The folks over on Android Police must have spent some of their time rewatching I/O videos. While they were doing that, they spotted a potential leak during the “Structure in Android App Design” session. In it, it seems, Google quietly leaked screenshots of what looks to be a revamped interface for the Gmail app.

If this turns out to be a real product, and the presentation sure made it look like that, the app could soon get a new navigation drawer that should make using it quite a bit easier – especially for those of us who like to use lots of labels in Gmail.

Currently, Google uses what it calls a “spinner,” the drop-down menu at the top of the screen you’ve probably seen in numerous Android apps. Instead, as Google’s Jens Nagel showed during his presentation, the new design would use a navigation drawer that users can pop out from the left side of the screen.

Here is what this would look like:

It’s worth noting that Google showed a lot of mock-ups during this presentation. The Gmail screenshot looks pretty real, however. Google does typically vet these presentations ahead of time, so we will just have to wait and see if this is really a leak or just an example of what the Android team could do with navigation drawers in Gmail.

During the presentation, Google also showed a mock-up of what the Calendar app would look like with the new navigation drawer, but Jens Nagel explicitly noted that while they could use this as the main interface for Calendar, the sidebar does “look a bit underpopulated,” especially on a tablet. It would be odd for Google to use one interface paradigm for one of its main native Android apps and go with another one in the rest of its apps.

Here is the full presentation. The discussion about the new Gmail interface starts about 23 minutes into the video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=XpqyiBR0lJ4

Thank the old gods and the new that it’s Friday, AMIRITE? You know what that means right? Friday is Gadgets Podcast day, and boy do we have a show for you!

In this episode, John Biggs, Matt Burns and Darrell Etherington discuss Microsoft’s just-announced Xbox One, complete with voice commands, a brand new Kinect, a slew of new entertainment/social features, and the best specs yet.

Plus, Laptop Week is coming to a close, so the fellas discuss some of their faves, like the Dell XPS 13 Developer’s Edition with Ubuntu and the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina.

We invite you to enjoy our weekly podcasts every Friday at 3pm Eastern and noon Pacific.

Click here to download an MP3 of this show.
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Intro Music by Rick Barr.

Features:

• Ships with Chrome OS (generally requires an update to get to latest build)
• 2560 x 1700, 239 PPI display
• 32GB SSD
• 1.8GHz Intel Core i5 Processor
• MSRP: $1,299

Pros:

• Hardware is incredibly well-designed
• Fast boot, right into Chrome-based workflow
• Touch is nice when actually needed

Cons:

• Seems to leech battery quickly in sleep mode
• Still just Chrome
• Expensive
• Battery life could be better

The Chromebook Pixel is the Chromebook I’d pick as my personal Chromebook – if money was no option, and if I felt I really needed a Chromebook. It’s an impressive beast, like a Bird of Paradise, but in the end a trained falcon would be a way better winged thing to own, since it could catch you some wild game, instead of just prancing around with its mesmerizing but fairly useless mating displays.

Aspirational

While not comparable to a bird of prey, the Chromebook Pixel is a very impressive piece of hardware. The construction, which includes an anodized aluminum shell that has a dark slate finish, corners that are just slightly rounded for a more angular look than say a MacBook Pro, and clear attention to detail paid to the overall fit and finish that results in a final product you feel like putting on display in your home. The computer is solid, and it bears a pleasing weight to remind you, tipping the scales at 3.35 lbs (which is actually lighter than the 13.3-inch Retina MacBook Pro but feels more substantial somehow, perhaps owing to the smaller screen size.

The Chromebook Pixel also has a touch-sensitive, high-resolution display that beats the Retina MacBooks in terms of pixel density (which may have something to do with Google’s naming choice here). The screen is admittedly gorgeous in ideal conditions, but ideal conditions are fewer and farther between for the Pixel’s screen than for the Apple one. The color spectrum was skewed slightly yellow on my unit, and viewed at lower brightness legibility suffers. Also, if you think glare is a problem on your MacBook Pro or iMac, you’re going to be amazed at how much worse it can get with the Pixel in bright lighting.

