Category: Tech news

If you’re a startup aficionado, you may be getting tired of the same old launch pages. You know, the ones with a big, splashy image, a message about how something awesome is coming soon, and a box where you can enter your email address. If that’s the case, then you’ll probably get a kick out of the sign-up process at HackerRank.

The team behind the site plans to start sending out beta invites next week for “a fun social platform for hackers to solve interesting puzzles, build quick hacks, code game bots and collaborate to solve real-world challenges.” In the meantime, it’s doing something a little different with the launch page — the page features an interactive terminal, where, yes, you enter your name and email address, but then you’re invited to participate in a sample challenge, facing off with the computer in a candy-grabbing game.

There’s no coding required, just a taste for logical puzzles — and clearly some users have that taste, since the leaderboard shows players who have won the game more than 1,000 times. (I got a bit hooked this morning, but sadly I’ve only won twice.)

HackerRank comes from the same Y Combinator-backed company that’s behind InterviewStreet, which holds CodeSprints for programmers can solve coding challenges and earn the attention of potential employers. Co-founder Vivek Ravisankar says he realized that there was an opportunity to “build something bigger” here, because programmers weren’t coming to the site just to get a job. They were having fun too, as indicated by the fact that they were spending an average of two hours on the site. So the team decided to build something more fun and social, where programmers solve challenges, collaborate, and see how they rank.

Ravisankar emphasizes that HackerRank is going to be very different from InterviewStreet: “It’s not going to be a jobs site.” The only way companies are supposed to get involved is by providing data sets and problems. (Y Combinator backed another hacker ranking startup called Coderwall, but Coderwall’s more about aggregating accomplishments from other sites, not providing the challenges itself, and its planned business model will be related to recruiting.)

Oh, and if TechCrunch readers want to be among of the first to join, you can send an email to [email protected] with your biggest hack, and the 50 most interesting ones will get access next week.

When we heard about Instagram (and other sites) going down when Amazon Web Services’ North Virginia hub was hit by a storm — not the first time AWS has gone down (April 2011 was another notable outage) we couldn’t help but wonder: could  it have been avoided?

Mike Krieger, one of the founders of Instagram, once presented a great slideshow describing how Instagram was able to scale up so well. “The cleanest solution with the fewest moving parts as possible,” has been one of the guiding principles for the photo-sharing app, bought by Facebook in a billion-dollar deal earlier this year. Could that too-simple architecture have played a role here?

We’ve reached out to Twitterverse and beyond to get some thoughts on that.

Disclaimer: Without knowing the exact ins and outs of Instagram’s architecture, it’s hard to say why Instagram and other services, like TechCrunch’s database CrunchBase.com, are still down while other sites that had been affected, like Pinterest, Netflix and Heroku, appear to have started working again (although some say they’re still having problems).

Dominik Tobschall, the co-founder and CEO of Munster, Germany cloud-based contacts startup Fruux, notes that there is a way to run services so that they are not hinging on the health of one physical data center, but that the bigger the service is, the harder that can be:

“Since everything that can go wrong always will go wrong with technology, it’s important to deploy applications in a way where you always have in mind ‘if power or connectivity or anything else fails in an availability zone, all servers in that zone might power down/be disconnected’ and ‘if a comet hits the datacenter, there is a huge earthquake or whatever, all servers in that region might power down/get disconnected.’

“The only way to protect an application from downtimes is to run machines in multiple availability zones; additionally run machines in different regions; have a good automatic (or quick manual) failover methodology in place. But it’s incredibly hard and the bigger a service is the harder it gets.”

Reader Nicholas James made a similar point. In his view, there is an inverse variation between high latency (distributing the operation of your cloud service across multiple regions means if one goes down you have other places where it will work) and the ease of replicating a database (it gets harder the more you have).

With a service like Instagram, reliant on a worldwide network of users uploading thousands of images (of food and more) everday, it may be that this kind of replication is impossible.

Aaron Levie, CEO of cloud services company Box, notes that the simplicity of Amazon’s infrastructure-as-a-service model is compelling but also takes a lot of control out of a company’s hands:

“At the end of the day, the cloud’s availability will come down to its physical infrastructure being available — it looks like Amazon’s data center in Virginia experienced a power failure, which knocked out a number of its systems there. For the applications built on top of Amazon, sometimes negative consequences from these events can cascade through your infrastructure (e.g. when one service goes down, it then overloads another service that was otherwise fine), and in other cases some apps just don’t have resilience for these events built into their software.

“AWS doesn’t necessarily promise to handle these situations gracefully for you; because it’s a provider of infrastructure as a service, you get pretty low-level access to the technology (vs. making it super abstracted). That comes with huge benefits, but equally has consequences if the infrastructure disappears. That said, AWS has a pretty great track-record for uptime, but of course given their popularity, when they hit a snag the entire internet notices.  At Box, we don’t use AWS for any primary infrastructure, and we run out of a number of our own datacenters to ensure fault tolerance in the event of a physical system experiencing issues, so that helps.”

“That’s the nature of relying on someone else for your website storage or application hosting. If your host goes down, so do you. Although AWS doesn’t go down too often, it might be prudent to have a backup that’s not based on AWS.

“The main selling point for AWS is that it’s cheap. Wicked cheap. It allows the little guy to compete with the big boys. Even a simple colocated server will cost upwards of $300 USD/month for a good one. AWS lets you have your data in more places at once a la carte, so you don’t have to pay for what your’e not using. It allows you to scale your app/website without worrying about infrastructure.”

Vineet Thanedar, another one of our IT heroes, tells me that CrunchBase’s hosting is managed by EngineYard (which runs on AWS). “While AWS is back up, Engine Yard is still bringing up all their instances across clients and fixing issues. Engine Yard has thousands of customers.”

Barry Nolan, the CEO and co-founder of in-app messaging specialist Converser, pointed me to a great note from the Twilio engineering blog that explains why Twilio, which also runs using AWS, was not affected during a previous outage.

It’s a technical post but is full of examples of how you can architecture a service so that downtime in one place doesn’t bring the whole thing to a crashing halt.

So that people can get on with eating their meals and drinking their lattes.

[Image: Aussiegall, Flickr]

Oh yes, the social media food humor is rolling in — eat it up, people. According to Twitter’s real-time search, Instagram being down, as a result of an Amazon Web Services storm-related incident, is unleashing a cornucopia of Instagram-related food jokes, at a rate of about one every couple of seconds.

They’re a little cheesy (sorry!) but do underscore just how much the photo-sharing app is used (or, least how much it’s used by the kind of folks who also take to Twitter when they have an issue with the world). And how much it’s become a part of life’s everyday small events, perhaps more than any other social media app.

According to Twitter, the most-tweeted Instagram-down-food joke so far comes from Jason de Plater (and I love that his name even has a food pun in it! how cool is that?), with currently over 5,000 tweets.

#instagram is down due to a thunderstorm wiping out their servers in Virginia. You can still drink your coffee and eat. It tastes the same.

—
Jason de Plater (@jdeplater) June 30, 2012

It’s a nice example of how something can go viral on Twitter: de Plater currently has less than 1,000 followers, compared to over 13,000 for a guy who has penned another popular Instagram-food-down tweet, Nicholas Austin Maroney, aka @YourFavWhiteMan, currently at nearly 3,000 tweets.

My Instagram is down? What am I supposed to with my food, eat it?

—
Nicholas. (@YourFavWhiteMan) June 30, 2012

Yes, there are thousands more like it! Including a nice meta-jibe from our resident hilarious comedienne, Alexia.

Twitter's down. Where am I going to joke about not being able to Instagram my food?

—
Alexia Tsotsis (@alexia) June 30, 2012

Others are trying to advance the joke a bit:

Gotta love a VC who’s thinking like a chess player, a couple of steps ahead of the crowd.

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — watched in amazement and not a little fear as Mike Arrington baited @Scobleizer from the Friendfeed chatroom. What started as a Mr. Greenjeans-like pulling of various Google I/O tablets and weird music balls from out of his pants suddenly went south in a hurry when @jtaschek noticed Arrington in the chat.

Normally we don’t call this out, but Robert’s Rant starts at somewhere around the 36 minute mark. Arrington wanted us to make him a clip and a ringtone out of this, but it’s late and I barely have enough energy to write this. Maybe tomorrow. Feel free to download the file on iTunes and cut Mike a version. Enjoy at your peril: Not safe for work or anything else for that matter.

@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kteare, @jtaschek, @kevinmarks

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

Editor’s note: Dan Greenberg is the founder & CEO of Sharethrough, the native video advertising company. Dan has been honored as an AdAge “Media Maven” and was recently named to the Forbes “30 under 30? list. You can find him on Twitter at @dgreenberg.

Over the past ten years, publishers have continued to monetize their sites with banners and pre-roll ads, and advertisers have continued to pump billions into these formats, in spite of tanking performance and near- universal disdain. While click-through rates on display ads started out at around 9% in 2000, they now hover around 0.2% – which means 99.8% of banner ads are completely ignored. Meanwhile, led by YouTube and Hulu, the pre-roll ad market is only shifting in one direction: towards “skippable prerolls,” not forced interruption. And preroll skip rates are only moving in one direction (hint: when you give users the ability to skip annoying ads, they usually do).

As banner clickthrough rates go down and preroll skip rates go up, a new opportunity has emerged for web publishers: native advertising. Native advertising is defined as ad strategies that allow brands to promote their content into the endemic experience of a site in a non-interruptive, integrated way.

Most, if not all, major platforms on the web — Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, and WordPress — have universally adopted “native” advertising formats, in some cases entirely eschewing traditional display banners and interruptive preroll. For these new native ad platforms, borne of a generation of banner blindness and skip buttons, native is the only viable ad strategy. These native ad strategies are built around twin pillars of content and choice, not banners and interruption.

Already, billions of dollars are being spent through Promoted Tweets on Twitter, Sponsored Stories on Facebook, Paid Discovery on StumbleUpon, Promoted Videos on WordPress blogs, and Tumblr Spotlight and Radar (just to name a few). This trend hints towards a native advertising market that’s already surpassed preroll video and is poised to overtake display advertising in the next few years.

As the native advertising market explodes, the framework presented here aims to add a first layer of structure and definition to the emerging medium.

Native advertising on “Closed” platforms is defined by brands creating profiles and/or content within a platform, then promoting that content through visually-integrated, content-driven, choice-based ads within the confines of that same closed platform.

But it appears native advertising on closed platforms is just the tip of the iceberg. Over the past year, content publishers and independent technology companies, not just social platforms, have begun to introduce native ad experiences that reach beyond these closed platforms.

For example, companies like Outbrain and Disqus power recommended content widgets on publisher sites like Mashable and USA Today, which enable marketers to promote their links through native ads.

Companies like StumbleUpon and Devour help users discover great web content, and their advertising models are native to their user experiences: brands promote their videos, articles and websites into the same stream of discovery. In these cases, brands upload their content to a “closed” platform (often YouTube) then distribute that same content into these new “open” platforms with native ads.

At Sharethrough, we’re betting on video being at the center of “open native advertising” as we help publishers generate new revenue with native video ads from top brands. Our platform distributes video content from the likes of Nike, Old Spice, Pepsi, Microsoft, and Nestle across choice-based, native video ad placements to drive views and sharing at scale. Web platforms like WordPress, Cheezburger, and major websites like Forbes, The Awl, ThoughtCatalog, Breaking Media, and Devour have all committed to “open” native video advertising using
Sharethrough.

Native advertising on these “open” platforms is defined by the fact that brand content can live outside of the site, and can be distributed across multiple platforms through native ad formats. Just as the infamous Lumascape frameworks have helped define and evolve the mobile, video, and display ad ecosystems, having a unifying framework is an important step for the native advertising industry to evolve. To that end, introduced here is the industry’s first Native Advertising Framework – a first step in helping the industry understand and define the new native model. It’s very much a work in progress, but it’s a start. Please leave suggestions and additions in the comments. Native advertising on these “open” platforms is defined by the fact that brand content can live outside of the site, and can be distributed across multiple platforms through native ad formats.

Just as the infamous Lumascape frameworks have helped define and evolve the mobile, video, and display ad ecosystems, having a unifying framework is an important step for the native advertising industry to evolve. To that end, introduced here is the industry’s first Native Advertising Framework – a first step in helping the industry understand and define the new native model. It’s very much a work in progress, but it’s a start. Please leave suggestions and additions in the comments.

What’s Next for Native Advertising?

• Video: Video is the most promising asset for scalable native advertising. Brands and agencies are doubling down on video production, beyond traditional 15-30 second ads. WPP’s (the largest ad agency holding company in the world) recent investment in Vice and commitment brand content production and native video advertising pours yet more fuel on the fire of branded video content.
• Standards and metrics: A new category of advertising requires new pricing models and new metrics for success. The IAB has not yet set standards for native ad formats, but with the pressure of billions of dollars of shifting ad spend, they’ll most likely chime in. Keep an eye on this conversation.
• Scale: Scalable buying platforms will accelerate the shift in advertisers’ ability buy native ads across multiple platforms, starting first with “social DSP’s” built on top of Facebook, then Twitter, StumbleUpon, Linkedin, Zynga, and beyond.
• Product innovation: Breakthroughs in design and interactive features will bring native advertising to new levels. Facebook’s new in-feed “offers,” Sharethrough’s native promoted videos, and LinkedIn’s personalized recruiting ads all hint at the future for native ad placements.
• Closed platform adoption: Keep an eye out for platforms like Pinterest launching Promoted Pins, Google Plus launching promoted discovery ads, and Instagram/Facebook mobile to introduce new native ad strategies to the market.
• Open platform adoption: As open platforms like WordPress, Forbes, New York Times, and beyond begin to adopt native advertising, it will create further opportunity for marketers to distribute brand content at scale.

Last week I wrote about television; this week I’ve been thinking about Hollywood. Not least because a screenwriter with a pretty good track record recently attached himself to my squirrel book¹ and is hoping to adapt it into a big animated movie. But it often takes five years or more to go from script to screen, so I can’t help wondering–will Hollywood as we know it still be around by then?

Internet hero Cory Doctorow doesn’t think so. A few years ago he wrote an essay predicting the death of big-budget movies: “The specific, rarefied animal that is the gigantic film spectacle demands a technological reality that has ceased to exist: just enough technology to distribute the films everywhere, but not so much technology that the audience gets to overrule your distribution decisions.”

So far, perhaps surprisingly, he’s been dead wrong. Theater attendance is down 20% in the USA over the last decade, but actual box-office income is flat, thanks to higher ticket prices. Home-entertainment spending (DVDs, rentals, Netflix, etc) is overall down almost 30% in constant dollars since 2005, but that’s counteracted by the huge rise in ‘foreign’ box office over the same period. Hollywood seems to be fighting the Internet to a standstill.

But does anyone out there really think that can last?

Music and books show that the Internet inevitably grinds ceaselessly and relentlessly away at entertainment prices. It’s a death of a thousand cuts–or, more precisely, ten million BitTorrents and a free alternative around every corner. All the DRM in the world won’t save Hollywood in the long run. They can’t keep raising ticket prices forever, and they won’t keep finding new revenue sources faster than the Internet devours them.

In the long run this is probably true of TV too, but there are some significant differences between the two. First, movies are crazy-expensive. Reality TV is insanely cheap; I’ve been behind the camera a time or two myself, helping to craft 30-minute travel shows filmed (on location) for a mere $50,000 plus post-production. Even HBO’s big-budget spectacles like Game of Thrones cost a relatively frugal $5-6 million per episode. Movies routinely cost 20 times as much–plus marketing costs. For network TV, advertising is income; for Major Motion Pictures, it’s a cost that can easily run into the tens of millions.

We’re culturally programmed to Go See Movies, which is a huge Hollywood advantage, but that won’t stick indefinitely. Rep and arthouse theaters are everywhere dying and struggling, respectively, and they’re canaries in the coal mine. As Hollywood hikes ticket prices, and fewer and fewer people attend theaters every year, eventually they’ll hit a point at which the cultural cachet and social buzz of going to see a movie seems less and less worthwhile to more and more people.

So it seems to me that the predatory price-gouging Internet is more dangerous to movies than television. Don’t get me wrong, I love the Internet, but I love movies too, and I’m worried about them. Hollywood will have to start driving costs down. That can be done to some extent–see digital cameras, digital distribution, and the entire career of Robert Rodriguez–but big-budget movies are fundamentally extremely difficult and expensive things whose creation requires an army of talented people. Yes, technology will change that…but not as fast as it eats away at Hollywood’s revenues.

So pity us poor underpaid novelists; Hollywood has been our lottery ticket for so long. At least animation is likely to get cheaper faster, meaning the odds of some day seeing my squirrel book on the big screen will actually probably increase with every passing year. A happy thought. But a much less happy one is that I can’t help wondering how many big screens will be left by then.

¹No, really, I wrote a whole book about a squirrel. It won an award and everything.

Are you out at a Friday night dinner somewhere, trying to take a filtered picture of some fancypants dessert and post it to Instagram to no avail? Are you currently making futile efforts to pin said dessert to your “Fancy Dessert” board on Pinterest but failing?

Well you’re out of luck, digital hipsters! Because of storms in North Virginia, power outages have impaired Amazon Web Services data centers in the region tonight, which means no Pinterest, Instagram, Netflix, Heroku and other sundry AWS-dependent services for you.

According to the AWS outage dashboard the company is ONIT, yet, as of 12:31AM PST, it is only at 50% recovery.

This service outage inevitably begs the question: If someone takes an iPhone pic of a Friday night artisanal beer, and it’s not posted on Instagram, does it make a sound?

As one HackerNews commentator put it, “No matter how powerful we become as a species with our technology, we are still at the mercy of the clouds. Pretty cool if you think about it.” Too true.

‘Night guys.

Also: It’s also worth pointing out that these outages seem to affect services in other markets like Europe — meaning that, despite Amazon having more local hubs in Europe, Asia Pacific and South America, these services appear to be routed through only one of them, in North America. We’ll keep checking and updating the blog with any more news.

Update: As of 9.34AM GMT today (1.34AM Pacific), selected services running through Amazon’s North Virginia servers are back up. Instagram still appears to be down, though.

Update 2: At about 12:45 PM PST it looks as though Crunchbase, Instagram and others are  slowly regaining their full-functionality. Quick, somebody find me a coffee with some sweet foam art!

Editor’s note: Dan Schawbel is the managing partner of Millennial Branding, a Gen Y research and management consulting firm. He is also the #1 international bestselling author of Me 2.0 and was named to the Inc. Magazine 30 Under 30 list in 2010. Subscribe to his updates at Facebook.com/DanSchawbel.

More and more students are realizing that they can’t pass their degree in for a job upon graduation anymore. The old promise made by our education system was that if you worked really hard in school, you would be almost guaranteed a job as a reward for your efforts. Furthermore, corporations used to hire most of their interns into full-time positions. Both of these promises have been broken due to economic constraints and global competition. Based on a recent report by my company, we found that employers expect students to have at least one internship, yet only half of them are bringing on new interns and few have hired them into full-time positions. The normal path to growing your career is non-existent. In today’s world, you can’t rely on anything or anyone to make you successful – you have to be accountable for your own career and create your own path.

Students are stressed out because there are few paid internships and it’s even hard to get unpaid ones. To me, the solution to this mess is clear: Students who can’t get internships should start a small business or a side project, both of which can act as an internship. If the business fails, they still learn something and have experience on their resume. If the business is successful, they don’t have to worry about getting a full-time job upon graduation. Instead of sending resumes, praying and begging your friends, you can do things your way. Years ago, it would be rare for a student to have entrepreneurship experience on their resume because the cost of starting a business was so high and because they didn’t have the resources or expertise to pull it off. Times
have changed!

Now, hundreds of colleges offer entrepreneurship courses and employers are starting to understand the importance of that type of education. In our research, we found that some employers are actually looking for students with entrepreneurship experience when hiring for entry-level positions. Why do you think? Well, it’s because students who have an entrepreneurial mindset are accountable for their own actions, aggressive and know how to execute. They also have the communication and sales skills that are necessary to be successful in business today. Smart companies fully understand that if they don’t innovate, they won’t exist in the future. By recruiting young entrepreneurs, they bring new perspectives and youthful ideas into the workplace.

When speaking to employers about this phenomenon, some of the top executives said that they would rather hire a student with entrepreneurship experience over a student that had five internships. Entrepreneurs naturally develop soft skills, such as communication skills and teamwork skills that employers are desperately looking for right now as they scout to find the next generation of leaders at their companies. If you’re a student right now, make it your mission to take your career into your own hands and start a project or small business, whether you’re selling clothes on eBay, selling products to fellow students or you come up with the next big Facebook idea. Employers don’t care if it succeeds or fails, just that you gave it a shot and learned something from it. If you want to graduate with a job, then you better brush up your entrepreneurship skills today – your future depends on it!

Nothing is more fascinating than the tech platform API wars because they are so, so similar to high school. Once a company feels it’s too cool for another company, it starts shutting off parts of its API to that company, like what happened here with Facebook and Google. It’s basically one of those big, swinging dick types of things, that I, as a female, entirely understand.

Twitter’s move is completely about growth and engagement. Twitter currently has over 500 million registered users, LinkedIn, a modest 150 million. Facebook, which is at almost a billion active users, is clearly bigger than Twitter — So allowing tweet syndication there helps more non-Twitter users discover the service, sign up, and increase Twitter’s growth.

I’m assuming that the same principle applies with Twitter integration on page-view machine Tumblr, which allows for tweet display depending on the theme..

So for the moment I can still post to Facebook from Twitter, most likely because someone over there at Twitter HQ made the assumption that most of LinkedIn’s highly monetizable usership is already on Twitter. It wants those people reading tweets on its website where it shows ads, not on LinkedIn, whereas Facebook has another a half a billion users or so of potential lead generation, so “delivering a consistent Twitter experience” becomes less important.

As Twitter transitions into monetization mode, keeping people on the site where it shows ads is important, so I wouldn’t be surprised if Tumblr’s or Flipboard’s access suddenly gets revoked. Welcome to the latest phase of API Darwinism.

Social benchmarking startup Unmetric just expanded its tools to include YouTube, giving brands a new way to measure the effectiveness of their video campaigns.

Of course, companies can already see plenty of stats about their videos — views, likes, and more. But Unmetric tries to synthesize all that data into a single score, and then shows how that score stacks up against competitors.

The company was already providing scores for Facebook pages and Twitter handles. On YouTube, Unmetric says it looks at 24 different metrics, including tags, views, comments, favorites, and ratings, then gives a channel a score between 0 and 100. Customers can also drill down on individual videos or on specific factors to see what they could be doing better. For example, Chevrolet (Unmetric score for May: 60) has uploaded 66 videos adding up to more than three hours of content, while Ford (Unmetric score: 43) has only uploaded four videos/six minutes, and Dodge (34) and Chrysler (35) only have four minutes between the two of them.

The company’s other YouTube features include the ability to compare the length of videos to see whether long or short videos lead to more videos and combining tags into a word cloud to see the types of content that seem to work.

Unmetric says it has already scored the YouTube channels of more than 1,750 brands. You can explore the results for here.

On the 25th of June, our dearest Alexia Tsotsis had an incredibly rough day.

First, her car was looted by very bad people in San Francisco, who stole her laptop and a pair of excellent Bose headphones that were near and dear to her heart. And as if that wasn’t enough, her car then got smashed by someone running a red light, totaling her vehicle and leaving her in quite a bit of pain.

Between whoever stole my laptop and the guy who just ran a red light and totaled my beloved car, really not so happy with humans right now.

— Alexia Tsotsis (@alexia) June 26, 2012

When fellow TechCrunch sharks heard the news, we knew we had to do something to help out one of our fearless leaders, and so our very own Ryan Lawler stepped up to the plate with a suggestion to buy some new headphones for Alexia. “Knowing that we can’t replace the sentimental value, I was thinking we could maybe (at least) help replace the item that was taken.”

After a little back and forth, the team settled on an app to help us accomplish the task at hand (we at TC need an app for everything), and that’s where CrowdTilt enters the mix.

CrowdTilt is an online platform that allows anyone to start a group-funding campaign, which is different from crowd-funding. According to CrowdTilt, group-funding is where a group of people give money to fund an objective where the entire group benefits, whereas crowd-funding lets the general public fund an individual’s goal or objective.

There are a few small caveats to the service, including a required Facebook login for campaign starters and U.S.-only availability at the moment. For Ryan, our own campaign starter, signing up with Facebook is no big deal. We’re hyper-connected.

But for someone who doesn’t want to access third-party apps through Facebook (and there are quite a few people like this in the world), this may be a road block. CrowdTilt explains on its FAQ that the Facebook log-in for campaign starters is meant to make other contributors aware of who they’re giving money to, which is noble for sure, but not always convenient for the campaign starter.

Another issue we had was the lack of international availability. Sure, every startup needs time to scale, but our poor Ingrid Lunden and Mike Butcher had to contribute via PayPal, as their UK billing addresses weren’t accepted.

If your eye can spy in the image below, founder James Beshara joined us to make his own contribution to the campaign. He was also nice enough to manually close the campaign for us when Facebook Connect was acting up on Wednesday. So Alexia, when you sit down to write everyone a thank you card (likely with another app), make sure to include James.

Click to view slideshow.

Paul Oakenfold, the world-renowned electronic music producer and DJ, has seen a lot of change in the industry since his career began more than 25 years ago. And perhaps the biggest shifts have come from technology — from the way music is made, to how it’s distributed, to where and how people listen to it, to how artists become known and signed to labels, to the tools DJs use in clubs to spin records.

So it was really amazing to have Oakenfold swing by the TechCrunch TV studios while he was in San Francisco this week. Watch the video above to see him talk all about the intersection of music and technology — where it’s been, and where it may be going. Here are just a few quick takeaways from our chat:

The Trance-Like Connection Of Music And Code

It seems that many people who are programmers also have a thing for electronic music. Oakenfold says that this could be because the “trance” like state that, well, trance music helps facilitate goes hand-in-hand with hacking. He explained it like this:

“I think that it has a lot to do with being in the moment, or trying to find the moment, getting into a state of trance, if I can say that. And what I mean by that is, you really need to focus, you really need to get to a place, whether you’re hacking, whether you’re writing code, or whatever you do.

And it’s the same with me in the studio or DJing. I’m trying to get into this place. And then suddenly you lock yourself in and you’re on this journey… [Programmers and DJs] totally connect in that way.”

Leaving The Laptop In The Studio

As much as Oakenfold has really embraced technology in his career — from the tools he uses to make music, to how he interacts with his fans (his Twitter handle is @pauloakenfold, by the way) — he still draws the line when it comes to putting a laptop screen between himself and the crowd at live sets. He said:

“It just used to be you and your music. I still deliberately focus on, when I am playing to the crowd, I don’t want to go the laptop route. I don’t want to have something between me and you. So, I run [memory] sticks or CDs.

I try to retain the art of what we do. The spontaneity on the live side, people can see that, rather than having a laptop. That’s fine in the recording studio, but i don’t want to go that route [on stage].

…I don’t want to be staring at the screen trying to get things sorted out. I want to connect with you. And then the barriers are down, you start to feel where I’m trying to take you, and then we’re on a musical journey together.”

Getting The Crowd To Put Down Their Phones

But while Oakenfold makes a point of not putting a screen between himself and a live crowd, it’s still increasingly common for the people at his sets to put their own screens up in front of him to record the show on video or take photos. This is not a trend that he’s especially keen on — to really experience live music, he says, it’s best for people to be totally in the moment, not recording it for posterity.

“People are just standing there with their phones filming you, and it’s like, this is not what we’re here for. …But it’s something that’s becoming, unfortunately, bigger and bigger. More and more people are doing it.”

Keeping The ‘Sparkle’ And Avoiding Burnout

What’s really clear when you meet Oakenfold is that he’s still so passionate about what he does, even though he’s been doing it for so long. I asked him how he fends off “burnout”, something that seems like it could impact professional musicians in the same way that it impacts people in tech. He had some really cool insights — balance is key, he said, and so is making sure to continue to embrace new things:

“In terms of burnout, you have people in the music industry that fall away [after] they have their moment… it’s important to embrace new technology, new media, and be a part of it. You may not like certain things but you need to be aware of it.”

TechCrunch Disrupt SF is back and everything is shaping up nicely behind the scenes. Actually, I was in a Disrupt meeting all day and that’s why this post is going out so late. So, you will have an extra day to enter. Congratulations to last week’s winner, Samer Karam. We asked everyone who entered to tell us who they would like to see at Disrupt, and Samer’s choice was Instagram’s Kevin Systrom. We’ve reached out and will let you know. Also, remember to keep your eyes out for announcement posts; we have some exciting news about Disrupt SF coming up.

Want to come and hang out with us this September? Make sure to follow the steps below.

1) Become a fan of our TechCrunch Facebook Page:

2) Then do one of the following:

– Retweet this post (making sure to include the #TCDisrupt hashtag)
– Or leave us a comment below telling us what you think Adrian Grenier of Churchkey Can Co. is thinking right now.

The contest will start now and end July 2nd at 7:30pm PT. Please only tweet the message once or you will be disqualified. We will make sure you follow the steps above and choose our winner once the giveaway is over. Anyone in the world is eligible. Please note this giveaway is for one ticket only and does not include airfare or hotel.

Now is the time to get the best deal for Disrupt Tickets, so grab them while you can. You can purchase tickets here.

If you would like to join us as a sponsor, opportunities can be found here.

Good luck!

Bloglovin, a startup that has been compared to Tumblr and RSS, has just raised a $1 million Series A.

The company bills itself as a fun, simple way to follow all the fashion blogs that interest you. Like RSS, you can sign up to read updates from any blog (not just the ones on a single platform or content management system), and like Tumblr, there’s an emphasis on high-quality visuals and community. Bloglovin even held a fashion awards ceremony in New York earlier this year.

I first spoke to the Bloglovin team about a month ago, shortly after New York City-based incubator and early-stage investor betaworks had bought some secondary shares in the company from a seed investor. At the time, betaworks CEO John Borthwick sounded particularly excited about the startup’s numbers. It has about 1.5 million registered users, and more impressively, its ratio of daily active users to monthly active users is 50 percent. Put another way — people who use the site must love it, because they come back a lot. The average Bloglovin user also follows 37 blogs.

The Series A is betaworks’ first direct investment in the company. Other investors in the round include:

• Lerer Ventures
• RRE Ventures
• Hank P. Vigil & Fritz Lanman
• Eric Martineau-Fortin
• Rob Wiesenthal
• Jill Greenthal
• Kinnevik

Bloglovin CEO and co-founder Mattias Swenson says his next big target is mobile. He notes that even blogs with a tech-savvy readership rarely see more than 10 percent of their traffic come from mobile — compared to social sites like Facebook and Twitter, where mobile usage is more like 50 percent. Bloglovin has already released a smartphone app, but Swenson says, “We’re not really proud of it.” He’s planning to launch a new iPhone app at the end of July, with the aim of presenting one of the first blog reading experiences that looks really great on a smartphone. The company plans to release iPad and Android apps further down the road.

In addition to mobile, Swenson says he’s looking to add more social features. After all, he says his girlfriend, a fashion blogger, has hundreds of thousands of monthly readers, but “she doesn’t know any of them — they’re just numbers in Google Analytics.” That’s why Swenson wants to “bring the social fabric to the blogosphere.”

And if that’s not enough, the company also wants to release localized versions in key international markets like Japan. After all, when you’re featuring such visually-driven content, it can appeal to readers who aren’t native speakers of a given language.

Dell’s XPS Windows PC looks like an iMac, but gives you more bang for your buck.
Photo by Peter McCollough/Wired

This computer got a lot of “oohs” and “ahhs” during the week it sat on my desk in the Wired office. And for good reason: Dell’s flagship all-in-one desktop, the brightest star in its XPS line of performance-minded machines, has got to be one of the nicest-looking Windows PCs currently on the market.

As with any large-screen all-in-one, the display is the centerpiece — in this case, a giant, bright 27-inch display encased in edge-to-edge glass above a subtle, black chin.

The rest of the XPS One 2710 exhibits the same minimal design. The silver case instantly reminds one of the iMac (actually, the look of almost every all-in-one PC looks like the iMac), but the finish is not quite as high-end. Rather than use aluminum, Dell opted for a plastic body with a silver-colored coating. It looks nice from afar, but when you actually touch it, it feels cheap.

Unless you plan to caress your all-in-one regularly, this isn’t a huge drawback. The screen is what really matters. At 2560×1440 pixels with a 16:9 aspect ratio, the XPS One’s WLED-backlit screen is the best I’ve seen on an all-in-one Windows computer. It’s definitely up there with Apple’s 27-inch iMac, which sports the same screen resolution and pixel density. It’s not as advanced as the new MacBook Pro’s display, of course, but colors appear vibrant and blacks are rich. I was never disappointed with the way an image or video looked on the screen.

The screen’s quality can be attributed to the fact that the XPS One 2710 uses a Samsung PLS (plane-to-line switching) display. It’s a technology that Samsung touts as giving screens a wider viewing angle, increased brightness, and better image quality than the standard IPS (in-plane switching) displays. I did notice that the display never appeared washed-out, even at extreme angles.

The 27-inch display uses plane-to-line switching technology from Samsung. Photo by Peter McCollough/Wired

The only drawback: there’s no touchscreen option. It isn’t a necessity right now, nor is it a common feature on current all-in-ones. But considering Windows 8 is expected to launch this fall, the decision not to at least offer a touchscreen as an option is a bit shortsighted. I’ve tried Windows 8 using only a trackpad and mouse, and it’s just not as pleasant as the fluid touchscreen experience.

There’s always the argument that most people who use Windows 8 on a stationary computer will rely more on desktop mode than the Metro Start Screen, but it would be amazing to swipe through Metro apps on this huge screen. Alas, that’s not going to happen.

There are some touch elements: capacitive buttons on the bottom right of the display control the on-screen menu, and if hold down a button to change a setting (increase brightness, for example) you can sense some haptic feedback from the button.

The internals don’t disappoint. Dell has outfitted the XPS One 2710 with the latest and greatest third-generation (Ivy Bridge), quad-core Intel chips. My test machine came with the i7-3770S chip that can clock speeds up to 3.90 GHz. And that’s not counting the “Turbo Boost: tech, which gives the chip the power to overclock when needed. Most of the XPS One 2710 models come with NVIDIA GeForce GT 640 M 2GB DDR5 graphics processors, unless you opt for the cheapest $1,400 model which has a slightly less-impressive Intel HD 4000 graphics card. Still, it should be enough to watch full-screen HD movies without hiccups and maybe play a couple less graphics-intensive games.

The most basic model comes with a 6GB memory and 1TB of hard drive, but my tester was an upgraded model with a 8GB memory (you can get up to 16GB) and a 2TB hard drive, plus a 32GB solid state drive. It’s enough speed and space to store an impressive movie collection, gobs of music, and then some.

The review model also came with a Blu-ray disc player, a feature that’s limited to the $2,000 Dell XPS One 2710. It’s unfortunate that you have to shell out that much cash just to get a simple Blu-ray player, since there’s no option to upgrade the optical drive on the cheaper models. But if you’re looking for a TV replacement, it’s worth the price. The XPS One 2710 also comes with an internal TV tuner card, so it’s perfect for turning your giant all-in-one computer into an all-in-one entertainment device. There’s even a remote control in the box to enable such behavior. You also get Waves MaxxAudio 4 speakers with surround sound, an HD front-facing camera (with a cute shutter to block it when you want privacy), and HDMI-in and HDMI-out ports. Other ports include a whopping four USB 3.0 ports and two USB 2.0 ports, audio line out, microphone jack, headphone jack, and an eight-in-one card reader.

It’s a machine made for entertainment — the $2,000 model comes with a TV tuner, a Blu-ray drive and physical remote control. Photo by Peter McCollough/Wired

The included wireless keyboard and mouse aren’t an ergonomic dream, but they are comfortable enough that I didn’t feel the need to replace them. Overall, the Dell XPS One 2710 is a cohesive, slick package with an impressively small footprint. If you’re looking for an all-in-one Windows PC — especially one that excels as an entertainment hub, or can double as a replacement for a smaller TV — this is a fantastic option.

WIRED Best screen available on an all-in-one Windows PC. Beats Apple’s $2,000 27-inch iMac in a specs-for-price battle: here, you get speedier quad-core Ivy Bridge chips, more storage, more RAM, Blu-ray and NVIDIA graphics. Has everything you’d need to turn it into a TV — now, or in a few years when it becomes obsolete as a computer.

TIRED Cheap, plastic casing pretends to be aluminum. No touch screen for future Windows 8 finger-swiping. Blu-ray disc only comes in the most expensive, $2,000 model.