Russia Hopes The Skolkovo Tech City Will Produce Its Great Leap Forward

During the height of the Cold War the Soviet Union built up a network of “Naukograd” or “Science Cities”. These were state-created clusters of scientists working on technologies that could help it compete with the West, especially in the field of nuclear weapons and space exploration. Those days are of course long gone, but today Russia â€" though now freed from the days of the old USSR â€" now faces a new race: how to revive its economy, compete globally in the next industrial revolution of science and technology and wean itself off its reliance on oil and gas.

For Russia has a problem. The energy sector accounts for approximately two-thirds of Russia’s exports, around 30 percent of Russia’s GDP, and almost half of Federal Budget revenues. In the U.S. almost 3% of GDP is spent on research and development while Russian firms spend just 1%.

The economy has entered the doldrums and needs re-balancing for the modern world. As the OECD has pointed out, Russia needs a thriving SME and startup culture if it is to prosper in the future, particularly in science and technology. Though Russia has some of the best of breed in these sectors, it’s had difficulty spinning that capability in science, technology and research into global commercial successes.

Although completely different from the old days of the Naukograd, could it be that Skolkovo, a new project to create large new science and tech cluster just outside of Moscow, will be Russia’s fast track to innovation?

So, in a typically Russian approach to the problem, it’s come up with Skolkovo, a vast new science-based city, to catapult its economy into a new era of technology and innovation. The Skolkovo Innovation Center will be a planned high technology business area with its own set of laws, designed to encourage science and technology companies. The 400 hectare site is predicted to house over 20,000 people permanently, with another 10,000 commuting in to work. In other words, this is a massive project on a typically Russian scale. But in an untypical breakwith the past the whole project is being run by a specially created non-profit, the Skolkovo Foundation.

The Skolkovo Innovation Center will be financed primarily from the Russian federal budget. Some 22 Billion RUB went into it last year, with 17.3 Billion RUB projected to be spent this year. It’s clearly on a scale that Russians themselves will recognize as being a modern take on similar projects of the past. Their main concern is, will it work, and will the money be spent wisely?

On Monday and Tuesday this week I was invited to a kind of showcase day on site, an event dubbed “Startup Village”. There, companies ranging from biotech to engineering to Internet startups displayed their products to visitors and potential investors in a fashion reminiscent of a traditional trade show â€" if that trade show was aimed only at Russian speakers, I might add.

On the Skolkovo site only the cube-shaped, seven-story “Hypercube” exhibition centre has been built so far. A vision in glass and concrete, the building has a rough and ready appearance reminiscent of many startup hubs and is dotted with pitching spaces, meeting rooms, media areas and, of course, bean bags. Surrounding it were temporary pavilions centered around areas like biotech, life sciences and IT.

Inside, the sheer variety of products â€" from aerial mapping drones to head up displays to devices for (perhaps ironically) oil and gas exploration â€" showed the enormous range of the kinds of companies Skolkovo will eventually entertain.

And despite patches of rain, which turned parts of the venue’s outside areas into a soggy bog, the overall genial, celebratory atmosphere could not be dampened, especially when the sun eventually came out. The outside portable toilets served to add to the ‘music festival’ like atmosphere. This was certainly not your average Russian event.

But the weather and the lack of any red carpets was not enough to put off Prime Minister Medvedev, who toured the event listening to pitches from companies, trying out products on display and talking to officials (though as you’ll see from our video we had a hard time trying to get an interview).

To a Westerner’s eyes, it might all have appeared at best ‘charming’, if at times a little haphazard â€" especially if you were a lady in heels having to negotiate the vast swathes of gravel paths.

How could a project with so much state backing put on an event in wind-swept canvas pavilions? It’s questions like this that ordinary Russians ask of the Skolkovo project generally.

And yet, as my contacts pointed out, the sheer informality of the event was exactly what they were aiming for. “To see so many important people in jeans is a big deal for us” one young entrepreneur said to me. To them, informality is a way to tap into a more free-wheeling Western interpretation of innovation, away from the white lab coats of old and the stuffy suits of officialdom.

But the allure of Skolkovo won’t be merely cosmetic to the new wave of Russia’s startups.

Companies housed there will enjoy special privileges compared to companies in other parts of Russia. The Skolkovo area is being created as a special economic zone in its own right, with its own border controls and legislative incentives for startups, such as a tax holiday lasting 5â€"7 years. It also has special laws enabling entrepreneurs to work there from other countries â€" in effect Russia’s ‘Startup Visa’.

Announced in November 2009 by Medvedev, then Russian president, the complex is headed by Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg and co-chaired by former Intel CEO Craig Barrett.

It has a brand new highway connecting Skolkovo to Moscow, with rail links to the capital and Vnukovo International Airport also planned.

Its five “clusters” will specialize in different areas including IT, Energy, Nuclear Technologies, Biomedicine and Space Technologies. Clean energy will be a particular focus, and the city will ‘eat its own dog food’ â€" recycling practically all of its waste to create an energy-efficient city with minimal or zero emissions. Only electric cars will be allowed in the city.

The main elements of The Skolkovo City will be the University and a Technopark. MIT has been signed up to co-manage the creation of the university, reportedly receiving $300 million for its participation. The Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology will have a curriculum designed by MIT, offer graduate degrees only and â€" unusually in Russia â€" teach in English. MIT has similar arrangements in China, Portugal, Singapore and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, but Russia’s home-grown talent has not been accessed by a Western university in such a way, or on such a scale, before.

The Skolkovo Foundation, the non-profit which is overseeing all this activity, has signed multiple collaboration agreements with Russian and international companies, including IBM, Rusnano, Rostelecom, Russian Venture Company and ITFY. IBM will establish labs and new jobs on the site in return for licensing its know-how related to how tech companies develop their IP and commercialization. Microsoft and Siemens have also already agreed to locate labs there and the foundation says it has recruited 52 venture capital firms to join the whole project.

That said, Skolovo’s journey so far has not been exactly smooth. A senior vice president of the Skolkovo innovation fund was suspended last month when the police investigated him for allegedly over-paying a lecturer two years ago. That lecturer later went on to become an MP opposed to the Putin Presidency. That said, the connection between this transaction and Russia’s current political landscape is somewhat blurred.

According to Russia’s top law enforcement agency â€" the Investigative Committee â€" Skolkovo executive Aleksey Beltyukov broke the law when he paid MP Ilya Ponomaryov $750,000 for 10 lectures and one research paper. Beltyukov has stepped down from Skolkovo while the case continues, but my enquiries indicate that he remains a consultant to the Skolkovo project while the case proceeds.

Meanwhile, the investigation has descended into a to-and-fro of denials and counter denials. Ponomaryov says the contract was genuine and all his actions were legal, and that the case against him was politically motivated. Meanwhile, The Skolkovo Foundation has since filed its own lawsuit against Ponomaryov.

It’s worth noting that the head of the Skolkovo foundation, Viktor Vekselberg, is one of Russia’s wealthiest businessmen and has substantial government support for the project. But that said, the project is supposed to be independent of all sides of the political spectrum.

Skolkovo has had a rocky political road. It was also backed by Deputy Prime Minister Vladislav Surkov, but he resigned earlier this month, after the government was forced to issue poor economic figures. Russia’s $2 trillion economy is growing at the weakest pace since a 2009 contraction.

To confuse matters, the media made much of Surkov’s resignation and its effect on Skolkovo, often without noting the foibles of Russian politics. The Prime Minister has several Deputy PMs, so it’s highly likely that another will simply take up the Skolkovo baton. For now, Putin has appointed presidential adviser Andrei Fursenko to oversee the project.

But during the ‘Startup Village’ event Serkov was seen touring the Startup Village exhibition this week as if nothing had happened.

What is clear is that Surkov will continue his connection, piloting a major global/Russian conference in October, “Open Innovations Forum 2012″ in Moscow, with Skolkovo’s involvement.

And Surkov recently publicly defended Skolkovo during a question-and-answer session at the London School of Economics, while Investigative Committee spokesman Vladimir Markin wrote a newspaper article attacking Surkov, after the latter called the criminal investigation heavy-handed.

Clearly, trying to work out what all this means for Skolkovo would require a PHD in ‘Kremlinology’.

But whatever the case, Skolkovo’s main mountain to climb will likely be critics who see too big of a disparity between the amount of resources being dedicated to the project and the results, which to date have been limited.

Certainly, touring what is in effect a building site with one building on it (and this, after three years since the policy was first announced) does not inspire enormous confidence.

Additionally, when private sector incubators like Digital October â€" conveniently located in the centre of Moscow and home to many startups â€" exist and thrive without billions in government funding, it’s tempting to wonder why the Russian government seems so keen to spend so much money and woo so many international partners.

However, it’s undoubtedly the case that Skolkovo has a big head of steam now, and projects of this scale clearly do not happen over night. Like Rome, Skolkovo will not be built in a day.

As I toured the site, I could see for my own eyes that the 400 hectare Skolkovo site was filled with other building projects clearly in progress. Essential services such as drainage and electricity have all gone into the ground, according to spokespeople. Some buildings were clearly being worked on as delegates milled around the Startup Village event.

In addition, much of the core of the city is being pre-fabricated elsewhere, meaning a number of buildings should go up quite quickly. A spokesperson said the heart of the site, the Technopark, could even be finished by the end of this year.

Another aspect of the project which could allow observers to be cautiously optimistic is the involvement of key advisors to Vekselberg. These include Conor Lenihan, Vice President for International Business. The extremely experienced Lenihan has served in several Irish government ministries and was formerly Ireland’s Minister for Science, Technology & Innovation. He’s also been a senior executive at O2. In other words, he’s worked on big projects like this before and has an international network to call on. Another is the involvement of Pekka A. Viljakainen, founder of the Finnish IT giant Tieto, a man with boundless energy and optimism, and a broad tech network. Viljakainen also made the Startup Village event feel much closer to a startup-event you might find anywhere in Europe or the US.

But perhaps most persuasive of all is the presence of Alexander Chernov, Vice President, External Communications and Advertising. Chernov is known in Russian circles as a man who gets things done. A former journalist, he became an executive at Coca-Cola in Russia but is better known as being part of the team that secured the Sochi nomination for the Winter Olympic Games (Sochi-2014) and the nomination of Russia for holding the FIFA World championship in 2018.

And Chernov points out that Skolkovo will not have the monopoly on Russia’s push towards a new innovation-friendly economy. He says the foundation is concentrating on touring its ideas and companies around Russia, most recently to 16 different centers: “There is innovation everywhere in Russia, we just need to expose it” he says.

But ultimately, he says, the Skolkovo project will be Russia’s flagship, and it has unprecedented backing at the highest levels. As he told me:

“The demand of partners is so high and the commitment from the government is so strong that they all are pushing for this to work. Every time a high-ranking official visits Skolkovo there is usually very strong criticism that, for instance, the university is not yet built or the TechnoPark is not yet functioning. They do not accept excuses. That’s the environment we’re operating in.”

And Chernov shrugs of the recent political hiccups surrounding the project: “We are enjoying extremely strong government support. Yes, Mr Surkov was very cooperative and supportive. He decided to leave the government. But I believe we will have a new liaison person with the government.”

On the police “raid” to investigate Skolkovo’s spending, he declined to comment on the specifics of the case, saying there would be a statement when there was an outcome of the investigation. But he emphasized that it was not this which was occupying the Foundation’s minds, but the desire for Skolkovo to get on with its work and create success. “It’s nice to think we are the Prime Minister’s project, but we still have to deliver.”

Yes, Skolkovo still has to produce results, of that there is no doubt. And heavy-handed, top-down initiatives like this nearly always look entirely alien to Western eyes in places like Silicon Valley, where government involvement in big technology projects would be viewed with surprise, to put it mildly.

That might of course be forgetting how even Western governments once invested heavily invested in new technology, especially post WWII â€" moves which often kick-started the private sector environment we know today. Many emerging countries â€" Cyberjaya in Malaysia and Dubai Internet City â€" have similar projects to Skolkovo. It is by no means alone. Even Israel’s highly successful startup ecosystem was largely kick started by the government-backed Yozma programme.

Indeed, could Skolkovo become a sort of Russian Tech Trojan Horse, promoting startups, innovation and entrepreneurship across the country?

Standing in a wind-swept building site, the bleep-bleep of cranes and lorries echoing in the distance, it’s hard to say. Certainly, it would be a shame if it became a Russian Albatross.

But to view the whole Skolkovo project as a mere building site could be missing the point of the enormous resources available to the team there and the continuing political capital it enjoys. Assuming the broad international involvement of some of the world’s biggest tech companies continues, Skolkovo has plenty in its favor right now.

With an open door to international partners and an ultra green city, Skolkovo is a universe away from the ‘Naukograds’ of old. But the sentiment is eerily similar. The question is, could Skolkovo produce the sort of ‘Great Leap Forward’ Russia has been looking for? It looks like we’re about to find out.

Hasselhoff Has Germany, Path Has France

As one is wont to do, I was checking the French iOS app store rankings this a.m. just to make sure that my old mainstay app “ameli, l’Assurance Maladie” was still in spot No. 3 when sacrebleu! â€" Path was the No. 1 free app in France.

Now I’ve never really clicked with Path, rarely checked in with people there (it’s super awkward to name drop digitally) and have too much FOMO to stomach scrolling through all the things you people are doing on weekends without me. Though I found the redesign to be a vast improvement, I didn’t actually use the app at all until people began to say things like, “Did you see all the crazy stuff he/she posted on Path?”

So I log in every once in a while to use it, morbidly curious, thinking that only people in my rarefied circle use it to brag or complain about their personal lives off of Twitter. Because of laziness, I still use Twitter to complain and brag.

There are plenty of things I don’t use that are popular (WhatsApp?), but I’m particularly fascinated by Path’s erratic growth. Seriously, how does one go from No. 740 in overall French apps on May 8th to No. 1 on May 11th? Dave Morin confirms that the startup isn’t using cost-per-install networks like AppGratis or any other sort of paid promotions other than a small number of Facebook ads, which he maintains are not particularly effective. And although the app was accused of being overly spammy and recently blocked from Facebook’s social graph API, it (with the exception of the calls) isn’t more egregious in its outreach than something like Facebook.

In fact, I just onboarded myself again to Path to test whether it was handsy with the invite process and have come to the conclusion that if you’re any sort of smart person, it doesn’t “spam” your friends. As in, don’t check “Invite Friends” if you don’t want to do that and it won’t invite them. Do you need me to repeat that?

Anyways, God only knows what Path is doing to get users in France if it’s not paying for promotion (we’re working on a whole ‘nother story about this). It might be some sort of David Hasselhoff/Germany-effect where the product market fit across cultures is weird but works. I’ve been asking the French I know why they think this is happening, and, though many of them have no idea, French blogger Gregory Pouy came up with some theories.

In his own (Note: French-as-a-first-language) words:

There is one thing that it is VERY important to understand about France: you’ve got Paris on one side and the rest and the other side. For sure we have other big cities but interestingly enough, Paris is one of the major city for Twitter but is France is rank 17 (I think). I believe Path is big in Paris (not in France) and some other cities which is slightly different.

Then, I believe that France is a mature market (especially Paris) when talking about social media, which mean:

- A need to go private especially that in France we have really true strong relationship.

- Directly connected to the way Facebook evolved (this is not private anymore) and people are a bit fed up/ afraid and just use Facebook for what it became (a mix between professional and personal).

- Twitter is too complicated for many.

Smartphone penetration:

- In France, mobile operator are supporting the smartphone so you don’t have to pay for it â€" I think the penetration rate is comparable to the U.S. (50%)

PR:

- A lot of bloggers talked about Path (me for example) as a solution for having a private relationships for true real friends

For example I wrote several article but one in a major french Newspaper called Le Figaro on that specific subject pushing Path.

Also there is a strong trend amongst teenagers since a month as they don’t want to share private stuff in a place where their parents are.

As others have pointed out, Path has a hard row to hoe over the past three years, having to engender trust as a “private” social network while quickly demonstrating venture-validating growth. Le chemin de la réussite a de nombreux nids de poule.

Path brings people closer together. Guided by the belief that mobile technology will fundamentally change the cultural, social, and economic landscape, Path focuses on simplicity, quality, and privacy to provide the best mobile personal networking service in the world. Path was designed with the people you love, your closest friends and family, in mind. It’s a trusted, intimate environment like your dinner table at home. 5 star rated, top 10 ranked, Path is loved by tens of millions of...

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Confronting The Reality Of US Broadband Performance

Editor’s note: Richard Bennett is a Senior Fellow with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and co-author of ITIF’s 2013 report, “The Whole Picture: Where America’s Broadband Networks Really Stand.” Follow him on Twitter @iPolicy.

We’ve all heard the story: America’s broadband networks are second-rate. We pay exorbitant prices for shoddy service because broadband providers print money and hold innovation in a death grip. While America languishes, our competitors in Europe and Asia are racing ahead to a user-generated content utopia. The only way forward is a government takeover, or, failing that, a massive dose of regulation.

So go a number of recent treatises such as Susan Crawford’s “Captive Audience”; works by like-minded Internet aficionados Tim Wu, Lawrence Lessig, and Yochai Benkler; reports by public interest advocacy groups Free Press, Public Knowledge, and the Open Technology Institute; as well as numerous tech bloggers.

The only problem with this story is that it’s almost completely untrue.

Granted, as recently as the late aughts, the story was plausible: In those dark days, our rankings in terms of both broadband subscription growth and speeds were falling. Increased demand for data capacity and a technology lull combined to push our average Internet connection speed down to 22nd in the world at the end of 2009, according to Akamai’s measurement of “Average Connection Speed.” Since then, the speeds of such shared connections have nearly doubled from 3.9Mbps to 7.2 Mbps, raising the U.S. to eighth place.

U.S. Average Connection Speed per Akamai

Akamai’s Average Connection Speed measures individual TCP streams over IP addresses that are often shared â€" and doesn’t sum simultaneous streams â€" so it’s more a measure of usage than of network capacity, however. To see the capacity of the underlying broadband network, it’s best to look at Akamai’s “Average Peak Connection Speed” metric.

The distinction between these two metrics flummoxed Ars Technica’s Cyrus Farivar, who maintains that the shared-connection measurement is the more meaningful indication of “user experience.” Farivar is clearly wrong about that, and Akamai’s “Average Peak Connection Speed” is the better indicator of network improvement.

The Average Peak measurement shows performance in the U.S. tripling over the past five years, up to 31.5Mbps in Q4 2012. We don’t know where the U.S. ranked on this scale before mid-2010, but it’s currently 13th. The tripling of network capacity combined with a doubling of “shared speed” says that networks are getting faster, as the U.S. is simultaneously using them more heavily

Average Peak Connection Speed per Akamai

America’s broadband speeds are improving for two reasons: first, broadband providers have installed newer technologies, such as Verizon FiOS, DOCSIS 3 cable modems, and AT&T U-verse that are four or more times faster than the technologies they replaced; and second, users have begun to demonstrate a preference for higher-speed broadband by opting into higher-speed upgrades. Some upgrades are costly and others are not; Comcast recently doubled the speeds of most of their Bay Area broadband plans for free.

While our networks are improving, we’re retaining low prices for entry-level broadband plans first noticed by the Berkman Center’s “Next Generation Connectivity” report: the U.S. is currently second in the price of broadband for entry-level users. The nation is also third in network-based competition, second in the fiber-optic installation rate, first in the adoption of next-generation LTE, ahead of Europe in broadband adoption, and doing quite well in Internet-based services.

While U.S. cable TV companies still lead telcos in new broadband subscriptions, fiber-based telco broadband is gaining subscribers at a faster rate than cable. U.S. broadband providers are profitable, but much less so than Europe’s or Korea’s, where applications like YouTube must pay ISPs for access to residential customers. Significantly, we’ve gained ground on competitors despite an enormous disadvantage stemming from America’s very low urban population densities, which make U.S. broadband networks much more expensive to build and maintain than those in most nations.

Amazingly, the European Commission’s top telecom regulator, Vice President Neelie Kroes, tells a story much like the tales of woe we hear from American broadband critics, but with the roles reversed: Kroes laments Europe’s declining standing relative to the U. S., where “high-speed networks now pass more than 80 percent of homes; a figure that quadrupled in three years.” To facilitate private investment in networks, Europe has developed a “Ten Step Plan” for a single, cross-border market for broadband that mimics our interstate, facilities-based broadband market.

But these facts are glossed over by the critics of U.S. broadband policy in large part because they directly contradict their neo-populist narrative of rapacious, profit-hungry broadband monopolists gouging consumers. The long tradition of American populism distrusts private provision of “essential” services and refuses to believe that competition can ever be brought to bear on infrastructure markets. Crawford in particular relies too heavily on a strained analogy with electricity, a genuine natural monopoly that is as different from the competing information networks we have in the broadband space as any network can possibly be: Can you get electric service over the air?

Critics also come up short on research, generally refusing to consult updated primary sources in favor of blog posts and news articles from inside the echo chamber that simply reinforce the traditional narrative. “Confirmation bias” is rampant in broadband criticism.

Broadband advocates would do better to focus their efforts on real problems, such as our dismally low level of interest in the Internet, the primary reason non-subscribers give for refusing to go online. Ideally, these efforts would be combined with initiatives to increase computer ownership among the poor â€" the second reason so few Americans use the Internet. The world’s high-subscription nations, such as Korea and Singapore, aren’t the price leaders for entry-level Internet services as we are, but they’ve led successful outreach efforts to spread computer ownership, digital literacy, and Internet awareness across their entire populations.

Getting all of America online is a goal that all Americans can support regardless of party creed or ideological doctrine. If we can make as much progress with online participation as we’ve made with speed, Europe will have a second Internet crisis on its hands.

AngelPad's Sixth Batch Of Startups Includes Companies Working On Drones, Storage, And More

AngelPad, the San Francisco-based accelerator founded by former Googler Thomas Korte, held its sixth demo day yesterday. I wasn’t there (I know, it’s super-embarrassing), but I did get to meet with Korte and partner Carine Magescas today to talk about the newest batch of companies.

Magescas said that in the three years since AngelPad was founded, “the premise of what we had in the beginning has been validated.” That premise breaks down to three main ideas, she said. First, she and Korte “push [the startups] really hard.” That’s particularly important in the company’s early stages, Korte said, because it can be hard for the founders to get honest feedback from their family and friends, and because making a relatively small change can have a big effect on a startup’s ultimate trajectory.

Another reason the partners might be particularly tough on the startups is because they’re investing their own money. There’s no separate fund â€" at least not yet. (When I asked, Korte said, “There hasn’t been a fund to date,” followed by what may or may not have been a significant pause.)

Second, Magescas said, “We are a really small family.” Twelve startups were chosen from thousands of applicants. The first AngelPad group had eight companies, and there was one with 15, but they’ve settled on a dozen for the last few classes. That allows the AngelPad team to spend a lot of time working one-on-one with each company.

“I feel like it’s better to spend more time with less companies,” Korte said, adding that he’s realized that having a long list of well-known mentors isn’t as useful. There are outside experts who come in and give talks on a specific subject, but it really falls to Korte and Magescas to work closely with the founders. When you have too many different people offering “cookie cutter advice,” Korte said, “It hurts more than it helps.”

Third, they said AngelPad has always had a strong focus on business-to-business companies. In fact, there’s not a single consumer-focused company in the current class, according to Korte â€" some of them might offer consumer products as part of their business, but none of them are focused on building large-scale, free services that make money from advertising. At the same time, Magescas said they’re open to consumer startups, they just have to be “really good.”

So that’e the vision. Here are the companies, in alphabetical order:

Audience.fm uses data from existing music services to help bands and marketers reach their desired audience. For example, if a band was making a tour stop in San Francisco, Audience.fm could identify the band’s biggest fans, and they could offer free or discounted tickets.

Boxbee is a storage startup that delivers boxes to its customers. You fill the boxes with whatever you want to store, then Boxee picks up them up. It won the best new startup prize at this year’s Launch conference.

Chasm.io is a content marketing network, where influencers and brands share content that they want to see promoted. Rather than getting paid for sharing sponsored content, it’s more of a quid pro quo system, where influencers are rewarded for successful sharing with points that they can redeem to share content of their own.

DroneDeploy has built software for commercial drone operators (just to reemphasize â€" commercial drone operators, not military ones). The founders are former Googlers with machine
learning PhDs from Cambridge and Edinburgh. We covered the company here.

Fieldwire is a mobile task management system designed for workers who are out in the field. For example, it could be used by a team of construction workers while they’re on a construction site.

HumanAPI aims to build an API for accessing all the data that’s being gathered on various health devices, sensors, and services. So instead of figuring out how to work with dozens of different devices, a medical provider could just pull data from HumanAPI.

Iterable is an email marketing startup founded former Google and Twitter engineers. Customers can test different emails and also personalize the messages to each user without any coding.

Pogoseat integrates with existing ticketing solutions and apps, allowing them to offer seat upgrades. Partners already include Ticketmaster, the Golden State Warriors, and other NBA teams.

Roobiq aims to build a layer of voice commands and natural language processing on top of existing CRM systems, so a salesperson who’s out taking meetings could update their CRM from their phone without slowing down to type.

SensorTower has built a marketing platform for mobile app developers, allowing those developers to track and improve their rankings on different search keywords.

TheShelf is a collaboration platform where fashion brands can interact with fashion bloggers. There are already 1,500 bloggers on the platform.

TrulyWireless has built an enterprise phone system that’s cheaper than traditional systems and runs entirely on smartphones.

Interested investors can find the AngelList profile of each startup here.

AngelPad is a mentorship program founded by a team of ex-Googlers to help web-technology startups build better products, attract additional funding and ultimately grow more successful businesses. AngelPad provides founders with funding, mentorship and the chance to work alongside other great founders in San Francisco.

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Thomas Korte is an angel investor and advisor to early-stage internet startups and the founded AngelPad, a startup incubator in San Francisco. Prior, Thomas worked at Google for 7 years. His roles there included International Product Marketing Manager, European Search Agency Business Lead and most recently Google Evangelist. He is the co-author of several patents related to improving efficiencies in search advertising and local search results.

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Bio-Hackers, Get Ready

When I speak to technical founders, they often look back with fondness to days of tinkering with a Commodore 64 or Hypercard.

But perhaps tomorrow’s founders will experiment with a very different kind of code â€" the genetic code that underlies how everything from one-celled organisms to humans develop and behave.

A pair of companies in San Francisco’s SOMA neighborhood and Tel Aviv are positioning themselves as the “Wintel” of the bio-hacking era. One company, called Genome Compiler, builds software for designing synthetic life forms, while the other, Cambrian Genomics, is experimenting with ways to cheaply laser print DNA.

Like the old Microsoft-Intel relationship of the PC era, they believe they have the symbiotic relationship necessary to usher in a new era where anybody can inexpensively create their own life forms. Genome Compiler is backed with $3 million in funding, including $2 million from Autodesk. Cambrian is funded by Founders Fund, Felicis Ventures and Draper Associates.

“We are democratizing creation,” said Genome Compiler co-founder Omri Amirav-Drory. “Cells are nothing more than a computer, running a program and the program is the genetic code. The code is DNA. The software are the chromosomes. The hardware is the wetware.”

Using Drory’s software, a person can load up existing sequences for different life forms like plants and then manipulate them by inserting or taking out various genes. It corrects the code for basic errors like not having three codes for an amino acid or having a stop and a start code in the wrong place.

“Wouldn’t it be nice in the future if someone could just load up a tree’s genetic code, drag another app from a file and make it glow in the dark?” said Amirav-Drory, who was a post-doc at Stanford University after completing a Ph.D. in biochemistry at Tel Aviv University in Israel.

In theory they could eventually build an app store where a Genome Compiler user could buy access to genetic code that might make a plant sells like a banana. One Kickstarter project which I wrote about last month is already using the software to create a glow-in-the-dark plant. The seemingly far-fetched aspiration is to eventually replace street lights with the more renewable solution of glowing trees.

Environmental considerations were what originally drew Amirav-Drory toward starting Genome Compiler.

“We live in a civilization that is totally dependent on finite resources like oil and coal to produce everything around us…. It’s unsustainable and dangerous. What will our children have?” he said in a talk at the Las Vegas Downtown Project earlier this year. “We should had look at life â€" living things have been around for at least 4 billion years. They can produce everything we get from fossil fuels.”

He hopes that people will use Genome Compiler to create bacteria or plants that could solve energy sustainability issues. Drory says the Genome Compiler software is free and that he has a little more than 3,000 users. He said a person would probably need at least a bachelor’s degree in a biology-related field to effectively used Genome Compiler.

One you’ve designed and the compiled the genetic code, however, you’ve got to print it and insert it into existing cells.

That’s where Cambrian Genomics comes in. While Amirav-Drory is a bit more buttoned-down, Cambrian’s CEO Austen Heinz is the rebel.

While his day-to-day considerations are about running his startup and perfecting techniques like laser pulse catapulting strands of DNA, he’ll make off-hand comments about a not-too-distant future where the technology’s he’s developing could help people design humans or help gay couples have their own genuine biological children by mixing and matching their DNA in software.

“Our pricing is designed to change behavior,” Heinz said. “Every biology lab in the world will become more virtualized. They’ll design code on a computer and then print out DNA. A biologist on a small budget should be able to design 50,000 different constructs at a time.”

Heinz didn’t offer more details on current pricing though, except to say that he has some early paying clients.

While he does use genome sequencers that you can buy from companies like Illumina, he’s also built his own sequencer that allows you to recover the underlying DNA instead of destroying it in the sequencing process. Then he uses an older technique called laser-pulse catapulting to eject copies of DNA. A client can then use time-tested and older techniques like PCR (Polymerase chain reaction) to copy this new synthetic DNA and then insert it into cells.

The advantage of using lasers over more conventional techniques like chemical synthesis is that the error rate should be a lot lower.

“Cameras, lasers, computers and software are reliable,” he said. “Those things can all break. But if anything breaks, it’s easy for us to change the part or to just fix it and get it back up and running. Their failure modes are predictable.”

Both Genome Compiler and Cambrian Genomics tie into a broader trend affecting the entire field around genetic data. Sequencing costs are falling faster than Moore’s Law, and so there are a host of companies and VCs that are betting that this new wealth of data could lend itself to all sorts of new innovations around software meeting genetic code.

“Sequencing a whole human genome cost $3 billion and took 15 years to complete just 10 years ago,” said Amirav-Drory. “Today you can do it in an afternoon for a few thousand dollars. More and more, we’re digitizing biology. We’re reading the genome and putting it in a computer.”

When he started his post-doctoral fellowship, it was $2 per base pair to print DNA. But by the time he left four years later, it had fallen by about 75 percent to 25 cents a pair.

Amirav-Drory is hoping that these lower costs will lead to all sorts of new kinds of bacteria or plants to could be used to solve the world’s ecological problems.

“The best thing about living things is that they can scale to meet the magnitude of our challenges,” he said in a recent talk.

But what about the regulatory concerns around unleashing a whole new host of synthetic bacteria and life forms into the environment?

As of now, projects like the Kickstarter glowing plant are covered by one or more of three U.S. regulatory agencies. The FDA would oversee anything digestible while the USDA and the EPA would look for organisms that would have properties of pests and could potentially crowd out more natural, beneficial plants or animals. Cambrian and other DNA printing companies already screen out incoming orders for ones that contain harmful sequences from the known library of viruses and bacteria.

It is a brave new world, though.

Aiming To Dominate Mobile Ad Attribution, HasOffers Raises $9.4M Round Led By Accel

HasOffers, a startup that helps mobile app developers see which ad efforts are actually paying off, is announcing that it has raised a $9.4 million round of funding led by Accel Partners.

The company was founded in 2009 â€" the product that it initially built, and the one that’s still highlighted on the HasOffers website, is a system that helps ad networks and agencies manage their performance-based programs. (Those agencies and ad networks include Bucksense, Tapjoy, and Sponsorpay.)

However, CEO Peter Hamilton said the team realized that mobile advertisers were facing a similar problem, so it built a product called MobileAppTracking, allowing developers to see where app installs, engagement, and purchases actually come from. So as publishers run ad campaigns, they can see which social networks, publishers, and ad networks are giving them the best results, and they can adjust their efforts accordingly.

Rich Wong, the Accel partner who’s joining the HasOffers board, definitely sounded more excited about the mobile side of the business when I spoke to him today. (Wong’s past investments include Google-acquired AdMob and Angry Birds-maker Rovio.) He said “some of the biggest spenders in the Accel portfolio, people who are on the cutting edge of doing customer acquisition,” such as HotelTonight, Spotify, and Trulia, were already using MobileAppTracking. (Other customers include Yahoo, Zynga, Pandora, and Square.)

Wong also argued that the company is part of towards a broader shift in mobile advertising. He said the industry’s first phase, was the early “walled garden” period, followed by a second stage dominated by ad networks like AdMob, Quattro (acquired by Apple), and Millennial (now public). The third, current phase is all about the shift to programmatic buying â€" in Wong’s words, “the machines are taking over.” In this phase, developers are running campaigns with a wide range of different sources, so they need a better attribution system.

And that system needs to be independent of any of the existing ad networks, so it can measure all sources of traffic effectively. After all, Wong said, many networks have their own attribution systems, and while they might work fine, publishers probably don’t feel entirely confident that AdMob’s can report accurately about one of its competitors, or vice versa. That point about independence came up repeatedly during our conversation, with Wong emphasizing that HasOffers is a software business, not a company that’s selling ads.

“One of the reasons we’re able to do what we do with over 150 ad networks and publishers is that we’re not competitive with them,” Hamilton added.

Until now, Hamitlon said HasOffers has been bootstrapped and profitable, with 79 employees, so it didn’t necessarily need the money. At the same time, he said the mobile ad tracking product has really taken off: “We saw an opportunity to put our stake in the ground as the attribution analytics platform, and we didn’t want it to pass us by.” For now, that means continuing to invest heavily on the technology and product side of the business.

In addition to Accel, RealNetworks founder Rob Glaser and Founder’s Co-op partner Chris Devore also invested. (Glaser and Devore are both based in Seattle, as is HasOffers.) Even though HasOffers is a bit older than your normal Series A company, and even though Accel has a separate fund for investing in bootstrapped, mature companies, this specific investment came from Accel’s early-stage fund: “Even though it has characteristics of a ‘growth-stage business’, we looked at it as an early-stage Series A.”

HasOffers is a Seattle based company that develops performance tracking technology for online advertising campaigns. Their affiliate tracking software allows online businesses to track and manage their own affiliate programs In less than two years, HasOffers disrupted affiliate tracking technology, gaining incredible adoption over 7,000 affiliate networks. The current SaaS based affiliate management solution has disrupted tracking standards by providing a cost effective, flexible, and scalable model for any business model. Learn more about their tracking solution...

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Accel Partners, Sunrun, Qwilt, Rovio Entertainment, Dealer.com, Parature, Atlassian, MoPub, MobileSpaces, Covad Communications, Unwired Planet, AdMob, McKinsey & Company, GetJar, Inc.

Richard joined Accel in 2006 with an interest in software, mobile and internet services. Rich led Accel’s investment in Angry Birds (Rovio) and serves on the boards of Atlassian, the leader in software for streamlining product development; SunRun, the leading provider of residential solar power; MoPub, a leader in mobile ad platforms; Dealer.com, a leading vertical SaaS company in automotive, MobileSpaces, a mobile enterprise security company, Qwilt, a provider of video optimization technology; Getjar Networks, the largest mobile development...

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As a Partner and CMO at HasOffers.com, Peter led all marketing efforts since the company’s creation in 2009. Growing to over 10K clients in less than three years, named “Service Provider of the Year” by the WTIA in 2010 and named “Best Bootstrapped Startup” by GeekWire in 2012. HasOffers continues to take the lead through constant technology innovation in performance advertising. In 2011, Peter contributed to the concept and development of MobileAppTracking.com, the leading provider for tracking performance advertising...

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The First Six Months Developing For The Computer On My Face

Editor’s note: Jon Gottfried is a Developer Evangelist at Twilio, Co-Founder of the Hacker Union, and a StartupBus Conductor. Follow him on Twitter @jonmarkgo.

Being one of the first cyborgs in the world, I have been privy to a unique set of bizarre experiences that have led to some early observations and theories about the future of Google Glass and wearable technology.

At Glass Foundry SF, among the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, the New York Times and Hearst, was a rag-tag group of independent developers building Ice Breaker: myself, Song Zheng, and Rajiv Makhijani. When I pitched the idea of creating a Google Glass version of the dorm-room game Assassins, I thought it would be an interesting tongue-in-cheek jab at the Terminator-esque form of this new piece of technology. I could not have imagined it would turn into a six-month secret project slated to launch at one of the largest tech conferences of the year. We were building the first (and only) game for Google Glass. We had a six-month head start, early access to the Google Glass Mirror API and Glass devices as early as they were available.

Developing applications for Glass is actually more similar to building a website than it is to building an Android application.

Let’s start off by talking about the reality of what it is like to develop applications for Google Glass. Like many of you, I expected it to be very similar to building mobile applications for Android. In fact, I began learning to build Android applications in preparation. My efforts were for naught, because the Mirror API is a RESTful web service. This means that developing applications for Glass is actually more similar to building a website than it is to building an Android application.

Once a user logs in to your application, they grant you permission to push “cards” to their Glass devices and to receive responses from it. It is purely asynchronous, and is not designed for real-time applications, such as an augmented-reality game or a Call of Duty-style, heads-up display. This will likely change with the upcoming release of the GDK, but for the moment you are restricted to building asynchronous applications. No problem for Twitter or Tumblr, where there is no need for instantaneous interactions. However, it certainly puts a damper on many of the science-fiction-esque predictions for Glass.

But there are still many reasons why I am excited about Glass and will continue to develop applications for it:

1. It gives us all a nerd boner.

Developers love technology for the sake of technology. People flock to line up for product launches with the same excitement that a tween feels when they spot Bieber for the first time. Glass is exclusive, mysterious and futuristic. As the first wearable-computing platform to have even a hint of mass availability, it makes us feel as if we are truly living in the future. You could meet a thousand Valley founders all creating the “next big social network,” but no amount of SoLoMo innovation can match the excitement or fear that we will all soon be addicted to The Game, only to be saved by a young Wil Wheaton.

We have the opportunity to create the canonical user experience for wearable computers.

2. We are defining the future.

As developers, we have the unique opportunity to quite literally define the experiences that consumers have with technology. The first third-party applications for the iPhone set the stage for all mobile apps to follow. The same rings true for Glass. Whether or not the product itself is successful, we have the opportunity to create the canonical user experience for wearable computers. In the future, when there are both iGlass and Microsoft Senior Professional Heads-Upâ„¢ Displays for Business, they will all be modeled off of these initial applications for Glass â€" consciously or not.

3. There is money to be made.

While it is unclear whether there will be mass consumer adoption of Glass, it is obvious that this will be a valuable platform. Imagine being a real estate agent walking down the block and seeing information on all of the homes for sale without having to shuffle around with folders and papers. Imagine being a doctor who can immediately see the medical history for an unconscious ER patient without having to manually look it up on a computer and waste precious life-saving seconds. We are not yet comfortable interacting with these new cyborgs in social situations, but I have no doubt that there are an immense number of professional uses that will prove to be more valuable than the potentially awkward social stigmas surrounding them.

4. It is exclusive and attractive.

We are nerds. We have traditionally been at the bottom of the social pyramid. Sure, nerds might be the new rock stars in some circles. But the only thing cooler than a rock star nerd is a rock star nerd wearing a $1,500 pair of glasses that very few people in the world have even heard of, let alone seen in person. A friend of mine described it as the Air Jordans of the 21st century. Whether you are trying to network or get a date, Google Glass is truly one of the best conversation starters I have ever seen. And I promise you, the Glass Explorers are doing both.

This is a new frontier and we are still defining the social norms involved with wearing a computer on your face.

5. There is hype.

The press loves Glass. For now at least, every application is the first X for Glass. My app GlassTweet was the first Twitter client for Glass. Ice Breaker was the first game for Glass. And what reporter doesn’t want to be first? It is a perfect opportunity for a developer to build a reputation as a Glass expert, and I have already met many developers attempting to do exactly this.

There are always skeptics. And they would be right to be skeptical â€" this is a new frontier and we are still defining the social norms involved with wearing a computer on your face. Some have even proposed that providing developers with Glass before the general public will make it seem too nerdy or awkward â€" what average person concerned about their appearance wants to be associated with a naked geek in the shower?

I would argue that Google took the only option available to them. The only truly scalable products of the future will be developer platforms. Facebook, Twitter, Twilio, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Arduino â€" all of these products have been successful in large part by embracing and empowering their developer communities. No company is omniscient enough to imagine every potential use of their products.

This gives developers an immense amount of power to define the success or failure of an entire product line. If they innovate and create amazing experiences, it can pave the way for mass consumer adoption of a product, and if they fail or are mistreated by their platform providers, they can create a product wasteland. It is a symbiotic relationship, and ultimately these developers in the Explorer program will define the consumer success of Glass. People will forget about Showergate if the applications on Glass are useful or fun enough to outweigh the initial awkwardness associated with any new product.

All concerns aside, the hard truth that skeptics must face is that this is an inevitable evolution of computing. We will continue to debate the pros and cons of wearable technology for decades to come, but one thing is crystal clear: wearable technology is coming, it is inevitable, and Google is steamrolling a path to this unavoidable future.

Will you join me in defining this future or will you be defined by it?

50M Matches Strong, Hot Mobile Dating App Tinder Is Ready To Go Global, And Move Beyond Flirting

Digital dating is nothing to scoff at; it’s a big business, and it’s changed a lot of lives â€" mostly for the better. Yet, while dating has seen enormous progress during the Digital Era, there’s still a lot garbage out there, and the space is still mostly dominated by a handful of old names. A gaggle of dating sites and apps have appeared over the past five years, but few have had real staying power, and many have gone the way of the dinosaur.

While it’s still too early to make any pronouncements, it’s looking more and more like Tinder could buck the trend. Created by Hatch Labs â€" an LA-based startup backed by IAC, the same Barry Diller-led digital media giant that owns Match.com and OKCupid â€" Tinder has grown like a weed since it launched in October. A crazy, dating weed.

In part, that’s due to timing, and in part because Tinder is based on a familiar, throwback model, drawing on the same addictive formula behind Hot or Not. Essentially, it’s Hot or Not made mobile, casual and connected to Facebook, but rather than promising to introduce people to their one true soul partner/life mate, Tinder just wants to make it easier to flirt â€" and get you off your ass to meet people. In the real world.

By focusing on reducing the “creepiness” factor (always a relative term in dating, mind you), reducing spam and by targeting young people, Tinder has been able to find that elusive, exponential growth curve. (Unsurprisingly, it’s initial growth spike came from college campuses, and the average age of its users is still 23.)

It’s also fairly easy to use: It’s free, it doesn’t focus on building traditional profiles, instead pulling basic info from Facebook, is location-enabled, and matches users to other people nearby based on similar behavior, interests and so on. If you’re not interested, you can pass. If you are, it connects you with the other person, allowing you to chat and arrange a meeting offline.

Thanks to the above, the app has been seeing the same kind of growth that Facebook, Instagram and Twitter saw in the early days, Tinder co-founder and CEO Sean Rad tells us. But what does that mean, exactly? When we wrote about Tinder in early January, it had served one million matches and users had made 35 million profile ratings. Today, Rad says, Tinder has served 50 million matches and users have made 4.5 billion ratings.

So, while the team is keeping a tight lid on the number of downloads and users it’s attracted to date, from what we do know (and what we’ve been hearing from other sources), it’s safe to assume that both number well into the millions. And keep in mind: The app was released in late October.

Tinder also seems to be avoiding a common trend among popular mobile apps: High number of downloads, but comparatively low engagement. In Tinder’s case, Rad tells us that around 50 percent of users open the app once a day, while approximately 75 percent open the app once a week and around 85 percent use the app every month.

Based on this growth, rumors have been circulating for months now that claim Tinder is in the proces of raising a big round of outside funding, or is in the process of being acquired. At this point, the founder says, neither of those are true. While the company isn’t sharing how much it’s raised to date, we do know that IAC is it’s primary investor, and owns a minority stake in the business, having been the sole investor in its seed and series A rounds (which we hear total in the millions). And the startup was incubated within IAC.

IAC would likely love to own Tinder outright, as would others, but at this point the startup is resolved to stay independent, and go public rather than sell. Of course, there’s a long road ahead, and these things have a habit of changing. Furthermore, while Tinder has opted not to raise outside capital, our sources tell us that this hasn’t stopped venture capitalists from courting Tinder in every way possible.

With plenty of runway ahead and initial growth and scalability snags behind, Tinder has begun to focus more on product development as well as an area that will be key to its future: International markets. To date, 15 percent of Tinder users hail from outside the U.S., the CEO tells us, with the highest adoption coming from Canada, Australia, Brazil and Ireland. (In recent weeks, Rad says, Tinder was seeing 2,000 downloads/day in Brazil.)

Going forward, the team of 13 will begin its international growth efforts in the UK, Australia, Latin America, Germany, France and China, in particular. To do that, the company is working on additional language support, targeted marketing and hiring local reps in each of these countries. Rad also sees big opportunity for growth in Asia, thanks to the explosion of mobile adoption, and is currently working on partnerships that will help it move into Asian markets and localize the Tinder experience to native languages, networks and so on. (Like how to leverage the biggest Chinese and Asian social networks for authentication, as opposed to relying on Facebook, for example.)

Tinder has also been busy building tools that will help it follow through with its mission to solve social, discovery and networking problems outside the confines of dating. Today, for example, the startup is releasing a new feature called “Matchmaker,” which allows users to create matches between any two Facebook friends â€" for any purpose.

Once users establish that connection, the two friends can chat within Tinder without sharing their contact information. The idea is to create a casual, simple way to make an introduction, whether you want to set two friends up on a date or make professional connections. Rad tells us that Matchmaker is anonymous and solves the awkward problem of introducing people and then being included on the resulting thread â€" an annoyance often experienced in email and Facebook intros.

With Matchmaker, the introducer doesn’t have to be removed from the thread, they can send the message to the two people they want to connect, and that’s it. If the recipient isn’t on Tinder, they’ll see that they get a message on Facebook, and they can then quickly create a Tinder login if they want to see the post.

Another cool feature of Matchmaker is that the person who makes the introduction can see if the match is active and they can get a sense of their success rate. Rad assures me that this feature is intended to be high level so that it’s not creepy, allowing users to get just enough of a sense of the activity level of the intros they curate so that they can check back in (or send a reminder) if the conversation goes silent.

Again, the idea is that, while there are plenty of media through which people can make digital introductions, those connections tend to carry more weight if they’re friend-approved. If that intro comes from a close friend, you’re more likely to follow through on it than if not. Of course, there’s the question of whether or not people will want to make introductions in a professional context through a networking that’s primarily associated with dating. For this reason, the startup is launching the feature in beta to test it out and to see if it catches on.

As part of this new release, Tinder is also making some improvements in the areas where its user experience has been less-than-impressive. In particular, many users have complained that the app’s sorting algorithm has matched them with teenage or underage users. (Not cool, Tinder, not cool.) So, in this release, Tinder now includes age filtering, so that users can select their preferred age range, along with making some general improvements to the accuracy of its matching algorithm and improving the speed of chat within the app.

As of now, Tinder remains exclusively an iPhone app, but the CEO tells us that the team is working on an Android version, which will be ready “within the next few months.” The team also has plans to develop tablet apps, but don’t expect Tinder to show up on the Web anytime soon. Tinder is going to remain mobile-centric for the foreseeable future.

In a crowded space, Tinder has, so far, managed to buck the trend and find that elusive, exponential growth curve. Of course, the next year will be critical. As growth inevitably levels out a bit, Tinder will have to keep evolving if it wants to avoid being another flash in the pan. International could hold the key to sustaining that growth, but it remains to be seen whether users will be willing to think of Tinder as more than a casual flirting and dating tool. That could be a tough sell, but if they get there, expect Tinder to stick around for awhile â€" and be on the receiving end of calls from every VC on the block.

For more, Find Tinder here.

Why Does Hollywood Hate The Future?

A few weeks ago, Chris Dixon tweeted something thought-provoking:

What were the last Hollywood movies you saw about technology & the future that were optimistic? They seem to be systematically dystopian.

I happened to be sitting in a movie theater waiting for Iron Man 3 to start, so I tried to come up with a good counter-example. It’s a lot harder than I thought it would be. Then the pre-movie trailers starting playing. The new Will Smith (and son) flick, After Earth: dystopia. The new Guillermo del Toro flick, Pacific Rim: dystopia. Even the new Superman flick, Man of Steel, could be classified as a technological dystopia (more below).

Sure, there are some films â€" mainly smaller indies â€" that in some ways are starting to buck the trend. But overall, Dixon (and Peter Thiel, who Dixon says he got the idea from) are right: Hollywood seems to hate technology. Why?

My initial thought is simply that dystopia sells. It’s the same reason why the mainstream media covering technology tends to harp on the downsides of new tech, sometimes to the point of fear mongering. They are tracking you! They want to know your location! They want to record you going to the bathroom!

Most people are predisposed to fear what they do not understand. Hollywood’s futuristic films are simply playing to this fear in the same way that horror films are packed with moments meant to startle you.

This is nothing new. In 1927, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis â€" the very first feature-length science fiction film â€" told of a 2026 where the lower class workers power the technology for the upper class. In 1951, The Day the Earth Stood Still saw aliens bring a giant robot to Earth that would destroy the planet if humans couldn’t get their act together. The 1960 version of The Time Machine (based on the H.G. Wells book) had technology (nuclear weapons) destroying civilization. 2001. A Clockwork Orange. Soylent Green. Alien. Blade Runner. The list goes on.

The difference is that we now live in a society where advanced technology permeates all of our lives. Nearly everyone now walks around with computers in their pockets that are far more powerful than the computers that filled up rooms just a few decades ago. Nearly the entirety of human knowledge is now just a few clicks or swipes away at any given moment. The vast majority of our recent technological breakthroughs, I think everyone would agree, have been overwhelmingly good for society.

And yet, Hollywood still seems sure that this is going to change. That at some point, our meddling with technology will create HAL 9000 or Skynet, and technology will turn on us.

The example I ended up tweeting back at Dixon as an answer to his thesis was Star Trek. As Grantland noted recently in looking back at the 25th anniversary of Star Trek: The Next Generation:

Gene Roddenberry’s guiding vision of the Star Trek franchise was, famously, that it would offer an optimistic vision of humanity’s future.

And that largely held true through The Next Generation television series:

The Soviet Union collapsed a couple of years into the filming of The Next Generation, and the show’s optimistic future became startlingly coterminous with the optimistic present of the George H.W. Bush administration. Where else but space could you find a thousand points of light? The grand adventure of the NCC-1701-D was no longer to spread civilization, or even defend it; it was just to keep the machinery oiled. Remember 1991, America?

But the recent Star Trek films are a bit different. While I always liked how plot of Star Trek First Contact revolved around making sure a man takes the first flight at warp speed in space to usher in an era of peace on Earth, the actions are kicked into motion by the threat of the Borg â€" perhaps the ultimate in dystopian technology â€" taking over the Earth.

The latest Star Trek franchise seems to take a mainly glitz and glam approach to technology â€" bright white decks on giant starships accentuated with lens flares galore! But there also exists plenty of tech that is also horribly destructive. “Red Matter”, for example.

I saw the latest film, Star Trek Into Darkness, last week. While I enjoyed it, many Trekkie diehards did not. Certainly there are plenty of elements that are more Top Gun than the idea of using technology for exploration. I mean â€" minor spoiler alert â€" we have some sort of ultra weapons developed in secret and powered by some vague futuristic technology. And the man with the most technological know-how gets booted off the ship at one point for not wanting to mess around with these things.

Iron Man is another interesting example. It’s seems to be about technology used for good â€" but only to combat technology used for evil. So it’s basically neutral.

Then there’s the forthcoming Man of Steel. You might think this has little to do with technology (or at least what we commonly think of as technology), but as The New York Times reveals in a profile of the film’s director:

The film also emphasizes the world of Krypton before its annihilation â€" a bleak, utilitarian planet with sophisticated if downright creepy technology â€" and the treachery of the Kryptonian villain Zod (Michael Shannon), who finds Kal-El on earth. The result is an unapologetic science-fiction spin on Superman, and while that may shatter audiences’ expectations for pure, unalloyed realism in “Man of Steel,” Mr. Snyder said this approach was built into the DNA of the character.

Why is Superman on Earth? Because technology has led to the destruction of his home planet. I can’t wait to see what the author views as “downright creepy”.

Minority Report is one of my favorite recent sci-fi films. While the future envisioned there doesn’t seem so bad (and the filmmakers went out of their way to make the futuristic world as feasible and realistic as possible), the underlying premise is still pretty dystopian. Also: eye-scanning tech to show you ads. Spider-like robots that scan everything. This sure sounds like The New York Times’ idea of hell.

Another Spielberg film, A.I., paints a peaceful, yet melancholy future where technology tries to but can’t quite replace elements of humanity. It’s far from Utopia. Especially when you consider that ultimately â€" again, spoiler alert â€" all our technology can’t save the human race from extinction at the hands of another ice age. Even though our technology, the robots, live on!

Speaking of robots, one of the best sci-fi films I’ve seen recently is Robot & Frank. It’s a decidedly smaller type of science fiction that focuses on an elderly man’s relationship with his caregiving robot. The film is actually quite sweet, but again, hardly a full-on endorsement of technology.

In Gattaca, we again find a fairly peaceful and advanced futuristic society. But the core technology of the film, DNA sequencing â€" something rapidly becoming a reality in our actual world â€" has led to a world with a whole new level of prejudices.

The Matrix, Avatar, Prometheus, now I’m just looking over films I own that fit the mold. All are either dystopian or a net-negative for technology. The most positive one I can find is Contact, which still has plenty of negative technological elements (and this is a film based on a book written by perhaps the quintessential science/technology optimist, Carl Sagan).

Where is the It’s a Wonderful Life set in 2150? Are a few scenes from Back to the Future Part II really the best we got?

Again, I think the answer is that we already live in a technological utopia of sorts. No, the world isn’t perfect, but the recent advances in technology have given us so much. And people go to the movies to escape reality. It’s just too bad that science fiction films have essentially become horror movies.

Sleep Tracking Startup Zeo Says Goodnight

One of the early pioneers in the Quantified Self movement has quietly gone out of business. Zeo, a leading maker of hardware and software used by consumers to track sleep and improve their health, has not been operating since the end of last year. A trustee has nearly completed the sale of all company assets. Zeo has been very quiet about the news up until now. In fact, Zeo’s website is still up and doesn’t mention the news.

Zeo was founded by three students at Brown University who had a passion for using the science of sleep and technology to improve people’s lives. The company introduced its first product, the Zeo Personal Sleep Coach in June 2009.

The following week, the first article mentioning the term “Quantified Self” was published in Wired magazine. While the article didn’t mention Zeo, it did claim “a new culture of personal data was taking shape.” And that every facet of life from sleep to mood to pain was becoming trackable. “Even sleep â€" a challenge to self-track, obviously, since you’re unconscious â€" is yielding to the skill of the widget maker.”

In 2011, the widget maker Zeo introduced a mobile version to its Sleep Manager product line. By wearing a special headband, with sensors to measure electrical current, the Zeo could track different phases of sleep, such as Light, Deep and REM sleep, in addition to awake time. This data was then sent to an iPhone, iPod, or Android phone, and could be automatically uploaded to a personal and private online sleep database. This data along with some analytical tools could then be used to help improve your sleep and health.

What Went Wrong

Former CEO, Dave Dickinson, who lead the company for the past 5 years, tells TechCrunch the problem was not the brand or the product. In fact, the company was growing before it shut down.

Dickinson says the problem was the business model. “The business model is more important than the brand. Consumer health devices are a very capital intensive business. You have to find enough money to address the consumer, funds to address the physicians, and also the retailers, and that’s up and above the device business having to fund inventory.”

Zeo had two business model options on the revenue side. Become a SAAS-like business with subscriptions and recurring revenue or make enough money from a customer who bought just one unit. But that was very difficult when the company started pricing its mobile product at $99, with ‘sub-optimal’ profit margins.

The Newton, Massachusetts-based company had raised more than $30 million over eight years. Dickinson says raising capital was not the problem.

Sleep Tracking As A Commodity

Another problem for Zeo was that sleep tracking became a commodity. Devices like the FitBit, lark, and Jawbone Up use an accelerometer to determine sleep and awake cycles, using wrist actigraphy. These products brand their products as sleep trackers just like Zeo.

Dickinson says Zeo had peer reviewed scientific studies, including one published in the Journal of Sleep Research, showing his technology was 7/8th as accurate as data from the a sleep lab, considered to be the gold standard for measuring sleep. The study also says data from wrist actigraphy to measure tiny motions in devices are much less accurate. But that didn’t seem to matter for enough consumers.

The Competition

Dickinson says he admires what the Fitbit and others like it have done. Those devices are not limited to one health issue like sleep, which was another problem for Zeo. Those other products work for different health and wellness areas, such as the well established desire to lose weight and become physically fit. Consumers already spend billions of dollars to achieve those goals. And they are already educated and motivated to improve their weight and fitness.

Part of Zeo’s business model required it to educate the consumer on the importance of sleep and how sleep awareness and data can improve your health. Arianna Huffington, Editor-in-Chief of the Huffington Post, our AOL sister site, has been a crusader on the importance of sleep to your health. But according to Dickinson, “sleep is still lagging behind as important to your wellness. So in that respect, Zeo was early in terms of its mission.”

The Product

I used the device for several months last year and thought it was amazing. While wearing the headband took some getting used to, for me and my wife, the data it revealed was eye-popping. In addition to learning that I wasn’t getting enough sleep, which I knew already, I learned about the different types of sleep I was getting.

Most nights, I would get a half hour to an hour of “Deep Sleep” (dark green in the chart below) after going to bed. This is the phase of sleep the helps you feel restored and refreshed.

I would also see several periods of REM sleep, important for overall mental health, mood, and the ability to retain knowledge. The bulk of my time asleep, like most people, was spent in “Light Sleep,” which is better than not sleeping but doesn’t do as much for my health as Deep or REM sleep.

I was able to see graphics like this on my iPhone in the morning.

Here’s a good night with a sleep score of 90 out of 100 and more than 8 hours of sleep.

And here’s a bad night, with a score of 47 with just 4 and a half hours of total sleep.

If I woke up in the morning during REM sleep, it was hard to get out of bed. If I didn’t get enough Deep Sleep, I didn’t feel I had a good night sleep.

Zeo claimed the real value of the program was I could get personalized online sleep coaching. But this required logging in to the website and entering more information about my sleep and other variables I wanted to track. If I could have entered the data right on my iPhone, I would have likely used it more. Since it required logging in on the website, it proved too much friction for me.

I also stopped wearing the headband after awhile because it does feel a bit awkward. The former CEO says the company was aware the device was too invasive for some customers.

But if a less invasive sensor was made and it was easier to enter custom data and get actionable information, I would have used it every night.

What’s Next

Dickinson can’t comment on exactly what’s next for Zeo, after all the assets are sold. But he is hopeful that there may be an opportunity for the company to re-emerge in the future.

An article appeared in the MobiHealthNews in March, that reported the Better Business Bureau had listed Zeo as being “out of business” but with no official announcement by the company, the news hasn’t been widely known.

It is still possible to log-in to Zeo’s “My Sleep” site that contains your sleep data. An article on the Quantified Self website today tells users how they can download their data in case the site goes offline.

As word about Zeo’s status has spread, Dickinson says they have received tremendous support and inquires from all over the world from disappointed customers and sleep researchers who had planned to use the units for the research.

He wrote a post on the MobiHealthNews site last week that included some additional lessons learned. He concluded by writing “motivating behavioral change through data visualization can be very powerful, but it is more of an art than a science. We will need far more artists, user interface experts and psychologists to help make our data work harder to motivate better health.”

Zeo uses their sleep technology and tools to track sleep and behavior sciences. They formulate their data into analytics and provide their users with recommendations based on each individuals sleeping patterns. On March 12, 2013, it has come to light that Zeo is shutting down and is looking for a buyer.1

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Rando's 5M Anti-Social Photo Shares Could Be The Canary In The Social Networking Coalmine

Rando only launched in March but the anti-social photo-sharing app that deliberately eschews the standard social network clutter of likes and comments and connections â€" simply letting users share random photos with random strangers and get random snaps in return â€" has blasted past five million photo shares after a little over two months in the wild. It is now averaging around 200,000 shares per day, says its creator ustwo.

For half that time Rando was iOS only, with its Android app not launching til April. Platform spread aside, the huge point here is that Rando has ditched all the self-congratulatory, endorphin-boosting hooks that apparently keep people tethered to their social networks. Yet managed to grow regardless. As Rando’s tagline pithily put it: ‘You have no friends’. The photos you share here will never be liked, never be favourited, and if they are shared outside Rando to other social networks, a feature Rando most definitely does not enable within its app, you likely won’t ever know anything about it. It’s a very rare digital social blackhole â€" but one that’s proving surprisingly popular (and all without any embedded social shares to grow virally), even while it’s refreshingly ego-free.

Rando has been downloaded almost 230,000 times since its March 10 launch, with nearly 35,000 downloads in the past seven days, according to data shared with TechCrunch by ustwo‘s Matt Miller (aka Mills). The platform breakdown is pretty even right now â€" with only slightly more iOS app downloads than Android (roughly 120,000 vs 107,000), showing how Android users are adopting Rando even faster than their iPhone owning counterparts, having had a month less to send strangers strange shots. There are, of course, many more Android owners than iPhone owners out there so there’s a lot more scope for growth on Google’s platform.

Rando’s top five countries by downloads are as follows:

South Korea  82,224 downloads 37% of total downloads

United States  41,120 downloads 19% of total downloads

Russia  25,553 downloads 12% of total downloads

UK  12,173 downloads 6% of total downloads

Brazil  7,795 downloads 4%

Even though Rando does not enable social sharing within its app, users can take screengrabs and share shots manually â€" and that’s happening a little. ustwo notes there have been more than 25,000 #rando Instagram shares, for instance, despite the app not giving users any simple path to do that. Searching for #rando on Twitter also typically brings up a handful of organic daily shares.

The single piece of contextual information that Rando does allow its users to retain â€" the general location where a photo was taken â€" is also removed by close to a fifth of users (17%). While less than 1% of shared images have been marked as inappropriate so you can’t accuse Rando’s growth of being fuelled by sexting. You could perhaps argue it’s a bit of a curiosity that’s appealing to a small minority of people, even while most folk find it baffling. ustwo’s data shows that the app’s most active users (top 10% in terms of uploaded randos) have uploaded more than half (57%) of all the shared randos. But the app retention rate (50% in the past week) does sound strong. Specifically that means half of Rando’s users logged in within that week, which isn’t bad as an active user type stat.

A little bird tells me that ustwo, the London-based studio which decided to find out what would happen when it made an anti-social photo-sharing app, is preparing to push Rando onto a third mobile platform in the not too distant future too â€" so expect Rando’s growth trajectory to continue stepping upwards, as it has been since launch. ustwo says one million randos are being shared every four to five days now, at current usage rates. ”You are literally looking at the next $1billion Yahoo! Acquisition,” jokes Mills.

Joking aside, there is something seriously interesting about Rando’s takeoff. Not to read too much into a single app, of course, but as an experiment in social-less networking it’s fascinating to watch. Not to mention ironic, since on Rando no one is watching you â€" which is entirely the point. But factor in the rumblings about teens’ declining interest in traditional social networks and Rando could be something of a canary in the social networking coalmine, picking up subtle traces of Facebook fatigue, and identifying a growing appetite among mobile owners at least to take back some control and reintroduce a little private space by slamming shut those social doors.

The rise of mobile messaging apps is another key trend to factor in here, apps which put private communication first, and social comms as a secondary add on. Certain age groups’ attention is arguably increasingly shifting to these more contained communications mediums â€" channels which offer both private and public comms within the one app, as Facebook does, but which aren’t centrally focused on publicly broadcast personal content. Rather they put the intimacy of one-to-one messaging at their core. Some, like China’s WeChat, even include serendipitous discovery features that are similar to Rando â€" like its Drift Bottle stranger messaging feature. 

Mobile usage is certainly fuelling this messaging-centric shift. There’s no doubt younger social network users have shifted focus away from relying on the workhorse PC in the corner, and on to apps on mobile devices â€" aka, the device that’s always with its owner. But the mobile is not only highly portable it’s inherently personal, containing an address book of your friends’ phone numbers. Which may be another reason why mobile social networking feels a little different, demands a little more privacy than the old web portal gateway to the social city.

There are certainly various trends at play here. Photo/image-sharing dominating text-based status updates being another, which explains Facebook’s recent focus on photos. But, if Rando’s rise proves anything it proves that humans communicate in more subtle ways than you might imagine, and need less social reinforcement than you might think. And when you think in those terms, it’s not such a huge leap to imagine the shifting sands of communication eroding the foundations of huge walled social strongholds after all. Lots of little apps, all taking away a portion of people’s attention, could eventually add up to a collective social exodus from the old networks. At least of key youth demographics.

Let’s face it, when the ex-owner of former teen-favourite social network MySpace feels capable of some very public Schadenfreude at Facebook’s expense â€" taking the trouble to dine out on the perception of members’ growing disinterest in Zuckerberg’s empire â€" something is definitely looking a little wonky in that gigantic electronic country.

MySpace hasn’t expired entirely but exists today, Ozymandias-esque, as a much diminished version of its past all-powerful self. And Murdoch’s Newscorp famously lost a bucket load of cash on the acquisition and sell off. You’d think he’d be too embarrassed to mention it â€" but instead he’s finding time to chuckle at Facebook’s imagined expense…

Look out Facebook!Hours spent participating per member dropping seriously.First really bad sign as seen by crappy MySpace years ago.

â€" Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) May 17, 2013

Read that again, and it’s the same timeless warning as is contained in Shelley’s poem. Murdoch might as well have tweeted: ‘Look on my past works, Mark Zuckerberg, and despair!’

So while Rando’s relatively modest growth trajectory (vs Facebook or mobile messaging giants) is unlikely to make it onto Zuckerberg’s radar, it’s something any developer working in the social space would do well to take note of. Because even Facebook can’t overlook the wider forces at play in mobile â€" forces that appear to be reconfiguring the rules of the social game. And Rando is a small but telling member of that movement.

ustwo™ is a multi-platform digital user interface design studio that develops pioneering user experiences and apps for some of the world’s leading brands. The creators of PositionApp.

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