The touch aspect works well, and surprisingly I haven’t had trouble with greasy mitts mucking up the screen so far. That’s probably because I seldom actually reach out and touch it though. The movement is awkward from a typing position, and of limited use value in my opinion. But for those few times you do get the impulse to tap something, it’s a very nice-to-have feature, if not a killer one. Speaking of touch, the Chromebook Pixel has one of the best trackpads currently available on a laptop, on par with Apple’s extremely solid input pads.

Hardware aside, the Chromebook Pixel’s main attribute is that it runs Google’s Chrome OS. If you’ve not used Chrome OS before, you’re probably not alone. But you also don’t need to worry about a learning curve; this is just like using the Chrome browser on your Mac or Windows computer. Web apps are treated a little more like proper desktop apps, perhaps, but the extensions, the experience and pretty much everything else about it is just like using Chrome. Which is both a good and a bad thing.

It’s good because it’s simple, easy, and for a good chunk of people, it probably actually satisfies the majority of their needs. If you’re a light computer user, making the browser the focus of an OS experience makes sense. But unfortunately for Chrome OS, tablets make almost as much, if not more sense for those users. Once you start requiring more than a tablet demands, your needs likely ramp up quickly, and then you’ll feel the lack of dedicated apps like Skype and Adobe’s Creative Suite products on the Chromebook pretty quickly. In other words, the Chromebook Pixel occupies a very thin sliver in terms of potential buyer needs, and there’s likely massive demand on either side.

Google didn’t make a mass market device with the Pixel, in the end. It made something that can stand as a shining example of what a Chromebook can be. That means that the Pixel is, in the end, something of a precious beauty, an exotic shape that won’t likely fit either a round, square or triangle-shaped hole.

Who is it for?

Designers

No. If you’re a designer and you’re using a Chromebook Pixel, you must be not very good at your job… or so good that I’m mystified at your abilities and you’ve evolved beyond the limitations of any physical tool. There are photo editing tools available for Chrome OS, and there’s even an SD card slot (but don’t try using ultra-high capacity ones like the 128GB I use as one of part of my go-to photography kit, it can’t read those), but if you’re a serious designer you’ll sorely feel the lack of better, more mature tools. It can output to other screens, too with a Mini DisplayPort, but that just gives you double the browser space, and still limits you in terms of design software.

A lot of effort seems to be going into putting more design tools in the hands of web-based editors and creators, but we’re not there yet. Maybe that’s next after Adobe has moved to its Creative Cloud subscription-based model, but for right now, designers steer clear.

Founders

No. The Chromebook Pixel might be perfect for a founder who’s building products based on the Google ecosystem and wants to kiss some extra ass, but really it isn’t a great tool for an entrepreneur on the move. The main reason being that some absolutely crucial conferencing tools like Skype are still not in place on Chrome OS.

The other conceivable situation where this might work is if you’re a web startup that’s betting big on HTML5 and you want to really eat your own dogfood. But other laptops also offer Chrome, and a lot more besides, so why not have your dogfood and eat it, too? Not sure that metaphor actually works here but it reads well, so go with it.

Programmers

No. This is a situation where it probably depends on what exactly it is you’re programming. If you’re building IFTTT recipes, for instance, a Chromebook Pixel is pretty exceptional. And if you’re working on tweaking WordPress themes, then you can do everything you want to on the Pixel. But for anything beyond straightforward and simple text-based coding, you’ll probably want to look elsewhere. I wouldn’t, for instance, recommend coding iOS apps on a Chromebook Pixel. I probably wouldn’t even recommend developing Chrome OS apps on a Chromebook, though you can apparently hack the computer to make it operate better as an everyday coding device.

Bottom Line

This is a very good Chromebook. But the fact remains that it still feels like devices running Google’s still-nascent Chrome OS need to be considered separately from other notebooks running OS X, Windows and even Ubuntu. The Pixel puts on an excellent show, has dazzling good looks and a stunning mating display, but it’s far from an apex predator.

Erply, the startup that makes iPad-oriented and cloud-based point of sale and inventory management software for retailers, has raised $2.15 million in new funding, co-founder CEO Kristian Hiiemaa tells TechCrunch.

The round, which is Erply’s Series B, was led by Redpoint Ventures with the participation of Index Ventures and Dave McClure’s 500 Startups. This brings the total venture capital investment into Erply to $4.2 million.

The decision to take on just $2.15 million was a definite choice, Hiiemaa said, noting that Erply had offers from investors keen to pitch in on a $10 million Series B. But Hiiemaa decided to keep the round small because his company, which has a staff of 45, is profitable. “There’s no need [for a larger round] now,” he said.

One way that Erply has achieved the strong financial position to be choosy with investors is by having its technology development in Hiiemaa’s native Estonia, where he has the know-how to employ top tier engineering talent. An Erply competitor with engineering operations in the United States “would need to raise $20 million to get the same team and speed,” Hiiemaa said.

Still, Erply, which has been kicking into high gear of late and currently has 45 million SKUs in 115,000 stores on board, has no shortage of ways that the new funding will come in handy — especially since its competitors include deep-pocketed tech giants such as Microsoft, Oracle, and RetailPro. The company just signed a lease on a new sales floor in New York City and plans to double its staff in the months ahead. Going forward, Hiiemaa said, Erply is focusing on big enterprise sales efforts, targeting more Fortune 500 companies with more than 200 store locations to use its platform. Also in the works at Erply is an iPad compatible RFID, NFC, and Bluetooth-enabled hardware device to manage inventory that should be making its debut later this year.

As Hiiemaa told me earlier this spring, Erply’s larger vision is a big one — to help brick and mortar shops stay in business and keep our neighborhoods vibrant. “The most important thing for me is helping retailers to survive and be successful,” Hiiemaa said at the time. “They have stores, locations, inventory, but they lack web knowledge and algorithmic-powered tools to understand retention. Otherwise, online eats the stores.” Now Erply has a bit more firepower to fight that good fight, and let technology help traditional businesses rather than hurt them.

Ladies on the zero-drop kick will love the extra cushioned comfort of Altra’s latest running shoes.

Ladies on the zero-drop kick will love the extra cushioned comfort of Altra’s latest running shoes.

A few weeks ago, Chris Dixon tweeted something thought-provoking:

What were the last Hollywood movies you saw about technology & the future that were optimistic? They seem to be systematically dystopian.

I happened to be sitting in a movie theater waiting for Iron Man 3 to start, so I tried to come up with a good counter-example. It’s a lot harder than I thought it would be. Then the pre-movie trailers starting playing. The new Will Smith (and son) flick, After Earth: dystopia. The new Guillermo del Toro flick, Pacific Rim: dystopia. Even the new Superman flick, Man of Steel, could be classified as a technological dystopia (more below).

Sure, there are some films — mainly smaller indies — that in some ways are starting to buck the trend. But overall, Dixon (and Peter Thiel, who Dixon says he got the idea from) are right: Hollywood seems to hate technology. Why?

My initial thought is simply that dystopia sells. It’s the same reason why the mainstream media covering technology tends to harp on the downsides of new tech, sometimes to the point of fear mongering. They are tracking you! They want to know your location! They want to record you going to the bathroom!

Most people are predisposed to fear what they do not understand. Hollywood’s futuristic films are simply playing to this fear in the same way that horror films are packed with moments meant to startle you.

This is nothing new. In 1927, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis — the very first feature-length science fiction film — told of a 2026 where the lower class workers power the technology for the upper class. In 1951, The Day the Earth Stood Still saw aliens bring a giant robot to Earth that would destroy the planet if humans couldn’t get their act together. The 1960 version of The Time Machine (based on the H.G. Wells book) had technology (nuclear weapons) destroying civilization. 2001. A Clockwork Orange. Soylent Green. Alien. Blade Runner. The list goes on.

The difference is that we now live in a society where advanced technology permeates all of our lives. Nearly everyone now walks around with computers in their pockets that are far more powerful than the computers that filled up rooms just a few decades ago. Nearly the entirety of human knowledge is now just a few clicks or swipes away at any given moment. The vast majority of our recent technological breakthroughs, I think everyone would agree, have been overwhelmingly good for society.

And yet, Hollywood still seems sure that this is going to change. That at some point, our meddling with technology will create HAL 9000 or Skynet, and technology will turn on us.

The example I ended up tweeting back at Dixon as an answer to his thesis was Star Trek. As Grantland noted recently in looking back at the 25th anniversary of Star Trek: The Next Generation:

Gene Roddenberry’s guiding vision of the Star Trek franchise was, famously, that it would offer an optimistic vision of humanity’s future.

And that largely held true through The Next Generation television series:

The Soviet Union collapsed a couple of years into the filming of The Next Generation, and the show’s optimistic future became startlingly coterminous with the optimistic present of the George H.W. Bush administration. Where else but space could you find a thousand points of light? The grand adventure of the NCC-1701-D was no longer to spread civilization, or even defend it; it was just to keep the machinery oiled. Remember 1991, America?

But the recent Star Trek films are a bit different. While I always liked how plot of Star Trek First Contact revolved around making sure a man takes the first flight at warp speed in space to usher in an era of peace on Earth, the actions are kicked into motion by the threat of the Borg — perhaps the ultimate in dystopian technology — taking over the Earth.

The latest Star Trek franchise seems to take a mainly glitz and glam approach to technology — bright white decks on giant starships accentuated with lens flares galore! But there also exists plenty of tech that is also horribly destructive. “Red Matter”, for example.

I saw the latest film, Star Trek Into Darkness, last week. While I enjoyed it, many Trekkie diehards did not. Certainly there are plenty of elements that are more Top Gun than the idea of using technology for exploration. I mean — minor spoiler alert — we have some sort of ultra weapons developed in secret and powered by some vague futuristic technology. And the man with the most technological know-how gets booted off the ship at one point for not wanting to mess around with these things.

Iron Man is another interesting example. It’s seems to be about technology used for good — but only to combat technology used for evil. So it’s basically neutral.

Then there’s the forthcoming Man of Steel. You might think this has little to do with technology (or at least what we commonly think of as technology), but as The New York Times reveals in a profile of the film’s director:

The film also emphasizes the world of Krypton before its annihilation — a bleak, utilitarian planet with sophisticated if downright creepy technology — and the treachery of the Kryptonian villain Zod (Michael Shannon), who finds Kal-El on earth. The result is an unapologetic science-fiction spin on Superman, and while that may shatter audiences’ expectations for pure, unalloyed realism in “Man of Steel,” Mr. Snyder said this approach was built into the DNA of the character.

Why is Superman on Earth? Because technology has led to the destruction of his home planet. I can’t wait to see what the author views as “downright creepy”.

Minority Report is one of my favorite recent sci-fi films. While the future envisioned there doesn’t seem so bad (and the filmmakers went out of their way to make the futuristic world as feasible and realistic as possible), the underlying premise is still pretty dystopian. Also: eye-scanning tech to show you ads. Spider-like robots that scan everything. This sure sounds like The New York Times’ idea of hell.

Another Spielberg film, A.I., paints a peaceful, yet melancholy future where technology tries to but can’t quite replace elements of humanity. It’s far from Utopia. Especially when you consider that ultimately — again, spoiler alert — all our technology can’t save the human race from extinction at the hands of another ice age. Even though our technology, the robots, live on!

Speaking of robots, one of the best sci-fi films I’ve seen recently is Robot & Frank. It’s a decidedly smaller type of science fiction that focuses on an elderly man’s relationship with his caregiving robot. The film is actually quite sweet, but again, hardly a full-on endorsement of technology.

In Gattaca, we again find a fairly peaceful and advanced futuristic society. But the core technology of the film, DNA sequencing — something rapidly becoming a reality in our actual world — has led to a world with a whole new level of prejudices.

The Matrix, Avatar, Prometheus, now I’m just looking over films I own that fit the mold. All are either dystopian or a net-negative for technology. The most positive one I can find is Contact, which still has plenty of negative technological elements (and this is a film based on a book written by perhaps the quintessential science/technology optimist, Carl Sagan).

Where is the It’s a Wonderful Life set in 2150? Is Back to the Future Part II really the best we got?

Again, I think the answer is that we already live in a technological utopia of sorts. No, the world isn’t perfect, but the recent advances in technology have given us so much. And people go to the movies to escape reality. It’s just too bad that science fiction films have essentially become horror movies.

Oh, Kim Dotcom. You just never stop surprising us.

Just hours after Twitter finally rolled out its long-awaited Two-Factor authentication feature to protect accounts, the Megaupload founder is claiming to have invented the entire mechanism… and he’s got a patent to prove it.

“But they won’t even verify my Twitter account?!”, he says.

The patent in question can be viewed here. Filed for in 1998 and published two years later, it lists a Kim Schmitz — Dotcom’s name before he changed it in 2005 — as the sole assignee.

For the unfamiliar, two-factor authentication is a mechanism intended to make it more difficult for hackers to access accounts that aren’t their own. When a user attempts to log in to a service from an unrecognized computer, the service sends a one-time password to an alternative device (like, say, a cell phone) known to belong to that user. At least theoretically, hacking a user’s account would thus require access to that device in addition to their password.

Google, Facebook, Twitter, and countless other monstrous sites all use two-factor authentication to protect user accounts, and Kim Dotcom’s tweets suggest that he hasn’t seen a cent from any of’em for the alleged “massive IP infringement”.

Google, Facebook, Twitter, Citibank, etc. offer Two-Step-Authentication.
Massive IP infringement by U.S. companies. My innovation. My patent—
Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) May 22, 2013

So, will he sue?

It seems he has at least considered it:

I never sued them. I believe in sharing knowledge & ideas for the good of society. But I might sue them now cause of what the U.S. did to me—
Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) May 22, 2013

But he quickly switched to a different approach; instead of getting into a legal battle with a bunch of giants, Dotcom would prefer that Google, et al. continue to use “[his] patent for free”, in exchange for financial assistance in his ongoing legal battle:

Google, Facebook, Twitter, I ask you for help. We are all in the same DMCA boat. Use my patent for free. But please help funding my defense.—
Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) May 22, 2013

All of our assets are still frozen without trial. Defending our case will cost USD 50M+. I want to fight to the end because we are innocent.—
Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) May 22, 2013

Given the rather broken state of software patents, it’s not impossible to imagine that there’s at least one other person or company out there that can claim to have invented it, with patent in hand. This patent held by Dynapass Inc, for example, was approved in 2006 for “Use of personal communication devices for user authentication”. We’re searching for other instances of similar patents.

As strange as it may seem for those who only know him as the founder of a file uploading site that was raided by the FBI last year, it would actually make quite a bit of sense for Dotcom to have security-related patents. His first brush with notoriety came in 1994, when he was arrested in Germany at the tender age of 20 for hacking calling cards. Those who spend their lives looking for security holes are often the same who come up with the solutions.

Fresh from closing its purchase of newsreading app Pulse, LinkedIn has made another acquisition to dive deeper into the mobile space. TechCrunch has found out, and confirmed, that the social network has aqui-hired Maybe, the social polling startup founded by Omar Hamoui — the man who set up, ran and then sold mobile ad company AdMob to Google for $750 million.

All staff from Maybe, except for Hamoui himself, are now at LinkedIn and working in its mobile division. That includes four engineers and one designer, LinkedIn has told us. Meanwhile, Maybe itself has now shut down. Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed.

Maybe first emerged in June of last year, a startup that was incubated and spun out of Hamoui’s now-defunct startup generator Churn Labs.

Maybe was one of the contenders in the area of polling startups — an area that has seen some other M&A activity, specifically with the acquisition of GoPollGo by Yahoo. Others include Seesaw, Fashism and Thumb.

It’s not clear why Maybe closed up shop so fast. Maybe because the polling space is so crowded? Maybe because Hamoui is working on something else? Maybe because LinkedIn made Maybe an offer it couldn’t refuse? LinkedIn is not commenting further, and we have not yet heard back from Hamoui himself. Maybe we will update when we do.

Update: Hamoui has now responded to confirm the acqui-hire as well, and explain a little more of what went on:

“After a number of different product directions we didn’t feel that what we were building was having the impact we wanted,” he says.

Putting aside competitive pressures in the polling space and startups in general looking for just the right product for the market, there is a connection between LinkedIn and Admob: Kevin Scott, SVP of Engineering at the social network, was previously VP of Engineering at AdMob. TechCrunch understands that after Hamoui and his two co-founders, Haider Sabri and Wayne Pan, met with him, they all decided it would be a natural next step for the mobile-focused team that they had built up.

“Although we had plenty of cash of in the bank, we were really impressed with the team and vision at LinkedIn,” says Hamoui. “Having the excellent mobile focused team we had built join them was clearly a way to have the kind of impact we were hoping for.”

Hamoui says the his own next steps “aren’t locked down yet.” We’ll definitely keep you posted with what we find out.

Cloud encoding vendor Encoding.com launched Vid.ly a couple of years ago to provide video creators with a way to publish a single universal video URL and then have that content accessible on any device. Now it’s providing a way to monetize those videos, thanks to an integration with ad delivery platorm FreeWheel.

The idea behind Vid.ly is that Encoding.com does all the hard work of encoding it into as many video formats and renditions as necessary, then serving up the appropriate copy of the video depending on which device was accessing it. In addition to transcoding, it also provided all of the storage, video player technology, device detection, streaming, and analytics needed by video creators. Customers could simply connect with the Vid.ly API and have a single universal URL created for them.

All of that’s great, especially for brands and agencies and marketers who wish to make their videos playable for all audiences on every PC, mobile phone, or tablet. But what Vid.ly didn’t provide (until now) was a way to monetize all of those videos. Hence, the partnership and integration with FreeWheel.

By integrating with FreeWheel’s ad-serving platform, Vid.ly will be able to provide all the same convenience and reach to publishers, but it will also enable them to monetize those videos across all those devices. By connecting with Encoding.com’s user interface or API, when a video is requested, Vid.ly will pass along user info to the FreeWheel ad server and pass along targeted ads along with the video. Pre-rolls, mid-rolls and post-rolls, as well as banner overlays, will all be supported.

Encoding.com has raised $4.5 million since being founded in 2008. While Vid.ly is a growing piece of its business, the company is still primarily focused on providing cloud encoding services to a growing number of publishers moving their content online.

GiftCards.com, a Pittsburgh-based company that has been around for more than a decade and has sold 5 million gift cards, agreed to buy San Francisco startup Giftly to grow out a mobile platform.

The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but Giftly had raised about $2.8 million from investors including Baseline Ventures, SoftTech VC, Floodgate, Thrive Capital, and Techstars’ David Tisch.

Giftly’s acquisition follows a number of other ones. Karma was picked up very early by Facebook although it may not produce meaningful revenue for some time for the social network, according to its earnings results earlier this year. Another gifting startup, Giftiki, which pooled together people’s money to get gifts, was acquired by Launchrock.

Giftly built a platform that avoided the hassle of individually dealing with merchants and point-of-sale systems. They came out with a native mobile app last fall that made it easier to send presents to friends and family.

The company’s platform didn’t put any limitations on what kinds of presents you could send because the company had a web of relationships with banks and credit card processors. When a recipient would go to redeem their gift, they would pay out of their own pocket, but Giftly would reimburse them that amount through their credit card.

GiftCards.com said Giftly will be rolled into their operations, but will maintain offices in San Francisco.

“We will continue to build out Giftly,” said Giftly’s CEO Timothy Bentley. “Our backend infrastructure will be used for their next generation products. We’ll continue to expand
the ways our technology and services are available to developers, through our API, and merchants, through our merchant services.”

The company is also looking to raise a first venture round, even though it’s been around for more than 10 years. That round will go toward completing the acquisition of Giftly. GiftCards.com has been around since 1999; they sell personalized, pre-designed and discount gift cards.

After scores of accounts were potentially compromised a few months ago, Twitter today launched two-factor authentication through SMS to protect people from hacks and phishing scams on the web. Unfortunately, it may not help shared accounts like big brands and news agencies where multiple people need to be able to log in and out but only one phone number can get the login verification codes.

Following the Twitter security incident in February where hundreds of thousands of accounts had to have their credentials reset, the tech world demanded Twitter offer two-factor authentication. Wired’s Mat Honan reported last month that Twitter was internally testing the feature. But since then, several prominent accounts including the Associated Press had been hacked through phishing tricks that the security feature could have prevented. With two-factor authentication now in place, we’ll hopefully see fewer compromised individual accounts.

However the brands and news outlets whose accounts are the most valuable to hackers may not benefit from the feature. They can only set one phone number as the recipient of the two-factor authentication codes, but may have several staff members who need to access the account. If they enabled it, whoever carried the phone registered with Twitter would have to relay the code to all the other staffers to get it to whoever needed it. That hassle might prevent shared accounts from turning on login verifications, and so the hackings may continue.

Hopefully the fact that Twitter labeled its security blog post “Getting Started With Login Verification” means more advancements are on the way that might protect shared accounts. Twitter’s product security team member Jim O’Leary writes “much of the server-side engineering work required to ship this feature has cleared the way for us to deliver more account security enhancements in the future. Stay tuned.”

How Twitter Two-Factor Works

The feature is rolling out now. If you don’t see it in your account settings, you should soon. To enable two-factor authentication, check the box next to Account Security that explains “Require a verification code when I sign in.” You’ll need to enter your phone number if you haven’t already saved it with Twitter. Once you receive a confirmation SMS on your phone you can complete activation of the security feature.

From then on when you enter your name and password to log in on Twitter.com, you’ll get a text message with a verification code you need to enter to prove you’re the account owner. The idea is that if someone steals your name and password, they probably don’t have your phone, too, and they need both to login as you.  Twitter’s “login verification” doesn’t work with its mobile apps, though, so you’ll need to use temporary app passwords to stay safe when logging in on your small screen.

You can watch a video here or below to learn how to use Twitter’s two-factor authentication. You can also check out its help center documentation.

We’ve confirmed with Twitter that it has rolled out a new part of its #Music service for the web, charts that we were accustomed to from the company We Are Hunted, that it acquired and now powers the service.

The charts are broken up into a few areas: the familiar genre breakdown, as well as some categories like “Superstars” and “Unearthed” that appear to be built based on current Twitter trends and trajectory of artist mentions. This is leveraging all of the data that Twitter is collecting from tweets that include links to tracks from popular and emerging artists.

As you click on each category, the tiles on the page swap out quickly, letting you surf around to find new artists and songs. The categorization was a necessity to be able to find hidden gems, as the original breakdown of Popular and Emerging changed so rapidly:

These are the types of charts that will get artists themselves more engaged on Twitter, as well as catch the attention of record labels who want to know what people are saying about the musicians that they’ve signed. Everyone in a band wants to know how well they stack up against others. In fact, some artists didn’t see the service coming at all, and were pleased with all of the new attention they were getting.

The service, which is still finding its footing, is still in the mode of getting musicians to participate by getting on Twitter and engaging with their fans. That engagement gives them a better shot of shooting up the charts and being found. With the addition of charts, which music listeners are also familiar with, people will be able to go deeper in finding songs that fit the genre that they like the most. Rather than waiting for Twitter to pair you with matches that it’s taking a guess on, the power is now in your hands.

If you’re an Rdio or Spotify user, then the entire #Music experience is seamless, but if you’re only buying music from iTunes, you’re not getting to hear full tracks within the app. It’s going to take a while for #Music to grip, as are a lot of Twitter’s “discovery tools.” As the company onboards more people who aren’t interested in tweeting, just browsing, they will benefit from sites like #Music being broken out. For those who are actively tweeting, it’s kind of neat to imagine that your support through tweets could shoot a band or artist up the “charts.”

These charts aren’t available for the Twitter #Music iOS app but are available to everyone on the web today.

For this week’s episode of Founder Stories, I sat down with Ilya Sukhar, co-founder and CEO of Parse. The interview was taped days before Parse was acquired by Facebook last month. Parse is a cloud app platform that provides a set of SDKs that enable developers to focus on the execution of their application instead of rebuilding backend functionality for every mobile platform. Sukhar shares his experience of leaving Salesforce and going through Y Combinator.

Sukhar, who entered YC as a solo founder, was connected to co-founder Kevin Lacker through Paul Graham. The duo then joined up with another co-founding team about a month into YC to build Parse.

“It was a big risk,” says Sukhar. “The founding relationship is a really deep one and there’s a lot of ups and downs to go through together.” Having only known his co-founders for a short time before deciding to work together, Ilya explains the risks and reality of starting a company with strangers. “It worked out well for me but I would not recommend it to other folks.”

In the later half of our discussion, Sukhar explains how he uses arguing tactics to learn whether an employee is a good fit and why stepping back from coding to focus on under-staffed areas of the company has given him the opportunity to learn more about each role before hiring someone to fill it.

Editor’s Note: Michael Abbott is a general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, previously Twitter’s VP of Engineering, and a founder himself. Mike also writes a blog called uncapitalized. You can follow him on Twitter @mabb0tt.

Another step for Adobe in its bid to become the go-to place in the cloud for those working in design and other creative industries: it is acquiring Thumb Labs, a bootstrapped, New York-based mobile app design agency.

Jared Verdi, one of the co-founders of Thumb Labs along with Rich Kern, tells TechCrunch that financial terms of the Thumb Labs acquisition are not being disclosed.

The news follows on from Adobe’s acquisition of another New York-based design startup, Behance, a platform for designers and others in the creative industries to share their work, which Adobe picked up in December 2012 reportedly for around $150 million. Earlier this month, Adobe put the Behance acquisition into context when it announced a massive push on its Creative Cloud strategy, with social/community features powered by Behance.

Verdi tells TechCrunch that Thumb Labs will see out existing contracts it has with other clients, but as of May 31, it will focus its efforts exclusively on making mobile apps for Behance.

That’s a position it knows well. Thumb Labs, which officially launched as a business in 2011, created the first mobile app for Behance, and as it points out in a note announcing the deal on its site, “We have been working closely with their talented team ever since.” That’s included a new version of the Behance app, and its Creative Portfolio app. There are under 10 people working for Thumb Labs right now, Verdi says, and all of them are joining Adobe, based out of New York.

Thumb Labs’ other clients have included a roster of startups, such as TechStars alum Bondsy (a platform to trade goods with friends); CanDoBaby (an app to make baby books); and ReadyForZero (a debt management app).

The main part of Thumb Labs’ work will now be focused both on maintaining Behance’s existing apps, as well as developing new ones. This will include “definitely some tablet work”, including an iPad app, as well as apps for more platforms beyond Apple’s, and in general making Behance’s main site design responsive so that it’s more mobile-web friendly.

Over time, there will be more focus on other Creative Cloud initiatives, which makes sense considering how linked the rise in cloud services has been with the boom in smartphone and tablet use. “We’ll also be working with other teams at Adobe for integration into the Creative Cloud. Mobile is a big part of that,” Verdi said.

In a way, getting acquired by Adobe is a natural fit for a design house like Thumb Labs, and Verdi says that it’s coming at a key time of change for its new owner. “In the creative profession everyone uses Adobe products, and the new focus on Creative Cloud is the biggest change we’ve seen in a while,” he said. “They’ve announced a number of exciting things, and hopefully we will be a part of them, too.”