Category: Tech news

Editor’s note: Tadhg Kelly is a veteran game designer and creator of leading game design blog What Games Are. He has recently moved into managing developer relations at OUYA. You can follow him on Twitter here.

Seth Godin told a story a few years ago about how a research team tested whether users really perceived a difference in the quality of Google vs. Yahoo results versus what they believed. The team performed some HTML jiggery pokery so that a user could type a search into “Google” and see Yahoo results, but they still appeared to be Google results, and vice versa. Then a test group of users was asked to try each engine and report which they preferred. The result? “Google.”

We’ve heard these sorts of taste-test stories many times before, about how aspects other than function weigh more heavily in the judgment of quality. They teach us something very human about reality versus perception, and how the marketing story of a technology is often its most important feature. It’s why aesthetics matter and also why key numbers and acronyms form the backbone of the conversation. The debate over whose tech is best, who has the most oomph and whose is the future is an important aspect of technology.

In the games industry especially so. There are few arguments more likely to get hardcore gamers agitated than who has the best “graphics.” This is not a style argument you understand, but rather an argument about realism, numbers of polygons, gigahertz and RAM. It’s an argument about the virtues of resolutions and screen size and benchmarks. Like watching car enthusiasts wax lyrical about the benefits of one engine over another, the power conversation in games is about groups of teenagers and grown men arguing over the perceived benefits of features about which they actually know very little.

I’m pretty sure that if a similar type of Google/Yahoo test were performed with console games using swapped joypads, the research would show the same kind of result. Tell them that they’re playing the PS4 version and hand them a PS4 joypad (yet actually have them control an Xbox One version) and they’d say it was best. Why? Because that’s what they have believed to be true since E3. Players would pick according to tribal loyalties rather than any tangibly noticeable difference.

Take, for example, the news that two top shooters (Call of Duty and Battlefield 4) are showing very slight differences in performance between the two systems. In one case one of the games shows almost imperceptible variations in crispness and some distance details. In the other, one of them is running at native 1080 resolution where the other is upscaling 720.

In raw physical terms it cannot be understated how much this news actually matters. Ultimately when playing either, the vast majority of players will have a perfectly grand time shooting up the world and each other with glorious visuals and sound. Indeed the apparent differences in graphics across platforms became meaningless years ago.

Since roughly around the time that Half Life 2 came out the differences have grown smaller as the budgets have escalated. So much so that these days it takes very zoomed-in shots of details to prove to the gamer crowd that yes, games are still getting graphically better. Details that a player will never likely notice while playing.

Yet in terms of the marketing stories, this sort of stuff is a big deal. On Reddit and forums like NeoGAF and you’ll find hundreds of pages of wild speculation about what it all means. The quasi-imaginary details that players think they can see feed into their emotional connection with both their games and their platforms, and justify their pre-orders. Nobody wants to be disappointed, everybody wants to make sure that their platform is the best, and a kind of circular logic takes hold between both console kids and PC fans who like to deride from above with a ”we were already here years ago” haughtiness.

It may sound baffling to the outsider that this aspect of the conversation around games retains so much gravity, but it is what it is. It happens across every platform. The average smart device user doesn’t really know what a Tegra 4 is, nor an A7, but fans like to justify themselves in much the same way. It’s not hard to find arguments over whose retina screens are even-more-retina than others. People who think they know like to connect to their favorite in this way.

The important audience here is “those who think they know.” Professional designers and developers have usually worked on the inside of platforms long enough to perceive the gap between reality and ideality. Go ask many an iOS developer what they think of working on Apple’s platform and you’ll probably get a meat-and-potatoes answer about the cost of user acquisition and the pros and cons of Unity or Xcode. It’s all just chips and bits and bugs.

The people who get passionate about the power conversation have a populist understanding of the technology, whether in an amateur or professional capacity. They are the best-placed ones to speculate and dream about what their chosen device might do, but also what it means. In this way they sometimes equate the power conversation with the legitimacy of the medium. As games get more real and more cinematic (such as in the Battlefield footage) this equates to fulfilling the promise of video games. Or maybe, they think, it will one day.

Yet for many game makers, that tendency to draw an equivalence is increasingly a problem. Within the indie sector especially, the power conversation looks completely alien, yet overshadows much of what they are trying to do. There are increasing numbers of game makers that want to have a different conversation with players. They want to be able to make playing games a social topic, much as many other kinds of art are, but that’s hard to do when the much wider popular press tends to only hear the power conversation.

The games industry is never quite sure about whether it’s an entertainment or a technology industry and it straddles that divide uncertainly. Talking up the virtues of a technology can be a very powerful way for a game to get noticed. Enthusing about motion capture, say, or real-time physics and the virtues of clouds and super smart AIs regularly gains a lot of attention from various media outlets. It’s a conversation that never really dies because it’s the easiest one to have. Yet at the same time it’s limiting.

Beyond the Reddit wars and so on, the widely known story about games tends to be much as it has been for decades. It’s the occasional oohs and aahs over some innovations and the odd media furore over salacious content. It’s finger-pointing in the wake of school shooters. It’s game reviews appearing in the technology section of newspapers rather than their culture sections. And largely that’s because the loudest voices tend to talk in tech terms over everything else.

The kinds of games that the power conversation represents are the ones that many industry commentators find uncomfortable. It’s hard not to notice how many big games these days display their wares with gory head shot cut scenes and similar displays of ultra violence. Advocate journalists talk about how games have a sexism problem and then segue into lush graphical sequences that show ineptly written story sequences with violence against women. There’s a dimension to the power conversation that’s awkward and sometimes even ugly, and it gets in the way. So much so that some more radical designers believe that games as they are need to be destroyed to make room for something else.

Perhaps the power conversation will always be with us. Like watching the blockbuster end of Hollywood spend gargantuan amounts of money on special effects for movies that are soon forgotten, many of the games that seek to exploit the power conversation arrive with tons of fury yet signify very little. They are quickly forgotten. While we may wonder if the quest for ever-more-slight detail in graphics will ultimately prove sustainable, other conversations, like the ones that talk about games such as Gone Home, will continue to find their own way through. I like to think that the rest of the world is slowly starting to notice.

Remember that night when you and your friends discovered how to “draw” with your camera’s long exposure function?

You started out simple, piercing the dark with a cheap handheld flashlight as you traced a terrible rendition of your name through the air. You were hardly halfway through the last letter of your name before you were running over to the camera to see if it worked. You, like many a bored digital camera owner before you, had discovered light painting.

Pixelstick takes that concept to a pretty ridiculous extreme.

As its name implies, Pixelstick is… a stick of pixels.

More specifically, the Pixelstick is a 6′ bar containing 198 full color LEDs. At the core of Pixelstick is a simple brain: a handheld controller, an SD card reader, and a bit of lightweight circuitry to parse images pulled from the card.

Pixelstick displays those images just one vertical line at a time. To the naked eye, it’s a mess of flashing color. Move it slowly in front of the open aperture of a camera during a long exposure, however, and each pixel becomes a paint stroke. Flash by flash, your ethereal imagery is burned onto your shot.

While that in itself would be quite cool, things start to get really trippy when you bring in animation. You can load up a bunch of sequential images onto the SD card, then use the handbox to switch between them as you shoot a series of photos. If you havent already, check out the video above for some particularly impressive examples. Oh, and the pixelstick can be unlocked and spun around its handle, allowing for all sorts of crazy experiments in spirography.

Pixelstick set out to raise $110,000 on Kickstarter, a goal which they pretty much immediately destroyed. Just 4 days into the campaign, they’ve already more than doubled that (at the time of publishing, they’d raised just over $245,000.) Alas, the cheapest tier to actually come with a Pixelstick – the $250 “Early Bird” package – has long since sold out; at this point, you’ll need to drop at least $300.

(If you pick one of these up, you’ll probably want to drop some more cash for a set of rechargable batteries, while you’re at it. It takes 8 AA batteries at a time, and the team says they can chew through those in a night or two)

UK-based Cambridge Audio has long made very well-regarded high-end audio equipment, but recently that’s a market that has changed considerably, thanks to the advent of digital audio and online streaming services. The company has changed, too, and one example of that change is the new Minx Xi all-in one streaming device, which adds to Cambridge Audio’s growing family of digital-focused Minx products.

Basics

• Wi-Fi & Ethernet
• 2x USB 2.0
• Toslink Optical audio in
• Digital S/PIDF input
• BT100 Bluetooth receiver included
• 2x RCA inputs
• 3.5mm audio input
• Headphone out
• 2x speaker out
• Subwoofer out
• Built-in Dual Wolfson WM8728 DAC
• MSRP: £600, $899 in the U.S.
• Product info page

Pros

• Excellent sound
• DAC works wonders for Bluetooth or when connected via optical to a Mac

Cons

• Wi-Fi but no AirPlay support

Design

Cambridge’s Minx Xi is not dramatically different from what you might expect of any home theatre or hi-fi stereo component device; it’s essentially a black box (or white, if you choose that option) with ample venting on top, a face with knobs and buttons, and a rear with the majority of inputs and outputs. But small design flourishes make this a very attractive, and decidedly modern piece of stereo kit.

The rounded rectangle border that surrounds the face is a nice touch, and frames the tall and wide display nicely. The display itself provides just enough information for easy navigation, without overwhelming or drawing the eye unduly. The low-res, basic LCD readout is a little behind the times in a market flooded with OLED panels, but it’s actually pretty refreshing in its retro appeal, and still gets the job done just as effectively as more advanced screens.

The Minx Xi case houses a lot of complicated internals, but it’s still relatively compact, and would look at home either in a stereo cabinet or on its own atop a dresser, bookshelf or cupboard. Paired with Cambridge Audio’s new Aero 2 bookshelf speakers, it makes a good-looking and minimalist setup that’s still capable of putting out impressive enough sound even for watching the occasional Hollywood blockbuster.

Features

Movies are now where the Minx Xi shines, however. Instead, it’s at its most impressive when it’s working with streaming audio, an area that’s always a challenge when it comes to sound quality. The Minx Xi connects direct to your network via Wi-Fi or Ethernet, and can stream thousands of Internet radio stations directly, access BBC’s iPlayer feeds, subscribe to podcasts and more – without the need for a computer or mobile device for playback.

The Minx Xi does a great job of making even, for example, the 128kbps BBC Radio 4 stream sound excellent, with terrific channel division and a natural rendering of voice and music. If you’ve been listening on computer speakers or even a very capable standalone radio, you’ll probably actually be amazed that what comes through the Minx Xi is the same thing as what you’re used to listening to, the difference is that marked.

Subscribing to podcasts on the Minx Xi is as simple as registering your unit via the web and inputting RSS feeds via that dashboard. This provides you direct access to the latest episodes, and again, its ability to really highlight high-quality voice recording comes through.

The Bluetooth adapter included is external, but it doesn’t cost any extra, and it works tremendously well. There’s generally a big step down in quality when you’re listening to anything streaming via Bluetooth, even though it’s gotten a lot better over time. With Cambridge’s BT100 and the Minx Xi’s special Bluetooth DAC capabilities, performance of A2DP streams get a big boost.

Performance

Just to expand on what I already mentioned above, the Bluetooth streaming powers of the Minx Xi make it so that streaming from your mobile device and listening through headphones is in some cases arguably better than listening to the stream on the device itself. It really is that good. That said, it leaves me wishing even more that Cambridge had included AirPlay functionality on the Minx Xi, since Apple’s Wi-Fi audio streaming protocol offers better performance than Bluetooth to begin with.

Performance for streamed connections is excellent, as mentioned, with 802.11n support and no drop-outs for streams during my usage. Connected to my Mac as a DAC, and used in tandem with both the Aero 2 speakers and my Sennheiser HD 598 headphones, the Minx Xi really starts to show off its magic abilities in terms of boosting audio that you might not even have realized could be improved to begin with.

With both locally resident files, and streaming services like Rdio, the Minx Xi delivers noticeable improvements in quality to attached audio output devices, versus having that same hardware simply plugged directly into the Mac. There’s significant improvement in sound separation and clarity on all files and streams, in my testing experience.

Bottom Line

The Cambridge Minx Xi isn’t an impulse purchase for most at £600 ($899 MSRP in the U.S.), but it’s a big step up in terms of the audio quality not only for Internet radio and service streams, and also for connected computers and devices. The service library is a little limited for my liking (Pandora and Rhapsody, but no Rdio/Spotify!), and I’d love AirPlay, but Cambridge Audio does say that firmware updates will be pushed out regularly, and support for those kinds of things could follow.

That fact that it improves any source dramatically with a built-in DAC that would be expensive on its own, and also operates as a very capable and fairly comprehensive audio streaming box in and of itself, makes this a very desirable piece of kit for anyone looking to take their digital listening habits to the next level.

This past week, we were lucky enough to sit down with Benchmark partner and Twitter board member Peter Fenton backstage at TechCrunch Europe to talk about his magic touch.

Of all the investors in the Valley, Fenton is one of the elite VCs who has the most number of companies that are in the process of going public or will be going public in 2014. This group includes Twitter, Zendesk, Zuora, New Relic and a number of others. We asked Fenton what his secret was in picking the companies that had the legs to be a public company.

Fenton admits that luck has an important role in some of his successes and bets. He shared that he falls in love with the companies he invests in, with the passion coming from seeing the dynamic of a mission-based company and how the employees are growing with the startup. He adds that the current dynamic in this climate is to focus on an IPO vs. an exit (M&A was more popular in the previous generation of technology companies, he says).

Check out the video above for more.

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah works on product for Swell, is a TechCrunch columnist, and an investor. He blogs at Haywire, and you can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

There is a “perfect storm” brewing in consumer mobile: Developers, companies, and investors see the explosive growth of smartphones (with no sign of slowing down), yet consumers only have so much bandwidth to interact with a small set of apps, let alone enough time in the day for another app. Consumer eyeballs are fixated on smartphones, triggering once-in-a-lifetime opportunities for application creators to reinvent products, interactions, and industries, but tragically, limited means of getting their creations discovered, or reengaged with, or paid through them. The result, for the time being, is that driving app installs and engagement is all the rage, as companies frantically line Facebook’s pockets to help drive downloads and retention of their mobile apps while a bustling ecosystem of third-party app analytic providers wait to scoop up the remains. Something has to give, right?

In the past few weeks, we have begun to see the inklings of what the future of mobile search, navigation, and app discovery may hold. Forget about Siri for now, as it actually took a step backward in iOS 7, if that was even possible. On Android, apps like Cover, which contextually places apps in your lockscreen based on when it knows you’re likely to use those apps, and Aviate, which intelligently surfaces information to your phone at the right time, recently launched at a time when iPhone fragmentation is starting to pick up and when Android handsets in the U.S. are getting better and better. Earlier this year, Google brought its mobile anticipatory compute engine to the iOS platform, giving iPhone users the chance to see how always-on integrated Google services can work at the application layer, though the battery costs from background processing impose hefty power costs.

All of this raises a high-order question: How will consumers interact with their phones in the future? Will it be through today’s “hunting and pecking” of apps in silos with a mix of a suboptimal mobile web interface? Or, will mobile operating systems learn our behaviors so well as to predict and anticipate what we will want to do or know next, either by the time of day, the way in which we hold our phones or other signals? Or, will we continue to search for information on our phones as we search for information on the web with Google, by inputting keywords and having the ability to search across our apps (even the ones buried in the back pages or in folders)?

This last question became more interesting this week when Android announced in its latest KitKat 4.4 update that it would enable App Indexing across apps through deep-linking. The interwebs were abuzz with the possibilities this would promote app discovery as well as re-engagement, helping to extend Google’s core competency of indexing and ranking information to include applications, which, to date, remain in their own silos. Very soon, on Android (and not iOS), users will be able to search across their devices as well as have Google Now push information to them – it remains to be seen if Apple can or will want to move in this direction at an OS-level, or leave everything federated to the app layer.

On iOS, there’s a small, early-stage startup based out of Palo Alto called Relcy that is trying to provide an app to let users search their phones, including other apps, on Apple’s mobile platform. And on both coasts, entrepreneurs have not forgotten about the mobile web, with startups like famo.us, Wildcard, and Instart Logic trying to reinvent what can be done with the content in the browser within a mobile context.

All of these advancements come down to how we search for information on our phones, how we can and will discover new applications, and how we can and will re-engage with those services through a mix of user-initiated search and machine-anticipated prediction. While voice command interfaces for mobile seem like a pipe dream (though, hey, it could happen eventually), bringing standard search back to our phones and becoming empowered to find information within disparate app silos could theoretically unlock a significant amount of utility and save time.

For developers, of course, it could help reduce the pain surrounding two harsh realities – getting new people to discover your app and, once they’ve downloaded it, getting them to engage again (and again) with the software. Will these advancements in Android unlock distribution for mobile developers and be the push they need to leave iOS? Whatever does happen, the mobile platform that can help with app distribution – whether through user intent and search, or through predictive services – will attract developers in droves.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius is not a tech founder. President Barack Obama does not have a GitHub account. The failed launch of the new health insurance e-commerce website, Healthcare.gov, came as a shock to political leaders that were too steeped in government shutdowns and the machinations of two-party infighting to understand how their hired geeks could flub a computer project.

Unfortunately, Silicon Valley’s powerful political lobbies were myopically focused on the stereotypical tech issues of immigration reform and broadband access to see that every single law affects the tech industry as much as the rest of the country. As a result, many Silicon Valley startups were legally shut out of a brand-new, multi-billion dollar market, while America’s new health-care system is in danger of missing crucial enrollment deadlines.

Here’s the lesson: there are no more “tech issues.” America and startups got hosed because Silicon Valley was politically absent. Since everything now has crucial technology components, the technology industry cannot sit out any issue.

The government, alone, is incapable of solving these problems. Upon entering office, President Obama thought he set a path to change by creating two new positions, the Chief Technology Officer and newly re-tooled Chief Information Officer, specifically designed to make government as innovative as his campaign.

New directors hired. Check! Problem solved? Of course! Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way.

The first CIO, Vivek Kundra, practically stormed out of his office after two years, denouncing the entire system. “We almost have an IT cartel within federal IT,” he said to Google Chairman Eric Schmidt. The searing criticism fell on the deaf ears of a few wonky trade publications.

The next CIO, Steve VanRoekel, gave me his first interview and declared a bold solution to gut the system from the inside by hiring young folks from Silicon Valley. While we know his ambitious plans didn’t stop the Healthcare.gov failure, we don’t know why, because sometime last spring when Healthcare.gov began serious construction, he was moved to a different department.

No one in the executive branch seemed to have the political power to change either the IT system or the Affordable Care Act’s regulations. In the end, the feds did what they normally do: hire a known contractor and keep the status quo.

“So what they did instead, and very rationally, is they opted to take a contract that they already had – one with CGI Federal – and amended that contract to add the Healthcare.gov stuff onto it,” wrote former Presidential Innovation Fellow Clay Johnson. Congress, likewise, had no incentive to anger a contractor that gives jobs to constituents. “No contracting officer wants a call from a member of Congress asking why their backyard IT integrator wasn’t selected.”

Worse yet, the Affordable Care Act put a new multi-billion-dollar commerce opportunity completely in the hands of the government. “Web-based entities,” or tech startup insurance brokers, who are designing an Orbitz-like experience for shoppers, were treated as second-class citizens. Startups like Fuse Insurance tell me they were given late access to the data and can’t test their product because of Healthcare.gov’s backend glitches. Worse yet, they’re completely overshadowed by a multi-million-dollar, celebrity-fueled ad campaign to drive consumers to the federal website.

The regulations, as written, give state exchanges the option to allow startups access to the new market. California and New York have delayed these partnerships for around two years. As a result of Silicon Valley’s inattentiveness, everyone got screwed.

Fortunately, there are models for Silicon Valley to broaden its reach.

Former Newark Mayor, now Senator Cory Booker, realized this fact on a problem that doesn’t seem to fit the typical “tech issue” mold: criminal justice. While civil libertarians were battling New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg over controversial stop-and-frisk policies, Booker won accolades from the local American Civil Liberties Union for finding a unique tech solution: open up all the data on police officer street stops. Watchdogs can now work cooperatively with law enforcement to find out exactly which stops are happening.

After the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre, noted Facebook investor Ron Conway spearheaded investment for startups that could equip police with gun-fire detection technologies; it’s also exploring ways to empower community volunteers with social media sentiment analysis that can find public gang feuds and defuse them with preemptive diplomacy.

In foreign policy, Benetech helped develop a James Bond-like eraser tool for spying dissidents, they used statistics to indict war criminals, and helping crisis workers more efficiently find victims of national disasters.

All of these areas are not only ripe for business but can save lives. Education, health care, immigration, tax reform, infrastructure (self-driving cars), energy, foreign policy, gay rights, voting rights, disaster relief – they’re all tech issues now.

Silicon Valley’s citizens and its well-heeled lobbyists better expand their interests. Where I can, I will also try to be better at identifying technology-relevant aspects of all major legislation. Health care was a rational oversight. But we shouldn’t get fooled again.

The Swatch Group has long been the primary movement supplier to the majority of Swiss (and non-Swiss) watch manufacturers. These movements – essentially the guts of the watch – have powered 60 percent of the world’s watches in the past decade. That’s about to end.

WEKO, the Swiss competition commission, has required Swatch to supply these movements in order to ensure that watch prices wouldn’t rise stratospherically when manufacturers began making their own movements. Swatch, for example, owns the ETA movement brand, manufacturer of hundreds of thousands of movements per year. This new ruling will allow Swatch to reduce its manufacturing efforts and increase its R&D expenditure.

Why is this important? Well it means that Samsung, Sony, and the like are about to get a competitor. Because Swatch, one of the most popular watch brands, has an international foothold, it could, in theory, create smartwatches for the masses. While Swatch has traditionally had trouble making popular smartwatches and, in fact, has had trouble understanding consumer technology, Swatch could partner with technology providers to produce an interesting amalgam of old and new tech.

Obviously the Swiss watch industry is, shall we say, a bit old-fashioned and is facing quite a few tough competitors. However, given a bit of marketing savvy and some R&D investment the shackles holding the company to its many customers could soon be broken.

via Quartz

Simulation video games are often purposefully, gloriously mundane. But they can also make the quotidian highly entertaining. And that’s certainly true of this U.K.-made example of the genre. Meet: Chippy, a fish & chip shop simulator game for iOS that’s plenty of fun to play – partly because its subject matter is so spectacularly mundane (frying fish and chips), but also because it turns that mundane task into an addictive game of time management.

Firstly, for non-British TC readers, “chippy” is slang for a fish & chip shop – aka a staple of the British small-town high street, selling battered fish and fat-soaked chips. Traditionally, this comfort food would be served straight from the deep fat frier, wrapped up in yesterday’s newspaper, and drenched in salt and vinegar. It’s about as quintessentially British as a cup of tea.

Now to Chippy the game: The game-play involves memorising orders, and remembering the correct sequence in which to swipe items around the screen to make up each order. If you lose track and leave the chips/fish in the frier too long, they’ll start to blacken and burn, eventually giving off a plume of dense black smoke and being good for nothing but throwing in the trash.

Burnt food also attracts flies, which has a knock on effect on your hygiene rating. You can dispatch flies by throwing stuff at them individually or by activating a UV fly zapper on the wall of your shop to net the whole swarm. But pressing on that until all the flies are pulled to fiery death means you can’t be making up orders so risk falling behind and having angry customers storm out of the shop.

Chippy scores are reputational, based on customer satisfaction, factoring in things like speed/efficiency of order fulfilment, quality of the food (burnt or uncooked fish and chips won’t win you many points), and whether you got all the aspects of the order right or not.

The game eases you in with simple orders, and steadily introduces new elements to ramp up the complexity – so you move from making up a single portion of chips, to making multiple fish & chips portions, with or without salt & vinegar, at the same time and so on. There are also challenges going alongside the basic pipeline of orders. These appear on the newspaper you use to wrap the food, prompting you to ‘cook up three of everything before you open the shop’ or ‘knockout a fly by throwing something at it’.

For the rest of the time, the newspaper headlines are pure entertainment, plus a dash of humour – such as ‘Hipsters alarmed by choice in craft beers’. For a game focused on a single screen environment, there’s a lot of detail to enjoy.

The developer behind Chippy was also involved in making the iOS pirate game Plunderland – a paid title that was downloaded more than 500,000 times. Chippy is not being made by Plunderland’s studio (Johnny Two Shoes) but is the first game from a spin-off sister company, called Glitche.rs. Co-founder and game designer Maxwell Scott-Slade says Glitche.rs will be focused on “making more targeted apps with smaller development cycles and a slightly different team”.

The studio (and Chippy) is being self-funded. “We don’t have any investors, our mantra is keep development cycles small and cheap – get the minimal viable product out there and add to it in response to fan feedback,” Scott-Slade tells TechCrunch.

Chippy is a paid app ($2.99/£1.99) that deliberately eschews in-app purchases – in part to ensure it can appeal to kids and their parents (who can be wary of gaming costs racking up expectedly). But Scott-Slade also reckons there’s plenty of life left in paid games, especially as he argues that gamers are getting tired of virtual currencies and would prefer a simpler, up-front approach.

“I think [an app being paid] shows an intention to the player. We did experiment with in-app purchases, but never with virtual currency, only to unlock the entire game,” he says. “It’s absolutely nuts to suggest that paid apps are dead. Knowing what you’re getting for a fixed price is important for a lot of players. Listen on the ground and see the general frustration from players being constantly sold virtual currencies – they don’t like it!

“But we also don’t like it as gamers ourselves, the choice to go ‘premium’ was partly due to age range reach but also to support the idea that charging up front for something is still a viable option. I want to prove that,” he adds. ”Another important thing to note is Chippy is potentially quite a niche game, with free you need millions of players before you really start to make any money.”

Being niche, Chippy is also going to have to work to pull the punters in. Scott-Slade says Glitche.rs will need around 20,000 downloads of the paid app to break even and they have “zero dollars for marketing budget.” To help spread the word they have built a gameplay recording feature into the app that lets players share short clips to social networks.

“Part of the reason we included Kamcord (the CCTV gameplay recording feature) was actually directly a result of Chippy being a single-scene game. There’s not much you can do for a gameplay trailer and it’s really the hands-on experience that makes you most excited. Sharing little segments of gameplay to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are our best options for piquing interest that doesn’t cost us a thing!” he says.

The studio has also been frugal in its development approach – building a “minimum viable product” and being strict about paring back their list of game-play ideas to keep costs and time down. Lots of ideas they had, didn’t make it in – or not yet anyway.

“Chippy will grow as more people download it – the idea was to build it with the fans after launch,” he says, confirming that new features will be added if Chippy fans clamour hard enough for them, whether it’s curry sauce, pickled eggs or deep-fried Mars bars.

“We had a strict 12 week development cycle with just three people plus our sound designer,” he adds. “Keeping development costs down was also key to us being able to make a potentially niche game.”

How niche the appeal of playing at making virtual fish & chips turns out to be will be fun to watch. “We realised that potentially, not every market would get Chippy. But we’re glad to see that most players seem to really love it – even in Japan!”

Editor’s note: Aileen Lee is founder of Cowboy Ventures, a seed-stage fund that backs entrepreneurs reinventing work and personal life through software. Previously, she joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in 1999 and was also founding CEO of digital media company RMG Networks, backed by KPCB. Follow her on Twitter @aileenlee. 

Many entrepreneurs, and the venture investors who back them, seek to build billion-dollar companies.

Why do investors seem to care about “billion dollar exits”? Historically, top venture funds have driven returns from their ownership in just a few companies in a given fund of many companies. Plus, traditional venture funds have grown in size, requiring larger “exits” to deliver acceptable returns. For example – to return just the initial capital of a $400 million venture fund, that might mean needing to own 20 percent of two different $1 billion companies, or 20 percent of a $2 billion company when the company is acquired or goes public.

So, we wondered, as we’re a year into our new fund (which doesn’t need to back billion-dollar companies to succeed, but hey, we like to learn): how likely is it for a startup to achieve a billion-dollar valuation? Is there anything we can learn from the mega hits of the past decade, like Facebook, LinkedIn and Workday?

To answer these questions, the Cowboy Ventures team built a dataset of U.S.-based tech companies started since January 2003 and most recently valued at $1 billion by private or public markets. We call it our “Learning Project,” and it’s ongoing.

With big caveats that 1) our data is based on publicly available sources, such as CrunchBase, LinkedIn, and Wikipedia, and 2) it is based on a snapshot in time, which has definite limitations, here is a summary of what we’ve learned, with more explanation following this list*:

Learnings to date about the “Unicorn Club”:

1. We found 39 companies belong to what we call the “Unicorn Club” (by our definition, U.S.-based software companies started since 2003 and valued at over $1 billion by public or private market investors). That’s about .07 percent of venture-backed consumer and enterprise software startups.

2. On average, four unicorns were born per year in the past decade, with Facebook being the breakout “super-unicorn” (worth >$100 billion). In each recent decade, 1-3 super unicorns have been born.

3. Consumer-oriented unicorns have been more plentiful and created more value in aggregate, even excluding Facebook.

4. But enterprise-oriented unicorns have become worth more on average, and raised much less private capital, delivering a higher return on private investment.

5. Companies fall somewhat evenly into four major business models: consumer e-commerce, consumer audience, software-as-a-service, and enterprise software.

6. It has taken seven-plus years on average before a “liquidity event” for companies, not including the third of our list that is still private. It’s a long journey beyond vesting periods.

7. Inexperienced, twentysomething founders were an outlier. Companies with well-educated, thirtysomething co-founders who have history together have built the most successes

8. The “big pivot” after starting with a different initial product is an outlier.

9. San Francisco (not the Valley) now reigns as the home of unicorns.

10. There is very little diversity among founders in the Unicorn Club.

Some deeper explanation and additional findings:

1) Welcome to the exclusive, 39-member Unicorn Club: the Top .07%

• Figuring out the denominator to unicorn probability is hard. The NVCA says over 16,000 internet-related companies were funded since 2003; Mattermark says 12,291 in the past 2 years; and the CVR says 10-15,000 software companies are seeded each year. So let’s say 60,000 software and internet companies were funded in the past decade. That would mean .07 percent have become unicorns. Or, 1 in every 1,538.

• Takeaway: it’s really hard, and highly unlikely, to build or invest in a billion dollar company. The tech news may make it seem like there’s a winner being born every minute?-?but the reality is, the odds are somewhere between catching a foul ball at an MLB game and being struck by lightning in one’s lifetime. Or, more than 100x harder than getting into Stanford.

• That said, these 39 companies have shown it’s possible? – and they do offer a lot that can be learned from.

2) Facebook is the super-unicorn of the decade (by our definition, worth >$100B). Every major technology wave has given birth to one or more super-unicorns

• Facebook is what we call a super-unicorn: it accounts for almost half of the $260 billion aggregate value of the companies on our list. (As such, we excluded them from analysis related to valuations or capital raised)

• Prior decades have also given birth to tech super-unicorns. The 1990s gave birth to Google, currently worth nearly 3x Facebook; and Amazon, worth ~ $160 billion. The 1980’s: Cisco. The 1970s: Apple (currently the most valuable company in the world), Oracle, and Microsoft; and Intel was founded in the 1960s.

• What do super-unicorns have in common? The 1960s marked the era of the semiconductor; the 1970s, the birth of the personal computer; the 1980s, a new networked world; the 1990s, the dawn of the modern Internet; and in the 2000s, new social networks were built.

• Each major wave of technology innovation has given rise to one or more super-unicorns?-?companies that could change your life to work at or invest in, if you’re not lucky/genius enough to be a co-founder. This leads to more questions. What is the fundamental technology change of the next decade (mobile?); and will a new super-unicorn or two be born as a result?

Only four unicorns are born per year on average. But not all years have been as fertile:

• The 38 companies on our list outside of Facebook are worth about $3.6 billion on average. This might feel like a letdown after reading about super-unicorns, but remember, startups generally start as ideas that most people think are crazy, dumb, or not that important (remember when people ridiculed Twitter as the place to share that you were eating a ham sandwich?). Only after many years and extraordinary good fortune, a few grow into unicorns, which is extremely rare and pretty awesome.

• Unicorn founding was not front-end-loaded in the past decade. The best year was 2007 (8 of 36); the fewest were born in 2003, 2005 and 2008 (as far as we know today; there are none yet founded in 2011 to today). From this snapshot in time, it’s not clear whether the number of unicorns per year is changing over time.

• It would be interesting to plot the trajectory of unicorns over time? – which become more valuable and which fall off the list – and to understand the list of potential unicorns-in-waiting, currently valued at <$1 billion. Hopefully for a future post.

3) Consumer-oriented companies have created the majority of value in the past decade

Venture investing into early-stage consumer tech companies has cooled significantly in the past year. But it’s worth realizing that:

• Three consumer companies – Facebook, Google and Amazon – have been the super-unicorns of the past two decades.

• There are more consumer-oriented than enterprise unicorns, and they have generated more than 60 percent of the aggregate value on our list outside of Facebook.

• Our list likely seriously underestimates the value of consumer tech. Of the 14 still-private companies on our list, 85 percent are consumer-oriented (e.g. Twitter, Pinterest, Zulily). They should see a significant step up in value if/when a liquidity event occurs, increasing the aggregate value of the consumer unicorns.

4) Enterprise-oriented unicorns have delivered more value per private dollar invested

• One reason why enterprise ventures seem so attractive right now: the average enterprise-oriented unicorn on our list raised on average $138 million in the private markets – and they are currently worth 26x their private capital raised to date.

• The companies that seriously improved this metric are Nicira, Splunk and Tableau, who all raised <$50 million in private markets and are worth $3.8 billion today on average.

• Plus Workday, ServiceNow and FireEye who are currently worth >60x the private capital raised. Wow.

• Contrary to conventional VC wisdom about enterprise companies requiring more early-stage capital, we didn’t see a difference in Series A dollars raised by enterprise versus consumer unicorns.

Consumer companies have delivered less value per private dollar invested

• The consumer unicorns have raised $348 million on average, ~2.5x more private capital than enterprise unicorns; and they are worth about 11x the private capital raised.

• Companies who raised lots of private money relative to their most recent valuation are Fab, Gilt Groupe, Groupon, HomeAway and Zynga.

• It may just take more capital to build a super successful consumer tech company in a “get big fast” world; and/or, founders and investors are guilty of over-capitalizing consumer Internet companies at too-high valuations in the past decade, driving lower returns for consumer tech investors.

5) Four primary business models drive the value and network effects help

• We categorized companies into four business models, which share fairly equally in driving value in aggregate: 1) E-commerce: the consumer pays for goods or services (11 companies); 2) Audience: free for consumers, monetization through ads or leads (11 companies); 3) SaaS: Users pay (often via a “freemium” model) for cloud-based software (7 companies); and 4) Enterprise: Companies pay for larger scale software (10 companies).

• None of the e-commerce companies on our list hold physical inventory as a key part of their business models. Despite that, e-commerce companies raised the most private dollars on average – delivering the lowest valuations vs capital raised, and likely driving the recent cool down in e-commerce investing.

• Only four of the 38 companies are mobile-first. Not surprising, the iPhone was only launched in 2007 and the first Android device in 2008.

• Another characteristic almost half of the companies on our list share: network effects. Network effects in the social age can help companies scale users dramatically, seriously reducing capital requirements (YouTube and Instagram) and/or increasing valuations quickly (Facebook).

6) It’s a marathon, not a sprint: it takes 7+ years to get to a “liquidity event”

• It took seven years on average for 24 companies on our list to go public or be acquired, excluding extreme outliers YouTube and Instagram, both of which were acquired for over $1 billion in about two years since founding.

• 14 of the companies on our list are still private, which will increase the average time to liquidity to eight-plus years.

• Not surprisingly, enterprise companies tend to take about a year longer to see a liquidity event than consumer companies

• Of the nine companies that have been acquired, the average valuation was $1.3 billion; likely a valuation sweet spot for acquirers to take them off the market before they become less affordable

7) The twentysomething inexperienced founder is an outlier, not the norm

• The companies on our list were generally not founded by inexperienced, first-time entrepreneurs. The average age on our list of founders at founding is 34. Yes, the founders of Facebook were on average 20 when it was founded; but the founders of LinkedIn, the second-most valuable company on our list, were 36 on average; and the founders of Workday, the third-most valuable, were 52 years old on average.

• Audience-driven companies like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr have the youngest founders, with an average age at founding of 30 (seemingly eminent unicorn Snapchat will lower this average). SaaS and e-commerce founders averaged aged 35 and 36; enterprise software founders were 38 on average at founding.

Co-founders with years of history together have driven the most successes

• A supermajority (35) of the unicorns on our list have chosen to blaze trails with more than one founder – with three co-founders on average. The role of co-founders varies from Co-CEOs (Workday) to technical co-founders who live in a different country (Fab.com). Looking at co-founder equity stakes at liquidity might be another interesting way to look at founder status, which we have not done.

• Ninety percent of co-founding teams comprise people who have years of history together, either from school or work; 60 percent have co-founders who worked together; and 46 percent who went to school together.

• Teams that worked together have driven more value per company than those who went to school together.

• Only four teams of co-founders didn’t have common work or school experience, but all had a common thread. Two were known and introduced by the investors at founding/funding; one team was friends in the local tech scene; and one team met while working on similar ideas.

• That said, the four unicorns with sole founders (ServiceNow, FireEye, RetailMeNot, Tumblr – half enterprise, half consumer) have all had liquidity events and are worth more on average than companies with co-founders.

Most founding CEOs scale their companies for the long run. But not all founders stay for the whole journey

• An impressive 76 percent of founding CEOs led their companies to a liquidity event, and 69 percent are still CEO of their company, many as public company CEOs. This says a lot about these founders in terms of their long-term vision, commitment and their capability to scale from almost nothing in terms of money, product, and people, to their current unicorn company status.

• That said, 31 percent of companies did make a CEO change along the way; and those companies are worth more on average. One reason: about 40 percent of the enterprise companies made a CEO change (versus 25 percent of consumer companies). And all CEO changes prior to a liquidity event were at enterprise companies that added seasoned, “brand-name” leaders to their helms prior to being bought or going public.

• Only half of the companies on our list show all original founders still working in the company. On average, 2 of 3 co-founders remain.

Not their first rodeo: founders have lots of startup and tech experience

• Nearly 80 percent of unicorns had at least one co-founder who had previously founded a company of some sort. Some founders showed their entrepreneurial DNA as early as junior high. The list of prior startups co-founded spans failure and success; and from tutoring and bagel delivery companies, to PayPal and Twitter.

• All but two companies had founders with prior experience working in tech/software; and only three of 38 did not have a technical co-founder on board (HomeAway and RetailMeNot, founded as industry rollups; and Box, founded in college).

• The majority of founding CEOs, and 90 percent of enterprise CEOs have technical degrees from college.

An educational barbel: many “top 10 school grads” and dropouts

• The vast majority of all co-founders went to selective universities (e.g. Cornell, Northwestern, University of Illinois).  And more than two-thirds of our list has at least one co-founder who graduated from a “top 10 school.”

• Stanford leads the roster with an impressive one-third of the companies having at least one Stanford grad as a co-founder. Former Harvard students are co-founders in eight of 38 unicorns; Berkeley in five; and MIT grads in four of the 38 companies.

• Conversely, eight companies had a college dropout as a co-founder. And three out of five of the most valuable companies (Facebook, Twitter and ServiceNow) on our list were or are led by college dropouts, although dropouts with tech-company experience, with the exception of Facebook.

8) The “big pivot” is also an outlier, especially for enterprise companies

• Few companies are the result of a successful pivot. Nearly 90 percent of companies are working on their original product vision.

• The four “pivots” after a different initial product were all in consumer companies (Groupon, Instagram, Pinterest and Fab).

9) The Bay Area, especially San Francisco, is home to the vast majority of unicorns

• Probably not a surprise, but 27 of 39 on our list are based in the Bay Area. What might be a surprise is how much the center of gravity has moved to San Francisco from the Valley: 15 unicorns are headquartered in San Francisco; 11 are on the Peninsula; and one is in the East Bay.

• New York City has emerged as the No. 2 city for unicorns, home to three. Seattle (2) and Austin (2) are the next most-concentrated cities for unicorns.

10) There is A LOT of opportunity to bring diversity into the founders club

• Only two companies have female co-founders: Gilt Groupe and Fab, both consumer e-commerce. And no unicorns have female founding CEOs.

• While there is some ethnic diversity on founding teams, the diversity of founders in the unicorn club is far from the diversity of college grads with relevant technical degrees. Feels like some important records to break.

So, what does this all mean?

For those aspiring to found, work at, or invest in future unicorns, it still means anything is possible. All these companies are technically outliers: they are the top .07 percent. As such, we don’t think this provides a unicorn-hunting investor checklist, i.e. 34-year-old male ex-PayPal-ers with Stanford degrees, one who founded a software startup in junior high, where should we sign?

That said, it surprised us how much the unicorn club has in common. In some cases, 90 percent in common, such as enterprise founder/CEOs with technical degrees; companies with 2+ co-founders who worked or went to school together; companies whose founders had prior tech startup experience; and whose founders were in their 30s or older.

It is also good to be reminded that most successful startups take a lot of time and commitment to break out. While vesting periods are usually four years, the most valuable startups will take at least eight years before a “liquidity event,” and most founders and CEOs will stay in their companies beyond such an event. Unicorns also tend to raise a lot of capital over time – way beyond the Series A. So these founding teams had the ability to share a compelling company vision over many years and rounds of fundraising, plus scale themselves and recruit teams, despite economic ups and downs.

We tip our hats to these 39 companies that have delighted millions of customers with fantastic products and generated so much value in just 10 years despite a crowded startup environment. They are the lucky/genius few of the Unicorn Club – and we look forward to learning about (and meeting) those who will break into this elite group next.

—–

*  Many thanks to the Cowboy crew who helped with this, including Noah Lichtenstein, Meg He, Lauren Kolodny, Kim Stromberg and Jennifer Gee.

** Our data is based on information in news articles, company websites, CrunchBase, LinkedIn, Wikipedia and public market data. It is also based on a snapshot in time (as of 10/31/13) and current market conditions, which are currently fairly “hot.”

*** Yes we know the term “unicorn” is not perfect – unicorns apparently don’t exist, and these companies do – but we like the term because to us, it means something extremely rare, and magical

**** By our rough definition, consumer companies = e-commerce + audience business models; enterprise companies = Software as a Service + Enterprise business models

***** Our definition of “top 10 school” is according to US News & World Report.

[Illustration: Bryce Durbin]

It’s been a long time since flying was fun (unless you are reading this on the upper deck of a 747, of course). This week, however, things got a bit more bearable thanks to the FAA’s decision that airlines can now allow their passengers to keep their gadgets on – in airplane mode – during taxi, takeoff and landing. The first two airlines to actually put this into practice are Delta and JetBlue.

Both say that they have worked closely with the FAA to evaluate the impact of gate-to-gate personal electronics use and have completed testing to ensure that the use of personal electronic devices during all phases of flights is safe on its planes.

Other airlines will surely follow soon, but the fact that every airline has to go through testing and get FAA approval will lead to quite a bit of confusion. We’ll hear about irate passengers on United, American or Southwest who refuse to power down their electronics after the boarding door has closed. It’s also worth noting that for Delta, this new rule only applies to mainline flights. Passengers on Delta Connections flights, which are operated by a number of regional airlines, will still have to follow the old rules until at least the end of the year.

Under the FAA’s guidance, virtually all small, lightweight gadgets are classified as “personal electronic devices.” Laptops and anything larger than a tablet, however, still need to be stowed during taxi, takeoff and landing just like before. The same goes for gadgets that were previously banned from in-flight use, including e-cigarettes, televisions, and remote-control toys.

All of this doesn’t mean that in-flight Wi-Fi will now be available until the flight passes 10,000 feet, however. Gogo, which powers the vast majority of in-flight Wi-Fi in the U.S., is evaluating the possibility of allowing connections from gate-to-gate, but in its current form, the service simply doesn’t work under 10,000 feet.

The Air Line Pilots Association, by the way, says it supports the FAA’s decision and was involved in the FAA’s rulemaking process. The organization, however, notes that it believes that electronics should be stowed for takeoff and landing and that “relying on passengers to selectively turn off their devices in areas of extremely poor weather is not a practical solution.” Under the new FAA guidance, passengers will still have to turn their electronics off when low visibility requires the use of some landing systems.

In case you are confused about when and where exactly you can now play Dots on the plane, here is a chart from our friends at Delta:

The Gillmor Gang – John Borthwick, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor – move further and further toward the Golden Age of Push Notification. What some see as a fragmented sea of apps, others see as a ripe opportunity to unify notifications as the successor to email, social streaming to the core. As Windows gets sucked into the tidal wave of mobility, it’s up to individual apps to intermediate themselves into the relentless flow.

Out of the soup of retweets, @mentions, and other graph-aware signals, a new hierarchy is presenting itself as an alternative to the conventional email aristocracy. The enterprise is not convinced of the viability of a meritocracy-driven individual contributorship, but luckily nothing else has yet surfaced to rule it out. Meanwhile, the slow iterative thinning of the tablet is fashioning a new template for navigating the new world, swimming against the tide in ecstatic leaps up the stream.

@stevegillmor, @borthwick, @kteare, @kevinmarks, @jtaschek

Produced and directed by Tina CHase Gillmor @tinagillmor

Live chat stream

The Gillmor Gang on Facebook

Over the past few years, Women 2.0 has become one of the most reliable places to find stories from female entrepreneurs, successful and otherwise. It has also, according to co-founder and CEO Shaherose Charania, become a profitable business.

That’s particularly surprising since the Women 2.0 site doesn’t run any advertising. Not that Charania said she’s completely opposed to the idea (“Maybe we will [run ads] eventually, but it will be thoughtful”). However, she sounded more excited about the company’s conferences, and about the different membership plans that it’s experimenting with, where readers pay a monthly or annual fee (currently the lower-priced plan costs $20 a month) for access to a combination of online and offline features, such as conference discounts and virtual happy hours.

To explain the broader vision, Charania compared Women 2.0 to Vogue. In the same way that Vogue is read by women who are never going to be models or wear all the expensive clothes featured in the magazine, she said many Women 2.0 readers may never start a company, but her goal is to turn entrepreneurship into “something aspirational.”

How successful is Women 2.0 at the goal? Well, that’s tough to quantify, but Charania did share the results of a recent survey of the site’s readers, which suggests that it is reaching a global audience (though it doesn’t reveal the size of that audience) – San Francisco and Silicon Valley account for only a combined 30 percent of its readership. And 60 percent of the readers self-identify as entrepreneurs.

One important aspect to the site’s model, Charania said, is the fact that it lets female entrepreneurs tell their own stories – more than 400 female founders and investors have contributed. At the same time, the Women 2.0 team has grown to seven people, as well.

As for the conferences, Charania said the company has settled into a pattern of two bigger events a year, one in San Francisco (which apparently attracts more than 1,500 attendees) and another that travels. The next traveling event, the “Las Vegas Edition” of Women 2.0, is coming up on November 14, with Zappos CEO (and Las Vegas tech proponent) Tony Hsieh just announced as a speaker.

With her nutrition startup HealthyOut, Wendy Nguyen was a finalist in the pitch competition at this year’s San Francisco conference, but she said she was an attendee of Women 2.0 events long before that – for example, she met her eventual investor Dave McClure at Women 2.0′s New York conference last year. And hey, after being onstage at Women 2.0, Nguyen raised $1.2 million in funding.

“Anyone who tells you that they got funded because they were in a pitch competition, that’s just silliness – we all know that,” Nguyen said. At the same time, she credited the event for helping her with making important connections, and she described it as “a culmination of doing the right things.”

HealthyOut was also onstage at our Disrupt NY conference. The difference between the two events, Nguyen said, is that “there’s more of a community aspect at Women 2.0 … They do a great job of promoting female founders.”

Oh, and if you’re curious about the finalists at the upcoming conferences, here they are (with descriptions provided by Women 2.0).

DailyDollar – DailyDollar is a Cloud-based receipting and personalized offer solution.

College Appz – CollegeAppz is a “TurboTax for College Admissions,” a college readiness platform built to maximize user data for better school matches for students and improved leads for universities and commercial companies.

Admittedly – Admitted.ly is an online college advisory platform that targets high school students early enough to help improve their chances of admission at their ideal universities, and offers tools to make parents’ lives and guidance counselors’ jobs easier.

Traveling Spoon – Traveling Spoon is an online marketplace that connects travelers with vetted, local and authentic food experiences – from homemade meals to cooking classes – in people’s homes around the world.

WeeSpring – weeSpring helps parents collect advice from their friends about what they need for their family, from strollers and sippy cups to apps and – ultimately – appliances.

Abbeypost – AbbeyPost is Etsy for Plus Size…with a proprietary tech twist, connecting the underserved Plus Size shopper directly with indie designers, boutiques and brands.

CareBooker – CareBooker is the “OpenTable” for booking family care services, such as babysitting, pet care, tutoring & lessons, and more.

CareLulu – CareLuLu is the easiest way for parents to find a daycare or preschool that fits their family’s needs through an online marketplace that offers a personalized search, verified parent reviews, photos, and even tuition rates.

Reorient Media – Infinite PDF is the latest flagship product of the Infinite Canvas Suite, published by ReOrient Media. Infinite PDF allows you to expand your existing presentations to add dimensionality, transitions and interactivity.

Totspot – Totspot is a mobile marketplace for savvy moms to discover, buy and sell new and like-new kids items such as toys, clothes, baby gear and books.

Dear Google: What’s wrong?

I ask because last weekend, while in San Francisco, I asked Google Maps for “hot chocolate mission” – and was promptly directed to an ARCO station in Fremont, 40 miles away. Similarly, last month I searched for “coffee” while in the Embarcadero Center, one of the denser coffee hotspots in America, and was sent to a Starbucks more than two miles away. And it hasn’t escaped my notice that you keep highlighting faraway places with Zagat listings over much closer places without.

Now, sure, if you’re thinking “hey, you’re just abusing your position as a highfalutin tech columnist to make anecdotal complaints here!” – well, you’re not entirely wrong. Perk of the position. What can I say? But Google Docs won’t save documents, the new Gmail interface still feels like a big step backwards, Gmail Offline keeps crashing on me, Google Hangouts hangs whenever we try to combine text chat and video…and for what it’s worth, it’s not just me who’s wondering what’s gone wrong:

Pop quiz: name a Google product that existed at this time last year that has improved in the last 12 months.—
Laurie Voss (@seldo) October 15, 2013

Don’t misunderstand. I’ve long been one of your bigger fans. Sure, I complained: “Google is in serious decline” a few years ago, but you’ve managed to turned your mighty aircraft carrier around quite nicely since. Stock at record heights, etc., etc., etc.

I don’t think you’re in decline now. Quite the opposite: I think in certain domains you’ve become so dominant that you’ve grown complacent. In fields where you’ve got real competition – e.g. Android, Chrome – you’re as incisive and innovative as ever. Google+ isn’t exactly setting the world on fire, but it’s probably become an asset rather than a hindrance. And the ambition of Google Glass and your crazy moon-shot stuff like balloon-powered global Internet and self-driving cars (oh, yeah, and immortality) remains awesome.

The problem is that in certain fields you hardly need to compete any more. I mean, who competes with Google Maps? Oh, there are plenty of competitors, but who actually competes? Even mighty Apple is perceived as dramatically inferior (although Apple Maps has improved by leaps and bounds since its balky launch.) As for Bing Maps, and Nokia’s There, and OpenStreetMaps et al. – forget about it.

So if you want to highlight all things Zagat since you acquired them, and downplay all others, who’s going to stop you, right? I mean, you sent me to a gas station 40 miles away for hot chocolate, and I just shook my head and took it in stride. It would be way too much work to install and familiarize myself with an entirely different map app, when you’re usually mostly good enough. (Also, to be fair, after I complained about you on Twitter, a friend who’s a Google employee directed me to Cafe St. Jorge, so I can’t rule out the possibility that you were just playing the long and subtle game.)

Same with your bread-and-butter search. Even if Bing was better – and I don’t for a moment believe that it is – who’s actually going to the trouble to find that out? I’d have to compare a multitude of different searches to figure out whether I should switch, and that’s way too much work in this modern world. As long as you’re perceived as good enough, you don’t actually need to get any better. Maybe you will anyways, out of the goodness of your heart, or, more accurately, your aesthetic hunger for purity and perfection – but you won’t be pushed there. So of course you slow down and get sloppy.

It’s not really your fault, Google; it’s the fault of your would-be competitors. So, what the heck, since they can’t seem to get their collective act together, why not go building barges instead of polishing products? I bet it’s a lot more fun.

But Google, be careful. IBM grew dominant and became complacent. Microsoft grew dominant, and became complacent. And look what happened to them. Okay, fine, so they’re still immensely profitable megacorporations, but they lost the initiative, they no longer dictate the conversation, they’re not the ones who build the future any more; they just come and mop up after it’s built.

That is not the Google way. But you’re pretty huge these days, arguably bloated, and middle-aged for a tech company – and while your numbers are great, revenue is a lagging indicator in the technology business. I’m not saying all is lost. Far from it. I’m just saying that, where everyone else seems to see a dominant unstoppable machine, I think I see some distant early warning signs. I hope you see them, too.

Image Credit: Rajesh Patel, DeviantArt.

Despite having a very public job offer handed to him last August, Edward Snowden will not be joining Russian social networking website VKontakte (VK), its founder Pavel Durov has confirmed to TechCrunch.

Contrary to reports that Snowden’s lawyer announced Snowden’s employment at VK yesterday, Durov writes that the stories and rumors are untrue. In fact, he told us onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt Europe in Berlin last week that Snowden, whom he views as a personal hero for exposing the NSA’s international surveillance, had not reached out about the August offer.

Earlier this week, a Russian news agency reported that the whistleblower had secured post-asylum employment with a “major” Russian website, which could mean odnoklassniki.ru, mail.ru, liveinternet.ru and many others. Yandex, which is the top website in Russia, confirmed to The Verge that it had not given Snowden a job.

Guess we’ll find out which site it actually is soon enough.

Editor’s note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and several-times entrepreneur. His latest book, is “Choose Yourself!” (foreword by Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter). Follow him on Twitter @jaltucher. I was a day trader for many years and it almost killed me.

I was a day trader for many years, and it almost killed me.

I made money by making profits on my own money and also taking a percentage of the profits for the people I traded for. I traded up to $40 million or $50 million a day at my peak. I did this from 2001 to 2004.

I learned about day trading but I also learned a lot about myself and what I was good at, what I was horrible at, and what I was psychotic at. Things that had nothing to do with day trading.

Day trading is the best job in the world on the days you make money. You make a trade, then maybe 20 minutes later you are out of the trade with a profit, and for the rest of the day you think about how much money you made.

It’s the worst job in the world on a bad day. I would make a trade, it would go against me, and then I wanted my heart to stop so my blood would stop thumping so loudly.

I did it for years, though, because I was unemployable in every other way.

Here’s what I learned. All of these lessons I will certainly use today, many years after I stopped day trading.

A) You can’t predict the future. Everyone thinks they can. But they can’t.

This applies not just to trading but everything. You could be married for 10 years and the next thing you know you are divorced and you would not have predicted that.

You could be healthy all your life and drink your vegetables and exercise and reduce stress, and a year later you could be dead from cancer.

You’d have much less stress if you let go of trying to predict the future.

You can always seek to increase the odds in your favor. if I don’t jump off bridges, for instance, it’s more likely I’ll be alive a year from now. But certainly a path to unhappiness is thinking the future can be predicted and controlled.

B) Hope is not a strategy.

If you get to the point where you “hope” you don’t get ruined, then you did something wrong beforehand.

For instance, if you plan a wedding outside and you don’t have a backup plan in case it rains, then you probably mis-planned your wedding, unless you are getting married in a desert.

“Hoping” is not a bad thing. I hope that every day my life goes perfectly.

But if hoping is the only thing I’m relying on, then it means I didn’t really look at all the possible outcomes of something that was important to me.

C) Uncertainty is your best friend.

A hundred percent of opportunities in life are created because people are uncertain about almost everything in their lives.

We are constantly trying to close the enormous gap between the things we are certain about and the things we are uncertain about, and almost every invention, product, Internet service, book, whatever has been created to help us close that gap.

Sometimes this is hard. If your husband betrays and leaves you, you often feel like crawling on the floor and burning all the self-help books. They all lied.

It’s hard to feel “in the now” or to “positive think” when life feels like it’s over. I’ve tried. For me it’s too hard.

But at the very least you can say…”help me.” You can say it to your close friends. You can say it something inside of yourself.

“Help me” is the most powerful, and most forgotten, prayer.

D) Taking risks versus reducing risk. 

Some people take too many risks and they go bankrupt. This happened to me. And sometimes people are too cautious and don’t take enough risks.

When I first started day trading, I was so afraid of risk that if I had a small profit, I’d end the trade. But then I would take big losses and that would wipe out all my profits.

The key is that you can take larger and larger risks if you work on better and better ways to deal with those risks.

For instance, I might be able to risk marrying someone if I know she is not a hard-core drug addict who regularly betrays the people she is close to.

I can risk driving without a license if I always stay below the speed limit (I know this is a stupid risk, but still). Once you have a method of reducing risks, it’s easier to make trades or decisions about anything.

E) Diversification.

Often I get emails, “I really want ONE job but they don’t seem to want me and now I’m miserable. How can I get that job?”

Well…you can’t.

And you’re going to be unhappy. You can’t wish yourself a job.

When I was raising money to day trade, I probably contacted over 1,000 people. When I was starting an Internet business I started over a dozen Internet businesses and watched all of them fail but one. When I was trying to sell my Internet business I contacted over a dozen companies (although Google broke my heart – damn you Google!).

When I wanted to get married, I went on lots of dates. Claudia’s approach was even smarter – she wouldn’t waste time with dinners. She would only go to tea with guys. Within the first 20 seconds you know if you are attracted. So keep it to a tea.

F) Say “no.”

In day trading, if something is not working out, even if your heart wants it to work out, you have to say “No” and cut your losses.

If a business relationship is not working out, don’t put more energy and time into it.

There is a cognitive bias called “committment bias.” We think because we’ve already put time and energy (or money) into something that we have to stick with it. But this is just a mental bias. Say no to it.

You have to decide every moment if this is the situation you want to be in.

Just because you were in the situation a moment ago, or yesterday, or for 10 years, doesn’t mean the situation is right for you anymore.

G) Health.

Day trading pulls everything out of you. It sucks the soul out of your body, blends it up, and then explodes. It doesn’t turn into a nice smoothie. It explodes.

So you have to take care of yourself. If you don’t sleep enough, if you don’t eat well, exercise, be around positive people, be grateful for what you have, blah blah blah, you will lose all of your money and go bankrupt.

And obviously, this applies to everything else in life. Every day, what small thing can you do to become a slightly better you?

The reason we get so attracted to “safe” cubicle jobs is that the pain is more subtle and sneaks up on us. It’s not the blender-drama of day trading so the need for health on a daily basis doesn’t seem as important. But it is.

H) Laughter. 

The only way to survive is to laugh. There’s that saying: “Man makes plans but God laughs.” Well, you might as well be on the same side as God.

I) “This is crazy” means you’re crazy.

I’ve seen it a million times. Guy makes a trade. The market goes against him. He says “this is crazy” and puts more money into the trade. And then he loses all his money and goes crazy. I’ve had to talk people off the ledge or tell them to put the gun down.

The market is never crazy. The world is never crazy. And I will go so far as to say that your girlfriend who just lied to you about where she spent the night is not crazy.

I only care about you. And you’re effin’ crazy if you thought the world was going to line up any other way than the way it lined up.

Tough on you.

I know when I feel like, “ugh, this situation is insane” that the first place I need to look is at me.

I am insane.

J) It doesn’t matter if a trade (or a day, or a life) is good or bad. 

Good and bad days happen. But life is about a billion little moments that add up to all the things around you. If you let one of those moments have too much control then you are bound to be mostly miserable.

I was mostly miserable during the period I was day trading. I let that aspect of my life take control. So I stopped focusing on being a good husband, a good father, a good friend, a good anything.

All of my other constituencies went to hell.

I would have nightmares. I would lose sleep. I would wake up many mornings and go to the church across the street so I could be by myself and pray. What would I pray? “Jesus, please make the markets go in my direction today.”

I’m Jewish. Nobody answered my prayers.

K) It’s never about the money.

Every day I get emails like, “Can you show me how to day trade?”

“NO!”

I know a thousand day traders and only two that won’t go bankrupt. So what makes anyone think they will have an edge? How many people listen to me?

Zero.

How come?

Because people are sick of their lives, their relationships, their jobs, and all the lies that have been told to them ever since they learned how to walk.

They want freedom from the BS.

I get it.

Day trading is the dream. You can make enough money to not care. To do it from anywhere. To be happy.

It won’t work. But people don’t want to believe it. Most people think they have that one special something that will make it work for them.

And it’s true – they do have that one special something. But you can’t get there by day trading first. You can skip right to the being happy part. You can skip right to being free.

But we never learned that. We were taught we had to do something first to earn freedom. We were taught that suffering was the currency to buy happiness.

Okay, go do it. Then cry about it. Then get scared. Then curse the craziness. Then cry more. None of that will make you happy.

Then read this blog post again. Not because it will make you happy. But because I like when people read my posts.

And laugh.