Emotions play tricks on our memories, making our recollections of events much happier or heart-wrenching than they actually were. Smartphone app Expereal seeks to cut through those cognitive traps by allowing you to rate your day on a 10-point scale and organizing that data into easy-to-read charts.

The iOS app (Android and Web-based versions are planned) is the brainchild of Brooklyn-based digital strategist Jonathan Cohen, who was inspired by psychologist Daniel Kahneham’s 2010 TED talk “The riddle of experience vs. memory.” Kahneham argues that our memories are often distorted by cognitive biases. For example, one bad day can completely spoil someone’s memory of an otherwise pleasurable two-week vacation.

When designing Expereal, Cohen decided to stick to a 10-point scale to help users keep their ratings objective.

“I could have potentially asked people to pick a word to describe their mood, but what I like about numbers is that in order to get the full breadth and benefit you also have to enter tags and give meaning to it,” says Cohen.

Expereal’s first screen allows you to rate your day (or part of the day, depending on how often you use the app). Then you can note your location and the people you are with, add tags and snap a photo. A drop-down menu takes you to a set of charts that visualize your ratings by day, week or month, and compares your numbers to all of Expereal’s users or your Facebook friends who also use the app (data is aggregated anonymously). The “Expereotype” option is an album of your in-app photos with embedded ratings, tags and locations.

Cohen says Expereal fills the gap left by journaling apps and life-tracking wearable tech products like Jawbone UP and Nike Fuelband.

“None of these services in my mind really address the fundamental question–’how is my life going and how is it trending over time?’ I thought that by having a better understanding of this over time, it would be an interesting way to look back in order to move forward,” says Cohen.

Of course, Expereal is only as useful as the data you enter into it. The app’s notifications can be set to remind you to use it 1-5 times per day. While testing the app out, I found I was more likely to enter a rating if I was having a bad day because adding tags allowed me to vent. If my day was going okay, however, it was tempting to ignore Expereal’s prompt on my iPhone.

“It’s not immediately sticky,” Cohen admits. “But for many of us who are relatively happy in our lives, I think there is value in those moments of self-reflection.” He adds that Expereal is meant to “counterbalance to the immediate promises of contemporary best-selling self-help books and programs.”

I committed to using the app five times a day for two weeks and was surprised by my data charts. A couple days I had written off in my memory as a total waste of time (because of a headache or a task left undone) were actually rated quite high, and I realized I’m much more pessimistic than I thought I was. I already use Timehop as a scrapbook and Step Journal to keep track of my daily activities, but I like Expereal’s focus on mood tracking because it’s already motivated me to stop being so negative.

Cohen tells me he is continually working on the app’s data analysis so that the aggregate numbers aren’t skewed toward any particular part of the day or people who log onto the app more consistently than other users. He declined to give me specific numbers, but says Expereal currently has several thousand users.

Aside from being a handy life-tracking tool, Expereal is also beautiful, with minimalist graphics inspired by mid-century California design, graphic designer Reid Miles and Monocle magazine. The app was bootstrapped by Cohen, who is currently looking for investors and investigating several revenue models. Cohen envisions Expereal as part of a larger ecosystem that will eventually include books, seminars and other tools that tap into people’s desires to improve their lives.

“If you look at the world of self-help, that segment of the marketplace, there are all of these amazing books by behavioral psychologists out there,” says Cohen. “If Expereal can capture a piece of that marketplace, I think the potential is huge.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

If there was any question as to Sebastian Thrun and Udacity’s resolve to re-imagine higher education in a more affordable, accessible virtual classroom — or their ability to actually make any real headway among the Ivory Towers of academia — we should probably just go ahead and put that to bed. This morning, Udacity continues to push forward with its plans to bring higher education online — and not just in bits, pieces and homework assignments. Following 2U’s lead, which set the ball rolling by pioneering the approach of partnering with graduate programs to go beyond asynchronous video learning to create custom, accredited full-service web and mobile-compatible graduate degree programs.

To date, 2U has worked with graduate programs in nursing, education, law, business and international, and today, Udacity took the next step — in what could mark an important moment for STEM education — announcing that it has partnered with Georgia Tech to jointly offer an accredited master’s degree in computer science, completely online. Not only that, but thanks to support from AT&T, the program will be offered for less than $7,000. So, really, this could be not just an important moment for STEM, but for MOOCs and online education as a whole.

The other point of note here is that Georgia Tech ain’t no safety school. According to U.S. News’ rankings of the best engineering schools in the U.S., Georgia Tech is tied for fifth place with Carnegie Mellon. So, it looks like Coursera and EdX aren’t the only ones providing online educational experiences with content from elite universities.

Furthermore, tuition (full-time, out of state) for Georgia Tech is $26,860 — which makes Udacity’s online degree look more than a little appealing in comparison. However, while anyone will be able to sign up and take Udacity’s Computer Science courses for free, only those actually enrolled at Georgia Tech will be able to earn credits towards a degree. The companies plan to launch a pilot of the program in the fall of 2014, beginning with a couple hundred students.

As for AT&T, it’s not exactly crystal clear what the company’s role in the partnership is, other than providing what the announcement calls “generous” support. Naturally, of course, AT&T Chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson thinks the partnership has transformative potential. He said:

We believe that high-quality and 100 percent online degrees can be on par with degrees received in traditional on-campus settings, and that this program could be a blueprint for helping the United States address the shortage of people with STEM degrees, as well as exponentially expand access to computer science education for students around the world.

Again, while the idea itself isn’t new, and Udacity isn’t the first to partner with an elite graduate program to provide quality education and an actual, graduate-level degree to students online, the quality of the academic program (and presumably its content), its focus on Computer Science, combined with its relative affordability and the ability to receive credit and complete a full, graduate-level degree online, is absolutely huge. Sure, the launch is still quite a ways off, which is at once makes the announcement perhaps a little bit premature, but is also evidence that they’re taking the development of this program seriously. No status quo.

This is also refreshing news, because, over the last year, there’s been a huge amount of buzz around massive open online course (MOOC) platforms, particularly around Udacity, Coursera, EdX and 2U, among a few others. With how much play MOOCs have gotten in education and in the media, it’s as if MOOCs are expected to employ some kind of techno-voodoo magic to totally “save” higher education from collapsing under its own weight.

Of course, since online courses are far from being new, some questioned just how innovative, effective (and collaborative) MOOC platforms actually are at the end of the day. And for good reason. Porting a lecture hall to YouTube or putting your professor in a Google Hangout probably won’t end higher education. At least, not on its own.

Is accessibility important? Yes, of course. But even in the traditionally offline world of higher education, “scalable” and “cloud” can only act as stand-ins for real “innovation” for so long before schools will want to see more. There still needs to be substantial proof that MOOC platforms offer a better learning experience (improve outcomes and retention rates), before higher ed simply turns over the keys to the kingdom.

Reservations aside, what Thrun and Udacity have done in a relatively short amount of time is impressive and everyone — not just teachers — should be keeping tabs. In January, Udacity already played a part in a potentially key symbolic moment for higher ed, as California Governor Jerry Brown approved a partnership with San Jose State University to create Udacity-powered, low-cost and lower-division online classes.

This was significant because it was really the first time a MOOC platform has been tapped to build a complete, automated (remedial) class experience online — let alone state-wide at the largest university system in the world.

As of April, the pilot had seen 85 percent retention going into midterms. At time time, EdSurge noted that it’s not the 100 percent retention rate Thrun has boasted about previously, but it’s not a bad start.

In the big picture, it may not seem important, but retention rates are critical for online courses and course platforms. If entire remedial classes are being automated/flipped, they need to be more effective than their offline counterparts. (Un)fortunately, our current education system has set the bar pretty low on this one, which will hopefully make it easy to leap over it.

But, on the other hand, universities have limited resources, and class sizes continue to grow as more and more people go (or return) to universities, community colleges and continuing education programs. Online platforms take the scale issue out of the equation, but droves of students now matriculate with little to no grasp of fundamental concepts, San Jose State Provost and Vice President Ellen Junn told TechCrunch in January.

If technology and online education are going to truly transform education, maintaining the status quo isn’t acceptable, especially if these automated courses replace or curb the need for real, live human teachers. So, not to be party pooper or anything, but while this program has significant implications, it’s still all about quality content/presentation, improving retention, outcomes and ye olde learning experience. Without that, scale and affordability don’t mean quite as much.

Find Georgia Tech’s announcement here and Sebastian’s blog post here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Thank you, Newt Gingrich, for this YouTube gem; I think America needed a good laugh. Last week, the former Republican presidential front-runner and moon colony-enthusiast called upon the wisdom of the Internet to come up with a term for an Internet-connected phone, apparently not knowing that they are already called “smartphones”.

If we had told you that Newt Gingrich’s “multimedia production company” had made a YouTube video titled “We’re Really Puzzled”, it would have been too ridiculous to fabricate. We cannot make this up.

“You probably think it’s a cell phone,” said Gingrich. “But think about it, if it’s taking pictures, it’s not a cell phone…This device, is something new and different. I’ve been calling it a handheld computer.

It gets better: “So having failed for several days to come up with an adequate term for the device we call a “cell phone,” we want to open the discussion up to you. Let us know in the comments what you think we should name it, and we’ll feature the best ones in a future newsletter.”

The YouTube comments are priceless:

–”i reached out to laurent too. Issa is participating in Bloomberg’s march for immigration

–”Smartphone? How about smartphone. Oh hey, look, we already call it that.”

–”I suggest calling it a “horseless telephone.”

–”There’s a book on the shelf behind him titled “Social Marketing”. LOL”

Ironically, Gingrich made a rare bipartisan endorsement of the wonky open government book, Citizenville, from California Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom. “Every single conservative in this country should read it,” said Gingrich. Citizenville is arguably the most thorough account of government technology to date, and, most importantly, mentions “smartphones” 16 times. I agree, every conservative should read it.

I will leave readers with a more sober and thoughtful idea to mull over: these people want to run our government?!?!

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

How much is your car worth?

It’s an easy enough question to answer. Punch in the details at Kelley Blue Book, hit submit, and bam — question answered, ego stoked (or not.)

But how do they know how much it’s worth? For the most part, even the tried-and-true sources like the ol’ Blue Book are kind of a black box.

PriceHub wants to make the process more transparent. They’ll tell you how much your car is worth, and give you a mountain of data to back it up.

Update: Whoops! Looks like we crashed their server. The PriceHub team says they’re working on getting it back up ASAP.

Like many a car valuing service, PriceHub pulls its transaction data from all sorts of sources. Some of it comes from users; some of it comes from dealerships, or used car auctions. The vast majority of it, says the company, comes from DMV records.

Unlike most other services, though, PriceHub makes a ton of this data available directly to the user for their own perusing. Want to see the transaction details for 10,000+ Honda Civics sold in the past 18 months? Sure. Want to limit it to just 2009-model Civics sold in California? Hey, why not.

PriceHub actually came into existence with little to no fanfare a few years back, built as something of a hobby project by Myron Lo, then the VP of Innovation at ZipReality. It lived the first few years of its life in a rather humble form; black text spilled across the white background, with a modest data set of around 50,000 transactions.

Over time, however, it became clear that this lil’ pet project could be something more. As the site naturally grew toward its 50,000th registered user, the team behind it decided to dive in headfirst. They applied to Adeo Ressi’s Founder’s Institute, got in, and have spent the last few months being “whipped into a start-up by Adeo” (their words!)

In that time, the team has added all sorts of new tricks to PriceHub’s repertoire:

• The old, Geocities-tastic design has been overhauled into something significantly more modern
• They’ve bumped their data set up 10X, from 50,000 records to 500,000
• They’ve added model research records, bringing in things like recall alerts, safety ratings, cost estimates, and service bulletins.
• They’ve added depreciation charts for each model year of a car, giving would-be buyers/sellers a rough idea of how quickly the car in question is losing its value
• The team has grown from one to three: the aforementioned Myron Lo, as well as Telly Chang (former Product Marketing lead at Yahoo! Autos) and Sandy Lo (currently also Marketing Lead at the Salesforce-backed Financialforce)

Speaking of depreciation, the company mentioned a work-in-progress feature that I find particular interesting: depreciation alerts. If you’ve told PriceHub that you own a certain car and their data starts to suggest that its value is startin’ to turn, they’ll soon be able to fire off an alert to let you know that it might be good to sell sooner than later. Also on the roadmap: mobile apps (of course), and Zillow-esque sale price vs. time-on-the-market data.

Anecdote time! Around half a year ago, I sold the first car I’d ever owned: a 2002 Honda Accord, which I’d more or less driven into the ground. I sold it to the first person with a stack of cash and a pretty smile, letting it go for a bit over $2.5 grand. According to PriceHub’s records for cars of that year with similar mileage, I probably could’ve gotten another two thousand bucks out of the car if I’d been patient. Whoops!

PriceHub isn’t alone in this space, of course. Transparent or not, legacy offerings like Kelley Blue Book and Edmunds have held the throne for decades, with relatively new folk like TrueCar chipping away at their lead for a few years already. What do you think: is data and transparency enough to make PriceHub standout?

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

For America to maintain its fragile role as the most innovative nation on earth, it must perpetually attract the world’s best and brightest. There will always be trailblazing engineers who stay in their home country, leaving the United States one notch below its potential. Yet, on the heels of comprehensive immigration reform, a new viral economic study claiming that there is no tech talent shortage has skewed the national discussion over why we need to aggressively attract high-skilled immigrants in the first place.

An Economic Policy Institute study claims that there is a surplus of American engineers, and, as a result, has garnered national headlines in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic for busting “The Myth of America’s Tech-Talent Shortage”. It has fueled protectionist critics who rail against the high-skilled visa system for a being a low-paying indentured servitude scheme to trap vulnerable foreigners into low-paying, exploitative companies.

While the study highlights important misconceptions about our less-than-pretty immigration system, let’s not forget that many major tech firms, from Google to Tesla, were founded by immigrants. Yet, as more and more household-names are produced abroad, from Skype to Spotify, it’s becoming clear that America is losing its grip as the sole source of pathbreaking innovation. There will always be a shortage to the extent that America has international competition

Below, I explain the Economic Policy Institute’s argument, its methodological shortcomings, and why there will always be a shortage of great workers.

What Critics Claim

The Economic Policy Institute argues that two important figures prove there is no tech talent shortage:

1. There is a surplus of American graduates with Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) degrees
2. Wages for STEM careers are stagnant; if there was a dearth of applicants, wages would rise to attract more workers

Both of these claims are true. Roughly half of STEM graduates never take a job in the field, and 52% of of those who ditch a technology career do so for reasons related to pay, promotion, and working conditions. “For STEM graduates, the supply exceeds the number hired each year by nearly two to one,” write the authors.

Perhaps more importantly, since the early 2000s, wages for programmers have virtually stalled. Yet, we know when there is demand for programmers in the tech industry, wages rise. Indeed, just prior to the Internet bubble, wages sky rocketed. Moreover, in one at least career with significant excess demand, petroleum engineers, wages rose a staggering 71%. In other words, STEM careers respond normally to the laws of supply and demand; if there truly was a dearth of programmers and engineers, we’d see wages rise.

Indentured Workers

University of California, Davis Professor Norman Matloff, one of the fiercest critics of the high-skilled H1-B visa program, has argued that companies largely seek foreign workers for cheap labor. Under the current system, foreign workers need a sponsoring firm, allowing them to extort dreamy-eyed immigrants for lower salaries, who are threatened with immediate deportation if they lose their job.

Almost half of the 85,000 high-skilled work visas are snatched up by shady consultant firms who are suspected of exploiting guest workers for cheap labor. Just last month, the FBI indicted a Texas IT firm, Dibon Solutions, for hoarding H1-B workers, paid only when contractors needed their service. Dibon “earned a substantial profit margin when a consultant was assigned to a project and incurred few costs when a worker was without billable work,” according to a government report.

For guest workers, abuse, exploitation, and uncertainty is rampant.

Not Apples to Apples

While it is true that the high-skilled visa system is flawed and there is a surplus of engineers, other researchers have found that the market does properly value immigrants, when they’re compared to natives of similar skill, education and age. The Economic Policy Institute averages all technology wages together, yet immigrants who uproot themselves from their homeland tend to be much younger, early career engineers (and, hence, lower paid).

“Age differences appear to play a role and the H1-B advantage is greater once this is adjusted for,” finds a study from the respected Public Policy Institute of California. When comparing foreign to natives by age, occupation, and education level, immigrants earn about 13% more than their US counterparts.

Not surprisingly, many immigrants, especially from Asian nations, have terrible English skills, which leaves them ineligible for higher paying managerial roles. “If all immigrants with an engineering degree had the proficiency of English–only speakers,” writes Rutgers professor Jennifer Hunt, “they would have conditional wages very close to those of natives (1.9% lower)”.

Before journalists reprint studies, we should be cautious of non-peer reviewed analysis from “think tanks” with an obvious agenda.

Sometimes Immigrants Are The Best Choice

In response to the types of studies that showed the relative wages of immigrants and natives, Matloff lashed out at the H1-B system for perpetuating agism in Silicon Valley. “Employers prefer to hire younger, thus cheaper, H-1Bs instead of older, thus more expensive, Americans.” In terms of patents and academic work, he found, immigrants tend to be on par with natives, busting the so-called “best and brightest” myth. In order to protect American workers, he argues, visas should only be granted to select immigrants.

While a large labor dataset of wages may show relatively equal economic value between natives and foreign, it ignores all ways in which immigrants contribute to American innovation. TechCrunch contributor Vivek Wadhwa has found that 24.3 of engineering and technology companies had at least one foreign born founder, employing 560,000 workers who contrbuted $63 billion in sales (just in 2012).

How can so few foreign works make such a big impact? They’re responsible for founding a litany of household name companies, including Sun Microsystems (Vinod Khosla), Google (Sergey Brin), PayPal, SpaceX, and Tesla Motors (Elon Musk). In some ways, the immigration system is a lottery: most immigrants won’t add much more value, but every so often a genius comes along that justifies thousands of average workers.

This is precisely why Congress is now considering the creation of a new “startup visa”, which permits immigrants to found companies without being shackled to an employee sponsor. There doesn’t appear to be limit on the number of immigrants who qualify for the startup visa, because it’s best to assume that America is always at a shortage of brilliant foreigners who could start the next Google or Paypal.

But, of course, it’s not just founders; Berkeley Researcher AnnaLee Saxenian found that one of the secrets to Silicon Valley’s success was immigrant cultural groups, who mentor new arrivals and develop lucrative ties with their family and friends around the world. These highly skilled emigrants are now increasingly transforming the brain drain into “brain circulation” by returning home to establish business relationships or start new companies while maintaining their social and professional ties to the US,” she writes [PDF]. Global benefits like these aren’t captured in wage data because workers won’t always reside in the U.S..

As a corollary, modern employers aren’t just looking for an adequate employee — they’re looking for a worker who’s at least as good, if not better, than everyone else their seeing around the world. “Jobs postings will be listed for months without finding a good candidate,” explains former Zynga software engineer and founder of Appurify, Rahul Jain, to us in an email, “we need the best of the best”.

In many instances, the only qualified worker may be a friend of a friend, who has the dewy-eyed drive of an early employee who spent weekend nights dreaming up the idea of a new company with the founders. “In my case, and some of my friends, you’re really passionate, you want to work for that company,” explains H1-B worker, Myles Sutherland, of Mapping company Esri , “I’ll take anyone from the United States or any country in the world that’s just super passionate about that job.”

It’s no shock then why the high-skilled worker visa cap was maxed out this year in a record 5 days.

This kind of employee motivation isn’t captured in the Economic Policy Institutes wage data, because startups may not be able to pay foreign workers more; rather, they’ll just wait months to the perfect fit, if the position gets filled at all.

Matloff and his fellow critics may be right that the guestworker program needs fixing. It’s exploitative and corrupt. But when the goal is to be the most innovative country on the planet, we’ll have a tech talent “shortage” until every single trailblazing founder, and their hyper-passionate friends, works in the U.S.

American can never get enough brilliant innovators.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

I’ve found that when people visit San Francisco, it’s not unusual to hear them ask something like: “No seriously, is there a coffee shop on every block in this city?” Yes, San Francisco likes coffee. So do a lot of cities. Busy people thrive on coffee, especially in the tech industry. In fact, some would even say that a substantial amount of coffee is an essential ingredient to success.

Phil Jaber would agree with that statement. After a long love affair with the brew and decades spent testing out his own blends, in 2003, he founded Philz Coffee. What was started out of a corner grocery store has today grown into a budding coffee chain, with 13 stores now open and serving across the Bay Area — one of which you’ll find in Facebook’s headquarters.

With all the coffee flowing through the Bay Area, Philz has stood out by combining varietals to make a bunch of fantastic tasting blends that are made without using a bunch of machinery. These blends were invented by Phil himself, and while they’re not patent-protected, they’re secret family recipes that you won’t find anywhere else, Phil’s son Jacob Jaber and current Philz CEO tells me.

Philz is a proponent of the drip coffee method and, while that may sound like a “hipster” practice to those outside of the Bay, it’s pretty fantastic and has taken off in the Bay Area. Some connoisseurs swear to it as the only way to make and drink it.

As a sign of just how hot the specialty coffee market is getting (at least in San Francisco), fellow Bay Area boutique coffee chain, Blue Bottle, took home $20 million in venture capital in October from Index Ventures’ Mike Volpi, True Ventures’ Tony Conrad and serial entrepreneur Bryan Meehan, among others. At the time, the coffee chain had expanded to ten stores of its own.

When asked if Philz sees Blue Bottle as a competitor, Jaber said that he doesn’t — that the success of one is a positive for the other, and that the market for this kind of branded, personalized coffee experience is huge. In other words, he thinks there’s plenty of room for both to get enough people caffeinated to pay the electricity bills.

Today, Philz Coffee is adding some growth capital of its own. Although the company isn’t ready to disclose the exact amount, Jaber says that the company has raised an eight-figure round that’s on the lower end of the spectrum. From what we can gather from sources, it appears to be in the $15 to $25 million range. The lead investor in the round is Summit Partners, and as a result of the firm’s investment, Summit Managing Director Greg Goldfarb will be taking a seat on the startup’s board of directors.

Jaber says that the company will also be looking to add a much smaller angel round on top of the growth equity investment, which they hope to close in the near future. While the angel investor list remains unclear, we were able to learn that it comes from entrepreneurs and executives in the consumer tech and retail spaces.

When asked why they decided to partner with Summit, the CEO tells us that the firm understood Philz’ ethos better than anyone else, both intellectually and viscerally, which was important to them, especially as it’s a family business and a passion of both Jabers. Of course, it also helps that the father and son duo will retain control of the company, with Summit taking a minority interest rather than a controlling share.

Philz’ name has slowly begun to spread of late, thanks to partnerships the company has struck with Virgin America, for example. If you’ve flown on a Virgin America flight recently and had a cup of coffee, you were drinking one of Phil’s blends.

With the new capital in its coffers, the company will look to strike a handful of partnerships like that one to increase distribution and awareness among coffee fans. To that end, Philz is also going to begin expanding outside of the Bay Area. Plans are still in motion, but Jaber says that you’ll likely see Philz begin to expand in California first, and into the surrounding states. They want to start close to home first. So you won’t be seeing Philz in Prague any time soon, unfortunately, but LA? San Jose? And you cities on the West Coast? Look out. Philz crazy tasty blends may end up on your streets sometime in the near future.

For more, find Philz Coffee at home here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

A California federal judge has ruled that Craigslist can’t sue real estate listings platforms 3Taps, PadMapper, and Discover Home Network for copyright infringement. But the judgement isn’t a complete victory for the developers of 3Taps because Craigslist is still allowed to sue the startup for gaining unauthorized access to data on its Web site. Critics of Craiglist’s legal actions have said that they stifle innovation and competition.

U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer denied 3Taps’ request to dismiss claims by Craigslist that it violated the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), but he threw out copyright claims against 3Taps for using information from user listings. Breyer wrote that aside from a two-week period last year, Craigslist’s TOU did not grant it an exclusive rights and copyright to user-generated postings.

Craigslist provides no authority for the proposition that an ambiguous grant of rights is presumptively exclusive, and the court declines to read that term into the terms that Craigslist itself drafted. The court therefore concludes that the TOU, standing alone, did not grant Craigslist an exclusive license. Without an exclusive license, Craigslist cannot sue for infringement; the TOU provision that purportedly granted Craigslist the right to sue is ‘impermissible,’” Breyer wrote in his decision.

Though the company may still face a lawsuit from Craigslist, 3Taps is viewing Breyer’s decision as a victory. On its Web site, 3Taps posted a statement saying:

“Craigslist has threatened scores of startups and established firms with copyright claims over user content posted to its site.  But, on April 30, 2013, Justice Charles R. Breyer, speaking for the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, put an end to further sham litigation by dismissing Craigslist assertions that it held exclusive licenses and copyright over user generated postings submitted to its site.

Furthermore, the fact that 3taps syndicates user generated content to 3rd parties such as Padmapper was also dismissed as a baseless accusation of criminal conspiracy.  Startups creating new search options for users for data from multiple sites can more confidently continue to focus on innovation rather than litigation.”

Craigslist began taking legal action against PadMapper, 3Taps, and other developers last July after a dispute over the use of Craigslist data in third-party services. In addition to 3Taps, which became PadMapper’s partner for data acquisition after the initial cease & desist letter from Craigslist), TechCrunch reported that Craigslist also sent C&Ds to Missouri-based Web site developer Jeff Kastner and the makers of Ziink’s Craigslist helper. Then in August, Craigslist made the move of amending its TOU to say that it is the exclusive licensee of user-generated posts, though it dropped that provision within a week.

3Taps filed a countersuit against Craigslist in September, citing unfair and uncompetitive business practices in violation of federal and state antitrust laws. At the time, 3Taps said that Craigslist used its “market power illegally to stifle innovation and hurt consumers,” depriving users of “better ways to find and execute real-time exchange transactions.”

In today’s statement, 3Taps addressed the potential lawsuit from Craigslist and again reiterated its belief that Craigslist’s tactics stymie innovation:

“Still remaining as an issue in the case is how 3taps accesses the data in question. At the start of the litigation between the parties, 3taps sourced the publicly available data through third party sources such as Google. Once Craigslist began blocking Google, 3taps accessed Craigslist directly, which resulted in a subsequent cause of action by Craigslist under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (the CFAA). The statute is the same anti-hacking cause of action leveled against the late Aaron Swartz over his high volume downloading of JSTOR academic articles from the MIT campus. The difference here is that Craigslist has leveled these charges of unauthorized access for data that is already publicly available, not copyrighted by Craigslist, and already in the hands of third parties such as Google. At issue is whether Craigslist restraints exist to “protect” its community or are actually thinly disguised tactics to deter competition and innovation at the expense of, rather than defense of, users.”

We’ve reached out to Craigslist and 3Taps for further comment.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Lars Rasmussen — one half of the dream team that led in the creation of Facebook’s new Graph Search and run its development — is leaving Menlo Park and setting up shop in Facebook’s office in London. Graph Search, or at least the engineering part that he oversees, is coming with him. I took the opportunity of a quick reconnaissance mission he made to the city this week to ask Rasmussen about why he’s coming to the UK, what is on the road map for Graph Search, internationally and otherwise, and what challenges lie ahead.

Graph Search has yet to launch in any other language other than English, and Facebook’s international user base is growing faster than its U.S. audience. But neither of these are the motivations for his move.

Rasmussen is coming for personal reasons: his girlfriend lives in Athens, and he’s tired of the commute from California to see her. So, because he has no intention of leaving Facebook, he’s decided to move as close as he can to Athens while continuing to work for the social network. And Graph Search, his baby, is coming with him.

How long does he intend to stay? “It’s a one-way ticket,” he told TechCrunch today. It’s also about coming full-circle. Years ago, Rasmussen studied for his PhD in Edinburgh, Scotland and only moved to California to follow his advisor when he migrated west. From there, Rasmussen ended up at Google, where he worked on Google Maps and Google Wave, before in 2010 leaving for Facebook.

For now, where Rasmussen goes, Graph Search engineering goes. So this week, he’s in town not only to find a place to live, but also to lay the groundwork to hire a new team of developers to work on Facebook’s new search efforts from here.

He says he’s put out an offer to the Menlo Park team for any of them to come join him in London. The rest will stay in California and keep working under Tom Stocky, the other Graph Search supremo. “So far no one has put their hand up high to move here but I’m pretty sure I’ve heard a hint or two that some folks are interested,” he said. Rasmussen is moving over permanently in August.

Third pillar, but a moveable one

For a product that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg referred to as the company’s “third pillar” after News Feed and Timeline, Rasmussen’s move and what it will mean for Graph Search sound pretty freeform at the moment.

It’s not exactly clear what part of Graph Search’s development will end up with Rasmussen in London, and what will remain in Menlo Park, nor how the two teams will work together with thousands of miles between them. (Note: from personal experience, it’s possible.) It’s likely that all this will only get decided after they figure out what talent can be recruited — classic Facebook, as one person described it to me.

Rasmussen also says that he can’t say for sure whether Graph Search’s international push will definitely be a part of his work in London because taking it international will not be a quick task.

“When it comes to internationalizing graph search, we may do it here but we may do it elsewhere,” he said. “We’ll only do it when we feel the product is mature and makes sense. We’re still in the beta stages with a million or few million users. Graph Search is a long term investment we realize we have years of work ahead of us.”

He notes that although “internationalizing is the best path forward”, it will only come when the team has “hit the nail on the head with a good search product.”

“We are not talking weeks or a few months, though. It will take longer,” he added.

Natural language, and acqui-hires

One of the big things with Graph Search, as engineer Xiao Li and research scientist Maxime Boucher point out in an essay published yesterday, is that it is built on a natural language interface. But that will pose a challenge when Graph Search goes to other languages.

“I hope that the model that we started creating for English will work roughly speaking for all of our markets, but it’s not something that we have looked too deeply at,” he said. “Graph Search has a natual langauge component, so it will be an extra challenge to internationalize it. It was a challenge we expected because we want to have people ask natural questions, but we realize that it means that it would be a challenge to make new languages. That’s a reason for the long delay.” He added that even though a minority of Faceboook’s users speak English it’s still the single language in which Facebook has the most users.

While Facebook has been pretty good at internationalizing its products, doing so with a product like Graph Search, based on users inputting search commands in their own words, is unchartered territory. Rasmussen said that Facebook may end up having to buy their way into it, as others like Google and Yahoo have been doing.

“It’s possibly an area where we wil have to acquire,” he said. “It is something we’ve invested in in general, but we haven’t quite built the tools out for this thing. So possibly, if the right startup and talent came along, this is definitely something that we would consider. We’ve had some very successful acquisitions of small startups that have brought tremendous talent to the company.”

As for hiring in London, Rasmussen’s looking forward to it and how it could impact Graph Search. “I think there is obviously lots of Euroepan talent speaking different languages so it might come in handy, but again it’s not the primary reason. We are doing research on Graph Search here on par with what Menlo Park is doing.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

During the summer of 2012, while working in venture capital, one of the early-stage companies I stumbled upon was founded by a trio of guys based in Singapore. We met a few times in the Valley and quickly became friends, and I informally helped them, from time to time, navigate the waters of moving to the Valley and getting situated here. I hadn’t talked to them in a while but we recently reconnected, and I thought their journey from starting a company in Asia to raising venture capital in California would be interesting to share with others, not only for those who reside outside the Valley and hope to move here to build their businesses, but also because this team is focused on building software exclusively for developers. This is an interest-area of mine because I’ve found there are some investors who are betting long on developer-focused businesses, while others like them but worry about their ability to scale to venture “size.” Below is an edited transcript of an informal Q&A we all coordinated over email with founders of Nitrous.IO, Arun Thampi, Peter Kim, and A.J. Solimine:

How did you all start the company in Singapore? Describe the tech scene there. Was it hard to raise money?

Arun Thampi: Pete, AJ and I were all in Singapore. The tech scene there is great, and there are lots of great engineers in Singapore. The problem is that it’s still young, and lots of people are still averse to taking risks and settle for jobs at bigger companies. We didn’t actively try to raise money in Singapore, but we spoke early on to Vinnie Lauria and Jeffrey Paine, who are good friends and run Golden Gate Ventures in Singapore. Vinnie runs SuperHappyDevHouse (a hackathon in Singapore), and we won two years in a row (including with Nitrous.IO), and so we knew each other well and he was very supportive of us from the beginning, and committed to invest in Nitrous.IO early on. Singapore is a great place, but in the last week, we’ve had detailed hour-long conversations with developers and software craftsmen we’ve looked up to (like Yehuda Katz and Guido van Rossum) and who’ve given us great feedback and encouragement, and also Joe Stump and Tobias Lütke agreed to be on our advisory board and are rooting for our success. This would probably not have happened had we been in Singapore.

Pete Kim: We decided from the beginning that we’d raise money from investors that had experience with cloud infrastructure and B2D space, and we have realized the investors in the Bay Area were the only ones that fit the bill. We did end up raising a small amount from Golden Gate Ventures in Singapore, because we are really good friends with the great team behind the firm, but we did not engage with any other investors in Singapore. If we did want to raise money entirely in Singapore however, there are various government programs in Singapore with generous matching grants and there are lots of investors willing to invest in startups with huge amount of cash, but we had consistent feedback from fellow entrepreneurs who received funding in Singapore saying that the amount of both technical and entrepreneurial help you get from the investors in Asia is minimal at best.

How did you all end up in Singapore in the first place? Seems like a random spot for the three of you to meet.

Pete: Arun and I both graduated from National University of Singapore and we’ve been in Singapore for over 10 years. We’ve met and worked together in Viki, an Andreesen Horowitz-backed startup based in Singapore that does crowd-sourced translation of international videos and music, where I was working as a lead engineer and Arun was working as a contractor. I first met AJ at a meet-up in Singapore, and worked together in many hackathons. After I have spent some time at Viki, I felt that I’ve learned enough to think about doing my own startup. Arun and AJ were then working together in a startup called Anideo where they were building a mobile video-discovery app called Vidyou, but despite the app being highly polished and feature-rich, it proved to be tough to gain enough traction, due to the highly competitive nature of online video market. The online video space was also riddled with problems that were difficult for a startup to deal with such as copyright issues. Having known and having worked with them with pleasurable results in the past, I’ve approached Arun and AJ and asked if they were interested in working together for a “Shareable cloud-based development environments that can be access from anywhere with any device” idea. They loved the idea having wasted countless number of hours troubleshooting their own development environment woes. They also loved the how the product will enable you to develop even on thin clients like Chromebooks and iPads. The timing was also perfect because they were just about to look for new ideas to work on. We then decided to join forces and started Irrational Industries Inc.

AJ Solimine: I was working in New York in the summer of 2009 when the financial crisis hit. I lived down in the Wall Street area and it was getting really depressing. The streets were pretty desolate but the bars were full of dejected, newly unemployed bankers & traders. A friend of mine from college grew up in Singapore, and I mentioned to him one night that I was considering living abroad and he suggested I consider moving there. I really only had a few suitcases and some ikea furniture to my name, so it was a pretty easy jump for me. Upon moving to Singapore, I realized that I knew all of two people in the entire country, so I started attending as many meetups as I possibly could and reached out to a bunch of people to have lunch and coffee. The community is small but pretty tight-knit in Singapore so it was actually easy and convenient to get settled. I met Arun at a Ruby meetup at hackerspace singapore and we kept in touch as we were both starting our own companies. We met up for a beer one night just to discuss our companies and we ended the night 5 hrs and about 20 beers later with a verbal agreement to join forces and start a company together – Anideo, where we developed a video-discovery app called Vidyou. I met Pete at a Pivotal Labs meetup at Viki’s offices, as Pete was working there as one of their initial lead engineers.

What motivated you to come to Silicon Valley?

Pete: It was a no-brainer decision. We are building a “B2D” product, so we just had to be in a place with the highest density of talented developers. Developer evangelism is a key user acquisition strategy for us and we knew there was no place better than the bay area for us to interact with developers. We plan to hold meetups, drinkups, and hackathons regularly in San Francisco. Hiring and getting advice is another reason why we had to be here. While there are some really intelligent engineers in Singapore, many of them lack experience in building a large-scale website, compared to those here. We also realized to form a real relationship with the thought leaders of the industry, we had to be geographically close to them. Eating, talking, and drinking IRL beats Skype calls, hands down.

AJ:  It’s a function of velocity for me. There’s no other place where knowledge transfer occurs as rapidly as it does here.  Everybody knows you want to “skate to where the puck is going to be”, and the best place to do that historically has always been to put yourself right in the middle of a “hub”.  In finance, it’s New York. In healthcare, it’s Boston. In entertainment, it’s LA and in Technology it’s San Francisco. I’m happy that I lived abroad for a few years though. There are a ton of amazing people in the valley, but it certainly feels deserving of the “echo chamber” description. I think it’s important to travel outside of the country if you’re able to so you can gain perspective on the problems that the other 6.7 billion people face outside of the U.S.

We all met back in the summer of 2012, and now in April 2013, you’ve finally moved to the Valley — was it difficult?

AJ:  Peter and Arun aren’t U.S. citizens, and getting U.S. visas wasn’t totally straightforward. By the time we decided to move to the U.S., the H1-B quota had already been hit, so we were really thinking we wouldn’t be in the U.S. until maybe October 2013. We did some research and realized that Pete and Arun were eligible for some other less common visas, so we put all the documents together and applied. I think both applications were well over 100 pages including supporting documents. It ended up working out well as they were both approved, but it definitely took up a huge amount of time and energy. Moving itself was pretty fun — we arrived on the eve of the Heroku Waza conference and crashed at a friend’s house in the city for a week (thanks Niles!).  We ended up subletting an apartment together down in Mountain View because it was cheaper. The location is great, I love Castro street, but the apartment itself has its flaws.

Do lots of other tech startups in Asia want to move to the Valley? What advice would you give them?

Pete: I definitely feel lots of other small tech startups in Asia want to move to the valley for the same reasons we have stated earlier. However, the visa situation really makes it difficult for most startups. Bootstrapping is virtually impossible since there is no chance that a ramen-profitable startup can qualify for any visa category that would let them stay beyond the typical three-month visa waiver period. Arun and I would not have been able to secure our work visas (we took L-1/O-1 route), had we not raised our significant seed financing. Having felt the pain ourselves (my visa application was 96 pages-long, and U.S. CIS requested for more evidence before finally approving it, followed by a rather unpleasant interview experience), we really feel that something needs to be done about this – afterall, we are trying to build a company and create jobs in the U.S. – and we strongly support recent immigration reform movements like FWD.us.

Arun: For an entrepreneur/developer outside Silicon Valley, moving here is the equivalent of an actor trying to move to Hollywood. We’d decided very early on that moving to Silicon Valley would be crucial to the success of the company – not just for the investors, advisors who’ve been-there, done-that with PaaS/SaaS companies, but also since Silicon Valley probably has the highest density of developers/early-adopters who would put up with the warts of your software but would still champion its virtues. If you’re doing a hyper-local startup or a travel search startup focused on Asia, then it probably does not make as much sense to move here, since your customers and evangelists are probably not located here.

Your company, Nitrous.IO (formerly Action.IO) is in the “B2D” space. How did investors respond to this kind of business?

Pete: Many investors have told us that they don’t like to invest in B2D startups because developers are cheap and they don’t like to pay for developer tools. I am not sure if I agree. Engineers are in such high demand right now, and because they are getting paid absurdly well these days (especially in the Bay Area), every minute of their time is really worth a lot of money. If some service can increase the productivity of an engineer that costs over $100 an hour by just 10%, that’s already worth over $1,500 dollars a month, and if a $50/month service can do that, then it’s really a no-brainer. Perhaps the term “B2D” is not really appropriate since it’s the companies that hire the developers that end up paying for the service, and not necessarily the developers themselves.

AJ: Investors have sometimes been critical of the “B2D” market because they don’t think developers will pay for tools. We don’t really think of Nitrous.IO as a developer tool, but as a productivity platform for individuals and businesses. We save time for people who want to code and provide them with multiple ways to connect to a development machine. Marc Andreessen said recently that “software is eating the world.” Everybody knows this is true–even in financially turbulent times, the need for optimization is compounded and technology is the basis of almost all optimization. So software is the brain behind everything, but writing software is still not the most accessible or simplest of processes. You actually need to be pretty smart just to *start* coding. Our goal with Nitrous.IO is to reduce the friction of getting started with a new technology, whether it be a new programming language or a new combination of technologies when you’re working on an application (often referred to as a “stack”). The important thing that helped with investors was communicating that Nitrous.IO isn’t just a developer tool, but a full-fledged platform that helps businesses and individuals streamline their entire development workflow. We’ve had over 6,000 development environments created in our private beta, which took a total of approximately 17 hours to create on our system. If the developers were creating them individually, it would have taken well over 10,000 hours. Imagine how much more software can be written in those 9,983 hours =)

How did you find the investment climate for your startup?

Arun: We’d decided  early on that we weren’t going to follow a “spray-and-pray-strategy” with investors in the Valley. AngelList was actually a great resource for finding investors who’ve invested in companies similar to ours. We knew that trying to explain a PaaS solution to an investor whose speciality is consumer/social would be a waste of both of our time and theirs (even if that investor was a “celebrity”). That is also when I’d noticed that you (Semil) had blogged about the B2D space and were making great observations about the enterprise software segment, and got in touch with you (through all places – Highlight!). You confirmed our thesis that there is no point trying to meet random investors, and made some great introductions to people (who we are still in touch with, as informal advisors). This is just an observation based on anecdotal evidence, but it seems like a few Valley investors have social/mobile fatigue – and unless social/mobile is part of a bigger play (for e.g. Github is social around developers, and we have a mobile component as part of our strategy), investors are tired of hearing the same thing over and over again. That’s where I think we had an advantage, because the idea in itself was interesting and game-changing, and we’d executed well and had a beta product ready before we began pitching.

Pete: New to the valley, we definitely lacked the social connections necessary to start talking to investors right away, and we were told by many that cold-emailing investors was a no-no, as it is highly unlikely for them to hear you out and once they say no, you have already ruined your chance. However one surprising thing we’ve discovered here is that other people in the startup scene in general are super friendly and willing to help. We’ve connected to lots of people whom we had absolutely no connection whatsoever previously over random channels, such as Highlight, AngelList, and Twitter, and more often than not, people were willing to meet up for coffee, hear our story and our pitch, and make intros if possible. That was also how we connected with you (Semil) and many others, and with lots of people following us in AngelList which got us in the “Trending Startup” list, we could slowly infiltrate and implant our names in the investors’ heads.

What are your plans now, Valley or City? How do you turn a million bucks of venture capital into a real business?

Pete: We’re currently based in Mountain View, but that is because we are currently working out of a great office space provided by our lead investor, at no charge (see picture above of the team in the Bessemer offices in Menlo Park). Once we have an external hire, we plan on moving to San Francisco, because that’s where all the cool developer gatherings and conferences are held. In San Francisco, if you really wanted to, you could probably attend a developer event every evening.

Arun: Long-term wewant to move to the city, there is an incredible amount of energy in the city, and with all the developer meetups and drinkups that happen, it makes sense for us to be there. Our immediate goal is to get to public beta and we have some awesome products and featured lined up which we are confident, will entice developers to pay for our service. We’re looking for a couple more engineers (http://nitrous.io/jobs) to help us get to that point and we have bigger plans for world domination once we hit general availability.

AJ: One of the most important things we’ve done to begin to transition to a true business is to engage with our users. I think this is where a lot of startups go wrong — they don’t think about which users are willing to pay them and what exactly they’re willing to pay for. Often, startups think about those things, but they’re usually just guessing and aren’t going on real data. We’ve had 1-on-1 conversations with over a thousand of our users, and are always surprised at what we learn from those conversations. The next hard part is using all the qualitative data we’ve captured to create a valuable pricing model for our customers.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

I was fortunate enough to spend a solid chunk of my adolescence strapped into an ill-fitting vest and shooting lasers at friends of mine, but a group of technically minded youngsters and their mentors in southern California didn’t just want to play laser tag.

No, the crew at San Diego-based ThoughtSTEM wanted to whip up a (slightly) more subtle laser tag system of their own, and they’re just about there — now they’ve kicked off a Kickstarter campaign to help bring it to market.

The wearable sensor the team has cobbled together is rather neat if only because of how unobtrusive it’s meant to be. Rather than go with a traditional (and bulky) vest, ThoughtSTEM has instead put together a small PCB that’s meant to be worn under a layer of clothing so all that’s visible are the six LEDs that change colors to display your remaining hit points.

For better or worse, you won’t have to lug around any plastic guns either. The sensors on the wearable unit can be triggered by any gadget that can emit infrared pulses at 38kHz, which means most of the remote controls currently cluttering up your living room will probably do the trick. That also means that with a little hackery, you could probably rig up a more traditional IR gun without too much trouble (there seems to be more than a few people who’ve already tried doing just that).

Alright fine, it may lack the panache that come with some more expensive, elaborate setups, but it’s a very neat first project for a crew of savvy young students and their college-age mentors. All told, the ThoughtSTEM team is looking for $10,000 in funding to improve the design of the wearable PCBs and produce them on a larger scale, as well as put together an online storefront to sell them from. $75 will net you a fully assembled target unit, but if you’re willing to apply some of your own elbow grease you can pick up the schematics and a pre-programmed processor for $25, or a bag full of parts for $49. While the proceeds of the Kickstarter campaign will help lock down the particulars of production, ThoughtSTEM aims to funnel whatever future money they make into the program’s coffers so those SoCal mentors continue to run workshops and summer camp programs for tech-savvy middle school and high school kids.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch