Category: Tech news

Editing video is tedious enough on its own, but it becomes a whole new world of pain when producers, editors, audio guys, and others are trying to collaborate on a single project.

That’s where First Cut Pro (not to be confused with Final Cut Pro) comes in. The software comes out of Austin, where the company won our TC Meetup + Pitch-off Competition, meaning that the First Cut Pro guys will be ready to roll at TC Disrupt SF in September.

But what is First Cut Pro? Well, in short, it’s a collaborative dashboard that lets multiple people work and give feedback on a single project.

The most important feature is the ability to autopause video. As an editor is watching a rough cut of a project, each keystroke he makes (as commentary to the video) is recorded alongside a timestamp. While he’s typing, the video pauses, and once he presses enter, the video resumes.

Users can also create custom buttons to insert at whatever time they’d like, which are timestamped just like comments are. Comments are threaded, just like they are in most professional collaboration software like Convo and Yammer.

Once commentary has been added, users have control over who can access the project, sharing to others via email with a special pin.

Finally, First Cut Pro closes the loop, letting managers prioritize comment threads and then assign particular cuts or jobs to various editors.

When the project is exported, the same timestamped comments show up on each editor’s dashboard in their editing software of choice. Currently, the platform supports AVID, Adobe and Final Cut.

First Cut Pro is available now here. It has a tiered pricing structure, starting with a free account for personal use and going all the way up to $119/month for power users.

The NSA whistleblower who exposed America’s massive spying operation has come out and taken an interview with the leak reporter, The Guardian‘s Glenn Greenwald. “The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife’s phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards,” he said, in an interview taped in Hong Kong.

Edward Snowden, 29, who has claimed he has worked with the National Security Agency, admits he never expects to see home again, but said, “I don’t want to live in a society that does these sorts of things.”

In response to officials downplaying the NSA’s targeting capability, “the NSA routinely lies in response to congressional inquiries about the scope of surveillance in America.”

Snowden argues that the institutional culture of the NSA has a sort of self-righteous attitude on national security: “Whenever we had a debate in the office on how to handle crimes, they do not defend due process – they defend decisive action.”

As for Snowden himself, “The only thing I can do is sit here and hope the Hong Kong government does not deport me,” noting that he might jet off to Iceland in the hopes of finding a place that will protect him.

The full, fascinating interview is on The Guardian here.

In the ever-raging Map War, Google seems to be not only a first mover, but the boldest mover.

According to the Globes, an Israel-based publication, Google is reportedly set to acquire the Israeli transit and navigation company Waze for $1.3 billion, making it one of the larger Google acquisitions in recent memory. This latest development comes amid swirling rumors that Waze would be bought up by one of the big guys, by Facebook for $1 billion, Apple for $500 million and now Google.

Waze provides information on traffic congestion, police presence, speed-sensing cameras, and other transportation-related information thanks to the crowdsourced information flowing in from its almost 50 million users.

According to a number of other Hebrew sources, the deal will be in all cash. Noam Bardin will reportedly remain as CEO and Waze will also continue as its own brand. Waze’s R&D facility, as well as their offices in Israel, will remain in place for at least three years.

We had heard originally that Apple was interested in Waze, which made perfect sense at the time considering Apple was building and releasing a buggy, inadequate Maps app. Waze probably could have helped out quite a bit.

However, those rumors died down to make room for new ones, namely that Facebook was considering buying the social satellite-navigation company.

In fact, Globes reports that Facebook executives went into negotiations with Waze right in Israel, but neither company could come to a comfortable resolution. But perhaps more interesting, Google moved in to have chats with Waze while Facebook was still in negotiations to buy, showing just how eager Google is to block out potential competitors in the mapping space.

Neither Google nor Waze is commenting on the acquisition at this moment, but this isn’t the first time that the search giant has been paired with Waze. Just last month, Bloomberg reported that the companies were in talks, and that Waze was seeking more than $1 billion.

The report says the deal has just entered due diligence, and details are subject to change.

Google’s long-term goal with Waze is somewhat unclear. It obviously increases its footprint in Israel, where it currently operates two offices, and there is a thriving startup scene, from which Google has already plucked Labpixies and Quicksee. But looking further, this is also a good way to keep competitors like Apple and Facebook away from such reliable and popular mapping software.

Remember, Google’s Maps application is already a world-class product, with nothing even remotely close following behind in terms of competition. But that’s not to say that folks aren’t trying. Apple booted Google Maps as the default mapping app on its iDevices with the launch of iOS 6 and the iPhone 5. Unfortunately for Apple, Apple Maps is abysmal.

By buying Waze, Google keeps competitors like Apple and others away from the easy out, which would be an acquisition of a company with already-working and reliable technology. With this deal, Google effectively blocks Apple and Facebook from even having a chance.

See, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and any other big tech player will be focusing on location technology as a way to bolster other services. Maps is the spinal cord of the mobile ecosystem. It affects advertising, other social tools and apps, and e-commerce. Apple, Facebook and friends won’t give up on owning our location data anytime soon, but Google is doing a good job of blocking out the potential to buy technology instead of build it.

Waze was founded back in 2007, and has since raised a total of $67 million from investors like KPCB, Horizon Ventures, Blue Run Ventures, Magma Venture Partners, and Vertex Venture Capital.

Goal setting within a startup or company is essential to success. But there are a number of different approaches to attaining these goals both within teams and individually. And what better framework to follow than Google’s strategy around establishing goals.

This gem is part of the Google Ventures Startup Lab‘s body of content, explained by current Googlers, and other technology execs; aimed at helping startups navigate things like A/B testing, holding productive meetings and more. While most of these talks are private, Google Ventures is gradually posting a number of these discussions online for all entrepreneurs to access. In the video above, Google Ventures partner Rick Klau, who runs the Startup Lab with Ken Norton, covers the value of setting objectives and key results (OKRs) and how this has been done at Google since 1999.

Klau, a former Google company employee himself, recalls the story of Kleiner Perkins’ partner and early Google investor John Doerr visiting the company early on to explain a method of setting goals he has witnessed at Intel (as told in author Steven Levy’s book, In The Plex). What’s super interesting about Klau’s presentation is that he found the actual deck that Doerr used when presenting to the Larry, Sergey, and the rest of the Google team in 1999 (around 7 minutes in).

Word leaked out earlier that the new release of Apple’s operating system, iOS 7, is in for a major overhaul, most notably bringing an end to so-called “skeuomorphic” design (visual metaphors reflecting the physical objects a digital version aims to replace – e.g. the faux leather in “Find My Friends,” bookshelves in iBooks, fake glass, notepad paper in Notes, green felt in Game Center, and so on.) It’s a welcome change to say the least, but more concerning is the fact that outside of the visual tweaks, the overall look of the operating system is supposed to remain very familiar.

That’s too bad, because iOS – perfectly simple as she may be – has gotten a little boring.

It’s easy to see the dilemma. Apple has found success by making technology accessible to a wide audience through careful design, quality craftsmanship and in-store technical assistance from blue shirt-wearing “geniuses.” A truly radical overhaul of its operating system could alienate a mainstream user base who’s grown comfortable with the general look-and-feel of iOS and its incrementally improving feature set.

But for another segment of the population – those no longer new to the concept of smartphones (or rather, these mini computers we occasionally use for phone calls) – iOS is starting to feel dated.

Rows of app icons. Hooray.

After years of back and forth between iPhones and Nexus devices, god knows I’ve tried to make Android stick, lured away by things like customizations, launchers, live updating widgets, as well as improved app switching, voice search, navigation, notification drop-downs, lock screens, and more – all of which I’d call “better,” but people will argue, so let’s just say “better for me.”

Yet as someone who writes about technology and startups, you can’t just abandon yourself to one platform. Startups often launch iOS first, requiring continued use of an iPhone, though my SIM currently resides in a Nexus 4 for the above reasons.

Most people are locked into contracts or can only afford one phone at a time, so I’m fortunate to usually have a few Androids, Windows Phones and iPhones at my disposal. (Sorry BlackBerry). Moving between the three, and it’s clear to see that the OS now coming up short in terms of pushing the bar forward is iOS. Hopefully, the new version of the operating system will address that problem. I’d love to be surprised again.

With iOS 7, we reportedly may get the following additions: new toggle switches for accessing quick settings in the notifications bar; deeper Flickr and Vimeo integration into the core OS; panoramic, scrollable background wallpapers; notifications you can manipulate with gestures; and maybe a new gesture to access “glance-able” information panels, like Notification Center. (This is why there are fanboy wars. Who had these things first? Not Apple. And when you realize that, it’s hard not to scoff. I get it.)

The big shift from skeuomorphism to flat design has not been without controversy – battle lines have been drawn on both sides of the design community. But if this and a few other tweaks is all we’re getting, there will be some letdown. To the untrained user’s eye, they’ll probably only notice that the interface and apps look different or more modern, and then either feel warmly or turned off by those changes, without having the correct language to explain what precisely has been edited or why. But the end of the day, gradients, colors, textures, styles – it all starts feeling like the OS got a new coat of paint. Necessary because rust was starting to show – and wow, does this paint sparkle! – but a coat of paint, nonetheless.

What does iOS really need? Oh wait, someone already did that post, with some snark of course. (The point being, there’s no way Apple can announce enough things at WWDC to please everyone. This is true.)

But let’s dig in anyway. For starters, there’s the problem of Apple’s services being no match for Google’s. From mail to calendaring to documents, Google is winning in the cloud. Apple needs to build a more functional iCloud – one that people understand, that isn’t angering developers, one that isn’t broken, buggy and overpriced. Google’s predictive add-on Google Now, also currently outsmarts Siri’s more limited virtual assistant, though Apple could change that quickly by opening up Siri’s API to third-party developers.

Apple also needs to be at least slightly more open. There’s a way of doing this where it could still maintain some level of control. For instance, it would be useful if apps could better to talk to each other and share data between them. With an ever-increasing number of iOS applications available, it’s becoming a winner takes all market. But because apps are treated largely as isolated silos, app engagement and usage rapidly declines after install. A shocking percentage of apps are never even opened.

Apps are tucked away in obscure backscreen folders and forgotten. That means, developers, in turn, have to use increasingly spammy push notifications to encourage re-opens. Frustrated, users simply delete the apps constantly bothering them. It’s a vicious cycle.

It’s hard also to see the harm in a bit more customizable operating system. One which loads the perfectly good vanilla experience for the masses, but which advanced users can personalize via the settings, allowing for new behaviors, gestures, homescreen setups, widgets, automations, different keyboards (I mean, really!), visualizations, layouts, and more. Why, for example, is it Apple’s call how many apps are stuffed in a folder, how many screens I have, or how many apps sit in my dock? Why can’t third-party apps become my “default”  browser, contacts app, notepad, weather app, mail client, and more? Why can’t I share to any app I want from Safari, not just Facebook, Twitter, iMessage and Mail? And so on.

There are those who will say that these sorts of changes are just not Apple’s M.O. They think for you, make the tough design decisions, and it usually works. It’s hard to point to their numbers and prove any differently. Still, a large number of Apple’s iOS users are perfectly comfortable with their iPhones and iPads now – they’re no longer as welcoming the heavy hand as they are feeling crushed by it. And they may be switching to Android, or just going Android-first when they finally ditch their feature phone.

So here’s hoping Apple can still surprise us with a new iOS 7 operating system whose newly upgraded beauty is more than skin deep, but is rather something which, once again, “just works”…for everyone.

Image credit: Simply Zesty

A 26-year-old farm dweller who helped expose the rape of a teenage girl is facing up to 5x more jail time than the high school football members who publicly assaulted the girl. The Steubenville rape case became a national firestorm after it was revealed that dozens of people had witnessed the assault at a party and then shared pictures and social media updates of the event mocking the girl.

Angered that a small town was turning their back on justice, several hacktivist groups got involved, including Deric Lostutter, who helped post a video on the football team’s website outing the assailants and bringing national attention to their crimes.

“If convicted of hacking-related crimes, Lostutter could face up to 10 years behind bars—far more than the one- and two-year sentences doled out to the Steubenville rapists,” reports Mother Jones, in an exclusive interview with Lostutter.

The first-time digital activist claims he never hacked the page, but was the masked man in the video. His relatively light touch reportedly didn’t stop the FBI from treating him like a world-class terrorist. “As I open the door to greet the driver, approximately 12 FBI SWAT team agents jumped out of the truck, screaming for me to ‘Get the fuck down!’ with M-16 assault rifles and full riot gear, armed, safety off, pointed directly at my head,” Lostutter recalls on his own blog.

The excessive force and even worse penalty highlights why many are calling for a reform of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFA), which treats principled hacking on par with the worst federal crimes. The CFA came to national attention last year after respected Internet prodigy, Aaron Swartz, committed suicide after harsh prosecutors threatened him with 50+ years in prison for freeing academic articles from a paywalled database.

“We should prevent what happened to Aaron from happening to other Internet users,” wrote Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren (CrunchGov Grade: A) about her (failed) “Aaron’s Law” bill.

While the hacker did violate the law, they are the newest evolution in the beloved American tradition of civil disobedience. “It was everything that I’d ever preached, and now there’s this group of people getting off the couch and doing something about it. I wanted to be part of the movement,” recalls Lostutter, of the Hacktivist mission-statement videos that inspired him to get involved.

Like many first-time activists before him, he seems like a typical American, not a thrill-seeking vigilante. “A 26-year-old corporate cybersecurity consultant, Lostutter lives on a farm with his pit bull, Thor, and hunts turkeys, goes fishing, and rides motorcycles in his free time. He considers himself to be a patriotic American; he flies an American flag and enjoys Bud Light,” writes Josh Harkinson of Mother Jones.

U.S. law needs to be to be updated to reflect the values of the free flow of information. Even though the acts were illegal, it’s hard to see what Lostutter did was wrong. It’s a shame the courts could sentence him with a punishment that treats his activism as worse than sexual assault.

For more stories like this (and a bit of wry humor) follow Gregory Ferenstein and CrunchGov on Twitter.

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. As a disclosure, please note he has been friends with the founders Scripted (see below) for over five years and is an official advisor to the company: You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

If you keep up with all the tech startup news, it’s easy to develop the impression that money is just sloshing around the Valley and even the worst products and ideas curry investors’ interests. Thankfully, this is far from the truth. As many of you know, raising institutional funding is quite hard and the process takes a long time, sometimes years. Years ago, Pandora suffered through brutal fundraising meetings before eventually securing venture capital — the rest is now history. And, just a few years ago, it was Pinterest who had to slog through many financing rejections before turning the tables on everyone. To that end, I wanted to highlight a company that I’ve been personally involved with as an advisor, where I’ve known one co-founder (Ryan Buckley) for seven years through graduate school and have come to know his CEO (Sunil Rajaraman) over the last five years. In fact, I remember Ryan telling me about his company while we were in graduate school (around 2008), and now, five years after starting their company — Scripted — the team finally reached, secured, and closed their Series A. Below is a brief Q&A with Sunil about their journey to date, which goes into candid detail about fundraising, marketplace businesses, and the emotional ups and downs of the process:

You recently raised and closed a Series A financing for your company. When was the company founded, and when did you first start going out into the market for your first institutional round?

Rajaraman: We have a long and complicated history. We launched under a different company name in January 2008 as a screenwriting software platform – our first idea was to give away “Google Docs” for screenwriters to amateur screenwriters. We planned on convincing producers they should crowdsource screenplays from us instead of sourcing screenplays from traditional routes (not too dissimilar from Amazon Studios). Our screenwriting software program became popular, but (surprise, surprise) producers did not want to buy screenplays from us. My co-founder and I were working at separate full-time jobs as we tried to keep the company alive through 2009-2010. We managed to keep the ship afloat long enough to realize our real customers were businesses. Companies started reaching out to us at the start of 2011 effectively saying: “Hey, we don’t have the time or the resources to, hire, vet, and ramp up a freelance writer workforce…you’re that company with a lot of writers – do you think you can help?” Scripted officially launched during the summer of 2011 and we raised our first round in November 2011 (took about 6 months in all).

You drew some initial interest for your Series A in the Fall of 2012. Describe what happened? Now in the Spring of 2013, it sounds like you were oversubscribed? What changed?

Rajaraman: Without disclosing actual numbers, I’ll say that for a seed company we were generating Series A-like revenue by Q3 of 2012. As a result, we drew initial interest and figured it would be relatively easy to get a round done. The main reason we didn’t get over the finish line is that we are smack dab in the middle of two types of businesses: recurring vs. transactional. VCs weren’t sure how to evaluate us because we had some transactional business, and some recurring business. All that really changed between the Fall ‘12 and Spring ‘13 was we shifted focus to more recurring business. We also got James Currier and Stan Chudnovsky of Ooga Labs involved as advisors and investors – those guys have a TON of experience growing marketplace-like businesses. As soon as we got them involved, a lot of VCs got very interested very quickly. Rick Marini, Michael Birch, Chris Michel and Paige Craig joined our investment contingent as well, and were helpful as we evaluated prospective investors, and decided on the best option for the company. We went out to a few investors we really thought made sense for Scripted, and the story was a lot easier to share with a full year of data. Numbers don’t lie, people do.

How did you regroup, both as a person and as a company, between the disappointment of last fall to the success of this spring? Any tactics?

Rajaraman: It sucks to try for an A and not get over the finish line. I’m not going to lie, I really suffered last fall and had to get myself back together. A few things really helped: One, we have a great team. Our team stayed positive because they knew what was going on at every moment. We have a transparent culture and this is where it helps. Everyone continued to work hard, and no one gave a second thought to what happened in the Fall. Two, Belgian beer helps. A lot. Three, at the end of the day you have to find what motivates you – for me that’s obviously) my fundamental belief that Scripted is going to be a massive business.

How did you keep the company afloat?

Rajaraman: Through a combination of two things: growing revenue (nothing beats growing a business the old-fashioned way), and a venture debt round we put together with WTI. Venture debt is a great tool for entrepreneurs to have in their back pockets, and very few folks actually take advantage of it. The cost of debt capital is far cheaper than equity capital (which is why we raised debt rather than an insider round) with one major caveat: you have to be able to make the interest payments. Venture debt firms recognize this, and only make investments in companies that look like they are fundable (eventually), and won’t default on the debt. Entrepreneurs benefit by not taking unnecessary dilution if all they need is a few extra months of cash to hit their funding (or revenue) milestones.

How did you know you could re-enter the funding market for your Series A? What was different this time?

Rajaraman: My confidence-level was much higher this time. I’d reiterate nothing beats revenue and growth – if you have both, raising money becomes much easier. We ultimately ended up with many options, and had the good fortune (for the first time in the company’s history) of picking between investors.

Which investors did you decide to go with?

Rajaraman: Eric Chin from Crosslink Capital and Chris Moore from Redpoint ventures. Note that I list the partner first, and the firm second – when you receive investment from a VC firm, you’re really working with the partner that invests in you, but it’s easy to caught up in the brand names of firms.

The process of picking the right investors is not all that straightforward, and my biggest advice here is to do your homework. We had a working relationship with Eric and Omar from Crosslink for a year and change, so we knew what it would be like to work with them, and vice versa. When the time came for us to raise our A, both sides already had a bunch of data, and we knew we wanted to work together. We still went through a traditional, thorough diligence process but all of the questions about whether Eric could be a great board member were already answered.

Chris also conducted a thorough diligence process on Scripted, but we did not have the luxury of knowing him for 16 months like we did with Crosslink (and vice versa). Over the period of a few weeks, we spent a lot of time together (including a long Easter Sunday meeting) to understand how we both work. What it ultimately came down to was the references – we asked for numerous references from Chris, and conducted several of our own (outside of his list). The feedback was consistent and positive.

Now, having closed the A round, what three pieces of advice would you give a seed-stage company that is just on the edge of raising Series A or closing shop?

• Don’t give up. I can’t believe how many entrepreneurs who I personally know, or who are friends of friends who just give up. It’s saddening, but it’s typically the best filter to figure out who is cut out for this stuff. You’re going to suffer and you’re going to look at the bank account and figure out you only have a week or two of payroll left – that’s when you really figure out what you’re made of. Read this if you need inspiration.

• Stay healthy. I wish I’d done a better job of this – I ate like crap, stopped working out and wish I’d taken better care of my health in general. Don’t make that mistake – this process is stressful and you’ll be better off for it if you manage your own health first.

• It’s all about the story- When a VC bets on you, they aren’t just betting on you as a person, but what you’ve been through. Don’t be afraid to share your story – you don’t need to get too personal or anything, but show that you actually have a human side. It’s the little things that you don’t think matter that can sometimes make the difference.

Any other tidbits you can share about VCs in general?

Rajaraman: Lots, but here is an abbreviated list:

• Don’t waste time with funds that aren’t actively investing. Danielle Morrill blogs about this a bit (her list is not entirely accurate), but you should know that firms you meet with are actually making investments.

• You have to get to the heart of the reason why VCs passed on you. Often times it’s not the stated reason, but a combination of things. You should reach out through advisors and other investors to find out the real scoop as to why folks pass on you so you can adjust accordingly. I’m not suggesting you make adjustments to your business strategy based on VC feedback, but if you want to raise outside capital you really need to understand why VCs decided to pass on you.

• The reality is that some VCs won’t get back to you. That’s ok – VCs are super busy and get a ton of inbound interest. Most of the time, it means they’re not interested, though sometimes they just get sidetracked. Focus on the guys that are most responsive – they’re telling you they’re interested. For the less responsive guys, send an email with positive company news/update to tease out whether it’s lack of interest, or they just got sidetracked.

• That being said, there are a ton of VCs out there who will commit partner time, allude that they are interested, and not get back to you at all after like they are. These are folks you ultimately wouldn’t want to work with anyway.

Facebook’s empire was built on photo tags and sharing, but it’s a grueling process many neglect. Luckily, new Facebook patents give it tech to continuously capture video whenever your camera is open, rank and surface the best images, and auto-tag them with people, places, and businesses. They tease a future where pattern, facial, and audio recognition identify what you’re seeing for easy sharing.

The patents are for Automatic Photo Capture Based on Social Components and Identity Recognition (’80), Preferred images from captured video sequence (’00), and Image selection from captured video sequence based on social components (’65). The were filed for in October 2011 and granted over the last two months to Facebook and its employees Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, David Garcia, and Soleio Cuervo (who now works at Dropbox).

The patents cover some colocation technologies similar to that of failed startup Color, who came out of stealth in March 2011 a few months before Facebook filed for the patents. That may be no coincidence, and Color’s ideas for using every available sensor on a phone to tell who someone is with may have inspired Facebook to brainstorm in the space. Soon after Color emerged from stealth, I called on Facebook to develop its own colocation technology to help it forge an “implicit social graph” of who you spend time with. What it came up with could redefine the way we share.

As we look at what the patents include, I’ll be referencing the last two digits of the patents number and their PDF page numbers so you can follow along.

Shooting Video While You Take Photos

The foundation of the patents is the idea that Facebook can capture video of everything you see in the viewfinder while you use the camera in its main smartphone apps or its standalone Camera app. It’s like an infinite “Zoe” video that some Android cameras take surrounding a photo:

“Although the camera function operates in a photo-capturing mode, the camera function may continuously capture video…Instead of the user capturing a photo by pressing a hardware (or software) button, [it] can automatically capture…one or more images relevant to the user from the real-time video being captured by the camera function {’80 p4}.”

“[the] user may capture a photo…Meanwhile, the camera function can continue to capture the real-time video {’65 p11}.”

Basically, Facebook could let you take traditional photos while dicing up continuously recorded video into still images. As camera lenses, storage capacity, and wireless connections improve, these images will increase in quality.

Knowing What You See

What’s special is what Facebook could do with these videos and images. The patents describe the ability to scan the frames for important things like public figures via facial recognition, brands or products via image matching, and landmarks or businesses via pattern and text character recognition plus location:

“For example…a place (e.g., Eiffel Tower, Golden Gate Bridge, Yosemite National Park, Hollywood), a business or an organization (e.g., a coffee shop, San Francisco Giants), or a brand or product (e.g., Coca-Cola, Louis Vuitton)…The image selection process may tag one or more social networking objects identified in the selected frames to the stored video segment {’80 p5}.”

“An object recognition algorithm may use optical character recognition techniques to identify one or more characters (e.g., “HOLLYWOOD”, “San Francisco Giants”) in one or more frames and match against image data (or identity data such as names, logos)…[and] may use computer vision techniques to extract a set of features (e.g., edges, corners, ridges, blobs, curvatures, etc.) from an image. The object recognition algorithm may determine a match between two images by comparing respective sets of features {’00 p11}.”

You might not want to formally tag these things, but the tags would be pre-filled for easy sharing. Whether or not you display the tags, recognition of he presence of these objects and locations can tell Facebook what the most important frames of your video are, exactly where you are, and what types of businesses might want to reach you.

Colocating You And Your Friends

Facebook’s patents also give it exciting ways to figure out who you’re with. Instead of manually tagging friends, or even using facial recognition through the Face.com technology it acquired, Facebook could put to work all the sensors in the phones of you and those around you:

“The image selection process can access a GPS sensor…[detect] a user who has GPS coordinates within 100 feet from the first user’s current location…a user who is attending the same event, a user who has just checked in to the same location…data reports from mobile devices of other users that have interacted with the first user’s mobile phone via Bluetooth or Near-Field Communication…The audio recognition algorithm may determine a match between two audio files by comparing fingerprints of the two audio files {’80 p5}.”

That last capability, matching the audio recorded by the microphones of two users to identify that they’re right next to each other, was one of Color’s most exciting features.

Identifying What’s important

So Facebook knows who and what’s around around you. Then it wants to rank which frames of your video are the most interesting to you. To do that, it looks at your affinity to these objects (which friends, locations or brands you interact with most), and how popular they are to the public. It combines this data with extra audio and image cues of importance:

“The image selection process may analyze content of the voice segments (e.g., by using a speech recognition algorithm) for indication of importance (e.g., “Say cheese!”, “Cheese!”, “This is beautiful!”, “Amazing!”), and adjust a score of a frame…[and] may analyze picture quality of a frame (e.g., blurriness) by accessing a motion sensor (e.g., an accelerometer), and adjust a score of a frame less favorably if the frame corresponds to a time period of significant vibration or movement of the mobile device {’80 p6}.”

Honestly, the idea that an app could hear you say “This is beautiful” and know the photos and video you take at that time are important is sci-fi brilliant.

Choosing Your Best Moments

At this point, Facebook can make well-educated guesses about what you want to share. It imagines splaying them out in what it calls a “media wheel” and showing the best frames as thumbnails when you share to the news feed:

“The image capturing process can cause the camera function to display in its graphical user interface (201) selectable thumbnails corresponding to the one or more selected frames in a scrollable media wheel panel (220) adjacent to the view finder (230) {’80 p6}.”

“the preferred image selection process can cause news feed engine (110) to construct a news feed entry comprising thumbnails corresponding to the selected frames {‘oo p12}.”

Essentially, Facebook would rank all the frames of your video, show you the best ones, and you could select your favorites to represent your video when you share it. When people want to watch the video, they can click on one of the thumbnails, and instantly view the video starting 10 seconds before that frame. As quality of the still images ripped from video improve, Facebook could likely even allow you to share the frames as photos.

Assisted Sharing

These patents could redefine how we share. You wouldn’t need to search for people, locations, or things to tag. They’ll just be there waiting for your approval. That’s a big win on mobile where you want to share and get back to your life. Your content will contain so much structured data that Facebook could better route it to the people who’ll find it most interesting. And when we consume video, an opaque medium that’s classically tougher to skim than photos, there’ll be anchors and highlights pointing us to the most important moments. These could all encourage sharing and expose us to more enjoyable content. Facebook could even use colocation to create collaborative photo albums and carry on Color’s mission to let you “Take photos together”.

There’s also huge implications for Facebook’s business. Likes are a terribly inaccurate graph of what businesses and places you care about. Today, recommendations of what to Like are scattershot, and it’s a chore to key them in. By recognizing businesses and brands in photos and videos, it can add them to its treasure trove of information about your preferences. That will help it fill out Graph Search, and target you with increasingly accurate ads and ecommerce opportunities.

Imagine if Coca-Cola could target ads to people frequently seen with cans of Pepsi in their photos — high potential customers who specifically don’t like them yet. A restaurant could show push real-time ads to people shooting videos of a landmark next door. Facebook could open up ads APIs to surface characteristics like “currently with three or more friends” that a bar could take advantage of to advertise to nearby groups.

The war for ad dollars will be won with data. Facebook already sees over 300 million photos uploaded each day. These patents could be a diamond drill, allowing Facebook to mine much more business information out of every piece of user generated content it imports.

The world’s premier social network is 9 years old now. In some ways, that’s actually a disadvantage. People have forged connections with too many people and things they don’t actually care about. Facebook doesn’t know much about your offline life, or whether someone is a close friend or a distant acquaintance in that realm. That leads to a boring news feed — a huge danger to Facebook’s engagement-based business model.

Facebook has spent years trying to get people to put in work to explicitly prune and classify their relationships with Friend Lists and news feed filters, but most still don’t. Implicit colocation and business identification could bring new richness and detail to its social graph, so your meatspace experience enhances your world of ones and zeros.

Editor’s note: Ted Summe is the founder of Discoverly, an enterprise tool that puts social data to work. Earlier in his career, he worked with enterprise software companies at Morgan Stanley and bought them at Salesforce.com. You can follow him on Twitter @tsumme.

Having slung enterprise software companies at Morgan Stanley and bought them at Salesforce.com, I’ve got some perspective on what it takes to sell an enterprise software company. It’s no secret that before you even get started, there are a number of things to consider. Who will fund your mission? Who will join your tribe? And how will you price and distribute your product?

While these are all important factors to examine early on, there might come a time when you will start to plan for your exit. When the time comes, you’ll need to take into consideration your location,  stack, uptime, how lean your team is and, of course, the legal stuff. Of course there’s nuance to all these considerations, but they’re the main themes to consider when positioning yourself for acquisition success in the future. For those building toward a thriving standalone business, this information can be a helpful part of your contingency plan.

Location Matters

Surprisingly, location might be the single most important factor in engineering acquisition success. The fact is most acquisitions fail due to poor integration and location can be a big part of that. If you’re acquired as a small company or acqui-hired, you’ll likely be expected to relocate. But if you’re acquired as a larger, more established company, location can become more of a challenge.  For the integration to be successful, leadership from the buyer is going to have to make frequent trips to your office location. That means you want to be headquartered in a city that is either convenient, strategic, or particularly desirable – executives will volunteer for the work trip to Paris but not to Topeka.

Stack

This is pretty simple. You want to build your software in the same language as your potential buyer(s). If a company’s software is written in Java, and yours is written .NET, you’re not appealing because they don’t want to support another language and don’t have the engineering talent to do so.  You might as well move to Topeka.

Uptime

One of the major differences between consumer M&A and enterprise M&A is driven by the SLA (Service License Agreement). SaaS enterprise software companies make uptime commitments to their customers, and if they fail to maintain them, they incur significant costs.

Big companies already have fat; they don’t want to pack yours on, too.

When YouTube went down occasionally after the Google acquisition, users would say “bummer” and come back later. When MSFT sells Yammer to its customers and it goes down, customers say “WTF, I’m running my business on this and you’re screwing me.” As a result, the buyer will need to invest in your product to meet the SLA requirements you’re contractually obligated to fulfill. The amount they have to invest can vary.

If your technology is reasonably hardened, the buyer will likely maintain your stack and invest to get it up to their standards. This investment increases their calculation of the cost of the acquisition and thus reduces the amount they’re willing to pay.

Say your technology is young and your codebase is relatively light. The buyer will possibly just rewrite your code on their stack to reduce the uptime risk. This costs money and slows their time to market and thus reduces the amount they’re willing to pay.

The worst case is that your codebase is heavy but not hardened because then the buyer will have to invest significantly to either rewrite or harden. This will make your company a risky acquisition and thus significantly reduces the amount they’re willing to pay.

Strong And Lean Team

Whether its an acqui-hire or a straight acquisition, the composition of your team is important. Startups are able to recruit talented, driven employees, and buyers love to pay them extra money to stay around after the deal. But only if the team is strong and lean. Big companies already have fat; they don’t want to pack yours on, too.

Don’t Forget The Legal Stuff

Big companies aren’t nimble like startups, and that is in some part because they have deep pockets weighing them down. Because people can come after those deep pockets, the big companies have to be bogged down with worries about IP and whether other companies could have patent-infringement claims against them, now or in the future. Many startups overlook this piece, since few companies will sue a startup based on IP, but those liabilities will become real upon acquisition. As such, monitor your IP exposure as you grow.

Dekko, a San Francisco-based startup that just closed extra funding to build a platform for augmented reality apps, just brought its first title to market with a racing game that has players drive virtual cars across tabletops.

OK, so augmented reality, which overlays virtual items or information over the real world through a phone or tablet’s viewfinder, hasn’t really come into its own yet. There have been plenty of companies like Layar, which built one of the very early augmented reality browsers for the iPhone, which have been around for a few years.

That’s partially because the user experience is still a bit unwieldy with people having to take their phones or iPads out and pan their built-in cameras around. But it’s possible that Google Glass could change all of this.

Dekko, which recently took an additional $1.3 million in funding, is betting that augmented reality’s moment could be around the corner. Other startups are making this bet as well; another company Daqri just picked up $15 million in a Series A round for augmented reality as well.

“We wanted to solve many of the basic user problems with augmented reality. We had a compulsion to at least show something that’s real and fun,” said co-founder and CEO Matt Miesnieks. “We wanted to build an experience that is kind of magical.”

The game, which you can demo below, has players hold up their iPads over a table. On the screen, you can see cars racing across a virtual track. It can turn any kind of flat surface into racetrack that’s visible on the iPad. The app is also multiplayer, allowing between one and four people to race each other, do stunts and crash into each other’s cars. The multiplayer mode can show a single, real-time shared view.

Tabletop Speed Trailer from Dekko on Vimeo.

To me, it sounds like a proof of concept that demonstrates Dekko’s platform, which was built by the startup’s in-house team of computer vision experts. Eventually, they’ll bring their platform to wearables like Google Glass.

“One thing we know about Glass is that our tech will work on it,” Miesnieks said.

Dekko’s backers include Echo Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Venture 51, Blumberg Capital, Launch Capital, Thomvest, Eniac Ventures, and Zig Capital, as well as angels like Howard Lindzon, Erik Moore, Dan Conway, and Raymond Tonsing.

Editor’s note: Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research and blogs at Techspressive. Follow him on Twitter @rossrubin.

It’s been six months since PlayJam’s GameStick started its off-again, on-again Kickstarter campaign that netted it nearly $650,000 — well beyond its $100,000 goal. While it attracted less than a tenth of the funds that its predecessor OUYA nabbed for its Android-based home game console, things have moved apace with the two-piece, controller-hosted console that plugs directly into the HDMI connector of a TV that should be shipping to backers next month.

“Thirty days felt like thirty months. We were so unprepared for it,” said PlayJam CMO Anthony Johnson, who notes that stretch goals such as a charging dock were conceived out of thin air in a matter of hours before they even knew if they were feasible.

The GameStick straddles worlds with different rules. Traditional consoles fix a platform essentially in stone typically for five or more years. The stability of the platform itself is a response to PC gaming where configurations are all over the map. This has been the inspiration for NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience addressing the issue from the PC side and Valve’s Steam Box(es) on the console side. On the other hand, its ARM processor and Android operating system hail from the world of smartphones where updates are an annual occurrence in a state of constant leapfrogging.

PlayJam plans to take advantage of the rapid progress in chip architectures. The company wryly notes that one of the few advantages of being based in the UK helps enable it to have a close working relationship with ARM. In this respect, the GameStick is kind of a no-frills vanilla equivalent to NVIDIA’s pricey Shield handheld, which costs $349 and which PlayJam characterizes as “a reference platform for Tegra 4,” a laudable but niche attempt by a chip company to get into the consumer device business.

GameStick, on the other hand, will be profitable at $79 while yielding a palatable retailer margin. And since the primary electronics are in the stick and not the controller, the former can be updated independently, and the company plans to keep offering new sticks to enable richer game experiences.

Which, in some cases, it could use. PlayJam’s 12-year history is in super-casual TV-based games distributed through cable operators and moving into smart TVs. That understanding of the power of distribution has helped lead to an agreement with GameStop, although GameStick, of course, lacks any way for physical distribution. The scaling up of smartphone-quality games to the bigger-than-tablet screen results in games that may be fun to play but don’t necessarily impress graphically. And like so many Android apps, the quality varies widely.

That said, GameStick, OUYA and another similarly inexpensive entrant from BlueStacks have some opportunity to capitalize on the pick-up-and-play home gaming market that the Wii resurrected only to stray from with the more complex and disorienting Wii U. In fact, the company is hoping to stand on OUYA’s shoulders; unsurprisingly, developers have found it a relatively easy port from that Android-based game console to PlayJam’s CMO Anthony Johnson. “It’s a new category. You need to validate the market.” Compared to the platform variation in designing for smart TVs and pay TV operators, Android’s level of fragmentation is pure bliss to PlayJam.

GameStick may be cheap. But its success will depend on if they are willing to come back to the TV for gaming experiences that may not be significantly more engrossing than what they can already get on their mobile phones or tablets. This will be particularly true if TV manufacturers and handset companies can better communicate the ability to project phone displays onto televisions via standards such as Miracast (which GameStick supports) in order to play the games that they’ve already downloaded or purchased. In that case, PlayJam will be happy to move its store to other platforms.

GameStick will launch with 100 titles and the company promises it will ramp quickly from there. For consumers who value the tactile controls or may not want to drain down their phone battery as they play on the big screen as well as for the company’s equally embryonic competitors, it’s game on.

There is a certain jollity in the reactions of the webby class to news that the NSA has been, first, spying on Verizon communications for years, and second has approached multiple information-gathering startups, hat in hand, asking for access to their data stores. It is indeed funny: faceless bureaucrats who, we are certain, can barely click the Start menu, are horking down data from America’s Can You Hear Me Now Network while browsing our Facebook profiles over lunch. Now that the truth has come to light, we’re positively giddy. All of our worst fears have come to call and it’s hilarious.

I had heard the refrain for years from the conspiracy-minded: “Google/Facebook/Twitter/Apple will sell you out in a second.” Well, they have. Every word written by RMS (“I refuse to have a cell phone because they are tracking and surveillance devices”) was true and every time Doctorow incited us to run Ubuntu with an encrypted root partition we should have listened. But who cares? We’re not building bombs in our kitchens, we’re playing Farmville. Their jeremiads only reminded us of what sticks-in-the-mud the privacymongers are and how clever we are when it comes to routing around damage.

Maybe we should have listened.

We asked for this. We asked for this when we traded password protection for single sign-in. We asked for this when we chased social network after social network, creating a deer trail that could lead a hunter to our crushed-grass bed, still warm. We asked for this when, almost a decade ago, we traded some privacy for some security and got neither in the bargain.

I’m as guilty as you (unless you’re Cory Doctorow.) I dumped my photos into someone else’s hard drive. We use a publishing platform that will roll over to plagiarists and lairs thanks to the DMCA. We have no expectation of privacy (nor do we particularly need it, I’d imagine) and so we upload our work to the “cloud” where it sits, potentially unmolested, in DropSugarGoogleBox’s servers. We give Amazon a list of things we like and do not like and are amazed when it offers up a slew of products that will strike the perfect chord of our fancy. We are like a drunk blundering through a crowd of pickpockets. That we are not poor and naked already is a testament to either the goodness of humanity or the ineptitude of the criminal class.

In short, we didn’t trade privacy for security. We traded privacy for convenience. And the government, seeing a hole, took advantage of this.

This era of absolute trust is fading, at least in certain circles. Facebook is boring and Twitter is a firehose so people late to the game probably won’t even bother with those services. It will take a few good Google crashes to wean us off of cloud services but as the price of storage falls precipitously and the ability to connect to a home network becomes increasingly easy I could see a time when Yahoo’s promise of a free terabyte is vaguely seedy. This breach itself will probably encourage millions of programmers to use harder encryption. And so it goes.

A bad sysadmin can get away with typing “chmod a+rwx .” for years. Then some hacker discovers that little peccadillo and hides a rootkit in his server. Then that sysadmin learns his lesson and moves on. I’d like to think we’re going to be the same way, but I doubt it. We love our ease-of-use, our single sign-ins, our constant pings and instant access. We will not trade that because someone, somewhere, may be reading our private correspondence.

And so we’ll ask for it again and again. The crypto-lovers will cry wolf, then the real wolf will come and we’ll laugh it off, confident in our abilities behind the keyboard to outsmart a bureaucratic apparatus so outdated that they still require us to file our taxes on paper. Slowly, steadily we will watch this crisis erode and the next one will build itself in the old one’s stead. By that time we’ll be lifecasting what we see and hear 24/7 using wearables, perhaps, but we web savvy users will laugh that off as well. We’ll smirk at some lumpen NSA agent hunched behind a computer watching us spoon sugar into endless coffees and talk about movies and TV shows. It serves them right, we’ll say, for wanting this data in the first place.

As Schneier writes: “Welcome to an Internet without privacy, and we’ve ended up here with hardly a fight.”

When apathy is our defense we deserve what we get. But apathy breeds another kind of insecurity and makes us bigger targets still. We forget this at our peril.

Makerbot, the Brooklyn-based 3D printing company, is in talks with Minneapolis/Israel-based Stratasys regarding a possible acquisition by the latter, according to a source close to the matter. While Makerbot founder and CEO Bre Pettis refused to comment on speculation, and in fact told reporters “We’re not going anywhere” at a factory opening on Friday, persistent rumors of a sale or new funding have followed the company this year.

Stratasys makes high-end, professional-grade 3D printers for industrial applications. For example, the Liberator 3D-printed pistol was built on a Stratasys machine. Stratasys does not yet have an entry-level model for average users, a niche in which Makerbot has generated $50 million in revenue this year.

The company also appears to be chatting with investors to raise $25 million on a $300 million valuation, according to a WSJ report. We had also gotten the information that the company had been raising, but at a valuation quite beyond that. With 3D printing technology all the rage, and considerably less-hyped startup Shapeways recently raising a $30 million Andreessen-led round, why wouldn’t Makerbot want to maximize its own momentum?

Note: That image above is not of a Makerbot, but a random 3D Printer in SkyMall magazine. Signal of lack of consumer utility? Or a sign of mainstream acceptance?

This week, CrunchBase released the May Excel Export Sheet, which includes charts and graphs that illustrate recent U.S. investments, acquisitions, IPOs and more. Though the charts and graphs focus on May’s data, the spreadsheet includes historical data on all U.S.-based companies that have received funding.

Nearly 10K users made more than 43K edits to CrunchBase in May, and data keeps flowing in from the CrunchBase Venture Program, which now includes more than 160 venture firms, angel groups and incubators.

Last month alone, the San Francisco Bay Area received $1.25 billion in investments spread over 22 angel, 22 Series A, 14 Series B, 17 Series C+, and 25 venture rounds. Compare that to May 2012, when the San Francisco Bay Area pulled in $1.06 billion and in 2011 $931 million. By contrast, New York companies earned $233 million in May 2013, $355 million in May 2012 and $267 million in May 2011. My good friend the SV bubble at its finest.

There is no doubt that the New York startup scene is growing, but the $120 million decrease in funding from May 2012 to May 2013 shows some instability in the area. The San Francisco Bay Area has been steadily growing and has more than four times the investments than New York, which is equivalent to 17 $60 million Lyft deals or 102 $10 million TubeMogul deals.

The SV bubble has nothing to fear — it won’t be popping anytime soon.

If you find information that is incorrect or missing, please submit updates to CrunchBase — any registered user can make changes. Download the Excel spreadsheet here. 

It’s had to have been an interesting week for the people at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The non-profit has been beating the drum about the importance of digital rights, privacy, and metadata for decades now. And in recent years, one of the EFF’s causes has been to shed more light on the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) and specifically its use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to essentially spy on the telecommunications and web activity of millions of innocent Americans under the guise of keeping them safe.

Now those issues have come to the forefront of the mainstream’s consciousness, with a series of revelations this week that the NSA has reportedly been secretly working together with major tech companies to give the government access huge amounts of private user data through a classified project called PRISM.

So it was a massive pleasure to have Peter Eckersley, the EFF’s Technology Projects Director, in TechCrunch TV’s San Francisco studio yesterday afternoon to speak about all that’s going on. It was a relatively long conversation, but I think it could have gone on much longer and continued to be fascinating — Eckersley is an expert on this subject and clearly passionate about the cause, and there were lots of bases to cover.

What’s interesting is that I spoke to Eckersley just one hour before the New York Times’ Claire Cain Miller reported that the technology companies named in the leaked PRISM slides were indeed complicit with the NSA’s data mining, contrary to their cleverly worded public denials. As you’ll see above, he expected that was exactly the case — that the tech companies involved in PRISM have been issuing clever “deniable denials” about what is going on, rather than telling the full truth. The reason they’re doing so, Eckersley said (and the NYT reported), is FISA.

We discussed the history of FISA, how the EFF is fighting for more transparency (and why it matters), why this news of companies like Facebook and Google working with the NSA is a surprising disappointment even to the folks at the EFF, what people who care about their privacy should do now, and much more.