Underwriters Laboratories’ UL Environment group — which validates claims, through lab testing, that a company or its product is environmentally sustainable, and helps thwart “greenwashing” — today reported that its first-ever Gold level Sustainable Product Certification (SPC) for a laptop was given to the forthcoming, Lenovo ThinkPad T420.

According to a UL press statement, the SPC Gold certification indicates “a product has met the most stringent and prestigious of three levels of compliance in the industry-wide sustainability standard for laptops, IEEE 1680.1…including reduction or elimination of environmentally sensitive materials in product and packaging, energy conservation, end-of-life management and corporate environmental practices.”

In 2007, Lenovo began formal Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reporting. In 2008, the company set a voluntary target of improving its carbon efficiency by 10 percent between 2007 and 2012.

According to Lenovo’s 2009-2010 CSR report, the most recent available, the company has been focusing on reduction of non-recyclable materials in its product lines across the board, making its products from enterprise to consumer fully recyclable, and reducing the amount of energy its products and operations use. Its initiatives to drive customers to recycle, rather than dump their spent electronics in a landfill, have been least successful in the Americas, and most successful in markets in Europe the Middle East and Africa (EMEA).

The company has faced other environmental challenges, despite attaining Gold certifications from UL, and EPEAT on some of its products. Lenovo’s position on the Greenpeace Guide to Greener Electronics fell from top spot in the mid-2000s to fourteenth in 2010.

Here’s part of what Greenpeace had to say about the company’s overall environmental results and commitment:

“[Lenovo] remains encumbered by a penalty point imposed for backtracking on its commitment to eliminate PVC vinyl plastic and brominated flame retardants (BFRs) in all its products by the end of 2009.

[The company] made significant progress on three energy criteria; it now supports the need for global emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) to peak by 2015, with a 30 percent reduction in emissions from industrialised countries by 2020 and a 50 percent reduction by 2050, relative to 1990; it has set its own targets for reducing GHG emissions, aiming to eliminate or offset its scope 1 emissions by 100 percent by April 2011 and achieve absolute reductions in scope 2 emissions, with progressive targets up to 20 percent by April 2020, relative to 2008/09; it also reports the percentage of its products that meet the latest Energy Star standards, with many of its products exceeding the standard.”

In light of the company’s track record — some good, some bad when it comes to sustainability — will certifications like this one from UL Environment help Lenovo win environmentally conscious customers?

Call it the anti-Facebook effect, but this private group text messaging thing is starting to get some serious traction. The chart above shows the growth in text messages per day going through GroupMe, the group chat startup that launched last May at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon. By the time our San Francisco Disrupt came around in September, GroupMe had reached its one millionth cumulative text message, and was doing about 30,000 text messages a day. Fast forward to today, and it is now doing one million text messages per day.

That is an incredible ramp. In mid-October, it was at 100,000 messages per day, which ballooned to 450,000 messages per day the last week of December. And now a month and a half later it’s doubled again.

GroupMe lets you create private groups on your mobile phone and send SMS messages to everyone at once. It is perfect for ski weekends, coordinating a night out with friends, or back-channel communications at a conference or event. (Competitors include Beluga and Fast Society). You can set up a group on your phone with an iPhone or Android app to send group text messages, share photos, or initiate conference calls. So one message can easily turn into 6, 12, or more individual texts (up to 25 people can be in one group).

Although GroupMe has plenty of cash right now (it just raised $10.6 million in January), paying for all of those text messages will become expensive fast. Of course, the more SMS messages it pushes through its system, the better discounts it can negotiate with SMS aggregators, but even at a penny per text (which is a complete guess on my part), that would be $10,000 per day for 1 million texts. Even if GroupMe is paying a fraction of that, it’s texts keep growing and the charges can add up fast. (For heavy users without unlimited text messaging plans, this can become an issue as well since carriers charge both senders and receivers of text messages).

On Friday, I visited the New York City offices of GroupMe and founders Jared Hecht and Steve Martocci have some interesting ideas for generating revenues, including sponsored groups which could be location-based. They’ve experimented with these already. But I think a better longterm solution, and I’ve discussed this before, is to offload as many messages as possible off the SMS infrastructure and just do it app-to-app over the mobile data pipe. That way SMS becomes the lowest common denominator for people in groups who don’t have smart phones, and everyone else can chat over the “free” data pipe (free to GroupMe, that is).

We heard the rumors that Research In Motion (RIM) was involved in serious talks to buy professional contact manager Gist, and today it’s official. RIM has bought Gist, we’ve confirmed with the company. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Here’s a statement from Gist: Today, we are announcing that Gist has become part of Research In Motion (RIM). We are extremely excited about our future at RIM and how Gist will be used by millions of BlackBerry users around the globe. This is a huge step towards our goal of utilizing the web-based Gist experience to allow users to build stronger professional relationships. Stay tuned for more details and thank you all for the support and encouragement that has gotten us to this next great phase at Gist. RIM also confirmed the acquisition on its BlackBerry blog.

Gist, which raised $10.8 million in funding, launched in 2008 as a “professional” communications manager, aimed at satisfying the filtering needs of a business user. Like the web service, the app organizes your streams according to your email contacts so it’s a useful way of following your colleagues, friends and professional contacts.

The Seattle-based Gist offers services that help you keep tabs on the people in your professional network, and allows you to see past messages and attachments from each contact, news about their company, and their recent messages on services like Twitter. The company also offers a number of mobile apps, and it appears that RIM will be using the technology for BlackBerry users.

Gist was founded by T.A. McCann, an entrepreneur and former senior employee in Microsoft's Exchange Server Group and was initially funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's Vulcan Capital. Last year, Gist acquired Learn That Name, a game that uses your LinkedIn contacts to help you remember the names of your business acquaintances and also launched a gadget for Gmail.

As Om Malik wrote this past December, it makes sense for RIM to use Gist to incorporate more social elements into BlackBerry phone books and to email as well. Gist says that users can continue to use its platform but it will be interesting to see if RIM will shut the service down in favor of using it exclusively for BlackBerry users. I can imagine that a number of Gist users will be pretty disappointed if this is the case.

Dick Costolo started off his speech at Mobile World Congress mentioning the fact that Twitter is very multi-platform, and how that’s a huge advantage. He siad the goals going forward were that Twitter should be instantly useful and highly mainstream. Right now the experiences are dis-similar between devices, but the “experience should be the same. I shouldn’t think how to use Twitter.” In addition he said Twitter wanted to be always present – such as not having to switch applications just to tweet.

“We used to create experiences for our users but now users are creating experiences for each-other.” He cited special initiatives Twitter did with Haiti not because there was commercial benefit, but because it created value for the users. DigitaCell Haiti had proved to be the most effective promoter of Twitter during the earthquakes because it helped the aid initiative.

A Tweet which embodied a mission for the company talked about ChoppedOnion who had done their shopping and commented on the sunset. It’s that kind of simplicity and personal connection which is effectively the life-blood of Twitter.

He also revealed that 40% of all tweets are created on mobile devices. 50% of active users are active on more than one platform.

