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The X1 Carbon Shows Lenovo Can Think Different

ACMAir — Wed, 16 May 2012 02:55:45 +0000

Lenovo rolled out its latest notebook today. It is, in a word, spectacular. The Chinese company proves time and time again that Apple isn’t the only company capable of producing class-leading designs. Lenovo’s 14-inch X1 Carbon shown here by Engadget is everything an anti-MacBook Air should be. If there was ever a true MacBook Air competitor, or, if you will, a notebook that lives up to the ultra part of the Ultrabook name, it’s the new Lenovo X1 Carbon. This Lenovo X1 Carbon is a refresh of last year’s X1, but it’s more than just a spec bump. The computer is mostly all-new and manages to weigh less than the older version even though it packs a larger, 14-inch 1600 x 900 screen. Packed inside the carbon fiber chassis is an Intel Ivy Bridge CPU, optional 3G connectivity, and Lenovo’s Rapid Charge feature that promises to refill the battery to 80% in just 30 minutes. Lenovo has yet to announce the price or release date, but don’t expect this notebook to have a low price tag. The current X1 starts at $1000, but can quickly climb north once options are checked. Lenovo took the reins of IBM’s personal computer division in 2005. The company wisely changed very little concerning the notebook design. A ThinkPad from 2004 looks very similar to a ThinkPad of today save for a few millimeters trimmed here and there. Everything from the logo placement to the trademark red pointer nipple is in the same spot. Even the casing’s color is the same. But overtime Lenovo’s designers have kept up with the Joneses and added chiclit keyboards, button-less touchpads, and the like. Lenovo changed the minor things while still maintaining the ThinkPad’s trusted identity. Meanwhile the rest of the PC industry seemingly fired their design staff and instead bought a photocopier and a MacBook Pro. It’s hard to look at the rest of the PC notebook scene and not see Apple’s influence. The latest Dell XPS is a Dell-ified MacBook Pro. Vizio’s first notebooks are exact copies of the MacBook Air. Samsung’s latest ultrabooks might as well say MacBook Air instead of Samsung under the screen; they are nearly the same thing. Toshiba, once a staple in the PC world, is even using Apple’s trademark design cues to attempt to bolster sales. HP is the worst offender though. The original HP Envy was a blatant MacBook Pro ripoff when it debuted in 2009 and several generations later it is still hard to deny the influence. HP’s latest model lines still use the MacBook Pro’s design as a springboard. Companies often deflect questions concerning similar designs by saying something about how there are only so many ways to design a thin laptop. That’s pure malarkey and they know it. Design is what sets products apart. It’s the great differentiator and often wins out over even price. When Art. Lebedev Studio introduced the Optimus Maxiums keyboard in 2006, it was instantly praised for it’s forward-thinking OLED keys even though it was projected to cost north of $2000. Design wins when done well and first. History does not care about the clones. While Lenovo is in the minority, the company is not alone at designing notebooks without Apple’s help. Asus knows how to make a good looking kit as well. A designer at Dell clearly managed a sort of coup with the company’s first ultrabook, the XPS 13 . Sony does it model after model, seemingly designing its notebooks in a vacuum, void of any external distractions as they look like nothing else. Right now the new Lenovo X1 Carbon is the only notebook I would get save a MacBook Air. I would opt for this Windows machine over a current gen MacBook Pro. I’m not loyal to either operating system anyway. The Lenovo gets everything right including integrated 3G wireless and high resolution 14-inch screen. But that might change once Apple rolls out its next iteration of the MacBook Pro that’s said to have a thinner design (no optical drive), a super high resolution screen, and an Intel chipset with an Nvidia GPU. That said, even if the next MBP is a sort of wunderkind, Lenovo will continue to find success and fans as long as they stay the course and produce notebooks like the X1 Carbon.

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The X1 Carbon Shows Lenovo Can Think Different

Begun, The Retina Wars Have

ACMAir — Sat, 12 May 2012 20:15:41 +0000

As we approach the E3, the electronic gaming show in early June, I suspect that the value of “retina” high-resolution displays will soon become apparent. While the prospect of retina Macbooks is all but inevitable, we have reached a plateau when it comes to general computing and, more important, living room media. The first question is, in short, why do we need a retina Macbook ? Presumably it would be a superior experience for video and photo editing and offer designers far more real estate on a large screen, especially when viewing photos at lower resolutions. As evidenced by the iPhone’s retina display, gaming will become considerably more compelling. This presupposes a rich and vibrant OS X gaming ecosystem. The second question is also quite interesting: If console manufacturers begin to promise 4K (4096 × 3072) video output, what does that mean for TV manufacturers? As we well know, the 3D craze was, just that, a craze. 3D hype was far overblown but 4K hype will be even crazier. Selling a few 3D screens would have been nice. Selling millions of 4K screens is a necessity. After all, 4K displays will be considerably more expensive and far less initially popular than even 3D. 3D was an iterative update, but 4K is a massive investment. The market expansion of higher resolution displays is contingent on a few things. First, manufacturers need to be able to retool previous manufacturing facilities to produce 4K screens. This isn’t difficult, just a concern in a situation where 1080p and other resolutions are still widely popular. Second, the global economy will need to be able to support a full upgrade from 1080p to 4K. Hard-core gamers will most definitely flock to the new resolutions, but will general users? Although the retina Macbooks will be sort of a gateway drug to higher resolution, convincing a cohort of television owners to upgrade will be tough, especially if they’ve just been burned by Blu-Ray (a dying, if not dead, format) and 3D. It will also be delightful to hear all of the marketing-speak behind newer displays. While “retina” is out, expect HP, Samsung, and Dell to offer “High-Rez” laptops and maybe even “SuperPlasmaWonderDisplay” phones. Display marketing will depend less on pixels and more on arbitrary words stuck together. We still have a while to go before 4K is even a “thing,” higher resolution screens are coming and console makers and gaming PC manufacturers will probably be the first to push it through into the mainstream. Whither go gamers, the public follows and, although this is just a guess, I suspect the first “cheap” 4K screens will arrive around CES 2015 and really hit stores by 2016 – plenty of time to get the last few years of use out of your PS3 and Xbox 360, not to mention your heavy-duty gaming PC.

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Begun, The Retina Wars Have

Understoodit Lets Students Voice Their Confusion Without Having to Raise Their Hands

A D M I N — Thu, 03 May 2012 04:36:19 +0000

Over the course of the last few years, more and more “ clickers ” have found their way into college classrooms. These little devices allow teachers to request real-time feedback from their students through short quizzes and surveys. Toronto-based developer Liam Kaufman, however, thinks that a simpler application that just tells teachers whether their students are confused or not could help improve learning significantly. Students, after all, often hesitate to raise their hands and tell their professors when they aren’t able to follow – especially in large lecture classes. With Understoodit , Kaufman hopes to give these students the ability to voice their concerns quietly. During a lecture, students can use their phones, tablets or laptops to tell their teachers when they are confused and when they understood something. Teachers then see this data in real time and can adjust their lectures accordingly. The app does not actually tell the teacher who in the class isn’t quite able to follow along, so students don’t have to worry about voicing their concerns. Kaufman says he came up with the idea for Understoodit during while studying computer science at the Unversity of Toronto. He then created a prototype and tested it in a first-year computer science class. After that, he spent two month on refining the application and worked with a designer to make it user-friendly. Understoodit is currently available by invitation only. If you are an educator and interested in using it, you can sign up for a beta invite here . The service will likely be available publicly by the end of the summer. Another company worth taking a look at in the context, by the way, is Top Hat Monocle , which we reviewed earlier this year .

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Understoodit Lets Students Voice Their Confusion Without Having to Raise Their Hands

Smarter TV: CrestaTech Grabs $13M To Bring Region-Free TV Reception To Any Device

user — Tue, 01 May 2012 15:10:15 +0000

Cord cutters and web TV users could be heard issuing a collective groan yesterday as rumors surfaced that popular online video service Hulu may soon begin requiring its users to prove they have cable or satellite subscription. Sure, distribution models have changed, but we’ll still make you pay regardless, the old guard seems to be saying. Of course, it’s never been cheaper or easier to distribute TV, thanks to the convergence of broadband and broadcast television, and startups like Aereo have rushed to capitalize on the “TV Everywhere” movement, drawing the ire of broadcasters. Though measured compared to mobile devices, connected TV adoption is growing fast, especially with names like Google and Apple in the mix. Apple TV, for one, is using AirPlay to let users turn their laptops, phones, and tablets into remote controls, wirelessly beaming streaming content to their connected TVs. What’s more, it’s leveraging its smart chip technology to make this experience compatible with high def, hardware that will continue to improve alongside advances in mobile OSes and technologies. Some believe that Apple may begin licensing AirPlay to connected TV manufacturers, because, as Redux CEO David McIntosh recently pointed out , the Holy Grail for networks, studios, and cable companies is to be able to offer a consistent, global TV experience that isn’t interrupted by regional restrictions and supports hundreds of devices and OSes. While Apple’s AirPlay offers a terrific, seamless experience, users are still locked into the Apple ecosystem, and to really win the day, one has to be adaptable and multiplatform. Fragmentation is the norm. On the connected TV side, broadcast TV, set top boxes, IPTVs, DVRs and PVRs are going the way of the Dodo, and today’s connected TVs have to be able to take advantage of the same smart processors and dynamic OS tech that powers smart consumer mobile devices today. This is the thinking being employed by a Silicon Valley-based startup called CrestaTech , which has been quietly designing a portfolio of programmable hardware and software technologies that enable universal TV reception for all manners of smart devices, TVs, tablets, and PCs. On the hardware side, CrestaTech has developed tuners that reduce the cost and make it easier for manufacturers to develop flat and light TVs that are in tune with global reception standards, and on the software side, it’s created multi-standard demodulation technology and an easy-to-use interface that allows PCs to receive and digitize TV signals anywhere in the world. In short, the startup is on a mission to make TVs not only smart, but global and maybe a little dynamic, too. And that’s just it: TV manufacturers are challenged with creating an easy to use product that is globally capable; not regionally constrained, and adaptable to supporting the quick-evolving feature sets provided in mobile, connected devices. So, CrestaTech is looking to bridge the gap, allowing OEMs to create products that boast a single, dynamic design, cloud services, and connectivity anywhere — at a price that doesn’t make consumers faint. The vision is a big one, and today CrestaTech received further financial validation for its endeavor, announcing that it has closed a $13 million Series B round of investment. The round was led by Bechtolsheim Ventures, Benhamou Global Ventures, Sofinnova Ventures and AVM Capital LP, and adds to the $5 million Series A the startup raised back in 2008, as well as early funding from Sun Microsystems founder Andy Bechtolsheim, bringing total funding to just under $20 million. With its new investment, CrestaTech plans to continue developing its next-gen smart TV platform, and plans a series of product releases later this year, along with expansion into smart devices, like smartphones, tablets and media players. As McIntosh pointed out, margins on TVs have decreased over time, and manufacturers want to integrate connected TVs into an ecosystem of higher-margin tablets and phones. CrestaTech says that it’s already been having success among manufacturers, and if it can start implementing its technology in mobile devices, we may just CrestaTech become an integral part of smart TV platforms around the world, and an alternative to AirPlay. And Aereo. At the very least, it feels good to imagine region-free TV, radio and GPS on any device. What do you think? For more on CrestaTech, check ‘em out at home here .

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Smarter TV: CrestaTech Grabs $13M To Bring Region-Free TV Reception To Any Device

