Last night, after much procrastination, I started my taxes—on my couch with a movie playing on the TV, using only my iPad. I was testing out an early build of TurboTax, which is now available for the iPad (in addition to the online and desktop versions). I got through the bulk of my taxes by the time the movie was over.

Taxes are never fun, even on the iPad. But the new TurboTax iPad app makes it fairly seamless. Anyone familiar with TurboTax will recognize the interface. It takes you through the same guided questions the online and desktop versions do, asks you about your financial situation, and keeps a tally of your refund up top (or, gulp, taxes you still owe). The app works in both landscape and portrait mode, and knows when to pop up a number keypad or the full keyboard.

Just like the desktop version, the entire app resides on your iPad, with no need to connect to the Internet until you file. It is free to download and do your entire taxes on, but once you want to file, it costs the same as other versions of TurboTax (starting at $29.99)

The one big drawback of the app for existing TurboTax users is that you cannot import last year’s data. You have to start from scratch. I thought entering all my personal and W-2 data on the iPad would be a pain, but it really didn’t take that long. And while you cannot import data from previous years, you can move your current year taxes over from the desktop version. So you can start on your computer and type in the bulk of the data, and then move over to the iPad and vice versa.

Next year, you should be able to import data from previous years. And who knows, with the new cameras in the iPad 2, maybe you will be able to simply take a picture of all your tax forms like you can with SnapTax for the iPhone (which only works with W-2s for now, but that’s a start).

Fwix is rolling out new versions of its iPhone and Android apps, which adds social geotagging to its hyperlocal places directory. As we’ve reported last Fall, Fwix originally launched as a hyperlocal news aggregator but has more recently been transitioning to a hyperlocal places directory, sort of a cross between AOL's Patch and Google Places.

For neighborhoods, businesses and points of interest, Fwix It culls local data from 30,000 blogs and news feeds; status updates from Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, Google Buzz, and BrightKite; geo-tagged photos from Flickr, Smugmug, and Picassa; local deals from Groupon, LivingSocial, and MobileSpinach; events from Eventbrite, Eventful, Zvents, Stubhub, Ticketmaster, reviews from Yelp, Citysearch, OpenTable, Yahoo! Local, and Zagat; and government data from SpotCrime, FixMyStreet, and SeeClickFix.

Fwix is launching new iPhone and Android apps that include the new places functionality to give users contextual information around businesses and neighborhoods. So Fwix’s technology will aggregate all the relevant social information around you can look for information around destination and places on the fly. Fwix says it will be geotagging check-ins, geotagged Tweets, reviews, events and local news and blog posts.

This is all part of Fwix’s evolution as a local data platform that is organizing the world’s information by location. A number of media publishers building on top of the company’s API including NBC, AT&T Interactive, New York Times Company, Viacom (BET.com), and others. By indexing the Web by location, Fwix is operating in 7 countries; 61,000 cities; and defined down to 87,000 neighborhoods in the US alone. Fwix says that its content and platform reaches more than 30 million uniques per month.

Hyperlocal news is consolidating with acquisitions, and Fwix has an compelling take on the sector by offering its data as a platform. It should be interesting to see if the startup ends up getting swallowed by a big media company in the coming year.

Atrinsic, the direct and online search marketing agency that acquired the assets of former P2P sharing tool Kazaa a couple of months ago, is trying to drum up some attention for the digital music subscription service this morning. In a press release, the company posits that there’s been a ‘breakthrough’ for iPhone and iPad (and Android) users because its service is now ‘accessible on iOS devices’ simply by visiting Kazaa.com.

Atrinsic is very explicit about why it is not taking the usual route of creating and marketing a dedicated mobile app for the mobile platform(s): it is not pleased with Apple‘s recent announcement that it will keep 30% of revenue generated by new subscriptions and media purchases made within an iPhone or iPad app through its App Store.

In addition, Atrinsic derides Apple’s successful mobile app marketplace by deeming it “just one of many marketing and distribution channels” it already engages in (although there’s never been an official dedicated iOS app for Kazaa to my knowledge).

The company says users can sign up and pay for Kazaa by charging their subscription to a credit card, mobile phone or home telephone bill after visiting Kazaa.com from their mobile phone’s browser, thus bypassing Apple’s rigorous rules.

Well, thanks for making a clear statement on the matter (Apple’s subscription policies are, after all, an enormous issue for music streaming service providers across the board), but how is that move a breakthrough rather than a step to (even more) obscurity?

Needless to say, it’s already quite difficult to compete in the digital music streaming business with dedicated apps for multiple platforms users can easily find through marketplaces like the App Store and Android Market, so having a Web-only solution in my mind only makes it that much harder for Atrinsic to market Kazaa as a solid alternative to the likes of Rdio (which was ironically founded by the co-founders of Kazaa), MOG, Spotify, Rhapsody and many others.

Neverthless, Atrinsic COO Ray Musci proclaims that the company still intends to broaden access for Kazaa with new and dedicated apps, so that the browser is not the only way customers can access the music streaming service.

Which makes me wonder why they’re calling today’s announcement a breakthrough, again.

I read an article on Seeking Alpha this morning that touted Kazaa’s not having dedicated mobile apps as a potential stimulus for a strong comeback, which left me puzzled (even if the author of that article owns shares of publicly-listed Atrinsic).

I simply don’t see how not being available on the various mobile app stores, which are growing more popular every day, can help Kazaa cement itself as a leader or even a serious challenger in the cutthroat music subscription space. It’s tough enough to get discovered by enough users to make the investment in developing and publishing mobile apps viable as it is – going Web-only merely makes it tougher on Kazaa, even if Apple doesn’t touch its margins that way.

The Business Insider is now profitable—just barely. In a post this morning reporting the digital media startup’s revenues, operating profits, and other metrics, Henry Blodget reveals that his collection of bloggy news sites and budding conferences eked out a net profit of $2,127, on revenues of $4.8 million last year. It’s about enough, Blodget notes, for a MacBook Pro.

But that’s actually quite an achievement for a media startup. Remember, the Business Insider was founded only in 2007, and this achieved profitability in its third year of operations. And as you can see by the chart above, its really the revenues that you want to keep an eye on. To put that $4.8 million in perspective, that’s roughly half of TechCrunch’s 2010 revenues of $10 million. Not bad. Most of last year, the Business Insider was pulling in about $1 million a quarter, which then almost doubled in the fourth quarter (I’m guess that bump came from its big conference).

Some other stats to chew on: The Business Insider now has 45 full time employees, and according to its internal numbers is attracting a 7.8 million unique visitors a month across its properties (which include Silicon Alley Insider, The Wire, and Clusterstock). ComScore has Business Insider at 4.6 million worldwide unique visitors in January, but also shows the same growth trend. SAI is now “less than half the total,” Blodget tells me. It looks like growth really took off in the past six months.

See, building a digital media business is possible. We need more, not less. Who’s next?

Adding existing features like third-party check-in and better photo support, the Austin based company updates the Android version of their location software today. Gowalla co-founder and CEO Josh Williams told me in a quick phone call that he feels like "we've created a better experience for our Android app than we even have for the iPhone version."

Strategically, supporting the best Gowalla experience on the fastest growing Smartphone platform makes sense for the company, as they compete with other Check-in services like Loopt and Foursquare as well as hybrid location-chat services like Yobongo. They need to fish where the fish are, for sure.

Read more…

Qriously, a service that lets brands measure location-based public opinion, has raised $1.6m in a new funding round led by Accel Partners. Amalfi Capital also participated, while the London-based startup is originally backed by Pacific Tiger Group. Through its SDK offered to mobile app developers, Qriously lets advertisers display questions instead of traditional mobile ads so that they can measure sentiment in realtime but also based on a user's location. Those advertisers could be ad agencies, marketers, research companies and eventually small businesses - Qriously wants to "democratize mass insight", says Christopher Kahler, CEO and co-founder - while app developers get a kick back via a pay-per-answer model rather than pay-per-click or transaction.

As the company prepares for a public offering in the next year, Skype released an updated S-1 filing that includes several new revenue, income and usage numbers. As you may have heard, Skype initially filed for an IPO registration statement with the SEC, with the maximum proposed offering amount listed as $100 million (that is a placeholder amount.) It was thought that the IPO would take place early this year, but apparently the company's newly appointed CEO Tony Bates is looking for more time to get Skype "in better shape."

Skype says that it has grown its average monthly connected users by 38% (to 145 million average monthly connected users) and has grown average monthly paying users by 19%, from the three months ended December 31, 2009 to the three months ended December 31, 2010. Average monthly paying users have increased from 7.3 million to 8.8 million users, and Skype is seeing an average of $97 in revenue per paying user. From December 31, 2009 to December 31, 2010, Skype has grown registered users from 474 million to 663 million users.

Net revenues increased by 20% from $719 million in pro forma 2009 to $860 million in 2010, and Adjusted EBITDA increased by 43% from $185 million in pro forma 2009 to $264 million in 2010. Skype’s net loss in 2010 was $7 million, compared to a net loss of $418 million on a pro forma basis in 2009 (which includes a $344 million charge incurred the settlement in the Joltid Transaction).

Skype ended 2010 with 911 employees, up from 733 in December 2009. Skype acquired mobile video startup Qik in January for $121 million in cash with $29 million in additional payments. As part of the acquisition, Skype added 63 employees from Qik.

In 2010, Skype users made 207 billion minutes of voice and video calls. In the fourth quarter alone, video calls accounted for approximately 42% of all Skype-to-Skype minutes, and in 2010, users sent over 176 million SMS text messages through Skype.

Another interesting tidbit from the filing—Skype’s primary source of revenue has been from the purchase of credit (on a pay-as-you-go or subscription basis) for the company’s SkypeOut product, which provides calling to landlines and mobile devices.

There are four contributing factors that Skype says will help increase revenue. First, the company’s userbase is rapidly growing as mobile broadband access increased. Skype also plans to increase awareness and adoption of its paid products and premium features. And Skype will continue to develop monetization models and revenue streams for its user base, and expects to grow revenue via marketing services (such as advertising) and licensing. Lastly, Skype will look to add more enterprise users to its user base.

Risk factors for the company include the fact that Skype has taken a loss in income in both 2009 and 2010 and may not achieve profitability in the next few years. Profitability, says Skype, will depend on the company’s ability to increase revenue, manage business costs, maintain tax positions and keep up with competitors (Skype specifically calls out Google has a growing competitor with Google Voice).

It’s only been a few weeks since social photo-sharing app Instagram released its API, but developers are trying their hand at it and coming out with new photo-linked services. Today, the Social Printshop is releasing not one, but three Instagram apps: Prinstagram, Instagrid, and Instawar.

All three are fairly simple apps, but they provide features that Instagram currently lacks. Prinstagram, for instance, is a way to print your Instagram photos in a giant grid on a poster or individually on fun stickers.

Instawar shows you two random Instgram pics and lets you choose which one is better. It’s like Pic A Fight. If you like a pairing you can create a link (like this one) and share it via Twitter or Facebook.

Finally, Instagrid is a useful way to see all of your Instagram pics on the web. Instagram itself is almost entirely mobile-based. It doesn’t provide any way to view your pictures online other than through individual links for each photo. With Instagrid, you can see all your photos on pne page in a grid. For example, here is my Instagrid page (see also bottom screenshot). Another Instagram online viewer worth checking out is Instagre.at.

The Social Printshop also has other similar poster and print apps for social photos on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. It was originally called Printing Facebook, until it was threatened with legal action and decided to change its name.

It’s no secret that Skype is looking for way to make more revenue from its VoIP technologies, both in the consumer and enterprise sectors, as the company prepares for a public offering in the next year. Today, Skype is rolling out a new revenue stream—advertising.

The advertising will appear in the Home tab of Skype for Windows, but will only appear in consumer versions not the enterprise versions. The company has been testing ads over the past month and will be working with a number of advertisers, including Groupon, Universal Pictures, and Visa (we are told Nokia, Volkswagon and Disney are also signed up). Ads will appear in the US, UK and Germany and initially, Skype will show an ad from one brand per day in each of the markets where advertising is being sold.

Skype has partnered with Meebo in the U.S., Ad2One in the U.K., and Ströer Interactive in Germany to sell advertising for Skype in each of their respective markets. Specifically, Skype’s advertisements will be placed in the large masthead space and will be display ads that can include audio or video. Since the ads are on Skype, advertisers can add a Click & Call button in the ad as another call to action. In addition, it allows people to share the ad to their Facebook or Twitter accounts, and with one-click, ads can also be closed with the "Close Ad" button.

