Thanks to technology, we’re watching a revolution happen in education right now.

From the explosion in popularity of language learning apps like Mindsnacks to the media furor about the rise of massive open online courses (MOOCs), companies are being built around the idea that technology can radically reshape our relationship with education.

Educating the well-educated

MOOCs have attracted more attention than any other edtech category, and with good reason. Imagine being able to take a physics class with Stephen Hawking without having to enroll at Cambridge, or learn poetry with Helen Vendler, and explore the solar system with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

The possibilities are seemingly endless — especially for the hyper-literate, hyper-educated communities of bloggers and journalists who typically write about this technology. These platforms started as experiments in distributing high quality education for single classes, and blossomed into fully-fledged companies on the strength of early, massive enrollments.

There’s an amazing amount of potential embedded in the idea of MOOCs, but for now, they are only struggling experiments aimed at the outer edge of enthusiasts of esoteric learning.

Enrollment figures point squarely at largely unfulfilled promises. Katy Jordan, an educational researcher, pulled together published stats, largely from Coursera, and plotted enrollment and completion rates for various popular MOOCs.

Harvard’s computer science class CS50x on edX had an amazing 150,349 enrolled students, of which 0.9 percent completed the course. Attrition rates on that level would instantly doom a college. While MOOC proponents argue that these completion rates are irrelevant because of varied interest levels of participating students at the outset, they’ve set the stage for their own measurement by using enrollment factors as their topline metric in interview after interview.

Education for the rest of us

But let’s say you ignore the massive discrepancy between enrollment and completion. Let’s say you focus, instead, on the stated mission of these companies. Each company states that its mission is access to education. So who is getting that access? Certainly not the millions of elementary and high school students struggling with a crumbling K-12 system in the U.S. Even if these kids have access to computers and broadband at home (which is a big “if”), they don’t necessarily have the skills to teach themselves the material with little or no human interaction.

Educating these kids in the subjects, and with the methods that they need to learn are not directly tied to jobs or expensive credentialing systems — the emerging business models of the biggest players in edtech. These kids are in the thick of the learning bell curve, not the autodidactic wunderkinds taking symbolic systems courses at the age of 12.

Many of the students that we work with at my company Tutorspree fall into this category. They are kids who are still learning to learn. Some are hugely advanced for their age, some need extra help — all want something more than the purely digital options being pushed by media and many government agencies.

These kids and their parents tell us every day that they need a real person to teach them, to learn with them, to react in real time to errors and successes, and to provide the kind of personal warmth and encouragement that computers cannot provide.

The power of people

We’re not the only ones noticing the importance of having real people interact with one another to make education work better. The MOOCs are beginning to hire teaching assistants and tutors to create emotional buy-in and attachment with students.

Sal Khan isn’t pushing for his videos to be the final say in teaching. They are meant as a gateway to unlock significantly higher rates of one-to-one teacher student interaction in the flipped classroom. Codecademy may use a carefully structured system to help people start learning to code, but they also encourage meetups and high school groups to get together to support one another through the really hard stuff.

The media likes to talk about how technology is creating radical shifts in education. Journalists talk about increases in access, tracking, and new mediums for delivery. But none of that is enough.

The real test of edtech is still to come. Companies will have to prove that they are able to actually teach students, not just put lessons in front of them.

We need teachers if we want a system that is effective for the students who really need help, and want real progress.

Aaron Harris is the founder and CEO of Tutorspree, a New York-based startup that finds the perfect tutor for every student.

Follow him on Twitter @Harris. 

Top image via Flickr 

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

Source: John Koetsier

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

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

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

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

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

Ontario’s reverse brain drain

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

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

Source: John Koetsier

Google bought local startup BufferBox in late 2012

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

That money has had an impact.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More education, more startups

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

Source: John Koetsier

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

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

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

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

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

Source: John Koetsier

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

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

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

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

Less tax, more benefits, more investment

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

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

Source: John Koetsier

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

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

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

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

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

Source: John Koetsier

Ontario had 500 startups in 2012 in Waterloo alone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ambition, meet reality

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

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

Source: John Koetsier

Toronto’s CN Tower

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

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

Few succeed.

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

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

That’s not a good sign.

Turning to BlackBerry for inspiration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image credits: John Koetsier

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

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Selling technology to schools is still a formidable task, but it’s a far less expensive and extended process than it used to be.

And because of this friendlier climate, we’re seeing the second wave of education technology tools and a surge in interest from businesspeople and entrepreneurs. But the education field only received 1 percent of venture capital funding between 1995 and 2011 — and educational startups still face a critical shortage of resources.

Oakland, Calif.-based NewSchools Venture Fund was formed 15 years ago to fund technology intended for K-12 schools. To meet the needs of educators and entrepreneurs, the nonprofit discussed its expansion plans this week, including strategic partnerships with venture firm Rethink Education and Zynga.org, the charitable arm of social-game publisher Zynga.

“Education is undergoing a long-awaited revolution,” said NewSchools’ CEO Ted Mitchell [above]. The partnerships will merge “cutting-edge technology with forward-thinking capital on behalf of kids’ learning,” he explained.

Most interesting is the agreement with Rethink Education; according to a release, the New York-based venture firm with $50 million under management will provide a “significant portion of the fund’s carried interest” to New Schools. Rethink Education will hand over an unspecified percentage of its profits from its investments in its portfolio, which includes Pathbrite and EverFi.

“This marks an unprecedented step in the alignment of public and private education investors and a powerful alliance between the two booming education technology centers of New York and San Francisco,” said Rethink Education managing partner Rick Segal in a statement.

Mitchell didn’t provide further insight into the terms of the deal, but he said the donation is “certainly generous” and will boost seed and early-stage funding.

In concert with Zynga.org, NewSchools also just launched a learning games accelerator. Zynga will provide the office space, access to product managers, and $1 million in capital for the first year. Zynga CEO Mark Pincus made the announcement Wednesday, and he referenced the surge in enthusiasm for educational games. “Everybody at Zynga is passionate about having a positive world impact,” he said.

In lieu of the recent announcements, VentureBeat reached out to NewSchools for insight into its investment thesis.

“A few years ago, our inbound deal pipeline was one or two startups a week” said Jennifer Carolan, the partner who leads the firm’s seed fund. “Now we’ll get 15 calls.”

Carolan said they regularly meet with educators to ask about the gaps and pain points. She said infrastructure is still a “massive problem” in schools, so analytics and cloud-based technology is of keen interest. Another focus for the seed fund is high-quality content, including a curriculum to help students learn to code. Carolan also noted the “unprecedented, rapid growth” of the tablet, and will invest in technology for special needs children.

In the previous ed-tech wave in the 1990s, school districts spent the majority of the budget on hardware, not software. Now it’s the opposite. As a result, “technology is finally reaching kids and impacting learning,” Carolan said. “The goal is for kids to become content creators — not just consumers.”

Images via NewSchools’ Facebook 

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

This is a guest post by technology executive Roman Stanek 

Despite all the inroads cloud computing has made among business users, it still hasn’t broken through the enterprise IT logjam. I see it as a cultural issue: IT organizations love control and complexity. They love being able to code, flip switches and grab control of their systems. And they love complexity because, frankly, they think it saves their jobs.

Unable to free themselves of this anachronistic mindset, IT departments live in the land of the “no.” That’s “no,” as in: “No, you can’t bring in your own device,” and “no, we can’t build this new function you need because we’re too busy just keeping the lights on.”

So while business people are bypassing IT and subscribing to cloud-based apps that help them manage customer relationship management (CRM) functions with Salesforce.com, connect with customers using Zendesk, and collaborate with Box, most IT organizations remain focused on the mundane. And the irony? By embracing control and complexity, IT organizations have effectively isolated themselves within a technology ghetto. They are the opposite of strategic. And that means they aren’t protecting their jobs — they have become expendable.

I believe it’s imperative for SaaS providers to help IT people accept a new mindset and help them make the transition to what I like to call the age of IT enlightenment. Instead of owning the infrastructure — and spending 90 percent of their time just to “keep the lights on” — they need to assume new responsibilities related to governance, capacity planning, security, workflow across apps, and the rise of BYOD.

How we as an industry handle this challenge — in essence, how we help IT folks into the age of IT enlightenment — could reshape the entire market. Some IT organizations have already begun this transition, and are seeing the rewards. But for the rest…..

It starts with psychology: convincing IT folks that that they are not abdicating responsibility. They are delegating it. This will be easier said than done, since IT craves control especially when something goes wrong, as it inevitably will. The solution?

Deliver excellent SLA: Google Gmail, the world’s biggest cloud-based e-mail system, has an average uptime of 99.99 percent. Amazon targets 99.95 percent uptime for AWS. I challenge any IT organization to come close to those levels of reliability. Even so, we as SaaS providers need to show customers that our levels of reliability are at least the match of their legacy systems. Statistics like these are our friends.

Be as secure as a bank: Make sure you’ve checked off all the legal, security and governance requirements: SOC2, ISO/IEC 27000, PCI. Certificates like these are the best way to clear away the misperception that cloud computing isn’t secure. People put their money in a bank and not under their mattress because they trust a bank’s security system. As an industry, we have to show we’re just as trustworthy when safeguarding customers’ data.

Show IT how cloud computing can make them heroes: The days of touting cloud computing as the way to save money or increase flexibility are behind us. Cloud computing will replace legacy systems because it can transform IT into a strategic arm of business. The successful SaaS companies are fluent in explaining how that can happen. And that fluency can help bring more IT organizations out of the land of “no” and into the promise land of cloud computing.

My hope is that SaaS providers will be able to more easily sell to IT; as they’ll both be speaking the same language: the language of business.

Roman Stanek is the founder and CEO of GoodData, a company that offers a range of business intelligence software and reporting tools to help companies monetize big data. Prior to this, he was the founder of NetBeans.org, sold to Sun Microsystems, and Systinet, which was acquired by HP.

Follow him on Twitter @RomanStanek

Top image via © grafvision, Shutterstock

Andrée Brazeau was a project manager with a degree in mechanical engineering. Eighteen months ago, she moved to San Francisco and started looking for work. A year into her job search, she had heard the same response time and time again: “We’re looking for someone with programming experience.”

So Brazeau learned how to code.

As the old women-in-tech debate fades out of the current hype cycle, a related trend is starting to gain momentum. In the the learn-to-code craze, online schools like Codecademy and in-person courses like Dev Bootcamp are springing up to meet a huge need for more developers across a wide range of industries.

Speaking volumes about both trends, Hackbright Academy is a women-only school in San Francisco that teaches its students everything they need to know to become entry-level programmers and get job offers right away — and does so in 10 weeks.

By putting her life and career on hold and signing up for a $7,500, full-time crash course, each student hopes to change her life, to jump from a salary of $30,000 or $40,000 to something that can sustain one person or even a family in an expensive city like San Francisco. But while this option is a quick fix for tech’s gender imbalance, some worry it’s not enough to fix the industry’s brogramming culture.

Girlschool

“For any person who wants to learn programming by themselves, San Francisco is the best place,” Brazeau said in an email to VentureBeat. “There are so many people in software here that it was easy for me to find group to help me learn.”

She started out with the usual suspects of online tutelage: W3Schools and Learn Python the Hard Way. Between these tools and a couple in-person groups, she was able to put together her first website.

“But you know, there is a big difference between building a static website and a web application,” she said. When she heard about the Hackbright program, she said, “I knew right away this was exactly what I needed.”

Ashley Lorden also had experimented with various online tools to learn to code. A nonprofit employee with an econ degree from Brown, Lorden was technically inclined and ended up doing web-related work wherever she went.

But to make the jump into a career as a software developer, Lorden said she only saw two options: returning to university for a computer science degree or doing nonprofit work at a tech company where she could eventually transition into a technical role. Neither route seemed particularly expeditious.

“I didn’t think it was possible to become a developer in a reasonable timeline until I found out about Hackbright,” said Lorden.

The most interesting part of Hackbright’s program is its gender split: 100 percent women students.

“I have always been surrounded by men,” Brazeau said, “at university in mechanical engineering and in my past jobs.” In spite of the radical change, Brazeau said she easily made friends and overcame her fears. In the end, she said, “I was not uncomfortable. I guess Christian and David were lot more uncomfortable than we were.”

By men, for women

“Christian and David” are Christian Fernandez and David Phillips, Hackbright’s cofounders. Fernandez is the veteran coder of the two; he’s worked at places like Fuzebox and Ask.com and has done a bit of developer instruction as well. In fact, Fernandez taught at the first-ever Dev Bootcamp.

Philips had been making apps with Fernandez for about a year, with Fernandez teaching him how to code, when the pair got the idea to offer a coding class. Eighteen guys and just three women showed up. As much as they wanted a 50/50 split between the genders, they realized it was unrealistic.

So why not offer a class only for women?

While that idea has been posited by many women’s groups in recent times, it seemed more audacious coming from a couple dudes. ”That was the biggest risk,” said Phillips in an interview with VentureBeat. “We’re two guys. We expected to be judged; it was kinda scary.”

Fernandez and Phillips started meeting with developer women’s organizations, “getting to know everybody and letting them know what our intentions were.” The duo was pleasantly surprised. “We really got a positive response from everybody,” Phillips said.

And with that, Hackbright was a go.

Pages: 1 2

Med-tech is off to a bold start this year with a hot acquisition, which will serve to consolidate the market.

Epocrates Inc., a medical applications company based in Silicon Valley, is being scooped up by AthenaHealth for $293 million. According to a company press release, AthenaHealth will pay $11.75 per share, a 22 percent premium to Epocrates’ Friday closing price.

Massachusetts-based AthenaHealth provides cloud-based services and tools to doctors and hospitals. The company faces fierce competition from Siemens Medical Solutions USA, Inc., Quality Systems, as well as Allscripts Healthcare Solutions, which is retooling after a protracted drama with its board. 

Epocrates is an attractive prospect for AthenaHealth, as it has built up brand-name recognition with doctors. AthenaHealth estimates that it is has been used by 338,000 U.S. physicians to pull up short summaries on drugs, including information about side effects and interactions.

“Capturing mindshare has been an uphill battle for Athena for years, and the addition of Epocrates to the platform is a step in the right direction,” said Greg Bolan, an analyst with Sterne Agee & Leach Inc, in an e-mail interview with Bloomberg.

The acquisition will help the company gain an iPhone app and expand into the lucrative electronic medical records (EMR) market.

“I have been an admirer of Epocrates since it first emerged and have watched the company grow consistently, one app download at a time, as it has cemented itself into the consciousness of America’s physicians,” said Jonathan Bush, the president and CEO of AthenaHealth in a statement. “Together, we’re excited by the opportunity to redefine the mobile toolset for care givers,” he added.

The entire world is eyeing San Francisco as we continue to crush it with standout technology. The financial bets are big, the innovation is intoxicating, and the city is buzzing with possibilities. But, as you can tell just by looking around, dapper dressing is still pretty low on the priority list for many digital-minded dudes.

However, in a scene filled with ill-fitting hoodies, we’ve had our eye on a few gentlemen who are bucking this trend. The nine coolest guys in tech are keeping style top of mind while making waves in the industry. We’ve asked them to get real with us about fashion disasters, their perspectives on S.F. style, and how they’re changing the world’s idea of what it looks like to work in tech. With not a flip-flop in sight, we promise — this is geek chic at its finest.

Name: J Sider
Gig: CEO and founder of BandPage

Tell us exactly what you do.
“We help musicians set up and manage their online presence. So, if you are a musician and need to set up a Facebook page, a website, or a blog — we can help. We have over 500,000 musicians around the world that use BandPage, from musicians that are just starting out to the largest artists in the world.”

How did you get started in tech?
“I slept on a couch in San Francisco for four months, going to tech meet-ups every day, talking to over 1,000 people. Then I found an amazing engineer, Chris Tholen. We would build products every day until 2 a.m. and then sleep for a few hours and wake up and start again. It’s true, ask his patient and awesome wife, Kate.”

What is the coolest part about your job?
“I get to build stuff I love for the people I care most about: musicians. We get to change an industry with an office full of amazing people. There is music playing all day at the office, great conversations, and tons of innovation.”

How would you describe your style?
“Virginia mountain man meets urban San Francisco.”
What are your go-to wardrobe staples?
“Levi’s, flannel, and a red cap.”

Photo: J Sider kicking it in Levi’s jeans, a thrifted shirt, and that infamous red beanie! 

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“I think we’ve sequenced the DNA of Republicans and Democrats,” Jason Garoutte told me today. “Based on words on someone’s website, we’d have a very good chance of determining who is a Democrat or a Republican.”

Garoutte is the general manager and CMO of customer search engine Mintigo, which we’ve featured before. Recently, Mintigo turned its company-profiling technology on people. Specifically, on the 519 very special people who are currently running for public office in Congress.

And there are some very interesting findings.

For instance, Republicans are more than twice as likely to use words like “budget,” “taxes,” “cut,” “debt,” and “reduce.” And Democrats are two-and-a-half times more likely to say things like “education,” “Medicare,” “seniors,” and “veterans.”

Source: Mintigo

Sh!t politicians say

In addition, Republicans appear to be obsessed with the president: “Obama” is used 50 percent more frequently on Republican congressional candidates’ websites than on Democrats’

Where do both sides fall down? Technology.

Less than half of politicians use Google Analytics, for instance, to monitor web traffic. That contrasts to at least 62 percent of top websites and as much as 82 percent of websites that use a recognizable traffic analysis tool. In addition, only three-quarters of politicians’ sites reference Facebook — which would seem to be table stakes in social today — and only nine percent link to the candidate’s LinkedIn profile.

Mintigo’s technology, Garoutte told me, is adept at finding and analyzing patterns of words on websites. Typically, the company uses that capability to help its clients find customers. In this case, however, it has come in handy to find out exactly what politicians are thinking about most … without the bother of asking them.

Which means you can apply the same principles when you meet and talk to people. Unless they start saying things like “I think we need to budget money for education, use taxes to fund Medicare, and help seniors cut their debt.”

Then all bets are off.

The key words being until now.

ZendCon, the big PHP conference, is coming up next week in Santa Clara, Calif. And Zend chief executive Andi Gutmans is planning on unveiling some major news about how his company is going help the world’s five million PHP developers — a third of whom are in his database — build for both mobile and cloud.

Today I chatted with Gutmans for a sneak preview, getting a few more details than I did three weeks ago.

“This is a very unique time in information technology history,” Gutmans said. “There are a lot of disruptions happening right now.”

He’s talking about the revolution in mobile, cloud services, and social that we’ve seen take over the technology world. Undoubtedly, PHP has been huge in social — it is, after all, the language in which Facebook is created — and huge in web content, with the world’s leading blogging services (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and more) all created in PHP. The reality is, however, that PHP has not been huge in mobile, where coders write Java to create Android apps and Objective-C to build iPhone and iPad apps. Nor has it had a strong, defined story in cloud services.

But things change.

Change means disruption, and disruption requires agility, Gutmans told me today. That’s exactly what he’s planning to demonstrate Oct. 23 onstage at ZENDcon, when he delivers the keynote address. And that agility means taking PHP beyond where it’s ever been before.

Far, far beyond.

“The biggest changes in technology are how mobile and cloud are converging,” says Gutmans. “Our intention is to tackle both of those head-on for our users.”

Mobile apps require a much more focused attention to users and usability. And we’re seeing mobile apps getting more and more sophisticated, Gutmans says, aggregating data from multiple systems — often cloud services — to deliver top-notch user experiences.

The new version of Zend Studio and Zend Server, plus another as-yet-unannounced tool, are intended to make PHP a big deal in both mobile and cloud development. That’s big news for PHP developers worldwide. And it makes me wonder: What will five million new mobile developers (minus some fraction who probably already also code for mobile) be able to create?

“You’re going to see a lot more from ZEND in the mobile space than you’ve seen before,” Gutmans promised.

Stay tuned!

photo credit: laihiu via photopin cc

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The reason?

ASML and Cymer have already been working together on Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) technology to help chip-makers like Intel, Samsung, and Taiwan semi make smaller, faster computer chips. The goal of the acquisition, the company said, is to speed up development.

Computer chips are currently made with a lithographic process using ultraviolet light at 193 to 248 nanometers: literally, the circuits are printed with light. Cymer and ASML are working on shrinking the ultraviolet laser beam down to just 13.5 nanometers, which will allow companies like Intel to squeeze more transistors on chips, making them faster.

By contrast, the hair on your head is gargantuan, at 40,000 to 60,000 nanometers wide, and the head of a pin is a galaxy-spanning million nanometers across.

“EUV is vital to support the semiconductor industry’s transition to the next manufacturing technology, which is needed to create microchips with more functions at a lower cost and that are more energy-efficient, consistent with Moore’s Law,” ASML said in a statement.

With the merger, ASML believes it will be able to install its first EUV-enabled NXE:3300B systems in 2013 for testing and R&D at customer sites, and move the machine into full production in 2014.

In June, ASML sold a 23 percent stake of itself to its three biggest customers, according to Reuters, to fund EUV research and development. This purchase looks to be the beneficiary.

photo credits: Krassy Can Do It via photopin, ccMalinkrop via photopin cc

That’s a bit of hyperbole, of course, because even though the world’s largest search engine indexes perhaps 50 billion web pages, the Internet itself is more than just Google.

But Google’s millions of servers are certainly “one of the most powerful server networks in the known Universe,” as Google says, and almost certainly the most powerful server network on the planet. And today the company is giving the universe a sneak peek inside with a cool online picture gallery.

That gallery, surprisingly, is short on information, saying little about the actual technical details, such as the probably 2 million servers Google runs, including almost half a million at its Georgia data center. Or how many billions of miles of Ethernet cable the company uses.

But it does have a very cool view of the places your computer has already been via Google. Apparently, while I’m sitting here with my butt in my chair, my MacBook Air may be virtually visiting Hamina, Finland, St. Ghislain, Belgium, and assorted U.S. destinations like Iowa and Oklahoma.

And Google does give us some amazing pictures of the machines that connect our lives.

Check them out:

Image credits: Google

The iPhone 5 is almost 20 percent thinner than iPhone 4, at just 7.6 mm or .3 inches, and it’s 20 percent lighter than the previous model as well. Plus, those diamond-cut chamfered (sloping) angles and glass inlays are not easy to get just exactly perfect.

That’s why Foxconn execs are calling the iPhone 5 “the most difficult device” that the company has ever assembled. And that’s the key reason why today, a month after its initial introduction to the market, iPhone 5 is still in limited supply.

iPhone 5 launched in late September, selling two million in 24 hours, and five million in its first weekend, and continuing to sell briskly. Shipping delays on Apple’s website today are between three and four weeks, meaning that supply is still significantly constrained.

Foxconn did say that the company was improving every day, getting better and faster.

One of the challenges has been build quality. iPhone 5 is partially made of aluminum, which — though it’s lighter — is also softer than the steel in the iPhone 4 and 4S. That’s caused some issues in brand-new phones, especially black models, with some reports saying that half of all phones were scratched out of box, or shortly thereafter. According to Apple exec Phil Schiller, that was “normal.”

When it was just launched, Schiller called iPhone 5 “the most beautiful consumer device that we’ve ever created,” and a “jewel-like device.”

Jewels, apparently, take time to manufacture.

photo credit: LJR.MIKE via photopin cc

Well, almost all.

The top-rated questions range from how fast you can you type on the Touch Cover (one team member replied 65 words per minute, another said an astonishing 86!) to why no 3G/4G option (Wi-Fi is used FAR more on tablets) to when will it be available in $country, where country is not USA (no announcements yet).

One of the most interesting responses is on the Touch Cover digitizer, which senses impact and profiles key presses an astonishing 1,000 times each second to detect and ignore spurious contact … meaning that yes, you can rest your fingers on the keys just like a normal keyboard without triggering uncontrollable key presses.

Another insight when the Surface team was asked about cellular connectivity revealed that of the 33 percent of tablets selling today with 3G or 4G capability, only half were actually activated. Which means, of course, that consumers are voting with their wallets and not paying for yet another connection toll to the internet.

Other questions include one on whether Microsoft was working on a docking station, to which the Surface team responded that the Kickstand and the Touch-Type Cover is your docking station, offering USB and HD connections, and saying that “we specifically thought of this scenario and optimized for it. It is a pretty cool experience.”

And another that I personally resonate with focuses on the design philosophy behind Surface, something that I’ve admired since seeing it unveiled for the very first time.

The questioner, anexahhume, calls Surface design “a refined industrial look. It’s like Motorola products if they weren’t cheesy or ’80s-inspired, or Apple products with a dose of testosterone and a dash of fighter jet inspiration.”

Microsoft’s creative director replied that:

We started at looking at the software and thought about how to extend it into a physical product. We tried to stay away from any classic design language stuff, we didn’t want to have a bunch of styling in the way, we wanted to build a bridge between you and your digital things.

We developed the idea that later turned into the keyboard covers and kickstand. Most of the time we spent on revealing the essence of this idea: How can we make it comfortable to hold? How do we fit our connectors, and so on.. Step by step we found the design. The language behind it is a point of view to make a very useful product. I don’t believe in defining a design language in shape. A design language should be a consistent approach to execute the vision you have.

Using magnesium allowed us to make our product thin, light and strong. The color we chose lets the physical product fade into the background and pronounces the screen as the main act … a stage for your software.

One question that so far has not been asked is about Microsoft’s biggest tablet competitor.

When will Apple do something like this?

Romotive, the “smartphone robot company” that is part of Zappo’s CEO Tony Hsieh’s downtown Las Vegas revitalization project, just launched its third-generation robot with — you guessed it — yet another KickStarter campaign.

This little guy is seriously cute. Check out the team’s video here:

Romo is controlled by an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch — or a modern web browser — and uses an iPod Touch or iPhone 4 or 4S as its brain and face. It has two-way audio and video, so could be used as an inexpensive telepresence unit as well — it retails for $150, and Kickstarter backers can reserve one by backing the project.

“Romo’s pretty amazing,” Hsieh says in the video. “It smiles at you, he’s happy to see you … it seems like it has a personality of its own.”

Source: Romotics

The third-generation Romo

The little personal robot can be used for spying, as the original Kickstarter campaign jokingly suggested, or telepresence, or even for mix-reality racing games. Little suggestion: don’t put your latest phone in Romo when you’re racing him.

In addition, there will be an API available so that hackers can create their own cool uses of the little robot.

As his creators said about the original robot, “Since Romo is a “true” robot, he’s infinitely programmable, and can be made to do just about anything.”

The new Romo is bigger, stronger, and faster, and will, if the Kickstarter campaign succeeds, add remote 2-way telepresence, computer vision, autonomous navigation, and facial recognition.

That would make one mighty capable mighty mite.

iPhones, iPads, iPods, and soon, iPad Minis are the hottest and most visible stories for the world’s most valuable company … but they are not Apple’s only source of massive sales growth.

A Digitimes research report just released today says that Apple’s laptop sales have jumped 30 percent higher than the previous quarter. That’s significant growth, particularly when compared to a 4.5 percent drop in global notebook shipments from the previous quarter, and a massive 11.6 percent drop from the same quarter last year.

“One of the things that has helped Apple’s laptop shipments is Apple’s overall ecosystem,” Frost & Sullivan analyst Todd Day told me this morning. “Consumers are used to the convenience.”

Apple had released new MacBook Airs in July, and thinner, retina display MacBook Pros in June of this year. The recent retina display MacBook Pro and MacBook Air models are not just continuing Apple’s strong portable performance, they’re actually increasing the rate of growth. But it’s not just about the ecosystem — it’s also just simple build quality, according to analysts.

“The other factor is the quality of product … Apple has made a lot of strides here.” said Day.

Meanwhile, cost leader Acer, netbook pioneer Asustek, and Toshiba all dropped from 15-25 percent.

Part of the global weakness in Windows-based laptops can be blamed on Redmond, according to Digitimes analyst Joanne Chien, who said that “consumers’ wait-and-see attitude to PC purchasing due to Windows 8′s upcoming launch” was one of the drivers of poor performance, along with the general economic downturn.

Source: Digitimes

Global PC shipments

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

iPad Mini models and prices have been revealed by someone with access to the internal system of Europe’s largest electronics retailer, Media Markt.

According to the screenshot, there will be 16 different iPad Mini configurations, starting at an 8GB WiFI model for approximately $250 U.S., rising to a 64GB version with cellular — presumably including 4G LTE connectivity as well as 3G.

The prices are an interesting comparison to an iPod Touch, which starts at $299 for 32GB, an iPad2, which starts at $399 for 16GB, and the newest retina iPad, which begins at $499 … all of which will force consumers to think hard about the exact mix of portability and product they want when purchasing. And they provide Apple a tablet price point at least within shouting range of Amazon’s we-sell-at-cost Kindle Fire, at $159.

But, in a very Apple-esque move, they are not aggressively challenging the $200 mark.

Here are the models, which anyone who’s looked at the current iPad versions will recognize. For each I’ve roughly translated the price from Euros to U.S. dollars, minus Germany’s 19 percent value-added tax.

• 8GB WiFi Black/White, $250
• 8GB Cellular Black/White $350
• 16GB WiFi Black/White $350
• 16GB Cellular WiFi Black/White $450
• 32GB WiFi Black/White $450
• 32GB Cellular Black/White$550
• 64GB WiFi Black/White $550
• 64GB Cellular Black/White $650

This is the screenshot, from a German blog. If you want to read the original, but don’t speak German, Google Translate is somewhat helpful.

Source: Flo's Weblog

iPad Mini models and prices

October 23rd seems to be the day for the big announcement, two days before Apple’s quarterly earnings will be released. Assuming these numbers are correct, we’ll see then what kind of value Apple is packing into the iPad Mini in return for $250 to $650 dollars.

photo credit: methodshop.com via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

So I finally picked up an iPhone 5 yesterday.

Astonishingly, iPhone 5 did not instantly take five pounds off my middle or make me devastatingly witty. Nor did my wife, excited by my new technologically-enhanced size, immediately turn into an eager groupie. In fact, if I recall correctly, the conversation when I came home featured the words “how” and “much” and “cost” rather prominently. It’s possible I mis-heard.

But it sure is a pretty nice little upgrade.

For the actual VentureBeat iPhone5 review … check here.

The slight increase in size makes iPhone better for both reading and watching. The reduced girth makes it fit better in your pocket. The lighter weight make you less anxious that a small-but-heavy objet-d’art will slip from your butterfingers. And the beefier battery — still almost full this morning after a charge yesterday around noon — makes you just a little less soup Nazi about ensuring your phone is fully charged before leaving the house in the morning.

One caution about the pocket thing?

Source: John Koetsier

iPhone5 next to my Google/Samsung Nexus

Be careful about bending over to tie your shoes with iPhone 5 in your front pocket. That one extra row of icons could completely mitigate iPhone 5′s inexplicable inability to induce amatory attitudes in your significant other.

I’m not really concerned about the aluminum-is-a-softer-metal scratch factor. Phones are tools, tools get used, and used things take wear. It’s a fact of life that I’m resigned to, and since I’m rabidly anti-case (anti anything that adds weight and bulk to my devices, actually), it’s something that I’ve learned to live with.

Besides, I picked white, which has fewer issues by all accounts than black.

Something I’ve noticed in my few short hours of playing with iPhone 5 is that the phone appears to have extremely good audio quality. Frankly, it was astonishingly good. Talking to a friend felt almost, at times, like being in the same room with someone. Which is interesting given that smartphones’ least-used feature, sometimes, seems to be the phone part. But with iPhone 5, I’m taking a renewed pleasure in using my phone as Alexander Graham Bell originally intended.

And, in true Apple fashion: one more thing is worth mentioning. This is a fast phone.

I’m not a big gamer — ask my kids, my copy of Call of Duty: Modern Warefare is still sitting around unused — but I do occasionally kill a few minutes on my phones. And while the extra speed doesn’t make me jump any faster in Temple Run, I’ve noticed much faster app load times.

Jetpack, for instance, which seemed to take agonizing minutes on my iPhone 4S (add some emphasis on seemed in that phrase), loads in six or seven seconds on iPhone 5 from a cold start. Everything else seems a bit snappier too.

All told, it’s a great update, and I’m happy with it. Not revolutionary but evolutionary.

That, I think, is for the iPhone 6.

Allied Minds, an “alternative investment company” in Boston, has secured a partnership with the DOD to license military-developed technologies, build commercial applications, and create new companies. First-year investment will total $100 million.

“This is a historic opportunity,” Allied Minds CEO Chris Silva told me this morning. “It’s the first time the DOD has ever partnered with a private investment firm.”

Silva has already launched two companies in the new fund, including Allied Communications, which is commercializing high-efficiency spectrum sharing technologies invented by the DOD, and Broadcast Routing Fountains, which is bringing more secure and efficient routing solutions to consumer and government networks. Eighteen more companies will follow in just the first year.

Both exhibit what really excites Silva about the DOD opportunity: already mature technology.

Since one of the roles of the DOD is to provide high-tech solutions for America’s military, the technologies are already in use. They’ve been “enabled,” as Silva puts it, and much of the risk of a new startup — that it is not addressing a real problem, and that its tech doesn’t actually solve the problem — has already been taken out.

Allied Minds invests somewhat like a venture capitalist, but instead of creating a fund, the company forms subsidiaries. The company previously focused on technologies created by university research labs, creating companies like Spin Transfer Technologies, which is commercializing a new kind of “universal” memory chip, a cross between DRAM and Flash, and just took an additional $36 million round of financing.

With the new DOD partnership, Allied Minds has a rich new field of opportunity: innovations from those 50,000 scientists. Silva is focusing investment in five key categories that he believes are “ripe” for commercialization:

• Cyber-security
• Advanced materials
• Data analytics
• Energy
• Power storage

But the opportunity is bigger than Allied Minds, and bigger than its initial $100 million investment. So Silva intends to partner with other investment firms and venture capitalists to reach the goal of 100 companies a year.

“We want to be the spearhead, not necessarily do all them ourselves,” he told me.

Allied Minds is an interesting animal in the evolving world of startups. Not a VC, not an angel, not an incubator or an accelerator, Allied Minds takes an ownership stake in every company it starts, and focuses on speed to market. The relatively mature technology it starts with helps, but the company also provides all the back office support, accounting, legal, HR, and other needs a new company has, plus all the funding needed.

The goal, Silva told me is helping CEOs focus on building the business, not on raising money or building infrastructure.

If successful, those businesses will also return some value to the American consumer — and the American taxpayer.

photo credit: United States Air Force via photopin cc

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

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Today, that’s exactly what they’ve done, making the code available to developers in a Github repository.

We open sourced the @clutchio bits finally so you can run the service on your own engineering.twitter.com/2012/10/open-s…

—
Twitter Open Source (@TwitterOSS) October 11, 2012

Clutch.io’s A/B testing tool allows mobile developers to add multivariate tests to their apps with just a few lines of code. They can then show different versions of their app to different users and measure the effectiveness of each variation.

The recently acquired company has also open-sourced its Clutch Framework, which enables developers to mix native code and web technology in a single app. Native code — Objective-C for iOS and Java for Android — gives the app speed and platform-standard look-and-feel. Web technologies allow developers to change parts of their apps, which now live on their own servers, quickly and easily without having to go through an app store approval process.

Source: Clutch.io

Code to integrate Clutch.io into your mobile app

As a little bonus, Clutch Framework also provides app analytics, telling developers what users are doing with their apps, which helps with future development.

Now that the open source version is available, Clutch.io’s hosted application has been end-of-lifed, and its termination is Nov. 1.

The negative of the open source code, of course, is that it is not a hosted service. It will require installation and maintenance. In addition, and perhaps worse, unless a core team adopts it and maintains it, the codebase will age while other tools improve their functionality.

Developers who don’t want to manage their own services will have to look at other options such as Leanplum or Swrv, who, incidentally, we interviewed at MobileBeat 2012.

photo credit: opensourceway via photopin cc

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

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Waiting for your Pebble to drop? Rest assured the team is working around the clock and pulling out all the stops to get it done.

I just learned that Pebble’s lead designer, Steven Johns, is, according to my source, “stuck in Asia” working with Pebble’s manufacturing partners to get the product out the door. And he’s canceled a speaking appearance later in October, so he’s planning to stay there for some time.

Source: Kickstarter

Pebble raised so much money that they broke Kickstarter’s site (design).

Pebble is one of Kickstarter’s most successful crowdfunding projects ever, raising over $10 million from nearly 70,000 backers after setting a goal of just $100,000.

But the project is also a poster child for what can go wrong with crowdfunded projects. It’s been delayed multiple times — after an initial shipping date of September, the team has refused to publish a new projected shipping date, not wanting to overpromise and underdeliver.

The project has also been critiqued for lack of updates, which team leader Eric Migicovsky addressed today by showing a new version of the watch, new software and screen designs, and new apps (see his video update below).

In the video, Migicovsky says he’s just back from Taiwan. But designer Johns is still there, according to my source. Johns was scheduled to speak at Interface 2012, a digital health innovation conference in Vancouver, Canada, on Oct. 16-18.

(Here’s his speaker page on the conference organizer’s site.)

But that appearance has been canceled, as Johns will now be staying in Asia, working overtime to get Pebble ready for shipment.

In Migicovsky’s update, he says that the remaining challenges include quality control, wrist strap color variations, and finalizing the Pebble’s software. Pebble is also undergoing various tests: salt water (some people sweat), water proofing, UV aging, dropping, abrasion, and impact testing, and more.

What that adds up to is two to three more iterations before mass production.

But what it means for almost 70,000 project backers, hopefully, is a better quality, fully functioning watch when Pebble finally does ship.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.

Today, Samsung won a reversal of the sales ban on the Galaxy Nexus phone imposed after Apple’s August court win. Also today, Apple won at least a stay of execution on the iPhone and iPad sales ban imposed after Samsung’s August legal victory.

The first case is in the U.S.; the second is in Korea.

It’s getting hard to tell these patent infringement cases apart. By some counts, which may not be completely comprehensive, 19 lawsuits were ongoing between Apple and Samsung in nine different countries on four continents — last year. This year, with appeals, refilings, and potential new frontiers in different countries, the count may go even higher.

But at least we have patent peace in Antarctica.

Google hasn’t been selling the Nexus for a few months now …

The Samsung Nexus ban stemmed from Apple’s billion-dollar win in August in which a jury found that Samsung willfully infringed on the Cupertino, Calif., company’s patents. But as Reuters reported, the U.S Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that the California court had “abused its discretion in entering an injunction.”

I suppose that means Google will be selling the Nexus again at some point.

The iPhone/iPad sales ban stemmed from Samsung’s whopping $35,000 win in a Korean court that ruled Apple had infringed two of the Korean company’s patents, while Samsung had violated one of Apple’s. The bigger punch in that court decision, of course, was the threatened import ban, which Apple has now, at least, delayed.

Interestingly, the Korean court had also banned Samsung’s Nexus and Galaxy Tab tablets in a probably healthy “pox on both houses” attitude that could stand a visit to courthouses Stateside.

Both bans, and both reversals, will almost certainly face tests in further legal battles. Samsung will likely appeal its billion-dollar loss, and Apple must respond to the Korean ban, which has just been stayed, not lifted.

The soap opera continues. …

Home-cleaning robot manufacturer iRobot announced today that it has acquired one of its key competitors, Evolution Robotics, for $74 million. Evolution Robotics is the maker of the Mint floor cleaning robots.

The acquisition means that the largest company in personal and home robotics, which has already sold over 6 million Roombas, is growing even bigger. And it’s acquiring some key technology it lacks.

Mint does a few things Roomba does not. First of all, it specializes in hard surfaces, dusting and then damp-cleaning floors better than a Roomba. Second, Mint has a repeat revenue business with name-brand cleaning cloths such as Swiffer. Third, and probably most important, Mint has better technology for navigating — via what the company calls “indoor GPS,” or NorthStar Navigation.

As anyone who has one knows, Roomba navigation can be a little head-scratching. In fact, Mint used that in, essentially, an attack ad on the market leader … which could be a little embarrassing now:

In a statement, iRobot chief executive Colin Angle said that the company would use its large sales and distribution network to expand sales of Mint products, which suggests that the Mint brand will remain, at least for some time.

Evolution Robotics’ current CEO will be joining iRobot as chief technical officer.

Image credit: thenorwoodbuilder

“Entrepreneurship is how America became great,” Case said. “The good news is that we’re still the most entrepreneurial nation in the world. The bad news is that all the other countries are trying to catch us.”

Case was speaking in Detroit at Techonomy on Entrepreneurship and American Relevance.

There are two types of founders, Case said: those who create an interesting product or service but have modest ambitions … and those who are trying to change the world, who are swinging for the fences.

Steve Case at Techonomy Detroit

Those who are swinging for the fences are continuing the grand American tradition of entrepreneurship, he suggested, continuing the legacy of legendary Detroit founders and leaders such as Henry Ford.

Case sees what’s happening now as the next revolution in technology. After the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and the initial stages of the digital revolution, we’re now seeing perhaps the most important part of the digital revolution: the impact of digital technology on all aspects of the economy.

Even heroes, of course, need loyal sidekicks.

That’s why Case accepted the role of chairman of the Startup America Partnership, which is focused on building up all the regions of the U.S. Not just social media companies — not just Facebooks and Instagrams — but also companies that use technology intelligently in transportation, in manufacturing, in all aspects of the economy.

“In some ways, every company is now a technology company,” Case said.

The most important thing for entrepreneurial heroes, according to Case?

“They really have to have passion.”

Image credits: Blastr, John Koetsier

Anyone building a business, listen up: Stanford is offering 16 free, online courses for anyone looking to pick up a few extra skills. The courses include some technology and entrepreneurship-based subjects that could help you get that edge you need.

Stanford University is the institution for entrepreneurship. In its history, the university spit out notable alumni such as Vint Cerf, now vice president and chief Internet evangelist at Google, Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, William Hewlett and David Packard of HP, and a number of recognizable technology enthusiasts.

It encourages students to start businesses, and offers courses to that end. Now it’s offering 16 free courses with focuses in business, entrepreneurship, technology, and science. But you don’t have to be a full-time student at Stanford to take advantage. The university says, “the courses are open to anyone with a computer, anywhere.”

For nine of these courses, Stanford is using Coursera, which partners with universities across the country to organize and launch free courses. It thus far has 16 participating universities, in addition to $16 million in its first round of funding. “Writing in the Sciences” and “Human-Computer Interaction” are two of Stanford’s courses being hosted by the startup.

There are a number of courses that could come in handy for someone trying to start a business in the Valley. Here’s a list of what’s coming up this fall:

1. Machine Learning with Professor Andrew Ng, starting August 20
2. Cryptography with Professor Dan Boneh, starting August 27
3. Introduction to Mathematical Thinking with Professor Keith Devlin, starting September 17
4. Probabilistic Graphical Models with Professor Daphne Koller, starting September 24
5. Human-Computer Interaction with Professor Scott Klemmer, starting September 24
6. Introduction to Logic with Professor Michael Genesereth, starting September 24
7. Organizational Analysis with Professor Dan McFarland, starting September 24
8. Writing in the Sciences with Professor Kristin Sainani, starting September 24
9. Algorithms: Design and Analysis, Part 2 with Professor Tim Roughgarden starting in October
10. Technology Entrepreneurship with Professor Chuck Eesley, starting in the fall
11. A Crash Course on Creativity with Professor Tina Seelig, starting in the fall
12. Designing a New Learning Environment with Professor Paul Kim, starting in the fall
13. Finance with Professor Kay Giesecke, starting in the fall
14. Startup Boards: Advanced Entrepreneurship with Professor Clint Korver, starting in the fall
15. Solar Cells, Fuel Cells and Batteries with Professor Bruce Clemens, starting October 8
16. An Introduction to Computer Networks with Professors Nick McKeown and Philip Levis, starting October 8

Stanford image via brianc/Flickr

Source: Google Finance

Apple shares from 2000 to today

CNet credits Apple for NASDAQ’s rise, among other companies, which makes a lot of sense. Apple has gone from a market capitalization of under $25 billion to a massive and world-leading $638 billion value.

But it’s not only Apple that is killing it, especially this year.

This week Fortune released its list of top 100 fastest-growing companies, and a plenty of tech exposure is in the list. Apple is there — which is frankly amazing, because it’s easier to move the dial on huge growth with a small company than with a multi-billion-dollar giant — but so is Baidu, the massive Chinese search engine.

NetApp, VMware, Rackspace, and Netgear are other well-known tech companies on the list. 3D printing company 3D systems is also there, with many other smaller tech companies. In fact, counting those small companies, at least 25 of the top 100 fastest growing companies in America are technology companies.

And technology, as a business sector, is growing the second-fastest of any industry, with almost 31 percent growth in the past 12 months.

Source: Fortune

Growth of the technology industry this past year

By contrast, the energy sector is only up 6.56 percent, education is down 3.65 percent, and mining is tanking at -30 percent.

Google is trending up, too, as CNet mentioned, with a stock price that just recently topped the $700 mark for the first time since 2007. Search revenue is strong — growing 21 percent this past quarter — and Android continues to tear up the mobile charts, with all the implications that has for future monetization possibilities.

The only downer, perhaps, is Facebook, with stock that has been hammered hard and is now at about $19, close to 50 percent down from its IPO. But that story is still in the first chapter.

A rising tide floats all boats, perhaps, and Apple — with other tech company’s assistance – is helping the index soar.

photo credit: Marc Ben Fatma – visit Benymarc.com and like my FB via photo pin cc

For most people, art, like espresso, is best served in small doses.

DailyArt, a free app for iOs and Android, is your daily dose of classic paintings. For five minutes a day, awaken your inner culture vulture and immerse yourself in the world of Rembrandt or Monet. Download the free app and you receive a push notification with a masterpiece and a bite-sized nugget of information.

If our diminishing attention spans can only handle a few minutes of culture a day, it’s a darn sight better than none. You just have to open the artwork, get a little education, and then return to answering that hoard of emails. At the very least, it could fill you with knowledge that could come in handy for a dinner party or trivia night at the local bar.

My only critique is that the app should have art historians, curators, or docents weigh in instead of integrating with Wikipedia. They may know juicier tidbits about the artist or the work than a Wikipedia editor would, further delighting users. Wouldn’t it tickle you to know the real reason why Van Gogh decided to cut off his ear?

For me, apps like these are a step in the right direction for getting younger generations engaged with art. I’ve long been fascinated by that intersection between art and tech, “art-tech.” Museums have been sluggish to adopt technology, but in recent years, some have experimented with branded iPad apps, data visualizations, and even Google Goggles, which were recently debuted in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Getty Museum.

Ambitious technology aside — DailyArt and it’s kind show that there is a simpler way to get digital natives enjoying the great masterpieces.

DailyArt was developed by Zuzanna Stanska from the Polish consulting company, Moiseum. It’s available to download from both the App Store and Google Play.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Calling all cloud fanatics! Nominations are open for our Innovation Showdown, one of the highlights of the CloudBeat 2012 conference (Nov. 28-29) at the Sofitel Hotel in Redwood City.

Returning for its second year, we’re looking for examples of innovation in, and around, the cloud. Do you have a product or service that will change how businesses serve customers, empower employees and deliver tangible value to investors?

This is your opportunity to showcase that fresh idea, disruptive technology or product, with special consideration for those that haven’t been widely publicized yet. Whether you’re a tiny startup in a garage in Cupertino or an established company, we’re looking for any and all examples of innovation in the cloud. To get an idea of what we’re looking for, check out VentureBeat’s round-up of last year’s competitors here.

Here’s how it will work. Finalists will have four minutes to showcase their innovative cloud technologies live at CloudBeat 2012. Our team of judges— made up of industry experts, venture capitalists, and actual enterprise customers — will provide feedback on the products/services presented. Ultimately, our sages will recap the highlights of the competition and determine the winner.

The Showdown winner will be announced onstage at CloudBeat 2012 and will receive a VentureBeat editorial profile, introductions to investors and/or relevant potential customers in our network, and other prizes yet to be announced. Additionally, the audience will get to choose its favorite new product or service. The winner of the “People’s Choice” award will also be announced live onstage.

We’ll be announcing the ten finalists on October 31 to present to a packed house. Tickets for CloudBeat are selling fast, so don’t forget to register!

What are the guidelines and other rules?

• A short video telling us more about your company or product must be included with your application. This should not be an elaborate production. We are just looking for a no frills video of the entrepreneur or executive talking about the idea, so that we know it is concise and clear enough.
• All applications must be received no later than October 31, 2012, at 5pm PST.
• A person from your company (ideally the person in the video) must be available to pitch live on stage CloudBeat 2012.
• We do not allow powerpoints; instead you can do a demo, video, screenshots or other creative ways of presenting your technology.
• If you are a startup and/or have received less than 10 million in funding, we will provide you with a mandatory “bootcamp” where experts will help you to hone your pitch (don’t worry, this will be amazingly useful).
• We’ll accept products that haven’t even been launched yet, and in fact we’d encourage this, and prioritize this.

Apply for the Innovation Showdown here. We’re looking forward to seeing you at CloudBeat 2012!

CloudBeat 2012 is assembling the biggest names in the cloud’s evolving story to learn about real cases of revolutionary cloud adoption. Unlike other cloud events, customers — the users of cloud technologies — will be front and center. Their discussions with vendors and other experts will give you rare insights into what really works, who’s buying what, and where the industry is going. Register now and save 25 percent! The early-bird discount ends September 14.

Special thanks to the industry leaders who are supporting CloudBeat 2012: Ping Identity as Gold Sponsor; New Relic, dotCloud, Huddle, and Oxygen Cloud as Silver Sponsors; and CollabNet, Aria, Apprenda, Nasdaq OMX, Scality, Egnyte, Norwest Venture Partners, Silicon Valley Bank, RingCentral, and Scale Venture Partners as Event Sponsors.

Hallway, a startup created by high-school students for high-school students, is launching to the public today with seed funding from Fortify.vc.

The founders view their technology as the next logical step in education, and this summer, they’ve been testing the private beta at schools across the Greater Washington region.

Hallway is a website where students submit questions about subjects, such as algebra or political science, that their peers can answer. The site uses a Reddit-style system to rate the most useful questions and answers, which then rise to the top.

The idea for the website originated when 17-year-old cofounder Sean McElrath created Facebook groups so students could chat about specific assignments. In just one of these groups, membership soared to more than 300 students and a single question garnered hundreds of responses.

McElrath said teenage founders have a competitive edge. “Every day we get to talk to students and get their feedback on how they’re using and what they like and don’t like about Hallway,” he told me. “That kind of perspective is rare in business and we don’t take it for granted.”

This summer, McElrath and his team shared office space at the Fort, a co-working spot in D.C. that is manned by Fortify.vc, an early stage investment fund. The Fort requires you to be 18 or older to have a key, so each morning, they would pop open their laptops and wait for the adults to arrive.

“Most of our days over the summer started with the team coding in the building’s stairwell,” said McElrath.

The rising seniors behind Hallway (McElrath, Cyrus Malekpour, Michael Chan, Darren Bolduc, Dennis Lysenko, and Allison Chou) met at the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a selective public magnet school in Alexandra, Va.

To recruit this all-star team of “hackers, hustlers, and designers”, McElrath said he started an after-school club for students with business ideas, known as Invent Team. At the club, they connected with alumni and the wider entrepreneurial community in D.C., including mentor (and now cofounder) Evan Burfield, chairman of StartupDC, and Jonathon Perrelli, founding partner and seed-stage investor at Fortify.vc.

Read more about DC’s budding startup scene.

Hallway isn’t the first ed-tech startup to focus on community-building and homework help for students. Lore, a competitor, recently launched its own educational social network, and Edmodo recently pulled in $25 million in funding to bring social media to classrooms. However, the vast majority of competing sites begin by targeting college students — K-12 is merely an afterthought.

Hallway is available for free and connects with Facebook’s Open Graph, so students can answer questions posed by teens across the world.

This is a guest post from Media Ideation Fellowship’s, Erin Polgreen 

The Slurpee straw is the pinnacle of straw innovation. Widened to accommodate refreshment the consistency of baby food — and with a little shovel-shaped bottom — the Slurpee straw gets it done.

So, consider a Slurpee straw with a hole in the side: Can it even be called a Slurpee when the would-be slurper pulls unsatisfying sips of air through her straw? No. The technical term for that, I believe, is a soggy paper cup full of food coloring and sucrose.

The tech field has a similar problem. The pipeline for entrepreneurial talent, like a broken Slurpee straw, has many strengths and is delivering new products and tools faster than ever before. We are officially up to our ears in accelerators and incubators, which is terrific. There are so many accelerators, in fact, I recently learned that they’re running out of land for all of them.

Yet, despite intense growth in the field, today’s leading entrepreneurs are generally white and generally male. Women and people of color are sorely underrepresented, despite the fact that these demographics represent the largest consumers of emerging technologies, such as mobile.

Accelerators perform the valuable service of providing the founders of promising early enterprises with direction and support. Accelerators launch new ventures and support new talent by providing invaluable critical feedback, a network of support, and, often, access to future investors.

Before enterprises are ready for accelerators, however, what structures exist to support individuals capable of launching such promising enterprises? Few to none.

The learning curve for would-be entrepreneurs is incredibly steep, and valuable swaths of runway are eaten up by minutia and misdirection. Less time plus less support equals fewer leaders who are able to take the leap and start their own ventures. This is especially true for would-be entrepreneurs that are also women and/or people of color, contributing to the virtual absence of diversity we see among tech entrepreneurs.

When it comes to social entrepreneurship and social ventures, things can be even more challenging. Social change-makers who want to take the leap from idea to venture often need extra support developing strong business plans and smart pitches necessary to bring their concepts to life. The risks are greater.

Between having an idea, acquiring the hard skills, and arriving ready to benefit from everything that accelerators offer, there is a gap in the entrepreneurial pipeline. That’s right, techies: There’s a hole in our talent-Slurpee straw.

We must patch our pipeline and diversify entrepreneurship. We need a means of supporting talented individuals with early-stage ideas–ideas that are mere twinkles in techies’ eyes. This concrete problem is something I’m trying to address with the Media Ideation Fellowship program. According to one recent estimate, only 1 percent of tech entrepreneurs are African American, despite the fact that the coastal capitals of U.S. tech — Silicon Valley and New York City — are among the most diverse places in the United States. The fact is that we are leaving talent untapped. Tomorrow’s entrepreneurs need better early-stage support.

As a sector, technologists are failing to utilize the full sum of talent our nation offers. Why is it that we should strain to think of a dozen African American or women tech entrepreneurs? Or even a half dozen? A recent article in The Guardian claims that young entrepreneurs are the future – yet all of the visionary, game-changing entrepreneurs mentioned in the article were men.

Long prosper the accelerators capable of helping ventures reach their potential. Might we offer them better prepared and more diverse enterprises to choose from, though? Let’s give individuals opportunities to fulfill their potential. Let’s flood the tech sector with a new crop of diverse, talented leaders that we, as a nation, are capable of providing.

Erin Polgreen coordinates the Media Ideation Fellowship program, which supports entrepreneurs for social good at the earliest stages of their careers. Applications for the fellowship’s inaugural class open on Sept. 11, 2012. Learn more at mediaideation.org. 

This is a guest post from entrepreneur Mario Schulzke, which he wrote while traveling across the U.S. in a beat-up Honda Element. 

Lesson One: The Chamber of Commerce is Irrelevant

For the past 50 days we have been driving across America trying to organize events for entrepreneurs in all lower 48-states. So far we have created 21 events across 20 different states, on average three per week all the way from San Francisco to Sioux Falls. Speakers have ranged from TechStars CEO David Cohen to Carl Blake, a pony-tailed pig farmer in rural Iowa.

We’re just three guys in a Honda Element who spend most of their nights couch surfing, staying in cheap hotels or on pig farms.

It has been the most tiring and rewarding challenge I’ve ever set for myself. The only way one can organize three events per week across three different states is by reaching out to local organizations and influencers to ask for their help in choosing the right speakers and venues and to get butts in seats.

The goal always is to create win/win/win situations. We shine the lights on many of the surprisingly entrepreneurial communities across America, speakers get exposure, and the audience gets to learn how successful entrepreneurs bring their ideas to life.

We’ve received incredible support along the way from organizations like Startup America, the Kauffman Foundation, Startup Weekend, TED organizers, and local startup tastemakers like Brad Feld (Boulder), Hugh Weber (Sioux Falls), Russ Fletcher (Missoula) and Red Russak (Seattle).

Yet there is one organization with a global footprint that with one or two exceptions has been of no help at all — the Chamber of Commerce, specifically its local chapters. When we call them to ask if they have any members who they might be able to recommend to us as interesting speakers, one of three things happens:

1. They don’t answer or call back.
2. They hang up on us.
3. They tell us they organize events themselves, so this is competitive to them.

All three are equally troubling for an organization that publicly states its goal is to fight for business. More troubling, every time we have gotten the support of local chambers (two out of 21), their representatives tell us that their biggest challenge is to attract and provide value to startups.

Being a (very) small business owner myself and having learned a fair bit from some traveling through some of America’s great startup communities, here are three small pieces of input:

Think like a startup

When I consider organizations that truly benefit the local startup scene, Startup Weekend and Startup America come to mind. The folks leading the charge locally tend to be local entrepreneurs. If the local chambers of commerce are run only by bureaucrats, lawyers, or accountants, that’s a real disconnect to potential members who are not.

Pay it forward

Great startup communities oftentimes are built because they’re being (sometimes invisibly) led by selfless entrepreneurs who care deeply about the places they live in. When I emailed Brad Feld of the Foundry Group in Boulder and told him about the event, he immediately put me in touch with three or four people who ultimately were key to making the event a success. Same for Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz in Seattle and Ethan Austin of GiveForward in Chicago. No great startup ecosystem has been built on a “if you do this, then I’ll do this” mentality.

Care about the ecosystem, not just your garden

My last piece of advice. I am not opposed to organizations that go to work for their paying members. That’s why members pay. However it’s not healthy for an entrepreneurial ecosystem when it’s squarely focused on benefiting big business, banks, and accountants. Successful entrepreneurial ecosystems come to life when you have a variety of businesses, large and small, pushing in one direction, not only for their own sake but for the community as a whole.

Mario Schulzke is the founder of IdeaMensch, a community that helps entrepreneurs bring their ideas to life. He is currently on a 48-state road trip to help promote entrepreneurship across America by organizing events in every state along the way.