Category: Tech news

Here in the tech industry, it seems that people are always talking about “how hard it is to hire.” That’s something that can sound a little odd, given that there are still so many unemployed people here in the United States. But the reality is, there is often a gap in skills and connections between the many people who are looking for work, and the many hot job openings in tech and business.

One organization called Year Up is dedicated to closing that gap, which it calls the “opportunity divide,” by providing specialized one year of intensive training to young adults aged 18 to 24 with no more than a high school diploma. After training is completed, the program provides introductions to companies keen to hire skilled staff. It’s working out quite well: 100 percent of Year Up graduates are placed into an internship. And earlier this fall, the White House recognized Year Up’s founder and CEO Gerald Chertavian for the impact of the program.

It’s an excellent nationwide program, and its outpost here in the Bay Area not surprisingly has a stronger focus on tech than on other industries – Year Up Bay Area has placed young people in high-paying jobs at tech companies including LinkedIn and Facebook, among others. So TechCrunch TV stopped by Year Up’s San Francisco offices to find out more about the program and what it’s all about. Watch that in the video above.

Earlier this week, Microsoft updated its Office 365 suite with a couple of new features and licensing terms. Overall, the update was very much in line with the other 100 changes Microsoft had made to its subscription-based Office version for consumers and businesses, but one feature stood out. Starting this week, all Office Web Apps will feature real-time collaborative editing – a feature previously only available to the Excel and OneNote web apps.

This in itself is an interesting move, but while talking about the update, John Case, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of its Office division, told me that this also signals a new way of thinking about the Web Apps inside of Microsoft.

Let’s take a step back first, though. If you are unfamiliar with the Office Web Apps, just take a look at SkyDrive and upload a Word, Excel or PowerPoint document. Once the file is online, you can view it in SkyDrive, but most importantly, you can also edit it in a light-weight version of Microsoft’s flagship productivity apps.

The Office Web Apps launched three years ago, but have mostly flown under the radar, despite the fact that they are more fully featured than Google’s offerings. Given Microsoft’s control over the file formats, it’s also significantly better at displaying and saving files without mangling any of the formatting. They also use the same Ribbon menu as the regular desktop Office apps, so regular Office users should be productive in them right from the get-go.

Until now, however, these Web Apps were basically companions to the clients, and Microsoft did virtually nothing to promote them. It looks like that’s changing now. As Case told me, Microsoft is now finally starting to view the Office Web Apps as standalone services. Case wouldn’t say whether Microsoft is considering a move to a freemium model and package paid services on top of the free offering. If Microsoft considers the Web Apps as a standalone version of Office, though – and in the (very) long run, they could become the only version, after all – I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s something the company is considering.

Microsoft always focused heavily on the Office desktop clients. That’s where all the money was made, after all. Now that it has moved to a subscription model anyway, adding premium features to the Office Web Apps feels like a logical next step.

Case told me Microsoft plans to invest more into the Office Web Apps in the coming months, so we will likely hear quite a bit more about what the company has in the works for these services.

If Microsoft starts to invest more heavily in this area, it will also provide an even greater challenge for Google, whose online office suite is still unsuitable for anything but very basic editing. One advantage Google always had, however, was that it offered collaborative editing. That advantage is gone now, but Microsoft has to start emphasizing these features. So far, it probably didn’t do this because it didn’t want to cannibalize its regular Office sales (the Web Apps are “good enough” for many use cases, afer all). If that starts changing, Google better watch out.

Image credit: Sunfox

There’s mounting evidence that the tendency to favour smartphones over standalone cameras isn’t just tanking compact camera sales – it’s affecting DSLR and interchangeable lens cameras, too. A new WSJ report claims that DSLR camera shipments could fall 9.1 percent by the end of 2013, versus 2012, according to research firm IDC. It’s a sign that going retro might not be the only thing required to save standalone cameras from going extinct.

Canon and Nikon, the two leading DSLR camera makers, both lowered their forecasts for the fiscal year in the past month, the WSJ notes, which means that the market is likely hurting as a whole. While those companies see this as a temporary setback due to global economic conditions, it looks a lot like what’s been happening to the PC market over the past few years – another phenomenon initially blamed on economic weakness, but more likely tied to the rise of smartphones and tablets as alternate computing platforms.

Smartphones likely are probably a culprit when it comes to the declining fortunes of the DSLR market. Image quality from mobile devices is on the rise, and the convenience of those devices is a very compelling argument for consumers who might otherwise buy a standalone camera as hobbyists or for use while traveling. And image quality/convenience isn’t the only factor here: there’s also the fact that far fewer people are printing photos than would’ve done in the past, preferring instead to trust their images to digital album services like those offered by Apple and Google.

While DSLR makers have been building features into their devices that approximate those employed by smartphones, including Wi-Fi radios, geotagging and social sharing, I’d argue they haven’t gone far enough. The reason DSLRs are attractive to their existing audience is that they’re tricky, to some extent, so it makes sense to want to keep the manual controls and exhaustive menus in place. But the reason more and more users are satisfied with their smartphones is that they’re increasingly making it easy to take great photos with a minimum of user input.

DSLRs could have a considerable advantage in this regard. They already have far better sensors capable of taking far better images than any smartphone. What they need now are the smartphone smarts: build in an algorithm for automatically creating the best photo out of five exposures, for instance, like Google has done with the Nexus 5. In fact, Google has all kinds of lessons camera makers should take to heart, with its automatic photo editing features in Google+, which I’ve found time and again make exactly the kind of minor tweaks I’m likely to do myself in Lightroom or Aperture.

Likewise, Apple is making its iPhone 5s camera more intelligent, with behind-the-scenes features that make you feel like a pro even if you’re a rank amateur. This is where DSLR makers should be focusing their efforts. They might believe that building front-facing consumer features, like filters, face detection, sharing and other things is what’s going to net them an even playing field with the smartphone set, but the real winning advantage would be in an end product that consistently amazes. Gadget development over the past 10 years has been all about spoiling consumers: These days, if something doesn’t work exactly as expected 9 out of 10 times, most users will put it down and never pick it up again.

Each exposure used to be precious, back in the days of film, when you had a limited amount and couldn’t check to see if you’d got a good shot until you were back in the darkroom. Then, exposures were cheap, made so because you have a virtually unlimited amount with digital storage. Now, I’d argue they’re precious again, because users want to be instantly rewarded with a great experience on the first try. Nailing every exposure, regardless of an operator’s level of skill, needs to be the goal of camera makers hoping to give consumers a reason to buy expensive, often cumbersome hardware, even if that’s something that strikes the hardcore hobbyists as counterintuitive.

There’s still room for dial-laden, finicky beasts that are time-consuming and rewarding to master, but to return to positive growth, Canon, Nikon and the rest need to cast a wider net with features everyday users have come to expect.

The Gillmor Gang – Danny Sullivan, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor – find themselves in a quandary over Steven Elop’s alleged exit strategy for Microsoft. Is he really serious, dumping XBox and casting aside Bing? Or is this just a magician’s sleight of hand, misdirecting the attention from the more radical idea of abandoning Windows to save Office.

The Gang is torn on whether Office can make the voyage to mobile or not, but with Bill Gates’ so-rumored involvement in the Post-Ballmer strategy, it seems unlikely the next CEO will stop protecting Windows by making Office cross-platform. Head of MS PR Frank Shaw is openly dismissive of the Bloomberg story, and most pundits doubt Elop will get the job turning the aircraft carrier around. It may be fiction, but our bet is some version of this story will be the rabbit pulled out of this hat.

@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kevinmarks, @dannysullivan, @jtaschek

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

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The biggest dilemma we face today building products is not whether we have an identity without our devices, but rather can we have an identity with our devices?

Our identities are fragmented across dozens of websites, mobile applications and databases. Every day, these programs simultaneously squawk at us with push notifications and email updates, disorganizing and splitting our mental focus. It’s not simply that we’ve lost control of our identities. It’s that we have multiple identities based on whatever platform we happen to be on. And that is hindering our ability to accomplish even the most mundane tasks without friction.

This digital schizophrenia is harming users who want a well-designed and cogent experience built for their own work patterns. Schizophrenia, as understood today, is a “disintegration of personality” that leads to the inability to properly process thoughts. That is precisely why founders should be focused on building products that allow each of our identities to coalesce across applications.

Digital schizophrenia is harming users who want a well-designed and cogent experience built for their own work patterns.

There are three principles that should guide how we build companies around identity today:

1. Create products that are properly targeting the right kinds of devices.
2. Companies need to democratize their platforms, because products benefit each other when data is shared.
3. Products should be built around frictionless workflows, both between users and devices, and between users themselves.

The Right Kind Of Device

Targeting the right kind of device is trickier than it seems. It is hardly a shock to anyone that users are interacting with more devices than ever. The popularity of smartphones and tablets has been among the most exciting developments in technology investing in the last five years. Yet, that doesn’t mean that every app should be mobile-only, or even mobile-first. Rather, founders need to focus on what they want their users to accomplish and what platforms make sense for that function.

Take Uber. The company takes advantage of smartphones by using your location to hail a taxi. As a workflow, it is among the best experiences of any product on the market today because it focuses on the sole platform relevant to its goals. It’s a great example of a mobile-only company. For Square, though, its product is best used on tablets, because that form factor is ideal for point-of-sale systems. Both of these examples are different from computer-aided design programs, which should probably still be on the desktop given a designer’s need for precision.

Platform Democratization

To ensure a great user experience, companies must also think about democratization of the platform. Today, too many companies are siloing away data, hoping to build revenue models instead of great products. There may be benefits to that strategy in the short term, but this siloing is a classic example of the tragedy of the commons, and we need to be aware of the loss to the user every time we consider adding another store of data to their lives. As I have written before, the great companies of the future will take advantage of economies of unscale and allow for decentralized workflows to work across their application.

Frictionless Workflows

With more of our identity information openly available, founders finally can build products with frictionless workflows.  Products should be built to take advantage of the different data stores that a user has under their control – whether that be communications on a social network like Facebook or contacts stored in a CRM. These integrations are certainly hard, but products built around each other will create the superior experiences desired by users. The best example of this sort of future is Google Now, which actively tries to combine different data sources together into one integrated experience.

These three principles aren’t just good for consumers, but will help enterprises, as well. If we do this right, our focus on identity will create the first quantitative view of an enterprise that can assess productivity in a data-driven way. Who does too many meetings? Who is engaging enough with customers? By giving a human view of the enterprise, we can create a better functioning workforce and ultimately increase our productivity.

Projects and companies that focus on identity and overcome this digital schizophrenia are of strong interest to me at General Catalyst. In some cases it’s right in our sweet spot – entrepreneurs at their inception, wishing to partner with us in building companies from a germ of an idea. Ultimately, these smart systems – based on our identities – will not only sweep away the idea that there is a consumer or an enterprise, but do something much more valuable: give us back control of our identity.

Editor’s note: Hemant Taneja is a partner at General Catalyst. His investments include Stripe, Snapchat, TuneIn and Highfive. You can follow him on Twitter @htaneja.

Images: Shutterstock, Flickr

Happy anniversary to me: I’ve now been writing this here weekly column for exactly three years. Over the last year I have opined, prescribed, and predicted many things. And now, like last year, and the year before, as part of my one-man crusade for greater opinion-journalism accountability, I’m going to take a moment to go back and look at what I got right… and where I went horribly, hilariously wrong.

(cracks knuckles)

OK, let’s start with my primary theme this year: technology and jobs. I actually asked the key question in a post two years ago, entitled “What If Technology Is Destroying Jobs Faster Than It’s Creating Them?“

This year, though, I expanded on that at considerable length with “America Has Hit ‘Peak Jobs’,” “Get Ready To Lose Your Job,” “After Your Job Is Gone,” (sense a theme here?) “The Future Of Work,” “Jobs, Robots, Capitalism, Inequality, And You,” and “Meet The New Serfs, Same As The Old Serfs.”

Whew. Tired of it yet? I can’t blame you. But I keep hammering at it because I believe this is one of the most important issues of our time. The notion that technology destroys more jobs than it creates has slowly become mainstream over the last few years: witness this recent piece in The Economist. My take on it, however, is different: I think all these job losses are good, in the long run, because we are (hopefully) at the very edge of a long, slow, decades-long trend towards zero jobs, i.e. a post-scarcity society. The trouble is, our current economic structure is built on those building blocks called “jobs” – and as their number slowly withers away, the necessary transition to a new system will be extremely painful and wrenching for a very large number of people worldwide.

OK. Back to the recap. Way, way back, to my very first TechCrunch post, which began: “Oh, Research In Motion. You never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” Prophet score: A++. And while that may seem like fish in a barrel now, back then, believe it or not, it was fairly controversial.

I also wrote a couple of pieces about Bitcoin back in 2011, saying: “Does Bitcoin have a long-term future? I strongly doubt it…but I expect that something like Bitcoin eventually will.” Which, I note, is a whole lot like what Naval Ravikant wrote this July: “It’s better to think about Bitcoin the protocol as Bitcoin 1.0, destined to evolve.” I followed that up this year with the suggestion that a Bitcoin-like currency would eventually go mainstream in the developing world, not the rich world. Here in the medium term, of course, Bitcoin is bubbling along nicely…

I wrote about the NSA and the incipient panopticon back in 2011, too, saying: “surely there are better ways to catch these morons than building a vastly expensive and dehumanizing panopticon surveillance state.” Quite happy to stand by that one, too. I’ve been writing a lot about surveillance ever since, though I’ve actually ramped down since it became well-trodden media ground thanks to Edward Snowden.

I complained about 3D printers twice. Well, I wrote that they’ll become amazing world-changing technology, at the enterprise level – but I wrote those in articles entitled “There Is No Reason For Any Individual To Have A 3D Printer In Their Home,” and “3D Printers Are Not Like 2D Printers: A Rant.” This remains a contrarian view, but I’m happy to stand by it.

I also claimed “All Journalism Is Tech Journalism Now,” which was admittedly a little aggressive, but I still think we’re heading that way. Same for “The Technical Interview Is Dead,” and “Prepare To Pay For Your Privacy.” (See also.)

Bored with my self-congratulation? Let’s move on to where I messed up. Six months ago I proudly proclaimed “The Time Has Come For Chrome In The Home,” a celebration of Google’s ChromeOS. It’s early days yet, but I think I got that one wrong. I’ve hardly touched my own Chromebook since I wrote that post. Meanwhile, ChromeOS isn’t actually that much more capable than a tablet – and tablet prices are dropping faster.

Last year I wrote “I Believe In Google Plus,” but this year my view evolved into to, “Google Plus Is Like Frankenstein’s Monster.” Which is actually mostly a compliment, as those of you who have read the original novel know; the monster was brilliant, urbane, civilized…but spurned by the world. Alas, that seems true of G+ too.

And then there’s Foursquare. I complained about them in my second ever TC post and in “Check In, Flame Out: How To Save Foursquare,” where I described it as a “long-term loser.” On reflection, that was probably too harsh; I think they’ll probably keep eking out an existence on the perpetual edge of mainstream relevance.

Last year, I wrote “Whither, Hollywood, Whither?“, in which I wrote “it seems to me that the predatory price-gouging Internet is more dangerous to movies than television,” and this year I followed it up with “When Will Doom Come To Hollywood?” where I, er, revised my opinion somewhat.

The prediction I’m personally most interested in, though, is one I made last year: “In Five Years, Most Africans Will Have Smartphones,” which I followed up this year with “The Second Billion Smartphone Users.” We won’t know until 2017 whether I’m right on that one – but there are claims that smartphone penetration has already risen to 21 percent in the Middle East and Africa, up from 1.3 percent in 2009. If that’s true, then 50 percent by 2017 looks downright conservative.

So: while I wouldn’t bet all your bitcoins on every word I type, that’s a decent performance nonetheless, if I do say so myself. And I hereby resolve to be a little bolder over the next 12 months with my predictions – because if nothing else, it ought to make next year’s iteration of this post awfully entertaining.

Just because you call it a “gaming laptop” doesn’t mean it has to cost a fortune. At $1,596, Digital Storm’s Veloce is hundreds of dollars cheaper than similarly-equipped rigs from brand-name manufacturers. However, its drawbacks are cause for considerable pause.

Editor’s note: Paul Holland is a general partner at Foundation Capital, helping early-stage startups go from zero to $100 million in revenue. He was previously a senior vice president of worldwide sales at Kana Communications.

Watching my two-year-old nephew Dashiel interact with his mother’s iPad made me realize that he was born into an era unlike any in history. As he grows up his expectations about how information should be presented and processed, and how interfaces should respond, will be profoundly different from how we experience technology today.

Mobile is now the channel of choice for everyone, but even those of us who use technology with great alacrity are still digital immigrants. Dashiel represents a new age: the Mobile Born – a generation of kids that have been raised while literally gnawing on the equivalent of a supercomputer – otherwise known as mom’s smartphone.

This fact will have a dramatic impact on how companies, consumers and society as a whole manage and view technology.

A New Enterprise

It’s hard to believe, but only a few years ago technology in the workplace was a top-down affair. The IT department decided what hardware got deployed, which applications were used and how business practices got enforced.

Then a tiny crack in the IT blockade broke open when C-suite executives, enamored by the stylish, functional and intuitive iPhone, trotted these devices into enterprises and told IT, “Make this work.” IT, accustomed to telling users “no,” had no choice but to listen, and they effectively gave rise to the BYOD trend we’ve seen explode since the iPhone launched in 2007.

Today, companies are not just allowing smartphones, but many are embracing mobility and transforming their business practices and work arrangements and driving new levels of productivity and value creation through mobility: MobileIron is leading the charge in the enterprise mobility management space; Bitglass is delivering transparent data security; Averail is creating a content management solution for smartphones and tablets; Lookout is making the post-PC era safer for everyone; and Mobile Helix is securing the enterprise mobile web.

These changes are the essence of the mobile-first movement, but they will give way to a new and more dynamic process as the mobile-born users enter the workforce.

The mobile-born generation will drive a radical rethinking of office productivity. Fast-forward a few years and we’ll see a new workplace with workstations akin to air traffic control centers powered by multiple touch-, swipe- and voice-enabled devices, allowing workers to visualize and manipulate information tactically, driving the adoption of new user-interfaces and fundamental changes in software and hardware. Think the new FOX newsroom, just without the “fair and balanced” reporting.

The way we interact with colleagues or business partners will change as we move to a mobile enterprise environment. We’re beginning to see new companies focused on augmented memory. Refresh, for instance, has created a dossier to put an end to small talk for your next business meeting. A nice-to-have now, but as the mobile-born mature, these services will become a must-have.

But this is just the beginning. It’s hardly far-fetched to imagine companies that exist and are run entirely in the cloud by a de-territorialized mobile workforce. Already we carry much of our day job’s office communications, data, colleagues, customers and products around in our pockets. This trend will only accelerate as the mobile-born found their own companies around entirely new expectations for organizational structures and workforce optimization.

A Shift In Consumer Engagement

As the mobile-born generation grows up, other unforeseen expectations will need to be met.

Watch any 12-year-old do homework and you’ll see that the notion of the “second-screen” is already a passé concept – TV, laptop, smartphone, iPod and tablet combine into a multi-layered information gathering and communications experience.

When the mobile-born reach their teenage years, their ability to process information and levels of interactivity will go far beyond what’s possible today, and their shift in consumption habits – right down to the way in which they watch TV – will only continue. Fifteen years from now, we may reach the “nth-screen,” as multiple screens may not only be watched but worn, while cameras capture, record and broadcast live conversations across the room and around the world.

As a result, we’re already seeing a new wave of companies whose DNA is 100 percent mobile. Kik, for instance, was born of the need for a cross-platform messaging tool on mobile devices. Kik was never resident on the desktop and is a perfect example of the frictionless communication that the mobile-born will come to expect.

But by the time Dashiel is behind the wheel, his expectations for seamless, safe communications will need to be solved well beyond what’s possible today. If he’s in a thread in Kik and has to hop in the car, he’s going to want to stay in that message. This will require messaging technology embedded directly into the infrastructure of cars to become the norm just like radios and then CD players once were. And God forbid he’s ever in an accident, companies like Snapsheet will ensure the insurance-claim process is as simple as it can be.

What Will The Mobile-Born Future Look Like?

Today, the expectation is that everyone has a high-bandwidth connection to the Internet. The future of the mobile-born is that on steroids, and entrepreneurs will rise to the need, seize the opportunity and start creating solutions for things yet to be imagined.

The clear winner in this future will be the Internet of Things. The mobile-born will expect everything to be software-driven, have rich functionality and be network-aware – Nest being a pioneering company in this new direction.

At the other end of the spectrum, my nephew’s grandmother laments the decline of interpersonal communication. No one’s writing letters anymore and people aren’t talking face-to-face as frequently. She’s right. But for Dashiel, a mobile-mediated reality will be all he knows.

[Image: Shutterstock]

Breaking non-news out today: Immigration reform is dead in 2013, meaning that high-skill immigration reform is also kaput this year. We already mostly knew that, but the third-ranking Republican in the House confirmed the fact today.

According to TalkingPointsMemo, “California Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the majority whip, said in a meeting with immigration proponents that there weren’t enough days left for the House to act and he was committed to addressing overhaul of the nation’s immigration system next year.” So, that’s that.

Not in 2013? Who cares! It’s the end of the year anyways! Well, yes, but if you are in favor of immigration reform, and many in tech are quite keen on fixing our high-skill immigration system, losing this legislative session is pretty darn bad.

In short, next year is an election year. That means the potential of primary challenges for sitting House members, which is a threat that can be used to force voting patterns. Currently, the far right is opposed to a path to citizenship, something that the Senate included in its immigration package. It will be a flashpoint in the debate, when we have it, between the parties and chambers of Congress.

And that flashpoint heats up when primary challenges are held up as threats to enforce orthodoxy. Don’t trust me, though. What do I know? Instead, listen to Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida. He’s a Republican who, according to the Washington Post, has been involved in immigration negotiations. Here’s his take on getting immigration reform done next year:

“I’m hopeful that we can get to it early next year. But I am keenly aware that next year, you start running into the election cycle. If we cannot get it done by early next year, then it’s clearly dead. It flatlines.”

I am not convinced that that is possible.

Top Image Credit: Flickr

Some YouTubers are not pleased about being forced onto Google+ for commenting, and one girl took a stand in the cutest, most profane way imaginable. “You ruined our site and called it integration / I’m writing this song just to vent our frustration / Fuck you, Google Plusssssss!”

Personally, I think the shift to Google+ comments is a huge win. It will greatly discourage bullying and trolling, turning a cesspool into civil discussion. It will also let YouTube rank comments by popularity, and show you the most relevant ones from friends and celebrities.

But change is tough, especially for emotional kids. Remember “Students Against Facebook News Feed”? 750,000 people, or nearly 10% of Facebook’s user base at the time, protested the launch of the feature in 2006. Now it’s one of the most popular pieces of the Internet and the key to Facebook’s addictive nature.

YouTube has had its own commenting system since forever. It’s basic, and has become a haven for homophobia and racism, but some people just don’t want to adapt to something new.

Emma Blackery has some good points about the forced transition and other troubles in YouTubeland.

“If it was gonna work it would have happened by now / Maybe ask Yahoo to fix it somehow”

“No one gets videos they subscribed for / Video responses are dead in the water / You can’t leave comments unless you’re linked up / Can you please listen to us? / Fuck you, Google+”

Blackery admits YouTube probably won’t halt the march of Google+ comments across its service. Perhaps with time she’ll see the strengths of less anonymous discourse, but for now she just wants to know the search giant isn’t ignoring the convictions of its content creators.

We had a tip about, and have now confirmed, Intel’s latest acquisition: Kno, the education startup that started life as a hardware business and later pivoted into software – specifically via apps that let students read interactive versions of digitized textbooks.

“I can confirm Intel has purchased Kno,” a spokesperson told us just now. The company is not disclosing deal terms but we’ll hopefully going to speak to John Galvin, the GM of Intel Education, to get more details. Since then, Intel has published a more detailed statement from Galvin on its site, which points to how Kno will fit into Intel’s efforts to build up its business in the education market – an effort it is making both in <a target="_blank" href=" wider efforts in hardware and software.

He writes:

The acquisition of Kno boosts Intel’s global digital content library to more than 225,000 higher education and K-12 titles through existing partnerships with 75 educational publishers. Even more, the Kno platform provides administrators and teachers with the tools they need to easily assign, manage and monitor their digital learning content and assessments … We’re looking forward to combining our expertise with Kno’s rich content so that together, we can help teachers create classroom environments and personalized learning experiences that lead to student success.

To date, Kno’s apps can be accessed via its iPad, Android and Windows 7 and Windows 8 apps, and the main idea behind Kno is that the books are not only digitised but also include additional features to help students and teachers assess their progress, share information with others and generally get more engaged in the content.

“They are the same books, only smarter,” the company notes on its site.

Although the pricing of the deal remains unclear, we have learned that the entire Kno team will be joining Intel as a result of the acquisition – with one notable exception. Osman Rashid, the co-founder and CEO (who is also a co-founder of Chegg), will not be joining the company. His plans after the exit remain unclear; we’re trying to find out and will update when we learn more.

“He was definitely the figurehead behind it,” Galvin admitted later to TC in an interview, but ultimately the two did not see eye to eye about the direction of Kno under Intel. “[Staying on] was something that Osman and I talked about early in the process,” he said. “But where I wanted to take Kno and where Osman wanted to take it were two different things. His direction was to continue with a North American focus and I want to go international; and for us to go international, that’s about integrating with Intel’s sales teams, working on bringing this to new markets.”

Using Kno for an international education play is not an out-of-left-field idea. The two companies had already been working together in markets like China on textbook digitising initiatives. Kno was a natural partner that that Intel Capital was among Kno’s list of investors. (The company had raised some $73.4 million in funding since being founded in 2009, with Intel leading its Series C round in 2011. In that $37.5m round, Intel invested $20m.)

“It became more attractive to me to have them be a part of the portfolio rather than just a partner,” says Galvin. He pointed out the company’s ingestion engine as a particularly interesting aspect of the business to help Intel work more closely with the publishing world.

There are also some aspects that play into Intel’s bigger investments into areas like AI and natural language processing. “Kno is a very nice e-learning platform, and perhaps eventually also a natural language support platform, with an analytics engine. The capabilities are there. We can perhaps push them into areas they weren’t ready to go in on their own,” said Galvin. He also added that there is still some IP left from the company’s previous incarnation as a hardware play, though for now the focus will be on more software development.

Hardware is an area where Intel wants to grow its presence. From reference designs for processors to use in other OEMs’ tablets to its own devices, Intel has been working hard to make sure that it remains a relevant part of the gadget equation with the move to tablets and other mobile devices (it’s been an uphill battle in mobile devices).

In education specifically, the biggest chipmaker in the world wants to take on Apple and Google – or the iPad and the Chromebook, respectively. Again, this is an uphill battle, with Apple currently holding a 94% share of the school market in the U.S. (no surprise that Intel is looking internationally).

With this acquisition, it essentially becomes the software platform for Intel’s hardware shell. It’s the same motivation that arguably led Amazon to acquire an education company, TenMarks, last month. And it wouldn’t be surprising to see Microsoft next, says BenchPrep CEO Ashish Rangnekar. (BenchPrep operates in the same space.)

A Kno-win situation?

For all the positives this deal may bring to Intel, the same may not be said for Kno. Most of the funding Kno received was for its hardware business. Why? Because distribution is a really difficult problem to solve in the education technology space, and a lot of great products die because they can’t get to scale in time.

But software is an equally tricky play because of margins. A few sources we talked to said that Kno’s gross margins weren’t exactly sky high, and though its product evolved and it continued to add great strategic partnerships, the business wasn’t blowing the roof off.

Rumors have been swirling for several months now that Kno’s principal investors have been pushing for the company to find an exit opportunity, and we’ve also heard from sources that this deal came together fast. It may not have been a huge financial victory for Kno or its investors, but ultimately Kno is better off in the hands of a company like Intel, which has enormous distribution scale behind it.

Apple is building a manufacturing plant in Arizona that will be used by GT Advanced Technologies to make sapphire crystals for use in its products. Apple currently uses sapphire in its home buttons and camera lens covers, but several details about the material itself and the nature of its deal with GT indicate that it could be expanding its interests in the hard crystalline substance over the next several years.

Sapphire, specifically synthetic, manufactured sapphire, has several properties that make it of interest to Apple. First of all, sapphire is superior to glass, even Corning’s Gorilla Glass material, in several ways. Synthetic sapphire has no color, as it’s a single crystal grown to be optically transparent – making it look very similar to glass. But it’s also extremely hard – 9 on the Mohs scale – which means better scratch resistance.

“Chemically strengthened glass can be excellent, but sapphire is better in terms of hardness, strength, and toughness,” says Matthew Hall, Director of the Center for Advanced Ceramic Technology at the Kazuo Inamori School of Engineering at Alfred University. “The fracture toughness of sapphire should be around 4 times greater than Gorilla Glass – about 3 MPa-m^0.5 versus 0.7 MPa-m^0.5, respectively.”

The hardness of sapphire will make it resistance to ‘flaw initiation’ (aka starting to scratch) and its ‘toughness’ is how it resists fracture once a flaw has begun (cracking altogether). This strength doesn’t come without a bit of cost, Hall notes. “The density of Gorilla Glass is 2.54 g/cm³ while sapphire is 3.98 g/cm³. Given equal-sized pieces, Gorilla Glass will always be lighter.”

The counter-point to the greater weight is that Apple could use thinner pieces of sapphire due to its greater strength overall. This would result in weight and thickness reduction, which is something Apple is very conscious about. You may have noticed that the latest iPad Air was reduced in thickness in part due to its use of thinner glass and IGZO display panels.

Sapphire has fairly good optical qualities, as well, says Hall. Both materials have roughly similar absorption properties, though sapphire’s refractive index is a bit higher, which would mean a tradeoff in light transmission for durability.

“Gorilla Glass is about 1.5 while sapphire is about 1.76 – the exact number is wavelength-dependent,” Hall says. “The reflection that occurs at an interface is directly proportional to the refractive index difference between the two media creating that interface.”

The technical details of GT Advanced’s sapphire product match up well with these numbers, you can read those here (pdf). This means that, in roughly the same amount of incident light, Gorilla Glass would allow for a brighter image than sapphire. The key difference between the two materials, and this is where we get to why Apple just ensured its own supply, is the manufacturability of sapphire vs. glass.

“The down draw process for making display glass is currently more scalable and energy-efficient than sapphire production,” Hall says. “I admit to being less familiar with the details of sapphire production, but it’s my understanding that all methods are batch-based while the relevant glass making process is continuous in nature. I don’t see an immediate solution for sapphire to compete with glass on economies of scale, but I would certainly be interested in learning what may be in the works.”

Hall says that there are questions about the methods of producing large amounts of thin sapphire that is not cost-prohibitive. Which may be why Apple is building a new facility which GT Advanced will inhabit, with its own machinery and processes. GT has been developing a method for making sapphire sheets thinner than a human hair, which are then laminated on top of glass material to protect it – a more cost-effective solution than a pure sapphire sheet.

A report earlier this week from Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Brian White noted that sapphire glass accounted for about 11 percent of GT’s sales this year – around $28.9 million in revenue. In 2014, GT expects to make between $480 million and $640 million from its sapphire business alone. So clearly it expects Apple’s additional business to increase its production quite a bit.

What chunk of that increased revenue will be sucked up by Apple? The answer lies in GT’s Q3 release, which notes that Apple will provide it with a $578 million prepayment, which GT will reimburse over the next five years. Apple’s deal length wasn’t mentioned, but it’s likely to last at least those five years. Note that this is only the pre-payment, Apple’s investment in sapphire may go well beyond that.

In its statement about the deal, GT said that it “has accelerated the development of its next-generation, large-capacity ASF furnaces to deliver low-cost, high-volume manufacturing of sapphire material.”

This increased volume indicates significant interest by Apple, for both its current products and future ones. A few months back, there were reports that production volume of sapphire materials was a ‘problem,’ which we’ve confirmed were accurate.

An MIT Technology Review piece from March of this year noted that production levels were one of the biggest barriers to sapphire being used in smartphone screens. At current volumes, sapphire was just too expensive. At the time, GT said that a sapphire display could cost 3-4x as much as a Gorilla Glass one, but people at the company noted that its prices would fall further as GT “improved the quality of its furnaces and as the manufacturers that purchase those furnaces streamline operations.”

Though Apple currently uses sapphire for its touch sensors, GT’s increased output in 2014 points to a much larger role for the material in Apple’s business. This could point to Apple beginning to use sapphire for the screens of its devices. Though there are production challenges, it’s technically possible that Apple has found a way to make it economically feasible to replace the glass material that they’re using with sapphire.

In supply chain analyst circles there is chatter that Apple no longer uses Corning’s Gorilla Glass for its iPhone screens, and hasn’t for some time now. But it still makes them out of glass. Expanding sapphire production and buying its own plant indicate a massive interest in the crystalline material by Apple.

“First, this material must be extremely strategic, says Creative Strategies Analyst and Techpinions columnist Ben Bajarin. “It is necessary for Touch ID because it is extremely scratch-resistant. If a scratch got on your thumb scanner it wouldn’t work. So then the question becomes what else may they want or need to use a scratch resistant screen for. This is where the wearables idea or watch comes in.”

There has been a lot of chatter about Apple and wearables, and it is indeed working on something in that arena. Apple’s M7 motion coprocessor likely has something to do with it, and there are some indications that it’s being worked on by both Bob Mansfield and ex-Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch.

Watches, a popular wrist-mounted wearable you may have heard of, often use sapphire for their face covers because of their durability. They simply get knocked around more than phones do.

“This, for now, is more about smaller screens than bigger. But perhaps it is also a learning process or investment for them to take this to other screens,” says Bajarin.

This is how Apple operates with its suppliers in China like Foxconn. If custom machinery or processes are needed for their products, they often put the money into the deal for those. It’s not disclosed in GT’s deal, but there may be a possibility that it’s helping it build the furnaces that it needs. It’s certainly building a fancy new facility for the manufacturing, complete with a renewable energy source in the form of a solar farm.

Apple’s investment in sapphire glass displays just how important it views the material. This could also mean that it is setting itself up to protect the supply of material over the course of the next few years. Apple has often done this with components like Retina displays.

Around the time HP was trying to build its TouchPad tablet, we had heard that the company was frustrated because Apple had locked up super high-res display production for some time. HP couldn’t get the panels even if it wanted to, and would have to wait until Apple’s exclusivity deals ran out. This may be a similar scenario, where Apple buys out capacity to prevent others from having access to it.

Or it could simply be a matter of building up production levels to where Apple needs them to be just to provide it for themselves. This is probably the likelier scenario, especially given the relative scarcity of sapphire and the production processes used to make it in enough volume. Especially if Apple expands production of its sapphire home buttons and TouchID systems to the iPad line in the coming year.

Either way, Apple is planning on using sapphire on a much larger scale than it has previously. There’s no telling exactly when we’ll see the fruits of this increased production, but GT’s increased production levels point to a much bigger use of sapphire by Apple in 2014 and beyond.

Time is running out to apply to Hardware Battlefield. Have you submitted an application but didn’t complete it? What the heck, man! Do it! Do it now! This is shaping up to be one of the coolest things we’ve ever done and it’s all set on the amazing backdrop of CES in Vegas this January. We’re going to have some amazing judges, some amazing entries, and some amazing times. We want you to apply.

If you have any questions email me at [email protected].

Rules

We will review applications on a rolling basis, so it’s to your advantage to submit as soon as you are ready. Due to strong demand, we are unable to review applications more than once, so please do not submit a draft application before you are ready for final consideration. Please note that video demos are required. We look forward to reviewing your application.

‘Ello ello! Welcome to another edition of TIDWRTWHUFOO. Today we’re looking at flying drones, crabby bots that climb your body, and a robot that can roll, spin, and eventually decapitate you and/or your pets. Good times!

First we see some silly humans who think they are making the robots dance for them. Robots don’t dance. Robots pretend to dance and then attack when your guard is down. Created by KMel Robotics for a Lexus ad, the robots use infrared light to control the position of the drones and the cameras while keeping track of each other in space.

Next we have a robot that’s totally OK with crashing. Called the IROS 2013, the robot can fly and float thanks to a big foam ring around its rotors. It can even turn on its end and roll towards you like some evil donut from outer space. Called a Multi-?eld Universal Wheel for Air-land Vehicle (MUWA), the robot came from the University Of Tokyo.

Need some good news? How about Baxter? We’ve talked about him before but let’s give him a hand for learning how to stab less and love more.

Finally we meet these tiny Rubbot, a cloth-climbing robot created by Guangchen Chen, Yuanyuan Liu, Ruiqing Fu, Jianwei Sun, Xinyu Wu, and Yangsheng Xu. This little robot can go up and down light materials (light clothes) and presumably eventually burn off said clothes so the robotic human slurry making machine doesn’t get all mucked up with nylon fiber. Keep your powder dry, humans!

Facebook’s share price tanked upon IPO, scaring plenty of private companies away from the public markets. But with its eventual recovery and now the stellar performance of Twitter’s IPO out the gates, the Wall Street bell suddenly has a much nicer ring to it.

Just in the last few days we’ve heard of Square, Box, and Seamless moving forward with IPO plans.

Now, a soaring share price isn’t always a good thing, and a sinking one isn’t all bad depending on a company’s intentions. But up and to the right boosts confidence of the market as a whole, and the shot in the arm from Twitter comes in sharp contrast to a rough 2011 and 2012 for technology offerings.

Facebook priced its May 2012 IPO high, and thereby raked in a ton of money for use on expansion, R&D, and acquisitions. What it sacrificed was perceived momentum. Though it was able to unload its shares at $38, the price would soon plummet to $18. That made Facebook look like a loser to the outside world, potential recruits and employees.

Soon we saw a grand exodus of veteran talent from the social network. Employees left citing they felt they had “done their duty” to make the world more open and connected. What they didn’t say was that they may have preferred to leave the pimping of Facebook as a business entity to someone else while they went on a new startup adventure.

Now Facebook’s share price is at $47.50. It’s regained some of its luster (though not with teens). Those prized employees are still gone but it has plenty of money to buy new ones. Overall, it was a tough transition from private to public that spooked a lot of people. What CEO wants to go public if they risk half their market value evaporating overnight?

Twitter waited until some of that fear subsided. It then its IPO low. The original price range of $17-$20 it looked now seems undeniably cheap (oh the joys of hindsight). But even at the time, most considered Twitter worth well over $11 billion. It’s become a backbone of digital communication whose raw, unfiltered nature gives it unique value in the social landscape. Even after pricing TWTR much higher at $26, many still though it was undervalued.

When Twitter IPO’d yesterday, its share price popped a remarkable 73 percent. Though it’s down a bit today, it still closed around $41, high above its $26 starting point.

Twitter did leave more than $1 billion on the table. Achieving the more traditionally sought-after 15 percent to 20 percent pop could have given it a much bigger war chest to buy complementary companies and invest in growth. But what it gained was the public sentiment that Twitter’s a winner, that it’s here to stay. And that it’s a beautiful time to go public.

Other companies apparently saw the sign. Payment service Square is in talks with banks, including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley for an IPO in 2014, someone conveniently leaked to the Wall Street Journal. Square’s sales are said to be around $550 million this year, with $110 million to $165 million in net revenue after payouts to credit card companies.

Cloud storage app Box has chosen Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse and JPMorgan Chase as underwriters for an early 2014 IPO that could raise $500 million, says Reuters.

And food delivery service Seamless is eying a late-2014 / early-2015 IPO says The Deal Pipeline. It had $85 million in 2012 revenue, bought its biggest competitor GrubHub six months ago, and is on track for $200 million+ in 2013 revenue, Deal Pipeline reports.

Other companies that might IPO in 2014 include Dropbox, Zendesk, New Relic, and Atlassian.

The idea seems to be “get money while the getting’s good.” Big private companies seem intent on getting their day in the Wall Street sun before the weather changes.

And the trend extends down to smaller startups private stories too, though their situation is very different. Pinterest may have raised $225 million because it wants to have plenty of money for expansion without fear the fundraising climate could get bleak if consumer investment dries up, as Fortune writes. Snapchat is said to be raising its own round of roughly $200 million.

Neither of these companies are earning any meaningful revenue right now. But rather than wait until they are so they could raise at better terms and even higher valuations, they’re squirreling away the cash now.

One problem this presents is that these big IPOs and raises could inflate valuations for smaller startups, as Jack Altman of Hydrazine Capital writes. If they can’t reach an exit before the market skies turn stormy, they may be left struggling to raise money, and end up with gloomy down rounds.

But for big private companies with solid revenue and a strong mobile presence, fast-tracking their way to getting their own stock symbol may be a smart bet. You never know what next year will look like.

Additional reporting by Alex Wilhelm

[Image Credit: Shutterstock, Institutional Investor]