Editor’s note: This is a guest post written by TheIceBreak CEO Christina Brodbeck. Brodbeck is a UI designer, angel investor and entrepreneur based in San Francisco, CA.

Women in tech.  I hate to say it, but I am tired of hearing about women in tech.

As a female tech startup founder and angel investor, I am routinely asked how I feel about the lack of women in the technology sector.  Frankly, I'm a bit tired of the question.  It's a topic worthy of discussion, but the conversation has grown far too narrow (as tends to happen in our Silicon Valley bubble).

While I have no doubt that the tech sector would benefit from more female founders, entrepreneurs and investors, we are missing a large part of the equation.  Wishful thinking and arguing about female founders, entrepreneurs or gender roles is overriding recognition of the powerful role that the female consumer is already playing in technology.

Let's talk not about women in tech.  Let's talk about women and tech.  We need to shift the conversation and analyze how and why the female consumer is affecting technology innovation.

For starters, let's focus our attention on the groundswell of female consumers impacting the web marketplace.  If gender is at all an investment consideration, it is best utilized in conjunction with concrete market statistics:

•    3,330: the number of text messages the average teenage girl sends a month
•    67%: the percent of Gilt Groupe's audience that are female
•    77%: the percent of Groupon subscription base that are female
•    Your mother: the average social gamer (ok, it's a 43 year old woman, but close enough)
A basic conclusion that one could draw here is that females are just as or even more enthusiastic than males about technology and the web.  The difference is in the types of web products and services females embrace and how they put these to use in their daily lives.  Here are a few more examples of female-driven web behavior and trends that represent rapid-growth market opportunities:

•    Real World Bookmarking:  Women have embraced bookmarking and sharing content, ideas and tips on the web.  Services like Foodspotting appeal to the desire to bookmark a tangible item that we attach affinity to, then enable sharing with an extended network of online friends.

•    Personal Relationship Management: Women have historically been attracted to online services that give them a productive platform for analyzing, discussing and improving their personal and romantic relationships.  My own start-up, TheIceBreak (a game-like service that helps couples and singles create rewarding relationships), is planning to take full advantage of this demand.

•    Self Analysis and Insights: Women are a strong driver of demand for the self-help book industry.  Publishing has only begun its march into the nascent digital world and self-help will be a huge growth driver as more content is made available on the web.

•    Families and Children: Women and men alike have begun to invest time and discretionary income in family-oriented technologies.  Outgrown.it is a promising concept of an online exchange that lets parents trade outgrown children's clothes or donate outgrown items to families in need.

I want to help women in technology, but a path to long-term success requires less charity (i.e. requiring at least one female on a founding team) and more common sense business practices.  An excellent first step would be the creation of an investment fund or incubator program oriented around startups that target the female web consumer.

Please do not misunderstand me.  I do not expect that creating a more attractive investment environment for female-targeted startups is the only answer for increasing female participation in technology.  I do believe, however, that males and females alike are attracted to products and services familiar to them, and that addressing demand for female-oriented online products & services is an excellent step in motivating more women to take a step into the entrepreneurial arena.

It’s not charity to invest in a growing market with hard numbers. Let’s start there…

The Q&A land rush is on. Quora, of course, has been hyped to the moon, and not without reason. Fortune magazine recently profiled five more Q&A sites, and three new ones just launched: Cloudy, where your friends answer your questions via SMS; InboxQ, Q&A on Twitter; and Setlr¹, which is like Twitter for yes/no questions. Is this a bubble full of copycats doomed to wither into Yahoo Answers Redux? Maybe – but I don’t think so. I think there’s something important going on here, and it’s more than just questions and answers. I think these are the first skirmishes in the reputation wars.

The identity wars are already over. Facebook won, Twitter snagged the silver medal, and OpenID lost. Log In With Facebook and their associated Open Graph have succeeded so thoroughly that Facebook increasingly defines users’ online identities across a whole panoply of sites. But who will define and codify our online reputations? That’s a question whose answer will matter – a lot.

Right now we only have ad-hoc measures to determine online reputations: LinkedIn’s recommendations, Twitter users’ following:followers ratio, third-party influence measurements a la Topsy, and raw friend/follower/connection counts. That last is the crudest and least useful, which is why Facebook itself isn’t really built for reputation measurement. Quora, however, is a serious contender, if they get their PeopleRank algorithm right.

But there’s another massively successful Q&A site out there, one whose reputation measurement already has significant effects: StackOverflow, a problem-solving-for-programmers site cofounded by Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software. While Quora gets all the hype, StackOverflow quietly racks up sixteen million unique visitors a month. It’s by far the most professionally useful site on the Internet. Like many if not most developers, I use it every single workday. One of my complaints about Google is that it should, but doesn’t, catapult StackOverflow into its top five search results for almost every software topic. I like Quora a lot, but if I had to choose between the two, it’d be no choice at all. Quora is interesting; StackOverflow is important.

Lately, though, Joel, his partner Jeff Atwood, and the StackOverflow community have spun off dozens of other Q&A sites under the “StackExchange” umbrella, in an attempt to beat Quora and the like at their own game. And are they ever screwing up. Their policy is to spin off new sites built around themes suggested and approved by their existing community. So what do you get as spinoffs from a coder community? A bunch of StackOverflow subsets for super users, sysadmins, etc., and a hodgepodge of sites focused on photography, mathematics, Apple, video games, board games, role-playing games, and science fiction. Interesting? Sure. Important? Hell, no.

StackOverflow’s killer value is that it’s where people go to solve the problems they’re having at work. That’s a feature that almost all of its spinoff sites completely lack. Having a high StackOverflow reputation is a definite plus, in the software world. I’ve seen it featured on resumes, and it influences hiring decisions. Coders are canaries in the coal mine; in the years to come, members of other fields too will increasingly value their online reputations. But who beyond a vanishingly small minority will care about your reputation on “Atheism”, “Board and Card Games,” or “English Language and Usage,” to pick three new StackExchange sites?

Joel and co. should do more than pander to the enthusiasms of their existing community by letting them vet new sites. That leaves them stranded on a social peninsula only tenuously connected to the rest of the world. Before Quora eats their lunch, they should also try to build Q&A communities – and reputations – focused on other professions: law, sales, etc. (And while they’re at it, they ought to clean up their very Web 1.0 UX, and let people log in with Twitter and Facebook, to make StackExchange reputations easily exportable to other platforms.) It won’t be easy to seed them and spin them up to critical mass, but it’ll be more than worth the pain, and miles better than what they’ve got now. StackExchange could be a real contender, but first they need to change their strategy.

¹Full disclosure: Setlr was incubated by my sometime clients HappyFunCorp.

Editor’s note: Guest author Semil Shah is an entrepreneur interested in digital media, consumer Internet, and social networks. Shah is based in Palo Alto and you can follow him on twitter @semilshah

People always say things change fast in Silicon Valley. Here, and in other entrepreneurial communities around our country, ideas collide, companies form, money is injected, talent is allocated, and the pace of innovation churns. Entrepreneurship is so accessible, the best talent flock here to found companies like Google. Today, it’s tougher for those foreign entrepreneurs to get here in the first place, which has given rise to the Startup Visa movement, a specific policy within Startup America. These are necessary moves our country needs to make to retain the international talent we train and to cultivate more ecosystems to build the next Google.

While we try to slowly fix our domestic policies, the world is less patient. Mobile social technologies have nudged citizens into the streets in of Tunisia, Egypt, Iran, Algeria, Bahrain, and now Libya. There’s no denying one huge influence in these movements: social networks. Social networks did not cause these revolts, but they greased the wheels. In Egypt, a Facebook fan page acted as the stone while it’s citizens banded together as a flint. The result was a spark. And, that spark was fanned by Twitter, a drum of kerosene so inflammable that Google, Twitter, and SayNow teamed up to enable Egyptian citizens to communicate outside national borders by creating mobile networks where phone calls could translate into tweets.

All of this activity got me thinking about what will be the next phase in the social networking revolution, what will reach mass consumer scale, be global, and generate real social and financial impact. There's perhaps no greater market to disrupt. The fast-moving nature of politics today, whether in "mature" markets such as America or "new markets" such as in Egypt, have paved the way for individuals to express themselves and their interests in a political context. Governments and elected officials may ultimately have no choice but to monitor and cater to these activities. This could be the start of the next mass consumer trend, political expression and organization via social networks directly to elected government officials.

Where Facebook connects friends around brands and causes, and where tweets amplify information in real-time, what happens after elections, or after governments are toppled? If citizens inherently want to express their preferences within a democratic republic, how will those interests be best organized, prioritized, and executed? And, who will be held accountable? These tools are currently effective at rallying citizens around an election or protest. But, what about the act of governing? The reality is that citizens often lose interest, and keeping citizen engagement high after an election (or regime change) into the nitty-gritty of actual lawmaking is not easy. Could social networking tools be built to motivate and engage citizens to keep their interests burning bright during the act of governing?

One company attacking this problem is based in Silicon Valley: Votizen. I don’t know much about them (stealth), other than Jason Kincaid’s profile last year. It’s clear the team’s background is stellar, the investors are some of the most experienced, and it’s timing could be great. On Quora, co-founder Jason Putorti writes: "We’re currently building a product that will fundamentally alter civic participation, and the balance of power in our democracy. $8B is being spent on political influence, much of it on television, it’s massively inefficient and this market will definitely change in the next 10 years…our tools allow voting citizens, votizens, to be recognized and heard by elected officials without resorting to shouting, or extremes." The team is building a solution for the U.S. market, but that also signals opportunities for entrepreneurs in other lands to pick up on the trend and design systems for their own countries. My belief is that once regimes change or loosen their grip, citizens must continue to push, to take up the equally hard work of self-expression and government, and that this activity is best organized online.

Relatively speaking, we have things pretty good in the U.S., so good in fact that we all don't vote (~50%+ only in Presidential races), and when we do, we sort candidates through primaries that are held during inconvenient hours and cater to party extremes. The process produces a showdown where candidates are nudged toward the center, in exchange for modifying campaign promises. And, lots of individual and corporate money trades hands. Politicians use Facebook and Twitter to rally voters to the booths, but what happens after the election? We all know the reality. Elected officials have to calculate their re-election prospects, looking over their shoulders every two, four, or six years, and end up having little choice but to earmark originally well-intentioned bills in order to make sure they bring home some bacon.

This is the pork-filled sausage-making of American politics. It’s easy for us to lay blame on them, but it may also be that we are outsourcing too many of our core interests to public officials who carry very different incentives for actually making sure our interests are met. We may hope our interests are taken into consideration, but hope only goes so far. Critics rightly ask for accountability, but changing horses every furlong may sacrifice the short-term for the future.

Most citizens in the Middle East do not have these luxuries we take for granted. For them, nations like GMail, Facebook, and Twitter provide that place, a common platform which helps them tap, refine, and express an assortment of pent-up desires, and as we have seen, generate tremendous kinetic energy most levees cannot withstand. I know Votizen is still building product for the U.S. political market, but I would wager if it was ready today and tuned globally, millions would register, interact, and make their voice heard.

It may be that entrepreneurs elsewhere in the world are busy working away to provide a solution, either for the world or their country. If you know of tech startups attacking this problem using a social layer, please let me know. Here in America, entrepreneurs are trying to use various technologies to improve fundraising, advertising, election security, fraud, voter turnout, and post-mortem analysis. Any online social activity which can educate, connect, motivate, and encourage voters to even turn up on election days is a huge victory. Beyond that, the amount of money that currently goes into campaigns, especially the American presidential races, is an exciting and lucrative industry to disrupt, all by anchoring a product within the notion that people are growing more and more comfortable sharing their views.

I don’t mean to suggest this will happen smoothly or quickly. Social layers on top of political interests may tease out voter preferences. Some voters may be willing to give up a bit of eminent domain in exchange for the chance at high-speed rail. Some may be more willing to pay taxes dutifully if they were assured the size of government programs would be cut down. A social network geared toward these impulses could help elected officials figure out exactly “who” wants “what” and how badly. Numbers and identity matter here. Elected governments should have an interest in knowing exactly what its electorate wants. The more they deliver, the greater likelihood they'll stay in power. The other side of the bargain is that citizens are going to have to accept the reality that not all of their personal interests will be met. That is the risk citizens take with this kind of network change, but without taking a risk, voters may never get the change they want.

One can say some of this tension has been embodied within the Startup Visa controversy. It took a committed, nimble team of well-known entrepreneurs and investors years and hard work to wedge key visa provisions into a forthcoming law. Critics wonder if it will be enough. Who knows? A social channel on top of this, beyond fan pages and 140 characters, could harness citizen momentum after the euphoria of elections and carry it into the realities of lawmaking, and more importantly, to spread the bulk of this hard work across the backs of more than just a few committed citizens.

Personally, I am grateful for those who have fought for these reforms, and while there are always criticisms to new laws, I find it most interesting to see how entrepreneurs are responding. I am rooting for the entrepreneurs who want to bring online social tools to politics, both here and abroad. We need politics-specific social networks to help increase engagement around local, state, and national elections, but also during the legislative process, to keep the heat on politicians. At the same time, citizens have to work to apply the heat, or else they will get the governments they deserve. My hope is that entrepreneurs ride this awesome, evolving wave of social networking into its next phase. It is a massive wave, and as the global events of the past month have demonstrated, it is not yet anywhere near shore.

Image source

Cultural relativity is an amazing thing. While American parents worry about their kids being on Facebook, Egyptian parents are naming their kids “Facebook” to commemorate the events surrounding the #Jan25 revolution.

According to Al-Ahram (one of the most popular newspapers in Egypt) a twenty-something Egyptian man has named his first born daughter “Facebook” in tribute to the role the social media service played in organizing the protests in Tahrir Square and beyond.

Helmed by now-famous Googler Wael Ghonim, the “We Are Khaled Said” Facebook page showed up within 5 days of Said’s death in June and served as a hub for dissidence against Egyptian police brutality as well as a way to disseminate logistical information about the escalating anti-government protests until Mubarak’s resignation. Other activist pages like one actually called “Tahrir Square” cropped up shortly afterward.

Translation:

A New Day

Man Names His Newborn Girl Facebook

A young man in his twenties wanted to express his gratitude about the victories the youth of 25th of January have achieved and chose to express it in the form of naming his firstborn girl “Facebook” Jamal Ibrahim (his name.) The girl’s family, friends, and neighbors in the Ibrahimya region gathered around the new born to express their continuing support for the revolution that started on Facebook. “Facebook” received many gifts from the youth who were overjoyed by her arrival and the new name. A name [Facebook] that shocked the entire world.

There are five million Facebook users in Egypt, more so than any other country in the Middle East/North Africa region. Facebook itself has reported an increase in Egyptian users in the past month, with 32,000 Facebook groups and 14,000 pages created in the two weeks after January 25th.

While the baby girl could just have easily been called “YouTube,” “Twitter” “Google” or even “Cellphone Camera,” it seems like Facebook has become the umbrella symbol for how social media can spread the message of freedom. There are countless manefestation of this, the above graffiti in Cairo, “Thank you Facebook” protest sign, and Wael Ghonim himself personally expressing his gratitude to Mark Zuckerberg on CNN.

I’m hearing that the temporary military government has begun using Facebook to reach out to Egyptian youth, even creating a Facebook Fan Page page (here). The Ministry of Interior, in attempt to repair the image of the state police, has set up multiple pages. And while my guess is that being a locus of political uprisings wasn’t the original intent of the American college campus-based social network, somewhere Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has got to be secretly proud.

The Internet as a whole should win the Nobel Peace Prize this year for all it’s done for democracy in the MENA region, but let’s not let this naming kids after websites get out of hand. I’d hate for little “Facebook” to have to share a classroom with a little “AOL,” or worse a little “Yahoo.” Even though you have to admit, a girl named “Quora” would be kind of pretty.

Jokes aside, click here for an excellent video of how young activists in Cairo documented the Egyptian protests despite the Internet blocks.

Thanks: Rami Taibah

Translation help: Mohamed El-Zohairy, Fadi Andraus, Om z and Wael Al-Sallami

Attention European startups based in or passing through London.

I will be hosting regular “Office Hours” from now on so I can meet you and hear about your company.

I’m initially trying an experiment by publishing my calendar availability on Tungle here http://tungle.me/mikebutcher.

On Friday afternoon, Paul J. Miller caused what passes for a kerfuffle inside the technology journalism meta-bubble.

Miller, as you know, is “Senior Associate Editor” at our estranged sister site Engadget – or at least he was until yesterday when he posted a resignation note on his blog. The reason for his leaving? The Aol Way.

You've already read the document: Tim Armstong and David Eun's 58-page death warrant for journalists and the practice of journalism at Aol. Hyperbole? Hardly. Here are a few choice quotes…

• “each article should be profitable and generate at least [emphasis theirs] 7k PVs/story"
• "[By March:] SEO checker to be used on 95% of stories"
• "Decide What Topics To Cover [based on] 1) Traffic Potential, 2) Revenue/Profit 3) Turnaround Time 4) Editorial Integrity"
• "use [freelancers] sparingly unless paid for by advertiser"
• ""Carefully craft headlines to grab users’ interest by incorporating in-demand terms and entice them to click onto the article [e.g.] 'Lady Gaga Goes Pantsless in Paris'"
• "use editorial judgment & insight to determine production. Ex: “Macaulay Culkin” & Mila Kunis” are trending because they broke up -> write story about Macaulay Culkin and Mila Kunis".

Had I been drafting the document, I might have added the words "Alternatively, kill yourself" to that last nugget of advice. (Although journalists with a ghoulish bent might enjoy pitching some ideas to Aol based on today's Google trending search terms: Suez, Benghazi, Radiohead and Planned Parenthood. You have 30 seconds – go!)

As an added bonus, the Aol Way also contains a borderline-satirical list of scheduled meetings and calls between editorial staffs and the mothership, mostly to waste everyone’s time constantly monitor progress. As anyone who works with Aol will tell you, this company freaking loves arranging meetings and calls. (As the old saying goes: those who can, do; those who can't, set up a conference call to outline targets for doing.)

So who can blame Miller for wanting to quit Aol while it was behind? Well, actually I can. Not for his motives – it's always heartening to see someone taking a stand – but for his methods. In fact, Millers's resignation broke every one of the Five Rules Of Stunt Resignation.

Having been fired – or "forceably resigned" – from every job I've ever had, this is kinda my wheelhouse. Here then, for the benefit of anyone else thinking about following Miller out the door, is a quick reminder of how the game works.

Rule One: Go Out In A Blaze Of Glory

This is the big one: never – ever – resign. Always – always – make them fire you. Assuming Miller really did jump as opposed to being being pushed, he was a fool to walk out the door of his own volition. Resignations do not a martyr make, and by tomorrow everyone will have forgotten about his admirable act of principle. Exhibit: How many high profile political resignations can you remember? Now how many high profile firings? Exactly.

Once Miller decided he no longer cared to keep his job, he gave himself a once in a lifetime opportunity to mess with his hated Aol overlords. He could have written a series of long, rambling, un-search optimised pieces poking fun at the Aol Way. He could have composed an open letter to Armstong and Eun, and posted it on the front page of Engadget for maximum embarrassment (posting his resignation on his own blog rather than his employers’ was a classic schoolboy error). Hell, he could have written Vogon poetry, or posted video of him doing interpretive dance. In short, if he didn't care about his job, he could have used Engadget's audience to loudly and annoyingly hammer home his point about Aol's repellent content strategy until he was dragged kicking and screaming from the building, a martyr to online journalism!

A grossly unprofessional abuse of power? Of course, but also this: a pitch-perfect stunt firing of which Network's Howard Beale would be proud.

Rule Two: Have A Specific Grievance

Another big problem with Miller's blog post is the lack of specifics.

“I'd love to be able to keep doing this forever, but unfortunately Engadget is owned by AOL, and AOL has proved an unwilling partner in this site's evolution.”

What does that mean? I don't know what life is like at Engadget but with TechCrunch, AOL has thus far stuck to its word not to interfere with editorial. No one (except possibly Mike) would be happier than me to receive an email from Daddy Tim, asking us to cover a particular subject, or leave something else alone. It would be posted on TechCrunch before the ink was dry. Likewise, the day that one of Aol's "SEO consultants" walks through the door of TCHQ, Powerpoint presentation in hand, will be one of the best days of TCTV's life. The video of us messing with them will get a zillion views.

Disappointingly, though, none of this has happened yet. I'm sure the TechCrunchers and Engageters who have to deal with Aol on a corporate level – those fucking calls – have sufficient specific grievances to justify taking a walk, but I'm not convinced that any editorial staffers do yet. If Miller's experience is dramatically different than ours, he should have given specifics – otherwise it just sounds like he was generally fed up with his job, and the Aol just gave him an excuse. Which brings me to…

Rule Three: Timing Is Everything

Miller joined Engadget in September 2005, about a month before the blog was acquired by AOL, and a full six years after Michael Wolff wrote Burn Rate, the first book to give an insight into how breathtakingly dysfunctional Aol can be. The Aol Way document is a hell of a flimsy final straw to break a six year employee's back –

– and even then, the Aol Way was published more than two weeks before Miller's resignation. If he was determined to resign on principle, rather than because of some specific example of corporate interference,  the rules dictate he should have walked within 24 hours of the document being leaked. Waiting 17 days reminds me of those soccer players (naming no names: Ronaldo) who take a dive ten seconds after an opponent has brushed past them. "Oh, ow… foul!" Oh, please.

Rule Four: "There's No One Else Involved"

In many ways, resignations follow the same protocol as celebrity divorces (speaking of: did you hear about Macaulay and Mila!? Oh Em Gee!"). Specifically, in one's statement of separation it's vital to include an assurance that the decision was made entirely alone; that there is no one else involved: no other job, or younger starlet, waiting in the wings. To suggest otherwise is to turn a shining martyr into a grubby comparison shopper. The nearest Miller's blog post got to such a statement was this:

"I'm not exactly sure what these next months and years are going to look like for me, and I'm truly sad that they can't look like Engadget, but I'm excited to find out what's next."

Meh. Four out of ten.

Rule Five: Find Someone Else Within A Week

In reality, of course, Rule Four is just an inside joke. Of course there's someone else, or at least there bloody well better be. After resigning, or being fired, you have a maximum of seven days before everyone forgets who you are – or until they assume that, if no other employer wants you, you weren't that great a loss in the first place.

When the Guardian laid me off a year or so ago, I immediately announced my move to TechCrunch, following a lighting-fast negotiation which made Phileas Fogg's sprint to the Reform Club look relaxed. Even back in 2004, when my re-employ-ability was less certain, I understood the importance of Rule Five: within three days of being fired as editor of a magazine I'd co-founded, I announced that I was launching a brand new company called The Friday Project. Of course I had absolutely no idea what The Friday Project would do, but I registered the domain name and created a holding site and sent out a press release anyway. Eight months later, when my new business partner and I finally revealed that The Friday Project would be a new publishing house, everyone assumed we'd planned it that way from the start. Appearances are everything.

So, Paul J. Miller, Rule Five dictates that you have fewer than six days left to make your next move. You're a talented, popular writer – and an even more popular podcaster – so hopefully, having screwed up all the other rules, you'll at least nail this one.

I mean, I'd suggest joining us here at TechCrunch but… well… you know… Aol. Those fuckers are everywhere.

Good luck!

In Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 film The Godfather, there’s a scene between Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall) and Sonny Corleone (James Caan) that plays out like this:

Tom: Your father wouldn’t want to hear this, Sonny. This is business not personal.
Sonny: They shoot my father and it’s business, my ass!
Tom: Even shooting your father was business not personal, Sonny!

Events the past few days in the tech ecosystem have reminded me of this scene.

As we’ve all heard by now, yesterday, Twitter made what seemed to be a quick and drastic decision to block a number of popular Twitter third-party clients, namely, UberTwitter and Twidroyd. Both of those, of course, are owned and operated by UberMedia, a company which is quickly buying up a significant part of the Twitter ecosystem — presumably to figure out a way to monetize it.

So Twitter’s move was an act of war, right? Well, yes. But it’s not as cut and dry as some are suggesting. Further, the only thing that’s actually surprising about any of this is that people are acting surprised.

First of all, Twitter did not block these apps because they hate them. Both applications are a significant part of Twitter’s ecosystem and give them more of what they ultimately really value: data. But the fact of the matter is that UberMedia has gotten too close to the territory that Twitter must protect: monetization. They don’t hate UberMedia, it’s business.

The stated official reasons for the suspension of the apps included “trademark infringement” and “changing the content of users' Tweets in order to make money”. Both of those are directly related to Twitter’s business. And while UberMedia denied the latter charge, it doesn’t matter. The message is clear: Twitter is going to protect their business.

Right or wrong, a shitstorm quickly followed. The larger web quickly descended upon Twitter and started taking shots at the company left and right. It looked as if the major problem was the timing of all of this, as the the UberMedia/TweetDeck (the largest third-party Twitter client) deal had just been reported a week prior (by us) and Twitter was also promoting its own apps on the same day.

And maybe it was time for Sonny Corleone to respond with, “Well then, business is going to have to suffer.”

Why didn’t Twitter simply talk to UberMedia before taking such drastic action? Well, according to them, they had, months prior.

But again, none of that really matters. What does matter is that people are once again pissed off because a beloved company seems to be taking action against their developer community. But again, why is anyone the least bit surprised by this? This has happened time and time and time and time again. And it will continue to happen until the end of time. Or at least the end of capitalism.

A tweet by Joe Hewitt yesterday perfectly encapsulated the situation. “At some point, every company gets taken over by conniving business assholes, even the ones you love,” he wrote. While some quickly jumped to the conclusion that Hewitt was talking about his own employer, Facebook, he quickly clarified his statement. “Every day on techmeme there is some example of this,” he tweeted. Clearly, he was talking about Twitter in this instance.

But Hewitt is right. This does happen all the time. And while Hewitt wasn’t talking about his employer here, it has happened with them too. How many actions has Facebook taken against their developer community in order to both protect and build their business? Dozens? More? Certainly, there will be many more to come.

What about Apple? I mean, just this past week we’ve seen a huge explosion of rage from the development community over the whole subscription thing. Why is Apple doing this? It’s business, not personal.

Google? I mean, why do you think they really decided to side with Verizon on their bogus net neutrality pact? Does Google truly believe in that BS? Nope. It’s business.

The list goes on and on. And again, it will continue to go on and on. Certainly, there are some companies that handle this better than others. But as companies get large enough, or simply to the point where they have to think about making money, the same things happen over and over again.

These moves start out small. The first thing you normally see is a company start to notify its ecosystem that they can’t use their name for third-party sites/apps. Is this because they hate those companies? No. In fact, they probably love them for helping them build up their ecosystem. But then lawyers start to get involved and the companies are advised that they have to protect their trademarks or they’ll risk losing them.

This almost always pisses off the ecosystem. But it’s business, not personal.

See a pattern here?

The point is that while people like Hewitt and the others giving Twitter shit, range from sad to pissed off by what they perceive to be hostile actions, absolutely no one should be surprised. This is what happens. And this is what has to happen. The alternative is that these companies do nothing to protect their business and as a result, they go out of business themselves. And then everyone is screwed.

Again, that’s not to say there aren’t better ways to handle all of this. And Twitter does have a fairly poor track record when it comes to these situations within their community. But sometimes things change quickly and companies believe there are actions that need to be taken.

It’d be nice if these companies were a little more transparent about all of this. How refreshing would it be for one to just come out and say, “look, we love what you’ve done for us, but we really need to make money now or you’ll be screwed along with us, so we’re screwing you now.”?

Even shooting your father is business.

But in some cases, maybe the the facades are all a part of the plan. I mean, just imagine if a player in the ecosystem ended up coming dangerously close to the main company itself — think: Zynga and Facebook, and now UberMedia and Twitter.

This reminds me of another Godfather quote. This time, it’s Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part II:

“There are many things my father taught me here in this room. He taught me: keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.“

[image: Paramount Pictures]

What was the best business decision VC Fred Wilson ever made? What was the worst? What part of his job does he dislike the most? The answers might surprise you. In the video above, Wilson answers some rapid fire questions (delivered in a not-so-rapid fashion) from Founder Stories host Chris Dixon.

The clip is an outtake from the interviews segments we ran a week ago, in which Wilson talks about frothy valuations, his investment philosophy, the relationship between VCs and startups, and the VC business in general.

We cut up the interview into four separate clips, which you can find in the links above, but they were so popular I am putting the entire unedited 17-minute interview below, for those of you who missed it the first time around or want to watch it all the way through.

This guest post is by Tien Tzuo, founder of Zuora, a subscription billing company. Previously, he was chief strategy officer and employee No. 11 at Salesforce.com.

Publishers have been struggling for years. Now local newspapers, magazines and even the New York Times, that Grey Lady, are being treated like old ladies by Apple, stealing their pocketbooks while they're trying to stay on a fixed income.

This week, Apple announced what the publishing industry has been clamoring for, subscriptions, in exchange for a whopping 30% cut. Clearly, paid subscriptions are a part of the future of all online media, whether tied to a print version or not. That's what The Daily is all about and even AOL might one day go down that path (Tim Armstrong admitted as much on CNN). It's part of the shift to the Subscription Economy that's happening across not just media, but software, cloud computing, communications, consumer services, entertainment, you name it. In just the past year, as one example, my company, Zuora, has signed over $1 billion in contracted subscription revenue.

But something very dangerous is happening. Apple is now calling the shots for the entire publishing industry's digital strategy. Think about that for a minute. While Apple is prescient and makes great products, it's hardly a publishing expert. Yet, Apple is setting up new rules that could bring the publishing industry to its knees. As if it weren't already in that position.

It's not that Apple can't save publishers—which I don't think it will with these financial terms. It's that its model completely ignores the realities of the publishing business:

• The App Store and iTunes only offers one subscription pricing model. Will a single model work for the San Jose Mercury News, the Wichita Eagle and Runners World? The reality is that it's likely going to be very different for different titles and subscribers.
• Apple has no way to bundle physical and digital goods. Do you want to give up home delivery forever? Or would you still like to get a Sunday paper every week or monthly glossy magazine along with your digital version? I bet most consumers would like some combination of both.
• With the Apple model, there's not enough adequate ad revenue from tablet editions of magazines and newspapers. In particular, eliminating the Sunday delivery also means that local papers lose a huge advertising vehicle.
• Consumers won't stand for one subscription through one device. People want to consume their news on whatever device they have at hand—whether it’s a Blackberry, an iPad or an Android phone. Amazon is showing us all the way with their “Kindle reader everywhere” strategy (with syncing bookmarks to boot), and Google has set a strong standard in its deal with Time Inc around Sports Illustrated subscriptions. Publishers also know that content ubiquity requires platform independence.
• As last week's article from John Squires, former EVP for Time Inc, so rightly points out, access to customer data is truly the lifeblood of the publisher's business model. In the Apple world, Apple is the one controlling this data.

To quote Steve Jobs himself, "A functioning media is vital to a functioning democracy." I agree, and I think there's a better way to use the genius of the iPad and other devices that enables publishers to control more of their destiny—and benefits everyone financially.

So what's a publisher to do?

Take Matters Into Your Own Hands: Don't be tempted by that juicy red apple called the iPad. You need to build your own online subscription commerce strategy, one that allows for lots of different ways to package up your content and sell it.

Not Your Father's Subscriptions: The industry continues to see "subscriptions" in terms that are far too simplistic. Yes, consumers will never agree to switch to a full "subscription only" paywall, so you need to have flexible billing that can slice, dice and package content by the month, the article, by home delivery days, by online, and the list goes on.

Make It Easy: Provide customers single click convenience while providing a PCI-compliant payment and billing process. You need to be able to bundle, cross-sell and rapidly deploy promotions to capture more readers than you ever could through a call center.

And as for Apple? Can you redeem yourself?

Customers with Benefits: If you want that 30% cut you have to let the publishers own the subscriber relationship. Share that data and you both win. Simply giving subscribers "the option" won't cut it.

Freedom of Choice: You know consumers want both print and digital. This isn't music. There's no love lost for the CD. Most consumers want to keep home delivery, and publishers want to be free to work across platforms and devices. "Control" and "closed" are completely counter to the anti-Big Brother brand.

Help Them Help You: Selling publications is not the same as marketing the latest Black Eyed Peas song. Newspapers and magazine titles will get lost in the iTunes model. Just being part of the App Store isn't enough. You need to deliver more merchandise value for a 30% cut.

The bottom line? The Subscription Economy is here, and Apple should be applauded for offering content via subscription. Unfortunately its model just scratches the surface. In the end, publishers should think twice before taking a bite of the Apple. This current plan will do more to hurt publishers then to help them make the shift to the online world.

The Gillmor Gang conflated two major stories this week into one: Apple's terms of service for app store approval, and Twitter's actions regarding UberMedia. The noise regarding Apple being hauled in front of the DOJ illustrates just how powerful Apple's strategy continues to be. As many point out, Android's market share makes it virtually impossible to tar iOS with monopoly status. It's almost as though Erick and Steve planned it that way, right down to Google following up with its 90% scenario as if to validate Apple's 70% model.

Stephen Elop also made that point with his decision to let Microsoft acquire Nokia, reminiscent of Yahoo's failure to notice the ballgame was over when Ballmer pulled the trigger on them a few years ago. Then it was a seat at the search table; today it's a seat at the mobile one. If Danny Sullivan was right that Google could have matched Microsoft's offer, then the real question was why they didn't. Perhaps because giving away 70% of the smartphone market licenses would underline how Google's search monopoly revenue was being used to buy the way into mobile, a much more DOJ-ish infraction.

That's why the crocodile tears shed by publishers and the open except for Flash crowd fail to resonate. Google can afford to give away its store service for 10% because they don't make money on free OS's and apps. Microsoft needs to spend billions on Nokia to buy what Android has done. Let's guess at what that ransom works out to in appstore dollars — maybe 20%. And Apple has invested enormously in squeezing the record cartel, the carriers, and now who? The publishers? I think not. If developers need to make a choice of investment, are they going to bolt iOS in favor of an ad model that may be under attack from Facebook?

As Twitter fleshes out its platform in a very Apple-like way, developers are beginning to notice the stability that effective control of the realtime message stream offers. Facebook ROI is already double that of Twitter messages, harnessing the social edge that leads to authority and decision making velocity. This forces Google to expand its social search integration, which benefits Twitter given Facebook's lack of two-way flow in the global conversation. At least President Obama understands why Twitter deserves to be at the dinner table.

@dannysullivan @scobleizer @kevinmarks @jtaschek @stevegillmor

This guest post is by Ben Keighran, CEO & Co-Founder of Chomp, a search engine for mobile apps.

1996 was a great year in the life of the web. Netscape had launched two years earlier, Excite@home was going to wire all of our homes with unthinkably fast megabit connections, Webvan was going to deliver farm fresh fruits and veggies to everyone’s house (without delivery charges) and Flooz was going to make wallets (as well as the cash they contained) obsolete. In terms of ground breaking innovative thinking, 1996 was a very good year.

For me, I was in primary school when all of this was happening, and I hoped that one day I could be part of something like this. I've always dreamed of changing the world with innovative technology and from my perspective 1996 was the time when an explosion of some of the most innovative thinking the world had ever seen became visible to the public in such a life-altering way.

When most people talk about the dot-com boom and bust they talk about the money that was made and lost in the process. What they don't talk about so much is the innovation that created completely new and world changing technologies. From my perspective the money is interesting but the real conversation needs to be about the rate at which a new technology is adopted, the speed with which new companies are gaining market share and the disruptions that are happening as new technologies and companies supplant the prior generation's most popular products.

As I see it, the big question people should be asking is, "Will mobile applications and the technologies that support them change the way people communicate, get information and do business to the degree that the web did starting in 1996?" Personally, I say yes. The dot-com boom was not a singular moment in history, just a notable one—but if there's anything we can learn from the history of tech, it's that there's always something bigger on the horizon.

Today people are asking if we're in another tech bubble. It's a distinct possibility, but if we are in a bubble, it's likely the expansion stage of that bubble and what we're witnessing looks a lot like what we saw in the late 90's, right down to the Super Bowl commercials. However, there's one key difference: in the 90's it was all about web sites; today, it's all about apps and the mobile web.

Granted, I see the world through a very particular lens as the co-founder and CEO of Chomp, a technology company focused exclusively on solving the app discovery problem. As a result, I'm quite literally invested in my perspective being the right one. That said, take a look at the data; even if you don't completely buy into my perspective, it's hard to argue with the figures.It's pretty clear that the growth of mobile usage and the rate at which mobile apps are being developed and downloaded continues at a rate that puts the 1996 numbers to shame.

When I look at the stats and compare them with what happened between 1996 and 2000 I feel very optimistic, and based upon what I see, I think we're witnessing a phenomenon that I like to call the "appification of the web". Here's why:

The slide above comes from Mary Meeker's presentation at last year's Web 2.0 Summit. During the presentation she also commented that right now the mobile Internet is growing at 8x the speed of the fixed Internet when the Netscape browser was launched in 1994.

Stats related to mobile apps are even more astonishing. By the end of 2009 roughly 3 billion mobile apps had been downloaded from iTunes alone. That sounds like a lot, but even the most optimistic analyst projections were blown away in 2010 when (only one year later!) a remarkable 8.2 billion apps were downloaded.

Since Apple launched their app store in 2008, over 10 billion mobile apps have been downloaded from the store. In late 2010, Pew Internet released a report called "Rise of the Apps Culture". Among the key numbers in the report, one in particular stood out for me: 35% of all US adults had apps on their cellular phones.

Another study, "Sizing up the Global Apps Market", had equally impressive stats. The number of app stores, which in 2008 was less than 5, had skyrocketed to nearly 50 by February of 2010. With the recent announcement by AppBistro—that they are launching white label app stores that will make it possible for any publisher to create a custom app store—this number is certain to grow even more rapidly for the foreseeable future.

Looking further out, the numbers go from optimistic (the Yankee Group is predicting that nearly 7 billion U.S. smartphone app downloads will garner $4.2 billion in revenue by 2013), to wacky, (Gartner projects that as many as 17.7 billion mobile apps will be downloaded in 2011, a 117 percent increase from the 8.2 billion apps they say were downloaded last year). Also, according to the Gartner report, mobile app store revenue hit $5.2 billion last year, with an expected increase of about 190 percent to $15.1 billion in 2011. Perhaps even more impressive, Mary Meeker and Matt Murphy both of Kleiner Perkins just presented a slide deck on mobile trends that among other things projects that global mobile traffic will grow 26 times over the next 5 years.

The New Disrupters

Just like in the 90's when new web technologies threatened—and frequently succeeded—to disrupt entire industries, what's happening today with mobile applications is creating a laundry list of the next great companies.

● Instagram (which just hit their 2 millionth download), PicPlz and Path look like a next generation of flickr
● Foursquare and Gowalla have created entirely new kinds of social networks built from the ground up with a mobile user in mind
● Square has given everyone the ability to process credit card transactions once again changing the way people conduct personal commerce just as PayPal did in the late 90's
● Shazam has fundamentally changed how people discover new music, making the process mobile and more spontaneous—further disintermediating record labels and physical stores
● Rovio is looking a lot like the next giant gaming company
● Thousands of novelty apps from androidify to doggy squeak toys (seriously) have replaced the dancing babies and flying toasters people were sending around over a decade ago

All of these companies and the applications they have developed threaten to topple the existing business paradigms in their respective niche. It was this same cycle of disruptive innovation that led to the explosion of web sites and web content during the dot-com boom, and it's disruptive innovation—this time centered around mobile applications—that will power the growth of these technologies and the value they create today.

So how can you capitalize on this next great tech wave? The same way the winners did last time. Figure out what people want and then deliver it to them using the new version of the Internet—the one delivered via apps. If you're able to give people a better, faster, more tailored mobile experience, you'll be one of the disruptors. By precipitating change, you'll create value. Those that do this best will win. After all, someone is going to create the next Facebook and someone out there is building the next Google. Disruption is in the air, and to me, it looks a lot like 1996 all over again.