We are in the midst of a great revolution the payments space: anyone with a phone can now accept credit cards; online-to-offline commerce is allowing online payment for offline purchase and significant friction is being removed from the consumer purchase experience thanks to mobile. All of this innovation (read: competition), combined with government intervention, means that payment fees are falling, threatening revenue streams for incumbents and startups alike in the payments space. But a broader opportunity exists: using the data of payments to build a more valuable, more defensible business model, one not dependent on fees. The result will revolutionize offline commerce and online advertising.

Today: It's All About Fees, and They're Heading Towards Zero

Payment companies make money by charging fees to "process" a payment from buyer to seller. Square charges 2.75% (or $275/month for volume up to $250K/year). PayPal Here charges 2.7%, as does Intuit GoPayment. Groupon and Amazon are both supposedly working on their own dongles, and prices will continue to fall, especially as these new devices create “one-sided” networks without significant defensibility outside of switching cost and inertia. "Pay with Square" is a potential game changer, as the millions of Square user accounts can ONLY be used with Square. But basic "acceptance of credit cards" is becoming a commodity where prices will keep going down.

Competition between payment companies is only one leg of inevitable downward pricing pressure. Government intervention is the other. Not too long ago, the Australian government decided that payment fees were too high, so now most Australian merchants pay less than .5% for credit card swipes, a fraction of the cost here in the US. The European Union is likely to enact similar legislation. The Durbin Amendment of Dodd-Frank and the $6B+ (pending) Brooklyn Settlement are US-based government and civil attacks on the business of payment fees. Many of these fee-cutting regulations help intermediaries like PayPal and Square short term, by reducing their cost (owed to the Visa/MasterCard infrastructure), but eventually it limits what they can charge, too.

Wherever fees end up, most merchants will still dislike paying them. They are a “cost of doing business” that every merchant has an incentive to bring down. Payment companies generally aren’t delivering new customers; they’re taxing the flow of existing ones. Google effectively charges 20-30% to deliver a customer (if you back out the cost-per-click to percentage of realized sale) to an ecommerce merchant, yet merchants are competing to hand Google more money because each dollar "in" produces more than a dollar "out." Payment companies charge a fraction of Google, but are often despised (witness the lawsuits and legislation) or treated with promiscuous disrespect.

It comes down to something rather simple: Connecting the bank accounts of buyers and sellers will never be as valuable nor defensible as connecting buyers and sellers. Google delivers customers at the top of the funnel, and payment companies serve the prosaic, but necessary, task of shuffling funds at the end.

Tomorrow: Payment Data Will Revolutionize Commerce & Advertising

As society goes increasingly cashless, payment companies will have a larger business, and a more valuable one, in closing the loop for offline transactions and helping deliver customers. The data they possess is without equal; did somebody buy something? How much did he spend? What did she buy? Paper money cannot be tracked in this manner. In order for Online-to-Offline commerce to take flight, every merchant needs an ability to track online/mobile action to offline purchase, and PayPal Here, Square, GoPayment and others could provide just this for a whole new class of small merchants.

Imagine that Wendy's, or even a local handyman, wants to advertise on the Internet. What's the point? What does a click, or an impression, really mean? It's clear what it means online, since every click can be measured to "action" (e.g., purchase) for an ecommerce company. Who can tell Wendy's, or the local handyman, if that online advertisement worked?

In an increasingly cashless society, the answer is pretty clear: the payment infrastructure. Tracking that purchase back to the originating source (Google? Yelp? Patch? etc) is known as "closing the loop" and will revolutionize offline commerce and advertising alike.

The million-plus merchants walking around with Square, PayPal Here, and GoPayment dongles want more customers, and these dongles provide a means to "close the loop" and let those merchants acquire more customers, remarket to those customers, understand those customers, and do everything that ecommerce companies have taken for granted for over a decade. Legacy POS systems were poorly integrated and insufficiently verticalized, often requiring a merchant to have separate relationships with every player in the payment chain (hardware vendor, merchant bank, CRM system, etc); moreover, they were priced out of reach of the sole proprietor.

Beyond closing the loop, payment companies can utilize data from existing transactions to generate more transactions. Companies who maintain a direct relationship with the consumer — such as American Express, PayPal, Square, Discover, etc — are in the perfect position to serve as an Amazon recommendation system for "everything." You bought a tennis racket at Sports Authority? How about tennis lessons with Saul the tennis pro, at a discount thanks to your purchase of a tennis racket, only redeemable with the same payment instrument? You weren't searching for Saul, and you wouldn't want an unsolicited email from Saul, but seeing an advertisement for Saul shortly after buying a tennis racket (say, on your purchase receipt) would likely produce a response. It's a way to preeempt search for a large class of "secondary" purchases (e.g., charcoal after buying a grill; tennis balls after buying a tennis racket, etc), in a "pull" based way.

None of this is to say that the fees charged today are wholly unreasonable and unconscionable; they're just not long-term defensible as more parties offer the same conduits to existing credit card infrastructure. I have $40 cash and five credit cards in my wallet right now, so any merchant wanting to charge $100 for some widget can either get 97.25% of $100 (if using Square), or $0. That's an easy decision and shows why things like Square and PayPal Here are hugely beneficial to merchants and consumers alike. But longer term, as those fees continue to compress to the benefit of merchants, the larger business will be in applying the data of payments to the benefit of merchants, consumers, and payment providers alike.

Image via stevendepolo 

Editor's note: Derek Andersen is the founder of Startup Grind, a 20-city event series hosted around the world to help educate, inspire, and connect entrepreneurs. He's an ex-Electronic Arts employee, as well as the founder of Commonred and Vaporware Labs.

Until a few weeks ago I'd never met Dave McClure. Like many of you I have read all about him, casually Twitter followed him, and personally censored many of his YouTube videos over the past few years. After attending 500 Startups Demo Day earlier this month I was really impressed by the founders and their products which were as good or better than any I've seen. The person I shook hands with at the end of that day was a soft spoken, humble guy who seems to be in full grind mode pushing 500 Startups to a new level. Last week I interviewed him at Startup Grind in Palo Alto.

It was a nice week for McClure and the family. 500 Startups had just had its second anniversary, McClure was celebrating his 46th birthday, and one of his earliest investments, Wildfire, had sold to Google for $350MM. Prior to that he wrote two widely talked about blog posts, one on Techcrunch about women in tech investing more, and another where he talked candidly about his entrepreneurial journey and struggle. In April he raised a fresh $50MM fund adding two new partners, and Forbes named 500 Startups one of the top-10 Startup Incubators and Accelerators in the world. It’s been a good few months.

The Journey To 500 Startups

Dave grew up in West Virginia and Maryland where his father was an elementary school music teacher. After slugging through classes and graduating with an engineering and computer science degree at John Hopkins University, he took various programming roles, which led him to the West Coast where he founded his own consulting company called Aslan Computing. It was eventually acquired for under $1MM in what Dave described as, “spending 5-7 years doing a ton of work, for not very much money. It was more like a paid MBA and I wish I’d had that 5-7 years compressed to 1-2 years.” He adds, “There were a lot of things I learned that I would not have gotten as employee 300 at Paypal.”

He joined Paypal in 2001 as a Marketing Director rubbing shoulders with future founders of Valley staples like LinkedIn, Yammer, YouTube, and Yelp. As Dave put it, he’s been ”a witness to genius.” Following stints working with Mint, SimplyHired, and Stanford as a lecturer, he joined Sean Parker at Facebook fbFund in 2008 where he helped close more than 40 investments including Wildfire, Twilio, Bitly, and TaskRabbit.

The details of 500 Startups founding in 2010 are still not totally clear. On Quora Dave explains, “One day a beautiful little unicorn farted, and next thing you know our star was born.” He neither confirmed nor denied this in person (watch the clip above). But what is clear is that it has exploded doing +360 startup investments across the globe. While 500 Startups is often compared to Y Combinator or TechStars, Dave points out those incubators were founded in 2005 and 2006 and have a 4-5 year head start. How quickly McClure’s fund, or as he calls it “startup,” has come into its own is evidenced no better than Dave’s absence in the infamous “Paypal Mafia” story of 2007 when he was relatively unknown, and thus overlooked.

Incubators and Investment Strategy

500 Startups focuses on engineering, design, and marketing. They do a design and UX review within the first two weeks. Generally they invest in 20-25 companies in the incubator program twice each year emphasizing that companies in the program actually work in their office space together in Mountain View. Dave found that with their first batch, “Five companies were amazing, five were miserable, and 5-10 were pretty good. We think the 5-10 that were pretty good got better because they were around the amazing companies. The amazing companies were amazing regardless. The second group models behavior after the first group and they level up.” Another thing that makes 500 unique is that they also invest in companies incubated at YC, TechStars, and others.

500 Startups is doing about 150 investments per year, funding about three companies each week. Why so many investments? As Dave explains it, the typical VC model theory is to invest in 30 companies over 4-years, take board seats, follow on investments with the winners, and ride a few to billion dollar exits and great returns. But usually that’s not what happens. “Most investors think they’re awesome. We don’t think we’re that smart,” Dave says. “But we think somewhere north of 75-100 investments per fund you start to get to predictability. We see who is successful, who figures it out, and invest more with them. Most VCs are thinking too small. There are thousands of ‘small’ businesses, $10MM-$25MM revenue businesses that solve real problems. Give me the rest of the long tail. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning for a viral loop.”

Want an invitation to join? Like most Silicon Valley firms they are referral based. But 500 Startups has a network of 180 mentors and 600 founders that have gone through the program. Get a few of these people to vet and vouch for you, and you will likely get an interview with the team. Ways not to get funded? Wear a banana suit to a Startup Grind tech event and wave a banner with your URL, as we experienced firsthand at Dave’s event.

International and Women

Unlike many VC funds, 500 Startups focuses on international investments as well as female founders. “300MM people live in the US. There are 6.5B outside of it.” What special components do these international entrepreneurs have? Dave says simply with hundreds of millions of people speaking Spanish, Arabic, Mandarin, Hindi, and others it creates opportunties to disrupt markets using learnings from Silicon Valley. They are focused on transaction commerce businesses, subscription businesses, and lead generation businesses using the following formula:

(# Language Block Speakers) * (Current Internet Penetration) * (Average GPD) * (Growth Rates of Language Population)

One final focus for 500 Startups is women founders, investors, and CEOs. Of their 15 employees, seven of them are female and while Dave says there’s not been a conscious effort to hire women, it reinforces their focus. They have funded +50 female CEOs and +100 female founders. Dave has encouraged women in tech to put their money into the arena was widely praised. As part of that, 500 Startups’ WIN Challenge is calling on anyone to make three $5K investments over the next year. Dave says it’s for anyone, but they’re pushing women to do it. So far they have about 120 females signed up for the challenge meaning at least $1.8MM has been committed.

Will these unconventional strategies payoff big returns and massive new disruptive companies down the road? It will be interesting to watch 500 Startups evolution and growth over the next few years as they hit their 500th startup next year and extend beyond that. But now after a 20-year tech career with no end in sight, Dave is on the horizon of what could be his first major founding and financial win. As he wrote on his blog a month ago, “I'm still betting my epitaph will read "late bloomer", and not "failure".”

Last week Wikileaks–remember them?–released a sheaf of documents about the Trapwire security system, which, depending on who you believe, is either a network of cameras being used to spy on everyone everywhere, or an ineffective bust more notable for shady business practices than any successful surveillance.

Is it being used for “monitoring every single person via facial recognition“? Probably not. Doesn’t matter. Let’s not kid ourselves: the point is that as cameras get cheaper and more connected and more ubiquitous, facial recognition gets more accurate, and data-mining software gets better, something like conspiracy theorists’ worst nightmarish fantasies of Trapwire will come to pass. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: this is only a matter of time, and not all that much of it.

Little pieces of the panopticon are already being built all around you. Even the New York Times has noticed this. PrivacySOS has a pretty good summary, too, but seeing as how it’s a whole week old, it’s already quite out of date:

6th circuit today: Gov can ping location of prepaid phones w/o warrant. // 25% of Americans use prepaid phones. (pdf) ca6.uscourts.gov/opinions.pdf/1…—
Christopher Soghoian (@csoghoian) August 14, 2012

Oh, and in case the prospect of ubiquitous cameras with automatic facial recognition connected to enormous databases aren’t enough–if even the ‘floating eye’ military spy blimps now being used to patrol America’s borders, and the surveillance drones being adopted en masse by police forces everywhere, are not yet sufficient to trigger a certain baseline level of paranoia in you–just remember that governments everywhere are busy trying to hack into computers, too.

Consider Duqu, and Flame, and Gauss, and that mysterious payload. Consider FinFisher, described as "Governmental IT Intrusion and Remote Monitoring Solutions" by its distributors Gamma International; recently deconstructed by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, its spoor has been discovered in at least 10 countries to date. Then consider what their successors will look like in five years’ time.

We could and hopefully will build more secure computers, but there’s not a lot we can do about the oncoming surveillance society. The tech is simply getting too good too fast. But for our future to be anything other than dystopian, this surveillance has to be two-way. It may be too much to ask that the powerful have less privacy than the powerless, but at the very least, governments must be at least as subject as their citizens to transparency and surveillance. Of course there are things that they should be able to keep secret–but the same is true of those they govern.

Instead, even relatively enlightened governments are becoming, if anything, more secretive than ever. Did you know that the Obama administration has persecuted more whistleblowers than every other presidency in history combined? Did you know that (PDF) government security classification activities alone cost more than $10 billion a year? These are not exactly statistics that fill me with hope for our panopticon future. In the name of so-called security, we’re charging headlong into a future filled with one-way mirrors behind which the rich spy on the poor, and the strong on the weak. It’s a disconcerting thought.

Image credit: watchingfrogsboil, Flickr.

Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post by Jeffrey Shieh, a senior patent attorney at patent filing provider inovia. I (Alexia) actually completely disagree with him here. Oh well — I should probably just write a post about it.  Yay TechCrunch!

The tech giants are clearly at patent war – Nokia vs. Google, Apple's lawsuits in China, and Facebook vs. Yahoo!, etc. And international patent protection is clearly a vital part of both these companies' defensive and offensive competitive strategies. However, not much is said about how international patent protection does or should factor into the business strategies of startups.  But we know that for many startups, their innovations are the lifeblood of their company.  As such, it is vital for these companies to protect their innovations from competitors by securing intellectual property rights.

Patenting 101

The first place to start is by applying for a domestic patent.  A patent gives the holder an exclusive right to an invention for a set period of time.  Patents are country-specific and are limited to the borders of the issuing country.  For example, a U.S. patent does nothing to prevent infringement in any other country.  This is why it is imperative for startups to also seek as much international patent protection as their budgets can allow.

Unfortunately, foreign patent protection can be quite expensive.  Depending on the size and complexity of the application, the need for translations, and the country or countries an applicant chooses to file into, the lifetime costs for a single application can reach the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars.

However, international patent protection is not something that startups can afford to ignore.  After filing for U.S. patent, there is a limited timeframe available for applying for international patent protection.  So while a startup may only be operating in the U.S. today, if there's a chance that they may be manufacturing in Asia, selling in Europe, or competing with a company in Australia in the future, they must act now to capitalize on that protection.  After all, once the timeframe for applying for international patent protection lapses, the applicant could be precluded from receiving a patent for their own invention.  Therefore, startups can't delay filing and risk losing their IP just to receive some short term cost savings.

Cost Saving Strategies

With these challenges in mind, there are several best practices that startups can employ in order to help guide their foreign patent strategy and obtain broader patent protection, while minimizing costs.

First, you can file a PCT application instead of filing direct via the Paris convention.  If you think you will be filing into more than just 1 or 2 countries, the PCT is a more cost-effective route.  The PCT also offers the advantage of delaying national stage filing costs by at least 18 months from filing your PCT application.  Many applicants use this time to refine the invention, research their markets, and look for licensees or buyers.  If you'd like more information on the PCT process, my company inovia offers a helpful guide on the PCT process, which you can download here.

Second, you should select your countries intelligently.  Not only do you need to know your invention, you need to know where it will potentially be sold and where it can be made in the future.  With this information, you can prioritize the countries you need to file into.  Additionally, you need to know if a country has patent laws affecting your technology.  For example, some countries prohibit the patenting of methods of treatment on human or animal subjects.  Other countries make it very difficult to patent business methods or software.  For these jurisdictions, you may need to draft your claims specifically to overcome these obstacles.

Third, you should ace the patent application process.  I certainly wouldn't expect a startup to know every detail involved with foreign filing, but by having a basic background understanding of the process, you can reduce your filing costs.  Knowing when deadlines are approaching and making sure to provide instructions in advance will help you avoid taking unnecessary time extensions or incurring rush charges.  Also, some jurisdictions (with Europe as the primary example) charge excess claims fees for each claim included in your application over a certain number.  If you are able to reduce your claims, you can avoid or reduce these fees.

Finally, you should explore your options for either bringing IP tasks in house or outsourcing them.  Depending on the amount of work you have in your patent portfolio, it may be more cost effective to pay the salary for an in-house patent attorney, rather than retain outside counsel.  Outsourcing certain services, such as foreign filing or annuity payments, can also be an easy way to reduce your legal fees.

Make sure to research your options for foreign filing and run cost comparisons.  Many steps of the foreign filing process, such as PCT national stage filing and European validation, are largely administrative and can easily be outsourced for a lower cost.  Specialist foreign filing providers, as opposed to working with your U.S. counsel to file internationally, can often offer time and cost savings.

Case Study

As I mentioned above, outsourcing administrative steps of the patent process, such as PCT national stage filing, is an effective way of reducing patent costs without affecting your relationship with outside counsel who would still handle the substantive work later on.

I head up inovia's "Small Business Solutions Team," which works exclusively with inventors and startups to help educate them on the foreign filing process, and I had the opportunity to work with a tech start-up focusing on holography for use in medicine, entertainment and advertising.  They were seeking broad protection into seven countries.  The startup did their due diligence and compared inovia's pricing to estimates from their outside counsel and found inovia's pricing to be significantly lower.

I can't comment on whether this startup would have been able to file into all seven countries had they chosen to work with their U.S. counsel, but if they were constrained by their budget, then there's a chance that they may have forgone vital international protection in order to cut costs.

The message here is simple: startups, while strapped for cash, must think long term and protect the future of their business by securing both domestic and international patent protection. By employing a few simple best practices, they can maximize their patent protection, while minimizing costs.

Image via.

On my last visit to Yahoo at the end of July, it was as if a dark cloud had been lifted. Employees enthuastically lined up to enter the cafeteria in the first week of "Free Lunch". URL's, Yahoo's main cafeteria, was more packed than a typical Tuesday. Many expressed how excited they were about the future of their company.

"I used to worry about my team quitting; not anymore!” said an engineering manager with a big smile.

"I was looking for a job but I am going to stick around for a while!" exclaimed another employee. 

During the regrettable five month reign of former CEO Scott Thompson, Yahoos rarely saw him on campus. In stark contrast to her predecessor, new CEO Marissa Mayer is often spotted in the cafeteria and at FYI (Yahoo happy hours) every Friday when execs showcase their products. You’d be an idiot not to stay a little while, at least to take in the Marissa spectacle.

However, despite atmosphere of excitement due to the arrival of a morale-boosting celebrity CEO, a few Yahoo employees continue to feel trepidation about company strategy, or lack thereof. After all, it's been more than eight months since the company had a clear direction to march toward, and it still doesn’t.

But it seems that the new executive is, smartly, taking a few cues from other well-respected founder-CEOs.

• When Marissa announced free lunch, she channeled the Apple founder by referencing "One More Thing" (Steve Jobs).
• She plans to review and approve each hire (Larry Page).
• She shuns PowerPoint and asks VPs to explain their products by drawing on the whiteboard (Jeff Bezos – when you present to Jeff, you write it in prose).
• AllThingsD reported that she's hiring a COO to run the business side, freeing her up to focus on product and innovation (Mark Zuckerberg).

As a former Yahoo myself, it will be interesting to see what happens to the beleaguered company when a product-driven, consumer-focused CEO is running the show. I, for one, can’t wait to meet her at Disrupt SF.  I also look forward to the day when Marissa finally resolves the decade-old question – “Is Yahoo a technology or a media company?” Because she’s already banned, “What is Yahoo?”

Editor’s Note: Christine Ying is TechCrunch’s new product manager, who (obviously) used to work at Yahoo before she came to TC.

[Image credits: David Geller,

Andreas Weigend, James Duncan Davidson, Guillaume Paumier]

Apigee’s Sam Ramji pointed out to me today that Twitter did a first when communicating with developers yesterday about its new platform policies. For the first time in recent memory Twitter has used a graphic to actually illustrate what it sees as the acceptable and not so acceptable ways to use its API. The graphic is clear and to the point.

When you look at the graphic, one thing is for sure, Twitter wants nothing to do with the enterprise.

Here it is:

The blog post,  and the reaction, to the say the least, is a sure example of the delicate nature of developer relations.  It also reveals a lot about how Twitter sees its business.

Here’s Twitter’s spin. Do you want to develop  a consumer facing Twitter client? Well, you will be under some strict guidelines if so. But if you want to use Twitter for business, you are pretty much free and clear. So that means if you are analyzing tweets for sales people to get new leads then I’d say you are okay. If you want to develop a service that helps marketers target influencers then yes, go for it.

Twitter gives a few examples of what it sees as fine uses of its API:

In the upper-left quadrant are providers of tools that help businesses engage with Twitter including social CRM providers like Sprinklr, HootSuite and Radian6 (acquired by salesforce.com), and integration companies like Mass Relevance, which aggregates and filters Tweets for display on TV.

I’ll add a few others that I think are just fine:

SocialPandas launched this week. It will use data from Twitter and other sources to give sales people better tools for building relationships.

SugarCRM integrated Twitter last year.

Datasift is a powerful Twitter data analysis and business intelligence platform.

Twitter has no interest in the enterprise. For that matter, neither does Facebook.

But  as we well know, enterprise startups do very well when using Twitter and Facebooks as models. Case in point? Yammer sold to Microsoft for $1.2 billion.  Considering that success, I’d say it’s a good thing for the enterprise entrepreneur that Twitter has no interest in the enterprise side of APIs.

According to Bloomberg, Google’s Motorola unit just filed a new patent-infringement lawsuit against Apple with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) in Washington. According to this report, Motorola’s complaint seeks to block Apple from importing the iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and “various Apple computers.” Today’s lawsuit is only the latest in a long series of recent disputes between Apple and Motorola/Google, but it marks the first time that Motorola is filing one of these lawsuits since its acquisition by Google became final in February.

It’s not currently clear what exactly the patents are that Google is trying to defend with this new lawsuit, but we reached out to Motorola and a spokesperson confirmed to us that the company did indeed file a complaint with the ITC today.

We are still waiting to get more details and will update the post once we hear more, but based on what we’ve heard so far, the complaint will focus on technologies Apple uses in virtually all of its current hardware products. The full complaint, Motorola tells us, won’t be available on the ITC’s website until Monday.

Until then, here is Motorola’s official statement regarding this complaint:

"We would like to settle these patent matters, but Apple's unwillingness to work out a license leaves us little choice but to defend ourselves and our engineers' innovations."

It’s worth noting that, as FOSS Patent’s Florian Mueller notes, an ITC judge already issued a preliminary ruling in a previous Motorola vs. Apple case and argued that Apple did indeed infringe on one of Motorola’s patents. The ruling for that case is expected to come down next week. This was a standard-essential patent, though, making an import ban based on the upcoming ruling in this previous case unlikely. Mueller also notes that if Motorola won a ban in this case, this wouldn’t affect the iPhone 4S and new iPad 4G, as these use a Qualcomm chipset that falls outside of Motorola’s patent claims.

Given that we don’t know enough about today’s lawsuit, it’s currently impossible to say if Motorola’s attempt to ban Apple’s imports based on the new lawsuit will have more teeth.

We’re hearing from a reliable source that OnLive’s founder and CEO Steve Perlman finally decided to make an exit — and in the process, is screwing the employees who helped build the company and brand. The cloud gaming company reportedly had several suitors over the last few years (perhaps including Microsoft) but Perlman reportedly held tight control over the company, apparently not wanting to sell or share any of OnLive’s secret sauce.

Our source tells us that the buyer wants all of OnLive’s assets — the intellectual property, branding, and likely patents — but the plan is to keep the gaming company up and running. However, OnLive management cleaned house today, reportedly firing nearly the entire staff, and we hear it was done just to reduce the company’s liability, thus reducing employee equity to practically zero. Yeah, it’s a massive dick move.

OnLive hit the gaming world hard when it launched in 2009. Promising playable games there were lag free, OnLive moved gaming to the cloud. The service took some time to gain traction but finally hit its stride last year with the addition of several top-tier titles. It was rumored in June that even Microsoft considered buying the company. Some even thought OnLive would be a good fit within Sony — until Sony bought OnLive competitor Gaikai last month instead.

"Sony Computer Entertainment will deliver a world-class cloud-streaming service" Andrew House, president and group CEO of SCE said last month. Sony paid $380M for Gaikai, a cloud gaming company with nearly zero brand recognition. OnLive could have gone for a lot more.

For an upstart cloud gaming service, OnLive has done relatively well for itself. The company initially outed only one cloud gaming console, but quickly embraced others. The software works with most Android tablets, ships preinstalled on Vizio TVs (and its new Co Star Google TV), and is available for the iPad and computer desktops.

We reached out to OnLive for comment but the company will neither confirm nor deny the claim. All the PR rep was willing to say was that the aforementioned Vizio Co Star launches today. The company also would not comment on the layoffs but Martyn Williams tweeted seeing OnLive staffers leaving their office carry boxes. These people likely just lost their jobs and equity prior to OnLive’s exit.

Update: OnLive provided TechCrunch the statement below. Like earlier reports suggested, it sounds like OnLive Inc. was dissolved and a new company, OnLive Inc 2 or something of the sort, will continue in its place and is likely backed by new investors. The statement indicates that “a large percentage of OnLive Inc.’s staff” will be hired by this new company, which will then hire more people. But there’s no word on if the original employees completely lost their equity. No matter how OnLive spins this move, it’s still looks shady to me.

We can now confirm that the assets of OnLive, Inc. have been acquired into a newly-formed company and is backed by substantial funding, and which will continue to operate the OnLive Game and Desktop services, as well as support all of OnLive’s apps and devices, as well as game, productivity and enterprise partnerships. The new company is hiring a large percentage of OnLive, Inc.’s staff across all departments and plans to continue to hire substantially more people, including additional OnLive employees. All previously announced products and services, including those in the works, will continue and there is no expected interruption of any OnLive services.

We apologize that we were unable to comment on this transaction until it completed, and were limited to reporting on news related to OnLive’s businesses. Now that the transaction is complete, we are able to make this statement.

Far away from Silicon Valley is another echo chamber in the Ivory Tower, except there’s very little transparency there about how content and ideas spread.

Academia.edu, a social network for researchers, just unveiled an analytics dashboard that’s meant to help scientists and other academics understand how their work is being read and distributed. It’s a difference from an older, more opaque world in which researchers vied to get into elite journals like the New England Journal of Medicine.

“To be a successful academic, it’s becoming as important to have an established web presence as it is to be published in a journal and it’s going to be increasingly critical,” said CEO Richard Price.

To those of us in the tech community, the concept of an analytics dashboard would appear pretty basic. But in the slow-moving world of academia, Price says it has profound consequences.

“Hiring and grant committees know that there is this credit gap where papers are being read, but they haven’t had the metrics to prove that historically,” Price said. “They’d look at which journal you published in and your citations.”

At the same time, it can take citations five years to emerge, he added. Real-time metrics that track mentions on the web and on Twitter could give credibility to a researcher a lot sooner.

“It gives scientists visibility into all of the traffic they’re receiving by country and other factors. It’s super granular and it’s in real-time,” Price said. A professor, for example, will be able to see how many paper downloads they’ve gotten in the last 30 days.

Price said the metrics also preserve reader privacy and are basically in line with what other analytics products offer like geographic data and time spent on the page. Academia.edu, which just picked up $4.5 million in funding last fall from Spark Capital and True Ventures, has 1.7 million members. The site doesn’t yet have a revenue model, although one could imagine premium, subscription products akin to what LinkedIn offers its power users.

“There are about 17 million academics in the world and when you’ve gone beyond about 15 percent of them, there’s probably enough data there to start a revenue model,” Price said.

More than a few AT&T customers got worked up a few weeks back when a peculiar pop-up in iOS 6 Beta 3 pointed to the possibility that the carrier would charge people to use FaceTime over its wireless data network.

Well, that’s officially not that case — AT&T just confirmed in a statement that it won’t be charging its subscribers to video chat over the air. That would normally be great news, but there’s a catch: some people won’t be able to FaceTime over AT&T’s network at all.

Customers who subscribe to one of the carrier’s newfangled Mobile Share plans (which, heads up, don’t launch until the 23rd) will be able to use the service free of charge. Anyone who doesn’t decide to make that switch is out of luck though, and they’ll just have to continue FaceTiming over Wi-Fi as usual.

I can see a few reasons why AT&T would opt to try something like this — company brass probably wanted to try and keep the network as unstressed as possible — but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. When AT&T first announced that it would offer shared data plans a la Verizon, I gave the carrier a pat on the back for leaving its new customers with more plans choices than its rival. After all, they’re great in certain situations, but the fact is that some customers are better served by their tiered or (gasp!) unlimited data plans.

Now those particular users are being shut out of a great new feature in iOS 6 just because they like the plan they already have. AT&T obviously has every right to do this, but man, that’s a tough break for everyone who still has an older data plan. Whether or not Verizon plans to try something similar with its own shared data plan customers remains to be seen, though there isn’t much indication of it so far — the same test that prompted AT&T users to contact the company regarding FaceTime over 3G did nothing when attempted on Verizon hardware. I’ve reached out to Verizon though, and I’ll be sure to update if I hear anything.

Here’s the AT&T statement in full:

AT&T will offer FaceTime over Cellular as an added benefit of our new Mobile Share data plans, which were created to meet customers’ growing data needs at a great value. With Mobile Share, the more data you use, the more you save. FaceTime will continue to be available over Wi-Fi for all our customers.

David Tisch, the well known New York City-based seed investor and advisor, is stepping down from his role as Managing Director of the TechStars startup accelerator. Tisch has been with TechStars since 2010, when he co-founded the program’s New York city location.

He announced the move in a post published this afternoon on his personal blog that read in part:

“…The time has come for me to move on to the next challenge and take a step back from my day-to-day role as Managing Director of the TechStars NYC program.

…So with a deep level of appreciation for the experience and sense of pride, I have chosen to take this less-active role to focus on starting and building new projects. I will continue to be actively involved in TechStars NYC, as a Co-Founder, investor, mentor, and participant in the company-selection process.”

Tisch did not provide details on what he’ll be doing next — he said more news about his next endeavor will be coming “shortly.”

Our own Jordan Crook sat down backstage with Tisch during TechCrunch Disrupt NYC earlier this summer. Watch the video embedded belwo to hear him dish on the NYC startup scene:

Yes, it’s a big day for mobile ad reports, at least at TechCrunch — mobile marketing company Velti just released its report for July.

One of the themes in recent reports has been the relatively slow growth of the new iPad when it comes to ad impression front. In July, however, Apple’s new tablet started to close its gap with the iPad 2 — the older device now accounts for 24 percent of the total tablet impressions tracked, compared to 20 percent for the new iPad. Apple also released the new iPad in China last month, and in the week following, ad impressions from the device increased 150 percent.

Despite that growth, the report also says that for the first time this year, Android took ad marketshare from iOS. The breakdown last month was 58 percent iOS and 42 percent Android, compared to 62-38 in June.

As for ad pricing, Velti says eCPMs fell between June and July, perhaps because of more spending in June as advertisers tried to finish their Q2 budgets. Weather is still the most highly-priced category — the report suggests this may be because of a high frequency of geotargeted ads.

The report is based on data from Velti's Mobclix Exchange, which supposedly serves ads to more than 33,500 apps. You can read the full report here.

If you were told you could listen to the radio at a reasonable level in your cubicle and that you were going to be allowed to keep your stapler, this is probably the tape dispenser for you. The T-EM50 by Kokuyo will spit out tape at pre-determined lengths again and again, ensuring a perfect piece of tape every time.

Why would you need this? I suppose if you want to save tape or need a specific length for closing envelopes. Otherwise, this kind of absolute precision seems like a bit of office overkill. However, considering some Japanese ballpoint pens cost $57, it’s clear that the land of the rising sun is definitely serious about their supplies.

The T-EM50 costs about $200 and will be available in September.

via Press Release via Akiba

The less said about the quality of NBC’s Olympics coverage in the U.S., the better, but in terms of the quantity of live and recorded Olympics video streamed this year, the partnership between NBC and YouTube clearly worked out well. Even by YouTube’s standards, live streaming the Olympics for NBC was a pretty massive undertaking and the company just released new data about its Olympics coverage from earlier this month. At its peak, the service pushed out more than half a million livestreams at the same time. On NBCOlympics.com, YouTube says, viewers watched more than 159 million total streams and just over a third of these came from mobile devices and more than 50% were in HD.

In total, YouTube says, its users across the U.S. and 64 countries in Africa and Asia watched a total of 231 million video streams. The IOC’s YouTube Channel alone was responsible for 72 million of these and the “Team USA” U.S. Olympic Committee Channel registered more than 6.75 million views (though most of these views seem to have come from a few select videos and quite a few of the “Team USA” uploads currently have fewer than 1,000 views).

According to YouTube, the quality of the live video was also “better than ever before, with a 7X improvement in quality based on low buffering and high frame rates.” YouTube doesn’t say what exactly it is comparing this year’s numbers to, so it’s probably a good idea to take this number with a grain of salt..

Reports are hitting that OnLive, the cloud gaming service, laid off the majority of its staff today. Apparently the staff was called in for an all hands on meeting this morning and was promptly shown the door — or something like that. According to Mashable, some staffers could be rehired for the company’s next venture.

We reached out to OnLive’s head of Corporate Communications who promptly replied: “I have no comment on the news other than to say the OnLive service is not shutting down.”

Since OnLive has yet to confirm the layoffs, it’s unclear exactly what’s happening with OnLive. The cloud service could theoretically continue as is with just a skeleton crew. If built properly, the OnLive gaming platform and might just need someone to sit in front of a server log and watch for errors. However, if the reports of layoffs are true, then it’s likely OnLive is coming to the end of its life.

OnLive was founded in 2003 by Steve Perlman but made headlines with its cloud gaming service in 2009. At the time we asked if OnLive was on crack? There was no way it could work, we thought. But work it did. In fact OnLive grew into a legitimate gaming system since its launch.

The timing of the layoffs is strange, too. OnLive just helped Vizio launch the Google TV Co-Star. With OnLive, the Co-Star seemed like a legitimate set-top box. Without OnLive it’s just another Google TV box.

OnLive does more than just gaming, too. The company launched OnLive Desktop at CES 2012, which gives the iPad and Android tablets access to a remotely hosted Windows Server 2008 desktop.

We’ll update as this story develops.

In early 2011, Y Combinator-backed AnyLeaf opened its grocery deal aggregation service to to citizens of the San Francisco Bay Area. Our own Leena Rao (and TC alumnus Greg Kumparak) thought rather highly of it, but it's been over a year since then and the team behind it has had a change of heart.

Today, the company formerly known as AnyLeaf will be officially relaunching with a new name and a new spin on its original mission. CEO and co-founder Jeff Hunter says the company — now called AnyList — still plans to improve the grocery shopping experience, this time with its thoughtful (and free) iOS-only grocery list app.

First things first: existing AnyLeaf aficionados don't need to fret just yet. Hunter doesn't plan on shuttering Bay Area-oriented grocery deals service for the time being, since it doesn't require much effort to keep it running in its current form. That said, don't expect much in the way of changes or new markets (AnyLeaf only works in the SF Bay Area) any more, since the AnyList team will be devoting all their time (and rightfully so) to the eponymous app.

So what of this app? There's no shortage of grocery list apps in Apple's mobile app store, but the AnyList team chose to focus on one particular aspect that other players hadn't yet nailed. The real kicker of the AnyList app formula is its ability to share and update multiple shopping lists in near real-time. It requires a trivial bit of setup (selecting contacts to share lists with) and multiple iOS devices, but once all that's done one touch is all it takes to cross a product off of everyone's list simultaneously.

In case users aren't exactly sure what they should be buying the first place, AnyList also sports a smart recipe system that culls ingredient lists from huge recipe depositories (think Allrecipes, Epicurious, and the like) to blogs (I've never heard of Indian Simmer, but it just got bookmarked). The sheer number of recipe sources is impressive, but equally so is how users can drill down by certain criteria — newness, popularity, main ingredient, etc. The whole package conceptually simple, nicely executed, and as a wannabe chef it's the kind of thing I could see myself using for the long haul.

But why the shift in the first place? According to Hunter, the AnyList app was first created as a feature to supplement the AnyLeaf service because he and his roommate/co-founder/fellow Apple alum Jason Marr often bungled the buying process. Both of them (perhaps naturally) kept separate grocery lists, but since neither of them had any idea what was on the other's lists, they were inevitably faced with multiples of products they both thought they needed. Eventually, after looking at (and being underwhelmed by) a handful of iOS grocery list apps, the pair cranked out a 1.0 release and submitted it Apple back in May.

Humble beginnings to be sure, but the app was quickly featured in the App Store, and now the service boasts over 60,000 users. From then, the team’s choice was clear.

"The traction we've been seeing with AnyList has been so overwhelming that it was clear that doing anything other than focusing completely on it would be foolish," Hunter said.

Editor’s note: Justin Rosenstein is the co-founder of Asana. He'll be speaking at Disrupt SF on the future of work. This article is a precursor to a larger vision which he has offered to share at SXSW; you can vote for his talk here.

When you watch a skilled guitarist play, it's fascinating to see her left hand and right hand doing entirely different things, yet synchronized perfectly towards a common effort. The guitarist can perform complex tasks with many moving parts because she has a central nervous system with a sophisticated, unified brain. Her brain maintains a model of her external environment and goals within it and coordinates her hands to achieve them: One strums the strings to create the notes, the other presses the strings against the frets to set the pitch. The result is beautiful music.

Teams and companies are also able to perform complex projects, because they too have a shared understanding of their world and their objectives. These organizations are like higher-level organisms with disparate parts working together toward a common end, composed of people and departments instead of organs and limbs. But no one would confuse the coordination of the average company — or even the best companies — for the elegance of the guitarist.

But this can change.

Primitive Organisms

Some organizations have "central nervous systems" like those of jellyfish: able to react to stimuli (perhaps with a flurry of email and meetings), but incapable of coordinating a conscious plan. Others seem to suffer from schizophrenia or amnesia. In many cases, the left hand hardly knows what the right is doing — or actually works against it.

This happens because the flow of information in most organizations is notoriously poor. Over the last 100 years, companies have come to evolve organizational structures like middle management, processes like weekly meetings, and technological systems like email. But compared to the sophistication of a human brain, these corporate structures seem hopelessly primitive – the source of constant complaint, even parody. Knowledge of what's been done, what's going on, and what's left to do remains scattered over message threads, grasped fleetingly during meetings, and lost in unstructured documents and folders.

The result is that these organizations and their people devote tremendous effort, energy, and time to keeping themselves in sync: A study by the Boston Consulting Group found that, in the companies with the most complex goals, managers spend an average of 40% of their time writing reports and 30-60% in coordination meetings.

What if these organizations could coordinate themselves as effortlessly and transparently as the guitarist coordinates her fingers and hands? How much more could they accomplish if they had a sophisticated "team brain"? And, emboldened by the confidence in their capacity to execute complex projects with clarity, purpose, and precision, what would they dare to pursue?

Excitingly, I don't think we'll have to wait long to find out.

The Survival Of The Organized

The human brain is a product of natural selection. In the face of scarcity, our hominid great-great-uncles were unable to compete against our sapient great-great-grandparents' abilities to build more elaborate mental models and orchestrate their bodies' movements in more sophisticated ways.

Natural selection applies just as strongly to organizations. Duryea Motor Wagon Company was America's first car manufacturer, but you've probably never heard of it. Duryea withered against Ford in the 1910s and 20s – not because Ford had superior product design, but because Ford's internal coordination systems (like the conveyor-driven assembly line) were more efficient. History is full of organizations that excelled at coordinating the collective action of their people, rendering less organized competitors extinct.

The Evolution Of The Team Brain

We're on the brink of another phase of evolution, where some organizations will thrive and others will fail to survive.

In a knowledge economy, natural selection favors organizations that can most effectively harness and coordinate collective intellectual energy and creative capacity. The same evolutionary force that produced sophisticated individual brains for human beings will produce more sophisticated "team brains" for companies.

This is already happening. To achieve their ambitious missions, the world's greatest companies have been investing in more evolved team brains for years. Apple has the legendary Radar, a closely-guarded internal tool that helps keep knowledge and tasks centralized, indexed, and accessible to teammates. Facebook has Tasks, a collaborative task tracker that Dustin and I had the privilege of designing and prototyping, and other home-grown internal systems that are considered a key part of Facebook's secret sauce.

Those are internal tools, though; their power is accessible only to the companies that built them. But that’s changing. Asana and complementary services are bringing the evolved team brain to the entire world. In great companies like Twitter, Uber, Airbnb, Foursquare, and LinkedIn, people already add information to and extract insight from these systems much the same way our hands and brain exchange signals.

Advanced Organisms

Just as the mind emerges from the actions of individual neurons and their cooperation, the success of an organization emerges not only from its individual participants, but also from the interplay between them. Indeed, people's individual creative capacities are multiplied in the context of their connection to a greater, well-functioning whole.

The next stage of organizational evolution will include not only leaps in communication technology, but also fundamental changes to companies' processes and basic organizational principles. The rigid top-down corporate hierarchies left over from the manufacturing revolution are giving way to flatter, more flexible, more agile structures that more closely resemble the fluid, intricate relationships between neurons.

As evolution continues its unyielding march, we will approach a world where the most impressive organizations on Earth coordinate their collective actions perfectly, without effort, like a healthy brain. This is a future in which every knowledge worker has exactly the information they need in front of them at every moment, doing only the intrinsically-creative, flow-inducing work that cannot be automated, each contributing something completely unique, yet as in sync with the others as the hands of a guitarist.

The result will be beautiful music – at organizational scale.

Further out, we see a future in which not just isolated companies, but all of humanity operates seamlessly as a single harmonious symphony, setting shared goals and accomplishing dreams beyond what we can imagine today. But, if you're interested, that's a topic for another time.

The weekend is coming up and that means one thing. I have to do my expenses.

It’s time to organize my receipts and make an expense sheet and invoice document. After that comes the scanning – standing over the printer, making sure the wireless is working so it syncs with my MacBook Pro.

That will be followed by the email with the PDF files for all of the above. That will take care of my Saturday morning.

But today I had a briefing with OfficeDrop which now has a service that works with ExpenseMagic for scanning and creating expense documents from an iOS, Android device or your desktop. It seems good enough to offer the potential for eliminating much of the manual work I do in preparing expense reports during my precious weekends.

OfficeDrop has scanning and optics in its DNA. The company started as a service you could use to send your mail for scanning. The model did not work. People wanted to do the scanning themselves.  So they pivoted, built a strong search engine to go with the scanning and now offer  a combined storage and collaboration service. They see themselves fitting between Box and Dropbox, offering a service for small business people for easily scanning receipts, ideally from a mobile device. Google Drive is also seen as a competitor.

In March of last year, OfficeDrop had 10,000 registered users. It took three years for the company to get to that point. It then launched an iPhone app. Today the service has 160,000 users. People love the mobile app to scan receipts on the go.

Expense Magic takes receipts and creates an expense sheet that is available on the date you choose. It reads the receipt and processes it into an expense sheet.

To use the combined services, you need to create accounts with both OfficeDrop and ExpenseMagic. In ExpenseMagic, you connect your account with OfficeDrop. An ExpenseMagic folder then appears in OfficeDrop. ExpenseMagic does not offer an Android app but you can sign up for the service and use OfficeDrop to scan receipts and then place in the ExpenseMagic folder.

Here’s a demo:

I gave it a try. I downloaded the app on my Android, took a photo of a receipt and moved it to the Inbox. I then signed up for ExpenseMagic and connected the account with OfficeDrop. I can now see the image of the receipt in OfficeDrop and the ExpenseMagic Folder. I placed the receipt in the folder and then looked for it in ExpenseMagic but did not see it.

Healy Jones of OfficeDrop he had a similar issue when he first used the combined services. He said ExpenseMagic does the processing over night so don;t be surprised if you do not see it immediately.

I like this service and will see how it works for my next trip. The user interface could use some improvement. It took me a while to figure it all out. If I did not have Healy to contact I am not sure I would have continued with trying to sync the services. All it needs to say is check back later to see your report.

Um, we leverage crowdsourcing and um, like, people’s social graph to like find out about new discoveries and the people and places you might find interesting. Right, OK. But what do you actually do? We tap into Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn to personalize our recommendation engine which generates the topics. And then, you know, you can like follow those and learn new things. It’s really addictive!

Oh, for god’s sake, what the hell are you? A mobile app? A digital magazine? A social network? Can you please just back up and start from the beginning and tell me what you’ve built? Who’s it for? What problem does it solve? We, um. Um. Well, it’s like the Facebook News Feed, but better – because it’s personalized to your interests, not your friends. CLICK. Hello? Are you there? …. I think they hung up.

Sound familiar? Maybe you need pitch practice.

I get it, really. Pitching is hard. It’s scary. Reporters can make or break the reception your startup receives, and getting investors can be the difference between seeing your dreams realized or having to close up shop. But wow, some people really do need help with their pitches.

The problem isn’t just one of eloquence, or having not thought through the hard questions, it’s also one of not knowing how to deliver a concise pitch. You’ve been knee-deep in this thing for months, maybe years. You know it so well, that you’re just itching to talk about its every little nook and cranny. But before anyone can admire every little brushstroke of your masterpiece, they generally want to know what it is. They want to know why you built it. They want to know, well, a lot of things. And you need to be able to tell them plainly and simply.

And because practice makes perfect, here’s something that can help with that: PitchPhone.

Created by DidThis and Addy founder Francis Dierick, who quit his job last year to work on startups, PitchPhone is a service that helps you practice your pitches over the telephone. (<— See what I did there? Be concise!) The service works in one of two ways: either you call PitchPhone and answer the question it asks you, or you can have PitchPhone call you at random times during throughout the day to ask you questions about your startup. Each time, you have 30 seconds to answer.

Dierick says he was inspired to create a tool that would help him practice pitching when he was planning to apply for Y Combinator with DidThis. At first, he built an iPhone app with 100 startup questions to help him out. But he soon realized that an app alone wouldn’t help him turn pitching practice into a habit, so he built the PitchPhone hotline instead. The hotline has been programmed with 100 different, tough questions about your startup, and currently works only within the U.S.

Right now, it’s free for the first 1,000 inbound calls, but there are pricing plans starting at $4.99/month for those who want PitchPhone to automatically dial them throughout the day. Dierick says he’s working to add international support, toll-free numbers, improved voice quality and support for call recording.

Ready to practice? Dial +1 (209) 215-2160 and tell that robo-voice guy why you’re going to change the world!

This is probably not the Google+ API you have been waiting for, but Google just announced the launch of version 1.2 of its Hangouts API, which comes with a number of significant new features for developers who are building products on top of Google’s group video chat service. In addition, Google also just launched private messages in Hangouts as an experimental feature.

Hangouts API 1.2

Among other things, the updated API now gives developer more control over which guests in On Air hangouts appear during a video broadcast. Google itself uses this feature for its Hangouts On Air Cameraman app. The updated API now also provides developers with more information about a hangout, including the topic, preferred locale and the YouTube ID for the recorded video.

Other new features include the ability to add sound to a participant’s audio stream. Google says this could be used to add a laugh track, applause, music or a sound notification to a video stream.

There are a number of smaller changes as well and you can find a more detailed rundown of all the changes here.

Private Messages In Hangouts

As for the experimental private messages in Hangouts, which were developed by Google Interns Mairin Chesney and Anthony Tordillos, the feature pretty much works as you would expect it to. To send a private message, you just type “"/to [their name] [your message]" to get started. Tordillos also notes that “you don't need to type their full name, just enough so that it's not ambiguous who you mean. Type "/users" to see the nicknames you can use for each person in the Hangout.” This feature should start rolling out in the next few hours.

Google, of course, still remains hesitant to roll out a full read/write Google+ API. Given Twitter’s recent changes to its API, now would probably be a good time for Google to start giving developers more opportunities to develop on top of its social platform, but given the recent public statements by the Google+ team, chances are that isn’t going to happen anytime soon.