It’s almost midnight, and you’re stuck on a math problem that is due first thing in the morning.

In stressful situations like these, online tutoring startup Instaedu can help. The Silicon Valley company specializes in finding stumped students a tutor or homework assistants at any time of day or night.

When the company launched, its core innovation was the pay-by-the-minute model, and the on-demand access to tutors. But with its new features, the startup is moving into the realm of personalized learning.

The Instaedu team is honing its abilities to better match its students with tutors based on their academic needs and interests, so they’ll be tempted to set up regular sessions.

Currently, there are 1,500 tutors signed up from top colleges like Harvard and MIT, but the founders aren’t disclosing the number of registered students. Tutors are paid a fixed rate of $20 an hour (Instaedu keeps the rest), and working hours are flexible.

The tutors connect with students using video chat, text chat and document editing — it’s all online, so there are no travel costs. Alternatives include Edoboard, which provides tutors with online tools, and TutorCentral.net.

“The goal is for our students to get to know tutors better before even having that first lesson,” said Alison Johnston, Instaedu’s 25-year-old cofounder (pictured above). So the new features also make it a bit easier to schedule a regular time to meet with the best possible tutor. They include:

• Real-time messaging so a student can chat with a tutor before scheduling a lesson (this makes it easy to connect with a tutor who is currently online);
• “Smart messages” for students who need to be matched with a tutor that can help with an advanced or niche subject;
• Tutor reviews which are displayed publicly so students can browse tutor profiles.

Instaedu has raised just over $1 million in seed funding from the SocialxCapital Partnership.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Fab released a number of updates to its iOS and Android applications today, saying that it wants to focus not on sales but on making the Fab app a place where people want to browse and stay awhile.

“We want people to want to take their mobile [devices] out of their pocket hourly just to see what’s hot on Fab right now,” said chief executive Jason Goldberg in a blog post. “We believe that if people enjoy browsing and discovering on Fab, plenty of sales will happen over time.”

And sales have certainly happened. The company says that 30 percent of its sales comes from mobile and even saw a spike up to 50 percent on mobile for two days in the last month. Fab predicts that that in the next two years, the iPad will overtake the iPhone (probably because of the larger screen size for product browsing). For now, however, mobile is even convincing customers to buy more — 20 percent more — than web customers.

Because of this, Goldberg says the company is issuing updates to its mobile apps ever few weeks. You can use today’s new features to search for a product by type, color, and to sort by what’s available, “favorited” by Fab users, best-selling, and price. In order to make Fab more “browsing-friendly,” it also hides the navigation bar once you’ve started scrolling.

“For nearly a year now, we’ve been designing and building new Features for Fab’s mobile users first, and then taking those features to the web,” Goldberg says. “Building mobile-first forces us to think about how Fab will be used by people on the go first, and people at their desks second.”

Jason Goldberg photo via Fab

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

As more details come to light in the much-publicized Megaupload case, other file-sharing sites around the web are shutting their doors in fear that they could be targeted next by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Over the weekend, popular Megaupload alternatives FileSonic and FileServe completely turned off the ability to share files with other people. And another well-trafficked site, Uploaded.to, has blocked all U.S.-based IP addresses in fear of getting in serious trouble with the U.S. government.

Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom and several other Megaupload employees were arrested after being named in a 72-page indictment issued Thursday by the DOJ. The indictment alleges Megaupload is connected to a vast criminal enterprise and has caused more than $500 million in harm to copyright owners. If convicted, the company’s executives could serve many years in prison.

Even with trouble brewing, many sites that emulate Megaupload’s basic capabilities still work just fine. The CEO of popular file-sharing site MediaFire told me Sunday the company isn’t too concerned about government scrutiny because it is a legitimate business and doesn’t incentivize piracy like Megaupload did. That said, just because a company is confident about its legitimacy and employees don’t absurdly flaunt their wealth, doesn’t guarantee the government won’t investigate it.

“At this point, it’s hard to tell how far you can extrapolate, but I don’t think anyone should rest easy,” said Felix Wu, assistant law professor at Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University. “The Megaupload case will set precedent for these types of businesses and how liable they are.”

With that in mind, we’ve compiled a list of 15 file-sharing sites still up and running that the government could potentially target next (in alphabetical order). Take a look:

1. BayFiles

Hong Kong-based BayFiles may be one of the file-sharing sites that attracts government scrutiny based on pedigree alone. The site was created by two of the founders of notorious torrent website The Pirate Bay, which said two weeks ago it would gradually stop serving torrent files because of sustained heat. BayFiles’ terms of service say content that “violates third-party copyrights” is not permitted to be uploaded, but the site still makes it effortless to share copyrighted material with others.

2. DepositFiles

Cyprus-based DepositFiles has a bare bones design, but the site has pretty incredible sharing capabilities available for free. You can upload and share files up to 300MB in size without registration, and if you do register, you can upload up to 2GB files for free. The site also offers a Gold membership that allows you download with multiple connections, no waiting time for downloads and no advertising. Having people pay for higher quality download connections to large files is one of the things that got Megaupload in trouble.

3. Divx Stage

Divx Stage is one of the shadiest looking sites on this list, without question. The site blatantly advertises it will pay $10 for each 1000 full-movie streams for movies uploaded on the site. The site lets you upload up to 1GB files and features tons of TV shows and movies to watch for free. As of Monday, some shows on the first page of the site include the Mark Wahlberg film “Contraband” and the latest episode of ABC’s “Once Upon a Time.”

4. HulkShare

HulkShare is a strange beast of a file-sharing service that walks the line between promoting artists and enabling those to spread copyrighted music illegally. The site makes it extremely easy to upload song files and let other people listen to those files using its embeddable HulkShare Player. The site’s terms of service states copyrighted material is “strictly prohibited,” but in line with DMCA, artists must let the site know if a file is there without authorization to get it taken down.

5. MediaFire

Texas-based MediaFire lets you upload and easily share up to 200MB files without registration. While I believe MediaFire makes a convincing case that it is a legitimate company targeting professionals, the site has a huge amount of users who use the service for spreading copyrighted files, especially music. If you do a Google search for a song name, an artist name, and “MediaFire,” for example, it will likely bring you to a copy of the file which can easily be downloaded from a MediaFire page. CEO Derek Labian told us the fault belongs to Google for indexing shared MediaFire pages, and that Google should look into the problem.

6. MegaShares

It probably won’t help MegaShares that the word “Mega” is in its name, but it might have other things to worry about. The site lets users upload up to 10GB files and it pays users for the amount of downloads they bring to the site. Every “unique premium download with a minimum 5MB file size” earns you a “1 cache point” and when you reach certain numbers of points, you get cash.

7. NovaMov

NovaMov is quite similar to the Divx Stage site, and it’s just as shady. It rewards people for uploading movies up to 2GB in size and keeps a searchable directory of streaming movies infringing on copyrights. Users who upload files are paid $10 for each 1000 full video streams.

8. OvFile

On the surface, OvFile is a lot less nefarious looking than Divx Stage and NovaMov. But because it allows you to easily upload up to 1GB movies and it’s plenty easy to find OvFile links through Google searches, it’s still just as capable of infringement as those other sites.

9. PutLocker

MediaFire CEO Labian told me PutLocker was one of the biggest sites on the web giving file-sharing sites a bad name. On the site, you can upload and share files up to 1GB for free and there’s no time limit on streaming shared videos. In a move likely inspired by Megaupload’s troubles, PutLocker will be ending its affiliate program, which gives users cash for streams, on Feb. 1. That’s at least a start, but the site will still almost certainly still be a place for sharing and watching copyrighted movies without authorization.

10. RapidShare

Switzerland-based RapidShare is one of the oldest file-sharing sites and currently has a global traffic rank of 211 on Alexa. The site has had numerous legal issues, but it still operates and serves millions of users daily who share files. RapidShare has no limits on upload or download sizes, but it does make you wait to download files if you are not a premium user. If you are premium user, you can download simultaneous large files with a waiting period.

11. SockShare

SockShare is one of many sites where you can share streaming videos links. There is a 1GB cap on what unpaid users can upload and a 5GB cap on what premium users can upload. It is troublingly easy to Google a video name and “SockShare” to find a watchable stream on the site. However, just like PutLocker, SockShare will be ending its affiliate program, which gives users cash for video streams, on Feb 1.

12. UploadHere

On UploadHere, you can upload files up to 2GB but you must be a premium member on the site to download files over 1GB in size. That sort of business model clearly leads to the site profiting on the downloads of large, mostly copyrighted files. The site charges $8 a month for premium memberships and slightly less per month if you pay for multiple months in bulk.

13. UploadKing

UploadKing offers people almost exactly the same service as UploadHere, except it costs a bit less for premium downloading status. Free users are encouraged to upgrade to premium because it limits free users to download files under 1GB in size and does not let you download several files simultaneously.

14. WUpload

Hong Kong-based WUpload will likely be one of the most-used file-sharing sites now that Megaupload has been taken down. The site allows users to upload and download files up to 2GB for free. It encourages users to sign up for premium accounts, which enable simulatenous large downloads, no delays on downloads, and downloads that do not time out.

15. ZShare

Hong Kong-based ZShare is another bare bones sharing site, but unlike many others it is completely free and ad-supported. It allows uploads and downloads up to 100MB. ZShare does not allow users to search directly on the site for files but it is easy to Google a file name and “ZShare” to find shared pages.

Cover photo via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

The International Consumer Electronics Show is a huge festival of gadgetry, but there’s no better place to get a bead on where technology is going in the coming year.

Among the 153,000 attendees at the show in Las Vegas last week were five VentureBeat staffers who were sniffing out the big trends. This story is our list of the most evident trends among the rows and rows of gadgets at CES.

The convention is like a step into the future, with many companies showing off the TVs, smartphones, computers and tablets that they will be bringing to market in the coming months. When you see the same kind of product over and over again, that’s a good sign that it will be dominating the tech headlines in the near future.

This story was written by Dean Takahashi, Dylan Tweney, Sean Ludwig, and Devindra Hardawar. Also check out the 10 most promising products of the coming year. For fun, here’s the link to last year’s top trends from CES 2011.

1. Connected TVs hook up with smartphones and tablets

Manufacturers have finally realized that the majority of us don’t just sit and watch TV: We usually have a phone, a laptop or a tablet in our lap whenever we tune in. That presents some interesting opportunities to the company that can figure out how to tie multiple screens together in an interesting way. For instance, everyone from Sony to Samsung is playing with ways of “swiping” a TV show from a touchscreen tablet onto your TV with a flick of the wrist. Gestures like this point to a day when you no longer need universal remotes, because the touchscreens you already own are a far better way to browse video content, whether it comes from cable, satellite, broadcast or internet sources like Hulu and YouTube.

More interesting, perhaps, is the possibilities that a “two-screen” experience opens up for connecting your TV-watching with your social networks and the internet at large. You could be watching the NFL game on the big screen while you look up stats on your little screen. You could be chatting with friends or sharing highlights via Twitter while watching the latest episode of Downton Abbey. Panasonic’s embrace of a reimagined MySpace might be the most prominent example of this aspiration, but other manufacturers, like LG and Sony, are working on it as well. And of course Google has been attempting this for several years, though we saw very little evidence at CES that Google TV has much traction among manufacturers or customers.

The big challenge: There are no broad standards to facilitate connecting TVs and tablets, and in the absence of that, every manufacturer is trying to own the whole burrito. If someone can figure out how to create a truly cross-platform TV and mobile device system, they’ll have a good shot at capturing a huge slice of consumer attention. –Dylan Tweney

2. Ultrabooks breathe new life into laptops

Who ever thought a new shape of laptop would be one of the most interesting aspects of CES?

Intel pushed Ultrabooks — its new name for thin and light ultraportable laptops — hard at the trade show. This year alone there will be more than 75 Ultrabook models on the market, and Intel has said that it’s gearing up its biggest marketing push since the Centrino lineup for the new machines. HP had one with Gorilla Glass on its cover, while Dell had one that was made out of carbon fiber.

So what’s the big deal? Ultrabooks promise to be lighter than typical laptops, weighing in around 3 pounds for the most part, allowing them to practically disappear in your laptop bag. They’ll sport solid-state drives (SSDs), instead of traditional hard drives, which will make them extra-thin and fast. (Expect startup times under 10 seconds and practically instant resume from standby speeds.) And thanks to Intel’s next-generation Core processors, Ultrabooks will be peppy under the hood and even capable of decent 3D graphics performance.

Ultrabooks are basically everything I’ve ever wanted in a computer — except priced to be more approachable than Apple’s MacBook Air. For more on Ultrabooks, check out our recent feature: More than just hype, Ultrabooks are the future of laptop computing. –Devindra Hardawar

3. OLED offers brighter and bigger TV screens

It may be a bit early to call OLED TVs a trend, what with only two models on display this year from LG and Samsung, but after being teased with OLED technology for years now, we feel it’s time to finally get excited for these displays, which represent the next-generation of HDTVs.

Why the hype? Since the OLED displays don’t require a backlight, they’re impossibly thin (LG’s display is only 4 millimeters deep with a 1mm bezel). They’re also capable of a richer color palette, dark-as-night blacks, and brightness beyond the capabilities of LCD sets. OLED also features fast response times (it doesn’t have the fast motion issues that LCD does), as well as extremely wide viewing angles.

The 55-inch OLED displays from LG and Samsung, which are expected to be released some time this year, are the closest the technology has gotten yet to dominating consumer living rooms. Expect even more OLED displays at CES next year, and most importantly, expect their initially exorbitant prices to fall within the next few years. –Devindra Hardawar

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

It seems like every week a must-have smartphone is either announced or released. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to track which phones are actually worth paying attention to and which will be swiftly thrown into the scrap heap of devices nobody cares about.

So, after a year of smartphone overload, we want to look back and see which devices this year actually mattered. Some will be obvious, others less so. But perhaps by paying special attention to the most relevant devices of 2011, we’ll be able steel ourselves for the avalanche of new models coming in 2012. (Don’t forget that the next Consumer Electronics Show is just weeks away.)

iPhone 5

Yes, the most talked about phone this year is one that doesn’t even exist yet. Rumors of the iPhone 5 began shortly after the iPhone 4′s release, but throughout 2011 the talk reached fever pitch with speculation of a thinner, larger-screen iPhone. iPhone 5 speculation was so rampant that some fans managed to create a stunning replica of the device, and many expected Apple to announce it in October. Instead, we got the iPhone 4S (more on that below), which initially left hardcore Apple fans disappointed.

But even though iPhone 5 rumors have quietened down, they never truly died off. The sheer amount of early information on the phone hinted that it was indeed something Apple was working on — we likely just got our hopes up a year too early. Speculation was further buoyed by a report from analyst Ashok Kumar, who said that the iPhone 5 was Steve Jobs’ last major project with Apple. Kumar echoed previous rumors, saying the phone will be thin and sport a 4-inch screen, but he added that it will support 4G LTE technology as well.

I wouldn’t be too surprised if all of the rumors proved true come next year.

iPhone 4S

So instead of the iPhone 5, we got the iPhone 4S. Sure, it looks exactly the same as the iPhone 4, but the introduction of Apple’s virtual assistant Siri is a significant computing milestone that shouldn’t be ignored. As I wrote in my iPhone 4S review:

More than a smarter version of the iPhone’s previous voice command feature, Siri represents the first step towards widespread adoption of consumer artificial intelligence (AI). It’s the beginning of something that will fundamentally change the way we live with our computing devices over the coming years.

The phone also sports Apple’s dual-core A5 processor and an improved 8-megapixel camera, which helped make it competitive against ever-faster Android smartphones. But while the better hardware is nice, the real star of the show is Siri. The iPhone 4S is also the first iPhone to be available on multiple carriers at launch, with Sprint joining Verizon and AT&T.

You’d think that consumers wouldn’t have flocked to the iPhone 4S since it looks exactly the same as last year’s model, but you’d be wrong. Apple managed to sell 4 million iPhone 4S units in its launch weekend alone, and analysts expect the company to sell at least 30 million this quarter. Not bad for a phone stricken with a 3.5-inch screen in an era of 4.3-inch behemoths. 

Galaxy Nexus

Google’s Nexus line typically sets the stage for the next year in high-end Android devices, and Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus doesn’t disappoint. With a 4.65-inch screen, the Galaxy Nexus inches into tablet territory. It certainly makes a striking comparison to the iPhone 4S. Spec-wise, the phone has pretty much everything you’d want in a dream device (although its camera still lags behind the iPhone 4S’ more sophisticated 8-megapixel shooter).

The Galaxy Nexus is also notable for being the first Android 4.0 device. With its latest mobile OS, Google is finally focusing on making users love their Android phones as much as iPhone users fawn over their devices. Android 4.0 sports a cleaner and friendlier interface than previous iterations, and according to Google’s mobile design guru Mattias Duarte, it’s just the beginning.

Indeed, there’s a level of polish that Android has lacked since its inception, and I’m hoping that Duarte’s new design focus will bring it to the level of iOS and Windows Phone. Android has always been great for techies, but for average users it can often be an exercise in frustration.

Droid Razr

Did you miss the Razr brand? Me neither, but Motorola certainly did. As I said when the phone was first announced, it’s an unholy union between Motorola’s former and current top phone brands. The Droid Razr aims to be a reminder of what made the original Razr so cool (Look ma! It’s thin!) while also cementing Motorola’s role as a powerhouse Android manufacturer.

The company certainly managed to turn some heads with the Droid Razr, though that attention was short-lived given that the Galaxy Nexus was announced shortly after. But even if the phone didn’t have much of a chance to shine, it’s an important release for Motorola, which desperately needs to reclaim some of its former glory. Though if regulators allow Google’s $12.5 billion Motorola acquisition to go through, the company will be far less pressed to increase device sales immediately.

Galaxy S II

Samsung’s follow-up to last year’s wildly successful series of phones, the Galaxy S II was my dream Android device throughout most of 2011. After launching in Asia in April, Samsung managed to ship 10 million Galaxy S II phones by September, when they finally reach US shores. By that point though, Apple’s iPhone event was all the news, and we began hearing inklings about the Galaxy Nexus, which is also built by Samsung.

Had Samsung delivered the Galaxy S II to the US during September, it likely would have held the limelight for much longer. Now though, the Galaxy S II is just one of many great Android options.

Nokia Lumia 800

While it may be shocking to see a Nokia phone in this list — especially when it’s not even available in the US yet — it’s hard to deny the significance of the Lumia 800 and its cheaper sibling the Lumia 710. They’re the first result of Nokia’s agreement to use Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform, and while they may not trounce other devices when it comes to specs, they symbolize something more. As I wrote in my Lumia 800 un-review:

The fact that the Lumia 800 exists at all is a sign that Microsoft and Nokia’s partnership is already paying off. It shows that Nokia is capable of humbling itself by wholeheartedly and quickly adopting Microsoft’s platform and that Microsoft is fine with relaxing its typical restrictions on Windows Phones to make a truly unique product. (Microsoft is rumored to be paying Nokia over $1 billion to use Windows Phone.)

HTC Thunderbolt

Given the rapid rate of Android phone releases, it almost seems like the HTC Thunderbolt came out years ago. But no. It was first announced at CES last January, and it was particularly notable because it was the first phone to run on Verizon’s wicked fast 4G LTE network. After a slight delay, the Thunderbolt was released in March, and excitement about the phone reached a point where it was even outselling the iPhone 4 in some locations.

Once a slew of other LTE devices were released later in the year, the Thunderbolt was mostly forgotten. Therein lies the problem with so many killer Android devices being released — while you may be king of the hill for a few months, it won’t be long before you’re knocked off. That’s an issue Apple doesn’t have with the iPhone, since it only announces one new phone every year.

Looking to 2012

Aside from the iPhone 5, 2012 will be the year when we finally see what Nokia and Microsoft are made of. After lackluster sales since its launch last year, Microsoft needs to do everything it can to entice consumers towards Windows Phone. Nokia’s devices, including the Lumia 800 and anything else it announces next year, will be Microsoft’s key to success.

And then there’s RIM. Its BlackBerry 10 devices are expected late next year, and it’s the company’s last shot to make a meaningful impact in the mobile market. RIM will be relying on its BlackBerry 7 devices for most of 2012, but since that platform already felt outdated when it launched this summer, they likely won’t attract many new customers. If RIM fails to make a bang with BlackBerry 10, it will likely be forced to find a suitor by the end of next year.

What is Foursquare? The answer is far more complex than it should be. The startup’s purpose in life is so muddled that it now finds itself in the midst of a self-imposed identity crisis that could cause it to fall victim to Facebook.

“The biggest misconception about Foursquare is that it is a check-in service,” founder Dennis Crowley told me in a recent in-depth interview. “We’re most interested in taking the data from check-ins to model what’s happening in the real world, and help people find new things … the data is more important than the check-in.”

What does that mean? In Crowley’s mind it means that every check-in contributes to a growing pool of information that will make Foursquare a transformative way to experience the offline world.

Crowley boils down Foursquare’s grand vision to this: “We’re making software that makes the real world easier to use.”

Nonsense, you might say: Foursquare is a check-in service, something that primarily lets people “check in” to restaurants, bars and other venues that they frequent.

You’d be right — to an extent. Foursquare popularized the act of checking into a venue (or an inanimate object) to share your location with friends. And in doing so, it’s become branded as nothing more than check-in service. It’s a label the startup scoffs at and loathes.

Worse still, Foursquare’s claim to fame could wind up making the company itself check in to an early grave.

Why? Because regular folks can’t relate to explicit location-sharing — only six percent of online adults are open to using geolocation apps — and points and badges aren’t compelling enough reasons to warrant a change in their behaviors. To moms, dads, uncles, aunts, kids, sisters, brothers, and you and me, location has meaning, but only in its ability to enhance a story, not to win some virtual badge.

Last year’s family trip to Disneyland, for instance, is a special occasion that brings joy in its remembrance. The kids eating cotton candy by Cinderella’s castle (and getting sticky hands in the process), nearly losing your lunch on the Matterhorn, your husband getting drenched on Splash Mountain: These are all poignant memories that you can cherish for a lifetime. Location is a huge part of this story, not because you remembered to check in to the rides, but because your location is the fabric that weaves each moment into a cohesive tale.

This is what makes Foursquare vulnerable to Facebook, even though Facebook got out of the check-in business months ago. Now that Facebook Timeline has finally rolled out to the social network’s more than 800 million members, the scrapbooking feature provides people with a rich lens for looking back at all the good times they’ve shared by way of Facebook. Tagging your location on a photo or status update becomes a way to add color to each and every experience. And because Facebook Timeline collects all of these tags and plots them on an interactive map, it’s offering you a way to go back in time and soak in the past.

It’s this approach to location, as a behind-the-scenes memory assistant, that will resonate with mainstream social media audiences. And Facebook knows it.

“[The check-in] is cool, but it’s only part of the equation,” Facebook Timeline product manager Sam Lessin told me. “I think that use case will certainly still power serendipity, but it’s only part of the story. We’re in the early stages of location being an awesome story-telling medium.”

When you add a location to a status update or photo, you know that you’re adding something of substance to your Timeline and your map, Lessin said. He believes that this notion will compel users to go back and add locations to past moments in an effort to create a more complete storybook.

Timeline lives up to its potential as the digital equivalent of the scrapbook, and it’s changed the way I use Facebook. Now, a moment worth remembering in real life is one that I also want chronicled on my Timeline, and so I make it a point to post a photo or status update, and add a location tag. If I’m already doing that on Facebook, why would I also want to check in on Foursquare?

The answer is a lot less clear than used it to be, and that’s extremely problematic for Foursquare, because it’s pretty much the last man standing with skin in the check-in game. One-time challenger Gowalla did little for the location-sharing cause and needed to pivot to make sense of location, but that didn’t really work either. Bizzy busted out of the “check out” business a few months back. (“Who?” you say. Exactly.) Brightkite died long ago, Yelp seems to have lost interest in its copycat check-in feature, and even Facebook once tried and failed at check-ins.

Full disclosure: I am the same reporter who predicted that Foursquare would be the next Twitter more than two years ago. I would still argue that I’m right in many ways, so I asked Crowley to explain what he means by “software that makes the real world easier to use.”

He speaks of the company’s Explore feature, which makes use of check-in and tips data to help you find nearby venues that you should try.

And then there’s Radar, Foursquare’s first attempt at predicting what you should be doing right now. Radar, which works on iOS 5 devices, is an opt-in, always-on feature that, when enabled, will automatically alert you when friends are checked in nearby or when you’re close to a venue on one of your to-do lists.

Radar, Crowley insists, is by far the company’s most ambitious project and is still very early stage. He envisions it as a way for you discover something interesting nearby without ever needing to open the app. So, in theory, you will be able to walk around your town or a foreign city, just as you normally would, and get suggestions for new things to do.

“[With Radar on], the app is waking up and saying, ‘Hey, Dennis, this is something you want to pay attention to,’” Crowley said. “We have enough data and users to make this stuff happen. We know which places are popular Thursday morning or Tuesday night, and we can help you out when you’re out of context.”

Where does the check-in fit into all this? It’s an explicit action that powers these place recommendations, but it’s no longer the core of the Foursquare experience, Crowley said. Enough power users have contributed enough data — more than a billion check-ins to date — to create content and recommendations that are useful for more passive users: those who just want to consume information.

In fact, he said, Foursquare is seeing a growing percentage of users open the app on a regular basis and not check in. They’re using the app to find stuff nearby, he added, and that’s perfectly okay with him.

The startup’s “Oprah moment,” Crowley said, will be when people realize that they can rediscover their own neighborhoods. But it’s an epiphany that needs to happen sooner rather than later.

“We have to go through this rite of passage,” Crowley said of the company’s perception problem. He likens the growing pains to Twitter’s similar battle a few years back, when it was then hazed by the press and considered just a purveyor of pointless babble.

“We’re building stuff that no one has built before, and it’s going to be a big deal. This time next year, a lot of these issues will have gone away,” Crowley said.

So what we have here are two fundamentally different approaches to location: Foursquare is taking the scientific route, while Facebook is traveling down the emotional path. Both takes are quite compelling, but now that Facebook Timeline is live for all, Foursquare’s clock is ticking.

Image via giaomeng/Flickr

Northern Five Entertainment and Airsoft GI recently released their joint Left 4 Dead short film to the world.

Sporting Hollywood-level production values but produced on a shoestring, the video quickly surpassed half a million views on YouTube, and the teaser trailer alone garnered over 400,000 views.

GamesBeat sat down with Northern Five director and co-founder Adrian Picardi for an exclusive interview to discuss the film’s budget, concept, reception, and why Hollywood is so damn bad at making video game movies.

We also have a gallery of 173 (count ‘em!) exclusive behind-the-scenes images and a Making Of video on the second page of this interview.

GamesBeat: Can you detail Northern Five’s relationship with Airsoft GI? Did they put up the funds for the production?

Adrian Picardi: A childhood friend, Tim Seargeant, who is now the online face for Airsoft GI, had wanted to make a fun video with us for awhile. It wasn’t until when he convinced his boss to allow us to shoot at their property and store front that we were able to conceptualize the idea. This really wouldn’t have happened if both N5 and A.GI weren’t passionate on the idea. It’s like the Avengers only with our favorite videogame characters.

GB: What is the intent of the film? What are you or Airsoft GI hoping to accomplish with it?

AP: For N5, absolutely nothing but hope that it could bring a smile to the gaming community.

GB: Can you talk about the budget for the film, and break down how it was distributed?

AP: We had just enough of a budget to feed the entire crew, ship out the costumes from across the country, and pay for a couple of the props and some of the crew’s gas. Everything else was donated. The entire crew came out for two nights unpaid. I couldn’t believe how passionate everyone was. It was a really fun experience.

GB: I understand you had a crane? Is that a hard thing to acquire?

AP: Yes! Very hard. Luckily we worked with an amazing gentleman on a couple older projects and were able to build a great relationship with him and his company. When we told him it was fan film he was instantly on board and came out for a couple hours with the crane on the second day of shooting.

GB: How did you conceptualize the idea?

AP: At first we were going to do a full on Battlefield 3 video but so many had been already created. The same went for many of Valve’s other properties, so we felt it was time to try something different with one of our other favorite games. There are so many zombie fan films out there and since we wanted to make this for the gaming community we took it into a different and unique direction.

GB: What sort of script was in place?

AP: The script was worked on in a collaborative fashion. From there we had to accommodate what we could and couldn’t achieve in two nights and with the prep time of only two weeks. We actually had the entire Left 4 Dead cast in the film but couldn’t find an actor in the character’s age range who was willing to stay up for two nights in a row for no pay. So we ended up tweaking the script. We actually tore out 4 pages of the script on the first night of shooting because initially we were suppose to shoot for three nights but it was due to rain on the third day.

GB: How do you go about wrangling in all the necessary talent and crew?

AP: We posted a casting call online. From there we had to sift through the talent to see who looked like the video game characters the most. Since we had a very tight pre-production schedule we hired them without having the proper casting session but I feel we were very fortunate that we had found a great team of people who actually looked the part.

GB: What was it like working with cosplayers and models who don’t typically “act” as is needed in a film like this?

AP: I was actually extremely worried that they wouldn’t understand the filming process and just become fed up with all the madness. But everyone who came out for this shoot was amazing and was a blast to work with. Meagan Marie, whom I was a fan of after seeing her GOW Cosplay article, came out and was completely thrown off guard since she had never acted before. But after a few takes she picked up on everything very quickly and did a kick-ass job. They all were really fun to work with.

GB: I heard it was pretty cold during the shoot. Is weather something you planned for, and how did you deal with it?

AP: We were hoping for three dry nights but it rained the last day so we changed the script. Since everyone came out for free we couldn’t reschedule either. So we ended up not shooting the entire thing that was originally planned but it still worked out for the most part in the edit.

GB: I think my favorite thing about fan films is that none of them are directed by Paul Anderson. Hollywood has become notorious for taking popular video games and making nightmarishly-bad adaptations. Why do you think that is?

AP: Because I believe most of them never played the actual video game until they acquired the script! So far I can’t say I’ve seen a hands down amazing Hollywood “game to movie” yet.

GB: What is it about Hollywood filmmakers that makes them want to adapt something by stripping out pretty much everything that made the video game version popular in the first place?

AP: Money? Making a movie for only the gaming demographic means less money made. At the end of the day it’s still a business and risk-taking moves can be frowned upon at times, such as making a true-to-heart video game adaption. But I have no doubt in my mind after the comic book pool and 80’s-90’s remakes run dry the film industry will start diving into the video game arena even more so then now. I’m betting with the huge success of Call of Duty they are already planning on turning it into a movie… I mean they already made a Jeep based off the game why not a movie? I just hope they put the source material in the right hands.

GB: Did you look at any other fan films before making yours? Did you learn any interesting dos or don’ts that you’d care to share?

AP: We did. We realized we wanted to make something different, something they haven’t seen before, and rather something for the entire rapidly growing gaming community at large. One thing I learned — and I’m actually slapping myself in the face for not thinking of this — but we should have called it something different other than Left 4 Dead since the twist came out of nowhere for most people.

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Facebook’s much-ballyhooed Timeline feature, which gives you a look at your entire history on the popular social service, has gone live for everyone in the world who wants it, the company announced this morning.

Timeline was announced in September on stage at the f8 conference, and it might be the most ambitious feature Facebook has introduced since the News Feed. The feature exchanges your profile page for a scrapbook-inspired list of your history on Facebook, telling the story of your life in a collection of photos, status updates and more.

A week ago we heard that Facebook had nearly 1 million people already using Timeline and that the feature was being rolled out in New Zealand. But now everyone who wants a go can jump in. To turn on Timeline, go to the Introducing Timeline page and click the green “Get It Now” button at the bottom of the screen.

If you’re worried about friends looking through your Timeline and seeing some not-so-appealing status updates from your past, note that Facebook gives you a 7-day “review period.” You can delete or hide anything on the Timeline before anyone else gets a peek, so no one sees pictures from the time you got married, then divorced 72 days later. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you can also highlight special occasions like graduating or getting a job.

Timeline also gives you access to a new Activity Log, which lets you see all your posts and activity since you started on Facebook in a streamlined fashion. You are the only person who can see your activity log. From the Activity Log, you can also hide, delete or feature posts and photos.

Check out the video explaining Timeline and the 7-day preview process below:

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

If you’re reading this blog, chances are you are the type of person who thinks a gadget can make for a mind-blowing gift.

Here’s a handy compendium for blowing minds on the (relatively) cheap. These gifts range in price from a $30 pair of hi-fi headphones to a $200 tablet, and they’ll make the nerd on your list smile. Or scream and jump around like that one House of Pain song never went out of style.

And if the latter is the case, we humbly request that you film it and upload it to YouTube with the title “Thank You VentureBeat.”

Tablets & E-readers

Kindle Fire: $199
This tablet-and-e-reader hybrid is currently the most popular in its class. With this Android tablet, you get access to a huge media library of 18 million movies, TV shows, songs, magazines and books through Amazon itself, as well as from third-party services like Hulu, Pandora and Netflix. The device supports thousands of games and apps, and runs Amazon Silk, the company’s own web browser.

The Fire features a 7-inch touchscreen and supports Wi-Fi connectivity.

Nook Color: $199
This e-reader from Barnes & Noble also features some suspiciously tablet-like touches, such as apps, multimedia services, email access and web browsing. It also has access to a library of more than 2.5 million books and magazines. Netflix and Hulu support are coming soon, as is Nook Comics, a Marvel-fueled marketplace of comic books and graphic novels. Nook users can get device support (Genius Bar-style) inside Barnes & Nobel stores.

The 7-inch color touchscreen device supports Wi-Fi connectivity.

Kobo Vox: $199

This e-reader-and-tablet hybrid sports Wi-Fi connectivity, a 7-inch color touchscreen and an Android operating system, which means you’ll find the expected range of apps, games and music and video services. You’ll also get web browsing, email access and the Kobo Store, which houses 2.2 million books alone, as well as magazines and newspapers. Kobo also wants us all to know about Pulse, its attempt to socialize the reading experience.

Toys & Games

iHelicopter: $59

This remote-controlled toy can actually be controlled with the iHelecopter app on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. And if you feel like buying more than one, up to three iHelicopters can be controlled by three different iOS devices in the same space, thanks to a handy band selection feature. For $10 more, you can spring for the missile-launching version.

Kinect for Xbox 360: $99

This motion-sensitive controller turns a hardcore gaming console like the Xbox 360 into something that’s approachable and fun for the whole family. Plus, it’ll keep your favorite couch potato on his or her feet, with many Kinect-focused games based on dancing, racing and similar activities. The Xbox itself is sold separately; you can find it at some stores or online retailers for less than $200.

Sony Xperia Play 4G: $49 (with contract)

If you’re open to signing up for an AT&T two-year contract, you can pick up one of these PlayStation-certified gadgets on a 4G network. The Play functions as a full phone, complete with front- and rear-facing cameras, texting, web browsing and apps. But it also comes bundled with seven PlayStation games. More games can be purchased separately.

Next, music & media devices, cameras and more…

Image via theirhistory/Flickr

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Update: This article is now available as a 63-page e-book on Amazon’s Kindle bookstore.

Zynga has turned the video game world upside down in its short five-year history. As it’s poised on the verge of a massive initial public offering, the social game startup is now one of gaming’s great success stories.

But its success was never a foregone conclusion. In fact, most game industry veterans didn’t view it as a real game company. Mark Pincus was a four-time entrepreneur, but had no experience in the game industry and had never managed a big company. He was the most unlikely entrepreneur to create a game industry giant.

Now Pincus is set to become a multibillionaire as the largest shareholder in a company that is about to hold on Thursday one of the biggest initial public offerings of the year. Zynga’s billion-dollar IPO, at an $8.9 billion valuation, will be one of the biggest events in gaming history and will make it a financial peer to established rivals like Electronic Arts and Activision Blizzard. Through the IPO, Zynga hopes to meet the ambitious goal of investing more “in play than any company in history.”

And it is possible in no small part because Pincus, the gaming novice, dreamed bigger than the game industry when it came to giving users accessible and social games, anytime, anywhere. Against all odds, Zynga has out-competed big gaming brands in the great social game Gold Rush. Zynga games have continuously held the No. 1 ranked spot on Facebook since the beginning of 2009. As of today, it has five of the top five games on Facebook.

Pincus couldn’t have done it on his own. Along the way, he has been helped by the fortuitous friendship of gaming veteran Bing Gordon. Facebook insider Owen Van Natta played a key role at a critical time. And experienced game designers like Mark Skaggs and Brian Reynolds have led the creation of innovative, addictive games, helping the company rise above its early reputation as a creator of cheap knockoffs and a persistent spammer of Facebook news feeds. Together, these people helped Zynga get where it is today, while rivals like Playfish and Playdom decided to take earlier, less lucrative exits.

Since its inception in 2007, Zynga has generated more than $1.5 billion in revenues — a remarkable sum for such a young company. It is now trying to seize the leading share of a $9 billion virtual goods market that it believes could triple in the next five years.

Now the company’s ambition is to become as synonymous with play on the internet as Google is with search, Amazon is with shopping, and Facebook is with sharing. It was lucky that Zynga started out with so little game experience in the beginning. But throughout its life, it would have to prove over and over again that it was a real game company that mattered.

In the following pages, I’ll tell the tale of Zynga from its earliest days. This story is based on extensive interviews and research since 2008. We’ve had limited access to Mark Pincus. In recent months, he hasn’t been giving interviews, due to a quiet period mandated by regulators. But the story of Zynga isn’t just about the founder of the company. It’s also about the whole cast of characters who surrounded him, the rivals who drove him to succeed, and the industry that challenged Zynga to prove itself over and over. We’ve done our best to triangulate on how Zynga became what it is today — and how it almost didn’t happen.

Humble beginnings

No one would have pegged Pincus as a game tycoon. The Chicago native went to study business as an undergraduate at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. After graduating, he worked in finance at Lazard Freres and Asian Capital Partners. He went back to get an MBA at the Harvard Business School and graduated in 1993. Then he bounced around at a number of jobs.

“I had a lot of careers before I became an entrepreneur,” Pincus said in a speech about starting companies at Startup Berkeley in the spring of 2009. “And I failed on other people’s money. If you were trying to become a professional athlete, you would want to go through junior leagues first before you started a pro circuit. Fail a lot before you are paying for the failure….I got fired or asked to leave from all my jobs.”

The option that was left for him, Pincus joked, was to become an entrepreneur. He had read George Gilder’s book, Microcosm, and was excited about the economics of the world enabled by technology. That drove him into new media. He eventually made his way to Silicon Valley, starting FreeLoader, a web-based push company, in 1995 with a $250,000 loan. That company was acquired after seven months for $38 million by Individual. It was the start of Web 1.0, or the first giant wave of the first real internet companies.

At the time, other tech companies were selling out for hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars, making Pincus’ exit look almost paltry. Still, his first startup success gave Pincus a full membership in Silicon Valley’s dot-com era. He then founded Support.com (later SupportSoft), a provider of service and support automation software, along with Cadir Lee and Scott Dale. The company went public in July 2000.

Flush with cash, Pincus co-founded his own incubator, Tank Hill in January, 2000. It was just in time for the dot-com crash, and he and his partner shut it down and returned the funds nine months later. In 2003, at the age of 37, he started Tribe.net, one of the first social networks. Pincus thought of it as a “Craigslist meets Friendster.” That didn’t work out so well. Pincus left in 2005, after the board threw him out. In 2006, he took it back over from the investors and sold its assets to Cisco. At the time, Tribe.net had just eight employees, and Cisco completed its purchase by March 2007.

He teamed up with his friend Reid Hoffman, a PayPal veteran and now founder of LinkedIn, to buy a patent on social networking from the defunct Sixdegrees for $700,000. Then they invested in a little company called Facebook, which turned out to be at the beginning of the Web 2.0 wave of companies, or those that were built to take advantage of a newly dynamic web and its growing network of interconnected users. That put Pincus in close touch with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and gave him the inside track to the social media revolution.

Pincus is on record as starting four companies, but he said there were 15 or 20 projects that failed. But Pincus did have a nice touch as an angel investor. His investments included Napster, eGroups, Technorati, Socialtext, Friendster, Ireit, Nanosolar, Merlin, Naseeb, EZboard, Advent Solar, Xoom — and Facebook. Noticeably absent from that list were any game companies.

Making the right bet

To get to Zynga, Pincus said he had three formal failures, including Tribe.net. Another failure was an ad company called Tag Sense. From that, he concluded, “Don’t go start a company just because you have a customer and someone will fund you. If it is a marginal idea, that’s bad.”

Because Tag Sense failed quickly, Pincus said, he was ready when, in the May 2007, Facebook opened up its applications programming interface, inviting other companies to make applications on top of its social network in hopes of beating MySpace. That move helped Facebook gain users as well as developers, creating a virtuous circle. Pincus decided to go along for the ride.

Previously, Pincus had been operating under the name Presidio Media, a company which he formed in April, 2007, as part of an effort to jump on the Facebook bandwagon.
“The whole time I was doing Tribe, I thought the thing I would have loved to do is games,” Pincus said in a 2009 interview:

I’ve always said that social games are like a great cocktail party: You’re happy at first to see your good friends, but the value of the cocktail party is in the weak ties. It’s the people you wouldn’t have thought of meeting; it’s the friends of the friends….What I thought was the ultimate thing you can do — once you bring all of your friends and their friends together — is play games. I’ve always been a closet gamer, but I never have the time and can never get all of my friends together in one place. So the power of my friends already being there and connected, and then adding games, seemed like a big idea.

In July 2007, Pincus changed the name of his new company to Zynga, named after his late bulldog, Zinga. Zynga’s first headquarters were in the Chip Factory in the Potrero Hill neighborhood in San Francisco.

From his previous experiences, Pincus learned, “Control your destiny. We all write this story for ourselves that we were really successful and the evil VC came in and f***** up our company. They backed us and got rid of us and if they had just left us alone. That’s everybody’s sob story in Silicon Valley. You f****** it up because you gave them control of it.” He said he would settle for half the valuation if he could control his company and destiny. As a result of that desire, he funded Zynga himself.

The early team included Eric Schiermeyer, Michael Luxton, Justin Waldron, Kyle Stewart, Scott Dale, Steve Schoettler, Kevin Hagan, and Andrew Trader. Pincus was intense and drove them hard, but he wanted to build a great company.

Its first successes were on MySpace, where other social game companies were making money from ad-based games. Zynga’s early revenue came from MySpace, but Pincus had the smarts to realize that Facebook would win in the future. It was a smart bet that helped Zynga to catch Facebook’s coattails as it went through an unprecedented wave of growth.

As he tried out ideas, he kept in mind that he should test them as cheaply and as quickly as he could.

The company released its first game for Facebook in September 2007. It created a free social poker game on Facebook, chosen because it was simple and it was a universal game that enabled friends to plan a “poker night” with each other no matter if they were far apart or not. Zynga was riding a wave of resurgence that poker had seen since 2003. Zynga’s first game was successful enough to make the company profitable.

“We were the first company to believe in the social gaming opportunity and go after it with our poker game in July, 2007,” Pincus said in an interview with VentureBeat in 2009. “Everybody else was focused on viral apps like pokes and other things that spread more virally. We were always interested in just the gaming opportunity. By the time we saw it was real and had a sustainable revenue stream, we were the first to start investing deeply in it.”

Before Zynga, free games were often viewed as low-quality shareware. But now they were something that millions of people could enjoy. The poker game gained users for a while, but it had no real monetization beyond ads at first. Eventually, in March 2008, Zynga added a way to sell poker chips via “lead generation,” where a user could get chips if they participated in a revenue-generating activity for Zynga, such as accepting an offer to sign up for something.

In a poor choice of words that would eventually come back to haunt him, Pincus later said in his Berkeley speech that “I did every horrible thing in the book to just get revenues right away.” He said that Zynga gave users poker chips in its first game, Texas Hold ‘Em Poker, if they would download a Wiki tool that was difficult or impossible to remove.

In mid-2008, Zynga launched Mafia Wars, its second game, and it acquired another game called YoVille. The Mafia Wars game was available on both Facebook and MySpace, because it wasn’t clear which social network was going to be the winner yet.

In the process of launching its games, Zynga would hit upon some unique ideas that it would later describe as its philosophy. It believed games should be accessible to everyone, anywhere, any time. Games should be social. Games should be free. Games should be data driven. And games should do good. Those were lofty goals, but no one else in the industry believed in trying to make all of those things happen.

Pincus’s intent was to create a real business before he needed to go into a venture capitalist’s office. By the time Zynga raised its first round of money, it had generated only $693,000 in revenue in 2007, but it had a path to growth because its user count was growing fast, and it was already profitable. As a result, Pincus was able to command unusual terms, like giving himself stock that had 10 times the votes of common shares and maintaining control of his board of directors.

He was also able to secure investors that he was already friends with. In a deal announced Jan. 15, 2008, Zynga was able to raise $5 million from Union Square Ventures, Foundry Group, Avalon Ventures, Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel and other angels.

With the new money, Zynga was able to move even faster at a time when the great Facebook land rush was under way. The social network constantly revamped its platform and app makers had to adjust in real-time. Pincus called this “organic development,” where the company’s own internal developers had to pay close attention to Facebook and redo their work every 90 days or so.

The business would be metric-driven, combining intuition and data. The would enable the business to rapidly iterate and drive reach, retention and revenue. That is exactly how Zynga put distance between itself and others; it learned what users wanted and modified its games quickly, sometimes overnight, to better provide what the users wanted. Zynga started testing every idea. Web 2.0 companies behaved in this fashion, but game companies for the most part didn’t.

But it was true the company forever be at the mercy of the rules that Facebook made.

“Does it bother us that we’re a fly on Facebook’s ass?” Pincus joked in his talk. “In 2007, people laughed at me” for doing a Facebook app company. “We live and die by the changes these guys make.”

Bing Gordon, consigliere for Mark Pincus

Data also could be a game designer’s enemy. If a game didn’t take off, Pincus had no qualms about killing it. He spent $3 million developing an unnamed role-playing game. But the title didn’t take off in a viral way when it launched, so Pincus pulled the plug on it. Pincus became ruthless about canceling games that weren’t working.

Zynga was growing fast thanks to Mafia Wars and Zynga Poker, and it was making money. And Facebook was still growing like crazy.

At the time, the speed was important. Not everyone realized it, but Zynga was in a monumental race to beat others to the treasure. If it learned the most about how to make money from social games and executed the fastest, it would own the market, regardless of whether giant companies came into it later.

So just a few months after its first round, Zynga raised another, larger pile of cash.

In July 2008, the world took notice as Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers invested $29 million in Zynga. Bing Gordon (pictured above), the former chief creative officer at Electronic Arts and now a partner at Kleiner, joined Zynga’s board. Mark Pincus welcomed him as a key advisor.

The amount of money was huge for a gaming startup at the time. Few other companies had amassed such a large amount. It meant that Zynga was always going to have a pile of money to invest in its next major titles. That was a luxury that many of its competitors didn’t have, and it was why they fell behind.

Later on, Pincus said that one of the lessons of failure was to surround himself with people that he could learn from. Gordon was such a mentor. While Pincus had the Web 2.0 experience, Gordon knew games. He was able to put Pincus in touch with large number of job candidates in the game industry who were willing to try something new. Some of them, like veteran game designer Mark Skaggs, came from Electronic Arts. He joined as a top game exec at Zynga in November 2008. Skaggs would go on to lead some of the most important games that the company would create.

“I’m a consigliere,” Gordon said in an interview with VentureBeat in the fall of 2010, referring to the Robert Duvall character in The Godfather movie. “I have my own assignments now and then. I have done more recruiting than Robert Duvall. But I have high regard for Mark Pincus as a visionary. He combined the best of the web, games, and social. It never occurred to anyone those would come together.”

Gordon showed up at the company all of the time, lending his advice and bringing in new people as they were needed.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

While it may not seem like it at first, Nokia’s Lumia 800 is one of the most significant smartphones on the horizon. It may lack the absurdly high-end specs of current Android superphones, and it doesn’t have the hype of Apple’s iPhone, but for Nokia and Microsoft, the Lumia 800 represents the viability of their joint mobile future.

I had a chance to test out a Lumia 800 for a few weeks, which made it all the more clear to me just how important this little phone will be.

Microsoft and Nokia, sitting in a tree

When the two companies announced earlier this year that Nokia was partnering with Microsoft to make Windows Phone 7 its primary mobile operating system, the initial response was mostly skeptical. At the time, Microsoft’s new mobile baby was just a few months old, and it was struggling with sales. Nokia, meanwhile, was still trying to shoehorn its aging Symbian operating system into touchscreen interfaces.

Even though Nokia never lost its knack for killer hardware, it was clear that the company needed a modern smartphone OS sooner rather than later. That meant the company couldn’t keep wasting time on MeeGo, its next-generation OS that was still years from completion. For Nokia, the union with Microsoft was born out of cold-hearted pragmatism — that much was clear from Nokia CEO Stephen Elop’s dramatic “burning platform” memo.

The fact that the Lumia 800 exists at all (along with its lesser sibling, the Lumia 710) is a sign that Microsoft and Nokia’s partnership is already paying off. It shows that Nokia is capable of humbling itself by wholeheartedly and quickly adopting Microsoft’s platform, and that Microsoft is fine with relaxing its typical restrictions on Windows Phones to make a truly unique product. (Microsoft is rumored to be paying Nokia over $1 billion to use Windows Phone.)

It’s also a significant feat that Nokia was able to announce and release the Lumia 800 in international markets before the end of the year, as the company previously hinted that its first Windows Phone may not be released until 2012.

A phone unlike the competition

So now, some 10 months after that fateful announcement, we finally have the Lumia 800, the first fruit of Microsoft and Nokia’s union. It’s not as fast as many competing smartphones, and it’s missing some key features like a front-facing camera for video conferencing, but it’s still in many ways a high-end device that will turn heads.

For one, the Lumia 800 looks and feels completely unlike any phone on the market — except of course Nokia’s own N9, an experimental MeeGo phone that served as the launching point for the Lumia’s design. Its curved glass display makes the imagery from its eye-bleedingly sharp 3.7-inch AMOLED display almost jump out at you. The Lumia’s screen is described as “ClearBlack” because of its uncanny ability to display truly dark, inky blacks, a sign of a high-quality display.

Eschewing the typical metal or plastic shells of its competitors, the Lumia 800 features a unibody polycarbonate case, available in black, cyan, and magenta. Since the colors run straight through the polycarbonate case — instead of just being painted on — nicks and scratches are virtually unnoticeable.

The phone features Windows Phone 7.5, also known as “Mango.” Unlike other manufacturers in Microsoft’s harem, Nokia was also able to include some of its own unique apps, like Nokia Drive, Maps, and Music. (Nokia’s less-expensive Lumia 710 Windows Phone also includes these apps.) The inclusion of Nokia Music is confusing, given that it’s completely separate from Microsoft’s Zune store and app.

As is typical for a high-end Nokia phone, the Lumia 800 features a killer 8-megapixel camera with a Carl Zeiss lens. The phone can also shoot 720p high-definition video at 30 frames per second. Long before Apple’s iPhone 4 and 4S cameras wowed consumers, Nokia was shoving quality sensors into its phones. For many consumers, especially in America, the Lumia 800 will be the first taste of just how well Nokia can put together a phone shooter.

Proof there is a mobile future for Nokia (and Microsoft)

After using the Lumia 800 for several weeks, it’s hard not to imagine where Microsoft and Nokia are headed. For years, it seemed like Nokia, despite all of its hardware expertise, couldn’t create a high-end smartphone to compete with the likes of Apple and Android phone makers.

But that was the Symbian-era Nokia. Now, thanks to the Windows Phone platform, Nokia can focus on developing its killer hardware without worrying about managing an operating system of its own.

And of course, Windows Phone once again gives Nokia a gateway to the US phone market. Nokia has been struggling to land phone deals with US carriers since before the iPhone was released, and the advent of Apple’s uber-popular smartphone certainly didn’t help things. As the premiere Windows Phone maker, carriers will be fighting tooth and nail for Nokia’s phones.

For Microsoft, the Lumia 800 proves that it chose wisely by teaming up with Nokia. Even though it’s already working with popular phone makers like Samsung and HTC, Microsoft’s partnership with Nokia is unprecedented, and it will open doors for Windows Phone internationally.

Ultimately, the Lumia 800 is fetching and capable enough to sway many consumers, including those not even considering Windows Phone. While there have been several Windows Phones with better hardware, the Lumia 800 will, for many, be the first must-have device on the platform.

Below, check out our hands on with the Lumia 800 by VentureBeat’s Sean Ludwig.

We’ve combined part one, “How Microsoft unleashed a video game revolution,” and part two, “Microsoft’s journey to the next generation,” into one convenient 53-page Kindle e-book. The final product is an inside look at the popular game console’s journey from conception to launch through today. You can get the $2.99 Kindle book, “Xbox: The Making of a Bad-Ass Machine,” now for your Kindle e-reader or Kindle app of choice.

The narrative is based on recent interviews, as well as Dean’s two earlier books: “Opening the Xbox: Inside Microsoft’s Plan to Unleash an Entertainment Revolution,” published in 2002; and “The Xbox 360 Uncloaked: The real story behind Microsoft’s next generation video game console,” which was published in 2006.

“Xbox: Making of a Bad-Ass Machine” is coming soon to Apple’s iBookstore, for all you iOS lovers. In the meantime, you can read this version of the book in the Kindle app on any iPhone, iPod touch or iPad.

Buy the book now.

[Image via Alfred Hermida/Flickr]

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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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Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

There is so much happening right now in emerging cloud computing — the entire economy is being disrupted by the trend.

With publicly-traded giants like Amazon, Google, VMWare, Microsoft, Cisco and Salesforce lurching around with new and improved services that can help businesses with cost and efficiency gains, sometimes it’s easy to miss the hot players that are up-and-coming.

We’ve assembled a list of ten private cloud companies that we think are particularly intriguing — they’re focused on massive opportunities and leading the disruption in the sector they’re targeting.

Any venture capitalist would be psyched to have invested early into this portfolio of ten. Frankly, there are hundreds of exciting companies that could have made this list — we’ve seen and like a lot of them — but as editors, we’ve forced ourselves to winnow it down to ten. Seven companies on the list improve the way things work in the enterprise. Three give consumers better services via the cloud. VentureBeat has covered all of them fairly recently.

As a bonus, with our first-annual CloudBeat 2011 conference coming up quite soon, this is be a great time to show off some of the innovators. Many of them, including Box.net, Workday and Zendesk, will be represented at the conference. You can sign up here.

Here are the top ten cloud companies:

Box.net

Led by young, charismatic CEO Aaron Levie, Box.net is a leading provider of cloud storage services for the enterprise. To date, the company has more than 7 million users and 77 percent of the Fortune 500 have deployed its service in some form.

Box recently raised a recent $81 million extension round of funding, and also has launched the Box Innovation Network — a network for third-party developers who work on enterprise apps. The Innovation Network includes strategic partners Heroku, Rackspace, Cloud Foundry (a division of VMWare), Appcelerator, SnapLogic, and Twilio. We eat our own dog food too; VentureBeat uses Box and couldn’t be happier. We can save our docs — any kind of docs — in a single place, and share everything easily.

Dropbox

Cloud storage startup Dropbox is on quite a roll. It now has over 45 million users in 175 countries that save upwards of a billion files every three days, and the company just closed a $250 million round of funding in mid-October. A report earlier in the year suggested the company was valued a staggering $5 billion.

While the company had a widely reported security snafu back in June, Dropbox’s basic philosophy of helping consumers (and businesses) with file management and syncing folders across computers and mobile devices is catching on. The service said recently that it is on track to triple its user base by the end of this year. It’s often considered comparable to Box.net, and we also use Dropbox for some of our files. Its user interface is incredibly simple. But we went with Box company-wide because of its focus on the enterprise and security features. Dropbox, amusingly, declares it is not a cloud company, and is going after consumers and small businesses (not enterprises). But we’re calling it a cloud company anyway.

Evernote

Multi-platform note-taking service Evernote helps its customers with keeping notes organized and synced across various operating systems. It is super easy to use, and it’s pretty fun to see it in action. It has a community of over 5,000 third-party application developers and offers apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, Windows, Mac, and more.

Back in June, Evernote reached 10 million registered users, with more than 400,000 of those customers paying $5 a month for a premium plan that enables bigger uploads and better collaborative tools. The company has raised $95.5 million in total funding to date, with a $50 million round in July.

Marketo

Marketo is a marketing automation firm that offers software and services focused on improving and managing sales lead generation. While that might sound a little dull, it’s a surprisingly fast growing and important type of service that can help enterprise sales teams succeed. The company also recently launched Spark by Marketo, a lead-generation engine for small businesses rather than its typical enterprise and mid-size clients. The company has raised $107 million to date, with its most recent round this month worth $50 million.

In the marketing automation category, we also want to give a shout out to Eloqua, the SaaS company that filed for an estimated $100 million IPO in August. The company helps its clients with analytics to help predict revenue performance. And its IPO, which may happen in the next few months, could help validate just how important and big marketing automation is right now.

OnLive

OnLive is easily the most consumer-focused cloud company on this list, and that’s OK because it’s pretty freaking cool. The company uses the cloud to provide games in an on-demand fashion over the Web, allowing users to play A-class titles like Deus Ex: Human Revolution with no locally stored content.

Its service has been available in the U.S. about a year, and in mid-September OnLive launched in the U.K. with more than 150 games. The service is available on web-connected TVs, PCs, Macs and tablets. OnLive has raised $56.5 million, with $40 million coming from HTC.

Panzura

Panzura equips enterprises with cloud storage hardware that’s faster, more advanced and more secure than typical “tier 1″ storage solutions. The company’s aim is to simplify the way file-based storage is deployed, managed, and protected using its multi-site file system and PanzuraOS. Additionally, it emphasizes its ability to encrypt data so it can be sent over networks safely. It scored a $12 million round last December, with funding led by Khosla Ventures.

RightScale

RightScale takes a software-as-a-service approach to cloud management with a browser-based interface to help businesses manage their cloud resources through a “single pane of glass.” Its service works with Amazon Web Services, Cloud.com, Rackspace, Eucalyptus and more, and it incorporates third-party apps like Alfresco. Its customers include Zynga, A&E, Patheos, Loggly, Coupa and Break.com. The company has raised about $43 million total so far, with a $25 million round in September 2010.

Tidemark

Tidemark came out of stealth mode in October with its take on cloud-based enterprise performance management apps. Its apps help decipher critical enterprise data and extract information that can help managers, strategists, operations planners and forecasters with judging business performance and overall health. CEO Christian Gheorghe told us previously that business intelligence hasn’t kept up with the advances of the cloud, but Tidemark helps solve that problem. The company has raised a total of $11 million in two rounds, with backing from the likes of Greylock Partners and Andreessen Horowitz.

Workday

Workday provides more than 230 companies with cloud services for human resources, payroll and financial management. Although it could be considered a “cloud 1.0″ style SaaS, Workday’s depth of customers and resources are impressive — those 230 companies account for more than 2 million users. It helps accommodate users through most web browsers and in mobile with native applications for iPad and iPhone. The company has raised an eye-popping $250 million total, with its most recent $85 million funding round happening in October. The company is reportedly valued at $2 billion and will most likely go public in the next year.

Zendesk

Zendesk provides on-demand help desk services that greatly assist with managing customer support, including tools like email-ticket integration, online forums and widgets. In August, the service opened a new office in Denmark and gave several startup incubators its customer support software to build word of mouth and goodwill.

In September, the company launched the Twilio-powered Zendesk Voice, which lets customers set up cloud-based call centers for much less money than old-school call centers. The company has raised $25.5 million in three rounds of funding, with a $19 million round in December 2010.

Cloud photo via Kevin Dooley/Flickr

CloudBeat 2011 takes place Nov 30 – Dec 1 at the Hotel Sofitel in Redwood City, CA. Unlike any other cloud events, we’ll be focusing on 12 case studies where we’ll dissect the most disruptive instances of enterprise adoption of the cloud. Speakers include: Aaron Levie, Co-Founder & CEO of Box.net; Amit Singh VP of Enterprise at Google; Adrian Cockcroft, Director of Cloud Architecture at Netflix; Byron Sebastian, Senior VP of Platforms at Salesforce; Lew Tucker, VP & CTO of Cloud Computing at Cisco, and many more. Join 500 executives for two days packed with actionable lessons and networking opportunities as we define the key processes and architectures that companies must put in place in order to survive and prosper. Register here. Spaces are very limited!

charity:water has already brought clean drinking water to 2 million people around the world and is supported by some of technology’s biggest names including Sean Parker (Napster), Jack Dorsey (Twitter), Marissa Mayer (Google), Dennis Crowley (Foursquare) and Michael Birch (founder of social network Bebo). So how did charity:water conquer the tech world?

Harrison spent 10 years working in the nightclub industry in New York. “I got paid to fill up nightclubs with beautiful people and sell them very expensive drinks,” he recalls. “After 10 years of that, on a trip to Uruguay, I took a look at my life and realized that I would never be happy chasing the things I was chasing. There would never be enough girls. There would never be enough money. There would never be enough status. I started reading the New Testament and theology, and I’m in Uruguay hungover, so this was an interesting push-pull. It was a debauched vacation where we were drinking Doms (magnums of Dom Perignon) every day. So I came back and I couldn’t throw these parties with any joy anymore. I made a deal with God that I would make my life 100 percent the opposite.”

Never one for half measures, Harrison volunteered as a photo journalist with Mercy Ships (the only NGO that would accept him), which operates a fleet of hospital ships in developing nations. “I thought I would be able to use those photos to bridge the gap between this new life and the 10,000 people on my nightlife list, ” he explains. Aged 30 and back in New York, he started charity:water to bring clean water to some of the billion people in the world who lack access to this basic necessity.

charity:water now has 4,282 water projects all over the world from Bangladesh to Bolivia. A network of 25 experienced partners in 19 countries actually implement the projects. “Many of them stink at fundraising and telling their story, so that’s where we come in,” comments Harrison. Access to clean water doesn’t just reduce levels of disease but also frees up large tracts of women’s time (women and children usually collect water) and improves the economic situation of the poorest households.

Projects use a variety of technologies, since there is no single solution that suits every situation. Some projects protect existing natural springs. Others filter water using biosand, harvest rainwater or rehabilitate existing wells. Donors can see photographs and GPS coordinates for each project on Google Maps.

Harrison didn’t just want to provide clean water; he wanted to reinvent charity. “When I talked to people about giving, there were so many excuses,” says Harrison.”They didn’t know where their money would go, and they didn’t know the impact it would make. Those were two solvable problems. The first problem was solved through the 100 percent model (100 percent of donations from the general public go directly to water projects). I found a group of people who would fund staff and operations. There is now a group of 81 such investors.” Other  ”investors” are Michael Birch, Sean Parker, Matt Mullenweg (the founder of WordPress) and Jason Fried of 37signals.

The Dollars to Projects feature tracks every dollar though the system. Every three months, charity:water sends a batch of money out. It is tracked for the next 12 months while the implementation partners are digging and drilling. The partners create a report, charity:water audits that data and presents it back to the donor. “Even if you only have $4, you can see where those $4 ended up,” says Harrison.

He also wanted to build a brand. ”To solve a problem this big, we needed to create an epic brand, an aspirational and transparent brand.” says Harrison. “So many charities seem to market guilt. We tell a story of opportunity. We needed to present the problems, the solutions and the joy that results when those solutions are implemented, in beautiful ways.”

Technology entrepreneurs got involved early on. “I wanted to spread my birthday idea (giving up your birthday presents and asking friends and family to donate instead) through social media so I googled the top five social networks, one of which was Bebo.

“I wrote Zuckerberg. I scraped Michael Birch’s (founder of Bebo) address and shot him an email in the dark. I got an email back saying ‘Wow that’s a really cool idea’ but the timing was bad and he couldn’t really help at the moment. Some months later, he was passing through New York and we met. A couple of days after the meeting, he wrote me an email saying ‘I’ve wired $1 million to your account’”.

Others followed. Twitter’s Jack Dorsey gave up his 33rd and 34th birthdays for the charity. Investor Chris Sacca and Spotify’s Shakil Khan visited Ethiopia to see charity:water’s projects there. ”In many ways we are a startup and a tech company, except that I have no equity and there is no exit.” Harrison claims. “Our shareholders are 65-year old women in Africa who walk three hours to get clean water. We are raising 73 percent of our money online. We are up 80 percent in a sector (charitable contributions) which has been falling. The bigger we get, the more people we can help.”

The charity’s latest initiative is WaterForward, a brainchild of Michael Birch, which is an online book filled with the faces of people helping to end the water crisis. Each slot in the book costs $10, and 100 percent of that money goes to charity:water. You can’t put yourself in the book. Someone else who is already in the book has to sponsor you with a $10 donation. Once you’re in, it’s up to you to pay it forward. WaterForward has raised $175,000 so far.

One consistent problem with water projects in the developing world has been maintenance. Wells are built, then fall into disrepair after the NGO that builds them moves on and the locals don’t know how to fix them. Harrison is now looking at innovating in this area. ”We are piloting a mobile mechanics project in Ethiopia where locals visit all the local projects and bring back data. We have funded women entrepreneurs in India [who] go and rehabilitate water projects. We are working on giving cell phones to women in these villages and incentivizing them by topping up their cell phone minutes to text us data on the water project, as simple as ‘Water is flowing’ or ‘Water is not flowing’.”

I ask Harrison about his plans for the future. He says “We’d like to help 15 million people get clean water by 2015.” Not many have that in their business plan.

Update: Don’t like page breaks? This two-part series is now available as an e-book for the Amazon Kindle.

Editor’s note: This story is the second of two pieces on the 10th anniversary of the launch of Microsoft’s Xbox video game console, which debuted Nov. 15, 2001. The narrative is based on recent interviews as well as my two books: Opening the Xbox: Inside Microsoft’s Plan to Unleash an Entertainment Revolution, published in 2002; and The Xbox 360 Uncloaked: The real story behind Microsoft’s next generation video game console, published in 2006. Part 1 took us through the launch of the Xbox. This story takes us through the aftermath, the launch of the Xbox 360, and the present day state of the video game wars.

It was a miracle that Microsoft got the first Xbox out the door. The company’s first video game console came together in just 20 months from conception to launch. It earned Microsoft a precious toehold in the living room, selling 1.5 million units in its first season. It sold three games for every box and generated $750 million in revenue. Over four years, that grew to 21 million consoles sold.

But Sony won the war for that console generation. The PlayStation 2 sold more than 90 million units by mid-2005, while Nintendo’s GameCube came in a close third with 20 million units sold. With such a lopsided tally, Sony was able to snare exclusive games such as Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

To turn things around, Microsoft had to initiate a new console war with its own surprise attack. Instead of being 20 months behind Sony, Microsoft now planned to hit the market at the same time or before Sony came out with its next console. As soon as the Xbox shipped, Microsoft had to start running full blast. The next project was code-named Xenon. Later dubbed the Xbox 360, it would finish what the Xbox had started.

On the night that the Xbox launched in Times Square, chief Xbox officer Robbie Bach was standing with co-creator Seamus Blackley. “Welcome to the starting line,” Bach said. “Fuck off,” Blackley said, laughing because he was so exhausted.

Bill Gates himself summed up his feelings with a Time magazine writer. He said, “The first generation, it’s just like a video game. If you play perfectly, at the end, it says, ‘You get to play again.’ That’s all it says! You put your hand in the till. There’s no quarter down there. There’s no, like, even tickets to buy funny dolls or anything. It’s just, ‘Hey, play again.’”

Easy come, easy go: $4 billion in losses

Blackley had no more stomach for this second battle. He left Microsoft in the spring of 2002, following his buddy Kevin Bachus out the door. In a recent interview, he had no regrets about leaving.

“The thing I’m really good at is being immune enough to pain to continue to push ideas I really believe in,” he said. “I’m stupid enough to push them even when it is disadvantageous to me. I’m not the right guy to hang out and optimize a business like that.”

A bunch of veterans did stick around. Bill Gates was up for another round, though this time he would do it as chairman, in a secondary role to the newly-minted CEO Steve Ballmer. There were now around 2,000 people in the game division, still less than what Sony had but far more than the 400 that Microsoft had before the Xbox.

But Microsoft had dug itself a hole. After four years, Microsoft’s Home and Entertainment Group reported a total loss of $4 billion. That number included some other money-losing ventures too. But the vast majority of it was due to Xbox and the loss that the company was taking on every machine that it made. Insiders believed that Microsoft lost $3.7 billion on the original Xbox by 2005. That amounted to a $168 loss on every  machine that Microsoft sold.

The toughest part was that the machine wasn’t designed to take advantage of declining prices or volume discounts on component manufacturing, the way a mass-market electronics product would ordinarily be designed. That was driven by necessity, since the machine went from idea to product in about half the time it usually took to design such a complicated device. There wasn’t enough time to design unique chips and hardware that could be made more cheaply over time. Microsoft had to take a lot of costly off-the-shelf parts, including an expensive hard disk drive. When the machine started selling for $299, the cost for making each machine was around $425.

Selling games was the way to offset the losses. But game making was getting costly. One Electronic Arts executive estimated that it took 20 employees to make a PlayStation game, 80 to make a PS 2 game, and 150 to make a PS 3 game. Working for two years, the PS 3 game could consume $30 million in payroll costs, not counting marketing. Xbox game making costs were not so different.

At the same time, the price gamers paid for games was dropping. Fewer games were accounting for all of the big unit sales. If a game wasn’t a hit, it could be a huge drain on a game publisher. Microsoft had entered the market to ease the burden on game developers, but their problems were multiplying. After its first round of hits and duds became clear, Microsoft cut back on its own teams that made duds.

Some observers in the industry were astounded at the losses Microsoft was willing to absorb. The company seemed like it was taking profits from its Windows and Office franchises and flushing it down the toilet of the Xbox. Later on, Microsoft’s pile of cash dwindled and the company found other needs for that cash, such as trying to catch up with Google in search. Even so, at the time, losing $4 billion over four years wasn’t a big deal; Microsoft was generating $4 billion in cash every two quarters. By sticking it out, Microsoft eventually wound up with a game business that was generating more than a billion dollars a year in profits.

“Clearly it was a big investment — but one that paid off well,” said Bach. “A business has been built that is worth much more than the original investment, the ongoing earnings potential is high, Microsoft has an ongoing relationship with millions of consumers through Xbox Live, and the company has a great opportunity in the living room and three screen entertainment space going forward.”

Ed Fries, former head of Microsoft Game Studios, added, “I wouldn’t say we lost $4 billion. I’d say we spent $4 billion building the Xbox brand and business.”

He noted that a recent brand value study says the Xbox brand alone (not counting the actual business) is worth more than $4 billion today.

Only a company like Microsoft could absorb such losses. And Bill Gates saw the strategic value in stopping Sony in its tracks and building a second pillar for Microsoft software, beyond productivity, based on entertainment in the home.

He knew the battle for the living room would play out over two decades, not just four years. Microsoft earned credibility with game developers and consumers by breaking the chokehold of the Japanese game giants. On a consumer level, Microsoft generated its most passionate fans. Gamers loved new titles such as Halo. In this arena, Microsoft was an underdog that had the power to upset the status quo and invigorate a market with new competition. In any other market it entered, Microsoft was always seen as an anti-competitive gorilla. Here, it was the good guy. Microsoft marketer Pete Parsons was able to joke about “world domination” without getting hauled off to court.

Microsoft’s entry into the console industry also had a broader effect on the industry. It strengthened a lot of American game developers, from Epic Games to Electronic Arts. And it forced Sony and Nintendo to come up with more innovations for their own consoles. Nintendo in particular had to move outside its own comfort zone to come up with its own risky console, the Wii.

“It escalated the technology arms race that had been building in the ’90s,” Kevin Bachus, one of the original Xbox founders, said recently.

Microsoft still had to make the transition that Sony had, leaping from hardcore gamers to the mass market. With the Xbox 360, Microsoft would pursue that goal aggressively.

Front image via Scott Akerman

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Update: This two-part series is now available as an e-book for the Amazon Kindle for your reading comfort.

Editor’s note: This story is the first of two articles on the 10th anniversary of the launch of Microsoft’s Xbox video game console, which debuted Nov. 15, 2001. The narrative is based on recent interviews as well as my two books: Opening the Xbox: Inside Microsoft’s Plan to Unleash an Entertainment Revolution, published in 2002; and The Xbox 360 Uncloaked: The real story behind Microsoft’s next generation video game console, published in 2006. This piece follows the Xbox from conception to launch. Part two of the series traces the history from launch through today.

Microsoft launched its Xbox video game console a decade ago this week. Nobody expected it to succeed. The skeptics were out in force when the giant-size console launched on Nov. 15, 2001.

But it turned out to be successful beyond Microsoft’s wildest expectations. Microsoft lost (or, more politely, invested) more than $4 billion in the first console. But it has created an entertainment business that is now much more valuable than that, said Robbie Bach, the former head of Microsoft’s game business and the highest-ranking executive who was present at the beginning of the project through his retirement last year.

Microsoft’s second console, the Xbox 360, and the game business that goes with it are now churning out more than $1 billion in profits a year in what has become Microsoft’s most successful diversification to date. The making of the Xbox was a historic event that changed gaming forever, allowing Microsoft’s brand to be associated with something cool and sexy for the first time.

The console finally helped Microsoft wedge its way into the living room with a device that people craved. Now that box is a gateway to internet services, from online games to streaming video. The Xbox Live online gaming service, launched a year after the Xbox in 2002, represents Microsoft’s greatest achievement in the social market that has become key to engaging users for the long term. Not only did it create a true connected console and make online console gaming a reality, Xbox Live created an ongoing relationship with 35 million gamers and a live service that could be updated through software changes, not the introduction of new hardware.

“Today, the TV screen is just one of several where you want entertainment and other experiences,” Bach said a couple of weeks ago. “Xbox plays a central role in delivering that. It is now more than just gaming, but includes social interaction, video, TV, movies, and communications like Skype.”

For gamers, the Xbox brought a whole new landscape to gaming. Before, first-person shooters were a lucrative domain on the PC. But with the launch of its massive hit Halo, Microsoft migrated the first-person market to the game console. More broadly, consumers got to see the benefits of increased competition at a time when Sega’s failure had consolidated the market into two rivals. The result was a whirlwind of better games, improved graphics, and innovations in game play.

“More generally, it played an important role in making gaming a mainstream form of entertainment and broadening it to include video, music and other forms of entertainment,” Bach said.

Microsoft didn’t defeat its rivals Sony and Nintendo, but it has earned a measure of respect for its accomplishments in games. There’s no denying that Microsoft is now a force to be reckoned with.

A decade later, the original Xbox team has scattered to the winds. But we caught up with a number of the key members of the founding team to get their perspectives on the tenth anniversary of the Xbox.

“It feels awesome how it turned out,” said Seamus Blackley, one of the Xbox founders. “Xbox seems like a de facto, foregone conclusion in the history of games. It wasn’t. It was a tenuous thing for the first year. It is a testament to the people who made it happen.”

Before Xbox was born

At the beginning, Microsoft started with very little. The company had scraped together a game business with popular niche titles such as Microsoft Flight Simulator. In 1995, the team had about 150 game developers. At that time, Ed Fries took over the business and commissioned a game that would become a monster hit: Age of Empires, produced by Ensemble Studios in Dallas. It debuted in the fall of 1997 and Fries used the profits from that business to justify an expansion of the game development studios.

But Microsoft had no presence in consoles. By comparison, Sony had carved out 47 percent of the game console market with its PlayStation, soaring past both Nintendo and Sega on the strength of a flood of cool games.

Microsoft tried many times to create set-top boxes or game boxes for the living room that never saw the light of day. Sega agreed to use Micrsoft’s software for Dreamcast games, but that partnership went nowhere.

Meanwhile, in the 1990s, a trio of engineers that nicknamed themselve “the Beastie Boys” arrived at Microsoft. Three rather large, physically-imposing engineers — Alex St. John (pictured above), Eric Engstrom, and Craig Eisler — were renegades of the empire. In a strategy document dubbed Taking Fun Seriously II from 1995, they noted that Sony depended on third-party developers for much of its content and so it was vulnerable to having those developers lured to another platform. They thought the winning game platform would be the PC, which could adopt new technology a lot faster.

They saw the future of 3D graphics — then the domain of Silicon Graphics supercomputers — coming to the PC. To capitalize on that, they created DirectX, a set of technologies that enabled 3D software to run on a computer. DirectX would make it easy for game makers to create 3D games without having to port their games to every single graphics card that could be plugged into a PC. Spurned by their official bosses, the “Beastie Boys” worked on their own, stealing resources to make DirectX viable.

DirectX enabled the PC to take advantage of the enormous boosts in 3D graphics and keep up with consoles such as the Sony PlayStation. Were it not for DirectX, Microsoft would have had no foundation at all to build a software-based games business.

To court game developers, St. John threw lavish parties, like one themed Pax Romana, complete with “slave girls” and a Playboy Playmate who auctioned off guests to the audience. Maybe it was tasteless. But the industry adopted DirectX, embracing it even to the point where Microsoft’s proprietary Talisman graphics chip architecture never got off the ground.

Sadly, St. John got himself into hot water after he ordered a $2 million alien spaceship to be built as part of a gigantic game promotion. Then he got himself fired after he mouthed off in a “fuck you all” way, in a dripping-with-sarcasm response to criticism from a colleague. Then Microsoft found that the PC alone wasn’t quite enough to conquer the game industry.

A state of panic

One of the apocryphal stories was that Bill Gates approached Sony’s CEO, Noboyuki Idei (pictured right), before the PlayStation 2 game console was announced. Gates wanted Sony to use Microsoft’s programming tools, but Idei turned Gates down. Idei said that Gates flew into a rage, taking the affront surprisingly personally. Later, Idei said in an interview with Ken Auletta of the New Yorker, “With Microsoft, open architecture means Microsoft architecture.”

Sony’s decision not to depend on Microsoft was no surprise. Everyone in the tech industry knew not to turn their back on Microsoft, based on what happened decades ago when IBM gave its PC operating system rights to Microsoft. So Sony decided to make its own software for its machine.

Sony announced the PS 2 on March 2, 1999. Sony game chief Ken Kutaragi called it a “revolutionary computer entertainment system set to reinvent the nature of video games.” Trip Hawkins, who ran the rival 3DO game company, called Sony’s box a “Trojan Horse,” meant to get into the home as a game machine and then becoming the gateway for all home entertainment. With such a machine, no one would need a personal computer in the home. Andrew House, then-senior vice president of marketing at Sony’s U.S. game division said that Sony had broader ambitions.

“If it is just a game console, then we have failed,” he said.

Gates had seen it coming. After his meeting with Sony’s Idei, Gates returned to Redmond, telling his people that Sony wanted the PS 2 to compete with the PC, that it was going to be more than a TV set-top or game box: It was going to be a threat to Microsoft’s Windows franchise. (Gates recalled the meeting with Idei as amiable.)

The PC and consumer electronics were on a collision course, and the press was already talking about a “post-PC era.” Gates held a strategic retreat where his executive team focused on two pillars, the first based on productivity software such as Microsoft Office, and the second based on home computing and entertainment. At the end of the retreat, the executive team decided it had to delve deeper into gaming and come up with an answer to the PlayStation 2. Games were on the cusp of breaking out into the mass market and could even become bigger than the movies. The fear that Microsoft would miss out on this lucrative market flowed down from the top.

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Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Anyone who who follows technology trends has undoubtedly heard the term “cloud service” thrown around a few gazillion times over the past few months. But if you don’t know the difference between terms such as PaaS, IaaS and SaaS, don’t fret — you’re far from alone.

Let’s start at the beginning. “Cloud” is a metaphor for the Internet, and “cloud computing” is using the Internet to access applications, data or services that are stored or running on remote servers.

When you break it down, any company offering an Internet-based approach to computing, storage and development can technically be called a cloud company. However, not all cloud companies are the same. Typically, these companies focus on offering one of three categories of cloud computing services. These different segments are called the “layers” of the cloud.

Not everyone is a CTO or an IT manager, so sometimes following the lingo behind cloud technology can be tough. With our first-annual CloudBeat 2011 conference coming up at the end of this month, we thought this would be a good opportunity to go over the basics of what purpose each layer serves and some company examples to help give each term more meaning.

Layers of the cloud

A cloud computing company is any company that provides its services over the Internet. These services fall into three different categories, or layers. The layers of cloud computing, which sit on top of one another, are Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Infrastructure sits at the bottom, Platform in the middle and Software on top. Other “soft” layers can be added on top of these layers as well, with elements like cost and security extending the size and flexibility of the cloud.

Here is a chart showing simplified explanations for the three main layers of cloud computing:

IaaS: Infrastructure-as-a-Service

The first major layer is Infrastructure-as-a-Service, or IaaS. (Sometimes it’s called Hardware-as-a-Service.) Several years back, if you wanted to run business applications in your office and control your company website, you would buy servers and other pricy hardware in order to control local applications and make your business run smoothly.

But now, with IaaS, you can outsource your hardware needs to someone else. IaaS companies provide off-site server, storage, and networking hardware, which you rent and access over the Internet. Freed from maintenance costs and wasted office space, companies can run their applications on this hardware and access it anytime.

Some of the biggest names in IaaS include Amazon, Microsoft, VMWare, Rackspace and Red Hat. While these companies have different specialties –  some, like Amazon and Microsoft, want to offer you more than just IaaS — they are connected by a desire to sell you raw computing power and to host your website.

PaaS: Platform-as-a-Service

The second major layer of the cloud is known as Platform-as-a-Service, or PaaS, which is sometimes called middleware. The underlying idea of this category is that all of your company’s development can happen at this layer, saving you time and resources.

PaaS companies offer up a wide variety of solutions for developing and deploying applications over the Internet, such as virtualized servers and operating systems. This saves you money on hardware and also makes collaboration easier for a scattered workforce. Web application management, application design, app hosting, storage, security, and app development collaboration tools all fall into this category.

Some of the biggest PaaS providers today are Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure, Saleforce’s Force.com, the Salesforce-owned Heroku, and Engine Yard. A few recent PaaS startups we’ve written about that look somewhat intriguing include AppFog, Mendix and Standing Cloud.

SaaS: Software-as-a-Service

The third and final layer of the cloud is Software-as-a-Service, or SaaS. This layer is the one you’re most likely to interact with in your everyday life, and it is almost always accessible through a web browser. Any application hosted on a remote server that can be accessed over the Internet is considered a SaaS.

Services that you consume completely from the web like Netflix, MOG, Google Apps, Box.net, Dropbox and Apple’s new iCloud fall into this category. Regardless if these web services are used for business, pleasure or both, they’re all technically part of the cloud.

Some common SaaS applications used for business include Citrix’s GoToMeeting, Cisco’s WebEx, Salesforce’s CRM, ADP, Workday and SuccessFactors.

We hope you’ll join us at CloudBeat 2011 at the end of the month to explore a number of exciting case studies in cloud services.

Cloud photo via Jeff Coleman/Flickr

Cloud breakdown slide via “Windows Azure Platform: Cloud Development Jump Start” via Microsoft

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Jay Sullivan is Mozilla’s vice president of products, and for a spokesperson of one of the open web’s dearest darlings, he’s on a tear.

“If you want to have a variety of mobile apps, it gets expensive… that’s a lot of apps to build,” he told VentureBeat in a recent interview.

Sullivan is making a strong case against building native apps and for the mobile web as the new platform to (literally) end all platforms.

Now, a number of developments make his words especially timely. Yahoo has just announced Yahoo Cocktails, a set of tools for developers to use that make web apps look and behave more like native apps. Mozilla is working on tools to help developers sell web-based apps to mobile device users, enabling them to make profits just as developers in the iTunes App Store or Android Market can now do.

Even Adobe is scrapping Flash for mobile phones and pinning its hopes on HTML 5 for the mobile web. “HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively,” wrote Danny Winokur, Adobe VP and General Manager of Interactive Development.

“This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms.”

It looks like mobile apps may be headed the same direction as multimedia CD-ROMs did a decade ago. Sadly for mobile apps, they don’t even have a useful second life as drink coasters.

But parties on the other side of the fence say it’s too soon to play Taps for apps. App advocates say mobile web enthusiasts are indulging in pipe dreams while the rest of the world is still working on proprietary technology stacks that do, now, what HTML5 has so far failed to deliver. Even if they admit that building for the mobile web will eventually be cheaper, faster and easier, it’s at least few years away from reality.

In the Mozilla Foundation’s new offices overlooking the San Francisco Bay Bridge, Sullivan — an unapologetic HTML5 advocate — sits in a conference room and rapidly deconstructs the assumption that to get your software onto a mobile phone you have to build a native application.

But he doesn’t resort to the familiar (and tired) ideologies about freedom from corporate technological tyranny that figure large in Mozilla’s current ad campaign. Rather, he gets downright practical.

First, he explains the obvious: Each mobile ecosystem has its own technology stack, its own operating system and programming language. That means developing apps requires a different skill set and a separate development process for each ecosystem.

At the end of the day, building a mobile web app instead of two or three or four native apps just makes more economic sense. “HTML5 is less expensive,” he says. “There’s always some stuff around the edges that won’t work perfectly, but compared to writing in seven different languages, it works.”

For developers, it’s technologically more manageable to build one mobile web app than a half-dozen or even just two native apps. And given the state of mobile web standards, we’re quickly approaching a point where end users can’t tell the difference between the two. All that’s really left is a business model for mobile web apps, Sullivan contends.

“When the web offers a more easy to access business ecosystem to developers, it will become more attractive.”

A better package

In conversations with organizations like Mozilla and Yahoo, in talks with mobile developers — basically, anyone who doesn’t have an explicit interest in promoting a single mobile operating system like Android or iOS — one trend is becoming quite apparent:

The app as you know it is dying.

It’s like the CD, an expensive package for digital information, a package that is increasingly becoming unnecessary and obsolete.

And just as with the CD, all we’re waiting for is a better delivery method to come along and kill it off.

The challenges to that shift are partly technical and partly cultural. Mobile web apps first must meet consumer demands for high quality and performance. And as previously noted, developers need to be able to market mobile web apps.

Yahoo is one company working on the first challenge. Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz is Yahoo’s platform vice president, and he is working on what he calls “a bunch of tricks to make web applications feel native.”

“We don’t want to emulate native, it has its own paradigm. What we want to do is create a new class of experiences. Something that’s the same across phones, TVs, tablets — the web is a paradigm that is cross-platform.”

But however much Mozilla or Yahoo might want to see the mobile web overtake native apps as a paradigm for ideological reasons, those who have to approach the problem practically in the here-and-now still have to deal with native issues and stacks.

“I absolutely believe that the mobile web is going to continue to grow rapidly,” says Jeff Haynie, who co-founded Appcelerator, a company specializing in getting web developers up and running on mobile OS platforms.

But, Haynie says, it’s too soon to discount the opportunity afforded by apps.

“That’s a huge opportunity for developers worldwide,” he continues, talking about mobile web apps. “But those compelling native experiences across lots of devices are where opportunity is going to be in the near-term. Consumers have come to expect a very high bar from experience, like the Flipboards and Instagrams that you just can’t achieve now with a web app.”

Referring to Mozilla et al., Haynie says, “These companies have many, many web developers — their foundation is the web. That’s what they’re yearning for, how to leverage that. That’s the promise of the web…

“The real question is, how do you let web developers build applications that span the native experience and the web?”

Web advocates, not surprisingly, have answers: New technologies and new marketplaces for making  money from web apps.

New technology for the new mobile web: JavaScript and Node

JavaScript and Node.js are two key technologies that will make the transition from native apps to web apps possible.

“JavaScript is LISP in disguise. It’s as powerful as any functional programming language can be,” says Yahoo’s Fernandez-Ruiz.

And with JavaScript-based Node.js in the equation, he says, “It’s hard to tell if this will be the next Ruby on Rails, but this could be.” (Ruby on Rails is a platform for developing web applications that has become wildly popular in the past few years, thanks to the speed with which developers can create sites and apps using it.)

JavaScript and Node are core components of Yahoo’s Cocktails, a new suite of tools to help developers make their mobile web apps look and feel indistinguishable from high-quality native apps. Fernandez-Ruiz says that in early previews, responses from mobile developers have been positive and enthusiastic; everyone wants to get their hands on it.

Getting content to run consistently across all mobile and device platforms is a daunting task, and to date, many companies are trying to tackle it by translating code from one OS’s language to another, e.g. Objective C for iPhone development to Java for Android development.

But the code that comes out on the other side of such translations is too often spaghetti, and trying to solve the compatibility problem programmatically isn’t a long-term option.

Instead, said Fernandez-Ruiz, “We decided to solve the problems of the next three years rather than the problems of today.”

Ideally, Yahoo wants to eliminate the multi-language scenarios that introduce complications for developers. That’s the goal of Cocktails. One Cocktail product, called Mojito, uses JavaScript and Node to run a single codebase both on client and server side.

“We’re not making any difference between the front end and the back end,” says Fernandez-Ruiz. “For us, it’s the exact same code.”

Manhattan, another Cocktail, is a Node.js hosted environment for Mojito. Apps can be wrapped in a native shell and shipped to the iTunes App Store or the Android Market or simply run in a browser, and Manhattan helps to speed up the user experience access across high- and low-speed networks and to run apps on platforms that don’t have full HTML5/CSS3 support.

While Node has been shown to have insane performance benefits, Fernandez-Ruiz says, “We’re not using it for event-driven, low-latency reasons, although those are there. We’re using it because it runs JavaScript on the server side.”

JavaScript is evolving, he says. “The next generation of JavaScript will make the it a compelling, high-performance programming language for the web. This is a new class of web apps that are cross-environment, continuous, fluid experiences.”

And for the end user, Fernandez-Ruiz says that jumping from one interface on a TV to another interface for the same service on a tablet or smartphone or PC is disturbing. “But with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript, you can have apps that look and feel the same.”

This is something we saw in action when we reviewed LinkedIn’s latest suite of mobile apps, which are Node-powered and web-heavy. Even the native apps for iOS and Android relied heavily on the mobile web for a lot of pages and features, and the mobile web version of the app looks and functions exactly the same as the native versions.

For Yahoo’s purposes, Fernandez-Ruiz continues, “Node.js is part of the puzzle, to execute code on the server side. But the premise is the same: It’s not native; it’s the web.”

Yahoo will also be introducing other Cocktails, including Windjammer and Screwdriver, in the near future.

But Haynie says the web-app-in-a-native-wrapper model should be regarded with some caution.

“That kind of hybrid application — we’re seeing almost no one using that right now. It’s a bridge to allow you to bring web content into a native app, but if you look even at the new LinkedIn app, it’s still mostly a native application.”

Dmitry Dragilev works for Zurb, a company that just released Foundation, a framework for designing apps that work across the web, both on mobile devices and desktops. The framework in action is somewhat magical. As the screen resolution changes from window to window and device to device, links become buttons. Images automatically resize. Layouts morph.

And since it’s web technology, it doesn’t have to be customized on a device-by-device basis. “The framework does all the work,” said Dragilev. “People don’t need to worry about this stuff anymore.”

The technology is intended to work on any kind of device, mobile or not, and Dragilev says, “That’s crucial now that mobile web use has started to overtake desktop use.”

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Earlier this morning, we published statements from Google chairman Eric Schmidt in which the executive said an acquisition of Motorola Mobility would not constitute an unfair advantage for the phone manufacturer.

Being journalists and generally rational people, we were skeptical, to say the least.

After all, Google had given Motorola time-to-market advantage and early access to the Android codebase in the past. If an acquisition were to go through, how in the world would Google not be able to give Motorola Mobility an unfair advantage?

Does it make sense that one company would not give another part of itself every opportunity to profit?

We turned to Google for more explanation of Schmidt’s words, in particular, the part where he said, “The Motorola deal will close and we will run it sufficiently and independently, that it will not violate the openness of Android.”

Google’s “lead device” strategy

First, we mentioned some court documents that had been made public. Those documents stated that Google would “give early access to the software partners who build and distribute devices to our specification (i.e., Motorola and Verizon). They get non-contractual time to market advantage, and in return they align to our standard.”

While there is a significant difference between i.e. and e.g., especially for the purposes of this reading, we had a chat on background about the meaning of this particularly hard-to-swallow passage.

What was explained to us is that Google has rolled out every new iteration of Android with a “lead device.”

As Android chief Andy Rubin put it during a conference over the summer, “What we do is pick our partners (a semiconductor partner, an operator and an OEM) and then combine them all together. This is the device that engineers have on their desk when they come in the morning.”

For example, with the launch of Ice Cream Sandwich, a.k.a. Android 4.0, Google gave time-to-market advantage to one original equipment manufacturer (OEM) and one carrier: Samsung and Verizon, who together launched the Galaxy Nexus. For Honeycomb, a.k.a. Android 3.0, the OS targeted at tablets, Google favored Motorola, and the Xoom was launched.

Going back to Android 2.0, Motorola and Verizon were let into the fork early and produced the original Droid. Samsung and T-Mobile launched Android 2.3 with the Nexus S. And Google worked with HTC and T-Mobile to launch its flagship Android device, the Nexus One.

While it is hard to imagine that Motorola Mobility would not have early access to all future Android forks, Google does have a history of spreading early access pretty fairly among all OEMs. And it would be dangerous for them to disavow this precedent for one critical reason.

What Google is too smart to risk

If Google did decide to favor Motorola, it would instantly lose the support of every other Android device maker. And the sole reason Android has become such a popular choice is its diversity.

Android owners can name their carrier, their OEM, their specs — even their price point. The bane of developers (the wide divergence in the Android diaspora) is the boon of its consumers. And that diversity would shrivel if OEMs like Samsung and HTC thought they were getting shafted by the OS maker and a preferred OEM.

After all, it’s not as if OEMs don’t have options.

Lest we forget, while Android is currently the fastest-growing and debatably most popular smartphone OS, there is another mobile operating system waiting in the wings to steal any share of the spotlight it can: Windows Phone 7.

Though the tech press loves to hate on all things Microsoft, we’ve previously called Windows Phone 7 a sleeper hit. While lagging in adoption, the hardware is beautiful and the design is magnificent. Right now, Nokia is putting all its eggs in the Windows Phone basket, and the Microsoft team is confident that given enough time, the platform will catch up.

So for Google, careful parsing out of early access on a version-by-version basis isn’t only fair; it’s vital to Android’s survival.

As Rubin stated in a recent investor’s call, “We don’t expect that [lead device strategy] to change at all. The acquisition is going to be run as a separate business; they will be part of that bidding process and part of that lead development process. And obviously Android remains open to other partners to use as they are today.”

What Google is too smart not to grab

So then why would Google endanger that carefully balanced peace with OEMs by acquiring one of them?

In most cases, when journalists have questions, we follow the money. In this case, however, we’ll first follow the lawsuits.

Android is under attack from several corners at once, most notably Microsoft and Oracle, which are waging entrenched patent law warfare against Google and its Android partners.

Both of those much older companies hold around 20,000 patents each. As a further example, IBM, one of the oldest technology companies still doing business, actively controls more than 26,000 patents in the U.S. and 40,000 worldwide.

When the Android patent suits began, Google held fewer than 1,000 patents altogether. While the company generates a wealth of intellectual property, its culture has publicly and historically espoused ideals of freedom over concepts of legal ownership of ideas. While that’s in accord with Google’s unofficial “don’t be evil” motto, it doesn’t hold much water in the quite official proceedings in court.

Google bought around 1,000 IBM patents in July and around 1,000 more in September. But the matter is more sophisticated than a my-stack-of-patents-is-bigger-than-your-stack-of-patents contest. To get closest to the issues at hand vis-a-vis Microsoft and Oracle (which owns the codebase for Java, the language upon with Android is built), Google needed to grab a huge number of patents directly related to the business of building cell phones and mobile operating systems.

What better target for acquisition, then, than Motorola?

Motorola Mobility was spun off in late 2010. At that time, this reporter noted that the Droid line (powered by Android) had been the OEM’s biggest success since the Razr in 2004, before the mass-market advent of smartphones.

Plus, Motorola holds some of the progenitors of cell phone intellectual property. In the 1940s, Motorola invented the walkie-talkie for military use. In 1946, the company worked with Ma Bell to launch the first commercial mobile telephone service in the United States.

The history of cell phones is replete with Motorola firsts, and that means the company has a rich vein of patents for Google to mine: around 17,000 held patents with an additional 7,500 patents pending approval.

Only thus can Google protect Android from an expensive death by patent law — and Android’s survival is a matter quite close to Google’s heart.

“From a consumer standpoint, consumers should not be concerned about losing their Android phone,” one Googler told us last month in an interview. “But they should be concerned with the way in which Oracle is taking a platform they supported for years [the Java programming language] and is now trying to capitalize on our success.”

Stay tuned for more coverage of the Motorola Mobility acquisition and Android’s struggles in court.

Images courtesy of laihui.

Social media experts and bloggers who were one month ago hailing the fledgling service as the second coming of Christ are now calling it a graveyard and a ghost town.

But from where Google executive Bradley Horowitz sits, in an office on the Google campus in Mountain View, the vista isn’t nearly so dire.

“I don’t blame the pundits,” he says, “they’re not privy to our long-term strategies.”

The comment may seem snide or passive-aggressive; it’s also true to some extent. To understand Google’s plans for Plus, Horowitz says, you need to listen less and watch more.

“Six months from now, it will become increasingly apparent what we’re doing with Google+,” he says with a measure of opacity. “It will be revealed less in what we say and more in the product launches we reveal week by week.”

Over the past couple of weeks, we have, in fact, been seeing Google+’s social features creep into other Google web products, including Reader and Blogger.

We were clued into the real scope of Google’s plans by Louis Gray, a relatively new employee of the company who is a product marketing manager for Google+. A few weeks ago, Gray gave us a glimpse at the long view: Plus isn’t a social network; it’s Google’s new way of getting you to use all its web products.

Now, Horowitz confirms that conception. As I explain to him the vision that Gray explained earlier to me, he says, “Directionally, the world you’re describing is the world we aspire to. And it will be much better than the current state for our users.”

What is Google+?

Too many pundits and tech bloggers have made the mistake of thinking of Google+ as a Facebook competitor, but it’s absolutely not — at least not as far as Google is concerned.

Of course, Google is still in the business of competing with Facebook for ad dollars. That boils down to compiling the best, most actionable data about consumers to sell to advertisers.

And if Plus catches on, Google stands a much better chance of accomplishing that goal, not by orchestrating a Great Migration of users from one social network to another, but by subtly linking all your Google-powered online activity and profiles so advertisers can see a more complete picture of you than Facebook could ever offer.

But that’s just the follow-the-money part of the story of how Google is banking on staying in the black. As far as what you, the average end user, are expected to do to use Google+, there’s a lot less effort involved than you might think.

After all, Google is a company renowned for the massive collective brainpower of its workforce, and no one in that workforce really expected a billion people, give or take, to switch their online lives and relationships to a new destination.

Rather, Google+ is simply a new way of accessing Google’s web search. And Gmail. And Google Maps.

In other words, Google+ is (or soon will be) part of all of those products, rather than a standalone social network of its own.

“We think of Google+ as a mode of usage of Google,” says Horowitz, “a way of lighting up your Google experience as opposed to a new product. It’s something that takes time to appreciate, even internally. It’s easy to think of Google+ as something other than just Google, and I think it’ll take more launches before the world catches up with this understanding.”

Until the world does catch up, however, Google has to find its own metrics for success. Users are complaining they don’t see enough activity in their circles, that too few people are coming to Plus to hang out and interact.

Then again, if you buy into the idea that Plus isn’t, pardon the pun, a hangout or destination per se, you can accept the idea that Google+ could still be a success without massive amounts of public sharing and user activity.

Google gets holistic

One part of Google+ that Horowitz says is essential at this point in Google’s lifecycle is the unification of account management and data.

Simply put, right now you have separate profiles and logins for Blogger, Reader, YouTube and Gmail. That will soon end, to be replaced with a single account and a single login.

The multiple logins are complicated and can be confusing, and the only real reason for the disparity is because Google has evolved over the past 10 years as a many-limbed beast without a head.

Since its inception, Horowitz says, the company has placed a premium on autonomy and innovation, which, as a younger company, gives it a distinct competitive advantage.

“We have browsers, phones, self-driving cars, TVs,” he says, by way of illustrating how Google has invented better mousetraps in a variety of industries. “In many ways, these products have grown up very autonomously and have veered off in different directions, and it’s clear that we can now rationalize them and make them coherent and accretive to each other.”

While he praises the company’s culture and the diversity of its product suite, Horowitz concludes, “Now, for the user’s sake, we need to make improvements across all these products. … We were making a lot of bets in a lot of places, now we’re harvesting the bets that have paid off and weeding out the others. There’s an art to that which is greater than the sum of its parts. It’s a natural oscillation that is very user-focused.”

In the coming versions of the Internet as Google sees it, the company’s products are not disparate but holistic, and you, the average Joe or Jane, can comfortably and conveniently be a Google user with one account over multiple identities and multiple products.

“Right now, Google requires users to invest a lot of duplicative effort in all our products,” says Horowitz. For example, he tells me he’s getting married soon and will have to change his marital status across around nine different profiles for a lineup of products.

Instead, Google wants to let your profile and social graph move fluidly with you across your YouTube account, your blog, your email and wherever else you need that identity.

By contrast, Horowitz calls the current Google experience disconnected and haphazard.

“We think in providing this base level of infrastructure, it’s much less work,” says Horowitz. “Managing all these facets vanishes. The interfaces get very appealing and unified. You now have one coherent frame, and we can use these metaconcepts like circles to apply to how you share content across all that Google does.”

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Notice I said “wedding” and not “honeymoon.” Sarver has for some time been Twitter’s first line of defense between the company and a occasionally disgruntled army of third-party developers. The relationship between those two entities has been testy at best and an out-and-out war at worst for the better part of two years. Unfortunately, mid-2011 was no time for a honeymoon.

I met with Sarver in Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters, where bikes stood in racks against the walls and neon plastic deer and framed cross stitch decorated the foyer. It’s a hipster paradise, and the clean-cut, blazer-wearing Sarver seemed at once infinitely at home and slightly out of place in it.

But where Sarver is unquestionably beleaguered is in the relatively public forum of Twitter’s ecosystem developers: the men and women who develop apps that use Twitter’s APIs. They try to build businesses that complement Twitter, and when anything goes wrong with that setup (for example, Twitter makes a minor change to an API), Sarver is the de facto shock absorber. And that explains why he skipped his honeymoon to deal with his unruly constituency.

For such a young man, he handles the role of “the guy developers love to hate” with a large measure of grace and resilience.

“The ecosystem is over 750,000 developers,” he told me. “It’s a massive thing. Any community of that size, you’re never going to keep everyone happy at all times. … Some people might be mad at me, but I try to hear what they’re trying to say and fold that back into what we’re trying to do.

“The most critical people are usually the most valuable ones. They tell you where the points of friction are and how you can improve.”

Unlike Sarver, Twitter did get a honeymoon. There were a few years when it was the much-beloved social platform of tech insiders and hipsters everywhere. Developers flocked to it, drawn by its openness, flexibility and simplicity, building a wealth of Twitter apps and integrating it into their own web services.

Now the honeymoon is over. For Twitter to survive challenges from rivals like Facebook and Google+, much depends on whether it can continue to hold onto the love of its developer community.

“The most critical people”

In 2007, the infant microblogging service had yet to establish any real foothold outside San Francisco techies, yet it was trumpeting the wild success of its APIs. Co-founder Biz Stone said at the time, “The API has been arguably the most important, or maybe even inarguably, the most important thing we’ve done with Twitter. It has allowed us, first of all, to keep the service very simple and create a simple API so that developers can build on top of our infrastructure and come up with ideas that are way better than our ideas.”

Yet for many developers, it seemed that as soon as an outside party came up with an innovative idea, Twitter jumped onto the same idea too, stomping on the little guys. A long list of Twitter’s features, including mentions and lists, first appeared as features of third-party Twitter clients, only to be incorporated into the main service.

Of course, since such features are often dictated by user behavior and requests, just how much Twitter was scamming off the ideas of others and how much it was simply responding to user needs are unknown.

What we do know is that the company began to seem opaque to the developers who used its API. By the spring of 2010, when it hosted its first developer conference, developer angst had reached a fever pitch.

As the conference opened, the world learned that Twitter had acquired Tweetie and crowned it the company’s official iPhone app. Other makers of Twitter iPhone apps felt blindsided and betrayed. Businesses went down not with a whimper but a bang. Development shops started wondering aloud what areas of the map were safe territory and what Twitter might decide to annex next for itself. No one seemed to be getting or giving any clear answers.

Twitter had built an ecosystem before it decided on a business model, and while it tried out different avenues and experimented with new features, it wasn’t disclosing all of its roadmap to all of its presumed partners. While some folks benefited from a close relationship with the company and its founders, others suffered from a full-on communication breakdown.

It was a situation that was bound to create bad feelings.

“The change in attitude Twitter had since Chirp conference … is just the feeling that they no longer care about developers or their ecosystem,” said third-party developer Arik Fraimovich in a recent interview. “They seem to look at it from the narrow perspective of ‘what’s in it for Twitter?,’ failing to understand that in an ecosystem, all parts need to contribute and communicate. They also fail to understand that the next creative use of Twitter won’t be developed by their developers, but by some API developer — just as it was since their inception.”

A big part of the problem was what plagues many relationships: Lack of clear communication.

Twitter only gradually worked to clear things up. A year after the Tweetie acquisition, after everyone had adjusted to Twitter’s official, in-house suite of mobile apps, the company made an attempt to communicate part of its roadmap, the upcoming acquisition of TweetDeck and a renewed focus on consumer features.

In a controversial memo to a Google Groups list in March, Sarver laid down the law: Don’t make a Twitter client using Twitter’s API. Don’t duplicate Twitter’s features. Don’t rename them. Don’t channel users away from Twitter’s ads and experience.

It was clear, but it was also surprisingly heavy-handed for a company that until then had been known for its open and easy-going approach.

On one hand, Twitter as a business had every right to control how its APIs were being used. On the other hand, it had willingly and knowingly cultivated a thriving sub-economy of Twitter apps and was now telling many of them to kiss off. It’s a communique Sarver regrets, and it started quite the war of words.

Laura Fitton, the perky, audacious founder of Twitter-related startup Oneforty (and an unofficial team mom for the Twitter app community), told me back in March, “Twitter is full of genuinely earnestly awesome people who want to do the right thing, but it has resolutely failed to create the conditions for real business success on their platform.”

I also spoke to Loic LeMeur, the tall, eccentric French entrepreneur behind the rapidly pivoting Seesmic, who told me, “There are two types of Twitter apps, the ones Twitter likes and the ones that are competitive and don’t have good communication with them.”

Of Sarver’s missive, which put Seesmic in the direct line of fire, LeMeur said, “I wasn’t expecting such dramatic changes, but instead of complaining, I have to adapt to it. … Competing with your number one partner is a little dangerous.”

Jesse Stay is another entrepreneur/engineer who has built a business around a collection of social APIs, including Twitter’s. Stay is the picture of a mild-mannered Mormon, a truly kind man who would think long and hard before uttering a negative word about anyone. Still, during yet another minor but uncommunicated technical change at Twitter, he told me, “This move by Twitter is no surprise, as I’ve experienced over and over through the last three years. It’s why we’ve moved to a $29-per-month plan for all the services we offer. … That’s the only way to afford the risk of Twitter.”

Perhaps no one understands the risk of Twitter better than Noah Everett, a man whose name came up more than once in my talk with Sarver. Everett built TwitPic, a highly popular and successful app for uploading photos and sharing them through Twitter. Out of the blue earlier this year, Twitter announced it would be implementing media-sharing capabilities into its web and mobile apps, first for photos, then for videos, cutting a number of photo-sharing apps — including TwitPic — off at the roots.

“TwitPic will continue to still live on,” Everett told me when the feature rolled out to users, espousing the kind of grim optimism I’ve heard from many entrepreneurs facing hopeless odds. “We’ve got a huge base of loyal users and we still want to continue to provide them with the best service possible … regardless of this feature announcement from Twitter.”

But there was a bitter twist. Everett had the previous year started working on a stealth project called Heello, a project attempting to “make email suck less,” as he put it to me. But out of spite or pique or frustration, he decided to turn Heello into a Twitter clone.

“If Twitter can compete with its developers without fair notice, then why can’t we?” he quipped. “Twitter rolling out their photo option to everyone [the day before the Heello site launched] was a complete coincidence, but I’m glad the timing happened that way.”

These voices and many others ring in my ears – and likely, to some extent, in Sarver’s, too – as we face one another over a small table in a small conference room at Twitter.

I ask him if he thinks the company made any mistakes.

“You can always do things better,” he told me. “If you go back to the guidance we gave last March, we could have executed that message much better. The tone and format could have been improved. But the intent is still important: The most important thing for us as a platform is to give people a clear idea of where we’re going.”

And that clarity of communication is all most of these critical voices were asking for.

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For perhaps the first time, “The way things look and make people feel are just as important as the speed and features,” said Matias Duarte, the Chilean-American designer who currently serves as Google’s director of Android user experience, in an interview with VentureBeat.

“Every time I unlock the phone and I see how it’s been transformed, it really makes me smile,” he continued.

“In previous generations, when I look back, they look dated, like a Windows 3.1 machine you found in your parents’ garage.”

Duarte took some time yesterday to dive deep into the new design language of Ice Cream Sandwich, which is a radical departure from the utilitarian Android UI many consumers are used to seeing.

Duarte came to Google about a year and a half ago, shortly before the release of Android 2.3, a.k.a. Gingerbread. The designer has a lot of mobile experience, having worked at Palm, where he was VP of user experience and helped to create the webOS platform, at Helio as VP of design, and at and Danger, the startup that created the Sidekick and was acquired by Microsoft.

The “ugly cousin” stigma

Coming into Google, Apple’s main competitor in the world of smartphones, Duarte said he was well aware that Android had been cast in the public imagination as an ugly cousin for years. But whether that perception was true or pure FUD, Duarte knew it needed to be aggressively countered.

“Ugly cousin, country bumpkin — we’re intimately aware of that characterization, and it’s something we wanted to tackle head-on with this release,” said Duarte.

“We did a lot of foundational research on people’s perceptions of Android. … Hearing it in the words of everyday people helped tell the story of why we needed to make a change and how big a statement we wanted to make.”

He said that most consumers have some sense that Android was “utilitarian, a tool, a task, associated with burdens, complications and additional effort. … We weren’t hearing the kind of joy and thanksgiving that we wanted to hear.”

To get to that point, Duarte saw a need to shift how Google thought about and communicated about mobile design. He said the company’s goal is now “to make Android respected as a design leader.

“There is a PR problem there. There is a perception, however ill-founded, that Google doesn’t care about or understand design and that Android is a place where design isn’t valued. We’re trying to show that’s no longer the case.”

However, much of the Android-related marketing from carriers and OEMs still glorifies the utilitarian, technical aspect of the Android OS while downplaying its new, rich aesthetics. Particularly with the Verizon-powered line of Droids, you see commercials featuring post-apocalyptic scenes with robotic arms, lasers and female models who could kick Lara Croft’s ass — hardly in line the user-friendly design language Google is trying to project these days.

“There’s clearly a market segment that revels in the joy of tech,” said Duarte. “They want to be Tony Stark, and that’s great. But what I really want to see as well (and I hope Ice Cream Sandwich enables this) is that it’s easier to make more kinds of products with a broader, emotional appeal, and we’ll see that reflected in [manufacturer and carrier] marketing and customization.”

Ice Cream Sandwich’s new design language

Beautiful design is one of the three core tenets of the new Android philosophy — or at least, the new Android marketing for Ice Cream Sandwich. And getting from the engineering-focused principles of the original open-source mobile OS to this new, Apple-competitive, consumer-friendly, multimedia-rich interface took a lot of work.

We talked to Duarte about how the design language evolved and the kinds of decisions he and his team had to make to get a beautiful smartphone design out of a hacker’s UI.

“With Honeycomb, we started the move away from the illustration style of fake wood, fake leather, fake buttons,” he said. “But it was still very technical, very cold. It reveled in its digital roots.”

When it came to Ice Cream Sandwich, Duarte said, the team continued to get away from the faux-materials aesthetic, which he called encumbrances, and also got away from a lot of the structure of previous Android iterations.

“We removed dividing elements, bevels, unnecessary UI junk,” he said. “We started using more white space and a variety of visual elements to create clear structures.”

Another big change with Ice Cream Sandwich is the color. “We expanded our palette, so there’s quite a range of light and dark,” Duarte said.

“We’ve introduced two types of palettes that are based on the kind of content you’re consuming. The media content retains a lot of the dark palette that Android used in the past,” he said, noting that the darker colors are still great for videos, photos and other content where you want a visual pop.

“Our other palette is light,” he continued. “Gmail, Google Talk, text messaging — all of these have a lighter color pallette that’s more closely aligned with what Google is doing with the web itself. It’s easier to read text on and is simply more approachable.”

Overall, the guiding principle was glossy magazine design, an approach that placed more emphasis on beautiful, large images.

“We look at each screen and think about the primary experience, then lay it out like a beautiful magazine cover with big pictures, big headlines,” said Duarte. “We make each screen custom so the pages speak to that individual use case.”

Duarte said that the new look and feel of Android also involves more transparency in the UI in general. That is, not philosophical transparency, but being able to literally see through various design elements to get a glimpse of the photo or other content behind it. “Very little of the UI imposes a theme on your homescreen,” Duarte concluded.

An iOS killer?

While Duarte acknowledged early on that Apple’s iOS was the product to beat in terms of design, he also didn’t have that constant competition in mind while creating a new look and feel for Android.

“We ask ourselves, when we come to design, how much are we setting ourselves against the competition?” Duarte said. He went on to tell us that question had to be silenced initially.

“We put that out of our heads, understand what our design goals are, and aggressively pursue those.”

Another reason Duarte isn’t obsessing over iOS is because he feels better mobile design, even from competing companies, lifts all the boats in the harbor and creates better experiences for everyone.

“I don’t want to measure us against the competition because there’s so much great work out there. … There’s a lot of terrific options for consumers,” he said.

“And I’m thrilled that the industry as a whole is taking design so seriously. They get it. That’s great for designers and great for customers.”

In the end, Duarte said, “I’m really proud of what the entire team has accomplished. When I look at the history of Android, we set out to turn a corner with Ice Cream Sandwich. It’s a significant milestone where a new look and feel has been introduced.”

Stay tuned later this week for a deep dive into Roboto, Ice Cream Sandwich’s new typeface.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

The iPhone 4S is a quietly revolutionary mobile device, even though it looks exactly the same as last year’s iPhone 4. The big pull this time around isn’t the hardware — though the faster processor and revamped camera are certainly welcome — it’s the integrated virtual assistant Siri.

More than a smarter version of the iPhone’s previous voice command feature, Siri represents the first step towards widespread adoption of consumer artificial intelligence (AI). It’s the beginning of something that will fundamentally change the way we live with our computing devices over the coming years. Modern touchscreen smartphones already seem futuristic compared to the clunkier handsets that came before, but Siri feels like something straight out of science fiction.

But is Siri enough to allay disappointed fans hoping for a completely redesigned iPhone 5? Read on to find out.

Hardware: Same design, more horsepower

iPhone 4S teardown, via iFixit

If you’ve seen the iPhone 4, there’s nothing truly remarkable about the iPhone 4S at first glance. Just like the iPhone 3GS, the 4S sports the same design as its predecessor. That’s a good thing, since the iPhone 4’s unusual aesthetic — two glass surfaces connected by a metal band — remains unrivaled. (It’s still prone to screen cracks though, since there’s twice as much glass to worry about compared to typical smartphones.) But if you didn’t care for the iPhone 4’s look, there’s nothing about the 4S’s design to sway you to the new model.

An unfortunate side effect of sticking with last year’s design is that the 4S retains the traditional 3.5-inch display size. By this point, flagship phones from competitors never dare to dip below 4-inch screens. Apple still holds the title for the highest screen pixel density, thanks to its high-resolution 326 pixels per inch Retina Display. Other phone makers have matched the Retina Display’s resolution over the past year, but since they use bigger screens, those displays don’t look nearly as sharp. (Personally, I’d sacrifice some pixel density for a 4-inch screen.)

While it may not look different, the iPhone 4S is a much changed beast under the hood. It sports Apple’s new dual-core A5 chip, which first appeared in the iPad 2, and is said to be twice as fast as the A4 chip in the iPhone 4. The A5 also features a dual-core graphics processor, which Apple says is seven times faster than the A4.

In regular usage, the A5 chip definitely gives the iPhone 4S an added kick. Launching new apps and switching between them is noticeably speedier than on the iPhone 4, and the A5 chip obliterates load times and lag from graphics-heavy games like Epic’s Infinity Blade. The iPhone 4S will certainly be appealing to gamers — new titles like Galaxy on Fire 2 will only run on the 4S and iPad 2, and more games will certainly follow suit.

iPhone 4S camera test

The iPhone 4’s 5-megapixel camera was already one of the best out there, but Apple made it even better this time around with a new 8-megapixel shooter that will give many point-and-shoot cameras a run for their money. The new camera also includes a five element lens (compared to the four in the iPhone 4) and a larger f/2.4 aperture, which serve to make photos sharper and easier to take in low-light conditions.

As you can see from the picture to the right, the iPhone 4S takes some mighty fine photos. It’s tough to tell much of a difference over the iPhone 4, but the improved optics are noticeable in situations where there’s a lot of fine detail to cover, like capturing the many leaves on a tree.

The new camera can also record 1080p high-definition video, a pretty big leap over the iPhone 4’s 720p HD video. Additionally, Apple has included image stabilization and noise reduction software capabilities. I’m still not convinced cellphones really need 1080p video recording (the larger file sizes don’t seem worth it, especially on storage-strapped phones), but thanks to the improved camera hardware, the video still looks much better when recorded at 720p. (You’ll need additional apps to record at lower resolutions since Apple only lets you record at 1080p.)

Next page: Software and Siri

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Last week, we chatted with Facebook product chief Sam Lessin about how and why Timelines came to be, including design inspirations and influences.

Today, we have brought together UX expert Chuck Longanecker of Digital Telepathy, former Google designer and current Backplane co-founder Joey Primiani and Flipboard co-founder and design chief Evan Doll to discuss and dissect Facebook Timelines.

Echoes of infographics, tablet apps & About.me

Lessin told us that scrapbooks and physical photo albums had a big impact on Timeline’s user experience; however, we also saw other influences from modern apps like Tumblr and form factors like tablets.

“I think the cover photo is allowing an improvement of personalization without MySpacing all over everything. Hats off to About.me for influencing this move,” said Longanecker, who has previously pointed to apps such as About.me as good examples of human-at-a-glance profiles.

“The current design iteration of profiles on any network is extremely weak in general and lacks the true personality of meeting someone for the first time or perhaps getting to know them better,” he continued.

“We are a visual group of people, reading someone’s bio and likes/dislikes online does not do us justice… It’s only natural for Facebook to want to visualize this data and enable their users to connect on a level with greater experience-based dimension.”

Doll saw a big correlation between data visualization and Timeline’s UI — no coincidence, considering Facebook hired two infographic gurus specifically to work on the product.

“Facebook is realizing there are huge amounts of data that need to be wrangled for users,” Doll said. “Information visualization is increasingly important for making sense of huge sets of social data. Designers with a strong information visualization backgrounds are very influential and in high demand. We saw a similar problem and found an incredible designer for Flipboard, Marcos Weskamp, with a strong information visualization background.”

And Primiani pointed out the Timeline UI is not unlike a lot of mobile or tablet application interfaces. “We are going to see a lot more web app-like interfaces with larger, visual click-targets and fluid animations similar to mobile and tablet design.”

The young designer also noted, “The higher-resolution media in the feed [is] similar to micro-blogging sites like Tumblr.”

How users will react

Of course, as with every minor user interface or user experience tweak that gets rolled out to hundreds of millions of people at once, users tend to recoil from change.

Lessin said that Facebook users tended to train one another on new features as part of the onboarding process. We asked our panel how they thought Facebook users would react to Timeline.

Longanecker told us, “The interface is a nice improvement, but I am not sure that people want to go back to looking at profiles instead of a better way to curate their newsfeed.”

“There’s been a lot of discussion and interest in the new design,” Doll said of the hum and chatter among Facebook’s loyal end users. “This exhibits the strong emotional connection Facebook users have with the product. Most companies would do anything to have a user base so passionate. As with every major Facebook redesign, I suspect people will get used to the new look over time.”

Primiani brought up an interesting design point, saying, “It will be interesting to see how people parse a two-column list rather than one-column. It seems after a few days I’ve gotten used to it, but I’m still concerned that content is being hidden by the other secondary and tertiary UI elements.”

Longanecker concluded that a lot of how users react to the new interface will come down to how much users like the way Timeline portrays them to the rest of the world. Users will have a seven-day window between activating Timeline and publishing their new profiles to work out the kinks and hide any embarrassing stories, but still, too much revelation could lead to a backlash.

It’s the age-old privacy question with a new emphasis on what we’ve uploaded in years gone by.

“It depends on much Timelines exposes about us by default,” he said. “If it’s TMI, and all of the sudden, everyone knows about that time I drank too much at SXSW 2009, we have problems.”

He continued, “In general, I think the most interesting aspect of this new feature is how we will change our sharing. Will we be more specific with our uploaded content or will we just upload less based on the new functionality?”

Ultimately, does Timeline pass muster?

Our panelists did have a few complaints about the new interface and experience.

Longanecker brings up a fundamental concern: “Focusing on a profile may be too passive for live interaction which Facebook has done so well with in the News Feed.,, I am not convinced that Facebook will figure out the apps side of things. I don’t think we need yet another service telling us what our friends are doing.”

Primiani said he dislikes what he called a “heavy” background and containers, which he claimed made the site feel slower than it did in previous iterations.

And, like Primiani, Doll said he is “still getting used to the two-column design for the Timeline. It looks great, but having to switch your attention back and forth can make it tough to keep track of where you are.”

But Primiani sums up the intentions of Facebook’s designers neatly in his verbal thumbs-up: “I think it is a step in the right direction to get an instant snapshot of who this person is as a whole very quickly.” In fact, that’s exactly what Facebook was going for.

“It gives you a sense that your life is a story that you’re building with each action you take online,” Doll noted. “It satisfies a very fundamental human need to be a part of something bigger.”

Doll continued to say that he loved the way personal stories were aggregated and summarized — something of a specialty of his. “When you start to think about fitting an entire lifetime into a single view, this becomes essential.”

Longanecker: The order that Stories brings in to your content is positive. It’s easy to become a digital pack-rat and have a disorganized and unusable set of content like boxes of old photographs or journals. Semantics and metadata allow the story to shine through without a ton of effort.

I am glad that Facebook is evolving the way we perceive past content and bringing in the element of time. When was the last time you looked up a post or image that your Facebook friend shared 2 years ago? Now it matters.

Image courtesy of Joey Primiani.

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As a result, while the new Facebook Profiles might look a bit like a WordPress or Tumblr theme, they actually have a lot more in common with a physical scrapbook or a box of old photos once you start using them (and most users will be able to activate the new options within a few weeks).

“We looked at a lot of print, and we did entire studies on scrapbooks,” Facebook product chief Sam Lessin told VentureBeat in an interview in San Francisco.

“We’d get out a big box of old pictures, flip through the photos and talk about them. We were watching test users reminisce over these things, and we tried to design with that in mind and create that experience.”

Reminiscence, memory and nostalgia are concepts that came up over and over in our talk with Lessin. He brought up the fictional Mad Men character Don Draper’s pitch for the Carousel slide projector, a presentation that emphasized memory and emotion.

“We must have watched that Carousel video internally fifty times, thinking about nostalgia,” said Lessin.

And that focus shows. When I activated Timeline on my own profile, I was immediately struck by what Facebook had done.

Years-old memories flashed before me — old friends, old places, things I hadn’t thought about in ages. I got sucked back into the past the same way I would have in front of my mother’s old cedar chest, a trunk packed full of childhood tchotckes and pictures that holds our family’s history.

This innocuous social web tool had just made a powerful and convincing bid for more than my information or my time. Facebook was grasping at my emotions by way of my memories, and it was doing a damn good job.

With Timeline, Facebook is succeeding where so many other web companies have failed: It has created a technology with real emotional power.

Under so strong a grip, I think it unlikely that any Facebook user would seriously consider leaving the site. The company would have to do something egregious to make its users abandon such an elegantly organized personal history of memories and relationships.

Is that scary? It’s as scary as you want to make it. You can still easily export all your posts and photos if you ever want to leave Facebook or simply back up your data. But Facebook is also giving you a well-designed, interactive, shareable, cloud-based scrapbook that’s more useful and possibly more interesting than the traditional format scrapbook sitting at the bottom of your mother’s cedar chest.

How Timeline came to be

The first thing I wanted to know from Lessin is where this Timeline idea came from. Facebook is famous for developing features and products with small teams of two or three employees working independently and intrapreneurially. Had Timeline been the work of a couple designer/hackers coding their butts off for a few months?

Lessin told me that Timeline was different from most other Facebook features in that respect.

“The number of people that touched this to make it happen was enormous. A large part of the design team worked on parts of Timeline. It was uniquely, really collaborative, and it took a village to get it done.”

The new user interface has been a long time coming; in fact, a lot of people have been wondering why a bold Profile redesign didn’t roll out sooner. “The most recent iteration took at least a year,” he said, “but even getting to that point took years.”

Lessin continued, “We had a thousand iterations for this. If you look at books, a lot of timelines are horizontal, so we had a bunch of iterations based on that. There were a lot of designs that we built and unbuilt with different designers.”

Also, Lessin confirmed that the Timeline idea “wasn’t something we at Facebook hadn’t thought about before.” In other words, Facebook has been thinking about chronological design and restructuring Profiles for quite some time – years, in fact. So while the thesis was easy and the end was a lot of work, Lessin said, “The really tough part was the middle. It’s hard to know when to go into build mode.”

Ultimately, one point stood out for the team: Facebook users kept going back in time.

That is, people were constantly looking through deeper, older information on their Walls and friends’ Walls. And that desire to quickly, easily navigate through time, skimming over the detritus but not overlooking the gems, was a large part of what motivated the team to structure the new Profiles as a timeline wherein memories are distilled and important events are highlighted. In the end, Facebook made Profiles an algorithmically derived scrapbook that can contain and beautifully display the most important things about you.

“Time is not a new concept,” said Lessin. “People have been making timelines since the Romans and before. So we had a lot of source material to draw from.”

Lessin also said that, as modern citizens, the designers looked to a wide variety of industries, time periods and places for inspiration. They even got into infographics and information design, which led them to two new hires with deep roots in information design.

“The way the project ended up running, we had certain people who spent 24/7 working on this, living and breathing it,” said Lessin. “Nick Felton was one of them, from the time he joined Facebook to the product launch.”

Felton was an information designer with whom Facebook had worked in the past, primarily on collateral for the company’s 2010 f8 developer conference. Felton is known for being a master of weaving time and information into stunning and clear graphical interfaces. His annual reports are visually fantastic, data-rich representations of personal interactions throughout the year. In short, his work represented exactly the kind of thinking Facebook needed behind Timeline.

Ryan Case was another person Facebook brought on specifically to design the new Profiles. Case was Felton’s co-founder at Daytum, a name the duo established to work on personal data visualization projects. So with a pair of infographic gurus at the helm, Facebook was ready to start building what became Timeline.

How and why Timeline works

As a result, said Lessin, “The design is obviously interesting. There’s a lot that may be familiar, but there’s a lot that’s new.”

With a Timeline-enabled Profile, the above-the-fold area of the screen (the information you see first without any serious scrolling) acts like a table of contents for your life and personality. You can read straight through or skip to the good parts, like what music someone likes or highlight posts from the year you met him or her.

The first thing each Timeline page displays is a large header image that Lessin called a “cover photo.” Because of the dimensions of the image space, this isn’t really an appropriate place to plaster up yet another headshot; rather, it’s a space to show people what you’re about. Facebook is channeling its users from narcissism toward genuine self-expression.

“There are a lot of reasons for your profile picture to be a picture of you,” said Lessin, “but people have been hacking that for self-expression. Watching people choose their cover photos, people are really using them to express themselves. It’s a rich storytelling opportunity.”

As you scroll down past the header and initial string of app-related information, the Timeline acts much like a prettier version of the Facebook Wall you already have, but the scrolling never stops. Better yet, it never gets boring.

As you continue backwards in time down the page, you see less detail and more of the bigger picture. You’ll get the highlights of months and years past. You’ll get highly visual content that triggers memories; you’ll be reminded of when you first made important friendships. If you see an event, image, or update that strikes you as particularly important, you can star it; the item will become a full-page-width pictorial display.

“The first few minutes of using the product is zipping through and looking at their memories, things that have always been there but weren’t easy to surface,” said Lessin.

For those who want to dig deeper, the Timeline theme (chronologically organized information that has more detail for recent events and big highlights for later events) carries throughout the applications listed on your Profile. Want to see all your Spotify information? It’s right there in a consistent, easy-to-browse timeline. Even the geographically organized map view, which sorts all your posts and photos by location, has a timeline on the side.

Ultimately, Facebook has managed to make something that is completely and visually personal without resorting to the kind of customization options that made a designer’s nightmare out of MySpace.

“We really wanted to make this feel like it’s yours,” Lessin told us. “It’s designed very differently from News Feed. I don’t know how the rest of the site is going to evolve over time, but the central concept is that if something is yours, it should feel different from other people’s pages and other Timelines on Facebook.”

While the design focus was intense and highly specialized and the engineering behind Timeline involved “a lot of heavy lifting,” Lessin said the most important part of building Timeline was an understanding of how people engage with one another and with information online.

“We had to figure out the interactions that people wanted to have, the social construction … We like to think we have a competency in that,” he said.

Finally, I was left wondering how Facebook users would react to the changes. Historically, Facebook makes incremental tweaks to the interface, and users revolt in agony and frustration. They don’t leave the site, but much to-do is made over the smallest adjustments. Molehills become mountains. So how are users going to handle an actual mountain?

“I think Facebook users prepare each other,” said Lessin. “One of the things we did with our last Profile redesign was we had an opt-in period. Facebook users who got in early taught one another and helped one another. This time, we also have an opt-in period.”

This opt-in period will give users ample time to explore and answer important questions about the new interface. “One aspect is, can you use your own Timeline? How shocking is this to you? Who is seeing what? So this window lets people hide posts and adjust their new Profile before turning it on,” said Lessin.

“It’s a big product, and there are a lot of different features. But learning it really comes when your mom asks you or when you teach a friend. Getting the product early to people who can help with that is how we navigate these things.”

For skeptics who believe we’re in the midst of a gaming industry bubble, the idea is just more evidence of mass hysteria among game makers. But the believers say that they can see the stepping stones to the goal, and they’re all grounded in an achievable reality.

New platform technologies such as HTML5 and mobile devices, the growing popularity of gaming, a receptive mass market, cloud gaming and changing demographics could all make it happen in the not-so-distant future, said Peter Relan (pictured right), chairman of YouWeb, which has incubated four high-profile game startups.

Speaking at the jam-packed HTML5 Dev Conference (which drew 1,200 attendees to San Francisco this week), Relan said that HTML5 — the next lingua franca of the web — will enable cross-platform games, where you can write a game once and publish it across many different platforms. HTML5 games are slow and don’t take advantage of each new device’s unique capabilities yet, but the standard is being updated and supplemented with technologies such as Relan’s own startup, Spaceport, which has made an HTML5 rendering engine combined with Javascript.

“We want to create the game that reaches a billion people,” Relan said. “We sense that web 3.0 is here. Mobile devices will get to six billion people. They will become pervasive. We will have the ability as app developers to build apps that, with a push of a button, could update the user experience of a billion people, just the way that Google does when it changes its search theme for Thanksgiving.”

It might seem like a game that reaches a billion people would have to be really simple and unsophisticated. But Relan said, “We greatly overestimate what we can do with a technology in two years, and greatly underestimate what we can do in 10 years. We’ve reached an inflection point in technology. When the iPhone first came out, the most popular games were arcade games. Now they are free-to-play, social freemium games. HTML5 games will start out as arcade titles. Then they will evolve. The technology is here to be the great normalizer across the platforms.”

He added, “The mobile web is combining the internet’s universal access with what the iPhone brought us, the simplicity of the app. That combination has never happened before.”

Zynga’s rapid growth on Facebook to more than 265 million monthly active users has inspired game companies to reach for a broader mass market. Facebook itself can’t yet deliver a billion users for one game, since the social network has only 800 million users. But if you take a game and publish it on Facebook, on Apple’s iPhone, on Google Android devices, and on web sites around the globe, it is possible to reach a billion users.

Back in July, Peter Vesterbacka (pictured left, on the right), the “Mighty Eagle” at Rovio, the maker of Angry Birds, argued that his company’s huge mass market game would be the big one.

“We want to be the first entertainment brand with a billion fans,” he said in a talk at the Casual Connect conference in Seattle. “That will take us two or three years to do.”

Already, Angry Birds has reached more than 350 million downloads, and it has become a recognized brand faster than just about any other cultural phenomenon. The simple bird slingshot game is played for more than 300 million minutes each day, and that is enabling the company to raise a round of funding that could value Rovio at more than $1.2 billion. “To get to the one billion fans, we will expand to all screens. The biggest platform for us is currently the smartphone (iOS, Android etc.), but we expect big growth on the web and also on lower-end phones,” Vesterbacka said in an email. Rovio is also expanding into the living room via initiatives like Angry Birds on the Roku2 box, and it is taking a multi-pronged approach to expanding in China.

“Facebook has 800 million users and they are not even in China, so reaching the billion should be pretty straightforward,” Vesterbacka said.

It’s a matter of removing obstacles to the expansion of the game industry and knocking down barriers that prevent a game from being distributed to the widest possible audience.

“Everything is coming together,” said David Helgason (pictured right), chief executive of Unity Technologies, maker of the browser-based Unity game engine. “Our industry is making quantum leaps forward. The web is closing the gap with the console technologies.” Helgason’s game tools “democratize game development” by enabling game designers to turn out sophisticated 3D games.

These games will run as well on smartphones as they do on high-end computers. And they won’t be crappy. They will have some of the same high-end 3D graphics features and awesome storylines and characters as traditional console titles, Helgason said at the Unite 11 conference this week.

It’s not just the goofy new game leaders who are talking about a billion gamers. Traditional game companies have the same goal. John Riccitiello, chief executive of EA, said that the global video game community would soon top a billion players.

“A few years ago, I think there were a couple of hundred million consumer participants in our industry. I think we are going to break a billion in a year or two,” Riccitiello said in an interview with Reuters at the E3 video game conference in Los Angeles.

Zynga, meanwhile, the new arch rival of EA, has a goal of connecting the world through games, said Owen Van Natta, chief business officer at Zynga. It will do so by taking its popular Facebook games and spreading them across mobile devices and other platforms.

Venture capitalists are looking to fund game companies that have a very big vision for reaching the widest audiences. “My sights are set on the company that can create the billion-player game,” said Relan, an active game investor.

“There are really game-changing things that will happen when you can play games across all of your screens,” said Josh Elman, a former Facebook and Twiter product manager who is a principal at venture firm Greylock Partners. “We are looking at companies that can take massive advantage of these platforms and build something that is unique and defensible.”

In addition to HTML5 and Unity, other technologies such as Adobe’s upcoming Flash 11, the WebGL 3D gaming standard, Facebook’s Project Spartan for mobile phones, and other technologies will make it easier and easier to share high-quality experiences across more and more platforms at very low production and distribution costs.

David Brevik (pictured left), president of Gazillion Entertainment, a maker of massively multiplayer online games, said in his speech at the Unite 11 conference that we could see a “Golden Age” of games return for developers and publishers. He points to console-quality browser games, no need to install anything, tablets and smartphones, cloud gaming. The stars are becoming aligned in networking, graphics, input systems, distribution, and business models.

The internet has provided the reach to billions of people. High-quality graphics will soon become available on everything from Facebook to mobile phones, thanks to technologies such as fast mobile chips, 3D game tools such as Unity, Adobe’s Flash 11 and Air 3 technologies, and HTML5 combined with Javascript. Touchscreens are far easier as input systems. Distribution is becoming both cross-platform and viral. And the free-to-play business model — where users play for free and pay real money for virtual goods in small transactions — is able to enlist more and more new gamers.

“This is very exciting,” he said. “You have to ask, ‘what would Nintendo do with this?’”

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The first time I met Box.net chief executive Aaron Levie, he showed me a magic trick with a deck of cards.

A year later, the 26-year-old was standing on stage (in his typical electric orange sneakers) in front of 350 customers and press at his company’s first annual conference, BoxWorks, held yesterday in San Francisco. He had just turned down a buyout offer worth more than $500 million. That evening, Box.net hosted a party where the entertainment was one of his favorite bands from middle school, Third Eye Blind.

Levie has come a long way since middle school. In fact, he and his company have emerged as iconic figures for the new wave of enterprise technology.

Like Steve Jobs, Marc Benioff and Mark Zuckerberg, Levie is part inspirational leader and part visionary. More to the point, Box.net is part of a new wave of startups that are bringing new ways of thinking into the enterprise, borrowing from Apple’s consumer playbook. For instance: make something simple, easy to use and insanely useful, something that you would have never realized you needed, but can’t live without today. It’s a totally different way of working than most enterprise technology companies.

“In the last 10 years, it feels like something fundamental is changing, consumer computing is leading the industry,” Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Marc Andreessen told VentureBeat. (Andreessen Horowitz is one of Box.net’s investors.) “Consumers get the hottest mobile devices years ahead in advance before adoption in the enterprise.”

Box.net was started in 2005 in a garage by a bunch of University of Southern California students. It has since gone on to capture the attention of investors and massive companies. The enterprise-focused cloud storage provider went from five-figure revenues in its first year to millions by the time it closed its first round of funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson in 2006 and more than $10 million by its fourth round in February, 2011, Meritech Capital managing director George Bischof said.

Today, the company has more than 7 million users and 77 percent of the largest companies in the world on the Fortune 500 list have deployed its service in some form. Box.net just closed an extension to its most recent funding round worth $50 million that includes its existing investors — including Draper Fisher Jurveston, Andreessen Horowitz and Meritech Capital, all Facebook investors — and also a new investment from Salesforce.com. In total, the company has raised more than $130 million in funding.

“We were kind of kicking ourselves for not getting in earlier, but they were below our revenue threshold,” Bischof told VentureBeat. “We met a year before, and we saw it had the potential to be one of those mega-spaces that affects everyone.”

And half of the $130 million is still in the bank, Draper Fisher Jurveston partner Josh Stein told VentureBeat. The most recent round is an extension to its fourth round of funding, which had already brought in $48 million. Box.net is gearing that funding toward infrastructure costs and opening a third data center to run alongside its existing two centers to manage the load from its new customers.

Now, using all those new enterprise applications is basically a prerequisite for an investment by Andreessen Horowitz, Andreessen said. Every company funded by Andreessen Horowitz in the past year has used Box.net to some extent, along with a mishmash of the other enterprise 2.0 applications like Google Docs and Workday, he said. Most of the time they are either free to try out — in the case of freemium apps like Yammer and Box.net — or are dirt cheap.

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We caught up with 29 electric car manufacturers and developers to find out what they’re doing today. Some are still going strong, some have begun actively producing their cars, and some … well, not every startup can survive.

Most major car companies have begun working on a hybrid electric car or a pure battery-powered electric car. The Nissan Leaf and the Chevy Volt, two of the cheapest electric cars on the market, now cost less than $50,000. And there are plenty of other battery-powered and hybrid electric cars in the pipeline that will bring those costs even lower.

This list is sorted according to car availability and release dates based on publicly available information.

Battery-Powered Electric Cars

Battery-powered electric cars are emerging as reliable forms of transportation. The Nissan Leaf is currently the leader in the early adopter market for battery-powered electric cars. It costs around $35,000 and has a range of around 100 miles. Tesla Motors’ cars have much higher ranges — the Model S is expected to be able to travel around 300 miles between charges — but are more expensive. Battery-powered electric vehicles face longer turnaround times than hybrids because they take longer to charge than filling up a gas tank.

American Electric Vehicle: Kurrent
American Electric Vehicle (AEV) advises its potential drivers to “slow down,” which seems like wise advice, given the golf cart-inspired design of its Kurrent car. Still, it’s ridiculously cheap.
Price: $10,000
Range/Top Speed: 40 miles/25mph
Release date: Available now

Commuter Cars: Tango T600
The Tango is an oddball. It’s less than half the width of a normal car, and two can fit in a single lane. It also accelerates like a bat out of hell, going from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 4 seconds. But this guy will cost you an arm and a leg. Future versions are planned to be much cheaper, and have longer ranges.
Price: $108,000
Range/Top Speed: 80 miles/150mph
Release date: Available now

Dynasty Electric Car Corp.: IT Sedan
This Canadian company sells five different models, although they all look relatively similar. The IT Sedan is another slow-moving electric car, which brings the cost of the car down.
Price: $19,000
Range/Top Speed: 30 miles/24mph
Release Date: Available now

Pure Mobility: Kewet Buddy
Somewhat reminiscent of the Think (now in the deadpool section below), the Buddy is currently only available in its first launch country, Norway.
Price: $28,000
Range/Top Speed: 37 miles/56mph
Release Date: Available now

Fly Bo: FB-3000
The FB-3000, which bears a strong resemblance to the Smart Car, is produced in China.
Price: $10,000
Range/Top Speed: 60 miles/35mph
Release Date: Available now

Global Electric Motorcars (GEM): e2
GEM is a division of Chrysler. Its vehicles resemble golf carts. Polaris Industries acquired the company earlier this year. It currently has six vehicles that are primarily geared to intra-city use.
Price: $7,500
Range/Top Speed: 35 miles/25mph
Release Date: Available now

Myers Motors: NmG (No more Gas)
The NmG is a three-wheeled car with room for only one passenger. It doesn’t go far, but it’s quite speedy. Myers Motors is based in Tallmadge, Ohio.
Price: $22,500
Range/Top Speed: 30 miles/75mph
Release Date: Available now

Reva: G-Wiz
The Indian-produced Reva still isn’t available in the United States. It’s considered unsafe at high speeds, so it may never make it here.
Price: $16,000
Range/Top Speed: 50 miles/50mph
Release Date: Available now

Smith Electric Vehicles: Edison
The Edison, a large van designed for local deliveries, is Smith’s smallest model, meaning drivers don’t need a special license to operate it. The company, based in the United Kingdom also makes several larger delivery trucks. Smith Electric Vehicles raised $58 million in March.
Price: Unconfirmed
Range/Top Speed: 100 miles/50mph
Release Date: Available now

Twike: The Twike
The company sold out its 2007 Twike line of three-wheeled vehicles. It’s based in Switzerland, but sells in several other countries, including the United States. The company has sold between 20 and 25 Twikes in the U.S. The Twike is registered as a motor cycle by the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Price: $24,400
Range/Top Speed: 80 miles/53mph
Release Date: Available now

Venturi: Fétish
Another high-end electric sports car (and we stress high-end — look at that price!), the Fétish is manufactured in Monaco. Venturi plans to continue manufacturing the Fétish until 2015.
Price: $400,000
Range/Top Speed: 155 miles/100mph
Release Date: Available now

Universal Electric Vehicles: Spyder
UEV’s Spyder has a sporty design, but the company itself doesn’t seem as slick and polished as some of the competitors. The company’s website is just an explanation of the car and the doesn’t indicate how to order it (which you can apparently do by calling the company). The company is based in Thousand Oaks, Calif.
Price: $70,000
Range/Top Speed: 300 miles/80mph
Release Date: Available Now

Miles Electric Vehicles: ZX40S
Miles Electric Vehicles specializes in low-speed cars and trucks that don’t require a lot of juice to run. The vehicles are also cheap because they don’t have to include the same safety standards that higher-speed cars require, such as airbags.
Price: $19,500
Range/Top Speed: 40 to 50 miles/25mph
Release Date: Available Now

Zap! Electric Cars: Alias
Zap! Electric Cars stopped producing the Xebra, its earlier electric car model, in 2008. Its next car is the sporty Alias. The company has also begun work on the A380, an SUV that Zap! says can travel around 350 miles on a single charge. The website indicates that the Alias was supposed to go into production in June, but there are no new details. The company is based in Santa Rosa, Calif.
Price: $38,500
Range/Top Speed: 100 miles/85mph
Release Date: “Accepting reservations”

Lightning Car Company: Lightning GT
This is the United Kingdom’s answer to the Tesla Roadster. The Lightning GT is still slated for a 2012 delivery, and the company is taking pre-orders for the car.
Price: $293,000
Range/Top Speed: 150 miles/124mph
Release Date: 2012

Arcimoto: Arcimoto SRK
The Arcimoto SRK is a two-seater battery-powered electric vehicle. It’s a bit like a three-wheeled electric powered jeep. Like other independent electric car makers, the company has a pretty small retail footprint.
Price: $17,500
Range/Top Speed: 160 miles/65mph
Release Date: Late 2012

Tesla Motors: Model S, Model X
The first shipments of the Silicon Valley-based company’s second electric car, the Model S, are expected early next year. Tesla Motors is working on a battery-powered electric SUV called the Model X, which it will unveil later this year.
Price: $57,400 (Model S)
Range/Top Speed: 300 miles/120mph
Release Date: early 2012 (Model S)

Phoenix Motorcars: Phoenix SUT
Phoenix Motorcars was originally planning to produce a sport-utility vehicle, but it has halted development as of last year. The company has since begun working on a sport-utility truck that’s due next year. The company is based in Ontario, Calif.
Price: $45,000
Range/Top Speed: 70 miles/80mph
Release Date: 2012

Motor Development International: MiniFlowAir
These tiny, unusual little vehicles are powered entirely by compressed air. Motor Development International unveiled a concept car, the AirPod, in 2009 and has since started working on several other air-powered cars. The company is based in Carros, France.
Price: $12,600
Range/Top Speed: 110 miles/68mph
Release Date: 2013

Aptera: 2e
In August, Aptera was forced to return 2,500 $500 security deposits due to a snafu with its credit card processor. The company filed for a $184 million loan from the U.S. Department of Energy but was denied. It’s still waiting to hear back about approval for a $75 million loan.
Price: $30,000
Range/Top Speed: 100 miles/TBA
Release Date: TBA

Persu (formerly Venture Vehicles): Persu V3
The Persu is a sleek three-wheeled electric scooter-like car that looks like it comes out of a sci-fi film. The car has plenty of buzz and showed up on Top Gear, a show that tests out supercars like the Tesla Roadster. Persu is based in Los Angeles, Calif.
Price: $25,000
Range/Top Speed: 350 miles/100mph
Release Date: 2014

Proterra: Proterra EcoRide
A Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers-backed electric car manufacturer, Proterra specializes in making buses powered by electric motors. Those buses are meant for public transportation in large cities like Chicago and San Francisco.
Price: TBA
Range/Top Speed: 400 miles/65mph
Release Date: TBA

Mission Motors: Mission One PLE
The Mission One PLE is a concept electric motorbike produced by Mission Motors. The company licenses its electric motors and powertrains out to other car manufacturers. Mission Motors is based in San Francisco, Calif.
Price: TBA
Range/Top Speed: 150 miles/150mph
Release Date: TBA

Wrightspeed: X-1
Wrightspeed recently cut the ribbon on a manufacturing plant for its supercharged electric car, the X-1. That car was last spotted on a track in April racing past a Tesla Roadster, for those of you keeping score. The X-1 is a formula one-esque supercar developed by Ian Wright, originally a founding team member of Tesla Motors.
Price: TBA
Range/Top Speed: 100 miles/104mph
Release Date: TBA

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The case highlights the growing problem of chip counterfeiting, which can put dangerously flawed electronic components in everything from U.S. military weapon systems to everyday consumer electronics goods. In this case, the defendants were busted in an undercover operation, and records from the case “paint a disturbing picture of the complex level of fraud taking place behind the face” of the VisionTech web site and its offices, according to a sentencing document.

The case offers a rare peek into the shadowy underworld of chip counterfeiting. The scary part is that the chips are used in critical systems and there is no telling when they will suffer a catastrophic failure. VisionTech’s counterfeit components were sold to every sector of the electronics industry, and most of those devices have still not been recovered.

“Counterfeit products may cause vehicles, trains, or planes to crash,” said one chip maker who testified in the case. But too often, these kinds of crimes go unreported because companies don’t want to admit they’ve been bamboozled.

U.S. Attorney Ronald Machen of Washington, D.C., and Sherri Schornstein, Assistant U.S. Attorney, said the harm caused by the case is “immeasurable and cannot be undone.” Prosecutors point out that a single short-circuit can ruin a chip and knock out a critical system in a fighter jet. That’s why counterfeit chips are “extremely disturbing and” raise public health, safety and national security concerns, the document said.

In their document, the prosecutors said, “It is impossible to retrieve the hundreds of thousands of counterfeit devices sold by VisionTech.”

The window into fraud at VisionTech

The chips sold by VisionTech were supposed to be “military grade,” but they were in fact counterfeits from Hong Kong and China. VisionTech employee Stephanie McCloskey pleaded guilty in the case and is awaiting sentencing at the end of the month on charges related conspiracy to distribute counterfeit chips and commit mail fraud. McCloskey admitted to one count of conspiracy and aiding and abetting, and she agreed to cooperate with the investigation. Her upcoming sentencing is the first ever involving distribution of counterfeit integrated circuits, or chips, according to the document.

The owner of VisionTech Components, Shannon Wren, who lived in Treasure Island, Fla., died of an apparent drug overdose in May. The 42-year-old Wren was described as having a passion for drag racing. He owned an apparel store in a trendy Tampa district and was a regular at the Pinellas Park SunShine Dragstrip. Had Wren been tried, he could have faced 35 years in prison.

On Sept. 14, 2010, Wren and McCloskey were both arrested in Florida. In the raid, police seized luxury vehicles, a motor home, numerous motorcycles, a beach home and four other properties, and funds in several bank accounts. More than 30 computers and 200 boxes of suspected counterfeit chips were taken. To gather evidence, investigators had to forage through 16 terabytes of data, or the equivalent of 4 million pages of text.

At the outset, investigators charged Wren and McCloskey with 10 counts related to counterfeiting and accused them of selling fake chips to 1,101 buyers for $16 million over five years. The firm had nine employees.

Some of the chips in question showed evidence of “black topping,” a process where counterfeiters grind off the original markings, paint the packages with a black paint, and then re-mark the devices with counterfeit marks. The marks falsely suggest that the devices have a certain brand, date code, lot code or country of origin, and are of a certain quality. Re-marked chips can be sold for much higher prices.

Inspectors can visually spot remarked chips sometimes, but they can also use “acetone testing” to check the permanency of ink-marked integrated circuits. Legitimate chips will always pass the acetone test, because the ink is cured to ensure that acetone or other corrosive elements will not remove the original ink markings. Inspectors can also examine a chip with X-rays to see if the chip is properly connected to its package. But electrically testing a chip often requires an expensive piece of equipment. In 2007, a VisionTech employee told its fake-chip supplier to use “stronger ink” and to use acetone to “make sure the ink does not come off” because customers were beginning to use acetone on all parts.

The chips were acquired from sources in China with the counterfeit marks on them, and they were imported into the U.S. through a variety of ports. On 35 different occasions, chips destined for VisionTech were seized at U.S. ports as counterfeit. A total of 59,540 chips were seized. Wren never challenged a single one of these seizures. And from 2007 through mid-2010, VisionTech imported 3,263 shipments — 95 percent of them from the same fake chip supplier in China. When U.S. officials began inspecting packages labeled “integrated circuits,” VisionTech started labeling them “electronic components.”

Companies that claimed damages from the chip fraud included major chip firm such as Analog Devices, and Raytheon. Other named customers that were victims of VisionTech are Dependable Component Sourcing, LCL Electronics, ITC Medical, Greystone Components, Bisco Industries, Abacus Technologies, Able Electronics, Global Wide Electronics Group, Baya Technologies, Merefield Electronics and Atonic Technologies.

Distributors such as Component Sourcing Solutions and Pacific IC Source lost some of their valued customers, based on the fact that they had bought chips from VisionTech. Raytheon found 1,500 flash memory chips it bought from Pacific IC Source, which bought the chips from VisionTech, were counterfeit. The devices were installed on 28 circuit cards assemblies and all failed. That cost Raytheon tens of thousands of dollars. Raytheon filed a report and cut off Pacific IC Source as a customer.

“I feel as though I have been made a fool,” said Naomi Ryder, the president of Pacific IC Source, according to the document. “Just the thought that someone could have died because of this crime sickens me.”

In a letter to Wren, Atonic’s representative said, “Listen Shannon. We are talking about planes and military, security devices….We already have had many issues with you and you already made me lose my top five customers.” A representative at Global Wide Electronics Group said in an email, “Who works in your warehouse — Stevie Wonder? These parts are awful.”

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With 28,000 employees and a constant stream of new hires, HR is an important topic at Google. But true to Google’s engineering roots, HR, just like any other area of the company, needs to produce data to justify decisions and policies. This led to the creation of a people-analytics team, a hodge-podge of data miners, psychologists and MBAs.

One of the team’s better known endeavours is Project Oxygen, Google’s quest to build a better boss, or at least identify what makes a good one. Project Oxygen initially set out to determine if managers matter. In the very early days, Google got rid of all managers. Although they were later reintroduced, a belief persisted within the company that managers do not really make a difference.

So the analytics team looked at a combination of performance review data and employee surveys, where employees review their bosses to determine whether there were significant differences between the impact of the best and worst bosses. The answer from the data was a resounding “yes”.

The people analytics team pushed on to try to determine the common characteristics of the best managers and how to improve the skills of the worst. The conclusion was a list of the 8 skills of a good manager, at least according to Googlers. One surprise was that a boss’s technical expertise is much less important to employees than the ability to take a genuine interest in their lives and careers. The best bosses didn’t micromanage, had a clear vision for the team and were results-oriented.

The worst managers also had some behaviours in common. Googlers generally like having regular, one-to-one meetings with their managers. “One thing that was consistent among the struggling managers was that they were not consistent in who they offered one-to-ones to,” explains Dekas. “They may have been meeting with people who weren’t performing well, or with those who were performing exceptionally well”. One best practice that Google introduced, based on the insights from Project Oxygen, was to institute one-on-one meetings with all team members. The company also completely redesigned its training for new managers in line with the results. One year after project Oxygen reached its conclusions, “75 percent of our struggling managers have significantly improved,” Dekas reports.

Another project the team undertook was to forecast the future organizational structure of Google based on current hiring and promotion practices. It turned out that if Google continued to promote at the current rate, it would end up “fat in the middle”, with many middle-ranking employees and fewer opportunities for junior hires to advance. So Google implemented a new practice where the company doesn’t directly replace employees who are promoted or leave the company but instead hires new employees at a lower level. The people analytics team forecast that this would make career advancement easier for junior employees.

Debunking HR myths also turned out to be an important function of the analytics team. Like any company, Googlers had persistent, but often erroneous beliefs, about HR issues. Typical myths were that employees at Google’s headquarters were promoted more quickly than those in other Google offices, or that Googlers who worked on “shiny projects” were more likely to be promoted. The data showed that neither of these hypotheses was actually true, but the analysis did reveal that getting feedback from senior peers was the most important factor if you want to be promoted within Google.

Google’s HR process is currently the acme of data-driven people management. I asked Dekas if any room remains at Google for gut feeling or intuition. “You can’t have an algorithm for everything” says Dekas. “You use data to inform, but you don’t rely on the data to make the decision.”