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

Those who know in the Valley know the name Sam Pullara. Whether it was his time as a repeat entrepreneur and technical founder, or stints as an EIR at some of the Valley’s most premier venture capital firms, or his time as a lead technologist at two of the largest tech companies in the Valley (most recently at Twitter), Pullara has occupied nearly every seat at the table throughout his career. Now, after leaving Twitter and after years of being an angel investor, Pullara has moved himself and his blog, Java Rants, over to the venture capital side as a Managing Director of Sutter Hill Ventures in Palo Alto, a firm which started back in the early 1960s and has focused on investing in SaaS, infrastructure, and other fundamental technologies.

I invited Pullara into the Studio because he isn’t the type to seek out attention, and I let the cameras run longer to capture the full arc of his career. He has started two companies, both of which were acquired, has been an EIR and consultant with Accel Partners and Benchmark Capital, was the Chief Scientist at Yahoo!, and most recently was part of a small, senior team that helped rebuild Twitter’s codebase. In this discussion, Pullara details his career moves, what he learned being a technical operator, a technical founder, and now a venture capitalist (including angel investments), with the hopes of providing an example for many engineers out there today starting out in their careers. Specifically, Pullara touches on how his technical ability gave him C-level access to company leaders to pitch solutions directly to them. On a different track, he also (honestly) explains his lessons as an angel investor and shares details into the unique capital and LP structure of Sutter Hill Ventures, where he is now investing into the next wave of technology startups.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Badgeville today launched a toolkit on the Salesforce Platform that is designed to get people more engaged in using online apps. The new toolkit puts a Salesforce Force.com wrapper around Badgeville’s APIs that hook into behavior tools and are designed to affect how people use the customer’s service, said CEO Kris Duggan in an email interview.

Using the toolkit, developers can reward cloud user behaviors in realtime by leveraging mechanics, such as points, achievements and missions. They can also provide recognition and rank to make users feel special or smart by leveraging mechanics, such as levels, tracks and leaderboards. They can also leverage social mechanics such as activity streams and real-time notifications to draw attention to relevant content and people.

“The cloud provides very compelling economics compared to traditional software, with its flexible pay-as-you-go model,” Duggan said. “Cloud applications providers have also focused on improving ergonomics of the user experience, and as a result, many of these applications look and feel a lot less clunky than software of days past. However, it has become clear that economics and ergonomics alone do not ensure that these cloud applications will be adopted. Businesses will spend nearly $300 billion on enterprise software (Gartner Research), yet usage of this software is only 50 percent, according to a survey by the IT Adoption Alliance. This means $150 billion of software is wasted.”

Badgeville customers include marketers, CIOs and line-of-business managers, training/human resource leaders, and product executives. It is deployed for both customer-facing and employee-facing use cases.

Badgeville, which launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in fall 2010, competes with gamification tools like Bunchball, as well as single-app, niche approaches to gamification such as 500 Friends and Hoopla.

“We also see businesses building their own gamification solutions in-house, but a large percentage of these companies seek out a scalable gamification technology and strategy team once realizing the challenge to deploy gamification right requires proper design expertise and a SaaS platform to support a program that drives long-term engagement and fulfills business objectives,” Duggan said.

The idea that software gets wasted means that the user interface is troublesome or the information architecture has inherent issues. It may also be a latency issue. Really, a whole host of issues may be at play. Gamification has its value but by itself it is nothing more than a game. Finding the bugs and studying the interactions determines the success of an app. Gamification must be driven into that process so it can enhance the fundamental value of the app itself.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Back in August, MindSnacks, the DreamIt Ventures accelerator grad and makers of language learning games for the iPhone, raised $6.5 million from Sequoia. The funding was validation of the 2.5-year-old startup’s core mission: To help gamers turn those nagging Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja addictions into opportunities for learning.

In the same way those of my generation were spurred to learn basic math concepts from desktop “edu-tainment” classics like Number Munchers, MindSnacks set out to leverage the mechanics (and popularity) of mobile gaming to teach anyone and everyone the fundamental building blocks of the language of their choice.

