Category: Tech news

This being Shark Week and all, budding super villains may be interested in this 1.25W laser from WickedLasers. This monstrous slab of electronics sends out a beam powerful enough to pop multiple balloons and looks like a light saber. It would look great on your shark’s head.

The 1.25W version of the WickedLasers Spyder S3 costs $399.95 and require eye protection to operate.

If you’re tempted, please remember that these are not toys. We’ve reviewed a few of these things over the years and they’re some serious ordnance. I very nearly burned my cornea once because I was being a doofus. Practice safe lasing, kids.

Nir Eyal writes 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 him on Twitter @nireyal.

A few years ago, everyone was clicking. Today, we’re all scrolling. Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, and as of this week, Instagram and Medium – it seems everyone is getting on the infinite scroll bus. What is it about this magical design pattern that has so many consumer web companies using it?

Not too long ago, users were forced to reload pages to progress from one piece of content to the next. Web designers were advised against creating websites with information appearing “below the fold”, the portion of the page underneath what is displayed on the screen. As mobile phones and tablets gained wider adoption, it looked like the swipe might become standard fare. But that’s all changed now. Today, designers are dumping the click and flick and opting for the scroll for one simple reason – it works.

The Endless Search

The infinite scroll is interaction design’s answer to our penchant for endlessly searching for novelty. Certainly, there are technical reasons for the scroll’s increasing ubiquity. The rise of dynamic content, like a new comment entering the feed, necessitated a better solution than pagination built for static content. But to really understand why the scroll works so well requires a brief trip inside the mind and back in time.

Our brains evolved through the millennia into incredible prediction machines, designed to help us make sense of our environment. Our species benefited from our ability to make good decisions based on what we know is likely to happen in the future, thus, keeping us alive long enough to make babies and spread our genes.

To make correct predictions, the brain accesses memories, which allow us to deduce what’s coming next in an nearly instantaneous process of pattern recognition. The ability to learn is simply the conditioning of the brain to recognize cause and (blank).

You were expecting “effect” weren’t you? Of course you were. That’s because your brain has learned that these two words, “cause” and “effect”, tend to go together.

It’s this conditioning that creates cognitive shortcuts and habits, allowing us to process tremendous amounts of information all at once. Our brains move known causal patterns to long-term storage so that our attention can be devoted to learning new things.

And nothing holds our attention better than the unknown. The things that captivate, engross, and entertain us, all have an element of surprise. Our brains can’t get enough of trying to predict what’s next and our dopamine system kicks into high-gear when we’re waiting to know if our team will make the field goal, how the dice will land, or how the movie plot ends. Like a loose slot machine, the infinite scroll gives users fast access to variable rewards.

Interestingly, our brain isn’t wired to seek pleasure alone. In fact, much of our motivation comes from alleviating the pain of desire. Dopamine levels spike when we’re just about to find reward and plummet after we receive it. To get us to do just about anything, evolution uses this chemical cascade to induce anticipation, motivation, and finally pain alleviation. Somehow we call this endless merry-go-round “fun.”

Once You Pop

Few other methods for displaying information produce the curiosity to see what’s next like the infinite scroll. Like coffee and chocolate, the infinite scroll pairs particularly well with another increasingly-used design pattern, the masonry grid layout made famous by Pinterest. Cliff Kuang, editor of Co.Design, wrote, “… the Pinterest-style grid forces the eye to zig-zag through content, slowing down your scrolling but packing more images onto the screen at any given point.”

The barrage of enticing content speeds users up, enticing them to scroll, while the grid slows them down, retaining their attention and moderating their thirst for more and more stimulation. The visual tension is mesmerizing and addictive. Don’t believe me? I dare you to go to the Pinterest homepage and not feel tempted to scroll just once. It’s like opening a can of digital Pringles.

To Mobile and Back

The infinite scroll has benefited both mobile and web interfaces as designers seize the opportunity to make consistent experiences across both versions of their products. Once users learn how to use a product, they form habits related to their expectations of how the service works. It is here that design becomes a competitive advantage as users find it difficult to switch to a competitor’s product because it “feels weird” even if its functionally works just as well.

Recently, the tail wags the dog as the constraints of the mobile experience influence the design of websites accessed on large screens. Creating an interface optimized for mobile and porting these interface decisions to the web, makes good sense given the projections that mobile is becoming the primary way people access the Internet. While certainly not perfect for every scenario, its efficient use of the mobile screen, ability to load dynamic content, and addictive characteristics, means we’ll all be doing a lot more scrolling.

Photo credit: Alex E. Proimos

Here is a high-end dive watch to consider if you like that Captain Nemo look. It is called the Octopus, and is from avant garde Swiss watch brand Romain Jerome (RJ). Those familiar with the Romain Jerome Titanic DNA collection of watches will recognize the styling of this new Octopus diver.

The number 8 plays throughout the piece. There’s a unique octopus engraving on the back of the case, 888 feet of water resistance, and they’ll sell only 888 pieces in the limited edition. There are even eight special screws. One feature we love is the “suction cup” style inner part of the rubber strap. Decidedly strange looking, Romain Jerome knows that they are designing and producing polarizing products. People with a strong sense that their watch needs to say something about themselves tend to find watches like this appealing. The RJ Octopus will come in a few styles and each contains a Swiss automatic mechanical movement. You can check out my deeper look over here or just save up your pennies to buy this $10K piece.

Hipset is a music discovery site launching today from Y Combinator’s Tracks.by that makes sure you never miss the hot new songs, videos, and other content from the artists you Like on Facebook — updates which the social network might not show in your feed.

If launched on its own, Hipset would just be a fun site for listeners. But while disarmingly simple, it’s the culmination of Tracks.by’s year-long master plan to shake up the music marketing industry. Here’s how Hipset is going to rock you.

The site launched this morning so you can go check it out Hipset now. Once you auth in with Facebook, you’ll find a single Pinterest-style grid view of all the recent posts by all the musicians you Like. That’s something you can’t get on Facebook, which deems most updates from musicians less critical than those by your friends so they’re filtered out of the feed.

In case you’re looking for a laid-back reel of concert clips and studio performances you can sort Hipset by content type, plus you can view dedicated pages for any artist. There’s also a popular feed where you can see algorithmic and human-curated picks for the best new music. With Spotify putting history’s music catalogue at your fingertips, there’s a big opportunity for Hipset to tell us what we should be listening to.

Yeah, it’s cool, but here’s how it fits into Tracks.by’s grand scheme. For the last year, its ex-Ustream founders Mazy Kazerooni and Matt Schlicht have been signing digital marketing deals to build apps and run the Facebook Pages of top artists like Lil Wayne and Drake. It also scored a seed round from investors like Dave Morin, Greylock’s Josh Elman, Menlo Ventures, and Wayne’s manager Cortez Bryant. But all the while they wanted to launch a destination site.

That’s fortunate, because the Facebook Timeline redesign cutting traffic to tab applications by up to 90%, forcing fellow developers like Bandpage to diversify beyond Facebook. If not for repping big celebrities, getting the standalone site Hipset off the ground might be tough. But Matt and Mazy are friends with all these artists and management companies, and can call in favors. So Tracks.by artists including Wayne (aka Weezy F Baby who has 40 million Facebook Likes) are going to promote their Hipset pages.

Why? Because Hipset is deeply tied into Facebook’s Open Graph. It might be a bit aggressive, but it shares to your friends every time you open a post or view a video. That means it makes artists go viral better than if people watched those same videos on YouTube.com, so thats where they want their fans going. Tracks.by will also help artists send email alerts to their fans when the have big announcements like a new single.

Hipset lets Tracks.by own the marketing channel, sucking up huge data sets and filling in where record labels are failing. With the added email marketing features and the power to massage the Popular feed, Tracks.by has the leverage attract more top-tier artists to its service arm.

And then come the ads. Tracks.by controls the feed and knows what artists you Like, so it could easily inject sponsored blocks into the grid view. If a label wants to promote the new Jay-Z single, it could inject a sponsored block featuring his music video into the feed of anyone who Likes Lil Wayne. And Hipset will let brands sponsor downloads of songs, so you could get the Drake single before its released by Liking Pepsi or watching one of its commercials.

So essentially, Tracks.by uses its connections to promote Hipset that seduces clients to its marketing service that sells ads on Hipset. That’s some evil genius-level business.

In the end, it still comes down to product quality, and the design of Hipset is still v1. If it isn’t sticky and sharable, none of this will pan out. Hipset needs to be more than just a better way to browse Facebook music updates. It needs great discovery of new artists, deals to pull in exclusive content, and viral hooks like stats you can publish about what favorite bands you and your best friends have in common.

Whether you want to be the first person on you block to hear that killer new song, or you want a more intimate connection with the artist who made up, Hipset’s got the hook up.

Editor’s note: Apoorva Mehta is the founder of YC-backed Instacart, a startup that’s taking on 1-hour grocery delivery. He previously worked on supply chain infrastructure at Amazon.com.

Getting into Y-Combinator is hard enough; but getting in two months late and as a single founder is almost impossible. This is how I hacked my way in.

It was June, and I decided to apply to Y-Combinator. I always wanted to go through the intense program, and I knew that getting in would dramatically improve the chances that Instacart would succeed. But there was a problem: I missed the application deadline. By over two months.

The Plan

I knew that if the Y-Combinator partners experienced my product first hand, they’d have to let me join. So I hatched a plan to get in touch with them. I pinged every YC alumni in my network looking for introductions to the YC partners for a meeting.

Within 24 hours I had several introductions to YC partners and things were looking pretty good. All I had to do now was wait for at least one of them to be interested enough to meet with me.

Then the responses started to arrive. One by one, each of Y-Combinator’s partners told me the same thing. “No way.” It was too late to enter the current batch, and I would have to apply again in the next batch.

In the final rejection email from Garry Tan, one of the YC partners, I found a glimmer of hope. “You could submit a late application, but it will be nearly impossible to get you in now.”

That meant it was possible!

I put together an application, and made a video describing my product. I waited for a response, and several days later I got one: another “No.”

The Hack

As I thought about this final rejection, I realized that so far, no one had seen my product in action. Did they even know what I was doing, and why it was different? I was determined to make one last effort to convince YC that I was worthy.

I opened my app and placed an order for one six pack of beer. I addressed it to Garry Tan at Y-Combinator’s headquarters. John, one of my drivers, handled the order and sent me a text letting me know when he was done.

Half an hour later I got a call from Garry. “What is this?” Garry asked. “This is Instacart!” I exclaimed. Garry asked me to come to Y-Combinator the next day to explain my company in more detail. I was so excited, I barely slept that night.

The Meeting

The next day, I arrived at the meeting location. I faced four YC partners and a barrage of questions about how my business worked and why it would succeed. We talked for almost an hour, but it felt like just a few minutes. I answered questions non-stop.

When our chat was over, I was asked to leave, and told that if they chose to fund me, I’d receive a call. This is standard practice for Y-Combinator, but at the time it felt cold, like there was no chance I would be accepted. It felt like the string of “no’s” would only continue.

Ten minutes passed. My phone rang. “Hello, this is Harj from Y-Combinator. I can’t believe we’re doing this. We haven’t let anyone in this late. Ever. But if you’re interested, we would love to have you. Call me back.”

Wow! I had done it! I reflected for a few minutes, and then called Harj back. Of course I would accept.

Fast Forward

It’s now two months later, and demo day is fast approaching. Thanks to YC, I’m working with the most impressive entrepreneurs and investors in Silicon Valley.

I learned a lot during Y-Combinator, but most importantly I learned that I’ll never take “No” for an answer again.

The Gillmor Gang — Keith Teare, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — huffed and puffed but could not blow Twitter’s house down. The social startup is betting we’ll still keep tweeting no matter how gated the community becomes, and with Facebook only worth some 40 billion, Jack and Dick may be right. Besides, push notifications make the clients irrelevant anyway.

Three weeks in, @scobleizer has given away his Nexus 7, with @kteare the only holdout. I can’t believe how much time I’ve switched over to the pocket tablet, but soon enough we’ll learn Apple’s response with iPhone the next. With our director on vacation I’ll have to watch the show to catch the rest of the conversation, as I found it impossible to talk and switch at the same time. And thanks, NBC, for pushing The Who out of prime time. Meet the new boss…

@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kevinmarks, @kteare, @jtaschek

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

We are in the midst of a great revolution in the payments space: anyone with a phone can now accept credit cards; online-to-offline commerce is allowing online payment for offline purchase and significant friction is being removed from the consumer purchase experience thanks to mobile. All of this innovation (read: competition), combined with government intervention, means that payment fees are falling, threatening revenue streams for incumbents and startups alike in the payments space. But a broader opportunity exists: using the data of payments to build a more valuable, more defensible business model, one not dependent on fees. The result will revolutionize offline commerce and online advertising.

Today: It’s All About Fees, and They’re Heading Towards Zero

Payment companies make money by charging fees to “process” a payment from buyer to seller. Square charges 2.75% (or $275/month for volume up to $250K/year). PayPal Here charges 2.7%, as does Intuit GoPayment. Groupon and Amazon are both supposedly working on their own dongles, and prices will continue to fall, especially as these new devices create “one-sided” networks without significant defensibility outside of switching cost and inertia. “Pay with Square” is a potential game changer, as the millions of Square user accounts can ONLY be used with Square. But basic “acceptance of credit cards” is becoming a commodity where prices will keep going down.

Competition between payment companies is only one leg of inevitable downward pricing pressure. Government intervention is the other. Not too long ago, the Australian government decided that payment fees were too high, so now most Australian merchants pay less than .5% for credit card swipes, a fraction of the cost here in the US. The European Union is likely to enact similar legislation. The Durbin Amendment of Dodd-Frank and the $6B+ (pending) Brooklyn Settlement are US-based government and civil attacks on the business of payment fees. Many of these fee-cutting regulations help intermediaries like PayPal and Square short term, by reducing their cost (owed to the Visa/MasterCard infrastructure), but eventually it limits what they can charge, too.

Wherever fees end up, most merchants will still dislike paying them. They are a “cost of doing business” that every merchant has an incentive to bring down. Payment companies generally aren’t delivering new customers; they’re taxing the flow of existing ones. Google effectively charges 20-30% to deliver a customer (if you back out the cost-per-click to percentage of realized sale) to an ecommerce merchant, yet merchants are competing to hand Google more money because each dollar “in” produces more than a dollar “out.” Payment companies charge a fraction of Google, but are often despised (witness the lawsuits and legislation) or treated with promiscuous disrespect.

It comes down to something rather simple: Connecting the bank accounts of buyers and sellers will never be as valuable nor defensible as connecting buyers and sellers. Google delivers customers at the top of the funnel, and payment companies serve the prosaic, but necessary, task of shuffling funds at the end.

Tomorrow: Payment Data Will Revolutionize Commerce & Advertising

As society goes increasingly cashless, payment companies will have a larger business, and a more valuable one, in closing the loop for offline transactions and helping deliver customers. The data they possess is without equal; did somebody buy something? How much did he spend? What did she buy? Paper money cannot be tracked in this manner. In order for Online-to-Offline commerce to take flight, every merchant needs an ability to track online/mobile action to offline purchase, and PayPal Here, Square, GoPayment and others could provide just this for a whole new class of small merchants.

Imagine that Wendy’s, or even a local handyman, wants to advertise on the Internet. What’s the point? What does a click, or an impression, really mean? It’s clear what it means online, since every click can be measured to “action” (e.g., purchase) for an ecommerce company. Who can tell Wendy’s, or the local handyman, if that online advertisement worked?

In an increasingly cashless society, the answer is pretty clear: the payment infrastructure. Tracking that purchase back to the originating source (Google? Yelp? Patch? etc) is known as “closing the loop” and will revolutionize offline commerce and advertising alike.

The million-plus merchants walking around with Square, PayPal Here, and GoPayment dongles want more customers, and these dongles provide a means to “close the loop” and let those merchants acquire more customers, remarket to those customers, understand those customers, and do everything that ecommerce companies have taken for granted for over a decade. Legacy POS systems were poorly integrated and insufficiently verticalized, often requiring a merchant to have separate relationships with every player in the payment chain (hardware vendor, merchant bank, CRM system, etc); moreover, they were priced out of reach of the sole proprietor.

Beyond closing the loop, payment companies can utilize data from existing transactions to generate more transactions. Companies who maintain a direct relationship with the consumer — such as American Express, PayPal, Square, Discover, etc — are in the perfect position to serve as an Amazon recommendation system for “everything.” You bought a tennis racket at Sports Authority? How about tennis lessons with Saul the tennis pro, at a discount thanks to your purchase of a tennis racket, only redeemable with the same payment instrument? You weren’t searching for Saul, and you wouldn’t want an unsolicited email from Saul, but seeing an advertisement for Saul shortly after buying a tennis racket (say, on your purchase receipt) would likely produce a response. It’s a way to preeempt search for a large class of “secondary” purchases (e.g., charcoal after buying a grill; tennis balls after buying a tennis racket, etc), in a “pull” based way.

None of this is to say that the fees charged today are wholly unreasonable and unconscionable; they’re just not long-term defensible as more parties offer the same conduits to existing credit card infrastructure. I have $40 cash and five credit cards in my wallet right now, so any merchant wanting to charge $100 for some widget can either get 97.25% of $100 (if using Square), or $0. That’s an easy decision and shows why things like Square and PayPal Here are hugely beneficial to merchants and consumers alike. But longer term, as those fees continue to compress to the benefit of merchants, the larger business will be in applying the data of payments to the benefit of merchants, consumers, and payment providers alike.

Image via stevendepolo 

Editor’s note: Derek Andersen is the founder of Startup Grind, a 20-city event series hosted around the world to help educate, inspire, and connect entrepreneurs. He’s an ex-Electronic Arts employee, as well as the founder of Commonred and Vaporware Labs.

Until a few weeks ago I’d never met Dave McClure. Like many of you I have read all about him, casually Twitter followed him, and personally censored many of his YouTube videos over the past few years. After attending 500 Startups Demo Day earlier this month I was really impressed by the founders and their products which were as good or better than any I’ve seen. The person I shook hands with at the end of that day was a soft spoken, humble guy who seems to be in full grind mode pushing 500 Startups to a new level. Last week I interviewed him at Startup Grind in Palo Alto.

It was a nice week for McClure and the family. 500 Startups had just had its second anniversary, McClure was celebrating his 46th birthday, and one of his earliest investments, Wildfire, had sold to Google for $350MM. Prior to that he wrote two widely talked about blog posts, one on Techcrunch about women in tech investing more, and another where he talked candidly about his entrepreneurial journey and struggle. In April he raised a fresh $50MM fund adding two new partners, and Forbes named 500 Startups one of the top-10 Startup Incubators and Accelerators in the world. It’s been a good few months.

The Journey To 500 Startups

Dave grew up in West Virginia and Maryland where his father was an elementary school music teacher. After slugging through classes and graduating with an engineering and computer science degree at John Hopkins University, he took various programming roles, which led him to the West Coast where he founded his own consulting company called Aslan Computing. It was eventually acquired for under $1MM in what Dave described as, “spending 5-7 years doing a ton of work, for not very much money. It was more like a paid MBA and I wish I’d had that 5-7 years compressed to 1-2 years.” He adds, “There were a lot of things I learned that I would not have gotten as employee 300 at Paypal.”

He joined Paypal in 2001 as a Marketing Director rubbing shoulders with future founders of Valley staples like LinkedIn, Yammer, YouTube, and Yelp. As Dave put it, he’s been ”a witness to genius.” Following stints working with Mint, SimplyHired, and Stanford as a lecturer, he joined Sean Parker at Facebook fbFund in 2008 where he helped close more than 40 investments including Wildfire, Twilio, Bitly, and TaskRabbit.

The details of 500 Startups founding in 2010 are still not totally clear. On Quora Dave explains, “One day a beautiful little unicorn farted, and next thing you know our star was born.” He neither confirmed nor denied this in person (watch the clip above). But what is clear is that it has exploded doing +360 startup investments across the globe. While 500 Startups is often compared to Y Combinator or TechStars, Dave points out those incubators were founded in 2005 and 2006 and have a 4-5 year head start. How quickly McClure’s fund, or as he calls it “startup,” has come into its own is evidenced no better than Dave’s absence in the infamous “Paypal Mafia” story of 2007 when he was relatively unknown, and thus overlooked.

Incubators and Investment Strategy

500 Startups focuses on engineering, design, and marketing. They do a design and UX review within the first two weeks. Generally they invest in 20-25 companies in the incubator program twice each year emphasizing that companies in the program actually work in their office space together in Mountain View. Dave found that with their first batch, “Five companies were amazing, five were miserable, and 5-10 were pretty good. We think the 5-10 that were pretty good got better because they were around the amazing companies. The amazing companies were amazing regardless. The second group models behavior after the first group and they level up.” Another thing that makes 500 unique is that they also invest in companies incubated at YC, TechStars, and others.

500 Startups is doing about 150 investments per year, funding about three companies each week. Why so many investments? As Dave explains it, the typical VC model theory is to invest in 30 companies over 4-years, take board seats, follow on investments with the winners, and ride a few to billion dollar exits and great returns. But usually that’s not what happens. “Most investors think they’re awesome. We don’t think we’re that smart,” Dave says. “But we think somewhere north of 75-100 investments per fund you start to get to predictability. We see who is successful, who figures it out, and invest more with them. Most VCs are thinking too small. There are thousands of ‘small’ businesses, $10MM-$25MM revenue businesses that solve real problems. Give me the rest of the long tail. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning for a viral loop.”

Want an invitation to join? Like most Silicon Valley firms they are referral based. But 500 Startups has a network of 180 mentors and 600 founders that have gone through the program. Get a few of these people to vet and vouch for you, and you will likely get an interview with the team. Ways not to get funded? Wear a banana suit to a Startup Grind tech event and wave a banner with your URL, as we experienced firsthand at Dave’s event.

International and Women

Unlike many VC funds, 500 Startups focuses on international investments as well as female founders. “300MM people live in the US. There are 6.5B outside of it.” What special components do these international entrepreneurs have? Dave says simply with hundreds of millions of people speaking Spanish, Arabic, Mandarin, Hindi, and others it creates opportunties to disrupt markets using learnings from Silicon Valley. They are focused on transaction commerce businesses, subscription businesses, and lead generation businesses using the following formula:

(# Language Block Speakers) * (Current Internet Penetration) * (Average GPD) * (Growth Rates of Language Population)

One final focus for 500 Startups is women founders, investors, and CEOs. Of their 15 employees, seven of them are female and while Dave says there’s not been a conscious effort to hire women, it reinforces their focus. They have funded +50 female CEOs and +100 female founders. Dave has encouraged women in tech to put their money into the arena was widely praised. As part of that, 500 Startups’ WIN Challenge is calling on anyone to make three $5K investments over the next year. Dave says it’s for anyone, but they’re pushing women to do it. So far they have about 120 females signed up for the challenge meaning at least $1.8MM has been committed.

Will these unconventional strategies payoff big returns and massive new disruptive companies down the road? It will be interesting to watch 500 Startups evolution and growth over the next few years as they hit their 500th startup next year and extend beyond that. But now after a 20-year tech career with no end in sight, Dave is on the horizon of what could be his first major founding and financial win. As he wrote on his blog a month ago, “I’m still betting my epitaph will read “late bloomer”, and not “failure”.”

Last week Wikileaks–remember them?–released a sheaf of documents about the Trapwire security system, which, depending on who you believe, is either a network of cameras being used to spy on everyone everywhere, or an ineffective bust more notable for shady business practices than any successful surveillance.

Is it being used for “monitoring every single person via facial recognition“? Probably not. Doesn’t matter. Let’s not kid ourselves: the point is that as cameras get cheaper and more connected and more ubiquitous, facial recognition gets more accurate, and data-mining software gets better, something like conspiracy theorists’ worst nightmarish fantasies of Trapwire will come to pass. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: this is only a matter of time, and not all that much of it.

Little pieces of the panopticon are already being built all around you. Even the New York Times has noticed this. PrivacySOS has a pretty good summary, too, but seeing as how it’s a whole week old, it’s already quite out of date:

6th circuit today: Gov can ping location of prepaid phones w/o warrant. // 25% of Americans use prepaid phones. (pdf) ca6.uscourts.gov/opinions.pdf/1…—
Christopher Soghoian (@csoghoian) August 14, 2012

Oh, and in case the prospect of ubiquitous cameras with automatic facial recognition connected to enormous databases aren’t enough–if even the ‘floating eye’ military spy blimps now being used to patrol America’s borders, and the surveillance drones being adopted en masse by police forces everywhere, are not yet sufficient to trigger a certain baseline level of paranoia in you–just remember that governments everywhere are busy trying to hack into computers, too.

Consider Duqu, and Flame, and Gauss, and that mysterious payload. Consider FinFisher, described as “Governmental IT Intrusion and Remote Monitoring Solutions” by its distributors Gamma International; recently deconstructed by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, its spoor has been discovered in at least 10 countries to date. Then consider what their successors will look like in five years’ time.

We could and hopefully will build more secure computers, but there’s not a lot we can do about the oncoming surveillance society. The tech is simply getting too good too fast. But for our future to be anything other than dystopian, this surveillance has to be two-way. It may be too much to ask that the powerful have less privacy than the powerless, but at the very least, governments must be at least as subject as their citizens to transparency and surveillance. Of course there are things that they should be able to keep secret–but the same is true of those they govern.

Instead, even relatively enlightened governments are becoming, if anything, more secretive than ever. Did you know that the Obama administration has persecuted more whistleblowers than every other presidency in history combined? Did you know that (PDF) government security classification activities alone cost more than $10 billion a year? These are not exactly statistics that fill me with hope for our panopticon future. In the name of so-called security, we’re charging headlong into a future filled with one-way mirrors behind which the rich spy on the poor, and the strong on the weak. It’s a disconcerting thought.

Image credit: watchingfrogsboil, Flickr.

Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post by Jeffrey Shieh, a senior patent attorney at patent filing provider inovia. I (Alexia) actually completely disagree with him here. Oh well — I should probably just write a post about it.  Yay TechCrunch!

The tech giants are clearly at patent war – Nokia vs. Google, Apple’s lawsuits in China, and Facebook vs. Yahoo!, etc. And international patent protection is clearly a vital part of both these companies’ defensive and offensive competitive strategies. However, not much is said about how international patent protection does or should factor into the business strategies of startups.  But we know that for many startups, their innovations are the lifeblood of their company.  As such, it is vital for these companies to protect their innovations from competitors by securing intellectual property rights.

Patenting 101

The first place to start is by applying for a domestic patent.  A patent gives the holder an exclusive right to an invention for a set period of time.  Patents are country-specific and are limited to the borders of the issuing country.  For example, a U.S. patent does nothing to prevent infringement in any other country.  This is why it is imperative for startups to also seek as much international patent protection as their budgets can allow.

Unfortunately, foreign patent protection can be quite expensive.  Depending on the size and complexity of the application, the need for translations, and the country or countries an applicant chooses to file into, the lifetime costs for a single application can reach the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars.

However, international patent protection is not something that startups can afford to ignore.  After filing for U.S. patent, there is a limited timeframe available for applying for international patent protection.  So while a startup may only be operating in the U.S. today, if there’s a chance that they may be manufacturing in Asia, selling in Europe, or competing with a company in Australia in the future, they must act now to capitalize on that protection.  After all, once the timeframe for applying for international patent protection lapses, the applicant could be precluded from receiving a patent for their own invention.  Therefore, startups can’t delay filing and risk losing their IP just to receive some short term cost savings.

Cost Saving Strategies

With these challenges in mind, there are several best practices that startups can employ in order to help guide their foreign patent strategy and obtain broader patent protection, while minimizing costs.

First, you can file a PCT application instead of filing direct via the Paris convention.  If you think you will be filing into more than just 1 or 2 countries, the PCT is a more cost-effective route.  The PCT also offers the advantage of delaying national stage filing costs by at least 18 months from filing your PCT application.  Many applicants use this time to refine the invention, research their markets, and look for licensees or buyers.  If you’d like more information on the PCT process, my company inovia offers a helpful guide on the PCT process, which you can download here.

Second, you should select your countries intelligently.  Not only do you need to know your invention, you need to know where it will potentially be sold and where it can be made in the future.  With this information, you can prioritize the countries you need to file into.  Additionally, you need to know if a country has patent laws affecting your technology.  For example, some countries prohibit the patenting of methods of treatment on human or animal subjects.  Other countries make it very difficult to patent business methods or software.  For these jurisdictions, you may need to draft your claims specifically to overcome these obstacles.

Third, you should ace the patent application process.  I certainly wouldn’t expect a startup to know every detail involved with foreign filing, but by having a basic background understanding of the process, you can reduce your filing costs.  Knowing when deadlines are approaching and making sure to provide instructions in advance will help you avoid taking unnecessary time extensions or incurring rush charges.  Also, some jurisdictions (with Europe as the primary example) charge excess claims fees for each claim included in your application over a certain number.  If you are able to reduce your claims, you can avoid or reduce these fees.

Finally, you should explore your options for either bringing IP tasks in house or outsourcing them.  Depending on the amount of work you have in your patent portfolio, it may be more cost effective to pay the salary for an in-house patent attorney, rather than retain outside counsel.  Outsourcing certain services, such as foreign filing or annuity payments, can also be an easy way to reduce your legal fees.

Make sure to research your options for foreign filing and run cost comparisons.  Many steps of the foreign filing process, such as PCT national stage filing and European validation, are largely administrative and can easily be outsourced for a lower cost.  Specialist foreign filing providers, as opposed to working with your U.S. counsel to file internationally, can often offer time and cost savings.

Case Study

As I mentioned above, outsourcing administrative steps of the patent process, such as PCT national stage filing, is an effective way of reducing patent costs without affecting your relationship with outside counsel who would still handle the substantive work later on.

I head up inovia’s “Small Business Solutions Team,” which works exclusively with inventors and startups to help educate them on the foreign filing process, and I had the opportunity to work with a tech start-up focusing on holography for use in medicine, entertainment and advertising.  They were seeking broad protection into seven countries.  The startup did their due diligence and compared inovia’s pricing to estimates from their outside counsel and found inovia’s pricing to be significantly lower.

I can’t comment on whether this startup would have been able to file into all seven countries had they chosen to work with their U.S. counsel, but if they were constrained by their budget, then there’s a chance that they may have forgone vital international protection in order to cut costs.

The message here is simple: startups, while strapped for cash, must think long term and protect the future of their business by securing both domestic and international patent protection. By employing a few simple best practices, they can maximize their patent protection, while minimizing costs.

Image via.

On my last visit to Yahoo at the end of July, it was as if a dark cloud had been lifted. Employees enthuastically lined up to enter the cafeteria in the first week of “Free Lunch”. URL’s, Yahoo’s main cafeteria, was more packed than a typical Tuesday. Many expressed how excited they were about the future of their company.

“I used to worry about my team quitting; not anymore!” said an engineering manager with a big smile.

“I was looking for a job but I am going to stick around for a while!” exclaimed another employee. 

During the regrettable five month reign of former CEO Scott Thompson, Yahoos rarely saw him on campus. In stark contrast to her predecessor, new CEO Marissa Mayer is often spotted in the cafeteria and at FYI (Yahoo happy hours) every Friday when execs showcase their products. You’d be an idiot not to stay a little while, at least to take in the Marissa spectacle.

However, despite atmosphere of excitement due to the arrival of a morale-boosting celebrity CEO, a few Yahoo employees continue to feel trepidation about company strategy, or lack thereof. After all, it’s been more than eight months since the company had a clear direction to march toward, and it still doesn’t.

But it seems that the new executive is, smartly, taking a few cues from other well-respected founder-CEOs.

• When Marissa announced free lunch, she channeled the Apple founder by referencing “One More Thing” (Steve Jobs).
• She plans to review and approve each hire (Larry Page).
• She shuns PowerPoint and asks VPs to explain their products by drawing on the whiteboard (Jeff Bezos – when you present to Jeff, you write it in prose).
• AllThingsD reported that she’s hiring a COO to run the business side, freeing her up to focus on product and innovation (Mark Zuckerberg).

As a former Yahoo myself, it will be interesting to see what happens to the beleaguered company when a product-driven, consumer-focused CEO is running the show. I, for one, can’t wait to meet her at Disrupt SF.  I also look forward to the day when Marissa finally resolves the decade-old question – “Is Yahoo a technology or a media company?” Because she’s already banned, “What is Yahoo?”

Editor’s Note: Christine Ying is TechCrunch’s new product manager, who (obviously) used to work at Yahoo before she came to TC.

[Image credits: David Geller,

Andreas Weigend, James Duncan Davidson, Guillaume Paumier]

Apigee’s Sam Ramji pointed out to me today that Twitter did a first when communicating with developers yesterday about its new platform policies. For the first time in recent memory Twitter has used a graphic to actually illustrate what it sees as the acceptable and not so acceptable ways to use its API. The graphic is clear and to the point.

When you look at the graphic, one thing is for sure, Twitter wants nothing to do with the enterprise.

Here it is:

The blog post,  and the reaction, to the say the least, is a sure example of the delicate nature of developer relations.  It also reveals a lot about how Twitter sees its business.

Here’s Twitter’s spin. Do you want to develop  a consumer facing Twitter client? Well, you will be under some strict guidelines if so. But if you want to use Twitter for business, you are pretty much free and clear. So that means if you are analyzing tweets for sales people to get new leads then I’d say you are okay. If you want to develop a service that helps marketers target influencers then yes, go for it.

Twitter gives a few examples of what it sees as fine uses of its API:

In the upper-left quadrant are providers of tools that help businesses engage with Twitter including social CRM providers like Sprinklr, HootSuite and Radian6 (acquired by salesforce.com), and integration companies like Mass Relevance, which aggregates and filters Tweets for display on TV.

I’ll add a few others that I think are just fine:

SocialPandas launched this week. It will use data from Twitter and other sources to give sales people better tools for building relationships.

SugarCRM integrated Twitter last year.

Datasift is a powerful Twitter data analysis and business intelligence platform.

Twitter has no interest in the enterprise. For that matter, neither does Facebook.

But  as we well know, enterprise startups do very well when using Twitter and Facebooks as models. Case in point? Yammer sold to Microsoft for $1.2 billion.  Considering that success, I’d say it’s a good thing for the enterprise entrepreneur that Twitter has no interest in the enterprise side of APIs.

The daily deal model has seen better days, with the market shrinking and consolidating, and the market leader’s share price in the can. But one startup hopes that it differentiate its deal platform from the rest by offering consumers and merchants a deeper package that includes consumer-driven deals (CDDs), events and ticketing, while allowing people to give back to their favorite charities and non-profits.

The consumer-driven (or reverse) deal has been tried before without mind-blowing success, but SoRewarding thinks its holistic approach will have appeal to local businesses. We first covered the company last year, when it was just getting started under the name SoBiz10. Today, the company is officially announcing that it has relaunched as SoRewarding, sold 51 percent of its business to CardFree and is launching an events feature that brings a little Eventbrite to its suped-up reverse Groupon model.

The Colorado-based startup started out with the goal of turning the reverse deal screw further by reducing the time it takes consumers to propose (and merchants to approve) a deal by automating the whole process. Consumers can propose deals as a group or as an individual at their favorite local merchant, who are then notified of the deal and can view, nix or accept via automated application within a 24-hour time frame.

If it’s approved, it goes live in SoRewarding’s marketplace and members are notified. While it might sound like the tyranny of the consumer, SoRewarding thinks it can offset the seeming immediacy of this approach by giving merchants the opportunity to generate new and retain loyal customers through a larger revenue share — a set rate of 75 percent. (25 percent is the general norm for other coupon sites.)

On the merchant side, all businesses have to do to sign is create a profile to become a member. Once they’ve done so, they can add fine print, edit the deal, add banking info, and presto. The other cool part of this is that SoRewarding is in the process of building a network of non-profits, which consumers can choose to give a portion of deal profit to for each CDD.

The startup is currently working with about 30 non-profits (with more being added each day), including names like Make A Wish, Big Brothers/Big Sisters, etc. Obviously, the company thinks that this charitable aspect adds to its network and provides some additional meaning to the typical coupon-clipping nature of daily deals. Plus, it believes that this approach is a great way to reduce sales overhead and create a more cost-effective model for merchants. So far, the company has successfully launched deals with independent and large brands, like Whole Foods.

Today, the company is unveiling its new “Events” feature, which incorporates events into its reverse deal platform, allowing users to create an event at a local merchant and request a group deal for each of the attendees. For example, an event on SoRewarding for a birthday party at a local sushi restaurant, while requesting a deal for each person attending. Merchants receive an email notification and has 24-hours to accept, reject or counter-offer. If the deal is accepted, invitations are automatically sent out and attendees can RSVP and purchase the deal from the event page.

Events can be made public or private, with public events appearing on SoRewarding’s homepage for anyone to attend. The idea is to create a community where people can create events, find events, receive a discount and give back to the community while they do it.

The startup has also sold 51 percent of its business to CardFree, a private equity growth fund that focuses specifically on investing in companies that build engagement between restaurants and their customers. Besides SoRewarding, their current holding investments include Profit Streams, Restaurant Sciences, Snapfinger and ThriveSpot.

As to what’s next, founder Marion Mariathasan tells us that the company is expanding into ticketing, which will bring automation to the process of purchasing tickets to events, allowing people to buy tickets, drinks and concessions ahead of time (from their phone) without having to use their credit cards. It will be working closely with CardFree to do this, which focuses on the mobile experience and has investments in platforms that facilitate POS integration, etc.

The ticketing piece of the business is expected to launch in the next three weeks, along with SoRewarding’s iPhone and Android apps. SoRewarding’s deals are currently limited to Colorado, but in the next two months, the startup plans to launch in San Diego, Boston, Phoenix, Kansas City, Chicago and Austin.

For more, find SoRewarding at home here.

Facebook used to only let you set a single privacy setting for all your old profile photos, but now there’s a privacy widget on every past profile photo. This puts your Profile Photos album in a special category alongside Mobile Uploads that Facebook tells me “gives people more granular control” over photos you upload one at a time. More controls may translate into more willingness to upload photos.

Your current profile photo and cover photo are still public, though, so you might want to keep the beer and cleavage out of those.

All your other albums beyond Profile Photos and Mobile Uploads will only have a cross-album privacy setting that applies to every photo inside. The “Edit Album Privacy” button seen below was how the Profile Photos album previously functioned as well.

To make sure people undersand their newfound control, Facebook will be doing some education in the form of sidebar ads explaining the change and leading to the Help Center

It’s a big day for Facebook photo privacy, considering this morning it confirmed with Ars Technica that after years of criticism from privacy groups and blog, its new server system completely erases photos users click the “delete” button on.

With these new controls, users may be more willing to share shots of themselves because they know they’ll always be able to control their visibility individually, and they can nuke them if need be.

Twitter’s Michael Sippey announced a bunch of upcoming changes to the company’s API in a blog post today. We’ve already summarized the post, but here’s the big picture: Things are about to get tougher for developers of traditional Twitter client apps.

A lot of the new restrictions come under the category of “Developer Rules of the Road.” For example, developers will now have to follow the Display Guidelines rather than treating them as, well, guidelines. Also, applications that are pre-installed on mobile devices need to be approved by Twitter first.

Perhaps most significantly, apps that require more than 1 million individual “user tokens” will now have to work directly with Twitter. If you’re accessing certain services, such as the home timeline, that are “typically used by traditional client applications”, the threshold is 100,000 user tokens. If an existing app is already over the threshold, it can continue to operate, but once it doubles the user count that it has today, “You’ll be able to maintain your application to serve your users, but you will not be able to add additional users without our permission.” (Emphasis mine.)

Why all the new restrictions? Well, it sounds like Twitter isn’t really interested in supporting services that compete with its own client apps. That’s something the company has said before, and it’s something Sippey basically says again in the blog post, accompanied by a handy-dandy chart, which I’ve included at the top of this post. (Uh, the red letters are my addition.) If you’re in upper left, lower left, and lower right quadrants, you’re groovy. If you’re in the top right … not so much. Or at least, Sippey says the company is trying to “limit certain use cases” in that area. He writes:

In the upper right-hand quadrant are services that enable users to interact with Tweets, like the Tweet curation service Storify or the Tweet discovery site Favstar.fm.

That upper-right quadrant also includes, of course, “traditional” Twitter clients like Tweetbot and Echofon. Nearly eighteen months ago, we gave developers guidance that they should not build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience. And to reiterate what I wrote in my last post, that guidance continues to apply today.

To be clear, the post seems to be giving a thumbs up to services like Storify and Favstar, but not to the traditional Twitter clients.

As Sippey says, Twitter has been moving in this direction for a while. But to paraphrase Hunter Walk, this looks like the moment when the company rips off the Band Aid. It’s going to hurt some developers now, but hopefully it’s not just drawing out their pain.