Category: Tech news

Editor’s note: Guest author Steve Cheney is an entrepreneur and formerly an engineer & programmer specializing in web and mobile technologies. His last guest post was on Why Mobile Innovation Is Blowing Away PCs

The success of iPhone 4 has been astonishing to witness, despite the antenna issues, proving once again that Apple has a unparalleled ability to differentiate around design and integration, not simply “features.”

Perhaps the best example of this so far is FaceTime, Apple’s take on video-calling. FaceTime makes video-calling on the Android-based Sprint HTC EVO look silly, because the EVO awkwardly requires users to sign up and download a third-party app, then launch it every time they want to talk. Normal people simply won’t do this.

Apple eliminated this friction by innovating at the confluence of hardware and software—hit one button mid-call and the feature just works. It really is amazing (yes, I am channeling Steve Jobs).

But FaceTime is just a teaser of Apple’s deep integration capabilities. Below the surface of hardware / software, Apple is on the cusp of differentiating on a much deeper level, a result of its strategy to vertically integrate at the component level. The advantages of integrating so deeply are subtle but incredibly powerful.

Feature Bloat in Components Benefits Apple:

I recently discussed why innovation in mobile is happening at an unprecedented pace. One primary driver is incredible component innovation.

But this rapid innovation—which is good overall—causes a negative byproduct: “feature bloat.”  The HTC EVO, which crams in 4G wireless, epitomizes this best (sorry, but mobile 4G is not ready for primetime, and I firmly believe Apple won’t even include it on next year’s iPhone 5).

The temptation for companies to differentiate via features is a virtuous cycle: component vendors (Broadcom, TI, Qualcomm) compete aggressively based on integration levels. Handset OEMs like HTC push vendors to release features prematurely, and they make component decisions based on availability of bleeding edge (but often buggy) technology.

This leads to a “kitchen sink” mentality, which conflicts with customer development frameworks, ironically driving a maximum feature set. Pressure from handset OEMs is a driver, but component vendors also tend to use competitive analysis to shape their marketing requirements. Steve Blank made some excellent insights into why this leads to feature bloat. The poor reviews of the HTC EVO are proof that—though alluring—additional features don’t always speak to consumers. Especially when they kill your battery overnight.

Apple thinks much differently about adding features. While the HTCs of the world “differentiate” blindly based on available technology, Apple innovates only when it can create a superior, well-integrated user experience.

Right now this virtuous cycle of feature bloat is accelerating in system-on-chip (SoC) development for the reasons I outlined above. And Apple is poised to sidestep it by vertically integrating and producing chips which mirror its minimalist product strategy.

Supply-Chain Transparency is an Enormous Unspoken Benefit for Apple:

Perhaps even more powerful is an unspoken advantage afforded to Apple’s SoC designers: vertical integration gives them explicit knowledge of what’s happening across the entire component ecosystem and value-chain.

How? Every component vendor in the world visits Cupertino to share its “secret” roadmap—despite the fact that Apple now competes in SoC development. The dangling carrot of an Apple design win simply outweighs any aversion to sharing. This transparency from other chip makers is extremely powerful, since handset OEMs plan several generations out (e.g. Apple is undoubtedly in concept stages with iPhone 6 and the A6).

Apple can learn Broadcom’s chip plans and mull over whether to bring portions of the digital logic related to GPS and WiFi on to the A6. New technologies like NFC for payments—bring in-house or purchase discrete? There are dozens of permutations, each with design challenges, benefits, and risks.

By extracting data from suppliers, Apple’s chip team has a feedback loop into product planning. All of this collective wisdom adds up, helping Apple decide what to roll-up, buy, license, or outsource. Imagine seeing your competition’s entire feature roadmap, and then planning your own SoC strategy. It’s like seeing your neighbor’s wife naked, and deciding afterward whether you’re interested, even though you’re already married.

Cisco has used a similar vertical integration strategy to its benefit in the enterprise for many years (Broadcom and Marvell pitch Ethernet fabrics despite the fact that Cisco builds its own switch chips). But in mobile, Apple is the only company who owns all three elements of the value-chain—hardware, software and chip components (outside of Samsung). Nokia divested its component division to STMicro, and Ericsson and Motorola spun off theirs as well.

As multicore ARM-based chips accelerate, and as software / hardware integration becomes more of a differentiator, Apple engineering teams will out-innovate competitors at the intersection of these three levels (again, antenna issues aside). It’s much more difficult for Google, Motorola, and others to cross-pollinate information from their own independent silos.

In tomorrow’s smartphone wars, this transparency into the entire mobile value-chain will give Apple an incredibly powerful advantage. This strategic implication wasn’t lost on Steve Jobs when he made the decision to vertically integrate and compete with the giants in the semiconductor world.

Fact is, Apple is a company run by brilliant strategists and user experience designers, not engineers. They know that deep component, hardware, and software integration gives Apple an enduring advantage as mobile platforms evolve. Which is why Apple will undoubtedly produce more devices and features that become huge hits like iPhone 4 and FaceTime.

Anybody out there remember the Rockman? It was this little personal guitar amplifier, about the size of a Sony Walkman (adding “man” to anything portable was all the rage in the 80s, you know).The Rockman let you play distorted guitar through headphones and it curiously made everything you played sound like BOSTON.

The AmpliTube iRig combo for the iPhone is kind of like the Rockman except WAY cooler. WAY, WAY, WAY cooler. We first told you about it a couple of weeks ago. I finally got my hands on one and while it’s been reviewed once or twice since that time, I thought I’d give you my view on it anyway since it ships this week – July 6 to be exact.

Read more…

In a speech at the American University last Thursday, President Obama highlighted the incredible economic rewards that America has gained from its immigrants. He spoke of new waves of immigrants—from places like Ireland, Italy, Poland, and China—challenging the generations before them, and consequently being subjected to “rank discrimination and ugly stereotypes”.  Yet the immigrants kept coming to America. That’s because it was the only land of opportunity. The President wants lawmakers to fix the immigration system so that America can remain globally competitive. But I don’t think it’s that simple. America is no longer the only magnet for the world’s best and brightest. Fixing immigration policy is an important start, but it won’t be enough to stop the brain drain of highly educated and skilled workers that the U.S. is presently experiencing.

Just last week, there were two notable visitors to Silicon Valley—Russian President, Dimitry Medvedev, and Chile’s minister of Economy, Juan Andres Fontaine. President Medvedev wanted the brilliant Russian-born and -educated programmers who write some of the Valley’s most sophisticated software to know that they are welcome back home and that he is setting up a science park for them. Minister Fontaine wants to turn Chile into a tech hub and is following my advice on how to make this happen: by attracting immigrants; building a diverse culture that encourages risk-taking and openness; and creating networks of mentors. Over drinks (some excellent Chilean wine), the minister told me of a new program that Chile is piloting to lure bootstrappers. Chile will grant $40,000 and provide some really cheap office space and accommodation to budding entrepreneurs from anywhere in the world. All they have to do is to build their products in one of the most beautiful locations on the planet. Chile is betting that once these entrepreneurs get there, they will never want to leave.

China is also doing all it can to get its scientists and engineers to come back home. It is spending billions of dollars to establish research institutes and build technical capacity. Returnees to China are now powering its most significant scientific breakthroughs. For example, according to the Washington Post, at the National Institute for Biological Sciences, which is responsible for half of the peer-reviewed publications in China, all of the key scientists are returnees from the United States.

I witnessed on my recent trip to India how much things had changed there, as well.

At Startup Saturday, which has become a regular hangout for tech entrepreneurs in Delhi, I gave a talk to a group of about 100 company founders. I was surprised at how similar they were to the techies I know in Silicon Valley: they are building the same types of products; have the same interests; ask the same questions; and, like their Valley brethren, complain that venture capitalists won’t give them the time of day.  I learned that more than one-third of these entrepreneurs were returnees from the U.S. They went back for the same reasons that my research had highlighted: they missed their family and friends and saw greater opportunities in India than in the U.S. Now they are invigorating the entrepreneurial ecosystem back home.

The returning techies aren’t only building tech companies. After completing his MBA at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Ritesh Bawri built a very promising product that could capture a customer’s real-time purchase intent. He had VCs lined up to provide funding but decided not to pursue this because he saw an even greater opportunity back home, in India. Among his father’s business interests was a cement business that produced $10 million a year in revenue. Ritesh knew that, with India’s need for infrastructure, there was almost unlimited potential for growth. But this would require rethinking production and distribution methods, importing new technologies from the west, and building the logistics infrastructure to consolidate the materials supply chain. Ritesh returned home in 2003 and raised about $110 million in financing from financial institutions and private equity funds to purchase assets and build plants, and revamped the cement business’s operations and strategy. His bet paid off.  His company, Calcom Cement, has become a hugely profitable $250 million business and expects to hit $2 billion in revenue in 2016.

Some of India’s best and brightest won’t even consider moving to the U.S. Ashish Sinha started his career in 1999 at one of the first successful tech companies in India, called Aztec software. Later, he worked for Ketera, IBM, and Yahoo, in India. He was offered several opportunities in the U.S., but believed his career would progress better in India. In 2007, Ashish started India’s TechCrunch—a site called PluGGd.in, which now draws 1.1 million visitors a month. Ashish takes a lot of pride in his decision not come to the U.S. as an H-1B worker. He says “I have seen a whole lot of my friends go to the U.S. for IT services/outsourcing jobs, and repent later as it hardly brings satisfaction to one’s soul”.

Arvind Nigam and Praveen Kumar Sinha are in the process of moving their ideas-crowdsourcing software company, called BubbleIdeas, to Singapore because the Indian government places restrictions on Paypal types of transactions, and they want to be closer to western markets. When I told Arvind about Chile, he thought it would be an even better place to move to, because of its physical and cultural proximity to the U.S. and Europe.  I asked Arvind whether he had considered the U.S.  His response: “too expensive… and who needs to put up with the visa nightmares?”.

The U.S. immigration debate will no doubt going be contentious and get bogged down in the issue of providing amnesty to people who entered the country illegally. The reality is that, no matter how long the debate takes or how it concludes, the poor and unskilled will still be here. But the educated and skilled professionals—who could be creating new jobs and making the U.S. more competitive—won’t be here. They will, instead, be boosting the economies of other countries. The U.S. will need not only to change its immigration policies to welcome skilled immigrants, but also to keep those who are already in the U.S. And  it will have to do what countries like China, Singapore, and Chile are doing:  send its scouts out to find and recruit the best talent in other countries.

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. You can follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa and find his research at www.wadhwa.com.

“On Monday, federal prosecutors accused 11 people of being part of a Russian espionage ring, living under false names and deep cover in a patient scheme to penetrate what one coded message called American “policy making circles.””

They weren’t particularly good spies, apparently. They were directed to gather information on nuclear weapons, American policy toward Iran, C.I.A. leadership, Congressional politics and many other topics. But at least two of them chose to pursue these goals by working at tech startups.

But statistics don’t lie. Based on recent espionage data we’ve rigorously gathered (from the NYTimes article), fully 18% of all Russian spies also work at tech startups. Amazing.

It seems mathematically improbable to say the least that two of the people accused of being Russian spies are in our relatively small tech community. One is Anna Chapman, who was recently pitching her startup NYCRentals.com to just about anyone who’d listen.

The other spy (lol) who is also a tech startup employee is Tracey Foley:

In Cambridge, Mass., the couple known as Donald Heathfield and Tracey Foley, who appeared to be in their 40s and had two teenage sons, lived in an apartment building on a residential street where some Harvard professors and students live.

“She was very courteous; she was very nice,” Montse Monne-Corbero, who lives next door, said of Ms. Foley. The sons shoveled snow for her in the winter, Ms. Monne-Corbero said, but they also had “very loud” parties.

When Foley wasn’t throwing those very loud parties, Foley pursued her spy career by working as a field agent for Seattle-based Redfin, a real estate startup we’ve covered often. Foley’s job consisted of showing people houses for sale when a lead agent was taking a long lunch or something.

Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman sort of argues that his customers deserved to know the truth in a blog post he wrote disclosing Foley’s employment with the company: “since she has been accused of a grave crime, we have disclosed the facts of our relationship with Ms. Foley here.”

But what Kelman is really saying, of course, is “HFS, how cool is it that one of those spies worked for us! Redfin FTW!” I mean it’s not like he now has to worry about thinking up interesting anecdotes at cocktail parties for the next twelve months at least. He’s all set.

I just wish someone at TechCrunch – me for instance – was actually secretly a deep cover spy. Blogger by day, but at night I throw on a tuxedo and zip off to North Korea in a stealth jet to kick some serious communist butt. And then get the girl(s) and take off in the rogue nuclear submarine I just stole. My God, the links we’d get once I was finally arrested would be worth millions. And the book and movie deals…priceless.

err, sorry, back to my point. Which I do have one I think. And it’s basically this: WTF?

One of the big announcements at this year’s Google I/O was that a new Chrome Web Store was being built. Think of it as Apple’s App Store or the Android Market but for web apps. In it, you’ll be able to purchase (or download for free) and install apps that can run in Google’s Chrome web browser. Google would only commit to the store and apps being ready “later this year,” but work on app compatibility for Chrome progressing quite nicely.

Builds of Chromium (the open source browser behind Chrome) have actually been able to run early apps for weeks now. The ability is still hidden behind a flag, but if you go here you can figure out how to turn on the functionality. As you can see in the screenshots below, these builds allow you to install apps (you can find some here) that then reside on your main “Most visited” Chrome page (the one with web page thumbnails for sites you often visit). From here, you can click on any of these apps to launch them in a new pinned tab.

Obviously, this isn’t as simple as it’s going to be with the full Web Store in place. But it’s still not too bad either. Clicking on a link to an app brings up a prompt to ask if you’d like to install it — just like you get when you install a Chrome extension. An overlay at the top of the browser then lets you know when the app is installed.

Eventually, it looks as if installed apps will have different looking tabs than regular pinned web pages (for now they look the same). It also looks like the UI for these apps will be a lot nicer by the time things launch, and there will be an easier way to delete apps from the page they reside on (see bottom image).

One quick note: the latest builds of Chromium for Mac appear to have the way to get to apps disabled. So you might want to try an older version from early June. At least one thread warns that apps might be available on the Windows versions of Chrome first, and Mac and Linux later.

[thanks Joe]

So, we finally got around to taping the first episode of our show for TechCrunchTV. It took us a while to figure out what the show was actually going to be but we knew the name: “Too Long; Didn’t Watch.” If I have to explain that to anyone, you clearly haven’t read either of our work.

Originally it was going to be a hilarious romp through the week’s news, but it seems that slot has been taken by the charismatic and slightly better titled “OMG/JK.” So in a bid to be different, we decided we would cover only tech and entrepreneurship news from outside of Silicon Valley. Of course, the problem is Valley companies tend to drive more traffic. So in a way, this show is an experiment to see if TC readers do indeed care about life outside the echo chamber.

Our first episode involves  spies, sex, lies, giggling and of course videotape: We discuss the weird story of alleged Russian spy, Anna Chapman and her odd social media approach to spying. It makes us wonder how many entrepreneurs out there are really just sleepers for foreign powers. Loic LeMeur, we’re watching you.

(This post will self-destruct in five seconds.)

What does Yammer’s David Sacks have to do with Apple’s reception hiccup? And what does DoubleTwist’s Jon Johansen have to do with Google Me? To be honest, not a whole lot. But we had both founders in on Friday morning, for our fifth episode of TechCrunch NOW.

For those who are unfamiliar with the program, TechCrunch NOW is a daily show (Monday-Friday, 3 PM PST) where we combine an assortment of entrepreneurs, investors, reporters and other tech personalities to debate the top headlines. This week, our line-up included Cyan Banister, founder of Zivity (and host of Speaking Of), Brian Singerman of Founder’s Fund, Ryan Sweeney of Accel Partners, Andy McLoughlin, co-founder of Huddle, Michael Seibel, CEO of Justin.tv, Evan Soloman, VP of Marketing for Justin.tv, and our OMG/JK dream team MG Siegler and Jason Kincaid.

We don’t expect our guests to be designated experts for each headline— however, as an engaged player in technology, his/her perspective will add an extra layer of context and facilitate intelligent discussion.

On today’s episode, we got a chance to delve a little deeper into Apple’s amusing press release, its botched formula for calculating reception, the problems with the Android marketplace, and the upcoming fight between Google and Facebook.

Below are a few highlights:

On the Android marketplace:

During our show, Jon Johansen got a chance to elaborate on his recent post, “Google’s Mismanagement Of the Android Market.” On Sunday, the co-founder of DoubleTwist (a music service often described as the ‘iTunes for Android’), ripped Google for failing to curate the Android marketplace— leaving it vulnerable to clutter, less-than-legal apps and making it difficult for quality apps to surface.

Rant aside, Johansen says there is a “middle ground” here, where Google can balance its desire to remain open and the need to control the Android eco-system: “Both Palm and Android have this option where you can actually install apps from outside the market…so even if Google started curating the Android market more and flushing out some of these spam apps for instance, that wouldn’t necessarily make the Android market not open anymore because you can still install apps from anywhere else.”

Sacks, also agreed that Google needs to overhaul its system to be more developer-friendly. As a CEO who has an app on the iPhone and the Android platforms, he said it has been a struggle for his team to design apps around the different Android devices and for each iteration of the operating system (although he notes that both Apple and Google still rank higher than RIM).

After our interview, Johansen told me he was looking for more editorial control and improved search algorithms for the market. Google, if you’re listening, he actually has a four-pronged plan for the Android:

“Here’s a few things Google needs to do:

1. They need to expand the number of countries that have access to paid apps (it doesn’t seem to be a big priority as they’re adding them at an extremely slow rate)
2. Developers need to be able to respond to user comments (perhaps through a proxy email to preserve the anonymity of the user)
3. Illegal apps need to go. They’re unfair competition for legitimate apps.
4. More payment options (subscriptions, in-app payments, etc).”

On Google Me vs. Facebook

Meanwhile, in the last portion of our round-up, David Sacks delivered a bold prediction for Google Me: Google Me, on its own will not be able to take down Facebook, if they want to tackle the 800-pound gorilla in social they will have to buy Twitter:

“I think it’s going to be very difficult to create a new social network that just copies Facebook…Google already tried with Buzz to bootstrap off of Gmail, to create a social network, and I think that failed….If it’s just a clone of Facebook it’s certainly going to fail…The only other sort of social networks that have achieved scale on the consumer side in a big way have been Twitter and I guess you could kind of argue LinkedIn…I basically agree with what Keith Rabois wrote which is that Google’s best shot of getting into social networking would be to acquire Twitter. I definitely don’t think they’ll be able build a product themselves that will be able to get significant traction.”

He also ominously warned that in the long term, the market might not be big enough for both a Twitter and Facebook. See the full video above.

Any suggestions for our show or guests you want to see? E-mail me at [email protected], subject: TechCrunch NOW.

The bizarre case of Russian Spy ring arrested by the FBI earlier this week just keeps on getting stranger. In particular, one of the alleged spies, 28-year-old Anna Chapman, is getting a lot of attention because of her “vixen” looks and lingerie shots on Facebook. Now, her former husband in London says her father was a former KGB officer and that she left him to pursue her startup dreams in the United States.

Chapman networked her way into the New York City entrepreneurial scene. In fact, before New York Entrepreneur Week last April, she sat down for a video interview to talk about her apartment rental Website, NYCRentals.com. You can watch the video below, courtesy of And Now Media (it has appeared elsewhere on the Web). Chapman does not come across as a very sophisticated businesswoman, or spy for that matter. Initially, she comes across as something of a red-headed ditz flirting with the camera, or maybe she is just nervous, but as she begins to talk about her business she starts to sound a little more believable.

The Website is up and running, although it is barebones. And she was shopping around a business plan, really more of a two-page executive summary, which we have obtained exclusively (also embedded below). NYCRentals is an apartment search engine which brings together listings for a very limited number of apartments in some neighborhoods of New York City. The executive summary pitches it as a vertical search engine for apartment rentals which aggregates listings from different broker sites. It is not a particularly original idea.

The name of the company behind the site is PropertyFinder, which is described as an “affiliate of a holding company in Russia by Anna Chapman who holds the majority shares in that company as well.” It is obvious the document was written by someone without a full mastery of English. It lists “Graigslist” as a competitor and is filled with grammatical errors. One typical sentence reads:

By specializing on narrow region it will allow for a system to gather not only information about letting but also create rich with information database with buildings, city infrastructure, other useful and relevant for choosing real estate to live area specifics.

Maybe NYCRentals was just a front to give Chapman an excuse to meet high-profile targets. Or maybe she really thought she could crack the New York City rental market. Update: It appears that the domain NYCRentals.com was only recently purchased on June 22 for $25,350.

It is still not clear what Chapman’s role in the alleged spy ring was or why she sought publicity. One theory is that these so-called spies were really trying to infiltrate different parts of American society to network and perhaps find valuable contacts who could provide real intelligence to Russia. But all evidence so far is that these spies who could not shoot straight. One contact from New York Entrepreneur Week who met with Chapman on several occasions, Aron Shoenfeld (no relation to me), describes her as a “very aggressive networker.” But she seemed no more aggressive than any ambitious entrepreneur. Maybe entrepreneurs would make good spies.

Or maybe she just wasn’t a very good spy.

Perhaps you heard, Microsoft has killed the Kin, its mobile device that was all of six weeks old. Some people were upset by this. Now they have a place to let our their grief, and pay their respects: KinRIP.com.

As the site notes, the Kin lived from 2010 to 2010 — it died at the ripe old age of 0. “She” was botn on May 13, 2010 and died on June 30, 2010. “We will remember her forever,” the site notes. Visitors are asked to light a candle in remembrance of the device, and already dozens have. You can also add your favorite photos of the Kin to the page.

Some choice statements left on the page:

• “Damn Kin, you were so fast we can never touch you. RIP.”
• “Sadly, you saw the Blue Screen of Death up close and personal. R.I.P K.I.N”
• “i held you for a few minutes only to leave you for the droid x im sorry :-(“
• “Most of all, I’ll miss those stellar commercials. RIP Kin.”
• “How appropriate that there will be no RECEPTION”
• “Kin, you’re the Betamax of phones but the iPhone of my heart.”

The memorial site, created by Shmuel Tennenhaus, has nearly 7,000 visitors so far paying their respects. It’s not clear if it will end up being as big of a memorial as the IE Funeral yet. Of course that product had millions more users, and is actually still not even dead yet.

This site was built using ForeverMissed, a online tool that lets users create memorial pages for departed loved ones for free. Obviously, this Kin page is a joke, but the site behind it seems like a nice idea, so hopefully this will drive more usage of that.

RIP Kin.

One thing we tried – very hard – to nail down yesterday was the price Disney paid for Tapulous. Disney appears to be extra paranoid around the price leaking, and forced key executives and investors to sign specific nondisclosure agreements promising not to disclose that information.

All of which of course makes us really, really want to know.

The purchase price was somewhere between $22 million and $50 million, we’ve confirmed via multiple sources. Employees, say one source, appear to be getting paid based on that lower number. But there is clearly an escrow and an earnout as well that is bumping the total price, if that money is paid out, to something over $30 million. Our best guess is the total price is somewhere around $35 million.

That’s not bad for a company that’s raised just $2.8 million in funding. But Tapulous was profitable almost immediately and didn’t need to raise a lot of money to scale. Revenue comes from multiple sources – ads, song downloads referred to iTunes, song downloads into the game, among others. Last year revenue was around $5 million. This year they are already hitting $1 million/month and will likely have $15 million of so in revenue for all of 2010.

The gaming space is very, very hot right now and all startups with any real traction are fielding buy offers left and right. We’ll see a lot more deals like this over the coming months, with Zynga, Disney, Playdom and others buying.

For many small business owners, managing financial health can be an overwhelming process. From credit cards to cash flow to saving, small businesses have many different fiscal elements to consider when monitoring finances. Mint.com helped solved this problem for consumers. And today, Y Combinator-backed startup Indinero is launching its real-time financial dashboard that has a simple ambition: to be the Mint.com for small businesses.

Like Mint, Indinero uses Yodlee to allow businesses to transferring bank and credit card account information from financial institutions. But Indinero’s site caters to the financial health and needs of small businesses, breaking out data that addresses cashflow, runway, spending, profits and more.

Indinero’s co-founder Jessica Mah tells me that complex accounting software like Intuit’s Quickbooks can often be confusing to navigate. Similar to Mint, Indinero’s interface is simple and easy to use. It makes pretty graphs of a business’ finances to make data trends more understandable. Indinero will soon include a forecasting feature, which will provide businesses an future glimpse into their financial performance based on past data and industry trends. And eventually businesses will be able to compare their performance to other companies of their size and industry focus.

The startup doesn’t aim to replace a human bookkeepers, but actually helps business owners collaborate with bookkeepers. Inidinero allows you to import data directly into Quickbooks, saving bookkeepers from the arduous task of inputing data into the program.

Indinero of course faces competition from Mint. And there are a number of sites providing simple bookkeeping applications for small businesses including Outright, Freshbooks and others.

Facebook already suggests pages to members based on the pages that their friends are engaging with in their network. But today, Facebook is now helping new members curate their interests as soon as they join the network. Now, any new member will see a list of Pages that other people in a similar demographic to them also commonly like.

Facebook says that it will only suggest Pages of people and organizations that are actually seeing engagement on the network. The new feature is powered by an algorithm, assures Facebook engineer Ziqing Mao, so the suggestions are not sponsored. It’s also unclear what demographic considerations Facebook is evaluating when making suggestions to new members.

Unsurprisingly, the new feature resembles a functionality on Twitter. It’s similar in theory to Twitter’s suggested user list, which shows a list of suggested users to follow based on topic. Like Facebook’s pages suggestions, Twitter’s suggestions are based on an algorithm that determines who users are engaging with on the microblogging network. And on Facebook’s suggested list, you can choose to like all of the suggestions

Twitter’s Suggested User List hasbeen controversial, because it guaranteed anyone on it hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers. Facebook’s new feature is expected to have the same effect. In January, Twitter actually changed its suggested user list format from just a list of users to suggestions based on topic. This could be something that Facebook might explore in the future to make suggestions of Pages more streamlined (and less random) for users.

With more than 50 million users and a recent infusion of cash, music streaming service Pandora is really hitting its stride. Founder Tim Westergren had his Charlie Rose moment last night, and one thing that really cam ethrough was how important the iPhone is to Pandora.

“It is impossible to overstate” its impact, saays Westergren. When the iPhone app launched in 2008, it was an instant hit, and it “almost doubled” Pandora’s growth rate “overnight,” says Westergren. But more than that, it freed up Pandora users from being chained to their desks. Now with the ability to run in the background, its usage on the iPhone should continue to soar. In the first clip below, Westergren talks about Pandora’s iPhone and the iPad strategies. In the second clip, he explains to Rose, Pandora’s underlying Music Genome project.

You can watch the full interview here.

Today, IBM delivered its first Aquasar supercomputer, which is cooled by water, to a Swiss technology institute. The system needs 40% less energy to run than air-cooled machines, and the waste heat it produces can be used to warm buildings.

The system works thanks to micro-channel liquid coolers that are attached directly to processors, one of the biggest culprits of computer heat generation. IBM says water is 4,000 times more efficient at removing heat than air. In the past, water was commonly used to cool mainframes and other large computing systems, but typically that water was kept at low temperatures.

Interestingly, the water used to cool the Aquasar system is warm, around 140 degrees F. This works because it’s still cool enough to capture enough heat from processors to keep them below their 185 degree F max. The water exits the system at about 149 degrees F, and can be used to heat buildings in which it is hosted.

IBM’s technology could help reduce energy costs to data centers, which use up to 50% of their energy consumption on air cooling systems to prevent processor over-heating. It could also reduce the initial costs of setting up a data center, allowing companies to pay to cool each machine as they’re added instead of needing to cool an entire room regardless of the number of machines in it.

I’ve never been quite sure what to make of the upcoming Facebook movie, The Social Network. On one hand, the talent behind the camera is pretty amazing. The screenplay was written by Aaron Sorkin (of West Wing, and A Few Good Men fame). And it’s being directed by David Fincher (of Fight Club and Seven fame). On the other hand, it’s a movie about Facebook. And the trailer is a bit cheesy. But some news today may have put me over the edge towards being very intrigued by it.

As he announces on the official Nine Inch Nails site, Trent Reznor will be doing the score for the film. It seems as if there’s entirely too much talent behind this movie now for it to fail — or at least, for it to be awful.

Writes Reznor:

I was planning on taking some time off after the continual waves of touring that ended last fall and spend this year experimenting around with what would become How To Destroy Angels and some new NIN. Well, that plan didn’t work out so well. David Fincher started inquiring about my interest in scoring his upcoming film, The Social Network. Yeah, the movie about the founding of Facebook. I’ve always loved David’s work but quite honestly I wondered what would draw him to tell that story. When I actually read the script and realized what he was up to, I said goodbye to that free time I had planned. Atticus Ross and I have been on a creative roll so I asked him if he wanted to work on this with me and we signed on.

Reznor goes on to note that the score is just about complete now and that he “couldn’t be happier with how it’s turned out.” He hints that he and Ross may even release two records based on the scoring work they did for the film, and that they’ll release the music a couple weeks before the film’s October 1 release date.

But back to the movie. Can it really be any good? “It’s really fucking good. And dark!,” writes Reznor.

This from the guy who made the video for “Closer.” Sold.

[photo: flickr/Burns!]