At the end of October 2009, my colleague Jason Kincaid traveled all the way to Hollywood, Los Angeles, for the official unveiling of Google’s new music search initiative by the Internet giant and its partners, Lala, Rhapsody, imeem and MySpace Music / iLike. He interviewed just about everyone involved about the news, and Mike Arrington followed up with a post basically calling out Facebook and Ticketmaster for not acquiring iLike instead of MySpace.

In a blog post, Google said that, going forward, a simple Google web search would enable users to “search and more easily discover millions of songs”. Queries for songs, artists or albums would return search results including links to an audio preview of those songs provided by its music search partners, at least in the United States – for starters.

People were invited to learn more about the exciting new feature on a special landing page.

Fast forward to today: the landing page linked above now redirects to a list of regular Google search features, Apple has acquired and killed Lala, MySpace acquired both imeem and iLike and already killed the former (and is pretty much on life support itself, too).

(On a sidenote, isn’t it sad that neither lala.com or imeem.com lead anywhere anymore?)

In addition, one of the key people behind Google Music Search, Director of Product Management R.J. Pittman, defected to Apple about a year ago.

From what I can gather, searches for popular artists, songs and albums no longer yield search results that come with audio previews even in the United States, as evidenced by a series of spot tests done by some TechCrunchers stateside. Here’s how it used to work:

A tipster pointed out the disappearance of the old Google Music Search landing page to us, which doesn’t necessarily mean it vanished recently, but I’ve searched everywhere for mentions of Google officially or unofficially retiring the service and have been unable to find any reports about it. I wonder if simply nobody noticed it was gone, or that my search skills or simply not what they used to be.

The last update I can find it when SearchEngineLand’s Danny Sullivan spoke with Google spokesperson Jason Freidenfelds about the future of the service and was told that it was firmly tied in with Google's search group, and that people would continue to develop it even after Apple shut down Lala. That conversation dates back to April 2010, so obviously things have changed somewhere along the way.

One more reason I think things have changed rather recently is because Google linked to its own blog post announcing Music Search back in December 2010.

Now, as I’m sure you’re well aware, Google has bigger plans when it comes to digital music than mere search, so perhaps the Google.com/music link to the former Music Search product landing page was quietly removed to make way for another, more appropriate landing page? Or did someone just quietly pull the plug hoping no one would notice?

I’ve asked Google for comment and will update when I hear back.

Meanwhile, according to Cnet’s Greg Sandoval, Google has begun testing internally its much-anticipated music locker and subscription service , which will simply be named Google Music.

Google had hoped that the service would launch to the public in 2010, but it has failed to sign licensing agreements with copyright holders fast enough to launch a digital music download store and cloud-based locker service for that to happen.

Google may, however, unveil Google Music at its I/O conference in May. As for its loudly-trumpeted-upon-launch music search engine: rest in peace, I guess.

TechCrunch Disrupt winner Qwiki is on a roll. The visual search startup raised $8 million earlier this year from a number of well-knowninvestors including early Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin. And today, the startup is announcing that it has received $1 million in new funding from Lightbank, the investment fund of Groupon co-founders Brad Keywell and Eric Lefkofsky. This brings the company’s total amount raised to $10.5 million.

What makes Qwiki so compelling is its ability to generate media on the fly that combines text, audio, and animated photos. It presents information in a highly visual way, assembling photos and spoken text from Wikipedia and other sources to create visual guides to millions of topics.

Brad Keywell, Co-Founder of Lightbank, said in a release: Doug and the Qwiki team are solving a real problem with a technically innovative and scalable solution that applies to multiple verticals. We are looking forward to working with them as they accelerate the expansion of their business.

After launching in private alpha last October, Qwiki opened up to the public in January of this year. New features include the ability to post, tweet, email or embed Qwikis, the opportunity to contribute content such as YouTube videos and pictures to Qwikis as well as give feedback on sound quality, and a text-based "Contents" section that includes all the information in a given Qwiki.

In its next version, Qwiki plans on expanding to thousands of other content sources, building an iPad app and eventually releasing a custom publishing platform which will allow publishers to transform their own content into a Qwiki.

Startups interested in applying to launch at TechCrunch Disrupt can apply here. The deadline is April 3.

"It's fucked up when your mind's playin' tricks on ya" —The Geto Boys

By far the most difficult skill for me to learn as CEO was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics, hiring and firing were all relatively straightforward skills to master compared to keeping my mind in check. Over the years, I've spoken to hundreds of CEOs all with the same experience. Nonetheless, very few people talk about it, and I have never read anything on the topic. It's like the fight club of management: The first rule of the CEO psychological meltdown is don't talk about the psychological meltdown.

At risk of violating the sacred rule, I will attempt to describe the condition and prescribe some techniques that helped me. In the end, this is the most personal and important battle that any CEO will face.

If I'm Doing a Good Job, Why Do I Feel So Bad?

Generally, someone doesn't become CEOs unless she has a high sense of purpose and cares deeply about the work she does. In addition, a CEO must be accomplished enough or smart enough that people will want to work for her. Nobody sets out to be a bad CEO, run a dysfunctional organization, or create a massive bureaucracy that grinds her company to a screeching halt. Yet no CEO ever has a smooth path to a great company. Along the way, many things go wrong and all of them could have and should have been avoided.

Things go wrong, because building a multi-faceted human organization to compete and win in a dynamic, highly competitive market turns out to be really hard. If CEOs were graded on a curve, the mean on the test would be 22 out of a 100. This kind of mean can be psychologically challenging for a straight A student. It is particularly challenging, because nobody tells you that the mean is 22.

If you manage a team of 10 people, it's quite possible to do so with very few mistakes or bad behaviors. If you manage an organization of 1,000 people it is quite impossible. At a certain size, your company will do things that are so bad that you never imagined that you'd be associated with that kind of incompetence. Seeing people fritter away money, waste each other's time, and do sloppy work can make you feel bad. If you are the CEO, it may well make you sick.

And to rub salt into the wound and make matters worse, it's your fault.

Nobody to Blame

"You can't blame Jazz Musicians or David Stern with his NBA fashion issues" —Nas

When people in my company would complain about something or other being broken such as the expense reporting process, I would joke that it was all my fault. The joke was funny, because it wasn't really a joke. Every problem in the company was indeed my fault. As the founding CEO, every hire and every decision that the company ever made happened under my direction. Unlike a hired gun that comes in and blames all of the problems on the prior regime, there was literally nobody for me to blame.

If someone was promoted for all the wrong reasons, that was my fault. If we missed the quarterly earnings target, that was my fault. If a great engineer quit, that was my fault. If the sales team made unreasonable demands on the product organization, then that was my fault. If the product had too many bugs, that was my fault. It kind of sucked to be me.

Being responsible for everything and getting a 22 on the test starts to weigh on your consciousness.

Too Much Broken Stuff

Given this stress, CEOs often make the one of the following two mistakes:

1. They take things too personally

2. They do not take things personally enough

In the first scenario, the CEO takes every issue incredibly seriously and personally and urgently moves to fix it. Given the volume of the issues, this motion usually results in one of two scenarios. If the CEO is outwardly focused, she ends up terrorizing the team to the point where nobody wants to work at the company any more. If the CEO is inwardly focused, she ends up feeling so sick from all of the problems that she can barely make it to work in the morning.

In the second scenario, in order to dampen the pain of the rolling disaster that is the company, the CEO takes a Pollyannaish attitude: it's not so bad. In this view, none of the problems are actually that bad and they needn't be dealt with urgently. By rationalizing away the issues, the CEO feels better about herself. The problem is that she doesn't actually fix any of the problems and the employees eventually become quite frustrated that the Chief Executive keeps ignoring the most basic problems and conflicts. Ultimately, the company turns to crap.

Ideally, the CEO will be urgent yet not insane. She will move aggressively and decisively without feeling emotionally culpable. If she can separate the importance of the issues from how she feels about them, she will avoid demonizing her employees or herself.

It's a Lonely Job

"And this loneliness won't leave me alone" —Otis Redding

In your darkest moments as CEO, discussing fundamental questions about the viability of your company with your employees can have obvious negative consequences. On the other hand, talking to your board and outside advisors can be fruitless. The knowledge gap between you and them is so vast that you cannot actually bring them fully up to speed in a manner that's useful in making the decision. You are all alone.

At Loudcloud, when the dot com bubble burst and subsequently sent most of our customers into bankruptcy, it crippled our business and devastated our balance sheet. Or rather, that was one interpretation. Another interpretation, and necessarily the official story for the company, was that we still had plenty of money in the bank and were signing up traditional enterprise customers at an impressive rate. Which interpretation was closer to the truth? In the absence of someone to talk to, that's a question that I asked myself about 3,000 times. As an aside, asking oneself anything 3,000 times turns out to be a bad idea. In this case, I had two specific difficult questions:

1. What if the official interpretation was wrong?  What if I was misleading everyone from investors to employees? In that case, I should be removed from my position immediately.

2. What if the official interpretation was right? What if I was grinding my brain into sawdust for no reason at all? What if I was taking the company off track by questioning my own direction? In that case, I should be removed from my position immediately.

As is usually the case, there was no way to know which interpretation was right until much later. It turned out that neither was actually right. The new customers didn't save us, but we figured out another way to survive and ultimately succeed. The key to getting to the right outcome was to keep from getting married to either the positive or the dark narrative.

My friend Jason Rosenthal took over as CEO of Ning about a year ago. As soon as he became CEO, he faced a cash crisis and had to choose amongst three difficult choices: 1. Radically reduce the size of the company or 2. Sell the company or 3. Raise money in a highly dilutive way.

Think about those choices:

1. Lay off a large set of talented employees whom he worked very hard to recruit and, as a result, likely severely damage the morale of the remaining people.

2. Sell out all of the employees who he had been working side-by-side with for the past several years (Jason was promoted into the position), by selling the company without giving them a chance to perform or fulfill their mission.

3. Drastically reduce the ownership position of the employees and make their hard work economically meaningless.

Choices like these separate the women from the girls. Tip to aspiring entrepreneurs: If you don't like choosing between horrible and cataclysmic, don't become CEO. Jason sought advice from some of the best minds in the industry, but ultimately he was completely alone in the final decision. Nobody had the answer and whatever the answer, Jason was the one who had to live with the consequences. So far his decision to reduce staff by letting go of primarily the most recent hires has paid off. Revenue at Ning is soaring and they will soon be profitable. If it had gone worse (or ultimately goes bad), it will be all Jason's fault and it will be up to Jason to find a new answer. Whenever I see Jason, I like to say: "Welcome to the show."

Techniques to Calm Your Nerves

The problem with psychology is that everybody's is slightly different. With that as a caveat, over the years I developed a few techniques for dealing with myself. Hopefully, you find them useful too.

Make some friends—Although it's nearly impossible to get high quality advice on the tough decisions that you make, it is extremely useful from a psychological perspective to talk to people who have been through similarly challenging decisions. My friend Bill Campbell was a huge help to me as CEO, but interestingly it wasn't his great success running Intuit that I found most useful; it was his disastrous experience running Go. Through that experience and his most traumatic days at Intuit (like laying off 1/3 of the company), Bill learned a tremendous amount about how to think about excruciatingly difficult decisions from a psychological perspective.

Get it out of your head and onto paper—When I had to explain to Bill and the rest of my board that, as a public company, I thought that it would be best if we sold all of our customers and all of our revenue and changed business, it was messing with my mind. In order to finalize that decision, I wrote down a detailed explanation of my logic. The process of writing that document separated me from my own psychology and enabled me to make the decision swiftly.

Focus on the road not the wall—When they train racecar drivers, one of the first lessons is when you are going around a curve at 200 MPH, do not focus on the wall; focus on the road. If you focus on the wall, you will drive right into it. If you focus on the road, you will follow the road. Running a company is like that. There are always a thousand things that can go wrong and sink the ship. If you focus too much on them, you will drive yourself nuts and likely capsize your company. Focus on where you are going rather than on what you hope to avoid.

Don't be a punk

Ben Horowitz is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. To read more from his blog, go here.

There are quite a few panoramic apps for the iPhone but they all require a steady hand, lots of patience and, most important, you can only take still photos. The GoPano aims to solve that by adding a panoramic mirror to the iPhone’s video camera, thereby allowing you to take panoramic video in real time.

The GoPano simply snaps onto your iPhone and the included app does the rest. As you record, you can turn the panorama by swiping the screen to shoot what you want as it happens.

Read more…

Baltimore-based video ad technology company TidalTV has raised more than $30 million in financing led by New Enterprise Associates with participation from Comcast Interactive Capital and Valhalla Partners. This brings TidalTV’s total funding to $61 million.

Launched in 2007, TidalTV develops a video ad optimization product for advertisers that helps deliver ads to a target demographic. For example, advertisers can use TidalTV to serve campaigns to specific age/gender segments or to select audiences that have shown an affinity towards a particular brand. This technology is currently being deployed for online video, mobile video and television.

The new funding will be used to expand TidalTV's technology into global markets in the coming year and to deploy its ad targeting technology into new multi-screen applications for advertisers, media agencies and publishers.

HeyWire, a service developed by MediaFriends that offers a free SMS service is debuting its Facebook App that will allow Facebook users to send both texts and Tweets via SMS (from a real phone number) from within Facebook.

Via the new HeyWire Facebook App, Facebook users can text worldwide without any per messaging fees and Tweet via SMS from within Facebook. Here’s how it works. Similar to other free texting apps, HeyWire users are given a real phone number to send and receive unlimited texts with friends and family worldwide.

Users can send messages via the HeyWire Facebook App or the HeyWire apps for iOS and Android devices. Texting conversations actually follow users from the HeyWire Facebook App to their smartphone apps, which is useful. Of course, this comes with a price. HeyWire is charging users 20 Facebook Credits (around $2.00) per month, for a U.S. phone number with unlimited texting from within Facebook to any mobile phone in the USA, Canada and Mexico, and to most mobile phones in China, the Caribbean and Central and South America.

Honestly, if I’m on Facebook, I’m probably just going to message my friends as opposed to using a text message, so I’m dubious as to the large-scale value of the new app. And if I do use Facebook’s messaging system, I can continue those messages on an iPhone or Android phone via Facebook’s app or the mobile web.

HeyWire recently partnered with Twitter to launch a worldwide service, called HeyTweet, that allows users to send free tweets via mobile SMS.

This year’s European startup conference GeeknRolla has become a platform for news, as startups launched and speakers broke news direct from the stage.

Duedil, the business reputation startup, secured first prize in the startup competition, and an on-the-day announcement from DFJ Esprit that it would award the winner a £50,000 no strings investment in the form of a convertible note. This would convert into its next funding round at the price of the next round. That kind of announcement is more common in Silicon Valley, so to have the deal announced literally within a couple of hours of Duedil’s pitch on stage was real news for a European event. Let’s hope we see more of that kind of fast action in the rest of the year. They also won a crack at a year’s worth of Windows Azure hosting, £5,000 in free legal advice form Orrick and free premium job advertisements for a year on CoderStack (normally £120 per ad per month). Not a bad result for a 3 minute pitch.

Google is one of 32 companies to recently join the NFC Forum, a non-profit industry association that has been advancing the use of Near Field Communication (NFC) technology since its founding in 2004.

Google is joining the organization as a Principal member, while CSR and Intel have also raised their membership status to that level (they were formerly Associate Members). The full NFC Forum member list is available here.

To explain what it means to be a Principal member of the NFC Forum, allow me to quote straight from the press release:

Principal membership is the second-highest level of membership in the NFC Forum, with each Principal member entitled to appoint a voting representative to each of the Technical, Marketing, and Compliance Committees and Working Groups.

Principal members may designate individuals to run for positions leading Committees or Working Groups, and they may propose initiatives and contribute to the development of Forum deliverables. As Principal members, organizations may also participate in the NFC Forum testing and certification program using their own in-house test labs.

As Near Field Communications World points out, that last part is crucial because it allows principal members to effectively use their own in-house facilities to conduct NFC Forum certification testing rather than having to send devices out to third-party testing facilities.

NFC, a standards-based connectivity technology, enables people to make transactions, exchange digital content and connect electronic devices with a simple touch. NFC is said to be compatible with hundreds of millions of contactless cards and readers already deployed worldwide.

The Wall Street Journal earlier this week reported that Google has teamed up with MasterCard and Citigroup to embed NFC technology in Android handsets, thus enabling consumers to easily make payments with their smartphones.

Retailers could use the data gathered by using NFC as one’s electronic wallet in order to send better targeted ads to users and even offer discounts to nearby mobile users.

Google is already supporting NFC chips in Android phones such as the Nexus S and is expected to roll out tests of wave-and-pay systems at stores in New York City and San Francisco in partnership with VeriFone Systems and ViVOtech.

Google tellingly also killed support for QR codes in its Places product some time last week.

Other companies that have recently joined the NFC Forum as Associate members include Daimler, Hitachi and Kovio. The NFC Forum’s Sponsor members, which hold seats on the board of directors, include companies like Microsoft, MasterCard, NEC, Nokia, NTT DOCOMO, Visa, Samsung and Sony.

For your further reading pleasure:

So Why Should You Care About NFC? (CrunchGear)

The Ever-Elusive Mobile Wallet: Why NFC Chips Are Overhyped And Will Underdeliver

Apple Aims To Take NFC Mainstream; Perhaps The Greatest Trick They've Ever Pulled?

With The NFC Wave About To Hit Shore, RFinity Raises Money To Make It Fast, Secure

IAC has made a business out of developing or acquiring mobile applications based on its popular properties. In fact, IAC’s mobile apps, which include apps for Match.com, CityGrid, UrbanSpoon, and Dictionary.com, have seen over 40 million downloads as of end of the year 2010. Today, we’ve learned exclusively that IAC is furthering its mobile strategy by launching Hatch Labs, a technology sandbox devoted to incubating mobile startups and innovations.

Hatch Labs is the brainchild of Dinesh Moorjani, who was formerly the SVP of IAC Mobile. At IAC, Moorjani started the mobile group in 2007 and helped lead all product strategy for mobile. During his time, Moorjani helped doubled mobile revenue annually for IAC. He tells us that for the past five years IAC has been acquiring mobile technologies and apps, but this can be an expensive endeavor. Moorjani and the company wanted to help incubate more innovation within IAC, particularly in the mobile sector and thus Hatch Labs was born.

The incubator, which is located in IAC’s New York office, is financially a joint venture between Xtreme Labs and IAC (financial terms have not been disclosed). Hatch Labs is bringing in talent to prototype and develop new applications, tools and platforms that tackle emerging problems in mobility. Moorjani, who serves as CEO of Hatch Labs, manages multiple teams of handpicked engineers and entrepreneurs, who work on developing mobile applications.

Moorjani says that three ideas/products are being incubated a any given time, and expects five businesses to be spawned from Hatch by the end of 2011. The most promising ventures, which will ranged from consumer facing to B2B apps, will seek additional capital from IAC and outside investors, to further grow the businesses, and could even be fully acquired by IAC.

In terms of equity and initial seed funding, Moorjani declined to give us specifics but says it is competitive and similar to the equity arrangements with other startup incubators, such as TechStars and Y Combinator.

Of course, recruiting talent is key to the success of Hatch Labs and its businesses and Moorjani is using equity incentives to attract talent that not only has experience in the mobile industry, but also has developed and sold busineeses previously. For example, Hatch’s first general manager to run one of its initial businesses is BumpTop’s former COO, Nina Sodhi. BumpTop was acquired by Google last year.

Details on Hatch’s first product Blu Trumpet, which is expected to launch in Q2 this year, are limited but Moorjani says that it is a monetization and distribution platform in mobile, that aims to help publishers make money off apps and provides a distribution portal for advertisers. Another business being developed within Hatch involves group texting, but Moorjani declined to reveal any further details.

Housing an incubator within a large company has its advantages and drawbacks. First, the incubator will need to be free of any corporate regulations, mentalities and rules for innovations to flow freely. While this sounds simple, it can be tough. Of course, IAC has tons of cash to put into these ideas, which is an added bonus. It should be interesting to see the quality of products that hatch from Hatch Labs.

A mere day after Salesforce announced that it was acquiring social media monitoring company Radian6 for $326 million in cash and stock, rival Visible Technologies this morning announced that it has secured an extra $6 million in financing.

The round was led by the company’s previous backers, which include Investor Growth Capital, Centurion Holdings, Ignition Partners, In-Q-Tel and WPP. Visible Technologies has raised a total of $45 million in funding to date.

Visible Technologies aims to provide its clients with a 360-degree view of social media chatter, and helps companies turn this data into actionable marketing and business strategies.

Visible Technologies CEO Kelly Pennock yesterday penned a blog post on Salesforce’s purchase of Radian6, positing that it shows social media monitoring is going mainstream and that the acquisition – for a ‘great premium’ – validates the space.

Social networking company myYearbook this morning announced it has acquired five new Android apps to support its mobile strategy and grow its team. In addition, the company acquired FlockEngine, which powers multiplayer games on Android phones.

The acquisitions include Toss It, Tic Tac Toe (both of which are among the top 30 most downloaded free Android games), Minesweeper, SpringDroid, and Line of 4.

As a result of the acquisitions, Chris Hager of Austria-based FlockEngine and James O'Brien of UK-based SpringDroid join myYearbook.

myYearbook made the moves to advance its mobile social network, which is focused on meeting new people. The company’s mobile applications, which it says are downloaded more than 25,000 times per day, are monetized through advertising and its proprietary virtual currency.

The acquisitions expand on the company's launch earlier this year of a Web-based gaming platform pairing live video chat with synchronous games and follow in the footsteps of significant additions to its mobile ad sales team and development team.

Exclusive - Munich, Germany-based social games developer and publisher MegaZebra has secured 'multiple millions of euros' in its latest round of financing led by Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures. Previous backer Kizoo Technology Ventures also participated, alongside private investor Markus Stolz. Founded in 2008 and originally supporting a variety of social networks, MegaZebra in the course of last year shifted its focus squarely on developing and publishing games for the Facebook platform only.

Exclusive - Viber Media, the Israeli startup behind the Viber service, which lets iPhone users make free calls to each other, has released version 2.0 of its app in the App Store.

The company’s still gearing up for the launch of their Android application, but in the meantime the update to the iPhone app brings a couple of goodies, in particular the ability to text message other Viber users free of charge. Sure, there isn’t exactly a shortage of free messaging apps for the iPhone these days, but it’s always nice to have a free app that supports both voice calls and text messages.

Viber 2.0 comes with a new tab dedicated to ‘Messages’, where users can see all of their messages and from which they can send new ones to their contacts. Viber sends push notifications to users when they receive a text, so it’s potentially a replacement for SMS.

In addition, the ‘Contacts’ interface has been redesigned to let users filter their contacts and easily see which ones are already on on Viber, or just their favorites if they prefer.

Viber’s calling mechanism has also been improved. When users place a call, the app will first enter a ‘Calling’ state. Once the other party’s Viber app has been contacted and it begins ringing, Viber will enter a ‘Ringing’ state, letting the user know that there’s a connection.

Viber has already been downloaded by over 10 million users to date.

There's a plethora of medical advice and information about drugs and treatment online. But separating the wheat from the chaff can be somewhat of a problem. Enter Diagnosia, a newly launched startup that is aiming to become "Europeʻs premier drug search engine" by providing a safe place for people looking up medicine information. Curiously, perhaps, it's aimed at both patients and physicians. In fact, the consumer angle plays a part in Diagosia's business model.

So, there I was, sitting at TCHQ, discussing the recent Vanity Fair article about Jack Dorsey — and the ridiculous bluebird-on-the-shoulder picture that accompanied it.

Keen to track down the image itself, I typed Dorsey’s name into Google’s predictive image search box.

Here’s what came up…

“Huh,” I thought. “‘Jack Dorsey girlfriend’ – that’s an odd thing to come up as the second suggested search term.”

Unless…

Google bases its prediction on what the majority of other users have previously searched for — and certainly there could be numerous reasons why large numbers of people are interested in the relationship status of paper-centimillionaire Dorsey.

Still, I tried some other famously wealthy and eligible names in tech…

Uh huh.

Right.

Yep.

Sure.

And, last but not least, let’s not forget Twitter’s resident superstar Biz Stone. After numerous high-profile appearances on Howard Stern, Conan and then vodka advertising campaign, surely his romantic currency is…

Awww.

…

Image: Vanity Fair, April 2011

President Obama seems to understand the role that startups play and the contribution that skilled immigrants make to U.S. economic growth. He has talked a lot about the importance of science and engineering, and expressed fears that, unless we improve our game, China and India will out-innovate us. He even visited Silicon Valley recently to talk to its elite. And he has had his Chief Technology Officer, Aneesh Chopra, make several trips here to the Valley.

I commend the President for putting a spotlight on entrepreneurship with his Startup America initiative; but I can't help wondering whether this is just a giant press release. It needs more substance: a way for foreign-born entrepreneurs to start companies here and a leveling of the playing field for entrepreneurs wanting to solve government problems.

I debated this with Aneesh Chopra, at the Economist Innovation Summit in Berkeley, last week.

The day before that event, Aneesh had invited me to a meeting with the director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Alejandro Mayorkas, at Stanford Law School. We had had a very productive discussion with leading academics, lawyers, and entrepreneurs about how the government can interpret existing laws in a more favorable way for immigrant entrepreneurs. I was pleasantly surprised at how open Mayorkas was to criticism and at how he listened to the ideas presented to him. Both he and Chopra acknowledged the deficiencies of the current system and pledged to do all they could to have them fixed.

But Chopra dropped a bombshell at the Economist event. He said that the President would only support the Startup Visa in the context of "comprehensive immigration reform". What this means is that the legislation will be lumped in with toxic debates about illegal immigration and will be held hostage to other interests.

There is reason to be concerned about the plight of the 12 million unskilled workers who are in the U.S. and lack documentation.  But there is a lot of anger and other emotion in these debates. Opponents of comprehensive immigration reform say that it will provide "amnesty" to people who broke the law. Supporters argue that there are humanitarian concerns, and that we need these hard-working people to do jobs that Americans don't want. Regardless of what is right or wrong, there is almost no chance that this contentious issue will be resolved until after the next elections—which means that the Startup Visa could be Dead on Arrival.

Indeed, I received confirmation from a staffer in the office of Senator Lugar (one of the two sponsors of the Startup Visa Act) that without the support of the White House, the legislation has almost no chance of passage. The senator believes very strongly that the Startup Visa will help keep the best and brightest entrepreneurs in America and create jobs for all Americans. He says that "the United States should not wait another day, and certainly not until after November 2012, to improve our global competitiveness".  And he warns, "If the White House delays, our economy and job creation in America are likely to pay the price".

Senator Lugar is right. Our economy will pay the price. The poor, unfortunate, unskilled workers will still be here five years from now, because they have nowhere else to go. But the highly skilled, highly educated entrepreneurs, doctors, engineers, scientists, and researchers who are trapped in "immigration limbo" will be long gone. They are in high demand and have many options.

If the President is indeed serious about addressing the needs of Silicon Valley, he should endorse the Startup Visa legislation. Most Americans will readily support a bill that ties visas to job creation. We can then focus on building consensus for comprehensive immigration reform.

In my debate with Chopra, I also criticized the Startup America initiative for providing what Forbes's Maureen Farrell called a "Venture Capital bailout" rather than fixing the government procurement system to level the playing field for entrepreneurs.

I have written about California's ageing legacy systems, which cost billions to maintain and can be replaced by newer web-based technologies for a tiny fraction of their maintenance costs. The problem is even bigger at the national level. We waste tens of billions of dollars on federal systems. The governments' procurement systems favor the big contractors—who charge as much a hundred times more to build and maintain computer systems and infrastructure than Silicon Valley's entrepreneurs would. Why not level the playing field and allow our innovative startups to bid on these? This will save taxpayers billions of dollars. Such a program will spur entrepreneurship as nothing else will. That's a real Startup America.

To Chopra's credit, he responded very well to criticism from Babson professor Daniel Isenberg and me. Even The Economist‘s "fireball" moderator, Vijay Vaitheeswaran, was no match for Aneesh.

I also challenged Aneesh on the Administration’s obsession with "clusters". As I explained in this article, these well-intentioned efforts to build Silicon Valley–style technology hubs are all based on the same flawed assumptions: that government planners can pick industries they want to develop and, by erecting buildings and providing money to entrepreneurs and university researchers, make innovation happen. There is not one example of a Government-sponsored tech cluster—anywhere in the world—that has worked. Yet our leaders talks about clusters as if they are the secret sauce for entrepreneurship.

Our economy is stuttering and stalling, and our competitors are rising. So our debating skills are not what matter here. What matter are how soon we fix our policies and what we do to boost entrepreneurship in this country.

(You can watch the entire segment including Chopra's keynote here.)

Editor's note: Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School, Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University, and Distinguished Visiting Scholar at The Halle Institute for Global Learning at Emory University. You can follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa and find his research at www.wadhwa.com.

Almost exactly one year ago (their birthday is tomorrow), WePay launched its group payment platform to the public. The goal was simple: give people an easy way to divvy up bills, member dues, and other common transactions with an integrated payment system and easy reminders to nudge those fraternity members who haven’t paid their dues yet. The service is also handy for selling tickets and collecting donations.

In light of the occasion, WePay is starting to talk about some of its numbers (albeit vaguely). WePay CEO Bill Clerico says that in the last three months, the service’s engagement numbers have surged from around 5,000 users per week to 25,000 per week. These users aren’t just visiting the site — they’re actually taking substantive action, like sending bills. He attributes this growth to optimizations the site has recently made to its sharing flows on Twitter, Facebook and its emails. He also says that WePay has drawn a lot of new users from referrals.

As for the amount of money WePay is actually dealing with, Clerico says that it is currently seeing “several million dollars” in payment volume per month. Obviously WePay only takes a small fee for each transaction (3.5%, with a 50 cent charge to pay with your bank account), so WePay isn’t seeing millions in revenue. But Clerico says that revenue is up 70% month over month. He declined to get much more specific, explaining that he didn’t want to draw apples-to-oranges comparisons with other payment platforms that have different fee structures.

In light of the growth, the company is hiring — a lot. Clerico says they’ll be hiring 25 people in the next 90 days, which will be enabled by the $7.5 million they raised last summer.

BuzzFeed and Huffington Post co-founder Jonah Peretti talked at Web 2.0 Expo today about the much misunderstood subject of how to make something go viral (no it’s not all about cats and bacon). Peretti began the talk running through his various early experiments in virality and what they taught him about why content spreads.

As part of his theory as to why content that elicits a reaction from users has more of a penchant for going viral, Peretti contrasted Google and Facebook in terms of their approaches to information. The difference between the “Google” and “Facebook” approach is namely that the Google philosophy is that media is about finding information related to queries like “How to stop oily skin?.” On Facebook media is just another way to express your feelings and more importantly a way to do something with your friends.“On Facebook you share things that define you,” Peretti said, as opposed sharing something trashy or embarrassing like that oily skin thing.

A lot of Peretti’s points could be gleaned from the single slide below, which shows “Viral Lift” or user engagement that isn’t from normal site traffic but instead from sharing activities happening on sites like StumbleUpon, Facebook and Reddit. BuzzFeed is designed with this viral lift in mind, and arranges it’s navigation to focus specifically on user reactions, separating it’s content into the Internet-inspired emotions “LOL,”"omg,”"wtf”"cute,”"win’ and “geeky” instead of by traditional news topic.

But what BuzzFeed does that’s particularly notable is that it extends these devices beyond editorial content to ads, sharing one CMS format for editorial and advertising, and optimizing its ads for viral distribution as well. Features like “Badges” and “Add Yours” where users can create their own viral content allow readers to go beyond reading and further engage and also apply to ads as well.

“Think of your social content not as information you want to get into people’s heads, but as an excuse for people to react,” Peretti explained was the key to virality. “The content matters, but [what matters] more importantly the ability to share a laugh with friend.” BuzzFeed is slated to hit 11 million uniques in March.

Long ago, before Chrome existed for OS X (so, 2009) my browser of choice was Camino. You’ll be forgiven if you’ve never heard of it, it’s an open-source project that zero people work on full-time. And it’s only available on the Mac. In fact, if you have heard of it, it may be as the other browser Mozilla makes. And its future is now at a crossroads.

As the team lays out in a post on their blog, a major change is needed to keep Camino going. Why? Because throughout its existence, the browser has been built using Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine — the one built for Firefox. But now that engine will no longer be embeddable in other browsers — even other Mozilla browsers, like Camino.

This means that they either go forward continuing to support the legacy versions of Gecko — which are already out of date, by the way, with the launch of Firefox 4.0 — or they have to go in a different direction. Obviously, they’re leaning towards the latter. And if they do go that way, the best option is clear: WebKit.

WebKit is the engine that powers Google Chrome and Apple Safari (as well as their mobile browsers). It has long been considered to be the hot engine of choice, even though the two largest browsers, Firefox and IE, don’t use it. In other words, it’s a nice fall-back option for Camino to have.

And others, namely Epiphany (the native browser for Gnome) have made the same jump in the past.

But there’s still a very big problem for Camino going WebKit: implementing it.

Again, Camino has no full-time employees working on it. It’s a true open-source community effort. For a long while, the project was lead by Mike Pinkerton, but he jumped over to help build Chrome for Mac long ago (but still contributes to the Camino project). Other contributors are Mozilla employees. These people all have very busy day jobs.

Here’s how they explain the problem:

Beyond that, the future is unclear. As a purely community-based open source project, no one is employed to work on Camino; all Camino developers are volunteers, working on Camino in their spare time, as a labor of love. While maintaining embedding in a fork of Gecko is theoretically possible, we don't have the manpower for a sustained effort of that kind. A more realistic option would be to port Camino to WebKit, but while this would be much easier to maintain in the future, it would require a large amount of initial work. While we would like to take that approach, we don't have the manpower to do it on our own—we encourage anyone who might be interested in adapting the Camino code to a new rendering engine join our development discussion list.

In other words, web developers, mount up! Save Camino!

[thanks Jeff]

My old friend Osama Bedier now works for Google. This is especially interesting after reports that Google has partnered up with MasterCard and CitiGroup to test out an NFC payments system.

It’s also pretty interesting in light of the fact that Google recently filed for a patent for a “Distributed Electronic Commerce System With Centralized Point Of Purchase”, or what sounds like a mobile shopping cart that wraps ups all elements of a transaction into a process, goes beyond PayPal and actually collects data about what users are buying.

Bedier started his Web 2.0 Expo talk by emphasizing that eCommerce hasn’t changed very much in 13 years, but then said that it was about to go through a major transition, as the convergence of mobile, local and social will change the industry. He set aside three elements that needed to be in place before the next eCommerce revolution.

1. Payments need to go digital.

2. Inventory needs to live in the cloud.

3. Identity needs to be interoperable.

So what does the future of eCommerce look like? It looks like it did 50 years ago, with a completely personalized experience according to Bedier. “But over coming these challenges, it’s not about any one app site or company,” everyone has to work together, Bedier said.

