Category: Tech news

More details have emerged about LivingSocial‘s new $110 million funding round announced yesterday. In response to a blog post characterizing the raise as an emergency round of debt financing, LivingSocial CEO Tim O’Shaughnessy issued a new memo to employees clearing up some misconceptions about the raise. (Full memo below)

The key takeaway? Yes, it was a down round, but no, this was not an “emergency debt infusion with oppressive terms.”

The whole thing started yesterday, when a memo to employees got picked up, announcing that the daily deals company had raised another $110 million, as it seeks to reach profitability. Late last night, however, a report from PrivCo emerged, painting the raise as a desperate round of debt financing that was necessary to keep the lights on.

Among other things, PrivCo reported that the financing was raised as complex class of convertible debt securities that effectively made employee and founder stock worthless. It also claimed “super liquidation preferences” of several times the $110 million raised, and an issuance of “super-warrants” at the same time. And citing LivingSocial senior management and investor sources, PrivCo characterized the raise as a take-it-or-leave-it, 11th hour-type deal.

In a memo to employees issued this morning, LivingSocial’s CEO rebutted those claims. In short, he said that the funding was not an “emergency round,” and that the funding was an equity round, not a debt infusion. While admittedly it was a down round, O’Shaughnessy wrote that there was no re-pricing of investor shares from previous rounds, no 4x liquidation preference, and no double-digit cash dividend.

Instead, LivingSocial straight up sold 7.5 percent of the company for $110 million. That values it at around $1.5 billion, which is lower than in 2010 when it raised $175 million from Amazon. At the same time, the market value of Groupon, its closest comparable, has also fallen dramatically over the last few years.

While there is some change in liquidation preference, O’Shaughnessy wrote that it shouldn’t change the value of employee stock too much, and that if the company goes public, employees shouldn’t be affected. “Basically, the preference stack is a little higher now. At any valuation over $1B, though, we clear that stack by quite a bit,” he wrote. And “in the event of an IPO, all preferred stock becomes common stock, and the preference stack goes away.”

Hey folks,

In light of a recent report on our financing round that contained significant inaccuracies and errors, I wanted to provide some additional details on yesterday’s round.

If you’ve seen some of that misinformation, here’s the real story:

* This was not an emergency round. We received our first term sheet on December 23rd, nearly two months ago, and this has been an organized, thought-out process.
* This was an equity round, not a debt infusion.
* There was no re-pricing of investor shares from previous rounds.
* There were no warrants issued as part of this round.
* There were no “double-digit” cash dividends. (Typical of many financing rounds, including our own past rounds, there was a nominal 3% dividend for a class of shares.)
* There is no “4x liquidation preference.” (Once again, typical of almost all venture rounds, there is a liquidation preference, but it slides up or down based on a key metric and gets nowhere near 4x.)
* The quotes from a “senior LivingSocial communication executive” are straight up fiction.
* Two of the three investors listed on the PrivCo site as participating in the round didn’t participate, and one isn’t even an investor in the company.

On valuation, people always seem to be overly enamored with market value, which has puzzled me because as a private company, there is no liquid market on which to buy and sell shares, so a valuation is established without any degree of market efficiency. In short, it’s an educated guess between the company and a set of investors at one particular snapshot in time.

But nevertheless here goes. Yes, this was a down round, which I’m sure is not a shock to anyone. Our main comp in the market is down significantly from when we last fundraised. In this round, we sold 7.5% of the company for $110mm. Although there were some bells and whistles associated with those shares, as mentioned above, this should give you some idea of the current valuation of the company.

So how does this round impact employee stock? In short, some, but not much. Basically, the preference stack is a little higher now. At any valuation over $1B, though, we clear that stack by quite a bit. For comparison, our major competitor’s market cap is now $3.9B. In the event of an IPO, all preferred stock becomes common stock, and the preference stack goes away.

We are a company that does over half a billion in revenue. If we stay diligent, we hope to turn the corner to become profitable soon. Thanks to this round, we have significantly more capital to be able to be opportunistic and drive the future growth of the business.

Hopefully this will help clear up any questions you may have or get on yesterday’s round. Now it’s back to executing on our plan.

~ Tim

With each fleeting moment, we inch closer to Disrupt NY. Today we’re excited to announce that Gilt’s Kevin Ryan will take Disrupt’s stage in late April, joining our ever-growing list of speakers, which so far includes Ben and Ken Lerer, David Lee, and Ron Conway among others.

We just wrote about the rise in company builders, in which seasoned and successful entrepreneurs create studios to innovate, create and help found startups. There’s no better example of this than Kevin Ryan, one of the founders of Gilt and the brains behind AlleyCorp. A serial entrepreneur, Ryan was formerly the CEO of DoubleClick (which was eventually acquired by Google for $3 billion).

