Category: Tech news

Hello again, tech company voyeurs, and welcome to a new episode of Cribs, the TechCrunch TV series that takes you inside the walls of the industry’s coolest companies to see what it’s really like for the smart whippersnappers who work there.

For this latest episode we headed straight to the heart of San Francisco to the headquarters of Kiip, the startup that runs a rewards-focused mobile advertising network. Kiip is situated in a part of the city that has a lot of auto repair shops — and in fact, the company’s office was a former garage — so there’s certainly a tough industrial theme there that contrasts nicely with the digital realm that Kiip’s products live in.

Check out the video embedded above to see Kiip co-founder and CEO Brian Wong show us all around the inside of the company’s office, which is full of funky street art, interesting places to work and play, and plenty of free motorcycle parking.

Pro-level audio and video software has always been daunting. While the average computer user knows how to operate them in a general sense (the advent of non-linear editing has essentially changed how we think about what we shoot and record) the addition of pro-level features like effects, mixing boards and MIDI instruments may make Trent Reznor drool but frightens bedroom guitarists.

Apple released Logic Pro X a few weeks ago to what I can only describe as quiet fanfare. The reviews spoke most highly of the built-in virtual drummer that can quickly and easily build backing tracks for your compositions and a remote control iPad app that allows for virtual control of your recordings via the tablet. Professionals lauded Apple, wondering if a new version would ever appear at all. However, I wanted to assess how usable this new software was for someone more accustomed to Garage Band and other simpler editors.

Upon opening the app, the new user will find herself in an environment reminiscent of the old game Adventure — you’re in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

The app supports a number of templates, including prepared tracks for electronic music, songwriting and music scoring. Most entry-level users will want songwriting, which supplies eight clean, empty audio tracks or, if you’re the Imagine Dragons type, a pre-set collection of loops, audio and MIDI tracks in the electronic template. To use the app properly, you need a good condenser microphone or a MIDI device like a keyboard. You can also use the iPad app as a sort of mini-keyboard to input MIDI music.

As with any computer program, the old adage “Garbage In, Garbage Out” is true here. If your tracks are difficult to hear or your inputs are too low — that is your microphone isn’t picking up enough audio — you’re going to have a bad track. There are multiple effects and techniques for fixing audio in the app, but good recording technique is important.

There are multiple types of tracks in Logic Pro X, including audio recordings, MIDI and loops. Upon installation the app downloads 2 gigabytes of amazingly useful loops and fills, including music familiar to users of GarageBand, as well as sound effects like ticking clocks, comical horns and crowds. For example, while piecing together a set of audio interviews I was able to create a little transition between speakers by adding a ticking stopwatch and the sound of a crowded bar that matched the sound bed of the interview perfectly. This could have been done quite easily in GarageBand, to be sure, but the speed and feature set of Logic Pro gave me a larger, more expansive palette with which to work.

That, in short, is the biggest difference between entry-level apps and Logic. The sheer number of controls and editor tricks essentially turns this into a portable, professional recording studio for $199. Bouncing tracks to disk — that is, “rendering” them the same way you render video — results in some of the highest-quality recording I’ve ever done on my Mac, and that’s high praise.

What does it sound like? First, please understand that I’m a horrible guitarist and only now getting better. That said, here is a guitar demo of a Squier electric with built-in DSP that outputs directly as a USB device. I started with the bass line — that squawk in the background — and then added a few power chords over it. These were both audio recordings. I then looped the bass line and added a drummer track which quickly “listened” to the music and added applicable rhythms. It was surprisingly simple to record and export the entire song to SoundCloud using the share function. I recorded it on a brand-new iMac, and rendering time for the audio took a few minutes.

Next we have a charming little techno song that I wrote in approximately five minutes. Because the loops can be transposed to any key, I selected a few MIDI and digital recordings and tuned them to C Major. The drums were looped in first then the little techno dance weirdness. The electric piano you here is a MIDI file. One version of the file is played in an instrument called Crystal Pad, and the other one is in Mellow Poly. I offset them slightly and added some strings and a synth to the end. I didn’t have to know the BPM of each drum track — the samples automatically set themselves to the proper speed. It was so surprisingly easy that I couldn’t help but feel a bit pleased with my bad self. I rendered this on a new MacBook Pro and it too took a few minutes.

As this is a look at the app from a newbie’s perspective I urge you to visit electronic music sites where actual studio-savvy folks may have more to say. However, Logic Pro X is clearly plenty powerful without being overwhelming.

