Category: Tech news

Apple’s MacBook Pro with Retina Display will soon be just the MacBook Pro, period. But this generation two version of both the 13- and 15-inch super slim notebooks with high-res displays is still something many average users will be weighing as an outlier possibility versus the more mainstream MacBook Air. But thanks to price cuts and smart improvements under the hood, Apple’s Retina MacBook has grown up a lot since the 15-inch version made its first appearance back in June 2012.

Video Review

Basics

• 2880 x 1800 (Retina), 15.4-inch display
• 256GB storage
• 2.0GHz quad-core Intel Core i7
• 8GB RAM
• 0.71 inches thick, 4.46 lbs
• 802.11ac Wi-Fi
• 8 hours battery life
• $1,999

Pros

• Screen is best-in-class
• Thin and light design despite ample power
• Now includes iWork apps for free
• $200 price cut versus previous entry-level version

Cons

• Still pretty beefy compared to Air and 13-inch Retina Pro
• Battery life now on the low end of MacBook spectrum

Design

The MacBook Pro with Retina display is a crowning achievement for Apple’s notebooks not only because of its screen, but also because it manages to trim size and weight compared to the legacy non-Retina MacBook Pro models. You’re not going to get the featherweight quality of the MacBook Air, but you will get a big break if you’re used to one of the older, bulkier pro models.

This 2013 15-inch model retains the exact same physical dimensions as its predecessor, weighing in at just under three and a half pounds, and under three-quarters of an inch thick. In absolute terms, that’s not all that svelte, but for a device that gives you a spacious 15 inches of display real estate, which can manage a surprising 2880 x 1800 resolution if you use a third-party app to scale beyond the built-in supported max resolution, it’s very impressive.

It’s hard to tell from my limited time with the machine so far, but I also believe that Apple has addressed one of the primary failings of the generation one product, which could suffer from case creak with the bottom panel in some instances. Compared to my personal 2012 15-inch Retina Pro, it feels more solidly constructed, for what it’s worth. And as always, Apple’s aluminum and glass construction stands up to any aesthetic test you could apply to it.

Performance

This Retina Pro actually appears on paper to take a step back when it comes to its graphics card, which is an Intel Iris Pro integrated model, vs. the NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M that shipped alongside an Intel HD 4000 integrated card on the original version. The dedicated graphics on the past model could definitely come in handy for graphics-intensive processes, but as AnandTech pointed out in a review of the Iris Pro earlier this year, it manages to come “within striking difference” of the 650M when it comes to performance, while offering considerable battery and heat savings, both of which are good in the short term and for extending the overall life of the notebook.

Of course, the really important factor to consider here is how the Iris Pro holds up in real-world usage situations, and I found I didn’t miss the discrete GPU in any of my usage scenarios. Whether working with Final Cut Pro X, Photoshop CC or even games like Bioshock Infinite, the Intel Iris Pro seemed to handle my needs pretty adequately, though you aren’t going to want to run games at maxed out graphics settings. One advantage of not having the discrete GPU, too, is that I find the fan spins up far less often, making for a much quieter notebook overall.

If you’re new to flash storage, you’re also in for a treat with the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, since it now uses a super fast PCIe-based memory type that all but eliminates any thought of startup delays, or stutters while opening apps. It’s now gotten to the point where, just like on mobile, it’s not a question of how fast your computer is – the only way you notice any slowness is when you go back to a previous version. This year’s model is snappier all around that the one it replaces, and that was already essentially a machine that gave you everything at your fingertips pretty much as soon as you think about wanting it.

Battery

Apple’s 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro from mid-2012 boasted seven hours browsing time on Wi-Fi on a full charge; this year’s model bests that by an hour. Apple also said separately during its launch event earlier this week that the OS X Mavericks update it’s putting out will add about an hour to the Haswell MacBook Airs it just launched, so this could be mainly a software benefit. But in terms of actual usage, I found that indeed, the new version beats the old, even when both are running Mavericks.

Estimated life on a full charge on the new Retina MacBook Pro in my “extreme battery extension” conditions (Wi-Fi on, brightness to minimum visible, no keyboard backlight, Bluetooth off, running browser with just a few tabs) comes in at over 10 hours on the new version, while the older model barely edges out 9. In practice, the new version seems to get about two hours more than the older one given similar usage patterns. Some of that could be ascribed to natural decrease in battery health, but there’s still a difference, and it favours the newer machine.

Display

The screen on the Retina MacBook Pro this year looks as good as it always has, which is to say it’s the best in the notebook business. But Apple also appears to have gotten rid of any image ghosting on the 15-inch version, based on my tests, which was an issue that plagued a healthy percentage of last year’s model. Devoid of any of those failings, the 220 PPI screen is a visual smorgasbord. And as mentioned above, you can also tweak it to display at ultra high resolutions in non-Retina mode, giving you a still very crisp huge canvas to work with, arraying windows wherever you please.

Maybe the best part about the screen is that by now, many websites and apps have managed to catch up with the concept of high-resolution screens. That means there’s more content that looks amazing on the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, versus when it launched back in June. I still remember marvelling at how ugly most of the web was when I switched; that’s no longer the case.

Bottom Line

This year’s Retina MacBook Pro packs some great new hardware features that were absent on the first-gen device, including Thunderbolt 2 (20 Gbps maximum throughout vs. 10 for the original) and 802.11ac Wi-Fi networking. Both are nice features, but mostly forward-looking, so if you’re not dissatisfied with your current Retina MacBook Pro I’d wait a cycle for the next upgrade, when 802.11ac will be more commonplace, and some peripherals will be able to take advantage of Thunderbolt 2′s higher data transfer rates.

On the other hand, this year’s model ships with iWork (Pages, Numbers and Keynote) free, which is a great productivity suite made even better. And Apple has ironed out any rough edges the bleeding edge first-generation Retina MBP may have had, so this is the one to get if you’ve been waiting for something better to come along, or if you were satisfied with your original machine but want something just *that* much better. Apple’s 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pros with Retina Displays are simply the best available notebooks, and which you choose depends totally on budget and priorities over anything else. If power is what you’re looking for, look no further than the 15-inch reviewed here.

Say goodbye to a good night’s sleep and say hello to night terrors because we have some very special things to share with you today in our ongoing feature, Today In Dystopian War Robots That Will Harvest Us For Our Organs. This week we have Elmo, a vacuum, and a twerking automaton that will soon replace Miley Cyrus.

First we present Elmo and Teddy Ruxpin doing what they do best – haunting our dreams. Built by James Cochrane from broken toys, hard drives, and Casio keyboards (all powered by a some PIC16F84A micro controllers), this robotic band is so proficient that one day they could replace all the member’s of Green Day. Teddy sings backup to Macklemore’s Thrift Shop while the Tomy Omnibot keeps the beat. Although today these robots may be rapping about “popping tags” and “wearing your grandma’s clothes,” I assure you that one day they’ll be literally “popping kids” and “wearing your grandma’s skin.”

via Giz

Next up we have Fonzie, the Twerking, 3D-printed robot. Apparently originally built for fighting competitions, Fonzie has been reprogrammed to dance to LMFAO, which is horror enough. Fonzie is nearly entirely 3D-printed and he will be the basis for future research into humanoid robots with usable hands, eyes, and powerful motion control. Soon, perhaps, Fonzie will take you as a human concubine!

Finally, there’s some kind of new Roomba-like vacuum floor washer, called the Moneual Rydis that costs $400 and creates “random patterns” on your floor, allowing you to fall and die. The Rydis will then drink your cold, congealing blood. Available soon at Best Buy!

Twitter has posted media related to its upcoming IPO Roadshow, scheduled to begin next week. The video accompanying the posting unites Twitter co-founders Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey, who all pitch the company to investors together.

Seeing all of the founders together pitching the company wouldn’t be such a strange thing with any other firm. But there have been some recent revelations care of the NYT’s Nick Bilton’s new book about Twitter. Tension between Williams and Dorsey has been central to the accounts we’ve seen so far.

Dicing apart the video a bit we see the evolution of Twitter laid out in succinct bursts. A simple timeline, which begins with Jack’s famous “Setting up my Twittr” tweet, stretches out. And then there is the canonical Twitter experience, which they describe as a “simple” concept.

The video then quickly turns to Twitter’s first major utility application: breaking news. Important events that were either broken or discussed heavily on Twitter flash on the screen.

CEO Dick Costolo also makes an appearance, emphasizing that with Twitter, you’re in the middle of a conversation rather than a passive observer to a “broadcast” platform. Which, in the end, is the ideal but not always the reality for Twitter which has had some difficulty getting a large portion of its users to actually contribute to those conversations.

After that, there is a bunch of media and a heavy emphasis of Twitter cards, including those showing off Twitter’s Vine video platform.

Notably, after all of its forays into media and entertainment, Twitter has just turned its focus back towards fostering the news capabilities of the platform. Just yesterday it hired a Head of News in NBC’s Vivian Schiller, who will work on building tools for newshounds and journalists to use on Twitter. She is also in charge of making sure that people making news view Twitter as a true broadcast platform.

The roadshow video putting such an emphasis on news is no accident. As we mentioned when we talked about its new breaking news notification experiment @eventparrot, Twitter is wise to build up the platform as a place to find out things first. Mirroring media found elsewhere on the web or on TV is fine and dandy, but news comes to Twitter first in many instances, and it’s important to foster that, as Twitter struggles to grow its user base at a rapid clip.

Costolo stresses the news aspects in his pitch, saying that Twitter is “the place to find out what’s happening, right now,” and highlights @jkrums Flight 1549 Hudson rescue tweet as an example. “Twitter users,” Costolo continues, “receive content on Twitter faster than any other media.”

And, not to be forgotten, brands get a mention as Costolo explains how Twitter enables ‘true one-to-one’ marketing.

There is an extended presentation, about 40 minutes long, that you can watch here that goes through all of the growth figures, statistics and more. It’s narrated by Costolo and you can watch it here.

Foundry Group has raised a fourth fund, called Foundry Group Select. This new fund is $225 million (the same size as Foundry’s previous funds), but has a much different focus.

This fund is purely for late-stage growth rounds in Foundry’s existing portfolio companies. The firm says it will invest up to $25 million into companies that Foundry has backed through its previous funds. As managing director Brad Feld writes, Foundry has been limited in the amount it can invest in later stage rounds due to the firm’s early-stage strategy.

The Foundry Group invests in early-stage North American-based software and IT companies, following a philosophy it outlined back in 2008, “thematic investing.” Startups that Foundry has backed include Zynga, Jiraffe, Fitbit, MakerBot, Awe.sm, Modular Robots, and others. Common areas where the fund invests in include storage, semiconductors, enterprise software, consumer Internet, communications equipment, etc.

Foundry, which raised a new $225 million fund last fall, also just debuted its FG Angel syndicate on AngelList a few weeks ago, which was one of the first VC firms to jump into the syndicates pool. Foundry said it would be investing as much as $2.5 million with a goal of making 50 investments between now and the end of 2014 in companies that list on AngelList.

The fund may have a number of startups in the portfolio that are at a later stage, as it’s been over five years since the firm’s first fund. SendGrid, Fitbit (which just raised $43 million in new funding) and a number of others that Foundry backed early years ago, may eventually raise late-stage growth funding. While Foundry did participate in Fitbit’s recent funding, it’s unclear if Fitbit’s recent round received investment from Foundry Group Select.

It should be interesting to see if other smaller, early-stage VCs will start raising separate funds to get into late-stage investing. Stay tuned.

India’s startup ecosystem is showing some promise. In the first half of 2013, for example, investors dropped $400 million into 141 deals, and startup Red Bus had a sweet $150 million exit. In other words, the time is right for our first ever event in India: TechCrunch Bangalore, which we are hosting with PlatformPlay in India’s tech hub on November 14-15.

TechCrunch Bangalore will focus on how to build companies in India that will go global – the question is how and when India’s startups will crack the code.

The event will feature a hackathon, startup pitch presentations and startup exhibits. On the second day there will be speakers, panelists and TechCrunch editors (including me!) on stage.

In the hackathon, over 400 hackers were shortlisted from over 750 entries. Picked from across the country, these hackers will work in groups to create their hacks in just 24 hours. The following day, each team will get 60 seconds to speed-pitch their creation to a panel of expert judges and audience members.

The pitch presentations will showcase 50 startups selected from over 400 entries, each launching their products before a live and online audience. The judging panel for the event will include VCs, investors, seasoned entrepreneurs and tech and product experts.

The main conference keynotes will feature speakers from across the globe, including Turochas “T” Fuad, CEO and co-founder of Travelmob, and Keith Nilsson, partner at TPG Growth. In addition, Troy Malone of Evernote and Anthony Hearne of Outbrain will join us for panels in Bangalore.

The winning teams will be awarded tickets to the TechCrunch New Delhi event, planned for August 2014, and a chance to attend TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2014. TechCrunch and PlatformPlay will host two additional India events together next year in Pune and New Delhi.

The exhibits in Startup Zone are a great place for attendees – especially investors, media and potential partners – to look over some great new entrants to the startup scene.

You can find more details on the event here.

It begins. The Greater Manchester Police in the UK raided the home of a criminal suspect where they found a 3D printer and 3D printed parts. With great pride and fanfare the police reported:

Sadly, they were quite wrong. The items in question, a little piece that looks like a trigger (shown here) and something that looks like a magazine, are actually a poorly-printed Replicator 2 drive block and a filament spool holder – essentially two parts you’d build if you were building another 3D printer. The criminal masterminds also printed it out of PLA plastic, which is not ideal for heavy-duty use, let alone firing a projectile. The printer, pictured above, is a Makerbot 2 which, in fact, only prints PLA. The jeers, needless to say, have been flying. https://twitter.com/Codepope/status/393661206000840704 https://twitter.com/foxsoup/status/393724792194760704 https://twitter.com/thefalken/status/393725471881326592 This sort of fear, uncertainty, and doubt will soon be flowing fast and heavy from “authorities” all over the world. What Cody Wilson at Defense Distributed has done by creating a media spectacle around his nearly useless 3D gun is set back the 3D printing industry considerably in the eyes of the uninitiated. While his gun works and can be fired, it requires far better materials and a higher-resolution printer to prevent death or maiming of the person behind the trigger. This “gun,” on the other hand, is simply plastic scrap. via Buzzfeed

Drawbridge, a cross-device ad targeting startup backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital, officially expands into Europe today with the appointment of Kate Burns, one of Europe’s most experienced ‘scaling up’ executives. Burns is the ex-Director of Google UK and the ex-CEO of AOL EU and will be based in London to lead Drawbridge’s entry into Europe, Middle East, and Africa markets.

Burns is a rare beast on the European tech scene: a highly experienced operator with over 16 years of sales, business development and digital expansion experience on an international level for major technology brands. In particular, London, where she will build out the office, is widely acknowledged as the platform for the international advertising industry.

Drawbridge is clearly looking to capitalise on the growth in the global market for cross device advertising. The company is located in Silicon Valley and is backed by Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Northgate Capital.

Its ‘big idea’ is trying to improve mobile ad targeting by collecting data about user activity on the desktop web, mobile web, and mobile apps, then using “probabilistic and statistical inference models” to suggest which PC and mobile users are actually the same person using different devices.

This is extremely important when it comes to so-called “two screen media” – where people watch TV and interact with the mobile or tablet device.

Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan, CEO of Drawbridge notes that “Kate was instrumental in driving Google’s early growth in Europe and her effort building AOL’s advertisers and publishers networks, made her a perfect choice to lead our international expansion.”

Burns was Google’s first international hire in 2001, has held key sales positions at Altavista, Doubleclick, Ziff Davis, and News International and also created KT3, a commercial development firm helping technology businesses expand into Europe.

Drawbridge recently expanded with a new feature allowing mobile advertisers to reach consumers with retargeted ads, regardless of whether they’re using an app or on the mobile web.

The Olloclip, a tiny four-in-one-lens accessory, is one of the easiest ways to add some flair to your iPhone photos.

The all electric BMW i3 won’t satisfy the hard-driving proclivities of a 3-series fanatic. But as a city car offering efficient, comfortable, and well-designed transport for four passengers, it delivers on its promise, and then some.

We liked the Surface devices Microsoft released last year, and these even better. But they aren’t without problems, some of which are significant.

Dan Siroker, the co-founder and CEO of Optimizely, a Y Combinator-backed company that helps businesses A/B test their webpages, says he’s got a trick for testing prospective investors.

He runs them through mock board meetings, he told founders and hackers at Y Combinator’s Startup School today in Cupertino.

Siroker says that the classic ways founders meet potential board members don’t work. They’re usually in fancy dinners or pitch meetings on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, where it’s hard to tell what an investor will have to offer a prospective company.

So when Optimizely was raising, they held fake board meetings to see who could offer the company the best guidance. Ultimately, they settled on Benchmark Capital and Peter Fenton to lead the company’s unusually large $28 million Series A round.

Siroker said Fenton didn’t fit what the founders originally thought they were looking for in a board member.

“He wasn’t technical. He didn’t have operational experience,” Siroker said. “But what he did have was a very good way of helping us get better in the feedback he gave us. He focused on asking the right questions, not on prescribing us the right answers.”

Optimizely is now a growth-stage company with a team of 130 people. Last year, they cleared $7.6 million in revenue with a team of 42 people, up from a team of 10 people and $1.2 million in revenue in 2011.

“We haven’t looked back,” he said.

While Evernote now has north of 75 million users and a valuation that’s reportedly more than $1 billion, the company faced many close calls. In fact, it had just three weeks of cash left during the 2008 financial crisis when an investor bailed at the last minute, said CEO Phil Libin today at Y Combinator’s Startup School in Cupertino.

The investor dialed Libin saying they had seen 60 percent of their fund value vanish into thin air as equity markets crashed on Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy filing.

They called Libin and told him, “We’re not going to do it.”

“We panicked,” he said. “I spent a week frantically calling everyone that I knew.”

Because he had entered “exclusivity” in those financing talks, Libin had given up his right to move discussions with other investors further along.

So he was left in a lurch. With two weeks left of funding, Libin made the painful decision to shut down Evernote and fire everyone. (He said that you can’t burn your cash all the way down to zero because you need reserves for the legal costs of shutting down a company.)

“I remember sitting there at 3 a.m. thinking that this is what it must feel like to be an adult,” he said. “This is what it feels like — making adult decisions. This sucks.”

But then something just short of a miracle happened.

A passionate Evernote user from Sweden dialed him up. He told Libin that he had been using the product for two months. He said it had changed his life — it had made him happier and more organized.

Libin remembered thinking, “That’s nice. This makes me feel better. Maybe if you can make a difference to one random guy in Sweden, that’s enough.”

The user, who asked to remain unnamed, went on to offer some investment. Twenty minutes later, they ended up on a Skype call and then within about a week or so, the investor had wired Evernote a half-million dollars.

That gave the young company enough runway to prove traction and fix a complicated legal structure that had scared off earlier investors.

They went on to secure investment from Japan’s DoCoMo Capital, then several rounds of financing with participation from Sequoia Capital.

After talking about his close call, Libin also offered a couple key pieces of advice to young founders.

1. Make friends with potential co-founders. “I think the most important thing at a young age that you can do is cultivate a group of brilliant, high-energy, willing-to-work-for-free, best friends for life.”

He said many of his key people from his earlier companies like Engine Five have stayed with him through Evernote.

He joked, “You shouldn’t even make friends with people you couldn’t see starting a company with. Why bother? You only have so many friends you can have.”

2. Don’t get clever with legal structures. Evernote was originally formed out of a merger between two companies — between Libin’s startup and that of another company in Silicon Valley that was working on the same idea.

“We were way too clever with the legal structure. It basically made us un-fundable for a couple of years,” Libin said.

“This was all a mistake. The personalities between the two teams were great. We were able to build something fantastic. But until we were worth enough, we had to unwind and fix it. The fact that we were clever — trying to preserve this unconventional structure — probably cost us 18 months.”

3. Build products for yourself. He said Evernote was the first company that he’s been passionate enough about to work on for life. (His earlier companies relied on contracts with companies and government agencies.)

With Evernote, he tried to do something different. “I thought — let’s build a company we want to keep. Let’s explicitly say there is no exit strategy. Let’s make something sufficiently epic to be our life’s work.”

And Libin says this matters now because the larger a company gets, the harder the job gets.

“It gets better. But it doesn’t get easier,” he said. “If what you’re trying to optimize for is making things easier, this isn’t it. This gets harder and harder all the time. It’s not fun day to day. Month to month, it’s really gratifying. It’s vastly satisfying. But the only reason this works, is because we found something sufficiently epic to do.

“Five years ago, it would have been stupid advice to build something for yourself. But now if you build something that you love, that you believe is sufficiently epic, there might be another billion people in the world who love it, too — unless you’re weird.”

Entrepreneurs from South Asia are obsessed with Silicon Valley, as is much of the world these days. Social media and mass media have combined to create the perception that geeks from the Bay Area are a breed apart.

The combination of skinny jeans, hipster glasses and confident personalities like Dave McClure or Steve Blank, it seems, is irresistible. But this style has nothing to do with building a great company. Solving important problems does, and for anyone not in Silicon Valley, that means focusing on their own markets and not what seems to be cool.

Countries like Sri Lanka and India have what it takes to be uniquely brilliant and entrepreneurial. South Asian entrepreneurs need to know and believe this. If they do not, South Asia will never become a center for innovation, creating the game-changing products and services their local economy demands and our global economy could benefit from.

I say this having spent the last couple of years traveling across India and Sri Lanka connecting with the startup community, recruiting local talent for my own venture, and listening to more than 200 pitches. I recently spent three weeks visiting with accelerators, incubators, and institutes on behalf of the State Department’s Specialist Speaker Program and discovered that founders’ obsessions with the Valley prevents them from solving local problems.

The paradox I’m seeing is this: The bulk of the world’s economic growth will come from regions like India and China, and although they may have cyclical slowdowns, these markets are necessary to the world economy.

In India, the story is not just about tech support and engineering offices. Product startups have been developing through accelerators like TLabs or Startup Village and incubators like IIT Bombay’s SINE and Startup Weekend. And various business communities are developing their own nationwide programs to support fledgling companies.

For instance, NASSCOM (National Association of Software and Services Companies) has undergone efforts to get India more product-focused. To this end, the organization has devised goals to create events and programming to help inspire 10,000 product companies by 2022. Even Uber, in some ways a symbol of “developed” cities getting even more sophisticated, just launched in Bangalore.

Solving large local problems is one easy way for Asian startups to differentiate and sustain a competitive edge.

But if the best entrepreneurial minds here are trying to copy the next Snapchat, they probably won’t be building products that the market truly demands in India. And the region won’t live up to the hype.

“Solving large local problems is one easy way for Asian startups to differentiate and sustain a competitive edge,” says Mukund Mohan, director of Microsoft Ventures. “Since customers are also local, the ability to get quick feedback and iterate rapidly will help them grow faster to achieve scale.”

One example of this is Flipkart, the Amazon of India. By introducing COD (Cash on Delivery), Flipkart has been able to convince consumers to buy online by allowing them to pay with cash instead of credit cards. This twist on traditional e-commerce is a major reason why the company was valued at $1.5 billion. Unfortunately, this example is an outlier.

So what are the issues that arise as a result of this infatuation with the Valley?

First, countries like India and Sri Lanka blindly implement Western approaches to cultivating entrepreneurship. Asian cultures tend to not be as “individualistic” as Western cultures, and the next breakthrough entrepreneur may not be a rebel like Steve Jobs. They tend to be more motivated by social reputation and intimacy than their Western counterparts. As an Indian-American entrepreneur, I understand this.

As a result, it is necessary to create approaches that uniquely address these differences. For example, showcasing entrepreneurship as a credible path is extremely important, as family acceptance is ingrained deeply in the DNA of South Asians.

“Entrepreneurship is still a taboo for most Indian parents,” says Cherian Thomas, founder of Cucumbertown. “Failure is too bitter a pill to digest and people fear society’s ostracization. A stable salaried career offers all the perks in life and is good enough for most. Besides, we are yet to have a Zuckerberg for inspiration.”

Second, key internal aspects of running a startup are also different, such as financing options and lean startup approaches. I recently had the opportunity to watch a Tech-Connect stream with a room full of Sri Lankan entrepreneurs. Tech-Connect is basically a video panel of American entrepreneurs preaching to foreigners. As a Global Innovation through Science & Technology (GIST) initiative, it is one of the U.S. government’s methods for fostering innovation abroad. I listened not as an American, but as a Sri Lankan. I felt transported, and it was as if I were part of a sci-fi movie where this Silicon Valley panel was a group of tech gods. The audience hung on the panel’s every word like it was life or death.

The problem was that the information disseminated was not only incorrect in the local context, but was also presented as incontrovertible fact. For example, convertible debt was advocated as the only way to raise “early” capital, $100K seed rounds were categorized as small, and crowdfunding was viewed as a viable option.

In Sri Lanka, most rounds are priced and equity-based, and $100K is considered to be a large investment since the cost of living is substantially lower. Thankfully, Brad Feld was there to offer the “it depends” perspective, otherwise this would have been a complete waste of time. As Silicon Valley spreads knowledge, it is important for us to adjust to the local context, and entrepreneurs from other countries need to call bullshit when we don’t.

Beyond deciding to start a company and figuring out how to run one, there’s also the issue of what results founders in South Asia want. To build something big or build something that looks like a Silicon Valley company that might get bought by a Silicon Valley company.

From what I’ve seen, it feels like the goal of getting acquired by a Facebook or Google is over-prioritized. Several entrepreneurs are trying to create the next hot social app. I have seen Quora, Instagram and Path copycats in just the last couple weeks. This is a waste of talent, and a sure-fire way to turn away foreign direct investment or local capital.

There are bigger and more relevant opportunities if these innovators would just recognize the unmet needs right before their eyes, such as better infrastructure, agriculture and mobile solutions.

“The Indian market is very different from most western countries,” says Abhishek Gupta, partner at TLABs. “Though the opportunities are great, the customer behaviour and purchasing patterns are very different. What works in the Valley may not work here, and even if it does, the purchase behaviour and distribution mechanism will most certainly be different. Deals sites are a good example of this. Groupon caught on quickly but most deal sites in India shut down a year or two later.”

That said, there are few companies leading the charge. As Pankaj Jain, venture partner at 500 Startups, aptly points out, companies like Eko Financial, ZipDial, Innoz, InVenture and Next Drop are approaching innovation in India with an “indo-flare.”

ZipDial is leveraging the common social interaction of “missed calls” to drive polling and contests instead of Internet-dependent solutions like Twitter, while Innoz makes SMS-based applications for the masses who do not have connectivity. Eko Financial provides low-income workers in urban areas to send money to their homes using mobile phones, while InVenture is a global credit-scoring service.

Solving these problems for three-quarters of a billion people who don’t have access to smartphones, tablets or computers is exciting.

“The real opportunity for smart, savvy entrepreneurs is to solve the problems plaguing them and their fellow Indians on a daily basis,” Pankaj says. ”There really is no shortage of problems, big or small. Solving these problems for three-quarters of a billion people who don’t have access to smartphones, tablets or computers is exciting.”

In addition, innovations in sustainable agriculture like Lifeline Agriculture, which connects farmers with quality information or management tools that help increase accountability from construction workers, are uniquely desi. These are a few that are taking local innovation seriously.

We need to stop idolizing Silicon Valley. We should seek to learn about and collaborate with international ecosystems, not just preach to them. Efforts like 500 Startups’ Geeks on a Plane or bringing different “local” experts into the GIST’s Tech-Connect mix are examples.

Silicon Valley is amazing. It’s why so many of the worlds smartest geeks flock here. However, it’s amazing because it supports the needs of our well-developed economy. South Asia should stop glamorizing the Valley and start looking within to find solutions. Only then will genuine innovation evolve. After all, there is much we could learn and gain from places like Sri Lanka and India.

Editor’s note: Shruti Challa is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. She has built several social consumer companies. She was recently part of a small team acquired by Groupon in 2011. Her most recent venture is called Mentorzen, which is an expert marketplace. Follow her on Twitter @shrutichalla.

[Images: AFP/Getty Images]

Last year, Walmart Labs jumped on the subscription commerce bandwagon with a new service called Goodies.co in order to compete with a range of startups offering monthly boxes of goodies to customers. But the service, which has spent a year or so in beta, will be shut down over the next few weeks.

To recap, Goodies.co was one of several projects that Walmart Labs has developed since launching as the Silicon Valley-based innovation arm of the brick-and-mortar retailer. The idea is to see what works, what doesn’t, and hopefully apply some of those learnings to the larger Walmart business.

With Goodies.co, that meant developing its own subscription commerce business. With the growth of Birchbox and services like it, there was a bit of a rush among e-commerce companies to begin offering various other types of products — including everything from snacks to underwear — on a monthly, recurring basis.

Goodies.co promised a box of six-to-eight snack samples for just $7 each month. At launch, there were already a number of similar products out on the market, including Love With Food and Sprigbox, but the Walmart Labs service severely undercut most of them on price.

It appears that plan hasn’t quite worked out: We’ve heard that Goodies.co will soon send email to subscribers — perhaps as soon as next week — that it will discontinue its monthly deliveries. A company representative confirmed the shutdown to us by email, but also said that learnings from Goodies.co will be applied to other products:

Yes, we are making changes to the program, and we’re always testing new ideas and concepts. Many graduate in their initial form like Polaris and Get on the Shelf, while some end up being applied in other forms. We are letting Goodies customers know we will discontinue shipping boxes, but the technology and learnings from Goodies have enabled several new products we are incorporating into our mainline Walmart.com business. More details will be shared in the coming months.

News Corp executive Greg Clayman has left his position with the company to join video distribution firm Vimeo as its general manager of audience networks. The news was first reported by Bloomberg, and later confirmed by Vimeo.

Clayman had previously served as publisher of the short-lived digital-only news publication The Daily, and after that took on a new role as News Corp’s EVP of digital strategy and business development. At IAC-owned Vimeo, Clayman will report to Vimeo CEO Kerry Trainor and will be tasked with growing the number of viewers who tune in to videos on its platform. That number is currently around 100 million, which isn’t bad but could be better.