Category: Tech news

With Unpakt, moving out of your house or apartment doesn’t have to be a nightmare. Unpakt lets you compare reputable moving companies, compare prices, and book online. Now it’s launching in 15 cities and listing 100 movers after starting in New York. It’s like Kayak plus Yelp for movers. Unpakt could earn juicy referral fees, bring transparency to an industry laden with hidden rates, and make moving as easy as booking a flight.

Traditionally, finding a good price for getting all your possessions moved from one dwelling to next was annoying and time consuming. You would look up companies, and call them one at a time. You’d have to repeat your addresses, preferred dates, how much stuff you have, and then get a quote that wasn’t even guaranteed to be what you’d pay. With this frustration and the inherent stress of moving, most people would end up just picking one of the first companies they called and overpaying.

Screw that. Most everyone moves a few times in their life, and prices can range from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. It’s a big market desperately in need of a marketplace. That’s where Unpakt comes in.

Unpakt’s website lets you choose the size of your place, and select what furniture you have or instantly go with the typical trappings. You can save your progress at any time so you never have to punch in your data twice. Then you’re shown prices for your move from a bunch of local companies, and you can compare reviews so you know they’re not gonna break everything. Pick the best company with the lowest price and you pay right there on Unpakt.

I just tried out the booking process and it took all of two minutes to plan a move. Without professional packing and unpacking, hauling all the stuff in a well furnished one-bedroom apartment across San Francisco cost around $550. Thanks to Unpakt, though, I could find a great mover for $100 less than that and avoid companies trying to rip me off for over $800.

Unpakt opened up its beta in New York City in July but now it’s launching in 15 more markets coast to coast: Los Angeles, San Francisco, DC, Boston, Dallas, Houston, Austin, Miami, Tampa, Atlanta, San Diego, Denver, Raleigh, New Jersey, and Connecticut. It’s got nearly 100 movers listing their rates in the marketplace now, meaning you can do serious price shopping.

That’s a big deal for anyone who has to move because most companies don’t publish their rate cards and there didn’t used to be any way to efficiently compare them. That meant moving was like booking airfare before the Internet existed — having to call each company individually and never being sure you were getting the best price. That lack of transparency and friction in the comparison process made it easy for movers to jack up their rates if they thought they were talking to a sucker.

Thanks to Unpakt, not only are all the prices laid out, but movers are incentivized to have the lowest. Unpakt’s director of marketing Jenna Weinerman tells me “the movers using Unpakt competitively are getting the most jobs.” She says “our goal is to shine up the industry.” The 15-person startup is bootstrapped but I bet VCs are going be clamoring to get in on Unpakt considering Kayak’s recent $1.8 billion exit.

The startup’s biggest challenge will be making sure the prices movers list on Unpakt are actually the lowest they offer. Otherwise people may worry they have to call in too to double check their rate. That’s why Unpakt is improving and teaching movers to use its price input tool, and regularly monitors and audits prices to make sure those it lists aren’t higher than if you call in.

In exchange for the small referral fee percentage, Unpakt is doing marketing, sales, SEO, PR, and reducing staffing costs for movers. Weinerman says “Over time as movers grow with Unpakt, there’s a chance they can pass the savings on to the customers.”

And even if they don’t, just saving you time on the phone and steering you away from needlessly expensive movers could be enough to get you recommending Unpakt to your friends. Otherwise, you might end up spending next Saturday breaking your back dragging their stupid couch down the stairs.

Unpakt isn’t just for individuals. Here’s the story of how one startup moving into their new office.

Mobile ad network Chitika measured traffic from tablets and smartphones via impressions on both the period leading up to Christmas and the period immediately following, and found a few devices grew their share significantly, while others didn’t fare so well. The iPhone 5 was the top gainer in smartphones, growing 1.11 percent overall following Christmas day; the Samsung Galaxy S III also grew 1 percent. But there was greater variance among tablets, where the Kindle Fire grew considerably, and iPad share actually dropped off.

Chitika found that on its network, the Kindle Fire gained 3.03 percent of the overall market share, nearly doubling its total share of tablet traffic to 7.51 percent. The Galaxy Tablet, both 7- and 10-inch versions, also gained a fair amount with 1.38 percent growth, and the Google Nexus grew by nearly 1 percent. Not surprisingly, traffic from the BlackBerry Playbook dropped, but only by a very meagre 0.02 percent. What is perhaps surprising is that traffic share from all iPad models actually shrank, and was down 7.14 percent overall according to Chitika’s numbers. Remember that despite share growth slipping, Apple likely sold a large number of devices over the holiday; the number just reflects usage share spread out across all devices in the category as they pertain to one another.

The iPad still dominates overall tablet traffic, with 78.86 percent of all traffic from slates, but it dropped from 86 percent pre-Christmas. Chitika still expects it to climb back above 80 percent, but it does suggest that a lot of gift-givers opted for (likely less expensive) alternatives from Android-based competitors this year.

This gives a little more device-specific context to the numbers put out by Flurry showing growth of iOS and Android device activations on Christmas and in the days following. It’s still likely not an exact representation of how the chips fell in terms of overall holiday sales, but at least it provides a look at which devices where being turned on and actively used in the days following the gift-giving season.

There’s no love lost between Microsoft and Google: The two have been feuding for more than a decade, with Microsoft regularly calling Google out for anti-competitive behavior in search. As AllThingsD pointed out earlier today, one issue that’s cropped up again is the lack of a Windows Phone app for YouTube.

On Microsoft’s public policy blog today, Microsoft VP & Deputy General Counsel Dave Heiner has an extensive post complaining about YouTube’s lack of support for its mobile platform, and how that affects its users. The gist is that Microsoft has been trying for years to get a proper YouTube app working, and has developed its own app to bring a high-quality experience to Windows Phone devices. But YouTube has prevented Microsoft from making the same features available to iOS and Android users available on its platform.

Microsoft has never been shy about building apps for its devices when developers don’t have the resources to do so, or its platforms are low on their priority list. It’s worked hand-in-hand with a number of developers to get their apps on Xbox Live (including YouTube), and has even built apps for companies like Twitter and Facebook to get them on Windows Phone. But according to the blog post, Google isn’t even allowing Microsoft to do that.

That’s likely because YouTube wants to control the entire app experience, something it won’t necessarily be able to do on the Windows Phone platform, especially if it’s an app built by Microsoft. It wants to be able to serve up ads and provide the same richness of experience that’s available on the other platforms it’s built apps for. That was part of the reason that it pulled support for Apple’s internally built YouTube app, and created its own version.

But for whatever reason, though, Microsoft believes the higher-ups at Google are dictating that a similar app shouldn’t be available on Windows Phone. Heiner writes:

“Microsoft has continued to engage with YouTube personnel over the past two years to remedy this problem for consumers. As you might expect, it appears that YouTube itself would like all customers – on Windows Phone as on any other device – to have a great YouTube experience. But just last month we learned from YouTube that senior executives at Google told them not to enable a first-class YouTube experience on Windows Phones.”

In the meantime, Google says that Windows Phone users will be able to access YouTube through the mobile web. The company has worked hard on building a robust mobile web presence for platforms where it doesn’t have an app or that aren’t app friendly. In a statement sent to AllThingsD, a spokesperson wrote:

“Contrary to Microsoft’s claims, it’s easy for consumers to view YouTube videos on Windows phones. Windows phone users can access all the features of YouTube through our HTML5-based mobile website, including viewing high-quality video streams, finding favorite videos, seeing video ratings, and searching for video categories. In fact, we’ve worked with Microsoft for several years to help build a great YouTube experience on Windows phones.”

YouTube recently updated its mobile HTML5 site for tablets that don’t run iOS or Android in a way that makes it more like the company’s web presence.

After a newspaper’s Google Map of New York gun permit owners sparked a political firestorm, officials in Putnam County say they will refuse to give up public gun permit ownership information for its residents. “In Putnam County I have over 11,000 pistol permit holders, and I refuse to put their lives and their families’ lives in danger,” County Clerk Dennis Sant told The New York Times, regarding the The Journal News‘ request for the public information.

“New York residents have the right to own guns with a permit and they also have a right to access public information,” said Journal Publisher Janet Hasson. In a revenge post against the Google Map of permit owners in selected New York cities, a Connecticut lawyer, Christopher Fountain, published the names, addresses, and phone numbers of the newspaper’s staff, including a Google satellite image of Hasson’s home.

Some are applauding Putnam County’s ironic civil disobedience. “I thank God that Putnam County has a clerk with the guts to stand up and draw the line here in Putnam County,” said State Senator Greg Ball, who referred to the editors as “elitist eggheads” who made an “asinine” decision to publish the map.

“My hope is that officials in Putnam county will actually take a look at the law and reverse their response,” said Robert Freeman of the state Committee on Open Government. “In a civilized society, we do our best to comply with the law. If we object to a law, we don’t simply ignore it.”

We put Shasta Ventures’ co-founder Rob Coneybeer in the hot seat this week for Ask A VC. After spending a number of years at NEA as a VC, Coneybeer decided to found his own firm. He explains in the video above why he felt there was a need for another fund, as well as the challenges of creating an investment vehicle. We also chatted about whether VCs have short attention spans, what’s next for mobile innovation, and more.

Check out the video above!

Ubuntu isn’t exactly a stranger to the mobile space — it started showing off its Ubuntu for Android project in early 2012, but it wasn’t about to stop there. Not long after teasing the prospect of a touch-friendly future for its peculiarly-named OS, Canonical has officially pulled back the curtains on its Ubuntu phone OS and it looks, well, great.

That beauty comes from the fact that it doesn’t really look like any other mobile UI out there right now — it eschews the traditional app grid concept that pervades iOS and stock Android and instead relies on horizontal swipes to view oft-used applications and switch between currently running ones. In a way, it’s approach is more reminiscent of Windows Phone 8 and Windows RT than either of the two leading mobile OSes, though whether those UI decisions catch on is another story entirely. Still, the end result is an interface that feels more spacious and expansive than its potential rivals, a tricky proposition when hardware designers struggle to balance device screen size and portability.

Plenty of sweat has been poured into the crafting of Ubuntu’s search functionality as well, and it’s mildly reminiscent of Palm/HP’s webOS. A single search query will yield results from multiple sources, and Ubuntu is apparently clever enough to determine which of the results are most likely be what you’re looking for. Throw in support for robust voice commands and the ability to play nice with HTML5 apps as well as native ones and you’ve got yourself one intriguing little product.

Now, a new mobile OS is swell and all, but it’s nigh useless without some proper hardware to go with it. Unfortunately, that’s where the situation gets a little stickier — Ubuntu Mobile is designed to play nice with hardware of all stripes (it supports x86 processors in addition to more common ARM chips, and doesn’t lean on a Java Virtual Machine), but there hasn’t been any word yet on device partnerships. Instead, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth has pointed out that first Ubuntu-powered phones could see the light of day towards the end of this year or in early 2014.

Of course, Ubuntu’s latest mobile foray raises some weighty questions, not least of which is “who would buy an Ubuntu phone?” If Canonical CEO Jane Silber is to be believed, Ubuntu’s appeal isn’t just limited to Linux enthusiasts and enterprises. Instead, We also see an opportunity in basic smartphones that are used for the phone, SMS, web and email, where Ubuntu outperforms thanks to its native core apps and stylish presentation.” The ability for OEMs and carriers to easily modify and rebrand Ubuntu on mobile devices certainly doesn’t hurt — Firefox OS has taken a similar route with carrier partners like Telefonica.

What’s really got me scratching my head is how Ubuntu will stack up against its rivals (and there are plenty of them). I don’t need to tell you that Apple and Google are running the smartphone show with their respective mobile operating systems and the list of players extends much further than you may expect. Windows Phone 8 and BlackBerry 10 have probably raised the most eyebrows lately, but the teams behind Tizen, Firefox OS, and Sailfish are gunning to make their mark on the mobile space all the same.

When we asked Shuttleworth about the motivation for doing this, rather than throwing their weight behind existing efforts like Android or Tizen. “Our vision is deeper and broader than I’ve seen from other ecosystems,” he said. “We believe that one platform can stretch across multiple environments”: the developer desktop to the cloud server to the end user’s so-called “superphone.”

Shuttleworth was honest that the smartphone OS market is already a crowded space, but feels confident that the Ubuntu story will present a winning proposition. Canonical can’t compete with the millions of dollars spent by Microsoft and RIM, but can compete, according to Shuttleworth, on a classy interface across all segments of phones. Here’s hoping it works out — I can’t help but feel that the Ubuntu approach is too interesting for people to ignore completely.

The mobile app economy continued to power ahead last year, with 43.6 billion downloads worldwide in the 12 months ending September 2012. And while first-mover Apple may have today had a setback in its attempts to fight off competitors with trademark complaints over the very use of the phrase “app store”, it continues to lead the market in the category, according to figures out today from ABI Research.

But while some might argue that the most obvious marks of app store success are download numbers and sales figures, ABI has chosen two other parameters to measure how well app stores are performing at the moment: implementation and innovation, which it scores on an overall scale of 100. The idea here is that while, at the moment, a store like Apple’s might be leading on download numbers because of its sheer size compared to, say, Microsoft’s Windows Phone store, there is an argument to be made that even if a store is smaller, it’s got a shot at longer-term success for developers who choose to place apps there.

As it turns out, Apple leads the pack with 80.8 out of 100, with Android in a close second position at 72.2. Microsoft is at a more distant 63.9 out of 100, but ABI analyst Aapo Markkanen notes that it actually beat Apple where innovation is concerned, with a total point score of 77 points compared to 76 for Apple in innovation.

In some regards, this is not a big surprise: it’s the latest entrant into the app store world, and it has fewer apps — 200,000 compared to 700,000 for iOS or over 600,000 for the Google Play store.

Markkanen says this has propelled Microsoft, in an underdog position, to being more innovative in terms of how it markets apps and helps users discover them.

He highlights “Microsoft’s approach to app charting” — the listings of Top Free, Top Paid, and so on — as one of the main ways that the company has taken the lead, with algorithm factors being more nuanced with Windows Phone. “An app with a modest-but-loyal and highly-engaged user base gets a boost over an app that may see boatloads of downloads but fails to retain its users,” he tells me. “It’s important because this favors quality apps with modest post-launch budgets over mediocre apps that throw a lot of money at ad networks and other forms of marketing.”

In other words, the underdog app store is better at promoting underdog-but-possibly-great apps. If more developers started to buy into this concept, it could potentially also start to shift the paradigm for how people chart app success away from download numbers.

“I also like the way Microsoft has been transparent about what its chart algorithm has eaten, if compared to Apple and Google which officially never comment anything and leave everything for speculation,” he says. That’s for a reason: “If your algorithm is less holistic, i.e. focused heavily on downloads, it’s also more susceptible for manipulation.” Storefront charts can be real kingmakers in app discovery, he notes, so that makes transparent policies all the more important.

Microsoft has also done a “fairly good job” at app personalization, although this has mainly been just to keep up with what Apple and Google already do; and the ease of use of the Windows Phone Store navigation.

Ultimately, what this says is that while Apple and Google are still leading overall above Microsoft’s app storefront, there is room for improvement for the leaders. Getting complacent however is one way to eventually level the playing field for competition.

Phunware, a company that specializes in enterprise branded mobile application infrastructure and experiences, just announced that it has acquired mobile ad company TapIt Media Group (not to be confused with the Australian NFC marketing company TapIt). The total purchase price was $23 million and the acquisition closed just before the end of the year on December 28.

All of TapIt’s employees, who work in the company’s offices in Irvine, California and Rockville, Maryland, will join Phunware and the company will continue to run TapIt’s ad products under the “TapIt by Phunware” label. When I talked to TapIt earlier this year, the company, which was bootstrapped with a $350,000 seed investment by its CEO Giancarlo Maniaci in 2010, had just launched a number of new mobile ad products and was already profitable and handling about 6 billion ad impressions per month.

TapIt specializes in offering self-service media buying, real-time bidding, cross-platform ad creation, publisher mediation and yield optimization to its network of about 30,000 active publishers.

“We are honored to become part of the Phunware family, as our combined mobile platform offerings will add operational value, insight and control to both advertisers and publishers alike,” said Giancarlo Maniaci, Co-Founder and CEO of TapIt Media Group. “With the velocity of adoption and maturation of mobile increasing daily, we strongly believe that fully integrated, easy to use, simple to deploy and all-inclusive mobile platforms like Phunware’s MaaS will soon define both ‘best of breed’ and the new global mobile standard.”

For Phunware, which already works with companies like the NFL, NASCAR, ESPN, Discovery and other major brands, this acquisition also gives it access to TapIt’s large customers like Disney, Toyota, EA Sports, MSNBC and Rovio. In addition, Phunware’s CEO and co-founder Alan S. Knitowski argues, the acquisition will allow his company to “add further breadth and depth to the existing global scale of our core MaaS [mobile-as-a-service] platform product offerings.”

As Phunware’s Knitowski also told me in an email earlier today, he considers his company to be akin to a “a big jar of Advil for the mobile cloud.” Phunware, he says, helps businesses “solve both operational and monetization headaches on mobile for global deployments at scale for the world’s most demanding brands. TapIt by Phunware will represent the core of our MaaS Advertising offering globally and will facilitate the monetization associated with free and freemium mobile applications.”

For Phunware, this acquisition will allow it to combine its expertise in building apps on its mobile-as-a-service platform with TapIt’s monetization expertise. As Phunware also notes, this move also shows Phunware’s “aggressive push for ‘mobile cloud’ leadership globally” and the acquisition will help it solve “the underlying operational and monetization headaches of those required to reach, engage and delight them.”

For the upcoming year, Knitowski told me, he expects to “scale our US geographic reach and we also expect to enter foreign markets with physical offices in Europe and Asia.  This will be done via a combination of organic growth and acquisitions both domestically and abroad. Our core focus is to provide the world’s only fully integrated mobile services platform and to become the defacto engine for the global mobile cloud.”

The government gave the nation’s suit-and-tie mad scientists a tax break again this year, agreeing to extend the much-loved R&D tax credit. “We can’t keep cutting things like basic research and new technology and still expect to succeed in a 21st-century economy,” said President Obama, hailing Congress’s passage of a budget related to the so-called “fiscal cliff.”

The popular 1981 law to incentivize research-oriented hiring has generally been extended annually for its 30-year existence, and there’s good evidence that the tax credit really does spur innovation. In 2005, the Congress Budget Office concluded [PDF]:

A consensus has formed around the view that R&D spending has a significantly positive effect on productivity growth, with a rate of return that is about the same size as (or perhaps slightly larger than) the rate of return on conventional investments.

Sean Haggard, Tax Manager of Florida accounting firm, Kaufman Rossin, tells Businessweek that the lion’s share of R&D tax credits, 80 percent, goes to the big dogs with $250 million or more in gross receipts. Smaller companies, often thought an important engine of economic innovation, use a modified version of the tax code to calculate the credit, the “Alternative Simplified Credit” formula. Entrepreneur Magazine gave a helpful dollar-by-dollar hypothetical of how this might play out for a small business owner:

Let’s say you averaged $50,000 in qualified R&D expenses over the past three years. That makes your credit base $25,000. You spend $60,000 this year, or $35,000 more than your base, and 14 percent of that amount yields a tax credit of $4,900. Typically, you can claim the credit in its entirety or amortize it over a period of 60 months. If your company is a startup and doesn’t have three years of history, the credit is a flat 6 percent of qualified research expenses.

In 2012, Senators Coon, Enzi, and Schumer spearheaded an attempt for a startup-specific tax credit, the Startup Innovation Credit Act, but it was referred to a committee (i.e. killed) back in July.

How will you use your tax credit this year? Build the next iPhone? Launder the money and head to Disney World? Build a basement meth lab? Oh, the possibilities!

The “paperless office” has been a fantasy of office managers since the advent of the personal computer. While you are probably printing less today than you did 10 years ago, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the average office worker still uses about 10,000 sheets of paper per year (the numbers for the UK are similar, too). To make a new push for a really paperless office, the “Paperless Coalition,” which includes Google Drive, HelloFax, Manilla, HelloSign, Expensify, Xero and Fujitsu ScanSnap, today announced the launch of a new campaign to get businesses to go paperless to save “time, money and trees.”

The group is led by HelloFax. “The digital tools that are available today blow what we had even five years ago out of the water,” said Joseph Walla, HelloFax founder and CEO in a canned statement yesterday. “For the first time, it’s easy to sign, fax, and store documents without ever printing a piece of paper. It’s finally fast and simple to complete paperwork and expense reports, to manage accounting, pay bills and invoice others. The paperless office is here – we just need to use it.”

Paperless 2013, the coalition says, is a “campaign to remove the need for paper from ‘paperwork.’” Besides saving time, money and trees, all of these companies are also obviously interested in getting new users. In its current incarnation, this group is clearly meant to be complementary and doesn’t include any obvious competitors. While Google Drive is not a bad choice for storing your data online, for example, competitors like Dropbox, SkyDrive, Box or SugarSync offer many of the same features.

If you want to go paperless in 2013, you can take a pledge on paperless2013.org, which will also sign you up for the group’s monthly email newsletter. According to its website, the coalition is also planning “other activities,” but it’s not clear what these will look like.

Image credit: clive darr

The court has rejected Apple’s earlier claim that Amazon’s use of “Appstore” to describe its Android application marketplace was “false advertising,” according to a Bloomberg news alert. Apple had filed a trademark lawsuit in 2011, stating that Amazon’s use of the term “appstore” could cause confusion among consumers. In September 2012, Amazon asked a federal judge to dismiss Apple’s Fifth Cause of Action in the case – the aforementioned “false advertising” claim.

Apple was alleging that the use of the word “Appstore” in Amazon’s advertising is false advertising, but as Amazon explained in its filing, that word is part of the name of Amazon’s store. “It is not a statement about the nature, characteristics, or qualities of Amazon’s store, much less a false one,” the document stated. U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton in Oakland, California, apparently agreed on this matter.

The false advertising claim was one of many tactics Apple was using against Amazon, but likely one of the least effective ones. By rejecting the claim, Amazon was essentially asking the court to focus on the trademark dispute, which is meant to determine if other companies have the right to use the generic term “app store.” In addition to trademark infringement and false advertising, Apple has also made other claims related to dilution and unfair competition.

This rejection only represents a partial summary judgement in the trademark case; the decision regarding trademark infringement has not yet been decided. On this front, Amazon has cited other incidences where former Apple CEO Steve Jobs and current CEO Tim Cook referred to competitors’ stores, calling them “app stores,” during press events and investor calls.

In this ruling, the document explains Amazon’s and Apple’s positions on the false advertising claim as follows:

Amazon argues that summary judgment should be granted as to this claim because Apple has not identified a single false statement that Amazon has made about the nature, characteristics, or quality of the Amazon Appstore for Android (or the Amazon Appstore, which allows viewing and downloading of apps for the Kindle Fire).

Apple essentially alleges that by using the word “Appstore” in the name of Amazon’s store, Amazon implies that its store is affiliated with or sponsored by Apple. Amazon argues that this allegation is nothing more than a garden-variety trademark infringement claim (false designation of origin).

According to the ruling, the court found “no evidence that a consumer who accesses the Amazon Appstore would expect that it would be identical to the Apple APP STORE, particularly given that the Apple APP STORE sells apps solely for Apple devices, while the Amazon Appstore sells apps solely for Android and 8 Kindle devices.”

Apple vs. Amazon Trademark Case: Case4:11-cv-01327-PJH Document102

The Aero wheelset doesn’t sit atop Reynolds’ product line, but in our opinion, it may as well.

The Nocs NS600 earphones from Sweden are advertised as being specially tuned for electronic music, but they work exceptionally well for most other flavors, as well.

Samsung has shipped its millionth Galaxy Note II “phablet” in South Korea just over 90 days after its launch, according to MK News (via Sammy Hub, h/t to TNW). The South Korean multinational conglomerate  announced last month that it has sold over 5 million Galaxy Note II units globally and, if its current momentum continues, the device might hit 10 million sales by next month.

This latest milestone is yet more proof that consumers have become increasingly accustomed to gigantic smartphones that can, in a pinch, serve as a handy disguise by masking your entire face. In just little over a year, Samsung “phablets”–specifically, its Galaxy Note series–have made a significant impact on smartphone and tablet design, arguably beating Apple in innovation as they left their mark on the iPhone 5 and the iPad Mini. Other Samsung smartphones have done extremely well: the Galaxy S3 overtook the iPhone 4S as the world’s bestselling smartphone in the third quarter of 2012 and gained an 11 percent share of all smartphones shipped globally, according to a November report by Strategy Analytics.

In between the ongoing patent wars and their dueling devices, it looks like Samsung and Apple are headed toward an epic showdown in 2013. One side is armed with conductive styluses and the other has sapphire crystals. Only two things are for certain: Judge Lucy Koh is not amused and, with this post, I’m now the bread in Michael Arrington’s sandwich of boring.

It’s just about 2013 and I gotta say, I’m a little bored.

At least, the blogger in me is. As an investor things are just peachy. All this panic about overpriced consumer startups has led to a nice softening of the market (periodic reports of Blubbles are great for that). And other sectors, like business to business, is still under capitalized v. the consumer sector.

But as a consumer and observer of tech, things feel very 2002ish to me. There’s been a lot of belt tightening, for example, as many startups are trying to make their seed rounds stretch just a little bit longer.

But it’s more than that. I just don’t see the tons of crazy new ideas that I did a few years ago. Things that are genuinely new and interesting.

Yeah, yeah, mobile. I get it. Everything’s mobile these days. LET’S GO MO-BILE! But really that’s just an IQ test. When you see bold new startups with nothing but a desktop strategy, you know they just don’t get it and you move on.

But really a lot of the mobile stuff out there is just radioactive decay from the iPhone launching in 2007.

2007!

Old news! Ancient platforms!

Yeah, the iPhone and Android are great. But seriously, look at the top headline grabbers in tech news in 2012. Apple. Google. Facebook. Microsoft. Christ. It might as well still be 2007.

I don’t want to read any more stories about how Facebook cloned something they couldn’t buy. Or that Twitter banned something that they tried to buy but Facebook got there first. Or the press regurgitating how Google+ is somehow not flailing. Or about the number of Android v. iPhone devices. Or Samsung’s patent mishaps. Or how Yahoo is winding down things in Asia.

I certainly don’t want to, for example, spend another minute debating Hunter Walk on the nuances of social graphs or whether we should be given a way to efficiently remove friends from Facebook.

For two other examples look at the post directly below this one, and (in a few minutes) the one directly above. Snoozers!

I want something completely new and different to happen, and lots of it. Stuff that makes us change the way we think about a market, or the world. Something that inspires a new generation of crazy startups doing crazy things.

I don’t want to be completely negative on the tech world today. And I have seen some pretty amazing things over the last year that really are indistinguishable from magic. We’ve even invested in a few of them. But it’s very early days yet.

And we need more. Lots more. Paradigm shifting stuff that has almost zero chance of succeeding. Which is ok. Because whoever tries this stuff (and fails) will certainly land on their feet, and they’ll have great stories to tell their grandchildren.

If you want to build a startup that has a good chance of succeeding, don’t listen to me. Listen to Paul Graham and others who are applying tons of data to the idea of startup success. That will maximize your chance of being successful.

Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for flying boats. Or something to improve my memory. And the last great human invention, 100 percent realistic virtual reality via a brain-computer interface. Because once we plug into that, most of us will probably never unplug.

Which is fine. We’re probably all just living in a computer simulation anyway. We might as well have some fun while we’re at it.

We live in an age where we expect and experience exponential change in tech. Where common everyday items were just fantasies (or unimagined) decades ago. Let’s speed things up, people. I’m bored.