Category: Tech news

Augusto Marietti, Marco Palladino and Mike Zonca founded Mashape in November 2010 to create a unified, all-in-one marketplace where one could go to find, sell, distribute, and hack on APIs, believing that APIs would become an essential part of the conversation for developers. Though it wasn’t an easy road, last September Mashape raised $1.6 million from NEA, Charles River Ventures, Jeff Bezos, and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors — to name a few.

Mashape has been in private beta since, testing its model and “building out the supply-side,” says Marietti. Today, the startup is finally throwing back the curtains, officially opening to the public, with new features and inventory in stock.

Github recently opened quite a few eyeballs with its $100 million from Andreessen Horowitz. The startup, which is part code sharing and publishing service, part marketplace, and part social network for programmers, had yet to raise a round. It took the slow-burn approach and wanted to become indispensable before raising money. Mashape is taking cues from Github in its approach both to its market and to its own growth. Marietti says that he likes to think of Github as an open source assembly line for code, and he wants Mashape to be the assembly line for APIs.

Github also provides a response to the question of why it took so long for Mashape to launch publicly. Says Marietti:

We wanted to reach a critical mass before opening to everyone. When you’re a marketplace, you always fight the chicken/egg problem and the last thing you want to do is open up a marketplace when you don’t have enough supply yet … so we wanted to get to a place of infrastructure stability and to a point when the community was starting to become substantial.

For context: A year ago, Mashape was adding two new APIs every 10 days, but today the startup is seeing 300 percent year-over-year growth, adding two new APIs per day. It now has an international footing, with API providers from China to Mexico and is driving millions of API calls a week to its 450+ APIs.

But, importantly, Mashape doesn’t want to focus on managing APIs — it doesn’t want to become a tools company. First, the startup is focusing on making it easy to distribute, monetize and discover APIs. In the long-run, Mashape wants to help centralize APIs and become a unified broker for services and data.

So, on the business side, like Github, Mashape is both public and private. Mashape is free to use, “as long as you’re not making money out of it,” the company says, and listing or consuming an API on Mashape is free. If API providers decide to charge using the startup’s billing add-on, Mashape takes a fee (between 6 and 30 percent) out of earnings. And those paid subscriptions to APIs, in particular, are now growing 40 percent month-to-month, the Mashape CEO says.

For clarification, for API providers, Mashape offers a billing system for their APIs with custom plans for customers, or the ability to charge for specific objects (SMS, MB, calls, data points, etc.), auto-generated documentation and client libraries. For the consumers, on the other hand, it’s a unified place to find multiple APIs — you can subscribe to any API using a credit card, consume, and analyze your API usage through a dashboard.

The CEO continued:

Scaling a marketplace for APIs is very challenging from both a business and a technology point of view. For example, there are more than 17 ways to monetize an API. Technically, the API world is a jungle; there are different formats and authentications and REST is not even a standard — everyone has their own interpretation. In addition, APIs change, go down and lose trust — we’re trying to create a trusted community where your API is at the center and if problems occur the community will notify and help developers fix the issues. In every marketplace, “trust” and “reliability” are the most important things. We’re committed to make the API Industry a more trusted place”

To illustrate Mashape’s usefulness in the wild, the team gives the example of Face.com, which was recently acquired by Facebook and quickly shut down. A lot of developers were annoyed and didn’t know what to do. Lambda Labs created and deployed a Face.com replacement on Mashape called Face, which has acquired hundreds of developers in just a few days — thanks to a great API.

Mashape believes that by enabling API providers to easily host their killer APIs and any developers to quickly sign up to consume, it’s bringing some Github to the API space. In doing so, it wants to bring another revenue stream to companies both big and small to help them better monetize their APIs — and if that means it can soon turn a profit itself, all the better.

And, for good measure, here’s a snippet of a back-and-forth between Marietti and Fred Wilson on Wilson’s blog post “Mobile Is Where The Growth Is”.

Michael Morganella, a defender on the Swiss Olympic soccer squad, has been kicked off the team for an offensive tweet about South Koreans, hours after losing to the country’s team. Five days ago, Voula Papachristou, Greece’s triple-jump champion, was kicked off her team for an offensive tweet about West Nile virus.

Morganella’s Twitter account, @morgastoss, has been deleted, but Swiss newspaper Le Matin grabbed a shot of the tweet.

The tweet is difficult to translate, as it is written in a rough mix of French and textspeak, but he tells all Koreans to “burn yourselves,” calling them a “bunch of ‘tards.”

Morganella released a statement through Swiss Olympic, “I am sincerely sorry for the people of South Korea, for the players, but equally for the Swiss delegation and Swiss football in general. It’s clear that I’m accepting the consequences”.

He “discriminated against, insulted and violated the dignity of the South Korea football team as well as the South Korean people,” said Swiss Olympic team chief Gian Gilli through a translator at a news conference, explaining that Morganella had been removed from the team.

Codecademy, the startup offering online lessons and tools to help people learn how to code, is adding Python to its lesson line-up starting today.

Until now, co-founder Zach Sims says Codecademy has “been focused on client-side languages and markup – javascript, HTML, and CSS.” Starting today, you’ll be able to find user-generated Python lessons on the site, and Sims adds, “This is the beginning of new language support on Codecademy – Python is only the first server side language you’ll see.”

He isn’t specifically identifying what other languages Codecademy plans to add, but you can see a list of other server-side languages here. The company points to the Codecademy Labs feature announced in December as its first step in its direction, since the Labs browser console allowed users to program in Python and Ruby (but there were no lessons until today).

Python has been in high demand from Codecademy users from the start, Sims says. This is something that teachers are asking for, too, both at the high school and college level. At the same time, Sims says the company’s on-boarding process tries not to overwhelm non-techie users with all the languages they might learn — users start with a JavaScript terminal, and there’s the Code Year program, which mixes training in JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and jQuery.

Photo courtesy of Bang & Olufsen

Let’s start with the obvious. Unless your name is Kardashian, Trump, or Zuckerberg, you’re not going to pay $4,000 for a 40-inch HDTV. Bling be damned, that’s literally 10 times the price of a typical 40-inch LCD at your local big-box. Ten. Times.

On the other hand, this is Bang & Olufsen we’re talking about, a company that unabashedly charges whatever the hell it wants for its bling-be-everything audio gear. The BeoPlay V1 marks the first HDTV effort from B&O’s new Play brand, which obviously isn’t synonymous with “affordable.” But surely there’s something about this panel that justifies such an exorbitant price tag?

Killer 3-D? Check. Ultra-slim design? Check. Netflix and other apps? Check. The best remote ever engineered? Check.

That completes the list of features the BeoPlay V1 doesn’t have. Excited yet?

This TV does exactly two things right, though arguably they’re the two most important things: picture and sound. Everything else feels like either a mistake or an oversight.

Measuring just over two inches thick and housed entirely in metal, the V1 looks industrial — and feels that way when you go to heft its 57 pounds. Conceived by Danish furniture designer Anders Hermansen, that metal casing lends itself to an impressive four stand/mount options.

The first, the basic stand, consists of two metal brackets that slide into tubes spanning the top and bottom of the TV. Curiously, though, there’s less “standing” here than leaning, as the brackets position the screen at an upward angle of about 10 degrees. Translation: It’s meant to sit on the floor or a very low table. Of course, that precludes kicking back on the couch with your feet up; you won’t be able to see the screen.

B&O offers a more traditional stand, one with legs that raise the TV closer to eye level and point it straight ahead, as well as wall and ceiling mounts. All three attach via the same versatile mounting tubes; all four evoke Ikea-grade design: cold, metallic, and not very attractive. The basic stand costs $100; the three others run $350 each.

The V1′s other major design amenity is its recessed rear ports channel, which keeps cables hidden behind a removable plastic panel and routes them out one side or the other. There’s even room in that channel to accommodate an Apple TV, a nifty Borg-like assimilation of the little box. B&O provides a whopping five HDMI inputs, but that’s it on the traditional connectivity front. If you have composite- or component-video devices, you’re out of luck.

There’s also an RCA-style (coax) digital audio input, but clearly you’re meant to use the TV’s three RJ-45 Power Link connectors, which are designed expressly for B&O audio gear. Irksome, yes, but the real problem here is accessibility: Because every port occupies that recessed rear channel and faces down, it’s a major hassle to connect anything.

Another major hassle: B&O’s remote. Long, narrow, heavy, and built to confuse, this metal baton mixes buttons like TV and DTV with V.MEM, TEXT, and A.MEM.

How bad is the remote? So bad I actually thought I had a defective one. Turns out the four-way D-pad — a staple on pretty much every remote in the history of cordless clickers — is not how you have navigate the V1′s onscreen menus. Instead, you use the tiny, nearly imperceptible joystick embedded in the center.

Oh, and surely there’s an “Off” button here somewhere? No, people who spend $4,000 on a TV are far too sophisticated for such a pedestrian control. Instead B&O provides a “Standby” button, one that’s not labeled as such, but rather represented by a red dot — the same red dot used to indicate “Record” on pretty much every other remote you’ve seen or used in your lifetime.

In case you still care at this point, the V1 delivers quite possibly the most perfectly balanced image I’ve seen on a 40-inch HDTV, and certainly the best sound.

Razor-sharp images and exceptionally accurate colors greeted me right out of the box, and the LCD’s adaptive-contrast feature did a masterful job tweaking the LED backlighting based on ambient lighting.

And speaking of masterful, the V1′s front-facing speaker bar can really fill a small to medium room with sound. Not the tinny, muted ear vomit you get from most HDTVs, but deep, full audio.

It’s too bad all this A/V acumen goes to waste on a TV that’s just a disaster in every other respect. The BeoPlay V1 lacks basic features found in every other modern TV. It’s a pain in the ass to control. And it’s priced for rich suckers who just don’t know any better. Thankfully, you do.

WIRED Exactly the kind of spectacular picture and sound you’d expect from B&O. Multiple stand/mount options based on your choice of hardware. Décor-friendly thanks to swappable color speaker grilles.

TIRED Just the worst user experience from any TV ever, and an insultingly high price tag to boot. Needlessly complicated remote. No apps, no 3-D, no tuner. Wi-Fi adapter is external, and useless for anything except DLNA. Virtually impossible to access rear ports without laying the TV flat and getting on the ground.

Smith’s new shades eliminate the frame, improving visibility. Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

If you’re out there mashing it three or four (or ten) hours a day, you’ve got enough obstacles to deal with. Fighting for a clear field of vision shouldn’t be one of them.

I’m tired of looking around, or under, or even through the top bar of my glasses frames while descending my favorites climbs. It’s a dangerous distraction, but mostly it just takes all the speed (and fun) out of it. The Pivlock V2 is a new, rimless design from Smith which smartly solves this issue while still covering all the prerequisites typical to sport protective eyewear.

The positives are clear with this piece of eyewear. They’re light, but sturdy. You get the full peripheral, without the optical distortion of lesser shades, and the option of three tints to choose from (as always from Smith). Making your lens choice in the morning is the hardest part of the equation, because snapping the pieces together is a cakewalk. A new feature for the Pivlock this year; the secure, snap-in-place nose pads have three positions to fit the unique contour of your schnoz, making them completely adaptable. It’s a luxury compared to awkward, one-size-fits-all frames.

And of course, the aforementioned frameless design was the initial draw for me. I wore these daily on our group bike test, and there were no airflow issues in the face of steep descents or serious oceanside crosswinds. Structurally, the glasses stayed sturdy even after excessive lens changes thanks to the smart mechanical technology that is unique to the Pivlock interchangeable lens system.

The only drawback of a rimless frame is that there’s a direct line from the sweat dripping off your forehead to the surface of the lens. If you’re not wearing a sweat-absorbing cap, this will put streaks in your line of vision. I found that on hot, bright days when I was loading on the sunscreen, a lot of the white stuff got on to the lens, creating more obstruction.

WIRED Adjustable nose pads give you a great fit. Classic Smith looks. Obstruction-free views.

TIRED Even with the Hydroleophobic lens coating, I still fogged up in the fluctuating temps of Northern California. Sweaty lenses almost propose more issues than a pair of glass with a top rim.

Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

None more black. Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Some people want to be warriors on bikes, muscling up climbs like they’re storming a castle. Some want to be pirates, swashbuckling their way through a peloton and ripping down descents like Douglas Fairbanks down a sail.

Me? I want to be a ninja. And that’s why I so enjoyed my time with the Giant TCR Advanced SL 1.

The murdered-out color scheme is only the beginning, though, (and let’s face it, most serious cyclists would ride a hot pink frame if it made them faster). No, the ninjaness really came from the bike’s tracking — smooth and silent.

The hugely oversized headtube is offset by nearly rectangular top tube and down tubes, giving the bike a distinctly stealth-bomber appearance and a stability that surprises. In past years, some complained that the Advanced SL line got jarring on rough pavement, but I felt nearly as comfortable flying over cattle guards as I did on newly repaved roads. The Dura-Ace groupset is Shimano’s crown jewel for a reason, and it performed admirably, even when struggling up 20-percent-plus grades. Never a hitched shift, never a dropped chain.

There’s one dividing point, however: the integrated seat post, which tends to be a hot-button issue with riders. Giant is one of the few major manufacturers left to still offer the option, which necessitates cutting the carbon seat post to your desired length and securing it with a slide-over mast and a pinch bolt. It saves significant weight over the conventional seat post, but also means that on-the-fly-adjustment is all but impossible. Its 20-30mm of play were enough for me to find a comfortable position on the ML build (53.5), but the flexibility is important enough to me that I’d opt for the conventional post were I to purchase the bike.

Good company. Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

I’m not clear exactly how a bike this fast and powerful manages to come in under $7,000. Part of that is the SL1 is outfitted with mechanical Dura-Ace rather than Di2, and Giant’s proprietary P-SLR1 wheel system. The other part is that Giant weaves its own composite in its own factory — something only one other major bike company (Time) does.

So yes, it’s lighter on the wallet than most of the bikes we tested, but when you consider that it put me on equal footing with riders who had nearly double that money invested in their rigs, it’s an absolute steal. Don’t want to take my word for it? Ask the pros. Luis León Sánchez rode a limited-edition Rabobank version of the Advanced SL in the TdF this year, capturing a stage, and Robert Gesink took the 2012 Tour of California on one. And while I certainly didn’t match his time on the climbs of Sonoma County, I had no trouble understanding how he rode this bike to victory.

WIRED Black-on-black-on-black made for the most badass ride of the crop. Component quality and performance for the price can’t be matched.

TIRED Integrated seat post feels unduly permanent. People love catching — and dropping — ninjas.

Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Trek’s Domane road bike is the latest entry into the ‘endurance bike’ category. Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

I can’t escape the truth: I have reached a certain age.

I’ve traded in my Chuck Taylors for more comfortable kicks with more support, I’ve been fitted for progressive lenses, and I’ve even faced the inevitable fact I will be growing more hair out of my ears and nose than on the top of my noggin.

But I would have never believed I was ready to trade my stiff, fast and race-worthy road bike for an “endurance” bike. Trek swayed me, though, with the new Domane — a road frame outfitted with some pavement-smoothing technology that kept my poor old bones from getting too rattled on long days in the saddle.

Endurance bikes are designed to be more comfortable and stable than traditional road bikes. They usually have shorter top tubes, taller head tubes and slightly longer wheelbases, effectively bringing the handlebars closer to the rider. They’re also referred to as “Classics” bikes — machines designed to be ridden over rough roads for long distances in bad weather, much like the Specialized Roubaix frame Tom Boonen rode to a decisive victory in this year’s wild and wooly Paris-Roubaix race.

Trek’s approach to reducing the shocks of the cobbles? The Domane’s IsoSpeed technology — it’s a decoupler system which separates the seat tube from the top tube, so the bone-shaking bumps of the road aren’t directly transferred to the rider’s body.

At the point where the top tube reaches the seat tube, it splits, forming a “Y,” and the tubes continue toward the back of the bike to form the seat stays. The seat tube nestles into the nook of that “Y.” It’s held in place by a cartridge-bearing pivot, so it’s free to pivot fore and aft. Fitted in the joint of the “Y” is a small bumper made of rubber-like material (it’s actually elastomer) that absorbs road shock.

I was a little skeptical at first. Would this bumper make the bike less fun by zapping all the snap out of the frame? It only took a couple of short rides to quell all doubt — the Domane is a blast.

The decoupler under the saddle, matched with the new IsoSpeed fork up front, takes just enough edge off rough roads and jarring debris to make the ride more pleasant, but not so much to make things uninteresting or too cozy.

In general, I prefer a stiffer bike I can toss around, something along the lines of the Madone, TCR Advance or Cervelo R5. But I found the Domane plenty stiff and lively enough to not want the ride to end. I made repeated trips up into the Oakland hills followed by ripping descents through the Berkeley hills, and at no point did I wish I was aboard a different steed. By the time I hit the four-hour mark of my ride — the point where I’d normally be feeling pretty stiff and beat-up — I was still semi-fresh and wanting more.

Your contact patch never had it so good. Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

The Domane I tested was spec’d with Shimano’s 7900 Dura Ace group and a set of Bontrager’s Aeolus 5.0 carbon wheels. Although I am excited get my hands on the new Dura Ace group (which I haven’t tested yet) and a set of new Reynolds carbon fiber hoops, the package on my loaner Domane left little to be desired. The shifting was crisp, the braking was spot-on and the wheels made spinning up to speed a joy.

Trek may have come a little late to the endurance bike category, but in my opinion, it’s been worth the wait. This isn’t the bike I’d choose for the local criterium series, or the one I’d pick if all my rides were under two hours and blistering fast. But the Domane smoothes out the most unnerving road vibrations while still being a blast to ride.

WIRED IsoSpeed tube coupler and shock-absorbing front fork mitigate the worst effects of rough roads. All-day comfort while remaining more Ferrari than La-Z-Boy. Tech is inconspicuous and doesn’t look nerdy.

TIRED There’s a gaggle of cables at the stem. The correct saddle pairing for this technology remains a mystery — the Bontrager saddle on my test bike left my butt wanting better.

Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

I’m in absolute love. From the gorgeous wood cabinet to the technical capabilities, the little Vers’ 1Q is simply perfect. The $120 price ($99 for Kickstarters) is just icing on the cake. It’s rather refreshing to see a warm, nearly alive device in our world that’s generally filled with modeled plastic and faux chrome trim.

Simply put, the 1Q is a battery-powered Bluetooth speaker. A 2-inch driver provides the audio while, packed inside the walnut or bamboo casing, a 6.5W amp powers the audio provided from either Bluetooth or the 3.5mm jack. The included battery charges via microUSB and should last 10 hours on a charge. What more can you ask for from a small speaker?

As shown by the pictures, the whole package is of a modest size. It fits in the hand, yet the creator brags that it “can easily deliver enough sound to fill some pretty large spaces.” Since it works with Bluetooth or an aux input, it should work with nearly every device.

This isn’t Vers’ first consumer electronic device. The company already sells the Vers 1.5R radio/alarm, Vers 1E ear buds, and iPhone/iPad cases — all out of bamboo and walnut.

The project is already funded on Kickstarter but they are still taking orders for 18 more days. Pledge $95 for a 1Q made out of either bamboo or walnut. Or, pledge $30 for the limited edition red beech edition. Best yet the Vers promises these things will be delivered well before the holidays.

If you’re like me, you never real got into spectator sports. Maybe it was the jock-induced swirlies or maybe it was the pointlessness of ball-based games, but I couldn’t give two shot puts about the Olympics. Thankfully, there’s the Olwinpics Blocker from FFFFF.at.

This plugin turns all mentions of the Olympics into soothing, bright primary colors. It works on Chrome, Firefox, and Safari and works a treat. For example, the image above is how I see this post: Olympics, olympics. Olympics!

The project took two hours to build but will save you days of olympic overdose pain. Olympics!

via BB

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Dan Farber, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — killed some time waiting for NBC to let us watch the Olympics on our tablets and phones like the rest of the world. @dbfarber isn’t ready to write off Microsoft, but I can’t help wondering why Steve Sinofsky was content to duck a journalist’s question about the Windows Surface’s impact on hardware partners by pushing him toward the tablet with the suggestion he go learn something.

With a week of Google Nexus 7 under our belts, a rumored deal between Apple and Twitter, and Mitt Money on his Insult Europe Tour ’12, we’re entering some good times as the world melts. Bring on the fiber; Kansas City here I come.

@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @dbfarber, @jtaschek, @kevinmarks

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

We’re very lucky that the creator of the Cerevellum is even alive. Evan Solida was a competitive cyclist until a major accident in 2007 left him unable to ride. After years of plastic surgery and physical therapy, he was able to get back onto his bike and now builds unique cycle designs, does contract work, and just released his first product, the Hindsight 35.

This unique device is essentially a rear view monitor and race computer for cyclists. It connects to various sensors using ANT+ wireless technology and a small lens and light combo on the back of the bike gives you a full view of what’s coming up behind you in brilliant color. The device also records the scene in five minute bursts and stops recording when you (or your bike) are suddenly interrupted by a collision. In short, it’s a way for cyclists to find out what’s behind them and, if they run into a spot of bad luck, see who’s responsible.

The device itself is essentially a 3.5-inch screen mounted to your handlebar with a cable that connects to the camera. An optional heart rate monitor and speed sensor allows for on-the-fly measurements that appear on screen as you ride.

To be clear, the Hindsight 35 is a shipping product but is more of a beta product. Because Solida designed, built, and manufactured this product himself, it’s definitely not fully-featured just yet. Luckily, the device is fully upgradable and future systems will include a GPS chip – there’s a place on the circuit board but it’s not yet installed.

A bundle with heart rate monitor and speed sensor costs $363.50 and the device itself costs $299. It also lets you record rides – albeit in rear view – with the press of a button.

I tried the Hindsight in the crowded streets of Brooklyn and I’m happy to report that it really works and it makes me feel just a bit safer. Riding down 65th Street near my house is always a wild experience but this let me see who was about to pass me and where I was in relation to other cars. Sadly, the transflective display is great in sunlight but nearly disappears when you’re wearing polarized glasses so you either have to look around your shades or eschew them altogether. Regular shades work fine.

Cerevellum is a true hardware startup built by a guy who knows his stuff. His story – and his hardware – is inspiring and his rearview is well worth the price, especially for biking gearheads like me.

Product Page

To paraphrase the late great David Foster Wallace, did you know that probing the seamy underbelly of software development reveals ideological strife and fanaticism on a nearly Godwin’s-law scale? Did you know that software development even had a seamy underbelly? It does, and its name is PHP, the world’s least-loved but arguably most-used programming language.

It’s loathed, it’s despised, and it’s everywhere. WordPress, meaning TechCrunch, is brought to you by PHP. Yahoo? PHP. Facebook? Them too–although Quora founder and former Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo hastens to stress that “PHP was out of the question” for Quora, and Facebook merely uses it because it’s “stuck on that for legacy reasons”. And yet PHP is allegedly used by more than three-quarters of all web sites.

To sum up: everybody hates PHP, except for the countless legions who use it, who should all be very ashamed of themselves. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to call that a general consensus. PHP has been called–and by people widely respected in the industry, too–”a fractal of bad design,” “the biggest, stinkiest dump that the computer industry had taken on my life in a decade,” and, worst of all, “the Nickelback of programming languages.”

Even its defenders are hilariously half-hearted and mealy-mouthed: it’s “better than you think,” and “has even learned from its mistakes,” we’re assured. Or we’re told that “The true problem with PHP lies in the community,” not the language. Or they just result to ad hominem attacks. Or, well, sometimes they just stop defending it at all. I mean, it’s really hard to defend a programming language whose behavior depends on whether you’re Turkish.

And yet. I’m loath to admit it. I may never again be acceptable in polite software company after this article is published. But I have a soft spot for PHP, and not just because I share an alma mater with its creator. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t actually use it; in my ten-year software career I’ve been paid to write code in more than a dozen different languages, but I’ve had to resort to PHP exactly once. For a pet unpaid project. I wrote about ten lines. When I mentioned this to one of the finest developers I’ve ever worked with, he responded: “Dude. TMI.” Did I mention that it’s widely hated?

Anyway, my sympathy for PHP’s deviltry is because I appreciate its ethos. Its just-get-it-done attitude. Or, as Melvin Tercan put it in his recent blog post, “here’s to the PHP Misfits. The pragmatic ones who would pick up anything – even double-clawed hammers – to build their own future. Often ridiculed and belittled by the hip guys in class who write cool code in Ruby or Python, but always the ones who just get shit done.”

He’s on to something there. The best is the enemy of the good, and shipping some working PHP code is approximately a million times better than designing something mindblowing in Haskell that never actually ships. I fully support Jeff Atwood’s call to replace PHP once and for all–but I hope that everyone realizes that eliminating its many, many, multitudinous flaws won’t be enough; they’ll have to somehow duplicate its just-make-it-work ethos, too.

Image credit: Double-clawed hammer, Nicole Aptekar, Flickr.

Well, we knew that Olympic organizers were likely to be tough on unauthorized content, especially after issuing regulations around social media prior to the Games. And evidence of that is surfacing today in the shape of deleted videos on YouTube. Search for scenes from the spectacular opening ceremony in London and while you will find excerpts from official broadcasters like the BBC, videos uploaded by ordinary users are being gradually being stamped out.

Viewing one example video here

Returned the phrase:

“James Bond (Daniel Craig) E…”
This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by International Olympic Committee.

This video looks like it might have been ripped from the BBC’s coverage and re-posted, in which case it would fall foul of YouTube’s rules on copyright. We have reached out to YouTube to check whether video uploaded via mobile from the opening ceremony by users on the ground will be terminated as well. (Update: Sources say this video was ripped form the BBC’s broadcast so it would be subject to a copyright take-down by the BBC/IOC. See further update below).

Meanwhile, other platforms for video are flying slightly under the IOC’s radar such as broadcasts from the cycling race today on Swedish startup Bambuser. And you’ll find some content on cheeky old Daily Motion.

But – if you’re in the UK – at least you can see still see the Queen jump out of a helicopter with James Bond, thanks to the BBC. Not in the UK? We apologise. Maybe blame global copyright laws…

UPDATE: A YouTube spokesperson sent us a statement: “As always, when we’re notified that a particular video uploaded to our site infringes another’s copyright, we remove the material in accordance with the law.”

The app store model, pioneered by companies like Handango and popularized by Apple, has become the preferred method for distributing software on everything from desktops to post-PC devices. We’re also seeing this model in the cloud, mostly through software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers, such as the Google Apps Marketplace. But what’s been missing so far is a platform-as-a-service that allows you to add components through an app store interface.

In the world of enterprise software, SaaS app markets are subverting the binary distinction between “best of breed” solutions that do one thing and do it well and large suites. It’s hard not to root for best of breed solutions. They are, after all, the best at what they do. But large enterprises have reasons for choosing bundles, ranging from integration to procurement issues. With an app store, you can standardize on a particular suite and then augment or replace specific features. For example, both Jive and Yammer are social collaboration suites that include idea management app, but both also include an app marketplace where you can install a competing idea management solution like Spigit or UserVoice.

We’ve yet to see this applied to PaaS, but I think it’s something we need. I recently moderated a panel on polyglot vs. single stack platform-as-as-service providers at DeployCon. Although there are clear benefits in choosing a PaaS provider fanatically devoted to a particular stack, the way Nodejitsu is devoted to Node.js, the general consensus of the panel was that the market is heading towards polyglot providers. There are just too many advantages in choosing a PaaS provider that give you a single place to multiple stacks with the same tools.

PaaS providers are trying a few ways to get out of the best of breed paradox. Engine Yard acquired Orchestra for its PHP PaaS instead of trying to build something in-house. Cloud Foundry and OpenShift are trying to get the open source community to create a best-of-breed implementation for each stack that it supports. But in the end the truly best implementations may be scattered across providers. Heroku, dotCloud and Active State Stackato may each end up with the best version of one component, but in the end you’ll probably have to pick just one provider.

That’s where an app store could come in handy. What if you could sign-up for a public PaaS and then choose among different components? What if you could actually add OpenShift’s Java stack and Nodejitsu’s Node.js stack to a Cloud Foundry PaaS with the click of a button? Not an integration with a separate PaaS instance, but as an actual component within your main PaaS, with support from a best-of-breed provider. I imagine developers competing to create the best architectures and configurations for stacks, and end users being able to pick the best ones. The primary PaaS provider would need to vet these for security and resource efficiency, of course, but it would turn the PaaS into more of a, well, platform.

There’s some evidence that something like this could happen. PHPFog already has a selection of “JumpStarts” for different applications and frameworks, such as WordPress, Drupal and Cake PHP. But AppFog CEO Lucas Carlson recently showed me Open JumpStarts, a forthcoming project which would allow third party developers to create and submit custom stacks for various frameworks and languages.

We may see this from Amazon Web Services soon enough. Elastic Beanstalk and AWS Marketplace provide the fundamental components. I could see Bitnami or CloudSmith getting into this market as well. You can even see the configuration repositories from Puppet Labs and Opscode as steps in this direction.

With an app store model, best-of-breed would become a realistic solution for platform-as-a-service and shake-up the existing support models.

Photo by Martin L / CC

Investors demand more revenue from Facebook, and Sheryl’s got just the APIs to give it to them. Over the last two days, three major ads tech partners have revamped their products with recently released Facebook APIs that allow brands to track and optimize for on-site conversions including app installs, buy home page ads and logout page takeovers, and target ads specifically to mobile.

The new capabilities in tools from Buddy Media, Nanigans, and BLiNQ Media (who just updated today) will attract ad dollars from app developers, huge brands, and local businesses. That means more revenue for these Ads API providers and more revenue for Facebook, which it needs  to rescue its share price, down 11.7% today.

On July 12th Facebook revamped its Ads API to handle premium ads sales, including home page and logout page placements which appeal to the world’s top brands and those like movie studios that need to reach a wide audience quickly.

It added the option to target ads to mobile specifically on June 5th, which attracts both app developers seeking installs and local businesses trying to reach people out on the town.

And a bit further back on April 18th it boosted the Ads API with the ability to optimize and track ads to attain the most on-site conversions – everything from shares and comments to Page Likes to brick-and-mortar checkins.  That means instead of seeking impressions or click throughs, advertisers can pay for what they’re actually trying to achieve.

However, little ad spend from these products factored into Facebook’s first earnings report yesterday where it just barely hit projections. That’s because the big tools built on the Ads API hadn’t been updated to take advantage of the new features. That changed this week.

Buddy Media bought Ads API provider Brighter Option in February, but it wasn’t up to date with these three new capabilities until yesterday when it launched a major update to its ads tool.

Nanigans was quick to jump on the mobile ad targeting and conversions API, and this Wednesday integrated premium ad buying. The company has quietly grown to power 12,000 Facebook ad impressions per second and serve A-list clients like Fab and American Express. I think there’s a good chance they’ll get acquired by some old-world enterprise marketing giant.

And today BLiNQ Media revealed to me that its launching version 2.0 of its BLiNQ Ad Manager, which supports mobile and premium ad buying. It has taken much less funding than other companies in the space, so it could be an easy acquisition for a social marketing company such as Wildfire that currently partners to offer Ads API access, or lacks ad buying power entirely.

There’s some proof that Facebook’s new ads types including mobile are performing well, including reports like ours featuring data from multiple ads API companies that showed a 13X for mobile ads over web ads. And the social network can rely on these providers to try convincing advertisers.

But it will need more than one-off examples like Sheryl Sandberg citing on Facebook’s earnings call that Electronic Arts got a 4X return in sales on its Facebook ad spend. It needs irrefutable evidence that social ads work before Wall Street will budge and give its ugly share price some love.

Facebook’s head of advertising Greg Badros will be on stage at our Facebook Ecosystem CrunchUp on August 3rd, so buy your tickets to soak up strategy on making social ads work for you.

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