July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

This is a guest post by entrepreneur Alastair Mitchell

Think of standalone social business software like a point-and-shoot camera.

Cameras are perfectly suited for achieving one singular thing: taking a picture. Now, pick up your mobile phone. Right there, jammed into just four ounces, is a camera that not only rivals many point-and-shoots when it comes to picture taking, it can do so much more. You can edit images, share them instantly with countless people via any number of channels and add endless comments and captions. For many, point-and-shoots just don’t make sense anymore — as Kodak’s decline has demonstrated.

Standalone social business software companies may soon find themselves in a similar situation.

About five years ago, standalone social software defined a new class of business software. Yammer, Jive and countless other companies saw a new market emerging that seemed to answer one of the most frequent questions in the modern workplace: how can we make workers as communicative, engaged and connected as they are in their personal lives thanks to tools like Facebook? The promise of the social business was, and still is, compelling. By connecting workers, businesses can unlock and distribute siloed worker knowledge and information, thereby increasing collaboration and achieving boosts in productivity, creativity and efficiency.

In some ways, these standalone social business tools were great. The interface mimicked consumer platforms that were quickly becoming ubiquitous, like Facebook and Twitter, ensuring rapid adoption. Instantly, workers around the world had a space, outside of email and personal social networks, where they could communicate and share ideas with colleagues. Those were the days when activity feeds seemed somehow magical—and proved useful.

And then, suddenly, it happened. Noise began to fill the once-glorious activity feed as coworkers started to chat idly about their cats or favorite lunchtime sandwich. Suddenly, the useful business conversations that the platform was purchased to foster were made obsolete.

Businesses began questioning whether there was any measurable ROI, or if they had simply provided an online location for water cooler conversation.

A little less conversation, a little more action

So, why, given that “social” is still a popular buzzword, will 2013 herald the end for standalone social software?

Primarily, it’s because social software facilitates communication but doesn’t facilitate action, making it difficult for businesses to determine ROI. Business action, that is, workers getting work done, is typically how businesses determine ROI. As content (documents, files, multimedia, webpages, and so on) is central to all of the work we do, effective collaboration must unite conversations and content to create context.

Communication is only as useful as the context that exists to enable workers to act upon it. Elvis Presley summed it up perfectly when he said, “A little less conversation, a little more action please.”

Indeed, in 2011 and 2012 we started to witness a shift in standalone social business software as content management providers augmented their offerings with powerful social features (or vice versa) and standalone social software providers declined or saw themselves consumed by bigger businesses. Just look at the following examples:

• Microsoft purchased Yammer for $1.2 billion to incorporate Yammer’s social functionality into its decidedly unsocial SharePoint content management product.
• Salesforce augmented it’s “Chatter” social offering with a file-sharing and content management offering, “Chatterbox”
• Google Apps for business began integrating with a business version of Google+, Google’s flavor of social network.

Fortunately, the business software marketplace is maturing. This is evidenced by these acquisitions and other developments, including the U.S. Federal Government shifting billions of dollars in IT budget away from inherently “unsocial” legacy technologies and into cloud content collaboration services that have social features baked in.

In my opinion, the future of social software isn’t as a standalone service, which simply becomes a fire hose of irrelevant conversations for workers, but as part of a suite of applications that enable workers to collaboratively share information and act upon it. So, perhaps it’s less of a death and more of an evolution — after all, where would Instagram be without Polaroid?

Alastair Mitchell is the cofounder of Huddle, a cloud-based content collaboration and content management provider. As CEO, he has raised more than $40 million in funding since 2007 and has grown Huddle to more than 150 employees in London, San Francisco, and New York.

Huddle is currently being used by more than 100,000 organizations around the world. 

Alastair lives in the San Francisco Bay Area where he regularly hosts DrinkTank and HuddleUp networking events for tech entrepreneurs. Reach him at @alimitchell and on the Huddle blog at http://www.huddle.com/blog.

Our illustrious executive editor is on holiday; this week’s Dylan’s Desk op-ed column is written by VentureBeat’s own Jolie O’Dell.

In the end, Google simply didn’t have room for Marissa Mayer.

Yesterday, the ambitious executive shocked the tech world by leaving Google to become Yahoo’s new CEO, a role she officially takes starting today.

As we published news of Mayer’s move, we were bombarded with criticisms of her decision. The Internet in general lambasted the executive’s choice, claiming that Yahoo was an inferior company and Mayer was making a fool’s bargain to choose Yahoo over Google.

But nothing could be farther from the truth. In fact, as promising as Mayer’s career was just one year ago, we say she’d have made a fool’s bargain to stay at Google any longer than she did.

In considering Mayer’s career — and, indeed, her life — we are struck by the string of blazing successes. Academically brilliant in high school and at university, she chose to work at the brand-new Google at the tender age of 24, unwittingly sealing her financial future in a dotcom gamble. Today, she has an estimated net worth of $300 million. Financially, she has not needed to work for some time; she continues to do so because she’s motivated by more than money.

She led the development of some of her company’s most successful products, influencing the minimalist and user-friendly interfaces of Google web search and Gmail. This product leadership, in addition to her poise and beauty, made her an obvious choice as one of Google’s go-to public faces for speaking opportunities and press events. Particularly in the first five or six years after Google went public, it seemed like Mayer was everywhere.

The success doesn’t stop with her professional life, either. Mayer married well in 2009, settling down with Clark Kent lookalike and San Francisco investor and philanthropist Zachary Bogue. Instantly, the duo was hailed as a power couple; they hosted President Barack Obama at a fundraising dinner at Mayer’s Palo Alto home just two months before their wedding. Yesterday, she announced she and Bogue are expecting their first child, a boy, in October.

Family life aside, Mayer is widely hailed as a fashion plate and was extensively profiled in Vogue in 2009, the writer gushing about Mayer’s designer footwear and trademark blonde bob haircut. And somehow, in spite of being pretty, in spite of being a “girl,” Mayer continued to be one of the most respected, well-liked figures in Silicon Valley.

Money, beauty, love, and a fabulous career — is there anything Mayer doesn’t have?

The one thing she lacked is the sole reason she’s now at Yahoo: Power.

At Google, Mayer had become a bit of a figurehead. While we’re sure she continued to work maniacally hard on her projects (she is known for pulling 130-hour work weeks and trading sleep for a few more hours in front of a laptop), she was passed up for an important promotion in the spring of 2011. Google had put Mayer in charge of local products in 2010, but the company tapped Jeff Huber to head up local products and commerce as a senior vice president the following year.

A few others were named as SVPs at that time, as well, including Andy Rubin and Vic Gundotra. Both of them have been hugely visible and powerful as Google fired up its Android and social networking machines to their fullest capacity. Mayer, on the other hand, was left behind in the executive reorg, and her failure to achieve the SVP role was a head-scratcher to many onlookers.

Mayer told press that the title didn’t matter to her and that she really only cared about the products she was working on; however, Google stopped showing off Mayer’s work as well. While she continued to be a fan favorite at tech conferences, she stopped appearing at the company’s press conferences and developer showcases, including Google I/O, where the company displays its most important products of the year. When she showed up at the Crunchies, Silicon Valley’s self-congratulatory awards show, she was acting as a distinguished alumna, presenting an award rather than receiving one — that honor went to Gundotra for his Google+ work.

While Google spun Mayer’s corporate immobility as a promotion, it became obvious to observers of the young dynamo that she had hit her own personal ceiling — not a gender-based one; Google is famously fair to all kinds of employees and counts several women among its senior leadership and board. But for some reason, Mayer was not going to get a seat in the C-suite or on the board of directors at Google.

After building up so much momentum in 2009 and 2010, Mayer’s rise to the top was suddenly stopped. And it’s obvious that if Mayer wanted to continue to fulfill her potential as one of the country’s most powerful executives, Google was not going to be where she would do so.

For someone as ambitious as Mayer clearly is, not moving forward was not an option; staying at a company where she could not advance was not part of her game plan.

It doesn’t matter that Yahoo is currently playing second (or third or fourth) fiddle to Google and other tech companies. What matters for Mayer is that she finally gets to call the shots. She’s paid her dues, and she’s earned her CEO spot at last.

She could have run off and been a startup founder and “CEO,” but what kind of power is that, really? Running around Silicon Valley begging VCs for a handout; pitching weary journalists on another software product; building everything from the ground up and never knowing if people will actually use it. That’s not power, folks; that’s just working like a dog, and it’s a gamble at best, no matter who’s doing it.

Now, Mayer will be pulling those long work weeks once again and putting her famous face and infinitely likable personality behind one of the more (unjustly) despised brands on the Internet. But it’s still a big brand. And if she can turn the ship around even a little bit, if she can negotiate the sale of some of Yahoo’s assets, if she can move the stock price up a few percentage points, that will be sufficient success — and more than she ever could have accomplished at Google.

Top image courtesy of Jolie O’Dell.

Checkin apps have always disturbed me. Why would I want to tell everyone in the world where I am? Call me a curmudgeon, but I like my privacy.

For those of you with a more laissez-checkin attitude toward location and privacy, have a look at this app: Girls Around Me. It lets any random creeper scan women’s public Foursquare checkins and renders a map scattered with profile pictures, allowing the aforementioned rando to stalk to his heart’s content, flipping through your photos and reading your profile data.

See this? This is why I don’t check in, not anywhere, not ever. Publicly telling the world where you live and work, where you’re going, and whom you’re with isn’t just narcissistic; it’s a very bad idea for your own personal security. And making all that data publicly available online is just asking for someone to scrape it up and make apps like these.

As an astute Cult of Mac writer notes, this should be a wake-up call to all of us — especially the ladies — about the importance of privacy, of discretion in what you post online, and of understanding how your data is being or could be used. However, I’ll wager that most of the social media-happy women already using Foursquare and similar services will be hitting the snooze button and continuing to check in.

Apps like this are not new, not by a long shot. Every now and then, I get a truly disturbing pitch from a developer — always a man, always insisting the app is “all in good fun” — who wants me to know about his checkin-tracking app for finding chicks. There are apps just like Girls Around Me for telling you the guy/girl ratio at a party (based on Facebook RSVPs); there are many apps for showing you your friends’ checkins around you. Ban.jo is one that will show you not only the location-tagged checkins, photos, and tweets from your friends; it’ll go a step further and show you all the public activity from anyone in your vicinity.

Showing women’s public checkins with the specific intention of making women into moving targets isn’t even the creepiest app idea out there. SceneTap, an absolute sewer of an application from two Chicago-based men, uses hidden cameras and facial recognition technology to determine the age and gender of unwitting people in public bars.

But did any of those apps get shut down by a barrage of vitriol from concerned citizens? Did young women stop checking in and sharing their location with anyone with a 3G connection? Hardly.

The wake-up call should have happened back when each person signed up for these services. There should have been a long, hard moment of thinking, “Why, again, do I want to share my location with anyone? And why do I want to share it publicly, not just with my friends and family?”

If we were, as a gender, going to pick a time to start being concerned about our digital privacy, we should have done so long before now. I can only hope that the spotlight currently being aimed at Girls Around Me will prevent some of the public checkin activity that allows apps like this one to be possible in the first place.

Update: Foursquare has shut off Girls Around Me’s access to its API. “This is a violation of our API policy, so we’ve reached out to the developer and shut off their API access,” a Foursquare spokesperson told the New York Times.

hat tip: Reader Gaurav Sharma for pointing out Ban.jo as a specific example

Image courtesy of Couperfield, Shutterstock