Should you upgrade? When I first used Logic in about 2009, the app was akin to the cockpit of a fighter jet circa 1990. There were plenty of computer controls and other gewgaws to make things easier on the pilot, but you were still going to crash on take-off if you couldn’t read the dials correctly. I would equate Pro X with the cockpit of the new Dreamliner, all easy-to-use, touchscreen-inspired controls with just enough complexity to please the old timers and a simplicity that will encourage new users to jump right in. Given that I probably couldn’t have created those two bits of music in an earlier version of Logic, I would say that Apple was successful at dumbing things down just enough for idiots like me.

What could Apple do differently? Not much without alienating long-time professional users. The banks of dials and controls are important for serious audio tweakers, and musicians will appreciate the amount of control they have over every instrument. Because the app is so similar to other multi-track audio apps I’ve used, I was able to dive in right away without having to look at a bank of sliders or understand the various icons. A bit of exploration brings up far more customization and therefore beyond my ken, including the ability to control a cleverly designed robotic drummer system that gives each percussionist a charming, hipster name like Aiden, Anders and Max (with an anarchy symbol for the A, naturally). In short, Apple has turned this into an app that will please long-time users while still paving a path for GarageBand converts.

Singers and guitarists will also enjoy the Flex Time recording features like pitch and timing correction. With the right microphones you could record a studio-class album using these tools with little more than a guitar and your rebel spirit. A guitarist friend of mine commented when he saw some of the features that he “wished he’d had these tools in high school.”

“Although,” he added, “I’d probably have never gone to class.”

All is not sunshine and roses in this redesigned app. It is still daunting, and without an understanding of the terminology things can get rough. The small buttons next to each track, M, S, R, and I, stand for Mute, Solo, Record, and Input Monitoring. If you didn’t know that, you’d be at a loss to explain how to mute individual tracks without turning down the volume setting. In addition the ability to create stacks with individual tracks is a bit confusing until you realize stacks are simply containers for a few tracks – say a backing bassline and drum track that you want to use over and over or a large orchestral section over which you want granular control. You can turn these stacks up and down like single tracks and even reuse them in other projects.

Like most other pro-level tools, I’m sure I’ll hear from users who will complain that Logic is overblown or unusable, referring instead to their ability to record 20-piece jazz bands using a Tascam 8-track digital recorder and Sony’s Acid (my musician friend can do this and more using software he hasn’t updated since the early 2000s). That said, I consider tools like Logic to be equivalent to typewriters in the 1960s: You could find a better one if you looked, but sometimes an Olivetti portable with just the right amount of key travel was exactly what you needed, and all of them got the job done.

What advice can I offer the newbie at Logic? Get a good microphone — I have a Blue Microphones Yeti but you can find something similar — and MIDI keyboard. That, in short, is all you need to get started. Then follow the directions to Carnegie Hall, and practice, practice, practice. I’ve decided to move from GarageBand to this version of Logic in order to edit our podcasts and my occasional forays into songwriting, and I would argue that this would have been impossible in the previous version of the app. The complexity was just too daunting and those twisty little passages, all alike, were too dark for my meager lamp to illuminate. Now, by fitful torchlight, I can attempt to use the app the way the pros use it and, most important (and at the risk of mixing games), I’m in no danger of being eaten by a Grue.

After your laundry has been pressed and folded for you. After you’ve been driven to and fro in black cars, and flown in black jets. After you shopped online for weekends on end.

After you’ve had your house cleaned, and dog walked, and food delivered. After you’ve messaged your friends for the millionth time. After you’ve figured out where the best place to vacation is, and what airline will get you there. After you’ve decided between five-star hotels or staying in a quirky downtown loft. After you’ve boated and biked and hiked and used up all those spa coupons. After you’ve organized and updated your music collection, and checked out all the new releases, and built a hundred playlists. After you’ve streamed all your favorite shows on demand, and filled up your e-reader with titles. After you’ve recorded your steps and breaths and dreams. After you’ve uploaded your dog’s health data into the cloud. After you’ve video-chatted and second-screened. After you’ve tweeted and retweeted. After you’ve posted, reblogged and liked. After you’ve beaten that level.

After you’ve bought another tablet and another phone and a new computer and that thing that’s still in beta.

Will you have any free time to build something for the rest of us?

It’s just so great that a small percentage of people believe that the toughest challenge we face today is that we haven’t figured out how to effectively share our iPhone photos (we have: it’s called email), or we can’t seem to find new art to hang on the walls of our beautiful houses.

But far outside the Valley, there are families who are buying their first computer, and it’s a smartphone. And they didn’t wait in line for it. They walked in the store and got the cheapest one that “has the Internet” and “lets you do email” and “has a few games.”

They walked in the store and got the cheapest one that “has the Internet” and “lets you do email” and “has a few games.”

Some of these are the same people who are trying not to lose their homes, or who are working two or more jobs. They are planning grocery and clothing budgets and fretting over how to pay for bills and college educations. They’re paying off credit cards and student loans. They’re clipping coupons and deal hunting. While technology is no longer inaccessible and unfathomable to them the way it was in the IT-controlled era, it’s also not seen as the answer to every problem.

Mainly because they have problems that technology is still failing to solve.

Do you know what it’s like to apply for jobs right now, for example? It’s a nightmare. You browse through a decent-enough aggregator like Indeed.com, sign up for alerts and save the ones you like. But when you click through to apply, each company’s website has its own complex system requiring manual entry of everything you already have detailed on your resume and cover letter. Sometimes you can upload your resume and it can import some of the times, places and job titles — which it inevitably gets wrong. Other times you click “Next” over and over to correct mistakes, such as the previously unmet password requirements, or selecting the response you had missed from one of the dozens of drop-down boxes, or putting a date or your phone number in their preferred format.

And then, when you finally get through, you’ll find that you’re only one page in out of a 10-page job application process. What hell! As if this is the only company where you’re trying to find work, and not one of a hundred you’ll probably apply to over the next few weeks. (Really, just because Apply with LinkedIn exists doesn’t mean everyone is using it — or even that, eventually, everyone will.)

And hey, did you know that you can actually walk into grocery stores and walk out with free food, but the only people documenting what’s basically a hackable loophole in the couponing system is an assortment of mommy bloggers who have the free time needed to sit at home and clip, print and stack and match coupons? I mean, that seems like something more people would get into if it weren’t so labor-intensive.

Oh, and do you know how tough it is to truly evaluate nearby schools, caregivers, extracurriculars and activities, because it’s all Yelp reviews and flawed rating systems and word-of-mouth? (Nah, probably not — because your Yelp reviews are to die for, aren’t they?)

And did you know that some of those debt-consolidation companies are actually trying to scam people?

Do you have any idea how much gas costs today?

Or mobile data?

I’m thousands of miles from Silicon Valley, and know people who have lost their homes, and who are working two jobs that barely total the income of their previous one. I also know what it’s like to live on a fixed income, where a subscription-based anything is considered luxury.

I know there are people who don’t think that $1,000 or $10,000 or $100,000 or even hundreds of thousands of dollars is a lot of money, but I also know people who don’t even have a bank account. I know people whose entire lives could be changed with someone else’s annual shoe budget.

These aren’t just the working poor, or the homeless guy you step over until he can help you test your new iPhone app beta. They’re regular people. Friends, family, neighbors, employees, colleagues. (Maybe they can’t afford the rent where you live, so you haven’t met them yet?) Some are college graduates with years of experience. Some have industry-specific skills instead. Some are trying to balance raising children and working from home. You can call them the normals if you want, but they’re really just people who are living lives accompanied by technology rather than obsessed by it. And they’ll care when you build something that matters to them.

Another ex-Googler/Facebooker/Appler/Yahooer-backed mobile photo-sharing application is probably not that something. 

But whatever, right?

Why build a better way to apply for jobs for the un-LinkedIn? Why worry about how people can get out of debt more quickly, or figure out their student loans? Why solve boring problems like helping companies provide better health insurance for employees? Or helping people find good schools or good doctors? Or help to crowdsource saving for a child’s future? Or help people’s families back home eat? Why worry yourselves with the exorbitant cost of mobile data? Or providing a home for the bullied and sad and scared to find support? Why build cars that don’t crash? Or even work on something harder like launching ships into space or saving lives through data mining?

It would be so much cooler to build the next Facetasnapchatwittergram. After all, you might make a billion dollars anyway just by repurposing the same old social friending/following model for a particular niche (Facebook for X) or iterating on the feature set (but the photos disappear!).

Look, it’s not that everyone has to solve the everyman or everywoman’s problem or, god forbid, change the world. It’s just that some of you can and you choose not to.

Plain vanilla tastes fine, and it’s so much harder to invent new flavors when the world you live in is so inexplicably struggle-free and creamy smooth that you have to invent solutions to the things that aren’t really problems, but just a function of being alive and human, employed and not starving to death. Things like ordering a drink at a bar. Or wearing clean clothes. Or taking a picture with a smartphone and sending it to someone.

The best technology makes computing effortless and accessible to more people. It improves lives and pushes humanity forward the way the invention of the personal computer and web once did. And yeah, maybe sometimes it reminds us of things we read in sci-fi novels or seem to function like magic. It’s not cliché to say that’s what we should aspire to. Technology transforms dated business models and makes things obsolete. It flattens hierarchies and gives people voices. It connects and corrupts and dissolves and erodes the past. At its best, it is a remarkable, world-changing thing. At its worst, it is just another thing.

I was promised flying cars and moon colonies.

Maybe there is only one guy capable of building flying cars (or electromagnetic tube transport, if we’re being specific). But I doubt it.

And if you’re not building something akin to flying cars, then I’d settle for something practical.

If you’ve got an Android device running version 4.2 or later, chances are you’ve tried capturing a photo sphere — one of those nifty little 360-degree panoramas that let you spin around to capture your surroundings until vertigo sets in. Instead of just letting those photo spheres languish on your phone or on your Google+ account, though, Google has thought up something awfully keen for them.

You know what I’m getting at (the headline was probably hint enough). Google has fired up a new Views page that lets users tie their photo spheres to specific locations for when static maps and satellite fly-bys just aren’t immersive enough.

The process is simple enough: once you’re logged in to Google+ and mosey over to the Views page, you’re given the option to import all of the photo spheres stored in your Google+ account. Haven’t uploaded them to Google+ yet? That’s fair — you can upload them to Google Maps straight from the stock Android gallery app, too. Google Product Manager Evan Rapoport also confirmed that users who share those photo spheres will also be able to view them from their own Views user page, which looks a little something like this. As you’d expect, you’ve got easy access to a grid of all your photo spheres, but a single click lets you pull out into a wider map view to see where all of those spheres were captured.

It’s all rather neat, but to be quite honest it’s about time Google managed to make the whole photo sphere experience meatier. Sure, they’re easy enough to shoot, and the end results are generally pretty impressive, but users were always fairly limited with what they could do with those photo spheres after the fact. At least now users who have dedicated themselves to creating awesome photo spheres (I’m sure there are more than a few people who fall into that category) have a centralized spot to show off some of their most impressive work. Of course, it’s not hard to see how Google benefits from this.

As intrepid as Google’s crew of drivers and trekkers are, there’s only so much in terms of resources the company can devote to making the world’s varying locales accessible from a web browser. Now that it’s easier for folks to share their photo spheres, Google can now theoretically serve up on-the-ground views of any (human-accessible) location in the new Google Maps. I wouldn’t expect Google to get terribly far in that endeavor until Android 4.2′s adoption figures swell a bit, but it’s certainly something to keep an eye out for.

Rover, the Airbnb of dog sitting, has raised a $3.5 million funding round led by Petco. The pet specialty giant, now one of Rover’s largest investors, will be joining the site’s board of directors. The two are at work on commercial promotion of Rover across Petco’s lines of business.

Rover CEO Aaron Easterly told us that this fundraising is more of an ancillary round than an official series. The important thing, he said, is the strategic relationship with a leading pet supplies retailer.

“When we were in our early stages we talked with people at Petco. We thought we had very similar philosophies on how the pet business was evolving,” Easterly said. “We had similar values, so we agreed to stay in touch. We rekindled that conversation after our Series B, as we were a little more mature and had a lot of growth to point to.”

Easterly said that the site’s biggest growth challenge and greatest opportunity is the 90 percent of dog owners that do not use commercial solutions for housing their dogs while they are away. Easterly derived this stat by looking at the existing market size in the American Pet Products Association National Pet Owner’s Survey and comparing it to an estimate of how big the market would be if all dog owners used a commercial service when they traveled. This is calculated by using Census data on households, the National Pet Owner’s Survey, and U.S. Travel Association.

Most of this 90 percent of people don’t even think to look for a service like Rover, Easterly said, and instead turn to family and friends for dog sitting. It’s a visibility problem that Rover has thus far sought to rectify with mass-media campaigns in TV and radio, and that promotion by Petco could go a long way in alleviating.

Although Rover faces competition from similar sites like DogVacay, Easterly said that their true competitors are those family and friend dog sitters.

Rover’s 150,000-person member base is relatively broad, but it does skew older than one might expect of a startup: Their biggest single demographic group is women aged 35-45. This is the group that sees itself as pet parents rather than pet owners and cares about whether their dog gets to sleep in a bed, Easterly said. These owners may be more likely to spend extra money on their pets, but at an average price of $30 a night, Rover is within most dog owners’ means.

This is Petco’s first investment in an early-stage, offline company, Petco VP of Business Development Ted Root tells us. Working with Rover is an opportunity to grow the service side of their offerings, which already includes in-store grooming and vaccinations.

“We believe that there’s rapid growth opportunity in certain slices of the service segment in the pet specialty arena,” Root says. “There are lots of mature services like grooming and things along those lines but boarding is highly fragmented… We see the opportunity to take advantage of a formalization of this super fragmented market where people have leaned on friends and family for a long time.”

Rover specifically complements Petco’s Pooch Hotels, daycare and boarding locations where dogs can play with each other. Dog owners want variety in their overnight options, and Rover is helping Petco deliver that. The involvement with Rover also provides another online growth avenue to Petco, which is strong in its brick-and-mortar presence.

The commercial evidence of the Petco partnership will become visible in the next few months, Easterly says, although he did not provide specifics on what that will look like beyond Petco offering Rover’s services to its customers.

Although Petco will be its main focus in the coming months, Rover also plans to release its Android app soon, as it is currently only available for iPhone. The mobile apps are primarily focused on keeping pet owners in contact with their pooches while they are away, through photo sharing and text communication.

Rover raised $7 million in Series B funding led by Foundry Group last February after closing a $3.4 million round led by Madrona Venture Group in April 2012.

Opera today detailed a proposal for NEX, the Navigator Extension format, a new vendor-neutral browser extension packaging format that it hopes to turn into a future W3C standard for packaging cross-browser, add-on development.

Currently, Chromium-based browsers use Google’s CRX format for delivering browser extensions. Opera, which recently switched to Chromium, says it developed NEX to “find a solution that would allow us to extend the Chromium CRX feature set without compromising the current ecosystem that has grown up around that format.” Because of this, NEX is basically a super-set of the CRX environment that developers are already using today. It supports a majority of the standard Chromium APIs for browser extensions, as well as Opera’s Speed Dial API. By default, Opera will also continue to run many CRX-based extensions.

Opera notes that its competitor Mozilla is currently driving the standards work on normalizing the packaging and manifest format for browser add-ons, and the company clearly wants to play a more prominent role in this process.

For users, Opera says, an open standard like NEX would allow them to switch browsers without being locked in to one specific vendor just because an extension they really need is only available on one browser. For developers, the company argues, this system would make their lives “easier and promotes shared innovation [that] continues to produce a healthy, competitive web ecosystem.”

The company also hopes that this kind of work will “make engaging at a shared System Applications API level much more useful [for browser vendors] – since the outcome of such discussions would likely make the lives of web developers easier while developing browser add-ons in the future.”

Sam Brin, 26-year old younger brother of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, has spent the last few months in a bit of borrowed office space with college pal Jon Li quietly building a startup of their own.

Lest you get too excited about the possibility of a bit of brotherly rivalry: Sam and Jon aren’t setting out to build a search engine. They aren’t building an ad platform. They aren’t building their own pair of crazy controversial robo-glasses.

Nay, they’re working on something Google hasn’t gone (and presumably won’t go) anywhere near: restaurant menus.

Sam And Jon’s company, Butter Systems (part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2013 class), wants to put a tablet at your table. The tablet would supplant (or augment) a restaurant’s paper menu, allowing customers to order food and drinks, or request their check without having to flag down a server. They’re quick to clarify that they’re not trying to replace the server — they’re just trying to make the server’s life easier, while bumping up the amount that restaurants pull in per table. As Sam put it, “We want to increase sales by making it easier to order more, all while keeping that human touch.”

When a customer is seated, an Android tablet will be waiting at the table. They’re free to order from their server as they normally would — but if their server is busy helping others or is otherwise unavailable, the tablet serves as the next best option. On the tablet is Butter’s own fully customizable digital menu system, running in a locked-down, Menu-only mode that makes it challenging for the curious tinkerer to use the device for any unintended purposes. Butter provides the tablets, prepped and ready to take orders out of the box.

Once you’re done eating, a “Check Please!” button lets the server know that you’re ready for the bill. There is no method for paying for the meal directly through the app at the moment, a decision they made to further maintain that aforementioned human aspect of going to a restaurant.

On the restaurant’s side, orders come in by way of a counterpart app running on a tablet next to the POS. When an order arrives, it flashes red until someone on the waitstaff looks it over and confirms it before sending it off to the kitchen — that way, a customer can’t accidentally order 55 steak dinners. Restaurant owners can adjust their menu on-the-fly through a web interface, tweaking prices and adding/removing items or promotions as the day goes on.

Now, before you run for the nearest rooftop to shout that tale of nepotism brewing in your lungs, I must say: in a startup scene so driven by its often off-putting bloodthirst for growing one’s “network,” it’s actually kind of shocking how little Sam seems to be tapping those familial ties. Sure, that last name can presumably open a few doors — or at the very least, open already-ajar doors wider — but he doesn’t seem to be trying to exploit it. Their original email pitch to us only mentioned the relationship in passing in one of its very last lines, long after explaining what the company did. I sat and talked with Sam and Jon for a few hours, and the pair only brought up Sam’s brother once, and that was to tell the story of how the idea for an upcoming feature came about. Sergey is Sam’s brother and an advisor (not an investor) to the company, but this is Sam and Jon’s ship to steer.

Bloodlines aside, I foresee at least two challenges: theft of the tablets and the difficulty of scaling sales.

In Butter’s test location, the tablet comes as you see it in the video above, resting on each table in a snazzy, lightweight leather folio. That might work well at a single, quaint location with relatively low customer turnover; but if they want to find themselves in hundreds of restaurants of all shapes and sizes, they’re going to have to deal with the fact that people, as a collective, can be terrible. People will steal these tablets. They’ll have to figure out how to keep them safe, be it latching them to the table (which is kind of ugly), or perhaps some sort of proximity-based alarm that starts squealing when you take the device out of a certain radius.

Second, they’re going to have to figure out how to get restaurants on board at a rather low acquisition cost. As many a startup before them have found, convincing a restaurant to change their structure and workflow in any way can be quite hard. Convincing enough of them to make the venture profitable? Monumentally hard. There are many, many others in the space, like E La Carte (or iMenu, MenuPad, or countless others) who have been attacking this problem for a while with varying degrees of success. Butter says that word-of-mouth alone has gotten them a steady flow of referrals so far, and they’re planning to give restaurant owners 30-day free trials to help seal the deal.

How they’ll charge after that trial, though, is still up in the air. They’ll either charge a one-time setup fee (that would include the cost of the devices, shipped with the menu ready to go), a monthly subscription fee, or some mix of the two.

One particularly interesting concept that came up during our conversation, and one that Sam and Jon say they plan on tackling, is that of analytics. What if the menu could essentially A/B test itself, finding the right item descriptions that lead to the most sales? Do you sell more drinks when they’re at the top of the menu, or at the bottom? Do pictures help or hurt? Access to that data (and being able to test changes on the fly with no reprinting cost) is perhaps the biggest advantage that a tablet-based menu has over its paper twin. Make it happen, guys!

Butter’s menu is currently in testing at Los Altos’ Bumble (a restaurant which Sergey invested in as part of his Los Altos project), with plans to expand to more locations in the coming weeks. Interested restaurateurs can hit up Butter for more details here.

Today Microsoft released the Windows 8.1 Enterprise Preview, an early build of the upcoming Windows 8 refresh aimed at large companies that need extensive control features to keep their machines, software and data secure.

If you are the sort of person who would have use for such a thing, you can find the code here.

Windows 8.1 will not extend the general life of the Windows 8 operating system. Instead, Microsoft stated today in a blog post, Widows 8.1 will see its support end on January 10, 2023. That said, Windows 8 users will only have two years to switch to Windows 8.1 once it is released. Those who fail to do so won’t be “supported under Windows 8 lifecycle.”

With the release of the Enterprise Preview, Microsoft also detailed a number of new features that it contains, including side-loading, which will allow companies to side-load apps onto machines that are “domain-joined,” as well as DirectAccess, which will allow users to “access resources inside a corporate network remotely” sans the use of another virtual private network.

Also in the updated operating system are restricted store access if a corporation deems that safer and a tool that allows Windows 8.1 devices to safely access a company’s secure data.

Windows 8 was not an enterprise-focused operating system at launch. Instead it had, in my view, a strong consumer and tablet focus. However, Windows 7 update cycles eventually end, and Microsoft needs to create a new core, stable, enterprise capable operating system. The slew of features that are coming in 8.1 to the Enterprise build of Windows 8 will do much to assist its maturation into something that it was not at launch.

We’ll see Windows 8.1 this year. What its impact will be on sagging PC sales remains uncertain.

Top Image Credit: Dell Inc.

There is growing proof that the API is a core value piece for selling software and services. The latest example of this emerging form of commerce comes from AppDirect, a cloud marketplace provider that is launching an API platform for connecting developers and resellers. Just out of private beta, AppDirect has signed about 1,000 developers.

The iOS and Android app stores are core channels for developers. But more recently, third-party marketplaces have emerged that provide a different avenue for developers to sell apps.

AppDirect provides developers with a way to connect with channel reseller partners that are using the platform. In this way, a developer making legal software can point an API to the partner selling the technology. Identity, provisioning and billing are the key endpoints that serve as the foundation for the service.

AppDirect standardized on OpenID but can also integrate with identity solutions such as SAML. The provisioning API allows a channel reseller to offer a service without having to do a custom set-up. The billing API allows for fixed and variable pricing, as well as metered services. Fixed pricing would be a subscription service that charges on a monthly basis. A metered service charges on a usage basis, such as per gigabyte per hour.

AppDirect’s distribution API sends the developer’s information to different marketplaces. The developer then gets charged according to the rates set by the channel partner. Marketplace fees are similar to the app stores with a 70/30 split, which improves for the channel reseller if more services are offered. It might be a 65/35 split or 60/40.

APIs are nascent in the mainstream market, and it will take some time for traditional channel resellers and old-school software providers to adapt. The challenge is in building the developer market and training channel resellers and their customers on this new way of distribution.

API platforms to manage purchases and payments are starting to become more common. 3Scale has this kind of service that it offers out-of-the-box, and Apigee has just launched its own service allowing customers to manage API-driven business efforts that extends from purchase-to-payment of digital assets.

But AppDirect is connecting developers and resellers to different marketplaces, and that seems to me like a different kind of service than what the competition offers.

Women Rule is a new programming and event series to recognize female leaders and bring them together to give advice to women in politics and business. The joint partnership between politics blog Politico, Google, and women’s support network The Tory Burch Foundation will produce an online media hub and four-part event series in Washington, D.C., that explore the challenges female leaders face.

The initiative shares some ideals with Lean In, the book and campaign by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg that hopes to teach and inspire women to achieve their goals. These issues have entered the spotlight lately, as it becomes clear that there is a lopsided presence of men in leadership positions, especially in technology.

Google’s Susan Molinari, vice president of Government Relations and Public Policy, says, “It is time to have an open discussion about the unique issues women face with our next generation of female leaders.” The Women Rule events in D.C. will include members of Congress, business leaders, entrepreneurs and administration officials and “will examine the steps women leaders are taking to effect change – everything from spurring a movement to passing legislation.”

Politico will launch the Women Rule media hub next month, which will also sell Women Rule apparel, with the proceeds going to charities, including the Tory Burch Foundation.

Google’s clout, as well as its financial and technical support, could give Women Rule a better chance of bringing in high-profile female mentors and making an impact. In the past Google has hosted The Bush Institute’s Women’s Initiative Fellowship Program, and actively promotes that it has women in leadership positions.

Still, Google was dinged in a New York Times article last year for a dwindling of women among its executive ranks. Marissa Mayer had left to become CEO of Yahoo, and other women were pushed out of the inner circle when Larry Page reorganized the executive team. Google has made strides toward keeping a strong female influence, though. It’s reportedly developed algorithms to detect where women were dropping out of job interviews, extended maternity leave, and that ensured female candidates interact with other women during the hiring process.

Getting the Google name more involved with the discourse on success equality through Women Rule could help it recruit and retain top female tech and business virtuosos in a fierce talent market.

[Image Credits: A Celebration Of Women, Eric Draper]

Brian Solis says that the future of business lies with the sale of experiences. Serial entrepreneur Trevor Traina would certainly agree. Traina’s freshly minted startup, IfOnly, is an online platform for the sale of once-in-a-lifetime experiences offered by celebrities. But while IfOnly is a for-profit company, its goal is to enable celebrities to distribute most of the revenue from sales to their charity of choice. IfOnly, Traina thus says, is “the Uber for doing well by doing good.”

Backed by angel investments from tech notables like Marissa Mayer, Yuri Milner, Marc Benioff and Mark Pincus, IfOnly already has, according to Traina, “dozens” of celebrities selling experiences including basketball star Kobe Bryant and the popular band Third Eye Blind.

Traina, probably best known as co-founder of the car data network Driverside, has also been in the news recently for having just bought the most expensive house ever sold in San Francisco. So, I asked him, would he enable me to have a once-in-a-lifetime experience and have tea with me in his new  Pacific Heights mansion? I offered Traina $500 for the experience to be donated, of course, to one of his favorite Bay Area charities, Tipping Point.

To see if he accepted my offer, you’ll have to watch the interview. But I’m beginning to think that the future of business may indeed lie with the sale of experiences. How much would you pay, for example, for breakfast with Mike Arrington? Or cocktails with Alexia?

Y Combinator-backed Floobits, a new startup allowing two people to write software at the same time on the same codebase — known as pair programming — is officially launching today to help better connect remote developers and distributed teams. What makes this company’s implementation interesting, however, is that instead of requiring developers to use a web-based editor as many pair programming solutions today do, Floobits users can pair program directly within the text editors they’re already comfortable using through the installation of plug-ins.

And for those who do prefer to work via an online editor instead of a native one, Floobits has integrated its web-based editor with one-click access to Google Hangouts for chat, audio and video conferencing.

Meanwhile, on the native side, the company currently supports plug-ins for Sublime Text, Emacs, and VIM. However, Floobits’ founders admit that some of these plug-ins work better than others at present, with Sublime Text being the least buggy, and VIM being the most difficult. In fact, the company may launch its own version of VIM in the future, as there were a number of “workarounds” (read: hacks) needed to make Floobits work.

Floobits was officially founded this February by former Rackspace engineers Geoff Greer (who came in via the Cloudkick acquisition, and who built this) and Matt Kaniaris. But in reality, they’ve been working on the idea since last August — and yes, often via pair programming.

Kaniaris and Greer pair programmed together while at Rackspace, and after leaving, they realized that they wanted to build something that could help others do the same. “The biggest advantage with pair programming is that when you get stuck on something and you’re alone, you can get stuck for an hour or two at times,” explains Greer. “But having a person next to you who notices the one tiny detail that you need to fix…that saves so much time and frustration.”

Of course, pair programming costs companies more because it means less code is produced per person, but its larger goal is to reduce the bug count. And while it’s not necessarily an environment that needs to be used 100 percent of the time, it can serve as a great learning tool.

Going forward, the founders see Floobits better capitalizing on the benefits of pair programming by expanding its capabilities to include more social features, such as allowing strangers to find each other and pair up, or letting users watch others code publicly in real time. Eventually, the team also wants to enable a situation where a domain expert could join users’ sessions to help them get up to speed on a new language or library they had just started to use. “That could massively improve productivity for programmers,” notes Greer.

At launch, the service offers freemium pricing, where free accounts have up to five workspaces available. But to work privately, a paid account starting at $15/month is required. Pricing for businesses and the enterprise is also available. In the future, the company will aim to better serve those larger organizations with a behind-the-firewall solution, as well. They will also roll out support for more editors, including IntelliJ by year end, and then Eclipse or Visual Studio will follow.

Floobits already has a handful of paying users, the team says, including three organizations, one of which is fellow Y Combinator startup, StatusPage.io. The company, only a team of two for now, has no outside funding beyond its YC backing and funds from YC VC.

Floobits soft-launched its service on Hacker News recently, which helped them catch some bugs and better prepare for today’s public debut. The HN launch kind of melted Floobits’ servers, admits Greer. “Once we had 300 people in the same workspace all typing at the same time, it didn’t work out so well,” he says. But he adds that they’ve since moved to more servers, and faster ones at that.

“Well…”, interjects Kaniaris.

“It’ll be fine, Matt, it’ll be fine,” says Greer.

Let’s see, shall we? Interested developers can try Floobits here for free.

If you can first make peace with the sheer, pocket-hogging size of the thing, you’ll find a lot to love about LG’s 5.5-inch Android phone.

We’ve been eagerly waiting for Nokia to make the Lumia 1020 since the PureView camera made its debut. And luckily, it doesn’t fall short of expectations.

For the first time in years, I spent 72 hours without Internet or cell phone reception. While I didn’t experience any life-altering epiphanies that some claim comes from a digital detox, I now enjoy a handful of very meaningful relationships that never would have existed, with the constant temptation for shallow interactions with dozens of peoples’ avatars, thousands of miles away. I learned that when you’re stuck with people, you’re forced to find meaning in conversations that otherwise wouldn’t have seemed more entertaining than YouTube at the time.

I don’t buy the snake oil that cutting ourselves off from the net makes us better thinkers; access to the world’s information has made me more informed and creative. But, the Internet can’t give you friendship, nor can it help you discover ideas that people have never told anyone about.

Last week, I had the fortune of testing the “never detox alone” hypothesis at two back-to-back business conferences held in the mountains. The first, Summit Outside, was an invite-only Burning Man-like gathering of 800 young social entrepreneurs in the Utah Mountains. Completely cut off from the Internet, attendees slept in tents, could go horseback riding, dance to A-list DJ’s under a fool moon, or attend spirituality-themed talks.

I left Summit Outside with more friends and business ideas than I have at any other conference–some from people I’d know for years, but thought I didn’t even like very much. On the flip side, CEOs and investors that normally would have avoided a tech journalist like the plague, were forced into uncomfortable conversations that unexpectedly led to great ideas.

The Internet has spoiled us; at the slightest hint of boredom or unpleasantness, we escape to the Internet. Modern life is a constant elevator pitch. Potential friends and projects that don’t enjoy a good first impression get tossed out.

Indeed, Summit Series itself has built a thriving company on top of the theory that the best business relationships start out as friendships. Since 2008, Summit Series has held a pricey annual conference of socially oriented entrepreneurs. Held on a cruise ship, at a ski resort, and in a makeshift camping mountain village, the Summit conferences intermix crazy-fun activities, such as shark tagging in the Caribbean, with A-list speakers, from the likes of Richard Branson and Bill Clinton. Now, Summit has raised $40 million to purchase a mountain and build permit home in Eden, Utah for grand pursuits.

Of course, I’m fully aware that pricey, quasi-exclusive networking conferences aren’t for everyone. There have been plenty of criticism of them over the years. I  understand the sense of irony of rich people talking about saving the world, while they party in ostentatious digs. And, of having more bark than bite when it comes to actually making an impact on the world. The conferences appeal to wide-eyed idealists.

That said, Summit Outside taught me that the world won’t come crashing down If I’m off the grid for a weekend. Like many people feeling the digital overload, I’m still planning my vacation from electronics. But, now I know I shouldn’t detox alone. I’m going to convene a camping trip–at least half from people I don’t know and never would have thought to hang out with. I’ve learned not to underestimate the power of experience and randomness.