Category: Tech news

Real estate listings site Zillow reported its first earnings as a public company today, after debuting on the NASDAQ in mid-July. Zillow revealed record revenues of $15.8 million in the second quarter, up 116% year-over-year. Net Income for the quarter came in at $1.6 million, compared to a net loss of $2 million in the same period a year ago and a net loss of $0.8 in the first quarter of 2011. This quarter marked the company’s first quarter of GAAP profitability

Zillow saw record Marketplace Revenues of $9.7 million, up 269% year-over-year. Premier Agent subscribers, which contribute to Marketplace revenues, totaled 13,385 at June 30, 2011, up 180% from 4,777 at the end of the second quarter of 2010. Display revenues increased 30% to $6.1 million from $4.7 million in the second quarter of 2010.

The company’s Average monthly unique users grew 93% to a record 20.8 million in the second quarter of 2011 compared to 10.8 million average monthly unique users for the same period in 2010. And July 2011 marked another record traffic month with 23.2 million unique users to Zillow’s websites and mobile applications, a 98% increase from July 2010.

Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff said of the company’s first earnings as a public company: “The second quarter was outstanding for Zillow with record revenues, traffic and mobile usage. It marks our first profitable quarter on a GAAP net income basis and our fourth consecutive profitable quarter on an Adjusted EBITDA basis..We’re extremely pleased with our progress and rapid growth, yet we believe we’ve only scratched the surface of our opportunity.”

Profitability for the company is a big deal considering that while revenues were growing for Zillow, the company had been taking a loss each quarter for the past three years.

Zillow, which initially filed its S-1 in April, currently lists over 100 million U.S. homes, including homes for sale, homes for rent and homes not currently on the market. Zillow launched a mortgage marketplace in 2008, and subsequently expanded into rentals and mobile. According to Experian Hitwise, Zillow.com is the third most visited Real Estate site in the U.S and received 5.36% of Real Estate visits in March 2011, which is a 53% increase compared to March 2010.

Acer, recently the world’s second-largest shipper of PCs, has had a rough year. But in March a deliberate decision was made by upper management to abandon their goal of dethroning HP and instead focus on making better, more distinguishable products. The result: sales and revenue in freefall. At least they knew it was coming — but losing millions of customers and a huge proportion of your worth isn’t something any company likes having to do.

The company is taking heavy losses — twice as heavy, in fact, as Reuters’ analysts estimated. 6.79 billion Taiwanese dollars (Around $250 million) went down the drain in Q2. That’s their biggest loss ever and the first time they did worse than they forecast. The results indicate that, as Acer’s chairman J.T. Wang admits, “trying to break even this year becomes impossible.” But I doubt they were planning on turning the whole company around in less than a year.

Despite the losses and job cuts, Acer remains stoic. They feel the tablet “fever” is lessening and people will return to notebooks (I’m not sure I agree). And while it’s unlikely that they have any interest in (or ability to) buy HP’s PC business, Acer’s president Jim Wang did comment that spinning it off was a natural thing for HP to do. He added, cryptically, that Acer would be working to satisfy its customers’ needs, “including HP’s existing customers.” What a thing to say! Again, though, with billions in losses every quarter, the last thing Acer needs is a $10 billion millstone around its neck from HP.

What he probably meant was that Acer may be stepping into HP’s shoes during the confusion. If they can stabilize fast enough, then while HP’s Personal Systems Group is in handoff mode, Acer can sweep in and carry off a few million customers. But before that happens, expect more bad news.

(Updated to reflect the fact that the 6.79 billion figure was in Taiwanese dollars. Very dumb of me not to catch that when a $7bn loss would likely bury the company)

Registration is officially open for our fourth Hackathon, and we’d love to make it our biggest yet! We promise more pizza, more caffeine and more glory than ever. We had 700 registrants for the last event in New York — let’s top it! The format remains the same – a little less than 24 hours to create a hack on site and present a working demo to an audience of developers, press and industry insiders. Sign up now!

Celebrating Developers

GroupMe has proven that you can build a Weekend-hacked, Seed-funded, Series-A-ed, Acquired-by-Skype, all-in-about-a-year startup from a TC Hackathon. (Props to Jared and Steve for their monstrous hustle). But the goal of these increasingly awesome events isn’t just to build startups–we want to give developers a platform to shine. For every GroupMe there’s a Mr Stabbyphone; for every Wisedame there’s a Drunkerator; for every Docracy a Venture Crapital. It’s that mixture of utility and whimsy that keeps the Hackathons, and our industry for that matter, fresh. Much of the field is built behind the scenes by the hard work of talented developers and Hackathons are a the best way we’ve found to spotlight them.

The first Hackathons were organized by Daniel Raffel, Chad Dickerson and myself and we’ve had a blast doing it. This time around Jeff Bennett will be taking the helm. He’s a seasoned hand, having organized Hackdays past for Yahoo and even winning one or two along the way! It’s going to be a great event. While we aim to accommodate everyone, it’s best to register now to make sure you’re in!

Last Day for Early Bird Tickets!

For those of you that aren’t hackers, today is the LAST DAY to get the best priced tickets for Disrupt SF. Check out the list of all-star guests and speakers here, and the agenda here. Disrupt SF will have amazing after parties, and even better battles as startups fight for the ultimate Disrupt Cup and $50,000. You do not want to miss this. Get your early bird tickets now HERE.

As an artist, I’ve always wanted some sort of one-to-one input when working in Photoshop or zBrush. I’ve used several of the traditional input tablets, but I’ve never been fully satisfied. I still ended up drawing on paper and scanning the results. It’s just more natural.

Input tablets have been constantly improving in the decades they’ve been around. But the technology remains imperfect. The pressure-sensitive pad sits on the desk, separate from the screen, which takes away some of that natural feel you get from drawing with a pen, especially when trying to add tiny details to your work.

So I jumped at the chance to test the Cintiq, a tablet that tries to do away with that annoying physical disconnect by allowing you to draw directly on the surface of an LCD screen.

The Cintiq is made by Wacom, the big kahuna of tablet hardware, and here the company has built its most advanced pen input technology into a large screen that sits next to your primary monitor (You can use it as your primary monitor if you want, but that’s not recommend).

I tested the 21UX, the $2,000 version of the Cintiq with a 21.3-inch screen and 2,048 levels of pressure sensitivity. Cintiqs have been around for a few years, but this is the biggest one yet. Wacom currently also offers the smaller Cintiq 12WX, a similar setup that costs half as much, but also has half the capability: a 10.3-inch work area and 1,024 levels of pressure sensitivity.

The technology Wacom is using to get the high level of pressure sensitivity on the 21UX has been around since the 1990s, according to the company’s spokesman Doug Little. But so far, it’s been used primarily in the medical and GIS world, he says. Since then, the technology has been perfected to be put to work by anybody, specifically those in the world of digital content creation. Now, graphic designers, automotive designers, animators, photographers, and visual effects artists are able to benefit, not only for more control and ease of use but also speed and proficiency.

This is not a small screen. In fact, it’s a beast. I definitely felt a little intimidated at first, but I quickly wanted to use it for everything. I found it really useful with key programs like Photoshop, Sketchbook Pro, or Manga Studio for drawing, and zBrush for 3-D sculpting.

The Cintiq’s 1600×1200 native screen resolution is gorgeous and crystal clear, and is one of the nicest displays I’ve used. The scratch-resistant glass surface allows for a smooth, natural drawing experience. When drawing in Sketchbook Pro or Manga Studio, for instance, the heightened pressure sensitivity stands out. The harder you press, the darker and thicker the line appears. The lighter the pressure, the lighter the line. As someone who draws often, this made the transition from drawing on paper to the screen relatively easy. Using the Cintiq in Manga Studio was the closest experience to drawing on paper I’ve found.

The small button arrays on the sides of the screen are customizable, allowing you to set up shortcuts for specific tools or for switching apps. But my favorite “buttons” were the two touch-sensitive strips located on the back of the screen’s frame, behind the customizable buttons. These let you zoom in and out quickly for detail work.

One of the side benefits of the Cintiq was the speed boost it gave me. With the one-to-one drawing input, I was working almost as fast as I work on paper.

The stand swivels vertically, giving you the ability to position the screen almost flat. At this angle, it feels more like a drawing table and provides a more relaxed and natural drawing experience. It doesn’t flatten all the way out, though, and its ungainly size becomes even more apparent in the prone position. You’re going to need plenty of desk space, so plan accordingly. Also, when standing all the way up, it doesn’t come to a 90-degree angle, which makes it less than ideal if you need to use it as a monitor.

The price point may seem high, but this is a professional tool, and in that regard, it’s worth it if you can afford it, especially given the level of control it provides. This type of draw-on-the-screen device is the future of computer art, and I would recommend it for those professionals who are going to use it everyday.

I went to Comic-Con last month, where I talked to Neville Page, the concept artist on Tron:Legacy, Avatar and Super 8. He uses a Cintiq, and he says if you’re a working professional, owning one is “a no brainer.”

It’s an extremely high-end piece of hardware, and it would be a waste of money if you weren’t going to use it more than just occasionally. But as a professional, you just can’t beat the direct one-to-one drawing input.

WIRED Amazingly natural to work with. Pressure sensitivity makes drawing on a computer as intuitive as drawing on paper. Highly accurate. Gorgeous display. Connects via USB and DVI-I.

TIRED High price point. Lack of 90-degree adjustability can cause neck strain after prolonged use (like an eight-hour workday).

Photo by Jon Snyder/Wired.com

This fall, Toyota’s Scion division will be rolling out its latest ride, the iQ, into dealer showrooms on the West coast.

With the small, extremely fuel efficient and feature-laden iQ, Scion is aiming for the same sweet spot as other undersized city cars — the Smart ForTwo, Mini Cooper and Fiat 500 — but it’s doing so with a much more affordable, and, it hopes, hipper package.

With a starting list price at a little under $16,000, the iQ continues Scion’s reputation for making inexpensive, funky-looking cars for young urbanites.

This blunt little box seems like a knock off of the two-seater Smart ForTwo, but it’s actually a four-seater. Cleverly dubbing the car a “3+1 seater,” Scion has massaged the overall design so the front passenger seat can be slid very far forward, allowing an adult to occupy the back seat immediately behind it without sacrificing leg room for either passenger (though the seat behind the driver is still a very tight squeeze). Scion bought the extra room by relocating things that normally occupy the area in and around the front seat passenger to other parts of the car. The glove box has been moved under the seat, and the heater/air conditioner unit has been miniaturized and moved to the center console. The airbag and dash remain the same.

And speaking of airbags, the iQ features eleven of them — a record for any car, and a feat made all the more impressive considering the iQ’s minuscule size. There are separate airbags for the head and knees of both the driver and the front passenger, side-curtain airbags, seat-cushion airbags, and even an airbag for rear window, which is a first.

Just how small is the Scion iQ? A tenth of an inch over ten feet long. That’s a little more than a foot longer than a ForTwo, and a full 20 inches shorter than a Fiat 500. It definitely makes the Mini look anything but. The iQ also tips the scales at a flyweight 2,127 pounds, or about as much as a first-gen Miata.

Speaking of Miatas, although the upcoming iQ is not sports car, nor does it possess handling that would make Colin Chapman smile, it does have an amazingly small turning radius. The front wheels can be spun to nearly 45 degrees, giving the iQ a turning radius of an astonishingly low 13 feet, or about the length of a Miata. Ergo, maneuvering this little guy through inner-city traffic and hanging a quick U-turn to snag that last parking spot is a snap.

The iQ is motivated by a 1.3 liter inline four. Nothing fancy, no turbos or superchargers. And no, there won’t be a hybrid version — lord knows where they’d put the batteries and other hybrid gear. To keep the length down, Toyota did some rather ingenious things like push the wheels and suspension bits way, way out to the corners of the car, much like Mini and Fiat have done. The 8.5 gallon gas tank has also been relocated so it resides under the drivers seat. Yes, that gave me a rather disconcerting feeling when I was tooling around Seattle in the iQ, but I eventually got past it.

With that little size and weight, and that small of an engine, the mileage numbers are very, very impressive for a non-hybrid car. Scion’s iQ returns 36 MPG city, 37 MPG highway and a combined figure of 37 MPG. These numbers make the little iQ the current record-holder when it comes to combined figures for internal combustion engine cars. Toyota is holding off on trumpeting that last fact until the EPA confirms it, though.

The iQ’s four-cylinder engine produces 94 horsepower and 89 pound-feet of torque. No, you won’t be walking away with any drag trophies from the local strip with this thing, but that’s more than enough juice to get you out of your own way when driving around town. Also making city driving easier is the iQ’s Continuously Variable Transmission (CVT), and the iQ is rated an Ultra Low Emission Vehicle (ULEV-II), which is nice.

The tech and gadgetry extends to the interior appointments, where the top of the center console houses the Scion Drive Monitor. It’s a small screen that displays information like outside temperature, average MPG, and an ECO-drive indicator that helps the driver maximize the iQ’s fuel efficiency.

Hipsters need music, so the iQ comes standard with a 160-watt, four-speaker Pioneer audio system with an AM/FM radio, CD player, a USB port, HD radio and a built-in hands-free phone connection with streaming audio capability. The audio system also features an organic electroluminescent (OEL) screen, and an RCA output for hooking up an aftermarket subwoofer.

There’s an optional “premium” audio system that has the same features as the standard unit, but ups the output to 200 watts and includes extras like a 5.8-inch LCD touch-screen display that allows iTunes tagging, Pandora radio (connected through your iPhone), and six RCA outputs to add external amplifiers. Plunk down even more cash and upgrade to the top-tier Scion Navigation package. You get all the goodies in the 200-watt audio system, plus a navigation system and DVD player — all accessible through a seven-inch touch-screen LCD display.

All in all, it’s a great city car, and it should hit a bulls-eye on price, performance and interior features with a certain demographic.

WIRED Tight turning. Great MPGs. No muss, no fuss CVT tranny. Comes with hipster cred.

TIRED 100 MPH speed limiter. That +1 seat is for pee-wees only. Hipster cred.

Photos courtesy of Toyota Motor Corporation

Here are some stories from the past week on TechCrunch Gadgets:

Okay HP, Let’s Make Some Lemonade
Review: Brite-Strike Rugged Flashlights
The Vibram Trek LS And Bormio: Ugly, Crazy Monkey Shoes Get Even Crazier
Giant Gundam Robot Statue Returns To Tokyo – In Parts
Kickstarter Project Empowers Students, Plays The Mario Theme With Plasma

Cisco this morning announced its intent to purchase service fulfillment software assets and associated employees from the UK subsidiary of partner company Comptel, for 21.3 million euros or roughly $31 million in cash. Axioss is a fulfillment solution developed by Axiom Systems, a company that Comptel acquired back in 2008.

With the acquisition, Cisco hopes to extend network and service management technologies across its IP-based network platforms and enable service providers to more quickly launch new video, data, mobility and cloud services to their customers, using a single management architecture.

The AXIOSS software suite will also enhance Cisco Prime, which enables service providers to better manage their networks and network services, the company says.

Upon the close of the acquisition, which is expected to occur in the third quarter of calendar year 2011, the AXIOSS team will be integrated into the Cisco NMTG and Cisco Advanced Services Group.

Gareth Senior, Comptel CTO and member of its Executive Board, will also be transferring to Cisco.

Comptel and Cisco will continue their cooperation across other areas of OSS/BSS, e.g. cloud mediation and charging. Comptel says it will continue in fulfilment business developing and selling its Comptel Fulfillment Solution, retain its existing Axioss customer relationships and continue to support these customers.

Editor’s Note: This guest post was written by Frank Barbieri, the SVP of Emerging Platforms at YuMe. You can follow him @frankba

Every five or so years for the past two decades the introduction of an Internet connection to a new device type has created a boom in disruptive businesses. Most of these booms—computers, followed by mobile phones, gaming consoles and now tablets—have been clearly successful. Others (remember the Network Computer?) have been ill-timed.

Now manufacturers, and a growing ecosystem of partners to support them, are betting big that consumers are finally poised to accept an Internet connection in their most cherished living room technology mainstay, the television. Players from Samsung to Sony are bringing the so-called Connected TV (CTV) to market in mass, and you’ll see a big push this holiday season. There are already upwards of fourteen million CTVs in North America and an estimated 65 percent of TVs sold in 2012 will be CTVs.

With every platform change, both new and established companies have lined up to try and capture a share of the redistribution of rewards that inevitably comes when consumers change their habits. North American television advertising is certainly no exception as a host of companies, old and new line up to try and capture their share of that $62 billion annual advertising feast.

While there has been some preparation to date, incumbents have an incredibly hard time cannibalizing existing revenue streams for growing, but yet to mature, new revenue streams. We’ve seen this with everything from books to brokerages. And in the TV world, we are seeing it on display with the recent stutter of Hulu, the pioneering archetype, catching arrows in their back from erstwhile incumbent partners as they bravely forge ahead.

Such is the nature of distribution when the business advantage is built primarily on pricing and bundling, and carefully restricted access, not on real consumer demonstrated desires and behaviors.

Technology has always been on the side of the consumer, especially in the realm of television viewing. You may not remember now, but broadcasters bitterly fought the arrival of cable in the 70s. And while it seems absurd now, given it has created hundreds of billions of revenue, studios fought against the arrival of DVDs in the late 90s. The early titles were a handful of B movies released by Warner Brothers in conjunctions with Toshiba. It was all Toshiba could get at the time.

We may be seeing another disruption today. With a new wave of CTV content applications, the pricing and access advantage of cable television may dissipate. Imagine downloading a TNT program application directly from Turner rather than paying a cable company for access to Turner content. Content providers themselves already, or will soon, have the tools to reach their audience directly on the big screen. Turner could pocket 100% of any subscription fee and advertising revenue rather than having to share with a distribution partner.

The traditional distribution players are betting, but not banking, on the fact that new television distribution will look substantially similar to old television distribution. They are expanding their services to include on-demand viewing and hoping much will continue as before with consumers paying a fee for content bundles.

But what if that’s not the way it goes down? What if like mobile phones and the PC before them consumers choose to snack on content delivered directly to them by the content providers themselves, effectively removing the pricing, bundling and access advantage of traditional cable and satellite television distribution. In that world the power of delivery, and advertising insertion, shifts directly to content providers, device manufactures and the ecosystem of direct Internet-connected business partners they surround themselves with. In that scenario, online advertising businesses have a distinct advantage over traditional distribution businesses as they are already in the market pumping billions of video ads through existing devices like PCs, mobile phones and tablets.

Sure distribution incumbents like Comcast could make IP connected set-top boxes that consumers use to access content directly, unbundled or a la carte, but that erodes their existing revenue model around cable pricing. The industry calls folks who end run cable to get their content directly from content companies, “cord cutters.” A recent Morgan Stanley report concluded that cable companies would have to double the internet access fees of so called “cord cutters” to make up for the lost revenue on cable TV packages.

There is change brewing. Years in this business and witness to booms and busts have taught all of us to be cautious of absolutist rhetoric opining the end of any particular distribution channel. Consumers have shown a remarkable ability to expand their entertainment appetites, and new consumption habits largely prove additive, not cannibalistic (except for my poor print friends of course). So be suspect of anyone who claims that all programming or advertising is going to be wholly delivered in a particular way. But the numbers themselves are so enormous, and the opportunity so large that even a ten percent swing in consumer viewing habits from cable and satelite to Connected TV applications and cord-cutters will represent a shift in $6.2B of advertising spending. That, to me, is a scenario worth preparing for.

Sources include GFK Market Analysis, Piper Jaffray, and DeutscheBank.

A few months ago I was giving a talk in my hometown of Memphis, TN, and someone asked what the city could do to ignite more entrepreneurship among inner city kids. My immediate answer was teach coding– even basic app building skills– along with English and Math in every public school. I was surprised that my brother– an engineer who worked for many years in Silicon Valley before relocating to the Midwest– didn’t necessarily agree. “That depends on whether there are still enough coding jobs for them, or they’ve all gone overseas,” he said.

It was then that the great American panic of a few years ago came rushing back to me. Somehow I’d forgotten all those business school reports and magazine covers warning the US that it wasn’t just the factory jobs going overseas; the white collar engineering jobs were all leaving Silicon Valley too and going to Eastern Europe, India and other pockets of the emerging world. These reports screamed that kids lulled into computer science degrees by the great late 1990s were graduating into the work world out of luck. Just like the Detroit factory worker, there was just no way for them to compete with the thousands of engineers graduating annually in India and China.

It’s amazing just how wrong so many people could be. Just a few years later, one of the only bright spots of employment in the entire country is for coders. In California, the latest numbers show unemployment at a staggering 12%. Yet if you are a coder in Silicon Valley, the world is your oyster.

You can apply for Y-Combinator, you can raise money from hundreds of angels and VCs, you can bootstrap a simple Web or mobile app off of your credit cards, you can work at Google, Facebook, Zynga, Groupon, or one of the thousands of other startups desperate for coding talent. Every entrepreneur tells us hiring is the single hardest challenge they face right now.

Those wacky offices you see Jason Kincaid parading around on TC Cribs are getting wackier as companies like DropBox and Airbnb want their companies to stand out even more to in-demand recruits. Why do you think everyone wants to their company on Cribs? COME LOOK AT HOW FUN IT IS TO WORK HERE!

Recently I asked Dustin Moskovitz–  the Facebook and Asana co-founder and the world’s youngest billionaire– to come be a judge at San Francisco Disrupt. He joked that he was going to tell the smartest entrepreneurs their startups were doomed so they’d give up and enter the workforce instead. At least I think he was joking. (By the way, he’ll give you a $10,000 allowance to pimp your desk if you come work for him.)

As someone who used to work for one of those magazines, let me apologize if you decided not to learn to write software because of all of those covers. But you probably shouldn’t rely on the media to tell you what to do for a living anymore than you should listen to CNBC for investing advice. Either could have screwed you out of a goldmine in recent years.

The idea that all the software jobs would leave the Valley was the second great lie of the early press and excitement around globalization. The first was that America would always stay the “brain” of the global workforce, while everyone else in emerging markets just did our grunt work, leaving us all the innovative, high-paying jobs. I wrote an entire book refuting the implicit naiveté-mixed-with-raciscm of that view, so I won’t argue it again here.

At first blush, it’s strange that both of these myths so fervently believed a few years ago both appear to be false, because they seem at odds. Either you believe people in the rest of the world are smart enough to do the higher level work and freak out about white collar jobs leaving the US as the rest of the world’s worker base gets more sophisticated OR you believe the rest of the world will forever just do the grunt work and more sophisticated US jobs are safe.

But as it turns out there was a fundamental flaw with that either/or dynamic that Marc Andreessen articulated perfectly in his recent Wall Street Journal oped: Software is eating the world. (Ironically, Andreessen became a coder because he read in US News & World Report it was a good way to make money. Lucky for him, he wasn’t born a decade or so later.)

What that means is software jobs are not the zero sum game we anticipated back in the early 2000s when many companies were sending them overseas. Instead, they’ve expanded exponentially as more industries have become fundamentally about virtual delivery.

And the trend isn’t just about a company like Pandora, Zynga or Amazon pushing music, gaming and books to be software-only  products, rather than physical things packaged on shelves. Nor is it just about the new globally exploding market of social media. We’re also seeing the biggest resurgence in companies disrupting the real world since the early days of the Internet, with Airbnb, Uber, Groupon, GetTaxi, and a host of other names taking on long-neglected, fragmented industries in new digital ways. Andreessen and his partners are betting that healthcare and education are next. Accel, too, has been placing some big bets on education.

Not only have software jobs expanded dramatically by industry, they’re expanding dramatically within industries too. You can’t overstate the impact of two billion people being online, and estimates that five billion will have smartphones within the next ten years. Even today, more people have basic mobile phones than have toilets, and those phones can provide a staggering array of digital services from banking to education to news and information.

Because digital companies reach so many more people than the days when we were fretting about the demise of software jobs, the handful of companies that dominate a category like social media are building massive organizations. And, unlike the dot com days, most are doing so profitably.

Silicon Valley isn’t the only place benefitting. Ask entrepreneurs in China how hard it is to recruit and keep video game developers. Or ask me how hard it has been to recruit Chinese bloggers over the last few months. It’s no longer an age when a Web company launches in the US, and years later the rest of the world is ready for those products and features. It’s an age when a Web company launches in the US, and a version of it launches in Germany, Russia, India, China, Brazil and a host of other countries within days, creating a smaller amount of jobs than we have in Silicon Valley but certainly more than those countries had ten years ago. More important: Those jobs are working for local companies, not doing low-level engineering for big US multinationals. That’s a much more meaningful way to break the poverty cycle in the long term, as multinational jobs will only employ so many people with limited upside potential.

Will all of those software jobs be safe? In both the Valley and overseas, the answer is most definitely not. The bulk are being created by startups, and the nature of startups is to IPO, sell or go out of business. They are supposed to be risky, and everyone going to work for one should remember that. The two latter categories could easily result in a huge wave of layoffs in coming years. That’s a far bigger risk for emerging markets just building their startup ecosystems than it is for the Valley.

There will be the regular commenters wringing their hands about a “job bubble”– and while we’re clearly not in a financial or psychological bubble right now, we may well be in a job bubble. It’s way too easy to start a company now, and the gulf between winners who get big enough to go public and everyone else is wider than it has ever been in Silicon Valley. (That’s one reason we’re not in a financial bubble.)

Still, if you are a recipient of that job bubble would you trade places with any the tens of millions of people out of work in the United States right now? I doubt it. Benefitting from a job bubble is not only a first world problem, it’s an upper-class-educated-lucky-to-be-in-the-right-industry-at-the-right-time kind of first world problem. The entire city of Detroit has the right to punch you in the face if you believe that’s the biggest macroeconomic problem the US faces right now.

If you’re worried, save some of that cash you’re raking in for the potential rainy day, and thank God you work in software. In a market like this, better to be the eater than the eaten.

Skype will acquire group messaging service GroupMe, a service that was born at a hackathon at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York in 2010. GroupMe was founded by Jared Hecht and Steve Martocci.

The terms of the deal, including price, aren’t being disclosed.

Just a couple of months after TechCrunch Disrupt the company closed a $850,000 round of financing from Betaworks, SV Angel, First Round Capital, Lerer Ventures and a number of prominent angels. Early this year the company raised $10.6 million more from Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst and previous investors.

GroupMe allows you to create on the fly private phone groups with others, and then send text messages throughout the group and set up free conference calls.

Skype CEO Tony Bates says that he’s been talking to the company for a few months, at about the same time Skype was in negotiations to be acquired by Microsoft.

The Microsoft transaction is still pending.

They’ll keep GroupMe as a standalone brand, Bates says, and look for integration points over time. “The group messaging space in general is one of the most important markets for Skype,” he told me via a Skype video call earlier today. He added: “GroupMe creates a very sticky instant feeling. Like Skype, it is an everyday interactive form of communication. Skype’s goal is to get to 1 billion users. Mobile is the place to do that.”

GroupMe, which has twenty employees, will remain in New York.

Zynga has snagged another EA exec today. The social gaming giant is announcing today that former EA Executive Vice President Jeff Karp is joining as Chief Marketing and Revenue Officer. This is actually a new role for the company, and one that should help Zynga as it expands as a public company, following an IPO this fall. The move was originally reported a few weeks ago, but Zynga has confirmed this today.

In his role, he will oversee all aspects of marketing at the company, and will also be focusing on optimizing and driving revenue within the Zynga’s game studios. Karp will also be in control of international sales.

Formerly, Karp was Executive Vice President at EA Play, the home of titles such as The Sims, SimCity, Spore and My Sims. In his role as head of the Label, Karp engineered strategy for the development teams, defined the SKU plan, managed profits and more. Karp previously served as Chief Revenue Officer in EA’s Games Label. Karp actually spent a total ten years at EA.

Earlier this year, Zynga hired EA’s COO John Schappert as COO. As VentureBeat reported recently, other former EA executives who have jumped ship to Zynga include Steve Chiang, Mark Skaggs and Colleen McCreary. There’s a serious talent war in the gaming business and Zynga can hand out pre-IPO shares as an incentive for many executives and employees.

Zynga currently has 2,543 employees worldwide.

Linux and open source development is not a zero sum game. This was the explicit message from Ubuntu Technical Architect Allison Randal’s keynote speech at LinuxCon, but the sentiment had been articulated in a number of ways all week long from everyone here. The processes by which a company makes great open source software improve the world for everyone.

“Free software is a fundamentally superior model for developing software,” Randal repeated several times. In addition to the classic Linus’ Law (“given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”), Randal put forward the claim that human beings long to be part of something greater than themselves, and free software development satisfies that in spades.

According to Randal, the future of technological innovation is not stealing limited resources away from one another, but creating new resources — and new opportunities to create new resources — together in a rich ecosystem. The term “ecosystem” came up several times in my chat with Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger, Chairman Emeritus of IBM Academy of Technology and Dan Frye, Vice President of IBM Open Systems Development. Frye made it clear that IBM’s efforts with Linux are to be a “solutions company” as opposed to a product company. IBM doesn’t make their own Linux distribution, but they work hard to contribute to the kernel and other key open projects that bring value to IBM’s customers.

It’s all about collaboration, and working together with other open source participants. Sometimes this means collaborating with direct competitors, but IBM “gets it” that this collaboration on open source creates new resources for everyone, and they’re not in a cut throat competition for a finite number of customer dollars. Certainly they compete strenuously in a variety of markets, and sometimes they compete strenuously against the companies with whom they’re simultaneously collaborating on open source. But it’s not a zero sum game.

Wladawsky-Berger continued the “solutions company” explanation by pointing out that a skyscraper is never built by a single company. Legions of small companies with specific expertise work together under the guidance of a project manager to coordinate and execute their specific tasks in the right order. This is ultimately how IBM envisions themselves, as a leader in the open source ecosystem working to enable new workloads for their customers.

There are many ways to thrive within the open source ecosystem. Whether its an unwavering dedication to kernel excellence (a la Linus Torvalds and Greg Kroah-Hartman) or a dedication to producing viable, usable tools for everyone to use to avoid reinventing the wheel. The Yocto project is working on this for the embedded space, just as SUSE, under the fresh leadership of Attachmate, is making available their Open Build Service to help people roll packages for multiple distributions. SUSE is also sharing their SUSE Studio to allow ISVs and companies to develop and maintain their own Linux build for use in appliances and “golden master” images. You don’t have to be a SUSE customer to use these tools.

But all of this collaboration doesn’t always happen naturally. Companies are still beholden to shareholders and their bottom line, after all. So sometimes it takes a neutral third party to get the interested parties together, provide neutral ground for discussion and shepherd the communications channels. That’s where the Linux Foundation comes into play. They provide much of the framework and stewardship of the communication between competitors that result in unparalleled technical advancement across so many industries.

“Free software is a fundamentally superior model for developing software,” said Allison Randal. Eucalyptus Systems’ Marten Mickos took it one step farther: “Any company with an IT strategy needs an open source strategy.” It’s important to recognize –and embrace! — the larger ecosystem of Linux and open source software, and to find a way to collaborate within it to increase the number of available resources for which to compete.

Leveraging the success of Rent The Runway’s model, Luxemi is launching as an e-commerce site where customers can both borrow or buy Indian apparel and accessories. The site is targeted at a niche audience of South Asian American women who don’t want to spend the money on an expensive Indian outfit, or that don’t live near a shop that sells traditional Indian wear.

Instead of just offering apparel and accessories for sale, Luxemi maintains two completely separate collections: one consisting of apparel and accessories for sale and the other a “borrow closet” consisting of apparel and accessories available for rental. When borrowing, shoppers will select their reservation date, rental period (4 or 10 days) and their size.

The site’s rental price point starts at $78 for traditional Sarees and Salwars and $28 for jewelry (includes a backup size saree blouse to ensure fit, the Luxe Pack for the clothing including pins, Bindis and a garment bag to keep, and free return shipping). Luxemi, which has been open for only a month, has signed up 4200 memberships, and so far the average order size is over $250.

While this is sure to be a hit amongst Indian-American women, it’s questionable whether Luxemi will be able to create a market outside of this ethnic demographic. But the startup says that they have seen a strong interest outside the South Asian community with 40 percent of orders placed by non-Indian customers.

And Luxemi isn’t the first retail site to cater to the Indian-American shopping community. Exclusively.in is another e-commerce site that caters to the Indian diaspora, but with a flash sales model. The company just raised $16 million from Tiger Global, and is growing fast for a niche e-commerce site.

Apparently we are now in the endgame, the victims of information overload ready for the triumph of socially curated automation flows. You’d think people might be wary of placing big bets on impossible goals (what were they thinking at HP?) but that’s not what keeps happening. In retrospect, it seems stunningly obvious: TouchPad? Why Pad? Why Touch? Why not make it HunchPad as in HP, as in I’ve got a hunch this is not going to work.

Again, what were they thinking? Well, we’ve got this suicidal idea that we can destabilize our Microsoft and Intel relationships with a new WebOS, unhinge our developer community with dreams of doing God Knows What to Apple’s giant wave of momentum, and give Google even more room to consolidate Android as the new Microsoft emerging market replacement. OK, let’s vote.

With friends like these, Microsoft must be longing for the days of DOJ and EU consent agreements. Back then, Bill Gates was laughed out of the interrogation room for suggesting a Google might come along and eat its lunch. Now HP proves him right by beating the Windows tablet to market by at least a year and giving the real Google room to do a Yahoo! on Motorola to cement the after market, buy a way in to set top boxes, and give Zune developers something to think about in terms of the likelihood that the Netbook will return.

No wonder Bill is happier fighting starvation and AIDS where at least he has a chance of making a difference. But wait, there’s more. Google has also claimed the high ground with a classic Microsoft tactic, the one rumored to be coming down the pipe along with the ZunePad, a replacement social network. Google+ arrives just in time to say, sorry, Steve (Sinofsky) don’t waste your time building a competent clone of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, been there, done that. Say what you will about G+’s brain dead circle spam engine, Vic and Bradley have plenty of time to fix things up before ZunePad gets its $99 firesale.

Along the way, G+ will need to take a hack at the noise problem aka socially curated automation flows. The inclusion of Plus in Google Search already paid off when I was looking for a link to Marc Andreessen’s Wall Street Journal post on the End of Hardware and found it courtesy of a Loic Le Meur Plus citation. This represents the only real solution to noise, a social incentive to populate G+ with more than Scoble blog posts. The social algorithm is not driven by content inside G+ but by the pointers in from search and RSS (Twitter).

Google needs a universal validating stream to succeed here, one that rolls up the major networks rather than trying to kill any one or several of them. Whether Twitter enables access to its hose or not, its users can take control if they start linking to Plus threads or objects as a way of building social credentials. For Twitter, there’s nothing to be done to stop this short of emasculating its audience’s social imperative, the basic drive for making a difference.

Twitter’s new Activity @mention streams are just such a social imperative engine, boosting usage of previously useless citation formats like Favorites and Lists by surfacing the actions we take to try and filter the unfilterable. It’s not the specifics of who and what we are signaling, it’s the envelope of metadata around the signals that not only tags the objects but is something that can be tracked, ranked, and applied as a filter. In other words, it’s the people who are the algorithm but only if they have an imperative to produce.

A Paul McCartney song plays over the McDonald’s speaker, suggesting we Listen to What the Man Said. In this time of Netflix and Spotify, the track oddly resonates with its post-Beatles sheen and pre-iCloud sensibility. It’s not the stuff we’ve endlessly been pitched in various holiday blockbuster windows that bubbles up. No, it’s the stuff that confidently sets out to be comfortable in its own skin and be ready when there’s nothing on. After all, it’s just music, right? Nothing to save the world, just something to arrive at the right time and be supportive rather than invasive, productive rather than interruptive. And the fingerprint of these products or services as they now are delivered forms the sweet spot of value in this world we live in, you know, so live and let die.

So thank you TouchPad, we hardly knew you and never were going to. As the dinosaurs become oil, we’re regaining a say in the soundtracks of our lives. Call it filtering, call it curation, call it a cab. As George Harrison said in Hard Day’s Night about God Knows What or Who: She’s a drag, a well-known drag… It’s not the subject that we remember, it’s the inflection, the attitude, the rhythm of the thing that counts. And the rhythm of the TouchPad was just plain awesome. What were they thinking?

When it comes to renewable energy solutions, sometimes nature has the best ideas. That was 13-year-old Aidan Dwyer’s conclusion after a wintry hike in New York’s Catskill Mountains, a trip that inspired him to build a unique and effective solar array design.

Dwyer observed patterns in the trees and, after further research and contemplation, realized the branches matched up with the Fibonacci sequence, a mathematical pattern found throughout nature, such as in falcon flight paths, nautilus shells and ratios within the human body.

Dwyer speculated that this pattern aided the trees in photosynthesis and tested his hypothesis by building a miniature tree-shaped solar array. The project won him a 2011 Young Naturalist Award from the American Museum of Natural History.

The 7th grader describes his experiments in a detailed essay:

I designed and built my own test model, copying the Fibonacci pattern of an oak tree. I studied my results with the compass tool and figured out the branch angles. The pattern was about 137 degrees and the Fibonacci sequence was 2/5. Then I built a model using this pattern from PVC tubing. In place of leaves, I used PV solar panels hooked up in series that produced up to 1/2 volt, so the peak output of the model was 5 volts. The entire design copied the pattern of an oak tree as closely as possible.

The design generated up to 50% more power than the model of a traditional solar installation during periods of low sunlight. The individual solar panels’ various angles help the array capture light even when the sun is very low in the sky. And, since they don’t lie flat, many of the panels are also less affected by shade and snow.

At this point, Dwyer’s design a backyard experiment, but perhaps in the future we’ll see roof gardens planted with solar tree arrays.

Images courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History Musuem.