Today at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman took the stage for a chat with NetworkEffect’s Liz Gannes. The main point of the discussion was Hoffman’s belief that “Web 3.0″ is data. More specifically, the platform part of data. But that’s old news, Hoffman gave that talk at SXSW a few weeks ago. More interesting were his thoughts on what Internet companies should do with their data.

Or rather, what they shouldn’t do with their data.

“Good Internet companies never ambush their users,” Hoffman said. When Gannes suggested that many often do, Hoffman cut back in, “but not good ones.” “That's one of the prinicples of data goodness," he continued.

He also noted that the “open” versus “closed” debate around data is often not based around economic variables, but rather this idea of not ambushing users.

This is interesting since Facebook is often cited as a company that perhaps does ambush their users with changes they make — and Hoffman is one of the original investors in Facebook. It’s also interesting given the news today that Google violated user trust with the Buzz roll-out.

Neither Facebook nor Google were directly addressed by Hoffman on stage, but he did give some examples of ways that LinkedIn is careful with their user data. And he noted that it’s not just about “open” versus “closed” data. Sometimes there is data that a user may want to share with another service, but it’s not technically “open” data. Users should have the right to share that data under the right circumstances, he noted.

Hoffman also cited location as one layer of data that could be be troubling with regard to this “ambushing” idea. “It’s something you have to be careful about,” he said. Hoffman is also an investor in location-based Gowalla.

Ever have one of those days where every news story bugs the living shit out of you? Where your faith in humanity ebbs further away with every click? We’re having one of those days.

*Click*

“Have you seen this Tesla thing? What is wrong with them?”

*Click*

“I can’t believe people are protesting outside Twitter over this tax cut…”

*Click*

“Seriously, PETA wants to rename the Tenderloin?”

*Click*

“Wait — we have a video studio…”

And so a show was born. Welcome to the very first episode of a new regular TCTV feature: “This week in STFU”. Video below.

It’s not safe for work. Obviously.

Andreessen Horowitz Founder/Partner Ben Horowitz took the stage today at Web 2.0 Expo SF to talk about what to invest in and what to build during a technological shift.

Comparing our current technological shift to historical technological shifts like the platform shift from mainframe to client server, the database shift from hierarchical to relational databases and then the infectious domino effect of applications, operating systems, infrastructure, networks and eventually PCs afterward, “The results of the change are bigger than the change”, Horowitz said.

He went on to reiterate the “sell pick axes during a gold rush” investment and development philosophy, emphasizing this outside the tech industry by bringing up the example of how the innovations in automobiles created the suburbs — and the fast food industry.

So what are the resulting things to invest in, according to Horowitz? “Not what we expect”, he said.

“Go out and build ‘question mark’” he ended with. “The one thing we can definitely predict is that there will be very large companies but what they will be will be completely unpredictable.”

You can view Horowitz’s entire slide deck above.

Five days ago, we reported that Apple was gearing up to release a new build of the OS X Lion Developer Preview. Sure enough, that’s exactly what they did today as build 11A419 has been seeded to developers.

This matters for a couple of reasons. First, it’s the first update to the OS X Lion preview which many developers complained was fairly buggy. Despite the bugs, the preview went a month without any updates. More importantly, this is the build that Apple is considering to be a “GM1″ revision internally, we hear. And yes, it’s said to be much more stable and complete than the previous build.

You’ll note that the build number has jumped pretty dramatically: from 11A390 for the initial build to 11A419. That seems to indicate that a number of builds were tested out internally before this one was released.

Having said that, it’s unlikely that this will be the actual “Golden Master” copy. We’re still a solid two months away from Apple’s WWDC event where Lion will be a key area of focus. Apple may attempt to launch Lion there, but more likely is that the release candidates is handed out to developers there. A public launch would come shortly thereafter.

This developer preview 2 launch follows a smaller update that came through earlier so that developers could get this latest build of Lion through the Mac App Store. As we previously reported, that initial roll-out was less than ideal.

Again, this build of OS X Lion is for developers only.

I’m at Columbia Business School tonight to talk with Jack Dorsey, a founder of both Twitter and Square. As I wrote earlier today:

It's really more of an interview, with questions from the students and the audience at large. If you have a question for Dorsey, leave one in comments below or Tweet them at me during the event @erickschonfeld. I'll be asking Dorsey about his new role at Twitter, where the product needs to go from here, how he will balance that with his role at Square, and how he thinks about designing social products in general.

The theme of the lecture is "Social Disruption." Both Twitter and Square are disruptive startups in the media/communications and payments industries, respectively. We'll get into how each company disrupts the current order of things and creates new value in the process. Square lets anyone accept credit cards, lowering the barriers to creating a business. Twitter lowers the barrier to communication, opening up a whole new way to consume information. I want to know what lessons he's learned from both experiences, and how the early rough days of Twitter helped him launch Square with so far hardly a hiccup. I also want to know what he thinks about larger players like Intuit rushing in after Square.

Send in your questions, and we’ll try to get to some of them (no promises, and they have to be good).