I’ve enjoyed the PS Vita for a couple of weeks now. It’s a fun device, but as John describes in our review, it feels like the last of its kind. Single function devices are no longer relevant and as much as Sony tried, the Vita is still pretty much a dedicated gaming handheld.

The company launched an app store for the Vita today, which folds Facebook, Netflix, Twitter, and Flickr apps into the Vita’s ecosystem. With these apps, along with the powerful hardware and 3G connectivity, the $249 Vita could be a good alternative to a traditional tablet. The only thing it’s missing is a proper web browser.

The apps work as expected. The Netflix app uses the same interface as the company’s Android and iOS apps. The app does not support streaming via a 3G network, though. Flickr is downright gorgeous on the Vita. The interface takes full advantage of the Vita’s widescreen OLED screen displaying the image on the left with the details on the right. This app works on 3G. For some reason Facebook is only available to European Vitas. U.S. owners will need to wait a bit longer.

These apps finally make the Vita slightly more than just a gaming device. They’re key to the Vita’s success, really. Today’s consumers expect a multifunction device, which, as I can attest, the Vita was not until these apps hit. In fact I was getting a tad bored with the Vita, tending to instead to pick up my iPad for a few minutes of gaming followed by some Facebooking.

You see, my gaming attention span is not what it used to be. There was a time when I played Link’s Awakening by flashlight under my bed sheets for hours. Not anymore. I can only handle a few minutes at a time before I get bored and need to move onto something else. I know I cannot be alone. The $249 Vita (or $300 for the 3G version) was a hard sell for me. But now that there are apps, it could potentially fulfill the need of a similar person who wants a gaming device but can’t give up the features of a modern tablet. The Vita already had a Google Maps app, text and voice messaging, and a photo app. If only the Vita had a quality web browser it would be nearly perfect for this demographic.

The Vita’s web browser still needs work. It renders web sites like IE 6 (read: poorly). It doesn’t support even Flash 9 and scrolling is painful because of how slow it renders. But it works in a pinch.

The Vita is a powerful little thing. It rocks a custom ARM Cortex A9 quad-core CPU, 512MB of RAM, and packs the same amount of connectivity options as an iPad. The 5-inch screen is an OLED capacitive touchscreen and then there’s a massive rear capacitive touchpad for additional controls. There’s dual analog sticks, a directional pad and traditional PlayStation controls. The Vita really is the most impressive gaming device ever made. But even with good launch titles in my opinion it was still missing something: apps.

The Vita is launching in a tough market. No other gaming device including Nintendo’s 3DS had to deal with so many competitors. The Vita must combat smartphones, tablets, the 3DS and in the coming weeks, the iPad 3, which will no doubt launch with the force of a mighty backdraft. But Sony seems to know this. The Vita’s hardware and accessories are pricey, hinting that Sony isn’t selling them at a loss. Sony probably knows the Vita won’t outsell the iPad. It doesn’t have to in order to be considered a success. As long as the Vita gets quality games, apps and new features at a steady rate, Sony will continue to make gamers happy. And that’s what it’s all about.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Yahoo’s management of Flickr has been something of a mystery. The photo-hosting service, once far and away the frontrunner and choice of pros and casual shooters alike, has seen few improvements in recent years — an eternity in the fast-moving online photography space. Many (including myself) cling to the service out of a kind of inertia, but it’s hard not to be jealous of the whiz-bang layouts and features of newer sites and services like 500px and Instagram. Even communities like Google+ and Pinterest are making Flickr users second-guess themselves.

It looks as though Flickr is finally getting the makeover it has deserved for years, though: launching on the 28th is a whole new layout and upload style, with an emphasis on community and consumption.

The news comes straight from Flickr’s head product manager, Markus Spiering, who told BetaBeat all about it in an interview. He explained that communication wasn’t as good as it could have been over the last few years, but insisted that Yahoo has its heart in the right place. But few would disagree that the site has remained mostly the same in a changing industry, and Yahoo has let new sites eat Flickr’s lunch for quite a while now.

At any rate, some serious changes are forthcoming: the photo browsing page is far more browsable, with a dynamic layout that minimizes white space and looks suspiciously friendly to touch interfaces.

A new upload page is in the works as well, something that’s long overdue. I’ll miss the small pleasure of the way the check marks pop into the progress bars, but the new drag-and-drop interface, with richer interaction with the photos uploaded (more like the organization page) and a more robust workflow.

It’s a serious UI change, but if it’s the only thing coming in 2012, it still might not be enough to satisfy the wolves at the door. Their presence in tablets and mobile needs to be boosted, and the site needs to decide who it’s competing with or else it will, by default, be competing with every comer. Spiering seems optimistic, but of course, that’s part of his job.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s Note:  TechCrunch contributor Semil Shah currently works at Votizen and lives in Palo Alto; you can follow him on twitter @semil

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s Note:  TechCrunch contributor Semil Shah currently works at Votizen and lives in Palo Alto; you can follow him on twitter @semil

Photo Credit: Creative Commons Flickr / jeehon

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

As we heard last year, Flickr and Hunch co-founder Caterina Fake was in the process of launching a new startup, with $2 million in funding from a number of high-profile investors, including True Ventures, Founder Collective, SV Angel, Keith Rabois, James Joaquin and Shoshana Berger. Today, Fake is revealing a number of new details on the startup, called Pinwheel, and named additional investors (Redpoint, Betaworks, and Ev Williams’ and Biz Stone’s Obvious Corp.)

We haven’t played with the product yet, but here’s what we know from Fake’s post. Pinwheel, which is in private beta on the web and mobile web, appears to be a way to leave notes, annotations, tips and photos for fellow users and friends at designated locations and place. As Fakes notes, while there is a web presence for the product, she anticipates the mobile version (an iOS will be launched next) to be the ‘primary experience.’

With Pinwheel, you can find and leave public or private notes at places all over the world. These notes can be shared with one person, or everyone; and can be categorized. Fake uses the examples of “Best Spots for Butterfly Hunting”, “Every place that you told me that you loved me, circa 2008″ or “Find me a Nearby Toilet NOW” as sample note sets that you can leave and find via Pinwheel.

Similar to other social and mobile experiences, you create a social graph of people you follow, places you follow and sets you follow. Eventually, you’ll also see notifications on your phone from who and what you choose.

Fake herself compares the experience to a Flickr for Places (‘ish’), because the note can be a container or social object for a given place. Notes are really meant to be any sort of contextual information that can add to a places’s value, such as stories, advice, jokes, information, memories, facts, advertisements, and more. And in terms of monetization, businesses will be able to create their own sponsored notes at given places.

As mentioned above, we haven’t used Pinwheel yet, but these are just a few of the initial interactions and details that Fake revealed. When we get our hands on the app, we’ll let you know and post a review. Oh and Pinwheel is hiring.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Confirmed: Apple can still surprise.

On July 20 of last year, Apple began a journey. With OS X Lion (aka OS X 10.7), the company started taking some of what they had learned from iOS, and the iPad specifically, putting in their more mature OS. Today, that transition continues with OS X Mountain Lion.

Yes, Apple is already ready to show off the next version of OS X — technically 10.8 — just seven months after the last version was released.

Actually, it hasn’t even been a full seven months. But given how quickly iOS development is moving, Apple wants to make sure OS X can keep up.

For the past week, I’ve been using an initial demo version of OS X Mountain Lion. To be clear, it’s not quite complete yet, but it’s already fairly polished. With that in mind, Apple will be releasing a developer preview of Mountain Lion today to Mac developers. And the plan is to release the new OS sometime this coming summer.

So what’s new?

The best way to think of OS X Mountain Lion may be to think back to OS X Snow Leopard (10.6). If you recall, Apple positioned it to be a smaller upgrade to OS X Leopard (10.5), hence the naming convention. My sense is that the same is true here — and again, hence the naming — but Apple isn’t really positioning it that way. Instead, they view it as the next step towards a more unified Apple ecosystem.

To be fair, while Snow Leopard mainly focused on improvements in speed and size, Mountain Lion actually packs a bunch of new features. Much like they did with OS X Lion, Apple is focusing on ten key ones (though there are dozens of other changes).

I’ll give the rundown of those first.

iCloud

Apple says there are now over 100 million iCloud accounts. With Lion, iCloud had a number of points of integration. But they were tacked on after the initial release. With Mountain Lion, the connection is much deeper. Actually, from the first screen in the setup assistant, you’ll now be asked to set up iCloud.

One key addition is Documents in the Cloud. In iOS 5, apps like Pages take advantage of automatic saving to iCloud. With OS X Mountain Lion, the circle is complete as all documents in the iWork suite of apps will save this way as well.

In Finder, you’ll actually now see a realtime list of all your documents stored in iCloud sorted by application. And you can create folders of documents simply by dragging one on top of another. Again, very iOS-like.

And the editing process between Mountain Lion and iOS 5 is seamless. You can change something on your Mac and almost instantly, the change will happen to an open document in iOS as well. Very nice.

Messages

This is a new app built right into the OS itself. It technically replaces iChat, but with some tweaks, you can find that old interface as well. But the focus now is on a unified dashboard of all your messages, meaning yes, iMessages as well as IM messages.

Heavy iMessage users are going to love this. Apple says there are already over 100 million registered iMessage users and that 26 billion iMessages have been sent since the iOS 5 launch in October.

The best elements of iMessages now come over to Messages, including delivery and read receipts. You can drag and drop both photos and videos from OS X to send them to iMessage users on iOS. You can also FaceTime right from within the app. And there’s group messaging.

Yes, the good old IM protocols still work as well. You can still hook up AIM, Google Talk, Jabber, and Yahoo Messenger by default.

One thing you can’t do is message between the various services to iMessage. So, for example, you can’t send an iMessage to an AIM users and hope to continue that coversation on your phone later. And, of course, SMS won’t work with Messages, it’s iMessage-only.

Good news: Apple is actually releasing Messages as a public beta today in the Mac App Store. The final version will ship with Mountain Lion in the summer.

Reminders

If you’re using iOS 5, you know what Reminders is — it’s Apple’s to-do list app. Now it’s coming to OS X as a stand-alone app. Previously, these were awkwardly baked into Calendar in OS X, not anymore.

As you might imagine, thanks to iCloud, all of your Reminders will stay in sync between iOS and OS X Mountain Lion.

Notes

Same deal as with Reminders, Apple has taken an iOS app and built a stand-alone OS X version. But the new version is beefed up, you can include photos. And you can pin a note to your desktop (like a sticky note — “Stickies” still exists as a separate app too, FYI).

This works with iCloud too, obviously. And yes, Notes has been removed from its former awkward home in the Mail app in OS X.

Notification Center

One of the hallmark features of iOS has long been Push Notifications, now they’re coming to OS X in Mountain Lion. And to make them manageable, the OS is getting a Notification Center, not unlike the one iOS gained in version 5.

The Notfication Center in Mountain Lion resides to the right of any screen you’re on. Hidden by default, you trigger it by hitting the dot-within-a-circle button in the upper right hand side of the menu (or by doing a two-finger swipe on a multi-touch trackpad — though this wasn’t working yet in the version of Mountain Lion that I tested). Doing this will shift your desktop to the left to show all your notifications in a way very similar to iOS.

There are also two types of Push Notifications you can get in Mountain Lion: Alerts and Banners. Alerts pop-up and give you the option to “close” or “show”. Banners show up for five seconds in the upper right of your screen then fade away (think: Growl). These notification types are configurable (and you can choose not to receive notifications for any app).

In the version of Mountain Lion that I used, only Apple apps (Calendar, Safari, Reminders, Messages, Mail, App Store, and Game Center — more on that in a bit) could receive Push Notifications, but fear not, there is a developer API. This means that all third-party apps will potentially have access to the feature as well — or at least those sold through the Mac App Store, I believe.

Share

In iOS, it’s easy to share something from just about all of the core apps. In OS X, it hasn’t been. With Mountain Lion, you’ll now see a Share button (the right-facing arrow you’ve see in iOS) in many of the apps.

In Safari, for example, you’ll now be able to send any website you’re on with two clicks to Mail or the new Messages app. You’ll also be able to AirDrop it from the drop-down. You can do the same for photos, videos, and documents as well.

One nice touch is that Share isn’t limited to Apple apps — Apple has worked with Vimeo and Flickr so that you can send videos and pictures to those respective services from the drop-down.

And there will also be a developer API for the Share box. Though my understanding here is that this will only be on a per-app basis. Meaning a Facebook app, for example, could include a “share to Facebook” link in the Share button drop-down but only for that app. System-wide sharing options will require dealing with Apple — again, as Vimeo and Flickr did.

Long story short, no, Facebook isn’t in the system-wide drop-downs. At least not yet.

But another app is…

Twitter

Just as with iOS 5, Twitter integration is coming to OS X Mountain Lion as well. And again, this is system-wide, meaning you can share just about anything from anywhere to Twitter with two clicks.

If you’ve used the integration in iOS, the Tweet Sheet will look familiar to you. Geotagging will work from here as well. And, of course, attachments. You’ll be able to attach photos, web links, and even Mac App Store links.

You’ll be able to sign in to your Twitter account from the settings area in Mountain Lion (technically, it’s under Mail, Contacts & Calendars). However, unlike iOS, I’m told that you won’t be promoted to download the Twitter for Mac client. Instead, Twitter is mainly meant to work in the background for when you want to socially share something. (Meaning there is no built-in way to view your Tweet stream.) But Tweet notifications for @replies and DMs should eventually come into the new Notification Center in Mountain Lion, I’m told.

Third-party developers will be able to take advantage of this Twitter integration as well, just as they have been with iOS. And you’ll be able to update your Contacts app with Twitter profile pictures.

Game Center

As I alluded to before, another app making the jump from iOS to OS X is Game Center. Apple says that their gaming social network now has over 100 million registered users. And there are over 20,000 Game Center-enabled games for iOS. That should get a considerable shot in the arm now that there will be Mac support as well.

What’s really promising about Game Center in Mountain Lion is that it’s not just about Mac-to-Mac gaming, it will enabled Mac-to-iPhone, Mac-to-iPad, and Mac-to-iPod touch gaming as well. Obviously, this is going to require game developers to custom tailor their apps for seamless gaming, but I’ve seen it in action — someone playing a racing game on a Mac versus someone on an iPhone — and it works very well.

You can probably expect a rush of iOS games being ported to the Mac by this summer.

AirPlay Mirroring

AirPlay is maybe my favorite feature of iOS right now simply because it seems like it’s magic. You can not only push things like movies to the Apple TV from your iPad or iPhone, you can push your entire iOS experience as well.

And with Mountain Lion, you can push your entire OS X experience as well.

In the menu area of Mountain Lion, you’ll see a new option to push your entire desktop to an Apple TV via Airplay. This will essentially turn your television inot a massive monitor.

I’m told there will be no limit on content that can be pushed, though developers may have the option to block certain content down the road (HBO is an example of one iOS app that doesn’t work with AirPlay, which is lame). There’s resolution matching to 720p HD video.

Gatekeeper

This is an entirely new security feature in Mountain Lion. While Apple feels like they’ve largely avoided some of the major malware problems out there, they acknowledge that the threat is still very real. With Gatekeeper, they offer a solution. And it’s going to be controversial.

Essentially, Gatekepper gives you control over the kind of apps that can be installed on your computer. There will be three options: allow apps from anywhere (the way it works today), allow only Mac App Store apps, allows Mac App Store apps and identified developers.

The reason why this will be controversial is because the final option will be the default one. To be clear: this means that by default, you won’t be able to install any app from the web on your machine.

Now, hold on for a second. Calm down. You can easily change this in the settings (it’s actually not all that different from Android’s default setting, oddly enough). And the truth is that this is likely to be a good thing for many people who might otherwise download bad by accident.

Apple is not requiring that all apps go throught he Mac App Store (though, again, this is an option), but the Mac App Store + Identified Developers option gives them a way to still offer a higher level of protection to the average user.

The other controversial element will be the way you become an “identified developer” — you’ll have to sign up to be a Mac app developer (which is $99 a year). Again, this doesn’t mean you’ll have to sell your software through the Mac App Store — nor will your apps be pre-screened by Apple — but it will make it so Apple can know who you are as a developer. And if they find out one of your apps is bad, they’ll quickly pull your credentials.

China

Apple is thinking a lot about China. And it’s hard to blame them — it’s the area accounting for their fastest growth. With Mountain Lion, there are a number of new features specially tailored for Chinese users.

First, there are improvements around the Chinese input methods. Apple notes that the Chinese language is evolving quickly, so they need to be able to update it quickly for things like word suggestions. And they also now have the ability to mix Chinese and English words (without switching keyboards), which apparently is a popular thing to do.

Apple is also integrating the Chinese search engine Baidu, into Safari by default for Chinese users. This makes sense as it’s by far the market leader in that country. Along those lines, they’ve added Tudo and Youku support for video uploads. And there are several popular Chinese email providers as options in Mail now as well.

I’m told these special Chinese features have nothing to do with blocking any kind of information that would otherwise be a part of OS X — though I still wonder if the Twitter integration will fully work, for example.

Other Things

While the things above are the 10 key new features that Apple is highlighting in Mountain Lion right now, there are dozens more not mentioned. A few of the ones I’ve found so far:

A unified search/URL bar in Safari. Yes. YES!!!! (And yes, like Chrome.)

A “VIPs” area of Mail to mark your favorite contacts. (Yes, sort of like Priority Inbox for Gmail.)

A search box in Launchpad (to see for apps if you have a ton).

Better date editing in Calendar (a calendar drop-down finally).

A much better way to add/remove widgets in Dashboard (more app-like).

There’s a new galaxy background (!).

Running “Software Update” now re-directs to the Mac App Store. It’s not clear if that’s the way all updates are going to come from now on or if that’s just due to the preview status of Mountain Lion.

AirPlay Mirroring will require an Apple TV software update.

Running “Shut Down” and “Restart” now remembers your last-used “Re-open windows” setting (finally).

There wasn’t a noticiable different in real-world use speed between Lion and Mountain Lion. I ran both on a 1.7 GHz MacBook Air with 4GB of RAM.

Startup and shutdown speed was noticably slower with Mountain Lion (but again, this is the first release, that may change).

Battery life doesn’t seem to be altered by OS X Mountain Lion versus Lion. If anything, it’s maybe a little better (though the machine was also newer).

Apple says that over 19 million copies of Lion have now shipped (including both Mac App Store and new Mac numbers). This means the software makes up about 30 percent of the total OS X user base in under seven months. They say that it took Windows 7 twenty-one months to reach that milestone.

Now the next race is on. Microsoft will release the first Windows 8 beta in two weeks at Mobile World Congress. The final software is due out before the end of the year. Apple beat them to the punch with the Mountain Lion preview. And they should beat them to the punch with the release this summer as well. (No word on the exact price of OS X Mountain Lion just yet, but Apple says it will be very competitive, just as Lion was — Lion was just $29.99. As you might expect, Mountain Lion will also be distributed exclusively through the Mac App Store.)

If the initial developer preview is any indication, Mountain Lion won’t be as big of a sea change as Windows 8 will be. Instead, it’s more of a continuation of what Lion started. Apple has far more iOS users than OS X users at this point. Now it’s about getting everyone on the same page. This early build is a great start.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

A significant announcement today that could have a big impact on Facebook and its mobile strategy: the mobile carrier Orange, part of France Telecom, announced that it is rolling out a new service that will let those using even the most low-end mobile phones to access the social network in Africa, where Orange has operations in 20 countries, covering 70 million subscribers.

The move is important because data access — both fixed and mobile — is still very minimal in many parts of the continent: Orange notes that on its own networks in Africa, only between seven and 15 percent of subscribers access data services of any kind. This gives Facebook (and potentially others) a way of getting around that issue and building up relationships anyway.

The service uses a bit of technology called USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data), which is built into even the most basic GSM phones (GSM is a ubiquitous standard in Africa), and operates on a channel separate from SMS, meaning a user doesn’t even need a messaging plan to access Facebook. Functions that will be available include the ability to search for friends, invite friends, accept or deny friend requests, status updates and comment/like/unlike friends’ status updates.

While the service will give Facebook — which already has 425 million active mobile users, according to its S-1 filing — a foothold in Africa, it is also being used by Orange as an additional revenue stream for itself:

Users will need to buy service bundles to use the service — sold in minutes, days, weeks or months of use. However, Orange notes that USSD is already used widely in Africa for other services like call-backs and sending account information, and with that consumer familiarity it expects at least one million people to sign up for the service by year’s end.

Orange’s service, which is the first of its kind in Africa, was actually soft-launched its USSD Facebook access in Egypt in December last year, with its operator Mobinil. In the last couple of months, the service has picked up 350,000 users — successful enough for Orange to decide to roll it out further. Today comes the Cote d’Ivoire, with the rest of the footprint coming online throughout 2012.

Important to point out that USSD Facebook access is also taking hold in other emerging markets, too: Aircel in India has also been offering a USSD-based Facebook access service.

And there are other, emerging-market routes to accessing Facebook and other services like Google+ and Twitter. These include the using the SMS channel, SIM-based solutions, and of course affordable feature phones and low-end smartphones that offer data-based access to those who can get it. (Orange itself launched three of these devices last year.)

As with other third-party services that have enabled Facebook access via mobile devices, this one uses Facebook’s APIs to interface with the social network. A spokesperson for Orange says that company worked with mobile services company Myriad to create the service.

One question this leaves is how and if Facebook is considering whether it will do anything specific or different to serve these users in developing markets longer term: yes, they may all eventually be using Facebook’s own apps on smartphones and tablets one day; but, today, for most that remains an abstract idea.

(Image: Madalena Pestana, Flickr)

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Reid Hoffman is the founder of LinkedIn and a prolific investor. His new book co-authored with Ben Casnocha is The Start-Up Of You, from which this guest post is adapted.

An entrepreneur receives lots of contradictory advice from really smart, experienced people. For example, you’ve probably been told to be both persistent and flexible; to have a clear vision you pursue relentlessly, and yet also to change your vision as the market changes. Simple, right?

This same tension pervades career advice. Some will tell you to think about where you want to be in ten years, work backwards, and construct a long-term career plan for realizing your ambitions. Others tell you that firm plans are like a straitjacket; they will blind you to unexpected breakout opportunities. It’s better, they say, to stay nimble and opportunistic.

Who’s right? Both are not only right, but critical. Entrepreneurs are flexibly persistent. The best entrepreneurs I’ve worked with engage in serious planning and strategy, but they do not set fixed plans. In my new book with Ben Casnocha, The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career, we show how any professional can apply entrepreneurial techniques to their career, even if you never plan to found a company.

I was involved in a number of companies that you wouldn’t have recognized at their inception.  Two in particular serve as great examples since they both have had massive impact: Flickr and PayPal.  Flickr started as a multi-player online game, before morphing into one of the most widely used photo hosting and sharing websites. PayPal started as an encryption platform for mobile phones, then became a service to transit money between Palm Pilots, then finally became the leading online payments company. Both persisted at their initial visions in order to learn and grow: Flickr by being a social experience and PayPal being secure with cash.  Nevertheless, despite being hugely resilient and perseverant, both companies radically changed the type of product and how they engaged with the customer.

How can you be flexibly persistent in your startup or in your career? Here’s a framework I use: ABZ Planning. In business and in life, you should have three plans: Plan A, Plan B, and Plan Z.

Plan A is your current plan, your current thesis about how you can win in the marketplace. For Flickr co-founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield, the original Plan A was Game Neverending, a multi-player online game.  Unlike most games of the time that only enabled play between a few opponents and through a fixed experience, they wanted theirs to have hundreds of users playing concurrently and creating new things in the game forever. To engage users, they built social features like groups, Instant Messaging, and – crucially – a feature that allowed players to share photographs with one another.

My original career Plan A was to pursue academia because I thought it would be the best way to have impact on the world by spreading ideas about what made a good society. As I studied at Oxford, I learned much about how people come together, interact in groups and relate to society. But I also learned that career success in academia too often meant producing specialized writings that only 50 or so people ever read.

Plan B is what you pivot to when you recognize that a new opportunity has more potential than the one you are working on. Sometimes you change to Plan B because A is not working, which is what most think when they hear “Plan B.” But sometimes A is working, yet Plan B appears to have more potential. Regardless of the reason for shifting, the best Plan B’s are different but related to what you are doing now; this way you can apply the lessons you’ve learned to date to the new plan.

At Flickr, unexpectedly, the photo-sharing feature eclipsed the game itself in popularity.  Caterina and Stewart were faced with a choice: Should they stick with their Plan A or put the game (and its twenty thousand avid users) on hold to focus exclusively on the photo-sharing feature? They shifted to Plan B. To be sure, Caterina and Stewart were still following their original idea to build an online social space—they just saw greater potential in photo sharing than gaming.

In my career, my realizations about academia led me to shift to a Plan B and find a career path that had broader impact. My Plan B was to build new software. Success in the software industry also meant “impact”—but on a much broader scale than academia. In some cases, it meant building a product that improved the lives of millions of people every day. To pursue this alternative route, I first focused on building relevant skills and connections by working in the online divisions of Apple and Fujitsu. Second, I connected with people who could cofound a company of my own. Then, when I started my first company, I recruited as many smart advisors and participants as I could in order to learn and adjust quickly. And, in terms of company formulation, since my first company (SocialNet) was unsuccessful, both PayPal and LinkedIn were my own shifts to new Plan Bs.

Keep in mind that you should rarely write down a specific Plan B, but you should always be aware of your parameters of motion as you are executing your Plan A. You should be thinking about the “adjacent possible.” Your transferable skills. Other opportunities on the horizon.

Plan Z has two critical parts. First, identify how to measure when you’re tracking towards a worst-case scenario. Second, it’s the plan that tells you what to do should that happen. Maybe when your credit card debt bloats to a certain amount you cash out your 401k or get a job at Starbucks. The certainty of a Plan Z backstop is what allows you to take on uncertainty and risk in your career. When I started my first company, Socialnet, my parents offered me a room in their house in the event things didn’t work out. Living there and finding another job was my Plan Z. It gave me the confidence to throw myself into the business knowing that if it all went to hell, I wouldn’t end up on the street. You want to be able to survive failure in order to play again.

TechCrunch readers see, on a daily basis, the adaptable paths of a number of successful companies. Yet few apply this adaptive playbook to their own lives. Frameworks like ABZ planning can help you take control of your career. It’s something we should all remember, whether we’re starting startups, working at a startup, or working at larger companies: the ultimate start-up is you.

Come writers and critics

Who prophesize with your pen

And keep your eyes wide

The chance won’t come again

And don’t speak too soon

For the wheel’s still in spin

—Bob Dylan
(“The Times They Are A Changin’“)

I’m Ingrid, and from Tuesday I’ll be writing for TechCrunch out of London.

I’m actually from Monterey, California, but today I live nowhere near that part of the world. I think this can only be a good thing for a Silicon Valley blog: it gives me a head start on covering news, a different perspective, and a chance to concentrate more on what’s happening elsewhere — specifically here in Europe but further afield, too, in a way that speaks to readers everywhere.

I’m joining TechCrunch from paidContent, where I’ve been writing about a lot of different things, but mostly mobile, digital business models (advertising, in-app payments, everything in between), and online media in its many forms (including my new boss, AOL).

What else? I’m interested in continuing on with some of the excellent work from Mike Butcher and Robin Wauters covering startups from over here.

And, apart from being a very approachable and charming person (who is never facetious), I can also speak Russian — I was born in Moscow. I wonder if that might help me penetrate some of that world a bit more.

There is one last thing I’d like to add, mainly because it’s been bothering me this week, but also because I hope it gives you a bit more of an idea of who I am:

There are some who believe tech journalism — online even more so — has reached an inevitable state of decline, that it’s only going to get worse from here on in, and will the last one out please shut the door.

I’m not going to argue about the merit of any specific post here.

I wanted to say something else: bad, very misguided journalism has always existed, way before pageview slaves were born (newspapers endorsing Hitler, anyone?), and that some good (even great) writing has always — always — coexisted with the very bad.

I think the key is to be persistent, to talk to people, stay honest, and leave your ego somewhere else. That’s what I’d like to do here.

Full disclosure: The big picture up above is, sadly, not one of me. The tiny one above it is.

(Photo courtesy of Fred Baby on Flickr)

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Tools cannot judge of their own use. The hammer does not rebel at striking pavement, the brush recoil at distasteful composition. This is true of the internet and its tools as well. What is bittorrent? A way to easily transfer large files between peers. Used by many people in legitimate ways, by pirates for illicit purposes. Bittorrent can’t choose to allow one and deny the other. If it could, it would no longer be a tool.

What is Reddit? A way for millions of people to collaboratively promote links and discuss them more or less anonymously. Used by many people in legitimate ways, and by pedophiles for illicit purposes. Reddit has decided to be more proactive in their policing of the site. If Reddit ever was truly a tool, it isn’t any longer.

Not that this is a bad thing, exactly. It’s just not going to work. To paraphrase Churchill, this was the worst thing Reddit could do, except for every thing they could have done.

Some people are worried that it’s a slippery slope thing. First, they came for the pedophiles, that kind of thing. Or a free speech thing. Where can I safely discuss the superiority of the Aryan race with a community of like-minded bigots?

Really, though, the practical changes are minimal. Reddit is banning and more carefully enforcing existing bans on child pornography. That’s more or less the entire thing. Reddit is unlikely to break its appeal by “ban creep,” looking for more and more reasons to mow down their community. They’re not like that. They’ll play whack-a-mole with kiddie porn subreddits until either the bad guys stop coming to Reddit or they find some way to exist without being shut down. In either case we’ll stop hearing about it, and in either case it’s just a drop removed from the bucket.

Their other options aren’t any better. Just do the minimum legal required? The world will look at Reddit as a cesspool instead of the vibrant community of communities that it truly is. And they can’t mess with the basic idea of the site by restricting the creation of subreddits or other changes to the mechanics.

The danger to Reddit is a little more subtle than these immediate, practical concerns. The danger is that they will no longer be viewed as a tool, a machine through which people can trade things. Now there is a ghost in the machine, and the ghost is watching. What if the creators of Bittorrent altered the protocol irreversibly so that it would detect child porn being transferred? You’d say good, I’m not a pedophile and this isn’t a problem for me, so no worries. But you’d also view Bittorrent differently, not the organization, but the tool. It would, like Reddit, have changed its aspect in a fundamental way.

In the meantime, the world is not changing. It’s a terrible world and a terrible internet, and no matter what you do, create, or promote, someone will find a way to use it for something awful and hateful. People are like that. And the better the tools, the better with which to commit misdeeds. The greater the edifice, the greater the shadow it casts – and the internet is the greatest edifice of our time.

But the world was built, and will continue to be built, by tools that don’t question their use. It doesn’t mean that something like Reddit (or Twitter, or Facebook, or Flickr) can’t be useful, powerful, and popular. But it’s important to recognize the difference between tools and things that are useful. It’s useful to have a permit, rubber-stamped and recognized by the powers that be, when you’re building a house, but you don’t build a house with a permit. For that, you need a hammer.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch