We’re less than a week out from our Austin TC Meetup + Pitch-Off, and I can already smell the barbeque in the air. Austin, are you ready to rumble?

The Austin Meetup + Pitch-Off is going down on Thursday, May 30, at The Stage On Sixth.

The event begins promptly at 6pm and runs until 10pm. Tickets are $5 each, and include booze.

But, you ask, what exactly is this fabled TC Meetup + Pitch-off that I’m pushing?

Well, at its core its a gathering of your city’s local VC, entrepreneurial, startup and general tech crowd. Attendees can socialize, drink booze (21 and up please) and maybe even meet a few really cool people. But that’s not all.

The TC Meetup + Pitch-off is equal parts meetup and pitch-off, which is a competition that lets entrepreneurs and founders pitch their products to a panel of judges with only sixty seconds to make their plea. Even if the ideas aren’t interesting (which they totally are), there’s real entertainment value in watching someone battle against a clock.

Judges will include Matt Burns and John Biggs from TechCrunch, as well as local Austin luminaries Bijoy Goswami and Noah Kagan. I’ll be MCing. It’ll be great.

Our NY Meetup + Pitch-Off was a smashing success. PaddleYou was spotted in Hardware Alley after coming in third at the Pitch-Off, while runners up Talkz and winner 3DLT both made it into the Disrupt Battlefield.

Applications are currently closed for the Austin pitch-off, but tickets to the event are still available here. We still have some startup tables left where you can demo your product to the attendees and TC staff. If you have any questions about the tables, please email Megan Lehn.

Our sponsors help make events happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here sponsors@techcrunch.com.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

There’s plenty of buzz about the concept of making our cities “smarter” — that is, loading them up with sensors and data-driven services to improve efficiency and quality of life. Hell, even Google has taken to loading up its event venues with scores of sensors.

Most of the discussion out there deals with how local governments are working toward this lofty, nebulous goal, but a team called Acrobotics Industries is trying to put the onus on the citizens. To that end the team has kicked off a $50,000 Kickstarter campaign for a small sensor array called the Smart Citizen kit in hopes that people will start collecting and sharing their environmental data with the world.

“There’s a problem with the way current cities were built,” Acrobotic’s COO Francisco Zabala told me. “Beijing’s air quality is insanely bad — we think we have it bad in L.A. — and it’s not getting any better.

The heart (or brain, I guess) of the Smart Citizen project is an Arduino-powered kit that gets tucked away inside (or outside, if you’ve got the right kind of enclosure) of a user’s home to track local environmental variables — think temperature, humidity, air composition, ambient brightness, and sound levels. It’s arguably neat enough to keep tabs on the environmental conditions at your home while you’re not there, but the real value here is when a host of users set up their Smart Citizen sensors and fire up them up en masse.

It’s the team’s hope that Smart Citizen kits will sell widely enough that regular people will be able to get an accurate glance at environmental conditions with a finer sort of granularity than you’d get by firing up, say, the Weather Channel app. For what it’s worth, Zabala concedes that the Smart Citizen project is largely geared toward making people aware of climate change and global warming without getting too political or divisive about it.

“I believe that climate is changing for the worse, but our approach is more personal,” Zabala said. “By raising awareness we’re working toward a solution without banging on people’s heads.”

As it happens, a few of those Smart Citizen kits have already been fired up. A quick look at a demo version of the sensor-tracking website reveals that a handful of the little things are live in Zabala’s native Barcelona — the Smart Citizen team ran an earlier, more local crowdfunding campaign (Zabala called it a “proof of concept run”) that saw a number of users in Spain install and fire up their sensor arrays all around the city. Hovering over a bright blue spot displays the latest environmental data (users can define how often they want those updates to occur), while greyed out units haven’t been fired up lately.

Thanks to how the Smart Citizen kit is constructed, users will eventually be able to monitor more than just the environmental criteria this early kit supports. Zabala said that the Acrobotics team is currently working on swappable daughterboards that will allow the Smart Citizen kit to be used for soil and water testing, too — perfect for you city-dwelling gardeners. If you’re suddenly itching to monitor your surroundings more acutely, you’ll be able to lay claim to a fully constructed Smart Citizen for $155 — the more handy among you can save a little money by springing for the $105 unassembled kit instead.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

“Los Angeles is an underachieving city,” wrote the Los Angeles Times in its 2013 mayoral endorsement. ”The candidate with the most potential to rise to the occasion and lead Los Angeles out of its current malaise and into a more sustainable and confident future is Eric Garcetti.”

An overwhelming number of startup founders seem to agree that Garcetti is the best candidate to bring out the best in Silicon Valley’s sister city to the south.

“Eric is by far the best candidate for Los Angeles, and has demonstrated a clear plan to grow jobs & our local economy. The proof is in his record, he spearheaded an innovative partnership with our company to provide LA business owners/operators the simplest way to get business licenses,” Jason Nazar, founder and CEO of Docstoc, told us in an email. “He has the overwhelming endorsement of our tech community, and he’s someone I know will work tirelessly to make this the best city for every small business.”

Given the strong desire by L.A.’s startup community to see Garcetti in office, and his impressively geeky record as a city councilman, I’m compelled to endorse his candidacy and urge Angelenos to elect him as its next mayor on May 21st.

Government’s have an undeniable impact on technology entrepreneurs: burdensome taxes and regulations can strangle innovation in the cradle, while funding for education and research are foundational to emerging stars.

Mayors can be powerful allies if they care enough about startups. If San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee hadn’t personally gone out to petition for local proposition E, it might never have passed and saved nascent startups thousands in payroll costs.

Most importantly, we likely won’t know the biggest challenges of the industry in the near future. A few years ago, the sharing economy barely existed, let alone faced the aggressive targeting of government regulators. In Garcetti’s (hopefully) eight years as L.A. mayor, the only thing we have to go on in whether he will prioritize startups on unknown issues against established interests is how he has treated startups in the past.

Nearly every startup we spoke to not only knew of Garcetti, but knew him personally. We cannot think of a policymaker in L.A. who has dedicated more of his time to our readers. But don’t take it from me, take it from the flood of endorsements we received on his behalf (below).

Our mission with TechCrunch’s policy channel, CrunchGov, is to keep our readers informed about laws and policymakers that affect your ability to build amazing things. As mayor, Garcetti will no doubt help you all do that.

Tara Tiger Brown, Represent.LA/ LA Makerspace
Eric Garcetti understands the importance of startups and technology to the future of the Los Angeles economy. He wants high school students to learn how to code, he understands that small tech firms are key to retaining engineering talent, and he’s dedicated to working closely with our research universities to ensure we benefit fully from our innovation leadership.

Sam Friedman & Alexander Israel, ParkMe co-founders
Eric Garcetti has the right policies to foster innovation and growth for our tech industry. His stewardship will drive collaboration among the private sector and local government to help create solutions and increase efficiencies to issues such as traffic and parking.

Jason Lehmbeck, Datapop
Garcetti would be the first real tech champion in the LA mayor’s office. His track record on the council in leveraging tech to make Angelenos lives better speaks for itself including launching the first 311 app in his district years ago. His specific plans as mayor point to LA taking its rightful place as a global center of innovation. These aren’t just campaign talking points, they are real initiatives that will have a big impact on city life including appointing a city CTO as well as setting up an office to work with LA’s great universities to encourage all those talented engineers and scientists to stay in LA. As a tech entrepreneur in LA, he has my vote.

Greg Cohn, Co-Founder & CEO, Ad Hoc Labs (makers of Burner)
Eric understands the impact the tech economy is having on LA today, and as an ideas person, the long-term transformative potential inherent in fostering a startup ecosystem. He also gets tech culture — both at the level of what needs to be done to support & enable it, and at the level of what the city could learn from it to be more efficient and effective.

Adam Lilling Managing Director – Plus Capital and Founding Director – LaunchpadLA
Too many politicians make decisions based on personal experience. It’s very limiting. Eric uses data to inform and drive his decisions and he uses it to help others see the way forward. From the first time I met him (he knew the lease terms on my Chevy volt by heart) to the last time I heard him speak (he used historical data and a trend line to make a point) he has the substance to support his charming ways

Marc Mitchell, CEO and co-Founder, Lootsie
Eric has consistently shown that he understands how technology can be used effectively, efficiently and at a low cost to address LA’s everyday problems. In his district, the Garcetti311 app has been used to fill potholes and to identify and remove graffiti in a quick, cost-effective manner that puts citizens directly in touch with their elected leaders. Solutions like these are replicable and scalable and will benefit all of LA when Eric is mayor.

Jason Rapp, Managing Director, Science-Inc.
“Eric Garcetti has actively supported the tech community in LA for years. He understands that the tech industry is a powerful job engine and community builder. He listens carefully and he takes action swiftly — two important ingredients whether you’re running a startup or a city.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It’s hard to believe that it’s been less than a year since ride-sharing service Lyft first launched in beta to friends and family, offering a low-cost alternative to on-demand black car service Uber. Not only has it grown aggressively in its home market since then, but Lyft has since begun offering service in Los Angeles and Seattle. It’s tacking on another city this weekend with a launch in Chicago.

With the addition of Chicago, Lyft will now be in four markets nationwide. That’s fewer than competitors SideCar and Uber, but it’s been focused on improving its rollout with each new city. With the recent addition of Cherry co-founder Travis VanderZanden as COO and its expansion playbook set, Lyft president John Zimmer promises me that the company will be aggressively adding new cities over the next year.

In the early stages of its expansion the company has seen positive signs of growth from each new city it’s launched in. Lyft’s launch in Los Angeles outpaced its first 12 weeks in San Francisco, with three times the number of users after its first 12 weeks. And the first month of service in Seattle has outpaced both its first two markets.

In Chicago, it’s hoping for the same type of demand trajectory, and believes it already has the driver supply to match. The launch team in Chicago has seen more drivers apply during its initial outreach period than in either Seattle or L.A., Zimmer tells me.

Exporting Company Culture

The company decided to expand to Chicago next due to the population density and transportation habits of residents there. Surprisingly enough, it didn’t really look at data around the number of people who have tried using downloading the app or using the service locally there.

Just as in L.A. and Seattle, Lyft sent a launch team ahead to Chicago to recruit drivers and vet them for service. For Lyft, that means driver and criminal background checks, as well as a car inspection and training to ensure that drivers fit with the community that it’s trying to build.

Along with the easily recognizable pink mustaches that grace Lyft vehicles, the company’s culture could be its biggest differentiator, but it’s also the most difficult piece of the business to re-create as it expands from market to market.

As for those mustaches — the company almost ran out, as it’s been adding drivers more quickly than its supplier could keep up, Zimmer tells me. Mostly, that was due to growth in San Francisco, where the company has recently doubled its driver count over the last two months.

Notably, the increase in supply has happened while Lyft has faced increased competition in its home market from Uber, which recently launched ride-sharing services of its own. In an effort to compete, Uber has been trying to poach Lyft drivers with some aggressive marketing tactics — including a “Shave the ‘Stache” mobile billboard that’s been driving around San Francisco over the past week.

Focus Now On Ride Sharing

Along with the launch in Chicago, the startup is announcing that it’s officially putting to rest the Zimride brand and will be known just as Lyft going forward. The company continues to support the legacy Zimride business, but the company’s main focus is on ride sharing — and has been for a while. So it’s not a huge surprise that it’s decided to reincorporate as Lyft Inc.

The rebrand follows a long and winding road that the company has been on since its inception. It all started about six years ago, when a group of friends founded Zimride to make it easier for university students to carpool home during the holidays and on weekends. The carpool community eventually expanded beyond university students, but the founders saw a larger opportunity in helping passengers get around urban markets.

So early last year, the remaining founders decided to take the business in a different direction and focus more on ride-sharing in cities rather than the longer, road trip-style carpooling that Zimride was traditionally known for. Thus Lyft was born.

Now that it has seen success with that model in San Francisco and subsequent cities, Lyft is ready to make it available throughout the country. Expect a number of new cities to be turned up over the next several months, as the Lyft expansion team continues to grow.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Urban Compass, a New York-based startup that last year raised an $8 million seed round while still in stealth mode, is coming out of the shadows and debuting its first services in public beta: a hyperlocal social network, called the Urban Compass Network, and a housing rentals platform that brings online the whole process of finding, securing and subsequently paying for a place to live. The two services, which debut first in New York, were formally unveiled today at a press conference led by the Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg.

Ori Allon, the co-founder and executive chairman — and also a search PhD who sold his last two (search-focused) startups respectively first to Google and then Twitter, where he became head of engineering based in New York until he left to start Urban Compass — is trying something new with his latest venture: a “data-driven company” as he describes it, but also one that, fundamentally, will be relying on a lot of human input for the wheels to turn.

In January, alongside an engineering recruitment effort, the company began to hire a cadre of “neighborhood specialists” to act as experts on specific locales in the city, with the request that they also have some kind of experience in customer services. The neighborhood specialists, it turns out, are serving a two-fold purpose. They are data collectors, reporting on the best that a neighborhood has to offer, which will be fed into Neighborhood Guides; these will in turn become the building blocks of Urban Compass Network. And, putting on another, more businesslike hat, those neighborhood specialists are agents, bringing prospective residents to look at potential homes. (And Urban Compass has equipped them with training and licenses for that purpose.) The aim is for 200 people to work for Urban Compass by the end of this year.

The rentals part of the service is already being used in private beta: a large corporate based in the city signed on and started to refer to Urban Compass all of its employees relocating to New York. Those users in turn were able to refer others to the site. With UC taking a percentage of every lease completed through the site, the rentals business has already started to bring in some impressive revenues — Allon says numbers will be made public soon, but he notes that those sales are strong enough that he and the other three co-founders — CEO Robert Reffkin, an ex-banker and non-profit fundraiser extraordinaire; head of product Mike Weiss; and lead engineer Ugo Di Girolamo — will not need to be raising more funding any time in the near future.

(Backers in the seed round included Founders Fund, Goldman Sachs, Thrive Capital, the CEO of American Express Kenneth Chenault, and ZocDoc’s CEO Cyrus Massoumi, among others.)

The rentals part of the site is a fairly disruptive operation in itself: not only does it cut out brokers who have acted as the costly middle man for each rental in the city; but by going directly to those leasing out properties, it’s offering one more way for them to bypass sites like Craiglist.org, creating a simple, one-stop shop for the lifetime of a rental deal. It’s also a direct link to one of Urban Compass’s first big hires, Gordon Golub, a long-standing real estate executive in the city.

Still, combining a hyperlocal social network and an e-commerce focused rentals site may sound like an incongruous pairing: a social network seems to work best when it feels as organic and uncommercial as possible, while a housing rentals site seems like the most overtly of commercial enterprises. But at Urban Compass, not only do the two have the same people working for them, but the they are built on the same platform.

“I like big challenges,” Allon says of decision to introduce the two services together. He maintains that both get equal weight in the companies’ current system, and they will do in the future as Urban Compass adds more features.

Allon describes the social network as “an essential part of both our system and future growth plans,” while the rentals service, which will soon also include homes to buy, addresses a fundamental need, one that goes hand-in-hand with selecting a neighborhood to live in: “We want to help people find a place to live, both as a neighborhood and a home.” The idea, he says, is for rentals to complement other neighborhood-focused services going forward. “It’s true that we’re starting with rentals, but this is the just the first step. We’ve designed the system with large scale in mind.”

In the beta phase of the service, only those who sign up for rentals services will have access to the Urban Compass Network. The plan is for that to open up as Urban Compass’s own services grow to cover other areas.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It’s fair to say that the “ambient location” craze has passed. Several of the mobile apps intent on connecting people with friends and other recommended users nearby are still struggling to find mainstream adoption. Some, like Glancee and Glassmap have sold. Others, like Kismet, have moved into new product categories. And today, the business-focused networking app Intro, is pivoting.

Gone are the “ambient location” features which once alerted you to nearby users based on things like geotagged tweets or check-ins. With the new version, the company has shifted the focus solely to making one-to-one introductions between members of LinkedIn or Meetup groups.

Explains co-founder Anthony Erwin, the decision to make this switch came from observations of user behavior. The best and most powerful introductions the app enabled were those where the members were each in the same group already. 90 percent of the time when an intro was created and members would connect, they cited being in the same group as the reason, he says.

“I think what’s happened in this space, is because it’s dealing with connecting strangers – people are kind of wary of that,” says Erwin. “If you’re going to create connections that work, they’re going to have to be very familiar; almost not like strangers, in a way.”