The startup’s portfolio of games now consists of 14 language acquisition and test preparation apps — that range from SAT help to French and Mandarin — all of which have collectively attracted over five million downloads.

What’s more, according to CEO and founder Jesse Pickard, MindSnacks users have learned over 100 million words and phrases to date, 50 percent of users actively recommend the apps to their friends and over one-third of users have downloaded more than one app. This traction and engagement is impressive for a mobile-focused edtech startup and was part of what led to Sequoia’s recent investment.

Building on what is impressive traction and engagement for a mobile-focused edtech startup, MindSnacks is today announcing its most significant upgrade thus far, including the arrival of its bite-sized educational games on the iPad, six new mini-games and three redesigned classics and a new user interface.

The new version adds to the MindSnacks education experience, Pickard says, by covering additional areas of learning that are specific to each subject, which intend to impart a deeper understanding of the subject material by allowing users to practice sentence composition, conversation skills, and so on.

Each game is designed with a personalized learning algorithm that helps users maximize memorization, retention and contextual usage at their own individualized pace. Collectively, the startup’s games include 50 different lessons that teach these grammar and contextual concepts along with over 1,000 essential vocab words, phrases and concepts. MindSnacks develops its games in-house, thanks to its growing teams of designers, engineers and educational content specialists.

Pickard says that the startup’s games aren’t meant to be a replacement for traditional learning tools, but are instead meant to act as a supplement to schoolwork and homework — or to provide extra tutelage for life-long learners. The key is to blend the addictiveness of the top mobile games with proven teaching methods so that language acquisition and test prep content becomes more digestible — and learning becomes something that’s actually enjoyable.

Next up, Pickard and MindSnacks will be looking to expand their portfolio to additional subject areas, like Math and Geography. Eventually, MindSnacks wants to be the go-to resource for those looking to learn about any subject in a gamified way on their mobile device. The CEO says the team isn’t looking to replace traditional educational tools but instead provide a complement to textbooks, video — and the other media that people are already using to learn new languages and study for those upcoming tests.

Find MindSnacks’ new iPad app (for Spanish-language learning) here. And find more on the startup in our previous coverage here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Today, there seem to be more business accelerators than there are startups to fill their classes and cohorts. It seems that not a week goes by without the launch of another accelerator or seed starter fund. In fact, as Peter Relan said in a recent post (riffing on Chris Dixon), accelerators have become an industry segment in their own right. He also goes so far as to surmise that — just as it is for startups — 90 percent of accelerators are likely to fail.

Nonetheless, even if they fail, accelerators are still essential to the growth of entrepreneurial ecosystems not only because they provide a petri dish for innovation, but because they create jobs. In an article in the Wall Street Journal today, Jed Christiansen contends that the fundamental value of seed accelerators lies in their ability to both drive economic growth and foster an entrepreneurial culture within local communities.

Christiansen, along with being the Head of Channel Sales for Emerging Markets at Google is also the founder of Seed-DB, a database for seed accelerators and their startups, which he created in 2009 to track the up-tick of incubators as well as the startups they graduate. Today, the resource is tracking 134 seed accelerators in 33 countries.

But what is most notable is the data that Christiansen has gleaned from Seed-DB on the impact of seed accelerator programs, starting with the fact that accelerators have funded over 2,000 startups, which have raised a total of $1.6 billion in funding. The founder, in turn, estimates that about 100 of these startups have already been sold for a total of approximately $1 billion and, perhaps most importantly, startups that have graduated from seed accelerators have created over 4,800 jobs.

Of course, Seed-DB’s data is to be taken with a grain of salt. The resource is incomplete, has compiled data on a fraction of startup exits (as many don’t report acquisition price) and it relies on startups and others to self-report (alongside the data it pulls from CrunchBase). However, Christiansen estimates that, were all accelerators to self-report, the total number of jobs created would in fact be closer to 7,000.

