Tristan O’Tierney, a co-founder at payment company Square, announced via tweet that yesterday was his last day at the company.

O’Tierney is less well-known than his co-founders, particularly the company’s CEO Jack Dorsey, but according to his LinkedIn profile (where he describes himself as an iOS engineer), his accomplishments include building the original iPhone app, as well as being a “large contributor” to its first iPad app, the first Pay with Square product, and the Register app.

In a Quora post (answering the question, “Why does Square have so many co-founders?”) O’Tierney writes that he joined with Dorsey and co-founder Jim McKelvey in January 2009. (His prior experience includes working as an iPhone programmer at Tapulous.) Apparently, in those early days the trio worked on Square in Dorsey’s apartment, and Dorsey had to flip up his Murphy bed every morning to make room for his co-founders.

In his tweet, O’Tierney says he’s not sure what’s next, “except for a bit of traveling!” In a tweet directed at The Next Web’s Jon Russell, he added, “I left on good terms. I just want to do something different. Square’s still in a lot of brilliant hands!”

I’ve emailed O’Tierney and Square for comment, and I’ll update this post if I hear back.

Update: Square declined to comment.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook has announced plans of streamlining its ad products by simplifying its offerings. From these changes, users will see a more standard set of ads, as the social network intends to reduce its 27 different ad units to less than half of that in the next six months.

In efforts to improve the ad creation process, Facebook plans on changing the way advertisers reach users. It has also revealed plans of removing both the Questions and Offers products from pages. For Questions, Facebook offers the advice to simply ask the question in the post and allowing users to reply as a comment. For Offers, the social network found that page post ads were more effective at driving sales to a business’s website. It will begin shifting from these ad types starting in July.

By reducing the number of ad units, Facebook will make its ad units more consistent across all types. It will also enable Sponsored Stories for all ads automatically. Previously, advertisers had to purchase sponsored stories separately.

By simplifying the ad creation process and ad types, Facebook looks to be making a push in getting more page managers to become ad buyers regardless of their expertise. The easier it is to create ads and the easier it is for the uninformed to understand how to measure their results, the higher potential for page managers to purchase ads. It also makes it easier for users as they find familiar ad units easier to understand and engage with.

Facebook’s proposed elimination of its Offers product comes at a surprise since it introduced a new look for offer emails just last week. It may be removing the ad type, but it is possible it will still use offers in some capacity in the future.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Supercell, the iOS gaming company that raked in $179 million in the first quarter of this year with just 100 employees, is pulling a social gaming veteran onto its board.

Kristian Segerstrale, who sold Playfish to EA for more than $300 million and eventually became its executive vice president of digital, is joining Supercell’s board. It’s not a surprise since he was one of the Supercell’s very first investors through a firm he started called Initial Capital.

“Supercell is incredibly ambitious,” he said. “They are so super thoughtful about how to genuinely how create the most successful gaming company for the next several decades. That’s an incredibly enticing opportunity.”

Segerstrale and Supercell’s CEO Ilkka Paananen go way back — like more than 10 years. Both are gaming veterans, with Paananen starting and then selling Sumea to Digital Chocolate and Segerstrale co-founding Macrospace, which later became Glu Mobile through a merger with Sorrent.

“Ilkka and his team are young. They only 34 or 35, but they have this grizzly attitude of having seen it all,” he said. “They’ve all been around long enough to see success is fleeting if you don’t perfect it.”

Indeed, Supercell’s massive $130 million round earlier this year was predicated on just two games — Hay Day and Clash of Clans. Both are still in the top 5 grossing titles in the U.S., but since this is a hits-driven business, the question is always about what’s next?

“Most companies would give into the idea that more games equals more revenue. But in the games market, the power curve is so strong that releasing a B title is a distraction and is worthless,” Segerstrale said. “You really need to make games that are in the top 20 to make meaningful revenue. And the only people who makes games in the top 20 are the very, very best talent in the world.”

Paananen has grown the company very slowly despite its massive profit margins. In the first quarter of this year, the company $104 million in profit. That’s more than 10 times the net income that Zynga made in the same period with about 1/30th the number of people.

He has small teams of people develop new titles, and the company kills ones that don’t perform well.

They also go out of their way to make the company feel more like a family. Just earlier this month, Supercell flew all of its employees and their significant others for a retreat out near Barcelona, Spain.

