Larry Page thinks we are, as a population, too negative. Especially the tech community.

It’s a topic that he tackled a few times during his surprise Q&A after this morning’s Google I/O keynote, and it actually ended up being one of my favorite bits from the entire three hour presentation.

The solution? Amongst other things, Larry wishes the world had some sort of permanent Burning Man-esque place for crazy builders to just be crazy. A place with less societal pressure, and without antiquated laws makin’ things sticky.

Early on in his post-keynote speech, Page dug into the tech community for focusing too much on Company A vs. Company B:

“… We’re at maybe 1% of what is possible. Despite the faster change, we’re still moving slow relative to the opportunities we have. I think a lot of that is because of the negativity… Every story I read is Google vs someone else. That’s boring. We should be focusing on building the things that don’t exist.”

It’s something I’ve touched on before, and have been meaning to go back to for a while now. Even when something is quite clearly labeled as an experiment from day one — as with Google Glass — we collectively rush to lampoon it.

“No one in the entire world would want this!”, shouts one site. “It’s the next Segway!” shouts a dozens others. “But at least they’re trying something crazy,” shouts pretty much no one.

Is Google Glass a bit strange? Absolutely! It’s weird as hell. But it’s also a rare example of a company using their mountain of spare funds to try something crazy. It’s Sergey Brin gettin’ his Tony Stark on. It’s something we should absolutely be encouraging. It doesn’t have to win or lose. Few companies have the resources and talent to build crazy, real-world crap just to see what happens. Even fewer of those are willing to.

In response to a question on how we could change the tide, and make the world a more positive place for people to build weird new things:

Yeah that’s a really good question. I think people are naturally concerned about change. We’re changing quickly, but some of our institutions, like some laws, aren’t changing with that. The laws [about technology] cant be right if it’s 50 years old — that’s before the Internet. Maybe more of us need to go into other areas to help them improve and understand technology.

We don’t want our world to change too fast. But maybe we could set apart a piece of the world .. I like going to Burning Man, for example. An environment where people can try new things. I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out new things and figure out the effect on society. What’s the effect on people, without having to deploy it to the whole world.

(If you think about it, this is exactly what Google is doing with Glass, constrained to limitations of not actually having a dedicated physical space to do it in)

Is it a bit Island Of Doctor Moreau? Sure, though it probably involves more rockets and robots than it does Leopard-Men and Beast Folk. But I’d buy a house there — or at the very least, I’d book myself an annual trip.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

How big is the connected devices universe? Analyst ABI Research reckons the Internet of Things contains some 10 billion+ wireless connected devices today. But it’s predicting this figure will triple in size to more than 30 billion devices in an Internet of Everything by 2020, as more and more objects are plugged into the network. The figures come from new ABI research published today.

The firm says the standardisation push behind ultra-low power wireless technologies is “one of the main enablers” of this Internet of Everything — which already contains such curios as the Hapifork and keyless entry systems that let you open your front door from an app. ABI analyst Peter Cooney notes that while 10 billion devices might sound like a lot, there are still many years before the IoE “reaches its full potential” — whatever that means.

“The next 5 years will be pivotal in its growth and establishment as a tangible concept to the consumer,” says Cooney in a statement.

ABI says a range of wireless technologies — including Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, ZigBee, Cellular and RFID, plus many others — are all important to driving growth in smart connected devices, but says the “long-term expansion of the market” depends on wireless technology “becoming invisible so that the consumer will be oblivious to which technology is used and only know that it works.”

And while “hub devices” — namely smartphones, tablets and laptops — are the enablers of the IoE ecosystem (such as the iPad being used as the hub for a smart connected kitchen scales, for instance), ABI sees future growth in this network being driven by “node or sensor type devices,” as device-makers start to think about connecting more of the things more of the time, not just things that are in close proximity to people some of the time.

ABI predicts that by 2020 nodes/sensors will account for the majority (60 percent) of the total installed base of IoE devices. Personal connected mobile devices will still be “an essential building block,” however.

[Image by FutUndBeidl via Flickr]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Yesterday, Dominos in Japan sold out of pizza, or rather pizza boxes.

Why?  Because a new ‘social’ promotion.  The new Dominos pizza box in Japan doubles up as a concert stage.  Point a smartphone at it, and one of Japan’s biggest stars Hatsune Miku plays a concert for you.  And here’s the social part – Miku’s songs were put together collaboratively by Dominos Pizza employees themselves – using vocaloid technology.  A great way to get a business behind a promotion.

Of course it helps that Miku, tipped to become the next Lady Gaga and with sell-out gigs across the globe, isn’t human but virtual anime idol that lives in holograph form. But the idea is great – use technology to add a digital layer to your value proposition and build that layer collaboratively – with customers, employees or investors.  Smart digital innovation. Kudos Dominos

Article courtesy of Social Commerce Today | Social Commerce Today

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is getting closer to having technology which could dramatically lower the cost of space travel. In a keynote speech at SXSW Interactive, Musk demonstrated tech that could be used to make rockets reusable.

During the interview, Musk showed off a couple of videos demonstrating how the technology works. The first video was a simulation, which showed theoretically how the different rockets used to launch shuttles into space could return to earth and land. That is in contrast to previous rocket technology, which typically breaks off and is not reused.

SpaceX has a prototype available which has already had a real-life launch, which was the second video that Musk displayed. The video had been shot a few days earlier and showed rocket, which is about 10 stories tall, launching briefly, and then returning to earth after a short time. While the rocket didn’t go very far in that initial test, Musk said SpaceX plans to continue going higher and higher with each test launch.

The successful launch was due to the thrusters and landing gear that were built in, but also due to a terminal guidance system that SpaceX had developed. That technology will be used in the design of its Dragon 2 capsule, which will allow it to land anywhere on Earth with the accuracy of a helicopter.

Musk said that reusability would be the most important part of making the economics of space travel feasible. The founder of PayPal, SpaceX, and Tesla, said it was crazy to throw away rockets after each trip. “If society is going to expand beyond earth, we need to have reusable rockets,” Musk said.

And all of that is important, because Musk really wants to see humans get to Mars in his lifetime. That’s kind of why he started the whole SpaceX thing to begin with. In fact, he apparently would like to see civilization on Mars, and maybe be a part of it. “I would like to die on Mars, just not on impact,” Musk said.

Oh yeah, and Musk said some other things about some other things.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Mobile backend-as-a-service (MBaaS) platform StackMob is expanding upon its earlier launch of a marketplace for third-party services, with the debut of a marketplace targeted toward enterprise customers. Through a series of partnerships, the marketplace allows StackMob to promote its integrations with other software and platforms-as-a-service companies, API infrastructure providers and more, initially including services from AT&T, Alfresco, Box, Braintree, GoodData, Mashery, Mulesoft, New Relic and Rackspace.

The move signals StackMob’s goal of attracting more enterprise customers to its platform. That’s a customer base that CEO Ty Amell describes as “small” today. Currently, there are around 15 to 20 enterprise companies working with StackMob on apps, ranging from those in the proof-of-concept phase to those which are in active development. StackMob is under NDA with these enterprise customers, so Amell can’t provide names, but says all apps are what you could characterize as “mission-critical.”

“It’s not these one-off marketing apps; it’s not a game for an enterprise company,” he explains. “That’s a really interesting shift, because it shows that the enterprise is really starting to trust StackMob in this space,” he adds. “Until now, if you looked at most of the other MBaaS providers, you might see some enterprise, but it’s usually through an agency, and it’s usually not mission-critical.”

Servicing the enterprise has always been on StackMob’s long-term roadmap, but in the near-term, the company was hearing the same questions from the enterprise over and over, Amell tells us. For example, “how do I securely connect you to my legacy system?” “How do I get this third-party API integrated?” “How do I control when it’s internal data versus external data?” “How do I do payment processing?” etc. The idea was to centralize all the things that StackMob can do for the enterprise under one umbrella.

While the previously launched and developer-focused StackMob Marketplace offers clickable modules for adding services from partners like Apsalar, Kontrol.io, Crittercism, PubNub, SendGrib, Urban Airship, UserVoice and others, the Enterprise Marketplace is different, as it’s not about one-click integrations. If anything, it’s more about advertising StackMob’s enterprise capabilities and partnerships than it is about providing sign-up flows and deals.

Amell also notes, though, that the cost to enterprise customers is cheaper than if they went out to the various services individually. Still, the only “action” that’s possible in the marketplace today is the ability to fill out a form requesting that someone from StackMob call back. It’s very lead gen.

The push into the enterprise is important, because in this over-saturated market of MBaaS companies, there will end up only being a few survivors, as the herd is thinned. Smaller players will likely bite the dust over the next year or two.

Unlike StackMob’s competitor Y Combinator-backed Parse, Amell declined to share hard metrics illustrating StackMob’s traction. Instead he simply says, “we have revenue; we’ll have to raise another round.” He says the round would be needed to grow the sales team and expand faster. “The dirty secret with backends-as-a-service is that it takes a lot of time and money, especially when you’re talking about enterprise. It takes a lot of time to become profitable,” he says. “We’re on a nice path there, but we’re not revenue-positive.”

Amell also refers to StackMob as a founding company in this space, which is true – as a three-year old company, it was among the first. And he touts that StackMob is ahead in some areas. ”Every time we do something, the others follow suit,” Amell claims. He even specifically calls out Parse’s third-party integrations (called “cloud modules”), saying that at Parse, they don’t provision the accounts for users and they don’t do all the things that make it a marketplace versus the StackMob Marketplace (though not necessarily this Enterprise version, it seems). Plus, he adds that StackMob has been doing custom code “forever,” as opposed to Parse’s more recent support.

Yet, as everyone knows, “first” doesn’t always translate to last man standing. And Parse and StackMob have been fighting for developer mind share. In October, Parse had 40,000 developers and just about the same number of apps. Today it has 60,000 apps and around the same number of developers. StackMob in November had 15,000 developers and 40,000 apps, and those are still roughly the same. All that being said, both companies are operating freemium services, so at the end of the day, it comes down not to raw numbers, but who’s paying and how much. And these are figures that neither disclose.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Your Internet-connected devices may be getting more cooperative, thanks to group of startups and established players who have come together to create a new nonprofit group called the Internet of Things Consortium.

The “Internet of Things,” for those of you who aren’t too familiar with it, basically refers to the growing trend of uniquely identifiable, Internet-connected electronic devices. Jason Johnson, the consortium’s chairman, said that the term was first coined to refer to industrial technologies like RFID, but we’re now seeing a wave of consumer products, too, often funded on Kickstarter.

There are 10 initial participants in the group: Active Mind Technologies (which makes Game), Basis Science, Coin, Kease, Logitech, Movl (which makes KontrolTV), Ouya, Poly-Control, SmartThings, and Ube.

Johnson said the goal is to play a “very active” role in finding new ways for Internet of Things-related products and services to work together (in part by taking advantage of new technologies like Bluetooth Low Energy and Low Power Wi-Fi) and create “a richer fabric of intelligent devices.” For that reason, one of the key criteria for new members is an open approach to integrating with other companies. Johnson said a meeting of the consortium would be “not unlike a standards body meeting,” except that the group won’t just focus on technology, but on business as well.

Here’s an email comment from Ube CEO Utz Baldwin about why this effort is important:

The successful adoption of [machine-to-machine] and connected home technologies is dependent on open standards for the provisioning and control of millions of headless devices. We are excited to be among other emerging companies that share the same vision and that are committed to moving the industry forward collectively.

Johnson may be best known to TechCrunch readers as a managing partner at the Founders Den, but his past experience includes serving as chairman of the Wireless VoIP Consortium and vice president of Dolby Laboratories’ technology standards licensing business unit. He said he’s also working on a stealth Internet of Things startup of his own.

The consortium will hold its first meeting on Wednesday at 5 pm, at CES in Vegas. If you’re interested in attending, you can email events@iofthings.org.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Foursquare — which this year passed its three-millionth check-in, added 15 million more users to its network, and in October kicked off a new chapter as a stronger competitor to Yelp with more local information and reviews — is now updating its privacy policy to keep up. It has been sending out an email to its users informing them that as of January 28, it will add in two new items that will reveal more user data than before: the use of full names and the ability for businesses to access longer data logs for individuals.

And, perhaps taking a cue from all the drama around Instagram and Facebook’s recent changes to their terms of service, the location-based social information app did two other things: it picked the Saturday evening between Christmas and New Years (when we’re all still full of good cheer) to tell users about it (mine came into my inbox at 4.37AM London time, although Phandroid seems to have noticed it earlier); and it is once again pointing users to its simplified explanation of its terms — called Privacy 101 – to help explain it.

Both of the changes are a signal of how Foursquare is beefing up its big data offering: more information being shared with more people — and importantly, businesses as part of Foursquare’s local-commerce dashboard play. The explanations in the email, printed in full below, are a little more nuanced:

“Full names.” Foursquare says that from the end of January, users’ full names (not necessarily real names, though) will show up with each of your check-ins, available for all to see. Foursquare implies that it’s making the change to be less confusing: it’s been providing full names already, which come up when you search for your friends on the Foursquare network, but “when you click through to their profile page you don’t see their last name.” These have prompted comments from users saying this is confusing.

But, important to note here that Foursquare makes a point of noting “full names” in quotes. If you don’t want your full name on the network, it notes that you can update your own settings to set whatever “full name” you want.

Extended user data for businesses. Again, here Foursquare is couching the change as a move for more practical use: it says that businesses in the past were only able to view the last three hours of check-ins, in addition to most-recent and most-loyal users, but that many do not check their Foursquare data until the end of the day. Again, as with the “full name” setting, users can turn off the permission for business to see their data.

Hello Foursquare community!

2012 has been a pretty huge year. We’ve released over fifty new features, welcomed nearly 15,000,000 new people to Foursquare, and had our 3,000,000,000th check-in. It’s a bit clichéd to say this, but your support really is what keeps us going day after day.

As our product evolves, one of the things we do is update our policies to match it. And a big aspect of that is privacy (something we think about a lot). This email lays out a couple changes that we’ll be making to our privacy policy in the coming month, and explains how they affect you and what you can do about it.

We know that privacy policies can be dense, so we put together a high-level document that we think of as our “Privacy 101.” It describes, in an easy-to-read way, how we build privacy into our product. While it doesn’t replace the legal need for the complete description of our privacy practices (which you can read here), we hope it helps you better understand how we think about privacy. We’ve also added new explanations of how privacy works throughout the app in our FAQs, including our default privacy settings and how they can be adjusted.

In addition to creating and refining those documents, we want to point out two specific changes to our policy, both of which will go into effect on January 28, 2013.

1. We will now display your full name. Currently, Foursquare sometimes shows your full name and sometimes shows your first name and last initial (“John Smith” vs. “John S.”). For instance, if you search for a friend in Foursquare, we show their full name in the results, but when you click through to their profile page you don’t see their last name. In the original versions of Foursquare, these distinctions made sense. But we get emails every day saying that it’s now confusing. So, with this change, full names are going to be public. As always, you can alter your ‘full name’ on Foursquare at https://foursquare.com/settings.

2. A business on Foursquare will be able to see more of their recent customers. Currently, a business using Foursquare (like your corner coffee shop) can see the customers who have checked in in the last three hours (in addition to the most recent and their most loyal visitors). This is great for helping store owners identify their customers and give them more personal service or offers. But a lot of businesses only have time to log in at the end of the day to look at it. So, with this change, we’re going to be showing them more of those recent check-ins, instead of just three hours worth. As always, if you’d prefer not to permit businesses to see when you check into their locations going forward, you can uncheck the box under ‘Location Information’ at https://foursquare.com/settings/privacy.

The Foursquare of today is so different than the first version that launched in 2009, and we appreciate that you let us continue to evolve and build our vision. This occasionally means altering our privacy policy. When we do, we make it a priority to come up with clear ways to help you understand your privacy choices, and to communicate them clearly. If you have any questions or want more details, head over to our updated privacy policy or support.foursquare.com.

Have a lovely holiday, and thanks for being part of the nearly 30,000,000-strong Foursquare community. We have a lot planned for 2013!

- Team Foursquare

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Ben Horowitz is co-founder and partner of Andreessen Horowitz. He was co-founder and CEO of Opsware (formerly Loudcloud), which was acquired by HP, and ran several product divisions at Netscape. He serves on the board of companies such as Capriza, Foursquare, Jawbone, Lytro, Magnet, NationBuilder, Okta, Rap Genius, SnapLogic and Tidemark. Follow him on his blog and on Twitter @bhorowitz.

I do this for my culture
To let them know what a nigga look like when a nigga in a Roadster
Show them how to move in a room full of vultures
Industry is shady, it needs to be taken over
Label owners hate me, I’m raising the status quo up
I’m overcharging niggas for what they did to the Cold Crush
—Jay Z, Izzo (H.O.V.A.)

Ask 10 founders about company culture and what it means and you’ll get 10 different answers. It’s about office design, it’s about screening out the wrong kinds of employees, it’s about values, it’s about fun, it’s about alignment, it’s about finding like-minded employees, it’s about being cult-like.

So what is culture? Does culture matter? If so, how much time should you spend on it?

Let’s start with the second question first. The primary thing that any technology startup must do is build a product that’s at least 10 times better at doing something than the current prevailing way of doing that thing. Two or three times better will not be good enough to get people to switch to the new thing fast enough or in large enough volume to matter. The second thing that any technology startup must do is to take the market. If it’s possible to do something 10x better, it’s also possible that you won’t be the only company to figure that out. Therefore, you must take the market before somebody else does. Very few products are 10x better than the competition, so unseating the new incumbent is much more difficult than unseating the old one.

If you fail to do both of those things, your culture won’t matter one bit. The world is full of bankrupt companies with world-class cultures. Culture does not make a company.

So, why bother with culture at all? Three reasons:

1. It matters to the extent that it can help you achieve the above goals.
2. As your company grows, culture can help you preserve your key values, make your company a better place to work and help it perform better in the future.
3. Perhaps most importantly, after you and your people go through the inhuman amount of work that it will take to build a successful company, it will be an epic tragedy if your company culture is such that even you don’t want to work there.

Creating A Company Culture

In this post, when I refer to company culture, I am not referring to other important activities like company values and employee satisfaction. Specifically, I am writing about designing a way of working that will:

• Distinguish you from competitors
• Ensure that critical operating values persist such as delighting customers or making beautiful products
• Help you identify employees that fit with your mission

Culture means lots of other things in other contexts, but the above will be plenty to discuss here.

When you start implementing your culture, keep in mind that most of what will be retrospectively referred to as your company’s culture will not be designed in, but will evolve over time based on the behavior of you and your early employees. As a result, you will want to focus on a small number of cultural design points that will influence a large number of behaviors over a long period of time.

In Jim Collins’ massively successful book Built to Last, he wrote that one of the things that long lasting companies he studied have in common is a “cult-like culture.” I found this description to be confusing because it seems to imply that as long as your culture is weird enough and you are rabid enough about it, you will succeed on the cultural front. That’s related to the truth, but not actually true. In reality, Collins was right that a properly designed culture often ends up looking cult-like in retrospect, but that’s not the initial design principle. You needn’t think hard about how you can make your company seem bizarre to outsiders. However, you do need to think about how you can be provocative enough to change what people do every day.

Ideally, a cultural design point will be trivial to implement, but will have far-reaching behavioral consequences. Key to this kind of mechanism is shock value. If you put something into your culture that is so disturbing that it always creates a conversation, it will change behavior. As we learned in The Godfather, ask a Hollywood mogul to give someone a job and he might not respond. Put a horse’s head in his bed and unemployment will drop by one. Shock is a great mechanism for behavioral change.

Here are three examples:

Desks made out of doors – Very early on, Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, envisioned a company that made money by delivering value to rather than extracting value from its customers. In order to do that, he wanted to be both the price and customer service leader for the long run. You can’t do that if you waste a lot of money. Jeff could have spent years auditing every expense and raining hell on anybody who overspent, but he decided to build frugality into his culture. He did it with an incredibly simple mechanism: all desks at Amazon.com for all time would be built by buying cheap doors from The Home Depot and nailing legs to them. These door desks are not great ergonomically nor do they fit with Amazon.com’s $100+ billion market capitalization, but when a shocked new employee asks why she must work on a makeshift desk constructed out of random Home Depot parts, the answer comes back with withering consistency: “We look for every opportunity to save money so that we can deliver the best products for the lowest cost.” If you don’t like sitting at a door, then you won’t last long at Amazon. 

$10 per minute – When we started Andreessen Horowitz, Marc and I wanted the firm to treat entrepreneurs with great respect. We remembered how psychologically brutal the process of building a company was. We wanted the firm to respect the fact that in the bacon and egg breakfast of a startup, we were with the chicken and the entrepreneur was the pig: we were involved, but she was committed. We thought that one way to communicate respect would be to always be on time to meetings with entrepreneurs. Rather than make them wait in our lobby for 30 minutes while we attended to more important business like so many venture capitalists that we visited, we wanted our people to be on time, prepared and focused. Unfortunately, anyone who has ever worked anywhere knows that this is easier said than done. In order to shock the company into the right behavior, we instituted a ruthlessly enforced $10/minute fine for being late to a meeting with an entrepreneur. So, you are on a really important call and will be 10 minutes late? No problem, just bring $100 to the meeting and pay your fine. When new employees come on, they find this shocking, which gives us a great opportunity to explain in detail why we respect entrepreneurs. If you don’t think entrepreneurs are more important than venture capitalists, we can’t use you at Andreessen Horowitz.

Move fast and break things – Mark Zuckerberg believes in innovation and he believes there can be no great innovation without great risk. So, in the early days of Facebook, he deployed a shocking motto: move fast and break things. Did the CEO really want us to break things? I mean, he’s telling us to break things! A motto that shocking forces everyone to stop and think. When they think, they realize that if you move fast and innovate, you will break things. If you ask yourself, “Should I attempt this breakthrough? It will be awesome, but it may cause problems in the short term.” You have your answer. If you’d rather be right than innovative, you won’t fit in at Facebook.

Prior to figuring out the exact form of your company’s shock therapy, be sure that your mechanism agrees with your values. For example, Jack Dorsey will never make his own desks out of doors at Square because at Square, beautiful design trumps frugality. When you walk into Square, you can feel how seriously they take design.

Why Dogs At Work And Yoga Aren’t Culture

Startups today do all kinds of things to distinguish themselves. Many great, many original, many quirky, but most of them will not define the company’s culture. Yes, yoga may make your company a better place to work for people who like yoga. It may also be a great team-building exercise for people who like yoga. Nonetheless, it’s not culture. It will not establish a core value that drives the business and help promote in perpetuity. It is not specific with respect to what your business aims to achieve. Yoga is a perk.

Somebody keeping a pit bull in her cube may be shocking. However, the lesson learned — that animal lovers are welcome or that employees can live however they want — may be societal values, but they do not connect to your business in a distinguishing way. Every smart company values their employees. Perks are good, but they are not culture.

The Point Of It All

In How Andreessen Horowitz Evaluates CEOs, I described the CEO job as knowing what to do and getting the company to do what you want. Designing a proper company culture will help you get your company to do what you want in certain important areas for a very long time.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Dalton Caldwell, the co-founder and CEO of Twitter competitor App.net, took the stage at LeWeb Paris to talk about the Internet of Things and how to make money on it by helping users make sense of the noise that the new Internet-connected sensors will soon create.

Caldwell started his talk by saying that he “wants to talk about noise.” Today, he argued, the “Internet of Things” era has already begun and the fact that we have thermostats that talk to the Internet is great. At the same time, though, this means we have to process so much data that it’s hard to find the signal in all of this noise. All these sensors, he says, will lead to noise problems, and the right filters just haven’t been developed yet.

The other problem here is also that it’s easy to build sensors but very hard to build filters. We can’t keep up with our email, Caldwell argued, so how will we keep up with all of this raw data that will be generated by the Internet of Things.

Caldwell says that as we think about fixing this problem, we can look at how administrators handle emergencies in data centers. To make sense of the noises made by thousands of servers, admins have to constantly readjust their alert notifications to ensure they don’t miss important messages in their megabytes of log data. Data center admins tend to use SMS alerts when servers go down, but that just doesn’t scale once you get to thousands of servers. We will face the same problem on the Internet of Things.

The same problem, of course, also exists on social networks, as users auto-tweet stories and continue to post massive amounts of auto-generated data. Consuming unfiltered streams has simply become too hard for many users. Social networks manage this by filtering your streams, but how can we deal with this on the Internet of Things?

Caldwell says people will use the traditional email, SMS and social streams to filter their raw Internet of Things data.

So how can you make money from of all of this? Caldwell says that if you are an advertising-supported stream company, you don’t want third-party user interfaces displaying the stream, and you don’t want third-party filtering algorithms. You also don’t want your “content” leaking out, and you need to optimize for user engagement, which in turn could increase noise and just exasperate the problem.

For consumers, the best business model, he said, “is an unbundled stream” with pluggable APIs, pluggable filters of a unified stream and pluggable UIs and methods of stream consumption. In Caldwell’s view, current examples of unbundled services are the likes of IFTTT, third-party Twitter clients and Flipboard. App.net, he said, is another example of an unbundled stream because it is simply the best way to create great user experiences.

The overwhelming amount of information we have to consume is a major problem, and developers will have to figure out how to make all of this data useful and actionable. To him, this is more important than just creating “cool gadgets” and things that just work in certain ecosystems.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Sure, it’s a bit early but we’ve been saving up gadgets and gizmos a-plenty for you all and we’re ready to share some of the coolest hardware, gear, and geegaws with you and yours. The goal is to get up a few mini-reviews per day of the things we liked the most this year including indie hardware from small manufacturers.

Instead of the typical list of TVs, MP3 players, and electronic detritus we’ll also feature books, music, and fun stuff for all.

While we’re pretty much full right now, if you have anything you’d like us to feature email john@techcrunch.com and we’ll see what we can do. Otherwise, feel free to take a break from your regular diet of web services news and hard-hitting examinations of Groupon’s demise with the Werther’s Originals of tech news – gadget reviews.

We’ll have giveaways for the next month so keep your eye on our posts over the next few weeks. Ho, ho, ho, as they say.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch