The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- RIM CEO Thorsten Heins: “We Will Continue To Make The People That Use A BlackBerry Successful”
- CED Program Director Dhruv Patel On North Carolina’s Startup Scene
- DirecTV’s Latest Message To Subscribers: A Plea For A La Carte Pricing?
- How To Prepare Your Startup To Raise An Angel Round
- Twilio Evangelist Builds Popular Phone-Powered Rolling Robot, Hints Flying Bot Is Next
- Blekko Launches ROCKZi, a Social News Site to Complement Its Search Engine
- Dear Free Press, Stop The Facebook Gossip Profiteering
- MobiTV Pulls Its IPO: Unfavorable Market Conditions, Or Unfavorable Business Model?
- Ad Targeting Is Hard
- How Authoritarianism Will Lead To The Rise Of The Data Smuggler
- Social Network At The Pool Releases TechCrunch “Pool” In Advance of Monday’s Launch
- Review: The Telikin PC For Older Folks
- Path’s Consistency Of Tone
- DIY Wireless Typing Glove Is The Future Of Michael Jackson Impersonation/Data Entry
- RIM Ordered To Pay Out $147 Million Over Mformation Patent Scuffle
- Facebook’s Latest Acqui-Hire: Spool, The “Instapaper On Steroids”
- Gillmor Gang: Tablet Stakes
- Iconoclasm
| RIM CEO Thorsten Heins: “We Will Continue To Make The People That Use A BlackBerry Successful” Posted: 15 Jul 2012 08:33 AM PDT  Blackberry’s future is the tech debate du jour, with pundits on either side promising either a BB10 renaissance or a slow-motion tailspin. While the jury was still out, we had a few moments to speak with RIM CEO Thorsten Heins about RIM’s way forward and where BB10 was going to put the company when it launches. He was unsurprisingly forthright and more than accommodating even when we asked him the questions any BB fan would ask today: Why should I buy a new Blackberry device? TC: In this interview we wanted to see what was in store for the consumer, what RIM is doing to maintain the energy that a lot of the BlackBerry users currently have, especially at work or in academia. What do you see as the best way forward for those folks? Thorsten Heins: What we are doing right now is, if you look at the installed base, specifically in enterprise, corporate and consumers worldwide, there is still a lot of phones running BlackBerry 5, mainly in Asia-Pacific. So we are still working on a program to upgrade the installed base to BlackBerry 7, which from today's view and perspective still is competitive, and I think an exciting platform. So we are absolutely working on our consumer and enterprise base to get us to BlackBerry 7, which is a real upgraded experience compared to 5 and 6, and to a certain extent also 6. That’s the first thing we are doing. Second is we are working on the BB10 platform to be launched in the first quarter next year. And this is not, as I said, based on a QWERTY device, which is a device type we dominate today. This will get us back into the full touch game, and this is where we will fight hard in the U.S. to regain market share and convince consumers that, well, BlackBerry is not just a great platform for productivity or for business people; it's a great platform for consumers as well. We will specifically talk to those consumers that are constantly on the move or need to stay ahead and introduce them to BB10. Given the ease of adoptions for this platform it will be a great gaming experience, a great media experience, and a great content experience. TC: It seems like BlackBerry itself has always been very specific about the email side of things. Is your vision to bring the company into more direct competition with the iOS/Android situation, or is email still paramount? Heins: The way I look at this is that email certainly is a core element of BlackBerry, but I would put a bigger frame around this. I think this is about being extremely socially connected. In today's world, email is not the only way to communicate anymore: it is Twittering, Facebook, BBMing, and other means of social communication networking. So what it really is about, I think, is to put a different frame around it and say “We keep you extremely well-connected through your various communication channels and we are making it really easy to deal with and to manage and to respond to notifications.” TC: In terms of BB10, are you at all concerned that the time involved in releasing this update is going to affect things negatively, and especially with 7-inch iPad rumors swirling? Heins: First, those are rumors. But as for BB10 I think this is not just a product launch, this is a whole new platform launch with a really new BlackBerry experience. So from that perspective, am I to a certain extent disappointed that we have that delay in BlackBerry 10? Yes, I would say yes. But on the other side, I just want this to be the best user experience, the best compelling quality that people see on a BlackBerry, and I will not sacrifice this. I just want this experience to be fantastic. And that’s what we are working towards. So knowing what we are building our BlackBerry 10 on, the product, the capabilities, the empowerment it actually gives to the people that use it, I have no concerns about our success. We will be successful. Also if you look at the channels that we are serving, basically through the carriers, they see not just the risk anymore, I think they see reality coming that there’s a duopoly of suppliers they can work with and that they can source from right now. They have a huge installed base of BlackBerry customers out there, they want to protect that installed base. They want them to be successful too. We get a lot of endorsement from carriers and the carrier partners globally on BlackBerry 10. So I am confident that we will make a good appearance in the rest of the world, but I am also confident that we are actually in a position to fight back in the U.S. based on the BlackBerry 10 portfolio. TC: I guess it seems like people need a pep talk. So what would you say to the folks who say, “RIM isn’t thinking about us specifically, us early adopters, us hardcore BB users, we haven't put down our BlackBerry since the late 90s.” What will you say to them? Heins: The pep talk is that we will continue to make the people that use a BlackBerry successful. That is really the DNA. It just allowed people to manage their life and have a very comfortable way of communicating. And with BlackBerry 10, we will take this to a whole new level. It's not just about you communicating with somebody else; it's about actually communicating with the whole network around you. So the strength in this whole social network and the strength is also in other elements that are not particularly BlackBerry elements, like gaming, because the platform supports it. We will not develop our own games, but the platform we are building allows game developers to program and to deliver really fantastic-performing games. I myself, I use PlayBook a lot to play racing games because I can look at PlayBook from a performance perspective and say, with the highest rendering requirement, with the highest load on the graphic unit, is it a good performance, is it a good experience? And it is. TC: And how many BlackBerrys do you carry around with you? Heins: I have a PlayBook I use for work. I have a PlayBook that I use privately. I am on a 9900 right now. And I am using a kind of an ultra device for L-series right now, for BB10. TC: You don't have a secret Google Galaxy Nexus hidden in there somewhere? Heins: What I always do is try be connected with the industry and know what's going on there. I always have competitive devices on my desk that I check out that I work with, just to really understand what's going on. I think this is just a good way of understanding what the industry is and where it's headed. So we constantly do this.
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| CED Program Director Dhruv Patel On North Carolina’s Startup Scene Posted: 15 Jul 2012 06:00 AM PDT  Over the past week, we took TechCrunch on the road for our Southeast Meetup tour. Of the five cities we visited in seven days, Durham had one of the hungriest entrepreneurial scenes. The majority of the city is relatively run-down, aside from the lovely American Tobacco Center facility you see in the background. But North Carolina’s tech scene is on a mission, and it’s not just about cleaning up the city, it’s about branching out of the usual life science industry to have a varied portfolio of young companies in the Raleigh-Durham area. I pulled aside Dhruv Patel, who is the program director of CED (what’s known by most as the TechStars of the South), and he said that about $7.7 billion has been invested in Raleigh-Durham startups in the past 12 years, most of it from a huge increase in activity out of angel investors (with a hat tip to the Triangle Startup Factory). He also said that in the past year the state has gotten a lot more interest from out-of-state investors who are willing to turn an ear to the south. A main focus in the area is to build out all the possible strengths of the area. With major schools like Duke and UNC around the corner, Durham has long been a life science and health care hub. But there are also major corporations that could help leverage a research and development capacity, such as Lenovo, IBM and Cysco. Another strength of Durham’s tech scene is the fact that most startups aren’t that capital intensive. They can get a beta on the ground and running for $500k, likely because cost of living is less expensive but also because this is a group of entrepreneurs who are far more used to hearing no than those in Silicon Valley. With the FDA in flux, staying focused on the life sciences and pharmaceutical industries only becomes a bit more complicated. That said, Durham has seen a huge boom in the IT sectors, with “investors being generally receptive,” said Patel.
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| DirecTV’s Latest Message To Subscribers: A Plea For A La Carte Pricing? Posted: 15 Jul 2012 03:00 AM PDT  DirecTV and Viacom continue to be embroiled in a nasty fight over carriage fees, with consumers still unable to view networks like MTV, Nickelodeon, or Comedy Central after several days. Both sides have taken to the web — and Twitter — in recent days, as they attempt to win over public support. In Viacom’s case, the cable programmer is trying to put pressure on DirecTV by urging customers to switch providers while its networks remain dark. But in the latest volley from DirecTV, CEO Mike White explains the satellite provider’s side of things, with a video message that appears on YouTube. White touches on all the usual talking points, assuring customers that the blackout of MTV, Nickelodeon, and other networks is temporary, while saying that Viacom is demanding a 30 percent increase in the fees it collects for its networks — which amounts to “an extra billion dollars for the exact same channels you already receive.” By standing firm, White said the satellite provider is fighting to keep subscribers’ bills as low as possible. That’s nothing new, and matches similar arguments made by other pay TV companies whenever these types of negotiations lead to a blackout of various channels. But White’s message also includes some pretty surprising rhetoric around how content is bundled together for pay TV subscribers:
Taken at face value, what White is asking for is the ability to let consumers pick and choose which networks they want to pay for, and which they don’t — so-called “a la carte” pricing of cable channels. And if that’s really what this fight is about, it could mean a major shakeup for the pay TV industry if the satellite company gets its way. That’s because a la carte — if actually implemented — could blow up the pay TV industry as we know it. The idea behind any cable or satellite package is that there’s popular programming which the majority of people are willing to pay for, which helps to subsidize more niche networks that don’t pull such high ratings. The problem with a la carte is that, if people choose to only purchase the most popular networks, then funding for more niche programming disappears. That, in turn, leads to less choice as networks go under. But what’s happened over the last several years is that the big media conglomerates — Disney, News Corp, Viacom, and the like — continue to dream up new networks and then package them with their flagship properties, demanding that their distribution partners buy them all as a big bundle. With their costs rising every year, some cable and satellite providers are beginning to fight back, realizing that perpetually passing on rate increases to their customers is an unsustainable business practice. Equally unsustainable is the plan to hold pricing steady while having margins are eaten away due to the increased cost of programming. Stuck between a rock and a hard place, those distributors are exploring the possibility of creating smaller, less-expensive bundles of content. Time Warner Cable rolled out its TV Essentials package in 2010, and Comcast has been experimenting with a pricing structure called MyTV Choice, which lets users pick bundles of channels based on a certain theme — for instance, kids programming or movies. The idea is that with more flexible cable packages, they’ll be able to better serve customers who are tired of paying more than $100 for networks they never watch. That’s seemingly what DirecTV wants to do as well. Win or lose, I don’t actually expect that the company will roll out true a la carte pricing, but it could mean smaller bundles of channels. Will that mean some networks will just disappear? It’s possible, maybe even probable, since it seems unlikely that subscribers will continue to bear ever-increasing cable or satellite bills. The question is how deeply that will affect the channels people don’t watch or care about.
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| How To Prepare Your Startup To Raise An Angel Round Posted: 15 Jul 2012 01:00 AM PDT Editor's note: Derek Andersen is the founder of Startup Grind, a 12-city event series growing around the world to help educate, inspire, and connect entrepreneurs. He's also ex-Electronic Arts, the founder of Commonred and Vaporware Labs. A recent email from an entrepreneur and complete stranger read: “We need to raise money. Who can you introduce us to?” I quickly encouraged him to submit his startup to AngelList but a few days later he returned with, “I messaged the AngelList founder and he didn’t respond. Can you give me some tips?” This post is for you buddy. Approaching a well known Silicon Valley angel investor cold with the expectation that they’ll fund you, is like walking up to a beautiful stranger and expecting you’ll be planning a wedding by the end of the conversation. For the masses, if you want top tier funding, there is a process or roadmap in most cases you can follow (ignore the geniuses and exceptions). Attempting to bypass it shows a lack of consideration and basic intelligence of how the funding process works. Why Is There Protocol? Well known angel investors and VCs are inundated with inbound requests for meetings and funding. A few months ago I interviewed Jeff Clavier of SoftTech VC, one of the top investment brands in Silicon Valley, and who one of his entrepreneurs recently told me was “simply an awesome investor.” Jeff explained that SoftTech VC receives between 2,000-3,000 inbound email requests for meetings every year. If they took a 30 minute phone call with each team, they would be stuck with 90,000 minutes worth of meetings. Lets say they work 50-hour weeks, it would take them half the year to get through the first meetings. Trust me you don’t want to see the math on the due diligence that would be required. As founders should we be offended when a VC doesn’t even respond to our cold email? Of course not. After looking at the numbers can you blame them? In most cases they physically don’t have the bandwidth. That doesn’t mean they won’t take a meeting or don’t want to invest, you just need to find the right channel to reach through their filters in a way that they’ll respond. How To Get A Meeting I am able to get top tier speakers on a weekly basis for our Startup Grind events even though I rarely I know these people beforehand. The protocol for getting them almost always involves a referral. Here’s an example. We started hosting our events and had around 20 people who would come regularly. I had met a very good but not overly well known venture capitalist and invited him to speak. He had a good experience and encouraged Steve Blank to come speak. Steve had a good experience and encouraged Ann Miura Ko (FLOODGATE) who is speaking this week. Getting investor meetings is the same process. You need an intro from someone sitting between the founders and the investors. A trusted entrepreneur in the portfolio, an investment partner, or people that have relationships with the investor and can vouch for the entrepreneur. In SoftTechVC’s case, Jeff says they use this social proof to “cut through the deal flow and 200-300 (monthly) opportunities, to get to the top 20-30 to meetings that we’ll actually take each month.” If someone is consistently doling out bad intros to investor friends, then those emails will quickly fall on deaf ears. What not to do? Jeff says, “Don’t reach out to us by phone, fax, tweet, singing in front of our door, or reaching out to my children – that’s really bad.” The Meeting And Followup When the investment team finally sits down with a founding team, Jeff looks for, “A smart a** team, building a kick a** product, in a big a** market.” While your product doesn’t need to be perfect, most experienced investors would expect to see an advanced prototype and at a minimum some customer development. Jeff and his team look for companies that fit their firm’s clearly identified investment focus. While most firms might not be quite so clear, with a bit of effort you can look at companies funded and make assumptions on what types of markets or categories an investor in interested in. Any good investor I know will not invest in a portfolio company’s competition. If they have, start pitching to one of the firm’s competitors. Maybe they missed on the opportunity or were waiting for the right team. The best recent example of this is Andreessen Horowitz who having invested heavily in PicPlz, passed on Instagram’s later round because they concluded that “funding Kevin to compete with Dalton would be a violation of the original implicit commitment made to Dalton—to not fund competitors to PicPlz.” If the meetings go well, an angel will likely engage in a due diligence process where they’ll call references to check on you and the team personally. They’ll speak with market experts to vet the product and opportunity, and they’ll look at the team’s compatibility with the firm. In SoftTech VC’s case all the partners must agree on an investment. If there is any dissent then they will pass. The Offer, Funding, and Beyond The length between meetings and receiving an offer or even an answer can vary greatly. Some Y Combinator founders get offers on the spot or in email later that day. Some people meet with you and never give you a clear answer either way. In SoftTech’s case they’ll go from the inital chat to making a decision within 10 days. If you receive and accept an offer, depending on the type of financing you’re taking, you can expect a wire transfer anywhere between a few days and several weeks. Most VC will not pay in cash or unmarked American US dollars. Take it from someone who has tried. An investor likely only sits on 5-7 Boards so if you’re gunning for them to take a board seat then do your homework and see how many they’re already on. Following funding Jeff says the best entrepreneurs leverage their investors by being specific with needs and ways to help, or quick phone calls to talk about product or strategy concerns. But he adds, “some early stage entrepreneurs or first timers forget that just because you are spending time with your investors doesn’t mean you’re spending it wisely.”
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| Twilio Evangelist Builds Popular Phone-Powered Rolling Robot, Hints Flying Bot Is Next Posted: 14 Jul 2012 10:00 PM PDT  So here’s something you may have seen floating around on Hacker News or elsewhere, but we thought it was cool enough to share in case you’re looking for something to do with your weekend. After all, there are few of us who don’t love stories that end with robots. Especially robots controlled by phones. Robots have indeed fascinated many of us since childhood, and thanks to modern technology, those imaginations and tinkerings of yore are now increasingly becoming reality. Thankfully, in the hands of those smarter (and less inclined to hatch plots to take over the world) than I. Jonathan Gottfried, Twilio’s resident developer evangelist, recently posted a tutorial on the company’s blog that shows developers how to build a basic robot that can be wirelessly powered with your phone, using Twilio, Arduino and Node.js. The developer evangelist told us that the primary motivation was, of course, to get developers excited about the possibilities of hacking on Twilio. So, he pulled out his old Arduino, which he’d experimented with before, in attempt to connect it to the Web to learn how to do it himself and to support the community with an in-depth tutorial. From the results, he was more than successful, as he tells us that the post has turned into one of the most-trafficked blog posts in Twilio’s history. The interest led to Gottfried and friends demo-ing their hack at NY Tech Meetup several days ago, which you can check out here. (Fast forward to 1:06.) You can also check out the final product in the video below. To oversimplify, the robot was created around an Arduino board and runs thanks to the help of Node.js and Twilio’s VOIP APIs. The robot is controlled via keyboard commands over VOIP, allowing users to press “2″ to get the robot moving forward, “6″ to turn, etc. Gottfried goes into some serious detail as to how this is all possible on Twilio’s blog, and he’s put the full source code on GitHub here. The idea is to showcase Twilio’s role in making the robot roll, and he offers examples of code so that hackers can follow along. He also lays out all the part he used, which tinkerers can opt to use themselves, or not. Boiled down, the essential parts that made it possible just entail an Arduino Uno, a WiFly Module, a Wireless SD Shield. Throw in a breadboard, some wheels, and a chassis, and you’re cookin’ with robot. But we also used the opportunity to ask Gottfried if there were any other motivations here beyond demonstrating how easy it is to hack together a phone-controlled robot or showcasing the power of Twilio’s APIs. Gottfried had a really interesting response, some of which I’ll share below. The main take-away: He thinks that the interest in the hack points to the disconnect between the web development world and the hardware hacking world — and that developers are always eager to find exciting ways to bridge the two. Food for thought?
He closed by saying that, based on this conclusion, he’s now working on two additional, follow-up tutorials that combine Twilio with Arduino hardware solutions. As a teaser, he says that one of them involves flying. It seems the Dark Knight returns, and rises. Twilio How-To here.
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| Blekko Launches ROCKZi, a Social News Site to Complement Its Search Engine Posted: 14 Jul 2012 08:00 PM PDT  The search engine Blekko just launched ROCKZi, a visually compelling way to consume and interact with the fresh content that users care about the most. After selecting the category that you want to read (Geekery, The BiZ, Glitterati…), you are presented with articles in a grid view reminiscent of Flipboard on the iPad. You can upvote the article with the “This RockZ” button and leave a comment. Users can submit new articles and share them on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest. On top of that, you accumulate karma points with every action. However, don’t be fooled by the different product names — Blekko and ROCKZi go hand in hand to improve the human-curated experience that made the search engine popular in the first place. ROCKZi was first conceptualized by a Blekko engineer during an internal hackathon and then developed into a full-scale product. “We didn’t want to present fresh content in a traditional news search kind of way by launching news.blekko.com and putting a search box there,” co-founder and VP of marketing Mike Markson says. “Blekko is all about curation — people want to curate, you just have to give them the right set of tools. The other goal with ROCKZi is to take the curation aspect out of the hands of just the power-users and hand it to the everyday users,” he continues. Indeed, Blekko users have been identifying quality content in vertical categories called slashtags since the day it launched. It then allows users to refine queries with /news, /tech or /blogs for example — those slashtags are the keystone of ROCKZi as well. “Rather than making slashtags a searchable database, we wanted to turn it inside out and provide it as a feed,” Markson says. In addition to leveraging Blekko search assets to constitute ROCKZi’s news sources, news categories are searchable. Putting it another way, it is a less intimidating way of using slashtags by simply selecting the category you are interested in as a first step. Finally, ROCKZi uses Facebook Connect to show you the content your friends have submitted or liked and their area of expertise. The website is now live and mobile apps are on their way. Blekko has raised around $50 million and, according to Markson, it had 5.5 million users in June. When it comes to monetizing the service, they are considering putting ads next to ROCKZi search results the same way they do in Blekko.
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| Dear Free Press, Stop The Facebook Gossip Profiteering Posted: 14 Jul 2012 07:00 PM PDT  The otherwise laudable Free Press book publisher has joined the ranks of media outlets that profiteer from cheap, gossipy, Facebook criticism. The Boy Kings is an autobiographical account from a Facebook customer service employee of the mildly frat boy behavior of Facebook’s male engineers, disguised as a tell-all investigative forewarning of the social network’s plans for the future. The Grand Canyon-size gap between author Katherine Losse’s apocalyptic claims and the actual examples are extraordinary. In one anecdote, Losse’s friend and fellow engineer, “Thrax,” crashed on the floor asleep after working unusually hard. When Thrax’s colleagues praised his work, this was Losse’s explanation: “It was as if, in the process of building out his technology, he had reached the technologist’s desired state in which he no longer had a human body…This, maybe, was Facebook’s primal scene, the moment when technology consumed the body, reality, and what was left of the physical realm.” You can’t make this stuff up…well, I guess you can if you’re a Free Press author. Sadly, what could have been an important insight into one of the world’s most powerful corporations was squandered on a self-indulgent, half-baked attempt at feminism. “I was a student of the humanities, including histories of colonialism and revolutions” writes Losse, in the anti-climactic build up to the book’s mushroom-cloud evidence of Facebook’s broken, chauvinistic culture: a 2006 birthday prank whereby the females were asked to wear a t-shirt with Zuckberg’s picture on it and the males asked to wear his signature flip-flops. “He’s not my god or my president; I just work here,” complains Losse. Was the birthday inappropriate? Sure. Does it deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as colonialism: no, not even close. And, in the face of actually offensive Silicon Valley sexism, Boy Kings seems like a distraction from real problems. Losse’s inescapable humanities perspective reads like an extended rant of a girl in Philosophy 101 class who thinks she’s offered a sound critique of Aristotle because she used the word “Western.” Facebook should be criticized, but we should also hold authors accountable to offering the requisite historical and social science evidence necessary to smash someone else’s hard-built dreams. Without reading the book, if I was told that a company of young 20-something male millionaires occasionally acted frat-boyish, I probably would have believed that without reading 200 pages of evidence. Here’s some bullet pointed examples that will save you $16
The book concludes without any real insight into Facebook’s vision, comparisons of other companies that satisfy the author’s values, or a single piece of damning evidence. Facebook is far from perfect, and its enormous influence deserves both careful criticism and thoughtful debate. Boy Kings offers none of this, but has managed to make headlines from its vaguely sexist claims. Free Press is sure to make money from the book, and perhaps they also plan to make more money by putting out a magazine of paparazzi-style pictures of Zuckerberg in the grocery store checkout aisle. [Image Credit: zalouk webdesign]
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| MobiTV Pulls Its IPO: Unfavorable Market Conditions, Or Unfavorable Business Model? Posted: 14 Jul 2012 06:00 PM PDT  At the end of August, mobile TV and video platform MobiTV filed its S-1 and announced its plans for a $75 million initial public offering. Founded in 1999, the company had been one of the early movers in the movement to bring live and on-demand TV to mobile devices, which led to partnerships with NBC, ESPN, Disney, CBS, and a bunch of other sizable media companies. The company closed over $100 million in outside investment in their time, had partnered with the big four carriers, and revenue was on the rise, so it seemed like a company on the road to a successful IPO, right? Wrong. Yesterday, the company essentially withdrew its public offering, citing “unfavorable market conditions.” Yes, in the wake of the Facebook IPO debacle, some companies got cold feet, and others would say it put a "freeze" on the IPO market, especially for tech companies. However, IT service management company ServiceNow had, by most accounts, a successful IPO at the end of June. What’s more, travel search engine Kayak is moving forward with its plans to IPO, recently pricing shares between $22 and $25. The travel search engine has seen its IPO delayed on a number of occasions (it originally filed for an IPO in 2010), and its CFO left to pursue other projects, even joining the advisory board of a competing, next-gen flight search startup. Certainly, Kayak still relies on ITA for its flight inventory and questions have been raised about the sustainability of its model, as next-gen competitors emerge and focus on personalization, granularity, and the world beyond price comparison. However, in the first quarter of 2012, Kayak saw year-over-year revenues increase 39 percent to $73 million and, as Sarah wrote last week, the company has been focused on product advancements, launching a redesigned iPad app, a new website UI, a more universal consumer experience, direct booking, and ramping up its mobile experience. Palo Alto Networks is also on course to IPO soon, recently pricing its public offering between $34 and $37 a share, as it plans to sell 6.2 million shares. At the top of the price range, its valuation could reach $2.5 billion. If these companies IPO successfully, it will go a long way towards warming that “freeze” in the IPO market. And, by all accounts, these two companies will get there — and fairly soon. Which then raises the question, is MobiTV’s withdrawal of its IPO a result of a horrid IPO market, or something else? Well, the fact of the matter is that, as Ryan wrote at the time of its initial filing, things didn’t look too pretty for MobiTV. It actually kind of makes you wonder what the company was thinking. In its most recent S-1 amendment, MobiTV admits that it has a “limited operating history and a history of losses.” Really, the company has yet to turn a profit, taking a loss for the past three years. In 2008 through 2011, MobiTV showed losses of $25 million, $14.6 million and $14.7 million, and most recently, $11.7 million. Sure, those losses are declining, but it’s still in the red. As of December 31st, 2011, the company had an accumulated deficit of $120 million. The company depends on four customers for most of its revenue (the four major carriers), and if any of those four were to terminate their relationship with MobiTV the company would be in trouble. It would be hard pressed to replace that revenue source, i.e. the company has few options in terms of supplementary revenue sources. They make this clear in the language of their S-1. What’s more their customers control end user relationships, pricing and terms, and the market they’re operating in is constantly in flux, fragmented, and extremely competitive. Again, as the company says, “many of our current and potential competitors have greater resources than we do and offerings by over-the-top providers may cause consumers to reduce their demand for mobile content through carrier-branded services.” Yep. MobiTV’s end users are seeing a growing landscape for mobile content that’s filled with choices, as Netflix and Hulu don’t have to depend on carriers, and that’s where most customers are going at present. Makes it hard to imagine that carriers are going to stick with them in the long run as things get tighter and customers opt for other sources for their mobile content. What’s more, the company has been seeing its cash deplete at a fairly alarming and consistent rate, and with salary and benefits, it was paying its top five executive just under $3 million. All the while its four carrier customers make up about 96 percent of its revenue. MobiTV is quickly trying to find its way into some fixes, mentioning strategic acquisitions, international expansion, and investing in R&D and managed services, but it’s hard to see how these lead to better margins — and none of this really makes one feel great about the future of the business model, with the tenuousness of its entire business should one customer choose not to renew its contract. In some ways, it was a wonder that the company was tapping the IPO market, but we now see that it has decided that wasn’t such a good idea. Whether an IPO is in the cards in the future remains to be seen, but things sure don’t look rosy the way they stand now. Especially in such a rapidly changing and dynamic market.
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| Posted: 14 Jul 2012 05:00 PM PDT  Editor’s note: Benjy Weinberger is the engineering site lead for foursquare's San Francisco office. He previously worked on infrastructure and revenue engineering at Twitter, and before that on search and ad engineering at Google for eight years. Microsoft recently announced that it’s taking a huge $6.2 Billion writedown over the failed aQuantive acquisition. This news, and the scrutiny of Facebook’s business model following their IPO drama, show that, in online advertising, it’s all about the targeting. As this Reuters analysis explains, there’s so much online advertising space that merely putting billboards up all over the internet is no longer a lucrative business. Meanwhile, Google AdWords remains phenomenally successful, generating over $36B in revenue in 2011. The key difference? targeting. Google’s sophisticated ad-targeting algorithms greatly increase the relevance to the user, and therefore the likelihood of the user clicking on an ad. This is what makes AdWords so much more effective than banner ads. So why isn’t everyone just improving their targeting? Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Ad targeting is a difficult artificial intelligence (AI) problem, and while you may not agree that it’s a worthy one, it does require a lot of technical heavy lifting. Here’s why: The Algorithm A targeting algorithm take everything you know about the impression – search keywords, location, demographics, previous user activity, time of day, the previous CTR (clickthrough rate) of the ad and so on – and uses that to choose from among millions of candidate ads the one to show. And it has to do this in a fraction of a second. This is not a trivial problem. Can you think, offhand, how you’d do it? If so, I’d like to talk to you about a Data Scientist role at foursquare… Ad targeting is a relevance problem somewhat similar to web search: given a huge repository of information, and whatever we know about what the user is looking for, find the most relevant information and return it. While the algorithms are not the same, and indeed Google has two entirely separate divisions solving each problem, both for technical and ethical reasons, the difficulty is similar. Basically, to even begin to tackle ad targeting, you need top-notch data scientists with PhDs in Machine Learning, Information Retrieval or other AI fields. If you’ve spent any time at all at a startup you know how hard it is to hire these people. The Data Even once you have an algorithm, it’s not much use without data. The more you know about the user, the more precise your algorithm can be. This is not just for the obvious reason that you need something to target by, but also because you need to train your algorithm. Machine Learning algorithms are so-called because they adapt through an iterative process: you feed them a set of training data, along with the expected results, and they slowly increase their precision, in a manner analogous to human learning. The kind of data you can gather depends largely on the consumer service you provide: Google knows a lot about your current intent, via your search keywords. Facebook knows a lot about your context, via your social activity. So far, intent appears to be more valuable than context when it comes to ad targeting. But the holy grail is to have both, which partly explains Google+. For precise targeting you need a lot of data, particularly about current intent, and this is hard to come by for any but the most successful services. The Systems Assuming you have the algorithms and the data, you still have the problem of how to apply them efficiently. You can’t let your user wait around while you laboriously figure out which ads to show. Ads systems are typically expected to return a result within a few hundred milliseconds. It takes very large, very complex distributed systems to pull this off. Google’s SmartASS system, for example, is one of the best-engineered systems I’ve ever encountered. Systems of this sophistication are hard to build. The Virtuous Trinity All too often, online advertising is a zero-sum game. The more intrusive display ads are to the user, the more benefit the advertiser perceives. And in a CPI (cost-per-impression) paradigm, the ad publisher is firmly on the side of the advertiser. But with strong targeting and CPC (cost-per-click) billing, a virtuous trinity emerges: the more relevant an ad is, the happier the user is, and the more likely to click on the ad. This gets the advertiser more engagement, and the ad publisher (who gets paid per click) more money. All three participants are incentivized by better targeting, and all share in the created value. Creating this virtuous trinity, rather than spamming the web with banner ads, is how to truly succeed in online advertising. To get ad targeting right you need a combination of cutting-edge algorithms, sophisticated systems and mountains of relevant data. Putting all these in place requires a world-class engineering team, the right product, and a lot of users. Not many companies have all these assets. Microsoft does though, which makes this recent news somewhat perplexing. I guess that just having the ability to do something isn’t enough. Whether you actually get out there and do it or not is the $6.2B question.
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| How Authoritarianism Will Lead To The Rise Of The Data Smuggler Posted: 14 Jul 2012 04:05 PM PDT  Dave McCrory has developed the concept of data gravity. It dictates that data has its own mass. When data gets stored it becomes harder to move. The more data stored, the greater the mass. The increasing efforts to control data provides a more dystopian vision about the future of transporting data. How does the data smuggler hide data of such weight when moving it from place to place? Mark Maunder sees two new forms of data transportation emerging. He expects we will increasingly see innovations in hiding data new ways to encryption networks. Interestingly, he sees both as a new form of data smuggling that will come as we seek ways to avoid an overzealous authoritarian culture. The idea of physically smuggling data might seem absurd. Why move it physically when you can transport it using a broadband connection? Maunder makes the point that if the data is too much to transport via broadband there are always data centers where you can go and download the data on a terabyte drive and then connect it to your laptop. But moving data becomes a difficult task when there is a lot of it to move. It’s one of the real downsides to cloud computing. To port it, you have to pretty much either move it physically or through an encrypted connection between data centers. But few if any cloud services are offering that encrypted connection with rival providers. Maunder tells a story about a conversation with Sebastian Thrun, the creator of Google Street Maps. Thrun told Maunder that the data from the “Street View” vans is put on hard drives and Fedexed to Google headquarters. Thrun told him that mailing hard drives will always be the highest bandwidth way of moving data around. He also refers to encryption laws passed in the United Kingdom that allows authorities to demand an individual’s encryption keys. Failure to turn over the keys means two to five years in prison. What will come of this? Maunder sees innovators developing new ways to hide encrypted data when transferring it across a wire. But physically moving data makes more sense for the data smuggler. He can move data by hiding it o his body far more fast than over an encrypted wire. Maunder:
But there are all sorts of risks with moving data on your body. If a data smuggler uses a self-destructive hard drive, authorities can still claim he was hiding something. It has to be invisible. It has to be in your body. With that in mind, what if you could use your brain to move data? He quotes an article from Scientific American:
A new form of authoritarianism is emerging as we seek new ways to move data. This will give rise to the data smuggler. How to hide the data will be the great challenge for these “data mules.” Perhaps the most effective ones will have a hidden data jack just behind their ear. As Maunder points out, just like Johnny Mnemonic:
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| Social Network At The Pool Releases TechCrunch “Pool” In Advance of Monday’s Launch Posted: 14 Jul 2012 02:57 PM PDT  Happy Saturday, readers! Unless your boss is making you work this weekend, you've got two days of freedom ahead of you. If you want to spend that time making new friends or meeting people with similar interests, a new startup called At The Pool can help. The social network sends users a different match, based on their location, history, interests and intent (their pools) every day in an email. Users are encouraged to connect on- and offline. "Think of us like the host of a party — someone who knows both of you, what you're into, where you're from, and more," the network's "about" section reads. "Like any good host, we make an introduction because we know you'll get along."
The site officially launches Monday—it's had beta launches already—with a "Silicon Beach Pool" aimed at the LA Tech scene. However, the At The Pool team has launched a "TechCrunch Pool" for readers that is live now. Readers can go to the site and sign up early using the code "techcrunch." Once in the site, TechCrunch readers will get matched with one another. "We’re sort of a mashup between Meetup and Match.com (you join pools like you would a Meetup group, but you’re then interacting and meeting others one-on-one, as Match facilitates)," founder and CEO Alex Capecelatro tells me. "While Facebook is all about connecting you with your friends and family, we aim to connect you with new people you don’t yet know." Capecelatro came up with the idea when he was frustrated trying to find someone to go road biking with in a small town in upstate New York. After using sites like Facebook and Meetup, and disliking the notion of using Craigslist or dating sites, he decided to build his own site. "I realized the Internet is pretty terrible at helping us meet new people," he says in an email from the company's Los Angeles headquarters. "This is very obvious when you graduate college, move to a new town, or pick up a new hobby. I set out to build a site to connect with like-minded people in an easy and fun way." He launched a beta version to the University of Connecticut and saw it "light up like wildfire." Capecelatro says they saw very high engagement by connecting people in pre-existing communities. There are a number of other companies in the same space, including the aforementioned ones. Coffee Meets Bagels connects users with a similar once-a-day introduction, but is focused on dating. Social mobile apps like Highlight and Glancee aim to connect the user with people around them, but Capecelatro points out that At The Pool recommends and tells you "why we think you should know each other," taking it a step further than geographic proximity. The company took an early $50,000 seed investment from David Carter. Capecelatro tells me they are currently "in the process of raising a more substantial seed round." He says At The Pool will be releasing more pools, based on interests and cities, this year, with a heavy focus on meeting like-minded people, as well as considering partnership offers.
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| Review: The Telikin PC For Older Folks Posted: 14 Jul 2012 02:02 PM PDT  I’ve been putting off writing about the Telikin because, arguably, any PC is suitable the older audience that the Telikin is aimed. I set my Dad up with a Linux machine and then a Mac Mini and he’s been surfing Drudge and listening to Polka like a champ for almost a decade now. Why spend $699 when you can feasibly hook Grandma up with a PC for $400 or so at Best Buy? Well the Telikin is an entirely different sort of PC. Built as an all-in-one device, the machine includes an 18- or 20-inch screen, large-print keyboard, and a normal wired mouse. It runs an unnamed version of Linux and is completely locked down, dumping you into a kiosk-like experience that you can’t leave. The machine is, in actuality, a MSI MSI Wind Top AE1920 with some special software installed and you essentially pay a $60 premium for Telikin’s software. I installed the Telikin for my mother who is approximately as computer savvy as our dog and, with a bit of coaxing, she was able to call via Skype and check an email mailbox I made her months before that she had never visited. Because the experience is completely curated, there is really no way to dump into a command prompt and the system supports something called Tech Buddy, which is essentially a remote desktop connection via any other PC. That said, the Telikin is clearly limited and may upset tech-savvy folks. The buttons do exactly as they say – News gives you the news, Web gives you a browser – but there are a few quirks that may stymie some users. For example, email attachments aren’t automatically displayed, a definite problem for folks trying to send images and video, and there are no social media buttons (although there are shortcuts in the browser). You can log in using your Facebook account to see friends’ photos in the Photos tab, which is quite fun, but a social tab would be nice. The system also has a basic word processor and calculator as well as a very simple file browser although you really can’t dig very far into the file system. In short, it hides everything from the user in order to ensure Mom doesn’t drag /var into the trash can. Walt Mossberg found the Telikin to be a flawed experience but – and I’d actually cede to Walt here if pressed – but I feel it is nearly perfect for an elderly parent who needs a set-it-and-forget-it web experience. I didn’t noticed any of the bugs Walt noticed, which suggests that they have updated the machine over the past year. The price is just about right, too – $699 isn’t a lot to pay vs. a $599 Mac Mini without monitor – but again you’re paying a slight premium for stock hardware and a special OS. Cheaper computers can be had and better experiences exist, but the Telekin seems to be an excellent choice for, say, a retirement center or home of an elderly relative. More computer-savvy folks like my Dad (who still types “Drudge” into Google to search for Drudge Report) are better served by a real computer with a real OS. Folks who are at a complete loss, however, may find this a superior experience. Click to view slideshow.
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| Posted: 14 Jul 2012 01:52 PM PDT  Editor's Note: Brenden Mulligan is an entrepreneur and product designer who created Onesheet, Webbygram, TipList, ArtistData, MorningPics, and PhotoPile. You can find him on Twitter at @mulligan. Admittedly, I have a negative bias towards overhyped startups. If a company gets a lot of attention before they do anything significant, I’m less likely to try their product and when I do, less likely to have a positive feeling about it. I realize this is a weakness I need to overcome, but it’s the way my mind works. There are few better examples over the past few years of overhyped startups than Path. Two years ago the company, after much uber-super-duper-stealth-mode speculation, launched a sub-par photo-sharing product that offered little utility over the other products in the space. Then, Path turned down a rumored $100m acquisition, again, before they’d released anything worth buying (except the team). So I’m choosing a very public place to admit the following: after using the new version of Path since November, I believe it is one of the best mobile products I’ve ever used and possibly the best true social network I’ve ever been a part of. Realizations like this don’t come easy and it’s led me to think a lot recently about why the network appeals to me so much. After all, I learn more from Twitter and have more friends on Facebook. One would think the value of those social networks would outweigh Path. And maybe their overall value does. But there’s something very different about Path. Something special that makes my Path experience much richer than the other social networks. Consistency of tone The conclusion I’ve come to is what makes Path so special isn’t its limited friend count. It’s not its beautiful design (which I dug into a few months ago). What I’ve realized is so special about Path for me is the consistency of tone. When I open Path, I’m seeing experiences people are having. Some of those experiences are checking into a new place. Some are posting a photo. Some are listening to music. Some are going for a run. But for the most part, they’re all experiences. And they all have a common tone, meaning they all feel like part of the same story. Everyone has their own storyline, but together, everyone’s moments merge together into a consistent shared biography. To further illustrate this, let me summarize the newest 8 updates for 4 different social networks: Facebook. A barrage of whatever can be crammed into a single newsfeed.
Twitter. A stream of extremely useful and extremely random information.
Instagram. Beautiful photos in a consistant format, yet inconsistent content.
Path. The personal moments of friends experiencing life.
Although the content in Path might seem more monotonous, what makes it really unique is the content is so consistent. It’s all friends sharing experiences. It’s not them sharing what they’ve read, or some photo they found in a magazine, or an article about their company. It’s personal moments. Unfit for Path The benefits of creating a community with a consistant tone means that some content just doesn’t fit. Lately I’ve noticed three examples of content that hasn’t fit Path: Information Sharing / Links Some people in my network occasionally use Path to share links. These come in two categories. The first is links to things they have written or things written about them/their company. Generally, this fits the tone of Path, although still feels a little off. But since these are generally about accomplishments of people I’m friends with, it’s welcome content. The second category is just standard link sharing that you’d see on Twitter. This feels very weird. Path isn’t an information network like Twitter, it’s a social network. It’s not a place I go for news, it’s a place I go to see what my friends are experiencing. Links to insightful articles unrelated to my friends don’t feel like they belong in this environment. Location Specific Invitations This is something I’ve been guilty of using Path for, and certain members of my network have voiced an opinion that they’d prefer to not see it. Occasionally, someone will post an invitation for others to come to an event, to join them for a meal, etc… Although this is a personal request that you’d think would fit with a social network, the complaint has been that one of the beauties of Path is that consuming the feed is location agnostic. When asking if friends want to get together for lunch, someone is posting something completely irrelevant to a large part of their network. I have friends exploring France right now and seeing their photos is delightful. But if they were constantly asking Path if people wanted to join them for a glass of wine, it’d be annoying because 99% of their network isn’t in France. Automatic Updates This is a new one, and caught me a bit off guard the first time I saw it. Recently, Path added Nike FuelBand integration, where at the end of each day, a user’s Fuel graph is posted to Path. This immediately struck me as out of place. While the graph certainly represents the result of many experiences, something about it doesn’t fit the tone of the rest of the updates. And since these are posted at the same time each day, it feels spammy when suddenly 5 friends have graphs posted automatically when they didn’t trigger the action. The FuelBand graph inclusion got me thinking about overall updates and where their place is (or isn’t) in this network. Every other action on Path requires someone to trigger it through a specific action at a specific moment. They turn on their phone in a new place, they wake up, they start or finish a run. But the FuelBand graph is automatic. It posts every day. And that makes it feel different. My hypothesis is that automatic updates will always feel weird and spammy in Path. Think if Path connected with Flipboard and at the end every day, it posted a summary of the articles the user read. Or they integrated with Spotify, and it posted statistics on all the music listened to. For me, this content just doesn’t fit. This content makes Path feel more like Facebook: a dumping ground for any app that can get a user to give posting permission. The Path team knows what they’re doing and I’m sure will find a way to make data coming in from other apps work. But they need to do it in a way that fits the tone of the rest of the content. If that tone becomes inconsistant, the thing that makes Path special will be lost. I’m a big believer in what Path is building. They’ve created a very unique environment, and they need to do everything they can to preserve it. I’m sure they will.
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| DIY Wireless Typing Glove Is The Future Of Michael Jackson Impersonation/Data Entry Posted: 14 Jul 2012 12:19 PM PDT  As we were wandering through the Atlanta meet-up last week we stumbled upon a charming young man wearing a glove studded with circuit boards and embroidered with what looked like silver thread. Upon closer inspection, it turned out that it was a wild homegrown glove made by a pair of former design students. The project is called G.A.U.N.T.L.E.T. (Generally Accessible Universal Nomadic Tactile Low-power Electronic Typist) and is currently in beta stages. However, it would allow a person to type on any smartphone or computer with one hand, opening up interesting possibilities for people with stroke debilitation or a missing hand. The creator, Jiake Liu, is co-founder of Kabob.it, a menu service for eateries. The glove, on the other hand, was an experiment he built in college and it has gone through a number iterations. Right now it uses electrically conductive embroidered letters to send signals via Bluetooth and they may improve the glove over time. Until then, I suggest that start-up founders wear something odd and cool when they come to our meetups in the future, thereby ensuring immediate attention.
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| RIM Ordered To Pay Out $147 Million Over Mformation Patent Scuffle Posted: 14 Jul 2012 11:00 AM PDT  And RIM’s rough ride continues. Within the past few weeks, the Canadian company has had to announce all sorts of bad news, and now RIM has been dealt an expensive defeat in court to add that list. Bloomberg reported late yesterday that RIM must now shell out nearly $150 million in order to settle a patent suit with a New Jersey-based mobile device management company called Mformation. The whole sordid story began back in 2008, when Mformation filed its suit against RIM, claiming (what else?) that the Canadian company infringed on two of its patents. Mformation, which counts AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, and Clearwire among its numerous operator partners, alleges that RIM included patented functionality into their own product after preliminary licensing talks went south. The jury eventually sided with Mformation, and as such RIM must now pay out royalties of $8 for each of the 18.4 million devices in question — a total bill of $147.2 million. Ouch. Naturally, RIM isn’t planning to give up the money without a fight — the company’s legal team has already moved to have the verdict reversed, and we’ll soon see how that works for them. Now, RIM is no stranger to these sorts of legal setbacks — the company lost the right to use the “BBX” name for their new mobile operating system late last year, and was (unsuccessfully) sued by over the BBM trademark by a Canadian broadcast measurement organization. That said, situations like this are the last thing that RIM wants to worry about right now, especially as they work towards saving a total of $1 billion before the end of the fiscal year rolls around (for reference, RIM is currently in the second quarter of fiscal 2013). The company has certainly gone all out on that front, as it has already begun to trim its workforce by 5,000 heads. What’s more, it was reported earlier this week that RIM has been looking to unload one of their two 9-passenger Dassault corporate jets to help reach that goal. Apparently, the company was looking to score between $6-7 million for the jet, but they may want to try bumping up that asking price in light of recent events. All things considered, the situation could have been even worse for the beleaguered smartphone company. While hefty, the damages they must pay only account for applicable devices within the United States — as CEO Thorsten Heins is fond of reminding us all, the company enjoys considerable popularity outside of North America.
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| Facebook’s Latest Acqui-Hire: Spool, The “Instapaper On Steroids” Posted: 14 Jul 2012 10:59 AM PDT  Facebook has acquired the team behind Spool, the mobile content-caching startup that launched in September 2011 at TechCrunch Disrupt. At that time, my colleague Sarah Perez snappily described its service as “Instapaper on steroids.” This looks like a pure talent acquisition — it doesn’t appear that any of the technology Spool built will be integrated into Facebook, and the company has already shut down its service. Spool raised a $1 million round of venture capital this past January from a group including SVAngel, Felicis Ventures, Yuri Milner's Start Fund and YouTube founder Steve Chen. We’ve reached out to Spool for more information about the deal — financial details, staff numbers, and the like. This will be updated with any news we receive. Facebook sent along this statement about the deal:
Here is the blog post Spool co-founder Avichal Garg wrote announcing the move:
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| Posted: 14 Jul 2012 10:00 AM PDT  The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — played Minority Report The Home Version as Google entered the Tablet Wars. The Nexus 7 or some such is actually a phenomenal device, and brings the Goog back from the Slow Death of Fragmentation and a step ahead of Microsoft SquareFace. Now we’ve got two push notification platforms that will actually get built out, as long as Google keeps the Nexus refreshed on the latest Android build. Whether the Gang members are right about the timing remains to be deciphered from the conversation, but it’s clear sailing for a unification of the metadata if not the actual notification streams. @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @jtaschek, @kteare Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
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| Posted: 14 Jul 2012 08:00 AM PDT  What can be said about the save icon? It is a diskette. It is often blue. And of course, as others have pointed out, many (soon to be most) people using computers today have never touched one and never will. Yet you could say the same for a the “home” icon (millions will never own a house), the “phone” icon (used a model 500 lately?), the lasso, the magnifying glass, the dodge and burn tools. “Games,” represented by a checkerboard! Copy and paste, for god’s sake? The simple fact is that there is a shared visual orthography in which some things are acknowledged worldwide, and this overpowers the logical suggestion to constantly update it. Many reading this would, 20 years ago, be unsure whether the icon represented saving or accessing the A: drive. Nowadays, many will never encounter portable storage in their life. Yet the diskette is firmly associated with saving changes, certainly more so than it is with removable media. So logic has nothing to do with it. Language has less to do with logic than it has to do with a shared interpretation of symbols. These symbols are widely used because they are widely understood, and they are widely understood because they are widely used. The snake will not run out of tail to eat. The Noun Project is a fun exploration of this concept — that there are, say, 32×32-pixel versions of every concept in the dictionary. But as computing (what a term!) grows out of this phase, in which its concepts are most effectively presented by flat, bit-mapped graphics and text, new ideas may become necessary. But what are the chances these new ideas are going to be truly new? The things we create and interact with are almost without exception analogues to real life actions and objects. What in computing or the online world has no precedent, is not a virtual representation of “real-life” actions? Precious little, and what little there is is arguable. Try it; it’s surprisingly difficult to find anything at all that can’t be explained in terms of things that have come before. Maybe I lost you there. What I am saying is that every action we create in the virtual world has by necessity an analogue in the real world. And by common consent, to represent those actions we go back to certain shared experiences that will not be misinterpreted. Lately it’s been hydrological phenomena. Cloud storage. Bittorrent. Streaming. Thunderbolt, to an extent. A few of you may remember that Zunes squirted. NFC is data osmosis, though of course no one calls it that. What did you expect when our data started coming from nowhere and being beamed into the blue? We did a caveman and reached for our primitive sky metaphors. We reach for these things because, like all metaphors, they make new things intelligible by linking them to concepts we have already internalized. The diskette icon in fact rankles because it is recent, not because it is old. But much further back and you’re trying to make an icon out of banks of cathode ray tubes, any further forward and you’re looking at even more jarring things: discs, Zip drives, and the blank, robotic face of a 3.5″ hard drive (still the icon for Macintosh HD on this flash-based laptop, for the record). The diskette isn’t such a bad compromise. So don’t be angry that the icon for save is a 30-year-old magnetic tape receptacle, or your freeform marquee tool is based on something used to round up cattle. The word icon comes from the Greek eikon, itself from the verb eikenai, to resemble. It’s good enough for the form to resemble the function; it doesn’t have to be a recent snapshot of it. In the meantime, we will be seeing more and more creative reflections of the real world upon the virtual, and vice versa. The boundary is crumbling already, and the two have been leaking into one another through the cracks for a long time. I look forward to the developments in real and abstract representation of the virtual. Will files have weight? Will there be weather on the Internet? Will servers have personalities? These questions sound ridiculous today, but don't forget that questions of the same type, asked 10, 50, or 100 years ago, may have positive answers today. Will our computers talk to us? Will robots clean our houses? Will we walk on the moon? Looking forward, it is likely that the most transformative technologies will be those for which we have the least adequate metaphors. It sounds a bit silly, but what that means is that what we have created does not resemble anything in the world. If you find yourself at a loss to explain what it is exactly your device, site, service, or algorithm does, it may be that you are yourself verbally inadequate, but it may also mean that you are onto something fundamentally new and powerful.
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