“Center For Digital Archaeology,” said the banner above one of the startups at the Funders and Founders Life 3.0 demo show, and for a moment I got excited, thinking of Vernor Vinge‘s software archaeologists. It wasn’t quite that. Instead, Codifi was a “solution for turning cultural heritage datasets and rich media into web- and mobile-ready interactive experiences.”

Which is cool, and worthwhile, but more a niche market than a world-shaker. As were a lot of the startups there. TennisRound: “find a tennis partner.” DreamBoard: an app for dream tracking and analysis. Plus the usual panoply of social marketplaces, socialsourced services, gamified giving, “Instagram for Products,” etc etc yadda yadda.

I apologize for being jaded. Michael Church’s scathing essay “Don’t waste your time in crappy startup jobs“–go read it–was still ringing in my ears, and I couldn’t help but wonder how many of these startups were founded more for the sake of founding a startup than because the founders had an idea that wouldn’t let them go.

But then I thought: I bet Marc “Software Is Eating The World” Andreessen would interpret all this very differently. And who am I to gainsay him?

I suspect he would argue that software is spreading, metastasizing, from its ‘usual’ domains, and beginning to infect, devour, and remake every aspect–and every niche–of human life. Tennis, dreams, laundry, you name it. That’s why he just invested $100 million in Github; because every human being and organization will be an indirect Github user before long, whether they know it or not. In the short term, Church may be right, most startups are dead ends–but in the long run, Andreessen has him beat cold.

And there were some genuinely interesting startups at Life 3.0. My favorite was MapsWithMe, not least because I’ve implemented (relatively crude) offline mapping in Android/iOS apps myself, so I have some idea of the size of the technical difficulties they’ve surmounted. Now you too can have a full-scale offline OpenStreetMap of the entire world on your phone or tablet, if you’re willing to sacrifice 8Gb of storage. What they offer is significantly better than Google Maps offline, no mean feat for a tiny company from Belarus–and they’re planning to offer an API and SDK to other developers soon.

I also really liked Coaster, “Uber for drinks”, which aims to save you time previously wasted waiting at the bar, and getArtup, which is so brilliantly simple – a subscription service to rent art from contemporary local artists, for businesses and wealthy individuals – that I can’t believe no one else has already cornered the market.

But the company that intrigued me the most was quite different. It had the terrible name SmogFarm. It was in a field–social-media sentiment measurement–that already seems crowded. But it seemed on first acquaintance to be more algorithmic, testable, and scientific than its competitors. More to the point, it was trying to do something new, something that has only recently been made even remotely possible; in this case, measuring the overall emotional state of the entire city of San Francisco. Who’s the market? I don’t know. What can you do with it? I’m not sure. Does it even really work? Good question. But it was a reassuring reminder that software isn’t just devouring the world we already know. From time to time, it may also open up new worlds to discover.

Image credit: Spring Dew, Flickr.

Andreessen Horowitz announced a whopping $100 million investment in GitHub this week. You can read commentary and speculation all over the web about what GitHub will do with the money, whether this was a good investment for Andreessen Horowitz and whether taking such a large investment is a good thing for GitHub.

But what the heck is GitHub and why are developers so excited about it? You may have heard that GitHub is a code sharing and publishing service, or that it’s a social networking site for programmers. Both statements are true, but neither explain exactly why GitHub is special.

At the heart of GitHub is Git, an open source project started by Linux creator Linus Torvalds. Matthew McCullough, a trainer at GitHub, explains that Git, like other version control systems, manages and stores revisions of projects. Although it’s mostly used for code, McCullough says Git could be used to manage any other type of file, such as Word documents or Final Cut projects. Think of it as a filing system for every draft of a document.

Some of Git’s predecessors, such as CVS and Subversion, have a central “repository” of all the files associated with a project. McCullough explains that when a developer makes changes, those changes are made directly to the central repository. With distributed version control systems like Git, if you want to make a change to a project you copy the whole repository to your own system. You make your changes on your local copy, then you “check in” the changes to the central server. McCullough says this encourages the sharing of more granular changes since you don’t have to connect to the server every time you make a change.

GitHub is a Git repository hosting service, but it adds many of its own features. While Git is a command line tool, GitHub provides a Web-based graphical interface. It also provides access control and several collaboration features, such as a wikis and basic task management tools for every project.

The flagship functionality of GitHub is “forking” – copying a repository from one user’s account to another. This enables you to take a project that you don’t have write access to and modify it under your own account. If you make changes you’d like to share, you can send a notification called a “pull request” to the original owner. That user can then, with a click of a button, merge the changes found in your repo with the original repo.

These three features – fork, pull request and merge – are what make GitHub so powerful. Gregg Pollack of Code School (which just launched a class called TryGit) explains that before GitHub, if you wanted to contribute to an open source project you had to manually download the project’s source code, make your changes locally, create a list of changes called a “patch” and then e-mail the patch to the project’s maintainer. The maintainer would then have to evaluate this patch, possibly sent by a total stranger, and decide whether to merge the changes.

This is where the network effect starts to play a role in GitHub, Pollack explains. When you submit a pull request, the project’s maintainer can see your profile, which includes all of your contributions on GitHub. If your patch is accepted, you get credit on the original site, and it shows up in your profile. It’s like a resume that helps the maintainer determine your reputation. The more people and projects on GitHub, the better idea picture a project maintainer can get of potential contributors. Patches can also be publicly discussed.

Even for maintainers who don’t end up using the GitHub interface, GitHub can make contribution management easier. “I end up just downloading the patch anyway, or merging from the command line instead of from the merge button,” says Isaac Schlueter, the maintainer of the open source development platform Node.js. “But GitHub provides a centralized place where people can discuss the patch.”

Lowering the barrier to entry democratizes open source development, and helps young projects grow. “Node.js wouldn’t be what it is today without GitHub,” Schlueter says.

Besides its public facing open source repositories, GitHub also sells private repositories and on-premise instances of its software for enterprises. These solutions obviously can’t take full advantage of GitHub’s network effect, but they can take advantage of the collaboration features. That’s how GitHub makes money, but it’s not alone in this market.

Atlassian acquired a competitor called BitBucket in 2010. And earlier this year Atlassian launched Stash, a product that enables you to host private, on-premise Git repositories with BitBucket/GitHub-style collaboration features. The company also sells developer collaboration tools like the bug tracker Jira and the wiki Confluence. Competition from Atlassian, which took $60 million in funding from Accel Partners in 2010, could help explain why GitHub took this round of funding, and hint at some possible future directions for the company. For example, Schlueter says GitHub’s issue tracking feature could eventually compete with JIRA for some projects.

The money may be in private and on-premise hosting, but the love is in the public repositories. Perhaps most importantly, GitHub has become the Library of Alexandria for code examples. Since Git encourages granular recording of changes, programmers, be they absolute beginners or experts, can trace the steps of some of the greatest developers in the world and find out how they solved thorny problems. But if GitHub were ever to meet the same fate as the Library of Alexandria, it could be reconstructed from all those local forks distributed on so many developers laptops all over the world. Regardless of how this investment works out, that’s a hell of a legacy for the GitHub team to leave behind.

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Emre Sokullu, founder and chief architect of GROU.PS

There’s been a lot of talk on the concept of minimum viable product lately, but not much has been written on how to actually implement one. Having gone through the process of developing one of the earliest social software mashups (GROU.PS) in PHP six years ago, and LoveBucks, a node.js Javascript app that is the Facebook "Like" Button for online content monetization (both alone), I want to describe to you a little bit what has really changed in web application development in recent years and the beauty of minimum viable product.

1. Build it on Facebook Platform

Don’t build your membership stack from scratch, let Facebook Connect handle it. Not only will that provide a better and more straightforward experience for your users, but it will also save you a ton of time and messy product decisions. You no longer have to mess with sessions, logout scenarios, collecting information about users, and probably most importantly lost passwords and spam accounts. Unless your product  is focused on the Chinese market, I don’t see any reason for not using Facebook Connect (1/3rd of the world, including China, uses it obsessively every day). Those who don’t use Facebook would probably not be your target audience anyway; after all, non-Facebook users are late adopters and conservative in their selection of new web apps. And don’t forget, Facebook Connect now lets you capture the emails of people using your service.

2. Use bootstrap.js

If your product starts life as a web app, chances are you may not be able to create a mobile experience from day one. But if you were to build it on bootstrap.js, the user experience on both mobile and desktop would be so linear and seamless that you could get along well enough by just having your users bookmark your site on their mobile devices so that they can use it like a mobile app. Hence, I call bootstrap.js a good way to show some steam on mobile without really investing in it. It also saves you a ton of work in CSS through its pattern templates.

3. Use Cloud, Scale Out

Without a doubt, cloud is easy and cheap. git + heroku + a mongo/riak host would save you a ton of time and money because you pay only for what you use. Scaling becomes much, much, much easier. I remember going through the phases of replicating our mysql stack at GROU.PS, putting a memcache layer in front of it and eventually sharding it – which was the most cumbersome part of all. It was hard. Bringing an expert on board costs a lot too.
Note that as you scale out though, the benefits of cloud decrease and it becomes an expensive solution. It’s important for you to know when to stop scaling through cloud, buy your own hardware for bare traffic and keep the cloud in place for excess traffic only (like Zynga does). To put this in perspective, think about how much you’d pay if you were an Amazon S3 client and you had to push about 1 petabyte a month. The answer is $50K (been there, done that). That’s probably a just portion of what instagram is paying right now to Amazon. It also justifies Adam D’Angelo’s explanation on their use of new funding at Quora.
At LoveBucks, we use heroku. Not only is it easy, cheap and fast to get started, it’s also acceptably reliable for a consumer web project, being a part of Salesforce and built on top of Amazon S3.

4. Beauty of jQuery

Bootstrap.js depends on jQuery. But that’s not the only reason why you’d want to use jQuery. If you’re old enough, you should remember having to choose from prototype, jquery, moo and a bunch of other libraries in the early days of web 2.0 . Well, now the competition is over and the winner is jQuery. jQuery is cross-browser, easy, beautiful, extensible and has a huge community. "DHTML" tricks are now so easy, compared to early days of web 2.0

5. Focus on core functionalities

Perhaps the biggest mistake I’ve made at GROU.PS at its initial phase was to add way too many features onto it. Sure, it made a lot of headlines in the web 2.0 community, but frankly thinking back, what I should have focused on was collaborative blogging (with ability to fetch RSS from external blogs as well as a built-in blog engine), plus email list sync’d blogging. These two were both large opportunities and GROU.PS would still be a unique value proposition with just these two. Instead, I added links (which was delicious, reddit) wiki and so on. The result? An unstable product which was trying to do too much and poor user experiences due to an overwhelming set of functionalities. (Of course this was back in the day, I can assure you now that GROU.PS is a very stable platform). It always makes sense to start simple. Don’t forget both Dropbox and Google started out as very simple products and they haven’t changed a bit in their UI (note: consistency) for a very long time.

At LoveBucks, we had the option to give people a lot of options with the amount and distributions of their donations. But we didn’t. We focused on the distribution of rewarded cash from consumers to publishers instead.
Another thing you may try for features that you believe might attract a lot of attention, is to create non-functional links, and when someone clicks them, a page with a counter is shown where it says "the feature is currently under development and check back soon". This way, you can see how many pageviews the feature gets, hence its potential popularity. From there, you can decide on whether to invest in it or not.

6. SaaS is your best friend

Best thing with SaaS is that there is no upfront commitment and you don’t have to deal with maintenance or anything like that. It saves you valuable resources. Some of the services that you’d definitely want to use are:

• Chargify, Spreedly, Recurly, CheddarGetter for billing: Believe me, billing is not easy and you want one of these guys to handle cancellations, trials, upgrades and downgrades. Otherwise, it’s too much math for a resource-hungry new app. When the time comes, you can always migrate to authorize.net (as long as you use it as the backend) for everything, because these guys are using authorize.net‘s APIs too. The benefit; you don’t have to create payment pages, implement logics to evaluate coupons and stuff. At GROU.PS, we used our own payment pages, and frankly, maintaining them is messy, albeit the flexibility has its own advantages such as further optimization, but using hosted pages of Chargify (which we used at LoveBucks) have literally saved us weeks in development.
• LiveChat, olark, Zopim, LivePerson, SnapEngage: Again, customer support chat is not something you want to develop or maintain on your own, even if your app itself has support for chat. The reason? Because customer support chat is different by nature (one to many, operators, canned responses, logging), plus you don’t want to mix things up. Best example is GROU.PS. At GROU.PS, we provide our groups with a nice chat service, and we’re masters of ejabberd, yet we’ve decided to go with LiveChat because otherwise it’s just a big headache.
• Wufoo, Google Apps: There will be a lot of times when you’ll need to collect information from your users, have them upload files, and even sometimes have them pay you. In those cases, it makes a lot of sense to use Wufoo. At GROU.PS, when we were facing the challenge of whether creating a new form for our Valet services on our own or just outsourcing to Wufoo, we chose Wufoo, because it’s an investment where we have no idea about its return, therefore it’s much safer to do it with wufoo (for as low as 20 bucks a month). Plus, the UI that wufoo provides is so beautiful, in fact, there’s no sacrifice at all in terms of user experience; hence Wufoo might be your answer for any type of form related work.
• Kissmetrics, mixpanel: At GROU.PS, I remember investing months in enriching our analytics infrastructure, installing Thrift and Scribe for eventually consistent logging and building a Hadoop base to analyze all that data we collect. Well there’s a much easier way now. Just use kissmetrics or mixpanel and with just a line of code on HTML or your server side code, you’re able to analyze anything that’s going on your web site. Andthey enable anyone on your team (who knows how to add a code snippet) to research what they’re seeking instantly. Again, thanks to beauty of cloud.
• ZenDesk, desk.com: Customer support help is another thing you definitely need from day one no matter what your service is about (especially in day one, because your first users are the most valuable ones, you definitely want to hear their feedback) so you definitely need a platform to take care of that. My recommendation, don’t do it over email, because you want your knowledge base form from day one, your future customer support team see the style you answer questions in your early days, hence you’re better off paying a couple of bucks to ZenDesk or desk.com for this service.
• GoodData, RJ Metrics: Good product decisions require data. And investors want it too. So don’t neglect data collection and analysis. The best part of GoodData is that it’s integrated with a bunch of services I mention here as well as Google Analytics, hence it can bring you great charts like "average life time value of your subscriptions" or "customer support average response time" in a snap.

7. Use Scribd to host paperwork

This is perhaps a minor point, but for legal boilerplate that’s sent to you from your lawyer or fetched from somewhere, don’t lose time converting into a page on your web site. Just use Scribd, grab a widget with your doc embedded, and put it somewhere on your site. Again, this is a minor point but thinking along these lines gives you a good idea of what you should outsource and what you should focus your efforts on building.

8. A video is worth 1,000,000,000 words

Don’t use pages, tour sites, or heavy javascript demos to explain your product. Craft your message carefully and then create a video, that’s it. If you’re on budget, you can do it on your own but I strongly recommend you to work with a professional on this one. Some of the services are Grumo Media, Epipheo Studios, and wdysd, and the budget changes from $3,000 to $40,000. (for a full list of video production companies, see Quora)

9. Short on time and money? Drop Internet Explorer

OK this was already covered on Techcrunch, so I won’t go into too much details here. But if you feel that you’re short on cash and time, don’t waste your time with Internet Explorer, the most incompatible browser of all times. Don’t forget now Chrome has more traffic than any other browser + users of Internet Explorer are usually not early adopters, hence it’s very unlikely they’ll stick with your service anyways. You may gently warn them to switch to Chrome or Firefox to continue to your web site.

10. Spread it over time

Some features are not required from day one. Change plans? Cancel subscriptions? Add billing info? Those are things people would need as they use your service. So to get to your launch fast, don’t waste time building these, just link them to mailto:you@gmail.com and take care of those handful of outliers manually. As you see traction, you can build them.

Results:

The first version of GROU.PS took 1.5 months to develop and you can see the result in the image above (please evaluate it by the standards of the day).

As for LoveBucks, it was created in 2 weeks. Its database is already more than 1GB large, we grew to serving from 0 to more than 45,000 people daily with no hiccup. We were able to do this through cloud and the minimum viable product best practices I specified above.

A note on node.js

One thing you want to avoid; don’t always go for the hip, new technologies, especially for your infrastructure. At Lovebucks, I’ve used node.js for the backend due to its event-driven non-blocking nature (which is a must for a button product that aims to take over blogs, wikis and social networks) and the beauty of using the same language for both backend and frontend. But it turns out it’s too unstable – the multicore processor support was just added recently, API breaks frequently and worst of all libraries are even more unstable. Also consider the language that people around you (where you’ll develop your product in the next few years) know, because eventually you’ll need to hire. For GROU.PS, it was hard to scale the team for a while, because developers in Turkey (where most of our development is done) are usually only familiar with Microsoft technologies and Java, and not PHP, the language GROU.PS was developed in.

"Don't let him climb a wall. We haven't finalized his life insurance plan."

That was one of the first directions I was given at Digg when I started in early 2008. "Him" was Kevin Rose, the founder of the widely popular social news site, and I was on my third day. It was widely known that Kevin was an avid rock climber, though he had recently been extending this skill to common household surfaces…walls, doorframes, stairways. We were heading together to Miami, for his keynote at Future of Web Apps, and he had offhandedly mentioned that he was going to scale the 3-story inner wall of the conference hall.

He climbed the wall.

That's how it was at Digg. And it was fantastic. This intentional disobedience, the bucking of the rules, the attitude of disregarding the norms, was the cornerstone of how we approached every technology challenge set before us. It permeated every department…engineering, sales, marketing, community. At the time, we were revolutionary in the space, arguably one of the first to add a social, communal element to something very traditional: news. We provided a very simple platform to share opinions – good (Digg) or bad (bury) – in many ways, giving a voice to the masses.

And voice we had…our company culture mimicked the outspoken, vocal nature of the 39M monthly users we were happily serving. I've worked at companies whose culture is often heralded in the press as being unique – Google and Facebook, included – and I can resolutely say that the experiences that we had working at Digg were far and away more fun and rewarding and absolutely, mind-blowingly, outstandingly ridiculous than any Game Day or Hackathon that any NASDAQ-listed tech company can hold.

Creating a culture is hard…it's not something you can artificially build by putting posters up on the wall or having weekly in-office happy hours. Trust me, I've tried (*cough* AOL West Coast *cough*) and failed. The Nerf wars, the Digg Meetups (including one where MC Hammer held a dance-off and the infamous Mark Trammell naturally won), and the booze-laden scavenger hunts made Digg fun. But the people were why we woke up every morning, why we tackled impossible problems with smile on our faces, and often with a beer in our hand.

The Digg team was passionate about being there, often because we were very active users on the platform prior to being hired. We cared about this immensely. One former engineer, Steve French, recounts: "I remember having multi-hour conversations over minor implementation details, just to make sure we were doing the right thing. I think this has a lot to do with why people were so close there outside of work. That professional trust translated into an expectation that everyone was as personally awesome as they were professionally." Basically, we hired people we wanted to inspire us during the workday and be hungover with the next morning.

We hired not just our peers, but spent time recruiting people we looked up to professionally. We hired managers we wanted to have the opportunity to work with, smart people who we gave the freedom to solve difficult problems. And they did. During the 2+ years that I was at Digg, the site grew from 21 million to nearly 40 million Active Users, and revenues steadily increased.

We launched programs like Digg Dialogg, taking the core 'voting' functionality of Digg and tweaking it to create an often-mimicked (see: Reddit's Ask Me Anything or Facebook Live) platform that extended a technical brand into a consumer one. We threw events all over the world that routinely had people lining up 24-hours in advance to attend, sometimes driving 10-12 hours to wait overnight outside in the rain. People didn't come for the food nor the drink (as we didn't provide either for free); they came for the experience. They came so that they could, for a few short hours, feel a part of this company, this community that was breaking boundaries, that was teaching the tech world that the collective is more than the individual, that each opinion and each user, when combined, has an impact.

It was the Digg Effect, crashing websites, eliciting lawsuits and setting the stage for the next evolution of online communication.

I left Digg over two years ago. Yesterday's news that Betaworks purchased the assets of Digg didn't sadden me – I've had a few years to process my disappointment in what has happened to the best company I've ever worked at.

Instead, I'm eager to see how the News.me team at Betaworks evolves what was once an extremely strong brand and, in my opinion, has the ability to be again, under their entrepreneurship and guidance. The Digg Crew – as we'd often call ourselves on the blog posts – aren't strangers…we regularly hold our own meetups, stay active on email threads and Facebook Groups with each other, and in a lot of cases, have sought out opportunities to work together again. More remarkable than anything, though, is the lasting effect of this unparalleled experience; over 40% of the 50 original members have gone on to be a founder or co-founder of a tech company.

As for me, I've since moved to New York City. After starting my own consulting company and helping lead Facebook's Consumer Marketing Team, I now head up Marketing & Communications at Sailthru, a tech start-up. And I did so intentionally, seeking out an opportunity at an innovative, thriving company, one that would provide me much of what I learned and experienced at Digg. Part of my role is to help create and define the culture here, and I look to Digg as the model for this.

I spent much of today talking to my former coworkers, sharing stories, reminding each other about the legendary anecdotes, reconnecting and laughing and reminiscing about the time we all spent there. The messages keep pouring in. And despite what the press has written about the acquisition being a disappointment, I think the sentiments of Digg's former employees clearly show otherwise. To note:

"I'll never have such a good working experience in my life."

"I continue to be amazed by the hard work and the willingness of every member to help, no matter what day of the week or time of the day."

"It's the best job I ever had, biggest ideas, smartest people."

"I was met with excitement and support [about suggested changes...everyone] was willing to let me shake things up."

"Digg helped jumpstart careers and create more jobs."

Digg may no longer exist as it once did, but I think it's pretty evident that the Digg Effect lives on.

———————————-

Editor’s note: Contributor Aubrey Sabala served as Digg's Marketing Manager from 2008-2010. Currently the Vice President of Marketing at Sailthru, a behavioral communications company headquartered in New York City, she misses her colleagues at Digg daily but is endlessly grateful for the experiences she had there. Her cat's name is Mittens.

Image via: Mathieu Thouvenin

This summer’s AngelHack was a little more ambitious than your average hackathon. Instead of holding one event in one location over one weekend, it held hackathons in four different cities (Seattle, Silicon Valley, Boston, and New York), then allowed the winning teams to refine their products for three weeks before coming to Palo Alto and competing in the final event last night.

I was one of the judges, along with Right Side Capital’s David Lambert, AngelPad’s Thomas Korte, Istanta Capital’s Matt Oguz, Google Ventures’ Wesley Chan, and Facebook’s Austen Haugen. (Oh, and TechCrunch’s Josh Constine was the event “host”, which meant that he introduced each presenter and cracked jokes while they took the stage.) The judging felt a little odd, because the presentations and products were much more polished than what I’ve seen at other hackathons. At the same time, they weren’t full-fledged companies yet, either.

However, some of the 25ish teams (it was hard to keep track, because the list kept changing) were clearly on the cusp of becoming real companies, especially the three winners. And to help get them started, two of the teams received a $25,000 check from either Instanta or Right Side.

Here are the winners:

Appetas: Most restaurant websites suck, especially on mobile — for that reason, I’d rather go to a restaurant’s Yelp page than its own site. That’s not great for the restaurant, though, because they don’t get to control what kind of content (like negative reviews) visitors see. During its demo, the Appetas team created a simple-but-attractive website in about a minute, with contact info, menus, and other information pulled in through data sources like SinglePlatform.

GiveGo: You may have participated in walkathons or runs for charity but GiveGo makes it possible to hold your own micro-fundraisers — you don’t need to find a big event, and charities don’t need to deal with the organizational costs of putting that event together. Instead, you pick a charity of your choice and ask your friends to support you, then the GiveGo app will track every mile you walk, run, or bike, and at the end of the month it will collect the donations you’ve earned.

ShareBrowse: A bookmarklet that lets you share what’s in your browser with another user, and converse via video chat. Think WebEx, but built for consumers (for example if you need to explain something Internet-related to a relative) and without any of the cost or technical hassles. ShareBrowse was created by 15-year-old Raphie Palefsky-Smith. Because of his age, the judges gave him a trophy instead of a check, but we all pledged to help him out, whether he wants an internship, funding, or whatever.

It looks like a titanic legal struggle has been avoided. Mobile payments startup mPowa has responded to a cease-and-desist letter from Square by taking down a photo on its home page that Square said was swiped from its site.

You can read more the dispute in yesterday’s post, but basically, Square’s lawyers said it was “clear and obvious” that mPowa had copied Square’s image. mPowa CEO Don Wagner, on the other hand, told us that Square was just trying to “divert” the company’s focus. At the time, he wouldn’t say how mPowa would respond, but we heard that the company was probably just going to take the photo down.

And yes, that’s what mPowa has done, replacing one generic hand sliding a credit card through a payment device with another generic hand sliding a credit card through a payment device. (You can see the new image at the top of this post.) In its press release, the company doesn’t admit to any wrongdoing, making sure to describe Square’s complaints as “alleged”, and it has a little fun with the fact that this whole argument is about a photo of a hand. (To be fair to Square, the hand photos look awfully similar, as you can see below.) The press release is titled, “mPowa extends ‘hand of peace’ to Square,” and it includes this paragraph:

“Rather than resorting to a legal tussle over the issue, mPowa decided to extend a fresh hand in peace, replacing the allegedly offending hand with another. The company hopes this generous gesture will pour oil on the troubled cross-Atlantic waters, and that it can now go back to doing what it does best, delivering mobile payments to its customers.”

I’ve emailed Square for comment and will update if I hear back.

Nodejitsu announced a long awaited public beta for its Node.js platform cloud service this week. The service can be run from private or public clouds, including Amazon Web Services, Joyent and Rackspace. The company also offers suites of tools for deploying, monitoring and managing Node.js applications in cloud environments.

Nodejitsu launched its first private beta, which co-founder and CEO Charlie Robbins calls “more of an alpha,” way back in November 2010. It was one of the first platform-as-a-service (PaaS) providers to focus on Node.js, a development platform that enables programs to run JavaScript on the server. Since then there’s been an explosion of interest in Node.js and companies like Wal-Mart.com Labs, LinkedIn and Yahoo are now running Node.js in production. Meanwhile, PaaS competitors such as Cloud Foundry, Heroku and Windows Azure have announced Node.js support. But Nodejitsu is only just allowing the larger Node.js community a peak at its service.

Robbins says other companies were able to bring Node.js support to market quickly by using off the shelf software like Puppet and Chef while Nodejitsu has obsessively built custom infrastructure automation and orchestration tools. Robbins is confident that the custom tools will make Nodejitsu more competitive in the long term, and the patience is starting to pay off. In April Joyent, the company that sponsors Node.js development, shuttered its competing Node.js PaaS and partnered with Nodejitsu instead. “PaaS was outside their core business, and they wanted someone who would take it on as their core business objective,” Robbins explains. Robbins says Nodejitsu’s focus on building custom tools has also landed the company some major customers who are paying for services and support for private clouds, but he declines to name those customers.

But as it competes with tech giants like Microsoft, Salesforce.com and VMware, Nodejitsu’s greatest asset may be its roots in the Node.js community. Robbins first became interested in Node.js in 2009 while working as a .NET developer on Wall Street. “With Silverlight Microsoft had been extremely effective at marketing the idea of writing the same code on the server and the client,” Robbins tells me. “In their mind it was going to be .NET.” But Robbins eventually realized that JavaScript was winning the client side wars, and that there would be a need for a server side JavaScript solution. He was drawn to Node.js and started attending JavaScript meetups with his high school friend Marak Squires. There the pair met Paolo Fragomeni. The three decided to start a Node.js company.

The team spent much of their first year building open source libraries and tools for Node.js, such as the command line deployment tool Jitsu. These tools were necessary for the development of Nodejitsu, but they also helped the Node.js community during its formative years. This work, along with the partnership with Joyent, gives Nodejitsu some real Node.js street cred.

Nodejitsu is going to need that cred as it tackles the giants.

Popular car service Uber is delivering ice cream today only to promote their newly diversified private rides. Last week, Uber expanded its fleet from Lincoln Town Cars to SUVs and hybrids in an additional service called "Uber X." To market the change, Uber is offering on-demand ice cream to users, ordered and paid for through their app, in Boston, Chicago, New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, and Washington D.C.

In San Francisco, you can get ice cream between noon and 6 pm (a few hours left, hungry readers). I just got back from riding in one of the trucks (AOL actually pays me in Choco Tacos), and saw the marketing genius firsthand.

I rode along in "Molly Moo's Ice Cream," which the owner purchased a year ago from a puppeteer in Las Vegas, with Molly and Uber engineer Dom Narducci. As we pass one of Uber's signature black town cars and pull up to the first stop, a group of coworkers comes running up to the truck like children. While Narducci starts handing out ice cream, I sit back and watch the genius of the operation.

The first customers work together at The Climate Corporation and are purchasing ice cream for their all company meeting. Narducci gives them ice cream, t-shirts, stickers and $10 gift cards for new customers for their office. No money exchanges hands, as they pay for the ice cream on Uber’s app. Meanwhile, one self-proclaimed Uber-lover organically makes an Uber sales pitch to her co-workers.

Four young professionals—potentially prime customers—walk past the truck. "It’s an Uber promotion, right?" one asks. Two of his friends haven't heard of Uber before; he explains the service as they walk down the street.

Uber engineer Dom Narducci awaits the first customers of the day. I wonder if he codes in that outfit.

At a later stop, an advertising agency spills out of the office to get ice cream and the user-generated marketing pitches continue. The system isn't perfect, though. As we leave one stop, a group of Uber users comes up to buy ice cream but can't get their request through on the app. Sticking to a tight schedule, we leave them behind, ice cream-less.

Most of the times I see advertisements, I want to punch their marketing director in the face (Cross-advertising for Prometheus and Coors Light, every Verizon commercial ever). But a few glorious times (AmeriCan Budweiser, anyone?), I want to shake the marketing genius' hand or give them a medal. Whatever Uber employee came up with this idea deserves a big raise, whether it's in Choco Tacos or, you know, real people dollars.

Uber’s promotional video for the ice cream. Sadly, I saw no one chasing us in slow motion today.

Dalton Caldwell is a very smart guy who has been a prominent entrepreneur and programmer on the Silicon Valley scene for a while now, so any time he announces a new project you can pretty much tell it is going to be newsworthy. The blog post he published today about “refocusing” his App.net company to being a real-time feed API and service (essentially, a new version of Twitter) was no exception.

The post, entitled “Announcing an audacious proposal,” hit Techmeme within minutes after it was published, and he immediately started receiving enthusiastic messages from other influential industry folks.

Lots of things about Caldwell’s new direction for App.net are interesting: It’s a big idea, attempting to go up against a big competitor, and he’s going about funding it in an interesting Kickstarter-like way. We will absolutely be reporting on all of that and more in the coming days. But to me, perhaps the most compelling aspect of the whole thing is his assertion that the currently dominant revenue model for web startups — advertising — just cannot go on any longer.

In his pretty epic blog post, Caldwell points out that the major sites of today’s social web — Facebook, Twitter, Google+ — all make money primarily by selling ads targeted to users based on the data they feed into the system:

“Why isn't there an opportunity to pay money to get an ad-free feed from a company where the product is something you pay for, not, well, you. To be clear: I'm glad there are ad-supported options, but why does that seem like the only option? … I want a real alternative to advertising hell… I would gladly pay for a service that treats me better.”

And it’s not just social networks that are dependent on ads, it’s practically all startups in the “Web 2.0″ space, Caldwell says. This is an era that he and others feel is now reaching its inevitable end:

“One session at Foo Camp this year felt like a wake for Web2.0. We discussed the progression: a free service with a vague business model captures the hearts and minds of a large user base, and becomes vitally important. Because the hosting bills and payroll balloon as the service grows, founders are left with a very difficult decision to make. Sell the company? Cram the site full of ads? Keep raising money to delay having to deal with this issue as long as possible?

…If I am honest with myself, I just don't have the will to ever play that particular game again. Running a service that is important to people with some sort of hand-wavy platitudes about someday launching a ‘new form of advertising’ is not OK. It's not fair to users, it's not fair to employees, and we should all know better.”

And that is what he is shooting for with this new direction for App.net — it will be something that he calls a “financially sustainable ad-free service” that sells a product, not its users’ data. This of course means that people will have to pay. He’s crowdfunding the site’s development, soliciting $500,000 from anyone who wants to pitch in. According to him, they’ll need just 10,000 paying users to make it work.

It’s a very ambitious proposal indeed, but I have to agree that it’s high time that the advertising dominance has to come to an end. We pay for so many other things in our lives — it’s how commerce works — but for many reasons we haven’t become used to pulling out our wallets for services we use on the web. It’ll certainly be exciting to see if Caldwell can help push people forward into changing how they feel about that.

Lightspeed Venture Partners has had a phenomenal run in the next generation storage market. In the past 12 to 14 months, four of its portfolio companies have been acquired and one has gone to IPO. Here they are:

• XtremIO sold in May to EMC for an estimated $430 million.
• In June, SK Hynix said it will acquire Link-a-Media.
• Portfolio company IO Turbine sold for $95 million to Fusion-io.
• Fusion-IO, also a Lightspeed investment, had an IPO last summer. It is now valued at $1.7 billion.
• Lightspeed sold its investment in Pliant Technology when SanDisk bought the company for $327 million last May.

This week  the venture capital firm made an investment in storage provider Avere Systems. The Series C funding round was led by Lightspeed and also includes previous investors Menlo Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners and Tenaya Capital.  Avere has now received $52 million in overall funding.

Avere Systems  gives a window into the disruptions facing storage companies and why Lightspeed has had such success by investing in the sector.

Lightscale Partner Chris Schaepe says flash, virtualization and the cloud are the big disruptors in the storage market.

Flash makes data available far faster than hard disk, which relies on mechanical parts to spin its discs.  That’s increasingly important in this age of big data. Hard disks don’t spin fast enough to manage the new deluge of data that runs in and out of the enterprise.

Virtualization has allowed companies to consolidate its servers but with a storage cost. It  often means finding new ways to keep the apps running at the same performance level. Servers get overloaded as virtualization taxes the system. New storage environments are needed to accommodate virtual machine loads.

Cloud computing has changed the way IT  views the enterprise. Over the next few years, we will see continued focus on how companies turn IT into a service. They will need ways to bridge its existing infrastructure with public, scaled out architectures from providers such as Rackspace and Amazon Web Services.

Schaepe says that Avere is at the center of this disruption. It has hardware that speeds up performance by caching data and integrating a hierarchy of storage media from DRAMthrough Flash memory and disk drives. This allows the most frequently accessed data to be served quickly. Less frequently accessed data is migrated to slower and cheaper storage tiers such as storage disk systems.

For Schaepe, it makes for a compelling story. Avere’s “edge filers,” helps an enterprise provider get better performance. Capacity issues are handled by traditional disk-based storage. That means companies don’t have to keep adding storage boxes to optimize performance. Performance is managed by the edge filers. Avere is also well-suited to companies adopting the cloud as the technology is designed to integrate on-premise and off-premise infrastructure.

Looking from the outside, it’s the data story Avere offers that I find most compelling. Avere's products helps IT organizations consolidate the management of distributed data across different locations and vendors. The data is pooled, That solves a key challenge. Data is often left in solos. By pooling it, a company can capitalize on its data assets.

Schaepe said Lightspeed identified disruptive trends in the storage about five years ago. They saw the price of Flash and DRAM begin to drop. That became a critical factor for the innovation cycle. It helped startups innovate with next generation storage architectures that fit well with the maturing trends in IT around virtualization and scale-out architectures. Other Lightspeed portfolio companies:

• Tintri combines Flash and disk media. it has developed a storage management software that is customized for the needs of  needs of virtual machines.
• Nimble combines primary storage and backup in a system with Flash and disk media.
• Nutanix combines compute and storage. That allows for consolidation of infrastructure environments – a huge priority as companies seek to shed their data centers.

Data is the disruptor. Lightspeed seems to understand this by investing in companies that will be crucial in shaping next generation architectures for the new age of data.

Competition in the tablet space has been heating up for a while now, and it's not just the big guys that are feeling the strain. Take the tumultuous story of OGT Mobile, for instance — they tried to make their mark on the industry by creating their own Android tablet, but just couldn’t see the project through.

I can't blame you if you've never heard of OGT before, but back in April 2011 when the company revealed their Eros tablet, it made a few waves thanks to its claims of being the thinnest Android tablet in the world. The spec sheet wasn't too shabby at the time either — it featured a 1GHz processor, what appeared to be a 7-inch screen running at 188 ppi, 3G/WiFi radios, and either 16 or 32GB of internal storage, all crammed into a frame that was 7mm thick.

Sure, the company had a long road ahead of it, but the OGT tablet had the makings of a solid device. That said, you can guess where this story is going. Thanks to some funding issues, a general sense of distaste for the versions of Android available at the time, and the speed of the market, the Eros never made it off the ground.

Earlier today, OGT CEO Alix Narcisse posted an open letter to the company’s supporters explaining why that Eros tablet never officially came to be. Here’s the juicy bit:

Last year, the tech world, saw an influx of interest in tablet PCs from a variety of companies both large and small. We were among the many companies. Tablets represent the next wave of technology and the power of mobile computing, but we had to be honest with ourselves knowing that our hardware was too advanced for the software that was available at the time. We took heed to what consumers wanted in a tablet and challenged ourselves to deliver it.

Unfortunately, with the instantaneous changes in this developing marketplace, we could not bring our tablet to market in time for your enjoyment and satisfaction. We apologize. Our integrity is exhibited in our interaction with you. This is the first step in establishing and maintaining that integrity.

Narcisse goes on to promise that the company still has plenty up its sleeves, but this is the sort of game that's just damned hard for smaller companies to crack. Established players like Apple, Asus, Motorola, and the like are capable of iterating much faster, cramming an ever-increasing number of features into devices meant for consumers who have been conditioned to expect continuous, unyielding innovation. It's little surprise that little guys like OGT struggle to keep up with that blistering pace, so does that mean they should stop altogether?

The short answer is no, of course not, but even an even weightier question comes to mind — how do hardware startups like OGT make a dent in a market that seems to be doing just fine without them? That answer could be worth millions, if only someone could come up with it. So far, we can surmise what that answer isn’t: it’s probably not fighting on price (Amazon and now Google have that segment well-accounted for), and shooting for mass market appeal is difficult when a brand doesn’t mean anything to people yet.

As far as Narcisse is concerned, his and other companies like it have to “create something new from something old.” Easier said than done, certainly, but here’s hoping that someone cracks that formula soon — after all, more competition pushes everyone else forward too.

The lore is that news doesn’t really break at Allen and Co’s Sun Valley mogul retreat, but it definitely gets made. Everywhere you look there’s an interesting pairing of successful individuals hanging out, which is what you’d assume would happen at a convergence of hundreds of the most powerful media, entertainment and technology elite.

A conversation here can often turn into tomorrow’s front page headline or top Techmeme hit. From Sheryl and Sergey taking a stroll, to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie chilling post bar with Activision’s Bobby Kotick to Peter Thiel and Palantir’s Alex Karp grabbing a coffee between panels at the lodge, one finds themselves in a constant state of wanting to find out about what everyone’s talking about.

Because everyone is here: From Yousef Al Otaiba to Mark Zuckerberg, the guest list is 624 machers strong, and we have it — minus a few no-shows like Groupon’s Andrew Mason. Btw. The Idaho State Governor is named Butch Otter. Really.

Complete List Of Moguls At Sun Valley

Tech

Tim Cook Apple Inc.

Mark Zuckerberg Facebook

Sheryl Sandberg Facebook

Dick Costolo Twitter, Inc.

Bill Gates Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Paul Allen Vulcan Inc.

Jack Dorsey Square, Inc.

Reed Hastings Netflix, Inc.

Mark Pincus Zynga Inc.

Dave Wehner Zynga Inc.

Owen Van Natta Zynga Inc.

Craig Mundie Microsoft Corporation

Charlie Songhurst Microsoft Corporation

Jeff Weiner LinkedIn Corporation

Jeff Bezos Amazon.com, Inc.

Sergey Brin Google Inc.

Eric Schmidt Google Inc.

Larry Page Google Inc.

Reid Hoffman LinkedIn Corporation

Drew Houston Dropbox

Andrew Mason Groupon, Inc.

Eric Lefkofsky Groupon, Inc.

Don Mattrick Microsoft Corporation

Dan Gilbert Quicken Loans

Jeremy Stoppelman Yelp, Inc.

Ross Levinsohn Yahoo! Inc.

Howard Stringer Sony Corporation

Nicole Seligman Sony Corporation

JK Shin Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.

David Ebersman Facebook

Anne Wojcicki 23andMe

Dara Khosrowshahi Expedia, Inc.

Jerry Yang Yahoo (formerly)

John Donahoe eBay Inc.

Tim Armstrong AOL LLC

Kaz Hirai Sony Corporation

Paul Jacobs Qualcomm Inc.

René Obermann Deutsche Telekom AG

Pete Karmanos Compuware Corporation

Alex Karp Palantir Technologies, Inc.

Travis Kalanick Uber

Brian Chesky Airbnb, Inc.

Craig Barrett Intel

Meg Whitman Hewlett-Packard Company

Rob Wiesenthal Sony Corporation of America

Tony Bates Skype Limited

Jeff Boyd priceline.com, Inc.

Dave Goldberg SurveyMonkey

WP Hong Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.

Joe Einhorn The Fancy

Aneel Bhusri Workday, Inc.

Cristian Croitoru Transfer Rapid LLC

Jack Cassidy Cincinnati Bell Inc.

Martin Lau Tencent Technology Co., Ltd.

Thomas Layton oDesk Corporation

Jay Lee Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.

Peter Klein Microsoft Corporation

Steve Luczo Seagate Technology LLC

Paul Sagan Akamai Technologies, Inc.

Michael Lynton Sony Corporation

Bobby Kotick Activision Blizzard, Inc.

Brian Kelly Activision Blizzard, Inc.

Ursula Burns Xerox Corporation

Andy Bechtolsheim Arista Networks, Inc.

Greg Blatt IAC

Steven Boal Coupons.com

Roy Bostock Yahoo (formerly)

Mike Brown Euronet Worldwide, Inc.

Barry Diller IAC

Finance and Consulting

Warren Buffett Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

Peter Thiel Founders Fund

Marc Andreessen Andreessen Horowitz LLC

Ben Horowitz Andreessen Horowitz LLC

Jeff Jordan Andreessen Horowitz LLC

Bing Gordon Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

James Anderson Baillie Gifford & Co.

Brad Burnham Union Square Ventures

Dennis Lynch Morgan Stanley Investment Management Inc.

John Burbank Passport Capital

Danny Rimer Index Ventures

Vindi Banga Clayton Dubilier & Rice, LLP

Scott Bommer SAB Capital Management, L.P.

Chase Coleman Tiger Global Management LLC

Hank Crumpton Crumpton Group LLC

Saul Pannell Wellington Management Company

Ted Pappendick Brookside Capital, LLC

Stephen Kappes Torch Hill Investment Partners

Jim Robinson III RRE Ventures

Jim Robinson IV RRE Ventures

Nathan Myhrvold Intellectual Ventures LLC

Roberto Mignone Bridger Capital

Bill Miller Legg Mason Capital Management, Inc.

Ken Miranda International Monetary Fund

Lou Simpson SQ Advisors, LLC

Herb Siegel ALS Capital, LLC

John Canning Madison Dearborn Partners

John Griffin Blue Ridge Capital, LLC

Andreas Halvorsen Viking Global Investors L.P.

Mason Hawkins Southeastern Asset Management, Inc.

Tim Collins Ripplewood Holdings LLC

Wes Edens Fortress Investment Group LLC

Brian Rogers T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc.

Hank Vigil Acequia Capital, LLC

Mike Volpi Index Ventures

Alex von Furstenberg Ranger Global Advisors

Wilbur Ross WL Ross & Co. LLC

Jim Rothenberg Capital Research and Management Company

Haim Saban Saban Capital Group, Inc.

Wally Weitz Weitz Funds

Alan Wilson Capital International

David Weinberg Judd Enterprises, Inc.

Judd Weinberg Judd Enterprises, Inc.

Brian Demain Janus Capital Management

André Desmarais Power Corporation of Canada

Michael Eisner The Tornante Company, LLC

Jon Dolgen Wood River Ventures

David Corkins Arrowpoint Partners

Gordy Crawford Capital Research Global Investors

José Luis Cutrale Sucocitrico Cutrale Ltda.

Will Danoff Fidelity Management & Research

Chris Davis Davis Selected Advisers LP

Mike Fries Liberty Global, Inc.

Tommy Frist Frist Capital LLC

Politics

Cory Booker Mayor of the City of Newark

Rahm Emanuel Mayor of the City of Chicago

Mike Bloomberg Mayor of the City of New York

Richard Daley Former Mayor of the City of Chicago

Chris Christie Governor of the State of New Jersey

Dick Riordan Former Mayor of the City of Los Angeles

Charles Rivkin U.S. Department of State

Julius Genachowski Federal Communications Commission

Yousef Al Otaiba Embassy of the United Arab Emirates

Erskine Bowles National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform

Media

Rupert Murdoch News Corporation

James Murdoch News Corporation

Tom Friedman The New York Times Company

Don Graham The Washington Post Company

Jeff Bewkes Time Warner Inc.

Michael Angelakis Comcast Corporation

Brad Grey Viacom Inc.

Chase Carey News Corporation

Joel Klein News Corporation

Les Moonves CBS Corporation

George Stephanopoulos ABC News

Brian Roberts Comcast Corporation

Evan Osnos The New Yorker Magazine

Charlie Rose The Charlie Rose Show

Richard Rosenblatt Demand Media, Inc.

Ron Meyer NBC Universal, Inc.

John Martin Time Warner Inc.

David Ignatius The Washington Post Company

Lionel Barber Financial Times

Emilio Azcárraga Grupo Televisa, S.A.

Philippe Dauman Viacom Inc.

Gustavo Cisneros Cisneros Group of Companies

Koos Bekker Naspers Limited

Shelby Bonnie Whiskey Media

Glenn Britt Time Warner Cable

Tom Brokaw NBC Universal, Inc.

Erin Burnett CNN

David DeVoe News Corporation

Strauss Zelnick ZelnickMedia Corp.

Dirk Ziff Ziff Brothers Investments

Becky Quick NBC Universal, Inc.

Philanthropy and Education

Melinda Gates Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Laurene Powell Job

Susie Buffett The Sherwood Foundation

Toby Cosgrove The Cleveland Clinic Foundation

Michael Ferro Merge Healthcare

Minxin Pei Claremont McKenna College

Bill Heavener Full Sail University

Mark Taylor Columbia University

Business

Neil Ashe Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.

Muhtar Kent The Coca-Cola Company

Phil Knight NIKE, Inc.

Andy McKenna McDonald’s Corporation

José Antonio Fernández FEMSA

Stewart Bainum Choice Hotels International, Inc.

Mike Berman The Duberstein Group, Inc.

Mark Bertolini Aetna, Inc.

Howie Buffett Buffett Farms

Bill Weldon Johnson & Johnson

Mickey Mikitani Rakuten, Inc.

Entertainment and Sports

Oprah Winfrey HARPO Entertainment Group

Bob Iger The Walt Disney Company

Anne Sweeney The Walt Disney Company

Jeffrey Katzenberg DreamWorks Animation SKG

Harvey Weinstein The Weinstein Company

Mike White DIRECTV, Inc.

Jeff Berg International Creative Management

Jim Berkus United Talent Agency

Jay Rasulo The Walt Disney Company

John Skipper ESPN, Inc.

David Stern National Basketball Association

Gary Bettman National Hockey League

Tony Bloom Cineworld plc

Jed York The San Francisco 49ers

Roger Goodell National Football League

Jerry Reinsdorf Chicago Bulls and Chicago White Sox

Robert Kraft New England Patriots

Rio Caraeff Vevo LLC

Bill DeWitt St. Louis Cardinals

Alfonso de Angoitia Grupo Televisa, S.A.

Rachael Ray Watch Entertainment, Inc.

Erik Logan OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network

Sheri Salata OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network

Bryan Lourd Creative Artists Agency, Inc.

Bud Selig Major League Baseball

Lucian Grainge Universal Music Group

Brian Grazer Imagine Entertainment

As Yet Uncategorized

Mathias Döpfner Axel Springer AG

Eric Eisner Double E Pictures

John Elkann EXOR S.p.A.

Tom Evans Bankrate, Inc.

Rodney Faraon Crumpton Group LLC

Nate Fick Center for a New American Security (CNAS)

Niall FitzGerald Hakluyt & Co. Ltd.

Jennifer Foster Chilton Investment Company

Dan Fulton Weyerhaeuser Company

Michael Fux Comfort Revolution

Mala Gaonkar Lone Pine Capital LLC

Whit Gardner Gardner Lewis Asset Management

Tom Giovine Giovine Capital Group LLC

Tom Glocer

Jimmy Hayes Cox Enterprises, Inc.

John Hendricks Discovery Communications

David Herro Harris Associates L.P.

John Heyman World Group of Companies

Martin Indyk The Brookings Institution

Eli Jacobs Essex Management Company

Bob Johnson The RLJ Companies

Michael Karsch Karsch Capital Management, L.P.

Gayle King HARPO Entertainment Group

Seth Klarman The Baupost Group, LLC

Victor Koo Youku Inc.

Sock Koong SingTel

Henry Kravis Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.

Ynon Kreiz

Blake Krikorian id8 Group Holdings

Ananda Krishnan Astro – Maxis

Stan Kroenke The Kroenke Group

Roger Kuo Dodge & Cox

Daniel Lamarre Cirque du Soleil

Michael Larson BGI

Mike Leavitt Leavitt Partners, LLC

Ted Leonsis Monumental Sports & Entertainment

Max Levchin HVF LLC

David Levin UBM plc

Maurice Lévy Publicis Groupe

Marty Lipton Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz

Andrew Liveris The Dow Chemical Company

Ken Lowe Scripps Networks Interactive

Michael Lowenstein Kensico Capital Management

Dan Lufkin

John Malone Liberty Media Corporation

Morris Mark Mark Asset Management Corp.

Kathleen McCarragher Jennison Associates LLC

Stan McChrystal McChrystal Group

Monty Meigs Business Executives for National Security

Lorenzo Mendoza Empresas Polar

Tom Monahan Corporate Executive Board

Luis Alberto Moreno Inter-American Development Bank

Danny Moskovitz D.M. Operations Management Inc.

Lachlan Murdoch Illyria Pty Limited

Liz Murdoch Shine Group

Michael Neidorff Centene Corporation

Jonathan Nelson Providence Equity Partners Inc.

Vivi Nevo NV Investments, Inc.

Sam Nunn Nuclear Threat Initiative

Mike O’Hanlon The Brookings Institution

Ron Olson Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP

Butch Otter Governor of the State of Idaho

Michael Ovitz Broad Beach Ventures

Mark Papa EOG Resources, Inc.

François-Henri Pinault PPR

Larry Probst United States Olympic Committee

Kevin Reilly Lamar Advertising Company

Fernando Rodés Vil ISP

Karim Sadjadpour Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Ricky Sandler Eminence Capital, LLC

Fayez Sarofim Fayez Sarofim & Co.

Nassef Sawiris Orascom Construction Industries S.A.E.

Jack Schneider

John Scully SPO Partners & Co.

Terry Semel Windsor Media

Eric Semler TCS Capital Management, LLC

Ronen Shilo Conduit

Bill Siegel

Chris Silbermann International Creative Management

Al Simpson National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform

Martin Sorrell WPP PLC

Don Stein Emory University School of Medicine

Christopher Stone Dyson Family Investment Office

Mike Stone Freestyle Capital

Nirav Tolia Nextdoor

Thomas Tull Legendary Pictures

Pete Ueberroth Contrarian Group, Inc.

Jay Vacanti Massachusetts General Hospital

Jeff Van Harte Delaware Investments

Martin Varsavsky FON

Jack Vaughn

Casey Wasserman Wasserman Media Group, LLC

Jimmy Williams

Amos Yadlin Institute for National Security Studies

Tadashi Yanai Fast Retailing Co., Ltd.

Daniel Yergin IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates, Inc.

David Zaslav Discovery Communications

Image Credit: Getty Images

Gillmor Gang – Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Recording has concluded.

At I/O last month, Google announced that it would soon start selling Chromebooks at Best Buy and the first of these Chromebook displays have now found their way into Best Buy’s brick-and-mortar stores across the United States. One thing Google didn’t say at the time was that it would also use these new Chromebook displays to hand out CDs with its Chrome browser on them. As Google+ user Clayton Pritchard found out, though, that’s exactly what Google is doing. The CDs, says Pritchard, hang underneath the Chromebook demo units and come “in really cool plexiglass cases held together by magnets.”

Google obviously took this idea of giving away free CDs straight out of the NetZero and AOL playbook (disclaimer: AOL owns TechCrunch). While it may seem odd that Google is giving away physical CDs in this day and age, chances are that many of the mainstream consumers who still shop at Best Buy haven’t quite moved away from shrink-wrapped software either.

Despite Chrome’s ongoing success, Google is clearly willing to put its marketing efforts behind the browser to make it even more mainstream than it already is today.

As for the Chromebook displays themselves, Pritchard writes that the one he saw was manned by a “Chrome Expert” who was pretty well informed about the product and likely worked for a third-party company and received his training directly from Google.

Photo credit: Clayton Pritchard on Google+

Facebook and CNN recently announced an ambitious partnership to boost America’s embarrassingly low voter turnout rate with a special “I Voted” app, which will broadcast users’ intent to vote and encourage their friends to follow suit. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely to make much of a difference, since the only known option to dramatically improve voting rates is completely unethical: threaten to publicize if users do not vote.

Clever political scientists have put every imaginable get-out-the-vote tactic through the experimental grinder, from call banks to TV advertisements, and found that shame, rather than persuasion or education, is the most effective way to get civic couch potatoes into the voting booth. Threatening punishment isn’t the only option available: carnivals and face-to-face canvassing work wonders to boost turnout, too. But, unless Facebook plans on throwing a block party for 130 million citizens, shaming users in their friends’ newsfeed is the only option available–and it’s unethical (and, probably illegal).

After experimentally testing countless get-out-the-vote tactics, Political Scientist’s Alan Gerber and Donald Green hit the jackpot: randomly sending letters (pictured below) that threatened to reveal who voted to their neighbors boosted turnout by an astonishing 8%, higher than same-day registration laws or vote-by-mail ballots (3%), direct mail (0.6%)and television (~0%).

The Facebook newsfeed is a ready-made weapon to implement Gerber and Green’s research, and we sketched a simple concept picture of what this might look like if Facebook decided to throw ethics out the window.

Both Facebook and other social networks have attempted soft peer pressure before: Facebook displayed a rolling count of users who publicize their vote and Foursquare gave a badge to those who checked into a booth on election day. Unfortunately, the perception of a voting norm has little influence on intent to vote, “Presenting the prevalence of college student voting in the last election resulted in a marginally significant increase in students' intention to vote in the upcoming election,” wrote researcher Carroll Glynn.

Americans, however, are not averse to voting: in the late 19th century, presidential voting rates were consistently above 80% (and, above 90% in some states). Back in the day, elections were filled with carnivals and merriment. Professor Green found that modern day political carnivals can boost turnout a respectable 6.5%–but, at America’s 2008 voting rate of 61%, that’s still not even close to its past glory.

Kudos to Facebook and CNN for using their superpowers to increase civic engagement. But, they’re going to need an army of canvassers and the biggest block party on the planet to really make up for our political laziness.

Over the past day or so, a few lucky souls have managed to get their hands on Google’s much-anticipated Nexus 7 tablet, leaving the rest of us to wonder when our time would come. As it turns out, the answer is very soon.

After their Nexus support phone line tipped users off earlier today, Google has finally come right out and said it — the company has begun shipping those wallet-friendly tablets to all those who pre-ordered from them.

Truth be told, some people may not be as excited about the announcement as others. A handful of retailers (Gamestop, Office Depot, Staples, and the like) have already received their Nexus 7 shipments in-store, which means that customers who pre-ordered from them are just a quick drive away from getting a taste of Jelly Bean. In fact, according to Droid-Life, at least one person was able to waltz into one of these stores to purchase a Nexus 7 without having pre-ordered.

Meanwhile, people who pre-ordered directly from Google right after the device was announced at I/O have a bit longer to wait before they too can join in on the fun. It may seem like a minor thing to get worked up over, but don't underestimate the sort of sway that a virulent strain of gadget lust can have on people. That the device in question is a Nexus tablet doesn’t help things — Nexus devices have always had a particularly lofty reputation among most Android fans, and now that distinction is being carried to a few new (and in the case of the Nexus Q, peculiar) product classes.

In any case, the wait for you Google gurus is almost over. All there is to do now is take a deep breath, settle into your favorite chair, snack on some jelly beans, and wait for the inevitable to happen.

Brewster, the hot, new personalized address book app for iPhone, launched to much fanfare this week. But it also launched with a concerning bug. Some users reported they had the ability to see the personal contact information for people they shouldn’t have had access to, including the likes of one Mr. Ashton Kutcher, for example.

His wasn’t the only private contact information exposed, from what we’ve seen. Other high-profile people whose personal information was available included TechCrunch contributor MG Siegler, Path co-founder Dave Morin, Foursquare’s former Director of Business Development Tristan Walker, Foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai, and more.

One Brewster user who discovered the problem was Marshall Haas, the co-founder and CEO of Obsorb.com. He tweeted about his discovery last night, and we reached out to him to confirm the issue was occurring. He sent over several screenshots as proof of the bug’s existence, which did indeed confirm that he was able to see things he should not, including email addresses and phone numbers. We’ve posted a couple here, with the personal information redacted.

Haas did the right thing, however, and notified the company of the issue, which is reportedly now resolved. I spoke with founder Steve Greenwood about the problem this morning, to confirm that it had been fixed. (If everyone could see Ashton’s and others’ private info, I would not publish this!).

Greenwood says that when the company was notified of Haas’s issue, they spoke with him and Haas was, by that point, unable to re-create the problem. “What was going on, as you can imagine, with a first day release,” explains Greenwood, “there were a bunch of things going well, and there were a bunch of things where we had bugs. We were deploying all day yesterday and into the night. And, as best as we can ascertain, there was an issue [Haas] had with Ashton’s information that must have been resolved by the deploys into production that we had done,” says Greenwood. “But that being said, we then went and looked everywhere, to see if this was anywhere else and we could not find any occassion of this issue.”

Greenwood continues, “there were bugs we had yesterday, this was one we took very seriously. We must have fixed it.” So, in other words, a one-off. But a bad one. And yes, it does appeared to be fixed at present.

But the issue highlights the potential privacy concerns of any “address book” replacement mobile application, and the very real risk that comes along with giving an app of any sort permission to access your iPhone’s contacts list. This is the same sort of concern that was blown out of proportion somewhat during Path’s “address book-gate,” for example. But it’s also why the crackdowns on the mobile app industry from government regulators are being taken seriously – and why they should be.

However, in this case, even tougher regulations couldn’t have helped the purported victims here – there were a ton of new users uploading their contact lists to the service. The victims themselves may have never even installed the app and shared their personal details.

We should also point out that it’s not just a new app’s bug that could leave you over-exposed, if however briefly. There’s also a general lack of understanding on the part of consumers as to whether the information you’re sharing with third parties is public or private.

“We’ve noticed there’s been some confusion over what you get access to over a third-party service when you’re connected with them, whether it’s an email, phone number or something like that,” explains Greenwood regarding other more general complaints. “We’ve also noticed around photos, there are public profile photos among certain services that have privacy settings that users select on that third-party service.”

User confusion is a problem that location-based “friend finders” like Highlight and Banjo face today. In Banjo’s case, for example, it’s able to locate people based on details they don’t even know they’re sharing – like geo-tagged tweets, for example, or Instagram uploads.

Still, let’s not throw out the baby with have the bathwater here. Brewster may have had a bug, Banjo may seem a bit creepy, Path may uploaded personal data without users’ permission. Yes, it’s all so very scary, right? But at the end of the day, the startups behind these apps are building tools and services that improve our lives, if we’re willing to give them enough breathing room to work out the kinks.

Apple’s Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering Bob Mansfield just published a letter on the company’s website announcing that Apple has reversed its decision to remove EPEAT environmental certification from its products.

“We've recently heard from many loyal Apple customers who were disappointed to learn that we had removed our products from the EPEAT rating system,” Mansfield writes. “I recognize that this was a mistake. Starting today, all eligible Apple products are back on EPEAT.”

Apple reportedly asked the EPEAT standards group to pull its 39 eligible products (including desktop computers, laptops, and monitors) from the EPEAT green products list earlier this month. A few days after the news broke, a company spokesperson defended the decision, saying, “Apple takes a comprehensive approach to measuring our environmental impact and all of our products meet the strictest energy efficiency standards backed by the US government, Energy Star 5.2.”

The company may have been counting on consumers like me, who own lots of Apple products but have very little idea what EPEAT is. (Products receive EPEAT ratings based on factors like energy conservation, use of environmentally sensitive materials, and recyclability.)  However, as with pretty much everything else Apple does, the decision got a lot of coverage. It may also have threatened the company’s ability to sell to schools and governmental agencies — San Francisco officials, for example, said they would be blocking purchases of Apple products.

Despite backing off its earlier decision, and also claiming that the company’s relationship with EPEAT “has become stronger as a result of this experience,” most of Mansfield’s letter restates the argument that Apple had been making earlier, that its environmental success shouldn’t be measured by older standards:

“It's important to know that our commitment to protecting the environment has never changed, and today it is as strong as ever. Apple makes the most environmentally responsible products in our industry. In fact, our engineering teams have worked incredibly hard over the years to make our products even more environmentally friendly, and much of our progress has come in areas not yet measured by EPEAT.”

EPEAT CEO Robert Frisbee has published on open letter of his on the EPEAT website, hinting (albeit in fairly convoluted language) that Apple’s move may be spurring the group to update its standards (or to work more quickly on already-planned updates):

“An interesting question for EPEAT is how to reward innovations that are not yet envisioned with standards that are fixed at a point in time. Diverse goals, optional points awarded for innovations not yet described, and flexibility within specified parameters to make this happen are all on the table in EPEAT stakeholder discussions. …

“Answers to these questions support all our subscribers, and lead to mutual benefit for all our purchasers.   And they led us to the path to our strengthened relationship with Apple.”

Sample sentences have long been a standard feature of many online and offline dictionaries. Starting today, Google Translate will also feature sentences that put translated words into context. Unlike old-school dictionaries, which carefully curated these sentences, though, Google will use sentences from recent news stories around the web. This, says Google, ensures that it can help users understand new words “by observing them in their natural habitat.”

To access this feature, simply head to Google Translate and look for the new example sentence icons in the text boxes on the site. While it’s nice to see these words in context, though, traditional dictionaries typically assign multiple example sentences to every translation, depending on the word’s meaning in a given context. Google only provides one recent sentence, independent of all the different meanings of a given word.

This new feature would likely be more useful if Google at least provided multiple sentences here so users could see how a word is being used in different contexts. For this, tools like Linguee currently offer a better solution, though Google promises that it will continue to “improve and enrich [its] corpus of example sentences.” Google also notes that it’s probably best to look at these example sentences in conjunction with its alternate translation feature and its dictionary results.

Back in October Changers appeared offering a solar powered gadget-charging system designed to power up your USB devices, smartphones and the like, using a simple, one-button device. But this was not your average solar unit. The device uploads how much power it has generated to an online energy marketplace where users compare their energy savings with friends via Facebook/Twitter. It’s “Green Social”. Each saving is turned into “Changer Credits” which can be spent at the company’s retail partners.

But there was a problem. The Berlin-based company quickly ran into financial difficulty – hardware is a tricky business – and went bust. Luckily two of the former founders, Markus Schulz and Daniela Schiffer together with Kushtrim Xhakli the (founder of Trajnimi) and Andreas Rückemann, a former CEO from the photovoltaic industry, founded a new company. Blacksquared GmbH successfully bought back all the assets of the insolvent company to pursue the Idea of Changers.

Now the plan is to launch in Europe and Japan. Here’s their scenario.

Japan is a good market for Changers. There is a nationwide movement after the Fukushima disaster to turn the country green.

They are also launching in Japan with Daymon Worldwide, a huge retail consulting company globally.

So: I’m a Japanese consumer with a Changers device. On my way into work I enter the subway in Tokyo and my Changers solar charger automatically transfers via NFC my “4 CC” (Changers Credits) from my account from the energy I’ve stored up that day with the charger sitting on the apartment balcony. Before I leave the train to enter my office I get a notification about the 48 CCs I got from a car-sharing startup for my eco-driving behaviour, and I can spend that how I like.

Sounds pretty futuristic huh? Well, it remains to be seen if this plucky startup can pull it off, but we love the idea here at TechCrunch.