Twitter Forcing Media Previews On Web Client Users Is Not Cool - But Feels Inevitable As It Preps IPO

And so it begins. Twitter, now firmly on the road to IPO, has equally firmly turned its attention to monetisation â€" which means it’s turning on new features that are designed, first and foremost, with advertisers in mind. And with the goal of attracting a more mainstream user-base.

Exhibit A: in-stream photo and video previews on the Twitter web client and Android and iOS apps.

(This being timed to coincide with Halloween is probably not at all coincidental. The disproportionate pull of people dressing up for Halloween on apps and services would make a fascinating study â€" see also FrontBack recently tweaking its offering so you can compose a shot with two images from the rear camera â€" thereby enabling  users to take lots of shots of other people’s costumes).

Returning to Twitter, what that means in practice is the densely packed wall of 140-character tweets which allowed Twitter to be an exceptional information delivery mechanism is now being interrupted by visual media.

Pictures, as countless photo-sharing apps prove, draw the eye and the attention. They crowd out words. Which means that the Twitter timeline has become less functional, and more trivial.

Pictures are distracting. That’s why advertisers love them. The big bold image can grab you, even if the product itself isn’t something you’d go looking for yourself. Images by their nature are arresting.

But if your primary product is an information network, then injecting visual media necessarily dilutes the offering.

Literally in the physical space sense. These visual media tweets take up more room than a typical text tweet (unless it’s stuffed with line breaks) â€" so users’ screen real estate is getting disproportionately hogged by anyone choosing to tweet out Twitter photos or Vine videos.

Obviously, Twitter users should expect vast amounts of visual media to be spewed out by advertisers all too soon â€" giving them a neat workaround to make an advert stand out in a sea of 140-characters.

Twitter’s core product is also now being diluted. The density of the information conveyed by the timeline is being watered down by whatever random visual imagery your followers are tweeting at any given moment (real-time events like popular TV broadcasts and big sports matches could easily end up overwhelming Twitter, more so than they already do).

It’s not that images and videos can’t be interesting; of course they can. But by forcing users to view media before deciding whether it is worth viewing (i.e. by reading the context provided by the accompanying text tweet before they click on the media link), Twitter is removing a vital content filter from its own network.

Now, if you’re using Twitter’s web client, there is no opt out of this visual clutter. And that makes Twitter step a little closer to the kind of content you’re forced to eyeball on Google+ or Facebook. So basically:

You can turn off the new media injection ‘feature’ in Twitter’s mobile apps (perhaps for download speed/data conservation reasons), but Twitter has confirmed to TechCrunch there is no off switch in its web client.

At the time of writing Twitter had not responded to a question asking why it is not offering an opt out to users of its web client.

What this means is that if you value Twitter as a fast information resource on your desktop device then the only option is to use an alternative Twitter client such as Tweetbot (which costs £14 on the Mac App Store vs Twitter’s free web client).

(On that point, Twitter has previously limited its API, thereby throttling the growth potential of third party clients, so opt-out options are being limited too.)

In my view, Twitter forcibly injecting media previews is not cool and makes the service less useful to me. But on the flip side â€" and there is a flip-side â€" pictures are very accessible, and are more likely to appeal to a mainstream user vs a dense wall of text that needs to be filtered and unpicked on the fly. So it’s easy to see their rational here.

A wall of tweets is great for busy journalists, but likely somewhat alienating for a first time user trying to figure out what Twitter is for. And attracting more users, and more mainstream users, is a key challenge for Twitter â€" being as it has a growth problem.

Injecting visual media is not the only recent change Twitter has made that tweaks its product to do a bit more hand-holding for newbies and less techie folk, either.

Back in August, for instance, it flipped the format of the timeline by adding a new conversation view that displays @replies in sequence to the tweets that generated them. For seasoned Twitter who knew how to follow the @reply trail, this change was an irritation â€" because it also dilutes the density of and interrupts the flow of the timeline.

But for newbies it probably helps to generate context on the fly, and also signposts how the service works. In other words: two Twitter birds, one stone.

I recently went through the process of setting my mum up on Twitter, and when you revisit the process of starting again from scratch with zero followers it’s easy to see how hard it is for a newcomer to hook into the service.

A lot of effort is required to ‘get’ Twitter, in terms of finding other users who are tweeting about things you’re interested in. And, unlike Facebook, none of my mum’s peer group is using Twitter. It become evident that a big portion of Twitter’s efforts at the new user sign-up stage are focused on pushing newcomers to follow celebrity accounts, as a way to offer a mainstream way into its service.

As Twitter prepares to IPO, and becomes answerable to a new influx of investors, it’s inevitable that it’s going to have to find more and more ways to make its service more mainstream. And that’s going to change its core product â€" in ways that long-time users are going to struggle with.

Add to that, with so much energy and attention still being sucked into photo-sharing services/visual social networks like Instagram, Twitter is evidently feeling a need to diversify beyond text.

Prettying up the timeline with pictures is therefore an obvious next step â€" it’s just a shame Twitter can’t throw a bone to the subsection of long-time users that value its service as an information resource and give us an opt-out of these mainstream changes.

By all means bury that off switch deep in settings where mainstream users will never find it. But give us an out so we can keep on using the Twitter we know and love.

After all, if we wanted to spend our time idly eyeballing a stream of random eye candy, we’d have long since migrated to Google+…

Fantastical 2 Brings Deep Reminders Support, Revamped iOS 7 Look To The Best iPhone Calendar

As my default Calendar replacement app, Fantastical has been on the home screen of my iPhone since its release nearly a year ago. As one of the few pieces of productivity software that I use regularly, I was extremely nervous about how the app was going to change with its iOS 7 update.

I shouldn’t have worried. Fantastical 2, out today, is one of the best examples of taking the opportunity presented by Apple’s iOS 7 update and using it for more than just a visual ‘re-skin’. It’s a fitting return for the only calendar app to have ever hit the #1 spot on Apple’s paid charts.

If you’re unfamiliar with Fantastical, its strengths are a natural language parsing engine that lets you dash off regular phrases like ‘meet with Joe at noon on tuesday at The Crab Shack’ and end up with a fully input calendar entry without ever typing in any numbers. It’s clever and powerful and almost always works exactly how you want it to. This is coupled with a unique layout that places either a ‘day ticker’ of 1 week or a monthly calendar above a simple continuous agenda of appointments.

For the second time in as many weeks, we’ve seen a very popular app with a distinctive feel re-imagined for iOS 7 with great results. While it could be argued that Tweetbot had an even more pronounced visual language, Fantastical hit some notes pretty hard that it couldn’t have been easy to give up.

Flexibits’ Michael Simmons says that the decisions made in the re-working of the app went far beyond how to make the visual language of the app fit in with iOS 7. Yes, the staples along the top of the virtual ‘calendar’ are gone, but there are also deeper changes that make a real difference in how useful the app is.

One of the biggest examples of this is the trademark ‘lens’ that sits in the center of the ‘day ticker’ in Fantastical. The old design was very heavily influenced by a ‘real’ magnifying glass, of the type that you’d slide over a desk calendar or log book to read a certain entry. The new design retains some of the magnification aspects, but gets winnowed down visually so it doesn’t punch you in the eyeballs with its cleverness as much any more. But the design changes didn’t stop there. 

“We moved it to position one, so you can see the full week ahead,” says Simmons. He notes this as an example of one of the hard decisions that was made to make the app work better, rather than cling to the conventions established in the original. The added context of a couple of extra days ahead in the ticker is welcome, and a good choice.

There have been some other additions as well, background syncing is in full effect, making sure that appointments and reminders are at your fingertips when you open the app. Test Expander support has been added for keyboard shortcuts. It supports Apple’s dynamic text sizing for the trademark list of items. The customized keyboard in the event creation view now features an additional row of number keys for those times when you want to enter times or dates quickly without having to swap keyboard.

There is also now a beautifully expanded landscape week view, which animates in context to give you a bigger eye on your current week ahead.

And, finally, there is now extensive reminder support built right in to Fantastical.

Deep Reminders Support

The reminders support, says Simmons, goes far beyond adding support for ‘to do’ actions with tick boxes in the list view. The whole app was re-thought to make reminders an integral part of your calendar. Not only do you get color coded list options for completed and uncompleted reminders, the parser has also been customized, adding thousands of trigger words that let you automatically add items as reminders.

You’ll notice that the composer now has a toggle to force an item you’re creating to be a Reminder, but simply typing a trigger phrase will also create a reminder. ‘To-do, ‘remind’, remind me’ will all work, and hundreds of others.

Of course, all of this is integrated with Apple’s Reminders app. And it all supports geo-fencing to trigger on arrival to or departure from a location.

One example of how well thought out those reminders are: you don’t just get a list of all of you ongoing, undated items in the list. This would clutter up the display and become meaningless over time. Only the items you’ve attached a date or time to show up here. This retains the list’s status as your ‘agenda’, only showing you the stuff you must get done on a timely basis.

The new iOS 7 background notification support means that you can also now set alarms, using keywords like ‘alarm’. Previously, because of Apple’s restrictive backgrounding rules for apps, these would only trigger if they were synced to Calendar and that app sent the alert. Now, you can set alarms right within Fantastical and have them synced to the desktop version and trigged in the background.

At A Bargain

One of the most powerful things about the original Fantastical â€" and which gets retained in the new version â€" is that it was truly a calendar built from the ground up for how we use our mobile phones. There have been some other notable entries since like Sunrise, but the simple swipe-able interface of the app and powerful timeline view still makes it a standout.

Fantastical 2 is out on the App Store today as a $2.99 paid upgrade, which fits in with another trend we’re seeing. Developers who put in a significant amount of work on an iOS 7 update are charging for the new versions of the apps. Tweetbot did it and had major success on the App Store charts â€" while receiving a significant amount of blowback from users who saw it as a money grab.

As far as I’m concerned, paying a couple of bucks for a productivity app, especially one as essential, and great, as Fantastical is an easy choice. This is an app that I will open thousands of times over the next few years, and rely on heavily to make sure I’m where I am when I need to be. After an initial sale period, the app will go up to $4.99, which is still a bargain.

iPad Air Review: Apple Makes Big Tablets Beautiful All Over Again

Apple introduced two new iPads this month at a special event in San Francisco on October 22, and the first of those to go on sale is the iPad Air, which is in stores and on virtual shelves this Friday, November 1. After a week with Apple’s newest 9.7-inch device, it’s clear there’s a new champion of the large tablet market, and one that breathes new life into Apple’s original slab-style game-changer.

Video Review

iPad Air Review: Apple Makes Big Tablets Beautiful All Over Again

Basics

• 2048 x 1536 (Retina) 9.7-inch display
• 16GB, 32GB, 64GB and 128GB
• A7 processor
• 802.11n dual-channel Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0
• 10 hours general use Wi-Fi surfing, 9 hours on cellular
• Starts at $499

Pros

• Thin and light design is a huge improvement over 4th-gen iPad
• No battery life sacrifices required

Cons

• Hard sell over the iPad mini with Retina, which also now has A7 power

Design

The design is the star of Apple’s iPad Air refresh this time around; the 9.7-inch Apple tablet has had the same form factor for two generations now, and that one actually made the design worse â€" it got heavier, and it got thicker. This new iPad mini-inspired look sheds both size and weight, giving the iPad Air a 43 percent smaller bezel, a 20 percent thinner case, and making it 28 percent lighter, at just one pound.

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It’s a difference that you feel, all numbers and measurements aside. The iPad Air is much, much more comfortable to hold than the iPad 4th-gen it replaces; This isn’t strictly a one-handed device, but it’s as close as you can get with a tablet that still has a gorgeous, expansive 9.7-inch Retina Display.

The aesthetics of the iPad Air are also improved: That smaller bezel better showcases the screen, for instance, and the mirror finish Apple logo is a nice touch. The silver version I reviewed is very nice, though I personally prefer the space gray finish in this device based on comparing them both at the Apple event itself. Plus, the speaker design is improved both in terms of looks and sound quality.

Display

The screen on the iPad Air is a Retina display, which means that when viewed from a standard distance, the human eye shouldn’t be able to make out individual pixels. The actual pixel density of that 2048 x 1536 9.7-inch display is 264 PPI, which is much less dense than the iPad mini, but you’d have a hard time telling the difference when you’re actually using the thing. In short, both are excellent, and lead the market in terms of quality when you factor in color rendering, viewing angle and other visual attributes.

Having used primarily an iPad mini for the past year, there’s no question that coming back to the 9.7-inch Retina display was an uplifting experience. It felt a little like getting your prescription adjusted and realizing you’ve been seeing everything poorly for a long time. Video shines on the iPad Air, as does image-rich content like comic books and photos.

There’s no question that coming back to the 9.7-inch Retina display was an uplifting experience.

Not to mention that all that extra space makes for a much more comfortable browsing experience, and offers a lot of benefits when it comes to content creation. It doesn’t feel arduous doing work on the iPad; you can start to remember why people touted the iPad as a PC-killer when it debuted, and it edges ever closer to being able to truly replace notebooks for the majority of everyday users.

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Features

Apple’s iPad Air has some new powers compared to its predecessor â€" chief among those is the new A7 64-bit processor, and the M7 motion coprocessor that goes along with that. This means that like its cousin the iPhone 5s, it’s a “forward thinking” device, but it also brings benefits right away, thanks in large part to Apple’s own redesigned first-party apps.

When using the new iLife and iWork suites, performance is considerably bolstered by the 64-bit retrofits they got with their recent redesigns â€" everything feels faster and more responsive. 64-bit processing doesn’t mean that every app necessarily gets a 2x boost in performance over those made for the traditional 32-bit architecture used in previous iPads, but it does mean that software made for those processors will feel even more instantly responsive than it has in the past.

Also new to the iPad Air are dual microphones which help out with sound quality on audio and video FaceTime calls, and the motion coprocessor means that you’ll start to see more activity tracking built into the iPad, too. It may seem an odd feature for a tablet, but the iPad is designed to go with you where you go, and it might be even more representative of your general activity level since it won’t be triggered so easily as a phone worn close to the body.

Cameras also get an update with the iPad Air, which is to be expected. The real gem here is the FaceTime HD camera that offers 1080p video calling instead of 720p on the last model, which does make a difference. It also has a new 5-megapixel shooter that gets bigger pixels on the sensor, which does lead to better photos. I feel no less ridiculous taking photos with a 9.7-inch tablet than I did before, however, but if that’s the type of photography you go in for, you’ll be better served with this device.

Performance

The iPad Air may be a lightweight device physically, but it’s a heavyweight when it comes to performance. Benchmarks tell only one side of the story, and the one that most users will be more interested in is around how the tablet work under normal, everyday usage conditions. Put simply, Apple’s latest iPad soars.

Put simply, Apple’s latest iPad soars.

Other performance tweaks from the A7 include support for OpenGL ES version 3.0 graphics, which makes it possible to build effects into games that were previously only available on the desktop. This iPad is a really strong gaming advice I learned based on my testing with Batman: Arkham Origins on the tablet, and you really get the sense that developers are just cracking the surface when it comes to what they can do with these new graphics capabilities.

The version I tested also supports LTE, and this iPad supports the most frequencies of that network technology than ever before. I was able to test out those claims right away, thanks to taking the device from San Francisco out to London. The iPad Air worked perfectly on both AT&T and on EE LTE, making this a world traveler’s best friend and constant companion. Thanks to FaceTime Audio and third-party apps like Skype, this could easily operate as someone’s international travel phone, letting people escape costly roaming charges.

Battery

The iPad Air’s battery offers up to 10 hours of continuous usage, according to Apple’s official published specs, and I’ve found that it easily matches up with the high bar set for power by previous generations. On average, I found myself getting around 10 hours of actual use on Wi-Fi, and slightly less on LTE networks. Standby time seems to have improved considerably with this generation, also, as the iPad Air seemed to positively sip battery life while unplugged but with the screen asleep.

Part of the iPad’s magic is the fact that you can put it down and forget about it for days, then pick it up and still have nearly a full charge. That’s still the case, and it’s made all the more impressive based on the physical changes Apple has made to the case design, which theoretically should leave less room inside for actual batteries.

Cases

Apple has two cases for the iPad Air, and they follow in the footsteps of those that came before. There’s the Smart Cover, and the Smart Case, both of which feature a magnetic closure with a multi-panelled front. The Case, as its name implies, also has a back component, but the Cover just protects the screen.

The Smart Case comes in leather variants, while the Cover is only offered in polycarbonate materials now, though both are offered in multiple color schemes. In almost every single instance where an Apple device is involved, I’m a fan of not using a case at all; the bumps and scratches that inevitably ensue help give the great design character, in my opinion. But if you’re going to get a case, I’d opt for the Smart Cover, as it adds virtually no bulk and protects the part of the iPad that is most important to protect â€" the glass.

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The Smart Case makes the iPad Air feel quite a bit more bulky, in my opinion, and is fairly difficult to get off once its on. On the other hand, it’s definitely more protective than the Smart Case, and it’s still relatively svelte. Apple has also nailed its leather case designs in terms of putting out a product that feels very high quality, and that’s what they’ve done here, too.

Bottom Line

The iPad Air is a huge improvement over the iPad 4th-gen, or the iPad 2, pictured in the gallery. Its form factor is the best currently available for a 10-inch tablet, and it provides a great blend of portability and usability that leans towards the media device end of the spectrum.

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When Apple introduced the iPad mini, I feel in love and felt that I’d never be swayed back to the other side. The iPad Air makes the argument anew that there’s still room for big tablets in people’s lives, and it might just help usher in an era of computing where households own more than one kind of iPad, and PCs are harder and harder to find.

The Web Behind The Wall Explains China's Complicated Startup Industry

“The Web Behind The Wall” is an e-book published by TechNode (our partner for next month’s TechCrunch Shanghai event) that wants to be “the #1 resource for foreign tech companies to understand China.” The book is a quick but highly informative read about China’s startup ecosystem, which has proven unpenetrable for tech giants like Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Amazon.

But any startup that wants to grow into a global company can’t ignore China. The country currently has 591 million people online and 460 million mobile Internet users and that number is rapidly increasing every day. In the next two years, 200 million users are expected to go online, rapidly increasing China’s current 44.1% Internet penetration rate. Companies like Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu have already enjoyed massive growth over the last decade and are poised for even more.

“The Web Behind The Wall” looks at the Chinese startup ecosystem’s laws and regulations, culture, market opportunities, barriers to innovation and funding opportunities. The book was co-authored by Kevin I. Chen, Jason Lim and Ben Jiang , who were introduced by TechNode founder Dr. Gang Lu, and includes contributions from The Founder Magazine, strategy and design firm Frog Design and blogs Tech In Asia and TechRice.

Correcting Misconceptions

Chen started writing the book as a memoir about his experience working for Shanda, a leading Chinese game developer and within the Shanghai startup ecosystem. Then “The Web Behind The Wall” evolved into a primer that seeks to clear up misconceptions about China’s tech industry.

“Before coming here in early 2010, my understanding of China was limited in that China startups are depicted by Western media as mostly copycats,” says Chen, who earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from UCLA. “Fact is, China’s startup scene is full of excitement and original ideas. Growth here is also phenomenal with around 10 million new users joining the Web every month.”

Chinese companies were among the first to adopt and scale innovations like the freemium model for games and apps. Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel has referred to Chinese Internet giant Tencent as a “role model” for its ability to make revenue from in-app purchases.

There are several daunting barriers to innovation in China, however, including weak intellectual property laws, high competition and government censorship. The latter not only includes the “Great Wall of China,” which blocks foreign sites like Facebook and Twitter, but also a domestic surveillance and filtering program called the Golden Shield. Coping with cultural differences when hiring and trying to retain employees is another potential headache.

“The most unexpected thing for me is how many people are interested in startups and how few individuals possess the skills and mental toughness to do startups here,” says Chen. “Unlike Western education, which teaches leadership and risk-taking, Chinese education teaches discipline and obedience. There are big pros and cons as a result of this, but definitely more handholding is required here.”

Chen says other things that foreign entrepreneurs tend to misunderstand are China’s regulations and policies, which are often unfavorable to overseas companies, and how to scale up. Though the government has invested billions of renminbi in cloud computing since 2009, it has been a “fairly slow moving beast” because of several issues including an immature ecosystem that negatively affects data quality, reliability and speed; skepticism among entrepreneurs who don’t trust cloud operators with their data; complex regulations; and the lack of developers who understand cloud architecture, all issues that Chen writes about in detail.

Looking Toward The Future

“The Web Behind The Wall” argues that people who want to truly grasp China’s startup ecosystem must not only familiarize themselves with the tech communities in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, but also the provinces of Sichuan, Jiangsu and Zhejiang.

The city of Chengdu in Sichuan is known for its business process and software outsourcing. Zhejiang startups are closer to U.S. startups in terms of their focus on app development, while Jiangsu is “by reputation friendlier to enterprise development.”

But it is still important for entrepreneursâ€"especially ones from overseasâ€"to first build relationships in China’s main tech hubs.

“These [second-tier] cities are accessible by transport but soft barriers are higher in talent availability and language capabilities,” says Chen. “There are lots of under-utilized resources in Shanghai as most people don’t know there are 600+ incubators and tech parks and 300 angel and venture funding organizations that welcome entrepreneurs.”

Several essays in “The Web Behind The Wall” focus on cultural differences. For example, entrepreneurs of Chinese descent who grew up overseas (referred to as “sea turtles”) often overestimate their understanding of nuances in language or management practices. As more of China’s population goes online for the first time, localization becomes increasingly important. This means that founders can no longer count on easy success by taking existing business models from other countries and cloning them in China.

Despite the headaches and the emergence of promising new markets like Southeast Asia, “The Web Behind The Wall” argues that China’s growth potential is still staggering enough for it to be worth the risk to foreign entrepreneurs.

One of the most anticipated developments for the tech industry is next year’s shift to 4G/TD-LTE by China Mobile, which is the largest carrier in the world with 740 million subscribers.

“I think there will be a fundamental transition in how people communicate and entertain when this happens,” says Chen. “Keep in mind, China Mobile never offered 3G, so the delta in experience from EDGE to 4G/TD-LTE will be tremendous for all these subscribers.

Click here for more information about ((http://webbehindthewall.com/))”The Web Behind The Wall.” The book is available for $2 online or as a Kindle download for $2.99.

Photo by MadanH on Flickr

The Future Of Bitcoin Will Depend On Upcoming Startups, Regulatory Issues And China

Today at Disrupt Europe in Berlin, a few major Bitcoin actors in the European Bitcoin community took the stage to share their thoughts about the future of Bitcoin. Michael Jackson (Mangrove Capital Partners), Shakil Khan (CoinDesk) and Nejc Kodric (Bitstamp) are all bullish and have great hopes for the digital currency. Yet, a recurring thought was that the community is still very early in this journey â€" the average end-user has yet to start using Bitcoins.

The next generation of Bitcoin startups

Khan, whose personal interest in Bitcoin led him to found a BTC news website called CoinDesk to be a news source for the ecosystem, revealed he has still not been tempted to get out his wallet to make any investments in Bitcoin companies (he does, however, “own some coin”). And that’s because he’s waiting for the next wave of digital currency companies.

Hope is not a strategy and most BTC companies are relying on hope.

“I have looked at probably most Bitcoin companies and I have passed on investing,” he said. “If you look at the waves of BTC companies that have been coming up, so far there have been some great ideas, and some great idealists that want to run these companies. But I’ve yet to find somebody that understood the deep technology, the opportunity about BTC but also who knows what a PNO, a balance sheet, how to run a business… There are very very few people out there who understand the whole package.”

“There is regulation involved. Hope is not a strategy and most BTC companies out there right now are relying on hope. That’s not a business plan,” he added.

Khan’s view is that the Bitcoin space is in the second wave of companies â€" the first wave having mostly been shut down (and some even facing jail time). The current crop includes the likes of BTC exchange Mt.Gox, which he argued now has its own challengers, despite Gox’s early dominance.

“I’m looking more forward to the next wave of companies. There are teams of entrepreneurs with tier-A VCs, with lawyers, with regulators, sitting in rooms around the world, thinking how do we launch the next generation of digital currency companies. I think that’s where the opportunity is. We’re still very very early in this journey,” Khan added.

Bitstamp’s Kodric agreed. “New services are going to pop up,” he said. “When I started [Bitstamp], it was 2011. There was only one large exchange. We ended up launching our own.”

Silk Road’s demise

When it comes to the recent shutdown of deep web black market Silk Road, everyone agreed that this incident was just a small bump in the road.

“Bitcoin is not reliant on Silk Road and Silk Road is not reliant on Bitcoin,” Khan said. “Yes, it may have been used on Silk Road to buy drugs, but so is cash in your pocket,” he continued. Over the past two years, Bitcoin media coverage has been mixed because of these isolated incidents, but the overall public reaction has been mostly positive.

In fact, Bitcoin recently broke $200 on multiple exchanges. It may prove that getting rid of the shady marketplace has had positive repercussions. The initial 15 percent price drop is now long forgotten.

Regulatory issues

While Bitcoin was initially a utopian dream come true, Bitcoin investors and entrepreneurs are now more realistic and know that they will have to deal with regulation. “Unfortunately, in 2013, society expects traceability,” Jackson said.

“[Regulators] are intrigued by how it is going to play out,” Jackson said. At the same time, regulators are acting quickly, without taking the time to understand how Bitcoin actually works and how it differs from other currencies. “We’re currently following the legacy regulation,” Kodric said.

“The good thing in Europe is that we have 29 different countries with 29 different legislations,” Jackson said. There will always be a European country with a sensible legislation for Bitcoin startups to operate.

Yet, a key argument in favor of more regulation is that average customers expect some kind of insurance. Bitcoin exchanges have closed their doors already, and there is no obligation for these companies to give the money back to their users. “If the average customer adopts Bitcoin, they expect some kind of regulation,” Khan said.

A lot of opportunities ahead

“The U.S. shutdown has been very good for Bitcoin,” Khan said. “It goes to show that there are new systems coming to place,” he continued. Bitcoin is not just an opportunity for startup. It’s a more disruptive idea that could turn into new use cases around your money. It’s a way to transfer money around the world very easily. It’s a new tool for traders.

As Khan puts it, “it’s really simple for Bitcoin: it either goes to 0 or to many, many, many 0s.” He even mentioned that large hedge funds have huge positions in Bitcoins. “They are not going to talk about it,” he said.

These positions are very small compared to the rest of their respective portfolios, but it demonstrates that traders are willing to try and hold positions in Bitcoins. “Putting a million in Bitcoins is not a stupid thing to do because the upside potential is huge.”

Another positive for the currency is interest from China â€" a huge market whichever way you cut it. A division of Chinese ecommerce giant Baidu recently started accepting payments in Bitcoin, for instance. But Khan also pointed to interest coming from an even larger entity: the Chinese government.

“Chinese television has been showing a number of short programs about Bitcoin,” said Khan. “Let’s recognize that Chinese television is state-run television. So you start seeing the education process taking place there â€" and that’s been very good.”

Ultimately, from a consumer point of view, what’s most interesting about Bitcoin are the services it can enable â€" instantaneous, low-cost, cross-border money transfers â€" rather than the technology mechanism itself. So Khan suggested there are also opportunities ahead for Bitcoin to artfully conceal itself â€" to become an enabler of attractive, easy to use consumer services while its own profile sinks below the surface.

“What the end user expects the technology will get us to a stage where maybe Bitcoin becomes an invisible mechanism,” he added.

StackMob Builds Parse App Importer For Refugee Developers Fleeing Facebook's New Acquisition

Some developers got very angry and threatened to leave mobile app backend platform Parse when it was bought by Facebook yesterday. Hoping to capitalize, competitor StackMob has since released a Parse migration tool that makes it easy for devs to import their Parse apps. It’s a cutthroat game, this game of tech.

When the Parse acquisition was announced, disgruntled developers flocked to Twitter, Hacker News, and our comments reel. Facebook pledged not to screw up the beloved development platform. While it won’t operate independently like Instagram, Facebook’s hands-off approach to the photo sharing app it bought a year ago should instill some confidence. Facebook’s director of product management Doug Purdy said in his statement about the acquisition that “We’ve worked closely with the Parse team and have seen first-hand how important their solutions and platform are to developers. We don’t intend to change this.” On the phone with me he reiterated that Facebook doesn’t intend to mess with a good thing.

Still, developers’ complaints I read centered on two fears: 1. That Facebook would degrade the Parse service, potentially by promoting its own social integrations and app install ads too hard, and 2. That Facebook would spy on data coming into Parse, including what types of content people chose not to post to the social network.

Wasting little time, Stackmob launched an auto-importer for developers looking to move their apps elsewhere and published a blog post touting its advantages over Parse. StackMob CEO Ty Amell tells me the company had already been tinkering with a Parse importer, but when the acquisition was announced, it finished it up and made it accessible yesterday alongside a step-by-step guide. Then today the company began offering a Python script that turns the multi-step process into a single step.

Amell explained to me, “Over the last few months we’ve seen an increase in people coming over from Parse. Once we heard they’d been acquired, we knew there was going to be a lot of backlash and uncertainty from mobile developers. Facebook has a history of monetizing other people’s users, and charging through ads and other ways to access users. Parse not being independent any more is a pretty large concern for developers.”

He says developers had two main questions about the acquisition. 1. Do developers still own their data? 2. What rights to privacy do developers have, and how will Facebook use their data? Amell says “Facebook has some pretty aggressive terms of service. ” However, most of those terms refer to user data, not developer app data, so Amell may be confused.

Overall I think he’s blowing the issue out of proportion for his company’s gain. Developers are right to have questions about what will happen now that Parse is a division of Facebook, but that doesn’t mean they need to migrate away from the platform immediately. Facebook may eventually need to add new terms to its legal documents to cover its new paid B2B services arm, though, which could clarify exactly what will happen with Parse data.

StackMob’s mobile platform helps developers create a mobile business by letting them easily build, deploy and grow full-featured applications from the very first version. StackMob cuts backend development time from months to minutes, letting developers focus on creating powerful apps with quality user experiences. StackMob also provides a front-end development environment that developers can use to create a single, feature-rich application that runs seamlessly on multiple mobile operating systems.

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Parse is the cloud app platform for Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, iOS, Android, JavaScript, and OS X. With Parse, you can add a scalable and powerful backend in minutes and launch a full-featured mobile or web app in record time without ever worrying about server management. Parse offers push notifications, social integration, data storage, and the ability to add rich custom logic to your app’s backend with Cloud Code. Build more with Parse.

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February 1, 2004

NASDAQ:FB

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...

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How To Tell If You're In A Cloud-Friendly Industry

Editor’s note: Gordon Ritter is a founder and general partner at Emergence Capital, a leading venture capital firm focused on cloud companies. He was an early investor in Salesforce.com and Veeva Systems, and he is currently chairman of Veeva. Follow him on Twitter @gordonritter.

The benefits of an industry cloud strategy are clear. But are there certain industries that are more cloud friendly? To answer this question, we analyzed industries using a framework that ranks each one based on eight factors that speed up cloud adoption and two factors that slow things down.

The Top Cloud-Friendly Industries

Two industries stand out as the most cloud-friendly: healthcare and education. Healthcare has the most traction, with focused and fast-growing cloud companies in many facets of this massive and concentrated industry. In addition to Veeva, companies such as Doximity, CareCloud and PracticeFusion are getting traction, and Athena Health has been successful for years. The cloud helps these companies stay current in a strongly regulatory industry.

Within education, universities and school districts have shown a willingness to try cloud solutions, particularly those that are designed for non-desk workers and leverage big data. We have seen a range of companies make inroads, including Coursera, Edmodo and Schoology, as well as two from Emergence’s portfolio â€" Top Hat and Civitas Learning.

The next tier down includes industries such as retail, utilities, transportation, real estate, construction and insurance, each of which score high on several dimensions. The retail sector looks promising due to its mobile workforce, visual elements, and big data value, and we anticipate major shifts in the software used to drive that industry over the coming years. While these sectors face more hurdles relating to fragmentation and cyclicality, companies such as Real Page (real estate), Textura and PlanGrid (construction), Drivewyze (transportation, Emergence portfolio company) and Guidewire (insurance) show the potential for cloud solutions in these industries.

Finally, a few industries such as banking and government will likely be among the slowest to move to cloud technology. While these industries have great potential given their massive IT spending, it may take a number of years to overcome the privacy concerns and high migration costs. We are starting to see some early progress with companies such as Addepar and nCino; however, many sub-sectors in the financial services industry may not benefit from the revenue expansion and cost savings offered by the cloud for some time.

What Makes An Industry Cloud-Friendly?

Below are eight factors that increase the potential for industry cloud success, as well as two factors that will slow things down. To arrive at these factors, we reviewed material for public industry cloud companies, such as Veeva, Textura, Dealer Track, Real Page, Athena Health, and Fleetmatics. In addition, we based our analysis on the growth metrics we have seen through meetings with hundreds of private-industry cloud companies.

Eight Factors That Impact Industry Cloud Adoption Speed

1. Dynamic regulatory environment. Software deployment through the cloud dramatically reduces the complexity of delivering updates and revisions. In the world of on-premise software, new regulations often mean company-wide software upgrades on every desktop and laptop â€" a burdensome process for IT professionals. Industry cloud platforms enable rapid and “auditable” deployment of new features or functionality that are required to comply with regulatory changes.
2. Dissatisfaction with incumbents. Unhappy executives grumbling about their existing software and systems can be good news. Users of incumbent software may have grown accustomed to changing their workflow process to accommodate a one-size-fits-all system, but once customers get a taste of a vertical solution designed specifically for them, they realize the lack of value in a horizontal offering.
3. High industry concentration. Industry cloud solutions enable more efficient sales and marketing processes, particularly in highly concentrated industries in which fewer than 50 companies represent over 80 percent of revenue. By concentrating sales energy on a limited set of companies, customer acquisition costs (CAC) can be especially attractive. In addition, industry concentration helps with word of mouth recommendations, further improving sales and marketing efficiency.
4. Mobile workforce. Emergence Capital has seen an increasing number of promising industry-specific, mobile-first cloud solutions, and many of these are focused in verticals with high percentages of non-desk workers. For the first time, workers in real estate, construction, retail, education, healthcare, and transportation have cloud applications that can be used on their smartphones and tablets, or even Google Glass.
5. Value in data. In many industries, the ability to access and analyze tremendous amounts of data (“big data”) is highly valuable. Retailers rely on big data to make sourcing, staffing and pricing decisions and financial services firms integrate sophisticated data models into nearly everything they do. Cloud architectures are uniquely good at sifting through large datasets. Additionally, cloud companies can capture new proprietary data streams by adding software features that capture new end-user data and behavior. In the insurance industry, Progressive’s Snapshot service is an example of not just mining existing data but creating new data points.
6. SaaS platform alignment. Many of the early industry cloud leaders have built their solutions on existing horizontal cloud platforms, such as Salesforce.com and Amazon’s AWS. The ability to leverage platforms can speed time to market and enable a young company to focus on what is specific to the industry rather than building the underlying infrastructure.
7. Industries with little to no cyclicality. Industries that tend to be immune from financial cycles are better candidates for cloud solutions for two primary reasons: First, seasonal or annual forms of cyclicality make it difficult to build recurring revenue businesses, the hallmark of most SaaS businesses. Second, moving to a cloud solution often requires some initial IT investment, and this can be hard to make if an industry is in a “down cycle.”
8. Visually dependent. Industries such as real estate, manufacturing, construction and retail rely heavily on visual representations, making industry cloud platforms the best solutions to integrate visual images. In addition, visually dependent industries can leverage the powerful cameras on mobile devices. Images can be updated from one location and pushed out to all parties, often via tablets that are well suited to showcase visual images. For example, in the construction industry, PlanGrid is transforming collaboration around blueprints.

Two Factors That Slow Industry Cloud Adoption Speed

1. Privacy concerns. One of the core tenets of SaaS infrastructure is that data is hosted “off-site” in the cloud. In industries such as banking, consumers and regulators are concerned about the potential for security breaches with this data structure. In fact, financial services companies have some of the largest IT budgets of any industry because they tend to build and run most of their systems in-house. While leading SaaS companies take extensive precautions to institute the highest level of data privacy, it may take many years to build enough comfort with these platforms.
2. Migration costs. Shifting to a cloud model requires a software transition that can be complicated and expensive. In industries such as transportation or manufacturing, software changes can lead to errors, lost revenue and customer dissatisfaction. High switching costs will reduce the appetite to make the change to an industry cloud solution, even if the next-generation software might ultimately be better. This is particularly the case if cloud solutions start with back-office solutions that tend to focus more on cost reduction rather than revenue enhancement.

Based on our analysis, we see potential for substantial new industry cloud leaders to continue to emerge over the next few years, particularly in the more cloud-friendly industries such as healthcare, education, retail and transportation. Industry cloud companies have been performing well in the public markets, and investors appreciate the capital efficiency that comes from being able to focus on customers in one industry. Gone are the days when industry verticals could be dismissed as niche plays. Today, they are the future of the cloud.

We Made Every SugarCRM Employee A Salesperson – Here’s How You Can, Too

Editor’s note: Clint Oram is the CTO and co-founder of SugarCRM. Follow him on Twitter @sugarclint.

I have worked with companies that considered its customers to be obstacles to avoid or ignore: “If only we didn’t have to deal with those pesky complaining customers,” they’d say, “we’d have time to do really great work.” Any company whose employees still cling to the “customer is always wrong” mindset can kiss success goodbye.

Customers will trust each other before they’ll trust a company, relying heavily on user opinions before deciding where to spend their money. And they don’t need to wait for brands to create a place to share these views; they can find plenty of places to talk trash about your company if you’re ignoring them. Social media has empowered customers to the point where they are self-sufficient and demanding of attention and delivery of quality products.

With so many customers becoming advocates (pro or con) for your company, you need to respond by creating advocates at every level of your business, which may require a major shift in culture. The old-school view of customer relations is that only the sales department gets and keeps customers. Now, all employees, from the CEO to sales to accounting to HR, are players in the customer-satisfaction game.

How do you create this “everybody is in sales” culture? By promoting enterprise-wide engagement. In other words, quickly connect your employees with your customers in high-value interactions, and you create more, happy customers.

Engage Your Customers

To make the significant shift to a sales culture, change needs to start at the top. Over the past 10 years, there’s been a movement at enlightened companies to align their operations specifically around customers. For example, many companies ranging from public, like Zynga, to private, like Onswipe, have added the new C-level position of chief revenue officer, which oversees sales, service, and support departments to keep all of these customer-facing functions operating with common goals.

Other positions that are popping up in the C-suite to create a broad-based sales culture include the chief product officer who is charged with developing solutions that customers truly need (not what you in the business think they need). Chief culture officers, whose brief includes making sure everyone is reaching out to customers in a company-approved manner, is another role that businesses are considering.

And of course, the CEO needs to think of herself as part of this process. In the end, the CEO is your chief customer officer.

Engage With Your Employees

As you enlist your employees in a customer-centric approach to their work, you need to engage in these discussions on their terms. This means establishing places where they can share ideas for raising the bar on customer service â€" for example, private groups online or internal solutions like IBM Connections or Jive.

Along with providing vehicles to encourage employee camaraderie, you need to give them access to the information that will help them become better, smarter customer advocates. In the old days, customer information did not travel far in the organization; it was mainly delivered up the ladder to management for reporting purposes.

But this unidirectional, siloed approach to customer data no longer helps create a customer-focused culture. The CRM revolution means that this information can be accessed across the business, so that sales can come from any department, or with the help of several departments â€" not just sales.

Engage The Enterprise

Everyone is becoming part of the sales process. Your company is most successful when you create a company culture that understands this. In addition to encouraging employees to share ideas and revamping your executive structure to place the focus on customers, you need to make changes in how various departments talk to each other.

Traditionally, departments’ goals weren’t shared with others. But today, everyone expects to be part of the decision-making process. Company leaders at SugarCRM are encouraged to create visibility into goals and targets for each quarter. Equal visibility is a terrific motivator.

The process of gathering the enterprise together in a united view of customer service requires social collaboration solutions. They provide the access to information that fuels engagement and can help you share each department’s goals in order to align people, processes, and technology to reach the overall business goal. And make sure to reward all employees when that deal is closed â€" don’t just limit awards to sales teams.

The combined impact of these customer, employee and enterprise engagement steps is that you send a clear message to customers that they won’t hit barriers when they try to get problems solved or inquire about new products. No matter who they contact in the business, or what department that person is in, the customer will quickly be well-informed.

SugarCRM is a customer relationship management software company. It started as open source project on Sourceforge, and the company still maintains a fully open source version. Its revenue relies on professional editions and through the provision of support. Total funding after 4 rounds stands at approx. $41 million.

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The Other IPO Roadshow: Design Your Initial Product Offering To Attract Fortune 500 Enterprises

Editor’s note: Deepak Jeevan Kumar is a Principal at General Catalyst Partners, a Venture Capital firm with offices in Palo Alto, Boston and New York. He focuses on funding and launching big data, cloud computing and cybersecurity startups. Follow him on Twitter @DJKHacker.

Getting to a successful initial public offering is not an easy road for enterprise startups selling to Fortune 500 customers. Earlier in the lifecycle, the first question of death they encounter is: “Who are your other customers?”

This can be effectively addressed by taking your startup on the other IPO roadshow: the initial product offering roadshow targeted at Fortune 500 enterprises.

Unlike consumer products, where early users will join a platform to discover something new, CIO offices in Fortune 500 companies are trained to play it safe. Many companies stick to Oracle, VMWare, EMC and Cisco not because their products are the best in the world, but because no one got fired for selecting one of them. Asking about your other customers is a way of de-risking the purchase decision â€" air cover in case something goes wrong.

There are a few simple and concrete steps available to founders to develop this “quotable referencability.” Never before has it been easy for startups to engage CIO offices. In this era when cloud computing, big data, international cybercrime and mobile are simultaneously disrupting decades-old legacy infrastructure in most CIO departments, Fortune 500 enterprises realize that they will be left behind if they don’t use innovative products from startups. So how do you programmatically exploit this opening to win reference customers?

Start with an ‘Initial Product Offering’ Roadshow 

“Sell first and code next” is my advice to any enterprise entrepreneur trying to win Fortune 500 reference customers. Selling starts before you develop your alpha/beta product and not after it.

Once you have convinced your VCs to fund your seed or series A round, it is your privilege to ask them to help you organize an initial product offering roadshow, aka a design customer roadshow. While most VCs are great in helping with ultimate initial public offering roadshows, very few can guide you through the first initial product offering roadshows. This is more than just making a couple of customer introductions. You need guidance in planning a trip to NYC and Boston to meet with 10-30 of the top financial institutions, pharma companies, insurance majors and media conglomerates.

Many companies stick to Oracle, VMWare, EMC and Cisco not because their products are the best in the world, but because no one got fired for selecting one of them.

Getting to the right person in these organizations is key. Busy Fortune 500 executives will give you guidance only if the intro comes from a prior entrepreneur they have engaged with or from a trusted VC who is familiar with the problem domain. It is also important that the founders (not product managers or sales engineers) represent the startup in these early discussions.

In my work as a venture capitalist, I find this roadshow to be the most crucial eye-opening experience for engineer-founders who have no prior interaction with Fortune 500 companies in a sales role. It helps them understand the meaning of the notoriously long enterprise sales cycle that may include RFPs, the complexity of the decision-making processes involving many stakeholders and the importance of finding a “budget.”

Develop The Minimum Viable Product With Your Customers

When you are on this roadshow, you are not expected to have a beta product, but you can still engage these prospective customers on key sea changes in the industry, their perceived needs and your mission on changing the world. Jointly brainstorm an architecture/product design that can help them address this change in a 10x cost-efficient and 10x faster manner. Make them feel a part of the company’s creation process. The output of this roadshow is to select three to five design customers who are willing to engage on paid PoCs (proof of concept). Select only those design customers who have been quotable references to other startups before.

After securing soft commitments from design customers, it is time to start developing your alpha product. This may take 3-12 months. Keep your design customers engaged through this long hiatus by giving them key milestone updates and organizing joint design discussions. Make them feel like they are developing the product with you. Be well-informed on their budget changes and ensure that they still have a budget allocated to engage you on a paid PoC.

Undertake Only Paid PoC Engagements

Do not use unpaid PoCs even if you have to wait one to two months to get a paid PoC. The best VCs realize this and will tolerate such delays. The conversion rate of a paid PoC to a “production-referencable” sale is significantly higher than the conversion rate of an unpaid PoC. Understand what success in a PoC means. Define clear parameters and talk to other startups that have undertaken PoCs with the same customers. Make sure your sponsor has experience in helping other startups through this conversion process. Once you have completed a PoC, convince your design customer to be a reference for future investors and other customers.

It is a good practice to hire a program manager and a sales engineer to ensure the smooth running of these PoCs. I have also seen a few startups first engage in testing the waters with alpha PoCs before starting an almost-feature-complete beta PoC for a much larger group of customers. This is specifically useful when you have a complicated product that has a long development cycle and also has multi-week testing cycles for customers to appreciate its complete value proposition.

Power and influence in the early days can come from public silence for enterprise startups.

Use Stealth Mode

Don’t talk about your product until you’re ready for its general availability. This serves three purposes. First, it keeps you focused on the proof-of-concept game. I have seen enterprise startups that stay in stealth mode for two years after funding to ensure that they have a few key reference customers before announcing the product publicly. You can’t open many war fronts. An all-out PR war front is unnecessary, as you already know who your design customers are.

Second, power and influence in the early days can come from public silence for enterprise startups (unlike consumer startups). Your competitors, the media and your customers like a game of treasure hunt to find out what you are doing. As you are selling to a select group of Fortune 500 customers, there is no point in announcing to your powerful enterprise tech competitors (e.g Cisco, Oracle, IBM, HP) what you are up to. Convince your design customers first before you open up the kimono.

Finally, stealth-mode PR is highly recommended instead of an open all-out PR strategy where all details are disclosed publicly. The cornerstones of stealth-mode PR are: a) speaking in industry conferences about where the world should be headed to enable a key transition and how you may have a unique plan to enable that key transition; b) getting your design customers to talk to their fellow CIOs and to the investment community; and c) engaging industry analysts and mentors.

Engage Analysts And Industry Mentors

Successful startups almost never sell to just two to three customers. There is a major risk that is built-in to the design customer PoC strategy described above. You can become hyper-focused on solving the problems of your design customers and forget that the product you create should be widely usable in the industry. You can mitigate this risk by engaging a few key external stakeholders in this phase.

Firstly, recruit a strong sales oriented entrepreneur to be a mentor, adviser or a board member. Such a person can provide expert advice on the problem described above, guide you in converting paid PoCs to production sales and help craft your recruitment strategy.

Start briefing industry analysts such as Gartner, IDC, 451 Research and Forrester. Boutique analysts such as Bernd Harzog and Curt Monash also have influence in the customer community. Get them to talk to their Fortune 500 clients about you and to provide you with the feedback.

It is also a good practice to open early discussions with key channel partners such as Trace3 and Cambridge Computer, who have experience in guiding early-stage startups to expand your beta customer pipeline. They give you an extraordinary amount of leverage in helping you focus your resources on your direct engagements.

Keep these stakeholders informed of your PoCs and reference wins. At the same time, keep these interactions limited to two to three industry analysts and two to three channel partners to maintain the stealth-mode effect.

General availability 

Once you are through these steps you have validated your product-market fit. You have a few quotable reference customers and solved the first chicken-or-the-egg problem. And you’re now ready for GA of your product, which will be the next inflection point in your startup’s lifecycle.

This is when you start talking publicly about your company and vision. The next sales steps are to create a repeatable sales process and scale the revenues. For that you will have to raise a series B, hire a strong sales team, win the love of channel partners, start your public-facing content marketing strategy, create a top-notch customer advisory board, raise a few larger rounds to reach $100M in annual revenue and establish thought-leadership in CIO forums. And that will position you well for a successful IPO roadshow.

Image: Flickr

Vogue And The Tech Hard Sell

It isn’t often that one learns about cool apps from Vogue. In case you don’t read fashion magazines, American Vogue is basically like a seasonal shopping catalogue for women who find themselves, or aspire to find themselves, in the 1%. With an average cost of $4,375 per item displayed, there are very few people who can afford what Vogue is peddling. But those who can, buy.

This September, the 906-page fashion tome is peddling tech â€" hard sell. Forget if you will the few data points pointing to a tech “slump.” Judging by the number of times Instagram and Twitter are mentioned in the September Vogue, it’s no longer okay to be a beautiful Luddite. Now you have to be gorgeous AND have built an app.

Like Peek founder Ruzwana Bashir who is featured wearing techie favorite Oscar de la Renta. Or model Topaz Page-Green (what a Vogue-friendly name!) whose yet-to-be released Feedie app turns your food selfies into charitable donations. Of course.

If you’re trying to profit off of consumer tech, consider your market expanded this September: Nike’s FuelBand now pairs nicely with a Cartier LOVE bracelet. Make up artist Michelle Phan’s 800,000 Instagram fans, 400,000 Twitter followers and 1.3 million Facebook Likes are considered just as valid a status symbol as Marissa Mayer’s multi-colored, thousand-dollar, de la Renta (of course) cardigans.

What better proof of this tech hard sell than Mayer herself? Her 3,000-word profile in the magazine, any tech reporter’s wet dream, reveals insights into Yahoo’s stealth “Project Grand Slam” and a breakdown of how the Tumblr deal went down last Spring, in addition to What Marissa Is Wearing: ”That’s when we said, ‘My gosh, if we’re going to do all this, it makes sense to merge.’ I loved David’s perspective on the products, and I think he respected mine. We had a tremendous meeting of the minds in terms of what we wanted to build and what we wanted to do.” Hell, the profile even made Techmeme.

Oh and of course Google Glass makes an appearance, continuing its vigorous efforts to expand beyond Josh Topolsky’s face onto 12 pages of model Raquel Zimmermann’s and, maybe someday, if everyone keeps their fingers crossed long enough, yours. This most recent Glass press cycle leverages Vogue, Nina Garcia, Diane Von Furstenberg, model Coco Rocha and a bunch of non-tech influencers in an attempt to make Google’s wearable form of Google+ something that normal people aspire to. At least it costs less than a Hermes Birkin.

Even before the Marissa Mayer star turn, the issue is littered with QR codes, so readers can call up all kinds of supplemental behind-the-scenes content. An apparition of Editrix Anna Wintour herself appears after you scan in a pretty randomly placed code. On the ads side, a CoverGirl Hunger Games campaign directs you to Blippar, an app that literally brings the advertisement to life, i.e. acting out a full CoverGirl Hunger Games makeover in front of the reader on iOS, like something out of Minority Report.

Vogue knows where its bread (advertisement) is increasingly buttered (through, or by, tech). Tech is a double target more than ever before â€" both as an advertising category and as a medium through which print can claw back some of the revenues it is losing in the overall decline of traditional ads. The fact that the industry is now fashionable enough for editorial fodder is a byproduct of this dynamic, the two go hand in Cartier-encrusted hand.

In fact, the two major non-tech profiles of stars in the issue make points of grounding themselves in a tech context, such as  Jennifer Lawrence’s mocking of Jonathan Van Meter’s “Radio Shack-era” recorder and pop star Grimes’ giving up on the medium entirely: “I don’t keep up with the Internet,” she says, a statement telling because of the fact that it would have been nonsense five years ago. Back then, Vogue didn’t even keep up with the Internet.

And now? Well now it courts the online world, and its money. Between begs at the end of articles to download the Vogue digital edition and pleads for QR code scans of the Wintour explainer, Vogue, and thus its 11 million strong audience, wants a piece of our brave new world, signaling that they’re aware of and willing to play by our rules.

And, for now, for novelty’s sake, we’re more than willing to let them have it. 

Mayer Vogue (pdf)

Google Glass Vogue (pdf)

Encouraging Female Engineers Is Key To Facebook's Recruitment Strategy

Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer and Director of Engineering Jocelyn Goldfein spoke at the she++ conference today, making Facebook by far the most represented company at the Stanford conference.

Their public remarks and comments shed light on Facebook’s aggressive strategy to recruit talented engineers to join their “deep bench” â€" the company’s greatest asset, according to Goldstein.

“When you look at the numbers of CS majors that are graduatingâ€"where are we going to get more from?” Goldfein tells me. “The fact that women are such a small percentage of CS majors when they’re such a large percentage of undergraduates is kind of the missing link. And it’s really obvious when you think about it.”

“The numbers are a challenge,” Schroepfer explains. “There are just fewer women graduating and fewer women in the industry. So I think there’s just a smaller pool of people and I think, because of that, if Facebook had gender parity, then everyone else in the industry wouldn’t, just statistically. So our first problem is not a Facebook problem, it’s an industry problem.”

Goldfein has been heavily involved with she++, appearing in the documentary and speaking at both conferences. Schroepfer says the company does work with the Anita Borg Institute and Grace Hopper conference as well.

For the past few years, Schroepfer and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg have guest lectured once per quarter in Stanford’s introductory CS class; it’s become both a unique aspect of one of Stanford’s most popular classes and a great recruiting event for Facebook.

“A lot of people take CS106A, the intro to computer science class, and it’s a phenomenal class, I think it’s the largest enrollment they’ve ever had this year,” he tells me. “But what you see happen is people take the class and then they move on to other things. They don’t actually end up majoring in computer science or being a professional in engineering. A lot of what we’re trying to do is just show up to the class and show people what it’s like to do this in the real world.”

Mark Zuckerberg in CS 106A with Stanford professor Mehran Sahami (Courtesy of Jacob Chen/The Dish Daily).

“Facebook has focused very hard on claiming our disproportionate share of the women that are out there,” Goldfein tells me. “Just like we want our disproportionate share of the people with iPhone experience, and we want our disproportionate share of the people with Kernel experience. There are a set of scarce, valuable, talent pools in software and we’re out to get more than our share. But that’s not a winning approach for the whole industry. Everybody can’t do that.”

Goldfein and Schroepfer say they then turn their attention to the “pipeline problem” and work to increase the total number of software engineers in the world, namely by increasing the number of women.

“We put a lot of energy into trying to find more women, because fundamentally for us it’s an applicant pool problem,” Goldfein says. “When women interview with us, we want to hire them and they want to work for us. Those numbers are great. The trouble is, there are just very few women we can find in the candidate pool.”

This summer, the company is experimenting with a program called Facebook University to “reach further up the pipeline.” While traditional Facebook summer interns are college juniors and seniors or graduate students in computer science, the company wants to reach students finishing their freshman year of college; Goldfein says they will teach these students principles of coding, particularly for mobile, and give them a taste of what working at Facebook is like. She says the inaugural Facebook U class for this summer is 30 students, two thirds of whom are female.

February 1, 2004

NASDAQ:FB

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...

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Mike Schroepfer is the Vice President of Engineering at Facebook. Mike is responsible for harnessing the engineering organization’s culture of speed, creativity and exploration to build products, services and infrastructure that support the company’s users, developers and partners around the world. Before coming to Facebook, Mike was the Vice President of Engineering at Mozilla Corporation, where he led the global, collaborative, open and participatory product development process behind Mozilla’s popular software, such as the Firefox web browser. Mike was...

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Rad, A Parisian Hipster Fashion Portal, Gets $3.3M Led By Index To Go International

Because fashion never goes out of style, fashion portals continue to bring in the money not just from consumers looking for the next big thing â€" be it style or bargain, and ideally both â€" but also investors keen to ride the wave. The latest example is Rad, a Paris-based startup that focuses on hipster clothes and accessories and likens itself to the online equivalent of Urban Outfitters. Today, Rad is announcing €2.5 million ($3.3 million) in funding. Rad is just under one year old, but on its own steam and through viral marketing it’s already picked up 1 million users. This round of money, €2 million of it from Index Ventures, is the first Rad has raised and it will use the backing to expand its business internationally. That will be first to the UK and Germany, and co-founder and CMO David Smadja tells us that the aim is to hit the U.S. in two years.

The funding comes in the wake of a much bigger round for a more established online fashion brand, but one that points to how hip can still mean big money: Fab earlier this week announced the closing of a $150 million round at a $1 billion valuation. And it’s still raising more.

Index, for its part, has built up a strong portfolio in online fashion, and as it were, sites that aim specifically for a more edgy look. Among the 150 companies it currently backs are biggies like Nasty Gal, Farfetch and ASOS, as well as smaller sites like The Business Of Fashion. (And yes, Index also has a lot of skin in the game with more mainstream operations like Etsy.)

Interestingly, it’s the Nasty Gal parallel that Martin Mignot, the partner at Index who led the investment, also highlights. Just before investing in Rad, he had thought that the online fashion space was played out, but when his girlfriend showed him Rad, he sat up and took notice. (It was she who first brought Nasty Gal to Mignot’s, and Index’s, attention, “and that story has played out well so far, ” he notes understatedly in a blog post on the funding.) The fast growth, and the team, were what comprehensively won him over, he says.

“We are delighted to be partnering with the Rad team, who have proven, in their short history, that they have an innate understanding of fashion, brands and design,” says Mignot. “Working with ground-breaking businesses like Etsy and NastyGal has proven to us that retail is an area undergoing enormous change and Rad has a great opportunity to become a global company in this space.”

While Rad has been doing well on its own â€" it says it’s on track to make €15 million in sales in its first year of operations, self-funded â€" the extra capital will give it a boost to move into new territories and staff up.

“We are raising to accelerate our growth â€" hire key people, build a logistics platform, speed up acquisition through marketing, develop our production capacities,” notes Smadja. “Ideally, we would like to enter the US market in the next 2 years but right now we’re focusing on Europe, next markets being the UK and Germany.” Other co-founders include Anthony Serero (its CEO), Simon Amzalag (its CFO) and Julia Serero (its chief buyer).

While online fashion is most definitely a crowded market, it’s the smart move to look for a particular slant on the market early on. In the case of Rad, it’s the young women and sometimes men who shop at Urban Outfitters â€" hip but not too out there. “Our competitor would be Urban Outfitters,” Smadja says. “The direction we’re taking will set us apart in terms of offer (we focus on small brands and cool products that are difficult to find and our dynamic is much different).” The difference is that because it is online, and because Rad has adopted the private sale business model many other sites have used, particularly in early days (Fab has, for example, since dropped its invite policy), “We are competitive on prices, something that Urban can never be.”

The other key part of Rad is that it tries to work the trend among shoppers these days to opt for low prices and fast turnover in wardrobe. “We do not believe in traditional seasonality in fashion,” he says, noting that they stay away from the idea of offering 2 big collections each year. “We focus on products and because of our turn around and dynamic, we’re able to showcase hundreds of collections a year at best prices.” Whether it will be able to hold to its anti-establishment approach as it grows up will remain to be seen.

Other investors in this round included Nicolas Santi-Weil (Founding Partner at The Kooples, who will be joining the Rad board) and the New York-based Vaizra Seed Fund.

Index Ventures is a leading venture capital firm specializing in investments in information technology and life sciences companies. The firm invests in seed, early and growth stage start-ups across US and Europe. Since its inception in 1996, Index Ventures has backed visionary entrepreneurs who have taken on incumbents and built seminal companies in a number of growth sectors including: open source software companies such as MySQL, Trolltech, Zend and Pentaho; broadband and VOIP companies such as Virata, Skype, FON and...

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