Category: Tech news

Our new fave in the Android realm. Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

The HTC One X is one of the best smartphones on the market, and the best Android phone you can buy right now, period.

It’s fast, it’s gorgeous, it’s lightweight and it has a stellar battery that lasts all day. The camera is also outstanding. It’s the best I’ve seen on an Android phone, though it falls just short of the camera on the iPhone 4S.

It’s not just the hardware — the One X runs version 4.0 of Android, aka Ice Cream Sandwich, which is overlaid by HTC’s own Sense skin. It’s fast and easy to use. Combine that with the excellent hardware and you’ve got a handset worthy of being a flagship device for both HTC and AT&T (even though you might have to wait a bit to get one).

In fact, the one thing I really don’t like about the One X is its exclusivity to AT&T, the only carrier that sells the phone in the U.S. It’s a shame this phone isn’t available on T-Mobile, Sprint and Verizon.

Android handset makers don’t have the same leverage as Apple when it comes to dealing with telecommunications companies, so they continue to pump out a few slightly different versions of every phone, each one exclusive to a different carrier. It’s unnecessary and insane — HTC produced more than 50 different handsets last year alone.

The One X, being a stellar phone, serves as a testament that Android handset makers should go the iPhone route and make fewer phones of higher quality available through multiple carriers. The hardware companies would of course gain from this, but the payoff for the consumer would be huge as well.

To wit: Nearly every quibble I had with the T-Mobile-exclusive One S — a fine mid-range handset being sold at a flagship price — was fixed in the One X.

My biggest complaint with the One S was its display, and the feature I enjoyed most on the One X was — you guessed it — the display.

The One X has a 4.7-inch, 1280×720 IPS LCD touchscreen, covered in Corning’s durable, crystal-clear Gorilla Glass. The viewing angles on the screen are some of the best I’ve seen on a smartphone. Colors are bright and accurate, producing consistently true-to-life images across websites and apps. Pixel edges are indistinguishable with the display’s density of 316 pixels per inch.

Let me put it this way: The One X’s screen is on the same level as the iPhone’s Retina display. I love looking at it, and it blows away the PenTile displays found on the One S and the Samsung Galaxy Nexus (my former favorite Android handset).

Beneath the fantastic touchscreen, the One X is a beast, with a 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, 1GB of RAM and 16GB of storage (the same set-up found in the One S). Performance is blazing-fast, and though the AT&T handset doesn’t pack the Nvidia Tegra 3 quad-core processor found in Europe and Asia’s One X, it doesn’t feel any less capable. The U.S. model is just as good and just as impressive as what HTC is offering overseas.

The U.S. version of the One X, unlike its overseas counterpart, runs on AT&T’s 4G LTE network, which is only available in a small number of cities right now. In San Francisco, the One X downloaded and uploaded data quickly, whether connected to AT&T’s 4G LTE, 4G HSPA+ or 3G service.

But despite performing like a beast, the One X is also a beauty.

The 0.36-inch chassis is made of a single piece of polycarbonate, giving the handset a sophisticated look free of seams or gaps, as seen on past HTC hardware. Given its size, the phone is also surprisingly light, weighing in at 4.6 ounces.

The One X is a handsome, well-designed phone. Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

The basic eBeam Edge kit includes a marker-like stylus and small wall-mounted device to track its movements. Photo courtesy of eBeam/Luidia

Except for the spiciest bits of The Social Network and the Steve Jobs biography, pretty much everything that happens in a conference room is boring.

Meetings are boring, presentations are boring, and whiteboards are boring. But here’s a piece of technology that makes all three more exciting — which admittedly isn’t that difficult, but stay with me.

It’s called the eBeam Edge, made by Luidia. It’s a handwriting capture system that adds an interactive element to whatever you’re viewing on your wall, allowing you and your colleagues to annotate a projected image or document, or to sketch something on a whiteboard, and e-mail the results around like a memo.

The eBeam is just one entry in the “interactive whiteboard” category — devices that let you virtually draw on any vertical surface using a special pen and have it captured electronically by a combination of hardware and software. Some of these systems use touchscreens or pressure-sensitive displays, some use interactive projectors, and others use special whiteboards. Luidia’s device is simpler and less expensive than those, since it uses things you already have around the office: a regular projector hooked up to a Windows PC.

In the basic eBeam kit (priced between $900 and $1,050 around the web), you get a fat, marker-like stylus and a hardware sensor that connects to your PC via USB or Bluetooth. This sensor, which is about the size of a candy bar, attaches to the wall using a non-permanent adhesive (a couple of 3M Command strips). You just stick it next to whatever flat surface you want to use to make your presentation, then point the projector at that surface. To calibrate it, you tap the stylus on the nine points projected on the wall. The whole setup process takes less than five minutes.

Once everything’s running, you can draw images or write text with a surprising level of accuracy. The eBeam’s stylus, which has a AAA battery inside, is tracked by the flat capture strip you’ve fastened to the wall. The tracking is pretty good — there is some lag, but it’s not too annoying. It’s about the same amount of latency I’ve experienced using a stylus on a smartphone like the Galaxy Note, or a Wacom Bamboo stylus on an iPad. You just have to remember to write a little more slowly and deliberately than normal.

Since it works on any flat surface, you can project the eBeam environment onto a map, a large-scale design mockup, or a large printed image. Where it really shines is when you use it in conjunction with a whiteboard. As part of my test, Luidia also sent me its whiteboard Capture Pack ($250 extra), a set of sheaths for regular whiteboard markers that have the eBeam tracking mechanism (the same one found in the stylus) built in. This way, you can draw on the whiteboard and have your every stroke recorded and captured. The sheaths are colored to match the common colors of whiteboard markers, and the software records the appropriate color — two people can use two different markers and keep their notes separate.

Photo courtesy of eBeam/Luidia

The low point here is the software. Pressing one of the two buttons on the stylus brings up a radial menu (called the eBeam Tool Palette) that lets you choose between functions like freehand writing, highlighting, drawing arrows, erasing marks and flipping through the stack of open documents. Unfortunately, these menus are not that intuitive and take some getting used to, especially if you’re one of those people who lives and breathes PowerPoint. Also, and this is odd, the menus are not as responsive as the writing functions. I experienced too many misplaced taps of the stylus, and sometimes I had to tap twice or three times to get the software to react.

eBeam’s software suite does have plenty of options for building and delivering presentations — slideshow tools, master pages, navigation elements to move forward and backward through a deck — and it has some collaborative features like the ability to stack transparent layers on top of your presentation, or to share your whiteboard with other users over the internet. But coming into the eBeam environment cold, it wasn’t exactly clear to me how these features work (and yes, I’ve been at this a very long time). A few web searches and YouTube videos had me sorted out eventually, but it was more time than I expected to spend learning how to use a piece of presentation software.

Obfuscated user interfaces aside, Luidia’s system works well enough for me to recommend it. But it’s a very niche product with a steep price and negligible payoff. If you work in an environment where collaborative communion is the lifeblood of your organization — not just presentations, but constant prototyping, brainstorming, group critique and swapping of ideas — then the eBeam could wipe away your whiteboard woes. But for the average office, it’s a flashy, expensive solution to a problem that probably doesn’t exist.

WIRED Mark up any document or image electronically and save it for perpetuity. Works on any wall or any flat, wall-mounted object. Uses the projector and PC you already have. Stylus is easy to use, and drawing surface is easy to calibrate. Optional capture pack enhances the boring whiteboard with the addition of computer magic.

TIRED Software needs work. Any projector will do, but a projector is required. MSRP is $1,050, but it’s available for around $900 — still very expensive. Latency could be an issue for the over-caffeinated drones from sales and marketing.

The Olympus OM-D E-M5 micro four-thirds camera is available as a body only, or with a kit (shown) that includes a 12-50mm f3.5-6.3 lens and a flash. Photo by Jackson Lynch/Wired

The latest micro four-thirds camera from Olympus is clearly designed to appeal to all those hoary, wizened photographers who long for the good ol’ days.

Olympus’ new digital OM series is modeled after the company’s original, beloved OM film cameras from the 1970s. But the new OM-D line is not just some tossed-off homage — the first camera in the line, the E-M5, is a fantastic picture-making tool.

It makes excellent RAW and JPEG images, and it is certainly the most customizable compact today. And the thoroughly modern design — a magnesium-clad, weather-sealed body — is so masterfully executed that I bet a lot of the “if it’s not curvy, it’s crap” cognoscenti will be wooed by it.

At the heart of the E-M5 is a collection of core features that makes it quite possibly the best-performing micro four-thirds camera on the market today: a new 16-megapixel TruPic VI image sensor, a speedy processor, the five-axis mechanical image stabilization system, an articulated OLED touchscreen and a high-speed lens drive control.

Both RAW and JPEG images can fly into the E-M5 at a 9fps burst rate with awfully impressive results up to ISO 6,400. Olympus’ default algorithms tend to over-sharpen JPEGs (this can be dialed down in-camera), but they are still on par with the tops in the mirrorless realm. RAW images are equally pleasing, with lots of highlight and shadow latitude for creative control once they’re downloaded.

Using the E-M5′s controls and dialing in custom settings is deceptively easy. The two wheels at the top of the body are the hub of the control center, and they can be set to operate different functions in a host of combinations to suit your shooting preferences. The Movie Record, Fn1 and Fn2 buttons are also configurable to 50 different settings. Once you get it set up to your taste, you won’t be missing great shots while fumbling through menus.

Photo by Jackson Lynch/Wired

Can something as delicate and complicated as brewed coffee really succeed as a mass-produced canned beverage? Photo by Jon Snyder/Wired

On a hot day, a cup of ice-cold brew from the local coffee shop is a thing of eternal beauty.

But the typical artisanal iced coffee isn’t an option when you’re at the Safeway, hoarding snacks for a bargain matinee showing of Cabin in the Woods.

It’s 80 degrees out, and the heat is making you sleepy. As you gaze bleary-eyed at the “Cold Drinks” section, you spy a beautiful silver cylinder of something called illy Cappuccino. You pay your $3 for it, and, once nestled in the darkened theater, you pop the tab and tilt the can to your mouth just as the movie’s protagonists get to someone’s cousin’s cabin, which is obviously the most haunted place on Earth, when — Blegh! What is this I’m drinking?

If they’re going to call this terribly sweet substance with strong notes of Swiss Miss and metal a “cappuccino,” then they’d better call you Buffy the Vampire Slayer, because words are meaningless.

While ruining a good thing for the sake of convenience seems uniquely American, canned coffee was actually invented by the Japanese. According to Hidetaka Hayashi, president of the Hayashi Coffee Institute in Tokyo, pre-made coffee in cans may have been introduced to Japan as early as 1958, although it wasn’t until 1973, when Pokka Lemon Corp debuted the hot/cold canned coffee vending machine, that the drinks really took off.

Canned or RTD (ready-to-drink) coffee is now a $16 billion business (.pdf), and the U.S. is the second largest consumer of the stuff thanks to offerings from Starbucks, Seattle’s Best, Trader Joe’s and even Wolfgang Puck.

It’s safe to say that canned coffee is having a moment. There’s just one problem: It doesn’t taste very good.

When I mentioned to a friend — an Italian who considers herself a coffee expert — that I was writing an article about the problems with canned coffee drinks, she looked at me like I’d said I was writing an article about how to make cats more like bananas. This dismissive (and dare I say, snotty) attitude was shared by all of the coffee connoisseurs to whom I so much as mentioned the words “canned coffee.” All except for one.

Peter Giuliano is the owner of North Carolina-based Counter Culture Coffee. He’s the guru of baristas everywhere and a cold-coffee expert. He is also a man intrigued by the possibilities of a good canned coffee. According to Giuliano — who even copped to wanting to create his own canned coffee — the main problem isn’t that pre-made coffee can’t be good. It’s that the way it’s currently made, with an emphasis on low cost, will never allow for a quality beverage.

“They’re not crafted. They’re manufactured,” he says. While this might be fine for something like Coca-Cola, it’s much harder to pull off with a highly unstable substance like coffee. There are thousands of chemical compounds in every cup, and according to Giuliano, more chemical reactions happen during the preparation of coffee than anything else we normally eat or drink.

So what makes the current crop of mass-market canned coffee so bad? In a word, heat. Because pre-made coffee must be able to sit unrefrigerated on a store shelf, it has to be sterilized, which in the case of canned coffee involves heating the ingredients to 250 degrees for about 15 minutes. Heating coffee for that long not only kills microorganisms, but also causes the naturally present acids to break down, making the coffee bitter.

Enter milk. As Giuliano tells me, the high concentration of milk and sugar in most canned coffees is likely an attempt by the manufacturers to counteract the bitterness. Unfortunately, the addition of milk brings on a whole other set of problems, namely that cooked milk acquires rancid notes like those found in condensed milk or tapioca. This cloyingly sweet smell is off-putting for many would-be canned coffee consumers.

The result of all this cooking is that canned coffee comes in two varieties: extra-sweet, with lots of milk and sugar, or stomach-achingly bitter, with minimal flavor additives. Often, the former will be marketed as “Latte,” “Mocha” or “Cappuccino,” but as far as I can tell, these titles are applied at random and can be ignored. Just know it has milk and sugar in it.

I chose four coffees for my taste tests. The choices were partly based on an attempt at diversity (milky, black, foreign, domestic) and partly based on availability, since, as it turns out, canned coffee is pretty difficult to find. If a store carries it at all, they typically only have one brand. I bounced all over Manhattan trying to locate an appropriate selection of beverages.

The first coffee I tried, and the only Japanese brand, was Boss Black, which I found in a Japanese convenience store near the East Village. It came in a cool black can emblazoned with the words “BOSS” and “BLACK” and a picture of a dude smoking a pipe.

But that was where its positive attributes ended. The coffee — if you want to call it that — was so stomach-achingly bitter that I, a person who always drinks black coffee and is typically not a sissy baby, couldn’t even finish the small can.

Next, I visited Trader Joe’s to get my hands on a can of the company’s “Latte.” The cutesy blue cylinder looked like something that might contain baby formula, and at just 75 cents per can, it was suspiciously cheap. So I wasn’t shocked when this “Latte” turned out to be aggressively sweet and milky, yet somehow watery at the same time and almost completely lacking in coffee flavor.

Surprisingly, the only palatable offering came not from venerable Italian coffee maker illy, whose issimo Cappuccino revolted me at the movie theater, but from Starbucks. The Doubleshot struck a good balance between coffee and milk and sugar, and had less of the metallic aftertaste that seems unavoidable in canned coffee. It was the only canned coffee I tasted that I would willingly drink again.

According to Peter Giuliano, canned coffee could be a whole lot better, and possibly even good, if companies used high quality beans and a pasteurization method like micro-filtration or flash pasteurization, neither of which require the coffee to be exposed to high heat for long periods of time.

In fact, good pre-made coffee already exists, albeit not in a mass market form. Brooklyn-based coffee roaster Kickstand makes a liquid coffee concentrate that can be shipped to consumers around the country. The coffee is made via cold extraction — the grounds sit in water for a minimum of 12 hours before being filtered. Because no heat is applied, this type of cold-brewed coffee is low in acidity and delicious without milk or sugar. Not adding milk has another benefit, which is that the coffee doesn’t have to be sterilized. Since cold-brewed coffee is essentially flavored water, the air-tight bottles stay fresh for around three months if kept in a cool environment.

Kickstand’s product is expensive, must be diluted before being consumed and can’t be bought at the store. So it isn’t exactly the answer to canned coffee’s problems. But it does demonstrate that, if made with quality in mind, pre-brewed cold coffee doesn’t have to suck.

Hundreds of Facebook employees congregated at ‘Hacker Square’ at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters this evening ahead of the company’s insanely-hyped initial public offering. Now, some of the first photos are starting to trickle in. There was a standing ovation for chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, who gave a talk before several long-time engineers bounced in while wearing capes or bringing boomboxes.

Tonight Facebook is having its 31st Hackathon to celebrate the IPO. Hackathons are a company tradition. They’re a place where engineers and other non-technical employees get to stay out all night building concepts into real products that sometimes eventually get shipped. Some of the big products that have come out of earlier Hackathons include Facebook chat and an early version of Timeline.

The company got its employees together around a big yellow crane that’s in the center of their ‘Hacker Square.’ The crane came from their old Palo Alto headquarters where it was originally put in by Agilent Technologies (the company that spun out of Hewlett Packard, which is arguably, the company that made Silicon Valley more than 70 years ago).

Here are some of the photos that have come in so far! The best photos are actually from Facebook product designer Francis Luu. But because we are trying not to be super lame, like various slideshow-addicted blogs that shall not be named, here is the link to his photo album. If you are a Facebook employee and are not living in ungodly fear of having your RSUs, options, etc. revoked on this special day, feel free to send us more photos at [email protected].

Here’s the crowd that gathered before Zuckerberg’s talk:

Here’s a photo that YouTube’s Hunter Walk posted of the standing ovation for Zuckerberg:

Here’s the set-up before the event started:

Here’s a new poster from Facebook’s analog research lab:

Here’s the commemorative T-shirt for the Hackathon:

More people hacking:

Editor’s Note: Nir Eyal is the founder of two acquired startups and an advisor to several Bay Area companies and incubators. Nir blogs about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business at NirAndFar.com. Follow him on Twitter @nireyal.

Tomorrow Facebook will sell shares in one of the biggest tech IPOs in history. New investors will gobble up the stock to get a piece of the global phenomenon famously started in Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room in 2004. But while owning the stock will have quantifiable value when it trades on the open market, few buyers will be able to say truthfully that they understood the value of the company just a few years ago.

Ask yourself candidly, what did you think of Facebook the first time you landed on its homepage? Where you blown away? Could you see how it would fill a gaping need in the lives of nearly a billion people? If you’re honest with yourself, and you’re not Peter Thiel, your answer is probably, “No, not really.”

Don’t feel bad. Like many of the astoundingly successful web companies of the last decade, it was hard to appreciate the value of Facebook at first glance. But one person who “got Facebook” early on was Noah Kagan, who in October of 2005 joined the company as one of its first product managers. In 2006, Noah was the source for an analysis of Facebook written by Nisan Gabbay. The essay identified one of the most important reasons for the company’s ascent to Internet glory and offers a prescient description of opportunities still to come:

“The Facebook success story is most interesting to me because of how daily offline social behavior drove usage of the site. There are plenty of activities in our daily life that could benefit from a complementary online product … Facebook demonstrates you have a great Internet service if offline behaviors can drive nearly daily usage online.”

The analysis was spot on. Facebook succeeded because it built new online habits around frequent offline behaviors. Originally, Facebook was designed to replace the physical face books undergraduates received their first week of school. The printed collection of classmates’ names and photographs was an indispensable artifact of college life and was referenced for everything from study group formation to late-night hookups.

TheFacebook.com, as it was originally known, offered users a digital way to feel connected to others throughout the day and from anywhere they could access the web. The power of this universal human need for social acceptance and connection helps explain how the company grew well beyond college campuses and now touches one in eight people on the planet.

The Need To Feel

Ask a devoted Facebook user why they log-in to the site several times per day and they’ll describe features they love and provide examples of how they use the service. They’ll tell you it’s a great way to share photos or keep up with their friends.

But below the surface is the need for emotional gratification. Though we can all shift our emotional states ourselves, it’s not easy. Instead of going through the hard work of consciously changing the way we feel, we use ready-made solutions to do it for us.

Using products or services for emotional gratification is nothing new; some of the most valued things on earth are those that have the ability to transport us quickly from pain to pleasure. For example, we laud the ability of painters or musicians to “move us” with their art. We shower athletes with millions for their ability to transform the gloomy start of the workweek into the excitement of Monday Night Football. Facebook, and the companies like it, are the new tools we use to quickly elevate our moods. This “emotion arbitrage” is the differential in work between having to create our desired physiological state ourselves versus utilizing a product or service to help do it for us.

Facebook won’t be the last company to help us feel good fast. The next web phenom to fulfill our emotional needs will likely contain the following traits:

Cued By Frequent Feelings

The most successful consumer web companies cater to our most basic and powerful emotions. People may feel emotions differently, but we all feel the same spectrum in varying degrees. The most valuable services create internal triggers in the user, activating desire to use the site whenever experiencing a particular sensation. These cues prompt users to come back to the site unaided by external messages. The site becomes the default solution to satiate their emotional needs.

The key is how often we feel the emotional cue. In fact, the market potential for a new company is a function of the frequency of how often the emotion it addresses is felt. As Gabbay correctly noted in his 2006 article, early Facebook users felt the need to connect to the site on a daily basis. Likewise, companies that successfully address frequently experienced emotions stand to reap huge rewards.

Pain Relief

When we feel negative emotions we seek out experiences to bring us back to more positive mental states. Products that can alleviate powerful negative feelings – like fear, sadness, rejection, anxiousness, inferiority, and uncertainty – even temporarily, can be a major draw for consumers.

Odds are that if you’ve felt restless during your day, you’ve visited Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest or one of the other top 25 websites to lift you out of your funk. However, positive feelings fade over time, and when we find ourselves in a negative emotional state again, the cycle continues. The chemistry of the brain ensures this is so.

With Facebook, it’s often loneliness that cues a visit to the site. Twitter is cued when the user fears being out of the loop about what’s happening. Pinterest users feel the urge to capture and collect visual scraps of the web, worried they’ll lose the image lest they pin it.

Specific Solutions To Fuzzy Needs

You may be thinking that to claim websites are used to satiate unpleasant emotions is a stretch. Clearly, no one logs into Facebook after saying, “I’m seeking to be taken out of a state of loneliness. Let’s check my timeline!” Yet, it’s undeniable that the mind compels us to do everything we do as it endlessly searches for rewards and avoids pain.

So how does a consumer technology company communicate what their product is for, without actually stating what the product is for? Obviously, no one would have signed-up for Twitter with the tagline, “Twitter alleviates your anxiety of social rejection.” Instead, the company made the value of the service concrete with the tagline, “Find out what’s happening, right now, with the people and organizations you care about.”

Yet, in Twitter’s early days even this messaging was still too opaque. So Twitter had to be even more specific about the value of the service. As Josh Elman, an early product manager who led the Growth Team at Twitter, explained to me, “We had to more actively tell the story and came up with use cases around knowing what was happening. One great example is when Conan O’Brien tweeted he was going on tour and sold it out quickly. We told the story as, ‘if you are a fan of Conan O’Brian and were on Twitter the morning of Thursday, March 11, you may have seen the tweet announcing his tour and quickly bought tickets. If you weren’t checking Twitter then, you missed out.’” Same message delivered, but with a specific example to drive the point home.

Things To Come

With the imminent Facebook IPO, Instagram’s recent billion dollar sale, and unprecedented new sources of capital funding seed-stage investments, a new tide of entrepreneurs will answer the enticing call of opportunity and pursue their Silicon Valley dreams. Though almost all will fail, a tiny few will create products, which will touch the lives of not just millions, but billions of people. Those entrepreneurs will have a firm understanding of human behavior and their products will be grounded in fundamental emotional needs.

If there’s something on Facebook that won’t stop pinging you with Notifications, tell it to shut up instantly with Facebook’s new granular, in-line notification controls. Hover over an alert in the Facebook.com homepage’s globe icon drop-down and click the ‘x’ for the option to turn off notifications from that app, group, event, or post you commented on. The whole drop-down has a slick new look, too

Previously you had to dig your way to the dedicated Notifications Settings pageto make these changes, and there was no way to turn off a specific source of alerts — you had to silence all your events or all your posts. Facebook has confirmed with me that most of the changes to notifications will be rolled out to everyone by tonight, except for app alert controls which are still in testing.

As we accumulate more friends and apps, Facebook’s notifications can turn from delightful pointers to annoying distractions that interrupt our lives. These new controls mean if you want a more zen Facebook experience, you can make it so.

Now that some of us have been on Facebook for eight years, Facebook needs to be mindful of exhausting its most active users. These are the people uploading the photos, starting the groups, and throwing the events that engage everyone else that uses the social network more casually. It’s already moving in the right direction by offering notification summaries instead of individual emails

If power users become even a bit annoyed with how often Facebook alerts them to minor occurrences, and they don’t feel like they have tight control, they could drift away and stop generating as much content. That could have a ripple effect on overall time-on-site and engagement that could hurt Facebook’s ad business.

The new controls should be especially helpful for quieting noisy groups. One minute someone adds you to a group without your consent, and the next minute you’re getting dozens of notifications about weird music genres or lame club nights. Facebook recently made it much easier to find notification controls on group pages, but now you don’t even have to visit to shut off these alerts.

With the IPO tomorrow, it’s good to see Facebook launching new features today. It seems it’s really serious about the message plastered all over its headquarters. “Stay Focused & Keep Shipping”, even if you’re about to be a paper millionaire. And now it’s got a new poster for all the haters who are gonna hate on its new-found riches…

Silicon Valley venture capital stalwart Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers is announcing this evening that it has closed on a $525 million round for its fifteenth venture fund, dubbed ‘KPCB 15.’

The fund will be headed up by 10 managing members: Mike Abbott, Chi-Hua Chien, Amol Deshpande, John Doerr, Bing Gordon, Wen Hsieh, Randy Komisar, Matt Murphy, Beth Seidenberg, and Ted Schlein. Longtime Kleiner Perkins investment partners Brook Byers, Ray Lane and Bill Joy are all notably off the list, which appears to confirm earlier reports that they will be declining their participation in future funds as part of a gradual general change in the partnership structure at the firm.

Kleiner Perkins says it will focus the fund toward making investments in early-stage digital consumer and enterprise, green technology, and life sciences companies. According to Kleiner Perkins, which for years has been known for placing more emphasis on green tech, it will place an extra focus on all things web going forward: “While KPCB has invested in the digital enterprise space for decades, a further emphasis will be made in KPCB 15,” the firm wrote in a press release.

$525 million is certainly big, but it’s not outsized given Kleiner Perkins’ history and the larger environment. The offering price for KPCB’s 14th fund was $650 million, and its 13th fund’s offering was sized at $950 million, according to regulatory documents. It’s also important to note that this is by no means KPCB’s only fund. In late 2010 the firm raised $1 billion for its digital growth fund, focused on later stage companies, for example, and the firm has a number of other funds focused on specific initiatives and markets.

Meanwhile, other venture capital firms have raised some truly massive rounds in recent months. Last week NEA filed documents indicating that it is raising up to $2.5 billion for a new venture fund that could be one of the largest ever in VC history. And earlier this year, Andreessen Horowitz and Tiger Global each raised $1.5 billion rounds for new VC funds.

Facebook’s $38 share price would make its deal to buy Instagram worth nearly $1.2 billion, up from the roughly $1 billion price the company announced in April.

That’s a nice little bump but the deal hasn’t gone through given regulatory reviews. On top of that, we don’t know the restrictions on the shares like when they vest or if they’re subject to lock-up period. Plus, shares may pop tomorrow and their value will probably fluctuate a lot by the time six-month lock-up date hits. When Facebook agreed to buy Instagram, it said it would pay with $300 million in cash and 22,999,412 shares of stock. That stock is now worth nearly $874 million, creating a $1.17 billion price tag.

Originally, Facebook said the deal was going to close by the end of June, according to its IPO filing. But now it appears that it may take longer because of a more thorough FTC investigation. There’s a requisite investigation if a deal is more than $66 million. But because of the more than $1 billion price that Facebook paid and the reach of both companies, the commission is said to be looking a little bit more closely at the deal, a source with knowledge of the talks tells us. The FTC usually doesn’t publicly confirm investigations until they’re over, and hasn’t publicly confirmed if they’re doing one on this deal.

But there is evidence that it’s taking longer than expected. Facebook changed its IPO filing earlier this month by amending a sentence projecting a second quarter close for the Instagram deal. It now forecasts a close sometime by the end of the year. If the government blocks the deal, Facebook has agreed to pay Instagram a $200 million kill fee, according to its IPO filing.

Because of this, Instagram’s dozen or so employees haven’t even started at Facebook. They’re still in limbo and they’re working from their San Francisco headquarters on the app, instead of Facebook’s Menlo Park office. Meanwhile, Facebook is also trying to improve its own mobile offerings; it recently boosted the size of photographs in the mobile news feed, making the overall experience more Instagram-like.

While the deal is ultimately expected to go through, a Facebook-Instagram acquisition poses several challenges for the FTC. For one, the FTC’s merger guidelines happen to focus a lot on pricing power, and how a merger would affect a company’s ability to raise prices and decrease output. But both Facebook and Instagram give their products away for free.

The other components of the FTC and Department of Justice’s guidelines have to do with market share. They’ll add up the square of different market shares for competing firms, creating a number called the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index. If it’s above 2500, then the market is highly concentrated. If it’s below 1500, then it’s unconcentrated.

But again, it’s not clear how this applies in a market where companies can rise and fall so quickly. Instagram basically appeared out of nowhere. It racked up nearly 40 million users in about 18 months. Plus, the time it takes for any given company to gain millions of daily active users is declining, partly because of the virality of the Facebook platform itself and then because the iOS and Android platforms are finally reaching scale.

So how do you apply a formula like this when changes in market share are so dynamic? The last time the FTC took a close look at a consumer web deal of this size, it was back in 2009 with the $750 million Google-Admob acquisition. The commission unanimously closed it after Apple entered the competitive field with its acquisition of rival mobile ad network Quattro, which became iAd. However, there hasn’t been a smartphone app deal of comparable size to Instagram — yet.

Teaching. In spite of George Bernard Shaw’s now infamous “those who can’t do” proverb, teaching is one of the most important professions out there. Even for the many self-taught coders out there, at some point along the way, we’ve all had our lives shaped by a great teacher — in the classroom, or out. That’s why, on the whole, teacher compensation in the U.S. is embarrassing. To pick on marketers, some might see the fact that the average marketing manager makes twice the average salary of just about every type of teacher as just a wee bit backwards.

Luckily, there are a number of startups that are starting to change that, thanks to the Web and the growing popularity of open, online educational platforms. For example, Udemy, a web platform that allows anyone to host and take online classes, this morning announced that its top ten instructors earned a combined $1.6 million over the last 12 months.

Of the top ten, all made over $50K in the last year, with highest earner at over $200K. Though Udemy courses focus on everything from design and corporate training to programming, most of Udemy’s top ten teach courses on the latter and are heavy on entrepreneur-focused content. And given the popularity of CodeAcademy and others, this isn’t surprising.

And the number of platforms offering or facilitating online courses, video and otherwise, (often free) is growing fast, including Khan Academy, 2tor, Udacity, Pathwright, StraighterLine, TED Ed, Course Hero, etc. Considering the high cost of education, the more, the merrier.

But the number of platforms where teachers make money is far smaller. Udemy offers courses for free, or for $20 or $250 a pop, and take 30 percent of those fees. Since Udemy is available to all teachers, and content on most subjects, there’s a lot of potential, and based just on the platform’s top earners, the startup is making money.

Give teachers technology that makes their lives easier, flips their classrooms, or allows them to make extra income, and you’re on the right track. It’s a little know secret that teachers are/can be extremely active and supportive early adopters. ShowMe’s CEO San Kim talks about this a lot. Given this to be true, it’s no surprise that Engrade founder Bri Holt told us that, since teachers generally don’t get much discretionary spending from schools, they tend to pay out of pocket for new technologies.

While they love to be early adopters and early testers, Holt says that banking on teachers isn’t such a great business model. Instead, for ed software (as in Engrade’s case), make schools and districts pay — they have budgets. Or, there’s Top Hat Monocle, which is finding success (surprisingly) charging students for their learning tools, while teachers use it for free.

If not saving teachers money, then help them make money. Of course, for Udemy, most of thsoe instructors outside the top ten aren’t making nearly enough for it to be a full-time salary, and those who do make money are generally experts — established names. It’s a model that’s been proven out by Lynda.com, which has been around for years, but is saw $70 million in revenue last year without having taken a penny of outside funding.

Lynda.com makes sure that the quality of its affordable, paid online course material is of high quality by hand-picking instructors who are experts in their field. And not just experts, but those who are experts and great teachers, which don’t always go hand-in-hand. But the Lynda co-founders told us that nearly 90 percent of its educators earn their entire annual income by producing videos for the platform.

But it’s not only video. One big, under-the-radar success story is TeachersPayTeachers, an open marketplace in which teacher can buy, sell, and share their original lesson plans. Like Lynda.com, the startup is not only making money, it’s profitable and self-sustaining without having taken any outside investment.

Teachers on the site passed $7 million in earnings last week, with the highest earner (a kindergarten teacher from Georgia named Deanna Jump) having made a total of $700K on the platform. She’s currently earning $60K per month, the startup’s founder Paul Edelman tells us. Yep.

For a historical perspective, Edelman tells us that, in 2011, teachers on its platform collectively made $3.4M. Today, that’s jumped to $7 million today, and since sales are growing at an average of 300 percent annually, the founder expects to hit $10 million by the end of the year and $24 million in 2013. Edelman has to be feeling good about the way things have worked out.

A former teacher, Edelman launched TeachersPayTeachers in 2006 and sold it to Scholastic later that year. But the recession saw the site’s growth dwindle, so Edelman offered to buy back the site. Scholastic agreed, so Edelman bought back his site in 2009 and it’s been profitable ever since.

As to the business model? The site is subscription-based, with two plans: A free option, which gives teachers 60 percent of all sales, and a premium membership that runs $57 a year and allows teachers to keep 85 percent of their earnings. Compare that to Udemy’s flat 30 percent cut, Pathwright’s 4 percent cut of sales, and Lynda’s $25 subscriptions (granted these three sites focus on courses, not lesson plans), and it might seem surprising that TeachersPayTeachers is growing like it is.

But Edelman tells us that the site hit 700K registered teachers last week, which is about the same number of teachers as the popular, venture-backed Edmodo, and 3.5x the size of Udemy’s entire user base.

Regardless, each of these sites, along with WeAreTeachers — an online community for teachers which allows them to collaborate and submit ideas for cash and prizes — are finding traction, adoption among the world’s savvy educators, and more importantly, are offering them supplementary online revenue streams. It’s still too early to say just how big these platforms will become, but with startups like Pathwright and Udemy opening the doors of online courses to one and all, there’s a lot more competition for eyeballs and dollars ahead.

For more on Udemy’s high earners, go here, and for TeachersPayTeachers at home, go here

This is the age of thinking thermostats and, not to be outdone by a well-known circular model, hardware startup Ecobee has released the Smart Si. It is a smart thermostat with small color screen and a web interface so temperature wonks can update their heating models on the fly.

The Smart Si is not quite as sleek as the Nest but offers more accessible settings – think of this as the Linux to Nest’s OS X. The web interface allows you to see your home’s current status, set a vacation profile, and view reports on your system’s performance including HVAC and heater usage.

The system pulls in weather alerts as well as alarms from your home system and you can chart and graph all of your performance parameters. Arguably, I doubt many will get very intense with this stuff, but it’s definitely available.

Ecobee has been around since 2007 and the introduced one of the first Wi-Fi-enabled thermostates. This is their effort at building a high-end thermostat but the company has plenty of experience in the space. The company also recently announced wireless Smart Plugs that allow you to control electronics in your house using the ZigBee networking standard.

The Smart Si costs $220 and is available now for pre-order.

Product Page

Pulse, the popular free mobile news reader for iPhone, iPad and Android, could soon get ads. Until now, Pulse, which launched its first app in May 2010, was ad free and the company focused more on user acquisition than monetizing its service. A new job posting on Pulse’s site, however, clearly spells out the company’s plans to start making money through advertising in the near future. The company is currently looking for its first sales executive and says that it is “building innovative and disruptive ways of empowering brands to share their content and tell their story in a way that’s natural and native to Pulse.”

Even though it’s now been more than two years since its launch, the company never revealed its monetization plans beyond a few glimpses here and there. Now it looks like some form of advertising is definitely coming to Pulse. Judging from this announcement, though, those ads won’t be standard mobile ads.

The job posting stresses that Pulse is not looking to sell standard ad units and is instead “reinventing what marketing can be and should be on mobile devices.” Pulse notes that, in the long run, it plans to build a global sales organization, but for now, the new sales executive’s job will be to establish the company’s relationship with brands and agencies and to evangelize the Pulse platform and the company’s approach to marketing.

Asked about the job posting, Pulse CEO Akshay Kathari told us that Pulse ads won’t look and feel like ads. Instead, they will “resemble the high-quality content that keeps users coming back to the app.” As the product is still a work in progress, though, he wasn’t in a position to say more about it at this time.

So far, Pulse has raised $9.8 million. Its mobile apps had about 11 million users by the end of 2011 (up from just 1 million a year go) and the company was seeing a new download every 2 seconds. Pulse also comes pre-loaded on a number of devices, including Amazon’s Kindle Fire.

It’s worth noting that, for a short time in 2010, Pulse was actually banned from the App Store for a few days after the New York Times complained that the app was using its content and making money off it (at that time, Pulse for iPad was still a $3.99 app). It’ll be interesting to see how Pulse plans to avoid similar issues once it starts selling its own ads.

It’s been about a month and a half since peer-to-peer bike rental service Spinlister launched in San Francisco and New York. Since then, the New York-based startup has been busy trying to attract bike owners to list their bikes and improve its inventory, while also trying to improve the overall experience of using its site.

Despite only being available in two cities and for six weeks, the startup has already attracted a fair amount of interest from listers and renters. It has an inventory of about 400 from bikes from individuals, and more than 2,000 from bike rental shops listed. And it’s seen rental interest from all over the world, with renters from six of the seven continents. (Antarctica is the only holdout.)

That’s translating into cash for those who list bikes that otherwise weren’t getting ridden. In the first six weeks, 25 percent of listers have completed a rental, with 25 percent of those receiving multiple rentals. Those folks have made an average of $50 each so far — and if your bike is popular, you can pull in upwards of $100 a week, depending on pricing according to CEO Will Dennis.

But just like Airbnb and Getaround before it, Spinlister still has a lot of work to do to educate consumers about peer-to-peer rentals, and to reduce friction in the process. As a result, it’s put up new resources on its website, including handy guides for renting and listing bikes on the site. The goal is to decrease fulfillment times and increase the likelihood that both renters and listers respond to one another. Spinlister also has general guidelines for those who haven’t been on a bike in a while, as well as city-specific resources for New York and San Francisco.

For those who are still unsure if they should list their bikes, for fear of theft or damage, the startup has also introduced the Spinlister Guarantee, which will insure the fair-value price of a bike for up to $5,000. That should set some folks’ minds at ease.

What’s next for Spinlister? The company expects to expand to several new U.S. cities over the next six months, with plans to expand internationally soon after that. It’s also hoping to go mobile and roll out an iPhone app. It has raised $225,000 in seed funding and is in the process of hiring an iOS developer and looking for a Rails developer as well.

For those of you who will be in New York City for TechCrunch Disrupt and wish to skip the cab line and bike around town instead, Spinlister is offering up $20 credits to the first 25 people to email [email protected] and sign up for an account. Happy biking!

Editor’s note: Peter Vogel is co-founder of Plink, a Facebook Credits-based loyalty program that rewards Facebook members for dining and making purchases at their favorite restaurants and stores. Reach him via email at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @pvogel.

Although introduced in 2009, we’ve only seen glimpses of what Facebook Credits will become when it grows up, and Facebook is about to kick off the training wheels.

So far, Facebook has done little to promote the virtual currency of Facebook Credits and it’s been used almost entirely in social gaming. But even with this limited exposure and promotion, Facebook Credits’ fees already represents $557 Million in revenue or 15 percent of Facebook’s entire 2011 revenue. Even more remarkable is that less than two percent of Facebook users bought virtual goods with Facebook Credits in 2011, yet it still represented 15 percent of Facebook’s revenue, primarily from just one vertical – social gaming. One vertical and two percent of members represented 15 percent of Facebook’s 2011 revenue!

Why hasn’t Facebook promoted the Credits Economy more aggressively? 

Some believe that Facebook has waited to promote Credits as a Facebook-wide currency until after the IPO; a valuation based on advertising revenue is less volatile and less likely to attract concern from investors.

A second theory is that Facebook tends to introduce features slowly and let them develop; even though Facebook’s App Platform was opened in 2007 and hundreds of millions of members were playing games, Facebook did little to monetize the platform until they required game developers to use Facebook to process payments on July 1, 2011, about four years later.

Now, about three-and-a-half years after Facebook Credits were launched, Facebook is ready and they’re going to need the revenue to satisfy shareholder expectations.

What will change after the IPO?

It certainly looks like, post-IPO, Facebook will begin promoting Facebook Credits heavily and will soon be making Credits easier for consumers to use and more profitable for developers.

On the consumer front, we’re predicting that a user’s Facebook Credits balance will be more prominently displayed (still privately) on their profile. Currently it’s hidden a few clicks deep under Home>Account Setting>Payments.  Facebook will also start featuring a list of places where members can spend Credits. Facebook’s new App Center is a great start for this, increasing the ease with which users can find new apps – not just games – some  for free, some for purchase with Credits. Facebook could also feature a new category under “Favorites,” listing recommended ways to spend Credits based on that specific member’s interests, friends, etc.

In addition, Facebook will likely run more promotions offering consumers Credits at a discount, “Buy  $1 in Credits and get $2-3 dollars worth of Credits for free.” This is similar to promotions Facebook ran in games just few months ago, but Facebook will use the same strategy outside of games to attract a wider audience.

Developers will also benefit from all the promotion that makes Credits easier to use for consumers, but for most developers, increased discoverability is key. No matter how great an app or game they build, if a consumer can’t find it, everyone loses. For the Facebook credits economy to flourish, discoverability is essential; increased listings, rankings, categories and a well organized App Center is key and Facebook is already on their way to providing developers with these features.

Facebook has also hinted, with little explanation, that in certain verticals outside of gaming, Facebook will consider lowering the 30 percent tax they typically keep on Credit transactions. This may open the door for Open Graph participants like Netflix, Spotify and the Washington Post, to name a few, to begin accepting Credits for monthly subscription plans, created just for Facebook. Since these partners and more than 50 others and counting are all integrated into Facebook’s Open Graph, already with the ability to share “like’s” “listening to,” and “watching,” the next logical step is to begin accepting Credits as payment. By lowering the 30 percent fee it is now financially possible for these partners to participate in the Facebook economy.

What does all this mean for the Facebook Credits Economy?

I’ve predicted and still believe the revenue generated from Facebook Credits will double every year for the next five year, eclipsing the revenue generated by advertising by 2016.

Credits will emerge from gaming this year and be used Facebook-wide for all sorts of paid apps ranging from dating to entertainment (TV, movies, music and live streaming of pay-per-view events) to more functional utility apps you might be used to buying for your smart-phone.

Facebook Credits is about to grow up fast.

Social gaming was its birth, the new App Center is its first step … and we’re all waiting to hear its first few words. I’m guessing it will be some version of, “Pay… here… always.”

“People are sick of shitty customer service,” said FastCustomer co-founder, Stephanie Hay. And she and her team aim to do something about it.

Their first product, for the iPhone, Android, and other platforms, allowed you to search for a customer service number – say Adam & Eve – and press a button. The program waits on hold for you and then calls you on your phone immediately upon connecting. The company saw 100,000 downloads and estimates that they saved people 1 million minutes of hold time.

They’ve just launched a new telephone concierge service, 1855-DONT-HOLD (855-366-8465), that allows you to call in and perform the same operation. In short, this thing stays on hold for you. The whole process usually takes less than an hour.

“We asked ourselves ‘How can we remove the pain for the customer service experience for the end user?’” said Hay.

The co-founders are Aaron Dragushan of Wondermill, the aforementioned Hay, and Paul Singh of 500 Startups. They closed a $750,000 seed round last September.

The company currently handles 1,000 calls per day and hopes to handle more with the new phone number.

“After hearing ‘Please stay on the line, your call is important to us,’ on repeat, we talked about how awesome it would be if humans never had to wait on hold with technology again,” said Hay. “So now, with the introduction of our concierge-level service, we’re trying to make customer service experiences — dare I say — actually enjoyable.”

The company works closely with companies to ensure proper routing. Premium services allow companies to completely control the user experience, from assigning the correct phone numbers to modifying the notification messages. They also white label the service for corporate clients.

The new phone service will launch shortly but you can try the in-app service now.