The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- The New Information Age
- The d.Fund Founder Enrique Allen: Innovation Will Take A Different Breed Of Designer
- I’m Having A Party. Here’s $50. Bring Cool People — Or You Owe Me $100.
- Ad.ly Versus Facebook: Something Doesn’t Add Up
- (Founder Stories) Right Media’s Mike Walrath: “I Was Never Qualified For Any Job I Got In My Life”
- OMG/JK: Google “Open”, Google Re-Org, Google Social
- Foursquare Wants To Help Google Employees Get Massive Counteroffers, Too
| Posted: 10 Apr 2011 07:00 AM PDT
Reid is a visionary and certainly had this right. But the information that Reid described is just the tip of the iceberg. We are already gathering a thousand times more data than that. The growth is exponential, and the innovation opportunities are even bigger than Silicon Valley can imagine they are. I'm going to explain why I believe this. But let me start with a short history lesson. Over the centuries, we gathered a lot of data on things such as climate, demographics, and business and government transactions. Our farmers kept track of the weather so that they would know when to grow their crops; we had land records so that we could own property; and we developed phone books so that we could find people. Web 1.0 made it possible to make this information globally available and searchable. This rapidly evolved into Web 2.0. Now data were being captured on what news we read, where we shopped, what sites we surfed, what music we listened to, what movies we watched, and where we travelled. And "the powers that be" started gathering information about our age, health, education, and socioeconomic status. With the advent of LinkedIn, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, and the many other social-media tools, the Web became "social" and "the powers that be" began to learn all about our work history, social and business contacts, and what we like—our food, entertainment, sexual preferences, etc. This is what Reid Hoffman calls Web 3.0. But there is much, much more happening in the Web 3.0 world. It's not just "social". In 2009, President Obama launched an ambitious program to modernize our healthcare system by making all health records standardized and electronic. The goal is to have all paper medical records—for the entire U.S. population—digitized and available online. This way, an emergency room will have immediate access to a patient's medical history, the effectiveness of medicines can be researched over large populations, and general practitioners and specialists can coordinate their treatments. The government is also opening up its massive datasets of information with the Data.gov initiative. Four hundred thousand datasets are already available, and more are being added every week. They include regional data on the efficiency of government services, on poverty and wealth, education, on federal government spending, on transportation, etc. We can, for example, build applications that challenge schools or health-care providers to perform better by comparing various localities’ performance. And we can hold the government more accountable by analyzing its spending and wastage. There are more than 24 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, and far more video is being collected world wide through the surveillance cameras that you see everywhere. Whether we realize it or not, our mobile phones are able to keep track of our every movement—everywhere we go; how fast we move; what time we wake. Various mobile applications are beginning to record these data. And then there is the human genome. We only learned how to sequence this a decade ago at a cost of billions of dollars. The price of sequencing an individual's genome is dropping at a double exponential rate, from millions to about $10,000 per sequence in 2011. More than one million individuals are projected to be sequenced in 2013. It won't be long before genome sequencing costs $100—or is free—with services that you purchase (as with cell phones). Now imagine the possibilities that could derive from access to an integration of these data collections: being able to match your DNA to another’s and to learn what diseases the other person has had and how effective different medications were in curing them; learning the other person's abilities, allergies, likes, and dislikes; who knows, maybe being able to find a DNA soul mate. You may think that the U.S. leads in information collection. But the most ambitious project in the world is happening in India. Its government is gathering demographic data, fingerprints, and iris scans from of all its 1.2 billion residents. This will lead to the creation of the largest, most complex identity database in the world. I'll cover this subject in a future piece.
Regardless of the risks and security implications, the technology will advance, however. This period of history has been called the Information Age because it makes available instant access to knowledge that would have been difficult or impossible to find previously. I would argue that we are way beyond this; we're at the beginning of a new era: the New Information Age. In previous technology revolutions, companies such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Google, and Facebook were born. Such giants get mired in the technologies that they helped create; they stagnate because they are making too much money and are afraid to obsolete themselves. It is ambitious startups that come along to change the world. I have little doubt that the next Facebook and Google are already being hatched in a garage somewhere. I discussed all this and much more in a keynote I gave at the recent midVentures Data 2.0 conference. This video is below, and you can find many other discussions on the conference website. Editor's note: Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Faculty and Advisor, Singularity University, Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School, Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University, and Distinguished Visiting Scholar at The Halle Institute for Global Learning at Emory University. You can follow him on Twitter at @wadhwa and find his research at www.wadhwa.com.        
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| The d.Fund Founder Enrique Allen: Innovation Will Take A Different Breed Of Designer Posted: 09 Apr 2011 09:36 PM PDT Earlier this week 500 Startups announced the creation of The d.fund, a designer-centric fund with the aim of increasing the number of startups co-founded by people who have design experience. As quite a few startups like Tumblr, YouTube, Android and Flickr have achieved success because of their designer founders, d.fund founder and 500 Startups designer Enrique Allen wants to foster a community that replicates their success. Design is valued more right now than it ever has been, hence the Quora question “Why is there such a stunningly short supply of designers in Silicon Valley right now?” Indeed, Allen tells me that the new fund has one goal, “How do we address this problem that everyone and their momma wants a designer, and there’s none to be had?” Well The d.fund’s solution is to ask 50 or so rockstar mentors in the field, like YouTube’s Christina Brodbeck, Facebook’s Ben Blumenfeld and Google’s Chris Messina to become mentors and/or contribute a minimum of 50K to the pool. When the fund hits 50 investors, it can then fund 50 design centered startups in return. When asked whether the fund was looking specifically for a UX, UI, or just plain graphic designer founders, Allen told me he was looking for “T-shaped people” a.k.a people with in-depth experience in one area but a broad outlook and a wide range of experiences. “It’s going to take a different breed, a new generation of designers that not only have visual ability, interaction ability, information architecture and everthing from user research and discovery to design ethnography to really foster consumer innovation,” Allen said. Word. More in the interview, above.        
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| I’m Having A Party. Here’s $50. Bring Cool People — Or You Owe Me $100. Posted: 09 Apr 2011 07:36 PM PDT
I’ve been thinking about this a lot this week following the news that Google is tying all employee bonuses this year to their social strategy. At first I thought this was a joke. It is not. They dance around the word “social” in the wording in the memo, but make no mistake: that’s exactly what this is all about. “[Your bonus] can range from 0.75 to 1.25 depending on how well we perform against our strategy to integrate relationships, sharing and identity across our products.” Social. And yes, you read that correctly, the bonus can go up or down based upon Google’s performance in the social realm. The critics are already jumping all over this one, noting that it looks like all Google employees will be losing bonus money this year. And given the decided lack of success from products like Wave, Buzz, and to a broader extent, Orkut, who can blame them? But on a higher level, it’s the strategy itself that may be the most interesting thing here. Mathew Ingram notes that you can’t threaten people into being social. While Mike Elgan calls this Larry Page’s first blunder (as CEO). I actually have a slightly different take on this. I think that on paper, this is actually a good idea and strategy. But in practice, I think it will ultimately be looked upon as a bad thing and may even directly backfire. At this point, at least we know that Google understands the value of social. Hell, they just appointed a SVP of Social (Vic Gundotra, which we more or less noted months ago). They’re clearly not asleep at the wheel as Facebook zips by them. And they know that unlike Wave, Buzz, and Orkut, they need to get meaningful traction worldwide. With Wave and Buzz, both products saw an initial wave of buzz (see what I did there?). But the hype quickly died down and the products atrophied. Given what we know about Google’s social strategy going forward, and interpreting this new bonus strategy, it would seem that Google wants to do the exact opposite with any new products they push. Instead of launching under some massive buildup and then watching a product not be able to live up to it, they want to do slow, gradual roll-outs that are propelled by Googlers themselves. Again, on paper this is not a bad strategy. Many of the services you know today started out this way. They didn’t launch with pomp and circumstance, instead they started out small and were pushed by a small group of diehard early-adopters. Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram, even Facebook could fall into that category. It’s the same story over and over again. It doesn’t always work — but it has a much better chance than the massive launch route. And much less downside. The problem that I have is that all of those launches were organic (or mostly organic). Naturally, employees of the companies were pushing their products, but at launch, all of them were small startups with just a few employees. The “Google Strategy” of making sure all employees push the products simply wouldn’t have meant much. Instead, they had to rely on the early adopters (some of whom were friends, but that too isn’t enough alone). And the natural progression from there. But Google has nearly 25,000 employees. It seems that will lead to an artificially and prematurely inflated re-creation of the launch environment described above. And that may only serve to create the type of paid-for party that I talked about at the beginning. It’s a party that will attract a lot of people. But it’s not one that anyone will likely remember — or want to go to again. And given that we all now know about this strategy, the initial Googler push will be an even harder sell. We’ll all be very skeptical. So the strategy could actually backfire. Unless… Google can actually get away with this strategy if the products they release are good. Really good. If they’re good, the Googlers’ push should actually accelerate the launches. It won’t matter at that point if the initial push is real or fake, enough people will try the product(s) out and see for themselves. But given Google’s past history in social, this is a very big “if”. Over the past few months, we’ve had more information than anyone about Google’s social strategy and products. We’ve gotten leaks and have talked to people who have actually used the things Google is working on. All of this is still very fluid (see: the +1 toolbar), but the constant has been that we have not yet heard of anyone absolutely blown away by what Google is working on. This worries me with regard to this new Google strategy. Having said that, Google still has several things yet to launch, many of which I’m sure we still know nothing about. For all the multiplexing video conferencing services and Loop (or is it Circles?) mobile networks, there are likely many more things being worked on. And we also know that Google has been calling in other experts in the space from around the Bay Area to get opinions and advice. But this many-pronged approach has issues of its own. As Elgan points out in his Computerworld post today:
Mike has stated this idea in the past before as well. One major problem that Google has in social is that there is no one place to go to be social. And it’s pretty clear at this point that there won’t be. That was in the cards a long time ago, but now it’s all about these new products wrapping Google’s other products in social. That’s going to be a really hard sell. I’m left wondering if it wouldn’t be smarter for Google simply to focus on a frontier that hasn’t been won yet: mobile. While Facebook and Twitter are both growing very, very fast in mobile, there’s still an opportunity for something new to come along in that space from a social angle and disrupt them. And Google would have a massive potential advantage with Android. Why not start something totally new from scratch — not tied into any of Google’s very forced social graphs like email contacts — and go from there? I’ve argued before that Buzz should have gone this route. And Google may be indirectly pushing this way with things like the Slide-built Disco. Speaking of discos, let’s hop back to the idea of a party. Unless their products are truly excellent right off the bat, Google needs their social products to be parties that friends get invited to organically. As we’ve already seen with Buzz, being force fed can lead to vomiting. That’s why this new strategy worries me — it’s pretty likely that it will not work. We’ll all be at a party that no one wants to be at because a bunch of Googlers are being paid to invite us. But if that’s the case, at least that extra bonus money saved can go towards the “Buy Twitter Now” fund. [photo: flickr/vectorportal]        
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| Ad.ly Versus Facebook: Something Doesn’t Add Up Posted: 09 Apr 2011 04:31 PM PDT
Inquiries to speak to both companies went unanswered. Then, this morning, Ad.ly posted an update to its blog stating that it has “complied with Facebook's request to no longer offer celebrity endorsements on Facebook.” A report on MediaMemo expanded on the news, and we’ve spoken to both Facebook and Ad.ly founder Sean Rad to get to the bottom of what’s going on. The only problem: both sides are directly contradicting each other. In a statement, Facebook says that Ad.ly has repeatedly violated its Terms of Service, and that the company has been “told many times” to stop:
But what exactly were Ad.ly’s “repeated violations”? Ad.ly founder Sean Rad admits that the company created a single fake user profile — which is against Facebook’s Terms of Service. But the reason why they created it sounds benign. Rad says that the service regularly posts updates to its celebrity clients’ Facebook Pages, but that because of the way its system works, it sometimes runs into trouble with Facebook’s API, and they’re forced to ask their celebrity clients to re-authenticate with the application. Rad says they’ve spoken with Facebook’s engineering team about getting a fix implemented. In the mean time, Ad.ly came up with a solution. Instead of dealing with the app, celebrities can opt to bless Ad.ly’s ‘fake’ user profile as one of their Facebook Page’s administrators, which means the celebrity doesn’t have to worry about it any more. Rad says that the company created this fake account because he didn’t want to have personal accounts of employees associated with these celebrity Pages. This fake account isn’t actually posting updates to users, it’s just managing the client Pages. In theory, Ad.ly could just avoid this violation entirely by simply doing the same thing with a ‘real’ user’s profile. And, Rad says, “The fact that [Facebook] say they told us repeatedly about this is completely untrue. The only time they said anything about our personal profile was when they sent us the Cease and Desist. Every comment they’ve had before the C&D was positive… all of our interactions were positive and often supportive.” I asked Facebook repeatedly if they could specify any of Ad.ly’s other infringements, but they declined to comment further. Either Ad.ly is being misleading and actually has committed further offenses, or Facebook has honed in on a minor policy violation and is using it as grounds to boot a service that could compete directly with its own monetization efforts. Unless Facebook comes back with something else I’m inclined to believe it’s the latter — especially since we’ve confirmed that Crowdrally, which offered a similar service as Ad.ly, was also issued a Cease and Desist. At this point it looks like Facebook is fine with celebrities using their Facebook Pages to post promoted updates. Just don’t make a service that helps them do it. That’s apparently Facebook’s turf.        
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| (Founder Stories) Right Media’s Mike Walrath: “I Was Never Qualified For Any Job I Got In My Life” Posted: 09 Apr 2011 12:34 PM PDT Mike Walrath “was supposed to write novels.” Instead, he got int digital ad sales, started Right Media, which became an online ad exchange that he sold to Yahoo in 2007 for $850 million. In this Founder Stories video, he answers some rapid fire questions from host Chris Dixon about startup advice, hiring, and investing. “Don’t try to solve a problem that you don’t fully understand,” he warns would-be entrepreneurs. He speaks from experience, having dabbled in the broken independent film industry after he left Yahoo. Now, the startup world is pulling him back in. He recently became the chairman of Yext, and is involved with some smaller projects as well. Walrath admits, “I was never qualified for any job I got in my life.” But the most important thing is to keep on learning. His No. 1 piece of hiring advice for startup CEOs is to figure put how fast a candidate can learn new things. We’ll post the other parts of this interview throughout the week. Check out previous episodes of Founder Stories or subscribe in iTunes.        
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| OMG/JK: Google “Open”, Google Re-Org, Google Social Posted: 09 Apr 2011 12:13 PM PDT This week’s episode of OMG/JK is all-Google, all the time. Given the big shakeup at the top of the search giant (with co-founder Larry Page taking over the CEO role this week), it should be no surprise that a lot of interesting things are happening. But even more interesting is how things are shaking out. The “open” debate has been kicked up a notch, there’s been a huge re-organization, and the big push towards a more social Google is finally beginning. Jason and I debate all these things. And of course, we get into it over the whole “open” debate. Jason hates it when I say “‘open’”. Watch the video above, and below find some posts relevant to this week’s episode:
       
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| Foursquare Wants To Help Google Employees Get Massive Counteroffers, Too Posted: 09 Apr 2011 10:59 AM PDT
We’ll, there’s the love right there, Dennis. So if you’re a Googler and want tens of millions of dollars for doing nothing more than interviewing at a startup, add Foursquare to that list. And let us know if it works. Dennis adds “we‘re hiring engineers by the boatload in both NYC and SF. i think our eng team in NY is one of the best engineering teams in the city. super smart people solving very hard problems.” Foursquare jobs are here.        
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LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman said, recently, "that if Web 1.0 involved go search, get data and some limited interactivity, and if Web 2.0 involves real identities and real relationships, then Web 3.0 will be real identities generating massive amounts of data."
It's not all wine and roses. There are major privacy and security implications such as those I discussed in 
Think about the best parties you’ve ever been to. They’re probably not thrown by some random promoter that you found via a flyer on the street. They’re probably thrown by your friends, or a friend of a friend. And they probably came together organically. Or at least more organically than a party you pay for.
Earlier this week we heard whispers that Facebook was clamping down on 
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