Category: Tech news

An Internet sales tax is inching its way closer to being the law of the land: The U.S. Senate supported a non-binding vote of approval, 75-to-24, for a law that would allow states to collect taxes from Internet retailers. If enacted as is, it would allow states to levy taxes on some online retail purchases from businesses with over $1 million in gross receipts.

Internet retailers can thank their mostly tax-free existence to a 1992 Supreme Court Case, Quill Corp. v. North Dakota, which declared that companies without a “substantial nexus” in a state didn’t have to pay sales tax. “Quill became a seminal case for online retailers: It meant, in essence, that they didn’t have to pay state and local sales taxes,” writes the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein.” That’s allowed them to undercut traditional brick-and-mortar stores on price. It’s also meant that state and local governments, which rely heavily on sales taxes, have lost enormous amounts of revenue as more and more commerce has moved online.”

There are some exceptions: Amazon currently charges California residents sales tax, and will soon charge residents of Massachusetts and Connecticut, after new offices and acquisitions gave it a significant presence in those states.

A score of Internet lobbies, such as Netchoice, representing Facebook, Yahoo, and (TechCrunch’s parent company) Aol, argue that the senate’s bill “does nothing to address what the Supreme Court says was an unreasonable burden on interstate commerce,” explains Steve Delbianco of Netchoice.

An equally self-interested set of lobbies, such as the National Retail Federation, representing the big box likes of OfficeMax, Macy’s, And Saks, argue that an Internet sales tax ban gives online retailers an unfair advantage and deprives states of billions in revenue.

The current law will give readers a flavor for the sausage factory that is the U.S. Congress. The tax was offered as a non-binding amendment to the Democratic budget by Senators Mike Enzi and Dick Durbin.

“The strategy of the bill’s supporters is to offer this general amendment and then claim that all the senators that vote for it support the bill,” explains Brian Bieron, eBay’s senior director for federal government relations and global public policy, to CNET. “That is not just a stretch, it is not accurate. But the game plan is to rack up a sizable vote and then make the claim the bill itself should jump over the Finance Committee and go right to the floor.”

So nothing is law yet, but it’s getting closer.

We’re back! After a long hiatus, we’ve started up the TechCrunch Gadgets Podcast, our weekly review of everything hardware. We’ll be talking about hardware startups, flagship gadgets, and the wild and wooly worlds of Apple, Samsung, HTC, and all the rest.

Featuring the TC Gadgets team, this weekly audio podcast will bring you the best we have to offer and comment on the news of the week.

We’re looking for guests! If you’d like to be featured, me a line at [email protected]. We aim to make each of these about 20 minutes long – just right for a commute – and will bring on a rotating cast of TC writers.

This week we talk smartwatches, Apple on the defensive, and the release of the Nook HD+. Enjoy!

Click here to download an MP3 of this show.
You can subscribe to the show via RSS. We’ll a direct iTunes link next week.

“I pledge allegiance to the logo of corporate marketing in Cupertino. And to the computers for which it stands: One notion, under Jobs, indispensable, for hardware and software for all.” Steve Wozniak, to the Denver Apple Pi Computer Club in 1984.

And that video above is just a funny anecdotes. TUAW reader Vince Patton pointed the Apple fan site to 14 insightful videos he uploaded to YouTube of Steve Wozniak talking to the Denver Apple Pi Club in 1984. As TUAW notes, they’re a treasure trove of first hand accounts into the formation of Apple, the creation of the Apple I and II, and Woz’s college antics.

Apparently Patton recently discovered his father’s VHS taping of Woz’s talk to Denver Apple Pi computer club at the Colorado School of Mines on October 4, 1984. He cleaned up the recording and uploaded 14 clips to YouTube. Two of the best are embedded here but they’re all worth watching.

On the Apple II’s creation

“The computer [the Apple II] was not being design to be a product and it was not being design to be sold, nearly as much as it was being designed to impress and do some very unusual things that had not been seen before.” Steve Wozniak

Ironically, when speaking about the Apple II’s integrated hardware, Wozniak brings up a point that Apple still abides by today, “Whenever you can recognized standards that will prevail, build them in.” By doing so in the Apple II, this allowed Apple to leave slots open for future hardware, or as Woz says, “for expansion beyond what we can think of.”

Looking at Apple’s past hardware, this is a notion the company still believes in. From the early iMac’s use of USB over serial to the 10-year life of the Dock Connector, Apple cautiously approaches emerging standards, but tends to invest early and sticks with standards more than most other consumer electronic companies. Apparently it has been that way from the start.

Steve Jobs on the formation of Apple

“Yeah, we’d lose our money, but at least we would have a company.” said Steve Jobs according to Woz.

As Wozniak states, this was reason enough to sell bare PC boards and run the possibility of losing money — just so they would be involved in a company. And so the two, along with Ron Wayne who designed the manual, began selling the Apple I personal computer kit in 1976.

Woz explains there was originally three employees with him and Jobs owning 45% of the company. The remaining 10% went to Ron Wayne, who designed the Apple I manuals. He got cold feet several weeks into the venture and sold his 10% stake in Apple for $800. He received an additional $1,500 later that year in exchange for forfeiting any claims against the company. Given Apple’s current value, Wayne’s 10 percent share would have been worth more than $43 billion today.

Brian Heater profiled Wayne for Engadget in 2011. It’s a fantastic read.

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All 14 videos are on Vince Patton’s YouTube account.

If you love books–heck, if you even like ‘em–run, don’t walk, and read this magnificent, magisterial essay by Richard Nash on their past, present and future. It’s long. Don’t be frightened. But even if the Internet has shredded your attention span, at least scroll down to its epic final paragraph. Go on. I’ll wait.

It’s been a rotten decade for book publishers, newspapers, and anyone else clinging to that 15th century technology called the printing press. Marc Andreessen has advised the mighty New York Times to “burn the boats” and shut down their presses. His partner Ben Horowitz claimed last year that “babies born today will probably never read anything in print.”

Meanwhile, Borders is dead, the tablet is killing the e-reader, and Barnes & Noble’s Nook has gone from investor darling to dead-weight albatross. The “Big Six” publishers may seem to be surviving nicely, but check out this graph:

If publishers are at war with Amazon, the undisputed king of e-commerce–and they certainly think they are–then that remarkable trend does not bode well for them.

Authors aren’t doing so well either. “For large parts of the year it only takes a few hundred copies a day, not a few thousand, to get to the top of Amazon’s daily charts.” “My novel shot to the top of the site’s bestseller list last summer. You won’t believe how little I got paid.”

Nowadays, when authors dream of financial success, they dream more of Hollywood or TV adaptations than slots on the New York Times bestseller list. Movies and television have held up remarkably well under the onslaught of the Internet, thanks largely to ever-more-lucrative foreign markets, while book publishing has quietly become far more hit-and-miss than Hollywood. Last year each book in E.L. James’ Fifty Shades Of Grey trilogy sold more than 15 million e-book copies. Only one other book, Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, broke a million. Which is more than it sold in print, incidentally.

For the last five years, in the face of this spreading transformation, the publishing industry has been caught in a tawdry and depressing spiral of denial and decay, constantly attempting to reject new media, new technologies, and new business models until they can fight back no more. (Disagree? Name some publisher-driven innovations.) Evan Hughes’ recent Wired piece is the latest in a long line of eulogies. If it seems incredibly musty and tired to you, you’re not alone. I’m faintly amazed that it was published in Wired in 2013; my own contribution to the genre dates back to 2007.

That’s why Nash’s essay is such a breath of revolutionary air. The publishing industry will never be the same, but why can’t it be better? Why can’t a whole new model of publishing be created, rather than this false dichotomy between “published” and “self-published”? So the king is dying; well, long live the king!

The Internet opens up new ways of connecting with readers that authors have never dreamed of before… and that publishers seem to barely even consider. Take Wattpad. A few months ago they put a couple of my novels up on their site for free. (They did ask permission, even though they didn’t need to; after the rights to the books in question had reverted from their initial publishers, I released them under a Creative Commons license.)

And I’m delighted that they did. A cool million chapter-views of my back-catalog hacker thriller Invisible Armies later, I know far more about how people read the book than I ever did before:

One of the fun things about @Wattpad is that you can work out how many readers actually _finish_ your book. In the case of Invisible Armies,—
Jon Evans (@rezendi) March 03, 2013

…about 50% bounce within the first 2 chapters, but >80% of those who stay to chapter 3 finish the book. Never had numbers before…—
Jon Evans (@rezendi) March 03, 2013

…obviously, the next step is for authorial algorithms to data-mine the hell out of all this and build the perfectly addictive book. —
Jon Evans (@rezendi) March 03, 2013

Hughes seems to be arguing that authors will choose to self-publish. Charles Stross disagrees:

Yes, I could do it. But it’d suck up a huge amount of time I would prefer to spend doing what I enjoy (writing) and force me to do stuff I do not enjoy (reading contracts, accounting, managing other people). The only sane way to do it would be to hire someone else to do all the boring crap on my behalf. And do you know what we call people who do that? We call them publishers.

Indeed. But wait: why do all of those people have to work under the same corporate aegis? Why can’t Stross hire a separate editor, copy editor, publisher and marketer? Why must their end-product be viewed as a thing that is complete and engraved in stone, rather than a living beast amenable to A/B testing and weeks-to-months of optimization, like a Broadway play in previews? If a book isn’t a sheaf of papers any more–and given that the bestselling e-books are now outselling the sheaves, it clearly isn’t–then what is it?

I’ll take a swing at that one: a book is a story told in the size and shape that fits most deeply and tightly into the human brain. Everyone keeps waiting for Amazon Singles and short stories to take off, and waiting, and waiting. But I believe novels will remain the dominant form of written storytelling so long as our brains remain substantially unchanged.

Maybe the existing system of publishers and booksellers will collapse. Maybe our collective ability to filter the good from the bad will be challenged. Maybe, as more and more books are written, and more and more made available for free, full-time authors will become an endangered species.

Doesn’t really matter. Books will remain, and because they’re books, because they’re that razor-barbed size and shape, they’ll remain a genuinely powerful and subversive medium. Richard Nash is right: whatever tidal wave of change comes next, whatever economic system or sociopolitical order, you can bet that books, in one form or another, will be at its disruptive heart.

Image credit: Booksplosion, by azrasta, on Flickr.

Editor’s note: Boris Wertz is the founder of version one ventures, and has invested in over 40 early-stage consumer and enterprise companies, including vertical SaaS investments in Clio, Frontdesk, Jobber and Top Hat Monocle. Follow him on his blog and on Twitter @bwertz.

We already know that the most profitable companies from the first wave of cloud software were players in the horizontal space. Companies like Salesforce and Workday replaced on-premise solutions and won huge markets. This is old news. What’s new is the fact that there’s a second wave of disruption in enterprise cloud computing coming, and it’s going to be in the form of vertical SaaS solutions.

When on-premise solutions were first being replaced by cloud software, on-the-ground sales forces drove customer acquisition. As a result, there was a high customer acquisition cost, which made it unsustainable to focus on smaller, long-tail markets.

In the new era of enterprise software, the winners will be purpose-built, vertically sliced tools. Here are four reasons why:

1. Narrow Focus = Better Products When your product team is focused on a single market, it’s easier to deliver a solid feature set for that market. You have the freedom to go deep in understanding the specific needs of a user base and customize a solution for them. Likewise, when your offering isn’t trying to meet the needs of a hundred different user groups, you can streamline the user experience to work for the most common use cases. The result is a more intuitive product that can be incredibly easy to use. That’s the beauty of vertical SaaS businesses like StyleSeat (business management software for stylists), CareCloud (health practices), or Clio (law firms). Ultimately, ease of use drives adoption, as even less tech-savvy people can use software products with little to no resistance. In addition, the cloud lets vertical vendors deliver niche features as specific needs arise. For example, Jobber – business management software for field services industries – was able to add a chemical-tracking feature so landscapers and lawn care professionals could meet regulatory requirements by recording any pesticide and chemical usage. 2. Reach A Category-Leading Position Faster The vertical approach helps companies capture a larger market share more quickly than if they were trying to build out a broad, all-things-to-all-people solution. Mindbody, vertical business management software, is said to have more than 60 percent market share in its core yoga and fitness vertical. In the cloud, word of mouth drives adoption. Useful products are shared and recommended among employees, colleagues, vendors, etc. For example, Clio saw a rapid increase in its user base through word of mouth, as lawyers from different firms spread the word as they worked on shared cases. By focusing on a specific vertical, software vendors can more quickly penetrate a certain market and become the de facto industry standard. This can lead to a “winner takes all” (or almost all) dynamic: category leaders do very well, while Nos. 2, 3, 4 and beyond struggle to attract customers and financing. 3. Better Customer Acquisition Metrics With a heavier reliance on word of mouth, the cloud enables a more scalable marketing approach – with social media, search, and email complementing a lean and mean inside sales team. By narrowing their target audience, vertically focused companies enjoy even better customer acquisition numbers. That’s because there are no broad-based or vague marketing messages. These vendors can speak directly to a particular market about their specific needs and challenges. The specificity leads to more effective marketing and better results. 4. Expansion Into Long Tail The economics of vertical SaaS solutions are particularly interesting. Not only are these solutions beating out existing on-premise software products, but they can expand the overall market by driving into the long tail of customers that previously did not have access to affordable software products. The affordability and ease of implementation of vertical SaaS are very attractive to SMBs with limited budgets and IT resources. While total cost of ownership and ease of implementation were the growth drivers for the first generation of vertical SaaS companies, mobile will be the most important factor for the next generation. First, it opens up completely new use cases. Second, anybody with a smartphone now has access to software. Compare those penetration rates to traditional desktop software that was limited by the number of computers in an office. For example, Frontdesk mobile-first business management software helps SMBs schedule classes, book appointments, manage clients, and more from a mobile device.

Challenges Lurk For Verticals

Due to their narrow focus, vertical SaaS vendors enjoy lower customer acquisition costs along with lower capital requirements. They’re able to become the undisputed category leader faster than a horizontal vendor, creating significant barriers to entry in their particular markets.

Yet the vertical approach is not without its own challenges. Vertical markets can be limited in size. In order to scale, companies will need to enter into parallel verticals once they own their first. This is not always an easy undertaking. Fortunately, most enterprise software markets are ripe for disruption from purpose-built, superior solutions.

Editor’s note: Mike Jones is CEO of Science, Inc., a Los Angeles-based technology studio; he has no connection to the companies mentioned herein. Follow him on Twitter @mjones.

Gawker Media made headlines recently when founder Nick Denton offered his full-throated support of sponsored posts and “commerce journalism” and said he expected 10 percent of the company’s 2013 revenues to come from e-commerce activities.

Content and commerce have always had a symbiotic relationship that many traditional content providers tried to separate. The wall between editorial and business, otherwise known as the separation of church and state, is and always has contained back doors and windows in which compromises are made.

The slow adoption of all that the digital revolution has to offer – curation, aggregation, social, and automation – has also hobbled many traditional content providers. Depressed revenues, layoffs and shrinking bully pulpits are the results of an industry that doesn’t quite know how to monetize content beyond selling advertising space. Today’s successful digital companies know to blend content and commerce so that the content is compelling and, frankly, still sells stuff.

The Fab.com content email makes for a fascinating read while simultaneously seducing me into wanting to open up my wallet.

Fab.com is a prime example of this melding of commerce with content. It is one of the fastest-growing sites because, in part, it is one of the most interesting content emails that subscribers receive daily. Its mix of absurd, colorful, interesting, expensive and affordable products in their signature checkerboard design provides as much content experience as an Uncrate.com or Acquire.com and yet it is essentially a featured sales list. The Fab.com content email makes for a fascinating read while simultaneously seducing me into wanting to open up my wallet.

This mixture of content and commerce is driving a wave of editorial shopping and curation that is rewarding its forward-thinking managers with viral growth and revenue. Men’s lifestyle site Thrillist.com just announced that 45 percent of its $40 million a year earnings comes from the iPhone app for its e-commerce site JackThreads.

In the next five years, I see the intersection of commerce and content as follows:

Traditional content outlets, including magazines and newspapers, will find their way onto social media including Facebook, Youtube and Pinterest and build meaningful businesses within other companies’ platforms rather than just relying on their own digital destinations.
Editorial staff, from editors to reporters, will start out-shining their respective publication brands and will rise as tastemakers. As brands themselves, they will have the ability to generate revenue beyond their content generation.

Commerce will become embedded within content to such a degree that commerce will be seen as content.  Fab.com and BureauofTrade.com are precursors of this seamless merge of content and commerce.

It’s unquestionably an exciting, albeit uncertain, time for those in the content business. The brouhaha over the Atlantic and the Scientology advertorial is an example of the need for content and commerce to meld seamlessly so that trust and credibility are maintained.

As we see rapid growth in the number of people purchasing items online – an estimated 80 percent of Americans last year – content businesses will need to go deeper into monetization through commerce opportunities or be ready to issue more pink slips and close up shop.

[Image: Shutterstock]

There are Twitter accounts for almost everything these days. Some people I know have accounts set up for their pets, then there are toasters, beds, drones and so on. The company itself has a fun account called @Twisitor, which was a project built during one of Twitter’s quarterly hackweeks.

There’s a camera in the lobby of Twitter’s new San Francisco office and it will snap a photo of anyone who stands in front of it. Once it does that, guess what’s next? You guessed it, a tweet goes out from the Twisitor account. It’s a great representation of the culture at Twitter, where its employees eat its own dogfood, or in this case…birdfood. Its first tweet was from January 11th, so it’s still relatively new.

I’ve been to quite a few tech startup offices and each has its own bit of style and flair. When you go to Facebook, there’s always a video of someone on the team talking about the company, at Google there’s usually some comfy couches to sit on with free WiFi to use but Twitter takes the cake with Twisitor.

Here are a few sample tweets from those who have visited the flock:

Hey, it's @sillimel at @Twoffice! http://t.co/jsE4wD8Q

—
Twisitor (@twisitor) January 11, 2013

Thanks @Twoffice for having @traynorbird here! http://t.co/gbGul97npV

—
Twisitor (@twisitor) March 21, 2013

There’s even an account that follows Twisitor, called TwisitorCameo, which points out all of the people that were unnamed in the background of photos. It’s interesting to see internal culture showcased publicly on the service that these employees work really hard on building.

Who is that? Is that @shinypb? RT @twisitor: Hey, it's me at the @Twoffice! http://t.co/OTDkmMpEdK

—
Twisitor Cameo (@TwisitorCameo) March 21, 2013

The hacked project was built by Mo Kudeki, an International Engineer at Twitter, along with @nick, @wyz, @marcelduran and a few other folks. The neat part about hackweek, I’m told, is that teams are comprised of employees all over the company. I’ve been hot on Twisitor’s tracks for some time, but this tweet from her filled in some color as to where the camera is in the lobby, nestled inside of a birdhouse, where people stand to get their picture taken:

I love looking at @twisitor tweets and photos to see who's been using our #hackweek project. http://t.co/Tf5sqJaCiq

—
ʍ๏ ƙµȡƹƙɨ (@kudeki) March 23, 2013

If you’d like to see tweets from other parts of Twitter’s office, you can follow Twoffice and Lawrence T. Bird.

