Category: Tech news

BlackBerry continues its rebirth with the be-keyboarded Q10. Thumb jockeys, rejoice.

Gengo, an increasingly popular online translation service that uses a network of more than 7,500 pre-screened and rated translators to provide high-quality translations in 33 languages, announced that it has raised a $12 million funding round. The round was led by Intel Capital, with participation from returning investors, including Atomico, Iris Capital, Infocomm, NTT-IP and Saudi Telecom Ventures. The service previously raised a total of $6.8 million, including a $5.25 million series A round led by Atomico and Dave McClure’s 500 Startups. McClure is also a Gengo board member.

The fact that a number of telecom companies are part of this round, Gengo’s CEO and founder Robert Laing told me in an email earlier today, ”shows how telecoms companies ‘get’ the global opportunity of Gengo.”

“The Gengo team is excited about working with investors from Asia, the USA, Europe, and the Middle East, led by Intel Capital, because of their global experience and track record helping entrepreneurs,” Laing writes in today’s announcement.

Added Matthew Romaine, CTO and co-founder of Gengo: “There’s a significant technology component to human translation at scale, so it’s great to work with a firm with the pedigree of Intel Capital.”

Currently, Japan and the U.S. account for about 40 percent of Gengo’s revenue each. The company currently has a staff of 30 in its Tokyo office and nine employees in San Mateo.

According to Laing, the company has been growing rapidly. Gengo’s translators have already translated more texts in 2013 than they did during 2012. Part of this growth, of course, is due to the recent partnership with Google’s YouTube, which has now made Gengo one of its two integrated paid translation services, as well as a recent partnership with 3Play Media.

Besides video, Laing says, Gengo is also seeing a huge volume of translations from travel and e-commerce sites, as well as from a number of “leading e-commerce, online travel, and community portals are powered by its translation platform.”

The Gengo team plans to use this new round of funding to accelerate its global expansion and improve both its translation platform and increase the speed of the translation process.

DailyWorth, an online community for financially minded women, is adding $1 million to their existing Series A round of funding. The money comes sixteen months after DailyWorth raised $2 million in their Series A last January.

This additional influx of investments was led by DFJ Gotham, while additional investors include Gabriel Investments, 500 Startups, Robinhood Ventures, Investors’ Circle, Bullet Time Ventures, Patient Capital Collaborative, Joanne Wilson, Rebecca Saeger, Carol Chow, Diego Canoso, and Mark Censits.

The money raised will be used for “growth and key hires” as DailyWorth continues to expand their readership.

DailyWorth was founded in 2009 as a daily email newsletter geared towards women, offering tips and advice on money management and investment. Their newsletter quickly amassed more than 55,000 subscribers within two years of launch, and in January last year that number ballooned to 250,000 subscribers. DailyWorth estimates that their site will hit two to three million monthly readers by the end of 2013.

DailyWorth’s website is populated with editorial content from their writing staff, which is helmed by MP Dunleavey, a former contributor and columnist for Money Magazine and the New York Times. In addition to their editorial content, DailyWorth has begun to offer an assortment of online courses called “Money Clarity”, which provides a four week program with YouTube videos and online workbooks that teach their registrants how to better manage their money.

DailyWorth also recently scored partnerships with Charles Schwab, Fidelity, and Nestwise, in addition to their preexisting partnerships with ING and H&R Block.

When Kera launched out of Toronto last year, its goal was to “teach the world how to use software.” Alas, Kera has taught its last lesson.

In a farewell post on its blog, the company has announced that they’ll be shuttering their products in one month.

For the unfamiliar, Kera provided tools that allowed web app developers to quickly build interactive voice/text tutorials that directly integrate into their apps. With just a bit of clever JavaScript dropped in place, you could walk new users through your product step-by-step from within the product itself — this, as opposed to, say, a tutorial video.

Here’s the thing: developers are, by and large, a proud bunch. If a dev recognizes that their product is so complicated that they need to hold the user’s hand through every step of the process, they (hopefully) rethink their design rather than search out a bandaid.

Just three weeks ago, the company pivoted when they realized that “people didn’t like to be guided the way [Kera] wanted to guide them,” with over 50 percent of users immediately dismissing the tutorial overlay. In place of the tutorial overlay, they built a pre-packaged “Get Started Widget” that gave users “missions” to complete to properly learn a product. Though it only had a few weeks worth of runway, this widget didn’t seem to be gaining traction, and the company was quickly running out of money.

While the team is considering open-sourcing or selling the tech if any interested parties come along, their current plan is to just shut it down. Though they’re announcing the shutdown now, they plan to leave the servers up until May 18th to give developers time to remove it from their applications.

Meanwhile, the company’s original three founders say they’re “hard at work cooking something special.” Best of luck, guys!

I love that POTUS has invited these scholars here and treating them like NCAA Champs!!!—
LeVar Burton (@levarburton) April 22, 2013

Some of the nation’s young brainiacs were honored today at the annual White House Science Fair. Every spring, the White House invites children to show off life-changing innovations that have mostly been constructed in MacGyver-like fashion from commercially available materials. Even though I cover this story every year, it’s hard not to be inspired by brilliant young kids motivated to tackle the world’s problems. “Let me just say in my official capacity as president, this stuff is really cool,” said President Obama.

We’ve rounded up three awesome and inspiring projects below:

1. A 3D-Printed, Mind-Controlled Prosthetic – 17-year-old Easton LaChappelle has created a mind-controlled prosthetic arm for the low price of $250, thanks to parts cheaply replicated from a 3D printer. In the Vine below, you can see the young lad using a commercial-grade, brain-wave-reading device, the Neurosky, to shake the robotic arm. LaChappelle explained to me that the prosthesis is controlled through a sophisticated system of blinks and thoughts. The Neurosky can measure different levels of concentration, as well as eye blinks. Two eye blinks, for instance, prime the arm for contraction, and the level of concentration controls the degree of contraction. The software is smart enough to learn a user’s daily patterns and make certain movements easier at specific times, such as eating lunch around noon.

2. Cancer Detection – Google Global Science Fair Winner, 17-year-old Brittany Wenger, found a low-cost way to radically increase early cancer detection. Wenger’s project utilizes a computer process modeled after the human brain, a neural network, to boost the accuracy of detecting cancer in skin samples to 99 percent, which could help doctors save lives through early treatment. The software lives in the cloud, so the more doctors feed data into it, the more accurate it gets.

“I came across artificial intelligence and was just enthralled. I went home the next day and bought a programming book and decided that was what I was going to teach myself to do,” she said. Since seventh-grade, this ambitious young scientist taught herself high-level artificial intelligence, mainly through the web and the help of available teachers.

3. Tactile sound – Eighth-grade Californian Jonah Kohn developed a tactile-sound device to help the hearing impaired enjoy music. Sound can actually travel through vibrations in the skin, which Kohn discovered when he decided to bite down on his electric guitar (remember what is was like to be young and experimental?). The discovery inspired Kohn to see if the same experience could aid the hearing impaired. “They were able to hum the melody of a song, even if they can’t hear it,” he told Bill Nye at the White House. Kohn said his project is related to a study that found a 93 percent increase in self-rated music quality of his hearing-impaired participants.

Many of the participants showed extraordinary fortitude and commitment to science. Sixteen-year-old Jack Andraka, who also developed a more accurate cancer-detection system, requested access to academic labs 99 times before he was granted permission. “I don’t know what you guys were doing in high school; that’s what Jack’s doing. Certainly better than I was doing in high school,” joked the president.

Obama also announced a new technology industry mentoring initiative with AmeriCorps, the U.S. 2020, where companies, such as Cisco, pledge that 20 percent of the workforce will spend at least 20 hours mentoring or teaching by the year 2020.

It’s been a crazy and disheartening week in the news. It’s good to be reminded that for as many setbacks as we face, the next generation is striving to make the world an even better place.

[Image: White House]

When Twitter #Music launched last week, it wasn’t a surprise at all to those following tech stories, since rumors had been kicking up about its existence for months. However, it was a surprise to the Frances Cone Band, which is popping up in the “emerging artists” section of the app.

In a world where we focus so much on “big stars,” especially ones with millions of followers on Twitter, it’s important to remember that these platforms can make all the difference for those who are just getting started and are waiting and hoping to be discovered.

I spoke with their lead singer, Frances Cone, who didn’t get a chance to play with the app before it was launched. She wasn’t a big Twitter user before, but has been pleasantly surprised thus far: “I was a pretty light Twitter user before the music app because I felt like it should be reserved for jokes. Only the best jokes. Or original feelings, of which there are few.”

She says that “Twitter and I are in love” when discussing the new experience, giving us some insight into what it’s like to start getting tweets, and more importantly new listeners, from a group of people that have never heard of you before:

It’s been really, really great. I wasn’t sure how to engage potential followers/fans and they basically just perfectly did it for me… like they set up a meet and greet and I get to hug all of these music lovers.

The “meet and greet” aspect is an interesting one, as we knew that Twitter could be a massive distribution platform if some order was brought to it. Twitter #Music pulls in all of the tweets that include links to music that people are listening to, and then drops them into pages in the app that show trending information in order to get people engaged. More than likely, you’re not going to catch every song that the people you follow are listening to, so this is a way to trap all of that to go back to at any time.

The mix of new fans and the devastating news out of Boston gave Cone mixed emotions, but reminded her that people can rely on music to get through tough times:

It’s been so nice to be able to engage with actual people all over the world. It started happening simultaneously to the Boston news coverage on Thursday night and my Twitter feed was ridiculous. These very, very heavy things were occurring and then someone on the other side of the world would post about “Rattles Your Heart” and it made me feel so many things.

Until the Twitter #Music launch, Cone tells me that the band has been pretty active on Facebook and Instagram, but that Twitter has more of an advantage since the app now links to actual songs.

It will be interesting to see what other experiences bands and artists have, as more people start discovering their music, following them and interacting with them over Twitter. It could help them make money, as well. Full songs are only available to Rdio or Spotify account holders, so those listens make their way back to the wallets of artists. For iTunes, a 30-second preview is given, and someone can pay for the full track if they like.

This is distribution at its best, and Twitter was smart to jump on all of the data flowing through its network when it did. The next “YouTube” star could actually be a “Twitter” star, skipping YouTube altogether.

Will Twitter be able to provide actual data other than followers to these artists and labels, though? The total number of plays that a song gets is data that will be as important as the distribution that Twitter is providing, which could be a huge potential for revenue in the future. The music industry is a messy one, to say the least, so Twitter has a lot of work ahead of it.

In the surrounding hills of Silicon Valley stands the impressive Tah.Mah.Lah, the “Greenest house in America.” The home is also the brainchild and abode of Foundation Capital partner and longtime VC Paul Holland and his wife, Linda Yates. We were lucky enough to be invited into their home to hear about why and how they built the most sustainable home in the country.

So what makes the “Greenest” house in America? First, every aspect of the house, whose name draws origins from the Native American Ohlone word for puma or mountain lion, has been built to have minimal environmental impact. Second, the house has the highest LEED certification, which is the defacto third-party verification of green buildings.

Another interesting factoid from Holland and Yates — there are seven green energy and sustainable living startups represented in the project: CalStar Products (building materials), Control 4 (home automation and energy management), Serious Materials (building materials), Silver Spring Networks (energy), Sun Run (solar), Tigo (solar) and Xicato (lighting). And many of these startups are funded by Foundation Capital.

Happy Earth Day and check out the video above for an in-depth tour of the house with Holland and Yates.

The Nest thermostat has already gone through a hardware revision or two and found its way onto plenty of physical and virtual store shelves, but parent company Nest Labs is eager to get it into even more households in short order.

The Palo Alto company has just announced that it has teamed up with energy providers from across the country that will see new climate-control services (not to mention some rebates) go live for customers in a handful of markets.

So far, the list of partners includes National Grid, NRG Energy, NRG subsidiaries Reliant and Green Mountain Energy, Austin Energy and Southern California Edison. You can probably guess what markets those last two serve. These newly forged partnerships could see adoption of the household gadget surge — customers who ink deals with National Grid, for instance, can claim a $100 rebate to help defray the costs of a Nest thermostat.

While the others don’t offer much in the way of actual cash back, Nest’s tie-ups emphasize the long-term value of having a Nest over a run-of-the-mill thermostat. The way the folks at Nest look at it, their gadget is only going to become more useful as the days get longer and warmer, and those new services I mentioned earlier should only help matters when it comes to the cost-conscious.

First up is Nest’s so-called Rush Hour Rewards, which are meant to reduce the load on already-strained power stations once it starts getting really hot outside. Rather than cranking the temperature down low and leaving it there as a hapless human might, the Nest instead gets a feel for the sorts of climates its users prefer and will sporadically turn down the temperature to keep things within that preferred range. By occasionally introducing blasts of cold air instead of just leaving things to run at full blast, the Nest can keep your house at about the same temperature as before without much of a corresponding bump on the bill.

Also part of the package is what Nest calls “seasonal savings,” which will see the smart thermostat measure user temperature preferences over the course of the year and make minor modifications over the course of a few weeks. The idea is to reduce a user’s heating bill by carefully acclimating them to a new, more cost-efficient temperature scheme without the residents even noticing.

For now, only customers who select certain plans with those power companies can use these new services, but I very much doubt that team Nest is content to leave things as they are. These sorts of deals will only serve to raise the company’s profile, and buy-in from power partners is a big deal for Nest especially as the company’s rivals have moved to make their own wares smarter. Consider Honeywell: it already filed a lawsuit against Nest last year for supposed acts of copyright infringement, an allegation that Nest Labs vigorously disagrees with. Meanwhile, the conglomerate is gearing up to release a rather handsome smart thermostat of its own, so deals like these could help Nest stay a step ahead of the pack.

Netflix released its first-quarter earnings report today, and the company saw another period of strong growth, adding more than 3 million streaming members, bringing its total to 36 million. Domestically, Netflix saw 2 million new streaming members, which was relatively equal compared to last quarter and up from 1.74 million in Q1 last year.

Helping Netflix along in its rebound after the split of its business, which caused a big customer backlash, has been the company’s focus on original programming, beginning with its first “major” TV series, House of Cards. Netflix just recently launched its second original series, Hemlock Grove, and on May 25th will feature the much-anticipated debut of Arrested Development. However, the question has been whether or not Netflix’s new shows would significantly add to its member total — or whether people would sign up for a month to get the shows for free and then cancel.

In its letter to shareholders today, Netflix said that in spite of the fact that “some investors were worried that the House of Cards fans would take advantage of its free trial, watch the show and then cancel,” there was, in fact, very little “free-trial gaming” as the company calls it — fewer than 8,000 people signed up to watch it for free and then cancelled — out of what the company says were “millions of free trials in the quarter.”

Herein, Netflix is just talking about the free trial portion of its service, whereas the other question has been whether or not the new members the company has been able to attract through House of Cards would actually stick around. And it seems that, from its 2 million new members, it was actually able to retain those new customers.

“The launch of House of Cards provided a halo effect on our entire service and spoke to the quality of experience members can expect from Netflix,” the executives said in their letter to shareholders this afternoon. In fact, the good news for Netflix is that, so far, Hemlock Grove seems to be attracting the same amount of attention, if not more than House of Cards.

“Hemlock Grove was viewed by more members globally in its first weekend than was House of Cards and has been a particular hit among young adults,” the company said in its letter. However, on the other hand, that goodwill may be short-lived. According to reviews from Metacritic, people aren’t exactly loving Hemlock Grove — in fact most seem to think it’s awful. The AV Club goes so far as to give Hemlock an “F.” So there’s that.

That could change, after all. The show hasn’t been out very long. Netflix just made all 13 episodes available three days ago. At the same time, it wouldn’t be surprising if Netflix were to go through a little bit of a hangover after House of Cards — or to learn that it has dedicated more capital, advertising, etc. to its first big splash (House of Cards) and its much-anticipated comedy (Arrested Development) than Hemlock. However, that’s just speculation at this point and only time will tell.

Netflix reported positive first-quarter numbers, including revenues of $1.02 billion during the first three months of the year. The company also announced that it added 2 million domestic in the quarter, bringing the total number of subscribers to 29.2 million.

The results represent a positive response to Kevin Spacey-led political thriller House of Cards, which just happens to be the first major release in Netflix’s original programming slate this year. And they’re driving investors to jump on the stock in after-hours trading, driving shares up nearly 20 percent.

Netflix announced net additions of 2.03 million subscribers in the U.S. compared to 2.05 million in the fourth quarter — which historically is its strongest period of subscriber growth — and 1.74 million in last year’s first quarter. As a result, it said that it’s growing its subscriber base and revenues faster than its content spend in the streaming business. It reported that its domestic streaming contribution margin increased to 20.6 percent in the quarter, which was up 140 basis points from the previous quarter.

Analysts estimated that the company would report about $1 billion in revenue, as well as earnings of 18 cents a share. But the number everyone is looking at is Netflix’s subscriber number, which Wall Street forecast would be around 29 million streaming subscribers in the U.S.

Netflix is betting big on the release of exclusive shows like House of Cards as a way to differentiate its service from the syndicated content that it’s licensed from existing TV networks. It’s investing hundreds of millions of dollars in these series, and hoping that investment will be paid back with greater subscriber interest.

While Netflix had released its first original show, the Steve Van Zandt-led Norwegian mob comedy Lillyhammer last year, this quarter marks the introduction of House of Cards. That series debuted to strong reviews and a huge marketing push by Netflix, which was hoping to capitalize on the acting of Kevin Spacey, producer David Fincher, and the popularity of the original British miniseries of the same name.

So far, that strategy appears to be working, as House of Cards very quickly became Netflix’ most-watched program. More importantly, more subscribers than expected signed up for the service since the launch of the new series. In its analyst comments, Netflix noted:

“Some investors worried that the House of Cards fans would take advantage of our free trial, watch the show, and then cancel. However, there was very little free-trial gaming – less than 8,000 people did this – out of millions of free trials in the quarter.”

That’s a great response to House of Cards — but Netflix has even more exclusive content in its pipeline. Netflix just introduced Hemlock Grove, a 13-part horror series from Hostel director Eli Roth. Next month, there’s the return of offbeat comedy Arrested Development, which will be available only on Netflix. Later, Weeds creator Jenji Kohan’s new series Orange Is The New Black will also be released.

In addition to its domestic streaming numbers, Netflix reported 1 million new subscribers in its international business, growing that number to 7.1 million total. That compares to 1.8 million international subscribers added during the holiday quarter, and 1.2 million a year previous. While those numbers might seem low compared to previous quarters, Netflix said it benefitted from launches in new markets in earlier quarters. The company plans to continue its expansion overseas, with a new international market to be added in the second half of the year.

To no one’s surprise, Netflix DVD membership continued to decline, but just modestly. The total DVD subscriber base fell by about 250,000 users, to 8 million total. But contribution profit continued to hold strong at $113 million, despite higher usage in the quarter and a small USPS price increase.

Netflix reported that its first-quarter net income was $3 million, or 5 cents a share, but that included a $16 million loss on the extinguishment of debt related to refinancing of a loan from February. Without that, the company would have reported net income of $19 million, or 31 cents per share, well above guidance.

Going into the second quarter, Netflix is forecasting slower growth in streaming subscribers — most likely due to Q2 seasonality — to end the quarter with between 29.40 and 30.05 million subscribers. That will amount to about $665 million to $673 million in U.S. subscriber revenue and between $139 million and $149 million in contribution profit. All in all, it expects earnings between $14 million and $29 million during the second quarter, or 23 to 48 cents per share.

We often give short shrift to hardware at Disrupt mostly because investors are afraid to look at companies that can’t pivot without trashing 30 days of inventory. No longer. Limor Fried AKA Ladyada will join me on stage to talk about what it takes to build a profitable, cool, and amazingly popular hardware company out of a dorm room.

Fried, who runs Adafruit Industries, founded her DIY electronics company after friends began pestering her to build them cool electronics kits. The company now fills 600 orders a day and sells 1,302 items in a catalog that includes Arduino boards, Raspberry Pis, and DIY coolness for the geek set. They’re making $15 million per year in revenue with no VC backing.

We’ll chat about what it takes to build a hardware startup, what it takes to run a successful manufacturing business in the heart of Manhattan,

She joins our list of Disrupt NY speakers that currently includes Bill Gurley, Chamath Palihapitiya, John Donahoe, Roelof Botha, Ron Conway and David Lee, with more to be announced.

Tickets are available here.

Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here [email protected].

---

Limor Fried
Adafruit Industries

Adafruit was founded in 2005 by MIT engineer, Limor “Ladyada” Fried. Her goal was to create the best place online for learning electronics and making the best designed products for makers of all ages and skill levels. Over the last 6 years Adafruit has grown to over 45 employees in the heart of NYC. Adafruit has expanded offerings to include tools, equipment and electronics that Limor personally selects, tests and approves before going in to the Adafruit store.

Fried was the first female engineer on the cover of WIRED magazine and was recently awarded Entrepreneur magazine’s Entrepreneur of the year.

Do you target kids with cheap ads or more expensive adults? Nanigans has just raised a $5.85 million “Series A.1″ from Avalon Ventures to build SaaS technology that predicts which audiences earn advertisers more money. With revenue up 6x in 18 months, Nanigans hopes to keep up with Facebook’s progress by pouring its funding into R&D. It’s already discovered a surprising trick to supercharging ROI.

In advertising, there are three numbers that really matter. Cost per acquisition (CPA) – how much you pay for a customer; lifetime value (LTV) – how much you earn off that customer; and return on investment (ROI) – how much higher your LTV is than your CPA. Most advertisers don’t have the technology or data to accurately predict LTV, so they aim to get the lowest CPA so a smaller LTV will still produce ROI.

But Nanigans has found that doesn’t actually work so well, and it’s building the technology to prove it. Founded in 2010, the company had previously raised just $3 million in a mid-2011 Series A to build its licensable self-serve tool for buying better Facebook ads in exchange for monthly or yearly fees, or a percentage of spend. The tool lets businesses buy, intelligently target, and A/B test huge Facebook ad campaigns much more efficiently than Facebook’s basic tools. Nanigans’ focus on technology and delivering lifetime value over smaller immediate returns has been a hit with social game and e-commerce game companies.

Now it believes it’s No. 1 or at least in the top 3 Facebook adtech companies in terms of revenue, which grew 6X since its last funding round. It now boasts customers, including eBay, Fab.com, Rue La La, Zynga, GSN, Wooga, Kixeye and Kabam. It’s now running hundreds of millions of dollars of Facebook ad spend per year, and has grown from 15 employees to more than 100 in just a year with offices in San Francisco, New York, Boston and London.

The Nanigans secret sauce is its predictive modeling engine, which can both deduce and track how much a customer spends. This lets it determine that while it might cost an e-commerce company 3x as much to acquire a 25-year old Australian female, she’ll earn them 5x as much as a 15-year old Australian male. An advertiser may have to invest more up front, but in the long-term they’ll be richer for it. 

Nanigans CEO Ric Calvillo (caricatured above)  tells me “Online performance advertising is broken for the most part, and ripe for disruption. Most campaigns for online conversion are not well-optimized. Most marketers optimize for the lowest cost something — cost per click, cost per thousand impressions, cost per action — but when you optimize for the cheapest cohorts you’re almost by definition not optimizing for ROI.”

What Nanigans has found is that especially in gaming and e-commerce, “age is a huge factor. If you chart age and cost and revenue, younger age groups are cheaper on a CPA basis, but they generate far less revenue proportionally. About a year ago we realized this. The older, more expensive audiences always have higher ROI.” The theory for why is that everyone is in a mad rush to get young, hip users. The wave of the future, right? Wrong. These kids just don’t have disposable income to spend anytime soon.

So why don’t other adtech companies and agencies know this? Because their clients are afraid to reveal their confidential revenue numbers. Calvillo tells me “software needs revenue on every user to be able to do the predictions. If you’re using a third-party service you probably don’t want to share your revenue details. That’s why our SaaS platform enables this optimization.” Since companies license Nanigans and use it privately in-house, they don’t have to share their revenue stats with anyone. “We can get customers to trust us and optimize for ROI,” Calvillo concludes.

Making this predictive modeling tech even more powerful is the big plan for Nanigans’ new Series A.1 (bridge between A and B) funding from previous investor Avalon Ventures. It will hire more PhD data scientists to aid with research and development of the predictive modeling algorithms. Facebook is also rapidly releasing new ad formats, targeting schemes, mobile, and Facebook Exchange retargeting. Nanigans needs a big R&D budget to build intuitive user interfaces on top of Facebook’s Ads APIs. Otherwise it risks getting beat by competitors like Salesforce’s Buddy Media, or clients going straight to Facebook’s native tools. Nanigans also plans to concentrate on more verticals, including retail, travel and other online conversion businesses, plus do some global expansion with a new office in Singapore.

With Calvillo on the phone and Facebook’s earnings coming up next week, I figured I’d ask his opinion on the state of Facebook ads. Nanigans now sees over a third of ad spend on its platform targeting mobile users. Calvillo and I agree that mobile should account for about 30 percent of Facebook’s total ad revenue in Q1, up from 23 percent in Q4 2012. He says a lot of mobile ad spend is coming from Facebook’s new app install ads as well as from brands, but that there hasn’t been as much spend from e-commerce or direct response advertisers just yet. This leaves Facebook a lot of upside left to capture. Calvillo also notes that he thinks Facebook Exchange is going well, but the departure of its product director Antonio Garcia-Martinez was a big loss for the social network.

As for the future of ads, there’s been a lot of hype about offline purchase data providers partnering with Facebook. I personally believe that with time, this data will reveal the heavy impact of online ads on offline purchases, and make web properties and apps that see a lot of eyeballs worth a lot more in the long term. Calvillo disagrees though, saying “Attributing an in-store conversion to an individual ad is a pretty difficult, complicated thing to do. If the majority of online conversion ad spend is not well optimized, it’s too early to be adding offline complexities.

In the meantime, Nanigans will keep chugging away at making online ads earn their owners more money. I’ve been covering Nanigans for almost three years now, and its progress and revenue growth is impressive. By facilitating so much social ad spend, the company is pumping the lifeblood of innovation into Facebook. Nanigans has strong growth, high-profile clients, gobs of business, and just a lean $8.85 million in the bank, so my question is whether an old ad giant would acquire Nanigans to get some fresh blood itself.

Because I like sharing cool watches with you guys I decided to share this cool watch with you guys. It’s called the Ressence Type 3 and it’s actually a liquid-filled mechanical watch with a nearly featureless face. Each of those dials – registers in the parlance – look like they are seamlessly embedded in the face surface and the watch, being suspended in synthetic oil, has no crown and is wound automatically.

Arguably the movement itself isn’t very special – it’s a standard timekeeper that displays the date and includes a rotating seconds wheel – but the way the entire package is put together is a feat of horology. The sapphire crystal surrounds the face almost completely and the back of the watch hides the manual winding mechanism and a switch that allows you to change the time.

On the wrist, the watch looks like a blob of liquid with markings suspended in it. It’s as if you were wearing a slug of liquid metal or a dollop of crude oil. The entire face spins (you can see it in action here) and a pressure valve compensates for temperature-related changes in the liquid.

You can see hands-on photos right here or visit the product page. The watch, sadly, costs $34,000 and comes in a wildly limited edition but it may be worth it just to say that your watch is literally full of alien liquids.

Google+ is finding its way into every Google product, and AdWords is no exception. Starting today, AdWords advertisers can easily highlight their Google+ follower counts in their enhanced campaigns. On average, Google says, ads with these follower counts have “a 5-10% higher click-through rate” than regular ads.

The company, it seems, tested these new ads with the help of a number of major brands, including Red Bull, National Geographic and H&M. Here is what these ads look like:

To be eligible to show these annotations, businesses need to have a Google+ page with a verified URL, and the Google+ page needs to have “recent, high-quality posts and a significant number of followers, meaning 100 for most businesses.” These new social annotations are automatic for all enhanced campaigns and won’t incur any additional cost.

Showing follower counts in ads isn’t totally new, of course. Google launched its “social extensions” for AdWords last year. Those, however, have to be set up at the campaign level while this new integration into enhanced campaigns is automatic.

Enhanced In-App Ad Targeting

Enhanced campaigns, it is worth stressing, are still a pretty new feature in AdWords, and the focus here is on creating ads that businesses can run on desktop and mobile without the need to set up multiple campaigns.

With today’s release, Google is also making some general improvements to these enhanced campaigns. Specifically, it’s making it easier to target in-app ads “based on people’s context like location, time of day and device, with enhanced campaigns.”

Once upon a time, back in the prehistoric late 20th century, we all suffered from something called Future Shock – a condition that, according to best-selling writer Alvin Toeffler, made us unable to deal with the pace of technological change. Today, however, our future shock has been replaced by present shock. That, at least, is the view of the contemporary Toeffler, Douglas Rushkoff, who has just written the much lauded Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now.

Rushkoff’s intriguing thesis in Present Shock is that today’s always-on technology has created a dictatorship of the present in which everything happens now. So what are the real entrepreneurial opportunities, I asked Rushkoff, in an age in which everything happens in the present? Rather than at companies like Facebook or Google, he explains, real innovation will happen with entrepreneurs who understood that our industrial model has been replaced by what he calls a “steady state real-time economy.” The big opportunities, Rushkoff says, now lie in areas like authentication, banking and alternative currencies – and with timeless companies like Etsy and Duncan YoYo.