Category: Tech news

I’m writing this while watching the NFL Week 5 showdown between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Pittsburgh Steelers. I’m watching it live, in the comfort of my own living room. That’s because, for the first time in years, I’ve made the decision to pay for cable TV. I’m not the first to try this experiment, but the experience has already reminded me why I didn’t want to pay for cable TV to begin with.**

The Background

I generally don’t watch TV, which is why I wasn’t paying for it. But I do need broadband Internet at home — my job pretty much depends on me being connected. But I was paying about $70 a month for not very good Internet — I think I was getting about 10 or maybe 15 Mbps. Now think about that for a second. In Kansas City, Google will be charging its users $70 for 1 Gbps fiber service. I was getting literally one-hundredth of that for the same price.

So when I received a call from Comcast customer service phone rep, asking if I wanted to upgrade my service, I said yes. The offer? Basic cable TV and 25 Mbps Internet at a promotional rate of $70, which goes up $10 per month after six months. For half a year I would be getting more for the same amount and then after that, I’d only be paying $10 more. Getting faster broadband was worth the extra money by itself — actually having live TV is just kind of a bonus.***

Lack of Transparency

Which brings me to my first problem with the cable industry. In the effort to endlessly slice and dice the market, with all the promotional offers and what-not, it seems like no one knows what they’re paying for or what they’re actually getting. Take a look at the Comcast bundles page whenever you get a chance and try to figure out which package you would want to sign up for. Try to figure out how much you’ll be paying once the promotional offers are over, and which channels you get and for how long. What’s more, all those offers differ by market, so the products and services I see will inevitably different than those available in other Comcast markets.

For Kansas City residents, that’s one of the most compelling things about the Google Fiber plan: One flat price, everyone gets the same pricing, and there’s no confusion about what they get: There’s the same Gigabit fiber speed for everyone at $70, the same TV package for those who opt to pay $50 more, and those who want premium channels like HBO pay a little bit more. Everyone gets the same equipment, unless they opt to pay for an additional box or whatever, but that’s not unusual.

There’s also the matter of “gotcha” promotions — like getting HBO or Showtime free for a couple months and then getting charged for it when the promotional period is over.

So what’s the solution here? A flatter pricing structure, fewer plans, fewer promotional offers that end after six or 12 months, more transparency.

Being Nickel And Dime’d To Death

Alongside the lack of pricing transparency, there’s also the issue of endless add-ons, upgrades, and equipment leases that Comcast users face. Time Warner Cable subscribers are all up in arms because the company just began leasing them the cable modems they used to get free, for $3.99. Guess what? I’m paying $7 for my Docsis 3.0 cable modem, and will likely just buy my own from Amazon over the next few days. It’ll end up paying for itself in six months to a year.

My set-top box is capable of displaying HD channels, but I don’t have HD. Why? That’ll be another $10 a month. Want HD and DVR? That’ll be $17 a month. Coming from a situation where I had 15 channels off an over-the-air antenna, I didn’t think I really needed to pay extra for those features. After all, I don’t actually watch TV all that often. But for someone who does, ordering high-speed broadband, HD, & DVR for one TV means spending $25 in monthly equipment costs alone.

Comcast also has a wide range of choices for allowing users to “Customize” their bundles, including adding things like Comcast’s Netflix wannabe, Streampix, for $4.99 a month. (I have been offered Streampix “free” as part of my promotional package, and wondering if I’m going to be charged $5 a month for a service I’m unlikely to use even before those six months are up.) And lots of On Demand channels — Disney Family Movies On Demand, WWE Classics On Demand, etc.

Cut the equipment leasing costs, Comcast. At least for the first TV in the home. Some things — like HD and DVR — are becoming table stakes. It makes no sense to charge subscribers for them.

The Customer Service Nightmare

And then there’s the customer service. Oh, the customer service. Complaining about cable company customer service is a total cliche, but it’s cliche because it’s true.

Here’s my experience: When I agreed to upgrade to get TV in addition to broadband Internet, I knew that I’d need a tech to come by to wire my tiny little apartment. So I set a time a few days later, between 8:00 AM and noon, for the tech to come by. When I told a few people, they laughed and said that means they’ll show up at 12:15. Ha ha, I thought.

That is, until it was 11:45 and there was no sign of anyone coming anytime soon. After talking to some Comcast folks, I found out that my appointment had been put in the schedule for 12:00 to 2:00. When he finally did arrive, the tech was courteous and professional and got my apartment wired up ok. And a follow-up call with customer service resulted in Comcast waiving the installation fee. But that still doesn’t change the fact that tasks like scheduling appointments shouldn’t consistently be an issue.

Caveat

I know that these issues are endemic in the industry, and this is a lot of piling on for Comcast, when different pay TV providers have the same issues. But Comcast is the biggest of those providers, and while it’s been really forward-thinking in pushing TV Everywhere and building apps for mobile and connected devices, it still suffers in the fundamental blocking and tackling skills that are required for keeping customers happy.

Then again, cable customers don’t expect to be happy. They fully expect these issues and this level of service. There’s still no reason for Comcast to play down to those expectations.

[Photo source]

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* From a pure economic standpoint, it absolutely makes sense for me to pay a few bucks for cable, instead of shelling out upwards of $50 a weekend to get really drunk and eat too much while cheering my team on amongst other fans. But not nearly as fun.

** Over the course of the Eagles game, I’ve seen no less than a dozen Comcast ads telling me that Xfinity is “the future of awesome.” Dude, just saying that on national TV doesn’t quite make it so!

*** The funny thing about upgrading my service in this fashion is that I’ve likely become a less profitable customer for Comcast than when I was just a pure broadband subscriber. As a pay TV customer, it now has to pay all of its content partners for channels that I don’t really watch. It’s making $10 more from me per month, but then turning around and paying all of that to cable networks. ESPN alone is going to get about half of the difference.

The fractured state of the Android platform can make it difficult to manage app development. Testing can be a bear but cloud-based services are providing new ways for developers to quickly see  how their apps look on any type of device.

In its presentation at PIE Demo Day in Portland on Friday, AppThwack’s Trent Peterson said the remedy comes in automating the testing. Through its cloud-based platform, developers can get answers in minutes to how their apps behave on all the various devices and version of the Android OS that people use. AppThwack runs a lab that tests every device that runs Android. They use that lab as the foundation for its service.

Here’s how it works:

• Use the site’s drag-and-drop to securely upload it.
• AppThwack runs your app on real phones and tablets, hits it with tests, and gathers statistics.
• You can Vvew screen-shots, high-level results, logs, stack-traces, and trends in real time.

For more information, I’d recommend Sarah Perez thorough review of the service that she wrote in July.

To get a picture of Android’s ecosystem, here’s a chart of its platform and the different versions running.

Since July, AppThwack has run 563,000 tests so these guys know what works and what does not. I asked Peterson what he would recommend to enterprise developers building apps for the Android platform. He gave me these five pieces of advice:

• Developing tests as the code is written is important. This can be done using JUnit (Standard unit tests), Robotium (An open-source automation library that makes it easy to write JUnit tests that simulate user interactions), or tools like Gorilla Logic’s MonkeyTalk, which is especially powerful since it allows cross-platform tests (Android+iOS).
• Since it’s impossible to catch every bug before sending it out into the wild, tools like BugSense and Crittercism provide a way to get bug reports automatically sent when an app crashes on an actual customer’s device.
• Apptentive (currently in TechStars Seattle) provides a way to actually connect with your customers and find out what works and what doesn’t. They focus on making sure customers are leaving good reviews because they truly love your app.
• ActionBarSherlock allows an app to gracefully degrade if the app is installed on older devices running older OS. This means on older devices functionality will either be simulated or replaced, but allows developers to skip the traditional in-code branching, which is very error-prone and becomes a nightmare as the market becomes more fragmented.

Enterprise developers would be wise to look at services that provide custom testing. Companies like AppThwack can recommend tools and strategies, or actually help in writing the test plan and scripting it. Testdroid is another service to explore.

A service like AppThwack won’t solve all your problems but it certainly can make development a more streamlined task and keep your customers from throwing their smartphone in the river.

Because we just experienced the one-year anniversary of Steve Jobs’ passing, I began to think about how technology has impacted my life and how different it is for today’s children. I thought about my first computer, what computing was like back then and what it’s like now. And it hit me: stories where people recount tales of their first computer will become something only the old people talk about.

Don’t laugh. I’ve been fooling myself for some time that I’m not one of those “old people.” After all, it’s not like I remember punch cards.

I remember the first computer I bought with my own money. It wasn’t a cool Apple II or a colorful iMac. It was a cheap, beige Gateway PC. (Forgive me, I was poor and it was on sale.) It ran Windows 98. And it crashed constantly. In fact, it blue-screened so much that I ended up spending hours on tech support calls, getting walked through restorations, booting into the BIOS, and eventually learning a little about how PCs worked. It changed my life. I realized that computers were interesting, and I wanted to know more about them. I went back to school, and later ended up working in IT for a few years. Somehow, that path brought me here, blogging about tech companies and startups.

But now the future is rapidly approaching. “First computer?, pfft,” the kids will smirk. I may as well be speaking of my first microwave, my first TV, my first vacuum. It will be mind-boggling to them that technology wasn’t just there, like a toaster oven or air conditioning. They won’t think about the iPad as this thing that came into their life, impacting it, changing what’s possible.

It will be like telling kids that, yes, I grew up without a mobile phone. ”That’s so weird,” they’ll say. Kids, I had to remember people’s phone numbers, I tell you. I got lost a lot! Like, crying and alone in-the-middle-of-nowhere lost. I had to rely on the kindness of strangers when I got a flat or ran out of gas. When I went outside to play, my parents had no idea where in the neighborhood I was! I wrote letters from summer camp, and wrote to pen pals. I always had stamps. “What’s a pen pal? Oh my god, you’re sooo old,” the kids will laugh.

Similarly, actually remembering and recounting tales of your first computer will soon be this odd, old-person thing to do, too. Kids’ first computers will be their parents’ hand-me down iPads. There are children being born into the world now who have always had an iPad. Like, from babyhood. I know that you know this already, but really think about that for a minute. To these kids, the iPad wasn’t any newer a thing to them than anything else in the world. It was there, just like air and sunshine, plants and animals, houses and cars, skyscrapers and freeways, boys and girls, dolls and bicycles…TVs and iPads. It’s just another thing.

It’s not particularly special or notable.

It’s not amazingly thin.

It’s not super annoying because it doesn’t have a keyboard or mouse. It’s not weird that you tap and touch it, or tilt it when playing a game. That’s normal. That’s what you do with computers. (“Computers,” of course, being how old people refer to these things.)

Whatever, it’s just an iPad. So what?

I was the first person in my family to get the iPad. I brought it over to my sister-in-law’s on Easter. The family passed it around throughout the day. It was memorable, because it was this shiny, new portable computer with a touchscreen. That alone made it incredible. It had apps! Games! Gestures! I described it then as “the first real family computer,” because it was something everyone could use. I had originally thought the only people who would care about the iPad were my younger nephews. I was wrong. Everyone used it. The kids played games, but so did the grown-ups. Grandma looked at baby pictures. Someone else played cards. Someone watched Netflix. Someone surfed the web. I didn’t get to see it much that day.

But even then, the most incredible thing about the iPad is that it was somehow both new and normal. It was natural. There wasn’t a lot of training involved. You just picked it up and used it. Here’s how I described it:

No longer is computing an isolated experience with one person staring at a screen, fingers clacking away on the keyboard while the rest of the family does something else. The iPad was shared between brothers, giggled over by children, and downright snuggled up with…It was no more isolating an experience than someone reading the paper in the next chair over. It was easily just another everyday object. And that may be its biggest selling point yet: the iPad hides away the technology, and makes content king.

My daughter, three in December, has had an iPad her whole life. There’s something remarkable to me about watching her launch Netflix, browse the queue, start an episode of “Dora the Explorer,” fast forward if need be, and hit “play.” It’s not remarkable to her that she does this, any more so than stacking Legos, or putting on shoes. It’s just another life skill to master.

But I can’t help but marvel. And in marveling, I’m showing my age.

It’s an iPad, mom. So what?

Amazing.

Image credits: BuzzFeed; I’m sorry Josie. 

Survival in a harsher age. That’s why we evolved to fear for our privacy. We needed somewhere secret to sleep, defecate, or have sex so someone couldn’t run up and club us while we were vulnerable.

Times have changed but we carry the fear like a vestigial wing. If we don’t stay conscious of our bias towards privacy, it could retard the progress of innovation.

Though closely linked, there is a difference between the need for privacy and the need for safety.

Keeping our credit card or Social Security numbers hidden protects us from real threats of fraud and identity theft.

Keeping the things we share to social media visible only to the right people protects us from judgement and discrimination. Unfortunately, there are many parents and employers who’d look down on or prefer not to hire someone who occasionally posts pictures of themselves drinking with friends. Everyone has to decide for themselves how much they want to share widely or publicly.

Keeping private correspondence concealed, like our emails or Facebook messages, is important too. It protects us from embarrassment or having our competition anticipate our next move. That’s why when a hoax tricked people into thinking their old Facebook messages had been published to their Timelines, there was worldwide panic. Luckily nothing was leaked. It was all a misunderstanding.

If a social network, website, device, or person exposes these types of information, we have every right to be angry. Violating our privacy in this way actually jeopardizes our safety.

But often times, people and the press are outraged by perceived “privacy violations” that don’t affect our security. This is dangerous because it makes innovators afraid to build great things that use our data safely or with our permission.

A year ago, Facebook began allowing developers to request permission for our home addresses and phone numbers. This could have powered apps that let us bypass entering our shipping information when making purchases or sent us emergency updates via SMS.

But before the new data-permissions capability could even be used, the press and politicians declared it an egregious privacy violation. They misconstrued it as apps stealing this information, not asking for it. They jumped to conclusions and worst-case scenarios of home invasions and telemarketing spam.

Instead, if allowing adults to make decisions about how their info could be used, the fearful forced Facebook to backtrack and remove the option. To this day, it hasn’t been reinstated. Great, useful apps were not built because of fear.

Then this week, it came to light that Facebook mechanically scans private messages for links to websites. If Facebook finds a link to a site hosting a Like button, its Like counter is increased. Our names and faces aren’t shown in the Like button, the link isn’t published to our profiles, and nothing publicly connects us to the website.

Still, this unleashed a wave of outrage from many outlets, including The Next Web (who broke the story), Forbes, and even my fellow TechCrunch writer Drew Olanoff. Why? This supposedly crossed some philosophical line on what is private. No matter that increasing the counter helps accurately reflect whether people are interested in that site, and that it’s done completely anonymously.

These examples are the panicked flapping of the vestigial wing of privacy fear. And unfortunately, with privacy being such a hot-button issue that draws clicks, news outlets are incentivized to prey on it.

As Sheryl Sandberg said this week, when caller ID first came out, it was declared a violation of privacy. In more recent memory, the Facebook news feed and Timeline both stirred hysteria. With time, though, we recognized these as change, as the future, and not as violations or things to be feared.

The world and technology in particular continue to hurtle forward at an increasing pace. We will be faced again and again with the question “is this a problem or is this progress?”

I urge that we stay conscious of our instinctual preference for privacy and strive to remain critical. Otherwise, we risk shouting down what we might one day appreciate.

[Image Credit: Forbes, Memo Angeles – Shutterstock]

I’ll stop by any startup showcase I can, but it’s always a bonus when it happens to be local. Last week’s TechTomorrow showcase, sponsored by TechColumbus saw nearly 50 regional startups show off the results of their hard work – here are just a few ideas and demos present at the event worth mentioning.

• BevCart911 is a mobile app/refreshment delivery system for golf courses, which lets you order the drinks or snacks you require with an app. The app geo-locates you and the refreshements are delivered to you wherever you are on the course.
• MorphCard is a gift card service that lets you purchase and exchange gift cards with no markup or charge. While the purchases or exchanges inside their ecosystem are not marked up, they monetize by purchasing any gift cards sold outside their ecosystem for slightly less than retail value, reselling them at retail value, and pocketing the difference.
• Lithophantastic is a service that transforms your digital photos into three dimensional Lithophanes. For the unfamiliar, Lithophanes are solid, back-lit surfaces that give images a three dimensional effect.
• Kiwi is a video app that lets you select single frames of a video captured with the app to create unique,  stylized, filter-affected thumbnail images to serve as link to the video.

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is currently an EIR with Javelin Venture Partners and has been a contributor to TechCrunch since January 2011. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

The topic of this week’s column is time-honored when it comes to business, perhaps even overused in many cases, and in the startup world, sometimes mocked, and at others, romanticized, but usually only in hindsight: The Pivot. This is a loaded word, so I should be clear that its more to describe a business decision on a spectrum, with “slight shift” on one end and “complete reinvention” on the other.

If a startup company matures and is able to achieve some level of success, we sometimes begin to hear from the founders about how they changed course along the way, either through a slight tweak, massive reset, or something inbetween. Fab, which now drives one of the fastest-growing e-commerce properties, originally started as a gay social network called Fabulis. Before entering the daily deals space as Groupon, the founders started The Point, trying to catalyze action by using the crowd to reach a certain “tipping point.” More recently, the small team behind Instagram initially began with Burbn, a location-based mobile application which struggled to find its way.

As founders know all too well, things change between the creation of fundraising slide decks and a diminishing runway, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. It is simply part of the struggle in creating something new, big, lasting, and meaningful. In fact, considering the stodginess in many traditional, larger workplaces, it is a luxury to re-roll the dice, the creative license to continually question direction paired with the nimbleness to optimize for a bigger opportunity.

Most of us don’t hear about all the slight tweaks or bold pivots early-stage startups make, partly because there are too many, aren’t of consequence (yet), and usually are only relayed once the move can be linked to a good outcome, in the same way that failure is discussed often only after success is in hand. In hindsight, the changes made by Fabulis, The Point, and Burbn look like strokes of genius (and they probably are), but what about all of the pivots and transformations currently unfolding, the shifts that are not too far removed from re-incubation, those gut-check moments when founders elect to rewrite their plans or come to the conclusion that while today’s opportunity looks rosy, they set their sets to change in order to address the larger markets tomorrow’s brings?

In 2012, there have been some “pivots” that, while early, show just how powerful (and risky) these moves can be. I’ll share a few recent examples, but of course cannot begin to list them all, though if you’ve encountered similar decision points, please do share in the comments.

Two years ago, a small team formed Greplin to power a new kind of search engine for people, places, and things. The service worked reasonably well, and I even used the iPhone app as a way to check up on people before meeting them in person, as sort of a quick, lightweight piece of context. At some point since 2010, Greplin’s team elected to pull back, reset, and rebuild, this time focusing on mobile with a web tie-in. The team came back reincarnated with Cue, which on the surface looks like a basic calendar utility application, but is in fact a bold attempt to collect and harmonize data between email, social networks, and your personal and professional networks, tied to your calendar and location, and all rolled into one service. While the app’s performance isn’t quite ready for prime time, it’s one that I certainly use and can see the future value in. Eventually, Cue could provide an intelligent background service that helps prepare us what we stuff our calendars with. (There is another service I’ve seen in this space is Sunrise, which emails a daily digest of your calendar, but it isn’t as deep.)

Almost four years ago, thredUp launched to be a “Netflix for used clothes.” The idea was to help facilitate peer-to-peer transactions, where customers would pay small fees to swap out the clothes in their closets that were never worn. The founders changed tack a few times, focusing on men’s shirts and women’s blouses, only to find that the real demand was in kids’ clothing. So, they brought their model to kids’ clothing, trying to facilitate those swaps. Through these iterations, the founders realized that in order to reach any meaningful revenue scale, they needed to power an extremely high number of transactions. Winding down this path, albeit one that was working and making money, wasn’t big enough. Luckily, their years of experience focusing on their market enabled them to have their potentially breakthrough idea — to actually physically handle used clothing, centralize operations in a warehouse, and attempt to create the largest online brand for “certified, pre-owned” clothes, which is a much larger market. Investors liked the idea, as well, recently helping the company raise a Series C financing round.

Perhaps the most notable pivot of 2012 is when Zimride launched Lyft. Originally designed to help facilitate ridesharing, mainly at college campuses and corporate partners, Zimride was founded and is run by folks who are obsessed about making transportation efficient, so it’s not all that surprising that their newest creation, Lyft, is taking San Francisco by storm. While the original Zimride is up and running, we perhaps don’t have a sense of its potential to scale, but for Lyft, it’s becoming evident in the Bay Area. While Uber certainly deserves credit for opening up the “on-the-demand” transportation market, Lyft entered the market by leveraging the team’s experience with Zimride and adding a slight twist to the model — and so far, it’s working.

Sometimes, pivots can be disorienting. Launched almost three years ago by a talented team, Blippy received significant hype (and money) for a big idea: to make credit card purchases social. No harm in taking a big swing, and while their approach may have either been off or too early, the team recently pivoted to the curated daily deals space with Heartsy, which helped the well-capitalized team with revenues, but was ultimately shut down. More recently, the folks behind Blippy tried their hand with Tophattr, a virtual auction house that unfortunately resembles the offspring of eBay, Etsy, Groupon, Zaarly and Turntable.fm. I hear that the team may be on to another idea, and while it’s easy to mock the changes and turns, it’s worth keeping in mind that they still have more shots on goals. It’s all a function of their talent retention and will power at this point, to keep stacking the deck and resetting the plans. I don’t know if they’ll shut the company down and return money to investors, or keep grinding.

Not enough time has passed for us to assess whether these were all good transitions or not. In hindsight, we’ll know, hopefully. In looking at these few examples above, what strikes me is that in most cases, it involved a close-knit team that had accumulated experience and expertise in their respective domains, accumulating knowledge by doing constantly. Making these changes are often very difficult decisions among founders and their teams, thinking through all the risks against the opportunities, reflecting on their learnings to date, and communicating those new decisions to existing users or customers, colleagues, investors, and even family and friends. I am not advocating for gambling blind, but if the experiences founders build up is truly unique, it may lead to new insights that could transform the business, if the dice is rolled properly. As a friend and former venture capitalist recently remarked, “if you’re a founder whose business doesn’t have a chance to be #1 in its market, pivot. The risk/reward question doesn’t make sense for you.” And economic incentives aside, isn’t that why we’re all here playing this beautiful game, to take big risks and constantly reinvent?

In hindsight, we marvel at the evolutions, pivots, and slight flashes of genius successful founders make. It is quintessentially American in nature, the ability for a person or business to constantly evolve and reinvent. Whether its individuals trying to pick up new programming languages or business model techniques between jobs or companies that rely on markets, platforms, or customer bases that shift, change is inevitable. But what about those business moves that are happening right now? How do we know if we’re witnessing something routine or something transformative? How could we know if Cue is going to help us to prepare for each meeting, or if Blippy can change again, or if thredUp can actually become the leader in the second-hand clothing space, or if Lyft and ridesharing takes the country by storm? The truth is, of course, we will only know in hindsight, so for a moment, let us pause and admire the changes these and scores of other founders take, often in the dark of night, setting their sights on the largest opportunities for the chance to look brilliant — in hindsight.

Photo Credit: Steve A Johnson / Flicker Creative Commons

Plenty of digital ink has been spilled about the iPhone 5 camera’s occasional tendency to capture purple flares (even though it’s not an issue exclusive to Apple’s latest handheld), and Apple released an official response to the issue earlier today. The company’s advice?

“Moving the camera slightly to change the position at which the bright light is entering the lens, or shielding the lens with your hand, should minimize or eliminate the effect.”

The company has already stated that this purple flaring issue is considered “normal” behavior for the iPhone 5, but now there’s a more thorough explanation for the issue. As some have already suspected, it has nothing to do with the iPhone’s new lens or a change in how the camera sensor handles noise. Instead, light entering the camera at an angle can cause a “reflection off the surfaces inside the camera module and onto the camera sensor.”

That said, the quick software fix that some users were hoping for is probably out of the question for the time being. If you’ll recall, Apple has been doling out that particular morsel of advice for at least a few days now. After reaching out to the company for instance, an iPhone 5 user named Matt Van Gastel received an email response recommending that he (what else?) angle the camera away from bright light sources when snapping photos. This new response smacks a bit of Steve Jobs’ recommendation to hold iPhone 4s differently in the wake of 2010′s Antennagate situation, but really — a bit of purple popping up in your photos is nothing compared to sketchy wireless connections.

Apple has posted a video on its homepage today, with footage of Steve Jobs over the years speaking at keynotes and Apple events, showing images of him and the products he created that changed the way we think about and use computers and mobile devices. The video begins with the famous Wayne Gretzky quote that pretty much defines Jobs’ career: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”

Steve Jobs passed away October 5 2011, after a battle with pancreatic cancer. His life was maybe the ultimate comeback story, having founded Apple in 1976, only to be pushed out in 1985, and then to return to the company when it was in serious trouble in 1997 to lead it to where it is today.

A message from Apple CEO Tim Cook follows the video, marking the occasion and discussing Steve and what he’s meant, and will continue to mean for the company. Here’s the letter in full:

A message from Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO

Steve’s passing one year ago today was a sad and difficult time for all of us. I hope that today everyone will reflect on his extraordinary life and the many ways he made the world a better place.

One of the greatest gifts Steve gave to the world is Apple. No company has ever inspired such creativity or set such high standards for itself. Our values originated from Steve and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple. We share the great privilege and responsibility of carrying his legacy into the future.

I’m incredibly proud of the work we are doing, delivering products that our customers love and dreaming up new ones that will delight them down the road. It’s a wonderful tribute to Steve’s memory and everything he stood for.

Tim

Samsung is reporting a record quarterly profit of $7.3 billion in earnings guidance ahead of its full Q3 report. Reuters notes the figure is nearly double the amount of profit the Korean electronics giant made in Q3 2011, bolstered by strong sales of its Galaxy range of smartphones and high end TVs.

Samsung also continues to be a key component provider for Apple but, with DRAM chip prices declining, its mobile division is doing the heavy lifting — accounting for around two-thirds of its total profit in Q3, according to the Reuters report.

The news agency notes that most analysts expect Samsung’s run of four record quarters to come to an end in Q4 when Samsung ramps up marketing costs to combat rival smartphones such as Apple’s iPhone 5 in the battle for holiday sales. Another factor expected to eat into Samsung’s profits is that record profits will trigger higher performance-related payouts to some staff. The company is expecting record profit of 28 trillion won ($25 billion) this year.

Samsung, which has a market cap of around $183 billion, expects profits at its mobile division to have more than doubled in Q3 — to around 5 trillion won — as smartphone shipments exceed 58 million, including up to 20 million unit sales of its latest flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S III. Operating profit is estimated to have jumped 91 percent to 8.1 trillion won from the year ago period — a jump which Reuters notes beats an average forecast of 7.6 trillion won in its survey of 16 analysts. Q3 revenue is estimated at 52 trillion won, in line with forecasts.

Samsung will report audited results for its Q3 financial quarter on October 26.

DEMO Fall 2012 wrapped up in Santa Clara today, where 77 startups took the stage to show off their apps, services and products. The young companies were given six minutes to pitch their ideas and impress the audience, collectively competing for the $1 million advertising prize that went to the idea with the most promise.

From a bird identification app and an “Internet of Things” to apartment finders and augmented reality, here are the 14 startups that stood out from the pack during the three-day launch event.

The Winners

RentLingo, which was picked as the best of the “Alpha Pitches” given by student entrepreneurs, began as a simple class project at Stanford. Co-founders Dan Lauer and Byron Sing interviewed hundreds of tenants, apartment owners and property managers, during which a pattern emerged. Although there are scores of sites that allow you to browse apartment listings, there is no easy way to find information on prospective tenants, roommates or sublets.

So RentLingo decided to use social networking to make the rental process less of a pain in the ass and help landlords find great tenants and renters find the best apartments. To do that, the startup aggregates info from the major listings players and uses Facebook’s Open Graph to give users social context as they search for apartments. It presents this all via a dynamic map UI, giving listings more of a localized feel and allowing you to see what friends have lived in a particular area and reach out to them (within the app) to ask questions.

Your friends can then drag and drop a comment about the apartment, all of which is visible to people within your network and social graph. The site aggregates and lets you view all of this social sentiment around each listing, aiming to provide a more effective and relevant “review” system. Listings with reviews from your network show up as blue pins, while national listings show up as red pins, all of which can be easily filtered by price, size, location and recency.

The idea is to turn the platform into a place where owners go to see what renters are saying about them (a la Yelp) and to help students and renters find great spots with the help of their social graph and location targeting. With Padmapper, Craigslist, Zumper and seemingly hundreds more, it’s a crowded space, but RentLingo has taken a unique angle that could be powerful at scale.

Austin-based Ube (pronounced yoo-bee) took home the “People’s Choice Award” at DEMO because it plays into our sci-fi-fueled visions of what technology will do to our homes over the next few decades. The startup is trying to take the unintuitive and costly world of home technology and make it simple and cheap, while removing the need for extra hardware or programming.

Ube’s app allows users to easily control IP-enabled smart devices using their Android or iPhone. This includes smart TVs, set top boxes, AV receivers, DVD players, thermostats, garage doors openers and more. You can even use the app to control your devices while you’re away from home using the Ube Cloud — all you need is a smartphone and a WiFi router. The company said that its app will work with over 200 IP-controlled devices when it launches next month. Peter covered Ube’s launch yesterday, which you can check out here for an in-depth review.

It was also a big day for Rock Health (and healthtech at large), as two of DEMO’s five winners were part of the health accelerator’s most recent batch. We covered Rock Health’s third batch here, and descriptions are included below.

Neumitra develops data-driven technologies to address the effects of stress on health, productivity, and happiness. More specifically, the company is developing both wearable and mobile tech that uses biosensors to monitor your autonomic nervous system and the contextual and personal cues that set off stress. The company collects that data, offering analytics and a dashboard that highlight key metrics — both for individuals and large organizations.

At DEMO, Neumitra presented its newest product, Bandu, a smart watch that helps users reduce stress and “slow down.” Using smart sensors to identify biometric signals, Bandu monitors your body temperature, motion and skin conductance. When it finds significant changes in the norm (i.e. red flags that indicate an increase in stress), the device prompts you to take a number of mood-altering actions, of the non-narcotic or barbiturate variety, of course. Sending notifications to your phone, Bandu might suggest that you play a game, or call a kindly grandmother, or play some music.

NeuroTrack is a suite of behavioral assessment tools (software-based cognitive/visual tests) that can help identify the symptoms and diagnose Alzheimer’s disease and cognitive impairment up to four years before their onset. Nerotrack works with pharma companies and researchers to recruit candidates for clinical trials and to help measure drug efficacy, thereby speeding up the process of drug development.

DEMO saw the launch of NeuroTrack’s newest product, which aims to make Alzheimer’s diagnosis more widely accessible by removing the need to take an eye-tracking test and, instead, simply allows users to take the test using a mouse or trackpad.

ElectNext aims to help anyone and everyone get informed and stay engaged with important political issues. People are busy and generally stay away from politics, but apparently our votes count and can help shape policy that determines how we live our lives — or at least so we’re told. At the very least, we could all stand to be a little bit more informed. So, ElectNext aims to make that easy through a little visual Q&A and some dating dynamics.

The end-goal is to match users with the right politician (the one who aligns closest with your political views) and does so by prompting them to choose the three issues that matter to them most. The site then asks an additional ten questions, using your responses to determine your political match. If that doesn’t satisfy, users can go through each question, digging down into the data and compare each politician’s stand on the particular issue.

Users can then make a donation to their chosen candidate and engage with them on various networks. Obviously, it’s simple as is, but you can see this potentially being a useful platform for politicians to engage their constituency based on issues that matter to them and a way to disseminate propositions (oh, California), petitions, etc. ElectNext itself simply wants to create a tool that increases voter participation in the U.S. Even if this isn’t the way to do it, the goal is an admirable one. But good luck with the young people, I hear they’re apathetic.

Ecolek’s Birdeez grew out of a student project at UC Santa Barbara. A bird in the hand is worth two on your phone, or something. The app, simply put, helps bird-watchers identify and track whales. No, just kidding, it helps them track birds they see on their routine bird-watching adventures. Birdeezows read descriptions of the avian animals you identify, keep track of all your sightings and even tweet about it. Get it? Tweet? Warning: This app may not have quite as much utility if you’re an urban dweller. You can only identify pigeons so many times.

Flinja is out to help college students and recent grads find jobs — at least part time. Which is an awesome mission given the un-and-underemployment epidemic among this age group. Flinja wants to turn college students into a freelance workforce, offering an eMarketplace in which they can make themselves available for freelance work. A bit like Zaarly or TaskRabbit with a twist, students post the services they want to provide and employers and faculty can book directly. The idea, writ large, is to give students one place where they can search for jobs and internships, make connections and build a professional network and make a few bucks on the side.

Notables

PassBan — One of my favorite products from DEMO was PassBan, an app that offers multi-factor verification for your mobile device and more. While there are a multitude of security apps and password keepers that help keep devices and sensitive digital info secure, few offer users the ability to unlock websites and devices by way of voice, motion, facial recognition, location and token verification.

Users can set up their phones, for example, so that access is granted only by scanning their glorious visage. On top of that, the app (which will be available on iOS and Android in the coming months) lets you choose different levels of security for individual sites or apps, so you could keep nosey roommates out of your Dropbox account or your Gmail. Or maybe your son or daughter has been racking up your bill from in-app purchases in a game on your iPad, in which case you could have PassBan grant access if and when it hears your voice.

Another cool feature: The app works remotely, so that you could, say, grant or deny access to websites your progeny is trying to view at home while you’re at work. Users can pick and choose between voice, face, location, etc. for different apps and websites or set up a combo of those on one particular app or website. The startup is currently in beta and will be launching to the public soon. So stay tuned.

Bizness Apps: We’ve written about this startup a number of times, thanks to their simple tools that allow individuals or businesses to quickly and affordably create their own mobile apps for iOS, Android or the Web (with HTML5) — even if they don’t have any technical know-how.

While the startup also offers a white-label program for DIY app development, at DEMO the startup added a new product to its growing arsenal of tools for the SMB market. The new product, called Bizness CRM, was initially built internally to help its white-label resellers sell apps and websites to startups and small businesses. Unable to find a good third-party product to recommend for those looking to sell to SMBs, the team turned it into a product.

One of the CRM platform’s key features is a lead generator that allows users to find leads in any industry, any location and then narrow that list based off of optional criteria, like “has website” or “has Twitter page,” etc. Obviously, a small business that has a quality website and a social media presence is much more likely to invest in a mobile app if they’ve already seen results from traditional marketing, so this helps sales teams and marketers save time and narrow the field.

The platform also includes a tracking pipeline, a scheduling calendar, a metrics dashboard, team collaboration and a native iPhone app to track sales on the go.

Portland-based Tellagence is making a bold claim: The startup believes that it has developed technology that allows it to predict the flow of content on social networks — who will share information on any network. Simply put, the social prediction technology uses algorithms to analyze and measure the enormous amount of interactions, behavior and changes that take place every day across social networks.

Not just another social analytics platform, Tellagence instead calls itself a “conversation monitoring system” that identifies context and relationship dynamics to predict the path of communication. The goal is to allow brands and businesses to optimize marketing efforts and increase reach by moving away from focusing on individual influencers to targeting smaller, key group of users and their most significant relationships.

The startup’s first product focuses on Twitter and is geared toward enterprise marketers. For more on the science, go here.

Ones To Watch

YouBetMe is an app that lets you challenge your friends (and strangers) to a wager about anything — at anytime. The app lets you capitalize on all of life’s betting opportunities, whether it’s on Monday Night Football, whether your startup will get covered by TechCrunch, how many Jello shots you can take, etc. Users can also create and confirm bets on the go through the app’s SMS-based betting platform, tracking betting data and view public ratings designed to keep bettors honest.

Bonfyre is a photo and content-sharing app that lets users create private groups to share with those who matter most (and will find the share relevant). Those private groups are created around events, which become part of group photostreams and forums to enable reminiscing, event planning and good ole realtime mobile sharing.

Blipboard is a personalized mobile map of the exciting stuff happening around you. The map surfaces places and events nearby based on the activity and interests of your friends, influencers and other businesses. Users can create “blips” or location-based alerts designed to attract others to the venue. The app is headed to the app store shortly.

Candy Lab’s new mobile app uses augmented reality to turn the world around you into a video game — with advertising. The company calls Cachetown a combination of “Google AdWords, Foursquare, and Super Mario Brothers,” delivering its game layer in location-based AR.

Top Photo Credit: Stephen Brashear

Apple’s online store went offline on Thursday evening — sporting the usual “We’ll be back. We’re busy updating the Apple Store for you and will be back soon” missive  (h/t to AllThingsD which spotted the store was AWOL). The store has been down for at least three hours.

Apple typically takes its online store offline ahead of new product launches, but with no Apple event officially scheduled, it’s not clear what the latest swathe of downtime relates to.

We recently reported an Apple investor’s claim that Cupertino plans to send out invites next week to an event that will unveil a smaller iPad — but the event itself is not apparently due to take place until October 17 so it’s a little early for Apple’s store to go offline to get ready to list an iPad mini.

Friday does mark the one-year anniversary of Apple founder Steve Jobs’ death — but the Apple homepage would seem a more fitting place for a tribute to Jobs.

Update: The Apple store is now back on line after several hours of downtime but it’s not immediately obvious what has been updated.

Update: The Apple homepage now carries a tribute video commemorating Steve Jobs’ life — followed by a note from CEO Tim Cook which includes the line: “Steve’s passing one year ago today was a sad and difficult time for all of us. I hope that today everyone will reflect on his extraordinary life and the many ways he made the world a better place.”

One of the coolest features that you can get from Google is the capability to see on a map and time it the time it will take to get to a destination either by walking, bike, car or mass transit based on traffic conditions. It quickly gained popularity when Google began offering the service last March. Today, Google began offering the same service to enterprise customers through the Google Maps API.

Google Maps uses live and historic traffic data to estimate, where available, traffic conditions that refresh with the most accurate, up-to-date information possible.

The service can come in handy when trying to get to the airport or making a meeting across town on your bike.

But it has business use cases, too.  It can be used to estimate the time it might take for employess to get to work from different parts of the city. Based on that data, a company may offer incentives for mass transit or car pooling.

A few weeks ago, I traveled with Donnie Berkholz of RedMonk from Palo Alto to San Francisco in his rental car. He used a grip with a suction cup to hold his Android smartphone from the windshield while he drived. Google Maps updated the driving conditions but royally screwed up when we got into the city. We lost about 15 minutes, at least.

My takeaway — Google Maps is awesome but relying on it can still be a gamble. I wonder what chances enterprise customers will want to take with a service that works most of the time.

When you think of the top-tier people in the tech industry today, you’ll certainly think of Vinod Khosla. From years ago when he was a co-founder of Sun Microsystems to his current role as a venture capital investor at Khosla Ventures, his time has been very valuable for decades now.

With that in mind, it was interesting when he told Michael Arrington on-stage at last month’s Disrupt SF conference that smart young job-seekers should send their resumés along to him. You’d think that poring over job applications would be a bit below his pay grade at this point. But it turns out, staffing is one of the things that Khosla is pretty obsessive about — when it comes to his venture capital firm and the startups in which it invests.

So when Vinod Khosla came backstage, the first thing we asked him about was what exactly he looks for in these resumés he so enthusiastically solicits. I don’t want to give too much away, but if you thought that — since he holds numerous degrees from the likes of IIT Delhi, Carnegie Mellon and Stanford — he’d be focused on hiring people with “proper” schooling credentials, you’re certainly mistaken.

We also got to discuss several other things beyond the hiring process. So please watch the video embedded above to see Vinod Khosla talk all about recruiting, startups that are solving big problems, and much more.

Also, please forgive the wire sticking out of my ear — we were on a break and I had to have it in to hear when they’d be going back to the show onstage. I’m just realizing now how distracting visually it is.

Ubiquity and intelligence are the two maxims of the post-PC world that Base places most importance on in its mobile CRM service.

It makes sense. I have talked to several companies that see an opportunity in disrupting traditional CRM tools built for the desktop and the web. Salesforce.com, for instance, came into the market more than 10 years ago, long before mobile emerged.  The UI is very much driven by filling out fields. That makes it difficult to use a CRM app on the go. It opens a new market opportunity for companies like Base that put a primary emphasis on developing a mobile web experience that makes data freely available across multiple devices.

This week, Base introduced new native apps for the iPad and Android tablets that its founder, Uzi Shmilovici says brings the same ubiquity and intelligence to tablets that the company offers with its phone apps.

The apps provide the same functionality as the phone apps Leena Rao wrote about a few months ago. With the service, users can capture, track and visualize sales leads, as well as manage contacts with notes, tasks and reminders. Base also supports Google Apps. You can send emails from Base using any email address.  In total, the data is as much available on a mobile phone as it is on a tablet or via the web from the PC at the home office.

Reading the Base blog you see a distinct difference in the feature updates a mobile CRM provider makes compared to a desktop or SaaS service. I think it points to why more traditional players are having issues with the move to mobile. I asked Shmilovici about this in an email interview. He gave this response:

1. Being too big to notice a technological shift – how come Siebel missed the web? They discounted it as being not relevant. We know what happened next. Same thing happens to Salesforce today with the move to post-PC.
2. Being stuck with legacy code – achieving perfection on data sync is extremely hard. There aren’t many companies that achieved that kind of sync capability that we did. The traditional players are stuck with spaghetti code which is very hard to maintain, let alone leverage to sync data perfectly across devices. For months, Salesforce Android app could only read data!
3. Not thinking about the users. The traditional players are thinking how to sell more licenses, complex systems, servers and to convince more managers to buy them. They are not thinking about the end user. We are all about designing an amazing experience for CRM users.

It’s not all wine and roses for Base, which follows a freemium model. Their challenge is scale and finding new ways to develop its ecosystem. That’s the difference with a company like Salesforce.com. It is actively building a developer community to complement its traditional CRM tools. It has also developed a core social underpinning with Chatter, its enterprise social network. Further, it is extending beyond its core with workforce management apps like work.com.

Base has raised $6.8 million in Series B funding led by Index Ventures with Social+Capital Partnership, OCA Ventures and the I2A Fund participating. The startup previously raised $1.1 million.

Ask Jon Ferrara what he thinks of today’s CRM software, and he’ll tell you, patently, that it sucks. Ferrara is the co-founder and former CEO of GoldMine, one of the pioneers of customer relationship management and salesforce automation software in the 1990s. He sold GoldMine in the ’00s for $100+ million, but returned to the game in 2009 based on the belief that CRM was still broken.

The result was Nimble (not to be confused with Nimble Storage), through which Ferrara and team hope to take the pain out of CRM, optimizing it for the Social Era. Marc Benioff and Salesforce have done a lot to bring social to the forefront of the CRM discussion (with Chatter, acquiring Radian6, Facebook evangelism, etc), but as Esteban Kolsky points out in detail, CRM is still not doing enough to solve the most common problems workers face every day.

Koslky concludes that, for CRM solutions to be truly effective, they need to do a better job of managing and channeling our social data and providing context. Within CRM systems, customers and contacts tend to be two-dimensional, like a business card, but contextualizing those profiles and conversations with up-to-date, relevant knowledge gives them real meaning. And utility.

That’s what Nimble is trying to do. By bringing valid, relevant social discovery, engagement and collaboration into the mix, Nimble wants to let sales people, marketers (and everyone else) avoid customer research and data entry and get back to engaging with and talking to their customers. To do this, Nimble developed a social relationship manager that lets you tap into the conversations the people you care about are having on social networks and engage with them when necessary (and relevant).

Nimble recently released a new version of its solution, which means that it now integrates with the major social networks, pulling email, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Foursquare and Twitter conversations and profiles into one portal. Users can now see conversations they’ve had with a customer or contact on email or on social networks in one place so that they don’t have to switch back and forth between apps to find the info they need. (This is, as far as I can tell, is the real underlying potential of Klout, but its value prop pales in comparison.)

This context can be powerful. Until now, finding new customers has been impersonal, with cold calls and emails being the norm. But with Nimble, users could identify a potential lead through LinkedIn connections and Facebook friends and then, when they see that the person checked in nearby on Foursquare (or, say, at a favorite restaurant), they could engage them in conversation. Based on their Twitter feed, they’d even be able to find some mutual points of interest to talk about.

It’s a bit creepy at first brush, but there’s application for this beyond a use case for marketing and sales, as Nimble becomes a good way to simply manage your social networks and contacts, and re-connect with those who you haven’t talked to in awhile, for example.

To wit, the new Nimble adds a section called “Engagement Opportunities” to its Daily Digest (a daily email blast that gives users a run-down of birthdays, job changes and future activities), which alerts you to opportunities to reach out to both new and existing connections.

But my favorite new feature would have to be the addition of a Rapportive widget, which can be a huge help to anyone who spends a significant portion of their day in Gmail. Rapportive (which was recently bought by LinkedIn), via pop-up, gives you a brief overview of what email contacts are saying in their social streams.

Nimble’s widget adds this functionality, so that every time you get an email from a Nimble contact in your inbox, you can hover over it with your mouse to view their social profiles. And, if they don’t show up, with one click, you can add them to your Nimble contacts. This is huge for those looking to optimize time management.

As mentioned before, if you’re like me, you don’t really give a hoot about what your Klout score is, but it can be a valuable tool to connect all of your social networks to in order to get a makeshift, aggregated social stream. Facebook can also be the same if you connect all of your favorite apps to your feed, but who wants to broadcast every Instagram, Foursquare check in and tweet to their Facebook friends? Oh, right, that’s why Google+ exists.

But, with its new update, Nimble now links your communications to contact info and lets you view social profiles, it also allows you to see a consolidated view of all those social streams mentioned above within the person’s contact card. You could see what I’m posting on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, for example, and then engage me to talk about one of those subjects. Big picture, it’s very similar to what Entelo is trying to do for recruiters.

It’s a great way to make new contacts and especially useful for sales people, customer service, business development — any case in which relationship management is critical. It makes it easier to reach your target audience, engage them and facilitate introductions with your key customers, investors, etc. You could see how startups and entrepreneurs might find this useful.

Nimble may or may not represent a new generation of CRM software, but it is definitely a movement away from things like database marketing and reporting, the traditional realm of CRM tools, to focusing on sales optimization, activities and events and engagement. It automates the sales force just as GoldMine and others set out to do over a decade ago, but with renewed focus on contact management and relationship development. “Intuitive” gets thrown a lot, too, in relation to design, but I think Nimble qualifies in this respect, it’s so easy that even a blogger can use it.

More on Nimble pricing here, prior coverage here.

What do you think?