Category: Tech news

Photo: Greg Broom

You should go ahead and believe Nissan’s hype about the 2013 Altima. The Japanese auto-maker is fond of boasting that the new Altima is the most innovative iteration of its midsize offering yet. And that is definitely true.

But this isn’t some Batmobile, it’s a dad-mobile. It also comes in a coupe, but no matter which model you’re talking about, the Altima badge still signals a certain staid buttoned-downed-ness. This will lead many to dismiss it on sight as plain vanilla, even though there’s a stack of tech goodies hiding inside.

The suspension is surprisingly advanced, and the zippy four-cylinder has been tuned to deliver high numbers in both performance and fuel efficiency. As is becoming de rigueur in flagship sedans, you get the showy hands-free features, like the ability to manage your incoming and outgoing text messages using voice commands and speech-to-text conversion. Choose the add-on “Technology Package,” and you get even more: an eye that watches your blind spots for you, a lane-departure warning system, a moving-object detector. It even tells you when it’s time to put air in the tires. All of these features are just as easy to access as the Altima’s standard infotainment and driver-assist systems. Compared to the fully touch-enabled interfaces out there, the Altima’s more traditional combination of buttons, knobs, and a touchscreen is refreshing. There’s less drilling through pages, and more direct access to the functions you wish to actuate.

While we’re on the subject of refreshing design, Nissan deserves kudos for the Altima’s relatively low beltline, rear deck and thin A, B and C pillars. I can actually see out of this thing. Hallelujah! In case you’d forgotten, seeing is safety. But seeing is also recognizing that the new Altima looks a lot like Nissan’s Maxima. How much? Go to Google Images, search for 2013 Altima or 2013 Maxima and you’ll get results showing both cars.

Though its dimensions haven’t increased tremendously since the last model, the Altima is within an inch or two of the Maxima (or larger) in headroom, legroom, hip-room and overall interior volume. Outside, the two cars share practically the same measurements, including front and rear track. One difference: The Altima is 451 pounds lighter (3,115 pounds total), disproving the theory that sedans inevitably get heavier with each successive generation. And it proves the notion that a lighter-weight car is better at accelerating, turning and sipping fuel.

The 2.5-liter 16-valve four-cylinder puts 182 horsepower and 180 pound-feet to the front wheels. That’s enough to pull the Altima from 0 to 60 mph in around seven seconds, making it about the quickest four-cylinder sedan in its class. Lightness pays dividends in handling, aided by a revised multi-link rear suspension and new ZF shock absorbers. The Altima gets standard “Active Understeer Control,” which brakes the inside front wheel during cornering. The result of all this is crisp turn-in and a moderate amount of body lean through each corner. In fact, the suspension and chassis far outperform the 215/55R17 all-season tires my tester rode on. Throw some more aggressive rubber on the Altima and it will surely stick impressively.

Less impressive is the hybrid electronic-hydraulic power-assisted steering, which is progressive, but numb. The Altima comes with but one transmission, a substantially overhauled continuously variable transmission (CVT) that contributes to fuel efficiency with a 40 percent reduction in friction. I’m still not a fan of CVTs, and in the Altima, selecting “Sport mode” doesn’t produce a discernible performance increase. But its affect on the Altima’s mileage numbers (27 city, 38 highway) in concert with the weight reduction generates some very good fuel efficiency.

The interior is pleasingly clean without being too spare, though there are some quirks. I appreciated the facility of the tuning knob beside the center-stack display, but I would have liked it more if it were moved to the left of the display. For whatever reason, once paired over Bluetooth, my BlackBerry would periodically de-couple. Nissan’s connected-car system — ingeniously named NissanConnect — offers Pandora and, when equipped with navigation, real-time Google points-of-interest search. The aforementioned hands-free text messaging assistant allows Altima owners to send, reply to and manage incoming text messages via spoken commands. You get an alert on the central display when a text comes in, and after initiating the system, you can hear it read to you, then respond via dictation. I didn’t find it particularly intuitive or effective, and I’m unconvinced many drivers will actually get use out of it.

Nissan loves to tout the NASA research it used to design the Altima’s less-fatiguing front bucket seats. I’m all for science, but it’s just a seat. The bottom line is that after 30 minutes or so of adjustment, I found the seats to be very comfortable. In fact, the Altima is a satisfying ride for all the passengers, with appropriate room in the rear seats and ample trunk space.

And when you want to hoon it a bit, the Nissan will play along, CVT notwithstanding. On several jaunts back and forth from Annapolis, Maryland to Washington, D.C. the Altima was in its element — whether in stop-and-go traffic or high-speed freeway running. It turns out “straight-up” is a pretty pleasant place to be.

WIRED Spirited handling and class-topping fuel efficiency in a package that people will routinely mistake for the more expensive Maxima. Great visibility and strong acceleration, even in four-cylinder trim.

TIRED The moaning CVT doesn’t really match the sporty character of the chassis and suspension. Numb steering, despite the hybrid electro-hydraulic system. Hands-free texting doesn’t work as advertised.

It is starting to seem like there’s a startup providing subscription delivery services for just about everything: Razors, snacks, kids items, makeup, underwear, DIY craft tools, even condoms and sex toys. Some of these things are necessities, but many of them are not exactly must-haves — but still, people are loving the monthly subscription e-commerce model.

The newest entrant in this space is Juniper, a startup that is providing monthly deliveries of items that a huge segment of the population absolutely needs on a monthly basis: Tampons and sanitary napkins.

It’s a topic that always makes people blush a bit, so Juniper’s business model sounds funny at first, but when you start to think about it, it makes a lot of sense. The vast majority of adult women out there need these items once a month, but shopping for them is always a chore and potentially embarrassing — you never want to run into, say, a professional acquaintance while you’re buying a box of maximum absorbency Tampax and a giant bag of Peanut M&Ms at Walgreen’s.

So Juniper handles it all for you. For $28, every 28 days (or longer or shorter, depending on personal preference) Juniper sends the tampons of your choice in a discreet box along with a handful of pads and pantiliners and a curated selection of goodies such as chocolate, tea, and sweets. As with all subscription e-commerce startups, the tech angle here is Juniper’s data and inventory management and the level of personalization it provides to each user.

Juniper, which is based in San Francisco and currently bootstrapped with a staff of three, just launched last week. Co-founder and CEO Lynn Tao stopped by TechCrunch TV to talk to us a bit about the company and show us a Juniper Box in person. Watch the video above to hear about where the concept for Juniper came from and how the company plans to grow in the months ahead.

Alteryx has opened a big data-analytics apps studio for people who do not necessarily have a deep knowledge of data science. The service is available as part of Alteryx 8.0, the analytics provider’s latest release. The intent is to make data analytics as accessible as a consumer application makes its service.

I tried playing with the apps. I used a Twitter tool to track tweets about Oracle. The results were relatively decent. A number of the apps in the studio are for the retail market, but there are also those that can be used for any business. For instance, there is a U.S. Census app for conducting demographic analysis.

Here’s an example of a retail app:

People may use the apps, collect and share data with colleagues — similar to the experience in a consumer app store. It also includes a desktop app builder.

George Mathew, president and chief operating officer of Alteryx, said the intent is to create a service that is not just the domain of a small community of data scientists. More so, it’s for the 2.5 million data analysts in the market who can use the tools to drive big data analytics into any kind of an organization.

Alteryx represents a trend with big data-service providers to take the information and expertise of data geeks and make it accessible through an app. For instance, Prior Knowledge, a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist, has developed a way for app developers to add a level of predictive analytics without the need to have deep knowledge of statistical analysis. The expertise is built into the Prior Knowledge technology. And on Friday, I featured Lytics, a service that tackles the problem that comes with getting value out of data from multiple sources such as mobile environments, the web, email, social, third-party APIs and commerce environments. Lytics customers use it to optimize pricing and inventory and multiple other aspects of the business that can draw from data to improve the queries and results.

Editor’s Note: Nir Eyal blogs about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business at NirAndFar.com. He is the author of the forthcoming book “Hooked: How to Drive Engagement by Creating User Habits.” Follow Nir on Twitter.

We are caught in an endless cycle of messaging hell and the pattern is always the same. First, a new communication system is born — take email or Facebook, for example. Ease-of-use helps the product gain wide adoption and reach a critical mass of users. And then things turn ugly.

Some crafty entrepreneur figures out how to exploit the system and starts building a business around it. He reaches millions of people and opens the floodgates to countless others who seek to emulate his methods. Inevitably, the messaging channel is deluged with crap, clogging the pipes of what was once an efficient mode of communication — again, email or Facebook.

Notification Noise

The latest messaging onslaught is hitting the notification systems on our smartphones. Those little red badges hovering over our app icons and urgent graphics along the top of our screens incessantly remind us of some task that needs doing. They crowd out real priorities with bits of tiny triviality. Notification spam has many up in arms, but the flood of distractions continues.

This is the story repeated ever since telemarketers started ruining dinners across the land. It was not until federal legislation effectively put them out of business with the Do Not Call Registry did they stop their pestering.

To date, platforms have been responsible for policing spammers on Facebook, Twitter, Android or Apple’s iOS. But keeping exploiters out is only half the challenge. The real problem is keeping the channels useful as they grow. Exhibit A:
Exhibit B – A Google search for “I hate email” returns 586 million results, more than twice the results for “the Beatles.” Very scientific, I know, but you get the point.

The irony is that the more efficient the communication channel is, the more overcrowded it becomes. No one seems to like email and dozens, perhaps hundreds, of startups have tried to fix it. And yet no one has. Email is just too easy, and the easier something is to do, the more people do it. As a result, even companies that want to deliver valuable content must fight in vain for attention between emails from Nigerian heiresses and offers for cheap pharmaceuticals.

What Works?

There is a hierarchy for the kinds of messages we respond to. If you’re a company trying to get noticed, it is useful to know what gets people’s attention.

First, we respond to messages from our past selves. A calendar reminder set the day before is likely to be acted upon. An emailed “to do” from oneself is rarely ignored. Technology that can time-shift the delivery of information to when the user needs it most has massive potential.

Next time I’m shopping, tell me my body measurements. When I’m in the vicinity of doing a task, like dropping off that package at UPS, let me know there is a store nearby. When I’m about to meet a friend for lunch, remind me they bought last time so I can make sure to pick up the tab.

What Robert Scoble calls “contextual computing” and Om Malik calls “predictive computing,” will have the power to cut through the clutter as long as the messaging feels as though it was sent from the user to the user.

Next on the hierarchy, we respond to messages from close contacts. The need for social cohesion is a key motivator of our everyday lives, and we act upon authentic prompts from the people most important to us. The current messaging morass is in large part due to our obligation to respond to everything sent to us from people we know, even if the reply is the banal but obligatory “thanx” or “ttyl.”

Rise And Fall Of The Machines

Finally, the least effective method is messages from machines — the lowest use of technology-enabled communication. A call-to-action from a pre-filled auto-responder has the smallest chance of getting our attention because people learn to sniff out and avoid inauthenticity.

Marketing messages using various persuasion techniques come and go in a constant game of cat and mouse. Users learn quickly what’s real and what’s fake and they become more annoyed the more often they associate a company with a message they didn’t ask for. Pasting a friend’s name or face on a message may be effective for a while, but when users figure out what’s going on, they move on. Eventually, messages are deleted without being opened, lists get unsubscribed from, and apps are uninstalled.

Cluttered communication channels, whether real-world post office boxes full of junk-mail or their digital equivalents, contribute to our collective frustration. In order to save apps from themselves and users from daily annoyances, companies must find ways to send useful notifications, or not to send them at all.

But companies now have an opportunity to provide the ultimate authentic messaging, namely information we choose to send ourselves. By shifting the delivery of the message to the most appropriate time and place, where it is most likely to be acted upon, new technologies will become indispensable solutions we can’t imagine living without.

Photo credit: banspy

Follow Nir on Twitter.

With Apple and Samsung still duking it out in the patent courtroom, a survey of U.S. consumers conducted by Morpace has taken a look at how the dispute is playing out among the gadget-buying public. Apple, it found, comes out pretty rosy, but ultimately the survey delivers some discouraging conclusions about where cases like these are taking the mobile industry overall.

Last week, a study from Localytics noted that sales of Samsung’s latest device, the Galaxy S3, have actually being doing quite well since Samsung lost a $1 billion patent verdict to Apple in August — growing on average about 9 percent every week, including the one where the iPhone 5 was launched. So it is a little surprising to see that according to Morpace’s results, general consumers are now showing more skepticism about the Samsung brand as a whole.

According to responses from 1,000 adult consumers — Morpace says that it matched these to U.S. Census demographics data to get a complete snapshot — Samsung had a 12 percent net decline among consumers “likely” to consider buying a Samsung smartphone or tablet, a decline that was softened to 6 percent when looking only at people considering purchases.

Respondents also believed that the patent ruling had a mostly-negative (47 percent) impact on Samsung’s long-term competitive position in smartphones and tablets, as well as its long-term viability as a mobile device maker (48 percent of respondents called the patent ruling impact “negative”).

Apple, meanwhile, got the reverse treatment. It had a 9 percent net increase in the number of consumers “likely” to buy an Apple smartphone or tablet, with that number increasing to 22 percent among those preparing to buy a device.

Apple also had a mostly positive response for being perceived as a leader in technology and design as a result of the $1 billion patent verdict, with 42 percent of respondents deeming the verdict had a positive impact on Apple’s leadership in these areas.  Morpace notes that when looking only at those who intend to purchase smartphones or tablets, or have influence on purchasing decisions, 48 percent thought of Apple as a technology and design leader.

The two caveats here are that the conclusions in the survey are opinions rather than fact, and that these are responses given relatively soon after the $1 billion patent verdict. Samsung at the moment is the world’s largest handset maker and the world’s largest smartphone maker. So questioning its longer-term viability based on the negative outcome of one patent case may be just a little out of proportion. And consumers may be likely to change their opinions with new product launches.

On the other hand, consumer perception counts for a lot when looking at what drives sales to one handset maker or another — sometimes even despite the quality of the handsets in question (just ask Nokia, which has found it hard to reach any kind of critical mass with its new Lumia devices, despite some positive reviews).

And it is striking to me how much of an impact a patent case can have in this regard. Some 70 percent of respondents had heard of the Samsung/Apple patent disputes, with that number increasing to 77 percent among those who are planning to buy a smartphone or tablet in the next six months.

Whether the public has it right with Samsung’s market position under threat or Apple as the true technology and design leader, another set of issues to consider is how the patent issue has impacted consumers’ view of the smartphone market in general.

When considering the range of devices on the market, 42 percent said this would be impacted negatively by the Apple/Samsung patent case, and 35 percent thought that the number of handset makers was also going to be reduced. In other words, consumers think we will be seeing fewer handsets as a result of the verdict; not more.

Specifically, only 14 percent had a positive view of consumer confidence in BlackBerry or Android. And only 16 percent had a positive view of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7.5.

When considering price, 38 percent thought this too would be impacted negatively, meaning they believe phones and tablets are going to get more expensive as a result of all of this.

And — as you might expect with fewer devices, fewer players and higher prices — consumers also believe that we will enter a period of less innovation in devices. Some 27 percent think new features will be impacted, with only 17 percent thinking this will have a positive effect on innovation.

Again, these are just opinions — not facts as such — but when buyers have such a negative take on the overall landscape, at a time when mobile sales are seeing an overall slowdown, you have to wonder whether the net effect of these cases is a loss for the market as a whole. That’s something all of them — including the so-called winners and losers — need to consider.

Editor’s note: Scott Rafer is CEO of Lumatic, a company that believes Cities are Humanity’s Future so they must be easier to love. Lumatic is located in the great cities of Singapore and San Francisco. @rafer already speaks Nerd pretty well and is working on his Singlish.

At Lumatic, we pieced the whole stack together, using Apple Mapkit obviously, plus OpenStreetMap, and in certain cities a special class of photography from Nokia. We used nothing from Google and no core services from Nokia. It sucked. And it sucked for the last 18+ months. Lean startup? Not quite.

PayPal co-founder Elon Musk’s SpaceX sure has come a long way since its rocky beginnings — a string of early launch failures threatened to ground the project permanently. Thankfully, they soon gave way to smooth sailing for the skyward venture, and today marks yet another successful launch to add to the SpaceX scrapbook.

Just a little while ago, the company’s unmanned Dragon capsule (perched atop SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, naturally) blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on the first of 12 missions to resupply the International Space Station.

Of course, the space buffs among you (there have to be at least a few, right?) will remember that this isn’t SpaceX’s first trip up there — the company made history earlier this year when its Dragon capsule successfully latched onto and docked with the International Space Station.

It’s the first time that a private spacecraft has ever done so, but now that SpaceX has proven that the feat is possible, it’s time to get some work done. Like the first Dragon capsule that docked with the ISS last May, this one is loaded up with about 1,000 lbs of cargo and consumables for the station’s crew (not least of which is the onboard store of chocolate and vanilla ice cream). SpaceX’s paycheck for this and its next 12 trips up there? A cool $1.6 billion — not too shabby, especially considering the company’s last big deal with satellite communications provider Iridium netted SpaceX $492 million.

I’m sorry to say that the fireworks display that was the vehicle’s launch is already over, but there’s still quite a bit to keep your eyes peeled for in the days to come. The Dragon is currently cruising along in its target orbit, while the crew aboard the International Space Station prepare to receive it this Wednesday.

It’s ironic that for a country that invented the word entrepreneur, France has gained such a reputation for being frosty towards startups. Take French culture, where talk of money is generally frowned upon in favour of which École you went to, or your opinion on philosophy or politics. Of course, this is a huge caricature, but it’s the kind of background noise against which many French startup entrepreneurs have to battle, despite their increasingly healthy numbers in recent years. And they have indeed battled and fought. But was it all in vain now they have a stridently Left-wing government intent on taxing startups to within an inch of their life? And what will happen now that Canada’s Quebec region has announced plans to woo 50,000 French entrepreneurs with a raft of new incentives? No wonder many entrepreneurs mounted a protest this afternoon in Paris in front of the National Assembly. It’s time for a look at the predicament of “Les Startup Miserables.”

The background to all this has been the actions of new President Francois Hollande (whose personal approval rating has recently been crashing through the floor of most popularity graphs). Two weeks ago, Hollande’s tax reform plans for 2013 (the “LF2013″ changes) caused uproar amongst entrepreneurs. Leaving aside the 75 percent tax on household incomes over €1 million, the new laws mean that an entrepreneur who sold their company after 10 hard years of work and risk-taking would have to pay a 45 percent income tax rate, plus 15.5 percent in social contributions, so amounting to over 60 percent in tax.

One of the best resources following the story has been the English language Rude Baguette blog which pointed out that France Digitale – a grouping of significant investors and entrepreneurs set up to lobby the French government – has been arguing in favour of reinforcing young companies, channeling more cash toward VCs, improving R&D tax credits and incentivising retail VCs.

There are plenty of French entrepreneurs who want to see their country compete and succeed on the global stage. Just give us a chance, they told the government. Hell, they earn the country a billion euros a year already.

But no. The result, under the government’s proposals, is that capital gains would be taxed more heavily than art transactions, real estate investments, and public stock purchases. One might even say this is a classically French approach. Classical, but not suited to modern French entrepreneurs.

And perhaps France would be fine if its big companies were stepping in while the government discourages startups. But they are not. Large corporations are currently engaging in massive redundancies.

The result of all this has been a huge protest amongst French entrepreneurs – a class not generally known for its collective action. They call themselves The Pigeons.

Across the web entrepreneurs have been changing their profiles to pictures of pigeons. Why? Well, ‘A Pigeon’ is french slang for a sucker, or perhaps a fall guy – which is exactly how they feel.

“The Pigeons: A movement in Defense of French Entrepreneurs” started with a few thousand members, but now it numbers over 60,000 on Facebook alone, and the #geonpi hashtag (here’s why) has proliferated from their Twitter account.

When he was campaigning, Hollande has said he would re-balance taxes and tax breaks to make them more equitable for startups and SMEs compared to big companies which have traditionally had it pretty easy in the French system.

There have been confidence-boosting VC funding rounds most recently in Work4Labs, Capitane Train, VoitureLib, Criteo, Melty and Deezer yesterday. France does have tools to promote startups – such as the Ubi France, supposed to promote Frech companies, and the Competitive Hubs (or Digital “Poles”) which have seen new clusters emerge. And startups even held their own Failcon recently.

And there was some emergent hope when this week the French government made noises about backtracking on the main ideas behind the tax “reform.”

The question is, can they move fast enough? French entrepreneurs are being wooed by other countries already.

Canada’s Quebec has now implemented a program to accommodate 50,000 French entrepreneurs. And let’s not forget the wooing the British government has done amongst tech startups this year around the Olympics and various other events. Heck, there was even a Le Web London this year.

Let’s hope for France’s sake they make the right decisions.

In the meantime, we leave you with the traditional French video explaining The Pigeons (which may well remind you of your old high school French lessons).

Vive La France!

When small businesses need to make investments in IT or other operations, it’s often the companies selling them the goods that help with financing solutions. Now it looks like Google is using that model to help drive more dollars to AdWords search advertising. Google says that from Monday it is launching a new service in the UK, AdWords Business Credit, which offers credit to companies specifically in the SMB sector to boost their online ad spend with the company.

This is not the first time that Google has offered credit to drive more AdWords investment — it’s been running a pilot with 1,400 companies in the U.S. for a year. Before that Google had run special offers giving people credits for more AdWords spend each time they invested in AdWords. This, however, is the first full commercial service of this kind.

The track record in the U.S. has been positive enough to see the company moving to full launches: In a blog post, Brent Callinicos, VP Treasurer for Google, notes that 74 percent of those in the U.S. pilot now use AdWords Business Credit as their “primary form of AdWords payment.”

Google will be following the UK launch with more invitations to users in the U.S. ahead of a full launch there, as well.

The UK launch is being run with Barclaycard in the UK and Comenity Capital Bank in the U.S. — both MasterCard-based cards.

In its Q2 earnings, Google noted that revenues, which it derives primarily from advertising, were $10.96 billion, a 21 percent increase over the year before. Revenues from the UK were $1.18 billion, or 11 percent of Google’s revenues in Q2. That’s level with the year before, and it could be that Google is going for a two-sided strategy here: both increasing business in the UK market, as well as coming up with more aggressive solutions for building up its ad business in a sector that has perhaps been hardest hit in the economic downturn.

While Amazon has lately been offering credit to its merchant partners in the form of Amazon Capital Services, Google is clear to note that AdWords Business Credit is only for AdWords — no other purchases are allowed.

Interest rates in the UK will be variable at 11.9 percent APR Representative, while the U.S. will be at 8.99 percent, as it has been in the pilot. Neither card will have annual fees, Google notes. This is lower than basic credit card rates, but given that the spend on these cards will all be going to Google, it’s a lucrative credit bet for the company. “You can assume we’re not doing this to lose money,” Callinicos said in an interview in the FT. He also noted, though, that this is not seen as a “profit center” for Google in the bigger scheme of things.

Editor’s note: After a rejection by Kickstarter, the co-founders of Lockitron, Cameron Robertson and Paul Gerhardt, decided to follow in the footsteps of App.net and take pre-orders for their innovative deadbolt add-on directly. This gamble paid off. Big time. The initial goal of $150,000 pre-orders was hit within 24 hours. Now, just five days after launching, the company has $1,500,000 in pre-orders. This is their story told by Cameron.

I’m still having a hard time believing that only a few short days ago, my co-founder Paul and I refreshed our homepage, anxiously waiting to see if anyone would subscribe to our vision for Lockitron and help us climb towards our lofty $150,000 goal. With reservations now exceeding 1,000% of our original target and most of the time left in our campaign, we are immensely thankful to our 10,000+ backers who have made this possible.

Just four months ago we squeezed in with over a hundred other hardware startup devotees to listen to the creators of some of the most popular and impressive Kickstarter projects impart their wisdom. The folks behind Pebble, Skallops and the Brydge answered dozens of questions about their success on Kickstarter; how much effort should you put into the video, did press matter, why did some projects take off and others flop. At one point, our moderator asked the group for a show of hands. “How many of you plan to release your own Kickstarter?” Nearly every hand in the room went up.

Kickstarter meant that for the first time hardware companies could take their ideas straight to the masses, bypassing the gatekeepers of venture capital, and de-risking their business in one fell swoop.

It wasn’t that long ago in Silicon Valley that the very mention of the word “hardware” in the context of fundraising was enough to glaze over the collective eyes of venture capital.

While we are just beginning to witness a renaissance of software wrapped in plastic, the traditionally high costs of making hardware, coupled with the perception of the low margins characteristic of the bygone PC-era, weigh heavily on risk-reward calculation for new investments.

So it was not surprising that Kickstarter gave hardware startups hope.

From its inception, however, Kickstarter was never designed as a store. Kickstarter’s benchmark for success is matching and exceeding the funding provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, not becoming the Apple store for yet-to-be realized products.

Last month, mounting backer frustration over project delays seemed to boil over when a series of articles ran detailing what some had been wondering; how many of these projects failed to deliver to their backers?

The question of who exactly assumed underwriting the risks for projects loomed large despite Kickstarter’s reaffirmation that creators were indeed responsible for delivering what they promised.

Consequently, new guidelines and rules were developed to meet these challenges and to protect backers using their site.

We applied to Kickstarter on a Wednesday, “Kickstarter Is Not a Store” landed on Thursday and by Friday we were rejected. We reached out to a co-founder of Kickstarter through our network. A brief e-mail exchange ensued, culminating with a firm “No” – stating that Lockitron fell into the “home improvement” category of prohibited projects. Kickstarter was simply not the right place for it, he said.

By the following Monday we knew what we had to do. We would launch Lockitron on our own, in an attempt to emulate the success that Dalton Caldwell had with App.net.

In running our own ad-hoc crowdfunding campaign, we knew that we needed to solve the same challenges inherent in Kickstarter’s model for running a hardware campaign.

Our solution was to create a customer-focused system. We decided to collect payment information using Amazon Payments, batch Lockitron shipments for customer transparency regarding delivery dates and only charge customers when their unit is ready to ship. This drives us to make the best product possible rather than overpromise what we can deliver on.

This approach also lets us know how many units to make and qualifies our backers as willing to put money down for the product when delivery time comes due, all while removing risk for them.

Since we only earn our keep once a customer’s Lockitron is ready, we are incentivized to use faster, low-volume/custom-quality production methods that may cost more initially, but will ultimately help us to compress our timelines.

Finally, this past Tuesday (October 2nd), just over a week after Kickstarter declined Lockitron, we took the plunge, fixated on our computer screens after a sleepless night filled with last minute video and website tweaks.

What followed over the next 24-hours was nothing short of stunning – thousands of people saw our vision and voted with their wallets to reserve a Lockitron, blowing past our initial goal in a matter of hours.

It’s debatable whether or not we will see another Pebble or Ouya on Kickstarter. But something I can’t emphasize enough is how much the success of our crowdfunding experiment is predicated on the groundwork that Kickstarter put in place. We are indebted to Kickstarter for validating the incredible potential of crowdfunding in bringing products to market.

Our crowdfunding method isn’t perfect. It requires that you have some resources to be able to kick off production of your product and I believe that there is room for a new model of crowdfunding.

Hardware startups need a platform that would add value for customers and producers by acting as an escrow for funds while validating and assisting fledgling hardware companies with their production plans. Consequently, we are planning to open source a skeletal version of our crowdfunding app to help start this discussion.

The power to ultimately go ahead and purchase a Lockitron rests with our backers. The onus is on us to justify and substantiate any delays along the way. Just as popular hardware Kickstarter projects have proven, it will be our willingness to involve excited Lockitron backers in our progress and turn them into happy customers that will drive our success.

Click to view slideshow.

Only weirdos enjoy hugs in real life. These people, likely hopped up on some sort of drug or whatnot, actually enjoy the physical embrace of another human being. But that’s gross. The touching, the emotion, the germs. Traditional hugging is just ridiculous in the age of the Internet. It’s obsolete. For the rest of us there’s the Like-A-Hug wearable social media vest. For each “like” you receive on Facebook, this vest inflates a little big, giving the wearer a little squeeze of comfort.

Of course this thing isn’t real. Neither is my hatred of a sincere hug. As explained on the creator’s website, the Like-A-Hug is “an exercise and exploration in shape display.” Melissa Kit Chow of MIT explains this concept addresses the pains of long-distance relationships and the limitations of video chat. You know, like the LovePalz, but with less lube.

The Like-A-Hug makes it possible to share feelings, says the video demo before. And that’s true. If this thing were real, it would bring Internet interactions into real life. Perhaps sadly, thanks to the Internet, it’s now possible to express emotions in many different forms. Sometimes you just want to express your sentiment by liking a person’s status, rather than sitting on the phone with them and listening to their bad day. The Like-A-Hug would put a tangible feeling to your click. Jerry explains it the best though — sometimes you just want the machine.

Hey, remember Reader’s Digest? It’s a magazine that I remember seeing on lots of shelves when I was growing up. Now Editor in Chief Liz Vaccariello tells me that the magazine has undergone a “digital transformation”, especially this year, and it’s finding a growing audience on tablets, with digital sales set to exceed newsstand copies by December.

As with other large, general interest publications, Reader’s Digest has had a bumpy few years. Back in 2009, it went from 12 issues a year to 10, as well as cutting the guaranteed circulation from 8 million to 5.5 million. It even filed for bankruptcy.

But the magazine is reversing that slide on at least one front — starting in January, it’s going back to a fully monthly schedule. Vaccariello says Reader’s Digest is also on-track to sell 211,000 digital issues in December, more than triple the 65,000 sold in August 2011 (though part of that growth may be due to the magazine’s traditional holiday season bump). It’s currently the number two magazine in the Kindle Store, and according to Vaccariello, the company has been told by Apple that it’s the highest grossing app in its “competitive set.” She even brought up the magazine’s social media presence, pointing to its 1.15 million Likes on Facebook and its Klout score of 88 (putting it behind, for example, the New Yorker’s score of 95, but hey, one point ahead of TechCrunch).

Since Vaccariello joined Reader’s Digest in November of last year, she says she has cut down on the organization’s “silos”, so that everyone on-staff works on both the digital and print editions. In fact, she says the digital edition has informed “the design and architecture and pace” of the print copy — for example, the buttons highlighting different sections along the side of the cover double as navigation if you’re reading on a tablet.

There is, of course, digital-exclusive content, including video and rich media. The magazine’s book reviews and excerpts have been surprisingly successful among tablet readers, Vaccariello adds, usually ranking among the top features in each issue (just behind the cover story and the jokes).

A magazine with such a broad and arguably old-school focus (the current cover: “50 secrets surgeons won’t tell you”) may not seem like an obvious candidate for a digital success story, but Vaccariello says the magazine has a clear point of view — everything is written through “the lens of this belief in the power of mankind, the lens of optimism, the lens of emotion.” She adds that this isn’t meant in “a New Age-y way,” but in the sense that each issue can provide “an oasis from the snark.”

Plus, even if the magazine needs to win over new readers, Vacariello notes that it has enormous brand recognition.

“People have grown up with it,” she says. “Their grandparents read it, it was part of their homes.
That serves us very well — we’re already starting on second base.”

Editor’s note: Jack Krawczyk is head of monetization at StumbleUpon, the discovery platform. Jack was a founding member of Google+ and tweets about stuff.

Have we forgotten that being social means connecting with the people in your life? In today’s world of growth hacking and viral marketing, we have taken social to mean acquiring likes and followers so that we can post a photo to Facebook or a quip to Twitter. Most often we forget the forgotten half of being social: intimate conversation.

Since we tend to communicate intimately (email, conversations, etc.) much more than we post to Facebook, it’s shocking that most products and brands are missing such a core growth channel to achieve success.

Intimate vs. Broadcast Communication

There are two main types of conversations that we enter into in our world: first, those meant specifically for a small group of people and second, those meant for literally anyone who will listen. We define the first group as intimate conversations and the second group as broadcast conversations.

Intimate conversations are those like “I read this article about Salvador Dali and I’d love to get your opinion,” “Where should we invest our savings?” — and my personal favorite — “Do these jeans look good on me?” They are conversations that create the potential for us to develop a deeper connection to the person we’re talking to. Their natively limited selection enables us to create a sense of connection with the people in our lives (or potentially place us in the dog house).

Broadcast conversations are effectively humblebrags that we cleverly disguise into brief snippets of content that make people want to feel more connected to us. These are things like, “the Salvador Dali exhibit at MOMA was INCREDIBLE,” “time to buy Apple stock… the iPhone 5 is amazing!!!!!” and “loving my new outfit!!!!” The everybody-look-at-me nature of these conversations inspires people to either feel connected with that person’s tastes or continuing a desire for future shared experiences.

This dichotomy of conversations recently inspired me to do some research to better understand the types of content that we prefer to broadcast versus those that we prefer to have a more intimate touch.

Understanding the Nature of Content

Communication is conducted through many media, though the main forms of intimate and broadcast communication take place in six main segments:

Intimate:Email, text/SMS message, and good old-fashioned conversation

Broadcast:Post to Facebook, tweet it, and blog about it

The launching pads for conversation identified were TV genres, social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Pinterest and YouTube), and 13 website content verticals.

I reached out to more than 550 people (friends, family, university and professional colleagues, and 400+ StumbleUpon users) and asked them the following question: What do you do when you find something you like on these platforms?

Based on their responses, the results show that there clearly are certain platforms and types of content that preference broadcast vs. intimate conversation and vice-versa. While the findings were driven within a statistician-approved 95 percent confidence interval, they serve as directional insights into our brains.

The data was broken down into two axes: the preference toward intimate vs. broadcast communication (x-axis) against the propensity to initiate discussion from content (hey, not everything is worth a conversation).

Defining the Nature of Your Conversation

The nature of conversation that your product or content generates is strongly defined by the nature with which it is personal to the user. Buying a car, picking a new pair of glasses or deciding what to do with your 401k? Chances are the best mechanism for inspiring a conversation is to drive toward intimate conversations. These are highly personal categories and often involve only the closest people in your life.

Making someone laugh, nerding out about tech specs of the new iPhone 5, or gushing about a new song you love? You have defined the key of what we discuss through broadcast mechanisms. These are quick, lightweight interactions that inspire a quick chuckle or feeling of connection.

Interestingly, content about sports, movies, news, and travel find a way to cross both chasms of conversation. Apparently we are all critics, yet seek admiration for our selections once we have made them.

From a platform perspective, there are three clear clusters. The platforms of Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr all inspire conversation to stay within their ecosystem, while YouTube, StumbleUpon and Pinterest all cross the chasm to inspire conversation through both intimate and broadcast means. The third cluster was that of TV, which naturally yielded a propensity toward intimate conversation.

Scaling Conversations Into Your Product Strategy

It is without a doubt that the creation of Facebook’s Open Graph has enabled products to take off by empowering a solid distribution mechanism, but too often, these products are based on whimsical content verticals that are natively suited for social platform interaction. Left behind are the products that focus on more intimate types of engagement.

Can you imagine Bank of America building a mortgage calculator using Facebook’s Open Graph API so that users can post their numbers to their friends? While they may build it, it doesn’t exactly fit into the world of platforms like Facebook and Twitter – but what about email?

When designing your product or your marketing campaign, it’s critical to think about the type of conversation your product inspires.

Most recently, insurance company Liberty Mutual created the Responsibility Project to highlight various methods for the responsibility that new businesses, homeowners and car buyers must take to ensure safekeeping of their assets. Rather than pump “BUY INSURANCE” all over the project, they created content like “How to Disaster Proof Your Home.”

This content isn’t inherently Facebook or Twitter social, but it does yield value for its consumer. For this reason, each page on the Responsibility Project contains a link to email the content, as someone who discovers this content will more than likely want to share it with their respective partner. Unfortunately, not all creators are as focused on the native social experience.

Take Warby Parker, for example. I recently was in the market for a new pair of lenses, tested out an incredibly cool feature that plots the glasses on my face and creates a picture of it… and then asks me to post it to Facebook.

My insecurity radar went haywire. There are few things more stressful than asking my Facebook friends whether I look like a potential doofus in my contending glasses. If I had the ability to send this picture to my wife/style consultant to get the full picture of whether these glasses are a good idea, the social interaction would more closely mirror what my native use case would be.

This is just one example among many where the temptation of social media trumps the benefit of social interaction. If your product or marketing campaign skews toward native email distribution, don’t fret just because you can’t buy a Sponsored Story against it. Focusing on maximizing user intent and value will always yield the best correspondence with your product.

[Image sources: kdhutton, quickmeme; StumbleUpon]

Editor’s note: This weekend we’re running a new column called Backed or Whacked by Ross Rubin, principal analyst at Reticle Research, focusing on consumer technologies, and writer for Engadget. Every week he’ll address two crowdsourced projects from the view of an investor, analyst, and gadget fiend. He’ll look at what made one a success and the other, well, a whack. 

Cloud-connected smartphones and tablets have become vast repositories of our information. Still, there’s more to be done to facilitate getting data into and out of them, at least according to a couple of Kickstarter projects having different degrees of success.

Backed: Jorno keyboard

Foldable keyboards saw a modicum of popularity during the heyday of the Palm V and the clever Stowaway keyboard, but, curiously, they haven’t made much of a comeback, even as smartphones have become ridiculously popular though frustrating to use for entering large quantities of text. Forces seemed to be conspiring to keep it off the market. After a warm reception of CES 2011, repeated delays led to am apparent cancellation earlier this year before it popped up on Kickstarter.

The Jorno keyboard is a bit thick at an inch of girth but folds into a pocketable square. That includes a detachable stand that can accommodate a 7″, or perhaps larger, tablet — including the rumored miniature iPad, particularly since rumors don’t take up any room. With its ability to accommodate smartphones and tablets of nearly every stripe, the Jorno is well on its way to meeting its funding goal, which should allow it to finally enter mass production.

Whacked: AirBridge

If the lack of a keyboard is one of the main input hindrances of a smartphone, the size of the display is one of the main output limitations, especially for content designed for group viewing such as movies or presentations. Many phones can wirelessly connect with a DLNA-enabled TV or AV component. For iPhones, however, the Apple-supplied solution is AirPlay to an Apple TV.

AirBridge has a few advantages over Apple TV. In addition to being battery-powered, its Pro version can create a Wi-Fi hotspot that allows someone to send a presentation to the screens of other iOS devices running AirBridge’s app and even send files to them, kind of like a conference room version of WebEx or GoToMyPC. These advantages may have marginal relevance to a lot of folks versus the stock Apple TV, particularly since the AirBridge relies on its own radio technology for screen broadcasting that requires the addition of an adapter into the iPhone’s dock (or potentially Lightning) connector.

But ambition will be the main reason AirBridge will miss its funding goal; the team is asking for half a million dollars. Such a sum, while not unjustifiable, is simply atypical for product design products. For example, the CruxCase add-on keyboard for iPad has met 250 percent of its goal, but has collected less than $250,000, whereas the Touch Time, an e-paper watch created by Donald Brewer, former CTO of Fossil Watches, raked in over $314,000. And so the team behind AirBridge will need to float another campaign or find alternative funding. At least it can use the prototypes in investor pitch meetings.