Editor’s Note: The following guest post by Thomas Clayton, the Chief Executive Officer of voice blogging startup Bubble Motion. Prior to Bubble Motion, Clayton was GM of the Worldwide Telecom Business at BEA Systems, an infrastructure software company acquired by Oracle for $8.5B USD. Clayton holds a BA from Harvard Business School and a BS degree from UC Berkeley. 

It goes without saying that Facebook is the darling of this era's technology boom. However, as many have repeated over the last month since its IPO, the company is now turning to face some major obstacles. Namely, adoption of the service is slowing, and the company is making little revenue off its increasingly large base of mobile users. I'm going to explain how Facebook can both supercharge user adoption – potentially hitting three billion users by 2014 – and who they can work with to boost their mobile revenues drastically.

In fact, the strategy may seem counter-intuitive in its simplicity: Facebook must prepare to go old school and partner with wireless carriers in its fastest growing emerging markets.

Find Tomorrow's Smartphone Users

Today, there are five billion mobile connections across the globe. According to Cisco, by 2016, this number will double to 10 billion connections across eight billion mobile devices. Facebook has the opportunity to be installed on every single one, but the company must start now in order to get in front of this coming wave of smartphone adoption.

Who are the smartphone users of tomorrow? The feature phone users of today.

Facebook's long-term vision and successfully monetizing mobile depends on penetrating this market. The company knows this: they've improved the biggest draws of Facebook on mobile, the News Feed, released the standalone Facebook Camera app, and are rolling out a mobile-only ad platform.

On the feature phone side, they acquired Snaptu in March 2011 – an app platform that allowed users to access services like Facebook and Twitter from web-enabled feature phones. They rolled the technology out as Facebook for Every Phone in June 2011, and partnered with hundreds of operators around the world to entice users by making the associated data free for 90 days. In the year since, the app page has registered a whopping 90 million likes.

With today's social juggernauts building their mobile services exclusively on smartphone platforms like iOS, Android, and Windows Phone, they are leaving out an enormous potential user base: 90 percent of mobile users in the developing world do not have smartphones.

For example, mammoth developing economies in Asia such as China, India, and Indonesia all have a smartphone penetration rate of less than 10 percent, compared to 50+ percent in the U.S. and most developed countries. Moreover, 90 percent of those feature phones do not even have data connectivity. Thus, even companies that build apps enabled for feature phones, are still missing out on the masses in extremely large developing markets.

Catering to feature phone users in the developing world in the short-term allows companies to ensure a vast upside in five years, as users accelerate their migration towards lower-cost smartphones. Services and social networks like Facebook are currently only addressing the tip of the iceberg of this unrealized upside. They should look to entrench their services even deeper into the developing world in order to fuel mass growth and user adoption.

After all, while average ARPU of these feature phone users in developing markets is significantly lower than smartphone users in developed markets and the mobile ad revenue markets are still in their infancy, the consumers willing to pay for subscription service and access to social media services is phenomenally higher than in developed markets since paying for these types of services via a prepaid card is the norm and far more frictionless.

Friending Emerging Market Operators

Many of Facebook's services can be adapted to feature phones via very basic telephony services – SMS and voice networks for retrieval of updates and USSD for authentication and login. Thus, a user wouldn't even need a data connection, much less a smartphone or app. Of course, this is not an easy endeavor and requires deploying servers in an operator's network, but looking at the new users it would bring to the service, it is an extremely small price to pay. This would allow the
billions of users on feature phones with no data connectivity in feature phones to access the service – and their willingness to pay a monthly subscription for this is extremely high. Moreover, it acts as bridge to higher tech mobile devices as consumers upgrade over the next five years.

Working with mobile operators can be challenging, but ultimately phenomenally rewarding. For example, my company Bubble Motion was able to attract 17 million users in less than two years and monetize them quite significantly, with no marketing spend whatsoever, by working directly with wireless carriers in a handful of target countries across Asia. Our potential user footprint is a whopping 2+ billion feature phones, which is far beyond what we could've hoped for on a smartphone app. We recently launched a smartphone app version of
our service, Bubbly, but for the foreseeable future, our feature phone users will be the overwhelming majority of our revenue stream. Like I said, while ARPU of smartphone users may be higher, the willingness of social media-starved feature phone users to pay for services is significantly higher.

By cracking a few deals with mobile operators in target high-growth countries, Facebook could see their user numbers shoot upwards once again. Facebook has some experience in this already – they've already partnered with AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile in the U.S. and with Bango in the U.K, mostly to streamline payment
through Facebook credits charged directly to user mobile bills.

They've also partnered with emerging market carriers to peddle their feature phone app – but only on superficial levels like subsidizing data costs for users for 90 days. Compared to the App Store model, leveraging operator networks makes it much easier to reach
the masses. On the other hand, working with operators is not easy, which is why so many Valley companies have shunned the idea. However, those with the scale and reach of Facebook or Twitter, need to embrace operators to take their user growth and service to the next level.

Facebook Can Start Making Money in Mobile

It won't be a lot at first, but by working with mobile carriers, Facebook can extract a healthy revenue share from operators. For example, our current average revenue per user (ARPU) is around $4 in Japan – this is the same amount Facebook makes off of its web-based U.S. users, where it has established a strong ad revenue model.

By contrast, we're making it solely off usage and access via mobile, which users are completely okay with when accessing services via their mobile device.

Feature phone users can spend money much more easily than their smartphone counterparts (especially those on Android), due to the fact that they are tied into a network's billing service. In Asia and most developing markets, a very small percentage of smartphone users have entered their credit card information into Google Play for app purchases – in fact, most do not even have credit cards! Direct
billing makes up for the greater engagement and web-access that comes with using a smartphone app. In fact, as I write this article, Facebook is announcing frictionless
payments in collaboration with mobile operators. However, this still does not
address the feature phone users without a data plan, which is the overwhelming majority of mobile users globally. This is where integrating tightly with operators, especially in emerging markets, will pay huge dividends.

As feature phone users become increasingly engaged with the service and then upgrade to smartphones, this trickle will turn into a torrent. They'll be much more likely to open their wallets after having done so in the past – you have to attach the hose before turning on the water.

Although partnering with mobile operators is something Facebook has been working on over the past year, expect to see them double down on these efforts in the years to come. To date, it has been primarily focused on getting them to make data charges free for accessing Facebook via their mobile device. Once again, this is great, but does not address those that do not even have data plans – which are the true masses.

All of these lessons come from experience. Our service started out as an operator- embedded service via voice calls and SMS, similar to Twitter in the early days, and has only recently launched a smartphone app version. This has enabled us to both attract a massive audience – one which is now following the evolutionary path as they migrate towards smartphones and a higher-touch experience, all while sticking with our service. In that way, we find ourselves well positioned for the coming Asian smartphone boom.

Although Facebook has made some good strides in this direction, it should double down and embrace the emerging market trend in order to find the serious money in mobile.

Editor's note: This post was written by guest contributor Aaron Levie, CEO and co-founder of Box.net. You can read his previous posts here.

The enterprise software market has been uncharacteristically turbulent of late. Beyond several hefty funding rounds and well-performing IPOs, the ecosystem has experienced some major consolidation with SAP's purchase of SuccessFactors and Ariba, Oracle's acquisition of RightNow and Taleo, and even IBM's multiple cloud additions. All totaled, we've seen more than $10 billion in enterprise cloud consolidation over the past three quarters.

But Microsoft's $1.2 billion acquisition of Yammer is a little different. Not just because it underscores the importance of social in the enterprise and cements Yammer's rapid rise to more than a billion dollars in value. Rather, it's different because it signals the severity of the disruption occurring in enterprise software – disruption that will make it very difficult for incumbent vendors to hold on, and disruption that's coming from entirely new places and in new ways.

Yammer began as an internal communication tool built specifically for employees at Geni, David Sacks' preceding company. Explicitly modeled off of Twitter, it allowed people to post and respond to ideas and keep track of each other's activities. Its thesis was unassuming at first: traditional enterprise communication sucks, and a very simple port of what we experience in our personal lives into the enterprise could address a massive problem. But when Yammer took the top prize at TC50 in 2008, it wasn't uniformly praised, and in some cases was completely misunderstood. Was it a Twitter competitor?  How useful would it really be?  Many analysts, pundits, and enterprises initially balked, dismissing it simply as an enterprise "toy."

But Yammer capitalized on its early traction, parlaying the service into a much broader social platform for workplace sharing and communicating, with the social enterprise space eventually exploding into a billion dollar market in just a couple of years. And these social "toys" quickly became a critical part of enterprise IT strategy – something that was not lost on Microsoft, nor on salesforce.com, which started building out Chatter. And the public markets have noticed as well, valuing Jive at  $1.3 billion.

Who would have thought that something as simple as status messages shared between colleagues would evolve to become such an important strategic product for Microsoft and the enterprise? But this is exactly how most disruptive innovations start: seemingly innocuous and grossly misunderstood at the onset. And by the time the misconceptions are corrected, it's too late for the legacy players. The toys are no longer toys; they're contenders.

First they're "toys," then they're solutions

Students of the Innovator's Dilemma know that a new technology starts out being just "good enough." Often, an early solution only serves a niche part of the market with limited requirements. This naturally shields it from the incumbents' radar, but what starts out as a nascent product attacking an unprofitable or unattractive market segment can quickly mature into a disruptive solution that becomes more than adequate for a broader population.

What is remarkable is the predictability and consistency of the incumbents' response to these new technologies.

The first sign that an important disruption is occurring is the incumbent writing off the new innovation as just a toy.  It's an age-old exercise, going back as far as Western Union's failure to see the value in telephones, classically stating, “what use could this company make of an electrical toy?”

More recently, when the iPhone was introduced, Microsoft's stance was that it "doesn't appeal to business customers because it doesn't have a keyboard which makes it not a very good email machine." Of course, this turned out to be an unlucky predication, and the Redmond giant is now powering similarly consumerized devices for the enterprise sans keyboards.  Fast-forward to today, and Larry Ellison is playing the same game with cloud ERP vendor Workday, dismissing it as frail and not ready for big customers.

I'm sure that Workday's customers – Flextronics, Sallie Mae and Kimberly-Clark – would argue that point. And by all accounts, Workday is just getting started. You'd think Ellison would have learned the game by now, having intimately watched Salesforce grow from a small, burgeoning company to an $18 billion player in a little over a decade, attracting a number of large customers at Oracle's expense.

And of course, when Salesforce was emerging, analysts and pundits claimed that it “doesn’t compare well at all with other large CRM packages like Siebel and PeopleSoft." Which was true at the time. But customers don't just buy what you've built today; they're buying what you'll have in the future.

It’s easy for incumbents – and everyone else – to forget how broadly and rapidly these solutions can evolve. Some of the most 'powerful' enterprise software on the market today started out as mere wedges, later transforming into meaningful and substantial platforms. Particularly for enterprises, it's far better to evolve from something simple after learning about customer demands, than to pare down something insanely complex.  And this is precisely the dilemma that traditional vendors are now facing.

Much of the enterprise's existing technology is too stale and cumbersome to support the needs of workers today. And most legacy vendors simply can't update their technology fast enough to compete in a world where business is changing overnight.  To capitalize on this void, new solutions – built with fundamentally different models, architecture, and DNA – are rapidly emerging.

Attack of the "Toys"

"Yammer has gotten it right with its viral adoption model," Steve Ballmer said of the acquisition. Yammer's rise to prominence and purchase underscores a number of critically important trends disrupting software today. Its virality, simplicity, and freemium business model represent important levers for startups looking to take on much larger, far better resourced traditional players.

Today, nearly every internet-connected, employed individual is a potential user and buyer of enterprise tools. And by making these tools accessible to users with just a few clicks, enterprise software providers can reach markets at a scale and speed that were impossible in the client-server paradigm. Across mobile and web, new solutions will emerge that help workers connect and communicate better with their customers, analyze business data, gain new clients, manage their payroll and expenses, and more. Which is precisely why we're seeing more investment in the enterprise software space than consumer internet, chasing hundreds of billions of dollars that are now up for grabs in enterprise IT spend.

At Box, we regularly talk with Global 2000 CIOs whose organizations now rely on dozens of applications that only cropped up in the past couple of years. This pace of adoption wasn't possible in any previous technology era; the way software was both designed and implemented prohibited it. In the past, each new application required new infrastructure and new competencies, making organizations wary of new additions to the stack. It was far "easier" to buy your technology for a select few vendors. But that's simply not possible today, given the heterogeneity of enterprise environments and diversity of new tools that users are bringing into work on their own. Consequently, today's technology buyers have become more comfortable with the mix-and-match approach to enterprise IT, and now managing another mobile app or cloud solution is a far more incremental, trivial exercise.

And unsurprisingly, the cycles of disruption are accelerating. Given increasingly lower barriers to distribution, less conservative buyers, and rapidly changing business demands, we're going to see unprecedented change in enterprise technology moving forward.  Yammer produced a billion dollar outcome in less than four years. Following suit, we're already seeing a new crop of companies initiate the next wave of disruption, like Base, Domo, CloudOn, GoodData, Asana, MixPanel, Zapier, PiCloud, DotCloud, intercom.io, PlanGrid (Box is an investor through /bin) and many others.

Initially, many will be written off by the legacy players as too simple to be important. But as they rise, we'll see software categories created, remade and destroyed. Some of these apps, of course, will invariably go the way of Yammer, and be snapped up by incumbents. Others, however, will remain independent, evolve to the needs of large enterprises, and turn into leaders that define the next generation of enterprise software. And then they, too, will have to defend their positions against the next wave of "toys."

Editor's Note: Nir Eyal is a founder of two startups and an advisor to several Bay Area companies and incubators. He is a Lecturer in Marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and blogs about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business at NirAndFar.com. Follow him on Twitter@nireyal and see his previous Techcrunch posts here.

Let’s admit it, we in the consumer web industry are in the manipulation business. We build products meant to persuade people to do what we want them to do. We call these people “users” and even if we don’t say it aloud, we secretly wish every one of them would become fiendishly addicted.

Users take our technologies with them to bed. When they wake up, they check for notifications, tweets, and updates before saying “good morning” to their loved ones. Ian Bogost, the famed game creator and professor, calls the wave of habit-forming technologies the “cigarette of this century” and warns of equally addictive and potentially destructive side-effects.

When Is Manipulation Wrong?

Manipulation is a designed experience crafted to change behavior — we all know what it feels like. We’re uncomfortable when we sense someone is trying to make us do something we wouldn’t do otherwise, like when at a car dealership or a timeshare presentation.

Yet, manipulation can’t be all bad. If it were, what explains the numerous multi-billion dollar industries that rely heavily on users willfully submitting to manipulation? If manipulation is a designed experience crafted to change behavior, then Weight Watchers, one of the most successful mass-manipulation products in history, fits the definition.

Much like in the consumer web industry, Weight Watchers customers' decisions are programed by the designer of the system. Yet few question the morality of Weight Watchers. But what’s the difference? Why is manipulating users through flashy advertising or addictive video games thought to be distasteful while a strict system of food rationing is considered laudable?

A More Addictive World

Unfortunately, our moral compass has not caught-up with what technology now makes possible. Ubiquitous access to the web, transferring greater amounts of personal data at faster speeds than ever before, has created a more addictive world. Addictiveness is accelerating and according to Paul Graham of Y Combinator, we haven’t had time to develop societal “antibodies to addictive new things.” Graham puts responsibility on the user: “Unless we want to be canaries in the coal mine of each new addiction—the people whose sad example becomes a lesson to future generations—we’ll have to figure out for ourselves what to avoid and how.”

But what of the people who make these manipulative experiences? The corporations who unleash these addictive technologies are, after all, made up of human beings with a moral sense of right and wrong. We too have families and kids who are susceptible to addiction and manipulation. What shared responsibilities do we code slingers and behavior designers have to our users, to future generations, and to ourselves?

The Manipulation Matrix

I offer a simple decision support tool for entrepreneurs, employees, and investors to be used long before product is shipped or code is written; even before customer development has begun. The Manipulation Matrix does not try and answer which businesses are moral or which will succeed. Nor does it describe what can and cannot become a habit-forming technology. The matrix seeks to help you answer not, “Can I hook users?” but “Should I attempt to?”

To use the Manipulation Matrix, the maker needs to ask two questions. First, “Will I use the product myself?” and second, “Will the product help users materially improve their lives?”

The Facilitator

When you create something that you will use and believe makes the user’s life better, you’re facilitating a healthful habit. It’s important to note that only you can decide if you would actually use the service and what “materially improving the life of the user” really means.

If you find yourself squirming as you ask yourself those questions or needing to create a preamble starting with, “If I were a…” STOP! You failed. You have to actually want to use the product and believe it materially benefits your life as well as the lives of your users. The one exception is if you would have been a user in your younger years. For example, in the case of an education company, you may not need to use the service right now, but are positive you would have used it in your not so distant past. Note however that the further you are from your former self, the lower your odds of success.

While I don’t know Mark Zuckerberg or the Twitter founders personally, I believe from their well-documented stories that they would see themselves as making products in this quadrant. There is also a long list of companies creating new products to improve lives by facilitating healthful habits. Whether getting users to exercise more, creating a habit of journaling, or improving back posture, these companies are run by authentic entrepreneurs who desperately want their products to exist, firstly to satisfy their own needs.

But what about when an addiction to a well-intended product becomes extreme, even harmful? For a product in this quadrant, I agree with Paul Graham in saying the responsibility falls to the user. In any normal distribution, a small percentage of people will be on the extremes. If the designers make a product that they would use themselves, and they believe it improves the lives of their users, they have fulfilled their moral obligation. To take liberties with Mahatma Gandhi, facilitators “build the change they want to see in the world.”

The Peddler

But heady altruistic ambitions can at times, get ahead of reality. Too often, designers of manipulative technology have a strong motivation to improve the lives of their users, but when pressed, they admit they would not actually use their own creations. Their holier-than-thou products often try to “gamify” some task no one actually wants to do by inserting hackneyed incentives like badges or points that don’t actually hold value for the user.

Fitness apps, charity websites, and products that claim to suddenly turn hard work into fun often fall in this quadrant. But possibly the most common example is in peddler advertising. Countless companies convince themselves they're making ad campaigns users will love. They expect their videos to go viral and their branded apps to be used daily. Their reality distortion fields keep them from asking the critical question of, “Would I actually find this useful?” The answer to this uncomfortable question is nearly always “No,” so they bend their brain into the mind of a user they believe might find the ad valuable.

Materially improving users' lives is a tall order. But attempting to create a persuasive technology which you don’t find valuable enough to use yourself is nearly impossible. There's nothing immoral about peddling; it's just the odds of success are depressingly low. You’ll lack the empathy and insights needed to create something users actually want. The peddler's project tends to end up a time-wasting failure because fundamentally, no one finds it useful or fun. If it were, the peddler would be using it instead of hawking it.

The Entertainer

In fact, sometimes makers just want to have fun. If a creator of a potentially addictive technology makes something that they would use but can’t in good conscience claim improves the lives of their users, they’re making entertainment.

Entertainment is art and is important for its own sake. Art provides joy, helps us see the world differently, and connects us with the human condition. These are all important and age old pursuits. Entertainment, however, has particular attributes which the entrepreneur, employee, and investor should be aware of when using the Manipulation Matrix.

Art is often fleeting; products that form addictions around entertainment tend to fade quickly from users’ lives. A hit song, repeated over and over again in the mind, becomes nostalgia after it is replaced by the next single. A blog article like this one is read, shared, and thought about for a few minutes until the next interesting piece of brain candy comes along. Games like Farmville and Angry Birds engross users for a while, but then are relegated to the gaming dustbin along other hyper-addictive has-beens like Pac Man and Tetris.

Entertainment is a hits-driven business because the brain adapts to stimulus. Art is about creating continuous novelty and building an enterprise on ephemeral desires is a constantly running treadmill. In this quadrant, the sustainable business isn’t the game, the song, or the book — it’s the distribution system for getting those goods to market while they’re still hot.

The Dealer

Creating a product that the designer does not believe improves the user’s life and which the maker would not use is exploitation. In the absence of these two criteria, presumably the only reason you’re hooking users is to make a buck. Certainly there is money to be made addicting users to behaviors that do little more than extract cash; and where there is cash, there will be someone willing to take it.

The question is: Is that someone you? Casinos and drug dealers offer users a good time, but when the addiction takes hold, the fun stops.

In a satirical take on Zynga’s Farmville franchise Ian Bogost created Cow Clicker, a Facebook app where users did nothing but incessantly click on virtual cows to hear a satisfying “moo.” Bogost intended to lampoon Farmville by blatantly implementing the same game mechanics and viral hacks he thought would be laughably obvious to users. But after the app’s usage exploded and some people became frighteningly obsessed with the game, Bogost shut it down, bringing on what he called, “The Cowpocalypse.”

Judging for Yourself

Bogost was right in comparing addictive technology to the cigarette. Certainly, the incessant need for a smoke in what was once the majority of the adult population has been replaced by a nearly equal compulsion to constantly check our devices. But unlike the addiction to nicotine, new technologies offer an opportunity to dramatically improve the lives of users. It's clear that like all technologies, recent advances in the habit-forming potential of web innovation have both positive and negative effects.

But if the innovator has a clear conscience that the product materially improves people's lives — first among them, the creator's — then the only path is to push forward. Users bear ultimate responsibility for their actions and makers should not be blamed for the misuse or overuse of their products.

However, as the march of technology makes the world a more addictive place, innovators need to consider their role. It will be years, perhaps generations, before society develops the antibodies to new addictions. In the meantime, users will have to judge the yet unknown consequences for themselves, while creators will have to live with the moral repercussions of how they spend their professional lives.

My hope is that Manipulation Matrix helps innovators consider the implications of the products they create. Perhaps after reading this, you'll start a new business. Maybe you’ll join an existing company with a mission you believe in. Or, perhaps after reading this you'll decide it’s time to quit your job, which you now come to realize no longer agrees with your moral compass.

Thank you to Amy Jo Kim, Jess Bachman, Max Ogles for reading early versions of this essay.

Photo Credit: byJess.net, Sarah G…, and NirAndFar.com

Poof. Vanished. Gone. Many Facebook users are no longer seeing the real-time news “Ticker” on the right side of their home page, but apparently it should reappear soon. While nothing was posted to Facebook’s Known Issues Page, one Twitter user relayed that his friend who works at Facebook said Ticker “will be back online soon”. There’s a chance the removal could be more permanent, though.

The Ticker is essentially Facebook’s firehose, showing abbreviated stories about nearly every action taken by your friends, no matter how insignificant. If Facebook did remove the Ticker, it could make it harder for third-party apps to grow, but give Facebook more prime real-estate above the fold to show ads.

friend working @facebook just told me the ticker will be back online soon—
Derek Austin (@DerekAustinS) July 01, 2012

Reports of the Ticker’s disappearance started trickling into Twitter just before 9pm PST on June 30th, and we’re waiting to hear back from Facebook for official details.

To some it’s known as the “stalker ticker” because watching it can give the feeling of peering over the shoulder of all your friends as they post comments, like photos, read articles, and more. To others it’s the “Spotify Ticker” since the music app was one of the only apps publishing to the Ticker when it first launched at f8 last year. Without other apps mixing their content in, suddenly everyone on Facebook became intimately aware of every song their high school classmates were listening to.

With time as the Open Graph app platform went public and other apps started publishing to Ticker, it refined to show fewer stories about distant acquaintances and more about your close friends. For a story to appear in the main news feed instead of the Ticker, it usually has to receive plenty of Likes and comments, be from one of your best friends, or get aggregated with similar stories like “4 of your friends listened to Japandroids.”

Without the Ticker as a distribution method, apps whose stories are less likely to reach the primary feed than status updates and photo uploads would find it harder to gain new users, which could cut down on runaway growth stories like Socialcam. However, Facebook would gain the extra space in the right sidebar, allowing it to show a full seven ads per page more frequently.

Facebook just never stops changing things ever, so the Ticker could suddenly reappear. The fact that the change was implemented on a Saturday evening Pacific time when most of Facebook’s key markets are away from their desktops is a likely sign that this could just be some maintenance. Ticker entries still appear in the Help Center too. That doesn’t mean it will be around forever of it returns, though. Facebook may be finding the Ticker was confusing people, geting few clicks, and taking up too much room on the home page to warrant its existence.

But power users and frequent visitors would mourn its loss. Without Ticker or a separate Twitter-esque firehose tab in the main feed like there was long ago, there might not always be something fresh on the home page, and we could lose touch with more distant friends. For better or worse, Facebook might not give as intimate a look into the lives of our friends without Ticker, so I’ll be happy to see it return.

Nobody likes to admit it, but if you’re a working professional, there’s a good chance you’re familiar with sweat stains. The commute to work, the stress of meeting a deadline, the faulty air conditioning in the boardroom, cotton weaves — all of these things and many more have been known to conspire against you, the working professional. Luckily, Ministry of Supply feels your stinky, stinky pain.

While athletes have Under Armour, business attire has more or less remained the same for the last century. So, armed with some of the same technology NASA uses in its space suits, Ministry of Supply has developed a line of dress shirts — called “Apollo” — that adapt to your body to control perspiration, reduce odor, and make you feel like a million bucks.

Founded in 2010 by MIT grads, Gihan Amarasiriwardena, Aman Advani, Kit Hickey, and Kevin Rustagi, Ministry of Supply launched three limited lines of premium dress shirts back in October. Of course, they quickly found that, in order to continue iterating and sell at scale, they would need funding. They went to venture capitalists for backing, and while there was interest, most wanted to see more proof of concept. So, like many before them, they took to Kickstarter to raise money for their hi-tech dress shirts.

And the working professionals of the world responded. The team set out to raise $30K and within 5 days of launching the campaign, they met their goal. Today, that total is at $123,386, and the excitement continues. The Ministry of Supply founders tell us that, over the last week, they’ve been averaging $8K in donations per day.

But what is it about these dress shirts that has people so excited? The team’s line of dress shirts, called “Apollo” use a knit, synthetic (and proprietary) blend of fibers that use “Phase Change Materials” to control your body temperature by pulling heat away from your body and storing it in the shirt. Find yourself back in air conditioning and the shirt releases the stored heat to keep you feeling warm — and like a million bucks.

The shirts, like Under Armour, also wick sweat and moisture away from your body and, by using an anti-microbial coating, get rid of that pesky bacteria that makes you smell like a barnyard. Not only that, but having done strain analysis and designing the shirt with motion in mind, the Apollo line adapts to your movements and stays tucked in and wrinkle free all the live long day.

In essence, it’s a magic shirt.

Ministry of Supply also wants to keep jobs in the U.S., so the whole production process — packaging to fabric — is done at home. The funds the startup has raised from Kickstarter will be put towards managing these costs and paying for the production of the proprietary raw materials that go into the Apollo line.

Not every Kickstarter project is lucky enough to reach its initial goal — let alone exceed that by tens of thousands of dollars — so, to keep people engaged, the team has been updating its page with video and has been setting new milestones in addition to the ones put in place at the outset.

At $75K, the team pledged to switch from XS to XXL to standard collar-sleeve length sizing; at $125K, they pledged to add two new colors to the mix, and if they reach $200K, they’ll add patterns, either a thin stripe or a plaid, the founders tell us.

And, if they reach $291,494 and become the highest-funded fashion-related Kickstarter project, the founders tell us that they plan to launch their backers’ names into space on a “ridiculous weather balloon.” To that end, they assured us that they have two aerospace members of the team, one of whom works for SpaceX, who will help make that happen.

When I asked what contributed to their success thus far, the founders said that it’s been important to them to bring the same intense iterative process to the development of their dess shirts that one sees when designing products for consumer electronics or for the consumer Web. They’ve done dozens of iterations of Apollo, A/B testing, you name it.

As the founders themselves boast experience working for IDEO, Apple, Lululemon, and more, the focus on design and iteration isn’t surprising.

As to what’s next? The team is working on finishing a showroom in Boston, which should be completed in the next couple of months, as well as a dedicated eCommerce site. The founders have been inspired by the work of Warby Parker and Indochino, and plan to initially do most of their selling online — and through their showroom in Boston. Just like their shirts — it’s a blended approach.

But with so much interest both at home and abroad, it won’t be long before the team begins to work with retailers to distribute their dress shirts. Right now they’re planning on selling them for about $130 a pop, so their Kickstarter campaign provides a good opportunity to get in early before prices start rising.

For more, find Ministry of Supply at home here. Kickstarter video below:

“I believe CrunchBase will gain a lot of attention from the academia soon, which is always eager for high-quality data set,” writes Guang Xiang of Carnegie Mellon University, who found that he could predict Mergers and Acquisitions much better using the unique business variables available in CrunchBase than the traditional databases used by academics. Thanks, Xiang, flattery will get you everywhere.

“Traditionally, people only used numeric variables/features for M&A prediction, such as ROI, etc. CrunchBase and TechCrunch provided a much richer corpus for the task,” he writes. Specifically, CrunchBase gave him data on a volume of companies roughly 43 times the normal dataset (2300 vs. +100,000) and access to valuable variables, such as management structure, financing, and media coverage.

For instance, “Strong financial backing is generally considered critical to the success of a company,” but traditional datasets won’t have detailed information on the management, their experience, and the funding rounds.

Even better, the news coverage itself on Techcrunch could also be a predictor of merger or acquisition (because, well, duh, if a company’s doing well enough to make the news, there’s a good chance someone is also itching to buy it out).

But, just when we were starting to blush, Xiang brought out the criticism, “Despite its large magnitude, the CrunchBase corpus is sparse with many missing attributes,” because the community-created database tends to focus on more popular companies and features. That said, even with drawbacks, the researchers still achieved “good performance,” with CrunchBase — Which impressively enough has been managed all these years by superwoman Gene Teare.

M&A activity is just the tip of the iceberg, and there are all sorts of business questions that could be answered using the vast amounts of data provided by CrunchBase. So, statisticians and business analysts, go nuts. And, when you find something cool, let us know first (tips@techcrunch.com).

Late Thursday, an extraordinary thing happened: Adobe announced in a blog post that it would not provide Flash Player support for devices running Android 4.1, and that it would pull the plugin from the Google Play store on August 15. The retreat comes five years after the introduction of the iPhone, the device which thwarted Flash’s mobile ambitions, almost even before they began.

That Adobe would make such an announcement nearly five years to the day that the first iPhone was sold is kind of funny. I’d like to think that the Flash team has a sense of humor and was well aware of the timing when it posted the blog entry, but I could also see the entry as unintentionally ironic. Either way, it caps off a five-year battle to win the mobile landscape — a war which for Adobe ended in defeat.

At the time the iPhone was announced, lack of support for Adobe Flash seemed like a glaring omission, for a platform that was so hell-bent on being a portable computing device. But it wasn’t until the iPad came out, two-and-a-half years later, that the battle between Apple and Adobe, Flash vs. HTML5, and “open” vs. “proprietary” reached a fever pitch.

The iPad Effect

The iPad was announced in January at WWDC, but wasn’t available until March. And when it did finally become available, people began to notice that the lack of Flash, which then was the de facto standard for video playback and interactivity on the web, was missing. For the iPhone, not having Flash was a minor annoyance — after all, few other smartphones had very good Flash support at the time… But for the iPad, which in many cases was being used as a laptop replacement, at least for consumption of media, that was a big deal.

It wasn’t long before Google latched onto this and began promising an alternative to the “broken” Apple devices which wouldn’t give users access to the full web, as publishers intended them to view it. It’s tough to believe now, but at one point, Flash on mobile devices was actually considered a feature. There was Google’s Andy Rubin in April 2010, announcing that Android would have full Flash support in Froyo, the next version of the operating system to be released.

The Impact Of “Thoughts On Flash”

Battle lines were drawn, and just a few days later, Steve Jobs issued his epic missive “Thoughts on Flash,” which sought to explain, once and for all, why Apple didn’t — and wouldn’t ever — integrate Flash into its mobile and tablet devices. There were numerous reasons, and Jobs debunked the trope of Flash being “open,” as well as its ability to access the full web. He also brought up security, reliability, performance, and battery life issues that plagued devices using the plugin.

Most importantly, though, Apple didn’t want Adobe developers to create cross-platform apps which didn’t take advantage of the most latest features, development libraries and tools. Jobs wrote:

“Our motivation is simple – we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever seen. We want to continually enhance the platform so developers can create even more amazing, powerful, fun and useful applications. Everyone wins – we sell more devices because we have the best apps, developers reach a wider and wider audience and customer base, and users are continually delighted by the best and broadest selection of apps on any platform.”

It turns out Jobs was right. When Flash finally did ship on Android devices, it didn’t provide users with the full web, as was promised. Android users who wished to watch videos on Hulu through the Flash browser, for instance, were met with a message saying that the content wasn’t available on the mobile web. Same thing for users who tried to access most premium video sites on Google TV, which also supported Flash. More importantly, even when those videos or interactive Flash elements did appear on Android devices, they were often wonky or didn’t perform well, even on high-powered phones.

The end result was that users stopped seeing Flash on mobile devices as a good thing, and developers quit trying to support the framework on those devices.

The Flash Issue Isn’t Just About Mobile

But the impact of that battle goes beyond just how people view content on mobile phones. While pretty much all developers have settled on building native apps or coding for the mobile web when trying to reach those users, the battle has also had an impact on the way that developers think about multi platform web development. Even when not building for 4-inch screen, they’re increasingly turning to HTML5 to build new user experiences or render interactive applications, rather than writing to be seen in the Flash player.

Video might be the last industry where the Adobe Flash Player continues to have a hold on how content is displayed, but even then, a growing number of sites are moving to HTML5-based video players for delivery. YouTube and Vimeo are leading that charge, displaying their videos in a HTML5 player first, when available, and only falling back to Flash when the player isn’t supported. And many others are following that lead.

Frankly, Flash had never been a huge business for Adobe, even when development for interactive websites using the plugin were in high demand. As time goes on, it will become an even less important part, as its development tools — where Adobe makes the bulk of its revenue — focus on catering to a developer base that is increasingly interested in building HTML5-based web applications. As more can be accomplished in-browser without a plugin, that’s good news for users and developers alike.

For a tech company founder in San Francisco, I'm a terribly late adopter of new technology. My buddy in med school had a smart phone before I did. The iPhone was out for a year before I bought the 3G. The iPad? I'm embarrassed to admit, I got my first one a month ago.

I held out on the iPad because I didn't get it. It didn't have retina display, and comparing the screen after looking at the iPhone 4, it just seemed… pixelated. My friends who had the original version bought them as a novelty, which quickly seemed to wear off. I didn't know what I would do with one once I had one.

So, when I finally buckled and got the iPad 3, I came to the realization that the rest of the world had over 2 years ago: the iPad is an amazing consumption device. You don't need a keyboard, because if you're doing any work at all it will be to send iPhone length one-liner emails. Most of what you'll be doing on the iPad is playing games, watching videos and shopping.

There's a plethora of iPad games, and you can download almost any movie or tv show from iTunes, but the shopping experience leaves a lot to be desired. When I first turned on the iPad, I went through and downloaded all the popular apps I recognized. In the shopping / ecommerce category, this was Gilt and Fab.

Both of these companies have amazing iPad experiences. For a while, I was browsing them every day; not because I actually needed to buy anything, but because I enjoyed the virtual window shopping experience of browsing through amazing photos of cool looking products. As any retailer knows, getting people in the store is half the battle, and pretty soon I was back to buying things off Gilt (when I had previously sworn off of it after their fulfillment sent me the wrong thing on multiple orders).

Inspired to find some shopping apps that weren't flash sales sites, I simply couldn't find any decent ones. All the apps for department stores and brands seemed like screenshots of their websites. In most of them, I couldn't even purchase anything.

The ecommerce experience for iPad has been dominated by the deals sites because the deals sites are the only retailers heavily innovating on the technology side. That doesn't have to be the case. The thing that makes a Gilt or Fab iPad app stand out is that they are extremely polished and conducive to casual browsing, which leads to serendipitous discovery and purchase. Also, they have a great excuse to bring you back in their "store" with a push notification every day — they have a new batch of inventory for you to check out.

Therere a couple other reasons iPads are natural platforms for ecommerce. On iPads shoppers are in a different state of mind (they are relaxing instead of being distracted with work or IM), and are more likely to make impulse purchases. Also, because of the high switching cost of opening up new tabs in Safari or switching between apps (when compared with a browser), a well designed app can keep users engaged for much longer than they would be on the web.

I think the next generation of ecommerce apps for iPad will focus less on the discounting and more on creating an amazing curated browsing experience. Recently, I got a preview build of an app called Monogram by founder Leo Chen (who I'm now advising), which does exactly that: curates collections of clothing from around the web, bringing the user a personalized boutique that updates every day with new outfit suggestions. Like Gilt, the emphasis on the app is about browsing and discovery. When I'm using apps like Monogram and Gilt, I find myself spending more time and browsing/buying more products than I ever do on the web. Apparently I’m not the only one.

A couple things I think this next generation of apps will have to figure out:

1. Some way of differentiating their product inventory. Some will be vertically integrated companies that are bringing their own designs to market, like Everlane or Warby Parker. Others will focus on curation of existing products. I personally have been waiting for a store that curates the very best item I can own in every category, and tells me why it is the best.
2. A great offline experience. Few companies in the ecommerce space have focused on innovating on what happens after you checkout with your shopping cart, and they all happen to be owned by Amazon (Amazon, Quidsi, Zappos). I believe there's a lot of room to innovate in how products are packaged and delivered, and not many people are doing that at the moment.

Right now the iPad is like an entire country of 60 million consumers with only a few stores competing for their purchases. The denizens of iPadlandia are waiting to buy your awesome stuff. Why are you not letting them?

For the past few years, we’ve been told over and over again that NFC will eventually replace the common wallet. And yes, NFC is a great technology. Parts of Europe and China are using it for public transport transactions, and the sharing of content between devices is incredibly cool (just check out this commercial). And moreover, the ability to ditch all of your loyalty cards and combine them in one place (potentially) PassBook-style would be highly convenient. But where mobile payments are concerned, there is no problem to be solved.

Let’s just start with the small stuff. For one, the motion itself should be no different. It’s not like contactless payments via mobile is a more physically efficient form of living and transacting. You grab your credit card out of your wallet in your pocket, and swipe it through the reader (or in some cases tap it, just like the phone). In the case of NFC, you grab your phone out of your pocket, open Google Wallet (or whatever), and tap it to the reader. It’s the same exact motion.

But that doesn’t even matter when we start to consider the real obstacles for NFC mobile payments. There are two issues: the smaller is that, along with not being any faster or easier physically, no one is actually getting rid of their wallet. For one, everyone needs an ID and an ID isn’t safe in a pocket or loose in a bag. So, until I can use my phone as a form of identification at the airport, with the police, or to go to a Dr.’s appointment, my wallet will still remain. And it’s fair to assume that at least some people prefer to have a little cash on them, just in case.

I took a quick Twitter poll using PopTip (a newly launched TechStars company), and it turns out that the few respondents I had mostly feel comfortable without any cash. But, I also assume that the majority of my Twitter followers are generally tech-savvy early adopters, so I still stand behind the fact that you’ll continue carrying a wallet, or some other carrier of small, valuable pieces of paper like insurance cards, IDs, etc.

Moreover, all merchants would need to be set up for NFC transactions to allow the consumer to ditch their wallet, not just forward thinking giants like American Eagle, Macy’s and OfficeMax. It’s not like consumers will stop shopping at non-NFC merchants just because they aren’t set up — paying with a credit card is just as easy, so why even go through the trouble of setting up Google Wallet? Google Offers is a nice incentive, but it isn’t enough to sway all consumers, and it certainly isn’t attractive enough to woo merchants.

In essence, the only true value given to the consumer is the fact that it’s “cool.”

And then the problems intensify when we visit the merchant side of things. There is no benefit to merchants to implement these systems. Sure, Google and Isis can try to convince these SMBs that NFC is the future, but in reality it’s only an added cost to overhaul the system. Even at a minimal cost, the only value is a slight increase in efficiency pushing customers through POS. Companies could potentially market through their POS using NFC, as is the case with Google Offers, though I’m not sure this is welcome on either side. As Mirth so gracefully stated at Disrupt, merchants aren’t quite as enthusiastic about deals services as consumers are.

This comment thread on LoopInsight says it well:

There’s no tangible, proven way to get any return on investment for the implementation. So why do it?

Credit cards are ubiquitous. Credit cards are fast and easy. Almost all merchants have the ability to process payments via credit card. So why? Why are we solving a problem that doesn’t exist?

And even if there is some added benefit, most research predicts that the ubiquity of mobile payments via NFC is between five and ten years away. That’s more than enough time for another disruptive payments solution, likely something that doesn’t require a complete merchant systems overhaul, to supplant NFC before it ever hits its stride.

Again, NFC is an incredibly useful technology. In fact, the social media implications of NFC ubiquity in mobile devices (not at POS) are kind of mind-boggling. Just look at these TagStand figures, and pair them with Google’s recent announcement of 1 million NFC Android devices shipped every week, and then imagine Facebook and Twitter bigger than they’ve ever been before. That is the future of NFC.

Very soon, we’ll be using it in all kinds of interesting and productive ways. I just don’t think mobile payments is one of them.

“There’s an oligarchy in the media and that needs to be broken up” Newark, NJ mayor Cory Booker tells me. So he’s building #waywire, a news site that features original and syndicated video content, but that also lets viewers record and share their responses. “Traditional news sources aren’t in any way talking to millennials” Booker says, so #waywire is designed to deliver them content from their perspective. It’s now taking registrations for its upcoming private beta.

#waywire want to challenge old media outlets like CNN, but also create a news discovery alternative to Facebook and Twitter. It’s bold ambition convinced First Round Capital, Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Lady Gaga’s manager Troy Carter and other angels to fund #waywire’s $1.75 million seed round. And the startup has told TechCrunch that Oprah Winfrey and LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner are investors too.

Booker believes “There are practical solution to [creating] more jobs, lower crime, better education. If more people could find their voice and be part of the national dialogue, we could solve these problems.”

As the mayor New Jersey’s largest city, once named “The Most Dangerous City In The Nation” by Time, Booker is no stranger to big problems. Nor is he a stranger to innovative solutions, as the steward of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million donation to Newark’s public school system.

To make his idea for #waywire a reality, Booker has recruited some co-founders with deep digital experience. including TechCrunch’s own former CMO Sarah Ross whose also worked with Katalyst Media and Yahoo. Nathan Richardson, former president of Gilt City, CEO of ContextNext Media, and head of Dow Jones online will be #waywire’s CEO.

When it eventually launches, #waywire will pull in data from your social sites like Facebook and Twitter to help you build a personalized newswire of topics you care about. #waywire plans to start by creating 10,000 minutes of original video content hosted by all-millenial newscasters, which will be combined with clips syndicated from established outlets.

While the company has yet to release any screenshots, Richardson tells me these pieces of professional content will appear flanked by video responses from the #waywire community and your networks. You’ll be able to shoot video responses to offer up your own opinion, and then share the news and your rebuttals to social networks, making #waywire inherently viral. Plus, there’s a badge and reward system that lets aspiring anchors and editors become part of a trusted set of curators who determine which content is highlighted on #waywire.

Richardson gave me an example of the content you’ll see on #waywire. “Say I see this post from a traditional media source on something like healthcare, but don’t understand what it means to me. {On #waywire I’d get] a millennial point of view. ‘Oh, you just graduated and can be on your parent’s healthcare plan until you’re 26. You just scored.’” You can see a promo video explaining the need for the product here.

As a voracious but busy news reader, I worried that video which can’t be scanned like text might make #waywire difficult to quickly browse. Richardson assured me, though, that there will be written summaries beside official clips to help you deciding whether to watch.

And if you’re scratching your head about why the medium is so critical, you might be older than #waywire’s target audience, the YouTube generation who are growing up with video as a format for creation, not just consumption. “All the research shows millenials want more video content” the startup’s CEO tells me. The fact that the startups name is a hashtag should indicate just how serious it is about courting young digerati.

Still, turning #waywire popular enough to change the world will be no easy task. Millenials are already saturated with stimulation. Facebook and Twitter have built brilliant mouse traps for attention, and their text and photo-focused inputs erect smaller barriers to participation than webcams and video. #waywire’s content is inherently sharable, though, so if it reaches critical mass as a news discovery tool, links to it could be pumped out across the social web.

And thankfully, Mayor Cory Booker is relentlessly inspirational. He tells me “Right now, we don’t have enough voices in the national dialogue, and it’s causing slowness in the pace of change. I want people to raise their voice, find something they’re passionate about. With that spirit we’ll see a country that moves further and faster down the pathway of change.”

Sign up for early access to #waywire’s private beta

If you’re a startup aficionado, you may be getting tired of the same old launch pages. You know, the ones with a big, splashy image, a message about how something awesome is coming soon, and a box where you can enter your email address. If that’s the case, then you’ll probably get a kick out of the sign-up process at HackerRank.

The team behind the site plans to start sending out beta invites next week for “a fun social platform for hackers to solve interesting puzzles, build quick hacks, code game bots and collaborate to solve real-world challenges.” In the meantime, it’s doing something a little different with the launch page — the page features an interactive terminal, where, yes, you enter your name and email address, but then you’re invited to participate in a sample challenge, facing off with the computer in a candy-grabbing game.

There’s no coding required, just a taste for logical puzzles — and clearly some users have that taste, since the leaderboard shows players who have won the game more than 1,000 times. (I got a bit hooked this morning, but sadly I’ve only won twice.)

HackerRank comes from the same Y Combinator-backed company that’s behind InterviewStreet, which holds CodeSprints for programmers can solve coding challenges and earn the attention of potential employers. Co-founder Vivek Ravisankar says he realized that there was an opportunity to “build something bigger” here, because programmers weren’t coming to the site just to get a job. They were having fun too, as indicated by the fact that they were spending an average of two hours on the site. So the team decided to build something more fun and social, where programmers solve challenges, collaborate, and see how they rank.

Ravisankar emphasizes that HackerRank is going to be very different from InterviewStreet: “It’s not going to be a jobs site.” The only way companies are supposed to get involved is by providing data sets and problems. (Y Combinator backed another hacker ranking startup called Coderwall, but Coderwall’s more about aggregating accomplishments from other sites, not providing the challenges itself, and its planned business model will be related to recruiting.)

Oh, and if TechCrunch readers want to be among of the first to join, you can send an email to ilovetc@hackerrank.com with your biggest hack, and the 50 most interesting ones will get access next week.

When we heard about Instagram (and other sites) going down when Amazon Web Services’ North Virginia hub was hit by a storm — not the first time AWS has gone down (April 2011 was another notable outage) we couldn’t help but wonder: could  it have been avoided?

Mike Krieger, one of the founders of Instagram, once presented a great slideshow describing how Instagram was able to scale up so well. “The cleanest solution with the fewest moving parts as possible,” has been one of the guiding principles for the photo-sharing app, bought by Facebook in a billion-dollar deal earlier this year. Could that too-simple architecture have played a role here?

We’ve reached out to Twitterverse and beyond to get some thoughts on that.

Disclaimer: Without knowing the exact ins and outs of Instagram’s architecture, it’s hard to say why Instagram and other services, like TechCrunch’s database CrunchBase.com, are still down while other sites that had been affected, like Pinterest, Netflix and Heroku, appear to have started working again (although some say they’re still having problems).

Dominik Tobschall, the co-founder and CEO of Munster, Germany cloud-based contacts startup Fruux, notes that there is a way to run services so that they are not hinging on the health of one physical data center, but that the bigger the service is, the harder that can be:

“Since everything that can go wrong always will go wrong with technology, it’s important to deploy applications in a way where you always have in mind ‘if power or connectivity or anything else fails in an availability zone, all servers in that zone might power down/be disconnected’ and ‘if a comet hits the datacenter, there is a huge earthquake or whatever, all servers in that region might power down/get disconnected.’

“The only way to protect an application from downtimes is to run machines in multiple availability zones; additionally run machines in different regions; have a good automatic (or quick manual) failover methodology in place. But it’s incredibly hard and the bigger a service is the harder it gets.”

Reader Nicholas James made a similar point. In his view, there is an inverse variation between high latency (distributing the operation of your cloud service across multiple regions means if one goes down you have other places where it will work) and the ease of replicating a database (it gets harder the more you have).

With a service like Instagram, reliant on a worldwide network of users uploading thousands of images (of food and more) everday, it may be that this kind of replication is impossible.

Aaron Levie, CEO of cloud services company Box, notes that the simplicity of Amazon’s infrastructure-as-a-service model is compelling but also takes a lot of control out of a company’s hands:

“At the end of the day, the cloud’s availability will come down to its physical infrastructure being available — it looks like Amazon’s data center in Virginia experienced a power failure, which knocked out a number of its systems there. For the applications built on top of Amazon, sometimes negative consequences from these events can cascade through your infrastructure (e.g. when one service goes down, it then overloads another service that was otherwise fine), and in other cases some apps just don’t have resilience for these events built into their software.

“AWS doesn’t necessarily promise to handle these situations gracefully for you; because it’s a provider of infrastructure as a service, you get pretty low-level access to the technology (vs. making it super abstracted). That comes with huge benefits, but equally has consequences if the infrastructure disappears. That said, AWS has a pretty great track-record for uptime, but of course given their popularity, when they hit a snag the entire internet notices.  At Box, we don’t use AWS for any primary infrastructure, and we run out of a number of our own datacenters to ensure fault tolerance in the event of a physical system experiencing issues, so that helps.”

“That’s the nature of relying on someone else for your website storage or application hosting. If your host goes down, so do you. Although AWS doesn’t go down too often, it might be prudent to have a backup that’s not based on AWS.

“The main selling point for AWS is that it’s cheap. Wicked cheap. It allows the little guy to compete with the big boys. Even a simple colocated server will cost upwards of $300 USD/month for a good one. AWS lets you have your data in more places at once a la carte, so you don’t have to pay for what your’e not using. It allows you to scale your app/website without worrying about infrastructure.”

Vineet Thanedar, another one of our IT heroes, tells me that CrunchBase’s hosting is managed by EngineYard (which runs on AWS). “While AWS is back up, Engine Yard is still bringing up all their instances across clients and fixing issues. Engine Yard has thousands of customers.”

Barry Nolan, the CEO and co-founder of in-app messaging specialist Converser, pointed me to a great note from the Twilio engineering blog that explains why Twilio, which also runs using AWS, was not affected during a previous outage.

It’s a technical post but is full of examples of how you can architecture a service so that downtime in one place doesn’t bring the whole thing to a crashing halt.

So that people can get on with eating their meals and drinking their lattes.

[Image: Aussiegall, Flickr]

Oh yes, the social media food humor is rolling in — eat it up, people. According to Twitter’s real-time search, Instagram being down, as a result of an Amazon Web Services storm-related incident, is unleashing a cornucopia of Instagram-related food jokes, at a rate of about one every couple of seconds.

They’re a little cheesy (sorry!) but do underscore just how much the photo-sharing app is used (or, least how much it’s used by the kind of folks who also take to Twitter when they have an issue with the world). And how much it’s become a part of life’s everyday small events, perhaps more than any other social media app.

According to Twitter, the most-tweeted Instagram-down-food joke so far comes from Jason de Plater (and I love that his name even has a food pun in it! how cool is that?), with currently over 5,000 tweets.

#instagram is down due to a thunderstorm wiping out their servers in Virginia. You can still drink your coffee and eat. It tastes the same.

—
Jason de Plater (@jdeplater) June 30, 2012

It’s a nice example of how something can go viral on Twitter: de Plater currently has less than 1,000 followers, compared to over 13,000 for a guy who has penned another popular Instagram-food-down tweet, Nicholas Austin Maroney, aka @YourFavWhiteMan, currently at nearly 3,000 tweets.

My Instagram is down? What am I supposed to with my food, eat it?

—
Nicholas. (@YourFavWhiteMan) June 30, 2012

Yes, there are thousands more like it! Including a nice meta-jibe from our resident hilarious comedienne, Alexia.

Twitter's down. Where am I going to joke about not being able to Instagram my food?

—
Alexia Tsotsis (@alexia) June 30, 2012

Others are trying to advance the joke a bit:

Gotta love a VC who’s thinking like a chess player, a couple of steps ahead of the crowd.

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — watched in amazement and not a little fear as Mike Arrington baited @Scobleizer from the Friendfeed chatroom. What started as a Mr. Greenjeans-like pulling of various Google I/O tablets and weird music balls from out of his pants suddenly went south in a hurry when @jtaschek noticed Arrington in the chat.

Normally we don’t call this out, but Robert’s Rant starts at somewhere around the 36 minute mark. Arrington wanted us to make him a clip and a ringtone out of this, but it’s late and I barely have enough energy to write this. Maybe tomorrow. Feel free to download the file on iTunes and cut Mike a version. Enjoy at your peril: Not safe for work or anything else for that matter.

@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kteare, @jtaschek, @kevinmarks

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor