Category: Tech news

Import.io participated in the Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt to show off its service, which makes data from a website more accessible by turning pages into spreadsheets for pulling relevant information.

Chief Data Officer Andrew Fogg explained that web pages are designed for humans to read. But machines need other ways to understand information. Using Import.io, the data can be queried either manually or through an API.

The effort follows a long history of using services to scrape data from websites. Yahoo! Pipes was designed as a system to connect different websites and the associated data. Dapper was a service that scraped data from web pages and then provided ways to build context. Today, services such as IFTTT and Zapier use data connectors to connect apps. With IFTTT, for example, a feed from a website can be connected to SMS so updates can be delivered as a text message.

Import.io represents a new kind of service for connecting data to get information quickly that would normally require considerable manual work. Data integration is a hot topic as more people find relevance from multiple sources of data. Import.io and other services provide a form of data integration so the web can be treated as a database for machines to understand more than pages designed for people to read.

Check out the video at the top of the post for some use cases about the Import.io service.

Before the five startups taking part in this year’s San Francisco Media Camp took the stage at Demo Day, the gathered investors, journalists, and tech/media industry folk were addressed by Turner Broadcasting CEO Phil Kent, who predicted big things for the startup accelerator.

Apparently this was the first time Kent has attended a demo day — which isn’t as bad as it sounds, since this is only the second one in San Francisco, and only the third Media Camp demo day overall. Kent said he’s “very proud” of the accelerator — the monetary investment from Turner is relatively small, but he pointed to the “time and talent of our executives” who are made available.

Kent added that he’d like to see Media Camp become “a much bigger institutionalized activity within our company.” That might mean investing more money, or it might mean continuing to expand geographically. (Media Camp has gone from being a Turner-only effort in San Francisco to a joint initiative between Turner and Warner Bros. — both companies are owned by Time Warner — in both SF and Los Angeles.)

On the other hand, Kent also acknowledged that it’s “easy for me to say,” since he recently announced plans to step down next year. In his words: “I fired myself a couple weeks ago.”

The idea that the mentorship, not the money, was what Turner really brought to the table was illustrated in the presentations themselves, where each startup was introduced by one of their mentors within Turner.

We actually wrote up all of the companies back in June, but here’s a refresher, with some updates from demo day:

• ChannelMeter – A video analytics platform aimed at growing audiences and improving engagement. ChannelMeter says it’s already working with 2,000 brands and publishers.
• Cinemacraft – Allows publishers to promote their content with “videograms”, which are interactive images highlighting different moments from a video. This is supposed to a big step up from the single thumbnail image that’s usually used to promote videos, and it also offers more opportunities for monetization.
• Meograph – A tool for businesses to engage with customers and fans in content creation, in the form of a branded, embeddable unit on the company’s website. Customers include BBC and NPR.
• Plumzi – A platform for animation studios to add interactive, game-like elements to their TV shows, turning them into “Active Episodes”. Plumzi has raised a seed round led by Insikt Ventures, with participation from the Walt Disney Company and Media Camp.
• Tomorrowish – A social media DVR. If you’re watching an episode of TV after everyone else, or if you’re just a West Coaster who’s naturally three hours behind everyone on the East Coast, you can enjoy the social media experience as if you were watching live, thanks to Tomorrowish synchronization.

Online education providers may very well disrupt the higher-education establishment, but first, these for-profit companies need to find a way to finance the mammoth technical infrastructure needed to support millions of students. It’s a challenge that all mission-based businesses wrestle with, and why many have wondered whether Massively Open Online Course (MOOC) providers will ever become big business — or be around in five years — let alone “transform higher education,” as they’ve so often promised.

Today, one of the biggest MOOC providers on the web, Coursera, showed skeptics that it has indeed found a way to monetize free educational content and may just be on the road to riches. In a blog post this afternoon, Coursera announced that it has raised over $1 million for paid certifications, which verify that students passed (an otherwise free) online college course.

For those unfamiliar, Coursera partners with top-tier universities — more than 83 institutions on board — to make their classes and lectures available online, for anyone in the world to consume. The company burst onto the scene with millions of dollars in backing from big names, and ever since its buzzy debut has been dogged by questions over whether or not MOOCs will ever be able to make enough money to justify $65 million-worth of venture capital.

In July, Coursera added a significant round of funding (bringing its total to $65 million), saying that it would use its new capital to develop mobile apps and increase its presence internationally (among other things). Of course, with so much capital and so many investors now on board, Coursera’s road to monetization and profitability became that much steeper.

The news today is reason enough for optimism, especially considering how quickly it has been able to turn a new feature into $1 million in revenue. The startup unveiled “Signature Track” back in January — a program that has been designed to allow students to earn “Verified Certificates” for a small fee.

Through Signature Track, students are able to verify the work they complete on Coursera, with the idea being to supplement the value of the work students do on the platform. While this represented Coursera’s first step (really, tiptoe) into credentialing and doesn’t include credit toward a degree program, it does give students something tangible to prove that they’ve completed the course and know the material.

While $1 million every nine months wouldn’t pay back their total $65 million in investment, there’s every reason to believe that there are many more students who would pay for this service. First, beyond being nine months old, Signature Track really hasn’t been aggressively promoted. Second, Coursera is quickly expanding to more universities, both in the U.S. and around the world.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, tech companies are exploring an alliance that would weight these types of certificates as equal to a college degree in the hiring process. While this Alliance is still very much in the nascent stages of development, if MOOC providers like Coursera and Udacity are able to come together with the Googles and Apples of the world to develop some kind of standard, it could have big implications for higher education.

In the future, we could see these platforms (and others that are sure to launch in the interim, like MOOC.org, for example) allow students to mix and match classes from MOOC and traditional universities, with MOOC providers offering some kind of paid certificate to its students.

There are, of course, many very valid concerns that need to be discussed as MOOCs, tech companies, startups and schools themselves rush to integrate technology and tear down the ivory walls around traditional higher education. Questions like these are becoming increasingly important to ponder: Are MOOCs best used as a platform for continuing education — to re-train, brush up on subjects and for general edification purposes — or as a viable alternative (or even replacement) for the traditional college degree?

For now, it’s the former, but as Coursera and others plow more time, resources and capital into their Signature Track-style programs, the more they will compete with campuses, institutions themselves — and the diploma. This is a great thing for education in the long run, as long as Coursera and MOOC providers aren’t just content with the bar set by traditional education, but look to push that bar higher. That’s what we want to pay for, and that’s what will shape the next big education technology business — not just a digital version of the same old thing.

Life is hard for famous people. You’re trying to @ reply with your celebrity friends on Twitter, but the conversation gets drowned out by rabid fans and spammers mentioning you. So Twitter’s begun rolling out to people with verified profiles two new filters for the Connect tab. Filtered, which attempts to cut down spam, and Verified, which only shows interactions with other verified profiles.

Twitter noted the rollout earlier today and you can see them below in this screenshot, though.

Keeping celebrities active and happy on Twitter is a big business for the company, which just filed its S-1 to go public today. Celebrities and their tweets are a big draw for users, who visit Twitter to absorb the latest updates from the actors, athletes, musicians, and other famous folk they love. Twitter capitalizes on that engagement with ad views, so the more celebs enjoy Twitter, the more money it makes.

[Image Credit: Jimmy Kimmel]

Today Microsoft announced that it has added IMAP support to its Outlook.com webmail product. Outlook.com has over 400 million active users according to Microsoft, making it not only one of the most popular webmail services around.

Why IMAP? Demand, likely, and the fact that Microsoft wants developers to take a keener interest in its little email program. In a blog post announcing the move, Microsoft noted that “some devices and apps that haven’t made the upgrade to [Exchange Active Sync]” and that “IMAP is widely supported on feature phones and other email clients such as those on a Mac.” So, it built it in.

Outlook.com is a viable Gmail alternative, though one that I fault for lacking a single feature (Priority Inbox, which I cannot live without), but it’s still worth noting that Microsoft managed to build a product that people tend to honestly dig. That’s in contrast to the Hotmail dog days.

Outlook.com also supports OAuth, which allows for simple integration into other apps. It isn’t clear how many applications and things of that sort are currently integrated with Outlook.com, though the potential could be sizable given its massive user base.

Outlook.com did fine on its own — 1 million users in its first day of life, and so forth — but it was when Microsoft folded the entire Hotmail user base into its roles that it became titanic in size.

Finally, a note on something social. I first heard that IMAP support was coming to Outlook.com the same way as a great number of other folks today, on Reddit. The Outlook.com team held another Reddit question session today (an “AMA” in nerd parlance) that was, in fact, great. Answering questions honestly is always refreshing. If you want a look at how to Reddit properly, this is it.

Top Image Credit: Bogdan Suditu

The official Arduino IDE is a dour piece of software designed for uploading code to the ubiquitous and super-cool micro controller. It is a standalone, non-networked app that isn’t very pretty to look at. But what if you want to share code and upload programs right from your browser? That’s where CodeBender.cc comes in.

CodeBender is a browser-based IDE that supports uploading to nearly any Arduino board. You can use the program to copy sample code, browse code uploaded by other users, and even store private snippets. Because it is collaborative you can clone bits of code and use it in your own projects and there is even a curated list of cool snippets.

Founded by Vasilis Georgitzikis and Alexandros Baltas, the site came out of LAUNCHub, a European seed fund. ” It all started by my frustration as a computer engineer who was used to advanced development tools, only to lose them when I moved to coding for Arduino, and my frustration as an Arduino instructor on various hackerspaces around the world, when I spent 2.5 hours of each 3 hour workshop just to install the damned thing,” said Georgitzikis.

“We’ve also developed a technology that allows our users to program and control a network-enabled Arduino (i.e. Arduino Ethernet) through the network, straight through the browser using pure HTML5 technologies (i.e. WebSockets), which enables remote programming of IoT devices,” he said.

The system handles compilation and error reporting and ensures that the code you upload to your Arduino won’t break your project. Unlike sites like Circuits.io, this system doesn’t just simulate projects it allows for full control of your Arduino hardware right from the browser. Maybe this system will finally enable me to dig out my Arduino boards and actually do something.

Happy Post-Disrupt Day, super troopers. I trust you are rehydrated and back at work. A pity. While we were watching Zuckerberg knock the U.S. government for misbehaving while others managed to toss the Constitution out with the PayPal water, Microsoft put together and released a new Surface promotion: Trade in your iPad, get mad store credit.

The gist is that if you have an iPad 2, 3, or 4 that is “gently” used, Microsoft will give you no less than $200 in store credit. And once you jettison that tablet, you’ll want another, right? Guess what? Microsoft wants to sell you one of its own.

This is the case because Microsoft has far too many Surface 1.0 models in stock. The promotion lasts for about a month. This means that we won’t see a new Surface until likely after October 27, when the trade-in campaign ends.

The title of this post is minor exaggeration – however, as the cost of a new Surface RT tablet hybrid is $349, and the least possible price for your Apple tablet is $200, the delta ‘twixt the two is small. Therefore, get rid of that old, soggy iPad and move to the Surface. It will make Redmond happy.

In reality, you probably have several tablets. If you want a new toy, you now have an option. Keep in mind, though, that Microsoft has sent out public invites to its Big Shiny New Surface Event, so whatever you get now is about to be made passé.

Top Image Credit: Vernon Chan

The E-P5 may look straight out of the ’60s, but it’s the newest and fastest addition to the Olympus PEN lineup of cameras.

Curiator, a new app launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, is not the first website that aims for people to discover and buy art, but it hopes its beautiful design, interactivity, and intelligent algorithms will mean that it will be the first to actually work.

As co-founder Moenen Erbuer sees it, the art world was one of the earliest industries to take advantage of the growth of the Internet; but as we have seen time and again in technology, sometimes being an early mover is not always the best position. “The online art world is stuck in 1995,” he says simply. Indeed, before I turned my attention to the world of technology, I worked for an art magazine, and I remember all too well the clunky websites full of too-heavy image files, glitchy marketplace joint ventures full of false purchases and dodgy work, and “galleries” of digital-specific art that too often bore little relation to beautiful work that you could see, if you could make a trip to a gallery in the flesh. It wasn’t pretty.

Co-founded by former Google engineer Tobias Boonstoppel and Erbuer — who himself comes from a background in design working at digital agency AKQA — Curiator is made with all the polish and savviness that you would expect from people who know both how the Internet works, and what makes people click with digital content.

Taking a page from Pinterest with its Masonry layout and dynamic grid, Curiator borrows in other ways from some of the later innovations in how many visually led e-commerce sites pick up information about new users: It initially takes the user through a page where it asks you to make a selection that you like from a page of options. Curiator then uses this to produce a wider selection of work that you may like, which becomes the basis of your collection. As with other social media services, you can follow other people’s collections, and others can follow you, or you can browse art by categories, specific names or through the whole river.

One of the most eye-catching parts of the site is its sharing tool. When you see a picture you like, you click on it and drag. Up comes a menu on the picture that lets you drop the image directly into your own collection; or to share it to Facebook, Google+, Twitter or Pinterest; or to download the image; or send it by email. It’s a nice way of making it very easy to move picture data around.

The social aspects, both with sharing work and also following people and being followed, is part of what sets Curiator apart from what it views as its closest competitor, Artsy, which Moenen describes as “having gone all-in on a recommendation engine and too focused on sales.”

For now, Curiator is focused mainly on getting more people on its site, uploading pictures, sharing them and adding them to their collections. This will help make the site not only richer for everyone to use, but will help Curiator pick up more data on what users want to have. This, in turn, will help Curiator with the next step in its development: adding a marketplace so that users can not only share artwork that they like to have in their “virtual” collections but also then use those “wishlists” — which may include museum pieces and other work that is not for sale — to generate lists of art that is there for the buying to become a part of users’ actual, offline lives.

The impetus for Curiator comes from two different areas. The first was Moenen and Boonstoppel’s own experiences, and those of their friends, in trying to collect art.

“A lot of people who have made a little money start buying art, but it’s an intimidating institution, going to galleries, fairs and auction houses. You see something you like, but don’t know if the price is right, or if it’s any good. If you’re not serious about art already, it’s hard to be confident about your own taste,” Moenen explained. He says that some people resort to hiring consultants, but that’s not to everyone’s taste. Others look to their friends to see what they buy. “So we decided, could we create a product that does both of those things, but for everyone?”

The other is that the two have dabbled in other projects before where people could send links to each other, which, when opened, created a way to let you track what that friend browsed via that link. This gave them ideas about how they could apply those learnings in a single site, even though none of that earlier code is being used in Curiator.

So far, in its limited beta, Curiator has seen some decent traction for the site, with a 17 percent retention rate, with many more people contributing work than they had anticipated. Users can either upload through the site, or use a Curiator bookmarklet to collect works from around the web.

There are no plans “ever” to add features like advertising to monetize the site, Moenen says. “We want the interface to be like a museum. When you start to put in ads, quality control is a challenge.”

Check out the video below, and also some questions from the judges:

Questions from the judges:

What kinds of sales do you plan to host on the site, when you launch them? Referral sales, getting a commission from sales from galleries, will be an opportunity. The other will be Curiator acting as a dealer or agent for artists. The third will be offering a platform for art owners to sell their own collections.

How do you deal with provenance and other kinds of authenticity questions on sales? We will cross that bridge when we come to it.

Is this aimed for total novices or experts? Ideally we want both using this.

Who do you see as your biggest competition, and how do you for example battle Pinterest? Amazon, Pinterest, Artsy are competitors. Pinterest is not specifically for art. And we have special ways of indexing users and artists.

Today, crowdfunding platform Kickstarter announced that it is going Down Under. It is opening up its network to Australia and New Zealand-based projects “in the very near future.” The move comes just two days after the site opened its doors to Canada, and comes some months after it went to its first market outside the U.S., the United Kingdom.

The move is an important one for Kickstarter, which is one of the more popular platforms but competes against sites like Indiegogo, which positions itself as “international” by nature.

Kickstarter, which has funded over 48,000 projects and raised $780 million, has yet to launch an official presence in non-English speaking countries, although as you can see from searches such as this one for France, there are still a number of projects already underway in that country, anyway.

The difference when Kickstarter launches a local presence is that those posting projects can accept pledges in local currencies — although those pledging, as before, can come from anywhere. As with other international launches, it’s likely to guess that Kickstarter will keep fees consistent. Currently Kickstarter takes a 5% fee on funded projects and no fee on those that don’t meet their goals. Processing fees for pledges, meanwhile, are also at 5% plus some cents for those under a certain amount (in Canada, for example,

Yes, Kickstarter will charge a 5% fee to successfully funded projects and no fee to unsuccessfully funded projects in Canada.

Payment processing fees for Canada-based projects are similar to those for UK projects. For Canada-based projects that just launched, the processing fees are 5% + $0.05 CAD for those pledges less than C$10, and 3% + C$0.20 for those greater.

The increased local focus should give Kickstarter a kickstart Down Under. Currently in Australia there are only 41 projects listed for Australia, for example.

Feed.fm just launched at Disrupt SF as part of the Startup Battlefield — and if the service takes off, you may soon be hearing a lot more music on your favorite websites and apps.

Co-founder and CEO Jeff Yasuda is already familiar with the music business. He launched music services Fuzz.com and Blip.fm (which both had some struggles), and he continues to operate both sites under the umbrella of a new company, Feed Media. But as the name suggests, Yasuda expects Feed.fm to become the main business.

When I met with him last week, Yasuda alternately described Feed.fm as “music as a service” and as “Stripe for music.” The goal, he said, is to take all the complication out of music licensing. Normally, if a website owner or an app developer wanted to use licensed music, they’d have to find a lawyer, try to understand SoundExchange, manage the payments, and more. Now, they can just pay Feed.fm a monthly fee and add the service’s stations to their site or app. They can also build stations from their own personal collections. And Feed.fm offers an analytics dashboard and A/B testing so publishers can quantify that the music is improving engagement and see how their visitors are engaging with the music.

Behind the scenes, Feed.fm handles all the complicated details, paying the standard, government-mandated fees for Internet radio. (Yasuda said he’s also trying to develop direct relationships with record labels.) The service starts at $25 a month, with pricing going up based on the number of tracks played.

Yasuda added that Feed.fm can also integrate with other platforms — and in fact, it’s already live with Shopify customers and and has launched a WordPress plugin.

But do people really want to hear music everywhere online? I was a little skeptical since I’m the kind of person who browses the web with my computer on mute, and Yasuda himself acknowledged that people sometimes turn off the music when they play games. The problem, he suggested, is that the music often isn’t very good. By tapping into Feed.fm’s library of nearly 1 million tracks (plus, as I mentioned, any music in their personal collections), that’s less likely to be a problem.

Music, Yasuda said, is a great way to make users feel more engaged. In fact, he suggested that Feed.fm is one of the few ways that publishers can improve engagement by just paying a small fee. Otherwise, he said, “You can buy an audience with advertising and you can buy retention to some extent with retargeting, but you cannot buy engagement.”

He had some data to back this up, saying that in early tests, websites integrating Feed.fm saw average time spent on site increase by 20 percent to 400 percent, and some saw spending go up by as much as 20 percent.

Sites that are already using Feed.fm include the University of California’s research Tumblr, Foreign Cinema, Frampton’s Guitar Circus, and Fuzz BlackJack.

Not that music will make sense on every site. He suggested that it will work best when there’s a clear, targeted audience, allowing the publisher to pick or build stations that are right for that audience. A broader e-commerce site would have a harder time with that.

Feed Media has raised $1.2 million in funding led by Allegro Venture Partners, with participation from Core Venture Partners, CrunchFund (which, like TechCrunch, was founded by Michael Arrington), Cornice Ventures, Operators Fund, Streamlined Ventures, and individual angel investors.

Feed.fm is offering free trials for a limited time to users who use the code CAPNCRUNCH.

Question & Answer With Judges

Can you share more details about your pricing and how you avoid the struggles of other music startups?

“Most importantly, we focus on customers that are actually making money.”

I like the analytics. Is that what’s going to differentiate you, or is it the ease of use, or is it the collection of music?

“Our customers drive this.” Many customers asked for more details about how people interact with the content, what songs are being shared or skipped, what songs are playing when sales happen, and more.

I’m skeptical that people want a noisy web and this seems like the equivalent of Muzak in stores — but the metrics are impressive. How would someone actually convince visitors to turn the music on?

Some companies blog about it. With other companies, the music is “ingrained in what they are” and “seep into the look of the product” — they don’t have to promote it aggressively because it’s “part of the DNA.”

Can this turn into a giant Play button on the site?

Some brands want a big radio that sits in the middle of the site, others are more subtle.

What kind of music should an early stage venture capital firm play on their site?

[laughs] Classical.

We are seekers. We always want something new to experience, but the iTunes Store is sorely missing social ways to discover music, movies, TV, and books. Bitcovery fills the gap. Add friends whose taste your respect, see what media they’re sharing or saving, check out what’s trending, preview the content, and buy it in Bitcovery for iOS, which just launched on stage in the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield.

You’d think someone would have nailed this by now, but alas. GoodReads was great for books and Spotify’s not bad at music, but no one has succesfully tackled media discovery holistically.

“In the past, a friend would come to my house, look at my CD collection or books on my bookshelf and see what I’m listening to or reading. But now the problem is that our books and music are trapped in our devices” Bitcovery founder Raj Lalwani tells me. He’s set out to make our collections discoverable again.

Open up Bitcovery and you’ll see a Pinterest-style grid of hot content, sliced into tabs for music, movies, books, and tv, plus sections for New, Trending, and All-Time. Tap an album and you can preview all the songs right from within the app — no bouncing back and forth to the iTunes Store until you’re ready to buy. That makes it quick to sample a ton of content and find what scratches your itch.

Really, these chart-based discovery features just expand on what’s already in the iTunes Store. What could make Bitcovery shine is its social features. Like and save your favorite content to keep track of it and share it with friends, then use your phone’s address book to follow your savviest buddies and get their picks.

The company was founded by Lalwani, who previously built Social Calendar. That Facebook app was at one point the 19th most popular app on the social network, and ended up being acquired by Walmart Labs. Lalwani has raised $300,000 from Play And Play Venture Group to build Bitcovery.

The app is far from perfect. Bitcovery’s design is drab, there are too many buttons and features on each screen, purchases don’t instantly populate in your Bitcovery collection, and it’s hard to know when exactly you’ll get pushed to the iTunes app. Really, I think the world needs a version of Bitcovery for discovering great apps more than another music or book discovery platform.

But if it works, Bitcovery could rack up revenue quickly. It already takes a 7% cut of all purchases made through the app thanks to iTunes affiliate payouts. And Lalwani tells me he believes big music labels, movie studios, and authors would be happy to pay for promotion in the app to vault to the top of the charts.

It might seem simple, but it’s anything but stupid. You could already share photos on Facebook, but Instagram took it to another level with a dedicated social network. Bitcovery wants to do the same for finding digital entertainment.

Download Bitcovery for iOS

What do you get when you put a pair of board gaming geeks who have worked at NVIDIA, Google, LucasArts, and Ubisoft together in the same room? It probably looks like Tangible Play, debuting at Disrupt SF.

Founded by Pramod Sharma and Jerome Scholler this lean startup aims to mix augmented reality, animated graphics, and audio with traditional board game elements. While this idea isn’t new, Sharma believes his team has created something special.

“In terms of social mission – we really think that we are connecting people through games,” he said. “Every time we demo our product to anyone, we hear that its super-cool. I think part of this is uniqueness and simplicity of the product.”

Sharma worked at Google in the book scanning project and spent eight years managing search and infrastructure. Scholler shipped Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter and Force Unleashed 1 and 2 for the 360 and PS3. He also built front-ends for Android. They’ve raised $350,000 this far from a team of angels. The company was part of the recent Stanford’s StartX accelerator group.

They launched their product today at TechCrunch Disrupt.

“About a year ago, the idea started when Pramod realized that his daughter has a lot of physical games / toys with very limited play lifecycle, while the iPad has unlimited entertainment power. We asked ‘How can we bring the long lasting engagement of iPad games to physical games?’” said Scholler.

“Something magical happens when you can grab things in your hand and can have a shared play experience,” he said.

After a bit of experimentation, Sharma used his computer vision experience to build a working prototype that could use the iPad camera to recognize objects and help play games. Scholler designed the game using his experience at Google. The game requires a very simple stand with a little cap that sits on the top of the iPad. The cap contains a mirror which allows the camera to see the playing surface and interact with the physical world.

The games are fairly simple. The box contains a set of parts – blocks, letters, and the like – and the app scans the playing surface for the objects. Each game can recognize certain shapes and, in the case of the word game, you spell words with tiles that you place in front of the iPad. The game app instantly recognizes the letters and displays them on the screen.

“The big innovation of tangible play is the elegant design of iPad accessory and extremely sophisticated computer vision / AI software that works with the accessory. It basically enables the development of whole new category of apps. We decided to focus on games right now but in future it will enable all sort of applications,” said Sharma.

The game will launch with two titles, a word guessing game and a puzzle game called Tangram. In its first incarnation the pair watched a mother and daughter play the world guessing game for an entire hour. They knew they had a hit.

“Our current focus for the project is to launch these two games and then open up the platform,” said Sharma. Once these titles gain a bit of steam, it will be fascinating to see Candy Land powered by robots or Connect Four that watches you in your sleep.

The National Security Agency improperly identified over 15,000 telephone numbers as “suspicious” because there was no one at the agency who understood the rules, according to a scathing court order declassified by the Director of National Intelligence (on Tumblr!).

“The court finds that the government’s failure to ensure that responsible officials adequately understood the NSA’s alert list process, and to accurately report its implementation to the court, has prevented for more than two years both the government and the FISC [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court] from taking steps to remedy daily violations,” wrote Judge Reggie B. Walton.

The court has issued guidelines for what qualifies as “reasonable articulable suspicion”, but there was apparently no one at the agency with complete knowledge of how to apply those rules to suspected telephone numbers.

The declassified court documents were dumped with a requisite cover-our-butt statement from DNI Director, James Clapper. “As demonstrated in these documents, once compliance incidents were discovered in the telephony metadata collection program, additional checks, balances, and safeguards were developed to help prevent future instances of non-compliance.”

As we reported earlier today, another key Republican was calling to defund the NSA’s surveillance authority, so we may see actionable policies soon.

The NSA is designed to protect us from terrorism, so even if it oversteps its bounds, PayPal co-founder Max Levchin says we shouldn’t hate it. That’s diametrically opposed to the sentiment of many in the tech industry, including Michael Arrington who thinks the NSA’s spying doesn’t stop terrorism — it is terrorism.

The argument boils down to America striking a balance between surveillance and what’s sacred. Some stand behind the paraphrased Benjamin Franklin quote “Those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.” Others worry that without a strong offense and defense, terrorism will uproot our way of life. Both are valid.

Levchin lays out his views on the NSA, spying, and why we need to take a deep breath in the video below. An excerpt:

There are several things going on in the NSA controversy and since the conversation I had with Charlie [Rose where he said what the NSA is doing is a good thing], more information has come to light, some of which is definitely distasteful.The thing that I disagreed with vs the popular media is that the NSA is broadly classified as evil. I think it’s ridiculous for a citizen of a country that view his government’s duty to protect me, protect all of us from evil, from harm, from terrorists, from foreign powers meaning ill — to classify a body of government that is designed to figure out what might hit us next and prevent it, throwing them into an evil bucket is just thoughtless.

He has a point. What the NSA is doing may be evil, but the organization as a whole isn’t, necessarily. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t question why this snooping is necessary, and it doesn’t mean we should protest and demand change, but we shouldn’t blindly hate the NSA.

Levchin went on to try to explain that the government spy agency is made up of hard-working people trying to help their country. He explains from his own experience,

“These people are making $40,000 a year. Not because it’s a path to wealth, it’s not a way to get recognized.

In college I applied to the NSA. I couldn’t get accepted because I wasn’t a citizen yet. I was a crypto-nerd. I was very excited about applying crypto-technology for the good of the country I just came to. The one the recruiter was clear about was ‘even though you’ll get paid peanuts, you’ll never achieve fame as a mathematician because you are not allowed to publish anything.’

So fortunately ( or unfortunately depending on how you look at it) I did not go down that road. I built companies for fun and profit. But people who do go down that road — many of them very talented, smart people  – they do it basically out of a sense of duty to make sure nothing blows up in this very room. I think affording them some respect is a good thing. The fact that they want to break my secure sockets layer bothers me. I don’t like that. I don’t think that’s a good thing. I just think that the debate around the NSA has gotten emotional, frequently information-free, and at times, just belligerent for no reason.”

It may be tough to stow our anger. I’ve never felt more distrust in my government than I do now. Dammit I’m mad and something must be done! But taking a more thoughtful, discerning stance on the issue is critical to us fixing things. Indiscriminate hate doesn’t help. We should consider focusing our rage on exorcising the devil practices, rather than demonizing the whole organization that carries them out.

For more on Levchin’s leadership advice, lessons learned from PayPal, and his new startup Glow, which wants to get you pregnant, check out the whole video of his Disrupt talk below:

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Backstage Interview