Category: Tech news

Yesterday I walked from Cambodia into Thailand. On the way out of Cambodia, I was fingerprinted; on the way into Thailand, I was photographed. While I waited for the train to Bangkok I read legendary hacker Jamie Zawinski’s tale of how the powers that be “wanted to mandate that I surveil all of my customers, and turn that information over to the Government without a warrant” in exchange for getting a liquor license.

He goes on: “this is a standard condition that SFPD is putting on all new liquor licenses! …when the people and their elected lawmakers unambiguously say ‘no’ on a civil liberties issue, the unelected SFPD and ABC career bureaucrats think they can force a ‘yes’ anyway. It’s disgusting.”

It is. But if you think the war on privacy and the rise of the surveillance state is bad enough in the First World, just imagine how bad it will be in nations where the people are poor, their governments have few checks and balances, and there’s no tradition of civil liberties. And surveillance technology gets cheaper much faster than the world’s poorest get wealthier. It may not be long before privacy — any privacy — will begin to feel, seem, and even cost like a luxury.

Worse yet, this may not seem like a bad thing — at first.

About 50 feet from the bustling main drag in Cambodia’s wealthiest town, I stumbled across the school photographed above, a one-room, benches-and-blackboards building straight out of Little House on the Prairie. I’m sure it’s quite nice for what it is, but I couldn’t help but think: “No tech at all? How much better it would be if there were at least some modern technology in every school like this; not the deluded pointlessness of One Laptop Per Child, but something more like Ten Smartphones Per Teacher. Of course, they’d be so valuable, you’d have to worry about theft…unless you had some central database that tracked their locations, and would disable them when stolen, so they wouldn’t be valuable any more…”

And then I realized I’d just invented a system that centralized government control of smartphones. Would such a system stop at phones in schools? Or would governments insist on extending it to control every smartphone in the country, and their content too? Voila! Centralized repression and censorship straight out of Orwell. Of course they probably would; and of course in most nations there’d be no EFF to try to stop them.

Similarly, corruption is the scourge of the poor world; transparency is the enemy of corruption; and better surveillance technology leads to greater transparency. It is one way, for the most part, so the rich will be able to watch the poor without being watched themselves. But ubiquitous cameras and smaller drones will still bring down more and more small-fry corrupt bureaucrats, the ones who steal thousands…while those who feed on millions can buy enough privacy that their parasitical businesses continue to thrive.

“Hey, that’s fine by the Finn, Moll. You’re only paying by the second.”

They sealed the door behind him and Molly turned one of the white chairs around and sat on it, chin resting on crossed forearms. `We talk now. This is as private as I can afford.’

– William Gibson, Neuromancer

It’s possible that you won’t have to explicitly pay for privacy in the near future. We in the rich world may manage to eke out a win in the legal and regulatory battle against the onrushing panopticon. But even if so, I don’t see how the poor world can succeed. It can’t be long before privacy becomes, like clean water or reliable power, something that only the rich can afford.

The Kindle Paperwhite is an amazing ereader. It’s arguably the best on the market. But it’s not flawless. Some users, including several TechCrunch writers, noticed the lighting on their Paperwhite is not evenly spaced, resulting in odd, slightly distracting gaps at the bottom of the screen (see the pic).

Well, in a recent statement, Amazon stepped up to the plate and addressed this lighting issue as well as reaffirming the Paperwhite model has less storage than its predecessor and lacks text-to-speech. Even with these, let’s say design decisions, the Kindle Paperwhite is a fantastic ereader. As John states out in our official review, it’s a reader’s dream.

Full statement,

We want you to know…

Kindle Paperwhite is the best Kindle we’ve ever made by far, but there are certain limitations and changes from prior generations that we want you to know about.

Kindle Paperwhite does not have audio or Text-to-Speech. This makes the device smaller and lighter than it would otherwise be. Audio and an improved Text-to-Speech engine are supported on Kindle Fire and Kindle Fire HD.

Under certain lighting conditions, the illumination at the bottom of the screen from the built-in light is not perfectly even. See examples of how the screen looks in different lighting conditions. These variations are normal and are located primarily in the margin where text is not present. The illumination is more even than that created by a book light or lighted cover. The contrast, resolution and illumination of the Paperwhite display is a significant step-up from our prior generation.

The Kindle Paperwhite has 2 GB of storage. Some previous Kindle models had 4GB of storage. 2GB allows you to hold up to 1,100 books locally on your device. In addition, your entire Kindle library is stored for free in the Amazon cloud, and you can easily move books from the cloud onto your device.

Thank you, and we hope you enjoy Kindle Paperwhite.
– The Kindle Team

There’s been quite a bit of disruption in bikes recently and the Bicymple is no exception. Designed by Josh Bechtel, the bike aims to be easy to ride, trouble free, and less expensive than traditional gear and chain models. You can check out a video here but we got a chance to talk with Josh a bit about his new design.

TC: What’s the impetus for this?

Josh: Ultimately, my passion for bicycles is the driving force behind the Bicymple. I’ve been riding bikes regularly since I was a child. I have more bikes than I care to admit to strangers on the web and people I’ve only just met. It’s a problem. I love cross country bikes, downhill bikes, road bikes, single speeds, fixies, cruisers, city bikes, clean bikes, rusty bikes, light bikes, heavy bikes…shall I go on? I think unicycles are great, too!

I built my first home-built bike back in the late 90′s. It was a traditional full suspension bike and I even successfully raced it. At the time, you could get away with that sort of thing, but as bike technology and building methods and materials advanced, it became tougher and tougher to compete in that way–especially for an average guy with a full time job and bills to pay. When the movement toward minimalist bikes came back around, it revitalized the bike builder in me and got me thinking about ways I could leave a mark, no matter how small it might be, in the world I am so passionate about. I started riding a single speed with a coaster brake that I had built up mostly out of used parts and it just made me so happy it got me thinking about how far one might be able to go in that direction. I started with a sketch of a standard bike and began crossing off parts one by one and addressing the problems created with each deletion until I ended up with a direct drive, freewheeling bike. From there, I felt like it might actually have become too simple. I felt it needed something else–a surprise in its back pocket–and the rear-steer was just the solution. I fully realize the contradiction this presents with the concept of simplicity and like the tension that creates.

TC: Is this the first bike of this particular type? I seem to remember seeing something like this before, but why this style and why now?

Josh: Yes and no. There have been swing bikes before, for certain, but they were all chain driven. There have been direct drive bikes before, too, but none (as far as I’m aware) had any lockout mechanism for the rear steering and they were all non-freewheeling and had smaller wheels, which severely limited their real-world practicality and left them in a purely “trick-bike” niche. I imagine most are familiar with the old penny farthing, too, and there are obvious connections there, too.

The bicymple might, however, bring these previous concepts together in a way that hasn’t been seen before. There seems to be a misconception out there on the web that I think that the established bicycle design is somehow lacking or insufficient, but that’s simply not the case. To me, that would be like thinking that anyone who ever picked up a paintbrush thought that Michelangelo just couldn’t hack it. I think that idea is a bit silly, really. The bicymple provides yet another outlet, another opportunity to accomplish the same goals as many other bikes, it just does it in a different way! Part of what makes life so great, in my mind, is diversity–and the bicycle world is a great example of this!

TC: What did you have to change to get it work properly? Is it really like a unicycle with another wheel? Something else?

Josh: At first glance, especially when you see someone riding it, it’s easy to see the similarities with a unicycle. Right away “the two-wheeled unicycle” became a nickname for it and the obvious oxymoron created by that name is pretty entertaining to me. It’s actually how I tend to explain it to those who haven’t seen it. The things that set it apart and make it special are obviously the rear steering, but also the fact that the rear steering can be locked out, allowing it to be ridden just like a regular bike. Many comments out there on the web overlook this key fact. It’s one of the subtle surprises that the bicymple has up its sleeve. The overdrive hub is another surprise. It is currently in development and has caught the attention of many in both the bicycle and unicycle communities. The classic thinking is that the only way to go faster with a direct coaxial drive is to increase the size of the wheel, which was the famous fatal flaw of the penny farthing. A few clever designs out there for unicycles have gotten around this but at quite a price. We’ll be able to accomplish the same goal at a price that should be quite affordable. It’s a compact, sealed, zero-service unit so you’ll never have to think about it–and it certainly won’t get your pants leg greasy!

TC: How much does it cost to build? How much was your prototype?

Josh: We’re not addressing dollar amounts until we’re able to offer an accurate
retail price.

TC: Bummer. When will you be ready to build some? Will you sell it via Kickstarter?

Josh: Our plan from the start has been to get an initial run built and provide them as test bikes to select bike shops. The incredible support and enthusiasm and sheer number of purchase requests from around the globe has made us consider a different approach. There is a very good chance we will be on Kickstarter in the coming weeks. Stay tuned for that. Crowdfunding is such a fantastic way for people to get their hands on products they never would have been able to before, so we’d be silly to not pursue that.

TC: What would you say to people who say it looks pretty goofy? Does it look as weird as those recumbent bikes?

Josh: I think it’s great if people think it looks goofy! I think it looks goofy too! It’s just not something many of us are accustomed to seeing. Ultimately, though, many, many people have expressed a great deal of interest and think it is a beautiful sort of goofy. From the first sketches, that’s how I felt about it. Wait, recumbent bikes look goofy?

TC: Have you ridden around on this in Bellingham? What do people think?

