San Francisco’s swanky new $300 million science museum has taken the bold initiative to encourage kids to ask, “what is normal?” Within the Exploratorium’s sea-side digs, a dingy 20th century exhibit on mental health is nestled conspicuously between light-bending experiments and lasers. Mental health clipboards detail the treatment of unfortunate individuals who were institutionalized and drugged for behaviors that, today, we would consider quite normal, including homosexuality. “Normalcy is a shifting landscape,” explains co-curator Pamela Winfrey, who wants kids and adults alike to understand how medical science helps define convention.

It’s most fascinating–and controversial–figure is “Frank C”, who was institutionalized for what doctors apparently called a “homosexual panic.” After being discharged from military service 1942, he went berserk outside of a restaurant. He told physicians, “I know that I am in the Kings County Hospital. I am not sick. I got excited on Fulton Street and I was throwing garbage. My blood temper. I went up. I was angry. In the Virginia restaurant I got a broken plate…I thought that someone planned to kill me”

Describing the treatment for his behavior, “doctors suspected he feared his own latent homosexsual desires; at the time, this so-called ‘homosexual panic’ was believed to lead to paranoia…he was confined in calm and quiet surroundings and treated with medication”.

Classification of what is scientifically deemed normal has long been governed by the bible of psychiatric diagnosis, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Its controversial 5th addition has folded Asperger’s disorder into a new umbrella category, the autism spectrum disorder. “Gender identity disorder” is now “gender dysphoria,” which refers to “emotional distress over a marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender”. In other words, what is “abnormal” today may be quite normal tomorrow.

Another important point of the “Changing The Face Of What Is Normal” exhibit, argues Winfrey, is that mental illness is both common and, often, transient. People go in and out depression. Conditions, such as Schizophrenia, do not always socially cripple the affiliated. And, perhaps most importantly, most people will either experience and be close with someone affected by mental illness. “it’s a way to be able to get to some of these touchy subjects in a way that’s safe,” she explains. In the wake of Internet activist, Aaron Swartz’s, suicide, mental illness is a timely and sobering topic.

The impact from this particular museum cannot be understated: the nation’s flagship science museum is a staging ground for exhibits all across the country. According to officials, it’s the largest teacher development organization in the Bay Area, and the travel exhibits touch more than 180 million people.

The hope, as Exploratorium director Dennis Bartels, explains, is to create “a population that actually thinks for themselves.”

Backlift, a Y Combinator-backed startup that’s launching today, describes itself as a back-end service for front-end developers. The service takes all of the work of setting up a server environment out of the equation and just lets front-end developers focus on their work. All a user needs is a Dropbox account – Backlift uses Dropbox as a file syncing service – and a text editor. With Backlift, a developer doesn’t need to know how to set up Rails, Django or node.js to get started.

As Backlift founder Cole Krumbholz told me last week, the idea behind the service is to allow developers to jump right into working on their front-end code. For many people, he said, front-end tools can be a bit daunting and he wants Backlift to be a great learning tool, but he also aims to make it a platform for prototyping and, soon, a platform for hosting applications.

To get started, users simply sign in with their Dropbox account, create a new app based on a number of templates, including numerous backbone.js sample apps, a Google Maps API-based site, and basic Bootstrap-based sites. You can also use other popular technologies like AngularJS, CoffeeScript and Handlebars. Backlift then creates a new folder in your Dropbox account (and hence on your desktop, too) and you can start editing it with your favorite text editor. Every time you save an edit, Dropbox will sync with Backlift and you can immediately see the changes on your site (syncing starts less than a second after your changes are uploaded to Dropbox).

Given that most applications need to work with at least some data, Backlift also offers a basic API for working with data, as well as an admin dashboard for adding users and browsing, importing and exporting the data in your database.

One of the companies that has been using Backlift extensively during the beta phase is Automatic.com – the YC-backed company that recently launched its hardware for turning any car into a connected car. “We have our own Amazon S3 servers, however Backlift is a much easier, faster, and secure way of working on the site as we got it ready for launch and showed investors,” Automatic.com’s visual and interactive designer Gabriel Valdivia told me.

The service, Krumbholz told me, will evolve constantly and the team plans to launch quite a few new features in the near future – though he wasn’t quite ready to share the team’s plans just yet.

For now, Backlift is completely free to use. The team will likely add some premium features, though the details are still up in the air.

Krumbholz, by the way, is one of the few solo founders who have made it into Y Combinator. After he left the Navy, he previously worked on air traffic control interfaces and then started making mobile games for iOS.

The real estate market in the U.S. is quickly picking up pace again, and last month, Zillow‘s mobile traffic hit a new record with 89 homes viewed per second (up from 75 homes the month before). Today, almost exactly four years after it first launched its Zillow for iPhone app, the service is relaunching its iOS apps with an updated homescreen and restructured navigation. On the iPad, Zillow has now also integrated its Mortgage Marketplace and financial calculators.

As Zillow’s CEO Spencer Rascoff writes today, the company believes that this new “streamlined interface […] significantly improves the Zillow app experience for home shoppers.” Specifically, he thinks the “enhanced design allows users to more easily access all the information Zillow has to offer and to customize their experience based on their goals.”

The first thing Zillow’s users will likely notice is the new homescreen, which now finally separates searches for houses and rentals from the get-go. In earlier versions, Zillow would display rentals and houses that were for sale simultaneously until you filtered one of them out. Given that most people don’t look for rentals and a house to purchase at the same time, this always felt like an unnecessary step. Zillow has also recently put a lot of emphasis on its rental marketplace, so it’s just a logical step to highlight that in the navigation now.

This new navigation structure also extends to the new homescreen, which now looks quite a bit more modern and, as Rascoff writes, “enables shoppers to access the breadth of Zillow’s inventory and personalized shopping tools with just one tap.”

