In one of the last I/O sessions for today, the Google Glass team answered some of the community’s most urgent questions about the product, including when the next units are shipping and what apps should come next.

Next recipients

Steve Lee, Glass product director, told the audience that of the I/O attendees from last year, everyone who signed up for Glass has received a unit.

Next, the 8,000 people selected from the #ifihadglass hashtag contest will start getting their devices; that rollout should begin fairly soon.

We still don’t have a date for when Glass will be widely available to normal consumers, so no need to play a Best Buy overnight camp-out just yet.

Next apps

Still, the panel is excited about the apps the developers at I/O will likely go home and build for the devices. Currently, there are fewer than a dozen functioning Glass apps.

“I’d love to have a fitness application on Glass,” said Lee. “That way, I could have relevant information to my workout without ever having to stop my workout.”

Charles Mendis, Glass software engineering director, talked about the hassle of buying groceries with a couple small kids in tow, saying, “I’d love a way to pay easily at the cash register.”

Isabelle Olsson, lead industrial designer for Google Glass, said, “I’m really into karaoke. … If there was a way to sing karaoke in a way that you actually faced the audience, which is usually your drunk friends, that would be awesome. Please make it!”

New features

One developer asked the team when app developers might have access to voice triggers so end users can use voice as a control mechanism for apps other than the Glass device itself.

Mendis responded that more voice commands might be possible in the future. We expect more information will be available when Google releases its Glass Development Kit, which will give devs access to native hardware capabilities.

As for the hardware itself, Olsson got a couple questions about Glass’s colors — currently a limited palette of black, gray, white, orange, and blue.

“We’ve developed five colors based on personalities and also what people look good in,” she said. “We started to see how important color was, how nonintuitive it was and how people develop an attachment to a specific color. … Colors are much more important than you would ever imagine. I want to keep on doing cool colors.”

Normal people

Throughout Google I/O, it’s been a surreal experience to walk through huge crowds of people, a third of whom look like Robocop Lite. It’s also been an interesting exercise in basic manners — knowing when not to take a picture or when to ignore a notification, for example.

“The social etiquette of using Glass has been on the top of our minds,” said Lee, “not just the people who wear them, but the people around them.

“The display is up above the person’s eye. We learned that very early on. Some of the early prototypes actually covered your eyes, and we discovered that a lot of human interaction has to do with eye contact.”

Lee, who is from Idaho, is hopeful about Glass’s chances in the wider market of consumers.

“They are very optimistic and intrigued about Glass,” he said. “There’s already interest, so there’s a real opportunity for Glass to become mainstream.”

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Isabelle Olsson, lead industrial designer for Google Glass, showed off a couple pieces of Google history as well as its near future today at Google I/O when she modeled two prototypes.

First, she showed off a huge, clunky early model typical of earlier prototypes of the device:

“I will never forget the first day on the team,” she said. “I walked into a room full of people wearing these crazy things on their heads. … It’s kind of heavy. How do you go from something like this to what we’re all wearing today?”

Three guiding principles in making that gradual evolution, she said, were lightness, simplicity, and scalability.

“We are obsessed with weight” Olsson said. “We care about every single gram.”

She said they also strive to make Glass modular so it can be used in other cases, such as prescription Glass units, which she showed the audience:

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At the Google I/O developer conference today, Mary Lou Jepsen bemoaned the lack of hardware innovation in the tech world.

“There’s no more silicon in Silicon Valley. It’s all iPhone apps.

“For the devices we use … the funding models are completely screwed up,” she said. “Angel funding isn’t sufficient for hardware.”

And that’s at least part of why she’s working on a hush-hush hardware project for Google X.

Google X is the division of Google that produced Google Glass. It’s run by Google cofounder Sergei Brin and operates as a skunkworks within the company — a sort of magic factory where ideas are shoot-for-the-moon big and projects are shrouded in secrecy.

Jepsen said she’s not too comfortable with “the sharp elbows and politics of larger companies.” But we’ve heard that Google X operates a bit more like a startup within Google. Her coworkers at X include Android founder Andy Rubin and former Google Maps chief Jeff Huber.

“Google X is the hardware division of Google,” Jepsen said. And while she couldn’t say too much about the hardware followup to Glass, she gave the I/O audience a few clues.

“For me, it all came together in displays,” she said. “How do we get data to all the people of the world, not just the rich people?”

That sentiment alone echoes Google CEO Larry Page’s keynote yesterday, a speech that was all about creating global opportunity and equality through technology. For Jepsen, that principle is the backbone of a huge part of her career, One Laptop Per Child.

Jepsen founded OLPC, designing the first the $100 laptop in the process. “It was just me for the first 18 months, then we grew to the massive size of four,” she said.

Her next move was Pixel Qi, a display company that uses existing manufacturing lines to make screens with vastly lower power consumption needs and increased readability in sunlight.

When it comes to making hardware, she said, “There’s not much competition, so there’s an advantage.” Unfortunately, the competition that does exist is more likely to come in gargantuan form — giants like Samsung and Sony. Her advice: “Don’t do something small.”

She also told the entrepreneur-heavy audience, “VCs don’t have the core competence to fund or even do due diligence on hardware. … You have to be creative to fund it.” While Google’s warchest funds the new projects for Google X, she suggested looking to the more forward-thinking superangels and hackerspaces for resources and funds.

One interesting difference in Jepsen’s entire hardware experience and the modus operandi for Google X/Google Glass is the country of origin for devices. Google Glass is made in the United States; so was Google’s other homebrewed hardware project, the Nexus Q.

Jepsen, on the other hand, has a huge amount of expertise in Asian manufacturing. In fact, she actually moved to Asia and learned Chinese as part of her founder experience for OLPC.

“These days, the manufacturing is controlled by a small number of countries, primarily Taiwan and South Korea,” she said. “You need to figure out how to deal with cultures, but it’s freed me for the last decade .. Basically, all I have to do is get a whole bunch of people to say yes. They say no 99 percent of the time.”

Image credit: Pixel Qi

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Timothy Jordan, developer advocate for Glass, takes a small stage in a large anteroom at Moscone West.

“[Glass] is a moonshot about our relationship to technology … technology that’s there when you need it and out of the way when you don’t.”

He’s selling the device, but in this crowd, there’s no need.

Currently, there’s only one way to develop apps for Glass, which Google calls “Glassware”: Using Google’s Mirror API. (Although Google itself is hosting a session on hacking Glass later today — called, appropriately enough, Voiding Your Warranty.) A more full-fledged software development kit (SDK) called the Glass Development Kit is coming, Google says, but hasn’t said when.

That means it’s relatively easy to Glassware now, but until the SDK arrives, it’s challenging to make them look good and work well with users’ expectations.

At this, the very first session for the Google Glass track at I/O, the session room seating a couple hundred developers had filled to capacity a half hour before the session started. Five minutes later, the overflow room (again seating a couple hundred devs) was also full. A hundred or so devs milled around in the hallway outside, queuing for no apparent reason and obviously miffed.

I can’t stress enough how fascinated these people are with Glass. For something that’s still a buggy, crash-prone prototype, it’s inspiring imaginations enough that I can see a nascent ecosystem growing around it long before the first consumer devices ship.

Jordan’s job for today is to guide those imaginations in the best directions. He has to explain the Glass platform and teach web and mobile developers how to design for a tiny screen with new ratios and new paradigms for user-device interaction. He’s not just teaching old dogs new tricks; he’s teaching dogs how to do Shamu’s Sea World routine.

Jordan runs through a Glass demo — how to turn it on, how to take and share a picture. As other writers have mentioned, nothing about the user experience is particularly (or even remotely) intuitive. But once (and if) you get the hang of it, Glass becomes remarkably interesting very quickly. It’s then that you realize the wonderful possibilities of technology that is literally in your face but still somehow out of the way.

So far, Google’s Mirror API is the only way to build Glassware. With the Mirror API, which we’ll talk about more later today, the developer’s service never communicates directly with Glass devices. Instead, the service “talks to” Google services, which sync with the Glass device in question. Devs can use location and subscriptions to make their services more interesting. All this happens with three common technologies: REST, JSON, and OAuth.

There’s no native API yet for accessing the hardware or working offline, but Jordan says this tool, called the Glass Development Kit, is coming soon. The company is soliciting developer wishlists for the GDK now.

Beyond the tech side, there’s the graphic design, UI, and UX. The screen size is more limited than any other modern screen, so what is presented on the display must be drop-dead simple — a photo, a video, some text, or the simplest HTML you can imagine (Google has made a few handy templates to get you started).

What you see on the Google Glass display are called “cards.” They’re more TV-shaped than phone or computer screen-shaped, but even though they’re parked right next to your eyeball, they’re a lot smaller than you might think, and designers have to work carefully to make the most of the tiny screen. Cards can be bundled, threaded, paginated. Jordan calls this ability “super powerful but tricky.”

And while Jordan doesn’t mention it aloud, we’re noticing a trend with the Glass card examples: Most of the cards contain some kind of prompt — otherwise, how will your users know what to do next? They’ve never worked with anything like this before, and they don’t know where to tap or swipe or what to say. There’s no norm yet, so you have to leave a visual breadcrumb trail throughout the entire UI. Jordan does say each prompt or menu item should be just a few characters long, with only a handful of menu items on a single card.

The technology of building for Glass is the easy part. Designing for a totally new interface is the hard part.

“We’re always thinking at Google, what’s good for the user?” says Jordan. “Really understand the design and experience of Glass,” he says, encouraging devs to do whatever they need to do to demo a Glass unit if they don’t already have one.

“The user experience is about design. It’s about making an excellent service for the user… the paradigms and patterns,” he continues. “The essential thing you must do is test Glass and use it in your daily life.” Over and over, Jordan tells the audience they need to test on Glass.

Designing for a device you know and use is Rule Zero of Glass development. The next rule is to not “get in the way.” Then, Jordan says, make sure all content is timely. Finally, he says, “Avoid the unexpected. This is particularly important on Glass … They’re wearing your service. Be honest about the intention of your application, and give them preferences to get notifications at certain times or to know what they’re going to get when they sign up.”

Facebook, Twitter, Path, Evernote, Tumblr, Elle, the New York Times, and CNN already have Glass apps out, and Jordan points to them as great examples of how to start. And of course, he recommends using Google’s own services, like Google+ and Hangouts, on Glass.

Glassware product design is the only big challenge facing developers who want to make apps for Glass. The tech is simple. The users, while few, are low-hanging fruit, willing to test just about anything you throw their way. But as hungry and fascinated as the developers at Moscone West are today, I’m sure they’ll find truly imaginative ways to work around and with Glass’s challenging interface in short order.

Image credit: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat, Jolie O’Dell/VentureBeat

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Now more than ever, normal people are aware of and attracted to good design. And no one knows that better than author/designer David Kadavy, who recently gave a fascinating TED talk on the topic.

“People are already learning about design,” said Kadavy via email. “You can talk about Times New Roman versus Helvetica at a cocktail party these days — and that wouldn’t have happened 20 years ago.”

In this 17-minute talk, he goes into the niceties and not-so-niceties of our cultural conversations around design and how design as a basic life skill is becoming mainstream.

Image credit: sima/Shutterstock

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Mark it on your calendars: Today, no social media, photo-sharing, casual gaming, consumer-y app-y startups announced funding raises.

No, for today belongs to cloud companies, finance companies, data companies — the solid, boring stuff that stands half a chance of seeing us through this bubble with slightly less egg on our collective face than last time around.

As the fella said, “He that outlives this day and comes safe home will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d, and rouse him at the name of Cloudant!” Or something like that.

And the winners are:

Cloudant pulls down a $12M round

Hot database-as-a-service startup Cloudant has raised $12 million in its second round of funding, the company announced today. The Boston-based startup was founded in Cambridge, Mass., in 2008 by three MIT physicists. The team struggled to move and analyze multi-petabyte data sets. So they ended up creating what would become Cloudant. Cloudant offers a highly scalable database-as-a-service that makes it possible to store, access, and analyze your operational data in the cloud. In the layers of the cloud, Cloudant becomes a “data layer” that can be run on top of most infrastructure-as-a-service providers, including Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, SoftLayer, Microsoft Azure, and Joyent. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

GraphLab gets $6.75M

GraphLab, an open source, distributed graph computation framework, has announced a $6.75 million funding round led by Madrona Venture Group and NEA. Seattle-based GraphLab, Inc. is building a commercial product the open-source project, applying advanced machine learning to massive graph datasets. “Data has the ability to make our lives better, whether applied to public health, economics, or suggesting the perfect song. But as the complexity of data sets grows, the need for entirely new ways of thinking about them has grown as well,” said Carlos Guestrin, GraphLab CEO, in a statement on the news.

TransferWise secures $6M

London-based TransferWise has just earned the distinction of sealing the first European deal by Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures. The startup specializes in peer-to-peer international money transfers, undercutting traditional banks with its crowdsourced currency exchange. A previous investment round in 2012 brought in $1.3 million from IA Ventures, Index Ventures, and a group of angels.

SugarSync sweetens its deal with another $3M

Dropbox competitor SugarSync just closed an additional $3 million in funding, according to an SEC filing. A spokesperson for the company just confirmed the debt raise and said it would be used to bolster the product development team. The funding was brought in through an existing investor — likely Draper Fisher Jurvetson’s Andreas Stavropoulous, whose name appears on the Form D. The company has not raised funding since February 2012, when it pulled in $15 million to grow and define itself in the crowded cloud storage market. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

WegoWise gets $3M

WegoWise, a company that uses utility data to help owners and managers track their utility use and encourage energy efficiency investments, has taken $3 million in add-on funding from existing investor Boston Community Capital. Right now, a company rep tells us, the startup is focusing on apartment/condo complexes as well as commercial real estate. The startup’s platform tracks and compares utility use across large portfolios of buildings to find energy-wasting elements. “Think of it as Mint.com, but for utility data instead of finances,” the rep said.

Pangea Payments takes $1M in oversubscribed seed round

Money-transfer startup Pangea Payments wants to “help underbanked people around the globe.” To that end, the Chicago-based startup has taken an initial million-dollar funding round from OCA Ventures, Origin Ventures, i2A Fund, and FireStarter Fund. Angel investors also participating in this round include former Navteq CEO Larry Kaplan, Cloverhill Bakery exec Bill Gee, and Potbelly Sandwich Works founder Bryant Keil. Pangea’s multiplatform service (including mobile, web, and retail options) lets users send money to anyone, anywhere around the world, at any time.

Image credit: NBC

Today’s funding announcements were all over the board, from big data to e-commerce to online education to a teensy little to-do-app-done-good.

Let’s get down to business:

Rocket Internet’s Namshi gets a $13M boost

Rocket Internet can’t stop churning out e-commerce startups in emerging markets. Today the Berlin-based incubator program announced that Namshi, its Middle Eastern online fashion retailer, has raised $13 million led by Summit Partners to sustain growth. Namshi features clothing, accessories, and footwear for women, men, and kids from over 550 international and local brands. Like Zappos, the sites offers free shipping and a flexible return policy. The site serves the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, and Bahrain. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Lucid Works strikes a $10M deal

Big data startup LucidWorks has raised $10 million to help enterprise companies use multistructured data to reap more revenue. LucidWorks product suite contains two development platforms that enable organizations to search, discover, and analyze their data. LucidWorks Search is built on top of Apache Lucene/Solr open-source search project and seeks to simplify and improve the process of building embedded search applications. The other product, LucidWorks Big Data, then helps businesses make sense of the data. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Logical Choice chooses $5M

Ed-tech startup Logical Choice Technologies has raised $5M in funding from Vert Capital Corp, which will assume a controlling stake. The Atlanta-based company is known for its solutions to help integrate classroom technologies with new digital tools. Among other products, the team has developed an augmented reality reading program for early learning.

Any.do gets $3.5

Popular to-do list application Any.Do has raised $3.5 million in new funding to continue helping people get things done no matter the device. San Fransico-based Any.Do competes closely with apps like Wunderlist, Clear, and Remember the Milk. I love Any.Do’s design and feature set. It’s free to use, simple, inputs tasks with your voice, and syncs across syncs iOS, Android, and Chrome apps. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

In the days before its big, splashy, Kardashian wedding-level annual developer conference, Google is letting one juicy tidbit escape from its locked-down treasure trove of announcements.

Brace yourselves, now.

It’s mobile recommendations. That is, publishers and developers can use Google+ to fuel a constant stream of recommended content for users of their mobile websites.

Recommendations from Google+ surface bring up content based on what you’re currently reading. It can also recommend more articles by the same author, articles your Google+ friends have shared, or pages that are particularly popular with the general Google+ audience.

Put it all together; whadda ya get?!

For now, this JavaScript snippet-powered feature is for mobile web only. Publishers and developers can specify content for the engine to not recommend.

This is just one of the Google+-themed platform announcements we’ll be hearing more about during I/O throughout this week. The biggest Google+ developer tool released to date has been Google+ sign-in, which is either a companion or competitor to Facebook’s Open Graph login, depending on to whom you’re speaking.

We asked Google+ PM director Seth Sternberg how Google+ sign-in was working out for developers so far — particularly developers using the mechanism to boost their Android app adoption rates.

“Anecdotally, we’ve heard really great things,” the Googler replied. “We wanted to drive more Android installs, and it’s been amazing in terms of user engagement. It’s really sending users back to our partners.”

At I/O, 50 Google partners already using Google+ sign-in will be present to talk about their experiences. The full list of partners presenting is included below:

Air New Zealand, AllTheCooks, Banjo, Branchout, Business Insider, Colopla, Community Factory, Contacts+, Dealflicks, Deezer, Editora Globo, eHow, Fandango, Flixster, Forbes, Funny or Die, Glamour, Go SMS Pro, HRS.com, Huffington Post, ibotta, Jolicloud , Kabam, KickSend, KLM, Magisto, Mashable, mon.ki, n24, NPR, Owners.com, Pixiv, Polygon, RCS, RebelMouse, Restalo.es, SB Nation, SkillPages, Slacker, Softonic, Songza, SoundCloud, Speakingtree, Synacor, Tamindir, Terra, The Fancy, The Guardian, The Verge, TravelZoo, Trovit, TuneIn, Vasily, Verbling, and Voxy

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For reasons involving reliability — which is semi-kinda important in low-Earth orbit, apparently — our fellow nerds living aboard the International Space Station have made the switch from Windows to Linux for astronauts’ laptops.

The space nerds will get training from the Linux Foundation for the upgrade to Debian 6. The foundation has actually customized two courses specifically for NASA astronauts’ needs, including a basic Linux user course and more advanced coursework on how to develop applications for Linux.

Previously, the laptops aboard the ISS had been running Windows XP.

The United Space Alliance manages the NASA/ISS computers. A United Space Alliance spokesperson told press the switch was made because ISS astronauts and cosmonauts needed an operating system “that was stable and reliable.”

Ouch!

The foundation also says the first humanoid space robot will also get a fresh Linux install. Called Robonaut (R2), the bot was created to “take over some of the astronaut’s responsibilities. … Running on Linux, the robot can be manipulated by onboard astronauts with ground controllers commanding it into position and performing operations. The Linux training from the Linux Foundation will help NASA developers ensure that R2 can be a productive addition to the ISS. Still in the fine-tuning phase, R2 will eventually carry out tasks too dangerous or mundane for astronauts in microgravity.”

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Asian e-commerce juggernaut Alibaba has paid $294 million for a 28 percent stake in AutoNavi, a location, GPS, and mapping company based in Beijing. The end goal, the companies said, is a combination of the two entities’ areas of expertise: physical location and online retail.

In a press release, AutoNavi states it plans “to share certain data, including AutoNavi’s map data and location-related information of the merchants on Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms. … AutoNavi and Alibaba will also cooperate in the areas of map engine, location search, navigation, and cloud computing services and will cross-promote their respective products and services, with a goal of developing new location-based business models.”

The deal itself is structured so that one of Alibaba Group’s wholly owned subsidiaries will purchase 28 percent of AutoNavi’s fully diluted outstanding shares. Alibaba executive vice chair Joseph C. Tsai and Eddie Wu, Alibaba’s mobile product president, will both gain seats on AutoNavi’s board of directors. The deal should close soon pending regulatory approval.

In a statement, Alibaba chief Jack Ma said, “This new alliance reflects our vision for the future of the mobile Internet.”

“With Alibaba’s support, AutoNavi will be able to establish a massive platform of points of interest (POIs) related to the kinds of services our users seek every day,” said AutoNavi CEO Congwu Cheng.

“The alliance will also enable us to create an innovative monetization model by providing consumers with a one-stop service application that integrates merchant information with POIs search, data mining, payment, and other e-commerce activities.”

AutoNavi was founded in 2001 and currently employs 2,000 people. The company had its $100 million IPO in the United States in 2010.

Image credit: fcasadei/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

It’s one of the biggest headaches for mobile developers and organizations launching mobile initiatives, and one where the most capital can be wasted: mobile testing.

Since testing can amount to as much as 10 percent of a mobile development budget, this headache can quickly avalanche into a disaster without the right direction and tools.

So what options are available to help companies get through this frustrating period before launching a mobile application? It’s easiest if you consider the four types of testing — unit, functional, data, and user experience — as building blocks that can be put together to create more comprehensive testing.

Unit testing: the basics

Put simply, unit testing is about testing individual functions in isolation. By testing each part of an application on its own, developers can detect problems before they reach the tester and ensure that QA and uniformity are part of the process from the beginning.

Functional testing: going through the motions

As a mobile “tester” goes through each motion in a test case, functional testing monitors the behavior of the application by examining the inputs and returns from each action that was called by the user — every swipe, tap, input, and other gesture.

As any developer would tell you, a poorly written defect is frustrating, and understanding what a tester did to produce an error is important. Using a concept we call “restrospection,” you can visually track what testers do and record a complete history of their actions that include lifecycle events.

Data testing: validating and integrating

With data testing, a mobile developer is looking to ensure integration quality and to validate the data before it reaches the application. This is one of the more critical steps for developers, as it can be a major hold up for mobile applications if backend systems are live but not functioning as expected, using a different version of code, or are undergoing development or updates themselves.

There’s nothing like opening up 50 or 60 tickets from testers when a backend system isn’t working like it should. So the holy grail here is to validate the data before it reaches the application, regardless of whether backend systems are live.

UX testing: getting it right the first time

There are several approaches to user experience testing out there that focus on text overruns/the location of a specific object on the screen including image comparisons using screenshots; but in my opinion the best approach is to do a user interface (UI) testing layout that focuses on the how items are aligned on a page.

When combined with a powerful mobile visualizer, you can truly compare and contrast the changes a developer has made to the layout of a mobile application. Further, user experience done well can help developers eliminate the challenges posed by using human testers.

The multi-channel problem: what’s coming down the road

As businesses start to move towards a multi-channel mobile strategy that aligns everything from a website to mobile apps to kiosks, they’re also going to need a way to test apps for all these channels. But if you thought just building a multi-channel app was hard, try finding a good way to test it.

At my company, one of our clients reported that prior to working with us, they spent a third of their launch timeline on testing. That’s just not going to be feasible as we move into a world where consumers and organizations want updated, fully functional mobile presences at the drop of a hat.

The reality is there are a plethora of products on the market that do portions of testing, but they often require you to buy separate testing suites for each channel — one for web, a bolt-on for mobile, etc. You also have to buy these tools from separate vendors, which adds the complexity of making sure they integrate and communicate well with each other.

What we’re going to see is a radically new and different approach to mobile testing. It’s an area ripe for innovation, where mobile testing will become significantly more automated. This will enable developers to leverage smaller building blocks earlier and give them the ability to build larger, consistent, and repeatable tests that are less costly and catch bugs early.

Raj Koneru is the CEO at mobile and multi-channel application platform provider, Kony Inc. Since founding Kony in 2007, Raj has spearheaded the development and continued innovation of the Kony platform. Raj has also co-founded several other businesses, including Intelligroup (NASDAQ: ITIG), Seranova (NASDAQ: SERA) and iTouchPoint, which was sold in 2005.

Image credit: Shutterstock

Clipboard, a company that had focused on digital archiving, has been acquired by Salesforce, its founders have stated on the company site. Its product will be shut down on June 30.

Explaining the shutter-slamming, Clipboard said further, “We came to the conclusion that it was essential to focus on a singular platform for building new capabilities within Salesforce, which is not something that we could do while keeping Clipboard operating.”

Clipboard was founded in 2011 and was based in Bellevue, Wash. The service itself, however, didn’t make its public debut until almost exactly one year ago.

At that time, we noted that while visually identical to Pinterest, Clipboard was different because users could bookmark text, audio, animations, and fully formatted sections of webpages with links intact as well as simple images. Like Pinterest, the service included public/private options as well as a following/follower social model.

At Salesforce’s Seattle office, Clipboard CEO Dr. Gary Flake will become Salesforce’s newest engineering VP, and the rest of Clipboard’s core engineering and design team will continue to work under Flake.

While the exact terms of the deal are unknown, rumor pegs the price around $10 million or $20 million. Clipboard had previously raised around $2.5 million in seed funding.

Image credit: hownowdesign/Flickr

Facebook has partnered with the women-only hacker bootcamp Hackbright Academy to create a special scholarship for moms.

Just in time for Mother’s Day, the Moms In Tech program will help women who once worked in the tech industry then left to pursue parenthood.

Hackbright will take 10 weeks to train the moms accepted into the program. During this time, old skills will get a refresh, and students will learn new skills. The women who participate will be prepared to return to the tech industry not as front-line code monkeys but as “technically hands-on leads, managers, or directors,” the program application notes.

RELATED: Tackling tech’s gender problem the right way: Teaching women to code

For the scholarship, Facebook will cover the entire $12,000 Hackbright tuition. Applications are open until May 17. The program will begin exactly one month after the deadline.

Attrition of women who become parents is a big concern for a lot of the folks we talk to at large tech companies. Taking steps like this may help give tech-minded moms a path back to work at top-tier companies.

Hackbright was founded by Christian Fernandez and David Phillips and is based in San Francisco.

Image credit: Shutterstock

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MENLO PARK, Calif. — Today at Facebook HQ, the company is announcing that one month after its launch, Facebook Home has seen 1 million downloads, and those early users — mostly male early-adopter types — have shown some interesting usage behavior: a 25 percent increase in feedback and in time spent in the app, Facebook execs said.

“Facebook is already the most-used app on mobile devices, so we’re really excited we can bump that up by 25 percent,” a rep said in a press lunch at the company’s headquarters.

We also got a preview of some new features coming to Facebook Home from Facebook product director Adam Mosseri:

• Chat Heads improvements that make chatting more seamless with fewer steps.
• A new, full-screen interface for your dock of apps that can be accessed more simply through a single swipe.
• Sub-folders within the app dock, kind of like you see in the iOS app launcher.
• More “Blue’s Clues” pop-up prompts to educate users on new features.

Facebook is launching an updated version of the Home app and the Android app today. Facebook reps say to expect new Home updates once a month. Today’s launch will focus mostly on bug fixes, not the new features listed above.

“It’s important for us to not launch features until they’re absolutely ready,” said Mosseri, so expect to see live versions of these features in the months to come.

A spokesperson also said Facebook is transitioning from a “mobile first” to a “mobile best” philosophy. While mobile engineers are part of every team now, he noted that improving mobile experiences and making them competitive and world-class is the next step.

Facebook has seen its rapid assimilation of Earth’s population start to cool in recent years. The areas where it’s still exploding are, interestingly enough, some of the areas with the least access to technology: Africa, the Middle East, and India.

One measure of technological modernity is the smartphone. In the Western world, smartphone penetration hovers around 50 to 60 percent for most countries. However, in Africa, that number is much lower, around 17 to 19 percent across the continent. In India, smartphone penetration is just 9 percent. In the Middle East, a handful of countries’ smartphone adoption rates are at parity with their Western peers, but some, like Egypt, lag around 5 percent.

Even when you take away the smartphone aspect and look just at Internet access, you get a similar picture: a sharp divide between the digital haves and have-nots around the world.

So it’s especially interesting that Facebook is making these less-connected populations a focus of its ongoing growth, seeing the lack of access as an opportunity to be addressed rather than an insurmountable hurdle.

In a report released today by marketing intelligence firm eMarketer, we learn that while Facebook’s growth has slowed or is quickly slowing to the single digits in the most highly developed areas around the world, it’s still seeing continued momentum in parts of Asia-Pacific, Africa, and the Middle East. Check out these numbers for 2013 and projected figures for 2017:

In some of these areas, especially Africa, Internet access via a traditional desktop or laptop computer is less common than access via a mobile phone. This is one reason Facebook has put emphasis on its mobile-only users, those users who never use a “regular” computer to log onto Facebook.com. That group swelled to nearly 200 million users this year.

The company’s quarterly earnings report this month also emphasized the growing need for a global scope in order for Facebook to continue its planned world domination.

Image credit: Flickr user axel rouvin

As a Google Glass owner, I can immediately see how it will be incredibly useful for so many kinds of people. Doctors, mechanical engineers, any sort of field worker.

But for us layfolk, the device only serves to make us look awfully nerdy, to make us economic targets, to make us less aware of the world around us, and to leave us more disconnected than ever from the real people we encounter every day.

I signed up for Glass the first day of Google I/O last year. The device was (and is) a gift to my now-husband. He loves it.

But even he, the tech-obsessed gadget fiend, admits it’s difficult to wear. The first time he set foot outside the house with it on, he immediately stepped in dog shit because he wasn’t paying attention to the world outside the screen. And he adamantly refuses to wear it on public transportation for fear of being mugged.

In its current form, Glass doesn’t have too many apps or features, and it’s incredibly non-intuitive and buggy — just as you’d exect from a developer prototype. Right now, it can’t do much aside from take really bad pictures and perform Google searches based on your poorly interpreted shouting.

But give it a few months. Soon, it’ll be streaming Netflix queues, taking brilliant long-form blog post dictation, and offering up a wealth of casual social games, a portal into an endless labyrinth of distraction.

In the tech press, we’ll probably be reporting on each app that pops onto the Glass landscape, gushing over the capabilities of the device as they grow with each new day. We’ll report on the novelty use cases, like the first guy who writes a play or a novel using Google Glass, or the girl who shoots a feature film using the device.

Occasionally, we’ll write about someone who runs off the road while wearing Glass, or some university that bans Glass in the classroom, or a babysitter who lets a kid get hurt because she’s playing with her Glass.

And some overzealous Emily Post type (probably at an old-timey print rag) will write a much-mocked op-ed about the slight but growing disconnection between people. The rudeness, amplified from the current norm of iPhones and earbuds, with distraction now appearing right before your eyes in addition to your fingers and ears.

But the cumulative effects won’t amount to a societal change in how we consume information or deal with life away from our desktop screens. It’ll just be the same kind of impact smartphones have had — all the good and bad — but slightly accelerated and accentuated.

On the other hand, for myriad kinds of workers, I can see Glass being an extraordinarily helpful, hands-free tool. Imagine working on an airplane engine and having the manual right in front of you or using it to photograph and catalog new species during a deep-sea diving expedition. Even the first coalition of Glass app investors see its greatest potential in professional use cases, not consumer applications.

It’s up to us as individuals to make moral decisions about the technology we use. For me, I consider technology a tool, a means to an end. Too often, my peers tend to get wrapped up in the joy of tech in and of itself, as an end and a goal to be celebrated rather than a tool to be carefully used.

In my moral universe, Google Glass for consumers can only serve to distract us, not truly help us any more, better, or faster than the other tools we already use. For example, you already have Google Maps to guide you around your city with turn-by-turn audio navigation. That tool doesn’t get any better when it’s smack-dab against your eyeball. Neither does your email or your Instagram feed or your Facebook account.

Glass is a game-changer, sure, but in the worst possible way.

From the first moment I saw it, Glass reminded me of a Star Trek episode called “The Game.” The plot was pretty simple: Everyone aboard the Enterprise got hooked on a Glass-like visor running a casual puzzle game — one that addicts its players. This sci-fi is within spitting distance of our current reality. But the unfortunate plot twist was that hostile aliens were able to infiltrate the ship because no one was damn paying attention to the world around them anymore.

Thus, Google Glass. If you’re using it recreationally, not professionally to complete a task, don’t kid yourself — it’s not enhancing your life. It’s robbing you of the joy of actually experiencing your life. You’ll realize it the first time you step in dog shit or have your girlfriend get mad at you for not listening to her or lose your kid in a store.

This post was supposed to be my big, hands-on review. Instead, all I have to offer is this: Unless your employer tells you otherwise, don’t even think about getting Google Glass. And train yourself to rely less on your smartphone, while you’re at it. We can wait for something better, more useful, and more human-friendly to come along.

All week, we’ve been hearing fascinating tales from the Humans to Mars Conference, and we’re pretty much kicking ourselves for not having booked out own tickets months ago.

One big reason for that is conference attendees are getting to hear firsthand about NASA’s big plans for Mars, including its ideas for long-term manned missions in the 2030s.

For example, NASA researchers revealed that one of the agency’s bigger concerns is how it plans to feed the first astronauts who call Mars their home.

To grow plants on Mars, you have to first think about light, air pressure, carbon dioxide, water, and a host of other environmental factors.

“In terms of the systems engineering required, it’s not an insignificant challenge,” said NASA life sciences director D. Marshall Porterfield at the conference.

Other researchers noted the need for pressure-inflated greenhouses, but since any such structures will block out sunlight — an already scarce resource on Mars — other lighting sources will have to take the sun’s place. Porterfield noted that NASA is considering using LED light sources for growing food on Mars.

As NASA plans for its first manned missions to Mars, its scientists are realizing that to make it worth the substantial cost of shipping greenhouses, lighting, and other necessary equipment to the red planet, the missions need to be very long in duration — as long as 15 or even 20 years.

A duration of that nature makes the Mars One-style one-way-trip option seem even less crazy.

Image credit: NASA

Hat tip: Space.com

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The HTC First, better known as the “Facebook phone,” is now selling for a hot 99 cents from AT&T. The original price at the device’s launch mere weeks ago was $99.

The First was launched, along with Facebook Home, back in April. At that time, we learned that First would bring Home, an immersive Android skin, to vivid life with a brilliant screen, multiple color options, and a fantastic camera.

The HTC First featuring Facebook Home is Facebook’s biggest bet to date on mobile. Basically, it puts all your Facebook news feed activity onto the phone as a living, interactive wallpaper.

We even got to test out the phone ourselves for a week or so. We were pretty impressed:

This pretty, lightweight phone is full of surprise and delight. Even the potentially annoying parts (like Chat Head pop-ups for SMS) were fun to use. The non-surprise is that you’ll see more of your Facebook news feed than ever before. Great for normal consumers of all kinds; maybe not so great as a work-first phone. …

The amazing-looking screen is important because of the wall-to-wall nature of the photo-laden homescreen. Once you put all your eggs in a GUI basket, you need a screen resolution that does the carefully crafted GUI justice.

The GUI (graphical user interface) itself is Facebook’s way of making a mobile operating system without actually making a mobile operating system. The result is pretty awesome, and for 99 cents (with a contract, natch), it’s a steal.

We’re loving the latest Google Doodle, a celebration of the 93rd birthday (and life’s work) of the legendary Saul Bass.

Check it out:

Bass was a truly great designer. In the golden age of cinema, he became famous for his title sequences. The first few minutes of classic films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo or The Man With the Golden Arm owe all their magic to Bass and his expert handling of shape, color, and motion.

In fact, we’d probably consider Bass the founding father of modern kinetic typography, which has all but taken over cheaply produced video marketing these days (just do a YouTube search for “kinetic typography,” you’ll see what we mean.)

“My initial thoughts about what a title can do was to set mood and the prime underlying core of the film’s story, to express the story in some metaphorical way,” Bass once said.

“I saw the title as a way of conditioning the audience, so that when the film actually began, viewers would already have an emotional resonance with it.”

Image credit: Harrie Verstappen via Wikipedia

NetSuite, the cloud financial software company, has just told the world its latest good news: It has acquired OrderMotion, another cloud company that specializes in order management.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“We focus on the order at NetSuite,” said NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson in a recent VentureBeat interview. “Order management is at the heart of our transactions. … The transaction at the center of the business process is defining big winners.”

Of course, NetSuite already has its own order management system, but in a statement on the news, the company said it was a “important and complex business challenge” requiring outside augmentation to meet their customers’ needs, which range from e-commerce to brick-and-mortar retail to telemarketing.

NetSuite will be using OrderMotion’s technology for continuity and replenishment, as well as supporting direct response marketing efforts. The resulting product, the companies say, will be useful for almost every kind of business, from B2B, B2C, and retail use cases to wholesale distribution and manufacturing.

Order management is a great compliment to NetSuite’s commerce-as-a-service platform, which it launched last year to help any kind of company attain Amazonian online retail goals.

“We’re transforming how your business operates and how your business interacts with other businesses,” said Nelson at that time. “Customers want to transact with several different devices and they want you to remember them across devices.”

Image credit: nadja_robot/Flickr

NowThisNews, a video-news startup from the brains of former Huddington Post execs, has just raised a healthy round of institutional funding.

The $4.8 million round (out of a total $6 million in equity the startup is attempting to raise, according to SEC documents.) comes from Oak Investment, Lerer Ventures, Bedrocket, and new investor SoftBank Capital.

A year ago, when the project was still in stealth mode, its founders managed to raise a $5 million round, as well.

NowThisNews itself is a website and iPhone app chock-full of video clips likely to be popular on the Internet — big names (Queen Elizabeth), big stories (Amanda Berry's Cleveland kidnapping escape), big novelty (cocaine smugglers dressed as nuns to avoid police).

For now, at least, the site's front page is a step up from the nip slips and cat clips you might see trending elsewhere. But all the clips are super short — even the Queen merits a mere 91 seconds — so don't expect powerful journalism with ample context. Mostly, you're just getting brief clips of official statements or from news or security cameras with no editorial or perspective.

But it's not bad for catching up on the news from your iPhone, which is all the NowThisNews team really needs.

The company was founded in 2012 and is based in New York City.

Image credit: modenadude/Flickr

Wefollow, a directory that sorts and scores people based on their social media profiles and declared interests, has been acquired by About.me.

Wefollow was co-founded in 2009 by Kevin Rose, an About.me investor — a fact About.me co-founder Tony Conrad (pictured above) calls “perfect continuity.” We have other words for it. Wefollow’s other founder is Jeff Hodsdon, a longtime Rose collaborator from his Digg days.

About.me co-founders Ryan Freitas and Conrad wrote today on the company blog, “As About.me continues to grow, it’s increasingly important that we simplify the way users discover people on the About.me platform. Discovery has quickly become one of the most popular uses of About.me and represents a significant opportunity for us to further evolve our platform.”

The pair continued to state that Wefollow’s Klout-like scores for individuals’ areas of expertise will be used in About.me’s search algorithms. The Wefollow brand will eventually disappear entirely.

Wefollow uses Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram data to score its users on a 100-point scale based on their perceived relevance and/or expertise in a given field. For example, Jimmy Fallon scores 99 for the term “comedy” and 100 for the term “actor.”

Microsoft is set to power Yahoo’s search through April 1, 2014, according to a recent SEC filing.

This isn’t really oh-my-gosh-it’s-so-new news. Microsoft has been dealing with Yahoo since MG Siegler still worked at VentureBeat, a.k.a. 2008, a.k.a. the mists of time.

Also, as Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer pointed out today while speaking onstage at a tech conference, her company sees most of the innovation in search happening around interfaces and voice controls rather than the underlying technology (or the revenue models that make it worthwhile for one or two companies to index all the information on the Internet.)

In that case, it makes perfect sense for Yahoo to focus its considerable engineering and design talent on tasks like prettying up its mobile apps rather than coming up with yet another programmatic formula for web search.

Microsoft also announced this year it’s powering web search inside Facebook.com‘s garden wall. Facebook, for its part, was busy focusing on Graph Search, its new method of indexing and serving up all the social nodes and edges inside Facebook rather than on the web.

Every week I get one or two companies who come into XSeed and ask if it is okay to pitch “without using a presentation.”

“Let’s just have a conversation,” they usually say.

I always oblige and see how it goes. What I have noticed, however, is that these meetings are very ineffective a high percentage of the time.

It isn’t that I’m a fan of PowerPoint; I agree with the idea that presentation tools can constrain one’s message and creativity if not used properly.

As I listened recently to an entrepreneur’s pitch that was drifting all over the map, I remembered a conversation with my first boss at Intel, Avram Miller. I was about to have my first one-on-one meeting with him, and I asked how he wanted me to communicate. Should I use a memo? Slides? Notes?  

I’ll never forget his reply:

“I don’t care if you strip naked, shave your body, and use smoke signals — just be effective in communicating the key points you need to get across.”

I love that advice. For companies pitching a venture capitalist, I can’t give better counsel than that.

If you are presenting to a VC and don’t want to use slides, be sure you quickly communicate the following:

1. Be specific on what product you are building.
2. Give examples of who your customers are, how many of them there might be and why they will buy your solution (what is the specific problem that you are solving).
3. State clearly against whom you compete and why your solution is better than theirs.
4. Be specific on how big a business opportunity this is and what revenues will look like in three to five years.
5. State where you are in your company formation process: prototype/demo/alpha/ beta/revenues, etc.

If you don’t use slides, you should be able to communicate these answers in 15 to 30 minutes, even if you are interrupted frequently with questions.

While there is a sexiness and aura of confidence in “flying without a net,” be sure you clearly answer the usual questions that investors need to know. You can have a deck as backup and refer to it as needed, but be very careful that you don’t meander in your meeting such that you don’t efficiently give essential information around your firm’s opportunity.

VCs often see hundreds of companies a month. Your job is to separate us from our money. Make that as easy on yourself as you can.

If you choose not to use a presentation and you discuss the above items effectively, you have a good chance of appearing confident and on top of key issues that will face your startup. VCs love knowledgeable and thoughtful entrepreneurs.

Be aware, however, that the risk of not using a presentation is that you come across as unprepared and disorganized regarding the issues which are critical to the people on the other side of the table.

Be careful that you don’t use the strategy of “just having a conversation” as an excuse for not being prepared and not leading the meeting in a proper direction.

Image via docpop/Flickr

Robert Siegel is a General Partner at XSeed Capital, bringing extensive innovative leadership in strategy definition, operational execution, and international sales and marketing for companies large and small. He is currently on faculty at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, has co-authored several articles for California Management Review, and served as lead researcher for Andy Grove’s book Only the Paranoid Survive. This post originally appeared on his blog.

Mars One, one of our favorite commercial space projects, has just released an interesting figure: More than 78,000 people have signed up for the mission’s one-way trip to Mars.

The Mars One mission aims to send a group of humans to Mars for permanent colonization. To fund the expedition, the Mars One founders plan to treat the whole thing as an extraterrestrial version of The Real World, selling $6 billion in sponsorships against one what is potentially of the most enthralling programs the world has ever seen.

For its astronaut selection process, Mars One founder Bas Lansdorp told VentureBeat in a recent interview, the mission is going to be difficult and dangerous, but for different reasons than you might think.

“We are finding the right people for the job,” he said. “Our medical director ensured me that the difficult part is living on a new planet with a small group of people in a dangerous environment and staying friends. It’s the most dangerous part. … So we’re not looking for engineers and pilots. We’re looking for people who have this inherent quality, being the kind of person you want to be stranded with. We can teach them any skill they need to have. Basically, what they need to do is survive. Anything that breaks, a machine or a person, it needs to be fixed. That’s the most important thing they need to learn.”

So far, just two weeks have passed since the mission opened its application process, which involves sending in YouTube clips as well as filling out an online application form.

To date, Mars One has received applications from more than 120 countries. The majority of applications come from the United States (17,324) and China (10,241), with 3,581 from the United Kingdom and fewer applicants from nations like Russia, Mexico, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Argentina, and India.

“With 78,000 applications in two weeks, this is turning out to be the most desired job in history,” said Lansdorp in a statement. “These numbers put us right on track for our goal of half a million applicants.

“Mars One is a mission representing all humanity and its true spirit will be justified only if people from the entire world are represented. I’m proud that this is exactly what we see happening.”

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San Francisco startup Chute has raised a second round of institutional funding: $7 million led by Foundry Group with participation from existing investors Freestyle Capital and U.S. Venture Partners.

It’s also announcing today the advent of Chute Ads, which use “real-time,” user-generated content as commercial fodder for big brands.

Chute, a Y Combinator alumnus company, makes it easier for developers and designers to get high-quality user-generated images into their apps and sites with a cloud-based backend for image uploading, processing, moderation, third-party API integrations, and user authentication, all with a few lines of code.

As for Chute Ads, the company promises potential advertisers quite a bag of tricks: real-time content, user-generated aggregation, voting and moderation, social sharing, and customized displays. End users can upload their content directly to a campaign, comment on it, upvote it, or share it across other networks:

Chute Ads can run as display ad units on any partner site, and clients can create a standalone site of their own to display all the ads (i.e. all the user-generated content for the campaign) in one place.

The startup raised $2.7 million last July. The company was founded in 2011.

Today in tech funding news, we saw a string of smaller deals at or under $1 million.

But are these pity rounds that will provide a few months of runway to struggling teams in competitive markets? Or are they kindling capital that will spark new fires of innovation, eventually engulfing the tech world in the hot, hot flames of profit?

Time will tell. For now, we’re just reporting the figures:

Fastback grabs a fast $15M

Fastback Networks has raised $15 million to save mobile data networks from total collapse. OK, perhaps that’s an exaggeration, but Fastback has created radio technology to transfer mobile data at fast speeds so that companies can expand and plan mobile networks to handle huge voice and data networking loads in the future. Fastback’s technology could be a key piece in mobile networks that can transfer data as quickly as land-based infrastructure such as cable modems. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Panna raises $1.35M

Panna, a digital cooking magazine for iPhone and iPad, has raised $1.35 million to make the connection between chefs and home cooks even stronger. An issue is released every months and contains 13 seasonal video recipes from the participating chefs. The emphasis is on home cooking, so each chef guides the user step-by-step through their favorite recipes in a home kitchen environment. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Unifyo raises $700K

Unifyo’s founder Ben Wirtz writes today to share some good news: His company has closed a $700,000 seed round from the likes of Ivan Mazour, EC1 Capital, and the Firestarter Team (which itself was founded by ex-Googler Anil Hansjee). Unifyo is a sales tool that combines social media, email, and customer relationship management tools; Wirtz said, “We just re-released our Exchange integration into beta, which means we’re now seriously going after SMEs [small and medium-size enterprises], not only startups. Box and Zendesk have been integrated too.”

VeryLastRoom gets $523K

VeryLastRoom, a French startup, writes to tell us it’s closed a €400,000 round, about $523,000, for its same-day hotel booking app. The iOS app first launched nine months ago at LeWeb’s London conference. Investors include Alain de Mendonça, founder of French travel agency Promovacances; Didier Blaise, founder of French tire-seller Allopneus.com; Laurent Therezien, former VP of Accor’s Lastminute.com; Laurent Benhamou, founder of micropayment platform AlloPass; and VC firms Pole Capital and Generis Capital Partners.

Aireum/Conspire raises seed round of $100K, more to come?

As it inches toward its first birthday, Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup Aireum (also known as Conspire) is showing signs of life with the SEC, claiming a wee $100,000 investment today in a Form D. Founded by Stanford grad and former attorney Alex Devkar, Conspire aims to help users understand and manage their networks of email contacts. The product is not yet publicly available.

Adobe has just demonstrated its very first hardware products, starting with a stunning stylus. Called Mighty, this supercharged stylus pairs with touchscreens and works with multitouch, finger-friendly features to help designers sketch and draw their way to greatness.

The demo happened at Adobe’s Max conference today in Los Angeles; it demonstrated the tools with iPads.

Here’s a first look:

The pressure-sensitive, three-sided pen has copy-and-paste features; you can swipe or tap with your finger to erase lines. Mighty is also completely connected to the cloud and Creative Cloud via Bluetooth, so you can take your drawings from one iPad or one Adobe app to another.

“Once we got started on hardware, it was hard to stop,” said Michael Gough, Adobe’s design experience VP, onstage at Max. So in addition to the pen, there’s also Napoleon, a short ruler (ha ha ha – get it?) that projects a line on your screen, allowing you to create precise, natural lines. Gough said he wanted to to recall the feeling of using a T-square and triangle.

Adobe is still prototyping Napoleon in particular, but one of the features it’s got in mind is snapping to vanishing points for easily creating perspective drawings.

The final piece of the puzzle is called Project Context, software that creatives can use organize and explore assets and work visually — a big departure from traditional, nonvisual digital file management.

Here’s a video showing the products in action:

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Since its launch, Adobe’s Creative Cloud has clearly indicated where the company’s future lies. But no one expected the company to get rid of Creative Cloud’s predecessor, Creative Suite, quite so soon.

But that’s exactly what Adobe is doing. Not only is the creative services software shop closing down the Creative Suite version numbers and branding; it’s getting rid of the entire paradigm of old-school, cereal-box* software.

*Our own term for CD-based hard copies of software you’d buy in a store, where they were lined up like boxes of cereal, instead of downloading it online.

RIP, Creative Suite

In a conversation with Scott Morris, Adobe’s director of product marketing, we learned that “Adobe has made the decision that moving forward, we are focusing all our efforts on Creative Cloud. We have no plans for a perpetual release.”

That means no more waiting two years for bug fixes. No more waiting for your design software’s features to catch up with what the web guys have been doing for six months.

It also means a new purchasing paradigm for the entire creative industry. Every ad agency, every magazine, every indie design firm and print shop — they will all be transitioning from bought-and-owned software at $200 or $700 or $2,000 a pop to the Creative Cloud subscription model, which can cost as little as $20 per month.

As for existing and even older versions of Creative Suite software, Morris said, “We’re not doing any [new] feature development. For the next major release of Mac OS and Windows, the products are supported.” And CS6 purchasers will get special, rock-bottom subscription prices.

But that’s as far as it goes. This is the last stop for the Creative Suite train; all passengers must deboard.

Why Creative Suite had to go

“The writing is on the wall for where Adobe is headed, but people are surprised we’re going all in as soon as we are,” Morris said.

Over the past 18 months or so, Adobe has been headed in a decidedly modern direction. It’s been making making big bets on responsive design and adding cloud-based collaboration features to some of its most popular products. It acquired Behance, a web-based portfolio service and creative community, and it started integrating those features into its other software.

Creative Cloud itself is the crown jewel as well as the signpost for Adobe’s recent directions. It presents more tools for developers (and transitioning designer/developers) and puts a greater emphasis on community, collaboration, and the web.

“They’re lightweight, task-specific tools to get the job done,” said Morris. “That’s the direction things are heading. This model lets us meet the new world way better than the old model ever would have.

“We have a beautiful vision of where creative workflows are going, but it is incredibly taxing on our engineers to have two different code bases … We’re not as focused as we want to be.”

Killing off Creative Suite, he said, “frees up our product teams to come up with new innovations faster.”

And speed is, these days especially, of utmost importance. Morris said, “With responsive design or HTML5, to be quite frank, when all that started coming out, Adobe had a hard time keeping up. … There wasn’t time to do another product cycle. The amount of time it takes to make that happen is tremendous, and it slowed us down enough that our customers felt left behind.”

Responses to Creative Cloud

Adobe has been frankly surprised by the creative community’s response to Creative Cloud and the new web-based software delivery and management model. Morris said customers are volunteering to migrate in huge numbers. “They love the promise that you get everything new as soon as it’s available,” he said.

But there are others who aren’t as immediately jazzed.

“It’s gonna be difficult,” said Morris of the shift. “We’re gonna have some cranky customers who aren’t ready for this transition. But it modernizes the way we operate. We have a 20-year-old desktop franchise, and things have changed so rapidly around us that we were getting pretty slow. We weren’t an agile, nimble company because of the software model.”

That agility, he said, is palpable. He continued to say that even employees at Adobe are more excited to come to work because instead of promising new features with the next release cycle in 2015, they can offer something much more responsive.

But to the die-hards who resist change because — let’s be honest — the current model is good enough and already required substantial financial investment, Morris said, “We’ve been through this before.

“Ten years ago, we moved from only individual products to suites, and we were told, ‘No! I don’t want this “CS” thing! I don’t get it.’ But we proved it was valuable because of all the things you could do with it. And now, everyone’s on Creative Suite, and they love it.

“It’s not just a business model change; it lets them do things better and faster than before. That’s what Creative Cloud is going to do, and we’re just at the beginning of this journey.”

Today, Adobe’s creative software for development and design is getting 15 full-version upgrades to its apps, a total rebranding with a new versioning system, and a payment plan and future upgrade path overhaul.

The most important thing for you to know is that Creative Suite is gone. In its place is Creative Cloud. That means no matter what you use, you’ll have to pay a monthly subscription fee to use it; it also means you’ll never again have to wait two years for a bug fix or a crucial feature you need to keep up with others in your industry.

As for the new features and news apps, we’ve got a full rundown, and they’re pretty exciting.

“They’re lightweight, task-specific tools to get the job done,” Adobe marketing director Scott Morris told VentureBeat in a phone call last week. “We have a beautiful vision of where creative workflows are going.”

A lot of what you’ll see in Creative Cloud is fuller integration between desktop and cloud; for example, you will be able to sync fonts, colors, and assets between all your devices.

You’ll be able to create Behance posts directly from Photoshop to show off what you’re working on.

Also, Adobe is killing off the Adobe Application Manager. Instead, a Creative Cloud app will automatically install on the desktop along with any CC software. The Creative Cloud app will also send you notifications on software updates and Behance activities in an activity stream and will help you keep assets, fonts, and style synced.

The 15 new apps and new app versions come with hundreds of new features and revamped features, which we’re highlighting below in painstaking detail for every kind of developer and designer.

New for Photoshop

One of Adobe’s most popular pieces of software is getting a thoroughly modern overhaul. It has new features here that everyone — web designers, pro photographers, photo-happy grandmas — is going to love.

• The new Smart Sharpen feature minimizes noise and haloing while leaving your pics supercrisp.
• Intelligent upsampling makes your images larger without all that sloppy-looking noise and blurring.
• Photoshop CC includes the video and 3D editing features in Photoshop Extended, too.
• Photoshop CC supports Camera Raw edits for any Photoshop layer or file, which permits for better heal edits and vignettes.
• Adobe is giving Photoshop users editable rounded rectangles and multishape and path selection so you can select more than one path, mask, layer, or shape at a time.
• Conditional Actions use if/then statements to automatically choose between different actions based on rules you set up.
• Photoshop is also getting expanded support for Smart Objects, so you can blur and liquefy in a nondestructive way, even after you save the file.
• For 3D painting, live previews have gotten a lot faster — up to 100x faster, the company says.

New for designers

Here are all the new Adobe software features you’ll want to know about before you decide whether your CS package needs an immediate upgrade.

• Adobe Ideas is a new, free iOS app that creates freeform vector illustrations on Apple touchscreen devices.
• Kuler is a new mobile app that takes a photo and creates a color palette that can be synced across your whole system.
• Touch Type is a feature that manipulates individual letters via multitouch, stylus, or mouse. You can also instantly switch between area and point type.
• Images can be turned into brushes, and pattern brushes have auto corners.
• Font search in Illustrator and InDesign, and font preview, and font favorites in InDesign.
• Syncing for fonts, styles, preferences, you name it, across your whole system.
• Multi-file place in Illustrator.
• For InDesign, the new version is faster; has a new, dark UI; supports HiDPI and Retina displays.
• An InDesign QR code creator.
• Parallax scrolling and in-browser editing in Muse.
• InCopy comes to Creative Cloud with HiDPI/Retina support, font search, and a dark UI.

New for developers

Adobe has been placing a ton of emphasis on web design and responsive mobile design lately. Here’s what the company has planned for the more technical side of creative teams.

• Flash has been reengineered for performance with 64-bit architecture.
• Flash now has hi-def export options, better HTML publishing, and a simpler UI.
• The new Flash brings a powerful code editor and comes with Adobe Scout, which detects potential problems in your code.
• With USB connections, you can now do real-time mobile testing in FLash with iOS and Android devices.
• Edge Animate now has motion paths, templates, and support for swipe gestures, as well as an Akamai-hosted content delivery network for your runtime files.
• Edge Reflow is getting an Assets panel and Typekit integration.
• Dreamweaver has a new CSS Designer, a Typekit-powered font library, and a simpler UI.
• You can also author new Dreamweaver projects in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, and you also get a jQuery widget.
• Dreamweaver has PhoneGap integration and an upgraded Fluid Grid layout for doing responsive design.
• As with all the other new CC products, Dreamweaver supports syncing of files, preferences, and settings across your whole system.

New for video

Video pros and special effects folks will also see a lot of the syncing, collaboration features popping up elsewhere in the Creative Cloud family. But Adobe’s video apps are also getting their own special dose of refreshed magic.

• Premier is getting a redesigned Timeline to make editing more efficient.
• Link and locate in Premier will help you keep track of the thousands of clips in a big project.
• Collaborative editing in Premier and After Effects is easier with new sync options. You can also use Anywhere features to edit on the go from a shared server without running into versioning issues.
• Premier Pro now supports closed captioning.
• A few Premier features focus on more precise audio control, including a clip mixer and new plugins.
• In After Effects, you can use tools like Refine Edge, Warp Stabilizer, and Pixel Motion Blur to up your creative game and create higher-quality visual effects.
• After Effects has new tools for 3D video with Cinema 4D support.
• Audition is getting new features for sound removal, previewing tracks, and multitrack editing.
• Adobe is also announcing minor feature upgrades for Prelude, SpeedGrade, and Story Plus.

Image credit: Adobe

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