No, AirPlay Is Not The New Apple TV

admin2 — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 08:14:19 +0000

Editor’s note : David McIntosh is the founder and CEO of Redux , a fast-growing video discovery company. Redux is the top downloaded app on Google TV, and you can read David’s other guest posts here . If you asked your mom or dad what DLNA or UPnP stood for or did, would they just look at you weird? While the two technologies enable users to wirelessly beam content to Internet Connected TVs from their tablets, phones, and computers, Apple’s AirPlay is the first implementation that makes the experience seamless. Tap the button again and playback resumes on your root device. No complicated setup is required – it simply works. Some, like Bloomberg and Hunter Walk , have suggested that AirPlay is Apple TV, and that Apple will simply license AirPlay to the major Connected TV manufactures – and by default every Connected TV sold will be an “Apple TV” – the remote being your iPhone or iPad. It’s certainly a sensible theory – there are 250 M+ iOS devices, and with the upcoming OS X update, laptops can now leverage Airplay as well. That’s over 300M Apple devices that can push content to TVs. Fragmentation is the reality That level of integration would be a dream come true for many networks, studios, and cable companies looking to sell a “TV Everywhere” experience directly to users. Simply integrate with an iOS app, and with one tap consumers can watch content on hundreds of TV devices. Today it’s a big competitive advantage to be able to offer a consistent and incredible TV experience across hundreds of devices. Netflix built its early lead around that competitive advantage, and many networks, studios, and cable companies are looking to build technological solutions to combat fragmentation so that they can compete with Netflix. A content network or studio needs to be able to deliver a discovery and consumption experience better than Netflix’s across just as many devices — otherwise the consumer will turn to Netflix. A ubiquitous AirPlay integration would level the playing field considerably, but is unlikely for several reasons: (1) AirPlay adoption is not wide yet. There are less than 5M Apple TV units in the market, which means that today there are less than 5M users in the market that use Airplay for video. And while Apple is heavily promoting AirPlay-video-enabled apps in the iTunes store, wide consumer adoption is unclear. Unfortunately, stats on Airplay usage aren’t widely available, but anecdotally – in my group of friends I’m the one evangelizing it – many Apple TV owners I meet don’t even realize AirPlay exists. (2) Manufacturer adoption will be slow. Given that AirPlay does not have a critical mass of users, it’s hard to imagine how in the short-term Apple will convince any of the top five TV manufacturers to adopt AirPlay. Margins on TVs have been decreasing over time, and manufacturers are looking to integrate Connected TVs into an ecosystem of higher-margin tablets and phones. Integrating AirPlay,while it may sell more TVs (when Airplay has critical mass) will reduce sales of higher-margin tablets and phones they could have sold that exclusively interfaced with their TVs. (3) A seamless experience is unlikely. It’s unlikely video AirPlay would be integrated consistently across all Connected TVs to create the same seamless experience consumers have with an Apple TV today. DLNA is a good example. It’’s an open protocol that in theory should accomplish what AirPlay does, except it’s implemented inconsistently across devices and often doesn’t work at all. Unless Apple has full control of the software layer, simply licensing out AirPlay would not achieve the desired experience. Apple can overcome the issue of critical mass with enough of its own Apple TV units in the market. But at the pace of sales for its existing Apple TV, it will be years before AirPlay would have the usage to give Apple the clout to get integrations with other manufacturers. That’s why the rumors of an upcoming integrated Apple TV or upgraded device make sense. While AirPlay may be the long-term bet, in the short-term Apple needs a critical mass of users airplaying content to their TV. And AirPlay may be a central part of the rumored AppleTV. It wouldn’t be surprising if Apple uses their new device to train users how to use AirPlay. At that point, AirPlay could become a must-have for other TV manufacturers. As a TV manufacturer you would lose sales by not having it integrated. But even with a critical mass of AirPlay users in the market, it’s still unclear whether Apple could convince many manufacturers to adopt AirPlay, or would even have success getting them to implement it the way it’s implemented in Apple TV. That’s why Apple owns the hardware and software layer; they can create experiences that would never be created by leaving third-party manufacturers to their own devices. Winners in TV will have technological solutions to fragmentation What’s more, a fragmented approach to DLNA and Connected TV has already developed. Just as the Android ecosystem is increasingly fragmented, while iOS is uniform, the Apple TV of the future will be nicely unified with other iOS devices through AirPlay, whereas other Connected TVs will have fragmented platforms with fragmented DLNA protocols. That means that succeeding in the fast-growing Connected TV ecosystem will require a killer approach to fragmentation. Leading cable companies, and networks looking to sell directly to consumers will have to sit on top of iOS’s uniform AirPlay platform, as well as a highly fragmented Connected TV and DLNA platform to reach meaningful scale. There’s also the issue of whether or not Apple can strike a deal with Hollywood and other content creators but that’s a story for some other time.

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No, AirPlay Is Not The New Apple TV

The Open Source CEO: Jim Whitehurst

user — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 18:10:20 +0000

If you read the Red Hat website, you’ll find pages describing their attitude toward open source , collaboration , and more. It reads pretty much like every other marketing spiel from every company online today. There’s something different about Red Hat, though: they actually believe this stuff. Not only do they believe it, they live it every day. I spoke to Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst recently about the open source culture at Red Hat and he told me it is a journey, not a destination. According to Whitehurst, the tenets of open source permeate all aspects of the culture at Red Hat. Whitehurst opened our conversation by stating that the last eighteen months have been a tipping point for Red Hat. According to him, they’re “no longer fighting an uphill battle for credibility.” Nowadays the conversations he’s hearing with customers focus on the issue of price versus performance, rather than whether Red Hat is a viable player in the enterprise marketplace. Red Hat’s big news is that they’ve broken a billion dollars in revenue, and are arguably the first all-open source company to do so. I’ve read some disagreement with the notion that Red Hat is a “pure play” open source company. I asked Whitehurst whether their earnings claims were just a matter of semantics: is Red Hat really a billion dollar open source software company, or a billion dollar support and services company? “We sell software,” was his immediate response. Rather than a specific, static piece of software, Red Hat sells you a subscription to their software. While the Red Hat source code is freely available, the compiled bits included in your subscription are not free. What you buy from Red Hat, says Whitehurst, is software that has been rigorously tested, known to be good, and is fully supported. According to him, the long-term support of Red Hat’s enterprise software represents 6% of the company’s overall costs. Red Hat employs “an army of engineers,” says Whitehurst, “maintaining 10 year compatibility.” The company spends even more money on engineering new solutions every year. I next asked Whitehurst “How does the open source culture affect Red Hat internally as a corporation?” Specifically, I wanted to know how have “the tenets of open source” affected management processes? This was, in many respects, the most interesting part of my conversation with him. “The traditional hierarchical org structure was developed to control, and steward fixed assets,” Whitehurst told me. The traditional hierarchies do not tend to innovate. “When information is your primary product, hierarchy isn’t the best way to drive.” To illustrate how the open source culture influences everything at Red Hat, Whitehurst told me a story about an early experience as the company’s CEO. When he started, the company had — to his mind — a rather weak mission statement. Coming from a traditional management background, Whitehurst’s first reaction was to do what CEOs all around the world do: gather the executive team, have an off-site retreat with a paid facilitator, and develop a new mission statement. This new statement would then be broadcast to the employees. “Hold on, sparky,” was effectively what his executive team told him. “You need internal buy-in,” he was told. An internal collaboration site was established — mailing list, wiki, blog — to discuss the mission statement with staffers who were passionate about that issue. Once the infrastructure was put in place, the discussion was entirely self-organized, and about 15 to 20 people really dug in. “Iterate, iterate, iterate” is how Whitehurst described the process. What was particularly interesting to him was that this ground-up process saw participation from all parts of the company: not just developers writing code but also artists and designers, UI and UX experts, and more. The end result was a mission statement that had tremendous buy-in throughout the organization, and one that didn’t have to be “sold” by management. “It takes us so much longer to make decisions because so many people are involved,” Whitehurst said. “Once a decision is made, though, we have no problems with execution.” He told me that it took him about a year to really understand “the open source way,” and another year to realize that as a leader he needed to be an internal catalyst. “Open source is not about democracy at all. It’s a meritocracy,” he said. As such, his employees expect two things from him: solicit feedback before decisions as much as possible assume accountability for decisions he drives Whitehurst claims that this forces much more robust conversations, but leads to significantly better results. Another example of the meritocracy of open source at work at Red Hat: Whitehurst has never sent a memo. Every communication needs to support response from recipients, rather than be seen as a pronouncement from on high. At Red Hat, this takes place on one of several internal mailing lists. They’re not afraid to set up new microsites (blogs/wikis/lists) for focused participation on specific issues, either. I’ve been a participant in open source communities for more than a decade, so much of what Whitehurst shared was common sense to me. But it’s clearly not business as usual at the executive level of a billion dollar company. I asked him “Do you only hire open source “true believers” at the management level? Is there strife between “true believers” and traditional business school grads?” For a long time they tried to groom the people they hired, Whitehurst told me. He shared the anecdote of one employee who quit after their first day: “This is chaos, I can’t do it,” that person said. Now more than 50% of all hires come from internal referrals. This includes all levels of the organization, from entry level through the executive level. According to Whitehurst, this helps ensure that new employees better fit the culture, and results in a lower attrition rate than seen at other tech companies. Interestingly, in the last several years only one person at the VP level has left the company, Whitehurst told me. Following up on Whitehurst’s opening remarks, I asked if Red Hat’s continued growth has affected their sales strategies at all? Specifically, are new opportunities opening now that Red Hat is a billion dollar company? The short answer is “not really,” but the longer answer Whitehurst provided was that over the last couple of years Red Hat’s success has made people feel more comfortable that they’re a long-term player. This has led to a self-reinforcing cycle, the results of which are clear. Linux is displacing older proprietary UNIX systems (HP-UX, AIX, Solaris) at an incredible pace. I’ve often been curious how long it will be until the rest of open source catches up? For example, who’s really threatening Oracle for traditional relational databases? Whitehurst’s answer here wasn’t quite as direct as I had hoped. He highlighted the “explosion of open source contributions from Web 2.0 companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter” as examples of people looking to solve their problems in “open source ways”. “Open source is ultimately where all companies are heading,” Whitehurst stated flatly. Companies are “going to solve problems in new ways,” rather than just commoditizing things that already exist like relational databases. The bleeding edge of innovation is driving entirely new ways to solve problems. With respect to my example about Oracle, Whitehurst pointed out the explosion of NoSQL databases and “Big Data” computing needs. It may take some time for these new solutions to trickle down into the commodity computing space, but it’ll happen eventually. My conversation with Whitehurst was thought provoking, and covered so much ground that I found myself out of time long before I was out of questions. Whitehurst indulged me with a few follow-up questions by email, which I share here in their entirety. Scott Merrill: Open source is open to anyone, but we still see it as a primarily male, Western approach. Is Red Hat making any effort to remedy that? Jim Whitehurst: I don’t see open source as being more suited or relevant to a specific region, country or ethnic group. That said, open source communities are generally built from use (i.e. a % of users become contributors), through social or relational networks, exposure from college or a desire to contribute to the greater good. As many projects start as a bunch of friends or an individual with a desire to solve a problem for everyone, projects in their early stages tend to be less diverse. As projects grow, get exposure and use they tend to diversify. An example that did not follow this trend is the launch of oVirt.org – an open source alternate to VMware. That project has members active from the US, Israel, China, Japan, India, etc. Linux is another diverse example that has contributions from just about every country and ethnic group in the world. SM: Now that Amazon has blessed Eucalyptus , do you feel any pressure to divert resources away from OpenStack? JW: We actually announced last week that we have joined the OpenStack Foundation as a Platinum Member and will be continuing to invest resources into that community. In some research on contributions made to OpenStack recently, Red Hat ranked third among all corporate contributors and we continue to plan to invest here as we see OpenStack as complementary to our cloud portfolio and approach. SM: How much of Red Hat’s internal IT runs on proprietary software? JW: Perhaps a better question is how much of our internal IT is open source-based. We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux almost exclusively as our operating system platform. 100% of our development and 60% of our production infrastructure is virtualized, almost exclusively on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. Our Enterprise Service Bus, application tier, and our redhat.com web site are built with JBoss. We have over 4,000 associate laptops running Linux, with well over half that number running Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the balance running Fedora. Our email and calendaring system, chat system, Intranet, office suite, browser, and email clients are open source. We also use open source solutions for a variety of speciality applications, such as document collaboration and vacation tracking. We recently deployed an open source phone solution for our remote associates and plan to offer it to the entire organization. In short, we use our own products and we work hard to be a beacon for the implementation of open source solutions. SM: Does Linux on the desktop make sense any more? If so, what is Red Hat doing to make it happen? JW: Red Hat does not provide client/desktop products for the consumer market and does not plan to pursue this strategy in the foreseeable future. We do, however, today offer the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop and Fedora, which are successfully meeting the desktop needs of our chosen markets and customer base. SM: Where do you want to take Red Hat next? JW: So far at Red Hat, my focus as been squarely on our datacenter business, trying to execute really well on our core offerings. I think the future is in the cloud and big data. Our acquisition of Gluster last year and the work we have done around these storage offerings gives us a huge opportunity — an opportunity that I think could actually be bigger than the Linux business. Red Hat has come an awfully long way since the company started in 1993. They’ve had their fair share of missteps, to be sure, but on the whole they’ve been remarkably successful. Their broad participation in many upstream open source projects demonstrably benefits Red Hat’s bottom line, but it also improves the state of the art for everyone. Whitehurst’s observations about open source culture and its effects on corporate culture should be instructive to everyone.

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The Open Source CEO: Jim Whitehurst

Microsoft Israel’s Best & Brightest on Parade at ThinkNext Tel-Aviv

A D M I N — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 17:57:52 +0000

Slowly but surely, Microsoft Israel is making itself more and more relevant for the local startup community. In fact, we recently covered its latest major push, the Windows Azure Accelerator . Then there’s the annual ThinkNext conference which has become one of the local tech community’s staple events. The more interesting portion of the event (in my opinion at least) is the demo area, where startups chosen by the the local Microsofties showcase their goods. So unless you happen to be at the event in the port of Tel-Aviv this afternoon, here’s what you’re missing out: Everything.me (formerly TechCrunch Disrupt finalist ‘DoAt’) is a search product that empowers users by putting everything they need at their fingertips. It’s simplicity of search with the mobility of apps. Just say what you need and get your results immediately from fully mobile ‘Instant Apps’. PointGrab provides hand-gesture recognition software for Windows 8, where users can control a PC, applications and popular games from a distance. TouchApps makes casual and social mobile games that have reached millions of downloads worldwide. iOnRoad develops apps that improve driving in real-time using state-of-the-art machine vision algorithms and augmented reality. Photoccino understands photos and their context. Using computer vision and image processing technologies Photoccino classifies, groups, and selects the best photos, then turns them into photo-based products. Umoove’s technology allows the control of user interfaces of mobile devices using natural head & eye movements, in real-time and with no additional hardware. Webydo let’s users create websites by converting any kind of graphical design into a functioning website without any programming knowledge whatsoever. VMP provides intelligent, personalized, interactive and humanized self-service kiosks retailers and service providers. Fooducate helps people make healthy food choices. Using Fooducate’s app, shoppers can scan supermarket product barcodes and see their “nutrition score”. The app also suggests healthier alternatives to low scoring products. Kinvestix is a new fitness platform based on the concept of adding adjustable and linear resistance to the user’s gaming movements. Loudlee is a social music network that gives you easy and unlimited access to music, and helps you discover music with friends. Play My Tone is creator of Tonify, an app that lets users mix their favorite music into multi-layered, personalized hi-fi mixes in less than 30 seconds and share it with his friends. Overwolf is a software client that adds a rich layer of functionality to games, without touching the game code. For game publishers, Overwolf is a tool to integrate social media within their games, boost virality and reduce user acquisition costs. Vodio is a video discovery magazine iPad app that keeps users up-to-date by matching their personal taste and preferences. Xtendi lets users design their own augmented reality experience for mobile devices, based on natural human behavior and the proximity of a user from an object. MetalCompass delivers a mobile gaming experience for real world games using gaming accessories for smartphones. DVP provides real-time make-up software for mobile video calls on smart-phones, tablets and laptops. EPOS provides digital input solutions that rely on ultrasound to enable high-resolution and precision positioning in both 2/D and 3/D. The company’s technology is embedded in mobile devices, enabling pen/stylus input.

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Microsoft Israel’s Best & Brightest on Parade at ThinkNext Tel-Aviv

An Interview With Linus Torvalds

Achilles — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 23:45:31 +0000

The Millenium Technology Prize , awarded every two years, is a Finnish award designed “to improve the quality of life and to promote sustainable development-oriented research, development and innovation.” Sir Tim Berners-Lee won the prize in 2004. The finalists this year are Dr. Shinya Yamanaka, who has been contributing to the area of stem cell research, and Linux creator Linus Torvalds. The 2012 Grand Prize winner will be announced on June 13 in Helsinki, Finland. From the press release: In recognition of his creation of a new open source operating system kernel for computers leading to the widely used Linux operating system. The free availability of Linux on the Web swiftly caused a chain-reaction leading to further development and fine-tuning worth the equivalent of 73,000 man-years. Today millions use computers, smartphones and digital video recorders like Tivo run on Linux. Linus Torvalds’ achievements have had a great impact on shared software development, networking and the openness of the web, making it accessible for millions, if not billions. I had the opportunity to ask Linus a few questions by email. Hopefully I didn’t simply create a nerd version of The Chris Farley Show . Scott Merrill : You use a MacBook Air because you want a silent, quality computer. Why is it that Apple has the corner on this market? Have you considered using your fame or some portion of your fortune to try to remedy this? Linus Torvalds : You *really* don’t want me to start designing hardware. Hey, I’m a good software engineer, but I’m not exactly known for my fashion sense. White socks and sandals don’t translate to “good design sense” That said, I’m have to admit being a bit baffled by how nobody else seems to have done what Apple did with the Macbook Air – even several years after the first release, the other notebook vendors continue to push those ugly and *clunky* things. Yes, there are vendors that have tried to emulate it, but usually pretty badly. I don’t think I’m unusual in preferring my laptop to be thin and light. Btw, even when it comes to Apple, it’s really just the Air that I think is special. The other apple laptops may be good-looking, but they are still the same old clunky hardware, just in a pretty dress. I’m personally just hoping that I’m ahead of the curve in my strict requirement for “small and silent”. It’s not just laptops, btw – Intel sometimes gives me pre-release hardware, and the people inside Intel I work with have learnt that being whisper-quiet is one of my primary requirements for desktops too. I am sometimes surprised at what leaf-blowers some people seem to put up with under their desks. I want my office to be quiet. The loudest thing in the room – by far – should be the occasional purring of the cat. And when I travel, I want to travel light. A notebook that weighs more than a kilo is simply not a good thing (yeah, I’m using the smaller 11″ macbook air, and I think weight could still be improved on, but at least it’s very close to the magical 1kg limit). SM : I wasn’t so much asking why you haven’t designed your own hardware — I fully understand people playing to their own strengths. It’s taken considerable time for hardware manufacturers to recognize Linux as a viable platform, and today more and more OEMs are actively including or working toward Linux compatibility. Surely there’s an opportunity there for the global Linux community to influence laptop design for the betterment of everyone? I know it’s not your passion, and I respect that. Do you have any suggestions or guidance on ways we can collectively influence these kinds of things? LT : I think one of the things that made Apple able to do this was how focused they’ve been able to stay. They really have rather few SKU’s compared to most big computer manufacturers, and I think that is what has allowed them to focus on those particular SKU’s and make them be better than the average machine out there. Sure, they have *some* variation (different amounts of memory etc), but compare the Apple offerings to the wild and crazy world of HP or Lenovo or Toshiba. Other hardware manufacturers tend to not put all their eggs in a single (or a few) baskets, and even then they tend to hedge their bets and go for fairly safe and boring on most offerings (and then they sometimes make the mistake of going way crazy for the “designer” models to overcompensate for their boring bread-and-butter). That kind of focus is quite impressive. It’s also often potentially unstable – I think most people still remember Apple’s rocky path. I used to think that Apple would go bankrupt not *that* long ago, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one. And it can be hard to maintain in the long run, which is probably why most other companies don’t act that way – the companies who consistently try to revolutionize the world also consistently eventually fail. So that kind of focus takes guts. I’m not an apple fan, because I think they’ve done some really bad things too, but I have to give them credit for not just having good designers, but the guts to go with it. Jobs clearly had a lot to do with that. Anyway, I don’t think it’s worth worrying too much about laptops. The thing is, the Macbook Air was (and still to some degree is) ahead of its time. But I actually think that hardware is catching up to the point where doing good laptops really isn’t going to be rocket science any more. Rotational media really is going away, and with it goes one of the last formfactor issues: people really do not need (or want) that big spindle for a harddisk, or the silly spindle for an optical drive. Sure, optical drives will remain in some form factors for a while, and others formfactors will remain bigger just because the manufacturer will want to continue to offer the capability of a rotational disk too – they’re still cheaper and have bigger capacities. But at the same time, *small* flash-based storage is really getting quite good, and while you still pay more for them, it’s not revolutionary any more. The mSATA/miniPCIe form factor is making it more and more realistic standard form-factor. Together with CPU’s often being “fast enough” I would expect that the macbook air kind of formfactor becomes way more of a norm than it used to be. Apple was ahead of the curve, and I absolutely have higher expectations of the hardware I use than the average user probably does, but at the same time I’m convinced that the notebook market will finally get where I think it should be. Sure, some people will still want to use the big clunkers, but making a good thin-and-light machine is simply not going to be the technical expensive challenge it used to be. In other words, we’ll take the whole Macbook Air formfactor for granted in a few years. It’s been done, it used to be pretty revolutionary, it’s going to be pretty standard. It *did* take a lot longer than I thought it would take, admittedly. I’ve loved the thin-and-lights for much longer than the Macbook Air has existed. It’s not like Apple made up the concept – they just executed well on it. What I in many ways think is more interesting are people who do new things. I love the whole Raspberry PI concept, for example. That’s revolutionary in a whole different direction – maybe not the prettiest form-factor, but taking advantage of how technology gets cheaper to really push the price down to the point where it’s really cheap. Sure, it’s a bit limited, but it’s pretty incredible what you can do for $35. Think about that with a few more years under its belt. The reason I think that is interesting is because I think we’re getting to the point where it is *so* cheap to put a traditional computer together, that you can really start using that as a platform for doing whole new things. Sure, it’s good for teaching people, but the *real* magic is if one of those people who get one of those things comes up with something really new and fun to do with it. Fairly cheap home computing was what changed my life. I wouldn’t worry about how to incrementally improve laptop design: I think it’s interesting to see what might *totally* change when you have dirt cheap almost throw-away computing that you can use to put a real computer inside some random toy or embedded device. What does that do to the embedded development world when things like that are really widely available? SM : You don’t pull any punches when communicating with kernel developers and patch submitters. Has this tactic helped or hindered your success as a father? LT : I really don’t know. I think the kids have grown up really well, and I don’t think it hurt them that we had rules in the family that were fairly strictly enforced (usually with a five-minute timeout in the bathroom). We had a very strict “no whining” rule, for example, and I’ve seen kids that should definitely have been brought up with a couple of rules like that. That said, maybe they’re just naturally good kids. I don’t remember the last time I sent them to the bathroom (but it’s still a joke in our family: “If you don’t behave, you’ll spend the rest of the day in the bathroom”) And while I do work from home, I am *not* a “father” when I work. The kids always knew that if they came in and disturbed me while I was at the computer, they’d get shouted at. I know some people who say that they could never work from home because they’d be constantly distracted by their kids – that is just not the case in our family. So despite me working from home, we’re a very “traditional” family – Tove stayed at home and was really the homemaker and took care of the kids. And don’t get me wrong: when I interact with kernel developers, there can be a lot of swearing involved. And while that may *occasionally* happen with the kids too, the kids get hugs and good-night kisses too. Kernel developers? Not so much. Would some kernel people prefer getting tucked in at night instead of being cursed at? I’m sure that would be appreciated. I don’t think I have it in me, though. SM : How does your family feel about what you do for a living? What questions did/do they ask? LT : They’ve never seen anything else, so I doubt they even think about it. It’s just what dad does. None of my three daughters have so far shown any actual interest in computers (outside of being pure users – they game, they chat, they do the facebook thing), and while they end up using Linux for all of that they don’t seem to think it’s all that strange. SM : Do you try to get involved with technology problem solving in your every day life, for example at your kids’ school? If so, how has that been received? LT : Oh, the absolute *last* thing I want to do is be seen as a support person. No way. Sure, I do maintain the computers in the house, and it obviously means that the kids laptops (that they use in school too) run Linux, but it turns out that the local school district has had some Linux use in their computer labs anyway, so that never even made them look all that different. But I’m simply not really organized enough to be a good MIS person. And frankly, I lack the interest. I find the low-level details of how computers work really interesting, but if I had to care about user problems and people forgetting their passwords or messing up their backups, I don’t know what I’d do. I’d probably turn to drugs and alcohol to dull the pain. Even in the kernel project, I’m really happy that I’m not a traditional manager. I don’t have to manage logistics and people, I can worry purely about the technical side. So while I don’t do all that much programming any more (I spend most of my day merging code others wrote), I also don’t think of myself as a “manager”, I tend to call myself a “technical lead person” instead. SM : What do you want to tell people that no one has ever bothered to ask you? LT: The thing is, I don’t have a “message” to people. I never really did. I did (and do) Linux because it’s fun and interesting, and I really also enjoy the social aspect of developing things in the open, but I really don’t have anything I want to tell people. SM : I apologize for not making this question more clear. I’m not asking if you have a message or anthem or anything like that. As a celebrity, you’ve conducted lots of interviews. Many of them have been formulaic, and there’s only so many times you can receive the same questions before rolling your eyes in exasperation. Is there any question you wish you’d’ve been asked in an interview? Whether it’s because you’ve got the perfect / clever / whatever answer prepared, or just because you’d welcome the novelty of it? If so, what would have been your answer? LT : Hmm. Some of the interviews I’ve enjoyed the most have been from somewhat antagonistic people who came from a non-computer background. I remember this russian journalist (back when I lived in Helsinki), who was writing a piece for some russian financial newspaper. He really was pretty aggressive, and being Russian from after the fall of the soviet union he had an almost unhealthy admiration for Microsoft and making lots of money, and capitalism. I’m sure it was heightened by the whole admiration for wall street etc that must run in the blood of most financial journalists to begin with. That made for an interesting interview – because I like arguing. Explaining to a person like that why open source works, and in fact works better than the model he so clearly idolized was interesting. I don’t think I necessarily convinced him, but it still made for a memorable interview. But any particular question? No. That’s not what I tend to find interesting – I enjoy the process, and the argument, and the flow of ideas of an interview, I don’t think there’s a “perfect question”, much less a “perfect answer that I wish somebody had asked me the question for”. So you’re not asking for something that I think I have. But to expand on that, and to perhaps give you something of an answer anyway: this is very much true for me in software development too. I like the *process*. I like writing software. I like trying to make things work better. In many ways, the end result is unimportant – it’s really just the excuse for the whole experience. It’s why I started Linux to begin with – sure, I kind of needed an OS, but I needed a *project* to work on more than I needed the OS. In fact, to get a bit “meta” on this issue, what’s even more interesting than improving a piece of software, is to improve the *way* we write and improve software. Changing the process of making software has sometimes been some of the most painful parts of software development (because we so easily get used to certain models), but that has also often been the most rewarding parts. It is, after all, why “git” came to be, for example. And I think open source in general is obviously just another “process model” change that I think is very successful. So my model is kind of a reverse “end result justifies the means”. Hell no, that’s the stupidest saying in the history of man, and I’m not even saying that because it has been used to make excuses for bad behavior. No, it’s the worst possible kind of saying because it totally misses the point of everything. It’s simply not the end that matters at all. It’s the means – the journey. The end result is almost meaningless. If you do things the right way, the end result *will* be fine too, but the real enjoyment is in the doing, not in the result. And I’m still really happy to be “doing” 20 years later, with not an end in sight. SM : Looking back over the history of Linux, do you have any “Oh man, I can’t believe I did/said that” reactions? (Note: this is not in respect to code strictly, but engineering or policy decisions) LT : Engineering decisions usually aren’t a problem. Sure, I’ve made the wrong decision many times, but usually there was some good reason for it at the time – and the important part about engineering decisions is that you can fix them later when you realize they were wrong. So the “oh, that was spectacularly wrong” happens all the time, but the more spectacular it is, the quicker we notice, and that means that we fix it quickly too. The one really memorable “Oh sh*t” moment was literally very early on in Linux development, when I realized that I had auto-dialed my main harddisk when I *meant* to auto-dial the university dial-in lines over the modem. And in the process wiped out my then Minix setup by writing AT-commands to the disk that understandably didn’t respond the way the autodialling script expected (“AT commands” is just the traditional Hayes modem control instruction set). That’s the point where I ended up switching over to Linux entirely, so it was actually a big deal for Linux development. But that was back in 1991. SM : If you could give an award to someone, who would be the recipient, and for what accomplishment? LT : Hey, while I am a computer guy, my heroes are still “real scientists”. So if I can pick anybody, I think I’d pick Richard Dawkins for just being such an outspoken critic of muddled thinking and anti-scientific thought. SM : The Millennium Technology Prize ceremony is on June 13, which happens to be my birthday. Any chance I can be your +1 to the party? LT : Scott, I never knew you felt that way. I think my wife would not approve. SM : Nor would mine, but you miss all the shots you don’t take! SM : What are the major Linux distributions doing right, in general, and where are they falling short? Your recent Google+ rant about OpenSUSE’s security stance sheds some light on this, but I’d like to know more. Are formalized distributions a necessary evil? How much (if any) influence do you have with the distributions? LT : So I absolutely *love* the distributions, because they are doing all the things that I’m not interested in, and even very early on they started being a big support for the kernel, and driving all the things that most technical people (including very much me) didn’t tend to be interested in: ease of use, internationalization, nice packaging, just making things a good “experience”. So I think distributions have been very instrumental in making Linux successful, and that whole thing started happening very early on (some of the first distributions started happening early 92 – on floppy disks). So they aren’t even a “necessary evil” – they are a “necessary good”. They’ve been very instrumental in making Linux be what it is, both on a technical side, but *especially* on a ease of use and approachability side. That said, exactly because they are so important, it does frustrate me when I hit things that I perceive to be steps backwards. The SuSE rant was about asking a non-technical user about a password that the non-technical user had absolutely no reason to even know, in a situation where it made no sense. That kind of senseless user hostility is something that we’ve generally come away from (and some kernel people tend to dismiss Ubuntu, but I really think that Ubuntu has generally had the right approach, and been very user-centric). The same thing is what frustrated me about many of the changes in Gnome 3. The whole “let’s make it clutter-free” was taken to the point where it was actually hard to get things done, and it wasn’t even obvious *how* to do things when you could do them. That kind of minimalist approach is not forward progress, it’s just UI people telling people “we know better”, even if it makes things harder to do. That kind of “things that used to be easy are suddenly hard or impossible” just drives me up the wall, and frustrates me. As to my own influence: it really goes the other way. The distributions have huge influences on the kernel, and not only in the form of employing a lot of the engineers. I actively look to the distributions to see which parts of the kernel get used, and often when people suggest new features, one of the things that really clinches it for me is if a manager for some distribution speaks up and says “we’re already using that, because we needed it for xyz”. Sure, I end up influencing them through what I merge, and how it’s done, but at the same time I really do see the distributions as one of the first users of the kernel, and the whole way we do releases (based on time, not features) is partly because that way distributions can plan ahead sanely. They know the release schedule to within a week or two, and we try very hard to be reliable and not do crazy things. We have a very strict “no regressions” rule, for example, and a large part of that rule is so that people – very much including the people involved in distributions – don’t need to fear upgrades. If it used to work a certain way, we try very hard to make sure it continues to work that way. Sure, bugs happen, and some change may not be noticed in time, but on the whole I think a big part of kernel development is to try to make it as painless as possible for people to upgrade smoothly. Because if you make upgrades painful, it just means that people will stay back. SM : You’ve been doing this for 20 years. What do you think of the newest crop of kernel contributors? Do you see any rising stars? Do you see any positive or worrisome trends with respect to the kind and caliber of contribution from younger developers? LT : I’m very happy that we still have a very wide developer base, and we continue to see more than a thousand different people for each release (which is roughly every three months or so). A lot of those contributions come from people who make just tiny one-liner changes, and some of them are never heard from again once they got their one small fix done, but on the other hand, the small one-liner changes is how many others gets started. That said, one of the things that *has* changed a lot in the 20 years is that we certainly have a lot more “process” in place. Most of those one-liners didn’t get to me directly – many of them came through multiple layers of submaintainers etc. By the time I see most “rising stars” they’ve already been doing smaller changes for a long time. The one worrisome trend is pretty much inevitable: the kernel *is* getting big, and a lot of the core code is quite complex and sometimes hard to really wrap your head around. Core areas like the VM subsystem or the core VFS layer simply are not easy to get into for a new developer. That makes it a bit harder to get started if that’s what you are interested in – the bar has simply been raised from where it was ten or fifteen years ago. At the same time, I do think it’s still fairly easy to get involved, you may just have to start in a less central place. Most kernel people start off worrying about one particular driver or platform, and “grow” from there. We do seem to have quite a lot of developers, and I’ve talked to open source project maintainers that are very envious of just how many people we have involved in the kernel. SM : You’ve said that it’s the technical challenge that keeps you involved and motivated. Surely there are plenty of technical challenges in the world. Why stick with the kernel? LT : I think it’s partly because I’m the kind of person who doesn’t flit from one project to another. I keep on doing Linux, because once I get started, I’m kind of obstinate that way. But part of it is simply the reason I started doing a kernel in the first place – if what you are interested in is low-level interactions with hardware, a kernel is where it is all at. Sure, there are tons of technical challenges out there, but very few of them are as interesting as an operating system kernel if you are into that kind of low-level interaction between software and hardware. SM : As the number of systems and architectures supported by the Linux kernel continues to grow, you can’t possibly have development hardware for each of them. How do you verify the quality and functionality of all the change requests you get? LT : Oh, that’s easy: I don’t. The whole model is built on a network of trust among developers that have come to know each other over the years. There’s no way I can test all the platforms we support – the same way there is no way I can check every single commit that gets merged through me. And I wouldn’t even really even *want* to check each hardware or each change – the point of open source and distributed development is that you do things together. We have a few tens of “highlevel” maintainers for various subsystems (eg networking, USB drivers, graphics, particular hardware architectures etc etc), and even those maintainers can’t test everything in their area, because they won’t have that particular hardware etc. I trust them, and they in turn trust the people they work with. I think any big project is about finding people you can trust, and really then depending on that trust. I don’t *want* to micro-manage people, and I couldn’t afford to even if I did want to. And the thing is, smart people (and people who have what I call “good taste”, which is often even more important) may be rare, but you do recognize them. I think one of my biggest successes is actually outside Linux: recognizing how good a developer Junio Hamano was on git, and trusting him enough to just ask if he would be willing to maintain the project. Being able to let go and trusting somebody else is *important*, because without that kind of trust you can’t get big projects done. What will Linus do with the prize money, if he wins? “I guess I won’t have to worry about the kids education any more,” he says. Thanks, Linus, for taking the time to chat with me. And good luck! We hope you win the Millenium Technology Prize! Photo credit: Wikipedia

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An Interview With Linus Torvalds

TuneUp Takes On Shazam With Free (And Ad-Free) Mobile Music ID App

jos — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 17:00:33 +0000

TuneUp , the service that cleans up your iTunes or Windows Media music collection, is moving into mobile from an unexpected angle. Unlike the TuneUp iTunes and Windows Media plugins, the main feature of the new iPhone app isn’t its ability to correct song titles and supply missing album artwork. Instead, you can activate the app when you’re listening to music that you don’t recognize, then it will identify the song based on the audio. (You can also look up the lyrics, and there’s a link to download the song from iTunes.) In other words, yes, the experience is pretty similar to Shazam and SoundHound. I tested TuneUp Mobile by playing some of the music on my laptop, and it identified the correct songs without fail. That’s not to say that TuneUp is better than the competition, but it holds its own. The real differentiator is monetization, specifically the lack thereof — the app offers unlimited song identifications for free, and there are no ads either. (Both SoundHound and Shazam offer free apps, but they’re ad-supported.) Founder and CEO Gabe Adiv says he’s “not concerned with monetization of the mobile app right now.” It’s much harder to convince consumers to pay for something on smartphones than it is on their desktops or laptops, so rather than trying to squeeze money from the app, TuneUp is treating it as a sales tool for its desktop product. In addition to the song identification, the app also provides a “free diagnostic” of the music on your phone, identifying ways that the TuneUp plugin could improve your collection. So in some ways, even though it’s ad-free, the app itself is functioning as an ad for the TuneUp plugin. In the future, Adiv says he wants to bring more of TuneUp’s features the phones — and perhaps his view on monetization will change then. You can download the app here . And speaking of the plugin, TuneUp also just announced that it has crossed 9 million registered users.

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TuneUp Takes On Shazam With Free (And Ad-Free) Mobile Music ID App

It’s Not About Instagram — It’s About Mobile

ACMAir — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 06:52:21 +0000

Editor’s note : Guest author Keith Teare is General Partner at his incubator Archimedes Labs and CEO of just.me . He was a co-founder of TechCrunch. Follow him on Twitter @kteare . It has been more than a week now, but Techmeme today is dominated by Instagram related headlines. Was the Board involved ? Did Marc Andreessen know? Did Instagram take the $50m from Sequoia and others before agreeing to be acquired? Was $2bn the right ask? Was $1 billion cheap or is it a bubble? These are soap opera-like questions. Interesting? For sure if you have insomnia. Deep? Not really. A week after the acquisition I think we all need to be stepping back and reflecting on the meaning of the deal as it relates to our future. Actually, if we do that, many of the other questions do become easier to answer, and possibly more interesting. So, here goes. Facebook got Instagram cheaply. Instagram was a cheap deal for Facebook. Focusing on the dollar amount is frankly meaningless unless you were an investor or employee in Instagram. The only really important number is that the deal represents 1% of Facebook. The $1 billion number arises based on the assumption that Facebook will IPO at about a $100 billion valuation (which may be conservative). 1% of Facebook is so little to the founders and shareholders of Facebook that the deal could be done and agreed over the weekend with only a minimum of Board involvement. There is no bubble There is definitely no bubble here. For Facebook to acquire the mobile DNA represented by Instagram (not unlike the DNA they acquired when Bret Taylor’s FriendFeed was acquired many moons ago) for 1% of the company is a cheap deal. Mobile is a life or death play for the Internet giants A cursory glance at the Facebook S1 filing should make clear how important mobile is to the company: Growth in use of Facebook through our mobile products, where our ability to monetize is unproven, as a substitute for use on personal computers may negatively affect our revenue and financial results. We had 432 million MAUs who used Facebook mobile products in December 2011. While most of our mobile users also access Facebook through personal computers, we anticipate that the rate of growth in mobile usage will exceed the growth in usage through personal computers for the foreseeable future, in part due to our focus on developing mobile products to encourage mobile usage of Facebook. We have historically not shown ads to users accessing Facebook through mobile apps or our mobile website. In February 2012, we announced plans to include sponsored stories in users’ mobile News Feeds. However, we do not currently directly generate any meaningful revenue from the use of Facebook mobile products, and our ability to do so successfully is unproven. Accordingly, if users increasingly access Facebook mobile products as a substitute for access through personal computers, and if we are unable to successfully implement monetization strategies for our mobile users, or if we incur excessive expenses in this effort, our financial performance and ability to grow revenue would be negatively affected. So, the true meaning of the acquisition for Facebook was that it represents an inexpensive bet on helping the company face up to its challenges on mobile. Mobile innovation will disrupt and build enormous value Now, having said that, $1 billion is a lot of money. And the size of the deal represents proof, if proof was needed, that mobile software innovation will drive real value in the years ahead. Instagram represents the iconic deal at the beginning of a new era of mobile computing, characterized by consumers using devices to capture and share their lives with each other, and having no need of desktops or laptops to do so. Instagram is the Netscape or YouTube of the new era Every era has its iconic deals that signify the start of the era. In Web 1.0 it was the Netscape IPO ; In Web 2.0 it was the acquisition of YouTube . In the mobile era it is the acquisition of Instagram. This is the first, and will not be the largest, deal of this new era. Already there is talk of Square being valued at $4 billion . Others of this size are surely coming. Web 2.0 is over The key takeaway from the last week is that Web 2.0 is now firmly in our rear-view mirror. Consumer adoption of powerful mobile computing devices and their adoption of the services that the mobile era brings means that innovation and value will now largely be found in mobile software and services, and mobile’s disruption of real-world businesses as well as of web 1.0 and 2.0. The numbers are clear and compelling The numbers support this thesis. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’ Mary Meeker, a regular analyst of the growth of the mobile internet, has documented it recently , showing both internet traffic and device sales beginning to eclipse the volumes for desktops and laptiops. But, and this is huge, we are only at the beginning of this era . The number of smart phones is still tiny compared to feature phones. We only just reached the point where monthly sales of smart phones eclipsed feature phones in the US. Over the next few years billions of smart phones will ship and be used by consumers to manage and record their lives. Enterprises will discard dated architectures to empower employees to use mobile for most tasks. Governments will use mobile to deliver services to citizens. The world is not going to stand still. Mobile or death. In all of this existing businesses will either be reinvented or die. Even relatively recent Web 2.0 services will fall into disuse as this trend grows, And re-invention will certainly require mergers and acquisitions. New behemoths will be born that will not want to be acquired – the Yahoo, Google, Facebook sized companies of this era. All talk of bubbles is both mistaken and perplexing when you examine the real trends that are unfolding, unleashed by the innovation at Apple, and others. Fasten your seat belts. We are about to take off.