The latest from TechCrunch
- The Cloud Has Us All In A Fog
- Gillmor Gang 4.30.11 (TCTV)
- How DIY Health Reform Can Help You Win The Talent Wars
- Game Over for Incentivized App Downloads
- Nancy Conrad On Education Innovation: Turning Geeks Into Rock Stars Is A Game Changer
| The Cloud Has Us All In A Fog | Top |
| Ever heard of Dropship ? It’s an open-source project that “enables arbitrary, anonymous transfers of files between Dropbox accounts.” Dropbox hopes you haven’t; they tried to squelch it this week, and even accidentally reported that it was subject to a DMCA takedown notice, with predictably futile results. I’m mostly sympathetic: I’m a huge fan of their service, Dropship was a clear violation of their terms, and for obvious reasons they don’t want to turn into an anonymous peer-to-peer file-sharing service. Unfortunately, they accidentally built a system which enabled just that. How about Sony’s PlayStation Network? Of course you have. It was so thoroughly hacked this week that Sony had to shut it down indefinitely . Did you also know that Sony’s PS3 firmware is effectively wide open, because they made a hilariously stupid security mistake ? Did you know that that’s probably how PSN got hacked , and that it raised the spectre of the hacker(s) taking over every connected PlayStation 3 in the world and turning them into by far the biggest botnet in history? That probably wasn’t what Sony had in mind, but they accidentally built a system which enabled just that. How about the new Google Docs Android app? Came out this week, and it’s pretty great. Among its many features is the ability to take a picture of an image with text and have that text automatically OCRed and turned into a document. Can’t wait ’til they integrate Google Translate into that, too, and recapitulate last year’s hot app World Lens . But I bet book publishers are pretty unhappy. Not long ago, if you wanted to scan a book you had to actually build a scanner , or buy a copy and turn every page. Now would-be book pirates can just crowdsource 10 people to go to bookstores and take 20 pictures each, et voila: 400 scanned pages in Google Docs. Easier book piracy probably isn’t what Google had in mind, but they accidentally built a system which enables just that. This was also the week that people who keep remotely controllable Internet-enabled camera/microphone/GPSes on them at all times expressed outraged surprise when they learned their privacy is at risk. The panopticon probably isn’t what the mobile industry had in mind, but they accidentally built a system which enables just that. What do these all have in common? The unexpected results of connecting client devices to the cloud. (Yeah, I don’t really like the term either, but it’s better than the alternatives.) People talk about “moving to the cloud,” as if we haven’t already. The heavy lifting may happen on the server farms ( when they’re up ) but every connected computer, phone, and game console already serves as a computing cloud’s eye, ear, and tentacle. Emergent properties . Unintended consequences. Get used to ‘em. My favourite Douglas Adams books are the Dirk Gently novels, in which the protagonist makes use of “the fundamental interconnectedness of all things” to solve crimes in hilariously unexpected ways. Now we’re literally building that interconnectedness into (nearly) all things . So we shouldn’t be too surprised to find ourselves moving into a Dirk Gently future, in which off-kilter left-field ricochet consequences happen at an ever-increasing rate. You can bet that those cited above are just the beginning — and that there’s a lot of money to be made in seeing them before they happen. Photo credit : Aspex Design, Flickr | |
| Gillmor Gang 4.30.11 (TCTV) | Top |
| The Gillmor Gang — Kevin Marks, Danny Sullivan, JP Rangaswami, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — christened the new Gang studio with a surprise welcome to Kevin Marks. It turns out he’s joining salesforce.com on Monday, following JP (six months), JT (7 years), and me, who is celebrating my one year anniversary. Kevin has been a forceful champion of open standards at Apple, Technorati, Google, BT (Ribbit), the Gillmor Gang, and now salesforce.com. Before, and once the festivities were out of the way, we got back to Gang business, namely the continued aftermath of the phone location recording crisis. With free lunch debunked, we tackled the Amazon outage and its impact on the Cloud. You can decide for yourselves, but the consensus is that such challenges will be remembered fondly as a validation of the moment, as with the Gmail outage of several years ago, when the Cloud passed from inflection point to basic services. The velocity of business in the iPad age, where CEOs can see deeply into their companies in realtime, demands a level of interactive services and an iterative feedback loop not possible with the previous generation of software. And that lead to a debate about iPhone video calls and what Danny is looking for in a flying car. CrunchBase Information Steve Gillmor JP Rangaswami John Taschek Danny Sullivan Kevin Marks Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| How DIY Health Reform Can Help You Win The Talent Wars | Top |
| Editor’s note : Guest author Dave Chase spent the 90′s working at Microsoft in various senior marketing and general management roles, including founding Microsoft’s global healthcare unit that has grown to be Microsoft’s most significant vertical market. Prior to joining Microsoft, he was a senior consultant with Accenture's Healthcare Practice working with a wide array of healthcare providers and systems. Dave has also been a successful investor and adviser to several early-stage companies. He can be found on Twitter as @ chasedave or on LinkedIn . The talent wars that were common back in the late 90′s appear to have returned whether it's using LOLCats or cheeseburgers to recruit talent. While I love the creativity, when it comes down to making a decision to join a new company, the lumbering tech giants (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Zynga, Facebook) which startups compete against for talent have one giant ace up their sleeve — great healthcare benefits. When I left Microsoft 8 years ago, my wife expressed only one concern — losing health benefits. At the time, I told her that it's just a matter of paying those costs directly. The reality has been that it's been a significant hassle and cost that we'd rather not deal with. The excitement of working with startups has outweighed that hassle, but even to this day it remains a burr in the saddle. Periodically, I will get an offer to join some company and her first question is "how are their health benefits?" Startups have repeatedly shown an ability to outmaneuver the behemoths we compete with but this is one area where the behemoths still have an edge. It's time to turn the tables with what I call Do-it-Yourself (DIY) Healthcare Reform. While the behemoths stick to the old health payment model, which is a Gordian Knot designed by Rube Goldberg , there’s a better way. The big companies can stick with a model that has led to health costs increasing 274x in my lifetime (compared to 8x for all other consumer goods and services). What’s better is that startups are beginning to offer key parts of the solution. There’s a Seattle startup called Qliance that is backed by Nick Hanauer (aQuantive founder, Second Avenue Partners), Rich Barton (Expedia/Zillow founder), Jeff Bezos and Michael Dell. (I am not an investor). In the Bay Area, there’s a similar model – One Medical Group – that has been written up in the NY Times Qliance and medical approaches like it recognize the budget-crushing impact of burdening the health equivalent of a car tune-up with insurance bureaucracy and profits. There’s a 40% “tax” that makes healthcare insurance unnecessarily expensive. Instead, in Qliance-like models, the health insurer gets disintermediated from day to day healthcare. It keeps insurance for what it does best—covering you for catastrophic items you hope never happen (major medical issues, house fire, car accident). The Solution There are steps an individual or companies can take today that can save a massive amount of money. I will explain three items that may be new to you but are important to understand and take advantage of depending on the scope of coverage you want for yourself or your employees. Direct Primary Care (DPC) : A relatively new concept that is a derivation of Concierge Medicine but targeted at the mass market. They typically cover everything from day to day items (physicals, flu, etc.) to urgent care. Sometimes there are added charges for items such as an X-ray (Qliance now includes this in their pricing) or lab tests where they pass along direct costs. Because it's completely outside of the insurance model (you pay a monthly retainer not unlike a health club that you can use as much or as little as you'd like), doctors are happy to be available by email and phone. In a typical insurance/fee-for-service model, they wouldn't get compensated unless they see you in person so it's understandable why they are reluctant to be available for their patients in this manner. Health Savings Accounts (HSA) : These allow pre-tax dollars to be put into an account that rolls over if they aren't used. Funds in the account can be used to pay for qualified healthcare expenses. As pre-tax money, you are essentially getting a 20-30% discount depending on your tax bracket. The funds contributed to the account are not subject to federal income tax at the time of deposit. Unlike a flexible spending account (FSA), funds roll over and accumulate year to year if not spent. HSA funds may currently be used to pay for qualified medical expenses at any time without federal tax liability or penalty. More on them can be found at the federal government's Web site and on Wikipedia . Health Discount Card : Think of this as a Costco Card for health & wellness services. It's NOT insurance. Your Costco Card doesn't allow you to take Cheerios off their shelf and not pay for them. Rather, they have aggregated the buying power of individuals and small business to save their members money when they purchase something. With the card, you can access items often not covered by insurance from Dental to Vision to Alternative Care to Prescriptions at a significant pre-negotiated discount. The following are examples of the range of coverage you can provide to your team. I would always recommend at least having a very high deductible insurance plan. Bare bones : At least offer a Health Discount Card even if you can't cover the employee's High Deductible Insurance Plan. Just be sure to communicate that it is not insurance as many will think it is. The Costco analogy helps people understand (i.e., you can't walk out without paying for what's in your cart, it just costs less). Good : Couple a High Deductible Plan with a Health Discount Card Better : Combine the "Good" with a HSA that you fund with pre-tax dollars. Employers such as Whole Foods have taken this approach and found their employees getting much savvier on spending "their" dollars. See the Wall Street Journal's piece by Whole Foods CEO on how they do this. Even if you don’t fund the HSA, it’s great to offer one as a way for employees to extend their dollars. Best : Combine the "Better" with a Direct Primary Care membership. Prices vary widely but Qliance charges $69/month for a 40-49 year old, for example. Many find that combining these can actually cost less than conventional insurance. Some are going a step further and offering corporate wellness programs such as those offered by startups such as Lime-Ade . My experience initially working as a management consultant to nearly 30 hospitals followed by founding Microsoft's healthcare business has led me to the conclusion that it is virtually impossible to reform a fundamentally flawed model (i.e., the payment side of the equation). I outlined this in more detail in my Huffington Post piece entitled Health Insurance's Bunker Buster . But taking giving employees new healthcare choices is one way startups can compete with larger companies in the talent wars. CrunchBase Information Dave Chase Qliance Medical Management Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Game Over for Incentivized App Downloads | Top |
| Editor’s note : Guest author Gurbaksh Chahal has founded three startups and is currently CEO and founder of RadiumOne, an online ad network that aims to combine social and intent data to serve ads. The business model of incentivized app downloads was recently dealt a death sentence by Apple. Apple said incentivized app downloads were driving inaccurate rankings in the App Store , almost certainly because essentially paying consumers to download apps was a way of gaming a ranking system that used downloads as a key metric. To be fair, there were many quality apps taking advantage of the loophole in the ranking system, but that era has ended. And so have the days of companies making money hand over fist in the incentivized downloads business, better known in the industry as Cost Per Install or CPI. So how exactly did it work ? Say you're playing a game that offers you virtual currency; the game might ask you to download an advertised application in exchange for virtual credits within that game. You install the app and get your in-game currency. The app gets a new install and pays for that. This quickly generates bursts of installs, immediately boosting an app's ranking in the app store. My feeling about this change in the App Store ranking—"Hooray!" I'm glad that Apple put a stake in the heart of this "quick buck" scheme. It's going to force everyone in the mobile space to get back to making money the old school way—with real and targeted advertising. The companies in the CPI business ( TapJoy , Flurry , mdotm , w3i ) were slowing this transition and this focus. And they all knew that CPI was a house of cards revenue stream that was not sustainable and wouldn't be ignored by Apple indefinitely. Furthermore, CPI is a business model with constrained inventory. You can only monetize to the number of apps in the network. That's always going to be a finite number and a small number when most app developers aren't big enough to even afford CPI. So what replaces CPI? In my opinion—and granted I’m biased because I've founded three companies that serve online display advertising—mobile display ad solutions are the way of the future. Display offers a much greater growth potential than CPI because of near limitless inventory. The IAB recently estimated that last year alone, advertisers spent more than $550 million on mobile advertising. That pace is outstripping the growth of online display and CPI is no match. Mobile advertising is a rapidly iterating field. In many ways this CPI ruckus is reminiscent of the early days of online display. Remember the days before IAB standards, when click fraud was rampant and there was a virtual cornucopia of monetization schemes offered by now defunct companies that were "gaming" the system? The next chapter in mobile advertising, for the companies able to keep up with the pace of change, will be better ad solutions for app developers, advertisers and consumers. Just consider this: Over 25% of current mobile landing pages go to the App Store. Display can drive App Store rankings. Think about what the seer of Internet advertising, Kleiner Perkins' Mary Meeker noted in her Top Mobile Internet Trends report : Mobile display is hitting a critical mass faster than the desktop Internet did Powerful shift to ad and virtual good monetization from initial pay per download models About 60% of time spent on smartphones is new activity for mobile users – activities such as games, social networking, maps, utilities. So let's say farewell and good riddance to mobile CPI and find better advertising models that actually give consumers something they want. | |
| Nancy Conrad On Education Innovation: Turning Geeks Into Rock Stars Is A Game Changer | Top |
| Last week President Obama spoke at Facebook , emphasizing during the townhall that the US needs to be bullish on Science and Math education if we are to pull out of the recession, “We want to start making Science cool. I want people to feel about the next big energy breakthrough and the next big Internet breakthrough the same way they felt about the moonwalk," he said. Taking off on that idea, Nancy Conrad, the wife of late astronaut Pete Conrad , has founded the Conrad Foundation in the memory of her husband. Peter was expelled from one school in the 11th grade because he had dyslexia and then went on to graduate from Princeton and walk on the moon because he was taken under the wing of another educator who saw promise in the young man. Nancy Conrad wants to give other kids with a penchant for entrepreneurship their “moon shots,” or the opportunity to get funding and actualize their ideas; Because of this the Conrad Foundation puts on the Spirit of Innovation Awards and Innovation Summit annually, attempting to foster a love of innovation in kids between the ages of 13 and 18. To attend the Innovation Summit , high schoolers across the country are invited to enter the three year old competition, which ends up flying in 27 finalists to NASA Ames to pitch their startups to judges in one of three categories: Aerospace Exploration, Clean Energy and Cyber Security. The winning team in each category receives a 5K grant to fund their project. While building the “innovative workforce of the 21st century” is an ambitious goal, after attending the extremely professional finalist presentations today it’s obvious that spotlighting kids who have a passion for innovation and technology is a fundamental step in turning our education system around. “There’s so many problems, we’re not running out of problems,” Conrad said emphasizing that you need to get kids excited about Science, Math and Technology in order build a viable workforce. “When you’ve got juiced kids who really want to do something, they don’t know there’s a box. And then all they do is think outside the box. This is where geeks turn into rockstars, and that’s the game changer. That’s where you can change the culture of students.” Hmm … So maybe Intel was right ? | |
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