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• 10 Things Entrepreneurs Don’t Learn in College
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10 Things Entrepreneurs Don’t Learn in College Posted: 12 Nov 2011 09:15 AM PST Editor's note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and entrepreneur. He is Managing Director of Formula Capital and has written 6 books on investing. His latest book is I Was Blind But Now I See. You can follow him@jaltucher. I’ve written before on 10 reasons Parents Should Not Send Their Kids to College and here is also Eight Alternatives to College but it’s occurred to me that the place where college has really hurt me the most was when it came to the real world, real life, how to make money, how to build a business, and then even how to survive when trying to build my business, sell it, and be happy afterwards. Here are the ten things that if I had learned them in college I probably would’ve saved/made millions of extra dollars, not wasted years of my life, and maybe would’ve even saved lives because I would’ve been so smart I would’ve been like an X-Man. 1. How to Program - I spent $100,000 of my own money (via debt, which I paid back in full) majoring in Computer Science. I then went to graduate school in computer science. I then remained in an academic environment for several years doing various computer programming jobs. Finally I hit the real world. I got a job in corporate America. Everyone congratulated me where I worked, “you’re going to the real world,” they said. I was never so happy. I called my friends in NYC, “money is falling from trees here,” they said. I looked for apartments in Hoboken. I looked at my girlfriend with a new feeling of gratefulness—we were going to break up once I moved. I knew it. In other words, life was going to be great. My mom even told me, “you’re going to shine at your new job.” Only one problem: when I arrived at the job, after 8 years of learning how to program in an academic environment—I couldn’t program. I won’t get into the details. But I had no clue. I couldn’t even turn on a computer. It was a mess. I think I even ruined people’s lives while trying to do my job. I heard my boss whisper to his boss’s boss, “I don’t know what we’re going to do with him, he has no skills.” And what’s worse is that I was in a cluster of cubicles so everyone around me could here that whisper also. So they sent me to two months of remedial programming courses at AT&T in New Jersey. If you’ve never been in an AT&T complex it’s like being a stormtrooper learning how to go to the bathroom in the Death Star where, inconceivably, in six Star Wars movies there is no evidence of any bathrooms. Seriously, you couldn’t find a bathroom in these places. They were mammoth but if you turned down a random corner then, whallah!—there might be an arts & crafts show. The next corner would have a display of patents, like “how to eliminate static on a phone line – 1947″. But I did finally learn how to program. I know this because I ran into a guy I used to work with ten years ago who works at the same place I used to work at. “Man,” he says, “they still use your code.” And I was like, “really?” “Yeah,” he said, “because its like spaghetti and nobody can figure out how to modify it or even replace it.” So, everything I dedicated my academic career to was flushed down the toilet. The last time I programmed a computer was 1999. It didn’t work. So I gave up. Goodbye C++. I hope I never see you and your “objects” again. 2. How to Be Betrayed. A girlfriend about 20 years ago wrote in her diary. “I wish James would just die. That would make this so much easier. Whenever I kiss him I’m thinking of X”. Where X was a good friend of mine. Of course I put up with it. We went out for several more months. It’s just a diary, right? She didn’t really mean it! I mean, c’mon. Who would think about someone else when kissing my beautiful face? I confronted her of course. She said, “why would you read through my personal items?” Which was true! Why would I? Don’t have I have any personal items of my own I could read through? Or a good book, for instance, to take up my time and educate myself? Kiss, kiss, kiss. Why can’t they have a good college course called BETRAYAL 101. I can teach it. Topics we will cover: Betrayal by a business partner, betrayal by investors, betrayal by a girlfriend (I’d bring in a special lecturer to talk about betrayal by men, kind of like how Gwynneth Paltrow does it in Glee), betrayal by children (since they cleverly push the boundaries right at the limit of betrayal and you have to know when to recognize that they’ve stepped over the line, betrayal by friends/family (note to all the friends/family that think I am talking about them, I am not—this is a serious academic proposal about what needs to be taught in college)—you help them, then get betrayed – how to deal with that? Then there are the more subtle issues of betrayal – self-sabotage. How you can make enough money to live forever and then repeatedly find yourself in soup kitchens, licking envelopes, attending 12 step meetings, taking medications, and finally reaching some sort of spiritual recognition that it all doesn’t matter until the next time you sink even lower. This might be in BETRAYAL 201. Or graduate level studies. I don’t know. Maybe the Department of Defense needs to give me a grant to work on this since that’s who funds much of our education. 3. Oh shoot, I was going to put Self-Sabotage into a third category and not make it a sub-category of How to Be Betrayed. Hmmm, how do I write myself out of this conundrum. College, after all, does teach one how to put ideas into a cohesive “report” that is handed in and graded. Did I form my thesis, argue it correctly, conclude correctly, not diverge into things like “Kim Kardashian will never be the betrayer, only the betrayed.” But this brings me to: Writing. Why can’t college teach people how to actually write. Some of my best friends tell me college taught them how to think. Thinking has a $200,000 price tag apparently and there is no room left over for good writing. And what is good writing? It’s not an opinion. Or a rant. Or a thesis with logical steps, a deep cavern underneath, beautiful horizons and mountaintops at the top. It’s blood. It’s Carrie-style blood. Where everyone has been fooling you until that exact moment when now, with the psychic power of the written word, you spray pig blood everywhere, at everyone, and most of all you are covered in blood yourself, the same blood that pushed you out of your mother’s womb, until just the act of writing itself is a birth, a separation between the old you and the new you—the you that can no longer take the words back, the words that now must live and breathe and mature and either make something of themselves in life, or remain one of the little blips that reminds us of how small we really are in an infinite universe. [See also, 33 Unusual Tips to Be a Better Writer] 4. Dinner Parties. How come I never learned about dinner parties in college. Sure, there were parties among other people who looked like me and talked like me and thought like me—other college students of my age and rough background. But Dinner Parties as an adult are a whole new beast. There are drinks and snacks beforehand where small talk has to disguise itself as big talk and then there’s the parts where you know that everyone is equally worried about what people think about them but that still doesn’t help at those moments when you talk and you wonder what did people think of me? Nobody cares, you tell yourself, intellectually rifling through pages of self-help blogs in your mind that told you that nobody gives a sh*t about you. But still, why don’t we have a class where there’s Dinner Party after Dinner Party and you learn how to talk at the right moments, say smart things, be quiet at the right moments, learn to excuse yourself during the mingling so you can drift from person to person. Learn how to interrupt a conversation without being rude. Learn how to thank the host so you can be invited to the next party. And so on. Which brings me to: 5. Networking. Did it really take 20 years after I graduated college before someone wrote a book, “Never Eat Alone.” Why didn’t Jesus write that book. Or Plato. Then we might’ve read it in religious school or it would’ve been one of those “big Thinkers” we need to read in college so we can learn how to think. I still don’t know how to network properly so this paragraph is small. I’m classified under the DSM VI as a “social shut-in”. I’d like to get out and be social but when the moment comes, I can only make it out the door about one in ten times. I always say, “I’d love to get together” but then I don’t know how to do it. Perhaps because not one dollar of my $100,000 spent on not learning how to program a computer was also not spent on learning how to network with people. [See also, my recent TechCrunch article, "9 Ways to be a Super-Connector"] 6. Politics. My very first girlfriend, the girl who first laughed hysterically when I showed her a piece of chewing gum I found on the ground that had sculpted itself into the muddy shape of a heart, took me to a movie called “Salvador”. Then there was a discussion group afterwards about how the Contras are bad, or good, I forget, and everyone was nodding and speaking in a Spanish accent. And afterwards my girlfriend was upset, “why aren’t you talking?” Because truth was I was so tired I couldn’t think but nobody ever taught me how to tell the truth so I lied and said, “it moved me so much I’m still absorbing it” and my girlfriend said, “yeah, I can see that.” And nobody ever taught me that there’s more than one acceptable opinion on a college campus. My roommate for instance would tell me, “Reagan is definitely getting impeached this time.” And I visited his dad’s mansion over Christmas break and he told me all about Trotskyism and the proletariat and I had to work jobs 40 hours a week while taking six courses so I could A) graduate early and B) pay my personal expenses and when I would run into him he had long hair and would nod about how a lot of the college workers (but not the lowest-paid, poorest treated ones—the students who worked) were thinking of unionizing and he was helping with that. “Do you have a job?” I asked and he said, “no time”. And that’s politics in college. What about the real politics of how people try to backstab you at the corporate workplace or VCs never properly explained the “ratchet” concept to you before they kicked you out of the company and then re-financed. Nobody told me a thing about that in three years of college and two years of graduate school. I wish I would’ve known that for my $100,000. 7. Failure. Goes without saying they don’t teach you this. If you are going to pay $100,000, why would you fail? You might think you were wasting your money if the first mandatory elective you had to take was about failure. About wondering how you were going to feed your family after you got fired when something that was not your fault: Post-Traumatic-Lehman-Stress Syndrome, a common medical condition coming up in the DSM VII 8. Sales. When I was busy learning how to “not program” nobody ever taught me how to sell what it was I was programming. Or sell myself. Or sell out. Or sell my ideas and turn them into money. Or sell a product to someone who might need it. Or even better, sell it to someone who doesn’t need it. Some business programs might have courses on salesmanship but those are BS because everyone automatically gets As in MBA programs so that the schools can demonstrate what good jobs their students get so they then get more applicants and the scam/cycle continues. But sales: how to demonstrate passion behind an idea you had, you built, you signed up for, so that people are willing to pay hard-earned after-tax money for it, is the number one key to any success and I have never seen it taught (properly) in college. 9. Negotiation. You’ve gotten the idea, you executed, you made the sale and now…what’s the price. What part of your body will be amputated in exchange for infinite wisdom. Will you give up one eye? Or your virility? Because something has to go if you are up against a good negotiator? What? You already thought (like most people without any experience do) that you were already a good negotiator. A good negotiator will skin your back, tattoo it with “SUCKA” and hang it up above the fireplace in his pool house if you don’t know what you are doing. The funny thing is, the best sales people (who are just aiming for people to say “Yes!”) are often the worst negotiators (“it’s very hard to say “No” when you are trying to get people to “Yes”). These are things I wish I had learned in school. I’ve been beaten in negotiations on at least five different occasions, which fortunately became five valuable lessons I’ve learned the hard way, instead of studying examples and being forced to think about it for the $100k in debt I got going to college. People will say, “well, that’s your experience in college. Mine was very different.” And it’s true. You joined the sororities and learned how to network and dinner party and be political and know everything there is to know about betrayal. My college experience was sadly unique and probably different from everyone else’s so you would be completely right to quote me that inane statistic about how college graduates earn 4% more than high school graduates and are consequently 4% happier . (Another thing, 10. Happiness. We never learn how it’s a combination of the food we eat, our health, our ability to be creative, our ability to have sound emotional relationships, our ability to find something bigger than ourselves and our egos to give up our spiritual virginity to.) So I can tell you what I wish I did. I wish I had gone to Soviet Russia, and played chess, and then gone to India and learned yoga and health, and I wish I had gone to South America and volunteered for kids with no arms, and did any number of things. But people then say, “haha! but that cost money.” And they would be right. It would cost less than $100,000+ but would still cost some money. I have no idea how much. But one of these days when the scars of college go away and I truly learn how to think. I might have better comebacks for these people. Or if I truly learn, I would learn not to care at all. – Follow me on Twitter. Or, just as good, buy “I Was Blind But Now I See”, send me the receipt and you get my next self-published book for free (PDF). Photo credit: Flickr/Herry Lawford

Can Content Producers Be Disruptors Or Is Content Only Meant To Be Disrupted? Posted: 12 Nov 2011 08:07 AM PST Editor's note: Contributor Ashkan Karbasfrooshan is the founder and CEO of WatchMojo.  Follow him @ashkan. Why is content such a dirty word in venture capital?  We have seen a few generations of technology entrepreneurs and investors, but there have been far fewer successful outcomes for media startups.  In fact, most of the value has remained in the hands of the Traditional Media Companies (TMCs), and as such, executives in those fields have not really had the vast war chests to fund new startups in media. And frankly, many content executives have been shell-shocked by technology disruption, so they tend to avoid content investments and favor media technology startups when they move over to investing.   If you look at the "digital media" companies in most VCs portfolio, it's not content but rather tech that focuses on the media industry. VCs Look for Disruption While all VCs look to invest in passionate entrepreneurs and companies that operate in big markets, some particularly fancy businesses that can shrink a market: “We love investing in technologies and business models that are able to shrink existing markets. If your company can take $5 of revenue from a competitor for every $1 you earn – let’s talk!”  boasts Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital, who has gone on to invest in Appnexus, Say Media, Uber and Turntable to name a few. The Internet shrinks industries by disrupting the incumbents.  We have seen this in technology and in media.  Newspapers have shrunk, magazines too.  The next frontier remains television: a $75 billion advertising industry in the U.S. and a $250 billion one when you include theatrical and home release sales.  It's a big market, and everyone from Google to Apple and Amazon are looking at disrupting it.  And they have a good shot at doing that. Apple's late Steve Jobs is said to have "cracked it" – it being television.  Google is further ahead, in large part to the $1.65 billion YouTube acquisition.  YouTube is now forking over hundreds of millions of dollars to content producers to lock up more premium, brand-safe programming.  Incidentally, despite all of the buzz and money that is flowing into the space, the VC community is standing idle.  Why? Why are VCs Allergic to Content? Speaking of First Round Capital, they were one of the first VCs I spoke to when I launched WatchMojo.  They were also one of the many VCs who turned me down because they "didn't like content".  It's no secret that VCs have shown an aversion to investing in content.  In fact, to some like Brad Feld, their definition of investing in content is investing in a platform that aggregates user-generated content (UGC), what marketers and producers generally view as anti-content, if such a thing existed.  That kind of thinking is why VCs have had a poor batting average in video investing: content will be ad-supported and marketers have rejected advertising alongside UGC. On the one hand, most VCs hail from technology companies and they just don't understand the content business.  On the other hand, most video content investments have been duds because they have sought to duplicate television on the Web; that is a recipe for disaster.  Ripe raised $45 million, Next New Networks raised $30 million.  We adopted a more efficient model and are trying to disrupt cable in our own small way.  We're not alone: VC Mark Suster is making a big bet on Maker Studios, which has scaled by focusing on low-cost content and aggregating views on YouTube: "the reason most content companies have failed is that they sought to build own-and-operated properties and had high cost models", he stated on a panel I was moderating at Streaming Media West.   He's right.  He pegged YouTube's investment in content at closer to $250 million, and not the $100 million that the media has reported.  It's Google's attempt to scorch the online video world and try to lock up a large chunk of the premium content segment. There's another way Google is scorching video advertising: skippable ads and their TrueView initiative, but we'll leave that for another article. Will Television Suffer the Same Fate as Print and Music Industries? While few people predict the television industry to suffer a fate similar to the print or music industries, it's no secret that Hollywood is bloated and it's likely that its cost structure and revenues will shrink, but it is and will remain a powerful industry.  In fact, it has always been far more tech-savvy and aware than its print and radio brethren, but history repeats itself and thinking that somehow the Traditional Media Companies (TMCs) can hold back time is foolish.  The genie is out of the bottle. Then Why Aren't TMCs Investing in New Media Programming The Traditional Media Companies are not investing aggressively in lower-cost, made-for-Web (and mobile, tablets) programming.  They have absolutely no financial incentive to see online video advertising grow and hit the projections because a lot of that will invariably come at the expense of television. Ultimately, online video content can be promotional or commercial. To TMCs, in all likelihood, it will be promotional: it allows them to bring down distribution and marketing costs.  Video content is an investment, a cost of goods sold or marketing expense, but it's a necessary part of the marketing mix and the most popular activity online, what people spend 47% of their online time doing. This Creates an Opportunity for New Media Content Producers Content is not a zero-sum game, so long as new media producers create content to fill the hole and demand online, then they can over time replace the mindshare previously held by the TMCs.  If you doubt that look no further than Disney's decision to partner with YouTube even though it's an investor in Hulu.  You also have to wonder when Viacom will sign a peace treaty with YouTube.  How much longer do they really want to not be on the largest video platform in the world?  How does that now grow the MTV brand and Viacom's revenues? VCs Remain on the Sidelines You would think that VCs would see this opening and aggressively fund content, especially when you consider that we're in the content consumption phase of the Web's evolution: we have built the infrastructure and platforms, now it's all about feeding the insatiable appetite of consumers who spend 33% of their time on new platforms (web, mobile, tablets) while marketers are only spending 19% of their ad budgets accordingly.  Kleiner Perkins' Mary Meeker sizes the opportunity at $20 billion (see slide above). Until more VCs come along who get the dynamics of media and online video, and back content plays, then they will be leaving a lot of money on the table.

TC Gadgets Weekend Giveaway: An iPhone 4S Posted: 12 Nov 2011 08:00 AM PST I gave my love a red, red rose but she actually wanted an iPhone 4S and now you, too, can hand over one of these exciting products to your loved ones thanks to Rebtel. This weekend’s TC Gadgets giveaway is a fresh-in-box iPhone 4S (your carrier choice) and $100 worth of calling through Rebtel’s VOIP solution. Got your attention? Good. The contest will run until noon Eastern on Monday, November 14. I will contact the winner then and update the post next week. To enter, comment below describing, in poem form, why you deserve an iPhone 4S. Limericks will be accepted but they must involve the man from Nantucket. Free or concrete verse is encouraged. Enter only once. I’ll pick one winner at random and laugh at your entries on my own time. I reserve the right to sell your poems in a chapbook on the subway, calling them my collection of “urban folk poetry” and “prayers to the muse of poesy.” Special thanks to Rebtel for the great prize.

Want The Chance To Work At Instagram? Solve This Photo Shredder Puzzle Posted: 12 Nov 2011 05:49 AM PST 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.

Quick Review: Kogeto Dot Panoramic iPhone 4/4S Add-On Posted: 12 Nov 2011 05:00 AM PST The Kogeto Dot isn’t necessarily new. We spotted it back at TechCrunch Disrupt New York and found it to be quite the fun little iPhone accessory, but back then it was merely a prototype. Today, we’ve gotten our hands on the real deal and I have to say, I’ve had a pretty good time playing around with this little guy. Along with the accessory itself, you’ll also need the Looker iPhone app to shoot, de-warp and upload your videos. You see, since Dot shoots in panoramic mode, the video looks kind of like a swirling black hole until you de-warp it. Processing the video into something watchable only takes a couple minutes tops. The Good: Let me start out by saying that I’m usually not a huge fan of phone accessories. Past a case (which is necessary), I’ve always felt that the cost and trouble of hooking up an accessory outweighs the final product. Dot proved me wrong. Snapping Dot in place couldn’t have been easier, and getting started shooting video took literally less than a minute. That included downloading the Looker app, which uploads to Facebook, Twitter, and Kogeto.com. As you can see from the pictures, Dot is not to be used as an iPhone case. Anyone who does so will sorely regret it. That said, it fits snugly and securely without being a B-word to pop on and off. The clips on the side snap on super easily, and removal is just as simple. But even after such a breezy setup, my skepticism wasn’t gone. My complaining then turned to the quality of the video itself. “It can’t be that great,” I thought. “And watching the video will probably make me nauseous with all that spinning.” Wrong again. In all honesty, I actually shot way more videos than I needed to to complete testing and get you kind folks a sample video. I was having fun, and each video I shot was even more fun than the last to view later. As I mentioned in my video, this could actually be used for more than fun. Personally, I’d have loved to use it as a way to record interviews, letting me look at myself and the interviewee while still hearing audio. The only issue is that Dot has a 3-minute maximum for videos, so it’d have to be a quickie interview to get it done. Luckily, the Looker app is due for a pretty significant update, which will include nixing that 3-minute max. I see anyone who travels a lot falling in love with this product, as you really won’t miss a thing shooting with Dot. In fact, anyone who enjoys mobile video or has an ounce of creativity can probably get a lot out of Dot, and it’s one phone accessory I’d actually recommend. The Bad: There are a few drawbacks to Kogeto’s Dot, though many should be squashed with the forthcoming update (which I’ll go into more detail on later). For one, it’s a bit awkward to hold while shooting. Since Dot shoots in 360 degrees, you have to hold the phone face down to record. You also have to remove your case to snap on Dot, meaning your holding your phone uncomfortably, away from your body, unprotected. To me, that’s a recipe for disaster so no drunk videos with Dot, OK? Past that, you need to make sure your hand is flat while shooting, rather than curving your fingers up over the sides of the phone. Again, this leaves your phone even more unprotected, but the trade-off is keeping your fingertips out of the video. As you can see in my sample, I didn’t follow my own rules. As far as video quality is concerned, I was pleasantly surprised. Obviously, DotSpots (videos shot with Dot) won’t be as high quality as the 1080p video your 4S shoots on its own. There’s a slab of plastic in the way for goodness sakes. But, all in all it’s just fine. Audio, however, is kind of a mess. In every video I shot there was a pretty serious audio lag, which is just annoying. If you’re doing something more serious with Dot, rather than just shooting a fun little video to share with friends, the Looker app offers different video quality settings, including a smoother and fps settings. Video may take longer to process and upload with better settings, but you win some and you lose some. The Update: When all’s said and done, yes, the Kogeto Dot has been found wanting in a couple areas. But I got the chance to speak with Kogeto CEO Jeff Glasse who told me that the upcoming update will help fill in those missing pieces. Depending on how quickly Apple approves the update, this is what you’ll be seeing in the next couple weeks: real-time de-warping of video, location services integration, trimming controls, no more 3-minute limit, and possibly the ability to use the volume buttons as stop/start record buttons. I say possibly because Apple is throwing a bit of a fit over that last one. Apparently, Apple’s developer terms state that only iOS’s official camera control can employ the volume buttons, but Dot uses its own custom control. The argument is that if game developers start implementing that functionality, it will confuse users who want to simply turn up the volume. It seems a bit unfair, to be honest, especially since Looker is a camera app and not a game. Perhaps there should be an amendment to that particular clause allowing camera-based applications to join in on the volume button fun, whether they use iOS 5′s camera control or not. The Bottom Line My favorite thing about the Kogeto Dot is that it changed my mind about phone accessories. I see this actually being something people use regularly, rather than a fun-for-a-few-minutes type of deal. It’s lightweight, portable, and adds a whole new layer of creativity to what once was a basic camera on your phone. The Kogeto Dot retails for $79.99 and is available on November 15 at select Apple stores, Apple.com, or at Kogeto.com. The Looker app is free to download from the ">Apple App Store.

People Now Watch Videos Nearly 30 Percent Longer On Tablets Than Desktops Posted: 12 Nov 2011 12:29 AM PST It may come as no surprise, but Americans are watching more and more online video. In fact, they’re practically jonesin’ for it. According to comScore’s numbers, 182 million Americans watched online video content in September (for an average of 19.5 hours per viewer), while the U.S. video audience tallied a total of 39.8 billion video views. But what may be a bit more surprising is the extent to which people are now watching their video on tablets. Ooyala, the provider of online video technology and services just released its first quarterly review, which you can find here. While the data is skewed slightly as it only takes into account those who actually watch online video, as comScore’s numbers show, at least in the U.S., there are more than a few watching online video. And Ooyala’s data set, too, is considerable, as the platform handles more than 1 billion analytics pings per day — revealing the global viewing behavior of 100 million monthly unique users. From Ooyala’s study comes a number of interesting interesting conclusions. First and foremost, tablets are seeing a significantly higher level of engagement in online video viewing, as tablet viewers watch longer than viewers of desktops or mobile devices. For each minute watched on a desktop, tablets recorded “1:17 in played content”, which works out to 28 percent longer than the desktop average. What’s more, tablet viewers are more than twice as likely to finish a video than desktoppers, as the completion rate for tablet viewers was double what it was for desktop viewing in the third quarter of this year — and is 30 percent higher than that of mobile devices. Of course, the high level of video engagement compared to desktops isn’t just limited to tablets, it seems it’s true of all mobile devices, too: In Ooyala’s words, “viewer engagement was generally higher on mobile devices than on desktops — even for long term videos”. Yup, mobile viewers completed three-quarters of a long-form video at a rate of 20 percent, compared to 18 percent for desktops. In terms of long-form videos, the study found that desktops and laptops are more likely to be used for short video clips, whereas videos that are 10 minutes or longer make up 30 percent of the hours watched on mobile devices, 42 percent on tablets, and nearly 75 percent on connected TV devices and game consoles. While desktops still make up the bulk of total video displays, plays, and number of hours watched, mobile devices, tablets, and connected TV devices are increasingly shaping (and changing) viewer behavior. For non-desktop video media, mobile devices owned the biggest share of total hours played, with 48 percent, while plays on tablets accounted for 45 percent. While connected TV devices lagged behind in most categories, as the industry is still in its nascency, Ooyala believes that these devices are closing in on the tipping point, as video plays on connected TVs tripled in Q3 alone. Of course, when it comes to video being watched on mobile devices and tablets, it’s all iOS and Android. Combined, Android and iOS devices make up 90 percent of the video hours for tablets and mobile devices. For tablets, unsurprisingly, iPad is king. iPads were responsible for 99.4 percent of displays, 97.7 percent of total plays, and 95.7 percent of total hours streamed. However, thanks to its growing lead in marketshare among mobile devices, Android is seeing an average conversion rate of 45 percent — one that’s considerably higher than that of iPhones at 22 percent. For tablets, Android devices were also higher at 47 percent compared to iPads at 13 percent. In terms of viewer engagement for tablet viewers, the percentages were close, but iPads grabbed the higher percentage of completion rates (at 38 percent compared to Android’s 36 percent). Also of note: As Erick reported back in August, Facebook had jumped into third place among the biggest video platforms, with an estimated 51.6 million people watching videos on Facebook in July. Facebook’s numbers have since dropped slightly, but the point remains: When it comes to display advertising and now video, Facebook is growing at a scary rate. To this point, Ooyala found that Facebook is across the board a more popular means of sharing video than its social media rival, Twitter. In the U.S., for every one video shared on Twitter, over eight are shared on Facebook. As to how much more popular Facebook was than Twitter as a video sharing platform — that varies widely depending on the region. In Japan, there’s a 1:1 ratio, whereas in Italy Facebook is 17 times more popular. In the end, Ooyala’s study seems to prove how it is becoming of increasing importance for content publishers to develop strategies for tablets. With viewers watching 28 percent longer per play on tablets compared to desktops, the publishers are now beginning to be guaranteed to have access their viewers’ eyeballs for a longer period of time. No doubt advertisers will be taking note of this. For a full dive into Ooyala’s study, download it out here. Excerpt image from Brassmusician

Stop Making Apps Posted: 11 Nov 2011 11:55 PM PST There are a bunch of iPhone apps I own though I have no clue what they do. These apps include but aren't limited to; FLUD, Apptitude, Cartoonatic, Can't Wait!, Punch, Pah, Prize Claw, Traveler, Concur, Jajah, Fast Customer, Pimple Popper and many more whose names I can't even remember. Occupying my valuable homescreen real estate are also a bunch of apps whose purpose I remember only because they were built by people I know or am friends with, but that I sadly never use. And in some cases I really wish I did, because it would make my friends happy and the world a better place. The few apps that I actually open daily (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Foursquare, Spotify, Reminders, Safari, Messenger, and Yammer sadly enough) are securely fastened to my homescreen. For those relegated to the “app ghetto” I usually either substitute Google or SMS because I've forgotten that I've downloaded them and am too lazy to swipe past my first screen. Dispersed throughout my app ghetto, or the neighborhood ten or so swipe screens past the iPhone homescreen, are things I’ve downloaded for work, apps that people joke about not using (Color, Path), new apps that people are still trying to figure out (Batch, Oink) and perfectly legitimate apps that lend themselves to more casual usage (Uber, Quora, Yelp). And all the apps that fit into one or more of those categories. Oh, and I just bought Camera+ (not to be confused with Camera Plus) — it's  not homescreen worthy just yet though it might just be the best 99 cents I've ever spent. If I ever want to use an app ghetto app I just use iPhone search (a swipe right) because there are just too many! There should be some sort of app that makes your app ghetto apps disappear if you haven’t used them in a while. Sure we've written before about app fatigue, but it seemingly hasn't discouraged app makers from continuing to churn out countless useless apps or SocialMobileLocal offerings that would be better suited as sub-features of Foursquare. And it doesn't look like they're going to stop anytime soon; Android growth is insane, iOS influence is crazy. Coupled with minimal development costs, you get the fact that the Bump app has 50 million downloads. Yes, Bump, that thing that lets you "bump" contact info over your phone and nobody I know uses. If Bump's existence proves anything, it's that many SoMoLo apps are basically competing with SMS. Why go through another tiresome two-second increment of human communication and exchange your contact info WHEN YOU CAN “BUMP”? YES THERE IS INDEED AN APP FOR THAT. I realize that asking y'all to stop making apps is a quixotic endeavor (so go ahead and have at me in the comments); 74% percent of you think that the world needs more mobile apps even though we've already got over 500K of them with 18 billion plus downloads– on iOS alone. The app economy is/will be huge and is inexorable, and I don't want to deprive anyone of the jobs it will eventually create, even though a lot them will be building things that will eventually fail. Oh well. The truth is that if you imagine the homescreen of your phone ten years from now, your favorite apps will be ones that don't even exist yet. And that’s pretty amazing. So if you can't beat them join them. But if you join them I'm going to ask you to consider one thing; rethink the notion of an app versus a service; Stop making apps, or gimmicks, things that don't solve problems. Don’t build something silly and ill-thought out just because you have a celebrity co-founder and/or lots of investor money that will help you scale initially no matter what. The truth is that the hardest part is hanging onto that first spike of users, and there is no number of TechCrunch posts about your every-single-decimal point update that will get you there, you actually need to solve a problem – even if that problem is "How the hell do I entertain myself for the next fifteen minutes?" Focus on building a service not just an app; a service may have an app component — like Spotify, for example — but that app component must only exist to make life easier for the user of your service, exist to add value not just to be cool. Listen to PG; start with a problem, then let your mind wander just far enough for new ideas to form. It's pretty simple, solve a problem and focus on solving that problem across as many platforms as you can, even if one of those platforms is an app store. This whole "solving a problem thing" is why people are liking Batch, even if they're skeptical at first, because it solves the real problem of, "What do I do with all these random photos on my phone?" Maybe that's not enough to be a long-term business? Well, at least it's a start.

What Should You Drink While Listening To Your Favorite Music? Ask Drinkify. Posted: 11 Nov 2011 10:19 PM PST When it comes to music and drinking, these activities are best enjoyed in the company of others — hopefully friends. But, when combining music and libations, it’s not always easy to know just what kind of drink should be sipped while listening to your favorite Barry White tunes. Courvoisier? Personally, I prefer a Fresca for music of every single stripe, but people want choice, and they want to match the best of both music and spirits. Last weekend, The Echo Nest, the music intelligence company that connects app developers to music and music data, organized a “hackday” in Boston for developers, coders, and hacking supastars looking to bring their skills to bear upon the current array of problems besetting the music industry to start creating apps, products, and more to solve those problems. The weekend produced a number of cool hacks, but I thought one in particular was worth sharing to get this weekend (or any weekend for that matter) off on the right foot. Drinkify is a new website that, simply put, tells you what to drink while you’re listening to certain types of music. Enter “Justin Bieber”, and Drinkify tells you what kind of libation is best enjoyed while listening to the Biebs’s greatest hit. In this case, it’s 8 ounces of Red Bull. I would have said a “Shirley Temple”, but what do I know? It’s fairly straightforward. According to the developers, Matthew Ogle, Hannah Donovan, and Lindsay Eyink, the best hacks should be about something one loves — they should scratch an itch and solve one of our myriad personal problems. Maybe it was a result of a hangover, maybe not, but drinks were on their minds. They wanted some hair-of-the-dog style recommendations, and so Drinkify (formerly “Boozi.ly”) was born. As for the technical side, the Drinkify creators used the Echo Nest’s API for lists of terms and genres that describe artists and audio summaries of top tracks (whether the songs are slow or fast, etc.), the Last.fm API for artist and album images, name spelling, most-played tracks for individual artists, and, of course, the proprietary Drinkify database, because, as the Drinkifiers say, “booze still doesn’t have an API”. And it’s a damn shame. Obviously, this was a hack created over a very short period of time, so it’s far from perfect. Many of the drinks paired with artists are seriously lacking in creativity, and some just flat out don’t make sense. But there are some that do, like Slayer, Edith Piaf, and Bob Dylan. Black Sabbath is pretty hilarious, too. I like the “garnish with olive” — that really topped it off nicely. In terms of the recommendations, “stirring speed” is tied to the average beats per minute (i.e. tempo) of the artist’s top song. This is a somewhat clever quick-fix, but obviously for many artists, their top song may not always be indicative of their entire catalog. The Drinkify founders said that they’ve had bands and artists reaching out to them on Twitter to tell them what their favorite drinks are, and in some cases, they’ve been changing them to reflect that where it made sense to associate them with their tipples of choice. Hey, maybe Drinkify could even charge these artists to do just that. Or simply paste the entire site in booze-related display ads, though I hope to God that’s not the case. Even in spite of some imperfections, Drinkify racked up over 5 million page views in only three days. Clearly, it has a few addictive ingredients — and if it refines itself from Carlo Rossi into a fine California merlot, maybe it’s got a shot at the big time. Let us know what you think, and try not to throw all your rotten vegetables at once.

WhereIsTheCool.com: A Lazier Pinterest for Men Posted: 11 Nov 2011 07:08 PM PST With its pink and white color scheme and emphasis on self expression, Pinterest has found a rapidly growing audience of women, and investors are lining up. But guys might not find content for them on Pinterest’s home page. Hell, even its Cars & Motorcycles channel is filled with hot pink Hummer limos. Enter WhereIsTheCool.com, a black and red site of photos showing off the lifestyle men aspire to —  speed boats, surfboards, and slick tuxedos. It’s designed for laid-back browsing like a men’s style magazine, rather than something you have invest time in like a girlfriend. Originally, founder Jack Archer (even his name is stylish) tried to translate GQ into a iPad magazine with monthly editions. Turns out the market wasn’t ready for an all digital mag in 2010, so he redesigned it as a photostream website that constantly updates. This feeds the content addiction of the modern man, and now the site has over a million page views a month and 27,000+ Tumblr subscribers. Where Is The Cool’s home page displays roughly 20 penthouse apartments, rugged actors, and the women those come with. Another page of what’s crave-worthy is a click away. An infinite scroll option would be faster, but so much vivid content could get overwhelming. Visitors can click through the photos to view them full size, share them through social media, and check out where they were first posted. That’s it, no flashy tech, just good taste and good design. Archer has it tough. His job is to scour the internet for what’s cool, and sift it out of user submissions. The “Contribute” page features an ugly, old-school web form that should really just let you enter URLs of photos, as most entries on the site don’t include any text. While he’s got a team providing support, its essentially a one-man, bootstrapped operation. To monetize, Archer sprinkles in the occasional sponsored photo from men’s fashion retailers like Mr. Porter whose products could just as easily hit the site organically. Where Is The Cool has also signed big buys for banner ads with brands like Land Rover and Banana Republic. Even if its visitors can’t afford the fighter jets or vacation home it shows, just activating desire for such objects can be a satisfying, masculine experience. In a culture of men lusting for distraction, Where Is The Cool wins with simplicity.

(Founder Stories) Livestream’s Haot: “You Have To Be Able To Say I Was Wrong & Do It In A Very Public Way” Posted: 11 Nov 2011 06:00 PM PST Have a great idea, investors lined-up and a passion for technology? If you live outside America’s borders, and weren’t born inside them, chance are slim you’ll be launching your company in New York, Silicon Valley or any other high-tech United States city unless you have deep pockets and the right paperwork. Speaking from first hand experience, Livestream co-founder Max Haot discusses what it takes non-native Americans to pierce though the U.S. border as entrepreneurs in his final Founder Stories interview with Chris Dixon. After ruling out marrying an American, winning the Green Card lottery or being awarded a Visa for possessing extraordinary talents – basically what’s left is receiving an investor E2 visa – which Haot was handed partially as result of possessing deep pockets following a couple-hundred-thousand-dollar exit. Those of modest means need not apply. Dixon’s not a fan of the legal maze and weighs in by saying, “You could have a top VC, Sequoia or something say I want to fund this person, this person wants to come here, create a company that creates lots of jobs for Americans and the current rules prohibit it unless they happen to be rich.” As the two continue their conversation below, Hoat reflects on key decisions he’s made. He rates swapping out the name Mogulus with Livestream as one of the most strategic – and humbling. After convincing co-founders, customers and investors that Mogulus was the strongest name for the company “you put your hand up one day and say [naming the company Mogulus] was the worst decision ever.” A bitter pill to swallow at the time, it turned out to be the right call. Haot says the change helped reposition the company and adds, “I don’t think we’d be around with the current revenue growth, which we need to stay around, if we were called Mogulus.” He ends by telling Dixon as an entrepreneur “you have to be able to say actually I was wrong, and do it in a very public way.” Make sure to watch episodes I and II of Dixon’s interview with Max Haot, along which past Founder Stories interviews which feature conversations with leaders including Mike McCue, Eric Reis, Seth Sternberg, and Kevin Systrom.

Peter Thiel Says He Looks For Platforms Big Amongst Small Businesses, Not Consumers Posted: 11 Nov 2011 05:50 PM PST While plenty of platforms can go viral with consumers, VC idol Peter Thiel said today that he’s impressed by platforms adding legions of small businesses. Speaking at the healthtech conference hosted by electronic medical record platform Practice Fusion, Thiel explained “High paid sales people can get big companies, mass marketing can get consumers, but it’s difficult to get small businesses”. If you see a platform managing to sign lots of small businesses, it could be a winner. Investors take note. Thiel continued that in addition to being hard to reach, small businesses have historically been resistant to change. To convince them, a product must be “a quantum step better” than their existing solution. He cited Intuit’s QuickBooks and PayPal for eBay sellers as examples of companies able to provide that drastic upgrade, and that subsequently succeeded. In terms of areas where there’s potential to make those quantum steps, Thiel said “there are tremendous problems to solve in the developed world” specifically in healthtech. He followed that “the single lowest hanging fruit in the US” is in process automation.”The first step in automation is getting everything on a single platform. Practice Fusion has the potential to be the platform company in the electronic record space, and that’s going to be an unbelievably important place to be.” Thiel is a top investor in Practice Fusion, which now hosts 25 million EMRs, more than any other company in the U.S. It followed his model, growing from 70,000 health care providers in April, to 100,000 in September, to 130,000 now. Part of his due diligence on Practice Fusion? “I talked to my doctor. He said ‘this represents a key improvement.’”

Giftly Now Lets You Give The Gift Of Discovery (And Some Money, Too) Posted: 11 Nov 2011 04:08 PM PST San Francisco-based startup Giftly is looking to help you kill two birds with one stone: quickly give your friends and family gift cards via the web, and introduce them to interesting new restaurants and venues that they (or you) have never heard of. The company is also announcing that it’s raised an additional $600K, which comes on top of a $1.8 million round last March. Since launching, Giftly has made it easy to send virtual gift cards to friends. But it doesn’t focus on just sending the money — you’re supposed to tell your friends where they should spend it. Which can be an issue, if you, say live in another city. So this week the site launched a ‘Gift Ideas’ section: Giftly is now employing curators who bundle together various activities and restaurants your friends may enjoy in their city. For those who haven’t tried Giftly, here’s how the process works: Say you wanted to give your friend $20 for their birthday. First, you’d head to Giftly.com and choose how much you wanted to give. Next, you’d specify up to three places where your friend could redeem that gift — be it a restaurant, a retail outlet, or whatever else you’d like. Finally, you send the Giftly via Facebook or email. You also can attach an image and a message to help spruce things up a bit. Giftlys are redeemed via a smartphone app — you just tap a button and your credit card gets credited with the amount of the gift.  The service doesn’t use any merchant API or interface with your credit card company, so you don’t have to figure out which card to use or show anything to the merchant. This also means you could actually just redeem your Giftly immediately and have the amount added to your credit card, without using it at one of the venues your friend originally suggested. Which seems a little counterintuitive. So why is Giftly using this setup? CEO Timothy Bentley says that this system has a couple of benefits. The first is that because Giftly isn’t actually dealing with any of the merchants, it doesn’t need a sales force, and it’ll work anywhere — you can specify any venue, activity, or restaurant you’d like. And second, he says that restricting the use of gift cards to a given merchant is a practice that has value for the merchant, but doesn’t provide any value to the consumer. The service originally did used to check your phone’s location data to verify your purchase was at the venue your friend had previously chosen, but it decided that if people want to spend the money elsewhere, they can.  And while you can use a Giftly anywhere, he says that most people still wind up using it at one of the venues their friends originally suggested (I suspect this is because the site implies that they have to do that). Giftly has several competitors that are also trying to innovate around gifting and gift cards, including Giftiki (which lets friends band together to give one large gift) and Treatful (which focuses on restaurants).

Practice Fusion, #1 in EMR With 25M Electronic Medical Records, Debuts iPad App Posted: 11 Nov 2011 03:08 PM PST With great power comes great responsibility, and in few places is that more true than the healthtech industry. Practice Fusion is the leading provider of electronic medical records, now helping 130,000 doctors to track records for 25 million patients, CEO Ryan Howard told me today. That’s over 3x the EMRs hosted by Kaiser Permanente or the VA. Practice Fusion is free for doctors and patients. It monetizes through a marketplace for labs, pharmacies, and drug companies who pay for preferred placement in front of doctors who direct a staggering $40 billion in spend a year through the platform. Its new iPad app, debuted today at Practice Fusion’s annual conference, will let these doctors access records while out of the office. In addition to saving lives, the average doctor in California directs about $2.3 million a year in spend. Just imagine how much decision and recommendation power doctors have: “take this pill not that one”, “pick it up from this pharmacy”, “your test is being analyzed by this lab”. By next year, Howard tells me that figure will have grown well past the $60 billion a year spent through eBay. These medical service providers buy expensive banner ads in the Practice Fusion platform to ensure doctors choose them, and it’s making the company a lot of money. Practice Fusion’s doctor and record uptake rate is growing exponentially. It counted 70,000 clients in April when it raised a $23 million series B, and by September when it took $6 million more in funding it had 100,000 health care providers on board. Now Practice Fusion is at 130,000, and with each new doctor comes roughly 2,000 new patients who can access their own medical records from anywhere. Doctors can begin using the product in minutes, and can pay to have all their existing paper records scanned in over a few days. Practice Fusion’s competitors can take 6 months or longer to get doctors set up. Howard tells me “We’re effectively the Salesforce for doctors, and the Facebook for health.” He explains that through its APIs, Practice Fusion will become the hub for personal medical data from consumer devices and services such as FitBit and wireless weight scales. This includes 100Plus, the personalized health prediction platform Howard co-founded with funding from Peter Thiel and Founders Fund to let people see how healthy decisions can expand their lifespan. That hub could become another lucrative medical advertising magnet. More altruistically, Practice Fusion is working with Palantir and the CDC to power disease outbreak detection with its data. At its core, though, Practice Fusion’s goal is to make medical record access instant and efficient. That’s why it debuted an iPad app for doctors on the go, designed by Cooper, the firm headed by Alan Cooper, the father of Visual Basic. It securely provides access to records so if a doctor gets an after-hours call about a patient, they have all their necessary medical data at hand so they can make informed decisions. Prioritizing usability, doctors can see their day’s appointments and instantly dive into each patient’s chief complaint, allergies, problems, medications, family history, hospitalizations, and more. Doctors can record patient dictations of their symptoms, and combine their own assessment and treatment plan with pre-defined treatment plans for common ailments to minimize typing. They can also view lists of tasks, and receive push notifications of updates from their office. Practice Fusion’s team is changing healthcare, and Howard says doctors love them for it. With strong growth, client loyalty, expanding revenue streams, and an ambitious vision, Practice Fusion is on its way to making us all healthier, and its investors richer.

How To Be An Optimist In A Pessimistic Time Posted: 11 Nov 2011 02:35 PM PST Editor’s note: Contributor David Kirkpatrick the author of The Facebook Effect and founder of the Techonomy Conference, taking place Nov. 13-15 in Arizona. It’s no secret to most readers at TechCrunch that technology is changing the world. Unfortunately, there are a surprising number of people who don’t get it. Many of them, even more unfortunately, are important leaders in business, other powerful institutions, and⎯most⎯governments. To meet the challenges that face us⎯whether as leaders of organizations, as leaders of countries, or as the global community addressing our collective challenges⎯we will only be successful if we unreservedly embrace technology and innovation as essential tools. For those of us who believe in the vast potential of technology to solve problems, it is both an exciting and a frustrating time. The world’s people are embracing cellphones. More than two billion people use the Internet. Facebook continues its extraordinary user-empowering spread, and the Weibos fill a similar role in China. Advanced companies around the world are redesigning their systems and management to accommodate the new realities of a flattened, technologized business environment. The people of the world have recognized that technology can alter and improve their lives. Those tech-empowered billions in the developing world will not be satisfied languishing in second-class status. They know about what we have in the developed world and they want more of it for themselves. Fair enough. But how can they get it? How can access to food, shelter, transport, healthcare, and education expand rapidly enough to satisfy the justifiable demands of the world's people? How can we produce enough energy for a globally-rising standard of living without choking on the fumes? And if we do not succeed in doing so, what are the consequences for global stability? What happens to the world if the scales of wealth do not begin to balance? At present we are not leveraging our resources quickly enough⎯or efficiently enough⎯for all the planet's people. Worse, the world lacks enough leaders who understand the potential for new, technology-driven solutions for global problems. To the degree that there is such leadership, it is concentrated in the business community. But even there, an understanding of tech's potential is disturbingly uneven. Some companies thrive by embracing new methods of marketing, managing, developing products, and engaging with society. Others, by contrast, steadfastly operate in the old ways. Compounding the complexities is a growing geographic disequilibrium. The U.S., Western Europe, and Japan dither over how to address their severe economic problems, often beset by political gridlock. China, by contrast, with almost one-fifth of the world's people, forges ahead, installing high-speed trains, energy-efficient power plants, and planned cities. China just does it, democracy be damned. This is unnerving to the rest of the world, which cannot help noticing that China's economy, along with India's, Brazil's, and a few others, isn't enduring the same economic malaise. Despite all, there is great cause for optimism: technology writ large—not just IT and the Internet but energy tech, biotech, civil engineering, and science-based progress generally—can revitalize growth and help create a more just, interesting, and prosperous world. In effect, the fastest-growing resource in the world is computing power and storage. At a time when resource consumption is growing faster in general than resource production, it is incumbent upon all leaders to take advantage of the resource that technology presents us. The countries where that is understood are the ones investing aggressively in technological R&D and in education, especially for science, math, and engineering. It is in large part the fear that existing resources cannot match human needs that drives the thick cloud of pessimism that prevails today in the world. The Greeks may no longer be able to retire young, enjoy their social democratic benefits, and still pay their bills, because there is not enough wealth to go around. Italy may follow, and some say France could be next. What if we closed ranks around what we know technology can do to improve the efficiency of literally everything? What kind of world could we create? Technology-driven progress is rapidly reducing the global economic divide. This has in fact been true for a long time. If you doubt it, go to gapminder.org and look at the data. (Load Gapminder World, watch the animation of “Health and Wealth of Nations,” and be amazed at the progress.) Those of us who are technological optimists also see plenty of ways that tech can help enormously with our other grave challenges⎯climate change, cultural misunderstanding, food shortages, inadequate housing, antiquated transportation, and reliance on unsustainable energy sources. Change from now on is likely to be bottom-up—driven by people empowered by iPhones and Android devices, and by Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Google. It is a new environment for business and for government, and our transition into it is fitful, incomplete, and sometimes frightening. But people are not going to accept the old answers. It is an enormously exciting time. Tunisia was exciting. The cost-of-living protests in Israel were exciting. And both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street are exciting. All these developments show that ordinary people are paying closer attention to what's happening in the world, and demanding more from their ostensible leaders. People no longer feel powerless and they are taking action. The most exciting thing about technology-based development is that it is not zero-sum . Rapid progress in other parts of the world does not mean a decline in already-developed countries, though that is what is more or less happening at present. We have been given a great gift by the exponential rate at which technology improves, undergirded by that old standby, Moore's Law. As the speeds and power of hardware improve, we can do more with software. With better software we can design better and more efficient vehicles and buildings and cities and healthcare systems and chemical plants. Despite all our optimism, tech is no panacea. There are real and troubling questions emerging globally about the impact of tech on jobs, for example. It seems more and more likely that while technological progress improves productivity, global GDP, and aggregate social wealth, it will replace more jobs than it creates. Separately, security concerns are growing almost as fast as new technological capabilities. We can see a new world of efficiency and connectedness coming into view. But there is the real risk it could be undermined or even stopped by those who do not want global prosperity⎯be they criminals, terrorists, or renegade governments. But if all of us who believe in technology’s promise organize our voices more effectively, and work together to understand and exploit its macro impact, there should be wonderful days ahead for the world. Our job is to keep pointing a big neon arrow towards technology as an underutilized tool. There are plenty of reasons to be an optimist in a pessimistic time.

In Defense Of The Stylus Posted: 11 Nov 2011 02:06 PM PST A little while back, I got an email from Atmel, one of the leading touchscreen makers, asking if I wanted to check out their latest creation: a new active stylus that works with an improved touchscreen, for stylus actions alongside normal finger-touches and technologies like palm rejection. I passed, because to be honest, it didn’t sound very exciting. It has shown up at a few other websites, though, and I thought (slightly apologetically) that I should at least watch the video. I did. And — it’s not very exciting. Yet despite being a third-class citizen in our world of capacitive touchscreens, being publicly ridiculed by Steve Jobs, and generally being considered a nuisance, the stylus isn’t something we should relegate to the company of floppy disks and CRT monitors just yet. Here’s why we can’t write it off. The first styli, strictly speaking, were used by the Romans, since they invented the word. But cuneiform writing was performed with a primitive stylus as well, and certainly it was used before then, though they were probably used more for scraping marrow from mammoth bones or the like. The point is they’ve been around for a long time because they have always offered certain advantages. They still offer them now. First, a stylus amplifies your input. With a stylus you can make quick and precise movements of a number of sizes. Ever wonder why nobody writes longhand with their finger? By amplifying small but precise movements that can be done rapidly, handwriting was made possible in the first place, as well as things like detailed drawings and paintings. Even if you’re drawing in the dirt, you do it with a stick. Second, it dampens your input. This seeming contradiction is at the heart of why a stylus, pen, brush, or what have you is so powerful. While it allows you to amplify the movements you make by extending their effective range, it also allows for more precise control by utilizing the gamma motoneuron system. This is (if I remember correctly) a sort of global tension control in your motor system that allows you to ratchet up the tension in lots of muscles in order to have more precise control over them. Have you ever noticed that you were unconsciously clenching your jaw or tightening your neck muscles while performing an action that required great precision and concentration? That’s the gamma system’s effects spilling over onto adjacent systems while it ups the quality of your hand’s movements. We use this system while we write and draw; haven’t you ever noticed how tightly some people grip their pen or pencil? By overshooting the tension required, the gamma system allows for tiny adjustments and quick but exact actions. The fine controls of our hands and fingers, however, are designed more around gripping and applying various amounts of pressure, not making tiny movements. Third, you can see what’s under the stylus. This is essential to artists, of course, but it also completes a simple visual feedback loop in which you can tell what you’re touching. With a fingertip, past a certain point it’s guesswork. You see the button, you move your finger, and then you hope. But with a stylus, pen, or cursor, you see the button, you see where your control point is, you move it closer, you see it’s closer, you move it on, you see it on, and you click, or write a check mark, or tap. You can see that these advantages aren’t just, say, 20th-century advantages, for generations that needed pen and paper to record things. A surgeon uses a sharp stylus to perform surgery. A painter uses a soft stylus to make strokes. We all use stylii with special tips to screw in screws, flip eggs, eat chinese food. The stylus isn’t a holdover from an earlier age; it’s a fundamental add-on to human physiology. So why did Jobs mock it and leave it behind? For some time before the iPhone came out, the stylus was used because it was the only option. Capacitive screens were too expensive, or not precise enough. Resistive screens offered a compelling alternative to d-pad-based navigation, and the best way to interact with resistive screens is a stylus, not your fingertip. Jobs wasn’t ragging on the stylus, he was ragging on an old solution to a problem, a solution people hadn’t bothered updating. The uses and form factors of mobile phones are such that a stylus isn’t the best solution when it isn’t the only solution; a fingertip serves much better in most cases. But there are just as many cases, as with the mouse and the trackpad, where the opposite is true. Think about the Courier and the Noteslate, both of which generated a froth of enthusiasm despite not being real. The idea was a sort of next-generation paper notebook, stylus and all. You wrote things, you circled things, you touched them with your finger if that worked, you used the stylus if that worked. Some might say it was more of a throwback than a look forward, a product that clung to outdated notions of how we interact with information. Outdated as opposed to when – now? Does this imaginary interlocutor think that in 20 years, we’ll all still be using 10-inch glass screens, running our fingers across them, doing pinch-to-zoom? This excellent “brief” rant on interaction design points out just how shortsighted today’s devices are: entirely abstract, using next to no natural inputs or gestures, and totally inflexible. Seeing the things cooked up with a Kinect suggest a fusion of the virtual and the real that makes a tablet’s flat, static window look positively primitive. But clearly, to return to the topic at hand, Atmel’s state of the art touch solution isn’t what we’ve been waiting for. An improvement to be sure, but it’s a far cry from the level of detail possible with a Bic and a sheet of paper, and until the stylus and screen pass that level of usefulness, the applications are limited (though it will likely work nicely with Windows 8). What needs to happen before the stylus becomes truly relevant again? One thing I saw earlier this year at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona was a touch system by Atmel’s arch-enemy Synaptics that fairly blew me away. A capacitive screen that could detect both conductive and non-conductive items (say, a gloved hand or stylus), but passively, unlike Atmel and others’ active solutions (this has its own substantial shortcomings). Latency was also reduced by integrating the touch sensor with the display sensor. You have probably noticed that when you write something with a pen, the line appears immediately. The fact that it doesn’t do so when you use a stylus on a touchscreen is probably more disorienting than you think; you can’t error-check your own small movements at your own rate, you must wait for the machine to catch up. Low latency is a step in the right direction, and it’s one place where high-Hz display rates could be truly useful. Resolution is also important, as in so many other things to do with exactness and design. When I draw a short line and the aliasing makes it look like a tiny lightning bolt, I feel like giving up. The rumors of an iPad with a vastly higher resolution are nice, but they don’t help the stylus, since Apple has inoculated itself, rightly or wrongly, against stylus support for the rest of time. But Apple doesn’t make the displays, and these mega-resolution screens could help make the stylus worth using again. The touch ecosystem and the people within it need to realize their limitations, as well. Right now finger-based interaction is still novel, still being fleshed out (so to speak), optimized, still being applied to different models. But we’re already bumping into the borders beyond which this kind of touch, the iPhone kind of touch, will be useless. For typing, it has already proven a painful technology to use — so we have an accessory, not unlike the stylus we have mocked, for this basic act of computing. For any kind of actions that require precision, such as illustration, the capacitive screen is also useless, failing as it does to provide that feedback loop. Our interactions with tablets and phones are for the most part coarse and inexact, and entire UIs (witness iOS, which some would argue falls more on the side of simplicity than elegance) have been designed around this fact. We’ve gotten around some of these problems with clever little tricks, and we’re constantly trying to invent new ones to expand the capabilities of what must be recognized as a very limited interaction method. Sooner or later someone will stand on a stage, as Jobs did, and ask “why are we still pointing and jabbing at our icons and applications like kindergarteners doing finger-painting?” And maybe he’ll show us, as Jobs did, how long we’d been rationalizing our poor choice in interface. Will it be Atmel on stage? Synaptics? E-Ink? Microsoft? Whoever it is, it won’t be for a while. The stylus today, let us admit, is impractical for a number of reasons, both design and technical, as Atmel’s video and every device available shows. But as touch goes from novel to normal to mundane, the angst of users stymied by its limitations will grow, and with that angst, demand for something new. The mouse rode a wave in the 80s. The iPhone rode the wave a few years ago, leaving the mouse behind. The next one will leave the iPhone behind, an artifact of the late aughts. What of the stylus? If we have truly exhausted the its applications, it won’t return, but I think it’s manifest that we have not. That was a long and winding rationalization for a perhaps irrational love of the stylus. But I firmly believe that its days are not done. Its weaknesses became a problem before its strengths were given a chance to shine. The stylus is as ageless as the wedge, the wheel, the projectile. We’ve reinvented all these multiple times. When technology catches up yet again to the pen, the pen will be ready.

Why Mobile Flash Died: An Adobe Employee Speaks Out Posted: 11 Nov 2011 01:53 PM PST Adobe’s mobile Flash efforts have recently gone the way of the western black rhino, and Principal Product Manager Mike Chambers isn’t too pleased with how the Adobe chose to break the news. In fact, he feels so strongly about it that he’s offered up his own clarifications on the matter. “Our goal was to be very clear about WHAT we were doing, but in doing so, we didn't pay enough attention to explaining WHY we were doing it,” he said on his blog today. Fair enough — the official Adobe announcement was pretty abrupt. So, now that everyone’s settled down a bit, why did Adobe really pull the plug? Well, for one thing, Adobe realized that Flash would never reach the same kind of ubiquity in the smartphone space that its enjoys on PCs. Adobe’s own statistics indicate that the company’s Flash Player is installed on a staggering 99% of all Internet-enabled PCs. Meanwhile, their smartphone penetration numbers were considerably less impressive. To absolutely no one’s surprise, the iPhone played a crucial role here. With Steve Jobs and company having fully turned their backs on Flash, further attempts by Adobe to push Flash onto other smartphones would mean that developers would have to craft online experiences for two opposing tribes. That’s where Adobe’s focus on HTML5 comes in. Mobile browsers have grown to be incredibly savvy in recent years, a far cry from the dumbed-down WAP views we previously had to deal with. Considering that most major mobile browsers pack support for HTML5, trying to shoehorn Flash into the mobile content mix is fighting an uphill battle. According to Chambers, “on mobile devices HTML5 provides a similar level of ubiquity that the Flash Player provides on the desktop. It is the best technology for creating and deploying rich content to the browser across mobile platforms.” There’s also the issue of how users consume content on their devices. Smartphone users have the concept of “apps” drilled into their heads before they can even take their phones home, so it’s no surprise that they’ll turn to their respective app stores if they want to play a game. I sincerely doubt that average customers knew (or cared) that their devices played well with Flash, save for a few highly specialized circumstances. Lastly, it was a simple matter of manpower. Adobe has been a fan of HTML5 for quite a while now, and it’s stronger position in the mobile space has become more and more apparent. Rather than devote time and energy to working on a platform that 1) needed to be tweaked for different OSs and hardware configurations and 2) would never be as widely-used as they would like, Adobe decided that those resources would be better spent furthering HTML5 development. So, there we have it. Mobile Flash died a quiet death, which is perhaps fitting because it never made much of a splash while it was alive. Here’s to Adobe moving on to bigger and better things.

Yes, Android’s New Face Unlock Feature Can Be Fooled With A Photo Posted: 11 Nov 2011 12:50 PM PST Within minutes of our big ol’ Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) demo video going online, one question barraged my inbox: could the new facial recognition-based unlocking feature be tricked with a photo? Google’s response on this was anything but solid. They kind of tip-toed around it when I asked, saying just that the feature “will only get better”. Meanwhile, Google’s Tim Bray implied that they’d most certainly thought of that. At long last, someone has managed to answer the question with video proof. Turns out: Yep, photos work. Check out the video below, courtesy of Malaysia’s SoyaCincau : As a few folks have doubted the tester’s methods, they went on to add: While some of you think that it is a trick and I had set the Galaxy Nexus up to recognise the picture, I assure you that the device was set up to recognise my face. Of course, this is still Beta software we’re talking about. The Galaxy Nexus won’t ship until later this month — so if this portrait trickery does work consistently (and this wasn’t just a fluke), there’s no saying it’ll still work in the final software. Third party facial unlocking systems have done things like requiring certain facial expressions or waiting for the user to blink — which, while not infallible, at least makes sneaking in more complicated. In the mean time: if you’re carrying anything sensitive on your phone (and really, with all of the accounts we sync to our smartphones these days, who isn’t?) it’s probably a good idea to avoid using face unlock as anything but a neat party trick.

Rovio Opens The World’s First Angry Birds Store In Finland Posted: 11 Nov 2011 12:03 PM PST Look out, Sanrio. After dominating the mobile world for just shy of two years (haters be damned), Angry Birds is movin’ on up into its own retail space. While Rovio plans on opening up shop in China (where the brand is huge, but next to all of the available merchandise is fake) sometime next year, this first store is on their home turf in Helsinki, Finland. It’s got a massive slingshot! Sadly, sad slingshot doesn’t appear to actually… you know, sling. Presumably because they’d rather not have an 8 year old fire his shoes through the storefront window, the slingshot instead acts as a swinging bench for those lookin’ for a new Facebook profile shot. Of course, it’s probably worth noting that the variety of Angry Birds wares available on Day 1 isn’t exactly.. diverse. They’ve got the Angry Birds cookbook (yep), and the Angry Birds pencil/eraser school kit… but for the most part, the shelves are stacked edge to edge with the line of plush toys they launched last year. Come on, Peter: Get to ripping off those pirates! Best of luck to all of the employees on not going absolutely insane after hearing the Angry Birds theme for the 37,000th time.

Google Employee Nigel Tufnel Sends Invites For Mysterious Android Event November 16 Posted: 11 Nov 2011 11:49 AM PST As you’ve likely heard by now, today is Nigel Tufnel day. Tufnel, who revolutionized the music world in the early-80s with the introduction of volume knobs that go to 11 (rather than a mere 10), is being honored worldwide because of today’s date: 11/11/11. It’s a nice gesture, but Tufnel’s current employer, Google, apparently isn’t giving him the day off: he just sent me an email invite to a special event that’s being held next week in Los Angeles. Thankfully Google’s at least let him inject some personality into the invite: the top of the invite fittingly says “These Go To Eleven” at the top, though it gives little indication as to what to expect. The event will be held November 16,and will be livestreamed at YouTube.com/Android — which, presumably, means that it’s going to be Android related. My hunch? I think we’re going to see some of the fruits of Google’s @Home project, which was announced at Google I/O this year. @Home is the Android platform for connecting ‘real-world’ devices, like speakers, lights, and all sorts of other things up with Android — sort of like Apple’s AirPlay, but for all kinds of applications beyond audio and video. Or, as the comments point out, it probably would make more sense for this to be related to Google Music, which is rumored to be getting new features over the current version, including the ability to actually buy songs. I still want my Android speakers, though. Here’s a video embed of a documentary covering Tufnel and his band, Spinal Tap, in which he explains the origins of his 11-digit knobs:

iFixit Tears Apart The Droid RAZR, Reveals Incredible Innards Posted: 11 Nov 2011 11:32 AM PST The Droid RAZR was only just released today, but silly things like release dates don’t mean anything to the folks at iFixit. In a strange departure from their usual process, they’ve taken a giant knife to Motorola’s latest and greatest to show us all exactly what’s lurking under the hood. Photos like this have limited appeal, I’m sure, but it’s a perfect opportunity to feast your eyes on a Qualcomm MDM6600 baseband chip or a Skyworks 77449 power amplifier module if you haven’t already. But seriously, if you thought the RAZR looked good on the outside, check out what Motorola had to do to cram all that good stuff inside. Regardless of how you may feel about the RAZR, iFixit’s teardown manages to illustrate how smart Motorola had to be with engineering and component placement. Also revealed in the teardown is the RAZR’s massive 1750 mAh battery. As expected, it’s incredibly thin, and it’s nearly as big the RAZR’s entire backplate. Strangely, that didn’t keep our review unit from being a little fussy when it came to power consumption. Now that I’ve met my daily quota for circuit board lust, you’ll have to excuse me: now I need to decide if I want to buy one of these things.

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