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Imagine walking into a flea market where you don’t know the price of anything until after you’ve bought it.

The sellers won’t tell you exactly what it is they want to sell you. And you can’t even tell how good something might be until after you’ve taken it home and used it up.

Then you get the bill. You might be able to haggle over the price, but only long after you’ve bought the product. Your success rate at haggling will depend a lot on your negotiating skills and clout, as in any market. But in this one, it will also depend your ability to find the seller’s correct phone number, work your way through a complicated phone menu system, and master complicated, unfamiliar terminology.

Now imagine that there’s no way to compare notes with other buyers, because everyone is just as much in the dark as you are.

A flea market like that would be what economists call “inefficient.” Ordinary people would probably use a more vulgar term that starts with “F” and ends with “up.”

Yet that’s exactly what the health care market looks like in the U.S. today. If there was ever a market ripe for technological disruption, this is it.

Because of the lack of transparency over prices, the U.S. health care market has little correlation between price and quality. Sellers have almost total control over the market, and they resist any attempts to change the game by introducing more data — or easy-to-use tech tools to analyze and compare the data — because transparency would hurt their capability to charge high prices and avoid quality comparisons.

But there are signs that the barriers are starting to crumble.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released a pile of data about what 3,000 hospitals charge for the top 100 services they provide. HHS, of course, is the cabinet-level agency that regulates the $2.8 trillion U.S. health care market. It’s got an enormous amount of data about health care in this country, but until recently, that data was not widely available.

“We have a ton of data that we have collected over the years, and lots of it was just sitting locked up in a vault, doing nothing,” said Bryan Sivak, the chief technical officer and entrepreneur-in-residence at HHS, speaking yesterday at VentureBeat’s HealthBeat conference in San Francisco. (He’s @BryanSivak on Twitter.)

The data made a bit of a splash, particularly once the New York Times used it to identify the Bayonne Medical Center as the most expensive hospital in the country.

“It was a big win for the government to put this data out there,” Sivak said, when I asked him about it. “It very accurately demonstrated the wide variety and irrationality of prices that hospitals charge for the same procedures.”

The data dump was a tiny piece of what’s available. Fortunately, it is just the latest step in the department’s “data liberation” project. Sivak’s predecessor, Todd Park (now the chief technology officer of the United States), put the process in motion a few years ago. Sivak estimates that the HHS holds at least 1,000 different data sets in its archives. So far, just 400 have been cataloged on the agency’s data-liberation website, HealthData.gov.

And that’s just pricing data. The real treasure trove is quality data: How well various health care providers do in actually treating the conditions that we’re paying them to treat.

“You could be paying the highest price in the region for a given procedure and be getting the lowest quality, and not even know [this],” said Peter Isaacson, the chief marketing officer of Castlight, when I asked him about it. “And that’s the mark of an inefficient market.”

Castlight offers a service, sold to employers for the benefit of their employees, that shops for medical services by price and quality. It currently works with 50 different corporate customers, but there’s huge potential to offer this kind of service to every American — if the data can be made available.

Medicare, for instance, tracks a variety of data about mortality rates, readmission rates, infection rates, and other details. But it won’t provide this data on a per-facility basis except to qualified academic researchers; for-profit companies can’t currently use it.

What’s more, Medicare charges $100,000 for the data. That’s contrary to the spirit of Affordable Care Act, according to Bob Kocher, who helped shape the health care reform bill as an adviser to the Obama White House. The ACA mandates that Medicare release this kind of information, but it doesn’t specify exactly how or to whom, Kocher told me.

Medicare is probably restricting access in order to protect patient privacy, but it may also be under pressure from health care providers who don’t want to see this data publicized. Still, Kocher said, he’s confident Medicare will eventually release it — if there’s enough demand.

For-profit companies can use other available datasets, but these cost as much as $20,000, an attendee at HealthBeat complained — a barrier to very early-stage entrepreneurs.

Sivak acknowledges that this is a problem. But for those startups who need help, he offered two channels.

One is the department’s fourth annual “HealthDatapalooza,” happening in Washington in two weeks’ time.

“We’re expecting about 1,800 people to come to D.C. for a two-day celebration of all things health data related,” Sivak said. (Sounds like a jumpin’ party.) It will present plenty of opportunities for entrepreneurs and other interested people to dig deep into the HHS’s treasure trove of data, ask questions, and press the department to release more datasets.

Second, Sivak said, he’ll personally try to help any entrepreneurs who are having trouble getting to the data they seek.

We may not yet have all the data we need for an efficient health care market, but we’re moving in the right direction.

Sivak’s email, by the way:  bryan.sivak@hhs.gov.

Flea market photo: Benjamin Stäudinger/Flickr

MENLO PARK, Calif. — Facebook is becoming a mobile app platform — and you’ll be able to use it even if you have no interest in building Facebook apps.

That’s driven partly by Facebook’s recent acquisition of Parse, a company that helps app developers by providing backend services such as database management, sync protocols, data serialization, and other technical issues.

But it also reflects Facebook’s changing view of itself as a platform spanning platforms of all kinds: mobile phones, tablets, the Web, and even Windows 8.

“We live in this world of heterogeneous devices. We’re trying to build a platform where third-party developers can create applications that span across all of those devices so they can really focus on people,” said Doug Purdy, an engineer who works on the Facebook platform, during a press briefing today.

Facebook acquired Parse on April 25 to bring its “mobile backend-as-a-service” (mBaaS, believe it or not) into Facebook’s developer platform.

One of the questions raised at the time was whether Parse would continue operating independently. It’s a mobile development tool, not a Facebook development tool, so some of its customers may be creating iOS or Android apps that don’t link into Facebook at all — and that’s OK, according to Facebook.

“Parse is not going away,” said Ilya Sukhar, Parse’s founder [above]. It is his fourth day working on the Facebook campus, so he acknowledged that he was still learning his way around the company. But he was quite clear on the future of Parse.

For instance, Parse currently supports Twitter for user authentication, and it will continue to support that, Sukhar said. “That’s not going away,” he said.

Additionally, all Parse services currently run on Amazon Web Services, and that’s not changing, either, despite that Facebook owns huge data centers of its own. And the pricing model won’t change: Parse will still offer a free tier, a $200/month tier for more serious users, and an enterprise tier for high-traffic customers.

All this should be quite reassuring to Parse’s current 80,000 developer customers, whose apps run on 200 million different devices, Sukhar said.

Naturally, Facebook hopes that mobile app developers integrate their apps with its platform, and many of them do. According to Purdy, 80 percent of the top-grossing iOS apps integrate with Facebook, and 70 percent of the top-grossing Android apps do, too.

The company is also encouraging developers to utilize Facebook as an app discovery tool. With 800,000 apps in each of the major mobile app stores, just getting noticed is a major challenge for devs. Facebook is building tools to help with that, starting with Facebook ads. Currently, if you click on an ad for an app within the Facebook iOS app, it takes you directly to the Apple App Store — without leaving the Facebook app — so you can install the advertised app.

Facebook has also made some tweaks to other parts of its platform. It’s splitting the “read and write” permissions that apps have to ask users for — so each app now has to get separate permissions from the end-user for reading their Facebook profile and friends list, and for posting to Facebook on their behalf. The change has been well received by end-users, according to Purdy.

And the company will soon enable Facebook apps to show up in Facebook Open Graph search results, something they don’t currently do.

“One of the things Parse does really well, and does it better than anyone in the world, is that it makes it really easy to create an iOS app and then move that to Android, move it to Windows Phone, and so on,” said Mike Vernal, another senior Facebook platform engineer (he was the lead engineer on the Facebook Connect project in 2008).

“We want it to be about people, and not the devices that they’re on.”

Photo: Ilya Sukhar, the founder of Parse, at the Facebook campus. Credit: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat

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Loyal3 makes buying stock more social and accessible for people who don’t have much experience with the stock market. In three steps, you can invest as little as $10 in well-known companies like Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Starbucks, Disney, Google, Coca Cola, Walmart etc…

Loyal3′s core philosophy is “own what you love.” Buying stocks can seem daunting for people without financial expertise. Loyal3 wants to make this process more user-friendly by providing fee-free investing and enabling the purchase of stock through a brands’ Facebook page. Loyal3 is a registered broker-dealer and offers stock in publicly traded companies, stock in Initial public Offerings (IPOs) and stock in follow-on offerings.

Consumer engagement is a major buzz word in the brand world right now as companies try to deepen their bonds with consumers and build loyalty. Loyal3 serves companies that want excited shareholders, as well as consumers who want to feel a strong connection to the brands they use everyday.

DNS-L3, LLC, an entity owned by Michael and Gigi Pritzker Pucker, led this round, along with existing investors Cris Kelly (former Chief Privacy Officer of Facebook) and Barry Schneider, Loyal3′s CEO. This is the company’s third round of financing. Loyal3 is based in San Francisco.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

VentureBeat excited to announce the opening of applications for the MobileBeat 2013 Innovation Showdown, one of the highlights of our 6th annual event on the the future of mobile.

Mobile startups: This is your chance to showcase your company, product, or solution to 700 mobile executives, leaders, IT decision makers, venture capitalists, and press.

We’re inviting 10 finalists to present their innovative mobile app or product live at the event. Our expert team of judges will provide feedback, recap the highlights, and determine the winners.

This year’s focus is on how your company embodies, enables, or amplifies a killer “Mobile Experience.” We’re selecting the 10 finalists based on these criteria:

1) Early stage companies (late seed stage to Series A):
We’ll select five companies that have received a range of $500,000 to $3 million in seed or early Series A funding. If you are a startup or a company that has received less than $3 million in funding, you may apply. We will provide you with a mandatory “bootcamp” pitch mentoring process where experts will help you to hone your pitch. We will also accept applications where companies have minimally viable product that is in a pilot or a beta but have not launched on a large scale yet.

2) Midstage Companies (Series A to Series B funding):
The other five companies must have at least Series A or B funding (have received more than $3 million in funding, including your first or second venture round). You have a product on the market with a defined customer base and paying customers or pilots. You have a defined sales cycle and pipeline. You are looking to expand your executive, tech, or sales team and need to do another raise for expansion.

We’ll be announcing prizes in the coming weeks. Click here for full application guidelines and form.

Make sure to register for MobileBeat 2013 soon. Early-bird pricing ends Tuesday, June 28 at 5 p.m. Pacific time.

Thanks the following industry leaders for supporting MobileBeat 2013: CloudOn as Platinum Sponsor; New Relic & Tapjoy as Gold Sponsors, Fjord, Flurry, Kontagent, LifeStreet Media, & MoPub as Silver Sponsors; and Helpshift, IDrive, & Urban Airship as Event Sponsors.

Apple is officially holding its developer conference keynote on June 10 this year. The event, otherwise called WWDC, is one of Apple’s biggest where it traditionally announced a number of new products and software updates.

VentureBeat received its invitation today for WWDC, which will run from June 10 through June 14.

In late April, tickets for WWDC sold out within two minutes of going on sale. The tickets cost $1,600, but with iOS and Mac operating system updates on the horizon, developers are rightfully scrambling for the access. Apple revealed earlier on that it would be talking about both iOS and OS X at WWDC, but other announcements are unknown. However, during Apple’s latest earnings report, Tim Cook hinted that we likely won’t see any new hardware announcements until after the summer.

“We’ve accomplished a tremendous amount,” he said during the call. “Our teams are hard at work on some amazing new hardware, software and services we can’t wait to introduce this fall and throughout 2014.”

Last year Apple announced iOS 6, the latest version of its mobile operating system, as well as details for its Mountain Lion Mac operating system. Apple also updated its Game Center, introduced its MacBook Pro with Retina Display, and added more guts to its MacBook Air line.

WWDC photo via Apple; hat tip All Things D

This sponsored post is produced by Electronic Entertainment Expo.

In three weeks, the video game industry will descend on Los Angeles to attend the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2013 to see the future of the video game industry. Will you be there?

Be the first to experience new technologies, demo upcoming games and titles, and immerse yourself in all things video games. E3 is your opportunity to be part of what’s next now. Check out the companies that will transform the industry at E3 this year.

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Follow E3 on Twitter at @E3Expo or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/E3Expo

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Folders is an application developed in France by Martin Destagnol. It provides (in true French form) “the most elegant client for your cloud storage.” Using its “amazingly polished user interface,” people can manage multiple accounts like Box, Dropbox, and Google Drive; copy, move, delete, or transfer files; sort, search, and share files; and view them clearly on your smartphone.

In a blog post about the news, Box’s VP of Engineering Sam Schillace said the acquisition is all part of Box’s mission to make enterprise software “that doesn’t suck” and make Box’s applications as user-friendly as possible.

“I’m a firm believer that even applications developed primarily for the enterprise, like Box, need to be pushing the leading edge for user experience and design,” he said. “They have to be “consumer-grade” in terms of their usability, simplicity, speed and performance. When we saw Folders we saw a beautiful experience and set of design patterns that we had to bring to Box’s users.”

Earlier this month Box announced the acquisition of Crocdoc, a YC alum that turns documents into interactive, entertaining experiences. Both Folders and Crocdoc are part of Box’s effort to make enterprise products more engaging, well-designed, and fun to use. Folders will be integrated into the next version of Box’s iOS application.

Photo Credit: Flickr user/benoit_D

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Nextdoor is going mobile. Today, the ‘private social network for neighborhoods’ released an iOS application so people can be connected to what’s going on in their community anytime, anywhere.

Nextdoor raised $40 million in Februrary 2013 to accommodate its rapid growth. In less than a year, it has gone from 3,600 neighborhoods to 12,000 and has a presence in all 50 states. Thirty percent of all visits to the site come through mobile browsers, and there was clearly high demand for a dedicated iPhone app.

Founder Nirav Tolia built Nextdoor after hearing some startling statistics about the state of the American community. Thirty percent of Americans do not know their neighbors by name and yet strong communities are linked to the overall wellbeing of its inhabitants and weak communities make people more vulnerable to safety and security threats.

“There are trends enabled by the intersection of social media and local content,” Tolia said in an interview earlier this year. “People want to come together to create safer neighborhoods, whether it is to track down a lost dog or warn neighbors against suspicious activity. We are helping neighbors help themselves when it comes to crime and safety. Everyone lives in a neighborhood and wants it to be stronger.”

Nextdoor is an online place for real-world neighbors to connect. People post personal profiles and there are discussion forums and news feeds where they can engage with their neighbors. The site’s most recent update focused on crime and safety and added in features like urgent alerts pushed to mobile devices and integration with police and fire departments. Users clearly wanted access to this “lifeline” while they are away from their computer. Now, they can warn neighbors about road construction, share photos of lost pets, report keys found on the sidewalk, or organize people around real-time issues.

David Sze of Greylock Partners, one of Nextdoor’s investors, said the mobile app brings “immediacy and context” to the platform and will help Nextdoor on its mission to “bring back a sense of community to the neighborhood.” Going mobile is an important step for most startups these days, particularly consumer-facing ones, and for a company that specifically deals with the real-world and real-time events, it is crucial.

Nextdoor has raised over $40 million and is based in San Francisco.  There are 48 employees.

Photo Credit: Screenshot 

In other words, the giant that sold almost 400 million phones last year is getting bigger. And faster.

There’s a reason Samsung gobbles up 95 percent of the profits in the Android device market. It knows how to produce, market, distribute, and sell phones and tablets in massive numbers.

And, it doesn’t rest on its laurels.

The company also announced today that it would soon be introducing more color variations. The S4 is currently only available in black or white, or, as Samsung likes to say, Black Forest and White Mist. New color options coming this summer include Blue Arctic, Red Aurora, Purple Mirage, and Brown Autumn.

Meanwhile, five and a half months after the introduction of the iPhone 5, Apple is still not offering varying color options, although this are rumored to be in the product pipeline, probably for a fall release.

One caveat on the numbers: Samsung typically counts shipped units as sold units. And the company very carefully worded its announcement as “global channel sales,” which should likely be construed as units that are sold and delivered to its channel sales partners. So it’s possible that in terms of actual units in the hands of customers, Samsung has not yet hit the 10 million mark.

But there’s no doubt that the device is successful and will sell a boatload of units.

I still maintain, however, that the extra software, add-ons, and flashy-but-buggy gewgaws Samsung has added to the device will spell the beginning of the end of Samsung’s smartphone dominance. And would suggest people interesting in buying one wait for the Nexus version, which is basically an Galaxy S4 stripped of all Samsung’s software, and featuring a pure Google Android experience.

Image credit: Samsung

Google announced today that it is reducing the cost of its Google App Engine storage from $0.24/GB/month to $0.18 per gigabyte. App Engine operations pricing is also going down: Google is dropping database writes from $0.10 to $0.09 per 100,000 operations and reads from $0.07 to $0.06.

Google App Engine is a relative newcomer to the cloud market, having just recently started to get serious about supporting non-Google-used languages such as PHP – the programming language that runs 75 percent of the web.

But it’s already in massive use, with 4.5 trillion monthly transactions at 99.95 percent uptime.

Google is in bitter competition with Amazon Web Services, which reduced prices by about 28 percent a month ago, and Microsoft’s Azure, which just entered full public availability but is already a billion-dollar business and also just reduced prices by 21 to 33 percent. Rackspace, also a big cloud competitor, recently chopped its prices as well.

This new price decrease appears to match those from Amazon and Microsoft. The challenge, however, when evaluating cloud costs from multiple providers is that each vendor calculates costs somewhat differently, so it’s hard to get an apples to apples comparison.

Google last cut prices in November 2012, also in an attempt to compete with Amazon. And the price war looks like it will continue for some time to come.

Essentially, it’s become fairly obvious that cloud is a commodity, and the cheapest provider will win. The question is, can companies maintain excellent service levels while cutting pricing to the bone.

photo credit: Hugo90 via photopin cc

Ride-sharing startup Lyft has closed a $60 million third funding round led by venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, the company announced on its blog.

The startup with the tagline, “your friend with a car,” has developed an iPhone and Android app that lets you order a ride from a stranger in a matter of minutes. It’s an alternative to taxi cabs and has taken off in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Lyft cofounder John Zimmer

The special touch is that Lyft cars are emblazoned with pink moustaches, and drivers routinely fist bump passengers when they step into the car — typically at the front, not the back. “A core value for the company is empathy, and we built that into the experience,” said Lyft cofounder John Zimmer in an interview with VentureBeat.

Lyft launched in San Francisco in the summer of 2012 and is the most recent product from parent company Zimride. Zimride has been around since 2007 and has closed about $7.5 million in funding. Zimmer said that the two products have raised a combined $83 million.

Lyft has seen some impressive traction since it launched. The company announced today that it is now facilitating 30,000 rides each week. For this reason, it’s attracted significant attention from investors; Lyft today confirmed that the $15 million fundraise led by Founders Fund reported by TechCrunch in January 2013 (closed in October 2012) is accurate.

If Lyft hasn’t reached you yet, expect to see moustache-adorned cars in your city by the end of 2014.

Zimmer said that Lyft intends to spread across the country — and eventually across the world — by the end of next year. With the new boost in capital, it will focus on building out the team.

“We have an ambitious goals and we know that,” he said. In the previous 12 months, Lyft has raised $75 million from Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, Mayfield, FloodGate, and others — it must grow at an accelerated rate so its later-stage investors will see a return. It has raised a total of $85 million.

Lyft faces a number of potential challenges as it scales. ”They [our investors] all know there are regulatory hurdles — but it’s clear we’re going beyond what’s expected in terms of safety,” said Zimmer.

Drivers are vetted and subject to extensive background checks. But city regulators and consumers are still nervous — California authorities levied hefty citations against Lyft in November 2012. These were later dropped so the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) could reexamine its policies.

Among the original charges: a lack of evidence of property damage insurance coverage and evidence of workers compensation insurance, and failure to enroll drivers in the Department of Motor Vehicles Employer Pull Notice Program.

To its credit, Lyft has built up a community of supporters, who launched petitions on sites like Change.org to fight in its corner. “Our evangelists came out with thousands of phone calls and emails to the CPUC,” said Zimmer. “I think we’ll rally the troops again if need be.”

A decision from California regulators in favor of Lyft and other regulators could set a precedent. And therefore, Andreessen Horowitz must not have viewed this an obstacle to Lyft’s expansion plans, which are necessary for the firm to get a return on its investment.

In addition, the company operates on a community ride-sharing model, which sets it apart from chief competitor Uber. Passengers are asked for a suggested donation — it’s not entirely clear as it moves across the country (outside of cash flush cities like San Francisco) whether this will be paid. Zimmer recently admitted that he might have to reevaluate the business model.

Spotted: An aggressive ad campaign from Uber against its rival, Lyft

Perhaps the biggest threat of all comes from Uber, which recently rolled out its own ride-sharing service. Uber had relied on third-party limo and taxi services to provide drivers. But it has been watching its competitors steal market share — and has seen regulators give tacit approval to ride-sharing — and isn’t willing to give up valuable revenue.

When pressed about the competitive market, Zimmer quipped: “We led the peer-to-peer ride space — and there is a big difference between the community experience and what our competitors are doing.”

Finally, the company must stay committed to recruiting drivers who are willing to work on holidays and rush hour. To ensure it could keep its drivers happy so they wouldn’t be lured away by rivals, Lyft didn’t take a cut of the transaction for the first six months. Now, it is taking 20 percent from each ride.

To surmount these challenges, Lyft’s founding team is in full battle mode. “Better transportation that’s more affordable and more social is worth fighting for,” said Zimmer.

Read the full blog post announcing the fundraise here:

Celebrating One Year Together

What does the pink mustache stand for? It’s a question we get asked frequently. People are curious when they see it for the first time, but once you’re a part of the community, a bigger meaning comes through. The pink mustache is a smile. It’s the goal of finishing your ride a little happier than you were before. It’s the belief that people are inherently good. It’s the idea that a great conversation on a trip across town can result in a new friend, a job offer, or even a hug after a tough breakup. Longtime Lyft driver, Danielle, put it best when she said “Lyfting restored my faith in humanity.”

Since you’ve helped define this larger meaning, we wanted the Lyft community to be the first to hear about some good news. Today, just one year after we first launched in San Francisco, we’re excited to announce that we’ve received additional investment from the amazing team at Andreessen Horowitz to bring Lyft to cities all over the world. This funding, along with an investment from Founders Fund earlier this year, will support our global expansion, giving us resources to strengthen existing Lyft communities and build new ones. From the beginning, the Lyft community has set itself apart inspiring us with passion, and we’re thrilled to be on this journey together.

To celebrate the past year, we took a trip down memory lane with some of our favorite community moments. We’ve learned that getting a kind note from a stranger can make someone’s day, that spontaneous in-car karaoke sessions are sometimes the best part of a night out, and that simple acts of kindness can bring us closer together.

If you have your own Lyft memories you’d like to share from this past year, we’d love to hear from you on Facebook or Twitter with #lyftlove.

Like a polished and mobile-first Craigslist, New York City-based Bondsy is building a social network that lets you trade just about anything with your friends. No strangers allowed.

Bondsy graduated a year ago from TechStars NYC as a simple social network for selling stuff from your phone — but since then it has evolved into a tool that could help you reconnect with your friends in the real world. The company soft-launched in January, but today it’s officially debuting to the world with a marketing push.

So far, people have used the service to trade handwritten letters in exchange for handwritten replies, gadgets for homemade dinners, and my favorite example, bacon for coffee beans.

Diego Zambrano, Bondsy’s founder, CEO, and serious beard curator, tells me that he learned a lot simply by letting users approach the social network as they saw fit.

“If you give tools that allow people to be creative, people get very creative,” Zambrano said in an interview. “If we go beyond transaction and become a platform that allows people to express themselves, that creates a true bond between people. Those are the most exciting things for us.”

The company’s free iPhone app lets you create a trade listing for just about anything. Maybe you want to get rid of your old records, maybe you’re trying to sell a piece of furniture, or maybe you just want to have dinner with your friends. Bondsy appears to be trying to recreate social connections in the real world that were common before social networks pushed us to the digital world.

Unlike most other marketplaces, Bondsy takes a freeform approach to price tags. While there are plenty of Bondsy posts asking for cash, the ones that truly stand out ask for something interesting, like a lunch or dinner. It’s a good way for you to reconnect with people you haven’t seen in a while, but it could be used for just about anything.

In Brazil, Bondsy users are using the social network to sell cars. In China, it’s being used to set up intriguing gamified challenges. Zambrano embraces all of it.

“My take is that we’ve been going through this whole phase of trying to make everything frictionless, and I noticed that the most meaningful experience I’ve had were the ones that actually had some friction,” he said.

To support his move from Brazil to New York City several years ago, Zambrano sold all of his personal possessions on Flickr. While he was able to get rid of his junk, what struck him most about that experience was meeting up with friends to complete the transactions. That sparked the idea to create Bondsy.

To encourage creativity, Bondsy places a premium on privacy. The company decided to build its own social graph, rather than latch onto an existing network like Facebook and Twitter, because it didn’t trust the way other companies managed their privacy settings.

“By building the way we’re building, it directly changes what people share,” Zambrano said. “It directly changes how open people are.”

Bondsy has received seed funding from Thrive Capital, Betaworks, Chris Dixon, David Tisch, and others.

“What is interesting about leaving Bondsy open and not very structured is that we allow our users to define how they want to use it,” Zambrano said. “It’s a sin to kill these possible behaviors by creating too much structure.”

Phil Harrison was once head of worldwide development for Sony’s PlayStation brand, leading that platform for years. But now he is a corporate vice president at Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business (IEB) and took a prominent role in this week’s Xbox One video game console announcement — including being part of the company’s confusing messaging about used games.

On Tuesday, he sat down with us to talk about the Xbox One, the company’s first new video game console since 2005. This time, Harrison is one of the executives touting Microsoft’s expansion into non-game entertainment and future investment of more than $1 billion in the next generation of games.

That includes eight new creative works and 15 internally developed games in the coming year. That’s a pretty ambitious plan, and it’s more than Microsoft has spent on a console launch before. In the meantime, Harrison has to try to stamp out fears that Microsoft will be anti-consumer in its policies for dealing with used games, backward compatibility, and always-on Internet connection requirements.

He also argues that Microsoft will preserve an element of “curation” in allowing games onto its platform. In short, Harrison says that the company isn’t headed in the wrong direction.

Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation.

Phil Harrison: It gives me great pleasure to say, “Welcome to Microsoft.” Isn’t that a strange thing for me to be able to say to you?

GamesBeat: What’s it like being on the inside of the empire that you used to fight against?

Harrison: Did we have a fight? I don’t know. I enjoy it. I love the team. You know these guys well from your various inside perspectives on the Microsoft team. I think it’s a very smart team. Not just inside the Xbox group, too, but the broader Microsoft family. They have impressive people and capability and technology. It’s great.

So what resonated with you? What sort of things were you surprised or impressed by?

GamesBeat: Kinect has a very large design space. You could do a whole lot more with it. They measured our heartbeats and so on. It’s a very big room, a wider angle, covering six people.

Harrison: Kinect for 360 was very innovative. It delivered some incredible experiences. But the degree of movement was quite exaggerated. Now, as you’ve seen with Kinect for Xbox One, it’s millimeters and nanoseconds now. That level of precision can actually equal subtlety. I think subtlety is one of those things that game designers are going to enjoy.

GamesBeat: Based on what’s in the works for Kinect, will games go in a direction that they haven’t gone before?

Harrison: The fundamental, most impactful thing is that there’s a Kinect in every box now. There’s the ubiquity of the platform having Kinect whereas before it was always a subset. That made it difficult for developers to invest against 20 percent of the installed base or whatever it was.

Having it as 100 percent — that’s a game-changer. There are games that are not using motion but using voice in a very subtle way. The conversational understanding in Kinect for Xbox One is super sensitive and smart. It allows us to do some subtle things with voice that we couldn’t do on 360. You’ll see that at E3 [Electronic Entertainment Expo]. I’ll point them out to you.

We have a couple of cool examples of that where — even though your game is a fundamentally controller-based experience — the voice becomes this augmented menu system. Previously, you’d have to go down N number of menu trees to get to a particular feature. Now you can just say it. That’s pretty cool.

And then movement can be subtle. While you’re playing the game, it could be just doing some very gentle movements that [Kinect] can pick up and then amplify in the world.

GamesBeat: On strategy this time around, what is some of the thinking? How much of a walled garden are you going to build? How closed or open should it be? We’re in this different world with iOS and Android now. There are other kinds of devices you want to connect to. What’s the thinking for design in that space?

Harrison: We like an element of curation in the content landscape and the content experience, but that is definitely getting more broadly curated than it has been in the past. I’m not sure I would describe it as closed versus open because that implies a more binary shift. I don’t think you can be partly closed or partly open. It’s more about curating content — the developer tools for building games or building snap-to applications — particularly the snap-to applications. That’s much closer to Windows 8 development. The developer ecosystem that we can tap into has gotten orders of magnitude bigger, which is great.

In the past, as you know, Xbox had retail games, it had Xbox Live Arcade games, and it had the indie channel. These were three very discrete clubs that we didn’t really cross-pollinate. Now they’re just games. The discovery tools that we’ve built into the system, the recommendation engine we’ve built into the system, and also something we didn’t talk about today, which is game DVR — that’s the ability for your game moments to become video, which you can then share socially — that becomes a great discovery tools for developers. It solves one of the massive discovery problems that you have in games irrespective of platform.

We will make more announcements at E3. We’ve done some very smart platform architecture work that unlocks it at a platform level. Then we can build various features and functionalities on top of that. We’re doing something that will show more of it at E3.

GamesBeat: There’s been a lot of chatter on particular controversial subjects leading up to this. People want to know about used games, about backward compatibility, and about the constant connection. What are some of the facts on those? Can you play used games on the Xbox One? Do you have to pay a fee?

Harrison: Just like today, if you have a game disc that you buy from the store, you can play that game. The game is now installed to the hard drive. Any user who is associated with that Xbox One can play that game. I can give that game disc to my son and he can go and take it to another machine inside the house and play it on that machine. Just like today, only one of us can play it at any one time.

The difference, though — the benefit of Xbox One is that that data can roam with me. I can go to my friend’s house. I can log in as myself into his machine. I can then play that game on his machine, and while I’m logged in, he can play it as well.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Mailbox is bringing its war on email inefficiency to another front: the iPad.

The email client, which launched in February on the iPhone, has been one of the most popular ways for iPhone owners to manage and reply to emails. It’s simple, clean, and according to people who use it, gets email out of the way quickly.

Mailbox for iPad, is more of the same and is, at its heart, just a blown-up version of Mailbox for iPhone — so don’t expect any big, earth-shaking changes here. The one notable shift with the app is that the message panel is now on the left side of the screen rather than the right so that it’s consistent with the iPad’s default Mail app. (The app doesn’t work in portrait mode, by the way.)

It’s also notable that Mailbox for iPad comes with no hints of the app’s change in ownership. Dropbox acquired Mailbox a month after its launch, though it doesn’t look like the company is eager to put its stamp on it just yet.

Also, Android owners — don’t feel left out. Mailbox says that it’s also working on a version of the app for Google’s mobile operating system, though there’s no indication of when that app will arrive.

You could wait for the Microsoft Xbox One or the Sony PlayStation 4 to arrive this fall, or you could play PC games with better graphics now. Nvidia is launching its GeForce GTX 780 graphics chip today that will be able to run outstanding visuals in the latest generation of computer games.

Santa Clara, Calif.-based Nvidia, the world’s biggest maker of stand-alone graphics chips, says that its new chip is primed to run this year’s batch of high-end PC games — such as Call of Duty: Ghosts, Watch Dogs, and Battlefield 4. Numerous gamer-PC makers are launching new computers today based on the new 250-watt chip, which can execute 4.0 teraflops in single-precision mode.

It’s worth noting that game consoles always lag behind the PC in performance. That’s because console makers have to lock in on a design a couple of years ahead of the launch and then give that specification to game developers so they make launch titles. The custom chip takes a while to design, and it can be engineered better than a general-purpose PC to run games.

But PC makers have the advantage of just taking the fastest off-the-shelf graphics chip and marrying it with other state-of-the-art components. They can build a more modern machine that isn’t based on last year’s technology. So it’s no surprise that a new Nvidia graphics chip with expensive PC trappings will be able to run circles around game consoles that haven’t launched yet.

The Nvidia chip has a Kepler-based graphics processing unit (GPU) with 2,304 cores and 3GB of high-speed GDDR5 memory. Those specs are 50 percent more than its predecessor, the GeForce GTX 680. Rival Advanced Micro Devices says it has a faster graphics card, but it achieves that by putting two graphics chips in a single card.

The new cards based on Nvidia’s new chip will come with Nvidia GeForce Experience software, gaming drivers, and other advanced features. The card taps PhysX, which creates more realistic physics and motion in games. Players who really want a fast experience can gang multiple cards together using Nvidia’s SLI technology.

“The GeForce GTX 780 delivers the fastest framerate and smoothest animation at a value never before seen in PC gaming,” said Scott Herkelman, the general manager of the GeForce business unit at Nvidia. “This level of performance allows gamers to become fully immersed into a game the way the developers originally intended.”

Nvidia’s GPU Boost 2.0 technology will automatically increase the GPU speed for enhanced performance while maintaining temperature range and fan controls. The 780 GPU is available today from add-in card suppliers including Asus, Colorful, EVGA, Gainward, Galaxy, Gigabyte, Innovision 3D, MSI, Palit, PNY, and Zotac. The chip is selling for $649. PC makers that will use the chip in gamer systems include AVADirect, Cyberpower, Digital Storm, Falcon Northwest, Geekbox, iBuyPower, Maingear, Origin PC, Puget Systems, V3 Gaming, and Velocity Micro.

So yeah, you can run your games faster than the consoles. But you’re going to pay extra in order to do it.

Check out the Nvidia video about the new graphics card.

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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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PHP company Zend has just released the results of its annual developer survey. The exhaustive poll of 5,000 developers highlights a few interesting trends and one particularly heartening mobile web factoid.

Clearly, everyone and their dog is thinking mobile first these days. But what’s more interesting in the survey is that the majority of developers aren’t looking to iOS or Android to do so.

From a release on the report:

When asked how they intend to deliver content and services to their mobile audience, 79% of developers identified their intent to leverage web apps and open standards such as HTML5.

Of course, the devops trend marches onward with the increased need for efficiency in deployment. Zend’s results show 87 percent of developers experience delays in moving their app from development to production, and a full 90 percent have worked weekends, vacations, and holidays because of production emergencies.

Here are the results in a handy infographic form:

Image credit: Based on photo from ostill/Shutterstock

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The newborn was diagnosed with tracheobronchomalacia, a condition in which the airways collapse, not allowing oxygen to enter the lungs. That, tragically, caused repeated heart attacks. As the doctors said when writing up the case study for the New England Journal of Medicine, “ventilation that was sufficient to prevent recurring cardiopulmonary arrests could not be maintained.”

Doctors then printed a splint that is completely customized to the baby’s tracheal tubes, based on a “computed tomographic image of the patient’s airway.” It’s bioresorbable, made out of a material called polycaprolactone, so it will never need to be withdrawn, and the baby’s body will just naturally absorb and discard the splint within three years.

By that time, doctors say, the baby’s lungs and airways will have developed enough strength to stay open by themselves.

Source: New England Journal of Medicine

The 3-D printed tracheal insert being placed

According to LiveScience, prior to 3-D printing, lung splints were carved by hand. 3-D printed splints can be fabricated in a single day, however, and cost about a third as much.

After inserting the device, doctors kept the baby on a ventilator for 21 days, until the child was discharged from hospital. One year after the surgery, no “unforeseen problems related to the splint have arisen.”

Doctors’ conclusions?

“This case shows that high-resolution imaging, computer-aided design, and biomaterial three-dimensional printing together can facilitate the creation of implantable devices for conditions that are anatomically specific for a given patient.”

Hewlett-Packard is moving into the innovative new category of tabletop computing today with the announcement of its HP Envy Rove 20 all-in-one computer. The touchscreen device has a 20-inch screen that you can fix at a variety of angles. You can even lay it flat as a tabletop computer.

The machine is part of a growing category of tabletop computers coming from major computer makers. Sony launched its Sony Tap 20 computer last fall, while Lenovo is coming out soon with a 27-inch tabletop computer that you can play Air Hockey on. These models are pricier, as computer makers hope to entice PC buyers to upgrade to the more versatile machines.

The device also comes with a built-in battery that can last for three hours while unplugged. In that sense, you can use it as a giant touchscreen tablet. You can carry it around the house or play games on it on the kitchen table.

The machine uses Intel integrated graphics and Haswell processors. It has an in-plane switching (IPS) panel with wide viewing angles and 10-finger multitouch. It has Beats Audio and comes per-installed with software including EA Monopoly, Fingertapps Jigsaw Wars Puzzle, Fingertapps Musical Instruments, and Disney Fairies. It will debut in July for an undisclosed price.

Hewlett-Packard is unveiling a small army of computers today that will use Intel’s next-generation microprocessors, code-named Haswell, for better processing without an increase in power consumption. The new products are HP’s latest bid to get its mojo back and to embrace the change wrought by tablets on the struggling PC industry.

Some of the devices are already shipping, but many are still waiting on Intel’s official release of the Haswell processors, which are due in early June. The Haswell processors are built in a 22-nanometer manufacturing process that enables both faster processor speeds and low power consumption, mainly by combining graphics and processor functions on a single chip. Haswell promises twice the graphics performance of last year’s Ivy Bridge processors.

Intel introduces major processors about once a year or so, and HP is using the occasion to launch a wholesale redesign of its computers. It is launching a new lineup of laptops, all-in-one computers, and desktops. All of the devices are thinner, stronger, and sleeker in design.

Among the new offerings are a bunch of thinner, lighter, and faster touchscreen laptop computers. They include the HP Envy TouchSmart 14 Ultrabook, with a 3,200-by-1,800 full high-definition touchscreen display, better battery life, Intel’s Haswell, and a 10-point multitouch screen. That model will ship on June 26 for $700. Such low prices mean that Intel-based Ultrabooks will finally reach a sweet spot of good battery life, good performance, and lower prices. The HP Envy TouchSmart 15 notebook (pictured right) also has a full touchscreen with Beats Audio. it will be available on June 5 for $530.

The HP Envy 17 notebook computer will come with a 17.3-inch screen, an Intel processor and Nvidia graphics. It has 2TBs of hard disk space, Beats audio, and a full-HD display. It will start selling on June 5 at $700.

HP is also launching new versions of its mainstream consumer Pavilion-branded computers. The HP Pavilion TouchSmart notebook is a thin laptop with a capacitive touchscreen and 10-finger gesture support. It will sell for $400 starting on June 26. The HP Pavilion 15 notebook will have a 15.6-inch display, a 1-terabyte hard drive, and an optical drive, and it will come in a variety of colors. It will sell on June 5 starting at $430.

As for desktops, HP is introducing a cool new all-in-one PC dubbed the HP Envy Rove 20. The device has a 20-inch touchscreen that you can fix at a variety of angles. You can also lay the device flat.

The device also comes with a built-in battery that can last for three hours while unplugged. In other words, it’s a giant touchscreen tablet running Windows 8. The machine uses Intel integrated graphics and Haswell processors. It has an in-plane switching (IPS) panel with wide viewing angles and 10-finger multitouch. It has Beats Audio and comes installed with software including EA Monopoly, Fingertapps Jigsaw Wars Puzzle, Fingertapps Musical Instruments, and Disney Fairies. It will debut in July for an undisclosed price.

HP is also launching the HP Pavilion TouchSmart 20 and 23 all-in-one PC models. These feature five-point optical touchscreens, widescreen displays, and new processors from both Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. The hard drives have up to 2TBs of storage. The machines have HP TrueVision WebCams and 25GBs of free Box cloud storage for U.S. users. The 20-inch model will sell for $620 starting June 23, and the 23-inch model will sell for $750 on June 5.

HP is also launching a series of new desktops. The HP Envy Phoenix 800 Desktop PC will have both Nvidia discrete graphics and Haswell processors. It will start selling on June 5 for $1,100. The HP Envy 700 Desktop PC will offer a choice of AMD processors or Haswell processors. It will be available on June 5 for $600.

The HP Pavilion 500 Desktop PC will have Haswell with a choice of discrete graphics from Nvidia or AMD. It will start selling on June 5 for $490. The HP Pavilion Slimline 400 Desktop PC will come with Haswell processors and Nvidia discrete graphics chips. It will start selling on June 30 exclusively at Best Buy starting at $400. And HP is launching the HP 110 Desktop PC. This low-cost machine has Intel processors or AMD processors, up to two terabytes of hard disk storage, and a 6-in-1 media card reader. It will be available on June 5 starting at $290.

HP is also extending the Envy brand name to its printers. The new products include the HP Envy 4500 e-All-in-One and the HP Envy 5530 e-All-in-One printers. Those printers are able to print from both mobile devices and web pages. They’re packaged in compact enclosures and offer Instant Ink subscriptions, which make it easy for a home user to get ink refills. Pricing for the printers will be announced later this summer.

Last week, HP unveiled a couple of new consumer notebook computers. Those included the HP Split x2, a laptop that can be used as a clamshell device or converted into a tablet by detaching the keyboard. Such 2-in-1 designs are an example of wider innovation in the PC industry and an attempt to change with the times. The HP Split x2 has a 13.3-inch touchscreen and two batteries. The Split x2 will sell for $800. HP also unveiled its HP SlateBook x2, an Android tablet that can be used either as a tablet or a laptop. It features an Nvidia Tegra 4 mobile processor and a 10.1-inch diagonal screen. The HP SlateBook x2 will sell for $480.

In fact, social media referrals represents just 1.55 percent of all traffic to major e-commerce destinations. And when that tiny trickle of traffic arrived, only .71 percent of it actually results in any kind of sale. Email marketing, by contrast, generates twice as much traffic as social media, and has four times the conversion rate to sales.

Those are not good numbers for social.

Source: Monetate

Conversion rates by traffic-referring sources

The darling of the omnipresent social media gurus on Twitter, social commerce was supposed to totally disrupt e-commerce. And, because people trust other people’s recommendations and spend a lot of time on Facebook where they meet other people and read what they say, social commerce was supposed to be huge, turning social media influence and shares into sales and revenue.

Unfortunately, there’s a problem:

“The challenge for social media — and for its big brother, word of mouth marketing — is that they are inherently additive pieces of the conversion funnel, rather than causative,” Monetate’s new report states.

But Monetate says that the problem isn’t in the social. It’s in how companies are using it.

Loyalty isn’t about clicking on an offer, report contributor Mitch Joel says, it’s about building a relationship. And a relationship goes far beyond “do you want to buy this.” Which means that social is not short term, social is not transactional, and social is not the same as direct response.

In other words: shocker, social media is, well, social.

Taken in that context, social can still be very worthwhile for brands, as marketing firm Syncapse found just a few weeks ago, valuing some Facebook fans at over $1,600. But it’s the relationship that’s valuable, not the episodic communications per se.

And that relationship can be very precious indeed. When an actual sale is made from a social referral, it’s often a large one, with the average Pinterest-referred sale clocking in at over $80, and the average Facebook and Twitter sale at about $70.

Source: Monetate

Average order value by social-referred sale

photo credit: zoomar via photopin cc

Twitter released its two-factor authentication option today, after major media organizations were tricked into giving out their login information to hackers.

Two-factor authentication is an extra form of security when logging into an account. It can come in a few different forms but generally involves some kind of code that users must input alongside their username and password. This code can be supplied through a mobile application such as Google’s Authenticator app, a text message, or a piece of hardware like RSA dongles. The code is often activated and deactivated within a short period of time, so if one code is leaked out, it can’t be used in the future to access an account.

Twitter is using a text-messaged code approach, according to its announcement today. Text messaging covers a much larger portion of the population, as opposed to an app, which requires users to have a smartphone. Twitter warns that some carriers may not support the technology.

You can turn two-factor authentication on by going to your account settings in Twitter and selecting “require a verification code.” You’ll then have to enter a phone number. After two-factor is set up, you will have to enter the code every time you log in to Twitter.

A number of big-name companies have rolled out two-factor authentication as a result of hackings, including Apple. Twitter recently experience a rash of “break ins” involving the accounts of major media publications CBS, NPR, the Associated Press, and more. The Syrian Electronic Army, a pro-regime group of hackers that often attacks publications for their coverage of the conflict in Syria, has taken responsibility for the majority of these hacks. It says it usually gets access through phishing expeditions, where the group will send emails that look legitimate to employees of their target company asking for login credentials.

In the case of the AP, a tweet about an explosion at the White House caused the Dow Jones Industrial Average to drop one percent in a minute. PhishMe chief executive Aaron Higmee explained that consumer-facing sites often leave these codes active for longer than usual because consumer sites don’t like having any barriers to entry. If a hacker phished a code and it still worked, then the two-factor authentication is useless. Jim Fenton, the chief security officer of OneID, also argues that two-factor authentication is breeding a false sense of security.

Twitter explains that now it has the two-factor technology in place, this opens the doors to future security elements to be introduced.

Image via Twitter

The world’s largest streaming music service, Pandora, is finally adding some deep integration with the world’s largest social network, Facebook, giving its users a much easier way to socialize their musical activity with friends.

Following on the heels of yesterday’s Pandora Premieres announcement, the new Facebook integration adds a helpful social layer to the streaming music service, and may help assure investors that Pandora is moving forward despite a grim business outlook ahead of tomorrow’s Q1 FY2014 earnings report. Previously, Pandora’s now former CEO Joe Kennedy testified at a congressional hearing that Pandora would be unable to sustain its business if music royalty rates weren’t lowered, (and it doesn’t appear the rates will drop). There’s also the matter of increased competition in smart radio services from giant tech companies with lots of money to burn. Google recently launched its own Google Play All Access streaming radio service, while Apple and Amazon are rumored to debut similar offerings later in the year.

As for the new Timeline app integration, Pandora isn’t following other media companies that have provided deep integration with Facebook’s Open Graph, which allows people to see all of your activity from both the Facebook news feed and from an activity ticker. Streaming services like Spotify allow friends on Facebook to see songs you’re currently listening to, which I’ve never found very compelling.

Pandora’s Facebook integration is a bit different because it focuses on adding things to your Timeline under a music section. When people are exploring your Timeline page, they’ll see a record of your songs played, favorite artists, and custom radio stations that others can then listen to. It also pops up in the Facebook news feed, but as a past event that behaves more like a news story than an activity. And determining exactly what listening activity you want people to see is pretty easy — meaning I can hide most of the random 90s slow jams that pop up. You can toggle the automatic sharing on and off as needed, which I can’t really say about the fire hose of activity offered by other music services that integrate with Facebook. Those sharing controls are also available on Pandora itself.

The new Facebook Timeline integration is available across all of Pandora’s applications and platforms (iPhone, iPad, Android devices, Pandora’s website, etc.) today. Obviously, the company is committed to a more social Pandora experience, but the more interesting observation is in how it’s not at all trying to promote an increase in listening (or consuming) activity.

Media companies like Spotify, Viddy, Vevo, Ustream, and others all saw a “Facebook bump” in new users and time spent on their respective services after integrating with Facebook’s open graph. But that sort of move could actually hinder Pandora’s overall business strategy. It’s already one of the largest streaming music service almost to a fault, with 200 million total registered users and over 1.49 billion hours of music listened to per month.

Despite record growth, the company said it’s unable to generate revenue and grow long-term profitability without the aid of any “Facebook Bump” due to what it sees as unreasonably high music licensing fees. Those fees have forced Pandora to implement a 40-hour monthly music listening cap on users of its free, ad-supported service. Therefore it would appear that a large growth spurt would end up hurting the company’s bottom line, since its advertising revenue isn’t able to keep pace with Pandora’s operational growth and increasing music licensing costs. But preventing the service from growing and attempting to lower the amount of interaction spent on it from its most loyal would be a very backwards strategy — not that I think Pandora’s Facebook Timeline integration is an attempt to do either of those things; still, the addition focuses more on keeping current users than grabbing new ones.

We’ll have to wait until tomorrow’s earnings call to find out if recent developments (Kennedy’s departure back in March, the Facebook Timeline integration, and new unreleased album station Pandora Premieres) are enough to keep the company’s stock from taking a dip.

Nothing can stop the next-gen hype train now that Microsoft and Sony have both unveiled their new home consoles. Sony showed off its PlayStation 4 in February, and Microsoft did the same yesterday with its Xbox One. We now know the basics about each device, and that gives us a chance to look at each system to decide which one is best prepared to win over gamers’ hearts this holiday and beyond.

First, let’s get some basics out of the way. We don’t know the price. We barely know about the games. Each company, and their partners, will certainly show more at the Electronic Entertainment Expo trade show in early June. Until then, we’re simply working from the visions that Microsoft and Sony attempted to establish with their announcements.

Analyst Jesse Divinch, the vice president of insights at industry-analysis firm EEDAR, thinks it’s too early to tell.

“It’s always difficult to determine winners and losers off of highly choreographed presentations, but from other experiences, it is too close of a call to say one presentation was better than the other,” said Divinch. “From EEDAR’s view point, both were successful in demonstrating their platform’s core experience, and we believe that both Microsoft and Sony will realize market success at launch and through 2017. It’s too early to predict who will have a larger market share, but we are confident in saying that both will be profitable and viable platforms for third-party developers.”

Let’s look at the facts and then you can decide.

Hardware separated at birth

Microsoft has already lifted the curtain on the design for its new box. The PlayStation 4′s aesthetics are still under wraps. That doesn’t really matter, because gamers know that true beauty comes from within.

When it comes to internals, these two consoles are nearly identical. That’s because both are using the same AMD Jaguar accelerated processing unit that combines the computational and the graphical processing on to a single, streamlined chip.

The Xbox One collection.

Both systems have eight cores running at around 1.6GHz, with 4MB of L2 cache. Things don’t diverge significantly until we look at the system memory. Again, both systems have 8GB of RAM, but the PS4 uses the speedier GDDR5 memory that can stream data at 5,500MHz, while Xbox One’s DDR3 RAM tops out at 2,133MHz.

That translates into a huge difference in the amount of memory each system can move at any one time. That gives the PlayStation 4 a clear edge in raw computing power – but it’s not as simple as that. Microsoft specifically designed Xbox One to offload computation into the fabled cloud.

“There are a growing number of transistors in the cloud that you can move the [computational] loads onto,” Microsoft software expert Boyd Multerer said in during an Xbox One panel. “I think it’s an inflection point. So — over time — your box gets more powerful. We move loads into the cloud to free up resources on the box.”

The idea is that Microsoft will continually get better at handling certain kinds of computations (artificial intelligence, for example) on its servers. This will open up One’s local hardware so it can process more detailed visuals and other kinds of data.

That’s the plan, anyhow. It is up to game developers to follow through with that.

Meanwhile, Sony’s Gaikai cloud service might be able to do the same thing, but it looks like it is attempting to unload entire game demos into the cloud rather than piecemeal portions each title.

In the end, these two machines are a pair of powerful PC-based gaming rigs that should produce high-quality graphics.

Gaming or multimedia features

If PlayStation 4 is a slightly more powerful Xbox One — or Xbox One is a slightly slower PlayStation 4 — then what separates these devices?

The answer to that question is features: software, social capabilities, and more. These two companies presented varying takes on what a gaming console is. In fact, Microsoft made a big stride toward leaving behind the notion that Xbox is a gaming brand.

According to Microsoft, Xbox One is an all-in-one multimedia powerhouse. It will control your TV and your sports. It will connect you with your family with 1080p Skype calls. The software company is using its core competency, Windows, to flesh out Xbox One’s features. It wants to do everything you consider entertainment — and while that might include games, it also includes a whole slate of other things as well.

To power all of this, Xbox One uses a “touch of windows,” as VentureBeat gadget guy Devindra Hardawar puts it, to quickly switch between live TV, applications, and games. The result is a speedy operating system that didn’t hesitate to immediately gratify the onstage presenter’s every need during Microsoft’s event.

Sony, on the other hand, focused the PlayStation 4 on games. Likewise, nearly all of its features attempt to improve the playing experience. Right at the top of that list is a new Share button on the DualShock 4 controller.

This is the company’s one-step solution to broadcasting livestreams of gameplay to websites like Ustream. It also enables players to send brag clips to friends and to social media sites like Twitter.

All of that doesn’t mean Sony won’t have a vast multimedia strategy for PlayStation 4, but it’s clear it thinks the key to success — at least at first — is through the heart of its core gaming audience.

The many unknowns

Then we have the controversies. If one thing set apart the PlayStation 4 announcement from the Xbox One announcement, it was that Sony was able to avoid upsetting fans while Microsoft inadvertently threw some rocks at a monster closet full of angry gamers.

Right now, we don’t know how Microsoft’s new console will handle used games. We don’t know the details of its online requirement. The company says the Xbox One requires the Internet, but it won’t detail what that means. It says it is designing the system to allow trade-in games, but it won’t tell us what that means, either.

On all of these hot-button issues, Microsoft first gave a confusing swarm of contradictory answers before falling back on one company line: “All policy decisions are still being finalized.”

Sony is better off, but not by much. Following its February event, the company stated that PS4 doesn’t require a constant Internet connection. The used games issue is far more muddled.

Sony worldwide studio head Shuhei Yoshida told Eurogamer that “used games can play on PS4.” When pressed on the issue, however, Sony told Game Informer: “We are just now announcing the basic vision and strategy for PS4, and we’ll have more information to share regarding used games later this year.”

That is a very ominous response. How hard is it to share a vision where all used games work all of the time? For Microsoft and Sony, apparently it is very difficult.

These unknowns are only a problem for now. It’s possible both companies will fully explain everything and we will happily greet the answers — or we’ll have something very specific to complain about.

So, who’s winning?

This is a pretty silly question. It depends on who you ask and what you want from a big box that sits alongside your television. Gamers are clearly excited with Sony’s laser-focused vision on core gaming experiences. Microsoft seems equally confident that it can conquer the world with nothing but Call of Duty: Ghosts (a multiplatform game) and some video functionality.

That might appeal to an audience outside of core gamer circles. But ask Nintendo how that strategy works out in the end.

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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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There are two key problems that require immediate remediation in Congress, according to the coalition of companies, politicians, and nonprofits: jobs and fairness.

“Our outdated immigration system is costing our economy talent, jobs, and innovation, not to mention the toll it’s taking on families and potential immigrants,” the organization says. “America can’t afford to fall behind in the race for global talent — a race we’re already losing. Already, other countries have incentivized innovation and encouraged startups while we make it difficult for talented immigrants to even apply for a visa.”

That sounds like a reference to Canada, which recently created a “startup visa” that gives immigrants who are founding companies instant permanent residency and had its minister of Citizenship, Immigration, and Multiculturalism, Jason Kenney, visit Silicon Valley to drum up applicants who might be having trouble staying in the U.S.

The result could be a net drain on the American economy:

Holy crap! @alexisohanian ‘s mom was an illegal immigrant. If she had been deported? No #reddit for the USA. That’s why #iMarch #latism

— AnaRC (@AnaRC) May 22, 2013

When I chatted with Kenney last week, he called the U.S. immigration system “dysfunctional.”

The U.S. has made attempts to address the situation with a Startup Act of its own, but even that would only allow founders to stay for up to three years. The March for Innovation is looking for much more comprehensive reform that would include help for undocumented immigrants already in the country.

March for Immigration is supported by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, Steve Case, Mark Cuban, Arianna Huffington, and numerous other business and technology leaders.

If you’re interested in participating, here are four things you can do to help:

1. Tweet or Facebook your senator
2. Spread the word on Twitter or Facebook
3. Change your Facebook profile picture to iMarch
4. Email your friends

The ultimate goal is immigration reform that supports innovation and delivers on the promise at the feet of the Statue of Liberty.

photo credit: gerson721 via photopin cc

Neurotrack, the startup that won the health prize at this year’s SXSW, has pulled in a round of seed funding, according to a Form D filing.

The $90,000 boost from angel investors is the first outside capital for the company with a diagnostic test for Alzheimer’s disease.

CEO Elli Kaplan is aiming her life’s work at Alzheimer’s and related disorders. “I watched two of my grandparents die ‘alone’ because they could no longer remember their family members who were sitting at their bedsides,” she said.

Neurotrack’s test is bolstered by 25 years of neuroscience research. Millions of dollars from foundations and grants have already been poured into the technology, which was developed by researchers at Emery University.

The company offers a computer-based cognitive test that can detect an impairment on the Hippocampus, the first structure in the brain to be impacted by Alzheimer’s. The program evaluates patients’ eye movement — and the time spent looking at familiar and new images.

Related: The founders launched the company at DEMO — read the full VentureBeat story here.

Kaplan was impressed by the technology, which she claims could predict patients with a high risk of Alzheimer’s up to six years prior to the onset of the disease. So Neurotrack licensed it and is beginning to commercialize the test by selling to pharmaceutical companies.

“The biggest issue that pharma companies have is populating clinical trials with people who are pre-symptomatic,” said Kaplan. To develop drugs to treat Alzheimer’s, they need access to patients before irreparable damage is done.

The Alzheimer’s Association reports that about 5.4 million Americans have Alzheimer’s – and that number is expected to rise to 16 million by 2050. But Kaplan is convinced that we’ll someday develop a drug that can cure the disease.

For now, informed patients can make lifestyle changes (exercising more, adapting eating habits) and take medication to delay the onset of the disease. “We know that some of the symptom-treating drugs are more effective the earlier you can start them,” said Kaplan.

Results from the most recent research is very promising — according to Kaplan, the participants who scored below 50 percent on the test have all received an Alzheimer’s diagnosis within six years. None of those scoring above 67 on the test have converted to Alzheimer’s. Ninety-two people participated in the study.

Neurotrack isn’t ready for the public yet — but if and when it becomes available, Kaplan said, people in their 50s will get tested every year. Patients with a family history of Alzheimer’s may receive the test earlier.

Kaplan would not yet disclose pricing information for the test when it becomes available. The company is in the midst of fundraising for its next round and is still fleshing out its go-to-market strategy. It is a graduate of Rock Health Boston, which has a strong relationship with venture firm Kleiner Perkins, and first launched at DEMO.

Top image of the founders at DEMO via Flickr

There’s a hacker who’s sure
All that glitters is old
And he’s buying a stairway to funding.

In Toronto he knows
If the doors are all closed,
On Sand Hill he can get what
He came for.

Ooooh, ooo-ooh, and he’s buying a stairway to funding!

There’s a term sheet that sucks
But for some fewer bucks
He says he can keep more of his equity.
In a bank run by crooks, there’s an old dude who sings,
“Sometimes all of our thoughts are collusion.”

And it makes me wonder.

Zalora scores $100M

Zalora, the Zappos-like fashion and beauty store for Southeast Asia, announced this morning that it has closed a $100 million financing round. That’s a lot of lipstick and high heels. Zalora focuses on 10 countries in Asia: Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. The year-old startup says it has already achieved “annualized double-digit million USD revenues.” Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Urturn raises $10.7M

Urturn, a U.K.-based social networking startup for iOS and desktop, has just taken a whopping $10.7 million in its first round of institutional funding. First time at bat, Urturned knocked it outta the park. I believe the expression is, “Nailed it.” The remarkable Series A was led by European Union firm Balderton Capital, which previously invested in Bebo. “It’s an important vote of confidence from a well-recognized VC for the company,” said a Urturn rep. From what we can see so far, the vote of confidence is, to be blunt, badly needed. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Cloudscaling climbs to $10M

Elastic cloud infrastructure startup Cloudscaling has raised $10 million in its second round of funding so it can keep growing at a quick clip and innovating its cloud technology. The San Francisco-based startup ‘s core product is the Open Cloud System, which can deliver the same benefits as providers like AWS and Rackspace. But unlike those companies, Cloudscaling’s solution is deployable in a client’s data center under an IT team’s control. It can also run its solution on Amazon and Google’s public clouds if a customer wants to do so. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Remote Medical raises $8M

Seattle-based Remote Medical just scored $8 million to bring health care to virtually anyone in need, anywhere in the world. Remote Medical serves companies and individuals in remote places; it’s a good option for military personell, research teams, law enforcement groups, or those lucky billionaires living out their days on private islands. Remote Medical offers a variety of services, including telemedicine (physicians can securely chat with patients via video), medical training, drugs, and equipment. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Ex-Facebook/Dropbox product guy gets $1.2M for stealth startup

Mystery meat of the day is YesGraph, a stealthy recruiting startup. Founder Ivan Kirigin, a former product manager at Facebook and Dropbox, has already secured $1.2 million of a $1.8 million round, according to a Form D. “The financing has enabled us to build a good product and hire talent — there is a lot that is hard about this space,” said Kirigin on a phone call. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

UpOut comes up with $850K

Bay Area find-stuff-to-do app UpOut has raised an $850,000 seed round. The app serves up quirky, hipstery, “interesting” personalized recommendations for local events — so basically, it’s Stefon in your pocket. That sounded weird. Moving forward, the funding came from leading Silicon Valley angels. The company claims “tens of thousands” of users in and around San Francisco and has desktop and mobile apps.

Video robotics company Swivl raises $500K

Swivl makes personal robots with a video twist, and the company has just raised a $500,000 round from Grishin Robotics. Swivl — well, think of it as a Roomba for Facetime or YouTube. It swivels (hence the name) to track a speaker and capture video without the need for a dedicated cameraman. It’s designed with iOS devices in mind, but it works with any smartphone or video camera. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Neurotrack gets $90 for its tech to predict the onset of Alzheimer’s

The $90,000 boost from angel investors is the first outside capital for the startup with a diagnostic test for Alzheimer’s disease. Neurotrack offers a computer-based cognitive test that can detect an impairment on the Hippocampus, the first structure in the brain to be impacted by Alzheimer’s.
Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Worlds are shaking as the father of the Graphics Interchange Format, ye trusty old bitmap image standby for animated images on Cheezburger and Reddit and every where geeks wanna have fun, says it’s pronounced JIF, not GIF.

“It’s pronounced JIF, not GIF.” ~ Steve Wilhite, the father of GIFs. Well that’s settled. #Webbys

— Brian A. Hernandez (@BAHjournalist) May 22, 2013

Steve Wilhite invented the venerable image format in 1987 for CompuServe, the first commercial online service in the United States. It supports a not-very-staggering 8-bit color palette, although it can go higher, and uses a loss-less data compression algorithm to reduce file size without degrading quality.

And according to Wikipidia, the creator’s “intended pronunciation deliberately echoes the American peanut butter brand, Jif … although an “alternative pronunciation with a hard ‘G’ … is in widespread usage.”

Wilhite disappointed those who believe GIF is pronounced the one true and right way, with a hard G, when he accepted a lifetime achievement award yesterday at the Webbies.

Response has varying, but true believers on the side of right and justice and the American way — not to mention syntactical and elocutionary excellence — have bravely stepped up to the plate to correct this horrific wrong:

@bahjournalist i don’t want to hear these communist lies

— Trevor Harmon (@maelstrommusics) May 22, 2013

@bahjournalist totally still disagree…even if he did make it. Graphic. Not jraphic. If I made apple and called it ahpple…no dice.

— Jarred Rowe (@JarredRowe) May 22, 2013

Unfortunately, the forces of evil are strong, and they have music on their side. Jonathan Mann, who has been making a “song of the day” for an astonishing 1,602 days, has made a song about the controversy which is mildly amusing, even if completely wrong-headed:

Take it back, Wilhite … or give back the award!

Image credits: Shocked Kramer/GifBin, Baby cringing/Reaction GIFs

Seattle-based Remote Medical just scored $8 million to bring health care to virtually anyone in need, anywhere in the world.

Remote Medical serves companies and individuals in remote places; it’s a good option for military personell, research teams, law enforcement groups, or those lucky billionaires living out their days on private islands.

Remote Medical offers a variety of services, including telemedicine (physicians can securely chat with patients via video), medical training, drugs, and equipment.

One customer, a remote worker on an island in the South Pacific had a heart attack, but a Remote Medical physician and nurse were able to treat his symptoms. The company’s operations team based at the Seattle headquarters booked a plane and crew to fly him to the nearest hospital in Honolulu.

The company will use the funding to expand its team of some 100 employees, enter into new international markets, and beat out competitors like RemoteMd. Remote Medical has been around since 2003, but hopes it can really establish itself this year and predicts a 60 percent revenue growth.

CEO Brian Vincent said he is looking to hire medical professionals and EMTs as well as sales and operations folk.

The funding comes from Columbia Pacific, a firm that owns 23 hospitals across Asia. Remote Medical will use these hospitals as bases of operations as it expands across the region.

joyfull / Shutterstock.com

Hewlett-Packard chief executive Meg Whitman said that “you can feel the turnaround taking place at HP” in the company’s earnings call today. She touted that the company hit its earnings per share target, but she ignored that the company’s revenue fell short in her celebratory comments.

But in a conference call with analysts, Whitman took a swipe at Dell, which is amid a struggle to go private under founder Michael Dell. After hours, HP’s stock is up 13 percent on the stock market, at $24.09 a share.

“You saw a competitor, Dell, completely crater earnings,” Whitman said in response to a question. “Maybe that is what you do when you are going private. We are setting up the company for the long term.”

She implied that Dell did that on purpose, since Michael Dell is motivated to repurchase shares in the company as cheaply as possible, and deliberately lowering earnings is a good way to get the share prices to fall. Dell spokesman David Frink said, “We won’t have any comment on her remarks. We’re confident in our strategy, growing our enterprise solutions business and our share in the important x86 server business.”

Whitman is probably more than a little angry at Dell because it and other PC makers evidently competed aggressively on price at the low-end of the PC business, stealing market share away from HP, which saw its consumer PC unit sales fall 29 percent in the second fiscal quarter ended April 30. HP hit its earnings targets, but it fell short on revenue, reporting earnings per share of 87 cents on revenue of $27.6 billion today.

Whitman said she could see the turnaround taking place based on conversations with employees, customers, and partners. But she reiterated that the turnaround is a multiyear journey.

While it isn’t as cool as Apple and it doesn’t make games like Microsoft, HP is a critical piece of the electronics industry, as it straddles both the consumer and enterprise markets across a bunch of product lines. The company has $120 billion in annual revenue (the biggest in the industry by that measure) and more than 330,000 employees. It has made 70 acquisitions in the past 15 years, but its stock price has been hurting lately.

“I must say I am encouraged with where we are,” Whitman said.

She said HP is investing in innovation, bringing cost in line with revenue, improving profits, lowering its debt, optimizing cash flow, and exceeding financial performance. In the call, Whitman said the balancing act was tough when it comes to taking market share or growing profits. At the low end of the PC market, HP lost share and gave up some business rather than lose money on deals. She said the team is evaluating what it can offer at the low end.

She said HP was getting better at electronic commerce, making its e-ordering portal more streamlined in the quarter and reducing cycle time for quotes up to 20 percent in Asia.

Meanwhile, she said she was cautious about guidance for the second half of the year, noting “macroeconomic headwinds” as Europe and China slow down economically. In printers, Whitman said HP was doing well as it moves to high-end printer and ink sales. She said HP gained strength with products like a new OfficePro printer, high-value ink, and multifunction printers. She said HP will roll out a subscription-based service for ordering ink in the home.

Whitman didn’t dwell on HP’s controversial $10 billion acquisition of Autonomy, which is the subject of litigation. She said that the division was starting to generate revenues thanks to turnaround efforts.

But she did say that the $1.6 billion 3Par acquisition is paying off nicely for the storage company, with a revenue run rate above $1 billion. HP launched its Moonshot server at the “hyperscale” server market. The server is 89 percent more energy efficient than HP’s Proliant servers. It uses less 80 percent space, and reduces complexity by 97 percent while costing 77 percent less. That product will take time to grow it sales, Whitman said. HP’s switching revenue also grew in the quarter while its largest competitor declined, Whitman said.

HP reduced its debt during the quarter. Personal systems (PC) revenue was down 20 percent from a year ago, with a 3.2 percent operating margin. Commercial PC revenue was down 14 percent, and consumer revneue was down 29 percent. Total unit sales were down 21 percent, while desktops were down 18 percent and notebooks were down 24 percent. HP is poised like other PC makers to introduce new machines based on Intel’s latest microprocessors, code-named Haswell. Whitman said HP had to do a better job managing the transition from the technologies that powered the past to those that will power the future.

HP has been dealing with a couple of negative trends. The PC market has slowed down because of rising tablet sales. And it has also had to deal with a downward shift in printing habits as the growing use and accessibility of the Internet makes paper less necessary. HP’s financial services business has been growing, but most of the other parts have been weak. On top of that, HP hasn’t been participating in the mobile market at all. She said that signs of interest in HP’s $169 Chromebook device are encouraging.

Whitman said HP saw a slowdown in sales of industry standard (Intel) servers. HP chief financial officer Cathie Lesjak said that Itanium server sales were particularly weak.

“I am not an unfair person,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told lawmakers yesterday. “Apple is not an unfair company.”

And yet, Apple was summoned to congressional hearings focusing on how Apple paid almost no tax — basically 2 percent – on over $100 billion in overseas income. Income that if brought home to the good-old USA would have resulted in $35 billion in tax revenues for Washington.

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) certainly disagrees. He asked Cook, Apple’s CFO Peter Oppenheimer, and especially Apple’s head of tax operations, Philip Bullock, tough questions for long minutes as Bullock’s face grew shinier and shinier with perspiration and the lines on Cook’s face grew deeper and grimmer.

“Let’s get a straight answer,” Levin said. “You’re not bringing the $100 billion in foreign cash home unless we reduce our tax rates … you are able to shift profits to places where you, an American company, don’t pay taxes. That is not right.”

But it’s fairly easy to see a scenario in which both Cook & company feel perfectly justified in doing what they’re doing, and lawmakers feel like Apple is acting in an underhanded, un-American, unpatriotic, and tricky manner.

Big clue here: These ain’t American dollars

Cook and fellow Apple executives are officials of a publicly traded company. As such, they are not just encouraged but obligated to maximize shareholder value. If they don’t, they could be subject to dismissal or lawsuits. Any corporation’s shareholders naturally expect the leadership of the company to minimize expenses in any reasonable way — include tax expenses.

That alone could influence Apple to utilize whatever tax shelters it can. And most big multinationals feel the same way — Google, after all, makes almost $10 billion in its Bahamas subsidiary alone. Avid searchers, those Bahamians.

But there’s another important point.

Lost in all this discussion of how Apple should “bring that money home,” as Levin says, or “repatriate its profits” is that the money is not American to begin with and cannot be “brought home” in any real sense. While it could perhaps be “patriated,” there’s no “re”patriation possible.

The money that Apple earns overseas is exactly that: overseas income. It’s not spent in the U.S., not earned in the U.S., and, one might therefore quite reasonably argue, should not be taxed in the U.S. Which is precisely how Cook sleeps very well at night, thank you very much.

“Everything that we sell in the U.S. is taxed in the U.S,” Cook said. “For a foreign country, everything we sell is generally taxed in the local market.”

(Cook did not mention, of course, that it is primarily due to Apple’s ingenuity and Ireland’s complicity that this foreign market turns out to be largely Ireland, and therefore largely one that taxes Apple at an effective 2 percent rate.)

But, as Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) noted, the United States is one of the last countries in the world to move to a territorial tax system, whereby income is taxed in the jurisdictions it is earned. Most countries do not tax overseas corporate income. As he also pointed out, “no other country in the world has such high barriers to bringing international income home.”

Which means, Portman highlighted, global Apple competitor Samsung can bring its cash home without any penalty. So while Samsung is free to bring profit out of the U.S. and invest it in Korea, Apple cannot do the reverse — without losing 35 percent of it at the border.

“That would be great for growth in this country,” Cook said. “We can’t use our overseas cash to make any investments in the United States … which would create more jobs and create more investment.”

But, but, but … it was American know-how that created those dollars

The flip side is also easy to miss.

While on the one side Apple doesn’t feel it should be taxed on overseas income just because it is an American company — “proud to be an American company,” Cook said — on the other side there’s the question of what enabled those profits in the first place.

Source: Foster and Partners

Apple’s proposed “spaceship” campus in Cupertino, Calif.

“Ninety-five percent of the creativity that goes into those products is in California,” Levin told Cook, nailing him with his own testimony. “Most of your global profits are sitting in three Irish companies that you control that don’t pay taxes … and there’s a huge drain as a result.”

In other words, without the environment in which you were created — the access to skills, talent, education, subsidies, ecosystem, everything — Apple would not be what it is. And the products that it created that revolutionized the world would not have been built. Which is precisely why Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) asked Cook an impossible question: ”What would it cost you to move out of California?”

The implication, of course, is that while it would currently cost Apple $35 billion to take its overseas earnings home, it would cost Apple its very existence to move out of the womb that birthed the company. Fifty thousand of Apple’s 75,000 global employees reside in the United States, of course, and it is ludicrous to assume that even a sizable fraction of them would follow Apple to some foreign country so that the company could avoid income tax.

Which is why Cook came to testify before the lawmakers in the first place.

“I feel good about participating,” Cook told Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in spite of the hard questioning. “Apple is ready to help.”

So, who’s right?

Levin sounds pretty unequivocally on the side that Apple is doing something wrong. Portman is pretty sure that the problem is an “antiquated, uncompetitive tax system” that is a “relic of the 1960s.” UCLA law professor Edward Kleinbard told the New York Times Apple’s actions showed “unbelievable chutzpah,” and international opinion is similarly divided.

Richard Murphy of the United Kingdom nonprofit Tax Research UK singled out Ireland for blame.

“Ireland is completely complicit in this low tax rate and in the process is guilty of deliberately undermining the tax revenues of states around the world and of destroying fair competition in international markets,” he said.

Pulitzer Prize-winning tax expert David Cay Johnston says the problem is the tax code itself, calling for simplicity. Which, interestingly enough, is exactly what Apple says needs to be done.

“Apple has always believed in the simple, not the complex,” CEO Tim Cook said yesterday. “It is in this spirit that we recommend a dramatic simplification of the tax code … a lower tax rate … and a reasonable tax on foreign earnings.”

Which means that Apple, at least, wants to meet somewhere in the middle.

photo credit: JD Hancock via photopin cc, Shutterstock/Cash