“The way to create the best home for this kind of talent is to create these very small, very independent companies and have a completely flat hierarchy,” Segerstrale said.

The other question is whether the venture model itself creates too many pressures to scale quickly. Or even whether the venture model is even suited for contemporary gaming companies at all since the good ones don’t need capital for operations. It also can make it harder to financially reward later employees with equity. Plenty of other gaming companies like Minecraft-maker Mojang have bootstrapped and avoided pressures for an exit or an IPO.

“It’s a question we think an awful lot about. They have this steely determination to prove that this is entirely possible — that you can create a great company for the long-term without compromising in the short-term,” Segerstrale said.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Quora famously doesn’t share its growth numbers. Due to this furtiveness, many people speculate that it is not growing. On Quora even: Has Quora as a business failed? is a Quora question that smacked me in the face right as I opened the site to research this article.

The first answer to the question brings up Quora investor Peter Thiel’s refutation of such short-term thinking and asks, “The more pertinent question is if Quora’s growth rate is accelerating, holding steady, or significantly decelerating over time?”

And, of course, there is a Quora question for that, as well: “The answer appears to be ‘no,’ if we believe Alexa, and we probably shouldn’t dismiss it.”

Well today, because of a promotional video the startup itself has released on its blog, we know that that growth is accelerating, with all user numbers up at least 3x from where they were last May, including DAUs, MAUs, users registered, questions answered and questions voted on. The startup is hockey-sticking, according to founder Adam D’Angelo who, no matter how much I beg him, won’t show me where the y-axis of any of their growth graphs was a year ago.

“Why are you choosing (and do you always choose) not to reveal actual numbers? Despite your users clamoring for them,” I asked D’Angelo, because, while 3x in a year isn’t to be scoffed at, 3x of 10K DAUs is significantly less impressive. ”We don’t see a good reason to,” he responded. “Usage numbers don’t reflect quality and user experience, which are what’s important to us.”

“What do you say to critics who bring up sites like Alexa and Compete as evidence of your traffic decline?” I also asked, because when a company is clandestine like this, people look for external cues of success. “Since I have our real metrics, I look at those and not external ones,” D’Angelo says. He does reveal that this growth spans beyond Silicon Valley, disputing the perception that Quora is singularly Valley-focused. “All of California is less than 10 percent of usage. New York City is the biggest city.”

In the question linked above, Thiel insists that focusing on hyper growth for consumer startups is an outdated and too-superficial heuristic.

“The focus, particularly in companies with exploding growth, is on next month’s, quarters, or, less frequently, years. That is too short a timeline. Old Economy mode works in the Old Economy. It does not work for thinking about tech and high growth businesses. Yet startup culture today pointedly ignores, and even resists, 10-15 year thinking.”

Thus I asked D’Angelo what the 10-15 year plan was for Quora: “You say you’re not planning on ever selling it in the video. What big opportunity will eventually justify the $61 million put in by investors 10-15 years from now?”

“Our mission is to share and grow the world’s knowledge,” he says. “We believe that if we can deliver on that mission at scale, we will create a lot of value for everyone.” He brings up this robustly filled-out Quora question about the International Space Station as an example of that value. There are countless others like this one, this one, this one and especially this one.

As the video intentionally highlights, Quora is hiring aggressively to fulfill this mission “through whatever it takes” and looking to fill product-development positions in engineering, product management, data science and design. If you’re interested, you can find its Careers page here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Foursquare, the social, location-based check-in app that has been pivoting into becoming a more of platform for local search, has finally closed its Series D round of funding. Foursquare tells TechCrunch that it is $41 million, led by Silver Lake Partners in the form of a multi-year loan from the Silver Lake Waterman growth debt fund; and convertible debt from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and Spark Capital. It takes the total raised in the company to an eye-watering $112.4 million.

The news was first reported by BusinessWeek, and puts to rest speculation that has been swirling for over a year about how the company needed to raise money to avoid running out of cash; and questions over whether it would be able to do so because of lingering skepticism about its business model.

Despite its size and reach — Foursquare’s user base at the end of 2012 was 30 million; and it powers location information in some 40,000 apps — the company reportedly pulled in only about $2 million of revenue last year. Meanwhile, its last raise in 2011 valued the company at $600 million.

Earlier this year, we reported that a D-Round that would have involved equity was potentially being done at a $700 million valuation, but that investors were hesitating because of worries of a too-high valuation. When I was researching a story on the company in March, I was assured by one reliable source that this latest round — the one announced today — would not be a down-round, with a valuation lower than $600 million it had in 2011. By opting for what BusinessWeek reports as a loan-and-debt deal with no immediate equity (the debt has the option of converting to equity in the future), that puts off the question of valuation for a while yet.

And it also somewhat puts off the question of whether Foursquare is an acquisition target.

In the meantime, CEO and founder Dennis Crowley and his team have been working hard to continue building up the business, both to create actual revenue streams, and also to counterbalance the fact that many have checked out of making check-ins. In February, Dennis Crowley told me Foursquare was seeing 5 million check-ins per day, but that’s also what the company said a year ago.

In addition to major app updates that put search front and center, and deals like the one with credit card companies American Express, MasterCard and Visa for member discounts for check-ins, Foursquare has been working hard to build bridges with handset makers, carriers and other content providers that could potentially result in commercial licensing deals.

Crowley’s trip to the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, spanning just a few days, saw him take in at least 30 meetings in that timeframe. Working with the old-school world of telecoms, though, is a long-term and long-odds game; this was not Crowley’s first year at the event.

Indeed, Crowley tells BusinessWeek that this round is about buying time for the company to play those long-odds out. “This allows us to get closer to being able to prove that there’s a real business here,” he said.

One area that looks like it will be getting more attention is advertising and marketing — specifically opening its platform to merchants to pay Foursquare to market themselves there. This is still a nascent part of the service — BusinessWeek points out that Foursquare “allows” only 50 large advertisers currently to buy ads. Some of the $41 million will be getting invested in a way to widen that pool, starting with bumping its sales staff up from 10 now to 40 by this summer.

“The biggest challenge is to take revenue-generating products that we launched in Q3 last year and take them out to the market,” Crowley told me in February. “The businesses using these are mostly national retailers [the 50 mentioned by BusinessWeek]. But we’ve got over 1 million merchants who have claimed their businesses on Foursquare, running specials and doing other things. What we want to do is take these tools used by the 50-100 national retailers and make them accessible to our 1 million merchants. Then you’ve got something really powerful.” These tools currently do not integrate with other point-of-sale systems, so that’s another area where the company might need to make some investments, too.

One thing we might expect is more of a Google-style approach to search marketing.

“If you look at what we’re doing in terms of harvesting intent from users, we have millions searching for things, and we’re helping them find places,” Crowley told me. “It doesn’t look that different from what google has done with AdWords. If you search for ‘Hawaiian vacation,’ Google shows you websites to get you there. And ‘Italian tasting menu’ will bring you a list of venues on Foursquare.”

BusinessWeek notes that by the end of the year, checking in at a particular location will get ads served relevant to that place — such as a brand of orange juice when you are at the supermarket. This could turn even more people off from checking in, though, unless there is a reward at the end of it.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Entrepreneur-turned-investor is a classic story arc in Silicon Valley but recently the plot has earned a twist. Certain operators are foregoing the traditional path of joining a traditional VC to instead create a studio-like holding operation. By doing so, they remain engaged with the grit and grassroots challenges of building a startup. They remain company builders.

John Borthwick and his New York City-based technology studio, Betaworks, was one of the recent pioneers of what Borthwick calls a “new asset class” in the VC world. And Bill Gross started this in the nineties with IdeaLab. But we’ve seen many others follow.

Twitter co-founders Ev Williams And Biz Stone launched the Obvious Corp.; Mike Jones and Peter Pham run the LA-based studio Science; Max Levchin debuted his R&D lab HVF; Snapfish founder and Mayfield partner Raj Kapoor is in the process of launching his studio cofounder.co; Michael Birch has Money Inferno; Groupon co-founders Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell, along with partner Paul Lee, are incubating ideas and startups at Lightbank; Kevin Ryan operates AlleyCorp; and most recently we heard that entrepreneur and Menlo Ventures partner Shervin Pishevar is creating is own startup-creation venture, Sherpa. Even VC giant Andreessen Horowitz is building an army of marketers, business development execs, recruiters and more to help aid in the creation of startups.

Each model differs slightly. Some take bigger chunks of equity than others. Some of the studio creators take co-founder titles on certain startups. Many studios not only create and incubate ideas in-house, but also make seed-stage investments in startups outside of the company. But at the heart of what each of these studios is doing is using entrepreneurial expertise and in-house resources to help generate ideas and build companies at scale.

As this trend takes off, it raises the question why?

Speed

Lee, who has helped Lightbank incubate a number of ideas including loyalty startup Belly, explains that because it is so easy to build startups these days, that there is a need for models that allow companies to leverage certain functions like sales and marketing, hiring, legal and more. It’s important to note that this is probably one of the biggest differentiators between studios and accelerators.

If the studio has some of these functions built in-house, then startups can actually leverage these repeatable services and scale more quickly with less capital. In Lightbank’s case, the firm has built and scaled sales teams across a number of industries and companies and can help startups quickly manage this area.

Borthwick echoes Lee’s thoughts on the value of a shared platform of data, analytics and monetization tools. Betaworks has a layer of tools that its companies, which include Chartbeat, Bitly and others, all use. He compares this to the movie studio model, where companies like Disney and Universal create individual movies but have a layer of services in-house that promote films, and provide other functions across these various content plays.

LA-based Science has a similar approach to Betaworks and has built a number of B2B companies that can provide its other consumer-facing startups with marketing technologies. TripleThread, which launched in November and powers personalization for styling and clothing companies, supports another Science company, Fourth and Grand, which offers a personalized styling service for men.

Andreessen Horowitz has been building its layer of services for startups by hiring an army of talent to help portfolio startups. The firm’s partner, Margit Wennmachers, explains that Andreessen sees entrepreneurs as the epicenter to an idea, and works on helping with everything else that the entrepreneur doesn’t have time to do. So if an entrepreneur is a coding genius, Andreessen will work on helping with go-to market strategies, marketing, recruiting, and more. The firm has developed a network of talent in-house to help with this. Andreessen just brought on Wildfire product exec Tom Rikert and Twitter marketing exec Elizabeth Weil.

While these services help startups get their products built, shipped and marketed in a speedy fashion; speed also has its benefits when things don’t go so well in development of an idea. The ability to quickly scale ideas can also be advantageous when an idea doesn’t work and you need to shut it down.

Borthwick explained to us that part of what makes this studio model work is that there’s the opportunity for rapid experimentation and company development. “Failure is part of the model. The traditional VC model is predicated on the fact that failure happens in the marketplace. But our model is a more flexible platform for innovation. If things don’t look like they will work out, we can easily pivot because there hasn’t been as much capital and investment put in,” he says. “Death and breakage is part of the system.”

“Parallel Entrepreneurship”

Ev Williams refers to this model on a Branch (which is a communications product that is investment and part of Obvious) thread from last year, as “parallel entrepreneurship.” In a lot of ways, this seems like an accurate description of these company building studios.

Stone and Williams, Kapoor, Borthwick, Pishevar, Jones, Levchin and others have all had experience being able to build and grow startups. They can all work in tandem with talent in-house, and help this new generation of entrepreneurs turn ideas into actual businesses. The benefit for the company builder is that they can scale their experience across a number of startups and ideas, take a hands-on approach to helping in product and engineering and take equity stakes in each. The new, young entrepreneur gets to learn how to build a company from someone who has had success and can scale more quickly. As Pham puts it, “collective knowledge is always better than singular knowledge.”

Kapoor, who announced his departure from Mayfield to create his own startup studio, explains that an experienced entrepreneur can give founders an advantage by being able to short-circuit lessons that the entrepreneur learned when he or she founded a company previously. Kapoor co-founded and was the CEO of Snapfish, which was sold to HP for $300 million. His model at Cofounder.co centralizes around co-founding startups and helping in all areas of the company including financing, recruiting, strategy, product development and mentoring the CEO. While he hasn’t yet officially launched, he explained that he found the traditional VC model doesn’t allow VCs to go as in-depth in the trenches with entrepreneurs as with the studio model.

His view is that entrepreneurs are looking for help as much as money, especially at an early stage. “Entrepreneurs are open to and expecting help that goes beyond just investing. In the traditional VC world, it’s done it through mentors and advisors,” he says. “But it is very difficult for someone who isn’t really close to the company to add value on a regular basis.”

Lee adds that for a young entrepreneur who may not have a lot of work and technology experience, it is still extremely hard to build a company on your own, even in a traditional accelerator or incubator. He feels that the company-building model fills a gap in the market.

He also points out that there will always be a class of entrepreneurs who don’t need to participate in the studio model. “There are some entrepreneurs who don’t need to strongly lean on the learnings of those who have succeeded previously, but there are some founders where it makes more sense to have a stronger network surround them,” he says.

In his experience, Borthwick notes that there are certain types of entrepreneurs that the studio model scales well for, and this sort of partnership isn’t for everybody. “It’s not a one-size-fits-all model for the entrepreneur.”

Another area where the studio model can differ from traditional VC investment or even accelerators is in the equity handout. Science takes mid-to-high, double-digit equity in their startups (compared to Y Combinator’s 7 percent). All models are different in terms of how they are breaking down equity allotments, but it can be daunting to give away that amount of equity and it begs the question of whether this is entrepreneur-friendly.

But clearly as more and more entrepreneurs flock to Betaworks, Science, Obvious Corp. and similar companies, it’s clear that some entrepreneurs see that there is a tradeoff in equity versus the value that people like Williams, Jones, Stone, Borthwick, Pham and others provide. Lee says that this exchange may make more sense for younger entrepreneurs who see value in the experience of working under these leaders and founders.

However, it’s still early days and too soon to determine the longevity of the companies that emerge from these studios, as well as how the entrepreneurs that these studios are nurturing will perform in the greater technology market.

The other question is whether this new model will produce the sort of iconic VC firms like Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins. This will largely depend on whether the bets that these studios and company builders make turn into the next Googles, Microsofts or Facebooks of our world.

Borthwick is confident that this model is succeeding in the seed-stage investment world. He notes in his yearly letter to shareholders. “Our approach allows us to achieve a velocity that other parts of the seed and VC stacks find hard to achieve…betaworks has played a part in the emergence of this larger, more diverse, more independent, and loosely-coupled seed financing marketplace; we believe its existence and growth tends to validate the betaworks model and its emergence as a new asset class.”

In a way, company building allows the experienced entrepreneur to keep playing the game. It’s like when Apollo Creed retired from professional boxing, but then decided to coach Rocky Balboa against Clubber Lang. As Pham explains, for some founders this is the best of both worlds. They get to raise a fund and invest in people they believe in, but also keep their hands dirty in the nit and grit of startup creation. It’s the classic story of an entrepreneur who has been through her own roller coaster ride and now wants to invest in others who have an appetite to do the same — only now, she wants a seat on the ride.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

When the Nintendo came out in 1985, there was something of a misconception of what, exactly, it was. For a generation that grew up without computers, much less video games, the NES must have seemed just like the latest toy – a high-tech plaything that, like other toys or the likes of arcade and pinball games, kids would engage with for a short time and then put away.

It wasn’t, of course; The Nintendo was among the first of the new generation of consoles, and games like Dragon Warrior, Super Mario Bros 3, and of course Final Fantasy ended up devouring not just hours, but dozens of hours, entire afternoons and weekends.

Naturally, there was a backlash among the parents. Did anyone else’s parents threaten to unplug their Nintendo or show it the window? And who can blame them? I can just barely imagine now their confusion (more so in another way, which I will get to) over how exactly this new toy was able to command so much of their kids’ valuable time. At the time, that confusion manifested in frustration and rejection, disgust even.

30 years later, video games are a mainstream hobby, largely because the kids who played all those games are now the grown-ups. We didn’t grow up with warped minds (though my mother still nurtures a fear, close to a hope, that she was right about video games crippling my ability to be function), and in fact many of us have found that games have become part of our identity, both individually and as a generation. Some of my most cherished memories from that time are of playing games with my friends (comparing progress in Final Fantasy) and my brother (yelling “word” when he beat Shadowgate, and I don’t blame him).

It’s funny to me, then, when I see people my age and thereabouts clucking with disapproval at people who are somehow managing to, in their eyes (and my own, occasionally, I’ll admit), misuse or abuse the tools of social media.

Someone like the now-infamous Carly McKinney (AKA @carlycrunkbear), whose saucy pictures and, let’s be honest, questionable behavior led to her being dismissed from her teaching position.

While I think we can all get behind the idea that we’d like our schoolteachers to be sober while at work, the question of whether she was using the social web wrong is a more difficult one. On one hand, the way she used it exposed her to widespread scrutiny and ridicule, both of her lifestyle and method of broadcasting it.

But isn’t it a rather more future-proof position to say that she was ahead of the curve? This girl is so wrapped up in social media that the question of keeping these things private may never have occurred to her, account setting or not. Isn’t it reasonable to think that if she’s going to share it at all, it’s likely to get out anyway? If it can happen to Zuckerbergs, it can happen to anyone. And she’s 23 — think of kids in elementary school right now, whose digital lives have been kickstarted by blogging parents and who think of the Internet more like how they think of electricity or running water.

Are we become our parents, yelling at a kid for playing Metroid all night because we have no idea what Metroid is? When we think of the social web as a new tool, the latest in the line of tools beginning with, say, BBSes or IRC, aren’t we coming at this thing from a completely different, and perhaps erroneous, angle?

It’s the flip side of the happy coincidence that I described as defining people my age in Generation i. The way we perceive technology may be unique, but it’s not superior. How we relate to something we saw develop parallel to ourselves is different from how we relate to something that was already mature when we were born. Our grandparents think differently about cars than we do, since when many of them were young, the things were comparably scarce, a luxury item. So I think it’s reasonable to posit that the way we think of social media and the Internet is very, very different from the way kids born in the last ten years do (to say nothing, I hardly need to add, of our grandparents).

Now, certainly, contemporary (as well as recently revised) notions of privacy and publicity are, like so many Nintendos, being thrown right out the window. But just because the rules are being rewritten doesn’t mean there are no rules. Abusing the social web because it’s always changing is like looting during a revolution.

So at the risk of burning my straw man (or woman, as it happens), it actually seems safe to say that Carly’s actions were, in fact, dumb by any generation’s standards. And not thinking about privacy the same way as others is not the same thing as being oblivious of the fact that things you post on the Internet are pretty much unable to be retracted.

But that said, when looking forward a few years it’s hard not to think that we’ll all eventually be in a similar position, if not quite so dire (or ridiculous): Our lives will be indexed and searchable by our bosses, healthcare providers, and significant others. When you were a smoker and how much you smoked, where you spend your time on any given day of the week, how your hair used to look, how you feel about the President, what you’re like when you’re drunk — it’s all valuable to somebody, and it will either be inferred from circumstantial data or you’ll end up copping to it directly whether you know it or not.

That is to say, in a few years, perhaps Carly wouldn’t need to do what she did, because it would already be done — for her and everyone else. And while good privacy policies and smart utilization of services, among other things, will prevent a few catastrophes, but let’s not kid ourselves: The level to which we document our lives online is deepening, even among those (like myself) whose caution regarding such things approaches Luddism. It’s mostly good, but as always, ignoring the bad just makes it worse.

As usual, the world in 20 or 30 years is elusive to the point of imperceptibility. I could be the wrong one, but I think it’s more likely to be these people with their objections to the way others are using technology we only pretend to understand. It’s a petty, passing tyranny, a nimbyism, this short period where they can shake their heads at the deeds of these misguided youths, oversharing the way they do — sexting, and yoloing, and swagging, and what-all, how can they not see this is ruining their lives, rotting their brains?

—Just like how we rotted our brains with late night sessions of Contra.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The Gillmor Gang — Doc Searls, Robert Scoble, Dan Farber, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — celebrated another undisclosed term of imprisonment in the siloed world of Twitter. Sure, we talked about lots of stuff. Microsoft losing its huge bet on Windows 8 and Surface. Netflix and Spotify carving up the media that used to be called TV and radio. How the Internet is too big to fail or be taken over.

But at the end of the hour or so, we finally got a good head of steam around the question of whether Twitter would stonewall its users, developers, and the realtime community — and get away with it. @dsearls thinks not, @scobleizer and (I think) @dbfarber think so, and @jtaschek is betting on the enterprise saving us. I agree with all of them.

@stevegillmor, @dsearls, @scobleizer, @dbfarber, @jtaschek

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s Note: Nir Eyal writes about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business at NirAndFar.com. He is the author of the forthcoming book “Hooked: How to Drive Engagement by Creating User Habits.” Follow him on Twitter @nireyal.

A reader recently asked me a pointed question: “I’ve read your work on creating user habits. It’s all well and good for getting people to do things, like using an app on their iPhone, but I’ve got a bigger problem. How do I get people to do things they don’t want to do?” Taken aback by the directness and potentially immoral implications of his question, my gut reaction was to say, “You can’t and shouldn’t!” To which his response was, “I have to; it’s my job.”

This gentleman, who asked that I not disclose his name, works at a well-known public accounting firm. He’s the corporate equivalent of the guy the mob sends to break kneecaps if a worker doesn’t do as they’re told. For the past decade, he has run the same methodical process of cajoling, and at times threatening, people to do things they don’t want to do. “It’s really unfair and mean. I know it is,” he said. “But people have to comply or else people get hurt.”

This man is an identity and access management auditor. Not exactly Good Fellas, but high-stakes nonetheless. His Fortune 500 clients pay his firm to ensure managers complete lengthy inquiries involving hundreds of employees collecting thousands of pieces of information, usually on tight deadlines. “Ever since Sarbanes-Oxley, these user access reviews just have to get done.”

Though the auditor’s job is unique, getting others to do uninteresting tasks (specifically those that are infrequent and involve work done outside normal responsibilities) is a common challenge.

A Shot in the Arm

I pondered this question and searched my mental database for examples of companies I’ve worked with or could reference as case studies. But instead, I thought about the last time I saw someone willfully doing something they didn’t want to do; my four-year-old daughter came to mind.

We had recently taken her to the pediatrician for a final round of shots before kindergarten and, to our surprise, she left the doctor’s office with a spring in her step and a smile on her face. To a child, there are few things more terrifying than getting stuck with needles, and it was the closest equivalent I could think of to completing the auditor’s “user access reviews.”

What made my daughter’s visit to the doctor so painless helps illustrate three tactics anyone can use to get people to do things they don’t inherently want to do.

1. One Prick At A Time

When the nurse stepped into the examining room, my daughter knew something was up. On a small tray, she carried four intimidating syringes. But instead of showing them all to my daughter, she thoughtfully kept them out of view. At the appropriate time, she reached for a needle, one by one, careful to consider how her actions would be perceived by my daughter. She tamed the instruments of toddler torment through what designers call progressive disclosure; to the nurse, it was just considerate common sense.

Staging tasks into small conquerable chunks is so basic yet so underutilized. Who wouldn’t take the time to ease a child’s fear with a little well-planned parsing? Yet in the office, it is all too common to lob large complex requests at our colleagues and be surprised by the ill-will we get in return. In the auditor’s case for example, he admitted that his clients start by sending long memos accompanied by even longer spreadsheets detailing the entire tedious task. No wonder their emails are met with contempt.

Managers pushing down tasks know all the level of details and tend to think everyone else should, too. But that’s just not the case. Most users just want to know what to do next, and flooding them with too much information induces stress and fear. Having the forethought to appropriately stage the work can reduce this fear, which ironically, in both children and adults, is often much worse than the prick of the needle itself.

2. Reduce The Pain With Progression

In the auditor’s case, his requests were particularly painful because they were too infrequent to become skill-building routines. Whereas many tasks become easier with time as people improve their abilities, corporate fire drills are dreaded for many reasons. For one, they distract workers from their regular duties. They often require learning new processes or hunting down long-discarded information. And worst of all, they can last for an undefined period of time, providing little visibility into when the pain will end.

Just as parsing tasks into smaller chunks can make a job seem more achievable, providing greater insight into the progress made is another way to reduce cognitive stress. In the pediatrician’s office, the thoughtful nurse asked my daughter to count to five as she administered each shot, giving my daughter an idea of how long the pain would last and creating a sense of control.

For years, game designers have utilized mechanisms to track advancement. Progress bars help players understand where they are in the game just as tracking and estimation tools could help workers better plan their work. These tools help inform how much time the next task should take and its relative place in the entire job. Providing a sense of progression is a form of feedback and is a key component of making unpleasant tasks more manageable.

3. Get Out The Treasure Chest

To our amazement, even after receiving four shots, my daughter left the doctor’s office without shedding a single tear. The nurse used progressive disclosure and eased the pain through progress indicators, but the final secret sat just outside the examination room.

There, on her way in, my daughter ogled a mysterious box she knew was filled with prizes. “After your visit,” the nurse told her, “you’ll get to pick anything you’d like from the treasure chest.” Offering prizes for the completion of certain tasks is effective in both children and adults, but beware, there is risk in rewards.

Numerous studies have shown that extrinsic rewards — incentives that are separate from the activity itself — often backfire. Reinforcing behavior this way tends to extinguish the pleasure of doing something for its own sake. For example, studies of children rewarded for doing activities they already enjoyed — like playing drums or drawing pictures — resulted in less motivation to do the activity later on.

Where long-term behaviors are the goal, more purposeful incentives are better. Self-Determination Theory, as espoused by researchers Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, contends that people are motivated by deeper psychological needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness. Clearly, making sure people know why their work matters is always the first step.

But while motivating through meaning is preferred, there are circumstances when prizes are in fact appropriate. When it comes to tasks people don’t want to do, specifically infrequent and uninteresting assignments, utilizing extrinsic rewards is safe because there is no existing behavior to de-motivate or extinguish. Shots in a four-year-old’s arm and the boring, routine work doled out by the auditor qualify as just such occasions.

What are appropriate rewards? Like everything in design, that depends on the person. Making a game out of the task doesn’t necessarily mean giving away points and badges if the user doesn’t find those incentives appropriate. However, utilizing other incentives, particularly those awarded with an element of variability, can be highly encouraging, just as long as they’re used only in this very specific condition and not as part of day-to-day operations.

Better Behavior Design

Unfortunately, the corporate norm remains drawing up a long list of what needs to get done and throwing it over the email wall to be completed … or else! There will always be tasks people don’t want to do. But there are better ways to motivate others, principally by designing conditions where people actuate themselves.

Fundamentally, people resist being controlled and both the carrot and the stick can be tools for unwanted manipulation. Instead, designing behavior by putting in the forethought to appropriately stage tasks, providing progress indicators, and finally, offering celebratory rewards under the right circumstances, are easy ways to motivate while maintaining a sense of autonomy.

Whether in the doctor’s office or the corner office, it is the job of the person inflicting the pain to do their utmost to ease it. Not doing so is intellectually lazy, whether to a kid or to a colleague. Considering how the receiver could more easily comply with the request is at the heart of inspiring action.

Photo Credit: Corey Ann

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Kngine (pronounced kin-gin, short for knowledge engine) is one of those startups with a goal that’s both straightforward and impressively ambitious — it wants to build an app that can answer any question. In fact, when you open the app, it prompts you to “ask me anything.”

When I watched the promotional video (embedded below), the first thing I thought of was Apple’s Siri. And while Kngine co-founder and CEO Haytham ElFadeel doesn’t shy away from the Siri comparison, he also said Kngine has a slightly different goal. One of Siri’s big selling points is allowing you to access a lot of the iPhone’s functions through voice, so when your questions are more fact-based rather than task-based (i.e. Kngine’s strong point) it relies on Wolfram Alpha.

I haven’t had a chance to give Kngine a thorough test, but when I tried the app out, it was able to answer all of my random questions accurately. (Naturally, I started with “What is TechCrunch?”) ElFadeel also said the company hired an independent consultant to compare Kngine to Siri and Evi in a test based on the NIST guidelines, basically by asking a bunch of different questions. The current version of Kngine answered 54 percent of the test questions (either by delivering the correct answer that showed an understanding of the question, delivering a partial answer, or delivering the correct answer despite misunderstanding the question), compared to 26 percent for Siri and 25 percent for Evi. Among the questions that Kngine could answer but its competitors couldn’t: What band is Fred Durst in? What is the periodicity of Halley’s comet? Who founded the AARP?

Version 2.0 of Kngine, which has yet to be released to the public, did even better, answering 71 percent of the questions.

Behind the scenes, Kngine is constantly crawling the web, not to index pages like Google, but rather to extract knowledge and meaning. ElFadeel compared the technology to Wolfram Alpha, but he said Kngine gathers its data in a much more automated way.

Kngine is based in Cairo, but ElFadeel has moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and is building out a business development team here. The company has raised $275,000 in funding from investors, including Sawari Ventures. The company first launched a prototype in 2010, but it didn’t release a real consumer app until this year.

For now, it’s more focused on acquiring users than making money, but ElFadeel said monetization possibilities include running advertising in the app and also licensing the technology to other companies, say enterprise search products that want a natural language interface.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch