Sunday, January 29, 2012

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To Pivot or Not to Pivot

Posted: 28 Jan 2012 07:32 AM PST

mountain bike

Editor's note: Contributor Ashkan Karbasfrooshan is the founder and CEO of WatchMojo.  Follow him @ashkan.

"To pivot, or not to pivot, that is the question:
Whether ’tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles."
Hamlet, were it set in Silicon Valley, circa 2011.

Ah, the internet – how you hijack our vocabulary.  A few years ago, "embedded" had connotations of journalists following soldiers.  Today, it's most associated with YouTube clips.  Similarly, a pivot was something that I vaguely recall my basketball coach talking about.  Today, it's the repositioning of a company and without a doubt, 2011 was the year of the pivot.

Talk is Cheap

Let's face it, despite the bravado and brashness, oftentimes Silicon Valley gets scared and zigs when it should zag.  Lean Startup author Eric Ries popularized the term "pivot" but the concept has existed for years.  Nokia used to produce rubber boots; today, well… that's another story.

But the point is, while the concept of pivoting has become commonplace in startup lore, it's good to separate the fad from the core concept to answer the question: "to pivot or not to pivot"?

Deconstructing Success

You may be driven by success, recognition, respect, money, power or fame.  Whatever the case, success is i) subjective, ii) relative and iii) fluid.  In other words, i) we define success based on what drives us, ii) but we tend to measure it relative to other people's success and over time, iii) we convince ourselves to change its definition, revising upwards or downwards, depending on the conditions on the ground.

Don't Believe the Hype

While Silicon Valley is entirely free and encouraged to have its own set of values, culture and objectives, the 24/7 media coverage startups and entrepreneurs are exposed to gives all entrepreneurs a sense that unless your idea and company blast off, you should pivot.  In that context, the mindset of "fail fast" is understandable given the herd mentality and impatient nature of VCs, but wrong when you consider that 1% of projects fit venture capital's profile and 1% of those become moderately successful.

In other words, while money may accelerate a company's ramp-up and growth, the reality is that teams needs to gel, products take time to develop and businesses have a natural life-cycle that can't really be circumvented.

Exacerbating this, of course, is that technology companies tend to compete in a zero-sum environment where the #1 and #2 players create value for shareholders but all others are left standing when the game of musical chairs stops.  Meanwhile, content companies tend to be long term bets anyway: Machinima is one of the larger content providers on the leading video platform YouTube, but it launched in 2000 (12 years ago!).  Vice is now featured in the pages on Forbes but it's been around since 1994 (it launched as a magazine).

Despite these realities, boards rush entrepreneurs to adapt or die without letting the child crawl, let alone walk or run.

Yes, Pivots May Work, Sometimes

To be clear, the extreme cases of Groupon and Fab are prime examples for why pivoting is sometimes the only solution to a stagnating or declining project, but those tend to be the exceptions and not the rule.

But Usually, You'll Simply Just Kill a Good Idea Before Moving to a Fad

As such, before throwing out the baby with the bathwater, understand the following.

Rule #1: Pivoting is a Function of Your Employees

When you recruit engineers and programmers, you can point them in any direction and challenge them to solve a given problem.  If you are a content company, you hire writers or videographers and are, as such, limited to remaining in the content business unless you really choose to blow up the building and start from anew.

However, you can't assume that a team that has built a search engine can build a better social network.  So don't let the tech vs. content variable underestimate the inherent challenges with any pivot.

As much as I dread quoting Donald Rumsfeld, "you go to war with the military you have, not the one you might want or wish to have at a later time".

Time is crucial in any company and hiring a challenge.  If you have good people, it might be better to improve something than assume you need to nuke the joint.

Rule #2: Focus on A Different Target

While the concept of the pivot refers to a radical and transformative change in company direction, strategy, focus and product line, it's important to note that to become successful sometimes what you need is to pivot what industry or clients you are going after, and not the whole company.  You may be developing a product and aiming for a B2B application, but perhaps by making it go free and targeting a B2C audience it might prevail.

Rule #3: Timing and Externalities Matter More Than You Think

After 9/11, a lot of companies repositioned themselves to serve the national security and defense industries.  They hit the jackpot.  This isn't so much chasing a fad but realizing that the broader macro environment and trends will affect your industry and company more so than you think.

Rule #4: Success Comes From Incremental Gains, Not Hail Marries

Apple is the ultimate pivot.  Most of its revenues come from iPhone and iPad – products that didn't exist five years ago!  But it was all born from the iPod.  So the best pivots are not overnight 180-degree turns but progressive shifts and extensions.  They are now charging into the post-PC era, but it was all an extension of their core.  Hulu, too, is pivoting before our eyes (as are YouTube and Netflix), moving from pure-play aggregators to creators of content.  After all, at that velocity even a seemingly small shift in strategy leads to a large change in overall trajectory.

While it’s difficult to define “pivot” and impossible to predict its outcome, you can drown out the noise and clearly ask yourself: "what do I define as success".  Once you do that, the rest falls in place.

Photo credit: purplemattfish

Book Review: Distrust That Particular Flavor By William Gibson

Posted: 28 Jan 2012 06:40 AM PST

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William Gibson is the defining author of our digital age. More than any social media pundit or Popcorn futurist, he has defined the dystopia we can expect once we escape the dystopia we’re in now. His fiction – a trilogy of trilogies that works backwards from the distant future to a world that is ours – is constantly approaching the present while exploring what it means to exist in a culture mediated by electronics. Although his early work owes more to Burroughs and Verne than anyone cares to admit, he was wildly prescient in his prediction that soon we would see the entire world – an entire world – through the lens of gadgetry. While the web isn’t cyberspace yet and the East Coast isn’t the Sprawl, we’re headed in that direction.

And that’s just his fiction.

Gibson’s non-fiction writing is a peanut in the bland Cracker Jack of the dead tree publications where they first appeared. He’s often graced the otherwise leaden pages of Wired with his unique style and many of the pieces in this book appeared elsewhere, whether in magazines or at public talks. His non-fiction is rare enough that we definitely want more, but do we want a whole book’s worth?

If you are a Gibson fan, then yes, this is definitely worth a read. There are a few great pieces in here, like his meditation on watches and eBay in “My Obsession” as well as an excellent look at the growth of a fiction writer in his essay “Since 1948,” a piece that shows us all stages of his growth – from child of a nervous mother to draft dodger to writer to genius. That both of these pieces are available online is a lucky coincidence, not a reason to avoid this book.

The rest of the non-fiction here will be a little less familiar and is, at times, uneven. Gibson’s writing style is as conversational and puffy here as it is flinty and clear-eyed in his fiction. A story by William Gibson about visiting Tokyo involves no super-charged street samurai. Instead it involves mediations on gomi, toys, and colonialism. We assume Gibson to be more plugged in than most of us but instead he seems to have a lot of good, cool friends who show him around. That’s one of the benefits of replacing Tom Swift as the go-to boyhood sci-fi of the tinkerer.

The other stories – the talks, the mediations on futurism and on the dystopian – are beautiful in their own way, well written and often full of telling detail. He notices the “demented, heartbreakingly lyrical, 3D collage of cargo containers, dumpsters, an Airstream trailer, a cabin cruiser, a school bus” on the set of Johnny Mnemonic. To the average sci-fi nut, a wall of junk as a set piece would be as commonplace as a laser gun or a Tribble – it’s the visual landscape we expect in what the set director will imagine as the “hinterlands” and nearly every movie has a compacted wall of junk that stands in for the place where the wild future people live. To Gibson, however, it’s seen with new eyes. Not naive eyes, really. Just new ones.

If you’re new to Gibson, don’t start here. Get the Sprawl trilogy first, then the Bridge trilogy, then, if you’re not done, the Present trilogy, a group of three books that are connected by the Dotcom boom and have a certain airport lounge, endless travel, Razorfish feel that the average start-up drone will love. Those books hae have no overarching geographical locus to hang on just as the late 1990s and the early aughts left us listless and disconnected, pining for a day when everyone – students, surf bums, and even a woman allergic to branding, could find a place in an economy that whirred like a shining VCR read/write head.

Each trilogy moves closer to “speculative fiction of the very recent past.” While you’re in there, hit The Difference Engine as a palate cleanser. Then you can begin to distrust this particular flavor.

I’m probably preaching to the choir, though. Gibson is a gem, our own Jules Verne who planted so many seeds in popular culture that it is difficult to look out across our roiling intellectual landscape and not see his ideas. He knew that the ability to render fluid 3D was coming, that Japan would rise as a major techno-center, that man-machine relations would become seamless. One could argue that cyberspace now exists in the wildly detailed games we play and that we’re a few steps away from really jacking in, as his characters did. He foresaw urbanity as cancer – in the Sprawl – and as Alternative Flea Market/Edgy Disneyland on the Bridge. He saw the world as a grey waiting room populated by the rich and their helpers in his post 9/11 novels, and saw fashion as an expression of commerce.

He does the same here, although on a much smaller scale. He’s talking about real life so there are fewer mirrorshades. Instead we visit with him as he lands in Singapore and makes a movie and walks by a window full of ephemera in lower New York where a jumble of missile identification models was dusted one September morning with “blasted dreams” as it sits in a closed antiques shop. He’s seen a lot, and wants to tell us about it.

My one peeve? Gibson adds these little asides at the end of each piece, explaining just how he failed and how this story “needed a haircut” or how he went off on an odd tangent. It’s like a magician doing a serviceable rendition of the disappearing elephant, and then explaining afterwards that his curtain work was a little sloppy and if you looked under the stage you could see the elephant.

In the end, this collection of essays is a minor addition to the Gibson canon. It’s a worthy one, though, and well worth a read. And while you wait for it to download onto your Fire or your iPad or your Sandbenders, give thanks to the seer of our age who didn’t expect things to turn out that rosy yet still understood the good in both us and, more important, our variegated and ever more cunning tools.

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Why Every Entrepreneur Should Self-Publish a Book

Posted: 28 Jan 2012 06:00 AM PST

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I’ve published eight books in the past seven years, five with traditional publishers (Wiley, Penguin, HarperCollins), one comic book,  and the last two I’ve self-published. In this post I give the specific details of all of my sales numbers and advances with the traditional publishers. Although the jury is still out on my self-published books, “How to be the Luckiest Man Alive” and ”I Was Blind But Now I See”  I can tell you these two have already sold more than my five books with traditional publishers, combined.

If you, the entrepreneur, self-publish a book you will stand out, you will make more money, you will kick your competitors right in the XX, and you will look amazingly cool at cocktail parties. I know this because I am seldom cool but at cocktail parties, with my very own comic book, I can basically have sex with anyone in the room. But don’t believe me, it costs you nothing and almost no time to try it yourself.

The rest of this article is really three discussions: Why self-publish rather than use a traditional publisher, why entrepreneurs should self-publish, and finally, HOW does one go about self-publishing.

WHY: 

A) Advances are going to zero. Book publishers are getting more and more squeezed by declining booksellers so they, in turn, have to squeeze the writers. Because of so much free content on the Internet, the value per unit of content is going to zero unless you are already an established name-brand author.

B) Lag time. When you self-publish, you can have your book up and running on Amazon, paperback and kindle, within days. When you publish with a traditional publisher its a grueling process: book proposal, agents, lawyers, meetings, edits, packaging, catalogs, etc that ensures that your book doesn’t actually get published until a year later. Literally, as I write this a friend of mine just IMed me the details of his book deal he just got with a mainstream publisher. Publication date: 2014.

C) Marketing. Publishers claim they do a lot of marketing for you. That’s laughable. I’ll give you a very specific story. When I published with Penguin they then met with a friend of mine whose book they wanted to publish. They didn’t realize she was my friend. She asked them, “what marketing did you do for James Altucher’s book”. They said, “well, we got him a review in The Financial Times and we got a segment about his book on CNBC and an excerpt in thestreet.com”

Here’s what’s so funny. I had a weekly column in The Financial Times. I WROTE my own review. As a joke. For CNBC, I had a weekly segment on CNBC. So naturally I spoke about my book during my regular segment. And for thestreet.com excerpt, I had just sold my last company to thestreet.com. So instead of doing my usual article for them I did an excerpt. In other words, the publisher did NOTHING, but took credit for EVERYTHING. Ultimately, authors (unless you are Stephen King, etc) have to do their own marketing for books. The first question publishers ask, even, before they look at your proposal is, “How big is your platform?” They want to know how you can market the book and if they can make money on just your own marketing efforts.

D) Better royalties. i.e. when I self-publish I make about a 70% royalty instead of a 15% royalty with a traditional publisher. I also own 100% of the foreign rights instead of 50%. I hired someone to sell the foreign rights and they get 20% (and no upfront fee).

E) More control over content and design. Look at this cover for “SuperCash” designed by a traditional publisher for me (this was my third book). It’s hideous.

Now look at the cover for my last book (self-published), “I Was Blind But Now I See”. You may or may not like it but it’s exactly what I wanted. Publishers even include in the contract that they have final say over the cover and this is one detail they will not negotiate.

You also don’t have any teenage interns sending you editorial comments back that you completely disagree with. YOU control your own content.

Now,

WHY SHOULD ENTREPRENEURS SELF-PUBLISH

A) You have content. I have enough material in my blog right now (including my “Drafts” folder which has 75 unpublished posts in it) to publish five more books over the next year. And I’m sure that number will increase over the next year as I write more posts. You’re an entrepreneur because you feel you have a product or an idea or a vision that stands out among your competitors (if you don’t stand out, pack it in and come up with a new idea).

You know how to do something better than anyone else in the world. How do let the world know that you are better? A business card won’t cut it. People will throw it away. And everyone’s got a website with an “About” button.

Give away part (or all) of your ideas in a book. You’re a brand new social media agency? How should social media work? Write it down. You’re a new CRM software package? How should CRM be better? Tell me. How should online dating services work? Tell some stories. Heck, make them as sexy as possible.

Don’t have time to write it. Then tell it to a ghostwriter you outsource to for almost no money. You don’t need 60,000 words. Do it in 20,000 words. Throw some pictures in. Just do it. Then when you meet someone and they ask for your business card, how cool will it be when you can say, “here, take my book instead.”

B) You have more to say. More and more companies have blogs. Many of the posts on the blog are “evergreen”. i.e. they last forever and are not time specific. If you just take the posts (mentioned in the point above) and publish them people will say, “he’s just publishing a collection of posts”. A couple of comments on that.

1. So what? It’s ok if you are curating what you feel your best posts are. And for a small price people can get that curation and read it in a different format.There’s value there.

2. Don’t just take a collection of your posts.  A blog post is typically 500-2000 words. Usually closer to 500. Do a bit more research for each post. Do intros and outros for each post. Make the chapters 3000-4000 words. Make a bigger arc to the book by using original material to explain WHY this book, with these chapters, presented in this manner is a different read than the blog. Have a chapter specifically explaining how the book is different from the blog.

With my last book, “I Was Blind But Now I See” I had original material in each chapter and several chapters that were completely original. Instead of it being a collection of posts, the overall book was about how we have been brainwashed in society, and how uncovering the brainwashing and using the techniques I describe can bring happiness. This was covered in a much more detailed fashion than the blog ever could even though the material was inspired by several of my posts.

 C) Amazon is an extra platform for you to market your blog. Or vice versa. You won’t make a million dollars on your book (well, maybe you will – never say never) but just being able to say, “I’m a published author” extends your credibility as a writer/speaker/enterpreneur when you go out there now to sell your book, syndicate your blog elsewhere or to get speaking engagements, etc. And when you do a speaking engagement, you can now hand something out – your book! So Amazon and publishing become a powerful marketing platform for your overall writing/speaking/consulting career.

D) Nobody cares. Some people want the credibility of saying “Penguin published me”. I can tell you from experience – nobody ever asked me who was my publisher when Penguin was my publisher. And, by the way, Penguin was the worst publisher I ever had.

E) How will I get in bookstores? I don’t know. How will you? Traditional publishers can’t get you there either. Often bookstores will look at what’s hot on Amazon and then order the books wholesale from the publishers. In many cases, tradtional publishers will take their most-known writers (so if you are in that category, congrats!) and pay to have them featured at a bookstore. As for my experience, my traditional publishers would get a few copies of my books in the bookstores of major cities (i.e. NYC and that’s it) but nothing more.

OK, I’M CONVINCED. HOW DO I SELF-PUBLISH

There’s lots of ways to do it but I’ll tell you my experience.

A) First write the book. For my last two self-published books, as mentioned above, I took some blog posts, rewrote parts of them, added original material, added new chapters, and provided an overall arc as to what the BOOK was about as opposed to it just being a random collection of posts. But, that said, you probably already have the basic material already.

B) Createspace.com. I used createspace because they are owned by Amazon and have excellent customer service. They let you pick the size of your book and then have Microsoft Word templates that you download to format your book within. For my first book I did this by myself, for my second book, for a small fee, I hired Alexanderbecker.net to format the book, create the book design, and create the final PDF that I uploaded. He also checked grammar, made proactive suggestions on font (sans serif instead of serif) and was extremely helpful.

C) Upload the PDF. Createspace approves it, picks an ISBN number, sends you a proof, and then you approve the proof.

D) Within days its available on Amazon. It’s print-on-demand as a paperback. And by the way, your total costs at this point: $0. Or whatever you used to design your cover.

E) Kindle. All of the above (from Createspace) was free. If I didn’t hire Alex to make the cover I could’ve used over 1mm of Createspace’s possible covers (I did that for my first book) and the entire publishing in paperback would be free. But with Kindle, Createspace charges $70 and they take care of everything until it’s uploaded to the Kindle store. Now you are available in paperback and kindle.

F) Marketing.

1. Readers of my blog who asked for it got the first 20 copies or so for free from me. Many of them then posted good reviews on Amazon to get the ball rolling.

2. I’ve been handing out the books at speaking engagements. Altogether, I’ll do around 10 speaking engagements handing my latest book out.

3. I write a blog post about how the bo0k is different from the blog and why I chose to go this route.

4. Writing guests posts for blogs like Techcrunch helps and I’m very grateful.

5. Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Google+ are also very helpful.

G) Promotions. You’re in charge of your own promotions (as opposed to a book publisher.). For instance, in a recent blog post I discussed the differences between my latest book and my blog and I also offered a promotion on how to get my next self-published book (“Bad Behavior”, expected in Q1 2012) for free.

Entrepreneurs are always looking for ways to stand out, promote their service, and get validation for their offerings. Writing a book makes you an expert in the field. At the very least, when you hand someone a book you wrote, it’s more impressive than handing a business card. It shows that you have enough expertise to write the book. It also shows you value the relationship with the potential customer enough that you are willing to give him something of value. Something you created.

And you can’t say the excuse “I don’t have time, I’m running a business.” Entrepreneurs make time. And they have the ideas so, again, at the very least you can use elance.com to hire a ghostwriter.

Over the next year I have five different books planned. All on different topics. I’m super-excited about them because I’m allowed to push the barrier in every area I’m interested in and there’s nobody to stop me. There’s nobody I need validation from. I get to pick myself.

You can do this also. And now, you should do it. There’s no more excuses in this environment. Good luck and feel free to write me with any questions.

–

Follow me on Twitter

Also, see 33 Unusual Ways to Become a Great Writer

Ron Paul, Mitt Romney Leading On Facebook Ahead Of Florida Primary

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 05:49 PM PST

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The Republican presidential candidacy is still far from decided, based on the split primaries and mixed polls so far. So here’s another source for trying to figure who’s really pulling ahead — the number of new Facebook fans that each candidate is getting, according to the Inside Facebook Election Tracker.

Mitt Romney is finally making some strong gains this month, in contrast to his Facebook performance over December. By “strong gains” I mean he’s been attracting a roughly similar number of fans to Ron Paul, the candidate who normally dominates on the web (and the clear leader last month). The two have fought for the daily lead for most of January, except for when Rick Santorum surged around his Iowa primary win on the 3rd.

Newt Gingrich, meanwhile, managed to win South Carolina on the 21st, which corresponded with his biggest gains on Facebook. But he’s still way weaker than the others. And the rest of the candidates are no longer registering any meaningful gains, whether or not they’ve officially dropped out.

Overall, Romney still has the most Facebook fans among Republicans, with 1.39 million. Paul is a distant second at 800,000. Gingrich is down at 250,000 and Santorum a pitiful 90,000.

Of course, these numbers only say so much about who’s actually the most popular. Fan growth can come through inorganic methods like Facebook ads, fan page promotions, or clever use of the news feed. And fans can come from anywhere in the world; they’re by no means primary voters. But, the gains made by Santorum and Gingrich right when they won their primaries suggests many new fans are Liking candidate pages organically, at least in the sense that users are acting on their because of larger events. Certainly, the low fan counts that these candidates are showing overall on Facebook suggest that they are not doing much of anything to reach more voters.

Paul’s fanbase could also be discounted because he consistently does well in online matchups like these, even though he has trouble winning primaries. But maybe that will change in Florida? He had the biggest day of the month recently, at 9,500 new fans on the 24th. As Brittany Darwell notes over on Inside Facebook regarding the other primary winners, the fan counts seem to start climbing right before they do well with the vote counts.

Otherwise, Romney’s position is looking stronger than ever, similar to the latest polls.

Harvard Gets Its First VC Firm: The Experiment Fund

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 04:05 PM PST

Experiment Fund

As just about everyone should know by now, the seeds of what grew into Facebook were planted at Harvard. Might there be a bunch of mini-Zucks lurking in the dorms of Cambridge? If so, a new venture capital firm — the first housed right on the Harvard campus — wants to find them.

Dubbed The Experiment Fund, the firm describes itself as “a bridge between America’s oldest universities and storied venture capital firms.” Backed by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), the firm is made up of Hugo Van Vurren, NEA co-head Patrick Chung, and NEA General Partner Harry Weller — all of whom have a degree of some form from the school.

When I say it’s “right on the Harvard campus”, I’m not kidding — it’s going to be based out of 33 Oxford Street, which is Harvard’s School Of Engineering And Applied Sciences. It’s a bit more than a stone’s throw from Harvard Yard. With that said, the fund operates with complete independence from the university.

And if you’re not a Harvard student? Don’t sweat it too much. The fund says they’re open to anyone, “regardless of university affilation, nationality, age, or prior experience.” Being a Harvard student (or at least a Cambridge local) probably wouldn’t hurt, though.

While it seems the size of the fund isn’t set in stone yet (or at least, it wasn’t disclosed — I’ll look into it. Update: they’re not setting a cap at this point), the team says they expect to seed “several” companies with up to $250k each over the next two years.

Secret Windows 8 Weapon: Kinect Built Into Your Laptop

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 02:39 PM PST

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The Windows release of Kinect is coming up in a couple days, but for most people that won’t be a major event: the Kinect they have is sitting on their TV or in a drawer, waiting to be taken out for an impromptu Dance Central 2 party. Of the 10 million Kinects out there, the only ones connected to computers are the ones being fiddled with by the various hackers and students making science projects out the things.

But according to the Daily, Microsoft is hoping to remedy this particular situation by building Kinect sensors right into your laptops. TechCrunch alum Matt Hickey got to handle a pair of prototypes, which were confirmed to be official, not just one of the many experiments that hide within Microsoft’s various lairs.

Unfortunately the laptops were not ready for their debut and no pictures seem to have been permitted. But they are described as netbook-like, with a number of smaller sensors instead of a webcam, and what could be an IR LED at the bottom of the screen.

The inclusion of depth-sensing cameras on a laptop is an interesting idea, and if they can drive the price of the sensor array down, it might become a standard feature. Microsoft has clearly also been focusing on miniaturizing the Kinect hardware, as the bulky original would seem somewhat out of place on a petite netbook. Whether this smaller sensor set has the same capabilities as the larger isn’t clear and wasn’t discussed.

A smaller Kinect would also suggest that Microsoft’s next console, rumored to have Kinect built in, is nearing readiness. While many gaming industry insiders have discounted the idea that the next generation of consoles will be announced this year, the rumor mill says otherwise.

Twitter Puts Its DMCA Takedown Requests Up For All To See

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 01:30 PM PST

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Yesterday’s announcement that Twitter would be selectively censoring tweets based on country was not well-received. But part of that announcement was the assurance that the process would at least be transparent. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.

They also mentioned that they were working with Chilling Effects to make notices and orders sent to Twitter publicly available. At the time of the post yesterday, the site wasn’t up yet, but you can now browse it at chillingeffects.org/twitter.

It’s a good thing, certainly, though not quite a successful saving throw versus the localized-censorship piece. The database has several thousand DMCA takedown requests right now, but is not quite up to date — it isn’t clear at what rate they’re updating the database, but there aren’t many from this month so it seems to be something less than weekly.

Browsing the listings is a good way to waste 15 minutes, looking at the different ways people tend to provoke a DMCA takedown request. There’s a lot of cricket being linked to, apparently. And there are the inevitable copyrighted avatars.

What’s interesting to me is that there are a number of requests that in themselves request dozens of tweets to be taken down; this one, for example, points out a number of pirated movies being linked to, and the accounts are clearly bots. The DMCA request is only for the movies the rightsholder is concerned with — which is at once both correct and perverse. The account only exists to link to copyrighted material and has done so thousands of times, but everyone involved would rather snip out individual tweets one by one. Talk about a Sisyphean task.

Presumably this database will also house the official requests by governments who wish to restrict tweets based on content. While most won’t agree with Twitter’s decision to accede to these repressive entities’ wishes, it can at least be hoped that it will be done so with maximum transparency. The best thing Twitter users can do, perhaps, is to make sure this database is up to date and reflective of the restrictions being placed on tweets. Until a solution comes along, reducing the harm this new policy does and making sure it’s well understood should take priority.

Y Combinator Names Seasoned Entrepreneur Geoff Ralston As Its Newest Partner

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 01:15 PM PST

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Y Combinator has just announced the newest partner to join the prestigious firm: Geoff Ralston. Ralston’s previous credentials include founding Four11, which was acquired by Yahoo back in 1997 for $96 million and served as the foundation for Yahoo Mail. Ralston spent eight years at Yahoo, eventually becoming Yahoo’s Chief Product Officer. Several years after leaving Yahoo he was named CEO of Lala, before it was acquired by Apple in 2009.

Most recently he cofounded Imagine K12, a tech incubator for education-related startups, which presented at TechCrunch Disrupt SF (you can find the incubator’s first batch of companies here). In his post announcing the news, Y Combinator’s Paul Graham writes that Ralston will continue as a full partner at Imagine K12. He also writes that he’s known Geoff for 13 years, ever since his days at Yahoo (Graham’s startup, Viaweb, was acquired by Yahoo in June 1998).

The news comes only a few days after YC announced two other new partners: Garry Tan (formerly of Posterous) and Aaron Iba (formerly of Appjet/Etherpad), both of whom are YC alumni. The timing probably isn’t a coincidence — YC just opened up applications for its Summer 2012 batch yesterday, and a bigger team will doubtless help the firm deal with the growing number of inbound applications (and larger batch sizes).

Fun sidenote: Ralston holds the honor of taking part in one of the most entertaining startup pitches I’ve ever seen, when he and fellow Lala execs Bill Nguyen and John Kuch (now both at Color) explained how Lala — whose previous incarnations included a CD swapping and a failed music hub — was being reborn as an innovative streaming music service.

It took around an hour (and a lot of hilarious handwaving and bickering between the three then-Lala execs as they debated what they could tell me — in front of me), but I went from being convinced Lala was launching something completely illegal to believing it was a taste of the future. Lala never got too much traction, but it was great, and it had a nice exit: Apple acquired the company for a reported $80+ million.

Gillmor Gang Live 01.27.12 (TCTV)

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 01:11 PM PST

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The Gillmor Gang – Danny Sullivan, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, Doc Searls & Steve Gillmor – is recording live today at 1pm PT. Recording has concluded.

Flurry: Amazon’s Kindle Fire Is Already Starting To Smoke Samsung’s Galaxy Tab

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 12:45 PM PST

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Wuh oh, Samsung — better watch your tail. While Apple might not be seeing any impact (be it positive or negative) on iPad sales from the launch of the Kindle Fire, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab ought to be feeling the heat.

Tapping into the data provided by their app analytics platform (which they estimate has found its way onto around 90% of the Android devices out there), Flurry highlights a few surprising numbers.

App Sessions:

This one’s pretty interesting, as it measures how many people are actually using their respective Android tablets (as opposed to how many bought them and let them sit on a shelf somewhere). It measures “User Application Sessions”, which is defined as a user opening an application and using it for at least 10 seconds before closing it.

After launching in November, the Kindle Fire accounted for just 3% of application sessions. Just three months later, it’s at 35.7% — pretty much neck and neck with Samsung’s 35.6%.

Think about that. The Kindle Fire, which has been out for 3 months, is seeing as much cumulative usage as a series of devices that have been out for an entire year longer. Even if the number of Galaxy Tabs sold well outweighs the number of Kindle Fires sold (and it likely does — again, the Tab series has been out for much longer. It’s also available around the world, whereas the Fire is US only for now), Fire owners appear to actually use their devices more often.

Downloads:

Next up, Flurry looked at the download numbers for 5 applications that were in the Top 10 on both the Android Market and Amazon’s App Store. To boil it all down: for every sale of one of these top apps to a Galaxy Tab owner, there were 2.53 sales to a Kindle Fire owner. Again, consider how much bigger the Galaxy Tab audience is (Flurry estimates that it’s at least double) — and yet, the Kindle Fire owners are buying more.

If you’re an Android developer wondering whether or not you should target the Kindle Fire and Amazon’s App Store, the answer seems to be an incredibly clear “Yes.”



Android Smartphone Round-Up: December/January Edition

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 12:04 PM PST

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We took a break from the Android round-up in December because, well, to be honest I was on vacation. But January gave us a few extra smartphones and the holidays are over, so we’re back. What we’ve got for you today leans into more expensive turf, and unfortunately, our favorite Android devices for the past two months are also exclusively at Verizon, so Big Red subscribers should pay attention.

Without further ado, these are our favorite December/January releases of the Android persuasion: The Samsung Galaxy Nexus, the LG Spectrum, and the Motorola Droid RAZR Maxx.

Enjoy!

Samsung Galaxy Nexus

Features:

  • Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich
  • Verizon 4G LTE support
  • 4.65-inch 1280×720 Super AMOLED display
  • 5MP rear camera (1080 video capture), 1.3MP front-facing camera (720p video capture)
  • 1.2GHz dual-core processor
  • MSRP: $299.99 with a two-year contract

Pros:

  • Ice Cream Sandwich is a solid step up from Gingerbread
  • That 720p display is huge and beautiful
  • Google Hangouts

Cons:

  • The phone might be a bit too big for one-handed actions
  • Feels a bit plastic-y
  • No pre-loaded Google wallet, but you can download it

If you’re looking for Android, the Galaxy Nexus is where you’ll find it. Ice Cream Sandwich is a joy compared to Gingerbread, and this coming from someone who is quite hard on Android. Of course, the screen on this bad boy is amazing, but as MG points out in his review, sometimes the phone is just too big to perform one-handed actions.

We also expected image quality to be better out of that 5-megapixel rear camera, but it simply can’t compete with the iPhone’s 8-megapixel shooter. (And no, I’m not saying that based on megapixels… Image quality is simply better with the 4S.) But that doesn’t really matter — an Android fan is an Android fan, and this is as good as Android gets.

LG Spectrum

Features:

  • Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread
  • Verizon 4G LTE support
  • 4.5-inch True HD 1280×720 Display
  • 8MP rear camera (1080p video capture), 1.3MP front-facing camera
  • 1.5GHz dual-core processor
  • MSRP: $199.99 with a two-year contract

Pros:

  • Beautiful display
  • Pre-loaded ESPN Sports Center app in HD
  • LG Y is actually a nice custom overlay

Cons:

  • Not a fan of that brushed plastic back panel
  • The silver bezels don’t handle prints well

I was hard on this phone when I first played around with it, and I still maintain that there’s nothing super special about the Spectrum. It’s not like the Rezound with Beats Audio imtegration or the Razr with its anorexic waist line. That said, you really won’t find these kind of specs on an Android phone for just $200. In fact, I’d be so bold as to call it a steal.

I’m also pretty excited about that display. I have yet to put a Super AMOLED Plus up against this 720p True HD display, but I’d say it’s one of the most (if not, the most) stunning displays I saw at CES. Certainly worth consideration, especially if you are a fan of LG phones to begin with.

Motorola Droid Razr Maxx

Features:

  • Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread
  • Verizon 4G LTE support
  • 4.3-inch Super AMOLED advanced 960×540 display
  • 8MP rear camera (1080p video capture), 1.3MP front-facing camera (720p video capture)
  • 1.2GHz dual-core processor
  • MSRP: $299.99 with a two-year contract

Pros:

  • 3300 mAH battery is a big improvement from the Razr
  • Less of a “Moto bump” along the back
  • Bump in storage from 16GB to 32GB

Cons:

  • 1.89mm thicker than its predecessor
  • UI can slow things down a tad

The Droid Razr Maxx is a very special phone. It kills the few things that were wrong with the original Razr — which is an excellent device, mind you — and then doubles the storage, to boot. I was originally bothered with how light the Razr was. It made premium materials feel cheap, but the extra heft and weight on the Razr Maxx really gives this phone a pricey, solid feel.

A Droid Razr update for Android 4.0 leaked out this week, so if you’re comfortable with tinkering than that’s an extra benefit to the Maxx. We’ll have a full review on this phone up very shortly, but from the short time I’ve spent with it thus far I’d say it has the superior hardware in this particular bunch of Android handsets.

It’ll all come down to what matters most to you. If that giant 720p screen excites you, go Galaxy Nexus all the way. The Spectrum, on the other hand, offers up some pretty killer specs at a much more reasonable price, while the Droid Razr Maxx wins in the hardware/design department.



Davos: BraveNewTalent Allows Job Seekers To Follow Their Future Employers

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 11:26 AM PST

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BraveNewTalent is a social recruitment platform operating in the UK and moving into the US. I caught up with CEO and founder Lucia Tarnowski at Davos.

The startup is built around the idea that people want to follow companies they might want to work for in the future, and companies in turn want to educate potential hires about how they work.

They recently introduced a few new features, which Tarnowski outlines, notably the new feature enabling a user to follow the key employees of a company.



Davos: Ushahidi Grows Its Global Crowd-sourcing Platform, Slams Twitter Censorship [TCTV]

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 11:09 AM PST

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At Davos I managed to catch Juliana Rotich, Co-Founder of Ushahidi, the incredible crowd sourcing platform which came out of Kenya. Starting with just a handful of countries in 2009, it’s main product, Crowdmap, is now used in hundreds of countries for crisis mapping and even crowd sourcing information about nuclear weapons in Iran.

I got an update from her about their latest moves. These include news that the Omidyar Network, which put $1.4m towards Ushahidi, and which late last year put in another $1.9m.

It’s worth noting also that Ushahidi has come out against a new partnership between the World Bank with Google that is supposed to empower citizen cartographers in 150 countries, but which threatens the open source map making community. Google's licensing agreement for Google Map Maker says users can only access Google Map Maker data unless it is via platform designated by Google.

In addition, her opinions about the move by Twitter to introduce a censorship platform. This of course is of huge significance to activists in Africa, and she doesn’t hold back.

Lastly, iHub Nairobi – a tech startup community – needs a 3D printer, so it would be great to see someone make that happen for them.

(Apologies for the break at the beginning due to a technical problem on the camera).

WSJ: Facebook Filing For IPO As Early As Wednesday

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 11:08 AM PST

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The Wall Street Journal has just reported that Facebook may file for its long-awaited IPO as soon as this Wednesday, but notes that the “timing is still being discussed”, according to an anonymous source. The article says that Facebook is eyeing a valuation between $75 and $100 billion as it raises up to $10 billion, which is in line with a previous WSJ report last November.

The article also reports that Morgan Stanley is currently the frontrunner to secure the top, “lead left” position in the filing, with Goldman Sachs playing a “significant role” as well. The news comes shortly after Facebook temporarily froze secondary trades on its shares, sparking speculation that the IPO filing may be imminent.

Facebook’s IPO has been the subject of constant debate and anticipation in the tech world for years now — though CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg have long avoided committing to any kind of time-table for the company to go public. The long wait for the IPO has led many employees to turn to the secondary markets to sell some of their valuable shares and secure some liquidity.

Here’s an excerpt from an interview this past November between Charlie Rose, Zuckerberg, and Sandberg, where they discuss the timing of Facebook’s public offering (you can full the full transcript here):

Charlie Rose:
What's the valuation today of Facebook?

Sheryl Sandberg:
So we're a private company so we don't really have a valuation.

Charlie Rose:
So then why do you want to be a public company? Why do you even think about an IPO?

Mark Zuckerberg:
I actually think the biggest thing for us is that a big part of being a technology company is getting the best engineers and designers and talented people around the world. And one of the ways that you can do that is you compensate people with equity or options, right, so you get people who want to join the company, both for the mission, right, because they believe that Facebook is doing this awesome thing and they want to be a part of connecting everyone in the world, but also, if the company does well, then they get financially rewarded and can be set. And, you know, we've made this implicit promise to our investors and to our employees that by compensating them with equity and by giving them equity, that at some point we're going to make that equity worth something publicly and liquidly, in a liquid way. Now, the promise isn't that we're going to do it on any kind of short-term time horizon. The promise is that we're going to build this company so that it's great over the long term, right. And that we're always making these decisions for the long term, but at some point we'll do that.

…

Charlie Rose:
You'll go when what? When will you decide?

Sheryl Sandberg:
When we're ready.

Mark Zuckerberg:
Yeah.

#Humblebrag: Jack Dorsey, Reid Hoffman, Kevin Rose Coming To The Crunchies; Harris Wittels Hosting

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 11:05 AM PST

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After writing for NBC’s Parks and Recreation for the past couple years (he’s about to start a writing gig for HBO’s Eastbound and Down), and authoring the sarcastic but brilliant and hilarious @HumbleBrag, Harris Wittels has decided to bring his talents to TechCrunch. This year, he will be hosting the Crunchies Awards, and bringing his chiding humor. If you’re not familiar with Humblebrag, he scours Twitter in search of  braggadocio wrapped in humility. I’m willing to bet at least one of you has been retweeted. If so, post them in the comments below. We want to see.

Not only is Wittels hosting, but Jack Dorsey, Kevin Rose, Marissa Mayer, Kevin Systrom, Reid Hoffman, Ron Conway and many more will also be joining us, many of them presenting awards themselves. This is going to be one night you won’t want to miss. We have just released our last batch of tickets. If you would like to come to the Crunchies Awards, make sure to go here to get them, and get them quickly since they tend to sell very fast. And there’s still time to vote for the best startups, apps, investors, and founders of the year. Voting ends at midnight on Sunday.

Like always, an after party will follow the ceremony, where we will be joined by all of our guests and winners. There will be a fully hosted bar, hors d'oeuvres, a casino game room, and other fun entertainment and surprises. The award show is taking place next Tuesday, January 31st, at 7:30pm.

Lastly, in all fun, would you like to get mentioned by Wittels on stage? If so, make sure you tweet out your best humblebrags between now and the start of the show using the #crunchies and #humblebrag hashtags, and you may be chosen. Below are some examples to get you started.

See you all at the Crunchies!

Gillmor Gang 01.24.12 (TCTV)

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 10:58 AM PST

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The Gillmor Gang — Dennis Crowley, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — visit with the ghosts of Foursquare Past, Present, and Future. @dens is semi-bicoastal these days, trying to stay ahead of his growing business. He just moved in to a new office in NY, and the one in SF is expanding as rapidly as he can hire.

We try to get him to say bad things about Google +, but he demurs. But he never escapes the Gang without leaving a bit more of his roadmap than he anticipates. Of course, you’ll need gamification chops to uncover it.

@stevegillmor, @dens, @jtaschek, @kevinmarks

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

Keen On… Payvment: Making eCommerce More Social (TCTV)

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 10:41 AM PST

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Earlier this week, Facebook announced changes to its Open Graph which have huge implications to the social ecommerce platform Payvment. The two year-old Palo Alto based start-up, which already manages 80% of the ecommerce transactions on Facebook, will now be able to be integrated into the Open Graph. What this means, according to Payvment’s Founder and CEO Christian Taylor, is  that we can now broadcast what we want on our Facebook pages. Such social one-click purchasing power is “big trouble” for Amazon and eBay, Taylor predicts. And even bigger trouble, I suspect, for parents who will now be inundated with gift ideas by their Facebook loving kids.

Playfish Product Leader John Earner Is Leaving To Be An EIR At Accel

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 10:27 AM PST

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At this point in his career, it’s safe to put John Earner in the “names as destiny” category. Following a hugely successful run with Playfish, he’s leaving the social game developer today to start as an entrepreneur in residence at one of its investors, Accel, according to sources.

A former naval officer, he joined as the company in 2008 as its first game producer, where he shepherded the development of its first big simulation game, Pet Society. Having figured out how to monetize virtual goods with it, he went on to launch the company’s next big hit, Restaurant City. These two games inspired competing ones from Zynga and many other developers, and provided the revenue and traffic numbers that got Electronic Arts to acquire Playfish in the fall of 2009 in a deal worth up to $400 million.

He also built out its product team as he moved up within the company. And after the acquisition, he helped EA to develop a variety of other titles using existing sports intellectual property, including soccer management game FIFA Superstars. His biggest win, though, has been Sims Social. The life simulator, based off of the long-running EA series, is now the single largest title in EA’s Facebook portfolio. It’s also one of the largest games overall on the platform today, with 3.9 million daily active users and 22 million monthly actives, according to AppData.

He will no doubt be missed, especially considering the general traffic decline of EA’s Facebook titles.

The gaming conglomerate is still one of the largest developers on Facebook, but its social game leadership has also continued to get whittled down. Of the Playfish founding team, only Kristian Segerstrale remains — albeit he’s moved up to be the executive vice president of EA Digital. Meanwhile, former division head Barry Cottle was recently poached by Zynga.

YC Alum Curebit Raises $1.2 Million For Online Referral System

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 10:13 AM PST

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Y Combinator alum Curebit, an online customer referral platform that leverages social media for “word-of-mouth” advertising, has just raised $1.2 million in funding. The investors include 500 Startups, Karl Jacob, Auren Hoffman, Dharmesh Shah, Gordon Tucker, Alex Lloyd of Accelerator Ventures, and others.

The funding will be used for continued product development and a slight expansion to the team involving three new hires (two developers, one designer) to the company’s now five-person outfit.

Curebit, for those unfamiliar, works to optimize the referral systems for eCommerce platforms and software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies (See previous coverage here).

The startup offers a few different ways for businesses to take advantage of its tools, the first being a post-purchase campaign that allows customers to share the details of the purchase on Facebook, Twitter or via email, as soon as the transaction completes.

“We figured when’s a better time than when you’ve basically voted with your wallet, saying ‘hey, I like this store,’” explains Curebit Co-founder Allan Grant.

Companies can also use Curebit’s technology to build standalone referral pages that are accessible at any time, or in one-off campaigns meant to further the reach of existing referral programs.

The startup says it now around 1,000 customers, including everything from smaller, e-commerce stores to larger customers like Giggle.com and a newly signed (but unannounced) top 20 retailer and a consumer foods company. The technology is also available as a plugin for 14 platforms, including Shopify and Magento.

By leveraging social media for the word-of-mouth referrals, Curebit’s customers see higher clicks and conversions than in traditional campaigns, where, for example, customers may have come in by way of ads. The referrals are like personal recommendations from friends, and often include a benefit, like a discount for the new customer, or for both the new customer and the friend who’s doing the referring.

When either the customer or the friend gets a deal via the referral, Curebit is seeing 15%-25% share rates. When the deal is double-sided (both people benefit), share rates are 45%-65%. Meanwhile, only 3% share using the standalone share button. Curebit also sees 1 to 5 clicks per share, depending on the product.

More unique products seem to do better than commodity products, notes Grant. And Curebit’s conversion rates are generally 2 to 3 times higher than traditional methods, and, in some cases, have been as high as 30%. Even better, Curebit’s referrals pay off in terms of dollars spent at checkout, too.

“The other thing we’ve seen consistently on just about every single site is that people spend more,” says Grant. “The average order amount is higher, and it’s not just higher based on how much the discount is – it’s higher even beyond that, even when you take the discount out.”

It’s the personal nature of the Curebit-powered recommendation that’s freeing people up to spend, it seems.



Jon Rubinstein Leaves HP After “Fulfilling Commitment”

Posted: 27 Jan 2012 10:06 AM PST

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HP’s had quite a 2011 and Jon Rubinstein, former Palm CEO and a top-level executive at HP after the giant acquired Palm in 2010, was along for the ride. But according to a report out of AllThingsD, Rubinstein has officially left the company.

Here’s the official quote out of HP:

Jon has fulfilled his commitment to HP. We wish him well.

Rubinstein was under contract with HP to complete a 12-24 month commitment post-acquisition. The report claims that Rubinstein doesn’t have any plans so far, but has said that he is “going to take a well deserved break after four and a half years of developing webOS."

On December 9, 2011, HP CEO Meg Whitman announced that webOS, Rubinstein’s main project, would be open sourced after the company killed webOS smartphones and tablets back in August.



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