Do we need another subscription service to deliver things to the doorstep? Blue Apron surprises with a new take on the market: every week, all the fresh ingredients you need to cook three meals are delivered to your home.

It removes many hassles, such as having to think about a meal, finding the recipe, and, more importantly, spending hours trying to find fresh ingredients. As the service is very specific and includes vegetables or meat, the company emphasizes the freshness of the ingredients.

That is why the service is currently restricted to the Northeastern U.S., including most parts of Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Maryland.

“Our food is a major differentiator for us — we source from the same wholesale providers who supply high-end restaurants, so the quality is extremely high,” said Matt Salzberg, co-founder and CEO of Blue Apron. “In fact, our food is higher quality than you could get on your own at the supermarket, and fresher because it doesn’t sit for a week on the supermarket shelf before you buy it,” he continued.

Even though the delivery occurs only once a week, you receive all the ingredients to cook three meals. The recipes are included in the package, and it will take at most 35 minutes to cook the meals.

Time is the major appeal of the service, but recipe discovery might be another important strength for food lovers. It is a new take — albeit more expensive — on the traditional and popular recipe websites.

When it comes to food, you have to deal with all sorts of concerns, including food allergy and special dietary restrictions. Over time, the company plans to introduce new plans to accomodate all those needs.

Many companies offer to deliver meals to your home, but the food is already cooked and you just have to heat it. Salzberg and CTO Ilia Papas founded the company with Matthew Wadiak, a chef and serial entrepreneur in the food business. Wadiak is responsible for the product — in this case, the meals.

Subscriptions cost $9.99 per person per meal; delivery is free and you can cancel at any time.

The company has raised $800,000 from an impressive list of investors: Nat Turner & Zach Weinberg (co-founders of Invite Media), Jason Finger (founder of Seamless), Eric & Alan Gould (co-founders of IAG Research), Graph Investments and James Moran (founder of Yipit).

Click to view slideshow.

Facebook today begins testing its own mobile ad network. Advertisers can pay to target you with ads for app stores or websites based on your Facebook data that appears while you’re on other apps and mobile sites. Facebook tells me that, similar to its first off-site ad placements on Zynga.com, the goal is to show Facebook users more relevant ads wherever they go, even outside the social network’s own properties.

If you were looking for a big new way Facebook could make money but avoid hurting its user experience, here it is.

Facebook isn’t revealing any of the advertisers, ad exchanges, ad networks, or publishers involved, but here’s how the small initial test of its mobile ad network will work:

Starting later today, you may start seeing banner and interstitial ads targeted by your Facebook biographical and social data within non-Facebook mobile iOS and Android apps plus mobile websites where you’ve authenticated with Facebook. The targetable data includes your age, gender, location, Likes, friends who’ve used an advertiser’s app and basically any other targeting options in Facebook’s standard ads marketplace.

On the back end, Facebook is acting as an ad-exchange layer on top of traditional mobile ad exchanges like Mobclix or Nexage that bid for placements on ad networks like AdMob, iAd, or individual publishers.

Advertisers set a bid they’re willing to pay Facebook to reach a certain demographic of users. Meanwhile, Facebook syncs its anonymous user IDs with several mobile ad exchanges. When a Facebook user visits one of the apps or sites where these exchanges have placements, the exchange instantly sends Facebook that user’s ID and asks if there’s a bid set to target them. If so, Facebook pays the ad exchange some portion of the bid, and the ad is shown to the user.

Those ads can lead to App Store pages where users can download something, or to mobile websites that might feature services, ecommerce, or brand promotions. They won’t be “social” though, meaning they won’t display the names or faces of friends who’ve interacted with the advertiser.

Why This Is Such A Big Deal

The mobile ad network lets Facebook earn money on traffic to other apps and sites by leveraging its remarkably expansive and accurate user data set. It gives app developers and brands such a powerful way to reach specific audiences that they’ll be willing to pay more than if they advertised with a less accurate ad exchange directly.

For example, a humor website aimed at young men could target 16-35 year old males who Like the TV show South Park on Facebook. Social shopping apps could target friends of their existing users who might have already heard of them. Parenting apps could target Facebook users who’ve stated they’re engaged or have kids. These are audiences Facebook can reliably deliver thanks to data volunteered by its users, while other ad exchanges might have to guess or infer about who fits an advertiser’s desired demographic.

Facebook tells me, “Right now we’re testing to see how these ads perform, whether people find them relevant. They could be an interesting way to discover new mobile apps and see relevant ads off of Facebook.” The mobile ad network’s value to advertisers is that, “With Facebook you have really great targeting. They’ll be able to reach people that are more likely to engage with the ads they see.”

Facebook launched its first non-social, in-feed ad unit last month, allowing mobile developers to pay to show download links for their apps within the Facebook for iOS or Android news feed. I spoke out against them, as they have the potential to reduce the news feed’s quality much more than Sponsored Stories and Facebook’s other social ad units that actually show updates about friends that happen to mention businesses. That means if Facebook shows too many, it’s hurting itself.

That’s why today represents an important shift from Facebook utilizing its traffic to instead solely utilizing its data to monetize. There might be some small vocal minority unhappy about the repurposing of their profile data, but Facebook assures me privacy was “top of mind” when designing the new ads program and no personally identifiable information is ever shared with third parties.

In the end, people are going to see ads in other apps anyways so they might as well be relevant. This less obvious data usage will surely cause less of a backlash than if Facebook massively increased the number of ads it showed per organic news feed story.

Now Facebook has to watch to see if users tap into these new off-app ads. If they do, Facebook could make a lot more money on mobile without having to choke its own apps.

We’ve written a lot about our Hackathon hackers: their shirts, their hats, their ability to code all night sustained by only junk food, beer, and Red Bull. But this year we decided to do something a little different.

We followed one hacker, David Kay, through all 24 hours of the event. Through the ups, through the downs, and through the delirious moments.

He and his partner, Steven Jung, have been regulars at this event for quite some time — he’s attended five Disrupts, four Disrupt Hackathons, and been a Disrupt volunteer twice — but decided that software wasn’t going to cut it this year. Instead, they bought a couple of Parrot AR.Drone 2.0 models and decided to teach the smartphone-controlled quadrocopter a few tricks.

The product they finished with was called Quadro, and was meant to fly, steer, and land via voice controls. And if not voice, an Xbox controller. This meant marrying base-level coding with Python, a more high-level programming language. But to take it a step further, they attempted to use facial recognition with the Drone’s camera, hoping to recognize the judges’ faces during their presentation.

It was a tough challenge, as you’ll see in the video — the duo finished with five minutes left on the clock.

David has worked for Google in New York, but now operates as an independent consultant with a focus on Android and iOS.

Here’s what he had to say about the role of Disrupt in his life:

Disrupt NYC 2010 was my first event in Startupland. After dropping out of school, I had been a professional DJ for a time, but, seeking something greater, I took some computer science classes and fell into programming. TechCrunch Disrupt was the first concrete assurance that I had made the right choice. As a lowly volunteer, I sat in the main hall, overwhelmed by the roster of developers, wet-behind-the-ears startup founders, grizzled tech veterans, angels and VCs, and could see myself, one day, enjoying each of these roles. It was then that I knew that Startupland was my home.

If you’d like to keep up with their exploits, you can follow David here and Steven here.

Microsoft just announced a few small but interesting updates to its cloud storage service SkyDrive. Just like your desktop, SkyDrive will now offer a recycle bin that allows you to recover files you may have accidentally deleted. In previous versions of SkyDrive, users had to acknowledge and dismiss a warning dialog before they deleted files. This dialog is now gone and has been replaced with an “undo” option.

Once the recycle bin starts taking up more than 10% of your storage limit, Microsoft will start deleting your older content and will also permanently delete files that were in the bin for more than 30 days. By default, SkyDrive will continue to automatically save previous versions of your Office documents, and today’s announcement does not change this.

Excel Surveys

In addition to this new feature, Microsoft also today announced that it plans to launch an Excel-based survey tool for the web soon. This is a feature Google Docs has offered for a while through Google Forms, but now that Excel also lives on the web, it makes sense for Microsoft to add a similar feature to its web apps. This feature, says Microsoft, “has been a top request from students in particular, as they’re great for getting suggestions for a group project or party, collecting feedback or research results, running a competition, and much more.”

Microsoft didn’t announce when exactly it plans to release these Excel surveys beyond saying that it is “putting this through some final tweaks, and you should expect to see Excel surveys show up in your SkyDrive soon.”

Analysts have begun making their predictions about the iPhone 5′s odds of success for launch weekend sales, and in fact there’s quite a range when it comes to how the experts see things shaking out. After Apple unveiled iPhone 5 pre-order totals of 2 million over 24 hours, double the 1 million the iPhone 4S managed, it would seem like multiplying out the 4S launch weekend total of 4 million total sales is a safe bet. But that’s not necessarily the tack all industry analysts are taking.

Shaw Wu of Sterne Agee, for instance, shared that his firm is estimating around between 3 and 3.5 million sales of the iPhone 5 during the launch weekend, but that’s just an extrapolated number Wu tells me, coming out of its quarterly projections for the device, and meant only to loosely represent the first few days as it relates to the rest of the three-month period. Overall, Wu said in an investor note today that estimates for the September quarter are up to 27 million, raised from 26 million projected before Apple revealed the strength of its pre-order success. The initial response also hasn’t significantly affected longer-term outlooks, with Agee adding only 500,000 (to make 46.5 million total) to its earlier prediction, owing to continued reports of supply constraints on the iPhone 5′s newly redesigned touchscreens.

Peter Misek of Jeffries thinks that Apple will indeed double its past performance, hitting around 8 million total units sold by the end of launch weekend, with pre-orders included. Misek thinks that a prevailing view on Wall Street that suggests supply constraints will keep the number at or below 6 million are overblown. Long-term, he told CNBC that he believes key drivers for Apple could be securing deals with Japan’s NTT DoCoMo, the last remaining major carrier in that country that doesn’t offer the iPhone, but lately there’s been talk that the iPhone 5 could in fact be a major pain point for DoCoMo, since no announcement has yet been forthcoming about bringing it to that carrier’s considerable LTE network.

Gene Munster, longtime champion of the standalone Apple TV and Piper Jaffray analyst, suggested Monday that Apple will deliver between 6 and 10 million iPhone 5 sales during launch weekend, likely hitting the 8 million sweet spot. That’s due in part to the 100 percent year-over-year increase in pre-order sales, but also based on the knowledge that pre-orders formed 25 percent of last year’s opening weekend sales, hence arriving at 8 million from 2 million pre-orders.

There are new variables at play this time, like an expanded pool of launch countries that includes Hong Kong, always a popular destination for grey market resellers. Even factoring in new countries, Asymco’s Horace Dediu predicted last week that we’d see around 6 million in initial sales, based on an increase in units sold per day in line with previous launches.

Unlike the 4S, this is also a complete visual redesign, and new aesthetics are bound to make a splash with the general buying public, aside from any consideration of features or specs, so that’s a variable that it’s hard to put exact numbers behind. Whatever happens, the bottom line is that iPhone 5 launch weekend sales likely won’t disappoint.

Virident Systems, a company that develops flash-based storage class memory solutions for the enterprise, has raised $26 million in Series D funding led by Mitsui Global Investments with Globespan Capital Partners, Sequoia Capital and Artiman Ventures participating. To date, Virident has raised $76 million.

Additionally, the company is announcing that Mike Gustafson has joined as CEO and is a member of its Board of Directors. Former CEO and co-founder Kumar Ganapathy will remain with the company and work closely with the executive team on business strategy, new product development, and strategic partnerships.

Virident has built flash solutions that are compatible with any servers and allow enterprises to enhance not only the speed of their applications but to ensure reliable performance under heavy workloads, specifically for data-intensive workloads, such as databases, business analytics, simulation, visualization and high-performance computing.

“We think flash storage is going to take over when it comes to performance. We are the performance leader with a flash-based PCI card. The vision is to build around that. There’s a lot of opportunity here,” Gustafson tells us.

The company believes that bringing flash memory to the storage space (both for data centers and enterprise storage) will fundamentally disrupt how information is stored. As Ganapathy has said in the past, a future may well be coming in which the very flash memory chips that are built into billions of smartphones today force data centers “to adopt a completely new storage architecture with massive cost reductions and a significantly smaller footprint.” For Virident, the future is all about solid-state devices.

Gustafson was most recently with Hitachi Data Systems, where he served as senior vice president and general manager of the File and Content Business. Gustafson served as president and CEO of BlueArc from 2005 until the acquisition of the company by Hitachi in September 2011. Prior to BlueArc, Gustafson was at storage area network company McData.

The new investment will be used for sales and marketing, as well as new software and product development. In the last 12 months, the company has doubled its headcount and invested heavily in the new version of its flagship product, Virident FlashMAX II, which allows enterprise application performance to be optimized.

“The flash storage market is predicted to grow to $4 billion by 2015, and this investment only strengthens our conviction that Virident will become the primary industry provider of the fastest storage class memory solutions to the world’s leading enterprise datacenters,” said Sanjay Pichaiah, investment director at Mitsui Global Investment.

It’s important to note that the flash storage space is chock full of competitors, including Fusion-IO. Gustafson agrees that this is an extremely competitive market with additional investment from VCs. “We expect more and more competition, but we expect to win in the markets we are focusing on. But we are the performance leader.”

Market research firm Harris Interactive today announced that it is partnering with Google’s recently launched Google Consumer Surveys “to develop and bring to market a new product that allows businesses, both large and small, to compare themselves to industry benchmarks at a fraction of the cost of traditional market research.” Using Google’s Consumer Surveys platform, Harris Interactive will now collect and distribute industry benchmarks. Businesses will be able to run their own surveys (for a price) and benchmark themselves against their competitors.

Market Research Through Surveywalls

Google Consumer Surveys is meant to make consumer market surveys easy for businesses. The interesting twist here is that users virtually have to answer your question as Google is positioning its surveys as alternatives to traditional newspaper paywalls. Instead of paying, users have to answer a few questions to get to the content they are interested in. Marketers can use these “surveywalls“ to ask basic multiple-choice questions or to run more complex studies; Google charges $0.10 per response for the general U.S. population and $0.50 per response from custom audiences (a portion of which it then passes on to the site owners).

“We are excited to be involved in a venture that has the potential to reinvent the manner in which market research is conducted,” said Al Angrisani, Harris Interactive’s CEO and president, in a canned statement today. “This is a unique opportunity to bring together Google’s innovative Consumer Surveys product with Harris Interactive’s expertise in delivering credible insights to the global business community.”

The first result of this collaboration is a study of people’s opinions of their banks. Users can use Google Survey’s interactive user interface (which our own Greg Ferenstein finds very huggable) to drill down deeper into these results, and smaller banks now benchmark themselves against their larger competitors.

While Mitt Romney fends off the press, after he was secretly recorded denigrating 47% of Americans, let us not forget that his rival, Barack Obama, and other illustrious politicians, have also forgotten that we live in a world of inescapable transparency. For a bit of balanced perspective (and delightful diversion), we’ve collect some of the best political gaffes caught on tape and released into the YouTube jungle.

*Update: In the time it took me to write this post, another video was released of Romney admitting that he doesn’t really think Palestinians are interested in peace. Video at the bottom.

Mitt Romney Denigrates Half Of America in front of  His Rich Donors

At a “private” fundraiser dinner in May, Republican contender Mitt Romney was caught with some candid opinions about the less fortunate who support President Obama:

“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what…There are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent on government, who believe that, that they are victims, who believe that government has the responsibility to care for them. Who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing.”

Romney has since admitted his words were “not elegantly stated.” Watch the video, which already has about 1.4 million views in 24 hours, below:

Obama Reassures The Russians He’ll Have “Flexbility” After His Re-election

Romney is not the only person who made the mistake of thinking we have secrecy anymore. Obama was famously caught with a “hot” mic, explaining to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev at a press conference that he’ll have more “flexibility” to work with the Russians on missile defense after his election.

“On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this can be solved, but it’s important for him [Prime Minister Vladimir Putin] to give me space,” whispered Obama. “This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.”

Do Not “Meeow” At A Lady

Australian parliamentarian David Bushby was caught in an ungentlemanly moment, “meeowing” at an opinionated female colleague during a heated debate. At first, he attempted to defend the sneer, saying that she was acting like an angry cat–neither male nor female–but was later forced to apologize:

Lawmakers Vote Often

Members of the Texas legislature were caught voting for their absent colleagues

Don’t Call Indian Americans “Macaca”

Former Senator George Allen political death knell came when he referred to an opposition interloper at a campaign rally as “Macaca.” Soon after, he lost his election by 10,000 votes. Please note the irony: this was Allen’s “listening” tour:

Obama And Sarkozy Gripe About Netanyahu

At the G-20 summit in 2011, President Obama and then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy were caught belly-aching about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“I don’t want to see him anymore, he’s a liar,” said Sarkozy, reportedly overheard by reporters. To which Obama responded, “You’ve had enough of him, but I have to deal with him every day!”

Allen West Thinks Democrats Are Communists

During a town hall, Florida Congressman Allen West made a rough estimate there are a couple dozen active communists in the Democratic party

Question: “What percentage of the American legislature do you think are card-carrying Marxists or International Socialist?”

Answer: “It’s a good question. I believe there’s about 78 to 81 members of the Democrat Party who are members of the Communist Party. … It’s called the Congressional Progressive Caucus.”

Romney On Palestinians

At the same fundraiser, another video was just released, which apparently shows Romney saying that Palestinians aren’t interested in peace. The video is below and you can read the full transcript on Mother Jones

I’m torn by two perspectives in this regard. One is the one which I’ve had for some time, which is that the Palestinians have no interest whatsoever in establishing peace, and that the pathway to peace is almost unthinkable to accomplish…

The Badgeville gamification service is now available on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange. The new service will allow people to give out badges for use on any app in the Salesforce.com ecosystem.

For Badgeville Co-Founder Kris Duggan, the news has a certain significance. Two years ago the company launched at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco. At the time, it was Duggan and his co-founder Wedge Martin. The company had raised $300,000, and the business consisted of a half-dozen customers. Today, Badgeville has $40 million in venture capital, 80 full-time employees, three offices, and 200 customers that include Dell, Barnes & Noble, and Oracle.

Since then, gamification has grown. Duggan says a “gamification” search shows 6.5 million results. Two years ago, there were a couple thousand results. Badgeville has grown into a platform that companies are using to launch gamification services for healthcare and other markets. With Salesforce.com, Badgeville is packaging its service to offer a platform of its own.

Duggan sees the service as a way to bring the Badgeville platform to different apps via an API. For instance, developers can now use the service to integrate into existing Salesforce.com social apps like Radian 6 or Ripple.

Part of the goal is for Badgeville to have an impact on the sales culture. Duggan started his career in sales. As he points out, salespeople are often poked by their bosses to do better. The point here is to offer a way to give sales managers a way to give their salespeople a carrot.

Badgeville has done well in the market competing with companies, such as Bunchball, Omniture, and Prooflink. It is a platform more than anything else. This news represents a shift for the technology to be a platform for apps. That’s a change that will play a role in the company’s next evolution and test it to see if it can take gamification to the wider universe of the app landscape.

PersonalWeb and Level 3 Communications have filed patent complaint against Rackspace for hosting GitHub. Update: PersonalWeb has a history of suing large tech companies, including Google, Facebook and Apple.

PersonalWeb is the main plaintiff in the case. Level3 and Personal Web purchased several patents from Kinetech and Digital Island in 2000 Kinetech, a subsidiary of Brilliant Digital Entertainment, acquired PersonalWeb Technologies last September. PersonalWeb’s arangement with Level 3 apparently predates the acquisition — and each own a 50% undivided interest in the patents. Update: According to the complaint, it’s being brought about solely by PersonalWeb, and Level 3 may not have even known that PersonalWeb was filing the complaint.

According to TechDirt, PersonalWeb was founded by Kevin Bermeister, whose previous company Brilliant Digital Entertainment acquired the file sharing system Kazaa, and former Streamcast (the company behind the file sharing service Morpheus) CEO Michael Weiss. PersonalWeb is actually owned by Brilliant Digital (see above). Weiss was CEO at the time of the acquisition.

After the acquisition, PersonalWeb began suing major tech companies: Amazon, Caringo, Dropbox, EMC, Google, NEC, NetApp, VMware and YouTube. As noted by a commenter, complaints have also been filed against Nexsan, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple and IBM.

PersonalWeb is registered in East Texas, an infamous haven for patent lawsuits.

When it’s not busy filing lawsuits, the company develops StudyPods a “social learning platform” that enables students to upload notes and collaborate. Students can upload assignments to StudyPod and the app will search for related notes and documents to help the student with their research. To do this it uses natural language processing, and the company cites many patents that it holds in this area. The PersonalWeb site says the company is also applying these patents to the enterprise. The complaint also lists a PersonalWeb product called Global File Registry, a digital content management system for copyright protection.

Although the complaint is focused on technology in use at GitHub, the complaint targets Rackspace, GitHub’s host. “Rackspace further contributes to and induces others to manufacture, use, sell, import,and/or offer for sale these infringing products and services,” it reads.

What kind of precedent would it set if companies were found to be infringing just by hosting other companies’ applications?

Here’s the complaint, via PriorSmart:

PersonalWeb Technologies et. al. v. Rackspace et. al.

The patents in question are:

• Data processing system using substantially unique identifiers to identify data items, whereby identical data items.
• Identifying and requesting data in network using identifiers which are based on contents of data
• Enforcement and policing of licensed content using content-based identifiers
• Controlling access to data in a data processing system
• De-duplication of data in a data processing system
• Similarity-based access control of data in a data processing system
• Distributing and accessing data in a data processing system
• Computer file system using content-dependent file identifiers
• Accessing data in a data processing system

You’ve heard of Kickstarter and IndieGoGo and I’m sure you’ve heard of plenty of other crowdfunding startups. But clearly there was a gap in the market waiting to be filled. That gap was farms. Yes, farms, ladies and gentlemen. Thus I give you Fquare (no, that’s no Square misspelled), a brand-new “Agriculture Crowdfunding Platform.” Yes, really. But hold everything. There’s more to this than meets the eye.

Frankly when I saw the release about Fquare’s launch I thought it would be about crowdfunding for… I don’t know… food? Buying cows? Anyways, it turns out it’s about something pretty cool for struggling farmers out there. This is about investing in farmland and potentially keeping hard-pressed farmers on the land in a totally new way.

Here’s the scenario. A farmer can’t keep up the payments on the farm or wants a new lifestyle. They decide to sell the farm. But instead of selling it to another farmer or for real estate, they sell it to ‘the crowd’ of investors on Fquare. The farmer agrees to pay investors up to 6 percent interest annually for up to 20 years. If the funds are raised successfully through crowdfunding, the farmer becomes the tenant and the investors the landlord.

On the investor side, Fquare collects rent from the farmer every month and distributes the rent payment to investors accordingly, depending on the amount of shares owned. Investors can sell their shares to other investors via the Fquare secondary market. Each year, investors vote to either hold onto farmland or list it for sale by a real estate broker. Hopefully the former.

Charles Polanco, founder and CEO of Fquare, reckons cash leases on farmland will return on average 5 percent in net annual income on Fquare.

So there you have it. Crowdfunding for farms.

Your suggestions for the next area to be disrupted by crowdfunding are now required in the comments.

RIM has licensed the exFAT file system from Microsoft. This will enable BlackBerry devices to handle files larger than 4GB.

exFAT (Extended File Allocation Table) was designed by Microsoft specifically for flash drives, including memory sticks and SD cards. It offers compatibility between flash drives and the file systems found on Windows and OSX. However, there is no Linux support.

According to The Register other companies that have licensed the technology include Sharp, Panasonic, SANYO, Sony, and Canon.

Microsoft and RIM have become classic “frenemies.” Windows Phone 7 competes directly with BlackBerry, and last year Microsoft announced that System Center 2012 Configuration Manager would have device management features that compete with the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES). But Redmond has also partnered with Waterloo to bring BES to Office 365.

Earlier today RIM announced that it is shutting down the popular calendaring service Tungle, which it acquired last year, to build a BlackBerry-only app, much to the chagrin of its users.

Editor’s note: James Gross is co-founder of Percolate, a marketing company with a mission to help brands create content at a social scale. Follow him on Twitter: @James_Gross. 

There’s been much buzz around the term “native advertising” lately. And with the buzz has come a bit of backlash, and it’s been mostly from publishers who are looking at the native solutions for their sites and saying it is nothing more than a banner ad in a different spot.

If we are going to move the advertising industry forward, and if we believe in the concept that Internet advertising can look like something other than a banner, then we must better define why we’re in the state we’re in. The criticism of native advertising is important and merited, but examining publishers’ solutions to native advertising is like studying the effect; let’s better understand the cause.

Native Advertising’s Secret Sauce

Native advertising is comprised of two major shifts, both of which are being led by social platforms. First, native is defined by the users (people + brands) who create content using the same tools and streams. Second, native paid placement is interwoven. There’s no separate box: all messages — ad or not — are formatted the same way. The key is you need both of these shifts in order to truly create native advertising.

This shift is not easy to understand and it is even harder to execute well. We’ve come from a world where Interactive Advertising Bureau display ads dominated the digital advertising industry. Now we are moving to a world where we’re saying that every opportunity for brands to communicate with consumers will be native to the platform. (LinkedIn’s latest design refresh signals that the total end for banners in social is near. Even the lone social platform holdout with IAB-standard ads is aggressively pushing to a native model, too.)

Let’s look at Facebook as another example: any brand (we’ll use Starbucks for argument’s sake) uses the exact same Facebook Timeline as I do. There is really no difference except for the brand’s ability to build what’s essentially an infinitely large audience and send a message to them whenever they want. In this new world, fans and distribution are a function of cost. Starbucks’ opportunity comes from its marketing budget, which is something I, as an individual, don’t have the means to duplicate. This business model and behavior is the same on all social platforms, whether it’s Twitter, Tumblr or LinkedIn (and we can assume Pinterest and Instagram will follow): Pay to build an audience and deliver content like everybody else.

So how can you possibly scale native advertising? This is a real challenge and it needs to be solved for the giant social platforms to succeed as well as for traditional publishers to begin to implement native strategies.

I try not to ask people to sympathize with brands when they complain about silly Facebook updates or lame tweets, and we all now have the Condescending Facebook Brand Page to get a chuckle at. But consider for a moment that brands have grown used to creating TV commercials a few times per year and are now expected to create 10 to 50 pieces of content per day to support an always-on social strategy. This is extremely challenging, and unlike what others might say, brands are not people, and these platforms have natively been optimized for people.

Lending A Branding Hand

We need to get to the root of the native ad problem to help brands create content that will resonate with their audiences. Here are a few ways to solve this for brands:

1. To create content in real time you have to consume content in real time. Brands don’t do that naturally, so they need to learn how to. The more they learn how to do this, the more real-time and culturally relevant they can be to their audiences in social and on a publisher’s website.
2. Once a brand learns to create content in real time, it then needs to work on its voice and grow naturally as it learns from what works and why.
3. The final step and the ultimate promise is to allow a brand to take the content that works — with the vast audiences in the millions that they now reach across social channels — and apply it to all their advertising. This could be brand-led posts on specific publisher sites, a potential native solution for digital publishers, or even bigger pieces of content such as TV commercials.

Native advertising is here to stay. Let’s define it correctly and make it the movement that finally makes digital advertising great.

[Image: OPENforum]

LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock partner Reid Hoffman has become known for giving solid advice — both to the entrepreneurs in which he invests, as well as the general public with his recent book The Startup Of You. So when he came backstage at Disrupt SF earlier this week after his fireside chat with Michael Arrington, we just had to ask him: What is some bad advice that people often give to entrepreneurs that they should ignore?

According to Hoffman, one big mistake is listening to others talk too much about making money. He said:

“People frequently try to talk about business models too early. The question comes down to, when you’re a seed stage company people say, ‘Well what’s your business model?’ And the answer is, a seed stage consumer company, you hopefully have some puzzle pieces and you’re thinking about what the business model might be, but if you say it with confidence, you’re wrong. because most often those change.”

We also asked about why he thinks LinkedIn has had a more well-received initial public offering than, say, Facebook. His answer was that it mostly comes down to expectations:

“I think we benefited from the fact that we never had a period in our lives when we were described as the ‘total world killer.’ So, no one every had this expectation of us that it was like, the whole world’s gonna change when we IPO [or] a year after we IPO. And so it’s been easier for us to beat people’s expectations for us.”

It’s really just a pleasure to talk to Hoffman, so watch the entire video above to hear him also discuss which young entrepreneur he’s most excited about (hint, he hails from Sweden), what is on his ten-year-plan, and more.

Continuing our look back at the SF Disrupt conference video highlights, Tuesday featured the standing-room only interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. In his first interview since the IPO, he called his stock performance disappointing and talked about his biggest mistake. Investors focused on the positive comments, including progress in the mobile business, and Facebook’s market value soared $6.785 billion after the speech. It might be the first nearly $7 billion interview.

Besides Zuckerberg, many other founders and entrepreneurs made news earlier in the day. Kevin Rose denied a leaked memo from Paul Graham that claimed Google Ventures was lowballing valuations. Benchmark Capital’s Matt Cohler told Michael Arrington he hasn’t made any startup investments this year. And Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff talked about how he thinks Google “squandered its enterprise opportunity.”

Another 15 startups presented their demos in the last 3 Battlefield sessions. The first company to present, YourMechanic, wound up winning the Disrupt Cup. It seems like going first helps, as the first company to present the day before was the runner-up.

For a look at the videos from Disrupt on Monday, check here. If you don’t have time to watch the entire Zuckerberg interview, you can cruise thru the featured sound bites here. SnappyTV put together a video player based on the tweets from Crunchfund’s MG Siegler during the Zuckerberg interview, that you can check out here.