Startups, small businesses and accelerators are critical pistons in the engine of job creation, there are a few who would argue with that. However, research from the Kauffman Foundation puts into perspective just how important they are, as it suggests that, between 1980 and 2005, all net job growth emanated from companies less than five-years-old. When it comes to how to best reverse an economic downturn, about the only thing you might find politicians agreeing on is the importance of supporting small businesses.

Not to say SMBs are the panacea, but they do play a critical role. For accelerators, it doesn’t mater whether or not all of their startups raise big rounds of venture capital, it matters how well their graduates can build a network of support for their peers and for future companies. The deeper and more robust it becomes, the more success startups find and the more jobs they collectively create.

Giving accelerators their due, Christiansen concludes: “From just one accelerator in 2005, to a handful in 2007, to over 130 around the world today, seed accelerators — and the jobs they create — are a positive change in the economic infrastructure of the technology industry.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Enterprise marketing technology company Unified today released the latest version of its Social Operating Platform, which includes a new ad monitoring application, improved insights and a self-serve version of its app suite that helps companies amplify their messages by integrating social features.

Unified says it wants to bring transparency to social advertising through its new adMonitor where users can see a record of campaigns by any Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer or Ads API provider. Agencies Horizon Media and Deutsche have been using the tool to bring together data from a number of vendors so they can monitor and compare results.

Unified Chief Product Officer and co-founder Jason Beckerman compares adMonitor to advertising software like Doubleclick, MediaMind or Atlas. He says that although some of the dynamics have changed with the rise of social advertising, the fundamental needs are similar to traditional digital advertising. Brands and agencies are looking for infrastructure to simplify the complex ecosystem of platforms and vendors that have arisen.

Rather than being another ad provider in that mix, Unified wants to serve as a technology platform. Again, Beckerman draws the comparison with DoubleClick, which started as an ad network competing with others but then began selling software that has become the system of record for much of the industry. Unified hopes its system can do the same for social.

In addition to adMonitor, Unified today released upgraded insights and a new “Brand ROI Timeline.” Users can import any third-party data set and assign dollar values to different actions in order to understand the earned media impact of their social efforts over time.

Also released today is the “Amplet Builder,” a self-serve version of Unified’s app suite through which marketers can integrate social sharing features and proper tracking framework so that they can see how their messages are being amplified across different channels.

Unified launched in January and has been releasing updates quarterly. The company, which raised $14 million in June, now has more than 40 employees with offices in San Francisco, New York and Chicago.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

If you get the opportunity to hear Clayton Christensen hold court, seize it. Christensen is a Harvard Business School professor and renowned author and innovation expert, perhaps best known for his book “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” which had a profound influence on many thinkers and business leaders, including Steve Jobs. Speaking at BoxWorks in San Francisco today, Christensen was characteristically soft-spoken, self-deprecating and good-humored, even prompting Ron Miller to describe him as “the Steven Wright of business research” and the anti-Aaron Levie.

His talk ranged across the board, touching on theories of disruptive innovation, effective management, product development and customer interaction. Some of the highlights and most memorable pieces of wisdom centered around the fundamental but often confusing relationship businesses have with their customers. Naturally, when building a growth product, businesses commit tons of time, energy and resources to getting to know their customers better and building something that solves their problem.

But Christensen said that many businesses and startups often make a mistake here, one that may, at first glance, appear counterintuitive. “Understanding the customer is the wrong thing to do — it’s confusing,” he said, before citing Peter Drucker’s assertion that customers rarely buy what companies think they are selling.

Instead, what’s really important is understanding the job that customers are trying to accomplish, and only once an entrepreneur truly understands the need that a product or service fulfills for the buyer can they optimize their business or product. He used IKEA as an example of a company that has been around for 30-odd years and by now probably should have been disrupted. Yet no one has managed to copy them and improve on the model. That’s because, Christensen says, of its true understanding of the job that their customers want to do: “I want to furnish this place today.” Once they understood that, simple as it may be, they optimized their entire store flow, their shopping experience around that.

Most early-stage products overshoot eventual customer needs that emerge over time, he said, so entrepreneurs and developers should instead design for the mainstream rather than the ideal consumer or use cases. Only by touching the customer and interacting with them and studying their problems will design and product development be optimized. “Products that aren’t the best, but are affordable and usable, disrupt markets,” Christensen told the BoxWorks audience.

What’s more, every job that needs to be done (the reason for creating your product in the first place) has a social function that needs to be understood to provide the right experience. By nature, he said, products are easy to copy, but it’s much harder to copy the experience and social dimensions around the job.

One of the biggest problems with the cloud computing era is that the cloud provides such capacity that it can tempt people into developing apps and tools that no one actually needs. Instead, developers need to build for the jobs people are trying to accomplish. The real disruptive power of the cloud, he says, is that it makes it exceedingly easy for SMBs to accomplish their business tasks more affordably and efficiently. This is also the reason that he and many others anticipate modularity taking over the cloud and the industry.

The problem is that the current focus across tech on efficiency is succeeding in destroying jobs for many and creating capital for few: “Disruptive innovations create jobs, whereas efficiency innovations destroy them.” Metrics like IRR and RONA, in the end, funnel profits away from disruptive innovation and distract management from investing in what’s important.

Christensen also said that he fears for the future of Harvard Business School and others like it, as this year the number of people that applied to two-year business schools dropped 22 percent. The reason is that HBS and others are churning out graduates that can command high salaries, which is why they end up getting hired by private equity firms, hedge funds, etc. — those who can afford to pay it.

Operating companies don’t go to HBS to recruit, he said. Instead they’ve developed their own corporate universities to train future managers and executives, immersing them in everyday operations rather than classroom philosophizing. As a result, they are disrupting business schools because academia is focused on teaching theory, not how to get work done.

There are no doubt better ways to encourage disruption and innovation, and the trend seems to be one that’s moving away from Silicon Valley, as startups and accelerators are popping up across the U.S.

What do you think? Is disruptive innovation creating jobs, while efficiency innovations destroy them?

Photo from Jon Morris (@Jon_Morris)

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

As the social world evolves, users are increasingly seeking new ways to share moments with friends and family that don’t involve uploading content that everyone in their social networks can see. Rather than post things to Facebook or Twitter, more social applications like Path are popping up that limit the size of the networks and make sharing a bit more intimate. There’s also couples apps, which reduce sharing to just one other person.

But while limiting who sees content, these apps still have a one-sized fits all approach to sharing. In order to provide more flexibility around who sees what content, a new startup called Quilt has emerged to allow users to more precisely define whom users are sharing with. To do so, the company has raised a $500,000 seed round, including funds from Facebook co-founder Andrew McCollum.

Quilt bills itself as a “real-time digital scrapbook built by close family and friends.” The app allows users to create “Quilts,” which “stich together” moments from their lives, providing granular sharing and privacy settings along the way. Within each Quilt, users can designate which members of their social circles they’d like to invite, and who they’d like to share with — whether those memories can only be seen by members of the group, or whether they’re available to the broader public.

Users can create as many Quilts as they’d like, sharing their thoughts, checkins, and photos within the group. They can be built to highlight special occasions, or document ongoing friendships or relationships. They can also decide when a Quilt is complete and be able to view those memories on other platforms, like tablets and PCs.

According to co-founder Austin Cooley, the idea behind Quilt was not built as just a group photo-sharing app, but as a “storytelling device” for groups of friends. By making Quilts collaborative, the idea is to extend the fundamental sharing unit out from just one person out to an entire group. As such, the app and its networks are meant to be complementary to existing social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Quilt is available for both the iPhone and Android devices, letting users share with friends across multiple devices. To start, it’s aiming at capturing the college market, due to that demographic’s comfort level of sharing through mobile devices.

In addition to McCollum, Energent Ventures, David Whitney, Randy Scott, and other angels also invested in Quilt’s seed round. McCollum is also an advisor to the startup, along with Tim Van Damme, Brady Brim-DeForest, and Josh Greenberg.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

I’m an optimist, I really am, especially when it comes to technology and its ability to transform the world. But today I can’t shake the feeling that we as a species are really screwing up. Guess what? “There is no hope of saving the global coral reef ecosystem.” How’s that for depressing?

