Google just launched Google App Engine 1.8.1 with a host of new features, most notable among them a long-awaited search API and push-to-deploy feature similar to pushing code to a Git repository.

The new features follow a busy Google I/O that witnessed the company showing its strongest push ever into the cloud services market. Until the announcements, Google had been quiet about Google Cloud Platform. But now with general availability, the team is pushing out new features weekly and  connecting different parts of the organization in a way it had not done before.

Today was similar with a number of new updates to Google App Engine:

Search API: About a year since the Search API release, Google has moved it to the preview stage — general availability. The Search API allows a developer to integrate Google-like searches over structured data such as plain text, HTML, atom, numbers, dates, and geographic locations. As we reported last week, Google will begin charging for operations and storage. Pricing details can be found here. Prices may change up to general availability.

Source Push-to-Deploy: App Engine now supports deployment of Python and PHP applications via the Git tool. The promise is that developers can deploy apps with the same ease as pushing to a git repository.

Google Cloud Storage Client Library: Google is improving access to Google Cloud Storage from App Engine through the preview release of the Cloud Storage Client Library. In its  blog post, Google says the client library contains much of the functionality available in the Files API but has stronger integrity guarantees and a better overall developer experience. There is some overlap so the Files API will be decommissioned in a future release. The Cloud Storage Client Library will be upgraded.

Task Queues: A popular request, developers can now quickly add tasks to any Task Queue without blocking, allowing a developer’s applications to process requests more efficiently.

Datastore: Google says there are two significant Google Cloud Datastore changes in this release. The team has changed the Datastore default auto ID policy to use scattered IDs. Also, the NDB library now supports ‘DISTINCT’ queries.

A fill list of features and bug fixes for 1.8.1 can be found in Google’s release notes.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google today launched a small but nifty new feature for its Gmail people widget that allows brands and businesses to highlight their Google+ profiles and recent Google+ posts right in their customers’ inboxes.

Once they have connected their Google+ accounts and email addresses, Gmail users will be able to easily follow these brands’ page right from within Gmail and without the need to go to Google+, just like they can already do with all of their regular email contacts. The people widget will also highlight the brands’ latest Google+ posts.

This, Google says, will make it easier for customers follow a brands’ or business’ Google+ page help them find and engage with the company’s content. It’s worth noting that this also means a brands Google+ logo will prominently appear in the Gmail sidebar, which will definitely draw a few more eyeballs to the follow button.

Getting started with this isn’t hard, but it’s not trivial either. A business must have a website verified Google+ page and all emails must then come from this domain. The emails also have to be signed with DKIM or SPF – two ways to prevent spam and phishing attempts – and the organization must send at least 1,000 emails a week from its domain (it’s not clear how Google tracks this, by the way).

Google also notes that the follow button will only appear for brands that have recent Google+ posts.

It’s worth noting that Google has also recently added a few more features to Gmail that make the inbox a bit more interactive. At I/O, for example, the company announced that email senders can now include small snippets of code to their emails to add extra functionality like one-click RSVPs to their messages.

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Zynga wasn’t the only company that had major layoffs this week.

Tapjoy, which has been an advertising and monetization backbone for many mobile gaming companies across the entire industry, also is going through a round of restructuring, according to multiple sources connected to the company. While Tapjoy wouldn’t disclose the number of layoffs, we hear that it’s more than 20 people, which could be close to 10 percent of the company’s headcount.

Tapjoy has weathered many changes on both the Facebook platform and Android and iOS throughout the years. It used to be known as Offerpal and was a leading offers provider for social games until Facebook put in tougher restrictions around the practice. Through the acquisition of a small mobile app install company called Tapjoy, they shifted to iOS until Apple banned the practice of incentivizing gamers to download apps in exchange for virtual currency. Eventually, they turned into a pay-per-install ad network where developers could spend to get new users through rich ad units.

Here’s Tapjoy’s vice president of global communications, Patrick Seybold, on the restructuring:

We have made changes in our organization to position the company for continued growth. Following the appointment of new executive leadership and a thorough assessment of our Product and Engineering teams, we have decided to re-organize these departments. Jeff Drobick, our CPO, is now in an expanded role and will oversee our Product and Engineering organizations end-to-end. Sean Lindsay, who had been running Tapjoy’s Boston engineering office, is now VP, Engineering for the company, reporting to Jeff.

In conjunction with these appointments, the company is also re-organizing its engineering organization. The changes are intended to address velocity of getting products to market, product quality and scaling the company’s core infrastructure for continued growth.

In addition, there have been some reductions across the company to better align our organization with our business plan and strategic direction. We believe these moves will make us more competitive, productive and will enhance our ability to bring innovative products to market.

The company has gone through several executive level changes over the past year, with the entire management team turning over. After former CEO Mihir Shah stepped down in November, a longtime Disney executive Steve Wadsworth stepped in. Other executives including Claire Hough, who had been senior vice president of engineering since last year, and Al Wood, who was brought in as CFO when the company had been even considering an IPO, have recently stepped down.

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Wearable computing looks more and more like the inevitable future, so today Stained Glass Labs launches to help entrepreneurs develop apps and businesses around Google Glass and similar devices. The incubator and accelerator will offer mentorship, office space, and one day maybe funding as well.

Stained Glass Labs is spearheaded by Redg Snodgrass, who formerly supported innovation and developers at Alcatel-Lucent, and worked at startups Skout and Taploid. The group aims to give entrepreneurs “the tools, the technology, the connections, and the support to take [wearable computing] products to a main stream market.” Those hoping to join Stained Glass Labs can apply now. It’s looking for both idea-stage companies to incubate, and funded startup with a product in the works to accelerate.

To aid those admitted, Stained Glass Labs will provide office space plus inroads to PR. It has also assembled a team of mentors “who have been successful entrepreneurs from all sides of the industry to be a sounding board and helping hand.” The mentors include Charles Hudson of SoftTech VC, Jacob Mullins of Exitround (and formerly Shasta Ventures), Greg Gopman of AngelHack, Ashwin Navin of BitTorrent, Julie Mossler of Waze, and Andy McLoughlin of Huddle.

Though the organization has no equity investment component, so those admitted don’t have to give up a stake, Stained Glass Labs wouldn’t legally be able to talk about it if they were raising a fund. One interesting quirk is that the incubator has a preference for second-time entrepreneurs rather than rookies.

Stained Glass Labs will operate in a similar space as the better-established powerhouse partnership Glass Collective, which will see Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, and Google Ventures sharing wearable computing startup funding deal flow.

Right now, Stained Glass Labs seems a bit half-baked, but it has a lot of potential. Wearable computing will spawn a huge ecosystem of startups. If Snodgrass and his incubator can forge relationships with these companies early on, they could gain power as the startups grow alongside the wearable wave.

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Mozilla today launched the latest version of its Firefox browser for Mac, Windows and Linux, and the highlight of Firefox 21 is additional support for Mozilla’s Social API. This API allows social providers to integrate directly with Firefox and the organization it launched in cooperation with Facebook at the end of last year. Today, it is adding Cliqz, Mixi and msnNOW to the mix.

The new Social API integrations, Mozilla says, “help you stay connected to your social networks, no matter where you go on the Web.”

Once installed, users can access these integrations from buttons in the browser toolbar. Cliqz users, for example, will be able to see content recommendations right in the new social sidebar in Firefox, share links across their social networks and preview Twitter commentary, all without actually going to Cliqz. The integration with Japan’s Mixi and Microsoft’s msnNOW works in the same way.

The Social API, Mozilla writes, “has endless potential for integrating social networks, e-mail, finance, music, cloud possibilities, services, to-do lists, sports, news and other applications into your Firefox experience.” Now that it has landed in the Firefox stable, chances are we will see a number of additional integrations in the near future.

Also new in this version is preliminary support for the new Firefox Health Report.

Similar to what Microsoft is doing with Internet Explorer, Firefox will now also provide users with suggestions for how to improve the application’s startup time.

Firefox For Android

The Android version of Firefox was also bumped up to version 21 today and with it, the team has integrated support for two new open source fonts, Charis and Open Sans. The fonts will replace the three Android default fonts to enable “a more visually appealing and clear reading experience on the Web.” The difference is “subtle, but beautiful,” Mozilla says.

Additional features are the ability to save media files through a long tap and access to your recent browsing history through the back and forward buttons.

This new version for Android also includes some HTML5 improvements and the browser now scores 421 out of the 500 possible points on HTML5test.com (plus 14 bonus points).

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Just a week after rolling out the latest version of its Firefox OS simulator, Mozilla has announced that it’s offering a nifty new proposition to would-be FFOS developers. If you’ve got an idea for a killer HTML5 application and the technical chops (or at least the drive) to make it a reality, Mozilla wants to give you a Firefox OS developer device.

