Revitalized action series, “24,” tops this week’s list of top gaining tv show pages in the People Talking About This metric. Also among the top ten this week is reality series of former child actors, “Tia & Tamera” and upcoming “The Avengers” spin-off series, “Agents of the S.H.I.E.L.D.”

Of the top 10 pages, the top three are shows have yet to begin their season, while six have just aired their season finales last week.

This list of top gaining TV Show pages is compiled with PageData, which tracks page growth and engagement across Facebook.

#	Name	People Talking About		Weekly Growth
1	24	483,952		+474,978
2	Tia & Tamera	394,900		+258,790
3	Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.	261,039		+238,063
4	Grey’s Anatomy	1,083,155		+219,380
5	The Simpsons	532,328		+167,244
6	How I Met Your Mother	326,211		+155,120
7	Arrested Development	319,974		+125,860
8	Survivor	197,924		+110,691
11	Bones	134,922		+76,216
12	Family Guy	350,255		+75,586

For “24,” the page’s increased engagement has spurred from a single post announcing the renewal of the series. With over 100k shares, the page has been able to experience growth virally. Page activity and PTAT will probably not be sustained until production begins, unless the page has a content strategy plan in place to produce more regular updates in the meantime.

Riding on the coattails of the release of “Iron Man 3″, “Agents of the S.H.I.E.L.D.” has been marketing heavily through Facebook advertising. The page’s managers have been purchasing ads to increase total page Likes to help reach more people. In the graph below, it can be seen that page’s Like growth rose significantly after May 10, but leveled out around May 19. Viacom has recently found through a study that Facebook users that like a TV Show page are 75 percent more likely to watch those shows. By acquiring Likes now, the show looks primed to earn high ratings early.

Visit PageData to see more about the top talked about TV Show pages as well as other categories. Now only $19.95 a month.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Artkive, an app designed to eliminate the overwhelming guilt you get tossing your children’s brilliant artwork into the garbage, now has another purpose, too: you can order printed out books of their creations. Instead of just hiding the child’s crumpled up drawings and precious finger-paint covered handprints that school sends home – what is now, like every day? – under cereal boxes and empty bags of chips, you can assure yourself that you’ve found a more efficient means of saving these items instead. You snapped a photo of them.

The sense of relief is overwhelming, I tell you.

OK, I kid…a little.

But as any parent will tell you, kids’ art output is overwhelming, forcing you to curate with a heavy hand. That’s why so many moms (and some dads, too) have begun snapping photos of the art before it hits the trash.

Explains CEO Jedd Gold, who has extensive experience working in kids’ entertainment, including with the relaunch of nostalgic 80′s brands like Strawberry Shortcake and Trolls, he was inspired to build Artkive after witnessing this very behavior at home.

“I was watching my wife take pictures of our kids’ artwork on her camera, that she would upload to her computer, and then she would upload from her computer to one of these photo sites. But by then she wouldn’t remember who created what piece, or when they were created, and they’d be out of order,” he says. “I thought, ‘there’s gotta be an app for that.’ But there really wasn’t.”

So he launched one.

The Kive Company raised $500,000 late last year for its mobile application that helps you to not just take the photos, but also annotate them with things like the child’s name, date of creation, and other comments.

Although the original goal was to make the art archiving process easier – as you can tell by the name – the app’s small but growing customer base of 105,000 (almost all moms) have already found other uses for it. They’re documenting everything that you would save for a kids’ scrapbook, including report cards, photos, other items from events and school activities, and more. One woman even used the app to document the last seven months of her pregnancy.

With this expanded focus, the printed book option begins to make more sense. Because as much as I love my own daughter’s art, I’m not sure how often I’d really revisit it in hardcover book format. But a scrapbook of her pre-kindergarten years? That I could get on board with.

Gold initially tested the concept with an alpha product launched in December. He added a “print” button to the app, without offering an explanation or any details as to what the final product would be. Despite this lack of information, a couple hundred Artkive users ordered books.

With the app’s recent update, the book purchasing feature has been overhauled. Users can now review and edit their books, changing things like the title, text on the page, the pictures it includes, and more. Books can either be 8

Practice Fusion has made a name for itself over the past few years by tapping into enormous demand for digital health information — particularly health records. From its inception in 2005, the startup has been on a mission to disrupt the slow-moving, archaic world of Healthcare IT by providing a free, web-based electronic medical records (EMR) platform to doctors and their practices.

These days, we take free scalable, online platforms for granted, but at the time, Practice Fusion’s approach to EMR was far from being the norm in the healthcare market. Since then, the company has gone on to raise $70 million, attract some 150K medical professionals and grow to over 250+ employees. Today, Practice Fusion hosts digital health records for over 64 million people in the U.S., making it one of the largest web-based EMR platforms out there.

With the success of its EMR software, Practice Fusion is now looking to extend the functionality of its platform with the goal of building a true end-to-end health service. Setting its sights on becoming the Salesforce.com for doctors and the Facebook for health, last month the company launched Patient Fusion — a new complementary site that allows anyone and everyone to compare doctor reviews and book appointments within an hour of arriving at the doctor’s office.

The new service takes Practice Fusion into ZocDoc’s territory, combining Yelp-like reviews with an Uber-style on-demand booking service. However, unlike Yelp, which would allow users to rate doctors even if they’ve never stepped foot in their office, Patient Fusion aggregates ratings from patients after their visits. This allows the company to not only build a database of verified reviews (based on visits it knows actually took place), but to lay the groundwork for a sizable local physician search engine as well.

With several million reviews now live, today Practice Fusion is taking the next step toward being a full-service health information platform with the launch of a free tool that aims to help patients keep better tabs on their health spending. Now, along with the ability to book appointments and access digital health records, Patient Fusion allows users to track their health spending across their entire history of medical visits.

The platform, which officially launches in beta today, is available to Practice Fusion patients who are covered by national health insurance providers like Anthem Blue Cross and United. If the initial launch of Patient Fusion brought the company into Yelp (and ZocDoc) territory, then its new free service marks the beginning of Practice Fusion’s own version of Mint.com for health.

By aggregating patients’ health information and family health bills, Patient Fusion allows users to track and visualize the history of their health costs, including out-of-pocket expenses and deductibles, for example. The idea is to help users more accurately plan their flexible spending account (FSA) contributions and estimate the cost of future visits to the doctor’s office, for example.

Another key piece of the new service is that it includes insurance claims information to enable patients to view their claims history and determine which claims have been rejected, which have been accepted and which may need to be disputed. By allowing patients to more effectively stay on top of their health bills, the company also sees a potential upside for doctors — as easier expense management could lead to an increase in payments that are more accurate and are actually on time.

With the average person now spending $3,000/year on out-of-pocket medical costs and with medical bills now representing one of the leading causes of personal bankruptcy in the U.S., Practice Fusion is hoping that its new tools can alleviate some of this financial stress. While the company is far from being the only service to allow patients to track their health spending, the service has the benefit of being tied to one of the largest EMR platforms in the U.S. and a search and booking service that now includes more than 27,000 verified providers.

By simplifying health expense tracking and by allowing people to view out-of-pocket expenses incurred to date (as well as costs covered by insurance and the remaining balance of their deductible) — all for free — Patient Fusion comes with plenty of appeal.

This is especially true for doctors and practices already using the company’s EMR platform, as they can now direct their patients to its appointment booking and expense tracking tool without worrying about the high costs of ZocDoc or other similar services. And, for its new tool, having access to the huge network of medical professionals using its EMR software, this means ready-made scale.

The new service will be of particular interest to startups like Simplee, which launched its own “Mint.com for healthcare expenses” service and medical wallet back in 2011 to enable people to better track visits, monitor benefits and pay bills online. More recently, Simplee has expanded its reach by bringing a payment and loyalty platform to hospitals in an effort to give them a better way to distribute bills (digitally), and, last month, it launched a new mobile app that allows people to pay their family’s medical bills from their phone — on the go.

While Simplee has managed over $2 billion in medical bills to date, Patient Fusion’s new service puts the two companies in direct competition — at least in regard to this functionality. However, Practice Fusion’s version does not yet support bill payments, only expense management, nor does it yet have the mobile piece. Though Simplee’s platform is (arguably) more extensive at this point, it likely won’t be long before Practice Fusion fills the remaining gap.

What’s more, as the company further extends it health platform, potentially adding integrations with popular health-tracking devices (like, say, Fitbit), Practice Fusion will begin to compete with a whole new category of startups and companies. While it remains to be seen which tools the average patient will find more accessible (and usable), at this point, given the ridiculous cost of healthcare and medical expenses, the average American will welcome any help in this regard with open arms.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Today, a day after discussing his voice issues, Google CEO Larry Page took the stage at I/O keynote. He skipped last year’s conference and a few earnings calls after it due to those same voice problems, which he has noted are improving. Page even did something a little new for I/O — taking questions at the end of his talk.

At I/O, Page discussed how important it is for both the developers and Google itself to keep dedicating themselves to technology, to make sure that people everywhere can get access to it. He also discussed his relationship with his father, and how important that was in influencing him when it comes to innovation:

My dad was really interested in technology. He drove me and my family all across the country to go to a robotis company. Then we got there, he thought it was so important his son would go to the conference.

He moved on to discuss how important it is to be able to put all of its work on every single device, making Google a platform to build from. Page notes that adoption of technology is now “much, much faster” and the smartphone itself shows that. Page wants technology to do the hard work, meaning that consumers should be able to use technology, not be used by it. Google’s latest design choices and product announcements reflect that line of thinking, specifically the ease of use that comes with Google Now.

His philosophy can be best summed up with this quote: “We should be building great things that don’t exist.” This is why Google doesn’t pay attention to competition who is working on similar products, it tries to stay one step ahead with things like self-driving cars and Glass.

Page being on stage is a big deal, as it shows that the company is unified under his direction, regardless of his medical condition.

When asked about freedom of information, Page said that in hundreds of countries in the world, Google is speaking to leaders of countries, specifically its Chairman, Eric Schmidt, to keep dialogue open about protecting users’ privacy as well as keeping your freedom of speech intact.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

As a fourth generation venture investor, Adam Draper was pretty much predestined to work with startups. The son of Tim Draper, the founder of global VC firm Draper Fisher Jurveston, Adam has made it his mission to do everything in his power to help entrepreneurs bring their ideas to life — without relying on his family name to do so. After taking the plunge as an entrepreneur himself, co-founding a capital raising and trading platform and an equity crowdfunding portal, the 26-year-old again finds himself back in the Draper wheelhouse: Early-stage finance.

In the summer of 2012, Draper launched his third venture, Boost.vc, a San Mateo-based accelerator that offers housing (in an on-site hotel), office space, mentorship and seed funding as part of its 12-week incubation program. But by today’s standards, considering the glut of startup accelerators that have emerged over the last two years, what was once an attractive model now almost sounds run-of-the-mill. I’d argue, and Draper would agree, that accelerators can provide more value for startups over the long-run by focusing on a particular vertical.

Today, Boost.vc is taking its first (experimental) step in that direction by focusing on one of the hottest verticals in the tech industry: Bitcoin. About three months ago, the decentralized, ungoverned currency became “an obsession,” Draper says, and since then, it’s been the focus of his blog, meetings and now, in part, his accelerator. Boost.vc will be dedicating half of its second batch (seven startups total) to companies building products and technologies around the Bitcoin ecosystem.

When it comes to Bitcoin, Draper unabashedly wears rose-colored glasses, calling Bitcoin “one of the most exciting innovations happening in the world today.” While the kind of endorsement might give some pause, Draper isn’t alone. Last month, Lightspeed Venture Partners’ Jeremy Liew penned a post for TechCrunch explaining why VCs “love the Bitcoin market.” Liew himself has been a champion of Bitcoin and its incarnations, having recently backed OpenCoin, the developer of open source payment protocol, Ripple, for example.

Now Liew and other VCs are ready to ante up and continue to put their money where their mouths are by helping to establish the “Boost Bitcoin Fund.” The Fund, Draper exaplins, is a follow-on or “start” fund for all Bitcoin companies that graduate from the accelerator program. Each of the fifteen companies in Boost’s cohorts receives $15K in seed capital (in exchange for a 5 percent equity stake), but with the new fund, Bitcoin startups will receive an additional $50K investment upon completing the program.

The fund is anchored by Lightspeed, Rothenberg Ventures, The Bitcoin Opportunity Fund and Beluga founder Ben Davenport, all of which have begun to invest more aggressively in Bitcoin startups. Draper says that the team began to toy with the idea of a follow-on fund when the founders decided to accept seven Bitcoin startups into its summer session.

In floating the idea for a Bitcoin Start Fund to the investment community, the team was surprised by the warm reception that followed. In fact, Draper says, the capital came together in a week. With the Bitcoin movement continuing to gain steam, both entrepreneurs and investors are eagerly jumping into the space and testing new ideas in hopes of finding business models that will stick.

True to form, Draper says that the Boost.vc team is fully “committed to pushing Bitcoin toward becoming the next digital frontier.” Even if, as part of that experiment, the eight startups not focused on Bitcoin have to look on with envy as the other half of their cohort pockets an additional $50K at the end of the program.

Not only that, but as part of moving to commit (half of) itself to the vertical, Boost.vc will be bringing in “a number of Bitcoin-focused mentors,” including Davenport, who has recently dedicated himself to the space, along with additional speakers, experts and investors.

As a testament to the growing interest in the Bitcoin market, the digital currency now has its own conference, Bitcoin 2013, which is scheduled to take place this weekend in San Jose. Naturally, the conference will also play host to a Bitcoin-focused hackathon, and Draper tells us that Boost.vc plans to pick one of the seven startups that will participate in its program from the field.

As to the program: Applications for Boost.vc’s second cohort are being accepted on a rolling basis, with a final deadline of June 1st. The program will kick off June 24th, concluding in a demo day in the middle of September (the date has yet to be set). Those interested in applying can do so here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

A number of startups have been trying their hand at subscription-based children’s books services, or something like a “Netflix for kids’ books,” so to speak. Today, another entry called Zoobean joins the flock, with the debut of its own handpicked catalog which parents can either subscribe to, or choose to just shop online like a standard e-commerce website.

The company was co-founded by Jordan Lloyd Bookey, Google’s head of K-12 Education Outreach, and her husband Felix Brandon Lloyd, who is a former Washington, D.C., Teacher of the Year. Like the founders of similar services in this space, including the recently launched Sproutkin and The Little Book Club, for example, Bookey and Lloyd are also parents.

“About a year ago, when our daughter was born, we were looking for a book for our son that would help him understand what it would mean to be a big brother. And in this particular case – we’re a multi-racial family – we were looking for something that might have kids that more resembled our family,” explains Lloyd.

That challenge proved harder than they thought.

The parents wanted a way to find a recommended book that matched their interests, but one they knew was also quality reading. So they built Zoobean to address this problem.

The site, at launch, has nearly 1,500 books for sale, all of which are parent-recommended, curated by a team of parents, teachers, librarians and others, and which are cataloged more extensively with topics, characters’ backgrounds, recommended ages, keyword tags and more. That way, when a parent is looking for a specific book on a topic, they can click to see all those that address that topic – like “self-esteem,” “anger and frustration,” or “growing up,” for example, as well as find books that match their own family structure and characteristics (e.g. “brother & sister,” “mother & child,” “black,” “Chinese Americans,” etc.)

The site will directly sell five featured items per month centered around a theme, and one of these will be available through an optional subscription. Subscribers pay $14.95 for the featured book of the month, a high-quality, hardcover. However, the majority of the cataloged books on Zoobean are being sold through affiliates like Amazon. Zoobean also offers a weekly reading guide for parents detailing the books in its featured collection along with activities parent and child can do together to learn more about the topic.

Though when the founders were speaking of their site’s uniqueness, their focus was on the curation aspects and the way the books were cataloged in more detail. But one of the more interesting things about this service with respect to its competitors is the diversity its selection reflects. There are books about many different ethnicities and subjects, and even harder-to-find books that cover transgender issues or bullying, for example.

“Any kid, parent or loved one who’s coming to find the right book can find one that the child can see him or herself in,” explains Bookey of the Zoobean collection.

The company has raised $500,000 in a seed round led by Kapor Capital, along with other private angels, friends and family. The plan is to raise another $250,000 on top of that.

Until today, Zoobean was in private, invite-only beta with some 200 testers. Now, it’s opening its doors to all parents or anyone else in the market for kids’ books. Users can sign up or browse the collection here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It’s a rare fall rainy day in Palo Alto and SAP Executive Board Member Dr. Vishal Sikka is as sick as a dog. It’s less than a week until SAP Sapphire in Madrid and the community around him are like a worrying family. I had told them that it is okay. I could make the trip another time. But they were insistent I make the trip.

Fast forward to May. It has been several months since that cold rainy week in Palo Alto. We’re on the eve of the next Sapphire conference in Orlando this week. Last week, Plattner and Sikka held a press conference, announcing the new HANA Enterprise Cloud.

HANA is an in-memory database that Sikka and Plattner developed with a team of about a dozen people around the world. SAP has built four data centers for HANA — two in Europe and two in the United States.

It would not be an overstatement to say that HANA is SAP’s future, the first technology in a long time from the German giant that is getting buzz for what it can do. It potentially puts the company into play as a key developer platform for real-time analytics in the evolving world of technology spanning both consumer and the enterprise services that are the company’s legacy (and slightly stale bread and butter). The big question is can SAP show the world that HANA is a bona fide developer platform with visionary use cases and clear customer examples.

Jon Reed is a longtime SAP Mentor and expert about the company. He is a great sounding board, someone who talked me through a lot of this story. He has a lot of respect for Sikka and Plattner. But he is skeptical, too, as am I about HANA and its direction. The potential is without question. And Sikka shows signs he has that rare combination of intellectual curiosity, technology credibility and passion that makes for a great leader. And he’s a humanist. He is impassioned about the potential for cancer research with HANA as much as he sees SAP transforming from an inward looking business software company to one that is outward facing, used for research and predictive analytics.

“It makes him a compelling figure,” Reed said. “You do get the sense that if the work is not purposeful, he won’t stick around. He really does believe HANA and interrelated innovations can change the world.”

But at the same time Sikka has to address profitability and revenues, Reed said.

Back in Palo Alto, Sikka arrives and he ushers me back to his office and sees that Hasso Plattner’s office is available. Plattner is the chairman of the SAP Supervisory Board and co-founder of the company. Sikka is the kind of guy who gets excited about those little things. Like the chance to look out across Palo Alto from his mentor’s office at the Stanford University campus where he received a master’s degree in engineering. We sit down and Sikka starts telling me about this accident that changed his life.

A Car Accident In Costa Rica

Sikka had gone to Costa Rica for a vacation with his family in 2008 over the winter break. He was CTO of the company. But he was unsettled about the direction of the enterprise giant. And then something happened on the way back to the hotel after a day by the ocean.

“On the way back I overcorrected and crashed into a pole,” Sikka said in a follow-up interview last month. “Thank God everyone was okay. At that point I realized I had to change something in my life.”

He called Plattner and said it was over — he needed to move on. The son of a railroad conductor, Sikka grew up in India, came to the United States and studied at Syracuse University. He graduated in three years. He then went to Stanford, built a startup with his brother and later sold it. He joined SAP in 2002. But by 2008, Sikka had second thoughts about the company’s technology direction. The accident pretty much sealed it. Or so he thought.

SAP is traditionally an application provider. It made its billions managing transactions but in recent years the disk I/O had become a bottleneck, slowing the application. The amount of data needed to make decisions had accelerated, pointing to the need for better, faster performance and results.

It’s a problem faced across the market. Machine-to-machine data is now more than transactional data, requiring a new approach to the application layer and the underlying database. Sikka had wanted to explore how to solve this problem. Developing a new database was that opportunity.

According to Wikipedia, Plattner, a consummate technologist, worked at IBM in the AI department, working on an enterprise-wide system based on the technology Xerox acquired from Scientific Data Systems (SDS). In 1972, after IBM decided to exit the business, Plattner, with four other German engineers, decided to leave the company and continue the project. IBM took 8% in founding stock in exchange for the engineers to use the software. Plattner and his colleagues called the company Systemanalyse und Programmentwicklung (“System Analysis and Program Development”).

Plattner is a different character than many founders. The Hasso Plattner Institute gives him the opportunity to spend tine with students, which keeps him interacting with young people and open to new ideas.

Plattner is also, like Sikka, doggedly persistent. During the winter of 2008, over dinner in Aspen, as Sikka tried to explain that he wanted out of SAP, Sikka said Plattner banged his fist on the table, challenging him to intellectually renew the company. But what did that mean? It took several months to figure out. They knew it had to be something new, something galvanizing. By the summer of 2009 they settled on HANA. The product launched in November 2010 and became generally available in 2011.

As for Plattner, he needed Sikka. Plattner has never really left SAP: although he retired in 2003 he has continued to serve as SAP’s chairman of its supervisory board. With Sikka, Plattner has a technologist who can manage the development of a new ecosystem and commands respect throughout the organization. Sikka, in turn, reports to Plattner, who can provide cover from the political dynamics of this $15 billion company.

This has bred an interesting basis for the development of HANA, which sits outside of much of what the rest of SAP does. It’s not like the two have complete autonomy but it is enough for them to define HANA’s technology direction and fold in its mobile strategy, cloud initiatives and begin the hard work of creating a developer ecosystem and startup culture. To do this, they have a team that operates in a separate wing at the Palo Alto campus, an independence that gives them the flexibility to build out their projects in a way that is different from the other SAP product groups.

When I visited last fall, I met a few of the team members, all hand-picked by Sikka. They are fiercely loyal to Sikka and reverential of Plattner. It’s this that Sikka has used to form the foundation for the intellectual curiosity that Plattner has insisted is so vital to the company.

Out of this, SAP is building its own startup culture. It launched AppHaus, an office that looks like a condominium building set in a neighborhood of the quaint community of Los Altos. Inside they are building consumer mobile apps. Last year, SAP launched a second AppHaus in Dublin. More are planned around the world.

SAP Ventures is seeding startups that are using HANA as the database for their technology. SAP Ventures Managing Director Nino Marakovic says Sikka was instrumental in helping it get started.

So where does this all bring us today?

First, the competition is intense. IBM, Microsoft and impressive startups like MemSQL and SiSense are offering their own brand of analytics. Workday is growing at a clip with consistent updates to its platform.

The SAP Palo Alto campus is where the innovation is happening. But the corporate executives in Waldorf are expecting results. And that sometimes seems like it is slowing SAP’s drive to work more aggressively with startups.

SAP is developing a cloud platform and a platform-as-a-service (PaaS). It’s these efforts and its focus on startups that will create the wellspring and potentially the scale that Sikka needs for SAP HANA to be a success — both in the market and with the chiefs in Waldorf.

And that’s Sikka’s challenge. Creating a company that is compelling and can grow to something far more than was ever dreamed of when Plattner and his colleagues spun off from IBM and created SAP in 1972.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The latest to join the cadre of startups offering tools for more private sharing outside of Facebook’s massive footprint is not, in fact, another startup, but rather another media giant: Disney. Citing its “rich heritage in storytelling,” Disney’s Interactive division, best known for games, sites, and virtual worlds like “Where’s My Water?,” “Temple Run: Brave,” “Club Penguin,” Disney.com, and more, today launched a personal, mobile memory maker simply called “Story.”

The new app, which debuts first on iPhone, takes the photos and videos saved on your device, then automatically organizes them into sharable, but by default, private albums, which can also be personalized with captions, text, and with various themes and layouts. The albums’ content is also saved in iCloud, so it can be backed up and synced to other Apple devices.

Separating a collection of photos into albums isn’t exactly a new trick – practically every photo management application today, including Apple’s own Photos app – allows for some level of organization. What makes Disney’s app a bit more cutting edge is the way it automatically organizes the content for you, based on the time and location of the photos and videos it finds.

Though our saved digital memories have long since included time, date and location information, only more recently have we begun to see a steady stream of newer mobile applications which use that data for grouping photos or creating shared albums with friends. Color was the big example standing out in everyone’s mind of how not to handle location-based photo albums, but others which followed including Flock, Cluster, Tracks, Flayvr, Moment.me, Everpix, and many more, have been experimenting to varying degrees in this space.

But because of Story’s scrapbooking-esque annotation and customization features, it also shares a similarity to mobile photo book makers like Mosaic, SimplePrints and KeepShot, for example. Unfortunately, Story stops short of actually allowing you to order a printed book at the finish of your creation, though Scott Gerlach, Senior Director of Engineering at Disney Interactive, says that’s something that’s “definitely” being considered for the future.

“In our extensive usability testing of Story, we heard clearly from our users that they’d like to purchase high-quality printed materials for themselves and others,” he tells us, adding that the company is “absolutely looking at different options to help users share their stories.” Those options may even include other photo-based gifts, too.

These extra options would likely be added into Story as in-app purchases, alongside other premium features the company has in the works, such as upgraded themes, for example. But for now, the app itself is entirely free, with no ads.

Story itself is simple to use. To further edit any of Story’s automatically created albums, you can tap a button to add more content, including photos, videos or text, or change the theme. You can also tap on any individual item to caption it, remove it, or change the size. You can also drag and drop items around to swap their positions, in a way that’s reminiscent to what the Kleiner Perkins-backed startup Erly once offered years ago on the web, before it sold to Airtime in March 2012.

Once you’ve created your “story,” you can then email it to your family or friends, or choose to share it a bit more broadly by posting to Facebook. Stories can also be embedded on your own website, if you choose.

If there’s any complaint with the app, it’s that it has launched only half-done, despite having the resources of a larger corporation at its disposal. Story would make the most sense on iPad, but support for both that and Android isn’t yet available, nor is the option for printed books or other trendy features like photo filters or stickers.

That being said, from the sounds of it, Story will slowly morph into a micro social network for families and/or other close friends over time, as Gerlach hints at plans for “more social and collaborative” features in time. That speaks to things like commenting, liking, or shared albums, perhaps, and could put Story up against other family-first mobile apps like Famil.io, Familiar, or Tweekaboo, for instance.

But for now, Story sits somewhere in middle of all these competitors, not quite finished on any front. If you’re leaning towards photo book creation or private, family-focused social networking, there are other apps which still lead this space for now.

Story is available here in iTunes.

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

For some of us, hanging out with our parents is something best relegated to off-work hours and holidays. But Kenneth Lerer and Ben Lerer have had some big successes working together at Lerer Ventures, the New York City venture capital firm whose portfolio includes BuzzFeed, Warby Parker, Everlane, FancyHands, and many others.

So when we had the chance to talk with Ken and Ben backstage at Disrupt NYC 2013 this morning, we asked how exactly they make the family dynamic work so well in a business setting. According to them, a big key has been that Lerer Ventures is not the only thing they’ve got going on — Ben is also very consumed with running Thrillist and e-commerce arm JackThreads, and Ken has had a number of other ventures throughout the years such as Huffington Post in addition to his investing work. Ben said:

“A big reason that it works so well is that a lot of the emotion and sort of the drama that comes with business that could maybe make it stressful and put strain on the relationship doesn’t necessarily exist because this isn’t the only thing that we’re working on. When we started the fund, dad still had HuffPo, and I’m obviously full-time running Thrillist and JackThreads. So I have other things in my life that I can stress out about and freak out about, and it allows me to really just take the good of the Lerer Ventures stuff and it’s not as emotionally charged as running my other business. So it takes some pressure off of the relationship.”

Another key, Ken added, was that it’s not just a family business.

“Don’t underestimate the value of having Eric Hippeau and Jordan Cooper as partners, because I think if it was just the two of us it might not be perfect, but with the four of us, it’s pretty perfect.”

We also talked to the Lerers about the importance of beautiful design when it comes to startup success, and how being vocal about politics — Kenneth is a prominent supporter of President Obama and a staunch anti-NRA advocate — affects their business deals. Check it all out in the video embedded above.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch