Houseplants can be hard to care for, even when watered regularly on a sunny windowsill. A new device from Swiss startup Koubachi takes the guesswork out of plant care through real-time monitoring and notifications when the plant needs attention.

“Many people don’t know what plant they have and what it needs,” says Koubachi co-founder and CEO Philipp Bolliger. “You try your best and still your plant withers.”

The company’s interactive plant care assistant tucks into a pot, tracking its water, fertilizer, humidity, temperature and light levels. Just tell it what species of flora you’ve got flowering, and it’ll tell you how and when to care for it. Koubachi analyzes your individual plant’s data in addition to your care habits to provide personalized feedback via email or iPhone push notifications. It also takes into account your geographic weather data and season.

The sensor sends data into the cloud via Wi-Fi. From there, it is analyzed and synced to the web and iPhone app. The interface provides an overview of your potted plant oasis. The sensor can be moved to different pots, calibrating its recommendations to each plant’s individual needs.

Koubachi is ready to analyze more than 135 plant species. Currently, the most popular plants are the Orchid (Phalaenopsis), the Weeping Fig (Ficus benjamina) and the Dragon Tree (Dracaena marginata). The company plans to have 5,000 plants by the end of the year, and their 10-person team includes a plant physiologist focused solely on adding new species to the database. The sensor is currently available in Europe, with a planned U.S. rollout next year.

Editor's note: Contributor Ashkan Karbasfrooshan is the founder and CEO of WatchMojo, he hosts a weekly show on business and has published books on success. Follow him on Twitter @ashkan.

"How You’re Defined by the Stories You Tell Yourself"

Oprah Winfrey recently interviewed Anthony Robbins, who talked about "how we’re defined by the stories we tell ourselves".

Last month, I met two investors; one of them asked how come I'd never raised capital. I answered with the "story" I've told for 6 years to the point I believed it: "No one really wants to invest in a producer of video content based in Montreal.”

Then the other VC interjected: "But that's not true, I've made you two offers.” He was right. Just because the offers I’d been getting over the years weren't what I was looking for didn't make my "story" true, yet I conditioned myself to believe it, to the point that it prevented me from maximizing the value of the company despite successfully bootstrapping it.

Before you can focus your energies on the "right" investor, you need to emancipate yourself from the stories that hold you back.

The Real Cost of Financing Isn't Dilution

We've all heard about the story of the founder who was left with 0.5 percent after five back-breaking years. But the real cost of financing isn't dilution.

The adage is "raise money when you can, not when you need it.” In fact, raise money because you want to, not because you need to.

Realistically, VCs care about 1 percent of companies, and maybe 1 percent of those actually raise money; so we're talking about 0.01 percent of startups while 99.99 percent get the attention.

In Silicon Valley, lifestyle businesses are derided while funding and spending other people's money is celebrated, even though revenue is the cheapest form of equity and the only celebration that is warranted is a successful exit.

With society increasingly embracing entrepreneurs, many VC-backed founders fail to understand what they're bound to once they raise capital: The clock starts ticking and you have to give in to envy and be willing to put a bullet in your otherwise healthy baby's head and pivot when greed comes calling.

In other words, just because others say they prefer to own a smaller piece of a potentially larger business, doesn’t mean you do too (or that it will actually happen). Bear in mind, an investor has his money spread out across dozens of companies, you have one company to keep you up at night.

Targeting the Right Investors: The Interested, Willing and Able

Despite this, many want to raise VC. In that case, focus on the right investor, based on tangible and intangible variables.

Tangible ways include i) sector preference, ii) company stage and iii) regional focus.

Intangible variables include two main variables:

1)      How you know the investor?

-          Are you going in cold?
-          Is someone referring you? or
-          Have you already worked with the investor in one capacity or another?

For example, Chris Sacca's lowercase capital (best VC website) admits to never investing in anyone who has emailed them cold off their website.

Then at the other extreme, the PayPal Mafia have funded one another with multiple successes.

2)      Ability and Capacity to Invest

Is the investor a talker or doer?

-          Is the investor interested and able to actually lead?
-          Will they tag along only once another investor sets the terms? or
-          Can they actually lead?

The following matrix represents the 1 percent of VC-fundable companies; focus on investors that fall in the darkest green areas, make those in yellow court you and avoid all of the ones that fall outside of the matrix.

You can have someone interested but not able or willing to lead; or you can have someone who can/does lead not being interested; in the end the outcome is the same: wasted time.

Similarly, your best bet is to secure financing from someone who has already worked with you, if that is not an option, then get a warm referral.

Leave the Bluffing for Poker Night

Entrepreneurs should drop the cowboy act and be sincere, because if you fail to raise capital then all you have is your word and integrity. In other words, in this context,

a) don’t rush those who are interested and can lead;

b) don’t force those who are interested but can’t lead; and whatever you do,

c) don’t waste time on those who can’t lead and aren’t interested to begin with.

The Art of Being a Challenge, Interest Level and the 51 Percent Rule

An investor’s level of interest is different from their capacity and ability to lead a round. If you throw yourself at someone, they will want you less.

In my previous lifetime, I wrote for a lifestyle magazine. One of my fellow dating columnists talked about being a challenge, interest level and the 51 percent rule. While his doctrine was geared towards dating, it was psychology 101 and absolutely applies to the courting that comes with fundraising as well.

He would argue that when you met a woman, if she was

- More than half interested in you (51 percent or more) then it was worth investing your time and energy in winning her over. But to accomplish that, you had to be a challenge, for if you threw yourself at her she’d lose interest;

- Simply not all that into you (less than 51 percent interest level), then she would never come around and fall for you.

A couple of weeks ago I was chatting with one of the VCs I respect most. He told me that while he never chased the popular deals, he was always interested in the harder deals (those where the company/entrepreneur was being a challenge).

To conclude, to paraphrase a wise man, "one of the marks of a great entrepreneur is following your convictions and convincing the world of the truth you know in your heart" even if investors are quick to dismiss your idea or mock and misunderstand you, but to do that you have to be honest with yourself and others.

If you liked this article, you may also enjoy mistakes VCs make and things entrepreneurs should avoid when raising capital.

[image via flickr/Sister72]

There are two sayings on the back of every Apple product: Designed By Apple in California and Assembled in China. These statements attempt to say that even though the products might be assembled in a different country, Apple is an American company — a fact Apple proclaimed loudly today with a new web page titled Creating jobs through innovation.

Apple has been under fire lately regarding its overseas manufacturing partners. Apple hired the Fair Labor Association to conduct voluntary audits of the final assembly partners, including Foxconn’s massive Asian facilities. But consumers and activists alike aren’t buying it. It’s a smokescreen, they say. Foxconn will just hide the children and give everyone a new pillow prior to inspector’s arrival. This has rightly put Apple on the defensive.

To a growing minority Apple is viewed as just another unethical company employing cheap overseas labor to assemble its wares while filling its coffers with the savings. Groups are calling for radical but compassionate actions to improve the working conditions in China and abroad. Apple will not deny its products are assembled by Foxconn and others, but it’s still an American company and responsible for a large chunk of jobs in America. Apple is essentially stating today that even though your iPhone was made in China, the company supports American households as well.

The page launched by Apple today breaks down employment numbers. There are 47,000 people employed directly by Apple in the U.S. There are Apple employees in all 50 states. iOS developers account for 210,000 jobs in the U.S., Apple says.

There are also 257,000 employees in support roles at different companies. As Apple notes, this number is comprised of many jobs, including employees at Corning making the iPhone glass, and the FedEx man delivering your MacBook Air. Apple also includes third party consumer sales staff, transportation professionals and healthcare associates in this estimate (don’t forget about the bloggers!). This estimate no doubt came from a standard employment multiplier applied to Apple’s base employment and U.S. expenditures.

Apple goes on to state that there are 27,350 Apple Store employees in 44 states, 9,700 U.S.-based AppleCare Advisors with 2,000 of them working out of their homes. As Apple says, they directly and indirectly employ a lot of Americans. But they should. They’re the most valuable company in the world with more cash on hand than many entire countries.

I’m not part of the pitchfork-wielding mob randomly shouting outside Apple Stores. Apple doesn’t employ the people that build its products; Foxconn and others pay those people’s wages. I think the idea of an ethically-built iPhone is a pipe dream — but I am also glad there are people naive enough to believe in it.

Massive entities like Apple need accountability. Unyielding affection leads to corruption. Fanboys need haters to bring the conversation back to reasonable territory. For every MG Siegler, there needs to be a Mike Daisey. The call to build an ethical iPhone will fail, but it will also improve the working conditions and wages for hundreds of thousands of assembly workers. In fact, Foxconn raised the base worker’s salary just days before the first inspectors arrived last month.

There’s a movement in America to bring the country back to its manufacturing roots and Apple is one of the prime examples, thanks to its recent success. Let’s get Americans to build products used by Americans, the movement’s activists yell. But that’s not how a global company like Apple, General Motors, IBM, or Nike survives. The same plants contracted by Apple are also used by HP, Dell, Sony, Amazon and nearly every other consumer electronic brand. Apple will never build a manufacturing facility in America’s heartland to manufacture and assemble iPhones. Chinese factory-cities have a head start of decades and billions in investment, and America isn’t going to catch up by putting up a few poky facilities here and there.

Apple is on the defensive. This page proves it. But the company is also one of America’s greatest success stories. Three guys started Apple 35 years ago and it is now the world’s most valuable company. Apple added 7,800 jobs in 2011. It’s growing and helping Americans grow as well. The point they are trying to make is that while iPhones may not be made in America, Apple was, and though it has to rely on China to get you your iPhone for less than a grand, it’s still giving back to the country that made the company possible.

---

The Future Of Foxconn

Our own John Biggs spent several days at Foxconn’s massive Shenzhen campus. Read about his experience here. It’s worth your time.

Mark this up as one more crucial chapter in the much-thumbed book called “The Consumerization of IT”: a new app has launched from a Y Combinator-backed startup that offers builders the ability to store, manage and view blueprints on and iPad tablet.

The unique selling point for PlanGrid, as the app is called, is that it promises to present building blueprints in a far more efficient way than they have been presented before.

But on a more general level, PlanGrid is a sign of how the iOS platform is maturing and attracting a new wave of developers who target specific enterprise verticals with solutions tailored to their business needs.

Ryan Sutton-Gee, one of the four co-founders and now CEO of Loupe, the company that makes the app, comes from a construction background himself and says the costs and frustrations of dealing with paper-based plans are what drove him to want to rethink how things were done.

The fact that his immediate world — he is based in Silicon Valley and is a Stanford grad — is so focused on Apple and apps made it a no-brainer that this would somehow figure in the solution.

And the other three co-founders fit neatly into what this app is bringing to the table: expertise in construction; visual design skills and cloud computing prowess. Tracy Young, the COO, also had worked in construction; while Ralph Gootee, the CTO, came from animation studio Pixar; and Kenny Stone, VP of engineering, had worked as a trading programmer. (It’s Stone who is now responsible for all the cloud-based storage and delivery of users’ documents.)

How it works. PlanGrid is a cloud-based service that delivers blueprints as PDFs directly on the tablet; then people working in the field can use these instead of paper-based versions. When a modification needs to be made, that can be directly noted on the plan, in the app. That is subsequently updated into a new version. PlanGrid’s technology makes the rendering and scrolling of those blueprints significantly faster, too.

PlanGrid claims that because it is easy to send out and use updated blueprints, this can help reduce the need for rework and other fixes. Typically, 6% of rework is due to outdated blueprints, and in turn around 15% of construction costs are due to rework, which means 1% of total construction costs are due to the blueprint problem. Those are significant figures, considering that an average margin that a builder could expect to make is only between two percent and four percent.

PlanGrid also claims that at its most basic level this app could eliminate the heavy printing costs associated with those building projects: typically for every $1,000,000 in building costs, there are $3,500 of printing costs.

And in contrast to many consumer-focused startups, this one has a pricing model from the word go: users can choose from a low-page-count free version, or pay $19.99 or $49.99 per month for either 550 or 5,000 sheets.

Unlike some enterprise verticals, construction is not one that has a natural need for all employees to own laptops, smartphones and tablets. “Whereas people in some businesses spend 10 hours in front of a computer, someone in the construction industry would spend one hour,” Sutton-Gee said.

That sounds like it would pose a challenge for the business — why buy an app if you don’t even have the device to use it? But Sutton-Gee claims that in fact what the app has done in its early days of sales is drive more purchases of the iPad by those in the construction industry — just so that they could use PlanGrid. “We’re a big enough solution to the problem they are facing that they're buying those tablets to use the app,” he says.

Looking ahead, Sutton-Gee says that the company has a lot more ideas for how to expand its construction services — for example linking up the whole chain from architectural designs, to the technical drawings and the final blueprints that are used to actually construct a building. That, he says, could be a massive help when a company is trying to figure out where a building project has leaked money, gone over budget or fallen down altogether.

You can download the app here.

Social game-maker Playdom officially launched Marvel: Avengers Alliance on Thursday, and executive producer Chia Chin Lee says the title is already disproving some of the common assumptions about social games.

The big assumption: that men don’t like to share their activity in social games the way that women do. That could be a problem for Avengers Alliance, since a game about superheroes would probably skew male. But during the beta test period, when the game was played by tens of thousands of users, it actually saw 45 percent more viral installs compared to most Playdom titles, and in fact men were four to six times more likely to send in-game messages.

“At first we thought it was a logging error,” Lee says. “Honestly, that completely baffled us at first.”

Eventually, however, the team decided that the data was accurate. Lee’s conclusion? That men will embrace social game mechanics, as long as they’re built around “strong [intellectual property] and a game that people love.” Lee says that after the official launch on Thursday, the virality stats even improved (presumably because the marketing attracted a lot of serious Marvel fans).

The early results, Lee says, bode “extremely well for Disney, as they have whole strongest IP in the world.”

Avengers Alliance is also the first game that Playdom has built using intellectual property from its parent company Disney, which also owns Marvel. Lee says Playdom was actually developing the game before it was acquired by Disney, but the acquisition made it easier to align the game with other Avengers plans. For example, even though Avengers Alliance isn’t officially tied to the upcoming movie, Lee says his team coordinated with Disney to ensure that the game included elements that will also show up in the film.

Random House, the world’s largest publisher of the kinds of books you and I read, has made some adjustments to the way it sells e-books to libraries. Notably, they have tripled the price of many titles. Librarians across the country are expressing their discontent.

The changes were telegraphed by an announcement a month ago that suggested prices would be going up soon, and most expected significant increases — but across the board popular genres and titles have gone up as much as 300%. Nothing is offered below $25, and some common titles are going for above $100.

As Kathy Petlewski, a librarian in Plymouth, puts it: “The first thing that popped into my mind was that Random House must really hate libraries.”

But the dismay at the major increase in prices is tempered by a sort of desperate gratefulness that the publisher is willing to play ball with libraries at all. The other big publishers have been less than generous: HarperCollins’ e-books “expire” after 26 uses, Hachette and Macmillan only make part of their list available, and others like Penguin and Simon&Schuster don’t allow library lending at all. So Random House, in a way, is the gold standard right now. They even make the library books available on the day they first go on sale.

(Incidentally, The Digital Shift has a great page describing publishers’ policies on this topic.)

And despite the obvious ugliness of charging obscene amounts for the purpose of making books available to the public, one can see that the publishers’ backs are against the wall. Any concession at all is to be, if not admired, at least understood as a difficult and possibly disastrous course of action.

These companies are faced, after all, with the prospect of selling one book and having it lent to a hundred people at once (though that is not the case here), never get stolen or damaged, be easily duplicated, and so on. In a way, the idea of having e-books “expire” or selling them at a significant markup is easily understood. They have to do something to make the new market at least partially reflect the old one. Should libraries and readers reap all the benefits of the digital revolution in publishing? They certainly don’t think so, but that doesn’t make them right.

It’s rare, however, that a technology or idea only benefits one side of the equation. With e-books, the big publishers can rid themselves of much of the overhead their business entails. They can reach more markets and deliver things faster. But to take advantage of this without conceding anything to the other side is an unrealistic hope that they have nevertheless cherished.

The libraries are the victims today, but let us not forget that the publishers are the victims every day. The difference is the libraries are the victims of the publishers, but the publishers are the victims of progress. Which is going to give up first?

Hopefully it won’t be the libraries. They are underfunded and often underutilized, but they are still an extremely valuable social service and should not be mischaracterized (as they often are in tech) as anachronisms. They will be changing form over the next decades, but the institution of the public library has existed for thousands of years, and will endure, though it may change. Big publishing houses, however, are a fairly modern invention and are perhaps more likely to become extinct.

[via The Digital Reader]

The tech world woke up today to reports of an imminent Apple TV, as Apple works to solidify deals with content providers. The rumored television product could indeed be ground-breaking, not just for television, but for computing as a whole. We’re hearing exactly what Nick Bilton reported earlier this year, that Apple is going to integrate Siri into Apple TV as well as other iOS devices.

In fact a multi-platform Siri could be unveiled as early as next week, when Apple announces the iPad 3.

Hardcore right? Well our friends over in Mountain View, never ones to miss out on an opportunity to compete, have come up with their own answer to Siri, Google ‘Assistant’ (earlier reports had it pegged as ‘Majel,‘ I have no idea whether that name was scrapped but do know that ‘Assistant’ is not a part of GoogleX as Majel was).

Google has had the in-house voice technology for ages — it hired Mike Cohen, the guy who started Nuance. But ‘Assistant’ is set to go beyond Siri in many ways, most importantly in that the search company will retain complete control of all the layers involved.

The project, helmed by the Android team with the involvement of search engineer Amit Singhal, has three parts according to a source.

1) Get the world’s knowledge into a format a computer can understand.

2) Create a personalization layer — Experiments like Google +1 and Google+ are Google’s way of gathering data on precisely how people interact with content.

3) Build a mobile, voice-centered “Do engine” (‘Assistant’) that’s less about returning search results and more about accomplishing real-life goals.

Unlike Apple with Siri, Google is planning on extending this service to developers so they can build novel things. Imagine the possibilities for apps, websites, etc interested in hooking into ‘Assistant’?

From what I know, Google has now set its ambitions beyond social and is focused wholeheartedly on building this “Do engine,” or goal oriented search: 2011 was the year of social for Google. 2012 is the year of ‘Assistant.’

According to one source, Google higher-ups plan on unveiling the ‘Assistant’ product by the fourth quarter of 2012, though they themselves are uncertain. Because our details are sparse for now, the fact that we might be missing a huge piece of this puzzle is also a possibility.

Email me if you know more, it’s alexia@techcrunch.com

Image: Warren Goldswain

When I was in Barcelona this week, I met up with Dennis Crowley, the CEO of Foursquare, just after he had gotten off stage from a keynote presentation with the CEOs of Nokia and HTC at Mobile World Congress.

The check-in app that was once little known outside of the world of tech early-adopters may only have around 15 million users, but that number has actually made it a leader in its field, and that has amplified the company (and Crowley).

In effect, Foursquare has become the mayor of mobile social location, and everyone watches it closely to see what it does now, and what it will do next.

Earlier today we published a longer interview with Foursquare’s Crowley. That was conducted, appropriately enough, in a very sunny square in the middle of the MWC event. (Dennis, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry again I made you sit facing the sun.)

I caught the first part of our conversation in a short video, and it complements that longer post. Which you should read.

Some of the subjects covered here: Crowley’s take on who the strong third player might be after Android and iOS; where international sits for Foursquare; and whether the company would ever move into making pared-down services for lower-end devices, as part of a growth strategy. (That’s worked pretty spectacularly for another social network, Facebook.) Take a look.

MindJolt, the gaming company led by MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe, recently announced that it’s changing its name to the Social Gaming Network. DeWolfe spoke to me earlier this week about the name change, and about his plans for the coming year.

The new company name may sound familiar, because MindJolt actually acquired SGN last year. (SGN founder Shervin Pishevar is now a managing director at Menlo Ventures.) DeWolfe says the SGN name is a better reflection of what the company is doing.

After all, MindJolt/SGN has now released a number of successful mobile and social games, such as Jewels of the Amazon and Bubble Atlantis. MindJolt, meanwhile, was just the first acquisition in DeWolfe’s strategy to “roll up” a number of gaming companies, and the MindJolt arcade site now accounts for only 25 percent of the company’s revenue.

That’s also reflective of a larger shift in the company’s business, DeWolfe says. In its early days, the company made 95 percent of its revenue from advertising. However, like most social games companies, it decided to invest into building a virtual goods model, and those goods now make up more than half of SGN’s revenue.

This year, SGN’s plans to release 11 new social games, all built using the company’s new technology for cross-platform development. DeWolfe says SGN can now achieve the coveted goal of being able to “develop once and publish anywhere.” It can build a game for Facebook, then create versions for iOS, Android, and the Web with some minor alternations, rather than rewriting it froms scratch. (Not every SGN game will be converted to every platform, but many will.) DeWolfe says that HTML5 will probably fill this role eventually, but for now it’s too limited, and he says there will probably be other gaming companies developing similar technologies.

“This year should really be the year of convergence,” he says.

On the financial side, DeWolfe says he wants to develop more games internally, and as a result he has his eyes on some game studios. “Expect some announcement of studio acquisitions in the very near future,” he says — and to support those acquisitions, SGN may be raising more money.

At the start of 2012 BranchOut had just 1 million monthly active users. Then the professional networking app hired a dedicated growth team, launched a mobile web app, and hit the network effect tipping point. According to AppData, by February it had 2.7 million MAU. Now the Facebook-based BranchOut is blowing up, riding the employment needs of blue-collar workers past the 10 million registration mark to reach 5.5 million MAU, half from overseas.

Take heed entrepreneurs, this is how you concoct a startup growth formula…

Find a real problem. LinkedIn works if you’re a white-collar grad with a great resume and tons of professional contacts to tap. But what if you’ve only got basic schooling and experience, and your only contacts are your friends? BranchOut lets you convert your existing social graph into your professional network, something LinkedIn’s lack of a meaningful Facebook integration prevents. It can help you find a top tech career, or a blue-collar temp job.

With each friend you add on BranchOut, you get access the names and employers of their friends, even if they’re not on BranchOut. That means there are actually 400 million profiles on BranchOut. Your second-degree connections can be searched so when you’re applying for a job, you can find out if someone you know happens to know someone who works there. Then you can request an intro and referral. With the world’s economy still shaky, helping people without other resources to find jobs is a real problem worth serious societal benefit.

Hire a dedicated growth team. BranchOut now has a full-time team working on analytics, A/B testing, new designs, registration flow optimization and viral techniques. They made it extremely simple for a user to invite their most relevant friends to join BranchOut. It suggests you invite your co-workers and schoolmates first, who then receive the invites as highly visible Facebook notifications.

BranchOut’s founder and CEO Rick Marini tells me the average user who enters the flow invites the Facebook-set maximum of 50 friends, and some go back to invite additional batches. Now the site is signing up 3 users per second, and was the 4th fastest growing app on Facebook this week ahead of Spotify and Pinterest. Facebook has free virality by the bucketload. You just have to know how to optimize it.

Get Cross-Platform. In Q4 2011, a single BranchOut engineer built a mobile web app in his spare time. In December it gained traction, by January it accounted for 25% of the service’s total traffic and now it represents a full 40%. In late February, BranchOut added the ability to invite Facebook friends via mobile, contributing to a doubling of its daily active users from 260,000 to 560,000 in just 3 days, according to app growth tracking service AppData.

While professional networking might seem like something serious enough to warrant web use, networking is still inherently mobile. By just putting 1 employee on the job, BranchOut got a big boost to its business. Mobile is worth experimenting with.

Do Whatever It Takes To Tip. Network effect services get better with every additional user, but they have to cross a certain threshold before they gain utility. BranchOut’s competitors are stranded below this tipping point, with Monster’s BeKnown supporting just 8,000 DAU and 200,000 MAU, while upstart Identified [updated] is still only six months out from launch and at 50K DAU.

Thanks to first-mover advantage in Facebook-based professional networking, multiple redesigns, tech celebs joining, some good press, but essentially zero marketing, BranchOut was able to claw its way above this mark. Now it’s snowballing because most invitees have already received invites from other friends, creating social proof that BranchOut is important.

Marini tells me “It took LinkedIn four years before enough people were there. In network effect businesses, it’s not interesting to anyone at first. Slow, slow, slow. Then it picks up steam, and then everyone body piles on. Startups need to grasp this principle. If you have to raise funds and pay your way there, so be it.

Now that growth is taking care of itself, BranchOut has two more goals: scaling and monetization. The 50-person company with $24 million in funding is focusing on data architecture, because Marini says  ”I didn’t expect growth to come this fast and this big.”

The network’s growth is also attracting more enterprise companies to its premium RecruiterConnect product, which already counts Microsoft, Target, and Allstate Insurance as clients. It’s recently signed partnerships with European job board giants totaljobs and StepStone. With a product that’s useful, a growth formula that works, and 800+ million Facebook users left to sign up, Marini tells me ”These are fun times.”

For Yelp, this has been a very good day.

The restaurant review site was received exceptionally well by Wall Street during its first day as a publicly traded company, closing at a price of $24.58 per share, up a full 63 percent from its $15 IPO price. Yelp shares traded at strong prices all day, hitting a high of $26 per share and never falling below its $22 opening price.

It’s a warmer reception than we’ve seen with some other recent web IPOs: Shares of Zynga, for example, dipped below the IPO price within the first minutes of its stock market debut back in December. The fact that Zynga was solidly profitable at the time of its IPO while Yelp is still operating in the red just goes to show how unpredictable the stock market can really be, and how many things are at play when the market is determining a company’s value.

Of course, today is just the first step in Yelp’s new life as a publicly traded company — it’ll be interesting to see how things shake out in the weeks and months ahead. But it’s fair to say that the company’s executives, employees and investors are probably pretty happy with how things have gone so far.

Privacy and security issues have been at the forefront of tech news this week, with The New York Times reporting on loopholes in two major mobile operating systems — Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android — that allow apps to access much more personal smartphone content than most users realize.

Superstar security researcher Ashkan Soltani (his résumé includes work with the Federal Trade Commission and The Wall Street Journal and giving testimony in front of Congress about mobile privacy) was in San Francisco this week speaking at the RSA Conference, so yesterday afternoon he came by the TCTV studio to dig a bit deeper into how safe smartphones are today and whether things are getting better.

In short? It’s complicated. But Soltani has clever and compelling ways of describing what’s going on, which made for a pretty fascinating discussion. You can watch the whole interview above; here are just a couple of his points:

Smartphones aren’t as smart as you think

This part of our chat happened off-camera, but Soltani has come up with an interesting analogy: Smartphones today are like toddlers who don’t understand etiquette. Just like a four-year-old who overhears you saying that Aunt Helen is fat (and repeats your statement to Aunt Helen the next time he sees her), mobile operating system software is not yet mature enough to understand that you may want an app to access some of your photos, but not others. That in itself is not necessarily a bad thing, but the real problem is that most average users think their smartphones are a lot smarter than they really are — and are surprised to find out otherwise.

Context is key

But as toddlers grow up, they come to understand that certain information is meant to be shared only with certain people. According to Soltani, smartphone software should evolve in a similar way, learning to keep more data in context. Right now, the only data that smartphones understand to keep private is location data. Going forward, things like photos and texts could start to be treated with more consideration. Even as smartphone security gets more sophisticated, though, average users would do well to be more wary with what they share with their devices.

These are the early days

Even though it may be hard to remember life without your iPhone, Soltani said, it’s important to remember that they’ve only been around for four-and-a-half years (which ties in well with the toddler comparison.) That means that we’re in the very early days of reaching a consensus on where the privacy and security boundaries should be. For comparison, Soltani brought up the car industry: The earliest versions of the Ford Model T were popular but also very dangerous, and it took decades for regulations such as drivers licenses, seat belts, and air bags to create some structure around the industry. It could take some time for the same thing to happen with mobile devices.

DealBoard, a recently launched iPhone app from Seattle and London-based nFluence Media, has just emerged as a new player in the crowded “daily deals” space. But this app isn’t yet another Groupon clone, it’s a daily deal aggregator. However, what makes dealBoard unique – and why the company has $3 million in funding – is how the app goes about aggregating those deals for you. Instead of just rounding up a list of all the deals in the area, dealBoard personalizes the experience based on your interests.

With dealBoard, you don’t have to create an account, hand over your email address, provide your phone number, or give up any other personal information to the company. Instead, the app helps you to set up an anonymous profile using nFluence Media’s proprietary “brand sorter” technology.

In practice, this consists of a visual interface where brands’ logos are presented to you as thumbnails which you swipe up or down to indicate your interest. The company claims set up takes under a minute, and while claims like this are usually overly boastful, this one was dead-on. I think it took me about 30 seconds.

Afterwards, the app builds up a list of deal recommendations for you, based on those interests. And as you continue to use the product, your continued feedback helps dealBoard better learn your preferences along the way.

In the app, the deals themselves are presented as cards which you flip through, with the deal title, price and photo as the only items shown on the front of each card. To see additional details, you just tap the card to flip it over. Here, you can also tap “get,” “save,” or “share” buttons.

However, when you go to purchase the deal, you’ll need an account at the deal provider in question, whether that’s Groupon, Gilt Groupe, Living Social, Dealfind, or another vendor. So, in this respect, dealFind isn’t introducing a completely anonymous shopping experience – it’s about anonymous targeting only. Still, using the app allows you to shut off the deluge of daily deal emails, many of which you have no interest in.

For what it’s worth, from initial tests on my end, dealFind’s system isn’t perfect. For example, after indicating interest in a number of kids’ brands, and a bit of interest in everyday deals like car detailing, clothes, makeup and magazine savings, the app proceeded to show me spa deal after facial after massage after microdermabrasion after yet another spa deal.

I mean, look, deal-targeting gurus, while it’s true that busy, working moms are probably those most in need of the R&R provided by a spa experience, they’re also the least likely to treat themselves to something like that. We’re more likely to spend the little time we have with our kids, and the little money we have on them. In fact, if I had to rank my deal preferences, spa deals would be at the rock bottom of the list. Cannot. stand. them.

Maybe that’s just me but the experience prompted me to look for the “X” button to kill off the unwanted deals. Unfortunately, it was nowhere to be found. You can save/favorite deals, but you can’t hate on them. Bummer.

nFluence Media announced last month that it had raised $3 million in funding from Voyager Capital with contributions from 17 angels in the Alliance of Angels. And while this first example of the targeting tech may still need a little work, the company’s expectation is to eventually port its ranking algorithms beyond the daily deal market to help improve recommendations for TVs, shopping malls, and more.

DealBoard is available now on the iPhone, with Android and Windows Phone apps still to come.

Paul Martin, NASA’s Inspector General, gave written testimony in a House committee earlier this week detailing the security threats faced by their IT infrastructure. The thrust of the document is that NASA needs to double down on cybersecurity but, naturally, needs more money to do so.

Their IT budget is $1.5 billion, but of that only $58 million was spent on security. Considering the enormous network of datacenters, laptops, operations centers, and research labs scattered around the world, this may not be nearly enough. As it is, in the last two years NASA has been hacked thousands of times. In one instance, the hackers gained full access to some NASA systems and credentials for 150 employees.

NASA counted 5,408 security breaches where some access was given or malicious software was installed. In 2011 alone they had 47 attacks they described as “advanced persistent threats,” serious attacks by well-funded “individuals or nations.” Of those, 13 succeeded, and one attack based in China gained complete access to Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) systems — read, write, delete, add and delete users, modify logs, everything.

Furthermore, they have lost dozens of laptops. And while government-wide, more than half of laptops are encrypted, NASA has yet to implement encryption as standard practice. The result: only one in a hundred NASA laptops is encrypted.

People in security are likely shaking their heads. Encryption of employee laptops and total isolation of root access is something even a small business should be trying to do, to say nothing of a major government entity with enormous amounts of sensitive data.

And that’s the point of this report: Martin is saying that NASA is the target of very serious hackers, and their approach to security is wildly out of date. They also are working hard to bridge the gap between security and control and the benefits of cloud computing.

Martin describes the need essentially for modern security: thin clients and cloud computing, a top-down administration of security, 21st-century standards like encryption and password regulations, and a general move to a “continuous monitoring approach,” the way modern IT should be. They’ve addressed dozens of security issues and implemented many real improvements to their systems, but it’s a good example of a organization totally reliant on technology, yet unable to move as quickly as the threats they face. For tech and research entities, agility is becoming more important yearly, and NASA hopes to convince the House of that.

Here’s the testimony in full:

I’m not a big fan of online gambling, particularly poker. I think it preys on weak, addictive personalities and all too often can destroy innocent lives. And my feelings are shared by the U.S. government which has made online poker illegal. But not everyone agrees with either me or the U.S. government about banning Internet gambling. Richard “Skip” Bronson, for example, the co-founder and chairman of U.S. Digital Gaming (USDG), a company that provides a suite of technologies for legal online gambling, is – not surprisingly, given USDG’s products – a leading advocate of legalizing online poker. Bronson wants to change the law and transform online poker from what he says is a murky offshore business into a highly regulated industry.

One way or the other, Bronson told me when he joined me on Skype, online poker is eventually going to legalized. This inevitability, he explained, is due to the bankruptcy of many U.S. states and their desperate need to collect tax revenue from online gambling. Even in states like Nevada where casinos are critical to the local economy, Bronson told me, online poker is attractive because it can be used to drive business to brick-and-mortar gambling establishments. And this is a good thing, Bronson insists, because it will make online poker not only “safer” but will also guarantee the privacy of gamblers’ data.

So is Bronson right? Is the legalization of online poker inevitable in America? And, if so, is allowing consenting adults to play online poker a good thing?

Gillmor Gang – John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Doc Searls, and Steve Gillmor. Recording has concluded.

As Microsoft's Windows Phone platform continues to pick up steam and hardware partners, one company has managed to stay out of the Windows Phone game despite their long relationship with Microsoft. Taiwan-based Asus has created developer units for the platform in 2010, and leaks indicate that they haven’t managed to get Microsoft’s mobile platform off their minds.

So with all that said, what on earth is taking the Taiwanese company so long to officially throw their hats into the Windows Phone arena? According to a brief interview with Pocket-Lint, Asus GM of Mobile Devices Benson Lin says it's only a matter of time. The thing is, it's been a matter of time for over a year now.

Let’s flash back to MWC 2011 — in an interview with Forbes, Lin mentioned that the company had the ability to launch a line of Windows Phones “but decided to look for the best timing." They had begun work on their fledgling Windows Phones back in 2009, but ultimately ended up sitting out the platform's launch because they "didn't have the bandwidth" for a new cellphone project.

Lin took a similar stance at this year’s Mobile World Congress, where he told Pocket-Lint that they would do it when the time was right. According to him, the company’s strategy is to “focus and focus and focus” before making such a big move.

In fairness, it's tough to blame Lin for taking the conservative approach here — while Asus is no stranger to the handset market, none of their previous smartphone efforts have caught on in a big way. Their sole model to hit the United States for example, the Asus Garminfone, was plagued by software issues. Certainly not the most auspicious start, but Asus has picked up their share of tricks in the intervening year and a half.

For now, the company is focusing all their attention on the Padfone, a smartphone/tablet hybrid that I got the chance to goof off with at MWC. It's a novel product, but one whose ambitions may ultimately limit its potential among consumers. It's got a solid enough spec sheet to be sure, but I seriously doubt anyone will be looking to buy the Padfone phone on its own. The device's appeal comes into play because of the various suits of armor it can be slotted into — a very cool concept that was ultimately executed better than I’d expected.

Windows Phone could be a welcome outlet for Asus, and if their oddball device ideas are any indication, there's a fair bit of creativity coursing through their halls. Meanwhile, most Windows Phones have already fallen into the doldrums of design — save for Nokia's colorful entrants, many are nondescript black or grey monoliths. Microsoft has set forth a stringent list of hardware requirements to help unify the user experience, but those only provide a foundation upon which Asus could build. I don’t doubt that they could bring something interesting to the table, but at this point, the wait is looking like a rough one.

A man named Eric who (uselessly) refuses to give up his last name (which I swear isn’t Eldon) has taken it upon himself to rid the world of annoying public cell phone conversations. But how, you might ask, is Eric X doing this? Just through the illegal purchase and use of a wireless jammer, of course.

“I guess I’m taking the law into my own hands and quite frankly, I’m proud of it.”

Ah, the glorious naïveté of vigilantism.

Eric lives in Philadelphia, and seems to take issue with loud conversations on his trip to work via the city’s number 44 bus route.

He was only discovered after an NBC10 employee (going under the pseudonym “Marie”) noticed Eric reaching for his jammer during others’ phone chats. “He's blatantly holding this device that looks like a walkie-talkie with four very thick antennae,” said Marie. “I started to watch him and any time somebody started talking on the phone, he would start pressing the button on the side of the device.”

But as you can see in the video (below), Eric is unapologetic:

“A lot of people are extremely loud, no sense of just privacy or anything. When it becomes a bother, that’s when I screw on the antenna and flip the switch.”

The only problem, Eric, is that you’re committing a crime and you’ve now put your face all over the Internet courtesy of an NBC news team. Sale, purchase, ownership or use of a jammer is a federal crime, and could result in a $16,000 fine and jail time if Eric is convicted.

While the shushing hacker originally found this particular part of the penal code to be “grey”, he has since decided to get rid of his jammer after learning the consequences.

Soon when you logout of Facebook, you could be greeted with a full recreation of the Bing home page, complete with pretty photo and an active search box. Facebook has wasted no time launching the new logout page ad unit it unveiled on Wednesday. This morning TechCrunch reader and MyJobLinx co-founder Raj Singh’s Facebook logout page featured a Bing search box that when used opened a Bing search results page in a separate tab.

[Update: Facebook has confirmed that Bing is the first advertiser to use its new logout page ad unit.] The new featured placement for Bing stems from Facebook’s longtime partnership Microsoft, where Microsoft is an investor and provided display ads, Bing powers the social network’s internal search engine and other features, and Facebook contributes data to Bing’s own social search features.

Facebook’s latest monetization strategies focus on exposing users to more ads without taking away from their social experience. Because there is no social content on the logout page and people usually just wait for it to show up as a confirmation of their logout before navigating away, Facebook may see little harm in displaying an ad or sponsored functionality there.

On Wednesday Facebook announced a new logout ad unit where advertisers could pay to have their Page posts displayed. It noted that 37 million people logout of Facebook each day in the US alone, and 105 million per month. This new ad unit is supposed to go live in April, but now Facebook tells me the Bing search experience is its live debut.

When Singh tried clicking the ‘close this’ button in the top left, he was shown the traditional Facebook logout page. There’s no information available right now about how Facebook would decide whether to show a Page post Sponsored Story ad or the Bing experience, though the latter could appear to users who don’t meet ad targeting critieria.

Bing’s current integration with Facebook is relatively buried in its internal search. This is much more prominent and could help Bing strengthen its position as an alternative to Google. When you logout of Facebook, there’s a decent chance a web search is your next move. This makes Bing’s engine the most obvious choice.

Women Innovate Mobile (WIM), the new accelerator aimed to help promote companies started by female entrepreneurs, is ready to debut its first class. Like other incubators, WIM provides mentoring, support, free office space, and seed funding. Participants in the program receive $18,000 to help get their companies get off the ground.

Except unlike the majority of other programs, WIM requires not only that the companies focus on mobile, but also that one of the co-founders must be a woman.

Recently, there have been a few other programs aimed at helping minorities and other under-represented groups get involved in entrepreneurship, including NewME, and the newly launched DreamIt Access. In NewME’s case, the focus is on helping African-Americans, Latinos, and women, while DreamIt is focused on a wider range of minorities, including Asian-Americans, for example.

In WIM’s case, however, the minority in question is women.

Based on the spirited debate that took place in the comments of our earlier coverage, there appears to be a wide range of opinions as to whether or not female entrepreneurship programs are the best way to help women get started with running tech companies. Few will argue that having a women in a leadership position or on a company’s board is a bad thing – it’s usually a great thing for a startup. The question, rather, is whether women-only groups are the best way to facilitate that.

Obviously, the issue, like most complex ones, is not black and white. Women need to be encouraged to go into technology and business careers, for example. There should be more women in STEM, and at younger ages, which requires more overall support for STEM in the U.S. There’s still societal pressure for women to do it all, if they choose to have children. And there are confusing messages from women in power, like when Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg encouraged women to stop blaming others (e.g., men, society, etc.) for holding them back. For some, that message is empowering and inspiring, while for others, it’s depressing – if you’ve failed, it’s because you didn’t try hard enough?

Side note: I personally like how Jezebel summed up that particular situation, when they said:

“Though Sandberg might not be overtly calling the woman who’s falling behind at work because she can’t afford child care lazy, she is implying that the only impediment between the average working woman and the riches of corporate America is attitude and that most definitely is not true.”

No, attitude alone doesn’t get you there – but it helps. So does, I suppose, improved access to funding, based (partly) on gender.

As for WIM, explains Managing Director Kelly Hoey, they’re leaving the “why’s” regarding women entrepreneurship to someone else. WIM, simply put, is a market opportunity.

“Accelerators are proven models for helping young startups, and there are a lot women out there starting tech ventures,” she says. “The absence of women in large numbers in existing accelerator programs was an opportunity for us with WIM, and that’s what we took.”

Hoey also notes that while the minority angle may seem as if WIM is in competition with other minority-focused incubators, they’re really competing with all incubators, everywhere. However, when a startup isn’t accepted into WIM, they’re referring the founders on to other programs. In fact, WIM’s advice to women is to apply to as many programs as possible to increase the odds of getting in.

As for why WIM should be on a female entrepreneur’s list at all? Hoey admits that while WIM’s mentorship network doesn’t rival YC or TechStars, the group’s founders have networks to draw on, specifically in mobile. In addition to Hoey, a business strategist, connector, and former attorney, WIM was created by Veronika Sonsev, the co-founder of inSparq and the non-profit Women in Wireless, and someone who has 14 years in mobile. The third founder is Deborah Jackson, also the founder of JumpThru, a Golden Seeds angel investor, and who spent decades working on Wall Street.

“We have networks to draw on,” explains Hoey. “We have mentors and others who want to see things done differently, and they are dialing up and producing connections for us that companies are going to be able to tap into,” she says.

Regardless of how you feel about women-only or women-focused entrepreneurship programs like WIM, the group is of the mindset that, when it comes to fostering entrepreneurship, the more programs, the better.

“Diversity leads to better decision-making,” Hoey says. “With the state the economy is in, we need more people coming up with good ideas to get us out of this mess, and we need to look bigger and broader in terms of where ideas are coming from.”

WIM says that it received hundreds of applications, shortlisted 23, then interviewed 11 finalists. That has been narrowed down to four. The startups will participate in a 3-month program in NYC starting on March 26th, and culminating in a Demo Day in mid-June.

And now, a preview of the new startups:

Twain
Founders: Roshan Hall and Miao Yun Kuang

Twain delivers “learn to read” interactive storybook apps designed to help parents teach reading skills to their children.

Loudly
Founders: Sophia Chou and Foy Savas

Loudly, still stealthy, has this tagline: Stop hiding your phone number, control how people call and text you with Loudly.

Appguppy
Founders: Ashwini Nadkarni, Raj Dandage, Anagha Nadkarni

Appguppy is a site that lets users create and distribute a cross-platform mobile app in 5 simple steps, and in less than 5 minutes.

Whadayathink
Founders: Emily Dimytosh and Harry Brundage

Whatdaythink delivers multi-location retailers/hospitality real-time guest feedback so they can improve guest experiences.