He then founded Silicon Alley Insider and flash sales giant Gilt, a company now valued at over $1 billion. His most recent AlleyCorp innovation, enterprise database company 10gen, was valued at $500 million. He stepped down as CEO in November, to be replaced by Michelle Peloso by the end of this month. Ryan will take on the role of Gilt Chairman.

We’re stoked to have him back. Ryan spoke previously at Disrupt NY 2011.

Kevin Ryan
Founder, Gilt Group

Kevin P. Ryan is the Founder and CEO of Gilt Groupe, an innovative e-commerce company offering highly coveted products and experiences at insider prices.

In 2007, Kevin along with a founding team created Gilt Groupe as an invitation-only site for coveted women’s apparel and accessories. Today, Gilt Groupe has over three million members and has added business lines in home; children; men’s apparel and gear (GiltMAN); vacation travel (Jetsetter); local services and experiences (Gilt City), and has launched the leading flash-sale site in Japan (Gilt Japan).

Kevin is one of the leading Internet entrepreneurs in the United States launching several New York-based businesses, including Gilt Groupe, Business Insider, ShopWiki, and 10gen/MongoDB. Kevin helped build DoubleClick from 1996 to 2005, first as president and later as CEO. He fostered DoubleClick’s growth from a 20-person startup to a global leader with over 1,500 employees.

Currently, Kevin serves on the board of Human Rights Watch, the NYC Investment Fund and INSEAD, and is a member of the Yale International Council and the Council on Foreign Relations. He holds a BA from Yale University and an MBA from INSEAD.

We have two guests joining us in the TechCrunch TV studio in the coming week for our Ask A VC series, where you put VCs in the hot seat. First up we have Menlo Ventures Managing Director Shawn Carolan. Later in the week, we’ll be joined by Kleiner Perkins’ partner Matt Murphy.

As you may remember, you can submit questions for our guests either in the comments or here and we’ll ask them during the show.

It should be interesting to see what technology plays Carolan, who focuses on consumer tech investments for Menlo Ventures, is excited about next. He’s made some pretty big bets, and has led investments in IMVU, Telenav, YuMe, Siri (in which Menlo was the first investor), PlaySpan (acquired by Visa), and CinemaNow, acquired by Rovi. Menlo Ventures just saw the departure of Shervin Pishevar, and the addition of newest partner, Venky Ganesan.

Murphy is focused on investments in mobile and cloud infrastructure technology, helping lead investments in Shazam, Shopkick, textPlus, Aerohive and others. Murphy, who also manages the iFund (an initiative with Apple that focuses on funding and building defining applications on the iOS platform and the mobile internet) was also a board observer at Google (from initial investment to IPO).

We’ll be asking Murphy about the next wave of disruption in cloud infrastructure, as well as what mobile app development companies he’s most excited about these days.

Please send us your questions for Carolan and Murphy here or put them in the comments below!

Take one look at HP’s new Envy x2 and you’ll immediately want to call it the MacBook Air Windows 8 Edition.

This counter-top machine claims to turn ordinary healthy fruit into a frozen substance resembling ice cream in both taste and texture.

These three backpacks are made for photographers who need to shoulder a quiver of camera gear to remote shooting locations.

The 35-liter cooler can be hooked up to three different fuel sources — a 110-volt AC outlet, a vehicle’s 12-volt outlet, or a propane tank — to keep your chillables cool.

If you’re a hardcore gamer, the name Turtle Beach most certainly means something to you. We met with the tournament-grade headset maker to discuss their new Seven series of headsets, originally debuted at CES.

There are three different models in the line, the XP Seven (meant for all consoles, PC, and mobile), the Z Seven (meant for PC and mobile) and the M Seven (mobile only). Both the XP Seven and the Z Seven come with a special Audio Control Unit (or ACU) that lets you adjust even the most minute details of the audio.

For example, you can set the speakers to be loudest toward the rear, letting you catch on to anyone who might be sneaking up behind you. You can also adjust the headset so that footsteps and gunshots can be louder, while the actual game sounds are much lower. There are eight different pre-set configurations you can build on your own, making it quick and easy to switch from one game to the next and still enjoy the best possible audio for each.

Users also have the ability to mix in music from their phone, answer calls, and chat with other players using the XP Seven. You can even remove the microphone and just use these bad boys as your main headphones. Plus, the plates on the ear cups are removable, so you can buy various colors to customize your headset.

At $279, the XP Seven is on the expensive side, but with the extra advantages they bring it’s well worth it if you game every day.

The Z Seven model has all the same functionality, but is meant for PC and mobile only, while the M Seven doesn’t come with an ACU but does bring console-quality sound to mobile gaming.

All three models are available now, so click here if you’re interested in learning more.

Pebble smartwatches have been hitting doorsteps for a little while now, but my colleague Darrell Etherington and I have only just been able to join the party. The reasons for the extra wait differed for the two of us — I was a late backer, and his got stuck in Canadian customs — but the timing seemed right, so here’s our tag-team review of the device that helped kick start a new era of smartwatch hype.

Darrell: The Pebble has one huge advantage over other smart watches right out of the box: aesthetics. This is a watch that lets your geek flag fly without being ass-ugly. The watch face options aren’t necessarily all that awesome, but set it to the text face that comes pre-installed and don’t worry about the rest. Also, black was the right choice, even if it was the only choice if you wanted one of the first shipping devices. Black watch on black strap in the Pebble looks fantastic on most any wrist.

The screen is legible enough, but in some light the glue becomes visible to the point of annoyance, which is a rookie mistake and should not make it into production units, if the Pebble team is worth its salt. It affects all the Kickstarter units I’ve come across so far, however, so that’s not a good sign.

Chris: I don’t think the Pebble is quite as handsome as Darrell does — it’s not bad looking, but it’s hardly a fashion-forward timepiece. Still, some of the promises that Pebble has made to its backers have positively influenced the watch’s look — rather than including something like a standard microUSB port for instance, the Pebble sports a magnetic charger so as to keep the whole shebang waterproof. The included rubber strap is plenty comfortable too, if a bit on the drab side. That’s easily remedied though — the Pebble apparently works fine with any 22mm watch band though, so the sky’s the limit as far as customization goes.

While we’re talking about design, the Pebble’s iOS and Android companion apps are both intuitively laid out (which is critical since the Pebble would be largely useless without them). The sync process is very brief, and once that’s done you’re quickly guided into setting up notifications — the whole process can be knocked out in just a minute or two. And of course a tiny vibration motor whirrs whenever you get a notification, though the wrong kind of aftermarket watchband may make it harder to feel.

Darrell: Compared to the MetaWatch, using the Pebble is like a breath of fresh air. It’s almost the difference between proving that a smart watch as a concept is a good idea vs. something no one needs. From display, to overall look, to usefulness and dependability of features, the Pebble just blows the MetaWatch out of the water. Some might miss features like weather, stocks, and more that you get with the MetaWatch, whereas the Strata struck me as a novelty that quickly lost its charm, the Pebble already seems like something I’d have to at least adjust to living without.

Chris: Unlike Darrell, the Pebble is my first foray into this whole crazy smartwatch thing, and my time spent with the thing has generally been very positive For the past few days I’ve been switching between linking the Pebble with my iPhone and my Droid DNA, and it wasn’t long before I began to prefer the experience on the latter just because of the extra granularity Android affords me. Under Android, I’m able to pass along notifications from Facebook and Google Voice (!) in addition to more standard fare like calendar entries and text messages.

Thankfully, the four-button navigation scheme used to handle all these notifications and menus is incredibly straightforward. The top and bottom buttons on the right side allow you to (what else) scroll up and down through menus, while the two remaining buttons take you forward and back. Hardly a flashy way to get things done (especially when some smartwatch rivals lean on touchscreens for operation) but it mostly works like a charm.

Darrell: There are still issues with the Pebble. Email notifications cut out when using it on iOS when it drops the Bluetooth connection and reconnects, for instance. Caller ID and message notifications work consistently, however, so this isn’t a huge issue. The menu system could also use work; it’d be nice to be able to rearrange items in the list to make frequently-needed ones easier to access. Adding watch faces from the app just puts them at the bottom, and that’s going to become a bigger issue once you have third-party apps to manage from the Pebble. The backlight is also immensely inconsistent; don’t even bother with the automatic ambient light sensor, just turn it on at night and off during the day, or keep it on all the time if you’re not that concerned with eking out as much battery life as possible.

On iOS, despite the fact that limitations are limited, the ones that it does provide work well. I actually prefer it to Android, since the limited support (only iMessage/SMS, email, phone and calendar notifications come through) means you won’t face a constantly buzzing wrist.

Chris: I’ll agree that notifications work, but the way they’re implemented leaves plenty to be desired. Let’s say you get more than one message within a short period of time — the Pebble will only ever display the most recent one, so you’re going to have to go digging for your phone anyway. Now, I never expected the Pebble to replace my phone(s) for these sorts of tasks, but I was looking for something that would at least help me triage the constant flow of messages and updates and the Pebble isn’t quite there yet.

I haven’t had much luck with the ambient light sensor, but that really hasn’t been an issue for me. I’ve been leaving the backlight setting on pretty much all the time and haven’t seen a huge loss in terms of battery life — I can get about 5-6 days out of it with everything turned on, and the backlight is off most of the time anyway.

Since we’re talking about inconsistency though, what about these screens? They’re not always the prettiest things to look at while in direct sunlight, mine in particular — it’s not as notable when the Pebble is just displaying a clock face, but there are some cloudy patches of coloration visible when I navigate the menu outdoors. Apparently it’s just a natural thing, but it’s still sort of unpleasant to see every day.

Darrell: The Pebble is still a little rough around the edges (visible glue at some angles under the display, which isn’t a problem limited to a few isolated units), but it’s much closer to the vision I had in my mind of a wrist-mounted, smartphone connected computer than anything else I’ve used so far. It still feels like a first-gen device, but it doesn’t feel like a prototype. But now that rumors of an Apple smart watch are swirling, most users who don’t feel a pressing need for this kind of device would do best to take a wait-and-see approach, especially if they’re already using an iPhone.

Chris: I’m frankly a little torn when it comes to the Pebble — it’s very limited in some key ways, but as a whole it’s a portent of very exciting things to come. People who haven’t already bought into all this smart watch hype probably won’t find anything particularly revelatory or earth-shaking here, though I can’t say I feel like I’ve wasted $150. If anything, I think of it more as investment in what the Pebble platform can actually become as it matures and garners more developer support.

Last October, eBay debuted a completely new homepage experience and redesign, marking the company’s biggest homepage in the marketplace’s history. eBay’s feed experience has been in pilot phase for several months, only tested with less than 10 percent of users, and tomorrow eBay is unveiling to new experience to all customers in the U.S. You can access the new homepage here.

eBay’s new homepage is essentially all about you. The homepage now includes a highly visual, personalized feed of products based on your interests, and the brands and trends that match their passions and preferences. For the feed, you can add your favorite interests (i.e. golf), brands and even trends. Using this data, eBay will show you new items, recent searches, and more. eBay is pulling from more than 400 million listings.

Tom Pinckney, head of the eBay NYC office and one of the co-founders of personalization startup Hunch, explains that the new homepage is not just about search, but also discovery and serendipity. “We are introducing a different type of shopping and inventing a new way to shop with product discovery,” he explains. “We have a huge map of date around discovery and serendipity and are trying to find ways to take this data and tap into collective intelligence.”

Another component of the new technology is real-time updates on product listings and changes. eBay will serve customers new items in their feed every time they visit the home page – and update them continually during their eBay sessions.

Based on results from the few test users since October, customers are responding positively, says Pinckney. Another are where eBay sees huge potential in data mining and product is helping users share knowledge about products and listings.

In the future, we’ll see the feed come to eBay’s mobile experience, but Pinckney says the newest development to come will be international rollout in the near future.

As we mentioned back in october, the feed has a striking similarity to Pinterest. But it’s not surprising that eBay is diving deep on providing a sleeker, more streamlined and visual experience. And with the enormous amount of data eBay has accumulated over the years, the company is delving into personalization and curation in a big way. We know this is the future of ecommerce, so it’s a wise bet. But how this affects the company’s top line remains to be seen.

Sequoia Capital and the student-run Princeton publication Business Today held their first Start @ A Startup conference this weekend, where more than 100 students (largely, but not entirely, from Ivy League schools) were recruited to join the startup world.

At least that’s the broad outline that Sequoia partner Bryan Schreier and Dropbox vice president Sujay Jaswa (Jaswa is the one speaking in the photo above) gave me when I interviewed them before the conference. The event itself (I was around for the first of the two days) turned out to be more varied — yes, it was partly a recruiting drive, but it was also an opportunity for startup founders to tell their stories, and for students to ask pretty much anything they wanted.

Schreier and Jaswa kicked things off, giving back-to-back talks in the basement of Princeton’s Frist Campus Center — Schreier described it as “the nicest basement you could possibly envision.” His talk covered a lot of the same ground as our earlier discussion, making the argument that too many Ivy League graduates end up going to work for investment banks and other large companies because that seems like the natural thing to do, when they could advance their careers more quickly if they went to a startup.

Schreier went into more detail about his personal experiences going from Morgan Stanley to Google to Sequoia. He said it was probably too harsh to call going to a Morgan Stanley after college a “mistake,” but he showed off a chart with the “deceleration and acceleration points” in his career, and indeed, his years in the financial industry were pretty static, at least from a job title perspective. Things picked up quickly when he joined Google. Schreier also offered a little more context around the rather eye-opening statistic that 41 percent of Stanford’s computer science graduates go to work for a startup after graduation, while the number is only 13 percent at Harvard. Turns out he cited Harvard specifically because it has the lowest number of the top-tier East Coast schools, with most Ivys hovering around 20 percent. (The numbers were based on LinkedIn profiles, he said.)

One obvious concern with going to work at a startup is the fact that the vast majority of them will fail. Schreier said that Sequoia’s portfolio companies, on the other hand, are successful more than 50 percent of the time, so he suggested the students can use the Sequoia website as a “cheat sheet” for which companies to work for. And anyway, he noted that the unemployment rate for software engineers is currently 2.3 percent, compared to the current U.S. unemployment rate of 8 percent (and the theoretical “natural” rate of 5.5 percent), so even if you join a startup that goes out of business, not only will you learn a lot, but “you’re so damn employable you don’t have anything to worry about.”

Jaswa made similar points, saying that working at a startup allows you to work with “the most brilliant people” in the world and to solve difficult problems in creative ways, because there’s no one else around to solve them: “If you’re the kind of person that wants to be challenged, that wants to be pushed, if you want to play the game, you have to go to a company that’s growing really fast.”

For me, the best part of the event was the opportunity to hear about the very early days of a few companies — these were mostly stories that had been told before, but the founders told them in a particularly relaxed and candid way. (The fact that I was the only reporter at the event, and that some of the speakers didn’t know I was there until I introduced myself, probably had something to do with it.)

For example, Keller Rinaudo, CEO and founder of iPhone-powered robot-maker Romotive, talked about how the team stayed up for days in order to put together the company’s first batch of robots. At one point they sent Jen McCabe (who’s officially in charge of customer development, but, hey, startups!) on a late-night run to Wal-Mart to pick up a sewing machine in order to attach one of the needed parts. (Afterwards, McCabe told me that the sewing method didn’t work out.)

Rinaudo also recalled some of the things that the company learned from its early customers. He said he was shocked when many of them didn’t realize that they had to turn their robots on before they would work — Apple has trained us to expect always-on devices, so Rinaudo realized that Romotive had to do more to highlight the on-off switch for customers.

As Romotive works through its early kinks, Rinaudo said, “We got away with a lot because we’re a team of young people that people wanted to believe in.”

McCabe added that until you have an awesome product that people love (and she said Romotive still isn’t quite there yet), “Your company is the product you’re selling.”

Daniel Gross, co-founder and CEO of smart calendar startup Cue, had a scary-but-impressive story about joining Y Combinator and working for several months on one project, only to have it fall apart after Amazon changed its terms of service in a way that basically made his product illegal. With only 72 hours until Demo Day, Gross met with YC’s Paul Graham, who told him that he had three options — demo the old product without mentioning the TOS change until later, go home and maybe try again later, or whip up something new in the intervening time and hope that no one figured out it had been put together in a couple of days. Gross went with the third option, and he seemed to pull it off, creating what was then called Greplin.

Gross quickly recounted the company’s progress since then (something he also attributed to his co-founder Robby Walker), and he said the big takeaway was the fact that at a big company, you have to deal with a lot of “process” that can stand in the way of the work itself, while at a startup, “You get to be the owner of your own success and your own failure.”

Gross didn’t just rely on his own experience to make that point. He also offered a long list of engineers whose talent was squandered until they joined a startup (though of course many of those companies are now way beyond the startup stage). For example, he talked about Jeff Dean, who worked at Digital Equipment Corporation but didn’t achieve his real potential until he moved to Google, where he became “arguably one of the most important engineers in the 20th and 21st centuries” by developing the BigTable, MapReduce, and Google File System technologies.

In addition to sitting in on some keynotes and panels, I also had a chance to talk to some of the students. Several of them were knowledgeable about and eager to join the startup world. In fact, the attendee from what may have been the most far-flung location, Oxford’s Christopher Pruijsen, has already worked for two startups — Letsgopublic.com (now Prizeo.com) and Letslunch.com — and part of the reason he attended was to meet potential partners for his own Launchpad Conference. So he’s not exactly someone who has to be convinced to work for a startup, but he did say he enjoyed the content and the opportunity to be a “fly on the wall” for other conversations.

Similarly, Columbia student Kaushik Tiwari told me that he’s already a part of Res. Inc, Columbia’s residential entrepeurship initiative. He said the weekend was “empowering”: “It was a wonderful initiative to ensure that talented people are not sucked into the vortex of big money but rather focus on the important things in life.”

Not that everything this weekend was an instance of preaching to the choir. The students certainly asked some skeptical and tough questions. (My favorite example: Rinaudo talked about how people had scoffed at Romotive and said that no one would be interested, and how Steve Wozniak had recounted hearing similar criticisms in the early days of Apple. Then one of the students pointed out that everyone remembers when the skeptics are wrong, but in fact they’re usually right.) But there’s clearly some startup love on these campuses, and with help, it will grow.

[photos by Jeremy Leibovitch, Graham Raubvogel, and Cody Powers]

A five-minute video? Ain’t nobody got time for that. Not to watch one, or to make one. But Harlem Shake dance videos are capped at 30 seconds. That’s why we’re so willing to watch just one more incarnation, and why it’s easy to recruit friends to make them. The result is one of the most pervasive gags in history. A “Symbiotic Meme,” the Harlem Shake has a lesson to teach all content creators.
Give people a formula, and they’ll substitute in their own variables. Most people just aren’t all that creative. They’re not going to come up with some entertaining meme on their own. With a little structure, though, our minds fill in the blanks.

To break it down, the Harlem Shake meme is:

[14T x (A1 + V1)] => ? => [14T x (A2 + V2)] => [2T x (A3+V3)]

Or

[14 seconds of (build-up music) played as (one person passively dances while others linger around them motionless)] then an instant video cut to [14 seconds of (bombastic dance music) played as (many people dance aggressively)] then [2 seconds of (a slurring sound) and (slow-motion video of the aggressive dancing)]

Or in “Harlem Shake v3 (office edition)”, for example:

[14 seconds of (the build-up of Baauer’s “Harlem Shake”) played as (one person in a helmet nods and thrusts while others sit at desks or work on computers)] then an instant video cut to [14 seconds of (the climax of Baauer’s “Harlem Shake”) played as (people shadow box, do hand stands, ride bicycles, and punch stuffed giraffes)]

Anyone can sub their own variables into this equation, and practically everyone has. The formula is very easy to replicate with little video production skill, and it’s not asking a lot for people to stand around and then dance for a total of 30 seconds. Stick a camera somewhere, film part one, get everyone riled up, film part two, cut them together, add the slow motion effect.

The end product is remarkably snackable. When you see someone share a Harlem Shake to Facebook or Twitter, there’s very little risk to clicking the link. Worst-case scenario, you burned 30 seconds. Best case, you get a nice surprise and a laugh. No one wants to sit through several minutes of home-made content where the payoff is uncertain. It’s part of the reason why Twitter’s 6-second video sharing app Vine is succeeding where un-capped video sharing apps have failed.

So why is this a “Symbiotic Meme”? It’s the term I coined five years ago when I wrote my final Stanford Cybersociology Master’s degree paper about the phenomenon. When content creators serve up a meme with an equation full of variables, people remix the variables, and share the product to their own networks. The audience becomes curious about what the source content was. This floods traffic back to the original or flagship version of the meme.

That’s why the original DizastaMusic standalone version of the Harlem Shake meme (broken out from a Dizasta compilation) has over 10 million views, and the flagship PHLOn NAN version, which crystallized the formula, has over 8 million views. All the versions of the Harlem Shake meme popping up around the world build on these, and in return increase their popularity. It’s a symbiotic relationship.

Content creators, and especially “viral marketers,” would do well to structure their products around a remixable formula when possible. Give us a coloring book and we’ll give you some pretty pictures and a whole lot of attention.

We all go through phases where we feel like we’ve seen every possible Kickstarter project that we’d ever want and then one like Mycestro comes along and reminds us that this is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s a 3D mouse that you strap to one of your fingers and it looks like it could become a huge asset for multi-tasking.

If you think about how you use your computer, be it a desktop or laptop, you know that your hands move from the keyboard to the trackpad or mouse constantly, over and over again. It’s wasted movement for the most part, especially when you see the possibilities that Mycestro unlocks. The only thing left is for this thing to get funded, because it looks like all of the prototypes work perfectly.

Its founder and creator, Nick Mastandrea, has been tinkering on this project for quite a while, having been featured in Engadget a few years ago, but it looks like it’s ready for primetime. You’ll be able to pick one up for a $79 pledge in white, or $99 with your choice of color. The estimated shipping date is sometime in October of this year, if all goes well.

Have a look at some of its features, which include touch buttons that allow you to navigate your computer without the need of moving your entire and to a dedicated area on a computer, thanks to 3D technology and space recognition:

Here are the specs for the 3D Mouse:

– Size of a wireless earpiece.
– Light, weighing next to nothing.
– Internal battery can be charged via USB.
– Battery life is estimated to be eight hours depending on usage.
– Two different replaceable clip sizes.

This isn’t a completely perfect situation though, as you’ll have to re-learn how to use a mouse. The other thing is that if you’re in a coffee shop or somewhere in public, people are going to look at you like you have some issues. The thing is called the Mycestro for a reason, it looks like you’re conducting your own private orchestra. In other words, you’re going to look weird. If you’re OK with that, then the benefits outweigh the public shame and looks you might receive.

The device works from 30 feet away from your computer, thanks to bluetooth, so you could use this for presentations at work. The touch technology it has reminds me of Google’s Project Glass, which allows you to tap a panel on the side of the wearable device to make things happen, like a mouse or trackpad. The other plus is that it’ll work with any iPad or iPhone with Android support coming by the end of the year. This could be a nice way to have a lean-back experience with a tablet, or do the driving while someone else holds it.

Check out this demo using it with an Internet-enabled TV:

It reminds me of the Xbox Kinect a little bit, but it’s in your hand and requires no setup.

With 38 days left to go on its Kickstarter campaign, Nick Mastandrea and his team has raised $39,735 out of $100,000. I think if people can look past the Mycestro as a curious oddity and understand how this could make them more efficient on the computer, this thing will get funded, and then some. If you’re a lefty, the team says that will come a bit after the original model. Personally, I use the trackpad and mouse with my right hand, even though I’m a lefty.

So who cares if people think you’re making hand gestures into thin air to nobody in particular, aren’t people who use bluetooth headsets already weird? Exactly.

Ride-sharing is becoming increasingly popular and more widely available, as San Francisco-based startups Lyft and SideCar have both begun expansion into new cities. But what if I told you there’s a ride-sharing company that already operates in all the cities that those companies are just now starting to enter? The company is called Tickengo, and it claims thousands of drivers signed up in more than 900 cities.

Tickengo was incorporated in 2011 to reduce the friction between drivers and passengers who are going to the same place. But the company differentiates itself from other ride-sharing providers that have sprung up over the last year by providing a more open marketplace between drivers and passengers. Unlike Lyft and SideCar, Tickengo hasn’t been recruiting and training drivers to work shifts driving around town. Instead, it allows users to sign up and accept rides at their convenience, without the friction of a middle man managing their routes.

In that way, the company sees itself as more of a pure peer-to-peer marketplace like Airbnb. In contrast, CEO Geoff Mathieux says the other so-called ride-sharing companies that are amassing fleets of drivers in various cities, providing background checks, and training them are just operating cheap taxi services.

With Tickengo, there’s little barrier to entry if you want to be a driver — you simply need to create an account and list a car in good working condition. For a better chance of getting ride requests, drivers can verify various other pieces of information, like phone number, driver license and insurance info.

Tickengo isn’t doing background checks on its drivers like some other services, and that’s by design. The idea is that the more it steps in to manage the driving force, the less it operates like a pure “ride share” service, and the more susceptible it is to regulatory scrutiny.

“From the moment we start managing the drivers, we’ve gone past the threshold of allowing people to connect with each other,” Mathieux said. “We don’t discriminate against drivers. People voluntarily choose to sign up, and the best we can do is verify their info.”

Because Tickengo lets anyone sign up, Mathieux says there’s little difference between it and 511.org’s RideMatch service, which allows users to request a list of carpool or rideshare partners. And because it’s an open marketplace, he says Tickengo is a lot more like Airbnb than competing ride-share services that are managing fleets of drivers.

“We’re closer to Airbnb than Lyft and SideCar. What they’re doing is not a peer-to-peer experience, it’s just hiring a cheap cab,” Mathieux said.

But like Airbnb in the early days, there are plenty of people who have signed up but haven’t actually used the service. This can make its stats a little misleading. While it claims more than 350 drivers in San Francisco, for instance, a very small number are actually verified or have given rides. Only 22 have given rides and just 18 are verified. Just five drivers are listed under both categories. The same is true for other cities.

That means if you’re a Lyft or SideCar rider, you probably won’t get the same kind of instant pickup that you’d expect from those services. There are no roving fleets of drivers, just those who choose to take a ride in their spare time. In that respect, Tickengo is probably best suited for pre-planned travel — like booking a ride to the airport ahead of time — as opposed to trying to find a driver to take you to that meeting in 10 minutes.

But if you’re willing to wait, Tickengo rides can be priced at about half what they would be for a normal taxi ride. Passengers set their own prices for rides, but Tickengo provides a suggested fare. The first driver to accept basically gets the offered amount, and Tickengo takes a 15 percent service fee from their cut.

Tickengo has raised $270,000, including a seed round of funding in 2011 from Kima Ventures. The company has five employees, and has former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown Jr. as its lawyer and an advisor.

Every few months I’m reminded of the intensity of feeling some technologies – be they physical objects (they usually are) or web services – engender in a certain subset of the human population. It’s a well-documented effect: The object of desire is courted for months before launch, then at launch it is defended to the death, and then, when it is obvious that said object is a success or failure, they react with righteous jubilation or, barring that, a muted boosterism seen in people who play the same numbers in the lotto day after day.

The great Broder v. Tesla controversy is the latest in this ongoing war of logic vs. reality and is still being fought by a group of die-hard Tesla owners who are driving the route a New York Times reporter drove a few weeks ago to prove, unequivocally, that their cars will survive the trek.

Obvious bias aside, it’s a noble goal to defend Tesla. I would say that this fanboyism is important simply because it defends the reality of the electric car. Is Tesla going to be the car-maker of the 21st century? I’m not certain. Even though it’s running circles around the incumbents, there are still far too many unknowns to let the matter of the everyman’s electric vehicle rest in their hands. But I do think they are proving to the world that they can make an electric car that looks great, runs well, and, barring a few glitches, won’t strand you in Scranton? Absolutely.

But a lot of what you people defend isn’t the future of fossil-free transportation. Most of it is Wii U vs. PS3, console vs. PC, and Android vs. iOS. And it’s pretty ridiculous to watch battles rage with such intensity when people are still dying of malaria.

I’d like to address the best way to love something unequivocally without looking like a freak. To be clear, I write this same post almost every year and, not unlike tears in the rain, the wisdom within is lost in the great morass of the blogosphere. But whatever, it’s a holiday weekend and here you go: The Rules Of Online Discourse.

1. Maybe you’re wrong. Understand this when you attack someone for what they’ve written: maybe they’re right. I’ll use a very basic example that I’m sure you will find horribly biased but here we go: I see a lot of things. I know what works and what doesn’t. As Raymond Carver once wrote: My friend John Biggs was talking. John Biggs is a blogger, and some­times that gives him the right.

So I saw this thing called the Notion Ink Adam. It was an Android tablet that came out just before the iPad and was supposed to be the best thing since dry cleaning. There was a vocal group of supporters who absolutely loved the thing and I thought they were deluding themselves. I wrote this:

The result? The device launched, a few other devices were promised, the device failed, and now the website is on hiatus. People defended it for months and months. The message boards were a blur of vociferous justification. New blog posts were hailed as messages from the ether. Then, slowly but surely, the creator stopped talking to the faithful. Messages like “I still love Notion Ink but where are the updates?” and “My Notion Ink is better than anything else but it’s broken now” appeared, where before “PEOPLE WHO BUY ANYTHING BUT A NOTION INK ADAM SUCK” reigned. The justification for their purchases grew increasingly vague, and no one will bet on a horse that died in the stable the night before the race except the insane and/or overly optimistic. I was right; the fanboys were wrong. I’m not happy that happened, but it’s the truth.

2. Say nothing. People online don’t care what you think about Android. They just don’t. Your best bet is to stay inside the forums and websites dedicated to your obsession and to talk about those obsessions there and not in public. Getting into a Twitter fight with John Gruber is pointless because he makes more than you simply by linking and writing one pithy line. He’s got Apple on lock, he’s not paid off, but it’s his business to write intelligently about his favorite thing. Don’t like his opinions? Either open yourself to conflicting ideas or don’t read him. As Wilhelm Stekel wrote, “The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.”

3. No one is biased or everyone is biased. Either way, shut up about it. Human beings contain multitudes. No one cares about the things you care about as much as you do and vice versa. Claiming bias is stupid. It suggests that you are biased in the other direction or suggests you’re free of bias, which is also wrong. You’ll argue with me on this point but you’ll be wrong.

4. When you fail, fail gracefully. When WebOS died, fanboys were forced to concede to the fact that their favorite thing in the world was a dud. A group of fans rallied around the open-source version of WebOS and are still futzing around with it, but like a legion of Betamax fanatics, they’re worshipping at the feet of a dead god. Move on. Be nimble and mentally malleable. Learn something new. Still defending PHP to your dying breath? Go learn Python. Think iOS is a blast? Swap your iPad mini for a Nexus 7. I do this quite often and it’s very refreshing. I learned that I loved Windows 8, for example, and that the Surface Pro is great. I learned these things because I’m in a very special position, but you (meaning MG), too, can at least go into the Microsoft store with an open mind and come out potentially changed.

5. Let’s not fight. There’s beer to drink. There are people to woo and befriend. There are songs to be sung and board games to play. There are things to be smoked, pets to be stroked, and a sun to cavort under or snow to fort into. To those who insist on massing on points of order on the Internet with a horde-like intensity, I say to you: I know high school is hard, but it’s only four years and your time is better spent on lomography or woodworking than defending a technology that will be irrelevant in two years. “We are all prisoners here, of our own device,” said a very wise man once. Let’s all try to get along if only to keep the number of shivvings down.

[Illustration: Bryce Durbin]