Facebook added 29 new positions to its careers page this week, including a number of openings on the user operations, public policy and global marketing teams.

New listings added to Facebook’s careers page:

• Software Engineer (London)
• Construction Project Manager (Contract) (Singapore)
• Executive Assistant, Public Policy (Washington)
• Communications Manager (Sydney)
• Manager, Public Policy, EMEA (Brussels)
• Localization Project Manager (Contract) (Menlo Park)
• IT Infrastructure Manager (Menlo Park)
• Technology Partner (Contract) (Dublin)
• eCrime Investigator (Austin – Menlo Park)
• Manager, Global Compensation (Menlo Park)
• People Operations (HR) Partner Lead (Menlo Park)
• Technical Lead Recruiter (London)
• Training and Development Program Manager (Menlo Park)
• Building Automation Controls Engineer (Altoona)
• Creative Strategist, Global Creative Solutions (Tokyo)
• Event Manager (Menlo Park)
• Ad Operations Coordinator (Contract) (Dublin)
• Strategic Client Services Coordinator (Dublin)
• Team Lead, Ads Integrity (Austin)
• Team Lead, Payment Operations (Austin)
• Analyst, User Operations Intellectual Property (Menlo Park)
• Analyst, User Operations, Turkish (Dublin)
• Intellectual Property Analyst, User Operations (Menlo Park)
• Intellectual Property Associate, User Operations (Menlo Park)
• Account Manager (Hamburg)
• Strategic Partner Development, Mobile Gaming (Menlo Park)
• Executive Assistant (São Paulo)
• SMB Analyst, Hebrew (Dublin)
• Client Partner – Tech, Telco & Entertainment, Global Marketing Solutions (Sydney)

Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Now that Defense Distributed is on the defensive, it’s time to think a bit harder about what 3D printing really means. To that end, Michigan Tech is sponsoring a Printers For Peace contest that is encouraging designers and engineers to make amazing stuff using a 3D printer that can change the world for the better. “Unfortunately, the only thing many people know about 3D printing is that it can be used to make guns,” writes Dr. Joshua Pearce, founder of the project.

“This is an open-ended contest, but if you’d like some ideas, ask yourself what Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King, or Gandhi would make if they’d had access to 3D printing.”

The deadline for the contest is September 1st and they’ll announce winners on the 4th. They are looking for designers to build things that will help, not harm, people.

The winner of best project will win a Type A Machines Series 1 3D Printer and the runner-up gets a simpler RepRap Prusa Mendel 3D printing kit.

With all the press attention on 3D printing is the gateway to firearms anarchy, it’s refreshing to see someone take a different path. By backing 3D printing engineers into a corner, DefDist and the government are simply using fear to achieve competing goals. The results will be both needlessly draconian legislation and a variant of the Streisand Effect that will spread these arguably faulty plans far and wide. When the government outlawed DVD decryption code you could buy a T-shirt with the code printed on it. The same will happen in this case, although this code, when run, could take off fingers and give legislators more ammunition for a full crackdown on home 3D printing.

Let us know if you enter and good luck. We need more weapons against poverty and fewer weapons against each other.

[Image via Thingiverse]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The weekend isn’t upon us just yet, but here’s a little project to tuck away for when the Sunday doldrums set in — the New York-based tinkerers/part suppliers at Adafruit Industries have worked up a way to give your old pair of Chuck Taylors a bit of luminescent DIY flair.

The process is pretty straightforward — with about $21 in specialized parts like a small sheet of electroluminescent material and a pint-sized power inverter (I suspect there’s a fair chance you’ve got AAA batteries, sewing needles, and glue nestled in a drawer somewhere) you too can have a pair of Converse that light up in the dark. Adafruit’s Becky Stern says that once everything is put together your shoes will stay aglow for about an hour before starting to dim if you’ve opted to use the slightly smaller CR2032-powered inverter, though you can eke out extra juice by playing with smaller EL panel sizes or using an inverter that runs on AAA batteries instead.

If nothing else, it’s a neat little crash course in cobbling together components and the end result is a pair of sneakers that are sure to catch some attention — just make sure not to get them too wet. First-time makers may not be completely comfortable with the concept of lashing together a gadget with an Arduino and some shields, but a lightweight hack for some light-up shoes may be enough to get them ready for more ambitious hacks to come.

As always, there’s nothing to stop you from peeking at the project tutorial and looking for somewhere else to buy your components. After all, when Adafruit Industries founder Limor Fried chatted onstage with our own John Biggs at Disrupt NY 2013, she said the company isn’t so much a parts vendor as it is an educational tutorial company “with a gift shop at the end”.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Today’s three-hour-long Google I/O keynote came with plenty of announcements, but the company mostly assured us that it is focused on building frameworks that can benefit developers and consumers.

We saw a more unified company that needed three hours in one session to get their message across. Breaking today’s keynote up into two days would have disrupted the momentum coming out of a company that closed the day at an all-time high on the stock market. Key areas of the business saw updates, all relaying the important foundation necessary to move Google forward over the next 10 years.

From search to maps, everything is getting a new coat of paint, a new polished experience and a focus from every team within the company. The only announcement that didn’t fit into a “category” was its new music subscription service. Some are calling it a Spotify-killer, but to us, it seemed like a necessary and inevitable announcement.

Android

The day started out with Android, with the news that more than 48 billion apps have been installed from the Google Play store, thanks to 900 million activations of Android devices.

That’s great news for developers, showing that consumers really care. To make their apps better, Google introduced a new tool called the Android Studio, which makes developing in multiple languages and for multiple screen sizes easier than ever.

The takeaway is that Android is massive, is giving Apple a run for its money and all developers should consider building apps on its platform first, rather than second.

Chrome

That little project that Google worked on, you know…the browser? It’s the No. 1 browser in the world, to the tune of 750 million active users, and Google isn’t afraid to tell you all about it. Oh, it’s also a platform upon which to build apps, so developers should be doing that too.

The takeaway is that if you’re building apps on the web, people love Chrome and Chrome offers all of the open tools you need to build gorgeous things.

Google+

Whether you think that Google+ is a Facebook competitor or not, the 41 features introduced today will get your attention. The stream itself, which now has 190 million monthly active users, is now three-columned and has interactive animations all over the place. Google says that the stream was flat, so it needed a fresh take.

If you’re into taking photos, Google has finally integrated all of Nik’s professional photo suite goodies and will now auto-enhance your shots with something they call “Awesome.”

Not a photographer, but chat with your friends a lot? GTalk, Talk, Google Chat or whatever you’ve been referring to it is gone. Hangouts is in, and it’s an app for iOS, Android and the desktop. It has video and text chats, complete with emoji and presence. We’re just glad that they didn’t call it Babel, which was the real internal name for the project.

The takeaway here is that Google knows that you want to talk to your friends and family. It thinks that if it can integrate features to facilitate your communication from anywhere — at your desk or on your phone or tablet — they have you covered.

Search

Search is getting smarter these days. Google knows that you go to its site whenever you can’t think of something, but it wants you to be able to ask it questions naturally. You can do that on Android and iOS with Google Now, but the company announced conversational search for the desktop today. Speaking of Google Now, you can get public transit information, as well as details on your favorite TV shows, books and video games.

Knowledge Graph, which fires in little snippets of information when you perform a search, added some new languages and statistics.

The takeaway here is that Google wants even more of your searches, but would rather you sit back and relax while performing them. There’s no need to think about how to get the best search result, simply ask a question.

Maps

Getting the gist yet? Google is refreshing all the things to make them easier to use, develop for and discuss with your Mom and Dad. Speaking of Mom and Dad, they probably use Google Maps to get just about everywhere.

Mobile Maps users will get a new experience come summertime, while the desktop experience got such a complete overhaul that they’ve only made it available in preview mode as to not give anyone a heart attack. Want to see it for yourself? Check out our hands-on look.

The takeaway here is that Google Maps has been a force for almost 10 years. It was time to make the product more user friendly, helping you discover new places and not just get from point A to point B.

The rest

Google’s CEO Larry Page made a triumphant return to the I/O stage, a day after discussing his vocal issues. He even discussed a world where cool things could be built without the moonshotters being bothered.

All in all, it was a solid day for Google. There were even fighting robots. The future is bright for Google; the foundation for everything has been (re)laid out. Unification.

We’ll be here for the rest of the week, hanging out with developers and listening to some roundtable discussions. If you want to watch the full keynote, have a gander here:

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

This is the evening before Google’s I/O developer conference and there’s already been quite a bit of chatter about what the company will announce and share at the conference. One important thing to note is that there will only be one keynote this year, a mega three-hour session where Google will talk to the attendees about all of the important things that have happened over the past year and what to expect moving forward.

For the first time in a long time, Google will be coming into the conference as a hot property in its entirety, a company that has many things going on that are getting attention. The truly important part of this I/O, which will be the third after Larry Page’s return to the CEO role, is that Google is much more than just a search company.

Last year, the focus was on the future, with Sergey Brin’s Project Glass stealing the show. While there was other interesting news, such as the Nexus 7, Chromebox and ahem…Q, the focus and hype were generated by the exciting future that Googlers were concocting in Mountain View. Page missed last year’s I/O, due to voice issues that he addressed today, and we’ve reached out to Google to see if he’ll be keynoting tomorrow.

This year, all the cards are on the table, and the new Google — Google Now, if you will — has to show developers that focusing on building on top of Google properties is the smart bet, even more so than for its rival Apple. Why? Because Google touches everything and everyone. From moms to CEOs, geeks to elementary school students, Google is surrounding us with the tools we need every day.

The best way to look at Google right now is by slicing up the company into three categories, something that we’ve never been able to do with them before.

Utility

Google started as a search company and this remains its No. 1 asset. It’s through this product that the company has figured out unique ways to collect and display information, something that has benefitted everything it has done since. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn’t gone to the web to “Google” something that they couldn’t figure out on their own. That utility has gotten social, thanks to Google+. Additionally, Gmail search results have been brought into the fray and other items unique to the person performing the search.

The pure utility of search has also carried over to its Maps product, a space that Google handily owns. Once again, the first problem of figuring out how to collect geo location information all over the world was only part of the solution to how to provide a tool that people could rely on. It’s rumored that Maps will be getting a facelift, potentially being announced this week. From the looks of what has been leaked, Google wants to make your map experience a bit more personal and social, too.

The unification of Google’s productivity tools, another important utility, shows that Page wants consumers to feel like the company has something for all of their needs. Instead of hunting around for Google Spreadsheets, people simply have to go to Google Drive and create the document of their choice. That was a long time in coming. Ahead of I/O, the company announced further unification by bumping up everyone’s free storage, as well as giving them one place to buy more space.

You have to have a browser to view the web, right? Well, Google has consumers covered with Chrome. The browser has become more of a platform for developers to build upon, giving them the tools to let consumers perform actions that they normally would in a tab on a website. This browser has become an operating system for its laptop and desktop devices.

The Google Now feature is a perfect example of how all of this utility is being wrapped up into one useful experience, finding its way to every device and OS to serve as your personal assistant.

Communication

Gmail has been continually improved, an approach that Page mentioned during Google’s last earnings call, but has become a bit cluttered with all of the other communication functionality that the company offers. Within Gmail, you’ll find Gchat, Voice and some Google+ features here and there. It needs work, and the rumored unification of chat could be a right step forward.

Eventually, no matter what Google product you’re using, you should be able to start and engage in a chat. This means that if you’re performing a search, the chat experience should follow you.

Google Voice is still a product out on its own, doing well, but should be folded into Google’s overall chat strategy at one point. The optimal experience for a user is to go to one app to contact someone by voice, video or text and then do it without thinking about whether they’re using the right tool. Google’s not there yet, and the product will suffer over time if left dangling.

Google+ on the other hand, has been leveraged as a way to tie all of Google’s products together socially. If you want to share a document from Drive, you can share it with your circles. If you find a cool place to eat on Google Places, you can share it with a circle. The concept of “circles” as a way to organize your contact list is the core purpose of Google+, with its stream and photo capabilities still serving as “nice to haves.” I would suspect at some point that you’ll be able to send an “Email,” which is just another type of message, to a circle from Gmail, much like you can from Google+. The company isn’t worried about competition, so thinking of Plus as a Facebook competitor is a mistake.

Mobile

Both of the categories above are converging with Google’s most important focus, mobile. It’s open-source strategy with Android is paying off, with 71 percent of all smartphones sold in Q1 using the OS. It’s not just phones that fall under mobile, though; it’s tablets, laptops, Glass and gaming devices like OUYA.

At I/O, we expect to see a small refresh of its tablet and phone line, with incremental improvements being added. It’s not the time for whiz-bang features, as more focus will be given to the operating system itself. The Nexus 7 is a decent alternative to the iPad, but the Nexus 10 never really got off the ground. A lot of that had to do with the fact that it’s Wi-Fi-only, and it’s possible that 3G/4G could be added to make the device more attractive.

At the end of the day, all of the utility and communication strengths will shine brightest on devices that you aren’t sitting at for eight hours a day. Picking up a conversation that you started on your desktop, finishing it on your tablet and then picking it up again in the morning from your phone is powerful. It’s possible with Google’s products now, but it’s not apparent to consumers. That’s why Google has been so focused on the presentation of its products and not just the integration.

What to expect this week at I/O

Want a visual? Here you go:

Expect less bravado and more focus from Google. While the three-hour keynote will probably be split up among different products, expect to hear some of the same messaging. The idea of making things easier for users, more delightful and accessible by everyone, everywhere will be the battle cry.

Google wants you to use its products, and it doesn’t care where and how you use them. Whether it’s on a video game system, a refrigerator or Glass, the company has something for everyone, whether they’re at work, in the car, in their bedroom or living room or out on a hike. We’ve been surrounded, but now it’s Google’s turn to tell us why that’s a good thing and how it’s easier than ever to get something out of it.

We might hear some gaming and music news, but expect it to fit within Google’s focused mission, and to not distract.

The Mountain View giant is a busy company, but all of its products and efforts are finally moving in the same direction under Page.

We’ll be updating you with all of the information on our live blog tomorrow, so keep your eyes peeled.

[Photo credits: Flickr, Flickr, Flickr]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

In a post on Google+ today, Google CEO Larry Page discussed for the first time publicly the voice problems he’s been experiencing. It doesn’t sound like Page is experiencing life-threatening medical problems, but it has become a topic of interest every time he speaks publicly. During the last earnings call, Page actually spoke for a long time, albeit a bit labored, and answered questions at the end of the call.

He’s addressed his fellow Googlers over the years, letting them know that nothing was “seriously wrong.” He had to skip I/O last year because of these issues, and then skipp the next few earnings calls.

Here’s his post, where he says that his problems started some 14 years ago:

About 14 years ago, I got a bad cold, and my voice became hoarse. At the time I didn’t think much about it. But my voice never fully recovered. So I went to a doctor and was diagnosed with left vocal cord paralysis. This is a nerve problem that causes your left vocal cord to not move properly. Despite extensive examination, the doctors never identified a cause — though there was speculation of virus-based damage from my cold. It is quite common in cases like these that a definitive cause is not found.

While this condition never really affected me — other than having a slightly weaker voice than normal which some people think sounded a little funny — it naturally raised questions in my mind about my second vocal cord. But I was told that sequential paralysis of one vocal cord following another is extremely rare.

Fast forward to last summer, when the same pattern repeated itself — a cold followed by a hoarse voice. Once again things didn’t fully improve, so I went in for a check-up and was told that my second vocal cord now had limited movement as well. Again, after a thorough examination, the doctors weren’t able to identify a cause.

Thankfully, after some initial recovery I’m fully able to do all I need to at home and at work, though my voice is softer than before. And giving long monologues is more tedious for me and probably the audience. But overall over the last year there has been some improvement with people telling me they think I sound better. Vocal cord nerve issues can also affect your breathing, so my ability to exercise at peak aerobic capacity is somewhat reduced. That said, my friends still think I have way more stamina than them when we go kitesurfing! And Sergey says I’m probably a better CEO because I choose my words more carefully. So surprisingly, overall I am feeling very lucky.

Interestingly, while the nerves for your vocal cords take quite different routes through your body, they both pass your thyroid. So in searching for a cause for both nerves that was an obvious place to look. I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis in 2003. This is a fairly common benign inflammatory condition of the thyroid which causes me no problems. It is unclear if this is a factor in the vocal cord condition, or whether both conditions were triggered by a virus.

In this journey I have learned a lot more about voice issues. Though my condition seems to be very rare, there are a significant number of people who develop issues with one vocal nerve. In seeing different specialists, I met one doctor — Dr. Steven Zeitels from the Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital Voice Center — who is really excited about the potential to improve vocal cord nerve function. So I’ve arranged to fund a significant research program through the Voice Health Institute, which he will lead. Thanks a bunch to my amazing wife Lucy, for her companionship through this journey and for helping oversee this project and get it off the ground. Also, thanks to the many people who have helped with advice and information many of whom I have not had a chance to thank yet.

Finally, we’ve put together a patient survey to gather information about other people with similar conditions. As it’s fairly rare, there’s little data available today — and the team hopes that with more information they can make faster progress. If you have similar symptoms you can fill it out here: voicehealth.org/ip

The medical condition that Page mentions in his post, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, is dangerous if it goes untreated, but as Page points out, he was diagnosed in 2003.

With Page missing public appearances and earnings calls, some pundits and shareholders wondered if this was a situation similar to former Apple CEO Steve Jobs. During Jobs’ final years at Apple, his physical condition was a constant target of speculation, leading people to wonder if Apple could maintain its forward progress without him. It’s unknown if he’ll be keynoting tomorrow’s I/O conference, but this is definitely a calculated announcement ahead of the event.

In typical Page and Google fashion, he will be setting up a fund to aid research for the Voice Health Institute.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Tracking oneself is all the rage, with quantified self devices like the Nike Fuelband, Jawbone Up, and Fitbit Flex enabling users to monitor and keep track of their physical activity over time. But what about tracking your mental concentration? A new device from a startup called Melon aims to help users monitor and improve their focus over time.

Using electroencephalography (EEG), the Melon headband monitors brain activity and can detect how well users are concentrating, and giving them feedback on how to improve. It does this by monitoring tiny electrical charges let off by neurons firing in the brain.

With three electrodes placed against the forehead, it can track this brainwave activity, and it has filtering technologies to eliminate noise frequencies that come in. Thanks to the NeuroSky chip embedded in the device, the Melon headband boasts that it can measure neural activity with 96 percent accuracy.

The headband is launching on Kickstarter, with a fairly modest goal of reaching $100,000 in pledges before going forward with a full production run of the product. For $79, the first 100 backers to the project will get a discount on the device, which is expected to cost $99. For a little more ($129), backers will be able to pick a customized color of the “badge” on the headband, or get one in annodized aluminum with a custom engraving ($159).

Kickstarter backers will also get access to the Melon mobile app, which will be available on iOS and Android devices, as a way to track their concentration. The headband has Bluetooth built-in so that users can connect their phones to the device and keep track of their activity.

The app is designed to enable users to monitor their concentration through a variety of activities, whether that means tracking them at work or during yoga or whatever. There are also a game through which they can work on achieving longer periods of focus.

Users can take note of the type of activity that they’re taking part in, as a way to track their focus levels over time. It also provides a way to track environment, feelings, and other details which might effect your concentration. During the activity, the app will store trends about how different behaviors affect your focus, and can provide tips and tricks to improve. It also has push notifications to let you know if your focus is slipping.

While the team has built its own app, it’s also hoping to court developers to build software and mobile applications that hook into its hardware. It’ll have an SDK available and will allow developers to have access to the focus and raw EEG data, as well as algorithms for different mental states.

Melon was created by Arye Barnehama and Laura Michelle Berman, as well as their lead electrical engineer Janus Ternullo. The team has raised a small round of funding to get it through the prototype stage, but is now turning to Kickstarter to help fund production and get units shipped.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

If you want a digital detox, you’re going to have to pull the trigger yourself. Social Roulette is an app that would delete one in six users’ Facebook account data, but its founder confirms it’s been blocked by Facebook so it no longer functions. While there’s no specific policy prohibiting apps from deleting your data, Social Roulette is clearly counter to Facebook’s mission and business model.

Social Roulette launched on Saturday as an online version of Russian Roulette, the lethal real-life game where a player places one bullet in a six-chamber revolver pistol, spins the cylinder, and fires the gun at their head. You die, you lose. But on Social Roulette, it’s implied that having your Facebook account deleted means you won. If you’re hit that one in six chance, the site explains “we can completely remove all your posts, friends, apps, likes, photos, and games before completely deactivating it.” Otherwise, it just posts to Facebook saying you survived the game, and encouraging your friends to risk their digital lives.

Social Roulette describes itself, saying “Everyone thinks about deleting their account at some point, it’s a completely normal reaction to the overwhelming nature of digital culture. Is it time to consider a new development in your life? Are you looking for the opportunity to start fresh? Or are you just seeking cheap thrills at the expense of your social network? Maybe it’s time for you to play Social Roulette.” Co-founder Kyle McDonald tells me he came up with the idea a few weeks ago, but hacked it together in just four hours with Jonas Lund and Jonas Jongeja after Lund had an idea for how it could actually work.

The app capitalizes on exhaustion with social networks. The dizzying stream of information, constant success theater, and perceived “responsibility” to be contactable can grow tiresome after a while. When I asked co-founder McDonald about the philosophy behind Social Roulette, he told me”Everyone talks about deleting their Facebook account, but we rarely take action. Sometimes we need a simple game to help take the responsibility off our shoulders, and provide a moment for reflection. Social Roulette is more of a provocation rather than a tool.”

Social Roulette seemed to be looking for a fight, considering it’s selling t-shirts of its logo, which rips off Facebook’s and sticks it inside a chamber of a six-shooter pistol. Facebook has aggressively pursued others who’ve tried to coin off of its trademarks. Facebook has also recently shut off API access to apps it perceives as competitors like Vine, as well as ones like Voxer that don’t share much back to it.  Facebook has also blocked apps without specifying a reason but that have been accused of spamming like Path.

Now McDonald tells me, “It took us 4 hours to create the project, and it took another 4 hours after the launch for Facebook to respond by blocking the API key and restricting our ability to create Facebook applications. The app was flagged by an automated system for ‘creating a negative user experience.’ After review, they decided they don’t like our logo either. We tried to follow the branding guidelines but we must have misunderstood them.” You could say the shut down was a bit murky as there’s not a specific platform policy that the app’s data deletion function violates, but Facebook typically enforces the spirit, not the letter, of the law. It might end up adding a specific provision banning apps that focus on deleting your data.

Facebook tells me in an official statement, “We take action against apps that violate our platform policies as laid out here: https://developers.facebook.com/policy/, in order to maintain a trustworthy experience for users.” It didn’t specify which policy, though. However, the app did allow users to circumvent Facebook’s account deactivation feature, which is designed to let people turn off their account but turn it back on later without losing their content and connections. This could be considered a violation of Facebook Platform Policy I.3 that state “You must not circumvent (or claim to circumvent) our intended limitations on core Facebook features and functionality.”

Without API access, Social Roulette can’t let people login with their Facebook account, or delete content from their profile. Surprisingly, McDonald is optimistic that Social Roulette will win Facebook’s approval and live on to kill another account. “We’re currently working to address this and other issues and expect a return to normal service some time this week.”

I wouldn’t hold my breath, though. Facebook’s goal to connect the world and earn money through advertising based on their personal data is directly threatened by Social Roulette. Facebook purposefully makes deleting your account tough so you don’t do it in a momentary fit of anger. Even if it receives jeers for shutting down apps at will, it’s not going to put that gun in any third-party developer’s hands.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Car Accident In Costa Rica

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So where does this all bring us today?

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

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

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

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

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Derek Andersen is the founder of Startup Grind, a 40-city community bringing the global startup world together while educating, inspiring, and connecting entrepreneurs.

I remember when the press first hit about Nest Labs, the guys behind the iPod/iPhone were taking on thermostats everywhere! A collective “huh?” went through the tech industry. It felt like the tech version of the Avengers got together to build an office park, not save the world. After sitting down with Nest co-founder Matt Rogers at Google For Entrepreneurs‘ office a few weeks ago, I learned the backstory and vision of a company on a mission to build one of the world’s only great hardware/software companies in the world.

There are hard workers, there are really hard workers, and then there are the Matt Rogers of the world. If you think you work hard, please read/watch our entire interview then reevaluate. He had a quick start with his first Mac product interactions being at age three. As a child growing up in Gainesville Florida, when asked what he wanted to be someday, Matt would respond “I want to work at Apple.” At 16 he was building robots and entering them into competitions with his classmates. As a sophomore at Carnegie Mellon, he agreed to basically do anything (anything was help draw bones in CAD for a robotics hand project) to get a chance to work with with the robotics lab. His Junior year he applied via Monster.com, and pestered employees until he got accepted for an internship at Apple. That summer he took on the worst grunt work project imaginable (he rewrote all the software for manufacturing for iPod), and had three months for what he described as a “one year project.”  7-days a week, 20-hour days, and “basically not sleeping.” How did it pay off? As an intern Apple awarded him a cash bonus, what VP of iPod at the time and eventual Nest co-founder Tony Fadell said was something, “He had never done before.”

Apple

After school he returned to Apple and spent the next few years working on the firmware for iPod nano and iPod classic. After his first weekend back at Apple, and spending Saturday and Sunday getting moved in and buying furniture, his manager approached him saying, “Where have you been?” Matt responded, “I went to buy furniture.” He replied, “You should have been here.” He responded, “Oh. I didn’t even know!” Matt said that this, ”Set the pace for how iPod would be for the next five years.”

In December 2005, Matt and a small team started working on the first iPhone concepts in a project called “Purple.” At the time no one in the company knew what was going on, not even some of their own managers. They built the initial prototype in four months. It wasn’t good enough so they started again.  That second version was the one Steve Jobs would unveil on stage at MacWorld in January 2007. Four weeks previous to that, 25-members of the team went to China hand-building from scratch each of the first 200-devices to be shown at MacWorld. The team was divided into day shift and night shift to hit the deadlines, working through Christmas and returning after New Year’s Day.

The Founding of Nest

After shipping the iPhone, Matt led work on Nano, Shuffle, and parts of the iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV projects. By late 2009 he had hired 40-people and managed teams building these products, all in his mid-late twenties. That fall he had a two hour lunch with Tony Fadell, his former boss at Apple who had left in 2008. Matt told Tony he wanted to start a company. “What do you want to do?” Tony replied. “I want to build a smart home company.” Tony’s response? “You’re an idiot. No one wants to buy a smart home, they’re for geeks.” But it turned out Tony was already building a smart home in Tahoe, with solar panels, geothermal heat pumps, and more. Tony honed in and focused on a single idea. “Why don’t you just build me a thermostat?” Matt replied, “Why not? We could build an iPod?” Tony responded, “We’ll do it in six months.”

Tony and Matt have what appears to be the ideal co-founder relationship, stemming back from his early internship days at Apple. “We think very much alike, to the point where we complete each other’s sentences. I don’t know if I would be able to do it without him.”

But was this the idea to risk a promising future at Apple on? Matt had elevated from intern to Senior Manager in just a few short years. “The more we dug, the more we realized, this is a company we must go start. We could save 10% of energy, solve an epic problem, no innovation, multibillion dollar market. Why would we not do this?”

Matt quit his job in Spring 2010, rented a garage in Palo Alto, and started cranking in secret. Matt would visit with old colleagues and say “Hey will you quit your job? Will you come work (for free) with us on a new project I can’t tell you about?” The first ten hires worked for free for six months before finally raising money in October 2010. They bootstrapped with money from Tony and some from Matt. “We were all working basically severn days a week, twelve hours a day, it was crazy. Not everyone was living in the office – people have families, so they’d go home for dinner and then come back. It was craziness.” Everyone worked on Thanksgiving only taking a few hours off. Matt claims no one got divorced over the extreme conditions adding that “all the wives are happy now.”

Still no one knew that Tony was even involved. “In the early days when we were fully stealth. “We had no website, no LinkedIn, we had nothing. Zero outbound communication. I wouldn’t even tell people that (Tony was involved). For all they knew, I was the only founder. To get people in the door the first time meant I did a lot of lunches, a lot of coffees to get people excited. I wouldn’t tell people on the first date – I’d show a little leg, but I wouldn’t go all the way.”

So here is Nest, in stealth, building an incredibly difficult hardware/software product, with limited funding, but still managing to assemble a killer engineering team, in the midst of a talent war with Facebook, LinkedIn, Groupon, and Twitter exploding all around. “It was a mixture of my old team at Apple, my old professor from CMU and a few folks from Tony’s early days at General Magic twenty years earlier. One guy was a VP at Twitter, one was running Microsoft User Experience. Unlike most startup teams the average age of our team was about 40. I think I was the youngest.”

A year after raising a Series A from Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, Lightspeed, Shasta, and others, they shipped their first product. This spring Nest was widely rumored to have raised $80MM at an $800MM valuation and shipping 50,000 thermostats each month. This company that was in a garage in 2010 is now +200 employees, and selling products in Lowe’s, Apple Stores, Best Buy, and about half their inventory is sold online. The company is not without controversy, having been sued by Honeywell for patient infringement, and as one friend in the home automation industry recently told me, “Everyone is watching Nest.” They also recently acquired venture backed energy dashboard MyEnergy.

Building HARD-ware

Nest launched their first product a year after raising Series A, 18-months after their inception, with 75-employees and having spent $10MM. “That’s with a team of extremely senior guys who have all done this a dozen times before. The difference between doing it a dozen times before at Apple, Samsung or Google and doing it on your own, is that there’s no backup. At Apple we worked on the project for a year, got it ready and hand it over to the operations team to go scale and shoot to the moon with. We all had roles we played at previous companies and that all went out the window at Startup Land. You have an HR hat, facilities hat, janitor hat, doesn’t matter, you have do it.”

Is it any surprise that there are so few hardware startups the Valley? Or that most entrepreneurs choose an app or a website over a hardware device? Entrepreneurship is hard enough not to have to layer in these complications. Matt adds, “I don’t believe I could build Nest if Tony and I didn’t have all that experience at Apple. It’s really hard to pull off fully integrated consumer electronic devices. It’s also really expensive to build a consumer electronic product. You have to build prototypes but you have to build tools. You have to get a manufacturing line set up. You have to front inventory costs. It’s crazy expensive.”

When our interview finished a few weeks ago, I walked Matt out to his car. It was 9pm, and he was cheerfully headed back to work for yet another late night at Nest. After hearing about the culture and work ethic at Nest, his attitude simply reminded me of how he described working a holiday a few years previously. ”That’s what it takes,” he casually said. And if you really want to change the world I couldn’t agree more.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch