Category: Tech news

In case you happened to miss the furor earlier today (or yesterday, depending on your timezone), Facebook officially pushed its Facebook Home launcher into the Google Play Store for owners of a select few devices to muck around with. Early impressions seem to run the gamut, but unless you had the right hardware you were plumb out of luck if you wanted to take Home for a spin.

Well, let me rephrase that: you were plumb out of luck. MoDaCo founder Paul O’Brien worked up a dead-simple way to get Facebook Home up and running on just about any Android device. Long story short, he patched a version of the Home app to keep it from figuring out what device you’ve just loaded it onto and showing you the customary it’s-not-your-turn screen.

All you really need to do is pop into your Android device’s settings and make sure it’s set to install applications from unknown sources (it’s in the “Security” section). From there, you just have to download and install his patched versions of the Facebook Home app, as well as his patched Facebook and Facebook Messenger apps. Already have those latter two apps installed? You’ll have to uninstall both of them and load up O’Brien’s cooked versions in order for Home to work properly.

That could pose an issue for some of the more curious among you — certain devices that have the Facebook app baked into it by the manufacturer (like the HTC One, for example) won’t play nice with this version of the Home app unless you root the device and remove the Facebook app yourself. Thankfully, rooting most popular devices is way easier than it used to be, but be sure to do your homework if you think you may take the plunge.

To test out O’Brien’s handiwork, I tried installing Facebook Home on two devices that it wasn’t supposed to wind up on yet: Motorola’s Droid RAZR HD and Samsung’s Galaxy Note 8.0 tablet. After an installation process that was completed in under two minutes for each device, Facebook Home was working mostly the way it should — it took a moment for messages to come through, but Facebook’s novel chatheads appeared on both devices, and I was easily able to see what my friends were doing on a Friday night while I stayed home to play with phones. That said, not every one of my friends’ news feed updates wound up in Home’s swipe-able stream, but that seems to be the case even if you’re running Home on supported hardware.

The only major missing feature I noticed was that neither device would let me send SMS messages from the Messenger app, an omission that seemed to plague most people that tried O’Brien’s builds. Granted, that means you don’t get the exact Home experience, but all things considered this’ll provide you a solid peek before Facebook officially brings Home to all the other Android devices of the world. As for whether or not you’ll find it to be worth keeping — well, that’s another story altogether.

In the first interview since her husband’s death, Laurene Powell Jobs dedicated her sizable platform to advancing immigration reform, while remaining notably tight-lipped about the private life of the late Steve Jobs. We’ve included highlights (with context) from her interview with Rock Center host Brian Williams.

On Steve Jobs: “Pretty Cool” Legacy

BRIAN WILLIAMS: It’s another way of saying we’re left with a world of really cool stuff. I always wanted to know what it was like to be a Kennedy and drive to Kennedy Airport; and what it’s like to be you at a light and watch 10 people cross, and the only thing they have in common are white ear buds. What’s that like?

LAURENE POWELL JOBS: It’s pretty cool.

BRIAN WILLIAMS: (LAUGHS) It’s pretty cool. I mean, that changed our world.

LAURENE POWELL JOBS: Yeah. To do what you wanna do, to leave a mark– in a way that you think is important and lasting, that’s a life well lived.

On Immigration Reform

Powell Jobs has been a vocal advocate of immigration reform, partnering with director Davis Guggenheim (Waiting For Superman, An Inconvenient Truth) on a documentary highlighting the struggles of talented, patriotic American youth who have been denied entrance into the military and college because they are undocumented immigrants. To add public pressure for Congress to pass a bill that provides a pathway to citizenship for children of immigrants who came to America illegally, the film (trailer below) is accompanied by a grassroots campaign and website.

BRIAN WILLIAMS: Climb into the minds of our viewers watching you guys on Friday night. So help us process this. How are we supposed to feel about their parents, who did do something bad? This is ill-gotten gains, because the first entry into this country was wrong. How are we supposed to feel about the bureaucracy we would now have to have just to hand Social Security numbers to our Marine, our civil engineer?

LAURENE JOBS POWELL: Yes. It’s understandable that people are conflicted about this. And, yes, the parents broke the law. And so I think that’s why Congress is trying to find a way to make amends. So have them pay a penalty, have them pay back taxes. Have them wait for two decades in order to have the chance to have citizenship. I mean, there are penalties that can be brought out. But then you have someone like Senator Marco Rubio who said, you know, “I understand why these parents came.” You know, if you are in desperate poverty, if you are struggling, if you would do anything in the world to get a better life for your kids, who are we to say — to judge you so harshly?

BRIAN WILLIAMS:…what about the argument that not everyone will succeed and prosper? Some people are trying to game the system; some will be a constant draw, a drain on the American economy. This won’t be all net positive.

LAURENE POWELL JOBS: One of my favorite quotes is a lawmaker said, “I do not support any immigration policy that would have kept my grandparents out of the country.” And I think that’s a good rule. How about we agree upon what our common American values are, which is let’s make this a true land of opportunity. We’re also a land of rules and laws that should be enforced. Let’s fix this problem, and then let’s let people flourish.

Congress is slated to begin debate on a draft of comprehensive immigration reform, which will likely include provisions to allow undocumented youth a path to citizenship, around mid-April.

Transcript excerpted from: “Rock Center With Brian Williams” on NBC News – Friday, April 12, 2013

[Image Credit: Wikimedia user Gobierno de Chile]

Editor’s note: Jon Auerbach is a partner at Charles River Ventures, a 42-year-old, early-stage venture firm based in Menlo Park and Cambridge, Mass., where he focuses on mobile technologies. Follow him on Twitter @jgauerbach.

Research over the past two decades has identified a strong link between hours of practice and expertise in sports, chess and the performing arts. In the early 1990s, Anders Ericsson, a psychologist at Florida State University, spent months tracking violinists at the Music Academy in Berlin. He found that the top violinists had practiced on average 10,000 hours during the course of their lives. The weakest violinists had averaged  4,000 hours.

This 10,000-hour “rule,” cited in Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers,” is now accepted as gospel among a segment of society that believes that hours logged for young athletes and musicians is the key to success. The core of the argument is that only through what is called “deliberate” practice can the 10,000 hours pay off. By this, the experts mean practicing in the right conditions with the right motivation, mentorship and potential for eventual success. Simply studying piano for 10,000 hours isn’t enough to ensure greatness. Deliberate practice is the key.

I’ve spent some time exploring 10,000 hours in entrepreneurship and whether the theory might be fungible. The essential argument is that behind many great entrepreneurs is a life spent, sometimes inadvertently, practicing deliberately. Some of the world’s best entrepreneurs were the kids running lemonade stands, building LEGO robots and hacking computers.

When Deliberate Isn’t Necessarily Deliberate

But deliberate practice doesn’t always follow textbook rules. Sometimes it comes inadvertently. One of the best examples is cited by Daniel Coyle in “The Talent Code.” Coyle tells the story of Simon Clifford, a gym teacher from Leeds, England, who traveled to Brazil in 1997 to better understand why the Brazilians were so good at soccer.

While conventional wisdom had held that the main factors were poverty, soccer as a dominant national sport and a good climate, Clifford found that until the late 1950s, the Brazilians were not a soccer powerhouse. But during that decade, Brazil became obsessed with a type of indoor soccer called futsal. The game is played with a smaller, heavier ball in a much tighter indoor space. Because the ball is heavy and small, it can’t be kicked in the air easily. As a result, precision in passing is key.

In one minute of futsal, the average player passes six times as much as in a minute of regular soccer. And in soccer, passing precision is key in separating great from good. So inadvertently, the Brazilians were acquiring the right soccer skills through futsal in a much more deliberate way than if they had been training on large, outdoor fields. In 1958, Brazil won the World Cup, beginning a dynasty of soccer domination.

Inadvertent Deliberate Practice: Entrepreneur-Style

The theory of 10,000 hours of practice translates into generally 10 years of roughly 20 hours per week. If the same holds true for entrepreneurs, then kids need to be building things and selling things in middle school to hit their stride in their mid-twenties. Further, there’s an argument that young entrepreneurs rarely have 20 hours a week in their teen years to practice their craft, so getting to 10,000 hours might take more like 15 or 20 years.

If the same holds true for entrepreneurs, then kids need to be building things and selling things in middle school to hit their stride in their mid-twenties.

The entrepreneurial world is full of compelling stories of great innovators putting in their 10,000 entrepreneurial hours. While other kids at Homestead High in Cupertino were playing football, Steve Jobs was building a “phone phreak” device that tricked the AT&T long-distance system into letting people make free calls. Bill Gates spent much of his time at the Lakeside School programming on leased-time GE and Digital Equipment computers, including writing code that allowed them to obtain free computer time. This led to a ban of computer use for Gates and three other students.

Larry Page claims that at age 12 he knew he would someday start a business. He would spend countless hours tinkering with computers and writing code, and he was the first student in his elementary school to turn in an assignment on a word processor. In middle school, Mark Zuckerberg wrote a computer program that connected computers at his father’s dental practice to machines in the Zuckerberg home.

Soccer is not learned from sitting in a classroom; it’s learned by kicking a ball over and over. The 10,000-hour theory is just that: a theory. But if it holds water, there are some pretty compelling implications for how (and whether) entrepreneurship can be taught, where best to acquire skills and how to think about funding models.

[Image via Flickr here and here.]

Schmap already helped advertisers and other companies understand their Twitter followers through its Know Your Followers product, but today it launched a new, upgraded service called Demographics Pro — CEO Paul Hallett described the concept as “Nielsen for Twitter.”

Nielsen does its own social media analysis, and it announced a partnership with Twitter last fall, but that was focused on measuring the social media impact of TV shows. Demographics Pro is much broader than that, giving customers a detailed demographic breakdown of the people following a given account or commenting on a given hashtag.

The best way to understand the data that Schmap is offering is to look at a few sample profiles. Hallett showed me the data for my own Twitter followers — apparently there are 12,032 real people following me, 62.7 percent of them are male, and their average income is $80,300 per year. They like to eat at In N Out, shop at Trader Joe’s, and are “dressed by” Nordstrom’s. The report says:

Professionally, @anthonyha’s followers are employed as sales/marketing managers, senior managers, programmers, web developers and investors. The account has a particularly high concentration of entrepreneurs (within the top 10% of all Twitter accounts in this respect).

This goes on for 27 pages, covering things like ethnicity, location, and interests. This is all algorithmically generated, Hallett told me, and it’s based less on what people say explicitly on Twitter (though that’s a component) and more on using “massive amounts of subtle correlations” that suggest implicit details about users’ demographics, interests and habits. For example, Hallett noted that if someone checks in frequently at Whole Foods, that tells you that they like to shop at Whole Foods, but it also suggests certain things about their income level and age — nothing definitive on its own, but something that can be combined with other indicators.

You’re unlikely to be as fascinated by my Twitter following as I am, but Schmap is releasing a few profiles to the public to give people a taste of what it can do. Here’s a profile of users who tweet about Sheryl Sandberg’s new book using the #LeanIn hashtag. And here’s one for people tweeting about #MarriageEquality.

You don’t have to look at profiles in isolation, either. You can build charts of comparing different groups, like those tweeting about the iPhone 5 versus the Galaxy S4 versus the BlackBerry Z10.

Apparently Schmap has been already made this data available to partners through its API. For example, it powers DataSift‘s demographics data. It seems more intuitive build the standalone product before releasing an API, but Hallett said the team originally thought that its main business would be offering this data as a customizable, white label service via the API. Eventually he realized there might be a broader audience, and also an opportunity to deliver insight and context (such as the description I quoted above), rather than pure numbers.

“What we realized was … a lot of what we see in Demographics Pro is based on not just the data but our deep understanding of what makes that data special,” he said.

Hallett also emphasized that Demographics Pro doesn’t allow any direct targeting of audience groups. In other words, an advertiser couldn’t just say that they wanted to run a campaign that reached a certain age and income group. Instead, they might look at a certain topic and, based on the demographic data, decide whether they wanted to run advertisements against that topic.

Customers can also combine demographic and sentiment analysis by importing their own Twitter lists (each list presumably representing a specific group from a sentiment analysis programming), Hallett said.

Given its interest in audience analysis (signaled, among other things, by its recent purchase of social analytics startup Bluefin Labs), I wondered if this is something Twitter could build itself.

“The short answer is, ‘Yes they could,’” Hallett said — but he added that Schmap’s technology was developed by a team of “hardcore mathematicians” for over two years. “It’s not the type of thing that they could just say, ‘We like that idea, let’s do it.’”

Since we have nothing much to go on other than a static landing page for Twitter #music, some folks didfurther inspection within the CSS on the login page, and certain features and integrations became apparent.

We’ve reached out to Twitter to confirm what we’ve seen, and we’ll update our story once we hear back.

Until then, here’s what can be taken from the styling code itself, picked up on by desginer Youssef Sarhan:

– Both web interface and separate downloadable app
– Pull in Tracks from iTunes, Spotify, Soundcloud and Rdio
– YouTube and Vevo integration
– We Are Hunted’s charts feature
– Turn playing tracks on/off
– Track purchasing
– Tweet a track

.iconmusic-spotify-connect-btn{background-position:-4431px -0px;height:32px;width:179px}

.iconmusic-player-source-rdio{background-position:-2801px -0px;height:19px;width:30px}

.iconmusic-player-source-itunes{background-position:-2751px -0px;height:19px;width:30px}

.iconmusic-player-source-soundcloud{background-position:- 2851px -0px;height:14px;width:92px}

.iconmusic-player-source-vevo{background-position:-2963px -0px;height:9px;width:53px}

.youtube-vid player{position:absolute;padding:10px;height:200px}

While this is in no way a finalized “feature set” for the Twitter #Music app, it is more information than we had before and confirmation of what we’ve seen others testing out on Twitter, which are basically embedded music players in Twitter Cards. And of course, since this is a Twitter-owned page, so the code speaks for itself.

Here’s a look at what the player will look like, again referenced in the CSS for the page:

Here’s that on/off switch for playing tracks:

These are some random graphical elements that point to what services will be included as well:

In addition to all of this, it looks like Twitter will be bringing in bios of musicians, perhaps from their Twitter profiles. All of this integration makes complete sense and perhaps the selling of music will be controlled by the artist themselves. If you’re listening to a track that someone shared from Spotify and want to purchase it immediately, it doesn’t matter which service Twitter hooks into, there’s a good chance that you’re going to follow through with your purchase. This could mean big bucks for Twitter as it marches towards going public, perhaps as early as next year.

This all gives us more of a sense of what the #Music service itself might look like, even though we have no screenshots to prove it. Much in the way that Twitter set up “hashtag pages” for brands such as NASCAR, Twitter is taking all of the data that it’s currently collecting and just showing it off in a different, more consumable way. If #Music becomes a full-featured service that artists can use to sell music, there’s a whole host of distribution metrics that Twitter is sitting on, which also means big bucks.

This week on the TechCrunch Gadgets Podcast we talk about the launch of Facebook Fone and my own horrible attempts at becoming a bitcoin billionaire.

We invite you to enjoy our weekly podcasts every Friday at 3pm Eastern and noon Pacific.

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Intro Music by Rick Barr.

Nicholas Felton, who came to fame through many super-detailed infographics and reports about his life as quantified through data, is leaving Facebook almost two years after being acq-hired to work on projects like Timeline.

His early work, which compiled data on things like all the songs he had listened to or everywhere he had been in a single year into a “Feltron Annual Report,” became the basis for Timeline. In a sense, all the profiles of Facebook’s roughly 1 billion users are all like living, breathing annual “Feltron” reports.

He posted on his page today:

On April 19, 2011 I walked into the Palo Alto Facebook office and began contributing to the timeline project. Two years, many late nights and a few launch celebrations later I will be moving on.

The opportunity to help mold a service of such importance to so many people has been a high point in my professional career. I’m extremely proud of the projects I worked on, grateful to the teams that built them and confident in the products to come.

Facebook acq-hired Felton’s startup Daytum in April of 2011 and Felton and his co-founder Ryan Case moved from New York to Palo Alto.

When Facebook’s vice president of product Chris Cox unveiled Timeline, he said he was inspired by seeing Felton’s annual reports: “14 pages. One year. One book. It was hard to call it anything other than what it really was — art.”

He went on, “We had one reaction: we have to try to hire this guy.”

There’s no word on what Felton be working on next yet.

One to 1.2 million Raspberry Pi microcomputers have shipped since the device’s launch just over a year ago but where in the world are they located? While it’s impossible to say exactly where* each Pi has ended up, the vast majority of the devices sold to-date have shipped to developed nations — including the U.S. and the U.K. But the potential of the Pi as a low cost learning-focused computing platform for developing countries remains very exciting.

Last week the U.K.-based Pi Foundation blogged about a volunteer group that had taken a suitcase-worth of Pis to a school in rural Cameroon where they are being used to power a computer class. At $35 apiece, and even $25 for the Model A Pi, the Pi does a lot to break down the affordability barrier to computing — although it still requires additional peripherals (screen, keyboard, mouse) to turn it into a fully fledged computer terminal.

Asked about the global sales distribution of the Pi, the Foundation provided TechCrunch with some “very rough”, internal estimates of Pi sales to developing/emerging nations — and the figures (listed below) suggest that the first million+ Pi sales have overwhelmingly been powered by wealthier nations.

The most Pi-populous country on the developing/emerging nations list (India) can lay claim to roughly 0.5%-0.6% of total global Pi sales to-date, according to this data. While, collectively, these listed nations make up between only 1.4% and 1.7% of total global Pi shipments. So more than 98% of the Pi pie has been sold to the world’s wealthiest countries thus far.

India	6000
Indonesia	1200
Lao P.Dem.R.	600
Malaysia	3400
Philippines	500
Pakistan	100
Sri Lanka	50
Thailand	2000
Vietnam	500
Egypt	150
South Africa	2000
Tunisia	200
Zimbabwe	50
Bolivia	100
Chile	400
Colombia	20
Peru	50

There are also, of course, scores of (apparently) Pi-less developing nations that do not make this list at all. One of which – the Kingdom of Bhutan — does actually have a princely one Pi sale to its name at present, according to the Foundation. “It’s a server for Khan Academy Lite in a school, whose 64GB SD card costs more than twice what the Pi cost,” the Foundation’s Liz Upton tells TechCrunch. “We’re working on getting more out there!”

It’s likely that some of the Pis shipped to developed countries have found their way to less wealthy nations – via charities and other ‘suitcase schemes’ such as the Cameroon school project mentioned above which took out 30 Pis. Or via individual buyers seeking to avoid high import tariffs that can push up the price of bulk commercial imports (such as in Brazil).

But even factoring in some extra spread, there’s no doubt the Pi is predominantly disrupting the living rooms and schools of the developed world. Which, it should be noted, was the original ambition of the Pi founders — specifically they wanted to get more U.K. kids coding, following a national slump in interest in computer science education.

But the Pi’s unexpected popularity has generated additional momentum for the project — and even grander geographical ambitions.

“We’re weighted very strongly towards the developed world,” admits Pi founder Eben Upton, when he sends the data, but he says that this spread — or rather concentration — is something the Foundation is keen to work on. “A major challenge for us this year is to find ways of making Pi more available, and more appealing, in these [developing/emerging] markets,” he says.

The Pi hardware seems to offer huge potential to the developing world — being cheaper than most mobile phones, let alone most smartphones — the other device touted as the likely first computing experience for connecting the “next billions” to the Internet. The Pi is also cheaper than another Linux-based low cost learning-focused computing project: the one laptop per child’s XO laptop. And it has an advantage over general Linux PCs or Android tablets in being conceived and supported as first and foremost a learning environment, making it well-suited to push into schools.

As for low cost PCs in general, the netbook category — still more expensive than Pi — is facing extinction by 2015, according to analyst IHS iSuppli, which has put out a forecast today predicting zero netbook shipments within two years, and just 3.97 million units globally this year.

As the traditional desktop PC declines, it’s great to see the rise of a new computing device that, unlike the slick consumer tablets du  jour, is intended to encourage hacking, tinkering and learning about hardware and software, rather than passive consumption of prepackaged apps — in the best tradition of the home computer. And a device which also, thanks to its tiny price-tag, has such huge disruptive potential.

So here’s hoping a lot more of the next million+ Pis end up very far from home indeed.

*At the time of writing, the Rastrack map, a project to get Pi-owners to report the location of their Pi and plot the owner locations on a map, was not accessible. The map is used in the feature image at the top of this post, showing a snapshot of self-reported Pi distribution in May last year

In this week’s Ask A VC show, Javelin Venture Partners’ Managing Director Noah Doyle sat down to talk with us about why he started a venture firm, where the next innovations in mapping are coming from and more.

Doyle has extensive experience in the online mapping world—he directed the enterprise product line for Google’s geospatial products, including Google Earth and Google Maps. Prior to Google, Noah managed the Marketing Strategy and Corporate Development functions at Keyhole, a company that created the first Web-hosted digital earth model and was acquired by Google in 2004. Doyle explains to us that some of the new technologies he’s excited about include layering social data across maps.

Check out the video above for more!

Y Combinator grad ReelSurfer is an instant video editor, born out of its founders frustration of trying to find clips, quotes and scenes from their favorite movies on YouTube and other video sites. The process is probably familiar to you: Search for clip, don’t find it; if you do find it, it’s part of a larger clip, so you have to download, convert and clip the video yourself.

So, ReelSurfer developed the tools to let you clip any video from any website and share it with your “homies” and “homedawgs” over the Facebooks, Twitters and more. Or at least that’s the eventual goal. In truth, ReelSurfer’s design has been less-than-perfect and it hasn’t really allowed you to clip any video. Yes, YouTube has a lot of videos. Like a lot. But that’s not the only media player out there.

Today, ReelSurfer has officially unveiled a redesigned interface, which looks a whole helluva lot better and makes it easier to navigate and makes its URL search box even more prominent — as it should be.

The new interface still enables users to make video mashups or reels of multiple videos and link back to the source so that viewers can check out the full clip if they so choose. However, the new interface does allow for improved search and video discovery, so that users have a better chance to see if the clip they want to make has already been clippity-clipped by someone else. Time saving, my friends, time saving.

Yet, the biggest addition would have to be that ReelSurfer the now allows users to use its bookmarklet to clip videos from both Brightcove and Ooyala, in addition to YouTube and Vimeo. Who cares? Well, that means you can now clip and share videos from ESPN (which uses Ooyala to power its billion-plus video streams) and The New York Times, which uses BrightCove. [You can see the full list of supported sites/media players here.]

Since it’s been a little while since we’ve heard anything from ReelSurfer, the startup also pulled back the curtain a little bit to give some examples of who is using its service and how. TedXTeen, PopSugar are using it to create and share viral, social media-friendly clips, along with The Counting Crows(!) and Reuters. More on the latter here.

Those coffee beans have traveled halfway around the world. Now, it’s your job to keep from messing everything up.

Giant sheds its time-tested compact bike frame for something fancier — its new Propel Advanced SL 0, a wind-slicing, go-fast road machine.

Shop, look for ideas, or simply try to get a handle on your overstuffed closet.

Hapyrus has launched FlyData, technology that enables it to automatically upload and migrate data to Amazon Redshift, the data-warehouse service that can scale to petabyte size.

Amazon has claimed that Redshift will increase the speed of query performance when analyzing any size data set, using the same SQL-based business intelligence tools analysts use today. Hapyrus Co-Founder Koichi Fujikawa says their service, a big data router, makes Redshift even more effective and an alternative to Hadoop and Hive, the most widely recognized combination used for processing and analyzing data.

After setup, FlyData runs in the background, moving the data to Redshift. Fujikawa said Hapyrus sets up a virtual private cloud on AWS. Customers can integrate their own virtual private network to transfer the data.

Hapyrus competes against the likes of Informatica and Talend. Its current focus is on integrating with AWS, but going forward it will integrate data from a variety of sources. Fujikawa said in an email that Informatica and Talend provide complex data-integration solutions for big enterprise customers — mainly for on-premise systems. “We provide our data-integration service for cloud components like Redshift for any size of companies, from startups to relatively big organizations,” he said.

Fujikawa says Redshift can be 10 times faster than Hadoop and Hive. Customers he hears from say they are seeking alternatives for the everyday kind of work that needs to get done. They can get stymied by the time and the expense that a query takes when using Hadoop and Hive.

But there are also complexities with using Redshift, as Airbnb discovered:

First, in order to load your data into Redshift, it has to be in either S3 or Dynamo DB already. The default data loading is single threaded and could take a long time to load all your data. We found breaking data into slices and loading them in parallel helps a lot.

On its nerd blog, Airbnb said Redshift lacks some of the features that come with Hadoop. But data analysts are liking it so much that they want to use it pretty much exclusively. The Airbnb nerd blog makes the point that, in the end, Redshift and Hadoop may be more compatible than anything else.

“Redshift, as a data warehouse, should be compared to Vertica, Greenplum, AsterData, Impala, Hadapt, and CitusData,” said Drawn to Scale Co-Founder Bradford Stephens in a recent email interview. “They’re just different things.”

The smallest of startups take the tiniest bites out of the profit margins of the enterprise giants. But time and again we see companies like Hapyrus emerge with new, novel ways to use Amazon Web Services architecture in a fashion that gives them access to a customer base that can eat by the morsel instead of a gluttonous software feast.

Hapyrus is a 500 Startups company with angel funding from a group of prominent Japanese angel investors, including Shogo Kawada, co-founder of DeNA, a $4 billion Internet company.

SmartAsset, a Y Combinator-incubated startup that built tools to help you answer tough financial questions, is expanding its offerings today with features for choosing the right neighborhood and the right mortgage.

Founder and CEO Michael Carrvin said that there are four broad stages to the home-buying process. The company’s initial product focused on the first part — whether it makes sense to buy a home, how much you can afford to put down, things like that. With today’s launch, SmartAsset now covers three out of four.

Carvin took me on a quick tour of the new features. As with SmartAsset’s previous products, the new features are structured around a question-and-answer format, with SmartAsset surfacing data that makes it easy for visitors to understand the implications of their decisions. On the neighborhood front, SmartAsset tells you things like the quality of nearby schools and the length of the commute. Some of this data is available on other sites, but now you get to see it in the context of the larger home-buying decision. Plus, Carvin said SmartAsset is the first site to incorporate data from Moody’s with investor predictions about the annualized change in home prices in a neighborhood over the next five years.

As for choosing mortgages, SmartAsset doesn’t just include a mortgage calculator, but also helps visitors wrestle with issues like whether they should buy mortgage points. (Carvin suggested that in many cases buying points is a bad decision.) And similar to other topics that SmartAsset addresses, Carvin said that most of the existing online mortgage aids are limited to “content and financial calculators.”

“Would you rather read about someone’s sister’s experience buying a house, or read real analysis about whether you should buy points and what mortgages you qualify for?” he said.

Carvin has plans to continue expanding the home-buying product, specifically by adding features to help close deals. At the same time, he said SmartAsset has formed a separate team that’s focused on building completely new products, revolving initially around car buying and going back to school.

Here’s the full list of new questions that SmartAsset answers as of today:

Section 2 – Finding the right home

1. What Neighborhood Is The Best Fit For Me?
2. Am I Overpaying for This House?
3. Will This Home Appreciate?
4. What Will My Commute Be?
5. What Do I Need In A Home?
6. What Type of Home Should I Buy?
7. Do I Need an Agent? How Do I Find One?
8. How To Make An Offer

Section 3 – Getting the right mortgage

1. SmartAsset Introduction to Mortgages
2. Mortgage Calculator
3. Should I get a Fixed or Adjustable Rate Mortgage?
4. Should I Buy Points?
5. Do I Need Mortgage Insurance?
6. How Will My Mortgage Amortize?
7. How Do I Get A Mortgage?
8. Do I Qualify For An FHA Mortgage?
9. FHA Loan Limits
10. VA Loans
11. VA Loan Limits
12. VA Loan Requirements