Category: Tech news

In case you feel the white Nexus 5 is too ostentatious and the black Nexus 5 is to monotonous, the Nexus 5 now comes in red. Because red says you’re confident and are not afraid to show it.

Pricing is the same: $349 for the 16GB and $399 for the 32GB. It’s currently only available through the Google Play store, but a recent Sprint leak seems to indicate it will hit at least that carrier in the near future.

Personally, I’m holding out for the transparent version because it’s what’s inside that counts. Or some malarkey like that.

Another update today from Evernote, the latest in its ongoing product sprint. Today the note-taking platform is adding “descriptive search” to its Mac app, based on what Evernote is calling “everyday language.”

What does that mean, exactly? In essence, it’s a new layer of intelligence on Evernote’s search function, going from more basic, traditional keyword-based searches to those that incorporate terms like date or place created or what device you may have used, as well as what media may be included, to help bring up the files that you would like to see, even when you do not have specific keywords in mind.

This should make your Evernote archives more accessible — an especially important thing for those of us who have amassed a large amount of data in Evernote and may find it increasingly challenging to find and discover what we have there or figure out useful ways of manipulating it. But it won’t be a universal convenience: for now Evernote tells me that the feature is not getting rolled out on its mobile apps, and it is for English-language searches only.

Descriptive Search is launched today for Mac and for English language searches only. It will be available to all Evernote users regardless of account type — premium, business, free. We do not have a date for mobile yet,” a spokesperson told me.

She would not comment on when other platforms may be getting the feature, or when other languages might get added.

It’s also not completely clear how many people among Evernote’s 80 million-plus users this change will impact. “We don’t share usage by platform publicly,” she added.

The news comes in the wake of Evernote pledging to update its service with more user-friendly enhancements, after coming under fire for letting the product slip, some would argue in favor of focusing more on scaling its user base and steering more people to paid tiers.

Updates in the last week have included new iOS apps and faster, more reliable data synchronization. It seems that some form of descriptive search has already been available for at least one platform up to now — Windows, which got a descriptive search feature added way back in 2010.

There are two parts to this new search feature. The first of these will be an algorithm that will be able to search your files for results that may or may not be in the keywords of the file itself. (Evernote’s example: vegetarian recipes, which may be tagged as “vegetarian” or “recipes” but may not be.) This is similar to what Evernote already offers in its archival searches.

The second part of the new descriptive search is that Evernote now will add a number of new filters to the content to help shape searches — some ten in all at the moment, it notes:

Dates	“notes created yesterday”, “updated since last year”
	Apps	“created in Penultimate”, “from Skitch”, “Post-it Notes”
	Places	“from San Francisco,” “notes created in London”, “in Japan”, “from Beijing”, “from California”
	Documents	“notes with Office Documents”, “notes with Excel spreadsheets”, “with attachments”
	Images	“notes with photos”, “jpeg”, “with images”, “with pictures”
	Audio	“notes with audio”, “mp3″, “wav”
	Devices	“mobile”, “scanner”, “iPhone”, “Android”
	Web Sources	“web clips”, “clipped from web”
	Type of Content	“recipes”, “business cards”, “email”
	Notebooks	“Cooking Diary”, “Clients”, “Team Meetings”, “Recipes”, Receipts”
	Tags	“favorites”, “approved”, “news”, “to do”, “lodging”

As I see it, there are a couple of advantages to descriptive search. The first, as I mentioned before, are that there are a lot of people out there who may not be using Evernote in the most organised of ways, or just as likely, are extremely organised to a very particular idea. A descriptive search function like the one that Evernote is adding will help them dig deeper into their archives and encourage them to make better use of what they have there.

The other advantage, I think, is for Evernote itself. A more searchable platform becomes a more useful platform, and subsequently becomes a more essential platform — one that people will want to keep around and make their default, go-to database in the clouds. The hope here is that this will eventually lead people to put more into that system, and eventually opt for paid tiers with higher storage limits.

Importantly, though, the new search is free for anyone to use.

On a wider scope, the addition of more enhanced search on Evernote speaks to bigger trends in how we access information.

Search has quickly gone from being something based on “what” (keywords) to more complex questions like why, how, where, who, when and so on. This evolution has greatly influenced what leaders like Google are doing, and would-be rivals like Bing would like to have, too. Evernote’s addition of more advanced search features make these bigger trends in search into a very personal application, and it plays into the company’s bid to be not just a platform for storing your notes, memories and other data, but also one for accessing and enjoying them.

DFJ is announcing the raise of DFJ Venture XI, a $325 million early-stage venture fund. For background, DFJ Fund X was $350 million, closed in 2010.

The firm says that while both Tim Draper and John Fisher will remain on DFJ’s management committee and are significant personal investors in the fund, neither will be an investing partner for DFJ Venture XI. As we heard last year, Draper is shifting his role in the fund, and stepping away from investing and focusing his time on Draper University and other initiatives. John Fisher, who co-founded DFJ’s Growth fund in 2006, will be devoting his attention to growth stage investments as a partner on that team.

Among the partners who will be focusing on investing DFJ Venture XI: Steve Jurvetson, Andreas Stavropoulos, Josh Stein, and Bubba Murarka. The firm says it has now backed more than 22 companies that have achieved more than $1 billion in value through an initial public offering or an acquisition (also known within DFJ as the DFJ Ultimate Club).

There is a lot of change afoot at DFJ, with reports of consolidation in ventures in China and India, as well as changes in the firm’s partner network. But DFJ, which was one of the earliest backers of IPO-hopeful Box, could have an interesting (and prosperous) year ahead.

Learning the fundamentals of programming is easy. But becoming an expert? That’s damn hard. There are a million and one languages, each with their own nuances, strengths, and weaknesses. Worse yet, the programming hype train is always chugging away; just when you think you’ve mastered the world’s greatest language, everyone will be talking up some new language or framework or database and your boss’ boss will be asking why you’re not using that, instead.

AirPair connects you with expert programmers, on-demand.

We first wrote about AirPair back in March of last year. Back then, it was just a one-man shop with an interesting idea. It seemed like something that should work, but it was a bit too early to tell. They’d done just seven on-demand calls, and had but a handful of experts to call in. Their service was, at its core, a Google Docs form.

11 months later, the idea seems to be working out. The one-man team has grown to five, and found their way into Y-Combinator’s most recent class. That handful of experts has grown into the thousands. They’ve ditched the Google Doc form, building up a proper site and service around the idea. Companies like Intel are turning to them to figure how which frameworks to adopt internally. While they kept their actual numbers under wraps, the company tells me that they reached “ramen profitable” levels shortly after launch, and have been growing their revenue 40% month-over-month ever since.

So how does it work?

If you’re familiar with Google Helpouts, the idea here is quite similar — just far more focused on a specific topic (and, to be fair to them, AirPair launched months before we broke the news of Helpouts’ existence).

First, you tell AirPair what sort of expert you’re looking for. Need help with an Android app? Trying to determine which Javascript framework would be best suited for your new web app before you start digging into one? (For the curious, I asked AirPair where they’re seeing the most demand. In no particular order: Angular.JS, Ember.JS, and of course iOS/Android)

From there, you tell AirPair how much you’re willing to pay per hour, with each tier opening up access to a wider pool of experts. $60 an hour, for example, gets you access to around 15% of the site’s experts — the folks who can answer most basic coding questions. $90 an hour opens it up to people who’ve been coding for a few years, and can tell help you start to crack the tougher issues. It goes all the way up to $300 an hour, at which point you’re talking to people who more or less live in code; the people who (literally) wrote the book on this stuff. (Each engineer on the service picks their own rate, with AirPair gauging customer success/satisfaction to ensure that everyone finds themselves in the right group.)

A few variables can send the price up or down, though. By default, sessions are private — but if you’re willing to let them record the session and share it publicly, they’ll drop the price a bit. Need the engineer on the other end to sign an NDA before your company will let you talk to them? They’ll organize all of that, but it brings the price up.

(Interestingly, that aforementioned session-sharing is part of how the company targets new customers. If you’ve allowed them to share the session, they’ll upload it to YouTube and tag it based on the topic matter. If people turn to Google with an issue and their video pops up, it serves as an ad for the next time that person finds themselves stumped.)

Once the pricing is set, AirPair takes over. Engineers don’t bid against each other for sessions, nor do companies pick engineers themselves — instead, AirPair picks the engineer they think is right for the gig, based on availability, track record, pricing, and expertise. “We’re kind of like Uber, in that sense.” AirPair co-founder Jonathon Kresner says. “You don’t think of who’s picking you up, you just trust Uber’s drivers are a certain level of quality. With AirPair, you trust our matching.”

But what about head-hunting? You have to imagine that if you’re offering up a direct connection to “experts” in a field that’s currently experience something of a talent drought, those people will be gettin’ job offers thrown in their face left and right. And if they get hired away from the service, that’s one less expert they have to call on.

“We’re not scared about it. The people who are on our system could work wherever they want anyway.” says Kresner. “But it definitely has happened. We have a policy where after you’ve worked with an expert for over 10 hours, you can pay a finder’s fee to engage them outside of AirPair.”

You can find more details on AirPair right over here.

Yahoo appears to be experiencing technical difficulties across its network of sites, with outages occurring on the Yahoo homepage, Yahoo Weather, Yahoo Mail and Flickr.

DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com confirms that Yahoo is experiencing difficulties, and Twitter is also in an uproar over the outage.

According to Twitter complaints, the outage seems to have started around 1:25pm ET, with touch-and-go service since.

It’s not clear how many users are affected, or whether or not the service interruption is affecting certain geographic regions.

Update: A Yahoo spokesperson has responded with the following statement:

Some sites are currently unavailable. We are aware and working to quickly resolve the issue.

In December, just a few short months ago, Yahoo experienced a series of outages across Yahoo Mail, Yahoo, and Flickr that left many loyal users in a foul mood. The company apologized, and continues to work on improving its products, but outages are worse to consumers than no improvements at all.

Hopefully for Mayer and friends, this outage is a short one.

Yahoo isn’t the only major tech company to have an embarrassing service interruption lately. Gmail and Google+ experienced a global, nearly hour-long outage on January 24.

Yahoo didn’t respond so well when that happened, instead poking fun at the search giant for having a service interruption. Yahoo later apologized for tweeting about Gmail’s outage.

Update: 4:11pm ET Yahoo seems to be back up for most folks.

Greylock is announcing a new EIR today — former Director of the Facebook Developer Network and Googler Ethan Beard.

Beard previously oversaw worldwide developer relations, operations and product marketing for the Facebook API. As Greylock partner and early Facebook investor David Sze explains, Beard was instrumental to the building and growth of the Facebook platform. Additionally, Beard also served as Facebook’s Director of Business Development during his time at the company. He joined the social network from Google, where he served as Director of Social Media and Director of New Business Development.

Prior to Google, Beard spent several years as Director of Business Development for MTV Online.

As an entrepreneur in residence, Beard is looking to start a company and take some time to evaluate potential opportunities. He recently took a year-long sabbatical, and the EIR role was the easiest way to “jump back in and get into the flow,” he explains to us. As for Greylock, he says the firm has “some of the smartest and nicest people in the industry. They’re not just investors, but partners to entrepreneurs.”

Beard is keeping an open mind as to what industry he’ll be tackling and feels that it’s a great time to start a company, with mobile penetration scaling rapidly. “The ability for a company to grow globally has never been better,” he explains. Stay tuned.

Image via Greylock Partners

This ain’t your mama’s Facebook. Paper is almost too modern, or maybe it’s just years ahead of its time. The free new iOS app released yesterday in the U.S. lets you browse your News Feed plus curated sections of articles and memes through full-screen cards, new gestures, and delightful animations. Paper is equipped to be a full-fledged Facebook client, but the question is whether we’re progressive and curious enough to adapt to Paper.

From the second you open Paper, it strives to forge an identity distinct from Facebook. First it plays you a quick teaser video that looks like the intro to an indie film. A Siri-meets-Facebook robotic-yet-sensual female voice then begins walking you through Paper’s features.

To hear her, you’ll have to download Paper yourself. But for now, check out my video demo and review to see how Paper looks and feels:

Temptingly Tactile

Beyond a reimagined version of the News Feed, you can select from sections like Headlines (world news), Tech, Exposure (photography), Ideas (long-form takes on a different topic each day), and meme channels like Cute and LOL. Each is filled with stories shared publicly to Facebook from big publishers, public figures, and emerging content creators.

In the top half of the screen you’ll see a cover image for your currently viewed section, and while a horizontal row of stories fills the bottom. Swipe up on a story and you’ll see it magically grow into a full-screen summary card. Swipe up again and the story unfolds into a mobile web view of the story on its original website. The double up-swipe gesture is oddly satisfying, like picking up a newspaper, then bringing it closer to your face for reading. Swipe down to fold an article back up and return to your Paper feed.

It takes wagging your finger back and forth over Paper’s home screen to see just how responsive the app is. The Facebook Creative Labs squad that’s worked on Paper for over a year is basically an iOS dream team, including acquired Push Pop co-founder Mike Matas, who helped design the Nest thermostat and iPhone interfaces for Apple; Loren Brichter, who invented “pull-down-to-refresh” and other UI mainstays while building Tweetie and Letterpress; Michael Reckhow, who product-managed the Kindle app for Amazon; and Jason Prado, who Facebook poached from Google’s Hangouts team.

Paper’s take on the News Feed is refreshing, as it makes every post as readable as possible, expanding the text size of status updates while laying out photo albums into vertical columns so there’s no click required. Oh, and there are no ads. The Paper team tells me that, like a startup, its sole focus now is growth. If it becomes popular enough to cannibalize Facebook for iOS or becomes a big enough revenue opportunity, that’s “a good problem to have,” and it will figure out how to inject ads or otherwise monetize.

One-Size-Fits-Some Content

The vertical content “sections” are where Paper could use the most work. I’ll cut it some slack, though, as along with algorithmic aggregation, Paper uses a team of human editors to pick what people see — a first for Facebook. Some of the news content feels a bit fuddy-duddy and mundane. It certainly doesn’t help that by the evening, most of the posts in a section are from five to eight hours ago. Compared to Twitter’s real-time news, it feels painfully behind, and there’s no way to manually refresh.

Meanwhile the Cute and LOL sections are cloying. They quickly delve into mediocre drivel out of fear of offending anyone with edgy humor. Hopefully the content immediacy improves, and the Paper team builds personalization into the Sections like it said it’s considering. Otherwise you’ll need pretty mainstream tastes for Paper’s sections to drag you away from Flipboard, Prismatic, Circa, Zite, Pulse, or another news reader.

One thing I did enjoy was how some big publishers’ Paper summary cards are customized and they retain their article formatting. For example, The New York Times headlines have their iconic font, and BuzzFeed floats buttons for Tweeting, sharing via email, and commenting at the bottom of its Paper stories just like on its mobile site.

What You See Is What You Share

A true “wow” feature, Paper lets you tilt or pan your phone side-to-side to view the edges of a panoramic photo. In most apps including old Facebook, panoramas are squished down to fit on the screen at once, obliterating their detail. Paper lets those wide angles shine. Similarly, videos auto-play, but in portrait mode by default.

Matas, who is Facebook’s product designer, tells me “Not that many people shoot portrait videos. But I would argue the reason for that is because not many people display portrait videos in a good way…just by giving people a way to share portrait videos in a good way…there’s lots of really interesting stuff that could be videoed in portrait like a person’s face.” By providing a beautiful outlet for them, Paper could get more people shooting and sharing panoramas or portrait videos.

Paper buries its own sharing button in the pull-down menu so you’ll have to remember to share, unlike Facebook’s web and mobile app that keep status composers at the ready. But Paper’s composer gives you real previews of how your content will look to others so there’s no guessing about whether a blurb or your text will be truncated. That lets you share with confidence.

Is This The New Facebook?

Though Facebook set out to make Paper extremely focused on content, it actually built a working replacement for its multi-featured main app. You can search, and view a mobile-first full-screen card version of profiles and Pages. Friend requests notifications, and Chat Heads messages are all in there and can be opened in little pop-overs on top of your currently viewed content. You can even change your settings in Paper to open notifications from Facebook within Paper instead of Facebook for iOS. The only critical feature missing is your full Events calendar, which Mark Zuckerberg hinted could become one of Facebook’s next standalone apps.

This all means you can stay current and communicate with Paper, and shove your old Facebook app in a folder with minimal functionality loss.

Facebook’s Creative Labs launched Paper to explore how content delivery could be reimagined if there weren’t a billion users to worry about shocking. It’s purposefully built for open-minded, style-conscious users willing to embrace change in exchange for a cutting-edge experience. You could almost say that makes Paper “Hipster Facebook.”

But Paper’s radically innovative design is its biggest liability as well as its greatest asset. Facebook learned from “Students Against Facebook News Feed” way back in 2006 that many people are resistant to change. That’s why it typically tweaks its website and main app conservatively, and when it does execute a major redesign or product launch, it often rolls it out slowly.

For the mainstream American, for Grandma, for people around the world still new to Facebook, Paper may be too different to fit into their daily lives right now. And there are a lot of those people. By launching Paper as a standalone app rather than a redesign of the News Feed, Facebook avoided giving a sizable percentage of the planet a heart attack.

There will surely be some people who use Facebook most of the time, and Paper when they’re in the mood to discover some new content. Others will try to remember to use Paper, but unless they replace Facebook with it on their homescreen, digital muscle memory will kick in and they’ll gravitate back to their old app. That’s why to gain traction, the Paper team needs an elegant way to convince people to make this switcheroo.

With time, though, I’d bet we find Paper to be pretty polarizing. For some, it will feel over-designed and overwhelming. Too unfamiliar. Too new. And they’ll keep using Facebook for iOS.

But for an influential minority of progressives and power-users, Paper could be the Facebook of the future. They’ll see it as setting a new bar for mobile user interfaces. They’ll be patient as its human-curated content gets up to speed. They’ll say seven years of vertically scrolling feeds of chrome and whitespace were enough. They’ll pick up Paper, and never put it down.

It’s not every day we here at TechCrunch just point to someone else’s work and say, “Here, you should go read this.” But today’s an exception, because The Economist has put together a 16-page Special Report on the rise of technology startups around the world.

The report, which is written for the magazine’s general news audience, could serve as a sort of “State of the Union” for the industry. That means a lot of what’s reported there won’t really be news to those of you who are deeply involved in the startup world.

There are no big surprises or gotcha moments, for instance, in its various stories on the boom in accelerators, the move by hardware startups and suppliers to embrace Shenzhen, or the growth of tech ecosystems in communities around the world.

But where The Economist’s report could be useful is in helping those of us who follow this world every day to see the forest for the trees. In so doing, it we could possibly better understand the broader global impact that the spread of technology is having, how we’ve gotten here, and what the big trends are driving us forward. What it really means when software eats the world, as it were.

And hey, maybe you don’t know much about how Rocket Internet operates, why platforms have become so important, or the negative psychological effects that entrepreneurship has on some founders. If any of that is of interest, it’s in there, too.

Anyway, I highly recommend you download the full PDF, save it for a quiet moment when you have some spare time, and read it in its entirety. Because every now and then it’s good to take a big step back, re-learn the things you think you already know, and maybe see the tech world from another person’s point of view.

Earlier in January Bitcoin, as it receded as recipient of an infinite press, began to see its trading range tighten after months of wild swings. I pointed this out as perhaps the start of new stability for Bitcoin, which in turn could help its platform mature, or indicate maturation thereof.

There was some squawking that the time frame I had selected as ‘enough’ to indicate a trend was too short. It was a reasonable complaint. Happily, Bitcoin has behaved and exonerated me by tacking on another tranche of time of generally stable prices.

The gist is simple: For nearly the entire month of January Bitcoin has traded in the 900s, with minor exceptions in 1,000s. For a currency that until very recently could see 50% of its value drop in a day and not have that day stand out all too much, it has been something of a calming of the seas.

Here’s the D1 chart you need (Mt.Gox data via Clark Moody):

Why does it matter if Bitcoin is seeing increasing price stability? Essentially the more wild the swings in its value, the less useful Bitcoin is as a tool of commerce. This goes both ways: The more real uses there are for Bitcoin, the smaller the percentage of speculative trades in the currency; and, the smaller the changes in its price, the more people may start to accept Bitcoin as a payment option. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle.

Marc Andreessen recently summed this well: “Bitcoin is a classic network effect, a positive feedback loop. The more people who use Bitcoin, the more valuable Bitcoin is for everyone who uses it, and the higher the incentive for the next user to start using the technology.” Marc’s piece — it’s mandatory reading, by the way — lays out a bullish case for Bitcoin arguing that its core technological tenets provide large incentive for its use, which will drive adoption and long-term use.  

Bitcoin volume on the Mt.Gox exchange is down sharply this year, a change I think that is roughly commensurate with the currency’s decline in media attention. If you were hoping for Bitcoin to shape up and fly right, it was a banner month.

Top Image Credit: Flickr (Image cropped)

With the Super Bowl right around the corner, for many Americans this weekend is all about football — but tech certainly gave sports a run for its money when it came to interesting news this week. It was a very busy seven days for the technology industry.

That means that Ryan Lawler, Alex Wilhelm and I had a lot to catch up on in this week’s CrunchWeek, the weekly show that brings a few TechCrunch writers together to chat about the hottest stories in tech.

Check out the video embedded above to hear us discuss the latest in Microsoft’s hunt for a new CEO, Google’s surprise sale of Motorola Mobility to Lenovo for $2.9 billion (just a couple of years after it acquired Motorola Mobility in a $12.5 billion deal), and Facebook’s upcoming Paper app, launching out of its brand new Creative Labs division.

Peek is a new (paid) calendar app for iOS that’s aiming to appeal to the social middle ground of people whose lives don’t consist of non-stop meetings from 9 ’til 9. So not a calendar app for professional calendar nerds, then. The app rethinks the calendar as a gesture-based playground, rather than a spreadsheet-esque chore.

It’s an attempt at designed interaction, with a minimalist interface that incorporates a playful, gesture-based UI — itself flagged up by the cheeky name Peek.

The look and feel of this calendar combines flat design — via rich blocks of colour — with a mischievous sense of dimensionality that allows subtly sign-posted calendar entries to fold open like origami when tapped on and hinge-closed again, simultaneously mocking the lie of flat design while embracing its seamless perfection.

To the uninitiated user, Peek’s interface can appear enigmatic or even inscrutable at first glance — with a rack of icons swiping into view that look alien rather than immediately obvious, and a series of interface gestures required to navigate the app’s functions, which don’t immediately leap out as intuitive and absolutely do require a little poking and prodding around to get into the swing of.

Yet, spend some time getting to know Peek, unlocking its finger signs and flat symbols, and the interface transforms — or rather unfolds, revealing hidden depths of fun and functionality beneath an intentionally minimalist exterior.

“Instead of using the conventional navigational elements, we decided to build Peek from the ground up,” says Peek designer Amid Moradganjeh.

“We believe interfaces can be more about the content. Focusing on the content makes the conventional navigational elements less visible, and using gestural control allows the design to be cleaner, quieter and more ambient. This can actually speed up the process of using calendar.

“There is also an element of play in Peek,” he adds. “We wanted to introduce new behaviors that are more fun to use. We believe that fun does not necessarily have to be less functional.”

Peek’s sense of fun can be summed up by a shake gesture feature that allows the user to ask the app to come up with an idea for something new to do in future — such as ‘read something inspirational’ or ‘call someone you miss’ — which they can then choose to add to their calendar at a random time ‘soon’ (or not at all).

So, yep: Peek’s got serendipity diarized.

If you’re the sort of person whose heart sinks every time you have to call up and fill out a form to create a new event in Google Calendar (or its utilitarian ilk), exactly because it’s all check boxes and text input fields,  then Peek’s purity of design is probably going to feel like a balm. Or a calendar panacea.

But, on the other hand, if you’re the type of professional time segmenter who relishes absolute granular specificity in slicing and dicing each and every one of your half hours on this earth, well, Peek will probably bring you out in half-day hives.

Here’s how the startup describes the design ethos it’s taking with Peek:

Peek is about cutting away the overwhelming features of mobile calendars. It redefines an on the go experience for people to use when they need it, so that they are not consumed by its entirety and benefit from its existence.

Peek is not just a minimalist and simple app, it is designed to be the right resolution for the context it is being used in. It is made to provide the necessary information in an easy to understand manner, without overwhelming you with data you might not need.

The app is the first product from Square Mountains, a new startup co-founded by Moradganjeh last July, and Patryk Zoltowski (who has a background in enterprise web app development). Designer Moradganjeh previously worked at vaunted design firm IDEO, and also at Microsoft (the latter may explain Peek’s distinct whiff of Windows Phone — an early and ongoing champion of flat design).

Square Mountains, which is based in San Francisco and Tallinn, Estonia, has a self-professed design focus clearly evident in this, its first product. A design ethos that’s hardly surprising given the IDEO connection.

“We believe that there is an opportunity to apply design thinking to the existing products and make them more useful for bigger groups of people,” says Moradganjeh when asked what problem the startup is aiming to solve generally. “We do not want to just come up with a new idea and introduce another gadget that only a small group of people might find useful.

“We have an approach which is very simple: understanding what people really value, coming up with new ideas, and then pushing technology to bring those ideas to life. Our goal is to apply the same approach and principles to other experiences and create more innovative products for people by using design.”

On Peek specifically, Moradganjeh reiterates that the aim is not to compete with calendar apps designed for power users, such as Sunrise, Tempo and Mynd. He argues that those are apps that “try to give too much to the users,” whereas Peek is designed for far less-focused folk.

“We think the smart calendars like Sunrise, Tempo and Mynd are great for the type of users they are designed for. But with Peek, we are addressing the needs of a different group, a bigger group, people that are not necessarily that busy. They simply need to manage time on the go without being overloaded by unnecessary information and features,” he says. 

“For this group, if using a calendar app is not easier than remembering things or writing them on a piece of paper, then they would not use it. Our goal was to make Peek a more relevant tool for them so they can also benefit from managing time on their smartphones.”

Another goal for the app is evidently to act as a design showcase for what Square Mountains can do — to help it when it goes out seeking funds for what Moradganjeh refers to as ”bigger projects.”

“We are currently experimenting with some new ideas that we hope will turn into products soon,” he adds, without being more specific about Square Mountains’ plans.

While Peek looks very nice on the surface, Moradganjeh concedes it is something of a “creative risk,” being as it’s so unconventional in its navigation — and thus requires users to put in the effort to learn it. Certainly I found my patience for figuring out the folds and foibles of certain sub-menus and deeper functions being tested. Portions of the design definitely felt as if they over-indulged at the expense of utility.

That effort may ultimately be at odds with the more idle audience Peek’s creators are apparently aiming for, although the app’s gestural dare and flare — and purist good looks — will undoubtedly push the buttons of tech aesthetes and attract a style-conscious app-using niche. So Peek may well get cachet, even if it doesn’t manage huge reach.

And if the app’s underlying aim is to plant a flag that puts Square Mountains on the map, and illustrates the calibre of design work this startup is capable of turning out, then Peek will probably have done more than enough work for one day.

Peek Calendar from Square Mountains on Vimeo.

GoDaddy has updated its account security policies in the wake of the now infamous extortion of a Twitter account. As TechCrunch previously reported, a hacker claimed to have gained the Twitter user’s last four credit card digits from PayPal, which was then used to convince GoDaddy to reset their account.

The compromised GoDaddy account — and its requisite domain collection — was used as leverage to extort the user out of their excellent Twitter account, @N. In the wake of the hacking and ensuing outrage over lax security, denials of culpability, TechCrunch wondered out loud why Twitter itself hadn’t made @N whole.

We spoke to @N, known to most as Naoki Hiroshima, after the fact and and he detailed a few things that GoDaddy should do to tighten its security, methods that might have helped protect his account:

“[Two factor authentication] can’t prevent this from happening again,” says Hiroshima. “GoDaddy allowed the guy to reset everything over the phone. As long as a company only uses the last 4 digits of a [credit card] to verify [identity], this will keep happening. They should ask multiple questions.”

GoDaddy has made steps that mirror what Hiroshima felt was needed. In a tweet today, the company said the following:

@N_is_stolen Will do. We now require 8 card digits, lock after 3 attempts and deal with 2-factor authentication accounts differently. ^NF

Requiring more credit card digits matters. If the hacker in question had been required to provide that quantity of information, the jig would have been up prematurely: The hacker claims that PayPal gave them the last four digits of Hiroshima’s credit card. If the GoDaddy threshold had been higher, we wouldn’t be talking about this now.

It’s a bummer that GoDaddy was able to be compromised in the above way, but the new security policies should reduce future risk for its customers, of which I am one.

I’ve reached out to GoDaddy for an explanation of the changes to its security policies and will update this post when I hear back.

Top Image Credit: Flickr (Image cropped)

Editor’s note: Scott Weiss is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and the former co-founder and CEO of IronPort Systems, which was acquired by Cisco in 2007. He works with companies like Lyft, Dwolla, Platfora, Bluebox, App.net and Quirky. Follow him on his blog or on Twitter @W_ScottWeiss.

In many of the old war movies, every elite unit has at least one member that has the critical talent to make something out of nothing: the scrounge. You know this guy: when everyone is out of rations or ammunition and the truck is broken down, he quietly heads out. The next day, when all hope of completing the mission seems lost, the scrounge comes rolling up in a freshly repainted jeep, full rations, ammo, and, stereotypically, a case of cold beer. How did he do that? Where did it all come from? “Don’t ask,” he growls, “Let’s get movin’.”

Harvey Keitel’s Winston “The Wolf” Wolfe in Pulp Fiction is another iconic fix-it guy. He comes directly from a party in his tux to “clean up” the situation. I love his “Can I get some coffee?” calm demeanor as he carefully assesses the situation, starts prioritizing, and then takes swift action to get Jules and Vincent out of their blood-soaked jam.

During a crux scene in Apollo 13, the engineers in Houston realize they have to somehow fit the Command Module’s square carbon dioxide filter in the Lunar Module’s round receptacles if they want everyone to keep breathing. They got together in a room, dumped the box of materials available to the astronauts on the table and said, “Here’s what we have to work with…” After working for a tense few hours, they cobbled together a solution with step-by-step instructions for the oxygen-starved astronauts. That scene always gives me goose bumps.

All of the successful entrepreneurs I know are part-scrounge, part-Wolf, with a good dose of calm-under-pressure space jockey thrown in. In other words, they are ridiculously resourceful. It’s this magical combination of wicked-smart, tenacious as hell, works harder and longer than most people think is humanly possible, thinks way outside the box and is also unbelievably passionate and compelling. In short, they have special tools to just get shit done.

Special, but not unobtainable.

Over the years, I’ve noticed some patterns and methods that explain how great people manage to pull off the impossible. And with Mr. Wolfe’s permission, here they are:

“Crack the egg with a sledgehammer.” This was a quote from my VP of Engineering, Nawaf Bitar, at IronPort. When IronPort anti-spam wasn’t working and it looked like our partner Brightmail was going to terminate our contract, we had a complete “Oh shit!” moment. Nawaf moved the entire engineering team over to work on it. He called them all in to work nights and weekends until it was fixed, and urgently sought out every anti-spam expert on the planet to help or to hire. Other people would have done one or two of those things – he did them all simultaneously and immediately. Nawaf saved our bacon.

Set a measurable goal and brainstorm like hell. When we were developing our first product at IronPort, we desperately needed to get feedback from email administrators at large companies. Our dream was to quickly talk to 50 of them to get to a critical mass, but how the hell do you do that when you don’t know any? We brainstormed, tested, stalked, and leaned on our networks. We made a list of the Fortune 500 and tried to line up anyone we knew on the inside. We all went through our school alumni networks.

“Can you introduce me to someone who runs your email? Who do you call when email goes sideways?” Everyone we did get through to was pumped for information to get to more: “What conferences do you go to? What do you read? Who else can you introduce us to?” We reached 43 of the exact right people — not quite 50, but it did the trick.

Cheat time. During a board meeting last year, Quirky’s CEO Ben Kaufman recounted a story about preparing for a critical Home Depot meeting. Quirky was just starting to build things for the “connected home” and Home Depot was a dream opportunity. When he got the call in New York one afternoon that the home improvement giant could squeeze him into a new product-review meeting the very next day in Atlanta, he brought nearly the whole company in for an all-night prep session. They split up into five different teams and came up with seven working products — overnight. They packed up prototypes of a Wi-Fi-enabled mousetrap, garage opener, smoke detector and water sensor, among others, and then slept on the flight down. A month later, Home Depot ordered $7 million worth of products.

“Insanely violent passion.” This is a phrase that I’ve heard used to describe Andrew Rubin, the CEO of Illumio. Andrew came out to Silicon Valley from the Midwest with virtually no connections. Within 18 months he raised two rounds of capital and hired one of the best leadership teams I’ve ever seen. How did he do it? Andrew “glows in the dark.” He is so charismatic, compelling, logical, and excited about what he is pursing that you can just feel the energy — even see it glow. Getting to the right person often requires a series of small baton passes or jumping from lily pads of different people to get to your destination.

Andrew was unrelenting  when it came to asking for suggestions and pursuing connections and introductions from just about everyone. And since he came across so passionate and compelling, people actually felt like they were building social capital by helping him.

Foot squarely on the line. I wouldn’t suggest that being resourceful has anything to do with doing something illegal or unethical, but I’ve definitely noticed a pattern of being “creative.” When my then head of sales, Shrey Bhatia, was trying to close a $900,000 purchase order from DoubleClick in New York, he called up the CIO and said, “Hey, I’ll be in New York tomorrow, could I drop by for 15 minutes to discuss this?” Of course, he had no intention of going to New York unless the CIO confirmed the meeting. When the CIO finally did, at around 7 p.m., Shrey turned his car around, jumped on the red-eye, slept on the plane and brought home the order the next day. We had the check framed.

Pulp Fiction’s Winston Wolfe is obviously a fictional character, but the stereotype he represents is worth exploring. A guy that’s seen it all, he’s completely unflappable, methodical and decisive. How did he get that way? Like an old sea captain, he is the sum of so many hard-earned life experiences of living on the edge.

While there’s no substitute for real experience, I believe it helps to hear and share stories of resourcefulness in action — almost like case studies in school. With every new account, we open our mind to a new path to take and learn the tactics that others have used to overcome much larger obstacles than the ones that are currently in front of us. I’d love to hear about more “great moments in resourcefulness” in the comments section.

Photo: Bobby Bank/WireImage.com

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — seem perfectly willing to predict the futility of the next Microsoft CEO, and even perhaps the next Bill Gates. But we can only successor-surf so long before returning to the more heady war of the social stream.

You can decide for yourself, but this feisty show was supercharged by @jtaschek’s minority report on the heir apparent and never really let up. From @kteare’s posit of Facebook devolution to everybody’s fascination with the mirage of brand loyalty, the emerging point is still elusive. Namely, that we’ll know it when we see it, and reward each and every app that fits into the puzzle with a notification seat at the table.

@scobleizer is right: it will be close to impossible to dislodge Uber, as long as someone comes along with another key function that extends, and then absorbs, the current shareholders of the new economics of app magnetism.

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

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

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The Gillmor Gang on Facebook

Kickstarter funding will often lead to the more traditional kind, and in the case of Boombotix, that’s exactly what happened. The California startup raised $17,000 for its music syncing app, which allows people to synchronize playback of music across multiple devices using mobile networks, and nearly $130,000 for its Boombot Rex mobile Bluetooth action-ready portable speaker. Now, it has also raised $4 million in venture funding from Social+ Capital, Baseline, Red Hills and many others.

May of its partners in this round are strategic in nature, and Boombotix co-founder Lief Storer says they were chosen for their ability to help build the brand.

“The investors’ interest is vested in amplifying our brand through product development and strategic marketing,” he explained in an interview. “There isn’t a single expense [in terms of using these funds] that stands out, but having key human capital in place to continue building the talent in the organization will be essential to the long-term strategy.”

Boombotix isn’t saying how many speakers it managed to see since its launch back in 2010, but it has seen its sales grow by triple figures since the debut of its Kickstarter campaigns, which also led to deals secured with retailers including Amazon, T-Mobile, Microsoft and Apple.com. The selling point of the Boombot REX is that it can stand up to mud, dust and some water exposure, as well as take spills, while providing quality sound, portability and also speaker phone functions, including the ability to use Siri on the iPhone from the gadget.

Its audio sync tech was designed to be an answer to user requests to broadcast to multiple speakers at once, which isn’t supported with standard Bluetooth. It isn’t perfect, but the app gets around this by allowing multiple devices (i.e. smartphones or tablets) to sync playback of music perfectly over a mobile network, which means that each can output music to their own attached Bluetooth speaker for what is effectively multi-speaker sound. Of course, you need more than one device to make it happen, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Boombot has begun to position its speakers as a wearable play, in part to capitalize on the growing interest in that device category. It’s true that they’re small and clip-mounted, and can be easily attached to clothing, but the key to growth will be holding appeal beyond the current action sports group of core buyers. With fresh funding, perhaps that kind of expansion is exactly what’s in store.