Category: Tech news

David McCrory has developed the concept of data gravity. It dictates that data has its own mass. When data gets stored it becomes harder to move. The more data stored, the greater the mass.

The increasing efforts to control data provides a more dystopian vision about the future of transporting data. How does the data smuggler hide data of such weight when moving it from place to place?

Mark Maunder sees two new forms of data transportation emerging. He expects we will increasingly see innovations in hiding data new ways to encryption networks and . Interestingly, he sees both as a new form of data smuggling that will come as we seek ways to avoid an overzealous authoritarian culture.

The idea of physically smuggling data might seem absurd. Why move it physically when you can transport it using a broadband connection? Maunders makes the point that if the data is too much to transport via broadband there are alway data centers where you can go and download the data on a terabyte drive and then connect it to your laptop.

But moving data becomes a difficult task when there is a lot of it to move. It’s one of the real downsides to cloud computing. To port it, you have to pretty much either move it physically or through an encrypted connection between data centers. But few if any cloud services are offering that encrypted connection with rival providers.

Maunder tells a story about a conversation with Sebastian Thrun, the creator of Google Street Maps. Thrun told Maunder that the data from the “Street View” vans is put on hard drives and Fedexed to Google headquarters. Thrun told him that mailing hard drives will always be the highest bandwidth way of moving data around.

He also refers to  encryption laws passed in the United Kingdom that allows authorities to demand an individual’s encryption keys. Failure to turn over the keys means two to five years in prison.

What will come of this? Maunders sees innovators developing new ways to hide encrypted data when transferring it across a wire.

But physically moving data makes more sense for the data smuggler. He can move data by hiding it o his body far more fast than over an encrypted wire.

Maunders:

If you can hide a 2 terrabyte drive and take a 6 hour journey to get it from A to B, your bandwidth is 388 Megabits per second. Try and get that on your cable modem or ADSL link.

But there are all sorts of risks with moving data on your body. If a data smuggler uses a self-destructive hard drive, authorities can still claim he was hiding something. It has to be invisible. It has to be in your body. Wit that in mind, what if you could use your brain to move data?

He quotes an article from Scientific American:

The human brain consists of about one billion neurons. Each neuron forms about 1,000 connections to other neurons, amounting to more than a trillion connections. If each neuron could only help store a single memory, running out of space would be a problem. You might have only a few gigabytes of storage space, similar to the space in an iPod or a USB flash drive. Yet neurons combine so that each one helps with many memories at a time, exponentially increasing the brain’s memory storage capacity to something closer to around 2.5 petabytes (or a million gigabytes). For comparison, if your brain worked like a digital video recorder in a television, 2.5 petabytes would be enough to hold three million hours of TV shows. You would have to leave the TV running continuously for more than 300 years to use up all that storage.

A new form of authoritarianism is emerging as we seek new ways to move data. This will give rise to the data smuggler. How to hide the data will be the great challenge for these “data mules.” Perhaps the most effective ones will have a hidden data jack just behind their ear.

As Maunders points out, just like Johnny Mnemonic:

Happy Saturday, readers! Unless your boss is making you work this weekend, you’ve got two days of freedom ahead of you. If you want to spend that time making new friends or meeting people with similar interests, a new startup called At The Pool can help.

The social network sends users a different match, based on their location, history, interests and intent (their pools) every day in an email. Users are encouraged to connect on- and offline.

“Think of us like the host of a party — someone who knows both of you, what you’re into, where you’re from, and more,” the network’s “about” section reads. “Like any good host, we make an introduction because we know you’ll get along.”

I just joined @At_The_Pool! Join me and get early access at: atthepool.com/?r=CBbCos

— Michael Arrington (@arrington) June 29, 2012

The site officially launches Monday—it’s had beta launches already—with a “Silicon Beach Pool” aimed at the LA Tech scene. However, the At The Pool team has launched a “TechCrunch Pool” for readers that is live now. Readers can go to the site and sign up early using the code “techcrunch.” Once in the site, TechCrunch readers will get matched with one another.

“We’re sort of a mashup between Meetup and Match.com (you join pools like you would a Meetup group, but you’re then interacting and meeting others one-on-one, as Match facilitates),” founder and CEO Alex Capecelatro tells me. “While Facebook is all about connecting you with your friends and family, we aim to connect you with new people you don’t yet know.”

Capecelatro came up with the idea when he was frustrated trying to find someone to go road biking with in a small town in upstate New York. After using sites like Facebook and Meetup, and disliking the notion of using Craigslist or dating sites, he decided to build his own site.

“I realized the Internet is pretty terrible at helping us meet new people,” he says in an email from the company’s Los Angeles headquarters. “This is very obvious when you graduate college, move to a new town, or pick up a new hobby. I set out to build a site to connect with like-minded people in an easy and fun way.”

He launched a beta version to the University of Connecticut and saw it “light up like wildfire.” Capecelatro says they saw very high engagement by connecting people in pre-existing communities.

There are a number of other companies in the same space, including the aforementioned ones. Coffee Meets Bagels connects users with a similar once-a-day introduction, but is focused on dating. Social mobile apps like Highlight and Glancee aim to connect the user with people around them, but Capecelatro points out that At The Pool recommends and tells you “why we think you should know each other,” taking it a step further than geographic proximity.

The company took an early $50,000 seed investment from David Carter. Capecelatro tells me they are currently “in the process of raising a more substantial seed round.” He says At The Pool will be releasing more pools, based on interests and cities, this year, with a heavy focus on meeting like-minded people, as well as considering partnership offers.

I’ve been putting off writing about the Telikin because, arguably, any PC is suitable the older audience that the Telikin is aimed. I set my Dad up with a Linux machine and then a Mac Mini and he’s been surfing Drudge and listening to Polka like a champ for almost a decade now. Why spend $699 when you can feasibly hook Grandma up with a PC for $400 or so at Best Buy?

Well the Telikin is an entirely different sort of PC. Built as an all-in-one device, the machine includes an 18- or 20-inch screen, large-print keyboard, and a normal wired mouse. It runs an unnamed version of Linux and is completely locked down, dumping you into a kiosk-like experience that you can’t leave. The machine is, in actuality, a MSI MSI Wind Top AE1920 with some special software installed and you essentially pay a $60 premium for Telikin’s software.

I installed the Telikin for my mother who is approximately as computer savvy as our dog and, with a bit of coaxing, she was able to call via Skype and check an email mailbox I made her months before that she had never visited. Because the experience is completely curated, there is really no way to dump into a command prompt and the system supports something called Tech Buddy, which is essentially a remote desktop connection via any other PC.

That said, the Telikin is clearly limited and may upset tech-savvy folks. The buttons do exactly as they say – News gives you the news, Web gives you a browser – but there are a few quirks that may stymie some users. For example, email attachments aren’t automatically displayed, a definite problem for folks trying to send images and video, and there are no social media buttons (although there are shortcuts in the browser). You can log in using your Facebook account to see friends’ photos in the Photos tab, which is quite fun, but a social tab would be nice.

The system also has a basic word processor and calculator as well as a very simple file browser although you really can’t dig very far into the file system. In short, it hides everything from the user in order to ensure Mom doesn’t drag /var into the trash can.

Walt Mossberg found the Telikin to be a flawed experience but – and I’d actually cede to Walt here if pressed – but I feel it is nearly perfect for an elderly parent who needs a set-it-and-forget-it web experience. I didn’t noticed any of the bugs Walt noticed, which suggests that they have updated the machine over the past year. The price is just about right, too – $699 isn’t a lot to pay vs. a $599 Mac Mini without monitor – but again you’re paying a slight premium for stock hardware and a special OS.

Cheaper computers can be had and better experiences exist, but the Telekin seems to be an excellent choice for, say, a retirement center or home of an elderly relative. More computer-savvy folks like my Dad (who still types “Drudge” into Google to search for Drudge Report) are better served by a real computer with a real OS. Folks who are at a complete loss, however, may find this a superior experience.

Click to view slideshow.

Product Page

Editor’s Note: Brenden Mulligan is an entrepreneur and product designer who created Onesheet, Webbygram, TipList, ArtistData, MorningPics, and PhotoPile. You can find him on Twitter at @mulligan.

Admittedly, I have a negative bias towards overhyped startups. If a company gets a lot of attention before they do anything significant, I’m less likely to try their product and when I do, less likely to have a positive feeling about it. I realize this is a weakness I need to overcome, but it’s the way my mind works.

There are few better examples over the past few years of overhyped startups than Path. Two years ago the company, after much uber-super-duper-stealth-mode speculation, launched a sub-par photo-sharing product that offered little utility over the other products in the space. Then, Path turned down a rumored $100m acquisition, again, before they’d released anything worth buying (except the team).

So I’m choosing a very public place to admit the following: after using the new version of Path since November, I believe it is one of the best mobile products I’ve ever used and possibly the best true social network I’ve ever been a part of.

Realizations like this don’t come easy and it’s led me to think a lot recently about why the network appeals to me so much. After all, I learn more from Twitter and have more friends on Facebook. One would think the value of those social networks would outweigh Path. And maybe their overall value does. But there’s something very different about Path. Something special that makes my Path experience much richer than the other social networks.

Consistency of tone

The conclusion I’ve come to is what makes Path so special isn’t its limited friend count. It’s not its beautiful design (which I dug into a few months ago). What I’ve realized is so special about Path for me is the consistency of tone.

When I open Path, I’m seeing experiences people are having. Some of those experiences are checking into a new place. Some are posting a photo. Some are listening to music. Some are going for a run. But for the most part, they’re all experiences. And they all have a common tone, meaning they all feel like part of the same story. Everyone has their own storyline, but together, everyone’s moments merge together into a consistent shared biography.

To further illustrate this, let me summarize the newest 8 updates for 4 different social networks:

Facebook. A barrage of whatever can be crammed into a single newsfeed.

• 3 friends liked a new app that I’d never heard of and had no relevancy to me.
• Photo of my nieces
• Picture of a friend’s family at an event
• Photo of George Clooney from Vanity Fair
• Copy of photo strip from an event
• Link to a photo of the leader board from the world series of poker
• Link about MOG being acquired by Beats
• Picture of a bottle of Vodka

Twitter. A stream of extremely useful and extremely random information.

• A company retweeting something nice someone said about them
• A blog post a friend posted
• A retweet of someone I don’t know announcing they will be a conference I’m not going to (in Spain)
• A friend complaining that birds defecated on her freshly washed car
• A friend tweeting how cigarettes lower life expectancy by 28 days per pack
• A retweet of someone linking to an article about Higgs Boson
• A retweet of someone giving away t-shirts
• Someone announcing they would be at a conference in England

Instagram.  Beautiful photos in a consistant format, yet inconsistent content.

• Person dressed in stars and stripes on stilts
• Trees
• Harbor in France
• Dog wearing sweatshirt
• Outside a gym
• Inside a gym
• Flowers
• Masts of ships

Path. The personal moments of friends experiencing life.

• A friend going for a run
• A friend checking into the Google Shuttle stop with his girlfriend
• A friend arriving in Cambridge, MA
• A co-worker checking into our new office
• A friend taking her pets to the vet
• A friend checking into breakfast (with a comment  from his girlfriend attached)
• A photo of a friend on a farm in Virginia
• A friend waking up in the Mount Tam area

Although the content in Path might seem more monotonous, what makes it really unique is the content is so consistent. It’s all friends sharing experiences. It’s not them sharing what they’ve read, or some photo they found in a magazine, or an article about their company. It’s personal moments.

Unfit for Path

The benefits of creating a community with a consistant tone means that some content just doesn’t fit. Lately I’ve noticed  three examples of content that hasn’t fit Path:

Information Sharing / Links

Some people in my network occasionally use Path to share links. These come in two categories. The first is links to things they have written or things written about them/their company. Generally, this fits the tone of Path, although still feels a little off. But since these are generally about accomplishments of people I’m friends with, it’s welcome content. The second category is just standard link sharing that you’d see on Twitter. This feels very weird. Path isn’t an information network like Twitter, it’s a social network. It’s not a place I go for news, it’s a place I go to see what my friends are experiencing. Links to insightful articles unrelated to my friends don’t feel like they belong in this environment.

Location Specific Invitations

This is something I’ve been guilty of using Path for, and certain members of my network have voiced an opinion that they’d prefer to not see it. Occasionally, someone will post an invitation for others to come to an event, to join them for a meal, etc… Although this is a personal request that you’d think would fit with a social network, the complaint has been that one of the beauties of Path is that consuming the feed is location agnostic. When asking if friends want to get together for lunch, someone is posting something completely irrelevant to a large part of their network. I have friends exploring France right now and seeing their photos is delightful. But if they were constantly asking Path if people wanted to join them for a glass of wine, it’d be annoying because 99% of their network isn’t in France.

Automatic Updates

This is a new one, and caught me a bit off guard the first time I saw it. Recently, Path added Nike FuelBand integration, where at the end of each day, a user’s Fuel graph is posted to Path. This immediately struck me as out of place. While the graph certainly represents the result of many experiences, something about it doesn’t fit the tone of the rest of the updates. And since these are posted at the same time each day, it feels spammy when suddenly 5 friends have graphs posted automatically when they didn’t trigger the action.

The FuelBand graph inclusion got me thinking about overall updates and where their place is (or isn’t) in this network. Every other action on Path requires someone to trigger it through a specific action at a specific moment. They turn on their phone in a new place, they wake up, they start or finish a run. But the FuelBand graph is automatic. It posts every day. And that makes it feel different.

My hypothesis is that automatic updates will always feel weird and spammy in Path. Think if Path connected with Flipboard and at the end every day, it posted a summary of the articles the user read. Or they integrated with Spotify, and it posted statistics on all the music listened to. For me, this content just doesn’t fit. This content makes Path feel more like Facebook: a dumping ground for any app that can get a user to give posting permission.

The Path team knows what they’re doing and I’m sure will find a way to make data coming in from other apps work. But they need to do it in a way that fits the tone of the rest of the content. If that tone becomes inconsistant, the thing that makes Path special will be lost.

I’m a big believer in what Path is building. They’ve created a very unique environment, and they need to do everything they can to preserve it. I’m sure they will.

As we were wandering through the Atlanta meet-up last week we stumbled upon a charming young man wearing a glove studded with circuit boards and embroidered with what looked like silver thread. Upon closer inspection, it turned out that it was a wild homegrown glove made by a pair of former design students.

The project is called G.A.U.N.T.L.E.T. (Generally Accessible Universal Nomadic Tactile Low-power Electronic Typist) and is currently in beta stages. However, it would allow a person to type on any smartphone or computer with one hand, opening up interesting possibilities for people with stroke debilitation or a missing hand.

The creator, Jiake Liu, is co-founder of Kabob.it, a menu service for eateries. The glove, on the other hand, was an experiment he built in college and it has gone through a number iterations. Right now it uses electrically conductive embroidered letters to send signals via Bluetooth and they may improve the glove over time. Until then, I suggest that start-up founders wear something odd and cool when they come to our meetups in the future, thereby ensuring immediate attention.

And RIM’s rough ride continues. Within the past few weeks, the Canadian company has had to announce all sorts of bad news, and now RIM has been dealt an expensive defeat in court to add that list.

Bloomberg reported late yesterday that RIM must now shell out nearly $150 million in order to settle a patent suit with a New Jersey-based mobile device management company called Mformation.

The whole sordid story began back in 2008, when Mformation filed its suit against RIM, claiming (what else?) that the Canadian company infringed on two of its patents. Mformation, which counts AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, and Clearwire among its numerous operator partners, alleges that RIM included patented functionality into their own product after preliminary licensing talks went south.

The jury eventually sided with Mformation, and as such RIM must now pay out royalties of $8 for each of the 18.4 million devices in question — a total bill of $147.2 million. Ouch.

Naturally, RIM isn’t planning to give up the money without a fight — the company’s legal team has already moved to have the verdict reversed, and we’ll soon see how that works for them.

Now, RIM is no stranger to these sorts of legal setbacks — the company lost the right to use the “BBX” name for their new mobile operating system late last year, and was (unsuccessfully) sued by over the BBM trademark by a Canadian broadcast measurement organization. That said, situations like this are the last thing that RIM wants to worry about right now, especially as they work towards saving a total of $1 billion before the end of the fiscal year rolls around (for reference, RIM is currently in the second quarter of fiscal 2013).

The company has certainly gone all out on that front, as it has already begun to trim its workforce by 5,000 heads. What’s more, it was reported earlier this week that RIM has been looking to unload one of their two 9-passenger Dassault corporate jets to help reach that goal. Apparently, the company was looking to score between $6-7 million for the jet, but they may want to try bumping up that asking price in light of recent events.

All things considered, the situation could have been even worse for the beleaguered smartphone company. While hefty, the damages they must pay only account for applicable devices within the United States — as CEO Thorsten Heins is fond of reminding us all, the company enjoys considerable popularity outside of North America.

Facebook has acquired the team behind Spool, the mobile content-caching startup that launched in September 2011 at TechCrunch Disrupt. At that time, my colleague Sarah Perez snappily described its service as “Instapaper on steroids.”

This looks like a pure talent acquisition — it doesn’t appear that any of the technology Spool built will be integrated into Facebook, and the company has already shut down its service. Spool raised a $1 million round of venture capital this past January from a group including SVAngel, Felicis Ventures, Yuri Milner’s Start Fund and YouTube founder Steve Chen.

We’ve reached out to Spool for more information about the deal — financial details, staff numbers, and the like. This will be updated with any news we receive.

Facebook sent along this statement about the deal:

“The Spool team has deep expertise in mobile software development and a passion for making content easy to consume. We’re excited for the team to join and accelerate their vision at Facebook.”

Here is the blog post Spool co-founder Avichal Garg wrote announcing the move:

We started Spool to make content easy to consume on a mobile device. To accomplish this, we built some very sophisticated technology and developed a deep expertise in mobile software development. We firmly believe that solving these problems will be increasingly important as the world accesses the Internet primarily through mobile devices.

We are proud to announce that today we will be pursuing our vision as a part of Facebook. If you were a Spool user, please read the instructions on retaining your bookmarks.

We are extremely excited to accelerate our vision and help Facebook’s users connect and share with the people in their lives. We wouldn’t be in a position to have this sort of impact without our supporters and the Spool community. Please accept a heartfelt thank you for supporting us and for affording us this opportunity.

Sincerely,
The Spool team

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — played Minority Report The Home Version as Google entered the Tablet Wars. The Nexus 7 or some such is actually a phenomenal device, and brings the Goog back from the Slow Death of Fragmentation and a step ahead of Microsoft SquareFace.

Now we’ve got two push notification platforms that will actually get built out, as long as Google keeps the Nexus refreshed on the latest Android build. Whether the Gang members are right about the timing remains to be deciphered from the conversation, but it’s clear sailing for a unification of the metadata if not the actual notification streams.

@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @jtaschek, @kteare

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

What can be said about the save icon? It is a diskette. It is often blue. And of course, as others have pointed out, many (soon to be most) people using computers today have never touched one and never will.

Yet you could say the same for a the “home” icon (millions will never own a house), the “phone” icon (used a model 500 lately?), the lasso, the magnifying glass, the dodge and burn tools. “Games,” represented by a checkerboard! Copy and paste, for god’s sake?

The simple fact is that there is a shared visual orthography in which some things are acknowledged worldwide, and this overpowers the logical suggestion to constantly update it. Many reading this would, 20 years ago, be unsure whether the icon represented saving or accessing the A: drive. Nowadays, many will never encounter portable storage in their life. Yet the diskette is firmly associated with saving changes, certainly more so than it is with removable media. So logic has nothing to do with it. Language has less to do with logic than it has to do with a shared interpretation of symbols. These symbols are widely used because they are widely understood, and they are widely understood because they are widely used.

The snake will not run out of tail to eat.

The Noun Project is a fun exploration of this concept — that there are, say, 32×32-pixel versions of every concept in the dictionary. But as computing (what a term!) grows out of this phase, in which its concepts are most effectively presented by flat, bit-mapped graphics and text, new ideas may become necessary.

But what are the chances these new ideas are going to be truly new? The things we create and interact with are almost without exception analogues to real life actions and objects. What in computing or the online world has no precedent, is not a virtual representation of “real-life” actions? Precious little, and what little there is is arguable. Try it; it’s surprisingly difficult to find anything at all that can’t be explained in terms of things that have come before.

Maybe I lost you there. What I am saying is that every action we create in the virtual world has by necessity an analogue in the real world. And by common consent, to represent those actions we go back to certain shared experiences that will not be misinterpreted. Lately it’s been hydrological phenomena. Cloud storage. Bittorrent. Streaming. Thunderbolt, to an extent. A few of you may remember that Zunes squirted. NFC is data osmosis, though of course no one calls it that.

What did you expect when our data started coming from nowhere and being beamed into the blue? We did a caveman and reached for our primitive sky metaphors. We reach for these things because, like all metaphors, they make new things intelligible by linking them to concepts we have already internalized. The diskette icon in fact rankles because it is recent, not because it is old. But much further back and you’re trying to make an icon out of banks of cathode ray tubes, any further forward and you’re looking at even more jarring things: discs, Zip drives, and the blank, robotic face of a 3.5″ hard drive (still the icon for Macintosh HD on this flash-based laptop, for the record). The diskette isn’t such a bad compromise.

So don’t be angry that the icon for save is a 30-year-old magnetic tape receptacle, or your freeform marquee tool is based on something used to round up cattle. The word icon comes from the Greek eikon, itself from the verb eikenai, to resemble. It’s good enough for the form to resemble the function; it doesn’t have to be a recent snapshot of it.

In the meantime, we will be seeing more and more creative reflections of the real world upon the virtual, and vice versa. The boundary is crumbling already, and the two have been leaking into one another through the cracks for a long time. I look forward to the developments in real and abstract representation of the virtual. Will files have weight? Will there be weather on the Internet? Will servers have personalities? These questions sound ridiculous today, but don’t forget that questions of the same type, asked 10, 50, or 100 years ago, may have positive answers today. Will our computers talk to us? Will robots clean our houses? Will we walk on the moon?

Looking forward, it is likely that the most transformative technologies will be those for which we have the least adequate metaphors. It sounds a bit silly, but what that means is that what we have created does not resemble anything in the world. If you find yourself at a loss to explain what it is exactly your device, site, service, or algorithm does, it may be that you are yourself verbally inadequate, but it may also mean that you are onto something fundamentally new and powerful.

“Center For Digital Archaeology,” said the banner above one of the startups at the Funders and Founders Life 3.0 demo show, and for a moment I got excited, thinking of Vernor Vinge‘s software archaeologists. It wasn’t quite that. Instead, Codifi was a “solution for turning cultural heritage datasets and rich media into web- and mobile-ready interactive experiences.”

Which is cool, and worthwhile, but more a niche market than a world-shaker. As were a lot of the startups there. TennisRound: “find a tennis partner.” DreamBoard: an app for dream tracking and analysis. Plus the usual panoply of social marketplaces, socialsourced services, gamified giving, “Instagram for Products,” etc etc yadda yadda.

I apologize for being jaded. Michael Church’s scathing essay “Don’t waste your time in crappy startup jobs“–go read it–was still ringing in my ears, and I couldn’t help but wonder how many of these startups were founded more for the sake of founding a startup than because the founders had an idea that wouldn’t let them go.

But then I thought: I bet Marc “Software Is Eating The World” Andreessen would interpret all this very differently. And who am I to gainsay him?

I suspect he would argue that software is spreading, metastasizing, from its ‘usual’ domains, and beginning to infect, devour, and remake every aspect–and every niche–of human life. Tennis, dreams, laundry, you name it. That’s why he just invested $100 million in Github; because every human being and organization will be an indirect Github user before long, whether they know it or not. In the short term, Church may be right, most startups are dead ends–but in the long run, Andreessen has him beat cold.

And there were some genuinely interesting startups at Life 3.0. My favorite was MapsWithMe, not least because I’ve implemented (relatively crude) offline mapping in Android/iOS apps myself, so I have some idea of the size of the technical difficulties they’ve surmounted. Now you too can have a full-scale offline OpenStreetMap of the entire world on your phone or tablet, if you’re willing to sacrifice 8Gb of storage. What they offer is significantly better than Google Maps offline, no mean feat for a tiny company from Belarus–and they’re planning to offer an API and SDK to other developers soon.

I also really liked Coaster, “Uber for drinks”, which aims to save you time previously wasted waiting at the bar, and getArtup, which is so brilliantly simple – a subscription service to rent art from contemporary local artists, for businesses and wealthy individuals – that I can’t believe no one else has already cornered the market.

But the company that intrigued me the most was quite different. It had the terrible name SmogFarm. It was in a field–social-media sentiment measurement–that already seems crowded. But it seemed on first acquaintance to be more algorithmic, testable, and scientific than its competitors. More to the point, it was trying to do something new, something that has only recently been made even remotely possible; in this case, measuring the overall emotional state of the entire city of San Francisco. Who’s the market? I don’t know. What can you do with it? I’m not sure. Does it even really work? Good question. But it was a reassuring reminder that software isn’t just devouring the world we already know. From time to time, it may also open up new worlds to discover.

Image credit: Spring Dew, Flickr.

Andreessen Horowitz announced a whopping $100 million investment in GitHub this week. You can read commentary and speculation all over the web about what GitHub will do with the money, whether this was a good investment for Andreessen Horowitz and whether taking such a large investment is a good thing for GitHub.

But what the heck is GitHub and why are developers so excited about it? You may have heard that GitHub is a code sharing and publishing service, or that it’s a social networking site for programmers. Both statements are true, but neither explain exactly why GitHub is special.

At the heart of GitHub is Git, an open source project started by Linux creator Linus Torvalds. Matthew McCullough, a trainer at GitHub, explains that Git, like other version control systems, manages and stores revisions of projects. Although it’s mostly used for code, McCullough says Git could be used to manage any other type of file, such as Word documents or Final Cut projects. Think of it as a filing system for every draft of a document.

Some of Git’s predecessors, such as CVS and Subversion, have a central “repository” of all the files associated with a project. McCullough explains that when a developer makes changes, those changes are made directly to the central repository. With distributed version control systems like Git, if you want to make a change to a project you copy the whole repository to your own system. You make your changes on your local copy, then you “check in” the changes to the central server. McCullough says this encourages the sharing of more granular changes since you don’t have to connect to the server every time you make a change.

GitHub is a Git repository hosting service, but it adds many of its own features. While Git is a command line tool, GitHub provides a Web-based graphical interface. It also provides access control and several collaboration features, such as a wikis and basic task management tools for every project.

The flagship functionality of GitHub is “forking” – copying a repository from one user’s account to another. This enables you to take a project that you don’t have write access to and modify it under your own account. If you make changes you’d like to share, you can send a notification called a “pull request” to the original owner. That user can then, with a click of a button, merge the changes found in your repo with the original repo.

These three features – fork, pull request and merge – are what make GitHub so powerful. Gregg Pollack of Code School (which just launched a class called TryGit) explains that before GitHub, if you wanted to contribute to an open source project you had to manually download the project’s source code, make your changes locally, create a list of changes called a “patch” and then e-mail the patch to the project’s maintainer. The maintainer would then have to evaluate this patch, possibly sent by a total stranger, and decide whether to merge the changes.

This is where the network effect starts to play a role in GitHub, Pollack explains. When you submit a pull request, the project’s maintainer can see your profile, which includes all of your contributions on GitHub. If your patch is accepted, you get credit on the original site, and it shows up in your profile. It’s like a resume that helps the maintainer determine your reputation. The more people and projects on GitHub, the better idea picture a project maintainer can get of potential contributors. Patches can also be publicly discussed.

Even for maintainers who don’t end up using the GitHub interface, GitHub can make contribution management easier. “I end up just downloading the patch anyway, or merging from the command line instead of from the merge button,” says Isaac Schlueter, the maintainer of the open source development platform Node.js. “But GitHub provides a centralized place where people can discuss the patch.”

Lowering the barrier to entry democratizes open source development, and helps young projects grow. “Node.js wouldn’t be what it is today without GitHub,” Schlueter says.

Besides its public facing open source repositories, GitHub also sells private repositories and on-premise instances of its software for enterprises. These solutions obviously can’t take full advantage of GitHub’s network effect, but they can take advantage of the collaboration features. That’s how GitHub makes money, but it’s not alone in this market.

Atlassian acquired a competitor called BitBucket in 2010. And earlier this year Atlassian launched Stash, a product that enables you to host private, on-premise Git repositories with BitBucket/GitHub-style collaboration features. The company also sells developer collaboration tools like the bug tracker Jira and the wiki Confluence. Competition from Atlassian, which took $60 million in funding from Accel Partners in 2010, could help explain why GitHub took this round of funding, and hint at some possible future directions for the company. For example, Schlueter says GitHub’s issue tracking feature could eventually compete with JIRA for some projects.

The money may be in private and on-premise hosting, but the love is in the public repositories. Perhaps most importantly, GitHub has become the Library of Alexandria for code examples. Since Git encourages granular recording of changes, programmers, be they absolute beginners or experts, can trace the steps of some of the greatest developers in the world and find out how they solved thorny problems. But if GitHub were ever to meet the same fate as the Library of Alexandria, it could be reconstructed from all those local forks distributed on so many developers laptops all over the world. Regardless of how this investment works out, that’s a hell of a legacy for the GitHub team to leave behind.

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Emre Sokullu, founder and chief architect of GROU.PS

There’s been a lot of talk on the concept of minimum viable product lately, but not much has been written on how to actually implement one. Having gone through the process of developing one of the earliest social software mashups (GROU.PS) in PHP six years ago, and LoveBucks, a node.js Javascript app that is the Facebook “Like” Button for online content monetization (both alone), I want to describe to you a little bit what has really changed in web application development in recent years and the beauty of minimum viable product.

1. Build it on Facebook Platform

Don’t build your membership stack from scratch, let Facebook Connect handle it. Not only will that provide a better and more straightforward experience for your users, but it will also save you a ton of time and messy product decisions. You no longer have to mess with sessions, logout scenarios, collecting information about users, and probably most importantly lost passwords and spam accounts. Unless your product  is focused on the Chinese market, I don’t see any reason for not using Facebook Connect (1/3rd of the world, including China, uses it obsessively every day). Those who don’t use Facebook would probably not be your target audience anyway; after all, non-Facebook users are late adopters and conservative in their selection of new web apps. And don’t forget, Facebook Connect now lets you capture the emails of people using your service.

2. Use bootstrap.js

If your product starts life as a web app, chances are you may not be able to create a mobile experience from day one. But if you were to build it on bootstrap.js, the user experience on both mobile and desktop would be so linear and seamless that you could get along well enough by just having your users bookmark your site on their mobile devices so that they can use it like a mobile app. Hence, I call bootstrap.js a good way to show some steam on mobile without really investing in it. It also saves you a ton of work in CSS through its pattern templates.

3. Use Cloud, Scale Out

Without a doubt, cloud is easy and cheap. git + heroku + a mongo/riak host would save you a ton of time and money because you pay only for what you use. Scaling becomes much, much, much easier. I remember going through the phases of replicating our mysql stack at GROU.PS, putting a memcache layer in front of it and eventually sharding it – which was the most cumbersome part of all. It was hard. Bringing an expert on board costs a lot too.
Note that as you scale out though, the benefits of cloud decrease and it becomes an expensive solution. It’s important for you to know when to stop scaling through cloud, buy your own hardware for bare traffic and keep the cloud in place for excess traffic only (like Zynga does). To put this in perspective, think about how much you’d pay if you were an Amazon S3 client and you had to push about 1 petabyte a month. The answer is $50K (been there, done that). That’s probably a just portion of what instagram is paying right now to Amazon. It also justifies Adam D’Angelo’s explanation on their use of new funding at Quora.
At LoveBucks, we use heroku. Not only is it easy, cheap and fast to get started, it’s also acceptably reliable for a consumer web project, being a part of Salesforce and built on top of Amazon S3.

4. Beauty of jQuery

Bootstrap.js depends on jQuery. But that’s not the only reason why you’d want to use jQuery. If you’re old enough, you should remember having to choose from prototype, jquery, moo and a bunch of other libraries in the early days of web 2.0 . Well, now the competition is over and the winner is jQuery. jQuery is cross-browser, easy, beautiful, extensible and has a huge community. “DHTML” tricks are now so easy, compared to early days of web 2.0

5. Focus on core functionalities

Perhaps the biggest mistake I’ve made at GROU.PS at its initial phase was to add way too many features onto it. Sure, it made a lot of headlines in the web 2.0 community, but frankly thinking back, what I should have focused on was collaborative blogging (with ability to fetch RSS from external blogs as well as a built-in blog engine), plus email list sync’d blogging. These two were both large opportunities and GROU.PS would still be a unique value proposition with just these two. Instead, I added links (which was delicious, reddit) wiki and so on. The result? An unstable product which was trying to do too much and poor user experiences due to an overwhelming set of functionalities. (Of course this was back in the day, I can assure you now that GROU.PS is a very stable platform). It always makes sense to start simple. Don’t forget both Dropbox and Google started out as very simple products and they haven’t changed a bit in their UI (note: consistency) for a very long time.

At LoveBucks, we had the option to give people a lot of options with the amount and distributions of their donations. But we didn’t. We focused on the distribution of rewarded cash from consumers to publishers instead.
Another thing you may try for features that you believe might attract a lot of attention, is to create non-functional links, and when someone clicks them, a page with a counter is shown where it says “the feature is currently under development and check back soon”. This way, you can see how many pageviews the feature gets, hence its potential popularity. From there, you can decide on whether to invest in it or not.

6. SaaS is your best friend

Best thing with SaaS is that there is no upfront commitment and you don’t have to deal with maintenance or anything like that. It saves you valuable resources. Some of the services that you’d definitely want to use are:

• Chargify, Spreedly, Recurly, CheddarGetter for billing: Believe me, billing is not easy and you want one of these guys to handle cancellations, trials, upgrades and downgrades. Otherwise, it’s too much math for a resource-hungry new app. When the time comes, you can always migrate to authorize.net (as long as you use it as the backend) for everything, because these guys are using authorize.net‘s APIs too. The benefit; you don’t have to create payment pages, implement logics to evaluate coupons and stuff. At GROU.PS, we used our own payment pages, and frankly, maintaining them is messy, albeit the flexibility has its own advantages such as further optimization, but using hosted pages of Chargify (which we used at LoveBucks) have literally saved us weeks in development.
• LiveChat, olark, Zopim, LivePerson, SnapEngage: Again, customer support chat is not something you want to develop or maintain on your own, even if your app itself has support for chat. The reason? Because customer support chat is different by nature (one to many, operators, canned responses, logging), plus you don’t want to mix things up. Best example is GROU.PS. At GROU.PS, we provide our groups with a nice chat service, and we’re masters of ejabberd, yet we’ve decided to go with LiveChat because otherwise it’s just a big headache.
• Wufoo, Google Apps: There will be a lot of times when you’ll need to collect information from your users, have them upload files, and even sometimes have them pay you. In those cases, it makes a lot of sense to use Wufoo. At GROU.PS, when we were facing the challenge of whether creating a new form for our Valet services on our own or just outsourcing to Wufoo, we chose Wufoo, because it’s an investment where we have no idea about its return, therefore it’s much safer to do it with wufoo (for as low as 20 bucks a month). Plus, the UI that wufoo provides is so beautiful, in fact, there’s no sacrifice at all in terms of user experience; hence Wufoo might be your answer for any type of form related work.
• Kissmetrics, mixpanel: At GROU.PS, I remember investing months in enriching our analytics infrastructure, installing Thrift and Scribe for eventually consistent logging and building a Hadoop base to analyze all that data we collect. Well there’s a much easier way now. Just use kissmetrics or mixpanel and with just a line of code on HTML or your server side code, you’re able to analyze anything that’s going on your web site. Andthey enable anyone on your team (who knows how to add a code snippet) to research what they’re seeking instantly. Again, thanks to beauty of cloud.
• ZenDesk, desk.com: Customer support help is another thing you definitely need from day one no matter what your service is about (especially in day one, because your first users are the most valuable ones, you definitely want to hear their feedback) so you definitely need a platform to take care of that. My recommendation, don’t do it over email, because you want your knowledge base form from day one, your future customer support team see the style you answer questions in your early days, hence you’re better off paying a couple of bucks to ZenDesk or desk.com for this service.
• GoodData, RJ Metrics: Good product decisions require data. And investors want it too. So don’t neglect data collection and analysis. The best part of GoodData is that it’s integrated with a bunch of services I mention here as well as Google Analytics, hence it can bring you great charts like “average life time value of your subscriptions” or “customer support average response time” in a snap.

7. Use Scribd to host paperwork

This is perhaps a minor point, but for legal boilerplate that’s sent to you from your lawyer or fetched from somewhere, don’t lose time converting into a page on your web site. Just use Scribd, grab a widget with your doc embedded, and put it somewhere on your site. Again, this is a minor point but thinking along these lines gives you a good idea of what you should outsource and what you should focus your efforts on building.

8. A video is worth 1,000,000,000 words

Don’t use pages, tour sites, or heavy javascript demos to explain your product. Craft your message carefully and then create a video, that’s it. If you’re on budget, you can do it on your own but I strongly recommend you to work with a professional on this one. Some of the services are Grumo Media, Epipheo Studios, and wdysd, and the budget changes from $3,000 to $40,000. (for a full list of video production companies, see Quora)

9. Short on time and money? Drop Internet Explorer

OK this was already covered on Techcrunch, so I won’t go into too much details here. But if you feel that you’re short on cash and time, don’t waste your time with Internet Explorer, the most incompatible browser of all times. Don’t forget now Chrome has more traffic than any other browser + users of Internet Explorer are usually not early adopters, hence it’s very unlikely they’ll stick with your service anyways. You may gently warn them to switch to Chrome or Firefox to continue to your web site.

10. Spread it over time

Some features are not required from day one. Change plans? Cancel subscriptions? Add billing info? Those are things people would need as they use your service. So to get to your launch fast, don’t waste time building these, just link them to mailto:[email protected] and take care of those handful of outliers manually. As you see traction, you can build them.

Results:

The first version of GROU.PS took 1.5 months to develop and you can see the result in the image above (please evaluate it by the standards of the day).

As for LoveBucks, it was created in 2 weeks. Its database is already more than 1GB large, we grew to serving from 0 to more than 45,000 people daily with no hiccup. We were able to do this through cloud and the minimum viable product best practices I specified above.

A note on node.js

One thing you want to avoid; don’t always go for the hip, new technologies, especially for your infrastructure. At Lovebucks, I’ve used node.js for the backend due to its event-driven non-blocking nature (which is a must for a button product that aims to take over blogs, wikis and social networks) and the beauty of using the same language for both backend and frontend. But it turns out it’s too unstable – the multicore processor support was just added recently, API breaks frequently and worst of all libraries are even more unstable. Also consider the language that people around you (where you’ll develop your product in the next few years) know, because eventually you’ll need to hire. For GROU.PS, it was hard to scale the team for a while, because developers in Turkey (where most of our development is done) are usually only familiar with Microsoft technologies and Java, and not PHP, the language GROU.PS was developed in.

“Don’t let him climb a wall. We haven’t finalized his life insurance plan.”

That was one of the first directions I was given at Digg when I started in early 2008. “Him” was Kevin Rose, the founder of the widely popular social news site, and I was on my third day. It was widely known that Kevin was an avid rock climber, though he had recently been extending this skill to common household surfaces…walls, doorframes, stairways. We were heading together to Miami, for his keynote at Future of Web Apps, and he had offhandedly mentioned that he was going to scale the 3-story inner wall of the conference hall.

He climbed the wall.

That’s how it was at Digg. And it was fantastic. This intentional disobedience, the bucking of the rules, the attitude of disregarding the norms, was the cornerstone of how we approached every technology challenge set before us. It permeated every department…engineering, sales, marketing, community. At the time, we were revolutionary in the space, arguably one of the first to add a social, communal element to something very traditional: news. We provided a very simple platform to share opinions – good (Digg) or bad (bury) – in many ways, giving a voice to the masses.

And voice we had…our company culture mimicked the outspoken, vocal nature of the 39M monthly users we were happily serving. I’ve worked at companies whose culture is often heralded in the press as being unique – Google and Facebook, included – and I can resolutely say that the experiences that we had working at Digg were far and away more fun and rewarding and absolutely, mind-blowingly, outstandingly ridiculous than any Game Day or Hackathon that any NASDAQ-listed tech company can hold.

Creating a culture is hard…it’s not something you can artificially build by putting posters up on the wall or having weekly in-office happy hours. Trust me, I’ve tried (*cough* AOL West Coast *cough*) and failed. The Nerf wars, the Digg Meetups (including one where MC Hammer held a dance-off and the infamous Mark Trammell naturally won), and the booze-laden scavenger hunts made Digg fun. But the people were why we woke up every morning, why we tackled impossible problems with smile on our faces, and often with a beer in our hand.

The Digg team was passionate about being there, often because we were very active users on the platform prior to being hired. We cared about this immensely. One former engineer, Steve French, recounts: “I remember having multi-hour conversations over minor implementation details, just to make sure we were doing the right thing. I think this has a lot to do with why people were so close there outside of work. That professional trust translated into an expectation that everyone was as personally awesome as they were professionally.” Basically, we hired people we wanted to inspire us during the workday and be hungover with the next morning.

We hired not just our peers, but spent time recruiting people we looked up to professionally. We hired managers we wanted to have the opportunity to work with, smart people who we gave the freedom to solve difficult problems. And they did. During the 2+ years that I was at Digg, the site grew from 21 million to nearly 40 million Active Users, and revenues steadily increased.

We launched programs like Digg Dialogg, taking the core ‘voting’ functionality of Digg and tweaking it to create an often-mimicked (see: Reddit’s Ask Me Anything or Facebook Live) platform that extended a technical brand into a consumer one. We threw events all over the world that routinely had people lining up 24-hours in advance to attend, sometimes driving 10-12 hours to wait overnight outside in the rain. People didn’t come for the food nor the drink (as we didn’t provide either for free); they came for the experience. They came so that they could, for a few short hours, feel a part of this company, this community that was breaking boundaries, that was teaching the tech world that the collective is more than the individual, that each opinion and each user, when combined, has an impact.

It was the Digg Effect, crashing websites, eliciting lawsuits and setting the stage for the next evolution of online communication.

I left Digg over two years ago. Yesterday’s news that Betaworks purchased the assets of Digg didn’t sadden me – I’ve had a few years to process my disappointment in what has happened to the best company I’ve ever worked at.

Instead, I’m eager to see how the News.me team at Betaworks evolves what was once an extremely strong brand and, in my opinion, has the ability to be again, under their entrepreneurship and guidance. The Digg Crew – as we’d often call ourselves on the blog posts – aren’t strangers…we regularly hold our own meetups, stay active on email threads and Facebook Groups with each other, and in a lot of cases, have sought out opportunities to work together again. More remarkable than anything, though, is the lasting effect of this unparalleled experience; over 40% of the 50 original members have gone on to be a founder or co-founder of a tech company.

As for me, I’ve since moved to New York City. After starting my own consulting company and helping lead Facebook’s Consumer Marketing Team, I now head up Marketing & Communications at Sailthru, a tech start-up. And I did so intentionally, seeking out an opportunity at an innovative, thriving company, one that would provide me much of what I learned and experienced at Digg. Part of my role is to help create and define the culture here, and I look to Digg as the model for this.

I spent much of today talking to my former coworkers, sharing stories, reminding each other about the legendary anecdotes, reconnecting and laughing and reminiscing about the time we all spent there. The messages keep pouring in. And despite what the press has written about the acquisition being a disappointment, I think the sentiments of Digg’s former employees clearly show otherwise. To note:

“I’ll never have such a good working experience in my life.”

“I continue to be amazed by the hard work and the willingness of every member to help, no matter what day of the week or time of the day.”

“It’s the best job I ever had, biggest ideas, smartest people.”

“I was met with excitement and support [about suggested changes…everyone] was willing to let me shake things up.”

“Digg helped jumpstart careers and create more jobs.”

Digg may no longer exist as it once did, but I think it’s pretty evident that the Digg Effect lives on.

———————————-

Editor’s note: Contributor Aubrey Sabala served as Digg’s Marketing Manager from 2008-2010. Currently the Vice President of Marketing at Sailthru, a behavioral communications company headquartered in New York City, she misses her colleagues at Digg daily but is endlessly grateful for the experiences she had there. Her cat’s name is Mittens.

Image via: Mathieu Thouvenin

This summer’s AngelHack was a little more ambitious than your average hackathon. Instead of holding one event in one location over one weekend, it held hackathons in four different cities (Seattle, Silicon Valley, Boston, and New York), then allowed the winning teams to refine their products for three weeks before coming to Palo Alto and competing in the final event last night.

I was one of the judges, along with Right Side Capital’s David Lambert, AngelPad’s Thomas Korte, Istanta Capital’s Matt Oguz, Google Ventures’ Wesley Chan, and Facebook’s Austen Haugen. (Oh, and TechCrunch’s Josh Constine was the event “host”, which meant that he introduced each presenter and cracked jokes while they took the stage.) The judging felt a little odd, because the presentations and products were much more polished than what I’ve seen at other hackathons. At the same time, they weren’t full-fledged companies yet, either.

However, some of the 25ish teams (it was hard to keep track, because the list kept changing) were clearly on the cusp of becoming real companies, especially the three winners. And to help get them started, two of the teams received a $25,000 check from either Instanta or Right Side.

Here are the winners:

Appetas: Most restaurant websites suck, especially on mobile — for that reason, I’d rather go to a restaurant’s Yelp page than its own site. That’s not great for the restaurant, though, because they don’t get to control what kind of content (like negative reviews) visitors see. During its demo, the Appetas team created a simple-but-attractive website in about a minute, with contact info, menus, and other information pulled in through data sources like SinglePlatform.

GiveGo: You may have participated in walkathons or runs for charity but GiveGo makes it possible to hold your own micro-fundraisers — you don’t need to find a big event, and charities don’t need to deal with the organizational costs of putting that event together. Instead, you pick a charity of your choice and ask your friends to support you, then the GiveGo app will track every mile you walk, run, or bike, and at the end of the month it will collect the donations you’ve earned.

ShareBrowse: A bookmarklet that lets you share what’s in your browser with another user, and converse via video chat. Think WebEx, but built for consumers (for example if you need to explain something Internet-related to a relative) and without any of the cost or technical hassles. ShareBrowse was created by 15-year-old Raphie Palefsky-Smith. Because of his age, the judges gave him a trophy instead of a check, but we all pledged to help him out, whether he wants an internship, funding, or whatever.

It looks like a titanic legal struggle has been avoided. Mobile payments startup mPowa has responded to a cease-and-desist letter from Square by taking down a photo on its home page that Square said was swiped from its site.

You can read more the dispute in yesterday’s post, but basically, Square’s lawyers said it was “clear and obvious” that mPowa had copied Square’s image. mPowa CEO Don Wagner, on the other hand, told us that Square was just trying to “divert” the company’s focus. At the time, he wouldn’t say how mPowa would respond, but we heard that the company was probably just going to take the photo down.

And yes, that’s what mPowa has done, replacing one generic hand sliding a credit card through a payment device with another generic hand sliding a credit card through a payment device. (You can see the new image at the top of this post.) In its press release, the company doesn’t admit to any wrongdoing, making sure to describe Square’s complaints as “alleged”, and it has a little fun with the fact that this whole argument is about a photo of a hand. (To be fair to Square, the hand photos look awfully similar, as you can see below.) The press release is titled, “mPowa extends ‘hand of peace’ to Square,” and it includes this paragraph:

“Rather than resorting to a legal tussle over the issue, mPowa decided to extend a fresh hand in peace, replacing the allegedly offending hand with another. The company hopes this generous gesture will pour oil on the troubled cross-Atlantic waters, and that it can now go back to doing what it does best, delivering mobile payments to its customers.”

I’ve emailed Square for comment and will update if I hear back.