The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Secret London Facebook Group Amasses 180,000 — Morphs Into Startup
- Indian IT Giant Tata Consultancy Services Hacked
- Silicon Valley: You and Some of Your VC’s have a Gender Problem
- NSFW: Hey, 1997 – Macmillan called, they want the Net Book Agreement back
- Linus Torvalds: Google’s Nexus One First Mobile Phone I Don’t Hate
- Late Last Year, Google Overtook Apple In WebKit Code Commits
- The Ridiculous Becomes The Absurd (Tiananmen)
- Looks Like Google May Have A Super Bowl Commercial
- Maybe Hulu Is Right To Block Boxee
- The War on Interruptions, an Excerpt from “Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard”
- California’s CTO Responds To Our Challenge With His Own: Give CA Your Best IT Ideas
- Walt Mossberg, David Carr And Michael Arrington Talk iPad With Charlie Rose
| Secret London Facebook Group Amasses 180,000 — Morphs Into Startup Posted: 07 Feb 2010 08:22 AM PST
If only he’d done it in the era of Facebook rise into the mainstream. Because today, two weeks after launching, the Secret London Facebook group has 182,010 members and counting and is poised to propel it’s 21 year old creator into her first startup. Bristol university graduate Tiffany Philippou originally set up the group in response to a competition from ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi to win a mere summer internship. However, it seems unlikely that Tiffany will be too bothered. There’s now a holding page and Twitter account (@secret_london) as her Secret London project morphs into a full-blown startup.
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| Indian IT Giant Tata Consultancy Services Hacked Posted: 07 Feb 2010 07:28 AM PST
The hack is believed to be a DNS hijack, which is similar to the breach that Twitter succumbed to last year. TechCrunch was also recently hacked earlier this year.
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| Silicon Valley: You and Some of Your VC’s have a Gender Problem Posted: 07 Feb 2010 07:01 AM PST
An analysis of Dunn and Bradstreet data shows that of the 237,843 firms founded in 2004, only 19% had women as primary owners. And only 3% of tech firms and 1% of high-tech firms (as in Silicon Valley) were founded by women. Look at the executive teams of any of the Valley's tech firms – minus a couple of exceptions like Padmasree Warrior of Cisco, you won't find any women CTOs. Look at the management teams of companies like Apple – not even one woman. It's the same with the VC firms – male dominated. You'll find some CFOs and HR heads, but women VCs are a rare commodity in venture capital. And with the recent venture bloodbath, the proportion of women in the VC numbers is declining further. It's no coincidence that only one of the 84 VCs on the 2009 TheFunded list of top VCs was a woman. Is the background or motivation of women that prevents them from becoming entrepreneurs? I just completed a project with National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) to find out (Kauffman Foundation will be releasing our research paper this spring). Our analysis of 549 successful startups showed there was virtually no difference in motivation between men and women entrepreneurs. Just like men, women started companies because they wanted to build wealth, capitalize on business ideas they had, liked the startup company culture, and were tired of working for others and wanted to be their own boss.
Is it that women are less competent than men? Quite to the contrary. An analysis performed by Cindy Padnos, managing director of Illuminate Ventures, showed that women are more capital-efficient than the norm and that venture-backed companies run by a woman had annual revenues that were 12 percent higher and used an average of one-third less committed capital. Women-led high-tech startups have lower failure rates than those led by men. And organizations that are the most inclusive of women in top management achieve 35% higher return on equity and 34% better total return to shareholders than do their peers.
So what holds women back from starting companies? Shaherose Charania, of Women 2.0, thinks it is because women have had few role models and mentors. Additionally, it is harder for women to obtain funding than for men. She notes that historically, women-led companies have received less than 9% of venture capital investments; in 2007, the proportion of funded female CEOs dropped to 3%. And there is another problem which her group works hard to overcome: some old-time VCs won't give women the time of day. Her group members recount examples of VCs and angel investors interrupting pitches to ask questions and make comments like:
Sharon Vosmek, CEO of venture accelerator Astia doesn't think that VCs have an overt bias against women. Instead, it's the way the venture-capital industry operates. Vosmek says that these “systematic or hidden biases” include:
So, it is clear we have a problem here: we're holding back the most productive half of our population. What can we do to fix this problem? NCWIT's CEO, Lucinda Sanders, Shaherose Charania, Cindy Padnos, and Sharon Vosmek have all given me their suggestions. I also have some ideas of my own. I plan to write a follow-up post that details some of these, but I'd like to get your input first. After my recent BusinessWeek column on the dearth of women entrepreneurs, I was deluged with angry emails from men who disagreed with my conclusion that the problem isn't a failure on the part of women but rather a societal failure. Some were really angry about my comparison of Wall Street firms to their counterparts in India. I've heard from the angry men, now I'd like to hear from the women. Please post your comments below. Editor's note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.
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| NSFW: Hey, 1997 – Macmillan called, they want the Net Book Agreement back Posted: 07 Feb 2010 05:30 AM PST
And yet, and yet – the fact that, seven days later, I’m still sitting at my desk and I still haven’t delivered the manuscript to my publisher, should give a hint to how perilous things are right now. I’m Wile E. Coyote about five seconds after he looks down and realises he’s overshot the cliff. And yet despite my urge to sack off this week’s column and focus on lessening the size of crater I’m about to leave in the desert floor, there’s something on which I can’t remain silent on any longer. Four words which I’ve been seeing again and again all week, and which threaten to drive me mad… “A victory for authors.” That’s how some people are describing Amazon’s capitulation to Macmillan over the pricing of ebooks. They say it in the same tone as people describe more expensive milk as “a victory for farmers” or subsidies for domestic cars as “a victory for American auto workers”, which is to say the same tone as you might use to pity a cat with three legs. Poor authors, after all, need all the help they can get. They work for years on their Great Novel, probably subsisting on stale cheese and rats’ milk as they do so, and what thanks do they get? A measly royalty, chipped away at by heavy discounting in book stores. Thank God then for Macmillan taking a stand against Amazon and its aggressive discounting. And thank Jesus for all of the other publishers bravely following them. Oh please. First a few facts, in the form of a disclosure statement. I am an author. Before that I was a publisher. Although my publisher is now Hachette, I’ve been published in the past by Macmillan, both in the UK and the US. Macmillan were a partner of the publishing house I co-founded, and were responsible for distributing all of our titles. Richard Charkin, the former CEO of Macmillan, was an advisor. I like Macmillan. I feel, then, somewhat qualified to call bullshit on the claim that this deal is good for anyone – including Macmillan and especially including authors. Much like the monarchy, Macmillan started life in Britain even though it’s now controlled by Germans. Its British roots go to the very heart of their negotiations with Amazon. In America, books have always been available at a discount – with book stores relatively free to set prices as they wished. Of course, publishers still choose their wholesale price, but there’s nothing to stop, say, Borders from heavily discounting bestsellers to get people through the door. Publishers didn’t necessarily like this as it led to booksellers demanding more aggressive discounting (sometimes more than 60% off the cover price), but they didn’t have much of a choice but to accept. The fact is that publishers couldn’t justify opening up their own stores, so if they wanted readers to be able to actually read their books, they had to keep bookstores happy. But that’s not how things used to work in the UK. In the UK, way back in 1900, publishers corralled retailers into the Net Book Agreement (NBA); an agreement between British publishers and booksellers that books would be sold at the price specified on the cover. If a bookseller offered so much as a penny discount, then the publisher would simply withdraw all of their books from that bookseller and encourage other publishers to do the same. The arrangement suited everyone; book shops were the only place to buy new books and the NBA meant they didn’t have to worry about rivals undercutting them; this particularly benefited independent bookshops. For their part, publishers knew exactly how much they’d be getting for each title and authors knew how much of that would form their royalty. It took until the late 90s for the Restrictive Practices Court to declare that the Net Book Agreement was anti-competitive and should be scrapped. Shortly afterwards, Borders entered the UK market, hundreds of UK independent bookshops went bankrupt and publishers decided to change their contracts with authors. Now, instead of being based on the cover price of a book, the author’s royalty would be based on ‘net receipts’, which is to say the price that publishers actually received from bookshops. Since 1997, that’s how things have stayed. Authors learned to adjust pretty quickly, especially as fewer than 20% of titles actually ever earn back their advance and start paying royalties. But publishers have remained annoyed. Deep discounting cuts directly into their profits. There was one area, though, where publishers could still make a killing on every sale: hardback books. The fact is that printing a hardback book, as opposed to a paperback, costs a matter of pennies more. But there is a perception amongst book buyers that they are far more expensive, a perception that it has been in no one’s interest to correct as it allows them to be sold for twice the price of paperbacks. Even with booksellers demanding deep discounts, the publishers still make a ton of profit on each hardback sale. By releasing the hardback book months before the paperback, publishers can subsidise a huge amount of their business from hardback sales, while booksellers can still discount highly to get people through the door. And then along came the Kindle and everything went to hell. Before e-readers, publishers didn’t care about ebooks. You could tell this by the fact that they gave authors really generous royalties on their electronic sales. It was an easy item to appear generous over – so they could fuck you on the paperback royalty. No one read books on their computer so it was no huge loss. For the same reason, publishers were happy to release ebooks at the same time as hardbacks – it wasn’t like the sales of the former were cannibalizing the latter. But now, with ebook sales soaring, and with the iPad looking to make them soar even higher, publishers are panicking. Thanks in part to deep ebook discounting by Amazon, but also because the same people who can afford hardback books are the same people who can afford e-readers, people are starting to buy ebooks where they once bought hardbacks. The only cash-cow remaining in publishing is disappearing, like CD sales for music, and DVD sales for movies. The publishers’ answer to this? A de facto return to the Net Book Agreement, for the whole world. Publishers don’t need booksellers as much as they used to. If an ebook isn’t available from one place – Amazon, say – it will be from somewhere that’s just a click away. Amazon on the other hand, can’t sell Kindles if a huge chunk of popular books aren’t available on it. Furthermore, thanks to the ease of distributing an ebook directly to the customer, there’s nothing stopping a publisher – or group of publishers – from creating their own store. Most sell ebooks directly online already. The balance of power has swung back to publishers, and they’re making the most of it, especially when then know they can play Amazon off against Apple. For the first time in the UK since 1997, and ever in the US, publishers are able to set – and enforce- their own prices on ebooks. And they will; not to make a fair return on ebooks but rather to cripple their sales in order to protect early hardback book sales. They’ve admitted as much themselves, saying that prices will start high on hardback release, before dropping steadily over time. The idea that this benefits anyone, least of all authors, is laughable. Every day, thousands more book lovers move to ebooks. These are people who devour books, and who are attracted by the convenience of getting new releases delivered instantly. Yes, there’s a chance that they’ll keep buying hardback books if ebooks go up in price. But now they’ve already invested in ereaders so there’s even more of a chance that they’ll simply turn to piracy to get their fix. It’s like if record labels had tried to encourage people to keep buying CDs by raising the price of mp3 downloads (or slapping restrictive DRM on them). All that would likely have done is drive even more people to Limewire. Piracy isn’t an industry-killing problem for publishers yet, and if they can keep prices low enough and delivery mechanisms convenient enough, it could even stay that way. Macmillan’s attempt to bring back the NBA though, while it might result in a few more hardback sales in the short term, can only end in disaster for everyone concerned. As an author, I don’t see a pricing strategy that encourages piracy as a victory. I see it as a backwards-looking quick fix that will do far more long-term harm than short-term good. Youa culpa, Macmillan.
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| Linus Torvalds: Google’s Nexus One First Mobile Phone I Don’t Hate Posted: 07 Feb 2010 05:04 AM PST
Things have changed now, he adds, now that he has caved and bought Google’s Nexus One a couple of days ago. Torvalds has owned a number of phones before, including Google’s G1 device and ‘one of the early China-only Motorola Linux phones’, but it took for Google to add multi-touch capabilities to the Nexus One before he finally broke down and bought one from the company’s web store. And he’s loving it:
While Google hasn’t disclosed how many phones it’s sold so far, the company is believed to have sold closer to 100,000 than 1 million devices. But at least one of them made one of the most famous software engineers in the world one happy camper.
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| Late Last Year, Google Overtook Apple In WebKit Code Commits Posted: 06 Feb 2010 03:13 PM PST
Now, the author is quick to point out the caveats of the graph (and does so for four paragraphs), and notes that he was hesitant to even publish it because of how easy it is to misinterpret. The graph, while it shows commits, doesn’t weigh more important ones versus less important ones. Nor does it in any way measure the ways in which companies or individuals contribute to WebKit in other meaningful ways. That said, it does clearly show that in late 2009, Google surpassed Apple as the company that now contributes the most (again, in terms of commits) to the project. WebKit is the open source web browser engine that both Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome browsers (among others) are built on top of. As such, it should be obvious why both are so heavily involved in the project (others on the graph include Nokia and BlackBerry maker RIM). The graph ranges from 2007 to the present. According to it, on November 15, 2009 Google surpassed Apple in number of commits for the first time. Google has been ahead ever since, and the gap between the two appears to be growing. That said, the two big spikes for Apple came during major releases of Safari, so when Apple releases another version, it could spike up ahead of Google once again. I’ve included a picture of the graph below (Apple is the blue line, Google is green, “Other” is purple, Nokia is gold, and RIM is light blue). But be sure to check it out on Chromium Notes’ site as you can drill-down to see more detail there. The author has also posted the code for the graph on github.
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| The Ridiculous Becomes The Absurd (Tiananmen) Posted: 06 Feb 2010 03:12 PM PST
If you can’t laugh at yourself… Robert Scoble insisted (insisted!) that we take these photos. Possibly to let the healing process begin after yesterday’s Google phone drama. And he isn’t the only one who wants to turn this into some kind of meme. I hope we can just let this go now, and move on with our lives. I promise to try to use a headset much more often while driving in those states that require it, and otherwise abide by the laws of the land.
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| Looks Like Google May Have A Super Bowl Commercial Posted: 06 Feb 2010 02:22 PM PST
While Google is a company built on advertising, for the most part it has stayed out of advertising itself on the dominant medium: television. Yes, there have been those short ads for Chrome and a few for Android that it has been involved with. And Google is even said to have considered an ad during the Olympics, but that was killed at the last second, apparently. But now, it looks like Google may be ready to advertise itself on the biggest stage possible: the Super Bowl. Google CEO Eric Schmidt has just posted this very intriguing tweet:
It’s hard to know exactly what he’s saying there, but it would seem to suggest that Google will have an ad that will run during the third quarter of tomorrow’s game. If that is indeed the case, who knows what product it will be for — but the “hell has frozen over” comment is interesting. Could Google be running an ad to promote Google.com itself to counter Microsoft’s Bing ads? We’ll all be watching. Below watch one of Google’s Chrome television ads. Update: After some internal discussion, we think it could be a Nexus One ad (which Google said during its launch event that it wasn’t likely to do outside of the web). Some commenters seem to be agreeing as well. Update 2: John Battelle believes the ad will be about Google “search stories” and singles out this “Parisian Love” ad below.
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| Maybe Hulu Is Right To Block Boxee Posted: 06 Feb 2010 01:11 PM PST  If I may, I'd like to play devil's advocate to something I wrote a few days ago. To quickly summarize, Boxee took issue with NBCU's Jeff Zucker's characterization that Boxee was some sort of rogue piece of software, and that Hulu is in the right whenever it blocks access to the XBMC-derived media player. How about this: maybe Hulu is right to block Boxee? Let's see where this takes us.
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| The War on Interruptions, an Excerpt from “Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard” Posted: 06 Feb 2010 12:00 PM PST
One of the most consistent findings in psychology is that people behave differently when their environment changes. When we're in a place where people are quiet (church), we're quiet. When we're in a place where people are loud (stadiums), we're loud. When we're driving and the lanes narrow, we slow down. When they widen, we speed up again. This may seem obvious, but when we try to make change at work, we often make the mistake of obsessing about the people involved rather than their environment. Often the easiest way to drive change is to shape the environment. This environment-shaping strategy was used in 2006 by Becky Richards, the Adult Clinical Services Director at Kaiser South San Francisco hospital, who was determined to drive down medication errors. On average, nurses commit roughly 1 error per 1000 medications administered. That's an impressive record of accuracy. Still, given the huge volume of medications delivered at Kaiser South, that error rate led to about 250 errors annually, and a single error can be harmful or even deadly. For instance, if a patient received too much Heparin, a blood thinner, the patient's blood would no longer clot and the patient could hemorrhage. If a patient got too little Heparin, he could develop a blood clot that could lead to a stroke. Richards believed that most errors happened when nurses were distracted. And it was all too easy to get distracted—most traditional hospitals put the medication administration areas right in the middle of the nursing units, which tended to be noisiest places on the floor. Tess Pape, a professor at the University of Texas who has studied medication errors, said, "Today we admire people for multitasking, we celebrate people who can accomplish many things at once. But when you're giving out medications is the last time you should be multitasking." At Kaiser, no one thought twice about calling out to a nurse who was delivering medication. Worse, nurses felt an obligation to respond when others distracted them. They couldn't very well tell a surgeon, "Sorry bud, can't help right now, I'm dealing with medication"? And yet that's exactly what would need to happen for errors to be reduced. Ideally, when the nurses were administering medication, they'd work inside a soundproof bubble, like the "Cone of Silence" from Get Smart. With that solution being architecturally infeasible, Richards came up with the idea of using a visual symbol, something that could be worn by nurses, which would signal to other people, Hey, don't interrupt me right now. After considering armbands and aprons, she settled on vests. She called them "medication vests." Richards scrambled to find someone who could supply her vests: "The first vest we ordered was off the internet. It was really cheesy. Cheap plastic. Bright orange. Be careful what you order off the internet." Later, with vests in hand, Richards unveiled the idea to her staff: When you're administering medication, you'll put on a medication vest. It's bright enough that people can see it from down the hall. And all of us, including the doctors, will know that when someone is wearing one of these vests, we should leave them alone. She selected two units at Kaiser South for a 6-month pilot study of the medication vests, and in July 2006, it began. Richards quickly encountered a problem with her pilot: The nurses hated the vests. So did the doctors. "Nurses thought the vest was demeaning, and they couldn't find it when they needed it," said Richards. "They didn't like the color. 'How do you clean it?' And physicians hated not being able to talk to their nurses when they passed them in the hall." The nurses' written feedback about the pilot was scathing: - "Oh, so you want to draw attention to the fact we can make a mistake…" "They were pretty brutal," said Richards. The reception was so universally poor that Richards was ready to write off the idea and try something else. In the 6-month pilot, errors had dropped 47% from the 6 months prior to the study. "It took our breath away," said Richards. Once the data was in, the hatred faded. Impressed by the results, the entire hospital adopted the medication vests, except for one unit that insisted they didn't need them. Errors dropped by 20% in the first month of the hospital-wide adoption, except for one unit that actually saw an increase in errors. (Guess which one?) You know you've got a smart solution when everyone hates it and it still works—and in fact it works so well that people's hate turns to enthusiasm. Becky Richards had found a way to use the environment to change behavior. The IT group decided to try an experiment—they established "quiet hours" on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday mornings before noon. The goal was to give coders a sterile cockpit, allowing them to tackle more complex bits of coding without being derailed by periodic interruptions. Even the socially insensitive responded well to the change in the Path. One engineer, previously among the worst interrupters, said, "I always used to worry about my own quiet time and how to get more of it, but this experiment made me think about how I'm impacting others." In the end, the group managed to meet its stringent nine-month development goal. And the division VP attributed the success to the sterile cockpit quiet hours: "I do not think we could've made the deadline without it," he said. "This is a new benchmark." In these disparate environments—cockpits and hospitals and IT workgroups—the right behaviors did not evolve naturally. Nurses weren't "naturally" given enough space to work without distraction, and programmers weren't "naturally" left alone to focus on coding. Instead, leaders had to reshape the environment consciously. With some simple tweaks to the environment, suddenly the right behaviors emerged. It wasn't the people who changed, it was the situation. What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.
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| California’s CTO Responds To Our Challenge With His Own: Give CA Your Best IT Ideas Posted: 06 Feb 2010 10:18 AM PST
Editor’s note: In a pair of posts a couple of weeks ago, contributing columnist Vivek Wadhwa highlighted the antiquated nature of the state of California’s IT systems and the way contracts for those systems are doled out to legacy IT firms. He then challenged Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to come up with ways to rebuild California’s IT systems at one tenth the cost. California CTO P.K. Agarwal responds in this guest post with his own challenge: walk the talk and give him your best IT ideas. He’s even set up a crowdsourcing site to gather them. Vivek, I'm glad to see you are challenging the readers of TechCrunch the same way you challenge the audiences of your speeches. The debate that has erupted on TechCrunch in response to that challenge is particularly interesting to me because it focuses on a question that my colleagues and I have spent a lot of time trying to find an answer to: What's the best way to migrate California's legacy portfolio to new technologies? And there are many other related questions. Like most governments in the US, California has a significant portfolio of legacy applications. Also like most governments, we are in the midst of converting many of these to newer technologies. Much of this migration work is being done in conjunction with our vendor partners, but we are always looking for more ways to get companies to work with us. Not just because we have an abstract appreciation of innovation, but because competition, between companies and ideas, produces better results for the state and its taxpayers. As a part of that shift, we are finding ways to ease the burden of doing business with the State. For instance, last year we made major strides in streamlining our procurement processes to make IT projects more timely and transparent. We in Sacramento are not under the delusion that we have a monopoly on good ideas. We would like to channel the energy and enthusiasm of your readers to help us strengthen how we build and deploy IT in the State of California. So how do we do this? I propose we engage in an online dialogue. Since a good number of the readers of this blog are technically oriented, let's “walk the talk” and use a crowdsourcing tool to get a consensus on the popular ideas. Using the link below, I encourage your readers to provide ideas, review and comment on other people's ideas, and vote ideas up and down. As the tool aggregates our judgments, certain ideas will rise to the top. I would then take the top ranking ideas and further refine them through an interactive dialogue. This would not only be a valuable exercise for California, but hopefully a rewarding activity for your readers. So please take a look at http://ca_it.ideascale.com and give us your best ideas.
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| Walt Mossberg, David Carr And Michael Arrington Talk iPad With Charlie Rose Posted: 06 Feb 2010 10:07 AM PST Charlie Rose had The Wall Street Journal/All Things D’s Walt Mossberg, The New York Times’ David Carr and our own Michael Arrington on his show Thursday night to talk about the Apple iPad. You can also view the video on the Charlie Rose website, here. This was Mike’s sixth time on Charlie Rose.
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There’s a certain irony that TechCrunch’s in-house satirist 
The website 
"People in technology businesses are drawn to places known for diversity of thought and open-mindedness", is what Professor 
Women entrepreneurs were as highly educated as their 
Padnos points out that the tide is turning in favor of women in education. Girls are now matching boys in mathematical achievement. In the U.S., 140 women enroll in higher education for every 100 men. Women earn more than 50 percent of all bachelor's and master's degrees, and nearly 50 percent of all doctorates. Women's participation in business and MBA programs has grown more than five-fold since the 1970s, and the increase in the number of engineering degrees granted to women grew almost 10-fold.
This time last week I rattled off the 
Today, the blog 
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