Category: Tech news

It’s not just an attractive advertising demographic that Facebook is losing as teens take their mercurial attention elsewhere in a sullen search of what’s cool. Facebook sans the cool kids may well be taking a substantial knock to the accuracy of its data, too.

A study of Facebook use among 16-to-18-year-olds in eight EU countries recently concluded that Facebook is “dead and buried” to teens, who have migrated to rival platforms like Instagram (itself owned by Facebook, of course), Snapchat and Twitter. Who is on Facebook? Parents.

Case in point: my 70-year-old mother is on Facebook (how she came to sign up is a telling tale in itself*). On her Facebook profile she deliberately has only a handful of friends — being as she’s not accustomed to the concept of sharing digital information with large groups of people. So instead of the hundreds of ‘friends’ younger Facebook users (used to) typically amass, she has around 10 connections on the service.

Now, as a general rule, the more data a service has on its users, the more data points it holds to triangulate to improve the accuracy of the information it holds. (Even factoring in those Facebook users who accept friend requests from random strangers — big data can be filtered; small data is riddled with holes and lacks a large enough sample size to accurately patch its gaps). So little wonder that the data Facebook holds on my mum is spectacularly wrong.

Based on the handful of friends she does have on the service, Facebook auto-filled the following fields: her current location, her (former) school, and her workplace. Or presumably that’s how it filled in those data fields. Because all that triangulated information was wrong (I’ve since deleted it for her, but the point stands: Facebook had associated incorrect information with her profile).

Facebook’s guess-work in auto-filling those fields seems to be attached to the few connections she does have on the service. For example, the school it listed her as having attended is the school one of her Facebook connections went to; and the location it said she can be found at is the location where another of her connections lives, and so on.

It may be that Facebook deliberately fills in such profile fields (via ‘best guess’) to encourage users to correct inaccurate data and thus socially engineers them to work for it on burnishing its data banks.

Or it may be that Facebook’s interface encourages people to confirm certain data points as they go along — such as where they live or went to school — and my mum simply didn’t notice that the suggested answers were so off the mark (and thus mistakenly confirmed Facebook’s algorithmic assumptions). Either way, she didn’t notice the info was inaccurate so it was left there to mislead (until I removed it and left those fields blank).

Facebook also, of course, made all her data public by default (my mum obviously had no idea it had done this) — which resulted in her receiving an unsolicited message from a spammer. She did see this, and became unnerved by this “stalker,” as she termed him. The result? She mistrusts Facebook even more than she already did. And is now even less inclined to voluntarily feed it with information. “Can I sue them?” she asked, when told the default Facebook data privacy setting had been public.

The only data she said she had filled in herself — ergo, the only accurate data on display on her profile — was her name, email and birth date. Plus a profile photo she had been encouraged to upload by her Facebook friends.

A single Facebook user that has been sketched inaccurately by the data inputted into a handful of data fields doesn’t amount to much. But if the proportion of active Facebook users is becoming skewed towards demographics that are less likely to amass huge friend bases on the service, and also less likely to voluntarily feed accurate info into Facebook’s data banks (either because they don’t trust it or don’t notice it’s wrong) then it seems likely that the quality of the data Facebook holds on its user-base is being diluted.

And that in turn paints Facebook as a less attractive proposition for advertisers: with less accurate user data in its databanks, and less attractive ad demographics comprising its (less) active user-base. Bottom line: less relevant targeted marketing and advertising leading to fewer money-making clicks.

While Facebook gets user data from other external sources, too — via its Facebook Login program, for instance, that allows it to stick its fingers in other developers’ pies — if Facebook as a brand has become toxic with teens, developers developing cool new services aren’t going to be falling over themselves to associate their shiny new thing with the digital equivalent of dad dancing. So it’s in with ‘sign up via email’ and out with ‘log in with Facebook’.

Teens are the most exciting demographic not merely because they are so lucrative from an advertiser point of view, but because they are such energetic users. When teens like something they obsess over it. They get their friends to obsess over it. They become addicts and advocates. Teen usage burns very bright indeed. And then they take that energy on to the next new new thing. Making it all the more chilly, for a business, when the cool kids move on.

Senior Facebook users obviously aren’t going to have the same usage pattern as teens. Not even close. And that changes what Facebook is now — and what it can become in future.

For me, and I am admittedly a rather atypical Facebook user (not to mention well north of the teen demographic), this long-in-the-tooth social network has felt like a very middle of the road service for years — a place where I almost never post anything, and which I check only occasionally to see friends’ wedding/new baby photos. As an information portal/photo-swapping site it can sometimes be mildly diverting or mildly entertaining or mildly useful. It’s rarely any more compelling than that. Twitter is where the really interesting information and interactions live IMO. From a data point of view, Twitter feels far more alive than Facebook.

No wonder Zuckerberg wants to connect fresh billions of Internet ingénues to his social network by targeting developing countries. In new markets he again has the chance of tapping into caches of teens who haven’t had a chance to get disenchanted with Facebook yet. Who can be sold on a ‘cool new service for keeping up with friends’ — being as it’s one their mums and dads haven’t heard of yet. And who can inject Facebook with the vitality of obsessive usage data again.

Except, even in those untapped markets Facebook has its work cut out to get users engaged because emerging economies are going mobile first. And many such countries have been keen adopters of social mobile messaging rivals that are already eating Facebook’s lunch elsewhere. Whether it’s WhatsApp or Weixin or Snapchat or even BBM. Mobile messaging — with its more bounded and intimate form of social networking, that allows teens to go off and do their own thing away from the parents — is where the kids are obsessing now.

And where the kids go, the adults eventually tend to follow (if only to check up on them).

So a Facebook that pesters pensioners for personal information needs to take serious stock of what its overreaching behaviour has wrought. And accept that its days as the digital Breakfast Club — where cool kids come together and come of age — are gone. Facebook’s future belongs to the mainstream and the middle aged. You could say it’s the new Yahoo — albeit one that lacks a shiny new Marissa Mayer-esque figurehead to rally the troops right now. (Zuckerberg and his perma-hoodie feel about as fresh as an old-school uniform.)

As Facebook approaches its 10th birthday, it’s time to take stock, to leave the wild parties to Snapchat and its ilk. Time to stop trying to clone cool. And consider what this massively mainstream service can knit from the fuzzier threads of data that a more established, less excitable user-base is going to give it. Or it can splash serious cash on trying to buy cool – and careen off in search of a premature mid-life crisis.

*My mother signed up for Facebook because of the pester-power of its spam advertising which uses direct appeals from people you know to emotionally blackmail you (via email) to sign up. So you could argue that Facebook sewed the seeds of its own demise among the hyper sensitive teenage group by failing to respect the subtle inter-generational boundaries that delineate essential social spaces that separate adults from their offspring. Spaces that allow teens to go off and start creating adult identities of their own.

The first full business week of 2014 is about to get underway. But before we jump into that, CrunchWeek is taking one more look back at the biggest tech stories from 2013.

We published the first installment of our year-end look back, in which Ryan Lawler, Leena Rao and I discussed the rise of Bitcoin and the NSA’s privacy violations, last week — you can check that out right here. In today’s episode, we talked about Twitter’s incredibly successful IPO and the tech companies that are poised to take off in 2014.

An intricate crop circle recently cut into a field two hours south of San Francisco baffled onlookers and spawned crackpot theories that aliens were responsible, but sources tell me it was created by Nvidia to publicize a big CES announcement. The design looks like Nvidia’s Tegra 4 chip, and though we can’t confirm this, it may be designed to drum up interest in the Tegra 5 chip Nvidia is expected to launch at CES.

Nvidia has a major CES press conference planned for tonight at 8pm PST in Las Vegas where it may fess up to creating the crop circle and is likely announce details of its new products. The Tegra is a “system on a chip” for mobile devices that combines a CPU, GPU, and memory controller. The new Tegra 5 Nvidia is expected to show off at CES is codenamed “Logan”, and will likely be faster and more energy-efficient than the Tegra 4 “Wayne” predecessor Nvidia showed at CES last year. Alternatively, the crop circle could related to the new Maxwell GPU Nvidia may unveil.

The crop circle appeared in the farming town of Chualar, California on the morning of Monday, December 30th. It was pressed into a field owned by a farmer named Scott Anthony who was out of town. On Tuesday, he ordered a crew to plough the crop circle, erasing it to the dismay of small crowds who had flocked to see it. You can see more footage of the crop circle and watch local news anchors’ hilariously misguided attempts to decode what it is in the embed below.

As tech companies battle it out for press at overcrowded conferences like CES and SXSW, publicity stunts are getting more and more ridiculous. Last year’s CES saw the typical, demeaning booth babes and free swag, but also paintball shooting galleries while SXSW parties featured celebrity performances from Justin Timberlake and Prince.

You could call these stunts signs of an indulgent tech bubble, but as gadgets and apps gain more and more mainstream appeal, there’s big money to be made in owning a moment with some theatrics. If Nvidia can sell more chips, it could easily make up for whatever the crop circle cost.

[Image: 111th Aerial Photography & Video via KDVR, KSBW, UFOSOnEarth]

Editor’s note: Tadhg Kelly is a veteran game designer and creator of leading game design blog What Games Are. He has recently moved into managing developer relations at OUYA. You can follow him on Twitter here.

Why are there so many cloned video games? The answer is simple. Whether you call it cloning, copying or fast following, a common perception in the industry is that the market moves in genres and it’s a safer bet to get in on a genre rather than strike out. Just as many technology companies do, lots of game makers watch a few leaders to see what’s next and use that as a form of social proof. Time to make a farming sim, an endless runner, a crafting game or an episodic adventure. That’s what’s hot now. That’s what someone will fund.

Of course this perception is – and always has been – a bit of an illusion, and it regularly leads the industry into irrational exuberance. The rush into social games, for example, evolved very quickly into blitz-style casual games, behaviorist Civ-style games, pet simulators, word games, quizzes, casinos and bare-bones roleplaying games. Wild innovation quickly transformed into a market where developers copied the hell out of one another, and effectively all provided variations on the same basic product to players (who then became bored).

Then came the crash, the regret, the millions lost on bad investments and the large-scale decamping to iOS. Now that iOS is all full up, the worry is what the next hot-ticket platform is going to be. Maybe next generation consoles or microconsoles? Maybe something to do with wearables? Maybe a surge in virtual realities or augmented realities, or both? A lot of people would dearly love to know, but it’s not obvious yet.

Game makers tend to be more risk-averse than risk-takers. At conferences, for example, some of the most-attended talks tend to be the ones that promise concrete numbers or discussions about successful techniques. There’s a constant search on for the next proven technique, the next risk mitigation, the next “it is known“.

Many are risk-averse because of perceived financial risk. A lot of cloners consider their more creative brethren as heroes, but feel that they can’t afford to be that risky right now. Yet even when they do manage to be super successful down the line, they still can’t justify the risk. Zynga, for example, mostly still fast-follows. EA developers have a hell of a time internally getting new creative projects off the ground. Supercell seems to be going through a difficult-third-game phase in the wake of its two very successful (but pretty clearly inspired by other games) hits.

Arguably the reason cloners stick to their cloning ways is also cultural: As the template for success is found early in many studios, it sets a precedent. There are numerous examples of single-franchise game companies (such as Jagex which just celebrated RuneScape‘s 13th birthday) that get stuck trying to make a second success that looks like its first success. Prior success becomes the filter through which new ideas are allowed, therefore if you’re used to looking at other games to be your guide, that’s what you’ll likely do again.

The other thing is that cloning sometimes works. There are many examples of an innovative game being developed by a small studio, but a bigger company rolled its own version and deployed its marketing might to get it into the hands of players first. In the social casino space, for example, players really don’t care or notice the difference between slots games and just pick the one that they see as the default. In the farming-game explosion on Facebook it was really all about who had the best marketing because the games were all basically the same.

The other kind of successful cloning happens when a genuine genre market does emerge around a type of game. Innovation within those genres becomes more important than from-the-ground-up design, leading to studios standing out within a market subset based on subtle distinctions. First person shooters, real-time strategy games, roleplaying games, racing games, side-scrolling shooters, point-and-click adventures and fighting games are all types of genre where specialization of this sort has occurred. To the outsider they would be called clones, but their audiences notice and celebrate the differences, and do not consider them as clones. 

Only a few game makers successfully manage to get beyond the risk-aversion. One example is the small studio that doesn’t know or care about the risks and just goes ahead and makes something. Vlambeer, for example, is a tiny studio based in Utrecht that created the wildly successful Ridiculous Fishing (and had a hell of a time with being cloned in doing so). Another smaller example is Kirkland-based Spry Fox, developers of Triple Town, High Grounds, Leap Day and numerous other highly innovative games.

On the other end are companies like Nintendo and Valve. Nintendo takes big risks in terms of its platforms, especially in interface innovation (some of which work out, others not so much). Yet the company also innovates very strongly on games. The sheer number of genres that it has spawned boggle the mind. Valve has a great track record of noticing interesting indie games that it then brings in-house and accelerates into full-blown successes.

The difference between successful creators and cloners is not merely about finance or culture. It tends to have more to do with process. Nintendo has a process that relies on building out a lot of a game before (in a sense) dumping it to then begin work on the real game. Many lessons are learned that can then be applied to the real project, so every Nintendo game is a sequel to itself.

The other difference is patience. Whether at large or small scale, the more successful innovators tend to find ways to give their games long-enough time to gel together. Daniel Cook (creative director of Spry Fox) regularly talks about how his company uses a gating process with its projects, resulting in lots of internal failures that are quietly killed. This process takes time and a willingness to let some projects ride for a while until they find what it is they are trying to be, so team sizes are kept tiny until the game is essentially found.

Clone companies tend to have poor (or no) systems in place for evaluating a game design (whether on paper or in terms of prototypes). They also tend to want to rush it. A clone studio typically regards the days, weeks or months that a designer says she needs as nothing but terrifying risk. What happens if, after all that time, the resulting product is no good? What do all of the other staff do in the mean time? What happens if the market moves on by the time the project is ready and the genre isn’t hot any more?

They clone or fast-follow and innovative games become their design document, their shortcut to success and their personal risk mitigators. Just copy the original until you get the same results that it does, they say. Write a playbook of all those techniques that we can then use in other games, they say. Just keep doing that enough. That’s what success in games looks like. 

Then comes the crash, and it turns out they learned nothing at all.

The advent of affordable quadcopters has made aerial photography accessible for almost anybody. Getting really good results still often takes a bit more than just attaching a GoPro to a quadcopter. A few months ago, I looked at the DJI Phantom and that was already a lot of fun to fly, though the images you could get from an unmodified Phantom can be quite shaky.

Now, DJI has launched the DJI Phantom 2 Vision, which comes with a built-in camera you remotely control through your phone. As far as out-of-the-box quadcopters go, the $1,200 Vision sets a new standard for anybody who wants to get into aerial photography and is a heck of a lot of fun to fly.

One thing to remember here is that you are looking at a prosumer device – and not just because of the price. This is not the kind of remote-controlled helicopter you can pick up at any discount store today. Just like its predecessor, the Vision has a built-in GPS unit that allows it to fly back home if the connection to the remote controller is ever interrupted. In the near future, DJI will release an app that will turn the Vision into an autonomous drone by allowing you to input GPS coordinates and have it fly a circuit without your input.

What makes the new Phantom stand out, though, is the fact that you get a direct video downlink from the camera that shows up on your iPhone or Android device. To do this, DJI built a mobile app and added a Wi-Fi extender to the remote (which you have to charge separately). As the remote has a range of up to 1,500 feet, the Wi-Fi connection between the phone and Vision would likely break up after just a few hundred feet. With the USB-charged Wi-Fi extender, you should be able to keep the video going up to almost 1,000 feet (though all of this always depends on your local conditions, too).

The phone app comes in handy for more than just seeing the video link. It also includes a heads-up display with all the pertinent information about your flight, including speed, distance, height and battery life. You can also use it to see a radar-like screen that tells you where exactly your quadcopter is in relation to your own position.

The phone controls all the settings for the built-in camera. The wide-angle camera itself is comparable to a GoPro Here 3 Silver Edition and can, among numerous other settings, take 1080p video at 30 frames per second (fps) and 720p video at 60 fps. Unlike the GoPro, it can also record 1080i at 60 fps. Thanks to the built-in vibration-damping platform underneath the vision, the video you get from this unit is significantly better than from an unmodified Phantom 1.

When it comes to these kinds of videos, higher frame rates are often desirable, as the slowed-down video makes the recording feel quite a bit smoother. All of the images are beamed to your phone, but also stored on a microSD card.

Using your phone, you can start and stop video recordings, but you can also take still images. The 14 megapixel camera doesn’t exactly rival a DSLR, but does a nice job of keeping up with different lighting conditions and in a pinch, you can always set your exposure settings manually from the app. You can also take images in RAW format, but so far, DJI hasn’t made any tools available to actually read these images in Photoshop or other photo-editing suites (chances are it will at CES this week).

I’ve got a feeling these kinds of images will be the next trend in wedding photography (let’s just hope the photographers are better fliers than this guy).

Here is an example of what raw video from the Vision looks like:

The gimbal underneath the Vision only moves vertically, so it doesn’t fully eliminate vibrations and only compensates for the quadcopter’s forward and backward motions. When you’re flying sideways, your image will also be slightly tilted to the side. Overall, though, this system does away with virtually all of the dreaded “jello effect” that often marred videos from the original Phantom when paired with a GoPro.

Unlike the previous Phantom, which had a battery life of about 10 minutes, the Vision comes with a far more powerful battery. I didn’t quite feel like crashing my review unit by running out of juice (though it should automatically land itself if it does indeed run out), but in my tests, the unit easily stayed in the air for a good 25 minutes, which is on par with DJI’s promises. In return, though, the battery, which includes the on/off switch for the quadcopter, is proprietary and an additional unit will set you back about $150.

How hard is it to fly the Vision? I’m not an experienced RC flyer, but just like the earlier Phantom, the Vision is pretty easy to get in the air and land after you’ve watched the introductory videos. Once it’s flying, the live video and radar scope make it straightforward to stay in control, though inexperienced flyers should definitely go slow at first. This isn’t a toy, after all, and it has four fast-spinning rotors that could easily hurt somebody. Because of this, you probably want to stay away from people at first (and trees, power lines and everything else, really).

I never quite crashed the Vision, but I did make a couple of ungraceful landings that didn’t seem to faze the Vision. If it’s anything like the original Phantom, which I did manage to crash into concrete and trees when I tested it, it should stand up to quite a bit of punishment.

It’s also worth remembering that the FAA would prefer it if you didn’t fly any remote-controlled planes within the proximity of an airport (three miles is the standard for regular remote-controlled aircraft) and to keep them under 400 feet.

If you have $1,200 dollars burning a hole in your pocket, the Vision is probably among the coolest toys you can buy right now (and hey, it’s even $200 cheaper than Google Glass). It won’t let you start your own Amazon Prime drone delivery service, but it’ll give your videos and photographs a whole new perspective.

Evernote CEO Phil Libin has responded to the scathing criticism of the company made in a blog post by former TechCrunch writer Jason Kincaid. A post which ended up making headlines recently. Libin says new versions of all the apps are planned, targeting note editing, navigation, search, sync and collaboration.

He says the company has already started on these, and it now plans to focus on stability, design and simplicity – with many more hires planned to beef up their team.

Libin goes to some length to address the issues surrounding Evernote’s increasingly bloated platform, many of which are around the ecosystem of apps Evernote has built up which has led to a series of issues around bugs.

He says “reading Jason’s article was a painful and frustrating experience because, in the big picture, he’s right.” But, he adds, “We’re going to fix this.”

Specifically, he says that despite huge growth the company needs to “pause for a bit and look in rather than up,” and he promises Evernote’s “central theme” for 2014 will be “constant improvement of the core promise of Evernote.”

He says work on this started a couple of months ago, precipitated by the frustrating roll-out of their iOS 7 version, resulting in “stability problems”.

There are 164 engineers and designers working at Evernote, with 150 assigned to the core software products. He pledges the total number will increase “quite a bit” in 2014, but the proportion will stay the same. He claims that since then they’ve made a lot of progress, and Evernote is “measurably less buggy.”

Libin says App store ratings have gone from 2 stars to 4.5, customer support volumes for iOS “have been cut by more than half”.

However, he says it may well take longer for the improvements to be felt by users.

It’s an unusually candid response from what is now a pretty big company.

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah works on product for Swell, is a TechCrunch columnist, and an investor. He blogs at Haywire, and you can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

Yes, we all know…If you’re reading TechCrunch, there’s a great chance we all look at our phones too many times during the day, during meetings, during conversations, during dinner, and every other piece of dead time in between. Mobile apps and the connectivity they provide to us induce addictive behaviors. So, as we think about how mobile evolves, two questions have been on my mind: (1) Could information be pushed to us (beyond push notifications) such that I look at my phone less? And, (2) Will there be apps which passively collect data from my phone, while running in the background, that will improve the notifications mentioned above?

Today in mobile, push notifications hold the promise of native re-engagement tools. Just as it’s hard to even get others to discover and download your app, it’s equally hard to get them to re-engage with your app. Where else could these notifications go to make sure we see them? Email is the next best channel, and with deep-linking becoming more uniform, helps developers touch users and coax them back into their silos. Maybe this is where “wearables” will come into play? Notifications can be sent to a wristwatch or connected glasses, but will we even use these new devices? And, maybe those notifications are just passive, or the types that bring us back into the phone. What if an app sends me great push notifications but I don’t go into the app — is that helping a developer today, or will that provide value in the future as the manners in which we use our phones evolve?

Now, what if we let apps just run like gears in the background after download and collect data for us? We wouldn’t have to open the app all the time and input information. We may occasionally go back into the app to see how our data is presented, or search for something in the past, but it wouldn’t require daily or even weekly active uses. Lately, this could be apps like Heyday and Memoir, which automatically create personal journals based on mobile activity. Instead of being inside our phones chronicling every check-in, or while we are out and about, such as Strava for cyclists, or using Automatic to track movements in the car. For instance, I have my Automatic set to turn on whenever I’m in the car. I rarely go back into the app itself, but I’m using it every time I’m driving. I’m certainly hoping one day I can do something with that data, but we shall see.

Now, let’s take a step back as 2014 commences and everyone recognizes the scale of the platform shift presented by mobile…

All of our attention is on mobile, and rightly so. As a result, investment dollars are focused on mobile, but most of those are chasing apps which could reasonably or already have achieved breakout status. There aren’t many of those. We may all focus on the daily swings of the App Store rankings or get sucked into what’s happening in a category, but if consumers aren’t using an app multiple times a day, the future of that app may be grim. Investors know this, which is why apps with serious daily engagement (like Snapchat) command such high valuations. Add on top of this the sheer number of people who are building new apps daily, and the competition is insanely intense.

Given the current atmosphere, could apps make a bold enough consumer promise to work smartly “in the background” and not ask for daily attention from users? That’s what I’ve experienced personally with Heyday so far, as an example. I know this app will make searchable journals for me based on photos and my location, and I can see them adding in people (as the app spreads), and then perhaps integrating data from Strava, Automatic, and the like. As a result, I let it track my location, I let it access my photo roll, and so forth. There’s a trade taking place, and while I don’t go into Heyday more than once a week, when I want to search for something the past, it’s usually there, right at my fingertips. These types of apps are like gears in a machine. We don’t see them every day, perhaps only when we need something at a specific moment, but we need them to work constantly and consistently for us. These gears could also make other systems run or even possible in the future, in that way, become platforms. While it’s early days mobile, it’s every earlier for these types of background apps, but I think it’s starting to turn in this direction, and with the competition for user attention so fierce today, apps that work like gears do, indeed, present a passive yet potentially aggressive mobile app strategy.

Photo Credit: Flickr Creative Commons / Sonny Abesamis

What is to be done with Europe? As The New York Times wrote just two days ago, there are not enough people in Europe qualified to fill all the technology jobs available. At the same time, Europe is not producing really big platforms to take on the global players. Too much of European technology has been caught up producing client-driven businesses in enterprise. As it is often said, where are the platforms like Google, Facebook and or Twitter in Europe? We can’t recycle stories about Skype forever. There are some amazing companies coming though. But more are needed.

So it is that the European Commission wants European member states to develop ‘a new generation of web services’, and of course, reap the economic benefits from those.

Of course, the Commission is not the magic bullet, or the super hero to save the day. But it wants to try.

There’s no getting around it. For a long time Europeans have looked with envy upon the sheer scale of technology innovation coming out of places like the USA (in software and internet platforms) and Asia (in hardware). The Commission, quite rightly, wants to help do something about this.

So back in May 2013 it introduce a set of ’6 actions’ by the EC VP for Industry & Entrepreneurship, Antonio Tajani as part of its grandly titled “Entrepreneurship 2020 Action Plan”. The little unit inside the Commission to deliver this is one year old, which, in EU Commission terms, is a teeny tiny baby.

So the question is, can they do it, and what the hell is their action plan?

Well, their Action Plan described as a blueprint for “decisive action to unleash Europe’s entrepreneurial potential, to remove existing obstacles and to revolutionise the culture of entrepreneurship in Europe.” (This was developed after a public consultation process with a number of European entrepreneurs).

The aim is to invest in in changing the public perception of entrepreneurs (typically poor in risk-averse European business culture), in entrepreneurship education and to support groups that are underrepresented among entrepreneurs. The aim is to revitalise an entrepreneurial spirit which has considerably declined in the postwar years. And let’s face it most jobs are created by SMEs and micro-firms that did not exist even 5 years ago.

The Commission wants to under-pin the idea that it is only when a large number of Europeans recognise an entrepreneurial career as a rewarding and attractive option that entrepreneurial activity in Europe will thrive in the long term.

So, what in each is in this “Entrepreneurship 2020 Action Plan”. Well, it has three main pillars: Entrepreneurial education and training; the creation of a business environment where entrepreneurs can flourish and grow; and finally, highlighting role models while also reaching out to specific groups whose entrepreneurial potential is not being tapped to its fullest extent.

Since it issued it’s action plan, the Commission has delivered six initiatives aimed at each of the above actions, which I’ll go into in a moment.

• Setting up a Startup Europe Partnership
• The “Leaders Club” of entrepreneurs
• MOOCs for increasing web talent in Europe
• Accelerators Assembly – A Commission-funded network of tech Accelerators who are asked to share knowledge and information.
• A network of EU investors active in raising venture capital
• An EU crowd-funding network

These activities are, in theory targeted as ‘web entrepreneurship’ (or W.E. as they like to call it) and is all about helping to cultivate more ambitious tech start-ups which, crucially, are also able to scale into full-blown going companies, while boosting overall economic growth and jobs in the internet-based economy.

The EU Commission has a motto for this action plan which is ‘start in Europe and stay in Europe’. Of course, it’s not going to suit every business, but it’s a laudable thought.

In order for this to happen they want to overcome what obstacles there are in Europe to starting up and to work out how they can enhance startups to ‘scale up’ inside the EU and compete internationally.

Here we detect a slight problem in the thinking. Many startups will want to scale internationally from the word go, not just in the EU.

But, of course, it’s only the EU area of member states that the Commission can deal with anyway. That said, if the EU can create some sort of ‘best practise’ there’s nothing to stop nearby non-EU states taking a leaf out of their book.

One area the Commission thinks it is ‘doing OK’ in is the area of the Telecom Single Market legislation – an area championed during Neelie Kroes’ second term in office, with it’s aim to reduce the cost and legislative burden on companies, and the geographical asymmetries that prevent ‘single market’ economies of scale. And to be fair, she has been pummelling the networks to reduce roaming costs – and it does indeed look like those will come down year over the next few years.

So what has the Commission been doing in a concrete manner on the ground, and where do they go next?

The answer is six main initiatives, with a couple of ancillary activities tacked onto the end.

• Startup Europe

They set up the Startup Europe which covers a a wide range of activities and calls on private sector to come together to support European startups. A number of these are listed here.

Confusingly, They have registered, and promote this URL StartupEurope.eu

which simply re-directs to this long URL. Meanwhile, they also have Launch.StartupEuropePartnership.eu which isn’t doing anything right now.

Under the banner of Startup Europe, the Commission ran “Tech All Stars”, which was basically a European Commission-backed effort to run a startup pitch competition. Except they did not run it. It was a series of two competitions run by AngelsBootcamp and Founders Forum culminating in the overall winner, Trustev, being showcased at the Digital Agenda Assembly in Dublin on the 19th June.

Note that this has a different logo to the StartupEurope Partnership. Confused yet?

Under the list of achievements is the expression of interest and the quality of the corporate ‘pledges’ received so far from companies such as Telefonica, Microsoft, Adobe, Google.

The pledges they are after include things like mentoring, Open office hours, access to office spaces, funding, training, etc etc. All things corporates are famously bad at, of course, but at least it’s something.

They’ve had Telefonica bring Campus Party to Europe. Microsoft pledged to create CoEntrepreneurs.eu as a “a platform, a community and a collection of 2.0 initiatives enabling massive entrepreneurship support by the entrepreneurs themselves” – however, the site re-directs to CoEntrepreneurs.be, a Belgian domain, and a site with a couple of guys taking in French about startups. Not very Microsoft.

There’s also a vague commitment from Microsoft BizSpark to engage with European Institutions, but since this is simply cover for MS to sell software then you’d expect them to do this anyway.

• The Leaders Club

“The Leader’s Club” is a group of six successful web entrepreneurs assembled by the Commission to basically come up with a list of things they think Europe should do, which they called the Startup Manifesto.

These are: Daniel Ek (Spotify), Kaj Hed (Rovio), Joanna Shields (Tech City UK), Reshma Sohoni (Seedcamp), Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten (The Next Web), Zaryn Dentzel (Tuenti), Niklas Zennström (Atomico) and Lars Hinrichs (formely of Hackfwd).

In March last year they met EC VP Neelie Kroes and in September launched their Manifesto of 22 actions needed to boost entrepreneurship for internet-driven economic growth across Europe. They boiled down to five headings: improving tech skills and education in Europe; making it easier to access talent in and outside the EU; increasing access to capital; modernising data laws across the EU; getting European countries to take ‘thought leadership’ in tech.

They tested the interest in the manifesto by subjecting it to public vote, but that garnered a relatively low 3,000 or so votes. That said, the ideas were rock solid. Indeed, the Leader’s Club has probably come up with amongst the best output of any Commission initiative to date – assuming anyone is listening.

If this were to go any further, one might suggest they look at the UK’s Tech City policy of creating a ‘Fast 50′ layer of much larger startups on their way to an IPO.

• Fostering Web Skills

The Commission has put out to tender a project to study the capability of MOOCs to improve web skills in Europe, for EUR 90,000. The study is due to report later in 2014, and will map the supply and demand for these, with the results to be published at a conference Q3 2015. The MOOCs Tender was launched to explore short term and long term objectives in developing massive online courses, such as the ones launched by Stanford’s Coursera, or MIT’s EdX which have had an explosive growth.

Massive Online Courses have clearly aided the development of skills, though, arguably, basic Computer Science combined with trawling the web for the usual coding resources works equally well.

There’s little to say about this initiative other than it’s probably a good idea to get data on MOOC usage in Europe.

• The Accelerators Assembly

This is a network of tech Accelerators which was launched in the first half of 2013. It was set up as an on-line group but has had some offline meetings. It has some 200 active accelerator members who are supposed to be sharing knowledge and information about access to funding opportunities. The Commission has commissioned a report expected Q1 2014 to summarize the overall situation in Europe with respect to the growth of accelerators.

• Web Investors Forum – A network of EU VCs

This is the work to create a network of Venture Capital firms, ongoing since March 2013. Oddly, although this is to “create awareness” about the growth of web services, you can probably agree that they already know this already. However, there is more specific work going on to survey of over 60 VCs and publish the results later this year.

• Crowdfunding Network – the EU crowd funding network

Once again we have a separate web site for a pretty related project. Launched in June 2013 by various Commission departments, the idea here is to make EU member states aware of the movement of Crowdfunding and ‘Crowd-Equity’ financing for startups. Why? Well, to put it bluntly, this who thing has apparently not been noticed at policy-making levels by quite a lot of EU states. This has led to some very non-EU friendly behaviour, such as the fact that legislation in Germany and Italy has a completely different view of what crowd funding actually is. Thus, ‘harmonisation’ – a favourite EU word – of the on-line crowd funding market is very relevant. If EU platforms played by the same rules, then they would be able to raise much bigger sums of funding. The Commission plans to commission a report analysing the policy priorities in the EU and run an event around this issue in the second half of 2014.

Other Activities

Aside from all this, the Commission has started some work on trying to dynamically map what is going on in Europe across the EU ecosystem, but there has not been results of that published yet.

In addition, the Commission has been dabbling in what amounts of PR works for startups.

It created the Europioneers awards to use its media profile to highlight the work of startups, alongside the Techallstars activity.

So there you have it, a long laundry list of things the Commission is planning or already implementing.

The question is, can they achieve what they have set out to do?

And should the Commission even be dabbling in these initiatives at all?

The questions is, are these the right things? Many would argue that the Commission would be better off emphasising that EU Members States invest vastly more into Computer Science and Engineering skills, than dabbling in startup competitions usually better run by the private sector.

With Europe facing a skills and entrepreneurship gap over the next few years, it would seem they have to do something.

Back in 2012 I’d been to enough tech startup conferences in Europe over the previous few years to work out which ones appeared to be most significant. Europe being the disjointed bunch of countries that it is has too many to mention. That ended up being a post about events in 2013.

Now, with 2014 already here, I figured plenty of readers would like an update. So here it is. A huge thanks to Heisenberg Media for helping me put this together. Thanks also to Conferize for their crowd-sourced list of European Tech Events in 2014 which you can find here. That is not our list, it’s theirs, but it’s pretty good. We also recommend the listing over at Lanyrd.

But, simply being listed below does NOT imply that any of these events are endorsed by or ‘partnered’ with TechCrunch, other than TechCrunch branded ones of course. This is a purely editorial list, based on our experience in Europe, the list is designed to help the European tech scene grow and get more organised. Simple.

Why is it important to do this? In the first instance, Europe is a bit of a mess. Every single country seems to have its own major conference on tech startups. And so we need a single overview of what’s going on.

But the main reason is that it’s easier for those of us in the media (hello!) to cover your company if we get to meet you at an event. And it helps if that event does not clash with another. So if we produce a list of the bigger events, the events organisers will – like several planes emerging from above the clouds and realising they are about to crash into each other – HOPEFULLY not clash with each other. It’s also MUCH easier for investors to move between conferences where there are startups to check out and entrepreneurs to meet. It’s also easier for startups to take their show on the road and present to investors or the media if the events DON’T CLASH. See? Everyone wins!

The reason the list below also includes some major events in the US and a few outside Europe is that – especially in the US – TechCrunch Staff will not be around in Europe at those times. For instance, if you want TechCrunch staff to be more likely to turn up at a conference event, don’t schedule it during our Disrupt events in San Francisco or New York or Europe. OK? Simple.

I have not included events in Asia as this is more about U.S./European event traffic. And we HAVE included some in the Middle East and Africa, as they are “near” Europe.

In this listing you will (mostly) not find developer events or hackathons or meet ups. We’d prefer to concentrate on events where startups get pitched and where investors gather. Although all of the events are good some are genuinely ‘Recommended’, or ‘Interesting’. Some are more off the beaten track than others and deserve a mention.

Here’s the list pertaining to the 2014 dates. Some events either haven’t updated their sites yet, or there’s simply no information a 2014 event yet. As they update their information, and I get told, I will update this post.

Please leave your feedback in the comments, and we will take them into consideration. Thanks!

However, this is our (well, my) editorial pick.

JANUARY
___________________________________________

Week 1
Empty

Week 2

CES, Las Vegas, Nevada, January 7-10

Week 3
Empty

Week 4

Hyberlin, Berlin, Germany, January 18 Demo (public), January 19 founders (invite only)

SIGNIFICANT: DLD, Munich, Germany, January 19-21 – Invited / Ticketed

WEF / Davos, Switzerland, January 22-25 – Invite Only (often featuring big tech giants and startups)

FEBRUARY
___________________________________________

Week 6

SIGNIFICANT: MIDEM, Cannes, France, February 1-4 – Midem Lab is a track for music startups

SIGNIFICANT: Seedcamp Week London (+ Sometimes SeedSummit at the same time), London, UK, February 3, Invite only

LIFT, Geneva, Switzerland, February 5-7

Week 7

SIGNIFICANT: The Crunchies – San Francisco, California, February 10, The Annual TechCrunch Awards – Very recommended!

Finovate – London, UK, February 11-12 – Good for Financial / banking tech startups

TechChill Baltics – February 13. Good event for Baltic startups.

Netexplo.org, Paris, France, TBA

Decoded Fashion Tech, NY Fashion Week, New York, New York, TBA

Startup Turkey, Antalya, Turkey, TBA

Week 8

London Fashion Week, London, UK, February 14-18 (big for Fashion tech startups)

Social Media Week (Multiple global cities), February 17-21

Week 9

SIGNIFICANT: Mobile World Congress, Barcelona, Spain, February 24-27

4 Years From NowFebruary 24-27, Barcelona, Spain

MARCH
___________________________________________

Week 9

SIGNIFICANT: London Web Summit, London, UK, TBA

Week 10

MENA ICT Forum – Dead Sea, Jordan, TBA

Week 10-11

CeBit, Hannover, Germany, March 10-14 – Trying hard to include startups more, though not a major focus and too B2B.

SIGNIFICANT: SXSW Interactive, Austin, Texas, March 7-16

Week 12

F.ounders NYC, New York, New York, TBA – Invite Only

Go Youth Conference – 16-17 March, “an event aiming to promote entrepreneurship and creativity” among young people, tech oriented

The Guardian Changing Media Summit, London, UK, March 18-19

FutureEverything Festival, Manchester, UK, March 27-April 1 – Digital culture, innovation

SIGNIFICANT: ArabNet, Beirut, Lebanon, TBA

GDC SF, San Francisco, California, March 17-21,

EU Digital Agenda Assembly, Athens, Greece, March 18-20

Scaling Startups – 26 & 27 March 2014 – London, UK

Economist Technology Frontiers 2014 (London, UK) 27 Mar

NACUE Startup Career Launchpad – London, March 28

APRIL
___________________________________________

Week 14

DEMO U.S., San Francisco, California, April 3

Week 15

FailCon Europe, London, UK, April 8

MiPCube, Cannes, France, April 7-10 (part of MipTV, good for tech startups around TV/entertainment/video)

LOGIN.LT, Vilnius, Lithuania, April 10-11 – Big Baltic states Conference, in English

Webexpo.net, Prague, Czech Republic, April 11-12

Week 17

Startup Day, Stockholm, Sweden – April 26 – general startup pitches but majority tech and growing bigger each year

Railsberry, Krakow, Poland, TBA – Recommended for European Rails developers

SIGNIFICANT: The Next Web, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, April 24-25

World Economic Forum on Europe, MENA and Eurasia (Istanbul, Turkey) – 27-29 Apr

Latitude 59, Tallinn, Estonia, April 28-29 – Baltics startups pitching & speakers

SIGNIFICANT:

Disrupt NYC, New York, TBA – Very Recommended

MAY
___________________________________________

Week 19

DigiTalk, Sofia, Bulgaria, May 2014

NEXT Berlin, Berlin, Germany, May 5-6 – Some startups, mostly corporates and digital marketing

Heureka, Berlin, Germany, May 6 – Startups & focused on Berlin’s ecosystem

London Big Data Week events, (crowd-sourced), London – May 5-11

Berlin Web Week, Berlin, Germany, May 6-7 – Range of events

Week 20

Engage Invest Exploit 2014, Edinburgh, Scotland, May 8

CapitalOnStage, Berlin, Germany, TBA

Decoded Fashion Tech, London, UK, May 10-14

Bacon, London, UK, May 16-17 – developer conference liked by starters.

Google Zeitgeist UK (London, UK) – 18-20 May (TBC)

Cannes Film Festival, Cannes, France, May 14-25 – Good for media startups

Week 21

Shift Split – Split, Croatia, TBA

Net Prophet, Cape Town, South Africa – TBA

Thinking Digital, Newcastle, UK, May 20-22 – Interesting

Forum SPB, St. Petersburg, Russia, May 22-24

Week 22

The D Conference, Rancho Palos Verdes, California, TBA

Digital Shoreditch – London, UK A SXSW style event, last week of May

JUNE
___________________________________________

Week 23

Startup Village – Created by Skolkovo, 2-3 Jun 2014

Kinnernet Europe, Avallon, France – June 5-8 – Israelis hanging out with Euros & others.

DEMO Europe – June 4-5, Moscow, Russia,

Red Innova, Madrid, Spain, TBA – Spanish / LATAM event

Startup 2.0, Bilbao, Spain, IS THIS STILL GOING?

PivotEast, Nairobi, Kenya, TBA, East Africa’s main mobile apps / startup pitch competition for investors

Spain Startup and Investor Summit – Madrid, Spain, TBA – In English

Week 24

SIGNIFICANT: Le Web London, London, UK, June 9-10

>Midnight Pitch Fest, Oulu, Finland, June 12-13

FoundersForum.eu, TBA – Invite Only

Startup Island, Hvar, Croatia, TBA

EU Commission Digital Agenda Assembly – TBA

Week 25

Significant: Cannes Lions 15-21 June 2014, Cannes, France – Relevant for tech companies driven by advertising, big players attend

SparkMe – June 19-20 2014. Budva, Montenegro

Startup Summit, Prague – TBA (21 June in 2013)

SIGNIFICANT: Bitspiration, Krakow, Poland, TBA

WPP Stream, Cannes, France, June 17 – Invite only

Cannes Lions, Cannes, June 15-21 – Good for media/advertising startups

ICT Spring Europe, Luxembourg, TBA

Week 26

MLove Berlin, Berlin, Germany (closer to Halle, Germany), June 25-27 – Interesting

Founders Forum Menorca Tech Talk, Menorca, Spain, TBA

D-Conf, Milan, Italy, TBA

NOAH, San Francisco, California, TBA – Interesting for late-stage startups

JULY
___________________________________________

Week 27

Tech Open Air Berlin – Berlin, Germany, July 4-5

Week 28

DLD Women, Munich, Germany, TBA

Tech4Africa Nairobi – Nairobi, Kenya, TBA

AUGUST
___________________________________________

Week 32

Young Rewired State, UK, August 4-10

Week 33

GDC Europe, Cologne, Germany, August 11 – 13 – Useful for social games developers/startups

Week 34

Rock, Paper, Startups – Rijeka, Croatia – TBA (18-19 July in 2013)

MediaEvolution.se, Malmo, Sweden, TBA – Media/Tech overlap conf.

Turing Tech Festival, Edinburgh, Scotland, TBA – Interesting

Week 35 – 36

Burning Man, Black Rock, Nevada, August 25 – Sep 1 – Lots of tech entrepreneurs now attend

SEPTEMBER
___________________________________________

Week 36

Hack Cyprus/ – Cyprus, TBA

DConstruct, Brighton, UK, TBA – “technology and culture”

Significant: IFA, Berlin, Germany, September 5 – 10 – Europe’s main consumer tech/gadget show

SIGNIFICANT: CTIA, Las Vegas, Nevada, September 9-11

Digital Derry, Northern Ireland, TBA

Week 37

SIGNIFICANT: TechCrunch Disrupt SF, San Francisco, California, TBA – Very Recommended (September 7-11, 2013)

Pirate Summit, Cologne, Germany, TBA (1st or 2nd week of September most likely) – Fun, startup event, junkyard atmosphere, good vibe

Campus Party London, London, UK, TBA – Big huge Hackathon and speakers

Startup Lisboa Demo day, Lisboa, Portugal, TBA

Week 38

Kinnernet, Israel – Invite only, mainly Israeli in focus, with some outside guests

DM Ex Co, Cologne, Germany, September 10-11 – Advertising startups / Germany

TechCrunch Italy, Rome, Italy, TBA

“Investor Harvest” – Sep 18-19 Odessa, Ukraine (by by Europe Venture Summit, invitation for European angels and LPs)

Investors AllStars, London, UK, TBA. Not a conference but an interesting gathering of European VCs and founders.

Overtheair.org, London, UK, TBA – Interesting for mobile startups

Week 39

MindTheProduct, London, UK, TBA

TechBBQ.dk, Copenhagen, Denmark, TBA

OCTOBER
___________________________________________

Week 40

The Next Web New York, New York, New York, TBA

SIGNIFICANT: Webrazzi Summit, Istanbul, Turkey, TBA. Usually 1st week of October – Recommended to download Turkey

TED Global, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, October 5-10

SIGNIFICANT: White Bull Summit, Barcelona, Spain, TBA – Oct. 6th-8th (2014) – Recommended, esp. for growth or mid-stage firms

Decoded Fashion Tech – Milan Oct 22 2014

MindTrek, Tampere, Finland, TBA

Spain Startup And Investor Summit – Madrid, Spain, TBA

Tech4Africa – Johannesburg, South Africa, TBA

Week 41

Ennovation, Poznan, Poland, TBA

WHU’s Idea-lab.org, Vallendar, Germany, campus of WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management, Germany,TBA

Week 42

IDCEE (Investor Day CEE), Kiev, Ukraine, October 16-17

Wired UK 14, London, UK, October 16-17

GigaOM Structure:Europe, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, TBA

Week 43

DLD Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv, Israel, TBA – Recommended

Venturecamp.mindthebridge.org, Milan, Italy, TBA

Week 44

TECHCRUNCH DISRUPT EUROPE AND HACKATHON TBA DATE OR WEEK NOT YET SET

SIGNIFICANT: Pioneers Festival, Vienna, Austria, 29 & 30 October – Recommended as a broad conference on science, tech and innovation

Dublin Web Summit and F.ounders, Dublin, Ireland, TBA

Stream Global 2014 (Marathon, Greece) 23-26 Oct

NOVEMBER
___________________________________________

Week 44

HowToWeb, Bucharest, Romania, TBA – Recommended to download Eastern Europe

Week 45

zz9

Explorers Conference, Lisbon, Portugal, TBA

Webit, Istanbul, Turkey, TBA – Recommend, Large trade show and exhibition featuring broadly on digital marketing, commerce and startups, in Turkey and Southern and Central Europe

Silicon Valley Comes to the UK – Nov 6-8 featuring veterans from the Valley touring London and Cambridge

Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford – Featuring veterans from the Valley at the Said Business School – (24-25 November in 2013)

Codebits – Portugal, TBA, Large hackathon style conference, not startup oriented but a pool for talent

Week 46

Noah Conference, London, UK, November 12-13 – Recommended for later stage startups, broadly European but heavily German and Israeli

Apps World, London, UK November 12-13

Global Entrepreneurship Week in Belarus – (Nov 18-21 in 2013) – Minsk, Belarus – Features startups

Slovakia Startup Awards – (22 Nov 2013)

Rise Up Summit – Cairo, Egypt – Recommended a as a major event for tech in the Middle East (Was 24-25 Nov 2013)

Global Entrepreneurship Week (various global events like Internet Week Europe)

SIME, Stockholm, Sweden, TBA

Monaco Media Forum, Monaco, TBA

SVC2UK, London, UK, TBA – Recommended

Slush, Helsinki, Finland, TBA – Recommended as the main Nordics/Scandinavia event

Startup Conference Next – Sofia, Bulgaria (November 30th 2013)

DECEMBER
___________________________________________

Week 49

RECOMMENDED – Startup AddVenture – Kiev, Ukraine, Dec 3-4 (by Europe Venture Summit)

SIME Miami – 3-4 December

Stretch, Budapest – December 5-6 – leadership and management conference for tech comps

TechCrunch Moscow 2014, Moscow, Russia, TBA

LeWeb, Paris, France, TBA – Recommended, big tech event in Europe for some time

API Days, Paris, France, TBA

Week 50
Empty

CES looms, as it frequently does, and soon we will all be awash in the deluge; the annual international carnival of gadgetry shows no sign of slowing. But beyond this yearly cycle, a longer pattern is about to reach an inflection point.

Mainstream technology is not exactly a paragon of ingenuity. The advances that trickle down to us as consumers are quite prosaic, really, compared to the high-risk world of startups (a few of them, anyway) or the churning erudition of academia and serious R&D. This lack of ingenuity manifests itself in a dozen ways, from acquisition culture to a general failure to grasp the zeitgeist, but the one I think matters the most at the moment is the tendency to advance by accretion.

Basically, it’s bullet-list syndrome. When the underlying technology doesn’t change much, one adds features so that people think the new thing is better than the old thing. Cars have always been a good example of this: a phase occurs between major changes (the seatbelt, for instance, or electronic fuel injection, or dash computers) when manufacturers compete on widgets, add-ons, luxuries, customizations — things inconsequential in themselves, but a moonroof or short-throw shifter is a useful psychological tool to make the pot look sweeter without adding any honey.

That’s what we’ve been seeing the last few years in consumer tech. Certainly there have been quantitative improvements in a few individual components, notably displays, wireless bandwidth, and processors, but beyond that our computers, phones, tablets, hi-fis, headsets, routers, coffee makers, refrigerators, webcams, and so on have remained largely the same.

Of course, one may reasonably say, that could be because of the greater amount of “innovation” being achieved in the area of software. But innovation isn’t a limited quantity that must be expended in one direction or another. Besides, Internet-connected apps and services have blown up mostly because of ubiquity, a consequence of ease of adoption, itself a result of microprocessors and flash storage reaching a certain efficiency and price.

At any rate, stagnation is occurring, which historically can be recognized by how different you are told things are. The iPhone and the Galaxy S 4 — what could be less alike, judging by the Super Bowl ads to which we will no doubt soon be subjected? Except they perform the exact same tasks, using almost identical interactions, access the same 10 or 20 major Internet services, and, in many important ways, are as physically indistinguishable as two peas in a pod.

The aspects in which we are told they differ, from pixel density to virtual assistant quality to wireless speed, are red herrings designed to draw the consumer’s attention; like a laugh track or “applause” sign, they’re signals that these, and not the innumerable similarities, are what you must consider. That they are not self-evident and you must therefore be told about them is testament to their negligibility.

These parlor tricks Apple and Nokia and Samsung are attempting to foist upon a neophilic customer base that desperately wants real magic, but which will accept sleight of hand if it’s convincing enough.

Tablets, too, are this way, and TVs, and fitness bracelets, and laptops, and gaming consoles, and so on and so forth.

This isn’t exactly a problem for consumers, since generally it means things have reached a high degree of effectiveness. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but everything is great! TVs are huge and have excellent pictures. You have coverage just about everywhere and can watch HBO shows in HD on your phone on the train. Laptops can do serious work, even cheap ones, and not just Excel and email — video editing, high quality gaming.

But when everything is great, people stop buying versions of things. And if you can’t do to the iPhone what the iPhone did to the Treo, you need to start putting bullets on lists.

Yet at some point, the list gets so long that people stop reading it, or else stop believing it. This is the inflection point I think we’re approaching. No one bought fridges that tweet whenever they’re opened, and no one buys a Galaxy S 4 because of some obscure networked dual-camera selfie stamp book, or whatever other garbage they’ve crammed into that awful thing.

At some point, things have to change in more ways than more. Sometimes less is the answer (as I’ve written perhaps too often), even within high tech: the Kindle, for instance, was (and remains) a very limited device; originally it wasn’t even better than the paperbacks it was meant to replace. And the original iPhone, let us not forget, was notoriously feature-poor, lacking rudimentary functionality found in flip phones worldwide. But both were very new in that they leveraged a powerful and promising technology to change the way people thought about what devices could be used for.

The next logical step along the path of proliferation (due to small, cheap microprocessors and memory) after devices that do a lot is devices that do too much — and after that, it’s devices that do very little. This last is the category that is making its real debut this year, in the guise of “wearables” and, more broadly, the “Internet of things.” The fundamental idea here is imbuing simple things with simple intelligence, though trifles like digital pedometers and proximity-aware dongles look for all the world like parlor tricks. There is reason to think that this trend will in fact create something truly new and interesting, even if the early results are a little precious.

Punctuated equilibrium is the rule in tech, and we haven’t seen any decisive punctuation in quite some time. Meanwhile the bland run-on sentence encompassing today’s most common consumer electronics is growing ungrammatical as the additions make less and less sense. And my guess is it will drone on for another couple years (not unlike some columns).

What will jump-start the next phase? Is it, as some suggest, the ascension of coffee mugs, toasters, and keychains to a digital sentience? Will it accommodate and embrace the past or make a clean break? Have we heard of it, or is it taking shape in the obscure skunkworks of Apple or IBM? I don’t know — and I suspect the prestidigitators at CES don’t know either.

Last year, Square debuted Stand, a piece of hardware that turns a merchant’s iPad into a card-swiping register. The idea was to provide a simple and elegant way to allow merchants to accept Square for credit card processing and swiping via their iPad. In news announced today at CES, Square is extending this ease of use to iPhone users of its card readers, via a new partnership with hardware developer Griffin Technology.

Until now, Square hasn’t debuted any accessories for its card case reader. Third-party developers have created key chains and cases for the readers, but these haven’t been part of the Square ecosystem. Square and Griffin are announcing a new Merchant case for iPhone 5s and iPhone 5, which is a protective case optimized for a Square Reader and a companion iPhone. The Merchant case, which also includes a Square Reader, is available to order for $19.99 here (current orders shipping within 2 weeks).

Square is also announcing a new initiative called Works with Square, which allows developers to build accessories for Square businesses. The inaugural partnership is the one being announced today with Griffin, and Square says it actually partnered with the hardware accessories developer to design the Merchant case to enhance both performance and convenience for merchants selling on the go with Square.

The case itself is custom-molded to secure the Square Reader when connected. A groove in the bottom of the case aligns with the Square Reader to guide a credit card to a frictionless, consistent swipe. The case is made from silicone, and aims to protect the phone from bumps and drops. Additionally, the merchant case features non-slip sides and corners so it’s easier to hold the phone and to hand over for customers’ signatures. And when merchants are not using the Square Reader, the hardware can be detached and stored in the back of the case. Aesthetics wise, the case is no beauty, but it seems to be solid and functional.

It’s unclear what percentage of Square’s merchants use the iPad vs. iPhone for readers, but it’s probably safe to assume that many merchants who are on the go (i.e a massage therapist, tutor, taxi driver) would use their iPhone over an iPad. The case provides a pretty easy way to use your iPhone for personal and professional use when accepting payments. Square decided to develop this case for iPhones, and has not yet developed any sort of external accessory or stand for the Android (although its reader does work with Android).

In terms of the Works With Square program, Square is expanding its ambitions beyond just providing point-of-sale hardware into providing accessories that are optimized for the Square experience. This could mean that the company starts partnering with the developers of receipt printers, kitchen printers, cash drawers and barcode scanners to create a more connected experience for merchants. We asked Square whether there is a revenue-share agreement with developers in this program, and did not receive an answer. But the company did say that products in the Works with Square program can use the Works with Square badge on their packaging, and in certain cases, can include Square readers as part of their packaging.

As Square prepares to potentially go public, it’s clear the company is creating an ecosystem of sellers and developers around its payments products and hardware. Square just debuted an API for the first time in December and also launched a marketplace for its merchants to be able to sell online as well as in-store. Works With Square could be another channel through which Square’s brand and readers are promoted.

Two months ago Luz Rivas walked away from her job to work full-time on her startup, DIY Girls. As the founder and executive director of the group that is teaching girls about engineering and technology, Rivas had to solve for many variables as she transitioned to her dream job. Health insurance was at the top of the list.

On October 1 open enrollment for insurance under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), or “Obamacare,” began. A study published in May predicted that the ACA would have the effect of creating 1.5 million more entrepreneurs nationwide, but how many of those will come from populations that traditionally are under-represented in the entrepreneurial world?

Rivas is almost 40, unmarried, and a freshly minted female entrepreneur who said that to her, healthcare is a “big deal.” While she said that health insurance won’t be the one thing to deter an entrepreneur, it is something that can be difficult to put to the back of your mind if you’re a woman and a Latina.

“I was concerned,” Rivas tells TechCrunch. “I think it’s important for me because my family doesn’t have a lot of money to cover me if something were to happen. I think that’s very common for some Latinas.”

Latinos have historically had one of the highest uninsured rates in the country, for example, and in some states more than 25 percent of adult women do not have health insurance.

For women entrepreneurs, healthcare is an important part of the decision to take the startup plunge — but it’s just one factor, said Shaherose Charania, CEO and Co-Founder of Women 2.0, which works to promote women in technology.

Charania said healthcare access is a huge building block to entrepreneurship, and the ACA is one step towards removing that barrier for women and minorities, but also people with pre-existing conditions. The wider availability of health insurance may not necessarily create a huge wave of change for women, she said — but it will be a positive change for everyone.

One big change the ACA makes that’s particularly pertinent to women is that one of the 10 essential health benefits every insurance plan must now cover is maternity care. Although gender and ethnic data is not available, thus far in California’s insurance exchange, health insurance applications for 777,000 people were started between October 1 and November 30; with an additional 144,146 applications the first week of December.

These plans will be available to people who make 400 percent above the poverty level or less, which is about $45,000 a year for an individual, according to Sarah Sol an information officer for the state’s insurance exchange, Covered California.

To date, startups and entrepreneurs have dealt with the health insurance issue in a few different ways. Some have purchased individual plans, which for women may not have included maternity care in the event of a pregnancy (post-Obamacare, some of these individual plans may become more expensive). Others have opted to bite the bullet and pay high monthly fees for insurance plans that will cover them. Finally, a popular and unfortunate decision for some entrepreneurs, especially those who are bootstrapping, is to simply make do without it.

“I haven’t had health insurance in quite some time. It just came down to money: money in, money out,” said Jesse Martinez, co-founder of the Latino Startup Alliance. “It’s in the back of your mind — ‘What if something happens?’ Most entrepreneurs are doing that. If you can get by without it, people will, that’s the risk that they take.”

Those interviewed by TechCrunch could not make a definitive statement as to whether the ACA would push more minorities and women to pursue entrepreneurship, but the general consensus is that removing barriers like health insurance certainly wouldn’t hurt.

Patricia Martinez founded the women’s mobile health platform Healthgauge, and believes the ACA is opening the door to more market disruption and innovation by removing the barrier of health insurance, and allowing people to become self-employed more easily.

“A large number of women and Latino entrepreneurs and small business owners are parents and or possess pre-existing conditions,” she said, noting this is in great contrast to the idea of the young, white male entrepreneur.

“The ACA is removing this barrier for working mothers, Latinos with pre-existing diseases, and giving them the opportunity to join the rest of the startup community.”

African Americans are another group underrepresented in the nation’s startup community, but with the added problems of suffering higher rates of illnesses than other groups, especially cancer. And African American entrepreneurs aren’t as likely to have access to investment capital as their white counterparts, meaning they are more likely to forgo spending on health insurance, said Jewell Sparks, CEO and Founder of Strategic Diversity Group and BiTHouse.

Thus, removing the uncertainty of health insurance via the ACA will certainly help African-American entrepreneurs, but exactly how much has yet to be ascertained.

“I can’t say that having access to health insurance will inspire more minorities to become entrepreneurs, but I can say it will make decisions regarding the maintenance of one’s health care easier,” Sparks said.

Rivas and others believe health insurance access is an important win for women, Latino and African-American entrepreneurs. But in Rivas’ case, when it comes to getting her startup going, there’s plenty else to occupy her mind.

“I have enough funding to cover DIY Girls for eight months, but if eight months comes by and I haven’t raised any money, that’s it,” she said.

[Tables via Covered California and California Department of Health Services]

Editor’s note: Daniel Doktori is an associate in the emerging companies practice at WilmerHale in New York City and the co-founder of the Harvard Law Entrepreneurship Project. Follow him on Twitter @ddoktori. 

Airbnb challenged local hotel zoning laws, Uber took on taxi licensing requirements, and Pinterest built a business around posting copyrighted images. Startup companies that simply follow the rules risk getting left behind. The right lawyer can mean the difference between pushing the envelope and breaking the law. Many startups struggle to decide whether and when to hire a lawyer and how to make the most of their in-house attorney once they do.

I asked several prominent General Counsels of tech companies (and one VC fund) about their work and about how their companies approached the decision to hire them. Here’s what they said.

 “Being general counsel is like being Tom Hagen in the Godfather – you’re a Consigliere,” the top lawyer at a New York City startup recently explained. But to achieve that kind of trust, “you need to understand where the founders are coming from – the sacrifices they had to go through to build their business.” Startup companies hire for “fit” into a company culture that celebrates and demands risk-taking – a quality not typically associated with lawyers. So when startup CEOs recruit their first in-house attorney, they look for someone who can replace “no, because,” with “yes, if.”

Why Do Startups Hire Their Own Lawyers? “Lawyers are not engineers. They don’t reliably produce products on a daily basis, but instead provide a strategic, long-term value proposition focused on smart growth and risk-management,” explained one Startup General Counsel (GC).

A typical assignment for a startup GC arises when a business idea confronts the question: how can we do this legally? The answer generally falls into one of several categories: how to protect intellectual property; how to hire, fire, and compensate employees; how to hold regular board meetings and ensure company officials honor their duties to shareholders; how to advertise in compliance with federal rules; how to enter into agreements to partner with other companies; how to maintain user privacy; how to sell things online; how to respond to government requests for user data.

GCs pride themselves on their ability to “get smart fast” on legal issues facing the company (it helps that they no longer get paid by the hour). When getting smart fast is either not smart enough or not fast enough, the general counsel acts as a savvy procurer of legal services by knowing which lawyer to hire for what and how much to pay.

As one explains, “I ask myself, ‘can we stage the legal costs?’” Another adds, “I come in with some very basic questions and I say, ‘for the love of god, don’t write me a memo. Let’s contain the legal costs to X.’ Then it’s lather, rinse, repeat. I do some more research and see if I need more from outside counsel after that.”

When Do Startups Hire Their First Lawyer? Conventional wisdom indicates that a startup’s first lawyer will have had four to 10 years of experience in a broad-based corporate practice, preferably one where the clients were themselves startup companies. Less conventional wisdom exists on the subject of when a startup company should hire that first in-house lawyer. Some startups look for a cost-benefit threshold of legal bills (about $300,000) that can be managed by bringing someone in house. Some see company size as the relevant metric, with one GC asserting that once a company has 10 employees, it should be hiring a full-time operations person to handle Chief Operating Officer duties (often times a lawyer who is not referred to as solely “general counsel”).

How do Startup General Counsels Work? At a startup company, speed counts. Driven by an ethos of “trust but verify,” many Startup GCs stress the importance of following their instincts. “You can say what you think and then go back and check. Things are moving fast, so the mostly right answer today is better than the perfect answer tomorrow.”

As a result, the single most important tool for a successful startup general counsel is a big rolodex. “Google is great. Friends are better,” quipped one GC, but Google remains first stop in the standard three step process of “Internet research,” “outreach to the legal network,” “hire outside counsel.”

As one startup lawyer puts it, “I’ve come to realize that every answer in the world is out there [on the Internet]. The decision is whether or not to spend the time finding it.” Internet research is important in priming the set of questions to ask one’s colleagues, because they have other priorities as well. “You need to pick your spots” when asking colleagues for help. One way to pick more spots is to grow your network. One General Counsel created a group of local general counsels upon being thrown into a job which seemed overwhelming at first. “I said let’s share information – you go first!” Another General Counsel joined the local State Bar Association’s corporate counsel group. “I now have buddies around town.”

A good startup general counsel has a keen grasp of what former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld termed the “known knowns,” “the known unknowns,” and the “unknown unknowns.” Generally, all litigation is farmed out. Further, a general counsel may seek insight from outside counsel in case of lack of experience, or lack of time. Sometimes, it’s a lack of stomach for the attendant risk: “We’re not taking any heavy actions without getting ‘adult supervision.’”

How do Startup General Counsel’s Interact with the CEO? Being perceived as the “no guy” ranks among a startup general counsel’s top fears. “You don’t want to be the guy at the end of the hall that just says ‘no,’ because eventually people don’t incorporate you into the conversation.” Another explains, “if you want the CEO to trust you, you need a track record of not always saying no.” Some general counsels have even eliminated “no” from their vocabulary. “It’s not the GC’s place to say no. It’s the GC’s place to expound on the risk and if there is something that is super risky, make that clear, but leave the call to the CEO.” A problem-solving stance and a deep understanding of the company’s product help GCs avoid unnecessary nos.

More than avoiding trouble, some GCs see their understanding of public rules and perceptions as an opportunity to lead. One GC explained that he filters his own legal advice through the lens of the customer: “If you’re reading [the customer] correctly,” and you have an internal reputation for doing so, your legal advice, whether restrictive or progressive, “will be an easy sell.”

This article was developed through a series of interviews generously granted by the following general counsels: Sarah Reed, Charles River Ventures; Brian Chase, Foursquare; David Pashman, Meetup; John Geschke, Zendesk; Sarah Feingold, Etsy; Doug Hicks, AVOS Systems; Jared Cohen, Kickstarter. 

[Top image: Flickr]

Google apparently cares more about giving the best search results than punishing spammers, as it’s returning lyrics site Rap Genius to its high rankings for searches after it was exiled for SEO spam 10 days ago. What looked like a death sentence for Rap Genius’ traffic has turned into a slap on the wrist. Today Rap Genius detailed what it did wrong, and how it ditched the spammy links to get back in Google’s good graces.

Previously on “Rap Genius’ SEO blunders”, the startup had raised $15 million from Andreessen Horowitz to annotate the web. It’s site hosts lyrics, religious texts, legal documents, poems, and news and allows users to add explanations of what they mean. The Rap Genius founders are known as braggadocious rabble-rousers, and they showed off their ridiculousness on stage in an interview with me at TechCrunch Disrupt New York embedd below. There they discussed doing study drugs like Adderall while naked to make sure the stayed home and focused on building the site.

Rap Genius steadly rose to the top of many search result pages thanks to links from bloggers and being venture funded so it doesn’t have to show ads like the aggressive pop-ups and ringtone scams that pollute competing lyrics sites like AZlyrics and MetroLyrics.

But in a sketchy failed attempt at growth hacking, Rap Genius started the “Rap Genius Blog Affiliate” program where it would promote anyone’s blog post through social media in exchange for the blogger inserting sets of links to Rap Genius lyrics into their posts. For example, it asked email filtering startup founder John Marbach to add links to Rap Genius pages for all of Justin Bieber’s new songs in hopes of scamming its way to the top of searches for Bieber lyrics.

The problem is that Google prohibits sites from gaming its search engine ranking algorithm by having links to them added to unrelated web pages and blog posts — which is exactly what Rap Genius was doing. Marbach published the instructions Rap Genius had sent him, which tipped off  Google’s search spam czar Matt Cutts who said his team would investigate.

Despite an apology from Rap Genius, we detailed how Google destroyed Rap Genius’ search engine result page rankings, burying them on the fifth or sixth page of results for lyric searches and even searches for “Rap Genius” where they used to rank high. The punishment dealt out on Christmas had a devastating impact on Rap Genius’ traffic since a signficant amount of it comes from Google searches. Quantcast says Rap Genius fell from around 700,000 uniques a day to around 100,000.

At the time, Rap Genius told TechCrunch “We are working with Google right now to resolve this….We’re working on it as fast as we can, and expect to be back on Google very soon.”

Negotiations appear to have panned out well, as today Rap Genius announced “Rap Genius is back on Google. It takes a few days for things to return to normal, but we’re officially back! First of all, we owe a big thanks to Google for being fair and transparent and allowing us back onto their results pages.”

In its lengthy blog post, Rap Genius explains how it initially begged music bloggers to link to it when appropriate. But then the founders Mahbod Moghadam, Tom Lehman, and Ilan Zechory admit “We overstepped, and we deserved to get smacked”, in reference to the shady Blog Affiliate program. “We apologize to Google and our fans for being such morons”, they wrote, showing they sure don’t come from the Snapchat ”never say sorry” school of crisis management.

Rap Genius goes on to detail how it got back on Google. The search engine had handed down a “manual action” where it directly manipulated search results to push down Rap Genius URLs as punishment. The reason was for “Unnatural links to your site” that Google explains as “a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to your site.”

To fix this, Rap Genius had to either have all the spammy links removed, tagged as “nofollow”, or disavowed. But there were hundreds of thousands of these links scattered around the web. So Rap Genius contacted the webmasters it knew, and built a scraper to find the rest of the links. Those it couldn’t have removed or tagged “nofollow” were fed into Google’s Disavow tool that prevents them from influencing search result rankings.

In a move that demonstrates why a bunch of rowdy Yale guys prone to telling tech luminaries like Mark Zuckerberg to fellate them got $15 million from Andreessen, Rap Genius detailed how it built a highly efficient, parellelized scraper. With tools like Nokogiri, Typhoeus, Heroku, and some serious hacking, it created a scraper that found all the links in just 15 minutes. The code snippets the technical details included in the post are surely an attempt to raise Rap Genius’ status amongst engineers it might try to hire.

In the end, it fetched over 177,000 URLs to find and fix or remove spammy links to its site. And apparently that was enough to get Google to restore their SEO standing.

Of course, it likely didn’t hurt that Rap Genius is funded by Andreessen Horowitz, one of the most powerful and well-connected venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. A bootstrapped company without such advantages might not have gotten off as easy, which some could construe as Google playing favorites.

We’ll check back to see whether Rap Genius regains all of its SEO juice, or has any lingering penalty, but Rap Genius’ site is now the top result for searches of “rap genius”, and it’s also again appearing amongst the top results for searches like “Kanye West Blood On The Leaves Lyrics”. Rap Genius is also planning to try to ween itself off such dependence on Google with the release an iOS app next week.

In the end, Google is putting its users first. Though Rap Genius’ tactics may have been deplorable, they provide a much better lyrics site experience than most of their competitors. Sites like AZlyrics and Metrolyrics are covered with scammy ads for $9.99 a month ringtone subscriptions, and are suspected of also engaging in dubious SEO practices. That’s not a music player in that screenpic of AZLyrics above, it’s a deceptive link to another site.

Meanwhile, Rap Genius provides accurate lyrics as well as explanations of what lyrics mean so you can decode obscure metaphors. It also provides SoundCloud embeds so you can hear songs, links to YouTube and Spotify, and even notes about where a song’s samples come from.

Google could have kept Rap Genius in a search ranking dungeon, but it would have just pushed its users to visit worse sites, and that just doesn’t jive with Google’s mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

For more on the absurdity of Rap Genius, check out:

When Growth Hacking Goes Bad

Google Destroys Rap Genius’ Search Rankings As Punishment For SEO Spam

Disrupt On-Stage Video: Rap Genius’ Co-Founder Apologizes To Zuck (Then Says They’ll Be Bigger Than Facebook)

Video Interview: Ben Horowitz And The Founders Explain Why A16Z Put $15M Into Rap Genius

Rap Genius Is Getting Into Breaking News Analysis With News Genius

Rap Genius Reveals One Of Its Business Models Will Be ‘Enterprise Genius’ Collaborative Tool

[Image Credit: Danny Ghitis]

Apple has acquired the one-man photo technology startup SnappyLabs, maker of SnappyCam, sources tell me. [Update 1/5/2014 9:15am PST: Apple confirms the acquisition.] The startup was founded and run solely by John Papandriopoulos, an electrical engineering PhD from the University Of Melbourne who invented a way to make the iPhone’s camera take full-resolution photos at 20 to 30 frames per second — significantly faster than Apple’s native iPhone camera.

I first noticed something was up when we got tipped off that SnappyCam had disappeared from the App Store and all of SnappyLabs‘ websites went blank. Sources have since affirmed that the company was acquired by Apple, and that there was also acquisition interest “from most of the usual players”, meaning other tech giants. I don’t have details on the terms of the deal, and I’m awaiting a response from Apple, which has not confirmed the acquisition.

[Update 1/4/2014 5pm PST: Papandriopoulos’ girlfriend posted a link to this story on Facebook congratulating the founder, effectively confirming the acquisition. We previously had a screenshot of it here but it wasn’t shared publicly so we’ve taken it down at her request.]

[Update 1/5/2014 9:15am PST: Apple has confirmed my report that it’s acquired SnappyLabs. In a statement to Re/code, Apple said “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.”]

Based on Papandriopoulos’ scientific breakthroughs in photography technology, it’s not hard to see why Apple would want to bring him in to help improve their cameras. The stragic acquisition of an extremely lean, hard technology-focused team (of one) fits with Apple’s MO. It typically buys smaller teams to work on specific products rather than buying big staffs and trying to blend them in across the company.

Papandriopoulos built his burst-mode photo technology into SnappyCam, which he sold in the Apple App Store for $1. After I profiled the app in July, Papandriopoulos told me SnappyCam jumped to #1 on the paid app chart in nine countries. Sales of the app let him run SnappyLabs without big funding from venture capital firms.

Back in July, Papandriopoulos told me he had a eureka moment in “discrete cosine transform JPG science” and had essentially reinvented the JPG image format. In a blog post, now taken down, the SnappyLabs founder explained

“First we studied the fast discrete cosine transform (DCT) algorithms…We then extended some of that research to create a new algorithm that’s a good fit for the ARM NEON SIMD co-processor instruction set architecture. The final implementation comprises nearly 10,000 lines of hand-tuned assembly code, and over 20,000 lines of low-level C code. (In comparison, the SnappyCam app comprises almost 50,000 lines of Objective C code.)

JPEG compression comprises two parts: the DCT (above), and a lossless Huffman compression stage that forms a compact JPEG file. Having developed a blazing fast DCT implementation, Huffman then became a bottleneck. We innovated on that portion with tight hand-tuned assembly code that leverages special features of the ARM processor instruction set to make it as fast as possible.”

By bringing Papandriopoulos in-house, Apple could build this technology and more into its iPhone, iPad, Mac, and MacBook cameras. Photography is a core use for smartphones, and offering high-resolution, rapid-fire burst mode shooting could become a selling point for iPhones over competing phones.

And in case you were wondering if Papandriopoulos will be a good fit at Apple, he once dressed as an iPhone at a San Francisco parade.

For more on SnappyLabs, read my profile of the startup