What’s interesting is that Skype may plan to offer highly-targeted advertising as a way to lure advertisers. The company warns that it “may use non-personally identifiable demographic data (e.g. location, gender and age) to target ads.” Users can also opt-out of this targeting. The reason Skype rolled out the advertising in the Windows Client is because this is the company’s most popular client and may extend advertising to other clients in the future.

Skype currently has an enormous user base, with 145 million average monthly connected users and 29 million concurrent users at peak times. But monetizing these users is a challenge. In August, only 8.1 million of out of a total of 560 million registered users were paying for Skype’s service.

But things are looking up for Skype, as seen in an updated S-1 for the company. sers and financial performance. As stated in the new S-1, Skype’s average monthly connected users have increased by 38% and average monthly paying users by 19%, from the three months ended December 31, 2009 to the three months ended December 31, 2010. Net revenues increased by 20% from $719 million in pro forma 2009 to $860 million in 2010, and Adjusted EBITDA increased by 43% from $185 million in pro forma 2009 to $264 million in 2010. Skype’s net loss in 2010 was $7 million, compared to a net loss of $418 million on a pro forma basis in 2009 (which includes a $344 million charge incurred by us in connection with the settlement in the Joltid Transaction).

Mobile messaging startup Kik Interactive has raised $8 million in Series A funding from RRE Ventures, Spark Capital, and Union Square Ventures. Kik also announced that Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson and RRE Ventures’ Adam Ludwin are joining the company's Board of Directors.

Launched in October 2010, Kik Messenger is an uber-speedy mobile messaging app. It’s similar to BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), except that it works across smartphone platforms. Once downloaded, the app will scan your address book, and tell you which of your friends have downloaded Kik. You can start chatting with these friends, and like BBM, the messages are updated in real-time. You can also see if and when a contact has read your message. You can send friends an invitation containing the install link via text, tweet or email and Kik will also suggest users to you.

In its first 15 days open to the public, Kik Messenger saw viral growth, gaining more than one million users. But the startup stirred up a bit of controversy last November when RIM pulled Kik’s app from BlackBerry World (Kik launched with iOS, Android and BlackBerry apps). According to RIM, Kik “breached contractual obligations.” It was thought that Kik’s use of the address book could have been a concern (which was also a concern for iOS terms, but that seems to be fine). To add fuel to the fire, RIM sued Kik for patent infringement.

Kik has also released a new version of Kik Messenger today for iOS and Android devices
that features real-time group chat for up to ten people. And Kik Messenger's new picture sharing features allows users to share what they're seeing on the fly.

As new board member and investor Fred Wilson says, "Kik is a fast, simple, and elegant solution to cross device mobile messaging which we think is one of the most exciting investment opportunities right now…We believe the Kik team has shown that they
understand how to deliver the right set of features in the right package…”

Kik now has 3.41 million users, so it seems to be growing steadily (though perhaps not as quickly as it was at launch). It’s important to note that Kik faces competition from a number similar mobile chat apps, including Beluga (which was just acquired by Facebook), HighNote, and PingChat.

ZoomSafer, developer of safe driving software for mobile phones, has raised an additional $1.1 million round of financing from White Birch Capital and SugarOak Holdings, bringing the company’s total capital raised to $3.35 million.

ZoomSafer provides risk management software to control and prevent employee use of mobile phones to text, email or browse the web while driving, which it says one of the most difficult challenges fleet operators face today.

For fleets equipped with smartphones, FleetSafer Mobile delivers an active policy enforcement solution that automatically prevents employees from texting, emailing or browsing the web while driving. For fleets equipped with any other type of mobile phone, the company also offers a cloud-based analytics service that enables companies to empirically measure employee use of phones while driving, with no on-device software required.

Kiwibox.com, a social network focused on young adults, has acquired German photo book community site Pixunity.de for an undisclosed sum. Pixunity lets users upload photos, design scrapbooks and share photo books with others. As a result of the asset acquisition of the online platform, Kiwibox will translate and adapt the website to the US market while continuing to provide support to existing members and the website in Europe. It's not clear how big the user base of either sites is, exactly, but the Pixunity community apparently grew by 15,000 members in the whole of last quarter, which means it isn't exactly growing by leaps and bounds.

A newly released app for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, called PlugShare aims to alleviate so-called “range anxiety” for electric vehicle drivers by giving them a map of an area’s available, paid charging stations and homes or lots that will allow them to plug in and recharge for free.

Xatori co-founder and chief executive Forrest North —who previously worked as an engineer at Tesla Motors, and founded and was CEO of Mission Motors, a company that makes electric motorcycles and their components— explained Xatori’s mission with PlugShare:

“We want to build and support a community that’s creating a paradigm shift to a massively cleaner type of transportation. The reality is that most people will charge their electric vehicles at home and not exceed the range of their vehicle very often. This [app] provides a kind of backup plan, and lets you feel comfortable. If you did miscalculate, you'd be ok.”

With oil and gas prices soaring, and with President Obama’s stated goal, from his January 2011 State of the Union address, to "break our dependence on oil…and becom[ing] the first country to have one million electric vehicles on the road by 2015," North sees the market for apps to serve EV and plug-in hybrid drivers as potentially massive, but declined to quantify that in dollars.

Why would anyone offer their outlet and electricity to EV drivers, for free, though? North said they might be motivated by environmental objectives. He sees other reasons to participate, too, for example:

“Mom and pop shops along a route where there are a lot of people [driving] and not a lot of places to charge could say we want to support EVs, become part of the charging network and draw customers. Electricity costs about 15 cents an hour in most of the U.S. now, so it’s not much of an expense to do this.”

Since PlugShare relies on volunteer providers of electrical outlets, and is free to download, it is reminiscent of CouchSurfing.org, a global network of travelers and people with accommodations to offer them, free. Over time, it could come to look more like an AirBnB for EV drivers and anyone offering them power.

Armen Petrosian the co-founder and chief technology officer of Xatori, noted: “Our mission right now is to have this be free and very simple and get as many people to sign up as we can.”

Xatori tested the PlugShare application with a small group of about twenty users in California’s Bay Area prior to launch. As its user base grows, the company hopes to launch a study of the app’s impact on the environment, including how well it encourages and enables the use of electric vehicles over others, the co-founders said.

The company will compete, if not directly, with the likes of Coulomb Technologies and Ecotality, companies that build and install EV charging station networks, and which both offer apps mapping their installed base of charging stations, The EV Project and MyChargePoint.net, respectively.

[crunchbase url="http://www.crunchbase.com/company/xatori,http://www.crunchbase.com/company/coulomb-technologies,http://www.crunchbase.com/company/ecotality" name="Xatori,Coulomb Technologies,ECOtality"

SpareFoot, which helps people find and compare self-storage facilities online, has raised $1.5 million in an extension to its Series B round of funding, bringing the total round size to $3.5 million.

Silverton Partners and FLOODGATE led the round with participation from Capital Factory (where the startup was presented back in September 2009).

SpareFoot, which also operates SelfStorage.com and Apartments.com, says it now boasts the largest advertising network for self storage in the United States.

The company offers consumers a comparison shopping experience for more than 5,000 self storage facilities nationwide. SpareFoot helps self storage operators find new tenants, through an entirely pay-for-performance model.

The company, founded in 2008, says it will use the proceeds to diversify its product offering.

Well that was fast. AOL has closed its $315 million acquisition of The Huffington Post. The deal was originally announced on February 6, so it’s taken a month for the acquisition to close.

As we heard a few weeks ago, Arianna Huffington is now the President and Editor In Chief of all of AOL's media properties, which is now called the Huffington Post Media Group (and which includes TechCrunch).

AOL says the the combined entity will have a user base of 117 million unique visitors a month in the United States and 253 million around the world, according to comScore. For AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, The HuffPo acquisition is his largest deal to date.

Along with the closing of the acquisition, AOL has also poached a number of talented new writers to join its newly formed team. Yahoo’s Michael Calderone has been named Senior Media Reporter, the New York Times’ Trymaine Lee has been named Senior Reporter, the New York Daily News’ Michael McAuliff has been named Senior Congressional Reporter, and The Daily’s Jon Ward has been named Senior Political Reporter. Bonnie Kavoussi will be Business Reporter, and Lucas Kavner has been named Entertainment Reporter

With the acquisition, AOL is buying into the new publishing model that the Huffington Post represents. Armstrong has said that the the driving factors behind the deal is how well the Huffington Post fits into the content platform he is trying to build, particularly around women, influencers, and local (his 80-80-80 strategy).

Tim and Arianna have been on a roadshow of sorts, explaining the new content strategy to the public. As we know, there will be layoffs, Hollywood, and more.

Disclosure: AOL owns TechCrunch.

Y Combinator-backed AdGrok has raised $470,000 in angel funding from Chris Sacca, Russ Siegelman, Ben Narasin, TriplePoint Capital and Y Combinator.

Today, the startup, which launched in August 2010, is also announcing the general availability of AdGrok to users. AdGrok’s web-based platform allows small businesses purchase contextual keywords on Google AdWords, without the cost of a SEM agency’s work. The SaaS suggests keyword buys, carries them out, and then collects and displays stats about their performance. AdGrok essentially becomes a business’ interface to AdWords, replacing Google’s platform with a more user-friendly software.

AdGrok’s "GrokBot" will crawl a website looking for product pages. When it finds one, it builds the AdWords campaign structures in order to send traffic to that page, generates keywords for that product, and builds text ads from a template library to accompany the keywords specific to that product.

Grok-O-Matic allows companies to import their entire product catalog on AdWords. And companies can find poor performing keywords or a compelling text ad that everyone likes to click on via Groknoculars.

AdGrok’s platform includes deep analytics, including how much traffic businesses are seeing from a keyword or how a text ad is doing, how much it costs, and how much revenue they're making. AdGrok’s technology will also evaluate a company's campaign for ways it can be improved and presents these actionable insights and recommendations to users.

AdGrok also offers an agency-like product called GrokMe, in which a Google Certified Professional will do all the set-up and daily management of a business' Google AdWords account, and they'll get a weekly report with their campaign's performance.

The startup’s founder Antonio Garcia-Martinez says that he wants AdGrok, which faces competition from Clickable, to be the TurboTax of search engine marketing and keyword bidding. AdGrok’s platform has evolved since we its launch, now offering both a self-serve and a agency-like offering and now appeals to both small and large businesses.

Privalia is very serious about becoming a major private online sales club on a global scale, kicking up its European presence up a notch with the acquisition of Germany's online clothing and apparel retailer Dress for Less. The site was acquired from Palamon Capital Partners, a pan-European private equity firm, and Privalia has disclosed that it raised 88 million euros ($123.4 million) in new equity financing from General Atlantic, Highland Capital Partners, Index Ventures and Insight Ventures Partners as part of the transaction. With the acquisition, Privalia has expanded its geographic reach to Germany (it was already operational in Spain, Italy, Mexico and Brazil) but also extends its business model into the open site, discount and full price segments. In other words, Privalia is on its way to becoming a global online fashion retail powerhouse.

Regardless of what you think about the Quick Bar in the newest version of Twitter for iOS, there’s no contesting that it’s definitely captured tech pundits’ imaginations for the past weekend or so.

This happened primarily because of general ad aversion but was aided by the fact that influential tech blogger John Gruber catchily dubbed it the Dick Bar, in homage to both new Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and the fact that the ”alerting function” is a little obtrusive and a little too hard on (that’s what she said) Promoted Trends, which really aren’t trends at all but ads, costing advertisers around 100K a pop.

Riffing off of how some Twitter Trending Topics are inane (um), developer Mark Beeson has created his own Dick Bar, one line of Javascript that will let you display Twitter’s auto-overlaying attempts at a viable form of mobile advertising on your own site. (To its credit Twitter has submitted a less obtrusive version to the app store, as to how much less obtrusive it is actually is remains to be seen — Costolo has been adamant about not including a way to turn it off.)

Says Beeson on the inspiration behind his creation,

“I don’t know that “inspiration” is the right word… that implies there’s been an accomplishment of some sort, of which I’m pretty sure if you asked the Twitter dev crew right now, rolling back their repository to the sounds of Internet Rage ™ and cheap shots like mine probably doesn’t count as an accomplishment.

As to why I wrote the thing, seeing “#tigerblood” in gigantic 64-pixel letters is really a reflection of just how absurd the trending topics really are. I think I understand where Twitter is going with this whole thing, but before carving out the ad space, they really should make trends much more relevant to individual users.”

I’ve embedded Beeson’s effort, above, to further demonstrate the value of such information for readers. But don’t get too uppity because, as Peter Kafka points out, Twitter advertising is here to stay. We ain’t seen nothing yet so don’t waste your energy bitching. I guess the only #Dickbar recourse for now is either #dealwithit or #makefunofit or build something better.

For reasons too odd to get in to right now, I’m writing this from the Hollywood Hills, in a house owned by the voice of one of the Rugrats.

I’m here with a gang of old friends from London, many of whom I’ve written about before. One new friend, though, is Sheridan “Shed” Simove, who describes himself as the “Ideas Man“. It’s an apt nickname for a serial entrepreneur — but while most entrepreneurs are obsessed with building their ideas into apps and websites, Shed’s creativity remains firmly rooted in the real world.

In the video below, Shed talks about his latest book, “What Every Man Thinks About Apart From Sex” and shows off a few of his amazing creations, including the “Martin Loofah King“, the “Flying Fuck” and the “Not Pad“, a very special version of the iPad while got him into some of the most amazingly comical legal trouble with Apple.

On a slightly (slightly) more serious note, Shed explains how he uses Chinese sourcing sites like Alibaba to take his ideas from inception to execution in just a few weeks.

It may not surprise you to hear that the conversation is not entirely safe for work.

Shed Simove’s memoir, Ideas Man: The Amazing Real-Life Adventures Of A Modern-Day Creative Genius is available from all good book shops. In the UK.

(Image Credit: Tom Boardman)

As you’ve noticed by now, we’re about a week into our latest experiment in troll-slaying with Facebook Comments. So far, the reactions have been very mixed and very interesting. Publicly, many of the reactions were initially negative. But that has been shifting as time has gone on. Privately, most of the reactions have been positive. But not all of them. We appreciate the feedback.

More importantly, is the system actually working? Well, yes — the real question is: is it working too well?

Since we flipped the switch on for Facebook Comments last Tuesday morning, you’ve probably noticed that the overall number of comments have fallen dramatically. This is completely expected and definitely not a bad thing. Previously, many of our posts would get hundreds of comments (and sometimes more), but at least half of those would be of a quality best described as weak to poor. And of those, about half would be pure trollish nonsense.

Simply put: with the previous system, roughly half of the comments were more or less useless.

With the Facebook system, the most popular posts are only touching around 100 or so comments (obviously, the ones about the commenting system have more). But of those 50 to 100 comments, many of them are actually coherent thoughts in response to the post itself — you know, what a comment is supposed to be.

That’s not the case across the board, of course. We’re still seeing a lot of commenters talking about their hatred of the new commenting system. But those are easy to discount as we saw the same comments when we switched to Disqus, and InstenseDebate before that. It’s a symptom of change. Those comments will dissipate quickly, if we stick with Facebook.

But the other interesting thing we’re seeing is that whereas trollish garbage used to infest the comment section, now we’re seeing almost the opposite. Many people are now leaving comments that gush about the subject of the article in an overly sycophantic way. It’s quite odd. The cold pricklies have turned to warm fuzzies.

Of course, neither is ideal. But nausea-inducing kindness is certainly better than rage-inducing assholeishness.

Shortly after we launched the new system, Erick did a post outlining the pros and cons. The majority of those remain the same, though a number of the initial bugs have already been ironed out.  So the big question is: are we going to stick with Facebook Comments?

It’s still undecided. As we noted with the initial rollout, this is very much a test. And it was a necessary test as the commenting situation on TechCrunch has been completely out of control for a long time. It was difficult to look at something like Quora, where people leave comments that are engaging and thoughtful, and then switch over to our site where it was a cesspool of bullshit about many of the same topics.

We have readers of the highest caliber with a deep interest in the tech space from around the world — there’s no reason why our comment section shouldn’t reflect that. Instead, a handful of trolls were ruining things for everyone. Yes, it was often humorous, but completely worthless. And it’s amazing how quickly the trolls vanished when real identity started to be enforced.

That’s not to say that battle is over. We’ve already had some trolls armed with fake Facebook accounts pop back in. But they sure are easy to ban now. I’m sure more will be coming.

We definitely don’t like the fact that you have to use Facebook (or Yahoo) to log in, but Facebook couldn’t come to terms with Google or Twitter in time to make their logins possible. And if they had, that may have just been another easier way for the trolls to get back in.

Long story short, we’re sticking with this comment system for the time being, but that could change at any time. I suspect the number of total comments will begin to rise again going forward — again, we saw this exact thing when we previously switched systems. But if they don’t, does it really matter? It’s the good old quality versus quantity debate.

Traffic to TechCrunch has been largely unaffected by the new system, or perhaps buoyed a bit by Facebook, but that’s not our prime motivation here. It’s about making all aspects of our site useful to readers. And killing trolls.

[image: New Line Cinemas]

The complete internet shutdown this week in Libya involved a new way to turn off web access for an entire country. Earlier this year, the total internet blockade in Egypt backfired and emboldened the protesters. China is well known for blocking internet services, but it’s not just China. Of course, having the government turn off the internet could never happen in the United States. We couldn’t condemn the action in other countries while at the same time plan it here. No one would even suggest such a thing, right?

Wrong. The topic came up last June when Senators Joseph Lieberman, Susan Collins and Thomas Carper introduced the controversial “Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010″. [PDF] One vague provision in the bill gave the President the power to “authorize emergency measures to protect the nation’s most critical infrastructure if a cyber vulnerability is being exploited or is about to be exploited.” It became known as the internet “kill switch” bill even though the words ‘kill’ and ‘switch’ are not found in the bill.

When talking about an internet kill switch, an image of a giant switch in the Oval Office, perhaps next to the “red telephone,” used to shut down the entire internet comes to mind. But that’s fiction and gives the bill’s sponsors cover to deny the bill contains a total kill switch. The internet was originally designed as a distributed network exactly to survive an attack. Egypt was able to turn off the internet by forcing its relatively few Internet Service Providers to shut down their servers. In Libya, the servers are answering, and the route is open but the traffic is being throttled down to zero. If the U.S government told the major Tier 1 ISPs to close, that’s technically not a single “kill switch” but it would cause a shutdown. In fact, one report claims, in the event of a cyberwar, an internet shutdown would cause more problems that it would prevent.

While denying the bill authorized a presidential “kill switch” in a fact sheet, Lieberman told CNN, “Right now, China, the government, can disconnect parts of its Internet in a case of war. We need to have that here, too.” Just because China does it is a laughable argument. It’s also clear he wants a way to turn the internet off.

Lieberman generously suggested the president is “not going to do it every day” (phew), but he did argue “we need the capacity for the president to say, internet service provider, we’ve got to disconnect the American internet from all traffic coming in from another foreign country, or we’ve got to put a patch on this part of it.” This sounds a lot like what might have been said inside Mubarak’s presidential palace.

The bill met with outcry from privacy and internet groups but was popular with the public. A study commissioned by Unisys last August, before the Eqyptian shutdown, showed a majority of Americans believe the president should have the power to control or kill portions of the internet if the U.S. was under a cyberattack by a foreign government.

The bill was approved by a Senate committee last December and then expired with the new Congress.

The legislation was re-branded and revised as the “Cybersecurity and Internet Freedom Act of 2011.” [pdf] Note the clever use of the phrase Internet Freedom for a bill that gives the government power over privately owned computer systems. Ironically, it was re-introduced on the same day as the Egyptian shutdown, when President Obama was called on “the Egyptian government to reverse the actions that they’ve taken to interfere with access to the internet.”

Lieberman changed his approach:

"We want to clear the air once and for all. As someone said recently, the term 'kill switch" has become the 'death panels' of the cybersecurity debate. There is no so-called 'kill switch' in our legislation because the very notion is antithetical to our goal of providing precise and targeted authorities to the President. Furthermore, it is impossible to turn off the internet in this country.”

The new bill says “neither the President, the Director of the National Center for Cybersecurity and Coummunications, or any officer or employee of the United States Government shall have the authority to shut down the Internet.” But, it does give the Department of Homeland Security the power to issue decrees to privately owned companies in a cyber emergency.

Surprisingly, the President has the power to shutdown the internet already. This authority originated well before the internet existed, in the Communications Act of 1934 that created the FCC. Section 706 gives the President authority, in a state or threat of war, to “cause the closing of any facility or station for wire communication” with no advance warning. [PDF]

“A station for wire communication” may not sound like the routers that power the internet. But the Department of Homeland Security has cited the 1934 Act as one of the powers the President would rely on if the nation was under a cyberattack.

Why does our government even need the power to block the internet? One of the justifications for the bill, that’s even written into the legislation, is the fact that the computer systems of the government are probed or attacked an average of 1.8 billion times a month. Most of these involved attacks infiltrating government workers copies of Adobe Acrobat or Microsoft Office. Or, phishing attacks with malicious email attachments, hardly a reason to justify even a partial internet shutdown.

Collins argues the President needs the power to shut down “critical infrastructure” during a serious cyberattack. As an example, the sponsors say if a cyberthreat was detected, the President should be able to instantly shut down any infrastructure connected to “the system that controls the floodgates to the Hoover dam.” On the surface, it sounds reasonable. You wouldn’t want 10 trillion gallons of water to cause havoc.

But, I checked the Hoover Dam website. I couldn’t find a way to control the floodgates and I’d be surprised if that control was connected to the public internet. [Update: The agency in charge of the Hoover Dam says it is not connected to the Internet and has several physical and technological safeguards to prevent the floodgates from opening.] And even if a hacker could control it, the government should be able to cut off the connection without this legislation.

Lieberman says the bill is needed because “the internet can be a dangerous place with electronic pipelines that run directly into everything from our personal bank accounts to key infrastructure to government and industrial secrets.” Yes, the internet can be a dangerous place. It’s also essential to the freedom of its citizens and nation’s commerce. And, it’s pretty good at self-policing. In the case of the private banks, the banks themselves know more about protecting customers accounts than then government.

John Dvorak says the senators supporting the legislation “aren’t Internet experts trying to protect the Net from damage. They, to be frank, are clueless about the internet.” Recall former Senator Ted Stevens, who headed a committee in charge of regulating the internet, describing the net saying “It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes.”

While TechCrunch and other blogs hosted by WordPress are hardly part of the nation’s “critical infrastructure” (wouldn’t that be great, though), those websites were hit by a huge cyber attack this week. Matt Mullenweg, who oversees the blog platform at wordpress.com, says the attack was the largest in its history. 98% of the attacks came from China. The target was a Chinese-language site, but it caused many other WordPress.com hosted sites to fail.

Let’s just pretend these sites were critical to the nation. The problem was the sites were shut down. An additional government-ordered shutdown isn’t the solution. Even if the sites were hacked, shutting down routers isn’t the answer. Private industry worked to identify and solve the problem, with no need for additional regulations.

There’s no question that technology has helped redefine the real estate industry. With the success of Trulia, Zillow and others, it’s clear that there is a huge market for providing the real estate sector with online tools. Y Combinator-backed startup YouGotListings is adding an innovative product for brokers and landlords with the launch of its simple, easy to use rental listings management software.

While there are a number of startups who are playing in the space, YouGotListings has an interesting back story. The idea for the startup was founded a few years ago by engineers Gordon Chen and John Li as a way to provide real estate brokers with a listings management platform and landlords with an easy way to market their properties to brokers and consumers. But the startup’s founders quickly learned that the real estate market can be a tough industry to break into without any insider knowledge.

So Chen and Li spent a full year as brokers in Boston so they could fully understand how the system works and eventually provide an application that would meet the needs of both brokers and landlords in the rental industry (apparently, they were so good at renting apartments that their former employers are still trying to get them back as brokers in Boston).

The software the founders ended up producing after this research is YouGotListings. The SaaS allows landlords to post new listings, which get distributed in real-time to the brokers they’ve selected. Previously, landlords would have to fax or email new properties directly to each broker, which can be a time consuming process especially if a landlord is managing a number of properties.

And YouGotListings aims to be a start to finish application for brokers, where they can find listings, publish these listings to consumers, and then also run credit-checks, print rental applications and more. YouGotListings is free for listing distributions, and costs anywhere from $50 per month for a single user to $100 per month for unlimited users.

The software also includes tools for syndicate rental listings to general listing sites like Trulia, Hotpads, Craigslist and others. And brokers can use YouGotListings to power consumer-facing websites with available rental listings. Within the software, landlords and brokers can message each other about properties and the startup recently launched an Android app to allows brokers to view listings on the fly (an iPhone app will be released in the next few days). Another useful feature is the ability to create and print itineraries for clients with information about all the rental properties they are seeing in a given tour.

While YouGotListings is currently focused on the Boston and Chicago markets (in Chicago YouGotListings has a ten percent marketshare), and plans to move into the Florida and San Francisco markets soon. Chen tells us that each city is different in terms of how rentals are found, and the startup is focused on building relationships in each city with both brokers and landlords as a way to expand use of their software. The model has worked in Boston and YouGotListings says that already have 75% of the market in the city.

One of YouGotListings’ main competitors is RentJuice, which just raised $6.2 million in funding and acquired a competitor, Kahoots. YouGotListings is bootstrapped and has only raised $150,000 via the StartFund. Chen says that while much of the functionality between the two platforms is similar, he feels that Li and his experience as brokers has helped them “know the business.” “We speak brokers’ language and know their pain points,” Chen explains. “Right now our biggest goal is not to expand quickly but to provide the best support for brokers and help make our customers happy.”

 

 

 

 

Editor’s note: the following is a guest post by Robert Scoble, who studies tech startups and innovators for Rackspace Hosting. His videos usually go up on Rackspace’s Building43. In the post he shares a tour he recently got of SRI International, the Silicon Valley R&D lab where the computer mouse was invented. It also has played a role in many other things, from Disneyland to Polaris Missiles and armor for tanks, not to mention it was one of the first four nodes on the Internet.

You might be like my friends, who thought that the computer mouse was invented at PARC, Xerox’s R&D lab.

It wasn’t.

Instead the computer mouse was invented by Douglas Engelbart at SRI International and, in the mother of all demos, showed it, and a number of other key features of computing that we all know like windows and hypertext, off in December, 1968.

Since then SRI International, which employs 1,700 researchers, has been busy on a number of things from radar, ultrasound imaging, remote surgery, and much more. It has also been incubating a few things that have turned into startups. My favorite example is Siri, which is an assistant for your iPhone. Apple bought that last year for a rumored $200+ million and I’ve been hearing rumors that we’ll see some of that work as part of the iPhone 5 launch later this year. More about Siri later.

I wondered “what is SRI International” up to now and do they have anything interesting cooking that could turn into another interesting startup?

That led to this tour, where Norman Winarsky, VP of Ventures at SRI, and Bill Mark, VP of Information Sciences Division at SRI, introduce me to many of the people who work there and show me around many of its most interesting labs.

Because this tour was so extensive, I’ve split it up into separate videos so you can watch what you’re interested in and get a sense of just how many diverse projects this influential R&D lab is. At the end you can listen into the venture capitalists who funded Siri and hear about the process that company went through during its acquisition by Apple.

Let’s kick it off with an introduction to the tour where you’ll meet Norman and Bill.

Next you’ll see an augmented reality system, built for the military, where a soldier can get training at a much lower expense than before. How? It replaces human actors with computer-generated ones that a soldier can “see” by wearing a helmet that includes a camera and glasses with a screen inside.

What could this be used for in real world? How about training of customer service agents? Or police officers?

To continue on the augmented reality theme, Norman and Bill next introduce me to “shopping of the future.” Using a Microsoft Kinect system someone at home could try on a variety of different items. In the demo, titled “Magic Mirror,” we see that a consumer could try a number of different handbags and see how they actually look as they virtually carry them around.

But how do we actually augment humans in another way? For instance, can we make an iPhone that takes spoken English text and translates it to some other language? Well, at SRI International they next brought me over to Kristin Precoda, director of SRI’s Speech Technology and Research, who demoed me a translation system. This system is being used in military in Afghanistan and other places in the world. It’s an amazing system, but will need work to build it out for consumer applications (most consumer uses would be in languages like Chinese, Japanese, or European languages like French or German and the system does none of those since it was developed for military purposes).

After getting my mind blown by the translation technology, what could we do with the iPhone’s camera? Well, SRI has invented an image processing technology they call “fusion.” Here they show us how they can fuse images together taken at different focus positions, which will let you get one image that’s sharp at all of them. Plus, they can combine images done at different exposures, which extends the dynamic range. Features like these have already shown up in cameras and software like Adobe’s Photoshop, but they go further with fun image replacement technology.

What else could these smart developers do with cameras? Well, how about an iPhone app that could help you track what you eat? Aim this iPhone app at food and it measures it and calculates how many calories the food contains. Since my dad just had a kidney transplant and needed to measure all of his food, this app means a lot to me. But imagine a future Foodspotting app that could share not just a photo, but caloric info about that ribeye steak you are considering eating! You’ll notice this isn’t ready for consumers yet, they need to make it work smoother because it needs you to capture five images so it can do its calculations.

After that we moved to another part of the building and while walking Bill and Norman told me about all the work that SRI had done on medical robots that help surgeons do their work (Intuitive Surgical was spun out of the work done here) but what is the latest work they are doing?

Well, they’ve developed systems that let a surgeon work thousands of miles away from the patient. This keeps battlefield costs down, but as it is privatized it can bring great healthcare to people around the world. A surgeon who lives in Palo Alto could operate on someone in Africa, using these devices. Here Tom Lowe, director of medical robotics at SRI, shows me several machines, in two parts, to see both the existing machines in the field now, as well as next-generation machines that give haptic feedback.

In the second part of the medical robotic demos, Tom shows me a machine with much higher resolution 3D imagery as well it includes haptic feedback. In other words, this machine can let you “feel” how much force is being applied by the robot (very important if you were defusing a bomb, for instance).

But how else can robots be used to augment human capabilities? How about a robot that can walk up walls or windows to look for cracks or other things that need to be fixed up?

Harsha Prahlad, research engineer at SRI, showed me around his lab, explained all sorts of things they are doing using electro adhesion. Whoa, what’s that? Well, adhesives used to only be chemical glues, right? Now they’ve replaced the glue with static electricity. He explains how it works and shows me several different use cases and robots.

This stuff is amazing. It can stick to anything. Glass. Concrete. Peeling paint. It doesn’t need suction to “stick.” I’ve never seen anything like it.

What else can you use static electricity for? Well, they started playing around and found they could make artificial muscles. See how they work here. These small muscles can compress and contract very quickly and they show a demo where it makes an iPhone have much better haptic feedback. Their technology is built into the Mophie Pulse, which is coming soon (I got an early demo and it definitely gives much better feedback than just the vibrator built into the iPhone).

While walking the hallways I saw a weird display case with some destroyed rings and asked them if I could turn on the camera and learn more. Turned out we were near the Poulter Lab, where they solve practical problems in explosions, impacs, and fire and their effects on materials and structures. In this segment I learned all about “impulsive loads” and now you will too as they show you some of the things they are doing now, including trying to find materials that will stand up to weapons. Gives new meaning to bulletproof glass. The stories this team can tell are lots of fun.

Finally, in a previous visit, I sat down with Norman and the VCs who funded Siri, the company that sold to Apple, and got the inside scoop in a two-part video (part I, part II). This is a rare look at how VCs think and how technology moves out of SRI and into your hands. Since I ran those videos before, I’ll let you go and watch them and won’t embed them here.

Lastly on our tour Bill and Norman wrap up our day. What a great tour and it’s a rare look inside SRI. Thank you to Bill and Norman for opening up the doors to me and giving me one of my favorite technology company tours ever.

As an exercise in futility, I decided to see how long I could go without thinking about the iPad this weekend. So far it's not going well. It's not that the iPad is somehow the most important thing since fire or the wheel was invented. It's that nobody else seems to have used all this free innovation time to come up with anything that comes close. Scoble offers Xbox Kinect as a worthy challenger, but I compare the number of times I see my kids playing with it to the noise cloud surrounding the iPad. It's 20 to 1 easily.

But, Robert would say if I had him sitting right here, it's amazing, so Minority Report-ish, etc. I'll admit, it's cool getting to do the super-secret spy analysis hand wave where instantaneous video from impossible camera angles complete with multiple cutaways are discarded with a gesture. Then there's circling the shadowy out of focus suspect's face from satellite orbit and "sharpening it up" until you can see the other conspirators reflecting in the guy's eye. The technology is great, but it all falls apart when you put your best men on it. Who you gonna call? Ghostbusters?

Seriously, how is Kinect going to work in Office? Will we be like Jerry Lewis typing merrily in thin air, keyboard- and clue-less? Will we construct a new sign language with gestures for expletive-laced searches, threads of bodily harm, inappropriate suggestions about where someone should go, frequently-repeated stock phrases (Winning!)? Or new methods of consuming realtime feeds by grabbing tweets and popping them in our mouths to hear read back to us by our favorite media personality holograms? I expect the Scobleizer video is being rendered as I "type."

No, Kinect is a feature, not a platform. It seems like the future, and it probably is part of it. If only they could replace Windows with it. Instead, Apple is doing it to them. By the end of the iPad 2 launch event this Wednesday, you could see a future without Windows. Not just Office dead, or in the cloud. An alternate universe, a path not taken, a recall of global proportions. As Doc Searls may have said or something like it, dead OS walking.

Everything about Wednesday was about what wasn't yet said. As Steve Jobs moved through the material — the relentless comedy of competitors not quite getting there, of ideas bubbling up from the glass formerly known as a toy, of what was thinner, faster, smarter — the more you could see of what is going to happen to OS X, aka the Mac. The Mac is the new Apple II, it is being revealed. AirPlay is the new surface, push notification the Matrix, the combination of signals the canvas on which magic really is being practiced.

In the new film The Adjustment Bureau, there are moments that not so much take your breath away as leave you suspended in midair or mid-joke. You know what's coming, as our heroes open a door in a long corridor and emerge by the monuments in center field. Not sure whether it's CitiField or the new Yankee Stadium, it doesn't matter. It's funny and effortless, and you could imagine your own jokes — not just space but time, the night you first got lucky, the recording session for Kind of Blue. Nodding at Coltrane and settling to the floor in the corner to stay out of the way. Magic.

That's what they're bottling with GarageBand. Using the aerodynamics, the laws of gravity, where the beat lies in this new form of blues. I'm not saying they've made it possible for anyone to play. I'm saying they've cracked the code on providing levers to invent new sounds and rhythms. They're at version 1 of the new platform, but already you can hear things I haven't heard in a very long time. Don't misunderstand me; I'm not arguing that something has been automated or replaced or any of that Terminator stuff.

David Sanborn and I were telling stories about Paul Butterfield. We got there via Charlie Sheen, opening one door and then another, shaking our heads with the sad knowledge that sometimes you just have to disconnect for your own good. But then, another door, to a time when Paul recorded In My Own Dream. Paul had this way with a guitar, an acoustic that he turned into this kind of overtone drum, petting it and the muted strings like a velvet hammer. Soft but within this envelope a universe lived and breathed.

On stage Wednesday, the GarageBand developer demoed such a sound. It wasn't the same thing, yet in its audacity it opened a door to some place and time where anything was possible, and often occurred. I think it was what made the Beatles so special, the lightness of being of the group's humor. Drop the needle at any point and you hear this energy, casual optimism or hilarious darkness, the accumulated resonance of what came before and what would certainly come in the future. Nothing, not even the end, could stop us from playing the track again.

It brought the memory of Paul when I played a bass note on a Mini-Moog, a synthesizer Marcus Miller had programmed out in California and I'd brought East to a friend's living room in Woodstock. Paul's head jerked up like my dog's does when he hears my wife's car coming home on the street. It wasn't the sound (awesome as it was) or the way Paul's guitar and voice fed back through the Portastudio and into the room and drum kit. It was all of it. It was funny and expansive and full of possibility. As Jobs conducted the iPad 2 launch, you could tell he couldn't keep from smiling.

I believe that's at the heart of what people have called his reality distortion field. Nope. It's the inspiration that comes to us as we see someone or some group or some country seize the possibilities of what has been done, and recognize the signature of what so much more can be done. Who knew what a silly thing like Twitter would bring? Right now we still don't know, but applying this hybrid of instant and You've Got Mail and soapbox and Underground Railway has already shaken the world.

Applying a combination of gyroscope and accelerometer and touch and Apple has produced something that is velocity sensitive without that actual capability in the glass. What John Borthwick apologetically calls the Singularity is what I call the Audacity. And its ripples will overturn Windows as surely as OS X is back ported to iOS rather than the other way around. Our suppositions about the applications sitting atop the OS are now a jump ball. Our assumptions about Office: jump ball. Our presumptions about owning versus streaming: jump ball.

Steve Jobs described Apple's edge as the intersection of technology and art. He played the Beatles non-stop at the launch, an audacity that worked because he challenged us to compare. At any moment, the Beatles' momentum could have been stopped — by over or under reaching, by hubris without saving grace, by standing pat. Even the document of their failure gave birth to the moment on the roof where we see the alchemy of the group on Get Back, topped by just one more thing, the joke by Lennon about how he hoped they'd passed the audition.