Category: Tech news

Bartle Bogle Hegarty today became the latest company to make the leap into social gaming, and it is on the lookout to give seed funding to social gaming developers who want to make the jump with them.

The ad agency’s Singapore-based Asian division, BBH Asia Pacific, has opened a new venture, Chuck Studios, which will be run in partnership with one of its longtime clients, the confectionery giant Perfetti Van Melle — makers of Chupa Chups lollipops. Together, the two will invest in social games promoting the brand, in exchange for a share of whatever revenue is made from the content.

The first product of the venture, Chupa Chucker, made in partnership with studio Atommica, goes live today on Facebook. Future games will also run on iOS, Android, and HTML5, BBH tells us, and may extend to other brands, too.

The news of BBH’s move into gaming was first reported last week by AdAge, although BBH has clarified to us that this venture will not cover investments into more capital-intensive areas like video games.

Rather, it is, at least for now, only limited to the smaller, more casual social games that have spread like wildfire through social networks like Facebook and have lifted the fortunes of companies like Zynga many times over.

It is nothing new for agencies to enlist the help of games developers to create engaging marketing content to promote a brand. But what is perhaps more interesting about this launch is that it puts BBH and Perfetti Van Melle into a potential partnership to actually generate revenues from these games — rather than simply throwing money into making games as part of marketing spend.

Atommica, in addition to developing games, also has created its own “cross-promotion and monetization platform” for social games — presumably this is incorporated into the game, and will help drive that revenue generation.

In addition to giving the developers access to the brands’ IP, BBH says it will also assist in helping to market the games once they’re published.

Product director Pieter Walraven tells us that BBH is not disclosing how much it will typically invest in each game, and in any case it will vary, depending on the work involved. “Deeper games that monetize better often require more capacity to develop which requires a higher upfront investment to lower the risk for the partnering developer and show our commitment,” he says.

He says before a partnership gets the okay, BBH models out the estimated installs on a particular platform and figures out the ARPU per game. “The only requirement is that the numbers have to check out.”

We’ve gotten a tip that Solvate, a venture-backed marketplace for hiring freelance work, is shutting down. Apparently, the freelancers who do work through Solvate have been told that the service will end effective March 1.

I’ve emailed and called Solvate, and haven’t gotten a response yet. (I will update this post if hear back.) I also tried to sign-up for a new client account on the Solvate website, where I was told that the company is no longer accepting new users. Comments on Twitter seem to confirm that Solvate is sending out emails about its shut down, and notifying users when they log in.

Here’s the text:

Dear Solvate user,

Effective March 1st, we are shutting down this service. We are proud to have connected US-based independent professionals with companies for contract work, but ultimately we couldn’t scale it in its current configuration.

We will collect for work performed through February 29th, and pay talent accordingly, after which you can connect with your existing talent or clients of your own accord. We will issue 1099′s for work performed in 2012 through February 29th.

We regret any inconvenience this may cause you! If you have any questions, let us know: [email protected].

Best,
Team Solvate

Solvate first launched in 2009 as a way to connect businesses with remote assistants to handle basic tasks like PowerPoint presentations or transcription. (In my initial coverage, I wondered whether the company’s aim of providing a hands-on, full-service approach might stunt its growth.) It later expanded to other types of freelance work, such as marketing and creative services.

Judging from Solvate’s wording, it’s not clear whether the company is shutting down completely or will relaunch with a new strategy. The New York-based startup raised a reported $6.3 million in funding from RRE Ventures, DFJ Gotham, and others — including a $4 million Series B about a year ago — so it might still have money in the bank.

Walmart is announcing this evening that it has upped its investment in Yihaodian, a massive B2C e-commerce company based in China. Walmart, which originally funded the retail giant last year, has made another undisclosed investment in Yihaodian to bring Walmart’s total ownership stake to approximately 51 percent. Closing of the transaction is subject to Chinese government regulatory approval, according to the two companies.

Launched in July 2008, Yihaodian offers more than 180,000 products ranging from clothing to grocery to consumer electronics. Less than 3 years after launch, the company boasts a whopping 5,400 employees and logistics operations in Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Wuhan and Chengdu, and delivery stations in 34 cities across China.

Neil Ashe, President and CEO of Walmart Global eCommerce, said, “This investment further enables Walmart to deliver a superb customer experience to Chinese consumers that are already connected to the world through smart phones and social media. We are on track to create the next generation of eCommerce, offering the latest in online innovations to give our customers a unique shopping experience.” Ashe explains that the further investment in Yihaodian also shows Walmart’s belief in retail in China as a growth industry.

In July, Bloomberg reported that Yihaodian is looking at a possible IPO. Yihaodian faces competition from China’s 360buy.com, which has raised money from DST and others.

Over the past year, Walmart has acquired social media technology provider Kosmix, Small Society, and OneRiot.

 

A combined hackathon and road trip to South by Southwest, the StartupBus is in its third year and becoming a bit of a tradition — and this time, it won’t be limited to the United States.

That’s because, after doubling the number of buses, the organizers decided to choose participating cities a little differently this year. To make sure it wasn’t overlooking any cities with passionate startup communities, StartupBus organizers allowed people to vote for their favorite regions. And it turns out that Mexico City was one of the top vote getters, behind only Cincinnati and Tampa Bay.

Until now, the main StartupBus event — founded in 2010 by Elias Bizannes — has limited its departures to US cities. Still, there were signs that it was starting to attract an international following. Entrepreneurs have flown in from other countries to join the US buses, and there was a StartupBus bound for Le Web last December.

Eoin McMillan, who is both “conductor” (basically, the organizer) of the Mexico City bus and director of operations at Bizannes’ new StartupHouse venture, says the entrepreneurs who will actually ride the bus are still being selected. (For logistical reasons, the bus will leave from San Luis Potosi.) In the meantime, there are other obstacles.

The main one, not surprisingly, is money. Some of the costs will be covered by Tec De Monterrey Zona Norte, which McMillan describes as “the MIT of Mexico” and which is sponsoring the bus. In addition, StartupBus will probably be reducing or waiving its normal fee (needed to cover costs like gas and paying the driver). But there are still the basic travel costs associated with the road trip, like buying food and paying for nightly lodging, that could make the trip too expensive for some Mexican entrepreneurs, especially college students.

So McMillan is hoping for help — ideally, he’d like to find a big sponsor who can provide the funding to give each passenger a small travel stipend, but failing that, he’s interested in talking to anyone who might be willing to help. If that’s you, email him at [email protected].

McMillan can speak passionately about the life-changing aspects of riding the bus — after all, he took the trip himself last year, after traveling from Australia to San Francisco to pursue his dreams of entrepreneurship. Now, he admits to not just drinking the StartupBus Kool-Aid, but “mainlining it,” and he says, “The thought that someone amazing who wanted to get on the bus might not be able to because of finances pisses me off.”

He also argues that Mexico City’s involvement is symbolic of a larger trend toward international entrepreneurship.

“It’s no longer about, ‘Can Mexico City compete?’” McMillan says. “It’s about, ‘Can San Francisco compete against the rest of the world combined?’”

Editor’s note: Legendary investor Vinod Khosla is the founder of Khosla Ventures. You can follow him on Twitter at @vkhosla. All Khosla Ventures investments, as well as ventures related to Vinod Khosla, are italicized.

We are in a whole new world of platforms, a post-PC era, which I’d more aptly describe as the always/everywhere era, finally, and that means a whole new set of opportunities. Add to it the fact that because of a variety of factors too numerous to cover here, the cost of experimentation has gone down dramatically (one can start a web startup or write an Android app with no more than a student credit card!) and raw computing power is taken for granted.

What you get as a result are the recent successes in the Internet/mobile space like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Zynga, Groupon and others, all of which have reenergized both entrepreneurs and investors. Many of these new startups will be the usual poor clones or feature add-ons to Facebook and Twitter, or poor attempts at doing one feature or another better than Zynga, or applying LinkedIn to a small vertical.

