Wired State

The Squatter

Did you read about the kid who squatted at AOL after his start-up cash from Imagine K-12 ran out?

Richard Byrne hung out in the hallways dodging security guards on rounds, ate the catered food, slept on company couches and showered at the company gym -- they have all that stuff like Google for the employees.

This was so he could "live his dream" which consisted of making a web site called ClassConnect about helping teachers share lesson plans.

He wound up getting another $500,000 from investors -- I wonder who?

The problem is that while he was mooching off AOL and preparing for his "second round," he was busy undoing other people out of their livelihoods.

His site seems to stress sharing, rather than selling class plans.

There's a raging debate about whether or not such plans constitute intellectual property -- it was based on this article in the Times and whether it should be the property of the individual teacher or the school that makes the setting possible -- the platform, if you will. Sound familiar?

The thing is, there are already teachers selling to other teachers at Teachers Pay Teachers without first becoming the darling of Silicon Valley (although Pando Daily has written about them). Good!

And it seems no venture capitalists were harmed -- or enriched - with this business:

With most of the growth occurring in the last 18 months, it is clear TeachersPayTeachers is a prime target for funding at very favorable terms. However, Edelman made it clear that after his experiences with Scholastic, he is hesitant to accept funding. Instead, he is working on growing the site organically, unless funding becomes necessary to accelerate growth.

And other sites like this one where lesson plans are sold in PDF form. You cannot stop a market that wants to exist, where a willing seller meets a willing buyer instead of a coerced sharer meeting an indifferent slurper.

I'm all for teachers selling their lesson plans. It is their intellectual property. Many of them go to great lengths to add in their life experience and creativity to these lessons. They're working in soul-less situations in the public schools where all kinds of rewarmed Marxist drivel is thrust on them and the existency of teaching to the test. If they get something creative wedged in AND can sell it, great!

So why is somebody giving $500,000 to this squatter kid to make something that looks like yet another share-bear trying to "disrupt" good business?

Byrne wants to "crowdsource" lesson plans rather than reward the individual's innovation and hard work in a free marketplace.

Why?

 

 

What Kind of Ad Thingy is Facebook Testing Now?

If you've been on Facebook the last two days, you may have noticed that instead of the steady stream of ads for correspondence schools and men or women in your age group, there's a different kind of "ad" which is an advertisement for something totally generic not related to a company that you can "like". They're just key words.

Last night it was "Jesus Christ" and "walking" that came on my page, possibly because I put a religion in my profile (Catholic) and mentioned going on a hike or something in my posts and pictures.

Today I've got "God" and "horseback riding," although I don't think I've been on a horse since I was five years old. I think it's probably from all those posts about Turkmenistan, homeland of the famous Ahal-tekhe race horses, and Berdymukhamedov riding on a horse, possibly.

"God" already has more than 6 million "likes," but you wonder how He is going to hold out, with "horseback riding" already getting "2 million" and "sex" (if that is displayed) probably slated to get 850 million.

What is this all about? Well, it's Facebook testing some kind of new key-word advertising thingie that will be the salvation of social media -- seeding ads into key-words that people will "like". We don't know how exactly they'll do this, but it's the rabbit that Mark Zuckerberg has to pull out of the magic hat of the Facebook IPO.

Everyone is watching to see how he is going to turn the IPO wealth ($19 billion) which led to a lot of broken hearts for investors who weren't inside the winner's circle but which enables Zuckerberg now to do various things -- like poach Apple engineers; like buy or make a phone of his own to be a branded Facebook phone which the cool kids say will suck -- but which most people would buy, like they buy smart phones now on the basis of how they are displayed in stores with the Facebook app already bundled into them.

And do whatever it is they are doing with these generic "like" words.

What will that thing be and will we hate it?

As I said, I don't care what they do, as long as they cut me in on the monetarizing like Google's AdSense. I want a FaceSense or an AdFace and I'm good.

But knowing how Silicon Valley works, I bet they won't do anything of the sort, cutting in the masses that they prefer to provide free accounts in exchange for surrendering masses of personal data and free content-production labour.

Well, masses of personal data that isn't "semantic". As I said, I don't like horses. I just happened to have written probably a half dozen articles about Turkmenistan involving horses that were linked on my FB via Twitter posts.

Right now, when a friend or relative "likes" something out there like the store Target, I see their "liking" of this brand when I go over to look at a picture and its comments, for example. I might then add my "like". What that gives the store is hard to see -- and maybe that's why GM pulled out $10 million of ads because they didn't see it, either. We can all "like" endlessly something that we might not click through to even see, let alone buy.

Hence the Groupon coupon thing and the deals and steals -- but there has gotta be another way.

 

Who Should Govern the Internet? Not the ITU, but Not NGOs Either

Next week, Congress will hold a hearing on international control of the Internet.

This rather arcane topic hasn't gotten the juices flowing of all the kids fearing takedowns of their Tumblr blogs in the way SOPA has but some of the leading "freedom fighters" like Rebecca MacKinnon have spoken out against having the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) run the Internet.

As we all know from hoary Internet legend, once upon a time the Internet was created by geeks at the US military, and then graciously handed over to their fellow geeks in industry and academia who decided it was "better" if not the US government, but an international non-profit society of professionals would run it, ostensibly without partisan bias.

So there is ICANN, which is supposed to concern itself only with certain very technical issues like naming convention and domains -- but of course, this rapidly becomes political as any "society of professionals" will have to grapple with the ongoing, central dispute of our time, which continues to be (whether you like it or not, or whether you feel it is cool or not), capitalism versus communism. Recently, the fight was over whether business domains like .cocacola could be added for a price. Long-time advocates of the "commons" as a collectivist dream like Esther Dyson objected, but it went ahead anyway because business funds Internet growth and this is what they themselves need for growth. There are other international standards bodies with other issues.

The world conference of the ITU this month sparked a few appeals, notably from a coalition of human rights groups. These included the usual suspects who themselves want to control corporations who actually provide the Internet, i.e. insisting, with freedom of expression trumping freedom of association in their minds, that Amazon be forced to store WikiLeaks and that MasterCard process payment for WikiLeaks, even though this Leninist anarchist group, now publicly taking the Kremlin's side this week on Syria, has incited the crime of stealing classified cables from the US government and incited the harm of the sources mentioned in them.

So Rebecca MacKinnon speaks out against the ITU running things, as do some other groups, but their solution is merely to get the ITU to cut them in. Hence, this appeal coordinated by Human Rights Watch and others leaning toward the "progressive" agenda (which includes government interference in the form of imposition of "net neutrality").

Yes, every international body should have NGO input and be more transparent about their deliberations and documents. This is always the case. So sure, ask for that at ITU. But what is the ultimate goal? The goal is to impose the "multistakeholder approach" rather than have states decide -- and that needs to be unpacked, as it is merely a stalking horse for the "progressive" agenda.

The "multistakeholder" approach is attractive to those who a) want to get rid of the oversized influence of hostile states like Russia, China, Iran, Saudia Arabia, etc. and balance it out with other kinds of forces b) want corporations in the tent, especially if they are cool corporations they like, such as Google; c) want their own NGOs to have influence, of course.

It replaces one problem with another, however -- the corporations have no democracy among their users, and the NGOs don't represent multiple forces in society such as a parliament would. They usually represent the international jet-set of "progressives" who bother with these sorts of meetings and have the funds to attend them and draft proposals.

"Multi-stakeholderism" never impresses me because it's merely a way for one set of lobbyists to do what they can't get done lobbying their own states or other states. It's not more authentic of "peoplehood" -- it's just a different form of lobbying. All talk of "the global south" ends up being merely yet another foil to put in progressive lobbyists, not the authentic global south.

What NGOs should be doing isn't merely demanding entry to the process but coming up with specific goals about what they want states *not* to do -- in other words, be transparent about their own agendas. In general, the task here should be affirming the "negative rights" -- how to keep state censorship, control, etc. out of the Internet's free realm. They should not be about fighting anti-piracy legislation under the guise of "freedom of expression".

The problem is that MacKinnon's coalition, Global Network Initiative, doesn't just want to fight for the "negative" rights but wants state intervention on certain goals they do like, such as "net neutrality," where they have partially succeeded (although not yet on mobile, so there is hope to keep them at bay).

I was disturbed to see that the special rapporteur on the media at the Organization on Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) took a position praising the Netherlands' new law on "net neutrality" -- something it should have stayed out of. "Net neutrality" is not an OSCE goal or a freedom goal; it's a consumption and business problem that free markets in free societies solve. Go0gle and its lobbyists in outfits like GNI and the Fight for the Future (which has a new astroturf campaign for freedom run by the same old anti-copyright forces funded by Mitch Kapor that have run all these campaigns for a decade) are merely converting the consumption/bandwidth/business issue to a "freedom" one as it is in their own business interest.

The Internet Governance Project, a group of evidently "progressive" academics who don't display on their website where they get their funding, is predictably dismissing "the threat" from the ITU which they call "a paper tiger".

They think the threat to the Internet doesn't come from China or Iran or Russia operating through the ITU, they think it comes from... the Washington think-tank CSIS. That's because CSIS has set up a scary...task force (!)...to become involved in these issues. Good for CSIS!

Internet Governance Project gets upset at any effort to discredit "multi-stakeholderism" (themselves and their own ideological influence).

Lurking under all the objections to CSIS are the old stories -- loathing of commerce and US leadership in the world, even as commerce on the Internet as it is now is welcomed.

IGP sneers at any concern about global terrorism and hostile states like China and Russia attacking the Internet itself and their enemies such as the US. They think this is old-fashioned Cold War thinking that is out of date in our modern age.

It's too bad that Russia itself is out of date still mired in the Soviet mentality that fuels the Cold War largely on their side. Which state threatened to launch a missile attack against other states recently? Not the US, but Russia. Which state supplies $1 billion in arms to Syria? Not the US, but Russia. That's a reality that IGP progs can't concede.

But ask Ustream about Russia and you will see where the real war in cyberspace is going on despite IGP's claims of the happy lightweight Internet governance still working fine.

Ustream has suffered three very powerful and coordinated attacks in the last month, all via a Russian user's account who was an independent citizen journalist covering the demonstrations.

Journalists such as those at Daily Beast still frame the question as "Did the Russian Authorities Shut Down Ustream"?

But Brad Hunstable, the CEO of UStream, who happens to be a West Point graduate, said it was "highly coordinated" and left no doubt that only a state could organize this level of an attack. “It’s an attack on the freedom of the Internet” said Hunstable.

It's always the case that even when obvious Chinese government attacks are made, that the media and experts on the Internet leave it open to doubt. This was said about attacks on Google's servers, which ultimately forced Google to leave China, while WikiLeaks later revealed that it was a Chinese official who was disgruntled about how he appeared in search (it's too bad this information had to come through the crime of WikiLeaks and not journalists being more curious about their own evasive and ambivalent insistence that these attacks aren't really government controlled).

Google probably has never forthrightly conceded that they were attacked by the Chinese state itself; these companies always leave this vague because they don't want to publicly admit it and thereby declare war.

But war is already underway, and the US decision to fight it as a state is the right thing to do; there is a new office of the US military and a number of programs related to the need for this fight. IGP dismisses this as war-mongering "security theater". Ustream takes it seriously and fights back by even making a special Russian channel.

IGP speaks of the CSIS critique of weak Internet governance structures, and says "to blame them for not facilitating a rapid U.S. military response to hypothetical cyber attacks seems dangerously wrong-headed."

I'm not sure CSIS was actually demanding that some pallid UN committee weaponize for US attacks. Yet we live in a world where the militaries and intelligence agencies of Russian, Chinese, Iran, etc.  are *already* in a rapid military response *already* launching military attacks. We're supposed to hum in a committee with engineers while that goes on, and the progressives remain in denial?

Military attacks require military responses, full stop.

There is a persistence by the geeks and their fan bases in perceiving the Internet as "special". As an "autonomous realm" that should not be marred by states or corporations.

When it comes to shipping, air traffic, postal, etc. communications, there are various international bodies in and out of the UN that manage standards, best practices, disputes. None of those bodies actually resolve the worldwide conflict between capitalism and communism (now technolibertarianism and technocommunism). None of them actually govern shipping, rails, mailing, etc.

But those avenues of communications are easier to govern because they are self-contained channels that states and corporations can control easily. While non-state actors attack them with hijacking or terrorism, this is rare.

Meanwhile, the Internet itself is more fluid and open and subject to constant attack through viruses and DDOS attacks. It's a problem some would like to see more like water and global climate change than like shipping, yet I don't believe it requires "special status" as some sort of "different" human artifact that shouldn't be governed by the rule of law which is based on state sovereignty and cooperation with other states under negotiated international law.

We don't have a "multi-stakeholder approach" to international postal standards or to international shipping management. NGOS aren't fighting to get in to audit the Universal Postal Union's deliberations.

So it's merely because some NGOs see this ground as a place to fight their political fights for their political agenda of demands consistent with their worldview advocating world governance.

 

 

 

 

 

http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/229231-house-to-hold-hearing-on-international-control-of-the-internet

Why Google is Screwed and Facebook Will Win on Mobile: Scoble

About a year ago when I went to last year's TechCrunch Disrupt, my main take-away was that apps and app search outside the ambit of Google were going to pose a real challenge to Google. It seemed so obvious to me that all the searches people were doing and all the data being harvested were not on Google's servers and were not therefore part of Big Ad. I even had a brief encounter with Google VP Marissa Mayer about this question, asking her if it would be a problem for Google.

She dismissed the challenge because she said the apps were only searching for other apps and people would still have to go to a web site for content. I said that they wouldn't, they would live in the apps. She said "Someone will do this well," in a way that suggested either Google would, or somebody was working on it now that Google would buy -- that it, she sounded very imperious and assured.

Few seemed to be focused on this challenge to Google, but surely Google itself had to be, which is why it produced the Android and bought other things or did other things related to apps. But the Android just hasn't done as well -- people don't like open source products and prefer the polish of Apple. There is more innovation at Apple and gravitating to Apple; the Android hasn't attracted as many interesting apps. This is the fact that dispels the open source myth -- open source as some big, free commons where the innovators will always come and excel. It doesn't happen.

This year, it was even more clear just how much data all these apps harvest and keep on their servers, not on Google's servers (or Amazon's servers, but I don't think that means Amazon gets to look at the data or mine and use it.)

So it was interesting to finally hear one of the official experts of the tech world say this: Robert Scoble, on the Gilmore Gang (which I seldom listen to because it is so ingroupy, long and boring), put it very starkly and urgently. And the others strangely didn't seem to get it.

"Google does not have the relationship with Foodspotting, and Runkeeping and Spotify and Ways. Google does not have the API to study the data coming from these mobile apps," said Scoble.

These apps run alongside the Facebook page and you see your friends doing things on it and you click and do them too. And of course, this is all coming from an app via Facebook gathering the data.

The others in that day's Gillmore Gang conversation didn't seem to accept the premise. Spotify is reporting what we're listening to, but not reporting it to Google. "Why is that important?" asks one. Well, so they can pitch you the ad better.

Scoble saw the Google eyeglasses as part of a marketing gimmick to make it appear that Google is making futuristic things and has a more interesting future for us than Apple. He also saw that it would have to get more information from sensors to give the glasses a context. He described some device being tested that was gathering everything about how he moved -- when he ran, when he got into his own car, when he got into somebody else's car, when he went to church or the store or a kid's basketball game. 

That would have to be related to Google's navigation, and as one of the investors said, Google's navigation is like no other -- you can be in the woods and it will help you walk out; you can tell how long your bus ride will be; it homes in on you and shows you as a blinking dot on a map and keeps rolling the map out in real time. I didn't realize this isn't available on an Apple phone because Apple doesn't want it there -- that would of course enable Google to scrape data from Apple's customers that Apple would rather have.

I would highly recommend listening to the video towards the end at 63:02 -- it's like a cameo view into the future, and a very disturbing one.

Keith Teare, who jokingly described himself as a venture communist on the show, said that despite that more precise view of the user that the apps might garner, "The ad will be hated just as much." Well, maybe.

Scoble seems to think there is some brand new form of advertising based on the vast treasure trove of data FB has about us that will be coming to mobile.

People are skeptical because they think users bat away mobile ads even more than on the web -- I see the reality on the dashboard at Adsense, however, is that people click on mobile ads even more than on pages simply because they are accessing content more on phones than sitting at a computer these days. That isn't my behaviour, but it is for more and more people.

The tablets can simulate the look of turning magazine pages and put full-page ads on them; what will mobile do? More games, for one, and maybe the awful gamification, but I really have to wonder what "new thing" could be brought to advertising.

Currently, Facebook pitches me ads that have nothing to do with what I am really interested in buying because it is drawing static data off my profile as it has rigidly set it up for me to fill out, and possibly key-word searching my posts.  So I get an ad for some correspondence school to get a masters in human rights, even though I have absolutely no intention, and have never written any such intention, of going back to school, online or off.

Says Scoble, "Google has Android, it knows where you are, navigation, but doesn't know the CONTEXT." Well, Facebook isn't terribly good at picking up that context, either.

"Name an app that doesn't have an FB integration into it. When FB starts to monetarize, it will accelerate," says Scoble.

Steve Gillmore concedes this, but he concedes it with the heavy sign of the technocommunist he is.

"Facebook Connect is probably the most successful software in history, followed by Twitter Connect. They are the on-ramp for this new kind of e-commerce. That's going to be enormous," he admits. Indeed. He would have preferred that we all be collectivized on Diaspora and...what was the name of that open-source Twitter-like thing he used to tinker with all the time? But it was not to be...

Scoble thinks in three months, we'll see a new kind of advertising network come out of Facebook. Well, as I've been saying, it better be Adface like AdSense that lets me monetarize the content of my FB pages, or I will not think much of it. More ads for dating men age 55-65 are not going to cut it.

"Apple and Google have not built this market, Facebook has. The market is rewarding them for that," said Scoble about the IPO.

I'm getting a bit sick of discussing an IPO for stock that I didn't have the inside price on and couldn't afford even now as it decreases in value, but the point seems to me, despite the wailing of the Guardian and many do-gooders, that Facebook did exactly what it needed to do. It got money from the public to grow its business. It unloaded the stock of employees it needed to cash out to keep motivated. It unloaded the stock for angels and VCs. The rest of the public got screwed, but then, they could just hang on to the stock and it will likely increase in value if in fact Facebook "executes," as the geeks say, on its mobile marketing scheme.

"Facebook shows a future where Google is less important," says Scoble -- even though Scoble himself has largely moved his blogging with commenting to G+ -- he doesn't let as many comments come through on Facebook. As for Twitter, I don't remember the last time I saw him there.

Scoble talked about a trip to Petaluma where using the app Ways, he would get traffic conditions in a way Google navigate couldn't give him -- social news about where accidents were, etc.

"Googles is not giving it to me, the app companies are; they have data tha that Google does not have. Period," said Scoble, and that has been my point. 

I don't use apps a fraction of what he does because I find them all laggy and clunky on our Androids. It seems like you spend a lot of time on a smart phone constantly shutting off apps to make sure they don't use up the power. It's all a nuisance.  I don't have a need for it, if I'd prefer to think when I'm out walking around and only go on the Internet while at home or in an office.

Really, Scoble couldn't be more emphatic about this -- and I wonder when he will blog this so it will get more attention -- the information is locked inside the less-viewed Gillmor Gang video.

"Google doesn't know I listened to Skrylix on Spotify on the way to Petaluma; Google doesn't know what Foodspotters shows, which is that I'm at a sushi restaurant. Google is fucked! Facebook has that data!"

I suddenly realized why Google may have bothered grabbing data from wireless connections like emails and content snippets while it is out ostensibly doing Street View.

It can't get that data from mobile phones and apps any other way.

All the apps are published on FB, Google cannot see that data. Google has to go and crawl it we give it permission -- and that means having an Android phone, not an i-phone from Apple or another company.

"Larry Page complains that FB is not giving up their data," says Gillmor. "Google has a problem."

It's why the geeks, including himself for years, who are Google-centric if not Google engineers themselves have loudly demanded social media to be "open" and that everybody be able to port data in and out -- so that Google could do the same thing and have everybody's data, too.  I never bought the line; it is the technocommunist line, and the only way we can have any semblance of freedom and privacy is if there are multiple big entities vying for us and competing with each other. The commons is not the answer in the way they imagine; the commons will be built up by walled gardens and choice, not collectivization.

Now the collectivization is not to be (you can see Scoble arguing with others mourning the death of the common web on his blog) -- but Google can hardly sit still with this for long. If even I've noticed it and especially Scoble has noticed it and dramatically expressed it, and probably hundreds of others, they will have to "do something".

Somehow, I don't see people adapting to the G0ogle glasses, but they might rush them out as a glorified i-phone with the screen in a flip-top or welded into one of the eye pieces to the side as you see in prototypes. And Google will probably buy up some of these apps so they can get the data.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fast-Tracking the White House Innovation Fellows on the Geek Circuit

TechCrunch writes that the new White House innovation fellows program, which is part of the US Government's Digital Strategies which I discuss here, is "flooded" with applications.

Well, there's 600.

Normally, with what we could call the "legacy" White House Fellows program there are 1,000 applications. A number like 600 or even 1,000 is not a "flood" but that's understandable, given that most people cannot stop their lives and go work even for a stipend for the federal government for six or twelve months.

So now on top of that program, which could include computer programmers like any profession, there will be a special, accelerated add-on just for geeks.

I was surprised that Todd Park didn't explain the new Innovation Fellows by analogy with the White House Fellows (maybe because someone might wonder why geeks were getting an inside track).

That's a program I know something about, because back in the 1990s, I made it as a National Finalist to the White House Fellows program -- the last batch of 35 or so from which they pick 16 or so. It's very tough and very competitive and I never expected to get beyond the regional competition because you are competing against everybody from physicians who are curing cancer to Navy SEALS -- it's a program for mid-career professionals.

The regular White House Fellows program accepts applications in January, then in March, you have the regional finals, then if you are selected, you apply to the national finals by May, and the final competition is in June. So there are about six months for the judges to check through you application -- and as you are going to be working in the White House, your background is examined as well.

I struggled as best I could during three days of final examination by the judges, surrounded by people who had circumnavigated the globe -- twice -- on homemade rafts and who fed all the homeless of San Francisco as a hobby while they rehabilitated abused children and published books. My claim to fame was that I was self-employed and had translated a lot of books and worked on a lot of human rights cases.

I felt I might have a shot at this when Ted Sorensen, one of the judges, began complaining about Yegor Gaidar's economic shock therapy and I countered by explaining that in fact it hadn't been implemented as planned given all the remaining subsidies and was merely a subject of media hysteria.

But then I had a brain freeze when Gen. Wesley Clark (!) asked me if I could name my favourite cabinet member in the Bush Administration. I thought about Jack Kemp, wondering if I could make an analogy from a field I knew better, that he was a lot like Politburo member Yegor Ligachev -- they threw him at housing figuring that would keep him out of harm's way. I was crawling mentally through other names I might mention and the pages just weren't coming up. Having to talk my way out of a corner, I suddenly burst out with a brain wave: "Bush himself was my own favourite member in the Bush Administration's cabinet," I ad-libbed, even though I didn't care for Bush and couldn't think of a single thing to say why he'd be my "favourite". Gen. Clark nailed me there, even though I  answered his question about Chinese-Soviet relations OK.

It got worse. Soon I was being asked to devise a program to employ inner-city youth by one of Hillary's old room-mates and girlfriends, who also confronted me about a typo on my application.

By contrast, the Innovation Fellows has been announced with only weeks from the deadline, and likely no opportunity for either regional finals or rigorous questioning. They just need people in the program to show it off. They also promise something that White House fellows don't promise -- networking for anybody who even bothers to apply, even if they aren't chosen or even if they are interested in apps, but can't apply to the fellows now.

They can do this because there are conveyer belts and revolving doors already well placed between Silicon Valley and the federal government.

As for the projects they will work on (you don't get to think up your own), they all sound pretty anodyne -- one-button downloads of your health info or other info the government may have on you.

Here's one that does have promise, as Frederic Lardinois at TechCrunch has explained:

3. A PayPal for foreign aid, the “20% Campaign.” The federal government has a nasty habit of losing crates of cash and foreign aid while paying security forces and contract workers in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Park and VanRoekel hope the new system can better track the money trail, and therefore reduce waste, fraud, and abuse. One study suggests that India could save billions with electronic transfers, and the savings could be just as significant for the U.S

You know, I wish these geeks would FIRST work on a secure micropayments system for the Internet itself so that people other than themselves might be paid on it, before turning their eyes to poor people overseas who give them a bigger flash of self-importance.

But this is the Holy Grail of the Better-Worlders at Silicon Valley -- a way to put money into the hands of poor Third World people and by-pass governments with bureaucratic agencies like USAID or even NGO contractors. That is, that system when anyone of us can send money to someone in Zimbabwe to help them survive starts with systems like this where the federal government at least tries to deter waste on its own foreign aid.

Naturally, there are analog governance problems galore with these systems that you'd need entire other White House Fellow programs to fix. What happens when the engineers and coders all throughout the loop tap in and start stealing and diverting the electronic funds? All you have to do is think about Anonymous, which includes people working in the federal government and every other corporation in America, and how they took down Stratfor, claimed they would take from the rich and give to the poor, but in fact, as records of victims show, bought themselves the latest World of Warcraft edition or sent themselves cash advances.

Next, what happens when wealth is on phones? Phone holders become more vulnerable to highway robbery, abduction, torture, and killing as robbers then get their passwords and steal their gadgets and identities.

After that, what happens to the little economies of poor places that thrive on personal relations and aren't invaded by "economies of scale" and more globalized aggressive business? One guy with a phone and electronic cash deliveries puts everybody in his village selling melons out of business in a click. And the other people make a living...how? Charging cell phones in their huts on electric generators? Or will they sell their daughters into trafficking schemes using their mobile phones?

People in Silicon Valley always believe the next big Internet thing and gadget will strip out human greed and fraud -- or at least hide their own -- and never accelerate anyone else's. The Internet caused the Recession, however.

Or how about another promising "democratizer"? As Frederic says:

4. A small-business friendly process for securing government contracts, named RFP-EZ. Don’t have a DC-bureau or a cushy relationship with a senator? This program aims to give the small guy a shot at big contracts. Park argued in his talk that the government sometimes prefers savvy startups in Silicon Valley, who can save the government a lot more than the typical contractor.

Hm, so these are just small guys who are still on the old boys' network? And now you need more staff to sift their way through all the applications of the little guys rather than the larger entities with whom you already have a track record of compliance? And you're saving the government money?

As for the little guys, even an EZ RFP is likely to cause you to have to hire a new accountant versed just in the ways of accounting these government contracts, they are a bear.  And do they require you first to spend your own money, then show receipts in a dedicated bank account to draw down the government tranche? How will that work out for you?

 

 

Why Didn't Open Garden Win TechCrunch Disrupt? It Was Sure Disruptive! #tcdisrupt

Open Garden demos at TechCrunch Disrupt May 23, 2012 in New York City. Video by TechCrunch.

Open Garden -- as you can tell from the name -- breaks down walled gardens intentionally and creates more Internet connection for all the apps and gadgets of Silicon Valley to be used on the lines provided by the older, crippled telecom companies.

It might be better to call it Open Theft of Services, and I believe it didn't win TechCrunch because the  judges on stage (except for one obvious vote) thought it was too great a challenge to the uneasy truce holding now between Big IT and Big Telecom.

At a bare-bones but geek-intensive demo at TechCrunch Disrupt, Open Garden catalyzer and co-founder Micha Benoliel spread his arms wide on stage and announced that his product is bringing "Internet Everrrrryywherre," rolling his Rs with a French accent.

Indeed.

It's created by the same guys who have been working on Bittorrent and Utorrent all these years, and have now created the Napster of Internet Connections by enabling you to utilize but not literally tap into wireless connections even when you haven't paid for them.

Advising them on "all technical matters" is Szymon Jakubczak, who currently works at Google -- so you can see Google's nose under this tent, which would harm or even eventually blow away the telecoms that Google spends much of its life fighting as competitors.

The cover story is that the app will enable you to network all your gadgets that currently don't talk to each other -- so it's like tethering with your i-phone but now you can put a laptop, desktop, i-phones, tablets all together on a kind of instant LAN with no configuration botheration. And bring along your family and friends.

But that's just the cover story. At TechCrunch Disrupt, Open Garden already had a cult following, with a million sign-ups -- because it's like Napster for finding not songs, but wireless connections you can jack into. It doesn't intercept or replace wifi -- it's on Bluetooth -- but it choses the fastest path. Asked on stage at TCD by Google VP Marissa Mayer, one of the judges, if this system would end up flooding all the devices,  Open Garden c0-founder Stanislav Shalunov said future iterations of the software, still in beta, will have channel bundling with multiple paths, and will load balance over all of them.

Naturally, New York venture-capitalist Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, with whom I've sparred with for years over his technocommunistic ideals, found this service using Other People's Wireless just awesome-sauce.

He quickly skipped over the "all your devices" use case (which he usually uses to justify content-copying) and asked about another: what if he were at the airport on one paid wireless account, could he bring his entire family, wife and three kids, on to that line, even if they don't have paid accounts? "Yes," said the devs.

Fred pressed further. Now what if he were on the plane with his family, using just that one paid account from the plane, could he bring in his whole family and friends? What if his daughter then went away to college?

"It won't be necessary for them to pay an additional fee," said Shalunov. "Awesome!" said Fred.

Lawyer-turned-tech-blogger Michael Arrington then piped up, "Won't you be litigated out of existence or just blocked?"

"Unquestionably the technology is very disruptive," Stanislav (who goes by the name "Stas") deadpanned.

I think Stas is Russian, but not from Moscow, and has been out of Russia for a number of years -- or maybe he's Polish. He already has a personal cult following, with geeks shouting "Stas! Stas!" when he came out on stage and twittering about him enthusiastically. A very young Russian coder leaned over to me and said excitedly in admiration, "Oni takiye surovyye programmisty!" Which means something like "These are kick-ass programmers!"

Stas elaborated with his theory of how his tool isn't really stealing-- it's just sort of borrowing, in order to "help" telecoms in fact get more business. Riiight.

"When VOIP appeared, the big players said 'no way," Stas recounted by way of analogy.  

Then the big carriers came around, and adapted to "reality". "Now, Skype will come presold working over 4G" on an i-phone, he explained. He believes Open Gardeners will help offload congestion of 4g and 3g networks to wifi, increasing performance. 

"Thus they can extend life of their infrastructure," he reasoned. I wonder if the telecoms could be the judge of that, not the torrent kiddies?!

Stas is very persuasive, however. Imagine a black-clad futuristic warrior fighting giant robots in a science fiction movie. He just stands his ground and tries to use dead-cold logic as his weapon. That it's essentially "insect logic" suiting his interests (and of course Google's) for lower costs on the utilities where they sell their products and services just doesn't matter -- it's "science."

Don't like the thought of "too much" connectivity with "everybody" on the "Internet everrrywhere?" These guys have thought of your privacy (although Open Garden is not actually getting into and seeing what is on a connection) -- a future iteration will have the ability to chose "public" or "friends of friends" or just "my own devices" as options for its use.

Meanwhile, the use case isn't Fred's family and their many gadgets or even Fred's daughter and her college friends, the use cases are political and social revolutions here and abroad.

If the San Francisco BART shuts off the wireless in a limited location, as it did with a flashmob recently, someone in the crowd of Anonymous rabble-rousers at the periphery outside the block might be able to keep the whole crowd wired. If the authorities of Egypt or Russia or Oakland, CA shut off the wireless in a public square filled with demonstrators, or shut off a mobile company, somebody with a DSL line nearby can still keep the demonstrators wired if they are all on Open Garden. This is the Wired State's greatest boon yet -- unless, of course it can't work with DSL/wireless, but that may be coming in a future iteration.

When the Sequoia Capital investor asked how these guys planned to make money, they answered that the service was free.

At 15:46 on the video, you can hear Fred Wilson exclaim "Communism!" and laugh.

Indeed. Who needs a business model when somebody like Fred will invest in your early stage and Google will buy you?

I went up to the stage after the show and caught sight of Micha donning a black Pirate Party t-shirt apparently for a photo opp -- he wasn't wearing one while he was giving the demo.

As Stas seemed to be available for his fans at the edge of the stage and none of them had come up yet, I asked in English if he were a member of the Pirate Party.

"I can neither confirm or deny that I am a member," he said slowly and carefully.

I tried again in Russian to see if I could detect anything more. In Russian, he replied slowly and carefully, "Ne mogu ne potverzhdat' ni otritsat'."

I asked if Open Garden currently had any lawsuits pending or lawyers' C&D letters.

He asked me to repeat the question, and said "Nyet." I asked if he anticipated any lawsuits, and he gave the same answer about how this would be good for all companies.

Open Garden won a separate prize for "most disruptive" technology from GetAround, last year's technocommunist TechCrunch Disrupt winners, who had collectivized your car.

Asked on his blog about why he was supporting this heist of telecom services, Fred fumed that he had already explained this to me 20 times and it was getting old. But his explanations have never been convincing and now Fred has gone beyond just tacitly endorsing the copying of content among devices; he wants all the telecoms to be subsumed to the endless appetite of him and his friends for content *and* broadband on the Internet for free. Who pays?

The Pirate Party, which is sort of like the expropriating Bolshevik Party only with better beer and gadgets, has already won seats in the German parliament where it is busy instituting something appropriately called "liquid democracy" with no "no" vote.

Crypto-pirate Stas stands his ground.

Embedle Enables -- and Continues -- the Twitter Conversation But Does it Need a New Name?

 

 

I'm still making my way through a TON of notes from TechCrunch Disrupt NYC this week, which is still among the most important intellectual events on the East Coast for me, whatever the drop in buzz (more on that in the next post).

The trick to working TechCrunch is not to sit in the room and watch a VC like Ron Conway say almost the same thing he said last year or at a dozen other conferences and try to dredge his chat for investment tips or clues to who's hot/who's not, but to watch the video later and meanwhile go out on Start-up Alley and talk to all the kids bursting with new ideas and enthusiasm.

One pair of geeks with fire in their eyes about their product are Embedle co-founders Daoliang Yang and Fei Deng. 

And like a lot of new tech things and apps with names that don't seem to fit, you may not have any uptake with it when you first see its web page, see a demo, or see them walk through an example tweet. The Twitter crutch space is getting crowded and it takes a little to appreciate when something is better.

When you see the demo, it seems like an interesting Twitter consumption tool, an aid to try to filter out some of your own personal firehouse of Twitter and perhaps follow just one coherent thought/conversation. Typically in an evening I find I might have dozens of conversations with dozens of articles or sites we're linking to and it begins to suffer the Second Life group chat problem -- the information goes by faster than the human eye can see it or specific threads are interrupted by other threads, and therefore you start to respond to about every 10th message and get out of sync with coherency.

So at first I perceived Embedle as a chat chiclet that was cleaner and more coherent than the old Weblins or the new Tokkster. I like Tokkster, and it enables me both to chat with the whole group that shows up on a page (or as many as can fit in my view) or individuals on the page, but I'm still left with the feeling, as Yogi Berra put it, "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded."

Embedle hit the sweeter spot for me by enabling me to take my *already hand-filtered convos* from Twitter, i.e. the ones I had manually selected with humint, and continue them in a focused way, while bringing in new people and new comments.

This has the potential of taking all those mindless myrmidons who just retweet stuff all day and never produce original content or say what they think, and luring them into saying just a tad more.

If you've ever followed a hash-marked topic on Twitter, it can be very frustrating, especially as a journalist. Twitter is like Google in that it rewards the mediocrity of the mass mind by putting on top -- and *keeping* on top the most retweeted, i.e. linked tweet, which in the case of a topic like "East River Helicopter Accident" or "Moscow Election Rallies" can be an official's view of the event (often belated or spun) or the very early (and biased) view of an event (like a "wow" from a 10-year-old kid) -- and that top tweet just keeps getting looked at and retweeted. How to break out into real-time from there?

You have to keep scrolling down -- Twitter willing, and it often lags or freezes -- to try to see *the rest of the actual news* under that hash-tag and then try to get more news and views from individual people tweeting.

Now, if you see someone who has posted their comment on a website using Embedle, Embedle enables you to go back to that interesting page linked and then keep the conversation going. So much of Twitter is shallow and inane precisely because of that inability to follow up meaningfully with the content you personally selected.

I find one of the hardest things to get working on Twitter is "the conversation". Often when I click on "view conversation" it simply never comes up. This could be due to the fact that Twitter will only display both sides of a conversation for people I follow, but even when I follow both of them, it often seems to fail to display.

If I I had a long Twit fight and I want to capture that debate, I don't know how I can do that usefully and quickly, except by using Storify, which still requires manually dragging and dropping the tweets into reverse order in which they now appear (like trying to read email from the bottom up) to make them coherent.

Maybe Embedle will be able to solve that problem (if it proves to have sufficient user demand down the road); currently it shows only an initial Twitter exchange and then one round of back and forth on Embedle -- but that's huge progress. I don't know what it would take to enable saving longer convos of many rounds -- it already took about a year to code and test and I don't know what's involved in adding a "Disqus" like memory archive.

Here's the problem with the name "Embedle", however: it does not describe the product as far as I can tell.

This script is not embedded on my web page, if someone uses it to visit and comment on my webpage. I am not pasting their script into my back end on Typepad, and it is not obviously injecting script into my web page without my consent.

(Note: the developers do plan to provide a script eventually that people can plug into their own web pages to have a ticker of conversations using Embedle -- but that's a separate concept.)

The name "Embedle" reminds one of the journalistic practice of "embedding" with the US army in Iraq and Afghanistan, which is usually signifies that you have biased information. They might want to stay away from that association.

"Embedle" isn't physically embedding in anything, from what I can tell, except in a sense a tweet, where it appears like any shortened web link such as bitly or owsly or Twitter's own link-shrinking function. That isn't "embedding" -- it's just linking, although in this case, providing a link that has "more to it" (and that was probably their train of thought in designing the name).

But the beauty of Embedle isn't that it's inside your tweet (where you might not appreciate it's potential at first when you spot it on someone else's tweet); the beauty is that it is on your bookmarklet bar at the top of the screen and you can instantly turn any page you're reading into a shared conversation on Twitter you are *already* in or will start with followers.

It sort of turns Twitter inside out: instead of fighting Twitter the platform to talk, trying to see past your own firehouse of feed, spam, random crap, distracting stuff, you tame Twitter to use for the purpose you were hoping you'd use it more for -- discussing the news (or whatever area you're interested in).

Of course, to succeed at making this really kick-ass, there will have to be more and more Embedle users who make it fun and interesting -- and I think there will be, although they just launched this week at TCD and I only see a few dozen on Twitter search.

In response to discussion of another app I haven't had a chance to look at, the founders of Embedle wrote: "I think Monki is about bringing related people to webpages, and we are about bringing focused tweet conversation to webpages."

Well, except your Twitter feed of those you're following and your followers responding to you is already what makes people stick; they then either discovery new content serendipitously, or travel to a related webpage to make a point, and have the more focused tweet convo, then come back to Twitter and draw in more people and more pages, so it's more of a spiral. The transaction does not end on the shared webpage. It's also a way of having asynchronous content accessed through Twitter

When I saw the demo on a Mac (I hate Macs), the chiclet was showing as a little blue box alongside the Twitter feed and then later on a web page.

But on my PC, for some reason (or maybe they changed the display in the interrim), Embedle manifests as a page-wide white box which very clearly gives me a template spread across the top with my original tweet and the dev's response, then my options to "reply" or "retweet" or "favourite".

Under "reply" I get a box to type in and the message "Your tweet as on Twitter will be the first 120 characters, plus a link to long tweet & webpage" -- which means I can "Twit longer" like Twitlonger. (I will never, ever use Twitlonger because it constantly spams me on Scoop.it under the guise of "suggestions" for my topic there -- a spammy annoying practice.)

OR I can restrain myself to the 140 characters and take the second option "Tweet as on Twitter".

There's also a "Tweet Later" function whose use case baffles me, but I suppose this is good for timed press releases for product launches or reminders about an event that will then drive people to the event page.

I asked the founders if they could summarize their story in one line. Fei Deng said, "We try to encourage the Twitter conversation."

They could drop the "try" and say "We encourage the Twitter conversation" but then change their service's name to "Convos" or "Encourage" instead of "Embedle" -- maybe the VCs in the clinics would tell them something like that, or maybe they would tell them to keep their name which connotes the wacky sounding verbified nouns of Silicon Valley products.

Precisely because it's outside the Twitter stream where you are viewing another web page, "Embedle" doesn't work as a name because it's not embedding in that web page, it's embedding (in a sense) *back* in your Twitter stream.

Also planned for this service is an "earned credit" concept that will create a "positive feedback loop".

This will mean a "promoted tweets" system but not the "promoted tweets" of ad agencies paying Twitter itself, but rather crowdsourced promotion, whereby the public enters the system, and people use up their own earned credits to retweet you in that system.

The "earned credit" system solves the problem you could foresee coming with a burgeoning Embedle community, where I will have to find interesting people no longer with a search of the term "Embedle" or sifting through my own stream, but will see what is "earning" in the system.

I don't know if the devs then have the capacity to put a "leaderboard" of "top earning tweets" on their own dedicated page, or give you script to run it on your own web page as interesting content.

What I do find intriguing about the direction the "earned credit" concept is going is that it crowdsources the value, i.e.

Full disclosure: While I was writing up this story, after I'd seen the demo and studied it, one of the Embedle founders gave a small tip to my "crowdsource" project on blogging about Central Asia. That's a nice thing to do, and teaches me to offer the link in each post to get more activity there, which I haven't focused on drumming up yet (crowdsourcing is not automatic, as you will discover!). But I don't believe this kind tip influenced my blog! It does bring my tips in the last 60 days to the grand total of...$147, so keep it coming, as blogging is an impoverished and lonely activity : )

Support Different Stans, My Crowdfunding Project on Indiegogo.

 

 

Platform America and User Governance: Will Gov 2.0 Ever Really Democratize?

Todd Park, CTO of America, Inc. speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt in NYC, May 23, 2012.

Imagine if you ran a platform with a MMORPG or virtual world and a related LARP network with 4 million new accounts made a day -- but 2.4 million also removed a day. That's a lot of churn, you might think.

But imagine if you had 311,591,917 users as of July 2011, but only 132,618,580 or  56.8% of your user base as your 1,460-day uniques -- half just never show up to play except once every four years, and with an attrition rate like that on the accounts, small wonder.

And try to envision managing a concurrency of 239 million, or about 75% of that constantly churning user base online. What a governance problem, and think of the trouble tickets!

That's the platform called the United States of America -- or at least, how the gov 2.0 crowd should think of Game USA -- but never do. A platform only a third of the size of Facebook, with only half the users coming to the polls every four years, yet with about 75 percent or so online using the Internet.

The digital strategists talk about "serving the people," but it's really only merely themselves and their friends running things, constantly under the guise of "serving the public," without really any meaningful access of that public or involvement. It's really only a small cadre of engineers revolving in and out of government from Google and Microsoft and other big tech companies who decide, and a few big industry lobbying concerns like the Sunlight Foundation and their tribes of Twitter followers. This debate set in motion by Whimsley, and continued vigorously by me with Alex Howard of O'Reilly in a context where Whimsley at least didn't censor most of it, really sums up the issues -- insular, arrogant, out-of-touch people who have trouble even connecting to other insular, arrogant, out-of-touch people.

The US Government's Office of Science and Technology Policy rolled out this week its new digital strategy:  Building a 21st Century Platform to Better Serve the American People and to be uber-cool, released the news at TechCrunch Disrupt.

I'll hazard a guest that most Americans, even tech-savvy social-media-using youth, do not have much to do with the social media or web presence of the federal government of the United States of America -- they may have checked a disease at cdc.gov or even a travel advisory for foreign countries at state.gov but they are unlikely to follow the politics of the government's social media programs itself.

Most of us who do interact with the government's presence on a daily basis encounter things like the USG's digital inanities in our daily automated news emails or actual live emails, where the State Department or other government agencies, eagerly trying to be cool, put social media button graphics *right in the email itself*. It's not like I'm going to be sharing the private bilateral email on Twitter! Nor would you want me to. And the press releases are often news-free and anodyne and wouldn't need to go on Twitter, where they'd already been tweeted and re-tweeted by the time you see them in your mailbox. So why all those dumb cluttery buttons in an email?! It's an embarrassment -- like painfully awkward adolescents trying too hard.

But for the insiders following this, such as TechPresident which has a mildly critical piece here, it's a program that both engages and frustrates them, but for reasons that don't have to do with how most Americans "access the platform".

A key program is even the notion of "platform," which is not a broader concept in the minds of these engineers -- not "of, by, and for the people" -- but a narrow concept that computer engineers have about their own work and the interactions with their peers in their culture. That's the problem -- they are blind to everything else -- although CEOS are not indifferent to the profits to be made.

Basically, the business proposition here made implicitly at TechCrunch Disrupt, and made more explicit on various tech blogs, is that the federal government will make available various data sets generated by the American people and collected by various government agencies, in order to be utilized and monetarized by both small start-ups and big IT businesses. The incentive is for the companies to monetarize this rich trove of user data, and the entire shebang is packaged in a "serve the public" wrapping both to entice the better-worlding geeks and fool the general public -- who are supposed to just be happy with new shiny apps.

Is this really in the public interest?

At TCD,  the Chief Technology Officer for the whole United States, Todd Park (a former Booz, Allen consultant and founder of his own health companies,  becoming the number-one venture-backed company in 2011) and the Chief Information Officer, Steven VanRoekel (a former Microsoft executive) did a demo where they tried to look like a "start-up" by saying phrases like "kick-ass" a lot -- but failed to wear hoodies.

Todd Park bounded out on stage booming like a TED speaker, warbling about "datapaloozas" the USG would have with geeks for "hackathons," and ranting how terrible it was that the average applicant for a federal student loan has to go to *14 websites*. Awful, awful!

But...I've filled out those applications. There weren't any 14 sites at all. There were about...2. Or three, maybe. It was a very streamlined process, in fact. I don't know what he's talking about. Has he ever actually filled out one of these applications?

And datapalooza? (I'm barfing a little at the term). There's only this health thing which doesn't seem like much -- except wait, one guy already monetarized it for $1.25 million in funding (!) for his health-related start-up!

I'm all for capitalism -- I'm for more capitalism than your average lefty geek who really wants technocommunism or Ron Paul libertarianism benefiting mainly his own clan. But this sort of thing strikes me as obscene from the user perspective -- we haven't had a say in how this data is selected, used, and then monetarized.

Why Didn't They Make UberConference At Google? #tcdisrupt

Firespotters, creators of UberConference, winners of TechCrunch Disrupt 2012. Photo by TechCrunch.

And the winner of TechCrunch Disrupt is...UberConference, a pain-free conference-calling app that takes out all the awful from group conversations for business or socializing. It's made by Firespotter, a company made up of former Google engineers. 

So the question is why UberConference, which was made by Xooglers, as Doug Edwards calls them, was not made at Google, where it would presumably make Google even more popular, win back some of its skeptical public, and make lots of money for Google.

And the answer is...according to a source very close to the situation -- because Google's  Marissa Mayer, VP for Location and Local Services blocked it.

As we know from the fascinating book by Xoogler Doug Edwards, I'm Feeling Lucky, if Marissa doesn't like something, it doesn't get done (well, unless somebody stays up all night to convince her). We learn from Edwards that she was dating founder Larry Page. But that wasn't enough to keep her on the L-team.

Not content to accept scuttle, even from very reliable knowledgeable birds in the rafters at TechCrunch Disrupt, I decided to go ask the Xoogler-Ubers -- the Firespotters -- themselves, who were predictably standing around in a circle in their identical blue t-shirts talking to each other instead of anyone else.

One of them began reciting essentially what they had said during their pitch on-stage, which was that in fact Google was still doing conferencing and that Google Voice was a great product and lots of people were using it.

Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch who left the blog last year but is still brought in by AOL as a "brand" to interview the stars of TCD, had really ridden on these Uber-Xooglers, asking defiantly, "Why should I trust you?"

Apparently, this was because Chris Walker, originally founder and CEO of GrandCentral, sold his company to Google, where it became Google Voice So, I guess if the founder already made one voice/telephony company he sold to Google, then left the Google Voice project to make UberConference, he wouldn't sound stable? And here I thought what Arrington meant was, "How can we all trust you notorious privacy-violators now with all our live voice business conversations?"

(It's kinda like the problem of real-life businesses trying to have a private group conversation in Second Life -- Linden Lab and its chosen voice platform would essentially own all that proprietary data and potentially have access to it -- that's why there was this demand at first from companies like IBM to have Second Life behind the firewall).

But Mike didn't mean that.

The UberConference founder responded bravely, "But I worked on it for several years and left recently and they are still working on it" -- i.e. it didn't sound as if he had left Google high and dry with the project.

I drilled some more in the engineering collective which was standing around in a circle, you know, like they have in G+, and making dead-pan statements with that meta-geek humour that is meant to tie the norms up in knots. Like in this thread where I argue with exasperating Google engineers on G+, which I shall call "The Mountain Lions and Gazelle Thread".

I asked how long it had taken to code the UberConference app to see if the time matched the time while those guys were still at Google. Does the 20% time include ideas that you then take out of Google to make as another start-up company? How does that work?

One of them said "a weekend." (I guess this was supposed to sound like Cory Ondrejka coding LSL.)

"Um, really? Like a hackathon?" I asked.

"No, just playin', it was actually several months." Hmmm.

So I kept up. "Why did you leave Google? Why couldn't you do this at Google? It makes no sense?"

"Google is only doing conference calls for enterprise," one of them began sagely. Yes, I've heard that one before.

"But why should only enterprise get to remove all the pain from conference-calling?" I asked. After all, it's usually the small businesses, the non-profits, the other smaller group conversations that suffer the most pain, because a wealthier organization could afford to have better video-conferencing equipment where calls wouldn't drop all the time as they do on Skype or you wouldn't hear somebody's baby crying or highway traffic.

Because each person is visually manifesting on a dashboard with their picture (dare I say "avatar"), name and information in real time, UberConference lets you identify the noise-maker, mute them yourself as the conference coordinator, and also lets you see who is speaking easily -- you can cut all that idiotic time introducing everybody -- then introducing them again as the call drops them all off and they all struggle to come back again.

It all takes place on a lovely wood panel background that looks like your family room in the 1970s, or maybe a mountain cabin where Google engineers go skiing. If they could add some nubby carpeting, I'd be even happier. In fact, if they gave me an avatar to dress, too, I might never turn the application off, ever.

By contrast, the Google Voice splash page looks like ass. Marissa is said to be a specialist in user experience and user interface, but maybe she wasn't put on this project. It's like a label on a medicine bottle. The UberConference page is much more warm and comfy.

Plus it has this really amazing value-add that is like having a PM or a DM or a "tell" in a MMORPG -- you can put "earmuffs" on some of the people in the conference, and then talk so that only the other people without the earmuffs can hear you.

Cool, eh? But it's bound to lead to problems, as it does in Second Life where everything like this was long ago prototyped in its social aspects. A business conference where some people are enabled to cybersex during the boring meeting or make snotty comments privately about the speaker unbenownst to her is a company where erosion of decency sets in and eventually a deep hidden malice.

There's another feature I found troublesome, typical of a lot of apps/SAAS these days. According to the company press release, UberConference is "adding value by incorporating public information on each participant from LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Google+, making it easy to know who's on a call and to quickly gather information about the caller."

But I don't want a profile on a service which I didn't make myself, which is slurped up from every other profile I have all over hell's half acre. I want my Facebook information to be public to get attention for my blog posts from friends and colleagues, but I don't want that slurped into every business conference call with every client. Why? I don't even want all the Linked-In data there, which you're sort of forced to put up to try to get jobs on there. And why the hell would you put Twitter on anything?! This is not opt-in, but opt-out, like all creepy geeky Googly things. And they're simply going to have to understand this is a value-substract, not a value-add, and not keep arguing that the data is out there to be scraped, so they get to scrape it, period.

Source: PR Newswire (http://s.tt/1cuI3)

Anyway, I kept asking, and in a group, where it was public -- and they wouldn't say a thing about why/how they were blocked at Google.

"Google does social so well," one of them deadpanned again. This time I was ready.

"No, it doesn't. You can't mean that. G+ is only a place for Google engineers."

"We're ex-Google engineers," the UberCon guy explained.

"G+ is where gifs go to die," I persisted.

"Just kidding," the guy explained to me again.

It's funny, my source noticed what we all saw -- Arrington gave these guys a harder time than Marissa did.

Now, how does this work? This former-Google-engineer company works for a bit with the $50,000 they just won, and spiffs it up some more, then Google buys it back? Is that the plan?

 

TechCrunch Disrupt: Start-Ups More Tethered to Real Life #tcdisrupt

TechCrunch Disrupt, May 20, 2012. Photo by Jon Gosier.

TechCrunch Disrupt opened in New York City today, in pouring rain with a bit less people than last year but with an intriguing turn of the apps from the self-referential virtuality of last year to more integration with real life and real-world activities.

Even if last year there was a 3-D printer and an Israeli company's app that enabled you to send an EKG to a doctor, as well as rental of time slices of your car to strangers on the Internet, most of the start-ups then seemed to be obsessed with merely rearranging the same puzzle pieces of Facebook and Twitter, designing various ways to meet people online, share music or pictures, or search for the apps themselves. 

This year, it just seemed as if there were more hardware on the floor, more apps attached to real things in the real world, and more real activity besides the social media staples of sharing chat, images, and music. Here's the list.

Babelverse has created a way to get video translation online and quickly put captions to video. And get this! They actually have a model, unlike Google Translate which wants to put people like me out of business, that helps good interpreters get paid. You can tip the translator or arrange payment -- they have lists of professional translators and then people who want to train and practice can work their way up and earn reputational points. Maybe this will drive the price down on translation, which has already been driven down by the Internet itself, but maybe it will make more people use translation services and create more opportunities.

StyleSaint lets you make a style book online by uploading photos or clipping them from other people's intellectual property, like Pinterest. But since other people's IP are mainly photos in fashion magazines that are meant to sell the clothes anyway, maybe they won't care? Or they will consider it "fair use," like a kind of review?

I was exactly one of those young girls like the site designer Allison Beal who cut up magazines and "repurporsed" them into collages. I didn't care about fashion, however, but just made art works or satire.

But the purpose of her site leads outside the echo chamber of online life to actually crowdsourcing clothing design. Now, they aren't going to design a dress by committee, but they take input from the users in an "inspired by you, designed by us" social contract. When they monetarize the dress instead of you, do you care? No, because you are supposed to bask in the collectivization of a design process that enables you to participate meaningfully while socializing with your friends. This will be fun for a lot of people, like Pinterest, only with a real fabric outlet.

There's also indication that the personal-data exposing riot of some apps last year that seemed to broadcast everything about you all over the room and 3,000 miles away on the Internet has backlashed so much that now at least some engineers are going in the other direction. In his interview with Alexia Tsotsis, Andrew Keen said that he fully expected that some start-ups would focus on monetarizing privacy, in fact, but when he asked for a show of hand of developers working on then, he only got one hand (and we're waiting to found out who that was!)

There was also a company in Start-up Alley called Roundpop that has figured out a way to have the fun of location and appearing on maps, but control so that it is only your chosen friends, and if you like, only minimal data, i.e. a zip code and not the exact location.

"We're non-creepy," said the guy at the booth, but of course, this remains to be heard from the customers. As we learned in Second Life, which in fact is the great prototyper of all these ideas (and never appreciated as such), it's not just location exposure, but proximity data exposure that bothers people, i.e. if they are shown to be with another person that they don't want broadcast all the time related to location, even if a friend.

Twake, a service for companies, is also concerned about not exposing customer data and has anonymous referential data about preferences. While it says it doesn't predict the future, in a way it does by collecting enough aggregated data about what people are doing to figure out what they are likely to do next. There's pre-crime, and then there's pre-shop, you know?

Twake intrigued many at the show with a display that some people seemed to mistake for some kind of augmented reality thing, while it was actually a metaphor for "targeting customer preferences" or something. So you punched at various preferences on the proferred i-pad, showing your picks for which weapon you liked, which office furniture you wanted to destroy, whether you preferred beer or wine, etc. So I picked out an AK47 to shoot a keyboard and indicated a soda preference. Then in real life, at a camp in upstate New York, a guy selected the weapon you had chosen, and as you watched him on the webcam, proceeded to shoot at the office furniture you had "disliked". The leaderboard on the screen showed mainly left-handed males who preferred beer chosing pistols to blast computers, but right-handed females who preferred wine and also chose pistols were at the number two spot.

Interestingly, this company, which may have a future in LARP and AR as a sideline, is "bootstrapped," which mean it did not have VC cash and put in their own money, and then took fees from actual customers.

Unwind is an app more in the virtual realm with the ability to make "lounges" where you can show movies or books to friends, but unlike the mad long scroll of Facebook or Live Journal or Twitter, you could arrange the content into "collections" which made it more useful. The app was made by a man who wanted to make something he himself and his wife could actually use -- and did.

Voteit nearly single-handedly restored my faith in geekitude by doing just one simple, right thing: allowing the "no" vote. Readers of this blog will recall my many rants on this subject, along with my illustrious career on Linden Lab's JIRA at Second Life where I long fought for a "no" vote (and the JIRA people themselves refuse to code it, urging me to put in a feature request and see if it attracts "yes" votes. Sigh.)

Voteit seems styled on its site and in the presentations as more related to how companies can use voting to "reach consensus" or "increase collaboration" or where groups of friends can "decide where to have dinner". But where I hope it will really be used is on the Internet in politics, and provide an alternative to the double-plus-yessing that pervades the entire online opinion space, i.e. you can "like" on Facebook but not "dislike". I will return to this subject in more detail as I had a long conversation with the founder.