Twish you were here! Love, @sparsuperstar http://t.co/8txpuV2je4

—
Twisitor (@twisitor) March 20, 2013

Welcome back for the last segment of our roundtable discussion of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s new best-selling book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead.

In part one, posted Tuesday, we discussed the controversy surrounding Lean In as well as the element of fear and how it plays into women’s career paths. In part two, posted Wednesday, we discussed the emotion of guilt and the myth that women can “do it all.” And in part three posted yesterday, we talked about Sandberg’s advice on finding real mentors and partners who will support your professional and personal ambitions.

We concluded the series with the discussion embedded above, about how women can be our own worst enemies when supporting each other in the workplace. Sandberg writes in the last chapter of the book,

“It is the painful truth that one of the obstacles to more women gaining power has sometimes been women already in power.”

Our roundtable consists of a small group of Generation Y female leaders that represent the Silicon Valley tech industry’s rising new guard: Leah Busque, the former IBM engineer who is now the founder and CEO of TaskRabbit, the startup that has built a platform for outsourcing errands, tasks, and deliveries; Ashley Mayer, the senior director of communications for cloud-based enterprise storage technology firm Box; Megan Quinn, the Google and Square alum who last year made the leap into the venture capital world as a partner at Kleiner Perkins; and Pooja Sankar, the Stanford MBA and former Facebook engineer who is now the founder and CEO of educational Q&A platform Piazza.

In this last segment, we also asked our panelists for their impressions on the book, and the larger movement it is meant to spark — across the board, everyone found Lean In to be easy to read and informative. Busque is actually buying the book for each of her employees (both women and men) at TaskRabbit, and a couple of our other panelists are thinking about following suit.

Tune in above for more! And make sure to check back on Sunday, when we’ll post the full video from the roundtable, along with a written transcript.

Apparently, starting one popular T-shirt website wasn’t enough for Josh Abramson.

Last week Abramson, who previously co-founded the jokey T-shirt retailer BustedTees, launched TeePublic, which is basically a Kickstarter for T-shirts. Users can pledge to buy designs that they like, and if a shirt gets at least 30 people to fund it, then TeePublic will print it and continue to sell the shirt indefinitely. Shirts cost $20, of which $5 goes to the designer.

Older sites have taken steps in this direction. Most notably, there’s Threadless, where people submit their designs and people vote on them. Ultimately, however, the designs that get printed are chosen by the staff. As a result, Abramson argued that there are plenty of designs that attract significant interest, but never get turned into shirts. (Y Combinator-backed Teespring is trying to do something similar.) For example, he pointed to this design, which the artist said received “a huge response from the members of the Threadless community” but “they never opted to print it for whatever reason.”

Abramson sold his company, Connected Ventures (whose properties included CollegeHumor, Vimeo, and BustedTees), to IAC, but he bought BustedTees back in 2011. He said that he considered making TeePublic part of the existing site, but he worried “there would be pressure on everybody to come up with funny T-shirts” (some shirts on the site are funny, but many are not). Nonetheless, he will be using BustedTees to cross-promote the new site.

In the first week since lauch, Abramson said TeePublic saw 50,000 visits, and there are now more than 2,000 registered users. Those users performed 1,000 funding/purchasing actions. On the design side, more than 480 designs were uploaded and 22 have been funded so far. And since it’s important for designers to publicize their shirts, Abramson also pointed out that 60 percent of the designers are sharing on Twitter and Facebook once they upload their work.

In this week’s Ask A VC, Comcast Ventures’ Managing Director Michael Yang sat in the hot seat to talk about his passion for digital healthcare, and much more.

During the show, Yang actually demoed wearable health tracking device BodyMedia. Comcast led a $12 million investment in the health care startup last year.

We also chatted about how things are going over at Yahoo. Yang was previously a Vice President/General Manager at Yahoo in the Media Group as well as the Local Markets & Commerce Division, where he managed Yahoo Autos, Yahoo Real Estate and Yahoo Health; co-led Yahoo Shopping; and was part of the team that formed Yahoo’s strategic alliance with the Newspaper Consortium.

Check out the video above for more!

There’s been nothing but bad news coming from Barnes & Noble lately, and it seems as though the company has decided to resort to the desperate measure of giving away Nooks for free. Reuters is reporting that customers who purchase the $269 Nook HD+ will receive a $79 Simple Touch free of charge as a limited offer.

It’s a great deal if you’ve been looking for both a tablet and an ebook reader, but I can’t help but feel a little sad that this is what it’s come down to. Nooks have always been solidly designed products, it’s just that they were never able to catch on with consumers after being doubly sucker punched by the iPad and the Kindle.

In January, Barnes & Noble revealed its plans to close nearly 20 of its retail locations over the next decade, which was followed by news last month that Nook revenue had dropped 26 percent YOY.

From an economic perspective, the fall of 2008 brought dark days all over the world. But one of the hardest-hit places was Iceland, the Nordic European country whose entire financial system went into a deep freeze after a rapid and systemic collapse of its banking system.

But two young Icelandic entrepreneurs Vala Halldorsdottir and Sesselja Vilhjalmsdottir found a silver lining in the situation. With an absence of traditional job prospects, the two young women decided shortly after the 2008 economy crash to start their own boardgames company — and it turned out to be a big success. After that, they were motivated to spread the word about entrepreneurship to more people by making a documentary film about startup life.

Much like they first jumped into entrepreneurship without a ton of experience, Halldorsdottir and Vilhjalmsdottir tell us they jumped into the filmmaking process with nothing more than a rented camera and a one-way ticket to the US. The plan was simple, but audacious: To somehow track down a number of successful tech startup founders and talk to them about entrepreneurship.

Thanks in part to a successful Kickstarter campaign and the participation of very well-known founders from the likes of Vimeo, Soundcloud, Kiip, InDinero, Dropbox, and Foodspotting, it all worked out — and The Startup Kids film became a reality. Up until today, the film has been seen at a smattering of screenings. As of today, though, it’s available to a much wider audience, with the film’s debut on iTunes.

It’s a fun story and the final product is an interesting watch. You can see the trailer embedded above, and download the full film here (for now, it’s available only in English-speaking countries, but the DVD is available for shipment worldwide on The Startup Kids website. The official summary goes like this:

“A film about young entrepreneurs in digital age made by two of these entrepreneurs themselves, The Startup Kids is a documentary about the growing number of young web dynamos such as the in the U.S. and Europe. Made by two Icelandic entrepreneurs who founded their first company shortly after the economic collapse of Iceland, this doc is an insider’s look into what it takes to make it even when everyone is telling you it is impossible.

We also had the opportunity to talk with the filmmakers via Skype about The Startup Kids, and you can watch that in the video embedded below to hear more about the inspiration behind the film, how it went from idea to reality, how the Icelandic startup scene is faring these days, and much more.

Where are the users headed following news of Google Reader’s shutdown? To Feedly, it seems. We already heard the company announce it had passed half a million new users, but more importantly, Feedly is now winning on mobile, too. According to new U.S. App Store and Google Play data, Feedly is leaving competitors like NewsBlur and Reeder far behind. Even though Google Reader will remain for a few months more, Feedly became the No. 1 news app across all three top mobile platforms (iPhone, iPad and Android) this week. It even climbed into the “Top Overall” section within all three stores.

This data is current as of mid-week. Today, Reuters moved up on iOS to bump Feedly to No. 2 on iPad, and No. 4 on iPhone. On Android it’s still No. 1.

Also, the data is U.S.-only, so it doesn’t present a complete view of the situation. But it’s notable as to where the Reader-replacement race stands now in one of Google Reader’s top regions.

Ten days prior to the Reader announcement, the average daily downloads for the Apple App Store for Feedly were around 1,200 to 1,300, according to app analytics firm Distimo. Since the news broke, Feedly downloads have increased more than tenfold to over 16,000 per day, on average.

Competitor NewsBlur, which also has a mobile client, is currently generating 1,000 to 2,000 downloads per day since the news broke – Feedly’s pre-Reader shutdown levels, basically.

It’s worth noting that Feedly has been at the game longer, and has been preparing in advance for the end of Reader. It has a transition plan in place already. NewsBlur, admirably, is a one-man shop. It’s inspiring to watch Samuel Clay scale that thing on his own. And it’s open source, so it has that going for it. But a mission-critical app can’t go into maintenance mode after Reader is gone, so people may be nervous about NewsBlur right now.

By the numbers, it’s Feedly’s half million users vs. NewsBlur’s 60,000+, currently. Things, of course, could quickly change – and the horse race is not limited to these two.

In The Running?

People are also responding to the branding of “The Old Reader“ (though it’s not really like the old one). It also struggles under the load, and the mobile interface needs work. Digg has pre-announced its intentions, but we know nothing of the final product. Black Pixel surprised everyone with plans for the return of NetNewsWire, which happens to be TechCrunch writer Frederic Lardinois’s preferred client. Reeder has a plan for D-Day, but limits itself to the Apple world.

There’s also a spreadsheet being passed around which lists about 50 alternatives to Reader, so no need to bore you by listing all of them here.

But only some are true replacements. Everybody with a remotely related news-reading service is trying to get a piece of the action these days. Zite, for example, very disingenuously posted last week that it had “rebuilt” Google Reader in six hours. That was seriously messed up. Zite is a news magazine. A news magazine is by no means a Reader replacement.

Feedly might not ever transition into a full Reader replacement, either. Founder Edwin Khodabakchian says he’s “trying to find the right balance” between what Feedly has built and serving the news of its new audience, which is demanding a minimalistic view of their feeds, like Reader offered. To some extent, he’s responding to their concerns. (And for those still not happy with the Feedly UI, there are always userscripts and Chrome extensions.)

“Our goal is not to copy per se, but understand the behaviors and workflows and try to support them as best as we can,” Khodabakchian says.

He also tells us that Feedly has been working for the past five months on a very big mobile update, which is being approved by Apple right now. The app should be out soon – maybe a week at best.

“The private beta feedback we collected on that update is by far the best we have had over the last 18 months,” he says. And he promises that Google Reader refugees will appreciate the new title view that the app offers.

Fingers crossed.

Damn it, Internet. I had things I needed to do this afternoon.

So much for that. A VHS recording of a 1984 Apple enthusiast meetup was recently rediscovered, and it had at least one very special gem tucked inside: footage of a 34-year old Steve Wozniak giving a speech on just about everything you’d want to see 34-year old Steve Wozniak talking about. Pranks. The decision to quit everything and start Apple. Changing the friggin’ world.

(Oh, plus a very special rendition of the Pledge of Allegiance, “One Notion Under Jobs”)

To give you a better sense of timeline: this is about eight years after Apple was first formed, seven years after the Apple II, and it’s the same year Apple launched the Macintosh. Woz would leave his full-time position at Apple about three years later.

A thousand high fives to public broadcasting journalist Vince Patton for digging these up and getting them online.

Woz On Quitting HP To Go All In With Apple:

Woz’s “One Notion Under Jobs” Pledge:

Woz On Getting Probation For Computer Abuse:

Woz On The Development Of Apple I:

Woz On The Development Of Apple II:

Woz On Knowing Apple Would Lose Money (Heh.):

Woz On Hacking His Hotel Rooms:

The zippy new smartphone won’t dethrone Android or put a major dent in Apple’s iPhone dominance, but it will make current BlackBerry users happy enough to lay down some cash.