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What "Disrupt" Really Means
Feb 16, 7:00PM
Editor's note: Andy Rachleff is President and CEO of Wealthfront, an SEC-registered online financial advisor. Entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley love to talk about disruption, though few know what it really means. They mistake better products for disruptive ones. Silicon Valley was built on a culture of designing products that are "better, cheaper, faster," but that does not mean they're disruptive.Gillmor Gang: House of Bacon
Feb 16, 6:00PM
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — pondered the debatable relationship between Netflix' House of Cards and the tech community. From HBO's Jeff Bewkes calling the Kevin Spacey series "pretty good" to Comcast buying the rest of NBC/Universal from GE, the economics of streaming TV took a big leap forward. Not so much email, which @scobleizer defended with filters, smart labels, and Sane Boxes. We heard about smart calendars and DM suckage and Apple spoilage, but no matter: it's all about finding more time to devote to binge viewing and meteor dodging. More bacon please.How Do You Scale Social Innovation Startups?
Feb 16, 6:00PM
Editor's note: This guest post is written by Erica Kochi, the co-lead of UNICEF's Innovation unit. Her team started UNICEF's open source RapidSMS platform which has been adopted in developing countries worldwide. She co-teaches a class "Design for Unicef" in NYU's ITP Program, is a global partner of Stanford's New Product Design Innovation course, and has lectured at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia University on leveraging technology and design to improve international development. She previously wrote on TechCrunch about how the future of mobile lies in the developing world. All views are her own. You can follow her on Twitter. You’re a social entrepreneur wanting to change the world, but are having a hard time scaling your promising idea and achieving lasting impact. In my job as UNICEF Innovation co-lead, I come across hundreds of promising and not so promising technology and social innovation startups every year. While this is an emerging space, many social innovation startups face similar challenges. In this piece I want to provide some practical advice for how social innovation startups can increase their chances of success. To frame this advice, let's first take a look at what the terms scale and impact mean. Scale implies that your idea is reaching a large percentage of your target audience. For example, the mobile money transfer and microfinance service M-Pesa serves over 26 million people across East Africa who could not otherwise easily transfer money to relatives and pay businesses. Another example would be that during the 2011 drought across the Horn of Africa, UNICEF and partners provided access to safe drinking water for 3 million people. Impact implies that your product or service has a positive and transformative effect or prevents a negative effect on even the poorest parts of society. An example of this is Tostan's work, which has led to over 6,000 communities in eight countries to abandon the harmful practice of female genital cutting. Another example is the effort by a multitude of partners to eliminate measles throughout the world. This effort has led to a 74 percent reduction of measles deaths in the past 10 years. The true skill of a social innovation startup is not just in choosing the right idea, but in using finding and working with the right partners, aligning with priorities and funding, and continuously delivering and communicating impact along the way. 1. Work with the right partners In the social space, there areThe Real Battle At Dell
Feb 16, 5:00PM
Editor's note: Roman Stanek is CEO and founder of GoodData. Private or public - either scenario for Dell will be interesting to watch. One of the most difficult skills I've worked hard to master as an entrepreneur is the ability to see the world six months out. Even more difficult is finding that balance between pleasing shareholders and driving innovation forward, which is why I respect any moves management takes that are aimed at improving innovation.Rep. Gutierrez, Let's Try The Silicon Valley Way – Lean Immigration Reform
Feb 16, 4:00PM
Editor's note: Vivek Wadhwa is Vice President of Innovation and Research at Singularity University, Fellow at Stanford Law School, and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Thank you for responding to my TechCrunch post in which I asked you to release your hold on Silicon Valley. I agree with everything you wrote and strongly support the cause. And I'll commit up front to what you asked for: my help in fighting for a top-to-bottom overhaul of our immigration system.In Defense Of Email
Feb 16, 3:00PM
Editor's note: Dave Girouard is founder and CEO of Upstart, a company that lets college grads raise capital in exchange for a small share of their future income. "Nobody uses email anymore - you get too much of it" - Yogi Berra In last Sunday's New York Times, we were treated to another rant about how dysfunctional and burdensome email has become. This particular piler-on lays the blame at "how stagnant the format of email has remained, while the rest of communication and social networking has surged light years ahead."Get Ready To Lose Your Job
Feb 16, 2:00PM
"Technological revolutions happen in two main phases: the installation phase and the deployment phase," observes Angel of the Year and new Andreessen Horowitz GP Chris Dixon, who says that the turning point between those phases for the Age of Information is...now. Meanwhile, "profits have surged as a share of national income, while wages and other labor compensation are down," notes Paul Krugman. Walter Russell Mead agrees: "The old industrial middle class...has been hollowed out, and no comparable source of stable high income employment has emerged." Recent data supports that: "Incomes rose more than 11 percent for the top 1 percent of earners during the economic recovery, but barely at all for everybody else ... Median household income is about 9 percent lower than it was in 1999."The Trials And Tribulations Of A Global Startup
Feb 16, 5:00AM
The Internet makes it easy to collaborate across borders. But despite the rise of remote work and virtual teams, founders still need to travel for business sometimes. For some, travel practically becomes the job. And while data and capital now flow virtually unrestricted across borders, physical border crossing have gotten no easier. That's causing headaches for global startups.The History Behind Facebook's Graph Search
Feb 16, 1:00AM
Editor's note: Taylor Buley is a senior developer at Conde Nast's PARADE. He's a former staff writer at Forbes and graduated from University of Pennsylvania and Stanford. On Thursday Lars Rasmussen, Google Maps co-inventor turned Facebook Graph Search guru, took to Reddit for an "ask me anything" open thread. The Australian native avoided questions about the competitive landscape for Graph Search but spilled a near complete history of its development inside Facebook.Meet Your Doppelganger On Sodisco. A First Look At Ex-Payvment CEO Christian Taylor's New Startup
Feb 15, 11:51PM
Lonely? Wish you had someone to geek out with about the weird stuff you're into? Sodisco wants to find you a play date. It's the soon-to-launch startup from Christian Taylor, ex-CEO of Facebook e-commerce platform Payvment that just got bought by Intuit. Taylor called me up to reveal what Sodisco's all about: analyzing your interests and introducing you to your nearest clones.TechCrunch Is Literally The Last Office In The World To Make A Harlem Shake Video
Feb 15, 11:47PM
In an effort to show the rest of the corporate world how "cool" and "spontaneous" their jobs are, hipster office workers around the globe have been making "Harlem Shake" tribute videos this week. Perhaps because we spend the most time online, the startup community is the dryest kindling to create viral video fire: In addition to Facebook, Google, Groupon, Path and Intel, yes Intel, have succumbed to the meme. Fuck, even Huffington Post/Aol beat us to the chase. And, when the Harlem Shake randomly came on in the background of a three-way TechCrunch "performance review" yesterday, I realized Posterous Will Shut Down On April 30th, Co-Founder Garry Tan Launches Posthaven To Save Your Sites
Feb 15, 11:00PM
It was just a matter of time before Twitter shut the blogging platform Posterous down, after acquiring the company last March. The team had already been folded into the flock, but this means that nobody has to worry about pesky service interruptions of keeping the service’s diminishing number of users happy. The site will be shutting down on April 30th, but it’s not a completely sad story. Have no fear, Posterous co-founder Garry Tan is coming to the rescue with a new site called Posthaven, which he promises will never shut down. Here’s what Tan had to say about the launch when we spoke to him: I’m teaming up with another cofounder of Posterous, Brett Gibson, and we are taking a pledge to keeping the URLs online forever. It’s $5 a month and will have all of the ease of use and power of Posterous. It’s just the two of us and we’re coding it in our bedrooms right now. Tan tells us that Posthaven will never accept funding and will be available to its users “forever.” Here’s what the Posterous/Twitter team had to say about the shutdown, along with instructions on how to get your data: Posterous launched in 2008. Our mission was to make it easier to share photos and connect with your social networks. Since joining Twitter almost one year ago, we've been able to continue that journey, building features to help you discover and share what's happening in the world – on an even larger scale. On April 30th, we will turn off posterous.com and our mobile apps in order to focus 100% of our efforts on Twitter. This means that as of April 30, Posterous Spaces will no longer be available either to view or to edit. Right now and over the next couple months until April 30th, you can download all of your Posterous Spaces including your photos, videos, and documents. As Twitter delves into how to make discovery easier for its users, some of the findings learned by Posterous will most definitely come into play. On the other hand, it’s nice to know that there’s an easy way to move your information, with one of Posterous’ co-founders providing the service “from the heart.” Posthaven is currently taking reservations for its service, so grab your name. UPDATE: It looks like Posthaven is having difficulties managing all of the attention: [Photo credit: Flickr]Ask A VC: Bain Capital Ventures' Ajay Agarwal On How Much Capital Startups Should Raise, And More
Feb 15, 10:35PM
This week's Ask A VC show put Bain Capital Ventures' managing director Ajay Agarwal in the hot seat. Agarwal heads the firm's recently launched Palo Alto office.Google Introduces SyncFileSystem API For Chrome To Let HTML5 Apps Sync Your Offline Data Between Devices
Feb 15, 10:05PM
One nifty feature of HTML5 is that apps can store data locally on your computer and have it available even when you are offline. Google today introduced a new API for Chrome, the Sync FileSystem API, that offers an app-private sandboxed file storage system, similar to what's already in the HTML5 specs. The interesting new feature here is that this data is also automatically synchronized across clients via a cloud back-up service linked to Google Drive.Xoom Closes Its First Day On The NASDAQ At $25.49 Per Share, Up 59 Percent >From IPO Price
Feb 15, 9:47PM
A number of Silicon Valley investors are starting the long weekend with a smile. That's thanks to Xoom Corporation, the online money transfer technology and services company, which made a very successful debut today on the NASDAQ stock market. The company's stock zoomed (sorry, I had to do it) up a full 59 percent from its $16 per share initial public offering price to close out the trading day at $25.49. The IPO price itself, announced yesterday, was a boost from Xoom's previously projected share price range of $13 to $15.Thanks For The 15-Minute Break, WordPress
Feb 15, 9:44PM
As you might have noticed, TechCrunch went down entirely (thanks to WordPress VIP), sporting a fun “502″ error. If you’re not sure what that means, here’s the skinny on why you might see a 502 error: The server, while acting as a gateway or proxy, received an invalid response from the upstream server it accessed in the attempt to fulfill the request. If you know exactly what that means, then kudos to you. This is the second issue that WordPress has had in the past week, with this one being called a “performance issue” or “service disruption.” Our site was down, so I’ll call it a service outage. One can imagine that when you’re a technology blog and a site as big as WordPress.com goes down, the first thing that you want to do is write about it. We clearly could not. Other sites like GigaOm and VentureBeat were affected as well, it seems. Here’s what WordPress’ handy status site had to say: Here’s the fun error that was shown on WordPress.com itself. Pretty professional, don’t you think? Last week’s outage came with this explanation: As we mentioned earlier this week, WordPress.com experienced a partial outage and service degradation when one of our three data centers was taken completely offline by a fiber cut. I wanted to provide some more information about how this occurred, what the impact was, and what we are doing to prevent this from happening in the future. With all of the other issues that folks who use WordPress VIP are having, which I won’t bore you with right now, one must ask, why aren’t there rules and technology in place as a fail-safe when a platform as large as this just decides to stop working? This is the same feeling that we get when Twitter goes down, but something tells me that the world could live without our 140-character musings for a few hours. The news? Not so much. Good job, good effort WordPress. Try harder. We’ve reached out to them for comment and will let you know what they say. To our readers and writers, we truly apologize. You are now free to move about the blogosphere. UPDATE: Here’s a mass email sent out to WordPress VIP customers (they call it an outage now, and it was longer than 5 minutes): At approximately 21:23 UTC (13:23 PT), WordPress.com had a site-wide outage that lastedKISSmetrics Makes Its First Acquisition — Open Source Startup SourceNinja
Feb 15, 9:19PM
Analytics company KISSMetrics has acquired SourceNinja, a startup offering to help companies manage security flaws in their open source libraries. KISSmetrics co-founder and head of product Hiten Shah made it sound like a pretty standard talent acquisition. Shah's company won't be using the Source Ninja technology, but it's bringing on the startup's two founders (and only team members) on-board — Brett Hardin will become a senior web application engineer and Matt Stump will become an infrastructure engineer.Congresswoman Proposes Ban On Armed Drones In U.S., Regulating Surveillance
Feb 15, 9:01PM
With the looming threat of faceless drones buzzing around American cities, congress has proposed banning armed drones and regulating their use for law enforcement surveillance. The Preserving American Privacy Act introduced by U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (CrunchGov Grade: A) would require warrants for unmanned aircraft systems to collect personally identifiable information and a public notice to collect information in public areas.GitHub Open Sources "Boxen," A One-Command Tool To Ready Newly Unboxed Macs For Developers
Feb 15, 8:44PM
GitHub has open-sourced "Boxen" an automated way to set up GitHub on just unboxed Macs. The one-command automation tool promises that a developer can install GtHub with one-command and be ready within 30-minutes to start coding.Dreaded Auto-Play Video Ads Could Be Coming To Facebook, VP Confirms
Feb 15, 8:34PM
TV commercials that automatically play could soon hit Facebook's news feed. This week Facebook VP of Business David Fischer admitted auto-play video ads might be distracting, but said "I believe there are ways we could do it." Fischer said during his Stanford Future Of Media Conference keynote that he admired YouTube's video ads. But auto-play video spots could be annoying in the quiet news feed.If at any time you'd like to stop receiving these messages, just send an email to feeds_feedburner_com_techcrunch+unsubscribe-hmdtechnology=gmail.com@mail.feed2email.net.
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