Category: Tech news

Grishin Robotics, a Russian VC group dedicated to the commercialization of robotics, has dropped an unnamed sum into Bolt, a hardware incubator in Boston. Grishin’s investment is part of a $3.5 million financing package closed this week.

“Since our launch in June last year and past two investments, we realised that there is plenty of smart entrepreneurs with good ideas, but they lack guidance and mentorship, and it’s too early for them to take VC money. Bolt is an ideal place for them to go,” said Dmitry Grishin, founder of Grishin Robotics.

“We believe that hardware startups, and consumer robotics and connected devices specifically, should have supporting ecosystem around them in order to succeed, and it’s just being built now.”

Bolt is a “product-focused” accelerator that allows for hardware startups to mature in a solid engineering environment. The six-month program puts start-ups through the ringer while supplying them with solid mentors as well as a complete machine shop and electronics lab.

Grishin was unable to describe its actual investment but told us it was significant. “Strategic partners (GR, Logitech, Autodesk) combined have provided the biggest share of funding, and size of this investment is much bigger than our previous two deals,” he said.

What’s next for Grishin? They’re still hunting for a few good hardware start-ups. “We can see a lot robotics companies emerging on a connected devices market, around ‘internet-of-things’ idea, and now talking with plenty of companies in this area,” said Grishin.

Updated. Memolane, the startup that helped users archive and explore social network activity across different platforms, is shutting down. The company announced the closure in a blog post published this afternoon.

The shutdown will be quite abrupt: Memolane accounts and content are set to be deleted tomorrow, February 22 (the company has not specified at what exact time this will occur.) All Memolane content is pulled in from existing social networking sites, of course, so the data will still be out there in its original format. But regardless, this is very short notice for a service to completely disband.

It’s almost always sad news when a startup doesn’t quite make it, but this seems to have a silver lining, albeit a very vague one. Memolane says its team is “joining another company that will utilize the Memolane features in an expanded way.” We’ve reached out to Memolane founder and CEO Eric Lagier for more details on which company is involved and if any money was involved in the transaction, and will update this when we hear back.

Update: Lagier has responded, but says that he “cannot share any more information” at this time. Memolane at the time of closure has five staffers, he said.

Memolane was founded back in 2010 and raised a total of $2.5 million in venture capital. The company’s idea of creating an “internet time machine” for easily viewing and exploring your past social networking content on sites such as Facebook and Twitter was certainly compelling — but perhaps a bit too much ahead of its time. Facebook, of course, debuted its own Timeline interface amid much fanfare in September 2011, which many saw as rendering Memolane’s service moot.

In the meantime, Timehop has emerged and garnered a lot of popularity with its own method of letting people walk down memory lane by surfacing past social networking content. Up until now, Memolane has kept up the fight and continued to release more new features, but ultimately it has opted to wave the white flag end its run as standalone entity. In fact, its farewell blog post pointed to both Timehop and Jolicloud as alternatives for its service going forward.

Here is the full text of Memolane’s blog post announcing the closure:

“Here at Memolane, we’ve had an amazing two years helping people see, search and share all of their social media content from across the web. Our goal was to make it exciting to relive great adventures with friends. We are proud that we could bring joy to people’s lives by sending out daily emails with fun memories from the past. As well, it has been a thrill to share in the excitement when one of our fans rediscovers a precious moment that was once lost.

Today we want to share the exciting news that our team is joining another company that will utilize the Memolane features in an expanded way, adding more value to all the great memories captured on social media.

Unfortunately this also means that we will be shutting down the memolane.com service. Your account with Memolane and all its content will be deleted on Friday Feb. 22th 2013. Please note that Memolane only aggregates content so all of your social media memories will still be available on the existing social media services you use.

As well, if you love receiving your daily MemoMail, there are other services which you can use, such as Timehop. JoliCloud also offers a service for accessing all your social media. Check it out!

Since our launch almost three years ago at StartupWeekend CPH 2010, we have seen continued innovation around our vision of rediscovering great memories. With the launch of Facebook Timeline we saw the ultimate validation of our vision.

If you feeling a bit nostalgic then you can read all about how it all started. Also, feel free to send us a message on Twitter or Facebook. Also check out our FAQs post for more information.

Finally, we would like to share a word of heartfelt thanks with our loyal users, partners and our incredible team. We cannot thank you enough for all of your support, feedback, and warm wishes over the years.

And as always…

Keep making great memories, thanks for being part of ours!
Eric, Nikolaj and the Memolane Team”

Over the past few years, Vevo has been working hard to simplify the process by which users search for and discover new music videos on its site. With that in mind, the company released a small update to its homepage today, aimed at making it easier for users to check out new music videos and to search for those they know and love.

The latest update to the homepage provides some incremental improvements to the massive redesign that Vevo rolled out about a year ago during SXSW. Interestingly, most of the changes are focused on removing features rather than adding new ones for users to play with.

Vevo SVP of product Michael Cerda told me by phone that the update was designed to provide a more immersive experience for users, and also to help them find the content that they want more quickly. “We decided, ‘Let’s not give people too many places to click around,’” he said. As a result, the company has stripped out some pieces of navigation that were part of the old design.

For instance, the company removed the navigation bar and radio buttons that were previously there for creating playlists and discovering what friends were listening to. Instead, with the latest update, all the playlists, friends and video pages are hidden behind the browse button. That provides an unobstructed view of the “larger than life” artist photos that rotate on the homepage. It also simplifies the scroll navigation to discover editorially curated and trending videos below the carousel.

Search is another area that the new design seeks to improve. There’s now an autocomplete feature when users begin typing in the search bar, which reduces the amount of time it takes to find and begin watching a video. “We don’t want to take people from the home page to a landing page,” Cerda said. Instead, the autocomplete function should get them directly to the video they’re trying to find.

Playlists were also an area of focus. While it’s the one feature that users need to be signed in to take advantage of, Cerda said that users will now have better tools for creating, curating and managing playlists. That will let users arrange and rearrange content the way they want to. Doing that will hopefully keep them on the site longer, as they can create and tune into near-continuous streams of their favorite music videos.

All in all, the update is aimed at getting people to discover more and get to what they want faster, Cerda told me.

The new streamlined features come a few weeks before Vevo is planning a major announcement at SXSW. It also was released as the company is in the midst of renegotiating a new deal with YouTube. That would replace the original deal that YouTube and Vevo had, which expired after three years of working together beginning in late 2009. Vevo had no comment on those talks, or the rumor that it is expected to raise more financing, including taking some money from Google/YouTube.

Five weeks after launch, Facebook gave reporters a ‘State Of Graph Search’ today at its Menlo Park HQ. It’s been rolled out from the original 100,000 users to “hundreds of thousands,” and now a news feed story is appearing to lure people’s friends to sign up for the early access wait list.

This morning I noticed Facebook was admitting a slew of wait-listed people to Graph Search. That’s because now when new people gain access, Facebook automatically publishes a news feed story, e.g. “Eric Eldon just got Graph Search.” Click through those last words, and people can sign up for earlier access, too. Facebook tells me this is a viral driver meant to increase waitlist sign-ups. The story frames Graph Search as the cool new feature you should be willing to beg to get access to.

Beyond user counts and the roll out, today’s “Graph Search Whiteboard Session” saw some of Facebook’s lead engineers delving deep into how people are using its new internal search engine, and how it works on the back end.

Graph Search Director Tom Stocky noted that early usage patterns show people using Graph Search for the same things they use the social network for: looking at friends and photos. “But Places is third” said Stocky, an encouraging sign for local businesses. Interests aren’t getting as many queries.

One thing that surprised Facebook was the ways people search for their friends. Rather than asking for something like “photos of my ‘friends’”, users frequently typed in terms like ‘chums’, ‘besties’, ‘buddies’, ‘homies’, and ‘peeps’. At first those stumped Graph Search, but a dedicated natural language team has now built those in so they’re recognized as synonyms.

Next, Facebook is working to scale up Graph Search — both the back-end system (called Unicorn) so it can support more users and the roll-out can continue, and in terms of foreign languages so it can expand beyond English. However, that second part may require it to hire linguists in each language to identify sentence structure and synonyms, or figure out a way to crowdsource this process the same way it did to translate the whole site.

It’s also trying to work out syntax problems so people can run “Or” queries. Right now you can ask for “friends who Live in New York who Like Game Of Thrones and Downton Abbey,” but not “Friends who live in New York who Like U2 or The Rolling Stones” which could help you quickly find someone to go to a rock concert with.

But where I see the real potential of Graph Search is intelligent sorting of results in a way only Facebook could do. For example, if you search for “people who work at TechCrunch” you get all our real employees, but lots of people who just list TechCrunch as their employer as a joke or to look like a techie. Luckily, Graph Search is smart enough to identify which people who “work” at TechCrunch are friends with each other. Since groups of real employees are often friends, it knows which are more likely to be real and to show at the top of the results. Facebook also looks at which people have listed a verified @techcrunch.com email address in their profile as another sign of legitimacy.

Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF), an old method put to new use by Facebook, is helping sort Graph Search results. Ask Facebook Graph Search for “books liked by founders” and you won’t see The Da Vinci Code or The Bible first, though they’re among the most Liked books. Instead you’ll see books disproportionately Liked by founders compared to the general population thanks to TI-IDF. Surfacing The Tipping Point, and Design For Hackers shows how smart Graph Search is.

Facebook’s Mike Curtiss explained TF-IDF to me using the example of “TV shows Liked by my friends.” He says “There’s a tough balance with TF-IDF. If you don’t use it you’d just be promoting the most popular TV shows. But if you can bias it towards the preference of these individuals and not what’s objectively the most popular, you get different results. It’s nice to use that when you can. It’s a good signal. You can show the things with the most Likes, or you can show the things that are very unique to people [you’re asking about], but often you want a balance of those to provide the most interesting results.”

Facebook is trying to leverage its social data to essentially create a custom search engine for every user. Then by sorting results further with TF-IDF, it could build something not just different from Google, but potentially better where they overlap as well.

For more on how Graph Search works straight from the horse’s mouth, watch my interview with former Google employees and the current Facebook Directors of Graph Search, Tom Stocky and Lars Rasmussen. 

HP just released its Q1 2013 earnings report and for once, the company beat analyst expectations: revenue was once again down 6% to $28.4 billion, but still higher than most analysts expected. The company reported an income of $1.2 billion and EPS of $0.82. Last quarter, HP still reported earnings of $30 billion and a net loss of $6.9 billion after its $8.8 billion write-down due to alleged accounting fraud at Autonomy prior to HP acquiring the company.

The stock market is reacting very positively to this news. HP’s stock is currently trading at $18.35 in after-hours trading, up $7.3%.

The general consensus among analysts was that HP’s total revenue would decline by about 7.5% compared to the year-ago quarter and that revenue would be around $27.79 billion, with a net income of around $1.39 billion and earnings per share would be around $0.71, a decline of 24% compared to last year’s EPS of $0.92. HP clearly beat these expectations.

After last year’s $17 billion write-off after the acquisitions of Electronic Data Systems and Autonomy, as well as five previous quarters of declining revenues, many shareholders were hoping that CEO Meg Whitman would be able to stop the company from sinking even further.

HP’s ailing PC business shows no sign of recovering so far. After a 14% decline in Q4 2012, the company reported n 8% decline in revenue from personal computers for this quarter. With its Servers, Storage and Networking revenue also dropping by 9% in Q4 2012 and 4% this quarter, the only area where HP really made some progress last time around was in software, where revenue grew 14%, but revenue from this business declined by 2% last quarter.

“We beat our non-GAAP diluted EPS outlook for the quarter by $0.11 per share, driven by improved execution, improvement in our channel and go-to-market efforts and the impact of the restructuring program we announced in May 2012,” said Meg Whitman, HP president and chief executive officer. “While there’s still a lot of work to do to generate the kind of growth we want to see, our turnaround is starting to gain traction as a result of the actions we took in 2012 to lay the foundation for HP’s future.”

HP, of course, faces a lot of headwind given that sales of its core products, including PCs, printers and servers, are on a downward trend that the whole industry is feeling and that isn’t likely to recover anytime soon. The company missed its chance to become a player in the mobile phone and tablet market and it remains to be seen if Whitman and her team can turn the company around.

For the second quarter of 2013, HP estimates that non-GAAP diluted EPS will be in the range of $0.80 to $0.82 and GAAP diluted EPS will be in the range of $0.38 to $0.40.

Here are the full segment results from HP:

• Personal Systems revenue was down 8% year over year with a 2.7% operating margin. Commercial revenue decreased 4%, and Consumer revenue declined 13%. Total units were down 5% with Desktops units up 10% and Notebooks units down 14%.
• Printing revenue declined 5% year over year with a strong operating margin of 16.1%. Total hardware units were down 11% year over year. Commercial hardware units were down 6% year over year, and Consumer hardware units were down 13% year over year.
• Enterprise Group revenue declined 4% year over year with a 15.5% operating margin. Networking revenue was up 4%, Industry Standard Servers revenue was down 3%, Business Critical Systems revenue was down 24%, Storage revenue was down 13% and Technology Services revenue was down 1% year over year.
• Enterprise Services revenue declined 7% year over year with a 1.3% operating margin. Application and Business Services revenue was down 9% year over year, and IT Outsourcing revenue declined 6% year over year.
• Software revenue was down 2% year over year with a 17.0% operating margin. Support revenue was up 11% while license revenue was down 16% and services revenue was down 8% year over year.
• HP Financial Services revenue grew 1% year over year as a 1% increase in net portfolio assets was offset by a 25% decrease in financing volume. The business delivered a 10.6% operating margin.

When talking about Apple’s rise from near-bankruptcy to become the most valuable company in the world, people often credit the amazing string of products from the iMac to the iPod to the iPhone to the iPad. And rightfully so. But just as important was another piece of the puzzle that ensured said products would find mainstream appeal and acted as an accelerant for Apple’s success: the Apple Stores.

When Apple first got into the retail game a little over a decade ago, many people scoffed. In hindsight, Apple seems to do quite well when people scoff (see: here and here) — it sort of makes sense, if an idea was obvious, others would have done it. But others in Apple’s position had tried to do retail and failed (see: Gateway — complete with cows out front — Sony, etc).

Yet Apple became the most effective and prized retailer in the world.

Naturally, this led others to take a page from Apple’s playbook. Notably, Microsoft. And while the experiment is ongoing, so far, those stores do not appear to be taking off in the same way. So when you hear the news that Google is considering opening their own retail stores as well, you might, well, scoff. But I think that would be a mistake. I think Google could be poised to nail retail as well.

With the news today about the Chromebook Pixel, the pieces are all starting to come together. Google says it’s selling that product through the Google Play online store and through Best Buy’s and Currys PC World’s websites. (And they’ll be available to use, but not buy, inside some Best Buys and Currys.) That won’t be good enough.

Google has been attempting to sell various Nexus products through their online stores for years now. The results have ranged from some success (Nexus 4) to fail (Nexus One) to major fail (Nexus Q). The Best Buy results seem mixed as well. While Chromebooks are finally seeing some traction, it’s still minimal despite the reach of Best Buy.

What Google needs for these products is what Apple needed a decade ago: their own stores that they’re in complete control of to showcase their products.

You have to believe Google knows this — hence attempts to create Chromebook sales areas staffed by Google employees in places like airports. But they need permanent hubs. They need central locations in cities around the world where people know they can go for all their Google needs. They need people in those stores to play with their products. And they need Google-trained employees there to answer any questions. It’s not good enough anymore to see a spec sheet online. We’re in an era of new usage paradigms. Hands-on time is key.

This is especially true for Google with products like the Pixel and soon Google Glass. Average consumers are never going to buy these products online without having tried them first. These are not standard PCs that are simply faster than the last PC you bought.

Average consumers are never going to buy these products online without having tried them first.

Okay, but how can Google Play Stores (the presumptive name) follow in the success of Apple Stores and not the mediocrity of Microsoft Stores? By not exactly copying Apple.

One of Microsoft’s mistakes with their stores is that they’re carbon copies of Apple Stores. Anyone who walks into one immediately feels this. It was an obvious but insanely stupid strategy on Microsoft’s part. Microsoft is trying to play to Apple’s strengths instead of their own. And in the process they’re reinforcing just how good Apple is at what they do.

In the beginning, Apple Stores made sense because Apple was generally considered to make high quality products. But that can only be truly appreciated when consumers use them. And because OS X (and later iOS) were not as ubiquitous as something like Windows, there was a large barrier to entry in people buying their first Apple product. And big retailers were reluctant to give a lot of space to Apple at their stores because of their low market share. Classic chicken-and-egg. Apple needed their own physical stores.

I’d argue that they were the single most important factor in the iPhone’s success as well. Without the stores, Apple wouldn’t have had the same leverage over the carriers. They would have needed those carriers to sell the phones and would have likely had to strike some unsavory deals with those devils as a result (like another company that’s the focus of this post).

That Apple nailed other elements like the Genius Bar was just a very smart cherry on top of the strategy.

Microsoft has had almost the opposite problem. Basically everyone both knows and has used Windows, Office, etc. Retailers have been awash with PCs for decades. Yet Microsoft still decided to copy Apple’s store model. You could argue that they now need these stores to get people to play with their Surface products. But I’d argue that doesn’t help because those products are simply not very good. That is still the key, remember.

(Honestly, Xbox may be the best thing those stores have going for them, going forward. Microsoft may be wise to pivot the focus. Come for the Xbox, stay for the Surface and Windows 8. Maybe. Please.)

Consumers need to know what the hell Google Glass actually is.

In contrast, Google products have been improving since the first Android and Chrome OS products. And they seem to be at the point where they’re ready to be showcased in a retail experience. People need to know firsthand if they can replace their BlackBerrys or *shudder* iPhones with the Nexus 4 (yes yes, my thoughts on that device are still coming — it’s tough when you have another day job). They need to know if they can really use a laptop with an OS that is essentially just a web browser. They need to know what the hell Google Glass actually is.

But again, these Google Play Stores shouldn’t be Apple Stores. They shouldn’t be stark white minimalist spaces of carefully crafted wood, cement, and glass. They should look like Google products. They should be colorful and sort of playful. There should be a self-driving car in there. There should be Google Glass stations. Android devices galore. Chromebook areas. Maybe even Google TV. (Maybe.)

Every machine should be connected to the web (maybe via Google Fiber?) and prominently displaying Google.com or Google Now. Another key insight Apple had for Apple Stores was to let people play with their machines as they would in their homes. I recall going to stores like CompUSA back in the day and only being able to see PCs with canned demos playing on the screen. Those places didn’t want people just hanging out and using their machines. Huge mistake.

Microsoft would love people hanging out in their stores like they do in Apple Stores. Yet they don’t. Maybe that means internet access isn’t enough. So maybe Google should do something I always wish Apple would do: open a coffee shop in the stores (Google Ventures did just pour some money into Blue Bottle Coffee — just saying). Make the Google Play Store a destination for the connected wanderer. Loiter all you want, just keep $earching for thing$.

Other companies now look at Apple Stores with their mouths agape. $6000 in revenue per square foot — double their closest retail counterpart, Tiffany & Co (motherfuckin’ Tiffanys!). But that can’t be the focus. That can’t be why Google is getting into this business. It has to be all about showcasing great products that simply need a bit of hands-on time (or a bit of hand-holding) to be truly understood and cherished.

It feels like Google is primed for this.

[Image: Adapted from Flickr/turbulentflow]

Google hasn’t always been known for making breathtaking hardware, but today’s announcement of the Chromebook Pixel — arguably one of the best-looking laptops ever made, if nothing else — means that may no longer be the case.

Still, you can’t be blamed for being wary of shelling out a decent chunk of money on Google’s first foray into laptops, let alone a Chromebook of all things, so here’s a preliminary look at how the Chromebook Pixel stacks up against two prominent rivals in the computing space: the stock version of Apple’s 13-inch MacBook Air and Microsoft’s Surface Pro.

*Note that we compared the base MBA and the surface Pro with upgraded storage, to establish a better baseline in terms of comparing more similar price points and spec load-outs. 

Versus the 13-inch MacBook Air

Compared to the base 13-inch MacBook Air, Google’s Pixel has a lot of similarities. It’s priced around the same, but actually comes in as more expensive that the OS X ultraportable, at $1299 and $1449 for options with Wi-Fi only, and Wi-Fi + LTE networking. What does the Pixel offer to justify the extra cost? It does have a denser display, with 239 ppi on a nearly 13-inch display. And that screen is touch sensitive, which isn’t something Apple can claim. But until now, it hasn’t shown off much about how touch might work with ChromeOS, though it has reportedly been “optimized” for finger-based input.

Another place where the Chromebook Pixel falls short of its competition is in local storage. 32GB on the Wi-Fi model and 64GB on the LTE version is tiny compared to the MacBook Air, which is already pushing it with 128GB. LTE is nice to have, but, with the prevalence of hotspots and modems, arguably less important than more offline-accessible storage space.

The Chromebook Pixel is very much aimed at the same market as the MacBook Air, with Google stressing that it’s an upscale device. But despite what looks to be a beautiful screen, this arrives with an even more experimental, touch-enabled version of an OS that has yet to prove itself with general consumers, meaning that the reasons to opt for Google’s brave new laptop over the Air perhaps aren’t as apparent as Google would’ve hoped.

Versus the 128GB Surface Pro

I can’t help but think about the Chromebook Pixel in relation to something like the Surface Pro, another premium computing device from a company that has historically shied away from making its own computers. Granted, the differences in execution between the two are pretty staggering, but it’s hard not to look at both devices as fresh steps into a market increasingly driven by novel hardware.

The Pixel certainly has the Surface Pro beat when it comes to sheer screen size and resolution (it has a 12.85″ display running at 2560 x 1700, compared to the Pro’s 10.6″ panel running at 1920 x 1080), but the Surface Pro seems to sport better touch support with its included stylus and Wacom digitizer. It’s too early to say whether or not one device has a definitive advantage of the other because of their seemingly similar processors (though the Pixel could squeak by because of its slightly quicker chipset), but we’ll return to that once we get our hands on a review unit.

Again, the Pixel may fall flat with its paltry 32GB of internal storage (though folks who spring for the LTE model will have around 64GB to play with). Sure, having a terabyte of cloud storage is neat, but those in need of real speed will prefer the Pro’s SSDs and memory card slot.

The other big question mark here is Chrome OS itself. The Chromebook is a very handsome little machine that seems to have some horsepower under the hood to boot, but I’m curious whether or not people will choose to plunk down upwards of $1299 for a computer that exists outside of the two entrenched environments that have dominated consumer computing. Windows 8 isn’t a shining star yet either, but it’s far from a company’s side project.

In the end…

While the Air and Surface Pro have their share of advantages, it’s still a little too early to write the Chromebook Pixel off completely. It may just be the right computer at the right time to give Chrome OS the boost it really needs, but for now Google needs to make a better case for why people should spend $1299 on a computer that hinges on the cloud instead of, you know, anything else.

Although I, like many of you, suffered through Sony’s interminable and boring press conference last night, I came away less concerned about the PlayStation’s future as a platform. What I saw, in short, was a company that has finally embraced the network to a degree that forces its competitors to play catch-up and, barring a horrible blunder on Sony’s part, could guarantee some modicum of success for the platform.

First, I don’t disagree with Darrell when it comes to the changing face of the modern gamer. There is little any of the console makers can do to stem the tide of the “casual” gamer and his or her mobile predilections. My seven-year-old son has stopped playing the 3DS and Wii U and instead downloads horrible, horrible little games on the iPod touch, much to my chagrin and his frustration. When presented with a plethora of titles in the App Store, however, a little plastic case full of Nintendo discs or 3DS carts seem less interesting.

That said, the console will always be with us, so we may as well look at the PS4 as an interesting addition to the living room and less as Sony’s folly.

Last night’s presentation was about whetting our appetites for E3 and, potentially, a November 2013 launch. That’s why they didn’t show the hardware – it probably wasn’t complete yet and, besides, why rent a booth in Los Angeles if you’re going to uncover your product a year (or two) from launch? As frustrating an effort as this was, it made perfect sense.

What did Sony show off instead? Their focus was on network play, network sharing, and the platform’s unique system of game broadcast. Why is this important? Well, web video is pretty darn important to the mass of humanity and in-game web video is a large subset of that fan base. Any method that will make it easier for a 12-year-old to share his gaming prowess online is valuable for the gamer (Sample Video Title: “LOLS TEABAGGED UR MOM! LOLS!”), the game maker (Sample Buzzfeed Title: “10 Amazing Moments From The New PS4 Game, Flark”), and the console maker.

The features also places Sony into a more interesting position with professional gamers. By being able to broadcast matches to the world in real-time, pro gamers can enter into interesting forms of competition. They can offer tips and tricks in branded channels and share videos and stills from their victories. There obviously isn’t much call for “professional” console gaming right now, but that doesn’t mean things couldn’t change.

More important, it seems that the PS4 finally does network play and discovery right. This is a console designed for the post-disc generation. By letting you demo games instantly Sony has a better chance of selling a high-margin download vs. a mid-margin disc. By letting better players help lesser players online – a feature I could have used even in the NES days – you encourage more play time and more chances for DLC downloads. By making things mostly about the network you ultimately capture a bit of that App Store magic – hopefully.

The trick is to make games culturally relevant and, in this era of “share everything” it makes perfect sense to add a share button to the PS4 controller. Could it be too little/too late? Sure. But is it absolutely necessary to improve the PS4′s network capabilities to at least match, say, Xbox Live? Absolutely.

But seriously, Sony: the next time someone tells you it might be fun to run a two-hour presentation with nothing to present? Don’t do it.

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

“In the Studio” rolls on this week by hosting an ex-management consultant who grew tired of that career path, wrote a book about how to prepare for and perform well during case-style interviews, self-published the work and started to make money from those sales proceeds, and eventually ended up in YC to help build out his new content-publishing business, Hyperink.

Kevin Gao brings the razor-sharp analytical skills of an employee from a top management consulting firm to the world of startups. As the CEO and co-founder of Hyperink, an early-stage company with the goal of organizing the web’s blog content around people and topics, Gao and his colleagues have a bold vision to bring structure to a web overrun with content and knowledge but also face challenges to prove scalability in their model to investors who generally tend to shy away from such businesses.

In this discussion, Gao and I quickly survey a range of topics, from the state of e-books today and what we can can expect in the future, what Amazon may do in this space, and how Hyperink’s technology crawls the web for content and pairs that information with human curators to create a “book-like” experience for the customer. The folks at Hyperink also were gracious enough to create an e-book for me, which went through my entire blog and organized it quite well (you can buy a copy here). Finally, Gao shares his experience of leaving consulting to enroll in Y Combinator (during the year the “Start Fund” was announced) and how going this route provided real value to him and his team and how he learned to handle the investment process with more leverage.

Google unveiled is fabled Pixel Chromebook today, and the thing does indeed have what looks to be a gorgeous, high-resolution display. It also has a touchscreen, as rumored, and the list gets more confusing from there. 32GB (or 64GB) of onboard storage? ChromeOS? A 3:2 screen ratio? A $1299 starting price tag? Huh?

The device is meant to be upscale, Google admits, but for a machine aiming at power users, it’s a device surprisingly devoid of power features. ChromeOS is, for all its strengths, still essentially a browser, after all. This thing can’t run Photoshop, which you’d be able to do no problem if you spend $100 less and get a 13-inch MacBook Air. It can play back movies on that gorgeous screen, but not in as many file formats or with as much ease as you could manage with a Lenovo Yoga 13, also cheaper at $1,049. It can accept touch input, which could be exciting, but then again might not, and that’s hardly a feature worth risking a cool $1300 for.

Which isn’t to say the Pixel isn’t attractive. It’s a looker, to be sure, and something I’d definitely be interested in owning myself. The 1TB of Google Drive storage and the LTE radio on the $1449 model make for an attractive package, so long as you’re already deeply committed to Google’s cloud storage ecosystem. But a gadget blogger wanting something and an everyday consumer being willing to cough up over $1,000 for it are two entirely different things, and the Pixel has too many of those moments that make you tilt your head slightly to provide any chance at success in that regard.

ChromeOS is a risky proposition on a $249 laptop for most people. It’s still just too new, and too untested in a world where you’ll attract far fewer headaches just going with OS X or Windows. With a price tag that makes it almost an impulse buy, it’s an understandable risk. At $1299, it’s not.

ChromeOS is a risky proposition on a $249 laptop for most people

Google doesn’t always care about marketability for its first generation devices. It originally tried to sell the Nexus One direct for $529, a price many felt was too high, contributing to the eventual failure of that experiment. The Pixel is also introduced as “a laptop that brings together the best in hardware, software, and design to inspire future innovation” on Google’s website, meaning it probably isn’t intended to fly off the shelves, but more to light a fire under hardware partners and developers.

Still, announcing a consumer launch (including a retail partnership with Best Buy) for the Chromebook Pixel (a device that looks like the notebook world’s equivalent of a hastily assembled Lego project built from memory) just comes off as weird. I once lauded Google’s strategy in going for cheap, ubiquitous data network access with previous hardware launches, and I’m all for technical innovation that explores new territory. But I see no answer to the question of “Why?” when it comes to the Pixel.

Retargeting company AdRoll has released some data today intended to suggest that advertisers shouldn’t rush too quickly to embrace Facebook Exchange (the ad retargeting service that the social network launched last year) exclusively — it’s not anti-Facebook, but it doesn’t want advertisers to forget other forms of retargeting.

That’s probably what you’d expect to hear from a company with a profitable business in web retargeting (where ads are targeted based on your previous online behavior). However, AdRoll was also an early Facebook Exchange partner, and it says that it has run Exchange campaigns for more than 700 advertisers. Facebook said last month that there are more than 1,300 total advertisers on Exchange. So the data it’s releasing today is based on 468 campaigns from the past six months that ran simultaneously on Facebook and the web.

What did AdRoll find? Well, some of the costs for advertisers were much lower on Facebook Exchange campaigns — CPMs (cost per thousand impressions) were 82 percent lower, while CPCs (cost per clicks) were 70 percent lower. However, clickthrough rates were 40.18 percent lower on Facebook than on the Web, and Facebook Exchange ads also had an 86 percent higher cost per unique.

“There were some things that we expected, like the lower CPM and CPC on FBX, but other things were surprising,” said President Adam Berke in an email interview. “In particular, the fact that the cost per unique user is actually better in standard web retargeting. This basically tells us that you can reach highly engaged users very efficiently at a low CPC on Facebook, but you really need to tap into the rest of the web to reach as much of your valuable retargeting audience as possible.”

That ties into Berke’s larger message: That it might be “tempting to overweight FBX as percent of media spend” based on the initial data, but that temptation should be resisted. (For example, Triggit reported more consistently positive results on Facebook, and said that’s where it’s betting its business.) Backing that up is another data point from AdRoll that there was only an 8.3 percent overlap between the audiences reached by the Facebook campaigns and the web campaigns.

“No doubt that based on the performance of FBX, it’s a crucial component of a retargeting campaign,” Berke said. “However, you don’t want to forget about the rest of the web.”

You can read more about AdRoll’s data here.

Update: There are two comments on this post that are worth bringing up into the post itself. First, from AdRoll’s Jonathan Lau:

To clarify, we’re not cautioning against using FBX. In fact, we’ve found the performance to be a boon for most of our advertisers, and people are implementing at an astonishing rate and growing their budgets.

Over the past 6 months, we’ve run over 1,000 FBX campaigns for 700+ advertisers – over half of our total impressions come from FBX and almost half of our clicks do as well. We have seen better CPAs and ROI from FBX campaigns, but the total return is larger when both types are used.

As our blog post mentions, we found that standard web retargeting is still a crucial component of a holistic retargeting strategy – using only one type of retargeting is leaving money on the table.

(I’ve actually tweaked the headline of this post — it originally read “AdRoll Warns Against Betting Too Heavily On Facebook’s Ad Exchange” — and the first paragraph, since some people seemed to be interpreting them as an all-out slam against Facebook Exchange, as opposed to a “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” statement. Other than that, I believe I have accurately represented my discussions with AdRoll.)

And from Triggit’s Christina Park:

Maybe it’s not worth it for SMB advertisers (which AdRoll focuses on), but for large advertisers and agencies (which is the segment Triggit focuses on), FBX works best for direct response marketers that see millions of monthly unique site visitors and thousands of items in their product catalogues. We did find the exact same 8.3% stat (8.25%, actually) and definitely agree that retargeting on both FB and traditional display exchanges is good practice since people use the internet differently. But I think AdRoll’s interpretation of this stat along with the rest of their data is frankly just whack. If CTRs are higher elsewhere but CPCs on FBX are 82% lower, then it’s still a better deal to pay for a cheaper ad on a high quality inventory source for a cheaper click in finding unique users you didn’t find anywhere else on the web.

With regard to the higher cost per user stat… doesn’t it just mean that the internet is bigger than Facebook? Why is that surprising to anyone? To put it another way, you can find more unique users on FBX than off of FBX up to a certain point. Obviously there are still more people on the internet than there are people on Facebook, so after a certain point you’re going to hit a higher cost/unique user on Facebook (especially if it’s not at full volume) compared to the REST OF THE INTERNET. Sounds like this was a manipulation of the data to support a business model that was working before FBX came along…

In Silicon Valley and other tech entrepreneurship hubs, you don’t meet many startup founders who are excitedly building products aimed at the government sector.

But in an on-stage discussion Wednesday night at San Francisco’s Founders Den coworking space, tech entrepreneur, investor, and author Tim O’Reilly and California’s Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom both agreed that there absolutely should be more startup activity in the government space — not just out of civic duty, but also because out of financial opportunity.

Speaking in front of an audience of startup founders, O’Reilly cited figures from Newsom’s new book Citizenville that show the surprisingly large amount of money that the US government spends on technology.

“$192 billion gets spent every year on government IT at the federal, state, and local levels,” O’Reilly said. “You compare that to the size of the markets that some of you guys are going after [with your startups]… there are amazing opportunities in this space.”

The IT ‘Cartel’

Of course, one reason why government IT spend is so high is that the companies who regularly provide tech products to the sector often have incredibly high prices.

“Some of these [companies] do act more like cartels, basically as an IT cartel,” Newsom, who served as San Francisco’s mayor for years before taking on the state Lieutenant Governor role, said. “They’re building [unnecessarily] big systems, hiring other people to manage them, requiring five and ten year contracts.” He relayed a story of one government entity paying millions of dollars annually for an email mailing list management service that costs $129/month for typical customers.

Governments do often have higher standards for security and other features than typical IT customers. But a big reason for the price difference is the tech illiteracy of many people in government, Newsom said. “Politicians don’t speak the language, and we don’t understand any of this stuff, so we submit ourselves to quote-unquote ‘experts’ to manage these systems.” They then end up paying top dollar for things that should simply cost much less.

Advice For Startups: Start Local

So how can startups break into this market, which is clearly in need of disruption but is filled with incumbent competitors who are more than happy with the status quo? Newsom recommends starting at the local level, and making products aimed at city governments. “There is a huge opp at the city level, there are so many cases where mayors [need solutions].”

He added that there is less partisan bickering locally than there is in state and federal government. “States are laboratories of democracy, and cities are laboratories of innovation.”

Don’t Be Afraid To Go Rogue

But even at the city level, it might be difficult for a startup to convince the governmental powers that be to try out their product over an incumbent system. Newsom said that governments are typically beholden to a “long procurement process” when evaluating new technologies — it’s such a lengthy ordeal that at the end they often “churn out something that’s not even relevant” anymore. That’s why there’s a case to be made for going around the official government process altogether.

“Think about possible things that governments do that actually you could do better, to compete with government,” O’Reilly said, pointing to parking and transportation as spaces that have already seen some action on this level. Newsom, meanwhile, said that he’s seen local app successes in crime mapping and recycling.

The key thing to keep in mind is that products don’t need to be as glamorous as Uber limousines to be make a big impact — and be lucrative. O’Reilly pointed out that big money could go to a founder who “finds a way innovate the business of food stamps.”

I also had the opportunity to sit down with Newsom this past fall backstage at the Disrupt SF conference, where we discussed technology, government, and startup innovation. You can check that out here:

Do you cash out or stick to your guns? Twitter co-founder Ev Williams says you should only sell your company if the offer captures the upside, there’s an imminent threat, or you personally want to. “Any of them will suffice,” but Twitter didn’t have any, says Williams.

In the Medium post, Williams discusses how in 2008, one of the tech giants was interested in acquiring Twitter. He didn’t reveal who it was, but around that time, Fortune and others reported that Twitter was in talks with Microsoft, Facebook and Google. In an email to Twitter investors, Williams explained his three reasons companies should sell, and why Twitter didn’t have to.

The first and most obvious reason to sell is if the financials of the offer capture the upside of your company’s potential. If the offer significantly exceeds the eventual value of your company, then sell. That  calculation requires looking closely at your market. Is it a grand, world-changing space where success could earn you a fortune? Or is it a discrete opportunity where even if you hit a home run and win outright, there’s a limit to your value. Think Google vs. a photo-sharing app. Ev saw Twitter’s short-form communication as having enormous potential, so the acquisition offer wasn’t big enough.

Second, is there an imminent threat to your company? Something that could derail your business and hamper the entire space or give your competitors an opening? Then selling out could net you a payday that might never materialize if you try to defeat that threat yourself and fail. Ev cites YouTube’s legal issues around copyright and PayPal’s fraud problem as reasons why it was smart for them to sell to Google and eBay, respectively, to get help fighting these risks. In Twitter’s case, the threat was the fail whale. It had been having scalability issues causing the site to crash, giving Twitter a reputation of unreliability. But by the time the offer came through, Ev thought Twitter had the fail whale harpooned.

Finally, the companies should sell if the founders really want to. Sometimes they want to move on to a new idea, or have lost enthusiasm for the current one. Other times the founders see the acquiring company as the right home that could take their business to new heights, or they want to go work there and learn more. Ev was excited to be the new CEO of Twitter, and thought the acquirer wouldn’t be the right cultural fit for his team.

It looks like Williams bet right. Now Twitter is flying towards an IPO. Revenue is expected to continue doubling year over year, and it’s got a new ads API that could boost sales. And Twitter’s user-base notoriety has grown significantly since it was an essentially unmonetized social network with just 50 employees that “probably had fewer than ten million users.”

Then again, Ev had already sold Blogger to Google and made his nest egg. The next hundred million dollars isn’t quite as tempting when you already have a couple mill in the bank.

After a few weeks of rumors, Google just announced the latest device in its Chromebook lineup: the Chromebook Pixel. Unlike previous Chromebook versions, the Pixel is aimed at power users who fully live in the cloud. The device features an impressive array of hardware specs. It has a 12.85 inch high-density 2560×1700 screen (that’s 4.3 million pixels) with a 3:2 aspect ratio, an Intel Core i5 processor and a whopping 1 terabyte of free storage on Google Drive for three years.

Google will also soon launch a version with a built-in LTE radio and has partnered with Verizon to offer 100 MB/month for two years of mobile broadband and with GoGo to offer 12 free in-flight Wi-Fi sessions.

The Pixel’s screen, which is obviously the highlight of the device, features a pixel density of 239 pixels per inch. That’s a bit higher than the 220 pixels/inch on the Macbook Pro with a Retina display, so Google proudly notes that its laptop “has the highest pixel density of any laptop display.”

The basic Wi-Fi version of the Pixel will retail for $1,299 in the U.S. and £1,049 in the U.K. The Pixel is now available on Google Play and will also be available at select Best Buy locations in the U.S. and Currys PC World in the U.K. tomorrow. The LTE version ($1,449) will ship in the U.S. in April. The other difference between the LTE and Wi-Fi models is that the LTE version will ship with a 64GB solid-state drive and the Wi-Fi version will only have 32GB.

Google did not disclose who its hardware partners are, but the company did say that the device is being assembled in Taiwan.

“I think the hardware shines,” Google VP Sundar Pichai said at a press event in San Francisco today. Google, Pichai stressed, wanted to build a device for power users who live in the cloud. “There’s a set of users who are really committed to living completely in the cloud,” he said, and Google wanted to build the perfect laptop for them.

The first thing users will definitely notice when they first open the Pixel is the screen. Not only does it have a very high resolution, but it also features a relatively unusual aspect ration of 3:2. According to Pichai, the reason for this was that Google looked at what people would do with this device, and given that the web still focuses on content that is meant to be displayed horizontally, the design team decided to discard the idea of a screen with the more typical 16:10 resolution and went with 3:2.

The screen, Google says, includes a 0.55mm layer of touch-enabled Gorilla Glass fused directly to the screen. Google says this screen “gives you smooth interactions while preserving picture clarity” and after some hands-on time with the device, Google definitely isn’t exaggerating the quality of the screen, which definitely measures up to Apple’s Retina displays.

Google also stressed that this is a very premium device (something that’s obviously reflected in the price). Pichai, for example, noted that the piano hinge has the feel of a “very premium car door” and the team added rounded corners to the aluminum body to make it feel better when you hold it. Google also stressed that it redesigned numerous components and often had to resort to designing its own parts to meet its specs. The team, for example, added a third microphone to the device so it not only cancels out background noise, but also the noise you make yourself when you type on the keyboard (the Pixel has a 720p webcam for Google Hangouts and other video chats, too).

Despite the premium price and components, Pichai stressed that the overall philosophy behind the Chromebook project hasn’t changed. The Pixel, however, is meant for power users. “We also wanted to design something very premium for power users – people who spend money on their laptops,” he said at today’s presentation. The idea behind Chrome, Google says, “has always been to minimize the ‘chrome’ of the browser. In much the same way, the goal of the Pixel is to make the pixels disappear, giving people the best web experience.”

Chrome itself, of course, has also been optimized for touch, which Pichai believes will soon be on every laptop. The menus are now larger and easier to click on with your fingers.

Asked about how the Pixel compares to the Macbook Air, Pichai noted that the Pixel has a higher resolution and a touch screen, something Apple doesn’t currently offer – especially on a 12-inch device.

The price, of course, definitely puts the Pixel in a premium category and it remains to be seen how the market will react to it. It is, no doubt, the best Chromebook on the market today and the hardware, including the fit and finish of the device, is very impressive. At $1,299 for the basic version, though, some potential buyers may decide to opt for a premium Apple laptop or Ultrabook instead.

Here are the full hardware specs:

INPUTS
Gorilla® Glass multi-touch screen
Backlit Chrome keyboard
Fully clickable, etched-glass touchpad
HD Webcam 

These days it seems like everyone and their cousin is trying to craft the next smash hit game, but simply bringing a concept to fruition isn’t enough. It’s got to be engaging and well-designed, and that’s exactly what Game Analytics wants to help developers out with.

The Copenhagen-based startup has announced today that it has opened its (what else?) game-centric data analytics platform to the game developing masses. On top of that, it has also locked up $2.5 million in funding from Sunstone Capital, CrunchFund*, and angel investors like HuffPo CEO Jimmy Maymann, former Podio CEO Tommy Ahlers, René Rechmann, and Anil Hansjee.

Game Analytics has been around in one form or another since mid-2011 (our coverage of the then-stealthy venture can be found here), but the road to market readiness wound up being a little longer than CEO Morten Wulff and his cofounders thought. Back then the startup said it would open the service to private testers within five months, but ultimately didn’t hit that stage of readiness until earlier this year. It would seem that time spent behind operating closed doors has done Game Analytics some good though, as Wulff says roughly 100 games have tapped into the GA platform.

But let’s back up a minute first. As you may have guessed, Game Analytics’ raison d’etre is providing games developers with a highly granular view of what their players are actually doing, and in doing so, helping those developers make crucial design and strategy decisions. GA does this by breaking player actions into discrete, trackable data points — did they complete one step of a tutorial? Data point. Did they just fire a weapon? Data point. Did they just get torn apart by a hideous alien? You see where I’m going with this. All those (user definable) data points then get aggregated and displayed to the curious dev watching the backend.

That data ideally gives the developer in question insight into the experience that the players are having, and lets them know if things need to be changed or rebalanced to make that experience better. Determining the proper level difficulty progression is one example Wulff likes to throw around.

“Let’s say a lot of players are dying on level 2,” Wulff said. “The data raises questions like ‘Is it too difficult,’ and ‘do we need to A/B test alternatives.’” Responses like modifying enemy placement or the level design itself could help retention. After the changes have been made, its possible users won’t quit the game out of frustration any more. GA also helps monitor how players move through the game and what items to players buy — potential boons for developers honing their monetization strategy.

Wulff was adamant in positioning Game Analytics as a cross-platform tool for developers creating game on the web, mobile platforms, and even potentially consoles. A slew of dev tools are already available for iOS and Android coders, as well as SDKs for game engines like Corona, cocos2D, and (perhaps most notably) Unity. In fact, Unity seems to have a few extra frills as far as analytics go — a GA plugin lets developers view a 3D heatmap so they can better understand what’s happening to players and where. It’s precisely this focus on supporting game developers of all stripes and making nice with key middleware providers that Wulff hopes will set GA apart from the crush of competitors that are waging war out there.

After all, the landscape has changed a bit since Wulff started Game Analytics. It’s hardly the only one to bring a more data-centric view of games to developers — Polish startup Use It Better kicked off its own public beta last August to largely positive feedback in a bid to provide its own game-centric analytics, while players like TalkingData have embarked on a similar mission and could give GA some healthy competition in Asian markets. And that’s not to say anything about more entrenched analytics players like Kontagent and Mixpanel, though the latter tends to focus on an area much larger than just games.

Another part of Game Analytics’ appeal to developers is its curious freemium approach — its free tier offers developers the ability to track 20 million data points a month, with paid tiers bumping that limit as high as 1 billion per month for larger studios.

Now that Game Analytics has some capital to work with, it’s looking at amping up its marketing efforts and opening up a North American office in either San Francisco or Vancouver. Curiously, the startup’s international expansion isn’t just limited to North America though.

“We’ve just hired a guy to being setting up an office in China,” Wulff noted. “It’s a booming market, and we see plenty of opportunities there.”

*Disclosure: TechCrunch founder and current columnist Michael Arrington is a general partner at CrunchFund.