Location-based social network Foursquare has its own day! New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg has mandated that April 16, the fourth sixteenth of the year, is Foursquare Day in New York City.

Foursquare, which now has more than 8 million users, is based in New York City, so it is a hometown favorite. From the official proclamation: Whereas: New York City is proud to be the home of both the powerhouse companies and small startups that are thinking big, creating new jobs, and leading the global economy. Foursquare is one such success story. Started by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai around Dennis's kitchen table in the East Village, it now employs more than 60 people in New York and has more than eight million users worldwide. That is why we are proud to join Foursquare's founders and fans in celebrating the first global social media holiday. Today, April 16th—4/16, the fourth sixteenth of the year—is Foursquare Day in New York City and around the world.

While not monumental news, the Mayor’s interest in the startup must be flattering for the startup. Checkout this Founder Stories segment with co-founder Dennis Crowley on Foursquare’s origins.

KupiVIP, Russia's largest private members shopping club for designer fashion and luxury brands, has landed $55 million in third round funding, something that appears to be a record for the Russian e-commerce sector. Three new investors participated in the funding: Balderton Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners and Russia Partners. The new investors join existing investors including Accel Partners and Mangrove Capital Partners.

The site will use the funding to move into selling consumer goods as continuing with discount offers, mashing up Amazon’s and Vente Privee’s model. A white label platform will act as a way for Western retail brands to launch stores in Russia and the former Soviet states. This will be useful. Western firms have found it very hard to break into the Russian ecommerce market. 11 out of the 15 top internet sites are Russian.

Janrain, a user management platform that enables third party sign-in with 18 different providers, including Facebook, Google, and Twitter; is releasing its Q1 2011 report today. Janrain’s report analyzes data from networks for social login and social sharing across the 350,000 websites worldwide that use Janrain sign-in product, Engage. For the first time in a year, Facebook has surpassed Google as the consumer preference for signing into Internet sites using Janrain.

During Q1 of 2011 (January 1 through March 31), 35% of online users chose to sign-in to sites with a Facebook account compared to 27% in Q4 of 2010. And 31% of users chose their Google log-in in Q1, followed by Yahoo with 13% and Twitter with 7%.

Janrain actually analyzed sign-in data by type of site as well. For example, Facebook is the most popular sign-in choice on news media sites for the second consecutive quarter, with 34% share, up from 32% in the previous quarter. Yahoo commanded a 28% share of all social logins in the news sector. Of course, Facebook’s share could increase more with the introduction of Facebook’s new commenting system.

Facebook has also picked up momentum in the retail space, says Janrain, with a quarterly growth rate of about 5% over the past three quarters. The startup says that this increase is at the expense of Yahoo, as opposed to Google, whose share has held steady over the past four quarters. Facebook’s login share on retail sites is up 10% over the past year, and Yahoo’s login share is down 11% year-over-year.

On mobile devices, Facebook and Google lead the pack by a considerable margin. Twitter's share (11%) is greater on mobile devices than desktop platforms. The data above examines logins in the U.S., says Janrain, and the data internationally presents different trends. For example, Windows Live is twice as popular in Europe as a sign-in choice when compared with the U.S. Hyves commands as much as 60% share of all social logins on websites in the Netherlands, and regional portals such Web.de and GMX are popular in Germany. In Southeast Asia, Yahoo is the popular social login choice, and Google performs well in Brazil due to the popularity of Google’s social network Orkut.

So many companies have tried to topple Craigslist, and they have all failed. Jonathan Wegener thinks they’ve all done it the wrong way. Today at Techstars Demo Day, he introduced Friendslist, a listing service that taps into your social network without requiring the middelmen (your friends who connect buyers and sellers) to do any work. “Craigslist obliterated the classifieds newspaper industry,” he acknowledges, but Craigslist is now “a scary place.” In between the the legitimate listings, there are “lots of scam listings and half of the postings are duplicates.”

Friendslist offers a cleaner interface to start, but that’s nothing new. What it does is connect buyers and sellers, or people who are looking for jobs and people who are hiring, through the people they know. Yes, Oodle does this to some extent on Facebook Marketplace, but Friendslist takes a slightly different approach. If you know your friend Mark is a great designer and you are looking to hire a designer for your startup, you would post your jobs listing to his Friendslist, which shows the listing to all of his Facebook friends. Mark acts as the middleman, but he doesn’t have to do anything.

“Nobody is trying the very approach that made Craisglist work in the first place, the social approach,” says Wegener. “We think people are the best platform in the world. They are the best brands and the best marketers.”

Friendlist right now is only Wegener and his co-founder Benny Wong. Wegener has created a few fun apps, such as 4Squareand7yearsago (an app that tells you where you checked in on Foursquare a year ago). Wong worked at Gilt, where he was the lead engineer who built Gilt City, a sub-brand which now employs 70 people.

Can Friendslist take on the mighty Craig? It will need a little help from its friends (and maybe more than two employees).

Another day, another launch of a Flipboard-like news and social reader for the iPad. It seems like every day a new app launches that aims to offer a social news reading experience for the iPad, including Pulse, Summify, Flud and others. And today, Taptu is debuting its free iPad app, which offers a sleek, social news service for the tablet. Taptu has already offered the service on the Android and the iPhone.

Taptu’s iPad app allows you to bring in streams of content from news sources, your Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter streams. The design itself is sleek and clean, allowing you to separate each stream. Instead of accssing RSS feeds for news sources, Taptu uses its proprietary mobile search technology to aggregate news from thousands of news sources.

The app offers a StreamStore, which allows you to search and choose for news streams. You can also import your RSS feeds as well. The app goes beyond just aggregating news from your social feeds and sources and allows you to personalize your streams. You can act as a DJ for news streams, and can aggregate and merge select news feeds into one stream. So you could create your Tech news stream with various technology news sources. You can also change the size of the stream to display its content more prominently or modify the color of your streams, allowing you to color code by interest.

Taptu has also integrated its recommendation technology which will serve new content from news sites and blogs based on what you read within the app. Taptu will serve related articles, both by topic and by source. And you can share your newly created streams with friends on the app. In terms of Facebook and Twitter, the app will display full stories in a pane from links shared by friends, so you don’t need to leave to app to access shared content.

An interesting sidenote-Taptu’s iPad app is the brainchild of CEO Mitch Lazar, a former journalist for CNN and member of the founding team of CNN.com. He says that the virtue of Tatptu’s app is that it mixes four important elements in development—relevancy, indexing, search crawling and sleek presentation. “It’s not just a magazine format with a beginning and an end,” explains Lazar. “Taptu is built around a continuous stream.”

For Taptu, this app is an entry point. The company says that the next step will be to create user accounts and perhaps approach monetization with premium features. Taptu also plans to launch a universal, HTML5 app that will allow users to access the same app across iOS devices.

If you are a power reader or a news junkie, Taptu’s app is the way to go. Not only does it allow you to access a large number of news sources (thousands), in an easy to read interface, but it allows you to personalize and customize your feeds, which is a useful feature. My only complaint is that if your bring in a lot of feeds (and news from your Twitter and Facebook streams); the app can get a little cluttered. But you can easily close streams if things get crowded.

:

This is the post I haven’t wanted to write for weeks. This is the post no one wants to write. No one wants to say Twitter is in trouble. That’s like shooting your best friend’s dog.

But I’m increasingly convinced that Twitter is operationally in trouble, for a lot of the same reasons that Fortune’s Jessi Hempel outlines in her cover today, and other reasons I’ve been hearing about for months.

The signs:

1. Three CEOs in less than three years is never a good sign. Jack Dorsey was the clear visionary of this company, and as we’ve seen with Square, a visionary beyond Twitter. Evan Williams was the guy who saw the promise of Twitter, invested his own money in it and made sure it actually became a company. Without either of them, Twitter would not exist. But the two couldn’t coexist at the company.

So what does the company do? Well it tried Dorsey running it; it tried Williams running it and for a variety of reasons– some documented and some not– neither worked. Everyone I’ve spoken with in the industry and at the company says CEO #3, Dick Costolo, has what the others lacked– he’s an amazing operator. But that’s a Sheryl Sandberg. Twitter needs a Mark Zuckerberg if it’s going to be more than acquisition bait. It needs a product visionary, which leads us to point number 2….

2. A product visionary, at a minimum, is a full time job. At most great technology companies the product visionary is the CEO– think Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Steve Jobs, Zynga’s Mark Pincus, Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, Oracle’s Larry Ellison and of course Facebook’s Zuckerberg. Plenty of research has shown that when a product-oriented founder stays the CEO the company tends to excel. But for a variety of reasons, this doesn’t always work out. That doesn’t mean a company is toast. Titles are just titles. In an earlier era, Sandberg might have been named Facebook’s “grown up” CEO ala Google.

But at a minimum, a company centered around a surging, beloved, disruptive product needs a full-time, in-house C-level executive who is focused 100% on product– not only 40 hours a week, but every second of every day. Despite early reports when he stepped down, that is not Williams. He has stepped into a board member and advisor role, eyeing his next thing. And, as Fortune reports via unnamed sources, that is not Dorsey.

And really, that Fortune story shouldn’t be a surprise, although Dorsey denies telling anyone it is a short-term gig. Of course Twitter’s product visionary can’t be Dorsey– he has a full-time job running Square. Square– while a potentially a more disruptive company than Twitter– has a long way to go on distribution, business model and execution. Time-sharing Square’s product visionary– long term– just hurts both companies. If Dorsey is going to do a great job at either, he has to pick.

There are few examples of even the best entrepreneurs and CEOs managing two more-than-full-time jobs. Steve Jobs comes to mind being CEO of Apple and Pixar, but he was clearly more hands on at the former. He wasn’t brainstorming Finding Nemo or sketching out fish, while he was dreaming up the look and feel of the iPod. Elon Musk comes to mind with Tesla and SpaceX, but he has always conceded it is not sustainable.

I’d heard speculation earlier this week that Dorsey might pick Twitter, stepping into a chairman role at Square and leaving the day-to-day responsibility to Keith Rabois, who has had plenty of startup experience with PayPal, LinkedIn and Slide. If you want to stretch the Jobs analogy, that’s was essentially his path in leaving Pixar and returning to Apple for redemption and glory. But if I had to bet, I’d go with Fortune’s sources and guess Twitter is the more temporary post.

That means Twitter needs to find an amazing product visionary– stat. (To Twitter’s credit, some attempts at this have been thwarted.)

3. This is more important for Twitter than it might be at a lot of tech companies because product is the thing that is unequivocally working. Sure it has glitches, and sure it hasn’t shown dramatic innovation, but it doesn’t matter. People love it. It has transformed how the media works. And it has the one thing Facebook lacks: Celebrities all over the place. The reason Twitter is worth billions of dollars is the product.

It makes sense that Costolo would be focused on revenues and operations– those are his strengths and Twitter’s weakest spots. Reports Twitter’s revenues are higher than many expected, but they’re still in the low hundreds of millions of dollars. That’s a lot lower than most Valley companies valued at several billion dollars. And I’ve heard from a dozen sources that Twitter has been a mess operationally. I’ve heard there’s a rift between older employees owning most the stock and working fewer hours than newer employees hired by the hard-charging Costolo. And that makes sense, given the three CEOs the staff has been hired by and variously reported to.

Most people I’ve spoken with seem confident Costolo can fix these problems. Here at TechCrunch, we salute the ballsy stance he’s taken on San Francisco’s payroll tax– which potentially benefits the entire ecosystem. But what gives him cover to do that is the product continuing to grow and delight its users. Twitter absolutely can not afford to get complacent at product as it’s turning this corner. If it does, it risks looking uncomfortably like MySpace in its glory years– an innovative product people loved with loads of celebrity cache that had no innovation and was out-gunned and out-maneuvered by Facebook.

4. Please don’t settle for the acquisition, Twitter. On a day-to-day basis I use Twitter more than any other Web 2.0 product, and it’s transformed the distribution of TechCrunch. It’s the realization of the early promise of Digg’s mission to up-end the media business. I would hate to see it gobbled up as a pawn in the war between Google and Facebook. Twitter is better than that. Twitter is more important than that.

When Williams was running it, the odds seemed remote– barring an obscene offer from Google– because Williams had been down that route before with Blogger and didn’t exactly relish the experience, even being a part of a smaller, more nimble and pre-IPO version of Google.

But now Williams is gone. Dorsey is half-there. I have an uncomfortable feeling that if the product void isn’t filled by someone dynamic, Twitter will start to sputter and that several billion dollar purchase offer will be impossible to turn down. I don’t want to be alarmist– Twitter isn’t at that point now. But it’s at that crossroads now, where it needs to get back on the path to building the next great public Web company or pick the path of inevitable acquisition.

Twitter has a great board, a stable CEO and the goodwill of nearly all of Silicon Valley. This doesn’t have to end badly.

Every few years in the CE industry we get products that really make us scratch our heads. A few years ago it was some guy who had built a “quantum computer” and this year at CES we had the goofy Peep Wireless, a company that stripped the label from one of those RSA keys and pretended they had invented a mesh networking telephone.

This one is a bit harder to fathom but, sadly, it has all the markings of a charming, if involved, ruse. These PCs “run” Xilinx Field Programmable Gate Arrays to power what appears to be a desktop. The inventor, a man who calls himself Humble Gregg, has a very Zen-like approach to technology demos, offering “humble” (Hardware Unified Multiple Branch Logic Engine) devices for folks who want to think different.

Read more…

Mike Walrath spent his career at online advertising, first at Doubleclick and then at Right Media, where he was CEO before selling it to Yahoo for $850 million in 2007. Now he’s back in the game, investing his own money in startups and launching new ones. But he as an investor, he’s not putting money into ad tech startups. In the Founder Stories video above, he tells host Chris Dixon, “The problem with the adtech space is that it is actually fairly easy to build a company.”

From an investing perspective, “It is hard to pick winners. There is obviously a big market out there but it is very fragmented.” That is not to say he shies away from advertising startups entirely. He is chairman of Yext and is an investor in Inadco, along with Ron Conway, Matt Coffin, and Redpoint Ventures. But he thinks “things are expensive, so you have to pick winners.”

And how does he feel about the prospects of online advertising in general, especially brand advertising and display, which seems to be on the upswing again? He doesn’t completely buy the notion that just because people are spending more time online, ad dollars will follow. Brand marketers are still not convinced that is the best place to put their money. “It’s a little bit of a pipe dream,” says Walrath, “that they will move their TV budgets online.”

What I love about this interview is that although Walrath is a born salesman, he’s not trying to sell anything because he doesn’t have to anymore. You can also catch Part I And Part II of this interview, or watch the entire uncut version below.

A New York-based clean tech startup, Ioxus, raised $21 million in a round from Energy Technology Ventures (a GE-NRG Energy-ConocoPhillips joint fund), Northwater Capital, Aster Capital and their previous backers Braemar Energy Ventures, the companies announced today.

Ioxus makes lithium-ion hybrid capacitors, and ultracapacitors, which are (often alongside other battery technology) used to charge and run: wind turbines, light rail and other public transportation systems, hybrid and electric vehicles, medical equipment, LED lighting, power tools and other consumer electronics.

Chief executive officer of Ioxus, Mark McGough, said that the funds would go towards the development and manufacture of ultracapacitors that can generate more power, store more energy and work with higher device operating voltages than those offered today. In particular, the CEO wrote in an email to TechCrunch:

“[The company] will continue to work on [developing ultracapacitors] with higher power density that maintain higher energy density with a wide temperature range. We will be coming out with a new generation of ultracapacitor cells later this quarter with a concentration on these features.”

As Inhabitat blogger Timon Singh has noted:

“[The latest Ioxus hybrid capacitor] has huge potential. It could lead to hybrid [vehicles] being fully charged in mere minutes and improve the life cycles of electric vehicles. Currently, vehicle braking systems demand recharging hundreds of thousands of times, but that would not be the case with a lithium-ion ultracapacitor.”

Ioxus has been experiencing growth in sales in Asia, aided by partnerships with wind power technology distributors GTAE and Mouser Electronics, and the increasing popularity of hybrid transportation in China.In the U.S. market, the company has been selling more ultracapacitors to the makers of consumer electronics industry, especially LED lighting.

Companies like Sinautec also sell ultracapacitors in China. Meanwhile, ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy) in the U.S. is funding a number of companies and labs developing energy storage technologies, especially capacitors, that can improve electric vehicles and public transportation, especially.

I’m beginning to think that the old phrase “think globally, act locally” has become an appropriate slogan for Web 2.0. (Or perhaps an alternative might be “think global, try to monetize the sh*t out of local”.) With the rise of location-based services like Gowalla, Foursquare, and Facebook Places, local-friendly deal sites like Groupon, LivingSocial and Yipit, and local-happy news services Patch.com, Everyblock, and Baristanet, the message is clear: It’s cool to be local. All the kids are doing it.

A new eMagazine called Street Fight has grouped these businesses under one umbrella, dubbed it the “hyperlocal industry”, and aims to be the industry’s main source of news and analysis. I’ll let you decide whether an industry getting its very own trade publication is an augur of exploding growth and collective interest, or is actually no signifier at all (besides, even kite flying enthusiasts have their own resource).

But, I tend to side with the Street Fight perspective, in that the current state (and near-term evolution) of local-centric industries provides an interesting looking glass through which to see how big, new ideas will affect both new and old models of advertising, commerce, and community interaction.

The rise of the Web has taken a major toll on advertising in old media, but in aggregate, local businesses represent an enormous potential market. Yes, local advertising on the Web was slow to take off, even as newspapers and print advertising stumbled, but as innovative approaches to the problem have gained user adoption, so has local advertising. With a vengeance. Research firm BIA/Kelsey predicts that local digital ad revenue will grow to $42.5 billion by 2015.

Though Groupon has made news for over its snubbing a $6 billion acquisition offer from Google and lofty pre-IPO valuation of $25 billion, daily deals sites — and hyper local media services to boot — continue to struggle with sustainable business models. In the case of Groupon, local businesses want to see its partnerships resulting in greater customer loyalty and retention, and some are finding that the benefit of Groupon as a publicity machine may not outweigh the cost of offering enormous discounts.

Regardless, the local space is getting more buzz than ever before, and I think Street Fight is brilliant to position itself as a source covering the companies and entrepreneurs making news in hyperlocal media, retail, and location-based efforts. As I mentioned, the companies and startups leading the way towards finding sustainable business models, and proper leveraging of local advertising, stand to make a lot of money — and no doubt will be crowned Silicon Valley darlings. And so, Street Fight aims to focus on these very “ideas about sustainable business models for the hyperlocal news, information and advertising efforts”, according to its blog.

What else will Local’s new trade pub offer you fanatical localists out there? It looks like the site’s primary fare will be news analysis, like “Is The Examiner A Content Farm?” and Q&As, like this one with Gowalla’s Josh Williams. Of course, Street Fight also plans to expand on its news foundation to include proprietary research on the local space, to launch events focused on idea-exchange and collaboration in local, as well as a job listings section. The startup aims to make proprietary research and events the core of its own business model.

Street Fight is co-founded by Laura Rich, a veteran of Portfolio.com, FastCompany.com, the New York Times, and co-founder of Recessionwire.com, and David Hirschman, formerly of Big Think and Mediabistro. The site also added Rick Robinson, the founder of AOL Digital City (which became Aol Local) as an advisor, and acquired his geosocial news site, Locl.ly. Altogether, the startup has amassed some serious new and old media talent.

There are certainly a lot of questions that remain unanswered in the booming local space, and if Street Fight can position itself as a definitive resource for hyperlocal issues, and doesn’t just cater to startups, but to old-school companies as well, the niche news platform could ride Silicon Valley’s prize pony right to the top.

That is, of course, if TechCrunch Local doesn’t crush its dreams like a hyper-tiny bug.

As tablets become the preferred digital reading device, every publisher out there is creating their own iPad apps. And soon they will have to create Android apps and maybe RIM Playbook apps and HP WebOS apps too. Or they can keep on publishing on the Web and display their websites differently to people who visit them via tablet browsers.

OnSwipe is a new digital publishing tools company that wants to make mobile browsing as swipe-friendly as a tablet app. The startup will be showing off its software later today at TechStars NYC Demo Day. I got a preview from co-founders Jason Baptiste and Andres Barreto when I visited the TechStars New York office last week (see video above). They are setting out to prove that the browser is the only app you’ll need.

OnSwipe already works as plugin for any WordPress.com blog, and the company is working with publishers to tabletize their Websites. Using HTML5 and other technologies, they publishers customizable templates that make their sites look good on tablets. Articles become swipeable, and rotate between portrait and landscape modes. And using bit.ly data (betaworks is an investor), it can even recommend related articles. The ads also become more immersive (and guess who wants to serve them up? Yup, OnSwipe).

When the A4 came out, I was surprised at the fanfare surrounding it. Why such a big deal? Apple was now designing their own chips, isn’t that great?— came the echoing chorus. But they weren’t — the A4 was almost entirely a Samsung design implementing existing ARM processor tech. But Apple touched it, so it turned to gold. I kind of expected Apple to ride that wave for a while and just “overclock” the processor for the iPad 2, but to my surprise, out came the A5.

Read more…

Despite the fact that all the major players in the tablet business are using non-Intel hardware, the semiconductor giant isn’t about to give up. They got a black eye from ARM in this first bout, but according to Digitimes, they’re ready for round 2.

Read more…

Today is Demo Day for TechStars NYC. I’ll be at the event, but here is a little preview from when I visited last week. TechStars organizers David Cohen and David Tisch showed me around the New York office. In this video, I get a peak at a smart digital sign being developed by Immersive Labs and a very cool learning app from a startup called Veri.

The digital sign is a large flat screen display with a camera on top that detects the faces of people who stop and look at the signs. It tries to determine gender, age, distance from the sign and how long each person is paying attention. Software then tries to serve up the most relevant ads based on whether it thinks more men or women are looking at it, and other factors. Yup, this is exactly the kind of thing that leads to a Minority Report type of world.

The other startup I saw was Veri. Founder Lee Hoffman took me through the basics. It is a way to learn deep topics through fun, multiple-choice quizes. Anyone can create a question and set of answers, and supplement each one with a video or other reference material for people who want to learn more. He will start with a couple topics like wine (with Gary Vaynerchuk videos) and lean startups.

I could see this becoming an interesting front-end for dense sites like Quora or a way to curate knowledge in a fun way. It makes the whole proces sof learning a topic much more approachable.

It turns out there really is no such things as a free lunch. Spotify is slashing in half the amount of free listening available to long term users of its service, with listening hours slashed in half from 20 to 10 hours from 1 May. New users will be moved over to this new restricted model in the next six months.

The details of the new service is this: The existing free advertising supported services will still exist as they are today. “Spotify Free” needs an invitation to work but is unlimited. “Spotify Open” – where anyone can just register without an invite – becomes limited to 20 hrs a month, no invite needed.

Brand new Spotify users still get to use the free service as it is today (either Spotify Free or Spotify Open) for the first 6 months, then the capping begins. But users who registered an account before 1 Nov who will see the changes from 1 May.

NuCaptcha, a startup that develops video captcha technology, unveiled its ad formats last year. Today, the startup is releasing a self-serve advertising server that will enable both advertisers and publishers to sell their own captcha ads directly.

Captchas are security questions you find on Web sites that require you to decipher and type words or numbers and detects whether the user is a human or a spambot. Most Captchas you see are transcription, text-based Captchas. NuCaptcha is trying to disrupt the space by adding video to the mix. NuCaptcha’s ad format allows brands to place advertisements behind the actual Captcha text. NuCaptcha's video animation technology aims to be easier to read and more secure, with animation that makes the captcha far easier for humans to solve.

Online publishers can replace website Captchas with the video-based advertisements and earn revenue. Brand advertisers can upload their video ads into NuCaptcha’s system to. It is essentially becoming an ad network for video captchas.

NuCaptcha had over a dozen advertisers who are using the platform and the startup is optimistic that more advertisers will sign up now that the service is self-serve. The startup says that it has seen high engagement rates with ads, so there is a benefit to brands using the format. Since June 2010, NuCaptcha has served millions of video-based Captchas.

Millennial Media’s monthly mobile report is out today, giving us a view into how each OS and manufacturer is performing on the mobile ad network. Millennial, whose ads reach 90.3 million users monthly in the U.S.; is the third largest network behind Google AdMob and Apple’s iAd, so data shared on Millennial’s network is certainly indicative of the state of mobile advertising. For the fourth month in a row, Android led in terms of the largest impression for Smartphone OS, with 48 percent of impressions on the network. But it’s important to note that Android’s share has consistently fallen over the past two months on the network.

While Android’s share is falling, iOS impression share in the U.S. grew 11 percent month-over-month and represented 31 percent of the impression share of the Smartphone OS Mix. iPhone impressions actually grew 17 percent. Millennial reports that this growth is largely tied to the growth of the Verizon iPhone on the network; the Verizon iPhone actually accounted for 8.2 percent of iPhone impressions in March. RIM accounted for 18% of the impression share on Millennial’s network.

Globally, iOS impressions grew 29 percent month-over-month compared to 23 percent growth for Android impressions and 14 percent growth for RIM. Symbian impressions grew 4 percent month-over-month.

Connected devices (non-phones—like the iPad, iPod Touch and Samsung Galaxy tablet) increased 21% percent month-over-month, and now make up 17 percent of the device impression share (compared to 64 percent for smartphones, and 19 percent for feature phones). Touch Screen devices grew 16 percent month-over-month, with approximately 59 percent share of impressions.

Apple topped the list of leading device manufacturers on Millennial’s network, with 32 percent of the Top 15 Manufacturers impression share in January, an 14 percent increase month-over-month. Android smartphone manufacturer Samsung grew 50 percent month-over-month to reclaim the number two position on list, passing HTC, which took 11.35 percent of share.

In terms of actual devices, the iPhone took the top spot with 16.75 percent share. Android manufacturers Samsung and HTC also performed well in terms of top mobile devices on the ad network. Samsung had four new Smartphones enter the Top 30 Mobile Devices ranking in February with 6 percent of impression share. HTC captured 10 percent of impression share.

Motorola devices represented four of the Top 20 Mobile Phones with a combined impression share of 6 percent in March. All Android devices combined represented 22 percent of the Top 20 Mobile Phone impression share and accounted for 14 of the Top 20 Phones in March.

iOS applications represented 47% of the Application Platform Mix, ranked by revenue, in March. iOS led the Application Platform Mix primarily because iPad application revenue doubled month-over-month. Gaming applications reclaimed the number one spot as the leading Application Category on the network, representing 37% of the application revenue in March. Shopping & Retail applications experienced a 40% growth month-over-month. This revenue growth, says Millennial, is largely tied to the increase of
multi-platform retail brand apps where customers can research and shop on their mobile device.

Well this is interesting. Amid all the hoopla about the new iOS Twitter client Tweetbot tonight, people began noticing something. In The “Requirements” section of the App Store, there’s something odd listed. Alongside the usual iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad compatibility, apps are being listed as compatible with something named “ix.Mac.MarketingName”.

Yep. Weird. And this is all over the App Store right now.

Now the big question: is this just some fluke, a bug — or is this actually a placeholder for something much more? A fourth type of iOS app device perhaps?

Right now, we’re going to lean towards it simply being a bug. A couple sources we’ve pinged who might know something about this matter seem to have no idea what this is about.

But the “MarketingName” aspect of it is particularly interesting. Could this be some truly top secret project that Apple hasn’t even named yet? But if that’s the case, what on Earth is the code string doing in the App Store already? And what’s up with the “Mac” aspect?

Again, probably nothing major — this would be quite a way for Apple to let a new project slip, it’s all over the App Store! But nothing like some late night speculation about future Apple would-be enigma projects.

AngelPad, the incubator found by ex-Googlers in order to help a select 15 startups make it here or anywhere, has officially opened up its application process for its summer 2011 cohort.

AngelPad selects startups twice a year and is looking for its third round of contenders today, putting out it’s application tonight in order to find the best and the brightest. In case you’re debating about whether to apply to YCombinator, 500 Startups or AngelPad, founder Thomas Korte tell me that what makes Angelpad different from other accelerator programs is its size (small) and its emphasis on product and market.

When I asked Korte what AngelPad was looking for specifically in a company, he said, “Well, anything that will get covered on TechCrunch. [Writer's/Editor's note: Ha.] Our founders are a little older than the typical incubator crowd, with some experience. And we need a technical co-founder, if you can’t code it, you can’t start a company in Silicon Valley.”

In addition to office space, mentorship and vetting, current and future AngelPad companies will receive $20K funding in exchange for around 6% of the company in common shares (which means a valuation of about $333k, which isn’t the point).

Prospective applicants must supply their basic info, a LinkedIn profile and two minute video in stage one.  In case you think this sounds like a piece of cake, 95% of applicants don’t get to stage two so try hard if you’re applying. If you are in the fortunate 5% that make it, you’ll need to provide a a long form application and real life interview after you pass.

Korte says that the actual value add of joining AngelPad extends beyond equity, “The 10 week program covers all aspects of a company launch – from idea to product, market fit, customer acquisition and fundraising. We also take care of the less glamorous things like incorporation, immigration visas or setting up books.”

Those interested can apply here.

Don’t focus on making new Twitter clients.

The message has been very clear — well, moderately clear — for weeks now. If you’re a third-party looking to develop in the Twitter ecosystem, you should focus on data or niche experiences. Good thing Tweetbot didn’t listen.

If you’ve looked at Twitter tonight, there’s a good chance you’ve seen the massive amount of buzz surrounding Tweetbot. It’s a new Twitter iPhone client made by Tapbots. And yes, it is very good.

It’s so good that it has a number of people promising to walk away from Twitter’s own iPhone client. And that’s interesting for a few reasons.

First of all, while apps like Echofon, Twitterrific, Seesmic, TweetDeck and other have their fans, Twitter for iPhone has been the undisputed king of Twitter iPhone clients since it was still known as Tweetie. In fact, that’s why Twitter bought it last year, along with developer Loren Brichter, and turned it into Twitter for iPhone (making it free in the process).

Second, Tweetbot isn’t free — it’s $1.99. It apparently doesn’t matter, people are still insanely excited for this app.

Third, Twitter is in the midst of a big push to get everyone using their own clients, and have been touting that shift taking place. Obviously, if Tweetbot actually does catch on, that could throw a wrench into things.

The backstory of Tweetbot is equally as interesting. It was a year ago yesterday that Mark Jardine wrote a post on Tapbots blog exposing the Tweetbot project to the world. At the time, they had been at work on the app for nearly 3 months when something funny happened: Twitter bought Tweetie. This caused them to second guess not only the pricing of their app, but also continuing to develop the app itself.

As Jardine notes in his “concerns” list at the time:

Will they [Twitter] eventually kill all 3rd party iPhone/iPad clients to prevent confusion between their app and all the rest?

A year later, that’s sort of what Twitter would like to happen (though obviously they wouldn’t use the word “kill”). But recently, Twitter had a bit of a nightmare with regard to Twitter for iPhone when they decided to shove advertising — I mean the dickbar — I mean the quickbar into the app. It was ill-advised and didn’t last long. Still, it has planted a seed of doubt in many users head about the direction of the app.

Enter Tweetbot.

A year after it was first announced we have the app. Both Shawn Blanc and MacStories have very thorough reviews of just what makes it so good. I’ve only been using it this evening, but my initial impression is that I too might be willing to replace Twitter for iPhone with it. It’s simply very well designed and great for power users — particularly those who use Twitter Lists.

I also love the idea of adding some chaos into the mix. If Twitter doesn’t own the most popular mobile client, what does that mean? Would they have to buy Tweetbot? Do they make moves to shut it down or limit it? What if Bill Gross tries to buy it? It’s enough to keep a blogger busy for weeks. The game has changed.

Try Tweetbot here — again, it’s $1.99, but worth it.

In the tablet world right now, there’s the iPad and then there’s everyone else. Sorry, Xoom, despite your hype, you just don’t cut it yet. But a new challenger is just about to take the stage and it comes from a somewhat unlikely player: RIM.

People have been talking about the BlackBerry PlayBook for months now following its initial unveiling last September and a buzz-worthy showcase at CES back in January. But all along, RIM has noted that there was much work still to do before the device actually came into existence. And that work is continuing right up to the April 19 launch next week. But the product is complete enough now that RIM felt comfortable giving out review units. We got one of them and have had a chance to use the device extensively over the past week or so. So how is it?

Well, right now it’s a total mixed bag. There’s a lot of room for improvement, but there are plenty of signs that point to such improvements — and they could happen relatively fast.

Hardware

The first thing you’ll notice when you hold the PlayBook is that it’s clearly meant to be used in the landscape orientation. This took a little getting used to for me since I’m an iPad user who predominantly uses it in the portrait orientation. But the PlayBook in portrait mode is sort of odd. My fingers overlap behind the device (because it’s so small) and the screen itself feels elongated and cramped. In fact, some apps don’t even rotate to work in portrait mode. And the most telling sign that RIM means this to be a landscape device is the fact that “BlackBerry” is written along the bottom of the border to be read in landscape mode.

So a horizontal orientation is where it’s at. And the device, which as you’re probably aware is significantly smaller than an iPad, feels great in that orientation. It’s easy to navigate and it’s easy to type on the device’s very nice virtual keyboard. I think it’s fair to say that the 7-inch form factor is a pretty great one for a device that will predominantly be used in landscape mode.

When you’re holding the PlayBook, you’ll also notice that unlike the aluminum back of the iPad, the backing here is more rubbery. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, just different. Though in my opinion, it does make the device feel slightly cheaper than the iPad — more plastic-y. It almost feels as if the PlayBook has a case around it that’s permanently affixed. This goes right up to the front bezel which is slightly raised above the PlayBook’s screen itself.

On the top of the device (when held in landscape mode) are the volume controls and a pause/play button. To the left of that is the power button. Let me rephrase that: to the left of that is the awful power button. I can’t for the life of me figure out RIM’s thinking here. The button is so small and very hard to push — I have to use my fingernails. I suppose this prevents accidental hits, but it’s laughably bad.

The top of the device also has the standard headphone jack. On the bottom of the device are the inputs/outputs: micro-USB/HDMI and charger/dock inputs.

A couple things about the PlayBook design that I prefer over the iPad include speakers that are front-facing (and produce a nice, loud, crisp sound). And a camera that is centered on the back of the device. Oddly enough, the front-facing camera on the PlayBook is off-center.

Despite being much smaller than the iPad, the PlayBook is actually a little thicker than the iPad (the iPad 2, at least). And while it does weigh less, it’s hard to perceive a major difference when you’re holding the two. Again, the iPad just feels different since it’s so much larger.

The screen on the PlayBook is very nice. It’s a 1024×600 WSVGA capacitive LCD touch screen. It’s certainly not a “Retina” display, but the iPad doesn’t have that either.

The cameras on the PlayBook clearly blow away what the iPad has going for it. The camera around back is 5 megapixels. And the one on the front is 3 megapixels. Though the iPad 2 can shoot 720p video, still pictures are technically less than even one megapixel. When you look at pictures taken by the two side by side, there’s a very clear difference. The PlayBook rear camera is also capable of shooting 1080p video. (Update: I’m told the front camera can shoot 1080p video as well!)

The battery life of the PlayBook is solid — I’d say comparable to the iPad. And I’d hope so given that this thing is thicker than the iPad.

Software

But like any tablet, it’s the software that is actually going to make or break the device. And in the PlayBook’s case, the homegrown stuff makes it, while the use of ported apps or web apps breaks it. Again, mixed bag.

The new BlackBerry Tablet OS itself is well done. When I first received a walk-through of the device, RIM representatives were quick to point out how they had paid attention to little things like transitions between images in the photo app. This is the kind of stuff that Apple always pays attention to but most of their competition simply doesn’t seem to care about. And it always shows after prolonged usage. So I’m happy to report that RIM has paid attention to a lot of the little things. Overall, the feel of the OS is solid.

The way you navigate around is also pretty well thought out. Because the PlayBook has no “Home” button like the iPad, to bring up the home area when you’re in an app, you simply swipe up one finger from the bezel onto the screen. A second swipe in this way brings up the full slate of apps on the device. Meanwhile, doing the same gesture from the top of the device brings down the settings (it’s nice to have these so accessible). Or if you’re in an app, this swipe from the top will bring up app options.

There’s also a swipe from the upper right corner option to bring down the menu bar which contains the time, date, media player controls, orientation lock, Bluetooth control, WiFi, power, and options. This all takes a little getting used to, but once you do, it’s a breeze to use.

The OS is also built to give users a much more complete multitasking experience than other mobile OSes offer. This means that if you’re in an app and you want to go to another one, you can swipe up to bring up a list of other apps and the app you’re currently using will keep doing whatever it’s doing. If it’s playing a video, that will continue. If you’re playing a game, that will also continue. I’m not sure that’s the best idea in the world from a usability perspective, but it makes for a good demo.

When you’re in an app, you can swipe from the left or right to go to another open app. It’s sort of like a carousel, and similar to the multi-touch gestures currently buried in iOS 4.3 meant for developers to test out.

One thing RIM clearly wants everyone to know is that the PlayBook comes with Adobe Flash baked in. The company says they worked closely with Adobe for several months to make sure everything works. And it does work — it’s just a bit wonky (like Flash is pretty much everywhere).

If you go to YouTube, videos play just fine, even in full-screen mode. There are a few jitters here and there, but it’s much better than the Flash experience I’ve seen on any other mobile device. If you go to a site that is Flash-heavy beyond single videos, like ESPN, things get a little dicey. Autoplaying videos (and ads) slow things down, and there’s quite a bit of lag all around.

The major problem with Flash on the PlayBook is that most sites simply aren’t optimized for touchscreens so Flash elements become almost like landmines. I often find myself accidentally clicking on a Flash element and getting whisked away to some other random page. This happens often when I’m just trying to scroll down the page. And it is very, very annoying.

This also speaks to a larger problem the PlayBook has: the browser simply isn’t very good. First of all, there’s a weird pause between typing in a URL and the page actually starting to load — it looks like nothing is happening for a few seconds. The site eventually does load and simple ones are displayed fine. More complex ones run into issues though. Twitter is a great example. Even though Twitter is one of the “apps” bookmarked by default on the PlayBook’s main screen, it runs like a nightmare in the PlayBook’s browser. Because New Twitter is fairly JavaScript-heavy, everything seems to slow to a crawl. And sometimes things just don’t work at all.

Worse, quite often the browser just crashes after a few minutes of playing around with Twitter.com and other JavaScript-heavy sites. I was told that these crashes should be fixed with software updates. But I received two during my review time with the device and neither fixed the issue.

Another JS-heavy site, Facebook (also bookmarked), runs relatively smooth. But that seemed to be the exception rather than the rule.

There’s also an issue when you switch orientations and the browser looks like it’s displaying television static for a couple of seconds.

Simply put: the browser still needs a lot of work.

But there are other big bright sides for the PlayBook in terms of performance. One of them is video. The device can handle 1080p video playback with ease. These videos look great on the device and look even better when you use the HDMI-out optional accessory to hook the PlayBook up to your HD TV. It’s pretty amazing that this small machine can power video of this quality. And the really neat thing is that you can do other things in the background on the PlayBook as it outputs this video. It’s impressive for a device that has the same type of dual-core setup as the iPad (though the PlayBook apparently has more RAM).

Apps

If there’s one glaring downside to the PlayBook right now, it’s the complete and utter lack of native applications. RIM has tried to play up the fact that it can run all the web apps out there, but as I’ve seen with Twitter, that’s less than ideal — they need native apps.

Right now, beyond the standard ones they’ve built (music player, photo viewer, etc), I only have had a chance to play with two games made by EA: Need for Speed and Tetris. Both work well and reinforce the need for more apps. RIM says that over 3,000 have been submitted so far to their App World store (many ported using Adobe tools), and they have a roster of companies who have pledged support. But that won’t matter to consumers who buy this thing and look for the apps on day one.

One huge light at the end of the tunnel is the PlayBook’s promised ability to run Android apps. This won’t be ready until the summer I’m told, but I did get a sneak peek at it in action, and it looks solid. Thanks to the PlayBook’s big processor, it can runs the apps smoothly in a sort of virtualization mode. Of course, there’s still the matter of getting all the touch elements in line and other optimizations, but I’m sure RIM is working on all of that.

Perhaps the coolest thing about the PlayBook — and potentially its biggest initial selling point — is BlackBerry Bridge. Essentially, this allows you to pair your tablet with a BlackBerry phone and access all your data on that device on the tablet. The key to this is that like the BlackBerry itself, all of this information can maintain the highest security if that’s important to your business.

And it gives you a set of apps which are oddly missing from the device itself: Messages, Calendar, Contacts, etc.

This pairing (which works over Bluetooth) also allows you to use your phone’s data plan to use the PlayBook while working remotely — and it’s completely free for RIM customers.

This is key since right now, the PlayBook is Wi-Fi only.

Overall

As a whole, I’d say that RIM’s first attempt at an entirely new product is a valiant effort. The problem they face is the same one that everyone in the space faces: Apple.

Is the PlayBook comparable to the iPad? No. Between the (lack of) app support and the wonky web browsing, there’s just no way around that fact. But RIM was smart to make the PlayBook a completely different form factor and give it BlackBerry Bridge to appeal to corporate users. So in that regard, there could be significant interest in this device.

But given that it’s selling at the same price points as the iPad, I find it hard to imagine they’ll be able to compete in the consumer space right now. Maybe if they can nail the Android app support that will change the scene a bit. But Google and their partners are undoubtedly hard at work to make sure something like that doesn’t happen as well — can you imagine the humiliation if a non-Android tablet outsells the Android devices thanks to it being able to run Android apps?

What’s promising is that even just in the time that I had my review unit, RIM pushed a number of updates that did improve the device quite a bit. If they continue to move that quickly, this may be a completely refreshed device in six months.

So why not wait until there’s a little more polish to get it out there on the market? It’s a good question — one that Motorola and Google should have asked themselves with the Xoom. But the fact of the matter is that we’re now in the full-on tablet wars. And the early players who can iterate quickly are perhaps the only ones that have any hope against Apple’s huge head start.

And RIM knows they have all those loyal BlackBerry users who will be very interested in the Bridge options. There’s a reason they’re calling this “the world’s first professional-grade tablet.” It’s a smart play. Now it’s just a question of selling other people on the idea.

The digerati ponder Color and its tens of millions of dollars in financing. It will become the next Cuil, or it will turn Facebook into a buggy whip, or both, depending on who you talk too. Only time will tell. Meanwhile, the actual user experience is horrific (luckily the product seems happily disconnected to the company’s hype).

Meanwhile, I still want to make on the fly photo albums during events. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time, and there aren’t many options out there. Flickr has some limited group sharing but it’s too onerous for one time events, and works better for long term groups (butterfly lovers or whatever). MG managed to use Color for a weekend trip to Mexico that ended dramatically if not surprisingly with a bout of Montezuma’s revenge. Few others will bother until the app has gone through a few more versions.

Anyway, new startup ZangZing will fit this need nicely. It’s a beautiful photo repository that focuses on sharing and presentation. If you’re at an event, say a wedding, and you want to start a group album, just upload a picture from the wedding via email and then invite your friends. They can reply with their own photos, which are added to the album. And they can add new friends by email invite as well, unless someone’s changed the privacy setting to make an album private or even password protected. There’s no need for anyone to create a new account, simply by responding to the email with photos they’ve begun the process, and can finish the rest later, if they like. It’s one of the ways Posterous grew so fast, by making account creation so simple that you’re done before you even know you’ve begun.

ZangZing hasn’t launched yet, but it will soon and I’ve been testing the service. Pictures are beautifully displayed, with very little distracting text and certainly no advertisements. Scrolling through photos is a very Flash-like experience but, wonderfully, the site is entirely Flash-free. The wonders of HTML. And they’ve integrated a very nice desktop downloader into the browser experience. No more broken Flash uploaders to deal with, either.

And ZangZing says they want to be your long term repository for photos. It will be a freemium service where you will eventually pay a fee for increased storage. But if you discontinue paying they won’t hold your photos hostage, like Flickr so callously does. “We’ll always give users access to their photos,” says cofounder Joseph Ansanelli (a promise we’ll hold him to). he says for long term users they may just send them a DVD on request with their photos to save the days and days of downloading required for huge numbers of photos. I imagine they’d charge a few dollars for that, but it would be worth it. Flickr should do the same.

Anyway, this is just a teaser for now, the company doesn’t want any screenshots out there yet. The team, by the way, has some serious chops. They’ve self-funded so far with $1.5 million.

Serious photographers will probably always have their favorite sites to show off their photos. But the social/sharing/group photo crowd space is still wide open, other than Facebook. I think there’s room for a service like ZangZing to capture our imagination, particularly if they integrate with Facebook and eliminate the need for another social graph.

Editor’s note: This post is a response to an ongoing educational debate over the efficacy of Peter Thiel’s fellowship, which encourages young entrepreneurs to “stop out” of school. The post addresses Vivek Wadhwa’s post “Friends Don't Let Friends Take Education Advice From Peter Thiel” and Sarah Lacy’s “Peter Thiel: We're in a Bubble and It's Not the Internet. It's Higher Education.”

Dale J. Stephens is a 19-year-old educational deviant and entrepreneur leading UnCollege, a social movement supporting self-directed higher education. He's working on building a platform to validate lifelong learning.

---

Over the last two days I've received dozens of messages from friends asking my opinion about the conversation between Vivek Wadhwa and Sarah Lacy on TechCrunch regarding the now-controversial Thiel Fellowship. So many people have sent me links to these two articles because I am one of the finalists for the Thiel Fellowship.

I was unschooled for half my life. For those not familiar with the practice, unschooling is a form of homeschooling wherein the learner directs her own education. Self-directed learning has been my shtick for the last eight years, and I believe that the world is my classroom. Self-directed learning does not mean solitary learning: unschooling never involved learning in my pajamas. To the contrary, unschooling allowed me to learn in the real world—how, where, and when I wanted.

I am biased against institutionalized learning. I disagree with Wadhwa's implied notion that education should only be gained in school.

I dropped out of liberal arts college in Conway, Arkansas because I'm behind a social movement called UnCollege which supports Mark Twain's mantra: "I have never let school interfere with my education." I am not part of the academic binary: I do not believe that college is all bad, nor that college is everything.

I believe that learning is everything but should not be limited to academic institutions.

UnCollege is about enabling people to value learning that happens anywhere and everywhere — be it inside the classroom or in the world. Universities should not limit how we learn or live. Ultimately, I hope to change the notion that obtaining a college degree is requisite for professional success.

Personalization

Wadhwa writes that "the best path to success is not to drop out of college; it is to complete it." I do not think everyone should go to college — nor do I think everyone should drop out of college. Pedagogy should not be applied ubiquitously.

Education is not the place for generalizations. There is no best path. Everyone learns differently.

Individuals should take whatever path to success — irrespective of how you define that term — that suits their learning style. For most people who have come from classically educated backgrounds, college is the accepted path to adulthood, but there should be more to college than putting one foot in front of the other.

Life Skills

I do not think that universities today are preparing students to face the world, a point that Jim Plummer, the Stanford School of Engineering dean, would debate. A dichotomy has arisen between "college" and "life." This is not an artificial crevasse I have imposed. I hate drawing this distinction: I think that life and learning should be mutually inclusive. I always operated on this assumption until I went to college and met students who dreaded "life in the real world."

Academia gives students a false sense of security.

Laundry, cooking, and paying bills are but three things that most college students do not think about. When we keep students from directing their own education, how can we expect them to direct their lives post-graduation? Plummer says that "if universities … are not providing the kind of life skills that will serve their students well … then universities should change what they are doing." I hope he'll be open to listening to my comments as an unschooler.

College isn't Dying

Plummer continues that "the students who drop out of college learn many life lessons and move on to either the next venture or in some cases . . . return to school." School isn't going away anytime soon. Millions have found success through the school system, and I am the first to acknowledge its virtues.

Friends have asked me what I will do if my plans go awry. The worst case scenario? I can always go back to college. It's not going anywhere.

People assume that because I'm leading the UnCollege movement I'm against school. I'm not against school; I'm for learning, and I think that learning happens everywhere — not just in the classroom.

There is value in structured learning: I went to public school through 5th grade. School taught me how to follow directions, meet deadlines, and work in groups. These skills have proved invaluable, but these skills do not take twelve years to master — a few well-taught classes suffice.

Skill or Knowledge?

You can gain knowledge through many methods: structured learning, individual study, mentorship, service learning, project-based learning, group study.

However, the skills you learn from each method are different. Skills do not relate to knowledge but to ability. If I learn through group study I develop leadership skills while if I learn through individual study I develop concentration skills while if I learn in a mentorship relationship I develop interpersonal skills. There are advantages and disadvantages to each type of learning, but we should understand which learning styles lead to which skill outcomes.

Lifelong Learning

Plummer goes on to say that "one should not take Peter Thiel's advice" because "the value of education is intrinsic and an end in itself rather than a something to be measured by its career financial return." I agree that we should not assess education in terms of earning potential (even though we as a society continue to do so—see the methodology for any college ranking), but I do not think that learning is an end in itself.

I'm a lifelong and lifewide learner. I believe there is no end to learning.

Plummer uses his observation as a reason to pursue education, which he presumes to be narrowly defined in a collegiate context. But if he is arguing that we should learn for the sake of learning, shouldn't he support people pursuing whatever type of education allows them to learn best, even if that education happens outside academia?

Signals

Wadhwa ends his post noting that "There is almost no chance you'll make it past HR" without a college degree. This statement is sad but true.

The college degree functions a signal to society. It says, "I'm arbitrarily trainable, can meet deadlines, and follow your directions." It does not convey information about you or your talents. As we asymptotically approach a point at which everyone has a Ph.D, how are we going to choose between potential employees?

Require everyone to get two Ph.Ds, then three? I hope not. There will come a point when society realizes that our accreditation system is a functioning fallacy.

I'm leading UnCollege to hasten that realization and prove that a college degree is not requisite for success. I do not want to burn down classrooms. I do not want to put professors out of work. I do not want to do away with college or university.

While going to college is the societally accepted path to professional success, it is not the only path. I want to help others understand that obtaining a college degree is not the only path to professional success. I believe institutionalized higher education limits possibilities, and that if we allowed people to learn from life instead of confining them to academic intuitions we could unleash human potential and allow everybody to change the world.

Editor’s note: Guest author Kate Ray is the co-founder of Nerd Collider, a new Q&A website designed to bring a diverse group of nerds to a temporary page to solve a problem.

Data.gov is coughing blood. The budget being negotiated by Congress will reduce the Electronic Government Fund by 75%, and the same open-gov advocates who championed the project for two years are now taking up arms to save it by persuading people of its importance. Data.gov has had around 1.5 million downloads in the past two years, but the impact of those downloads hasn't been made clear enough and the site is difficult to use.

This past week, I started a discussion on how to turn the project around. It drew great responses from people knowledgeable about Data.gov, but despite invitations, neither the Sunlight Foundation nor a representative of Data.gov took part. After a week of discussion, a series of common, simple questions emerged and as calls to #SaveTheData intensify, we still don't know the answers to them.

Questions for Data.Gov

1. Who are your users?

Any startup raising money is immediately asked: Who is your market and how will you reach it? It's unclear whether data.gov is aimed at journalists, academic researchers, entrepreneurs, or special interest groups. "Different user groups will have different interest in open government data and will have different barriers to using it. So I think the next step is for us to “unpack” the word user and have a serious conversation about who the intended users for open government data are and what their needs/issues might be," wrote Justin Grimes, a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland researching open government data initiatives.

2. If your users are programmers, what's in it for them?

Anil Dash just wrote a cogent post about some of the successes of data.gov (particularly health.data.gov) but wrapped it up with a burdensome, do-gooder imperative, "As a community of developers and technologists, we have to" build apps on the data. Reaching out to programmers by telling them what they should do won't sustain the program for long. NYC BigApps – an app-building contest with cash rewards to increase the city's transparency – is a good example of a sexier way to market gov data. Food+Tech Connect founder Danielle Gould suggested enlisting media companies and venture funds to identify startups that currently use data.gov and connecting with them through media and events to learn what they wanted.

3. If your users are Normals, how are they supposed to use your site?
Barriers to entry on the site are extraordinarily high. Data is available for download in XML, CVS, RDF, and other formats that most people wouldn't know what to do with. One person who joined the discussion imagined a Kickstarter-style profile page that would showcase apps built on the data and let people make suggestions. "I like the idea of embedding or linking apps’ description pages through to something like challenge.gov with bounties," added James Forrester from data.gov.uk.

4. Why is it so hard to find data on data.gov?

It's difficult to visualize the full extent of data.gov's database and to sift through it for the correct piece of information. Even data.gov's 'Internet Web Expert' James Hendler said, "Searching for data on the site is tough — keyword search is not a good way to look for data", and talked about efforts to use more metadata. Another respondent recommended products like MIT's SIMILE as a way to look at all of the data as a cohesive set.

5. What are your metrics of success?
A huge reason that the debate over data.gov's future is so contentious is that it's hard to judge whether the project is succeeding or failing. A number of people argued that a graph of visitor traffic to the website was a false metric because success is represented in the number of downloads of data, or simply the fact that "the right people…do visit those pages sometimes and get the things they need to." Just as data.gov was established to help us hold government organizations accountable, we need clearer benchmarks to hold data.gov itself accountable.

It’s time for a new episode of TC Cribs, and this week we’re showcasing the home of one of the easiest-to-use blogging platforms around: Posterous, the service that lets you turn an email into a blog post (among other things).

As you’ll see in the tour, the Posterous office is located in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District so there’s always something exciting going on outside the window. The team has also developed a strange affinity for a certain inexpensive beer… and Snuggies. Oh, and don’t worry if you’re not sure how to actually pronounce “Posterous” — in this episode, we answer the question once and for all.

Once again, credit to Ashley Pagán and John Murillo for the camera work, and to Mr. Murillo for the great editing.

If you haven’t already, make sure to check out the past episode of TC Cribs:

• Inside The Psychobox: A Tour Of Dropbox's Bumping Office
• Take A Doc On The Wild Side At Scribd (With Bonus Go Karts!)
• Dogs, Unicorns, And Mysterious Gongs: Inside Yelp's 5-Star Pad
• TC Cribs: IGN HQ Gets Its Game On With Lawn Gnomes, Plumbers, And Creepy Dinosaurs
• TC Cribs: From Frenchmen To Randy Raccoons, An Inside Look At Seesmic