Category: Tech news

It was less than a week ago that Tenthbit, the developers of the buzzy, new social-networking-app-for-couples (or other partners) Pair, picked up a $4.2 million seed round, money the founders said would be used to expand its mobile development and design teams. Now it looks like some of those funds might also need to go to legal bills.

Tenthbit is getting sued by pair Networks, a hosting and domain registration company based in Pittsburgh, for trademark infringement.

Tenthbit, meanwhile, has also sued pair Networks, to try to prevent the other suit from going ahead. Pair Networks is asking for an injunction on Pair the app, as well as “other relief as this Court deems appropriate.” Tenthbit argues the two do not compete directly, and would therefore not result in any brand confusion.

While trademark cases can be a dime a dozen — and there is no guarantee of how this one will fall — this one is interesting for a few reasons:

One is that it pits a startup working at the forefront of mobile social networking, against the kind of Internet company that has been around for years and is not so much about disruption as it is about making the internet work like it’s supposed to.

Another is that this old-school Internet company has apparently taken others to court for the same reason — and won. And there a couple of other twists to this story, as you’ll see below.

Tenthbit’s case against pair Networks was filed first, in a U.S. District Court in the District of Northern California, San Jose, on April 6 in an apparent attempt to stop pair Networks from filing its own case. That didn’t seem to work, and pair Networks filed its own case against Tenthbit in a Federal court in Pennsylvania on April 27. Both suits are embedded below.

Pair Networks alleges in its suit that Tenthbit “doubly infringes” on pair Network’s trademark through both the use of the brand “Pair” as well as its URL, www.trypair.com. Pair Networks says that it has spent “substantial amounts of time, effort, and money” to ensure that the public associates the Pair family of marks (these include pair.com, pair.net, and pair.org, among others) with its own company.

Pair Networks, founded in 1998, offers its services both in the U.S. as well as internationally and claims to be one of the world’s biggest privately-held hosting companies. It says it delivers more than one billion Web hits per day via its servers.

Pair the app, meanwhile, has seen over 220,000 downloads since it went live in the app store a month ago.

Pair Networks says that it has been policing for the use of its name by Internet-related companies for years now, and cites three different examples in its complaint where courts have ruled in its favor in other trademark infringement cases.

Still, there is something a little depressing, and desperate sounding, about when companies begin to get possessive about basic words — “pair”, meaning two, perhaps being one of the most basic of all.

For its part, Tenthbit maintains that it is not in the same business as pair Networks — with a consumer mobile app being on the opposite end of the Internet spectrum from offering hosting and domain registration services to websites.

“It is axiomatic and commonplace that the same word may be used as a trademark by different parties provided that such use does not create a likelihood of confusion on the part of relevant consumers,” the app makers’ lawyers, Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe, write in response to the infringement claims.

There are a few other eyebrow-raising points in pair Networks’ complaint against Tenthbit:

• Pair Networks claims that its reputation is being damaged because Pair the app is associated with “explicit adult activity” like “sexting.” (The suit doesn’t mention the spinoffs that Pair has spawned, such as PairMixer, which helps you find someone to pair with on the app if you are unattached.)
• Weird coincidence: Pair Networks claims that Tenthbit possibly already knew about pair Networks when it had registered its own domain as trypair.com because it turns out that among the companies hosted by pair Networks is Y Combinator, the incubator where Tenthbit created and launched Pair. Y Combinator used pair Networks for hosting for at least six years.
• Pair Networks is asking to get all the profits that Tenthbit will have made from Pair the app. (For now, it’s a free app for iOS only, with no revenue-generating services incorporated into it at this point.)

The cases are due to be heard later this year. We have reached out to Pair, pair Networks and their legal teams for further comment.

Pair’s $4.2-million seed funding round, announced on May 1, came from an A-list of angels that included Ashton Kutcher’s A-Grade Ventures, Dave Morin, Paul Buchheit, Founder Collective, SV Angel, Lerer Ventures, Michael Birch, Sam Altman, CrunchFund, Tencent, Yuri Milner,Betaworks, Alexis Ohanian, Garry Tan, Harjeet Taggar, Gary Vaynerchuk, Brandee Barker, Brian Pokorny, Elad Gil, and Susan Wu.

In the past year or so since he became the mayor of San Francisco, Ed Lee has become a household name of sorts in the Bay Area technology community — no easy feat for an industry that’s known more for forging its own speedy path, rather than mixing with the notoriously bogged-down world of politics and legislation.

For years, companies have been known to flock more to SF’s southern suburbs or to San Jose some 50 miles south, where space is often cheaper and the tax situation has historically been more lax. But surrounded by tech-focused supporters such as Ron Conway and Marissa Mayer, Ed Lee has made it a major priority of his administration to bring more technological innovation and startup businesses into the city of San Francisco. His methods have been controversial in some circles, but with rapidly growing companies such as Twitter and Airbnb signing major contracts to keep their operations within the city limits at times in their development when many tech companies typically decamp to the South Bay, they have clearly been effective.

TechCrunch TV had the opportunity to grab a brief interview with Ed Lee when he stopped by NewMe Accelerator’s Demo Day held at Google’s San Francisco office this past week. Watch the video above to hear him talk about the TechSF initiative launched last month with a $5 million grant aimed at fostering more high tech jobs, and why he’s working to keep tech companies within the urban center of San Francisco.

Feature image of the San Francisco skyline courtesy of Flickr user moonlightbulb.

Editor’s note: Erin Tao is a business development associate at Aviary — and, yes, its hackathon organizer. Follow her on Twitter @etaooo.

For anyone who enjoys (or has a knack for) planning, organizing a hackathon is not terribly difficult: it’s a matter of understanding your goals, assessing needs, and figuring out how to bridge the two. Naturally, this is much easier said than done.

The most important part of a hackathon, by far, are the demos. I mean, they’re what make the event worth attending in the first place. Sponsoring companies wouldn’t offer money to anything that didn’t provide exposure. Developers wouldn’t forsake sleep if they couldn’t show an eager audience the hacks they built overnight.

Pulling off demos at Photo Hack Day and Photo Hack Day 2, for example, has proven to be a continuous learning process, with a much more public (and much less forgiving) learning curve. There’s no need to be a n00b, we’ve actually done a lot of the screwing up for you.

Format

Almost every sponsored hackathon will have two sets of presentations: those that kick off the event (for sponsors to introduce developers to their APIs) and those that close it (for hackers to show what they’ve done). Since company demos are the most visible component of the hackathon, ensuring that this portion runs smoothly is key to the event’s success. The caveat: extensive preparation is useful to a certain degree. You can – and absolutely should – do a number of related tasks in advance, but a significant portion of hacker demos require efficient, on-the-fly work that takes place within a short amount of time.

Photo Hack Day 2 was organized almost entirely through three tools: email, spreadsheets, and HackerLeague. How you choose to keep track of everything is up to you, but I’d strongly suggest the following for each set of demos.

Part I – API demos:

• Keep a company database handy. Any correspondence with a particular company should be labeled and filed away. It wouldn’t hurt to note how up-to-date companies are with their essential obligations, such as a cross-promotional blog post, whether or not they supplied a logo for the website, or when they paid any sponsorship dues. A CRM will help streamline the inbound and day-of workflow, but keeping everything in a consolidated document in a single browser window saves a significant amount of time compared to digging through archives. I’ve included a sample spreadsheet where I organized the relevant information, and left a few examples of notes that I didn’t want to forget. (Note: the template is the same as what I used for both Photo Hack Days.)
• Encourage presenters to use layman’s terms for sake of efficiency. If hackers are curious, they will approach a company developer and ask questions after a presentation is over. Being overly technical hampers presentation speed.
• Distribute guidelines on good presentations ahead of time. As a rule of thumb, attendees and developers are generally fond of the following: Cool APIs, funny presentations and no PowerPoint.
• Establish time limits and follow the schedule. Higher-level sponsors generally demo longer, and with more materials. Giving your headline company five minutes to speak in front of a captive audience with a laptop and projector is ample time; the next tier of sponsorship can have three minutes with a laptop and projector. Non-sponsors are allowed a one-minute pitch with a microphone, and can host non-mandatory demos and workshops during hacking hours instead.

Part II – hack demos:

• …Clearly establish time limits (yes, it’s important enough to mention twice.) – Unlike sponsors, each team of developers gets an equal amount of time to present. Two minutes is standard and a well-planned presentation can cover the high-level ins and outs of a hack in that much time.
• Ban PowerPoint if you have to – This is also worth mentioning twice, because too many teams continue to try to use it. It may even be worth an explicit ban. It’s a waste of time and they can’t effectively showcase an app or service’s functionality.

• If companies are providing their own sponsored prizes, supply a list of hacks (and, if possible, the demo order) that can be filtered by API usage – This enables them to know who to look out for; shareable spreadsheets on Google Docs are perfect for this.

• When s#*t breaks — and trust me, it will — have multiple spares on hand – During Photo Hack Day 2’s Demo Day, we destroyed General Assembly’s two HDMI and VGA cables (they were taped to the floor underneath the audience chairs, so when people moved around, the cables were yanked from the wall and damaged). So, keep two or three spares of everything to keep the party going: electricity, Wi-Fi, presentation tools, dongles, cables, power strips, extension cords and even a projector! (Pro Tip: keep your receipts!)
• Prepare any relevant material for the judging panel – Provide all judging criteria ahead of time and make this publicly available for attendees and hackers alike. Provide plenty of writing materials and judging templates (usually a list of hacks; this falls under the category of things you’ll need to create on the fly). Encourage judges to ask questions and push back on developer ideas – for instance, “Why did you do it like x when you could have done it like y?” If hackers can consolidate important development points in ten seconds or less, that will definitely win over technical judges.

To-do on the fly

Remember the aforementioned caveat? This is it, and it’s the trickiest, most stressful portion of the event.

• Demo order – Consolidate signups into one place. Categorizing demos based on requisite equipment (i.e. live websites, locally-hosted applications, mobile apps), will prevent you from having to scramble to find the appropriate cables / dongles every time a new person comes on deck. Test your platforms thoroughly; you’ll need to be very familiar with the sign-up procedure that your hackers will be relying upon.

• If you’re using social media to post updates, create incentives for people to follow relevant feeds – During Photo Hack Day 2, we posted most of the updates via Twitter with the #PHD2 hashtag. Everything seemed fine until the demo sign-up process was announced, both over the microphone and via Twitter — Not everyone could hear us, nor were they checking Twitter.

By creating incentives (i.e. sponsor giveaways to those who follow the feed, tweet about the event, or retweet any official posts), you gain a stronger following while making sure that hackers stay in the loop. This translates to a less chaotic process of organizing demos.

• Voting process – Whether you choose a web or mobile service, it helps to have SMS voting enabled. I say this because (1) I have yet to find a platform that I love to use on mobile browsers, and (2) most Demo Day attendees are not going to bring a laptop with them. Be sure to test it ahead of time to avoid hiccups.
• Prize ceremony – If there are only official event prizes, the process should be easy enough: emcee as necessary, but allow judges to briefly talk the audience through some of their thoughts before delivering the verdict. For company prizes, be sure representatives know when to be onstage. Keep timeliness and brevity in mind. Feel free to relax now.

Here’s what I still haven’t figured out

Should there be a cap to the number of demos?

This has some very obvious pitfalls, but after four hours of demos, the judges and audience at Photo Hack Day 2 were equally exhausted. This translated to a rushed prize ceremony: it was getting dark, everyone had been at General Assembly since lunch, and hackers were beginning to shut down after a night without sleep.

If judges and attendees are only interested in the high quality hacks, should there be some sort of screening process? The tradeoff for a large turnout is a long Demo Day, and you’d hate to end the event on a poor note (read: tired, grumpy hackers and attendees.)

What alternatives exist to the monotony of demos? Is it worth dividing hack submissions into categories?

After the hackathon (and a much-needed day off), our team broke down the areas where we thought there was room for improvement – and there were plenty. Though the demo tech mishaps were the most glaring, the actual process of demoing needed work.

The consensus was to encourage (and more importantly, reward) creative and entertaining presentations with prizes; they provided a much-needed relief to the spell of monotonous ones. Good demos – especially those that are funny – make the entire afternoon worthwhile. In terms of condensing the block of time required for participants to demo, the jury is still out.

A final note

This is the summary of everything I’ve seen and experienced from the two hackathons I’ve organized, and the three cumulative months I’ve spent planning. There are certainly alternatives to all of these “methods” and a better way of approaching these things is to consider them variables. Trust that you understand the nature of your hackathon well enough to know what will work and what won’t.

Yes, demos are time consuming, and yes, they are stressful, but I absolutely wouldn’t mind doing it all over again. For the developers who appreciate cool APIs, for anyone who loves observing the creative process, and for the many people out there concerned with building community: organizing these type of events is so gosh darn rewarding. Awesome people should meet awesome people, and awesome products beget even more awesome products.

This, in a nutshell, is why we put on hackathons in the first place.

An automated Facebook spam filter gone slightly awry, not purposeful censorship, is to blame for startup enthusiast Robert Scoble and some other commenters getting blocked, according to a company spokesperson.

Users attempting to comment on blog posts have recently been prevented from doing so, with warning text from the company saying that “this comment can’t be posted” because it is “irrelevant or inappropriate.” We’ve heard back from Facebook, and here’s what it says has been going on.

The company says that the intention is to bar spammy or abusive commenters. Scoble’s comment was specifically blocked because of its length, and the length of the comment thread it was on. Long and popular threads are particularly attractive to spammers as they provide the largest distribution for whatever content is being spammed. Facebook also may block other types of comments that go against positive conversation, such as some ASCII art. Other factors may include who you’re commenting on, how long the comment is, and who is commenting.

Sentiment itself is not considered, the company says.

The wording is somewhat confusing, as “irrelevant or inappropriate” comments are a subjective judgement that could apply to many topics. But this doesn’t appear to be some sort of content filter that Facebook could tune to specific political content in order to get the social network approved to operate in certain countries like China. The company will be sending us an official statement soon and the specific reason Scoble’s comment was barred.

Update: Here is the official statement from Facebook:

“To protect the millions of people who connect and share on Facebook every day, we have automated systems that work in the background to maintain a trusted environment and protect our users from bad actors who often use links to spread spam and malware. These systems are so effective that most people who use Facebook will never encounter spam. They’re not perfect, though, and in rare instances they make mistakes. This comment was mistakenly blocked as spammy, and we have already started to make adjustments to our classifier. We look forward to learning from rare cases such as these to make sure we don’t repeat the same mistake in the future.”

And here’s what Facebook told Scoble, which he’s commented (!) with further thoughts on our previous post:

Facebook PR responds.

I just talked with Facebook PR about my “comment censorship issue.” They say what actually happened is my comment was classified as spam. He further said that this was a “false positive” because my comment was one that Facebook doesn’t want to block.

Turns out that my comment was blocked by Facebook’s spam classification filters and that it wasn’t blocked for what the comment said, but rather because of something unique to that message. They are looking more into it and will let me know more later, after they figure out what triggered it. Their thesis is that my comment triggered it for a few reasons:

1. I’m subscribed to @max.woolf https://www.facebook.com/max.woolf and am not a friend of his in the system. That means that the spam classification system treats comments more strictly than if we were friends.

2. My comment included three @ links. That probably is what triggered the spam classification system.

3. There might have been other things about the comment that triggered the spam system.

The PR official I talked with told me that the spam classification system has tons of algorithms that try to keep you from posting low-value comments, particularly to public accounts (er, people who have turned on subscriptions here on Facebook).

I actually appreciate that Facebook is trying to do something about comment quality. I had to recently change my privacy settings to only allow friends of friends to comment on my posts because I was getting so many poor comments on my posts (when I did that the poor quality posts instantly stopped).

The PR person also said that a team is looking into why this message got a false positive, and will be adjusting the algorithms to let messages like these get through the system.

Also, the error message made it sound like the message was blocked because of the content of the message, not because it looked spammy. They are looking into the wording of the error and will update that to make the error clearer as to what’s going on and why the spam classification system got kicked in.

More as I learn more.

[Image via Robin Wauters/Flickr.]

As we put more of our private information online and entrust it to web services, privacy breaches become almost inevitable. One major problem with online privacy is that there is really no enforceable chain of confidentiality. So when a third-party service makes your information available to another party, things can get complicated. A new paper by Samford University law professor Woodrow Hartzog argues that traditional privacy laws aren’t the best ways to protect private information online. Instead, he suggests an approach that’s more like the U.S. HIPAA rules that currently govern how private health information can be shared between your health provider and third parties. The system he proposes would be based on established principles in confidentiality and contract law.

Confidentiality law, says Harzog, typically only binds the first recipient of information. Online, that obviously isn’t enough to protect a user’s privacy and most scholars have argued that confidentiality law is simply not suited to deal with online privacy issues. Hartzog, however, argues that a HIPAA-like “chain-link confidentiality” regime would be more effective in protecting users’ privacy than current regulations. This system would not just ensure confidentiality between the user and the first service where data is stored, but the obligation of confidentiality would also flow downstream. Under this regime, he writes, “Internet users could then pursue a remedy against anyone in the chain who either failed to abide by her obligation of confidentiality or failed to require confidentiality of a third-party recipient.”

Hartzog argues that our current privacy regulations are “a patchwork of laws and remedies” and often in conflict with other laws and evolving technologies. It’s also often unclear how “privacy” is actually defined and what, for example, constitutes a “reasonable expectations of privacy.” In Hartzog’s view, “traditional privacy remedies are inadequate in the digital age.”

Here is what chain-link confidentiality on the Internet would look like in practice: a website that collects your personal information (and that explicitly allow to share your information with other services) would also have to establish a confidentiality contract with any other company it discloses your information to – and those companies would be required to establish the same kind of contract with every subsequent recipient as well. These contracts, of course, could also simply prohibit any further dissemination of your personal information or limit it to certain companies or companies that fulfill certain security requirements. Every web service could, of course, also tweak this contract depending on its needs.

In a way, this isn’t all that different from the Creative Commons “Share Alike” provision: depending on the Creative Commons license used – artist can allow others to remix their work, for example, as long as it is then shared under the same license terms as the original work.

The chain-link confidentiality approach then would allow for the flow of information, says Hartzog, ” by continually re-creating an environment for sharing that accommodates the sender, receiver, and the subject of the personal information.”

Even though this isn’t a cure-all – your information, after all, could still leak out or be scraped by others – it’s an interesting way of looking at privacy from a more contractual point of view, especially because it sets up a legal framework for sharing information between services.

For the more lawyerly and in-depth discussion of this, take a look at Hartzog’s paper here.

[Image credit: Flickr user Yandle]

Updated. Today was just another Saturday morning in blog land when Robert Scoble, the well-known tech startup enthusiast, went to post a comment on a Facebook post written by Carnegie Mellon student (and TechCrunch commenter extraordinaire) Max Woolf about the nature of today’s tech blogging scene. Scoble’s comment itself was pretty par-for-the-course — generally agreeing with Woolf’s sentiments and adding in his own two cents.

But when Scoble went to click post, he received an odd error message:

“This comment seems irrelevant or inappropriate and can’t be posted. To avoid having comments blocked, please make sure they contribute to the post in a positive way.”

Now, Facebook makes no apologies for working to create a safe and clean environment on its corner of the web by shutting down abusive or harassing behavior, content such as pornography, or general spamming of the system. This particular method policing “inappropriate” comments may be new, but it would fall within the same realm.

But even so, this instance seems to be a very strange enactment of any kind of Facebook policy. Scoble posted his original comment in its entirety on his Google+ page, and it’s clear that it contains no profanity or even any obvious argumentative language.

Of course, what makes a comment “positive” or “negative” is a very subjective thing. Since Facebook is a global site, and what is acceptable in one culture is offensive in another, the company generally relies on a combination of software algorithms and notifications from other users to identify inappropriate behavior. This seems to show a glitch in that system.

This could be similar to what happened to film critic Roger Ebert back in January 2011, when Facebook temporarily disabled Ebert’s blog because of allegedly “abusive comment.” It turns out that Ebert’s blog never actually contained objectionable content — a number of Facebook users had flagged his page as “abusive” after he wrote a critical tweet about Ryan Dunn, an actor who died in a drunk driving accident. It could be that Robert Scoble has been similarly flagged by other Facebook users, for reasons justified or not.

Scoble’s a pretty popular guy on the web, so not surprisingly his Google+ post about the incident attracted more than 100 comments within the first hour after he posted it. Several other people there report having seen the same message in recent days, and one person named Steven Streight wrote that recently his Facebook commenting ability was “temporarily limited” because of comments that he says were similarly benign such as “I’m a married man.” TechCrunch commenters have weighed in on this post as well to recount similar experiences.

Not surprisingly, a number of people are seeing this as an example of censorship — a word that almost always has negative connotations in the tech world.

We’ve reached out to Facebook for more information on what this policy means, how it is powered, and what specific words or behaviors it is meant to filter. We’ll update this post if we hear anything back and as the situation develops.

Update: A Facebook policy spokesperson emailed the following explanation:

“To protect the millions of people who connect and share on Facebook every day, we have automated systems that work in the background to maintain a trusted environment and protect our users from bad actors who often use links to spread spam and malware. These systems are so effective that most people who use Facebook will never encounter spam. They’re not perfect, though, and in rare instances they make mistakes. This comment was mistakenly blocked as spammy, and we have already started to make adjustments to our classifier. We look forward to learning from rare cases such as these to make sure we don’t repeat the same mistake in the future.

For more information about our spam prevention systems, please see this blog post: https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=403200567130.”

Also, my colleague Josh Constine has written a detailed report on Facebook’s explanation on the situation, which can be found here.

As a high school student in 2003, Bri Holt found himself increasingly frustrated by the fact that there was no easy way for he and his classmates to view their grades online. So, being familiar with the wizardry of web development, Holt decided to build his own, laying the foundations for what would become Engrade. While Holt went on to other projects, over the next seven-odd years, his simple, free online gradebook slowly found increasing, organic adoption among teachers. In 2010, Holt returned to Engrade, brought in some help, and over the next 18 months, focused on turning the education tool into a more robust, enterprise education platform.

To help it scale, the startup is now ready to take on venture funding, announcing yesterday that it has closed a $3 million round of seed funding, led by Rethink Education, along with participation from the non-profit, education-focused venture fund, NewSchools, which counts John Doerr as a board member, and individual investors including co-founder of Wireless Generation (one of edtech’s largest exits — to News Corp. for about $360M) Greg Gunn, Zac Zeitlin, and Richard Chino.

Since 2003, Engrade has grown its user base to 4.5 million teachers, admins, parents, and students in all 50 states, and 150 countries, with institutional customers that include the New York City Department of Education and KIPP Charter Schools. Based on Engrade’s adoption, it’s clear that there’s a high demand for simple web-based gradebooks — as well as evidence of the little-known fact that teachers can be active early adopters.

Of course, for a free web app, teacher adoption doesn’t necessarily translate into a sustainable business. If your company is driven by a mission that purports to make those very teachers’ lives easier, you don’t want to bite the hand that feeds you. Plus, teachers often don’t have discretionary spending from schools, so they end up paying for new technology out of their own pockets. In other words, this isn’t the best business model.

Instead, Holt tells us, Engrade has turned to schools and districts to generate revenue, which generally speaking, have much more sizable budgets for purchasing ed software. Engrade uses, like so many other software startups, a freemium model. Users start off with the free product, but for schools with 100+ students looking to use the platform, the startup offers EngradePlus, starting at $600, and scaling up from there based on the number of students.

To attract institutions and districts to its enterprise-grade features, the startups has added an array of features, which includes attendance, discipline, and parent-teacher conference tracking, score messaging, standardized test score analysis, report card printing, parent email and SMS alerts, an API for integrating with existing software, and admin-level reporting, among others.

With its new funding, Holt says, the team is now looking to tackle one of the biggest problems to plague schools: They are producing a huge amount of data, but that data is spread across a fragmented group of learning management, grading, and tracking services. Teachers may use one service for grade tracking, and another for test scores. To combat this, Engrade is moving to integrate each segment of data into one centralized platform and make it accessible for teachers, students, parents, and third-parties via its API.

Today, Engrade is tracking over 1 billion student data points, from grades to attendance and test scores. The goal is to be enable all those who make educational decisions, in each part of the chain, to have better access to the information through which they can identify problems earlier, which students are absent, at risk, etc.

As it gears up for further expansion and sales efforts, the startup is also announcing two new additions to its leadership. Dr. Steven Paine, the former superintendent of schools in West Virginia, is joining Engrade as Chief Academic Officer, and Julie Huston joins as SVP of Sales. Huston is formerly the EVP of Global Sales for Archipelago Learning.

While Engrade has been around longer than most and has the benefit of a sizable user base, there’s plenty of competition afoot. There’s JupiterGrades, ThinkWave, and venture-backed free gradebook and lesson planner, LearnBoost. Read Leena’s initial coverage here. [Disclosure: My significant other works for LearnBoost.] There are also a slew of Student Information Systems and Learning Management Systems that offer gradebooks as part of their services, like Spiral Universe, for example.

But with a workable, easy-to-use free option to bring teachers in, and a robust enterprise-grade platform to lock in paying schools and districts, Engrade thinks it’s onto a winning model.

For more, check out Engrade at home here, and let us know what you think.

What’s the penalty for lying on a resume? It’s an important question for new Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson, after his PR department offered up the laughable excuse that he made “an inadvertent error” on Yahoo’s website and in an SEC filing claiming he had a Computer Science degree. TechCrunch editor Eric Eldon just wrote this should cost him his new job. At Yahoo, the penalty could include “immediate discharge.”

I got a job at Yahoo in 1999. Before I started, I was required to fill out an Employment Application. The form included educational and employment history information and notes “A resume may be attached.” At the bottom of the form, there is a boxed section, with the bold headline “Authorization: Please read carefully, initial each paragraph and sign below.”

Here’s the first paragraph in that section:

“I certify that the facts on this Employment Application (and any supplements attached) are true and complete. I further understand that any omissions or misrepresentations made by me on this application will be sufficient grounds for denying my application, withdrawing any offer of employment or immediate discharge.”

So, if I had made ANY misrepresentations (in Yahoo PR speak: inadvertent errors) as a Yahoo employee, I would have been at risk of losing my job immediately. We’ll find out of the same rules apply to the CEO.

Some caveats here of course. This application is more than 10 years old and Yahoo might have changed this part. Unlikely. Also, Thompson’s employment application (if he even wrote one) and his contract are not part of the public record, so we don’t know exactly what’s in there.

We do know what’s in documents Yahoo filed with the SEC where the false degree was also mentioned. As activist shareholder Daniel Loeb noted in his letter to the Board, Yahoo’s Code of Ethics may have been violated. It states “Disclosure in reports and documents filed with or submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commision, and in other public communications made by Yahoo! must be full, fair, accurate, timely and understandable.”

Update: Michael Arrington, who is now CEO of Yahoo according to his LinkedIn profile, just reported Yahoo even has a 24-hour IntegrityLine to report Code of Ethics violations. Mike says he called the number “and damn if they don’t pick that phone up on the first ring.” I tried calling the number and all I get is some peaceful on hold music and a message “Thank you for holding.” Seems that line might be pretty busy right now.

Perhaps, Thompson should have read this article, found ironically on Yahoo Voices titled “3 Reasons You Should Never Lie on Your Resume.” It ends with the following suggestion on why its not a good idea. “In the end, you’ll be happier for not having to look over your shoulder for the rest of your career, just wondering if, right now, someone is calling that bogus school you mentioned last year when you finally got your dream job.”

[Image: alexskopje/Shutterstock]

“You guys might want to cover this before he resigns tomorrow,” one hardcore reader emailed in this evening. And yes indeed, newish Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson’s “inadvertent error” about which degree he got in college is looking like it could cost him his new job. It should.

After a day of TechCrunch covering companies who are busy pushing the world forward — like Facebook and its big IPO plans — here’s our obligatory late-night story about the guy who is, uh, suing the massive social network over some old patents that are supposedly infringing on the aging web portal.

For more than half a decade, at least, Thompson has told the world that he’d gotten a computer science degree from Stonehill College, located outside of Boston. Today, that falsehood got exposed by activist Yahoo investor Daniel Loeb, whose firm discovered that he had in fact gotten an accounting degree.

A hardcore techie degree isn’t a job requirement in a world where anyone can learn to code, where college dropouts are shaking up the technology world (Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg being one relevant example).

But it was probably more important earlier in Thompson’s career, when he working his way up the chain of command at his past jobs. Before he joined Yahoo in January, he served as the chief information officer at Barclays Global Investors, “where he implemented a new strategic technology platform and global infrastructure,” and as the CTO then President of PayPal.

One still assumes (or wants to assume) that he demonstrated the appropriate technical skills in these past jobs, even if Yahoo’s board failed to completely vet his background.

The real issue is that he lied about it. And the corporate explanation of an “inadvertent error” is just making the falsehood look like it runs that much deeper at the company. Not only did the company not uncover Thompson’s real degree before hiring him, it failed to do a few Google (er, Yahoo) searches today and see that even his alma mater is still describing him as an accounting major. 

And, I’m done writing this post. The whole affair, like Yahoo’s patent lawsuit against Facebook, and the company’s various bumblings over the past decade, is just embarrassing. Time to get back to covering innovation, and let the activist shareholders like Loeb have their field day trying to come up with a better plan for the company.

[Image via Yodel Anecdotal/Yahoo! Inc.]

Sometimes people ask me why we’re still here even though we’re owned by poopy pants Aol, and I’m all like, “Huh what? Oh I’m sorry I’m drunk, who are you again?”

Lolz.

Okay so the real reason that I and the rest of the TC team are here, despite the fact that we’re all so incredibly and obviously employable, is that we get to work with a bunch of geniuses all day every day. Seriously, it is awesome just getting to set a record/ be a part of this crazy time while also inadvertently creating jobs and keeping our own.

But the biggest reason we’re all still here is that we all super believe in all the amazing stars on our team. And there is no one who we believe in more than Leena Rao, who is about to have a kid and still just wants to work.

Like she sent this maternity leave email to us earlier and it we’re all like, “Wow Leena, you are so hardcore, we have to publish this …” So here you go Rao (I’d say you should hire her, but if you try to poach her from us I will kill you):

Hey Eric and Alexia-

I had a doctor’s appointment today and right now I am scheduled to have a c-section delivery on the morning (8:00 am CT) of Friday, May 11. I’d like to make my last day Wednesday, May 9 if that is ok with both of you. I think I’ll be so nervous on Thursday that I can’t imagine I’ll get much work done anyway:)

That being said, I could go into labor any time before then…if that happens, I’ll email you immediately and turn on my email responder. The likely scenario in this situation is that I’ll have a few hours to get wrap things up before I have to head into the hospital.

Starting this week, I’ve been mostly passing embargoed news and requests to the other writers. I figured that next week, I’ll focus on spot news and a few feature items that I’m working on. I am doing a One Kings Lane-like long-form company profile piece on Box, and also have another thought piece I’m going to write before next Wed.

I’ll get you an excel spreadsheet of the companies I cover and contacts in the next day or so.

Let me know if there is anything else I can provide. At the moment, I am scheduled to take 12 weeks of maternity leave but I don’t know if I can last that long…I may miss it too much:)

Leena

Goddamn she makes me want to be a harder worker/mom. Too legit, too legit to quit: Leena Rao.

BoomStartup, an incubator based in Salt Lake City, Utah, just announced the startups participating in its third annual session.

The program runs from May to August. Participating companies get $20,000 in seed capital and $80,000 worth of infrastructure, office space, and services from companies like Microsoft, PayPal, and Rackspace.  Co-managing partner Robb Kunz places a big emphasis on mentorship — each startup is assigned a lead mentor as their main point of contact, and other mentors include SimpleGeo co-founder Matt Galligan and Omniture co-founder John Pestana.

And if you’re thinking, “Utah? What? Did someone say incubator bubble?” well, at least a few important tech products have come out of Utah, including WordPerfect and Omniture. More recently, there was Space Monkey, the Dropbox competitor that won best new startup at this year’s Launch conference.  And BoomStratup was actually on the Kauffman Foundation’s list of top 15 incubators last year. (Yes, that’s a real list that someone made.)

Anyway, here’s a (lightly edited) list of the companies, provided by BoomStartup:

• Akomplish – Akomplish is online productivity software that allows users to manage contacts, tasks and calendars for their personal lives as well as for one or more groups or companies.
• AutoBid – AutoBid provides simple, elegant technology solutions for the collision repair industry that reduce administrative costs, save employee time and increase overall profit.
• BlueRoof360 – Blueroof 360 is designed to provide real estate brokers with easy-to-use online tools to help their agents make effective use of the Internet to grow their businesses. The tools they provide include a professionally designed, custom personal website with interactive MLS map search, client management, email marketing, blog, mobile site and market analysis tools.
• CityGro – CityGro gives businesses real-time access to customers by releasing special offers. Through the CityGro platform, businesses can build a network of customers who receive live mobile updates for each promotion they run.
• CitySpark – CitySpark is a local event discovery portal that enables users to discover the hundreds of interesting and relevant events going on all around them.  The service provides ideas for dates, afternoon activities with the kids, professional conferences and outdoor adventures.
• Match Mate Inc – MatchMate.Me is wants to reduce the awkwardness and complexity of matchmaking.  The service – distributed through web, mobile and social platforms – turns users into matchmakers, helping match up the people we know with the people they don’t.
• Referral.IM – Referral.IM simplifies the practice of referral passing for the medical industry.
• TextMeTix – TextMeTix is a free consumer service that has unique relationships with various ticket vendors allowing them to create and send last-minute deals.
• XoomPark – XoomPark.com offers online guaranteed parking, including reservations for large, downtown events within walking distance of multiple venues such as sports arenas, theaters, restaurants, etc.

The Obama Administration’s plan to spread the country’s wealth around has made its way to struggling technology entrepreneurs. This past Tuesday, the Small Business Administration (SBA) began accepting applications for the $200 Million “Early Stage Innovation Fund.” The new fund will allow venture funds to augment privately raised capitol with a grant up to a 1-to-1 match, to be used for early stage investments (around the $1-to-$4 million range).

The program is an extension of the Administration’s StartUp America campaign to catalyze job growth through the engine of small business entrepreneurs. Most importantly, according to Sean Greene, a Special Advisor for Innovation at the SBA, the new fund will inject much-needed capitol in to what the Administration feels are underfunded areas outside of the typical startup zones (i.e. California and Massachusetts).

According to Greene, the important details of the project are that a fund must raise at least $20 million in capitol to receive up to another $20 million in matching funds. “This is too small for Sequoia. The more realistic scenario is a small fund in Austin, or Minneapolis,” Greene tells me at the annual Milken Global conference in Beverly Hills, California this week. Venture funds must have “an established track record with good returns” in early stage investments and be able to demonstrate a solid business strategy to the SBA. To be competitive, Greene says that a venture fund should be within the top “quartile” or “half” of their venture peers.

Contrary to the myth of a perfect market, venture funding isn’t a cold, calculated process of pouring over the best ideas from around the country. The dumb luck of meeting at VC at a party or having mutual a friend can often be just as important as having a good idea. Since the entire population of tech entrepreneurs can’t squeeze into San Francisco’s already-crowded housing market, the SBA is hoping to give some attention to smart technologists outside of Silicon Valley.

The open question is, can the SBA overcome earlier failures to achieve an important economic goal?

Greene seems aware of previous criticism of the SBA’s earlier investment programs and it’s current incarnation. A previous equity-based program in the early 2000s was inundated with complexity, and collapsed along with the Tech bubble. “We’ve restructured the instrument”, he says, to make it simpler, with a match-granting program to companies that have a proven track record of success. This is the so-called “fund of funds” model: instead of the government selecting companies, it simply allows already successful private funds to continue what they do outside of the normal cities.

In addition to the problem of location-sensitive investing, Greene says that there’s a trend, especially among institutional investors (banks, pension funds), to manage fewer projects and therefore to make larger investments. Additionally, for reasons he would not speculate, viable businesses outside of California and Massachusetts could be worthwhile investments, were there capitol flowing to those regions. As a result, the SBA hopes to close the gap and spur innovation in some of the hardest hit economic areas of the United States.

To learn more about the fund and application process, visit SBA.gov

Do thoughts of Hadoop send you into a tizzy? Do petabytes of data make you wild?

If so, then we have just the thing for you. Accel Partners, the firm that will be scoring a touchdown this month with Facebook’s IPO, is holding a big data conference next week.

It’s a one day event at Stanford University on May 9 from 9 to 5 p.m. There will be discussions and fireside chats with entrepreneurs like Sun Microsystems and Arista Networks co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, Hadoop founder Doug Cutting, Cloudera co-founder Jeff Hammerbacher and former Yahoo chief technology officer Raymie Stata.

Also speaking there are Aditya Agarwal, the crucial early Facebook director of engineering and the current vice president of engineering at Dropbox, Factual founder Gil Elbaz and Metamarkets chief executive officer Mike Driscoll. On top of that, there’s Amazon Web Services director Peter Cohen, Nimble Storage chief executive Suresh Vasudevan and Lookout co-founder Kevin Mahaffey.

There are more than 500 attendees so far.

If you’d like a ticket, please comment below and post the story to Facebook. Accel will pick 10 winners this way and they’re looking for entrepreneurs! Otherwise, reach out at accelbdc.com to attend.

Even though Facebook’s IPO roadshow video was a mostly touchy-feely affair with videos of friends have coffee and babies blowing out candles, there were some new stats tucked away in it.

For the first time, the company gave a look at how it monetizes on a per user basis in different parts the world. There was one chart of most interest.

It shows that Facebook made about $9.51 in advertising revenue per user in the U.S. and Canada. Europe was about half that much with $4.86 in ad revenue per user. Asia and the rest of the world follow that at $1.79 and $1.42 per user. What this shows is the revenue trajectory that other more economically developed markets like Western Europe and Japan could get to if Facebook successfully grows there or convinces more regional brand advertisers to come on board.

But these revenues are also affected by seasonal and macroeconomic trends. The average price per ad in Europe actually declined in the first quarter from the holiday season because the weak economy there, according to Facebook’s most recent IPO filing.

Plus, Asia and the rest of the world will be a challenge for awhile. These economies can’t support the kind of spending per user that the U.S. or Europe can. Also keep in mind that Facebook is still blocked off from China, where competitors like Sina, Tencent and Renren are thriving.

There are six main factors that affect how much Facebook’s advertising revenues can grow over the next several years. They’re listed below and they have to do with raw growth (or how many users Facebook has) to engagement (or how sticky and addictive the product is) to targeting (how well Facebook can route the right ads to the right users).

Facebook is at 901 million monthly active users, so it’s running out of room to grow given the sheer limit of world Internet usage. More importantly, it’s gotten a lot of the low-hanging fruit, or users in developed countries. It’s also continuously changing the product, which can affect short-term revenues. Facebook has bumped up the numbers of ads per page to seven units from four over the past year.

In terms of Facebook’s overall ad pitch, the company’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg said that the company’s long-term goal is to be the place where 70 million businesses worldwide go to offer personalized, relevant advertising.

She said, “Every day on Facebook is like the season finale of American Idol times two,” in a reference to the home page.

She also added that advertising budgets are not moving online fast enough to match user behavior. Of the roughly $600 billion spent on advertising every year, only 11 percent of it is devoted toward online ads. Another $1.5 billion in advertising is spent on mobile devices.

Overall, as we’ve reported before. Facebook’s revenues have two components: advertising and payments. Both are up on a year-over-year basis, but advertising revenue actually declined going into the first quarter, which Facebook says happened because of seasonal spending habits. Plus payments revenue is virtually flat from the fourth quarter into the first one.

If we look closer at payments revenue, it’s up by quite a bit year-over-year. Facebook earns a 30 percent revenue share from apps and games on its platform. But this isn’t a fair comparison since Facebook only made the revenue share mandatory in July. Payments revenue is pretty much flat on a sequential quarter-over-quarter basis, at $186 million from $188 million in the fourth quarter.

The concerning thing is that if you look at games on the platform, Zynga’s quarter-over-quarter bookings for the Facebook canvas aren’t really growing anymore. Most of their bookings growth is coming from mobile. So unless Facebook turns on other kinds of payments revenue soon, this figure is going to stagnate.

Facebook’s chief financial officer David Ebersman stressed that the company may cut its 30 percent revenue share if it expands payments beyond gaming, which we reported on a few weeks ago.

He also pointed out that Facebook’s operating margins are declining. A measure of how profitably the company can run, operating margins fell to 36 percent  in the first quarter from 53 percent in the same time a year earlier. Ebersman said this has a lot to do with share-based compensation expenses.

He also added that the company is still in growth mode and will make decisions that will hurt its short-term profitability from time to time. For example, even though Facebook has only started to bring in revenue from its mobile apps, it will still continue to spend aggressively on them.

“We believe mobile usage of Facebook is critical to our future,” he said. “Expect us to invest in it even if mobile monetization is uncertain.”

Video chat is still something many people don’t feel comfortable with. For U.S. teens, however, it is quickly becoming a pretty routine way of communicating with each other. According to a new study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 37% of teens now regularly use Skype, Apple’s iChat and startups like Tinychat to video chat with each other.

There are significant differences between how many boys and girls use video chat, though. Only a third of boys use video chat while 42% of girls said they have video chatted. Maybe unsurprisingly, those teens who use the Internet more frequently also use video chats more often than their peers who only go online a few times per week. The same is true for teens who text and use social media more often than their peers.

The Pew study also looked at how often kids upload video to the web. A quarter of the U.S. teens who were interviewed for this study also said that they record and upload video to the web. This represents a 100% increase since 2006. Just 14% of adults, by the way, upload video to YouTube and similar services.

Despite the gender gap in video chatting, though, boys and girls are equally likely to upload video these days. That’s quite a change from 2006, when Pew last asked this question. At that time, boys were twice as likely to say that they regularly uploaded video they had taken.

Streaming video over the web, however, still remains a bit of a niche activity among teens. Only 13% of respondents said they stream video live online. Interestingly, 3% of teens with dial-up connections manage to stream video to the web – one postage stamp-sized picture at a time.

The Pew study also noted that 95% of the 799 teens it interviewed said that they use the Internet. This number has not changed over the last few years. It’s worth noting – and somewhat odd – that this data is based on interviews that were conducted between April 19 and July 14, 2011. Given how quickly these trends change, chances are these numbers are actually a bit higher today.