Category: Tech news

Back in 2006, cloud computing company Joyent offered a lifetime subscription to bundle of hosting services for a one time fee of $500. Now, according to an e-mail sent to customers, Joyent is pulling the plug on those lifetime accounts. Customers are predictably upset, but not for the reasons you might expect.

Here’s what’s going on: Joyent acquired a web hosting company called TextDrive back in 2005. TextDrive was founded in 2004 by Dean Allen, creator of the content management systems Textile and TextPattern, and Jason Hoffman, who also co-founded Joyent. As Watts Martin explains, TextDrive sold lifetime subscriptions to customers to fund the company rather than raise venture capital. Customers felt like investors in the company. Drew McLellan wrote on Hacker News:

I was one of the original 200 to back TextDrive in with the VC200 accounts. The risk, of course, was that the venture wouldn’t be successful and we’d be laying out $200 for less than $200 worth of hosting. If they were successful, $200 would buy a reasonable shared hosting account for life.
Far from being naive and “falling” for the pricing model, my assessment was that
1) 200 shared hosting accounts (one server?) is a completely plausible lifetime offering for a successful hosting company, 2) $200 is a low risk punt, and 3) these are good guys and I think they can realistically make a go of it
TextDrive was a success, now continues to be a success as Joyent, and 200 shared hosting accounts (the state of play when I signed up) should be trivial for them to provide – even if they outsource that obligation to another provider.

Joyent followed that tradition and continued to offer lifetime accounts after it acquired TextDrive, including the above mentioned offer that said the services would be available “As long as we exist.”

It’s not that customers haven’t gotten their money’s worth. TextDrive shared hosting service was priced at $12 a month in 2006. That means five years of that service alone would be worth $720. Joyent went back on its word to offer the lifetime service “as long as we exist,” but that’s not the only issue here. The real issue is that the customers felt like investors, even if they didn’t have a formal investment relationship. Joyent has gone from a small hosting company to one of the big names in cloud computing and just closed $85 million round of funding last year. The people who helped them get to that point by putting up cash feel like they’re being left out in the cold.

I asked Joyent for comment and their representative pointed me to a forum post by Hoffman, who is now CTO of Joyent. “It’s ironic that our biggest advocates are the ones most affected by this and I know many of you are disappointed in me,” he wrote. And: “We’re only here because of the initial community that trusted us, and I’m genuinely grateful for the support. I’m sorry that I’ve lost that trust and I’ve upset you. You have a right to be upset.”

So why make this decision then? Joyent’s business has fundamentally changed since the TextDrive days. Today it sells higher end cloud hosting services, not commodity shared web hosting. Hoffman writes:

Making the decision to discontinue the service was extremely difficult. It was driven by some simple things: the hardware is simply old (6-8 years old), it’s failing, there isn’t an upgrade path from it, there’s more than many of you likely realize and oddly enough it’s more expensive with time (while not being used much). The rest of the Joyent’s business has been paying for that, and I can’t make the argument as to why it can continue.

What lessons can be learned from this? Instapaper creator Marco Arment writes: “Anyone who bought this should be annoyed, but buyers should also blame themselves for casting insufficient skepticism on the deal in the first place. Nothing in this business is ever truly “unlimited”, and “lifetime” never means your lifetime.” (Instapaper sells a mobile app for a one time fee, but also runs ads on the web version to make money.)

But again, the real issue isn’t the money. The users got their money’s worth. It’s the fact that they were used as investors and are now being left out in the cold. Companies eying Kickstarter and other alternative ways of raising money should look at this situation and be careful what they promise or risk alienating the very supporters that got you off the ground. And customers should be wary of investing in for-profit companies that will only offer cheap, commodity services as a pay off.

So Twitter is making updates to its API, and to prepare for that, it’s providing developers a preview of new requirements to access it. In an effort to create a “more consistent Twitter experience,” the company told developers that it is placing restrictions around how the API is used. With a new version of the API coming in a few weeks, Twitter announced the changes on its developers blog today. And it’s saying devs have six months to implement changes, or risk being shut out.

Prior to the changes, developers could access the Twitter API anonymously, without having to register or let the company know how it was using that data. Well, no more of that. Twitter says that to limit malicious use of the API, and to better understand the apps that are accessing it, the company will require every request to be authenticated.

Twitter is also changing the way it limits API requests. Before now, the company had a flat limit of 350 calls per hour, regardless of the type of app or the number of endpoints. Now, it’s created a sliding scale for API requests, so that apps accessing just one endpoint limited to 60 calls per hour, while those which use multiple endpoints will have more. Twitter will also have a set of “high-volume endpoints” around tweet display, profile display, user lookup and user search that apps will be able to access up to 720 calls per hour per endpoint.

Twitter is also issuing a number of requirements in how tweets will be displayed. This is to provide more consistent views around its plans to make media available inline with tweets, not just on its own site and apps, but third-party apps as well. For instance, Twitter will require apps to link usernames to the appropriate Twitter profile, show actions such as retweet, reply, and favorite, and scale the display of Tweets based on the device accessing them. It’s also requiring any pre-installed or pre-loaded Twitter clients on devices or chips to be certified by the company, and requiring developers who need a large number of user tokens to work directly with it.

For all the anonymous Twitter apps out there, the new requirements will no doubt strike a huge blow. For other developers, guidelines around what’s expected of them could actual help to clear up some uncertainty that’s lingered over Twitter for some time now.

Earlier this year, at its I/O developer conference, Google announced that it would soon turn on delta updates for apps running on Android 2.3+ and it looks like this feature is now up and running. With these smart updates, users don’t have to download the complete app when there is an update. Instead, only the parts of the app that have changed need to be downloaded. When Google first announced this feature, its engineers estimated that smart app updates would only be about a third of the size of a full update, saving users bandwidth and extending battery life.

Developers, Google said at I/O, won’t have to do anything to enable this feature and according to the folks over at Android Police, this feature quietly went live late last night or early this morning. We have contacted Google to confirm this and will update this post once we get official confirmation that this is indeed the case.

According to Android Police, an update of the popular ezPDF Reader, which would usually weigh in at about 6.3MB, now clocks in at under 3MB. An update to Instagram, which went out this morning, is now a 3MB download instead of 13MB for the full app.

These numbers should be even more dramatic for larger apps and especially games. After all, instead of having to download all the graphics assets for a game again, you now only have to download the parts needed to enable that new level or feature.

Three years ago Adknowledge paid $50 million to buy game monetizer Super Rewards. But then its founder bought it back and today sold it to user acquisition service Playerize. Super Rewards’ embeddable paywall for developers lets gamers score virtual goods and currency by buying offers, completing surveys, and watching branded videos.

Super Rewards will turn Playerize into a one-stop shops for devs who want to buy users and squeeze money out them while staying focused on making their games fun. But considering Playerize has raised only $1 million to date, this must have been a fire sale.

Jason Bailey co-founded Super Rewards back in 2007. Just 18 months of bootstrapping later it reached a $100 million yearly revenue run rate helping developers convert credit card-less kids and stingy adults into paying it customers. According to Playerize’s blog post, it seem the acquisition will fill a ton of holes in its business:

This deal adds thousands of customers. Millions of end users. More than a hundred thousand impression per hour. A solid and experienced team of eight people. A suite of mobile, social and stand alone MMO products to help monetization and game discovery. Thousands of advertiser relationships. Dozens of diverse payment options around the globe for mobile payments, prepaid game cards, localized credit cards, and bank payments. Historical analytics and data around user behaviour and virtual currency optimization.

But things got tough for Super Rewards over the last year as Facebook signed an exclusive deal with TrialPay to power its official offer wall and rewards system. We heard a lot of employees left Super Rewards after that and it had to retreat from part of its mobile offering. Maybe Playerize can make better use of it than Adknowledge. Still, the low price we expect for the sale could just be one more aftershock of Zynga’s dismal debut on the public market.

With all the rumors about a new 9-pin connector on the iPhone, what could be better than a tube of bamboo that amplifies your iDevice or Android phone in a sustainable way? The iBam 2 is basically a tube of bamboo that channels sound out and away from the phone, thereby creating a superior, bamboo-infused experience.

The sad thing? It costs freaking $63.22 and they’re only sold in Singapore so you may have hop on a slow, sustainable solar boat to pick one up. However, as you see from the above video, a honking big bamboo tube can really spruce up an iPhone.

The creators, Pasargora, are a sustainable-living maker space and a portion of the proceeds go to supporting DIY activities in Singapore, so there’s that. Otherwise, get yourself to Pier 1 Imports and grab some bamboo and rock out.

Product Page

While I wouldn’t want to be the parent who buys their kids a Leapster GS instead of a Nintendo DS, I still think that this mini educational handheld is an interesting addition to Leapfrog’s line of kids toys. The GS looks a lot more like a handheld device than its predecessors and can take pictures and video with a built-in camera.

The GS runs on four AA batteries and features a color screen and comes in green or purple. It runs a number of game times and kids can use it to view animated ebooks. Kids can store content on 2GB of built-in memory.

Leapfrog hardware is rugged and none of the handhelds we’ve had at home have ever broken in the course of play. N.B., however, parents: kids abandon these things pretty fast when they figure out Dad’s iPhone plays Angry Birds, so enjoy it while it lasts.

The GS costs $69.99 and is available now.

We are incredibly excited to announce our next special guest for this year’s Disrupt SF. On top of directing the most popular TV show on the planet, House, Greg Yaitanes is an early investor in Twitter, Square, and Pinterest. Yaitanes made waves in Hollywood, leveraging cutting edge applications and applying lean startup principles to revolutionize television production. He is easily one of the most disruptive, tech-savvy minds in entertainment.

For instance, he sparked a cottage industry of light-weight professional cameras after using a simple SLR to record a season finale of House. Now, with a new show at HBO/Cinemax, he’s on a mission to prove that technology can make high-quality televsion cost-effective enough to compete with the current cultural waste-land of cheap reality-show TV. From using Google maps to remotely scout shoot locations to replacing DVDs with an iPad app, iAnnotate, Yaitanes has plugged himself into the most successful startups to gain an early vantage of upcoming tech.

As economic distance between LA and Silicon Valley shrink, Yaitanes brings a seasoned eye to see how our battlefield competitors might disrupt entertainment.

Yaitanes will join our already all-star speaker list which now include influential all stars like: TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, The Honest Company’s Jessica Alba and Brian Lee, Vinod Khosla, Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams, Box CEO and co-founder Aaron Levie, Asana co-founder Justin Rosenstein, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, Ron Conway, and many, many others. You can view all of the speakers we have announced so far here.

This is one show you seriously do not want to miss! Get your tickets while you still can, on sale here.

As always, if you are interested in becoming a sponsor, opportunities can be found here.

Greg Yaitanes
Angel Investor & Film Director

An Emmy Award-winning television director for top shows including Lost, Heroes, Grey’s Anatomy and House, Yaitanes was an early angel investor in Twitter, Square, Pinterest and Foursquare, among others.

But Yaitanes is better known for his day job as showrunner for Alan Ball’s upcoming show Banshee, which is slated to premiere on Cinemax in 2013.

Remember netbooks? Exactly. Two years ago netbooks could do no wrong. They were the future, a way to get work done on the go on a laptop the size of a paperback book. In the end, manufacturers saw them as a great way to squeeze profit out of a moribund product line.

Sadly, I fear that’s where we’re headed in the tablet market.

For a long time it was a few horse race. Motorola, Apple, and Samsung were pumping out top-of-the-line tablets and selling them at a premium, because that’s what the market could support. However, with the launch of the $199 Kindle Fire, and more recently the Nexus 7, the floodgates will soon open, driving down prices, quality, and value.

Here’s the pattern: a product group becomes popular. Major players make comparatively expensive products with good QA and designs. Early adopters gobble them up, then there’s a brief period of popular adoption. Then everyone who was going to buy a tablet has a tablet. Positions are taken regarding the various advantages of each type. Flame wars are fought.

Then people stop caring.

As evidenced by the mediocre reviews of the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 and the many reports of broken Nexus 7 devices, it’s clear that the tablet segment is losing profitability. Build quality and design dedication are falling and the tablets of yesterday, the tank-like Xoom and the rough and tumble Kindle, are ceding to chintzier, cheaper devices designed to entice bargain buyers. As manufacturers realize they have to hit that magical $199 price point, the quality will fall even further as more corners are cut. This spiral will continue until OEMs start shipping barely upgraded devices for under $200.

Sure, it’s nice to have low-priced options on the market but low price without intrinsic value is bad for the consumer. Resale value, for example, is an excellent indicator of overall demand and no models in recent memory hold their value over a few months. A new Toshiba Excite costs costs $400 while a used one tops out at about $250. Similar price drops can be seen in nearly every other “value” tablet.

I don’t think we’re going to see the death of tablets the way we saw the death of netbooks. Netbooks were so wildly niche that they just couldn’t survive. Tablets, on the other hand, will be with us for a long, long time. The problem is that we’re about to see tablet stagnation and the quality and value will go down exponentially. The danger is that as profits fall, tablet makers will build cheaper and cheaper hardware while maintaining premium prices. We’re not quite there yet, but we’re getting there.

Prognoses like these are tough to take early on in a product life cycle by the tell-tale habits of entrenched products are clearly at work here. Manufacturers can either take a huge hit vs. costs – consider the rumors of a $199 Surface – or drive down costs. The tendency, of course, is just to go cheaper and cheaper until the product is irrelevant.

If you have ever tried to use SPSS you know the nightmare that it can be when trying to do even simple analysis. SPSS is designed for statisticians to analyze data sets. But even statisticians find it aggravating to perform such tasks as making a neat graphic to show the relationship between variables.

So here’s what happens. You hire a consultant who can do it for you. That’s why IBM, which owns SPSS, has thousands of analysts on its payroll.

Statwing is a Y-Combinator startup that translates the arcane technical terminology into plain english so you can do data analysis on your own.

Co-Founder Greg Laughlin explains that Statwing is designed to make it easier to ask questions about data. I agree but I also think there is something more to the service. It’s another example of how the interface is getting abstracted. Statwing make it easier to do what used to be required of someone with deep technical knowledge about statistics. We see this trend a lot these days. Expertise is not required to do any number of tasks. I can write this blog post and post it immediately. I do not need technical help to do that.

You can see this when comparing Statwing with SPSS. The difference: Statwing comes with visualization, a summary sentence, and plain English translation. Technical jargon like “p-value” is hidden in the advanced tab.

Here’s the output for the SPSS analysis:

Here’s the Statwing output of the same data:

And the accompanying text:

Using the service is pretty simple.  You upload correctly formatted data and then pick different variables to look at such as gender and geographic location. Data can  be uploaded from your computer, Google Drive, Dropbox, GMail, a Web site URL, GitHub and Box.

It is then pretty simple to use.  You choose what variables you want to compare and the service then gives you the analysis. You can see a demo here.

Statwing is now free. It will eventually change to a freemium model.

Statwing reminds me of Tableau with its analysis and easy data visualization. I like the service in that it helps people like myself do analysis that I could not do before.

But Statwing is not dead simple quite yet. It needs more iterations to be more explanatory about why a certain analysis did not work. The company’s greatest challenge will come in extending the data sources that the service can pull from. As those data sources get increasingly complex, Statwing will need to stay focused on its core value of helping people like myself who want answers without needing to learn a host of new technical skills.

When it comes to helping CEOs and other executives stay on top of the big issues at their company, a startup called 15Five has taken inspiration from Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard. Even though Chouinard is supposedly out of the office on outdoor adventures for several months of the year, he developed “5-15 reports” (weekly employee memos that should take no more than 15 minutes to write and five minutes to read) to stay up-to-date.

That idea has been adopted at other companies, but 15Five CEO David Hassell  wants to make it even more widespread, by turning the 5-15 idea into a simple product for submitting, reading, and acting on weekly reports. 15Five demonstrated at the Launch conference earlier this year, and today it’s coming out of beta testing.

To use the system, employees fill out a weekly report with updates on recent successes, challenges, ideas, and morale. Their managers can read and comment on those reports, then pass along any larger issues in reports of their own. Eventually, the reports make their way to the CEO, and if there’s anything they want to discuss, they can start a conversation that goes all the way back down to the employee who first brought it up.

15Five customers already include GlaxoSmithKlein Consumer Healthcare USA, Ustream, Warby Parker, and Mahalo (whose CEO, Jason Calacanis, runs the Launch conference).

ThinkFuse, another startup focused on weekly employee reports, was recently acquired by Salesforce. The product was shut down, and 15Five says many of former ThinkFuse customers migrated over.

By taking the beta label off, Hassell says the 15Five team is signaling that it has built a product that’s ready for wide adoption (although it’s planning already planning a big update with the launch of version 2.0 this fall). It’s also adding new features — managers can now remind employees from within the app that they need to fill out their reports, and they can manage groups and questions on their own (that was previously limited to a single administrator).

In the future, Hassell says he’d like to see 15Five integrate with business conversation tools like Yammer. (In fact, Yammer founder David Sacks offered to invest while on-stage at Launch.)

But is this really a standalone company, or is it destined to become a feature of a larger product?

“We’re just focusing on doing one thing and doing it really, really well,” Hassell says. “We’re finding that for a lot of our companies, our number one design value is elegant simplicity.”

15Five has raised $200,000 in funding from friends and family.

Ignore us. Ignore the pressure from the media and Wall Street to make more money now as lockups expire and your stock price dips to new lows. The only thing you need to remember is “Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.” That’s your leader Mark Zuckerberg in his pre-IPO letter to the world.

I say this because I worry you may be veering off course in a fit of desperation to please investors.  This week you announced two new ad units that give businesses unprecedented access to the news feed. They pose grave threats to the user experience and your ability to accomplish your mission of bringing us all closer together.

Saving Facebook

In the eight years since I joined your social network, I’ve only seen one moment more dangerous than this. After you opened the platform, quizzes and games from companies took advantage of the ability to publish to the news feed. The stream was soon overrun with app spam.

Developers loved it. They’d pay you for ads to score some users, whose automatic posts to the news feed would then make games grow virally. But the Facebook experience suffered. Zuckerberg explained in an interview that “A lot of users like playing games, but a lot of users just hate games…people who don’t care about games want no updates.”

So you did what was right. You protected the news feed by changing it so game posts only appeared to other gamers. This tough decision drastically reduced free growth for developers, hurting the partners who boosted your time-on-site. But by prioritizing the long-term health of the user experience so people kept coming back to Facebook, you ensured those developers would still have a business today.

The Perils Of Asocial

Now everyone wants you to generate more revenue, and you’ve found some ways that align with your mission. Pages can use Promoted Posts to reach more of the fans who’ve opted into their marketing updates. Mobile app developers can buy mobile-specific Sponsored Stories to show us what our friends are playing. You’re starting to make ads more relevant outside of Facebook with your ad network appearing on Zynga.com. And you launched Facebook Exchange, a powerful cookie-based retargeting system that makes your sidebar ads helpful by reminding us of things we almost bought around the web.

With time, these could blossom into strong revenue streams that satisfy investors. And there’s little danger since they embody your business model’s core ideology of connecting us to what we and our friends are interested in. But you’re also testing two new ad units that diverge from this pursuit.

The new mobile app ads let developers target anyone with “Try These Games” ads in the mobile news feed that push people to download from their device’s App Store. Unlike the old app usage Sponsored Stories, none of our friends need to have installed the advertised app.

Meanwhile, the new ads for Pages let businesses push their updates to the news feeds of non-fans. Again, these are not social. They inject marketing messages in the news feed from Pages we haven’t subscribed to and that our friends haven’t interacted with.

For the first time you’re not relying on the wisdom of the social graph or the user’s choice to populate the stream. You’re trusting the user experience to the brands and the app developers. If they fail to accurately target me, I’ll end up with a less relevant feed.

Living Up To The Hacker Way

These are early tests, and I know you’re just iterating to see what sticks. You’ve been clear that limits may be put in place to keep these ads from overrunning the feed. Those kinds of limits are safeguard enough when we’re talking about paid social content that could have appeared in the feed anyway.

But these asocial news feed ads contradict your mission, so displaying just few enough that users don’t get angry doesn’t cut it. Even if users occasionally click, the data won’t show that you’ve subtly but seriously altered the feel of Facebook. And its a slippery slope to a feed that’s less friendly and more like a scrolling billboard.

You’ve built a company that’s meant to last. Even with a share price around $20 you’re trading at roughly 30x your next year’s earnings projection. That’s because those who believe in you believe you’re going to be the dominant social network for years to come.

Asocial news feed ads jeopardize that. You’re extraordinarily popular and your network effect creates a giant moat. That doesn’t make you impervious to disruption, though. You’re arming your challengers by diluting the feed — the herald of ambient intimacy, a concept that let you redefine how we communicate. There are plenty of other ways to earn money, and with time they’ll pan out. But your foundation of relevant content has to stay strong for you to make it that far.

One tenet of The Hacker Way is “Be Bold: Building great things means taking risks…even if that means being wrong some of the time.” This is one of those times, and it’s not too late to move away from asocial feed ads and get back on track.

Your toughest months are still ahead. In November, a huge number of employee RSUs will be converted to actual stock they can sell on the market. But no matter what happens, remember why you’re making money, and stay true to the ideals Mark laid out in his letter:

There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice…

We’ve always cared primarily about our social mission…

By focusing on our mission and building great services, we believe we will create the most value for our shareholders and partners over the long term.

Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.

Living in Brooklyn, NY (the place where package deliveries go to die), I know better than anyone the struggle of missing a package, tracking it down, and then traveling however long it takes to recover said package. It’s so much of a pain, in fact, that I often give up the second I see that “Sorry we missed you” sticker.

But a company fresh out of Y Combinator‘s Summer 2012 class is ready to disrupt this mayhem with a clever little box, a BufferBox. It’s a bit like Amazon Locker, where you have all your Amazon packages shipped to a relatively convenient location instead of missing them. However, BufferBox works with all of your packages (UPS, FedEx, USPS, and Amazon).

Here’s how it works:

After signing up with BufferBox, you’re given a specific address — you will use this address every time you plan on receiving a package. Once the delivery arrives, BufferBox will send you an email with a unique PIN, with which you can open up your BufferBox and walk off, package in hand.

BufferBox then takes a fee for every parcel delivered through their system. “Integrated retailers” will offer a BufferBox distribution channel direct from their own ecommerce sites, and at that point the rate to the retailer comes down to shipping volume. The customer pays nothing. On the other hand, users buying through non-integrated retailers can always sign up for a BufferBox of their own, and pay $3 per parcel.

According to founder Mike McCauley, Amazon’s Locker program poses the greatest threat competitively, but he actually sees it as an advantage.

“They opened up a whole new market for us because they have 30 percent of the commerce volume,” McCauley said. “The other scattered 70 percent don’t have the order volume to justify building a network of kiosks.”

“In that way, we’re kind of like an open platform.”

The roll-out has already begun, starting with Union Station in Toronto, Canada. (The BufferBox guys are primarily out of the University of Waterloo.)

The team has plans to expand into 100 new locations, including convenience stores, grocery stores, and transit stations within Toronto, which should expand their potential user base to approximately 7 million consumers. Perfect practice for a roll-out in the Big Apple.

BufferBox has also signed an agreement with Walmart ecommerce to give consumers the option of having packages delivered to a BufferBox instead of their doorstep.

Click to view slideshow.

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah (@semil) is currently an EIR with Javelin Venture Partners.

“In the Studio” continues this week by welcoming a computer science student from UT-Austin, originally from India, who began his career in industry at Trilogy and then, upon moving to Silicon Valley after the first bubble, took on roles at Oracle and Aster Data (where he was VP Engineering) before reuniting with a former colleague to cofound his first company, which could be one of the fastest-growing enterprise appliance companies ever.

Dheeraj Pandey, the CEO and co-founder of Nutanix, has experienced one of the Valley’s classic entrepreneurial journeys, an immigrant who came to America to pursue his academic passions in computer science, dabbled in a few industry-related jobs, observed the first Valley bubble as a quiet engineer, and after gaining managerial experience at a large data company that had a nice outcome, finally emerged as a cofounder of a new company. Pandey and his cofounder learned from their earlier experiences that the convergence of a few key trends — flash storage, improved network speeds, rising costs of storage area networks — would provide a rare opportunity to consolidate storage and computing, which had traditionally been kept far apart and was complex to manage. With Nutanix, the company offered software-defined storage placed inside commodity hardware, though part of the company’s plan is to offer these technologies through the cloud.

Nutanix is currently at that middle-stage startup phase, where the proof-of-concept has been proven out (quite well, in fact) and customers are lining up. Moving forward, as Pandey explains in this video, he and his team will focus on both product and key functional areas to make sure they ramp up as quickly as possible to maintain their growth. This video discussion would be of interest to any technologist currently working in large enterprise IT companies who has initial thoughts about starting a company one day, especially as Pandey recalls the progression of his thinking that led to the creation and formation of his first startup.

Y Combinator-backed RegistryLove is officially debuting its universal bridal registry service today, and it already has 3,000 brides-to-be signed up to use it. And 750 of those signups occurred before the website itself was even finished. That speaks to the demand – and also the potential – in the newly hot “weddings” vertical which has recently been under attack from all sides, from wedding websites to photo-sharing apps.

With RegistryLove, the idea is simple: any store, one registry. No single store has everything a couple wants to register for, and many couples would like to include unique items they adore from smaller merchants, or even local shops without an online presence, on their registries.

Plus, many modern couples also have fewer needs for household goods, plates, and linens, having merged domiciles ahead of the big day. What they would rather have are more unconventional gifts – tickets to a play, a paid dinner out while on their honeymoon, or maybe skydiving lessons.

Brides (or grooms, as the case may be) who join RegistryLove can either import the online registries they’ve been working on previously at big box retailers, or they can opt for a one-on-one consultation with a special wedding concierge. The concierge will reach out via phone or email, depending on preference, and ask a series of simple questions to learn more about the couple and their style. Then, she will pull together a group of recommendations which the couple can add to their official registry on the site. The initial registry will start off with 20 or 30 suggestions, so as not to overwhelm the couple, but the end result may grow as large as hundreds of items, or even shrink to just a small selection of just a dozen.

The service generates revenue through affiliate income and sources items from either the merchants (now over 100) or the wholesalers the company is working with – a group which even includes some national retailers. For local merchants without a website, RegistryLove will also go to the store and snap a photo (currently Bay area only).

There’s even an option to include charitable donations as an option for couples with comfortable lives who OH I DON’T KNOW, just find it just a tad bit greedy to throw a $10,000+ wedding and request guests pay their way in with stainless steel appliances and fine china, when some people in the world just need clean drinking water and a functional toilet. (Sorry, sorry. Sigh. This is why I eloped. Is it too late to ask for donations now? My anniversary is next week.)

The service was created by a team of three, sisters Marika and Sofia Chen, and Jeremy Poteck. None knew how to code, so Sofia taught herself following a little TechCrunch inspiration. “At first we tried to hire somebody, but we quickly realized that master coders are just not that interested in the wedding market,” says Markia, “and we were like, well, we could just sit here forever or we could just do it.”

So they just did it. And here it is.

The best part of the entire Apple-Samsung patent war has been Federal Judge Lucy Koh. She’s a smaller woman with straight, silk black hair, but she manages to make some of the wealthiest lawyers and highest level executives bow down.

She’s an Alpha, and not without a touch of humor, either.

In fact, today she asked Apple’s attorney if he was smoking crack. At least, that’s what this tweet from NYT writer Nick Wingfield says.

Apple’s attorney responded with, “Your Honor, I’m not smoking crack.”

Judge Koh just accused Apple’s attorneys of “smoking crack.” “You’re Honor, I’m not smoking crack,” an Apple attny responded in earnest.

— Nick Wingfield (@nickwingfield) August 16, 2012

Apparently Koh was bothered by how long the witness list is, considering that both sides only have 25 hours each to argue their case.

To be clear, this type of comment isn’t out of the ordinary for Koh. She’s been frustrated right from the start at the intricacy and length of the trial, and it seems as though she feels its a relatively huge waste of tax dollars considering that both companies seem more interested in continuing litigation than a conclusion.

Back in June of last year, when this trial was in its preliminary stages, the Judge asked if Apple and Samsung brass couldn’t get together for a little chat.

Can’t we all just get along here? I’ll send you with a box of chocolates, whatever.