I’ve been wandering around Mobile World Congress and I managed to bump into a startup which – although unable to can’t afford the expensive stands here – actually has an app that stands out from the crowd by quite some way. You see, it’s obvious to people that getting a decent signal on your mobile is crucial. You’ll no doubt recall how the launch of the iPhone suddenly created a massive interest in the quality and reach of mobile phone networks across the planet. Imagine being able to work out which mobile carrier was best for you based on where you are, in real time? OpenSignalMaps does just that.

They are addressing a common problem. Carrier coverage maps are often outdated, exaggerated by marketing and it’s rare that you can mash up maps to fairly compare the signal strength of each network’s base stations. All the while people make actual life decisions based on whether they can get a good signal strength or not, like travel plans, working out where they should locate their new apartment or office, or just picking a mobile provider.

In the FACE! Nevermind the man is recovering from cancer, LG just kicked Steve Jobs’ in the face. Really. Well, virtually at least. But it still counts!

At the 1:00 mark in the official Optimus Pad promo video, there’s a not-so-quick segment that shows Spec Fighter, a take on Street Fighter, where the Optimus Pad fights the “A pad” whose virtual fighter’s likeness is quite similar to Steve’s. You know, the greying beard, balding head, and wire-frame glasses hiding his kind eyes. At least the video wasn’t a Mortal Kombat clone complete with the Finish Him! moves. No, ol’ Jobs just gets a foot to the face Anderson Silva-style. The video is harmless, but will no doubt cause the Apple loyalists to rise up in the name of their leader. Click through for the action.

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In November 2010, a young man created a Quora account. A few weeks later, his account was blocked. Why? Because he had to use a real first and last name and his real name is “Hasan Hasan.”

After all, unless you’re Cher or Sirhan Sirhan, nobody has the same first and last name. After a bit of back and forth, the jack-booted Quora admin in charge of the names division requested that poor H. Hasan supply a “scan of a government ID” in order to prove that he wasn’t a troll. That’s where H.H. left it, writing:

The effort to dig up a government ID, redact non-name info, and track down a scanner is a significant barrier to sign-up but nonetheless it would not be an unreasonable request if you required this from all your users otherwise this seems nothing more than ignorant and flawed discrimination.

To be fair, while it is fairly common to use the same last and first name in some cultures, as evidenced by this quick search of LinkedIn, I’m sure there are very few foreigners in Palo Alto, where Quora is based, so clearly these cultural nuances are lost on the admins. And it gets better!

Hearken to the tale of poor Ken Ryu, an actual person whose parents apparently loved Capcom so much they named him after both Karate characters in Street Fighter. He, also, had to supply a government issued ID to Quora in order to use the service and has still not been reactivated after refusing to show ID in order to use a site approximately as useful to the world as Yahoo! Answers.

While I’m all for reducing the level of trolling on any social forum (and I do my fair share on Quora, changing my profession from Pornographer to Tiny Dancer without issue and offering silly answers to the earnest, naive questions posed by folks looking to build up their social media credentials), I think Quora’s ridiculous, birther-ist requirements for a “government-issued ID” are a little bit rough, as if the Socialist Republic of Quora was some failed post-Soviet state intent on maintaining a thriving bureaucracy.

Sadly, this policy hasn’t changed in months and poor Ken “Hadooooken” Ryu’s and H^2′s accounts are still deactivated. There is some discussion of the trend here, to read it you would have to go to Quora and if your name is Gordon Freeman or Vang Vang, you probably wouldn’t be able to make an account. Rest assured that poor Hasan++ and Ken will probably be reactivated after this post, but how many more people are trapped by Quora’s Kafka-esque policies?

ID confirmation is a hard job but jeez, Quora, it’s not like you guys are curing cancer over there. Anyone else run up against the Iron Quortin recently?

Here’s Hasan Hasan’s conversation with the Quora admins:

Conversation with Quora Admin

Nov 27, 2010Quora Admin
Hello,

One of the rules of Quora is that everyone uses his or her real full name. Do you mind changing your name to reflect that?

If this is a mistake and you are already using your real name, just reply to this message letting us know that.

You can change your name here:
Edit Profile Name

And you can find more details here:
Do I have to use my real name on Quora? Can businesses or organizations have a user account?

Thanks!

Jan 15, 2011Hasan Hasan
Hi, this is my real name.

Feb 7, 2011Hasan Hasan
Why is my account still blocked? I replied to Quora Admin email confirming my real name 3 weeks ago!

Feb 8, 2011Quora Admin
Hi,

Most people don’t have the same first and last name. Could you please send a scan of a government ID to moderation@quora.com to confirm that this is your real name? Please feel free to redact all non-name information.

Thanks,
Quora Admins

1:48pmHasan Hasan
Dear Quora Admin (do you have a real name?!),

Thanks for getting back to me.

While I do appreciate that having the same first and last name is uncommon in English-language culture, I would respectfully point-out that this is not as uncommon in Arabic culture – myself being of Arabic descent. See example below:

http://www1.imperial.ac.uk/medic…

http://www.ahmedr.com/aboutmypra…

I feel the fact that I don’t have access to a scanner is irrelevant in this context. I understand and appreciate your requirement for users to use real names but unless you are asking all your users to provide documentary evidence how can I (or others) be confident that other users are using genuine names also?

Your reason for querying the authenticity of my name seem arbitrary and unfair. Discriminating against non-familiar names begs the question: non-familiar to who? Would you have questioned me had I used a fake but common English name? If you intend to attract a global community of users you will have to reconsider this approach.

The effort to dig up a government ID, redact non-name info, and track down a scanner is a significant barrier to sign-up but nonetheless it would not be an unreasonable request if you required this from all your users otherwise this seems nothing more than ignorant and flawed discrimination.

I’d also like to add that in your initial request for verification dated 27 Nov 2010 you asked simply that I ”reply to let you know” my name is real – you made no mention of any further requisites. Instead, you ignored me for three weeks until I followed up the matter on 08 Feb 2011.

With respect to the foregoing, I would appreciate if you unblock my account with immediate effect.

Thanks,
Hasan Hasan

img via Zazzle

HP has just announced that it has acquired data management company Vertica. Terms of the deal, which is expected to close in the second quarter of 2011, were not disclosed.

Vertica, which has raised $30.5 million in funding, develops data management solutions for storing and querying databases. Its products include The Vertica Analytic Database, which helps in analyzing data; Vertica for the Cloud, a cloud-based analytic database that helps in data management; and Vertica Analytic Database appliance, a hardware/software data management platform.

HP says that Vertica’s technology will help enhance HP’s ability to optimize data and will add real-time business analytics for large and complex sets of data in physical, virtual and cloud environments. Vertica products will be available through HP sales and service channels.

For HP, Vertica represents another set of technologies to boost its data management, analytics and storage capabilities for enterprises. Last year, HP spent $2.3 billion to acquire data storage company 3PAR.

The lads are hard at work hanging at MWC 2011, drinking red wine, and eating patatas bravas. But, luckily, they’re also looking at tablets. Here’s a run-down of what they’ve seen so far.

Optimus Pad/T-Mobile G-Slate

In case you were wondering, yes, they're the same thing. Originally revealed as the T-Mobile G-Slate, it was soon made clear that it was an LG-made tablet, and that they would be putting out their own self-branded version. They're pretty much identical, with the G-Slate having some unannounced partnerships for mobile media and such. I got a quick hands-on at the LG booth, and we'll have video a little later.

Read more…

Xoom

You already know about the Xoom, Motorola's big foray into the Android tablet world, but I thought I'd get some shots of the guy while I was over in Motorola's booth here at Mobile World Congress. The device, as we've noticed, has a pleasant chunkiness to it but isn't over-large. Its screen is nice, the OS is responsive, and the specs are competitive with what's out there. Here are our latest hands-on pics of it and its cute wireless keyboard…

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Galaxy Tab 10.1

We're here at Mobile World Congress, and the brand new Galaxy S 10.1 was one of our first stops. My first impression? I like it. The larger size screen combines nicely with the different aspect ratio to make something that's a nice medium-large size, and the grippy, sculpted back cover is a joy to hold. Of the several tablets I handled today (more hands-on posts on the way), I think this one is my quick-judgment favorite.

[Video]
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Intel Capital, Intel’s investment arm, has announced six new investments totaling $26 million in a number of startups developing technology for mobile platforms. The startups intel invested in include open source mobile software company Borqs; location-based mapping platform provider CloudMade; QuantumFilm-based image sensor vendor InVisage; open source online video platform Kaltura; online authentication provider SecureKey Technologies; and collaboration software developer VisionOSS Solutions.

For Intel, this funding represents more than just investments. Intel is working with these startups to develop complimentary mobile applications and platforms with the company’s technology. Here are the mobile companies Intel announced investments in:

Borqs is an Android software integrator for mobile devices, which has been deployed in more than 30 Android mobile devices for W-CDMA networks and TD-SCDMA networks. The investment will be used for business development.

CloudMade’s platform allows third parties to create applications with stylized and customized map tiles, fully featured turn-by-turn navigation, in-app advertising, local search and data sets relevant to thousands of consumer activities. CloudMade distributes its collaborative mapping, package maps, geo services and advertising to developers and businesses; its main customers are mobile developers, OEMs and network operators. More than 16,000 developers using CloudMade’s tools to create applications. The new investment will be used to improve technology and work with developers to provide them a better suite of tools designed for their specific needs.

Kaltura, a TechCrunch40 company, provides an open source online video platform that is used by more than 100,000 media and entertainment companies, enterprises, small- and medium-size businesses, educational institutions, service providers, platform vendors and system integrators. The investment, which is part of a $20 million round from Nexus Venture Partners, .406 Ventures, Avalon Ventures, and Silicon Valley Bank, will be used to enhance rich-media functionalities on tablets, mobile phones and other connected devices.

InVisage Technologies develops QuantumFilm, a commercial mobile technology material for image sensors. It is essentially a light capture material to allows users to take high-resolution images from such handheld devices as camera phones and digital cameras. The investment will be used to mass produce InVisage’s technologies.

SecureKey Technologies designs hardware and software solutions to enable cryptographic capabilities of debit, credit and identity smartcards, specifically for Near Field Communication-based phones, for online authentication and online purchases. The investment will be used to drive growth and expansion.

VisionOSS Solutions develops a communications and collaboration platform to enterprise customers that are planning to, or have already launched, complex, multi-cluster IP-PBX and UC&C architectures. The investment, which is part of a $10 million round from Eden Ventures and XAnge, will be used to fuel the company’s growth, and for further development of its technology.

First we quote the immortal words of our national poet, Lou Reed:

Candy came from out on the Island
In the backroom she was everybody’s darlin’
But she never lost her head
Even when she was browsing the Internet on a WebOS-powered Touchpad tablet.

Oh, that’s not how it went? Sorry. After HP completely subsumed the riff of one of music’s seminal songs of change and rebellion in order to sell uninventive electronics – and given that they didn’t get this song for free and that Lou Reed deigned to sell it to them – in my rage I seem to have forgotten the real words.

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Customer support startup Zendesk is rolling out an iPad app today, which allows support agents to manage a company’s help desk on the go.

Launched in 2008, Zendesk offers a web-based, SaaS-delivered help desk/support ticketing application that gives companies a simple way to manage incoming support requests from end customers. Zendesk is adding around 20 new customers per day, recently hitting the milestone of 5,000 businesses using the customer service platform.

Zendesk for iPad joins existing apps for the iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android, which have exceeded more than 80,000 total downloads. The iPad app contains much of the same functionality as the web and mobile apps, but also includes a few exclusive features. Users can view a real-time list of the tickets assigned and support agents can also bookmark a ticket to respond to it later, or use it for future reference.

The company’s COO Zack Urlocker says that he expects the iPad app to be the company’s most popular mobile app as more and more companies adopt the device.

Zendesk has raised a total of $25.5 million.

You already know about the Xoom, Motorola’s big foray into the Android tablet world, but I thought I’d get some shots of the guy while I was over in Motorola’s booth here at Mobile World Congress. The device, as we’ve noticed, has a pleasant chunkiness to it but isn’t over-large. Its screen is nice, the OS is responsive, and the specs are competitive with what’s out there.

Read More

Maxroam, the mobile company out to disrupt mobile cell roaming, has signed a significant deal with Ryanair, Europe’s biggest low-cost airline which carries 78 million passengers annually. The deal is to create the world's first free mobile phone roaming service allowing users to passengers to receive free mobile calls and SMS messages when they travel abroad. Although the deal is being marketed via Ryanair’s channels, anyone can take advantage of it by buying a SIM card. I’m told the deal will last for around a year. Given that Europeans have to cross borders frequently when travelling, this could well shake-up the mobile market here.

In an on-stage announcement at Mobile World Congress, Foursquare founder and CEO Denis Crowley said the location-based startup had added five new languages to its mobile application.

These are: Spanish, French, German, Italian and Japanese. He said the new app (2.2.5) will be available on versions for the iPhone, Blackberry, and Android today.

The analytics platform for merchants and venue owners remains oriented towards the US, but Crowley said they were looking at further internationalisation. He added that they would be focusing on the API this year.

Multimedia browser plugin Cooliris, which lets you view photo and video content on the web in a more visually appealing manner (screencap above), has snagged $9.6 million in Series C financing from investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Deutsche Telekom’s T-Venture, The Westly Group and DAG Ventures. The company has now raised a total of $27.6 million in funding.

Not surprisingly, the company plans on using the new financing to further strategic partnerships and product innovation.

In line with this, Cooliris is also releasing the newest version of its LiveShare group photo sharing app in conjunction with the funding announcement and the Mobile World Congress. LiveShare 1.2 allows users to discover and share content with their Facebook friends through the creation of shared group photo streams.

Entering the mobile photo arena with heavy hitting contenders Instagram, PicPlz and Path, what makes LiveShare 1.2  different is that users can now organize photos by event and adjust share levels. LiveShare users can also filter photos by  popularity, time, category and GPS location whether viewers are on web or mobile. And LiveShare 1.2 is available on the iPhone, Android and Windows Phone 7.

In the same sleek multimedia visualization space as Disrupt finalist Gunzoo, the Cooliris offerings run the gamut from the Cooliris browser plugin for the Desktop, to Cooliris for the iPhone, to Cooliris Express which enables publishers to easily embed the visually stunning Cooliris 3D walls, to its Discover application for the iPad and the Cooliris CoolPreviews browser add-on that allows for faster multimedia web search.

Cooliris CEO Soujanya Bhumkar holds that the Cooliris 3D wall plugin (which really is impressive once you try it) has had over 35 million downloads since its initial launch and that its Liveshare Gallery application for Android has had over 100K activations since the product was released a month ago.

Said Bhumkar about the company’s continued foray into the next media browsing frontier, “We've established a good beachhead in media browsing … [and now] the Cooliris team, which includes our investing partners, is poised to deliver the next-generation communication service for content discovery."

The meaning of a Facebook Like has been getting more and more vague ever since Facebook changed the wording from “Become a fan” to “Like” on Facebook Fan Pages. What’s even more frustrating than this is that there’s no simple way, aside from visiting the “Activities,” “Interests” and “Other Pages” part of your Facebook profile, to figure out what Pages you have liked in the past.

In essence: It’s complicated.

As many Pages employ tactics in order to “force” people to like stuff (in order to access content for example), it’s about time users had a simple way to view and manage what they’ve Liked, especially as the new Facebook “Sponsored Story” features cull information from your Likes in order to show ads to your friends.

As rough and scrappy as it is, the MyLikesBox Facebook app shows you the Pages you’ve Liked, lets you sort by them category and allows you easily remove Pages you’d like to un-Like (Note: webpages that use Open Graph tags also show up as Likes, because Facebook holds them equivalent to Pages).

I have no idea why Facebook has yet to build something like this, especially as Like button use becomes a more and more predominant marker of brand engagement. And while I wish the MyLikesBox tracking was more comprehensive than just Facebook Pages, i.e. it showed me every article and status update and person I have ever liked, Pages is a good start, for now.

Proof: Through the use of MyLikesBox, I have un-Liked at least two pages I hadn’t really meant to Like. Like.

You can try out the app here.

I’ve been writing about the mobile industry for a few years now, and there’s one thing that still blows my mind each and every day: the rate at which these companies are able to make new feel old. Everytime something comes along and rocks our world, someone else in the industry responds with “Oh yeah? Well our new thing is twice as fast! And twice as efficient! Oh, and ours is completely powered by the laughter of unicorns! Beat that!”

And then someone does.

Just 3 weeks ago, a document leaked out NVIDIA detailing the Tegra 3, a 1.5 GHz, Quad-Core chipset for smart phones and tablets. Madness, right? Texas Instruments responded with their own quad-core chipset — except theirs clocked in at 2 Ghz.

Now it’s Qualcomm’s turn. Their rebuttal? 4 cores, each running at a theoretical maximum of 2.5 GHz. Punch it, Chewie!
Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

Leave it to those ambitious, young grad students to show us the objects of our desire that we didn’t even realize we desired. Thanks to Jordi Parra, an Interaction Design student at the Umeå Institute of Design in Sweden, we now have a futuristic new music player that lets you listen to Spotify from the comfort of your living room. (Only if your living room is in Europe, however, as Spotify is not yet available in the U.S.)

At first glance, the player — which Parra made as part of his final design project in collaboration with Spotify — looks like a digital lovechild of Jonathan Ive and the brilliant Swedes at Ikea. Perhaps the coolest feature of the product’s design is its inclusion of 192 LED nodes, which display volume levels, battery life, and Internet connectivity on the device’s face. Not too shabby for a degree project!

How does this bad boy work? The player uses radio frequency identification (or RFID) technology: place one of the colored RFID tags, which contain your playlists, onto the magnetized volume knob, and voila! As soon as the tag sticks to the knob, the antenna/Arduino in the player reads the tag and plays your hot jams. You stop those hot jams by simply removing the tag. Kinda cool, right?

In the case of Parra’s reader, the information is actually transmitted via magnetic induction using the player’s magnetic volume knob and an Arduino processing board to sense the tag and extract its contents. (Pictures of Parra’s Arduino and the player’s insides here if you have no idea what the hell I’m talking about.)

How you go about encoding your playlists on the RFID tags is a little equivocal, but it sounds like this is done by connecting the player to a computer via USB. This should automatically call up Spotify and begin configuration. The RFID tags are read-write, so once the tag is connected to the player (while the player is connected to your computer), you can change your songs or link to a new playlist.

The player is sold with a unique serial number that will essentially register your device with Parra, though “register” may be a strong word in this case. The serial number allows Parra (and perhaps his future company) to track the player and its corresponding tags. Obviously, as you may have guessed, RFID technology has the potential for myriad security and privacy issues. (Think of the ad technology in Minority report that is essentially Philip K. Dick’s conjecture on RFID technology.) So, this will require some sensitivity on Parra’s part should the player end up being sold at market by Spotify.

Though the inner workings of the device works may sound a bit complex at first glance, the UI is sleek and simple. Use the two small buttons in the lower left corner of the speaker (as seen in the above image) to skip to the previous and next tracks in your queue. The adjacent magnetized knob holds your tags and controls volume. The slick packaging that would ship with the player will include 8 RFID tags (which incidentally look suspiciously like pogs), a USB cable, and a stand for the tags.

It seems that, thanks to collective consciousness (or the relative novelty of applying RFID tech to music players), a few other designers and firms have been developing their own RFID devices. You can check out IDEO’s retro (whoa! Cassettes! Turntables!) player here. Or this guy’s squeezebox here.

You can also check out Jordi Parra’s blog for a stroll through the product’s development.

On Friday the WSJ published an article entitled “Apple’s Jobs Calls Shots From Home” which depicted the Apple CEO as still having a generous hand in the day to day going ons of the company despite being on medical leave. Jobs involvement comes as no surprise, as Jobs himself said in the statement announcing his absence, “I will continue as CEO and be involved in major strategic decisions for the company."

Along with proof that Jobs has kept his word, the WSJ has somehow tapped into the motherlode of people familiar with Apple this week, publishing reports on multiple product developments, from the existence of a cheaper iPhone nano, to the possibility of MobileMe being available for free as well as the chance it might be turned into cloud-based storage for iTunes media. The WSJ also hints that Steve Jobs has returned to campus specifically to focus on these and other upcoming projects, including the new iPad.

As speculation as to what the reported Jobs appearances may mean nears fever pitch, we have confirmed that he indeed has been making the rounds, and that he isn’t on campus for any one reason according to a source. In any case, the sight of Jobs returning to work instills hope at both Cupertino and beyond. On Friday, the same day as the WSJ story, I received the following email from an Apple employee, with their take on what their former CEO’s reappearance may mean.

The email was so eloquent and timeless it bears republishing in full, below.

————————————————————————————–

Double rainbows, and what they mean

“Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things.”

—Apple Think Different ad campaign

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple as Interim CEO, he worked with Chiat Day to create an ad campaign to answer: “Who is Apple, and what is it we stand for? Where do fit in this world?” The Think Different campaign featured Jobs’s personal heroes: Einstein, Gandhi, Picasso, and others. Yet looking at the campaign today, it feels like it applies as much to Steve Jobs himself as it does to the people he featured.

For that reason, when Steve Jobs sent an email on January 17 of this year to Apple employees announcing that he was taking an indefinite medical leave of absence, there was a sadness that, perhaps, the tech community had limited time to spend with someone who, like him or hate him, was “crazy enough to think he could change the world”.

While the financial markets didn’t reflect a sense of panic or sorrow (Apple’s stock price is higher today than when the news was announced on January 17) many people in Silicon Valley felt that the indefinite leave implied that Steve Jobs was moving out of day to day work and essentially retiring from Apple, never to return.

It was, therefore, a bit of a surprise when reports began surfacing that Steve Jobs was spotted back on Apple’s campus only 2 weeks after his announcement. The Wall Street Journal ran a story on February 11 that not only was Steve Jobs “taking business meetings at home and on the phone” he had also “been seen on Apple’s Cupertino campus”. Reports have surfaced on other websites that Steve Jobs has in fact been on campus frequently, meeting with executives and having his lunch meetings in the cafeteria with SVP of Industrial Design Jonathan Ive. For many who have seen Steve Jobs at Apple recently, this is a “double rainbow” moment: a mixture of awe, excitement, and confusion.

So what does it mean?

Financially, these reports will likely do little to move Apple’s stock price, just as the original announcement had a muted response. But this isn’t about stock price. It’s also not about computers, phones, operating systems, App stores, or televisions. It’s about community. And knowing that someone that has been a part of that community for decades is still there: browsing lunch options in the cafeteria, walking around with his coworkers and doing his best to contribute something meaningful.

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary,” Steve Jobs said in his 2005 Stanford Commencement Address.

It feels appropriate to take a moment now to reflect on those words, our community, and our time here.

————————————————————————————–

[A link to this video was included at the bottom of the note.]

The mobile market has had an unusually exciting past couple of weeks, with news of the Nokia and Microsoft partnership and HP launching a suite of devices based around its newly acquired webOs making headlines. But bold moves by competitors haven’t shaken the market’s faith in Apple, as our tipster and the WSJ point out, Apple stock has risen 2.4% to $356.85 a share since Jobs announced his leave and COO Tim Cook took over on January 17th.

As my colleague MG Siegler touched on, this market optimism is parallel to what happened during Jobs’ six month leave in 2009. After an initial hit, Apple’s stock price bounced back due to a series of product updates including iPhone OS 3, the iPhone 3GS and OS X Snow Leopard. If  we can glean anything from the stream of media reports in the past couple of days, history is at least trying to repeat itself.

Alluding to a popular Internet meme where a man expresses extreme amounts of emotion over the sighting of a double rainbow, our Apple tipster refers to a Jobs appearance as “double rainbow” moment: “a mixture of awe, excitement, and confusion.” And whether we’re reading about it in an article or seeing Jobs himself unexpectedly lunching in the cafeteria, we’re all still left asking “What does it mean?”

Watch our own version of an Apple “double rainbow” moment or read more about Apple’s 2011 product vision here.

Image: GigaOm

A lot of things about Facebook have been impressive, even by the Silicon Valley standards. Almost no other Valley company has reached so many people around the world so quickly. Few Valley companies have been considered important forces in causes as disparate as planning a party or a political uprising. Rarely has a kid in his early 20s held onto the CEO reins this long. And of course, no other Valley company has been made into a star-studded, over the top Oscar-nominated film.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that the Facebook mafia– made up of high profile alumni responsible for building companies like Quora, Cloudera, Jumo, Asana and Path– has also emerged so early and become so distinct, well before Facebook has come close to a major liquidity event. Like most of the things that make Facebook unique, part of this is due to Facebook itself, and part is due to the time in which the company was formed.

But before we get to the specifics of the Facebook mafia, it bears noting that not all companies produce bona fide mafias. It’s more than just alums doing well. A true “mafia” is a collection of co-founders, early hires and top engineers who’ve been battle-tested together with an enthusiasm and financial resources to start many different ventures immediately. There’s also a communal sense of co-investing in and supporting one another, hence the idea of keeping it “in the family.” While plenty of smart entrepreneurs and angel investors came from or filtered through Google, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon and Microsoft, those gargantuan successes didn’t really create a mafia that catalyzed at a certain moment of time, resulting in an cluster of cool new stuff.

In fact, few big successful, lasting companies spin out mafias, because those companies grow to such a large size that the unique DNA of the culture gets watered down. And for financial reasons, insiders used to be tethered to the company until after its IPO. By then, they’d missed being in the middle of the next big startup wave. Instead mafias tend to fall out of companies that didn’t go as far as they could have. It creates a frustrated sense of still having something to accomplish, or as Peter Thiel said about the PayPal mafia, “You had a lot of smart, competitive people who all needed something to do.”

Think of the most noted mafias in Valley history: Fairchild Semiconductor started it all with a high-profile exodus of core talent that encouraged others to do the same. Netscape was another huge one, post AOL sale. Netscape was such a world-changing company, it was hard for anyone who was a part of it to go back to a regular day job, and Netscapers had more cred than anyone in the dot com heyday. There was Quincy Smith, Ram Shriram and Khosla Ventures’ David Weiden to name a few members of the diaspora. Of course, the biggest result of the Netscape mafia was the angel portfolio of Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who also founded Opsware selling it to HP for $1.6 billion. That angel portfolio included early bets on companies vital to the early Web 2.0 movement, including Digg, Delicious, Twitter and more. And that angel portfolio led to the formation of Andreessen Horowitz, which has funded everyone from Zynga to Foursquare to Skype.

Excite@Home spawned another mafia. For those who don’t remember, Excite@Home was an ill-thought out $6.7 billion mash-up of two hot companies that proved to be one of the highest flying dot-com disasters. But out of Excite@Home came Joe Kraus who founded JotSpot and is now a partner with Google Ventures, Brett Bullington an angel investor and board member in several Valley companies, Craig Donato of Oodle, David Sze who would fund Facebook, LinkedIn, and help revitalize Greylock’s West Coast brand.

Excite’s mafia may not have founded the next billion dollar company, but they’ve funded several of them. And, like most mafias, they do things collectively. Donato was funded by Sze and Bullington is on his board. Find an industry conference and you’ll find these guys clustered at a back table joking about the good-old-days. Mafias aren’t just about people who had a certain company on their resumes starting something new– there’s the cultural aspect of doing it together that makes them unique.

Of course, the most written about Valley mafia was the PayPal mafia. The three founders alone had a tremendous impact. Max Levchin started Slide which sold for $228 million to Google, and incubated Yelp, which has a good shot at becoming a billion dollar company. Peter Thiel started Clarium Capital and Founders Fund which backed many PayPal mafia companies and most famously, backed an early Facebook when no one else would. Thiel was an important early mentor for Mark Zuckerberg. Elon Musk invested in Solar City, and founded Tesla and SpaceX. Tesla has already gone public and revolutionized the automobile world, SpaceX and Solar City are expected to go public sometime this year. Oh, and the three founders have produced movies too.

And let’s not forget the biggest exit so far of the PayPal mafia: YouTube’s $1.65 billion sale to Google, which cemented the reputation of Sequoia’s then new partner, Roelof Botha– once PayPal’s CFO. Second biggest was IronPort, built by Scott Banister and sold to Cisco for $830 million. And soon, we’ll see the debut of the PayPal mafia’s first IPO, when LinkedIn– founded by former PayPal executive Reid Hoffman– goes public. Hoffman, too, has funded and mentored dozens of Web 2.0 companies.

And let’s also not forget some newer, promising companies from the mafia like David Sacks’ Yammer. Sacks was PayPal’s COO– and the guy who came up with that early viral marketing scheme of paying users cash to refer their friends. And PayPal’s Keith Rabois is one of the top executives at Square, a company leading the next wave of fundamental disruption of the financial industry. eBay loves to trumpet how fabulous PayPal was as an acquisition. But the PayPal mafia has created many more billions and changed the world far more.

I once asked Peter Thiel if PayPal made a mistake selling too early– something we fixate on in the Valley. He answered that he’d wrestled with that a lot, especially seeing how big PayPal has gotten under eBay, and imagining how much bigger it could have become as a stand alone company. But ultimately, he said, looking at all the companies that had been created as a result of those smart competitive people needing something to do, it was hard to argue selling PayPal was a mistake in the macro sense.

You could have the same conversation today about the good and the bad of Facebook’s hundreds of millions of dollars of secondary share cash-outs, which has largely made this early mafia possible. The secondary sales have been a challenge for Facebook, because it makes retaining some of those early employees harder, and I’ve argued before that it contributes to the Valley’s increasingly short-term, instant-gratification, mercenary culture. But if Quora, Path, Asana and others can live up to the early hype, the Valley’s ecosystem will get its cake and get to eat it too: Facebook keeps growing, seemingly unstoppably, to become the biggest company of this generation and we get a wide impact of startups spinning out of it too.

So what does the Facebook mafia look like, and other than its surprising early existence what makes it different? I wanted to examine it, because I was struck by three things: The continuing Valley love-affair with Quora, Dave Morin of Path’s almost incomprehensibly ballsy rejection of Google’s $120 million purchase offer and the many things about Dustin Moskovitz’s Asana that reminded me philosophically of the early days of Facebook, even though the product is decidedly not a Facebook for the enterprise. That got me thinking about other Facebook spinouts we don’t write about as much like Cloudera and Jumo.

So I decided to spend much of the last two weeks interviewing more than a dozen people who were early advisers, investors and insiders at Facebook on and off the record about what it was that was making the companies spinning out of this young mafia so striking, in so many different ways. Here are some of the core characteristics, and how they stand out from startups I’m seeing in the Valley at large.

Not for Sale by Owner

To a person, the early Facebook people I spoke with all mentioned Zuckerberg’s July 2006 rejection of Yahoo’s $1 billion purchase offer as a seminal moment that not only changed Facebook, but changed their thinking personally as entrepreneurs. In hindsight it looks like a no-brainer, but the outside world deemed Zuckerberg arrogant and delusional at the time. Inside Facebook, his decision caused a split within the company.

Dustin Moskovitz remembered several people saying to Zuckerberg at the time, “If you knew you didn’t want to sell, why did you take us so far down this path? Because that’s what was so painful, getting to the alter and then breaking up.” After that, Zuckerberg never went down the aisle again. And similarly, Moskovitz’s company Asana has refused to engage in conversations about a flip, and sources say Quora has the same philosophy.

And then, there’s Path– a mobile photo sharing site that doesn’t even have a million users and turned down a purchase of more than $100 million. As Mike said in his post, Morin is definitely crazy– we just don’t yet know if that’s a good crazy or a bad crazy. During the weekend Morin was agonizing over the decision, he holed up with his biggest angel investor– Moskovitz. Moskovitz was one of the only people who didn’t make Morin feel crazy, and it played a big role in giving him the confidence to do what he knew he wanted to do, turn the insanely generous offer down.

Engineers Are Gods and Education Isn’t what Made Them that Way

These companies all revolve around engineers in almost a cultish way. Their investors and competitors always note how good the team is– which is saying something in a Valley locked in a full-scale talent war. They are insanely picky about hiring engineers and when they find a good one they will pay him nearly anything. Asana gives engineers $10,000 to pimp their desks. Zuckerberg has described Quora co-founder Adam D’Angelo as one of the best — if not the best– engineers he has ever met. And Path’s team was reportedly one of the assets Google was so willing to pay up for.

But unlike companies like Google and Amazon who rigorously hired based on college degrees, GPAs and standardized test scores, Facebook and the companies that have spun out of it have hewed toward sheer, raw, hacker-like genius. That’s created a more entrepreneurial culture inside the company. Justin Rosenstein– who was at Google and then Facebook before leaving to co-found Asana with Moskovitz– says that working at Google is often described as a wonderland for academics, while Facebook’s early days were more of an extension of a messy dorm room full of engineers hacking away all night, then collapsing most of the day.

Rejection of the Lean Startup Ideal

One thing that made Facebook so distinct from its early Web 2.0 peers was how much money it raised and how rapidly it scaled up. In the aftermath of the dot com bust, there was a paranoid fear of taking too much money or doing in house what you could outsource. But Zuckerberg had missed the bubble and the bust, and built the company as he deemed appropriate.

Likewise, some of these companies still have small teams, but it’s not for the sake of being small. They’ve not been shy about raising money, and because there’s not an emphasis on selling the company, they have no problem hiring or raising more when needed. And as the salaries and perks paid to engineers show, it’s not a culture that wastes time nickeling and dimeing the important things.

Efficiency and Organization at the Expense of a Free-for-all

The hallmarks of each of these products are around efficiency, not sprawling messy communities. Quora seeks to organize information to benefit the person answering the question, not the person asking it. As such, some people posing the questions get annoyed that they don’t get the right to retain more control of the dialogue.

Similarly, Path is an efficient way to jump in and out of friend’s photo streams. Like Facebook, the emphasis is on engaging with the app seamlessly throughout a day, not spending hours in it at a time. And Asana controls work flow and collaboration through a core news-feed like layout. The emphasis again, is on living in the app, engaging with it throughout the day, not spending an hour doing things inside of it. It’s that difference between being a “utility” and a “media” property that Zuckerberg talked so much about in the early days.

Controlled Pacing, Not Cheap Viral Hacks.

Here’s a core difference between these companies and many I see in the Valley. Most companies put an implicit value on size for the sake of size, and doing any cheap viral game in the book to get there, even if it means a low percentage of users ever engage with your app or return to your site again. In the last five years the value of a unique user has been almost completely eroded.

Instead, many of these companies take a cue from the way Facebook rolled out with a deliberate controlled pacing that allowed it to scale as it went from just Harvard, to include Ivy League schools, high schools, work places, and eventually the world. Facebook had a confident sense of not being in a hurry, that helped keep its community from becoming overrun and eroded. Likewise, Quora’s press, valuation and influence has far outstripped its user base. Path has a small fraction of Instagram’s users. And Asana has more than 5,000 companies on its waiting list to use its product. These companies may all become huge one day, but that’s clearly not their priority now.

Solving Big, Messy Social Problems Others Have Failed Trying to Solve Before

Perhaps it’s because the founders were at Facebook before, and it would take something big to get them to leave. Or maybe they’re all idealists who want to change the world. But each of these companies has a big sense of mission. None of them started from building a cool app or site for the founder and his friends, they all started to solve a big problem. And what’s more: That problem isn’t typically a new problem. This is where you get these companies biggest haters: The people who say Quora is just Yahoo Answers, the people who say Instagram beat Path before it got the chance to get started, the people who look at Asana and see yet another collaboration software play.

But here’s the thing: The core problems still exist despite billions invested in solving them, particularly in the case of Quora, Asana, and Chris Hughes’ Jumo, an ambitious play to organize the messy world of nonprofits. We can all see the pitfalls these companies will face, because we’ve seen companies fall into them before. But call it arrogance, confidence, delusion or some insight we just don’t understand from the outside, these founders all think they have a key to solving it.

It’s hard not to compare this to Facebook. The biggest reason people wouldn’t fund it in the early days was because of the great flame out of Friendster. Then, when MySpace took off, no one thought Facebook had a chance of catching them. Those naysayers were all wrong.

And like Facebook, companies like Asana, Path and Quora are trying to solve problems that are inherently social. Not social in the capital-S SOCIAL MEDIA! sense of the word, rather social in the sense of the messiness that results from people trying to interact online and bringing all the messy aspects of human interaction, communication and relationships with them. They are problems that machines can’t purely solve and people can’t purely solve, and each of these companies tries to use both to solve them, rather than Google’s slavish love of the algorithm or Yahoo’s early belief in directories and curation. They are all likely problems that have no one solution, but a long road of getting closer.

Moskovitz says it’s less like they’ve all gone their separate ways, and more like they’re all still working in one bigger, deconstructed company that stretches through the Valley. He’s still trying to solve problems he was working on within Facebook, but on a bigger scale and for all companies. He uses Cloudera’s data processing engine and Quora to handle some of their press and messaging, and uses all the others on a personal level.

At the end of the day, this is exactly what makes Silicon Valley irrepressible as an entrepreneur hot spot–more than the money, the universities, and the rest. You can trace a whole lineage of mafias coming out of mafias. Facebook had its roots in the PayPal mafia, which had its roots in the early University of Illinois days along with Netscape and Mosiac. And Netscape grew out of Silicon Graphics. It’s this lineage that has taken decades to develop in the Valley that no government programs or well-meaning civic boosters can replicate.

For all the whiz-bang graphics and nifty apps appearing on smart phones these days, there are still few things that feel more futuristic than pulling out your phone, uttering the words, “find directions to the Exploratorium”, and having Google immediately do your bidding. The technology is becoming widely available via apps on the iPhone and deep integration into Android, and this is really only the beginning.

Earlier this month I had the chance to sit down with Mike Cohen, the man who leads all of Google’s speech technology efforts, to get a look behind the curtain at why Google has invested so much into voice, and where things are going from here.

A Look Back

Before we discuss where we stand now, it’s worth looking at Cohen’s past, which also serves as a good history lesson on speech technology. Cohen has been at Google since 2004, but he’s been straddling the intersection of voice and technology for decades, getting his start at the Stanford Research Institute in the early 1980s.

Cohen says that in the 1970s there were two main camps working on speech: linguists and engineers. The linguists were all about rules — they’d identify various trends in grammar and pronunciation and how each phoneme interacted with the others. The engineers were taking a different approach: rather than trying to painstakingly identify each rule manually, they set out to build complex statistical models that improved as more speech data was fed into them.

By the late 70s and early 80s, when Cohen started doing research at SRI, the engineers were in the lead. But there was a problem: the improvements seen in their models were starting to asymptote. Cohen explains that because these models were always the same, feeding them more data was eventually going to provide diminishing returns (for example, their models were bad at recognizing how pronunciation depends not only which words are being said, but also their context). The engineers needed to find a way to build richer models — so they finally began to collaborate with the linguists. And a research boom ensued.

By the early 90s speech technology had gotten sufficiently advanced that researchers could create the DARPA-funded Air Travel Information System (ATIS) — where a user could walk up to a terminal, say, “Show me the flights from Boston”, and the computer would spit back the relevant data. The system could understand countless variations on such commands (you didn’t have to memorize certain keywords) — pretty amazing given the fact that this system was built around the time Windows 95 came out.

Based on the success of the ATIS, Cohen decided that the technology was ready for commercialization, so he and three cofounders left to start Nuance. The company focused on building automated enterprise call systems, which it then sold to major businesses that had to deal with high inbound call volume — things like an automated stock quote system for Charles Schwab, and customer service for phone companies.

Given his history as a researcher, it isn’t surprising that Cohen was looking at ways to improve Nuance’s speech recognition software. And, as it turned out, the huge number of call recordings coming in were even more useful than the data he’d had access to while a researcher at SRI. He explains that there are things that can’t be reproduced in a lab environment — a dog barking in the background, a child crying, and so on — that were present in these inbound phone calls, exposing Nuance to important new challenges in speech analysis.

But there was one big problem: despite the fact that its technology was dealing with a huge volume of data, Nuance would have to approach each of its enterprise customers and ask for access to this data for research purposes. Enterprises stood to gain because they’d reap any improvements in the technology, but some of them were wary anyway. Which set the stage for Cohen to finally make the jump to Google.

GOOG-411 and Beyond

In 2004 Google’s voice efforts were basically non-existent. But Cohen saw an opportunity: even then it was clear that mobile was going to have a big impact on the future of technology. And because Google faces the end-user directly, any incoming voice data would be immediately accessible for research purposes. So he made the switch to the search giant, and began what became Google’s free 411 voice service, GOOG-411.

The service launched in 2007, offering a straightforward and handy feature set: you’d call in, ask for some basic information like a business’s phone number, and it would immediately give you that information free of charge. Cohen says the main motivation for launching GOOG-411 was the fact that it’s useful, but it had an important secondary function: it allowed Google to begin building up a massive corpus of voice data. Remember the data models discussed earlier? Google’s speech systems use similar concepts, but at a much larger scale.

GOOG-411 was killed off in October, but Google now has more inputs of voice data, including the microphone button seen throughout Android and the Google Mobile application for iPhone. And Google can look at text-based search queries to identify what terms appear most often after each other. All of which means Google can train its language models relatively quickly.

These days, Cohen says that Google uses 230 billion search queries to train the language model used by Google’s speech recognizer. To give an idea of how large that volume of data is, he says the training would take 70 years to be completed on a single CPU (though Google obviously has far greater resources).

The technology is now used across a variety of products. YouTube automatically captions millions of videos. Google Voice attempts to transcribe inbound voice messages (with some pretty hilarious results). And voice search is going to play a much bigger role on mobile devices — don’t be surprised if we start seeing cars with media centers running Android in the not-so-distant future. You can bet they’ll be voice-enabled.

Cohen was happy to talk in broad terms about Google’s voice efforts, but he was opaque when it came to sharing stats, upcoming features, and predictions. He wouldn’t discuss the kind of voice search volume that Google sees, though he did acknowledge that it fluctuates widely depending on if a new voice-enabled feature has launched and if there has been recent coverage in the press.

When I asked him how long it would be before voice search would become accurate to the point where we take it for granted (and didn’t have to check for typos), he declined to really offer a projection (he noted that he could say something like “five years”, but that that’s just research terminology for “I have no idea”).

I also asked him what he thought about Apple’s voice efforts — the company acquired Siri last year, and it seems obvious that it’s going to begin incorporating voice into iOS. Again, Cohen didn’t have much to say here (though this wasn’t really surprising). He did say that Google has the natural advantage of having already released a product that gives it a massive volume of data, but ultimately it will come down to what Apple builds and who they partner with.

But while he wouldn’t get into specifics, Cohen did share Google’s long-term vision for this technology: it wants speech input to be completely ubiquitous. “We don’t ever want there to be a scenario where speech would be valuable, if only it had been available — just like you can enter text with a keyboard anywhere, you should be able to do it with speech.” And accuracy is a big part of that: “It needs to work so close to perfect that the choice isn’t based on performance, but on end-user preference.”

When it comes to Instagram, there are generally two complaints: 1) there’s no Android app yet. 2) the web experience is severely lacking. Today they’ve finally taken a stab at the latter. Well, sort of.

The Instagram team has put together a what they’re calling a “microsite” as a subdomain of their main website. Why? Because some of the team is at the Grammys right now and they’re working alongside MTV to cover the event in the filtered, square images that are Instagram’s hallmark at the moment.

It’s a nice partnership for Instagram to grab to help increase their exposure. But the bigger deal may be what’s going on behind this microsite. As you can see, images are coming in in realtime and the page automatically updates with the newest ones. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a rudimentary look at part of what they’re thinking about for their main site as well.

Currently, the Instagram website is just a static landing page pointing you to their iPhone app. Meanwhile, each image has its own landing page as well, but you can’t do anything on the page besides see the picture and see who took it. You can’t even click on people’s profiles. But co-founder Kevin Systrom has made it clear that they’re working on their web presence but want it to be really good and different — more than just a static stream of photos that replicate the app photo stream experience.

Or perhaps they’ll make these types of live-updating sites for each hashtag used on the service. That could be perfect for events such as this.

Editor’s note: This post was written by Alex Rampell, the CEO of TrialPay. Rampell is a regular contributor to TechCrunch – see his previous guest posts here.

The 1980s and 1990s witnessed the slow death of the “mom and pop” general store, replaced by superstores like Walmart that sold everything from butter to guns.  Regardless of one’s position on this trend, it makes classic economic sense: by buying in bulk, Walmart commands better prices with suppliers, and then passes on lower prices to consumers. (Walmart has even been accused of “predatory” pricing to drive mom and pop stores out of business, raising prices after their disappearance.) By aggregating every product under the sun, Walmart can lure consumers in to buy staples (sometimes sold at/below cost), and cross-sell them other impulse items.

There’s one primary reason why Walmart hasn’t completely taken over the world: geography.  Walmart.com is a drop in the bucket compared to Walmart’s offline retail presence (remember that people spend far more money offline than online). Some communities keep Walmart out, New York City being one such example. And some people just live far away from Walmart.

But nobody can keep UPS or Federal Express trucks away, and the Walmart effect is going to be even more extreme online. This time Amazon is the big gorilla.

Consumers traditionally shop at retailer A versus B based on the intersecting calculus of five variables:

Price (actual price to consumer + "friction" in ordering process)
Geography (proximity to consumer)
Selection (do they have X in my size, or sell rare item Y?)
Service/Brand (do I trust/like them?)
Experience (is it easy/designed to shop for X?)

Internet commerce has witnessed incredible price transparency, where the Walmart effect can play out without any pesky geographical barrier for most items that UPS will ship; this explains why there are 41,000 shoe stores offline in the US but maybe only 5 of scale online.  That leaves Selection, Service, and Experience.  Selection explains why a small site like SquashGear.com is likely thriving, and Service shows how Zappos got to $1B in sales.

The danger is that when a niche becomes big, it will simply be invaded by Amazon, the Internet's Walmart. I’m pretty certain that if Squash becomes the number one sport in America, Amazon will “go big” and put squashgear.com out of business by squeezing better prices out of suppliers and providing lower prices to consumers, combined with a world-class logistics engine.

If you're an entrepreneur itching to get into e-commerce, remember that you can't compete on geography (unless you're cloning an existing retailer in a region where there is no Amazon), and you can't compete purely on price.  But here's what you can do:

Cultivate a better shopping experience: BlueNile is simply a better place to shop for engagement rings. Zappos is a better place to shop for shoes. In some cases, what makes Amazon.com great (every shopping experience is the same) is also its greatest weakness.  Some things are designed to be bought differently.

De-Commoditize: If you're just another reseller of a generic commodity, you better have a pretty clear advantage outside of price…but these are often tough to come by.  Diapers.com is one of very few companies that has out-Amazoned Amazon. If there's something unique you can add to the order (e.g., proprietary software that consumers can use with the commodity good) it makes it easier to differentiate and provide value to the consumer in excess of a nominally higher price. For example, a vitamin reseller might be wise to develop a smartphone app to remind consumers of pill times…and bundle it with every order.

Build a marketplace for buyers and sellers, don’t be a reseller. Etsy, eBay, IronPlanet, Copart, Elance and others have built great value by focusing on the defensible art of the network effect.  This area is far from played out, and there are many marketplaces waiting to be created for verticals from babysitting to piano lessons. The best marketplaces tend to be for frequently purchased items with a diverse quantity of sellers and few repeated interactions.  For example, you want to eat at different restaurants, but typically go to the same piano teacher for years, so it's easy to see why OpenTable might be bigger than a piano lesson marketplace.

Distributed commerce: Who can beat Amazon on price? The companies whose products are sold on Amazon!  Outside of the Kindle, Amazon is merely a reseller — marking up the price of others' products, so those "others" could theoretically beat Amazon in selling direct to consumer.  But most manufacturing companies do not do a very good job selling products direct to consumer, and hate to risk channel conflict.  And consumers prefer to shop at supermarkets, not "silo" markets.  Imagine a world of decentralized commerce — where you can shop at any number of manufacturers within the context of one meta-shopping cart or wallet.  It might be a pipe-dream, but it's a huge opportunity that could beat Amazon on price and selection if the experience and service components could be filled in.

It’s interesting that TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington kicked off a debate today about the current problems with search. Because it’s clear that while few players feel able to take on the might of Google, there remain a few startups out there trying to attack the problem from different angles.

One of them is Israeli startup SortFix, who I met on a recent trip to Tel Aviv in Israel (more on that soon).

Previously, SortFix tried concentrating its search functionality directly through its website and through its iPad app. But now SortFix has created a FireFox extension for Google which makes use of SortFix's algorithms to generate suggested words to improve your search. It’s still in beta but you can try it here.