As a man who spends most of his time in his attic, it’s nice to hit the open roads, feel a little wind in your hair, and run over crack vials as you motor through downtown Manhattan. That’s exactly what I did yesterday as when I tried to ride an Hero Eco A2B Metro electric bike from Bay Ridge to our offices on Broadway, thereby cementing my love for electric bikes and this electric bike in particular.

The Metro, made by German manufacturer Hero Eco (formerly Ultra Motor), is a brutalist electric bike with a built-in battery and maximum speed of 20 MPH. It has pedals and a 7-gear shifter so it is technically considered a moped and does not require a motorcycle license and a built-in limiter ensures you don’t go roaring down the streets on this 80 pound machine.

The company has had these bikes in the US for a few years now but they are working on a complete rebranding – although the bikes will remain the same. You can see the brand new bikes on this absolutely awful webpage they’ve made. This particular model costs about $3,000 online but the build quality is excellent and the equipment – from the fat Kenda tires to the Shimano shifter – is acceptable enough. I noticed some bad reviews on Amazon complaining of damaged motors or tires and, although I didn’t experience these issues over the past week, I cannot speak for extensive use. In my 15 mile ride I saw solid performance and no skidding or fishtailing while accelerating. I did, however, experience a low battery and riding this thing home, even for a mile, on pedal power wasn’t great.

The bike is bit big but it’s still thin enough to ensure you don’t get entangled with other riders in tight paths. I found it worked great in tight quarters and, because it is in actuality just a bicycle with a hub motor, the other cyclists didn’t give me that much of a stink eye.

I’ve avoided looking at electric bikes of late because most of them look like motors strapped to 10-speeds. This is far different and, if I were to describe it in any way, it is the exact opposite of those foldable city bikes folks are riding. My kids, in fact, have taken to calling it Super Bike.

Hero Eco is finding its footing right now and also has sub-$2,000 models available, including their own version of the folding electric called the Kuo which retails for $1,599. The company is also now calling itself HeroEco and was formerly called Ultra Motor, so you may see a bit of confusing until their full rebranding.

What are you paying for? Well, you’re paying for a solid, welded frame, solid components, and excellent acceleration. The range isn’t too shabby and for a bit more you can add on a second battery for 20 miles of range. I could also imagine a user removing the governor – though I’m sure Ultra Motors doesn’t condone this. This isn’t a sport bike. I could really see it more as a bike for folks with a 10-15 mile commute who want to hit the open air a little and don’t want (that much) of a carbon footprint.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

A new video showcasing the future of weapons was released on YouTube today: a enterprising 24-year-old gun enthusiast manufactured his own high-capacity 30-round gun magazine using a 3D printer. Hoping to spread the amateur design of more “Wiki Weapons”, the rebellious 24-year-old designer nicknamed the blueprints of the weapon, the “Cuomo,” named after New York Governor, Andrew Cuomo, who signed a recent ban on all gun magazines in excess of 7 rounds. “He [Cuomo] wants to be associated with these magazines,” designer Cody Wilson told Talking Points Memo. “Lets make that association permanent.”

Wilson’s Defense Distributed wants to catalyze a massive online catalog of weapons, similar to the user-generated encyclopedia, Wikipedia. The online blueprints, which are free and open to tinkering, have already been downloaded over 100,000 times, according to TPM.

3D printed weapons have faced harsh backlash from others in the growing industry of amateur 3D printing, the so-called “maker movement.” Popular 3D printer manufacturer and icon of the movement, Makerbot, has issued a strictly enforced ban on weapons.

3D printer company, Stratasys, attempted to stop Wilson by seizing the very printer he was leasing from them, but Wilson has since purchased another Stratasys printer.

Given the decentralized nature of such open-source movements, it’s hard to crack down on those who are willing to organize their own communities. “Our idea is to facilitate a community around what we’re doing,” said Wilson. “Defense Distributed is just about proving concepts and releasing snippets of basic information so others can learn. I think we’re a software organization, primarily.”

Wikipedia probably never imagined it would be the inspiration for a global movement of gun makers. But, in this new world of easily accessible technology, every group will be able to re-imagine their ideology for the 21st Century.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

In 2012, the buzz around education technology reached new heights and, with the new year now underway, the hype surrounding the potential transformative impact of technology on both higher and K-12 education continues, thanks to initiatives like the one Udacity is piloting with largest university system in the world, which aims to bring affordable, lower-division and remedial online courses to the California State University system.

Of late, we’ve seen growing interest in education technology across the board, from venture capitalists and entrepreneurs to state and federal governments. Some of the country’s most influential players in business and politics have taken an interest in the conversation. Last week, Jeb Bush — the younger brother of former President George W. Bush, former Governor of Florida — penned an Op-Ed for CNN in which he discusses the importance of digital education — particularly its ability to unify through the “ubiquity of its tools” … and … “maximize students’ potential to succeed by opening their eyes to a more diverse, customized array of learning techniques” — more so “than ever before.”

In his annual letter to supporters of The Bill And Melinda Gates Foundation and in subsequent interviews last week, Bill Gates discusses the influential role that big data can play in “saving” a troubled public school system in the U.S.

Considering that public spending on education has hovered around 6 percent of the country’s total GDP for the last few years, the opportunity is massive. To wit: When News Corp. purchased edtech startup Wireless Generation for $360 million in late 2010, Rupert Murdoch said of technology’s potential to transform learning: “When it comes to K-12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed by big breakthroughs that extend the reach of great teaching.”

Why am I telling you all this? Besides a shared expression of the importance of digital tools, big data and personalization in the transformation of learning (and education), they have something else in common. Jeb Bush, Bill Gates, News Corp.’s Wireless Generation (and many more) have all been involved in supporting, backing or developing a program called the Shared Learning Collaborative (SLC). Backed by $100 million from The Gates Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation and others, the SLC is, in its own words, an alliance of states, districts, nonprofits, foundations and companies that share the vision of “accelerating student achievement through personalized learning.”

Although the SLC emerged in 2011, not has been known about the details of its plans, other than the fact that it set out to build a “set of shared technology services” that aim to enable states and districts “to connect student data and instructional materials” and integrate them more effectively for “educators, parents and students.” But, again, how it planned to do make that possible has remained unclear.

Today, however, we finally get a glimpse into what the Shared Learning Collaborative has in store — and it’s potential to transform education. This morning, the SLC has renamed and rebranded itself under the guise of a new non-profit startup called inBloom that it has been developing quietly over the past 12 months. Simply put, inBloom is a provider of technology services that aims to transform education through big data.

Of course, when names like Jeb Bush and Bill Gates enter the picture, along with states and federal institutions and governing bodies, one might worry that political and financial interests will be guiding the new company. However, inBloom CEO Iwan Streichenberger assures us that the company was designed as a non-profit from the beginning to keep special interests at bay, in order to create a tool that is data, platform and user agnostic — one that can help educators, schools and entrepreneurs unlock the value behind the mountains of educational data that have long been trapped in proprietary data silos and myriad software platforms. This fragmentation and lack of portability has rendered data incommunicative, he says, stripping it of much of its utility and, really, its value.

The inBloom CEO believes that no company, institution or state program — no matter how massive — can create the underlying, agnostic data resource that can allow applications, software, tools and platforms of all stripes to communicate with each other and make their data more actionable. To do that, inBloom required the support of dozens of companies, institutions and districts, non-profit standing and open-source technology.

In discussing the state of education technology with a friend recently, we both agreed that the space has been abuzz with activity over the last year and, as a result, with hype. However, in talking to investors, I’ve found that, while many want to invest in education because of its import, size and technology’s potential transformation of the industry surrounding it, many are still balking. While early-stage venture capital has flowed freely into EdTech businesses, many later-stage investors don’t see the ROI yet that would warrant big investments. There are still too many unproven concepts (and undercooked business models), and too many features-masquerading as companies.

The experimentation will no doubt prove valuable in the long-run either way, but the hope is that 2013 will be the year that our attention, investment and focus moves beyond the novelty, the hype and the features to the core of what really works.

InBloom is just getting started, but certainly the visions and the potential is there. School districts are racing to adapt materials and assessments for the Common Core State standards, publishers are moving to keep up with the digitalization of content and new academic requirements. Meanwhile, teachers and schools are being flooded with data, new startups pitching tools, software and apps at every turn, while still wrestling with archaic infrastructure, data in multiple formats — really, just a broken system.

LearnSprout and Clever arrived in 2012 to help create a standardized set of APIs that could allow developers to unlock Student Information Systems — the data silos that contain much of a school’s essential student data — and create applications that can interface with this data and leverage it to create tools that actually make a difference. InBloom wants to go several steps further and create a standardized, open-source data architecture that isn’t just limited to Student Information Systems, but is instead inclusive to Learning Management Systems and applications — any portal in which schools and districts are storing critical learning data.

The new non-profit wants to make data integration and content search easy — to enrich learning applications by connecting them to systems and information that live in a variety of formats and places, while helping reduce costs for schools. The CEO says that he wants inBloom to offer a comprehensive view into each student’s history, their progress and help startups, developers, companies and schools create the tools that will give them greater insight into how students can improve their learning outcomes and personalize their learning paths.

The company also wants to help educators locate standards-aligned instructional resources from multiple providers, matching them to students’ individual needs. “We want to create more choice for schools and educators,” Streichenberger says, but not in a way that is overwhelming or makes their lives more confusing. “But in a way that allows startups and companies to create different versions of learning analytics, for example, with teachers being able to choose the one that’s best for their needs.”

In turn, the CEO hopes that this will provide a rising tide for all boats, lifting the monetization potential, the ability for companies to make money, by allowing them to work within the same educational niche, while specializing within that niche. Whether it be a tool for a learning management system, or an assessment application for a particular state, district or school system — based on the data it shows, which inBloom allows them to access — companies can create specific tools for that particular need.

“InBloom lets us compile and access assessment data from more than a dozen different systems,” said
Tom Stella, Assistant Superintendent of Schools, Everett, MA. “This information, paired with relevant content that maps to a student’s individual needs, helps maximize a teacher’s time and a student’s learning potential by letting them focus on in-class teaching and learning.”

This means that inBloom’s framework can allow technology providers and startups to develop and deploy their applications and products without having to spend time building custom connections to each state and district’s data source. Naturally, this has the potential to solve many of the costs and pain points that developers, teachers, schools and startups face when building technology for schools. And that’s huge.

Today, 21 education technology companies have already announced plans to develop apps that will work with inBloom’s open API, including Agilix, BloomBoard, CaseNex, Clever, Compass Learning, ConnectEDU, CPSI, Ellevation Education, eScholar, Global Scholar, GoalBook, Gooru, KickBoard, Learning.com, LearnSprout, LoudCloud, PBS, Promethean , Scholastic, Schoology and Wireless Generation.

On top of that, nine states (representing over 11 million students) are currently participating in the development and pilot of its services, including Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York and North Carolina. Five of those states have already selected districts to be part of the pilot testing.

The inBloom CEO also went out of his way to say that the company, while open-source and focused on inter-communication, data portability and scalability, still holds data privacy as a “top priority,” and the platform is compliant with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), he says. And for developers interested in getting a look, the company plans to release the code behind inBloom at some point over the next two months and will be demo-ing the platform in action at SXSW in March.

This is just an general introduction to inBloom’s new platform, we hope to have a more detailed breakdown in the coming weeks, so stay tuned. For now, find more on the initiative at home here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The Minerva Project burst onto the scene last year with an ambitious goal: To create the next elite American university, online, and, in so doing, help rethink the role of higher education in the Digital Era. Not only that, but the startup wants to establish rigorous, Ivy League-caliber standards, admitting only the best and the brightest, with a faculty to match, while offering tuition that’s “substantially less than half” the price of today’s elite universities, according to founder Ben Nelson.

Given the current landscape, in which states are under pressure to cut spending, tuition costs and student debt are skyrocketing, class sizes are increasing, infrastructure is archaic and outcomes are suffering, it couldn’t come at a better time, yes, but it’s also an extremely tall order. Furthermore, while the company is full of exciting plans for what it wants to accomplish by the time classes begin in 2015, it hasn’t offered much in the way of how it plans to make them a reality. In fact, for all intents and purposes, Minerva has remained largely silent since its debut in April of last year.

