Editor's note: This guest post was written by Dave Chase, the CEO of Avado.com, a patient portal & relationship management company that was a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist. Previously he was a management consultant for Accenture's healthcare practice and founder of Microsoft's Health platform business. You can follow him on Twitter @chasedave.

Image is courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

I know of no industry where technology is as despised as it is in healthcare. It’s telling that it took government money to incentivize healthcare providers to finally do what virtually every other industry has done — apply information technology to streamline processes. “Established technology is being given a federally funded new lease on life,” athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush said. “Traditional health software now is on Medicare, being kept alive like grandma.” Bush dubs this program as the “cash for clunkers” program for health IT leaving no doubt what his opinion is regarding the legacy vendors’ solutions.

While one might dismiss this coming from a company with a dog in the fight, the feeling is nearly universal amongst doctors who are the most important users (besides patients who are almost completely ignored). Perhaps the best evidence of how abysmal legacy healthIT is, is that even the market leader is having trouble getting medical practices to adopt their software despite huge subsidies from large health systems. In the course of discussions with large health systems, they often proudly shared the deployment of a mega EMR and how they were offering subsidies to affiliated physicians to adopt the same system. When pressed about how broadly it was being adopted by non-employee physicians (i.e., MDs who have a choice), the penetration was staggeringly low — 2/10 of one percent was the average of those who shared figures. This was despite the fact that they were subsidizing 85% of the cost (the maximum allowed by Stark Law).

When I’ve spoken with physicians who have rejected the entreaties from their affiliated health systems, it’s more than the expense (even after a massive subsidy, it’s still several thousand dollars plus monthly costs). Rather, the complexity and lack of user friendliness is the bigger driver.

HealthIT Vendors Reflect Flawed Reimbursement Model
All of this begs the question, “why is HealthIT so bad that massive government and health system subsidies are required to drive adoption?” And how can this possibly be good news? Let me address the issues and then I’ll conclude with the good news. While it may seem easy to bash legacy HealthIT vendors, my experience has been that vendors reflect their customers. I would take this a step further. In the case of healthcare, customers reflect the reimbursement model. It’s a reimbursement model that is so broken Americans pay nearly twice as much as other countries to get inferior outcomes.

The “do more, bill more” reimbursement model in the U.S. has been at the root of healthcare’s hyperinflation (fun fact: while what we spend on all other goods and services has increased 8x since the 60′s, healthcare costs have skyrocketed 274x). The byproduct is a focus on activity rather than value/outcome, the primary IT focus has been how you can get more bills out faster. Despite the fact that most physicians call the patient the most important member of the care team, in reality, the “patient” as architected into most HealthIT has been little more than a vessel to attach billing codes to.

More recently, there’s been a drive to add so-called Patient Portals to involve the patient. However, these have been more driven by marketing objectives than truly rethinking the care delivery model. Making the patients central in a system designed for optimizing billing is even less likely than Yahoo or Microsoft surpassing Facebook in social networking. Both require a different architecture from the ground up. As I wrote earlier, EMR portals are like driving a 747 to the grocery store — it can get you there but it’s going to be far more expensive and complex than necessary.

Convoluted Decisions Processes Have Killed Great Products
When I’m asked why I didn’t get back in to healthcare sooner, I share with them a story from my past. I was at a well recognized hospital implementing their patient accounting system and we needed to decide the unique patient identifier scheme. It’s an important decision, but they were in year seven of debating what the new scheme should be! It may seem like an absurd example, but it’s indicative of how interminable and almost crazy the decision processes can be in a health system. It virtually guarantees that the only companies that can survive those processes are incumbent vendors — breakthrough young companies die on the vine waiting those processes out. If you wonder why MUMPS is still widely used in healthcare, it’s because old vendors, and old technology persists in healthcare.

Separation of Consumptive User and Economic Buyer
The role of Chief Medical Informatics Officer (CMIO) is relatively new and long overdue. The idea is a senior level physician plays an integral role in IT decision processes. However, there are still many scenarios where the people who will actually use software are a great distance from those who pay for the software. In other industries, the rise of SaaS software has closed or eliminated this gap where you see individuals and departments not waiting around for IT to pick something that they don’t want to use. Rather, they can directly contract with the technology company. This has only just begun in healthcare.

There was a parallel scenario 10-15 years ago when multi-million dollar CRM implementations from companies like Siebel weren’t embraced the way Salesforce.com has been embraced today. A key driver of this is the user of Salesforce.com is often only a step removed from the purchaser.

One Item For Which HealthIT Vendors are Fully Responsible
Most of the items above put the root cause at the provider level. However, there persists one insidious practice. There are various ways to ensure customers stick around as long as possible — lock-in or loyalty. Successful SaaS businesses are built on the loyalty model. Rather than holding data hostage or locking customers into long agreements, they believe that the more freedom you give customers, the more loyal they become (assuming you deliver the goods). In contrast, there’s still the old model of lock-in used in many HealthIT vendors. For example, they make it expensive and/or difficult to get access to data in a system to keep any in-house or 3rd party built system from being integrated. These vendors pull it over on naive customers by telling them that it’s a ton of work when it’s only a ton of work if that vendor is incompetent. Like escaping an abusive relationship, healthcare providers must take action or else they reward that behavior.

The Good News

Tectonic shifts are underway. Smart healthcare providers are trying to avoid making the same mistakes newspaper companies made in the late 90′s. For those of us used to the convoluted, interminable decision processes of the past, it is breathtaking to see the decision processes of today. As I detailed in the Rise of Nimble Medicine, not only are entrepreneurial ventures popping up like weeds, healthcare providers are getting far more aggressive about trying new models without doing the equivalent of organizing the Roman Legions.

Naturally, when a project is hugely expensive and will take months to implement, it’s going to lead to a longer decision process. However, the principles we see in agile software development, are spreading to healthcare delivery. I’ve seen scenarios, such as in telehealth, where the time from initially seeing technology to moving into implementation takes less than a week. The startups that are adept at finding the nimble organizations will have great success. The reward for healthcare providers in rationalizing their decision processes is they will no longer have to settle for rigid software that is difficult to implement.

The best news for healthtech startups is that, by definition, legacy HealthIT is optimized around the flawed reimbursement model of the past. The disruptive innovators instinctually know that they will either have to build their own software (if there isn’t off-the-shelf software) or they can work with software companies that allow them to be nimble. There is universal agreement that anything less than a fundamental redesign of healthcare will fall short in solving the most important problem the U.S. and the world faces — spiraling healthcare costs.

Related story:
Money Ball for Medicine – Business Models for Healthcare

Social video browsing app Showyou just launched version 3.0 of its iPad application, a major update with a ton of new features. Competing in a hot space with competitors like Fanhattan, Shelby.tv, Squrl, Vodio and others, Showyou offers a grid-like view for browsing the videos your friends are sharing on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube and Vimeo. Once connected, you can watch any of the over 30 million videos indexed by the Showyou search engine.

With version 3.0, four months in the making, the focus is offering users a better way to find content and new ways to drill down deeper into their favorite videos and topics.

The Showyou application now pulls in over 5,000,000 videos retrieved from users' Facebook and Twitter feeds per day, and includes nearly 700,000,000 "social signals" (data from tweets, other metadata) in its search index.

According to founder Mark Hall, Showyou is now handling a video volume of 150 videos per second and 5 million videos per day – numbers which represent the incredible amount of videos being socially shared across various networks. With the new version of the iPad app, the aim was to use this massive archive of data to improve Showyou’s social discovery mechanisms.

In Showyou 3.0, users can tap on friends’ user icons within the app which will then launch a grid of the videos they’ve shared. Another update involves a new category grid feature that lets you see the top videos within a given topical area. You can also now browse the videos by social network (e.g. those shared on Facebook, Twitter, etc.), toggle between popular and recent videos, and browse through videos associated with Twitter hashtags, among other things.

There are actually dozens of features in this new update, some of which involve user interface improvements which, like the above, are easier to see and use than they are to explain. Hall tries to simplify things, saying “we’ve gone from this 2D grid to being able to drill down into more specific grids for users… and that interaction is going to really fun.” (Well, yes it is.)

But given the increasingly crowded social video discovery space, the question is not necessarily why is Showyou fun, but why is it the one to beat?

Hall says that one of the app’s distinguishing features is its “immersive, engaging UI – it’s really unique.” The other thing is that the app is “really data-driven,” he says.

“Doing that at scale, I don’t think anyone’s close to us,” he says, “And using that data in really intelligent ways to make the grid more responsive and intelligent is another area where we are excelling and will continue to excel. It’s not just a pretty interface, it’s a pretty interface powered by incredibly sophisticated data.”

The updated version of Showyou is live now in the iTunes App Store here.

DocStoc, a document sharing site has been focusing on providing bundles of premium professional documents for businesses for some time now. But today, the startup is expanding to producing articles and videos related to starting and running a business, providing more than just form documents for professionals.

Docstoc has launched four iPad apps: Legal and Copyright Small Business Toolkit; Sales Techniques and Training Secrets; Adwords and SEO Secrets; and HR & Employee Management Advice to help businesses streamline operations, sales and more.

As CEO Jason Nazar explains, in addition to becoming the go-to destination for documents for small businesses, Docstoc also wants to be a content resource as well. In addition to the four released this week, the startup will be releasing 30 "Teaching and Training" Apps for Small Business in Q1 of 2012.

All the apps are free and include original video content with SMB and startup experts as well as articles and access to premium documents for free (for a limited time, Nazar says). Eventually, Docstoc will expand these apps to Android. Nazar explains, “We want to create a high quality Khan Academy for small businesses.”

Currently, Docstoc sees around 20 million unique visitors per month and has almost 30 million registered users, with the highest concentration being small business owners and operators. Nazar says that Docstoc’s revenue has been growing 100% each year for the past three years and has been profitable for last 2 years.

Bad taste. Is nothing off-limits anymore?

I’m always up for a good satire but this Action Electronics’ video promo airing on Taiwanese for the Action Pad misses the mark. It’s not the turtle neck, stage, or even the premise. For me it’s the angel wings and halo. The little props takes the ad from a tasteless parody to an absurd stunt. But personal feelings aside, this company won. Their ad spot went viral and the Action Pad won’t go unnoticed.

PC World spoke with an Action Electronics’ spokesperson who indicated they’re not trying to “use his death.” She added “This is not meant to make fun of Jobs.”

The tablet in question is just another budget 7-inch Android tablet. It runs Android 2.3.3 and costs 6990 yuan ($236 USD) — nothing special besides the marketing.

The commercial started airing on Taiwanese TV late last month. The company even held a mock press conference with the impersonator, which is slightly less offensive because of the lack of angel wings and halo.

Apple is known to aggressively defend its image and Steve Jobs likeness and generally quickly releases the legal hounds. But this is a slightly different case. This isn’t a Steve Jobs action figure. This is some company, desperate to sell their wares, turning to a dirty tactic that they knew would go viral. It’s hard to hate on swaggering bravado even if the result is fucking ridiculous and rude.

Hub Ventures, the San Francisco-based startup accelerator focused on funding entrepreneurs “building a better world,” is the newest member of the TechStars network. The official announcement of its TechStars affiliation will be made next week. For those unfamiliar, the organization’s 12-week program provides companies with typical accelerator benefits like seed funding, mentorship, workshops and access to investors, but what makes this accelerator different are the types of startups it’s interested in. Specifically, Hub Ventures is looking for startups building solutions for things like collaborative consumption, healthy food systems, off-grid energy, clean energy, civic engagement, and other sorts of “change the world” technology.

“Our operating philosophy is that business and technology can play a key role in solving some of the issues of our time and to fill the gaps where government and philanthropy are unable to create sustainable impact, which some would say is quite large,” explains Hub Ventures founder Wes Selke. “The world needs more innovative models to solve these tough problems…and we believe our approach is on the cutting edge.”

The program is based out of Hub Bay Area, a collaborative workspace with over 1,000 members in San Francisco and Berkley, which is connected to 30 other locations through the Hub network. Before Hub Bay Area opened in 2009, there wasn’t really a physical space where like-minded social innovators could get together and collaborate. Now, Hub Ventures is there, hoping to tap into the emerging asset class of “impact investing” – something which JPMorgan forecasted to be a $400B-1T investment opportunity over the next decade.

Besides Hub Bay Area, other partners include Good Capital, Village Capital, ImpactAssets, and SOCAP. Many of the group’s growing list of over 40 mentors come from the program’s partner organizations, but some mentors come from mobile-focused companies like Nokia and ngmoco, some are angel investors, and others come from similarly focused startups, like ride-sharing startup RelayRides.

Participating companies will receive free and heavily discounted services in PR, human resources, web hosting, business process outsourcing, lean UX design, accounting, banking, legal assistance, and more. They also have access to Hub Venture founders via weekly office hours, and access to $10,000 to $20,000 in seed funding.

Hub Ventures officially launched in January 2011 and did a Spring 2011 cohort with 16 impact-oriented startups. Over half have raised money since its Investor Day in June 2011, ranging from $75,000 to $1 million, Selke tells us. Other startups have decided to bootstrap. A few of the standouts from the previous round were MobileWorks, a crowdsourcing platform that doubles incomes for workers in India, Zamzee, a device that combats teen obesity by motivating them to be more active, and SpyGlass, a wireless water quality monitoring platform.

The accelerator is now preparing for its second round, which will be smaller – probably 8 to 10 companies this time, says Selke. Interested entrepreneurs can apply now through March 5th. The program will begin April 16th and will wrap up on July 9th with its Demo Day.

Mobile ad startup Mojiva is the latest startup to start throwing around the word “billion” in its press releases. The company says it now reaches one billion unique devices each month.

Of those devices, about 224 million are in the United States, Mojiva says. The United Kingdom, Germany, and Italy, account for 33 million, 10.6 million, and 8.7 million devices, respectively. Overall, Mojiva says it’s serving 45 billion ad requests in 190 countries.(When mobile ad network Millennial Media filed for an IPO last month, it said it reached 200 million unique users worldwide and claimed 40 billion ad impressions per month.)

Mojiva CEO Dave Gwozdz said via email that 2011 was a big year for the company. The network saw “roughly 350% growth … in many different areas,” including revenue, ads served, and publishers in the network, he said — and the company’s ad serving business, Mocean Mobile, grew even more quickly. Plus, Mojiva raised a $25 million round in July.

When asked about 2012, Gwozdz said that the mobile ad industry as a whole will need to start providing better analytics and optimization, as well as more standards around ad serving counts and ad sizes. As for Mojiva itself, not surprisingly Gwozdz said that it will continue to focus on providing opportunities for its advertisers and publishers. More specifically, he said the company will be trying to expand in China.

According to filings with the Federal Election Commission, Google spent approximately $390,000 (out of $3,760,000.00 total) on SOPA and PIPA lobbying including efforts to educate lawmakers on SOPA and the DMCA. The question, then, is whether the massive search and advertising giant was for or against the bill – and why so much money was spent to argue the case.

The document, available online in PDF here, is fairly succinct and covers a number of topics, thereby explaining the massive cash outlay. Here’s the specific mention of SOPA:

The document also mentions a number of other lobbying topics including “Regulation of online advertising; privacy and competition issues in online advertising” and “Renewable energy policies” so it’s not all SOPA all the time over at Google’s New York offices. However, there is a key word missing in the filing – whether Google was for or against the bill and what, if any, opinion they injected into the lobbying effort.

Google was unavailable for comment for this piece but it’s clear that most organizations with a dog in the fight spent some money on lobbying. Wikimedia spent a mere $10K on their efforts, at least according to documents we found. The MPAA made its interests clear in the media but less clear in FEC filings, pouring in $850,000.00 in lobbying money while mentioning nothing of its stance.

According to one reader who performed a bit of data mining on the documents, top spenders are, in order:

These numbers are clearly elusive. There’s no value in admitting your position in these documents and clearly there’s no requirement. All we have is a trail of cash going from company to lobbyist to politician. What is said during these glad-handing sessions is unclear, but given the predilections of some of the filers, assumptions can be made.

More interesting are these numbers on the aggregate. While we don’t know what was said, the $1,799,066 represented above talks and it’s clear big business has more resources to pass favorable legislation than any nerd army massing online at SOPA’s gates.

When people watch the Super Bowl on Sunday, they may notice something different about the ads — many of them will be touting a new way to interact with the advertised brands. Shazam, an app that allows people to connect with extra TV content by listening to a few seconds of audio, says it has big plans for Sunday, and IntoNow, a Yahoo-acquired app offering similar capabilities, is announcing a big partnership, too.

Shazam is better-known as an app for identifying music, but it recently brought its technology to TV, where the experience is less about identifying a song and more about creating an easy way for TV shows and advertisers to spur viewers to action. The company has been ramping up its advertising efforts over the past year, and it sounds like the SuperBowl should give those efforts a huge boost — Shazam  already announced in January that it signed deals to include Shazam capabilities with nearly one-third of Super Bowl ads.

Now the company says it’s working with nearly half the advertisers at the Super Bowl, and it’s revealing a few key ones: Viewers of the Toyota ad will be able to use Shazam to enter a contest to win two free Camrys. When viewers tag the Cars.com ad, Cars.com will donate $1.00 to one of seven charities. Pepsi’s ad will feature X-Factor winner Melanie Amaro, and using Shazam on the ad will unlock an extra video. Viewers who tag the Teleflora ad will receive a special offer. And not only is Best Buy using Shazam to offer a $50 gift card to customers who buy and activate a mobile phone in 2012 — it’s actually featuring two of Shazam’s founders in its commercial.

Beyond the success of any specific campaign, this year’s Super Bowl will probably serve as an introduction to Shazam’s TV capabilities for many millions of viewers. After all, they’re going to be seeing a Shazam logo, or some other mention of the app, on-screen throughout the day. (Oh, and Shazam users will be able to tag the game and the halftime show, too.)

“There are going to be a hundred-plus million people watching,” says Evan Krauss, Shazam’s executive vice president of advertising sales. “We’re excited for that many people to see it, and for them to see that many commercials in one day.”

IntoNow, meanwhile, hasn’t been as aggressive about signing up advertisers — or at least, in naming them for the press. Instead, it shared plans for one specific campaign Pepsi. After viewers tag the Super Bowl on IntoNow, the app will automatically sync up when the Pepsi MAX commercial airs, giving them an opportunity to enter a contest to receive Pesi MAX for life.

Today, a company called ConnecTV is launching an ambitious new service for socializing the TV viewing experience using mobile and web-based applications. The new app, available first on the iPad, with Android tablet support in the works, is similar to competitor IntoNow in that it also seems to “hear” what’s on TV in order to load the appropriate content. But the way it’s processing the data on the backend is completely different. There’s no “Shazam-like” experience here – everything ConnecTV does is in real-time.

ConnecTV was founded a couple of years ago by the former TV Guide President Ian Aaron, the former founding head of technology at TiVo, Alan Moskowitz, and the original Chief Programming Officer at TiVo, Stacy Jolna. The proprietary technology underlying the service was developed over the course of the past two years, with no venture funding. Instead, the startup was self-funded and took in money from a few, undisclosed “high net worth” people. Partner broadcasters also made a small minority investment as a part of a long-term agreement. The company plans to raise capital through strategic investments going forward, but does not plan to raise funding from the venture community.

At launch, the service supports over 250 channels (compared with IntoNow’s 130) and has partnerships with 10 leading broadcast groups, including Barrington Broadcasting Group, Belo Corp., Cox Media Group, E.W. Scripps Co., Gannett Broadcasting, Hearst Television Inc., Media General Inc., Meredith Corp., Post-Newsweek Stations Inc. and Raycom Media. These broadcast groups represent 45 of the top 50 markets in the U.S., Aaron tells us, which provides the service with access to most of the regional channels. ConnecTV also supports premium cable channels (Discovery, TLC, etc.) and paid channels (HBO, Showtime, etc.).

In addition, the company is planning to soon add support for over 200 local ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, The CW and MyNetworkTV affiliate channels as well as the top 26 regional sports networks. In fact, sports is a high priority for the service, which has plans to support all the major and college sports including baseball, basketball, football, Formula 1, NASCAR, tennis and more.

Another unique aspect to ConnecTV is its technology. Competitor IntoNow “hears” what’s on TV by listening to the show’s audio signal and matching it to the program using closed captioning systems, but there’s a lag involved as the signal is identified. Although ConnecTV also uses audio recognition technology, instead of matching signals to closed captioning, it’s tracking the audio in real time across all its supported channels.

“Most of the technologies built are not really designed for real-time use,” explains Aaron. With other technologies, “you have to hold [the device] up to something that was pre-processed, or was integrated through the production process, where you have to take the feed and process it before it airs on TV.”

“Everything we do is in real-time,” he says. What that means is that if you’re watching a game, two seconds after every play, you’re seeing all the stats on the play, you can share the play with your friends, you can chat about it and you can invite friends to watch with you. Using a combination of proprietary audio and video recognition technology, ConnecTV can also match up what it “hears” up to a day after airing. That window may expand in time.

In terms of the app’s social elements, ConnecTV isn’t all that different from other companion apps, not only IntoNow, but also the check-in based apps like GetGlue or Miso. You can see what your friends are watching, share your favorite TV moments with a touch or simply post what you’re viewing to Facebook and Twitter. As you change channels, you can also see the total number of your friends who "like" the show and invite those who are not watching to join you. Meanwhile, a "show chat” feature includes top fan Tweets and official Twitter feeds from players, leagues, cast members, producers and networks.

Its overall user interface, however, feels a little more spartan. Personal opinion: IntoNow is the more attractive app. Your mileage may vary, of course.

The new ConnecTV app (beta) is available as a native app for iPad or as a web-based app for desktop users with a modern browser. Android tablets will be supported in a later release.

Here are some of yesterday’s stories on TechCrunch Gadgets:

Swarming Robots Will Fly Menacingly Towards Your Loved Ones In Perfect Formation

Mint.com Launches Android Tablet App

The New Android Watch In The Google Store Isn't What You Think

Review: Panasonic Lumix GX1

Back To Basics: Sony Appoints Kazuo Hirai, Ousts Stringer

Tucows is probably best known for their slew of web services and their extensive reseller network, but CEO Elliot Noss sees room to grow in another space: mobile. After spending months conducting a private beta for a few hundred users, Tucows has officially opened up their Ting wireless service to all comers. The goal? To offer wireless customers “a whole different type of carrier relationship.”

“Big name carriers have services meant to maximize their profitability, not their service to customers,” Noss told me.

That customer-centric vision extends from Ting’s selection of voice plans (there are six, with minute buckets ranging from 0 to 3,000) to customer service (there are no tiers, and all reps can provide “geek-powered” support) to their handling of overages.

Like I mentioned earlier, Ting has six tiers of voice plans. If you’re signed up for the 500 minute plan and go over on your allotment, you’re automatically bumped up to the next plan. While thoughtful, it can at times be worse than the standard overage model imposed by other carriers, especially if you only tiptoe over your limit. Even so, Ting attempts to make up for this by having it work in the opposite direction too — you’ll automatically be bumped into a lower plan and credited accordingly if you use fewer minutes than the month before.

Just for kicks, I threw my own Verizon bill into the Ting savings calculator to see how much I could potentially save should I decide to make the switch. For my two-person 700 minute Verizon family plan with 2GB of data and 1,000 messages per person, Ting estimates that I could save nearly $436 each year.

Maybe not the most impressive savings I’ve ever seen, but it’s certainly enough give me pause. There are more savings to be had if you or your loved ones aren’t huge data hogs (like me), as their data packages are easily the priciest parts of the Ting formula.

At this stage in the game, hardware choices are a bit limited. Ting service uses Sprint’s mobile network to provide the actual connectivity, so most of the handsets in Ting’s lineup should seem familiar to Sprint customers and phone enthusiasts. The newest device in the lineup is Motorola’s angular Photon 4G, while mid-range Android devices, flip phones, and mobile broadband devices fill out the rest of their roster. In typical MVNO fashion Ting doesn’t bind users to long-term contracts, but that leaves those users paying the full retail price for their hardware.

While it’s still usually a better deal that getting a subsidy on a phone and paying higher bills each month for two years, people could get (understandably) gun-shy when it comes to taking the plunge on an unknown entity like Ting. Even so, Ting may be able to drive adoption thanks to some help from its parent company.

MVNOs historically haven’t had much sticking power, but Ting could potentially lean on Tucows prodigious list of reseller partners. According to Noss, Tucows resellers will also be able to offer Ting wireless service to their own customers, while Tucows handles payment processing and billing. If reseller reception of Ting is positive — and Noss tells me that so far, it is — then Ting’s lack of a physical retail presence could be offset by leveraging existing Tucows affiliates.

Noss’s plan for Ting is to start off small, with their first promotional efforts slated to begin in the middle of this month. Frankly, I wish them all the best — while Ting isn’t a perfect service, their twist on wireless service has some facets that I think every carrier could benefit from absconding with. In the meantime though, Noss is content to keep his expectations pretty grounded.

“If in one year, we were known as the carrier that sophisticated users were using, that’s fine by me.”

We learned a lot of things about Facebook today from its IPO filing. But there is one detail that sticks out for its improbable exactness: The $1.000 billion in profits Facebook reported for 2011.

The number wasn’t $998 million. It wasn’t $1.003 billion. It was $1.000 billion right on the dot.

Is this just a happy coincidence, or did Zuckerberg “manage” earnings to make a statement? Companies have many different accounting levers they can pull to slightly adjust their reported earnings.

With that very precise number Zuckerberg is telling Wall Street that number is completely under his control. Investors like companies with that kind of leeway because it signals predictability. It is also nearly ten times Google’s profits of $106 million the year before its IPO.

I am not sure where it ranks in terms of profits for an IPO, but I would not be surprised if it the highest of any tech company ever.

And, of course, it’s a lesson in what’s really cool. It’s the ultimate comeback to Hollywood’s caricature of Facebook.

There is something to be said about the serendipity of shopping in a brick and mortar stores, especially when you’re buying fashion. The dilemma with clothing is that you don’t know what you’ll like until you get to the store and are presented with an array of options, and that perfect thing you never though you’d like. Perhaps this is why people stock up sartorially in actual stores — Part of the fun of shopping is the sense of discovery involved in finding and loving items IRL.

Attempting to bring some of this spontaneity back, startups like Stylemint and Birchbox are trying to make the online shopping experience as novel as the offline. A new addition to the spontaneous online shopping club today is startup Little Black Bag, which takes off on the Japanese shopping concept of fukubukuro, or "lucky bag sale,” where shoppers buy a mystery bag of fashion products and the trade those items with friends.

Taking off on this concept, Little Black Bag attempts to apply this model to the Internet. To get started the app asks you questions about your style preferences, allowing you to choose options like “Hipster” or “Classic” to questions like “What are your favorite styles?” The site then presents you with a virtual “bag,” revealing one item and keeping the other two a mystery.

A user can purchase their bag for $59.95 or $49.95 for a monthly subscription and, if they don’t like the products, can trade their items with other Little Black Bag users resulting in modest savings on brands like Betsey Johnson, Z Spoke by Zac Posen and others. The company turns a profit on its resale margin.

“I've been fascinated for years by how cold the Internet is when it comes to eCommerce,” writes co-founder Dan Murillo, “And this gap has only gotten bigger as new social media sites have emerged (Pinterest, Path, etc.)  When I came across this idea, I thought it would be the perfect starting point from which to build a truly interactive community around eCommerce.”

To execute on its vision, Little Black Bag has just raised $2.75 million from investors like GRP, DCM Chamath Palihapitiya, Tim Kendall and David Tisch. Murillo will be using the money to build out his product and team.

The jobs and career community site Glassdoor is hoping to ride on the coattails of the Facebook IPO hotness with this evening’s launch of a new Facebook-based product called “Inside Connections.” With this new option, which is really just an enhancement to the company’s website, users can sign in to Glassdoor.com using their Facebook account information and then immediately see where their friends work.

Conceptually, the product isn’t all that different from what BranchOut has already been doing, or what Monster.com is doing with its BranchOut copycat BeKnown. Using BranchOut’s Facebook app, for example, you can view which friends work where and who they may know at companies you’re interested in. And, like Glassdoor’s new Inside Connections, the others are also built on top of the Facebook social graph.

The difference is that with BranchOut, the goal is to create a mini LinkedIn right on top of Facebook. You can post projects, share links, post jobs, search through people and companies and grow your network. Glassdoor’s Inside Connections, meanwhile, isn’t meant to be a standalone experience. Instead of duplicating the Linked In experience on Facebook, it’s using Facebook to enhance its own website.

After you’ve authenticated using your Facebook credentials, when you’re browsing through company profiles on Glassdoor.com, you’ll see who among your friends works at the company whose profile you’re currently viewing. You can then read all the fodder that makes Glassdoor so popular – the job listings, anonymous reviews and ratings, salary reports and interview questions and reviews, all of which are associated with specific job titles from current and past employees and job candidates.

Glassdoor currently has data on 150,000 companies, including 100% of those that make up the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the Fortune 500 and the S&P 500. Glassdoor has raised $22.2 million to date through its Series C that closed last year. Inside Connections will be live on the company’s website as of 9 PM PT today.

While sitting at the Crunchies last night something became quite apparent: almost all the big guys — even the ones who were stubborn about it — are currently available on Android.

And what do you know? They won at the Crunchies!

Interestingly enough former Google CEO Eric Schmidt made a bold comment about the future of Android apps just a month ago at LeWeb, stating that the platform would be preferred among developers in the next six months.

Ultimately, application vendors are driven by volume, and volume is favored by the open approach Google is taking. There are so many manufacturers working so hard to distribute Android phones globally. Whether you like ICS or not, and again I like it a great deal, you will want to develop for that platform, and perhaps even first. Think of it as a transition over the next 6 months.

To say that developers will launch on Android first is still a bit of a leap. Developers tend to prefer building for iOS (likely since iOS apps generate more revenue) and if we look at the most popular apps available today, almost all of them launched on iOS before Android.

Now, the Crunchies doesn’t necessarily determine the success or lack thereof at a company, but that’s not to say it isn’t a great indicator. I mean, it’s you guys, the users, who vote for the winners and who else to tell the tech world what works and what doesn’t.

A couple mobile apps that have made quite a splash are still holding out on Android: Instagram and Flipboard.

Update: This post originally discussed Square, but it is, in fact, already on Android. My apologies for that.

Flipboard and Instagram seem concerned with presenting a unified UI experience across platforms. Since both apps focus so much on the UI experience, a migration to Android would be difficult if both companies want to maintain their high-quality status in the UI department. I hate to say it, but let’s face it, Android apps are uglier than iOS apps.

The point is that these apps — exclusively available on the iOS platform — came in second in their respective categories. Meanwhile, apps like Google+ stole the crown from Instagram for best social app, and Evernote stole the top spot from Flipboard for best mobile app.

Google+ beating out Instagram speaks volumes, mainly because Instagram’s marketing strategy that integrates Facebook and Twitter is killer. Even though Google+ is a Google property, the search giant still saw fit to put the application on the iOS platform. Meanwhile, Instagram taunts Android users through Facebook and Twitter, showing off awesome pictures easily shared, and then offering nothing for them after a search through the Android Market.

Dropbox, which won best overall startup, was loved by many well before it hit Android. In fact, it launched on the iPhone in 2009 and didn’t make the transition over to Android until May of 2010. In January, just months before the Android app went live, Dropbox boasted over 4 million users coming off of a 2009 Crunchies win for best internet application. After a little over a year on the new platform, the company reported it had reached 25 million users. More users means more voters.

Evernote had around 2 million users at the time it launched an Android app, in December of 2009. By May 2010, the company had extended that to 3 million, then to 4 million in August, and jumped to 5 million users in November. By June 6 in 2011, the company boasted over 10 million users. Flipboard, runner up for the best mobile application category, still isn’t on the Android platform and reported 5 million+ users in December 2011. Granted, Evernote took a bullish approach entering the mobile space launching on as many platforms as possible, not just iOS and Android. But Flipboard did the exact opposite, and has forced people to either buy an Apple device or use Google Currents.

Just from the results of last night’s Crunchies awards, it’s clear that Eric Schmidt was right. With 700,000 activations daily, Android simply can’t be ignored any longer.

Photo organization service (and TechCrunch Disrupt finalist) Everpix just launched its first iPhone application. The app does two key things: it offers you a way to access your entire photo collection from your phone, plus it automatically uploads all your iPhone photos to the Everpix cloud.

The app is a crucial part of the overall Everpix experience, which, for those of you unfamiliar, works primarily as a Mac application at present (Windows coming) to automatically organize and combine all your photos, whether they're stored on your computer or in the cloud. The service supports photo uploads from iPhoto, Aperture and Lightroom, plus photos from your online collections on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and Picasa.

With Everpix for iPhone, your on-device photos can now be more easily uploaded to the Everpix cloud. Instead of having to first sync your phone to your Mac, download the photos into the software program of your choice, then wait for Everpix to upload them, you can now just use the new app to have those uploads happen automatically. In some ways, it’s similar to Google+’s “Instant Upload” feature in its Android app, but unlike Google+, when you delete an app from your iPhone’s camera roll, it’s also deleted from the cloud. Nifty!

Of course, the magic will only happen when Everpix is running in the background. For obvious reasons, while Everpix can’t perform uploads offline, it does allow you to browse your photos when offline. And, like the Everpix cloud service, the photos are organized in thoughtfully created collections after they’re online. You can even quickly re-share photos to Facebook and Twitter from within the app itself, if you choose.

The new app is available as a free download from iTunes here.

I really wish this whole post could be about Google taking a big step forward in the field of wearable tech with the introduction of a new Android-powered wrist device, but their new Android watch is simply a watch with Android logos on it.

So what if it can’t display text messages, connect to a phone via Bluetooth, or play Angry Birds on your wrist — it’s a completely serviceable timepiece and it’s a fraction of the price of an actual Android-powered watch. The watches themselves are from Modify, and sticking to their usual MO, they allow you to swap the actual clock itself into different wristbands.

Still, I don’t think there’s such thing as too much swag, and it already looks like a fair number of people are pledging their mobile OS allegiance with their wallets. The Google Store already out of the large watches, and there are only ten more meant for people with tiny wrists at time of writing. If the disappointment is too much to bear though (and you don’t feel like waiting for new stock to come in), you could always try and ease your pain by buying a Chrome watch instead.

Facebook put the “sexy” in S-1 today, with its IPO filing basically DDoSing the SEC’s site and eventually Scribd this afternoon.

Because it drives massive amounts of traffic we are genuinely interested, we covered it a lot on the site and even changed our logo to Zuck’s face, a move that some thought was funny and others not so much. We’re going to be doing this for some big stories from now on, so new life goal = Getting your face TechCrunched.

For the record I don’t think the Zuckerlogo is the most egregious thing we’ve done [dramatic pause] but do find being like “All hail Zuck” sort of lame — just because it’s just not that cool to be all fanboy about anything.

Here’s a round up of all the posts we’ve done so far, in case you JUST CAN’T GET ENOUGH FACEBOOK IPO.

Facebook Files For $5 Billion IPO

“Facebook is looking to raise $5 billion— and will mint hundreds (perhaps even thousands) of employees as millionaires in the process.”

Facebook's S-1 Letter From Zuckerberg Urges Understanding Before Investment

"Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected. We think it's important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us."

Facebook's S-1 Reveals: 845 Million Users Every Month, More Than Half Daily, Half Mobile

“[Facebook] had 845 million monthly active users and 483 million daily active users as of December, for year over year growth of 39% and 48% respectively.”

Facebook's Profits: $1 Billion, On $3.7 Billion In Revenues

“The company did $3.7 billion in revenues in 2011, and $1 billion in profits. That's right. Net income was $1 billion. Profits grew 65 percent last year from $606 million in 2010. And revenues grew 88 percent.”

Facebook's S-1 And The Largest Shareholders: Zuck Owns 28 Percent

“Mark Zuckerberg is the largest shareholder with 28.2 percent of the company. He's followed by Accel (invested in 2005) and Accel Partner Jim Breyer who owns 11.4 percent of the company. Co-founder Dustin Moskovitz owns 7.6 percent of the company, followed by DST with 5.4 percent. Peter Thiel, Facebook's first investor, owns 2.5 percent.”

Zynga Makes Up 12 Percent of Facebook's Revenue

"If the use of Zynga games on our Platform declines, if Zynga launches games on or migrates games to competing platforms, or if we fail to maintain good relations with Zynga, we may lose Zynga as a significant Platform developer and our financial results may be adversely affected.”

Facebook IPO Crashes SEC Website

“The excitement over the Facebook IPO has crashed the SEC's website. The link to the Facebook SEC filing, previously available here, is no longer loading. Instead, we're seeing a "this webpage is not available message" when attempting to load the site using Google's Chrome web browser, and similar errors in other browsers.”

Facebook Still Growing Everywhere, Europe Leads At 229M, Asia Catching Up With 212M

“I've spent the last few years trying to figure out Facebook's regional traffic numbers via third party measurement firms and by scraping its ad tool. But now, I don't have to, because the company has included the breakdown in its S-1 filing today.”

Facebook's Risk Factors: Mobile, Gov, Slowed Growth, Google+

“Facebook's $5 billion S-1 IPO filing includes a detailed assessment of business risks. These include: its lack of mobile monetization and the fact that it doesn't own a mobile platform, government censorship and privacy scrutiny, inability to maintain its growth rate, and competition from Google+ as well as Twitter and Microsoft.”

Mark Zuckerberg Will Have a $1 Salary, Starting In 2013

“Zuckerberg requested that his base salary be reduced to $1 per year, effective January 1, 2013. His 2011 base salary was $500,000, and he also received a $220,500 bonus for the first half of the year.”

Can't Get Facebook's SEC Filing To Load? Good News, We Have It Here

“Since we were getting a little frustrated with the slow-loading, totally crashing SEC.gov website, we decided to do everyone around here a favor.”

Facebook's IPO: An End To All The Revenue Speculation

“This means no more "leaks" of Facebook's revenue numbers to spike its valuation in secondary markets. No more banal and vague conversations about how Facebook is "killing it" at San Francisco bars. It means that I'll never have to write another one of these "Report: Blah Blah Blah" posts about Facebook revenue using this Zuckerberg dollar graphic I made for Mike.”

Payments Are A $557M Business For Facebook — That Could Expand From Games To Apps

“It's not specific about what these other apps are, but they could include anything that somehow uses Facebook. Dating apps, social shopping apps, news-reading apps — who knows? The filing is meant to paint a broad picture of where Facebook is headed, and the line could just be a simple aside for potential investors. But still, any developer running payments in a way that connects to Facebook should keep it in mind.”

Facebook Ads Becoming (A Little) More Valuable; Mobile May Be Next

“Despite the fact that mobile makes up about half of Facebook's traffic, the company doesn't currently serve ads in its smartphone apps, something the filing brings up multiple times. However, Facebook says, "We believe that we may have potential future monetization opportunities such as the inclusion of sponsored stories in users' mobile News Feeds."

Facebook Wants All 2 Billion Internet Users, But Growth Rates Are Slowing

“The problem, as the filing also notes, is that "our rates of user and revenue growth will decline over time." A quick analysis of the worldwide monthly and daily active user counts in the document shows this phenomenon is already in full effect.”

Make no mistake about Facebook’s ambitions. “There are more than two billion global Internet users,” its S-1 filing states, “…and we aim to connect all of them.” As evidence of its ability to reach this goal, the company says that it already has some countries with above 80% penetration rates among users.

The problem, as the filing also notes, is that “our rates of user and revenue growth will decline over time.” A quick analysis of the worldwide monthly and daily active user counts in the document shows this phenomenon is already in full effect. From quarterly gains of above 20% for much of 2009, both monthly and daily increases fell to above 10% in 2010, and then to the single digits in 2011.

The good news for Facebook is that the numerical gains don’t show as clear of a decline. While the last quarter of 2011 ended a little lower than many previous ones, at 45 million new MAU and 26 million new DAU, that has yet to be a trend. Growth rates inherently decline as size increases, so Facebook could eventually get much bigger than its current 845 million MAU and 483 million DAU if it continues to grow month over month, even if the rate of growth declines further.

Facebook’s filing, meanwhile, shares a little more about how it’s going to get bigger — basically, by continuing to grow in populated countries where it is still small, as you can read between the lines here:

We have achieved varying levels of penetration within the population of Internet users in different countries. For example, in countries such as Chile, Turkey, and Venezuela we estimate that we have penetration rates of greater than 80% of Internet users; in countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States we estimate that we have penetration rates of approximately 60%; in countries such as Brazil, Germany, and India we estimate that we have penetration rates o approximately 20-30%; in countries such as Japan, Russia, and South Korea we estimate that we have penetration rates of less than 15%; and in China, where Facebook access is restricted, we have near 0% penetration.

The company goes on to say that it expects its monthly active user counts to continue growing as more and more of the 6.8 billion people in the world get broadband and mobile internet access, particularly in developing markets. “Growth in MAUs depends on our ability to retain our current users, re-engage with inactive users, and add new users, including by extending our reach across mobile platforms.”

But the filing also includes a word of warning about further growth rate declines:

We believe that our rates of user and revenue growth will decline over time. For example, our annual revenue grew 154% from 2009 to 2010 and 88% from 2010 to 2011. Historically, our user growth has been a primary driver of growth in our revenue. Our user growth and revenue growth rates will inevitably slow as we achieve higher market penetration rates, as our revenue increases to higher levels, and as we experience increased competition. As our growth rates decline, investors' perceptions of our business may be adversely affected and the market price of our Class A common stock could decline.

[Top image via NASA]

When Steve Jobs took the stage at Macworld in 1998, he did something unusual. For the first time in any presentation he had ever given, he ended with a slide reading, “Oh, and one more thing…” This phrase would of course enter the Apple lexicon in the subsequent years. But what was it that was hidden behind this first “one more thing”?

“Think Profit.”

You see, Jobs had just been named interim CEO in September 1997 after successfully pushing out the man who brought him (back) in, Gil Amelio. And he had good reason to do that: under Amelio, Apple had lost $1.04 billion in the prior year and was less than ninety days from being completely broke. Just a few months later, as he announced on stage, Jobs had the company back in black: a $45 million profit — the first profit the company had seen in more than two years.

Jobs’ move wasn’t magic. He slashed thousands of jobs and killed off dozens of products. Walter Isaacson details this time in his Steve Jobs’ biography. One part in particular stuck out to me.

In 1997 Apple was selling StyleWriter color printers that were basically a version of the Hewlett Packard DeskJet. HP made most of its money by selling ink cartridges. “I don’t understand,” Jobs said at the product review meeting. “You’re going to ship a million and not make money on these? This is nuts.”

I was thinking about this in relation to Amazon’s recent earnings. The company posted a record $17.4 billion in revenue in Q4 2011, but from all those sales, they were only able to squeeze $177 million in profit. Compare this to Apple’s most recent quarter in which they posted a record $46.33 billion in revenue and, more importantly, a record $13.06 billion in profit. The margin difference could not be any more stark.

Obviously, the first thing everyone jumps to is to say that Amazon and Apple are in two different types of businesses. Amazon is a retailer while Apple sells hardware. But the line is increasingly blurring between the two companies. Amazon now sells a number of hardware products thanks to its Kindle line. Apple, meanwhile, sells plenty of content via iTunes.

The thing is, even with Amazon entering the hardware game, they’re not making the kind of money that Apple is. In fact, with the new Kindle Fire tablet, it’s believed that they’re losing a small amount of money on each one sold. “This is nuts,” you could imagine Steve Jobs saying once again.

But is it nuts?

Amazon clearly views products like the Kindle Fire as a loss-leader to keep customers happy and keep them shopping for more content. Apple’s model is the exact opposite. Content sales are a loss-leader to keep customers happy and keep them buying new hardware.

At least for now, one model is working, one isn’t. Not only did Amazon only make $177 million on sales of $17.4 billion last quarter, they’re warning that they could actually lose money this quarter. They have enough money in the bank to sustain this for sometime, but at some point, they’re going to have to get back in the black in a meaningful way. And if they keep selling hardware, investors are going to look at their margins compared to Apple’s and wonder what the hell is going on?

Amazon has said time and time again over the years that they’re perfectly happy to live in the low-margin space. But these most recent margins are likely getting too thin for comfort. The Q4 profit numbers are 58 percent lower than they were a year earlier. Presumably, they have a plan that justifies these losses for the sake of the bigger picture. But again, it’s not unreasonable to think that this bigger picture will eventually pit Amazon against Apple directly.

Amazon may find itself in a race to get to Walmart-size revenues before there’s true competition in the space. Last quarter, Walmart pulled in $109.5 billion in revenue, which led to $3.3 billion in profit. As with Amazon, the margins are awful, but at that scale, it doesn’t matter. Walmart’s quarterly revenue more than doubled Apple’s which resulted in profit less than a quarter of what Apple saw — but at the end of the day, Walmart still walked away with over $3 billion in their pockets. That’s all that matters.

As their dance with the dreaded red line proves, Amazon isn’t anywhere close to operating the way Walmart does yet. In fact, Amazon’s margins are so slim that Facebook, which just filed to go public today, recorded nearly double the profit of Amazon last year ($1 billion versus $631 million). That’s pretty crazy when you think about it.

Jobs’ decision to exit Apple from the printer business 15 years ago proved to be a smart move. Of course, had Apple been selling ink — which has ridiculously high margins — it may have been a tougher call. Amazon’s problem is that the “printers” they’re selling have crappy margins and the “ink” they’re selling has crappy margins. It’s starting to sound a little nuts.