And the devices in question? None other than the seemingly popular Keon from Spanish smartphone startup Geeksphone — one of the very same devices that forced Geeksphone to limit their sales to ensure that the team would be able to stay on top of existing orders. It seems not even Mozilla has been able to secure a sizable stash of Keons, as developer evangelist Havi Hoffman points out on the Mozilla Hacks blog that the program will either run through the end of May or until Mozilla blows through its “limited supply.”

Granted, the Keon isn’t the flashiest smartphone floating around — it sports a relatively pokey 1Ghz Snapdragon S1 chipset, and pairs it with 512MB of RAM, a 3-megapixel camera, and a 3.5-inch HVGA touch display. Then again, it’s not like other Firefox OS devices we’ve seen lately have been substantial better. The Geeksphone Peak is a decent step ahead of the Keon in terms of pure horsepower, but phones like the ZTE Open that will ultimately appear in South America and Europe later this summer seem more focused on keeping costs down to appeal to as wide a segment of people as possible. That focus on making a splash in emerging markets may just be Mozilla’s opening salvo though, as Mozilla SVP of mobile devices Li Gong noted that Sony would eventually push out a more premium FFOS handset.

Mozilla is no stranger to these sorts of developer outreach tactics — it’s pushing developer resources for months, and the organization showered attendees at last year’s JSConf with Samsung Nexus S’s loaded up with even earlier builds of Firefox OS. Buy-in from developers will go a long way in securing a stable future for Firefox OS, and shelling out phones to some exceptionally eager creators seems like a small price to pay if the resulting apps push the Firefox OS experience forward.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

When the AP Twitter stream was hacked a few weeks ago leading to a massive drop in the equities market, I went off. I found the fact that the AP – a news organization staffed by intelligent people and with a long history of adapting to new media – could be hacked through a phishing attack was unconscionable. It would be like Bank of America being hacked by a group of script kiddies.

Sadly, this happens over and over. Why? Thankfully the folks at the Onion had the foresight to explain what exactly happened when the “Syrian Electronic Army” “hacked” their Twitter stream.

If you run your company’s social media account, read it. The takeaways are here:

I think the third suggestion is the most important – always change your Twitter password on a regular basis and, more important, never ever ever ever click on a link that suggests you should change your Twitter password via the browser. If you must change your Twitter password, either do it through Twitter.com directly or, barring that, email Twitter. If you’re the AP or the ACLU or the Boston Pony And Terrier Lovers Of America Club, I’m sure they’ll help out.

Twitter itself needs to offer dual factor authentication or, at the very least, send you a text when someone changes your password. This is imperative. Twitter is now a medium for corporate communications and for it have the security of a web forum is unconscionable. The person in charge of your Twitter feed should also have a completely separate email address, outside of your domain, and that person should have a process in place to check the URL of the password change page and then only change the password if everything is kosher. At the risk of raising script kiddie, I would say that most “hackers” depend more on the stupidity of their marks and less on their technical skill.

Don’t be stupid.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook has finally found a permanent executive for one of its key leadership positions in its international operation: Nicola Mendelsohn, a longtime veteran of the ad industry, is joining the social network as its VP, EMEA. She replaces Joanna Shields, who left Facebook nearly seven months ago in October 2012 to run Tech City, the London tech cluster advocacy group. Carolyn Everson, VP of Global Marketing Solutions, was in the role on an interim basis.

Mendelsohn joins most immediately from Karmarama, an ad agency where she was partner and exec chairman. Before that she was at Grey London and a board member at BBH. She had also most recently been president of the IPA — the first female in the organization (an ad trade industry body) in 96 years. She’ll be leaving her position at Karmarama in July and making the transition then.

Facebook has had a mixed picture in EMEA and given that it currently makes the vast majority of its revenues from advertising, it makes sense to draw from that world for the role. Europe alone has 269 million monthly active users in Q1 but its ad revenues in the region actually declined last quarter, and are now at $423 million, down from $440 million the quarter previously. That was in a quarter where other regions like the U.S. declined as well — although some of that would have been due to seasonal attributes and also the fact that the last quarter covered a slightly longer period.

On the other hand, the EMEA operation also includes key markets that in some ways may represent some of the most interesting growth for Facebook: with regions like Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe also included in Mendelsohn’s remit, she will also be responsible for some of the emerging markets that are currently some of the fastest growing for the social network. As CEO Mark Zuckerberg said when Facebook announced 1 billion users, the next 1 billion is likely to be in emerging markets like those in in EMEA rather than in more developed and mature regions like the U.S.

Mendelsohn will be bringing deep contacts in the industry, along with both independent and big-four agency experience to the mix as Facebook looks to grow the number of brands and agencies relying on Facebook and its particular brand of social advertising for their marketing strategies.

“Facebook’s innovation in the way brands are putting people at the centre of the conversation is fascinating,” Mendelsohn said in a statement. “I am very excited to be joining the team and I look forward to bringing my experience to Facebook.”

She will be reporting to Everson. “I could not be more thrilled to announce Nicola Mendelsohn as the VP of EMEA,” Everson said in a statement. “She brings outstanding leadership and passion for what Facebook can do to become an indispensable partner for our clients and agencies throughout the region. It’s testament to Facebook’s innovative role in business and advertising that we’re able to welcome a leader with such great experience.”

More to come. Refresh for updates.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Asana, the high-profile productivity startup that’s trying to redesign the workplace around tasks (instead of email), is tackling the scale of its productivity app with a new announcement today.

Last year, Asana announced premium plans, which allowed larger teams larger than 30 members to use the cloud-based app. Co-founder Justin Rosenstein says that there has been rapid adoption of Asana in larger teams that have grown to hundreds of members. These teams have generated more than 55 million tasks and 85 million messages.

Asana has been noticing that businesses want to expand Asana to several parts of their companies. Rosenstein says that the startup identified a big problem for enterprises—as companies get bigger, it’s a challenge to expand productivity across all products and missions. Today, the company is announcing organizations, which enables companies to adopt Asana at an enterprise scale: from hundreds to thousands of employees.

The company is debuting a number of new features that would help large organizations coordinate and achieve their goals. Specifically, Asana says that larger organizations need better support for managers, multiple teams and IT departments, and the app now allows managers and team members alike who belong to multiple teams to access a single Inbox and single My Tasks list across all their teams. They will also be able to search or create custom reports from saved searches across all these teams. This is especially useful for employees using Asana across multiple teams and projects.

Asana is also making it easier for new members to join groups. Before Organizations, new team members needed to be invited to join an Asana team by someone already on the team. Now, anyone who creates an account with their company’s email address will automatically be added to that company’s Organization.

Asana now categorizes teams as groups of people (working on projects) within an Organization. Anyone can create and name a new Team, and invite existing or new Asana members to it. Teams are listed in the new Team Browser this is a new feature of Organizations. The Asana left pane now lets you see all the Teams in your Organization. Within the Team settings, each team has control over how their team membership is defined and whether the Team is listed or not.

Lastly, IT teams can create admin accounts to view user activity, set security and access policies, centralize billing, and manage users. Clearly for large enterprises, this added security and control is necessary.

Asana has been consistently adding innovative features to its productivity app. A few weeks ago, Asana added unified search. And this iteration seems to be paying off—Asana, which is less than two years old, now has tens of thousands of users and hundreds of companies paying for the product.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Peter Levine is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz. He has been a lecturer at both MIT and Stanford business schools and was the former CEO of XenSource, which was acquired by Citrix in 2007. Prior to XenSource, Peter was EVP of Strategic and Platform Operations at Veritas Software, where he helped grow the organization from no revenue to more than $1.5 billion, and from 20 employees to over 6,000. Follow him on his blog and on Twitter @Peter_Levine.

As a former CEO and senior executive, there was a time when I did not quite understand the profound impact a CEO has on the culture of a company, even though I always knew culture was important.

The organization reflects the behavior and characteristics of the CEO, and that establishes the culture. Foster an environment of open communication and the organization inherits a culture of open communication. Operationally detailed? The organization becomes operationally detailed. Political? The organization becomes political. Curse a lot? The organization curses. Angry? The organization gets angry. Have a big office? Everyone wants a big office. It doesn’t matter what’s written on a coffee mug or on a “culture” slide, what you do as a CEO, day in and day out, and how you behave will define your company’s culture.

Dysfunction

Despite the best intentions, companies often become culturally dysfunctional. This occurs when leadership has a perception about the culture that conflicts with reality, or leadership behaves differently than what might be written down. 

The organization reflects the behavior and characteristics of the CEO, and that establishes the culture.

One of the most studied examples of cultural dysfunction occurred at Enron, the former energy-trading giant. The CEO (Ken Skilling) and several top executives were arrested for a pattern of deceit, dishonesty and illegal financial practices. They promoted a culture of dishonesty, self-dealing and self-enrichment that destroyed the company. Ironically, the Enron code of ethics outlined four key principles: communication, respect, integrity and excellence… So, yes, culture matters and the CEO defines it.

Cultural dysfunction is not limited to large companies. When I arrived at XenSource, which was a 50-person company, the culture was dysfunctional, despite the fact that the founding team believed the culture to be awesome and supportive of innovation and collaborative thinking. There were two telltale signs: 1) Employees painted a very different cultural view from the founders; and 2) The responses were inconsistent with each another, indicating that the culture was a free-for-all with very little leadership. One clear example of the inconsistency resulted in the organization having two engineering efforts that competed with each other. Here was a company with a supposedly “collaborative, non-political” culture that had engineering teams pitted against each other to see who would win. The competitive activity turned out to be corrosive and undermined the intended culture of the company.

Stemming dysfunction

I often talk about CEO self-awareness as one of the key attributes of corporate success. In the case of XenSource, the leadership espoused and verbalized cultural “intent,” but practiced and allowed something very different in the company. The company almost failed due to a highly dysfunctional culture. Make sure what you believe is what is truly happening in the company. 

Stemming dysfunction requires leadership and taking some simple but important actions: proactively define cultural attributes important to the organization—write them down and let people know what they are, and “walk the talk.” You must practice and exemplify your culture and have a mechanism to review culture deep within the organization. Ask the following questions:

• Is the organization’s culture consistent with the defined attributes?
• Where are the differences?
• What are we doing right or wrong to keep a strong and consistent cultural backbone in the company?

The Cultural Paradox: I can’t change the culture because that’s not part of our culture

Culture is formed — whether intentionally or not — in the early days of a company’s life. Activities and behaviors are repeated and these become the elements that shape the culture of the company. Examples of such early practices might be: 1) The founding team always interviews all new people applying to the company; or 2) a product-oriented focus in everything the company does. The accepted and repeated practices become the culture and define how the company operates.

However, what has worked in the early days might not be as effective as the company grows up. As a result, you might be forced to choose between two conflicting cultural attributes.

Take the attribute “the founding team must always interview new people”—a great cultural practice intended to ensure new employees are a perfect fit. Is there a point where growth is hampered because the company can’t interview fast enough and candidates go elsewhere? What part of the culture do you change? Limit growth or change your hiring practice? Changing either impacts culture.

One of the most difficult aspects for technical founders is hiring outside the comfort zone of the founding team. This is evident when hiring sales, marketing and finance people. A good example of this is how a technical founder might apply engineering hiring techniques to a sales organization, which my partner Ben Horowitz recently blogged about here. The fear here is that bringing on non-technical people will destroy the company culture. Do you put engineers in all the non-engineering functions and continue to only hire technical people, or do you augment the culture and integrate new and different organizations into the company? Here again, sticking to the past practice/culture of only hiring technical people might be counter to building a great finance or sales organization.

Steering change

Existing culture can get in the way of future growth and company leadership must steer the transition. Changes to practices and culture should be done by first asking why something is done a certain way and what’s the intended outcome. Preserving the intended outcome should trump the practice. 

A strong culture is the backbone of any organization, and the CEO is the standard-bearer and the agent of change.

Let’s go back to the example, “the founding team shall interview all new applicants.” The intended outcome is to make sure that all new employees are of the acceptable caliber and intelligence, and understand the culture and origins of the organization. The problem is the system does not scale, particularly as candidates are hired around the world and at a pace that far outstrips the capacity for the founders to handle.

A change to the practice might be to empower key employee “ambassadors” who act as a proxy for the founding team. Alternatively, maybe just one of the founders meets all new candidates as opposed to all founders meeting all candidates. If part of the intended outcome is for a candidate to meet the founders and get a feel for the company, then have all new employees meet the founders at a lunch or dinner after they join the company. Developing a strong and scalable interview process and on-boarding/mentoring system will ensure that the intended culture is preserved while steering change from an operational perspective.

Managing culture

The concept of managing culture may seem a bit heavy-handed, particularly in tech companies that pride themselves on being free from overbearing rules and bureaucracy. However, not managing culture can be likened to not managing growth, or not managing expenses, or simply not managing and certainly not leading…

Remember:

1. Self-awareness. If you can’t accept self-awareness, you should not be CEO.
2. What are you trying to accomplish? What’s the end game?
3. Translate energy to the areas you are least comfortable understanding.

A strong culture is the backbone of any organization and the CEO is the standard bearer and the agent of change. In a recent Fast Company article, GitHub Co-founder and CEO Tom Preston-Werner shares his perspective on how he and his cofounders have thought about and managed the company culture from 10 people to 160. Regardless of age, background and experience, culture is something that evolves with the CEO and the process of creating a great culture requires leadership to routinely and consistently assess and exemplify the core values of the organization.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch