Category: Tech news

There’s no shortage of robust, full-featured file storage and sharing services out there, but where do you turn when you want the quickest, simplest way to go? Crate costs money, JustBeamIt requires both users to be online at the same time, but newcomer Dropcanvas? They may be onto something.

The beauty behind Dropcanvas is that it requires virtually no thought or effort to use properly. Upon navigating to the site, users are told to drag and drop a file onto the page. Once a file has been dragged onto the so-called “canvas” — there’s no set file size limit though canvases are capped at 5GB — users are provided with a link to spread around and a share button for easy access to Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit.

That’s all there is to it. Users can register an account if they want to retain access to their canvases, but the service is just as useful for those looking to work with no names involved. We’ve seen drag and drop file sharing services before, Dropcanvas takes a delightfully pared-down approach here — there’s very little visual cruft, no extraneous features — it just works. Oh, and it’s totally free. The cheapskate in me really appreciates that.

Dropcanvas came about when co-creator Chris Newnham came up with the concept after trying to talk his aunt through the process of sharing her vacation photos with her friends. After discussing her issues with his friend Heath Axton, they decided to create a service simple enough for their mothers to be able to handle. I’d say they succeeded.

After sharing the service with their friends and family, the pair decided to take things to the next level by launching the public beta on Reddit two weeks ago, a process that temporarily brought the service to its knees. A few harried tweaking sessions later and the service seems to be running like butter, and over 18,000 users have used Dropcanvas since launch day.

Here’s the interesting bit though — the pair don’t have any plans to try and monetize the service. Instead, they’re looking at Dropcanvas as a means of contributing to the community.

“Our goal really is to keep the site as minimalist and simple as possible,” co-creator Heath Axton told me. “We feel like monetization would really get in the way of that.” That said, keeping an operation like this running requires funds, and while they’re not thrilled with the potential idea of running ads on the site, a donation box may come down the line.

As simple and as useful as the service is, one big question remains — how long will it last? With the ability to anonymously share files of any stripe comes the potential for abuse — just look at the whole MegaUpload fiasco. I’m told that users have been thoughtful about sharing their own content so far, but honestly, who knows how long that trend will continue? Neither of them wants the service to become the “next Pirate Bay” as they put it, and though they don’t want to have to police the site for infringing material, they say they’re committed to doing whatever it takes to keep the service around for users on the up-and-up. Here’s hoping it works out for them — I’ve ended up leaning on the service quite a bit lately, and it would be shame to see some unscrupulous users ruin it for the rest of us.

Cleveland, known to many as the “Land From Whence The Cleves Came,” is rarely mentioned when you think of hotbeds of entrepreneurial energy. But yet it was the long time home to Harvey Pekar and does still have many local colleges, including Case Western Reserve, John Carroll, and Cleveland State. It is also home to Sherwin-Williams, Progressive Insurance, and now LaunchHouse.

In other words, it’s a city that’s ready to make a few sweeping changes.

LaunchHouse is a small accelerator in the LaunchHouse office park. It is accepting 10 teams out of 30 finalists set to present at their July Unconference and the winning teams will receive $25,000. LaunchHouse will retain 8% of the company on launch.

“Cleveland has a low-cost of living and operating while it is host to a highly educated and technical workforce,” said David Greenberg, LaunchHouse’s representative. They’ve seen 50 applications so far and the deadline is July 1 for submissions.

But why Cleveland?

“Because we believe in the Ohio community. We believe that Northeast Ohio can become an international center for entrepreneurship and innovation with the help and support of the local community. Cleveland is home to many fortune 500 companies, as well as many venture capital and private equity funds that will provide follow on funding to our entrepreneurs,” said Greenberg.

“We are most excited about putting Cleveland Ohio on the map as an innovative center for technology where entrepreneurs come from all over the world to build and grow their businesses.”

You can submit your proposal here and here’s hoping you don’t get hit by a rocket from the tombs.

People keep asking, “Why would anyone of sane mind buy a $17,000 luxury watch with a Space Invader’s theme?” If you are familiar with the Swiss watch brand Romain Jerome – you don’t need an answer. They are the people that brought you pieces such as the Titanic DNA (with metal from the actual titanic), and the Moon Dust DNA (with yea… real dust the from moon and metal from spare parts of the Apollo XI). So a “luxury licensing” deal with Taito Japan isn’t that odd.

Based on the Moon Invader watch collection, the Space Invader pieces come in a few color styles with a special three-dimensional dial designed to look as though it was built from pixels. The cases are in black colored steel and 46mm wide. Inside the watches are purely mechanical. Limited to between 78 or 8 pieces per version, this is an ultimate lifestyle accessory for the guy who grew up gaming and has now really made it.

You can see more images here but you may have to insert another coin – and another and another – to pick this thing up at a jewelers.

Robots are hard to talk to. They’re not friendly, they’re mostly made of plastic, and, as anyone who has tried to chat with a Roomba can attest, they are often dedicated to a single task. Luckily, there’s ApriPetit.

Toshiba’s R&D department built ApriPetit as a successor to their larger ApriPoco. This little guy is about six inches tall and follows along to conversations by moving its slug-like body and eyes in ways that resemble proper conversation.

This wee fellow is designed to help older folks with their daily chores. Its eyes are expressive and will follow the user across a room and it can ask and answer simple questions relating to health and mood.

The robot is part of Toshiba’s “Advanced Personal Robots with Intelligence” project and is not yet for sale.

via PlasticPals

The Gillmor Gang — John Taschek, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — watches helplessly as robots briefly take over the show. As investors reel from the backwash of the Facebook IPO, Microsoft chooses the moment to start pushing Windows 8. The Gang is underwhelmed.

Also: Missing Steve Jobs at the D conference, liner notes on the way to Spotify, and another round of Google Glasses from @scobleizer. The thing is, we want to give permission to be interrupted, not beg for restoration of a clear view. Even when we don’t talk push notification, we do.

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

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

You guys may remember a post on TechCrunch yesterday about a trademark spat between an entrepreneur named Brian Hamachek, who built an app called Who’s Near Me Live, and a Lightbank-backed startup called myRete, who built an app called WhosHere, strikingly similar in both functionality and name. The story unfolded that Hamachek had been bullied by WhosHere in the legal realm, despite the fact that WhosHere was built two years earlier, but there are at least two sides to every story.

Hamachek’s side of the story was written by Rip yesterday, but the main points you should know are these: Hamachek changed the name of his app to WNM in most (but not all) instances of its appearance after being hit with a C&D from WhosHere over a year ago. But the spat was revived after WNM got some traction on TechCrunch in March (this is where it gets really good).

This apparently led WhosHere to hit Hamachek with a federal lawsuit, alleging trademark infringement, unfair competition, cybersquatting, and breach of contract. But what Rip likely didn’t know is that WhosHere has a relationship with John and I. We met with Bryant Harris and Stephen Smith in DC before the mini-meetup (and various times thereafter), and we thought it highly unlikely that they would whip out a legal team based solely on a competitor getting TechCrunch coverage.

Hamachek paints himself as the victim here, but there’s another side to the story: he borderline-copied an app that was already on the market, right down to the name.

Here’s the other side to that story from myRete, addressing Hamachek’s points about the timeline, the name, how the legal docs got served, and the offer the parties had already discussed.

In an email sent to us, Smith and Harris state the following:

We are not patent trolls, we are entrepreneurs and developers, and here’s what we’re struggling with.

We founded WhosHere in 2008. Mr. Hamachek approached us in 2010 to integrate his idea for a Windows Mobile version into WhosHere. At that point, we had built a successful app on iOS with just us two founders doing everything from coding to customer service. We had to make a decision on where to put our resources and declined his offer.

We bootstrapped WhosHere for 3 years, through 4 million users and into a profitable company when we met with and ultimately took an investment from Lightbank last summer. We were exceptionally proud of everything we had built including our brand name.

After we declined the opportunity to integrate a yet-to-be-built Windows Mobile version, Mr. Hamachek said he was going to go ahead and develop his own app. Our only response was, ‘fine, but please don’t trade on our brand name. We’ve invested a lot into WhosHere and our trademark.’

We felt that it would be unfair competition (and bad for the strength of our trademark) if we let another app in the space have a name that sounded very similar to WhosHere. We then politely asked him to rebrand. He agreed. When the original brand name came back this spring we felt sucker punched. Despite a lot of correspondence with Mr. Hamachek, we have arrived at this unfortunate point.

To all the other entrepreneurs and developers out there, this is the bottom line for the two of us. We literally bet our life savings on this and years of zero vacations to bring WhosHere to where it is. We were both down to a week or two of savings when we turned WhosHere into a profitable company. Would you protect your company and its name?

In Sarah’s post, the one covering WNM, Hamachek’s app is first referenced by its Christian name, Who’s Near Me Live. I believe this is what myRete is referencing in that second-to-last paragraph of their statement.

But there are some other points to consider when looking at this from the side of WhosHere.

First of all, Hamachek alleged that WhosHere withheld certain deadline information, and as a result, he missed the deadline to file a response in the lawsuit. Apparently, this can be a standard practice among IP lawyers who are looking to take advantage of defendants unfamiliar with the system. But WhosHere rebuts:

We did not withhold any court documents from Mr. Hamachek. The documents filed with the court confirm that WhosHere has served Mr. Hamachek with all relevant documents.

From a more objective viewpoint, it seems as though WhosHere didn’t withhold any info, but they probably weren’t as forward as they could have been.

Then there’s also the matter of cooperation. Hamachek claimed that he approached Smith two years ago to build out a Windows Mobile version of WhosHere for them. Hamachek says that Smith rejected the offer and suggested Hamachek build it himself and see what kind of traction he could get. Based on that, WhosHere would decide whether or not to bring him on. From there, Hamachek’s story dives straight into the original C&D sent to him.

But myRete says that they actually made Hamachek an offer:

Just a few weeks ago, we offered to partner with Mr. Hamachek. We offered to integrate his Windows Mobile work into WhosHere and offered a revenue share deal for $100,000, plus fees, for ongoing development (that is where the license agreement that Mr. Hamachek references comes into play, but he left this upside out of his blog post). We truly expected a counter offer. But, when he rejected the offer outright, we asked him what he thought was fair. We never received a response.

It’s clear that both parties have invested a great deal of time and energy (and undoubtedly money) into these efforts. And there’s no question that the apps are a huge part of these founders lives — hell, Bryant Harris met his wife using his own app, WhosHere.

MyRete had the idea first, Hamachek then followed up with his own version in an area they hadn’t been focused on. Everyone involved has worked hard and created something valuable for users. Sure, it’s understandable why Hamachek feels like the victim here, but it’s equally understandable why MyRete does too — and thus decided to take this to court.

Only time, and the courts, can decide who’s right.

Editor’s note: Abhi Nemani is Strategy Director at Code for America, which is a nonprofit helping develop public service opportunities for developers, designers, and entrepreneurs. The Code for America Accelerator is providing seed funding, support, and networking for startups interested in working in the civic space.

At TechCrunch Disrupt New York, the White House’s chief geeks — CTO Todd Park and CIO Steve Van Roekel — rang the bell for Silicon Valley to step up and help recode the federal government with their Digital Government Strategy. They hammered home the need for developers to leverage the mountains of open data coming out of the government to create new services and products for consumers.

But you shouldn’t do this just for fun, or even out of a sense of civic duty: you should do it because there’s money there — lots of it.

You hear a lot about government going broke and not having money (which they are and that’s true), but what’s often lost in the debates about budget reduction and spending is the magnitude of the market. First consider the iOS apps market, which developers are always clamoring at: it prices out at roughly $2 Billion annually. Or take the entire video games industry, which includes not only software but hardware too: $16 Billion.

Now back to government. Last year alone, federal, state, and local governments in the United States spent over $140 Billion just on technology. And the kicker is this: the tech sucks.

Ripe for Disruption

Here’s a situation that might sound familiar: after slogging through piles of paperwork (none of the forms were available online, so even finding out what information you needed to supply was an ordeal) and trekking back and forth to several different offices at City Hall, you’re finally waiting at the right counter to get a permit to build a new deck. There’s two people in front of you, and you’ve already in line for twenty minutes.

As you wait, you respond to a few emails, find a new restaurant near your office to try for lunch, and check your bank balance. How could it possibly be taking so long to perform a routine government service in a world where you can order sushi delivery from your iPhone in thirty seconds flat?

Through our work at Code for America, we’ve gotten some insight into what’s happening behind the scenes. When you are filing paperwork or reporting an neighborhood issue, here is the kind of software that the people on the other side of the counter are using:

If it looks like it was built twenty years ago, that’s because it probably was. (Sidenote: most of the web apps only run on older versions of IE.)

This is the software that congressional staffers use to log incoming concerns from constituents — which number into the tens of thousands. You can imagine it takes quite a while to fill out one of these forms:

And it doesn’t help when the machines they’re stuck with look like this:

There are deeply-rooted structural issues that have caused this situation: the way government procures software is slow, there’s a bias against risk in government, and sometimes it’s just hard to get things done. But unless smart, creative, entrepreneurial people get excited about the opportunity to bring innovation and disruption the government IT space, there will never be a driving force for change.

That’s why it’s exciting to see leaders like Park and Van Roekel call on the Valley to step up. We’re starting to see it actually happen with the emergence of “civic startups” — and I think it’s just the beginning.

Consider Brightscope. The BrightScope tools allow consumers — and employers — to compare their 401K choices, and learn when they are getting a good deal or when they’re getting ripped off. Or take SeeClickFix, which allows citizens to report neighborhood issues — illegal dumping or sidewalk defects — to local government through their mobile device or computer, saving the city time and money. GovLoop, a social network for government with tens of thousands of users, was acquired, and runs fairly easily on the Ning platform. (Some of this stuff isn’t hard.)

Additionally, more established tech companies are taking the government sector seriously as a major enterprise opportunity. Google Apps and Microsoft are competing for their email and documents, and Box.net and Amazon are vying for their cloud contracts.

But again, this is just the beginning.

Civic Opportunities

We have had the privilege to work inside nearly a dozen cities across the country, and we’ve seen first hand the need for this kind of disruption — in fact, our city contacts are asking for it. Three themes are emerging as opportunity areas for entrepreneurs:

• Leverage Open Government Data. As Park and Van Roekel mentioned onstage and off, open government data can be the jetfuel for innovation, ranging from the federal datasets like the healthcare.gov API or the green button for energy data to local datastores like crime data from Chicago or 311 reports in San Francisco.

• Create New Government Technology. While contracting can be difficult at times, governments themselves need and are asking for new service providers for their infrastructure. The success of Palantir or Socrata in offering innovative, web 2.0-style services for government shows the way forward for new government-focused enterprise companies.
• Change the way citizens ask, get, or need services from government. Sometimes you may not even have to contract with the government to change it. For an older example — that’s not even a startup anymore — think about TurboTax. Instead of changing the software government was using it just offered a better interface for citizens. With scrapers and web services now readily available, nearly any government service is ripe for a similar workaround.

Tim O’Reilly has often called on the web industry to “work on stuff that matters.” As citizens — of the web, and of the government — we have the power bring the same innovation that’s transformed the consumer web to the public sector to create a better, more efficient democracy. But this is not just an chance to do something that matters — it’s also a huge market opportunity.

All the pieces are in place for dramatic disruption in the government IT space. Now it’s up to entrepreneurs to make it happen.

So Facebook’s IPO was a disaster. Or maybe it wasn’t. Yes, it was an utter fiasco. No, wait: “The debacle was not the IPO but all the whining by speculators who didn’t make money.” Nope, it was “the flop of the decade“, the worst first week of any IPO in years. Au contraire: “What we have here is an investment banker acting ethically. And the whole financial press is atwitter about it.” Nuh-uh: “The IPO discount is the cost of going public.” Yadda, yadda, yadda, ad nauseum.

Why, what with all these furious alarums and excursions and outraged complains, Benchmark Capital’s Bill Gurley was moved to compare Facebook to another company that immediately dropped below its high-profile IPO issue price and stayed there for weeks and weeks; that well-known loser called … er … Amazon.com. You may have heard of it.

Why is anyone paying attention to the this ultimately meaningless pageant? Probably because suckers people used to think tech IPOs were a guaranteed way for those lucky enough to buy at the issue price to make money. Now everyone is shocked — shocked! — that Facebook’s investors may have been treated unequally, and grousing “I’m just extremely skeptical about the ability of a retail purchaser to be able to play on a level field in the market.” Gee, you think? Come on, folks: it’s not like you weren’t warned.

The weird thing is that people actually seem to think that the sinking stock price means Facebook’s prospects are grimmer than they were a few months ago. Now, I can’t stand Facebook — indeed, I’m on record as a regular and frequent Facebook basher myself — but this is nothing but a colossal failure of imagination. Take Henry Blodget’s deconstruction of Facebook’s “natural” value: it’s sharp, it’s incisive, it’s insightful, and it completely misses the point.

Facebook is indeed, as Blodget says, extremely expensive relative to its expected earnings over the next year or two. But, unlike most businesses, Facebook’s long-term upside has nothing to do with its expected earnings over the next year or two. It’s believed by many to be extraordinarily valuable not because of its advertising income but because it has a real chance of becoming a company unlike any that has ever existed before, with the possible exception of pre-breakup AT&T.

Look into the medium and long term, something that the stock market is notoriously bad at. In 10-20 years’ time, everyone on the planet has a smartphone, and/or some even smaller and more ubiquitous form of wireless access. We spend more and more time online. Indeed, the whole notion of “online” disappears, as the Internet is woven into literally every facet of our waking life. As this happens, what company defines our identity, and becomes the gateway to every activity and every service?

Yep. Facebook. Sure, Google+ is arguably better, but that doesn’t matter. Bing search is roughly as good as Google’s, but Google won that land grab; similarly, Facebook has won the identity wars. So their advertising income is (relatively speaking) peanuts. Who cares? They don’t need to invent a new form of monetization. They have one already: Facebook Credits. Right now their income from it is a rounding error. But as years go by, and people slowly get accustomed to buying and using and transferring them, and as Facebook grows more and more intertwined with every online action we take–which is to say, nearly every action we take–it could well become the first global virtual currency … and then ultimately lose that “virtual” disclaimer.

Now, to be clear, I don’t actually think this will happen — and I don’t want it to happen, because I think Facebook is a colossal testament to the triumph of lowest-common-denominator homogenizing mediocrity devoid of any real innovation — but I do believe that they’ve got a legitimate shot at it. (Not least because they’re so paranoid that they decided a twelve-person company with no revenue was an existential threat and spent a billion dollars to buy them out. As Andy Grove always says, “only the paranoid survive.”) That longshot long-term possibility, not potential growth in advertising revenue, is what’s baked into Facebook’s more extreme valuations; and that possibility hasn’t diminished because of the IPO. In fact, with billions upon billions of cold hard cash now sitting in Facebook’s war chest, it has if anything grown.

Editor’s note: Scott Weiss is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and the former co-founder and CEO of IronPort Systems, which was acquired by Cisco in 2007. He blogs at http://scott.a16z.com.

One of the most frustrating things I’ve experienced as a leader is putting months into recruiting an amazing VP or engineer, only to have them change their mind at the 11th hour because of a ridiculous counteroffer. This is the big risk you face when aiming for the best people on the planet (see: “Hiring Rockstars”) as they are the “beating heart” of their existing employer, and the incumbent company will often go beyond great lengths to keep them. They may be prized recruits for you, but they are absolutely the most critical people at their current employer. For instance, Google has been rumored to be especially aggressive at countering with restricted stock grants in the millions of dollars for their top people. But they aren’t alone. Any employer will do whatever he or she can to keep key talent.

We found out the hard way at IronPort by being overconfident and sloppy at the offer stage. In reality, once an offer is accepted and before the start date, candidates can still be lost—and won—in this no-man’s land. The work of getting a top recruit in the door can’t stop until they started working for us (and, even then, keeping employees excited to come to work every day never really stops). To mitigate the risk of getting left at the altar, we took a sledgehammer to this egg of a problem and came up with a systematic approach that gave us the best opportunity to close on our most prized recruits (and make them feel good about joining our organization):

Have an outstanding recruiting process. Candidates would go through 2-3 rounds of interviews at 2-4 people per round, which usually resulted in 8-12 total interviews. The interview team would meet beforehand to discuss the job description, learn about the hiring manager’s hot buttons and assign interview roles (so everyone doesn’t ask the same bullshit resume questions). After each round, the hiring manager would lead a live input discussion and decide whether to pass the candidate to the next phase. We were prompt, organized, responsive as hell and would over-communicate with the candidate. (For more insight into improving your hiring process, see Peter Levine’s blog post on hiring.) In addition to making damn good and sure that we hired the best people, the process was a reflection of a well-run company, allowed the candidate to meet and connect with a critical mass of our great people and, lastly, it made them feel like they successfully ran a gantlet to get an offer. It made the offer feel hard earned and special.

The hiring manager must control the offer process. Many companies use a recruiter or HR for managing a candidate pipeline, but when you get close to making an offer, the hiring manager needs to take the wheel completely. People leave and join companies primarily on the connection they have with their boss and negotiating the offer is the crucial start of building this relationship. There’s also a lot of critical information that can be gleaned: When will they give notice? What’s the candidate’s psyche? Who did they connect with during the interviews? I’d always want to get a handshake and an eye contact “yes” to the “Are we done-done?”  question. This commitment mattered a lot during the notice process.

The Welcome Basket. We would put together an awesome basket of IronPort swag: t-shirts, coffee mugs, hats, Nerf guns, fruit, wine, chocolate and a handwritten note to let them know how excited we were to have them join. We’d deliver it to their home a few days after acceptance and we’d always get a shockingly enthusiastic email or phone response: “Wow—totally unexpected!” I always thought it was much harder to consider a counteroffer when our swag was strewn all over the house and their daughter was walking around in our hat and a baby-sized logo T-shirt.

Enlist the interview team. Once I knew when the candidate was planning to give notice, I would schedule a team dinner or drinks within 24 hours to help diffuse the pressure and reinforce the decision. It’s also important to keep in constant contact with the candidate during the notice period and the team would help there as well. It’s a little weird for the hiring manager to be calling every day, but a coordinated effort among the 8-12 interviewers was not only appreciated but unexpected.

Pay attention to onboarding. The first day, week and month of an employee’s experience carries a lasting impression. Everything needs to scream: “We’ve been expecting you!” Business cards printed, desk with supplies, lunch buddy schedule, basic orientation meeting and a thoughtful plan for training and beginning real, useful work. As CEO, I had a standing 30-minute meeting every Monday to greet and connect with new hires. We also had a daylong new hire orientation scheduled every quarter where I would go over the founding history, values, goals and the most recent board presentation. The product managers would go through every product and an available VP would go through the organizational structure.

Changing jobs is a scary, precarious proposition and the very best people have lots of options. It’s the hiring manager’s job to connect with the candidate, quarterback the process and get the candidate emotionally comfortable with the new job situation. All of this requires a ton of work AFTER the offer is presented. At the end of the day, I knew we were hiring a real rock star when we would get a “cease and desist” letter from a big public company—a last resort to prevent a beating heart from leaving their organization.

So here’s a story that hopefully will be an eye-opener for entrepreneurs and startups, while providing a painful peek into trademark harassment and the importance of due diligence. It goes a little something like this: About two years ago, software engineer Brian Hamachek decided to build an app first on Windows Mobile (how some horror stories have been known to begin), then on Windows Phone, that enables location-based chat — and calling. In other words, call and chat with new friends who live close by, for free. He called it Who’s Near Me Live.

Long story short: A Lightbank-backed startup called myRete owns and operates a similar app called WhosHere, which was founded two years earlier. Well, they didn’t like the name Brian had chosen for the app — claimed it was too similar — so they asked him to change it. At first, he said “why no thank you,” but then they hit him with a C&D and then a lawsuit, so he acquiesced. Sounds like standard stuff for startup vs. incumbent, right? Well, it doesn’t end there.

Remember, this account is one-sided, and only tells Hamachek’s side of the story. [WhosHere’s response is now included below.] We’ve reached out to WhosHere co-founder and COO Stephen Smith as well as WhosHere PR and will update when we learn more. After having slowly built his user base to about 400K (with limited revenues), he decided to expand and launch an iPhone app. Fellow writer and awesome person Sarah Perez covered the app’s launch for TC. According to Brian’s account of events, that’s when things turned sue-y — or, sour, if you prefer.

But don’t blame TechCrunch. Brian had changed his app’s name to WNM and moved all appearances of “Who’s Near Me Live” under the more prominent “WNMs” on the homepage, social channels, etc. The name still appeared, but Brian made it clear that the name was now “WNM.” WhosHere had apparently thanked him and things remained gravy for about a year — until the TechCrunch post. Seeing that WNM was getting some coverage, WhosHere slapped him with a federal lawsuit, alleging trademark infringement, unfair competition, cybersquating, and breach of contract.

They apparently gave him two choices (paraphrased, put simply): Hand over all your assets to us, or shut everything down completely. (See Brian’s description here.) Obviously, the WNM founder wasn’t particularly thrilled with either of those ideas, but even after exchanging emails with those on the other side, things remained unresolved.

Locked in a stalemate, WhosHere pushed for a default judgement and sent Hamachek the resulting paperwork. Not long after, he received a notice saying that he’d missed the deadline to file a response to the lawsuit. Unaware of any proposed deadline, he dug around and found that the page that included the terms had been cleverly (or dickishly) removed from the paperwork he was sent.

Now he has 7 days to “lawyer up,” and respond. In his words:

I have less than 7 days to find an affordable, but competent, lawyer, request the default be put aside, and respond to their accusations. The lawyers I have spoken to thus far are asking me for at least a $10,000 retainer just to get started on the process and I don’t have those kind of resources laying around. I have spent 2 years building this project into something of a success, sacrificing my time, sleep, and social life for this app every waking day. I fear without help in the next couple days, everything may have been wasted.

The WNM founder today posted the above, non-abridged story to his blog, asking the startup community for support and advice — and included a “Donate” button should readers want to give to the cause. The post found some traction on Hacker News, and he tells us that he’s been surprised (and humbled) to find a community ready to support him, or at least lob pearls of wisdom from the comment section.

He also tells us that there’s more back story. About two years ago, having devised the idea for Who’s Near Me Live, he contacted Smith. Knowing they were already working on a similar app and service, he wanted to build a Windows Mobile version of WhosHere for them. After a back and forth that lasted about two weeks, Smith decided that they didn’t want to take on Hamachek’s services, but they encouraged him to build it himself and see what kind of traction he was able to get.

According to Hamachek, Smith told him that if the app found a user base, they would consider bringing him on, or taking the next step. (Psych!) It took awhile as Brian worked on Who’s Near Me Live in his spare time, working at cloud storage startup, Storsimple, full-time. But a year later, Hamachek says that Smith reached out to him and asked him politely to change the name. When he refused, he received the C&D letter and a lawsuit.

For entrepreneurs and founders out there, as Johnny_Law suggests in the comment section of Hamachek’s post, it’s at this point that he should have retained the services of a lawyerin’ type. But, understandably, not wanting to pay an armload, and, as he says, believing that two reasonable parties would/should be able to work things out, he declined to do that and just accepted the need to change the name.

He might also have removed all incidences of “Who’s Near Me Live” from the site, but he didn’t do that either. He might also have chosen a better name to begin with, but thinking there was enough differentiation, he didn’t bother. A mistake many would make, and, after all, hindsight is 20/20. (Also why sites like Trademarkia exist.)

In regard to the missing “deadline” from WhosHere’s second, federal lawsuit, as Hamachek has since learned, this can be standard practice for lawyers looking to take advantage of those defendants who are unfamiliar with IP/Trademark law and the litigation process. And it seems to have worked, sadly proving their point.

So, while it’s difficult not to see all this as being a bit underhanded, again, as JohnnyLaw points out, painting WhosHere as the “bad guy” may be a little bit misguided. Although, admittedly, if Hamachek’s account is true, it does seem rought. It could also just be a play for 400K users and some SEO. (Again, we’re waiting for a response from WhosHere.)

While Hamachek says he’s open to fully changing the name and removing any appearance of “Who’s Near Me,” he says that the lawsuits seem to be evidence that WhosHere is no longer satisfied with a name change, they want the whole kit-and-kaboodle. So, as a result, he’s currently looking for lawyers and hopes that they can still negotiate a fair result, although the two parties may be beyond that at this point.

A friend who works at one of the biggest business litigation firms told me that courts usually don’t have a lot of sympathy for those that miss filing deadlines. If that happens because one was improperly served or there was a procedural defect in play, avoiding the default is easier. If, instead, the lawyers can prove they did everything right, it generally depends on the judge. And even if there is a default, WhosHere would have to collect the judgement, at which point they may go back to court, where a judge may be more willing to hear the merits rather than resolve on a technicality.

But, again, the moral is: If someone sticks you with a lawsuit, hire a lawyer. And to the bullies: Listen to Bart Simpson (above).

You can find Brian’s post here and myRete is here.

What do you think? How can both startup get back to building their products and avoid the distraction of litigation?

UPDATE: WhosHere responded on Zendesk, you can read their response below:

We are not patent trolls, we are entrepreneurs and developers, and here’s what we’re struggling with.

We founded WhosHere in 2008. Mr. Hamacheck approached us in 2010 to integrate his idea for a Windows Mobile version into WhosHere. At that point, we had built a successful app on iOS with just us two founders doing everything from coding to customer service. We had to make a decision on where to put our resources and declined his offer.

We bootstrapped WhosHere for 3 years, through 4 million users and into a profitable company when we met with and ultimately took an investment from Lightbank last summer. We were exceptionally proud of everything we had built including our brand name.

After we declined the opportunity to integrate a yet-to-be-built Windows Mobile version, Mr. Hamachek said he was going to go ahead and develop his own app. Our only response was, ‘fine, but please don’t trade on our brand name. We’ve invested a lot into WhosHere and our trademark.’

We felt that it would be unfair competition (and bad for the strength of our trademark) if we let another app in the space have a name that sounded very similar to WhosHere. We then politely asked him to rebrand. He agreed. When the original brand name came back this spring we felt sucker punched. Despite a lot of correspondence with Mr. Hamachek, we have arrived at this unfortunate point.

Two other data points that folks may find helpful:

We did not withhold any court documents from Mr. Hamachek. The documents filed with the court confirm that WhosHere has served Mr. Hamachek with all relevant documents.
Just a few weeks ago, we offered to partner with Mr. Hamachek. We offered to integrate his Windows Mobile work into WhosHere and offered a revenue share deal for $100,000, plus fees, for ongoing development (that is where the license agreement that Mr. Hamacheck references comes into play, but he left this upside out of his blog post). We truly expected a counter offer. But, when he rejected the offer outright, we asked him what he thought was fair. We never received a response.
The relevant emails are posted below.

To all the other entrepreneurs and developers out there, this is the bottom line for the two of us. We literally bet our life savings on this and years of zero vacations to bring WhosHere to where it is. We were both down to a week or two of savings when we turned WhosHere into a profitable company. Would you protect your company and its name?

Bryant Harris & Stephen Smith

UPDATE 2: The back and forth continues, and it looks like it’s headed to court. Brian Hamachek has responded to WhosHere’s comments in another blog post.

In response to this very candid email that I sent, I received a response which in my eyes clearly was taking advantage of my situation which I had just revealed to them. They had told me that I either had to give them WNM or basically shut it down. Yes, in exchange for my giving them WNM, they offered to pay 33% of the app’s revenue up to $100,000 (minus legal fees). I knew that if I gave them WNM though, it would never be implemented into their system. They would shut it down and I would never see a dime. Plus, this was never about the money. I was angry, well actually I was way beyond angry.

Below you’ll find the original lawsuit and attachments in one:

Affectiva, a startup that tries to measure the emotional response people have to ads and brands, just announced that it has a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.

The company spun out of MIT’s Media Lab. This is its second NSF grant — in January 2011, it won another grant to help launch its Affdex service, which uses webcams to track consumers’ responses as they watch videos. That should allow companies to test their ads with a broad audience in a quick and affordable way. When I spoke to co-founder Rana el Kaliouby last year, she also touted Affectiva’s ability to recognize complex emotions — not just whether you’re smiling or frowning, but also whether you look confused.

Among other things, Affectiva says its technology has been used to crowdsource readers’ responses to ads at Forbes.com, and that it worked with research agency Millward Brown to test Super Bowl campaigns. In addition to Affdex, the company also offers a wireless biosensor that it calls the Q Sensor.

Affectiva says it will use the grant to continue developing Affdex, and to build an “emotional norms database,” which is supposed to answer questions such as “How does an ad’s emotional engagement compare to other ads?” and “How do people in different countries respond to humor in a campaign?”

The startup has also raised venture funding, most recently a $5.7 Series B. Eventually, Affectiva says its technology could expand beyond ad testing, for example by helping people with autism disorders understand facial expressions.

Photo: Basem Wasef/Wired

Supercars should look like sex. This is what the voice inside my head has been insisting since I was 14 years old, when the very same (if slightly less mature) spirit guide led me to hang a Lamborghini Countach poster above my bed and doodle Ferrari Testarossas all over my Pee Chee folders.

But somehow, to my eye, the McLaren MP4-12C doesn’t quite strike a nerve the way old school überexotics once did. Eye-popping curves and salacious silhouettes are time-honored ingredients of the exotic car formula. Like Vegas strip clubs or the pool bar at the Delano in South Beach, the meek need not apply — and if they do, they better damn well have a good reason for loitering in that rarified company.

And so the McLaren MP4-12C, while comely and sleek, isn’t the most visually charismatic player in this pumped up, pornographically endowed slice of the automotive stratosphere. Waist-high and swoopy, the McLaren may not be a shrinking violet in the topiary of supercars, but neither is it as sensuously enticing as the Monica Belucci-in-a-negligee Ferrari 458 Italia, or as intimidating as the oh-shit-the-mothership-has-landed Lamborghini Aventador. Even its alphanumeric moniker has more in common with C-3PO than any vehicle ought to. Car geeks unite: Your steed is here, and only you will get the four-wheeled joke.

But the proof, as they say, is in the pudding. Or the dihedral doors, which open up and out to allow easier entry into the cabin, one of countless McLaren details engineered with an uncanny instinct for design purity. Bisected by a narrow center partition, this cockpit exemplifies levels of functionality typically associated with military aircraft. The windshield is taller than it is wide, and the proportion is designed to help you spot apexes and place the front wheels — visually identifiable by the slight humps on the front end — exactly where they need to be. The multimedia screen is oriented vertically in order to help achieve the vehicle’s target dimensions, and the massive tachometer is the instrument equivalent of a Jumbotron. The center console dials, cryptically distinguished with single letter labels, click into place like the switchgear of an F22 Raptor — all the better to enhance your jet pilot fantasies while loping down your favorite boulevard.

Photo: Basem Wasef/Wired

And then there’s the techy viscera: the carbon fiber chassis, the extruded aluminum subframes, the hydraulic roll control that’s so effective at minimizing body movement, it does away with traditional stabilizer bars altogether. Despite its ground-up newness and its of-the-moment technological artistry, analysis of the 12C would be incomplete without a brief look back at history.

Take the legendary F1 for instance, the most recent road car since the 12C that’s a pure McLaren (and no, the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren doesn’t count.) With a screaming 6.1-liter V12 and a centrally positioned driver’s seat flanked by two co-thrones for your favorite grunties, the F1′s production run of roughly 100 cars made it one of the most deeply loved exotics of all time, reinforced by the fact that if and when they hit the market these days, they run well into the seven figures.

Can you feel us getting our geek on?

And I haven’t even touched on the fact that McLaren won one of every four Formula 1 races it’s entered since 1966; in contrast, during Toyota’s eight-season, multibillion-dollar F1 effort, the Japanese manufacturer couldn’t muster a single win. There’s verisimilitude in victory, friends.

But enough armchair quarterbacking. Let’s climb into the cockpit, flog this thing, and pass judgment based on seat-of-the-pants driving impressions, not theoretical musings.

Photo courtesy of Nikon Corporation

The Nikon D4 has some fairly big shoes to fill. Its predecessor, the 12.1-megapixel Nikon D3S was a veritable low-light killer, capable of shooting crisp images even in poor lighting without a flash.

But the D3S had one major deficiency: while its 35-millimeter “full frame” CMOS sensor took great pictures in a range of conditions, the paltry 12.1MP of resolution meant you couldn’t significantly blow those images up or crop in too deeply without losing detail.

Nikon seeks to solve that issue with the new D4 by increasing the resolution to 16.2 megapixels while, at the same time, maintaining the camera’s killer instincts when shooting in low light. That’s not easy. Adding more pixels to the D4′s 36 x 23.9-millimeter imaging chip means those individual pixels have to be smaller, which gives them less surface area to absorb light. But after shooting with the D4 in a range of tough conditions, it’s clear this camera is a master of the dark arts.

I took the D4 to one of the more challenging environments I know: the shadowy depths of New York City’s Grand Central Station, where I photographed two dancers in an improvised duet. Because I didn’t have a permit for the shoot — Permit? We don’t need no stinkin’ permit! — and didn’t want to attract attention, I shot quickly, on the fly and without a flash.

To increase the sensitivity of the imaging chip to pick up the weak available light in the station, I cranked the camera’s ISO up to 12,800 and was able to capture impressively clean images of the dancers with only a few traces of digital noise in the shadow areas. Meanwhile, the D4′s quick and accurate 51-point autofocus system was tack sharp, even when capturing dancers dipping and spinning across the train platform.

Along with its impressive low-light chops, the D4 exhibited blazing speed overall, firing off ten frames per second (or 11fps when the focus and exposure were locked on the first frame). I was able snag several winning images before the police ejected our party from Grand Central. The camera is about as quick to start up and shut down as the previous model — which is a good thing, because the D3s was fast — and exhibited no discernible shutter lag.

As a video camera, the D4 also impressed. After the escapades in the train station, I shot a gorgeous 1080p HD movie of a bartender making me a well-earned margarita. The D4 has a one-touch video button that eases the transition to moving images. Though my hands were a little shaky from the tequila, the D4′s video mode showed minimal “rolling shutter” — the Jell-O effect that occurs when you pan too aggressively while shooting HD video with a CMOS sensor. I was disappointed in the audio quality, though. Since the D4 only has a built-in monaural mic, if you want better sound, attach a stereo microphone to the camera’s stereo mic jack to record more fully.

WIRED Separate 91,000-pixel sensor is dedicated to light metering, autofocus and recognizing and adjusting to different shooting scenarios. More rounded and ergonomic design with lower pentaprism still lets you see 100 percent of what you’re shooting through the viewfinder. Back-illuminated buttons help you set the camera in dark conditions.

TIRED Second card slot is Sony’s new and expensive XQD format. Built-in mic only offers mono sound. Burst shooting is a frame slower per-second than the competing Canon 1D X.

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