Twitter is great if you’re famous. But Jawbone’s founding CEO Alexander Asseily thinks everyone deserves a powerful voice online, so today he’s launching State, a structured opinion-sharing network where people don’t need to follow you see your posts. You can get an early State invite now and start contributing to an opinion graph where what matters is what you believe, not who follows you.

An Equal Opportunity Opinion Graph

Let’s be honest. Twitter seemed like it would host a global conversation, but it’s evolved into a one-to-many broadcast network. In fact, Twitter’s about page touts “You don’t have to tweet to get value from Twitter.” Or, let experts, artists, comedians, and celebrities tweet, you just sit back and take it. And in practice, you don’t have much of a choice. Unless you have some special way to gain followers, your audience will remain some subset of your friends on Twitter. Barring the rare tweet that goes viral in a big way, the average user’s voice doesn’t travel very far.

That doesn’t mean Twitter doesn’t have it’s place. As a journalist it’s a vital tool, but there’s a need for a more egalitarian way to share publicly. That’s what State could be. The service launched today at TechCrunch’s Disrupt NY conference, and you can see State’s loud and proud launch video here.

State co-founder Alexander Asseily explains to me, “The Internet would be better if it was organized around what people think instead of who they are, or where they shop, or what they browse. All the intelligence that’s gathered online today is gathered by following people. It’s not very empowering to people, and it’s not a precise way of getting insights about what people think.” Luckily, Alexander and his brother Mark, who was formerly head of product at VOIP startup Rebtel and is now State’s CEO, have $14 million in seed funding to reorganize the web.

Structure Plus Speed

Organization is actually one of State’s key differentiators. Rather than start with an open text field, when you “State” an opinion, you use type-ahead boxes to pick a topic or paste in a link and choose several words that describe it. For example you could pick the portable stereo Big Jambox and call it “Amazing” and “Loud”, Bitcoin and describe it as “fad” or “misunderstood”, actor Christian Bale as “talented” or “deteriorating”, or TechCrunch’s article “Google Now Launches On iOS” and call it “overdue” or “inferior”.

This typeahead system makes it extremely quick to share an opinion. Alexander tells me “The objective is to make it accessible in practice to everyone ,which means making it so easy that you can use it for both serious and frivolous opinions.” If you want to leave more complex thoughts, you can always tack on a longer text description.

Instead of these posts going just to your followers, State surfaces them to anyone interested in the topic you’re talking about. The homepage shows popular topics and sentiments you can respond to. State also focuses on showing them to people the minute you publish, so there’s a feeling of real-time feedback and community. That’s why State’s structured data is so important. It creates a precise, interconnected graph of thoughts, while other social networks are more scattershot. There’s still some interface quirks that could cause confusion, and you can’t delete posts just yet, but the publishing system is strong for version 1.

State also shows you what the world thinks about a certain topic with a slick word-cloud visualization, as well as where you stand compared to everyone else. Structure begets aggregation, which reveals insights.

And beyond what you do on State, Alexander wants its data to be valuable elsewhere. Along with its bookmarklet for importing and posting about websites, State wants to eventually serve as a replacement or supplement to blog comments. It could replace swarms of trolls drowning out sane ideas with a structured view of what people thought about the article’s content. This could also draw more traffic to publishers because it exposes their articles to the State network alongside opinions.

Finally, Alexander hopes to release a State API that gives open access to its structured data. For example a politics site could employ State data to show off a synopsis of perceptions of different politicians or legislation. Alexander says “we could potentially monetize that somehow.” API apps and publisher integrations could also solve State with its biggest problem.

Revealing We To We

Proving its unique value and gaining traction will be the real challenge for State. If you asked most people where they share their opinions, they’d tell you Twitter or Facebook. It’s no easy task explaining why structured data and nerdy aggregations are reasons to add another web service to their lives. But State hopes to wake the world up to what they’re missing. If it succeeds, there’s a second-order benefit for us all. Alexander concludes, “The ultimate goal is much self-awareness in society — products that are built with the opinions of the market in mind, or political and cultural decisions made in the same way.”

Visit State to get an early invite, and watch my interview with Alexander Asseily about how State answers what broken with Twitter

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

In an interview with reporters today at the Venture Capital In The Rockies event in Beaver Creek, Colo., Gov. John Hickenlooper revealed that the state will be partnering with a number of local CEOs and technology companies to create a $150 million VC fund.

He explained that the fund, which is currently in formation with a goal to launch by the summer, would be a consortium of CEOs in technology who would put in around $10 million or so in the vehicle. The state would be the largest LP, contributing money from pension funds. Investments in local tech startups and companies would be made across all stages, including early and late stages.

Hickenlooper is looking to continue to grow entrepreneurship and technology innovation in the state, and more money for startups is always helpful. “We don’t need more patents, we need more entrepreneurs,” he said during the discussion.

State-run VC funds are not new–Maryland, Vermont, Georgia, and many others run early-stage VC funds to help fund entrepreneurs in the state. CALPERS, the agency that manages the pension fund for California state employees, is one of the largest LPs to many VC firms in Silicon Valley. But it’s interesting that Colorado’s fund will focus purely on tech and will span across a number of stages.

Disclosure: VCIR paid for me to attend this event as a speaker. I chose to cover this story on my own given the news value.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

President Obama will be holding a townhall follow-up to his State of the Union speech on Google+ at 4:50pm ET today. We’ll be covering the speech in separate posts. Readers are invited to watch the “Hangout” live in the YouTube video below:

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Winning. RT @marcorubio: #GOPResponse #SOTU #gop #tcot http://t.co/vdjPX7IR

—
Andrew Kaczynski (@BuzzFeedAndrew) February 13, 2013

Up-and-coming Republican Senator Marco Rubio was facing the onslaught of a full-fledged Twitter meme after he awkwardly took a sip of water during his State of the Union response. During the time-honored opposition rebuttal to the President’s speech, Rubio stepped outside of the camera frame to take a sip from a tiny water bottle. Naturally, Twitter hastags for #waterbreak exploded, eclipsing any substantive discussion of his well-rehearsed speech.

Omg here it is. THE VIDEO. #watergate #polandsprings #RepublicanResponse #waterbreak #SOTUresponse #SOTU vine.co/v/bvEHi30LzWB

—
Kristen Shock (@k_shock) February 13, 2013

Republicans seemed to have learned from the “binders full of women” meme that haunted Mitt Romney after his presidential debate.

Since then, my Twitter stream has been full of tweets praising the response. It may not totally eclipse the gaffe, but it certainly stemmed the online tide. Well played, senator. Well played.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Obama in #SOTU: “this year, Apple will start making Macs in America again.” #JobsNow

—
The White House (@whitehouse) February 13, 2013

President Obama gave a huge shout-out to Apple during his State of the Union address tonight, using the company as an example of how manufacturers are once again seeing value in making things in America: “This year, Apple will start making Macs in America again.”

Obama was referring to an interview last year in which Apple CEO Tim Cook declared, “We’ve been working for years on doing more and more in the United States. Next year, we will do one of our existing Mac lines in the United States.”

Readers can see a live feed of the State of the Union on YouTube here and follow the White House Twitter account, which is live-tweeting most of the speech.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

President Obama will conduct a Google+ Hangout after the State of the Union tomorrow night, continuing his recent tradition of answering online questions after the speech. Additionally, there will be a PowerPoint-augmented YouTube version of the speech, complete with charts and graphs. Finally, after the speech, thousands of citizens will join a “Citizen’s Response” of rapid fire responses from White House staff and experts.

Apparently, the White House was so impressed with the Google+ Hangout experience of American’s happy warrior, Joe Biden, that they decided to double down and put the big man in front of Google’s town-hall style group chat platform. Unlike YouTube comments, Hangouts can be more selectively curated, edging out the horde of pro-marijuana commenters for citizens who, ideally, are more representative of the American electorate.

You can watch the speech tomorrow at 9pm ET on the White House YouTube page and the Hangout at 4:50pm ET on Thursday.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Jay Kirsch is the President of AOL’s Business, Technology & Entertainment Group, which includes properties such as TechCrunch, Engadget, Autoblog, DailyFinance and Moviefone among others. Follow him on Twitter @jaykirsch. 

The church and state metaphor is referenced almost daily in the business of monetizing journalism. For the most part, when episodes like the CNET debacle happen, the damage to journalistic integrity (the church in the metaphor) is the center of attention. That makes sense since writers make their livings on that reputation and want to take it with them to their next outlets. What is frequently ignored, however, is the damage to the state: properties like TechCrunch, Engadget, Autoblog or CNET.

In the short term, there will always be reasons to cave in and mold editorial to the needs of the business. Winning a specific ad campaign, getting more distribution or helping to support a lawsuit all have measurable, short-term benefits to media companies. But in the long term, you’ve started the process of destroying asset value in a less clear, less measurable way.

I’m not talking about the other overused metaphor, the slippery slope, where you lose readers because ad dollars are buying your opinion. The truth is, only a very small percentage of CNET readers will ever hear about this issue, and most of them won’t care.

The real slippery slope works more like this. First, you lose the trust of your editorial team, which counts on management to give them the resources and freedom to create great content. Then they lose the passion for the product they work on, which is likely the biggest reason they do it. Then they leave and you can’t recruit great writers anymore. Then your audience leaves. Then your advertisers leave. Then you are out of business.

While your personnel exodus is in process, your sales reps are getting beat up by clients who want to know why their product is getting a bad review? Maybe they should sue you and then the bad review would come down? Last month sales may have been pissed about the coverage of their client, but now they are begging to start a sales call without apologizing for the product. Your distribution partners start dropping you because their editorial teams don’t want to work with you. Traffic falls. The link legacy that creates such great SEO starts to fall off, as you are no longer the paper of record. Traffic falls more. And during it all, your shareholders still expect you to grow earnings, so you cut costs — probably from editorial.

When I learned about the CNET story, I sent a note to Tim Stevens at Engadget, as well as Eric Eldon and Alexia Tsotsis at TechCrunch. I told them that I actually laughed when thinking about the hypothetical phone call I’d make to any one of them telling them not to review Company X because AOL was involved in a lawsuit with them.

I guessed the conversation would have gone something like this:

“Tim, hi, it’s Jay. So, I need you to take down the review of that smartphone. It seems AOL is in a lawsuit with them and, well, it wouldn’t look so good if we said it was the greatest thing in the world.”

“Ha, that’s a good one Jay [several seconds of laughter]. No, seriously, what’d you call for?”

Tim Stevens is far more polite than Eric or Alexia, so I don’t even want to speculate how either of them would have responded. But the end result would be the same; the review would remain on the site. To Michael Arrington’s point, if I really pushed the issue and actually took down the review myself (or had an engineer do it since I don’t know how to use the CMS), the same content would have been on every social network in the world in minutes.

The church/state metaphor works. It also proves the futility of what CBS management was trying to do. Religions almost always survive the downfall of the states with which they coexist. Journalists, more now than ever before, will always be able to have a voice, even if the business they are part of, its state, gets taken down. Don’t worry as much about the church, it will keep rolling along. But once the state gets toppled, it is down permanently.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It’s easy to get lost in the Silicon Valley and Bay Area tech bubbles, where it seems that everyone carries five phones, owns three laptops and just had lunch with a sentient robot. But, the reality is outside of the bubble is a little different. Digital literacy is a privilege, and more the exception than the rule. Not everyone owns a computer or is employed at a startup that just raised $10 million. In fact, California’s unemployment rate for December 2012 was 9.8 percent, significantly higher than the U.S. average at 7.8 percent.

Christina Gagnier, Stephanie Margossian and Carter Fort co-founded JobScout last year to help address this problem — to help combat unemployment through digital literacy. With funding from the California State Library and the California Technology Agency, JobScout set out to create an online learning platform to help teach Californians (and everyone else for that matter) the basic skills required to help find a job in an increasingly digital world.

JobScout is part of the state’s larger digital literacy effort, iCalifornia, which aims “to promote and foster digital literacy and digital citizenship” in California and, in turn, help to energize local economies, boost innovation, competitiveness and improve the overall quality of life for residents by giving them the tools, skills and education they need to find jobs (and keep them). Initially launched as a web app, JobScout is today officially launching its app for iOS, through which it hopes to bring the power of its web platform to mobile, especially for those who might not have access to a computer.

While the app has broad applicability and seeks to provide value whether one is a first-time job seeker or a Baby Boomer looking to re-enter the workforce, the co-founders tell us that the platform is particularly geared towards Millennials. By offering educational content to help users learn resume building and other related job-seeking skills, JobScout wants to make it easier for young people to navigate the job search process, something that is sure to hit home for Millenials, which have one of the highest levels of unemployment — currently at around 25 percent.

“While people used to be able to check the classifieds or pick up an application at a local employer, these days most of the job search and application process has moved online,” says JobScout co-founder and CEO, Christina Gagnier. “For many people, this is a problem because they do not know how to make the most out of all the Web offers, or, for young Millennials, may not know how to apply their tech savvy to finding work. While this may seem unbelievable, 60 million people in the United States alone are considered digitally illiterate.”

To address this, JobScout makes a variety of lessons on how to best use the Web to look for job opportunities (on the Web and on iOS), supported by a gamified platform that allows users to earn badges for completed lessons (and presumably make the whole experience more engaging). In addition, the app’s “One Stop Job Shop” allows users to search for openings, save listings, apply and track their progress with interview dates and times, while its “ResumeBuilder” offers a simple, easy-to-use, fill-in-the-blank-type resume system.

On top of that, JobScout offers one-click submission with pre-formatted cover letters and provides ideas for how students can earn money through micro-entrepreneurship while on the job search, walking users through TaskRabbit, Etsy and other platforms. It’s also backed by its web-based platform, which offers a social community where users can connect with each other and share experiences, techniques and tips, as well as a dashboard, additional lesson content, and so on.

Of course, all that being said, you may feel as if you’ve heard about JobScout before. Today, it seems as if there are millions of online educational platforms, but the truth is that many of them target higher ed (Coursera and its ilk) or more general academic content for higher ed or K-12 (like, say, Khan Academy), or offer more advanced lessons in entrepreneurship, technical skills, web design or trade-based skills (like Skillshare, Lynda.com and CreativeLive, to name a few). So, JobScout may not be as much of a me-too idea as one might initially suspect.

And, while the gamification of education should be approached with a skeptical eye (especially for tools targeting the academic side of education, for use in or around the classroom), it could prove to be more valuable in JobScout’s context and for an audience of young people. The co-founders believe that, in the end, the platform’s value doesn’t emanate from its badges, but instead the consolidation of meaningful lesson content for a broad range of web-based skill sets.

Rather than targeting schools, districts or high school teachers, JobScout is going after the masses — the 60 million Americans without regular Internet access. “People need to learn what a URL is, how it works and why it’s important before they can learn about HTML or CSS,” Gagnier says. And while that may be cause for eye-rolling for those who spend 24/7 in the tech industry, it’s important.

It’s the same reason that California’s new Udacity-powered pilot for cheap, lower-division online courses could have big disruptive potential — it’s not always all about wowing geeks with sexy tech, it’s about bringing utilitarian, modern tech to everyone else to improve our quality of life. That’s what moves the needle, not just creating yet another online, distance learning platform for well-educated, technically-proficient non-minorities to brush up on the fundamentals of natural language processing — or whatever it may be.

JobScout is a free (so cost-effective), self-guided tour of the job search process for those who may not be overly-familiar with the ins and outs of the Web beyond using Facebook, YouTube and Google — and maybe not even that advanced. Its content is created by the startup itself in correlation with the Basic Digital Literacy Skills Framework developed by the State of California. (More on that here.)

As for JobScout-the-business, the startup is also now offering white-label solutions for institutions that want to offer job search learning resources to their communities. So, while the startup is backed by $800K in federal grants, that’s where the for-profit company plans to begin generating revenue, and it already has a few institutional customers on board. Plus, the platform also includes basic analytics through “COMPASS,” so that institutions can get visibility into activity on the platform and make more informed decisions.

Going forward, the team plans to add to its platform with another app that will provide similar educational and learning tools for healthcare — in other words, to help the novice navigate the byzantine world of healthcare in the post-Obamacare world. JobScout also intends to launch a Spanish language version of its app this year, something the co-founders say is already in high demand.

While it may not necessarily be for you, JobScout is beginning to go down a very important (and valuable road). By offering valuable job training and easy tools to learn digital skills, JobScout or some hybrid thereof will likely make waves in the job market. At launch, it offers 31 lessons, but its resources will grow quickly and it’s smart not to limit itself to California — even though it’s a huge market (and opportunity) to start with — and the more language editions it offers, the broader the potential reach.

Digital literacy, FTW!

JobScout at home here, and on the App Store here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

After a newspaper’s Google Map of New York gun permit owners sparked a political firestorm, officials in Putnam County say they will refuse to give up public gun permit ownership information for its residents. “In Putnam County I have over 11,000 pistol permit holders, and I refuse to put their lives and their families’ lives in danger,” County Clerk Dennis Sant told The New York Times, regarding the The Journal News‘ request for the public information.

“New York residents have the right to own guns with a permit and they also have a right to access public information,” said Journal Publisher Janet Hasson. In a revenge post against the Google Map of permit owners in selected New York cities, a Connecticut lawyer, Christopher Fountain, published the names, addresses, and phone numbers of the newspaper’s staff, including a Google satellite image of Hasson’s home.

Some are applauding Putnam County’s ironic civil disobedience. “I thank God that Putnam County has a clerk with the guts to stand up and draw the line here in Putnam County,” said State Senator Greg Ball, who referred to the editors as “elitist eggheads” who made an “asinine” decision to publish the map.

“My hope is that officials in Putnam county will actually take a look at the law and reverse their response,” said Robert Freeman of the state Committee on Open Government. “In a civilized society, we do our best to comply with the law. If we object to a law, we don’t simply ignore it.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The continuing saga of China’s Great Firewall has taken another turn for the worse. VPNs formerly usable inside China proper to access sites like Facebook, Twitter, and certain web searches, have been hobbled by the Great Firewall and users are now scrambling to find alternate providers.

Services like StrongVPN are offering specific instructions for getting VPN access in China while many services like HideMyAss have reported few issues inside the country. The ultimate solution is port randomization – essentially sending traffic through odd ports not usually associated with VPN or web traffic.

Sadly, crackdowns like these hinder commerce, media, and reporting coming out of China and can even slow down sites (like this one) that use social media plugins.

In related news, Chinese Nationals are taking to their own microblogging services to complain about the Xinhua state news agency’s Twitter account which has 8,000 followers and Tweets out news from within China and, ironically, from foreign news sources.

Arguably hot news like this…

China's coal output to top 3.7 bln tonnes
t.cn/zjCj4Me—
Xinhua News Agency (@XHNews) December 19, 2012

isn’t gaining them many followers but it’s ironic that China’s house organ has unfettered access to Twitter while Chinese users are limited to censored services like Wiebo. As MIC Gadget writes:

Article courtesy of TechCrunch