Users told him that when they were shown other group members, those people didn’t feel like random strangers.

Intro has always been more sensitive to the potentially creepy nature of ambient location apps, having previously introduced features that would allow users to switch of networking with those not outside of a set of preferred groups, for instance. The revamped version of the app is something of an extension of that earlier concept more than it is a hard pivot to an entirely new vertical.

In the updated application, available now on iOS and for Android in a few weeks time (currently the Android app is the older version of Intro), you’ll still be shown other group members who are nearby, but now the app take a wider view of your location. It begins by offering you connections across your city, as opposed to at your exact location. You can then quickly swipe through the suggestions to connect or reject the proposed connections.

However, when there is an event or other congregation of members in the same location, the app’s algorithm will immediately adjust to sort its recommendations by degrees of separation and other signals which would indicate closer ties with that user. These same signals come into play any time you’re sorting through connections, but they’re even more critical when there’s a crowd.

In addition to finding users who are in your same LinkedIn and Meetup groups, the updated service also now lets group administrators import their member list to Intro, then use an online web dashboard to view demographic data or to create and send out messages and alerts to users, such as meeting details. Recipients can then add these event reminders to their iOS calendar.

During testing and in the past few days when the app quietly relaunched, hundreds of group admins have claimed their groups on the app, and thousands of their members have begun networking. Groups where the admin has taken control include the NY Tech Meetup group, Founders Network, the Lean Six Sigma group, Soho House, the Silicon Roundabout group, the U.S. Realtors Association, the Pharmaceutical Association of America, a Red Cross group for frontline aid workers, and others.

Groups are free for members and admins of those with up to 100 members. Afterwards, pricing ranges from $10/month to $100/month, depending on the number of members. Around 30 percent of the group admins are now paying users, and the average price falls around $49/month.

The updated Intro app is available here in the iTunes App Store. The Android version will be updated soon.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Andreessen Horowitz partner Chris Dixon has been a big part of the New York City scene for years — and finance has long been a dominant industry in the city. So when talking about the ascent of Bitcoin onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC Dixon directly addressed corruption in Wall Street, we thought it’d be interesting to follow up and hear more.

So in our chat backstage, Dixon talked a bit more about how he sees the tech industry impacting the “company town” feeling of Wall Street dominating New York — and how tech is shifting the energy of the city back from a place that takes things, to a place that makes things. We also talked about Andreessen Horowitz is investing beyond software and into the hardware space, Dixon’s very popular personal blog, and more.

Check it all out in the video above.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Transit trade groups pulled out the race card and managed to block smartphone taxi “e-hailing” a day after they were cleared to pilot in New York City. Associate Justice Helen E. Freedman issued an emergency injunction against smartphone taxi app companies Hailo and Uber, after hearing arguments from the several car service groups alleging that smartphones permit drivers to discriminate against passengers based on race, name, age and location.

“We’re disappointed that there is a further delay in implementing the e-hail pilot program. It’s unfortunate that taxi riders will not be able to continue to test this innovative tool for hailing taxis,” wrote Senior Counsel in NYC Law Department, Michelle Goldberg-Cahn, in a statement.

On May 1st, hand waving-averse New Yorkers were supposed to be able to summon and track taxis from their mobile phones, though they weren’t allowed to pay through the application and the pilot was only available in certain parts of the city and call taxis within a certain radius of the passenger.

This latest legal injunction is just the low point in a roller coaster between smartphone car service apps, who have been cleared and blocked over and over again, as taxi groups fight tech startups for control over the lucrative transportation industry.

It is wholly ironic that taxi organizations allege that smartphone applications are a threat to equality. For years, news organizations have replicated the abject racism that occurs between people of color and drivers.

“At night they will slow down to pick me up and realize that I’m a person of color then suddenly flip the switch; they’re out of service and will drive on. And I’ve seen it as far as they will go to the next block and pick someone else up within clear sight,” said Briscoe Savoy, a resident of Brooklyn who participated in an ABC experiment.

Indeed, one black D.C. resident defended Uber against regulators back when the state had threatened to raise prices on the smartphone black car service. “That’s why I’m dismayed by the proposed regulations that could potentially put Uber out of business,” wrote Clinton Yates, for the Washington Post. “It would be a step backward for those of us who are willing to pay more money for a respectable transaction rather than take our chances on the street and be degraded in the process.”

The injunction is part of an ongoing court battle. We will update readers as the story unfolds.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

New York-based startup HealthyOut already has a popular iPhone and Android app for quickly finding nearby restaurants and dishes that users can order and have delivered. Today at Disrupt NY 2013, HealthyOut is unveiling a new service, which will provide users with personalized menus of food delivered to help them lose weight or just eat better overall.

Launching first in New York City, HealthyOut’s delivery service is designed to provide users with healthy options two times a day, five days a week. By combing through the menus of restaurants around the city that deliver, HealthyOut will come up with 10 meals a week that can automatically be sent to a customer’s home or office.

Now, there’s no shortage of food delivery services out there. But HealthyOut will make sure that when you’re ordering out, you’re making healthy choices. In fact, it’ll more or less make those decisions for you.

HealthyOut is designed to be “your own personal concierge and nutritionist planning out your meals,” co-founder Wendy Nguyen told me. The idea is to simplify users’ lives by planning meals out for them, and helping them discover new dishes that they might not have ordered for themselves.

“Everyone knows go-to meals around a given spot,” Nguyen told me. “But they don’t know what are the best meals” for healthy eating. HealthyOut solves that problem.

Users can personalize those deliveries based on dietary preferences or requirements. For instance, they can choose from about a dozen different types of diets — like low carb, Paleo, or vegan. They can also set preferences, like types of cuisine or foods that they want to receive (or not), as well as a price range per meal.

Once all that’s done, the program gets put on autopilot, and healthy meals from nearby restaurants will just start showing up to a customer’s home or office a couple of times a day. Users will get a menu at the beginning of the week telling them what’s coming, and a text notification as a reminder about 90 minutes before the delivery.

Customers can cancel or put a meal on hold if they plan to eat out somewhere else or *gasp* cook something themselves. In either case, HealthyOut will make suggestions for things that they can order or cook to keep with their diet plan.

HealthyOut keeps the customer’s billing information, and automatically deducts the cost of food, delivery, and tip from a customer’s account. In addition to the cost of food and delivery, HealthyOut has a subscription cost of $28 per month for managing all diets and orders and keeping people on track.

The service was built based on dish-level information that HealthyOut has collected in building out its iPhone app. So it will be able to suggest (and schedule) specific dishes from restaurants even if they’re not exactly known for being healthy.

HealthyOut has been working with restaurants themselves to build out the service and ensure a high level of quality. It also has partnered with a third-party delivery service for payments and delivery.

In a place like New York, where there are a ton of restaurants that deliver in a small area, it’s easy to find healthy choices. So it makes sense to launch there. But the team wants to take HealthyOut’s delivery service to other markets, and ultimately make it available everywhere. For other cities and even suburban markets, that could mean having a mix of takeout and delivery.

HealthyOut has raised $1.2 million from 500 Startups, Bradley Harrison Ventures, Answers.com COO Peter Horan, AOL’s former head of marketing Jan Brandt, N.Y. restaurateur Dave Kassling, Pivotal NYC managing director Josh Knowles, and other angels. The company was founded by Nguyen, who previously was the second employee of SocialChorus; as well as Dan Myers, who was previously at TSG Consumer Partners, and full-stack Rails developer Jonathan Hironaga, who was also part of the SocialChorus team.

Judge Q&A

Q: What’s the cost to consumers?

A: It’s $28 a month and the cost of food, which turns out to be less than comparable diet plans.

Q: How do you gather information from the restaurants?

A: We got dish-level menu information, so we have all that data in our app. The way that these orders come through, there are special instructions. If we find a restaurant that aren’t delivering these orders, we’ll stop working with them.

Q: What about private chefs that can post meals? Are you just working with restaurants? What’s the competitive landscape?

A: We use the restaurant supply chain. To get real scale, you need to work with restaurants.

Q: User acquisition strategy?

A: We’re on track to do a million downloads. From there, we use it as a funnel when we enter a new city.

Q: Biggest challenge for restaurants is you have no idea what’s in your food and how it’s prepared.

A: It’s about finding the best dishes in your neighborhood. Took a sample in small markets and compared against nutritionists, and found that we had better data.

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