Meanwhile, even those few scientists who previously doubted that climate change was human-caused are increasingly conceding that global warming is a) very real b) our fault — and yet, “the American public has grown increasingly skeptical.”

What do coral extinction, global warming, and global finance have in common? All are screwed up beyond all recognition, and given our current geopolitical systems, all are beyond all hope of repair. To which the innovator’s response should be: disrupt the system! But of course there’s no money in that. The system is, pretty much by definition, built to distribute money to those who perpetuate it.

Still, despite that defense mechanism, there’s money to be made in changing the world. Elon Musk is doing it twice over with Tesla and SpaceX. I believe Google’s Glass and self-driving cars, among other products of the “Google X” lab reportedly headed up by Sergey Brin, will both become huge money-minting markets. But note that both Musk and Brin were already enormously successful. How many truly ambitious founders who haven’t already hit home runs ever get to step up to the plate?

Despite the billions and billions of venture capital dollars wafting around looking for investments, I can’t hardly think of any. People–including me–complain about how everybody’s launching meaningless sugar-water startups, but to be fair, I bet a lot of those founders would in fact rather be working on something more important and significant. They aren’t doing so because they believe they first need to build their Instagram and cash out à la Brin and Musk.

They may well be right. But only a tiny minority of a tiny minority will succeed. So much talent and so much effort spent–wasted, really–building meaningless gamified SoLoMo apps, while around us an entire global ecosystem is already effectively dead, and more are queueing up to follow.

Or, as William Gibson, technology’s poet laureate, recently put it:

I assume that we live in the first era in human history against which all posterity will have reason to hold a sad and bitter grudge.—
William Gibson (@GreatDismal) July 25, 2012

The horrors of the Dark Ages don't irreversibly diminish and constrain the daily possibilities of all of our lives.—
William Gibson (@GreatDismal) July 25, 2012

But while we aren't what life on this planet was “meant” to be “about”, we are now in the process of ending much of it, for good.—
William Gibson (@GreatDismal) July 26, 2012

I'm not constantly gloomy about the state of our response to climate change. I'm not constantly gloomy about mortality, either.—
William Gibson (@GreatDismal) July 27, 2012

But I do try to be realistic about both. I've taken anthropogenic climate change for granted since the 80s.—
William Gibson (@GreatDismal) July 27, 2012

Scary topics are tricky, though, because the very worst players invariably resort to fear as a motivator.—
William Gibson (@GreatDismal) July 27, 2012

To an extent I disagree. I don’t think fear or malevolence are the fundamental problem. I think the problem is that we’ve built a geopolitical system whose eddy currents have evolved into runaway feedback loops that the system is not equipped to handle. Worse yet, the few people who do want to disrupt the system, eg the Occupy movement, have very little in common with the innovators and visionaries who could maybe actually improve things.

I hate to be a downer on this sunny Saturday morning, but despite the enormous wealth, resources, and knowledge of our age, despite Moore’s Law and our ever-multiplying marvels of technology, it’s hard to see a happy ending for the world’s coral reefs, and hard to imagine that they’ll be the last of our world’s treasures to go down in flames on our watch.

Image credit: Patrick Hoesly, Flickr.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The app store model, pioneered by companies like Handango and popularized by Apple, has become the preferred method for distributing software on everything from desktops to post-PC devices. We’re also seeing this model in the cloud, mostly through software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers, such as the Google Apps Marketplace. But what’s been missing so far is a platform-as-a-service that allows you to add components through an app store interface.

In the world of enterprise software, SaaS app markets are subverting the binary distinction between “best of breed” solutions that do one thing and do it well and large suites. It’s hard not to root for best of breed solutions. They are, after all, the best at what they do. But large enterprises have reasons for choosing bundles, ranging from integration to procurement issues. With an app store, you can standardize on a particular suite and then augment or replace specific features. For example, both Jive and Yammer are social collaboration suites that include idea management app, but both also include an app marketplace where you can install a competing idea management solution like Spigit or UserVoice.

We’ve yet to see this applied to PaaS, but I think it’s something we need. I recently moderated a panel on polyglot vs. single stack platform-as-as-service providers at DeployCon. Although there are clear benefits in choosing a PaaS provider fanatically devoted to a particular stack, the way Nodejitsu is devoted to Node.js, the general consensus of the panel was that the market is heading towards polyglot providers. There are just too many advantages in choosing a PaaS provider that give you a single place to multiple stacks with the same tools.

PaaS providers are trying a few ways to get out of the best of breed paradox. Engine Yard acquired Orchestra for its PHP PaaS instead of trying to build something in-house. Cloud Foundry and OpenShift are trying to get the open source community to create a best-of-breed implementation for each stack that it supports. But in the end the truly best implementations may be scattered across providers. Heroku, dotCloud and Active State Stackato may each end up with the best version of one component, but in the end you’ll probably have to pick just one provider.

That’s where an app store could come in handy. What if you could sign-up for a public PaaS and then choose among different components? What if you could actually add OpenShift’s Java stack and Nodejitsu’s Node.js stack to a Cloud Foundry PaaS with the click of a button? Not an integration with a separate PaaS instance, but as an actual component within your main PaaS, with support from a best-of-breed provider. I imagine developers competing to create the best architectures and configurations for stacks, and end users being able to pick the best ones. The primary PaaS provider would need to vet these for security and resource efficiency, of course, but it would turn the PaaS into more of a, well, platform.

There’s some evidence that something like this could happen. PHPFog already has a selection of “JumpStarts” for different applications and frameworks, such as WordPress, Drupal and Cake PHP. But AppFog CEO Lucas Carlson recently showed me Open JumpStarts, a forthcoming project which would allow third party developers to create and submit custom stacks for various frameworks and languages.

We may see this from Amazon Web Services soon enough. Elastic Beanstalk and AWS Marketplace provide the fundamental components. I could see Bitnami or CloudSmith getting into this market as well. You can even see the configuration repositories from Puppet Labs and Opscode as steps in this direction.

With an app store model, best-of-breed would become a realistic solution for platform-as-a-service and shake-up the existing support models.

Photo by Martin L / CC

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

One of the themes that came up repeatedly during the conference call for Google’s second quarter earnings was mobile advertising. Analysts asked a number of questions that, collectively, seemed to be gauging what the shift to mobile means for Google’s advertising business.

Senior Vice President and Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora (pictured) offered some numbers at the beginning of the call, saying that with AdMob integrated into AdWords, 1 million AdWords advertisers have access to the 300,000 mobile apps in the AdMob network. When asked specifically about mobile cost-per-click rates, Arora didn’t get too specific, but he said they’re “healthy.”

“The good news is, we’re seeing phenomenal growth in mobile queries across the board,” Arora said. “Mobile is right now where search was in 1999.”

He pointed out that Google has been unveiling a number of ad innovations that are specific to mobile, like a click-to-call option (which generates 15 million calls every month). As that continues, we can expect to see mobile ad pricing to rise, similar to the trajectory of search ads.

Google’s overall CPC rates were actually down 16 percent compared to the same period last year, and Arora acknowledged that the drop was partly because mobile and tablet ads made up a bigger part of the mix. He cited other factors too, such as the mix of developed and emerging markets, and he argued that while CPC is “an important metric for us” it doesn’t necessarily reflect “the fundamental health of our business.”

Another question wasn’t directly about ads, but it addressed some of the same issues: As mobile searches grow, are they taking away from desktop searches? Senior Vice President of Ads Susan Wojcicki cautioned that it’s a complicated issue that Google is still analyzing (especially when it comes to tablets), but she said, “We believe that mobile searches are mostly incremental.” She noted that smartphones and tablets are mostly used on-the-go, so Google’s hope, at least, is that they’re just leading to a bunch of new searches, rather than replacing the ones you would’ve done on your desktop.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch