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- iPad Mini Said To Look Like A Large 3G iPod Nano, Be As Thin As A 4G iPod Touch
- Startup Act 2.0: Free Agency Is Still There, Still A Problem
- Louis C.K. Responds To Online Ticket Sales Experience: Scalpers’ Opinions Have Been “Enlightening”
- Paul Carr’s NSFW Corporation Has Officially Launched And There Is Much Rejoicing
- Greenway Wants To Put An End To Traffic Jams
- Heads Up! This Was Google’s Apple Moment
- Google TV Needs To Decide: Platform Or Closed Ecosystem
- StethoCloud: Australian College Students Build A Digital Stethoscope And Mobile App To Fight Childhood Pneumonia
- Tipflare: Two MIT Seniors Build A One-Stop Shop For Recommendations On Anything
- Facebook Might Be Working On A Job Board, But Don’t Get Too Excited
- Yahoo Implies It Can Still Shake Down Facebook For Patent Money. Bloody Unlikely
- How to Get One Of Dell’s Linux-Based Developer Laptops And Become A Sputnik Beta Cosmonaut
- Addvocate: Salesforce’s Former Head Of Social Marcus Nelson Preps A New Social Enterprise Startup
- Sony’s $380 Million Gaikai Acquisition Shows LA’s Technical Talent
- Blogception
- So, That’s It For Thunderbird
- Don’t Put Down That iPad — 8,000 Mobile Devices Left At Top U.S. Airports
- Twitter Search Adds “Search Within People You Follow”, Autocomplete, Related Results
- PSA: Check Your Computer For DNSChanger Or Risk Getting Booted Off The Web On Monday
- Remember: See Us In Savannah, Georgia Tonight At 6pm
| iPad Mini Said To Look Like A Large 3G iPod Nano, Be As Thin As A 4G iPod Touch Posted: 07 Jul 2012 08:22 AM PDT  Watch out for iPad mini rumors! They’re dropping left and right, and odds are, at least a few of them are going to be on target. The latest state that the so-called iPad mini will be thinner than the Kindle Fire the overall thickness that of the iPod touch 4G. That would put the smaller iPad at 7.2mm, nearly 25% thinner than the new iPad. The device’s screen reportedly measures 7.85-inches although there doesn’t seem to be a consensus among reports concerning the device’s form factor and design. It might look a large iPod nano rather than a small iPad. According to a report published by Japanese Mac site Macotakara, the prototype for the rumored iPad mini looks like a 3rd generation large iPod nano. This means the device likely still uses employs tapered sizes although perhaps in a different fashion. The report also states that a 3G model is planned, too, although it doesn’t state if 3G is included or optional like in the current iPad lineup. This different design and capabilities would likely help Apple sell the iPad mini without cannibalizing the full size iPad’s sales. It’s within reason that the iPad mini will not use a retina screen and use smaller storage options — maybe just 8GB. That said, expect Apple to use the dual-core A5X SoC to give the iPad mini as much computing horsepower as possible. Reportedly the Foxconn will start making the device in Brazil this September with the announcement and release coming prior to the holidays.
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| Startup Act 2.0: Free Agency Is Still There, Still A Problem Posted: 07 Jul 2012 08:00 AM PDT  Editor’s note: Laura A. Schoppe is the president and founder of Fuentek, LLC, a consulting firm that provides intellectual property and technology transfer services. On May 22nd, Sens. Moran and Warner were joined by Sens. Rubio and Coons in introducing Startup Act 2.0, a revised version of legislation proposed last December that contained questionable provisions to allow university professors to choose their own agents to help transfer their technology rather than be tied to their home university's technology transfer office (TTO)—the so-called free agency provision. I dug into the new legislation, comparing it to the original wording, to figure out exactly what's changed (besides the fact that the accelerated commercialization of research provisions are now part of Section 8 rather than 7). Here's what I figured out. This legislation is not much better than the original version when it comes to the free agency issue in managing university intellectual property (IP). All of my previously stated concerns (as well as those stated by AUTM®) about the practicality of giving individual innovators authority to commercialize their own technologies still holds. But let's look at the specifics in the bill. The Grant Program in General
Capacity Building Grants vs. Accelerator Grants
Awarding of Grants
At the end of Section 8 (on page 32), the bill explicitly states that nothing in the section changes the Bayh-Dole Act, which specifically authorizes the institution to hold the IP rights and therefore control the decisions on commercialization. This control also includes an institution's ability to "release" the technology to the innovators to allow them to expend their own resources (time and money) to patent, license, and otherwise commercialize the technology. It's kinda funny that this aspect of how TTOs can release the IP to the innovator is equivalent to the desires of Kauffman's free agency concept but provides clarity on authority and responsibility. Well, I guess you'd need a pretty dark sense of humor to find that funny.
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| Louis C.K. Responds To Online Ticket Sales Experience: Scalpers’ Opinions Have Been “Enlightening” Posted: 07 Jul 2012 07:45 AM PDT  When Louis C.K. announced that he was selling tickets to his shows for $45, cutting out ticket middlemen entirely, the response was fairly giddy. As of this writing, he sold $6,102,000 in tickets, not a bad haul. Of those 135,600 tickets, 500 are now floating around the scalping sites. He did, however do a little experiment: he sold two shows traditionally, through Ticketmaster and the like, and 1,100 of those tickets out of 4,400 available are already on scalping sites like Stubhub. He writes: Contact with these scalpers has been enlightening. They tend to respond with indignance and a defensive posture "Hey man! Scalping is NOT a crime!" We're not treating it as a crime or even a wrong-doing. We are just competing with them, on behalf of my fans, to enforce the terms and conditions of our ticket sales and to keep the prices down. It's worth the effort, it's working and it's even been kind of fun. The interesting thing is that C.K. hasn’t yet described the methodology for “killing” scalped tickets but it seems to be some sort of fan-based mechanical Turking that grabs barcodes from scalped tickets online. While I suspect this is more difficult than it seems, I also suspect that the folks who would traditionally go to scalpers are erring on the side of caution, thereby disabling the scalping business model. It’s an amazing display of frictionless markets and, although it does reduce revenue on the seedier side of ticket sales, it certainly makes fans feel warm and fuzzy. Incidentally, am I alone in not being happy with the first episode of the new series of Louie?
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| Paul Carr’s NSFW Corporation Has Officially Launched And There Is Much Rejoicing Posted: 07 Jul 2012 07:29 AM PDT  Paul Carr’s NSFW Corp has officially launched, bringing us all from the doldrums and despair of the Age of Pisces and into the majesty of the Age of Aquarius. The site, essentially the news of the day with jokes, launched a few months ago in beta and is now a 17-person strong comedy juggernaut putting out stories like “UK WORRIES ABOUT SPIRALLING COST OF FREE HEALTH CARE >> Run, America. Run while there’s still time //” and “KUWAIT ARMY STRUGGLES WITH OBESITY >> Are we heading for the first real Golden Arches war? A Gastric Band of Brothers? //.” Paul describes the business plan as such: Logistics: our daily publishing schedule begins today, and continues until the last of us is dead. NSFW Live resumes Monday, broadcasting from our sound-and-bullet-proof studio, high above the Las Vegas strip. Today we’re letting in everyone who signed up for the Pilot. From the end of next week, we’ll be admitting subscribers, by invitation. Once invited, everyone – EVERYONE – pays $3 a month. The site, Paul’s second after leaving Techcrunch (this is his first one) and he’s learned a lot about HTML5 and the mechanics of building a news organization. You can visit him on the Internet here and sign up for some of the best news comedy since Redd Foxx got topical.
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| Greenway Wants To Put An End To Traffic Jams Posted: 07 Jul 2012 07:15 AM PDT  Traffic jams are annoying, but they are also responsible for extra CO2 emissions and plenty of wasted productivity. Greenway, Germany’s entry into Microsoft’s 10th Imagine Cup student technology competition in Sydney this week, wants to do nothing less but to put an end to traffic jams. To do so, the three-person team has developed a mobile app, which is basically a very smart turn-by-turn navigation system, and a cloud-based routing and tracking service that ensures that drivers use streets as efficiently as possible. Ideally, the Greenway team says, its app can cut driving times during peak traffic hours by half. What’s cool about the service isn’t the impressive underlying technology, though, but also the team’s innovative business model. Here is how Greenway is tackling this problem: most of the time, drivers choose the most direct route between two points and because of this, traffic tends to converge on a small number of roads, making traffic jams inevitable. What would happen, though, if you could route cars more efficiently and have them use underutilized roads? To find out, the team developed an algorithm that constantly monitors where cars are in a city and then routes them as efficiently as possible, keeping in mind where all the other cars are as well. The team built a number of impressive traffic simulations to validate its approach. In addition, it’s also running a small pilot project in Germany right now that has already validated the team’s approach. The idea here is to ensure that cars are distributed in the most efficient way possible. To do this, Greenway, for example, uses its algorithms to predict where a driver will be in the future and it then basically reserves a certain stretch of road for this vehicle. This being a Microsoft event, the app is currently Windows Phone-only and the backend runs on Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service, but the team plans to release clients for other platforms, too. Ideally, of course, every car in a city would use Greenway to make the system work perfectly, but even just having 10% of all cars use it is enough to provide the system with enough data to achieve most of its goals. Greenway can also substitute data from its own users with publicly available traffic data and the team plans to work with GPS manufacturers to integrate its service into their apps and hardware devices. That’s also where the team’s business model comes in. Whenever a user opens the app, Greenway will show two sets of data: one for a regular, non-optimized route and one for Greenway’s optimized route. This data includes driving time and the mileage a user can expect to get on these routes. Users who choose the Greenway route then pay a fraction of the money they save in gas using the app, but never more than $0.30. Greenway is among the 20 teams that were chosen to advance to the next round in Microsoft’s student competition today and the team will get another chance to pitch its project in front of a jury later this week as it competes for the . Greenway is also one of three nominees for Microsoft’s Environmental Sustainability Award at the event.
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| Heads Up! This Was Google’s Apple Moment Posted: 07 Jul 2012 06:00 AM PDT  It looked like the X Games, but it was the most significant product launch of the decade so far. For the first time, Google did what Apple has done thrice, with the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Granted, Apple announces products that ship immediately, while Google merely allowed a few thousand I/O attendees to pre-order a beta version that wouldn’t ship until next year–but don’t let the mechanics distract you from the heart of the matter. Google Glass isn’t just a new product, it’s a whole new product category, and it has every chance of being every bit as revolutionary as Apple’s Big Three. Of course, like every revolution, it brought the nattering nabobs of negativity out in force. “We struggle to imagine Google Glasses reconciled with normal life,” carps Gizmodo. That line’s going to sound as embarrassingly tone-deaf in five years as these hilarious quotes from iPhone naysayers do today. Wearable computing, in one form or another, is the future. How extraordinary is it going to be? Some people suggest it could actually save Research In Motion. Now that’s amazing. But a company that took most of a year to build an email app for the PlayBook isn’t going to lead the way. This category is so new that Google’s fail-fast, permanent-beta, make-it-up-as-you-go ethos is really the only viable direction. And we’re only in its infancy; has anyone else noticed that those big thick glasses look a lot like Neurosky’s brainwave sensors? Thought-controlled heads-up displays, anyone? Do I sound excited? Well, sure, yeah, I am–but I’m also kind of terrified. You see, at first the skeptics almost seem to have a point. Google Glass is in no way a replacement for a phone. At least not yet. Of course, neither was the iPad, and that did pretty well, but who’s going to be the big initial market for Google Glass, beyond the die-hard early-adopter? Well, there are a lot of possible applications. Travel, for instance; a heads-up display is a lot more convenient than a phone when you’re wandering a strange city, and being able to tether to your phone and actually share what you’re seeing with friends and family in real time would be terrific. Industrial uses. The elderly. Augmented-reality games. But you know who I think the first big market for Google Glass will be? Law enforcement. Imagine a heads-up display that automatically parses every license plate and recognizes every face in sight, and tells the wearer about any outstanding warrants. Charles Stross has been predicting this for years: “Police in the UK are already experimenting with real time video recording of interactions with the public – I suspect that before long we're going to see cops required to run lifelogging apps constantly when on duty, with the output locked down as evidence.” In places where the integrity of the police is questionable–which is to say, most of the world–this could help stamp out corruption, too. Of course, this will lead to an enormous spike in the amount of video data in the world that needs to be tagged, categorized, sifted, and mined. If only there was a company out there that was really, really good at search… Well, hey! Win-win-win, right? More efficient law enforcement, less corruption, lots of business for Google. So why am I scared? Because Google Glass is–probably both inadvertently and inescapably–a giant step towards the panopticon society I’ve been worrying about for some time. The future is here, and it’s awesome…and soon it will be watching you. Be concerned. Be very concerned.
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| Google TV Needs To Decide: Platform Or Closed Ecosystem Posted: 07 Jul 2012 01:00 AM PDT  Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Andy Liu, CEO of BuddyTV Guide, a channel guide app available on iOS, Android and Google TV. There is no debating that consumer adoption of Google TV is extremely disappointing. Logitech has dropped out of the business, several online publications including this one have declared the platform dead. While some new OEMs like Vizio, Sony, and LG have launched new devices with Google TV, it's not clear that any meaningful customer adoption will come as a result of these deals. I believe there is one big reason it hasn't taken off. It's that Google TV is straddling a dual-strategic approach when it needs to pick one strategy and double down on it. Google TV needs to be building a platform that embraces a strong developer ecosystem or it needs to close it down and focus on a closed ecosystem like Apple TV and iterate until it has the right consumer product not both. The problem with Google TV is that it claims that it is a developer friendly platform and embraces the developer community. It does not. Time and time again, Google TV has chosen the route of straddling between building their own apps and trying to engage the developer community to build a killer app for its platform. For example, there are over 90 second screen startups building apps that could be an extremely compelling use case for Google TV users. Instead of pushing 3rd parties to succeed, Google TV has taken the approach of building its own second screen app without being very transparent with its partners about its intention of building its own. There is an inherent disadvantage for a 3rd party to build a second screen app, when there will be one that exists native and developed by Google. This is an extremely dangerous position to take with the development community as it takes real investment by companies to build for this nascent platform. Companies will quickly realize that anything successful will be copied by Google TV and relegated to second class status as Google TV promotes its own apps ahead of those by 3rd parties. Instead of having potentially 90 companies innovating and building compelling second screen apps on the Google TV platform to find a killer use case, Google TV has taken a poor short-term approach of competing against its own developer community. Google TV in their v2 OTA update last year launched an app called TV & Movies, it's native to the platform and pre-installed with every install of the update. This update was in direct competition with first screen apps like BuddyTV Guide which Google TV had early versions of internally. While disappointing, it would have been nice to know that Google TV was developing TV & Movies in advance, so we could have built another app focusing on areas that would be complementary to TV & Movies. Instead, we invested a ton of resources to build on a nascent platform only to see a very similar app on Google TV. Most recently, TV & Movies have updated the app to include favorite channels, one of the most popular features on BuddyTV Guide. As a third party developer on the platform, we have significantly reduced our investment in the first screen app primarily due to the lack of support from Google TV to promote third party apps and the lack of transparency regarding its roadmap that may be competitive to third parties. Strategically, Google TV needs to pick a strategy and focus on it exclusively. If it is to build a developer ecosystem which allows thousands of developers the ability to innovate and to find that killer app or two, then Google TV needs to re-think its product roadmap to enable developers to be successful. Focus on building great developer tools and listen to the developer community. If Google TV must compete against a 3rd party developer since it is a "core" feature, then be transparent and work with the 3rd party to cover other white space that might be compelling. Google TV's platform could focus on in-app purchases, subscription services, developer tools, developer outreach, OEM relationship building, and design resources for 3rd parties would be a great start. Work with developers to develop marketing strategies to get app adoption. Build momentum with the developer community such that more developers come on board. Be transparent about what's working and what's not. Help developers avoid pitfalls and use cases that work and don't work. Identify customer holes for 3rd parties to tackle before they become impediments to adoption. Focus on becoming a real partner for developers. Or, conversely, shut down the developer ecosystem to get the product right. It's ok to focus on getting the product right and iterate until there is critical mass before going back to the developer community. Build great apps and find the killer app internally. This, in itself, is a great strategy as well since the developer ecosystem won't be wasting time potentially competing against Google TV and can wait until there is real market traction to go after. We want Google TV to succeed. I've been a long-term user of Google TV and it's a good product with a good vision. However, I bought a Google TV for my parents a while ago and it's still gathering dust –- the product is just not ready for mass consumer adoption. Google TV needs a killer use case and either they need to enable developers to find it or they should focus all their energy on finding it themselves. The success of Google TV is good for consumers and developers; it's disruptive and will force the TV ecosystem to evolve quicker. I know we'll be watching closely with anxious anticipation that Google TV will eventually get it right.
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| Posted: 06 Jul 2012 11:55 PM PDT  The finals of Microsoft’ Imagine Cup, the world’s largest student technology competition, are taking place in Sydney this week and StethoCloud, the Melbourne-based home team, is definitely making a good case for Australia’s growing tech scene. The competition’s theme challenged students to build apps that “help solve the toughest problems” and the Australian team decided to tackle childhood pneumonia, which – despite the fact that it’s highly curable when detected early – sadly still kills more children than measles, malaria and HIV combined. The key to survival, says the Australian team, is to detect the illness early, but that’s obviously not easy for community health workers or unskilled staff in developing countries. Using a Windows 7 phone (this is a Microsoft competition after all) and a digital stethoscope combined with the StethoCloud software running on the phone and in the cloud, the service’s backend can analyze a patient’s breathing patterns and look for signs of the earliest stages of pneumonia. The approach itself is based on the World Health Organization’s diagnostics manual for the management of childhood illness. The team expects its stethoscope to cost around $15 to $20. This is significantly cheaper than current digital stethoscopes in the market which tend to cost hundreds of dollars. The device simply plugs in the phone’s stereo jack and besides the analog-to-digital conversion, all of the analysis happens in the cloud using Windows Azure. The team argues that the cost of the phone itself is somewhat negligible, as smartphones are quickly becoming more common even in the developing countries where childhood pneumonia is most prevalent. It’s worth noting that StethoCloud also developed a version of its app that is running on Nokia feature phones. What’s especially impressive about this team is that the whole project only started earlier this year. Even though the group only consists of four people, StethoCloud build and tested various prototypes of its digital stethoscope and algorithms in this short time period. The team’s pitch, by the way, was more polished than that of many highly funded startups I’ve interviewed and the group also makes a compelling business case based on other uses for the data it plans to collect from patients around the world. Asthma, specifically, is a disease the group is planning to target next. Using its self-developed algorithms and hardware, which the team is looking to patent, StethoCloud thinks it can also branch out to other diseases next. Image credit: Daniel Brusilovsky
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| Tipflare: Two MIT Seniors Build A One-Stop Shop For Recommendations On Anything Posted: 06 Jul 2012 10:24 PM PDT  With so much information, content and so many services now living online, there’s a lot of choice — even for something as simple as where to go to buy a new pair of socks. Oh, and there’s a lot of data. As it’s evolved and gotten better at making sense of its new Big Data, the Web has become an extraordinary engine for discovering new stuff: News, cat videos, porn, you name it. Naturally, scores of sites are becoming (or are building) recommendation engines to help users wade through the noise, and, dining on Big Data, they get smarter every day. However, as it stands today, the discovery process is pretty fragmented, as recommendation engines tend to be domain-specific. Want to find a good movie? Try Netflix. Want to find a good book? Go to GoodReads, etc. And this fragmentation makes for a crappy user experience. So, frustrated with the fact that there’s no one-stop shop for great recommendations on, well, everything, a couple of seniors at MIT have developed, and quietly launched, Tipflare to be that general solution. While the site’s creators, Hayden Metsky and Thiago Vieira, have bigger ambitions, today Tipflare focuses in on giving users one place to find quality recommendations on books, movies, songs, and restaurants — in a jiffy. If you’ve ever struggled to find a recommendation for a good book that’s actually based on what you like to read and not just your browsing or purchase history (Amazon, for example) and then repeat that for a good movie, Tipflare’s value is obvious. If not, you might just say, hey, why not go to GoodReads or Amazon or Netflix? And it’s true that, using Netflix as an example, those that specialize in one domain will probably be better at recommending (say, movies) than a generalist. But the Tipflare creators aren’t worried about that. If you want to watch something on Netflix, you’ll discover on Netflix. Instead, Tipflare really aims to differentiate itself from other services by being broad in focus while trying to keep the design and UX as clutter-free and as easy to use as possible. Users simply enter what movies or books they like — or import their “likes” from Facebook, and the site instantly serves recommendations on what they’ll go bananas for based on what they already enjoy, factoring in Facebook friends’ interests, your location (for restaurants, specifically), the day of the week, time of day, etc. so that it can offer “New for You” recommendations when you come back. Like Triposo, the travel and destination recommendation service we recently covered, Tipflare leans heavily on its algorithms to serve quality recommendations. But it also incorporates social cues as well, though Metsky says that Tipflare’s social integration is really a tool to back up and support its algorithm. It’s the supporting cast, not the star. While Tipflare has a lot to recommend it (see what I did there?), it’s not a panacea. In other words, it’s not yet that next-gen, hyper-intelligent personal assistant; it still requires work on the part of the user. One day in the not-so-distant future, the Web, search, etc. will transition from a demand-based system (where you input what you want and a service tells you where to go), to one that’s more actively directive in telling you what to do and where to go based on your history, behavior, browsing, and more. The site is early in its gestation and still has a long way to go, but the founders are asking the right questions. When it comes to algorithmic recommendations and discovery, there’s a trust issue. Google and so many others are addressing this with friendsourced and social graph-authenticated recommendations and results. The core reason for this being, hey, you’re probably going to trust recommendations from real people, especially those who know you and your tastes, more than a machine — even if those algorithms are wizardry. Metsky and Vieira want Tipflare to be able to handle anything, any topic one could imagine, and beat the rest by not focusing on page views or targeting ads — just on offering a service that’s more intuitive and easier to use than the rest. And the founders have the benefit of being young and still being in school — meaning that this is a side project, not a business. In 2006, TechCrunch covered a site that Metsky created when he was just 15, called MovieTally, which sought to improve movie recommendations by allowing users to add their own tags and reviews and discover movies that other users had tagged with the same terms. Tipflare is a broadly-focused response to MovieTally. It still requires you to add songs and movies you enjoy — i.e. there’s some work involved, and it won’t recognize your more obscure entries — but like MovieTally it learns the more you use it. Foursquare, too, has been turning its check-ins into a vehicle for its new recommendation engine, gathering data on your favorite locations to ultimately give its users more personalized, location-based (i.e. more meaningful) discovery. Metsky says that the distinction between Tipflare and the new Foursquare is that the check-in champion focuses on the social networking aspect of discovery, while Tipflare prioritizes simplicity and speed above all else. Metsky says that location-based discovery is high on his list of things to improve, as it’s aligned with their top priority: Mobile. So, naturally, the next step, he says, is developing Tipflare apps for your mobile devices. He also points out that Tipflare isn’t ignoring other engines, as its restaurant recommendations, for example, do display supplemental information from Yelp and, in turn, lets users break down restaurant recs by proximity, what’s open now, closest match, etc. Again, what’s great is that, at present, Tipflare isn’t a business, so there’s not the same pressure to develop revenue streams, slap banner ads everywhere, and so on. They see it as a project that can help push recommendation engines forward while solving a big pain point in the user experience of discovery tools. The founders are looking for feedback, for helpful tips on how to further improve the user experience, retain simplicity and speed. So check it out.
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| Facebook Might Be Working On A Job Board, But Don’t Get Too Excited Posted: 06 Jul 2012 07:15 PM PDT  Stop the presses! Facebook and LinkedIn are about to become archrivals in the recruiting market! At least, that’s the implication of a Wall Street Journal article, which reports that Facebook plans to launch a job posting board later this summer. It’s a nice scoop if true (the Journal cites “people familiar with the matter”), but reading the story is a strange experience. Basically, it starts out by explaining why the job board isn’t a big deal. Then, having established that it isn’t a big deal, the story talks about what a big deal it is. The board will reportedly aggregate job listings from third-party services like BranchOut, Jobvite, and Work4 Labs, making them searchable for Facebook users. One of the quoted sources describes it as “lightweight” and says, “It doesn’t feel like a big effort that they’ve worked on for a long time.” Someone also says Facebook didn’t build the site itself, and instead got a third-party developer to do it. The Journal reports that Facebook doesn’t plan to monetize the service initially, and says it’s “unclear” whether the company will do so in the future. Apparently, the job board might be an extension of the Social Jobs Partnership that Facebook announced with the US Department of Labor last fall. In fact, if you read the program announcement, one of the partnership’s plans was to “explore and develop systems where new job postings can be delivered virally through the Facebook site at no charge.” A Facebook spokesperson, meanwhile, sent me the obligatory statement: “We don’t comment on rumor or speculation.” Add that all up, and what do you get? A cool-sounding feature, possibly part of an existing partnership, but not a major new direction or revenue source for the company. So … why talk about how it could be “more of a threat to other professional networking sites such as LinkedIn”? Or the stuff about the evolution of recruiting and the size of online recruiting industry? All of this speculation comes with caveat of, “If Facebook decides to get serious about this … ” but the story doesn’t offer any real evidence that that’s going to happen. Again, I’m not trying to take away from the Journal’s scoop. It’s just that parts of the article are … puzzling. And as someone who’s had his own moments of pressure (from myself or from my editors) to make news seem like a bigger deal than it is, I’m seeing some familiar signs. With all the “ifs”, “shoulds”, and “coulds” it almost feels like the Journal had a dramatic story in their head about Facebook vs. LinkedIn. When it turned out to be less of a page turner than expected, they weren’t quite willing to let it go. (I’m also not opposed to blue-sky speculation — speculation is fun! — but a little dodgier when mixed in with real reporting.) Put another away: Could Facebook become a more serious player in recruiting? Sure, anything is possible. But there’s nothing here to make me think it’s more likely.
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| Yahoo Implies It Can Still Shake Down Facebook For Patent Money. Bloody Unlikely Posted: 06 Jul 2012 06:50 PM PDT  Yahoo and Facebook signed a contract today that says they cannot sue each other over patents. Yet Yahoo may be trying to convince investors that Facebook would still pay to buy or license some Yahoo intellectual property. But according to a source familiar with the exact wording of the Yahoo-Facebook contract, the two companies have rights to each other’s entire patent portfolios, so Yahoo would have no leverage to extort money or value from Facebook. I smell something fishy. Let’s investigate. Facebook’s press release states the agreement does “include a patent portfolio cross-license”, and my source says the word ‘portfolio’ means each company’s entire patent repertoire. Kara Swisher had a scoop that the agreement was signed. Yet in a follow-up interview about details, “the pair” of Yahoo interim CEO Ross Levinsohn and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg apparently told Swisher that “The deal encompasses licensing of a little more than half of Yahoo's rich portfolio of digital patents and an agreement not to sue on the remaining ones, which Facebook can license or even buy in the future.” Swisher tells me this information is attributed to “both companies”. So the question is, is this case shut tight and Yahoo can’t make money off of Facebook via patents? Or is there still potential for Yahoo to salvage some direct compensation beyond the value of a deepened partnership? The contract’s details are confidential, so we may never get a definitive answer on this. But here’s what I believe based on my sources and the press release: What Swisher was told and published would cause people to believe Yahoo might still make money directly from its patent assault on Facebook. The same assault that Swisher said former CEO Scott Thompson promised Yahoo’s directors would earn it a huge settlement pay-out from Facebook. The same assault that deeply hurt Yahoo’s reputation by making it look like a troll fighting against innovation. The only chance for Yahoo would be if Facebook eventually wanted to outright buy its patents to assert them against other companies. But Facebook has said and shown it’s not interested in patent aggression. Plus with stockpiles already purchased from IBM and AOL/Microsoft, there would be little need to buy or license IP it already has rights to. Seems like Yahoo has a lot to gain by somehow painting today’s agreement as leaving space for it to still recoup some of its losses from fighting the case. But that gain comes by misleading investors into thinking patent-based monetary gains for Yahoo from Facebook are still on the horizon. And while Facebook is trying to claw its way back to its IPO price, now it has investors worrying there could be more Yahoo patent woes. Unfortunately for Yahoo, I don’t think that’s true and I see nothing on the patent horizon but the open sea its sinking in. Even as Facebook threw it a life preserver of an ad sales partnership, Yahoo is still trying to act macho. This was a chance for Yahoo to start over, but now I’m thinking old habits die hard, and the deceitful ghost of Scott Thompson lingers. [Image Credit: Zazzle]
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| How to Get One Of Dell’s Linux-Based Developer Laptops And Become A Sputnik Beta Cosmonaut Posted: 06 Jul 2012 05:00 PM PDT  Dell has a skunks works project underway to offer a Linux-based laptop made for developers. Dubbed “Project Sputnik,” the effort has started to gain some traction. As part of its development, Dell has launched a beta program called the Sputnik Beta Cosmonaut program. Selected participants will receive the Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook with Ubuntu 12.04LTS pre-loaded at a discounted price. Project Sputnik signals Dell’s changing focus to offer open-source technology that it can integrate into its servers, storage and networking offerings and solutions. Part of this effort means attracting developers to a laptop that they can configure in the way they wish. Here’s what Klint Finley wrote a few months ago upon the launch of the project:
In a blog post this week, Dell’s Barton George writes that the laptop is now available on Dell.com. The page points you to where you can buy the XPS 13 and an image to load on it. But if you want to get one of the discounted versions then you have to agree to be a volunteer:
Here’s the form to apply. I’ve talked often with George and his colleague Michael Cote about the laptop and the hopes for what it will provide. Mostly, though, for me, it shows how Dell is putting attention into open-source efforts such as Crowbar, a tool Dell developed and open-sourced. Finley writes ”the tool is an open source deployment tool that can provision OpenStack from bare metal up to higher level Chef configuration. It can be expanded using plugins called "barclamps," which add support for tools like Cloud Foundry and Zenoss. Dell can then leverage this platform for building solutions on top of it, such as its Apache Hadoop solution.” Dell is active in OpenStack, the open-source cloud effort that is providing the framework for anyone to build open cloud environments. Project Sputnik an exciting project that shows how a big hardware company is changing course. George and Cote represent a new generation of leaders who recognize that the future of the enterprise is an open one. Hardware and software will continue to integrate at the device level clear through to the infrastructure. In this automated world, we need the flexibility and the ability to leverage services far more than on-premise software. Efforts such as Project Sputnik represent how this change will occur.
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| Addvocate: Salesforce’s Former Head Of Social Marcus Nelson Preps A New Social Enterprise Startup Posted: 06 Jul 2012 03:32 PM PDT  Marcus Nelson, co-founder of customer service startup UserVoice, left his role as head of social media at Salesforce.com back in April to start a company called Addvocate — and now he’s starting to talk about what he’s up to. When I met with Nelson yesterday, he gave me a quick demo of the initial product (currently in private alpha testing) and talked about his broader vision. He says the idea came from his work at Salesforce, where convincing his coworkers to share content on Facebook, Twitter, and other social sites was always a bit of a struggle — a complaint he’s heard from other companies. The problem is that “share this blog post!”-type requests usually come at the wrong time, like when someone is just trying to read through all of their email or catch up on all of their updates on an internal social network like Chatter. Sometimes, they’re even passed along via Excel spreadsheets (ouch). “Knowledge is your best marketing,” Nelson says. “However, I feel this speaks to where social enterprise products are going, not the products being offered today.” With Addvocate, on the other hand, companies can make these suggestions at the moment when employees are logged into their social networks and primed to share. After someone installs the Addvocate browser plugin, they’ll see a bar at the bottom of the screen whenever they’re on Twitter (and eventually other social networks). Administrators can use the plugin to add links that they want to promote (for example articles that talk about the company in a positive light, or new posts on the company blog), which then appear when employees log in. Nelson argues that in many ways, employees are a company’s best advocates on social media. After all, if you follow a company on Twitter or “like” them on Facebook, you’re probably expecting promotional messages and deals. On the other hand, if you follow someone who works for the company, you probably expect them to be, for lack of a better word, a real person, who is more likely to share genuinely interesting content. (That’s doubly true if they’re might a friend of yours.) Of course, not everyone wants to become a shill for their employer. That’s why one of Addvocate’s key features is that you can always say no to a suggestion, and only share the content that seems like it might be relevant to your followers. Ultimately, Nelson says he’s hoping this will encourage companies to create content that’s more interesting and less nakedly self-promotional. Nelson and his co-founder Abraham Williams plan to release a beta version of the product in August, perhaps after raising some funding. The browser plugin will be free, with customers paying for additional features, Nelson says. For example, he plans to offer analytics that give companies a better sense of which messages and employees are driving the most engagement, so they can take a more systematic approach to their social media strategy. He also told me about some more ambitious plans for future products, but I’ve been sworn to secrecy.
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| Sony’s $380 Million Gaikai Acquisition Shows LA’s Technical Talent Posted: 06 Jul 2012 03:26 PM PDT  Editor’s note: Nate Redmond is the Managing Partner of Rustic Canyon Partners. The firm was an early investor in cloud-based gaming platform Gaikai, leading its second round and participating alongside NEA and Benchmark in a subsequent one. Sony's announcement this week to buy Gaikai for $380 million shines a light on the startup ecosystem in Los Angeles and the explosive growth that's taking place. Though the majority of the conversation to date has been about LA's historical strengths in digital media and commerce, Gaikai represents a new class of companies built around engineering talent solving hard problems. LA has once again become a hotbed for technical leadership, as indicated by the flurry of investment activity. Entrepreneurs in the LA region attracted $567 million in venture capital in the first quarter of this year, 50% greater than the NY Metro area in the first quarter of the year, according to PriceWaterhouseCooper’s Money Tree report. Between the outstanding technical talent and the passion and vision of great founders, those dollars are being invested into technology-driven companies that break the stereotype of startups in LA. It's understandable that to date, when people think of LA start-ups, they typically think of digital media and ecommerce. Powerhouses such as Activision/Blizzard, Hulu, and Jamdat (EA) were built in LA. More recently, Riot Games (Tencent) and Machinima have asserted leadership in their respective segments. Similarly, an earlier vintage of ecommerce companies, including Shopzilla, PriceGrabber, and Lowermybills have been replaced by a new collection of direct-to-consumer brands including those from Intelligent Beauty and a number being developed at Science such as Dollar Shave Club. However, these segments represent the beginning of the conversation in LA, not the end. Deeply technical engineering teams, brought together by visionary entrepreneurs, are reshaping the character of startups in LA. These teams are building a new set of engineering-driven companies that break the mold and lead with technical innovation. We see great entrepreneurs building on prior successes, joined by a fresh influx of talented founders seeking their first big outcome. There's also been a well documented crop of accelerators and seed funds formed in the last twelve months that lend mentorship and capital to these entrepreneurial ambitions. The imaginative and entrepreneurial culture in LA has spawned a number of critical innovations in the IT industry, including the foundation of the Internet's largest profit center. Google's AdWords took off following the acquisition of Applied Semantics, which was built by Gil Elbaz and his technical team in LA. Gil is now building another extraordinary technical team at Factual, which is leading a new revolution around data as service. Perfect Market and Gravity are two examples of strong technical teams being led by successful repeat entrepreneurs. Both are leveraging data as an asset, creating competitive barriers through improved decision making enabled by the algorithms and feedback loops in machine learning. Oblong Industries, whose core spatial operating platform was featured in Minority Report, is an otherwise quiet company that keeps its technical talent tucked away in downtown Los Angeles. Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised at the level of technical talent in LA. After all, LA has a deep engineering heritage rooted in the aerospace and defense industries, which for decades sat at the cutting edge of innovation and was a considerable draw for technical talent. While many assume the LA economy has always been dominated by entertainment, it wasn't until the 1990s that the entertainment industry passed aerospace as the largest employer in the region. With a new wave of technical innovation, LA is once again importing top engineering talent to join the (large number) of science and engineering graduates from local universities. Indeed, despite common misconceptions, LA doesn't need more tech talent or entrepreneurship. It has both in spades. What it does need is for more of the tech talent to be interested in entrepreneurship. Founders with compelling visions are the catalyst. Which brings me back to Gaikai. The founding team at Gaikai, led by CEO David Perry, is a great example. Gaikai is a technical powerhouse that solved a tightly connected series of engineering problems in order to stream games from a remote server to a web browser running on PCs, tablets and TVs, with no noticeable latency. While many companies claim to stream games, Gaikai delivered on it commercially, holding up to the technical scrutiny of major partners including Nvidia, Samsung and LG, in addition to the discerning eye of some of the world's best game developers. Add to that list Sony Computer Entertainment. Gaikai runs a cloud-scale, purpose-built system that is optimized across the interdependent interfaces between server, distributed network infrastructure, and client rendering. The resulting performance is hastening the disruption of a large industry. The global gaming industry is $60 billion, the largest and fastest growing sector of international media. Look beneath the surface of this growth and you will see a massive shift from a packaged goods business, where customers fork out $60 for a disk that is played on a PC or console such as Microsoft's Xbox or Sony's Playstation, to an online service played on mobile, tablets, PCs and Internet-connected TVs. Over the last five years the online/wireless segment has tripled and is on the verge of overtaking the console/PC segment. The resulting disruption is creating massive shifts in value. Gaikai's cloud streaming capabilities will enable Sony to better capture the shift to online services. Like all great entrepreneurs, Gaikai's CEO David Perry, had vision and a steadfast belief in the impact of that vision. David enticed his co-founders to move from Europe and collectively they built a team with deep technical competence in LA. Entrepreneurial leadership causes engineering talent to coalesce around a grand vision and to see that vision realized. Expect to see more of this in LA as the region returns to its roots of deep engineering. [Top image by tonx/Flickr.]
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| Posted: 06 Jul 2012 03:10 PM PDT  The tech news cycle is a desperate bitch, as we’ve brought up before; A brief rundown of yesterday’s bitchmeme sparked by a mere tweet from my colleague MG Siegler once again proves how absurd it is. “I used to love to plant one really weird bit of random information (sometimes even false) into stories to catch the rewrites,” MG wrote in response to developer Marco Arment’s concise analysis of the insatiable tech news beast. As fast as a fractal, the tweet was quickly turned into a blog post, Betabeat’s Adrianne Jeffries asserted that MG “couldn’t be trusted,” based on his own admission that he couldn’t be trusted?! What’s shocking is that Jeffries didn’t think once about the Liar’s Paradox: What happens when a pathological liar tells you that they’re a pathological liar? What’s weirder is that MG himself had broken this piece of “news” back in October, when Jeffries perhaps wasn’t online to jump on it. Well now, most likely because it’s summer, the same item of (true? false?) information sets off a media firestorm because people still working the holiday shift don’t have anything better to do. (Siegler is, poetically enough, on vacation.) When Jeffries asked me yesterday via email whether or not this “random information” thing was still going on at TechCrunch, my response was, “I’m not sure if it was even happening then.”
Hmmm … So did MG just pull off the world’s most successful blogger honeypot? It may just be enough that his tweet about the state of blogging led to Blogception, unleashing a torrent of the very same rewrites and thinly-sourced stories he was referring to.Including this one.
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| Posted: 06 Jul 2012 02:16 PM PDT  Mozilla is not “stopping” Thunderbird development, it has just decided that: “continued innovation on Thunderbird is not the best use of our resources given our ambitious organizational goals.” And it’s pulling people off the project. But it’s not stopping? Right. This, according to a letter shared with “Mozillians” ahead of the official announcement to be revealed on Monday. Recipients were asked not to share the letter, blog or tweet about the news until then, but obviously someone out there didn’t agree with that plan. While it’s sure to upset some diehards, it’s a move that makes sense, given that Thunderbird, an open source Outlook competitor, is desktop software in a world that has been rapidly moving to mobile and web. Mozilla itself has been ramping up efforts in these areas as of late, with the recent introductions of its “boot-to-gecko” OS (now “Firefox OS”), for example, as well as a new web-based code editor called Thimble, “Junior,” a Webkit-based browser for iPad, its Firefox mobile web browser, of course, and more. The timing of the Thunderbird announcement is kind of funny, though, since it was barely a month ago that Mozilla was touting the release of a new version of the software which introduced options for large file sharing and the ability to create personalized email addresses. Now, it seems that the company’s focus will be mainly on security and stability, not new features. On Monday, the company will post details of Thunderbird’s proposed governance model here, to complement the forthcoming blog post from Mozilla Foundation Chair Mitchell Baker. Although the letter makes it sound like the reassignments from Thunderbird to other projects would be new changes, people started moving off of Thunderbird in January. And as for any hopes that the “community” of Thunderbird contributors will rise up to fill in the gaps once those folks are gone…well, don’t hold your breath on that one. The full text of the letter is below. (We’ve confirmed it’s legit.)
Update: Oh look, a blog post just went up.
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| Don’t Put Down That iPad — 8,000 Mobile Devices Left At Top U.S. Airports Posted: 06 Jul 2012 02:08 PM PDT  The flight is boarding and you are in a rush. You get on the plane. At 10,000 feet, you reach into your bag. Your laptop is not there. It happens all the time. In fact, according to a new survey, more than 8,000 devices are left at seven of the largest airports in the United States, including: Chicago O'Hare, Denver International, San Francisco International, Charlotte Douglas, Miami International, Orlando International and Minneapolis/St. Paul. The survey by Credant Technologies reveals some of the downsides of mobile and the security issues raided when the devices get lost. Here’s the breakdown:
People mostly leave devices at TSA checkpoints and restrooms. All but one of the airports donates the devices to charities. One airport sends the left behind devices to the authorities. It’s evident then why the enterprise market now has its own category for “mobile device management. (MDM)” CIOs and IT managers are finding an increasing need for technology that protects these devices left in TSA bins, bathroom stalls and any other place you can imagine. Gartner Research published a report on the topic last year. The report lists some recommendations:
MDM has steep demand. And it always will as long as we keep forgetting our tablets after we put our shoes back on at TSA security.
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| Twitter Search Adds “Search Within People You Follow”, Autocomplete, Related Results Posted: 06 Jul 2012 12:27 PM PDT  Twitter has just implemented a massive set of improvements to search, allowing you to search just within tweets of people you follow, autocomplete, and related results including similar hashtags and usernames. These will all help you find what you’re looking for even if you’re unsure of the exact hashtag or someone’s handle. Today’s updates are already live on Twitter.com, and related search suggestions, autocomplete, and spelling corrections are also now available in Twitter for iPhone and Android. You can try them out now with a search for “Jeremy Lin” which returns his username and the real names of teammates as suggestions, plus a filter for tweets from People You Follow. Here’s a list of many of the additions:
The announcement, which was teased yesterday, follows along the wave of enhancements to the Discover tab, email digests, and Tailored Trends designed to make Twitter about more than just tweeting and reading. I’m most excited about being able to search within People You Follow, which will help resurface content you noticed in your stream but need to return to later. Without this new tool, you had to wade through page after page of tweets by strangers. For example, a general search for “tonight” would produce tons of results I don’t care about, but by filtering to “People You Follow” it gives me a look into what my network is up to this evening. Hey look, I just discovered a concert by dj Doorly tonight. While the improvements sound great, they still need some refining. A search for the misspelling “Jeremey Lin” only pulls up the basketball star’s correctly spelled name in the auto-complete until you get to “Jereme” where the misspelling starts. It also won’t show him as a related result the way Google’s “Showing results for…” and “did you mean” do. That means users will either have to type slowly and watch for suggestions for these improvements to truly guide them. Maybe our conference just wasn’t cool enough to get assistance, but a search for hashtag “#techcrunchdisrupt” doesn’t return suggestions for the proper hashtag “#tcdisrupt”. Still, the ambition of the changes should be commended. While Twitter’s blog post announcement was titled “Simpler Search”, autocomplete and suggestions are quite complicated engineering challenges. Twitter search has long lagged behind other internal search engines that have featured autocomplete and suggestions for years. With time and data monitoring, Twitter is sure to improve the features, and unlock the potential of exploring the world’s real-time consciousness.
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| PSA: Check Your Computer For DNSChanger Or Risk Getting Booted Off The Web On Monday Posted: 06 Jul 2012 12:06 PM PDT  It’s something of a 21st Century nightmare — headlines are declaring that come Monday morning, thousands of people could wake up to a startling lack of Internet access all because of a crafty bit of malware. How chilling! Well, it would be more chilling if people haven’t had plenty of advance warning. What’s more, the steps to detect and eliminate that malware — unimaginatively called “DNSChanger” — are relatively simple, so less-than-tech-savvy folk out there can take care of business with too much outside assistance. But first, a little background. The whole sordid story began back in 2007 when DNSChanger first started making the rounds. As its name implies, one of DNSChanger’s primary functions was to fiddle with an infected computer’s DNS settings in such a way that users who attempted to surf the web would be re-routed to fraudulent sites instead. To cover its tracks, DNSChanger also prevented infected computers from accessing sites where they could download antivirus and OS security updates that would clean things up. That being the case, users could still get online, but their view of the Internet was a bit different from ours — the group operating the servers were able to earn a considerable chunk of money by sending people to malicious sites and raking in the ad revenue. The seven men behind the widespread scam reportedly managed to score around $14 million in ill-gotten funds before they were arrested in late 2011. Interestingly, the FBI and Germany’s Information Security Agency made some adjustments and left the system running because of the number of people who would’ve been affected by pulling the plug outright. You can guess where this is going — that plug finally comes out on July 9, which means anyone who hasn’t yet made the fix will be unable to watch their daily dose of cat videos on YouTube. Thankfully, the process of getting yourself all squared away is terribly simple — if you haven’t yet, check this site provided by the DNS Changer Working Group to see if you’ve got anything to worry about. On the off-chance that you are infected the working group also refers to a handful of tools to clean things up, though some seem simpler than others. And that’s all there is to it. If your machine was infected though, there’s a pretty good chance that someone else has already tried to tell you about it. Google began displaying warning messages to users they believed were affected by the DNSChanger malware in their search results back in May, and Facebook decided to do something similar one month later. Exactly how many computers are infected by DNSChanger remains unclear at this point — the FBI pegs the number of infected at around 275,000, while some estimates reach as high as 300,000. Either way they’re not inconsiderable figures, especially considering that nearly 70,000 of those computers are reportedly based in the United States. That said, most of you savvy TechCrunch readers have probably dodged the DNSChanger bullet with ease, but it’s still worth passing the word along to the less tech-savvy folks in your lives just to be safe.
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| Remember: See Us In Savannah, Georgia Tonight At 6pm Posted: 06 Jul 2012 12:00 PM PDT  Here we go: tomorrow we’re heading to the offices of Creative Coast, 15 West York Street for our first ever Savannah meet-up. We’re excited to see what Savannah has to offer. You can RSVP here. Special thanks to The Creative Coast for hosting the event.
Here’s the rest of the program: Atlanta is happening on July 9. We’re holding it at Sweetwater Brewery Raleigh-Durham is happening on July 10th at the Tyler’s Taproom in the American Tobacco Historic District. We will be taking over most of the restaurant and garden so roll on over. You can RSVP here.
Charlotte is happening on July 11th at Packard Place. You can RSVP here. Special thanks to Packard Place for hosting the event.
Greenville is happening on July 12th at 411 University Ridge. RSVP here. Sponsors:
Atlanta:
Raleigh-DurhamAbout inMotionNow inMotionNow is a leading provider of workflow solutions for the enterprise creative department, facilitating efficiency and productivity in the approval process for print, video, and interactive content. The company's flagship product, the inMotion SaaS application for Creative Workflow Management, enables companies to manage and track their marketing and creative projects in a centralized, online environment. inMotion reviewers can access and markup content online and deliver approval back in minutes, from any internet-enabled device or through the inMotion Mobile Review app for iPhone and iPad.
Charlotte
Greenville:
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