As research indicates that the U.S. is an increasingly difficult place for foreign founders to come and build companies and founders tell horror stories of the massive challenges they faced dealing with byzantine U.S. immigration policies, Canada is burnishing its reputation as open for business — and open for new residents.

Canada’s new startup visa has received a huge amount of attention in the U.S. as the the global war for talent heats up. Senators such as Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) have tried to address the situation via legislation like the Startup Act 3.0, but that’s a slim hope after deaths of 1.0 and 2.0.

Source: Wikipedia

Jason Kenney, Canadian Minister of Citizenship, Immigration, and Multiculturalism.

The Startup Visa provides immediate permanent residency in Canada if a founder meets just three criteria. An applicant must:

1. Secure an investment from a designated Canadian VC or fund
2. Demonstrate English language proficiency
3. Have at least one year of postsecondary education

This weekend, Canadian member of parliament and Citizenship, Immigration, and Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney is in Silicon Valley promoting his country’s Startup Visa.

We chatted with Kenney about the visa’s goals, his intentions, and the U.S. immigration system.

VentureBeat: What’s the ultimate goal of the Startup Visa?

Jason Kenney: We want a pathway for the world’s best and brightest to come to Canada and to harness that drive and innovation to be at the cutting edge of the modern economy.

VentureBeat: Why are you coming to Silicon Valley right now?

Kenney: The U.S. immigration system is dysfunctional, and it’s really difficult for talented immigrants to stay in the U.S. permanently. I’m coming to further raise the profile of the program and send the message that Canada’s open for business.

If you’re a young startup entrepreneur having trouble renewing your visa, come here! We offer immediate permanent residency.

VentureBeat: What’s the response been so far?

Kenney: There’s been a great amount of interest, but we only opened for applications on April 4, so it’s too early to tell. We will issue up to 2,500 per year, but I don’t anticipate it will be fully subscribed for the first year because it’s still new.

I know there’s a huge pent-up demand in the U.S., and I think the word is going to spread virally: If you want to stay permanently in NA, think of Canada.

VentureBeat: You’re offering permanent residency to anyone in who secures an investment. What about those who fail?

Kenney: Many countries, such as Australia, only offer temporary resident status. In Canada, we’re going to give you the “green card” right up front.

We know full well the rate of failure in startups is high, but if they come up here and don’t succeed, they have demonstrated they they have high human capital. And in the long run, their chances of succeeding and building a successful enterprise are high.

We want Canada to become a magnet for people like that.

VentureBeat: Why is Canada a good place to come build a startup?

Kenney: We have really strong tech sectors in Kitchener/Waterloo, Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, and a few other places, an increasingly strong venture capital industry, and very well-run industry associations, angel associations.

Plus, we have the lowest business taxes in the developed world, and the strongest fiscal position in the developed world.

In terms of macro-economic terms, that’s important … Canada weathered the storm of the economic downturn better than any other country.

In addition, we have an immigration system that works, which means you have access to global talent … and human capital is even more important than financial capital.

VentureBeat: Any other message for Silicon Valley?

Kenney: While here we’ll be meeting with the CEOs of many major IT companies just to emphasize what a great place Canada is to invest in.

I think we’re really going to kick this into hyperdrive.

photo credit: PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE via photopin cc

So you’ve developed a cloud-based electronic health record (EHR) or medical device that will drastically change the way we deliver health care.

Just a few years ago, you may have faced a prolonged struggle to gain investment. Practice Fusion CEO Ryan Howard, CEO of Practice Fusion, one of the more dynamic new EHR companies, recalls having to use the cash from a motorcycle accident to pay the salaries of key employees. But by 2009 when the Obama administration calling for doctors to shift to electronic health records, investors saw opportunity.

Today, investors are rushing to invest in digital health.  This will be a “record year” for investment in the health care, Rock Health recently predicted. The research shows an uptick in deals in the first quarter of the year and an increase in venture capital.

But will the elite venture capital firms open their check books for you? With our inaugural health conference HealthBeat coming up next Monday and Tuesday (it’s almost sold out, but you may be able to get a ticket still if you move fast), I caught up with Sequoia Capital‘s Warren Hogarth, and Morgenthaler Ventures‘ Missy Krasner to dig deeper into their digital health investment thesis.

VentureBeat: What’s the primary area of health that you’re currently interested in? What’s the future?

Warren Hogarth: One of the key areas is bioinformatics. It’s everything that is enabled by cheap genome sequencing. We’ve made about a half dozen investments to date in the U.S. and Asia. We have also taken a keen interest in the consumer side and health IT. These new technologies will play a role in engaging people in their health in a complete way.

Morgenthaler’s executive in residence, Missy Krasner.

Missy Krasner: A sister theme would be “big data” analytics and business intelligence in health care. There is a tremendous amount of interest in sucking data out of health records and mining data from clinical performance.

Hogarth: We’re talking now about the microbiome, not just the genome. We’re understanding that the microbiome interplays with our health, and we’re seeing a new opportunity for non-invasive treatment and testing.

VentureBeat: Have you addressed the ethical concerns around mining data about the human body?

Hogarth: Patients will have choice and control when it comes to their data. Hopefully, we’ll overcome some of the concerns about the broad misuse of data. The trick is to do it in a de-identified way with a clear process.

Krasner: And in 2014, medical underwriting will be banned so patients won’t be rated based on preexisting conditions. [Medical underwriting is already prohibited for children. -Ed.]

VentureBeat: Are you buying into this “quantified self” trend? Is it empowering for patients to have access to all this data about their health?

Hogarth: I think it’s empowering. I just had my genome sequenced, and my doctor was able to use that information to make a decision regarding my health. Companies like Jawbone are taking reams of data and surfacing it to a physician in a meaningful way.

Krasner: I spent five years at Google Health trying to get patients to engage. We tracked some of the early adopters of Basis, BodyMedia (recently acquired by Jawbone), and other great activity trackers. But there are a couple things that still need to happen. The data that is collected needs to actually be put into nuggets that are actionable. We need to take this data and figure out how to use smart algorithms to provide usable clinical insights. Otherwise we’ll get alert fatigue.

Hogarth: We need to go beyond the “chronically worried well.” We need to make an impact on people who are obese.

Krasner: I did some interesting research by signing up for Weight Watchers. I went to the meetings and subscribed to the mobile product, the device that helps you count activity. It’s a great program but we are still in the stage where patients have to record what they’re eating and put manual data into the app. The next piece of technology will automatically know my patterns. We’ll see a fantastic amount of adoption.

[Editor's note: Krasner will moderate a panel at HealthBeat on the "death" of the personal health record (PHR). That's different from the Electronic Health Record (EHR), which is alive and well and seeing serious innovation. Also at HealthBeat, we'll have executives of the major disruptor EHR companies speaking, from Practice Fusion's Ryan Howard, to the leaders of CareCloud and AthenaHealth).

VentureBeat: Are there areas that you wouldn't invest in?

Hogarth: We don't invest in drug discovery or medical devices that are pre-FDA approval. [Venture capitalists say it's a nuclear winter for medical devices. Read more on that here. -Ed.] It’s too risky, and there is a lack of control. When it comes to devices, I would love to see a culture where things happen in a timely manner.

VentureBeat: What’s the one big health care transformation that you’re most excited about?

Krasner: The one area we haven’t talked about is the new insurance models for health. Patients are being asked to pay more out of pocket than ever before. That whole wave is forcing people to think much harder about where they go. There is no transparency around quality and price. There is a big opportunity here.

Hogarth: We will see a big transformation with employee sponsored healthcare — we’ll see businesses not offering insurance. You’ll shop and make a decision about health care based on price. We’re looking hard at startups that consumerize this experience.

Meet and mingle with health investors at HealthBeat, VentureBeat’s conference in San Francisco on May 20 and 21. Partners from Sequoia Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Norwest Venture partners, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield Beyers will speak on a panel “Health IT: The Numbers, The Funding, The Exits,” about the drivers making this industry segment more appealing to investors. 

photo credit: Emmanuel Gadenne via photopin cc

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HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

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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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A Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur and a Hollywood actor cross paths at a coffee shop in San Francisco’s Financial District.

You’d never know by appearance alone, but one of these men will sleep on the streets tonight.

Scott Glover and Marc Roth are feeling quite comfortable at this branch of Peet’s Coffee. Roth tells me that the homeless spend hours on end in coffee shops, which offer optimal shelter on chilly days like this one.

Scott Glover and Marc Roth (L-R)

Glover is in town for a three-day gig providing protection detail at the annual Veteran’s Day Parade. His current employers don’t know he’s homeless. Roth is no longer living in shelters, but he can relate to his new acquaintance’s transience. Until last year, he was living in his car, in hostels, the BART (for one night after he missed a curfew), and in shelters around San Francisco.

But Roth is a startup founder now. And in true startup fashion, he reels off ideas for future business ventures minutes after I arrive.

His ideas are in various stages of development and include a food delivery service, a laser company, and a hardware accelerator program. But they all have one thing in common: Whatever he does next, Roth intends to hire from within the homeless community, which he views as a hotbed of untapped talent.

How did he move out of the shelter and into TechShop?

One wintery morning in 2011, Roth awoke after a rough night in a homeless shelter in San Francisco.

It was Christmas, and Roth was determined to make a change for the sake of his two kids living with their mother in Las Vegas. He had originally relocated to San Francisco to build a better life for his family, but had developed nerve damage and a condition called Meralgia Paresthetica from standing for hours on end at a pizza restaurant. This condition left him with medical bills so steep, he was soon unable to pay rent and return to his job, and he found himself on the street.

Source: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat

A quilt and printer at San Francisco’s TechShop

When he spotted a business card for TechShop in the shelter’s garbage bin, it seemed like a sign. Intrigued, he fished it out.

TechShop, a membership-based do-it-yourself workshop, provides tools, equipment, and classes for the community. The San Francisco venue is one of the hubs of the burgeoning “maker movement,” the trend to employ DIY techniques to develop unique technology products.

For a glimpse inside TechShop, don’t miss our gallery below. 

“I had these inventions in my head but didn’t know I could make them myself,” Roth explained. So he spent his remaining dollars on a membership and a few introductory courses.

Roth’s goal was to pick up basic skills like woodworking, laser cutting, CNC machining, and welding. His first core discipline was 3D printing, the process of making a solid object from a digital model, as members don’t need to pay for the materials.

“I was studying 10 or 12 hours a day, seven days a week,” he recalled.

This drive was born of necessity, but Roth soon discovered he had a natural aptitude for it. The opportunity to “make something” appealed, given that he had spent much of his career as a C Sharp programmer. C Sharp is considered a bit outdated today; the most popular and employer-friendly languages are Java and Python. ”My skills didn’t port to the cloud,” said Roth.

Fortunately, TechShop was catering to a different kind of entrepreneurship, and fueling a kind of “Renaissance” for hardware startups. So it didn’t take long before TechShop’s most dedicated member began to receive requests for help.

A number of other makers desperately needed an extra pair of hands to get their prototypes developed and products shipped on time. Many of them were freshly-minted after successfully raising funds for their projects on sites like Kickstarter. A dab hand with a laser cutter, Roth could charge upwards of $20 an hour.

Within a few months, Roth was able to move into a house for startup founders. Chris Fornof, a TechShop member and community builder at 3D gesture controller company LeapMotion, paid his rent for several months “purely out of the goodness of his heart,” Roth said.

He sent a good portion of his earnings to his family in Vegas and started making plans to relocate them to the Bay Area.

OpenROV cofounder David Lang at TechShop

“Marc had this tenacity, commitment to learning and re-skilling,” said David Lang, a member of TechShop who started taking classes around the same time.

Similarly to Roth, Lang’s living situation was unstable. For the past year or so, he had resided on a sailboat in Berkeley, Calif. After discovering TechShop, he saw an opportunity to reinvent himself as a maker.

Lang learned how to build robots and work with machines in less than six months. His first project, a mini submarine for amateur ocean exploration called OpenROV, raised $111,000 on Kickstarter. Lang would later hire Roth on a contractual basis.

By this time, makers were starting to get mainstream media attention. Lang would later launch a second Kickstarter campaign to fund a book on his experiences.

A maker, remade

Fast forward a few years to spring 2013. Roth is now an entrepreneur with a funded laser company. He threw himself into design with such gusto that he’s an Autodesk instructor, consults for LeapMotion, and teaches seven classes at TechShop.

Most importantly to him, Roth still regularly interfaces with the local homeless. He’s a living testament that the right program can make all the difference.

His dream is to build his own version of TechShop called “the Learning Shelter” that specifically caters to the homeless. He envisions a venue with shower facilities (a desperate need in the city), accommodation at a nearby church, computers, equipment, 3D printers, and an openness to any and all ideas. He claims to be already in the early stages of discussions with Autodesk about potentially donating computers.

Roth and business partner Matt Stollenwerk unload a laser cutter for new business “SF Laser.”

But the maker movement is no quick-fix solution, in part because existing homeless programs aren’t ready to embrace it. “With few exceptions, I’ve heard nothing but resistance from shelters,” said Roth.

One of the exceptions is Project Homeless Connect, a nonprofit that caters to the roughly 6,500 homeless people in San Francisco, according to a recent count (I use the word “count” in the literal sense; the actual number is thought to be far higher.)

Director Kara Zordel said the main goal is to help the homeless develop the skills they need to take job openings at tech companies. “If they were just given a little training, they could apply,” she said.

Can the tech industry be a true “meritocracy?”

Zordel believes the tech community has a responsibility to its most underserved population. After all, technology is supposed to level the playing field; we often hear the term “meritocracy” bandied about.

However, homeless people have scant access to computers. To make matters worse, it’s exhausting to simply secure housing. If a homeless person isn’t lucky enough to win the lottery for a 90-day bed, they are forced to queue up for a one-day bed. Those with the best shot have stood in line since 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. the previous night. Good luck competing in a meritocracy if you haven’t had a good night’s sleep in a safe place.

Glover, who met Roth through a mutual friend, has not been lucky enough to secure a bed for the night. At this juncture in our conversation, he hands me a resume and shows a video reel for his acting work. He doesn’t ask for anything but a job. “It feels like we’re stuck in this cycle,” he said.

And there’s another challenge — the lack of self-belief after being told “no” for so many years. Roth tells a revealing story about a friend from a shelter who needed to be coaxed just to admit his life’s goal to open a chicken restaurant. “People aren’t comfortable seeing themselves as creative,” he said. “They just don’t see their own potential.”

With the Learning Shelter, Roth’s goal is to shine a light on the true face of homelessness and a community that is plagued with misconceptions. “I worked hard all my life, but the world changed,” said Roth. But he adapted — it just took $49 for a month’s membership, a 3D printer, and an open door policy.

As Roth wrote on his profile in TechShop’s meetup group, “I haven’t had a bad experience with anyone I’ve met here. I’m so at home here.”

• Want to help the homeless? Attend the next meetup for homeless innovation. Zordel tweets one request a day for a homeless adult or child — search and share via the hashtag #EDCDailyNeed. 
• Interested in joining TechShop? Check out our feature here. 
• Eager to learn more about the Maker Movement? The Maker Faire takes place on May 18-19 in San Mateo, California. 

TechShop images via Dylan Tweney; Marc Roth and Scott Glover images via Christina Farr

Over the last few years, media companies and brands have turned to Mass Relevance’s social curating platform for plenty of projects, and now the startup said it’s hit a big milestone.

Today, Mass Relevance announced that it’s pushed 25 billion pieces of “social content” (tweets, Vines, status updates, Instagram photos, and such) through its platform from the more than 250 big media companies that are its clients. That’s a lot of social content when you consider that Mass Relevance’s tech is focused on reviewing everything  before it goes out and doing it in a way that’s, well … pretty. And if you haven’t heard of Mass Relevance, that’s because the company stays largely behind the scenes.

Mass Relevance is worth keeping an eye on because it’s helping Twitter and Facebook use their social interaction data in unique ways that are appealing to media companies and big brands during live or notable events. For example, it’s in the CBS’s best interest to curate and increase social interactions during the Super Bowl because it can then justify the higher advertising rate prices to advertisers that want to run a commercial during the big game.

The platform itself allows highly visible media companies to manage the flow of social information they’re consistently getting hit with. It takes social data streams from various social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Vine, Instagram, YouTube, and others) and weaves them into a single console for clients. From there you can set word/hashtag filters, audience demographic filters (age range, gender, geography), media or social network filters, and so on — basically fine-tuning all that social data for a specific purpose. The platform can also help its clients display that “social content” intelligently through mobile apps, live TV broadcasts, websites, projector screens at conferences, stadium displays, and other visualizations that run alongside media events.

Source: Mass Relevance

Mass Relevance CTO Eric Falcao presenting to President Obama during his recent trip to Austin, Texas.

You’ve probably experienced Mass Relevance’s tech in action without realizing it, too. It’s already working with all four major broadcast TV stations (Fox, CBS, ABC, NBC) as well as the most socially engaged prime time television shows (X Factor, Glee, American Idol, and The Voice). Previously, the company curating tweeted questions from audience members watching panels at SXSWi back in March, helped launch the first Twitter Town Hall for President Barack Obama, managed Twitter data during the 2012 Olympic Games, integrated Facebook data for CNN’s coverage of the 2012 election, and also worked with some of last year’s biggest media events (2012 Grammys, MTV music video awards, Super Bowl XLVI, the BET awards, NBA Finals).

Mass Relevance isn’t the only startup offering media companies (and brands) a way to streamline interactions from across multiple social networks. One example is indirect competitor Echo, which has seen success of its own platform of social curation tools with clients like pro wrestling company WWE. Yet, Mass Relevance does seem to be emerging as a leader when it comes to building tools for large events. While it didn’t disclose financial figures, the company said its revenue quadrupled in 2012 (compared to the previous year), and estimates doubling revenue again by the end of 2013.

Founded in 2010, the Austin-based startup has previously raised $5.5 million in total funding to date. Mass Relevance has 90 employees, but plans to double its R&D team in the next year as well as open an international office in London, U.K. this month.

Photos via Mass Relevance

I’m in the Institute for Quantum Computing in Waterloo, Ontario, which just added a new 283,000-square foot, $160 million research facility to its existing two buildings.

“We work on the science of the small,” executive-in-residence Rob Crow says. “We sit at the junction of pure research and technological innovation.”

The new facility, which will accommodate some of the Institute’s current 200 researchers as well as provide space for an additional 200 over the next year or so, took seven years to build, mostly because it needs to be completely insulated from outside radiation, vibration, and contamination.

As Martin LaForest, a senior manager at IQC explained, vibration — and sound — is the movement of molecules. And molecular-level nanotechnological assembly is tough to do when things are moving.

That is why the Institute has 3 feet-thick concrete floors and a completely isolated foundation that goes down 30 feet underground to bedrock. And why the building took seven years to complete.

Source: John Koetsier

Martin LaForest

“This is the second-biggest quantum computing center in the world,” Crow says. “We’ll double in a few years and are recruiting experimentalists right now from all around the world.”

The world’s biggest quantum computing lab is in Singapore. China is building two facilities. Pittsburgh is just starting its own, and Russia has invested $100 million in building yet another quantum computing institute.

Why all the fuss and bother?

“The holy grail is a general purpose quantum computer,” Crow explains. “That will be many many orders of magnitude more powerful than all the computers in the world today.” (Maybe even powerful enough to serve as the brain for a Cylon, as a recent Forbes profile suggested.)

A quantum computer calculates using quantum mechanical phenomena, essentially using what Einstein called the “spooky” nature of tiny particles, such as photons, to exist in multiple contradictory states at the same time. Critically, that enables quantum computers to calculate certain problems much more quickly than classical computers like the one you’re using right now. For instance, while standard computers represent data via bits that can be either on or off, or a 1 or a 0, a 10-quantum bit computer or 10-qubit computer, could simultaneously represent data in 1,024 states.

Source: John Koetsier

T

“Small quantum computers already exist,” LaForest says, but adds that ”we will be many years to a useful quantum computer.”

That’s what the Institute is all about, and that’s the “holy grail” the researchers are seeking. It’s also why Mike Lazaridis of BlackBerry fame (and fortune) funded the development of the institute, and set up a $100 million venture capital fund to commercialize products and technologies discovered at the facility.

There have already been multiple spin-off product and companies, including one called  Universal Quantum Devices that makes a time tagger for photos, which can accurately count and tag the arrival of individual photons, and another device, the world’s smallest chip for making entangled photos, which are critical for quantum communication studies.

In other words, LaForest says, we’re in the pick ax-and-shovel phase of the quantum era:

“Some of the most important tools are the ones you have to build yourself, and then you sell them to labs around the world working on the problem.”

Once the mission bears fruit, however, as Crowe is confident it will, the results will be immense. Much better simulation capabilities, new technologies for biological studies, better weather and climate modeling computers, amazing cryptography capabilities, and quantum sensors that could map the interior of the earth for geological exploration are just some of the possibilities.

And, even cooler perhaps, a Star Trek-like medical tricorder.

“We actually think we can build one of these things now,” says LaForrest. “Now we’re almost to the point where we can do MRI on the molecular level.”

And maybe, that’s even thinking small. Because the quantum computer, in spite of its potentially sub-atomic size, is a big, big deal.

“We are trying to be the first to build the quantum computer,” says Crow. “When we do it, and we will do it eventually, it’s going to be bigger than the moon landing.”

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HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

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If you’ve been waiting for the day when robot doctors will cut you open, monitor you recovery, and keep you company in your hospital room, you won’t have to wait much longer.

“We’re in the first inning of a nine-inning exercise. The average patient walks in a hospital and is not touched by robotics. That’s going to change in 10 years,” said John Simon, a partner at Boston-based investment firm Sigma Prime Ventures.

That adoption rate, Simon argues, is based on cost: As the price of robotics adoption decreases, hospitals may be more likely to invest in new technology. At their core, robots aren’t all that different from any other hospital gear.

The problem for hospitals, however, is that there’s a danger in pursuing robotics too far. “With medical robots,  if you automate something too much, people won’t accept it,” Simon said.

This results in a fine line that hospitals and doctors must manage. While some automation and robotics is good, the last thing a hospital wants to do is embrace robots to such an extent that they alienate patients.

Little of that, however, is on the minds of hospitals today. Right now, most of them are just trying to figure out how to get robots in the front door. Here are a few ways robots are changing hospitals today.

Zapping germs and cutting infection rates

In hospitals, fewer things are more lethal than the average bacterium. Approximately 1.7 million people get sick each year as a result of so-called “health care-associated infections,” and 99,000 of them die. So you might say that tackling this issue is a major problem for hospitals.

One potential fix is Xenex, a 5-foot, 2-inch robot that fights bacteria by flashing hospital rooms with ultraviolet light. This light, which comes from a Xenon bulb, damages the cell walls of bacteria, frying their DNA and preventing them from reproducing. (The light is so powerful that even humans have to leave the room while the Xenex is working its magic.)

While Xenex has only been around since 2009, evidence suggests that it’s working pretty well so far. Cone Health System, a health care provider in North Carolina, says that Healthcare-Associated Infections dropped over 40 percent after it started using Xenex. Another hospital, Massachusetts’s Cooley Dickinson Hospital, says that Xenex’s helped cut rates of infection of Clostridium difficile by 82 percent, according to a Xenex case study.

Keeping doctors present … even when they aren’t

Fewer companies are as well known in the robotics world as iRobot, the creator of the Roomba vacuum cleaner. But while iRobot is dominating the consumer space, it’s also doing some interesting things areas like defense, naval exploration  and, in particular, health care.

Among its health care products is Remote Presence Virtual + Independent Telemedicine Assistant (RP-VITA), a tablet-controlled telepresence bot it developed alongside InTouch Health. Unveiled last July, the RP-VITA lets doctors care for patients remotely, allowing them consult with patients even when they’re miles away.

Reception to the idea has been pretty strong so far. Not only has the device been commercially deployed in seven American hospitals but the RP-VITA is also the first telemedicine robot approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Telemedicine is officially a thing.

Letting amputees walk again

While some robots are mostly about improving patients’  in-hospital experiences, device’s like the BiOM prosthetic ankle system are improving their whole lives. Developed by Boston-based robotics firm iWalk, the BiOM solves one of the less-advertised problems with conventional prosthetics: They’re exhausting to use.

“When people wear prosthetics, they are providing all the power themselves and sort of dragging this leg around,” notes Sigma Prime’s John Simon, whose firm invests in iWalk.

The problem is one of angles. When we walk up ramps or take stairs, our ankles rarely stay at one angle — but that’s exactly how most prosthetics force wearers to walk around. This is why the BiOM is so effective: Instead of forcing the wearer to power it with their own bodies, it powers itself. And that makes a huge difference.

The only problem with the BiOM is cost: The device runs for $50,000. And while that’s not cheap, it’s a small price to pay for amputees looking to walk around freely again.

Helping doctors cut you open

If you’re a surgeon operating today, it’s hard not to be at least a bit enticed by robotic surgery. Surgical robots promise the capability to operate on patients quickly, accurately, and with fewer of the side-effects associated with traditional surgery. By creating smaller incisions, robotic surgery (which is mostly just robot-assisted surgery at this point) cuts blood loss and reduces recovery time (which means patients leave hospitals earlier). Adding to the intrigue is the possibility of remote surgery, which enables doctors to operate on patient from halfway across the world.

The interest is real: Market leader Intuitive Surgical, which creates the da Vinci surgical robot, says its product was used in 450,000 procedures last year.

The problem is that robotic surgery systems are really expensive.  Systems like the da Vinci cost at least $1.5 million, and for a lot of hospitals, it’s tough to justify that sort of investment. More, robotic surgery systems carry with them significant liabilities, as Intuitive Robotics found out earlier this year. In February, the FDA launched a probe into claims that the Da Vinci was causing post-operation complications for patients. Intuitive surgical maintains that adverse event rates are low, but the debate over the company’s products is ongoing.

Still, in spite of this recent skepticism, robotic surgery remains a popular option for procedures like prostate cancer extraction, which, due to the, er, difficulty of access, is often better left to robot hands than those of humans.

Keeping patients and the elderly company

If all of this talk about amputees, bacteria, and botched operations has got you down, I offer the Paro, a well-known therapeutics robot developed by Japanese research company AIST. Paro has a very simple but very important job: It’s supposed to feel like a pet. Similar to the that ancient tabby that your grandmother’s nursing home keeps around, Paro relaxes patients in ways that other humans can’t. Aist, which was developed over 10 years ago, still remains one of the most well-known robots of its kind.

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HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

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Larry Page is feeling sentimental. The Google chief executive delivered a heartstring-pulling speech today at the I/O conference in which he spoke about the intersection of technology, humanity, and, of course, Google.

It’s obvious that technology built this man’s life.

Page successfully delivered what should be the end to the era of Steve Jobs-esque inspiring keynotes. He’s filled with hope for technology’s future, saying we’ve only hit about 1 percent of what we’re capable of producing.

He opened the talk by recalling a time his father took him on a road trip to a robotics conference, getting him in even though Page was under the admitting age. He explained that we’ve got a barrier to entry for youngsters. Young people aren’t interested in computer sciences, and that is a scary thought. He urged people to get children involved in engineering, math, and sciences.

But Page is also “sad.” Our technology is failing us, in his eyes. The web hasn’t done enough, though technology itself is booming. For Page, it’s about building a generation that will build life-altering tools. Tools that will change not just the way we watch TV but also the way we live our lives. The way we spend our days.

“Technology should do the hard work, so people can get on with the things that make them happiest in life,” he said at Google I/O. “People are starving in the world, not because we don’t have enough food, but because we’re not organized. And computers are part of that. … Farming is great if that’s what you want to do, but not if that’s what you have to do.”

He says he’s uninterested in the stories about Google versus other companies (of course, everyone’s thinking Apple). Instead, he’s focused on building “things that don’t exist.” To him, the “important things aren’t zero-sum.” An example of one of these big visions is giving people’s commuting time back through self-driving cars.

He explained that technologies need a safe place to experiment, that technology is stunted by regulatory and legislative barriers.

“Many of our laws can’t keep up with the pace of change in technology. … Maybe more of us need to go into other areas, and in those areas, improve and understand technology,” he said, “We had Google Health, and we didn’t make that much progress with it. The primary obstacle was regulatory.”

But all in all, Page doesn’t actually seem bitter. He seems hopeful. Maybe it was his raspy voice or his musings about technology replacing the labor so we can do what we enjoy, but it seems Page may have just become tech’s richest hippie.

Larry Page image via Jolie O’Dell/VentureBeat

Google I/O 2013, the company’s annual developer conference, will kick off soon with a massive 3-hour keynote. We’re on the scene and ready to liveblog the heck out of this thing.

News announced so far:

• Larry Page is sad, hopeful, and frustrated in his heartfelt Google I/O speech
• OK, Google, your conversational search is awesome as hell
• Maps rebuilt from the ‘ground up,’ iPad version coming this fall
• Google Play for Education could kill the iPad in schools
• Major design overhaul makes Google+ look a whole lot like Pinterest
• Hangouts, the best part of Google+, gets standalone iOS, Android, and Chrome apps
• Google Glass is for dorks — and for doctors
• Google Glass gets first news app for the ‘connected generation’
• Google gives mobile developers some massive love with 5 new money-making features
• Google’s latest Nexus phone is an unlocked Samsung Galaxy S4 with pure Android
• Google Chrome reaches milestone of 750M montly active users
• Google announces its Spotify competitor, Google Play Music ‘All Access’ — ‘radio without rules’
• Google releases location APIs that may hugely help fitness apps
• Google Play game services is a Xbox Live-like mobile network — and offers cross-platform gaming
• Google Play has 48B app installs, 2.5B in the last month alone
• 900M Android activations to date, Google says

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Most of us wouldn’t be excited about the prospect of a camera mounted on the side of our face.

But then again, most of us aren’t doctors.

Google Glass uses augmented reality and voice activation to project data into our field of vision. And while the technology is still in its early (and annoying) stages, it holds a lot of promise in the medical field.

One obvious use includes looking up drug data. Doctors could easily perform a search for a drug or disease using Glass’s voice-recognition commands: “OK, Glass, Google ‘What’s the correct dose of Temazepam?’” Likewise, the gadget could also document a patient visit, such as storing a photo of a skin rash or an audio recording of a conversation.

Indeed, Google Glass may be the butt of jokes for consumers, but it represents some exciting possibilities for health care. As Arun Matthews, the chief medical information officer at Texas Tech University and a full-fledged Glass enthusiast, puts it: “I dream about technology being seamless and invisible, but constantly present, anticipating my needs with point-of-care decision support — but getting out of the way so that physicians can be physicians.”

What ideas are entrepreneurs already cooking up?

A screenshot from Augmedix’s promo video.

It’s still early days for the technology — Google only recently began shipping the gadget to a carefully selected group of people, and it won’t sell the device until the end of the year. But already developers are buzzing with ideas, and many of them are related to health care.

Ian Shakil [top, left] is one of the first entrepreneurs developing a Google Glass app for doctors. Shakil hit on the idea for his startup, Augmedix, while working at wearable electronics company MC10 and trying Glass for the first time.

“I had an epiphany moment and committed to drop everything,” he said.

To buy him some time to test the merits of the idea, Shakil applied for funding from Upstart, a startup that asks wealthy backers to fund individuals rather than projects. With the $55,000 he raised, Shakil incorporated the company and began to experiment with Google Glass at hospitals.

The first app is still in development — so Shakil wouldn’t reveal much at this stage — but he did tell me both patients and doctors were open to wearing Glass in a clinical setting. “We see all kinds of applications for health care providers,” he explained.

Shakil has a point — physicians are already avidly discussing potential applications on LinkedIn forums. Some of their most plausible medical scenarios include:

•  Video sharing and storage: Physicians could record medical visits and store them for future reference or share the footage with other doctors. 
• A diagnostic reference: If Glass is integrated with an electronic medical record (EMR), it could provide a real-time feed of the patient’s vital signs.
• A textbook alternative: Rather than referring to a medical textbook, physicians can perform a search on the fly with their Google Glass.
• Emergency room/war zone care: As storied venture capitalist Marc Andreessen proposed in a recent interview, consider ”dealing with wounded patients and right there in their field of vision, if they’re trying to do any kind of procedure, they’ll have step-by-step instructions walking them through it.” In a trauma situation, doctors need to keep their hands free.
• Helping medical students learn: As suggested by one blogger, a surgeon might live stream a live — and potentially rare — surgery to residents and students.
• Preventing medical errors: With an electronic medical record integration, a nurse can scan the medication to confirm whether it’s  the correct drug dose and right patient.

Is Google Glass the future of connected health?

The “quantified self” movement — the idea that tracking your own health can help you live longer and better — is gathering steam. A small but growing segment of the population is hooked on fitness apps and trackers like FitBit One, Jawbone Up, and Nike+ FuelBand.

For them, Google Glass is the logical next step. Beyond tracking your daily movement with apps like FitBit, you could potentially track your social interactions and analyze how that affects your mood. Healthy eaters — or those looking to improve their diets — could get a real-time feed of nutritional information when they shop, which would help them make better food choices.

“Google Glass has the potential to fundamentally change the way we track and gamify health,” VentureBeat guest author Chris Hollidale recently wrote. Hollidale argues that tracking your steps via today’s current suite of fitness tracking devices isn’t enough and that Glass provides more meaningful metrics.

An unintended benefit of the widespread adoption of health and fitness tracking devices is that patients routinely use devices in the doctor’s office. They frequently show their primary care provider how much they exercise daily and how well they eat by referring to a FitBit, for instance. Likewise, doctors will often use a medical app on a tablet or smartphone device as a research tool.

Dr. Roni Zeiger, former chief health strategist at Google

“I used to be worried that patients would be concerned that I didn’t know everything — but now I look something up whenever I see patients in the exam room,” said Dr. Roni Zeiger, a practicing physician and Google’s former health chief.

Zeiger sees immediate value in Glass to improve the quality of care. “It would be great to more fluidly pull up relevant information,” he said.

For example, he recently saw a patient at an urgent care center with a skin problem and realized that “no workflow currently exists to take and store an image for a doctor to see.” Zeiger had to describe the rash in writing and draw a doodle so he could track the patient’s progress — a practice that could be replaced by Glass.

When will we see Glass at the doctor’s office?

Before committing to fund the next wave of Google Glass apps, investors need to see evidence of traction.

Only time will tell whether hospitals and health practitioners will invest $1,500 into purchasing Glass when most doctors already have a smartphone or tablet device. As the price of Glass falls over time (and the technology improves to justify the added cost), developers writing Glass apps may find success more easily.

Meanwhile, developers will need to tackle compliance and regulatory issues as well as deal with potential patient privacy concerns.

“Industry giants will not be willing to gamble on such a venture until there is either a huge public outcry or the government mandates this level of innovation as the front-end standard for electronic health records,” said Matthews. “I’d say we’re looking at at least five years.”

Obstacles aside, Silicon Valley’s venture firms will be looking for investment opportunities in the near future. Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, and Kleiner Perkins recently formed a partnership known as the “Glass Collective” to help fund the development of apps.

“I used to work at a neurobiology lab, and scientists are excited about being able to interact with their experiments without having to remove layers of gloves,” said Google Ventures’ Bill Maris in a recent interview with VentureBeat.

And Maris is just one of the investors who is intrigued by health-specific applications.

“We are excited about the possibilities,” said Missy Krasner, an entrepreneur in residence at Morgenthaler Ventures and a former cofounder of Google Health.

However, Krasner pointed out another obstacle: Physicians may be reluctant to record sessions due to increased risk of medical liability.

On a fundamental level, there’s another risk: Google Glass developers would be basing their fledgling businesses on the intellectual property of another company. If Google decides to discontinue Glass (not wholly out of the realm of possibility — just ask anyone whose company relied on Google Reader), then anything those developers invested in Glass-based apps would be a bust.

“My feeling is that it’s futuristic and forward thinking — but a little early,” Krasner explained.

Would you feel comfortable if your physician examined you while wearing Google Glass? Or would you record your own doctor’s visit using Glass? Please let us know in the comments section below. 

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HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

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And like in all big rushes, the companies providing the picks and shovels can make a killing.

Lately, a number of enterprising startups that sell big data analysis tools to large companies are seeing explosive revenue growth — the latest sign the big data gold rush is fully on.

One of them is Datameer, a Silicon Valley (San Mateo, Calif.) company that offers a tool to help other companies analyze and visualize their big data quickly and easily — by providing it in a spreadsheet-like user interface that most employees can understand.

Datameer has tripled revenues over the past 12 months and looks on track to hit a $10 million run rate by early Q3, according to back-of-the-envelope math. Datameer CEO Stefan Groschupf says the company will reach 100 enterprise contracts by that time, and the average contract is $100,000 in value. The company offers annual software subscriptions, including an enterprise version can cost $100,000 or more, depending on data throughput.

Groschupf says many of his customers like to keep the details of their contracts confidential. But if you check Datameer’s web site and other announcements, you’ll see it serves companies like Sears and Visa, as well as emerging companies like hot gaming firms Kabam and Kixeye. Datameer says it also has four of the five largest global banks as paying customers as well as three of the four largest credit card companies and the U.S. government, though Groschupf is mum on specifics, citing confidentiality agreements.

Datameer’s traction comes as news emerges about other big data companies with similar growth. GoodData, a San Francisco company that provides business intelligence from data, said it too has tripled revenues over the past year. GoodData has been around since 2007. Datameer was founded in 2009. The coinciding explosion of growth this year suggests we’re seeing the “hockey stick” growth part of the big data cycle.

Datameer has raised $17.8 million from firms like Kleiner Perkins and Redpoint, but it may raise an expansion round to ensure it can grab more market share even as other competitors pile in. It can reach profitability based on the money it has already raised, said Groschupf.

Datameer’s value comes in offering an easy-to-use application layer on top of Hadoop, the popular open source software framework that allows companies to store and organize data on the fly. While companies can try to hire hard-to-find and expensive Hadoop experts to analyze the data themselves, Datameer’s app layer dumbs things down. Just about any manager in any unit can integrate, analyze, and visualize any data for their own needs. Does an HR manager want to track the performance of sales executives in new ways? Well, they can query that.

The advantage of the Hadoop-spreadsheet approach is that it allows companies to interact directly with new or existing data sources, without actually changing the underlying data. And it lets them run new types of queries on-the-fly. This contrasts to the cumbersome technology that has dominated until now, where data queries are constrained by slow and expensive data manipulation process: Generally, ETL (extract transform load) technology is used to feed data into enterprise warehouses for subsequent manipulation by business intelligence apps. This process can take up to 18 months to set up, and requires preconceived data modeling. In other words, if your intended queries aren’t thought up beforehand, you’re out of luck. No peering into your data with new sorts of queries.

Datameer’s CEO Stefan Groschupf recently shared evidence of his company’s traction during a panel discussion I moderated at Interop Tuesday (see a good summary here).

Here are five interesting ways Datameer, or services like it, are creating value:

Making money

Datameer helped a large anti-virus software company double the conversion rate of some of its marketing campaigns, netting it more than an additional $20 million in revenue within six months. Before using Datameer, the company had sunk more than $1 million into advertising campaigns that weren’t converting very well: It had used Google ads and tried to market through weblogs, its download logs, and sales accounts. Datameer helped it optimize across all of these areas, with no additional investment in infrastructure or advertising outlays. Similarly, Datameer is helping fast-growing gaming companies like Kabam and Kixeye respond more dynamically to data collected by their users, giving them a leg up on more mature companies like Zynga, which isn’t using Hadoop and is reliant on the more traditional, less flexible ETL/warehouse technology. By encouraging Kabam and Kixeye game developers to write to log files that can be instantly analyzed, Datameer can run 1,000 reports a day on them, checking to see say, what color — red or blue — is best used on game buttons for enticing gamers to click. Similarly, hundreds of other variables can be tracked on the fly, about how gamers are clicking, buying virtual goods, and then leaving.

Identify fraud

Datameer worked with a credit card company to help it save billions by identifying fraud before it happened. Groschupf wouldn’t identify his customer. However, the WSJ recently reported how Visa has used big data to save “billions” by identifying fraud that could have cost it $2 billion; it mentions Visa is using Hadoop but didn’t mention the app running on top of it. The technology allows credit card companies to view data at the individual merchant terminal level and across hundreds of attributes from average authorization volumes to the frequency of purchases that turn out to be fraudulent.

Prediction

Datameer helped an unnamed “hardware company” analyze server usage among its customers to predict when those customers will need a new server. Instead of waiting for the customer to realize servers are at full capacity, Datameer’s data knows capacity will be hit in, say, two weeks, and ships a new server to the customer before they realize they need it. That has helped the hardware company improve sales by more than $100 million “over a few years,” according to Groschupf. Datameer can perform a range of other needs for customers based on trends. One example is price optimization. While online retailer Amazon is using price optimization techniques to update prices up to 12 times a day, traditional retailers have typically optimized pricing once every 12 weeks. Datameer recently helped Sears shorten that time to three days.

Matching people

Datameer’s principal competition is not other providers, says Groschupf, but when companies decide to do the job themselves. Relationship site eHarmony, for example, was an early adopter of Hadoop, and claims this has helped eHarmony allow 550,000 U.S. marriages to happen. eHarmony matches people by running Hadoop every night on the questionnaires filled out by its customer base.

Another big step for the big data industry occurred late last year, when Datameer announced an OEM deal with online human resource software vendor Workday to embed the Datameer analytics platform as part of their big data analytics application for customers. “This marks one of the first deals to integrate Hadoop analytics into the enterprise packaged application ecosystem,” said Tony Baer, an analyst at research firm Ovum at the time. The firm called it a “key milestone in the process for big data securing mainstream enterprise acceptance.”

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HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Finally, there’s an Android phone that doesn’t make me miss anything about the iPhone. It’s called the HTC One, and it’s the best Android phone I’ve ever laid hands on.

It might also be the best smartphone I’ve ever used.

That’s saying a lot. Until now, the iPhone 5 embodied everything I wanted in an ideal smartphone: a solid-yet-elegant design, seemingly limitless speed, and a great screen. Android phones have certainly come close, but up until now there’s always been something that inexplicably held them back: the Nexus 4’s lack of LTE, the Galaxy S4’s cheap-feeling plastic case, or Android’s own design immaturity until Android 4.0.

What makes the HTC One so great? Simply put, it’s a phone that never leaves me wanting. It has a great camera, it’s freakishly fast, and its screen is fantastic without needing to be oversized. It also packs in several features I never thought I’d want in a smartphone but that I’ve found myself coming back to quite a bit.

Did I mention it’s gorgeous? Holding the HTC One in your hand will instantly make your current phone seem cheap and dated. Yes — even if your current phone is an iPhone 5.

Perhaps most of all, I appreciate HTC’s restraint. Unlike Samsung’s pile-on of features and questionable technology in the Galaxy S4, just about everything in the HTC One feels like a deliberate choice meant to create a better experience. That’s important, as it may just be the company’s last chance to turn its dismal fortune around.

It’s just too bad that most buyers will probably ignore it.

The good: It inspires pure gadget lust

The HTC One is so striking that strangers didn’t hesitate to ask me questions about it. “What is that?,” was a common refrain among New Yorkers as I was testing the phone throughout the city. I could tell they noticed it wasn’t just another Galaxy S or iPhone. It was something completely different — and they just had to know more.

One young couple I talked to, both Android owners, immediately noticed that the HTC One felt more substantial than the Galaxy S phones because of its solid metal case. They also appreciated the clean design of the phone, as well as HTC’s Sense software, which they noted was more tasteful and less intrusive than other Android phones they’ve used. These weren’t gadget geeks either, which made the conversation all the more intriguing.

I’ve tested plenty of phones in New York City, and the HTC One has managed to get me more attention than any other phone from random passersby.

You can chalk up its immediate appeal to that case, which is carved out of a single piece of metal and evokes Apple’s MacBook Air. HTC stacks the phone’s hardware to take full advantage of its limited internal space, which makes for a slightly rounded rear that fits comfortably into your hand. The HTC One feels like an evolved form of last year’s One S, which was one of my favorite Android phones so far. (Since it was only available on T-Mobile in the U.S., most people didn’t even know it existed.)

From afar, the HTC One looks similar to the iPhone 5, but up close it’s distinctly different. The One’s 4.7-inch screen commands most of its front, and it’s flanked by noticeable-yet-attractive speaker grills. Its screen is bright and vibrant with a sharp 1080p display. It even looked flawless under direct sunlight while wearing polarized sunglasses.

I initially thought the One’s stereo speakers were a gimmick (who really uses their phone like a boombox?), but I’ve grown to enjoy its ability to project decent audio. It’s particularly great for watching YouTube videos with friends — and it’ll amaze people used to tinny smartphone speakers. The One also includes Beats Audio support, but, as always, its impact on music quality felt negligible aside from making things a bit louder.

Under the hood, the One packs in a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 processor running at 1.7 gigahertz, as well as 2 gigabytes of RAM. Those are the same basic specs as Samsung’s Galaxy S4, and you can be sure that most other new Android phones will match it as well. For the most part, that means you can expect similarly fast speeds across most modern Android devices. The big differentiators for smartphones now are build quality, style, and features — all of which the One excels at.

It’s been a while since I’ve been unable to keep my hands off of a piece of tech, but the One’s combination of confident style, speed, and useful features has made it my go-to gadget over the last few weeks (beating out the iPhone 5 and iPad Mini).

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This story has game spoilers.

Brenda Romero made a board game in her kitchen that she calls Train, but she never intended to show it to anyone.

There is no easy way to explain why such a game should exist, and it’s certainly unlikely anyone would ever agree to sell it. But it is clearly the kind of game that pushes the boundaries of what you would consider to be an entertainment experience.

But Train accomplishes something that few other board games can do: It makes you think about an emotionally difficult subject. When Romero talked about it in a speech at a game conference on Friday, she got a roar of applause.

A board game might seem like one of the last places you’d find innovation. In fact, board games are going through a revival now, in part because of the popularity of crowdfunding on Kickstarter, and because they are now an increasingly popular inspiration for their digital cousins, video games. The game is part of a growing tradition of Games for Change, which are as much about social causes as fun.

Romero is primarily a video game designer, famous (under her previous name Brenda Brathwaite) for titles such as Wizardry. Most recently, she was designing social and mobile games with her husband John Romero at Loot Drop. She is now a game designer in residence at the University of California, Santa Cruz’s Center for Games and Playable Media. The center sponsored a symposium on interactive storytelling on Friday, where Romero decided to discuss the game in a speech entitled “He wouldn’t walk away: Stories from Train.”

Train is one in a series of six board games that Romero calls The Mechanic is the Message. The challenge she created for herself was to capture and express difficult emotions with game mechanics.

In the game, the players read typewritten instructions. The game board is a set of train tracks with box cars, sitting on top of a window pane with broken glass. There are little yellow pegs that represent people, and the player’s job is to efficiently load those people onto the trains. A typewriter sits on one side of the board.

The game takes anywhere from a minute to two hours to play, depending on when the players make a very important discovery. At some point, they turn over a card that has a destination for the train. It says Auschwitz. At that point, for anyone who knows their history, it dawns on the player that they have been loading Jews onto box cars so they can be shipped to a World War II concentration camp and be killed in the gas showers or burned in the ovens.

The key emotion that Romero said she wanted the player to feel was “complicity.”

“People blindly follow rules,” she said. “Will they blindly follow rules that come out of a Nazi typewriter?”

The player is part of a system, and Romero says that all “human-on-human tragedy has a system.” Train is not so much a game as a system. The typewriter represents the efficiency of the Nazi bureaucracy. And if you look at the key for the numeral “5,” you see that the shift key is for the Nazi SS symbol. Everything crystallizes. The broken glass is a symbol of Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, when the Nazis launched a series of coordinated attacks against Jews throughout Germany and Austria in 1938.

Romero created Train in 2009 and she has watched just about every time it has been played at places such as the recent Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. She has collected observations about the players and the audience that watches the game.

“With the exception of two play sessions I have missed, it lives with me. It is unique. I have met everybody who has ever played my game,” Romero (pictured) said.

Romero said she showed the game with some trepidation to a rabbi. He blessed it as a “work of Torah.”

The game was designed with “procedural gaps,” or intentional missing explanations that force the players to stop the game and agree to the rules. Those procedural gaps “force complicity,” Romero said.

When the players find out that the train is going to Auschwitz, there is a clear sense of shame. Sometimes they cry. Sometimes they feel hate. One man said he saw the Nazi typewriter and said, “I just want to fucking smash it.” Sometimes people are grateful. Sometimes they walk away.

Holocaust survivors have played the game and told her their own stories.

“Train is over when it ends,” Romero said.

Some people respond to the discovery of the game’s story by breaking the rules. One person hid people under the board. Another said, “These people are going to Denmark,” a reference to the haven where some Jews escaped.

“Each yellow person is worth 100,000 Jews,” she said. “There are six million. Six million died. Some people don’t know that.”

Some kids were playing it while drunk and being disrespectful. Romero stopped them. One man lied when Romero said quietly that it looked like he didn’t know what the game was about. He vehemently insisted, “I knew.”

“You go from the high of winning a game to the most horrific low, realizing you delivered people to Auschwitz,” she said.

Sometimes people exchange phone numbers or emails after they play.

Romero is about halfway through her series. The first was The New World, a game about slavery, created in 2008. She created that game for her daughter. She also created Síochán leat (Gaelic for Peace Be With You), or The Irish Game, in 2009. That game, about Oliver Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland, will be on display at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, N.Y. through 2014.

She is still working on three other games: Mexican Kitchen Workers (about illegal immigration, still in prototyping), Cité Soleil (about day and night violence in a densely populated shanty town in Port-au-Prince in Haiti), and another that she called One Falls for Each of Us (about the Trail of Tears). The latter is expected to be finished this year.

Word about the series is getting around. A film crew is prepping a documentary about Train. Other publications have written about it. Romero has given talks about it before. The game will be displayed in a museum at Georgia Tech University, and it will likely travel around. But Romero has never pushed it. She said, “If you’re an artist, you have things nobody has seen. I have games that nobody will ever see. This game was never intended to be seen. But they did in this case.” She said it was “terrifying at first” to show people the game.

During the nine months that Romero was designing the game, she spent a long time each day just staring at the picture on the right, depicting two boys wearing the Star of David that the Nazis made Jews wear for identification. She tried to picture herself as the mother of those boys, making sure that they were tidy.

“That image is so incredibly powerful,” Romero said, choking up and crying during her speech.

She closed the talk with a focus on one man who stuck around by himself after two other players left. Romero watched him for about 20 minutes while he moved the characters and rolled the die. She asked him what he was doing.

“He said, ‘I can’t walk away.’ He had to free every person,” she said. “To me, that was the most beautiful ending I have ever seen.”

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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This is a guest post by Patrick Ward, CEO and founder of PR firm 104 West.

I feel like I have this same argument at least twice a year when a disgruntled entrepreneur lambastes PR agencies. And I am invariably bemused when I dig deeper only to find the complainer has poured a bunch of negative experiences into a collective bucket and thrown the PR industry baby out with his or her personal bathwater.

So, following Kevin Leu’s recent post on “5 reasons you’ll regret hiring a PR firm for your startup,” here I go again, but this time I’ll mirror his points with my own five reasons you won’t regret hiring a good PR firm for your startup.

1. They will keep your story honest

I have always been a PR agency guy and have been working deeply with startups for almost my whole career — starting with companies like Sun and Autodesk in the late 1980s through launching Digital Chocolate and Webroot 10 years ago to companies like Evolv today. I have never met a CEO or founder who thought his or her product was anything but newsworthy.

Good PR agencies temper that enthusiasm and ingest some realism. No one wants to hear their company isn’t newsworthy, but some companies just aren’t. Good PR agencies keep it real and really good ones find other creative ways to communicate the company’s brand value. Bad PR people feed egos and apologize later — that serve’s no one’s interest. You want unfettered praise about your product or your company, it’s Mother’s Day on Sunday, ask her. The more sober and honest you are about your story and your media goals, the more strategic you can be.

By the way, anyone who thinks a press release is anything more than search engine fodder isn’t paying attention. Releases have value, but no reporter worth his or her salt gleans stories from press releases. Press releases are for your web site and other, let us call them, receptive audiences (again Mother’s Day is Sunday). You want to tell a story? Write three good lines in an email to a reporter whom you know covers your company or industry. If you can’t hook them in three lines, you’ll never hook them. And if you don’t know who to send the email to, well then let’s move on to Point #2.

2. Their past experience means they know the right reporters and outlets

I have worked with Pulitzer Prize winners. I’ve worked with arrogant sloths. Some of my best friends are reporters. I’ve hung around them since my days drinking with the staff of Electronic News in 1986. That means my experiences color, influence, and inform every client engagement I take. My past successes don’t mean I can always make a future client successful, but they do mean I have access. If the story is good, it will get a hearing — and that’s a valuable thing in this competitive world. If it’s bad or even mediocre, all the contacts in the world won’t help. But if the story is good, then they can help immensely (see Point #1).

3. They may not know everything, but just might know more than you

There is something in the coffee at many PR agencies that makes junior and mid-level staff think they know much more than they sometimes do — but I’ll take a confident staffer over a tentative one any day. And remember one thing: they do this everyday, all day. So when an entrepreneur is dealing with QA or buying Aeron chairs, or in a board meeting, your PR agency is doing PR. So when they say it’s uncool to send a gift to a reporter after a story has hit, don’t send it. When they say is TA-reese, not TA-rez-A, listen to them. And when they say that your enterprise software story won’t work in TIME Magazine, they’re right. Oh, and don’t always assume they don’t understand sometimes arcane technology — like what a software abstraction layer is. Sure, some PR people are, shall we say, over-extended, but others are brilliant. Again: babies and bath water.

4. They’re thinking beyond publicity

The more brilliant ones are starting to think beyond publicity. Clients complain about inflated clip reports because that’s the only measure some smaller-minded clients can think of. Here’s a fun fact: According to a Pew study a few years ago (and it’s absolutely trending this way even more now), about 10 companies represent more than 40 percent of all tech press coverage. You know which companies they are; there in the press every day.

So guess what, your media chances just got sliced almost in half. Moral of the story: you had better find another way to communicate with your audiences. The good PR agencies are doing just that. But if a client insists on making buggy whips, well guess what, we’re going to show them how many horses there are on the street. And I can guarantee you, the most carefully crafted ideas — at this time when communications are undergoing such rapid change – are not going to come from the PR manager at your new startup.

5. They’re a better value than an internal employee

That brings me to my final point. Anyone who thinks a PR manager can do the work of a PR agency is either cheap, has never had a good PR firm, doesn’t really care, or some combination of all of the above. And don’t give me some financial analysis that shows an internal hire is cheaper. If that were true, you’d have formidable accounting and law departments at every company in the US and fewer accounting and law firms. And the fallacy that a $100,000 PR contract is better spent on one or two employees is especially ill-conceived. With payroll taxes and benefits, any employee actually costs about 20 percent more than a service contract.

But, here’s the real kicker: When you hire an employee, you only get that individual’s personal experience. When you hire an agency, you get the whole team’s perspective and background.

Finally, what do you think happens to that PR manager after six months? He or she realizes that the growth path inside the company is outside PR and he or she starts to attend a bunch of meetings to demonstrate their other skills and assess where they might contribute to the organization in a larger, more lucrative role. Then, they turn to you and say, “You know, with all the other stuff I’m doing beyond PR, I’m really not getting to my core function and I think we should consider hiring an agency.”

There are business reasons to hire or not hire a PR firm. Many reasons are valid. But to dismiss any option categorically or to blithely substitute one’s own poor experiences as a reflection on an industry is questionable advice.

Patrick Ward is the CEO and founder of 104 West. He started 104 West thinking of the slogan of the fictional California senate candidate, Bill McKay, “There’s got to be a better way.” He started his career in New York, moved to Silicon Valley and finally settled in Denver. The logos of Canon, Panasonic, HP, Webroot, Digital Chocolate, and Mapquest, among others, appear on his personal experience slide.

Man yelling through bullhorn image via sparkstudio/Shutterstock

Cody R. Wilson is disappointed.

Sitting in front of him at a conference in New York City are fifty or so 3D printing enthusiasts, investors, and reporters, all of whom are eager to hear what the face of the 3D printed gun movement has to say about his dangerous new pastime.

But there’s one problem: The room is half empty. Wilson was expecting more interest, more animosity.

“This is bizarre to me. I’ll have to think about what this means,” Wilson said at the podium, mostly to himself.

Wilson’s disappointment is perhaps understandable: Over the past year, the 25 year-old law student has become the face of the budding, controversial 3D-printed gun movement. Reception to this, however, has been less than positive. Wilson’s exploits have not only upset those in the 3D printing world, but they’ve also been severe enough to warrant death threats, questioning from the U.S. government, and a persistent concern that he may one day have to flee the country.

Like most troublemakers, Cody Wilson lives for the fight and the controversy (though the more cynical take is that just likes the attention).”I want that feeling of opposition. That animates me,” he told me.

That opposition is in great supply these days. Earlier this week, Wilson unveiled the Liberator, the first gun created entirely with a 3D printer. The gun’s only metal components are its firing pin and a slug of steel designed to set off metal detectors.

Within hours of the news,Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) responded, writing a letter expressing his distaste for what Wilson had created.

“When I started talking about the issue of plastic firearms months ago, I was told the idea of a plastic gun is science fiction. Now that this technology is proven, we need to act now to extend the ban [on] plastic firearms,” Israel said.

Israel wasn’t alone. Days later, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) also chimed in, confirming that he would support legislation to ban 3D-printed firearms.

Source: Defense Distributed

Cody Wilson’s Liberator was both groundbreaking and controversial. (Source: Defense Distributed)

The worst of the opposition came just a few days ago, when the U.S. State Department’s Office of Defense Trade Compliance ordered Wilson to remove the Liberator design files from his site. Wilson, however, didn’t seem too perturbed: The files had already been downloaded over 100,000 times. They were everywhere.

“Because the files are all over the Internet, the Pirate Bay has it — to think this can be stopped in any meaningful way is to misunderstand what the future of distributive technologies is about,” Wilson told BetaBeat.

The U.S. government still isn’t letting Defense Distributed host the files, but Cody Wilson’s mission to distribute them is already complete.

3D printing your way to freedom

While much of the talk on Defense Distributed focuses on firearms, Wilson says the effort is about so much more. ”This project is a way for me to do everything I was ever interested in all at the same time. I want to represent this position in a very pure, forceful way, and I think we did it,” he said.

To understand that position, you first have to understand the idea of “crypto-anarchy,” which holds that the most effective route to political freedom is a combination of unhindered access to information protected by the hard math of cryptography. Wilson, a crypto-anarchist himself, argues that everyone has a right to download their own firearms regardless of how many governmental bodies say they shouldn’t.

Cody Wilson, a known troublemaker, lives to create headaches for regulators. (Photo: Ricardo Bilton/VentureBeat)

That’s where 3D printers come in. Because the technology enables us to digitize and replicate physical objects, 3D printers give crypto-anarchists (or even just gun enthusiasts) a powerful new tool to circumvent governmental control: Once people digitize and disseminate 3D gun files, it becomes a lot harder for law enforcement to regulate them — which is exactly Wilson’s goal. Defense Distributed is blurring the line between gun regulation and censorship by making guns information rather than just objects.

The 3D-printed gun movement isn’t about guns, then, but about what guns represent. As Wilson noted in a Reddit AMA last month, guns are soaked with symbolism.“Printed guns aren’t even proven technology and are extremely impractical devices from my experience. But there is a symbolic advantage to the individual in being at least capable of printing one,” he said.

Click, print, kill?

Keep in mind that we’re talking about guns here. Is Wilson prepared for the possibility of someone one day using his inventions to kill?

”I recognize that this tool might be used to harm people. That’s what it is — it’s a gun,” he told Forbes this week. While that isn’t the most morally sound stance, it’s clear that Wilson is beyond concerns over the harm his inventions could cause.

More, Wilson doesn’t argue against claims that his project will give people increased access to guns because giving people increased access to guns — digital or otherwise–  is his organization’s mission:

“[Defense Distributed's goal is] to defend the civil liberty of popular access to arms as guaranteed by the United States Constitution and affirmed by the United States Supreme Court, through facilitating global access to, and the collaborative production of, information and knowledge related to the 3D printing of arms; and to publish and distribute, at no cost to the public, such information and knowledge in promotion of the public interest.”

Here’s the reality: Anyone who’s really looking to get their hands on a gun already has more than a few options at their disposal — including CNC-milled firearms, $2 dollar zip guns, and AK-47s created with garden shovel parts. 3D printing really isn’t giving the bad guys of the world anything they didn’t already have access to. But the tech could make procurement easier.

“This technology would probably not increase total access but rather the convenience in procuring some type of gun,” RJ Miller, a 3D-printed gun enthusiast told me.

Right now, though, 3D printing a gun is anything but easy. While getting your hands on a gun design file is as simple as a few mouse clicks, actually printing that file is almost the complete opposite, as The Atlantic’s Phillip Bump extensively details.

It won’t always be that way, of course. 3D printers are becoming more common, and Wilson is already working on improvements to the Liberator — so all of this bound to get easier. As much as politicians and gun regulation proponents hate to hear it, what Defense Distributed is working on is going to be really difficult to stop.

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/zcopley/5914558006/sizes/l/in/photostream/

Like Bitcoin, Defense Distributed is all about using technology to fight regulation. (Image source: Flickr/Zcopley)

Gunning for the future

Defense Distributed, at its core, isn’t just a technical exercise in the possibilities of 3D printing; it’s a political statement meant to show governments how technology can disrupt their capability to create and enforce laws. 3D-printed guns are Wilson’s answer to Wikileaks and Bitcoin: He wants to use information to engineer both freedom and governmental impotence regardless of the possibility that bad guys will do the same.

“If we begin second-guessing every potential illicit use of a technology and restricting it from the outset because of fear, we’re not going to progress as a society,” said Michael Guslik (aka Have Blue), the mind behind the original 3D-printed lower receiver design.

The 3D-printed gun movement also means a lot to 3D printing itself, as it takes the technology’s “make anything” imperative and pushes it to its most logical extreme: If 3D printers can create whatever you think up, why not create a gun, a sex toy, or even a car?

“Why would I run a 3D printer if I can’t make the things that are worth making? 3D printing is all about unintended uses,” Wilson said.

And if all of this talk about guns is too glum for you, just know that these “unintended uses” extend beyond that of dangerous objects like firearms. Seeing as some people are printing out prosthetic hands for kids, it’s clear that 3D printing enthusiasts can take take the technology just about wherever their minds go.

Cody R. Wilson’s mind just took him to guns.

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.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Enterprise software giant SAP has been throwing its hands in the air for years, exclaiming that it is indeed a cloud company. But yesterday, SAP took a big step that shows where the it and its customers are at by offering its “HANA” in-memory database technology from its own cloud.

HANA (High-Performance Analytic Appliance) is an appliance that stores terabytes worth of data and can move through that data at high speeds. As of this week, SAP and its clients are storing more than 750TBs of data in the system. HANA is an expensive solution not many companies can offer, and it’s clearly important to SAP’s future. “We expect [HANA] to have a billion-dollar future on its own,” SAP mobility head Sanjay Poonen told us in November.

SAP previously only offered HANA via the cloud through Amazon Web Services. There are many potential reasons why SAP would want to offer HANA from its own cloud rather than AWS. For example, it gives SAP more control over its product, lets SAP allocate the right high-performance hardware for HANA’s monumental tasks, and lets SAP offer HANA in the cloud at a lower overall cost.

Another reason SAP has moved HANA to its own cloud is that HANA has reportedly underperformed with current customers. SAP has even given away HANA for free to some tech startups in order to seed interest and maybe gain more big customers if those startups grow big.

But after talking with several “big data” experts, one final reason particularity sticks out: SAP needed to move HANA to its own cloud to make it easier to deploy the damn thing to businesses.

“In the last 10 years, the speed of business has significantly increased,” Stefan Groschupf, the CEO of Hadoop-based big data analytics startup Datameer, told VentureBeat. “No one has time to wait 18 months anymore.”

Essentially, many businesses have given up on overly long deployment cycles — it bogs down other processes, and the software is outdated once it’s ready to be deployed. Cloud software pioneers like Workday have shown enterprises how handy the cloud can be and they like what they’ve seen.

SAP and chief competitor Oracle have been watching this trend carefully during the past few years. Both companies have acquired smaller companies and launched new cloud-focused products to help speed up deployments and stay relevant. SAP’s biggest move in recent history was acquiring SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion back in December 2011. Similarly, Oracle has purchased a boatload of companies.

In the case of HANA, this is SAP tapping two huge trends (big data and cloud) and trying to tie the biggest companies in the world to its solution. Offering it via the cloud means companies might bring in those companies that see how the cloud can speed up their workflow.

That said, lean startups focused on big data solutions could gobble up some of the market SAP wants to attack with HANA. One such startup is SiSense, a big data company that has seen a 520 percent growth in subscription revenues in the past year. SiSense’s offering is different than HANA but it still thinks it can solve many businesses’ big data qualms.

“We can run on any hardware out there; many companies don’t want to buy new hardware,” SiSense marketing VP Bruno Aziza told VentureBeat. “There’s been a shift in the market for how people procure their big data solutions.”

For example, SiSense’s CTO recently crunched 10TBs of data in 10 seconds using an off-the-shelf $10,000 server as a conference stunt.

Another thing on SiSense’s side: it only takes “hours” to deploy.

Clouds image via PhotoAtelier/Flickr

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Discovering new music online is a pain, more so months after I try to pull up the songs I liked across several streaming media services. (My thought process goes as follows: Did I add that song to YouTube as a favorite? Did I just “like” the song from a video I barely watched on YouTube? Or was this something I heard on Vimeo … or am I totally wrong and this was on Pandora?”)

Piki, the new music service from the creators of Turntable.fm, released a new version on the web yesterday that solves that problem even though it’s primary goal is to provide a algorithm-based smart radio experience that’s superior to Pandora.

The web version provides you with a bookmarklet that you can click whenever you hear a song you like on another site (like YouTube, SoundCloud, Rdio, Turntable.fm, or even Pandora). It then identifies the song and pulls it into Piki, essentially making it a more functional musical bookmarking service. It’s nice because that means you don’t have to keep up with your favorite songs on multiple services, and unlike a regular bookmarking site, your picks actually feeds into Piki’s musical discovery engine.

“We try our hardest to determine the song you’re listening to on other sites with our own technology,” said Piki and Turntable.fm cofounder Billy Chasen in an interview with VentureBeat. He added that not all songs can be identified due to the way each streaming service encodes their music. Still, this is a nice feature that none of the other streaming music services offer.

Piki launched an iOS app last month that provides a different spin on music discovery via algorithms. The service enables you to pick the best songs you’re listening to and then provides a smart radio station based on the “picks” of other users. Unlike Pandora, the service uses its algorithms to match you up with people who have similar music tastes instead of songs that sound the same, and it enables you to alter what gets played on a single station rather than providing you with separate stations comprised of a few genres or artists. It also has some cool features like the capability to capture/recognize songs that you hear (sort of like Shazam or SoundHound).

The web version’s bookmarket is a nice way of tying Piki’s goal of capturing music you like as you hear it — and doing so without stepping on all the other streaming music services out there. You can still enjoy all those other services and just use Piki as a bookmarking service. And the more songs you add, the better Piki’s discovery algorithms will be when you do use it as a music service.

“We’ve actually been working on a web/desktop version of Piki parallel to the iOS app for about a year and a half, and there’s been several versions of the interface,” Chasen said. “Mobile is an important portion of Piki, but there’s a lot of people working at their desks during the day that just want a lean-back listening experience that doesn’t come from their phone.”

The final version that launched today is very similar to what you’ll find on the iOS app in terms of user interface. The sidebar still presents you with controls for “tuning” the type of songs that play on your station, and the album artwork is prominently displayed as is the user who originally “picked” the song. Visiting a user’s profile on the web lets you toggle the frequency for how often you want a particular user’s picks to pop up on your station as well as sample their musical tastes.

The web version of Piki does handle importing your own music differently. You can’t just navigate to your iTunes music folder. Instead, Piki only lets you chose from songs you’ve uploaded on Turntable.fm after you’ve linked your account. There’s also a message that instructs people not to go crazy with adding every song they own, either.

“We’re really trying to get people into the habit of only picking their favorite songs of the moment … just your jams, not an entire album,” Chasen explains. “So if users pick songs only once or twice a week, that’s OK for what we’re trying to build with Piki.”

Chasen said Piki’s development team (which along with Turntable.fm is part of Stickybits) plans to launch an Android version of the service in the near future.

Except, of course, at a hockey game. And, increasingly, in Ontario, where startups, government, industry, universities, angels, and venture capitalists are working aggressively to try to create the world’s leading technology hub.

Source: John Koetsier

Inside Waterloo, Ontario’s new $160M center for quantum computing.

“We want the world’s next biggest tech company to be built in Ontario,” the most populous Canadian province’s minister of research and innovation, Reza Moridi, told a small group of journalists recently in Toronto.

That’s aggression — even if spoken in a kinder, gentler way by an urbane, mild-mannered politician.

It also might strike some as hubris, given that Ontario’s biggest technology story to date is that of a dying smartphone manufacturer, BlackBerry (formerly known as Research In Motion).

But it’s not just words, and it’s not just the government that’s behind this effort.

Ontario’s reverse brain drain

Ontario is home to about 40 percent of Canada’s population and accounts for 48 percent of Canada’s gross domestic product. It’s the fourth-largest population center in North America, after Mexico City, New York, and Los Angeles, and it produces more cars than any other region in North America, including Michigan. Ontario also has the Americas’ second-biggest financial services sector, after New York.

More to the point, it’s North America’s second-leading cluster for technology companies, after California, and has the third-largest concentration of life sciences companies on the continent.

Source: John Koetsier

Google bought local startup BufferBox in late 2012

The government has invested $3.6 billion in those sectors, primarily, over the last decade, with two-thirds going to research and development, and one-third focused on building the entrepreneurship ecosystem.

That money has had an impact.

For years, countries like Canada and the U.K. have complained about a brain drain, with the best talent heading stateside for more options and better pay. Not anymore. In fact, quite the reverse.

“My co-founder left Silicon Valley to come here,” Cream.hr CEO Kateline McGregor told me.

She’s starting her company at Communitech, a thriving, almost frenetic community of startups, accelerators, massive technology companies, students, and coworkers in Waterloo, Ontario. An hour’s drive up the 401 from Toronto, Waterloo is a city of 98,000 that saw more than 500 startups take root in 2012. And the massive burst of innovation has not gone unnoticed.

“Something very interesting is happening here,” Google’s top Canadian employee, Steve Woods, told me. “This area has a very high proportion of startups to population. Google loves startups … and we love to hire entrepreneurial people.”

Woods himself is a Silicon Valley refugee, returning home to Canada after building several companies in the Valley. Google recruited him over the course of several years to lead its Canadian operations.

He points directly to U.S. immigration policies that pose a critical problem for both startups and large, wealthy corporations such as Google. Getting into the U.S. to build a company or join a startup is notoriously difficult and expensive.

Where Woods works: This Google office has a real fireman’s pole, slide, cattle walkway, and more (gallery)

Meanwhile, Canada has just recently taken even more steps — such as the Startup Visa — to make it simpler, quicker, and cheaper to come to Canada.

“Because of visa situations, Canada has received a disproportionate amount of the talent that is coming into North America,” Woods said.

All of that translates into a significant competitive advantage for Canadian startups and tech companies.

More education, more startups

Another competitive advantage, particularly in the Waterloo region, is the constant stream of high-quality students coming out of engineering, math, and computer science schools. I heard this ad nauseam from government representatives I met with, and credible sources in the industry confirmed it.

Source: John Koetsier

University of Waterloo students build startups at Velocity Garage, a for-credit accelerator-like program.

“Waterloo University produces an amazing kind of talent,” Woods told me. “It gives students a great grounding in computer science, but also by the time they graduate they’ve passed through four summers of co-op programs, so they’ve worked at Facebook, at Google, Microsoft, BlackBerry, or other companies.”

Ontario’s 44 universities produce about 30,000 computer science and engineering graduates each year, a steady flow of new talent for the province’s startups as well as established IT, life sciences, and aerospace companies.

By contrast, California — a state with about three times the population of Ontario — produces only 21,000 STEM graduates per year. The results are clear, at least for Woods.

“People that come into Google from the University of Waterloo do disproportionately well,” Woods says.

Source: John Koetsier

One of the meeting rooms at Communitech, a startup mecca in Waterloo, Ontario. Google also has an office here.

Rob Crowe, executive-in-residence for Waterloo-based Institute for Quantum Computing, the second-largest quantum computing research center in the world, agrees.  And he points out another advantage that translates to more startups coming out of key Canadian universities.

According to Crowe, a key difference between the U.S. and Canada is that many Canadian universities have followed the European model of education-funded research and development. Essentially, professors and researchers at the University of Waterloo own any intellectual property they develop, not the institution they work and teach for. That’s an incentive for academics to put their best foot forward while on faculty, and to kickstart companies when their ideas result in a viable product or company.

“This is the university that throws off more startups than any other university in the country,” Crowe told me.

Less tax, more benefits, more investment

All of the above regional traits are excellent for students, researchers, and startups, but there’s also good news for investors. Moridi’s ministry of research and innovation has helped reduce corporate tax, while also providing significant tax credits for companies doing innovative work.

“Ontario has one of the lowest corporate tax rates in North America, at 22 percent,” says John Marshall, president and CEO of the Ontario Capital Growth Corp., Ontario’s voice in two venture funds totaling about $500 million. The funds were raised partially by government, which recently announced intentions to pump in another $50 million, but mostly by venture capitalists and institutional investors.

Source: John Koetsier

Google has invested significantly in Waterloo, Ontario, hiring 200 engineers for its Canadian engineering headquarters.

The goal is simple: Invest in potential high-growth venture-stage startups in Ontario via a fund-of-funds approach that ensures industry participation and leadership in every specific investment. In other words, Marshall puts money into funds assembled by local VCs such as Omers, Northleaf Capital Partners, and Rho Canada. Those VCs in turn drive the actual investments into companies like Shopify, Desire2Learn (which recently closed an $80 million round), Polar Mobile, and BlueCat Networks.

“Our overall aim is to build the ecosystem for innovation,” Marshall says. “That includes the demand side, with accelerators and startups, and the supply side: seed funding, angel investors, and venture capitalists.”

The fund-of-funds strategy appears to be working. Two years ago the average fund size in Canada was $60 million, compared to $180 million in the U.S., but now the average Canadian VC fund is $90 million. Other venture entities, such as Intel Capital and Samsung Venture Investment, are following the money and making their own investments.

When that money gets into the hands of actual startups, it goes further, according to the companies I talked to. The reason is Canada’s federal and provincial research and development credits, which the Ontario government says are “among the most generous of the OECD countries.”

Source: John Koetsier

Ontario had 500 startups in 2012 in Waterloo alone.

Taken as a whole, those credits can reduce the after-tax cost of $100 worth of R&D to just $57 for corporations and just $39 for startups.

Fixmo CEO Rick Segal, an ex-patriate American, says those tax credits are one of the key reasons he chose Toronto as the location for his latest mobile security startup. The CEO of online advertising startup Chango, Chris Sukornyk, told me the same thing.

Marshall says that the credits simply add on to a startup environment that has long stretched every single dollar as far as it can go.

“Our entrepreneurs have already been so capital efficient by necessity,” he says, adding that now that Ontario’s entrepreneurs have access to more money, they’re still using it wisely.

That capital is starting to flow more freely lately, with VC investment up in Ontario in the past few years. But startups, who benefit most from the R&D tax credits, also have additional benefits. Almost every startup that graduates from a major Canadian accelerator such as Hyperdrive and Extreme Startups in Ontario, FounderFuel in Montréal, and GrowLabs in Vancouver, gets offered a $500,000 convertible note by the Business Development Bank of Canada.

That’s cheap and none-dilutive money, and provides more runway for startups. Most of which, realistically, need more than a three-month stint in an accelerator program to become real companies.

Ambition, meet reality

There’s no doubt that Ontario is taking smart steps with the ultimate goal of dominating the business of technology. But can it really out-innovate the innovation capital of the world, Silicon Valley?

Toronto currently ranks eighth on the Startup Genome’s list of global startup ecosystems, just above another Canadian technology hub, Vancouver. Tiny Waterloo ranks 16th with its population of just under 100,000, bringing to mind Tel Aviv, the super-fertile startup ecosystem of 400,000 people that currently holds third place.

Source: John Koetsier

Toronto’s CN Tower

In addition, Ontario officials quietly let me know that they believe Ottawa would have won a spot in the top 20 as well, if Startup Genome had analyzed the data just a bit differently. That would, of course, have given Ontario three cities in the global top 20.

But even considering the province’s leading contender, there’s still a long way between eighth and first. And every country in the world, seemingly, wants to follow the Silicon Valley model to the yellow brick road of employment and riches.

Few succeed.

VC investment in Canada overall is still just a fraction of that in the U.S., with about $1.5 billion invested in the entire country over all sectors in 2012, compared to $8.3 billion invested in the U.S.  in software alone, and another $6.7 billion just in web-based startups. In Ontario specifically, VC investment was just $603 million, compared to California’s U.S.-leading $14.1 billion.

And RIM, with revenues of $18 billion in fiscal 2012 dropping to $11.1 billion in fiscal 2013, is still probably the province’s biggest tech company.

That’s not a good sign.

Turning to BlackBerry for inspiration

Despite the small numbers, startups are increasingly choosing Ontario as home. Taxation and immigration policies as well as investments from blue-chip funds like Union Square and Kleiner Perkins are having a massive cumulative effect.

Even BlackBerry is feeding the culture of innovation in Ontario, despite being in what are perhaps its death throes.

Fixmo CEO Segal says BlackBerry has been an amazing influence in Ontario, and continues to be influential. “There are lots of alumni from RIM, both voluntary and involuntary,” he says with a wry grin.

Marshall says the growth of BlackBerry from nothing to its heights as the first key innovator of the smartphone revolution has had its own impact, regardless of the company’s current situation.

“Now you’ve got kids coming up who saw their parents do it,” he says. “So they believe they can do it too.”

500 new startups in Waterloo in 2012 alone attest to that fact.

In the against-all-odds world of the startup, belief is the key ingredient of success.

Image credits: John Koetsier

Disclosure: Ontario’s ministry of economic development invited VentureBeat to visit the province, and paid my expenses. My reporting, however, remains my own.

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Electronics Arts just laid off 10 percent of its staff and let go of chief executive John Riccitiello. Now it is about to take on a huge challenge: Making games for the legendary Star Wars franchise.

Can EA pull it off? Or will it find itself stretched thin — and maybe even forced to cancel some of its own games in progress?

A source familiar with the matter said that Disney wanted EA to buy LucasArts, the game division of Lucasfilm, which it had acquired from George Lucas in October. But after mixed results with big acquisitions such as PopCap Games, EA’s appetite for big deals was limited. So Disney decided to shut down LucasArts and then license the rights for Star Wars games to EA. However, EA chose not to pick up LucasArts’ major work in progress, Star Wars 1313, which has been canceled.

EA’s studios are going to find themselves busy, because the company laid off perhaps 1,000 employees in the wake of the departure of Riccitiello. If it finds itself short of staff, it could hire former LucasArts employees. Or there may be another shoe to drop: the coming cancellation of other games.

An EA spokesman declined to comment on upcoming Star Wars games or any possible cancellations.

However, Frank Gibeau, the executive vice president of EA Labels, said in a post on Monday that developers at DICE, Visceral, and BioWare are going to work on the EA Star Wars games. Gibeau didn’t offer more details or say what might be canceled, if anything.

Here’s an overview of what those studios are already busy doing:

• BioWare made the now free-to-play, massively multiplayer online game Star Wars: The Old Republic, a huge six-year effort that turned out to be a disappointment.
• EA’s DICE studio in Sweden already has several hundred people working on Battlefield 4.
• Another group at DICE was said to be working on Mirror’s Edge 2, but it’s not clear if that team would be in jeopardy if EA management wants to reassign the developers to work on Star Wars games.
• Visceral Games, the studio that made the Dead Space series, was also reportedly working on a Battlefield title.

EA might have the option to postpone games rather than cancel them outright, but if Disney was savvy enough to exact a heavy price for the Star Wars license, it would make sense for EA to get to work on those games as soon as possible so the company can start making revenues to offset its licensing costs.

EA is likely to shuffle around a lot of people in order to make the Star Wars games. Disney and Lucasfilm are working on the next Star Wars movie, Episode VII, due out in 2015. But from what we hear, EA isn’t going to work on a game related to the next trio of films — at least not yet. EA will borrow from the movies, but it plans to make original Star Wars titles.

Disney will retain certain rights to mobile, social, and online games, but that does not mean that EA cannot do mobile Star Wars games. In fact, mobile is a big priority at EA under its acting CEO, Larry Probst, and the license allows EA to make games across all platforms.

The challenge for EA is that, as usual, it has too many enemies. EA had commissioned multiple Battlefield titles in order to fully compete against Activision Blizzard’s Call of Duty modern-combat franchise, which comes out every year. EA’s Battlefield series was on a two-year cadence, alternating with its Medal of Honor combat franchise. But the poor performance of last year’s Medal of Honor: Warfighter game caused EA to take that series “out of rotation” and shift resources to a Battlefield-focused strategy.

DICE announced in March that it was working on Battlefield 4, which is expected out this year. Danger Close, the Medal of Honor development studio, has had some layoffs, and its next assignment hasn’t been revealed. But Visceral, which recently shipped Dead Space 3, was also secretly working on a different Battlefield title.

Will EA still have the staff to come out with a Battlefield game every year and still make the Star Wars games? Or will it have to cut some of the games in progress?

There’s no law that says EA can’t hire more people, but the company’s priority has been to cut costs in order to improve profitability. If it hires more people, such as the laid-off LucasArts employees, it won’t achieve the cost savings that it sought with the recent layoffs.

EA reports earnings today. We’ll see if any answers are forthcoming.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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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.”

Betable has blasted a hole in the barriers between the social casino game and online gambling business. That was clear from a discussion about the San Francisco startup at the recent Social Casino Summit in San Francisco, where rivals and partners highlighted some of the hopes and fears about the disruption of the online gambling business and the potential for increased regulation of social games that may happen as a result.

As we’ve reported before, Betable’s ambition is to disrupt real-money online gambling by enabling many more businesses to enter the market. By converting mobile games so they can accept real-money bets, it breaks the walls between real-money gambling and social casino games, where players typically purchase chips for social games but can’t cash out their winnings. The early results look promising, Betable says, but real-money gambling executives see controversy in Betable’s tactics.

I moderated a debate at the summit April 25, and I’m summarizing the Betable-focused parts of that discussion here.

Focused on mobile games, Betable’s service presents players the option to play for real money in the United Kingdom, where it has a license to operate real-money gambling games. Social casino game makers can take their existing products and integrate the Betable applications programming interface (API) that turns them into real-money gambling games. Betable’s backend infrastructure handles tasks such as regulatory compliance, identification of the player and whether the player is actually located in a place where they can legally gamble, security, and if the player really has the money that they intend to gamble with.

This capability to transform a social casino startup into a real-money gambling house is important, since social games have large audiences where a small percentage of the players pay $2 or $3 a month for virtual currency. In online gambling, a smaller number of players often spend $100 or more a month to play the same type of digital casino games — poker, slots, or blackjack. As the legal separations come down between these businesses, a land grab is happening. More than 100 companies are fighting each other, with plenty of  territorial expansion opportunities, platform opportunities, partnership opportunities, M&A possibilities, and other paths to disruption.

Our debate highlighted the blurring lines. And Betable was a hot topic, so I’ve decided to focus on that discussion here. Jill Schneiderman, the vice president of games for Social Gaming Network (SGN), said that her company’s partnership with Betable enables the company to focus on making games and to delegate the expertise in gambling regulations to Betable.

“We’re experts in making fun and engaging social games,” Schneiderman [holding microphone] said. “We’re leveraging their backend and their expertise in this world to be able to enter it with traditional types of casino games, but we’re also exploring a hybrid of skill games and casino games.”

SGN hasn’t yet launched a game with Betable. But both Digital Chocolate and Big Fish Games have sung the praises of Betable in bringing their social casino games to the U.K. as real-money gambling games.

But Jez San [middle, in white shirt], the chief executive of real-money online gambling firm PKR, said, “ I think that Betable and companies like that are a real threat. What it effectively enables any gaming company to do is to take their existing social game and make it playable for real money. The problem is that those existing social games weren’t designed to be played for real money. They’re not designed around fairness. All the mechanics that real-money games go through – the auditing and the verification and everything else – are all missing from the development side of those social games.”

Schneiderman said that Betable had enough documentation to be able to satisfy regulators in the U.K. She said that Betable is very responsible when it comes to handling any problems with users.

Sumit Gupta [second from right], the CEO of social casino game firm Bash Gaming, said, “I think it goes beyond that. It goes beyond technology and altering the random number generators (RNG) and so forth, because I’m pretty sure that these games are at least mostly compliant. The bigger issue is that we know that there are certain people who are potentially vulnerable and may spend too much money. There’s a whole framework in real-money gaming, as part of the licensing requirements, to deal with that responsibility. Say somebody plays a Betable-enabled real-money game and spends too much money. Their husband or their wife finds out about it and tries to get in touch with the operator to say, ‘Stop this.’ Who are they going to call? Do they call SGN? Do they call Betable?”

San added, “When you’re regulated, the games are audited. The source code is investigated. The RNG is analyzed. Betable’s not doing any of that. And if they are, who is regulating that process? Betable’s just some company that’s got a gaming license. That doesn’t automatically mean that every game ever made should automatically be licensed. It doesn’t work like that in the real-money world.”

After knocking Betable, San added, “I’m not knocking Betable in any way, but I am really worried that it’s a shortcut to avoid regulation. You can do a real-money game without being regulated just by saying, “Well, Betable’s our real-money partner.”

Raf Keustermans (far right), CEO of London-based Plumbee, a maker of both real-money online gambling and social casino games, said, “My concern about Betable is not so much about the technology layer in the product, because I’m pretty sure they know what they’re doing on that level. My concern is more that to be a gambling operator, you need to be very responsible. You need to cover a lot of different areas. It’s not just product technology. It’s all about what kind of skeleton you create the company around. How do you offer gambling services? A lot of companies, big companies, have been working a very long time to get that right. It’s been a combination of making good products and being very responsible. To just allow anyone to become a gambling company, I think, is extremely dangerous. There’s a reason why gambling is regulated. There are certain risks. You can’t just make those disappear with a technology platform.”

Chris Griffin, the chief executive of Betable, said in response to the panel comments in an email to GamesBeat, “This isn’t the first time, and unfortunately it won’t be the last time that online gambling companies who have zero expertise about Betable aim to deposition us publicly. Unsurprisingly, the falsehoods they spread are exactly that: false. In fact aside from our partner SGN, none of the [Social Casino Summit] panelists have even seen a demo of our platform. This is the oldest trick in the anticompetitive gambling book – misinformation and distortion. These gambling companies rely on lies and innuendo as a competitive tactic because of their inability to compete with Betable on a product or technological level.”

He added, “Here are the facts as they relate to comments made on the panel. The real-money mechanics in any Betable-powered game are exactly that: Betable-powered, meaning Betable handles all real-money activities and services, and its random number generator is audited and certified as required by the United Kingdom Gambling Commission. Every Betable-powered game is held to the highest regulatory standards for compliance and social responsibility and is rigorously tested by third-party testing houses that are approved by the United Kingdom Gambling Commission. These are the same third-party testing houses that all online gambling companies use.”

He also said, “Betable takes safety and security very seriously. As the operator of all real-money play within our partners’ games, Betable handles all player issues or concerns directly while providing industry leading safeguards to protect both players and partners.”

Schneiderman said, “One thing, Dean, that you were hinting at before is that politics are involved. It’s easy for real-money gambling institutions to have good relationships with regulators. What Betable does that we’re not talking about, it’s allowed underdogs and small companies who don’t have seated relationships with these regulators to be able to participate on the space through them.”

Keustermans replied, “I really disagree with that. We are a 40-person company. We’re 20 months old. We didn’t raise that much. You guys are better-funded than us, right? We’re already a fully licensed gambling operation.”

In closing, Keustermans said, “I appreciate that there are concerns. Some of these concerns are valid and some of these concerns, I think, are primarily perception issues. But let’s not forget that social gaming, and the social casino games within that, is an extremely young industry. It’s a bit unfair to demand that social casino should organize itself in the same way that real-money gambling operators have. They’ve been around for decades. I think we can have a little bit of time to get our act together.”

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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This is a guest post by entrepreneur Adam Peterson, CEO of video-sharing platform VipeCloud.

Do startups need a video strategy? I’ve been in and around the “video for business” industry for the last six years and I get asked this question by startups quite often. The answer is always yes.

Video is the most engaging form of online content. But it’s also a highly expensive and time-consuming proposition for startups. So the strategy you take will depend a lot on what stage your company is in.

Here’s a breakdown of what kind of video you’ll want to invest in at each stage:

Pre-funding and pre-launch

There are really only two types of videos a startup at this early of a stage should consider. Most companies this early are going to change their messaging and possibly even direction several times. Taking valuable time or bootstrapping dollars to create a video can be a tough decision to make; however, these two use-cases should qualify:

1. Create a simple screenshot or animation of the problem you are solving and your proposed solution. This will help you tell your own story, and it will help you with customer discovery to validate the problem and your proposed solution with prospective customers or buyers. I would not invest any funds in the first versions of this video. Simply use a screen recorder like Quicktime or Camtasia and run through a PowerPoint presentation, basic animation, or recorded whiteboard drawing.
2. Create a professional looking video if you’re planning to do a crowdfunding campaign. A good-looking video will show your audience that you’re serious about your project. Tim Ferriss discusses the idea of “Minimum Effective Dose” in his blog about how Soma Water raised $100,000 on Kickstarter in 10 days. A professional-looking video is a required “Minimum Effective Dose.” If you’re on a tight budget, don’t worry; there’s an overwhelming number of resources available about how to make good videos. For reference, here’s an article offering tips for how to record a video on a skeleton crew and a series about how to make professional-looking content.

If you’re not one to pick up video editing software quickly and have a few bucks to invest, it might be worth hiring a videographer. A handful of low-budget options exist, including videographer networks like BBN3, Pixelfish, or SmartShoot. If your budget is slightly larger, you might try the animation approach with Ephipheo or AutoDemo. Of course, you might also have a friend of a friend who’s willing to help.

Pre-launch but MVP-demo-ready

Once you have a functional minimum viable product, recording a typical use-case of your product is a great way to validate your problem/solution and even generate pre-launch signups. Dropbox has one of the more recognized success stories doing this. Their waiting list purportedly went from 5,000 to 75,000 overnight after launching their simple screen recording video demo. That said, they took great care to cater to their audience by adding in several easter eggs.

Near this stage, your company might also begin social media and other efforts to generate attention. Videos are expensive and you shouldn’t always promote your own product on social media, yet video is one of the most effective forms of content to generate engagement. So what do you do? Share other people’s videos.

Sharing an interesting, educational, or new video meme with your network will still make you the source of the great content to your audience and thus help you generate attention. For example, you can generate thought leadership by sharing industry- or business-relevant videos like this strategy discussion from the Harvard Business Review, or an interesting TedTalk, or even the new Psy Gentlemen video if you dare. With 72 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, something should be interesting to your audience.

Launched

If all goes well, you’ll eventually get your product out the door. At this stage it’s almost a requirement to use video. Why? Because your buyers want it. Ninety-five percent of business-to-business (B2B) tech buyers are watching videos. Furthermore, your competitors are more than likely using video, as 87 percent of B2B enterprise marketers and 70 percent of business to consumer marketers use video.

What kind of videos should you make? The first priority should be product overviews. Product demos are more valuable than case studies or white papers for influencing purchase decisions. These overviews can include a high-level product showcase, highlights of key sections, feature releases, and use-case scenarios.

Product videos for customer support and onboarding efforts can also hit two birds with one stone. A quick screen capture can be much faster than typing up support guides, at the same time, the more FAQs you get on video, the more you can automate your support engine. If you check out the Box channel on YouTube (below) it’s clear their video focus is on supporting their existing customers. Zappos has also publicly discussed how videos have increased conversion rates and reduced return rates.

Whether you’re funded or not will really only affect the quality of videos you can produce. Quality is important; however, there are workarounds. For example, if you can’t afford a professional video to represent your brand on your homepage, then put one on your blog. Write an article and embed a “micro-webinar” product overview that’s positioned as something you made quickly like a screencast or a live interview.

What do you do with your videos once you have them?

Everything you possibly can. Videos can be the most expensive sales and marketing assets your company creates, so you should get the most out of them. Here’s what you should consider:

1. Post them to YouTube. Though be careful not to rely too much on the “SEO value.” When a link to your website shows up in a Google search, it brings the searcher to your website or a landing page that’s also on your domain. When a link to your YouTube video shows up in a Google search, it brings the searcher to YouTube. You can turn the in-video ads off; however, ads and distracting promoted videos can still show up within your channel (for instance, click on any of the videos on Box’s channel and you’ll see a featured video ad on the right).
2. Consider private hosting. There are thousands of video hosting options. We offer this at VipeCloud, so does Brightcove, Vimeo, and several others. Note, if you’re going to use Vimeo, you’ll have to upgrade to VimeoPRO as their community guidelines don’t allow videos for commercial use on their free or plus levels.
3. Get everyone to share them, including your sales team, support team, and any evangelists inside and outside your company. The more people distributing your videos, the more value you’ll get. Buyers are looking to build relationships earlier in the process as they look for trusted advisers. Furthermore, your sales teams, support teams, and evangelists build different relationships with buyers than marketing does, and can guide video suggestions as such.

Video is a means to an end. It will soon represent most all of Internet bandwidth and a majority of mobile data. However, your company still needs to solve a real problem for a large market. The exercise of making your first video at an early stage will help you think through the details of the problem you are really solving. Once you’ve chosen your path, video becomes a requirement. Put together a strategy that works for your company, and remember to track if it’s working.

Adam is CEO of VipeCloud and an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at StartX, Stanford’s student startup accelerator. Prior to VipeCloud Adam launched eFaceTime in 2010, integrating video into Cendyn’s eProposal, the hospitality industry’s leading sales proposal software tool used by more than 10,000 hotels and venues worldwide. In 2008 he launched VipePower, an offering that became the leading recruiting and staffing video solution. From 2008 to 2012 he served as the Technology Chair on the board of the Silicon Valley Chapter of the California Staffing Professionals. 

Top image via Shutterstock

Many people, when faced with doing something new that they know nothing about, won’t ever get started. The project seems too daunting and they don’t have any context for even where to begin. In fact, in the very beginning, Justin.tv was exactly this type of problem.

When we first conceived of Justin.tv, it was simple to explain: we’d have a live streaming video feed of our exploits in San Francisco broadcast from a camera in real time to many viewers simultaneously watching on the web. It wasn’t as simple to figure out how to make this a reality, in fact, Emmett and I (it was just us at first) didn’t know the first thing about online video protocols, servers or infrastructure, cameras, or mobile network connections. At that point, we were simply two web developers with a year of experience building an AJAX calendar app. To us, the whole project appeared to be one big black box:

1. Build Justin.tv

However, we could break this down:

1. Figure out how to build a mobile camera that streamed video to one server
2. Figure out how to ingest a video and stream to multiple viewers from our server

Going further:

1. Talk to an expert in hardware devices
2. Research available mobile data transmission technologies
3. Talk to a startup we’d recently met who was doing live streaming (to figure out what tech they were using)
4. Investigate using a Content Delivery Network for streaming

I’ve found that when faced with a set of seemingly insurmountable challenges, the first step towards making it easier is to break things down into as large a set of small individual tasks as possible.

In this case, our list of to-dos list was broken down further many times. The first item lead us to Kyle, who became a cofounder and built the first streaming device (a computer that encoded video data from an analog camera). We learned that EVDO Rev A was coming to San Francisco, enabling us to send data at reasonable speeds over the cell networks (#2). Following up with #3 lead us to learn about streaming server options, and eventually choose #4 (paying someone else to stream our video for us).

Six months after we first began working on the Justin.tv project full time, starting from a place with zero knowledge, we had a mobile streaming hardware device that sent video to multiple viewers, and launched our show.

This process is simple to apply to any set of challenges, from the fantastic to the mundane.

Make yourself a list of what must be done and go through that list. For example, if you need to graduate from university and get a job so you can take care of your family, that probably entails a large set of smaller, more manageable things: getting decent grades in each of a set of credits, creating a resume, applying to jobs, practicing interviewing, etc.

In turn, each of these things can be reduced to a set of smaller tasks that will seem more accomplishable: getting a decent grade in a class turns into a set of tasks including studying, writing term papers, and preparing for an exam. Often times, the first step in accomplishing your goals might be as simple as buying the assigned books for a class.

I recall a disagreement I had with a friend many years ago. My claim was that anything I set my mind to was achievable; he thought this idea was ridiculous. The point came up because he thought the idea of private spaceflight orchestrated by individuals would never work. Looks like I was right.

You can achieve anything you set your mind to; doing so is just process of reduction.

If you are of a like-minded attitude, come build things at Exec.

Justin Kan is the founder of Exec Cleaning, which recently launched in Boston and New York City. This post originally appeared on his personal blog.

Image credit: Chones/Shutterstock

For many gamers of a certain age, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, or SNES, represents all that is good about their hobby.

Despite being 22 years old, the console remains timeless, with a lively second-hand market and committed playing community.

This year the SNES will go one step further, though, as it is receives two new boxed cartridge releases. Nightmare Busters is a lost gem that retro publisher Super Fighter Team is resurrecting, and Project N is a completely new game from WaterMelon Games of Muscatine, Iowa.

The 16-bit console wars

Released in North America in 1991, the SNES was Nintendo’s answer to Sega’s 16-bit Genesis. The head-to-head battle between these two consoles, and their respective mascots, Mario and Sonic, would define a generation of gaming.

Despite going up against an already established machine, the SNES could eventually declare victory in the 16-bit console war, shifting 49.1 million units worldwide compared to estimated Genesis sales of 29.5 million.

With the SNES bringing us the first installments of classic Nintendo series such as Super Mario Kart, Pilotwings, F-Zero, and Star Fox, many consider it as the greatest console of all time.

It’s quite fitting, then, that the SNES is seeing renewed interest from developers and publishers 14 years after Nintendo ceased its production.

Nightmare Busters

Source: Super Fighter Team

Super Fighter Team president Brandon Cobb.

Super Fighter Team is a dedicated retro developer and publisher, based in Santee, Calif. Its back catalog includes releases for Sega Genesis, Atari Lynx, PC, and Mac. This year, it’s working on the SNES.

“Since our company’s founding, back in 2004, there’s been a lot of excitement about the possibility of new Super Nintendo games appearing on the market,” says Brandon Cobb, the president of Super Fighter Team. “I can’t count the number of requests that have landed in our inbox. It was about waiting for the right title to come along, because we don’t put our name on just anything.”

The right title was Nightmare Busters, a run-and-gun game originally created by French developer Christophe Gayraud in 1994. The SNES version of the game got shelved, and didn’t ever see an official release.

Arcade Zone, the studio that Gayraud was working for, fell victim to a changing gaming maket, disrupted by the Sony PlayStation. “What happened is that Sony broke off the Nintendo distribution in Europe, refusing to take the product,” explained fellow developer Carlo Perconti to 1UP.com. “Without buyers and incapable of publishing them by ourselves, we had to close down Arcade Zone and interrupt undergoing developments, with profound regret. Other companies … survived and moved on to the PlayStation. We were at the wrong time at the wrong transition, the one which saw Nintendo’s European market become Sony’s European market. “

In the intervening years, Nightmare Busters has appeared as an unauthorized ROM, and a few homemade cartridges containing this game have found their way to eBay. Now finally, nearly two decades later, Nightmare Busters is officially entering production, with Super Fighter Team planning a limited release of 1,200 copies, all of which have already been preordered.

Source: RetroGameSpace

Nightmare Busters programmer Christophe Gayraud.

Sadly, Nightmare Busters’ original creator will not see his game’s official launch. Gayraud passed away in April last year, at 46, following a heart attack.

“Christophe was one of the nicest guys I’ve had the pleasure to do business with,” says Cobb. “He was overjoyed at the prospect of Nightmare Busters finally getting an official release. Though he won’t be here with us to see it happen, I was at least able to break the news to him about the start of our preorder process. That ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ announcement meant a lot to him.”

What the heck is a Lynx cartridge?

Super Fighter Team has a long history of publishing games on “forgotten” consoles.  Founded in 2004, the company is responsible for the localization and release of Sega Genesis role-playing games Star Odyssey, Legend of Wukong, and Beggar Prince. It also published the 2009 Atari Lynx horizontal shooter Zaku from developer PenguiNet.

Cobb explains how tricky manufacturing authentic-looking cartridges is on consoles that have long ceased production. “One of the harder things is getting the plastic casing for the game boards,” he says. “For the Genesis, you can at least rely on an existing mold. When we did Zaku for the Lynx, however, our factory in China was like, ‘What the hell is this?’ because the Lynx is completely unknown over there. I had to send them an original game card by Atari so they could reproduce the case design to a T.”

As for publishing rights, it seems that the console manufacturers no longer care much for their old machines. “We contacted Sega of Japan ourself, in regard to publishing games for the Genesis,” says Cobb. “They don’t offer official developer licenses for the machine anymore, so they just told us not to use any of their trademarks on the products.”

Cobb won’t give a release date for Nightmare Busters yet, but it will ship sometime this year. “As soon as the official release date is confirmed,” he says, “it will be announced on our website and company Facebook page as well as by e-mail to all of our preorder customers and mailing list subscribers.”

So will it be worth the 19-year wait? Cobb says yes. “It embodies what all the top Super Nintendo games are: vibrant works of art.”

You can watch Gayraud playing Nightmare Busters in the video embedded below. It’s in French:

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Kevin Leu is the founder of GirlsOnAMap.com.

There are lots of dumb things you could do as a startup entrepreneur — like base your company out of Bakersfield, allow yourself to be acquired by Groupon in an all-stock transition, or pitch your growing U.S.-based startup to the Samwer brothers — but nothing could be more dumb than throwing your hard-earned venture capital money at a public relations firm.

Sure, many startup founders out there don’t have the first clue about how to “do” public relations for their startup. They’ll think long and hard before finally plopping down that $12,000 retainer fee — with a required six month commitment — out of their precious Series A investment.

Don’t do it.

As a former journalist who entered PR for a few years (working in-house, managing PR firms, working with them on joint announcements, and consulting with other startups) I can tell you that most PR firms I worked with are full of sh*t. I’m not saying there isn’t some value, but the value is nowhere near enough to justify the cost, given your limited resources.

Here are five reasons PR firms are crap:

1. They don’t know how to tell a story

I’ll be honest, working in “professional” news and reading press releases every morning really honed my sense of what does and does not make a story. I was able to sift through all the hyperbole from clichéd PR specialists and figure out a way to tell an interesting story. (At least I hope it was interesting!)

So when I joined the ranks of PR, I always thought backwards: from the point of view of the specific trade journalist, to writing the press release so that the journalist would see those points.  Unfortunately, most PR people don’t know how to do this.

I’m not saying that someone who studied “Public Relations” in college can’t tell a good story, but they’re immediately limited by the conformity of a non-innovative industry.

2. They rest on their laurels

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve worked with PR firms who tout their “previous clients” — which are indeed impressive — but who are no longer clients. Or the executives who handled those high-profile clients are not the ones who will be working on your account. Sure, those executives will show up for the first few meetings, then they’ll pass off the duties to a couple of underlings: one mid-level manager (6 – 8 years experience), and the other just a few years out of school. It’s also called Bait-and-Switch, which I learned about from Mike Seaver on Growing Pains. It was a good episode.

3. They act like they know everything

Well, it’s probably mandatory they speak like they know everything, which is how they convince many a startup that their services are needed and the commitment will be rewarded. I have found this bravado to be annoying. Maybe it’s because in Silicon Valley we value humility over braggadocio.

I would be much more impressed with a PR person who showed curiosity and asked a lot of questions about my team and product. There is no one who knows the product as well as you, but if a PR person is any good, he/she’s going to try and get as close to your knowledge as possible.

4. They take more credit than they deserve

During every press campaign, PR firms mark down every publication and online newspaper that “picks up” the story, which for them means whomever re-prints the press release word-for-word. This is an automatic thing that is triggered from release sites like PR Newswire, Business Wire, and PR Web, and does not require the services of a PR firm. Startup entrepreneurs are always impressed by these links when they shouldn’t be. How many people go to the Jacksonville Business Journal and read the re-printed press releases from that day?

Entrepreneurs should be putting a premium on original stories that are being written, not these automatic pick-ups.

I’ve also seen PR firms take credit for stories that were facilitated by me or someone else within the startup, even when they had nothing to do with it.

5. They’re a rip-off

At a market-rate of $12,000 a month, which is pretty standard, they supply you with about 20 hours a week, total, of two junior employees, who they pay anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000 a year.

If you’d like me to do the math for you, they’re charging you $144,000 a year for a half-assed job that costs them maybe $50,000. Did you also know that those employees have other clients? So, even if they do get through to a reporter, their interest does not lie squarely with you. It’s kind of like a taxi driver who gets paid commission to bring a customer to several different places. Wouldn’t you like that taxi driver to have the singular purpose of delivering that customer to you?

Now, PR firms aren’t all bad, and PR is important. This brings me to my key recommendation. Hire an in-house PR specialist, manager, director, whatever you want to call this person. You can pay them much less than $144,000 a year, and get triple the value. Heck, if you hire a journalist (they’re losing their jobs everywhere you look), you could probably pay them $80,000 a year, have them working 60 hours a week alongside the rest of your team, doing much more than crafting the occasional press release and conducting a launch. They can work on the site’s overall message, the outbound emails to clients, a company blog (which builds organic SEO), business development, press contacts, and they can write those press releases – full-time!

If you do want to go with someone trained in PR, put out a listing for a PR Manager with several years experience. I’m sure you’ll have more than enough quality candidates coming from within several of the PR firms you’re considering anyway.

Don’t get me wrong; PR firms do some things really well. Their presentations are always beautiful and concise. And, as people, they’re always very presentable and well-spoken. Okay, okay, okay.  They also know how to coordinate a launch. Whether that’s a website or a product launch, they do it very succinctly and efficiently. They are excellent at scheduling briefings with journalists and getting everyone to agree to a certain embargo for maximum coverage. Still, you can accomplish this with someone in-house.

If you’re going to bring on a PR firm — against all my recommendations — make sure you insist on having one of the senior-level executives working directly with you and that all communication does not go through the recently-hired college grad. It also wouldn’t hurt to know that this executive came from the ranks of journalism (I’m biased! Sorry!).

For an additional test, during the pitch and courtship period, send them an email during non-office hours and see how quickly they respond. Too many times I’ve dealt with PR professionals who didn’t respond to emails for hours, sometimes days, which baffles me. If I had been a journalist on a deadline, an hour’s delay would’ve meant me finding another contact and writing the story without your company.

Remember one final thing: PR firms are like cell phone companies. Once they lock you into a contract, you’re not getting out of it unless you pay them a penalty, even if their service is spotty and you’re unsatisfied with their work. That doesn’t seem fair, does it?

[Editor's note: Since publishing this story, we've had a number of people from the PR field contest its conclusions. Be sure to check out the rebuttal story -- "Here we go again: 5 reasons hiring a PR firm is good business" by long-time PR exec Patrick Ward.]

Kevin Leu is a former television reporter and PR specialist who has worked with various venture-backed startups. He recently launched his own startup, GirlsOnAMap.com, which is a combination of Hot or Not and Tripadvisor that relies on user submitted content to provide travel advice for singles. You can follow him @SVBachelor.

Top photo credit: Mark Z. via photopin cc

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LocalResponse’s pitch is simple, but ingenious for the ad set: it combs social media data to better target ads on mobile devices and desktops. That means more interesting ads for you, and hopefully better conversions for advertisers (especially those struggling to figure out how to make mobile ads work).

The social focus seems to be paying off for the company, as it announced today that its first quarter revenues increased 716 percent from last year. That’s particularly notable, since its revenues for January 2012 ended up equaling its sales for all of 2011.

“There’s been this hunt for [ad] inventory that performs better and is more targeted to the end user,” said Nihal Mehta, LocalResponse’s chief executive and co-founder, in an interview with VentureBeat. “I think we are one of the few ad networks that actually really perform.”

Mehta laid out three big reasons why the company is performing so well: More brands are shifting their ad spend to digital (he predicts 2013 will be the biggest ever for digital ads); the economy is on the rebound and brands are realizing consumers are ready to spend again; and finally, consumers are more social than ever, which gives LocalResponse plenty of data when it comes to targeting.

“We make ads more relevant and more contextual through these social signals,” Mehta said. “If you tweet ‘I’m hungry,’ you could see a banner ad for Pizza Hut on your phone. If you check-in to Wal-Mart on Foursquare, you could see an ad for Target the next time you go to CNN.com.”

The company’s strong ad performance has attracted some big clients like State Farm and Best Buy, 19 percent of which are Fortune 100 companies. It also announced today that it’s opening an office in Los Angeles. In an ad campaign using LocalResponse’s Direct Intent Targeting, L’Oreal saw a 0.19 percent click-through rate — ten-times the typical click-through rate of around 0.02 percent.

LocalResponse competes with 33Across and SalesForce’s Marketing Cloud (built out of the remains from Buddy Media), but Mehta tells me it has built something truly unique. The company has upgraded its infrastructure to handle 10 billion social media signals a month (which is almost the same as Twitter’s monthly usage), and it’s also natural language processing algorithms to determine intent from social data.

Mehta felt particularly vindicated in LocalResponse’s social focus after hearing about Foursquare’s potential plans to resell check-in data to advertisers. That’s something he predicted would be huge two years ago.

three words: check-in. retargeting. kaboom.—
nihal mehta (@nihalmehta) June 16, 2011

LocalResponse’s technology enables ad targeting to carry over from mobile to desktops, but the company isn’t particularly focused on cross-platform targeting yet. Mehta revealed that the company is eventually planning to take advantage of your social media identity for deeper cross-platform capabilities eventually.

Since the company is so focused on ad targeting, I asked Mehta how LocalResponse could take advantage of something like Google Glass.

“Glass for us won’t be an ad interface, but it could be a data signal,” he said. For example, it could take advantage of the fact that you’re taking a lot of pictures of a particular place or product, or simply spending a lot of time looking at something. “We want to stay laser-focused on social signals. But I think it’s cool, I think it will have as much of an impact as the iPod had in the music industry and the iPhone had in the phone industry.”

LocalResponse was founded in 2010 and has received around $8 million in funding.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

“Creepy” is a word that often gets thrown around when we’re talking about Google Glass, somewhat rightfully, and somewhat not. Creepy, however, is mostly an emotional appeal; like Justice Potter Stewart’s views on pornography, while it’s tough to describe what “creepy” is, most of  know it when we see it. And right now, Glass is pretty creepy (and, no, Robert Scoble isn’t helping.)

But does Glass have to be creepy? Judging from the basics of how Google is advertising it — as a camera that you have strapped to you face all day, recording everything and everyone — I’d say the creepiness is unavoidable. It’s going to be a long time before people don’t automatically flinch when someone wearing Glass looks their way. And that’s going to have major effects on how fast the technology is adopted and accepted.

But while Glass seems doomed to the world of the creepy, augmented reality glasses themselves don’t have to be. This is clear judging from devices like Epson’s Moverio BT-100, a pair of augmented reality glasses that’s targeting a very different audience than Google’s catch-all Glass experiment. While Epson actually announced the device years ago, the company is trying to get its specs back into the conversation now that Glass is getting big.

Eric Mizufuka, Moverio’s product head, sums it up the Glass situation well: “Glass has been around for over a year, but Google is still struggling to say what they want to do with it. Right now it’s just photos and video,” he said.

Moverio, on the other hand, was designed with its killer app in mind: workforce training. Because the specs function as true augmented reality displays, developers can create overlays for things like car repair and thermostat installation  – basically anything that would benefit from the use of a hands-free walkthrough.

Here’s another example: Say you are a hapless plumber trying and failing to repair someone’s toilet. Rather than give up — or, worse, do a crummy job — you flip on your augmented reality specs and someone sitting at a distant computer uses  overlays to take you through the repair process step by step. It sounds farfetched, but it’s the very sort of thing companies like Scope Technologies are working on. (It’s also completely opposite of the thing that Google seems to be concerned with.)

This video gives you a good idea of how such a system would look. It’s pretty  neat.

Of course the tough thing to ignore here is that Moverio is ugly, bulky, and not all the type of thing people would want to walk around with all day. These realities would be a kiss of death if  Moverio were a consumer device, but it’s not a consumer device. This, Mizufuka argues, gives the device a bit more wiggle room in the aesthetics department.

“For a lot of enterprise applications, if a technology provides a return-on-investment, style isn’t as important. I think that’s one of the real struggles with going real heavy after the consumer market,” he said.

The same goes for the creep factor: In the commercial marketplace, people are going to be less worried about being photographed or recorded and more concerned with getting their jobs done.

The takeaway here, again, is this: Augmented reality is more than just Google Glass, even though it’s Glass that’s dominating our current discussions — and fears — of what augmented reality can be. There’s a whole world outside of Glass, and more companies than just Google are looking at it.

Renee James became the president of Intel today. That’s the highest position a woman has ever held at the world’s largest chip maker. Alongside new CEO Brian Krzanich, James will be part of the two-person executive office running Intel. She rose to that position through tenacity and leadership during a career at Intel, but she was also part of a very exclusive club.

The 25-year Intel veteran was one of the early young employees who served as “technical assistant ” to former chief executive Andy Grove, the hard-charging leader who went by the motto “Only the Paranoid Survive.” In that position, she was not just an executive assistant. Rather, her job was to make sure that Grove always looked good and was up-to-speed on his personal use of technology. She helped him prepare his PowerPoint presentations and orchestrated his speeches. As a close confidant, she had close access to one of the most brilliant leaders of the tech industry.

Intel’s executives needed technical assistants in the way that contemporaries like Bill Gates, who grew up as a programmer, did not. Intel’s leaders were technically savvy manufacturing and chip experts, but they were not born as masters of the ins and outs of operating PowerPoint. So the company developed the technical assistant as a formal position, and each top executive had one. That position has turned out to be an important one; executives mentored younger, more promising employees. These employees then moved on to positions of great authority within Intel.

What makes James’s career so interesting — and a stand out — is that unlike Intel’s early leaders, she wasn’t a chip engineer or manufacturing executive. She has an MBA from the University of Oregon, and she pitched no-chip businesses for Intel to enter and became chief operating officer of Intel Online Services.

James will start her new position on May 16 and will report to Krzanich.

James served under Grove for a longer time than most technical assistants did, as she proved indispensable to him. James said that she learned a huge amount from Grove, and she took lots of notes on the things that he said that made an impression on her. Paul Otellini, the retiring CEO of Intel, also served as a technical assistant for Grove. The technical assistant job was one of those unsung positions that required a lot of wits. James had to pull together lots of Intel resources to set up, rehearse, and execute Grove’s major keynote speeches.

She was eventually given the more impressive title of “chief of staff.” During the dotcom era, she moved out on her own to set up an ill-fated business. She was in charge of Intel’s move into operating data centers that could be outsourced to other companies.

Under James’ plan, Intel would set up data centers with the same discipline and precision that it did with its chip manufacturing plants. It would build out the huge server rooms in giant warehouses and then rent the computing power to smaller companies. The business was much like Amazon’s huge web services business today. But Intel was too early and on the wrong side of the dotcom crash. When things fell apart in 2001, so did Intel’s appetite for noncore businesses. Intel shut down James’ baby.

But she went on to manage a variety of other businsses, including Intel’s security, software, services, and other nonchip businesses that have become more important as Intel takes on its mantle as a leader of the technology industry rather than just a component maker. That’s one of the legacies of Grove, who saw that Intel had to do a lot of the fundamental research and development in the computer industry, in part because nobody except Microsoft had the profits to invest in R&D.

As executive vice president of software and services, James managed Intel software businesses, including Havok, McAfee, and Wind River. During her tenure over software, Intel struggled in its alliance with Nokia to create the Meego mobile operating system, and it eventually gave up on it.

Among the other technical assistants at Intel were Sean Maloney, a rising star who retired last year after having a a stroke in 2010; venture capitalist Alex Wong; and Anand Chandrasekher, who left Intel and is now the chief marketing officer at rival Qualcomm.

So you’ve selected your investors, negotiated the financing documents, closed the funding round and deposited the check.  Now the real work begins.  You’ve sold your vision to investors who now expect you to deliver on the promise of your plan and to build a viable, growing and eventually, a profitable business.  The first steps you take with your new investment partners will set the tone for your future relationship and how you work together through the challenges that inevitably lie ahead.  The road from start-up concept through to your destination of a successful and viable business is akin to running through a mine field at night.   You will improve your odds of success (both as a business and as an executive) by making your investors and board members true partners – leveraging their experience and resources – and bringing them into your inner circle of trust.

To be fair, the board of directors, representing your investors and perhaps outside industry expertise, does not want to manage the business “for you” or even “with you.” Rather, they want to partner with you to achieve success.  As the company leader, your job is to set and manage the framework for that collaboration. In the first 90 days after the financing:

• Set a board meeting schedule for the next year.  As simple as it seems, taking the lead here sends a message about your desire to engage your board.  While busy schedules make this process a challenge, I usually advocate for monthly meetings early on.  If possible, schedule a board dinner prior to the board meeting so that the folks sitting around your table will get to know each other on a more casual footing.  This is a chance to build the bonds upon which your future relationships will be based.

• Schedule a full-day offsite meeting for your third board meeting.  This gives you an opportunity to learn your board’s interests and pressure points at the first two meetings and then incorporate that knowledge into your offsite session.  The goal of the offsite board meeting should be to 1) develop a common understanding of your business amongst the participants, 2) agree to the strategic framework around which you will develop and business the business, 3) identify and articulate the critical business metrics around which you will measure the progress of the business, and 4) agree to the level of reporting and the associated framework around which you and the board will discuss the progress of the business.  Bring your executive team in for key segments of this meeting – give them some face time with the board to reinforce access and accountability.  This is your opportunity to demonstrate mastery of the key business drivers while developing an atmosphere of “we” at the board level.  CEOs that are disconnected from their board often find themselves disconnected from their company.

The first 90 days is not the end of the process of building effective board relationships, it is the beginning of a process that requires continually cultivation:

• Meet with your board members on a regular basis outside of the board meeting.  Board meetings are great opportunities to “sync” management and the board, but many times critical questions are not asked in this environment.  You want those questions on the table and in the open so that they can be addressed.  One-on-one is a great way to do this.  These meetings also provide a great opportunity to ask for assistance and/or guidance from your board members or brainstorm.  Again, you are building relationships based upon trust and respect that you will need down the road.

• Organize your board meetings so that there is time to tackle one significant business or strategic issue as part of the agenda.  Use the directors as a sounding board for making better decisions around these issues.  Present the question/problem, the considerations and constraints, and potential alternative approaches.  This pulls the board into decision and develops a sense of shared ownership for the eventual outcome.  The guiding principle with these types of decisions is “no surprises”.

• When there is BAD NEWS (and there will be) – get ahead of it.  Effective leaders are proactive in acknowledging problems and attacking them.  Experienced board members understand there will be problems on the road to success – a good board will become part of the solution if you give them the opportunity.  What they don’t like are surprises.  Transparency engenders trust, and trust is the key to navigating through troubled waters.

• Incorporate your management team in board meetings.  This allows the board to calibrate your team while also developing a sense of accountability to the board for members of your executive team.  Experienced board members can often identify team members that may be challenged as a team and an enterprise grow.  Performance and scaling are about people – your board can be an “early warning” system if and when you begin to grow through the experience and capabilities of a member of your team.

Time is your most precious commodity – at least when you have money in the bank.  Developing a strong and supportive board relationship may not have the immediate payback and satisfaction that you get from extinguishing a fire within a critical account or jump starting a stalled product development process, but the time will come when your personal and business success are likely to come down to the relationship you have with your board.  If you delay in building the trust and confidence that underlie a strong partnership, you do so at the peril of your business and your career as an entrepreneur.  No one plans for failure, but they are a fact of life in startups. Should you join the legions of entrepreneurs that fail in one of your outings, strong relationships and recommendations from your board can often become the foundation for your next startup.

Bob Ackerman is the Founder and Managing Director of Allegis Capital and formerly a successful serial entrepreneur. In his spare time, Bob teaches New Venture Finance at the University of California, Berkeley in the MBA program and is active in the non-profit world, focusing on education and the arts.

Top photo credit: Shutterstock