The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Notes on Leadership: Be Like Steve Jobs, . . . And Bill Campbell, And Andy Grove
- Craig Barrett Takes On Vivek Wadhwa In The Tech Education Debate
- Famebook: Because You’ve Always Wanted To Have Your Facebook Feed On Paper
- Something Is Technically Wrong With Twitter.com
- “No Excuses” For European Startups And More Videos And Photos From Plugg 2010
- India’s Rural Cell Movement: Can You Hear Me Now?
- Twitter Launches A Site So You Can Stalk Twitter Employees AT SXSW
- Danah Boyd: How Technology Makes A Mess Of Privacy and Publicity
- Pixelpipe Gets Into The Location Game With Foursquare Integration
- Foursquare Opens Up Its Firehose A Bit. Social Great Takes A Drink.
- Rushin’ For Fiber, Baltimore Appoints A “Google Czar”
- The New Museum Brings Together Seven Artists With Seven Engineers (50 Discount Tickets)
| Notes on Leadership: Be Like Steve Jobs, . . . And Bill Campbell, And Andy Grove Posted: 14 Mar 2010 09:29 AM PDT Editor’s note: When venture capitalists invest in early stage startups, more than anything else they are investing in the founders of the company and their ability to lead their employees through the most improbable set of circumstances to take an idea from a germ to a real and profitable business. In this guest post, Ben Horowitz of VC firm Andreessen Horowitz explains the leadership traits he and his co-founder Marc Andreessen look for before they invest in a startup. SOme of their investments include Skype, Zynga, Factual, and RockMelt. Before becoming investing partners, Horowitz and Andreessen co-founded Opsware, which they sold to HP for $1.6 billion, and prior to that Horowitz was an executive at Netscape. At Andreessen Horowitz, we favor founders running the company. The reasons are many (and will be the topic of a future blog post). As a result, we spend a great deal of time thinking about the characteristics required to be a founding CEO. Perhaps the most important attribute required to be a successful founding CEO is leadership. So what is leadership and how do we think about it in the context of the CEO job? Are great leaders born or made? Most people define leadership in the same way that Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously defined pornography when he said: "I know it when I see it." A better definition comes from former Secretary of State Colin Powell who said: "You have achieved excellence as a leader when people will follow you anywhere if only out of curiosity." For our purposes, we can generalize this to be the measure of the quality of a leader: the quantity, quality and diversity of people who want to follow her. So what makes people want to follow a leader? We look for 3 key traits:
Let's take these in order. The ability to articulate the vision—The Steve Jobs Attribute Can the leader articulate a vision that's interesting, dynamic, and compelling? More importantly, can the leader do this when things fall apart? More specifically, when the company gets to a point when it does not make objective financial sense for any employee to continue working there, will the leader be able to articulate a vision that's compelling enough that the people stay out of curiosity? I believe that Jobs' greatest achievement as a visionary leader so far was a) getting so many super talented people to continue following him at NeXT, long after the company lost its patina; then b) getting the employees of Apple to buy into his vision when the company was weeks away from bankruptcy. It's difficult to imagine any other leader being so compelling that they could do these back-to-back and this is why we call this one the Steve Jobs attribute. The right kind of ambition—The Bill Campbell Attribute Andy Grove once remarked that a company needs highly ambitious executives in order to achieve its goals. However, it's critical that those executives have "the right kind of ambition": ambition for the success of the company rather than the "wrong kind of ambition": ambition for the success of themselves. One of the biggest misperceptions in our society is that a prerequisite for becoming a CEO is being selfish, ruthless, and callous. In fact, the opposite is true and the reason is obvious. The first thing that any successful CEO must do is get really great people to work for her. Smart people do not want to work for people who do not have their interests in mind and in heart. Most of us have experienced this in our careers: a bright, ambitious, hard working executive that nobody good wants to work for and who, as a result, delivers performance far worse than one might imagine. Truly great leaders create an environment where the employees feel that the CEO cares much more about the employees than she cares about herself. In this kind of environment, an amazing thing happens: a huge number of the employees believe that it's their company and behave accordingly. As the company grows large, these employees become the quality control for the entire organization. They set the standard of work that all future employees must live up to. As in, "Hey, you need to do a better job on that datasheet—you are screwing up my company." I call this characteristic the Bill Campbell Attribute after my friend Bill who is the best that I've ever seen at this. If you talk to people who worked in any of the many organizations that Bill has run, they refer to those organizations as "my organization" or "my company." A huge part of why he has been so unbelievably strong on this dimension of leadership is that he's totally authentic. He would happily sacrifice his own economics, fame, glory, and rewards for his employees. When you talk to Bill, you get the feeling that he cares deeply about you and what you have to say, because he does. And all of that shows up in his actions and follow through. Ability to achieve the vision—The Andy Grove Attribute The final leg of our leadership stool is competence, pure and simple. If I buy into the vision and believe that the leader cares about me, do I think she can actually achieve