Sunday, March 11, 2012

The Latest from TechCrunch

The Latest from TechCrunch

Link to TechCrunch

Save Helpless Faraway Africans From The Comfort Of Your Armchair!

Posted: 10 Mar 2012 09:00 AM PST

congo-volcano

Wow. I never dreamed that I’d have a legitimate excuse to write a TechCrunch post about Joseph Kony, the crazed Ugandan warlord whose Lord’s Resistance Army has been a pet obsession of mine for some years now. The first draft of my thriller set mostly in Uganda and the Congo had a villain loosely based on Kony, but I had to edit him out, basically because he’s far too batshit crazy to be even remotely believable. The world is surprisingly full of things so implausible they would never fly in fiction, and the LRA is one of them.

Now, stretching credulity even further, a 30-minute-long LRA-awareness video from the quasi-NGO Invisible Children has gone viral around the world. Celebrities and A-listers everywhere are retweeting it. Of course! Because if we just increase worldwide public awareness of the LRA’s horrific depredations, why, then…

…and that’s where they lose me. What exactly are Invisible Children hoping to accomplish with this? They claim credit for persuading Obama to send 100 US troops in October to help the Ugandan army find the LRA; but for what it’s worth, I happen to know that the US Army was interested in tracking down Kony well before that. (How? Last June, while roaming around East Africa, I went diving in Djibouti with some Special Forces dudes–as you do–and Kony came up in conversation.)

Raise your hands: who here seriously thinks the Special Forces will be any more effective because Taylor Swift, Diddy, Rihanna, and Zooey Deschanel are tweeting their moral support? Exactly how deluded do you have to be to think that “public awareness” will solve a grim and deadly military problem? Remember a few years ago when the Twittersphere got all irate about Iran’s disputed election, and everyone set their location to Tehran to “help the resistance,” as if a posse of faraway microbloggers might help take down a totalitarian government? Have we learned nothing?

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve said time and time again that technology, especially social media, can overthrow governments and change the world in fundamental ways. But only if it’s synchronized with actual on-the-ground action. What good is “public awareness” going to do to hunt down a gang of crazed psychopaths wandering around one of the last effectively lawless regions in the world, the vast anarchic northeastern Congo? (No, not Uganda – Kony fled from there six years ago.)

Aside from “raising public awareness”, Invisible Children wants to raise money to pay for an early-warning radio network that will warn villagers if the LRA is nearby. (That is, whatever’s left over after they pay themselves — millions in salary and over $1 million on travel last year.)

That part may actually sound like a good idea … until you realize we’re talking about distributing equipment to thousands of tiny habitations in an area bigger than France with almost no infrastructure whatsoever, all essentially to spread FUD, because even if you do successfully warn people that the LRA is nearby, there’s not a lot they can do about it. It’s completely impractical verging on absurd, which may explain why their list of actual accomplishments is so anorexically thin, despite that million dollars spent on travel…

Wait, no, it’s OK: they have an app! The LRA Crisis Tracker “gives real-time updates of atrocities committed by the Lord’s Resistance Army in Central Africa.” Because, you know, iPhones are ubiquitous in the remote Congolese and Central African Republic regions haunted by the LRA. But who cares about them? The important thing is that you can download the app and somehow feel connected to their plight. Like you’re making a difference.

“A perfect illustration of the good that can be accomplished with evolving technology,” says a review on the App Store. That person is smoking crack. Look, I am a huge, huge, huge champion of technology in the developing world and its ever-growing ability to revolutionize people’s lives for the better. I give you this, this, this, this, and this as evidence. But this Invisible Children crap–wholly aside from the many, many questions raised about that organization–is meaningless feel-good armchair activism at its worst.

And that’s without even beginning to consider the whole insulting, paternalistic “Africans are helpless and doomed, as ever! Only we rich Americans and Europeans can save them!” subtext. (Meanwhile, in the real world, over the last decade, six of the world’s ten fastest-growing economies were in sub-Saharan Africa.)

But if all this still somehow strikes a colonial chord in your heart, and you feel like you need to do something — do me a favor? Give to Doctors Without Borders, who go to the toughest, grimmest places in the world, where they do astonishing, lifesaving disaster-relief work, with their eyes wide open to the limitations and compromises of their context. And please don’t pretend that “raising public awareness” has anything to do with actual solutions.

Image: Lava trail to Mount Nyiragongo, outside Goma, DR Congo, by yours truly, on Flickr.

Entrepreneurs Are Difficult At Best And Abrasive at Worst — Get Over It

Posted: 10 Mar 2012 06:00 AM PST

Editor's note: Contributor Ashkan Karbasfrooshan is the founder and CEO of WatchMojo, he hosts a weekly show on business and has published books on success.  Follow him @ashkan.

The greatest entrepreneurs follow their gut and as a result are perceived as difficult at best and abrasive at worst.

Most people who know me say I'm too diplomatic, but last week my advisor told me that someone asked him if I was "difficult".  His answer was "if Ash was difficult, I wouldn't work with him.” I was going to write something on the matter, but felt that doing so would make me come across as, you know, difficult.

But after a recent brief discussion this week with a fellow executive ended in disagreement, I thought to myself: "well that guy's definitely going to think I'm difficult", even though only a fool would have accepted his offer.

It reminded me of that Chris Rock line: "What's sexual harassment? When an ugly guy wants to get some?” Well, what’s being difficult? When someone doesn’t give you what you want?

A Different Kind of 1%

Even if 99% of people think you're reasonable, there will always be the 1% that thinks you're difficult.  Personally, in my situation, it boils down to being a self-funded, bootstrapped founder who's the company "CXO", wearing many hats and not having the luxury of having a fellow C-level executive come in afterwards to play the bad cop. Ultimately, I have to deliver on my word, so occasionally this means I won't say or do what someone may wish.  This avoids larger problems down the road.

Equity Means Ownership to Others; Control to Entrepreneurs

There's a fine line between being assertive and an ass.  We've already touched on how you can get others to do what you want.  This article isn't about management of employees, it's about negotiations with outsiders and others thinking you're difficult when

i)                    you don't offer them what they want and/or
ii)                   you don't accept what they offer.

That might make you come across as difficult to them, but that really says more about them than you.

My philosophy on negotiations echoes Time Warner's Dick Parsons: "When you negotiate, leave a little something on the table", otherwise no one would want to deal with you in the future  In fact, I try to avoid saying "I'm being reasonable", because everyone thinks they're reasonable: it's more important how others perceive you in your wheeling and dealings.

There's way too much envy and jealousy in the world and our industry, so part of what makes critics think that entrepreneurs are difficult stems from that, though no one will admit it. No one is "driven by money" until they realize that someone is about to make money or has made money, at which point everyone inherits a sense of entitlement.

Control vs. Stability: Missionary vs. Mercenary Mindsets

While founders seek missionaries (in a secular sense) to join their cause, they tend to draw mercenaries. Despite the high failure rate of startups, the perception of overnight success and quick riches is high to those driven by money.

As such, to the founder, equity means control and the ability to prioritize the stakeholders' needs and wants according to his moral compass.  To the recruits, ownership rarely means control (since they have minority stakes) but rather, possible wealth.

The following nuance is key in both understanding and reacting to claims you're being difficult: managers and employees usually get equity as a bonus and incentive for joining a fledging startup; whereas investors are getting equity in exchange for an investment.

Not All Stakeholders Are Created Equally

However, oftentimes you're accused of being difficult by would-be investors and future employees. Their feedback may be really valuable and to some extent correct, but it's impossible to please everyone, especially if the majority don’t view you as difficult to begin with.

While it's important for your clients and employees not to think you're difficult; it's actually not the end of the world for your investors, board, competitors and even your suppliers to think that you're at least a little bit difficult.  If dealing with you is akin to taking candy from a baby, you're doing something wrong and will end up like the founder who had 0.5 percent of his company after five years.

In fact, to please some stakeholders, you need to resist others; that might make you seem difficult to narrow-minded stakeholders that don't like your position on a matter, but it absolutely makes you a better leader over time.

To some, Mark Zuckerberg wasn't being reasonable when he turned down offers from Yahoo, Google or Viacom early on, but in hindsight, everyone that doubted him then supports him now.

So it's not the end of the world if would-be advisors and investors think you're tough, because there's actually a very weak chance they're really interested anyway (especially since sometimes would-be investors want you to upset your existing investors).  You're building the company so the best investors and advisors are the ones who understand and support you.

I'm not saying to go to ignore feedback or become abrasive, but to quote football coach Steve Spurrier: "If people like you too much, it’s probably because they’re beating you."

The Irony of Honesty

Many entrepreneurs eventually drown self-doubt out through naïveté, idealism and determination, which spills over into how we communicate our vision and rationalize criticism.  Ultimately, people appreciate candor until you're forthright with them, at which point you're impolite.

As impossible as it seems, if you can leave your emotion aside when people give you feedback and choose your spots when it comes to dishing out the criticism, then you'll become a very effective leader.

The Hypocrisy of Time

Entrepreneurs are always told that "time is the most precious asset". Perhaps. But when we cut to the chase and pass on an idea or offer, we're sometimes told we're difficult, even though the greatest skill an entrepreneur has is listening to his gut.

The Double Standard of Being Difficult

As an entrepreneur, it seems that everyone goes out of their way to be difficult with you.  Now it’s the entrepreneur’s turn to get over it, no one forced you to lead this life.

In the end, a little bit of understanding of the other person’s situation and background would help everyone be, well, less difficult.

Paper Or Plastic?

Posted: 09 Mar 2012 06:57 PM PST

tale

I have a confession to make: despite having reviewed a few e-readers, and having written dozens of articles about them, I’ve never really used one. I mean, I’ve used them enough to know a good one from a bad one, to understand the features, and to do a proper evaluation — but I’ve never made one part of my life, the way one makes a mobile phone or laptop part of one’s life. In that way I haven’t really used an e-reader. Until just recently.

As a book lover, I view e-readers as interlopers; as a practical person, I acknowledge them as inevitable. But in both cases, I have come to view them as a deeply unsatisfying reading experience. They fall short of paper in meaningful ways, and objecting to them should not be considered technophobic.

The future of e-books is bright, but as far as I’m concerned, right now we’re still in the dark age — though that isn’t to say the stone age.

The core experience of the new Kindle, Nook, and Kobo (pictured) is practically the same. Sure, there are aesthetic differences and the selection is different, but when you’re doing what the devices are intended to do — reading a book, page by page — they are nearly identical.

Now I expect the PR departments have already started composing a new email with their talking points about how their device is the best, but let’s be realistic. These guys are using almost exactly the same parts (the most important bit, the screen, is the same in all three) and if you took the logos off the devices, few people would be able to tell you which is which or express a strong preference.

I don’t say this to denigrate the devices. This generation of e-readers is the most user-friendly and practical by far. But aside from the change to a touchscreen, e-readers have barely advanced from the day they were first introduced. So when I say I prefer paper, that’s not sentimentality. Paper really is just better.

No, I’m not putting you on or trying to play the devil’s advocate. But I’m willing to make a few concessions first. Obviously e-readers are better in a few ways: the wireless in the Kindle which allows you to get books almost wherever you are, for instance. And you can certainly keep more books on one device than you can keep in your carry-on. But that’s pretty much where the benefits end, isn’t it?

Text can be pixelated or low-contrast

The screens aren’t actually that good. You can admit it, it’s okay. Even the newest ones. They’re rather grey, and the text doesn’t really look that good, does it? They’re a bit small, too. Don’t you feel it’s a bit limiting? You can’t replace a newspaper with this thing, and images look pretty bad. That blinking thing when it refreshes itself is annoying, finding a particular chapter or passage can be a pain, and lending or borrowing books isn’t as straightforward as it could be.

Am I just being an entitled consumer? A bit, yes. But there’s a good reason for my (mild and proportionate) frustration. The makers of e-readers have made a conscious choice over the last two years or so: provide the same product at a lower price, not a better product at the same price. It’s not that I have a problem with this. I wrote two years ago (http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/24/dirt-cheap-and-no-features-to-speak-of-will-the-kobo-e-reader-sell-by-the-million/) that this was the end game for the current players. That’s only an issue if, like me, the initial devices held no interest. For many, the race to the bottom was a good thing, making the basic e-reading experience possible for an extremely low price (and getting lower year by year). This is already having serious effects on the publishing and education ecosystems.

But what you see is also the inevitable result of companies relying on a dwindling pool of OEMs capable of manufacturing parts in the millions. The leading devices all use the same third-generation E-Ink display; few people would notice differences between the way they handle text, or care either way. As I mentioned, there are differences in the interface outside of books, and in how you search and buy, that sort of thing, but the purpose of these devices is to display e-books, and they all do it without appreciable differences.

Now, when their products are the same, companies compete on bullshit. We saw this in the 90s when every Compaq, HP, Dell, and Gateway PC was using the same pieces, and we see it today with TV makers who all have the same fundamental features and have to invent new numbers to increment at every CES. Markets at this stage are ripe to be broken into, as Apple is fond of doing. This point is when it often steps into the picture. I don’t mean to imply Apple will enter the e-reader wars (in fact, the iPad is their entry in a way), but someone is going to have to change the game. Selling a commodity, which is what e-readers have become, is a dangerous business in tech, because commodities tend to devalue rather quickly.

What needs to happen? A superior product, that’s all. E-readers can’t remain dumb, paperback-sized, text display gadgets forever. If they’re going to replace books, and paper, they need to learn a few more tricks.

Browsing your “library” is slow and lacks discoverability; organization isn’t organic

It’ll take some time; no one wants to obsolete their own product, and these readers are setting up what is potentially a very profitable ecosystem. But at the same time, if they don’t do it, someone else might. Leave your lunch out too long and someone might just eat it for you. So you better believe that the big guys are planning real replacements for the e-reader of today, and are on the lookout for any sign that they might get beaten to the punch.

What will the new features be? Well, for example, Bridgestone has produced a screen that appears to beat E-Ink at every level. And half the electronic companies out there are hard at work on flexible OLED or bistable displays. Sony is testing the waters with a foldable tablet, and Readius has been flogging their flexible device for a while now. E Ink, conscious that they’ll have to make serious advances in order to keep their position as head bistable display honcho, is making screens that can be crumpled or attached to cloth. Color e-paper is shipping right now, though it’s not particularly good. Don’t expect the e-readers of tomorrow to be the same static window on text that they are today.

The screen quality, too, is going to have to improve. In both resolution and contrast, e-readers need to approach print on paper, or they will forever be understood as being a sub-par option, grey and indistinct. More comfortable to read on than LCDs, sure, but for how long? The advantage of the reflective display will eventually be outweighed by other factors if they don’t start moving.

And we’ll want to write on them, too. The Noteslate device, unfortunately totally fictional (but apparently now in the works), awakened a sleeping giant of gadget envy on the net. Who wouldn’t want one of those things? Yet none of the major e-reading devices are even attempting it.

Annotating and highlighting content is clumsy and slow

What else? Social and collaborative features, no doubt, like those just beginning to be promoted; more portability and ruggedness; features to enable reading by the blind, like quality real-time text-to-speech and tactile displays; richer formatting and rendering; self-illuminating screens or text; adjustable page tint; to say all, anything you can imagine might improve the reading experience, and probably a few things you haven’t imagined yet.

These fantasy devices don’t have to beat paper at everything — after all, they’ll never beat it on battery life — it’s just a little disappointing in how few ways they better their venerable competitor. And note that the e-reader should be considered distinct from the tablet (which, though more versatile, shares many shortcomings) as a device aimed specifically at consuming and storing text, and mostly black and white text at that. I suspect that factor will remain important for years to come.

Now, it’s not as if e-reader makers have been standing still all this time. Their devices are lighter, brighter, and faster, and making the screens touchable was a good move. But the problem is that after all these improvements, e-readers’ advantages over books still aren’t very significant. If you read one or two books at a time, and not big ones, the advantage is almost nil. E-readers should be way better than books! The possibility is there; the technology is there; the demand is there. There are dozens of things we would like to be able to do with our literature, our journals, our newspapers, that are inconvenient or impossible with existing form factors (paper, tablet, PC, or other). E-readers have a world to expand into, yet they are exploring it at a snail’s pace.

Why whine about this? Think back on the last ten years. How many tablets and MIDs do you spy with your little Internet eye? Dozens, most of them failures or niche products. Because, really, they simply weren’t good enough. E-readers have caught on to some extent, more so than the early tablets and MIDs certainly, but I would suggest that this is because of a pent-up demand for a device like this and not because of any particular fitness on its part. At the moment, they’re still quite crude, really — and we only tolerate their crudeness because right now convenience is valued over utility.

No one would blame you for not buying a Palm Pilot or Newton or early MID back in the day, because although they did have a purpose, they were, even at the time, clearly not mature products. E-readers aren’t mature either; don’t be fooled by the homogeneity of today’s options. They’re like that because of the decision they made, to drop prices instead of change the product. Just because they look alike and act alike doesn’t mean they are mature, the way PCs became mature in the late 90s.

These early devices ape semi-convincingly the experience of reading a book. Is that the end game? No. Should you expect something better? Yes. Should that stop you from buying one right now? Maybe.

For me, buying the most advanced e-reader today involves too many compromises in quality. The ways in which I read and interact with my books are simply incompatible with e-readers as they exist today. So I don’t buy, though in five years their successors will have me reaching for my wallet. It’s like seeing Microsoft showing off a tablet in the early 2000s. Did I want a tablet? Sure, ever since I first saw one — probably in Star Trek. But I didn’t try to buy that one, because it’s okay to say that something isn’t good enough for you. That’s the prerogative of the consumer. I don’t want a Kindle – I want what the Kindle will become, just as I wanted what the Treo and Newton would become. There’s no shame, and maybe even a little dignity, in waiting.

I love books. I love reading. And I love technology. But I can’t bring myself to even like today’s e-readers, except as promising indicators of things to come. For now, between paper and plastic, there’s no contest.

Army Warns Of Danger Of Geotagging

Posted: 09 Mar 2012 06:03 PM PST

loc

While for an ordinary civilian the automatic geotagging of your photos or check-ins might be convenient, in the military it can be a lethal mistake. In 2007, geotagged photos of a new fleet of helicopters allowed enemy forces to mortar the base and destroy several of them; it could just as easily have been a field hospital or barracks.

The Army has therefore published an article calling attention to this fact, though its casual tone suggests that they aren’t ready to take serious action on the issue. A warning is all it is, and perhaps also an acknowledgement that sometimes it’s better to bend with the breeze than fight it.

While soldiers in the field aren’t likely to be checking in to engagements or taking pictures of their fortifications for the kids, such things are still going to happen. Whether it’s enlisted personnel or people like embedded journalists, DoD researchers, civilian contractors, or what have you, the risk of someone posting sensitive information is real. And with the speed of sharing today, such data can propagate rapidly enough that it’s a serious security risk.

The army’s power to control the devices used by its soldiers and those around them is limited. And any attempt at locational lockdown would almost certainly end in failure. Luckily, it can still minimize the risk by making social media part of a soldier’s situational awareness. It’s a testament to the power and reach of social media that it should be entered into tactical calculations.

And while location sharing is framed primarily as a risk today, it’s obvious from the military’s pursuit of smartphones as an integral part of a soldier’s equipment that they value it as a potential asset as well.

Eyeing An IPO, Kayak 2011 Revenue Up 32 Percent To $225M; Net Income Up 21 Percent

Posted: 09 Mar 2012 04:41 PM PST

kayak-1

Travel search giant Kayak just posted new revenue numbers for the fourth quarter and full year 2011 in a new S-1 filing with the SEC. As we heard last September, Kayak put its IPO plans on hold until market conditions improve. Now that the markets are more stabilized, it should be interesting to see when Kayak makes the push to become a public company. For the year, Kayak generated $224.5 million of revenues, up 32 percent from 2010.

Net income for the year was $9.7 million, up 21 percent from 2010′s net income of $8 million For the fourth quarter, Kayak saw a 27 percent increase in quarterly revenue, posting $53.9 million in Q4 2011 sales. In contrast, revenue grew 28 percent in the third quarter.

But the company says that typically its highest revenue quarters are the second and third quarters.

Kayak says it finished 2011 with 899 million user queries processes for travel information, representing growth of 42 percent from 2010. For 2011, Kayak had 7 million downloads, up over 70 percent from 2010.

Despite the IPO being on hold, Kayak has been consistently trying to improve its core product and add additional functionality. The company has been heads down on product development and improving customer experience over the past few months, as the company battles with Google in the travel search space.

In December, Kayak redesigned its iPad app and consolidated the app with its iPhone cousin. The company’s website most recently got a big UI upgrade, creating a more universal and comprehensive consumer experience across all Kayak platforms: web, mobile web and apps. And the search engine just debuted direct booking for flights.

Cater2.me May Be Feeding Your Favorite Startup

Posted: 09 Mar 2012 04:39 PM PST

cater2me logo

Startup Cater2.me is trying to answer one of the rarely-discussed challenges facing any company that wants to keep a large workforce happy — feeding them meals that aren’t boring.

Cater2.me was founded in late 2010 and has already attracted some positive press attention. Now, its client list includes some startups worth bragging about, such as Yelp, Eventbrite, Tagged, Square, Dropbox, Twilio, Causes, Posterous, and Heyzap. The company is serving 40,000 lunches a month (including many to non-startups, of course.)

Co-founders Alex Lorton and Zach Yungst are both graduates from the Wharton Business School and before starting Cater2.me, both worked finance/consulting jobs in downtown San Francisco. They saw it was their time in those offices that convinced them of the opportunity. Outside, they saw a vibrant culinary world of hole-in-the-wall ethnic restaurants, food carts, and farmers markets. Inside, bland catered food.

So Cater2.me tries to bring that varied world of food into workplaces. Office managers, or whoever else is in charge of a company’s meals, can just go to the Cater2.me website and enter their needs — for example, if they need to feed 50 people every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and five of them are vegetarians. Then Cater2.me handles all of the logistics, bringing in a rotating menu of food from a network of small restaurants and carts — businesses that probably don’t have the time or resources to do large office catering on their own.

Eventbrite’s Brooke Michael says she started testing Cater2.me as a lunch option back in June 2011. Over time, she did more and more ordering for them, because the process was so easy and the company was so responsive to customer feedback. Now Eventbrite is even relying on the service for its breakfasts.

“Overall, they have really improved our meals at Eventbrite and have brought a lot of smiles to our employees,” she says.

This market seems to be catching the interest of investors, too. Two other catering services, Eat Club and Zero Cater, both raised $1.5 million in venture capital recently. (Eat Club reportedly served 60,000 lunches in the past year.) Cater2.me, however, remains self-funded.

Mobcaster Crowdfunds Its First TV Season

Posted: 09 Mar 2012 03:20 PM PST

mobcaster

It’s famously difficult to get a TV show on the air — much less one that still matches your initial vision. That’s why Mobcaster has launched a new platform where creators can ask fans for the financial support to produce their shows.

The startup just had its first funding success story — The Weatherman, an Australian-produced comedy about, yes, a weatherman, which has raised the funding needed for its first season. The production company set a goal of $72,500, and it raised $73,975. (As the team notes at the beginning of the pilot episode, traditional television episodes cost hundreds of thousands of dollars at the very least, so that’s a tiny budget for a full season.)

In many ways, Mobcaster is clearly modeled on Kickstarter. Members donate however much they want, they receive rewards for different donation levels (if you donated $100 to The Weatherman, you would receive a full Producer credit, for example), and you only pay if the project reaches the minimum donation level to get made. However, co-founder Aubrey Levy points out that Kickstarter doesn’t have many TV success stories, and whereas Mobcaster is designed specifically for the television model.

Creators first raise money for a pilot episode, usually by uploading a pitch and pilot script. Then, after they’ve shot the pilot, they can use it to fundraise for a six-episode season — which is shorter than most American TV seasons, but keeps the funding needed to a manageable level. (That’s also the length of a normal British TV season.) Shows can continue for as long as the creators want, raising money one season at a time.

Levy says Mobcaster provides another crucial piece of the puzzle — distribution. The vision is to turn the site into both a crowdfunding platform and an online video channel. Otherwise, creators raise money for a show but have no place to broadcast it, and are forced to “post and pray” for an audience. Levy argues that people don’t go to any of the existing video sites for an independent TV experience. On YouTube, they expect short-form amateur content (and music videos), and on the other end you have Hulu, where people want traditional TV shows.

Mobcaster will run ads with the videos and split the revenue 50-50 with the creators. And the creators own all the intellectual property, so if there’s interest, a show might actually make the transition to traditional TV (and Mobcaster gets a small cut of the payment).

Levy, by the way, was a digital media strategist at HBO, and he says he spent six or seven months pitching a TV show the old-fashioned way. Like most pitches, it never made it on-air, and thanks to network feedback, Levy says the show had actually got worse throughout the process. Not surprisingly, Mobcaster was built in response to those experiences — it gives the creators complete creative control, and it puts the show’s survival in the hands of the fans. (Think of all the fan campaigns to save canceled shows like Arrested Development and Firefly.)

“Ultimately the TV show is being made for you, so you’re the only person who should make the decision on whether the show should live or die,” he says.

PayPal’s New Digital Wallet Will Offer Personalized Deals, Flexible Payments, And More

Posted: 09 Mar 2012 03:00 PM PST

PayPal-1

We’ve been hearing recently about PayPal’s in-store payments platform for large retailers (which will soon be rolled out to small businesses as well). But we haven’t seen PayPal do much in the past few months with its plans for its digital wallet on the consumer side. We know PayPal has a major vision for how payments will be made in the future, but today, the company is giving us a glimpse of exactly what new features will be added to the platform in the coming year.

As PayPal’s director of communications Anuj Nayar tells us in an interview, “PayPal is changing, and this is the first major revamp of the core PayPal product. We’re known as an online payments brand but this is all part of PayPal becoming an actual wallet.”

Sam Shrauger, Vice President of Global Product and Experience for PayPal, says that the “new PayPal” will “let consumers do things with their money that have never been possible before.” One of these features is the ability to have flexibility with how you want to pay for an item in a store. So let’s say you purchase a computer from a store or online with your Starwood credit card but realize that you actually have a Best Buy credit that you wanted to use.

With the new digital wallet, you can buy something in a store, take it home and decide later how you want to pay for it. PayPal will offer a five to seven-day grace period for consumers to change their minds. So you can switch from one funding source to another, decide to pay over time in installments and even apply different sources of value (gift cards, airline miles, loyalty points, etc.) to a payment.

As we heard from PayPal over the holidays, data is going to be a huge part of the payments company’s product strategy over time. The new version of PayPal will allow you to create personal lists of items you want. Via PayPal, you can search for items, compare prices and create lists of things you want to buy for a variety of situations. PayPal will then find deals and coupons for these items on your list whether you are in the store or online.

Additionally, you’ll be able to create spending rules that tie specific cards and payment instruments to specific merchants. So you can create specific "set asides" like travel funds and set rules by purchase amount. For example, you can earmark a bank account for all grocery store purchases, and a specific credit card for entertainment and travel directly from PayPal. All you’ll need to do is pay via PayPal, and the platform will automatically recognize whether a specific payment should be drawn from a credit card or bank account.

As Shrauger writes in a post announcing these new features, “PayPal is not about replacing a card swipe with a phone tap at point of sale. We are reimagining money to free it in its digital form so that it can work better for everyone. These features and examples are only the beginning: moving forward, we're only limited by our ability to imagine what's possible.”

Nayar explains that there will be “an avalanche” of product announcements that will bring these features to life in the coming year, starting in late May. “This will be your new PayPal account,” he says.

This new wallet will also be able to be used with the new in-store experience at retailers (and perhaps at small businesses as well). PayPal clearly wants to become the digital wallet provider for consumers, but the company already has a number of competitors vying for this spot. Google seems to also have major ambitions to dominate in this space with Google Wallet. We’re seeing other competitors enter the space, especially in mobile. And we still don’t what Apple’s intentions are when it comes to the wallet.

But there are a few things in PayPal’s favor. First, the company already has an established user base of over 100 million active users. Second, PayPal is device-agnostic and can be layered over the web, mobile, and other platforms. The company hasn’t revealed any new mobile plans today, but that’s also sure to be a significant component of the digital wallet’s technology.

Gundotra: Google+ Won’t Let 3rd-Party Apps Post Because “Your Stream Could Easily Be Overwhelmed”

Posted: 09 Mar 2012 02:39 PM PST

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Today at his SXSW fireside chat, head of Google+ Vic Gundotra said “I am 100% to blame” for the social network lacking an API seven months after launch. The reason? “Your stream could easily be overwhelmed” if Google allowed third-party apps to post content on users’ behalf.

Additionally, Gundotra criticized Facebook’s inclusion of ads on photo albums and said that only a “very small number of people have turned off social search”.

Gundotra made no guarantee a third-party posting API would be made available by the end of 2012, “I just don’t want to do it because I’ve seen other [platforms] open APIs, develop an ecosystem of third-party clients, and then shut down the API. I’m going to release that API when I’m confident we’re not going to screw over developers.”

The problem with allowing third-party apps to contribute content is that “if ranking is not good in the stream”, single apps could publish too many posts and push out authentic content from the people you follow. Gundotra said that “When Google opens an API, we want you to know we’re not going to revoke access.” Moderator Guy Kawasaki quipped that developers are used to rapidly changing APIs from Facebook, but Gundotra snapped back, “We hold ourselves to a higher standard”.

In this case, Google’s late start on social is holding it back. Facebook has had years to refine its EdgeRank algorithm for sorting the news feed and minimizing the impact of noisy friends and apps. Without such data on who and what its users are interested in, Google+ doesn’t know what to promote and hide

The senior VP of engineering seemed confused, saying “We get these messages that we’re a ghost town” but developers are still eager for access. Well guess what? If users could cross-publish posts to Google+ the way that apps like Path allow syndication to Facebook and Twitter, maybe the network wouldn’t feel so dead. Overwhelmed might be better than underwhelmed

A Better Live Wiki: HackPad Could Be Your SXSW Backchannel

Posted: 09 Mar 2012 01:47 PM PST

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There are lots of apps for finding the right people and parties at South By Southwest this year, but what about, you know, actually going to panels and sharing your thoughts about them? Well, there’s Twitter for short-form public sharing, and messaging apps like GroupMe for group chats. But HackPad has a more serious idea: actually taking notes about the panels and keynotes you go to, with other people who care.

It sounds dangerously productive for the fun-oriented event. And it is — this is one of the better live group word-processing products I’ve seen in a while.

The interface is nice and simple. You log in with Facebook, or with Google or by creating a new account.  Then you can just start creating and editing docs. Participating users appear on the right side of each page, and each person gets a unique color bar on the left side of where they’re typing. Live edits are in real-time, so you can watch other users pounding out their own notes while you’re busy sharing yours.

The top menu includes a simple set of actions for all the main things you need to do. There’s a plus button for creating new docs, a search bar, and basic WYSIWYG commands including a big button for creating links to other docs or the web (something a lot of editors don’t show off well in their interfaces).

Two-man veteran engineering team Igor Kofman and Alex Graveley (who earlier in his career created Tomboy Notes) also created a special sub-site for SXSW. A list of every panel and talk  is available now at austin.hackpad.com, organized by hour and by day. If you’re here at the rain-soaked conference, or interested in any of the panels, be sure to check it out.

Overall, the Y Combinator-backed company feels like it’s on the right track for pushing online collaboration forward.

Nokia Lumia 900 Won’t Hit AT&T Shelves Until April 22

Posted: 09 Mar 2012 01:46 PM PST

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We’d heard a while back that the long-awaited Windows Phone-powered Lumia 900 would show up on AT&T’s shelves on March 18.

However, around the time that this rumored launch date leaked, the Lumia 900 had yet to go through its testing in the technical acceptance process. Turns out, that may be the reason BGR is now reporting that the Lumia 900 launch has been delayed to April 22.

Luckily, the Lumia 900 will still go for an absolutely ridiculous price point. And when I say ridiculous, it’s a compliment. While Windows Phone devices haven’t had the most impressive specs to date, the platform itself and Nokia build quality are certainly worth more than $100.

But that seems to be the strategy with this partnership.

Nokia has seen a rough year, to say the least, and Windows Phone has never really been what Microsoft (or anyone else) would call a success. But all the pieces are falling into place, in terms of the products themselves. Now all Nokiasoft has to do is get people on board with the platform, and that means attractive pricing.



Marvel Touts New Deal: Buy A Comic Book, Get The Digital Version Free

Posted: 09 Mar 2012 01:27 PM PST

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Pop quiz, hotshot: it's Wednesday, and that means a new shipment of comic books is sitting pretty at your local dead tree retailer. Do you schlep down to the store to buy a physical copy, or will you reach for your smartphone/tablet and buy it from the comfort of your own home?

Well, if you want the best bang for your buck, you should probably get dressed and prepare to brave the outside world. Starting in June, any Marvel comic that costs $3.99 or higher (when did comic books get so pricey?) will come with a code that lets the purchaser download a digital copy of that same comic via the Marvel Comics app for iOS or Android.

How benevolent. Not every comic will get the two-for-one treatment, but most of Marvel's biggest names are accounted for thanks to their price tag. Think The Avengers, Amazing Spiderman, Invincible Iron Man, and Captain America, with plenty more to like on the list.

The move isn't without its downsides though — namely, that you’ll have to wing your way to the local comic book store and carry out a financial transaction in person. Which is fine, if you're into that sort of thing, but it's 2012 dammit and I don't want to move any more than I have to.

I'm kidding. Really.

Marvel tested the concept last year when they announced that their Ultimate Comics line would come bundled with a digital copy, and the move garnered the comics giant plenty of “positive reactions from both retailers and fans.” Of course it did — fans get free stuff and comic book stores get their business and the potential for increased traffic. Meanwhile, Marvel eats up the goodwill from both parties and builds awareness of their mobile marketplace (and all of its in-app purchases). Everyone’s a winner!

Stride, A CRM System Salespeople Will Hate (But Freelancers Will Love), Launches Into Beta

Posted: 09 Mar 2012 12:40 PM PST

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Stride, a new CRM system designed to meet the needs of freelancers and small business owners, is launching into private beta today. The product, which was born out of an actual need for a more simplified CRM system, is focused on efficiency, not a complex feature set. It’s not for adding contracts, managing cases, or allocating tasks to a team of salespeople. Instead, Stride is about deal-tracking and high-level metrics only.

“For salespeople, this app is going to make them cringe,” says Stride co-founder Andrew Dumont.

The idea for the app was sparked by Nathan Carnes and built by the team of Andrew Dumont, Adrian Pike, and Amiel Martin. Carnes explains the history of Stride’s creation via a blog post detailing the frustrations he had running a small design shop and not being able to find a CRM system that fit his needs.

“I didn’t need multiple salespeople or complicated reports,” he says, “and I didn't have time to enter contacts and manage them.”

Giving up on finding a solution, Carnes decided to build one instead. That’s something that often leads to inspired ideas, frankly. And Stride, which looks attractive, simple and accessible, may just be one of those.

Andrew Dumont tells me that he felt similar to Carnes about the current state of the CRM market. Everything he used (Highrise, Salesforce, Capsule, Base, etc.) were always “way too complex and clunky,” he says.

“We like to think of Stride as the consumerization of sales tracking,” explains Dumont.

In Stride, the whole system is focused on deal-tracking, meaning any relationship that has a dollar value associated with it is entered into Slide. The deal name and status are in blue, the value (dollar amt.) is off to the right in green, and there are buttons that let you quickly change the deal’s status (lead, pitch, negotiation, closing, won) as well as buttons that let you pause, indicate if the deal is lost, edit the deal, or delete it.

Deals can also be drag-and-dropped on the dashboard, so you can organize them as you see fit.

A simplified metrics section shows you the key figures you need to track: active deal value, average value, number of active deals and deals all-time. Pie charts further break down things like time and value in each step and number of deals won and lost, for example.

The simplicity of the product is promising – CRM for anyone, clearly – but there’s certainly room for Stride to grow to meet users’ demands for some slightly more complex features in the future. Although after small businesses, some owners may want to have multiple people to sign in and track deals under their own names, for example, or they may want a bit more detail to the reporting options. Given that product’s pricing starts at free (for 25 deals) and go up to $7/month for unlimited deals, adding a few carefully considered enhancements for a slight price bump seems reasonable, without worrying about the app moving into Salesforce territory.

Dumont tells me that, indeed, the plan is to add features in the near future, but to keep the focus on simplicity. Specifically, Stride will soon roll out a feature that will lets users add, edit and remove certain steps of the sales flow process to better fit their flow. The company is also adding email reminders and integrations with Quickbooks, Freshbooks, Rapportive and more, which will help reduce the complexity of using the system. And yes, they’re going mobile too, and plan to launch on iOS first.

TechCrunch readers interested in trying out the beta will need an invite code to get in. You can use the code “techcrunched” when you sign up here.

Apple Goes Big In Texas With $304 Million Austin Campus

Posted: 09 Mar 2012 12:10 PM PST

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Most of the news around Austin this week is centered around SXSW, naturally, but Texas Governor (and erstwhile presidential candidate) Rick Perry broke some news today that’s unrelated, but still Austin-relevant. Apple, it seems, which has been slowly growing its presence in the state’s tech oasis, chose SXSW weekend as an auspicious time to announce a major new campus in Austin.

There isn’t much known about the campus or its purpose, but Perry’s announcement does note that the price tag is a hefty $304 million, so it’s more than just a new building or two on the existing Riata Vista Circle. It’s estimated that it will add 3,600 jobs over the next decade, doubling Apple’s employment in the area.

The existing buildings and employees are reportedly focused mainly on administrative duties, and a few related to chip engineering. Apple told Reuters that the new campus will be in customer support, sales, and accounting. Not the most exciting thing in the world, but essential to supporting Apple’s increasing software base and customer responsibilities.

To sweeten the deal, the state has earmarked $21 million from the Texas Enterprise Fund to help with the cost of establishing the facility. That’s less than $6000 per job if things pan out as expected &Mdash; a bargain. Perry’s press release lauds the fund as having successfully created thousands of jobs and much revenue for the area. So far, the TEF has spent $443.4 million, matched by over $15 billion in other tech investment in the state.

Clouds & APIs: Mayor Lee Unveils The San Francisco Open Data Cloud

Posted: 09 Mar 2012 11:56 AM PST

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With 30,000 tech jobs already in town and more (hopefully) on the way, San Francisco has been making a big push to make its city as friendly as possible to entrepreneurs. In January, we saw Mayor Ed Lee, Ron Conway, and former TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde launched sfCITI, a committee which focuses on hiring — both placing and training competent programmers and just generally bringing smart people into San Francisco’s workforce.

Last month, the city complemented its hiring committee by announcing a new initiative again aimed at making the city more relevant to its chief industry, called the 2012 Innovation Portfolio, which helps founders, as Eric wrote at the time, do everything from “completing the paperwork for creating a company, to giving developers new access to city data, to actually testing out tech products at City Hall itself.”

Today, Mayor Lee unveiled data.SFgov.org, a cloud-based open data site and the successor/replacement to DataSF.org. The city is adopting cloud services, “social citizen interfaces,” and APIs to power its new open data site, all in an effort to provide a more robust, technologically sound infrastructure that can drive innovation, access to information, engagement, and government efficiency.

Mayor Lee said in his announcement:

The future of San Francisco, as the world's first 2.0 City, is greatly enhanced by a deeper integration with the local technology ecosystem, and by promoting the frictionless flow of information and feedback between the city and our residents. It's only natural that we move our Open Data platform to the cloud and adopt modern open interfaces to facilitate that flow and access to innovation.

According to San Francisco's Chief Innovation Officer Jay Nath, the upgrade today aims to expand access to information, while enhancing cost efficiencies and speed of execution. The San Francisco Open Data Cloud offers easy-to-use citizen interfaces that let the non-technical explore data, including visualizations, and share relevant info across the Web. On top of that, it offers “automatic full-text indexing of every data set’s content” in order to improve online search and the ability to “download the data in multiple open, machine-readable formats.” The initiative also includes automatic API access to every data set, including technical support and online developer resources — aiming to lower the barriers for civic developers.

Nath tells us that the city originally launched its open data efforts in August 2009 and, since then, have developed over 60 apps and published over 200 datasets. What’s cool is that, in order to facilitate its new data initiatives, it’s calling on a data sharing startup — from Seattle no less — called Socrata.

The city’s Chief Innovation Officer said that the startup allows the city to share data in multiple formats (JSON, CSV, etc.) and allows non-developers to easily visualize that data in maps, charts, and so on, with the ability to post to their own blogs — like YouTube videos, for example.

As you may have guessed, the Seattle-based, VC-backed startup provides a cloud-based platform for aggregating data from multiple sources, then disseminates it as interactive information through web, app, social, and API interfaces. Socrata has focused on the public sector in particular, where it’s enabled open initiatives at the federal, state, and local level, including work for New York, Chicago, Seattle, as well as FederalData.gov, the United Nations, the World Bank, and so on.

It’s a credit to San Francisco that these kind of open data initiatives were experiments two years ago when the city launched DataSF.org, and now those cloud technologies have grown by leaps and bounds, and it’s looking to again stay ahead of the curve with a full suite of citizen, social, and programmatic interfaces — not all things you’d necessarily immediately associate with government services. But if the cloud can make it more cost-effective and agile, there’s no reason not to.

It also helps that the city recently received a $5 million federal grant for a workforce-training program, specifically for IT jobs.

For more, check out the San Francisco Data here.

How Green Dot Will Use Loopt To Go After Mobile Payments

Posted: 09 Mar 2012 11:29 AM PST

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Imagine you’re walking by your local cafe, and you get a notification on your phone that you’ll get a free bagel if you buy a cup of coffee. You walk inside, and make the purchase with your credit card — no need to take out your phone again. The bagel rings up as “free,” and you get a notification from your bank confirming you’ve received the discount.

All of this payments and loyalty interchange can happen over the cloud. A lot of companies are trying to get their arms around mobile payments. Many of them, trying to make your phone itself act as the credit card. Google with Wallet, Square, PayPal, American Express, everybody who’s experimenting with NFC.

And now prepaid card service Green Dot is, too, via its acquisition of location company Loopt.

Here’s a bit more about this vision, which Green Dot chief executive Steve Streit and new SVP and Loopt founder Sam Altman laid out to me today.

First of all, many Silicon Valley readers might not even really know what Green Dot does. TechCrunch has only talked about them a little bit, like in this big post Michael did in 2010 after the Monrovia, Calif.-based startup had a giant initial public offering. Basically, the company provides those pre-paid cards you see at supermarkets and other retailers. Teens and people with poor credit can buy them ahead of time, then spend through a month without being worried about incurring overages and fees like they might with credit cards. The cards, sold in conjunction with Visa, Mastercard and other credit card and payment service providers, are available in 59,000 locations around the country.

So, Green Dot has relationships with businesses large and small. And it’s a bank, regulated by the federal government, and has call centers, a payments processing infrastructure, and all the other components of handling lots of transactions.

But those cards it has in stores today are not the end game. Streit, like top entrepreneurs and investors around Silicon Valley, believes that everything in the future will come through the device you hold in your hand.

This is where Loopt comes in. The formative location startup has been working towards offering mobile deals and other offers to its users over the years, combining information about the user and where they go to match them up with retailers. It has also built a collection of patents in this area.

A business with a local presence, in other words, could work through a Green Dot/Loopt merchant service to stick a deal in, that a user with the app installed would see when they walked by.

Altman and his team are going to become the Silicon Valley outpost of the LA-area company. He’ll be the senior vice president of interactive, and the new division will be building the types of mobile applications that you’ll soon be using to get that free bagel with your coffee.

[Image via Flickr/scaredy_kat]

How To Win At SXSW: Give Away Experiences, Not Grub and Booze

Posted: 09 Mar 2012 11:17 AM PST

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The fundamental mistake companies make when marketing at SXSW is giving away things I can easily buy on my own. Open bars and taco giveaways only attract freeloaders. If brands want influencers to take notice, they have to provide unique experiences.

From my last three SXSWs, I couldn’t tell you who provided the ice cream sandwiches or Lone Star beers. But Zynga’s warehouse concert with TV On The Radio, Tagged’s limo rides, and Diggnation’s fire-eating magician — those I remember.

Food and drink giveaways work most places, but not at SXSW. Here, attendees pay for flights, hotels, and expensive badges. Compared to those, the price of  a burger or cocktail is negligible. If you want me to stay at your event, those will help, but they can’t be the main attraction. They’ve become commoditized goods I can get anywhere else, for free at another event or for a few bucks at a local bar or food truck.

The key is novelty, and that doesn’t have to run up a huge budget. Take something common and change the medium. Last year when Angry Birds was strictly a mobile game, Rovio sponsored an event where you could play on a big screen. The set up and staff couldn’t have cost much but it got me and a line of other people excited.

Another method is filling an urgent need. This year it’s going to rain like crazy, so the saviors will be those distributing umbrellas and ponchos like GroupMe is doing. Normally it’s scorching hot, and fans and visors rule the day.

Companies should also look to give away the most valuable commodity at SXSW: time. There’s no parking, cabs are overrun, and there’s always something amazing happening on the other side of town, so transportation makes an awesome perk. Chevrolet had a fleet of cars and chauffeurs stationed at the convention center last year, ready to deliver people to their destination of choice. Discovering and RSVPing to parties is a big time suck too, so I dig WillCall’s 1-click RSVP to 70 parties.

These promotions will not buy favor or headlines from any journalist worth their salt (go ahead and be nice to me, if your product sucks, I’ll say it sucks). But unique experiences will get people, talking, tweeting, and leave a lasting impression. Because really, if you get someone drunk, how are they ever going to remember you?

[Image Credit: Studio Wide]

StartupBus To SXSW Day Three: Las Cruces To San Antonio [TCTV]

Posted: 09 Mar 2012 11:02 AM PST

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StartupBus, the hackathon-on-wheels in which busloads of entrepreneurs make the journey down to the South By Southwest conference with the goal of teaming up to create viable web apps by the time they arrive in Austin, rolled into its third day yesterday.

Yesterday, the SF/SV StartupBus made its way from Las Cruces, New Mexico to San Antonio, Texas — one big step closer to SXSW. TechCrunch TV’s indefatigable John Murillo has been along for the journey since the San Francisco/Silicon Valley bus departed on Tuesday morning, and in this video you can see how the buspreneurs’ apps have gone from concept to code with demos from customizable breakfast cereal app Cerealize and motion detection video technology startup Kinect.ly.

It’s almost the end of the road for the buspreneurs, but in a lot of ways the best parts are yet to come: The crew is set to arrive in Austin today, and on Saturday they will demo their final apps to a panel of potential investors. We’ll be covering the whole thing til the end, and in the meantime you should check out our earlier coverage of the StartupBus journey, Day One and Day Two.

Resumes Are Bullshit. HireArt Is Better.

Posted: 09 Mar 2012 10:43 AM PST

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HireArt, a newly launched Y Combinator-backed company, is working to solve a major problem that all employers face today: resumes are bullshit. Job candidates often like to fluff up their experience, and sometimes they even outright lie about their abilities. Other times, potentially great employees are overlooked because they have unorthodox backgrounds that don’t match up with what an employer thinks they need in terms of experience. Sometimes these kinds of things are realized during the in-person interview. Unfortunately for many employers, they often don’t discover how much a particular candidate may have oversold themselves until they’ve been hired and can’t perform to expectations.

With its new applicant screening system, HireArt thinks it may have a solution: have the employees actually do the work first.

Here’s HireArt’s pitch in a nutshell: “You really can’t bullshit anymore.”

That’s per co-founder Elli Sharef, in explaining why the traditional resume system is broken.

Instead of asking applicants to talk about their experience, HireArt has them actually perform a series of tasks. For example, if an interview candidate claims to be an expert in Excel, an employer on HireArt might ask them to create an Excel model using a dataset they provide, then have them upload the completed file. Another employer may instead want to hear a creative’s pitch for a new product.

The idea for the company, founded by  Sharef, Dain Lewis and Nicholas Sedlet, three college friends from Yale, was inspired by their own experience in the corporate world, working at large corporations like Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, and a real estate company.

“We had varied experiences running interviews – some very good, some not so good,” explains Sharef. “We realized there was a need for a better way to interview, and a better way to make sure the candidates we were bringing on board were really the best candidates we could find,” she says. After doing research, the team realized that work samples were the best way to find the right people for the job.

Using HireArt, employers in need of filling a position can choose from HireArt’s online library of predefined templates, or can optionally create their own. Typically around four or five questions are chosen, specific to the job. For example, “create a marketing pitch” or “write out a business plan.” Basically, anything that requires the candidate to actually demonstrate, not just talk about, their skills is a good pick.

Candidates are then sent a link to the questions which they can fill out in their own time. The responses to the questions can include videos, file uploads and text responses, depending on the task. When complete, the employer has the option to review the responses on their own, or they can outsource that task to HireArt instead.

Using the company’s team of graders, which includes college professors and other industry experts working part-time to curate the responses, employers are given a set of top candidates who they could then choose to call in for the in-person interview.

Currently, HireArt has over a dozen clients testing the service to fill positions which include a head of marketing at a Silicon Valley startup, a junior operations manager at a London startup, a Fortune 500 company looking for summer interns, and more.

For the less technically savvy (like Baby Boomers and up), HireArt also provides technical support in using the system. Surprisingly, the company says that they’ve found these candidates are not all that intimidated by the technology, but are grateful for a chance to demonstrate their experience.

“There’s a distortion in the labor market in which some really qualified middle-career people are not employed or are under-employed right now,” Sharef says. These people see HireArt as an opportunity to actually prove their worth and their skills versus their younger counterparts, she explains.

But more importantly, a system like this encourages responses that don’t just involve taking a paper resume and turning it into a video version where a candidate repeats their work history and skill set out loud. This gives employers a chance to really understand the personalities of the candidates, how their minds work, and whether they’re up to the job at hand.

Sharef also notes that another problem with the traditional system is that it’s screening out a lot of the diamonds in the rough. Hiring “A players” is all that should really matter, but it’s often hard to do when you’re focused so much on a candidate’s pedigree (e.g. attended a top university, their previous position titles, etc.).

In the near future, HireArt also plans to further refine their predefined questions based on employer feedback as to how the candidate ended up performing on the job. In the long-term, the data generated by HireArt could even help universities better craft their curriculum to better reflect the real-world needs of employers.

The HireArt system is somewhat similar to another new startup called TakeTheInterview, which allows candidates to answer interview questions on video. While perhaps simpler for the candidates, there’s more work on the employers’ part to actually view all the responses they receive. Plus, candidates are only responding to questions on video  - which is just one aspect of HireArt’s service.

Pricing for HireArt is still being handled on a case-by-case basis. Employers can sign up for access here.

Microsoft Envisions A Future With Super-Fast Touchscreens

Posted: 09 Mar 2012 10:38 AM PST

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As solid as modern touchscreens are, there's very often an subtly apparent sense of disconnect when you try to use one. According to Paul Dietz of Microsoft's Applied Sciences Group, it all comes down to latency — he notes average touchscreens have a latency of a 100ms, which yields a noticeable bit of lag between a user touching a screen and the screen displaying a reaction to it.

Sure, it's totally usable, but it never really feels like you're fully in control. If you drag an app across the iPad's screen, for example, the icon will dance around your finger a bit as the display tries its best to keep up. That’s not good enough for Dietz and his team, as they have whipped up a demo of how things ought to be — unlike the 100ms delay of a regular touchscreen, the demo knocks that delay between touch and tracking down to 1ms flat.

The difference is staggering, especially when Dietz trots out the slow-motion footage. With the delay between touch input and screen response slashed by orders of magnitude, a device that sports the sort of super-low-latency Dietz envisions has the potential to feel far more (for lack of a better term) natural than its brethren. There’s zero delay when you slide a checker across a board, for example, and bringing that sort of instantaneous feedback to the many screens in our lives could help to bridge the gap between operating a bit of software and the feeling of interacting with objects.

Stylus-based interfaces would benefit greatly from this sort of tech. I spent a few brief moments playing with Samsung’s 10-inch Galaxy Note, and while the included S-Pen certainly did the trick, it was still jarring to see the line I was trying to draw following the pen rather than coming from it. (It took me a few tries to nail that TC logo, natch).

But here’s the thing: as cool as this stuff is, I can’t help but wonder if it’s an accomplishment best appreciated by nerds. Microsoft’s interest in this seems purely academic — they’re not, after all, in the business of stamping out displays. The touch mavens at Synaptics though showed off an impressively precise low-latency screen at MWC 2011, so the interest within the industry is definitely there.

Whether or not this sort of tech will ever make it to the mainstream is something else entirely. Cost of implementation is one potential issue, but I would imagine for something like this, a bigger question is whether or not the average consumer will care enough. A stylus-driven UI is one thing, but our standard, slower displays have been doing an adequate job with finger-based input for a while now. Do we really need a disruption in screen tech if what we have is good enough?

I say yes (I’m no fan of just “good enough”) but that’s really not for me to decide. I look forward to seeing if any manufacturers out there are willing to take the plunge on a low-latency screen like this, and I’m even more hopeful that people find they like how it feels.
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