Both the new homescreen and navigation are available on the iPhone and iOS. Until now, however, only the iPhone version included an integration with Zillow’s Mortgage Marketplace for finding lenders and the service’s mortgage calculator. Now, the iPad version also features these tools.

The HTC First is a middling device designed to fade into the background and bring one thing, and one thing only, to the forefront: Facebook.

The One is the finest device HTC has ever built, and one of the best Android phones out now, though a couple of things keep it from being perfect.

Hidden amidst the winding pathways of Llewelyn Park, New Jersey, America’s oldest gated community, steampunk designer Will Rockwell is building a future that never was. He began his career as a TV producer but he always loved to tinker with metals, leather, and wood – the three components of good steampunk. After building a set of Rocketeer-style USB keys, friends turned him on to Etsy. He opened a shop and almost immediately was flooded with orders.

These designs are a labor of love for Rockwell who scours the junkyards of New Jersey for cool odds and ends. He has two workshops, one in Pennsylvania and one in the basement of his 1912 home.

Rockwell doen’t expect to get rich with his hobby but he’s doing well, nonetheless. His unique style, nautical-themed designs, and electronic additions to his devices meld the modern and the mysterious in a quirky way. My favorite project? His electric guitar outfitted with wild effects and knife switches, although his handmade USB keys are still amazing.

Will is definitely following the maker spirit and is even making a little money. His world is one of the imagination, full of undersea starships and steaming hard drives run by pistons. It’s enough to make you think you’ve stumbled upon the world of Captain Nemo via the Jersey Turnpike.

TechCrunch Makers is a video series featuring people who make cool stuff. If you’d like to be featured, email us!.

Facebook had its big coming-out party for mobile on Wednesday, and its Home launcher will soon start shipping exclusively on an HTC device. This is the social network’s first crack at being the default experience on any device. Until now, using Facebook has been a completely optional and background experience, meaning you’d have to visit its website or download one of its apps. After nine years, that approach worked rather well, to the tune of over a billion users. To get to the next level, Facebook had to start dipping its toes into uncharted territory…being the default.

Creating a situation where you are the default, out-of-the-box experience certainly has many advantages. For example, HTC is putting all of its marketing power behind the HTC First, and Facebook probably didn’t have to pay a dime for any of this. The phone manufacturer is hoping that even though this isn’t a true “Facebook Phone,” that the fantasy of it being that, along with a manageable $99 price tag, will be enough to sell a slew of them. AT&T is certainly helping the cause on their site with this massive advertisement, which is of course what you see by default when you surf there:

On April 12, when people start opening their new devices, they will see a Facebook screen asking them to log in. Yes, Facebook has reached default status. If for some odd reason the person with the phone doesn’t have a Facebook account, they can simply sign up for one. Sounds crazy, but there are still many people without a Facebook account and might not have had a reason to have one before. They might have never had a smartphone before either, which means that the Facebook Home experience will be their guide.

The importance, and potential negatives involved, cannot be understated.

The Power Of Default

Talk to Microsoft about defaults. It worked quite well for its Internet Explorer browser until it got them into hot water. We’ll get to the hot water later, but Internet Explorer was a beast, because it shipped as the only browsing experience for Windows machines. Was it the best web browser out there? For a while, yes it was. Installing another browser used to be seen as something only really geeky, or adventurous, people would do. I remember tweaking my old Windows machine every chance I could get, downloading any other interface to the web that I could download. For most, though, the idea of using something not blessed by Microsoft was risky and not worth the time.

During the early “browser war” days, the only other viable options to Internet Explorer were Opera and Netscape Navigator. There were plusses to both, but nothing overwhelming. Web surfers simply wanted to use the web, so they used the interface that was given to them, and it worked. For its operating system, Microsoft stole the enterprise market because they were the only option, and once one big company became a Windows shop, everyone else had to if they wanted to compete.

Facebook is now in a similar situation with Facebook Home. They are the most popular experience for interacting with your friends online. The lure of Facebook is just that — all of your friends and family are on it. Why would you use something else to talk to them if that’s where they spend their time? Every app developer is trying to conjure up a “Facebook Hook” because it’s the easiest way to attract more people to your product.

The power that comes along with that is just mind-boggling. Zuckerberg knows that after going public, Facebook is in a position where it can put its foot on the gas to get to 2 billion users. To get there, you have to pull out all of the stops. Will Facebook ever create its own phone? Maybe, once they see how the HTC test goes and how many people install Facebook Home onto their Android devices. It’s doubtful that Apple will ever open up enough for Facebook to take over iOS, so if all goes well with Home, there has to be a next phase of the plan.

That plan would be its own phone and hardware. Another company, that starts with a G, has gone through similar testing phases with hardware products, only to start building ones in-house. That same company has its own software bundled with a mobile operating system, but they’ve gotten around any issues by making that operating system open source and modifiable. Or in their words, “flexible.”

The Weakness Of Default

After Microsoft had cornered the browser market with its genius plan of shipping every copy of its Windows operating system with it pre-installed, other players cried foul. At the time, Microsoft saw its distribution methods as its No. 1 asset, because they were. But how could Microsoft not be open and let people choose which browser they used before being thrust into Microsoft’s idea of what browsing the web should be like.

Choice. For users? Crazy.

It was alleged that uninstalling Internet Explorer slowed down PCs using Windows, and that Microsoft didn’t provide users with the proper tools to completely rid themselves of the web browser and move onto another one. Accusations flew about monopolies, but Microsoft contested that Internet Explorer wasn’t a product, but just a feature.

It got ugly, and in case you’ve never seen Bill Gates’ deposition from 1998, here are some of the greatest hits:

If you ever have a lot of time to research this, listening to the deposition or reading through the transcripts are a hoot.

All of this was awkward because Microsoft had helped pioneer home computing, so cases like this had never happened. The questions for Microsoft and the answers that the court received were firsts. It wasn’t a perfect case or remedy, but Microsoft’s stronghold on the browser market soon came to an end. Users don’t have a problem downloading Chrome, Firefox or any other flavor of a web browser anymore. Personal choice is king on the Internet.

The problem here for Facebook is that it will soon find a day where its lock on all of your friends and their data will be seen as a monopoly. Moves like becoming the default experience, even though it can be reversed, for a smartphone, could easily be seen as a move similar to Microsoft’s Windows distribution tactics. Does it mean they’re evil? No, it means they’re smart.

Being smart catches up with you, though, because other smart people find all of the flaws with your product and build alternatives. Now that choice is commonplace for consumers, especially on the web, Facebook for the first time has really opened itself up to someone building a competitive service and becoming the sexy alternative the ugly, old default.

Thinking Ahead

Naturally, Facebook is full of really smart people, people that have worked with Microsoft’s finest for years, since they were an early investor. The social network can of course learn from the software company’s mistakes, but it will be once again heading into uncharted territory. There will come a day, maybe sometime soon, where Mark Zuckerberg is being deposed over what is seen as monopolistic behavior. There will be companies like Netscape and Opera who are crying foul, putting all of their efforts behind breaking down everything that Facebook had built over the years with its distribution methods.

It’s all cyclical, there has to be a big guy. Facebook is the big guy in the social space, but when you have that target on your back, you know that others will come after you. Facebook will have a Pepsi to its Coke, and some predict that the true Facebook alternative will be a place for younger people. Only thing is, Zuckerberg already thought about it and that’s why it partnered with HTC for the Home launch and why it acquired Instagram. If it goes where the younger people are and captures that market, it will take longer for a competitor to unwind what Facebook has wound over the past nine years. Facebook is already an operating system, but you and I are the bits and bytes that make it up.

For consumers, once they see the same thing every day, even though Facebook promises to update Home every month, they will start seeking out alternatives. Sure, Facebook allows you to take your data with you, but there isn’t anyone that properly handles all of that data just yet to disrupt Facebook’s position. There will be, though. It isn’t Twitter or Google+ alone, but it will probably be a combination of a few services, some of which haven’t been invented yet.

In the same way as bundling Internet Explorer with Windows, selling its own phone with nothing more than a login screen for the social network would be seen as anti-competitive, Home could be seen as slightly anti-competitive, cutting off apps that have similar functionality to Facebook could be seen as anti-competitive. After all, being the first thing people see when they interact with their phone is more invasive than being the default browser, right?

The only problem is, there is no real competitor. Yet. There will be, though, and it won’t be pretty once this cycle happens all over again.

An app on a smartphone is a limited vessel, one that can provide content and information for your audience, but within bounds set out by the operating system. People still have to navigate to your app, and therefore there’s a time when they’re “in” your product or service, and a time when they’re “out” of said product or service. Facebook clearly demonstrated last week that it wants to own that distinction, and it’s sure to propel others to see if they can’t do the same.

Facebook Home reverses the natural order of things on mobile devices compared to what has existed to date: A user actually starts off in Facebook, and then has access to a launcher which can take them “out” of the social network (though not truly out) and into Android proper, from which they can access other apps. The social networking company says that the whole idea of Facebook Home is to put people first, but the business motivation behind it is actually to put Facebook first.

The chart Facebook used to illustrate how Facebook Home operates and compares to other tools like true Android OS modifications and apps (it’s a layer sandwiched between the core OS and apps that run on top, Facebook says) is actually a perfect example of why it’s a desirable state of affairs for FB, and for others looking to derive more value from mobile users, who tend to be more focused on doing one thing at a time than desktop users, and who can also pick and choose how they want to share with service more readily thanks to the ease of integrating mobile SDKs and APIs into other people’s software.

In general, companies trying to move their model from a primarily web-based one to a version that starts on mobile first are experiencing growing pains, specifically around finding ways to convert the advertising model to be as effective on smaller screens and in an app-centric context. Facebook Home isn’t starting out with ads, but Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg strongly indicated they’d make their way to Cover Feed down the road, which means they’ll occupy prime real estate on the main interface of FB’s Android launcher.

On Android, the opportunity is there for anyone with development resources, time and motivation to build their own launcher, which sits between the OS itself and apps, in many ways directing the experience of the user. Any company with a suite of services it wants to promote for sharing or communication would be well-served by occupying that space on a user’s device: it doesn’t take much imagination to conceptualize an Evernote phone, for instance, or even a GetGlue tablet, or yes, a Twitter phone, too.

To imagine that a user might want to give over control of most of the experience of their devices to a single service or app-making company is more than a little egotistical, which is why Facebook with over 1 billion monthly active users seems perhaps justified in attempting it. Others with smaller networks might seem a little more ridiculous attempting the same, but if you can convince enough users to hand over the keys to their mobile experience, presumably, the initial risk will be well worth it in the long run.

It feels like college Hackathon season is in full swing, and that’s why I’ve been making it a point to drive around the Northeast and check out what all these undergrad hackers are capable of cobbling together in just 24 hours. Last Saturday I pulled over at Princeton University just in time to see 30-some sleep-deprived teams demo their projects at HackPrinceton — here’s a quick peek at some of the clever hacks that caught my eye:

Tamagetitdone

I’m something of a slow-starter when it comes to getting things done, so Tamagetitdone is right up my alley. Long story short, it’s a Chrome extension that aims to improve your productivity by slowly removing distractions from that time-sucking websites you frequent.

In case the name didn’t tip you off, a Tamagotchi lookalike follows your mouse cursor around and eats elements off the page to keep you from getting too distracted — you can fiddle with its hunger tolerance too so it doesn’t devour the contents of your Facebook news feed during your downtime.

As it happens, the team behind Tamagetitdone is no stranger to the Hackathon scene — Lehigh University’s Greyson Parrelli, Ben Chen, and Michael Toth also developed the SparkTab project that John was so fond of at the PennApps Hackathon. The trio had to settle for second back at PennApps, but this time around they picked up first prize in the software division — a cool $1,000.

InstantKarma

Meanwhile, a project called InstantKarma sought to remove all the guess work from racking up worthless internet points on Reddit.

Created by Kyle Dhillon (Princeton) and Ned Williamson (Carnegie Mellon), InstantKarma is a program that monitors Reddit’s new submissions and analyzes them to determine which are most likely to become popular (and by extension, which ones you should comment on). Can’t come up with a witty riposte of your own? The program can also tell if a particular submission is a repost, and displays comments that did well the last time for easy recycling.

SeeMail

A group of Yale undergrads on the other hand cobbled together their own spin on the email read receipt. Jonathan Chang, John Maheswaran, Charles Jin, Mike Wu, and Frank Wu churned out a service called SeeMail that alerts email senders when their missive has been read thanks to an image that gets embedded in the email’s signature.

Once you’ve signed up for SeeMail, you punch in the names of your intended recipients on the SeeMail page, and it generates a snippet that you text into your email client of choice. After that you compose and send the email as usual — when the recipient opens said email, the SeeMail status page automatically updates to reflect the status change. According to Frank Wu the service is geared more toward curious individual users than for those who managed massive mailing lists, but SeeMail seems to work like a charm despite its humble origins.

Rd Trpr

One of the most promising hacks at HackPrinceton was RdTrpr (pronounced “road tripper”), created by vowel-averse Carnegie Mellon students Siddharth Dhulipalla, William Duff, Atharv Vaish, Mihir Pandya, and Vijay Thurimella. The service is comprised of two parts: an Android application that tracks your location when you head out on road trips, and a web app that displays your location to friends and family once you provide them with a link Rd Trpr automatically generates.

To top it all off, Rd Trpr also collects and displays information about landmarks and local attractions near your current location, just to make sure that your trip is as eventful as possible. It’s still early days for the service, but it certainly seems to work — you can see the route the Rd Trpr took to get back to CMU here. With enough polish I could definitely see it picking up some steam down the road (sorry, couldn’t resist).

Drawing Robot

To my surprise (and delight), there were a handful of promising hardware hacks too thanks to HackPrinceton’s approach to reimbursing costs. Drawing Robot, developed by Princeton’s Neil Chatterjee, Joseph Bolling, Ankush Gola, and Pranav Badami , was far and away one of the crowd’s favorites that night. It’s not hard to see why — the four-person team whipped together an Arduino-powered rover about the size of a soccer ball that would slavishly follow a user-defined course.

The kicker? The “navigator” would create that course by tracing one out in mid-air, which a Microsoft Kinect would interpret. The team took a photo of demo area from above which acted as a canvas of sorts — from there, the user could position a wireframe avatar of himself on top of the image and sketch out a path that the orange robot (mostly) stuck to.

Here’s the thing about simplicity. It’s all relative. A developer’s idea of simplicity is different from a finance chief or a customer service agent.

I run across a variety of startups in my daily work at TechCrunch. But few have that innate sense of elegance or the capability to abstract complexity to such an extent that anything else seems antiquated in comparison. Here are 10 that turn traditional complex processes into simple ways to get work done. This is by no means a comprehensive list nor are these services necessarily market leaders. Instead it’s a snapshot of companies that embody what mak?es a great app or service and why they are so important as it becomes ever more necessary to get more done in less and less time.

CloudMunch

I thought a lot about simplicity at Cloud Connect this past week after a lunchtime chat with Pradeep Prabhu, CEO and Founder at CloudMunch. I had been skeptical of the CloudMunch service. It took me some time to understand how the company has automated the manual steps that developers have to take to get their apps ready to launch. CloudMunch offers what it calls a “GitHub to Cloud,” one-click functionality. Collaborating on code makes GitHub awesome but it’s a monstrous task when it comes to sharing code across multiple clouds. The company does this by offering a platform that allows for continuous delivery all in one SaaS app. It fixes a problem that nags at development teams. Code has to be continually tested, but in this new, distributed world, it’s a bit like herding cats. CloudMunch pulls it all together so developer teams can stay on track, do their test/development and deploy.

There is a complexity in managing code, Prabhu said in an interview last week. What works on one cloud may not work on another. The code also needs to work on multiple devices. CloudMunch simplifies the process through its continuous delivery platform. Code gets delivered, deployed and then managed through real-time analytics and monitoring.

GitHub

GitHub has simply changed the way developers work. Open-source projects now turn to GitHub for posting code. On GitHub you can copy someone’s code and fork it. To share the code, a developer can submit a pull request, asking if the code can be added to the original creator’s project. That user can then easily merge the changes. Through this process of forks, pull requests and merges, updates can be made faster than the old way of committing patches. As Klint Finley wrote last year:

These three features – fork, pull request and merge – are what make GitHub so powerful. Gregg Pollack of Code School (which just launched a class called TryGit) explains that before GitHub, if you wanted to contribute to an open source project you had to manually download the project’s source code, make your changes locally, create a list of changes called a “patch” and then e-mail the patch to the project’s maintainer. The maintainer would then have to evaluate this patch, possibly sent by a total stranger, and decide whether to merge the changes.

This is where the network effect starts to play a role in GitHub, Pollack explains. When you submit a pull request, the project’s maintainer can see your profile, which includes all of your contributions on GitHub. If your patch is accepted, you get credit on the original site, and it shows up in your profile. It’s like a resume that helps the maintainer determine your reputation. The more people and projects on GitHub, the better idea picture a project maintainer can get of potential contributors. Patches can also be publicly discussed.

GitHub abstracts the complexity of Git by turning it from a command-line tool to one with a web interface. Git, first developed by Linux Creator Linus Torvalds, has provided value to legions of developers. GitHub has made Git collaborative and an essential tool for developing apps in this increasingly distributed world.

Opscode and Puppet Labs

Opscode helps Facebook scale its infrastructure without deploying armies of IT employees. At Opscode’s heart is Chef, the cookbook of scripts that are used to automatically keep servers configured. Opscode simplifies how infrastructure is managed by automating the way machines interact. Puppet Labs IT automation software helps system administrators manage its infrastructure. It allows for the automation of repetitive tasks so administrators can deploy applications and manage change, scaling from tens of servers to thousands on-premise or in the cloud.

Without offerings from companies like Opscode and Puppet Labs, there is no way companies could manage the complexities that come with Internet scale services or massively virtualized operations.

New Relic

Last month, New Relic launched the capability to monitor mobile apps with the stated purpose of helping developers get better reviews on app stores. The service, New Relic for Mobile Apps, visualizes in realtime how an iOS or Android app is performing across services, such as Facebook, different operating systems and in the variety of ways an app can be affected as it is used. By tracking the interactions, a developer can see in realtime how the app is performing and react immediately to fix what is not working. Without this kind of monitoring, a developer will often have to wait for bad reviews to come in before making improvements. New Relic has created a service that gives developers a fast way to better their apps, allowing them to focus on what matters more than reacting to what people say.

Fancy Hands

Fancy Hands helps people get things done that they would normally have to hire someone to do or get done themselves. It now integrates with task-management and project-management tools: Basecamp, do.com, Asana and Evernote. This means you can automate your task-management service so Fancy Hands does the tasks for you. Awesome. Here’s how Fancy Hands is used by my good friend, Marshall Kirkpatrick, CEO of Little Bird:

It enables me to do things that I wouldn’t take the time to do. For example, we just found what I think is going to be our company’s new office and I’m going to ask Fancyhands to do a little research on the history of the building. I’ve been walking my dogs and listening to a podcast about something interesting, called Fancyhands to ask for additional background research and had a beautifully formatted collection of links to read in my inbox as soon as I got home. There’s something beautiful about taking a little bit of time to put a request into the system and seeing work that took more time that I invested come out the other side.

SiSense

We talk a lot about analytics but there are few services that make it as dead simple as SiSense. The platform is fast, has rich visualizations and is designed for the everyday user. Visual software tools will often integrate with expensive data-warehouse solutions that require expertise that most people don’t have. SiSense can process terabytes of data from a user’s laptop and present rich visualizations without any time-consuming integrations.

Spanning

Spanning makes it simple to back up Google Apps. Backup is not easy. Companies actually still use tape to back up their data. Spanning offers a one-click way to back up Google Apps in the original document format.

Pertino

Pertino has turned to AWS to offer companies a way to network their businesses without having to install expensive networking gear. The Pertino data plane routes internal employees or can be used to set up networks that companies can use to create micro-networks with customers. It’s managed through the company’s software defined networking (SDN) technology.

Here’s how I explained the SDN concept when I covered Pertino earlier this year:

SDN is the term for how software is abstracting and separating the elements of a network built on hardware. It symbolizes what is happening across the enterprise market. Software is replacing hardware as a means to deliver new services that are cheaper and better than what customers had the option to purchase. It’s similar to almost any market you can think of. You don’t have to go to the store anymore to rent a video. You can get it streamed over Netflix. The disc is becoming obsolete, as will, eventually, networking gear from any number of providers.

Pertino also shows the importance that AWS and other cloud services have for many startups. Pertino’s service would not be possible unless there were data centers around the world that it could leverage to offer its SDN offering.

2600hz

2600hz builds open-source software for developers to create services such as their own phone services or web apps. To do this on traditional telco infrastructure is pretty much impossible. But with data-center infrastructure, a telco or anyone else can use 2600hz to offer voice or text apps.

The telcos use 19th-century systems with a business model just as old. Make a call and the telco charges you by the minute. But with data as the core, the model is changing to one not as much measured by minutes used but usage of the data itself. With 2600hz, the software can run in any data center and so the customer can choose their own telco network. A company developing a private video network using 2600hz software may use an AT&T network in the United States and Vodafone in Germany.

2600hz makes it simpler to be a telco and act like one, too.

Conclusion

These services have a common underpinning. They all abstract complexity so customers can differentiate their businesses.  In years past, companies employed armies of IT professionals and consultants to manage heavy, custom solutions. These solutions allowed companies to grow in ways that were not possible when thousands of administrative and clerical people were needed to type letters or use calculators to crunch numbers.  That was a time when processes were heavier in human capital terms more than anything else. The business world transformed with the advent of enterprise technology but the weight had been transferred to IT. Today the weight is getting distributed to tens of thousands of servers, making the apps more lightweight and nimble. The weight is still there but just in distributed networks of horizontally scaled machines across data centers around the world. How this distributed weight is managed over the next ten years will define a new work world that we are just beginning to understand.

(Feature image source: Wikipedia)

Apple pulled discovery service and daily deal app AppGratis from the App Store. So far, AppGratis is not communicating on the issue and users can only speculate about what the issue is. Sometimes, Apple pulls an app because its latest update crashes or because the app uses a private API. Then, the developer has to submit a new release to return to the App Store. But there could be a bigger issue.

Back in October, Apple added a new rule in its iOS developer guidelines. It reads: “Apps that display Apps other than your own for purchase or promotion in a manner similar to or confusing with the App Store will be rejected.” As a reminder, AppGratis curates apps from the App Store, provides a short description and make paid apps free for a day.

At the time, AppGratis CEO Simon Dawlat answered that Apple was probably going after low-quality copycats, not AppGratis. AppGratis is all about discovery and helping independent developers thanks to its revenue-sharing deals.

Yet, other popular discovery apps have been affected by Apple’s new guidelines. For example, as PocketGamer.biz notes, AppShopper was removed from the App Store and has yet to make a comeback. AppShopper provided a way to search the App Store that competed directly with Apple’s own App Store. Moreover, users could be alerted when an app was on sale, effectively reducing developer revenue per user.

That’s why many other scenarios are still possible. Maybe AppGratis uses a private API or breaks an insignificant guideline and Apple won’t put the app back in the store until an updated version is submitted. As always, developers are at the mercy of Apple’s review team. The team often contacts developers to require some changes to an app in order to stay in the store.

Paris-based AppGratis has coincidentally raised $13.5 million in January. With 7 million users and the ability to lead to up to 500,000 downloads for a single app, the company is not a newcomer. If Apple wanted to stamp out AppGratis, it could have done it a few months ago.

All there is left to do is to wait for Apple’s final say. For now, existing users can still use the AppGratis app. Maybe a few UX changes or infrastructure changes will be enough to make the app reappear in the App Store.

We have reached out to AppGratis and will update this post as we learn more about the case.

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

Everyone wants more transparency. It is part of a deep, fundamental trend. In government. In the workplace. Inside large systems like health care. And, more recently, around early-stage startup metrics and investment data. The crowd wants more transparency. They want to know more about metrics, revenues, and stats, and they want to know more about how investment dollars are allocated. Yet, the result of this shift raises concerns about privacy. In this world of imperfect, asymmetric information, combined with the desire among participants to build up, invest in, and report on the industry itself, frustrations can mount easily because, somewhere in the recess of our minds, the game feels slightly rigged in the other person’s favor, and the light of sunshine offers a promise of transparency to perhaps root out those bad apples and, just perhaps, inject an ounce of fairness, comfort, and peace of mind in an otherwise shady world.

In this real tension, we find many nuances.

For companies, unless they’re growing as fast as Pinterest or booking revenue as fast as Bloomreach, there’s little incentive to be fully transparent and publicly disclose metrics. Doing so may impact future fundraising efforts, strain relationships with existing investors, hamper potential partnerships, and inform competitors of an opening. Remaining relatively quiet is one of the key benefits of being a small, closely-held private company.

For investors, transparency may be an even dicier proposition. First, companies they invest in may want to remain stealth or not have their investors made public. In these situations, it is the founders who drive privacy — not the investors. Second, some investors may prefer to keep their moves private so as to not give their own competitors actionable information, especially in a climate where competition among funds within a contracting industry is growing fiercer. By law, investment funds are required to make filings with regulatory agencies, but those laws do not include, for example, listing out limited partners and other details many would like to know. Many people are also simultaneously investors in many funds at multiple stages, compounding the sensitivity.

So, here we are. Many want — in fact, at times, demand — that all of this data be made public to identify, tag, and call out the early-stage companies and investors who are not active, who are not what quite what they say they are. Investors may be growing tired of companies who craft and broadcast vanity metrics, and founders may be growing tired of converting their investor spreadsheets into a never-ending cascading waterfall of pointless investment pitches that waste time. Investors are in pursuit of perfect information when considering pulling out the checkbook, and every minute a founder spends pitching an investor who likely won’t pull the trigger because they’re generally disinterested, are phishing for information, or may not have any gunpowder left.

We have forgotten one dimension. We must investigate what fundamentally drives all of this to begin with: It is our collective curiosity to know more during a time in society where demand transparency is rising and at loggerheads with keeping some information private.

Nearly everyone in the ecosystem participates in the making of, analyzing of, or reporting on the news. Nearly everyone has a desire to know more about “who” funded “what” and at “what price.” Founders are lured to coordinating PR around their funding announcements, helped by an industry devoted to this and a network graph of relationships which can make dreams sing above the noise to target the right set of potential partners, the next key hires, and even the next investor. By the same token, investors love to be mentioned in these announcements, their brands gently stitched into the threads of the story. Both, ironically, work in concert, revealing what is material but oftentimes — as is currently their right — cloaking the specifics. The result is speculation masked as information. Add the real-time nature of Twitter to the mix, and perception distorts any signal frequency into reality.

People are keeping score, if even in the back of their mind, of who is following who, who is investing in who, who has real growth, who has real money, who is walking dead, who won’t be able to raise their next round, who won’t be able to raise their next fund, and all the other aspects and currencies of what makes the Valley’s parlor game so dynamic and opaque. I believe in more transparency on a fundamental level and am not an apologist for shadowiness, but I do recognize that part of the draw of private enterprise is, well, privacy.

The big fault line here is between transparency versus privacy. The web continues to make imperfect markets more efficient, and it is only rational that in these imperfect markets, rational actors will want as much information as possible before transacting. The startup world, in this context, is just another market, one that has traditionally been kept largely private and is slowly opening up thanks to new platforms, blogging, and (ironically) private dashboards created by actors to try to use data to make sense of the madness. The cost of this transparency is privacy, but not just for private companies and firms — but also perhaps for people, because a person’s reputation in our industry is tied so closely to one’s place of work, the drive for transparency might mean that individuals, in addition to firms and startups, may have to give up more privacy than they bargain for.

Photo Credit: midorisyu / Creative Commons Flickr

Single-tasking has been a hallmark of mobile. But Facebook Home lets you chat in an overlaid drop-down window as you use Google, Yelp, Maps or any other app, bringing the productivity of the desktop to the small screen. Home’s cover feed and responsive design are nice, but you could call them mediocre. Chat multi-tasking, though, merges the communication and computing sides of the smartphone.

Innovation doesn’t need to hit you over the head. It just has to solve a problem in a new way. Until now, a real hinderance to text messaging on mobile was context switching. You were either communicating with someone, or you were in another app. ‘Or’. Not ‘And’. What Android and iOS call “multi-tasking” is really just more rapid switching. Even with pop-over notifications, you still had to leave one app and open another to respond. That moment you see your current activity fade to black and a messaging app ascend to replace it causes a mental break.

This context switching is unnatural and unhelpful. Often we are communicating about what we’re computing — giving someone the answer to a question, making a joint decision, guiding someone to a destination, or discussing a piece of content found online. I’ve definitely had to go back and forth multiple times in frustration between SMS or Facebook Messenger and other apps when I couldn’t remember a set of directions or other complicated string of information I was trying to pass to a friend. The best option was to carry on a voice call over speakerphone as you navigate around the phone, and some connection types don’t even support this.

Our desire to converse as we cruise around the digital world stems from pre-mobile behavior patterns. Humans have always been able to talk while doing something else at the same time. Since the days of IRC and (TechCrunch parent company) AOL’s Instant Messenger, you could browse the web or use other apps with a chat window floating on top. We were led to believe there simply wasn’t enough space on our little mobile screens to do this. Maybe on big phablets like the Galaxy Note II or full-size tablets like the iPad, but not a traditional-sized smartphone screen.

Facebook’s designers weren’t satisfied with that. They are obsessed with modeling mobile after how we conduct our lives in person. That’s why they built “read receipts” into Messenger a year ago. They mimic the body language cues that tell us someone heard what we said At the time, I asked Facebook Director Of Product Peter Deng who oversees messaging about the philosophy behind alerting people when their messages are read by their recipients. He told me:

“Technology has always been here to assist us, not to get in our way, not to make us think too much. We’re building technologies that are modeled after real life conversations. We start with people and how we’ve been wired for thousands of years to behave. ‘How do you get things closer to face-to-face?’ Everything we do is built on this social principle. What we’re doing today is just the start.”

Chat multi-tasking in Home is the next step he was alluding to. When someone messages you, a little bubble with their face pops up over the top of whatever app you’re using. A preview of the first dozen characters of the message splays out sideways from their head. What’s special is that if you tap their face, rather than closing your current app and opening Facebook Messenger, the bubble scoots to the top of the screen and an overlaid message window drops down from it with part of your currently used app still visible. Tap their face again and the message window retracts, revealing what you were doing with no context lost. When I used it in the launch event’s demo area, I was very impressed by how seamlessly it worked into typical mobile activity. Rather than being interruptive, chatting felt complementary to whatever I was doing.

This system brings us one step closer to bonafide simultaneous messaging and mobile activity. In my opinion, the only serious shortcoming is that you can’t park the overlaid chat window on part of the screen and scroll around the exposed background app behind it. There isn’t a ton of room for this on the HTC First screen and some standard Androids, but I still think it’d be useful. Luckily the trend is growing screen sizes, so we’ll likely have more space soon.

Everyone I showed the Facebook Home hands-on video to or described the homescreen replacement app to has fixated on chat multi-tasking, which Facebook has given the silly name of “Chat Heads”. When I showed the Home video to a group of three decidedly non-techie 27-year-old women in Washington, DC, it was Chat Heads that surprised and elated them. It was met with calls of “I want that” and even one “I want to buy that” in regards to the HTC First running Home.

The feature is a true game-changer because I believe we’ll see similar functionality emulated and improved upon in other apps and operating systems. I would be extremely surprised and disappointed if the next version of Apple’s iMessage didn’t have some kind of chat multi-tasking. The same goes for the Google’s rumored unified messaging system that’s supposed to launch at some point in the near future. Hopefully they’ll offer true, simultaneous messaging and other app usage.

Until then, Chat Heads could be the feature that convinces people to download Facebook Home or buy an HTC First. The messaging space has gotten extraordinarily hot these last few years as companies realize just how long we spend texting, and how much valuable data about who we care about comes with it. Instant, asynchronous mobile messaging brought us the ability to communicate as we go about our offline days. That’s why SMS got so popular. But as we increasingly live digitally within the infinite potential of our smartphones, we need messaging broken out of its silo.

Read more of our coverage and analysis of the Facebook Home Launch.

A commentator on Bloomberg, Princeton student Evan Soltas, writes that Bitcoin is an “existential threat to the modern liberal state,” a line that can be read in two ways. One reading of his op-ed suggests we are all in danger and that the inability to tax and track bitcoins will result in a thriving black market and reduced fiscal control that will be disastrous for all of us. Taken another way – and given Soltas’ biases, I suspect he’s focusing a bit more on the “liberal” part of the title versus the “modern” part – it suggests that the modern nation cannot afford to fritter money away on the welfare of its people because it will no longer be able to tax the rich unfairly, leading to a fiscal nirvana for men and women of a certain breed. Either way, it’s a goofy way to look at what will remain, for the time being, a blip on the economic radar.

There have long been ways to transfer money anonymously. Ad hoc networks, most notably Hawala, have allowed relatively seamless transfers of wealth for centuries. Further methods have consisted of the condensation of wealth into precious metals, jewels or jewelry – a sort of money ZIP file that has allowed all manner of misdeeds to thrive between borders.

Each of these methods have been seen as a way to launder money, support wars and help war victims, and, as Soltas notes, build an “existential threat to the modern liberal state.” The FBI, for example, says that “the way it creates, operates and distributes bitcoins makes it distinctively susceptible to illicit money transfers.” The same can be said of a $20,000 watch that someone wears over the border and resells when he lands.

Bitcoins still require a way to convert the virtual currency into something you can spend in the real world. While you can buy a Porsche with bitcoins, I doubt the service will become sufficiently popular that every merchant will have a wallet at the ready for your next Slurpee purchase.

Instead, Bitcoin represents a new part of the economic engine. As it stands, trusting, say, a wallet service or your own computer to hold millions in bitcoins is a risky proposition. The transfer may be seamless but the extraction will be hard. While I find it laughable that various federal agencies will be able to track the inflow and conversion of funds from a bitcoin transaction programmatically, an intrepid auditor should be able to raise a red flag when you have $100 one day and $20,000 the next – unless you keep your cash in turbulent bitcoins or less turbulent cash.

This talk of the destruction of the modern banking system is akin to the talk about 3D-printed guns: it’s an interesting aside but it’s still far easier and cheaper to just do things the old-fashioned way. If Bitcoin becomes truly seamless and relatively solid, I could see some cause for worry. As it stands, it’s a cool way of doing something that has been done for centuries before and it’s definitely something to watch.

Editor’s note: Hassan Baig is an entrepreneur who runs White Rabbit Studios, a South Asian gaming startup he founded four years ago in Pakistan. Follow him on Twitter @baigi.

It’s an open secret that the social gaming industry is no longer the cornucopia of opportunities it used to be. Rising CPAs, falling k-factors, plateuing ARPUs and channel saturation all have made life difficult for the typical gaming studio devoid of a big network of users or a deep warchest of advertising money. But there’s a new gaming opportunity on the horizon, and the savvy tech investor will do well to take notice of it now that it’s still nascent. This opportunity is the impending mobile gaming boom in South Asia, scheduled to arrive by 2015 for all practical purposes. Read on for a thorough look at the gaming history of the region, emerging fundamentals and future expectations.

Fighting Bollywood And TV

Spurred by 200,000 gaming cafes popping up across the country, China witnessed an online gaming revolution in the early aughts. Facing no serious competition from traditional entertainment media heavily tethered by government censorship, gaming companies like Shanda and Giant Interactive firmly entrenched themselves in the typical gamer’s consciousness, making gaming a life-changing pastime in China.

By 2006, sensing the time had come for neighboring South Asia to take the plunge as well, India’s Reliance Entertainment released a gaming portal called Zapak. But unlike China, the response that Reliance received was lukewarm at best, and it turned out to be a stalled revolution. Zapak is still alive today, as are Shanda and Giant Interactive, but whereas the latter have grown to become industry leaders, Zapak never validated the business case upon which it was built.

Ultimately gaming failed to take root in India because of stiff competition from the prevalent form of entertainment in the region: Bollywood and TV. Zapak’s offerings were too underdeveloped, and subsequent interest in them was too thin to displace these highly mature regional media. Thus, other than a curious fringe, Zapak never made a dent in the South Asian universe like online gaming did across the border in China.

Analysts are mistaken to equate South Asia’s lackluster past performance with its potential as a mobile gaming hub.

Today when mobile gaming is en route to become a $48 billion industry by 2016, South Asia is excluded from the discussion almost entirely given its tepid history. But here’s the thing: Analysts are mistaken to equate South Asia’s lackluster past performance with its potential as a mobile gaming hub. Web and mobile games are two very different animals, and where the former failed to make inroads in South Asia, the latter will create some strong ripples.

Filler Entertainment

At their core, mobile games are excellent fillers for idle time when, say, waiting in a queue or for a bus. They harmoniously coexist with going to the movies or watching TV, while also retaining opportunities of exclusive engagement for hardcore users. So whereas web gaming in the region has had to compete with television and Bollywood, mobile gaming will never be in direct competition with these favorite pastimes in South Asia.

Moreover, given the region is one of the most densely populated in the world, it is reasonable to expect the average South Asian to have available more idle minutes due to greater wait times than their counterparts in the west (meaning potentially more minutes available for absorption by mobile games). And as game developers will tell you, every extra minute of engagement correlates to an uptick in ARPU.

3G And Smartphone Penetration

South Asia has been globally viewed as a slow adopter of the 3G standard. However, most people have missed the tipping point, which was reached in January: 3G penetration is now growing at a startling rate of 11 percent month over month in India, according to K. Srinivas, president of Airtel, India’s largest and the world’s third-largest mobile network operator.

Such a growth rate ensures that the current pesky 6 percent 3G penetration in India will more than triple within 12 months. That’s an estimated 210 million 3G subscribers in India by mid 2014. And you know that something has surely entered the Indian public’s imagination when Bollywood ends up making a movie about it.

Though lagging behind India, the rest of South Asia is also exhibiting healthy interest in 3G and smartphones. Taken as a whole, South Asia boasts an estimated middle class of 310 million (same as the population of the US). Owing to falling entry prices of smartphones coupled with availability of inexpensive data plans, it can be safely assumed that this 310 million strong middle class will each own a smartphone phone with affordable mobile broadband by 2015. In effect, South Asia is poised to become one of the largest smartphone markets in the world, and the implications of that on the mobile gaming industry are immense.

Carrier Billing

Because of a lack of widespread credit card usage, ARPU from digital content monetization remains quite low in South Asia. Hence conventional wisdom views the aforementioned explosive growth in smartphones as not necessarily translating to big bucks for mobile game developers. But here’s what conventional wisdom is overlooking: much like Japan and Korea (and China recently), ARPU from mobile content consumption in South Asia will be driven by carrier billing, not credit cards.

Optimistic about the role carrier billing can play in unlocking South Asia’s digital economy, local mobile network operators (MNOs) have sprung into action. For instance announcements of carrier billing rollout by MNOs in the region spotted all of 2012, and have continued well into 2013, as well. As long as MNOs deliver on these announcements and ensure judicious revenue shares for developers, expect the South Asian gaming market to become a big story around the world.

Industry Size

Total mobile phone penetration in the region currently stands at 1.1 billion subscribers, so there exists ample headroom for smartphone adoption. Expect the mobile gaming industry to be volume driven as carrier billing is rolled out and improves payer conversion rates.

Assuming the region’s 310 million-strong middle class is each armed with a smartphone by 2015 and carrier billing can help generate yearly ARPU between $1 and $3, we’re looking at an industry size between $300 million to $900 million annually, and with ample room for further growth.

Role Of Localization