Category: Tech news

If you are a Windows RT user looking forward to moving to Windows RT 8.1, you can’t — at least for a little while. Today Microsoft removed the update from the Windows Store following the discovery of a “situation” that was “affecting a limited number of users updating their Windows RT devices to Windows RT 8.1.”

So the code is now unavailable “temporarily” while Microsoft fixes whatever the heck is wrong. The issue appears to impact the booting cycle of some machines after they update.

Microsoft is likely pissed that it had to yank the update – it was hoping for a very smooth Windows 8.1 update cycle. Still, if the error had been present in the vanilla Windows 8.1 update, and not its RT flavor, the embarrassment would have been greatly magnified. Windows RT, of course, is a sliver when compared with Windows 8.

Aside from this error, the Windows 8.1 release cycle has been mostly smooth. There were reports of individual user problems, and a general meme was that the update process took longer than expected, but worked. Until today.

How many Windows RT users are there? I don’t know, but given that the majority are presumably Surface RT users, Microsoft is delaying those who both bought into its hardware efforts as well as its new software platform. That’s not a very good Saturday for the company.

Peter Bright of Ars Technica has the best analysis of the situation:

To call this embarrassing for Microsoft is something of an understatement. While x86 PCs have extraordinary diversity, in terms of hardware, software, and drivers—all things that can prevent straightforward upgrading—the Windows RT devices are extremely limited in this regard. Upgrading Windows RT tablets should be absolutely bulletproof. It’s very disappointing that it isn’t.

Precisely.

We’ll have preliminary market share numbers for Windows 8.1 upgrade cycle next week, though I don’t expect this specific bug to move those numbers too much.

Top Image Credit: Dell Inc.

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Doc Searls, John Taschek, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — demonstrate once again a complete disregard for the trending topics of the week. Instead, we talk bodyware, iBeam fashion design, the things that are still dead, and a healthy component of digital dish disguised as news.

Excerpt from the live chat stream:

Most people think they use tech for rational reasons, Steve. Your observation is what’s going on beneath those reasons. – Tom Guarriello
push notifications? idk thats steve’s default answer ha – Matthew Voshell
with the free market there is always going to be multiple channels. like multiple carriers – Matthew Voshell
You’re asking for a Message Blender. – Murray Macdonald
Twitter is just the subject line of email. DM is just email. It’s all just email done differently. – Todd Hoff
I love these end-of-show wrapups by Steve. It’s like, OK I’ve listened to all this shit. This is what’s really going on. – Amyloo
Why can I hear Doc Now? What changed? – Murray Macdonald
he shut down lightroom – Matthew Voshell

@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @dsearls, @kteare, @jtaschek

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

The Gillmor Gang on Facebook

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.

Here are the rules: I’ve been at zero a few times, come back a few times, and done it over and over. I’ve started entire new careers. People who knew me then, don’t me now. And so on.

I’ve had to change careers several times. Sometimes because my interests changed. Sometimes because all bridges have been burned beyond recognition, sometimes because I desperately needed money. And sometimes just because I hated everyone in my old career or they hated me.

There are other ways to reinvent yourself, so take what I say with a grain of salt. This is what worked for me.

I’ve seen it work for maybe a few hundred other people. Through interviews, through people writing me letters, through the course of the past 20 years. You can try it or not.

A) Reinvention never stops.

Every day you reinvent yourself. You’re always in motion. But you decide every day: forward or backward.

B) You start from scratch.

Every label you claim you have from before is just vanity. You were a doctor? You were Ivy League? You had millions? You had a family? Nobody cares. You lost everything. You’re a zero. Don’t try to say you’re anything else.

C) You need a mentor.

Else, you’ll sink to the bottom. Someone has to show you how to move and breathe. But don’t worry about finding a mentor (see below).

D) Three types of mentors

1. Direct. Someone who is in front of you who will show you how they did it. What is “it”? Wait. By the way, mentors aren’t like that old Japanese guy in “The Karate Kid.” Ultimately most mentors will hate you.
2. Indirect. Books. Movies. You can outsource 90 percent of mentorship to books and other materials. 200-500 books equals one good mentor. People ask me, “What is a good book to read?” I never know the answer. There are 200-500 good books to read. I would throw in inspirational books. Whatever are your beliefs, underline them through reading every day.
3. Everything is a mentor. If you are a zero, and have passion for reinvention, then everything you look at will be a metaphor for what you want to do. The tree you see, with roots you don’t, with underground water that feeds it, is a metaphor for computer programming if you connect the dots. And everything you look at, you will connect the dots.

E) Don’t worry if you don’t have passion for anything.

You have passion for your health. Start there. Take baby steps. You don’t need a passion to succeed. Do what you do with love and success is a natural symptom.

F) Time it takes to reinvent yourself: five years.

Here’s a description of the five years:

• Year One: you’re flailing and reading everything and just starting to DO.
• Year Two: you know who you need to talk to and network with. You’re Doing every day. You finally know what the monopoly board looks like in your new endeavors.
• Year Three: you’re good enough to start making money. It might not be a living yet.
• Year Four: you’re making a good living
• Year Five: you’re making wealth

Sometimes I get frustrated in years 1-4. I say, “why isn’t it happening yet?” and I punch the floor and hurt my hand and throw a coconut on the floor in a weird ritual. That’s okay. Just keep going. Or stop and pick a new field. It doesn’t matter. Eventually you’re dead and then it’s hard to reinvent yourself.

G) If you do this faster or slower then you are doing something wrong.

Google is a good example.

H) It’s not about the money. But money is a decent measuring stick.

When people say “it’s not about the money” they should make sure they have a different measuring stick.

“What about just doing what you love?” There will be many days when you don’t love what you are doing. If you are doing it just for love then it will take much much longer than five years.

Happiness is just a positive perception from our brain. Some days you will be unhappy. Our brain is a tool we use. It’s not who we are.

I) When can you say, “I do X!” where X is your new career?

Today.

J) When can I start doing X?

Today. If you want to paint, then buy a canvas and paints today, start buying 500 books one at a time, and start painting. If you want to write do these three things:

• Read
• Write
• Take your favorite author and type your favorite story of his word for word. Wonder to yourself why he wrote each word. He’s your mentor today.

If you want to start a business, start spec-ing out the idea for your business. Reinvention starts today. Every day.

K) How do I make money?

By year three you’ve put in 5,000-7,000 hours. That’s good enough to be in the top 200-300 in the world in anything. The top 200 in almost any field makes a living.

By year three you will know how to make money. By year four you will scale that up and make a living. Some people stop at year four.

L) By year five you’re in the top 30-50 so can make wealth.

M) What is “it”? How do I know what I should do?

Whatever area you feel like reading 500 books about. Go to the bookstore and find it. If you get bored three months later go back to the bookstore.

It’s okay to get disillusioned. That’s what failure is about. Success is better than failure but the biggest lessons are found in failure.

Very important: There’s no rush. You will reinvent yourself many times in an interesting life. You will fail to reinvent many times. That’s fun also.

Many reinventions make your life a book of stories instead of a textbook.

Some people want the story of their life to be a textbook. For better or worse, mine is a book of stories.

That’s why reinvention happens every day.

N) The choices you make today will be in your biography tomorrow.

Make interesting choices and you will have an interesting biography.

N1) The choices you make today will be in your biology tomorrow.

O) What if I like something obscure? Like biblical archaeology or 11th-century warfare?

Repeat all of the steps above, and then in year five you will make wealth. We have no idea how. Don’t look to find the end of the road when you are still at the very first step.

P) What if my family wants me to be an accountant?

How many years of your life did you promise your family? Ten years? Your whole life? Then wait until the next life. The good thing is: you get to choose.

Choose freedom over family. Freedom over preconceptions. Freedom over government. Freedom over people-pleasing. Then you will be pleased.

Q) My mentor wants me to do it HIS way.

That’s fine. Learn HIS way. Then do it YOUR way. With respect.

Hopefully nobody has a gun to your head. Then you have to do it their way until the gun is put down.

R) My spouse is worried about who will support/take care of kids?

Then after you work 16 hours a day, seven days a week being a janitor, use your spare time to reinvent.

Someone who is reinventing ALWAYS has spare time. Part of reinvention is collecting little bits and pieces of time and re-carving them the way you want them to be.

S) What if my friends think I’m crazy?

What friends?

T) What if I want to be an astronaut?

That’s not a reinvention. That’s a specific job. If you like “outer space” there are many careers. Richard Branson wanted to be an astronaut and started Virgin Galactic.

U) What if I like to go out drinking and partying?

Read this post again in a year.

V) What if I’m busy cheating on my husband or wife or betraying a partner?

Read this post again in two or three years when you are broke and jobless and nobody likes you.

W) What if I have no skills at all?

Read “B” again.

X) What if I have no degree or I have a useless degree?

Read “B” again.

Y) What if I have to focus on paying down my debt and mortgage?

Read “R” again.

Z) How come I always feel like I’m on the outside looking in?

Albert Einstein was on the outside looking in. Nobody in the establishment would even hire him.

Everyone feels like a fraud at some point. The highest form of creativity is born out of skepticism.

AA) I can’t read 500 books. What one book should I read for inspiration?

Give up.

BB) What if I’m too sick to reinvent?

Reinvention will boost every healthy chemical in your body: serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin. Keep moving forward and you might not get healthy but you will get healthier. Don’t use health as an excuse.

Finally, reinvent your health first. Sleep more hours. Eat better. Exercise. These are key steps to reinvention.

CC) What if my last partner screwed me and I’m still suing him?

Stop litigating and never think about him again. Half the problem was you, not him.

DD) What if I’m going to jail?

Perfect. Reread “B.” Read a lot of books in jail.

EE) What if I’m shy?

Make your weaknesses your strengths. Introverts listen better, focus better, and have ways of being more endearing.

FF) What if I can’t wait five years?

If you plan on being alive in five years then you might as well start today.

GG) How should I network?

Make concentric circles. You’re at the middle.

The next circle is friends and family.

The next circle is online communities.

The circle after that is meetups and coffees.

The circle after that is conferences and thought leaders.

The circle after that is mentors.

The circle after that is customers and wealth-creators.

Start making your way through the circles.

HH) What happens when I have ego about what I do?

In 6-12 months you’ll be back at “B”

II) What if I’m passionate about two things? What if I can’t decide?

Combine them and you’ll be the best in the world at the combination.

JJ) What if I’m so excited I want to teach what I’m learning?

Start teaching on YouTube. Start with an audience of one and see if it builds up.

KK) What if I want to make money while I sleep?

In year four, start outsourcing what you do.

LL) How do I meet mentors and thought leaders?

Once you have enough knowledge (after 100-200 books), write down 10 ideas for 20 different potential mentors.

None of them will respond. Write down 10 more ideas for 20 new mentors. Repeat every week.

Put together a newsletter for everyone who doesn’t respond. Keep repeating until someone responds. Blog about your learning efforts. Build community around you being an expert.

MM) What if I can’t come up with ideas?

Then keep practicing coming up with ideas. The idea muscle atrophies. You have to build it up.

It’s hard for me to touch my toes if I haven’t been doing it every day. I have to do it every day for a while before I can easily touch my toes. Don’t expect to come up with good ideas on day one.

NN) What else should I read?

AFTER books, read websites, forums, magazines. But most of that is garbage.

OO) What if I do everything you say but it still doesn’t seem like it’s working?

It will work. Just wait. Keep reinventing every day.

Don’t try and find the end of the road. You can’t see it in the fog. But you can see the next step and you do know that if you take that next step eventually you get to the end of the road.

PP) What if I get depressed?

Sit in silence for one hour a day. You need to get back to your core.

If you think this sounds stupid then don’t do it. Stay depressed.

QQ) What if I don’t have time to sit in silence?

Then sit in silence for two hours a day. This is not meditation. This is just sitting.

RR) What if I get scared?

Sleep 8-9 hours a day and never gossip. Sleep is the No. 1 key to successful health. It’s not the only key. It’s just No. 1. Some people write to me and say, “I only need four hours of sleep” or “in my country sleeping means laziness.” Well, those people will fail and die young.

What about gossip? The brain biologically wants to have 150 friends. Then when you are with one of your friends you can gossip about any of the other 150. If you don’t have 150 friends then the brain wants to read gossip magazines until it thinks it has 150 friends.

Don’t be as stupid as your brain.

SS) What if I keep feeling like nothing ever works out for me?

Spend 10 minutes a day practicing gratitude. Don’t suppress the fear. Notice the anger.

But also allow yourself to be grateful for the things you do have. Anger is never inspirational but gratitude is. Gratitude is the bridge between your world and the parallel universe where all creative ideas live.

TT) What if I have to deal with personal bullshit all the time?

Find new people to be around.

Someone who is reinventing herself will constantly find people to try and bring her down. The brain is scared of reinvention because it might not be safe.

Biologically, the brain wants you to be safe and reinvention is a risk. So it will throw people in your path who will try to stop you.

Learn how to say “no.”

UU) What if I’m happy at my cubicle job?

Good luck.

VV) Why should I trust you – you’ve failed so many times?

Don’t trust me.

WW) Will you be my mentor?

You’ve just read this post.

[See also, The Ultimate Cheat Sheet For Starting and Running Your Business]

It’s not often that I use a new ‘photo capture’ app and impressed by it within seconds. It’s not that there’s not a lot of cool stuff being built out there, it’s just that the frontiers are getting closer and easier to predict.

That’s not true with Seene, an app by computer vision company Obvious Engineering that leverages smartphone sensors and WebGL to present curious and eerie 3D scenes. The app is the product of four-man team including CEO Andrew McPhee and CTO Sam Hare. The ‘seenes’ themselves are images mapped onto a rough 3D model of your subject that give the feeling of being able to shift perspective even after you’ve shot it.

This produces small three-dimensional digital dioramas of a moment in time and space.

The capture process is simple. You tap on the capture button to shoot an image and then turn your device to capture the sides, top and bottom of your subject. Just a few degrees will do. The image is then processed and mapped onto a simple object that approximates 3D space. You can then view it in 3D or share it with others.

There are a couple of interesting components to Seene, in my view. First, it has the same sort of post-capture feel that Lytro, the focus-stacking camera that everyone loves but that has failed to gain an immense amount of traction in its current hardware form. The power of that kind of experience is interesting in the way that it ‘explodes’ these static images out into things that approximate human vision. In the case of Lytro it’s the way that our eyes nearly instantly re-focus when they travel from object to object. With Seene, it’s our simple but compelling binocular vision that creates a feeling of ‘being there’.

Seene is also an experience that couldn’t exist in the way that it does without the smartphone, something it has in common with other interesting services like FrontBack and Vine. You couldn’t capture a Seene without a mobile camera in your pocket attached to accelerometers and a powerful dual-core processor that renders the images. The only mass-produced product like this that’s ever been made is the smartphone.

The processing power required is one reason that only iPhone 4S and newer devices can create Seenes, though most other devices can view them.

There have been plenty of other experiments using computer vision to model 3D scenes on the web, but Seene doesn’t use cloud processing to accomplish the unique images it produces. Instead everything, from capture to mapping to processing is done right on the device. And the processing time is nearly instantaneous, a fully rendered Seene pops up almost immediately after shooting on new devices like the iPhone 5s.

Obvious Engineering was founded in March of 2012 and typically works on projects for clients using their computer vision expertise. Seene, says McPhee came out of a desire of the team to build “something that was our idea.”

“Photos drive social communication,” McPhee says and that made them want to do something on a ‘mass scale’ that had the potential to reach hundreds of millions of users. It’s the first thing they’ve attempted to do on this scale.

The experience of viewing a Seene in the hand is fairly visceral, as tilting your hand or body will move the 3D image around as if you were ‘looking around the corner’ of an image. I’ve experienced the desire to do that with really compelling images before, but this is the first time I’ve been able to do it and the effect has really impressed me.

You can also view Seenes in browsers that are WebGL compatible like Chrome and new versions of Safari.

Hare says they’ve had testers in London like directors and photographers producing compelling material that ‘feels’ like a photograph but do things with the app that they hadn’t foreseen. McPhee says that these results come from users who have “different ways of looking at the world.”

And indeed some of the Seenes out there are pretty clever, though it does take a bit of experimentation to get results that look great. In my experience, the best subjects are shot at a medium distance, not close up. Moving subjects aren’t really an option at this point though an image of a fountain I shot did give off the impression that water droplets were hovering in mid-air, very cool.

The team is bootstrapped currently but looking for funding. I’m not sure what kind of future an app like Seene has at scale without the welcoming arms of a larger entity. But the initial experience is fairly compelling.

The dangers here, of course, is that there are all sorts of compelling silos and feeds out there vying for our attention. Instagram, Vine, FrontBack and more all create vertical streams of cool, clever things. But there are only so many hours in the day. Is Seene compelling enough to slice off a chunk of that time?

If it gets enough traction and people take to the unique ‘seenes’ that it presents, there could be something here. I hope so, because the team says that they have a bunch of ideas for how to make the app better and some cool features that they need resources to execute, and so far I’m intrigued.

You can grab Seene on the App Store here.

Like everyone else I am shocked, shocked!, to learn that Facebook’s latest policy switch was one which will lead to users posting more public data. This time it’s teenagers, who now “have the choice to post publicly on Facebook.” which they didn’t before. Why? Simple: as the NYT puts it, “fundamentally, Facebook wants to encourage more public sharing, not less … to attract consumer advertisers.“

I don’t intend to get all moral-panic on you here. Letting teens post publicly sounds pretty reasonable to me, as does Google+’s recent moves to surface your friends’ +1s in your stream, and use their faces in ads. Both are good examples of how social media providers keep trying to make their users’ activities both more visible, more public, and more intimately tied to the advertising that keeps the money rolling in. As Josh Constine recently put it, “you’re not just the product, you’re the ads.”

But there’s more to it than that. Advertisers, marketers, and Facebook and Google themselves are already analyzing all the data you’ve given them, to better target you with ads. Facebook has commissioned an “AI team” working on using deep-learning neural networks to find hidden patterns and insights in that data; Google, which already uses deep-learning technology in various domains, is presumably ahead of them.

What people don’t realize — yet — is that many of the things they haven’t explicitly told Facebook or Google can be deduced from the things they have. Got a medical condition, legal issue, sexual predilection, substance habit, or professional failure that you want kept private? It seems very likely that the ever-improving pattern-recognition systems Facebook and Google are building (and others will inevitably follow) will be able to extrapolate those secrets, with a high degree of confidence, from the subtle cues and nuances inherent in your visible online profile and chatter.

Put another way, you may think you’re sitting privately in your home, telling the online world only what you want it to see…but, in fact, every little morsel of seemingly innocuous knowledge you give the Internet is being used to build a window in the wall beside you, opaque to human eyes, but all too transparent to the deep-learning systems of the future. Like a one-way mirror.

I suggested this in a post six months ago. Now there’s some data to support it. For instance, Microsoft Research’s Kate Crawford warns:

People think ‘big data’ avoids the problem of discrimination, because you are dealing with big data sets, but in fact big data is being used for more and more precise forms of discrimination … it is possible to generate a detailed picture about a person’s health, including information a person may never have disclosed to a health provider.

Similarly, a Cambridge University paper reports:

Facebook Likes, can be used to automatically and accurately predict a range of highly sensitive personal attributes including: sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender.

Oh, yes, and:

The volunteers completed a common personality questionnaire through a Facebook application and made their Facebook status updates available so that researchers could find linguistic patterns in their posts … the researchers built computer models that predicted the individuals’ age, gender, and their responses on the personality questionnaires with surprising accuracy.

That’s all with today’s technology. Imagine that of a decade hence.

The conclusion seems clear. Any individual comment of yours, or tweet, or Like, might be meaningless outside of its context … but collectively, they can be used to determine almost everything about you, including whatever you don’t want other people to know. It’s very possible that you have already, accidentally, revealed your deepest secrets to the entire world.

Now, granted, the world was probably going to find out anyway. Mark Zuckerberg is right when he says we are moving towards a world which is more open and more connected — and therefore less private. In fact, between social media, deep learning, “big data,” and increasingly ubiquitous cameras and other sensors, on drones and embedded virtually everywhere, we’re moving headlong towards a world where privacy is a scarce and expensive commodity. Just as was foretold by the prophet Gibson, lo these many decades ago:

`Hey, that’s fine by the Finn, Moll. You’re only paying by the second.’

They sealed the door behind him and Molly turned one of the white chairs around and sat on it, chin resting on crossed forearms. `We talk now. This is as private as I can afford.’

– William Gibson, Neuromancer

On a personal and cultural level, we could probably just adjust to this. I can envision people a generation or two hence reacting to sex tapes with disinterested shrugs rather than outraged shaming, whether or not celebrities or high-school students are involved. It’ll be heaven for stalkers, but that appears to be part of the social price that tomorrow’s technology demands.

On a professional level, however, things will get messy. What happens when would-be employers run tomorrow’s pattern-recognition analyses on the sum total of all your lifetime online activity to see if you’re a likely job-hopper, or your health is sketchy, or you’re “not a good cultural fit,” or you’re a binge drinker, or you’re pregnant?

Simple: people will inevitably wind up carefully tailoring their online lives to seem professionally desirable — meaning that real sharing, and especially public sharing, will wither away and die, because no one will want to take the chance that they inadvertently share far more about themselves than they wanted to. Which is of course the exact opposite of what Facebook and Google want. Facebook’s AI Team may boost its ad sales now, until people begin to realize the consequences of that kind of analysis…but in the long run, that team could conceivably be carrying the seeds of Facebook’s demise.

Internally, the gold iPhone 5s was jokingly referred to as ‘The Kardashian Phone’ by some Apple employees. This fact was tweeted out by the NYT’s Nick Bilton today and we confirmed the nickname with our sources. Yes, we asked this question of our sources.

Apparently this was not a serious ‘code name’ or anything, just an internal joke. Kim Kardashian, of course, has a well-known connection to gold iPhones. The reality star actually had an iPhone 5 that was anodized gold long before Apple’s ‘champagne’ device hit the market, as you can see in the image below.

The thing is, it’s a joke right? I’m sure that people in Apple know Kim loves a gold iPhone just as much as the rest of us. It was a fairly unpopular stance for quite a while to say that the gold iPhone might actually be…pretty hot.

But the fact is that the gold iPhone was easily the most sought-after model at launch. Before launch, everyone laughed about the thought of a glossy, sickly gold iPhone 5s. After launch, the opinions were almost universally the opposite; even those that didn’t necessarily love the gold acknowledged that it wasn’t bad after all.

I love my gold iPhone 5 by http://t.co/x14clif7 — thanks @boygenius http://t.co/4wxmwb7T

— Kim Kardashian (@KimKardashian) December 7, 2012

At this point, we don’t know if Kim actually has a new gold 5s, they’re still in fairly short supply. It’s possible that Kim is using a gold iPhone 5s inside a black case in the famous bathing suit image above. We’ll leave it for a site in tune with the celebrity iPhone news to decipher. BGR perhaps? BGR actually says Kim is using a black iPhone 5 now. Stay tuned as we bring you the latest in Kim Kardashian iPhone news.

Image Credit: Kim Kardashian.

@kimkardashian Do you own a gold iPhone 5s?

— Alexia Tsotsis (@alexia) October 18, 2013

Monica+Andy, a new children’s clothing line and online store launching in early November, has the benefit of receiving input from a famous name in the e-commerce space: the “Andy” in “Monica+Andy” is Andy Dunn, CEO of men’s fashion brand, Bonobos. Now his sister, Monica Royer, is getting into the business too, but with a completely different take. She’s not designing clothes for men or women, but instead for babies and toddlers.

Initially, the line will be aimed at parents with children ages 0 to 3, before expanding to additional age ranges.

Royer, Dunn’s older sister, became a mom herself back in November 2010, and was inspired to create what has now become Monica+Andy following her own difficulties in finding clothes for her daughter online. Her child, though not a preemie, was still very small and couldn’t fit into all the cute clothes Royer had on hand in those early days.

“I was desperate to buy her new things,” she says. “And after seeing the Bonobos model and how well that worked in men’s apparel, we thought that is something that could potentially work well for moms, because moms are a very reachable demographic and are very focused on the Internet and social media,” Royer explains.

Dunn is not involved in the business in any official capacity, but he has invested and helped provide his sister with advice and introductions, she notes, acknowledging the advantage she has in having Dunn for a mentor. The name Monica+Andy, meanwhile, was a suggestion from their mother.

Royer’s background is not in e-commerce, startups or apparel. Prior to having her daughter, she spent 10 years working in the corporate world at places like Pfizer and Novartis. But she says she always had a personal passion and interest in design. And after having her daughter, she decided to take on the challenge of turning those personal passions into a business. Ahead of the site’s launch, Royer spent a year designing the dozens of products offered on the site, but she has now hired a full-time design assistant to help her out going forward.

After the design work was completed, and the focus became building the site and getting a business off the ground, together Dunn and Royer interviewed Monica+Andy co-founder Brian Bloom, a recent graduate of University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. After he came on in June, Bloom’s title was to be Director of Operations, but given his role in this early stage, he’s now considered a co-founder instead.

As for the clothes themselves, Royer describes them as “modern, luxurious and fun.” She designed them using soft fabrics and had them all approved through the company’s five-person “panel of moms” advisory board. Though aiming for a luxury feel, Royer says that she also wanted to keep prices affordable, with basic items ranging from $25 to $60 – price points appealing to those who may currently shop for baby clothes from Gap. Also like Gap, Monica+Andy offers free shipping on orders over $50.

In addition to being an online brand and e-commerce shop, Royer plans to also help other moms running their own children’s fashion businesses through the site. Either at launch or shortly after, Monica+Andy will open up a marketplace section that features non-apparel items from other moms who may not have the means to launch an online brand themselves.

“I feel very fortunate that I’ve been able to have this great e-commerce platform and a family that was involved. I was able to do this because I had some advantages,” Royer says. “Now we want to help other moms launch their own businesses, too.” The company has already selected the first two moms they’ll feature on the site, and revenue sharing is being handled on a mom-by-mom basis, for the time being.

Ultimately, Monica+Andy wants to embody that “for moms, by moms” spirit. The company is very mom-friendly, in fact, with toddlers running around the office, at meetings, and lots of part-time help from moms who work on the side. After the launch, the plan is to staff up the customer service department using part-time moms.

Royer and Bloom tell us that Monica+Andy has also just closed on an initial $300,000 out of a larger $1 million seed round, from various angels investors. As I mentioned above, brother Andy is one of them, though he did not lead the round.

The site will launch to the public on November 3, and the company will be promoting the event through a playful kids’ fashion show held at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum in Chicago.

In the meantime, parents can visit the Monica+Andy landing page and input their email address to stay informed.

If you’re studying math or science, you are probably pretty familiar with Wolfram Alpha as a tool for figuring out complicated equations. That makes it a pretty good tool for cheating, but not necessarily for learning. Today, the Wolfram Alpha team is launching a new service for learners, the Wolfram Problem Generator, that turns the “computational knowledge engine” on its head.

The Problem Generator – which is available to all Wolfram Alpha Pro subscribers now – creates random practice questions for students, and Wolfram Alpha then helps them find the answers step-by-step.

Right now, the Generator covers six subjects: arithmetic, number theory, algebra, calculus, linear algebra and statistics. The difficulty of the questions can be tuned down for students in elementary school and tuned up for those in college calculus classes. As the company notes in today’s announcements, the material for students in elementary and secondary schools closely follows the Common Core Standards initiative.

Using the tools is pretty straightforward. Students (or their teachers) choose which topic they want to study and the difficulty level (beginner, intermediate or advanced) and the system will generate a problem.

The team notes that the tool uses Wolfram Alpha’s natural language processing capabilities to try to understand the students’ answers to “ensure that all students can learn and express themselves in their own unique way.” This may actually be the highlight of this service. Too often, after all, similar tools force a very rigid way of answering complex math questions on their students and when they make a mistake, it’s not clear if the answer is wrong or if the student just got the syntax wrong.

If a student can’t find the answer after three tries, Wolfram Alpha can show a step-by-step solution. The Problem Generator also allows teachers to easily create printable quizzes with multiple-choice tests.

In this week’s Ask A VC, we were joined by Greylock’s newest partner, Simon Rothman, to talk about future disruptive marketplaces and more.

Rothman, who is spearheading Greylock’s new $100 million commitment to investing in marketplaces, led U.S. operations and founded eBay Motors, which he built into a $14 billion a year global business. He talked about mobile marketplaces, what the next opportunities in creating marketplaces are and more.

Rothman also shed more details on the firm’s first marketplace conference, Greymarket, on Friday, November 15th. The event, which is invite-only, will be open to companies and entrepreneurs outside the Greylock portfolio. Speakers include Reid Hoffman, Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky, eBay CEO John Donahoe, Lyft co-founder Logan Green and more.

One lucky reader could score an invite to the conference. Greylock wants you to send them a one-minute video explaining your best hack or trick for creating demand for, or how you helped to grow, your marketplace to [email protected]. The winning entry will spend time with Rothman to develop a presentation to be included on the agenda for the conference (the deadline is Tuesday, October 29).

Check out the video above for more!

U.S. Cellular, the 5th largest wireless network in the US, has announced today that it will get the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c on November 8th. Subscribers on the network have been champing at the bit for the announcement and Twitter is full of folks complaining that they still hadn’t announced a date that the device would come to the carrier for the first time ever.

The iPhone 5s and 5c launched essentially simultaneously on Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile, and has been rolling out to smaller carriers ever since. November 8th marks a delay of over a month from the initial release, though Virgin Mobile and other regional carriers have had it since early October.

@panzer My aunt has been waiting for this! No other network reaches her house up in the mountains of Virginia.

— Eric Leamen (@ericleamen) October 18, 2013

U.S. Cellular tells us that it does not yet have any pricing or plan details to share, but it seems likely they’ll be very similar to the majors. Some retailers like Best Buy have been slicing the sticker price of the iPhone 5c by around $50 to boost early sales.

The carrier recently joined the bigs by offering shared data plans and eliminating its unlimited data tier for new subscribers.

As TechCrunch’s resident guitarist/horrible guitarist, I enjoy apps like Capo. The $29 program allows you to “reverse engineer” any song in your iTunes library, allowing you to play along by marking out your own tablature, playing the chords the app senses in the music, or by looping and slowing down tricky parts of the song.

How does it work? I recorded a bit of “Creep” by Radiohead, strumming away, Rock Band-style, to the chords offered by the app. The song consists of four chords – G, B7, C, and Cm – and you usually play barre chords in the 3rd or 4th position. Capo “found” most of the chords, offering up good approximations for what was going on in the music and serving up imperfect but acceptable alternatives to the real notes. You can hear me below.

Arguably it wasn’t perfect – it dropped some B minor and D chords in there for kicks – but it was enough to get you started. If I were a beginner I’d wonder why things didn’t sound exactly right but it would be easy enough to fix things with a little practice and research. The same thing happened with a number of other songs. Surprisingly Icona Pops “I Love It” came out the best with excellent chord recognition off the bat.

One of the best features is the pitch and speed shifters. You can reduce the speed to 1/4, allowing you to listen to the guitar parts and learn solos by playing and repeating the parts you’re having trouble with. There are similar apps that do these same things (Riffstation is one) but this update to Capo seems to have really nailed usability.

It’s not perfect – the tab system requires you to swipe over a spectrogram of the song to tell it which notes to pick out and the process is quite imprecise. However, with a bit of practice and the right song I’m sure it can get a bit easier.

Capo is a cool tool for amateur guitarists and an interesting toy for professionals. As I so often say when I try stuff like this if I’d had Capo and a nice Stratocaster when I was in high school I’d probably never have gone to class.

Gillmor Gang – Robert Scoble, Doc Searls, Keith Teare, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor. Live recording session has concluded for today. Like us on Facebook at Facebook.com/GillmorGang

Coming off of what can only be called a political victory in the shutdown and debt limit crisis, President Obama is making noise about reviving comprehensive immigration reform from its dead status.

Don’t get too excited. Following his win, the president appears to feel it’s time to push an issue that was all but written off a month ago. However, it remains unclear what, if any, momentum from the shutdown will translate to progress in the House of Representatives for immigration reform.

What that means for us in technology is that high-skill immigration reform could be where it was when we last checked: stuck.

A few nibbles to get started: Instead of risking his speakership, Speaker of the House John Boehner swung right during the shutdown, and is riding high among the most conservative members of his party. For his stance and actions before and during the partial government shutdown, he is stacking plaudits.

Representative Raul Labrador – remember that name – was recently quoted in the National Review as saying the following about Boehner: “I’ve actually been really proud of Speaker Boehner over the last two and a half weeks. I don’t think he should be ashamed of anything he has done.”

Whether you agree with GOP leadership or not, it’s fair to say that the further right elements of the party got the fight that they were looking for. The speaker said as much following the eventual denouement:

The House has fought with everything it has to convince the president of the United States to engage in bipartisan negotiations aimed at addressing our country’s debt and providing fairness for the American people under ObamaCare. That fight will continue.

That is the temperature.

How does all that fit into the immigration reform issue? Well, the folks that did get the fight they wanted, and are currently united behind Speaker Boehner, are viscerally opposed to passing immigration reform this year. And now that they support the speaker, it seems unlikely that he would cross the folks that are currently propping his leadership up, by forcing immigration changes on them in this delicate Congressional moment.

Here’s our friend Rep. Labrador, as quoted by USA Today, on the chances of reform passing the House: “It’s not going to happen this year […] After the way the president acted over the last two or three weeks where he would refuse to talk to the speaker of the House […] they’re not going to get immigration reform. That’s done.”

A reform bill passed the Senate, and died in the House, and that happened before rancor was this bad betwixt our two parties.

–

That we are stuck regarding immigration reform should come as no surprise. Mark Zuckerberg’s efforts in the area have been less than effective. As far back as July, politicians were predicting that the issue could stretch into 2014.

The IBTimes was blunt in its assessment of the immigration landscape:

But opponents of reform — at least the kind envisioned by Democrats, that is, one that includes a path to citizenship for the undocumented 11 million — said the prospects of a bill leaving the House have been dead for some time now. Not because Americans and even opponents don’t want reform, but because there was too much optimism that a bill including what they call “amnesty” for the undocumented could pass.

And nothing in the past few months has changed that fact. I felt that attaching high-skill immigration reform to the larger package lowered, not increased, its chance of passing. And, damn it, I was right.

So it comes down to this: High-skill immigration reform won’t pass – unless the Senate changes its strategy – until we work out the issue of what I prefer to call the path to citizenship, and others call amnesty, which is the key sticking point on the road to change.

Stupendous.

Top Image Credit: Adam Inglis

Boulder & SF-based startup Occipital is probably still best known for its Red Laser and 360Panorama apps, but it confirmed today that it raised over $1 million on Kickstarter to bring its Structure 3D sensor to market.

The Structure isn’t just any 3D sensor though. It’s an incredibly small one — so small, in fact, that it can onto the back of your iPad (note: it’s compatible with any iOS device with a Lightning port) and connect without completely killing your battery life. While run-of-the-mill users can use the Structure and its early batch of companion apps to scan objects for printing at Shapeways or to fling balls for virtual kittens to chase around the 3D representation of a room, Occipital was really gunning to pick up developer support this time.

It’s certainly a nice little show of financial validation for the team, especially considering this is their first big foray into consumer-facing hardware and the fact that they didn’t exactly need the cash in the first place. At the time, CEO Jeff Powers remarked to me that since the company still had money left over from its previous funding round, the Kickstarter was meant in large part to be a marketing tool that would help gauge the demand for its curious gadget. The team originally set out to raise $100,000 when the campaign officially kicked off in mid-September, and early momentum put the project over the top in just three hours.

But could the project’s popularity ultimately prove to be detrimental? After all, I can think of a few projects that ultimately took flak because overwhelming demand outweighed the producers’ ability to deliver on what they promised. For now though, the team remains positive about its chances at delivering the Structure to 3D-hungry developers and tinkerers — to hear Occipital marketing director Adam Rodnitsky tell it, this current level of demand won’t affect shipping schedules “at all”.

“We put a lot of effort into setting up our supply chain well in advance to make sure we could deliver on what we promised to backers,” he said in an email. “We’re ready to meet this demand… and hopefully much more.”

In case you haven’t been keeping tabs on the Structure’s voyage from curious concept to crowdfunding darling, you can check out our interview with CEO Powers and demo of the Structure in action below.

Google and Facebook are getting a bit friendlier despite their social networking competition. Google’s DoubleClick ad buying software will soon allow clients to buy retargeted ads on Facebook. FBX, Facebook’s retargeted ads platform, has become a major player in the 16 months since launch, and DoubleClick will be a more comprehensive ad buying solution by tapping into it.

Google writes “Partnership has been key to Google’s success as a rising tide lifts all boats.  So we’re excited to announce a new way to help our clients succeed by working with Facebook to participate in FBX, their real-time bidding exchange…we’re always looking at ways to serve our clients even better – starting in a few months, clients will be able to buy inventory on FBX via DoubleClick Bid Manager.”

DoubleClick allows clients to buy ads on dozens of different ad exchanges, but excluding Facebook may have forced some clients to look elsewhere for their media buying needs. Once the integration is live, DoubleClick will become more of a one-stop-shop for buying ads across the web.

Facebook launched FBX in June 2012 to let advertisers buy cookie-based retargeted ads on Facebook’s site. When someone visits an advertiser’s website, say to buy a flight to Hawaii, a cookie is dropped onto the user’s computer. The site can then pass this cookie to a demand side platform (DSP) ad tech service that uses it to target that same user with an ad on Facebook. So if the person didn’t buy the flight, the travel site can show them ads hawking that exact same flight at a discount in hopes of getting them to pull the trigger.

Facebook started with a small set of DSPs but expanded the ranks over time, yet Google was nowhere to be found. Soon that will change, as DoubleClick will become one of these DSPs with access to place ads on Facebook through FBX. In this way, both Google and Facebook can make money off of advertisers together.

It’s unclear who reached out to who about the deal. While Google may have hoped that FBX would flop, the platform gained steam and became necessary to support in DoubleClick, so it may caved. Or perhaps Facebook pushed for the partnership in hopes of driving more FBX sales.

Either way it proves that Google doesn’t have a stranglehold on demand fulfillment anymore, as I wrote in April. Facebook is successfully breaking into the lucrative bottom of the funnel with FBX.

Historically, Facebook ads have centered on demand generation — getting people to want to buy something. But that space doesn’t command as high of ad rates as demand fulfillment — getting people to buy something they already want from a specific seller.

FBX and retargeted ads in general can reach people who’ve already been considering a purchase, and the return on investment is often clearer because the ads can be the last click before a purchase. In this way, FBX ads are similar to and compete with search ads, which are Google’s bread and butter. Even if Google will be selling these FBX ads, most of the money goes to Facebook.

The deal will create more competition for advertisers between FBX providers. Now Nanigans, AdRoll, TellApart, and other startups that serve ads on FBX will have to compete with Google. At the same time, the move validates the space of these startups and might signal to more businesses that they should be investing in retargeted campaigns.

While you might assume the two tech giants are at each other’s throats because of competitions between Facebook and Google+, but relations have improved over the last few years. Facebook ended up working with Microsoft’s Bing to power web searches and ads in Graph Search, but at the feature’s launch even Mark Zuckerberg said “I would love to work with Google”.

All of this is a big endorsement of retargeting as an ad format, but there’s one problem. FBX doesn’t work on mobile…yet. And that’s where users are going. Facebook may very well be hard at work at getting FBX ready for mobile. But in the meantime, I’m very excited about this startup URX, which lets ecommerce apps retarget their existing users with ads that deeplink directly to specific products in the app and get people to buy them.

Expect mobile retargeting to be the next big space for innovation, investment, and acquisitions.