Category: Tech news

Facebook just launched a new version of its Messenger app for iOS. Messenger, the company’s stand-alone chat app, got a bit of a user interface refresh with this update, as well as a speed boost and official support for iOS 6 and the iPhone 5′s larger display. Today’s update comes just a bit more than a week after Facebook also launched an update to its Messenger app for Android and, for the most part, this update brings the iOS app’s design on par with the Android app.

The conversation view, for example, now uses chat bubbles, which make the app look more like a text messaging app like Apple’s own iMessage. The previous version, as our own Sarah Perez pointed out when she reviewed the Android update, looked more like your email inbox.

In addition, the iOS app now brings up a list of all of your friends who are currently online when you swipe to the left. From there, you can now also easily pin those friends you talk to the most to the top of your Favorites list.

One feature that’s missing from the iOS app, though, is the ability to text with your contacts from within Messenger. It’s worth noting, however, that only a few Android devices currently support this feature.

Here is the full changelog:

What’s New in Version 2.0

– Swipe left anywhere in the app to quickly see who’s available and send a message
– Add friends you message most to the top of your Favorites
– New design for conversations
– Improved speed and reliability
– Support for iOS 6 and iPhone 5
– Bug fixes

Editor’s note: Boris Wertz is the founder of version one ventures, and has invested in more than 35 early-stage consumer Internet and mobile companies, including Chloe & Isabel, Julep, and Indochino. Follow him on his blog and Twitter.

There has been more e-commerce innovation during the past year than there has been during the last decade.

First, flash-sale and daily-deal sites brought a much-needed breath of fresh air to a vertical that hadn’t seen much change since Amazon and eBay arrived on the scene. Now there’s a whole new generation of e-commerce players. Ever heard of Nasty Gal, Warby Parker, Indochino, Stella Dot, Chloe & Isabel, Frank & Oak, Julep, Beachmint, Shoedazzle, ModCloth, Everlane, Bonobos or J Hilburn? Together, this group of companies will generate over a billion dollars in revenue in 2012.

These web-only brands are vertically integrating the retail value chain, including manufacturing, branding, and distribution. By eliminating stores from the supply chain, these companies bring products directly to consumers from the factory without the bloat of the traditional retailer. This translates into high-quality products (whether eyeglasses or t-shirts) at significantly lower prices.

Here are three reasons why vertically integrated commerce is an attractive retail model.

1. Unique product lines mean no competing with Amazon

Any brick and mortar retailer will attest that it’s pretty difficult to compete with Amazon on price. In the aisles of any shop, a lower price is just a click away. The situation isn’t any easier for online retailers either. E-commerce giants are nearly unbeatable on price. Chris Dixon quoted one entrepreneur as saying, “If it has a UPC code, Amazon will beat you.” Vertically integrated retailers don’t have to compete head-to-head with Amazon. By making their own unique products that can’t be found elsewhere through a quick Google search, these pure play e-tailers can still thrive — even surrounded by large incumbents.

2. Unique products lay the foundation to a unique brand

Warby Parker has its own brand. As does the Dollar Shave Club and Bonobos. A key benefit of being an online niche retailer is the ability to build a distinct, easily recognizable brand that can grow customer loyalty even as new brands are just a click (or discovery site) away. While physical stores may have once enjoyed the advantage in crafting cool shopping experiences, the aesthetics of the iPad and all the social sharing surrounding online shopping today are now shifting that advantage to online retailers.

3. Less bloat = better prices and margins

The traditional retail value chain has significant costs built into both the retail and wholesale channel – such as stores, warehouses, and inventory. By controlling the whole supply chain, vertically integrated companies take a lot of the costs out of the system. That can be good news for consumers: They get high-quality products at a fraction of the price at department stores and other retailers. Hil Davis, co-founder and chief executive officer of J. Hilburn tells Businessweek that a typical garment from most retailers is marked up three times as it works its way through the supply chain from the factory to the store. According to Davis, a men’s dress shirt costs J. Hilburn approximately $57 to manufacture. They sell this shirt directly to consumers for $125, while another brand’s shirt sourced from the very same Italian mill can cost upwards of $325-$435 at Neiman Marcus.

The challenges facing vertically integrated retailers

For every online retailer success story like Bonobos or J. Hilburn, there are countless other e-tailers struggling to make their way. Vertically integrated companies are hard to start and hard to scale.

For starters, product design is tougher than merchandising, so a startup team needs to have someone experienced in the space who really connects with the target audience. Then, there are supply chain complexities: Vertically integrated retailers need to build a strong network of manufacturing partners and effectively manage these partners.

In addition, retailers generally need to order minimum quantity from manufacturers, so there is significant inventory risk if products cannot be sold. Vertically integrated commerce only works profitably at large scale, meaning that funding requirements are relatively high.

However, the downside also offers an upside. All these challenges create a significant barrier to entry; this means that once a vertically integrated company makes it, they’re less likely to be uprooted by the latest up-and-comer.

The beginning of the wave

We’re just seeing the start of innovation and investment activity when it comes to vertically integrated commerce. Today this direct-to-consumer model has begun to disrupt the apparel and jewelry verticals, but expect to see more online-only brands emerge in other markets over the coming years. From furniture to beauty products, most commerce is ripe for disruption. Consumers are ready for high-quality, unique products, and lower costs and the opportunities are just beginning.

 

Twitter’s Bootstrap, an open-source framework for quickly building web sites and apps, has been a massive success. It’s even starting to spawn its own ecosystem of related services now. Mark Otto and Jacob Thornton, the two developers behind the project, however, have now decided to leave the company to pursue new opportunities at GitHub and Biz Stone’s and Evan Williams’ Obvious Corp. respectively.

As Otto noted in the answer to a Quora question earlier this year, the two never worked on Bootstrap fulltime. Instead, he wrote, he tries to “get a few hours in at night and more on weekends.” Today’s announcement, Otto emphasized in his blog post, “has nothing to do with a disagreement about Bootstrap.”

The project, writes Otto, “will remained a Twitter project on GitHub fort he time being.” In the long run, however, Thornton and Otto plan (with the help of Twitter’s open source team) to launch an open-source organization dedicated to the development of Bootstrap. The project, Otto writes, “has grown beyond us and the Twitter brand. It’s a huge project playing a pretty awesome role in the web development industry, and we’re excited to see it continue to grow.”

Questions About The Early Days Of Bootstrap

Bootstrap, says Otto, was originally developed to make better-looking internal tools for the company and then open sourced by him and Thornton. Today’s announcement, however, also stirred up a bit of a discussion about the genesis of the Bootstrap project. Otto, after all, previously worked at product design firm ZURB, the company behind Bootstrap competitor Foundation.

As ZURB’s “Chief Instigator” and Foundation evangelist Bryan Zmijewski notes on Hacker News today, “the first iteration of Bootstrap emerged from the work ZURB did over the last few years prototyping with our clients. In fact, the initial Bootstrap push had direct lines of code and copy taken from ZURB’s work on what today is Foundation 1.0.” Quite a few of ZURB’s engineers, he says, worked on the project before Otto left and the “designers at ZURB even shared that vision with Mark as part of our refinement of Foundation 2.0 before it was launched.”

In a response to Zmijewski’s comment, Otto admits that Bootstrap “emerged” from his work at ZURB, “but more importantly, from the entire web community.” He also argues that he removed all of the old code before the launch of Bootstrap. “I made an honest mistake that any developer can by using code from the work I did at my previous employer, but I also fully rectified it immediately by removing all the offending code and replacing it with my own,” he writes. Otto then goes on to accuse his former employee of ripping “nearly every single component we created in our framework and added it to Foundation, including: the basics of our grid system, navbar, responsive navbar, breadcrums, alerts, labels, tooltips, popovers, prepended and appended inputs, breadcrumbs, accordion, progress bars, image styles, and more.”

Editor’s note: Derek Andersen is the founder of Startup Grind, a 30-city event series hosted in 15-countries that educates, inspires, and connects entrepreneurs. He’s ex-Electronic Arts and the founder of Commonred.

A few years ago I asked a successful entrepreneur for advice on what I should do with my latest product idea. His reply was simple. “Trust your gut. What does your gut tell you?” I confidently replied, “That this is a $100MM business.” To which he added, “Then go for it.”

So that’s exactly what we did. We went for it and a year later we didn’t have a $100MM business or even a $10MM business. We didn’t even have a….ok I’ll stop there. But how did I get it so wrong? Is my gut untrustable? Was I wrong to follow it? Or was my stomach just acting up after a recent trip overseas? I recently sat down with Charles River Ventures Partner George Zachary who has had his fair share of big successes.

In his 17-year venture capital career, he has had over $1B in returns on $150MM in investments. He is an investor in companies like Twitter, Yammer, Playdom, Jambool, and a lot more you’ve heard of. This subject is one George has preached for a long time.

“Listening to my gut is the right thing to do for me. It doesn’t mean it’s going to work out.  But it does mean that’s what I should follow,” he told me a few weeks ago at Startup Grind in San Francisco. “That’s my passion. When I’ve done that it has worked well. When I’ve followed my brain and not my heart it’s resulted in disaster and failure every time. I’ve had no success operating from making a rational decision or a decision based on fear. It’s all come from listening to my gut and intuition.”

George isn’t the only person with this creed. Steve Jobs famously said at the Stanford Commencement Address in 2005, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

But that’s Steve Jobs. For the rest of us normals some times it does let us down or so it appears. Like when your gut tells you that you’re building the next great product of this generation, and after 3-months you have 1,000 users, most of which were college friends, extended family, and creepy ex-girlfriends who still can’t let it go. You know who you are.

For someone with his level of success, George is surprisingly honest and frank about his failures. Despite their friendship, George didn’t invest in one of Elon Musk’s early companies X.com which he says was a mistake. He had an opportunity to lead Twitter’s Series A at a $25MM valuation (eventually taken by Fred Wilson at USV), but he did invest a smaller amount.

“A lot of the mistakes I’ve made at acting out of my gut, led to important things that I’ve needed to learn to get better. I’m not so sure there’s any divine purpose or anything behind it, but what I do know is that by learning through my mistakes I’ve tended to get better,” George says. “There’s no science to it, there’s no 64,000 variable algorithm to investing. If there was then I’d be doing it and so would everyone else. My investing algorithm is: Do I feel more energized at the end of the meeting than at the beginning of the meeting? That is all it is. There is nothing more.”

In 17-years of investing, his gut is a solid bet. George was a founder of Shutterfly which eventually went public. He was one of the few Odeo investors that managed to also invest in Twitter. He backed David Sacks at Yammer and Geni. He’s an investor in Millennial Media. Early in his career he even nearly managed to convince his firm to invest early in Google but was outvoted by the other partners. His gut approach is working just fine.

So back to my original experience. Yes I followed my gut, and yes I failed at building a massive company with it. But I learned all sorts of things. I worked with a dozen engineers refining my product management skills. We had lots of small wins which taught us we have what it takes but this was the wrong mixture. I solidified my relationship with my co-founder and we’re battle scarred taking on the next thing. I earned my startup education through blood, sweat and tears, and we were able to eventually sell the product at a small financial but massive moral victory. Not a $100MM, but it was the right decision for me at that time and my gut was still right. So next time you’re in doubt about the right decision, remember George’s advice on the cause of his success, “It’s all come from listening to my gut and intuition.”

Here is a reminder for developers who want to write apps for Windows 8′s Metro mode (or whatever Microsoft prefers to call it these days): the only way to distribute your apps to consumers is through the Windows Store. This isn’t actually a new policy but one that Microsoft announced a year ago. Judging from this Hacker News thread, though, this still comes as a surprise to many developers and it’s clearly something Microsoft hasn’t stressed enough in the run-up to the Windows 8 launch on October 26.

The discussion started with a question on Microsoft’s Windows 8 forum, which asked whether Windows 8 will allow developers “to post Metro apps on the web for end users to freely download, or will public dissemination of Metro apps be limited to the Windows Store?”

Here is the answer:

Surely, the fact that Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Presson also recently wrote that he would rather see his game not run on Windows 8 than get it certified by Microsoft played a role in the fact that this discussion is now flaring up again.

Microsoft obviously says it is restricting side-loading of Metro apps to prevent the spread of malware and to create a better user experience. In return, of course, it will also make 30% of all the sales in the store (and 20% from apps that make more than $25,000 over the course of their lifetime).

The exception to this rule is that business users will be able to side-load their custom apps and IT administrators will be able to deploy them to employees, but these apps, too, must adhere to the same certification policies and go through the same processes as the other apps in the Windows Store.

Desktop apps, of course, can still be distributed the old-fashioned way, though developers who want to do so can also have them included in the Windows Store. Microsoft will just link to desktop apps in the store and show a description and screenshots, however. Developers won’t be able to sell these apps from the store but will have to use their own payment and licensing solutions.

Where Are All The Metro Apps?

Currently, there are around 2,500 apps in the Windows Store. Microsoft has made a massive push to get developers to bring their old and new apps to Windows 8 and Metro on both the desktop and on tablets (through WindowsRT). The total number of apps seems rather low and hints that most developers aren’t rushing to get their apps into the Windows Store. It’s worth noting, however, that the Store has only been taking submission from all developers for about two weeks now, so we could still see a major growth spurt before the end of October.

The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — watched in amazement as Twitter made good on its promise to hobble the core of its viral power adopter developers and users. By shutting down third party clients to focus monetization on its core clients and the Web, Twitter leaves itself exposed to its challengers for control of the realtime wave. To some of the Gang, Apple’s move to eject Google Maps in favor of its own immature product seems similarly motivated and fated to bad results.

But Twitter has historically made these kinds of protective overreaching in order to protect the fledgling company from being overrun by more powerful competitors. This time it’s different, as Twitter releases services designed to capitalize on the innovations of its ecosystem. The real calculation is whether the openings provided to Google + and to a lesser extent Facebook can be leveraged before innovation dries up in the Twitter pipeline. A high stakes game of Chicken.

@stevegillmor, @borthwick, @scobleizer, @kevinmarks, @kteare

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

Editor’s Note: Jim Dalrymple is a former Editor at Large at Macworld, and contributing expert on Apple-related topics on CNN, Fox, CBS and ABC. You can follow Jim on Twitter at@jdalrymple, and on his blog The Loop.

With the release of iOS 6 last week, Apple introduced a brand new version of Maps, the company’s new turn-by-turn mapping application that replaced Google’s offering on the iPhone. While the fervor over Maps has given Apple a black eye, it’s certainly not the beginning of a downward spiral for the company, as some tech pundits like to say.

Mistakes happen. Every company in the world has a misstep now and then, even Apple. The important thing is how the company responds. Do they ignore the criticism and hope it will go away or stand up and take responsibility?

Apple did the right thing and took responsibility. Shortly after iOS 6 was released, Apple told me that they were “working hard to make the customer experience even better.” On Friday, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that Apple “fell short” with Maps and promised to make it better.

The apology from Cook was humble and sincere, something we don’t always see out of CEOs these days. Now Apple has to get to work and make those promises a reality and it appears they’ve already begun.

TechCrunch reported on Sunday that Apple is aggressively recruiting ex-Google Maps employees to work on Apple Maps. That’s a great step for Apple. Hiring the people that built the competitor’s app is a method used across the industry, especially when you’re in a time crunch.

Still, many people have wondered why Apple switched to Maps if there was still a year left on the Google contract. Why put themselves in this mess? I think John Gruber explained it nicely on Daring Fireball.

If Apple had stuck with Google Maps for another year they would have been forced to renegotiate with Google in a situation where both sides at the table would know that Apple either (a) had to agree to whatever terms Google demanded to extend the deal; or (b) would be forced to swap the mapping back-end of iOS 6 midway through its development cycle.

Apple was basically stuck in a no-win situation.

There is no doubt that Maps doesn’t perform perfectly for all users and Apple must fix it. I believe they will do that as quickly as possible. I also have no doubt that this is a small blip for Apple, one that will forgotten by most people in a short time.

We expect great things from Apple because they consistently deliver great things. I think we expect more from Apple than we do from most other companies on the planet, so when Apple has a misstep, it gets magnified out of proportion.

Maps is an important part of iOS 6, but it’s not the most important part. Would the iPhone stop working without Maps? No, it would be just fine. Apple is not going to fail because of a mapping application — they will take their lumps and deliver a better app in the future.

That’s what I expect from Apple.

Once upon a time, in 2003, there were two entrepreneurs with a dream. Their names were Evan Prodromou and Michele Ann Jenkins, and they dreamed of a collectively edited global travel guide — a Wikipedia for travel, if you will. So they created Wikitravel. And it went over like the proverbial lead zeppelin. Two years later, a company named Internet Brands bought it from them for $1.7 million; pretty good money for those long-lost days before the startup craze began. And Wikitravel thrived, and lo, it was good.

Until Paradise came crashing down in flames.

For six years Wikitravel worked beautifully. There was some advertising, but nothing intrusive. The tech platform on which it ran grew increasingly ancient and flawed, but it functioned, and that’s all that matters, right? In 2006, true, the Italian and German admins — the unpaid, independent volunteers who curated the site, filtered out spam, edited structure and language, and in essence made it usable — forked all the Wikitravel pages in those languages to a new site, called Wikivoyage. (This was legal because all of Wikitravel’s content was and is Creative-Commons licensed.) However, that was but a minor hiccup. The site continued to draw a respectable half-million visitors per month, and its travel guide to the entire planet grew better and better.

But some months ago the Wikitravel admins grew angry that Internet Brands had neglected their many tech requests for so long and was planning new and more intrusive advertising. And when Internet Brands finally did upgrade its now-ancient technology, the upgrade went the way many back-end upgrades do, which is to say, beset on all sides by locusts and a rain of bloodbugs and failures. And finally the Wikitravel admins threw up their hands and journeyed across the Internet to that free-content oasis named the Wikimedia Foundation, and said, more or less: “We’re sick of where we’re at. Would you like to host a travel site?” And the Wikimedia Foundation pondered, and mused, and eventually decided: “Yes!“

And then all litigious hell broke loose.

Threatened with a fork of Wikitravel hosted by Wikimedia, Internet Brands, after apparently initially proposing a partnership, went and “actually brought a suit against unpaid volunteer contributors James Heilman and Ryan Holliday — for using the word “Wikitravel” in the phrase “Wikitravel community” in promoting the fork,” to quote David Gerard. In response, the Wikimedia Foundation has SLAPPed back and sought declaratory relief from the courts.

I’ll leave all that cut-and-thrust to the lawyers. I just want to mention some of the important lessons highlighted by this all-around debacle:

• Don’t piss off your power users. You may think the overall mass of your users is what’s important; but the people who actually care about your site/app/product/community are its heart and soul, and if they go, you’re in big trouble.
• Don’t postpone paying off your technical debt any longer than you have to. Like most debt, it suffers from exponentially compounding interest; unlike most debt, you don’t know what that interest rate is until you finally start paying it back. I think if Internet Brands had handled Wikitravel with more technical care and competence, the forthcoming fork would never have happened.
• Don’t sue your users in a fit of pique. Really. Just don’t. Have we learned nothing from the RIAA? Take a deep breath, take a stress pill, and relax. Because — aside from the moral issue — the moment you sue your users, you have lost all credibility in the eyes of a huge fraction of the Internet. And credibility matters. Alas, many people don’t realize just how much until theirs is gone.

An interim version of the new English-language travel guide, incidentally, is now live.

(Disclaimer/disclosure; I am not entirely personally detached from all this. I created the app WikiSherpa, which relies heavily on Wikitravel, and last year briefly talked to Internet Brands about the possibility of selling it to them, though nothing came of this. I intend to point WikiSherpa to the new site at some point.)

I leave you with, courtesy of Jani Patokallio, a highly likely diagram of Wikitravel’s past and future:

Image credit: Elyce Feliz, Flickr.

Editor’s note: Jeff Ma is the founder of tenXer, a startup that provides tools to help people better understand their performance, progress, and productivity at work. Previously, he helped start GolfSpan.com, CircleLending, and Citizen Sports. Follow him on Twitter.

The first thing you learn when you start playing Blackjack is something called basic strategy – a decision matrix that tells you the correct play for every hand based on your cards and the dealer’s exposed card. Data and statistics will tell you that basic strategy is always the optimal strategy. In fact, following it perfectly reduces the casino’s edge over the average player from 3 percent to 0.5 percent.

Yet many people choose to ignore basic strategy, instead relying on hunches and, in the process, falling for cognitive biases. Specifically, in a research study, UCLA Professor Bruce Carlin found that most players are far too conservative, favoring inactivity over activity especially as it pertains to “expected regret.”

The classic example of this is when a player has 16 and the dealer is showing a seven. Basic strategy dictates that the player should hit that hand (take an additional card). Yet many people are afraid to do it because if they get a six, seven, eight, nine, ten, jack, queen, or king, they will lose immediately. That’s an eight in thirteen chance (62 percent) of losing immediately. Yet if they do nothing, their chances of winning are even worse.

The player in this case is falling for omission bias – a cognitive bias where we favor inactivity over activity especially as it pertains to potentially doing harm. Yes, there is a natural allure to standing pat on that 16 and hoping that the dealer busts, but it is the wrong decision.

Blackjack is littered with these difficult decisions, and when money – and therefore emotion – are involved (just like as they are when starting a company), it is hard to avoid making bad decisions. One of the first lessons that I’ve taken from my days at the table to my work in startups is the importance of being data driven, and that starts with first collecting good data.

In this lean startup era, learning is the most important thing you can do when you launch your product, and without the proper tools in place to capture data, you cannot learn.

At my current company, tenXer, we have played around with a combination of different tools, including KissMetrics, Google Analytics, and a homegrown solution. Regardless of what you use, it is paramount that you have something in place from day one that you can rely on to give you accurate data.

Of course not all situations in business are as cut and dried analytically as Blackjack. But that is why in the startup world we have to be resourceful. A couple months after starting tenXer, well before launch, we wanted to test some messaging. Specifically we were concerned that words like “productivity” and “analyze” might not be very consumer friendly.

So we took a page out of the fake landing page playbook and tested different messaging in Facebook and Google ads that pointed to our LaunchRock.  With this effort, we were able to capture real leads while capturing data that messages like “be more productive” and “analyze your work” converted, as well as more consumer-friendly terms, such as “improve” and “be better at your job.”

Another challenge we face at tenXer, is prioritization of the services that we connect to.  Currently we connect to services like Gmail, Calendar, Twitter, Jira, GitHub, Phabricator, and Pivotal Tracker. But how do we decide what service to connect to next? This is a difficult decision because there are a lot of criteria involved: How good is their API? How many users do they have? How unique is their offering? How valuable is their data? etc.  In order to make a more qualitative decision a bit more quantitative, we isolate these specific criteria and rate each on a scale of 1-5. While this is still somewhat of a subjective measure it helps us avoid favoritism toward a certain service.

Finally, the most important decision a startup has to make is around prioritization of features. With limited resources it is impossible to do everything, so understanding what features your customers really want is paramount. But sometimes that can be difficult, because asking a point blank question of your users can be very leading and can yield poor data.

So to solve this issue we leaned on technology. We sent out the typical Survey Monkey to our users where we asked them to prioritize different proposed features, but we also gave them open text fields to comment on things they liked and wanted to see in tenXer. We then used a proprietary sentiment analysis tool, developed primarily for use on Twitter, to identify different themes in their responses. Some common themes emerged, and fortunately those themes mimicked what we were seeing in their more structured survey responses. This gave us the confidence to move ahead on some specific product features.

While the decision to be data driven seems obvious enough, so does the notion of hitting a 16 against a dealer’s seven. Yet many times both are ignored. And when this happens the player seldom wins.

Earlier this month, I wrote about Silicon Valley Voice, a karaoke competition for the tech world hosted by Silicon Valley Bank and Coverflow (a cover band made up of techies, including Mayfield Fund’s Tim Chang, Facebook’s Ethan Beard, and Fandalism’s Philip Kaplan). Now, the finalists have been selected, and you don’t even have to wait until next week’s event to hear them sing.

Coverflow member (and Mayfield managing director) Raj Kapoor  tells me that all of the regular tickets have sold out, with 800 RSVPs. But the organizers convinced Silicon Valley Bank to expand the budget, which means there’s room for another 200 people. You can apply to attend the event here. The application, Kapoor says, is just to confirm that you work in tech.

The event (described in an invite as “American Idol for the geek set”) will be held on Oct. 3 at The Fillmore in San Francisco, and the winner will be chosen by judges including Mike Arrington, August Capital’s David Hornik, and Soundtracking founder Steve Jang.

Are the contestants actually going to be good? Well, despite some of my initial skepticism, it looks like these guys are, for the most part, serious musicians, and some of these videos are actually pretty rad. But hey, you can judge for yourself — here are they are:

Christina Dunham, VP marketing/business development, Froomz

Sara Oliver, executive assistant, Electronic Arts

Madhu Punjabi, strategic partner development manager, Google

Ian Brown, VP marketing, PagerDuty

Allen Mask, product specialist, Google

Andy Barton, tech recruiter, self-employed

Andrew Chung, partner, Khosla Ventures

Decades before Steve Jobs, the Google founders, and Mark Zuckerberg, small groups of unglamorous technologists turned Santa Clara Valley into the world-changing region we are still reinventing today. My grandpa, Charles Alfred “Bud” Eldon, was one of them, a Hewlett-Packard engineer and executive since the days of the apricot orchards. He passed away at 7:45am this morning.

I’m going to share a little bit about his life below, because my generation in Silicon Valley and the tech world needs to know about all the shoulders of giants we are standing on and the heights we can also reach. Too many of us don’t right now.

His story begins in Hawaii during the Great Depression.

Kupu (Hawaiian for “Grandpa,” as us grandkids called him) grew up on sugar plantations and fishing boats, with his mother teaching grade school and his father working as a handyman mechanic. He was living in the Honolulu area on December 7th, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He watched it all from a nearby hill — so close that he could see the attacking pilot’s faces and the Arizona sink — and spent the next days helping to bury the dead.

But instead of getting drafted like every other able-bodied male, his high school scores gave him the chance to take a special exam for war-time military engineers. The catch was that he’d have to go on a one-way ticket to take the exam in the Bay Area. Civilians weren’t allowed to travel back through the war zone. If he didn’t pass the test, he’d be stuck without friends or family and no way home.

He aced it.

That led to a stint working on electronics in the Navy, including a job manning the radar station on Treasure Island. And it led to Stanford, the completion of a Physics major, and a relationship with early Hewlett-Packard engineers and Frederick Terman, the then dean of the engineering school and a cofounder of Silicon Valley. Kupu joined HP shortly after graduating, as one of the first few hundred employees — and worked his way up as engineer then product manager, and eventually executive.

I was able to visit Kupu in Arizona this past February, where he and my grandma had retired. This was right after he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and the weekend before I got the surprise job offer to become the editor of TechCrunch.

He was upbeat and still quite nimble from a lifetime of cleaner living and more exercise than I can claim.

We spent the weekend hiking around his home, talking stocks (particularly HP’s) and politics (he has been campaigning for immigration reform for engineers since the 1980s). He got in his usual jabs at modern Silicon Valley for its focus on ephemeral web products instead of hardware. I got the usual scientific lessons on the flora and fauna of the highland desert.

But I also managed to get a few stories out of him about the early days, when Caltrain still had a spur that went to Los Altos, when my dad would walk through the orchards on the way to school, and when the nearby 280 was still being built (“kids, go play out on the freeway” was the running family joke).

My favorite story was about his efforts in software, as it turns out, in an area that most any big tech company takes for granted today. John Vardalas of IEEE got a better story out of Kupu than I did, I’m embarrassed to say, so I’m just going to run the excerpt from that interview in here.

Eldon: I was a manufacturing manager in three or four different places, but along the way in the mid, early 1960s, I got a side job… to be in charge of corporate systems and operations analysis. That involved supervising all the company’s data processing activities and potential applications of operations research. I’d been sent by Mr. Packard himself to Case Institute of Technology, in the late 1950s, to learn about that, with potential applications for inventory control, and statistical analysis and so on for the company, for Hewlett-Packard.

That’s why I was given that job. And that ended up being rather interesting, because it occurred just when Hewlett-Packard was in the process of purchasing a bunch of independent entities who were known field representatives for electronics companies. Neely Enterprises was one rather famous one in the West Coast. And so Hewlett-Packard was involved in a potential major reorganization, and Mr. Packard and my boss said “Bud we’d like you to think about how we can integrate these entities. In addition to our independent companies there were subsidiaries, not divisions but subsidiaries of Hewlett-Packard to engineer and manufacture various products, and of course the operating divisions of Hewlett-Packard that existed…. How would we tie all these together? I found out that there was a way to computerize all [that] data. The interesting thing is that this tied in with my knowledge that in the near future, Hewlett-Packard would be releasing some products related to electronic computers.

And yet, none were available to us right at the time. I had contracted to buy a Model 360 from IBM for Hewlett-Packard Company. We installed that with full OS, which was the first time in the West of the United States that full OS under an IBM 360 system had been installed. Along with that, I found out that there was a opportunity to start working on the communication of information to handle orders and inventory from remote divisions by using TWX machines. They generated a punch paper tape. The punch paper tape fit directly into my Hewlett-Packard corporate computer operation, under my control. We could then distribute to the various operating divisions, from the sales offices, order information and then generate shipment and accounting information.

Vardalas: What year was this?

Eldon: 1963. All by myself, I invented the system that would generate this corporate control system. I assigned a couple of people—another Stanford MBA, as a matter of fact—to work on how we would tie inventory control and manufacturing control with standardized boxes of software to this input of information. The vice president of finance told me he wanted all cash eventually from the customers to go into a lockbox that he would specify. So here I had developed and implemented in the following year a system which, to my knowledge, did not exist anywhere else. It was a totally enterprise-integrated operating system.

Vardalas: So what did Mr. Packard and Mr. Hewlett think of all this?

Eldon: They bought it, hands down. [laughter] They claimed they didn’t understand it. My boss absolutely did not understand it. And…. Then I went on to other things.

The system was a big hit. Those other things included a brief detour into the early era of venture capital, and a job managing early hardware factories in Taiwan (that offered great wages and working conditions, he made clear to me during one hike that weekend). The HP founders ended up bringing him back in the 70s, and he continued in leadership roles through the 90s, including a term as the president of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 1985, and a bunch of awards.

This story isn’t just about Kupu, though, or about the history of enterprise software integrations, or about the fact that he was one of the main role models that got me from Corvallis, Oregon to Silicon Valley — although he was that. Growing up at the poverty line in a recession-stricken state during the 80s, with some tough setbacks that my wonderful parents did not deserve, I had trouble really understanding that I or anyone could climb their way up from nothing and change the world for the better. Kupu’s life helped me think big.

Which comes back to what Silicon Valley, and the countless thousands of people like Kupu, have helped to make. It’s not just the location, but the idea. You can be anyone, even a bunch of no-name nerds in a farming area on the wrong coast of a second-tier country in a global Depression, and you can build technology companies (HP and Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel) that make the world a better place, and breed new companies (Apple, Google, Facebook) that themselves push humanity forward.

Too many of the younger people I see getting into tech these days — I say this at the ripe age of 31 — are focused on the money, the fame, the trendiness of it all. Those motivations will wipe you out when the next recession hits tech, as it inevitably will. Those of us who are in it because we strive to fix the world, who know that the going is always going to be tough at some point, are going to be here sticking it out.

I say all this as a writer, sadly, and not as someone who can actually build the tech itself. But I have a saving anecdote on that point, from Kupu, that I’m taking with me for the rest of my life.

Some other tech writers noticed that at this past Disrupt conference in San Francisco, the theme was no longer just about “Web 2.0″ and all the revenue-free entertainment stereotypes that go along with it. It was about products that were trying to save people time and money, as well as help the average person at the same time — hardware like Lit and service software like YourMechanic. In planning the conference, we were most certainly following and capitalizing on those broader trends among the entrepreneurs and investors we track.

But I also had Kupu’s voice in my head. When my dad called me earlier this week to say that Kupu wasn’t doing well, he also told me something else. That Kupu had found those articles about Disrupt, and had been ecstatic.

And so, readers, go build awesome stuff and change the world so we can write about it and change the world even more. Because between life and death there is meaning, even if it’s what we create: The value of a role model is that they teach you what’s possible.

[Image credits: Kupu photos via IEEE, the legendary HP garage via ddebold/flickr, Stanford panorama via Julian Lepinski.]

When you think about Detroit, you don’t often think first about the technology industry; you think about automobiles. But the reality is that nowadays, the two industries are more intertwined than ever. Indeed, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that, as Marc Andreessen likes to say, “software is eating the world” and becoming more central to the future of many traditionally non-techie companies.

Ford Motors is no exception to this trend. Ford’s CTO Paul Mascarenas was in San Francisco recently, so we were pleased that he took some time to swing by TechCrunch’s offices and talk a bit more about what’s happening on the tech side at Ford and what his job is like on a day-to-day basis.

Watch the video embedded above to hear about why Mascarenas has been spending more and more time in Silicon Valley, how consumer electronics and automotive electronics are coming to a point of “convergence,” what Ford’s close partnership with Microsoft means for the its rep among Apple fans, what he looks for in engineering hires, and more.

A little more than a week after announcing its acquisition by telecom giant SingTel, Pixable is releasing a substantially redesigned version of its iPhone photo aggregation app.

As with the old version, the Pixable app aggregates photos and videos from social networks, highlighting the ones that will most likely be interesting to you. The big theme with the redesign, the company says, is “letting the photos shine.” That may seem like an odd claim for a photo app. Weren’t the photos front-and-center before? Well, the change is obvious when you compare the old home page to the new one. Both pages offer selections like “Most Recent Photos,” “Top Of The Day,” and “Top Of The Week,” but the thumbnail images previewing each section have been dramatically enlarged and really take center stage. The photo view has also been redesigned to maximize the size of images.

There have been other changes to the UI, including an iPhone 5-optimized layout, a move to a lighter color scheme, and the replacement of the old menu bar with a new sliding menu. In addition, the app features expanded integration with Twitter and Instagram. For Twitter, you can now tap to see all of a photo’s retweets and to reply or retweet the photo yourself. For Instagram, you can just tap to like or comment on a photo.

Pixable co-founder Inaki Berenguer tells me that the redesign has been underway for a while, and that it would have happened acquisition or not. But he adds, “The excitement and momentum created by joining forces with SingTel paired with the iPhone 5 release created the perfect opportunity.”

The same team continues to operate independently out of the same office, Berengeur says: “We are still Pixable, but we are just now part of a bigger and exciting family with great support from one of the world’s largest mobile operators.” The app now has 4 million users.

You can download Pixable here.

Apple has made a small but significant tweak to its App Store for iOS 6 users, changing the Apps for Passbook section of the store. Before, when you clicked through in Passbook the link that brings you to a list of apps, that’s all you saw: a simple listing of compatible apps. Now, there’s a new paragraph describing what Passbook is, and what Passbook-enabled apps are capable of.

Here’s the new descriptive paragraph in full:

Passbook is the simplest way to store your boarding passes, tickets, coupons, gift cards and more in one place. With Passbook, you can scan your iPhone or iPod touch to check in for a flight, get into a movie, or redeem a coupon. Wake your iPhone or iPod touch, and passes appear on your Lock screen at the appropriate time and place. Explore our collection of apps that work with Passbook and check back often as new partners will be added regularly.

The new information is clearly designed to help new users get up to speed on what Passbook is and what it provides. I noted in my first test of Passbook that it might not be clear enough what the feature is and how it’s intended to be used for people who’ve never heard of it before or read the extensive descriptions at Apple’s site or elsewhere on the web.

This is a good step towards raising awareness about Passbook, which should eventually become a key feature of iOS, once more developers come on board. Passbook is the first step in a mobile wallet strategy for Apple, and it’s good to see the company paying attention to how it’s received and communicated to users and already making changes for the better.

Happy Friday! We have something special to give away. Box is hosting its annual BoxWorks event October 7-9 in San Francisco and we have a bunch of tickets.

Box has some amazing speakers on tap. Box CEO Aaron Levie kicks things off, followed by Marc Andreessen, John Donahoe, and Clayton Christensen. There’s also Tony Fadell, Gary Reiner and Gary Kovacs along with Adam Lashinsky, Andreas Bechtolsheim and our own Drew Olanoff. It’s three days, six keynotes, 55 speakers, and a ton of fun.

So, here we go. There will be 10 winners and each winner can bring a friend, so we have 20 tickets in total. If you want a shot at winning one of these tickets, all you have to do is follow the steps below.

1) Become a fan of our TechCrunch Facebook Page:

2) Then do the following:
– Retweet this post (making sure to include the #BoxWorks hashtag)
– Follow Box on twitter

The contest will start now and end October 5th at 7:30pm PT. Please only tweet once, or you will be disqualified. Box will make sure you follow the steps above and choose their winners once the giveaway is over. Please note the prize is for two tickets per winner only and does not include airfare or hotel.

Fun fact! Weezer will be there. Good luck everyone.