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- Today’s Google Doodle Is An Actual Turing Machine
- How To Get 100,000 Facebook Likes For Your Blog Fan Page
- Laocoön
- Only Messi Can Save Us Now
- Was I Too Hard On Klout’s Joe Fernandez?
- Pharma’s Huge Threat (and Opportunity): mRx
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| Today’s Google Doodle Is An Actual Turing Machine Posted: 23 Jun 2012 08:39 AM PDT  Today’s Google Doodle is a working Turing machine that contains six puzzles. Sophia Foster-Dimino on Google’s Doodle team built the app in honor of Alan Turing’s 100th birthday. What’s a Turing machine? It’s not an actual machine, per se, but a thought experiment that allowed for the advent of digital computing. …an unlimited memory capacity obtained in the form of an infinite tape marked out into squares, on each of which a symbol could be printed. At any moment there is one symbol in the machine; it is called the scanned symbol. The machine can alter the scanned symbol and its behavior is in part determined by that symbol, but the symbols on the tape elsewhere do not affect the behaviour of the machine. However, the tape can be moved back and forth through the machine, this being one of the elementary operations of the machine. Any symbol on the tape may therefore eventually have an innings. Turing went on to head the team at Bletchley Park that decoded Germany’s Enigma encryption machine, thereby turning the tide of the war. The British government subsequently sentenced him for “gross indecency” – homosexuality – and offered him prison or chemical castration. He chose the latter and killed himself two years later. UK PM Gordon Brown posthumously apologized to Turing in 2009. Let’s take a moment to remember Alan Turing, the inventor of the modern computer and a persecuted intellectual who, in the end, gave us everything we use every day.
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| How To Get 100,000 Facebook Likes For Your Blog Fan Page Posted: 23 Jun 2012 08:00 AM PDT  Editor's note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and entrepreneur. He is Managing Director of Formula Capital and has written ten books. His latest books are I Was Blind But Now I See and 40 Alternatives to College. You can follow him on Twitter @jaltucher. I wanted to have 100,000 Facebook fans for my blog. I don't have a product to sell. I'm not trying to get advertisers on my blog. I'm not even trying to get more speaking gigs because of my blog. But I believe in the message of my blog and I enjoy having an audience for it. So I wanted to expand that audience. We have entered the "Choose Yourself" era. No longer do you have to wait for the big media companies to reach down from the heavens and bless you with a column, a book advance, a TV show, a job, a career, money, or even customers. In 2008 the tide came in, the financial system collapsed, and we saw that the myth of corporate safety was just another example of the brainwashing that we had undergone since we were kids. [See also: "Self-publishing your own book is the new business card"] Now, if you want to spread the truths of your brand, of your ideas, of your products, of your message, you have to create your own platform, you have to spread it across all media, and then you have to manage each medium differently. I can't just link my blog posts on Facebook. Or tweet links to my posts on Twitter. Your message has to be spread across the entire digital landscape and treat each medium as its own channel, with your message, formatted, designed, and massaged to have the greatest impact in that particular channel. For each medium, you have to ask: why this medium? For Facebook the answer is obvious but is so different from prior media that most people don't think about it. In general, if you want a fan (or a customer) to "Like" you even if he has never heard of you, you are going to have to pay to reach him. BUT, on Facebook, as opposed to any other medium (other than twitter) you pay ONCE and then forever after you can market to that Fan for free. You can't do that with TV, for instance. Budweiser has to reach the same fans each year with another $4mm commercial. But on Facebook, once they are a fan, then anything you post goes on their newsfeed for at least three hours. More on that in a second. So here's what I did. It was a three step process. Here's my Facebook fan growth in the month that I pursued this. It basically took about 30 days to get 100,000 fans. Just to experiment, I then tried a slightly smaller approach on my wife's very popular yoga blog and she went from 0 to 37,000 fans during those few weeks. While there will always be some churn in Fans, it is much smaller than you would think. It’s relatively rare for people to Like and then un-Like. 1) Many people around the world have no idea who I am (this is hard for me to accept but it’s reality). Even though I get a lot of readers to my blog, these were not the people I necessarily wanted to reach. I wanted to reach new people who didn't know me. So I used FanNewsCast.com to set up these tabs on my Facebook fan page. (see below) This made my fan page not only a source about my own blog (which most of the seven billion people on the planet could care less about) but a source for the top trending stories at any given moment for Innovation, Inspiration, Healthy Lifestyle, and Entrepreneurship. Then, even if someone was not interested in me, they could still Like my page and always know they can come back to see these top trending stories in their favorite topics for any moment in time. FanNewsCast could then make ads targeting people interested in these topics. So then I would know that there was a high likelihood these same people would also like posts coming from jamesaltucher.com. Then, FanNewsCast came up with ads that targeted the friends of people who were already connected to my blog but specifically not the people connected to my blog. I made FanNewsCast an admin on my ads and they developed the ads. Essentially, it reached all the friends of friends of my blog, which means they targeted millions of people. The ads would point to the tab pages that included the top trending stories about inspiration, entrepreneurship, etc because they knew people would be interested in these stories. They also worked with the agency I hired (see #3) to help them update my page three times a day with the best material I have. Each of those friends of friends would see "XYZ Likes James Altucher's Blog" in the ad, where XYZ was someone already connected to my blog. This is sort of like dating. If the woman's friend already approves of you before you even meet the woman, you've already overcome a major hurdle. Exact same principle. These ads were mostly CPC ads. Using this approach got me to the first 50,000 Fans. Overall, I ended up paying about 7 cents per click (because friends of friends of friends would start seeing their friends like my fan page and so they would then Like it so I was getting, in some cases, greater than 100% returns). 2) I next used a company called Optim.al. They did several things for me: - They set up a mobile ad campaign which got me mobile users. The clickthru rates on ads were as high as 90% on some of their ads. It is much more effective to advertise to a mobile user. They also found demographic data differentiating the iPhone users (who clicked through at a much higher rate) and the Android users and were then able to optimize the ads to target them more efficiently (“efficiently” means “cheaper and faster”). - I wanted to bring down my cost per click even lower. And I was hungry for speed. Optim.al determines what words in an ad, in general, causes people to click and causes people to "Like". So they started putting together ad campaigns that used those words. Then they would do a lot of testing: putting the words in the front of the ad, in the back of the ad, linking to specific posts on the page, linking to the whole page, experimenting with different pictures in the ad, etc. They also changed my ads from CPC to CPM to bring cost down since they were specifically optimizing and targeting the type of people who would click on a CPM ad. Each ad campaign probably had four or five separate factors they were testing and they would start new campaigns each day. Within hours they would drop the ads with slower and more expensive click-thrus and up the budgets on the ads that were working. In the last few days before I hit 100,000 I was adding 10,000 fans per day probably at a cost of 3 or 4 cents per Like. - Right now they are doing more geo-targeting so I pick up Fans from specific cities. Like New York City. They have optimized which approaches work best for each city. Targeting a specific city is more expensive but now with my first goal achieved I’m taking my time and experimenting more with what works. I am fine, in general, with all English speakers. This is in part because I am not selling a product but I believe in my specific message and ideas and I like to get those ideas across to anyone who will listen. Altogether, I've probably had less than 1/10 of 1% unlike my page during this process (I wrote at first, "unlike me". Freudian slip or perhaps too close an identification with my social media persona as opposed to who the real me is). 3) All of this required a lot of maintenance. I like to focus mostly on writing my blog and I needed help with maintenance on several levels. So I hired TheSocialPag.es to do my daily maintenance and here is what they did: - Managing the content of the page day to day. For this I need to have someone find the best quotes from all my blogs, put those quotes in an image, and put them out at the ideal times that both FanNewsCast and optim.al had concluded were the best times for my page to post to maximize on "Likes" for the image. For example: the below image on the right got a lot of PTAT (‘people talking about this” in Facebook lingo): [See also "How Kissing Ruined My Life", the post that image is from] Why an image as opposed to a link to my blog? One reasons is I want the page itself to be its own channel for me and not just an extension of my blog. The other reasons was that I wanted to improve my "edgerank" score. Facebook tends to favor images, text, links in that order when deciding what to put on a user's fan page. Links are last because they would prefer people not leave the site. So I wanted to be seen by as many fans as possible so more people would be "talking about" (commenting, liking, or sharing) my "story". This, in turn, increases my edgerank further. It becomes a virtuous cycle. A lot of theSocialPag.es work also involved A/B testing. Was it better to post an image or text? Was it better to have an image with text or a more artistic image? What time of day, etc. They worked closely with FanNewsCast and optim.al to figure all of this out. They also then set up an email subscription service for me using Mailchimp. Again, I’m trying to use the Fan page as it’s own channel but to also interlink with all of my other channels. The outcome of posting a signup image on my Facebook fan page for the email service was that I got a quick few thousand signups, mostly from the US. So regardless of where most of my “Fans” were coming from, it was quality users responding to an offer. (the above image linked to this and proved very successful) They then would pin all images to my Pinterest boards. They also took the results from my Twitter Q&A posts and would update Quora questions with them. Again, they took every channel and updated it for me. I also use them for technical maintenance on the blog along with the guys from Stocktwits, who host my blog. Everyone who is saying "Facebook will eventually die just like Myspace" simply doesn't understand Facebook and how it has already gone so far beyond a tipping point there is no turning back. Facebook is a scrubbed-clean mini-Internet that will soak up large ad budgets that were intended for mainstream traditional media. With one billion users and growing people say "the growth has matured. It will slow down now." (See also (the post from the left image above): “25 Ways to Make a Trillion Dollars“) But examples like mine shows that it won't. - Every company will do a strategy similar to the above to get Fans for their brand - Many bloggers will apply the strategies outlined above. Why not? You can do it at your own pace and at your own budget. In fact, if you want to be a part of this "Choose Yourself" era you will have to do it. Similar to the reasons why one should self-publish a book on Amazon, or participate on G+ and twitter and even China's Weibo (where I have an intern helping me maintain my "presence" and engagement there). Nobody is going to choose you until YOU choose you. - Facebook continues to roll out new ways to advertise. Not only for mobile, which is fairly new but now I can promote more individual posts. When you post on your fan page it will hit, on average, 16% of your audience. This has always been the case. But now, with a small budget of $10-$50 you can make sure your post will hit up to 75% of your audience or even more. I had one post exposed to over a million people because of the Shares. Both of the posts in the above image, I separately promoted. This applies for any page with less than 100,000 Fans. Once you hit 100,000 fans there are other techniques but similar budgets. And I haven't even begun to scratch the surface of what I could do with my page. I feel like it's TV in 1955. The entire world is open to me. What other medium can I potentially target a potential 700 million people (as one of my ads targeted) in an ad with a budget as low as $200. Altogether, my entire ad budget over the last month was about $6000. Then maybe $2000 more for the maintenance and upkeep. The ad budget includes also promoting individual posts, which I didn’t need to do to get more fans but I used to get more engagement. I feel like I’m just now beginning to fly with this fan page. And, of course, the final outcome:
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| Posted: 23 Jun 2012 06:00 AM PDT  Suppose you dropped your phone — a real fall, like from the second story — and it broke. You’re picking up the pieces, cursing and trying to think of the last time you backed up your contacts, when you notice something. Deep within the phone’s hardware, hidden from everyday use, you find a message — etched right onto the chassis. What kind of message? Let’s say you found a Darwin fish, or the letters YHWH? Or perhaps something a little more difficult to decipher — a code or symbol of some kind, not an inventory number, but still something meant to be seen and read? What would you make of it? This isn’t actually a hypothetical situation or something out of a Neal Stephenson book. Apple has actually done this — and the symbol they’ve chosen is as arcane and ominous as it is unmistakable. That’s the symbol at the top of the post, in case you haven’t guessed. Do you recognize it? No cheating, now. You don’t need any tools to identify it. It’s not a code, not binary or anything. Do you give up? It’s a glider. IterationConway’s “Game of Life” is one of the true legends of software, and a lasting monument to the power of procedural generation. The game is “played” on a grid of cells that turn on or off according to a few simple rules that imitate the real-life conditions of isolation, generation, and overpopulation. Each “step” applies these rules to every cell and the result is usually a very different-looking grid. Random messes of on and off cells will resolve themselves into shapes, expanding or contracting masses, islands, patterns, and so on. It was played on some of the earliest computers, requiring as it did very little computing power and being both entertaining and mathematically edifying. It has produced some surprisingly complex behaviors, and is Turing complete. (If you’re curious, it is available for free in many places on the web, and indeed can be played on paper or with rocks, in the dirt) One of the things the game produced was a number of arrangements of cells that could be relied on to propagate in a certain way. Some would spin, some would explode, some would neatly disappear. And some would travel; these were known as spaceships. There was one very simple spaceship, made of just five cells, that would move forever in a diagonal fashion. This was called a glider. The glider could arguably be called the mascot of the Game of Life — that is, if the game ever needed one. It represents both the emergent complexity of the game and its extremely simple core nature. There are certain symbols that are unintelligible to many, but instantly recognizable by a certain set of people, especially in certain contexts. A triangle stacked on the apices of two other triangles will to billions look like — some triangles (or a young Sierpinski fractal). But to practically anyone born in the 70s or 80s, it’s the Triforce, and it represents Nintendo, old school gaming, childhood, and so on. Or the number 42: just what comes between 41 and 43 for some, but for others, it’s a very important answer. Certainly there are fewer who would find themselves affected by the arrival, as it were, of a glider outside of the Game of Life. But people who learned to code in assembly on monochrome screens, who soldered new contacts when the old ones burnt out, who count their Amigas among their treasured possessions, in short people who loved computing before you had to love computing to get by, — to these people, the glider is unmistakable. It is to them that the glider inside Apple’s computer is addressed, because it is only to them that it is even intelligible. But there’s something else. Still lifeThe glider, it was mentioned, is made from five cells. If you’ll scroll up, you’ll find that there is one more than that in Apple’s little frozen game. A stray cell, two rows over. Curious — what happens when you put this into the Game of Life? The glider dies. Yes, things can die too in the Game of Life. Groups of cells can reduce themselves to nothing, though this only happens under certain conditions and should perhaps be likened to extinction rather than death. More commonly, constellations of cells end up stagnating in shapes that could certainly be called stable, but are as distant from the constantly changing, fascinating dance of dots that defines the game as they can be without disappearing altogether. Technically the glider becomes a known static shape. But for this active and useful little craft with its wiggly diagonal propagation and useful character, it is as good as death. Etched permanently into the body of one of the most advanced computers ever made, then, is a symbol of experimentation, tradition, and potential — being killed. Can this really be the meaning of the symbol? Would Apple, or someone within Apple, really create such an Easter egg, loaded with strange and somewhat disturbing symbology? A tiny tableau frozen in a perpetual state of doom, like that of Laocoön and his sons? (His story is apt, even prophetic) There isn’t enough information to lay it on Apple’s doorstep just yet. For one thing, there’s just the one Retina display that was taken apart, and maybe it is a tracking code that just happens to be in the shape of glider. Or maybe it wasn’t Apple that did it, but a sentimental coder at the aluminum mill. Or maybe the interpretation is wrong, and whoever drilled that doomed glider into the chassis was playing the Game at a higher level than this writer. Or maybe they had no idea. Or maybe it’s deliberate, and someone is trying to say that this is the end of the line. But then who is that someone? Am I digging too deeply into the meaning of this symbol? No. Symbols are like fractals, in that they bear almost infinite scrutiny. It is difficult to find the bottom of a symbol, because symbols are abysses of culture — attractors, not artifacts. The dying glider might be looked at from a hundred different angles and interpreted in a hundred different ways. But whether it can be said to have significance in relation to Apple, the current trends in technology and culture, and the philosophy of consumption — to decide that is beyond the scope of this article, since the only evidence is the existence of the symbol in history and on this device. What does it signify? Unless an answer falls out of the sky, this dying glider will remain an enigma: too purposeful to be meaningless, yet not explicit enough to be meaningful. But whether it turns out to be a manufacturing error or a declaration of war, it is not wrong to contemplate, though our contemplations be moot. As the nameless narrator of Poe’s “The Assignation” apostrophises his idealistic former comrade:
That it is food for thought is enough — that it has the potential to be subtly terrible is enough. For that matter, that it is an interesting history is enough. Read it how you will, and draw your own conclusions. But if you will, a moment of silence for the doomed glider.
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| Posted: 23 Jun 2012 02:00 AM PDT  What’s wrong with this picture? It’s 2012, cheap broadband is ubiquitous in the developed world, and TV still isn’t dead. In fact it’s thriving. Sure, for the first time ever, Nielsen says more people watch videos on the Internet than on a TV–albeit barely–but if you look at how much time is spent on the two, there’s no comparison: TV utterly dominates. Which explains why, again according to Nielsen, more money is spent on TV advertising than all other ad platforms combined. A few doomsayers say the TV industry “may be starting to collapse” and that excessive production costs are its weak spot. Yeah, if only. Television as constituted today makes no sense at all; it’s a kludged-up legacy system that’s enormously painful and expensive to maintain. But TV’s entrenched economic interests and cultural inertia are so pathological that even HBO GO wouldn’t make sense as a standalone app–as HBO confirms–and the rumors of a brand-new Apple TV ecosystem were, alas, dead wrong. Sure, YouTube, Netflix, and Hulu are mighty powers in their own right, but if even nigh-omnipotent Apple has given up, what hope do they have? Funny you should ask. I just happen to have an answer. For starters, they could ask Rupert Murdoch, who singlehandedly disrupted the TV industry in the 1990s, when it was even more powerful. He’s a man not without his flaws–when Dennis Potter, the great British TV writer, was diagnosed with cancer, he named it “Rupert”–but in the mid-1990s he defeated the invincible Goliaths of television in both the USA and the UK with a mighty sling named sports. Many, many techies are virulently anti-sports. Maybe that’s why so many of us don’t realize their importance. But where sports fans lead, the viewing public will follow. That’s what Murdoch proved with Fox in the USA and Sky in the UK. I’m (mostly) a huge sports fan, and take it from me, live Internet sports video coverage is terrible–most of the time. But two years ago I caught a glimpse of how great it could be: when I was living in Canada, the CBC streamed every single game of the World Cup live, free-to-air, in high quality. It was terrific. But until that kind of sports programming is regularly available on the Internet, cutting the cord will simply not be an option for hundreds of millions of people. Netflix and YouTube are pouring money into original programming, but instead they should have gone hunting for the biggest elephants of all: the NFL (in America) and European Champions League (elsewhere). Alas, in December the NFL re-upped its TV deals until 2022. The deals “will ensure the NFL will stay on free television for another 11 years”–meaning the NFL will stay on television for another 11 years, and we’ll be stuck with these antediluvian legacy “networks” and “channels” for at least that long. O disintermediation, where is thy sting? But America is not the world. Elsewhere, it’s soccer that matters, and the Champions League rights are only being sold for three years at a time. Some TV entity or another will win them this time around, but maybe, come 2015, YouTube will splash out and buy those rights, and knock the TV industry right on its ear. One can hope. I look forward to one day watching Lionel Messi‘s magic as shown by a 21st Century industry rather than a 20th Century dinosaur. Image credit: thesportreview.com
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| Was I Too Hard On Klout’s Joe Fernandez? Posted: 23 Jun 2012 01:06 AM PDT  I like Joe Fernandez a lot, more than I like most people. He’s a true entrepreneur and badass, asking specifically to be onstage with me at LeWeb London because he knew that I had serious misgivings about his product, Klout. He told me he wanted a challenge and to put himself outside his comfort zone, both before and after the interview. Cool, anyone who’s not scared of being in the hot seat garners my immediate esteem. So what was the result of a conversation between two people who respect the (red) pants off of each other? "The hardest grilling I've seen at a LeWeb conference in over five years," wrote one audience member. Apparently the talk was so painful it led to countless critical tweets, multiple synopsis posts with titles like “Klout CEO gets sauteed in London,” “Klout clouted at Le Web” and allegations that I “broiled” Fernandez out of some sort of personal vendetta. Both Joe and I were dumbfounded at the reaction afterwards. I’ve also realized this weird dichotomy about being a female interviewer after doing a bunch of these things: If you smile and are nice people think you’re being flirty. If you are serious and ask pointed questions, people think you’re being a bitch. You can’t win. But, though a lot of audience feedback about this specific interview leaned towards the latter option, Joe and I actually had a lot of fun onstage and I for one learned a lot and thought he was authentic and sincere. ”The story of Klout is me and the team not being smart enough to realize how challenging what we’re doing is and charging straight ahead into this crazy ambition,” Joe explained. Sound familiar? You can’t say October 26th [The Kloutocalypse] in our office without people flinching,” he went on, “[But] it bonded everyone much tighter. It fuels us to work harder and build better things. We love the challenge and the naysayers.” Inspiring words, from someone whose concept of a world where text-based social communication is rewarded stemmed from the harsh reality of having his jaw wired shut for three months. So no, I’m not the “sexy bar gurl [sic] disinterested in nerdy guy,” I’m a fellow traveler who wants to help someone else with an ambitious vision execute as efficiently as possible. Do you guys think I was too harsh on Joe here? Be as honest as possible in the comments, and don’t worry about offending me; This job makes your skin so thick it’s more like a peel.
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| Pharma’s Huge Threat (and Opportunity): mRx Posted: 22 Jun 2012 10:00 PM PDT  Editor's note: This guest post was written by Dave Chase, the CEO of Avado.com, a patient portal & relationship management company that was a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist. Previously he was a management consultant for Accenture's healthcare practice and founder of Microsoft's Health platform business. You can follow him on Twitter @chasedave. It was only a matter of time before healthcare providers would start prescribing mHealth apps as soon as they proved to be as or more effective than prescription drugs. Happtique, a mobile health application store and app management solution startup will launch a trial of mRx. They claim this is the first program to enable doctors to prescribe mHealth apps to patients. mHealth pioneers are calling it an “app formulary” that complements (and competes) with a traditional drug formulary (i.e., the list of approved drugs a clinician can prescribe). Pharma Execs Exhibiting Behavior Similar to Railroad and Newspaper ExecsWhat Pharma Can Learn From the Railroads and IBM outlined a grim future for pharma if they don’t take action. A program such as Happtique’s can be either a huge threat or a huge opportunity depending on what actions they take. I have had several meetings with leaders of pharma companies that are eerily reminiscent of meetings I had in the latter half of the 90′s with newspaper executives. Pharma execs frequently share that when they gather as an industry, they all commiserate with their industry colleagues that their business is, in their words, “effed”. However, when they return to their office “innovation” is little more than small tweaks to existing business models. Like the newspaper execs I observed, the vast majority either seem to not fully believe the consensus about the future or they are simply incapable of marshaling the ability to drive change within their organizations. Whatever the case might be, they are lulled into complacency as they remain hugely profitable and face the reality of dealing with the short-term thinking of Wall Street. I predict most of them will have a final chapter of their career that reads the same as newspaper execs of that era. The chapter title will be “He/she ignored the handwriting on the wall.” I have yet to see a pharma CEO like John Paton who is one of the few newspaper CEOs to fully take advantage of the changed media landscape. In fairness, John Paton took over a bankrupt newspaper chain so it’s relatively easier to make drastic change when an organization is that close to extinction. A cautionary tale for pharma is how IBM swung from their most profitable year to losing $16 billion in just three years. The lesson is that change lurks for awhile and then hits like a freight train. The question is whether pharma will have to wait until they near death or if they can make bold changes before they are in a death spiral like the newspaper or minicomputer/mainframe companies before them. Smart Pharma Will Become Players, Not Just Spectators in Industry DisruptionIt seems that a day doesn’t go by where I don’t hear about some pharma sponsored “app challenge.” While the challenges are a step in the right direction, they are doing the equivalent of providing polite applause from the stands and giving the gladiators (aka startups) some modest rewards for their efforts. “Here you go startup. Job well done. Take this $5,000 check and run along.” For something that could completely annihilate their industry, most app challenges aren’t rounding error in their marketing budgets. In other words, it’s wildly out of proportion to the threat/opportunity. When I am asked for my advice by pharma execs regarding how to drive change and innovation, my primary piece of advice is to get out of the stands and onto the playing field. They should put more skin in the game (both money and people), however it need not be at the same scale as their venture arms. In fact, they could probably get involved with ten companies for the cost of one of their venture investments in biotech. Imagine the learning they could get from the program Happtique is running. One of the benefits of participating in a program like this is pharma would get out of their industry bubble. For the program trial, Happtique is recruiting physician prescribers who treat heart disease, diabetes, and musculoskeletal conditions, as well as physical therapists and trainers to test the technology with health and fitness apps. After a training program, Happtique will track both prescribing processes and patient mRx™ downloads through early summer. "Mobile app prescribing will add an entirely new dimension to my ability to care for patients," said Steven Magid, M.D. of New York-based Hospital for Special Surgery. "The use of Happtique's mRx™ will ultimately improve patients' health." Dr. David Shayvitz, comments in Pills Still Matter; So Does Biology — Managing Expectations About Digital Health about the combination of pills and apps likely being the most effective combination. I agree. Another sage industry commentator, John Moore of Chilmark Research, has interesting analysis in a piece mHealth: There When You Need It. He debunks the myth that lower income people won’t engage with mHealth apps, however two key attributes must be present. First, physicians’ reimbursement needs to be aligned with outcomes (and thus the transition from fee-for-service to fee-for-value that is underway). Second, patients consistently engage if there is someone they are interacting with via the tool such as a nurse. Microsoft’s R&D Experience Instructive for PharmaI’m not an expert in pharma by any means. However, I can see pattern recognition and have seen how one of the few organizations to spend as much on R&D as pharma (Microsoft) can be both a cautionary tale and a guiding light. Over the last 15 years, Microsoft has spent tens of billions on R&D. I would argue there are only two true stand-alone successes that have emerged out of that massive investment — Xbox and Expedia. What was the common thread between these two businesses? Microsoft physically and culturally separated them from the mothership. In Expedia’s case, it also made the most sense to separate them financially. It wasn’t that the Xbox and Expedia teams had people who were any smarter or harder-working than other Microsoft teams. However, the key difference was they were unshackled and unfettered. Rather than having a mission of servicing a legacy business they operate as industry natives in their given sectors. This even included choosing to not use Microsoft’s crown jewel — Windows. Every so-called “innovation” I have heard about at pharma is in service of an existing business. For an industry that has made breathtaking bets on drug investment, pharma is remarkably timid when it comes to the changes coming in healthtech. Just as some of the R&D Microsoft spent was to support and grow existing businesses, pursuing some new tactics in service for the legacy business is a logical thing to do. However, if the objective is to be a market leader of an entirely new industry sector, that isn’t the path to success. The “right” path is to venture down some roads where the outcome isn’t clear and recognize there will be dead-ends. It’s really no different than clinical trials except the winners and losers can be determined much more rapidly. What breakthrough innovation am I missing? I saw Sanofi is selling a glucose meter in Apple stores. That’s a step in the right direction. There must be more given the scale of the pharma industry. I look forward to hearing about them in the comments below. Related articles Strategic Healthcare Investors' Investment Thesis What Pharma Can Learn From the Railroads and IBM
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| After Surviving ABC’s ‘Shark Tank’, Unikey Technologies Raises $1.1M For Smartphone Door Keys Posted: 22 Jun 2012 08:06 PM PDT  Unikey Technologies, a company made known by ABC’s Shark Tank for technology that turns your smartphone into a universal door key, has raised $1.1 million according to an SEC filing. The amount appears to be in addition to a $500,000 equity stake raised from Mark Cuban and Kevin O’Leary earlier this year on the season finale of the program. Once the Unikey locking system is installed in a door, any paired Android, iOS, or BlackBerry device can unlock it. The system is not dependent on an app, but rather the system unlocks the door by simply detecting when the phone is in the immediate vicinity. “As long as I’m in range of the lock, I can control it,” said Unikey founder and CEO Phil Dumas on the show. Cuban and O’Leary were rather enthusiastic about the company and Dumas accepted $500,000 in exchange for two seats on the company’s board and a 40% equity stake. This was after one of the show’s other sharks, Robert Herjavec offered $1,000,000 for a whopping 75% of the company. As Dumas explained on the show, his background is in biometric security and while at Sequiam Corp, helped launch the first mass-market biometric residential deadbolt. As we’ve probably all experienced, biometric security is anything but foolproof. There are a lot of points for potential failure. This led Dumas to develop Unikey as a more reliable and convenient system. With Unikey, a paired phone simply needs to be next to the door to gain access. Plus, the company promises a robust user management system allowing owners to quickly grant and deny access to other phones — there’s even a scheduling system to allow access during only specific times. A standard key still works with the system, too. The Unikey is not yet available for purchase or pre-order. However, there’s a form on the company’s website to reserve a spot in the pre-order line and you may want to put your name down. Unikey tells TechCrunch that they’ve had tens of thousands of sign-ups since appearing on Shark Tank. If you don’t mind dealing with several minutes of ads, you can see Unikey’s Shark Tank footage by clicking to the 28:42 mark. Sorry, the video is U.S. only, but it’s not my fault. Yell at ABC for locking down their videos.
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| Posted: 22 Jun 2012 04:58 PM PDT  Facebook is finally working closely with Apple — on iOS 6 — but it’s also hiring away some of its design talent. The latest is Chris Weeldreyer, who has just left his position as a user interface design manager to become a product design manager at the social network. What will he be doing? “We’re excited to welcome Chris Weeldreyer to Facebook, where he will be a great addition to our growing design team,” Facebook tells us. But we’ve also learned from a source close to the company that he’ll be focused on its mobile products. Another interesting clue is the description in his LinkedIn bio, where he describes himself as a ”[p]roduct designer with experience in both hardware and software product development.” That’s more than eight years of experience… right when Facebook is recruiting hard for a renewed smartphone hardware effort. Here’s some more detail about that, from Nick Bilton at The New York Times in late May: One engineer who formerly worked at Apple and worked on the iPhone said he had met with Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, who then peppered him with questions about the inner workings of smartphones. It did not sound like idle intellectual curiosity, the engineer said; Mr. Zuckerberg asked about intricate details, including the types of chips used, he said. Another former Apple hardware engineer was recruited by a Facebook executive and was told about the company's hardware explorations. …. Facebook is going to great lengths to keep the phone project a secret, specifically not posting job listings on the company's job Web site, but instead going door-to-door to find the right talent for the project. There’s still an open position for a product design manager, as Inside Facebook notes. But rather, as it wrote when it broke the story yesterday, the hiring seems to be separate. Here are a few reasons why. Facebook is quick to update the hiring page (that is, I spent years watching it closely when I was at Inside Facebook, and it was always fast in my experience). The page is still live so it may not be about him, particularly since he made his move official on LinkedIn. Also, the current position doesn’t say anything specific about mobile. Whether or not Weeldreyer is part of some smartphone skunkworks project, he’s also not the first Apple design-side person to go over to Facebook recently. There are only 89 former Apple folks at Facebook, according to available LinkedIn data, but another one of them is Sharon Hwang, who went from being a senior art director to a product designer in March. The overall sense is that Facebook is trying hard to polish the rough edges of its products, and continues to be attractive enough as a workplace that it can get world-class talent.
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| Private Facebook Data Powering Ads Outside Of Facebook — Is The World Ready? Posted: 22 Jun 2012 04:50 PM PDT  Because investors sure are. Facebook’s share price jumped up 3.8% to $33.05 today on news that it’s now showing its ads on Zynga.com in a revenue sharing partnership. Most amazingly, neither the press nor users seem to be freaking out that their private, personal data is now being used to target them with ads outside of Facebook. That means Mark Zuckerberg waited just long enough, proving he’s even smarter than he used to be. Once upon time, Facebook rolled out massive changes to all its users at once, and sometimes it pushed them too early. The news feed would eventually become one of Facebook’s most popular features, but dropping it onto everyone’s home page at once without warning caused uneasiness to snowball and produce “Students Against Facebook News Feed”. And Beacon, often called Facebook’s biggest privacy blunder, is essentially back in the form of Open Graph auto-sharing and it’s helping apps like Socialcam pop up to 83 million monthly users. Oh what a difference a few years makes. Pundits have said for years that Facebook should launch an AdSense-Killer offsite ad network, but it wisely delayed until now. Beyond the meddling of extremists like Europe vs. Facebook, a major privacy scare hasn’t rattled the average Facebook user in quite a long time. The company even emerged from privacy audits by U.S. and European government agencies without having to make changes. With time, many users have come to realize that personal data-targeted ads are actually less annoying because they promote things they might actually want to buy. People are ready to realize that a lack of targeting data is the primary reason ads on the Internet are so annoying. Facebook’s ad network could make them relevant. It’s the right time for off-site ads. And Facebook didn’t suddenly roll out those ads to thousands of sites. It signaled with the Developer Agreement in its S-1 to IPO that it would show ads on Zynga.com, and it made a change to its privacy policy to give it the freedom to show more types of ads off-site. Most importantly, it rolled them out first to Zynga and Zynga alone, a company hundreds of millions of Facebook users have already given their personal data while playing games like FarmVille, CityVille, and its acquired Draw Something. This is the right way to roll out off-site ads. With this careful strategy, Facebook has prepared the world for seeing those little blue-boxed ads all over the Internet. It still might wait months or more to officially launch an ad network. You can bet when it does that first it will be with “trusted sites” — ones that are popular and uncontroversial, before opening it any wider. Now that it’s a public company, Facebook can’t afford to ship something that causes massive backlash. That doesn’t mean it won’t keep innovating and iterating. It will just do it incrementally. Facebook wants you to be more “open”. Open with friends and open to ads. But it’s done swinging the battle axe in the name of the future, waging a war on our ingrained behaviors. Facebook’s new strategy is social by a thousand cuts.
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| Apartment Search Engine PadMapper Gets A Cease-And-Desist From Craigslist, Removes Listings Posted: 22 Jun 2012 04:34 PM PDT  It’s been years since I’ve had to look for an apartment, but in that time multiple friends have sung the praises of PadMapper (TechCrunch alumnus Greg Kumparak is a fan too). Usually, they describe it as a mashup of Google Maps and Craigslist. Starting today, unfortunately, they’ll have to scratch “Craigslist” from the equation. According to an account that creator Eric DeMenthon published on the PadMapper blog, and that he elaborated on over email, Craigslist’s lawyer sent him a cease-and-desist letter earlier this week, demanding that PadMapper take down any postings from Craigslist. The lawyer also sent DeMenthon a mobile license, so he could pay to use the postings in a mobile app. “When I told him that the website was the most important part of PadMapper, and that many millions of people depend on PadMapper to find places, the lawyer said flatly that they don’t license to websites,” DeMenthon says. As a result, DeMenthon is in the process of removing Craigslist postings from the PadMapper site. That seems like a pretty big blow, although PadMapper still includes listings from other sites like Apartments.com, as well as listings posted directly through its PadListings service. I’ve contacted Craigslist for comment and will update this post if I hear back. In the meantime, DeMenthon also sent me a copy of the cease-and-desist, which seems to match-up with his account. The letter says that DeMenthon is in violation of Craigslist’s terms of use, and it demands that he confirm in writing that he has “ceased and will forever desist from all access to and use of Craigslist for any reason or purpose whatsoever, directly and through any other person or entity.” (I’ve embedded the full letter below.) Obviously, I’m not a lawyer, but I’m sympathetic to DeMenthon’s position — which, actually, is more of an appeal to common sense than a legal argument. PadMapper, he says, “just acts as a search engine and sends all traffic back to the sites it searches.” In other words, it’s helping Craigslist by sending traffic to its listings, not hurting it or competing with it. DeMenthon says he’s hoping that if PadMapper fans reach out to Craigslist to try to explain that perspective, he might convince the company to change its mind. Update: Posterous co-founder and Y Combinator partner Garry Tan just published an open letter to Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and CEO Jim Buckmaster asking them to reverse the company’s decision.
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| Tesla Motors Starts Shipping The Model S Sedan, Its First Family-Focused Electric Car [Livestream] Posted: 22 Jun 2012 03:41 PM PDT  Tesla Motors, the electric car company headed up by PayPal founder and all-around tech industry badass Elon Musk, today began shipments of the Model S, the electricity-powered sedan it first unveiled back in 2009. Above we’ve embedded a livestream of the event, being held right now in Fremont, California. “There are a lot of people who said this day would never come,” Tesla executive George Blankenship said while kicking off the press event in Fremont this afternoon. “But at Tesla we don’t even think about them… we think about the people who made sure that we are here today.” According to Blankenship, chief among those people are the 2300 owners worldwide of the Tesla Roadster, the first electric car the company debuted a couple years back. “Everything they taught us is in the Model S.” When Elon Musk took the stage at the event, he said that the Model S is mean to “break a spell” in the car industry. “The world has been under this illusion that an electric car can’t be as good as a gasoline car… the Model S is about breaking that illusion,” Musk said. “It’s about showing that an electric car can really be the best car in the world.” According to Tesla, the response to the Model S, which has pricing beginning at $49,900, has been solid: The company has more than than 10,000 reservations placed for the car (it costs $5,000 to make a reservation for the standard Model S, and $40,000 to reserve a Model S Signature), and it plans to produce and deliver 20,000 vehicles per year beginning in 2013. The specs on the vehicle are pretty impressive — zero to 60 in less than six seconds with instant torque (that’s a big perk of electric vehicles), an electric vehicle range of 265 miles (purportedly a new record for the industry), all designed and built in California. Its dashboard has a 17-inch touchscreen connected to 3G, which Tesla says puts “streaming radio, web browsing and navigation at the driver’s fingertips.” Not too shabby. It’s also a much more practical car than Tesla’s slick Roadster two-seater, as the Model S seats five adults and two children. TechCrunch had its first hands-on look at the Model S this past fall — you can check out the full run-down of that right here.
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| TechCrunch Giveaway: Free Ticket To Disrupt SF #TCDisrupt Posted: 22 Jun 2012 01:23 PM PDT  Here’s another chance for one lucky reader to win tickets to this year’s Disrupt in San Francisco! Congratulations to last week’s winner, Stephen Hsu. Last week, we asked everyone to let us know who they would like to see at Disrupt SF. The comments were tallied and Mark Zuckerberg was the chosen one. Our people have reached out to his people. We’ll let you know. Disrupt SF is going to be a blast. Last year we had speakers that included: Reid Hoffman, Tom Conrad, Max Levchin, Dustin Moskovitz, Mayor Ed Lee, Ashton Kutcher, Peter Thiel and many more. Want to come this year? All you have to do is follow the steps below! 1) Become a fan of our TechCrunch Facebook Page: 2) Then do one of the following: - Retweet this post (making sure to include the #TCDisrupt hashtag) The contest starts now and ends June 24th at 7:30pm PT. Please only tweet the message once or you will be disqualified. We will make sure you follow the steps above and choose our winner once the giveaway is over. Anyone in the world is eligible. Please note this giveaway is for one ticket only and does not include airfare or hotel. The best deal for Disrupt tickets are still on sale now, so grab them while you can. You can purchase tickets here. If you would like to join us as a sponsor, opportunities can be found here.
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| Gillmor Gang Live 06.22.12 (TCTV) Posted: 22 Jun 2012 01:17 PM PDT |
| The Turtle Beach Ear Force XP500s Are The Gaming Dad’s Dream Posted: 22 Jun 2012 01:06 PM PDT  As a father it’s amazingly hard to play video games. First, I’m not good at them anymore – try practicing sniping n00bs when you’re trying to feed a 3-year-old something other than Goldfish crackers – and second I can’t play them in their full aural glory because they sound like WWII carefully mixed with a terrible accident at a jackhammer factory. In short, they’re too hard and too loud. Obviously I can fix the “too hard” part by only playing Yoshi’s Story. But what about the “too loud” part? I’m glad to say the Turtle Beach XP500s have taken care of things. These headphones are completely wireless and connect to a Bluetooth base station. You can route the audio into the box via an optical cable or RCA jacks and the headphones – large cans that fit the ears comfortably – are connected to the base with Bluetooth. I’ve never really liked wireless headphones. Many required line-of-sight connections thanks to wonky IR sensors and the audio quality was sub par. This new model – based on Turtle Beach’s PX5 headphones – is much more impressive. First, it works with both Xbox and PS3 and an included 360 dongle allows for a direct wireless connection to the controller’s audio port. The headphones also add a few interesting sound processing tricks to the mix. First, you can change the “sound field,” reducing the sound of explosions and bringing out small noises – footsteps, guns cocking – that could be missed while sneaking through a warehouse or a jungle. The headphones also simulate full surround sound and offers in-game voice morphing so you can disguise yourself. After all, on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog – until you bark. The XP500 is pretty cool, but I did run into a few problems. For example, in my setup the audio was very low, thus requiring me to turn most of the volumes up quite a bit. It was very specific to my receiver and I was eventually able to fix things by plugging directly into the TOSLink port, but it was a bit annoying at first. Second, it’s a very complex pair of headphones and while there are loud voice prompts for nearly every action, it’s still a bit mystifying without the manual. All of its capabilities are hidden behind small, featureless buttons and it’s easy to press the wrong thing. The price is a bit high, as well, especially for a gaming peripheral. At $270 you could probably just buy a pair of Sennheisers and a long headphone cord. However, the value added by the various DSP features as well as the microphone connectivity make things a little more acceptable. Hiding your gaming from your children is hard work and anything that makes it easier is a boon to the young father. I, for one, welcome Turtle Beach’s innovations to the craft into my life and thank them for watching out for me. Now if I could only get past the weird baby creatures in Dead Space 2 without screaming obscenities, waking up my children and prompting them to ask what, exactly, a “c*nting f**kb**tard on warm toast” is.
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| F*** Yeah! Supreme Court Tosses Out “Vague” FCC Indecency Fines Against Fox And ABC Posted: 22 Jun 2012 12:57 PM PDT  Public airwaves may be one step closer to becoming an indecent wasteland of swearing, nudity, and violence—a victory for First Amendment-lovers everywhere. Yesterday, the Supreme Court unanimously threw out fines against Fox and ABC for airing brief expletives and nudity, arguing that the FCC’s rule against “fleeting” indecency was too vague. The narrow decision won’t change the content of broadcasting anytime in the near future, but it has given the FCC more latitude in what it considers indecent and renewed the conversation about whether indecency rules are relevant in a world of Netflix, Hulu, and 24-hour access to the pornographic universe. In FCC v. Fox Television Stations and FCC v. ABC Inc, the Court decided in an 8-0 decision against a rule levying heavy fines for “fleeting” indecency between the hours of 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. ABC, which briefly showed the buttocks of a saucy NYPD cast member, faced a steep $1.2 million fine (or $600,000 per buttock, for those readers who are still learning their fractions). Fox was charged for failing to censor expletives uttered during the Billboard Music Awards. Cher, referring to her critics, exclaimed, “F— 'em. I still have a job and they don't." Just one year later, soon-to-be-forgotten Nicole Richie said, “Have you ever tried to get cow s— out of a Prada purse? It's not so f– -ing simple.” “The commission failed to give Fox or ABC fair notice prior to the broadcasts in question that fleeting expletives and momentary nudity could be found actionably indecent,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy. The decision fell short of deciding the constitutionality of fleeting indecency or the broader question of indecency at all. However, the Court did leave the FCC free to revise its policy, under the direction of Chairman Julius Genachowski, who has not made the punishment of indecency violations a top priority for the agency. Not that the chairman would tip his hand, saying in a statement, “We are reviewing today's decision, which appears to be narrowly limited to procedural issues related to actions taken a number of years ago. Consistent with vital First Amendment principles, the FCC will carry out Congress's directive to protect young TV viewers.” More importantly, the court did at least acknowledge the argument that indecency rules could be “overruled” because the once scarce public airwaves have been “overtaken by technological change and the wide availability of multiple other choices for listeners and viewers.” While the language might seem inconsequential, the Court is a compulsively coy institution, and acknowledging an argument is enough for First Amendment and broadcast groups to start gearing up for a fight in the future. Censorship over public airwaves draws its legitimacy partly from the fact that broadcast television is aired through publicly owned spectrum. However, now that services like Hulu and Netflix can show the exact same filthy material that broadcasters can show after kiddies go to bed, it’s nearly impossible to truly police material. The Electronic Frontier Foundation made the case to the court in a brief, ” Consumers now have unprecedented freedom of choice to avoid exposure to inappropriate content, and, thus, it is simply no longer true that ‘[p]atently offensive, indecent material presented over the airwaves confronts the citizen" like an "intruder’ in the home.” For instance, consider this gem from Saturday Night Live‘s Andy Samberg’s “J*zz in my pants,” which finds its way to the Hulu homepage “popular” section on occasion. Hulu has graciously covered its legal butt with a warning at the beginning of the video “The following material originally aired at 12:40 am and might not be suitable for younger viewers,” but doesn’t require an age verification to stream. Of course, the digital short would be hilarious were it not for its unequivocal powers to turn straight-laced honor students into heathens of the night. With material like this digital short and worse easily accessibly for common websites, the government may (gasp!) lose its powers to keep adult material from impressionable young minds. While the Court’s decision this week didn't give sensible speech advocates the victory they hoped for, it does set the stage.
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| Zappos Labs: Retailer’s San Francisco Office Searches For Disruptive New Ideas Posted: 22 Jun 2012 12:48 PM PDT  Zappos left San Francisco way back in 2004, and since then it has become closely associated with its new home in Nevada — in fact, CEO Tony Hsieh is working to revitalize downtown Las Vegas, in part by turning it into a startup hub. At the same time, the Amazon-owned online retailer hasn’t entirely severed its connection to the Bay Area — in 2010, it reopened an office in SF, one that’s focused on experimenting with cool new ideas. The role of the 11-person SF team is getting a little more official today, with its renaming from Zappos San Francisco to Zappos Labs. To be clear, that’s basically the role that the team was filling already, releasing products like a fashion magazine-style iPad app. And it was even called Zappos Labs unofficially. Nonetheless, Will Young, who directs the local team, says the official change should make its mission of “disrupting online retail a lot more explicit.” He says that a lot of Zappos’ success is due to ideas that seemed innovative at the time, like free shipping, free returns, and great customer support through its call center. But e-commerce has been changed a lot since then, and the Zappos Labs team is trying to figure out the next wave of innovative ideas. To coincide with the renaming, Zappos Labs is also launching its latest effort, What’s New. I don’t think you’ll too surprised to hear that What’s New is a page that highlights all the goods that have just been added to Zappos. There’s also a cool visualization showing the different categories of new products. Zappos Labs products are also going to be highlighted more prominently on the Zappos site. Previously, everything the team launched was featured in a section called the Zappos Expo, but you had to know that the site existed in order to find it. Starting next week, Zappos will add a link to the Expo from its front page. Young says new, experimental features from other Zappos teams will also be included, as will innovative uses of the Zappos API. He also wants to use the Expo page to feature research done by the Labs team. For example, Young says that they’ve been looking into the value of social sharing. It turns out that Zappos buyers are 13 times more likely to pin an order on Pinterest and 8 times more likely to share it on Facebook than they are to tweet it. However, it’s the tweets that are the most valuable, because they convert into more sales. Young’s team calculated that a pinned order is worth 75 cents, a Facebook shared order is worth $2.08, and a tweeted order is worth $33.66.
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| Error 451: A Proposed Change To Web Standards Would Make Bradbury’s Story Denote Censored Content Posted: 22 Jun 2012 12:14 PM PDT  Google employee and creator of XML, Tim Bray, has proposed a new error message for the web. Rather than hiding censored websites behind a generic 403 error – “the server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it” – these websites would return 451 – “Unavailable For Legal Reasons.” In his official proposal, released at the beginning of this month, Bray suggests that websites return detailed information about the particular censorship in play. For example: This request may not be serviced in the Roman Province of Judea due to Lex3515, the Legem Ne Subversionem Act of AUC755, which disallows access to resources hosted on servers deemed to be operated by the Judean Liberation Front. He goes on to thank Ray Bradbury in the comments. Moves like this are of vital importance to Internet freedom. When fools and potentates try to hide information, they should be held into account. That there is no “censored” bar already on the Internet is a testament to the network’s ability to self-heal and route around idiocy.
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| We Need A Whole Section On TC Called “Intern PR” Posted: 22 Jun 2012 11:47 AM PDT  Pro tip: Don’t let the following happen to your PR pitch/intern. So I know this is a particularly egregious case of “pot calling the kettle black” (I personally am a Black Belt in typos) but, instead of being psyched up to “Party Our Apps Off!” at Google i/o next week, our team has been discussing the simple grammar mistake in the subject line of the below email for at least 30 minutes this morning. I thought I would share the thread with you guys, if anything to remind you again that there’s a crucial difference between “your” and “you’re” (“its” and “it’s” are also tricky). Okay, I think I’ve filled my “huge bitch” quota for today. À tout à l’heure!
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| Google Maps API Gets Massive Price Cut In The Wake Of Developer Defections Posted: 22 Jun 2012 11:28 AM PDT  Ever since Google introduced limits to how often developers could ping its popular Maps API for free and started charging developers for usage above these limits, we’ve seen a slew of prominent developers like Foursquare switch over to other platforms, including the open-source project OpenStreetMap. Now, it looks like Google has noticed that it couldn’t keep charging up to $4 for 1,000 map loads above its free allowance. Instead, the company just announced that it is massively lowering its pricing to just $0.50 per 1,000 map loads. As before, Google will start charging developers once they exceed the free usage limit of 25,000 map loads per day for 90 consecutive days. According to Google, only about 0.35% of sites currently exceed these limits regularly. Also just like before, Google doesn’t automatically enforce these limits but will contact developers who regularly exceed them to discuss their options. This, says Google, ensures that your site will not stop working “due to a sudden surge in popularity.” In addition to these price cuts, Google is eliminating the distinction it used to make between styled maps and unstyled maps. Styled maps, which developers can tweak according to their preferences, previously had lower free usage limits (2,500 loads per day) and higher prices for users who went beyond 25,000 map loads per day. It’s probably no surprise that Google is making this announcement just a few days before its annual Google I/O developers conference is about to start. The original pricing changes, after all, created quite a bit of unease in the Google developer community and with this topic out of the way, the company won’t have to face uneasy questions about this topic.
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| What Are You Really Like At Your Job? ViewsOnYou Intends To Find Out Posted: 22 Jun 2012 11:02 AM PDT  There’s a “Recommend Me” feature on LinkedIn which I’m sure many readers of TechCrunch will be aware of, having been asked multiple times for references by their contacts. But what if you took that concept and created a data-oriented approach? That’s the angle the bootstrapped startup ViewsOnYou is taking, and it’s aiming it at companies that want to find out much more about you, beyond what your CV might say. The problem with recruitment these days is that recruiters need more than paper credentials, and now often rely more on people’s “soft skills,” such as creativity, ingenuity, and resilience. So to address this, ViewsOnYou consists of 23 sliding scales covering a broad spectrum of the kinds of things employers and headhunters look for. Admittedly this has been tried in different ways. TalentBin (formally Honestly.com) is a startup that aggregates a person’s social profile to build up a picture of them, and already has corporate customers including Intuit, Groupon, and Yahoo. And BranchOut and BraveNewTalent are attacking this from different angles. But unlike an app like BranchOut, which is about networking and displaying a CV, ViewsOnYou more about displaying what you are like. You can try it out on me. The ability for a user to match their ViewsOnYou 360 profile with the culture of an organisation lets them see how well they fit. The idea is you find out what your top traits are, and whether you are a better match with Google or Facebook, HSBC or Goldman Sachs, KPMG or McKinsey. Heaven forbid that we end up seeing how Google compares to Facebook as an employer – but that’s ViewsOnYou’s potential. The business model is employer branding (advertising). And there is an incentive for employers to get their employees onto the platform so they can work out where they are strong and weak, and also benchmark what they do. The startup was founded by tech entrepreneur Ab Banerjee, a non-exec director of PeerIndex and a former Founder and CEO of RAW Communications.
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