday growth numbers. During the same period of time, the company’s device sales grew 70 percent — not bad, perhaps, but a sign that Amazon still has greater momentum.

The Times also reports that Barnes & Noble engineers are “putting the finishing touches” on the next version of the company’s e-reader, due for release sometime in the spring.

Apple’s Off-The-Charts iPhone And iPad Sales

Posted: 28 Jan 2012 02:02 PM PST

Sometimes you have to see things to truly appreciate their magnitude. Apple’s latest quarter was so massive that MG had to write two posts about it: $46 billion in revenues, 37 million iPhones sold, 15 million iPads. The chart above, which comes from Asymco (see a fully interactive version here), shows how unusual this quarter was for Apple.

The quarter was driven by iPhone and iPad sales. And you can see that by looking at the blue and red lines, which show unit sales of each. iPhone sales went from 17 million the quarter before to 37 million. They more than doubled in a single quarter.

But look closely at the iPad line. What I just noticed for the first time is that Apple sold almost as many iPads last quarter as it sold iPhones in the previous quarter. And now it is selling as many iPads as iPods. That red line is going to keep on going up. Will it ever catch up to iPhone sales?

Let’s Get Personalized: Moving Beyond Recommendations

Posted: 28 Jan 2012 01:30 PM PST

Editor’s note: Hank Nothhaft is the co-founder and chief product officer of Trapit, a personalized content discovery platform currently in beta. Trapit was incubated at SRI and the CALO project.

eBay's recent acquisition of the recommendation service Hunch was an important score for the online retailer, giving it a way to mine the ever-mounting mounds of structured and unstructured data for more relevant and accurate consumer recommendations.

Such recommendation engines are already (and have long been) a necessity, not only for retailers, but for the entire Web. Every major internet company, from media outlets to social networks to software applications, is having to meet an expectation of better understanding their customers as individuals, to provide them with information and suggestions that they themselves may not even have realized they want or need.

Integrating better recommendation algorithms and services was really just the first part of a larger, necessary movement to make the Web more personalized. As we watch the ongoing struggles of search engines to provide relevant yet deep-diving results, or Facebook's fruitless attempts to better identify which content shared by your friends is most important for you to see, it's clear that we need something smarter, something more sophisticated than mere recommendations and customization. Personalizing the Web is one of the most important and difficult engineering tasks we now face in the evolution of the Internet.

Recommendations Have Hit the Ceiling

Amazon and Netflix once stood as exemplars of recommendation, providing suggestions based on what other users with similar habits and product histories selected, with a touch of genetic genre data thrown in. Yet both have faltered in recommendation relevance as the crowd-sourced approach has become more of an echo chamber than a personalized filter. (And Amazon certainly does itself no favors with its barrage of "recommendations" for its own Kindle Fire).

These recommendation engines were once ground-breaking, but they have failed to evolve. And more importantly, our expectations as Web consumers have evolved beyond the simple concepts of "users who purchased item X also purchased item Y." At best, services that claim personalization based upon these aggregate metrics attempt to triangulate an identity for us as individuals based upon the galaxy of other individuals. They try to pin us down into an archetype, into a box of likes and interests, without recognizing that as humans, what we desire, want and need is in constant flux and ever-evolving.

In all fairness, that's an incredibly difficult awareness to achieve. But its disingenuous to attribute "personalization" to services that are really just crowd sourced general interest mapping. And those results are just insultingly banal!

Getting Closer, All the Time

The acquisition of Hunch will hopefully signal a shift from recommendations to actual personalization. This is not because Hunch is such a precise personalization tool, but rather because it is an excellent recommendation engine. As more relevant recommendations become ubiquitous as the standard across the Web, we can finally begin to aim to shoot beyond that baseline to realizing a personalized Web.

Over the next few years, technology that truly understands and recognizes us as dynamic and unique individuals rather than types will be the predominate trend. Siri's adaptability and cognizance is the first major step in this direction, and we will begin to see that type of finely-tuned, perpetually trained artificial intelligence helping turn the Web and our technology more and more towards us as individuals.

It's a movement from the Web mentality of searching, to one of delivery. It's a shift from pull to push technology–and it's happening because there is enormous upside for the first movers in the era of personalization.

The shift to a more personalized Web is all about revenue and customer/user experience.

Consider the shift that is still occurring with our televisions. Whereas we have long considered our television sets to be mere boxes for broadcasting pre determined content to us as passive consumers, we are increasingly taking control of that content. This extends beyond mere DVR capabilities, as Web-enabled televisions begin to offer a new layer of personalization.

Our televisions will eventually become truly our own, unique televisions. Better yet, we will have accounts that we can log into that will personalize any television set with programming specifically selected by and for us.

Groupon, no doubt, is itching to find ways to personalize each and every offer they have for each individual it is sent to. Groupon knows that targeting by regions increases conversion and sales, but imagine how much they could amplify that effect if they were targeting based on a rich and sophisticated understanding of the individual person that receives each offer?

We can imagine this type of personalization applied to all of our current technologies, but it first requires a fundamental, philosophical shift in how we think about and understand the notion of personalization. A big part of that means that recommendation technology needs to be properly understood as the tip of the iceberg — it's table stakes and nothing more. The real game is played with true personalization and a sophisticated understanding of individuals and all of their unique, ever-shifting personas.

The Endless March of Personalization Progress

At this stage, personalization is best achieved as a mashup of our interest graph, social graph, individual input, and Pandora-eque qualifications of structured data. When maximized, this can work quite well, but we can't stop there.

As the Web becomes our own personal web, the technology needs to register and understand our flux in personality. This means incorporating both more direct and more ambient information, such as awareness of time, location, my schedule, my habits and engagement with content. Furthermore, it means realizing that human identity is a constantly shifting target. The work of personalization is never done, even if it is done with less direct input and feedback from me personally.

Content creators, marketers, sales professionals and publishers crave that myth of stability in defining their users and audience. Yet as the Web has shifted to become dominated by the stream metaphor, that myth has been easily eroded.

This is not a bad thing, even if it makes understanding that customer baseline upon which we build businesses that much more difficult to determine. It was always a myth to begin with — we simply did not have the data or the tools to operate otherwise and recognize users as individuals, as the amalgam of ever-shifting interests and personalities that they truly are.

What replaces that baseline of stability, however, is the flux of new opportunities, of understanding our customers and audience in increasingly focused and nuanced terms. Likewise, we as Web consumers are starting to expect this understanding from the websites and businesses with which we choose to interact.

For companies, recommendation is the gateway into recognizing the value of a much more attuned personalization. And as recommendation layers become ubiquitous, we can now finally begin moving beyond it, to achieve personalization as the next great triumph of the Web.

Gillmor Gang 01.28.12 (TCTV)

Posted: 28 Jan 2012 01:18 PM PST

The Gillmor Gang — Doc Searls, Danny Sullivan, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — debut the latest Google catchphrase to replace Do No Evil: We Really Don’t Care!

@stevegillmor, @dsearls, @dannysullivan, @jtaschek, @kevinmarks

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

10 Ways Your Startup Can Hook Into Facebook, Part I: On The Web

Posted: 28 Jan 2012 12:30 PM PST

This is a guest post by Ryan Spoon (@ryanspoon), a principal at Polaris Ventures. Read more about Ryan on his blog at ryanspoon.com.

Having already covered how startups can use search and Twitter to find customers, here’s 10 steps for finding people on another key marketing platform: Facebook

Facebook has evolved from a social network into the fabric with which much of the web is constructed: identity, product, data, experience and so on. Even if you chose to no longer use it as a social destination, you would still find immense value in it through your every-day web usage: registration, personalization, sharing, interaction, etc.

This is of course a huge opportunity for consumer-focused startups. Facebook plays a core role in touching each step along the standard product / user funnel:

- Acquisition: virality, referrals, paid traffic
- Activation: conversion paths from new to active users
- Activity: user engagement and retention

Below is a slide presentation with five ways to think about leveraging Facebook to affect those three steps on your web experience. Tomorrow I will share five ways to find success on Facebook.com.

Motorola Droid Razr Maxx Review: 4G LTE With Solid Battery Life Just Got Real

Posted: 28 Jan 2012 11:55 AM PST

Short Version

The Droid Razr Maxx by Motorola is a very special phone. You see, I had a bit of a thing for the Droid Razr when it first came out, but it wasn’t quite perfect. It felt a bit light, and I had trouble holding it in my hand since it was so big and so thin at the same time. Plus, battery life was a bust. It wasn’t awful, but it only lasted about nine hours, meaning most people would need to bring a charger along every day.

The Droid Razr Maxx throws all those problems into the trash can, and only gains about 18g and 1.89mm in return.

Features:

4.3-inch Super AMOLED Advanced qHD 960×450 display
Dual-core 1.2GHz processor
8-megapixel rear camera with autofocus, flash, and 1080p video capture
1.3-megapixel front-facing shooter
Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread
Verizon 4G LTE
MSRP: $299.99 on-contract

Pros:

Big battery life improvements (more on that later)
Bump in storage from 16GB to 32GB
Feels a bit more like a premium product with the added heft

Cons:

If you liked the size of the RAZR, the thickness might bother you
Poorly placed microUSB charging port
No removable back cover (which has its rough consequences, I recently learned)

Long Version:

If I had to choose between the Droid Razr and the Droid Razr Maxx, I’d go Maxx all the way. Battery life may not be the star spec when you’re reading your reviews, but we all sooner or later realize that it’s probably the most important spec of all. 4G LTE is amazing. If you haven’t tried it, you should (seriously) run down to a Verizon and do a Google search or load an app on to one of the store units. You won’t just notice the difference; you’ll pine for it. But don’t get ahead of yourself. Before the Razr Maxx, every phone with 4G LTE support couldn’t keep up after a few hours of use.

The Razr Maxx crushes that pretty huge problem and finally makes 4G LTE a viable option for the power user.

Battery Life:

I usually save this section for closer to the end, but I figured you guys are just going to scroll to this section anyway, so I might as well get it out of the way.

Yes, the Razr Maxx’s battery life is far better than that of the Razr. I actually still have my Razr from when I reviewed it, and was able to test both phones alongside each other. But before I get into the results, let me tell you about how we tested it. We have a battery test program here that continuously searches Google for images. Once one page loads, another pops up. I can close out of the browser at any time to load apps (which I did), make calls (did that, too), browse the web (yep, that too), and watch some videos.

But the most important thing to remember when I give you these numbers is that both phones, the Maxx and the original Razr, were in constant use from the beginning of the test until they died. No locked screen. No minute to catch their breath.

The Razr lasted for four and a half hours with constant (and varied) use. The Maxx, on the other hand, stuck with me for eight hours and fifteen minutes. For those of you following along at home, that’s almost double the battery life. If I use the phone like a normal human being (read: not Google Image searching random names constantly), it lasted a full day and on into the next day before it needed a charge around 11 am. This is with Wifi and 4G LTE in use.

Hardware:

The phone itself is beautiful. Many of you may be bothered by the fact that its 8.99mm thick compared to the Razr’s 7.1mm waist line, but I actually found the extra bulk to both feel more premium and look… well, better. Because the Razr is so very thin, the classic “Moto hump” on the back is much, much more pronounced than it is on any other Droid. On the Razr Maxx, the hump is actually quite subtle.

The phone is a tad heavier than its predecessor, which I think lends itself to that premium feel, as well. Though, size may still be an issue for me. As I said with the Razr, my hands are pretty big for a girl and I still have trouble performing one-handed actions on the Razr Maxx.

One thing I failed to mention in my Razr review that I’ve since realized annoys me quite a bit is the placement of the microUSB port. Both the microUSB port and HDMI out are placed square on the top of the phone. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: this makes it impossible to play a game or work in landscape while the phone is plugged in. Motorola (and others), please start putting your charging ports on the top side, if possible.

As far as the display goes, of course it’s beautiful. There’s very little differentiation between pixels and the size really lends itself to TV/movie viewing. Screens vary from phone to phone (even if they’re technically the “same screen”), and I did notice that the Razr Maxx has a more of a yellowy tint to it, whereas the Razr has more of a bluish tint. These are just my units, though, and if they weren’t side by side I might not have noticed at all.

I’m still a huge fan of the design, and think those boxy corners and that Kevlar fiber casing are a great direction for Moto to be headed in.

Performance::

Alright guys, after two whole sections of (mostly) praise I need to get out a big gripe. While I was testing the Razr Maxx, it froze twice. This isn’t that big of a deal. I’ve spent a good deal of time with the phone and really pushed it to the maxx (heh), and pretty much all phones freeze at some point or another. The problem, however, is that every time the Maxx froze, it stopped responding to touch.

You don’t necessarily need a removable back cover to help with battery life on this thing, but without it there’s no way to manually shut down the device. Each time I held the lock button to turn it off, I couldn’t tap the icon to shut it down. Plugging it in to a PC didn’t jolt it out of its freeze either. This left me waiting for the phone to either cool down and snap out of it, or run out of battery (which can be a helluva long wait with the Razr Maxx, especially when it’s basically sleeping). The Maxx overheats to an extent, just like the Razr, and I assume this was the culprit in my freeze issue.

Basic performance, on the other hand, was just fine. Switching between apps, surfing the web, and watching mobile video was all pleasant. I didn’t experience any serious hiccups (other than those freezes), but the usual Android lag still remains. Luckily, Moto chose to leave Blur out of the equation and laid a rather light, useful overlay onto both the Razr and the Maxx. I say keep ‘em coming like that, Moto.

As far as software goes, everything is the same on the Maxx as it is on the Razr, so I’m going to refer you to the Razr review.

Camera:

I kind of brushed over the camera performance in my Razr review, so I figured I’d show you guys what I’m talking about this time around. Still image quality is very good, especially in bright environments (see below). Even zoomed in, the camera still takes quality shots though it still won’t replace a nice point-and-shoot if you take pictures more than the average bear (that Yogi reference is weak, but I’ll still leave it.)

Low-light pictures aren’t as great, but it still gets the job done as far as stills are concerned (see below). Video capture in low-light environments doesn’t really cut it though. I tried to take a little video at my friend’s birthday party last night in a bar and had no luck. Just a lot of squiggly, blurry darkness.

If you know how to use the camera and focus before you hit the shutter button, the lag between tapping shutter and taking the picture isn’t that bad at all. If you try to focus and hit the shutter to early, you’ll be waiting a while.

Motorola packed all kinds of fun goodies into the camera application, which can be accessed by a rather slick drop down bar that sits right on top of the view finder. It offers up basic settings (like where to save the pic, geo-tagging, etc.), effects (like B&W, negative, and sepia), scenes (some of which help a bit with low-light shooting), modes (including panorama), exposure and flash.

All of this is majorly helpful, but I did have one small complaint with panorama. Unless you’re really steady, the shot can look a bit awkward. If you tilt a bit, for example, while moving from frame to frame, the shot can have bendy lines that should be straight and other strange qualities (in the image below, the train tracks dip a bit toward the right even though they are completely straight and level in real life).

Light:

Dark:

Panorama:

Conclusion:

At the end of the day, I’d say this is probably my favorite new 4G LTE phone, mostly because it actually makes LTE a viable option. Past that, it’s quite beautiful, reliable, and well-built. You won’t scratch the screen by dropping it a few feet (thanks to that Corning Gorilla glass) and the Kevlar fiber casing is not only durable but it adds a nice touch in the design department.

I’m a bit concerned about the overheating issue, but I’m also aware that I was using the phone in a way that most users won’t since I was testing. Still, if you’re a power user, I’d think twice about this and maybe see how others are faring as far as freezing is concerned.

Last, but certainly not least, I want to apologize on behalf of Motorola for screwing over Droid Razr owners. If you’re happy with your Razr and love how thin it is, than just ignore me. But for most of you, I assume that battery life is really bugging you on the original. It’s only been a couple of months since the Razr debuted, and that’s probably the biggest problem I have with this phone. I applaud Motorola for seeing an issue and nipping it in the bud, but you have to be careful that you don’t screw over your original customers in the process.

Steve Jobs, Superhero

Posted: 28 Jan 2012 11:21 AM PST

Editor’s note: Scott Weiss is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and the former co-founder and CEO of IronPort Systems, which was acquired by Cisco in 2007.

When I was a kid, I read tons of superhero comic books. I fantasized about superpowers, but the storylines about heroes with massive Achilles' heels really held my attention the most. They saved the world but had screwed up personal lives, made lots of mistakes, and often acted like complete assholes. In retrospect, I related to their flaws. And, probably not coincidentally, my favorite characters exhibited core weaknesses I had experienced: Spider-Man (immaturity), Iron Man (overconfidence/hubris), and Wolverine (rage). Ironically, when the character's weakness comingled with the superpower, it would often spur them to succeed against impossible odds.

It was in this context that I was riveted reading Steve Jobs' biography by Walter Isaacson. Given the number of different interviews and unfettered access granted to Isaacson, it felt like an incredibly authentic account of Jobs' life. His greatest accomplishments, mistakes, superpowers, and flaws were laid out about as raw as I've ever read. Steve's superpowers were many: He was wickedly brilliant, could see around corners, and had unparalleled understanding of how people interact with technology, to name just a few.

Did Steve have an Achilles' heel? From the book, one could conclude that he was an extremely demanding boss. Like a beacon, superstars from every function (e.g. engineering, design, marketing, etc.) were drawn to work for Steve. They described his aura as absolutely overwhelming. And Steve pushed these A+ players to extraordinary, impossible achievements. Steve's drive for speed and perfection often resulted in harsh, public criticism — usually directed at his very best people. Steve would constantly look over their work and declare, "This is shit!" or "This really sucks!" On my Kindle, I searched the words "shit" and "sucks" and counted 24 instances where he used one of those phrases referring to someone's work/product.

I've had a number of entrepreneurs suggest that this persona isn't unique to Steve Jobs but a common trait among some of the most successful founder/CEOs in the world. Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, Larry Page, and Jeff Bezos have all been reported as similarly caustic at times. Is this something to be emulated?

As I was reading the book, something struck me like a hammer: Despite Steve Jobs' choice of words, lack of empathy, and sometimes prickly demeanor, he spent a huge amount of time giving his most talented employees constant, hard, critical feedback.

Thinking about how most companies dole out feedback — if they do at all — it's usually directed at the bottom quartile of performers versus the top. A typical manager at review time spends 80% of their time preparing detailed reviews on the bottom 25%. The top quartile gets lame, short reviews — the equivalent of "You're doing great, keep up the good work!" So, a manager takes all that time and effort to get someone doing the work of half of a full-time employee (FTE) to do the work of .75 or 1 FTE. In contrast, Steve Jobs — with his feedback energy directed at the top — manages to motivate people already doing the work of 2 or 3 FTEs to do the work of 10, maybe 20 FTEs. Now that's serious leverage! Could this be a superpower comingling with a weakness?

I've found that the A players are comparably lazy with regards to their potential. Without serious motivation, they will never reach it—or even try. Despite his delivery, I believe Steve's critical energy was directionally correct.

Here are a few other suggestions for motivating top talent:

Flip the feedback equation to 80% of your energy spent on the top quartile. This is really hard in practice as the feedback is usually more nuanced. And the top performers are usually defensive.
Infuse some damn passion. The best people don't just want money, they want to go on a crusade and make a difference. An entrepreneur needs to constantly re-enroll the troops with a compelling, authentic story of how and why we will do the impossible.
Set stretch goals and push like hell to meet them. It's great if these goals have meaning as well — e.g. we need the software release out before a
major industry conference.
Find a bogeyman competitor to hate. (Preferably a company bigger than yours — Microsoft!) At IronPort, we called out our competitors to the entire company and rallied the team to play catch-up. We also gave bonuses to the sales teams for rip-outs of a competitor's appliance and then mounted them like trophies on the wall.
Work your ass off by example. A leader who is always present, ridiculously responsive and contributes real, hard work sets the right pace and tone.

A constant challenge for leaders is to find effective AND positive ways to motivate. The very best companies have inspirational founders who have found a way to coax the superpowers out of their top employees. When the top quartile contributes at 5x to 10x, it makes a serious difference.

(Founder Stories) SoftTech VC’s Clavier: How To Avoid The Series A Crunch

Posted: 28 Jan 2012 10:32 AM PST

At the top of this Founder Stories episode featuring SoftTech VC’s Jeff Clavier, Chris Dixon mentions much has been written about the “Series A Crunch.” It’s the occurrence of seed stage companies hitting the end of their initial funding cycle at roughly the same time and having to compete for big checks from a limited supply of VC. There’s just not enough money or VC interest to keep all entrepreneurs afloat for another round.

In an effort to prevent future founders from colliding into the Series A Crunch, Dixon advises startups set out to initially raise 18 months of funding, adding, “18 months effectively gives you let’s say 12 months of real operating, which gives you three iterations instead of one.” The more time to perfect the product the better.

Clavier agrees that the Crunch “is absolutely happening” and backs Dixon’s longer runway strategy.

Clavier also says consumer internet companies need to demonstrate more than ”just pure user traction” to whet a VC’s appetite. He tells Dixon SoftTech VC is moving towards backing “businesses” and trots out Fab as an example. “We’ve made money from Fab the day we launched the service, Why? Because it is transaction based.”

Make sure to watch the full interview for additional insights and make sure to watch episode I and episode II of this interview.

All Founder Stories videos including interviews with David Karp, Lauren Leto, Stephen Kaufer, Christopher Poole, Dennis Crowley and many other founders are here.

iNdustrial Revolutions

Posted: 28 Jan 2012 10:11 AM PST

To paraphrase Otto von Bismarck, “iPads are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.” It’s an ugly story. Over a hundred employees “injured by n-hexane, a toxic chemical that can cause nerve damage and paralysis” because its use “meant workers could clean more screens each minute.” Other workers killed or injured by explosions. All so that iPads can be built as cheaply as possible, so that Apple can maintain its 44.7% gross margins. Isn’t that awful?

Yes, of course — but let’s try to maintain a nuanced perspective here. This is hardly a new story, and it’s hardly unique to the tech industry. Think of the exploitation of child labor to harvest Egyptian cotton and Cote d’Ivoire cocoa. Plus ça change; a decade ago it was Indonesian sweatshops and Indian fireworks exciting outrage. Think of the exploitation of Congolese workers to mine coltan, used in electronics everywhere. Show me a country with a large population of desperately poor people, and I’ll show you horrific exploitation of impoverished workers.

Please note, though, that the latter is an inevitable symptom of the former; and again, let’s please try to maintain a sense of perspective. It’s awful that a dozen Chinese workers were killed and hundreds injured building iPads–but at the same time, coal mining kills more than two thousand Chinese workers a year (down from almost 7000 ten years ago) and nobody’s suddenly outraged about them. We in the West don’t really seem to care that Chinese employees work under awful conditions and die in appalling numbers — unless they make shiny things that we use. We claim we don’t want people to suffer, but in fact we just don’t want our iProducts tainted by that suffering. Isn’t that more than a little hypocritical?

So what? you might say. It’s all horrible! Stop them all, or any of it that we can stop, right now! Right?

No. Not necessarily. This is a really complex and difficult issue, and there’s no obvious right answer. Over the last thirty years, trade and export-driven growth have been insanely great for China, and made life enormously better for the overwhelming majority of its billion-plus people. (My personal experience bears out all the data, for what it’s worth: in 1997 I spent a month roaming solo through central China, then came back nine years later. China 1997 and China 2006 were like two entirely different nations, and the latter was vastly better off.)

If Apple and other Western manufacturers were to pull production from China to other, better-paid, union-friendlier jurisdictions with stronger protections for worker rights, that would be disastrous for Apple’s profit margins and innovation speed — but it would also be disastrous for China’s people. On the whole, overall, despite the gruesome and heartrending disasters in the spotlight right now, both sides benefit greatly. That’s how and why free trade works.

At the same time, we can all agree that no businesses anywhere should be poisoning their workers and/or generally treating human lives like disposable Kleenex. This is especially true in a nation whose government only accepts trade unions which are powerless government puppets. But I would argue that it’s China’s steadily growing wealth — which comes from trade, and especially, manufacturing — that will ultimately transform it into a nation where real unions and real worker rights can and do exist.

It’s worth noting that Foxconn’s problems are China’s national problems writ small. Hexane pollution and aluminum dust are scale-model versions of the nationwide poisoned milk scandal, or the ongoing catastrophe of Beijing’s hyper-polluted air, or the major lakes entirely conquered by toxic cyanobacteria. Again, employee exploitation is a symptom, not a problem. The problem is ubiquitous grinding poverty – something that trade, investment, and economic growth slowly, over decades, alleviates, albeit at a terrifying cost to the environment.

Think of the West’s Industrial Revolution. That’s more or less the same revolution transforming China right now. Is it possible to have such a revolution without some concomitant Dickensian horrors? The available evidence sadly indicates “probably not.”

In the interim, what Apple (and the countless less-sexy enterprises whose products are manufactured in China under similar conditions) can do to improve the lot of those who craft its wares is this: increase their leverage over their suppliers, by making the threat of moving production elsewhere credible. Foxconn wants to keep Apple happy, obviously – but they’d be a lot more proactive about doing so if they genuinely thought they might lose massive amounts of Apple’s business to someone else.

A concrete example: Apple shouldn’t get Foxconn to manufacture iPads in Brazil: they should have another company entirely build iPads in Brazil. Right now Apple needs Foxconn almost as much as Foxconn needs Apple. Real competition among suppliers would mean that each of them will jump a lot higher and faster when Apple says “worker rights.”

But let’s not get myopic about Apple and iPads, when the landscape of globalization and its excesses is so much vaster and more diverse. Let’s not pretend that the dynamic is purely “rich Western tech companies exploiting poor nations.” And let’s remember that technology, and China’s growing wealth, will probably ultimately solve this problem. Remember that decade-old outrage about child labor in India’s fireworks industry? Well, it’s much diminished these days, thanks to automation and India’s much wealthier society. Similarly, China’s burgeoning online population has pressured its government to pay attention to air pollution… and Foxconn is already roboticizing its assembly lines.

Most of all, let’s not lose sight of the fact that the technology pioneered in large part by the very same cohort of Western companies who outsource production to China is, slowly but steadily, lifting China, India and sub-Saharan Africa out of poverty. That, not where your iPad came from, is the most important story in the world today.

Image: Smog over Tiananmen Square in 2006, by yours truly. By all accounts it’s gotten much worse since.

The Latest from TechCrunch

2012-01-28T13:37:00.001-04:00

The Latest from TechCrunch

To Pivot or Not to Pivot
Book Review: Distrust That Particular Flavor By William Gibson
Why Every Entrepreneur Should Self-Publish a Book
Ron Paul, Mitt Romney Leading On Facebook Ahead Of Florida Primary
Harvard Gets Its First VC Firm: The Experiment Fund
Secret Windows 8 Weapon: Kinect Built Into Your Laptop
Twitter Puts Its DMCA Takedown Requests Up For All To See
Y Combinator Names Seasoned Entrepreneur Geoff Ralston As Its Newest Partner
Gillmor Gang Live 01.27.12 (TCTV)
Flurry: Amazon’s Kindle Fire Is Already Starting To Smoke Samsung’s Galaxy Tab
Android Smartphone Round-Up: December/January Edition
Davos: BraveNewTalent Allows Job Seekers To Follow Their Future Employers
Davos: Ushahidi Grows Its Global Crowd-sourcing Platform, Slams Twitter Censorship [TCTV]
WSJ: Facebook Filing For IPO As Early As Wednesday
#Humblebrag: Jack Dorsey, Reid Hoffman, Kevin Rose Coming To The Crunchies; Harris Wittels Hosting
Gillmor Gang 01.24.12 (TCTV)
Keen On… Payvment: Making eCommerce More Social (TCTV)
Playfish Product Leader John Earner Is Leaving To Be An EIR At Accel
YC Alum Curebit Raises $1.2 Million For Online Referral System
Jon Rubinstein Leaves HP After “Fulfilling Commitment”

To Pivot or Not to Pivot

Posted: 28 Jan 2012 07:32 AM PST

Editor's note: Contributor Ashkan Karbasfrooshan is the founder and CEO of WatchMojo. Follow him @ashkan.

"To pivot, or not to pivot, that is the question:
Whether ’tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles."
Hamlet, were it set in Silicon Valley, circa 2011.

Ah, the internet – how you hijack our vocabulary. A few years ago, "embedded" had connotations of journalists following soldiers. Today, it's most associated with YouTube clips. Similarly, a pivot was something that I vaguely recall my basketball coach talking about. Today, it's the repositioning of a company and without a doubt, 2011 was the year of the pivot.

Talk is Cheap

Let's face it, despite the bravado and brashness, oftentimes Silicon Valley gets scared and zigs when it should zag. Lean Startup author Eric Ries popularized the term "pivot" but the concept has existed for years. Nokia used to produce rubber boots; today, well… that's another story.

But the point is, while the concept of pivoting has become commonplace in startup lore, it's good to separate the fad from the core concept to answer the question: "to pivot or not to pivot"?

Deconstructing Success

You may be driven by success, recognition, respect, money, power or fame. Whatever the case, success is i) subjective, ii) relative and iii) fluid. In other words, i) we define success based on what drives us, ii) but we tend to measure it relative to other people's success and over time, iii) we convince ourselves to change its definition, revising upwards or downwards, depending on the conditions on the ground.

Don't Believe the Hype

While Silicon Valley is entirely free and encouraged to have its own set of values, culture and objectives, the 24/7 media coverage startups and entrepreneurs are exposed to gives all entrepreneurs a sense that unless your idea and company blast off, you should pivot. In that context, the mindset of "fail fast" is understandable given the herd mentality and impatient nature of VCs, but wrong when you consider that 1% of projects fit venture capital's profile and 1% of those become moderately successful.

In other words, while money may accelerate a company's ramp-up and growth, the reality is that teams needs to gel, products take time to develop and businesses have a natural life-cycle that can't really be circumvented.

Exacerbating this, of course, is that technology companies tend to compete in a zero-sum environment where the #1 and #2 players create value for shareholders but all others are left standing when the game of musical chairs stops. Meanwhile, content companies tend to be long term bets anyway: Machinima is one of the larger content providers on the leading video platform YouTube, but it launched in 2000 (12 years ago!). Vice is now featured in the pages on Forbes but it's been around since 1994 (it launched as a magazine).

Despite these realities, boards rush entrepreneurs to adapt or die without letting the child crawl, let alone walk or run.

Yes, Pivots May Work, Sometimes

To be clear, the extreme cases of Groupon and Fab are prime examples for why pivoting is sometimes the only solution to a stagnating or declining project, but those tend to be the exceptions and not the rule.

But Usually, You'll Simply Just Kill a Good Idea Before Moving to a Fad

As such, before throwing out the baby with the bathwater, understand the following.

Rule #1: Pivoting is a Function of Your Employees

When you recruit engineers and programmers, you can point them in any direction and challenge them to solve a given problem. If you are a content company, you hire writers or videographers and are, as such, limited to remaining in the content business unless you really choose to blow up the building and start from anew.

However, you can't assume that a team that has built a search engine can build a better social network. So don't let the tech vs. content variable underestimate the inherent challenges with any pivot.

As much as I dread quoting Donald Rumsfeld, "you go to war with the military you have, not the one you might want or wish to have at a later time".

Time is crucial in any company and hiring a challenge. If you have good people, it might be better to improve something than assume you need to nuke the joint.

Rule #2: Focus on A Different Target

While the concept of the pivot refers to a radical and transformative change in company direction, strategy, focus and product line, it's important to note that to become successful sometimes what you need is to pivot what industry or clients you are going after, and not the whole company. You may be developing a product and aiming for a B2B application, but perhaps by making it go free and targeting a B2C audience it might prevail.

Rule #3: Timing and Externalities Matter More Than You Think

After 9/11, a lot of companies repositioned themselves to serve the national security and defense industries. They hit the jackpot. This isn't so much chasing a fad but realizing that the broader macro environment and trends will affect your industry and company more so than you think.

Rule #4: Success Comes From Incremental Gains, Not Hail Marries

Apple is the ultimate pivot. Most of its revenues come from iPhone and iPad – products that didn't exist five years ago! But it was all born from the iPod. So the best pivots are not overnight 180-degree turns but progressive shifts and extensions. They are now charging into the post-PC era, but it was all an extension of their core. Hulu, too, is pivoting before our eyes (as are YouTube and Netflix), moving from pure-play aggregators to creators of content. After all, at that velocity even a seemingly small shift in strategy leads to a large change in overall trajectory.

While it’s difficult to define “pivot” and impossible to predict its outcome, you can drown out the noise and clearly ask yourself: "what do I define as success". Once you do that, the rest falls in place.

Photo credit: purplemattfish

Book Review: Distrust That Particular Flavor By William Gibson

Posted: 28 Jan 2012 06:40 AM PST

William Gibson is the defining author of our digital age. More than any social media pundit or Popcorn futurist, he has defined the dystopia we can expect once we escape the dystopia we’re in now. His fiction – a trilogy of trilogies that works backwards from the distant future to a world that is ours – is constantly approaching the present while exploring what it means to exist in a culture mediated by electronics. Although his early work owes more to Burroughs and Verne than anyone cares to admit, he was wildly prescient in his prediction that soon we would see the entire world – an entire world – through the lens of gadgetry. While the web isn’t cyberspace yet and the East Coast isn’t the Sprawl, we’re headed in that direction.

And that’s just his fiction.

Gibson’s non-fiction writing is a peanut in the bland Cracker Jack of the dead tree publications where they first appeared. He’s often graced the otherwise leaden pages of Wired with his unique style and many of the pieces in this book appeared elsewhere, whether in magazines or at public talks. His non-fiction is rare enough that we definitely want more, but do we want a whole book’s worth?

If you are a Gibson fan, then yes, this is definitely worth a read. There are a few great pieces in here, like his meditation on watches and eBay in “My Obsession” as well as an excellent look at the growth of a fiction writer in his essay “Since 1948,” a piece that shows us all stages of his growth – from child of a nervous mother to draft dodger to writer to genius. That both of these pieces are available online is a lucky coincidence, not a reason to avoid this book.

The rest of the non-fiction here will be a little less familiar and is, at times, uneven. Gibson’s writing style is as conversational and puffy here as it is flinty and clear-eyed in his fiction. A story by William Gibson about visiting Tokyo involves no super-charged street samurai. Instead it involves mediations on gomi, toys, and colonialism. We assume Gibson to be more plugged in than most of us but instead he seems to have a lot of good, cool friends who show him around. That’s one of the benefits of replacing Tom Swift as the go-to boyhood sci-fi of the tinkerer.

The other stories – the talks, the mediations on futurism and on the dystopian – are beautiful in their own way, well written and often full of telling detail. He notices the “demented, heartbreakingly lyrical, 3D collage of cargo containers, dumpsters, an Airstream trailer, a cabin cruiser, a school bus” on the set of Johnny Mnemonic. To the average sci-fi nut, a wall of junk as a set piece would be as commonplace as a laser gun or a Tribble – it’s the visual landscape we expect in what the set director will imagine as the “hinterlands” and nearly every movie has a compacted wall of junk that stands in for the place where the wild future people live. To Gibson, however, it’s seen with new eyes. Not naive eyes, really. Just new ones.

If you’re new to Gibson, don’t start here. Get the Sprawl trilogy first, then the Bridge trilogy, then, if you’re not done, the Present trilogy, a group of three books that are connected by the Dotcom boom and have a certain airport lounge, endless travel, Razorfish feel that the average start-up drone will love. Those books hae have no overarching geographical locus to hang on just as the late 1990s and the early aughts left us listless and disconnected, pining for a day when everyone – students, surf bums, and even a woman allergic to branding, could find a place in an economy that whirred like a shining VCR read/write head.

Each trilogy moves closer to “speculative fiction of the very recent past.” While you’re in there, hit The Difference Engine as a palate cleanser. Then you can begin to distrust this particular flavor.

I’m probably preaching to the choir, though. Gibson is a gem, our own Jules Verne who planted so many seeds in popular culture that it is difficult to look out across our roiling intellectual landscape and not see his ideas. He knew that the ability to render fluid 3D was coming, that Japan would rise as a major techno-center, that man-machine relations would become seamless. One could argue that cyberspace now exists in the wildly detailed games we play and that we’re a few steps away from really jacking in, as his characters did. He foresaw urbanity as cancer – in the Sprawl – and as Alternative Flea Market/Edgy Disneyland on the Bridge. He saw the world as a grey waiting room populated by the rich and their helpers in his post 9/11 novels, and saw fashion as an expression of commerce.

He does the same here, although on a much smaller scale. He’s talking about real life so there are fewer mirrorshades. Instead we visit with him as he lands in Singapore and makes a movie and walks by a window full of ephemera in lower New York where a jumble of missile identification models was dusted one September morning with “blasted dreams” as it sits in a closed antiques shop. He’s seen a lot, and wants to tell us about it.

My one peeve? Gibson adds these little asides at the end of each piece, explaining just how he failed and how this story “needed a haircut” or how he went off on an odd tangent. It’s like a magician doing a serviceable rendition of the disappearing elephant, and then explaining afterwards that his curtain work was a little sloppy and if you looked under the stage you could see the elephant.

In the end, this collection of essays is a minor addition to the Gibson canon. It’s a worthy one, though, and well worth a read. And while you wait for it to download onto your Fire or your iPad or your Sandbenders, give thanks to the seer of our age who didn’t expect things to turn out that rosy yet still understood the good in both us and, more important, our variegated and ever more cunning tools.

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Why Every Entrepreneur Should Self-Publish a Book

Posted: 28 Jan 2012 06:00 AM PST

I’ve published eight books in the past seven years, five with traditional publishers (Wiley, Penguin, HarperCollins), one comic book, and the last two I’ve self-published. In this post I give the specific details of all of my sales numbers and advances with the traditional publishers. Although the jury is still out on my self-published books, “How to be the Luckiest Man Alive” and ”I Was Blind But Now I See” I can tell you these two have already sold more than my five books with traditional publishers, combined.

If you, the entrepreneur, self-publish a book you will stand out, you will make more money, you will kick your competitors right in the XX, and you will look amazingly cool at cocktail parties. I know this because I am seldom cool but at cocktail parties, with my very own comic book, I can basically have sex with anyone in the room. But don’t believe me, it costs you nothing and almost no time to try it yourself.

The rest of this article is really three discussions: Why self-publish rather than use a traditional publisher, why entrepreneurs should self-publish, and finally, HOW does one go about self-publishing.

WHY:

A) Advances are going to zero. Book publishers are getting more and more squeezed by declining booksellers so they, in turn, have to squeeze the writers. Because of so much free content on the Internet, the value per unit of content is going to zero unless you are already an established name-brand author.

B) Lag time. When you self-publish, you can have your book up and running on Amazon, paperback and kindle, within days. When you publish with a traditional publisher its a grueling process: book proposal, agents, lawyers, meetings, edits, packaging, catalogs, etc that ensures that your book doesn’t actually get published until a year later. Literally, as I write this a friend of mine just IMed me the details of his book deal he just got with a mainstream publisher. Publication date: 2014.

C) Marketing. Publishers claim they do a lot of marketing for you. That’s laughable. I’ll give you a very specific story. When I published with Penguin they then met with a friend of mine whose book they wanted to publish. They didn’t realize she was my friend. She asked them, “what marketing did you do for James Altucher’s book”. They said, “well, we got him a review in The Financial Times and we got a segment about his book on CNBC and an excerpt in thestreet.com”

Here’s what’s so funny. I had a weekly column in The Financial Times. I WROTE my own review. As a joke. For CNBC, I had a weekly segment on CNBC. So naturally I spoke about my book during my regular segment. And for thestreet.com excerpt, I had just sold my last company to thestreet.com. So instead of doing my usual article for them I did an excerpt. In other words, the publisher did NOTHING, but took credit for EVERYTHING. Ultimately, authors (unless you are Stephen King, etc) have to do their own marketing for books. The first question publishers ask, even, before they look at your proposal is, “How big is your platform?” They want to know how you can market the book and if they can make money on just your own marketing efforts.

D) Better royalties. i.e. when I self-publish I make about a 70% royalty instead of a 15% royalty with a traditional publisher. I also own 100% of the foreign rights instead of 50%. I hired someone to sell the foreign rights and they get 20% (and no upfront fee).

E) More control over content and design. Look at this cover for “SuperCash” designed by a traditional publisher for me (this was my third book). It’s hideous.

Now look at the cover for my last book (self-published), “I Was Blind But Now I See”. You may or may not like it but it’s exactly what I wanted. Publishers even include in the contract that they have final say over the cover and this is one detail they will not negotiate.

You also don’t have any teenage interns sending you editorial comments back that you completely disagree with. YOU control your own content.

Now,

WHY SHOULD ENTREPRENEURS SELF-PUBLISH

A) You have content. I have enough material in my blog right now (including my “Drafts” folder which has 75 unpublished posts in it) to publish five more books over the next year. And I’m sure that number will increase over the next year as I write more posts. You’re an entrepreneur because you feel you have a product or an idea or a vision that stands out among your competitors (if you don’t stand out, pack it in and come up with a new idea).

You know how to do something better than anyone else in the world. How do let the world know that you are better? A business card won’t cut it. People will throw it away. And everyone’s got a website with an “About” button.

Give away part (or all) of your ideas in a book. You’re a brand new social media agency? How should social media work? Write it down. You’re a new CRM software package? How should CRM be better? Tell me. How should online dating services work? Tell some stories. Heck, make them as sexy as possible.

Don’t have time to write it. Then tell it to a ghostwriter you outsource to for almost no money. You don’t need 60,000 words. Do it in 20,000 words. Throw some pictures in. Just do it. Then when you meet someone and they ask for your business card, how cool will it be when you can say, “here, take my book instead.”

B) You have more to say. More and more companies have blogs. Many of the posts on the blog are “evergreen”. i.e. they last forever and are not time specific. If you just take the posts (mentioned in the point above) and publish them people will say, “he’s just publishing a collection of posts”. A couple of comments on that.

1. So what? It’s ok if you are curating what you feel your best posts are. And for a small price people can get that curation and read it in a different format.There’s value there.

2. Don’t just take a collection of your posts. A blog post is typically 500-2000 words. Usually closer to 500. Do a bit more research for each post. Do intros and outros for each post. Make the chapters 3000-4000 words. Make a bigger arc to the book by using original material to explain WHY this book, with these chapters, presented in this manner is a different read than the blog. Have a chapter specifically explaining how the book is different from the blog.

With my last book, “I Was Blind But Now I See” I had original material in each chapter and several chapters that were completely original. Instead of it being a collection of posts, the overall book was about how we have been brainwashed in society, and how uncovering the brainwashing and using the techniques I describe can bring happiness. This was covered in a much more detailed fashion than the blog ever could even though the material was inspired by several of my posts.

C) Amazon is an extra platform for you to market your blog. Or vice versa. You won’t make a million dollars on your book (well, maybe you will – never say never) but just being able to say, “I’m a published author” extends your credibility as a writer/speaker/enterpreneur when you go out there now to sell your book, syndicate your blog elsewhere or to get speaking engagements, etc. And when you do a speaking engagement, you can now hand something out – your book! So Amazon and publishing become a powerful marketing platform for your overall writing/speaking/consulting career.

D) Nobody cares. Some people want the credibility of saying “Penguin published me”. I can tell you from experience – nobody ever asked me who was my publisher when Penguin was my publisher. And, by the way, Penguin was the worst publisher I ever had.

E) How will I get in bookstores? I don’t know. How will you? Traditional publishers can’t get you there either. Often bookstores will look at what’s hot on Amazon and then order the books wholesale from the publishers. In many cases, tradtional publishers will take their most-known writers (so if you are in that category, congrats!) and pay to have them featured at a bookstore. As for my experience, my traditional publishers would get a few copies of my books in the bookstores of major cities (i.e. NYC and that’s it) but nothing more.

OK, I’M CONVINCED. HOW DO I SELF-PUBLISH

There’s lots of ways to do it but I’ll tell you my experience.

A) First write the book. For my last two self-published books, as mentioned above, I took some blog posts, rewrote parts of them, added original material, added new chapters, and provided an overall arc as to what the BOOK was about as opposed to it just being a random collection of posts. But, that said, you probably already have the basic material already.

B) Createspace.com. I used createspace because they are owned by Amazon and have excellent customer service. They let you pick the size of your book and then have Microsoft Word templates that you download to format your book within. For my first book I did this by myself, for my second book, for a small fee, I hired Alexanderbecker.net to format the book, create the book design, and create the final PDF that I uploaded. He also checked grammar, made proactive suggestions on font (sans serif instead of serif) and was extremely helpful.

C) Upload the PDF. Createspace approves it, picks an ISBN number, sends you a proof, and then you approve the proof.

D) Within days its available on Amazon. It’s print-on-demand as a paperback. And by the way, your total costs at this point: $0. Or whatever you used to design your cover.

E) Kindle. All of the above (from Createspace) was free. If I didn’t hire Alex to make the cover I could’ve used over 1mm of Createspace’s possible covers (I did that for my first book) and the entire publishing in paperback would be free. But with Kindle, Createspace charges $70 and they take care of everything until it’s uploaded to the Kindle store. Now you are available in paperback and kindle.

F) Marketing.

1. Readers of my blog who asked for it got the first 20 copies or so for free from me. Many of them then posted good reviews on Amazon to get the ball rolling.

2. I’ve been handing out the books at speaking engagements. Altogether, I’ll do around 10 speaking engagements handing my latest book out.

3. I write a blog post about how the bo0k is different from the blog and why I chose to go this route.

4. Writing guests posts for blogs like Techcrunch helps and I’m very grateful.

5. Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Google+ are also very helpful.

G) Promotions. You’re in charge of your own promotions (as opposed to a book publisher.). For instance, in a recent blog post I discussed the differences between my latest book and my blog and I also offered a promotion on how to get my next self-published book (“Bad Behavior”, expected in Q1 2012) for free.

Entrepreneurs are always looking for ways to stand out, promote their service, and get validation for their offerings. Writing a book makes you an expert in the field. At the very least, when you hand someone a book you wrote, it’s more impressive than handing a business card. It shows that you have enough expertise to write the book. It also shows you value the relationship with the potential customer enough that you are willing to give him something of value. Something you created.

And you can’t say the excuse “I don’t have time, I’m running a business.” Entrepreneurs make time. And they have the ideas so, again, at the very least you can use elance.com to hire a ghostwriter.

Over the next year I have five different books planned. All on different topics. I’m super-excited about them because I’m allowed to push the barrier in every area I’m interested in and there’s nobody to stop me. There’s nobody I need validation from. I get to pick myself.

You can do this also. And now, you should do it. There’s no more excuses in this environment. Good luck and feel free to write me with any questions.

–

Follow me on Twitter

Also, see 33 Unusual Ways to Become a Great Writer

Ron Paul, Mitt Romney Leading On Facebook Ahead Of Florida Primary

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 05:49 PM PST

The Republican presidential candidacy is still far from decided, based on the split primaries and mixed polls so far. So here’s another source for trying to figure who’s really pulling ahead — the number of new Facebook fans that each candidate is getting, according to the Inside Facebook Election Tracker.

Mitt Romney is finally making some strong gains this month, in contrast to his Facebook performance over December. By “strong gains” I mean he’s been attracting a roughly similar number of fans to Ron Paul, the candidate who normally dominates on the web (and the clear leader last month). The two have fought for the daily lead for most of January, except for when Rick Santorum surged around his Iowa primary win on the 3rd.

Newt Gingrich, meanwhile, managed to win South Carolina on the 21st, which corresponded with his biggest gains on Facebook. But he’s still way weaker than the others. And the rest of the candidates are no longer registering any meaningful gains, whether or not they’ve officially dropped out.

Overall, Romney still has the most Facebook fans among Republicans, with 1.39 million. Paul is a distant second at 800,000. Gingrich is down at 250,000 and Santorum a pitiful 90,000.

Of course, these numbers only say so much about who’s actually the most popular. Fan growth can come through inorganic methods like Facebook ads, fan page promotions, or clever use of the news feed. And fans can come from anywhere in the world; they’re by no means primary voters. But, the gains made by Santorum and Gingrich right when they won their primaries suggests many new fans are Liking candidate pages organically, at least in the sense that users are acting on their because of larger events. Certainly, the low fan counts that these candidates are showing overall on Facebook suggest that they are not doing much of anything to reach more voters.

Paul’s fanbase could also be discounted because he consistently does well in online matchups like these, even though he has trouble winning primaries. But maybe that will change in Florida? He had the biggest day of the month recently, at 9,500 new fans on the 24th. As Brittany Darwell notes over on Inside Facebook regarding the other primary winners, the fan counts seem to start climbing right before they do well with the vote counts.

Otherwise, Romney’s position is looking stronger than ever, similar to the latest polls.

Harvard Gets Its First VC Firm: The Experiment Fund

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 04:05 PM PST

As just about everyone should know by now, the seeds of what grew into Facebook were planted at Harvard. Might there be a bunch of mini-Zucks lurking in the dorms of Cambridge? If so, a new venture capital firm — the first housed right on the Harvard campus — wants to find them.

Dubbed The Experiment Fund, the firm describes itself as “a bridge between America’s oldest universities and storied venture capital firms.” Backed by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), the firm is made up of Hugo Van Vurren, NEA co-head Patrick Chung, and NEA General Partner Harry Weller — all of whom have a degree of some form from the school.

When I say it’s “right on the Harvard campus”, I’m not kidding — it’s going to be based out of 33 Oxford Street, which is Harvard’s School Of Engineering And Applied Sciences. It’s a bit more than a stone’s throw from Harvard Yard. With that said, the fund operates with complete independence from the university.

And if you’re not a Harvard student? Don’t sweat it too much. The fund says they’re open to anyone, “regardless of university affilation, nationality, age, or prior experience.” Being a Harvard student (or at least a Cambridge local) probably wouldn’t hurt, though.

While it seems the size of the fund isn’t set in stone yet (or at least, it wasn’t disclosed — I’ll look into it. Update: they’re not setting a cap at this point), the team says they expect to seed “several” companies with up to $250k each over the next two years.

Secret Windows 8 Weapon: Kinect Built Into Your Laptop

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 02:39 PM PST

The Windows release of Kinect is coming up in a couple days, but for most people that won’t be a major event: the Kinect they have is sitting on their TV or in a drawer, waiting to be taken out for an impromptu Dance Central 2 party. Of the 10 million Kinects out there, the only ones connected to computers are the ones being fiddled with by the various hackers and students making science projects out the things.

But according to the Daily, Microsoft is hoping to remedy this particular situation by building Kinect sensors right into your laptops. TechCrunch alum Matt Hickey got to handle a pair of prototypes, which were confirmed to be official, not just one of the many experiments that hide within Microsoft’s various lairs.

Unfortunately the laptops were not ready for their debut and no pictures seem to have been permitted. But they are described as netbook-like, with a number of smaller sensors instead of a webcam, and what could be an IR LED at the bottom of the screen.

The inclusion of depth-sensing cameras on a laptop is an interesting idea, and if they can drive the price of the sensor array down, it might become a standard feature. Microsoft has clearly also been focusing on miniaturizing the Kinect hardware, as the bulky original would seem somewhat out of place on a petite netbook. Whether this smaller sensor set has the same capabilities as the larger isn’t clear and wasn’t discussed.

A smaller Kinect would also suggest that Microsoft’s next console, rumored to have Kinect built in, is nearing readiness. While many gaming industry insiders have discounted the idea that the next generation of consoles will be announced this year, the rumor mill says otherwise.

Twitter Puts Its DMCA Takedown Requests Up For All To See

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 01:30 PM PST

Yesterday’s announcement that Twitter would be selectively censoring tweets based on country was not well-received. But part of that announcement was the assurance that the process would at least be transparent. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.

They also mentioned that they were working with Chilling Effects to make notices and orders sent to Twitter publicly available. At the time of the post yesterday, the site wasn’t up yet, but you can now browse it at chillingeffects.org/twitter.

It’s a good thing, certainly, though not quite a successful saving throw versus the localized-censorship piece. The database has several thousand DMCA takedown requests right now, but is not quite up to date — it isn’t clear at what rate they’re updating the database, but there aren’t many from this month so it seems to be something less than weekly.

Browsing the listings is a good way to waste 15 minutes, looking at the different ways people tend to provoke a DMCA takedown request. There’s a lot of cricket being linked to, apparently. And there are the inevitable copyrighted avatars.

What’s interesting to me is that there are a number of requests that in themselves request dozens of tweets to be taken down; this one, for example, points out a number of pirated movies being linked to, and the accounts are clearly bots. The DMCA request is only for the movies the rightsholder is concerned with — which is at once both correct and perverse. The account only exists to link to copyrighted material and has done so thousands of times, but everyone involved would rather snip out individual tweets one by one. Talk about a Sisyphean task.

Presumably this database will also house the official requests by governments who wish to restrict tweets based on content. While most won’t agree with Twitter’s decision to accede to these repressive entities’ wishes, it can at least be hoped that it will be done so with maximum transparency. The best thing Twitter users can do, perhaps, is to make sure this database is up to date and reflective of the restrictions being placed on tweets. Until a solution comes along, reducing the harm this new policy does and making sure it’s well understood should take priority.

Y Combinator Names Seasoned Entrepreneur Geoff Ralston As Its Newest Partner

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 01:15 PM PST

Y Combinator has just announced the newest partner to join the prestigious firm: Geoff Ralston. Ralston’s previous credentials include founding Four11, which was acquired by Yahoo back in 1997 for $96 million and served as the foundation for Yahoo Mail. Ralston spent eight years at Yahoo, eventually becoming Yahoo’s Chief Product Officer. Several years after leaving Yahoo he was named CEO of Lala, before it was acquired by Apple in 2009.

Most recently he cofounded Imagine K12, a tech incubator for education-related startups, which presented at TechCrunch Disrupt SF (you can find the incubator’s first batch of companies here). In his post announcing the news, Y Combinator’s Paul Graham writes that Ralston will continue as a full partner at Imagine K12. He also writes that he’s known Geoff for 13 years, ever since his days at Yahoo (Graham’s startup, Viaweb, was acquired by Yahoo in June 1998).

The news comes only a few days after YC announced two other new partners: Garry Tan (formerly of Posterous) and Aaron Iba (formerly of Appjet/Etherpad), both of whom are YC alumni. The timing probably isn’t a coincidence — YC just opened up applications for its Summer 2012 batch yesterday, and a bigger team will doubtless help the firm deal with the growing number of inbound applications (and larger batch sizes).

Fun sidenote: Ralston holds the honor of taking part in one of the most entertaining startup pitches I’ve ever seen, when he and fellow Lala execs Bill Nguyen and John Kuch (now both at Color) explained how Lala — whose previous incarnations included a CD swapping and a failed music hub — was being reborn as an innovative streaming music service.

It took around an hour (and a lot of hilarious handwaving and bickering between the three then-Lala execs as they debated what they could tell me — in front of me), but I went from being convinced Lala was launching something completely illegal to believing it was a taste of the future. Lala never got too much traction, but it was great, and it had a nice exit: Apple acquired the company for a reported $80+ million.

Gillmor Gang Live 01.27.12 (TCTV)

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 01:11 PM PST

The Gillmor Gang – Danny Sullivan, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, Doc Searls & Steve Gillmor – is recording live today at 1pm PT. Recording has concluded.

Flurry: Amazon’s Kindle Fire Is Already Starting To Smoke Samsung’s Galaxy Tab

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 12:45 PM PST

Wuh oh, Samsung — better watch your tail. While Apple might not be seeing any impact (be it positive or negative) on iPad sales from the launch of the Kindle Fire, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab ought to be feeling the heat.

Tapping into the data provided by their app analytics platform (which they estimate has found its way onto around 90% of the Android devices out there), Flurry highlights a few surprising numbers.

App Sessions:

This one’s pretty interesting, as it measures how many people are actually using their respective Android tablets (as opposed to how many bought them and let them sit on a shelf somewhere). It measures “User Application Sessions”, which is defined as a user opening an application and using it for at least 10 seconds before closing it.

After launching in November, the Kindle Fire accounted for just 3% of application sessions. Just three months later, it’s at 35.7% — pretty much neck and neck with Samsung’s 35.6%.

Think about that. The Kindle Fire, which has been out for 3 months, is seeing as much cumulative usage as a series of devices that have been out for an entire year longer. Even if the number of Galaxy Tabs sold well outweighs the number of Kindle Fires sold (and it likely does — again, the Tab series has been out for much longer. It’s also available around the world, whereas the Fire is US only for now), Fire owners appear to actually use their devices more often.

Downloads:

Next up, Flurry looked at the download numbers for 5 applications that were in the Top 10 on both the Android Market and Amazon’s App Store. To boil it all down: for every sale of one of these top apps to a Galaxy Tab owner, there were 2.53 sales to a Kindle Fire owner. Again, consider how much bigger the Galaxy Tab audience is (Flurry estimates that it’s at least double) — and yet, the Kindle Fire owners are buying more.

If you’re an Android developer wondering whether or not you should target the Kindle Fire and Amazon’s App Store, the answer seems to be an incredibly clear “Yes.”

Android Smartphone Round-Up: December/January Edition

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 12:04 PM PST

We took a break from the Android round-up in December because, well, to be honest I was on vacation. But January gave us a few extra smartphones and the holidays are over, so we’re back. What we’ve got for you today leans into more expensive turf, and unfortunately, our favorite Android devices for the past two months are also exclusively at Verizon, so Big Red subscribers should pay attention.

Without further ado, these are our favorite December/January releases of the Android persuasion: The Samsung Galaxy Nexus, the LG Spectrum, and the Motorola Droid RAZR Maxx.

Enjoy!

Samsung Galaxy Nexus

Features:

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich
Verizon 4G LTE support
4.65-inch 1280×720 Super AMOLED display
5MP rear camera (1080 video capture), 1.3MP front-facing camera (720p video capture)
1.2GHz dual-core processor
MSRP: $299.99 with a two-year contract

Pros:

Ice Cream Sandwich is a solid step up from Gingerbread
That 720p display is huge and beautiful
Google Hangouts

Cons:

The phone might be a bit too big for one-handed actions
Feels a bit plastic-y
No pre-loaded Google wallet, but you can download it

If you’re looking for Android, the Galaxy Nexus is where you’ll find it. Ice Cream Sandwich is a joy compared to Gingerbread, and this coming from someone who is quite hard on Android. Of course, the screen on this bad boy is amazing, but as MG points out in his review, sometimes the phone is just too big to perform one-handed actions.

We also expected image quality to be better out of that 5-megapixel rear camera, but it simply can’t compete with the iPhone’s 8-megapixel shooter. (And no, I’m not saying that based on megapixels… Image quality is simply better with the 4S.) But that doesn’t really matter — an Android fan is an Android fan, and this is as good as Android gets.

LG Spectrum

Features:

Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread
Verizon 4G LTE support
4.5-inch True HD 1280×720 Display
8MP rear camera (1080p video capture), 1.3MP front-facing camera
1.5GHz dual-core processor
MSRP: $199.99 with a two-year contract

Pros:

Beautiful display
Pre-loaded ESPN Sports Center app in HD
LG Y is actually a nice custom overlay

Cons:

Not a fan of that brushed plastic back panel
The silver bezels don’t handle prints well

I was hard on this phone when I first played around with it, and I still maintain that there’s nothing super special about the Spectrum. It’s not like the Rezound with Beats Audio imtegration or the Razr with its anorexic waist line. That said, you really won’t find these kind of specs on an Android phone for just $200. In fact, I’d be so bold as to call it a steal.

I’m also pretty excited about that display. I have yet to put a Super AMOLED Plus up against this 720p True HD display, but I’d say it’s one of the most (if not, the most) stunning displays I saw at CES. Certainly worth consideration, especially if you are a fan of LG phones to begin with.

Motorola Droid Razr Maxx

Features:

Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread
Verizon 4G LTE support
4.3-inch Super AMOLED advanced 960×540 display
8MP rear camera (1080p video capture), 1.3MP front-facing camera (720p video capture)
1.2GHz dual-core processor
MSRP: $299.99 with a two-year contract

Pros:

3300 mAH battery is a big improvement from the Razr
Less of a “Moto bump” along the back
Bump in storage from 16GB to 32GB

Cons:

1.89mm thicker than its predecessor
UI can slow things down a tad

The Droid Razr Maxx is a very special phone. It kills the few things that were wrong with the original Razr — which is an excellent device, mind you — and then doubles the storage, to boot. I was originally bothered with how light the Razr was. It made premium materials feel cheap, but the extra heft and weight on the Razr Maxx really gives this phone a pricey, solid feel.

A Droid Razr update for Android 4.0 leaked out this week, so if you’re comfortable with tinkering than that’s an extra benefit to the Maxx. We’ll have a full review on this phone up very shortly, but from the short time I’ve spent with it thus far I’d say it has the superior hardware in this particular bunch of Android handsets.

It’ll all come down to what matters most to you. If that giant 720p screen excites you, go Galaxy Nexus all the way. The Spectrum, on the other hand, offers up some pretty killer specs at a much more reasonable price, while the Droid Razr Maxx wins in the hardware/design department.

Davos: BraveNewTalent Allows Job Seekers To Follow Their Future Employers

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 11:26 AM PST

BraveNewTalent is a social recruitment platform operating in the UK and moving into the US. I caught up with CEO and founder Lucia Tarnowski at Davos.

The startup is built around the idea that people want to follow companies they might want to work for in the future, and companies in turn want to educate potential hires about how they work.

They recently introduced a few new features, which Tarnowski outlines, notably the new feature enabling a user to follow the key employees of a company.

Davos: Ushahidi Grows Its Global Crowd-sourcing Platform, Slams Twitter Censorship [TCTV]

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 11:09 AM PST

At Davos I managed to catch Juliana Rotich, Co-Founder of Ushahidi, the incredible crowd sourcing platform which came out of Kenya. Starting with just a handful of countries in 2009, it’s main product, Crowdmap, is now used in hundreds of countries for crisis mapping and even crowd sourcing information about nuclear weapons in Iran.

I got an update from her about their latest moves. These include news that the Omidyar Network, which put $1.4m towards Ushahidi, and which late last year put in another $1.9m.

It’s worth noting also that Ushahidi has come out against a new partnership between the World Bank with Google that is supposed to empower citizen cartographers in 150 countries, but which threatens the open source map making community. Google's licensing agreement for Google Map Maker says users can only access Google Map Maker data unless it is via platform designated by Google.

In addition, her opinions about the move by Twitter to introduce a censorship platform. This of course is of huge significance to activists in Africa, and she doesn’t hold back.

Lastly, iHub Nairobi – a tech startup community – needs a 3D printer, so it would be great to see someone make that happen for them.

(Apologies for the break at the beginning due to a technical problem on the camera).

WSJ: Facebook Filing For IPO As Early As Wednesday

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 11:08 AM PST

The Wall Street Journal has just reported that Facebook may file for its long-awaited IPO as soon as this Wednesday, but notes that the “timing is still being discussed”, according to an anonymous source. The article says that Facebook is eyeing a valuation between $75 and $100 billion as it raises up to $10 billion, which is in line with a previous WSJ report last November.

The article also reports that Morgan Stanley is currently the frontrunner to secure the top, “lead left” position in the filing, with Goldman Sachs playing a “significant role” as well. The news comes shortly after Facebook temporarily froze secondary trades on its shares, sparking speculation that the IPO filing may be imminent.

Facebook’s IPO has been the subject of constant debate and anticipation in the tech world for years now — though CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg have long avoided committing to any kind of time-table for the company to go public. The long wait for the IPO has led many employees to turn to the secondary markets to sell some of their valuable shares and secure some liquidity.

Here’s an excerpt from an interview this past November between Charlie Rose, Zuckerberg, and Sandberg, where they discuss the timing of Facebook’s public offering (you can full the full transcript here):

Charlie Rose:
What's the valuation today of Facebook?

Sheryl Sandberg:
So we're a private company so we don't really have a valuation.

Charlie Rose:
So then why do you want to be a public company? Why do you even think about an IPO?

Mark Zuckerberg:
I actually think the biggest thing for us is that a big part of being a technology company is getting the best engineers and designers and talented people around the world. And one of the ways that you can do that is you compensate people with equity or options, right, so you get people who want to join the company, both for the mission, right, because they believe that Facebook is doing this awesome thing and they want to be a part of connecting everyone in the world, but also, if the company does well, then they get financially rewarded and can be set. And, you know, we've made this implicit promise to our investors and to our employees that by compensating them with equity and by giving them equity, that at some point we're going to make that equity worth something publicly and liquidly, in a liquid way. Now, the promise isn't that we're going to do it on any kind of short-term time horizon. The promise is that we're going to build this company so that it's great over the long term, right. And that we're always making these decisions for the long term, but at some point we'll do that.

…

Charlie Rose:
You'll go when what? When will you decide?

Sheryl Sandberg:
When we're ready.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah.

#Humblebrag: Jack Dorsey, Reid Hoffman, Kevin Rose Coming To The Crunchies; Harris Wittels Hosting

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 11:05 AM PST

After writing for NBC’s Parks and Recreation for the past couple years (he’s about to start a writing gig for HBO’s Eastbound and Down), and authoring the sarcastic but brilliant and hilarious @HumbleBrag, Harris Wittels has decided to bring his talents to TechCrunch. This year, he will be hosting the Crunchies Awards, and bringing his chiding humor. If you’re not familiar with Humblebrag, he scours Twitter in search of braggadocio wrapped in humility. I’m willing to bet at least one of you has been retweeted. If so, post them in the comments below. We want to see.

Not only is Wittels hosting, but Jack Dorsey, Kevin Rose, Marissa Mayer, Kevin Systrom, Reid Hoffman, Ron Conway and many more will also be joining us, many of them presenting awards themselves. This is going to be one night you won’t want to miss. We have just released our last batch of tickets. If you would like to come to the Crunchies Awards, make sure to go here to get them, and get them quickly since they tend to sell very fast. And there’s still time to vote for the best startups, apps, investors, and founders of the year. Voting ends at midnight on Sunday.

Like always, an after party will follow the ceremony, where we will be joined by all of our guests and winners. There will be a fully hosted bar, hors d'oeuvres, a casino game room, and other fun entertainment and surprises. The award show is taking place next Tuesday, January 31st, at 7:30pm.

Lastly, in all fun, would you like to get mentioned by Wittels on stage? If so, make sure you tweet out your best humblebrags between now and the start of the show using the #crunchies and #humblebrag hashtags, and you may be chosen. Below are some examples to get you started.

See you all at the Crunchies!

Meeting w/ Dutch prime minister, pizza at table next to Eric Schmidt, then Sean Parker's party. "Surreal" is only way to describe #Davos.—
Matthew Prince (@eastdakota) January 26, 2012

Its kind of insane though, the world is at the brink of depression, military conflict and ecological collapse and me in a bra is global news—
Andrej Pejic (@Andrej_Pejic) December 16, 2011

Akward moment: boarding a sold-out flight & hearing flight attendant announce the in-flight movie is one of mine: #Dolphin Tale.—
ashley judd (@AshleyJudd) January 12, 2012

why am i so good at flirting when im not trying to flirt—
Joshua Decker (@JoshPointO_) December 13, 2011

Gillmor Gang 01.24.12 (TCTV)

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 10:58 AM PST

The Gillmor Gang — Dennis Crowley, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — visit with the ghosts of Foursquare Past, Present, and Future. @dens is semi-bicoastal these days, trying to stay ahead of his growing business. He just moved in to a new office in NY, and the one in SF is expanding as rapidly as he can hire.

We try to get him to say bad things about Google +, but he demurs. But he never escapes the Gang without leaving a bit more of his roadmap than he anticipates. Of course, you’ll need gamification chops to uncover it.

@stevegillmor, @dens, @jtaschek, @kevinmarks

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

Keen On… Payvment: Making eCommerce More Social (TCTV)

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 10:41 AM PST

Earlier this week, Facebook announced changes to its Open Graph which have huge implications to the social ecommerce platform Payvment. The two year-old Palo Alto based start-up, which already manages 80% of the ecommerce transactions on Facebook, will now be able to be integrated into the Open Graph. What this means, according to Payvment’s Founder and CEO Christian Taylor, is that we can now broadcast what we want on our Facebook pages. Such social one-click purchasing power is “big trouble” for Amazon and eBay, Taylor predicts. And even bigger trouble, I suspect, for parents who will now be inundated with gift ideas by their Facebook loving kids.

Playfish Product Leader John Earner Is Leaving To Be An EIR At Accel

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 10:27 AM PST

At this point in his career, it’s safe to put John Earner in the “names as destiny” category. Following a hugely successful run with Playfish, he’s leaving the social game developer today to start as an entrepreneur in residence at one of its investors, Accel, according to sources.

A former naval officer, he joined as the company in 2008 as its first game producer, where he shepherded the development of its first big simulation game, Pet Society. Having figured out how to monetize virtual goods with it, he went on to launch the company’s next big hit, Restaurant City. These two games inspired competing ones from Zynga and many other developers, and provided the revenue and traffic numbers that got Electronic Arts to acquire Playfish in the fall of 2009 in a deal worth up to $400 million.

He also built out its product team as he moved up within the company. And after the acquisition, he helped EA to develop a variety of other titles using existing sports intellectual property, including soccer management game FIFA Superstars. His biggest win, though, has been Sims Social. The life simulator, based off of the long-running EA series, is now the single largest title in EA’s Facebook portfolio. It’s also one of the largest games overall on the platform today, with 3.9 million daily active users and 22 million monthly actives, according to AppData.

He will no doubt be missed, especially considering the general traffic decline of EA’s Facebook titles.

The gaming conglomerate is still one of the largest developers on Facebook, but its social game leadership has also continued to get whittled down. Of the Playfish founding team, only Kristian Segerstrale remains — albeit he’s moved up to be the executive vice president of EA Digital. Meanwhile, former division head Barry Cottle was recently poached by Zynga.

YC Alum Curebit Raises $1.2 Million For Online Referral System

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 10:13 AM PST

Y Combinator alum Curebit, an online customer referral platform that leverages social media for “word-of-mouth” advertising, has just raised $1.2 million in funding. The investors include 500 Startups, Karl Jacob, Auren Hoffman, Dharmesh Shah, Gordon Tucker, Alex Lloyd of Accelerator Ventures, and others.

The funding will be used for continued product development and a slight expansion to the team involving three new hires (two developers, one designer) to the company’s now five-person outfit.

Curebit, for those unfamiliar, works to optimize the referral systems for eCommerce platforms and software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies (See previous coverage here).

The startup offers a few different ways for businesses to take advantage of its tools, the first being a post-purchase campaign that allows customers to share the details of the purchase on Facebook, Twitter or via email, as soon as the transaction completes.

“We figured when’s a better time than when you’ve basically voted with your wallet, saying ‘hey, I like this store,’” explains Curebit Co-founder Allan Grant.

Companies can also use Curebit’s technology to build standalone referral pages that are accessible at any time, or in one-off campaigns meant to further the reach of existing referral programs.

The startup says it now around 1,000 customers, including everything from smaller, e-commerce stores to larger customers like Giggle.com and a newly signed (but unannounced) top 20 retailer and a consumer foods company. The technology is also available as a plugin for 14 platforms, including Shopify and Magento.

By leveraging social media for the word-of-mouth referrals, Curebit’s customers see higher clicks and conversions than in traditional campaigns, where, for example, customers may have come in by way of ads. The referrals are like personal recommendations from friends, and often include a benefit, like a discount for the new customer, or for both the new customer and the friend who’s doing the referring.

When either the customer or the friend gets a deal via the referral, Curebit is seeing 15%-25% share rates. When the deal is double-sided (both people benefit), share rates are 45%-65%. Meanwhile, only 3% share using the standalone share button. Curebit also sees 1 to 5 clicks per share, depending on the product.

More unique products seem to do better than commodity products, notes Grant. And Curebit’s conversion rates are generally 2 to 3 times higher than traditional methods, and, in some cases, have been as high as 30%. Even better, Curebit’s referrals pay off in terms of dollars spent at checkout, too.

“The other thing we’ve seen consistently on just about every single site is that people spend more,” says Grant. “The average order amount is higher, and it’s not just higher based on how much the discount is – it’s higher even beyond that, even when you take the discount out.”

It’s the personal nature of the Curebit-powered recommendation that’s freeing people up to spend, it seems.

Jon Rubinstein Leaves HP After “Fulfilling Commitment”

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 10:06 AM PST

HP’s had quite a 2011 and Jon Rubinstein, former Palm CEO and a top-level executive at HP after the giant acquired Palm in 2010, was along for the ride. But according to a report out of AllThingsD, Rubinstein has officially left the company.

Here’s the official quote out of HP:

Jon has fulfilled his commitment to HP. We wish him well.

Rubinstein was under contract with HP to complete a 12-24 month commitment post-acquisition. The report claims that Rubinstein doesn’t have any plans so far, but has said that he is “going to take a well deserved break after four and a half years of developing webOS."

On December 9, 2011, HP CEO Meg Whitman announced that webOS, Rubinstein’s main project, would be open sourced after the company killed webOS smartphones and tablets back in August.