the vision? Will I follow her into the jungle with no map forward or back and trust that she will get me out of there? I like to refer to this as the Andy Grove attribute. Andy Grove will always be my model of CEO competence. He earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, wrote the best management book that I've ever read (High Output Management), and tirelessly refined his craft. Not only did he write exceptional books on management, he taught management classes at Intel throughout his tenure. In his classic book, Only the Paranoid Survive, Grove details the story of leading Intel through the dramatic transition from the memory business to the microprocessor business. In doing so, he walked away from nearly all of his revenue. He humbly credits others in the company with coming to the strategic conclusion before he did, but the credit for swiftly and successfully leading the company through the transition goes to Dr. Grove. Changing your primary business as a 16 year old, large, public company raises a lot of questions. As Andy describes in an incident with one of his employees:
Despite shocking many of his best employees with this radical strategy, ultimately the company trusted Andy. They trusted him to rebuild their company around an entirely new business. And that trust turned out to be very well placed. So, are great leaders born or made? Let's look at this one attribute at a time:
In the end, some attributes of leadership can be improved more than others, but every CEO should work on all three.      
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| Craig Barrett Takes On Vivek Wadhwa In The Tech Education Debate Posted: 14 Mar 2010 07:17 AM PDT Editor’s note: The most valuable employees of any technology company are the engineers and scientists, which is why everyone in Silicon Valley does whatever they can to ensure the continuous supply to this talent pool. The size of the talent pool is ultimately determined by the number of people who graduate from colleges and universities with science, technology, engineering, or mathematics degrees. The U.S. is graduating fewer and fewer scientists and engineers, causing concern in many quarters. While many people agree this is a problem, not everyone agrees on what should be done about it. Former Intel chairman and CEO Craig Barrett is a strong proponent of priming the pump with more undergraduate science, engineering, and math students. Duke/UC-Berkeley professor (and regular TechCrunch columnist) Vivek Wadhwa thinks that better rewards for people who pursue engineering and science degrees is the right approach. So we asked Barrett and Wadhwa to debate the issue of how best to fix technology education in the U.S. Their exchange is below: Vivek Wadhwa: Craig Barrett is someone who I hold in the highest regard. Ever since he retired as Intel's CEO, Dr. Barrett has made it his life's mission to improve U.S. competitiveness. He believes that the way to do this is to teach more math and science. And he believes we need to graduate more PhDs in science and engineering. I wholeheartedly support improvements in education and know the value that math and science skills provide. But the problems I see in U.S. competitiveness aren't related to the numbers of engineering PhDs or scientists that we graduate. American companies are shifting R&D abroad because it makes economic sense for them to be near growth markets, and they can hire talented workers at a lower cost. It isn't about deficiencies in American workers or a weakness of U.S. math and science education. We are also graduating enough PhDs in science and engineering. The problem is that the majority of these graduates are foreign nationals (who are now increasingly returning home). American's don't consider it worthwhile to complete advanced science and engineering degrees because it doesn't make financial sense for them to do so. Research by Harvard economist Richard Freeman showed that because salaries for scientists and engineers are lower than for other professions, the investment that students have to make in higher degrees isn’t cost-justified. Doctoral graduate students typically spend seven to eight years earning a PhD, during which time they are paid stipends. These stipends are usually less than what a bachelor’s degree-holder makes. Some students never make up for this financial loss. Foreign students typically have fewer opportunities and see a U.S. education as their ticket to the U.S. job market and citizenship. Hence, 60% of U.S. engineering PhD graduates are foreigners. As this article from Scientific American discusses, the problems are even worse for graduating scientists. …But today, however, few young PhDs can get started on the career for which their graduate education purportedly trained them, namely, as faculty members in academic research institutions. Instead, scores of thousands of them spend the years after they earn their doctorates toiling in low-paying, dead-end postdoctoral "training" appointments (called postdocs) in the laboratories of professors, where they ostensibly hone skills they would need to start labs of their own when they become professors. In fact, however, only about 25 percent of those earning American science PhDs will ever land a faculty job that enables them to apply for the competitive grants that support academic research. And even fewer—15 percent by some estimates—will get a post at the kind of research university where the nation's significant scientific work takes place. So, my argument is that if we create the incentives for American children to study math and science and to complete advanced degrees, the magic will happen. In addition to math and science, we should teach our children about world culture, geography, and global markets. In the era of globalization, these subjects are equally important. And while we fix the incentives for Americans, let's do all we can to keep the best foreign students who come to the U.S. to study, here, so they are competing on our side. Craig Barrett: Economic competitiveness in the 21st Century will be quite different than in the past. With the free flow of information, capital, and people, economies will have to look for new comparative advantages. Most observers of this topic conclude that there are only three things that a country can do to increase their relative competitiveness and provide for an increased standard of living for their citizens. Countries have to invest in the education of their work force (smart people), they have to invest in research and development (smart ideas) and they have to provide the right environment to let smart people get together with smart ideas and create new products, new businesses, and new services. The most fundamental of these three issues is education. Historically the standard of living or per capita income has tracked closely with the level of education of the work force—as education lets workers add value to what they do and as the economy grows the standards of living increase. Looking forward every major economy has identified the general areas that will drive innovation and economic growth. Japan, the US, and the EU have all listed those technologies (nanotech, photonics, new materials, micro electronics, alternative energy, biotech, etc) that will be key for development, productivity improvements, and growth. All of these areas have the common foundation of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Hence it is straightforward to conclude that work force expertise in STEM will be a determinant of economic growth. If we look at the US for a moment we can make several observations about the education of our current and future work force.
So in contrast to the importance of STEM education for economic performance in the 21st Century we see the US moving in the opposite direction. Certainly our universities are still top ranked in the world in STEM but increasingly the graduates of those universities are foreign nationals who are often choosing to return home to pursue their professional careers. And we are producing no more STEM graduates than we did decades ago. If the US is really serious about competing in the 21st Century economy we will have to decide to compete. This simply means that you have to create the work force (smart people), invest in R&D (smart ideas) and make sure the environment is attractive to investment in innovation (do something about tax rates, make it easier to form corporations, provide incentives to invest in R&D and make capital investments, etc). Otherwise you will see the continuous flight of capital and jobs to regions of the world where governments have made the environment more attractive. This is not a simple issue of wage rates—corporations chase after the best possible work force in areas where the total cost is most attractive and often the total cost is much more heavily weighted by corporate tax rates and incentives, not wage rates. STEM education is key for our future. We need a major upgrade in our K-12 education to produce high school graduates who understand and appreciate STEM. We need more undergraduates majoring in STEM for the jobs of the 21st Century. And we need more STEM graduate students to drive those industries that are key to our future. As a measure of how rapidly things are changing with time, it used to be that many STEM Ph.Ds turned right around and went after faculty positions in our universities. Today, STEM Ph.Ds are the entry level education requirements to get into the engineering and research laboratories of the successful tech corporations in the US, like Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, IBM, etc. It is also certain that not every STEM graduate is going to pursue a limited career in STEM. STEM education is a great introduction to many other professions – the basis of STEM education being problem solving means that this education is a great entry to other jobs. In fact the most common educational background of the Fortune 500 CEOs is engineering. So at a time when the rest of the world is gearing up for competition let's refocus the US to do the same. That is unless you believe our future is in low value add services or manufacturing, investment banking, tort lawyers or asphalt ready construction jobs. Somebody has to create some wealth if you want your economy to grow. Vivek Wadhwa’s Rebuttal: Again, I wholeheartedly agree that we need to improve K-12 education and I agree about the importance of STEM education. The question is, how do you motivate American children to enter fields like science and engineering that are harder than others to learn, don't provide the economic rewards, and that aren't considered "cool"? We can't force our children to do PhDs in math. As the article from Scientific American showed, many engineering and science PhDs can't even get jobs – in academia or industry. This is after they have worked for years at ridiculously low wages as researchers or postdocs. Those that do get jobs don't ever make up for the financial sacrifice they have made. When American children choose to study science or engineering, their friends call them geeks or nerds – they are made to feel inferior. Their Indian and Chinese counterparts are held in high regard by society and end up at the top of the social ladder. Indian and Chinese engineers and scientists are often national heroes. Here, our kids idolize football players and rock stars. We can't also just tell our children that the nation's competitiveness and standard of living depends on them making sacrifice and completing advanced degrees in math and science. They won't care. We should improve the K-12 education system as you suggest. Our corporations should also invest in workforce development – which they generally don't. We should also provide tax breaks for research as you say. And we should fix our university research system (I have written about the big problems with this). The issue I am highlighting is that even if we did all of the good things you suggest, this would not fix the problem of American children not being motivated to become scientists and engineers. My top students at the Masters of Engineering Management Program at Duke University still vie for high-paying investment banking jobs; they don't become engineers. It is the same with our top PhDs in math; they become quants at investment banks. Their talent ends up being used by investment banks to find new ways of bilking the financial system. We need to create the excitement about science and engineering at the national level and motivate our best and brightest to become engineers and scientists. And we need to make it worthwhile financially for them to help our country stay competitive and to solve the problems facing our planet. This is as much a marketing problem as it is an investment problem. An example of a way to fix the marketing problem is what National Academy of Engineering President, Charles Vest, proposed with the Grand Challenges for Engineering program. But this is a tiny first step. We need to do a lot more. Craig Barrett’s Rebuttal: Let me respectfully disagree with one point Vivek makes and then give some suggestions on how to overcome his second issue. First, this is not a financial compensation issue. If it were then every kid who goes to college would choose to major in engineering because a BS in engineering (almost any subject) commands the highest salary of any university graduate. Most kids don't major in engineering because they don't have the interest, the aptitude, or they like some other major more. Our young college graduates do not chase the dollar; they tend to follow their interests. In addition, when I look at the unemployment statistics, engineers are usually amongst the highest employment professions in the country. Certainly the percentage of NFL or rock star wannabes or business administration majors or medieval history majors on unemployment is much higher than that for engineers. So can we please move away from the simplistic argument that STEM doesn't pay? In addition if you look at graduate school and the graduate Ph.D who spends years working as a Post Doc angling for a teaching position at a prestigious university you simply cannot do an ROI analysis on his or her investment to land the faculty position and conclude that no one will be a Post Doc. The individual is chasing that faculty position because that is what they really want to do. Just like an aspiring actor spends years doing bit parts to finally land the big role. You know that because the end point, the faculty position, is not the highest paid option for the Ph.D. He or she can make more money in the private sector and probably have greater resources (capital facilities and research dollars) to pursue interesting problems. The Post Doc pursues their interest precisely because that is what they are interested in. As there are many more Post Docs than faculty positions available we have to conclude that Post Docs are Post Docs because they want to try to become faculty members and that Post Docs do not represent an inherent limitation or barrier to people trying to obtain a Ph.D in STEM. The private sector has a strong appetite for STEM Ph.Ds—just look at the hiring practices of the major corporations. The real barrier to pursuing degrees in STEM is that we have almost a perfect filter in place in K-12. For a student to want to major in STEM in college they have to exit high school with a strong mathematics background. That means that they need to have a good math teacher in nearly every grade (in addition to having a good physics, chemistry, and biology teacher). We know that about 1/3 of all math and science teachers in K-12 are not certified in their subjects and probably do not do a good job educating and motivating their students. If you assume for a moment that you need 12 good math teachers in a row to exit high school being proficient in math then the calculation of the probability of such an event happening is simple: 0.67 raised to the 12th power shows you what a perfect filter the K-12 system is. So how about a national effort to get more STEM content majors into K-12 teaching? A few exciting programs have started in this space (UTeach out of Texas, Teach for America, the revamp of the education school at ASU). All we need to do is start recognizing that hiring content experts in K-12 is more important than hiring someone who has studied education pedagogy for 4 years. Just imagine how many folks interested in STEM want to take all those School of Education classes to get their teaching certificate. On to the point where I want to support Vivek, i.e., the need to get more kids interested in STEM during K-12. This can happen in the class room with good teachers (can you imagine a PE teacher doubling as a math teacher inspiring kids to want to pursue math?) and it can happen outside of the class room. For example I just spent yesterday afternoon in Phoenix at the FIRST Robotics Championship competition—the energy, the enthusiasm, the application of STEM was fantastic. But only about 15,000 kids nationwide participate in this competition. Just suppose we had a FIRST team at every school in the country. Next week I am at the Intel Science Talent Search (the Nobel equivalent for high school students doing research). The 40 finalists will be doing research better than my Ph.D thesis topic. But only about 1500 kids a year enter this competition—what if we had 15,000? Or 150,000? This is where we need to mobilize the public and private sectors to improve. This is where we can catch the imagination of the next generation and turn them into candidates for those STEM Ph.Ds. There is sub critical mass working in this area – it just needs to be expanded. Suppose we organized the top 200 STEM oriented companies in the US and let them work at the local level to make FIRST robotics, science fairs, and computer club houses really happen across the US. Then we could overcome the tired arguments that our society doesn't value STEM. There is a movement to make this happen right now. The best thing we could all do is throw our weight behind this effort.      
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| Famebook: Because You’ve Always Wanted To Have Your Facebook Feed On Paper Posted: 14 Mar 2010 04:53 AM PDT
Ok, fair chance you don’t – I sure do because I have one of those lying around here somewhere. Anyway, it was only a matter of time before they did the same for Facebook – and lo and behold, here’s My Famebook. Concept is the same as Tweetnotebook: you can create and order a unique notebook, featuring an item from your Facebook feed at the bottom of every page, via the website in just a few minutes. You can make a ‘book of you’ or select the wittiest Facebook status messages from your friends. Once personalized with a custom lay-out, message selection and cover design, you can preview your Famebook and choose to order the 320-page paperback version for €14 ($19) or go for a 200-page hardcover edition at €18 ($25) – shipping costs not included. You know, if you really always wanted to have your Facebook stream printed on dead trees. Just a thought: who actually owns status messages posted on Facebook, and is it cool for My Famebook to just print them out? Not that we want to be party poopers, but there must be some copyright issues here, right?      
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| Something Is Technically Wrong With Twitter.com Posted: 14 Mar 2010 04:36 AM PDT OMGTwitterisdownagain. Or extremely flaky, at least. This time, the problems seem to occur only when trying to access the Twitter website, as the API seems to be fully functional and thus not causing any trouble for third-party clients. Search also seems to work fine, as you can tell from all the people tweeting that Twitter is down for them – go figure. We’ll keep it short and sweet: use a third-party client for your tweeting needs or find something else to do (like blog about the fact that Twitterisdownagain).      
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| “No Excuses” For European Startups And More Videos And Photos From Plugg 2010 Posted: 14 Mar 2010 03:53 AM PDT  Last Thursday saw the third edition of Plugg, a conference I started in my home country Belgium back in 2008 that essentially aims to launch and inspire European tech entrepreneurs and advance the startup ecosystem in these parts. The event is closely tied to TechCrunch, with myself as lead organizer and TechCrunch Europe editor Mike Butcher running things on stage. We invited a host of speakers from all corners of Europe to deliver inspiring keynotes about a wide range of topics, and as every year had 20 (well actually, 19) startups vying for the top prize in an exhilarating pitching competition. All these startups were carefully selected and are some of Europe's most promising early-stage ventures, so I invite you to take a look at the full list of finalists in our previous post. In the end, Estonia's Fits.me won the main award of the show, with RazWar snatching the audience choice prize and Distimo and Inbox2 as runners-up. If you didn't attend the event but are interested in finding out what went on on stage, we've got you covered: the whole thing was captured on video and in pictures, and we also embedded a handy Nomadesk widget on the Plugg website where you can access a virtual folder carrying all the presentations. Here's a selection of videos I think will interest TechCrunch readers most (but please check out all of them):
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| India’s Rural Cell Movement: Can You Hear Me Now? Posted: 13 Mar 2010 11:04 PM PST
The results have been phenomenal—550 million people in India have phones, and it has transformed the poorer service economy by giving them an affordable way to be reached and arrange jobs. Just last month, nearly 20 million new mobile accounts were opened. That's more than double the people than have high speed Internet in the entire country. Even in slums where people live on less than $2 a day, everyone has a phone. If "Slumdog Millionaire" was more accurate, Jamal wouldn't have had to go on TV to find Latika. He could have just called her, or worst case, called a few friends until he found her number. It's unequivocally India's most successful infrastructure achievement —despite some mounting concerns about the effects of all those towers dotting nearly any urban rooftop that can hold one. And a host of exciting applications are being built on top of this invisible thread that connects a disparate country with a vast terrain and even bigger gulfs in language, literacy, income, religion, language and living standards But amazingly, when Rajiv Mehrotra (pictured below) looked at the existing telecom penetration in India, he saw failure. What about the people who can't afford $6 a month or live too far to get service? Don't they deserve to be connected as well? The result was VNL, a company that's already gotten a good deal of press and acclaim for its dead-cheap, low-maintenance, Ikea-like easy-to-assemble, solar-powered base stations that extend existing mobile footprints into rural villages for a fraction of the price, allowing the remotest, poorest villages to have mobile phones in every household at drop-dead low prices. "We are the bottom of the bottom," boasts Mehrotra, practically daring competitors to try to play his low-cost, super-durability game. The World Economic Forum named it one of 26 Technology I met with Mehrotra at the company's headquarters in Gurgoan during my November trip to India. This time I wanted to see its technology live in villages and hear first hand what the impact had been. I traveled to a village that had now had phones for about seven months to see how the technology had changed their lives. Of the 500 families spread across this area, almost all of them had a phone—and most for the first time. The majority of the people I spoke with said the first calls they made were to family members, and that the biggest impact was the ability to stay in touch with family, to know when there was an emergency and be able to respond quickly. But there have been business effects too. One man (pictured here) has a Another woman (pictured below) I spoke with was a widow with six Another man (pictured to the right) told me he felt more connected to the rest of India as a result of having a phone. This village is surrounded Indeed, Mehrotra says it's already having a ripple effect on the politics of Rajisthan—the state between Pakistan and India where VNL did its first installations. Politicians come through and make promises and villagers demand their cell phone numbers and call to check up on whether those promises are kept. "They have to be accountable," Mehrotra says. "They can't wriggle out." These phones are not just a nice-to-have, they've quickly become a must have for these villages, deeply tied to the way they make money, participate in their government and retain closely important family relationships. And these ripple effects are only now beginning. Think of what the impact will be when there are better programs for marketing crops, saving money and even learning and game playing rolled out on these very basic phones. Life will always be different in a village or a city, but India can at least gain some basic common denominators between the two. Mehrotra is a big believer in the Ghandian mantra: Change the villages and you change India. He's a serial entrepreneur who has already built businesses rolling out satellite TV and landlines to rural areas, but he thinks this company will have a bigger impact than anything else he's done and is the one with the real potential to go global. It bears noting that he's invested all of his own money in the project—and it's taken far more than he expected. This is not a cheap venture—Mehrotra has invested more than $100 million in the last five years and is still investing more. But I'm not sure it could be built any other way. I don't think there's the venture capital appetite or risk profile in India to fund something like this and most of the mobile equipment companies Mehrotra talked to back when he started thinking about this insisted it couldn't be done. Once he built it he'd take equipment and operator executives out to see it and they still couldn't believe it. They were making calls to test the quality from different areas of the village trying to find pockets without a signal. "They were climbing on the antenna and shaking it like monkeys trying to break it and they couldn't," Mehrotra says. From a business point of view, the operators love VNL because it cheaply expands their existing footprint. The equipment operators aren't so sure. In theory, VNL isn't competing with them because they're not going into the cities. Now that VNL has proved this model works, could a larger established vendor steal the market? The best chance of that would likely come from a Chinese powerhouse like Huawei. That said, any vendor that builds such a low cost solution that's too good will risk eroding his higher priced systems designed for urban areas. "They'll say 'Give it to me in the city too.' " Mehrotra says. All these awards aside, this is the year for VNL to prove it’s really a viable business. And Mehrotra says there are some surprises in store. In terms of market, VNL is already rolling the technology out in other countries and in terms of product they're not done with just simple mobile access. The countries are likely in Africa and perhaps Latin America, and my guess is the new functionality will entail turning on some kind of Internet access through the existing base stations. Expect much more on this newly minted international do-gooding darling in 2010.      
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| Twitter Launches A Site So You Can Stalk Twitter Employees AT SXSW Posted: 13 Mar 2010 05:48 PM PST While a lot of the smaller startups like Foursquare and Gowalla are getting much of the buzz at SXSW, Twitter isn’t sitting idly on the location sidelines. Sure, they launched location integration on their site a few days ago, but they’ve also apparently set up a sub-site totally around location for SXSW. But here’s the weird thing: It’s only for stalking their employees. As co-founder Evan Williams tweeted out earlier, sxsw.twitter.com shows you a Google map of Austin, Texas (where SXSW is held) with tiny Twitter logos overlaid on it, showing Twitter employees at the conference tweeting. The site, which is clearly tailored for mobile usage (it looks great on the iPhone, for example), has two areas: “Twitter People” and “To Meet.” The Twitter People area is the one that shows the map and the tweets overlaid on it. The To Meet area is interesting because it asks, “Which of these sound like awesome things to work on?” and gives you a few different options to click on. For example, if you click on, “Making fast and sexy applications” it takes you to a list of various Twitter employees at SXSW that you should meet. If you click on “Partnering with Twitter,” you get a different list. Clearly, Twitter is using this site for both new employee recruitment, platform expansion, and partnership opportunities. Twitter, while now fairly commonplace in the mainstream (especially the media), first rose to fame among early tech adopters during SXSW three years ago.      
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| Danah Boyd: How Technology Makes A Mess Of Privacy and Publicity Posted: 13 Mar 2010 02:20 PM PST
Boyd says that privacy is not dead, but that a big part of our notion of privacy relates to maintaining control over our content, and that when we don’t have control, we feel that our privacy has been violated. This has happened a few times recently. How The Buzz Launch Failed As a first example Boyd brought up Google Buzz. She says that nothing with the launch was technologically wrong — you could opt out of Buzz, elect to hide your friend list, and so on. But the service resulted in a PR disaster because Google made non-technical mistakes, doing things that didn’t meet user expectations:
Boyd says that years ago, researchers noticed people in a chat room would often ask “A/S/L” (age, sex, location). So some services, looking to streamlines things a bit, started building user profiles that had this information. What they failed to understand is that this “A/S/L” was a sort of chatroom icebreaker. Users lost that, and putting that information in a profile — even if they would have shared it to answer that chat message — could creep them out. With Buzz, Google found the social equivalent to the famous “uncanny valley” (where things seem almost natural, but aren’t quite close enough, so they’re creepy). They collapsed articulated networks (email) and assumed it was a personal network. Boyd then transitioned to talk a bit about the fuzzy lines between what is public and private. She says that just because people put material in public places doesn’t mean it was meant to be aggregated. And just because something is publically accessible doesn’t mean people want it to be publicized. The Facebook Privacy Fail
Boyd then discussed how different groups of people think about privacy. She says that teenagers are much more conscious about what they have to gain by being in public, whereas adults are more concerned about what they have to lose. As an example, Boyd talked about a teenage girl who often put risqué, sometimes illegal content online. When Boyd asked why she’d want to do something, the girl replied, “I want to get a modeling contract just like Tila Tequilla”. Her calculation wasn’t about what she could potentially lose, but rather what she stood to gain. Boyd says that most techies think about Personally Identifiable Information, but that the vast majority of people are thinking about personally embarrassing information. People often share private information with their friends in part because it allows them to bond, it makes them somewhat vulnerable and establishes trust. But when it’s through technology (e.g. Facebook’s public by default setting) it’s a huge technology fail. Boyd also called out the presence of racism in social media. On the night of the BET awards last year, all of the trending topics were dominated by terms relating to the event and the black community. In response, some Twitter users made very racist comments — clearly even these open communication platforms are still prone to hate. To conclude the talk, Boyd pointed out some of the challenges we will continue to face with regard to privacy online. She asks whether or not teachers can be expected to maintain a professional, pristine presence online — something that is very difficult to do while leading a normal life. Ultimately, she says, “neither privacy nor publicity is dead, but technology will continue to make a mess of both.” We’ve been looking at privacy and publicity as a black-or-white attribute for content, when really it’s defined by context and the implications of what we’ve chosen to share.      
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| Pixelpipe Gets Into The Location Game With Foursquare Integration Posted: 13 Mar 2010 02:00 PM PST
Using Foursquare’s API, Pixelpipe now allows you to add check-in to a location with a link to media captured at the venue, which is hosted on your Pixelpipe Page. And you can check-in to a location with media (text, photo, video, audio or a file) with Pixelpipe’s Android app. Pixelpipe will present a list of venues to a user. The number after the venue represents the number of recent check-insFor example, if you are at SXSW, you can record an audio clip or video and post the media long with your check-in to the Austin Convention Center. The link will lead vistors back to your Pixelpipe landing page. Sort of like a Ping.fm for media, Pixelpipe automatically distributes any new audio files, images, or videos to your profiles on social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed. You can choose to group these services by tags, so you can be more selective about where you'd like to to post the content. Pixelpipe’s CEO Brett Butterfield tells me that Brightkite and possible Gowalla integration will be rolled out in the future. As the geolocation wars heat up, it seems like web applications and mobile apps, both new and old, are getting into the location game. Hot Potato, SimpleGeo and new startups StickyBits and Social Great have hooked up their applications with Foursquare. And Foursquare competitor Gowalla upped the ante with a new release.      
  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Foursquare Opens Up Its Firehose A Bit. Social Great Takes A Drink. Posted: 13 Mar 2010 12:09 PM PST
Social Great, a service which tracks trending places in cities back on location data, has just gotten access to this firehose of data. This allows them to show in realtime the trending places throughout Austin, Texas, where SXSW is taking place. The service also pulls in data from Gowalla, Brightkite, and GraffitiGeo (Loopt). As Polaris Ventures EIR Jon Steinberg notes (who helped build Social Great), “the numbers look crazy.” What he means is the check-in data at SXSW. Judging from what I’m seeing on the ground here in Austin, that may be an understatement. Venues routinely have dozens if not hundreds of other Foursquare users at them when they’re trending. SimpleGeo, one company that has had early access to Foursquare’s firehose, built Vicarious.ly to visualize real-time check-ins around Austin. That data looks fairly insane as well. Most of the check-ins appear to be coming from Foursquare (which saw over 300,000 check-ins on Thursday alone) and Gowalla, but co-founder Joe Stump notes that the battle is too close to call still. One other note: all these check-ins are made possible by the fact that AT&T’s network has been up and working the whole time. It’s been impressive. Crisis averted, so far.      
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| Rushin’ For Fiber, Baltimore Appoints A “Google Czar” Posted: 13 Mar 2010 09:20 AM PST
The city has appointed a “Google Czar” — yes, that’s the actual title — to lobby the company to put Baltimore on the list of cities in the initial trial. Tom Loveland, CEO of a local tech company, Mind Over Machines, has been appointed by Baltimore’s mayor to take this exalted, but volunteer position. The Baltimore movement has also launched a website, BmoreFiber, which states in huge, bold letters, “Ask Google to Invest Billions in Baltimore's Future.“ These attempts by cities to catch Google’s attention, while humorous, show a massive desire for better broadband in this country. It’s kind of sad that it takes an outsider, Google, to spur faster broadband development. Meanwhile, companies that offer broadband as a core business, like Comcast, drag their feet with service that is an order of magnitude slower at huge prices.      
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| The New Museum Brings Together Seven Artists With Seven Engineers (50 Discount Tickets) Posted: 13 Mar 2010 09:10 AM PST What happens when you pair seven visual artists with seven engineers and technologists? The New Museum in New York City is about to find out. An upcoming exhibit called Seven On Seven will put together artists and programmers for one day and tell them to come up with something together. It could be an application, a work of art, a full-blown product, or anything they want. Some of the participating technologists include Delicious founder Joshua Schachter, WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg, former Facebook data dude Jeff Hammerbacher, and Tumblr founder David Karp. Here are all seven pairings: Schachter, for instance, is being paired with artist Evan Roth, who has created open-source software to analyze graffiti tags and has even created a Graffiti Markup Language (GML). Schachter, of course, pioneered the use of data free-form tags to categorize Delicious bookmarks years ago. Mulennweg is being paired with Aaron Koblin a digital artist who creates art based on the input of thousands of individuals. He is also the artist who created Radiohead’s “House of Cards” video using no cameras (embedded below) The seven pairs of collaborators will present their final project at the New Museum on April 17. We have 50 discount codes good for $100 off the $350 ticket price (just enter the code “techcrunch” here). The idea to pair programmers with artists came from betaworks CEO John Borthwick, who is also a board member of Rhizome, the New Museum affiliate which is put the program together.      
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Remember that time when a marketing agency’s labs unit cooked up an application that allowed you to 
Today at SXSWi, keynote speaker Danah Boyd took the stage to talk about privacy and publicity, and how they intertwine online. Boyd is a Social Media Researcher at Microsoft Research New England, and has studied this space extensively for years. It was a compelling talk that challenged the notion that personal information is on a binary spectrum of public or private. To help underscore her points, she recalled and discussed a number of major privacy blunders from Facebook and Google. You can find my notes from the presentation below.
There’s been a lot of hoopla over the past couple of years about Twitter’s so-called “firehose.” Essentially, it’s an open stream of all their data that is provided to developers to use for third-party apps. 
A couple weeks ago, 
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