Online learning startup Knewton has a new chief operating officer. David Liu, the former senior VP at AOL who spearheaded its Lifestreaming efforts and is also an angel investor (SimpleGeo, BlockChalk), is joining Knewton as COO and a member of the board of directors.

Knewton is an adaptive learning platform which raised a $12.5 million B round last April from Accel, Bessemer, First Round, and Reid Hoffman. Knewton currently offers online test prep and tutorials for the SAT, LSAT, and GMAT using adaptive learning algorithms which progressively make the questions harder or easier depending on each student’s knowledge and ability.

Liu’s charge is to help turn Knewton into a platform for textbook publishers and schools to create their own adaptive learning tools. Knewton proved itself with its test prep products, but now wants to move into the center of the education market, an approach other education startups like Grockit are also pursuing.

Hoping to cash in further on Ning's shuttering of its free version, competitor Grou.ps is upping the ante with the launch of "WinWin", a referral program directly targeting so-called Ning exiles. The service claims to have already migrated more than 50,000 Ning networks, making it the largest "do-it-yourself social networking platform", and hopes to continue this trend by rewarding new converts and those who encourage others to follow suit. Specifically, Grou.ps will be dishing out credits which can be converted into a host of premium features such as extra bandwidth. The size of the reward is proportional to the size of the migrated network so the bigger the switcher, the more credits awarded to both the referrer and the owner of the converted network.

Many pixels have been spilled over Steve Ballmer’s admission that “[Apple has] sold certainly more [iPads] than I’d like them to have sold.” As Ars points out, Ballmer just doesn’t get why a dumbed down machine running a poky processor is so popular. However, any media lover can tell you it’s not about running Excel and Powerpoint on a tablet – it’s about doing a few simple things without much fuss. Here’s what Microsoft can do to build a great tablet platform that people will actually buy.

Use the Zune interface – As the four people who own Zunes will attest, the UI is great. It’s so great, in fact, that MS is planning on using parts of it in Windows Phone 7. But we’re not talking about Windows Phones, are we? We’re talking about a usable, cool tablet. So take the best of the Zune and blow it up to tablet size.

Ignore Windows 7 – Seriously: unless you’re an insurance adjuster or an EMT, you don’t need a full-bore version of Windows on your tablet. What you need is a media player and a few basic functions, not a full programming platform for folks to write garbage data entry apps. After all, isn’t that what the Internet is for?

Read more…

As one of the world’s leading media publishers, it’s critical for The New York Times Company to stay ahead of the curve in the digital space, or die trying. Hence, its efforts on the desktop with Times Reader 2.0, as well as its mobile website and multi-platform applications.

But the company has now come up with an additional way of deriving (sorely needed) revenues from its mobile apps apart from selling or slapping ads on them: licensing.

The NYT is reportedly experimenting with a platform dubbed Press Engine, which will allow other publishers to produce their own apps for devices such as the iPhone and iPad, apparently because they kept asking for a decent way to do so.

According to AdAge, which gained insights about the platform straight from a Times spokesperson, publishers will pay a one-time license fee for the platform at first, followed by a monthly maintenance fee. Any revenues generated from advertising or distribution of the apps, the publishers will get to keep for themselves.

Update: the press release is up.

The iPhone and iPad application templates will include the following features:

- partial offline reading and the ability to save articles;
- share functionality;
- photo gallery, audio and video;
- horizontal and vertical reading;
- simple search; and
- device-standard advertising units.

The first publishers to sign up for Press Engine are the Telegraph Media Group and three U.S. newspapers, namely Dallas Morning News, Providence Journal and Press-Enterprise.

James Moroney, CEO and publisher at the Dallas Morning News, is quoted as saying that the company plans to debut its iPad app, built using Press Engine, near the beginning of next year.

Like any publisher with no intention of getting left behind as the world evolves, the Dallas Morning News will of course need to figure out how to marry charging for the iPad application with posting all of its content free on the Web, Moroney acknowledges.

In other words: licensing another publisher’s apps does not a business model make.

Christine Topalian, director of the News Services division at the Times, also told AdAge that the initiative will not necessarily result in a tsunami of NYT app clones from publishers, but rather aims to help them “take the DNA of [its mobile apps] and the functionality of them”.

Nevertheless, if you start seeing news sites offering mobile applications that vaguely remind you of your experience with the NYT’s apps, you might just be looking at one that was replicated with their help, in exchange for a licensing fee.

Like a good number of startups, payments technology giant Visa too wants to make shopping on the Web more socially interactive, visually appealing and easy to manage.

Today, the company is formally introducing a free Web-based tool dubbed Rightcliq, which it markets as a social e-commerce service.

Essentially, Rightcliq is a browser add-on aimed to enhance and speed up your online shopping experience, by letting you auto-fill personal address and payment card information stored on its servers on merchant checkout forms.

Users can also bundle goods they want to buy online in their personal ‘Wishspace’ – a sort of (nifty) visual wishlist – where one can manage items of interest but also monitor and track history and delivery of purchases.

In addition, the tool lets people involve friends and relatives in their purchasing decisions via email or Facebook, and access special offers from select online merchants like 1-800 flowers and Barnes & Noble directly. All in all, a pretty decent offering.

Worth noting: the launch of Rightcliq comes shortly after Visa completed its $2 billion acquisition of online fraud prevention and payment gateway provider CyberSource, whose global client base includes 300,000 e-retailers.

You can ‘enroll’ here, provided you don’t use an ancient, out-of-date browser like I do (Google Chrome, facepalm).

In all seriousness, I think this is something I could really use, so looking forward to Chrome support and a compatible extension. If I like it, you’ll hear more about it.

Exclusive – Mobile ad exchange network operator Mobclix is kicking off a monthly series of infographics based on its analytics platform and advertising impressions served by the startup.

In particular, Mobclix will use the infographics to highlight trends and other findings about a variety of platforms, including Apple's iOS (iPhone and iPad), Android and Windows Mobile 7.

The stats used for the infographics come from the total number of iPad ads served by Mobclix, which currently translates to some 300 million monthly impressions according to the company.

Here’s the first infographic for July 2010, which the company will introduce shortly:

Mobclix posits that out of the 295,488 iPhone apps currently available on the App Store, 284,989 apps were compatible on the iPad at the end of June 2010.

That’s close to 96.5 percent.

The startup adds that click-through rates for iPad apps are nearly 11 times higher when it concerns rich media video ads in comparison to standard display banner ads. Aside from better conversion rates for rich media advertising units, developers also stand to earn more from iPad apps that iPhone apps altogether: on average, iPad apps command eCPMs that can be up to five times higher than that of their smaller-screen counterparts, says Mobclix.

Out of 15,547 iPad-specific apps, the ‘Games’ category has a 20 percent share of the App Store at the end of June 2010.

Distimo, another app store analytics provider, says there were 20,798 iPad applications available at the end of July 2010, 4,903 of which were Games (roughly 23.5 percent).

It’s safe to say games are popular on the iPad either way (surprise!), whether they make up a fourth or a fifth of the total number of iPad-specific apps. Be that as it may, Distimo said over one third of iPad-only apps were games back in April, admittedly when the number of available apps at the time was still reasonably low.

Mobclix also claims engagement is much higher on the tablet device: the time spent by iPad users on their gaming apps is said to be three times higher (about 10 minutes more) than iPhone users on the same app.

If you’re interested in the topic, be sure to read our guest article “How The iPad Will Change The iPhone Game Industry” by Alex Ahlund, CEO of AppVee and AndroidApps.

By now, I’m sure you’ll be aware that there’s a New York man named Paul Ceglia who claims he owns most of Facebook, which would turn him into an instant multi-billionaire if we were living in his Utopia and not planet Earth.

The wood-pellet entrepreneur filed suit against Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg last June, claiming 84% ownership of Facebook as well as additional monetary damages based on a web development project contract signed back in April 2003. The company calls the lawsuit ‘frivolous’ and without any merit whatsoever, so that story is to be continued in court.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg tracked down Ceglia for a fascinating face-to-face interview.

In said interview, the man says a number of interesting things, including:

- his arrest and a suit by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo two months later, both the result of complaints related to his wood-pellet business, got him looking through old files to find assets to pay back customers. One of those files held the 2003 contract with Zuckerberg.

- he had forgotten about the contract, which is why he stepped forward so many years later.

- now that he found it, he says he’s “willing to come after” the Facebook CEO, and that “a deal’s a deal”.

- there is more evidence to his agreement with Zuckerberg than the contract, including year-long email conversations.

- Ceglia remembers the 18-year-old Zuckerberg as a great coder but "probably one of the most difficult people that ever worked for me, in the sense that he simply could not finish his work.” Celgia adds: “He just could not keep a deadline."

- Ceglia said he looks forward to a day when he might employ Zuckerberg again. He is quoted thusly: “If at some point in the future I start running Facebook, I guess I'm going to have to hire him to keep running the company. I really don't have much interest in it."

- About a month after filing the lawsuit, Ceglia signed up for a Facebook account. He likes it as it gave him a chance to get back in touch with old friends from high school.

A riveting read.

On top of all this, it turns out there’s a new contestant for ‘owner of Facebook’ in town.

Bloomberg also talked to Andrew Logan, founder and CEO of StreetDelivery, which Ceglia did work for when he set up a competitor called StreetFax in 2003 and hired Zuckerberg to do some coding work on the company’s website.

Logan says that if Ceglia's contract with Zuckerberg gives the latter an ownership interest in Facebook, that interest may in fact belong to him. His lawyers are said to be looking at the old contracts and settlement papers with Ceglia.

"We're going to lay claim that I own it," said Logan. "He was under contract to me."

Who’s next in line?

Some day, someone should do a Hollywood movie on the origins of Facebook. Oh, wait.

WikiLeaks, the Sweden-based organisation that publishes anonymous leaks of secret material (most recently 90,000 documents about the War in Afghanistan) has until now, relied on donations to fund its activities. That's lead to outages when funds became scarce, for whatever reason. But today WikiLeaks is unleashing a potentially devastating strike against critics which could see it become an almost unstoppable force in the world's media. It's joined Flattr. Flattr is another Sweden-based outfit with close links to The Pirate Bay as the the brainchild of a group of people formerly associated with The [infamous] Pirate Bay, including Peter Sunde. Flattr has a micropayments business model based on the idea of people tipping content they like, Digg or perhaps Facebook Like buttons - but this time with real money. As a result, WikiLeaks Afghan War Diary, which has made headlnes around the world, is currently pulling in hundreds of Flattrs, with most of them anonymous. We covered Flattr's launch in July.

Runa Capital, a new Russian VC firm, has launched today with a $30m seed fund for early-stage Russian technology startups. It's founded by Serguei Beloussov, chairman of Parallels and Acronis and will be advised by Alexander Galitsky of Almaz Capital Partners. In particular the new fund will target the "rapid growth tech sectors" of cloud computing, machine learning, virtualisation and mobile/Internet applications, with the aim of helping local startups focused on these areas to "grow and compete at a global level". The companies that Runa Capital invests in will also be supported by the Runapark business incubator. Interestingly, the fund is also offering investors from the U.S. and elsewhere in Europe, opportunities to share expertise and co-invest in order to tap the potential of the Russian early-stage technology sector.

When Twitter first strolled into the world of commerce with EarlyBird. I yawned. Two-for-one tickets to the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice?” Pass. A 32″ Vizio HDTV from Target for $349.99? Oh boy! Except now it’s on sale for $359.99, a staggering difference of $10. Exasperated sigh. That’s not even enough to buy a ticket to see Nicolas Cage’s latest flop at my local theater.

Although the deals have improved (most notably, JetBlue’s 20% discount which led to 1,000 ticket sales within the first 10 hours) I’ve been generally underwhelmed. However, I get the feeling that’s about to change, as Twitter tinkers with its deal formula.

It’s unclear exactly how Twitter’s commerce strategy will evolve but if product manager Shiva Rajaraman is right, EarlyBird will define a new category in social deals: offers based on real-time conversation. Rajaraman envisions a system that will track company and sector trends for advertising partners. The partners could then work with Twitter to quickly deploy deals based around trending conversations and emerging demand. As long as this doesn’t spark a tsunami of Justin Bieber-related goods, I’m in.

“We’re trying to say look there’s a ton of organic conversation on Twitter that is often about expressing want articulated or inarticulated…In the sense of saying “Hey, I’m hear and I really like this,” or “I’d love if there was a deal for this product because then I could afford it.” What we’d really like to do is start having our retail and advertising partners ask that question directly to the people who follow them and then take that input back and craft basically a great deal for them. So we’re trying to couple this demand and supply thing, it’s not just about a discount.

What we’re doing is working with these people to say particularly for the flight of a deal but more broadly, are you listening to that can you listen to that every hour and see what’s happening? The second piece which is something we haven’t done but we’re interested in exploring is how can we publish these trends to people so they can keep an eye on it and then respond actively as a trend hits their space.”

For example, Rajaraman says, if a celebrity wears a new outfit and that style starts trending, Twitter could tip a fashion retailer, who might offer a special deal on a similar outfit. If Twitter can efficiently mine the conversation, this could create a powerful and dynamic advertising/distribution model, with retailers tapping into the slippery vein of real-time demand.

For more on how Twitter is using EarlyBird as a test lab and its monetization strategy (Twitter is trying out various models, including revenue-share and a one time media fee for product launches), see the video with Rajaraman above.

How will Twitter make money? It’s a question as old as time itself. Well, at least as old as Twitter itself. This weekend, film critic (and excellent Twitterer) Roger Ebert revisited the most obvious way Twitter could make money: charge to use it.

Ebert was surprised when a survey he found last week said that 0 percent (yes, zero) of Twitter users would be willing to pay for the service. With 1,900 responses, the survey was relatively small — but still, zero is zero. But it turns out the survey was “seriously flawed,” in Ebert’s words. How does he know? Because he sent out his own survey (a poll he created) to his nearly 200,000 followers.

Ebert wrote up a post on his Chicago Sun Times blog with the results. What did he find? Of the 3,901 who answered the poll (so more than double the original survey), 19.4 percent said they would be willing to pay for Twitter.

Ebert didn’t give any kind of variables in his poll, such as how much people would be willing to pay. He simply wanted to see if users would pay anything for it, because he would. And clearly he’s not alone.

While many people have (rightfully) argued over the years that charging for Twitter would ruin its main appeal (that anyone in the world can send these short message out at any time), Twitter could always offer some soft of pro accounts with more features or analytics. The company has stayed away from such ideas for users, but is going to be charging some brands for similar features. They’ve also stayed away from showing traditional ads in the stream, instead going with promoted tweets and trending topics.

But all of that seems to have Ebert a bit worried:

I have no idea how Twitter can pay for itself. I wouldn’t mind a reasonable number of ads in my stream. There are ads on almost every other site or service on the Web. If software analyzed my (public) steam and targeted ads I would theoretically find interesting, that would make sense.

I don’t have any answers. I succeeded only in proving 0.00% was too low.

As a company with over $150 million in funding, Twitter hasn’t been in a rush to make money. But they still will eventually need to make it. Data deals with Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo provide some revenue. And the aforementioned promoted tweets provide a bit more (as do the newer @earlybird ideas). But Twitter has yet to really nail their money-making scheme. And while Ebert’s ideas are nothing new, they do (obviously) make some sense.

But what I find most interesting in all of this is just how adamant Ebert is that he would pay to use Twitter. Previously, Ebert was on record as saying he would never join the service. Now, despite joining nearly three years after me, he’s almost sent as many tweets as I have (and I think I tweet a lot).

This part Friday at our Social Currency CrunchUp I was joined on stage by Tristan Walker (director of business development at Foursquare), Kara Nortman (Senior Vice President of Publishing at CityGrid Media), and Shiva Rajaraman (a product manager at Twitter) to talk about check-ins, coupons, and commerce. You can watch the entire conversation in the video above, but I wanted to highlight a few key parts of it.

Overall, an element that kept popping up during the talk was the idea that the check-in is just the first (or base) component of location. All parties seemed to be in agreement that the field was going to expand far beyond that. Obviously, Foursquare is one of the key players there (and popularized the term itself), but even Walker agrees that they are going to have go beyond this first phase. He notes that the key to Foursquare is to “socialize loyalty” no matter how that is done.

Walker said that recently with the heat wave in New York City, someone created a fake venue called “Heatpocalypse.” Some 5,000 people checked-in to it in one day. And again, it’s not really an actual venue, it’s a state of mind, essentially. But all of those people were told that a deal to get yogurt was nearby — a perfect potential solution for the heat. This is the type of thing Foursquare never would have thought of as an idea, because it’s not really a check-in to a venue, but it speaks to how moving beyond that basic concept might work.

Rajaraman noted that the check-in was a great game mechanic, but said that a ton of other game mechanics will emerge. And that’s exactly what Twitter wants because they’re going to federate and mine all of that data to see what works best among their users. Notably, Rajaraman also indicated that Twitter was thinking about the best way to filter out types of content you may not care about — such as check-in tweets.

When I asked the group about Google and Facebook both getting involved in the location space, they were mainly positive in saying that it would be good for everyone. Well, except when Nortman said that “everyone should be afraid of Facebook.” She also hinted that Google can be a bit scary too if they start focusing more of showing content rather than just pointing to it. This very idea was on display later in the day when Google and Yelp took the stage.

Interestingly, Walker ended the conversation by noting that everyone in the location space seemed to be “looking for the Holy Grail that doesn’t exist.” By that he means a single way to do location-based coupons. This is all about much more than that, he reasons.

Many a post has come before this one on the special adventure that is pitching TechCrunch. And while most of our writers have their own preferences (Please don’t call my cell before 7 a.m. PDT unless you’re Google, and you’re buying Twitter. And you’ve made breakfast in bed.) there’s definitely a right and wrong way to ping tips@techcrunch if you’re a startup hungry for coverage. The following email thankfully fit into the former category.

On Jul 29, 2010, at 11:00 PM, Mark Nielsen wrote:

TechCruch Team,

Another late night, we're tired, hopped up on caffeine, malnourished and could probably use a shower…but man do we love this startup S#!T. We are sitting here with the launch of our productivity tool rule.fm ( http://rule.fm – screenshots attached) around the corner and we figured hey, we dig a good read on the CRUNCH, wonder if they'd be interested in what's been brewing in a garage somewhere in So-Cal. 6 months ago we were code heavy, experience freaks that just weren't satisfied having to use Basecamp (or any other productivity tool) to manage our client projects. We decided we'd rather not see the light of day for awhile than have to live with knowing that with just a little bit of creative (ok, maybe a lot), a pinch of logic (more like a boat-load) and a dash of sexy (we'll leave that one to your imagination), we could revive the productivity software world with a tool that would even make Apple cry. What's happening — people, projects, documents, and more…under one rule. What's brewing — wikis, CRM/opportunities and Money (intense accounting with style).

We are not

* Funded
* Backed by a PR firm

We are

* Virtually completely unknown to the blogosphere
* Literally in a garage right now (see attached picture)
* Underpaid
* Overworked
* Chomping at the bit to show the world what RULE is made of

What we want

* To give you the first taste. The only thing out there is our splash page and we want you to have the first peak at our product before we release the tour this week just prior to going live on Aug 3rd. This is last minute, so you guys may not be able to move on this before the tour, but we wanted you to have it anyways.
* To be notified before you release anything to the public

What's on tap

* Friday July 30th, our tour goes live on our website still able to request an invite
* Tuesday August 3rd, we would like to give the public access to RULE unless someone gives us a better idea

Thank you for your time and dedication.

Cheers,

Mark Nielsen and Patrick Carmitchel

–

Step 1. BE INTERESTING

You know, just like with almost everything else in life, once you’ve got the “be interesting” thing down, that’s pretty much it. Hell, you don’t even have to spell the name of our blog right (Hint, it’s not “Techcruch”). Sure it helps if you do part of our job for us by providing screencaps, funding info, possible competitors, current functionality, future plans and launch dates, etc … but first and foremost don’t bore us. We’re business reporters, not robots.

Yes, sometimes there’s a fine line between “being creative” and “being a stalker” but the truth is that if you’ve done more than just copy and paste a press release, you’ve already surpassed about 70% of our inbox. So we want to hear that you’re hopped up on caffeine, malnourished and could probably use a shower… (So could we, actually). Despite the fact that our imaginations might be too vivid for your “dash of sexy,” anyone, I repeat ANYONE who thinks the words “work productivity” and “sexy” even remotely belong in the same sentence deserves some consideration.

We’re looking for stories, so have one. There is no Step 2.




Extra credit: Make sure to read this post. Also, it’s totally cool if you send us a picture of yourself in your garage, as long as you are fully clothed.

Garage photo, courtesy Mark Nielsen and Patrick Carmitchel.

You can read our RULE.fm coverage here.

I’ve spoken to four different investors over the last two weeks trying to get at least a small piece of an angel financing round being quietly pitched by Delicous founder Joshua Schachter. He’s raising just $1 – $2 million, we’ve heard, at a valuation that may be as high as $15 million.

Schachter sold Delicious, one of the definitive startups that re-energized the consumer Internet sector in 2004-2005, to Yahoo in 2005. He left Yahoo in 2008, and joined Google in 2009. He left Google earlier this year.

Entrepreneurs like Schachter are highly valued by investors. The success rate of repeat entrepreneurs higher than first timers. And one potential investor put it succinctly – “Even if the company fails, someone will buy it just to get Schachter. There’s no way we lose our money.”

So what’s the name of the new startup? That seems to still be up in the air. I contacted Schachter to get confirmation of the funding raise and to ask what the new startup will do. He won’t comment on the funding. But he did say he was tossing around a few ideas for the startup. His response:

I’m either going to launch an open source operating system for unmanned aerial vehicles, or build a first person shooter to teach non-violent solutions based on buddhist principles. Or a pet food review site. Which one do you like best?

We’re going to take that as a “no comment,” too. Although I think the U.S. government would just love to use an open source OS for its UAVs. I’d go with that one, Joshua.

The crux behind game mechanics is the feeling that you've accomplished something; “Whether you're clicking on a plot of land or a musical note, that is an accomplishment" says Social Gaming Network's Shervin Pishevar. Social gaming gives you the opportunity to share these goals with your social graph so that many people see them, as well as the chance to work on these accomplishments collaboratively.

At Friday's Social Currency CrunchUp, leaders from the Social Gaming space including Pishevar, Disney Mobile SVP Bart Decrem, Stanford School of Business Professor Jennifer Acker and SCVNGR CEO Seth Priebatsch sat down together in order to discuss gaming's latest incarnation.


What elements are needed for addictive games?

Pavlovian mechanics are crucial. It’s important as a user to feel like the time that you spent came up with a result, social elements like being able to see how you did with other people, and being able to play with other people play into this. Integration with music also creates an emotional linkage, one thing responsible for Tapulous’ success was the functionality to apply multiple songs from artists like Justin Bieber to Lady Gaga.

Decrem elaborates, "There’s an actual science around how to engage and monetize users, the Farmville harvest mechanic, for example. On mobile, its ‘the x factor’ does the game have magic?" What we're now seeing is what happens when the science of game mechanics in social games is combined with the quirkiness of what you see on the iPhone platform.

According to Seth Priebatsch, new employees at SCVNGR memorize a deck of 50 game dynamics like the progression dynamic, or earning points to make progress. They then can incorporate those elements into a game, "Humans love progress bars, if you see a progress bar, you want to complete it."


How will games increasingly square with the real world?

Currently all the value creation happens mostly on Facebook, but that will soon change. The panelists all agreed that this recent integration of social and mobile is beginning of a new computing platform, mainly due to the capabilities introduced by the iOS. Killer apps on this new platform will need to incorporate both a social element and an entertainment element in order to survive.

According to Pishevar, SGN is “Working on things where you’re placing your phone in the real world and seeing 3D characters walking down the street, games where you have a garden in your actual physical yard that you’re actually tending to and it's growing and you can see it on the iPhone.“

Decrem elaborates "There’s no difference to me between playing Tapulous on the iPhone and using my Starbucks card in the morning, wanting to get 15 stars so I can get a free coffee … “

Real life rewards for online behavior are a force to be reckoned with, and will increasingly become more prevalent as developers continue to experience success with them. Yelp for example, saw their usage skyrocket when they incorporated the Check-in element. "You're checking in with a physical card instead of a mobile. We haven't invented anything new."

Says Priebatsch "We are bringing one very new thing to the game framework, the open graph API. Social traffics in connections, games traffic in influence. By applying that to the real world, we are building a platform that traffics in motivations and rewards.”

In what new ways can these game mechanics can be applied in the future?

“We're really in the first or second inning on the mobile side,” says Pishevar, “The level of creativity and fun that's coming is incredible.”

Should businesses rush to apply social mechanics? “It's just natural evolution,” says DeCrem. Businesses developing a product should ask themselves, How about if you can connect with your friends? How about if we make it fun?

Piveshar’s one criticism is that the gaming industry could do so much more. “Because of the social graph many have cut corners of quality in order to monetize; We've got hypergrowth. Lots of millions have been created and its time to give something back.”

Acker brought up the idea of games that cure cancer as one way social gaming can actually benefit society, referring to HopeLab’sRe-Mission and Zamzee, "It doesn’t matter how many brochures you show a kid, he’s not going to want to [go to chemo]. But when you build an avatar called Roxy, have her shooting the cancer cells, and then when she feels feel weak you go get her a chemo tap … It's incredibly powerful."


Elements of gaming engender powerful emotions; Chemotherapy can become a positive thing and cancer becomes something you can beat. And that’s pretty formidable.





Photo: Flickr/Allaboutchase

You know what's getting old? The debate about ageing.

In today's Observer, molecular biologist Aubrey de Grey is interviewed about how he sees no reason why a human being alive today might not live to 1000. If the prediction sounds familiar it's because de Grey – this time described as a gerontologist – was subject to a similar profile in Friday's New York Times, thanks to his being a key subject of Jonathan Weiner's book Long For This World: The Strange Science of Immortality.

Right here on TechCrunch, Halcyon Molecular's William Andregg spoke to Cyan Banister about the need for humans to conquer death to allow us the time to reach the stars.

And of course, Ray Kurzweil has been at this stuff for years: according to a 2005 Wired profile "Kurzweil ingests 250 supplements, eight to 10 glasses of alkaline water and 10 cups of green tea. He also periodically tracks 40 to 50 fitness indicators, down to his ‘tactile sensitivity.’”

Christ.

Oh yes, go to any Silicon Valley party right now and you’ll find a scrawny huddle in the corner discussing the science of living forever: a topic that's gone from fringe to hot to cliché in – ironically – less time that it takes a tsetse fly to start getting interested in girls. But then why wouldn't it when the science of ageing touches on so many valley obsessions?

For a start, gerontology is a science. But it's also hacking: human bodies aren't supposed to live much beyond 80, and these are people who would gladly spend a weekend hacking a Furby to make it curse, just because it's not supposed to. Bill Gates has described bio-hacking (deathhacking?) as the logical successor to computer hacking. More importantly though, Silicon Valley people are – by and large – massive overachievers. Company founders in their teens, rich by the time they're 30, angel investors by 31, charitable foundation at 40. No wonder these people want to go on forever: just imagine what they could achieve by the time they're 1030!

And so the research goes on, millions more dollars are poured in to deathhacking startups by rich-mortal-and-terrified benefactors, dozens more books are published on the subject and every day countless startup founders jump into their Teslas and speed to their "doctors" to pick up the latest batch of pills that they hope will keep them around until someone figures this shit out. And why not?

Here's why not.

A few months ago I finished writing my book about living in hotels – a second memoir by the age of thirty, which is unwarranted by any measure. My deadline was January 1st, but I finally scraped past the finish line somewhere around the start of March. The truth is, I didn't need the extra time: I'd already had a year to write the thing, and much of that time was spent dicking around in the name of "additional research", most of which never made it into the final manuscript. But it's generally accepted that authors never make their deadlines, and my publisher gladly gave me the 90 days grace I claimed I needed to complete the task.

By contrast, Lacy is about to hit ‘send’ on her second book – a book that required many thousands of miles of travel, hundreds of interviews and an immeasurable amount of actual reporting. And yet she's delivering right on deadline. Why? Well, mainly because she's more professional than I am, but also because her publisher (being a serious business publisher rather than a chilled-out literary one) is less generous with deadline extensions. They have a schedule to keep to. And, anyway, Sarah has other important projects to be getting on with and doesn’t want to waste time.

The difference between my behavior and Sarah's is the classic "time taken to complete the task expanding to fit the deadline" curse. By knowing she’s working to a fixed deadline, Sarah is able to deliver a much more ambitious manuscript in less time than it took me to bash out a memoir for which the only research was getting up in the morning and waiting to see what happened next.

And it's that same curse that takes us to the heart of the life extension myth: that if we can live longer, then we can achieve more. We blithely assume that it's the success of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs that makes them fear death so much: they can't take their wealth or success with them so they are desperate to stick around longer and longer to double and redouble it. But what if the truth is precisely the opposite? What if the real reason these entrepreneurs have achieved so much is precisely because – more so than other mortals – they were born with a keen understanding they are working to a fixed (if unknown) deadline? It's that fear of death that makes them succeed, not the other way around.

Of course, by extending their lives – if there's any hard evidence it's possible, which of course there isn't – there's every chance that the current crop of entrepreneurs and scientists will continue achieving greater and greater things until they're hit by a bus on their 10,000th birthday. Every day will seem like a miracle and they won't want to waste it. But even so, that first gang of grateful near-immortals will be the only ones to feel that gratitude.

Subsequent generations will never have known the idea of a strict biological deadline – the need to overachieve while there's still time – and so will be quite justified in taking things easy, diluting their work to fit the time available. Perhaps they'll start their first company in their hundred-and-teens, they'll be rich by the time they're 3000, angel investors by 3100, charitable foundation at 4000? 40,000? Whatever.

But at least they’ll have more time to enjoy life, right? Not really. Apart from rabid over-achieving, there's another thing that unites all life-extension obsessives: they look like death. "Medievally thin and pale," is how the Times (quoting Weiner's book) describes de Grey. Kurzweil spends his days glugging green tea and popping pills, not eating to excess and avoiding recreational drugs. One can only imagine how much fun life would be if you had to live like that for 1,000 years. And by 'one', I mean Dante.

So, please God, let's put an end to this deathhacking nonsense. Let's flush the pills, stock up on recreational drugs, drive fast cars, work long hours and stay inspired by nature’s crippling deadline to achieve greater and greater things in our fourscore years and ten.

After all, to paraphrase Hippocrates – the original doctor – vita might be brevis but, done right, ars can be very, very longa indeed.

On Friday at our Social Currency CrunchUp, Groupon CEO Andrew Mason sat down for an interview with our own Michael Arrington and Erick Schonfeld. Mason touched on Groupon’s history — including some dabbling with slippers with flashlights, and also gave some insight into the company’s growth as well as his view on the competition.

During the interview, Michael revealed that he’d heard that Groupon was generating $1 million in revenue a day — Mason played coy and didn’t appear to confirm this. However, he did acknowledge that the company is getting a gross margin of 50% or higher, going on to say “it’s a cool business”.

It’s safe to say that Mason, at least publicly, isn’t overly concerned about Groupon’s potential competition. Asked about the possible entry of Google into the market, Mason facetiously responded, “Google, Oh My God!”.  And Mason said that Amazon (and Woot, which it recently acquired) were primarily focused on consumer products, while Groupon caters more to local businesses.

Asked about Tippr, which acquired a number of patents relevant to this space, Mason said that Groupon has “had people look at us to see if [the patents] applied and they don’t.” Mason also doesn’t worry much about clones — the company started seeing them pop up in March 2009, but Groupon doesn’t actively do anything about them because “the basic idea of Groupon is not something we can patent” (though they do go after companies that infringe on its trademarks, like its logo).

Other key stats Mason talked about:

• Launched in November 2008
• A year ago today, we were active in 5-6 cities
• Now running in 170 cities in 22 countries
• Over 1000 employees now
• About 12 million people getting daily email. Adding 2 million a month
• 97% of businesses featured want to be featured again
• Breakage rate is probably around 10%, though Groupon doesn’t directly track it

Asked about advertising on Facebook versus Google, Mason said that six months ago Facebook was often cheaper. However, that’s changing. Mason explained that in the past, when he wasn’t really focused on the Silicon Valley scene, he would look at Facebook’s valuations and not really see how it could warrant them — but now that he’s an advertiser on Facebook, he thinks “they’re going to be worth a lot of money”.

Also see our recent interview with Mason on TechCrunch TV right here.