Earlier this week Adobe announced it was abandoning traditional boxed product in favor of Creative Cloud, Creative Suite’s digital and subscription-based equivalent. Although Adobe maintains that many customers have already made the transition to Creative Cloud and have no intention of looking back, the comments on the coverage across the web have been notably negative on the move.

VentureBeat sat down with Adobe Software Marketing Executive Scott Morris at the Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles to discuss the reaction to the controversial announcement.

VentureBeat: In all of your time with Adobe, has there ever been a more divisive announcement than the one made this week about moving to the cloud?

Scott Morris: I don’t think I’ve ever had a time in my career, at Adobe or Macromedia or any other company I was at, where we’ve been going through as massive a change as what we’re going through at Adobe right now. The introduction of Creative Cloud last year was huge for Adobe, but even then, even though we had two very discrete and different offerings, both new and both available at the same time with the introduction of CS6 and Creative Cloud, it took a while for customers to really understand what Creative Cloud was about. We’ve done that now, but this is definitely a huge transitional moment for Adobe.

From a controversy perspective, we know that a lot of customers are ready for Creative Cloud, because they’ve moved there in really big numbers already. But we definitely know that not everyone is ready. It was 10 years ago, in 2003, that Adobe introduced the idea of Creative Suite. There were some similar reactions at the time, where a lot of customers were upset or frustrated or angry and didn’t understand what Adobe was doing. They thought this was just Adobe’s way to get more money out of them and things like that.

Then, what they saw over time was that the value they were actually getting from the Suite was high. They were spending less than if they were buying multiple individual products. The value we could give them by integrating the tools really tightly, where work flows between the apps, was significant. Now fast-forward to 2013, when pretty much everyone is on Creative Suite, or now Creative Cloud. We’re going through something like that. We’re going through a change that is at least as significant and probably more so, because we’re also pretty dramatically changing the whole model.

VentureBeat: Not only on VentureBeat, but also on TechCrunch and pretty much every site that I checked, for the announcement of Creative Cloud, there were hundreds and hundreds of comments of people complaining, with maybe literally one or two people who stuck their neck out to defend it. Did you feel the reaction to the Creative Cloud thing kind of overshadowed all of the features that were announced for CC? How does Adobe plan to work around that?

Morris: Yeah, that’s a great question. You’re the first person to ask me that, and also, since we’re doing this a [couple days in], you’ve had a chance to see those comments and that reaction, so you have kind of a unique perspective. We expected there to be some of the community reaction that you’re seeing. We’re introducing a huge change for our customers. There are a lot of them who are already on board. They’ve already moved to Creative Cloud. There’s a bunch more who we know are excited.

What I also saw was, there were very specific examples of people who’ve been complaining about the Creative Cloud model – customers of ours on very public forums, like on Creative COW. If you actually look at those, some of those same customers are saying, “All right. I like what I saw with CC so much, even though I’m hesitant about this, I just signed up.” We have a specific example of that with this one guy who was really, really upset on Creative COW the last couple of months, and then just yesterday, one of my colleagues showed me his tweet. He’s like, “I gave in. I signed up. I love what the CC apps have in them.” So I think there definitely was some of that negative community reaction from people just not being ready for this big of a change.

I don’t think it overshadowed all the goodness that we released. I’m sure, to a certain extent, it did. I’m sure there are customers who right now are so focused on the change that they’re not taking a good hard look at what the actual offering is. But that will come over time. It’s going to be part of people’s process for figuring out what they want to do moving forward. Some of them will just sit on CS6 for a while, some of them will move immediately to the cloud, and some of them are going to wait and see what happens and then take a deeper look. We hope that then they’re going to move, because we think it’s a pretty great release. But everyone has to be on their own path.

VentureBeat: Did Adobe look at something like Steam or any similar digital distribution service to reference what works and what doesn’t for Creative Cloud?

Morris: We’ve definitely looked at all the different models and the different examples of what other companies have done, peer companies. We looked a lot harder at what Autodesk does and what Microsoft has done and what some of our competitors or peer companies in the creative space have done. We also have a lot of people who have joined Adobe in the last two years who came from some of those companies and worked on those businesses, companies that transitioned from a traditional shrink-wrapped software business to a services-based business.

We brought that knowledge in-house to help us with the transition and we examined what other folks had done. What we’re doing is unique. I think even if you look at Microsoft, they offer their subscription offerings, but they also offer their perpetual… The subscription offering actually hasn’t been as successful. We decided that splitting ourselves like that actually didn’t make sense for us. Evaluating companies that had to do that, that had to manage the traditional shrink-wrapped software and the new model of services… That’s really tough to do. It was tough for us to do in the last year. That’s why we said that we’re just going to focus on one thing.

VentureBeat: I come from the games industry, where every year, especially at E3 — which is kind of like the Adobe Max for the entire games industry — a lot of CEOs and suits and businessmen get up and tell you what you’re supposed to be excited about for the holiday season and the coming fiscal year. It’s always extremely forced and usually extremely awkward as a quick search on YouTube can attest to.

Yet when I watched the keynote and the Sneaks from MAX, everyone from Adobe was very genuine and really enthusiastic about what they were talking about. Not only are these the people who make it and make decisions around it, but they’re also people that use it, which is not always true of other companies and industries. So with that said, when the entire company make such a dramatic shift in one direction, who is involved in that decision?

Morris: The business decision, in terms of the path that we chose forward, is made at a pretty senior level, but with input from people all throughout the company. But actually, having that change be socialized throughout the whole company and getting the whole company on board is a huge effort. Everyone takes part in that. So in terms of the decision, do you mean how we get the whole company aligned like that?

VentureBeat: Correct. Was there alignment, or was there just kind of like a memo handed down? “Hey, guys, by the way…”

Morris: [laughs] No, it actually didn’t work that way at all. We were very deliberate in terms of getting feedback from employees, from customers, from partners all over the last year and a half. Even before we launched Creative Cloud, we announced that it was coming. At Max, actually, a year and a half ago. So it’s been 18 months that we’ve been talking about Creative Cloud. We spent a lot of time getting feedback. We didn’t know, back then, that we were going to choose one path 18 months later and basically stop any further development on Creative Suite to only focus on Creative Cloud. It caught us by surprise in terms of… We knew Creative Cloud would be successful, but it was even more successful than we thought it would be.

And so you really see that, as an employee, without someone telling me what we’re going to be doing… For me, one of the reasons why it’s been so exciting working at Adobe is because customers who are moving to Creative Cloud really, really love it. They’re very vocal about how much they love it. So while this whole change is difficult for some, when you look at the enthusiasm that the people who have moved to it have… Just look at what they’re putting on social media, like ratings and reviews on our site, or things like Yelp reviews. We don’t control what people post. They can give us one star or five stars. Creative Cloud has a higher star rating than Photoshop, which is unheard of. Just by a little bit, but that’s unheard of. And you read what customers are saying about it.

I think that as a company, it’s been so thrilling over the last year to see that happen and have customers just love Adobe again. When the decision went down throughout the organization that we were only going to focus on this, I don’t think it surprised a lot of people. I think it was easy for the company to get on board, because it feels like a different place even internally now than it was a year and a half ago. It really does.

VentureBeat: Everyone from starving students all the way up to Disney animators use Adobe’s products. Recently, in the past year or so, crowdfunding has surged in popularity, especially on Kickstarter. You see a lot of creative projects popping up, whether it’s an indie film or a game or even an artbook or whatever. Because Adobe’s products do play such a large part in the projects that are being made through crowdfunding, do you have any initiatives that might be of interest to creative teams with really small budgets, such as a sponsorship program for particularly creative indies? For example, Epic Games will still license the Unreal Engine to smaller dev teams who can’t pay for the fees up front. The backend arrangement changes, but they don’t want to exclude anyone from being able to use their product.

Morris: You know, we actually don’t, because that’s a really interesting idea, especially with things like Kickstarter. In fact, someone who is a big influencer for Adobe in the video space just had a Kickstarter project funded on Sunday. He was telling me about it, and it really made me think. I have other friends who’ve put creative-related projects there. They wanted to get a documentary film made and stuff like that. I think that’s something interesting that Adobe probably should look at doing. We do have a program, a community involvement program, where we actually give free software, and in some cases funding, to community organizations or people who are doing really interesting projects, non-profit things. But we don’t really have anything formal beyond that. We don’t. That’s actually a really interesting idea.

SPARCIN debuts today to “create better interviews.” The software opens up a crowdsourced question pool in which members of the community can submit and rate interview questions.

“Interviewing is traditionally a pretty terrible experience. It’s awkward and intimidating for the interviewers and even more so for the candidate” said founder Patrick Hutchinson in an email. “What we’re doing is creating positive experience for both the interviewer and candidate so that at the end of it all, the interviewer is able to make an informed devision about the candidate.”

Interviews are an opportunity for employers and recruiters to dig a little deeper into an applicants experience and judge whether there is a personality match.

By contributing questions, employees not normally involved have the chance to participate. The more they participate, the more of a role they play in supporting the company’s interviews. Contributors can also vote for other people’s questions to promote the queries they think are important.

SPARCIN currently has thousands of questions across hundreds of content-specific categories. The Interview Builder tool finds the highest scoring questions that meet specific needs (category, difficulty, and so on), and the Live Builder feature displays those questions along with possible answers and tips to the interviewer to keep the momentum flowing. After the interview is over, it has tools to aggregate and quantify the results to help recruiters with the next step.

While many recruiting and interviewing products are on the market — like Hirelogy, which provides questions for interviewers, or video-interviewing service HireVue — SPARCIN distinguishes itself by focusing on crowdsourcing.

SPARCIN is the second product crafted by SPARC, a web development shop in Charleston, S.C. Hutchinson was spending significant amounts of time growing SPARC’s team from two to 175 and realized the interview process was not as effective as it could be. In February 2012, he cofounded SPARCIN with Jake Benardot. It was the first launched out of SPARC’s ‘interpreneurship’ program SPARC Ventures.

Check out this infographic from SPARCIN:

It’s one thing to be a company man. Or to toe the company line, parrot the company’s talking points, and be a staunch defender of your team. It’s another to be a bloody idiot and refuse even to acknowledge the rest of the world exists.

Like BlackBerry exec Stephen Bates in a chat with the BBC today.

But the BBC interviewer pursues him doggedly, magnificently, patiently, and wonderfully — at least for us. It’s embarrassing, to say the least, for BlackBerry corporately, and for Bates personally. Here’s the interview (transcript below):

BBC interviewer: What have you learned from Apple?

So BlackBerry is a unique proposition. We’ve got round about 17-18 million customers who love the BlackBerry experience, so we’re taking the essence of that BlackBerry experience and moving it forward.”

BBC interviewer: Have you learned anything from the iPhone?

And … this … market is a great market. There’s a, there’s a change …

BBC interviewer: I’m just wondering, technologically, it’s a pretty straight question, have you?

So, so, so, we … BlackBerry was one of the inventors of the smartphone market. You know, we’ve helped shape what the smartphone market is today, and we’re at the bridge of a new transformation where we see it going from mobile communications to this mobile computing world. And we saw that with our existing BlackBerrys that that would not give us the power to drive this new market.

BBC interviewer: OK, but obviously the iPhone is your main competitor. You all learn from each other. What have you learned from the iPhone?

So, so, the key focus around BlackBerry 10 that we’ve really driven to is to deliver a new unique user experience.

BBC interviewer: So you haven’t learned anything from the iPhone, you’re saying?

So, fun-fundamentally…

BBC interviewer: The new user experience? Sounds a little like you’re reading from a press release. I’m just wondering, you all learn from each other, you say ‘Oh, that’s a good idea.’ And one of the things about the iPhone, which has its faults — they all have their faults — is that it’s very incredibly user-friendly and you can bounce around it and it’s, it’s … so what have you learned from it?

So, so, so, we’ve spent the last few months with BlackBerry 10 engaging our customers, our consumer customers, our business customers, the developers, our partners, and we’ve been interacting about what the new BlackBerry 10 will deliver …

BBC interviewer: OK, you’re clearly not answering that question …

. . .

At this point the Beeb journalist basically gives up trying to get Bates to answer that question and goes on to other topics. You have to love the British, who seem to know how to do mean better, and more politely, than anyone else. Simon Cowell and Piers Morgan come to mind.

It’s a massive fail for BlackBerry, as this has made the news on multiple sites on the same day of BlackBerry’s big new launch. I don’t blame the exec — he was almost certainly coached by PR reps to not mention competitors and keep the focus on BlackBerry — but memo to PR agencies: People do better when they speak naturally.

Let the man have a conversation.

His points — and BlackBerry’s — are much stronger when he acknowledges that maybe, just maybe, there are good mobile products in the universe that did not originate with a company formerly known as Research in Motion.

photo credit: Peter Werkman (www.peterwerkman.nl) via photopin cc

The wireless and wired future won’t happen without Broadcom. The company ships more than a billion chips a year for connecting devices in homes and businesses. Its chips are making cars ready for Internet access. They’re enabling faster Wi-Fi. And they’re part of a new home gateway that will allow you to receive 4K Ultra HD video into your home and share it on various screens and devices.

We caught up with Broadcom’s co-founder Henry Samueli, the former engineering professor who is now chief technical officer, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week. He told us about new technologies coming down the pipe, such as a compression algorithm dubbed High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), that will allow home networks to transfer 4K video without being overwhelmed with data.

He’s also excited about the transition to faster wireless computer networks, or 5G Wi-Fi, which should allow you to transfer video in the home without crashing your wireless network. But he warns that we’re going to have to pay more for our wireless data services.

Samueli walked the floor and told us what was real and what was still a pipe dream. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

VentureBeat: What’s on your agenda here at CES?

Henry Samueli: Well, it’s a big show for Broadcom. This is probably the key trade show we attend every year. Primarily we’re highlighting our broadband products. The company’s split into three groups: broadband, networking, and mobile and wireless. For mobile and wireless, the Mobile World Congress, which is next month, is the main show. Networking is Interop and others. Broadband is our focus at CES.

If you look at the key things going on at the show — and you’ve probably seen a lot of this on the floor besides Broadcom — it’s the whole UltraHD phenomenon. Broadcom just today introduced our BCM7445 (in TV pictured at top), which is a big step forward in set-top box technology. We’re just introducing it now, sampling it. It probably won’t hit the consumer production level until the middle of next year. I’ve walked around the show floor to get a feeling for some of these UltraHD displays, and they’re pretty remarkable.

VB: And the problem is that they generate about four times as much data, I guess?

Samueli: That’s the key. The big advancement in our BCM7445 home gateway chip is that it uses the next-generation compression technology called HEVC — High-Efficiency Video Coding. That cuts the bitrate in half for the same quality. You’ll see it side by side. Even though the bitrate of the 4K by 2K goes up, when you cut that in half, you’re still at a very reasonable bitrate for the carriers.

VB: So it’s about two times, if I get my math right.

Samueli: Right. Exactly.

VB: There’s still the problem of trying to handle twice as much data as they would normally…

Samueli: You’re not going to see a wholesale switch over to all 4K by 2K. It will start with one, two, three, four channels, just like high definition (HD) when it was first introduced. Then there will be more and more. Now, today, most channels are HD. I think it’ll take maybe 10 years before you see a wholesale switch over to UltraHD, but it will happen over time.

The network capacities are expanding. I’m not worried about that. I think you’ll see a nice, gradual shift into UltraHD, especially once the sets come down in price. Today they’re $20,000 dollars or whatever, but as they come down over the next five to 10 years to the same cost as standard full HD today…

VB: Out of curiosity, what will people do when 8K comes along and it’s 16 times as much data? 

Samueli: Same thing. [laughs]

VB: Sharp just introduced one of those.

Samueli: Did you see it?

VB: Not yet, no.

Samueli: Oh, you have to go see it. It’s remarkable. You can stand three inches in front of the screen and still not see the pixels. They’re so tiny. It’ll come along, five years or whatever down the road.

Anyway, probably the hottest thing at the show is the whole UltraHD phenomenon. TV sets are first, but without content, you have nothing. That’s all made-up content you’re seeing on these TVs. The next step is getting the carriers to deliver it, and therefore they need set-top boxes to decode it. That’s where step two comes in. We’re starting to work with the carriers. You’ll probably see the satellite carriers, because they’re more constrained by bandwidth… They want the additional bandwidth reduction of the HEVC. They may even use it on high definition, just to get a lower bitrate.

VB: Is the transition reasonably paced, as far as you can see? Is it going to happen naturally? 

Samueli: Yes. I don’t think it’s unnatural…

VB: When HD came along it was a decades-long process, right?

Samueli: Same thing is going to happen with 4K. It’s really price-driven in the end. The consumer, given the choice of spending $1,000 dollars for a full HD screen or $10,000 dollars for a UltraHD screen, is going to buy the full HD screen. It’ll be five to 10 years before the prices hit those levels. Price regulates the demand and adoption of new technology.

VB: So the 4K technology ecosystem has time to grow up.

Samueli: Exactly. In the 2015 time frame, you’ll probably see more mainstream adoption of set-top box technology using UltraHD. We’ll start shipping it in 2014, but the volume will take off in probably 2015. It’s a slow, natural evolution. There’s no major rush for it. But it’s an exciting transition because it’s a major shift.

We had the hype for 3D TV, which didn’t do too well. I was never a fan. The glasses phenomenon just doesn’t work for me. This is a whole different thing, though. It doesn’t require any glasses. It’s just a better screen. As long as the price is there, people will adopt it.

Another thread that we’re really excited about is the proliferation of wireless everywhere. 5G Wi-Fi in particular. The whole new push to the next generation of Wi-Fi has really opened up new opportunities for media sharing in the house. Older generations of Wi-Fi weren’t quite robust enough to deliver video in the home without breaking up and losing packets and so forth. 5G Wi-Fi gives you extended reach, extended data rates, and more robust coverage. The carriers are now willing to accept Wi-Fi in the set-top box with the 5G Wi-Fi. We’re getting designed in all over the place.

VB: How does 5G Wi-Fi do with 4K video transfer?

Samueli: It should be fine. Again, with double the speed, you’re still okay. If you have a data rate of 10 to 20 megabits per second, you can easily handle that with a 5G Wi-Fi network. It’s not going to be an issue to upgrade video distribution to 5G Wi-Fi. But the devices now are all adopting the software protocols to allow that, like Miracast, which is the Wi-Fi protocol that lets you have peer-to-peer from your phone direct to your TV. You can plug in a little USB dongle to your TV set with a Wi-Fi chip on it that’s enabled with the Miracast software. Then, if your phone has Miracast — which all the latest-generation phones will — you could be watching YouTube on the phone, you hit the button, and boom, it’s showing on your TV set. Media sharing in the house is going to be a big thing going forward for the next few years. We’re proliferating our Wi-Fi technology everywhere. It’s going into thermostats, home appliances, you name it.

VB: For a while, it seems like we’ve had a wireless logjam. Not only in the house with Wi-Fi, but also with mobile data networks. Are you optimistic that these things are going away, that we’re going to be able to do these things as fast as we can on the wired internet? 

Samueli: I think it’s getting pretty close to wired internet speeds. If you look in your home today, gigabit is the maximum speed you could expect to get. With 5G Wi-Fi you can get to gigabit speeds. We just introduced new MoCA technology, which is home networking over the coax cable that already connects up your TVs. We have a demo here of a gigabit MoCA. So we have gigabit Wi-Fi, gigabit MoCA, gigabit ethernet. Powerline is getting close to a gigabit.

VB: And then everybody uploads some 4K video to YouTube and clogs it all up again. 

Samueli: Right. [laughs] Once you have the bandwidth, people will find something. The quality of the streaming will go up. Right now YouTube is fairly low resolution, but as you start watching it on a 60-inch TV instead of your phone, you’re going to want higher resolution and you’ll need a higher-bitrate YouTube. You’ll need the 5G Wi-Fi technology to handle that.

It’s an endless cycle. You get more bandwidth in the home. You get more quality video, which demands more bandwidth, which demands more quality. It never ends. But I think that with gigabit home networking, you’ve got enough bandwidth to handle pretty much all the needs you want for a family all watching independent HD video streams, or even UltraHD quality.

VB: I have to carry around a MiFi now. I’m not happy that a larger percentage of my household income is going towards getting bandwidth in some way. [laughs]

Samueli: That’s the other issue, the economics of it. People are going to start demanding gigabit services from their carriers, and that’s not free. They’re going to charge you for more bandwidth. That may be the regulating phenomenon. Just like how the cost of the flatscreen regulates how many people adopt it, the cost of bandwidth to your house could regulate how much you’re willing to use.

VB: What trend do you think will win out there? Is bandwidth going to get more expensive, or thanks to folks like Google, is it going to be free?

Samueli: No. Fundamentally, bandwidth is not cheap. You have to install a lot of infrastructure. It’s not obvious that the Google model will scale nationally. They can wire up a city to test it, but to wire up a country is expensive. It’s not clear that you can give away the service for free and build a business model out of that. We’ll see. Maybe they can.

VB: If we do a lot more Google searches…

Samueli: [laughs] Exactly. If you can get enough advertising in there, you might be able to do it. At least in the short-term, the mainstream carriers will likely have to charge more for more bandwidth.

VB: Is all of your mathematics done, or do you have other challenges ahead? 

Samueli: There are always challenges. Every technology has a next generation, even on the mobile side. You have LTE (Long-Term Evolution), but there are five different flavors of LTE going forward. The first generation of LTE was introduced with 75 megabits per second. It was called Category 3. Then Category 4 is now 150 megabits per second, which I think is in the iPhone 5. Then you go to Category 6 with 300 megabits. Then you’ll have a 600 megabit LTE. LTE is going to keep increasing in data rates, which means you have to have more sophisticated chips inside the phones to process the signals. Then the cable modem speeds are going to continue to go up. It’s endless. Our guys are always inventing new algorithms and new signal processing techniques to figure out how to get more bandwidth through the same airwaves and the same wires. There’s still more mathematics to be evolved before we’re done, if we’re ever done. I don’t know if we’ll ever be done.

VB: [OnLive founder] Steve Perlman had an interesting talk about DIDO — Distributed In, Distributed Out. It was a way to get around the limitations of Shannon’s Law by basically figuring out where somebody was and directing wireless signals to them, so that they could — in a given cell site area — get the full bandwidth available in that area. Rather than splitting it up with 100 other people, you all get 25 megabits a second. 

Samueli: Yeah, yeah. That goes by many names. MIMO is a more common name for it, but it’s basically the same thing, where you have multiple antennas in both your handset and especially in the base station. You could put a whole array of antennas in the base station and steer the beam to a very narrow target, right to the person you want it to go to. If 10 people are around, you have 10 independent beams being steered, each with its own dedicated bandwidth.

That technology, or at least the systems algorithms, is worked out and well known. It’ll eventually get into the cellular network. It’s probably going to take a decade or so, but I think we’ll get there. Even in our access points today, we do some beam steering technology. Our 3×3 11AC access points have beam forming technology where you can steer the beam towards the client and increase throughput. It’s very sophisticated technology.

VB: Why might that take a decade, that part?

Samueli: You have to upgrade all of the cellular infrastructure to accommodate that. New base stations. That’s a slow process. People know how to do it, but it’s a matter of deploying it. That’s not easily done.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

AgilOne does cloud-based predictive analytics, and at VentureBeat’s recent CloudBeat conference, AgilOne CEO Omer Artun took a few minutes to chat with us about big data topics as well as the startup’s recent funding round.

AgilOne tries to use the cloud to predict parts of the future with some degree of accuracy. The company used CloudBeat to announce its $10 million round of funding and the launch of its product, which provides cloud-based predictive marketing intelligence to help marketers figure out what their customers are going to do before they do it.

Big data itself was a huge topic at the conference. One of the more interesting revelations as one speaker’s assertion that companies were collecting vast amounts of unstructured data on consumers — data that they then were ill-equipped to actually use. Many of the startups at CloudBeat were attempting to meet that need, to make data from social media and other inputs actually useful.

How do you take something as boring (though admitedly useful) as a public transit map and make it fun? By injecting video game characters into it. Digital artist Dave Delisle is the creator of works such as MarioBART, which turns the map of the San Francisco Bay Area-based tranist system into a fun piece of 16-bit Mario Kart-themed art.

GamesBeat: Could I carry MarioBART around the Bay Area and use it for mass transit? Would I get where I want to go?

Dave Delisle: Feedback from locals is that the map is very accurate! I did my best to ensure every stop was marked clearly. Having said that, the lack of truly apparent terrain and landmarks might make this tough for a tourist, so I’d say you’d do OK, but not as well as a local.

GamesBeat: You use Inkscape, Gimp, and Maya Learning Edition for your art. They’re free. Did you learn all the software on your own?

Delisle: I went to school for Maya. The other two were self-taught — lots of Googling. I am still learning to use Maya effectively. You could probably notice my improvement artistically from the start of the blog in early 2010.

GamesBeat: I take it that geeky design is more of a hobby?

Delisle: It has become a hobby, that is for sure. Prior to all this, I did very little art for myself besides some sketching. I could always draw well.

GamesBeat: Is your day job related to design?

Delisle: Yes, I do mostly freelance art or animation. I have a lot of input creatively for both, so I am helping on the design side, not just churning out art.

GamesBeat: Would you turn this into full-time a job if you could?

Delisle: It’s something I am considering. I do OK for traffic and get a lot of attention from many other sites and some media outlets. Perhaps one day down the road, if this continues to grow, I’ll turn it into a full-time gig.

GamesBeat: Have any major companies contacted you about working for them?

Delisle: Several companies have tracked me down. The only one I can openly mention is Voltron, WEP [World Event Productions]. They’re not ashamed to be seen with me.

GameBeat: What’s the most difficult piece you’ve created?

Delisle: Probably the first Mario 3 map I did last year for Vancouver’s Skytrain line. It was the first time I really attempted pixel art on that scale. I’m starting to get the hang of it!

Source: http://davesgeekyideas.com/2012/07/28/vancouver-skytrain-map-super-mario-3-style-second-edition/

One of the most challenging pieces Dave has created is the Vancouver Skytrain Map. Getting the pixels to have an authentic look proved difficult.

GamesBeat: If you could turn one of your designs into a reality, what would it be?

Delisle: That answer changes every day. The one I really like now are these Zelda lawn ornaments I thought would be neat. Seeing those strewn about a yard would bring a smile to my face every time.

GameBeat: What TV show are you following right now?

Delisle: Community! The world would be a better place if it drew half the audience The Big Bang Theory does.

GamesBeat: What game is getting the most playtime right now?

Delisle: Telltale’s The Walking Dead for PC. Brilliant game. L.A. Noire is a close second.

GamesBeat: What’s your favorite game of all time?

Delisle: Without a doubt: Super Metroid for the SNES. Made such a huge impression on me. Only a few games have came close to equaling its impact — Grand Theft Auto III, Halo, Half Life 2, Portal.

Delisle doesn’t sell most of his designs, because they are based on other’s properties. He just enjoys what he does. You can check out more of his work at his blog, Daves Geeky Ideas, or his other site, Dave’s Geeky Hockey.

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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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Hundreds of tools are out there for job applicants trying to master the interview process. HireVue has raised $22 million for the people on the other side of the table.

HireVue is an digital interview platform that recruiters use to screen candidates. The service makes interview questions available on demand, so job seekers can answer them remotely and interviewers can listen at their convenience.

The footage is stored and saved so interviewers are able to review the applicants multiple times, share the footage with coworkers, and make comparisons. Unlike in-person interviews, where all that is left behind is an impression and a resume, HireVue enables more prolonged consideration.

This method lets companies avoid scheduling, small talk, bad phone connections, and unpleasant body odors triggered by stress. It also makes it easier to disregard underqualified applicants, minus the awkwardness and wasted time. Employers can fast-forward, rewind, and pause the videos to suit their needs. Popcorn is optional.

More than 300 businesses, including big names like Walmart, Nike, Starbucks, Dunking Donuts, eBay, Nestle, Geico, and Dow Jones, use HireVue to screen the hundreds of applicants they receive in a more manageable way.

This is the company’s third round of funding led by Investor Growth Capital. It consists of $17 million in Series C equity and an expansion of the HireVue’s debt facility. Previous investors Granite Ventures and Peterson Ventures also contributed, as well as Rose Park Advisors.

HireVue is based in Salt Lake City and has 60 employees.

And if anyone can change the status quo, it’s Béhar, who has shaken up everything from laptops to speakers over the past six years.

“In many ways we’ve seen dramatic changes to other industries,” Béhar told VentureBeat today in an exclusive interview. “We’ve seen dramatic change in the mobile industry: connectivity, the personalization of small devices with apps. We haven’t seen a lot of change to the console world, though.”

Béhar (pictured right) wants to push these changes with Ouya, the new console his studio Fuseproject is helping to design. Ouya has raised more than $3 million on Kickstarter since going live Tuesday. The project actually hit that milestone during his interview with VentureBeat, right after his appearance onstage at MobileBeat 2012. (He was eagerly checking the Kickstarter total via his iPhone backstage.) Gamers have embraced what they hope will be a game-changer — a completely open console built upon Android that costs a mere $99.

Béhar was approached only three months ago by the team lead by Ouya founder Julie Uhrman to work on the project. He was immediately impressed. “I saw the energy. I saw the passion. I saw the credentials,” he said.

Fuseproject quickly jumped into what Béhar termed a “partnership,” in turn giving the studio a major share of both the risks and the incentives. For his part, Béhar believes the time is ripe to jump into the established industry, with a small company like Ouya’s only advantage being that it’s a “180 degree turn” from established trends.

So far, so good. The console has received overwhelming support, which Béhar believes is a reaction to the “frustration” that both fans and developers feel toward the limitations of existing consoles. “In a world where makers are kings, [being open] seemed like the right approach,”

Béhar gained notoriety in the tech industry in 2005 when he set out to create the $100 laptop for the One Laptop Per Child project. He sees many similarities between these projects, noting that PC development used to be entirely focused on “raw power” but has since seen the rise of netbooks and other inexpensive devices. By the same token, he said, consoles are more dependent on having great content than the latest power.

“I don’t want [the Ouya] to be a gilded, velveted salon that overpowers what gamers and creators are doing. We’re taking a counterstep to the current trends,” he said.

Building a completely open platform comes with its own set of challenges. It is a natural haven for piracy, which has bedeviled both large publishers and independent developers alike. Many of the moves by companies like Nintendo in recent years, such as region locking the Nintendo 3DS handheld console, have been in reaction to limiting such piracy.

Béhar shrugged off such concerns. “It’s like any ecosystem. You’re going to have to establish who are the players. Who is your crowd in that ecosystem? Who is going to be fair, and who isn’t?

“My sense is that we can do both. We can both have an open attitude and a stimulating platform to engage creativity.”

Béhar also welcomed the challenge of designing a console that some critics have derided as an unattainable fantasy. “I love these comments. I’m titillated and always excited to hear those comments,” he said. “Naysayers are a great source of conversation. We love to go out and prove that something can be done. That’s exactly the kind of challenge that lights our fire, so to speak.”

Nevertheless, there’s still room for what Béhar terms “editing” in the specs. There has already been a great deal of debate among some of the console’s more than 22,000 backers about what changes are needed, such as multiple specs, and more memory (the Ouya has a mere 8GB of internal Flash storage).

Béhar has followed some of the conversation threads, and he noted that there has been an “interesting debate” on what is needed versus what is ultimately superfluous: “Some of them ask, ‘Do we really need all that extra stuff?’ Someone might be asking for three USBs, but someone else might point out that it isn’t central to what we’re [trying] to do. Editing to a reasonable amount of specs is something we know how to do well, rather than just putting in the maximum amount of specs.”

Having raised more than three times their original goal (and counting), the Ouya team is also soliciting feedback on what to do with the extra money. “We’re working with the community to develop stretch goals,” Béhar said. “We want to see what the people want.”

For now, a portion of the money will go toward turning the Ouya into a production-ready model and possibly funding some initial game development. Béhar is focusing on “really delivering a high-quality product and high-quality experience,” with a particular emphasis on getting the controller right.

“The focus on the controller is on playability. On weight,” Béhar said. “The right amount of weight, the right kind of balance. In many ways, the controller is like crafting a great tool.”

Contrary to other reports, the promised trackpad will also be part of the controller. “That will make it possible to play a variety of games. Something like Angry Birds,” he said.

In many ways, Ouya is exactly what publishers and investors have been pining for since the launch of the iPhone app store: a reconciliation of dynamic mobile development and traditional home consoles. In a sense, the Ouya is an especially powerful Android phone that you can plug right into a television.

As for whether larger publishers and developers will embrace the Ouya, Béhar is optimistic given the explosion of interest in the console. “I would be surprised if we didn’t get some interesting phone calls from larger developers,” he said.

Skepticism remains. Ouya will face formidable competition from established platforms like the Xbox 360. During his discussion at GamesBeat 2012, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner Bing Gordon complained that developers don’t want to worry about yet another platform.

In a way, Béhar agrees with Gordon. “There is a need for new, more open, easier to access platform, rather than the status quo. In our case, I don’t feel like we’re splitting the developer’s attention one more time. I think we’re adding something that simply wasn’t there.”

Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell

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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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It isn’t easy to move to a new city, launch a new studio, and create a new game at the same time. But LightBox Interactive has done just that, and now Sony is finally releasing LightBox’s new sci-fi western-style game, Starhawk.

The third-person shooter game debuts today on the PlayStation 3. The predecessor game, Warhawk, debuted on the PS 3 as a multiplayer-only title. But with Starhawk, LightBox has stepped up and created a single-player campaign along with multiplayer and cooperative play as well. The frenetic action game requires you to be a good shot and a strategist at the same time.

During the production, chief executive Dylan Jobe said, the company watched the game industry change and saw the rise of Zynga, which focused on learning from its social game analytics and immediately modifying its games as a result. Jobe said that even after today’s release, LightBox will have a big job ahead of it tuning the game to what the fans want. It will not only have to fix bugs but will also change the game and come out with new content to keep the fans coming back. Game design, it seems, is always changing and never done.

Here’s a transcript of our interview with Jobe.

GamesBeat: How does it feel to have gotten to this point now?

Jobe: It feels great. It’s kind of tricky when you release a multiplayer game like this. I felt the same way with Warhawk. There’s that good feeling of having it done, yet at the same time you know that when you release a multiplayer game, especially to the global community, there’s still a lot of work ahead. There’ll be tuning and fixes and all kinds of thing that we’ll have to address and take care of for the community. So in some respects it’s like we’re done, but in other respects, we’ve just started.

GamesBeat: Tell me about some of the development history here. And also about Lightbox and starting that up.

Jobe: Sure. We are a new studio. Starhawk will be our first game, even though I and my business partners have been working with Sony for many, many years. Even going back to the good old days of SingleTrac. Originally, I actually was not in the game industry at all. I worked as a product designer for AT&T and NCR, National Cash Register, of all places.

But I always really loved video games. So I eventually just thought, ‘Well, I keep making Quake mods and all these things, I want to get into the industry.’ I ended up leaving NCR and going to SingleTrac in Utah. I worked there for a little while and then worked at Incognito Entertainment, where I got to work on Twisted Metal Black and then produced and directed War of the Monsters, and then of course Warhawk, the PSN multiplayer game.

About the same time, Scott Campbell — who was at the time the president of Incognito — and Dave Jaffe wanted to start a new company, Eat Sleep Play. So they went off to create that new company. And I took 12 guys. We moved from Utah down to Austin and from there started LightBox and started developing Starhawk for Sony. We’ve been working on Starhawk for just over two and a half years.

GamesBeat: What were some of the hard parts about starting a company at the same time you’re starting your first game?

Jobe: That’s actually a good question. The hard thing is maintaining the production timeline, because you have milestones due to your publisher, yet at the same time you’re building your company. You have to contend with milestone deliveries, and you have to make sure that build gets out on time, but you also have to make sure that the actual build-out of your space gets done on time. We started doing a little bit of development while we were still in our small space in Salt Lake City. It was kind of a weird jumble, because we had some people still working in Salt Lake City, and we had a temporary space in very startup fashion, one of these rent-a-office places in Austin, while we were looking around for office space.

At the time, the economy was not super great. Credit was pretty much locked up. We were able to get LightBox started without having to take out any small business loans at all. It was tricky to find office space that could accommodate a new studio. That was one of the challenges, but one of the upsides, because it was such an economic downturn, we were able to get a really good price on some of our general contracting, furniture, some of the other costs that probably would have cost a bit more money had we started the company while the economy was doing well. So it was kind of a balance. Managing all that, working with our electricians and everything, and at the same time continuing to deliver monthly prototypes to Sony was definitely challenging. It felt like a strategy game, like a Sid Meier’s video game.

GamesBeat: It seems like it’s pretty tricky to get people to move for your company, too, down in Austin.

Jobe: It turned out way better than I thought it was going to be. So what we did was work with 12 people in Utah. I was very up front with them. I said, “You know, we’re going to be starting a new studio in Austin.” Because at the time we were still Sony employees, Incognito Entertainment was a wholly owned company of Sony’s. I wanted to make sure that I was very up front with all the new employees. I and the business partners ensured that we were able to give everyone a ton of notice, saying, “We’re going to start on this day, here are your new employee packages when you do become LightBox employees, let us know any of your thoughts.” We gave people a ton of fair warning and information.

And as it turned out, everyone moved down with us. It worked out great. So what we did was, we pulled our 12 people down from Utah, but at the same time we were doing remote hiring. So we were able to staff up with about an additional 20 headcount, by doing deferred hires. We were bringing people out to interview, having them come on board, letting them know what was going on, and then we set their start date a little bit later, about the time — and this was all very stressful — about the time that we got our studio done. The furniture was installed, the infrastructure was all in place. We had a bunch of new people start, for what amounted to a kind of overnight transition from about 12 to 30 people. I think we got lucky, actually. At the time there were some studios in Austin and in Dallas that had suffered some hardships. There were people who were looking, on the market, who were kind of fresh blood injected into the Austin scene, and we seemed to be an attractive place to start.

GamesBeat: So how many did you wind up with altogether?

Jobe: Right now we’re at 43. LightBox Interactive is a small team compared to other big shooters. Just like all game developers, we put in long hours.

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Anthony Wood (pictured) is Roku’s CEO, and at his house (he’s married with three kids), each person gets seven hours of TV each week — all sans cable, natch.

The family gets its fix primarily from Amazon’s pay-per-view video selection, he said, and hours are logged on a per-person basis using the BOB screen time manager.

But there is some cheating in the system; when his wife sits down for Modern Family, for example, a few others will join the viewing party without having to log in themselves, meaning most family members get more than seven hours of TV per week.

It’s a small infraction, and Wood seems generally nonplussed. The important part is the way his family gets their TV fix — via the web and a small set of services and hardware that are severing ties between consumers and cable companies.

In an exclusive interview with VentureBeat yesterday, Wood talked at length about his company, their competitors, the changing entertainment industry, and where we’re all headed over the next couple years — including Roku.

“Forcing change”

“The Internet is clearly going to revolutionize the way we get video,” Wood begins by stating the obvious. Both he and I (a happy Roku user) know that the online TV revolution is well underway. Wood sees the evolution nearing its completion relatively quickly. “I think over the next four years, most Americans are going to get their video over the Internet,” he said.

Even old-guard cable networks like HBO are rolling out online subscriptions; Wood points out that web incumbent Netflix has called out HBO Go, an online companion to the channel’s traditional subscription, its biggest competitior.

“There’s a lot of change coming; a lot of stress for the industry as it figures out how to move to this new world,” Wood continues. In a way, he sees the pressure the music industry faced ten years ago being echoed in today’s video wars; the only reason this battle is being staged ten years later is that we consumers now have the bandwidth to get what we want from almost all forms of media, not just small MP3 files.

Still, most of those heading up content creation for film and television don’t see the Internet as a primary means for getting and consuming video content. “The content owners view TV as their traditional market,” said Wood. “They view watching on your laptop or phone as a second, incremental market.” Because of this worldview, he said content creators will give Internet-enabled viewing rights to PCs a lot easier (and cheaper) than rights for Internet-connected TVs. Cable operators still see the television set as their proprietary domain.

And if you’ve ever wondered why, for example, you can watch some Hulu Plus shows on your laptop but not on your TV, this is the crux of that issue. Every few years, content creators and cable operators renegotiate the rates that the operators pay to license the content. And if, for example, ABC let Hulu give its users the ability to watch Pretty Little Liars on Internet-connected TVs, the cable operators “will use that fact to pay less during the next negotiations,” said Wood. “Or they’ll take [the content creator] from channel two and put in on channel 638.”

Still, in spite of this seeming stranglehold, Wood said, “The Internet is forcing change. Why is HBO Go around? It’s because of companies like Netflix… and the incumbents realize they have to do a lot more to compete. It’s forcing them to give consumers more choice.”

After all, for every roadblock cable operators create, creative consumers find a way around it. Whether it’s torrenting content we can’t buy online or setting up our home media servers to stream web content to our TVs, sisters (and brothers) are doin’ it for themselves. And sometimes, when we realize we’re doin’ more for ourselves than the cable and satellite companies are doing for us, we simply cut the cord.

But most of us still maintain some relationship with a tradition TV provider — for now. “We survey our customers, and we ask them what they did with their cable package after they about a Roku,” said Wood. “Around 40 percent cut back or cancel cable, and that’s split half and half,” in other words, 20 percent cancelled and 20 percent reduced their service. “And that number is pretty consistent, so the majority of Roku customers have cable or satellite, and Roku is additive. It’s an extra source of content.”

But that supplement is rapidly trending toward becoming the norm. “It used to be people watched around four hours a week on Roku,” said Wood. “Now, they’re watching 12. I think in four years, it’ll reach 30 hours, and most people today watch 35 hours each week.”

The cable connection

But cable networks and providers don’t want to get cut out of the deal completely, so they’re attempting to keep pace with consumer-driven change and innovation.

“The big trend that’s happening now — a lot faster than I thought it would — is that the cable networks and operators are embracing the Internet and doing authenticated packages,” said Wood, citing HBO Go as an example. This service, while it still requires you to be a traditional HBO cable subscriber, allows you to have access to Internet content with on-demand features and the like.

“Over the next year, all the major cable networks and operators will be on Roku,” said Wood. “The next step after that, sometime this year, will be a company that offers an over-the-top cable package… And then, all hell’s gonna break loose.”

But Wood doesn’t see à la carte service for cable content coming any time soon; the traditional system of bundles has too much money and legacy tied up with content to ravel that quickly. “I think what you’ll see is fraying of the bundles, different packages with less content bundled, different kinds of packages, some à la carte products, and a much better experience,” he said. “There are also companies looking at doing these virtual cable packages… they’ll charge a monthly fee.”

He continued to explain, “In the next couple years, a lot of customers are still going to buy a cable package from a cable operator, but you probably won’t get your box from the cable operator anymore… and then you’ll be able to sign up for a whole bunch of video options on that box. And it won’t be controlled by your cable company.”

Don’t feel too bad for the cable operators, though. Wood said they’ll continue to make money on their highest profit margin item: high-speed Internet and related products and services.

As far as fraying the cable bundle, Wood sees premium content channels such as HBO and Showtime being unbundled first. “But look at ESPN,” he pointed out. “It’s owned by Disney, Which owns about seven different cable networks. And those guys, I don’t think they have any plans to let you buy ESPN without buying the whole package.”

Another interesting challenge is sports. TV content for sports programming is often signed over to networks like ESPN for hefty licensing fees. “They paid billions of dollars for those rights, and they want to make sure they get paid for that content,” said Wood. “The industry knows they need to start offering their content over the Internet, but they don’t want to cannibalize their exsiting business.”

And while most of the major sports networks (except NFL) are on Roku right now, Wood said they’re all out-of-market because of the aforementioned licensing deals. For sports fans, he concluded, “It’ll come down to getting your local station or ESPN over the Internet.”

Apple and Google: The competition

“Our target audience is people who watch TV,” said Wood, outlaying the major difference between the $50 Roku box and the hundreds-of-dollars competition.

“It needs to work for everyone. The most common mistake tech companies make with TV is they make it too complicated.”

In fact, Wood continues, bang for the buck and drop-dead simplicity are two of the company’s core principles, the third being providing great content.

Due to its affordability, Wood said of the Roku box, “We outsell Apple TVs in the U.S…. We compete with them, they’re a streaming box, but the similarities end there. [Apple TV] is an accessory for the iPad and iTunes. Roku has over 400 channels, and none of that is on Apple TV.” Referencing AirPlay and the walled garden Apple has created for streaming media and hardware, Wood said, “Our focus is to be the non-Apple alternative.”

As for Google TV, Wood said the reason not many have been sold is one of simplicity. “It’s hard to use, and there isn’t a lot of content. …I think [Google] fundamentally believes TV should be about search and activity, and I don’t think that’s true.”

He adds, “Also, the content companies don’t really like Google; there’s a lot of conflict there.” Conflict might be an understatement. Google and content creators stood on opposite sides of SOPA/PIPA, the legislation that emphasized the deep rift between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. And over and over again, content creators have asked Google to take a stronger stance against film and television piracy, never with satisfying conclusions.

With piracy as the main point of contention — and one that’s keeping consumers from enjoying a fruitful collaboration between the entertainment and tech communities — than no party is closer to the center of that debate than Google. All this makes imagining happy partnerships between content companies and the search giant a near impossibility, at least for now.

Where Roku is going next

Currently, Roku has sold more than 2.5 million of its boxes. In 2011, sales tripled, and half those sales occured during the holiday season, when the company made a huge marketing push. Overall, said Wood, “Sales are huge, we’re getting 132 percent year-over-year growth on average.”

Wood said the company expects to sell 19 million boxes over the next three to four years. But for 2012, Wood said smart TVs are going to be the next focus for Roku. At CES, the company unveiled its streaming sticks, thumb-sided drives for MHL ports, which Wood said should be part of all new TV sets within four years.

“If you look at the way people view streamed video content, the majority of it is on game consoles,” said Wood. “But the percentage of hours on consoles is declining, and the percentage on Roku and smart TVs is growing.”

Smart TVs, he admitted, are currently a very small part of the overall market, but, he continued, “It’s a market that we want to make sure we’re participating in.” And the streaming stick, while it is a stand-alone product, is “more of a strategy for us,” he said. “We did a deal with Insignia, and we’ll be doing bundles with them. We have deals with other major TV OEMs we haven’t announced yet.”

In addition to the streaming stick and adding more authenticated channels like HBO Go, Roku will be concentrating in 2012 on bringing more games to its newly launched gaming platform.

And yes, Roku-interface haters, Wood said drastic improvements to the user interface are coming this year. “Now that we’ve got 400 channels, and more channels coming, we want to make finding and searching for channels easier, too,” he said.

Now, all Roku has to do is break into profitable territory — an as-yet-unreached goal for the company, which has been pouring money into product development and marketing.

“If you think of the range of new connected devices, at one end you have Apple. They make almost all their money on hardware,” Wood said. “And on the other end, you have companies like Amazon that sell their hardware at cost but make most of their money from content. We’re more toward the Amazon end. We make some of our money from the hardware… but we get revenue share. We did about $100 million in sales last year, but we’re still not profitable. We’ll prbably turn a profit sometime in 2013.”

Of course, with sales and revenue share from current products alone, Wood said the company could be profitable right now if it wanted to. “But theres still so much to invest in, so many opportunities.”

VentureBeat Founder and Editor-In-Chief Matt Marshall had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and legendary actor Leonard Nimoy on stage at the VentureBeat/DEMO Enterprise Disruption event last night.

Having the co-creator of arguably the most important tech company in the world on stage at the same time as the man famous for captivating entire generations of hopeful space travelers as Star Trek’s Spock is every bit as awesome as you’d expect. This was the first meeting between the two men since their first encounter in 1988 when they casually walked passed each other on Moscow’s Red Square without saying a word.

Fortunately, Nimoy and Wozniak were much more talkative this time, as you can see in the video of the interview embedded below.

After Woz admitted to stealing an usher’s name tag at a local theater to sneak into the midnight premiere showing of the first Star Trek movie, Nimoy followed up by asking him about the practicalities of some of the fictional technology used in Star Trek.

“Is it possible to create a universal translator?,” Nimoy asked, which prompted Woz to explain some of the current technologies available — namely, using Google Translator through a mobile device.

Other highlights include the plausibility of artificial intelligence, references to the race of cyborg drones called the Borg and more.

Anyone who wasn’t able to watch the live stream of our Enterprise Disruption event yesterday should check out our video coverage, including Nimoy’s discussion from earlier in the night.

It’s sad that in her first interview since the firing, she’s undermining Yahoo — putting her own raw emotions over the company she was previously entrusted to lead.

Read the Fortune interview. She unloads everything and doesn’t hold back. It’s very telling. This is truly Bartz’s personality. She regularly comes unglued, and this is not the first time she’s told someone to “fuck off” in public.

Even before her call to Fortune last night, it was easy to start questioning the wisdom of her bluntness: She had emailed Yahoo’s 13,400 employees to tell them she’d been fired over the phone — and did so immediately after Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock called her.

Market analysts have been furiously debating the wisdom of that first action by Bartz, because it contradicts the traditional candor in corporate America. (There’s a great piece in the New York Times about this today.)

So, is this public display by Bartz a dose of refreshing honesty, and thus therapeutic for everyone concerned? No. It’s  a misguided lack of restraint that hurts herself and her former company.

As CEO, Bartz was charged with caring for shareholders’ interests, but in the interview with Forbes she does the exact opposite by calling the board “doofuses.” It’s worth noting that even as she calls the board names and attacks their decision, she provides no real evidence of how they actually screwed her over.

Keep in mind that Bartz agreed to take the top job at Yahoo two and a half years ago with the intention of restoring order to the position — and she did so after meeting the board. In the time since then, she wasn’t able to improve Yahoo’s performance. The company’s stock hasn’t gone anywhere. Yahoo’s market share has declined in the areas it’s most active in. A realistic person would understand that as CEO of a major company, your performance is inevitably going to come under scrutiny.

In fact, given Bartz’s past behavior, her termination should have come to a head much sooner. Bartz has bungled many times, never clearly defining the company’s vision in crucial situations.

“Technical company, innovative, largest media content communications company in the world,” Bartz blurted out last year, when asked by entrepreneur John Battelle to define the company. “Content, communications media, technology, innovation — that’s Yahoo.”

What?

Bartz’s performance rating among employees was in the tank, too — far lower than other executives of big companies in the valley.

Again, whether you like Bartz’s personal candor or not, she’s not been very clear on why she’s been “fucked over.” That lack of articulation is the real problem. Emotion is fine if it’s backed up. But Bartz’s emotion is not.

Later in the interview with Forbes, Bartz says she doesn’t want employees to think she abandoned them. Yet, by attacking the board needlessly, she’s actually making it harder for the very same employees she shows concern for. She’s hurting the brand, and when you do that it hurts the employees.

It’s sad to see Bartz self-destruct like this. The valley needs more strong female leaders, and Bartz once enjoyed widespread respect for what she’d accomplished in her long career before Yahoo. In the past, she arguably set a positive example for female executives in this industry. It makes her recent behavior all the more tragic, because it’s tarnished her once admirable character.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Scott Croyle only just took over as the new design head at mobile device company HTC, but the former vice president of design already has big plans.

In the near future, the smartphone and tablet maker will “concentrate on delivering more content and services into our products, focusing on the user experience,” Croyle said in an interview with VentureBeat. “For example, larger screens for streaming video and enhancing the entertainment experience, and front and rear cameras to take advantage of real-time face chatting with friends and family.”

When HTC chief innovation officer Horace Luke left the company for personal reasons last month, the company’s vice president of design, Croyle, took over Luke’s duties. We asked a Croyle a few pointed questions about whether and how HTC’s remarkable and distinctive mobile products might change.

“Horace led HTC through a transition, creating a culture that puts a major emphasis design,” Croyle told VentureBeat of his predecessor. “That culture continues to thrive today… [HTC CEO] Peter Chou’s attention to detail forces us to keep designing products that give people the opportunity to create their own memorable experiences.

“In this sense, my day-to-day won’t change, given that our ‘consumer first’ focus is core to our DNA.”

Luke was a strong guiding force within the HTC after he joined the company in 2006. During his time there, HTC transitioned from an obscure Asian contract manufacturer to a smartphone brand known for its glossy, elegantly designed handsets. To help meet the company’s burgeoning industrial design needs, HTC acquired One & Co. in 2008. The then ten-year-old San Francisco design firm was owned and operated by Croyle, who worked closely with Luke on some of HTC’s most innovative design work.

In hearing from Croyle, it’s clear that HTC’s design team places a huge emphasis on meeting the needs and desires of consumers. In fact, creating customizable, relevant user experiences for every kind of smartphone user is a key piece of Croyle’s philosophy — and something he thinks other manufacturers and handset designers get wrong.

“We focus on the experiences people have while using our products rather than focusing solely on the technology behind it,” he said. “We observe people in their daily lives to have a pulse on what they expect from their mobile devices, which allows us to design a product that is more personalized and can be tailored to a person’s expectations.

“For example, if someone uses their phone to send email and relies on just two or three applications, their experience with their phone is largely different than a person who uses their phone in more complex ways. We give them features to support that. This consumer-centric approach to design stems from the idea that it should be easy for consumers to get the experience that they want from their devices versus assuming everyone will use a device in the same way.”

In addition to zeroing in on how consumers interact with the software, Croyle is also continuing what he called Luke’s palpable passion for continuity in design — design that permeated every aspect of a product launch. “We both believed that a carefully designed product could come from any place, and we believed deeply in a holistic design approach. For example, the HTC Diamond was the first project where HTC made a foray with this approach [in] packaging, marketing and sales. It was not just hardware- or software-focused.”

Although Croyle stated that design is and will always be a focus at HTC, he also said, “We’re always questioning how we approach design, even if we’re not necessarily making a radical change.” In other words, especially since Luke and Croyle have similar philosophies and inspirations, we can expect incremental shifts in how HTC handsets look and feel; but don’t hold your breath for any seismic activity.

“Inspiration can come from anyone, anywhere,” said Croyle. “Inspiration may come from one of our carrier partners or a designer or from observing consumer behavior with a device. It can also come from the design of everyday goods (Shoes! Chairs!) which is why the collaboration with the One & Co. team has always been so effective for HTC.”

Croyle ended the interview by saying that he and his team are “constantly looking for new sources of inspiration, which is why we encourage designers to identify how consumers are using their phones. The focus on user experience aligns with our idea that one size does not fit all, and people should have choices.”

He gave the recently launched HTC Flyer as an example. The tablet-cum-stylus combo was first sketched out at the company’s Taiwan headquarters. After executives hammered out a product-specific design language, the Flyer project was shipped off to the company’s Seattle-based user experience team. The Seatte team’s goal was to make user experience suggestions based on how consumers interacted with HTC product. “Our goal is twofold,” Croyle concluded, “to provide a product that is deeply and holistically driven by design, and to create an unforgettable user experience.”

Steve Jobs is a notoriously private figure, but you can learn more about him in Leander Kahney’s book Inside Steve’s Brain. Kahney, currently the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac, stopped by VentureBeat to chat about the hurdles encountered while writing about Jobs. Kahney also talks about Jobs’ recent resignation.

Kahney approached over 100 people in the course of writing the unofficial biography, looking for sources who would tell him about the company, and no one would speak on the record — even former Apple employees.

“It was like getting blood out of a stone,” says Kahney. Inside Steve’s Brain required Kahney to fry his own in an effort to write thoroughly and accurately about a living legend.

In the interview we talk about reasons why Jobs is stepping down as well as his greatest accomplishments.

Spoiler Alert: “The greatest product that he ever made is Apple itself,” says Kahney.

In the interview — as in the memoir — the 58-year-old billionaire attempted to tell his side of the story of the founding of Microsoft, perhaps still showing some amount of animosity toward his co-founder, Bill Gates.

Talking about the company’s humble beginnings, Allen remembered approaching Gates with various ideas, one of which incidentally led to the founding of the company.

“I would have, you know, ten ideas, and he would kind of pick them apart, one by one,” he recalled in the interview. Spotting a magazine which announced a new computer called the “Altair,” the co-founder excitedly approached Gates with the issue, which led to the duo setting out to build software for the computer, and subsequently founding Microsoft.

But despite their upbeat early days, Allen said the relationship between the duo turned sour down the line. Intriguingly, the Microsoft co-founder said Gates had become “brow beating”, a “tough task-master”, and wasn’t afraid to resort to “personal verbal attacks.” The two, he said, would be involved in spats that lasted hours and had each yelling and screaming at the other.

As the company grew, Allen was diagnosed with cancer. At that time, he overheard a conversation between Gates and Steve Ballmer, an early Microsoft employee and current CEO, in which the two considered diluting Allen’s shares in the company. Ballmer later apologized to Allen, although Gates never spoke about the meeting.

Soon after, Allen left the company, keeping his shares and cured of cancer. Since that time, the billionaire has distributed his fortune across various personal interests and activities. Last year, he sued many large Internet companies over decade-old patents owned by his former company, Interval Research.

Asked if a meeting about the book with Gates today will involve any raising of voices, he said, “I don’t know about screaming, but I’m sure it’ll be a heated discussion.”

http://cnettv.cnet.com/av/video/cbsnews/atlantis2/cbsnews_player_embed.swf

Any individual who’s thought they had the next big idea, campaign or product probably wished they had some kind of focus group to get unbiased feedback. GutCheck, a do-it-yourself research tool, launched at DEMO today with the hopes of making focus groups more accessible and affordable to marketers, agencies and startups.

According to GutCheck, focus groups can cost upwards of  $500 per person, making it expensive to get any kind of consumer feedback a company might need. The web-based service is looking to change all that and allow users to find qualified consumers for interviews at $40 per person.

Once an account is set up, the user enters in the target market they wish to interview. For example, you may only want to interview females, aged 24-54, living in the Southeast, with a household income of $45k plus. Through a partnership with uSamp and Opinionology, known as “panel companies,” GutCheck scans databases of consumers and finds a list of individuals matching the criteria.

The final stage is the interview process, which is done 100 percent online via one-on-one chat rooms. The user asks the questions and the participant responds. Upon completion, a transcript of the interview is saved and can be sent via email.

While the company told VentureBeat it faces no direct competition, I found a couple of companies that seem very similar, including Qualvu and Group Quality. Both of these companies allow for a user to set up focus groups online and are much less expensive than a traditional focus group.

The Denver, Colorado-based company, founded in 2009, secured a first round of funding of $2 million led by Highway 12 Ventures with Village Ventures.