Category: Tech news

Want to know how serious a photographer is about their art? Look at their tripod. Whether you’re shooting a wedding, hiking up Annapurna, or sledding down Everest, the right tripod will offer a stable base for your work and serve as an indispensable part of your travel kit.

The LG G2 is a beast in the specs department. Too bad LG mucks things up with gimmicky and poorly implemented features.

Electricity in Jakarta, Indonesia costs three cents per kilowatt hour. That’s 30 cents less than power in the US and Europe. This means, all things being equal and provided you don’t mind your apartment heating up alarmingly, you can make a decent living mining for Bitcoin and Litecoin (another cryptocurrency) using powerful – and hot – graphics cards, each one running at 140 degrees Fahrenheit or more.

That’s exactly what Tiyo Triyanto has decided to do. Using some off-the-shelf components he has jury-rigged a 105 GPU system that can, with intense maintenance, make him $114 a day.

The system, a chain of motherboards, cards, and ethernet cable so convoluted that you could imagine it powering a mad scientist’s lab. Instead, Triyanto has created a very precise and complex mining platform using his own – secret – configurations.

“Currently I’m making about 60 litecoin per day,” he said. “I’ve kept 95% of the mining profit since April and once the major exchanges start accepting LTC, others will follow, and price is expected to soar. So that 60 LTC could turn into $1,500.”

Jakarta, where the temperature hovers around 80 degrees and climb to a balmy 95 with 75% humidity is obviously not an ideal environment for a set of machines that require constant cooling. To keep things from burning up Triyanto aims his machines in different configurations and maintains air conditioners that run in his home all night and day.

“However, having cheap electricity is not enough for me,” he said. “I kept optimizing my mining farms, did a lot of research and testing, built an effective air cooling method, and created heat flow management and hardware airflow alignment, all in the effort to maximize the mining uptime. When I started I was too eager to get it working and missed a lot of testing.”

In one way Triyanto’s system is genius. Like Kramer in Seinfeld who attempted to cash in on the pricing disparity between bottle returns in New York and Michigan, CS grad Triyanto is cashing in on his home country’s relatively low electricity costs. This arbitrage, while ingenious, could end as sadly as Kramer’s own adventure. Triyanto’s amazing system will be outpaced soon by faster, more efficient mining rigs. In short, this complex, expensive, and seemingly profitable mining rig is about to be eclipsed by newer and better technologies at a pace far faster than the average user can match.

Welcome to the Bitcoin arms race. Things are just getting warmed up.

Bitcoin mining is like making money out of thin air. Bitcoin is a controlled currency supply and, as Wikipedia notes, “it requires exertion and it slowly makes new currency available at a rate that resembles the rate at which commodities like gold are mined from the ground.”

Bitcoin is a mix of three monetary processes. First, it handles its own transaction processing (think credit card companies,) fraud prevention (the SEC and security firms), and currency issuance (the treasury.) In a real world these things are very complex systems with many moving parts. The beauty of Bitcoin is that each of these systems are reduced to very simple, very powerful cryptographic methods that ensures that each step in the chain verifies the next.

Adam B. Levine, Editor-in-chief of Bitcoin podcast Let’s Talk Bitcoin describes it in another way:

“Mining is like a race occurs every ten minutes where participants from around the world all compete to solve a math puzzle, when someone finds a solution, all the transactions since the last puzzle was solved are wrapped up into what’s called a block.”

These blocks are sent out every ten minutes as a package of cryptographically verified transactions – the buys and sells of the system. Your computer, while it’s mining, is actually verifying and encoding these transactions and, as a reward,if you encode the block you get 25 Bitcoins. Computationally it’s akin to getting a few hundred dollars for rolling a massive boulder up a mountain. And then the boulder rolls down again. Groups can get together and mine concurrently, sharing in the proceeds, but the resulting payouts are minuscule – perhaps a few dollars per day at the very most.

Mining speeds are measured in number of hashes processed per second – megahashes (MH/s) and gigahashes (GH/s) are the common notation. A hash is a way to “compress” a long number into something that can be used by a computer to, say, find a piece of data in a database. Some have called the hash a long number’s resume.

The goal of processing is to find a hash that has a sufficient numbers of zeroes at the beginning. This signals the completion of the block and pays out the reward from the coinbase – an imaginary mine containing all possible Bitcoins.

Bitcoin appeared on January 3, 2009 and slowly ramped up in popularity over the next few years. Originally created by the mysterious researcher (or researchers) going by the alias Satoshi Nakamoto, the system was designed to give early adopters an improved chance of mining Bitcoins. When Satoshi began, the fastest way to mine Bitcoins without burning up your computer was by forcing the computer’s graphics processor to run the process in the background. Because these GPU units were inexpensive and good at handling complex equations, you could squeeze a few hundred megahashes per second out of them resulting in a few Bitcoins a week. They peaked at about 600 MH/s but, depending on the hardware and the setup, they could reach gigahash levels.