Josh: Oh yes, the bicymple has been out and about plenty. The reception has all been incredibly positive. I get yells from people across the street, from over fences and through windows, all curious and wanting to understand what it is they’re looking at. It is certainly eye-catching and incredibly unique. Those who are adventurous love the fact that the rear can be set loose to swing freely and really like the challenge it presents. Those less adventurous appreciate the ability to lock the steering out and pedal normally. I look forward to the bicymple getting in the hands of some really skilled trials riders to see the sorts of things they’re capable of doing with it–unicyclists, too! Thanks again, and let me know if you have any other questions!

Editor’s note: Bruce Cleveland is a General Partner with InterWest Partners focused on software and services sector investments with an emphasis on cloud computing, mobile and analytical applications. Follow him on Twitter.

Most of us are familiar with the adage by George Santayana, who, in his biography said, ”Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” You may recognize it as, “Those who ignore history are bound to repeat it.” Either way, I agree.

This truism is applicable to the high-tech industry, specifically when it is applied against transformational technologies. For example, the change from mainframe computing to client-server computing. Or, for those of you old enough to remember, the move from Codasyl databases to relational databases. Companies that remain steadfastly adhered to old architectures (e.g. ADR or Cullinet – who were unassailable technology giants in the early 80’s) are eventually upended and replaced by companies with new technology architectures (e.g. Oracle).

The “old” technology that once served as a weapon to win customers, market share, employees, partners and profits eventually turns into an enormous anchor of status quo that then sinks companies into oblivion. In the enterprise, these tectonic technology shifts happen about every 10 years. The last big technology transformation was SaaS and cloud computing – led by Salesforce.com.

And while enterprises are just beginning to really understand and absorb SaaS/cloud computing, an even bigger quake is shaking up IT: mobile computing.

According to a recent article by Technology Review, an MIT publication, called “Are Smart Phones Spreading Faster Than Any Technology in Human History,” mobile computing has the potential to reshape the technology landscape faster than any other technology in history.

“It took almost a century for landline phones to reach saturation, or the point at which new demand falls off. Mobile phones, by contrast, achieved saturation in just 20 years. Smartphones are on track to halve that rate yet again, and tablets could move still faster, setting consecutive records for speed-to-market saturation in the United States.

While it wasn’t popular at the time – consumer Internet companies were all the rage – my firm, InterWest Partners, began making serious investments in enterprise technologies in the early 2000’s – in areas such as cloud/SaaS and mobile.

As a result, we now have investments in cloud computing and SaaS companies that are helping enterprises to completely transform their business processes and IT infrastructure. These companies are experiencing significant year over year growth (Aria Systems, Aryaka, Get Satisfaction, Marketo, Spredfast, Virsto and Workday).

Mobile First

At InterWest, we have put mobile at the top of the list for quite some time. In fact, we have been deliberately investing in startup companies that have architected their enterprise products with mobile as the first targeted platform. The web/browser is a secondary consideration. Companies such as Appmesh and Doximity are representative of these new “mobile first” companies.

We believe – and the data from the Technology Report supports our thesis – that the primary compute device for all employees in the enterprise will soon become the smartphone and/or tablet. Yet, most incumbent enterprise technology providers continue to treat mobile as just another endpoint. They have not re-architected their products for mobile computing – they are not “Mobile First.” They are “Mobile as an Afterthought.”

This “Afterthought” approach is similar to the approach of the now defunct Cullinet and ADR who, instead of re-architecting their products, simply “bolted on” a relational layer and offered it as an option. It was a kluge. The company knew it. Customers knew it. And yet, due to the need to “preserve status quo,” they stuck with it. Unfortunately, customers didn’t stick with them.

So, if mobile computing becomes a dominant enterprise platform, could this be the new battleground for innovation with a new breed of mobile-born disruptive companies?

Salesforce + Mobile = Null?

Keeping this in mind, let’s take a look at some recent news. With more than 100,000 companies as customers and with 90,000 attendees at Dreamforce, Salesforce is without question one of the major forces in enterprise computing.

Salesforce is clearly making big strides and acquisitions in the ever-popular social space – which, by the way, has yet to prove itself as a viable revenue channel. But just like Facebook, Salesforce doesn’t seem to have a cogent strategy for mobile, arguably the biggest technology transformation the world has ever experienced.

The recently announced Salesforce Touch application development environment doesn’t support native iOS or Droid – it is HTML5. That approach didn’t work out so well for Facebook. And Touch’s functionality is going to take a while to catch up with native Salesforce web applications.

We are seeing enterprise customers adopt mobile extremely fast and looking to their technology providers for solutions. Unfortunately, Salesforce’s approach to mobile feels a lot like Cullinet’s and ADR’s approach to relational – somewhat half-baked and bolted on and certainly not tightly integrated and well thought through as many of Salesforce’s other strategies have been.

No one from Salesforce asked me – and they are unlikely to do so – but if they were to ask, here is how I see their options if they want to capitalize on the mobile computing transformation:

1. Build (completely rebuild their architecture to support mobile),
2. Buy, or
3. Bog-down

The big question I have is whether they will take George Santayana’s advice? At the very least, it will make for interesting history.

Social media optimization technology company SocialFlow has made a change at the top. We’ve learned that its Co-Founder Frank Speiser has stepped down from the CEO position to make way for now former Managing Director of North Sea Partners, Missy Godfrey.

The service is used by some of the biggest brands in the world, including: Pepsi, Dole, The Economist, National Geographic and The Washington Post.

Here’s what Godfrey told me this evening about why she was excited to join the company:

The reason why I was so excited to come on board is because the market has caught up to the mission of SocialFlow. The company had the foresight to understand that the brands and publishers would have a better understanding of what the need would be for social media. The answer to “what is social media?” is “what can it do for you?” We have a platform that has complex data mining and processing to sort through what’s going on through all of the noise. We give you the lever to react to what’s going on in real-time. The timing was right to come in, the product is ready for what the market needs. The market is now screaming for this.

Speiser spent over three years at the helm of the company, but it appears that it was time for new leadership to be brought in. The company has raised $7M in funding as a Betaworks company, and its A round of financing included Softbank Capital, AOL Ventures, and SV Angel. According to the SocialFlow website, Speiser is now the acting President and Chief Product Office of the company. Godfrey shared:

Frank is a brilliant product guy, and he has done an exceptional job of bringing in paying clients to show our proof of concept. He suggested to the board that they consider bringing me in. We have a great relationship and he’s so happy to be working on product again.

Here’s a bit of Godfrey’s bio from SocialFlow’s leadership page:

Missy Godfrey is a senior operating executive and general manager with a distinguished track record spanning over two decades in multiple diverse sectors, including traditional and digital media, luxury goods, advertising, private equity investing, and wealth management. She is an expert in the planning and execution of turnarounds, product launches and start-up growth initiatives.

It sounds like Godfrey’s extensive experience in media will be a huge asset for SocialFlow as it moves forward in trailblazing the tracking of digital mentions and engagement with its “SocialFlow AttentionScore” technology.

Adtech companies are trying get better at demographic targeting, especially on mobile, but a startup called Sensegon aims to go a step further — targeting ads based on audience members’ personalities.

To illustrate the concept, CEO Omer Efrat talks about going to a car dealership with his co-founder and CTO Tal Yaari. Efrat was more interested in engine power, while Yaari was more interested in gas consumption and safety. The salesman, Efrat says, knew intuitively to direct his pitch differently towards the two men. That’s the kind of intuition that Sensegon is supposed to replicate.

A normal ad campaign on a site like Facebook could target audience members based on things like age, gender, and location. With Sensegon, you get an additional piece of data — you’re not just targeting housewives in North Carolina, but also practical women or emotional women. Or you can create one version of an ad that’s targeting at one set and a second that’s targeted at another. The company’s personality types include “the status seeker,” “the emotional,” “the explorer,” and so on.

To make these kinds of evaluations, Efrati says Sensegon looks at users’ interactions on social networks. The company claims to look at 300 different criteria, and since it doesn’t rely on semantic analysis or keywords, it’s language independent.

Efrati adds that the technology has its origins in academic research. (In fact, the company hired Dr. Shmuel Hirschmann, a behavioristic evaluation expert and former director of mental health services for Israel, as its head of research.) It initially tried to apply the technology to homeland security, before deciding to focus on advertising.

It’s been a long time coming, but private equity firm Providence Equity Partners has sold its stake in Hulu for $200 million, people familiar with the matter have confirmed. The buyout of the firm’s shares by Hulu’s media owners, which has closed but has not yet been announced, will have a huge impact on Hulu and could significantly shape its future.

Providence was an early investor in the online video site — back before it was Hulu — as News Corp.’s Peter Chernin and NBC Universal’s Jeff Zucker sought to create a new aggregator for their long-form broadcast TV content. In 2007, Providence put $100 million into Hulu and retained a 10-percent stake in the joint venture.

During its tenure, Providence acted as an independent voice on the board, which was otherwise controlled by Hulu’s media partners. According to a source, it also helped bring Disney — the third broadcast partner to invest and join the consortium — on board in 2009. But after five years serving as an outside investor, the private equity firm will no longer participate. With Providence out, that leaves just NBC Universal, Fox, and Disney as investors, with the latter two holding the majority of Hulu’s board seats.

The buyout has long been expected, as Providence had an option to exercise its shares in Hulu at 2x the amount it put in, in lieu of an IPO or sale to another company. Hulu looked at both options over the years: It explored an IPO in 2010 but backed away from those plans. The following year, Hulu put itself on the block and entertained sale options from a number of suitors such as Yahoo, Google, and Dish, before ultimately deciding not to sell.

Will CEO Jason Kilar Stay?

The sale of Providence shares also means some Hulu employees can cash out. That includes CEO Jason Kilar, who has been seen as the driving force behind the video site. According to a report in Variety in August, Kilar stands to gain about $100 million as a result.

That, by itself, would be seen by many as a reason to leave Hulu and to take a good long vacation before figuring out what to do next. But a bigger reason might be the current board structure, which would leave Kilar with few real allies as the company moves forward. Kilar has always had an uneasy relationship with his corporate overlords, in some cases even getting into public spats with them indirectly through the company blog.

This change in the board’s structure could also mean that he’ll have little strategic control over the long-term prospects of Hulu. But for an entrepreneurial guy like Kilar, being held hostage by the board might be a deal-breaker.

Good for broadcasters, bad for consumers

Hulu has always had a bit of a sweetheart deal from Fox, NBC, and Disney. But with no real impetus to sell or go public, Hulu’s parents and media partners could seek to reign in its biggest advantage over competitors: exclusive, next-day access to broadcast content.

Hulu was formed at a time when most media companies were still experimenting with web video as a way to combat piracy and make a little incremental money along the way. As a result, it had been founded with an exclusive license to the content of its media partners Fox, ABC, and NBC. But today, with the growth of competing online video properties such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, it’s become clear that there’s more money to be made by licensing content to multiple distributors.

With the likes of Fox and ABC in charge at a board level, those companies will definitely seek to make Hulu’s access to most broadcast shows non-exclusive, and they will most likely expect the company to begin paying market rates for their content. That could be a huge blow to Hulu, which pulled in just $420 million in revenues last year. While that amount is not bad for a five year-old startup, Hulu is not very well positioned to compete against the likes of Netflix or Amazon in licensing content.

Ultimately, that means users could see some of their favorite shows disappear over the next year or so, or show up later than the next day, or be available on other sites before they show up on Hulu. That might not be a deal breaker for some, but Hulu’s entire value proposition is a providing a one-stop place for next-day broadcast content. Without that, Hulu could have a difficult time competing.

What’s next for Hulu

No changes are likely to be announced right away — don’t expect Kilar to step down tomorrow or this season’s Modern Family episodes to show up a week after they air. But over the next 12 months we’ll probably see a slow unraveling of some of the things that made Hulu great.

Congratulations, Workday. Its share popped 74 percent when it IPOed today. Or should I say condolences? $470 million ended up in the pockets of investors instead of the cloud startup’s war chest.

Meanwhile, Facebook is called a flop for filling its coffers with $10 billion by pricing shares at nearly twice its current value. This all raises the question: How should Silicon Valley define a successful IPO?

Let’s be clear that I’m no career financial analyst, and this article will be a simplification. But there seem to be two conflicting motives in IPOs: raising the most money vs. displaying the most momentum.

Mo’ Money

Facebook maximized the former, an asset with concrete value. To buy out disrupters and fight off other giants like Google for top-tier talent, it needed gobs of cash. That’s what it got.

The only problem is that Facebook’s share price has sunk so low since that it’s generating scrutiny and may be hurting team morale. People are wary to invest in, develop on, or work for a loser, and if you look at the NASDAQ, that’s what Facebook is.

Luckily it has natural defenses against the momentum loss. If you work there, you build something a billion people, most of your friends, and maybe your Grandma use. You’re creating things that help people connect and share. It moves fast with a declared Hacker Culture. These make Facebook attractive to potential hires and third-party developers, offsetting the post-IPO slump.

Mo’mentum

Now let’s look at Workday. It either grossly underestimated demand, or it purposefully maximized for momentum. Either way it generated a massive pop, and got very little flack for it.

The share prices soared! That sounds great, except as Henry Blodget puts in a sharp Business Insider article, “Pops provide no advantage to the company other than a bit of extremely expensive and ephemeral excitement and PR.” I don’t fully agree, though. Maybe PR isn’t as reliable as money in the bank, but I believe public perception is actually quite important when you’re amidst a tech talent crunch.

Enterprise cloud software is critical and challenging to build. But despite becoming more consumer rather than CTO-focused, I wouldn’t say it’s sexy like a social network. Most people don’t grow up giddy to build the cloud. If Workday wants the smartest minds to work for it after it’s IPOed and the biggest rewards may have already been dealt out, it needs to look like a clear winner.

Meanwhile, having watched the vultures descend on Facebook, Workday may have played it safe, pricing shares conservatively to ensure positive momentum. It might not have needed those extra $450 million to buy anyone who looks dangerous. Seventy-four percent may have been overkill, but maybe prioritizing a rising price was the right move for Workday.

What Really Matters

So if you consider IPOs from this perspective, it’s not necessarily about raising the most money or getting the biggest first-day pop.

Workday only “wins” if it doesn’t end up without enough money to buy the scrappy new cloud kid on the block who might eat it’s lunch in three years. And Facebook only “flopped” if all the money it raised can’t convince people to board or stay on a sinking share price ship. Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems, if you will.

What really matters is a company getting what it needs, not just the purse or the share price.

I’ve seen plenty of interesting and unique “resume sites” where people are trying to get the attention of the companies that they really want to work for. Sometimes it’s a Facebook ad, a video or something using the service itself, like a slideshow.

In the case of Ryan Lessard, he really wants to work for social reward company Kiip. He’s gone all out by posting a link to this site on AdWords that display for a Google search of “Kiip.” Genius. But what’s more genius is the site he created (WhyIWouldKickAssAtKiip.com), check it out:

Yes, this looks like a Kiip reward unit that pops up in a mobile app that uses the service’s SDK, complete with a video pitch. Amazing.

Is this the new way to land a job that you covet? This is becoming a trend and it’s only getting more intense and seriously targeted to the potential employers. I reached out to Kiip’s CEO Brian Wong for his thoughts on the maneuver by Ryan and here’s what he had to say:

It’s pretty awesome that someone can be this creative to catch our attention. Kiip is hiring and we’re always looking for great people. I think he raised the bar for everyone just a little bit.

It’s almost as if this type of thing skips the recruitment process completely, surfacing passionate people who care about the company itself. Will Ryan get the job? I’m sure he’s being considered just like Kiip considers all candidates, but this surely got his foot in the door in a major way.

The United States Postal Service (USPS) just informed the Postal Regulatory Commission that it plans to launch an experimental same-day delivery service called Metro Post. The USPS says this test is specifically designed for e-commerce companies and will initially focus on a single (currently undisclosed) metropolitan area. The market test for Metro Post is scheduled to begin around November 12 and run for at least one year.

The Postal Service notes that the daily cut-off time for making a purchase will likely be between 2pm and 3pm and delivery should occur between 4pm and 8pm. Sadly, the filing does not include the USPS’s pricing plans, which it asked to be redacted from the public version of the document.

Currently, it seems, the Postal Service is looking for online e-commerce companies to partner with. To qualify, a company must have at least 10 physical locations in the U.S., and at least one of these must be in the test area. In total, the USPS plans to partner with up to 10 companies for this test.

It’s worth noting that this will be a relatively small experiment at first. According to the filing, only 200 packages per day can receive same-day delivery during the first phase of the market test. The filing, however, also notes that this restriction can obviously be lifted after the initial test.

Overall, however, the USPS anticipates that revenue from Metro Post could top $10 million in the first year, though due to postal regulations, the filing also notes that the Postal Service doesn’t expect that revenues will exceed $50 million in any year.

Numerous e-commerce companies, of course, have been experimenting with same-day deliver lately. Amazon, for example, has slowly expanded its same-day delivery service and Walmart just launched its test earlier this week. With Shutl and other startups, there are also currently quite a few startups that plan to compete in this market.

There is clearly demand for this kind of service, though the success will also depend on how the various companies price it.

Here is a copy of the filing:

(Image credit: Flickr user David Guo)

Postmates has always wanted to be the go-to app for on-demand delivery of local items. It took off thanks to the launch of its Get It Now app, providing hundreds of warm meals a day to lazy, hard-working,* hungry startup workers throughout San Francisco. But now it’s expanding to also help users feed themselves at home, with an update to its app that provides fast delivery of groceries as well.

Postmates users can already request delivery of grocery store items through its existing app, but there’s a catch — you have to actually know what you want before placing an order. Even without inventory or help from stores, groceries are already the No. 2 category for deliveries, and the average order from a grocery store is $41. Postmates had previously announced a partnership with Whole Foods, and orders have been up 240 percent month over month since the pilot.

But the update to the app — which Postmates expects to go live next week — will take things a step further. The updated Get It Now app simplifies the process of outsourcing your grocery shopping, by providing an inventory of items that users can have delivered. Users of the app can check out local grocery stores like Whole Foods and Safeway within Get It Now and navigate a Pinterest-like menu of items that can be purchased and delivered within an hour.

As part of the rollout, the startup is working with merchants like Whole Foods to facilitate orders at stores. According to founder and CEO Bastian Lehmann, Postmates learned a lot from its test with Whole Foods, such as how couriers should navigate through the stores, where to find various items and the like. It’s looking to make that even easier for couriers, by giving them express checkout, and stores have agreed to help pre-package orders. As a result, the startup hopes to get its average delivery time for groceries down from 42 minutes, which is where it stands now.

The company has also been growing its number of couriers, and especially those with cars, to support the increased focus on groceries. Lehmann says it now has nearly 150 Postmates couriers, and is adding 10-20 per week.

In addition to the expanded focus on groceries, Postmates will also be testing out a new pricing scheme for deliveries that don’t have to take place in under an hour. The economy pricing system, which will be perfect for stuff like groceries, would cost around $4 for deliveries within a three-hour window. That compares to its current dynamic pricing structure, under which deliveries range anywhere from $5-$12, based on how difficult they are.

The grocery delivery business isn’t exactly a totally new idea. Companies like Kozmo tried to capture the local delivery market in the Web 1.0 world. And there are newer options like FreshDirect or Safeway’s own delivery service, as well as startups like Instacart going after that opportunity. For his part, Lehmann says Postmates’ advantage comes from “doing more and doing more faster… when it comes to urban logistics.”

Postmates has raised $1.75 million from investors like Crosslink Capital, AngelPad, SoftTech VC, and Matrix Partners, as well as angels that include David Wu, Thomas Korte, Naval Ravikant, Russell Cook, Russel Simmons, Walter Lee, Andy McLoughlin, Scott Banister, Paige Craig, and Jawed Karim. The company has 12 full-time employees and is headquartered in foggy San Francisco.

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* So hardworking, they can’t get up from their desks to walk down the street and pick up Jamba Juice

Instagram is huge because it’s a network made of people who are passionate about taking pictures of things that they see and then dropping a cool filter on them to enhance their vision. It caught on immediately with everyone from geeks to Starbucks baristas. Since then, many companies have tried to duplicate the magic that Instagram used to sell itself to Facebook, but have failed.

An app called Whims is trying something completely different, but extremely familiar. The social network iOS app lets you express yourself with words, colors and fonts only. There are no pictures. There are no videos — just you and your thoughts.

I’ve been playing with it for quite a while and I really love it.

Sweet nothings are impactful somethings

Expression is what the Internet is all about, and when services come along that allow us to express ourselves in different ways, I pay attention. Whims has done just that, and the app is really fun to use. You can enter a saying, thought or anything on your mind, and then make it beautiful.

The layout of the app is definitely something that will remind you of Instagram. You can follow people, and read the stream of “Whims” that fly by. You can like things and share them on Facebook or Twitter, but more importantly you can make your own:

It’s simple, it’s straightforward, and it takes some creativity and imagination. These are the things that make for some great content. I really like the team behind Whims and one of its founders, Alex Khorram, was extremely persistent with pitching me on this. In fact, he used a Whim or two to get my attention, and boy did it work. Try it out.

Today the Apache Foundation released a major update to the open source search engine building tools Lucene and Solr. Version 4.0 adds several new features aimed at making Solr easier to use, more scalable and more customizable.

Although they’re jointly developed, Lucene and Solr are actually two different things. Lucene is just a Java library, not a stand alone search engine. Solr is a search engine server built with Lucene as its core.

Lucene was created in 1999 by Doug Cutting, better known as the creator of Apache Hadoop, and has been used both companies like AOL and LinkedIn to power search features. Solr was created by Yonik Seeley in 2004. It can be used as a custom search engine, or be used to power search for a separate application.

Scalability was the Solr/Lucene team’s biggest focus for today’s release, according to Search Engine Hub — particularly scaling out as opposed to scaling up.

Web companies like Google and Amazon.com have popularized scaling out in recent years. To over simplify: when you scale up, you replace your existing servers with more powerful ones when you need more capacity. When you scale out you add more servers to your environment to add capacity. This approach is generally seen to provide more bang for the buck, but clusters of servers can be difficult to setup and manage, and distributing data across a cluster introduces a number of challenges.

To address these issues version 4.0 introduces a collection of tools designed to make it easier to build and manage Solr server clusters, including a new indexing system designed to deliver near real-time search results in a distributed environment.

These features will help Solr compete with ElasticSearch, an open source, Lucene-based search engine server that has long focused on distributed environments.

Other new features in 4.0 include a new web based UI, a spell checker and better support for spatial data (which will be useful for anyone doing geographic searches). The new version will also give users more customization and control.

LucidWorks, a company founded by Seeley, offers commercial support for the Solr.

As The Next Web reported users are finding that their Facebook status messages aren’t being cross-posted to Twitter even though they’ve set up their accounts to do so. I first noticed this the other night, but thought nothing of it, since I’m not really a fan of cross-posting.

We reached out to both companies and Facebook let us know that this was indeed a bug and that they’re working on it. The interesting thing to me is that nobody has been loudly upset over this “bug.” I’d like to call it more of a “feature.”

Think about cross-posting for a minute. What purpose does it really serve? Is it convenience? Consistency? Laziness? I think it’s the latter. That’s not to say that posting certain things from one place to another doesn’t ever make sense. In the case of Instagram, it makes complete sense to take a piece of media like a photo and share it on Twitter or Facebook automatically or with a few extra taps. Same with Foursquare.

However, when it comes to cross-posting between social networks like Twitter and Facebook, I find it to be an infinite loop of craziness.

Remember Friendfeed?

If you don’t remember Friendfeed, the service brought to you by former Googlers that went on to work at Facebook, then let me remind you:

The idea of Friendfeed was that it was supposed to allow you to pull in ALL of your things from every site on the Internet. Your followers/friends/family could then go to the site and see it all in one place. Pretty smart. Until other cross-posting started. Soon, I saw someone post something on Facebook that got sent to Twitter and it would appear twice on Friendfeed. It was like some weird statusception infinite loop that made Friendfeed noisy and ultimately unusable.

Facebook and Twitter

There is nothing more maddening to me lately than seeing a funny tweet on Twitter, favoriting it, then heading over to Facebook later and seeing it in my News Feed, marked as “via Twitter.” It’s so silly to me, so lazy looking and very noisy. I understand that not everyone feels the same way as me, but I honestly believe that cross-posting can be the devil. It kills creativity, it kills your thought process and it’s not enjoyable for your friends and followers, which is the point of using social networks.

(Sorry, Tia)

When I’m on Twitter, I tweet. When I’m on Facebook, I post a status update or other media. Why should I place the same things on both networks? And automatically, to boot. It seems like overkill to me, so that’s why I didn’t get upset over Facebook’s bug.

We heard nuttin’

I really believe that TechCrunch has the best community of readers and tech enthusiasts on the planet, which is why I now work here. Our tipsters are the best in the business, and I have to be honest with you…nobody sent this particular Facebook/Twitter issue to us. That alone is very telling.

It’s telling because this is clearly a feature that only early adopters and geeks tend to use. Either that or it’s someone who doesn’t really understand how to use the tools we have at our disposal on the web. Every person that I talk to about cross-posting says that even if they do it, they feel guilty about it, for the reasons that I’ve shared.

Then why do it?

Cross-posting needs to go away…or change

So, I don’t hide the fact that I really appreciate Google’s approach to social with Google+. One of my favorite features is actually the lack of a particular feature, and that’s cross-posting. You see, Google+ hasn’t exposed write-APIs for developers to start pumping things into the streams of your circled friends. And that’s a good thing as far as I’m concerned.

Once content starts getting pumped in blindly, you lose the essence of the experience of the network that you’re on. For example, Twitter is 140 characters, and Facebook isn’t. Why should I read 140-character tweets on Facebook and have to click links within tweets back to Facebook? It’s a joke as far as I’m concerned.

I could be wrong. It happens a lot. All I know is that I respect the framework of the network that I’m using, and I feel like I’m doing it, and my friends, a disservice when I force things into it that don’t belong.

This is exactly why Twitter is showing embedded photos and videos, so you don’t have to leave the service that you’re currently using. I’m fine with posting blog posts, videos, photos and links to other things. But think about it, when you click “Like” or “Share,” you’re taking an explicit action. An extra step. Cross-posting is automatic. Having said that, it’s really just the copycat nature of cross-posting that makes me sour. Very sour.

Even though it’s taken for granted that you have to manage your own personal brand on the web, that still isn’t necessarily the case in the slower-moving world of academia.

But it’s starting to happen, with individual brands beginning to eclipse the importance of being published in a well-known (and often exorbitantly expensive) journal.

Academia.edu, a social network for professors and researchers, is taking advantage of this by overhauling its profile pages.

The company’s CEO Richard Price says that academics are starting to want more of a direct connection with their audiences. So Academia.edu’s new profiles let researchers showcase their best work and track analytics on views and followers.

Academics can now organize their research into different sections with places for published papers, drafts, book reviews and conference presentations. There’s also a new bio box at the top of the profile where they can show key career achievements. In addition, there is a section where they can link to their profiles on other sites like LinkedIn or Twitter.

This all sounds very basic, like a standard set of features you’d expect in any consumer-facing web or mobile product today. But career advancement in a university or research setting is still very much tied to where you publish, not how much or how influential a following you have on a social network.

“We’re shifting away from a world where the journal industry sits between the academic and the audience,” Price said. “We’re now moving to a world that’s more reflective of social media, where the academic is becoming the key node of distribution of research.”

As for the Academia.edu itself, the site is approaching 2 million users with 4,000 joining every day. Price estimates that there are 17 million academics globally, so Academia’s numbers would suggest that they’ve registered up to 10 percent of the population. (A portion of the 2 million users are probably enthusiasts, not actual academics, however.)

He adds that every month, the site sees 4.5 million monthly unique visitors. That figure has grown by 30 percent in the last month. It’s growing fast enough where the site is starting to pick up on trending papers or research that is being actively discussed among members. Price said it’s often not the most recent paper that gets the most attention.

“The journal industry is focused on what’s new, new, new,” Price said. “But a paper is kind of like a jigsaw puzzle. When it first comes out, it doesn’t always fit into the scientific conversation.”

The hope is that as the site grows larger and accumulates more network effects, it will democratize dissemination of scientific research.

“A high school student in Japan should be able to access these papers and nurture their intellect,” Price said. “They shouldn’t just be for the scientific population.”

The company is backed with close to $7 million in funding from investors, including Spark Capital and True Ventures. It currently earns revenue through advertising and job listings.