But today, the company finally offered a first look into how it intends to attract and retain top-tier professors and students while keeping tuition affordable. This morning the startup announced the creation and launch of The Minerva Institute for Research and Scholarship, a non-profit organization that will help attract and direct financial support for its academic programs and for faculty research.

The Minerva founder says that the Institute is part of the company’s effort, in part, to re-shape the traditional university business model to make it more effective and efficient. Particularly, it aims to to this by providing additional means of recruiting talented professors, offering the funding that will both support their jobs in a challenging economy and allow them to pursue their own studies and research in their field of interest.

Nelson tells GigaOm that the other impetus for the creation of the Institute was to safeguard the R&D side of its university, providing a check that will make sure the for-profit university doesn’t end up profiting excessively from funding that should be put towards innovation and development. In principle, it sounds a lot like the The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), a nonprofit organization that helps transform University of Wisconsin research into products that benefit society.

The separate, but affiliated foundation supports scientific and technological research by patenting and licensing inventions that come out of university discoveries, generating revenue which it then funnels back to the university. And it’s more than peanuts. To date, the organization has contributed more than $1 billion to the university through annual “margins of excellence” grants and other modes of funding.

It’s a smart move, and one inspired by successful non-profit university R&D and investment vehicles, like WARF. In fact, the move has attracted another big-name to Minerva, as Bob Kerrey, former U.S. Senator and Governor of Nebraska, joins as the Executive Chairman of the Minerva Institute. Needless to say, this seems like a big victory for Minerva, as Kerrey’s political and governmental relationships will no doubt be of great value to an organization whose sole purpose is to build the financial resources that can sustain an elite faculty and cutting-edge research.

Kerrey also has plenty of experience in higher education, being the President Emeritus of The New School, where he served as president from 2001 to 2010. The former senator also joins former Harvard President and Treasury Secretary, Larry Summers, on the startup’s advisory board, and follows Minerva’s quiet addition of senior execs from Yahoo and Grockit to its (for-profit) leadership team.

Cheerleading it may be, but add the $25 million in seed funding Minerva raised from Benchmark last year (notably, in Benchmark’s largest seed investment to date), and one can understand why the new Executive Chairman is jazzed: “I believe the Minerva Project is the single most important innovation in higher education in my lifetime,” he said.

I, for one, am not as willing to get giddy with superlatives. Really, The Minerva Project was born out of the ongoing struggle to prove that online programs and institutions can provide a legitimate alternative to the traditional, purely-on-campus model — at a high level. But it’s far from being the first in this regard.

2tor (now 2U) was, in part, founded on the belief that online education has traditionally been of lesser quality, comparatively, because it isn’t striving to be great, defined instead comprised of a million crappy micro-correspondence courses and make-shift MOOCs. As one of the most-funded education startups out there, 2U has been partnering with graduate schools at elite universities to build legitimate online programs that allow institutions to offer the same rigorous standards for academics and admissions online as they do offline.

Capitalizing on the progress the 2Us of the world have been able to generate in higher education, Minerva — to its credit — is taking it one step further. Besides being built from square one around online resources and only going after the best and the brightest, Minerva is also looking to differentiate its model by eschewing federal aid. Nelson says that, in reality, financial aid only leads to higher tuition rates and restricts how universities construct their admissions policies.

So, in order to live up to its goal of accepting any student that lives up to its academic standards and its focus on building an international student body, Nelson tells GigaOm that Minerva will instead fight for favorable loan rates and create its own scholarship programs, which will allow it to avoid federal assistance.

Through its new Institute, Minerva also hopes to be able to attract top-notch faculty by offering incentives that are different from traditional universities. Because the university is online, professors can presumably work from any location, and if it’s able to secure funding, the opportunity for professors to lead teams of bright young students in R&D projects. Nelson also says that the Institute plans to let professors and students retain the rights to the intellectual property developed while at Minerva. However, it’s not yet clear how exactly it will approach tenure.

In the end, there’s a lot of friction working against Minerva in terms of attracting and retaining great talent, but the startup university has already begun to put some important pieces in place which could make its virtual campus an attractive alternative for the alternative-minded. There’s still a long way to go, and even if Minerva doesn’t fulfill its goal of becoming the next elite American university, the work it’s doing now could very well lead to a solution that will allow the liberal arts education to survive in an increasingly Digital World — without bankrupting those future generations of students.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Barack Obama is this week’s top gainer in the People Talking About This metric among politician pages. With 3,586,328 engagements this week and growing, the Obama campaign found itself far ahead of the Romney campaign just in time for the election.

The top 10 political pages saw PTAT growth between 15,827 and 791,987 engagements. We compile this list with our PageData tool, which tracks page growth across Facebook.

#	Name	People Talking About	Daily Growth	Weekly Growth
1	Barack Obama	3,586,328	+1,184,540	+791,987
2	Michele Bachmann	117,474	+9,690	+83,629
3	Sırrı Süreyya ÖNDER	103,356	+7,256	+44,618
4	Mike Huckabee	142,995	+10,702	+35,224
5	Gary Johnson	125,690	0	+27,979
6	Governor Jan Brewer	152,736	0	+27,069
7	AtaTürk Yolunda Ölürüm, S…	98,014	-10,752	+22,631
8	Governor Chris Christie	27,360	+1,215	+17,108
9	Scott Walker for Governor…	23,538	+1,354	+16,765
10	John Boehner	26,090	-823	+15,827

“Palmer was hanged outside Stafford Prison on 14th June 1856, watched by an enormous crowd of some 30,000 people. As he stepped onto the rather rickety gallows he turned to his gaoler and said “Are you sure it’s safe?” — via

Manhattan, a place I’ve always considered a spiritual home and sometimes an actual one, actually turned into a real-life version of all those post-apocalyptic movies about Manhattan on Monday evening as Superstorm Sandy hit landfall. We all learned that what the disaster movies miss in their bathos is something elemental to human behavior in these sorts of situations: Gallows humor.

Those of us with access to the Internet watched enthralled as the center of world commerce, New York City, was swallowed by flooding that eventually left 43 people dead and millions of dollars of property damaged. Because of all of the aforementioned disaster movies, the scenes broadcast were eerily familiar. Fake photos of the carnage abounded, trumped only by the more horrific, and real photos of the carnage. And jokes, lots of jokes.

The evolution of the Instagram feed for #Sandy over the past couple of days has been fascinating: What started out on Sunday night as a steady stream of 10 jokey images per second referencing Spongebob Squarepants or Ice Age or Grease or people otherwise laughing in the face of the storm’s imminent danger, slowly turned into a steady stream of 10 images per second referencing real survival strategies (stockpiles of non-perishables and water) as the storm approached.

By the time Sandy hit Manhattan, the feed was 10 images per second, late last night, of insane flooding and the facades falling of buildings and cars floating by in water. Interspersed by jokes.

And the same on Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr: The @ElBloombito Twitter account was on a roll this a.m., as the real El Bloombito gave parts of his recovery speech in Spanish. His sign language translator Lydia Callis became Internet famous, with people building numerous Tumblrs and fan pages in her honor.

Nowhere in “28 Days Later” do you see people Gangnam-styling in the background of news reports of oncoming floods, or a guy running around in a horse head mask defying Mother Nature, Instagramming his costume and alerting the Internet about his plan beforehand. (Horse Head Guy will you marry me?) But that’s what happened in the social media storm and resulting Internet campfire that surrounded Hurricane Sandy: Countless quips about Sandy-themed Halloween costumes and the #Frankenstorm interspersed with sincere entreaties to “Stay safe” or “disaster updates” from friends.

Sure gallows humor is nothing new: People have always made jokes like this when faced with their own mortality, from murderer William Palmer above to the literary playwright Oscar Wilde remarking “Either that wallpaper goes, or I do” on his deathbed. Humans like to feel in control of their fate, even in cases where they are not so at all, and making light of a bad situation or threat at least conceptually takes away some of its power.

What if Gangnam Style is actually a rain dance and we have brought this hurricane on ourselves? #Sandy—
Vu Tran (@vuberrypie) October 29, 2012

Up until now, though, offline media has had a hard time spotlighting this behavior, because it’s not cheery and mainstream and not easily advertised against. On the Internet, which revels in niches, gallows humor can take center stage. The Internet amplifies these jokes to the point where people, like this prankster college student or Horse Head Guy, actually try to aim for meme status.

This morning, we woke up and the first thing many of us did was think “Is New York going to be okay?” And as we turned to Instagram (and Twitter and Facebook) to find out, the apocalyptic pics of last night turned into pics of rainbows over Redpoint, Brooklyn. Or Governor Christie joking about rescheduling Halloween. And we then knew it was over, at least the worst part.

If conditions are not safe on Wednesday for Trick or Treating, I will sign an Executive Order rescheduling #Halloween.—
Governor Christie (@GovChristie) October 30, 2012

Image vtjkru

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

California Governor Jerry Brown struck down a privacy bill that would have required a warrant before tracking the location of a citizen’s mobile device, signaling a trend among Democrats and Republicans, at all levels of power, that warrantless spying has become a staple of American life. Earlier this month, the American Civil Liberties Union reported that wiretapping has nearly quadrupled under President Obama. After Senate Democrats refused to pass a cybersecurity law for America’s infrustructure installations, such as power plants, the Obama administration is reportedly penning an executive order to push through some of the measures.

Proponents of warrantless spying argue that faster criminals require faster response times, such as the need to find a missing child before it became too late. “It may be that legislative action is needed to keep the law current in our rapidly evolving electronic age,” Brown wrote [PDF], “but I am not convinced that this bill strikes the right balance between the operational needs of law enforcement and the individual expectation of privacy.”

Specifically, California law SB 1434 would have required a search warrant to track suspects through their proximity to cell phone towers, a plan-B for law enforcement after courts denied them the ability to covertly affix GPS tracking devices to their cars.

When cybersecurity fails at the federal level, it falls to states. On this one-of-a-kind privacy law, California has sided with the president that new threats demand different expectations of privacy. What do you think? Is safety worth the privacy tradeoff?

[Via Wired]

[Image Credit: flickr user kiwanja]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

“Behind the scenes it was a real struggle,” said Howard Posner, a veteran legislative staffer who helped Google lobby behind-the-scenes for autonomous cars in California. In an unusually candid interview with the investigative reporting outlet, the Bay Citizen, the soon-to-retire consultant was surprised with the level of support. “It was a powerful effort that they put together,” said Gov. Schwarzenegger’s former Deputy Chief of Staff, Rob Stutzman, who represents the carmaker’s opposition. “They picked a powerful author. They clearly lobbied the governor’s administration as well.”

With the bill now law, California joins Nevada as the only two states in the union that permit road testing of Google’s self-driving car effort. Specifically, it requires the DMV to draft rules to authorize public testing of the cars and expand the definition of a car “operator” to the person who “causes the autonomous technology to engage.”

In Google’s defense, cars take an enormous economic, financial, and human toll on humanity. “The vast majority of traffic fatalities and injuries are caused by human error,” said mechanical engineer and State Senator Alex Padilla, who sponsored the bill. “Can we utilize and incorporate state-of-the-art technology to make our vehicles and therefore our roads and society safer?”

Google boasts the safety track record to back up its ambitious aims: after 300,000 miles in testing, the only incidents have been human errors.

Numerous other concerns, including privacy, additional testing, and liability logistics, had all been resolved by the time they reached the Assembly Transportation Committee in late June. The California Highway Patrol, who was apparently expected to voice concerns, was MIA. “They’ve been silenced by the governor’s office,” Posner said.

The Bay Citizen notes that Google spent about $144K on lobbying efforts, and gave 89K to California campaigns. Though, Google has a number of interests, and linking those dollars to this particular issue, when it could have been simple fascination with robotic cars, is dubious.

“The benefits of this could be enormous,” gushed Posner, in conclusion, “but if you don’t do this right, there could be some horrific accidents.”

[Via Buzzfeed]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

SAP is having a blogger and analyst event this week that is an education in how a big company can one day be exciting and another offer a reminder of how different it is from the startups of the world.

That was pretty well summed up today when SAP’s Sethu Meenakshisundaram said the client/server is back and it is cloud. It’s such a curious analogy and a vexing one for most of the people I know and talk to every day. But on a practical level it shows how SAP is trying to bridge two worlds by using the client/server metaphor as a comparison to today’s modern services that the company is trying to embrace.

Meenakshisundaram said the client/server analogy to the cloud encompasses dimensions such as communications, deployment, and domain expertise. Cloud is a deployment model. Apps are deployed to the cloud as much as they are to on-premise servers. Cloud is a communications model driven by RESTful APIs. And there are domain specific cloud environments.

But, oh, how confusing it can be. It felt like the B.S. meter was at full tilt this morning, or perhaps it was just muddled thinking. But then again, as James Governor said, at least SAP is not making up some new term.

What we are really seeing is a company trying to get an understanding of a new reality. It’s not just cloud versus client/server. It’s about what it means to be an enterprise software company in an age when most developers are thinking about a new infrastructure and not what it compares to the ways of managing applications.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

As car service Uber continues its expansion across the U.S. and beyond — its business is growing 26% month-on-month right now — it has found itself on the wrong side of rules and regulations, and in the firing line of the Taxi Establishment. Today, the company’s founder and CEO, Travis Kalanick, came out swinging with fighting words for his competitors and the bodies that regulate all of them.

“Every city we go to eventually the regulators will make something up to keep us from rolling out or continuing our  business,” he told an audience at TC Disrupt in San Francisco. Talking about the tos and fros that have followed Uber to Washington and Boston, he suggests that the struggle to grow its service may not be over. “Just because we have rolled out does not mean they like you.”

Delivering a message that is a poignant one for any other startup working in a disruptive space (Kalanick cited Airbnb as one company he talks to regularly), he also noted that one of the big issues for Uber has been that working in completely new areas of technology, it’s found that regulators put the brakes on in cases where it hasn’t actually established rules. Two examples for Uber have been the case of how to implement standards for in-car GPS services in Boston, or how to charge for trips that cost over $25 (a recent issue in NYC).

“A regulator is supposed to create and enforce a standard. If they don’t have a standard, that doesn’t make it illegal.”

He notes that this is the argument Uber has been using in cases like the recent one over GPS in Boston, where the company was issued with a cease-and-desist on its operation. “We said there’s no standard here, and 24 hours after that, the Governor of Masssachusetts rescinded the C&D.” That got a huge round of applause from the audience here in San Francisco.

In New York the solution has been even more disruptive: “We will roll this out for free and then talk about the credit card processing issue. Our view is that credit card processing is legal.”

He also pointed out how regulator intransigence has been behind some of Uber’s reputation as a premium service: “In DC they tried to set a floor on our pricing; they tried to say we could not charge less than 5 times a cab,” he said. That effectively meant that the regulator was saying: “We will only allow this quality service to exist only for rich people.”

Kalanick also waxed philosophical about what it is that drives regulators in his industry specifically. ”I have been trying to understand the regulators,” he said, and he’d decided that they work on three levels — none too good.

“One is cronyism,” he said. “They get a Stockholm Syndrome with the folks they regulate… One even told me that they view themselves as customer support for the taxi and livery companies.”

Number two: “If they don’t have rules they feel it is illegal,” he said. This is the knee-jerk, err-on-the-side-of-caution approach that Uber has currently been fighting.

Number three will sound familiar to anyone who has covered regulation in many other areas, like technology: “They are incredibly sensitive to what’s the public view, the optics rather than the reality,” Kalanick said. This effectively means that decisions get slowed down, and regulators who are meant to sit above the organisations they cover are actually very susceptible to how they are then perceived in context with them. That has also worked to Uber’s advantage, however: in the case of Washington a number of public figures got on the side of the Uber in the “Uber amendment” and that actually helped get it shelved.

Uber is getting pressure from two sides of the competitive landscape: not only is it about doing battle to be able to operate alongside old-school taxis and other hire-car services; but there are the many, many other disruptive car companies that have come into the picture. In at least one case, Uber has been working with one of its competitors to help push through its agenda among regulators.

“In London, I partnered with Hailo for regulatory thing, but you have to take it on a city by city basis,” he said. “I’ve spent time with [CEO] Brian Chesky at Airbnb because they also have regulatory issues: it’s important for tech companies to band together and have a voice.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch