Most venture capitalists obsess on the latest shiny object for the 18-34 demographic. That’s remarkably shortsighted. The aging U.S. population is a potential gold mine for entrepreneurs who can build technologies to help this huge demographic remain active and stay in their homes as long as possible.

The cohort of Americans over age 55 is massive. “This is a huge market —  $3 trillion in annual disposable income,” said Jody Holtzman, SVP of thought leadership for the AARP.

Holtzman was one of a panel of experts who spoke this week on The Rise of the Grey Market an event hosted by Redstar, a Cambridge, Mass. company that’s somewhat like an incubator. Redstar focuses on the older demographic and a few other underserved markets. So why is Redstar keen on retirees? Here’s what the panel had to say:

1. Technologies and services to foster “aging in place” will be huge
The number-one desire of most aging Americans is to stay in their homes. That age-in-place trend represents a $10 billion to $20 billion market opportunity in and of itself, Holtzman said.

Still, it’s a thorny problem.  Most senior citizens aren’t wild about having surveillance cameras or other intrusive technologies tracking them at home. And yet many of them live alone (42 percent of women over the age of 65 in the U.S. live solo), and have distant children who worry about their well-being. So research must be done to make technologies that are acceptable to them and let family members know whether they’re okay or not. The AARP estimates the unpaid value of care provided to family members by children or siblings is $450 billion annually.

“If we can blend monitoring and managing with social media tools and sharing or connecting with other people, that might be more attractive,” said Joe Coughlin, director of MIT’s AgeLab, which is working on the e-Home project, which uses wireless sensors to signal potential problems, like a stove being left on for hours.

2. When tech products hit big with older Americans, it’s often by mistake
The Wii and Apple’s iPad are big hits with aging Americans, but that was a happy accident. “Wiis are huge in nursing homes, unbeknownst to Nintendo,” said panelist Joe Coughlin, director of MIT’s AgeLab.

Smart companies will design products for older people while not condescending to them. For example, car companies should focus on personalized dashboards that will help older people drive safely longer. Similarly, car doors should be designed to allow easy entry and exit, and seats should be crafted with stronger lumbar support.

“Connected health” efforts, like Vitality’s smart pill bottle cap, could have a huge impact. That product alerts pharmacies when a refill is needed and reminds a person to take her pills on time. ”The challenge for these connected health initiative si to embed things in everyday objects,” said David Rose, CEO of Vitality, another panelist.

Also, those who design things need to make them look good. Many elderly people don’t wear their emergency alert devices because they’re ugly, panelists said.

3. Target market: baby boomer care givers
Baby boomers — people between 47 to 65 years of age — face a dilemma. Many are still caring for children while also assuming more care for aging parents. A huge percentage of that group is both willing and able to pay for services and products that will keep their parents safe and happy — and give the caregiver peace of mind.

“As parents age, life is more complex. When you turn 50 to 55, that’s the in-between stage, and your life gets exponentially more complex. How do you take people in my situation and make their lives simpler?” asked Frank Moss, director of new media medicine at MIT’s Media Lab.

4. Think services, not just products
SilverRide, a Bay Area company that started up to help retirees get to doctors appointments, quickly found its users wanted more. “They found demand pull from people was not just for rides but to introduce customers to other customers,” said Coughlin.  ”People want to connect — they want social interaction and activities. SilverRide now promotes and hosts group events.

Home delivery and check-in services, and add-ons around them, could be very big.

5. Research, research, research
The findings may surprise you — and force you to rethink your game plan.  Coughlin mentioned one research project that wired up people’s medicine cabinets to monitor their use of prescriptions. “What they found was very few people keep their meds in a medicine cabinet. It’s all about bags, baskets and boxes,” Coughlin said.

Panelists recommended talking to social scientists and anthropologists as well as senior citizens themselves to gauge behaviors and preferences. AARP makes a lot of its information public as does the MetLife Foundation, Holtzman said.

But the biggest takeaway from the event remained that this “huge bulge of people getting older is a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs and investors,” said RedStar co-founder Jeet Singh.

Some rights reserved by Marcel Oosterwijk

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Connected world: the consumer technology revolutionConnected Consumer Q2: Digital music meets the cloud; e-book growth explodesDisruptapalooza 2011: how Amazon’s Kindle is changing the portable media game

If the movement to re-engineer enterprise software is looking for an evangelist, Aaron Levie — co-founder and CEO of cloud-based collaboration service Box.net — would be a pretty good candidate. During a fast-paced talk at GigaOM’s Net:Work conference in San Francisco on Thursday, Levie repeatedly got laughs from the attendees as he made fun of how boring and difficult to use most enterprise software is. The Box.net CEO said that the key to making better software is to learn from consumer software and service companies, and make tools that are easy for users instead of just trying to lock them in to a specific platform.

Levie took aim at Microsoft early in his presentation, introducing Box.net as being “like Sharepoint, if Sharepoint actually worked,” and then showing a photo of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer with a pirate-style eyepatch. The Box founder talked about how many companies are frustrated because more than $250 billion is spent on enterprise software annually, but the industry still suffers from bloated software that is expensive, slow to innovate and takes too long to deploy. And despite the size of the enterprise industry, no one really talks about how to make it better because everyone is too busy “talking about check-ins and virtual cows.”

Enterprises are going to create more than 1.8 trillion gigabytes of data this year alone, Levie said, but too much corporate software makes it hard to find that information, makes it hard to see who is using it and where, and makes it difficult or even impossible to share it outside the organization. The enterprise software industry is devoted to creating a complicated stack of programs and services that can be controlled by the company, he said, and IT departments spend all their time managing this infrastructure in the hope that it will create this “magical rainbow of enterprise value,” but the rainbow never appears.

Companies like Microsoft don’t want to dismantle this industry because they have so much invested in it, said Levie, but startups can re-imagine what the industry might look like if someone could rebuild it from the ground up — and the Box.net founder said it would look a lot more like the consumer software business, where satisfying users is the most important thing. “We need simple software, solutions that humans would choose to use even if they didn’t have to, and open systems where software works together instead of just locking customers into one solution,” he said.

With freemium and open-source and software-as-a-service models, companies can not only innovate and adapt rapidly, but users only pay if they like the product and find that it works for them, instead of buying a huge, complicated solution and then getting stuck with it — which Levie called the “Zappos model instead of the Oracle model.” And because they are more open, companies can choose several different pieces of software that work together, instead of going with a single-vendor solution.

The enterprise software industry may not see a lot of evangelists who wear orange sneakers and drop quotes from rappers like Notorious B.I.G. into their presentations, but Box.net’s CEO is clearly out to change that — and pretty much everything else the enterprise business seems to take for granted.

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Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforceThe Future of Work Platforms: An OverviewA 2011 NewNet Forecast

Social is no guarantee of effectiveness in an organization because it creates unnecessary friction as people try to figure out how to work in new ways, according to David Gutelius, the Chief Social Scientist at Jive Software speaking at the GigaOM Net:Work event Thursday. Gutelius said that while such software might be intuitive, fast and beautiful to look at, it’s also just another way to push work forward, which essentially boils down to finding the right resource for whatever the employee is trying to do.

That resource might be a person or a document, but the employee still has to find it. That’s where the machines come in. Software that learns about employees, their relationships in the company and outside the company can help humans navigate social environments more quickly, and even pull in resources that may not even be on the network. For example, Gutelius used the example of the Army realizing that one of its soldiers had figured out a new way to help deal with IEDs in Iraq. This soldier wasn’t even online, but by tracking the improvement in certain squads and soldiers the Army was able to identify this individual and promote him. He was also given a forum to teach soldiers more widely.

This example shows not only how creepy this type of software could be, but also how close it is to reality. Some people might resent having their relationships mapped at such a level. Imagine if you are in a department with a horrid boss and trying to switch roles within the company. Such software might draw unwanted attention to your wooing of the marketing department as you tried to escape product management.

Anyhow, creepy or not, Gutelius’ adaptive social computing is a few years away from widescale adoption, and no longer the stuff of science-fiction fantasies.

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NewNet Q3: Facebook remakes headlines in social mediaMillennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforceThe Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

As location gradually becomes more important to the on-the-go consumer, what with daily deals, check-in coupons, and local promotions, so that consumer’s fine location becomes more important to merchants. GPS and wi-fi can only get you so far, though, and inside a mall or airport it’s much more difficult and inefficient to narrow down a user’s location to anything approaching usability.

There are systems for tracking people and devices indoors, but Scottish startup Sensewhere (formerly Satsis) says they’ve leapfrogged existing solutions. Their new “self-correcting” location-sensing network will allow for quick and low-power situation of devices to within 5m by forming a sort of constantly updated mesh of self-aware devices.

The company, which split off from research at the University of Edinburgh and got its launch money through awards and loans, received £1.2 million in funding from private equity firms just this last August. They’re making their public launch nowish (there have been a few news items over the last week or so) and have made an app available on iOS and Android.

Their technology is similar to existing indoor-tracking systems, but the company says theirs is superior due to its self-updating nature:

By cross-referencing this information from different sources, at different times, sensewhere improves the accuracy of indoor location over time, autonomously mapping RF reference points in a way that is self-correcting, updated by every device that determines its own position, reliable, and more accurate than other solutions.
If you cut through the marketing there, what you basically have is a self-updating network with devices pinging a central server with the networks they see (wi-fi, Bluetooth, RF, etc.) and their position as best they can determine, and that central server continually collates this data and updates the map, using mobile nodes as reference as well as stationary ones.

Assuming the system works, it could be a great add-on for megastructures like department stores and airports, with tons of device traffic and square footage. While I’m sure it falls short of the idea right now, one imagines the endpoint: get a promo deal when you walk into a store that expires when you walk out – that sort of thing.

Right now it’s available as an app, but it seems unlikely that they’ll see uptake in that form. They’ll have to go white-label and market themselves as a customizable solution for individual locations – that or talk with mapping or deal companies and get themselves integrated at a lower level. No hardware is required for setup at your local mall, but places will still have to tie in and do setup – there’s a lot of low-level work to be done there interfacing with small stores, corporate offices, and so on. Retail is a nightmare but they are always up for new marketing opportunities.

The Sensewhere site is pretty spartan at the moment, but you can get more info on the apps into which the service is integrated through them. The system is described in more detail in their press release and at Crowdsourcing.

Gary Swart, CEO of freelancer sourcing site oDesk took the stage at Net:Work 2011 to talk about how work is changing in the face of remote work trends. He started by pointing to a key competitive determinator all companies seek and must compete for: talent.

Swart said that competition for talent is rapid, despite economic woes. He specified two big problems: getting work to workers, and the hiring process, in terms of investment of time and resources. How to deal with both those problems has been steadily evolving: Work 1.0 was rigid, single-employer, and on location, probably what describes your grandfather’s career. Work 2.0 was about more flexible work schedules, better collaboration between remote teams and some ability to take work home with you. It’s sort of the model that’s still in place at big tech firms in Silicon Valley.

Work 3.0 is where we’re at now and where a good chunk of work is heading, according to Swart, and it’s only just getting underway. It means “access to the best people no matter where they are in the world,” and the “ability to work with those people as if they’re in the room with you.” Swart says it’s a transparent process, one that takes place primarily online using tools with built-in reporting elements. It’s a very situation-based, ephemeral mode of staffing, too: He applied a movie production analogy: the team comes together to accomplish something specific, then separate again.

He discussed examples of companies forming in order to source and staff remote work projects. Thumbtack is one, which serves 170,000 customers today, Swart says, and provides access to the services of 230,000 service professionals in discrete areas for on-demand, just-in-time labor requirements.

In short, we’re moving from rigid, structured, non-specific workforces to on-demand, targeted transparent freelancer-based staffing. Doing so saves on infrastructure, by cutting back on costs like transportation and facilities, and also leverages talent on a global scale that otherwise might go unnoticed and unappreciated. Swart sees Work 3.0 as just getting started, with its most significant effects on how we do business yet to be felt.

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Opportunities Abound as the “Rules of Work” are BrokenMillennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforceThe Future of Workplaces

HealthTap has raised $11.5 million in a first round of funding to expand its expert online physician community, which answers questions that patients pose online or via smartphones.

The backers include Google chairman Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors fund and Mohr Davidow Ventures, while Mayfield Fund led the round.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based HealthTap’s interactive health network started just two months ago and it already has more than 6,000 doctors and 500 healthcare institutions. Patients ask questions and physicians answer them. That by itself is pretty mundane. But HealthTap motivates the doctors to stay engaged because it rewards them with a better reputation and peer recognition.

Ron Gutman, chief executive of HealthTap, said in an interview that the idea for company came about because searching for authoritative health information on the internet is a frustrating experience since users don’t trust the answers they find. Doctors can be much better at answering direct questions, but they are notoriously busy and technology-phobic.

“The goal is to transform healthcare in this country,” Gutman said. “People who use the internet for health information find it useless because they don’t trust it. There are 1.2 billion health searches every month, but the real trusted information comes from doctors.”

HealthTap “gamifies” the process of answering questions, giving the physicians reputation points for their answers. On top of that, physicians can simply tap a button on a mobile phone if they agree with an answer that another doctor gave. Doctors who earn a lot of “agree” buttons can grow their standing among peers.

In the network, anyone can ask health questions online or on a mobile app. They can get answers from U.S. doctors across 100 specialties for free.

HealthTap will use the money to accelerate growth, recruit talent, and engage more physicians and patients in its online HealthTap community.

Tim Chang, managing director at Mayfield, said in an interview that Gutman has a track record of working for seven years in the field, dating back to work he did at Stanford University. Chang said that no other service has gotten doctors so engaged in answering questions and the reason is the “gamification of health.” The physicians stay engaged because they enjoy giving answers, getting rewards, and getting peer recognition. And the network taps mobile apps, which make it easy to respond.

“The ‘aha’ that caused me to invest is not just Ron’s vision for health 2.0 and gamification,” Chang said. “It was also that he was able to get doctors to care in a way that no other startup has been able to.”

In the past, drug companies often tried to bribe doctors with money. But HealthTap also taps into the same kinds of motivations that keep people playing games. The apps feed the doctors’ pride, altruism, and vanity.

“We call this the virtualization of healthcare,” Gutman said. “Instead of using strangers to do crowdsourcing, we call this ‘trust sourcing.’”

Gutman said that all physicians undergo background checks to participate on HealthTap, verifying their medical licenses and good standing in terms of lawsuits or complaints. Approved doctors get a free “virtual practice” from which they can lead an online health conversation. They can also make connections to get new patients for in-person care.

HealthTap was founded in 2010. It launched its beta apps a few months ago with expert discussions focused on pregnant mothers and pediatricians. Then it expanded to 100 different specialties where patients can ask questions 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The information is free.

HealthTap has 12 employees. The competition is doctors and hospitals who work in traditional ways. Participants include the big providers such as Cleveland Clinic and The Mount Sinai Hospital, as well as small practices across the nation like Women’s Care of Beverly Hills Medical Group, to individual physician offices such as the one run by Robert Kwok in Saratoga, Calif.

Filed under: games, mobile, VentureBeat

In March, the platform-agnostic research management tool, Mendeley, announced an API Battle, held in conjunction with the Public Library of Science. The goal was to spur the community into developing neat apps that use the database that powers Mendeley. Apps were judged by a panel that included Tim O'Reilly (of O'Reilly Media) and Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, based on the following criteria: API key usage, whether or not it goes viral, how much the app contributes to collaboration and transparency, and general coolness.

Late last week (December 1st) the winners were announced, and 1st place went to openSNP, a community-driven project for publicly sharing personal genetic data (such as an individual's 23andMe results). You can read an interview with the winners over at Mendeley's blog. PaperCritic and rOpenSci were the runners-up.




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Enflick, the Canadian creator of popular apps like TextNow and PingChat, is taking a big step forward today with the launch of Touch, a new mobile messaging platform to help you keep in touch with your closest friends and family.

Yes, that sounds a bit similar to Path, the year-old mobile social network that recently received a major update. But Touch, available for iOS, Android, and BlackBerry, is more focused on real-time chat rather than posting updates. It’s about active communication with your close friends.

And Touch has one other major advantage over its better-funded competitor: a massive pre-existing user base. The company says it has 21.5 million worldwide users on PingChat and TextNow, and Touch will roll out as an update for 13 million existing PingChat users.

Enflick co-founder and CEO Derek Ting tells us that Touch will completely replace the existing PingChat network — which makes sense, since Touch is an evolved form of that app. Like PingChat, you can have quick text conversations with your friends and share photos, but Touch will also let you easily keep track of all of your friends’ updates in typical social network fashion.

The Touch app looks attractive (though perhaps a bit too similar to Path), and it lets you easily move friends in and out of conversations to make group chats easier. Like all mobile messaging apps, it lets you know if your messages have been delivered and read, as well as when your friends are typing.

Still, Enflick has a long road ahead, as there are plenty of other messaging solutions on the market. And when it comes to keeping in touch with close friends, many are already praising Path’s slick new interface and life-tracking features.

Based in Waterloo, Ontario, Enflick recently raised $1 million in seed funding from Freestyle Capital, the Menlo Ventures Talent fund, and both Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga’s managers (not surprising, given the massive teen demographic for free texting services).

Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat

The iPad has been a success for Apple in business, apparently in spite of Apple’s lackadaisical approach to promoting its products directly to enterprise customers. But there’s a specific vertical market where the company is clearly making a concerted effort to promote professional adoption of the iPad: medicine.

Apple has a medical market manager, Afshad Mistri, who was profiled by Wired in a feature on Monday. Mistri is rare because he has a specific type of business to sell to: health care. Mistri is behind the dedicated iTunes store section for professional health care apps, has organized conferences on how to use the iPad in medicine, and is known to make house calls for medical professionals hoping to set up their organizations with iPads for use in treatment and patient care.

We have talked in the past about how iPads can help hospitals and doctors modernize their record-keeping systems. A program instituted in July offers doctors incentives for using electronic medical record (EMR) software on the iPad, and during our recent RoadMap conference, MIT Media Lab’s director of new media medicine, Frank Moss, said that “everyone’s got an iPad” at the nation’s leading medical schools these days.

Much of the iPad’s use in medical settings so far has been in the form of pilots and trials, but it’s getting ready to take off in a much bigger way. The Veteran’s Administration in the U.S. is looking at rolling out as many as 100,000 tablets across 152 hospitals, says Wired, based on the success of the 1,500 trial iPads it currently has in use. Over 80 percent of U.S. hospitals have similar trials in place, according to recent comments made by Apple CEO Tim Cook, which means that many more could soon take the plunge, resulting in a huge uptick of orders from medical organizations for the generally consumer-oriented device.

IPads can help on both sides of the stethoscope. For patients, they can act as a source of entertainment, providing a way for those who are bed-bound to escape their situation and just browse the web, play games or watch a movie privately and in comfort. Doctors can use them to consult more easily while out of office, and they increase the likelihood of uptake for EMR programs, since they make such records convenient and accessible, instead of a chore tied to a stationary desktop.

Apple’s iPad is a hit with consumers, that much is certain. But its success in health care, which, due to the slower nature of institutional adoption is only now beginning to become significant, might be the key to its remaining the king of the tablet heap. Apple can offer apps, security and a uniformity of experience both within and between medical organizations that Android devices can’t match; if the iPad becomes a tool young doctors just can’t live without, as it already appears to have become in many ways, it could be the go-to slate for healing hands for decades to come.

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Connected world: the consumer technology revolutionForecast: Tablet App Sales To Hit $8B by 2015Connected Consumer Q3: Netflix fumbles; Kindle Fire shines

It’s been a busy year for Google — in more ways than one. Larry Page took over the reins from Eric Schmidt as CEO; there have been a steady stream of products hitting the deadpool (see the first graf here for some examples), while on the flip side, we’ve seen the arrival of Google+, Google Music, Google Wallet, and the purchase of Motorola — just to name few.

We’ve heard a lot about the success of Android, too, as well as Google’s ongoing redesign of its products: Search, Maps, Reader, Gmail — each are getting a new coat of paint. Android.com got a new look in November, YouTube launched “the biggest redesign in its history” yesterday with serious G+ integration, and on and on.

For all the coverage of smartphone proliferation, Android, search, G+, and so on, we haven’t heard as much about Google’s fledgling web apps market. We’re quietly sneaking up on the first birthday of the Chrome Web App Store. Google’s browser itself has been quickly gaining ground amongst the competition, as Robin reported last week that Chrome had passed Firefox to become the second largest browser in marketshare, with 25.7 percent. Based on those numbers, both Firefox and IE (which has the top share) have been in seemingly aggressive declines, while Chrome has been growing steadily.

As to Chrome’s app store, the early reports showed slow growth and sales, but in September the Web Store passed 30 million aggregate users. Then came the redesign.

In October, Google brought its wide-ranging redesign to its browser’s web app store, completely overhauling the store’s look and its user experience. In contrast to its launch, the web app store’s remake seemed to catalyze a big increase in traffic, across downloads, users, and total number of apps, with The Independent reporting that the web store’s apps have now hit ‘millions of downloads a day’.

Chris Sorensen, Founder of ChromeOSApps.org, an independent website that monitors CWS app performance, shared some interesting numbers with us: In the month prior to redesign, the Chrome Web Store saw an average of 33 million app users, and the month after redesign CWS is now seeing 55 millon users. Downloads per day prior to redesign were about 525K, compared to the month after, when they’d jumped to 1.2 million, and the monthly growth of users prior was 20 percent, compared to 63 percent after.

Taking a look at these numbers, one would think that Google’s redesign has, in just over a month, already had significant impact. Not exactly “millions per day”, but it has.

But how? What’s important to remember is that, during the month surrounding the web store’s redesign, Google synchronized its downloaded apps across its platforms. What counted as one app download (when the app store launched, for example), now may count as multiple downloads as the store began synching apps across browsers on users’ desktops, laptops, and devices.

As such, Sorensen tells me that he thinks the Web Store’s download numbers (and user numbers) are likely inflated. This isn’t a deliberate move on Google’s part to mislead, the truth is that they’re learning on the fly.

What’s more, before its redesign, Chrome Web Store was showing just over 6,000 apps total. Since redesign, we’ve seen the total number of apps jump to over 18K — a threefold increase in about six weeks. It his a dramatic sign that all of a sudden developers have fallen in love with Chrome’s Web App Store? Not exactly.

Certainly, the new app store has significant new potential for app developers, but this increase is due to the fact that the old Chrome Web Store had an inherent limit to the number of apps that could be displayed in each category, like 50 pages of 20 apps, for example. So, for the “Games” category, there were 1,000 apps that could be accessed and downloaded, but there was no page 51, that was it.

So, now that the ceiling has been lifted, the full bevy of apps is now appearing in the store, and it’s likely that many of these apps were already there, they just hadn’t made the cut. Whether that was because of a lower quality of apps, fewer downloads — that remains to be seen. Google hasn’t yet shared.

Thus, while the drastic increase in downloads, number of users, and total apps in the store — over a fairly short period of time — has been inflated by the processes involved in restructuring the store itself, the redesign is still having a very real effect on the success of its apps.

The new layout has brought a new image-centric look to the store, with each app getting a title, showing its rating in number of stars, and an accompanying image. When you scroll over the app, a brief description pops up, with the ability to one-click download from there. If you click on the app, you remain in the store at the same expanded URL, but now see a full-screen box with three tabs within, where you can view images, details, reviews, etc. All in all, the new design looks great; it’s a big step up — it now looks as if Google’s actually taking CWS somewhat seriously.

Furthermore, some apps receive larger images within the storefront, and Google has not yet shared exactly how it’s deciding on placement, which apps get larger images, front page real estate, and so on. Some apps with 20K users are still at the bottom with apps that have under 50 users. But the real point of interest for developers is that apps, whether they’re now on the equivalent of “page 1″ or “page 20″ (there are no pages anymore, it’s just one long stream), all apps are rising on a rising tide.

Without having to click through pages, some of the friction has been removed. And while apps close to the top are still benefitting from a higher volume as one would expect, the growth is happening across the board. Below you can see a sample from the “Education” category, for “page 1″ and “page 20″.

Of course, not everyone wins, but at present, some app developers are happily surprised to find that their apps are being placed on the front page — with large promo images to boot. Sorensen cited the example of a game called Little Alchemy, designed by a young developer from Poland. Receiving a large image on the front page, without prior warning, the app’s user base shot up from 186K to 342K — with no other promotion. Inflated or not, that’s a good sign.

As Chrome’s share of the browser market continues to rise, there’s no doubt that its web store will benefit. And with less of an atrocious user experience, there is bound to be less friction and, with it, more downloads, users, and (gasp) maybe even more paying users. If the number of apps continues to grow at or near 60 percent every month, the key for developers, then, will be how to optimize placement within the app store’s ranks. There is currently a “Popular” tab, but no breakdown of these popular apps into categories — no top ten lists, a la iTunes. So, the number of ways for an app to be discovered remain small.

Sorensen said he’s currently developing an app to track placement in the Chrome Web Store, what categories the app appears in, its rank, image size, etc., which should give developers a better sense of how their apps perform as they move. Will be interesting to see, too, how much control there is over placement within the store.

Side note: CWS turns one officially on Wednesday.

What do you think? Tongue planted in cheek: Any chance app placement optimization rivals SEO in the next year?

If you’ve used the new Path app for iOS or Android, then you’re probably aware that the interface design of the app is second to none. It’s friendly, interactive and emotive without being twitchy and flashy and it invites use with its clever animated ‘share’ button.
The Path sharing UI is nothing like the bottom-dwelling tab bar that is persistent across many, many app UI designs. This can be found in a huge array of apps (especially on iOS) like Twitter and Instagram and can make one-handed operation a bit more difficult than it needs to be. It’s also pretty fidgety when it comes to accuracy, it’s not unusual to hit a wrong tab first, before stabbing the right one.

The Path sharing UI is a different beast. The button hovers in the lower left corner of the screen, with the universal ‘+’ symbol indicating that it can be used to add things. What you can add is a mystery until you tap the button, at which a nicely tuned animation rotates it to an ‘x’ (which indicates the ability to close it or make it go away).

Round sharing buttons, which are just enough smaller than the main button to indicate that they are children, fly out, rotating a quarter turn counter-clockwise. This gives them a floating appearance, enhanced by a slight bounce as they reach the constraint.
Once the buttons are out, they’re a natural thumb’s reach from the corner of the device and, at least in my experience using the app, seem to lead to a lot fewer mistaken touches.
On the way back in, these buttons bounce back outwards, spinning at a higher frequency and traveling faster, giving it a snappier feel.
When a new, flashy and obviously effective sharing UI pops up, it tends to get passed around, analyzed and deconstructed by the design community, but the speed at which this is happening with the Path UI is pretty astounding. Designer Jon Gold pointed out that some of the examples are very smooth already.

Whether created using native CoreAnimation, CSS and web technologies, designers are getting excited about it. Some have posted their source code for others to refine and play with. The design-sharing site Dribbble is always a good place to take the pulse of trends like this and there are a half-dozen examples of people playing with it on there already.
This doesn’t mean that the tab UI is on the outs completely yet, and, as Gold points out, it could just be people riffing, but the Path UI is definitely making its mark. “I love it,” says Gold, adding, “hopefully people won’t rip it off too much and rather use it as a kick to be more experimental in their work.”
It would be a shame to see an exact clone of the Path UI suddenly pop up in dozens of apps, although I’m not writing that off as a possibility, but it would be a joy to see it become an inspiration for those looking to move beyond the tab bar in their own apps.
And, who knows, maybe you’ll see the UI in use on your favorite social network if Path ends up as another Facebook acquisition on the way to improving its mobile fortunes.

The days of a mobile device living or dying on the strength of its operating system are gone. Now, it’s all about the apps. An OS will make it pleasant to use those apps, and will probably give you a reason to use the device more, but the real value-add is the apps available in the device’s ecosystem.

Apple’s iOS is undoubtedly the king when it comes to sheer volume of class-A apps. The list of marquee apps for the platform that are simply delightful to use is long. That’s not necessarily the case for Android, where the lower barrier-of-entry for app makers can at times be difficult to wade through the crap to find the gold.

That’s why this list of ‘Android niceties‘ is welcome. It’s a Tumblr, shared by developers Steven Troughton Smith and Sam Steele on Twitter that I feel is pretty packed with good examples of Android apps that don’t suck.

The list is focused on showing off apps that utilize Android user interface conventions, or come up with their own, in a good way.

Some of the examples that I thought were solid:

Path
FlightBoard
Into Now
Gowalla
Foodspotting
Baconreader

So, not every app on here is a complete home run when it comes to usability, and I certainly don’t agree with some of the selections, but a good UI is normally priority one on a mobile device. Some of the apps are also available on iOS in a similar form, but are translated well to the framework of Android.

In these days of small screens and a market place glutted with choices in apps, a good and standout UI is almost a pre-requisite for success. So whether you’re a desinger looking for inspiration, or an Android user that just wants some cool apps to use, check out the list here for yourself.

Thanks to the efficiency boost provided by cloud computing’s debut about five years ago, web applications can now launch on almost a shoestring budget. That’s why there are so many new web companies that deal in things such as photo sharing, daily deals websites, travel planning and the like. The truth is, it’s easier than ever to put together a web or mobile app and call yourself a startup.

But there are a few recent developments that, taken together, are creating an even more powerful efficiency boost: one that puts resources that were once limited to well-funded corporations and research universities within the reach of a new generation of startup founders. Perhaps it’s time entrepreneurs took advantage of this new environment to solve larger problems, instead of building yet another lifestyle app.

The way I see it, the big components at play here are:

New money is investing in big ideas
Even though the larger economy is rocky, there are a lot of people just itching to pour money into the next big technological thing — hence pre-launch photo sharing startups that net $41 million in funding. While many tech investors are focused on funding sure short-term bets (i.e. the tried and true realm of web and mobile apps), there’s a budding sect aggressively looking to invest in larger, long-term innovations.

Peter Thiel’s Breakout Labs is one of the most explicit examples of this. As we reported at the program’s launch last month, Breakout Labs will aim to fund nascent research proposals: opportunities too early stage or radical to attract dollars from VCs or government grants. Basically, Thiel, who recently told the New Yorker he doesn’t consider the iPhone to be a major technological breakthrough, is saying: Enough with the toys and games. It’s time for us to make something big.

Supercomputers are going mainstream
The next “something big” in tech might not require all that much money to make.

If you want to build something really complex — think aeronautics, new pharmaceutical drugs, medical devices, jet engines, and the like — you need high-performance computing (HPC). HPC solves advanced computational and scientific problems by using a massive amount of computing power to solve very complicated problems that involve a lot of moving parts.

HPC facility at Argonne National Labs (attribution below)

It has historically been so prohibitively expensive to do HPC that only entities such as governments, militaries, well-funded universities, or huge corporations have the kind of access to the machines needed for computational fluid dynamics problems and the like.

But last year, Amazon started offering HPC as a service with “Cluster Compute,” making high-performance computing available in the same way that EC2 made regular servers available in the cloud. Earlier this month, Amazon souped up its Cluster Compute offering significantly — now, Amazon’s HPC-as-a-Service offering provides access to one of the world’s top 500 supercomputers for around $1,000 per hour. Meanwhile, tools such as CUDA and OpenCL give programmers the ability to harness massive numbers of compute cores without having to learn a special programming language.

This takes HPC out of the realm of scientists and makes programming for massively multicore HPC systems accessible to software engineers. What Amazon’s EC2 did for democratizing the ability to develop scalable web apps, HPC-as-a-Service can do for democratizing the ability to solve computationally heavy engineering problems or build gigantic predictive models.

3-D printing is becoming a reality
Printed engine prototype by Mcor Technologies

Once challenging technology problems have been mastered with the help of HPC, some of the solutions will need to be prototyped and put into physical production. This is still a very labor- and cost-intensive process, which is a big reason why many startups prefer to stay in the virtual realm. But the emergence of viable 3-D printing technology is on the cusp of changing that, making it cheaper and easier than ever before to make a physical prototype of a new design.

How much of a reality is 3-D printing today? It’s now available at the consumer level with a startup called MakerBot, which makes a 3-D printer called a Thing-O-Matic. The Thing-O-Matic costs $1,200 and makes relatively simple items such as small toys and gadgets like bottle openers on demand. Three-dimensional printers from companies such as Mcor Technologies are aimed at making more complex prototypes for enterprise-level applications.

Of course, startups have the option of skipping the prototype step and selling simply the IP of their HPC-developed designs to a larger company. But if a startup wants to have more control over the production of what it has made, 3-D printing brings that much more within small companies’ reach.

What will be the hot startup of the next era?
If everything works out as it should, the smart, early stage entrepreneurs of the near future won’t be thinking about how to build the perfect restaurant recommendation app. Instead, they’ll devote their energy to designing a more efficient airplane wing to conserve jet fuel, or a tiny device that can perform real-time monitoring of kidney enzyme levels, or an even more awesome landing gear apparatus for the next Mars Rover. Starting the next SpaceX or Virgin Galactic won’t need the kind of funding that only an Elon Musk or Richard Branson can provide.

Today, the lion’s share of companies that emerge from incubators such as Y-Combinator and 500 Startups deal in consumer-focused web apps. Here’s hoping that in the near future, incubators will look for startup founders who are taking real advantage of their new-found access to serious tech tools to build bigger and bolder products. It seems to me that driving toward that kind of world is where the attention of the tech industry — and the media that covers it — should focus.

“What’s Next?” image courtesy of Flickr user Crysti

Image of the HPC facility at the Center for Nanoscale Materials at the Advanced Photon Source courtesy of Flickr user Brian Howard on behalf of the Argonne National Laboratory.

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Flash analysis: lessons from Solyndra’s fallCleantech Financing Trends: 2010 and BeyondConnected world: the consumer technology revolution

You CAN get healthy!

HealthRally, a new San Francisco startup, is what you might get if you crossed Facebook with AMC’s Intervention reality show. The startup, which has raised $400,000 in seed money from noted angels and launches Thursday, allows you to reach personal wellness goals by getting friends and family to pledge cash to support you.

The idea is compelling as wellness apps and fitness tracking devices gain new converts at a rapid rate. But instead of a focus on sensor-driven metrics, HealthRally wants to optimize your connections. CEO Zack Lynch, a former neuroscientist, says that some people might be motivated by simply seeing how few calories they burn if they are trying to lose weight, but for many, getting them off the couch will require more than a device telling them they’ve barely walked 5,000 steps.

However, he might bust a move if his friends and family were contributing money for an iPad if he manage to meet a weight loss goal in a set time frame. HealthRally aims to make that possible. Lynch was inspired by research that showed people were more successful at quitting smoking if they had hundred of dollars in rewards at stake. From that point, the idea for HealthRally crystalized.

HealthRally: How it works
To use the service, someone with a wellness goal, let’s say to quit smoking, can go to the site and create a Rally for herself. She selects a goal, a timeframe and a reward and then invites friends and family to participate in helping her achieve her goal. Friends and family members can also set up a HealthRally for someone else, which inspires the Intervention comparison.

Can HealthRally (and your friends) help you stop smoking?

Once folks sign up to support a goal, they pledge money at set points throughout the challenge to help motivate the object of the Rally. They can also send encouraging messages and whatever else they’d like through a private social network affiliated with the challenge. At the end of the set time frame the person has either met the challenge or forfeits the pledged cash. That cash can be in the form of money, devices, vacations or a variety of other items. Lynch said one challenge involved a bridal party offering to buy the bride’s dress if she lost weight before her wedding.

HealthRally manages the invitation process and built the private social network for participants that sends notifications via email. It also includes an AI component that tracks participation in each Rally. For example if friends aren’t being supportive enough, the service reminds them to support their friend. Likewise if the person working toward the goal hasn’t updated their friends and family about their progress in a while, they get a nudge. For these services, HealthRally gets an undisclosed percentage of the cash put into the Rally as a motivation.

So far, an “extraordinarily high” number of the Rallies attempted during the program’s alpha phase were completed, according to Lynch. And there’s also a social verification process tied to completing a challenge. It’s not enough to say you’ve stopped smoking. Other folks participating in the Rally can reach out to make sure it’s true. People have contributed between $100 and $1,000 to various rallies and participants range from three people for a challenge to 1,000.

Peer pressure can be positive too
Peer pressure may get you to eat your greens.

The cool thing about the service is the recognition that social pressure is an integral aspect of wellness. We are getting closer to an age of the quantified self, where devices such as the Body Bugg or the Withings scale can help share and track personal metrics. But for many, social pressure is what will keep people turning to those nifty metrics to monitor their progress. As Lynch says, “Gamification, badges and levels are interesting, but the people in the middle of the bell curve are driven by the real reward.”

Plus, he has a plan to attract the die-hard wellness fiends using devices as well. He said the company is in talks with other device makers to tie their data into the program. This means someone wearing a pedometer could funnel data into the program to back up their claim that they walked 2 miles that day. Of course, communities already exist at fitness sites and many device-makers such as FitBit (see disclosure below) and Withings already allow folks to communicate their personal metrics to a social network. It’s a new space, but one with lots of competition and new products all the time.

HealthRally isn’t even the only company trying to get people to be healthy by using social pressure. Keas, a startup founded by Google alum Adam Bosworth, is building a motivation program aimed at helping HR departments improve employee health and morale. Bosworth described the startup at our Roadmap event last month, and the big difference between the two firms is Keas focuses on businesses while HealthRally is trying to appeal directly to consumers.

HealthRally, which was formed last year in San Francisco, raised its seed round from Esther Dyson, a prominent angel investor; Isy Goldwasser, a successful biotech entrepreneur; Richard Sass, a medical device entrepreneur; Ty Danco, a prolific angel investor; and Jeff Thiel, a former Microsoft executive. Let’s see if consumers rally around the idea.

Disclosure: Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Image of food courtesy of Flickr user gabriel amadeus.

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Connected world: the consumer technology revolutionThe Internet of things: creating tomorrow’s health careThe Internet of Things: What It Is, Why It Matters

Even relatively conservative forecasts predict there will be 50 billion connected devices online by the end of the decade. Over time, the majority won’t be laptops or phones but rather machine-to-machine connections from network infrastructure, sensors in cars, appliances, health care monitors and the like. They will produce data that needs to be combined and analyzed alongside structured data, application logs, customer info and social media streams. Already today, companies across multiple industries and government agencies are struggling to harness the sheer volume, complexity and variety of the data generated.

In this webinar, we will look at the various kinds of machine-driven big data, how to develop an analytics and usage framework for them, and how companies can use this data to run their businesses.

Some of the topics we will discuss include:

Where machine data fits in the big data ecosystem
How to identify the low-hanging fruit — practical, near-term benefits from data analysis
How to integrate machine data with heterogeneous sources and databases
How big data analysis is changing the role of IT and business management
This free analyst roundtable webinar, hosted by GigaOM Pro and our sponsor Splunk, will take place on Dec. 7, 2011, at 10 a.m. PST. Register today.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Jason McHuff

If you are lucky enough to own one of the Jawbone UP bracelets that doesn’t have issues, then you’re probably pretty psyched at the potential the simple and streamlined life-tracking device holds. You know what else is psyching me up right now? The prettiness of Path’s re-launch and expansion into a slicker, more agile life timeline, a way to curate the overwhelming amount of content you produce as a digital citizen.

Path has two key features that indicate where social sharing is heading. The first is sleep mode. While some might not “get” why people would want to share their sleep patterns with their friends, Dave Morin (and UP creator Hosain Rahman) do; “It used to be that people would be online or off. Nowadays with mobile, it’s more like asleep or awake,” Morin told me yesterday.

Exactly.

I love my UP wristband in just its own little app silo, but last night when I clicked it before I fell asleep, I wished that my sleep info would sync to Path so hard it hurt. Same goes for waking up.

Both Path and UP devices play into natural human laziness: UP uses its accelerometer to automatically track and graph the number of steps you take a day, Path uses the iPhone’s GPS to automatically update your timeline with “Arrived @ Location” anytime you travel a distance that could be traveled by plane.

Mind you, the sharing of this kind of extremely personal information like sleeping, eating and exercising (and trusting “smart” updating) is only possible when you’re sharing with a limited amount of people. The difference between a being “journal that writes itself” and an invader of user privacy is 50 versus 500 friends.

Path also has the beginner’s advantage of being new to the market; You’re more likely to want to share with a social graph you JUST picked, versus the one you started building on Facebook four years ago.

I have little idea how I’m supposed to set up a “Team” on UP (yeah, I know you can manually search for people but somehow remembering people’s names has gone the way of remembering people’s phone numbers in the age of the instant Friends List). If only there was a mobile-based social network built specifically for private sharing …

Think about Facebook versus Path like email versus texting, email is great if you’re on the web with a wide variety of people whereas texting is suited to mobile devices and few contacts. In the age of the almighty Facebook, micro-networks like Path can and will survive because of smartphone OS evolution and hardware advancements like UP, the Withing scale or Nike+.

The UP bracelet progresses mobile life-tracking . And Path mobile life-sharing. Both have some kinks that need to be worked out (the food tracker on UP absolutely needs to be supplemented by something like this crazy app that comes up with calorie counts of photographed meals using Mechanical Turk).

But it is early early days.

Much to the dismay of pretty much everyone on the web, a federal judge decided yesterday to allow luxury brand Chanel to seize and shutter 228 web domains that it argued offered counterfeit versions of its products.

The decision, and the process by which it was made, are ridiculous. A judge based in Nevada issued a death sentence for these sites without so much as a hearing. And none of these sites was given a chance to make its case before the sentence was carried out.

In an even more troubling move, the judge has ordered Google to remove these sites from its index. Search is the gateway to the Internet – the modern day access to information. The government telling a search engine which sites it may include in its index sounds like censorship to most people.

But a bad decision based on a bad process doesn’t mean that there’s not a real underlying problem here. Anytime a user can go to a search engine, search for a Chanel product and end up getting a knock-off instead, that’s a problem. And not just an annoyance. It’s a full-fledged security problem.

Clever search engine optimization professionals are experts at positioning sites of dubious quality on the first page of results on a search engine. There is no branding that allows sites of high quality to distinguish themselves at a casual glance from those of content farms, spammers or knock-off sites. Indeed, it’s the opposite. These sites are specifically designed to look legitimate. So consumers can be completely unaware they’re not on a company’s official site.

Ignoring First Amendment issues for a moment, having a federal judge curating a multibillion-page search index is a little like putting a finger in the hole of the dam without realizing there are 100 more holes draining the same lake. The web did not become a littered cesspool overnight, and it won’t be cleansed in one day by one judge issuing one arbitrary ruling.

A number of technology companies are already at work on tools and services that could solve this problem. My own company, Blekko, for example, uses human experts to curate the web and tell us which sites are shady. Our curators cull the results across hundreds of vertical topics and surface the results they think offer the best information.

Then, of course, there’s Facebook, which is itself a form of curation and one of the reasons many people think the social network will be such a huge threat in search. Facebook users don’t “like” sites that are spam, so user curation has the potential to create an incredibly high-quality index.

And now Microsoft’s Bing admits it is using its own editors to curate results. The search company has said its editors eliminated many holiday shopping and information sites because content on the sites is too thin. Google this year issued another update to its algorithm in an effort to improve its machine’s ability to recognize and kill spam.

Another approach to the problem is the new peer-to-peer search model developed by YaCy. The peer-to-peer network approach is interesting as it uses your browser history — a form of curation — as its index. Only sites that users have actually visited are returned in search results.

And there’s Quora, which skips the middleman search engine altogether and asks users directly for answers to specific questions. No doubt, human-supplied answers are going to trump algorithm-served answers every time.

It’s time to face the facts: The Web is more and more the Wild West every day. Search spam is now one of the fastest growing inroads for malicious attacks. It’s time to start thinking about how to improve security in search. If we need spam filters to protect us from malicious email attacks, then we also need something to protect us from getting ripped off by phony web sites or having our computers trashed because we click on a malicious link in search results.

Rich Skrenta is cofounder and CEO of search engine startup Blekko. A serial entrepreneur, Skrenta previously cofounded news site Topix and NewHoo, a crowdsourced web directory acquired by Netscape in 1998.

Filed under: VentureBeat

Asana wants its task-list tool to feel so simple that you only encounter complexity when it’s useful. In other words, the opposite of how most enterprise software feels. And it has just added a little new piece of complexity in the form of a feature that lets you sync tasks to calendars. The result is that users have to make smarter decisions about which tasks matter most, which should end up helping their productivity.

The feature looks obvious enough. A drop-down in the project menu lets you syndicate any task with a due date to apps like Apple iCal, Microsoft Outlook or Google Calendar. Select the sync option, and you can either click to add to Gcal, or click the URL to add to iCal, Outlook or other services. You can then use your calendar app to fine-tune things like how often you sync.

But there’s more going on. The core interface lets you create projects for different sets of task lists, and within that, creating any task is as simple as hitting return on a project page then writing a few words. The date-creation option is purposefully buried in a window to the right of the list, that you need to click on to open. This means that if you create a calendar date for the task, it’ll be because date is going to be pretty important for whatever the task is. The importance of the date implies that you’re going to want to track it carefully.

The new calendar-syncing feature reinforces the value of adding dates by only letting you sync entire projects. Does any given task really matter enough to appear on your general calendar, or is it so nebulous that it shouldn’t even have a date?

The end result is a better process for keeping track of what matters than just using a calendar. And there’s an added bonus for people like me who don’t think too highly of the date creation and task features in the calendar apps we use (by which I mean iCal’s frustrating new interface). Now I can see the dates for important tasks show up on my calendar without actually having to enter them.

There’s not much to complain about with Asana’s version, although I think it could use a little more complexity. The main thing I’d like is a way to schedule a specific task down to the minute and hour if necessary. Right now all tasks are just for the full day, so they’ll appear at the top of each day within calendar apps. For a few important tasks, the timing matters too much to gloss over. I’d also like a way to schedule some tasks to repeat by week or month.

Back in September, game startup Tiny Speck launched an unusual online game called  Glitch. Today, the company said it is “unlaunching” the game. The company will keep the game running, but it will take it back into beta testing so that the developers can rework the game play to make it easier for users to start the game and also to add new tools for fans to create things in the game world.

Fans have fallen in love with the zany title, said Stewart Butterfield, chief executive of San Francisco-based Tiny Speck, in a a post on the Glitch blog moments ago. But there are a couple of major improvements the company wants to make to change the way the game plays. I guess you could say that Glitch has hit a glitch.

“There are two obvious and huge improvements we need to make: the first is to make the early game reveal itself more easily to new players so they can get into the fun faster,” Butterfield wrote. “The second and larger task is to give those players who have gotten over that initial hump and fallen in love with the game — spending dozens or even hundreds of hours playing — the creative tools that they need to change the world in more tangible ways: building whole new locations themselves, designing new buildings, setting up resource flows and forming flexible organizations to create bigger things together.”

Butterfield added, “And we’re committed to giving people a square deal: we know going back to beta was not what you expected, so if you have bought anything from us and you don’t feel like you got your money’s worth or you don’t like the idea of everything changing, we will give you a 100 percent, no hassle, full and complete refund.”

The funny there here is that most other game companies do major revisions like this, and they simply require their users to download a big patch. They don’t announce that they’re “unlaunching.” It’s almost business as usual in online games for the games to change over time.

[Update: In an interview, Butterfield said that the company felt like it was making a couple of major changes and had to go through the formal process of "unlaunching" because it was already generating revenues from the game. He said that the game has more than 100,000 users and that it wants the customers to be happy or get their money back.

Tiny Speck will likely work on the new features for a period of months -- more than a couple of months but less than a year -- as it seeks to enable the changes. The biggest change will be making the world more malleable so that heavy-duty users can create their own major objects, such as buildings, and stay busy so they don't run out of content, Butterfiled said.

Butterfield said that the game would stay available but would have occasional down times as the company does the revisions. ]

Glitch is unlike most other games you’ve seen. From the moment you log in, you know you’re not in the real world anymore. You appear inside a brain, one of the minds of eleven giants who imagine the game’s zany landscape.

“It is super metaphorical,” the greeting for the tutorial says. “Your job is to grow and expand the world, shaping it while developing your own unique character.”

This journey into the imagination isn’t your normal game, so it’s no surprise it came from a startup that’s been working on it for a very long time.

Glitch is the brainchild of Butterfield’s Tiny Speck. Butterfield previously co-founded photo-sharing site Flickr. Video games are often slammed for their blockbuster mentality, not creativity. If Glitch takes off, it will show that there is still room in the perhaps overly commercialized game industry for artistically crafted and thought-provoking independent games. The animations of the persistent world are hand-drawn. The world has its own ecology and economy.

From the very start, Glitch is different. You can water plants, but you can also pet them to make them grow. If you nibble a pig’s ear, it will give you some meat. You can find little “music blocks,” which play snippets of music when you click on them. If you find a butterfly, you can give it a massage. If you squeeze a chicken, you can get a piece of grain.

You have to do things that keep your energy and your mood high. In order to do that, you have to collect and eat things. Everything has to stay in balance. These complex systems, such as the world’s trees, have to be cared for in order to keep the world in order. Pigs have to be fed or they eat leaves off the trees. If the leaves are eaten, the trees die.

Tiny Speck’s own press release opens with a quote from James P. Carse, who said, “There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other, infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.”

Glitch is a web-based massively multiplayer online game. It is non-violent, highly social and is played as a two-dimensional cartoon animated world. Butterfield says the designers of the game and the players create the Glitch universe in tandem, with the designers constantly tweaking and improving the platform while the players cultivate a sophisticated and irreverent civilization.

Players can do just about anything, from curating an art installation to hosting a diamond-infused dinner party. Tiny Speck provides the raw materials and a stimulating environment. “The vision is to bring a new level of creativity, beauty and social engagement,” Butterfield (pictured at top) says.

Part of the mission is to bring art to a wider audience. The game mixes all sorts of original visual styles. The look varies as you travel up and down the boulevards of the world. It changes from psychedelic to surreal, from Japanese cutesy animation to hyper-saturated pixel art, classic cartoon to contemporary mixed media.

Players can adjust their avatars, or game characters, in many different ways. They can buy outfits and customize as they wish. They can go on missions. In one, they have to get some official papers from a government agency. They have to interact with bureaucrats, who keep saying they have to check with someone to get a proper answer. At some point, the bureaucrat finally delivers the papers.

The game invites players to come back a lot by getting them to learn skills. There are about four months’ worth of skills in the game now. The game also has hundreds of different objects.

You can also come back just to explore the surreal universe. If you want eggs, you can get them from an eggplant. Then you take them to a chicken to incubate them. Dairy products in the game come from butterfly milk. And pigs are born from the eggs.

On the social side, players can go on quests together or play multiplayer sports mini games. They can form conga lines and dance. The world is unified, so friends can interact with anybody in the world. The game is built in Adobe Flash, so it isn’t that demanding, technically. But Tiny Speck tried to push the limit on how many objects can be on the screen at one time. The game has cool lighting effects and faux 3D animations.

Butterfield and his wife Caterina Fake were thinking about making a game before they did Flickr. But Flickr took off like wildfire and they sold it to Yahoo in 2005. They then returned to work on the original game that they had started. Tiny Speck’s founders include Butterfield and three other original team members from Flickr: Cal Henderson (pictured above and below in green shirt), Eric Costello, and Serguei Mourachov. They started the firm in 2009 and it now has 40 employees. Tiny Speck raised $10.7 million in April from Andreessen Horowitz and Accel. Legendary game designer Keita Takahashi (no relation to me), the creator of Katamari Damacy, joined the team in July as a Glitch game designer.

Players can stay in touch with the game while on the run. The full Glitch site is accessible from a mobile app, Glitch HQ, for the Apple iOS platform. The mobile app lets players keep up with updates and chatter from their game friends. Third-party game developers are busy creating web and mobile extensions of the game using Tiny Speck’s applications programming interface.

The game is free to play, with virtual item sales. But you can subscribe to the game if you wish to get wider access to cool things. You can’t purchase anything in the game that gives you an advantage over other players. If you buy anything, it’s mostly for the sake of decoration or vanity.

Filed under: games, social

Plantronics updated its InstantMeeting app to allow iPhone (a aapl) users and enterprise users to connect to conference calls on their calendar with one click, much like Android and BlackBerry users have been able to for almost a year. The InstantMeeting app, which is pretty darn useful for those who handle a lot of conference calls, combs your calendar and shoots you a reminder when one is about to start. On a mobile phone, clicking through on the reminder allows the user to click to call or click to say you’re running late with the push of a button.

The update brings that same functionality to those on PCs by letting them click to call through Skype or Microsoft Lync. Gunjan Bhow, VP and general manager of New Ventures at Plantronics, says the goal is to ensure employees with VoIP clients and softphones can still take advantage of cheaper rates instead of going directly to their mobile phones and racking up big charges while traveling. It’s a pretty specific use case, but Plantronics is on the cutting edge of a shift in how people work, and how smarter and more personal computers, such as mobile phones, are allowing this shift to happen.

A personal assistant for everyone (no, it’s not Siri)
InstantMeeting on the iPhone

Apps such as InstantMeeting, Expensify and yes, Siri are taking mundane tasks top managers might have hired an assistant to handle and making delegating them affordable for all. In the case of InstantMeeting, it means I can work right up until a minute before my conference call or hop in the car knowing I’ll get a reminder when I need to get on the call, and will effectively touch a button to connect. I do have to manually enter some conference numbers because the app can’t read the bridge information, but it’s pretty solid. It’s similar to having someone outside my office connecting my calls so I can move seamlessly through my work until the exact moment I’m needed.

Expensify lets me snap a picture of my receipts and then automatically scans them for the relevant line items to create an expense report in a few minutes. The mobile app allows me to take those pictures on my mobile the moment I get my receipt and shoot them to the cloud, where Expensify does all the heavy lifting. My days of scrounging receipts from the bottom of my bag and taping them to copy paper are over, as are my efforts to then transfer that information to Excel.

Siri, of course, takes all kinds of dictation like a pro and helps find nearby restaurants, services and other items much like a real personal assistant would. Vlingo also does some of this for Android users. There are scores of other apps such as TripIt Pro making it easier and less time-consuming to book and keep track of travel, something those lucky souls who have worked at a company with a travel bureau will be glad to learn.

This isn’t just nice; it’s necessary
Just as computers helped drive productivity thanks to replacing typewriters with word processing software and calculators with spreadsheets, these new apps will help boost productivity for the masses who don’t have an assistant at their beck and call. And given that workers are being asked to do more in a day, gaining those two or three hours back each month that it takes to pull together an expense report, or the thirty minutes required to book a trip (or even avoiding the hours lost to flight delays) is a necessity.

And as we handle more and more information coming at us, it’s harder to sink into the uninterrupted flow of work, so being able to maximize that time knowing your phone can ping you when you have to join a call and then connect you can help you relax into work. Yes, these apps all take some time to set up and learn how to use (some may require you to invest in setting up rules so the app can better learn what you need from it), but much like training an assistant, the effort pays off. And thanks to advances in natural language processing, artificial intelligence, better data processing and algorithms, employees don’t have to pay quite as much to offload non-core tasks.

For more on how apps, computing and broadband will change the way people work, come to our GigaOM Net:Work event in San Francisco next week.

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The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM ProSiri: Say hello to the coming “invisible interface”The future of mobile advertising, 2011 – 2016

This past spring, the team at Path realized it was time for a change. The San Francisco-based startup had debuted its flagship photo sharing app (accompanied with a serious amount of media buzz and some mixed reviews) in November 2010, and had spent the first several months post-launch working to perfect the original product.

“Six months ago we stopped. We just said, ‘Okay, what are people really using Path to do?’” Path co-founder and CEO Dave Morin said in an interview this week. The company surveyed Path users and found that many were using the app to remember moments in their daily lives — it wasn’t just about sharing photos, it was about cataloging personal memories for themselves. “Ultimately we realized that we had to completely re-imagine Path.”

Path 2, the new version of Path that is launching Tuesday for both iPhone and Android, is what’s emerged from that redesign effort. But to think of this as the 2.0 version of Path would be a big mistake: Path 2 is a dramatically different product than the app the company launched one year ago.

A diary for a mobile and social world
Path 2 aims to be a “smart journal” that catalogs all the big and small moments of your daily life. Along with your photos and videos, the new app has features that let you keep track of your thoughts, the music you’re listening to, where you are, who you’re with, and even when you wake and when you sleep. You can choose to keep each update entirely to yourself, share it with your Path contacts (limited to 150 based on Dunbar’s number), or share it publicly via Facebook, Twitter, or Foursquare (Tumblr support is on the way.)

Path 2 screenshot (click to enlarge)

Morin took me through an in-depth demo of Path 2, and for me it had the perfect combination that I look for in the increasingly crowded world of mobile apps: It was both beautiful and actually useful. Lots of people — myself included — maintain personal blogs or use social media sites partly for the same reason that they would maintain a diary: To personally remember what they’ve done. Every New Years’, I vow that I will be better about tracking the little things that make up my days by keeping a journal, but I typically start slacking off on it a couple months in. With Path 2, it could be a lot easier to keep my resolution: It’s on my mobile phone which makes it easy, and the social options make it more fun.

More complexity, more competition
With this redesign, Path is going more squarely into competition with services such as Evernote and even Facebook, the platform on which it was conceived as a much simpler photo-sharing app one year ago. When asked about this, Morin stressed that Path is different from Facebook on several counts: “We’re private by default and always will be, while Facebook is often public by defualt. We’re a tech company, Facebook is a media company. We’re a freemium business, and Facebook is advertising driven.” He was more accepting of an Evernote comparison, but pointed out that many people use Evernote primarily to keep track of their business lives. “What Evernote does for work, we do for life.”

Path 2 music post (click to enlarge)

This move also brings up questions for Path that weren’t there when it was a simple photo sharing app. When you position your service to be something as personal as a diary, users have the right to be a bit more demanding than they would with a more standard social app. For example: Path 2 still does not have a one-button export feature for all your content, although Morin says this is on the way. Right now, the only way to get all your data from the system is by sending an email request to customer service.

Also, the ability to view and analyze your Path data from other perspectives — say by zooming out to see an annual timeline, or a month view — is not yet available. These types of features could be made possible if Path releases an API, which Morin says is a definite possibility for the future.

But will it have staying power?
The question of money is an important one here. Many web startups don’t start thinking seriously about revenue in the first couple years of business, but if you’re going to use an app as your personal journal, you want to have confidence that it will stay around for a while. Evernote, for example, is a profitable business: The company charges $45 per year for its premium app and the company’s CEO Phil Libin has been forthright about his mission to make Evernote a going concern for the next 100 years.

Path, which has 20 employees, is not at a point where it can cover its own costs. Path 2 is a totally free app and Morin says he has no plans to start running ads. The business model is a “freemium” one, but for now the only premium products Path sells are small: Additional photo filter options and the like. Path has other premium offerings in the pipeline, Morin tells me, and the good news is the company won’t have to worry about keeping the lights on for a while: It has taken on some $11 million in funding since its inception.

All in all, Path 2 is a great looking app and it stands a chance to become a big hit in the months ahead. But if it wants people to really be serious about committing to the new app, Path could do well to outline its financial plans a bit more firmly for prospective users.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
Connected world: the consumer technology revolutionNewNet Q3: Facebook remakes headlines in social mediaFlash analysis: the tech startup investment environment, Q3 2011

One of the great parts about mobile devices is having the world’s information at your fingertips, whenever you want it. Some apps give you way too much information, and iTriage for iOS could be one of them, even though it’s useful information. But when it comes to your health, I suppose more information than necessary is better than none at all.

For those of you that aren’t familiar with sites like WebMD, iTriage lets you self-diagnose (at your own risk) what’s wrong with you when you’re not feeling right. You can search the app by symptoms, specific illnesses, or start with a particular part of your body and drill down to a potential problem.

If you’re a hypochondriac, don’t download this app. When tapping around to find out issues related to headaches, one of the suggested causes was a brain tumor…yikes. Although, if used in moderation and with good judgement, iTriage is a helpful and handy app to have, especially if you have kids who complain of stomach aches or other mystery illnesses that only happen during school hours from Monday to Friday.

What’s wrong with me, Doc?
As with any information found on the web, if you’re having serious health issues you should see a doctor immediately and not fiddle around with an app.

However, iTriage has some interesting features that help you diagnose a pesky symptom and get basic suggestions on how to treat it or when to see a doctor.



All joking aside, this app will guide you in the right direction when you’re not feeling so hot. For example, you can find doctors in your area who perform certain types of procedures or treat certain types of illnesses. For example, I was able to find five doctors in the San Francisco area to talk to about my Alopecia (hair loss).

The app also has a huge database of medications, and lists out possible side effects and overdose instructions. In short, iTriage could really help you out in a pinch with a lot of your medical questions.



If you do find a potential illness or medical condition that fits the symptoms you’re having, the app will gently suggest a course of action and lists out hospitals in your area. In some cases, iTriage will tell you how long the wait is at its emergency room, which sure beats calling a hospital if you’re already in the car on your way to the ER.

What iTriage does really well is pull together a lot of information into one place and makes it simple to read and digest. While you can’t rely on an app or website to tell you whether to seek medical attention or not, having this type of information readily available does let you breathe a sigh of relief.

➤ iTriage

A fun new iPad game is pushing the limits of psychology and gameplay. Gua-Le-Ni, Or: The Horrendous Parade is a beautiful series of memory puzzles that are supposed to give you the jitters.

The object of the game is to match disjointed paper drawings of animals with cubes that have different sections of animals’ bodies on each side, all while the drawn critter marches across the screen. For example, the drawing might have the the head of a tiger, the body of a wartho and the tail of a lobster. You manipulate the cubes below the drawing by pinching and turning them to find the corresponding animal bit.

The $4.99 Horrendous Parade draws upon the PhD work of Italian game designer Stefano Gualeni, for whom the game is named. It was developed by game studio Double Jungle at the Academy for Digital Entertainment at NHTV Breda University of Applied Science, where Gualeni is conducting his thesis research.

While creating the game, developers hooked tester players up to monitors that tracked their heart rate and blood flow, and monitored their facial contractions with cameras. This was done in order to better understand player responses, and to build a game that would stimulate them on as many levels as possible.

Rather than being invasive, the team thinks they’re pushing the boundaries of gameplay for the iPad. “Most design is based on this type of feedback loop, [Horrendous Parade] is just more defined,” Gualeni told VentureBeat. The result, the designers hope, is a game that creates the maximum thrill and engagement, by intentionally striking a nerve.

“I think it’s no better or no worse than traditional design philosophy in terms of ethics,” Gualeni said, and his sentiments were elaborated in a press release:

By observing the way stress and anxiety changed in our test subjects together with the changes in the game while designing and tuning it, we were capable — we believe —  [of having] a better, more thorough and more objective insight [into] what it is like to play our game than would ever be possible to achieve with traditional quality assurance procedures. This experimental way to approach game design was never even attempted in the casual sector of the industry, we are very proud of this pioneering effort too.

Gualeni also said that the developers for console games such as Left 4 Dead and NBA 2K11 rely upon observing the same types of bodily reaction to create the maximum response and enjoyment in players. Gualeni also cited products like Gmail that carefully track user metrics as a way to constantly improve design and user experience.

“Gmail is one of the most used services in the world, and they heavily rely on user metrics to refine the product,” said Gualeni. “What we do is push it to a more objective and embodied version. Personally I see it as a useful tool. I wouldn’t be surprised if more people start to use it.”

My first impression was that if the intent of the game is to provoke anxiety, it may work too well.

The interface of the game is supposed to evoke images of a leather-bound field journal from an old library. The book is filled with gorgeous illustrations, and flipping the page grants access to the next set of challenges. But as the only mode of controlling the game, the touch controls felt sticky and slow, and it was hard not to get frustrated.

I was flummoxed by the game mechanics at first, too. It took while to get a handle on the pinch and twist gesture that is familiar to any iOS user. After a block was placed, it was easy to accidentally dislodge it. As I went along I quickly realized that part of the trick to doing well is to remember which parts of each animal were on each colored cube, such as the humps of the camel or the snout of a salmon

“We only give the player two basic mechanics,” Gualeni said. “There are three hidden, unexplained mechanics.” Rather than spell it out for users at every turn, Gualeni said the game is meant to be an experiment in exploratory game play. “Most casual games treat the users as minors,” said Gualeni. ”I hope someone will discover all the secrets and play the game in advanced mode,” said Gualeni, insinuating that game itself is full of secrets.

The initial level of difficulty was higher than expected, and an “ease-in” period would have been nice. Because some of the mechanics were unfamiliar, I thought about bailing before I mastered the techniques.

Even though the game took some getting used to before becoming fun, once I was up to speed, it was definitely worth the investment of time and energy.

It’s still too early to know whether the team behind the Horrendous Parade has a hit on its hands, but the developers have pushed the boundaries of science and game play in a beautiful and highly engaging iPad app that’s unafraid to be misunderstood.  And just like a clomping, camel-headed rabbit-tailed beast with the body of salmon, it may not be love at first site, but you have to respect it.

Filed under: games, VentureBeat

The latest healthtech research shows that the forecast is looking good for mobile health solutions, especially for those companies buying into mobile apps. ABI Research recently released a report which predicts that the sports and health mobile app market is on pace to hit $400 million in revenues by 2016. That’s up from $120 million in 2010, meaning the market could quadruple over the next four years.

ABI’s report projects that the majority of that $400 million will come from sports, fitness, and wellness apps, which have begun to see heavy adoption over the least year. The increase of available health data and the growing adoption of health-related apps is owed largely to the development of increasingly wearable, portable, and non-invasive devices and their sensors that can effectively measure and transmit biometric data.

As smartphones add new ways to access and support healthcare apps and connect with these complementary diagnostic and health-measure devices, the mobile health market — and its customers — only stand to benefit. There are many great examples of this new generation of smart health tracking devices, like Basis’ heart and health tracker that you can wear on your wrist, Lark’s sleep monitoring band — to name a few.

These wearable devices are hooked into apps and web dashboards that let users track and improve their health. These bundled solutions are becoming increasingly user-friendly and intelligent, with many beginning to take advantage of gamification to keep users interested and coming back.

Naturally, everyone wants to build a graph, interest, social, etc., and the health graph seems to be poised to be next in line. RunKeeper, an app that helps users track their exercise, is just one among many going after the health graph — that is to say, they’re looking to aggregate all of your fitness and health data, culled from an ecosystem of apps and smart-sensored devices that collect and transmit this data (and speak to each other through APIs), then serving it to users across platforms and mobile devices, all through a simple dashboard.

And RunKeeper isn’t alone. This is where the healthtech industry is going — well, there and of course digitizing health records as well as making everything about health insurance less of a pain in the ass.

In conjunction with ABI’s report on the mobile health market’s growth, Juniper Research today released its own study, forecasting that “mHealth” apps will reach 142 million downloads globally by 2016. Which is slightly puzzling, especially when contrasted with the projection made by Jonathan Collins, the principal analyst at ABI Research. Collins said that he expects downloads to grow at almost twice the rate of revenues, with more than a billion downloads occurring annually by 2016.

Collins appears to be more optimistic than Juniper, which is likely using slightly different criteria to define mobile health apps.

But the point is clear, mobile health is on the rise.

Excerpt image from BasicHealthCare

Editor’s note: Serial entrepreneur Steve Blank is the author of Four Steps to the Epiphany. This story originally appeared on his blog.

Venture capitalists who are serious about turning their firms into more than one-fund wonders may want to have their associates actually start and run a company for a year.

Running a company is distinctly different from simply having operating experience, such as working in business development, sales or marketing. None of that can compare with being the CEO of a startup facing challenges such as a rapidly diminishing bank account, your best engineer quitting, working until 10pm and rushing to the airport and catching a redeye for a “Hail Mary” close of a customer, with your board demanding you do it faster.

Today, you can start a web, mobile or cloud startup for $500,000 and have money left over. Every potential early-stage venture capitalist should take a year and do it before he or she makes partner. Here’s why.

Why have a startup

Venture capital as a profession is less than half a century old. Over time, venture firms realized that the partners in the firms needed a variety of skills:

 

People skills (ability to recognize patterns of success in individuals and teams)
People skills
People skills
Market/technology acuity (patterns of success, domain expertise)
Rolodex/deal flow (deal sourcing/ability to make connections for the portfolio)
Board skills (Startup coaching, mentoring, strategy, operational/growth)
Fund raising skills

Some of these skills are learned in school (finance), some are innate aptitudes (people skills), some are learned pattern recognition skills (shadowing experienced partners, hard won success and failures of their own), and some are learned by having operating experience. But none of them are substitutes for having started and run a company.

How to become a VC
Early-stage Venture Capital firms grow their partnerships in different ways, some hire the following people:

 

Partners from other firms
Associates and put them on a long career path
Venture/operating partners to get them into new industries
An executive who had startup “operating experience”
Rarely a startup founder/CEO

In surveying my VC friends, I was surprised about their strong and diverse opinions. The feedback varied:

“.. because culture is such an important part of who we are, we will probably never hire a partner from another firm. The idea of bolting on someone from another firm is somewhat antithetical to who we are. We think that our venture partner role is the most likely path to general partner.”

..we have a partner-track associates program.  We want to find someone who has a lot of consumer internet product experience as either product manager, founder, VP Product, etc. with 3-7 years of experience.”

“…we do not even try to train new partners. We bring people into our firm who have learned how to be VCs at the partner level somewhere else and have demonstrated their talent in boardrooms alongside of us. We completely and totally punt on the idea of “training a VC.”  It’s an ugly and painful process and I don’t want to be part of it.”

“…if they don’t have operating experience  the odds of them knowing what they’re talking about in a board meeting for the first five years is low..”

Carrying the cat by the tail
When I finally became a CEO, it was after I had spent my career working my way up the ladder in marketing in startups. I did every low-level job there was, at times sleeping under my desk (engineering was doing the same.) By the time I was running a company, having some junior employee tell me why they couldn’t do something because of “how hard it was” didn’t get much sympathy from me. I knew how hard it was because I had done it myself. Startups are hard.

What running a company would do is give early-stage VCs a benchmark for reality, something most newly-minted partners sorely lack. They would learn how a founding CEO turns their money into a company which becomes a learning, execution and delivery engine. They would learn that a CEO does it through the people — the day-to-day of who is going to do what, how you hold people accountable, how teams communicate and more importantly, who you hire, how you motivate and get people to accomplish the seemingly impossible. Further, they’d experience first hand how, in a startup, the devil is in the details of execution and deliverables.

My hypotheses is simple:  What most VCs lack is not brains or rolodex or people skills, but hands-on experience as a startup CEO — knowing what it’s like trying to make a payroll while finding sufficient customers while you’re building the product.  Sure, a year as a CEO won’t make them an expert, but it will change them quicker than 10 years in the boardroom.

Does it matter?
There’s a school of thought that says the skill set of a great early-stage VC (awesome people skills, curiosity, likable) versus the attributes of a great entrepreneur (pattern recognition, tenacity) may not have much overlap. Early stage investing is not a spreadheet, quantitative driven exercise, nor is it about technology — it is a deal business and people drive the deals. And while having experience as a startup CEO may make you a better board member, it may not substantively contribute to your career as an early stage investor, which depends on many more important skills.

Steel in their eyes
Ten years ago starting a company required millions of dollars and first customer ship took years. Now it’s possible to build a company, ship product and get tens of thousands of customers in a year with less than $500K. For venture firms who want to groom and grow associates or operating execs into partners (rather than hiring proven partners), here are my suggestions:

 

Have them start as an analyst (search for deal flow and people, due diligence).
Then take a year as a product manager in a startup in the firm’s portfolio.
Then come back as an associate for a year – shadowing board and partner meetings.
Then take a year and $250-500K to start and run a mobile, web or cloud company. See what it’s really like on the other side of that boardroom table.
Then return as a partner.

This process will create a new generation of venture capital partners, ones who have been battle tested in the trenches of a startup, hardened by hiring and firing, tempered by making a payroll and losing orders, and will never forget it’s all about the people.

These VCs would return to their firms with steel in their eyes. They’d be relentless about accountability from board meeting to board meeting with laser like focus on the one or two issues that matter. They would understand the CEO-VC-board dynamic in a way that few who hadn’t lived it could. They’d be ruthless in their choice of people and teams, looking for those few who have natural curiosity, a passion to win and who won’t take no for answer.

[Folder image via Shutterstock]

 

Filed under: Entrepreneur Corner, VentureBeat

Our very own Greg Kumparak and Jason Kincaid have both reviewed one — both giving it positive reviews. It’s the first time Greg has been excited about Android from a software standpoint in a while, and Jason thinks it is going to be really big. With special thanks to Appitalism, we have one Samsung Galaxy Nexus to give away.

First off, not only is the winner of this giveaway receiving a brand new Samsung Galaxy Nexus as soon as it’s released, but the winner will also receive a $500 app download card from Appitalism and Beats headphones by Dr. Dre Headphones. Obviously, in light of the holiday spirit, we wanted this giveaway to be big.

If you want a chance at winning this Samsung Galaxy Nexus, the $500 app download card from Appitalism, plus the Beats headphones by Dr. Dre Headphones, all you have to do is follow the steps below!

1) “Like” our TechCrunch Facebook Page:

2) Then do one of the following:

- Retweet this post (including the #TechCrunch hashtag)
- Or leave us a comment below telling us what excites you the most about this new phone

The contest starts now and ends Saturday, December 3rd, at 7:30pm PT.

Make sure you only tweet the message once, or you will be disqualified. We’ll choose the winner at random and contact them over the weekend. This giveaway is for U.S. only.

Good luck everyone.

GigaOM’s recent RoadMap conference in San Francisco featured a number of thought-provoking speakers on the topic of the future of technology, including Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, venture investor Mike Moritz and former Sun Microsystems founder Andy Bechtolsheim. While many views were expressed, one thread that ran through many of the different presentations, from mobile and design to health and communication, was the idea that successful technology involves making the computer invisible to the user, even as it becomes more powerful.

I took a look at this idea in a recent article for GigaOM Pro (subscription required). Dorsey, for example, said that the power of an information network like Twitter doesn’t have anything to do with the technology behind it. It doesn’t matter, for example, that the service is now processing more than 250 million tweets a day. Dorsey said that for him, the most powerful aspect of the service is how it can help connect us to others in far-flung parts of the world, as it did earlier this year during the demonstrations in Iran.

The Twitter co-founder said that he has also tried to make the technology in his other company — mobile payments–processing startup Square — as invisible as possible, so that retailers and other entrepreneurs can use it easily to expand their businesses and make them more efficient. Said Dorsey:

Both [Twitter and Square] are great at encouraging more face-to-face human interactions . . . I believe strongly that this information and these tools help us be better, but we need to be sure, as builders of tools, that it’s not overwhelming, that it’s meaningful, and that it’s not distracting. That it’s not something that puts technology first; it puts humans first.

Meanwhile, Mark Rolston of frog design (which famously helped design the original Macintosh) talked about how computers and other advanced technology are already beginning to disappear into our surroundings and devices, and that he expects this to accelerate in the future. Rolston said that it doesn’t take much to think about combining voice technology, like the kind Apple has in Siri, with the kind of processing power we have now to create a computer that uses any available surface (a wall, a mirror, etc.) as a screen.

Rolston imagines an extension of the kind of physical interface that Microsoft’s Kinect uses, where gestures and even facial recognition could be used to control all kinds of processes or devices and where computing power behind the scenes would allow us to interact with our homes in different ways. Computers would become “externalized resources in a room.” In that kind of environment, Rolston said, “I can talk at it and wave at it, and maybe I have a keyboard or maybe there are screens or cameras around, but [the computers] compose in the moment as we need them.”

This concept of hiding the computer can be seen emerging in other areas, too, including health-related devices like the UP from Jawbone. Many of them appear to be just fancy jewelry — in the UP’s case, a somewhat geeky-looking bracelet — but they contain as much computing power as a desktop computer probably did a decade ago. The UP tracks your activity and records your steps, just like some other devices do, but it can also be programmed to alert you when you have been inactive for a while, and it watches your sleep patterns so it can wake you at the right point in your sleep cycle. So it has a tremendous amount of sophisticated software inside it, but it looks extremely simple — all the complex parts are hidden.

As this phenomenon accelerates, companies of all kinds are going to have to adapt to this ubiquitous computing environment, both by making their products as noncomputer-like as possible (something Apple has always excelled at) and by taking advantage of the intelligence and connectivity being built into even the smallest objects around us. For more details on what is required in order to do that, please read the full article at GigaOM Pro (subscription required).

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users See-ming Lee and Angry Julie Monday

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
Connectivity means making the machine disappearThemes for a connected world: GigaOM RoadMap reviewConnected world: the consumer technology revolution

There is so much happening right now in emerging cloud computing — the entire economy is being disrupted by the trend.

With publicly-traded giants like Amazon, Google, VMWare, Microsoft, Cisco and Salesforce lurching around with new and improved services that can help businesses with cost and efficiency gains, sometimes it’s easy to miss the hot players that are up-and-coming.

We’ve assembled a list of ten private cloud companies that we think are particularly intriguing — focused on massive opportunities and leading the disruption in the sector they’re targeting.

Any venture capitalist would be psyched to have invested early into this portfolio of ten. Frankly, there are hundreds of exciting companies that could have made this list — we’ve seen and like a lot of them — but as editors, we’ve forced ourselves to winnow it down to ten. Seven companies on the list improve the way things work in the enterprise. Three give consumers better services via the cloud. VentureBeat has covered all of them fairly recently.

On top of this, with our first-annual CloudBeat 2011 conference coming up quite soon, this is be a great time to show off some of the innovators. Many of them, including Box.net, Workday and Zendesk, will be represented at the conference. You can sign up here.

Here are the ten cloud companies:

Box.net
Led by young, charismatic CEO Aaron Levie, Box.net is a leading provider of cloud storage services for the enterprise. To date, the company has more than 7 million users and 77 percent of the Fortune 500 have deployed its service in some form.

Box recently raised a recent $81 million extension round of funding, and also has launched the Box Innovation Network, a network for third-party developers who work on enterprise apps. The Innovation Network includes strategic partners including Heroku, Rackspace, Cloud Foundry (a division of VMWare), Appcelerator, SnapLogic, and Twilio. We eat our own dog food too. VentureBeat uses Box and couldn’t be happier. We can save our docs — any kind of docs — in a single place, and share everything easily.

Dropbox
Cloud storage startup Dropbox is on quite a roll. It now has over 45 million users in 175 countries that save upwards of a billion files every three days and the company just closed a $250 million round of funding in mid-October. A report earlier in the year suggested the company was valued a staggering $5 billion.

While the company had a widely reported security snafu back in June, Dropbox’s basic philosophy of helping consumers (and businesses) with file management and syncing folders across computers and mobile devices is catching on. The service said recently that it is on track to triple its user base by the end of this year. It’s often considered comparable to Box.net, and we also use Dropbox for some of our files. Its user interface is incredibly simple. But we went with Box company-wide because of its focus on the enterprise and security features. Dropbox, amusingly, declares it is not a cloud company, and is going after the consumer and small business (not enterprise). But we’re calling it a cloud company anyway.

Evernote
Multi-platform note-taking service Evernote helps its customers with keeping notes organized and synced across various operating systems. Super easy, and pretty fun to see it in action. It has a community of over 5,000 third-party application developers and offers apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, Windows, Mac, and more.

Back in June, Evernote reached 10 million registered users, with more than 400,000 of those customers paying $5 a month for a premium plan that enables bigger uploads and better collaborative tools. The company has raised $95.5 million in total funding to date, with a $50 million round in July.

Marketo
Marketo is a marketing automation firm that offers software and services focused on improving and managing sales lead generation. While that might sound a little dull, it’s a surprisingly fast growing and important type of service that can help enterprise sales teams succeed. The company also recently launched Spark by Marketo, a lead-generation engine for small businesses rather than its typical enterprise and mid-size clients. The company has raised $107 million to date, with its most recent round this month worth $50 million.

In the marketing automation category, we also want to give a shout out to Eloqua, the SaaS company that filed for an estimated $100 million IPO in August. The company helps its clients with clients with analytics to help predict revenue performance and its IPO, which could happen in the next few months, could help validate just how important and big marketing automation is right now.

OnLive
OnLive is easily the most consumer-focused cloud company on this list and that’s OK because it’s pretty freaking cool. The company uses to cloud to provide games in an on-demand fashion over the web, allowing users to play A-class titles like Deus Ex: Human Revolution straight from the web with no locally stored content.

Its service has been available in the U.S. about a year and in mid-September OnLive launched in the U.K. with more than 150 games. The service is available on web-connected TVs, PCs, Macs and tablets. OnLive has raised $56.5 million, with $40 million coming from HTC.

Panzura
Panzura equips enterprises with cloud storage hardware that’s faster, more advanced and more secure than typical “tier 1″ storage solutions. The company’s aim is to simplify the way file-based storage is deployed, managed, and protected using its multi-site file system and PanzuraOS. Additionally, it emphasizes its ability to encrypt data so it can be sent over networks safely. It scored a $12 million round last December, with funding led by Khosla Ventures.

RightScale
RightScale takes a software-as-a-service approach to cloud file management with a browser-based interface to help businesses manage their cloud networks without having to physically interact with servers. Its service is built on top of Amazon’s cloud and incorporates third-party apps like Alfresco. Its customers include Zynga, A&E, Patheos, Loggly, Coupa and Break.com. The company has raised about of $43 million total so far, with a $25 million round in September 2010.

Tidemark
Tidemark came out of stealth mode in October with its take on cloud-based enterprise performance management apps. Its apps help decipher critical enterprise data and extract information that can help managers, strategists, operations planners and forecasters with judging business performance and overall health. CEO Christian Gheorghe told us previously that business intelligence hasn’t kept up with the advances of the cloud, but Tidemark helps solve that problem. The company has raised a total of $11 million in two rounds, with backing from the likes of Greylock Partners and Andreessen Horowitz.

Workday
Workday provides more than 230 companies with cloud services for human resources, payroll and financial management. Although it could be considered a “cloud 1.0″ style SaaS, Workday’s depth of customers and resources are impressive — those 230 companies account for more than 2 million users. It helps accommodate users through most web browsers and in mobile with native applications for iPad and iPhone. The company has raised an eye-popping $250 million total, with its most recent $85 million funding round happening in October. The company is reportedly valued at $2 billion and will most likely go public in the next year.

Zendesk
Zendesk provides on-demand help desk services that greatly assist with managing customer support, including tools like email-ticket integration, online forums and widgets. In August, the service opened a new office in Denmark and gave several startup incubators its customer support software to build word of mouth and goodwill.

In September, the company launched the Twilio-powered Zendesk Voice, which lets customers set up cloud-based call centers for much less money than old-school call centers. The company has raised $25.5 million in three rounds of funding, with a $19 million round in December 2010.

Cloud photo via Kevin Dooley/Flickr

CloudBeat 2011 takes place Nov 30 – Dec 1 at the Hotel Sofitel in Redwood City, CA. Unlike any other cloud events, we’ll be focusing on 12 case studies where we’ll dissect the most disruptive instances of enterprise adoption of the cloud. Speakers include: Aaron Levie, Co-Founder & CEO of Box.net; Amit Singh VP of Enterprise at Google; Adrian Cockcroft, Director of Cloud Architecture at Netflix; Byron Sebastian, Senior VP of Platforms at Salesforce; Lew Tucker, VP & CTO of Cloud Computing at Cisco, and many more. Join 500 executives for two days packed with actionable lessons and networking opportunities as we define the key processes and architectures that companies must put in place in order to survive and prosper. Register here. Spaces are very limited!

Filed under: cloud, enterprise

The sheer number of new startups forming and getting funded these days is dizzying. It’s never been easier to start a company to harness new technologies and turn them into products. Traditional venture capital may not even be able to keep up with it. We are at the beginnings of what may very well become a Cambrian Explosion of startups, which will have implications well beyond the technology industry to the entire economy.

We’ve spent the last 15 years building out the tethered web. The next 15 years will be about connecting the web, and the broader internet, to the physical world. And mobile is just the start.

We will soon be able to shrink fully-functional computers into almost anything—mobile phones and tablets today, TVs, car dashboards, and wearable devices tomorrow. And they will all be connected to the network. The only limit to what can be done with these connected computing devices will be what entrepreneurs and engineers can dream up.

The Cambrian Explosion is a useful metaphor. During the real Cambrian Explosion, of course, many new species were created. But how many of them thrived? How many quickly became extinct? It was a period of rapid evolution, with new species both emerging and dying off quickly. In the end, the world was better off from an evolutionary perspective, but not every new animal survived, just like every new startup won’t survive.

Early evidence of this Cambrian Explosion is already showing itself. Last year, for instance, there were more than 1,100 seed/angel funding rounds, up from 855 in 2008, according to Crunchbase. That was a 33% increase in just two years, and 2011 looks like it will surpass 2010. Why are there so many more early stage startups? I believe there are two reasons. The barriers to creating a startup are falling away, and the market opportunities have never been greater. (This is tempered by the current global economic malaise, and serious concerns about how many of these early stage startups will make it past the seed stage, which I will address later on).

Let’s talk about the lower barriers to startup creation. First, there is less capital required than ever before, while at the same time there is more capital available (at least for seed stage companies). The advent of cloud computing, open source software, and plug-and-play APIs for every web platform means that 3 coders can create a product for a few hundred thousand dollars instead of the few million it would have cost just ten years ago. They can start lean, learn from their early customers, and improve the product along the way.

On the opportunity side, the potential online audience is bigger than it’s ever been before, with 2 billion people online, and even more of them are moving to mobile. The Internet is no longer just the desktop Web. It is apps for mobile phones and tablets which pull data from the internet but never launch a browser. It is connected devices like Jawbone’s Up bracelet that monitors your physical activity. And that is just scratching the surface.

There are whole industries yet to be seriously touched by the Internet, but which could benefit from better information: health, education, transportation, energy consumption—to name just a few. The consumer internet has basically zero barriers to entry, which is why we see so much action there, but brave entrepreneurs are beginning to take the same principles and apply them elsewhere. In health, for instance, where there are regulatory requirements or in education, where institutions hold the keys to the kingdom, internet startups are beginning to make some serious headway.

The internet is today’s steam engine. Anyone can tinker and build an app or a web business. The pace of innovation is similar to what was seen during the tail end of the industrial revolution in the late 1800s when anyone with a barn (the garage of its day) could apply steam engines to all sorts of practical uses, including machinery and vehicles. The barriers to experimentation were similarly low back then. But now the engine is the internet itself. Any product or service that is not connected to the internet is dead in the water.

Today’s most productive machine is the computer. But that machine is increasingly useless if it is not connected. What is the first thing you do when you turn on your computer? Launch a browser or check your email. Imagine a Kindle Fire or iPad as a standalone device. You wouldn’t be able to download any apps, books, or movies. Tablets and smartphones are merely interfaces to the network.

It’s not just that the network is the computer. The network is society, the market, and politics all rolled into one. We live our lives connected to the network at practically all times through various devices.

What seems frivolous in one context (using mobile technologies to organize a night out with your friends) can literally overturn governments in another (the Green Revolution in Iran, which gave rise to the Arab Spring, used Bluetooth-connected phones as its basic organizing network). Mobile, social, and local technologies are having a much deeper impact across the world than being able to offer up local deals on your mobile phone.

The internet is at its core an information network and a communications network. The ideal of better information, of perfect information, changes everything it touches. And while that creates new opportunities, it also creates new challenges. Every single industry, every single business that profits from information asymmetries, will be challenged.

Technology is not a panacea. It might very well be eliminating jobs faster than it can replace them. Technology makes industries more efficient, yes, but that also means they need to employ fewer people.

Just look at the data. Economic growth and employment growth used to go hand in hand, but now it appears as though they have been decoupled. Apple’s big new server farm in North Carolina, for example, employs only 50 people.

The Cambrian Explosion not only created millions of new life forms, it eliminated many of the weaker species that preceded it. They just couldn’t compete. I believe we are going to see a similar phenomenon in the coming decades on the economic front. The question is not whether it will happen. It is what side of the evolutionary divide do you want to be on?

Image via Ecology and Evolution

Editor’s note:  This guest post is written by Aileen Lee, Partner at venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, where she focuses on investing in consumer internet ventures.  Full disclosure: some of the companies mentioned below are KPCB-backed companies, including One Kings Lane and Plum District (both of which count Lee as a board member). You can read more about Lee at KPCB.com and follow her on twitter at @aileenlee.

As I’ve written about before, we’re in an amazing period of the consumer Internet.  Despite a shaky economy, many web companies are in hypergrowth.  This is reminiscent of the five-year period over a decade ago when companies like Amazon, Netscape, eBay, Yahoo, Google and PayPal were built.

One challenge, which isn’t new, is the battle for consumer attention.  If you’re looking to grow your user base, is there a best way to cost-effectively attract valuable users?  I’m increasingly convinced the best way is by harnessing a concept called social proof, a relatively untapped gold mine in the age of the social web.

What is social proof?  Put simply, it’s the positive influence created when someone finds out that others are doing something.  It’s also known as informational social influence.

Wikipedia describes social proof as “a psychological phenomenon where people assume the actions of others reflect the correct behavior for a given situation… driven by the assumption that the surrounding people possess more information about the situation.” In other words, people are wired to learn from the actions of others, and this can be a huge driver of consumer behavior.

Consider the social proof of a line of people standing behind a velvet rope, waiting to get into a club.  The line makes most people walking by want to find out what’s worth the wait.  The digital equivalent of the velvet rope helped build viral growth for initially invite-only launches like Gmail, Gilt Groupe, Spotify, and Turntable.fm.

Professor Robert Cialdini, a thought leader in social psychology, has many examples. In one study, his team tested messages to influence reusing towels in hotel rooms.  The social proof message – “Almost 75% of other guests help by using their towels more than once” had 25% better results than all other messages.  And adding the words “of other guests that stayed in this room” had even more impact (also an example of how A/B testing of small details matters). 

In another study, a restaurant increased sales of specific dishes by 13-20% just by highlighting them as “our most popular items”.  SP also works on your subconscious – it’s the reason why comedy shows often use a laugh track or audience; people actually laugh more when they can hear other people laughing.

Five Types of Social Proof

If you’re a digital startup, building and highlighting your social proof is the best way for new users to learn about you.  And engineering your product to generate social proof, and to be shared through social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, YouTube, Pinterest and others, can multiply the discovery of your product and its influence.  Think of it as building the foundation for massively scalable word-of-mouth.  Here’s a “teardown” on various forms of social proof, and how some savvy digital companies are starting to measure its impact.

1) Expert social proof – Approval from a credible expert, like a magazine or blogger, can have incredible digital influence.  Examples:

Visitors referred by a fashion magazine or blogger to designer fashion rentals online at Rent the Runway drive a 200% higher conversion rate than visitors driven by paid search.
Klout identifies people who are topical experts on the social web. Klout invited 217 influencers with high Klout scores in design, luxury, tech and autos to test-drive the new Audi A8.  These influencers sparked 3,500 tweets, reaching over 3.1 million people in less than 30 days – a multiplier effect of over 14,000x.
Mom-commerce daily offer site Plum District also reached mom influencers thru Klout, and found customers referred by influential digital moms shop at 2x the rate of customers from all other marketing channels.

2) Celebrity social proof – Up to 25% of U.S. TV commercials have used celebrities to great effect, but only a handful of web startups have to date.  Some results:

In 1997, Priceline.com was one of the first web startups to use a celebrity endorser – William Shatner – not a travel expert, but seemingly obsessed with saving consumers money.  It has been a huge win; Priceline now has a $23 billion market cap, and the fee Shatner took in shares is estimated to be worth $600 million.
Trendyol, the fastest-growing fashion ecommerce company in Turkey, regularly launches merchandise campaigns with the endorsement of celebrities. This practice increases site traffic by 2.5x and product sell-through by 30%.
ShoeDazzle launched with celebrity Kim Kardashian as chief stylist. Her involvement helped leapfrog the company to an estimated $25m in 2010 and $70 million in 2011 sales, plus a recent $40m financing.  Celebrity endorsement by Jessica Simpson and aesthetician Nerida Joy recently helped Beautymint attract 500,000 visitors in the first 24 hours of its launch.
The most authentic (and cost-effective) celebrity social proof is unpaid. For home décor site One Kings Lane, a 2010 unpaid mention in Gwyneth Paltrow’s influential blog GOOP provided a 90% lift in daily sign-ups vs. the previous 4 days’ average.  Celebrity use on Turntable.fm by Sir Mix-A-Lot and producer Diplo generated viral buzz, helping the company skyrocket to 140,000 active users in just 4 weeks.

3) User social proof  – Direct TV marketers are masters at sharing user success stories. (fascination with this was actually the inspiration for this blog post).  Companies mastering this digitally include:

More than 61 million people visit Yelp (working on an upcoming IPO) each month to read user reviews.  And reviews drive revenue; a recent HBS study showed that a 1-star increase in Yelp rating leads to 5-9% growth in sales.
User-generated videos (UGVs) are a growing and important social proof phenomenon.  Early visitors to Shoedazzle watched more than 9 UGVs on average, helping catapult sales; and user testimonials on YouTube drove a 3x conversion rate vs. organic visitors for Beachbody, the makers of P90x fitness.
Negative user social proof is also important to track. The first negative user review on eBay has been shown to reverse a seller’s weekly growth rate from 5% to -8%. It also hurts pricing; a 1% increase in negative feedback has been shown to lead to a 7.5% decrease in sale price realized.

4) Wisdom of the crowds social proof – Ray Kroc started using social proof in 1955 by hanging an “Over 1 Million Served” sign at the first McDonald’s.  Highlighting popularity or large numbers of users implies “a million people can’t be wrong.”  Some digital examples:

Fashion e-tailer Modcloth enables its community to “Be the Buyer” by voting on which styles they think Modcloth should sell in the future.  Shoppers take strong cues from the community; styles with the “Be the Buyer” badge sell at 2x the velocity of un-badged styles.
Callaway Digital Arts finds that when any of their kids’ iPad apps is listed as a top 10 most popular app in the iTunes App Store “Top Charts,” daily downloads vault 10x over the prior week – but being the No. 1 most popular app drives 30-50% more daily downloads than being No. 2.
Greentech company Opower uses social proof to help reduce electricity consumption. It works: Opower sees an 80% response rate to e-mails citing how a household’s use compares with the neighborhood, which has driven more than 500 million kilowatt hours of savings so far.

5) Wisdom of your friends social proof – Learning from friends thru the social web is likely the killer app of social proof in terms of 1:1 impact, and the potential to grow virally.  Some examples:

Friends inviting friends to play through Facebook and other social networks helped Zynga grow from 3 million to 41 million average daily users in just one year, from 2008 to 2009.
Moms, arguably the most valuable demographic on the social web, rely heavily on friends and family recommendations.  A recent Babycenter study showed moms rely on the wisdom of their friends 67% more than average shoppers; and they rely on social media 243% more than the general population.
Friends referred by friends make better customers.  They spend more (a 2x higher estimated lifetime value than customers from all other channels at One Kings Lane); convert better (75% higher conversion than renters from other marketing channels at Rent the Runway); and shop faster (they make their first purchase after joining twice as quickly than referrals from other channels at Trendyol)
They also make better contributors.  People who see content from their friends on TripAdvisor contribute personal content to the site at 2x the rate of others, and are 20% more engaged than other users.

Building Your Social Proof

Will one form of social proof work best for your company? Maybe, but companies like LegalZoom have found that a “mixed salad” of various types of social proof is most effective.  The beauty of the web is you can test, learn and iterate quickly to find what works best.

To note, I don’t think a social proof strategy will be effective if you don’t start with a great product that delights customers, and that people like well enough to recommend.  How do you know if you have a great product?  Track organic traffic growth, reviews, ratings and repeat rates.  And measure your viral coefficient – if your site includes the ability to share, what percentage of your daily visitors and users share with others? How is the good word about your product being shared outside your site on the soc[…]

No one embodies the classic, sniff-it-out serial entrepreneur more than Mike Cassidy, who has now built and sold four companies (Stylus Innovation, Direct Hit, Xfire and Ruba), some of them with very impressive exits.

Last week, Cassidy traveled to Turkey for a start-up event, and he talked about how he does it. Below right is one of the slides he showed to the audience of about 200 entrepreneurs and investors. It documents the milestones he hit while building DirectHit, which he sold 500 days after he started it, for $532 million to AskJeeves.

MIke Cassidy's slide on Direct Hit milestones, on way to $500M exit
I’ve been soaking up the lore of Silicon Valley for the past ten years, but something about Cassidy’s talk still grabbed me: With infectious energy, Cassidy takes the classic tenets of entrepreneurship and douses steroids on them. For the uninitiated, Cassidy’s recommendations look a tad perverse, but the results, like former SF Giants’ Barry Bonds’ home-runs, are effective.  To be sure, Cassidy’s is not the recipe used by folks like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison and Bill Gates, who think especially long-term while building their companies. It’s the recipe for the extremely quick exit. It’s the second of two dominant strands in company-building.

So let’s turn to Cassidy’s philosophies, which he encouraged the Turkish audience — largely a group of early entrepreneurs — to try to emulate if they want to succeed.
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Raise funds in a single day: Most outrageously, for the inexperienced Turkish audience, Cassidy said it is important to try to raise funds in a single day. He wasn’t joking. To create a sense of urgency, you should ask the investors you’re talking with to make sure they have all the decision-makers in their fund present during your pitch. You round up all meetings with investors in a single day (Cassidy calls this “sychronized timing”) and give them a deadline by 5pm to give you a termsheet. He backed up his point, and he does with his other points, with examples from the companies he’s launched. He’s gotten a termsheet on the same day he presented to VCs in seven of the eight times he’s raised a round.

Idea in two weeks: Entrepreneurs should limit themselves to two weeks to formulate their business idea, he said. Anything longer, and the entrepreneurs risk talking themsleves out of it. Better to launch quick, and to iterate, than take too long perfecting something that will bomb later because it hasn’t been tested.

Team in two weeks: Entrepreneurs should take only two weeks to put their core team together, another provocative prescription, considering it can take some entrepreneurs months to make core hires. Cassidy wasn’t apologetic. The excitement and urgency you create by offering someone a job on the same day that you meet them, and forcing them to give you an answer by 9am the following day, leads to significant momentum for the company, he said. And if they don’t work out? Well, you can fire them just as quickly. Cassidy talked about some of his tricks: He invites candidates over to dinner at his home — the same night as the interview — with himself and his wife. And once the candidate has accepted, Cassidy makes sure they get all the HR paperwork and agreed-to task-list signed before they even start. That way, they hit the ground running. This contributes to warp speed.

3.5 months to launch: Once you’ve settled on your idea, it shouldn’t take any longer than 3.5 months to launch your product. By launching your product, and iterating on a quick schedule of every couple weeks, you’re more likely to surge ahead of slower competitors and bigger companies.

Deal with hard deadlines. On deal-making, Cassidy’s recipe for success is to drive partners to decisions by pointing a virtual gun at their head. Either they sign a deal by a hard deadline, or he walks. This also helps drive things quickly. A deal’s chances of closing declines by 10 percent every day it doesn’t close, according to Cassidy’s rule of thumb. So he may be bluffing a partner when he provides a deadline, but it’s worth the risk, he says. If a partner is unwilling to sign a deal by an appointed deadline, the chances of it closing are declining anyway. And it’s good if you can use these deals to drive funding decisions too. Cassidy’s second company, Direct Hit, once found a way to accelerate a search results by rendering a URL 50 milliseconds faster than competing search enginse. By convincing a major search engine to sign an binding agreement to use the technology — before the deal was full approved by lawyers — Cassidy was able to present  the agreement to investors. This convinced the investors that Direct Hit was worth investing in, and at a higher valuation.

Raise smaller rounds. Cassidy recommends raising smaller amounts of VC funding, because they can propel you quickly to the next step in your business, with minimal dilution. You can raise money later at higher multiples. The results speak for themselves: He sold Stylus Innovation for $13 million after he and his founders put a total of $1,500 into the company to start with — a near 10,000 times return, he notes. With Direct Hit, he took about $1.3M in funding in his first round, and produced $532M the eventual exit in a year and a half to AskJeeves. With Xfire, he raised $1M, and sold it to MTV/Viacom for $110 within two years. With Ruba, he raised a first round, and Google bought the company within two years after he launched it, but he isn’t saying for how much.

To be sure, his Turkish audience was left scratching their heads.

Cassidy’s slide presentation below.

(See my related story about the emergence of Turkey as an e-commerce hotbed.)

Filed under: Entrepreneur Corner, VentureBeat

As we know, sharing photos is one of the most popular things to do on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr. The act of sharing photos has also spawned services like Flickr, Instagram, and 500px who serve that purpose exclusively.

While you probably haven’t gotten around to storing all of your photos in one place with a service like Snapjoy, it can be a maddening experience to try to figure out which site you shared what photo on. Especially if you’re trying to show one to someone at a bar or family function.

SuperAlbum won’t store all of your photos for you, but the iOS app will let you view all of your shared photos from one interface within the app. It’s extremely well done, and fixes a problem I’ve been facing for years.

The app is $.99 cents, which is a steal if you’re facing the problem of “where did I post that photo?” like I am.

All the photos
Once you open up SuperAlbum, you connect the app with all of your accounts. Luckily, most services provide quick and painless authorization, so this shouldn’t take but a few minutes. After you’ve connected your accounts, you can start taking a look at all of the photos you’ve shared over the years.



The thing you’ll notice right away, is that SuperAlbum has a prettier and easier to navigate interface than most of the apps it supports. For example, one of my major gripes with Instagram is that I can’t swipe through a feed of photos, or through someone’s personal collection. SuperAlbum lets you do just that.



Additionally, SuperAlbum will let you save any picture you see onto your iDevice’s Camera Roll, which is really handy if you’re trying to text or email it to someone. The app will also let you tweet a picture instantly, or send it to another application for editing or sharing that SuperAlbum works with, seamlessly.



For the price, SuperAlbum is completely worth it, and as soon as I started using it, I didn’t feel like my pictures were as scattered around the Internet as I first thought. Some of the other services out there should take note of SuperAlbum’s features their own adoption, as I find that even Facebook’s app is sluggish when cycling through photos.

➤SuperAlbum

Much of what happens at a startup happens out of sight of journalists and their readers.

It’s not the stuff of compelling reading, either. Running a business involves a vast amount of logistical work, stuff that has to be learned step by step if you don’t already know how to do it.

You don’t find this out in business school. The only way to learn it is by doing it. That’s why, if you’ve got a killer business idea, you should go out and do it.

You don’t find this out by being a journalist, either. Back in the dot-com era, another writer and I got together, decided we had a pretty good grasp on this digital publishing thing, and started a company.

We probably did have a good idea. Our plan was to write and syndicate how-to content like tips and tricks, starting with tech products and then expanding into other categories. We figured we’d sell advertising, and syndicate our content to sites that needed to make themselves stickier, like e-commerce sites. A better-funded competitor, eHow, went on to dominate the how-to category before getting acquired. It’s still around. Meanwhile, syndication turned out to be a decent model for making money from content. We were just 10 years too early.

At least, that’s what I like to tell people. In reality, we had a great idea but no clue how to execute it. Despite great advice from more experienced business people and investors, we were good at the writing and editing business but not so hot at the generating-revenue and organizing-a-team business.

Things you wouldn’t ordinarily think twice about, like incorporating and taking care of our (nearly nonexistent) finances took up a huge amount of time, as we realized that we were out of our depth. We then spent too long talking with lawyers and accountants who cost way too much. Eventually, we realized we didn’t really need such heavy-duty firepower helping us, but by then we had spent thousands on them.

We were convinced we needed to raise a lot of money, and quickly, so we could “get big fast” and then figure out our revenue model. In reality, that was exactly backwards: For our kind of business, we should have stayed small, kept the company simple, built a product that we understood and could sell, and then grown the business once we had some idea what we were doing.

Eventually, we ran into one too many roadblocks (including the dot-com bust) and wound the company down. We didn’t make ourselves or our investors rich, but we did return more than half of what they’d invested to them — which is more than you can say about Pets.com or Boo.com.

But here’s the thing: I think our experience is typical of many, many startups. Unless you’ve been through a startup at its earliest stages before, you have no idea what kinds of unexpected, and possibly stupid, things you’re going to have to deal with. Do you need desks? How is your team going to communicate: on ICQ, AIM, Yammer or something else? Should you incorporate or form some kind of simpler partnership? What happens when a customer asks for an invoice? How do you handle it when one of the cofounders refuses to bathe and smells terrible? (Just to be clear, that last example comes from Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, not from my experience.)

One of the advantages that entrepreneurs have today is that, thanks to cloud technologies like Amazon EC2 and S3, it’s easier than ever to build a prototype, get a website up and running, and start testing your business with real customers.

It’s also easier, thanks to the examples of companies like Craigslist and 37signals, to ignore the received wisdom about “getting big fast” and raising venture capital. If you haven’t read Rework, the 2010 book by the founders of 37signals, check it out — it’s an excellent book with lots of practical advice for people in regular jobs as well as startups.

But one thing remains the same: Starting a company is a risk. Doing that when you’ve got kids, a mortgage or other obligations is a lot more challenging than it is when you’re in college, or just out of school.

In my case, the entrepreneurial thing to do would have been to learn from my failures and jump straight into another startup. Silicon Valley is full of repeat failures, and one of the strengths of the area is that failing in business is not stigmatized, as long as you learn from your experience. With kids on the way, I didn’t have enough flexibility, so I went back to the lucrative, stable world of journalism. (Ha!)

So if you’ve got an idea for a company — or want to work at a startup, like our new columnist Julia Plevin — do it before you’ve incurred a lot of other responsibilities.

“You can’t build a world-changing company in between classes or while servicing six figures of debt,” the president of the Thiel Foundation said this week, when announcing the foundation’s plan to give $100,000 “un-scholarships” to 20 people under 20 years of age. The scholarships are meant to help students with good ideas so they can drop out of college and work on their business.

I think that’s a great idea — and the Thiel Foundation is right. Whether you can get an un-scholarship or not: Do it now.

Image credit: Robert S. Donovan/Flickr

Related articles

Dylan’s Desk: How stressful product launches make stressful products (venturebeat.com)
Startup and the City: Lessons from landing my first startup job (venturebeat.com)
Peter Thiel will give you $100K not to go to college, opens 2012 Thiel Fellowship class (venturebeat.com)
The lean startup: How to stay lean when your company takes off (venturebeat.com)

Filed under: Entrepreneur Corner, VentureBeat

Coding is a language, but it’s not foreign and shouldn’t be treated as such. It should be taught in schools alongside the ABCs. Unfortunately, as it’s a relatively new field, our teachers and professors lack the resources to do so.

Enter: Squad, a real-time, web-based collaborative code editor built by the folks at Code Together, which is based out of SproutBox, a startup incubator located in Bloomington, Indiana. Squad is built on the idea that working together produces better code and better products. Have you ever collaborated on a Google Document? It’s a similar concept. Squad’s tools are for both experts and those learning to code that supports more than 15 common programming languages including HTML, PHP, CSS, JavaScript, XML, Python, Lua, C, C++.

This month, Squad announced its first education product, a workshop platform for students and computer science teachers. Squad for Education contains all of the features of the original software, but has been further optimized for large groups in the computer lab setting.

Computer science educators can use the platform to quickly assemble and monitor the progress of their students and can provide real-time demonstrations for up to 50 students simultaneously within the same platform. The software is customizable so universities can include single sign-on access and dedicated subdomains.

“I see great potential for collaboration using Squad, not just in CS, but also math, history and even debate club; anywhere there are minds coming together, Squad can be used to log arguments and compile one final document. Squad was easy to setup, I now can quickly switch between student’s workspaces to observe and interact with them as they progress on an assignment.”

-Dan-Adrian German, Senior Lecturer at Indiana University Bloomington School of Informatics and Computing, who’s been using Squad for lab activities in his class this fall.

Features of Squad product include syntax highlighting with multiple color modes and line numbering, chat with searchable history, the ability to browse remote FTP/SFTP locations and open and save local files. Pricing for Squad for Education is determined by several factors, including the number of students enrolled in CS courses and the amount of customization needed. Regular pricing includes $3.95/month for an individual plan and $49.95/month for a 5-person team with additional users costing $8.00/month.

Squad is similar to YC’s Stypi and Cloud9 IDE, which also let you collaboratively code in the browser. It’s complementary to Codecademy, an online tool to help beginners learn coding that we covered last month. There’s also Programr and Treehouse, which like Codecademy, have similarly gamified the programming learning process.

Squad would be great for individuals who finished Codecademy courses and are ready to jump into some projects, but would like to work on them with friends – solving coding challenges together and sharing knowledge.

➤ Try Squad for a free 10-day trial.

Featured image: Shutterstock/Dmitriy Shironosov

EBay has announced it is buying New York startup Hunch, a recommendation engine created by Chris Dixon and Caterina Fake, to help improve its recommendation services. The purchase price hasn’t been announced, but venture capital investor and former TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington has said it was about $80 million.

EBay said it will use Hunch’s “taste graph” technology to provide its users with non-obvious recommendations for items based on their unique tastes. The company said it will also apply Hunch’s technology to other areas such as search, advertising and marketing, in order to better surface product information based on its customers’ tastes.

“We are engaging consumers in innovative ways and attracting top technologists to shape the future of commerce,” said Mark Carges, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President, Global Products, Marketplaces. “With Hunch, we’re adding new capabilities to personalizing the shopping experience on eBay to the individual relevant tastes and interests of our customers. We expect Hunch’s technologies to benefit eBay shoppers as they browse and buy, and to bring sellers on eBay new ways to connect the right products with the right customers.”

Hunch will remain in New York with co-founders Chris Dixon, Tom Pinckney and Matt Gattis staying on board with the company. Fake, who also co-founded Flickr, stepped away from the company earlier this year.

Dixon said in a blog post that he and the team decided to sell because of the opportunity to apply Hunch’s Taste Graph to one of the top e-commerce leaders. He said Hunch will continue to operate a standalone site and will be providing eBay with predictive merchandising, interpreting unstructured data and creating merchant insights. Hunch had reportedly turned down previous offers for as much as $60 million from suitors including Google .
I think the purchase could improve eBay in a number of ways. For one thing, it could help the retailer better compete with Amazon, and it keeps Hunch out of the hands of its rival, which has been well-regarded for its ability to recommend products to users based on their purchase history and preferences. EBay launched its own recommendations last year to help suggest items based on past searches, but it clearly has a long way to go in matching Amazon, which moved ahead of eBay in sales last year. Earlier this year, Om wrote that Amazon should buy Hunch because of its ability to create an interest graph that can be tied into social commerce. And as retailers like Amazon and eBay build out almost limitless inventories, matching recommendations to these products becomes even more important. Here’s what Om wrote in April:

“Amazon should buy Hunch. It could use the decision engine to help customers sift through the ever-expanding array of offerings and make purchasing decisions. That little kernel of an idea still looms large in my thinking, especially as I wonder what the future of media and e-commerce looks like….Interest graph, for me, is the underpinning of a new kind of e-commerce experience. Think of it as a new kind of social commerce experience that goes beyond the notion of group shopping (Gilt Groupe, Groupon), shopping communities and recommendation engines,”

Hunch could allow eBay to create some very smart recommendations based on more than just searches. I think past search or purchase history is limiting, and sometimes an inaccurate predictor for recommendations because a lot of gifting happens on these sites, which can skew the suggestions. Hunch uses what it knows about a person’s likes and interests along with answers to personal questions to help understand a user’s tastes, then makes very intelligent recommendations based on those answers and their correlation to other data. Hunch originally began a consumer-facing service but changed course last year to license its technology to retailers who participated in its Hunch Partner Platform.

I think this could also help with eBay’s self-described goal to become a technology-driven company. The company is in the midst of a big push to become much more than just a seller of goods. You could see that at eBay’s X.commerce Innovate conference, where it showed off its X.commerce platform for retailers and developers. EBay has been on a buying binge recently, buying a number of companies that have helped it aspire to be a sort of plumbing or infrastructure for e-commerce. It has bought GSI, Magento, WHERE, Milo and RedLaser, much of which is being put into the new X.commerce platform and also its bid to enable payments in-store. Hunch is a very intelligent company that uses a lot of machine learning and data mining to create recommendations. And it has a smart team led by the well-known Dixon, who can also help build out eBay’s presence in New York

Adding Hunch could be another tool for X.commerce customers, who could plug smart recommendations into their business operations. EBay is really trying to build a commerce operating system for businesses, and it’s putting all these new assets together into one big resource to help enable sales for retailers and developers. Increasingly, retailers need better ways to engage consumers and personalize service to the tastes of their users. By providing a tool like Hunch to X.commerce customers, it can make the platform that much more attractive.

I think the move makes sense for eBay and follows through on CEO John Donahoe’s attempts to remake the online seller into a technology company. Donahoe said at the X.commerce conference that eBay is not done buying up companies and it looks like it will continue to add more pieces to its growing collection of e-commerce assets.

Here are a couple of video interviews we did earlier with Dixon:



Watch this video for free on GigaOM





Watch this video for free on GigaOM



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Connected world: the consumer technology revolutionThe future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM ProFlash analysis: Collaborative consumption – a first look at the new web-sharing economy

Editor’s note: TechCrunch contributor Semil Shah is an entrepreneur interested in digital media, consumer Internet, and social networks. Shah is based in Palo Alto and you can follow him on twitter @semil

Earlier in the year, I wrote an opinion column on TechCrunch that big data “needs to think bigger.” At the time, I kept hearing the term “big data” over and over, and wondered how much of the emerging insights and techniques would be applied toward the Internet versus the larger problems society faces, such as detecting fraud in financial markets, finding new deposits of natural resources, or helping discover the next big pharma drug.

Yet in some of my experiences monitoring the space since then, I’ve come to conclusion for now that my March 2011 column meant well, but that reality is much further behind than we’d like to think. One would assume, for instance, that big drug companies would be aggressive adopting new, external, cutting-edge techniques to analyze their own data for new insights, especially with a dangerous patent cliff looming in 2012. Turns out, oftentimes drug companies aren’t always willing to share data with third parties, which is often necessary to take advantage of big data infrastructure. While I believe that eventually the best data science will emerge to help these industries grow in new ways, for now at least, the best opportunities lie in the one area I wanted to gloss over last time: the consumer and mobile web.

Investors see the wave coming. Over the past few months, the top-tier funds have begun to make their moves. Benchmark Capital brought in Craig Weissman from Salesforce as an EIR and invested in Josh James’ new company, Domo; Accel Partners recently announced the creation of a “Big Data Fund” by reallocating monies from existing funds, which will improve data dealflow; and of course, there’s Greylock Partners, which was one of the earliest investors in this space through numerous companies and, most recently, by recruiting DJ Patil to be their “Data Scientist in Residence.”

Since March, I’ve continued to hear the term “big data” uttered by so many, yet so few seemed to grasp what it means for us and the web (yours truly, included). We all know that the major social networks (like Facebook), broadcast engines (like Twitter), self-expression tools (like Tumblr and Pinterest), and services (like Dropbox) generate ridiculous amounts of data. Add to this the growing Quantified Self movement, where connected devices from companies like Fitbit, Runkeeper, and Jawbone let us track our offline movements and analyze them online.

What happens, then, when the companies holding these big buckets of data go to cash them in?

In the earlier stages of consumer web companies, data can be used to create new products with the hopes of increasing engagement metrics. Then, as a company begins to mature, services can be built using the data that may ideally involve revenue. In these companies today, data-driven engagement products are oftentimes baked into the earliest versions of the products, such as recommendation engines for whom to follow, where to go, or what to watch.

We should not take data as a given, however. To start with, the FTC has been warning technology executives to collect data core to their business only. One might be shocked at just how many well-funded, recognizable startups haven’t been collecting good, structured data, and in some cases, they don’t collect any. For those that do get a handle on their data, they oftentimes do not possess the talent in-house to make sense of it because the skills required to do so are rare.

The consumer web companies that do interesting things with data are the ones you’d expect: Google, Facebook, Amazon, LinkedIn, and Zynga, among a small group of others. Most web startups don’t have access to the right mathematical and statistical backgrounds needed in order to extract value from the data. Some data scientists I’ve talked to will go so far as to say that consumer startups that start to grow fast need a data scientist as part of the core engineering team as soon as possible, because most engineers working in the consumer space don’t have the skills in statistics and/or machine learning required to make sense of the data. (A data scientist is someone sufficiently trained to ask the proper questions of the data in order to tease out insights that serve as the basis for building new products and that, in turn, generate income for the company).

And, herein lies the rub.

What I’m writing isn’t news. Everyone who watches the space knows it. The reality is that this talent is in short supply. To put it in terms we can understand, for every 100 great iPhone engineers, there may be one or two people who can, on their own, dig into consumer web data and discover and build new and engaging services from it.

It’s been my experience that the majority of those who do, in fact, posses these statistical, mathematical, and machine learning skills are currently busy, diligently applying their rare skills in other industries such as finance, life sciences, and the physical sciences. They oftentimes haven’t applied their techniques on data sets culled from the consumer web, nor are they interested in doing so. As a result, there are very, very, very few people like DJ Patil, Pete Skomoroch (of LinkedIn), or Jeff Hammerbacher (of Cloudera) who truly understand these techniques as they relate to the world wide web. Since we can’t clone them, the alternative has been to build data teams consisting of data specialists and pairing them with those that have extensive consumer web data experience.

So, the next time you hear someone talk about “big data” in the context of the consumer web, realize that, yes, valuable data, whether big or small, is being collected by every click we strike. The big companies with resources are keenly aware of the opportunity, but most web startups don’t have data scientists as part of their early teams, and even if they wanted to, those folks are hard to find. Therefore, it’s my opinion that “big data” is a term we’ll hear for a very long time to come. Data generated by the web will produce some of the largest data sets ever known, if they haven’t already, and somewhere within all those billions and billions of likes, retweets, upvotes, reblogs, and repins may reside truths that, yet again, change the way we live. But more data scientists will be needed to unlock them.

Photo Credit / Creative Commons by An&

Apple and Google have been working hard to become the conduit through which you access all of your data. This process has involved replacing the desktop machine with ‘the cloud’ as a repository for all of your information.

In the process, these companies are waging a war for you. Not just for your patronage for their services, or as a customer for their devices. No, they want you to pledge your data loyalty to them exclusively.

They are looking to do this by helping you to embed your life so thoroughly into their respective systems that you become locked in, unwilling or unable to leave without a great expenditure of time, effort and money.

This war stands to get more intense as data lockin becomes a real metric by which observers and the companies themselves measure success.

The Cloud
The cloud is nothing new. The basic concepts of storing files in a remote location that can be accessed anywhere are as old as the internet. But the modern application of this technology, by companies like Apple and Google, is more aggressive than ever before.

The biggest reason for this is the shift from stationary to mobile computing. Products like Dropbox have proliferated by riding the frothy wave of the move away from the towers and boxes that sat on our desks, to the ever more powerful and portable laptop.

But a second, and overlapping, shift is underway. People are leaving their laptops behind for tablet computers and smartphones. These devices are insanely powerful when compared to even the laptops of a decade ago and feature a set of key benefits, as well as limitations.

The most important catalyst for this change was the availability of an always-on data connection. The expansion and near-ubiquity of data networks is the platform that has allowed smartphones to become our constant and necessary companions.

On the other side of the coin, we have the limitations of storage. Yes, these smartphones are robust compared to computers of a few years ago, but their storage capacities are nowhere near what is available on a desktop computer. This makes choosing what to bring and what to leave behind a massive headache, and something that many people will never bother to do.

Enter the cloud. A small, portable and connected device, with limited onboard storage makes the ideal companion for a system that allows all data to be hosted and facilitated by a service that allows you access to it from wherever you are.

The cloud has been shoved to the forefront of the struggle between Apple and Google because of the rise of smartphones and tablets. It would still exist without them, but now it has taken on a new meaning and has become the biggest battleground in this conflict.

A gateway drug
In fact, it can be argued that these clouds, each curated by a different company, provide the real value, not the phones or tablets. The devices are just the gateway drug, the cloud is the addiction.

The importance that is attached to this by these companies is illustrated when you compare the introduction of the first iPhone to the introduction of the iPhone 4S.

The first iPhone was introduced by Steve Jobs as three devices in one.

An iPod
A phone
An internet mobile communicator

If you watch the original announcement, which I highly recommend, as it is the gold standard of product introductions, you’ll notice that the first got some applause, the second almost brought the house down and the third was barely acknowledged.

If the iPhone were being introduced today, which of those three do you think would be the most important, the most emphasized?

Well, we don’t have to speculate, because the announcement of the iPhone 4S told us everything we needed to know when 70% of the event was devoted to iCloud and its various services.

Apple is heavily invested into iCloud because it realizes that the best way to gain a customer for life is to become the one way that they access their most important data.

Google rallies the troops
Although Apple has been flirting with the cloud for a while, with varying levels of failure, Google has built its entire business off of offering internet services that are based on storing customer data on its servers.

With the massive storage afforded Gmail users, Google invited them to simply archive their email, breaking the decade-old habit of deleting email due to a lack of space. This effectively creates an archive of your life from the day you signed up for Gmail until now.

Receipts, conversations, references, even files emailed to yourself in a crude approximation of what services like Dropbox do, all available to you with a quick Google search. This is the power of Gmail, not the fact that it’s a decent and normally reliable email system.

Google Docs, while still trailing Microsoft’s Office juggernaut, are also quickly becoming indispensible collaboration tools and its Google Apps offerings are almost always the default choice for startups and websites of all sorts.

These are great infrastructural services, but they aren’t all that smartphone consumer-facing. This is why a concentration on building out services that appeal to the mobile device user, and encourage them to make a heavy investment in Google for their data storage and serving are the next big focus for Google.

To this end, Google has been focusing on initiatives like Google Music and integration of Google+ into every product it makes. These are the things that an Android phone user will see as a benefit and figure that they should try out,

Google services, including Gmail, Google Music, Google+ and Google Docs are all part of its strategy to incur user loyalty. When the services are efficient and enjoyable to use, they get people in the door.

But once the data is there, once people have made a commitment to Google’s cloud, the services exist to create the lockin it needs to retain those customers beyond the life of their current device.

If you’ve got all of your music, movies, documents and more wrapped up in a cloud that is seamlessly integrated across your device, then you are less likely to jump ship to another system.

Google Music vs. iTunes Match
This concept is why it’s so silly to compare Google’s recently launched Music service with Apple’s iTunes Match.

These services aren’t competing with each other, they’re designed as a hook to get the user more deeply invested in the platform. And they stand a really good chance of doing so. Once you’ve got seamless access to your music from anywhere you want, without having to ever sync it, it’s fairly addictive.

After using iCloud for nearly 5 months, including the beta period, I can tell you that I think much less about where items are synced and what devices I pick up to use for certain things.

This has become especially evident over the past weeks as developers have begun releasing updates to their apps that take advantage of Apple’s CoreData syncing, making preferences, game progress, documents and other items transfer seamlessly to all iOS devices.

iTunes Match has only enhanced this cozy feeling of your data being taken care of for you. Sure, there are rough patches still, both in iTunes Match and iCloud at large, but by and large it just works.

Once users come to expect their music and application states to be seamlessly available across all of their devices, it will become unfathomable that any device won’t work this way. As this becomes a way of life when working with our devices, the concept of locking will become ever more valuable.

Every new smartphone user is essentially making a choice with the purchase of their first device that will chart the path of their operating system brand loyalty over years to come. And the cloud integrated services are just in their infancy.

Google vs. Apple will be decided in the cloud
Apple’s heavy investment in iCloud is its statement that the battle for customers will be won or lost in the cloud. Google, although effectively popularizing many cloud services for the first time, is playing a bit of catchup here.

It has yet to brand its cloud services under one name, although it is making attempts to do so with Google+. Pretty soon I feel we will see Google+ Docs, Google+ Music, Google+ Everything. The social layer is one more piece of lockin that Google is anxious to leverage, rather than succumbing to an external layer like Facebook.

That isn’t to say that it is completely ‘advantage Apple’ at the moment though. Google excels at single sign-on services and the Google ID has proven to be an excellent way to insta-personalize Android devices. If you ditch an old Android phone and grab a new one, you can be up and running in minutes, provided that you are invested in Google’s cloud of course.

Apple’s ‘PC-free’ improvements to the iPhone and iPad with iOS 5 are its answer to a seamless transition from one device to another, using the cloud. Beginning with iOS 5, it became possible to drop an iPhone in a river, walk into an Apple Store and be up and running with your essential information in minutes and a fully restored device within an hour.

These conveniences are all due to the cloud, and are completely incompatible with the opposing system. Switching customers are effectively starting over from scratch unless they put forth the effort to collate, download and re-upload their data from their current cloud.

This is something that we will see people less and less willing to do as the cloud experience gets better and more seamless. The increasing ‘stickyness’ will benefit whichever system got its hooks in first.

Different games
Google knows that the only way that Android is going to survive is by a superiority of numbers. By doing that, it is playing a completely different game than Apple, which is after profitability first, rather than market share.

This is the fact that is overlooked by most of the people writing “Android is Winning” or “Apple is Winning” piece[…]

Today saw the Silicon Valley Comes To Tech City event take place in London. As part of a wider initiative called Silicon Valley Comes To The UK, organized by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and angel investor Sherry Coutu, it was designed to give existing and future entrepreneurs advice to help them build Britain’s next generation of tech businesses.

Among the discussions and interviews in the program was the session on product design, featuring IDEO‘s Tom Hulme, Adam Nash and DJ Patil of VC firm Greylock Partners, and Last.fm‘s Matthew Hawn. The panel had some fascinating insights into the importance of design to a product’s success.

The bar has risen – users expect great design
Adam Nash talked about how there’s been a resurgence in appreciation of design in consumer products. This is a challenge for designers because the bar has risen fast on the quality of design that is expected.

While the general public may not understand how to create a great design, they’re developing a taste for what works. As Matthew Hawn added, delighting people with design can be crucial to a product’s success.

Data and emotion is key to understanding your users
So, how do you make sure that you delight your users? Nash discussed how analysing data was vital – peruse all the data you can in order to understand how your product is being used. DJ Patil and Tom Hulme sang the praises of  ’Narrative Design’. This process involves imagining the story of how a user discovers a product and learns to use it. Mapping out a user’s journey through the product, and discussing his or her emotions as they use it is another technique, used often in the US but not so much in the UK, which can also help identify the best design decisions.

Hawn discussed how Last.fm, traditionally engineering led, is becoming more design focused, and sending engineers and designers out to meet end users to really understand first-hand how they use the service, what they need and how that can be best achieved. While it may be tempting to send product managers or others at the company out to research users, today’s panel was agreed that those actually developing the product need to do it if they are to have a true sense of who they’re building for.

…but don’t hand over your vision to your users
However, you shouldn’t necessarily let information from users override your own vision. As DJ Patil put it, “Don’t let the GPS drive you into a lake.”

A former LinkedIn executive, Nash explained that in the early days of the social network for professionals, some early users wanted to take it in directions that would ultimately have been bad for it.

For example, building in a feature for creating mailing lists of users may have been handy for some, but it would have resulted in the service being full of sales people with no-one to sell to – who wants to use a service that helps others send you unsolicited messages?

Staying true to the core vision of a social network for professionals helped the team filter through conflicting feedback from some of LinkedIn’s keenest early users.

Designer co-founders
Tom Hulme pointed out the lack of startups founded by designers in the UK. He cited Airbnb, Posterous, Tumblr and Flickr as just some of the US startups co-founded by designers – the feeling amongst the panel was that having a designer at the heart of the company was incredibly beneficial to ensuring that a design-focused ethos was engrained in the startup’s DNA.

I just added Studly to Launchpad.net.

Studly is a simple flashcard trainer using the Leitner “spaced repetition” model.

It supports unlimited card groups, fullscreen study mode, studying your cards forwards or backwards, study statistics, and CSV import and export of cards.

The README has package dependency info for Ubuntu. Please leave comments if you can provide install instructions for other distros.

I set up the project for translations, so if you’d like to help out check out:

http://translations.launchpad.net/studly/trunk

The Brazilian startup EverWrite is the winner of RBS Prize for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, with Ledface and Igluu taking the second and third places, the competition’s curator Bob Wollheim just announced.

As you may remember, 12 Brazilian early-stage startups had been shortlisted to pitch their projects to PREI’s jury today and compete for a trip to Silicon Valley (see our previous story).

The winning startup, EverWrite, will no doubt make good use of this free stay in Silicon Valley. As we reported a couple months ago, the company, which provides publishers with a tool to adapt their content to users’ demand, was born in Belo Horizonte, but is currently in the process of moving to the US. Besides the trip, EverWrite will also receive R$50,000 (US$28,800), as well as mentoring sessions.

As for the Campinas-based Ledface, a promising crowdsourced Q&A platform which we have reviewed here, its second place means that it won R$25,000 (US$18,100) and mentoring sessions in partnership with Endeavor.

Besides its R$10,000 (US$5,750) prize, Igluu also won mentoring sessions, a concept it’s no stranger to. The company, whose tagline is “Making Meals Simple”, is currently participating in 21212′s acceleration program, which involves tons of mentoring (see our story about 21212).

Opening doors
Winning these awards could be particularly meaningful for these companies, starting from the exposure every finalist got by pitching their projects today.

Although startup competitions have mushroomed in Brazil over the last month, RBS Prize for Entrepreneurship and Innovation (PREI) doesn’t have to worry. Backed by the powerful Brazilian media group RBS, the competition boasted a prestigious line-up.

Besides the usual suspects from Brazil, such as Yuri Gitahy from Aceleradora and Eric Acher from the VC firm Monashees, today’s speakers also included big names from the US, such as Dave McClure, whose accelerator 500 Startups is already working with two Brazilian startups, Rota dos Concursos and ContaAzul.

The schedule also featured a conference by Ron Berman on the Startup Genome (see our previous story). As you may know, the ambition of the Startup Genome is to identify the patterns of successful Internet startups. Do EverWrite, Ledface and Igluu have what it takes? If PREI’s jury is to be believed, the answer is yes.

Are you familiar with the winners? Let us know in the comments.

We wrote about stealthy startup Personal earlier this year when the company announced $7.6 million in funding from Steve Case’s Revolution LLC, Allen&Company, and others. This week, Personal finally launched its service, which aims to give consumers control over their digital data, to the public.

Personal is a free web and mobile service that helps you take control of all the digital information about yourself and your life, decide who gets access to it, and use it for your benefit. This information ranges from your passwords, your kids allergies, emergency contacts, credit card info, and more. Basically, any information you may not want to store in email but want to be able to share with your loved ones or friends.

With Personal you can store various information in ‘data vaults’ where you can selectively share certain vaults with people. Of course, all accounts on Personal include a legal guarantee that you own your data in the system.

For example, one way to use Personal is via its Form Killer app. You simply enter personal data once (that you would typically enter into forms such as address, social security numbers, birth data and more and then you can gill out forms with a single click using the startup’s Form Killer app

At the very heart of Personal, are what the startup calls ‘gems.’ Gems are nuggets of reusable information that represent the details of your life – your family, pets, car, home, office, food and travel preferences, and more.  You can decide which gems to add to your vault and which to share with others using our grant and request features. And you can download existing data from LinkedIn and Facebook. Personal also has a Gem Gallery, which is where you browse for the gems you need to use.

Your Personal data vault is a secure and convenient place for your gems. All sensitive data that you put in gems must be locked and unlocked with an owner-chosen password that Personal does not store and therefore, cannot access. Personal uses a 256-bit SSL encryption and HTTPS to ensure that there is no eavesdropping whenever data is transferred back-and-forth from your computer to Personal.

Personal is available on the mobile web and will be launching native Android and iPhone apps will be released soon.

There are number of services similar to Personal (such as Singly) but one thing the service has in its favor is its relatively clean and easy to use UI. It makes understanding which data is being shared very easy. Considering some of the hesitations we have sharing certain types of confidential information over email, or even Facebook; there is a need for a private (and highly secure) data organization service.

For background, Personal was founded by the same management team that built business mapping application The Map Network (which was acquired by NAVTEQ in 2006).

Box, the online file storage and sharing company, on Thursday debuted the Box Innovation Network, also branded as “/bin,” a platform to make it easy for third party developers to create enterprise-focused apps utilizing Box’s APIs. The company also announced a $2 million fund aimed at supporting developers building the most promising apps on /bin.

Box has assembled a number of partners for /bin’s launch, including Heroku, Rackspace and Cloud Foundry, whose services can help host the apps that are built using Box’s framework. Twilio, SnapLogic and Appcelerator are also /bin launch partners, and their services can be used to help developers build apps more efficiently.

Order of magnitude app growth
Box isn’t new to working with third-party app developers: The company currently has an app store with around 150 applications on it today, Box CEO Aaron Levie told me in a recent interview. But /bin is aimed at making it easy for many more apps to be built using the company’s technology framework. “We wanted to make an order of magnitude change in the amount of Box-oriented apps out there,” Levie said. (Levie will be speaking at our Net:Work event on Dec. 8.)

/bin was born largely out of necessity. Many Box customers have requested specific features, such as the ability for a doctor to use an iPad to access a patient’s CAT scan image document hosted on Box. “We get requests every day for features that we don’t offer in some really specific but useful areas,” Box VP of platform Chris Yeh said in an interview. “These kinds of things we’re never going to be able to build out ourselves, and /bin makes it easier for other people to create those things.”

Adding cash to the equation
To that end, Box says it will spend up to $2 million within the next year to invest in applications built on /bin. The money will go toward equity investments in apps, intellectual property acquisitions, and co-development projects.

Overall it’s a very promising program, but certain details are still fuzzy. For example, no financial details of the /bin platform have been solidified yet, meaning that there are no established rules for whether Box will take a cut of any revenue generated by an app built on the platform, or how much that cut will be. Yeh tells me the company will probably establish that on a case-by-case basis going forward, as /bin matures. It seems to me that those details should be firmed up soon to make developers confident about making serious apps on the platform. But in general, it will be interesting to see what kinds of apps are built with /bin in the weeks and months ahead.

Here’s a video explaining how /bin works:

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What Enterprise Software Vendors Could Learn from the Consumer SpaceMillennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforceA field guide to cloud computing: current trends, future opportunities

It always annoys me when I want to make an appointment, whether it be for a haircut or a doctor’s visit, and I go online to make said appointment only to find that the company or provider doesn’t offer eBookings. You would think that, if airlines have managed to do it, most businesses might have followed suit by now. Online scheduling software enables customers to book appointments from their browser, reducing friction for them, and streamlining workflow for SMBs. And, hey, even Siri can schedule appointments.

Of course, for SMBs, adding a scheduling option to their website can be a pain in the ass. Or, at least the prospect of building a calendar app/module can feel like a pain in the ass. Which is why there are companies like Genbook, which offer local merchants the ability to automate their appointment scheduling through cloud-based software that can integrate with SMBs’ existing software — or allow them to introduce that capability.

Genbook’s solution adds a “BookNow” button to merchants’ websites and Facebook Pages, so that customers can scroll through available times, schedule and confirm their appointments with a few clicks. The online appointment and CRM platform is accessible from any computer, iPad or iPhone or Android smartphone, and for merchants, Genbook automatically collects and publishes customer reviews to help promote local merchants within their communities. And they’re genuine reviews, not just canned comments.

While Genbook has competitors like Schedulicity, Appointy, and BookFresh, each of which offers a similar service with varying limitations on how much functionality you’ll get for free (Genbook is free for 30 days, and then it’s $20 a month after that), the startup seems to be having some success. (Even though a lot of startups have opted for freemium plans to monetize, and I’d like to see Genbook do the same.)

Today, Genbook is announcing that it has scheduled over 10 million appointments for SMBs in the U.S., and has scheduled more appointments in 2011 than in any of the four years it’s been around. Just in October, local businesses scheduled 500,000 appointments.

The cloud scheduling platform has attracted 5,000 customers, which it says consists of businesses like massage therapists, spas, photographers, chiropractors, etc. — obviously any small company that requires appointments to do business.

And for those SMBs, as one can imagine, this can have a positive effect on their bottom lines, as scheduling software that lets customers book in realtime, at any time of day, can prevent no-shows and reduce friction. What’s more, plugging that capability into a social network via Facebook Pages, for example, extends the reach and can presumably provide a boost to customer acquisition.

And at less than $250 a year for solo operators and less than $500/year for SMBs, it’s not a bad deal. For more on Genbook, check out the video below:

There’s been a bit of a debate going on of late among venture capitalists and investors over whether or not web startups are currently experiencing a cash crunch when it comes to early-stage and series A financing. (You can read Alexia’s recent breakdown here.) As per usual, the answer depends on whom you ask. This recent debate contrasts with the data seen in Column Five Media’s infographic from June, which showed venture funding and investment levels picking back up in the first half of 2011, poised to storm back to pre-2008-collapse levels.

Of course, the data showed that not all tech sectors were experiencing the boom times: Health and medical-related investment, for example, was on the low end, receiving only 3 percent of venture funding over the last year. Yet, there may be some evidence that investment in the digital health space may in fact be heating up. Looking at this data compiled by new healthtech startup incubator Rock Health, we see a list of 41 healthtech startups have been funded in 2011. CrunchBase’s data, which uses slightly more generous paramaters for defining “health tech”, puts that number over 120 or so.

Of those startups that were founded this year, Aza Raskin’s Massive Health raised $2.25 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, and more. (Well, Massive Health was actually founded in December 2010, but close enough.) And Azumio, which was founded this year, raised $2.5 million in seed funding from Founders Fund and Accel in July.

What’s more, we just covered 100Plus’ $500K seed raise from Founders Fund earlier this week. The personalized health prediction startup was not mentioned in Rock Health’s list, I assume because it is still in private beta.

But the point is, as we’ve seen in Dave Chase’s series of guest posts, the healthcare industry is ripe for disruption. Sure, the industry has a long way to go, but we’re seeing some great progress from startups like Practice Fusion, for example, which is busy becoming the largest provider of electronic medical records in the industry.

There’s also plenty of room for help in the way of incubators. On Friday, Rock Health, the startup accelerator for health-focused startups, hosted its Demo Day at UCSF Mission Bay, where the 13 startups in its latest class introduced their businesses to 250 attendees, among them investors from Accel, NEA, Khosla Ventures, True Ventures, Benchmark, Kapor Capital, SV Angel, The Social+Capital Partnership, Founders Fund and more.

For those unfamiliar, Rock Health provides seed funding ($20K grants, without taking equity), office space, and mentorship to entrepreneurs that want to break into healthcare. We covered their debut here.

The thirteen startups that demo-ed range from BitGym, which makes motion-sensitive iOS video games for working out; to IDEO-spinoff Omada, an online support group to reverse diabetes; to CellScope, a smartphone plugin designed to remotely diagnose ear infections.

It was also great to see that these teams included entrepreneurs that have previously worked in other areas of tech and media and are now bringing their talents to health: For example, Gabe Vanrenen, the former Founder and CTO of Flurry, Jackson Wilkinson, the former head of UX for Posterous and LinkedIn, to Jeff Lieberman, the host of Discovery Channel’s Time Warp.

Again, we covered the initial eight Rock Health startups that were ready to introduce their wares back in June, and you can read about them here. However, five of the startups were not yet ready for the limelight, so we’re providing brief introductions to those below:

Bigevidence provides clinicians focused access to the universe of medical evidence at the point of care and within electronic health records, improving quality of care, while reducing costs and risks.

BitGym thinks you should be using video games to exercise. Their patent pending technology uses an iPad to turn any cardiovascular machine into an interactive
gaming experience.

Cake Health is the best free way to manage your healthcare expenses online. The startup was a finalist at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco in September. You can read our initial profile here.

Crohnology is a social health network for people with chronic medical conditions to share and learn what treatments work, meet others near them, and track and share their health.

Heartbeat is a salesforce.com-like enterprise solution for wellness professionals that aims to empower people to be successful doing what they love.

Applications for Rock Health’s next class beginning in January 2012 are open until Wednesday, November 16th.

Purchasing books has been transformed a lot recently with the arrival of the iPad and Amazon Kindle devices. Browsing through books for purchase has never been simpler.

Unfortunately, browsing for books to buy on the web isn’t quite an elegant experience. Even Amazon‘s own site has felt stale for sometime without major upgrades or special treatment. Having to search for books the same way you would search for clothing or other items to buy on Amazon.com feels almost like it’s from 2001.

Even though books are going digital, people are still buying physical copies. I passed up on buying the digital version of the Steve Jobs book, as I wanted the physical version to hold in my hands.

Bookflavor pulls in books from Amazon’s site and displays them in an extremely attractive and simplistic way, and also shows way more book reviews than even Amazon.

It’s all in the presentation
When you go to Bookflavor, you’re shown the top sellers on Amazon by default. You can also switch between that and the New York Times Best Sellers list.

The books are shown in a large thumbnail on a white background, and aren’t numbered. It’s a simplistic presentation that is reminiscent of how books a shown on the iPad and Kindle Fire. Clicking on the book will take you to its own page, with information pulled from Amazon and GoodReads. The information is shown on a similar white background in large font. The site itself even looks great on the iPad.

As you scroll down the book’s page, you’ll find reviews from both Amazon and GoodReads. This is something that Amazon should take notice of. Getting book reviews from all different services on the web is important. Having as much information and perspective on a book before buying it is nice to have. While Bookflavor only pulls in the two, I imagine that it would be simple for the developer to pull in even more services. That’s the only downside of the site.

If you’re still buying physical books from Amazon, you might want to skip the Amazon site until its time to checkout. Bookflavor has a link on its book pages directly to the Amazon page for purchasing, but your decision may already be made thanks to a recommendation from someone who never wrote it in to Amazon’s site.

➤ Bookflavor

TL;DR
Modern application development platforms are addressing the related issues of globally-coordinated task dispatch and nonblocking IO.

Here’s my definition of the problem, an argument for why it matters, and some suggestions for specific standard library features to add to Scala in particular.

The same ideas apply to any application development platform, though. It’s rapidly becoming mandatory for a competitive platform to offer an answer here.

Definitions
Let’s define a blocking task to be anything that ties up a thread or process but does not use CPU cycles. The most common ways to block are on IO channels and locks.

A busy loop is not a blocking operation in this sense; it takes up a thread, but it’s using the CPU, not “wasting” the thread.

By “task” I mean any piece of executable code. A task is blocking if it spends part of its time waiting, or nonblocking if it needs the CPU the whole time.

Dispatch just means scheduling the task on a thread and executing it.

Dispatch for nonblocking tasks, in an ideal world
For nonblocking tasks (which are CPU-bound), the goal is to use 100% of all CPU cores. There are two ways to lose:

Fail to use all the cores (not enough threads or processes).
Too many threads for the number of cores (inefficient and wastes memory).

The ideal solution is a fixed thread or process pool with a number of threads related to the number of cores. This fixed pool must be global to the app and used for all nonblocking tasks. If you have five libraries in your app and they each create a thread per CPU core, you’re losing, even though each library’s approach makes sense in isolation.

When the fixed number of threads are all in use, tasks should be queued up for later dispatch.

Dispatch for blocking tasks, in an ideal world
Blocking tasks pose some competing concerns; the trouble with blocking tasks is that these concerns are hard to balance.

Memory: each blocking task ties up a thread, which adds overhead (the thread) to the task. A super-tiny http parser gets you nowhere if you accompany each one with a thread.
Deadlocks: blocking tasks are often waiting for another blocking task. Limiting the number of threads can easily create deadlocks.
Tasks outstanding: with IO, it is desirable to send lots of requests at once or have lots of sockets open at once. (With CPU-bound tasks, the opposite is true.)

The ideal solution (if you must block) is an “as huge as memory allows” thread/process pool.

If you run blocking tasks on a bounded pool, you could have deadlocks, and you would not maximize tasks outstanding. Still, as memory pressure arrives, it would be better to start making some tasks wait than it would be to exhaust memory. Apps inevitably become pathological when memory is exhausted (either you have swap and performance goes to hell, or you don’t have swap and an out-of-memory exception breaks the app). But as long as memory is available, it’s better to add threads to the pool than it is to queue tasks.

An automatic solution to this problem might require special help from the JVM and/or the OS. You’d want to have an idea about whether it’s reasonable to create another thread, in light of each thread’s memory usage, the amount of memory free, and whether you can GC to recover memory.

In practice, you have to do some amount of manual tuning and configuration to get a thread pool setup that works in practice for a particular deployment. Maybe setting a large, but fixed, thread pool size that happens to keep your app using about the right amount of memory.

Different tasks, different pools
It’s broken to dispatch nonblocking tasks to an unbounded (or large) pool, and broken to dispatch blocking tasks to a small bounded pool. I can’t think of a nice way to handle both kinds of task with the same pool.

Possible conclusion: a dispatch API should permit the application to treat the two differently.

Physical resource coordination requires global state
We’ve all been taught to avoid global variables, global state, and singletons. They cause a lot of trouble, for sure.

Assuming your app runs on a single machine, you have N CPUs on your computer — period. You can’t create a new “CPUs context” with your own CPUs every time you need more CPUs. You have N megabytes of RAM — period. You can’t create a new “RAM context” with its own RAM.

These resources are shared among all threads and processes. Thus you need global, coordinated task dispatch.

Nonblocking IO creates another global resource
With nonblocking IO APIs, such as poll(), you can have multiple IO operations outstanding, using only one thread or process.

However, to use poll() or equivalent you have a new problem: every IO operation (on the same thread) must be coordinated so that the file descriptors end up in a single call to poll(). The system for coordinating this is called an “event loop” or “main loop.”

In an API such as libev or GMainLoop, applications can say “I need to wake up in 3 seconds” or “I need to know about activity on this socket handle,” and the library aggregates all such requests into a single invocation of poll(). The single poll() puts the thread to sleep until one of the requests is ready.

Nonblocking IO requires a globally-coordinated “managed poll()” — also known as an event loop. Otherwise you’re back to needing threads.

How Java sucks at this
In brief:

No global task dispatcher to coordinate CPU and memory usage.
The APIs are mostly blocking.
The nonblocking APIs in nio have limited utility because there’s no global event loop.

1. No global dispatcher
Java has all sorts of nice executors allowing you to dispatch tasks in many different ways.

But for average apps doing average things, we need two global singleton executors, not a zillion ways to create our own.

An average app needs the executor for nonblocking CPU-bound tasks, so that executor can coordinate CPU-limited tasks. And it needs the executor for blocking tasks, so that executor can coordinate memory-limited tasks.

In the JVM ecosystem, you start using a library for X and a library for Y, and each one starts up some tasks. Because there’s no global executor, each one creates its own. All those per-library executors are probably great by themselves, but running them together sucks. You may never create a thread by hand, but when you run your app there are 100 threads from a dozen different libraries.

2. Blocking APIs
With the standard Java APIs, many things are hard or impossible to do without tying up a thread waiting on IO or waiting on a lock. If you want to open a URL, there’s URL.openStream() right there in the standard library, but if you want to open a URL without blocking you’ll end up with a far more involved external dependency (such as AsyncHttpClient).

Just to kick you while you’re down, many of the external dependencies you might use for nonblocking IO will create at least one dedicated thread, if not a whole thread pool. You’ll need to figure out how to configure it.

3. No event loop
Low-level nonblocking APIs in the spirit of poll() are not enough. Even if every library or code module uses poll() to multiplex IO channels, each library or code module needs its own thread in which to invoke poll().

In Java, a facility as simple as Timer has to spawn its own threads. On platforms with an event loop, such as node.js, or browsers, or many UI toolkits, you tell the platform how long to wait, and it ensures that a single, central poll() has the right timeout to wake up and notify you. Timer needs a thread (or two) because there’s no centralized event loop.

The impact in practice
If you just use Java and Scala APIs naively in the most convenient way, you end up with a whole lot of threads. Then you have to start tracking down thread pools inside of all your libraries, sharing them when possible, and tuning their settings to match the size of your hardware and your actual production load. Or just buy a single piece of hardware more powerful than you’ll ever need and allow the code to be inefficient (not a rare strategy).

I recently wrote a demo app called Web Words, and even though it’s not complex, it shows off this problem well. Separately, the libraries it uses (such as Akka, AsyncHttpClient, Scala parallel collections, RabbitMQ) are well-behaved. Together, there are too many threads, resulting in far more memory usage than should be required, and inefficient parallelization of the CPU-bound work.

This is a whole category of developer tedium that should not exist. It’s an accident of broken, legacy platform design.

The node.js solution
node.js has a simple solution: don’t have any APIs that block. Implement all nonblocking APIs on top of a singleton, standard event loop. Run one process per CPU. Done.

Dispatch of blocking tasks is inherently hard, so node.js makes it impossible to implement a blocking task and avoids the problem.

This would fail without the global singleton event loop. If node.js provided poll() instead of an event loop, poll() would be a blocking API, and any task using it would take over the node.js process.

People often say that “no threads” is the secret to node.js; my take is that first the global singleton event loop enables all APIs to be nonblocking; second the lack of blocking APIs removes the need for threads. The global singleton event loop is the “root cause” which unlocks the big picture.

(The snarky among you may be thinking, “if you like node.js so much, why don’t you marry it?”; node.js is great, but I love a lot of things about Scala too. Type safety goes without saying, and I’ll also take actors over callbacks, and lots more. Comparing one aspect of the two platforms here.)

Event loop as a third-party library: not a solution
You can get event loop libraries for lots of languages. This is in no way equivalent to a standard, default global singleton event[…]

Jobs. Gates. Ellison. McNealy. A generation ago, they changed the way we live, work and communicate with each other.

Those are the kinds of names that sprang to mind when I first saw the lineup for GigaOM RoadMap, and I thought about the new generation of entrepreneurs that we’re seeing spring up right before our eyes. There’s a whole new set of revolutionary applications and technologies that are being launched today, and a whole new generation of whiz kids leading that charge.

This week I was lucky enough to see people like Jack Dorsey, Brian Cheskey and Drew Houston take the stage and talk about how the world is changing, and how technology is revolutionizing the way we interact with each other. They’re not alone, of course. We could throw out other names — Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, David Karp of Tumblr, Dennis Crowley of Foursquare and Kevin Systrom of Instagram. Each is, in his own way, contributing to a fundamental shift in communication and consumption enabled by the Internet.

Lessons from Outliers
What interests me about this new crop of entrepreneurs is the enabling force behind their rise. In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell argues that it was timing more than anything else that gave rise to the personal computing revolution and the entrepreneurs that rode that wave. As Gladwell points out, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Jobs Bill Joy and Scott McNealy were all born within a few years of each other, and all hit adulthood around the same time that the first do-it-yourself computer kit hit the market.

What fundamentally changed personal computing was the introduction of the graphical user interface, which stripped away the need for a command line interface. When all you had to do was point and click, users no longer needed to understand how a computer worked to use one — and that opened up a whole new set of productivity tools and applications.

More than thirty years have passed since then, and we haven’t seen a comparable crop of world-changing thought leaders pop up, all at the same time. Sure, we have Larry and Sergey, but the rise of Google seems a truly extraordinary exception to the more general dot-com crash. There’s Jeff Bezos and Amazon, which also rose to prominence in the same environment. More importantly, however, what those companies focused on is automation, on solving problems and creating efficiencies through data and algorithms. In a way, they were focused on taking humans out of the equation.

People are the connection
This crop of entrepreneurs is fundamentally different. Their mission is not to create tools that increase productivity, but that seamlessly connect people with one another. They’re not building hardware or software or networking technologies; for the most part, that heavy lifting has already been taken care of for them.

The personal computing revolution took hold because the software that runs computers finally became user-friendly. The value that the visionaries of the 80s provided was in taking all of the hardware and software that was already available and simplifying the user interface.

Today’s entrepreneurs are faced with a similar challenge: the Internet already enabled communication through a number of tools like email, voice and video chat. Just as Jobs and Gates provided the abstraction layer on the PC which simplified the user interface, Zuckerberg, Dorsey and others are simplifying the way users interact and enable new applications on top of the network. In a world where everyone is persistently connected through PCs, mobile phones and other devices, the goal is to make sharing between people easy and seamless.

At the core, what they are building are user experiences and removing the barriers that exist in bringing people closer together. That’s why companies like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Instagram — all of which help users connect, share and communicate — are so important. And that’s why, 30 years after the dawn of personal computing, there’s a whole new group of whiz kids that are once again changing the way we think, learn, live and work.

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Connected world: the consumer technology revolutionNewNet Q3: Facebook remakes headlines in social mediaA 2011 NewNet Forecast

Coding puzzles have been part of the Silicon Valley hiring process and lore since the days when Fizzbuzz was just a gleam in some HR recruiter’s eye.

Blue chip companies like Microsoft, Google and Amazon all use questions like, “Write a function that takes a string consisting of numeral characters and returns all possible alpha character strings of same length as input that correspond to the keypad of a typical telephone,” in order to separate the skilled coders from the chaff.  Come to think of it, that function would really come in handy if you want to create customized phone numbers like 247-PIZZA really quickly (but I digress …).

Photo-sharing startup Instagram isn’t yet raising new funding, but it is adding to its staff of six, setting up this “shredded” photo puzzle as an engineering challenge. The objective? Write an algorithm that would “un-shred” the photo — i.e. producing a whole image when given the sliced image as input.

“If you think about it, there’s a pretty simple approach that would allow you to find matches in a different domain,” Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom writes in a blog post announcing the challenge, “That is, imagine you’re sitting there trying to find a match between two pieces. What are you looking for to decide whether they’re a fit or not?”

Ooh! Ooh! I know.

While the idea of an image-based puzzle is novel, some of the folks at HackerNews were concerned that this particular puzzle was too easy (of course they were), to which the solution of course is “make it harder.” Systrom has provided a couple of ways to do this on the blog, and I feel like someone whose coding skills were better than mine could really get creative with this.

Apparently at some startups it’s not even that important if the candidate correctly solves the puzzle, just that they were the type of person who would attempt it. At those startups I’d be a shoo-in!

When asked why he followed in the footsteps of Facebook and his former employer Google in using a puzzle as part of company’s hiring process,” Systrom explained, “It’s less of a hiring process and more of a marketing tool. I think it starts a discussion that may lead somewhere – but not necessarily with hiring. We just like meeting really smart folks — [and] want to attract people who have the same intellectual curiosity as the rest of our team. We love the challenges we face every day with imaging and building scalable technology, and this challenge is simply a way for us to speak to the people who feel the same way.”

Anyone who completes the challenge correctly will get an Instagram T-shirt and everyone who tries will get a response from the team. When asked how many people they were planning on hiring, Systrom told me, “Anyone that’s great we’ll take,” saying that he had no specific numbers in mind.

Before Steve Jobs had even passed away, people had already started playing the “who is the next Steve Jobs” game — trying to come up with names of technology and design visionaries who might be able to don the mantle of the Apple co-founder and CEO. Jeff Bezos of Amazon? Napster co-founder and Spotify investor Sean Parker? Those names and others have been floated by industry watchers, but listening to Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey at GigaOM’s RoadMap conference on Thursday made me think that he is at least as strong a contender for that mantle (if such a thing even exists) as any of them. Could Dorsey change the way we interact with technology and the world around us in as profound a way as Jobs?

Why do we even need an heir to Steve Jobs? The obvious answer is that we don’t. Jobs was unique, in both positive and negative ways, and the precise combination of those features made him who he was — and thus made Apple what it was. No one is going to be “the next Steve Jobs” because they will have a different combination of strengths and weaknesses, and they may not be as smart (or as lucky) in specific ways. But when it comes to the role that Jobs played in technology — the role of visionary designer, creator, instigator and disruptor — it’s a different story. We need those people more than ever, because visionaries inspire others, and they change the way we look at the world in fundamental ways.

Not just technology, but how it changes us as human beings
I haven’t spent a lot of time around Jack Dorsey, but based on his conversation with Om at RoadMap, he clearly spends a lot of time thinking about the big picture behind the technology that he is involved in. So it’s not just about Twitter and how it works — or what it looks like or even how to monetize it — but how it connects us to our own “humanness” as he put it, and enables us to experience things and see through the eyes of others. He described how he found this an incredibly powerful thing during the protests in Iran, and I think others have had a similar response to the events of the Arab Spring and the earthquakes in Japan and Haiti.

And when it comes to Square — the other company that Dorsey is helping shape and create — it’s not just making payments easier or more efficient that interests him, but how making that easier can help artisans and individuals more easily become fully functioning businesses, and how that could help change society.

Dorsey’s roles with two very different companies have also sparked some comparisons to Jobs, who helped revolutionize animated films with Pixar while also changing the personal electronics industry at Apple (the differences between Square and Twitter are arguably even more dramatic than Pixar and Apple, since Square is device-based and Twitter is an information network). And Dorsey was also forced out of the company he founded, much like Jobs was — after a dispute with former CEO Evan Williams, who funded the company in its early years — and then returned to become the product visionary.

The way Twitter has evolved as a service is also very different from the way things worked at Apple. The company excelled at product design during Jobs’ reign as CEO, but it was notoriously inept at anything service related: iTunes, to take just one example, is a total mess when it comes to usability and design despite years of evolution, and efforts like Ping have effectively been stillborn. One of the most powerful things about Twitter, however, is the way in which the service was transformed by its users, with additions like the @ mention and the retweet — features that were never even imagined by its creators. Steve Jobs, by contrast, wouldn’t even let people replace the battery in his products.

Steve Jobs’ replacement or not, vision is in short supply
From what I can tell, Dorsey also seems to be missing what could charitably be called the “difficult” elements of Jobs’ personality (other people have more blunt terms for it), which are detailed in Walter Isaacson’s biography: the shouting, the merciless humiliation, the ruthlessness even with friends, the crying in meetings, and so on. One of the questions that this description of Jobs raises is whether those things were a necessary part of his success, or simply character flaws. Would Apple products have been the same, or been as revolutionary, if he were a different kind of person?

So is Jack Dorsey the new Steve Jobs? Probably not (although even some early Apple employees think he could be). But he clearly has a vision about two fairly significant areas of the technology sphere — the way in which even a simple service like Twitter can change the way we interact with each other and distribute information in a digital and connected world, and the way a simple payment service like Square can potentially transform entrepreneurialism and small business. And he is thoughtful about the implications of those things in a way that many product or business-focused technology executives are not (he even has a fascination with Zen Buddhist design principles, as Steve Jobs did).

Dorsey has already altered the media landscape with Twitter, whether he knew that’s what he was doing or not, and he is also trying to alter the payment landscape with Square. Either of those would be a substantial undertaking for any technology CEO. Whether those changes turn out to be as massive and transformational as the ones Jobs unleashed remains to be seen, but one thing is for sure — we could definitely use more visionaries.

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Connected world: the consumer technology revolutionMillennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforceNewNet Q2: Google closes the quarter with a bang

Cloud computing has fundamentally altered the economics of software.

Thanks to the cloud, it is much, much cheaper for users who only need a browser to tap into the world’s largest data centers. It is cheaper for developers to write code and deploy it on virtual servers that are rented by the minute. And it is fundamentally cheaper for entrepreneurs to build and launch new services, to support business users and to scale rapidly.

Traditional SaaS companies have ridden the wave of lower costs, taking significant share from traditional software companies, but their single biggest cost continues to be sales and marketing. Innovative cloud service providers are figuring out how to take this advantage further, using lower costs to generate millions of users by giving away their service for free.

This approach is common in consumer world because advertising revenue can support the operating costs, but increasingly, business application companies are utilizing this approach by relying on a small percentage of users who pay for premium features or heavy usage.

In just over two weeks at Cloudbeat 2011, some of the leading business freemium thinkers and entrepreneurs will come together for a panel (Wednesday, November 30 at 1:30pm) to discuss how they were able to build fast growing, capital-efficient market leaders that are disrupting established competitors and making real money by giving away their crown jewels. Expect an interesting and in-depth discussion about how a business freemium company works, and how it is effecting the software landscape. Our panelists will include:

Ivan Koon is CEO of YouSendIt. A proven and passionate business executive with over 20 years of experience, Ivan has built YouSendIt into the Web’s largest business content collaboration solution. Under his leadership, YouSendIt has aggressively expanded its B2B collaboration platform and increased its registered user base from zero to over 23 million around the world.

David Sacks is Founder & CEO of the enterprise social network Yammer. He has been involved in the internet space for ten years as an entrepreneur, executive and investor. Prior to founding Yammer, David was PayPal’s Chief Operating Officer and product leader, taking the company from startup to IPO and eventual sale to eBay for $1.5 billion.

Jason Lemkin is Founder and CEO of EchoSign, acquired by Adobe. His operational experience spans the business development, sales, legal, human resource, and finance fields, and he is an acknowledged expert in the field of electronic signatures and electronic contracting.

Freemium in the business world is here to stay, and I am excited to talk with some of the pioneers of who can share their experiences and insights. Join us!

Brian Jacobs is a General Partner and Founder of Emergence Capital. He has over 20 years of venture capital experience, a deep national network and an understanding of how technology startups grow into market leaders.

CloudBeat 2011 takes place Nov 30 – Dec 1 at the Hotel Sofitel in Redwood City, CA. Unlike any other cloud events, we’ll be focusing on 12 case studies where we’ll dissect the most disruptive instances of enterprise adoption of the cloud. Speakers include: Aaron Levie, Co-Founder & CEO of Box.net; Amit Singh VP of Enterprise at Google; Adrian Cockcroft, Director of Cloud Architecture at Netflix; Byron Sebastian, Senior VP of Platforms at Salesforce; Lew Tucker, VP & CTO of Cloud Computing at Cisco, and many more. Join 500 executives for two days packed with actionable lessons and networking opportunities as we define the key processes and architectures that companies must put in place in order to survive and prosper. Register here. Spaces are limited!

Filed under: cloud, VentureBeat

I remember the first time I saw Soundcloud, the website that lets you share and listen to audio. It looked great, worked really well and felt right. But I couldn’t help staring at the scratchy, squiggly lines that represented tracks and thinking ‘is putting the waveform at the center of things really sensible?’.

This technique seemed really nerdy. And to me — as somebody who has spent his fair share of time inside audio editing programs — it just felt as if the waveform was too far from ordinary people’s experiences of sound. I thought it would just make the site look more technical than it needed to be, and could hamper Soundcloud’s chance of success.

Turns out that I was wrong.

The site is now doing really well. It’s one of Berlin’s top startups, and we listed it as one to watch in our GigaOM Euro 20. Just last month it announced that it had more than 8 million users, and recently I even heard somebody talking on BBC radio about how much they loved it. And here’s the thing: it’s success isn’t despite the waveform but — at least in part — because of it.

To me, the waveform meant “work”, but to millions of other people it means “play”.

But I think there’s something else going on here besides me just misreading it. It seems to me that Soundcloud’s approach is — consciously or not — part of a broader shift: one that takes us towards services exposing the guts of what they do in ways that would have seemed impossibly geeky just a few years ago.

Look at something like Wikipedia, which makes its DNA readable and is now an indisputable part of the cultural landscape. Or Twitter, which really thrives on exposing connections between people — making the way we are connected very clear through layers of information, or shorthand like “@” or “RT”. Or what about when you are inside iMovie and editing a piece of footage and you scrub backwards and forwards through the clip.

These services all make hay, in one way or another, by wearing their structures on the outside: they wear data exoskeletons.

This isn’t just about layers of complication. True enough, it is amazing how people who are otherwise technically illiterate seem to keep on top of Facebook Facebook’s increasingly byzantine, constantly changing systems — but that’s not what I mean.

I’m talking about a different way of looking at things, of feeling the web. Perhaps it is a move towards what James Bridle calls the new aesthetic. Bridle, who thinks mostly about publishing, uses the term to talk specifically about a new way of looking at the future — but I think it holds true for what I’m talking about too.

Here’s how he explains it:

What I mean is that we’ve got frustrated with the NASA extropianism space-future, the failure of jetpacks, and we need to see the technologies we actually have with a new wonder.

Sometimes simply being able to see something allows us to wonder at it. Sometimes, as with Twitter, it’s about making the connective tissue — in their case messages and conversations — a living part of the service. Sometimes, as with Soundcloud, it’s the idea of having a visual or physical representation of a previously invisible concept.

This isn’t always new. The truth is that we’ve often had physical representations of sound — a piece of vinyl, a tape, a CD — and it’s only in the last few years, with the move to non-physical formats that we’ve lost the conception of what music looks like. But Soundcloud’s adoption of the waveform is perhaps the purest we’ve seen. It’s not just a package: you feel like this is what music would actually look like (in a way, it is).

Is the data exoskeleton a brutal industrial statement? Is it the equivalent to architecture’s structural impressionism, like Richard Rogers’ Lloyd’s building, or the Pompidou Centre? Or is it gentle reminder that the service is based on something real, like having a room with exposed brickwork that simply shows the craft that went into production?

And should web services do more to show you that you aren’t just trading in strings of intangible data, but in thoughts, in ideas, in effort?

I wonder if we’ll see more services like this emerge, and whether it’s possible that websites that can use this idea carefully will have an advantage over others.

Shot of Twitter used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Guspim.

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NewNet Q2: Google closes the quarter with a bangConnected world: the consumer technology revolutionNewNet Q3: Facebook remakes headlines in social media

Clingle is a new location-based social network that wants to enhance conversations as you check in to places throughout the day.

The service, which officially launched across the U.S. yesterday with a new iPhone app, allows people to leave multimedia messages (text, video or audio) for a specific user or group of users when they check in to a certain location. Those messages can grow into full-length conversations. Users can also leave messages for others to discover, regardless of their location — sort of like Foursquare’s Tips feature.

But unlike Foursquare, Clingle isn’t focused on a public stream of activity. Instead, its more like Google+’s Huddle feature. Clingle co-founder Puneet Mehta told VentureBeat that the service is best compared with the experience of text messaging that’s been enhanced with GPS and the ability to send video and audio messages.

Mehta said Clingle has plans to partner with retail and restaurant chains to allow users to purchase items for friends so that those items are waiting for the friend when they check in at the location. And rather than dealing with point-of-sale integration with thousands of merchants, he said a solution can be as simple as providing a proof of receipt. For instance, if I wanted to buy a cup of coffee for a friend who will be at the cafe down the street hours from now (when I’m not around), I could take a picture of my receipt and send it to him. My friend would show the picture to the merchant to receive the pre-purchased cup.

Clingle’s revenue model is based on commission fees and advertising from its merchant partners. However, the company’s main focus for the time being is providing a good experience for its users, Mehta said.

While the service does have potential, it’s going to have plenty of competition from both Twitter and Foursquare, which are adding new features that give its users a more well-rounded experience.

Clingle was developed by MyCityWay, a New York-based startup co-founded by Mehta, Archana Patchirajan and Sonpreet Bhatia. Founded in 2009, MyCityWay has received $6 million total funding to date from BMW iVentures, FirstMark Capital, EDC and IA Ventures.

Filed under: mobile, social, VentureBeat

Inkling, the San Francisco startup that develops interactive iPad versions of college textbooks, made its first big step in courting the mainstream consumer a few weeks ago when it debuted its version of The Professional Chef, the official textbook of The Culinary Institute of America (CIA) chef school.

Turns out, it’s working out pretty well.

This week, Inkling’s Pro Chef title became the third highest-grossing iPad app on Apple’s App Store, Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis said at the GigaOM RoadMap Conference in San Francisco Thursday. That’s compared to all iPad apps worldwide. It also became the top-grossing iPad app in the App Store’s “lifestyle” category.

As we wrote in the piece about the Pro Chef launch last month, the cookbook represented a bit of an inflection point for Inkling, which had up until then produced more strictly academic titles. Inkling thought that Pro Chef would have a wider appeal, MacInnis told me in a brief interview, but its current performance has certainly surpassed its expectations. This means that there will likely be more crowd-pleasing titles with crossover appeal in the future — and that’s good news for students, as well as the rest of us.

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Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC EraConnected Consumer Q2: Digital music meets the cloud; e-book growth explodesMobile Q2: Smartphone growth surges; iPad’s rule continues

NYC-based startup Dispatch, which just graduated from the latest batch of TechStars NYC, has raised a $965,000 seed funding round.

The round was led by Thrive Capital, with participation from SV Angel, Lerer Ventures, and a number of angel investors including Jared Hecht and Steve Martocci (who founded GroupMe together), TechStars founder David Cohen, TechStars NYC Managing Director David Tisch, Kal Vepuri, Bob Pasker, Matt Turck, and Zelkova Ventures.

Also notable: Dispatch got its start at the TechCrunch Disrupt NYC hackathon earlier this year where it was the runner-up for best hack (you’ll find a backstage interview with them here). They’re in good company — GroupMe, whose founders are participating in the funding round, got its start at a Disrupt hackathon a year earlier and was recently acquired by Skype.

Dispatch is setting out to become a sort of Finder (or Windows Explorer) for the cloud. You enter your credentials for the various services you use online — Dropbox, Facebook, Gmail, Google Docs and so on — and it lets you browse through the files stored on each service from a single dashboard. You can view these files in a preview window, download them, or move them around between services by dragging and dropping files from one service’s folder into another.

Dispatch won’t be available until next month and the company isn’t keen on doing a full public walkthrough just yet, but they say we’ll be seeing more from them soon. From what has been released so far, though, it looks solid — they’re clearly paying a lot of attention to making sure the UI looks polished.

In the longer term, I’d like to see Dispatch abstract the cloud file system enough that you don’t have to remember whether you’re dealing with Dropbox or Gmail or Facebook — you should be able to just have your ‘stuff’. Dragging and dropping between each of these will certainly be handy, but I think the mass appeal will lie in making the cloud generally easier to use.

Don’t listen to the naysayers. The time to jump into healthcare IT is now, said Frank Moss, director of new media medicine at MIT’s Media Lab. Creative technologists working in mobility, social networking and nano devices should actively seek health IT opportunities, and seek them now.

Here’s why:

1: Med students are wired and ready.
Ten years ago, medical students didn’t carry laptops. “Now if you go to Harvard Medical School, it looks like a cafe in Silicon Valley or Austin. Everyone’s got an iPad,” Moss said at the GigaOM RoadMap Conference on  Thursday. As these students become doctors, there will not be the resistance to health IT that older doctors exhibited, he said.

2: There’s a big B-to-B opportunity now.
Any employer of any size knows it can’t afford employee health costs as they stand. They know they need to help employees reduce disease. “This is a huge market for startups,” Moss said.

3:  A big B-to-C opportunity is coming soon.
IT innovators see it coming and they’ll work out a business model. Moss isn’t sure if it’ll be advertising or subscription-based, but it’ll be here, he said.

Moss, who wrote an Op-Ed piece on the topic in The New York Times, acted as a cheerleader for prospective entrepreneurs who might be spooked by uncertainty around payback.

“Don’t listen to the VCs, who say there’s no business model. They’ll change their tune very soon,” he noted in his onstage discussion with GigaOM Pro analyst Jody Ranck.

For those who take the plunge, the satisfaction can be huge, he said, citing Dr. John Moore, a ophthalmologist who gave up his practice after one year despairing of the amount of time he had to spend on insurance paperwork.

Moore moved to the MIT Media lab, where he worked on a smartphone app that lets patients collaborate with their doctors on their own healthcare. “They see what the doctor sees, and can change their behavior,” he said.

One such app enables HIV patients at Boston Medical Center to visualize how HIV develops into AIDs, how the virus attacks their T cells and what happens if they do or do not take their cells.  Using that app, he saw the percentage of patients sticking to their drug regime soar from 25 percent to 95 percent, Moss said.

By democratizing medical care — giving people the ability to understand their disease — things can change, said Moss.

He cited the use of sensors and other tools to help people self-administer care. “Change is driven by the consumer or the individual. As these tools come online, they will change how chronic care, acute care, primary care and drug discovery is accomplished, he said.

Moss sees resistance on the part of healthcare pros and VCs as a good thing. “I’ve been through this before. I attacked people who believed PCs would not be a part of enterprise environments,” he said. Well, that certainly changed. “We’re at that point now where the naysayers, who say the healthcare reimbursement system will not work for this, that the incentives pay on the wrong metrics, or that Americans don’t care about healthcare — all that indicates fear that they’re wrong.”

“Now is the time for entrepreneurs to get on this issue. If you’re into technology and biology and social media and nano technology — it’s all coming together to create tremendous opportunities for people to use this data to change their health. It’s a great time for patient-centric healthcare.”

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Flash analysis: the future of YahooThe mobile backhaul market, 2011-2012: more innovation, greater competitionNewNet Q3: Facebook remakes headlines in social media

Is there a business in making mobile to-do lists more collaborative and less headache-inducing? Startup Any.do formally launches Thursday with a free Android application proffering shareable, voice-operated to-do lists, and $1 million in seed funding to find out.

The startup, founded in 2010, first released a simple to-do list application for Android called Taskos to test the mobile task management waters and determine what mobile users wanted in a lightweight to-do list app.

Taskos became an accidental hit and attracted 1.3 million users, who now create hundreds of thousands of tasks each day. The startup claims that it’s the most popular app of its kind on Android — and that’s what got investors salivating.

“We have a killer team … we’re tackling a huge market … and we came with proof,” Any.do CEO Omer Perchik told VentureBeat. “The combination of the three got us [the] funding.”

Any.do managed to get Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Genesis Partners, Blumberg Capital, Joe Lonsdale at Palantir and Aydin Senkut at Felicis Ventures to participate in its first round of funding.

Now, Any.do for Android, a free mobile app hitting the Android Market Thursday, will be the company’s key product moving forward. It comes with three particularly drool-worthy features — shareable tasks, contextual autocomplete and a simple but elegant interface — that set it apart from similarly-purposed applications, including Apple’s new Reminders application for iOS 5.

You can also interface with Any.do using your voice, drag-and-drop tasks, sync with a Google account and choose themes to personalize the experience.

A similar application for iPhone is said to be several months away from release.

“We invested in Any.do because of the strong team and their vision to take the productivity space beyond the task list,” Dror Berman, managing partner of Innovation Endeavors, said of the firm’s interest in the to-do list app maker. “Any.do’s core technology understands people’s intent, and leverages the mobile phone to not just make a list, but to actually get things done — anytime, anywhere.”

How Any.do will profit with its nifty little application is anyone’s guess. Perchik says the startup has a few business tricks up its sleeve, but he isn’t ready to reveal those plans just yet.

As for Taskos, the startup will eventually let users port over their tasks and lists to Any.do, but its ultimate fate remains uncertain.

Ten-person Any.do is based in Israel and has an office in Palo Alto.

Filed under: mobile, social, VentureBeat

Although it appears significant venture capital investment in Platform-as-a-Service startups is drawing to a close, Boulder, Colo.-based Standing Cloud was able to raise another $3 million, it announced on Thursday. The money comes from existing investors Foundry Group and Avalon Ventures, bringing Standing Cloud’s total investment to $8 million. The company likely can thank its unique spin on PaaS for keeping it in investors’ good graces.

Unlike more-popular PaaS options such as Heroku or Microsoft Windows Azure, Standing Cloud isn’t so much about automation and scalability as it is about choice. Developers choose the infrastructure cloud on which they want to deploy (you name it; Standing Cloud supports it); build their application stack (i.e., web servers, database, programming language, etc.); port their code; then launch their server. Standing Cloud also hosts a variety of open-source applications that customers can choose to launch, as well, which takes the platform into SaaS territory. It’s not as sexy as what some other PaaS providers are doing, but it’s very functional and probably very approachable for a large number of small businesses.

At this point, though, PaaS is becoming passé, at least with regard to general-purpose platforms for hosting web applications. It’s not that PaaS adoption has peaked — far from it, actually — but that the market seems to be getting saturated with regard to how many platforms it can support. Heroku, Google App Engine, Windows Azure, Amazon Elastic BeanStalk and Red Hat’s OpenShift are all backed by the deep pockets of public companies. In the startup realm, DotCloud, AppFog and CloudBees are all operating with double-digit-millions in funding and are regularly expanding their capabilities. Then there’s Standing Cloud, the similarly application-focused BitNami and veteran Engine Yard.

Assuming the world doesn’t need dozens of PaaS offerings — there are only a handful of legacy application platforms that PaaS providers are trying to displace, after all — it’s hard to imagine what investors would have to see to find a new PaaS investment worthwhile. Maybe it’s a focus on a new breed of social and mobile developers, or a business model that blends SaaS and PaaS in such a manner as to make those labels irrelevant. Thankfully for anyone trying to build those next-generation platforms, projects such as VMware’s Cloud Foundry help eliminate the need to invest in foundational PaaS capabilities so companies can just focus on differentiation.

But when it comes to broad platforms targeting applications generally, it seems investors have picked their horses and are backing them to the finish line. Hopefully, that means a wave of innovation to push the cloud platform discussion to the next level.

Image courtesy of Standing Cloud.

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Connected world: the consumer technology revolutionInfrastructure Q3: OpenStack and flash step into the spotlightNewNet Q2: Google closes the quarter with a bang

Computers — the boxes that we consult in the form of tablets, mobile phones and desktops — are wonderful, but they take away from what it is to be human and to really connect with one another. So the challenge and opportunity that lies ahead is how to get the computers out of computing, said Mark Rolston, the chief creative officer at frog. Speaking at the GigaOM RoadMap conference in San Francisco, Rolston took the audience through a vision of omnipresent computing.

“The room is the computer,” he said, as he described putting something like Apple’s Siri voice recognition system into an earpiece, and then being able to interact with a projector in a room to create a screen wherever the user needed one.

“Computing is decoupling. Most computers are composed machines, but if you can image a case where they are externalized resources in a room,” he said. “I can talk at it and wave at it, and maybe I have a keyboard or maybe there are screens or cameras around, but [the computers] compose in the moment as we need them, and they are no more ornate than we need.”

So today, if you have an iPad, that’s all you have. But if computing is decoupled from computers, then it becomes more flexible, and available to become whatever the user needs for the function they need to fulfill. However, if computing is decoupled from the computers, input becomes more challenging. Now that computers have eyes (Kinect for example) and ears (Siri), designers — such as those at frog — have to figure out how to use the human body as an input device.

Things such as figuring out what gestures are universal, or easy to perform repeatedly, as well as understanding how to tell a computer that has eyes and ears that you want to talk to it rather than the person next to you, are all things Rolston and designers are thinking about.

But as we interact with computers in a more human way, and they become smarter, Rolston wonders if we will hit a point where computers behaving in human ways — or doing things humans do — becomes creepy. Will computing hit that uncanny valley, where it becomes so human — but is still clearly not human — that it creeps us out? He cites a video of people riding in a Googlecomputerized car that drives itself, where the people are clearly freaked out, as an example of this.

Regardless, he’s thrilled to be alive and working on these problems, and says that much of the technology is available today to make this a reality. The question will be what user experiences will help drive this level of computing into our products and lives. He said that touchscreens had been around for 20 years, but it took someone with belief and vision to really make them a common reality. So from his perspective, it sounds like the future of computing is here and just needs someone, or several someones, to package it up so people will adopt it.

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Report: Monetizing Digital ContentThe future of notebooks: Following in the footsteps of the MacBook AirSiri: Say hello to the coming “invisible interface”

Nokia is totally ready for the future. They’ve already debuted a totally insane flexible kinetic interface concept, and now they’ve even drawn up an implementation for it: HumanForm. No, the phone doesn’t look like a you-themed action figure, but rather has a tear drop shape (probably my biggest gripe about the concept).

I’m not going to go into too much detail about what’s included in the video, as you can easily see for yourself. I will, however, say that this takes the cake compared to Nokia’s earlier flexi-screen concept. One thing that really jumped out at me is the idea of electro-tactile feedback. Seems pretty out there, but it would be pretty freaking sweet to take a picture of velvet or wood and feel that texture.

I’m not so sure how I feel about the shape, though. In the hand, I’m sure this concept is actually much more comfortable than our usual candy-bar phones. But (and this is a big but), how do you account for corners of anything? At this point we’re watching video and viewing pictures on our phone pretty regularly. Web pages happen to be rectangular, as is just about anything you pull up on a mobile phone.

I’m sure there are ways to circumvent this issue, but it seems like too far of a leap to make from rectangle to teardrop. It reminds me of when Dwight wanted everyone in The Office to sell the Sabre Pyramid, a triangular tablet. It seemed crazy, but in the fictional version of Scranton, PA people still seemed to be interested in “unleashing the power of the pyramid.” Maybe the same will be true for Nokia.

Then again, if this concept even comes to fruition, it won’t be for quite a while. Enjoy the video while you wait.

[via Engadget]

At a recent Music Hack Day in Boston, developers got together to play around with new technology and popular platform APIs like Spotify‘s.

Some of the apps were very basic, yet powerful, and some need a coat a paint on them before they get presented to the masses. And then there’s Spartify.

Spartify is a web app that gives control to multiple people to create a music playlist on the fly, using Spotify.

Developed by Andreas Blixt and Ricardo Vice Santos, Spotify lets you set up a “party” and turn the music choices over to everyone with the party code. The idea is genius.

Here’s how the duo explains Spartify:

Host a Party and let guests choose what songs to play on Spotify. No more huddling in front of one computer or messing up the queue! What if they’re all drunk? Don’t worry, We’ll fill it up for ya!

Set up a Spotify House Party
By simply clicking “Start a Party”, you are given a code to give out to your friends that they can enter from any computer or mobile phone on the Spartify site.

Your friends are then presented with a search box that uses Spotify’s API, and each track it finds has a +1 button next to it. By clicking the +1, you add the track to the party playlist.

All you have to do is set one computer as the host, and the Spotify desktop app will open up and play with Spartify tells it to. Your friends can even tap the +1 on songs in the playlist to promote it to the top of the list. If people start drinking too much and stop requesting tracks, Spartify will play similar tracks no matter what.

The app uses The Echonest API which is being extremely popular with hackers who are playing around with music technology and apps. It provides aggregated data with a smart layer on top of it, which lets recommendation come to life combined with apps like Spotify.

The next time you’re having a party, you might want to forget about iTunes, since you have to pay for each track. Having the huge Spotify database at your disposal during any party will make sure the beat goes on and on.

➤ Spartify

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“Forget being in love with the open web and all that touchy-feely stuff.”

Jay Sullivan is Mozilla’s vice president of products, and for a spokesperson of one of the open web’s dearest darlings, he’s on a tear.

“If you want to have a variety of mobile apps, it gets expensive… that’s a lot of apps to build,” he told VentureBeat in a recent interview.

Sullivan is making a strong case against building native apps and for the mobile web as the new platform to (literally) end all platforms.

Now, a number of developments make his words especially timely. Yahoo has just announced Yahoo Cocktails, a set of tools for developers to use that make web apps look and behave more like native apps. Mozilla is working on tools to help developers sell web-based apps to mobile device users, enabling them to make profits just as developers in the iTunes App Store or Android Market can now do.

Even Adobe is scrapping Flash for mobile phones and pinning its hopes on HTML 5 for the mobile web. “HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively,” wrote Danny Winokur, Adobe VP and General Manager of Interactive Development.

“This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms.”

It looks like mobile apps may be headed the same direction as multimedia CD-ROMs did a decade ago. Sadly for mobile apps, they don’t even have a useful second life as drink coasters.

But parties on the other side of the fence say it’s too soon to play Taps for apps. App advocates say mobile web enthusiasts are indulging in pipe dreams while the rest of the world is still working on proprietary technology stacks that do, now, what HTML5 has so far failed to deliver. Even if they admit that building for the mobile web will eventually be cheaper, faster and easier, it’s at least few years away from reality.

In the Mozilla Foundation’s new offices overlooking the San Francisco Bay Bridge, Sullivan — an unapologetic HTML5 advocate — sits in a conference room and rapidly deconstructs the assumption that to get your software onto a mobile phone you have to build a native application.

But he doesn’t resort to the familiar (and tired) ideologies about freedom from corporate technological tyranny that figure large in Mozilla’s current ad campaign. Rather, he gets downright practical.

First, he explains the obvious: Each mobile ecosystem has its own technology stack, its own operating system and programming language. That means developing apps requires a different skill set and a separate development process for each ecosystem.

At the end of the day, building a mobile web app instead of two or three or four native apps just makes more economic sense. “HTML5 is less expensive,” he says. “There’s always some stuff around the edges that won’t work perfectly, but compared to writing in seven different languages, it works.”

For developers, it’s technologically more manageable to build one mobile web app than a half-dozen or even just two native apps. And given the state of mobile web standards, we’re quickly approaching a point where end users can’t tell the difference between the two. All that’s really left is a business model for mobile web apps, Sullivan contends.

“When the web offers a more easy to access business ecosystem to developers, it will become more attractive.”

A better package

In conversations with organizations like Mozilla and Yahoo, in talks with mobile developers — basically, anyone who doesn’t have an explicit interest in promoting a single mobile operating system like Android or iOS — one trend is becoming quite apparent:

The app as you know it is dying.

It’s like the CD, an expensive package for digital information, a package that is increasingly becoming unnecessary and obsolete.

And just as with the CD, all we’re waiting for is a better delivery method to come along and kill it off.

The challenges to that shift are partly technical and partly cultural. Mobile web apps first must meet consumer demands for high quality and performance. And as previously noted, developers need to be able to market mobile web apps.

Yahoo is one company working on the first challenge. Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz is Yahoo’s platform vice president, and he is working on what he calls “a bunch of tricks to make web applications feel native.”

“We don’t want to emulate native, it has its own paradigm. What we want to do is create a new class of experiences. Something that’s the same across phones, TVs, tablets — the web is a paradigm that is cross-platform.”

But however much Mozilla or Yahoo might want to see the mobile web overtake native apps as a paradigm for ideological reasons, those who have to approach the problem practically in the here-and-now still have to deal with native issues and stacks.

“I absolutely believe that the mobile web is going to continue to grow rapidly,” says Jeff Haynie, who co-founded Appcelerator, a company specializing in getting web developers up and running on mobile OS platforms.

But, Haynie says, it’s too soon to discount the opportunity afforded by apps.

“That’s a huge opportunity for developers worldwide,” he continues, talking about mobile web apps. “But those compelling native experiences across lots of devices are where opportunity is going to be in the near-term. Consumers have come to expect a very high bar from experience, like the Flipboards and Instagrams that you just can’t acheive now with a web app.”

Referring to Mozilla et al., Haynie says, “These companies have many, many web developers — their foundation is the web. That’s what they’re yearning for, how to leverage that. That’s the promise of the web…

“The real question is, how do you let web developers build applications that span the native experience and the web?”

Web advocates, not surprisingly, have answers: New technologies and new marketplaces for making  money from web apps.

New technology for the new mobile web: JavaScript and Node

JavaScript and Node.js are two key technologies that will make the transition from native apps to web apps possible.

“JavaScript is LISP in disguise. It’s as powerful as any functional programming language can be,” says Yahoo’s Fernandez-Ruiz.

And with JavaScript-based Node.js in the equation, he says, “It’s hard to tell if this will be the next Ruby on Rails, but this could be.” (Ruby on Rails is a platform for developing web applications that has become wildly popular in the past few years, thanks to the speed with which developers can create sites and apps using it.)

JavaScript and Node are core components of Yahoo’s Cocktails, a new suite of tools to help developers make their mobile web apps look and feel indistinguishable from high-quality native apps. Fernandez-Ruiz says that in early previews, responses from mobile developers have been positive and enthusiastic; everyone wants to get their hands on it.

Getting content to run consistently across all mobile and device platforms is a daunting task, and to date, many companies are trying to tackle it by translating code from one OS’s language to another, e.g. Objective C for iPhone development to Java for Android development.

But the code that comes out on the other side of such translations is too often spaghetti, and trying to solve the compatibility problem programmatically isn’t a long-term option.

Instead, said Fernandez-Ruiz, “We decided to solve the problems of the next three years rather than the problems of today.”

Ideally, Yahoo wants to eliminate the multi-language scenarios that introduce complications for developers. That’s the goal of Cocktails. One Cocktail product, called Mojito, uses JavaScript and Node to run a single codebase both on client and server side.

“We’re not making any difference between the front end and the back end,” says Fernandez-Ruiz. “For us, it’s the exact same code.”

Manhattan, another Cocktail, is a Node.js hosted environment for Mojito. Apps can be wrapped in a native shell and shipped to the iTunes App Store or the Android Market or simply run in a browser, and Manhattan helps to speed up the user experience access across high- and low-speed networks and to run apps on platforms that don’t have full HTML5/CSS3 support.

While Node has been shown to have insane performance benefits, Fernandez-Ruiz says, “We’re not using it for event-driven, low-latency reasons, although those are there. We’re using it because it runs JavaScript on the server side.”

JavaScript is evolving, he says. “The next generation of JavaScript will make the it a compelling, high-performance programming language for the web. This is a new class of web apps that are cross-environment, continuous, fluid experiences.”

And for the end user, Fernandez-Ruiz says that jumping from one interface on a TV to another interface for the same service on a tablet or smartphone or PC is disturbing. “But with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript, you can have apps that look and feel the same.”

This is something we saw in action when we reviewed LinkedIn’s latest suite of mobile apps, which are Node-powered and web-heavy. Even the native apps for iOS and Android relied heavily on the mobile web for a lot of pages and features, and the mobile web version of the app looks and functions exactly the same as the native versions.

For Yahoo’s purposes, Fernandez-Ruiz continues, “Node.js is part of the puzzle, to execute code on the server side. But the premise is the same: It’s not native; it’s the web.”

Yahoo will also be introducing other Cocktails, including Windjammer and Screwdriver, in the near future.

But Haynie says the web-app-in-a-native-wrapper model should be regarded with some caution.

“That kind of hybrid application — we’re seeing almost no one using that rig[…]

Flowdock, a group chat application for teams and businesses, has raises $650,000 in seed funding from Gil Penchina, CrunchFund, Marten Mickos, and IDG Ventures.

Flowdock, which aims to disrupt the group chat space, is a collaboration web app for technical teams. As we wrote in our initial review of Flowdock, the startup brings activity from your project management tools (Pivotal Tracker, JIRA), version control systems (GitHub, BitBucket, Kiln), customer feedback channels (Zendesk, email lists) and many other sources to a single stream. Team can then work on the issues together, chat about problems, and react in seconds.

The virtue of using the products is that it allows development teams to track, archive and act on real-time chat, a key functionality which is missing from many collaboration or chat applications.

For example, a customer service team using Zendesk cannot resolve a development issue by themselves. They can escalate it to the development team’s Flowdock and the development team can then discuss and resolve the issue in minutes. Normally, this sort of correspondence is done over email or even Skype, and takes longer to resolve.

The product, which is available via the web and a desktop app, includes real-time group chat, the ability to upload files, notifications, and more. There’s a free 30-day trial for Flowdock, and paid plans range from $19 per month to $159 per month.

The startup has already seen a pickup in customers, and counts Pivotal Labs, TED conferences, and Appcelerator as users. Flowdock faces competition from Hipchat and others.

Web-based collaboration platforms are common enough—we know plenty of companies that use them to manage their teams—but most of them offer a defined set of features and are targeted at companies. But what if you just want to collaborate with your friends? Or if you want a simpler solution for your small business?

Newly launched startup Zwiggo thinks it has a solution for you. Zwiggo puts you through a quick signup procedure and then starts you off with a blank slate. You can then wait to be invited to a space or choose to join one from the public spaces directory. Or, if you are the industrious sort, you can create one yourself and invite your friends or colleagues.

Again, you see a blank slate. If you want a calendar in your group, you have to install an app for it. Want chat capabilities? There’s another app for that. There are apps for chatting, sharing photos, files, links, documents and books, creating and assigning to-dos, date planning and calendaring, putting up sticky notes, having discussions, mapping out locations, blogging, getting votes and making decisions.

That’s just the set it starts you off with; more will be coming in the future as they open up their APIs and developers start taking advantage of the platform. We may see integration in desktop and mobile apps as well. All of that is in the future.

Right now, it’s just a Web app, and it works pretty well. It is simultaneously confusing and simple. When you first sign up, you get a sense that you don’t quite know what to do with it. The UI encourages you to create a space, but you’re not sure what to create one for. Once you get started though, it becomes quite clear how the service is intended to be used.

We tried some of the apps out and found them to be elegant in their design. The features have been deliberately limited to make the whole service easier to wrap your head around, but they should work well for most users. We were able to have a chat about things even as we assigned to-dos to each other and voted on who was the most handsome person in the team using the various apps. Take a look at the official demo video:

One important feature of Zwiggo is the ability to make spaces public, so you can invite others to participate in them and decide on which apps you want to use. You can rally around common interests, form a book club or talk about movies. It becomes less about collaboration and more of a social network at that point, fuzzing the boundaries between the two types of services, but that seems to be the aim of Zwiggo anyway.

It is clearly a v1.0 service and has room to grow is all directions. Email updates do not work right now, even though the option is present, and the only form of notification are small badges that get overlaid on your spaces and on the apps within the spaces. The badges aren’t dynamically updated either, so they aren’t a very effective way to stay on top of what’s happening.

Once a space starts to become busy, we anticipate seeing a lot of those tiny badges all over the place, and that isn’t something we are looking forward to. We also ran into a few rendering issues in the Windows version of Google Chrome, though it seemed to work just fine on its Mac counterpart.

At this point, it all feels very unfinished—which it obviously is—and it’s difficult to pinpoint what the target of this app is. Is it for groups of friends and family, like Facebook’s Groups feature, or is it for businesses, like the Basecamp or DeskAway apps?

There is definitely a lot of promise and the Web app seems like a solid foundation to build upon. What Zwiggo already has is very polished, but it needs to gain new features fast if it is to take the place of more established players in this field. We’ll be keeping an eye trained on its future developments.

➤ Zwiggo | via ReadWriteWeb

[Header image courtesy of RAGMA IMAGES / Shutterstock.com.]

The space for mobile payments has heated up really fast over the past couple of years. One thing that we’ve started to see more of lately are applications that focus more on peer-to-peer payments versus something that you’d use to see a business. With PayPal implementing NFC, Dwolla providing software solutions to hardware problems and Venmo firmly in between all of it, the space is getting crowded quite fast.

But not so crowded, according to newcomer Clover, that there isn’t room for something new.

First off, you need to know that Clover is in a private beta, which just came into the world’s view today. The way that it’s set up, you’ll need to know someone who has access already and have them send you an invitation. Once you get invited, via and SMS to your phone number or in person via a QR code, Clover has apps available for Android and iOS.

Firing up the app, you will see a main screen that shows your current balance. Funds can be added to Clover via any credit card, but not directly from your bank or PayPal. You can choose to Pay, Request, browse your Contacts or Invite new users to Clover from this screen.

If you want to Pay, there are 2 ways to go about it. You can either pay a contact directly, or you can create a QR code that is then scanned by another Clover user to accept funds from you. This makes it easy to split a bill at a restaurant, for instance, but it also leaves the door open to long-distance transactions. In time, according to some grayed-out options in the UI, you’ll also be able to pay via SMS or email.

Requests for money work the same way. You can choose to ask in person, which creates a QR code, or you can send a request to one of your contacts. Again, SMS and email-based requests appear to be coming at a later time.

To withdraw, you can do immediate transfers to your PayPal, or a bank transfer in 2-3 days. Obviously, if you’re using PayPal, you’re going to get a fee tacked onto transactions. Bank transfers might have them as well, depending on your particular bank’s methods.

So that’s the basic rundown of Clover. But what’s interesting is how the company is going about its fees. There’s a breakdown on the site, but I’ve copy/pasted it here for you.

For personal or non-profit use, it works like this -

Accepting Clover funds via Clover is free
Accepting credit card payments via Clover is free, but limited to $100 a month
Accepting PayPal payments via Clover is free, but limited to $100 a month
Accepting bank funded payments is free, but limited to $3000 per month

If you’re using Clover for your business, the fees come into play -

Accepting credit card payments via Clover costs 3%
Accepting PayPal payments via Clover costs 3%
Accepting bank funded payments costs 1.5%
Accepting Clover funds via Clover costs 1.5%

The fee structure alone should help Clover to get a healthy footing in the market, but I also have a sneaking suspicion that the team has more up their sleeves. We do know that there’s an API in the works, which will bring payment options to more apps and websites. Beyond that, the plans are still a bit in the dark.

So why not just use PayPal? According to Clover CEO Brian Lamkin, you’re probably not using it for quick payments anyway -

“…it’s not about what you can’t do with PayPal but rather what you don’t do with PayPal.  Over the past decade, PayPal has done a great job transforming how people think about payments, but most PayPal users don’t routinely use the service to pay each other for lunch, drinks, etc. from their mobile phone.”

That fast and easy idea is what you’ll probably notice about Clover from first boot. It really is incredibly simple to use. But in that fashion, so is Dwolla, so it’s going to take more than just easy to make things work.

If Lamkin’s name sounds familiar to you, there’s good reason — He’s a valley native who was previously the Senior Vice President for Yahoo’s Consumer Products division. He’s joined by other Valley-credentialed names such as John Beatty, Kelvin Zheng and Leonard Speiser who all worked at Bix before its Yahoo acquisition. Annie Lausier and Nagesh Susaria also join Clover from Yahoo. Mark Shulze comes from Quantcast, Marcus Westin from Meebo and that’s just to name a few.

Presently Clover is sitting on a $5.5 million investment from Andreesen Horowitz, Sutter Hill Ventures and Morado Venture Partners. With cash in the bank, a hot app on the market and a team that would make any startup drool, the future should hold fields of green for this new mobile payments player.

Want in? Find someone who is, or browse this article carefully. I’ve left a way for you to join me on Clover. Since, apparently, Clover gives me $5 for every referral, I’ll be donating that to Charity Water.

Viral startup launching platform LaunchRock is announcing a get of $800K in seed funding today, from investors 500 Startups, Venture51, Quotidian Ventures, Social Leverage, Lady Gaga’s manager Troy Carter, David Tisch, Diego Berdakin, Paul Bricault, Dharmesh Shah, Ryan Holmes, Paige Craig, Scott Becker, Eric Cantor, Mike Edwards, David Famolari, Stephen Gill, James Levine, Daniel Wolfson, Philip Reicherz, Adrian Stone and Lance White (What a mouthful!).

In addition to announcing financing, LaunchRock is also, um, launching to the public, so that anyone who wants can create their own startup launch page as of today can. Coming out of private beta, the startup has introduced a design revamp which includes new launch-page themes, additional social options like Tumblr and LinkedIn and a more streamlined email invite flow.

LaunchRock founder Jameson Detweiler tells me that he plans on using the funding to bolster the marketing and analytics part of the LaunchRock launch packages, “The thing that our customers are telling us (and the thing we see them struggle with) is what to do with the [email] list after they’ve built it,” Detweiler says.

The service for the most part is still free and Detweiler is testing a variety of pricing models, leaning towards a performance-based approach, “We believe that we’re only at the beginning of data driven, social marketing. 99% of people who log into Google Analytics have no idea what they’re looking at or, more importantly, what to do with the data. We’re using the capital to build tools that aren’t just marketing, aren’t just analytics, but a combination of the two. Tools that just work. [So] don’t pay us for the tools, pay us for how well they work.”

Aside from themselves (enter your email into LaunchRock’s ubiquitous launch page to get started), LaunchRock has seen some  well known startups and celebrities use it as part of their product launch strategy, including The Olsen Twins, Jessica Simpson, TaskRabbit, Birchbox and hilariously, TechCrunch Disrupt startups Shaker and Shakr.

Sharing things using your mobile phone is nothing new, but apps like Path are putting a new spin on sharing by only allowing you to have a network of fifty people to share photos and videos with.

One app wants to take that number down to two. It is called Cupple, and was built by creative agency Darling Dash for iOS.

Cupple focuses on sharing the most private moments, those being ones between you and your significant other.

Perfect for long distance relationships
If you travel a lot, or have a long distance relationship, Cupple is a pretty handy app. While sending photos back and forth with love notes might be something you use text messaging for, the location features in Cupple allow you to let your loved one know that you’re thinking of them.



While the app only lets you share photos right now, the idea of collecting moments and locations as your relationship with someone grows is a cute idea. I’d like to see a web component at some point, because if you’re lucky enough to have your relationship turn into a marriage, it would be nice to glance back at all of the moments you’ve shared with each other.

I spoke with the Co-Founder & CEO of Darling Dash, Tim Allison, about the originating idea behind Cupple.

TNW: What was lacking with other sharing sites or services, like email, that couples needed?

Tim Allison: I think there is an uncertainty around sharing really personal content on existing social media. It doesn’t feel like the right place for it. Cupple allows the two people in a relationship to have fun sharing photos and building a feed of memories and there is no concern over how that might be viewed by their wider social network. Email and SMS certainly have their place but they have become very functional and often just blur into the daily routine. Cupple is a richer, more connected sharing experience. And of course, completely mobile.

TNW: Why is sharing for couples so important?

Tim Allison: We’re different people when we are with our partners. The intimacy that people share, albeit in-jokes, experiences, places and memories is unique in a relationship. Cupple recognises the bond and the timeline that exists between two people who share a life. Cupple works for teenagers who have just got together just as much as it does for a couple that have been married for 5 years.

TNW: Are you finding that more and more couples share things on the go?

Tim Allison: We have busy lives and we use mobile all day. Whether it’s a simple ‘thinking of you’ share or letting your partner know this restaurant is a ‘place we should go’, Cupple connects people when they are apart and adds a context to the message. I want to be able to share something I’ve seen with my girlfriend when I’m out and about, if I’m traveling with work, having dinner with friends, or I simply see a dress in a window I know she would like. Cupple let’s us share the moments when we are on the go and keeps that memory in a a private place.

TNW: What are your future plans for the app, what will you be adding?

Tim Allison: The plan is to build the best private sharing experience on the planet. We wanted to launch the service with the core features working really well. There are so many ideas we have around the user being able to modify and customize their sharing experience. Of course, shared calendars and ideas around bookmarks and content of interest is on the roadmap. We see Cupple as a platform that is truly scalable. Right now, we’re focused on delivering a great service and paying attention to what our users say about their experience. It’s really just the start of a journey.

If you’re looking for a way to share moments with your loved one while on the road, or from up the street on your way from home, Cupple could be a nice way to text less and share more.

Music fans, listen up! 8tracks (the self-proclaimed “social, curated alternative to Pandora”) is now available on Android.

For the unassociated, 8tracks is a massive collection of handcrafted playlists built, for the most part, by the music-obsessed. It’s one of those things that takes a bit of tinkering to wrap your head around… until suddenly, you find yourself 40 playlists deep with a monstrous collection of new tunes behind you. It’s the music lover’s music discovery engine.

This new Android app isn’t their first endeavor in mobile — in fact, the 8tracks iPhone app launched way back in April. With that said, this app isn’t just a quick port — it’s seemingly been rebuilt from the ground up with all of the mechanisms and design paradigms Android users would expect. In other words, it feels right at home on Android.

For those just diving into 8tracks (do it!), know that the service comes with some limitations: the same artist can only appear in any given mix twice, playback order is randomized after the first playthrough, and you can only skip a handful of tracks per day. When you’re willing to tune in and tune out, though, playlists from the likes of VICE, Pitch, Ghostly, Spin Magazine, and Resident Advisor should make you the hippest kid in Hippsville.

You can nab the free app from the Android Market right over here.

If you’ll excuse me, I have like 70,000 Adele/Jay-Z dubstep mashups to catch up on.

Click to view slideshow.


Timeline: android



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Website: 8tracks.com

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Strobe, an App Delivery Network that facilitates getting HTML5 apps up and running on various platforms and app stores, has joined Facebook, CEO Charles Jolley announced today.

Jolley is also the creator of the SproutCore JavaScript framework for web apps that is used to quickly build web apps in the browser. It’s used by companies like NPR, Second Story and Sports Illustrated, as well as being popular among Facebook app developers.

Before Jolley created SproutCore, he was responsible for Mobile Me app development at Apple.

We’re happy to announce that, as of this week, the Strobe team is joining Facebook!

Strobe was founded on the belief that HTML5 can transform the way average people use their mobile phones through apps that are available everywhere, anytime, on any device. Now we’re joining the talented people at Facebook to help develop innovative mobile experiences for their users around the world.

For now, the Strobe service will continue to be available to existing users in its existing beta form. We will provide updates by email if and when this changes. SproutCore, meanwhile, will continue as an independent project.

Strobe has been a fantastic adventure. Thank you to everyone who has supported us. We look forward to working with you again in our future roles.

Sincerely,

- The Strobe Team

Strobe is described as “an App Delivery Network that solves the problem by enabling you to combine what the Web and native apps do best, using cutting-edge tools and technologies. It’s the quickest and easiest way to get your HTML5 applications up and running, on the web and in app stores.”

As SproutCore is remaining an independent product, at least for now, it seems like Facebook is after the technology or skills offered by the Strobe team. This appears to be an effort by Facebook to bolster its web and mobile experience and syncing services between them.

Facebook has come under fire lately for the relatively poor quality of its mobile apps, while at the same time introducing a major revamp in its desktop experience.

SproutCore has become popular among app developers implementing Facebook connect, so hopefully it will continue to support it as well.

Apache Hadoop-based management service Cloudera has raised a new $40 million funding round, just ahead of its Hadoop World 2011 conference tomorrow.

Cloudera provides its own take on Hadoop’s powerful open-source data management software and couples it with IT support and management. Using Hadoop, enterprises can store and process huge amounts of unstructured data. But Hadoop can often be unwieldy and difficult to manage, so Cloudera helps make it possible to manage that data effectively.

“Any company with a data-intensive environment is probably using Hadoop in some form,” Cloudera COO Kirk Dunn told VentureBeat. “Whether those companies have sought out Hadoop training or management solutions, we’re the company people are looking to and the leaders in this space by any metric.”

The new $40 million funding round was led by Frank Artale of Ignition Partners with participation from existing investors Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, Meritech Capital Partners and In-Q-Tel.

“Cloudera is the defining company in the big data industry and the popularity of Hadoop is increasing every day,” said Artale, in a statement. “The Big Data space is moving fast — we looked at many investment opportunities and chose Cloudera due to their clear leadership. The team and its technology are the best in this business and we are excited to be part of it.”

Cloudera also announced today that it has partnered with storage and data solutions company NetApp. The two companies have created the NetApp Open Solution for Hadoop, which combines Cloudera’s wide-ranging Hadoop distribution with a NetApp-constructed RAID architecture. It’s a big deal for enterprise customers seeking to put more power behind Hadoop and customized data processing and management efforts.

“This gives NetApp’s customers the ability to process new data and existing data and that data together, which hasn’t been possible before,” Dunn said.

Cloudera is on a roll when it comes to funding, and its total raised, including today’s round, now stands at an impressive $76 million. It raised a $25 million round a year ago with funding led by Meritech Capital Partners and previous investors Accel and Greylock. Before that, it raised $6 million in June 2009 and $5 million in March 2009.

Filed under: deals, enterprise

The idea of replacing hard disk drives with flash memory has been gaining steam in the IT industry. But a research group at Stanford University is going even further: they say the goal should be to replace hard disks with DRAM.

While it's just in the prototype phase, the Stanford group is trying to make it a reality with a project called RAMCloud, which can aggregate memory from thousands of commodity servers to dramatically speed up data access. Hard disks, and perhaps flash, would still be used for backup, a crucial consideration because when DRAM loses power it also loses data. But in daily operations, all the information applications access would come directly from DRAM.






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The current toast of the web is Pinterest, the visual pinboard for collecting and sharing content online. The “pinning” phenomena is spreading from its modest beginnings to appearing in national media outlets. There are over 2.5m monthly active Pinterest users on Facebook. A co-founder of the site has over 500,000 followers on Pinterest. Ron Conway (an investor in the site) remarked that Pinterest’s user growth rate is what Facebook’s was five years ago. Earlier in 2011, it was valued through venture financing at $40m and, most recently, just a few months later, at around $200m.

What is going on here?

Pinterest is growing for a variety of reasons. It enables users to clip things they like. It emphasize pictures over text, which are more visually appealing and easier to digest. Signing up is easy. Pinterest has crafted a fun, whimsical, artistic image. In particular, it has struck a chord with female users, an attractive demographic. Pinterest has added to the lexicon of “like” or “retweeting” or “reblogging” or “upvoting” with the ability to “pin” content and then “repin” it across the site and other networks. A leading expert on marketing to moms, Kat Gordon of Maternal Instinct, remarked that using Pinterest is a “soothing” experience for her.

Despite the hockey-stick growth, doubts exist. Where’s their revenue? It’s likely they won’t make this a focus until the product and backend systems are complete, but note that they already route affiliate links to online shops and are believed to drive incredible traffic to Etsy. Why did Pinterest raise so much money? It was a very competitive round, and the team needs much more technical talent, and in this environment, they’ll need to be aggressive about finding that talent. And, what exactly is Pinterest? It’s a site about discovery and data. On the front-end, users can discover things that they like and organize things they like. On the back-end, it’s a data company, where the company can capture rich metadata around each image.

I’ve been tracking Pinterest for a while now and, to me, the single most important aspect of the site is that it has deeply tapped into an important shift in consumer and purchasing behavior. As we make a decision to search for or buy something online, we are trained to go to Google (or Amazon), search by keyword, and sort through results to eventually make a transaction. In return for that sorting, Google charges for advertising, but in order for it to work, we users have to signal our intent: “Red Nike running sneakers.” But, how did I decide to want these red running shoes in the first place? While Google makes money at the bottom of this decision funnel, the top of the funnel is where “discovery” happens. It’s much wider at the top of the funnel, and harder to pin down where the thoughts originate (pun intended).

A site like Pinterest could help bring some of that discovery online. For the red running sneakers, instead of researching them myself, I may instead elect to browse the pinboards of Pinterest users who are dedicated runners. I could find sneakers on a friend’s board and may have reasonable confidence that this pair could suit me, too. In this manner, I may elect to buy the shoes right after seeing my friend’s board on Pinterest and get to a transaction faster.

If Pinterest can (1) get its users to take pictures of things in the real world with its mobile app and post them online with data and (2) leverage image-tagging tools such as Stipple and help bypass intent-based search on just a small fraction of online transactions, it could be a huge cultural and financial success. This is the promise of Pinterest. Of course, there’s a long way to go and there will be other opportunities to create discovery engines for different types of users, whether broad or niche.

There is too much information online, too many pages filled with stock images and no context. Search engines provide significant utility, but we still have to exert energy to find what we need after results are algorithmically surfaced. The new crop of social media companies help discovery come online and threaten traditional search. With these new tools, users are able to clip and collect the bits of the web that they are most interested in and, in the process, disregard the rest as noise.

Sites like Pinterest, Twitter, Tumblr, Instapaper, Snip.it, Clipboard, and Curisma, among others, all allow their users to decide what aspects of the web (text, media, etc.) are worth saving and sharing, instead of browsing the web from Google, or even Facebook for that matter. Because many of these networks have asymmetric follow/follower models, and because users can “tune” whom they are following, users’ feeds could increase in relevance as items are retweeted or repinned. These networks allow for self-expression, and in doing so, re-sort and re-shape the web we see, and that is a very big shift away from traditional search toward social discovery.

Photo Credit: Flickr/fdecomite






Crunchbase





PINTEREST






Company:
Pinterest


Website:
pinterest.com


Launch Date:
November 7, 2011


Funding:
$37.5M



Pinterest is a social catalog service. Think of it as a virtual pinboard — a place where you can post collections of things you love, and “follow” collections created by people with great taste.






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Writing in 2002, Peter Drucker, the great management consultant, foresaw the future. “In the next 30 years,” he wrote, “power will shift to the customer – for the simple reason that the customer now has full access to information worldwide.” And the stage for Drucker’s great power shift – from the corporation to the consumer – is, of course, the radically transparent Internet, where nobody, it seems, can hide anything from anyone.

But is this power shift to the customer good for today’s digital economy?

One supporter of today’s radically transparent marketplace is Dov Seidman, the CEO of the consultancy firm LRN. As Seidman told me when he appeared on my TechcrunchTV show last weekend, this transparency will force companies to behave more ethically thereby creating both a fairer and more efficient economy.

But what Seidman and many of the other apologists for radical transparency miss is the destructive economic cost of all this openness. Today’s customer-centric Internet may be radically transparent, but it isn’t either radically fair or radically efficient. The problem is that power has shifted so dramatically from the producer to the consumer that it is becoming harder and harder to build viable, long-term companies in today’s fast moving and increasingly unforgiving digital economy.

Take, for example, Reed Hasting’s Netflix, which, in 90 nightmarish days, has been transformed from one of Silicon Valley’s most impressive paragons of innovation into a company on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Just last March, MG Siegler was rightly gushing  that Neflix was about to “shift” the entire cable television industry with its strategy of streaming originally produced content. But six months later, having increased its price by 60% for some customers earlier this summer, followed by a poorly communicated attempt to split the company into an analog and digital operation, Netflix has lost 800,000 customers and $12 billion in market value in 90 days – including a stunning $2.3 billion in one black day earlier last week.

Some people are thrilled by this hyper-democratic run on Netflix, arguing that it reflects the general will of a consumer that will no longer put up with any kind of corporate ineptitude or doublespeak. One so-called “customer service guru”, John Tschohl, even came on my TechcrunchTV show to crow that the arrogant Reed Hastings has got everything he deserved in this all-too-public humiliation.

I’m not going to defend the undefendable and make excuses for Netflix’s poorly executed strategic shifts this summer. But the problem with consumer and market reaction to corporate screw-ups in our age of radical transparency is that they lack any kind of scale. Up until this summer, Netflix ranked highly on customer service and was the poster child of innovation, offering an alternative business model to both iTunes and the cable providers. But today, with the company’s market valuation tanking and with its continued hemorrhaging of customers, Netflix’s focus is on its own survival rather than innovating an increasingly archaic industry.

In the old days, before Drucker’s great shift in power from the corporation to the consumer, a young promising company like Netflix would have had shelter from the intolerant storm of public opinion. And while I’m not arguing that we should (or could) go back to a pre-digital economy in which corporations are infinitely more powerful than consumers, we do need to discover a better balance between the almost instant destruction of today’s digital marketplace and a consumer culture which is more forgiving of corporate screw-ups.

So here’s the solution. My message to all those dissatisfied Netflix customers who care about the future of the culture business:  stop whining, show some generosity of spirit and foresight, and forgive Reed Hastings for his mistake. Uncancel your Netflix subscription and pay that extra couple of bucks a month for a service that is still unrivalled in its efficiency and still offers the most effective vehicle for building a 21st century customer-friendly subscription model. That way, Netflix can continue to innovate – which, in the long run, will be of incomparable value to consumers everywhere who want to enjoy high quality video entertainment on their digital devices.






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NETFLIX
REED HASTINGS






Company:
Netflix


Website:
netflix.com


Launch Date:
November 7, 1997


IPO:

NASDAQ:NFLX



With more than 23.3 million members in the United States and Canada, Netflix, Inc. is the world’s leading Internet subscription service for enjoying movies and TV shows. For $7.99 a month, Netflix members in the U.S. can instantly watch unlimited movies and TV episodes streaming right to their TVs and computers and can receive unlimited DVDs delivered quickly to their homes. In Canada, streaming unlimited movies and TV shows from Netflix is available for $7.99 a month. There are...






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Person:
Reed Hastings


Website:


Companies:
Netflix


Reed Hastings co-founded Netflix in 1997 with then CEO Marc Randolph and launched the subscription service in 1999. He currently serves as Chairman and CEO of the movie-rental company.

In 2005, Time magazine added Reed to its “Time 100” list of the one hundred most influential global citizens. In March 2007 Reed was appointed to Microsoft’s board of directors.

Earlier in his career, Reed founded Pure Software, which was acquired by Rational Software in 1997 after a successful IPO and numerous...






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Yesterday, we covered the world-wide launch of publishing platform Scoop.it- the company came out of private beta and graced the rest of the world with a tool that  allows you to publish content without blogging. We spoke to Scoop.it’s CEO Guillaume Decugis who told us about the revenue model for Scoop.it which will be  a monthly subscription model. Compared to the traditional model of becoming a publisher which required huge capital in setting up a newspaper, Scoop.it allows anyone to become a news outlet and share it on their social networks.

Extreme Venture Partners, the Toronto and Palo Alto-based early-stage venture firm, today announced that it is launching a new-and-improved version of its accelerator program, Extreme University — also known as “ExtremeU”. Extreme Venture Partner’s accelerator program has been up and running since 2009 and is aimed at becoming a training ground and valuable ecosystem for Canadian startups targeting the social, mobile, and local spaces.

Extreme University graduates, like Locationary and Uken Games have gone on to raise millions in follow-on financing rounds. Jon Evans also recently wrote about Maide, a current ExtremeU participant that’s turning iPads everywhere into 3-D controllers.

Extreme University’s revamped model will consist of a 12-week program, in which five selected teams will share office space at the venture firm’s offices in Toronto, along with access to its network of founders, advisors, and developers. Extreme University will run two 12-week programs a year, each with five participating startups. What’s more, founders will also have the opportunity to participate in weekly personal sessions with experts and advisors, as well as work directly with key members of of some of the tech industry’s biggest companies.

Case in point: The accelerator is today announcing the first of its collaborating partners, which is none other than the social network of record, Facebook. Representatives from Facebook (which will include Elmer Sotto, FB’s head of growth in Canada, and his team) will work with startups to design and build socially-enhanced products in addition to offering product strategy and design mentorship, including educating founders on the best ways to leverage its Open Graph to create powerful distribution channels for their products.

Facebook reps will also enable startups to test new features on the platform and offer feedback on the tools startups create during the program before they’re launched to the public.

In addition to this awesome collaboration with Facebook, the startups chosen to participate in ExtremeU will receive $50,000 in funding. The venture firm will be taking an equity stake in the companies chosen to participate. While the exact level of equity taken has yet to be decided, it will likely be between 5 to 10 percent.

Among the mentors that will be sharing their wisdom with ExtremeU’s class of startups will be former Facebook VP (and the founder of Social+Capital Partnership) Chamath Palihapitiya as well as Albert Lai of Kontagent, Tomi Poutanen of Yahoo Answers, and more. You can check out the list of mentors here.

Extreme Venture Partners has forged (and is forging) some deep relationships with Facebook, Google, and other well-known tech companies that have significant presences in Canada. While Y Combinator, TechStars et al get a lot play in the media (and deservedly so), it’s nice to see our neighbors to the north building a valuable resource (and ecosystem) for early-stage companies — and encouraging them to stay in Canada and help to build Toronto into a vibrant tech community.

For more on Extreme Ventures, check ‘em out at home here. Startups can apply to ExtremeU here.






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EXTREME VENTURE PARTNERS
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Financial-organization:
Extreme Venture Partners


Website:
extremevp.com



Extreme Venture Partners (EVP) focuses on providing early stage venture capital and management expertise to startup businesses to help propel them into the big leagues. We work with smart people who have great ideas and the energy and abilities to deliver on them.

EVP has deep roots in the technology and investment communities. We get involved as early as possible in a startup’s development. Beyond the financial resources we provide, we like to take a hands-on approach to supporting our...






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Company:
Facebook


Website:
facebook.com


Launch Date:
January 2, 2004


Funding:
$2.34B



Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users.

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskowitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks.

The original idea for the term...






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It’s time those front-facing cameras on smartphones were used for more than just video chatting or taking low-resolution pictures: Pantech is adding software in its phones that will allow users to control the handset with gestures. The concept is similar to Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect but on a smaller scale.

Pantech’s new Vega LTE smartphones will be the first products to gain the technology, which is powered by eyeSight, an Israeli startup we highlighted in June of 2010. Using the eyeSight solution, handset owners will be able to use a gesture to answer a call, start music playback, control games and more. The idea is that the gesture interaction is useful when the smartphone is in a hands-free mode such as driving, cooking or when the phone is sitting in a dock.

Last year, when we first heard of eyeSight, the company’s founder and CEO, Itay Katz, said this in the news release: “Users are looking for ways to ease, improve and enjoy their day-to-day interaction with their mobile phone, ideally aiming to gain effortless control of the device’s applications and functions, which is where eyeSight’s solution comes to place.”

While I’m not sold that the general public will take to gestures on smartphones like it has with the Xbox Kinect, I agree with Katz’s sentiment about users looking for improved device interaction. For those who prefer a smartphone in a hands-free use case, eyeSight’s solution should bring that improvement. But the smartphone is a device that is generally meant to be held. As such, I think there’s a limited audience for gesture controls on a handset.

Still, the news that eyeSight’s solution getting picked up by a hardware manufacturer — Pantech is one of Korea’s top three handset makers — shows that some are willing to think outside the box when it comes to user interfaces on mobile devices. And it’s not the only solution either: Take a look (or a listen?) at Siri on Apple’s iPhone 4S and you’ll see another example of a user interaction improvement.

Touch is still a key user interface on mobile devices, but with all the sensors in our smartphones, expect to see more of these forward-thinking ideas as devices begin to adopt what I call the “invisible interface.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
Siri: Say hello to the coming “invisible interface”What the history of handset platforms can teach the future of mobileSocial media reactions to the iPhone 4S