For a while miners were tooling along, pumping out Bitcoins and sharing tips and tricks for maximizing their setups. Bitcoin mining was a hobby.

Now it’s not.

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In April 2011 Satoshi was gone. He (or they, or her) told a Bitcoin developer that he had “moved on to other things,” a decision that had little impact on Bitcoin. Two years after pressing the start button, Bitcoin was steaming along under its own power. Exchanges rose and fell – the most famous one being Mt. Gox in Tokyo, Japan. Mt. Gox was originally a Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange (M.T.G.O.X.) but switched to Bitcoin transactions in 2011. Tibbane Ltd. bought the company in March, 2011 and it has survived countless attacks, hacking attempts, and serious losses. Today Mt. Gox deals in about a million Bitcoin a month.

GPU mining worked well for a while but, thanks to the natural inclination of the miner to add more and more power, the average gain from a few more megahashes fell exponentially.

“Its like if your computer got slower every time someone new bought a computer, or someone upgraded to a faster one,” said Levine. As single GPU mining fell to parallel mining the speeds seemed to explode – along with energy usage. Rigs that could mine a few Bitcoins a month were now mining a few Satoshis – the miniscule parts of the Bitcoin after the decimal point and the electricity need by GPUs was frighteningly wasteful. In the end you spent more on the hardware and energy than you could ever sanely mine.

And so the arms race began.

First users tried field-programmable gate array machines – chips that could be specially programmed after manufacture to do nearly anything. These boards hit about 400 MH/s at 15W, considerably less than GPUs and at similar rates. By 2012 a few manufacturers were offering dedicated FPGA devices that could hit GPU speeds. Then, in 2012, FPGAs were outpaced.

Bitcoin rose in notoriety thanks to the rise of Silk Road and the Cyprus economic crash. June 2012 brought Y Combinator-backed Coinbase and the Winklevoss twins of Facebook infamy invested $11 million in the currency while calling it “better than gold.”

In April 2013 it reached an all-time high of $266 per Bitcoin, a stratospheric rise. Accounts that once were worth a few dollars exploded and early users cashed out. A number of folks I talked to described selling their Bitcoin and buying gold bars, cars, and fancy watches. They were either further compressing their wealth into relatively non-volatile investments or just having fun.

It was an arms race. “It’s now about getting the newest technology first and deploying before anyone else can,” said Levine. After FPGAs users discovered single-purpose, low-power ASIC chips, the entry-level models being the USB-powered ASIC Sapphire Block Erupters. These tiny ASICs could be installed in parallel on a standard USB hub and run at a few gigahashes – provided you kept things cool. A small mining rig I have set up under my desk uses two Block Erupters and maxes out at 600 MH/s a second – enough power to mine a dollar every six days.

On October 15 the first KNC Jupiter mining rigs hit the network. These $5,000 machines can mine at 500 GH/s at about 500 Watts, a power to mining trade-off that many would be willing to make. A back-of-the-envelope calculation let you expect to see profit of $6,000 from these machines every six months – impressive at first but with each new KNC rig brought online the difficulty is increased.

Heavier iron pops up on the forums and Bitcoin fan sites with alarming regularity. One company, Cointerra, is promising 1 TH/s – that’s 1000 GH/s – for $6,000. Other manufacturers opened up shop offering massive speeds and close up almost immediately – taking preoders with them. One company, Terrahash closed up suddenly in September 2013, writing: “We will be able to refund about 50% of every order with this amount. We are trying to get our money out of Chase, which will help us refund another ~5% of each order. We are trying to return as many components as we can, and as soon as we get more money back, we will send additional pro-rated payments to each order.”

The buyers were understandably incensed, writing “Don’t think you can scam people to accept a 50% deal for YOUR failures. Customers are not responsible for the risks you took.”

In short, Bitcoin mining has become a fool’s game. The instant a new batch of mining tools hits the streets the total processing power of the Bitcoin hive mind rises. When KNC released its product the total power of the network went from 1 petahash per second to 2 petahashes per second. Many expect the network to hit 3 petahashes in the next month. As a measure of pure computing power the Bitcoin mining system – the actual number of machines blasting away at each block – has exploded… over and over again.

“ASICs have increased difficulty and are making mining increasingly out of reach for anyone but very deep-pocket miners,” wrote Reddit user Subduction. “It is concentrating more and more mining power into fewer and fewer hands, leaving the network at substantial risk for a 51 percent failure.”

Click to enlarge

For their part, manufacturers like Cointerra are trying to support the small miner.

“We are actually selling to the retail guys, the low-end miners,” said Ravi Iyengar. “We don’t want to focus on enterprise mining because we want it to be distributed. And that’s the whole idea behind Bitcoin: keep it distributed, decentralized, not put all the hash in the hands of the field, and we want to increase that and build that.”

But Bitcoin is now a big business. With Valley investment and worldwide interest – especially as a medium of exchange – many users are moving towards hosted solutions. Leasebit (warning: auto-playing video), for example, offers a lease-to-own model for 1.49 TH/s machines that cost $149 a month. You own the machines outright in 59 months. Rowan Alter, VP of sales at Leasebit, sees the hosted model as the only way to fly.

“If somebody wants to own a miner that actually works it will be so sophisticated, so hot, and so loud that you will have to outsource to a firm of your choice to maintain it,” he said. “I think the day of the little guy plugging in a chipset is over.”

Where can mining go next? All indications point to large farms where users lease out powerful machines or, barring that, the entrance of large, well-heeled banks that simply continue the ASIC race at a much higher scale. As the difficulty increases the resulting firepower needed to squeeze out a single Bitcoin will raise exponentially.

After years of easy returns and rising prices, Bitcoin mining has hit a point where it is all but futile to try to mine at home. Funds like Coinlab are busy building Bitcoin data centers like Alydian where massive banks of ASICs run 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Not unlike the early Internet, Bitcoin is growing slowly and then all at once. In a way, it’s just what Satoshi would have wanted.

About as far as you can get from Jakarta, another miner was blasting away at the block chain. Julian Rodriguez, 29, lives in the Bronx and, in February, 2012 purchased an $1,500 Avalon ASIC miner that could do 82GH/s . He overclocked it – forced it to run faster than its original specifications – and succeeded in mining $16,218 since June 21st.

“I had just started my own consulting business and money was tight, I put a lot on the line for that machine. After overclocking it, the fans ran on full blast at all times, and there was a constant hum in my room. My girlfriend didn’t mind too much,” he said. He ran an air conditioner all summer to keep his room cool at a cost of about $60 a month.

He recently sold his Avalon on eBay for $1,725. It’s a profit of about $16,500, less expenses. He pulled hundreds of dollars out of the machine the way Jack’s giant pulled golden eggs from his magical goose. The box, a nondescript metal enclosure with three massive fans containing some of the fastest, single-purpose computing circuitry available to consumers, is a strange thing. To some it’s the future of currency, a way to free us from the chains of fiat tyranny. To others it’s a hobby with little upside. To still others it’s an investment as sure as gold or municipal bonds. It’s Schrödinger’s currency generator, containing nothing and everything at once

Why did Rodriquez sell his miner? He’s done mining and sees trading as the next big thing.

“I personally feel like it’s now time to trade Bitcoin itself. Buy coins in cash and trade,” he said. He estimated that he’d make about $800 more before January and then watch the machine burn itself out, his processing power winking out like a hot, strange star. But he was amazed at the power the Avalon afforded him.

“I’m a Bitcoin believer. I’m just waiting for the rest of the world to get it,” he said.

[Illustration: Bryce Durbin; Infographic: Joshua J. Romero, Brandon Palacio & Karlssonwilker Inc.]

Email management company Boxer has raised $3 million in funding led by Sutter Hill Ventures. The company, which launched its iPhone app in June, will use the funding to expand its engineering and design team and to build apps for other platforms, most notably Android. Along with the funding, Sutter Hill Ventures managing director Sam Pullara will join the Boxer board of directors.

LG is following Samsung’s example in providing a curved glass smartphone that makes no earthly sense, HTC is offering a fingerprint scanner that no one needs executed poorly, and Mad Catz is entering the crowded Android console space – for which there is no proven demand.

The Android world has gone mad this week, and me and your host Chris Velazco are just trying to put the pieces back together. Join us as we try to divine the twisted psyche of the people who created these unnatural devices.

We invite you to enjoy weekly Android podcasts every Wednesday (or Thursday this week) at 5:30 p.m. Eastern and 2:30 p.m. Pacific, in addition to our weekly Gadgets podcast at 3 p.m. Eastern and noon Pacific on Fridays. Subscribe to the TechCrunch Droidcast in iTunes, too, if that’s your fancy.

Intro music by Kris Keyser.

Direct download available here.

IBM has reported its third-quarter revenues were $23.72 billion compared to $24.74 billion this time last year. The revenues were down due to the company’s underperforming hardware division, which is taking a hit with the growing popularity of cloud services. Revenues for the nine-month period totaled $72.1 billion, a decrease of 4 percent, compared with $75.2 billion for the nine months of 2012.

Revenues in the hardware group were down almost entirely across the board. Revenues from its Systems and Technology segment totaled $3.2 billion for the quarter, down 17 percent from the third-quarter of 2012. Pre-tax income decreased $291 million to a loss of $167 million.

Total systems revenues decreased 19 percent, and revenues from Power Systems were down 38 percent compared with the 2012 period. Revenues from System x were down 18 percent. Revenues from System z mainframe server products increased 6 percent compared with the year-ago period. Total delivery of System z computing power, as measured in MIPS (millions of instructions per second), increased 56 percent. Revenues from System Storage decreased 11 percent. Revenues from Microelectronics OEM increased 1 percent.

Software revenues were up just 1 percent the prior year, showing again the company’s stagnating revenues in the third quarter.

“Hardware is down as a trend,” said Ray Wang, co-founder of Constellation Research. “There is an impact because of cloud computing.”

IBM had some of its best results with its cloud services efforts. Cloud revenue is up more than 70 percent year to date with revenue in third-quarter exceeding $1 billion, of which about $460 million is delivered as a cloud service.

As more companies choose cloud services, it can be expected that this trend will continue for IBM and other enterprise providers.

eBay reported its third-quarter financial performance today, including revenue of $3.9 billion and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.64. The company’s revenue was up 14 percent from the same quarter last year, while its earnings per share rose 17 percent.

Analysts had expected eBay to earn $0.63 per share (non-GAAP) on revenue of $3.9 billion. In its most recent sequential quarter, eBay had revenue of $3.9 billion, and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.63. That’s not a typo; eBay’s second-quarter performance matches earlier third-quarter predictions precisely. Put another way, eBay failed to grow sequentially, which investors might find disappointing.

eBay unit PayPal drove $1.6 billion in revenue, up 19 percent. PayPal now has 137 million members, up 17 percent. eBay’s “Enabled Commerce Volume” metric was $52 billion for the quarter, up a healthy 21 percent.

Digging into the numbers, eBay’s operating margin is now back over the 20 percent mark (20.5 percent), it generated $1.3 billion in cash during the quarter, and repurchased around $146 million of its own stock during the period. eBay ended the quarter with cash, and equivalents of $13 billion.

In regular trading, eBay fell just over 1 percent. The company is sharply down in after-hours trading.

Why is eBay falling if it managed to best expectations by a smidge? eBay stated in today’s earnings report that it expected revenue of $4.5 billion to $4.6 billion in the fourth quarter. Its non-GAAP earnings per share range is $0.79 to $0.81. The revenue figure is in line with expectations, but the EPS prediction is lower than what the street expected, which was $0.83.

It’s never good to meet investor revenue expectations with your forecast but fail to estimate a similar EPS figure, because that can imply that margins are set to worsen. It’s even tougher to say after reporting a quarter in which your earnings per share and revenue were flat sequentially.

Top Image Credit: Brian Cantoni

Like a cautious parent, Facebook is giving teen users new freedom despite risks. For the first time, users under 18 can post publicly. The logic is that other sites don’t restrict kids, teens are getting more web savvy, and young celebrities want a voice. This could let minors publicly share things they’ll regret, so they must manually opt in to public sharing and confirm they understand the risks.

Somewhat disingenuously, Facebook frames its blog post about the change as being about adding more protection for teens. It starts off saying that now when people age 13 to 17 sign up, their posts to the News Feed are defaulted to “friends only” instead of “friends of friends (fof)” as they were before. That is important because many people don’t change their default settings, and if you have thousands of friends with thousands of friends, the fof setting would share your posts to more than a million people.

But considering there are 1.15 billion people on Facebook already, and its growth has slowed significantly as it saturates key markets, there are likely well over a hundred million teens grandfathered into the old fof default. The real news is opening up public News Feed posting to minors.

That’s good news for teenage celebrities. They can now turn on the option for their user profile to have followers — people who aren’t their friends but who see their public posts in the News Feed. That means they don’t have to run a separate fan Page to build a public audience. Having significant social media reach can help child actors get jobs or earn teen musicians favor with record labels.

Meanwhile, the young celebs will generate compelling content that appeals to the critical under-18 demographic. Critics say Facebook is losing its cool with this audience. The company has repeatedly claimed on earnings calls that it’s not seeing significant reductions in engagement from teens, but it admits that mobile-first social networks like Snapchat could be grabbing eyeballs Facebook would have gotten otherwise. Giving their famous peers a megaphone could encourage kids to stick around on the nearly decade-old social network.

Another argument supporting the change is that teens are hardcore Internet users that are supposedly becoming quite familiar with how to purport themselves online. If they want to make the conscious choice to switch the audience of the News Feed posts to public, they should have that right.

Facebook claims it’s doing its best to protect them by making them acknowledge the risks by confirming the dialogue window, pictured above, that states: “Did you know that public posts can be seen by anyone, not just people you know? You and any friends you tag could end up getting friend requests and messages from people you don’t know personally.” If a minor confirms and starts posting publicly, down the line Facebook will remind them they’re sharing publicly so they don’t forget, and give them a quick way to limit the visibility of their posts.

The final argument is that many social media sites and blogging platforms like Tumblr let teens post publicly without restriction or heavy-handed warnings. There are plenty of legitimate reasons for teens to post publicly like campaigning for social causes. Why should Facebook be different from the rest of the web?

Well, the counter argument is that Facebook should be different because it’s evolved to be viewed as a friendly place where content is somewhat private. Facebook has had its share of privacy stumbles over the years, and some still think it’s pushing people too hard to be open. For instance, last week it stopped letting people opt out of being searched for and found by name. But the general perception is that Facebook is for sharing with friends.

There will surely be users who breeze through these warnings, post immature status updates or embarrassing photos publicly to Facebook, and their reputations will pay the price. Naive 13-year-olds might wrongly assume that anything inside the site or app’s blue walls can’t be used against them. But should that mean intelligent, responsible 17-year-olds with driver’s licenses should be able to post publicly? It’s a nuanced, subjective thing to judge.

What’s certain, though, is that it’s more important than ever for parents and schools to educate children about safe and respectable use of the Internet. If we teach kids to look both ways before crossing the streets, we should teach them to look at the privacy setting of their Facebook posts before they share.

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Until recently, advertising company Jun Group focused on video. In recent months, however, it’s been exploring a format that it calls “owned advertising” with a new product called Overdrive.

CEO Mitchell Reichgut told me that Jun Group actually “soft launched” Overdrive back in June, and it already accounts for more than 30 percent of the company’s revenue.

Overdrive is basically an ad format that looks like sponsored content on the publisher’s website, but actually points to a promotional website or micro-website owned by the advertiser. You can see an example here, where the ad appears in a site’s news feed, and when you click on it, it links to a Starbucks page. Reichgut said the sponsored content shouldn’t just be the usual promotional copy, but something that’s actually interesting and worthwhile for consumers.

Is “owned advertising,” as Reichgut characterizes it, really a new idea? Well, the term itself isn’t entirely new, and in appearance, the Overdrive ads resemble what are sometimes native ads or content-style ads. (I think trying to pry apart each of those terms with strict definitions would be futile).

For his part, Reichgut said that, compared to other ad products, with Overdrive, “The focus is on pages that the brands control. … The big insight is that it’s no longer about reaching out to people but bringing people in.”

I also asked him how this fits into Jun Group’s existing business, and he said it takes advantage of the existing network to deliver “millions of impressions” for each campaign, while also applying the company’s “core principles,” namely that “advertisers have an absolute right to know where their video is going to run and how.” Plus, even though the Overdrive ads can point to any kind of content, Reichgut said they often involve video in some way.

Last we heard from Apartment List, they had just launched their app and were aiming to take on Craigslist as apartment hunters’ tool of choice. Now the service has made its next move: acquiring the reviews site RentAdvisor, which will immediately add 20,000 reviews to the site’s listings.

The all-stock deal brings on board 12 new employees, who will remain based in Atlanta at RentAdvisor’s headquarters. RentAdvisor co-founder Jamie Gallo will be joining the management team of Apartment List.

Up until now, reviews have been a missing piece of Apartment List’s product puzzle, and one of users’ most common requests. This means that in addition to high resolution photos and floor plans, users will be able to see ratings and reviews on any given listing.

The RentAdvisor site will remain separate from Apartment List for the time being, but the two will be rolled into one next year. The team is currently working on integrating RentAdvisor’s reviews, CEO John Kobs said, with the aim to have them live on the site by late October.

“The reason we didn’t want to roll out [reviews until now] was critical mass,” Kobs explained. “We just passed 1.5 million monthly visitors, and now we’re in a place to roll it out. If you have too small of a site, and you don’t have that traffic, it could turn into more of a gripe site.”

By adding reviews to its site, Apartment List is aiming to be a point of transparency in a relatively opaque market, which could be a big selling point for apartment hunters. Previously, Kobs had pointed to the number of photos posted per listing — an average of 14.5 as of July — as their metric for transparency, as compared to competitors like Craigslist, Padmapper, or Lovely (the latter two of which have both come under fire from Craigslist for aggregating its data). Reviews are a big step up from that.

Current residents can post their thoughts on landlord issues or neighborhood safety; when they do, the landlord is notified and can respond in turn. Not everyone meets their landlord before signing the lease, and the fact that they are visible in the review process could add to Apartment List’s appeal.

Apartment List did $10 million in revenue last year and expects to double that this coming year. The goal over the next twelve months is to have a complete supply advantage over other listings sites, Kobs said.

“We have a team of people curating profiles for properties that don’t have a file online. We’re taking brick and mortar buildings that up until this point hadn’t had an online destination or home page and creating those on Apartment List,” Kobs said.

More specifically, the goal is to build a profile for every apartment in the United States. Addresses first go through a location and identity verification process, after which the team contacts the landlord via phone and email to gather data like photos, floor plans, rental rates, square footage, availability, and amenities. Once the property is online, the team periodically reaches out to the landlord to keep the information up-to-date.

Gallo said that RentAdvisor had been approached by another player in the housing listings industry previous to saying yes to Apartment List.

[Image: Flickr/Ernest Duffoo]

Tomorrow, at 4 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time, Windows 8.1 will begin to roll out as an optional update to Windows 8 users. The new software represents a reset and rebirth of the bets that Microsoft made with its Windows 8 operating system.

Windows 8.1 contains a grip of new features, including new built-in applications, fresh user-interface changes, and a more powerful search technology that elevates Bing as a component of the Microsoft services suite. SkyDrive also has a prominent place in Windows 8.1, as Microsoft works to ensure that it continues to manage its users’ files wherever they are stored. (For a quick look at why that matters, head here.)

Trust me, you want to upgrade. Windows 8.1 is to Windows 8 as Office 2010 is to Office 2007.

I’ll be running through the final code tomorrow (Microsoft did not provide TechCrunch with a copy of the final build) and covering the larger launch itself. However, as this is a staged rollout, not everyone will see the code at 4 am Pacific tomorrow. The new operating system will pop up as an update in the Windows Store at various times, depending on your location. All you have to do is have a fine sleep, and when you wake up, the operating system will either be ready for you to snag, or on the way.

Windows 8.1 is even more services-dependent than Windows 8, which opens up more potential fail points – if SkyDrive, Bing, Skype or other services falter tomorrow, it will mar the release of the operating system itself. That said, Microsoft services have been more or less stable of late.

What will be interesting is whether most Windows 8 users switch to Windows 8.1, and at what pace. We’ll be able to track Windows 8.1′s market share independently, but I suspect that Microsoft will share a few statistics as they become relevant and aggrandizing.

So tonight marks the calm before Storm 8.1. Will consumers react positively? Will the new code spur sales? Will it sit well with the new hardware that is on the way? In about 16 hours, we’ll start answering those questions.

Top Image Credit: Dell Inc.

Makeably, the New York-based, custom-made goods marketplace that closed on seed funding from Great Oaks, 500 Startups and others earlier this year is now relaunching under a new, easier-to-remember name: Hatch. Alongside the rebranding, the company has also evolved the process by which consumers tweak and “remix” the products offered for sale.

The site, founded by ex-Googlers Ryan Hayward and Anastasia Leng, is similar to CustomMade in that it’s an attempt to connect everyday shoppers with artisans capable of producing custom goods.

But this summer, Hatch (then Makeably), made a slight shift to differentiate itself somewhat from its competitors. Leng explained that the majority of shoppers looking for custom items weren’t reaching out to artisans with detailed requests sprung out of their own minds, but were rather “remixing” existing products with small change requests. Around 90 percent were asking for minor adjustments – like changing the base material used in a product. For example, they might request a necklace in gold instead of silver. They may have also asked for slight changes to designs or sizes, among other things.

To encourage this culture of remixing, the company changed the site to better support user behavior. In a newly added side panel, customers were told to “Make it Yours” and could fill in a form where they selected the changes they wanted to request.

Today, Leng tells us Hatch is evolving things yet again. “Based on what we’ve learned from our buyers and makers, we’ve moved the customization process directly into the photograph,” she says. Users can now interact with hotspots over a product in order to make better decisions about how to modify it, and they’re presented with visuals about what some of their inputs would look like after doing so.

At present, users can select options from visual cues the makers themselves provide (like color or type of wood), they can choose from a drop down menu of options for things that don’t require visual cues (like size), or they can describe what they’d like (e.g. a message they’d like engraved), Leng explains. Soon, they’ll be able to drag their own hotspot over a product to better communicate to a maker what they’d like to personalize, too.

To do customization right, Leng thinks Hatch should make it easier for customers to understand what they can change, see what the change looks like, and immediately see the final pricing. “These are the principles that make your experience with a service like Moo, NikeID or event CustomInk a great one. But it’s not obvious how you visualize customization when you’re dealing with products that are made by a large number of individual artisans and makers around the world, as well as products that have never been created in the exact variation you want (but which easily could be),” she says.

In early tests, the company found user feedback about the new process to be positive. “We kept hearing users describe their behavior as not one of buying, but that of designing and creating,” says Leng. (You can try it here with customizing these 3D letters or these wooden coasters.)

Today, Hatch offers 1,500 live products on its site, on average around two to three per maker, and the average price point has stabilized at $112, which Leng also notes is six times higher than Etsy’s. Eighty-five percent of makers have had at least one inquiry, 40 percent have made one sale or more, and 60 percent are full-time makers not hobbyists.

Meanwhile, on the buyers’ side, 30 percent are repeats, and 98 percent of those make their second purchases from a different category than their first. Since May, Hatch has grown 30 percent month-over-month in new makers and products, and has doubled its user base. The company doesn’t disclose users or revenue, but says that all orders today have come through organic search or referral traffic.

And now that the team is comfortable and has made the sell side of the business work, they’re going to focus on building up the demand side in the months ahead.

However, the question here is whether the maker movement and the market for those in search of custom goods online is large enough today to keep sites like Hatch afloat for as long as it would need to see this thing through. It’s also interesting that they compare themselves to Etsy, a much larger maker marketplace which recently went through growing pains of its own, despite achieving profitability back in 2009. Hatch may have successfully market-tested how custom goods sales can work online, but there’s nothing stopping a larger player from implementing similar technology of their own (or even acquiring Hatch if the startup runs out of runway, perhaps).

In other news, Hatch was previously working out of a maker co-working space in Brooklyn called 3rd Ward, which shut down earlier this month, after giving Hatch less than a week to find a new home. They’ve now put an offer down on a space in Chelsea, which would bring them into Manhattan.

Two heads are better than one. It’s an age-old saying that has particular poignance in the entrepreneurial realm, where investors are much more comfortable handing over wads of cash to a team instead of an individual.

A new betaworks-backed startup out of New York, CollabFinder, is banking on that very idea.

The service helps designers, developers, artists, and producers find each other to collaborate on projects, based on various groups. New York City used the service (while in beta) to power it’s NYCBigApps contest, the city’s largest technology competition, and Bloomberg said the quality of the apps produced this year was much better than previous years.

Why? Because CollabFinder made it easy for individuals with good ideas to find the necessary collaborators to make their project awesome instead of mediocre.

“If you give people interested in making apps a place to collaborate and make projects together, you’ll have much better projects and apps,” said CollabFinder founder Sahadeva Hammari. “We’ve seen teams make more and better projects than individuals.”

Here’s how it works:

Anyone can sign up through Facebook, which automatically shows all of your connections within the CollabFinder website. From there, you can check out various groups. A group is created by a company, organization or city. This group is essentially a community of people and projects devoted to a certain platform or API.

For example, Flickr is currently piloting with CollabFinder and sending developers interested in using the Flickr API to CollabFinder. This way, anyone who’s looking to build on top of Flickr data can meet with like-minded individuals to build something twice as nice.

Once you’ve found the group you’re interested in, you can then post a project. Projects are free to post, and can be any idea you’ve ever had for something you want to build. Other users can then browse through projects, perhaps stumbling on yours and thinking it to be the bees’ knees. You two can connect on CollabFinder and get cracking on the next big thing.

In terms of a business model, CollabFinder works a lot like Meetup.com. Group creators, such as Flickr, Harvest, and eBay to start, pay a base fee of $35 each month to foster their communities on CollabFinder. These group creators will often push traffic from their own API sites to their group on CollabFinder, according to Hammari.

But what about idea theft?

We in the startup world, after watching The Social Network one too many times, have a strange fear of idea theft. However, Hammari reminds me that most people with great ideas simply can’t build them into realities without telling someone. A designer alone does not an app make, and the same can be true for developers.

But as added protection, CollabFinder only lets creators on the website, including engineers, scientists, designers, writers, and artists.

If you’re interested in finding your professional soul mate, head on over to CollabFinder now and sign up.

On a regular basis, we get pitched with major tech industry initiatives to broaden computer science education. A day after Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates signed on to a new initiative from Code.org to inspire 10 million new computer programmers, education startup General Assembly launched a tool for self-taught coding. And, just a few weeks earlier, Square CEO Jack Dorsey sat down with House Minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, to chat about a new “coding camp” for young girls.

But after everyone and their mother can code if-then loops, then what? There are many college-trained computer programmers who never use their coding skills and a sizable share of CS majors who can’t get hired in Silicon Valley.

Who caught up with LinkedIn Co-Founder and nice-guy enthusiast, Reid Hoffman, at the Code.org launch event to ask about why he was supporting their initiative. He has some refreshingly realistic ideas about what happens when everyone can code.

1. All Employees Could Be Capable Of Building Tech Solutions ”It’s not that everyone will have the skills for a high performing job.” he says. “Software skills are useful in every industry, not just for being hired by LinkedIn.”

The more people who hand-code their own solutions, the more cool projects we’ll see. Even in the slumbering luddite of the U.S. Congress, Representative Darrell Issa was able to launch a novel crowdsourcing legislative utility, Project Madison, because he and his staff could code a rough version of it without worry about hiring developers. Who knows how many ideas never happen because an inventor can’t create a prototype themselves.

Universal computer science education won’t solve Silicon Valley’s perpetual tech-talent shortage, but it will make us a more innovative society.

2. More Social Good Tech. “If I hadn’t have gone to Stanford, I probably wouldn’t have become a software entrepreneur,” says Hoffman, who remembers always having a world-changing orientation, but never considered technology as a pathway to making an impact. Being embedded in Xerox PARC gave him the epiphany that technology could allow a friend tutoring in East Palo Alto to reach many more students. He never developed the tutoring software, but it did inspire him to get into large-scale tech projects.

The same goes for other inventors. Seventeen-year-old Brittany Wenger recently designed a new low-cost way to radically improve cancer-detection rates using artificial intelligence and databases. “I came across artificial intelligence and was just enthralled. I went home the next day and bought a programming book and decided that was what I was going to teach myself to do,” she explained.

Without exposure to technology, this cool stuff simply doesn’t happen.

Silicon Valley has to be a little realistic about the mathematical prowess of the average American. Forty-seven percent of U.S. college students failed questions on rudimentary algebra fractions. The Logical notation of programming, which is much more complex, might be a bit out of reach.

Even if we could accomplish the monumental task of transforming the K-12 education system to teach all students anything new, only a fraction of students would actually use it. That said, it only takes a fraction of computer-science-literate students to come up with some super cool stuff, and that, alone, is worth the effort.

A little less than two years after being acqi-hired by Facebook, Gowalla co-founder and CTO Scott Raymond has left to join Airbnb‘s mobile product team. There, Raymond will work on a product that is growing in importance, as Airbnb seeks to facilitate connections between its users and speed up the process of creating listing and booking reservations.

Airbnb has been steadily trying to improve its mobile experience for both guests and hosts. While it has always done a good job of providing guests with ways to search, bookmark, and book reservations on its mobile apps, it’s recently added features enabling hosts to manage their listings on the go.

Earlier in the summer, it updated its mobile apps to allow hosts to create listings directly from the app. That included the ability to upload photos, set a space’s location via GPS, and have instant phone verification to ensure that hosts could be reached from the phone they were listing from.

Airbnb plans to continue investing in mobile, because communication between guests and hosts happens a lot faster over mobile than if both parties are on the company’s webpage. About 50 percent of hosts use the Airbnb mobile app today, according to Airbnb head of engineering Mike Curtis. The company has previously said that hosts on its mobile apps typically respond three times faster than those on desktop.

“We’re really concentrating on mobile right now, building out our mobile team and building out our mobile product,” Curtis said. Today, Airbnb has a team of 15 working on mobile, but the company will continue to add to the team over time. With that in mind, Curtis said it was important to bring in someone to help the growing mobile product team.

That person will be Raymond, who has experience building mobile products for travelers and adventurers. As co-founder and CTO of Gowalla, he built one of the earliest location-based mobile apps for finding and discovering interesting new venue and sharing them with friends.

“Gowalla’s mission was to get out and explore places in the world. That experience has been percolating in my mind for years,” Raymond said. Getting back to the themes that he explored at Gowalla was one of the big things that drew him to Airbnb.

While Gowalla ended up losing the so-called “check-in war,” the product evolved in an interesting way, particularly with the last release before the team was acqi-hired by Facebook. Gowalla 4.0 was designed to enable users to tell stories and discover new places with social travel guides.

That’s consistent with a lot of the work that Airbnb has done recently, as it moves beyond just being a platform for finding a place to stay, and seeks out ways to help travelers, once they get to where they’re going, better enjoy their stay. A year ago, Airbnb launched its own local travel guides, giving guests on desktop deeper insight into the shops, restaurants, and overall local vibe of the neighborhoods they would be staying in in major cities.

It’s too early to say which of those elements will make it into the mobile app, but Raymond says it’s clear there’s huge opportunities to do interesting new stuff to bridge the online Airbnb experience with the mobile experience, while also blending users’ experiences online and offline. Stay tuned, as I’m sure it’ll be interesting to see what comes next.

Shameless plug: I’ll be interviewing Airbnb co-founder and CTO Nate Blecharczyk about product, mobile, and other stuff at TC Disrupt Europe in Berlin in a few weeks. If you’re around, come through! It’ll be epic.