You wouldn’t throw a fancy dinner party in a 7-Eleven. You wouldn’t hold a symphony concert in a subway station, or teach a meditation class on a tilt-a-whirl ride.

So why does anyone expect readers to read long articles on the Web?

Call me a traitor to my kind, but I think the World Wide Web is a terrible medium for long-form writing, precisely because of the mismatch between content and venue. The basic problem is that browsers are for browsing. Today’s commercial Web, where no morsel of exposition is more than one saccade away from a link, a logo, or an ad, is an impossible place to do any deep thinking.

No one designed this outcome. It’s just that the medium grew up so fast, evolving in less than 20 years from a hypertext file-sharing system at a European physics laboratory into today’s infinite digital bazaar. There wasn’t much time to think about whether it really made sense to translate our collective creative output into HTML, dump it onto Web servers, and pay for the whole operation with hyperlinked ads that, by their very nature, take readers away from whatever they’re trying to read.

Fortunately, there are folks scouting for ways out of this mess. Over the last few years, programmer-entrepreneurs like Marco Arment, the creator of Instapaper, have come up with a series of clever applications for separating or “parsing” the Web’s text from its context. This new menagerie of minimalism includes browser-based apps that zap the clutter around Web posts and replace it with a peaceful white background. It also includes mobile apps that let you store these pared-down posts for on-the-go consumption whenever you choose. And in this general category, I’d also include a few new curation services intended to spotlight contemporary and classic long-form writing and make it easier to consume.

I’ve picked 10 of my favorite reading apps and services for quick summaries on the following pages. If you’re like me and you spend a lot of time using the desktop or mobile Web, yet you also love getting lost in a long, thoughtful non-fiction article, then you’ll find some of these services to be life-changing.

But I wouldn’t say that we’ve reached an apotheosis—not by a long shot. At best, the Zen approach to repackaging Web articles is only one element of the solution, and it’s not one that will scale up very well. Already, critics are arguing that this kind of republishing is impolite at best, copyright infringement at worst. As soon as the big online publishers realize how many people are bypassing ads by saving parsed text to Instapaper and the other reading apps, they’ll freak out, the same way broadcasters did when TiVo came along. (It’s no accident that people have called the reading apps “DVRs for the Web.”)

What’s needed now are business models that would make publishers happy about providing more content in these ad-free environments. But we’re a long way from finding payment mechanisms that appeal to readers—let alone equitable ways to split up reading-app revenue between publishers, authors, developers, and platform providers, as a tussle last year between Readability and Apple illustrated (more on that below).

For now, damn the torpedoes—here’s my list of the 10 most interesting and useful reading apps and curation services. I’m going to describe the apps first, because once you understand those, the curation services will make a lot more sense. (For a single-page version of this article that you can export to one of the reading apps, click here.)

First app: Clearly.

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I don’t think there’s ever been a textbook that made it this easy to be a good student. —Roger Rosner, vice president of productivity applications, Apple

Whenever a company as powerful as Apple, Facebook, or Google announces a big new product push, it evokes wonder and acclaim from some observers, head-scratching and horror from others, and the usual FUD from competitors. So I wasn’t surprised when Apple’s press event last week at the Guggenheim Museum—where it said it will sell low-priced iPad textbooks to high-schoolers through its iBooks store and give away the software needed to make them—was followed by a flood of criticism. But I was definitely impressed by the range and vehemence of the objections. I’ve spent part of this week trying to figure out where all the discomfort is coming from.

Here are a few of the reasons Apple’s textbook plans are doomed, misconceived, or just plain evil, in the eyes of the blogosphere:

A page from E.O. Wilson's "Life on Earth" for the iPad

This is all about one media giant trying to grab market share from other media giants. Education publishing is the most profitable part of the book business these days—maybe the only profitable part. So experiments with digital publishing have been cautious, and hampered by the lack of a great delivery device. Apple thinks it can hasten the technological transition, just as it did with music on the iPod, and grab a big slice of the profits in the process. The only difference this time around, say some observers, is that giants like Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill, and Pearson have decided to join ‘em rather than fight ‘em.

This is all about selling iPads. This point of criticism has two variants. The first says Apple’s textbook push will fail because it’s insincere: the company really just wants to hook teenagers on Apple hardware, so they’ll buy the iPad 7 (with direct neural interface!) when they grow up. The second says it will fail because iPads are too expensive: schools can’t afford to supply every kid with a $499 gadget that they’ll probably just break, lose, or misuse.

Schools will never buy e-textbooks if they can’t own them. Apple’s textbook program is dead in the water because the company wants schools to purchase books using “volume vouchers.” The vouchers would come with codes that students can redeem in the iBooks store; the textbooks would then be placed into the students’ personal iTunes accounts. The objection here is that schools won’t be able to grok the accounting math or the concept that the books will actually belong to the students, rather than being passed along from year to year.

Authors will never write textbooks for iBooks if they can’t sell them elsewhere. The biggest post-announcement hullabaloo has been over the terms of the end user license agreement for iBooks Author, the free program Apple built to help authors, publishers, and teachers create their own multimedia textbooks. Under the agreement, iBooks Author users who want to give away their textbooks free can do so by any means they like, but those who want to sell their books for profit may only do so through the iBooks store, where Apple gets its usual 30 percent cut. That might seem like simple business logic—there’s no reason Apple should help authors create content for competing platforms like Amazon’s Kindle. But critics screamed bloody murder about the provision, saying that it was like Microsoft taking a cut for every novel written using Word.

Nothing new here—iBooks textbooks are an inferior ripoff of existing technologies. Apple is obviously late to the consumer e-book party, where Amazon still has a commanding lead. The criticism here is that Apple, despite its boastful press releases last week, hasn’t really reinvented anything about e-textbooks. Companies like Inkling, Kno, Chegg, Vook, Flatworld Knowledge, and Cengage Learning already offer systems for creating and publishing multimedia textbooks, and most of these books work on multiple platforms, not just the iPad.

Apple is trying to kill open e-book publishing standards. Ahh, standards. Few debates are as bitter, partisan, and unending—it’s the tech world’s version of “The Blue and the Gray.” Apple is an ongoing supporter of the open ePub format. Books using this format work on devices from a variety of manufacturers (one exception being Amazon, but that’s another story). But critics are incensed that e-textbooks created using iBooks Author are … Next Page »

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Once upon a time, there was a magical innovation called RSS, for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. It freed news articles, podcasts, and other content from their original homes on the Web and allowed news junkies to follow their favorite publications and blogs through story streams called news feeds, which could be bundled together inside programs called RSS readers. For a long time, RSS readers were the best tools for browsing stories from lots of sources quickly.

But RSS was invented by geeks and didn’t belong to any single company, so there was nobody with an incentive to make the whole scheme more user-friendly. Finding a publication’s RSS feed and adding it to your reader was always a hassle, and the RSS readers themselves weren’t particularly fun to use. On top of that, publishers didn’t have good ways to make money on all the content they were sharing in their news feeds. So the RSS system, while important and useful, never really developed into a booming product category.

Now fast-forward a few years to the birth of tablet computing. With their big screens and touch-based interfaces, tablets look and feel a little bit like real magazines. So programmers naturally started thinking about how to revive the news aggregation idea on Apple’s iPad and other tablet devices. Pulse, released for the iPad in May 2010, was the first tablet reader to feature a combination of features that has now become standard in this category: a graphically rich table-of-contents page for navigation, and a stripped-down story page for reading. Flipboard quickly followed in July 2010, adding a social element. Feeds now consisted not just of the articles being pushed at you by news organizations, but also of the content your friends were sharing on Facebook or Twitter.

In the free-for-all world of Web and mobile software, what’s worth doing twice is worth doing a dozen times. Today there so many social news reader apps to choose from that it’s hard to know how they differ and which ones are most useful. To help you get oriented, I’ve rounded up the most noteworthy tablet news readers on the following pages and made note of a few strengths and weaknesses for each.

Note that I’m restricting my list to free reader apps available for the iPad (since I don’t have an Android, BlackBerry, WebOS, or Amazon tablet). I’m leaving out apps that require a paid subscription, such as Ongo, and I’m not including pure RSS-aggregator apps like Reeder, which tend to lack the graphical and social features of the newer crop of news apps.

Click “Go to First App” to start reading, or jump directly to an app from the list below. Be sure to continue all the way to The Bottom Line on last page, where I share my personal favorites.

GO TO FIRST APP >>

	Editions by AOL
	Flipboard
	Flud
	Google Currents
	News.me
	Pulse
	SkyGrid
	Trove
	Yahoo Livestand
	Zite
	The Bottom Line

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I have a lot of Apple gear, and I’m pretty happy with it. There’s just one problem. The better Apple’s stuff gets, the less patience I have for everyone else’s clunky hardware and software. Televisions and all the boxes we hook up to them are the worst offenders. No two TV manufacturers or set-top-box makers use the same remote controls or user-interface conventions, and they’re all painfully bad (except those developed for the hockey-puck-like Apple TV, which are decent but not great). That’s why I’m hoping that Apple will eventually follow through on Steve Jobs’ dying wish, in biographer Walter Isaacson’s words, “to do for television sets what he had done for computers, music players, and phones: make them simple and elegant.”

While we await that glorious day, though, there are some existing technologies that can help ease the pain. In fact, there’s no lack of innovation in the area of video entertainment, as the acres devoted to new “digital home” technologies at this week’s International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas attested. The problem is a lack of unification—meaning interfaces that would make it just as easy to find, buy, watch, and share great cable content on your TV as it is to find, purchase, consume, and share great book, magazine, or game content on your iPad.

For the last few months I’ve been following a TV technology startup called Dijit Media that’s both innovating and making an attempt at unification. They know Apple is coming, and that the Cupertinoids—unless they’ve completely lost their touch in the post-Jobs era—are likely to create a product that melds beautiful TV hardware, a slick and simple operating system, and a rich content marketplace. Meanwhile, the San Francisco-based firm has built its own universal TV remote for iOS devices, and is using it to foster a new “second screen” culture.

Dijit's program listing and remote control on the iPad

The Dijit app, which controls your TV with help from a Griffin Technology gadget called the Beacon, marries channel listings from your cable operator with diverse Internet resources like Facebook, YouTube, and Netflix. It turns your iPhone or iPad into a kind of social command center for the living room—a place where you can browse listings, find out what your friends are watching, or rearrange your Netflix queue, all while sitting back in front of your big screen. It works with hundreds of models of TVs, DVRs, and set-top boxes, replacing the welter of remote controls and on-screen interfaces that come with those devices and moving all of the control and choice to the smaller but far more versatile touchscreen.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t yet fully integrate with Internet-TV boxes like the Apple TV and the Roku Player—and I’ll have more to say on that in a minute. But Dijit figures that the more progress it can make toward unification before Apple enters the market in earnest, the more Apple’s competitors will need to seek the startup out. “We think sooner or later Apple will come in, and it won’t be a ‘hobby,’ and it will show what’s really coming,” says Jeremy Toeman, Dijit’s chief product officer. “The Samsungs and Vizios of the world will need external technology to bridge the gap, and the only way to bridge it will be to go cross-platform. We think we can help the consumer electronics manufacturers adapt to a world where they are not as proficient at building the end-to-end ecosystem as Apple is.”

Dijit, originally known as UMEE, was founded in 2009 by former Nvidia and Riverbed Technology engineer Maksim Ioffe. It won funding in late 2010 from technology investor Alsop Louie, backer of streaming-video startup Justin.TV and mobile iOS game developer Smith & Tinker. The startup switched to its current name at CES in January 2011, which is also when it released the iPhone version of the remote-control app and announced its partnership with Griffin.

The $70 Beacon device, which is available at Apple Stores, bridges the communications gap between … Next Page »

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How will the media habits of families, especially those with young kids, evolve in the era of the tablet computer?

I got an interesting perspective on that question over the holidays, which I spent with my brother and his family in Alaska. Jamie and his wife Jen Athey have two loveable children, aged four (Kieran) and 13 months (Lucy). My parents were also visiting, so the Athey-Roush house on Moose Mountain, 15 miles outside of Fairbanks, was temporarily home to five adults and two children, plus two dogs and two cats.

The weather was standard for central Alaska in December—a frigid -10F to -40F—so there wasn’t a lot of outdoor activity. There is a TV in the house, but given that it’s located in the room where the toddler sleeps, it’s almost never used. In any case, there is no cable TV service that far from town, so there’s not much to watch besides DVDs and Netflix. (Internet data gets beamed in wirelessly from a transmitter on nearby Ester Dome.)

What we did have at hand, however, were four tablets (three iPads and a Motorola Xoom) and three smartphones (one iPhone and two Motorola Atrix Android phones). So conditions were ideal for observing how a high-density group of family members uses their mobile devices for entertainment, reference, learning, communication, and just goofing off.

It goes without saying that Kieran and Lucy already know their way around touch-driven devices. Kieran can’t read fluently yet, but he knows exactly which icons open his favorite apps. He can flip virtual pages, start and stop videos, and tap on words in lists. To his generation, non-touch interfaces will feel antique. Indeed, when we took the kids into town to visit the public library, Kieran had no idea how to use the trackballs attached to the ancient Windows computers.

He did, however, leave the library with three actual books. His favorite: The Z Was Zapped, a book of abecedarian mayhem by illustrator Chris Van Allsburg.

There is an idea circulating on the net that tablets somehow spoil kids for other types of media. You may have seen the video that surfaced on YouTube last fall called “A Magazine Is an iPad that Does Not Work.” The video, which been viewed about 3.4 million times, shows a 1-year-old girl deftly navigating an iPad, then trying futilely to interact with the pages of a paper fashion magazine using pinch-and-spread gestures like those pioneered for the iPhone. To the Apple-fanboy dad who made the video, it showed how “magazines are now useless and impossible to understand, for digital natives.”

But if I could offer one conclusion based on my visit, it would be this: the notion that tablets will kill off older, more static media is poppycock. Kieran’s bedroom has shelves full of books, from Dr. Seuss to Richard Scarry to Roald Dahl to Dorling Kindersley’s obsessively detailed nature and engineering books. His parents read to him at least twice a day, at naptime and bedtime. And that’s not counting all the time they spend reading with him and Lucy, usually curled up on the couch or the easy chair with a physical book. When reading with Kieran, the only problem is finding books around the house that he doesn’t already know by heart. Lucy, who isn’t old enough to comprehend what books are, nonetheless loves to flip through them.

At the same time, tablets offer beginning readers elements that books can’t. Jamie and Jen bought the Xoom so that Kieran could use a Flash-based early reading program from Seattle-based Headsprout. (Flash doesn’t work on the iPad.) Headsprout uses cartoon games to keep kids motivated while they learn to recognize and sound out words. In the lesson segment Kieran showed me, he advanced a monkey character through a jungle by … Next Page »

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The iPad 2 won’t be the only tablet turning up as a holiday gift this year: it’s finally got some real competition in the form of the more affordable Kindle Fire. But let’s face it: you don’t buy (or give someone) a Kindle Fire because of the apps. The device is designed primarily as a portal to Amazon’s digital content, including books, music, and movies.

The iPad 2, on the other hand, continues to be the ideal tablet for app lovers, and the iTunes App Store still boasts the largest collection, by far, of apps optimized for the tablet form factor.

Last holiday season, I brought you a list of 10 paid apps to consider as gifts for new iPad owners. I decided to make it a tradition this year, so I’ve come up with 15 new recommended apps, most of them published within the last year. To make my list, an app has to be absorbing and well-designed, and must make especially good use of the iPad’s multimedia capabilities and touch-driven interface.

If you know someone who’s going to need to load up their iPad with apps starting December 26, you can get them an iTunes gift card, or pre-pay for specific apps using the “Gift This App” option in the iTunes App Store. (You’ll find it under the down arrow next to the “Buy App” button.)

A note for current or future iPhone owners: several of the apps in my list are also available for the iPhone, including Fahrenheit, all of the Fotopedia apps, Naturespace, Our Choice, Scrabble, Superbrothers Sword & Sworcery EP, and Wunderlist.

	NEXT APP >>
	1. Da Vinci HD — Overdamped, $0.99 — A bare-bones but inexpensive app for browsing more than 100 paintings, studies, and notebooks by the original Renaissance Man. Overdamped publishes similiar apps collecting the works of nearly 70 other artists, from Cassatt to Velazquez.

… Next Page »

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In Silicon Valley, there is no more pejorative term than “lifestyle business.” It’s usually applied to companies that do well enough to earn their founders and employees a living—sometimes a very good living—but that will never make anyone mega-rich. Venture capital partners, who have to weed out all but the fastest-growing companies if they’re to have any hope of making the Forbes Midas List, often dismiss these less meteoric players with a phrase like “It’s probably a nice lifestyle business, but it just won’t move the needle for my fund.” Even many startuppers, who often work insane hours on the assumption that their options will turn to gold when their company is acquired or goes public, seem to reserve special pity for lifestyle entrepreneurs who haven’t won Sand Hill Road money and aren’t perpetually “killing it” or “crushing it” in the way Silicon Valley culture demands.

Well, I visited a Web company recently that occupies a lovely cottage near downtown Palo Alto, has grown to 12 employees without raising a dime in outside funding, and attracts 30 million unique visitors a month to its website. For comparison’s sake, that’s more traffic than Groupon, the New York Times, Match.com, Zynga, or Yelp can boast. If that’s a lifestyle business, then I’ll have what they’re having.

WikiHow founder and CEO Jack Herrick

The company is wikiHow, which, as the name implies, is a crowdsourced encyclopedia of instructional articles on everything from how to kiss to how to perform CPR on a dog. (As it turns out, those are pretty much the same thing.) It was founded in 2005 by a former management consultant, serial entrepreneur, and rock climber named Jack Herrick. If I were making a list of unsung heroes around Silicon Valley, I’d nominate Herrick for his success building a huge media property without help from the venture industry, and for assembling an amazing online resource for readers without polluting it with acres of advertising. One hundred percent of the company’s revenue comes from unobtrusive Google AdSense text ads, which makes wikiHow one of the many companies that owe their existence to the search and advertising giant; more on that below.

“I hate the term, but yeah, that’s what we are, a lifestyle company,” Herrick confessed to me in a recent interview. “Somebody needs to create a better word. I think it should be ‘awesome company.’ One of the reasons I have the best job in the world is that we are not venture financed. It just gives us so many more degrees of freedom. We can decide not to have a sales force, we can decide we don’t need to grow revenue 100 percent this year. We can figure out what is the most important thing in our mission, and focus on that.”

The mission at wikiHow is simple, and as breathtaking in its ambition as Google’s: “We want to cover everything and have it be universally good,” Herrick says. And the site has made impressive progress in that direction. It features more than 129,000 user-contributed articles in seven languages. Obviously, it’s not nearly as comprehensive as Wikipedia, which has 3.8 million articles in 282 languages. But you won’t find Wikipedia articles on such indisputably helpful subjects as How to Deliver a Baby, How to Remove Odors from Your Car, and How to Accept Criticism with Grace and Appreciation. If there’s anything Web audiences seem to love more than seeking advice, it’s giving it—and wikiHow taps both impulses with more sincerity, and far less junk, than any other how-to site I’ve seen.

Back in July, just days before its acquisition by Autodesk, I profiled a maker-focused how-to site called Instructables. I called it “the rare crowdsourced site that actually turns a profit,” which brought an e-mail rejoinder from Josh Hannah, a friend and former business partner of Herrick’s who now works at venture firm Matrix Partners. Hannah called wikiHow “the even more rare profitable crowdsourced site that has 5x the traffic.” That might be a bit of an exaggeration: WikiHow’s U.S.-only traffic is only … Next Page »

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Will the startup accelerator model that’s proved so popular and successful in the Web and mobile sectors also help to boost entrepreneurship in other industries, such as healthcare and cleantech? In a tottering economy that needs all the job-creating companies it can get, that’s a crucial question. And here in the Bay Area, it’s been getting a thorough test this year.

Back in August I reported on the first class of 13 startups graduating from Rock Health, a new health-tech incubator with offices in San Francisco’s Chinatown. In just five months, the startups came up with a dazzling array of products and services, ranging from diabetes-prevention programs to iPad fitness training to meditation aids. I won’t be surprised if several of these Rock Health alums strike it rich.

Just as Rock Health was winding down, another new accelerator, Greenstart, was getting underway a few blocks down the hill, in San Francisco’s Financial District. Greenstart invests in cleantech companies, with the goal of promoting renewable-energy technologies and reducing the nation’s carbon footprint. Four companies participated in Greenstart’s inaugural 12-week session, and yesterday they made their formal “demo day” pitches to investors (though one of them, Tenrehte, didn’t need the money—it had just signed a Series A term sheet with unnamed venture investors).

Greenstart's Demo Day session ended with a networking party. At far left: Tenrehte founder and CEO Jennifer Indovina.

Once again, I was impressed by all that these companies had accomplished. Their founders gave polished presentations, and seemed to have a solid grasp on the potential markets for their products, which include self-tinting windows (SmarterShade), an inexpensive way to mix biofuels with diesel fuel (Sylvatex), an online game designed to heighten consumers’ awareness of their energy consumption (Wa.tt), and a wireless system for managing the energy flowing through electrical plugs (Tenrehte).

So while the sample size is still small, there’s starting to be some evidence that accelerators are effective, even in slow-moving fields like healthcare and energy.

That definitely wasn’t a foregone conclusion. The most famous tech accelerators, such as Y Combinator, TechStars, AngelPad, and 500 Startups, are able to churn out dozens of promising new companies every year in part because their canvas is generally limited to the Internet and the world of Internet-connected devices. In that realm, a magic confluence of infrastructure components such as open source software, cloud computing, and app marketplaces has made it drastically easier and cheaper to start new companies. The healthcare and energy industries, by contrast, are about as Neolithic as they come. Software and the Internet are only beginning to have a real impact in these businesses. More money is at stake, the big players are far more deeply entrenched, and getting a new product to market means negotiating a daunting maze of existing supplier-customer relationships.

Rock Health and Greenstart have both found formulas that help get their companies off to a strong start despite the long odds against them. One of Rock Health’s main techniques is to avoid a frontal assault on the healthcare system, and instead deploy companies building various health-related Internet and mobile products to nibble around the edges. (Blueprint Health, a new accelerator in New York, is adopting a similar strategy, but with a focus on enterprise software rather than consumer products.)

Greenstart’s key tactic, I gathered from attending yesterday’s event, is slightly different. It aims to succeed mainly by … Next Page »

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Video editing software is way too hard to use.

At least, that seems to be what most consumers think. It explains why most of the videos you’ll find on YouTube and other video sharing sites are so raw, with no cuts, titles, or other effects. Apparently, people have a hard enough time just getting video off their smartphones or videocams and onto the Web; they can’t be bothered to whittle their footage down to just the best parts, or to jazz it up with music, graphics, and the like.

Well, you know what? Consumers are right. Video editing is too hard, especially if your first exposure to the craft is through Apple’s Final Cut Pro, Adobe’s Premiere Pro, Avid Studio, or one of the other professional-level video editing packages. These programs are powerful, but they’re also finicky, time-consuming, difficult to learn, and hard on your computer. (Don’t even bother trying to run them if you don’t own the latest, greatest Mac or Windows machine.) Even entry-level video editing tools such as Apple’s iMovie and Avid’s Pinnacle Studio force users up a pretty steep learning curve.

At the opposite extreme from the professional editing programs are the automated video creation tools from startups like Animoto. To make a slick music video at Animoto, all you have to do is upload a collection of still photos and video clips and select a theme and a soundtrack tune. The startup’s cloud servers do the rest. It’s a great boon for busy people whose videos might otherwise languish on their cameras or hard drives; the only downside is that it takes all the creativity out of the process.

Now there’s a startup that’s trying to stake out some middle ground, by offering a freemium, cloud-based video editing tool that’s full-featured but easy to use, and doesn’t tax your computer. It’s called WeVideo, and it’s led by a Norwegian serial entrepreneur named Jostein Svendsen. If you follow the tech scene in Silicon Valley, you might have heard of these guys—they won a DEMOgod award at the Fall 2011 DEMO conference in Santa Clara, CA. But you probably didn’t know that the software was originally designed for schoolchildren in Scandinavia, or that the startup follows the same principles as the video game business—i.e., if it’s easy enough for kids to use, then at least a few adults should be able to figure it out, too.

I met with Svendsen last month and got the whole story behind WeVideo. I’ve also been trying out the system myself—the video below, made up of clips from a recent weekend trip to Mendocino, CA, is my first attempt. I spent about two hours making it, plus another hour to upload the original clips to the Web. (Story continues below video.)

Now, if you’ve done any video editing at all, you probably did a double-take two paragraphs back where I mentioned that WeVideo runs in the cloud (on Amazon’s EC2 compute infrastructure and S3 storage infrastructure, to be precise). Traditional video editing involves such large files that it’s almost the archetypal desktop application—it’s the last thing you’d expect to see migrating to the cloud. But that’s the whole point of WeVideo, and it’s the factor that Svendsen hopes will allow the company to pull ahead of the other consumer-level video editing providers.

“We’ve found a process which is extremely fast, easy to use, and efficient by utilizing the cloud to take away the bottlenecks on the desktop that have limited people, especially when they’re working with high-definition video,” he says. “Just like YouTube represented a new way of distributing video, we represent a new way of producing it.”

But is cloud-based video editing really ready for prime time? My experiments indicated that it’s close enough to be a decent alternative for non-professionals who might otherwise turn to … Next Page »

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If you’re a hammer, you just want to smash nails; if you’re a programmer, you just want to build features. But features do not a successful product make. This is the central myopia that eventually blinds even the most brilliant engineer-entrepreneurs, unless they’re smart enough to surround themselves with people who can check their bias.

If you want an interesting example of this phenomenon, look no further than Adam Bosworth, the co-founder and chief technology officer at San Francisco-based health gamification startup Keas. There’s no question about this guy’s brilliance. At Citicorp in the late 1970s, he invented an analytical processing system that helped the bank predict changes in inflation and exchange rates. At Borland, he built the Quattro spreadsheet, and at Microsoft, he built the Access database. He was one of the first to propose standards for XML—the foundation of most Web services today. At Google, he helped to develop Google Docs before moving on to start Google Health.

But as everyone knows, Google Health was a failure—and so was Bosworth’s next effort, Keas, at least until the venture-backed startup went through a dramatic pivot in 2010. How Bosworth figured out that his old approach wasn’t working, and how Keas reinvented itself as a provider of health-focused games for large employers, is the tale I want to tell you today.

It’s looking like there will be a happy ending: Keas (pronounced KEY-us) is bringing on 90,000 new users per quarter and has grown to 20 employees, thanks to continued backing from Atlas Venture in Cambridge, MA, and Ignition Partners in Bellevue, WA. But to hear Bosworth tell the story, things were touch and go for a while, and Keas didn’t really turn itself around until Bosworth stopped looking at his beautiful software code and his analytics dashboards and started listening to young psychology majors and game designers.

“Most software people don’t start by thinking about psychology,” Bosworth says. “Most software people think about features first, because they are concrete and they know how to implement them. They think, ‘I would want this, therefore my users would want this.’” But sometimes—perhaps most of the time, Bosworth argues—they’re dead wrong.

Keas CTO Adam Bosworth

Bosworth grew up in New York and graduated from Saint Ann’s, a private academy where his father, Stanley Bosworth, was the founding headmaster. He says he discovered early on that he is dyslexic, and that he learned to compensate by thinking in pictures. This gave him a talent, he says, for “basically taking Lego blocks for adults, and finding really simple ways to help people build solutions to hard problems.” Those skills enabled him to make breakthrough after breakthrough in the software world, and turned him into one of the hottest commodities in Silicon Valley—Bosworth has ducked recruiting attempts by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, among others.

But it was during the Google Health project that the limitations of Bosworth’s data-centric point of view began to show through. The idea behind Google Health was to get millions of people to put their health records—medications, lab results, immunizations, chronic conditions, and the like—on the Web in a central, secure repository accessible to them and their caregivers. “The idea I had was that in order to help anyone be healthier, you would need their health data,” he says. “This was in 2006, when only 10 percent of doctors had access to electronic health records, and only 10 percent of them would share it with patients, meaning that 99 percent of people weren’t able to get their own health data electronically.”

At the same time, coincidentally, personal financial management startup Mint.com was getting off the ground. “I had in mind doing Mint.com for health,” says Bosworth. Mint had three features that Bosworth wanted to emulate: … Next Page »

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Put high-quality cameras into devices with broadband wireless connections. Add powerful smartphone operating systems like iOS or Android and app-store ecosystems like iTunes and the Android Market. Mix in some sloth and disinterest on the part of established photo-sharing destinations like Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter.

Under these conditions, it was probably inevitable that entrepreneurs would create a slew of new mobile photo-sharing startups like Instagram, Picplz, and Path. Instagram, with somewhere north of 12 million users, seems to be the winner in this space so far; it’s getting smartphone owners used to the concept of snapping photos on the go, applying optional faux-vintage filters, and sharing instantly on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr, Posterous, or Foursquare.

Now comes the next logical step: video sharing apps and startups. All of the latest smartphones shoot high-definition video as well as photos, but so far, Instagram doesn’t let users share video clips—at least, not yet. That’s created room for even newer iPhone apps like Socialcam from Justin.TV, Vlix from Spotmixer, and Klip, from the Palo Alto, CA, startup of the same name.

All of these free apps let users record and edit short video clips and share them with friends. None have a gigantic following yet, and I don’t know which one will dominate. But if the contest were being decided on sheer elegance, the winner right now would be Klip.

I sat down recently with Alain Rossmann, the veteran computing and mobile entrepreneur behind Klip, and got a tour of the app and a glimpse of the thinking behind its design. (See the video below.) If there’s a single theme that differentiates Klip from the other video sharing apps, it’s Rossmann’s obsession with refining the user-experience details.

That’s a skill he says he began to develop at Apple, where he was on the marketing team for the original Macintosh in the early 1980s. One thing Rossmann says he learned from Steve Jobs—whose “genius was there even then, but also the difficult side”—was that “the last 10 percent of refinement gets you 90 percent of the market share.” Which explains why Klip includes seemingly obscure but aesthetically important features like face detection—to make sure that the profile photo that shows up alongside your uploaded videos is cropped properly. “When you see your friends, you want to see their face,” Rossmann insists. “To get that on a phone with retina-display resolution, you have to do face detection.”

Here’s a short video of Rossmann demonstrating Klip. Story continues after video.

Rossmann has five startups under his belt prior to Klip. Three went public, and two were acquired. That’s “more than any one man, or his wife, should have to bear,” he jokes. But he can’t seem to resist.

After Apple, Rossmann co-founded Radius with a group of other Macintosh team alums; the company made graphics cards and external displays for the Mac. Next came C-Cube Microsystems, which built the first chips for handling MPEG video compression. EO, which made a pen-based wireless communications tablet (like the iPad, but about 16 years ahead of its time) was next. Then there was Unwired Planet, which helped give birth to the Wireless Access Protocol for Web browsing on feature phones and ultimately morphed into OpenWave (NASDAQ: OPWV). And finally there was … Next Page »

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There are roughly 500,000 iPhone and iPad apps in Apple’s iTunes App Store, and almost that many smartphone and tablet apps in Google’s Android Market. That gives mobile consumers lots of choices, but it has created an untenable situation for mobile developers. Unless you get lucky and your app vaults onto the top-5 or top-10 charts, or is anointed as a “New and Noteworthy” or “Featured” app by a human curator at Apple or Google, it’s virtually impossible to get noticed amidst all the noise. As a result, there’s a very long tail of perfectly good apps that are failing to find their natural audiences, simply because mobile users have no way to discover them short of browsing page after page of poorly organized lists in the app stores.

I’ve been covering technology long enough to remember when there were 500,000 sites on the entire World Wide Web. That was back in mid-1996, when Yahoo-style guides and directories were still considered the best way to find new stuff. As the Web swelled—to 1.7 million sites by December 1997 and 3.7 million by December 1998—the directory model quickly became unworkable, and people started turning to first-generation search engines like AltaVista. But search results in these early days tended to be pretty random, and vulnerable to manipulation through spamdexing schemes. It wasn’t until Google came along with its Page Rank algorithm in late 1998 that Web surfers finally had a reliable way to locate high-quality content.

The app world hasn’t yet had its Google moment—which is more than a bit ironic, considering that Google itself runs one of the two largest app stores. Just try searching on the term “restaurant guide” in iTunes or the Android Market. The top result at iTunes is something called VegOut, and the top result at the Android Market is the U.S. Army Survival Guide. I kid you not.

In any rational universe, the top results for “restaurant guide” in both stores would be Yelp and Urbanspoon. But at iTunes, these apps don’t even appear in the first 180 results. Zagat, which would be a logical number 3 result, does turn up in the 17th position at the Android Market, but that’s probably just because Google now owns it. The overall rankings are so goofy that even AltaVista couldn’t have come up with them.

Chomp CEO Ben Keighran

Entrepreneurs aren’t waiting for Apple and Google to fix the mess they’ve created; several startups now offer alternative ways to find great mobile apps. The one with the biggest lead is probably Chomp, which is based here in San Francisco. Chomp’s own app for searching apps is available for both the iPhone and Android phones. In many ways, it’s what the iTunes App Store and the Android Market should be—a fact that Verizon recognized in September by announcing that it would build Chomp into the Verizon app store that ships with all Verizon Android phones.

Lately I’ve been getting to know Chomp co-founder and CEO Ben Keighran, an Australian-born programmer-entrepreneur who moved to the Bay Area about six years ago. “Search is really broken on both Apple and Google for searching for anything other than the name of an application,” Keighran says. “It’s just like the Web. Search wasn’t important at the beginning of the Web; what people needed was a curated directory. Search wasn’t important at the beginning of the app store revolution. And now it’s an incredibly broken feature.”

Before Chomp, Keighran was best known as the creator of a Java-based text messaging service called Bluepulse, which, at its peak around 2006, was handling 10 million messages per day for mobile subscribers in India, South Africa, and other countries. Bluepulse actually started out as an app store, so Keighran has been thinking about the problem for a long time. “Technically, it was a lightweight, 63-kilobyte browser, and it downloaded a list of apps you had said you wanted to use, and you would launch the apps within the browser,” Keighran recounts. “But it wasn’t used as much as the messaging feature, so it kind of got rolled into the messaging product.”

Keighran moved Bluepulse from Sydney to San Mateo, CA, in 2006 and raised almost $10 million in venture funding for the company in hopes of … Next Page »

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I had been planning to talk in today’s column about the shortcomings of the Google Chromebook, which are numerous. But I’m in too good of a mood this week to play the critic, partly because of a terrific Silicon Valley event that I attended Tuesday night called Get Bigger! With Vinod Khosla. So instead, I’m going to tell you about the event itself, which featured the legendary Sun Microsystems co-founder and venture investor on stage with the CEOs of six early-stage startups.

Microsoft hosted the event at its Mountain View campus, and Joyce Park of 106 Miles, an increasingly active and important group of engineer-entrepreneurs based in and around Silicon Valley, was the organizer. Park—who is the co-founder with Adam Rifkin of stealth startup PandaWhale, but is perhaps better known for being the first person ever fired for blogging—came up with an unusual and refreshing format for the session. In six 15-minute bursts, Khosla alternately quizzed and advised the CEOs about their business strategies. In the process, he provided a wonderful glimpse of how his own mind works when it comes to evaluating investment opportunities and mentoring startup founders.

Vinod Khosla on stage with David Johnson of ArmedZilla

Below, I’ve summarized some of the nicest gems of startup wisdom bestowed by Khosla in the course of the interviews; it’s stuff that any entrepreneur working on an Internet or social media startup should listen to. Alongside my (fairly faithful) paraphrases of Khosla’s words, I provide some context that shows how each point came up. But first, a rundown of the six companies:

Stipple, Rey Flemings, CEO. Stipple turns Web images into mini-stores by allowing publishers to annotate the images with links to product information and e-commerce sites. (As it happens I’ve written two articles about Stipple—one after their Series A funding round and other after the startup rolled out a new set of services for publishers.)

ArmedZilla, David Johnson, CEO. ArmedZilla is a social network for members and former members of the U.S. armed forces. Veterans can create profiles documenting their military service, and this data can be used to help connect them with benefits, services, and products.

Oomnitza, Arthur Lozinski, CEO. Oomnitza is building a suite of cloud-based, mobile-compatible, highly customizable enterprise resourcing planning apps, including apps for tracking physical assets, expenses, and timesheets.

Relevvant, Craig Davis, CEO. Relevvant is building a system that helps advertisers tailor SMS-based advertising and promotional campaigns for specific psychographic, demographic, or geographic groups.

CodeLesson, Jeffrey MacManus, CEO. CodeLesson organizes 4- to 6-week online training courses for people who want to learn Javascript, Ruby, MySQL, Node.js, and other computer languages.

Zerply, Christofer Karltorp, CEO. Zerply is a professional networking and jobs site for “creative class” individuals; it’s like LinkedIn with portfolios.

Now on to Khosla’s observations (in italics) and my own commentary/context.

There are three possible reasons to start a company: so that you can be famous, so that you never have to balance your checkbook again, or just to make friends. They are all good reasons, but if you are clear about your reason, you will build a much more successful company.

This came up in Khosla’s conversation with Rey Flemings of Stipple. Flemings confessed that that he and his co-founders aren’t really in it for the money—”if we were we’d probably be doing something else,” he said—and that everyone on the team would be … Next Page »

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There are two kinds of people: Those who already own an iPhone 4S, and those who don’t but have seen Apple’s Siri ads and wish they did. Siri, of course, is the voice-operated personal assistant that can read your text messages, schedule appointments, check on the weather, make waffles, and babysit your toddler (just kidding about those last two). It’s the coolest feature of the latest Apple smartphone, which went on sale last week. Virtually overnight, it has brought state-of-the-art artificial intelligence technology into the consumer mainstream.

Well, it turns out that there’s more where that came from. The same Silicon Valley defense project that gave birth to Siri—called CALO, for Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes (more on this below)—has another, lesser-known spinoff, a Palo Alto news personalization startup called Trapit. The company’s web-based service uses AI to organize the welter of new content that appears online every day into tailored collections called “traps.” And while the technology is still a bit raw, there’s a chance that it could have the same kind of impact in the world of Web search and online news that Siri is beginning to have on mobile interfaces.

I’ve been playing with TrapIt for about three months now. It hasn’t become a part of my daily news-browsing routine, but I can definitely see that happening if the startup continues to refine the interface, improve its search algorithms, and make the site more tablet-friendly. (Trapit took the lid off its service in June, but it remains in closed beta testing, which means you have to request an invitation to get an account. The wait was short when I registered. The company says it’s going to open the beta version of its service to the whole public later this fall.)

The first thing to try when you go to Trapit is either to browse one of the existing, featured traps—which are often related to breaking news, such as yesterday’s killing of Muammar Qaddafi—or start one of your own by entering a phrase or keyword into the “Discover” bar. After a short wait, you’ll be presented with recent news stories and blog posts on your topic, culled from across the Web.

At first the selection may seem pretty random. The neat part is that as you peruse various articles, which pop up in lightbox-style windows, Trapit observes what you’re reading, how long you spend with each article, and what you’re sharing with others. It uses these cues and others to beef up its profile of your personal tastes, so that over time it’s able to surface more articles that fit your interests and fewer that don’t.

You can also train Trapit manually by clicking on the thumbs-up or thumbs-down buttons—and the more you do this, the faster the software will learn your preferences. As you create traps on new topics and train your existing traps, you can end up with a whole gallery of mini-magazines, exclusively tuned to the mix of subjects that you, and you alone, are passionate about. It’s a pretty unique service—the closest comparison I can think of is Google Alerts, which are like standing search queries with the results e-mailed to your inbox every day. But Trapit is more like regular Web surfing. It’s just that you’re surfing the Web you want.

Trapit’s AI-driven approach goes completely counter to the dominant trend in news curation today, which emphasizes the power of social networking and collaborative filtering. News aggregation apps like Flipboard, Pulse, AOL’s Editions, CNN’s Zite, Yahoo’s Livestand, and Google’s forthcoming Propeller platform may seem to provide personalized news feeds, but … Next Page »

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Dear Mom:

You asked me to write to let you know if I arrived safely in iCloud-land. Well, I’m here and I’m in one piece, although unfortunately some of my things didn’t make it here with me, such as my calendar. It was a pretty hellish journey, I’ll tell you. There were a couple of long stops where I wasn’t sure I was going to make it the rest of the way, and we almost crashed a couple of times. The whole trip took about 16 hours! I think you’ll like it here in iCloud-land and I hope to see you here soon. But I hope you can find a less hectic day to travel.

Love, Wade

If I had to write a postcard home about my experiences switching over to iOS 5 and iCloud on Wednesday, that would the sanitized version. The honest version would include a lot more swear words.

Don’t get me wrong—the new version of Apple’s mobile operating system and the cloud-based sharing service that goes along with it are great. They make your iPhone, iPad, and Mac even more useful than they were before. If you’re an Apple customer who hasn’t already upgraded, I don’t want to discourage you from doing so. But I do want to summarize my tale of iCloud and iCal woe, in the hope of saving you a little heartache along the way.

Some of this story came out yesterday in an article in Talking Points Memo. Tech reporter Sarah Lai Stirland had come across the series of increasingly ticked-off tweets that I penned Wednesday as I attempted to get my whole menagerie of Apple devices upgraded to the latest specs. She called me up Thursday morning to ask for more of my tale, and I gave her an earful.

The new iCloud settings menu on the iPhone

But looking back on my tweets and my talk with Stirland, I regret playing the indignant card, because the truth is that I predicted all of this months ago, and, at least to some extent, brought it on myself. (I honestly only blame Apple a little—more on that below.)

I figured it was the duty of every self-respecting alpha geek to download iOS 5 the moment it was available Wednesday morning. Unfortunately, tens of millions of other iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch owners were doing the same thing at the same time. So that was problem number one—the parts of the upgrade process that depended on Apple’s servers went in fits and starts.

The first order of business was to upgrade Lion, the operating system on my MacBook Pro, to the latest iCloud-compatible version (10.7.2) and to upgrade iTunes, long the master program in the Apple universe, to version 10.5. That all went fine. Next came my iPhone 4. That’s where the snags started, for me and a lot of other folks. Before iTunes can put iOS 5 on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, it has to back up key data such as contacts and calendar appointments and completely erase the device itself, including all of your music, movies, books, and other media. Then it installs iOS 5, restores the data from the backup, restarts the device, and re-syncs your media material from iTunes. The restore part is what kept failing for me. The restore process would appear to be on the verge of finishing, but then it would fail, giving me cryptic messages like … Next Page »

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Today’s column was co-written by myself and Curt Woodward, Xconomy’s Seattle-based senior editor.

There’s a great term of art in the history profession: hagiography. It’s from the Greek for “holy writing,” and at one time it pertained mostly to biographies of saints. Well, there’s a whole lot of beatification going on this week as the world processes the news of Steve Jobs’ death—and for good reason. As I wrote in my own tribute piece Wednesday night, Jobs taught us to expect more from our technology. He played the game at such a stratospheric level that everyone in the industries he touched—personal computing, digital media, telecommunications—had to become more innovative and customer-focused just to compete. Commentators are right to place Jobs in the same section of the history stacks with giants like Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Howard Hughes, David Sarnoff, Edwin Land, and Walt Disney.

But like these other men, Steve Jobs was human. A more accomplished human than most, with a thoroughly American, rags-to-riches life story that even Horatio Alger couldn’t have dreamed up. But also one with so many intriguing, controversial, and sometimes abrasive sides to his personality and his business philosophy that it would be dishonest for chroniclers to focus solely on his innovations. If we want to understand what made the man tick, we need to acknowledge both the good and the bad, the inspiring and the infuriating.

In that spirit, here’s a brief survey of some of the less savory aspects of Jobs’ career, as noted by sources around the Web. These darker pieces of the story are, in the end, inseparable from Jobs’ incredible successes.

Jobs the Tyrant

While the Apple co-founder had perfectly good interpersonal skills, it’s clear from several book and journalistic exposés that he didn’t always choose to use them. After his return to the company in 1997, Jobs reasserted control through what Alan Deutschman called a “reign of terror” in his 2000 book The Second Coming of Steve Jobs. “Word got around about Steve going into meetings, saying, ‘This is shit,’ and firing people on the spot,” Deutschman wrote. Jobs developed a method of alternately praising and belittling employees; insiders came to call this the “hero-shithead roller coaster,” according to Wired writer Leander Kahney. A May 2011 Fortune article added to the picture with an account of a harrowing 2008 meeting where Jobs shared his displeasure over MobileMe, Apple’s troubled e-mail synchronization system, berated employees for letting each other down, and relieved the project leader of his duties.

But while these sorts of confrontations weren’t pretty, the Fortune article described them as part of a larger pattern of accountability that helps to explain Apple’s uncannily low failure rate. “On a regular basis you either get positive feedback or are told to stop doing stupid shit,” one former Apple designer told the magazine. Even people you might not suspect of harboring warm emotions toward Jobs say his brusque management style was effective: “It’s O.K. to be driven a little crazy by someone who is so consistently right,” former Apple CEO John Sculley told Bloomberg BusinessWeek in a September interview. (Sculley is the guy who will always be remembered for kicking Jobs out of Apple in 1985.)

Jobs the Egomaniac

Steve Jobs’ greatest creation was Apple. His second-greatest may have been his own public persona. Although rival Bill Gates probably has spent a longer period as an identifiable public figure, Jobs’ public image has long seemed perfectly designed—just like one of Apple’s products. Jobs frequently favored clothes that would stand out as a kind of brand, from his early bow-tied days at Apple to the lasting image of a black mock turtleneck, round spectacles, and jeans. And although each Apple launch event had a specific product at its center, Jobs himself was the marquee part of the show every time. iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad—you could leak all the specs you want, but they didn’t really exist until Jobs held them up before the crowd and sparked the applause.

The ultimate salesman? Absolutely. A showman at heart? Undeniably—Walt Mossberg writes that Jobs insisted on hiding products under a cloth and unveiling them even in private pre-show sales pitches for a tiny conference-room audience. Contemporaries and employees have long described the “reality distortion field” that seemed to emanate from Jobs. As early Apple employee Andy Hertzfeld wrote in this remarkable retrospective, the phenomenon was “a confounding melange of a charismatic rhetorical style, an indomitable will, and an eagerness to bend any fact to … Next Page »

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Jobs are the single biggest political issue of the day in the U.S., and rightly so. As of August, the official unemployment rate in the United States stood at 9.1 percent. That was down one point from the October 2009 peak of 10.1 percent, but still higher than at any time since the 1930s, with the exception of the worst months of the 1982-83 recession. And today’s real unemployment rate, if you include discouraged workers who have stopped searching for jobs and people who have settled for part-time positions, is much higher, at around 16 percent. That translates into 25 million Americans who need work.

That’s a terrifying number, because no one knows how the country might create that many new jobs. Let’s say President Obama’s $447 billion jobs bill were enacted in its current form (an unlikely prospect, given the levels of partisan obstructionism in Congress). The most optimistic estimates from economists are that the new spending in the bill would add only 2 million jobs to the economy in 2012. That’s nothing to sneeze at, but it’s a tenth of what’s really needed.

On top of that, technology-driven productivity gains are allowing American corporations to rack up big profits despite their trimmed-down workforces. So even if consumer demand were to magically return to pre-recession levels, companies probably wouldn’t hire back all the people they’ve laid off since 2008.

Could there a technological cure for unemployment? Ever since the 2005 introduction of Amazon Mechanical Turk, a Web service that pays users small amounts for completing tasks such as transcribing short audio recordings or recognizing an object in a picture, tech pundits have been talking about the benefits of digital crowdsourcing. It’s been portrayed both as a way for companies to get work done cheaply and as a source of supplemental income for casual Internet users with a little time to kill. But with the joblessness picture looking so dire, observers are now starting to ask if crowdsourcing technology could play a more central role in economic recovery. Could Internet-mediated “microwork,” as this kind of employment is being called, give millions of people a way to earn meaningful amounts of income?

Mechanical Turk, by itself, certainly isn’t a panacea. As a service, it’s not terribly inviting or easy to use, and Amazon itself has never expressed much ambition to improve or expand it. And by definition, Mechanical Turk workers need a computer to complete tasks, which leaves out a big slice of the unemployed population.

Here in San Francisco, though, there are at least four organizations taking Amazon’s idea and tweaking it to make microwork more feasible for broader populations. One is Samasource, a non-profit that distributes computer-based tasks such as data verification and audio and text transcription to workers in Haiti, India, Kenya, Pakistan, South Africa, and Uganda. Another is Servio, which creates crowdsourced editorial content for clients using a platform called CloudCrowd. Then there’s CrowdFlower, a kind of meta-platform that helps big, Fortune 500 companies with data management tasks by farming out the work to Mechanical Turk, Samasource, and other crowdsourcing engines. Finally, there’s a new player called MobileWorks; it’s a Y Combinator-backed startup that offers digital work to underemployed people in India and Pakistan, but with an emphasis on tasks that don’t require a computer and can be completed using only an Internet-connected mobile phone.

Yesterday I called up MobileWorks co-founder and CEO Anand Kulkarni to find out how people are using his platform, and whether the technology might offer hope for unemployed people here in the United States. As you might expect, he’s bullish on … Next Page »

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One of the most persistent criticisms of Facebook is that it’s trying to build a “walled garden” analogous to AOL’s dialup service in the 1980s and early 1990s. Blogger Jason Kottke said it in 2007. Tim Berners-Lee said it in Scientific American in 2010. Google’s Vint Cerf revived the meme earlier this week at an event organized by the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper: “You can’t stay locked into a closed environment for very long before people will start demanding that it open up so that it becomes more interoperable with everything else,” Cerf said.

The tech blog VentureBeat repeated the hoary accusation in a September 20 article about the Wall Street Journal’s new Facebook app, which highlights the articles your friends are reading. “New Walled Garden,” VentureBeat labeled the WSJ app, presumably because it lets users read articles from the newspaper from within Facebook, without ever going to the WSJ website. The delicious irony here is that VentureBeat’s article begins with a prominent Facebook “Like” button (it’s got more real estate than the Google +1, LinkedIn, and Twitter buttons combined) and ends with a Facebook social plugin showing thumbnail images of Facebook users who’ve Liked VentureBeat. If Facebook is a walled garden, there sure are a lot of players on the Web who want to get in.

But the truth is that the walled-garden trope was never very accurate: Facebook is a child of the open Web, and the company focuses on HTML-based delivery technologies almost to the exclusion of alternatives such as native mobile apps. And with this week’s announcements at f8, Facebook’s annual developer conference in San Francisco, the charge that Facebook is a closed environment rings even less true.

Forget about “Timeline,” the redesigned Facebook profile format that everyone is buzzing about; it’s pretty, I like it, and I’ll have more to say about it later, but the real news at f8 was about the coming expansion of what Facebook calls the Open Graph. This overhaul isn’t simply going to change how people spend time inside Facebook; it’s going to make it easier to find and share information across the digital universe. The changes will cement Facebook’s role as the default social fabric weaving together everything else on the Internet. And I think they herald an important redistribution of power within the triumvirate of Silicon Valley companies—Google, Apple, and Facebook—that currently dominate many people’s digital lives.

The crowd at f8 awaits Mark Zuckerberg's keynote talk.

Open Graph is the protocol that makes outside Web pages recognizable to Facebook’s infrastructure. When you click on a Like button at VentureBeat, Xconomy, or thousands of other sites, you’re using Open Graph to tell Facebook that it’s okay to publish updates about that site on your profile. Facebook said yesterday that it’s handing developers the ability to define new Open Graph actions and objects, which means the range of updates that sites and apps can send to Facebook is about to get a lot broader.

To quote from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s f8 keynote talk:

“Facebook’s mission is to make the world more open and connected. We do this by mapping out all of the things you are connected to…As a first step toward this we made it so you could connect to things by Liking them…This year we are taking the next step, so that you can connect to anything you want in any way you want. Now you don’t have to Like a book, you can just Read a book. You don’t have to Like a movie, you can just Watch a movie. You can Eat a meal, Hike a trail, Listen to a song, and connect to anything in any way you want. This will let you make an order of magnitude more connections than before. We are helping to define a new language for people to connect.”

Facebook is taking this “new language” idea quite literally. As Zuckerberg explained, the first iteration of Open Graph allowed lots of subjects and objects, but only one verb: Like. Now it’s letting outside developers add lots of new actions: “Mark reviewed a restaurant.” “Mark completed a 6.5 mile run.” “Mark listened to ’21 Guns’ by Green Day.” By dropping the right code into their website, Facebook apps, or mobile apps, developers can now cause almost any action to be published to their users’ Facebook profiles. And thanks to some additional changes, these sites and apps won’t have to … Next Page »

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My job is pretty cool. I get to spend time picking the brains of some of the planet’s smartest and most successful entrepreneurs—and invariably, I’m asking them to talk about the one thing they care about most passionately, their startup and/or its technology.

Even if I weren’t doing something I care about passionately myself—helping to build a new kind of journalism startup—their excitement would rub off on me. How could it not, for anyone who believes that entrepreneurs drive innovation, and that innovation drives economic growth and holds the hope of solving some of the world’s biggest problems?

My agenda yesterday—Thursday, September 15, 2011—included a fairly typical mix of meetings and interviews with local tech-community members. The only unusual thing was that I wound up eating lunch twice. Maybe I didn’t get to grapple with big topics like unemployment or global warming, but I did get to have in-depth talks with about a dozen different people about their businesses. That material will find its way into dozens of different stories down the road, some right away, some months from now.

Here’s how my day went—minus (most of) the boring minutiae. Cue the ticking-digital-clock sound from 24.

7:00 am Get up. Make coffee. Fire up Flipboard on the iPad to see what the other tech blogs are saying today. Check e-mail. There are 72 new messages since I zeroed out the inbox the night before.

8:43 am Publish the daily deals roundup.

8:50 am Update the Pier 38 eviction story from Wednesday with added details that came in overnight.

9:00 am Study up on the StoryWorld Conference and Expo and MindJet for meetings later today.

9:26 am Publish Steve Blank’s latest essay, cross-posted from his personal blog, about Silicon Valley’s pay-it-forward culture.

9:50 am Take Rhody—to me, perhaps the most important member of the San Francisco innovation community—out for a walk.

10:00 am Jean-Marie Hullot, president and CEO of Fotopedia and former CTO of Apple’s Application Division, arrives for an interview, along with Christophe Daligault, Fotopedia’s senior vice president of global business. I can’t say yet what we talked about, but it was extremely cool.

11:34 am Walk from Xconomy San Francisco’s Potrero Hill headquarters to Warm Planet Bikes at 4^th and King to pick up bicycle. (I highly recommend them. They fixed my bent rear wheel for $54.)

12:10 pm Bike to Pier 38. Meet Gus Weber, entrepreneur-in-residence at Polaris Venture Partners, at Dogpatch Labs. Walk to Momo for lunch. Discuss the Pier 38 situation. Dogpatch, like the rest of the pier’s tenants, must move out by September 30 by order of … Next Page »

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Back in April 2009, community leaders in Boston were in a tizzy over the prospect of a shutdown at the Boston Globe, where unions were resisting salary and pension cuts proposed by the paper’s owner, the New York Times Co. I didn’t quite understand the leaders’ concerns. As a longtime admirer of the Globe, I certainly didn’t want to see it disappear—but neither did it seem to me that the paper’s demise, should it come to that, would mean the end of local journalism. As I pointed out in a column, there are plenty of other credible news outlets in Boston these days.

Luckily, the Globe survived. And I’m pretty sure that TechCrunch, the AOL property that has been the blog-of-record for Silicon Valley for the last six years, will survive its own current crisis—that is, the apparent ouster of founder Michael Arrington, after he revealed plans last week to start a venture capital fund called CrunchFund. What form the future TechCrunch might take is unclear. The tech section of the Huffington Post? An independent publication within AOL headed by Arrington’s hand-picked successor? A splinter blog staffed by disaffected Arrington loyalists? It’s too soon to tell; AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher says “tense severance negotiations” are underway between Arrington and AOL.

But whatever happens with TechCrunch, I think this is a good moment to step back, as I did for Boston in my 2009 column, and look at the larger journalistic ecosystem in Silicon Valley. I’m not going to suggest, as Fortune commentator Chadwick Matlin did earlier this week, that the end of TechCrunch would be a good thing. It wouldn’t, if only because there are so many good reporters and editors there who’d be (at least temporarily) out of a job—Paul Carr, Jason Kincaid, Sarah Lacy, Leena Rao, Erick Schonfeld, and MG Siegler, to name a few. But I do think it’s important for everyone who participates in the innovation economy to ask what kind of journalism they’d really like to see happening in the nation’s tech hubs, and whether TechCrunch, under Arrington, has lived up to their expectations.

My hat is off to TechCrunch for energetically filling the void in startup coverage that had opened up by the mid-2000s, after the collapse of dot-com-era biztech publications such as the Industry Standard, Business 2.0, and Red Herring. Venture investment was slow to rebound after the dot-com crash, and for a while it almost seemed that the culture had stopped believing in entrepreneurship. Startup founders needed a champion, and Arrington built a big following by offering broad coverage of their companies and products, not to mention frequent scoops and an irreverent, pugnacious attitude. Over time, he also signed up a crew of aggressive, workaholic writers who multiplied his efforts.

But it all came with a dark side. Arrington was never content to be a mere chronicler of the Silicon Valley phenomenon. He also wanted to be a player, a kingmaker, and he seemed to be saying to startup founders that if they wanted friendly treatment from the blog, they had to play by his rules. “Treat us with respect and you’ll get it back ten times in return,” he wrote in one recent post—right after declaring that Caterina Fake, the co-founder of Flickr and Hunch, had fallen out of his favor for writing about her latest startup’s funding on her own blog rather than letting TechCrunch break the news. “It’ll be the last time she ever knows we’re writing a story about her or her startups before it’s published,” Arrington wrote.

The arm-twisting took many other forms. Companies that appeared at TechCrunch50 (now Disrupt) could expect plenty of coverage in the blog, while startups that appeared at rival conferences were “off limits,” as one former TechCrunch writer attested this week. TechCrunch used its influence to gain a virtual chokehold on news about new startups from Y Combinator, Silicon Valley’s most prolific venture incubator. (Numerous YC founders have told me, always apologetically, that … Next Page »

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