A few will be successful, many will fail, some will be acquired for a piece of technology or for the team (acqui-hires). But that does leave the question: What else new has the potential (nothing is certain!) to be truly disruptive or establish a new category in the domain of consumer Internet/mobile/services (which to me are fast becoming interchangeable)?

The post-PC always/everywhere platform will be defined by the many variations of mobile, always available, silent complementary standbys (like home or personal networks and agents) and more. A new category to me means doing something old differently enough to have it become a large business or have substantial impact among users.

AirBnB and Instagram would be examples of companies whose categories existed prior to their entry, but they are meaningfully different. Likewise, LinkedIn was not the first professional social network but it had substantial new impact and business potential.

Personally, it is hard to see all the areas in which some disruptive or large new segment idea will take off, but it is clear that there are many. So when going fishing for these, I have defined certain pools that are more interesting than others in which to fish. I call them the “unhyped dozen” (to go with my energy investing activities, which I call the “clean dozen”) and am hoping the readers of this post can add another dozen. Treat them as potential fishing ponds rather than predictions. Some of these areas will end up pretty unremarkable and others unmentioned here will surprise us (so, to you entrepreneurs, hang on to your idea I failed to mention).

So here they are, with some examples drawn both from inside and outside of our portfolio to illustrate what I mean:

1. Data Reduction or Filters (Siri, Donna, Recorded Future, and many others): “Reducing, filtering and processing data streams to deliver the information or action that is relevant to you.” The web has been expanding what we have access to. It is time for tools (our proxies or agents on the web) to start reducing the amount of information coming at us. News or article feeds, TV shows, YouTube, “must watch” emails — these can all be prioritized for us like our proxy was a virtual assistant who knows our current context and our preferences. Even serendipitous feeds will have a higher probability of being interesting. More of “do what I mean,” instead of “make me spell it out in detail” interfaces, will prevail. Siri is a start, but a great application could go much further and reduce, prioritize, and recommend my to-do list according to the time I had, instead of always making me feel I was behind and driven by external interrupts and priorities. Advertisers could approach our “proxies” directly and the proxies could decide if something is of interest to us—automatically separating “wanted advertising” from spam. Meanwhile, the level of data reduction will be based on our specific context, our current priorities, our social networks and our interest networks. Underlying this is the evolution of A.I. and advanced machine learning — which I discussed in a separate post — and even big data analytics.
2. Big data or Analytics (Ness, Billguard, The Climate Corporation, Kaggle, Datasift): “Analyzing massive amounts of structured and unstructured data to deliver unique services or analysis.” Per the OATV website, so many of the most transformative applications today rely on massive cloud databases — often generated by user participation — with meaning extracted from that data by predictive analytics and powerful machine-learning algorithms. We see the back-ends of many of these applications becoming the functional equivalents of subsystems in a kind of internet-scale operating system driving not just the web but mobile devices. Location, social networks, identity, and personalization are just the tip of the iceberg. There will be countless new types of data streams and new ways to make data useful. Fundamental data utilities and applications will be built on these and a lot more information and data reduction will be extracted from this hairy-looking big ball of often-unstructured data. New data sources will become valuable, as will new technology for scaling data, new algorithms, and new ways of connecting people and devices. Bionic software apps (another OATV idea) that supplement or are supplemented by humans in conjunction with big data could become newer versions of Mechanical Turk by Amazon. All these will be part of user utilities, business services, health diagnosis, credit, fraud, risk, education, advertising targeting, user relevant services and much more. The colors and text chosen for menus and buttons will depend upon data analysis, as well as discount offers and a lot more. Much has been written about big data and it and may be getting past the unhyped label! There’s a lot going on already – Tellapart, Factual, Ayasdi, Explorys, Platfora, and Metamarkets come to mind, but there are many more.
3. Emotion (Foodspotting, Ness, Instagram): “Services that evoke strong emotions in users,” which is often a component of other categories, can also be enough of a driver to be mentioned separately. I include here the applications that because of their emotional appeal are adopted more rapidly or easily (more pull from users than push to them) as a major component of the application. Some will be useful services (Ness, AirBnB) and in others the emotional appeal itself will be the “product” (Angry Birds, Foodspotting. Fotopedia). The power and leverage of this class of applications are making designers the essential ingredient of a startup’s founding team and “experience” design (instead of just user interface design) a key skill and product offering. I might lump new classes of games into this category though I consider games an established category and I am trying to focus on new, surprising areas in this post. The line is hazy though. One could reasonably put gamification of everything from health to education to training to shopping as a new emotional tool for applications.
4. Education 2.0 (it’s early, but Altius, Khan Academy, CK12, Udacity): “Education models that dramatically reduce the cost and increase the availability of quality learning.” The puzzling question is why education has not already changed. My guess is we have not experimented enough with non-linear, rapidly evolving, out-of-the-box approaches but have instead tried to force-fit ‘multi-media textbooks’ and other traditional (often broken) ideas into the “computerized” model. We have also had too much punditry from experts in education instead of just trying hundreds of new ways of doing things. This is starting to change; it makes me optimistic that what has not worked so far can now work, especially given the role gamification can play in increasing student interest and social can play in increasing peer and teacher support and assistance. I believe past attempts have failed because of the specific tactics they adopted instead of the overall strategy of new modes of education. Data analytics on what works can also help here. We can re-imagine credentialing as one of the side outcroppings of online education. For instance, Interview Street expects that a programmer’s performance on their ACM “programming puzzles” could be used as alternative credentials if they never went to an Ivy League school. Add your work on Github and an employer may prefer you to a Princeton computer science grad even if you went to Banaras Hindu University in India. Meanwhile CK12 can get you credit for any time spent during high school helping other students, as part of your application to Harvard, provided you use an online study help group or application. And Altius gives high school students who did not get serious about college until too late a second chance to re-credential themselves and get into over a hundred and forty colleges—basically a second chance to get your grades up! Even more extreme, in a separate post I also examine if we could get to self-driven education in high school and focus on job-targeted skills learning without college degrees (nursing or plumbing anyone?) and more.
5. TV 2.0 (Miso, Flingo, Maker Studios, both first and second screen apps as well as content production & sourcing): “TV as an interactive and social experience both on the primary and the second screen.” Most U.S. Internet users, I am told now, have a second screen in front of them when watching TV. Whether it is true or not, it soon will be, and the interaction that is possible will allow for all kinds of creativity and user engagement shows/applications/techniques. More importantly, program production, be it video for TV, audio for radio, or text for next-generation news formats (tomorrow’s “newspapers”?) could be crowdsourced or gamified. This allows for new personal brands to emerge (much like the Drudge Report or Politico or some YouTube channels that are emerging now). Better experiences for users, better targeting for advertisers, more access for programmers and the creative types are all likely. Your proxy or agent prioritizing your viewing or reading queue will be an adjunct area. The big guys and the small guys meanwhile will battle for newer first screen experiences and applications.
6. Social Next (intersecting with all the interest graph stuff and verticals like Github, Coursekit, and Researchgate): “Social as a useful and productive part of lives—enabling collaboration and deep community building around the world in specific areas.” I include here new uses of social such as Github to do a cooperative task or the kind of social learning Coursekit and others are trying to encourage. I suspect we will see the power of social harnessed for many applications beyond just the Facebook friends network or the Google+ circles implementation. Beyond the few examples cited above, it is hard to envision all the specific vertical applications, though LinkedIn is just another verticalized social application and I expect to see more of those. Some would say social is a part of most applications/uses, though there is a difference between adding social functionality to e-commerce and applications uniquely enabled and defined by social experience.
7. Interest-based networks (where Meebo is pivoting to, Twitter, Snip.it, State): “User driven content that maps to people’s interests both for a better user experience and better targeting.” I was impressed by a post by Naval Ravikant and Adam Rifkin on interest graphs and why they are different from social graphs. I do think a number of startups will either target interest graphs to create a network different from Facebook’s and others will use these graphs as monetization strategies. Social is about friends, while interest is about your interests and the two may or may not intersect. For instance, my daughter’s startup Teethie is trying to do intense conversations around your passions. I see interest-based networks as different from social networks (friends versus interest-focused activities) and I consider interest more easily monetizable and more susceptible to the emergence of innovative new applications.
8. Health 2.0 (Jawbone UP, Nike Fuelband, Empatica, BodyMedia, MC10, Fitbit, iBike, Recon, Withings, Alivecor): “Exponentially growing data will yield personalized lifestyle suggestions, improved outcomes, predictive diagnostics and applications we can’t imagine.” Health applications will flourish in many directions and are laid out in a separate post. From more data (especially more baseline, or “healthy” data), “health”-care instead of “sick”-care, more DNA and proteomics data, to mobile-based “second opinions” substituting for doctors and more traditional health systems, we will see an influx of non-sick status data and applications leading to what is called the Quantified Self. You cannot improve what you cannot measure, and these days you can measure just about everything – external factors from pace to distances covered to altitude, and internal factors from heart rate to blood glucose levels to sleep patterns and much more. Alpha geeks have been hacking together solutions to track various types of personal data for years, but with the advent of open source hardware, cheap sensors and smart mobile applications, we believe that there will be a new class of applications unlocking the value of this data. And, in doing so, they will reshape the understanding of our own health and the health care industry as we know it and probably provide a lot of fun, games and motivation along the way. All this data will be complemented by artificial intelligence and machine learning systems.
9. Internet of Things/Universal ID/NFC/Smart sensors (a technology with the applications still to emerge): “Sensors and authentication technologies which will interconnect everything and remake our interaction with the world around us.” Sensor networks aren’t just for cargo containers anymore. Sensors have found their way into every aspect of our lives — whether it’s the phone in our pocket, the digital photo frames on our desks or the barcodes embedded with information in our local grocery stores, often complemented by NFC, Bluetooth LE, Wi-Fi and other networks. The network of things is supposedly growing faster than any other network, social or otherwise. We’ve just begun to scratch the surface on the kinds of applications infrastructure needed to harness its full potential. Meanwhile,the management of identity, privacy, security and verification is a huge theme for the next decade and hasn’t yet been addressed much beyond the Facebook login, which makes it exponentially easier to take advantage of people’s online personal data/money/(and privacy which some will complain about). There is probably a completely disruptive way to reinvent online presence and verification, beyond the universal ID system (albeit an offline system with online instantiations) being pioneered in India.
10. Personal Collaborative Publishing (Pinterest, Tumblr, storify, Snip.it): “Truly free press with no barriers to entry and personalized interest-based curation.” This trend seems to be moving forward fairly rapidly. I’m not sure if it will become more or less verticalized or what new dimensions will emerge but the potential clearly remains promising. Self-publishing on Amazon is becoming real, removing the gateway of traditional editors and the tax of traditional business models. Where will this lead? Books, especially non-fiction, can become more interactive, crowdsourced (ck12.org), social and collaborative.
11. Utility Apps (Siri, Seatme, Ifttt, Uber, and many, many more): “Leverage device ubiquity and context to deliver valuable services.” It goes without saying that we will continue to see more and more utilities that are just plain helpful to us. I do wonder how many major new categories of utilities there will be. Ideas anyone, for major new categories? Utilities will provide personal assistance, productivity and maybe even decentralized work (new clones of Mechanical Turk or Skype!). They will aggregate experts into marketplaces (see below) or crowdsourced services or just plain telemedicine and remote reading of your radiology scans (yes it is hard to separate any of these applications into clean areas – overlap is inevitable). One of the evolutions we will see is that these utilities (and other real/virtual crossover areas like gamification) will require less, not more, input from us as they evolve – as the virtual bleeds into the physical, the enhanced experience will become more seamless and a natural part of activity. In a few years it will seem ridiculous that we had to take out our phones, open an app and type something in order to check into a location in order to activate a daily deal—how awkward! Personal transformation might be a “utility” combination of the Emotion, Education 2.0, and Health 2.0 categories, but we are still trying to tackle the problem of how to use all of these new tools for personal transformation, be it habit forming (e.g. learning, meditating) or physical metamorphosis (e.g. losing weight).
12. Marketplaces & Disintermediation (Interview Street, Kaggle, Etsy): “Remove the middle man, increase market efficiency and produce better results, faster“ Marketplaces are about economic efficiency (and active engagement) and more and more of them will keep emerging. My favorite new marketplace is Kaggle, where 13,000 data scientists can compete with their talents and the best ones can benchmark themselves and hopefully get paid accordingly. There will be more of these, unconstrained by the additional friction, the overhead (which is really a tax) or the constraints often placed by traditional gatekeepers. Gatekeepers who collect “taxes”, because of their lock-in, have the most to lose from the freedom that comes from connecting buyers and sellers directly without intermediaries. I wonder when more intermediaries will be disintermediated even beyond marketplaces, and I’m looking forward to it. Why does Tom Freidman need The New York Times to get readers, or can a Washington Post writer just get publishing and distribution services and develop his own loyal audiences as the SBNation bloggers have done? This possibility seems quite plausible in the face of news filters that are tailoring content to user preferences. Deep user preference through big data analytics will reduce the need for the Times’ editorial staff, and editorial work will become a more specialized and more valuable function. By reducing friction and increasing access between producers and consumers of content (and reducing the number of “broker” jobs which are essentially unproductive types of work and friction on the whole system), next-generation marketplaces and disintermediation could expand the rate of development and rate of quality improvement across a wide variety of fields. In the end it means more creative people trying to create – and a much more transparent way to select for excellence and improve on it.

Of course, it is hard to classify any startup into a single category. Kaggle is both big data and a marketplace for data scientists. Ness is at its core a big data analytics play but its appeal is primarily emotional. Many in fact are more often than not enabled by the new mobility and capability in both phones and tablets.

So, what have I left out?

I chose not to define mobile or tablets as a category but it clearly is a major driving force behind much of this innovation; mobile is the theme that underlies the concept of “post-PC” or “always/everywhere.” The emergence of new languages like HTML5 (which I suspect will soon turn into new, hopefully cross-platform standards through the addition of traditional operating system services like inter-process communication) will enable more innovation, which will sell more devices, and drive even more innovation. Other capabilities like sensors around always/everywhere devices will enable health, the Internet of things and other functions. Compasses, GPS sensors, accelerometers, touch interfaces, voice, and image capture all open the door for rich new experiences. I consider all of these enablers rather than categories by themselves.

I ignored areas like cloud computing, because they are not new anymore (though still a source of significant innovation and a source of services that can be drivers of innovation). Given the consumer orientation of this post, I also ignored the changes in enterprise that consumer technologies are driving. That trend I suspect will continue to accelerate and surprise.
There will be both large permanent innovations and categories established as well as passing fads (especially in gaming). I don’t list games as a “new pond” here, though it will continue to grow and surprise us in categories—whatever the next Angry Birds/Farmville phenomenon will be—while gamification will become pervasive in everything from education to health to shopping. Given the similarity to social’s ubiquity, I admit a slight inconsistency given that I’ve included new classes of social applications labeled Social Next. Both gamification (separate from gaming) and social may become basic tools that enable many of the areas I mentioned. Still, I cite some examples of what defines Social Next versus adding social functionality to an application like e-commerce.

I also did not focus on e-commerce given its already substantial popularity. Still, we will continue to see innovations in this area, especially given the different optimizations that are possible on new sized screens like mobile phones. I expect e-commerce to be disrupted by many of these ponds—and the move toward all commerce being e-commerce creates massive potential. For instance, what’s the potential impact on local merchant expertise getting supplanted by mountains of behavior data, curation and social recommendations? I wonder what will happen to local or hyper local products; will that be the domain of the traditional large players or Internet players given their scale and greater access to data versus the local merchants? That question is in the hands of the data analytics and data reduction applications. Will some local merchant expertise get supplanted by disruptive data analytics and reduction in some categories, while other services and certain products from local merchants get enhanced?

Then there are payments; I think it is possible that we are seeing just the tip of the iceberg in a potential rethink on payments. We as investors have seen Square take off at an unprecedented rate (so far) for a payments startup, but in terms of relative scale, even Square is dwarfed by Mpesa — it is 20% of Kenya’s GDP already (using a totally different model than Square). Meanwhile in India, their UID system could remake the concept of “cash”. Feel free to include or exclude payments and even next-generation currency from the “new new” categories that are emerging. Diablo 3, a next-generation role-playing game from Blizzard, will be the first game to have a double-world auction house: you can use real-world or in-game currency to sell and buy items. Is this another sign of new currencies, or is it just a fancy loyalty program which gets you to buy more—the reincarnation of airline miles?

Facebook has validated another category I haven’t mentioned, “Timeline”, and others are looking at “health timelines.” This is a feature that will show up everywhere and, to me, is more of a tool than an application. There will also be technology services like Singly and Dropbox that allow applications with new utility and features to be built. NFC may also just end up as a basic service technology, but I listed it above in the hope that it enables a new class of applications. There are probably other universal features that will initially look like applications.

Then there is the Maker movement. Makers are enthusiasts who hack and modify the world around them in interesting and whimsical ways. Tools and services that used to be inaccessible to all but large manufacturers are now available to everyone. Foreign factories that were impenetrable before are now an email away. Design software costing thousands of dollars per seat is freely available (or very cheap). Hackers are mixing all of these elements together and re-imagining entire industries from the ground up.

As with technology movements before it, the Maker movement has laid the groundwork for what will be the next industrial revolution based around personalized fabrication from one-off runs with 3-D printers to at-scale manufacturing. I am not yet sure that this will be a category in the next 2-3 years, but it will happen sometime. I do want my sofa custom-made for the size of my living room, in custom colors, and maybe a custom design while cutting out all the expensive intermediaries in the supply chain. As an example, I recently came across an intriguing example of crowdsourced design for custom vehicles and automotive parts by Local Motors.

While talking about new tools or technologies I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a category of entrepreneurs I find particularly intriguing: “The under 25” who don’t know what they don’t know, mostly have not worked at what traditionalists would call a “real job” and are not afraid to try new things. They are often most creative in their thinking and willing to try things and tolerate failure. Peter Thiel’s “20 under 20” is an extreme example of this as are the many Y Combinator startups. I’m very excited about what the next few years will bring — the rate of change is accelerating and the possibilities are endless!

Editor’s note: Tien Tzuo is the CEO of Zuora, as well as the former chief strategy officer/chief marketing officer at salesforce.com. You can follow him on Twitter at @tientzuo.

Everyone is applauding Oracle and SAP’s cloud acquisitions — RightNow, SuccessFactors, and now Taleo. But the biggest cheers are coming from SAP and Oracle’s cloud competitors, salesforce.com and Workday. Because with these acquisitions, Oracle and SAP have effectively validated the cloud and sounded the death knell for ERP (enterprise resource planning).

Why? Because SAP and Oracle are acquiescing to the cloud, yet they have no strategy to get their customers there. If SAP and Oracle were serious about the cloud, where are their big cloud solutions or visions for migrating customers?

Consider SAP, the leader in ERP. SAP had supposedly bought into the cloud five years ago with SAP BusinessbyDesign. But there are only 1,000 BusinessbyDesign customers to date; that’s less than half of a percent of SAP’s entire install base. Salesforce has over 100,000 customers last time I looked. So where’s SAP’s NetSuite killer? How are they going to fend off Workday?

Similarly, Oracle is the leader in the enterprise stack, but, when it comes to the cloud, it has acted like a follower. Oracle’s initial response to the popularity of cloud computing was to revert to the mainframe mindset with Oracle private clouds. Oracle should be reinventing its entire stack and look to provide the next generation platform for the enterprise. That position is open and available. Instead, it bought Taleo, an HR solution, and RightNow, yet another CRM solution. Why isn’t Oracle offering a relationship database in the cloud? Or an app server in the cloud? Why isn’t Exadata a true competitor to Amazon? That would be a true sign of Oracle really trying to be a leader.

SAP and Oracle should be pushing innovative cloud solutions that cannibalize their bases. Instead, they’re attempting to acquire themselves into innovation. That’s not a strategy. That’s a shift into survival mode.

These kinds of deals have a history of backfiring on the deal makers. We’ve seen this story before: an industry giant makes a “strategic” acquisition that causes a critical shift in perception of a nascent space. It happened when Siebel acquired Upshot and in turn validated salesforce.com. It happened when Yahoo acquired Broadcast.com and validated YouTube. It happened when Cisco acquired Pure Digital, propelling video as a standard feature on smart phones. I would argue that it happened when Time Warner acquired AOL and in turn validated the entire Internet economy.

In each case, an industry leader first denies the relevance of a technology, then frets over losing marketshare to it, then finally spends big money to acquire it under the pretense that it’s the key to “expanding innovation”. Overnight, that technology is now worth far more in the eyes of customers and investors. But more importantly, the acquisition strategy failed in each case. Instead of leading the way, the deal makers never committed to the technology, and their actions usually helped open the door to a whole new class of companies to take over.

The bottom line is this: A series of cloud acquisitions won’t help lumbering old ERP one bit. Acquiring cloud companies doesn’t make you a cloud company any more than buying a Giants jersey makes you Eli Manning. It’s not a strategy for an on-premise solutions company. It’s an attempt to distract customers and hope they will forget about the ERP boat anchor they’re stuck with.

The big ERP players had their day, but now it’s coming to an end. This is the classic Innovator’s Dilemma. For too long SAP and Oracle have watched the enterprise market innovate around them, stuck to their knitting and failed to adapt. The cloud technology wave has passed them by, and now it’s too late.

It’s time for SAP and Oracle to either accept that they need to adapt and go all cloud, or accept that they are going to go the way of the mainframe stuffed in the back closet. They won’t die completely. They’ll just become irrelevant.

Editor’s note: Aileen Lee is a partner at venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, where she focuses on investing in consumer internet ventures. You can read more about Lee at KPCB.com and follow her on Twitter at @aileenlee.

Good questions have been asked lately of tech companies without gender diversity on their boards of directors. While women comprise 51% of the population, they make up only 15.7% of Fortune 500 boards of directors, less than 10% of California tech company boards, and 9.1% of Silicon Valley boards.

Why should we care? For one, women are the power users of many products and it’s just smart business to have an understanding of key customers around the table. Could you imagine a game company without any gamers on the leadership team or board?

If you’re not aware, studies also show companies with gender diversity at the top drive better financial performance on multiple measures – for example, 36% better stock price growth and 46% better return on equity. And, studies show the more women, the better the results. This is likely because teams with more females demonstrate higher collective intelligence and better problem solving ability. So it’s probably not a coincidence the world’s most admired companies have more women on their boards than the average company.

There is a group of public companies that gets these insights – they are quietly adding some of the smartest women in Silicon Valley to their boards of directors. And most are not making much noise about it, perhaps they want to benefit from their savvy while their competitors are asleep at the wheel.

I was impressed by a move by AutoNation, the country’s largest auto retailer ($4.6B market cap). They did an extensive search and last year added Alison Rosenthal to their board – an off-the-F500-radar-screen, Brown and Stanford educated, early Facebook team member who led FB’s core BD activities for 5 years in social, growth, international and mobile.

Why add a 30-something female to a male board with an average age of 58? Mike Maroone, AutoNation’s President and COO explained, “We looked at our board [and realized] it’s male dominated, while women make over 50% of the purchasing decisions in our business. And, the travel, music and news industries have been transformed by digital. We’re trying to transform the auto business and connect with the thinking of the digital generation, and we need this level of insight at the board level.”

AutoNation is not alone in identifying next gen talent that adds diversity of gender, thought, age and experience to the boardroom, long the domain of (male) titans of big business, law and finance.

LinkedIn ($9.1B) was ahead of the curve when they added longtime Netflix CMO Leslie Kilgore to the board in 2010. And in the past year, TripAdvisor ($4.1B market cap) added former Google International exec Sukhinder Singh Cassidy to the board of directors; HomeAway ($2.1B) added Google Ads head Susan Wojcicki; LuluLemon ($9.3B) added FB local-and-mobile exec Emily White; Starbucks ($36.5B) added 29-year-old Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay Social and author of The Facebook Era; and Scripps Networks Interactive ($6.9B) just announced the addition of Gina Bianchini, CEO/founder of Mighty Software.

Of this, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner says, “Some boards may look for candidates already on other boards, or CEOs of other companies. In the case of Leslie’s seat, we were looking to add someone with specific expertise, CEO or non-CEO, to complement our board – and the results from broadening our consideration set have been outstanding.”

Christine Day, CEO of LuluLemon, offered similar sentiments. “We wanted a board member who understands how our target guest thinks, is a leader in the world of digital innovation and social, and understands steep growth. Emily is part of a new generation that is going to change the game.”

Ebay ($45.1B market cap) also recently added Facebook product marketing exec Katie Mitic to their board. Of this, CEO John Donohoe told me, “We were looking to add people who understand the web of the future and our consumer (50% of whom are women), and who are product and tech savvy. Katie is a 12 out of 10 on these. And, we have a strong commitment to attracting, developing and retaining female leaders. There’s also a cultural impact outside of the boardroom – it’s inspiring to our team members and community to see someone like Katie on our board.”

By adding new blood to the boardroom, these companies are getting a four-fer, or more: 1) gender diversity, and in most cases, age diversity around the table; 2) better understanding of core customers; 3) Social-Mobile-Local expertise and insight into digital platforms like Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, Twitter, Path, Square, Flipboard and Pinterest that are fundamentally changing business; and 4) hyper growth and rapid innovation DNA.

These factors are driving a trend to change board composition. And from what I’ve heard from CEOs, the smartest companies will continue to diversify their boards rather than “checking a box.” Initiatives like 20by2020 will also help.

There’s an opportunity to make your board, and your company, smarter by adding diversity, especially of gender. And if you’re at a smaller company, there’s a greater likelihood that your board lacks diversity – and that’s an opportunity to seize, especially if your company counts on females as key users. Savvy companies are quietly changing up their boards of directors and teams, and this is giving them better collective intelligence, more community admiration, and better financial results.

PS if your company would benefit from new DNA in the boardroom, there is great talent to consider. Here are just some examples of female leaders who are savvy about digital innovation, customer experience and hypergrowth. I’ve listed talent with experience from larger companies, as startups are generally less able to share their talent:

Allison Johnson, former VP Global Marketing Comm, Apple
Anne Raimondi, VP Marketing, SurveyMonkey
Amy Chang, Head of Global Product, Ads Measurement, Google
Barbara Messing, CMO, Tripadvisor
Caterina Fake, Founder, Pinwheel; cofounder, Flickr and Hunch
Carolyn Everson, VP, Global Marketing Solutions, Facebook
Heather Harde, former CEO, TechCrunch
Jennifer Bailey, VP WW online stores, Apple
Jessica Herrin, CEO/founder, Stella & Dot
Jessica Steel, EVP of Business & Corporate Development, Pandora
Joanne Bradford, Chief Revenue and Marketing Officer, Demand Media
Julie Bornstein, SVP, Sephora Digital
Katie Jacobs Stanton, Head of International Strategy, Twitter
Kerry Wharton Cooper, CMO, Modcloth; ex VP eCommerce, Walmart.com
Lori Goler, VP of People and Recruiting, Facebook; ex marketing, eBay
Marissa Mayer, VP of Local, Maps and Location Services, Google
Raji Arasu, VP of Technology, eBay
Selina Tobaccowala, VP of Product and Engineering, SurveyMonkey
Stephanie Tilenius, Global Commerce Strategy, Google
Tina Sharkey, Chairman and Global President, BabyCenter

[image via Flickr/Bill McChesney]

Editor’s Note:  TechCrunch contributor Semil Shah currently works at Votizen and lives in Palo Alto; you can follow him on twitter @semil

Like many other services, goods, and commodities, prescription drug prices can vary widely depending on location and what particular vendor is offering them. Launching last September at the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco was GoodRx, a service that’s aiming to bring some transparency back to prescription drug purchases by bringing some sophisticated price comparison technology to the everyday consumer.

GoodRx was co-founded by Scott Marlette and Doug Hirsch, both early employees of Facebook. Hirsch was VP of Product at Facebook back in 2005, and Marlette, one of the company’s first 20 employees, was an engineer who worked on, among other things, Facebook’s photo application. The culture of transparency, openness, and focus on the big picture, Marlette says, had a lasting influence on him after Facebook, leading he and Hirsch to apply some of that psychology to building a better way to serve consumers with the latest pricing info from the prescription drug market.

Thus, with a web service and a free iPhone app, GoodRx is giving its users a simple prompt, where they can enter the name of a prescription drug and their zip code, whereupon the startup serves them with a list and map of prices by brand name and generic versions from both local and mail-order pharmacies.

Marlette says that the company’s database already contains over one million prices for more than 6,000 brand name and generic drugs and is growing quickly. On top of offering free, accurate price comparisons between local pharmacies, GoodRx allows customers to find discounts, free coupons, get savings tips, or set up refill reminders or get price alerts through email.

When it comes to prescription drugs, many are covered by health insurance policies, but there’s a chance that GoodRx can still save searchers money by finding prices below their co-pays, surfacing bargains in the same way Kayak does for airline tickets. While the White House has been attempting to extend healthcare coverage to millions of uninsured Americans, there are still many plans that cover only fractions of prescription drug costs, and furthermore, there are many out there who are without any coverage whatsoever. GoodRx could represent big savings for the millions of Americans who let their prescriptions go unfilled because they can’t spare the extra cash.

To boost the Los Angeles-based startup in its mission, it announced this week that it has raised over $1 million in seed capital from a host of top venture capital firms, including Founders Fund, GRP Partners, Highland Capital, SV Angel, Lerer Ventures, as well as angels like Former CEO of Drugstore.com Dawn Lepore, Mike Ovitz of Broad Beach Ventures, former President of Tribune Broadcasting Ed Wilson, among others. GoodRx is not yet sharing specific numbers, but we’ve learned from sources that the round was in fact over $1 million, which the startup will use to ramp up hiring, and continue to improve the product.

Bringing talent from Facebook, Yahoo, and others and applying time-tested consumer tech models to the prescription drug market, to give consumers an easy way to search for prices and discounts from a sizable pool (of what is intended to be every pharmacy nationwide) — could be a winning combination. It’s also great to see that GoodRx provides a Spanish-language version of its service, with access right at the top of the homepage.

One potential caveat, though, is that prescription drug prices tend to be in flux, and pharmacies are constantly changing them based on a host of criteria, meaning that it’s an enormous challenge to present prices that reflect the realtime prices offered at the actual stores.

If consumers find low prices, then call up the pharmacy only to find that the price for a specific medication is actually different from that being offered on GoodRx, well that starts to chip away at their reputation. That being said, when I searched for prescriptions I take or have taken, all were in line with what was being offered by the pharmacy, and that is music to my wallet.

GoodRx will next look to expand the site to better explain savings opportunities and cost for insured consumers, upping the educational factor, and giving users more insight into whether to choose brand name medications or generic, or how to seek out “therapeutic equivalents” to prescription drugs. Of course, in the end, consumers just want to know where they should go, and they want all the information easily accessible. That’s what GoodRx has been focusing on, and it will be interesting to see how the consumer reacts.

For more, check out GoodRx at home here. And let us know what you think.

Editor’s Note: This guest post is written by Jay Jamison, a Partner at BlueRun Ventures, who focuses on early stage mobile, consumer and enterprise investments. He also serves on the boards of AppCentral, AppRedeem, Foodspotting, and Thumb. You can follow Jay on Twitter @jay_jamison or read his blog at www.jayjamison.com.

With the pending public offering of Facebook anticipated to be the largest tech IPO in history, it’s an interesting time to think about where we go from here. Some say “social is done,” Facebook is all the social media anyone would ever want or need. Unquestionably, as it nears one billion accounts, in the solar system of social media, Facebook is the Sun — the gravitational center around which everything social revolves.

But while some may pronounce that Facebook is all the social we’d ever need, users clearly haven’t gotten the memo. Instead, users are rapidly adopting new interest-based social networks such as Pinterest, Instagram, Thumb, Foodspotting, and even the very new Fitocracy. (Disclosure: BlueRun Ventures is an investor in Thumb and Foodspotting.)

The numbers tell the tale around users’ appetites for these new interest-based social networks. Pinterest, the increasingly popular virtual pinboard, crossed 10M monthly unique users in the US in January 2012, achieving 8 digits worth of monthly uniques faster than any site ever, comScore says. According to Silicon Valley uber-investor Ron Conway, Pinterest is growing like Facebook 5 years ago.

On Thumb, a community for instant opinions, user engagement has mushroomed in its short history. Users asking questions can expect to receive over 60 answers from other users within 5 minutes. As a result of this near instantaneous community engagement, Thumb’s average usage is currently second only to Facebook’s, and is far ahead of mainstream services including Pinterest and Tumblr, though on a smaller base.

What accounts for the fast growth of these interest-based social networks, and what does it mean for Facebook’s future?

Interest-based social networks have a markedly different focus and approach than Facebook. The Pinterest, Thumb and Foodspottings of the world enable users to focus and organize around their interests first, whereas Facebook focuses on a user’s personal relationships. Facebook offers us a social utility to deepen social connectivity with our existing social graphs, while these new interest-based social networks enable users to express their interests in new, engaging ways and offer authentic, high value connectivity with new people we don’t already know. The different approaches of these interest-based services are distinct from Facebook, and they are powering the massive growth and engagement we are seeing in these new services.

On Pinterest, I can curate and express my interests in Crossfit, cars and architecture, giving me the ability to create a strongly personal identity that draws me into new social relationships with people on the basis of my interests. Similarly on Foodspotting, I can easily express my love for ramen, which in turn connects me with other ramen fans who aren’t in my current social graph.

So if interest-based social networks focus first on an individual’s interest graph and Facebook centers on an individual’s social graph, which service will be the winner?

Both.

Humans are inherently social creatures, and we define ourselves both by the people we know and our interests. We make decisions about where to eat, what to buy, where to visit, etc. based on a complex matrix of social relationships, past experiences, location, long standing interests and future goals. Today’s platforms approach our lives from different angles but both are integral to how we define ourselves and interact with the world around us.

There are opportunities to establish differentiated, sustainable social media brands with large, passionate audiences. Much like the modern day media disrupters (e.g. ESPN or HBO or CNN), these services can establish new social media networks that are differentiated and unique, protecting them from the inevitable concern that they get squashed by Facebook. The traditional “Big 3 networks” (NBC, ABC, and CBS) used to be the only properties that really mattered, similar to how some view Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn in today’s social media landscape. Emerging networks will be the new media brands and properties that augment social networking and media.

At the same time, the rise of these new interest based social networks does not really threaten Facebook, in fact, they are more likely to benefit Facebook. Specifically, Facebook has evolved itself brilliantly into not only an end user application drawing near to 1 billion accounts but also a robust, powerful platform other apps can leverage in order to drive more users to their services. Pinterest, Instagram, Fab, and many others have adopted Facebook’s Timeline API for precisely the reason of wanting to raise awareness of their services and drive more users to their sites. As these new services grow, more content gets pumped back to Facebook, Facebook’s platform gets more robust. Wash, rinse, repeat… Facebook’s positive feedback loop gains more momentum, and becomes more powerful.

In the words of Marc Andreessen, “Software is eating the world”, and in the world of social media, there is, for now, plenty of world to go around.

Excerpt image credit MignonGameKit.org

Editor’s Note: This guest post was written by Frank Barbieri, a serial entrepreneur and sometime blogger. You can follow him @frankba.

I had dinner last week with a senior exec from a global advertising holding company who asked what I often get asked these days, “What’s going on with mobile advertising?” it’s a timely question as last week Apple announced they were lowering the buy-in price for iAds from $500,000 to $100,000 and increasing the publisher revenue share from 60% to 70%. The move seems innocent enough, but with a little inspection is actually very worrying for a segment still struggling to shake off its inferiority complex, and potentially chilling for many innovators and entrepreneurs.

You would think that the Flurry data posted late last year on exponential mobile adverting inventory growth late last year would correlate with an industry finally reaching maturity. But a couple weeks after that data posted I had a conversation with a Fortune 100 senior media buyer who became bearish on mobile ad spending in 2011.

This person has a total media budget in the tens of millions annually, and for the first time since she started buying mobile, she decreased her spend over the previous two quarters and expects to decrease even more in 2012. Why? Perceptual and brand attitudinal data consistently comes back as not even outperforming search engine marketing.

Mobile advertising has become the Baby Huey of the media world: it’s huge and lumbering, but not mature. Analytics, measurement and targeting have not caught up to where online is, exactly when we’re hearing inventory volume is set to surpass online. Neither Comscore nor Nielsen rank the top mobile apps like they rank the top online properties by category and unique users. Nor do they rank ad networks. Phone and operating system manufacturers as well as the carriers have created fragmented and feature poor cookie environments on phones. What is seen as standard operating procedure online, the use of cookies to target users and understand usage, is treated as heresy in mobile.

This lack of basic advertising infrastructure means it’s hard to manage and measure brand campaigns. Performance is a different story as you just spray massive volume and pay for the converted. But with brand advertising you have to tune the campaign to give the right audience the right message the right amount of times in the right context to move the needle on campaign objectives. All this becomes near impossible without the simple help of a cookie. Only in isolated cases is buying brand advertising on mobile valuable. For instance buying direct from content brands with huge audiences and registered targeting data, like Pandora and The Weather Channel. Or buying video where brand studies still consistently show attitudinal value. Otherwise it’s just too hard to buy quality at scale.

Look at the somersaults Millennial Media, the largest North American “independent” ad network undergoes just to try and replicate simple cookie functionality to target a unique user (from their S1 filing):

MYDAS then runs a proprietary set of algorithms to analyze multiple data points from the device, carrier and app to statistically determine, on an anonymous basis, the likely unique user of the device and the app requesting the ad.

Seriously. Enter hoop, commence jumping. Ad platform managers I’ve spoken with are now worried that even this will get worse as Apple deprecated unique phone identifiers in iOS 5 and is poised to cloak UDIDs from apps in iOS 6. This is one of the data points Millennial surely uses as do many ad platforms and it means there will be one less credible way to ensure a unique user is targeted. This means brand advertisers will again buy less at lower prices.

No doubt consumers have strong opinions about companies using and storing data on their phones, and they should have controls and transparency. But shouldn’t the browsers at least shoot for parity with the web? Isn’t that a better experience for consumers in the end? Where cookie infrastructure feeds a revenue model and users always have the option to turn cookies off. That revenue model in turn allows great content and apps to flow. Simple unique user targeting is foundational to online ad spending and in mobile we’re using magic potions to describe a “likely” unique user. Ad spend will never catch up to online with these constraints. That will eventually hurt developers and end users’ access to great content and apps.

Apple’s strategy now is to help itself while it hurts the industry. iAds can identify unique users through iTunes registration and maybe they’ll even reserve UDID information for themselves as a trusted steward of consumer privacy. It just so happens that that stewardship creates an unfair advantage in the ad network space where networks will have trouble competing. Machiavelli would have noted with glee the timing of the announcement and Millennial Media’s expected upcoming IPO.

Frankly Apple doesn’t care as much about advertising revenue as they do about happy publishers. As the lack of ad infrastructure depreciates the value of developer inventory, Apple is providing a life support alternative in the form of higher revenue shares. This is a short-term fix and bad for the industry as buyers like the one referenced at the beginning of this post want to see a vibrant ecosystem of sellers and selling technology to increase their spend to online levels. The move is bad for most publishers no matter what the revenue share.

Apple could have easily taken a position to build quality and value in the mobile brand advertising ecosystem by addressing the infrastructure problems rather than pretending that they alone can support the segment. As one platform product manager put it to me, They could have designed a “reliable, and privacy conscious third-party tracking mechanism” that all networks and developers could use. This would help networks and brands to better track and target users and ad usage across properties, web and app. It would lead to a well spring of new ad innovation on iOS devices. This would have started to build the infrastructure for brand buying at scale with confidence and credibility. Users would get higher quality advertising. Developers get more dollars and Apple wins by having happy developers.

What they did instead is tell advertisers they are slashing prices and opening up the bargain bin. And they told developers that they’ll be happy with the new benevolent ad dictatorship and sole innovator. Shame. Mobile advertising was very close to its Cinderella moment, and Apple just decided to keep the glass slipper and close the ballroom doors.

Editor’s Note: Contributor Ashkan Karbasfrooshan is the founder and CEO of WatchMojo, he hosts a weekly show on business and has published books on success. Follow him @ashkan.

Last week, Forbes contributor Eric Jackson published a list on the 9 lessons that Jeremy Lin can teach you; number 2 on his list was “Seize the Opportunity”. Lin’s not the first, and he won’t be the last, but his meteoric rise has reminded us once again that anything is possible if you seize the opportunity.

In this article, we’ll expand on that and discuss how you can seize your opportunities.  It is, after all, easier said than done.

Carpe Diem Is More Than Words

Jackson rightfully pointed out that Lin “got to start for the Knicks because they had to start him.”  Indeed, with Toney Douglas, Mike Bibby, Iman Shumpert, Baron Davis and Carmelo Anthony all injured – and the Knicks playing abysmally – Lin got the call (the Knicks even considered releasing him to sign another player).  What makes Linsanity truly insane is that Lin pounced on his opportunity like a cold-blooded and calculated assassin.

All Overnight Successes Are Years in the Making

While to most onlookers Lin was the “overnight success”, he was anything but.  In fact, while it’s debatable whether leaders are made or born, they don’t appear overnight, so don’t get disappointed if you don’t have a breakthrough moment.  Successes are rarely the result of Hail Marys, but rather, successive 10-yard gains as you march down the field, with the occasional setback (and there will be setbacks).

Build on a Strong Foundation

For what it’s worth, Lin comes from a solid family (his father taught him the sport at the Y).  He was the editor of his school paper.  As a high school senior, he captained Palo Alto High School to a 32–1 record, winning the state title.

In other words, don’t expect to slack off all of your life and then be handed an opportunity on a silver platter.  It actually does take years of work and sacrifice.

Even When You’re Good, You May Not Be Lucky

Lin wasn’t unknown.  ESPN’s Dana O’Neil reported that Lin “was the runaway choice for player of the year during high school by virtually every Californian publication,” with the “instincts of a killer” according to then-Harvard assistant coach Bill Holden.  ESPN’s Fran Fraschilla picked him among the 12 most versatile players in college basketball while Connecticut coach Jim Calhoun added: “I’ve seen a lot of teams come through here, and he could play for any of them. He’s got great, great composure on the court. He knows how to play.”

Take the Road Less Traveled

Despite all of the praise, at 6 feet 3 inches, Lin didn’t get any scholarship offers and attended Harvard University, which hadn’t produced an NBA player in 50 years!

Undrafted by the NBA, he signed a two-year deal in July 2010 with the Golden State Warriors, his favorite team growing up, becoming the first American of Chinese or Taiwanese descent in the NBA.

You Can Only Succeed If You’ve Failed

His stint with Golden State was unsuccessful, by his second year he was in the NBA’s D-League. In December 2011, Lin was cut on training camp opening day.

The Houston Rockets claimed him off waivers only to cut him on December 24^th.  Merry Christmas, indeed, to the Evangelical Christian whose ancestors emigrated from China to Taiwan in the 18^th century (Lin himself was born in California).

The good news is that in life, you get more than one opportunity.  The bad news is that you don’t get that many, so don’t think that patience is necessarily a virtue, either.

No Flash, All Substance

Part of what made Lin unsuccessful at the draft explains his success with the Knicks – his third pro team.

University of San Francisco coach Rex Walters opined that the NCAA drafting rules hurt Lin: “Most colleges start recruiting a guy in the first five minutes they see him because he runs really fast, jumps really high, does the quick, easy thing to evaluate.”

Lin didn’t disagree: “I just think in order for someone to understand my game, they have to watch me more than once, because I’m not going to do anything that’s extra flashy or freakishly athletic.”

In other words: keep it simple.

Make Your Doubters Pay At Every Level

After being outscored 38-34 by Lin and losing to the Knicks, LA Lakers‘ Kobe Bryant noted: “Players playing that well don’t usually come out of nowhere. It seems like they come out of nowhere, but if you can go back and take a look, his skill level was probably there from the beginning. It probably just went unnoticed.”

Warriors’ owner Joe Lacob added that “Stanford’s failure to recruit Lin was really stupid. The kid was right across the street. If you can’t recognize that, you’ve got a problem.”

People are driven by fear and greed.  Make the fear of them doubting or not backing you haunt them, forever.

Loyalty Matters

Despite effectively filling the injured Carmelo Anthony’s role, it was he who suggested to coach Mike D’Antoni that Lin should play more.  In other words, you need to be humble and understand the dynamics of loyalty.

Respect the Chain of Command

Yes, before drilling that game-winning three-pointer against the Toronto Raptors, Lin held on to the ball to kill time.  It was a gutsy move; but if you look at the footage, Lin clearly turns to the coach and gets clearance.  Strategically it was a sound move, tactically he nailed the shot, and yes, luck was on his side, but luck is required to succeed in life – along with vision, ambition, execution, determination and timing.

No Risk, No Reward

Ultimately, he took the risk, he prevailed.  That’s how you seize the opportunity.  As they say: nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Everything happens for a reason: maybe it was a good thing that he had a chance to fail in a smaller market before hitting the prime-time in the Big Apple.

Jeremy Lin didn’t just give hope to the Knicks and the NBA, he made underdogs around the world walk taller.

Image credit to nikk_la

Editor’s Note:  TechCrunch contributor Semil Shah currently works at Votizen and lives in Palo Alto; you can follow him on twitter @semil

Photo Credit: Creative Commons Flickr / jeehon

Editor’s note: Pedram Keyani has been an engineer at Facebook since 2007. He is a manager on the Site Integrity team, the inventor of Keg Presence and a Hackathon enthusiast.

Looking for internships and jobs after college can be exhilarating, especially for people with engineering and other technical expertise. In an otherwise tough job market, demand for software engineers is higher than ever right now. You may find that companies are actually competing to pay you for the knowledge you worked so hard to acquire in school.

But as pumped as I was when I started out, I also felt a lot of stress: the uncertainty of facing an interviewer; the big differences between companies; the difficulty of deciding which company would be best for me.

Companies, like people, have distinctive personalities. Just as you won’t get along with every person you meet, you aren’t going to get along with every company that offers you a job. And vice versa. To figure out your best fit, you’ll need to ask some meaningful questions to help you figure out what you value beyond the salary. What is the pace of work? What kind of bosses would you like to have? Will that fast-growing start-up be around a year from now? Will that big, established company be boring?

I would love to say that if you are a talented engineer, Facebook is the obvious place for you. But it wouldn’t be true, because the fit between a person and a company is more complicated than that. It’s not just about matching up technical skills and money. It’s also about whether a company’s culture and mindset resonates with you. In other words, you should be interviewing the company at the same time they are interviewing you.

But since you have to get an internship offer before worrying about which company to pick, let’s go over the nuts and bolts of that process.

What They Didn’t Teach You in School

When you solve problems for school, you’re usually writing on paper or using your keyboard. But if you’re given a problem to solve in an internship or job interview, you will be doing something more: you’ll be projecting the kind of person you are. Your words will indicate what you know, and your demeanor will indicate how you think and what kind of disposition you have. Are you calm and patient, or restless and energetic? Confident, cocky or humble? Can you communicate with those around you? There isn’t a “right” or “wrong” type, but the interviewer will be taking it all in.

To prepare yourself, I have three words for you – practice, practice, practice. Interviewing well is a skill they don’t teach you in school, but it’s crucial. Fortunately, you can gain the basic skills you need in a Saturday afternoon.

Start by picking a few fun programming problems, printing them out and taking them to a whiteboard. To simulate the stress you might feel in an interview, time yourself as you write the solutions and talk them out. Don’t worry if you get tripped up — interviewers are more interested in how you wrestle with the problem, and whether you keep working at it, than whether you come up with a perfect answer. Doing this a few times should make the format feel more comfortable so when you get to the interview, you’ll look less stressed because you will be less stressed. That’s important, and it will give your interviewer a better sense of who you are.

Sampling the Buffet

Assuming you passed your interviews, you may have several different internship options. This is when the fun begins. My advice is that you should never intern at the same place twice, even if it’s a huge company and you can try a different group. Why? Because internships are like appetizers — you get to try out different bite-sized morsels and see which ones you like best before diving in to the main course. Before starting my first real engineering job, I had internships at four great companies, from Sun Microsystems to Google, and each gave me a very different taste. Sure, you may like the company you were at last summer, but you might love the next company. Use internships to go to big companies, small companies, companies near home and companies in different states or even countries. Why not? What do you have to lose?

The Main Course

If you do well in your internship, you may very well get a job offer at the end of the summer. If so, great! But if not, don’t worry. You now have strong work experience and will know what to expect in the interview room.

But since even the most thorough practice can’t fully prepare you for interviewing at your dream job, my advice is to line up interviews for companies from least desirable to most desirable. By the time you are at that last interview, you’ll be a pro.

In that interview, it may help to act as if you already have the offer. You shouldn’t be arrogant, but it may be helpful to pretend that you have to decide by the end of the day if this is where you want to work. This is when it gets interesting, because now you’ll be interviewing the company instead of the other way around. It can be tough to get the answers you need, so ask questions that can reveal concrete details about how the company works. Here are some questions that worked for me. See which ones are important to you:

• How quickly does the company move on ideas (what is the typical time between releases)?
• What would it take for an engineer to test out an idea on the live site/product?
• Are groups very distinct or do they work in a more fluid manner?
• How often do people move around between teams?
• What is the rough ratio of managers to direct reports?
• Do they have some sort of formal or informal mentoring program?
• How much are you going to learn there?
• Do they offer opportunities to grow and try new things?

The Negotiation

Let’s assume that you got the offer (hopefully multiple offers). Before I get started with specifics, let’s deal with the elephant in the room: money. Most of us don’t like talking about money or acting as if it’s important. That’s fine, but you should be prepared for that conversation because the only time you can negotiate your compensation is before you start. Once you have signed on, your pay is entirely based on your performance and you won’t have much opportunity to re-negotiate (other than by being promoted).

Your offer will likely consist of a salary component and an equity component, and both parts are fair to negotiate. Each company will have its own range for new hires based on factors like the candidate’s school, degree, and interview strength. It’s hard to advise exactly how to
negotiate, but don’t be afraid. If you think you want more salary, ask for it and see what they come back with. You can negotiate until the recruiter says, “this is our final offer” or “this is the best we can do.” At that point, you have to decide whether to take the offer or politely decline.

Equity is a bit more nuanced. You can’t simply look at the number of shares a company is offering, or even their current value. The big question is how much you think the company will grow in the future. This is the classic risk/ reward calculation, and it’s a judgment you have to make for yourself. Big, established companies usually offer less equity than small startups because their futures are more secure. A startup has to offer you more stock because it may be gone in a few months. You face two questions. First, how bright do you think the company’s outlook is? Second, what’s your appetite for risk versus reward?

During this process, you will be talking to a recruiter who serves as the company’s ambassador to you. Even if he or she casually asks how much salary or equity you want, know that this isn’t a casual question, and it’s not wise to throw out a number in that kind of conversation. You haven’t had a full-time job, so you can’t be expected to have a reasonable sense of what’s fair. It’s better to tell the recruiter that you haven’t thought about exact numbers but are excited to see what your offers look like. The recruiters aren’t trying to cheat you, but you are both part of a negotiation and each side has its own interests.

Your First 100 Days

A new job can be rough because you are starting from scratch and have to prove yourself. Don’t worry, this phase will pass. With every task and project, you will learn something new and start to take on bigger tasks. It’s important to remember that the people around you are there to support you and help you get up to speed (if you’ve picked correctly). You are going to make mistakes and it’s going to suck, but you will learn from the mistakes and keep going.

When things get tough — and they will — don’t beat yourself up with thoughts like, “I’m not smart enough” and “everyone around me knows more.” The truth is that everybody was new at some point, and everybody has strengths and weaknesses. If you are having a hard time, ask your manager or mentor to tell you about their first jobs or internships and the issues they dealt with. A little perspective goes a long way. Instead of agonizing over your stumbles, focus on doing what you enjoy and give it your very best shot. Trust me, the rest will follow.

[image via Flickr/felixtsao]

Allow me just a little self-congratulatory chest-beating. Four years ago I started writing a near-fiction thriller about the risks of swarms of UAVs in the wrong hands. Everyone I talked to back then (including my agent, alas) thought the subject was implausible, even silly. Well, it’s not like I’m the next Vernor Vinge — it always seemed like a pretty blatantly obvious prediction to me — but I am pleased to see that drones and drone swarms have finally become the flavor of the month.

In the last month, the Stanford Law Review has wrung its hands about the “ethical argument pressed in favor of drone warfare,” while anti-genocide activists have called for the use of “Drones for Human Rights” in Syria and other troubled nations; the UK and France declared a drone alliance; and a new US law compels the FAA to allow police and commercial drones in American airspace, which may lead to “routine aerial surveillance of American life.”

We’ve been reporting on UPenn’s amazing drone-swarm research (great title, John!) and Sandia Labs’s self-guiding bullets, and I’ve been on a drone kick for more than a year. Now John Robb, the author of Brave New War, has taken up the drone cudgel with great enthusiasm: in the last couple of weeks, he’s written about drones as the future of warfare, drone diplomacy, defenses against drones, BattleSwarms, and Francis Fukuyama and the inevitable ban on unlicensed drone technology. Go ahead and take a look: I’ll wait.

Terrified yet? No? C’mon, go back and read some more. Granted, Robb does have an apocalyptic streak, but I’m pretty confident his central thesis is dead-on. Drones, and swarms of them, will be everywhere; they’ll soon change everything about warfare and surveillance; and the recent open-skies FAA mandate will ultimately be rolled back, as governments start trying to extend their “monopoly on violence” into a “monopoly on drones” as well.

Meanwhile, obviously, a lot of people aren’t happy about the notion of police drones –

#HELP by adding your idears on how to KILL HACK & STOP #policedrones by sharing your idears and knowhow scribd.com/fullscreen/819… #DROPtheDRONE—
Someone unnumbered (@ntisec) February 17, 2012

and would rather they be used by the Occupy movement or by livestreaming media.

But the really breathtaking and worrying thing is that all of the above is already yesterday’s news. Tomorrow’s drone swarms will be to today’s clumsy quadricoptors as the MacBook Air is to the Altair 8800. And they’ll be mass-produced. I give you the Harvard Monolithic Bee, insect-sized drones printed — yes, printed — by a team who “have been working for years to build bio-inspired, bee-sized robots that can fly and behave autonomously as a colony.” Want to print (most of) your own drone? Go right ahead.

There’s little doubt that tomorrow’s skies will be stuffed full of eyes. Whose eyes, aimed where, for what purpose, under what control? We don’t know yet. That depends in large part on whatever plans, policies, contingencies and/or regulations we collectively come up with. Unfortunately, it seems that everyone’s still scrambling just to react to last year’s technology. I’ve hardly seen anyone look into the future with the understanding that drone technology is evolving with astonishing speed — and I have a nasty feeling that the powers that be won’t understand just how disruptive that technology might become until we run smack into the rotor blades of the first drone disaster.

Image credit: Bee swarm, doubleagent, Flickr.