Showing posts with label software. Show all posts
Showing posts with label software. Show all posts
February 01, 2022
On The Horizon For #Solar: A Vertical #Software Decacorn
Tags:
Clean-Tech,
software,
Solar
Climate software entrepreneurs are serving far larger markets than most investors expect. Billion dollar software companies serving the renewable energy markets are here now. The $10 billion software company focused on renewables and sustainability is coming!
March 11, 2014
The Youngest Technorati @NYTimes
Tags:
Apple,
apps,
Google,
hackers,
Internet,
iPhone,
MasterTech,
software,
Tech,
United States,
Universities
you got a good job, and that was the societally acceptable thing to
do,” said Ms. Stern, Ryan’s mother, who was a straight-A student and is a
graduate of Duke University.
Now, she said, “there is no rule book.”
The Youngest Technorati
From
left, Michael Hansen, Ryan Orbuch and William LeGate at the TEDxTeen
event in SoHo this month. Michael and Ryan, both in high school,
developed the procrastination-fighting app Finish, which became a top
seller.
left, Michael Hansen, Ryan Orbuch and William LeGate at the TEDxTeen
event in SoHo this month. Michael and Ryan, both in high school,
developed the procrastination-fighting app Finish, which became a top
seller.
Benjamin Norman for The New York Times
By MATT RICHTEL
March 8, 2014
Ryan
Orbuch, 16 years old, rolled a suitcase to the front door of his
family’s house in Boulder, Colo., on a Friday morning a year ago. He was
headed for the bus stop, then the airport, then Texas.
“I’m going,” he told his mother. “You can’t stop me.”
Stacey Stern, his mother, wondered if he was right. “I briefly thought: Do I have him arrested at the gate?”
But the truth was, she felt conflicted. Should she stop her son from going on his first business trip?
Ryan was headed to South by Southwest Interactive, the technology conference in Austin. There, he planned to talk up an app that he and a friend had built. Called Finish,
it aimed to help people stop procrastinating, and was just off its high
in the No. 1 spot in the productivity category in the Apple App store.
Ryan was also eager to go because, as he put it: “There were really dope
people, and I really like smart-people density.”
Ms. Stern loved
her son’s passion, but told him that he could go to Austin only if he
finished the schoolwork he’d neglected while building the app. But Ryan
didn’t comply, and, like battle-weary parents everywhere, she let him go
anyway.
Ryan is now 17, a senior at Boulder High. He is among
the many entrepreneurially minded, technologically skilled teenagers who
are striving to do serious business. Their work is enabled by low-cost
or free tools to make apps or to design games, and they are encouraged
by tech companies and grown-ups in the field who urge them, sometimes
with financial support, to accelerate their transition into “the real
world.” This surge in youthful innovation and entrepreneurship looks
“unprecedented,” said Gary Becker, a University of Chicago economist and a Nobel laureate.
Dr.
Becker is assessing this subject from a particularly intimate vantage
point. His grandson, Louis Harboe, 18, is a friend of Ryan’s, a
technological teenager who makes Ryan look like a late bloomer. Louis,
pronounced Louie, got his first freelance gig at the age of 12,
designing the interface for an iPhone game. At 16, Louis, who lives with
his parents in Chicago, took a summer design internship at Square, an online and mobile payment company in San Francisco, earning $1,000 a week plus a $1,000 housing stipend.
Ryan
and Louis, who met online in the informal network of young developers,
are hanging out this weekend in Austin at South by Southwest. They are
also waiting to hear from the colleges to which they applied last fall —
part of the parallel universe they also live in, the traditional one
with grades and SATs and teenage responsibilities. But unlike their
peers for whom college is the singular focus, they have pondered whether
to go at all. It’s a good kind of problem, the kind faced by great
high-school athletes or child actors who can try going pro, along with
all the risk that entails.
Dr. Becker, who studies microeconomics
and education, has been telling his grandson: “Go to college. Go to
college.” College, he says, is the clear step to economic success. “The
evidence is overwhelming.”
But the “do it now” idea, evangelized
on a digital pulpit, can feel more immediate than academic empiricism.
“College is not a prerequisite,” said Jess Teutonico, who runs TEDxTeen,
a version of the TED talks and conferences for youth, where Ryan spoke a
few weeks ago. “These kids are motivated to take over the world,” she
said. “They need it fast. They need it now.”
The college-or-not
debate neglects other questions that high school students like Ryan and
Louis and their families are wrestling with now: Go to class or on a
business trip? Do grades still matter? What do you do with $20,000 when
you’re 15? And when the money rolls in, what happens to parental
control?
“Things used to be linear. You went to a good school and
you got a good job, and that was the societally acceptable thing to
do,” said Ms. Stern, Ryan’s mother, who was a straight-A student and is a
graduate of Duke University.
Now, she said, “there is no rule book.”
Productive Procrastination
Ryan
and his business partner, Michael Hansen, who is 17, met in seventh
grade. They each had a pet lizard and liked computers. They were nerdy,
but not nerds, and they were complementary: Michael is precise and, like
his close-cropped hair, not flashy. In the partnership, he’s the
programmer. Ryan is high-energy; he talks in veritable tweets, bursts of
slick, hypercasual quips laced with start-up vernacular. (South by
Southwest is “South By.” Of the author John Green, he says, “Everyone my age loves him, which is really interesting from a teen sociology product development perspective.”)
But Michael and Ryan shared a goal: “Since middle school,” Michael said, “we wanted to make an app.”
App
making, while hardly child’s play, has become easier. It’s not
necessary to know intensive programming language to make a simple one.
Apple, as well as other phone makers and tech companies, provide
shortcuts, like templates that let you drop in images or automate
payment methods. But making a complex app is still a big deal, requiring
programming expertise and design and business savvy. And competition is
fierce, with a million apps in the iPhone store alone.
Ryan was
studying for his 10th-grade finals in December 2011 when he thought: I
wish there was something that would help me stop procrastinating. So, he
procrastinated by sketching a picture of a to-do-list app that would
let you clump tasks into three time frames: short term, medium term and
long. The idea was to help people prioritize and not feel overwhelmed.
He
texted the crude picture to Michael. By that March, when both were 15,
“we had our first mock-up,” Ryan said. By June, they were at it hours
every day, refining the design, with Michael writing thousands of lines
of code using Objective-C, a computer language that he learned from
online tutorials. Ryan refined the design and networked. One night that
summer, they went to an informal meeting of Boulder entrepreneurs, who
asked, mostly in jest: “What’s your favorite kind of beer?” They drank
water.
On Jan. 15, 2013, the day before the launch of the app,
Ryan pulled his first all-nighter, sending publicity notes to
TechCrunch, Forbes and other media outlets. Within days the app, priced
at 99 cents, was No. 1, en route to having 50,000 paid downloads. After
Apple took its 30 percent, the boys split about $30,000.
Ryan’s
dedication came at a cost to his grades. The previous spring, he was
almost an all-A student; the fall before the launching, busy with
business, he earned four Bs and two Cs. At school, he’d break the
no-cellphone rule when he saw an incoming call from the 415 or the 408
area code. Silicon Valley, and potential business, calling.
Maybe he was making up for lost time. He was 16, and, at least when compared with Louis Harboe, he was playing catch-up.
First Job at Age 12
As
a child, Louis loved drawing, and at age 10, he got into Photoshop. He
made a portfolio of designs, like icons to use in place of
computer-program icons on your desktop; he shared them on his website
and on Twitter, seeking feedback from designers and developers.
He
didn’t reveal his age; his online profile picture was a smiley face.
“You don’t want to tell anyone you’re 11,” he said, “because no one will
hire you.”
His first job was to design the look of a puzzle game.
It took a week of work. The game maker asked Louis his fee. But he was
12. He had no idea. “Um...,” Louis remembers stalling. “$150?”
“He was like: How about a little more because I really like you?” Louis got $350.
Louis
got a handful of such gigs, and email inquiries for full-time jobs,
including interest from Mozilla and Spotify when he was 14. The next
year, an email came from an Apple talent scout. This time, Louis
conceded his age and received this response: “You’re the second high
schooler I’ve emailed. What are they teaching you in high school these
days?”
In the summer after 10th grade, he was hired by Square, the
payment company; he says he heard the predictable “child labor law
jokes.” Lindsay Wiese, a Square spokeswoman, said that its internship
program focuses on “talent, not age,” and that it looks for leaders
“like Louis” who provide a diversity of perspective. Young people
understand young consumers.
For Louis, the money has added up,
around $35,000 in all, most of it spent on computers and accessories,
some on business trips and some on eating out. Not on the college fund.
Along
with his own money, he came back from San Francisco with what his
father, Frederik Harboe, lovingly describes as a touch of attitude.
Louis, his dad said, developed a taste for high-end coffees, and
remarked on the lack of sophistication of his father’s “dinner platings”
— the arrangement of food on the plate. At Square, there was free
Odwalla orange juice. His family drank Tropicana. He came home after the
first summer asking why his parents weren’t matching Silicon Valley’s
breakfast-drink brands, recalled his mother, Catherine Becker, who
manages a clothing store. “Because Odwalla fresh-squeezed is very
expensive!” she told her son.
In San Francisco, Louis was seeing
techies who had skipped college, or dropped out, and were making it big
in real life. Back in Chicago, his dad suggested that Louis apply to
Carnegie Mellon University, and recalled his son saying, “You want me to
go where — to Pittsburgh?”
Last June, Louis attended the
Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. A year earlier,
Apple lowered its minimum age of admission to the annual conference to
13 from 18, owing to interest from young people. Louis was one of around
150 students to win a free ticket — ordinarily costing around $1,600 —
to attend; he had previously collaborated on two apps, Mathmaster and
iChalkboard.
Other student winners, Apple said, have included
Puck Meerburg, now 14, from the Netherlands, who has released 10 apps.
He gave a TEDx talk at age 11. Lenny Khazan, 15, a ninth grader in
Woodmere, N.Y., who started basic programming in fourth grade, has a
handful of apps; he says he collaborates with teenagers around the
world, including one in Singapore and another in Ohio. Another
scholarship winner in 2013 was Larissa Laich, now 18, from Germany, who
Apple said has six published apps.
Ryan attended the conference,
too, and he and Louis shared a room at the Best Western to save money.
This was their first meeting in person, and Louis watched Ryan with
something like awe. “Every day he had some meeting with some Apple exec
to go to, or he’d say, ‘I’ve got to go to this Bloomberg thing,’ ” Louis
said. “He’s incredible at networking.”
Ryan kept his conference
admission badge, which shows that he is an award winner. “It was like
gold,” Ryan said. “You can get a meeting with anyone with one of those,”
he paused. “But you can’t get into the over-21 parties.”
The Enablers
“I love Ryan’s energy!” Danielle Strachman said. “He embodies the go-getter.”
Ms. Strachman is the program director of the Thiel Fellowship,
which annually awards $100,000 each to 20 young people to pursue their
innovations or businesses. The first year, there were 400 applicants,
and this year there are around 550. Among them was Ryan, who recently
learned that he is a semifinalist. The winners will be announced in
June.
Even over the phone, Ryan impressed Ms. Strachman so much
that she invited him to do an introductory talk at Thiel’s fourth “Under
20 Summit,” held last November in New York. There were 350 attendees,
from ages 9 to 19 — double the attendance from a year ago.
Team
Thiel doesn’t say that college is bad for everyone, but rather, that
having a degree doesn’t insulate people from economic tumult. Young
people with talent and ideas should “strike while the iron is hot,” as
Ms. Strachman put it.
Or, as Jonathan Cain, 32, president of the Thiel Foundation,
which oversees the fellowship, described the situation: “The safe
career track is totally broken.” Even lawyers are laid off, he said, and
janitors have Ph.D.’s. Young people “need a greater sense of urgency
than in the past,” he said, while “college has an infantilizing effect;
it’s an extension of adolescence.” He graduated from Yale, but said it
didn’t dawn on him that there were other options; Ms. Strachman
graduated from Simmons College in Boston.
Other programs are cropping up to support college alternatives. Enstitute, a nonprofit
that puts 18- to 24-year-olds in company apprenticeships, placed 11
interns in its first year, 2011, and will place 500 this year. A
co-founder, Kane Sarhan, said that 20 percent of interns, making $25,000
a year, come directly from high school. But he also encourages college
for many people, saying it’s the rare teenager who is ready for the
“work, motivation and time” that it takes to go directly into the real
world.
In another sign of the trend, some of the biggest tech companies, including Facebook, eBay and Microsoft, are sponsors for “HSHacks,”
a programming talent contest this weekend that signed up 800 students
aged 13 to 18. The event was organized by Shrav Mehta, 17, a high school
senior. The event’s tagline is “Welcome to the Big Leagues.”
Economists
who study education largely agree that college matters greatly to
future financial gain. In general, college graduates find better jobs
and earn higher wages than those with only a high school degree, said
Sandy Baum, an education scholar at George Washington University, though
she acknowledged the economic uncertainty for many graduates. “But
that’s so much more true of people who did not go to college,” she said,
and to suggest otherwise is “misleading a lot of people.”
Dan Finnigan, chief executive of Jobvite,
which helps tech companies find talent, agreed, adding that a tech
sensation might not last. “You may be hot for now, but we live in a
fashionable society,” he said. When the economy softens, or a start-up
or two fails, “it’s going to catch up to that person.”
Silicon
Valley, which has long valued young consumers as early adopters of
technology, seems particularly drawn these days to the wisdom of young
creators and entrepreneurs. Hunter Walk, a partner in an investment firm
called Homebrew, met with Ryan Orbuch earlier this year, when the teenager asked for his insights into Finish.
“It
wasn’t like he showed up and I said, ‘You’re just a kid,’ ” said Mr.
Walk, who knew Ryan’s age. The investor says he benefits from hearing
the insights of young people. “The age gap collapses pretty quickly when
you’re talking product and design,” he said.
Mr. Walk conceded
that there could be a risk of making too much of early tech success.
“You start to ask the same questions you do about child stars in
Hollywood,” he said. “Did they peak at 17, and never have another great
app?”
Waiting for the Future
“I’m scared
that my parents were right when they wanted me to focus completely on
school, but I deeply believe I’ve done the right thing.”
Ryan
wrote that as part of his Thiel Fellowship application, in answer to a
question about important truths in his life. He also wrote 11 college
applications, including one to Stanford, his dream school. His grades,
however, had dropped further; last fall, he received two Ds.
His Thiel application was for something he calls “fixschool.org,”
a concept for inspiring and motivating students “in ways that were
never before possible” with real-world tasks as opposed to homework.
It’s
not clear what he will do next; it depends, he said, on where he gets
in. In the meantime, he and Michael are pushing ahead with Finish. Just
last weekend, they relaunched it as a free app — but with paid add-in
functions — and got more than 50,000 new downloads in just 48 hours.
Louis
is committed to college, a view that solidified in the fall, partly
after bearing witness to the experience of friends in the working world.
“Their Facebook posts are all about work,” he said. “Their lives don’t
seem that interesting.”
There was another reality check. Last
summer, after he spent the better part of a year designing a beautiful
app to show the changing tides, Apple changed the design specs and Louis
had to scrap his project.
So, last fall, he took a break from
heavy design work — though he still wants it to be a big part of his
life and plans to develop apps in college — and he picked up his dad’s
guitar and taught himself to play. He applied to Carnegie Mellon. He
also applied to Georgia Tech, without parental prompting. It wasn’t lost
on his father that both schools were far from Silicon Valley.
Louis
said he wants “the full college experience.” It’s almost as if he’s
been given the gift of seeing an alternate version of his life — that of
a passionate developer who leaps into the tech fray — and realizes that
the real world is a lot of work.
“I want to have fun,” he said. “I still feel like a kid — kind of.”
Orbuch, 16 years old, rolled a suitcase to the front door of his
family’s house in Boulder, Colo., on a Friday morning a year ago. He was
headed for the bus stop, then the airport, then Texas.
“I’m going,” he told his mother. “You can’t stop me.”
Stacey Stern, his mother, wondered if he was right. “I briefly thought: Do I have him arrested at the gate?”
But the truth was, she felt conflicted. Should she stop her son from going on his first business trip?
it aimed to help people stop procrastinating, and was just off its high
in the No. 1 spot in the productivity category in the Apple App store.
Ryan was also eager to go because, as he put it: “There were really dope
people, and I really like smart-people density.”
Ms. Stern loved
her son’s passion, but told him that he could go to Austin only if he
finished the schoolwork he’d neglected while building the app. But Ryan
didn’t comply, and, like battle-weary parents everywhere, she let him go
anyway.
Ryan is now 17, a senior at Boulder High. He is among
the many entrepreneurially minded, technologically skilled teenagers who
are striving to do serious business. Their work is enabled by low-cost
or free tools to make apps or to design games, and they are encouraged
by tech companies and grown-ups in the field who urge them, sometimes
with financial support, to accelerate their transition into “the real
world.” This surge in youthful innovation and entrepreneurship looks
“unprecedented,” said Gary Becker, a University of Chicago economist and a Nobel laureate.
Dr.
Becker is assessing this subject from a particularly intimate vantage
point. His grandson, Louis Harboe, 18, is a friend of Ryan’s, a
technological teenager who makes Ryan look like a late bloomer. Louis,
pronounced Louie, got his first freelance gig at the age of 12,
designing the interface for an iPhone game. At 16, Louis, who lives with
his parents in Chicago, took a summer design internship at Square, an online and mobile payment company in San Francisco, earning $1,000 a week plus a $1,000 housing stipend.
Ryan
and Louis, who met online in the informal network of young developers,
are hanging out this weekend in Austin at South by Southwest. They are
also waiting to hear from the colleges to which they applied last fall —
part of the parallel universe they also live in, the traditional one
with grades and SATs and teenage responsibilities. But unlike their
peers for whom college is the singular focus, they have pondered whether
to go at all. It’s a good kind of problem, the kind faced by great
high-school athletes or child actors who can try going pro, along with
all the risk that entails.
Dr. Becker, who studies microeconomics
and education, has been telling his grandson: “Go to college. Go to
college.” College, he says, is the clear step to economic success. “The
evidence is overwhelming.”
But the “do it now” idea, evangelized
on a digital pulpit, can feel more immediate than academic empiricism.
“College is not a prerequisite,” said Jess Teutonico, who runs TEDxTeen,
a version of the TED talks and conferences for youth, where Ryan spoke a
few weeks ago. “These kids are motivated to take over the world,” she
said. “They need it fast. They need it now.”
The college-or-not
debate neglects other questions that high school students like Ryan and
Louis and their families are wrestling with now: Go to class or on a
business trip? Do grades still matter? What do you do with $20,000 when
you’re 15? And when the money rolls in, what happens to parental
control?
“Things used to be linear. You went to a good school and
you got a good job, and that was the societally acceptable thing to
do,” said Ms. Stern, Ryan’s mother, who was a straight-A student and is a
graduate of Duke University.
Now, she said, “there is no rule book.”
Productive Procrastination
Ryan
and his business partner, Michael Hansen, who is 17, met in seventh
grade. They each had a pet lizard and liked computers. They were nerdy,
but not nerds, and they were complementary: Michael is precise and, like
his close-cropped hair, not flashy. In the partnership, he’s the
programmer. Ryan is high-energy; he talks in veritable tweets, bursts of
slick, hypercasual quips laced with start-up vernacular. (South by
Southwest is “South By.” Of the author John Green, he says, “Everyone my age loves him, which is really interesting from a teen sociology product development perspective.”)
But Michael and Ryan shared a goal: “Since middle school,” Michael said, “we wanted to make an app.”
App
making, while hardly child’s play, has become easier. It’s not
necessary to know intensive programming language to make a simple one.
Apple, as well as other phone makers and tech companies, provide
shortcuts, like templates that let you drop in images or automate
payment methods. But making a complex app is still a big deal, requiring
programming expertise and design and business savvy. And competition is
fierce, with a million apps in the iPhone store alone.
Ryan was
studying for his 10th-grade finals in December 2011 when he thought: I
wish there was something that would help me stop procrastinating. So, he
procrastinated by sketching a picture of a to-do-list app that would
let you clump tasks into three time frames: short term, medium term and
long. The idea was to help people prioritize and not feel overwhelmed.
He
texted the crude picture to Michael. By that March, when both were 15,
“we had our first mock-up,” Ryan said. By June, they were at it hours
every day, refining the design, with Michael writing thousands of lines
of code using Objective-C, a computer language that he learned from
online tutorials. Ryan refined the design and networked. One night that
summer, they went to an informal meeting of Boulder entrepreneurs, who
asked, mostly in jest: “What’s your favorite kind of beer?” They drank
water.
On Jan. 15, 2013, the day before the launch of the app,
Ryan pulled his first all-nighter, sending publicity notes to
TechCrunch, Forbes and other media outlets. Within days the app, priced
at 99 cents, was No. 1, en route to having 50,000 paid downloads. After
Apple took its 30 percent, the boys split about $30,000.
Ryan’s
dedication came at a cost to his grades. The previous spring, he was
almost an all-A student; the fall before the launching, busy with
business, he earned four Bs and two Cs. At school, he’d break the
no-cellphone rule when he saw an incoming call from the 415 or the 408
area code. Silicon Valley, and potential business, calling.
Maybe he was making up for lost time. He was 16, and, at least when compared with Louis Harboe, he was playing catch-up.
First Job at Age 12
As
a child, Louis loved drawing, and at age 10, he got into Photoshop. He
made a portfolio of designs, like icons to use in place of
computer-program icons on your desktop; he shared them on his website
and on Twitter, seeking feedback from designers and developers.
He
didn’t reveal his age; his online profile picture was a smiley face.
“You don’t want to tell anyone you’re 11,” he said, “because no one will
hire you.”
His first job was to design the look of a puzzle game.
It took a week of work. The game maker asked Louis his fee. But he was
12. He had no idea. “Um...,” Louis remembers stalling. “$150?”
“He was like: How about a little more because I really like you?” Louis got $350.
Louis
got a handful of such gigs, and email inquiries for full-time jobs,
including interest from Mozilla and Spotify when he was 14. The next
year, an email came from an Apple talent scout. This time, Louis
conceded his age and received this response: “You’re the second high
schooler I’ve emailed. What are they teaching you in high school these
days?”
In the summer after 10th grade, he was hired by Square, the
payment company; he says he heard the predictable “child labor law
jokes.” Lindsay Wiese, a Square spokeswoman, said that its internship
program focuses on “talent, not age,” and that it looks for leaders
“like Louis” who provide a diversity of perspective. Young people
understand young consumers.
For Louis, the money has added up,
around $35,000 in all, most of it spent on computers and accessories,
some on business trips and some on eating out. Not on the college fund.
Along
with his own money, he came back from San Francisco with what his
father, Frederik Harboe, lovingly describes as a touch of attitude.
Louis, his dad said, developed a taste for high-end coffees, and
remarked on the lack of sophistication of his father’s “dinner platings”
— the arrangement of food on the plate. At Square, there was free
Odwalla orange juice. His family drank Tropicana. He came home after the
first summer asking why his parents weren’t matching Silicon Valley’s
breakfast-drink brands, recalled his mother, Catherine Becker, who
manages a clothing store. “Because Odwalla fresh-squeezed is very
expensive!” she told her son.
In San Francisco, Louis was seeing
techies who had skipped college, or dropped out, and were making it big
in real life. Back in Chicago, his dad suggested that Louis apply to
Carnegie Mellon University, and recalled his son saying, “You want me to
go where — to Pittsburgh?”
Last June, Louis attended the
Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. A year earlier,
Apple lowered its minimum age of admission to the annual conference to
13 from 18, owing to interest from young people. Louis was one of around
150 students to win a free ticket — ordinarily costing around $1,600 —
to attend; he had previously collaborated on two apps, Mathmaster and
iChalkboard.
Other student winners, Apple said, have included
Puck Meerburg, now 14, from the Netherlands, who has released 10 apps.
He gave a TEDx talk at age 11. Lenny Khazan, 15, a ninth grader in
Woodmere, N.Y., who started basic programming in fourth grade, has a
handful of apps; he says he collaborates with teenagers around the
world, including one in Singapore and another in Ohio. Another
scholarship winner in 2013 was Larissa Laich, now 18, from Germany, who
Apple said has six published apps.
Ryan attended the conference,
too, and he and Louis shared a room at the Best Western to save money.
This was their first meeting in person, and Louis watched Ryan with
something like awe. “Every day he had some meeting with some Apple exec
to go to, or he’d say, ‘I’ve got to go to this Bloomberg thing,’ ” Louis
said. “He’s incredible at networking.”
Ryan kept his conference
admission badge, which shows that he is an award winner. “It was like
gold,” Ryan said. “You can get a meeting with anyone with one of those,”
he paused. “But you can’t get into the over-21 parties.”
The Enablers
“I love Ryan’s energy!” Danielle Strachman said. “He embodies the go-getter.”
Ms. Strachman is the program director of the Thiel Fellowship,
which annually awards $100,000 each to 20 young people to pursue their
innovations or businesses. The first year, there were 400 applicants,
and this year there are around 550. Among them was Ryan, who recently
learned that he is a semifinalist. The winners will be announced in
June.
Even over the phone, Ryan impressed Ms. Strachman so much
that she invited him to do an introductory talk at Thiel’s fourth “Under
20 Summit,” held last November in New York. There were 350 attendees,
from ages 9 to 19 — double the attendance from a year ago.
Team
Thiel doesn’t say that college is bad for everyone, but rather, that
having a degree doesn’t insulate people from economic tumult. Young
people with talent and ideas should “strike while the iron is hot,” as
Ms. Strachman put it.
Or, as Jonathan Cain, 32, president of the Thiel Foundation,
which oversees the fellowship, described the situation: “The safe
career track is totally broken.” Even lawyers are laid off, he said, and
janitors have Ph.D.’s. Young people “need a greater sense of urgency
than in the past,” he said, while “college has an infantilizing effect;
it’s an extension of adolescence.” He graduated from Yale, but said it
didn’t dawn on him that there were other options; Ms. Strachman
graduated from Simmons College in Boston.
Other programs are cropping up to support college alternatives. Enstitute, a nonprofit
that puts 18- to 24-year-olds in company apprenticeships, placed 11
interns in its first year, 2011, and will place 500 this year. A
co-founder, Kane Sarhan, said that 20 percent of interns, making $25,000
a year, come directly from high school. But he also encourages college
for many people, saying it’s the rare teenager who is ready for the
“work, motivation and time” that it takes to go directly into the real
world.
In another sign of the trend, some of the biggest tech companies, including Facebook, eBay and Microsoft, are sponsors for “HSHacks,”
a programming talent contest this weekend that signed up 800 students
aged 13 to 18. The event was organized by Shrav Mehta, 17, a high school
senior. The event’s tagline is “Welcome to the Big Leagues.”
Economists
who study education largely agree that college matters greatly to
future financial gain. In general, college graduates find better jobs
and earn higher wages than those with only a high school degree, said
Sandy Baum, an education scholar at George Washington University, though
she acknowledged the economic uncertainty for many graduates. “But
that’s so much more true of people who did not go to college,” she said,
and to suggest otherwise is “misleading a lot of people.”
Dan Finnigan, chief executive of Jobvite,
which helps tech companies find talent, agreed, adding that a tech
sensation might not last. “You may be hot for now, but we live in a
fashionable society,” he said. When the economy softens, or a start-up
or two fails, “it’s going to catch up to that person.”
Silicon
Valley, which has long valued young consumers as early adopters of
technology, seems particularly drawn these days to the wisdom of young
creators and entrepreneurs. Hunter Walk, a partner in an investment firm
called Homebrew, met with Ryan Orbuch earlier this year, when the teenager asked for his insights into Finish.
“It
wasn’t like he showed up and I said, ‘You’re just a kid,’ ” said Mr.
Walk, who knew Ryan’s age. The investor says he benefits from hearing
the insights of young people. “The age gap collapses pretty quickly when
you’re talking product and design,” he said.
Mr. Walk conceded
that there could be a risk of making too much of early tech success.
“You start to ask the same questions you do about child stars in
Hollywood,” he said. “Did they peak at 17, and never have another great
app?”
Waiting for the Future
“I’m scared
that my parents were right when they wanted me to focus completely on
school, but I deeply believe I’ve done the right thing.”
Ryan
wrote that as part of his Thiel Fellowship application, in answer to a
question about important truths in his life. He also wrote 11 college
applications, including one to Stanford, his dream school. His grades,
however, had dropped further; last fall, he received two Ds.
His Thiel application was for something he calls “fixschool.org,”
a concept for inspiring and motivating students “in ways that were
never before possible” with real-world tasks as opposed to homework.
It’s
not clear what he will do next; it depends, he said, on where he gets
in. In the meantime, he and Michael are pushing ahead with Finish. Just
last weekend, they relaunched it as a free app — but with paid add-in
functions — and got more than 50,000 new downloads in just 48 hours.
Louis
is committed to college, a view that solidified in the fall, partly
after bearing witness to the experience of friends in the working world.
“Their Facebook posts are all about work,” he said. “Their lives don’t
seem that interesting.”
There was another reality check. Last
summer, after he spent the better part of a year designing a beautiful
app to show the changing tides, Apple changed the design specs and Louis
had to scrap his project.
So, last fall, he took a break from
heavy design work — though he still wants it to be a big part of his
life and plans to develop apps in college — and he picked up his dad’s
guitar and taught himself to play. He applied to Carnegie Mellon. He
also applied to Georgia Tech, without parental prompting. It wasn’t lost
on his father that both schools were far from Silicon Valley.
Louis
said he wants “the full college experience.” It’s almost as if he’s
been given the gift of seeing an alternate version of his life — that of
a passionate developer who leaps into the tech fray — and realizes that
the real world is a lot of work.
“I want to have fun,” he said. “I still feel like a kid — kind of.”
Read the article online here: The Youngest Technorati - NYTimes.com
April 03, 2013
#Twitter Is Building A Gateway To The “Web” Of Mobile #Apps
Tags:
apps,
MasterTech,
News,
software,
Twitter
filled with geekier terminology like "footer tags," "deep linking," and "URL schemes,"
Twitter Is Building A Gateway To The "Web" Of Mobile Apps | TechCrunch
Twitter is making a move to become the jumping off point for discovering, browsing and accessing the mobile app ecosystem, the company announced yesterday, in a somewhat understated event only developers were invited to attend. The event, due to its nature, was filled with geekier terminology like "footer tags," "deep linking," and "URL schemes," making summaries of its announcements hard to parse by the everyday Twitter user who isn't as familiar with what some of these things may mean.
So let's clarify: Twitter wants to connect its users with content found in the broader mobile app universe, including products for sale from e-commerce companies, the mobile applications themselves, as well as other media, such as photos, videos, article snippets, and soon music, too.
This a major step forward for a service which begin life as a way to post brief, 140-character text-based thoughts, inspired by SMS.
With Twitter Cards, tweets are no longer boring status updates like the above, but are rich, perhaps even interactive elements, which will not only help to increase users' time spent using Twitter and viewing content on its service, but that can also help send increased traffic to mobile applications.
There are two critical pieces to what Twitter announced: a way to increase e-commerce conversions via mobile apps, and a way to boost discovery and app installs for any mobile developer.
Twitter To Impact E-Commerce Conversions
Addressing the first item, the way this works is that Twitter will allow tweets to link to other applications. This is what Twitter refers to as "deep linking." For e-commerce applications, being able to seamlessly move from a tweet to an app users already have installed on their devices – which already contains their account info (name, address, credit card, etc.) – will go a long way to increase e-commerce conversions versus sending those same clicks to the mobile web.
Fred Wilson, of Union Square Ventures, remarks on his blog that while Twitter's phrasing of the announcement "might not seem like much," it's actually "a big deal" for e-commerce apps. "For many e-commerce and marketplace businesses, this will be a huge help in delivering transactions instead of page views," he says.
E-commerce conversions are a big challenge, with typical conversion rates (the ratio of a site's sales to a site's visits) around 2 or 3 percent. On mobile, it's even more difficult because of the tediousness of typing onto smartphones' small screens. By instead pointing a Twitter user interested in a particular product to an app that already contains users' payment info, there's a better chance for serendipity and impulse purchases.
Twitter's early partners on Twitter Cards include e-commerce players like (Wilson's firm's) portfolio company Etsy, as well as Gumroad, Storenvy, and Wine Library. Other partners, like Jawbone and Angry Birds' maker Rovio, also sell physical goods, though not only via the web in the traditional e-commerce sense. Still, they too could take advantage of the simplified app-to-app flow to increase sales of their own items, if they choose.
Boosting App Discovery And Installs
But it's not only e-commerce players who will benefit from the deep app linking. Also benefitting is any mobile app developer looking to increase their app's discoverability – and then, hopefully, decrease the cost associated with acquiring users through other channels like pay-per-install schemes, for instance.
Developers can now include "footer tags" on their app's tweets which are just links that appear below the tweet which point users to the appropriate mobile app store (iPhone, iPad, or Google Play for Android devices), encouraging users to download the app whose content they're viewing.
For example, social messaging platform Path, Flickr, Foursquare, and Twitter's own video app Vine, will be among the first to adopt this new Cards feature.
As users tweet from the apps, their Twitter followers will have only to click on a link to download the app their friend is using if they want to check it out, too. It's closing a loop of sorts – before, users would connect their mobile apps to Twitter, share content from the app, and people would click links and tweets to view that content. But that would be the end of it. If users then wanted to try the app, and hadn't yet downloaded it, they would have to manually do a search in the app store to install it.
The alternative was moving Twitter users to web, and then from web to app. On iOS, Apple only recently (in iOS 6) added this connectivity in the form of "Smart Banners" which allow a web page to display a pop-up banner suggesting the link to download that app from the App Store, or opening the web content within the app. (There's a similar plugin for Android).
But Twitter's newly announced "deep app linking" goes a step further. Instead of taking a user from mobile web to app, it takes the user from app to app. That is, Twitter's app to the developers' app.
Genius, right? After all, a lot of the activity taking place on today's "mobile web" is actually happening within apps. And unlike on the desktop Internet, these apps have not been hyperlinked to enable easy navigation between them. Instead, they've been standalone, isolated pockets of content, requiring users switch between them themselves. That's been a problem for a number of reasons, but notably for app developers, because people only have so much mental bandwidth when it comes to accumulating and then remembering to launch and use the applications they download.
Twitter, which has long since transitioned from text-based thoughts to a content discovery network, is ideal for pushing people around this web of apps. And for developers, the benefit is that they can use Twitter as the jumping off point to move people from viewing content to actual (revenue-generating) in-app activity.
Backing Up: But On Mobile, Facebook Is Still King Of Social
It's a big leap for Twitter, of course, to enable these connections, but lets pull back for a minute from being overly enthusiastic here. For any of this to really matter, Twitter needs to find a foothold on mobile of a significant and meaningful size.
So far, it's still dwarfed by Facebook, which Flurry just reported today comprises 18 percent of users' on-device activity. Twitter, along with all other non-Facebook social networks, only accounts for 6 percent of user activity in comparison.
And Facebook, too, has been working on its own mechanisms for moving users from social network to mobile apps. It taps into Facebook's social graph to make recommendations. Facebook's App Center, available on both web and mobile, is visited by hundreds of millions of users per month. Twitter, meanwhile, as a whole, has over 200 million monthly active users, out of over double that who are registered on the service.
Facebook's app install ads, a new business for Facebook's mobile future, are doing well, too.
And Facebook has 680 mobile monthly actives, while 120 million Twitter users are mobile monthly actives (Twitter said this February that 60 percent of its 200 million monthly actives log on via mobile at least once per month.) Twitter touted this group as skewing younger, noting that those 52 percent of those 18-34 are more likely to login on mobile than other groups.
But being young and mobile isn't only Twitter's thing.
Facebook, despite anecdotal reports to the contrary, isn't struggling to find traction with its youngest users. According to Pew Internet & American Life's latest figures, 86 percent of Internet users 18 to 29 use Facebook today. The site is not in decline, and according to new data from J.P. Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth (via All Things D), Facebook is growing more than other mobile competitors like Twitter, Snapchat, Whatsapp and even its own property, Instagram.
So even as this next, new generation of web – or rather mobile web – users step in to engage with content on social services, it's not necessarily Twitter which will serve as their main gateway to the app universe. That's not to say that Twitter won't be an important, and growing, channel to connect users to apps, but it might be more fair to dub it a window and not a doorway at this time.
Created in 2006, Twitter is a global real-time communications platform with 400 million monthly visitors to twitter.com, more than 200 million monthly active users around the world. We see a billion tweets every 2.5 days on every conceivable topic. World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations and entertainment outlets are among the millions of active Twitter accounts through which users can truly get the pulse of the planet.
→ Learn more
http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/03/twitter-is-building-a-gateway-to-the-web-of-mobile-apps/
Twitter Is Building A Gateway To The "Web" Of Mobile Apps | TechCrunch
Twitter is making a move to become the jumping off point for discovering, browsing and accessing the mobile app ecosystem, the company announced yesterday, in a somewhat understated event only developers were invited to attend. The event, due to its nature, was filled with geekier terminology like "footer tags," "deep linking," and "URL schemes," making summaries of its announcements hard to parse by the everyday Twitter user who isn't as familiar with what some of these things may mean.
So let's clarify: Twitter wants to connect its users with content found in the broader mobile app universe, including products for sale from e-commerce companies, the mobile applications themselves, as well as other media, such as photos, videos, article snippets, and soon music, too.
This a major step forward for a service which begin life as a way to post brief, 140-character text-based thoughts, inspired by SMS.
With Twitter Cards, tweets are no longer boring status updates like the above, but are rich, perhaps even interactive elements, which will not only help to increase users' time spent using Twitter and viewing content on its service, but that can also help send increased traffic to mobile applications.
There are two critical pieces to what Twitter announced: a way to increase e-commerce conversions via mobile apps, and a way to boost discovery and app installs for any mobile developer.
Twitter To Impact E-Commerce Conversions
Addressing the first item, the way this works is that Twitter will allow tweets to link to other applications. This is what Twitter refers to as "deep linking." For e-commerce applications, being able to seamlessly move from a tweet to an app users already have installed on their devices – which already contains their account info (name, address, credit card, etc.) – will go a long way to increase e-commerce conversions versus sending those same clicks to the mobile web.
Fred Wilson, of Union Square Ventures, remarks on his blog that while Twitter's phrasing of the announcement "might not seem like much," it's actually "a big deal" for e-commerce apps. "For many e-commerce and marketplace businesses, this will be a huge help in delivering transactions instead of page views," he says.
E-commerce conversions are a big challenge, with typical conversion rates (the ratio of a site's sales to a site's visits) around 2 or 3 percent. On mobile, it's even more difficult because of the tediousness of typing onto smartphones' small screens. By instead pointing a Twitter user interested in a particular product to an app that already contains users' payment info, there's a better chance for serendipity and impulse purchases.
Twitter's early partners on Twitter Cards include e-commerce players like (Wilson's firm's) portfolio company Etsy, as well as Gumroad, Storenvy, and Wine Library. Other partners, like Jawbone and Angry Birds' maker Rovio, also sell physical goods, though not only via the web in the traditional e-commerce sense. Still, they too could take advantage of the simplified app-to-app flow to increase sales of their own items, if they choose.
Boosting App Discovery And Installs
But it's not only e-commerce players who will benefit from the deep app linking. Also benefitting is any mobile app developer looking to increase their app's discoverability – and then, hopefully, decrease the cost associated with acquiring users through other channels like pay-per-install schemes, for instance.
Developers can now include "footer tags" on their app's tweets which are just links that appear below the tweet which point users to the appropriate mobile app store (iPhone, iPad, or Google Play for Android devices), encouraging users to download the app whose content they're viewing.
For example, social messaging platform Path, Flickr, Foursquare, and Twitter's own video app Vine, will be among the first to adopt this new Cards feature.
As users tweet from the apps, their Twitter followers will have only to click on a link to download the app their friend is using if they want to check it out, too. It's closing a loop of sorts – before, users would connect their mobile apps to Twitter, share content from the app, and people would click links and tweets to view that content. But that would be the end of it. If users then wanted to try the app, and hadn't yet downloaded it, they would have to manually do a search in the app store to install it.
The alternative was moving Twitter users to web, and then from web to app. On iOS, Apple only recently (in iOS 6) added this connectivity in the form of "Smart Banners" which allow a web page to display a pop-up banner suggesting the link to download that app from the App Store, or opening the web content within the app. (There's a similar plugin for Android).
But Twitter's newly announced "deep app linking" goes a step further. Instead of taking a user from mobile web to app, it takes the user from app to app. That is, Twitter's app to the developers' app.
Genius, right? After all, a lot of the activity taking place on today's "mobile web" is actually happening within apps. And unlike on the desktop Internet, these apps have not been hyperlinked to enable easy navigation between them. Instead, they've been standalone, isolated pockets of content, requiring users switch between them themselves. That's been a problem for a number of reasons, but notably for app developers, because people only have so much mental bandwidth when it comes to accumulating and then remembering to launch and use the applications they download.
Twitter, which has long since transitioned from text-based thoughts to a content discovery network, is ideal for pushing people around this web of apps. And for developers, the benefit is that they can use Twitter as the jumping off point to move people from viewing content to actual (revenue-generating) in-app activity.
Backing Up: But On Mobile, Facebook Is Still King Of Social
It's a big leap for Twitter, of course, to enable these connections, but lets pull back for a minute from being overly enthusiastic here. For any of this to really matter, Twitter needs to find a foothold on mobile of a significant and meaningful size.
So far, it's still dwarfed by Facebook, which Flurry just reported today comprises 18 percent of users' on-device activity. Twitter, along with all other non-Facebook social networks, only accounts for 6 percent of user activity in comparison.
And Facebook, too, has been working on its own mechanisms for moving users from social network to mobile apps. It taps into Facebook's social graph to make recommendations. Facebook's App Center, available on both web and mobile, is visited by hundreds of millions of users per month. Twitter, meanwhile, as a whole, has over 200 million monthly active users, out of over double that who are registered on the service.
Facebook's app install ads, a new business for Facebook's mobile future, are doing well, too.
And Facebook has 680 mobile monthly actives, while 120 million Twitter users are mobile monthly actives (Twitter said this February that 60 percent of its 200 million monthly actives log on via mobile at least once per month.) Twitter touted this group as skewing younger, noting that those 52 percent of those 18-34 are more likely to login on mobile than other groups.
But being young and mobile isn't only Twitter's thing.
Facebook, despite anecdotal reports to the contrary, isn't struggling to find traction with its youngest users. According to Pew Internet & American Life's latest figures, 86 percent of Internet users 18 to 29 use Facebook today. The site is not in decline, and according to new data from J.P. Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth (via All Things D), Facebook is growing more than other mobile competitors like Twitter, Snapchat, Whatsapp and even its own property, Instagram.
So even as this next, new generation of web – or rather mobile web – users step in to engage with content on social services, it's not necessarily Twitter which will serve as their main gateway to the app universe. That's not to say that Twitter won't be an important, and growing, channel to connect users to apps, but it might be more fair to dub it a window and not a doorway at this time.
Created in 2006, Twitter is a global real-time communications platform with 400 million monthly visitors to twitter.com, more than 200 million monthly active users around the world. We see a billion tweets every 2.5 days on every conceivable topic. World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations and entertainment outlets are among the millions of active Twitter accounts through which users can truly get the pulse of the planet.
→ Learn more
http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/03/twitter-is-building-a-gateway-to-the-web-of-mobile-apps/
May 13, 2011
Another day, Another Security Leak: Facebook this time
Today it's Facebook.
" ... Over the years, hundreds of thousands of applications may have inadvertently leaked millions of access tokens to third parties,"Symantec had to get them to come out and tell you...
And yet it amazes people continue to put things online that they wouldn't want the whole world to see...
Story from Reuters below:
Facebook may have leaked your personal information: Symantec
(Reuters) - Facebook users' personal information could have been accidentally leaked to third parties, in particular advertisers, over the past few years, Symantec Corp said in its official blog.
Third-parties would have had access to personal information such as profiles, photographs and chat, and could have had the ability to post messages, the security software maker said.
"We estimate that as of April 2011, close to 100,000 applications were enabling this leakage," the blog post said.
" ... Over the years, hundreds of thousands of applications may have inadvertently leaked millions of access tokens to third parties," posing a security threat, the blog post said.
The third-parties may not have realized their ability to access the information, it said.
Facebook, the world's largest social networking website, was notified of this issue and confirmed the leakage, the blog post said.
It said Facebook has taken steps to resolve the issue.
"Unfortunately, their (Symantec's) resulting report has a few inaccuracies. Specifically, we have conducted a thorough investigation which revealed no evidence of this issue resulting in a user's private information being shared with unauthorized third parties," Facebook spokeswoman Malorie Lucich said in a statement.
Lucich said the report also ignores the contractual obligations of advertisers and developers which prohibit them from obtaining or sharing user information in a way that "violates our policies."
She also confirmed that the company removed the outdated API (Application Programing Interface) referred to in Symantec's report.
Facebook has more than 500 million users and is challenging Google Inc and Yahoo Inc for users' time online and for advertising dollars.
(Reporting by Thyagaraju Adinarayan and Sakthi Prasad in Bangalore; Editing by Bernard Orrand Anshuman Daga)
© Thomson Reuters 2011. All rights reserved.
-- The MasterFeeds
Facebook Loses Much Face In Secret Smear On Google
Facebook Loses Much Face In Secret Smear On Google
Facebook secretly hired a PR firm to plant negative stories about Google, says Dan Lyons in a jaw dropping story at the Daily Beast.
The source emails are here.
I’ve been patient with Facebook over the years as they’ve had their privacy stumbles. They’re forging new ground, and it’s not an exaggeration to say they’re changing the world’s notions on what privacy is. Give them time. They’ll figure it out eventually.
But secretly paying a PR firm to pitch bloggers on stories going after Google, even offering to help write those stories and then get them published elsewhere, is not just offensive, dishonest and cowardly. It’s also really, really dumb. I have no idea how the Facebook PR team thought that they’d avoid being caught doing this.
First, it lets the tech world know that Facebook is scared enough of what Google’s up to to pull a stunt like this. Facebook isn’t supposed to be scared, ever, about anything. Supreme confidence in their destiny is the the way they should be acting.
Second, it shows a willingness by Facebook to engage in cowardly behavior in battle. It’s hard to trust them on other things when we know they’ll engage in these types of campaigns.
And third, some of these criticisms of Google are probably valid, but it doesn’t matter any more. The story from now on will only be about how Facebook went about trying to secretly smear Google, and got caught.
The truth is Google is probably engaging in some somewhat borderline behavior by scraping Facebook content, and are almost certainly violating Facebook’s terms and conditions. But many people argue, me included, that the key data, the social graph, really should belong to the users, not Facebook. And regardless, users probably don’t mind that this is happening at all. It’s just Facebook trying to protect something that it considers to be its property.
Next time Facebook should take a page from Google’s playbook when they want to trash a competitor. Catch them in the act and then go toe to toe with them, slugging it out in person. Right or wrong, no one called Google a coward when they duped Bing earlier this year.
You’ve lost much face today, Facebook.
Update: Sleazy PR Firm Throws Scummy Facebook Under The Sordid Bus
Facebook secretly hired a PR firm to plant negative stories about Google, says Dan Lyons in a jaw dropping story at the Daily Beast.
For the past few days, a mystery has been unfolding in Silicon Valley. Somebody, it seems, hired Burson-Marsteller, a top public-relations firm, to pitch anti-Google stories to newspapers, urging them to investigate claims that Google was invading people’s privacy. Burson even offered to help an influential blogger write a Google-bashing op-ed, which it promised it could place in outlets like The Washington Post, Politico, and The Huffington Post.Not good.
The plot backfired when the blogger turned down Burson’s offer and posted the emails that Burson had sent him. It got worse when USA Today broke a story accusing Burson of spreading a “whisper campaign” about Google “on behalf of an unnamed client.”
The source emails are here.
I’ve been patient with Facebook over the years as they’ve had their privacy stumbles. They’re forging new ground, and it’s not an exaggeration to say they’re changing the world’s notions on what privacy is. Give them time. They’ll figure it out eventually.
But secretly paying a PR firm to pitch bloggers on stories going after Google, even offering to help write those stories and then get them published elsewhere, is not just offensive, dishonest and cowardly. It’s also really, really dumb. I have no idea how the Facebook PR team thought that they’d avoid being caught doing this.
First, it lets the tech world know that Facebook is scared enough of what Google’s up to to pull a stunt like this. Facebook isn’t supposed to be scared, ever, about anything. Supreme confidence in their destiny is the the way they should be acting.
Second, it shows a willingness by Facebook to engage in cowardly behavior in battle. It’s hard to trust them on other things when we know they’ll engage in these types of campaigns.
And third, some of these criticisms of Google are probably valid, but it doesn’t matter any more. The story from now on will only be about how Facebook went about trying to secretly smear Google, and got caught.
The truth is Google is probably engaging in some somewhat borderline behavior by scraping Facebook content, and are almost certainly violating Facebook’s terms and conditions. But many people argue, me included, that the key data, the social graph, really should belong to the users, not Facebook. And regardless, users probably don’t mind that this is happening at all. It’s just Facebook trying to protect something that it considers to be its property.
Next time Facebook should take a page from Google’s playbook when they want to trash a competitor. Catch them in the act and then go toe to toe with them, slugging it out in person. Right or wrong, no one called Google a coward when they duped Bing earlier this year.
You’ve lost much face today, Facebook.
Update: Sleazy PR Firm Throws Scummy Facebook Under The Sordid Bus
Blogger is (Finally) back
Tags:
Blogger,
blogs,
Google,
MasterBlog,
MasterCharts,
MasterFeeds,
MasterLiving,
MasterMetals,
MasterTech,
News,
Security,
software,
Tech
Hello all readers of the MasterBlogs!
Excuse us for the breakdown in our blog service, but Blogger is to blame!!! - not us!!
_______________________________________
Check it out on The MasterTech Blog
May 08, 2011
The ‘Facebook Class': Apps & Fortune Makers
NYTimes.com
By MIGUEL HELFT
STANFORD, Calif.
ALL right, class, here’s your homework assignment: Devise an app. Get people to use it. Repeat.
That was the task for some Stanford students in the fall of 2007, in what became known here as the “Facebook Class.”
No one expected what happened next.
The students ended up getting millions of users for free apps that they designed to run on Facebook. And, as advertising rolled in, some of those students started making far more money than their professors.
Almost overnight, the Facebook Class fired up the careers and fortunes of more than two dozen students and teachers here. It also helped to pioneer a new model of entrepreneurship that has upturned the tech establishment: the lean start-up.
“Everything was happening so fast,” recalls Joachim De Lombaert, now 23. His team’s app netted $3,000 a day and morphed into a company that later sold for a six-figure sum.
“I almost didn’t realize what it all meant,” he says.
Neither did many of his classmates. Back then, Facebook apps were a novelty. The iPhone had just arrived, and the first Android phone was a year off.
But by teaching students to build no-frills apps, distribute them quickly and worry about perfecting them later, the Facebook Class stumbled upon what has become standard operating procedure for a new generation of entrepreneurs and investors in Silicon Valley and beyond. For many, the long trek from idea to product to company has turned into a sprint.
Start-ups once required a lot of money, time and people. But over the past decade, free, open-source software and “cloud” services have brought costs down, while ad networks help bring in revenue quickly.
The app phenomenon has accentuated the trend and helped unleash what some call a new wave of technology innovation — and what others call a bubble.
Early on, the Facebook Class became a microcosm of Silicon Valley. Working in teams of three, the 75 students created apps that collectively had 16 million users in just 10 weeks. Many of those apps were sort of silly: Mr. De Lombaert’s, for example, allowed users to send “hotness” points to Facebook friends. Yet during the term, the apps, free for users, generated roughly $1 million in advertising revenue.
February 15, 2011
Google Chases Computer Criminals to Search-Engine Competitors
Incredible the industry that it has become!
Google Chases Computer Criminals to Search-Engine Competitors - Bloomberg
Google Inc. has almost cut in half the malicious software affecting users of its search engine, driving hackers to competitors including Microsoft Inc.'s Bing, Yahoo! Inc. and Twitter Inc., a report says.
Hackers targeted Google, owner of the most popular search engine, 38 percent of the time as of Dec. 31, according to the report to be released later this month by Barracuda Networks Inc., a web security firm. Mountain View, California-based Google accounted for 69 percent of the attacks in a sample conducted around June, the report says. A Barracuda report in July labeled Google "king of malware."
Even as Google improved its security, the number of attacks increased. In the December sample, Barracuda said it found 226 pieces of bad software a day, compared with 146 in June. Meanwhile, Google's competitors recorded an increase in malware- laced search results: Cyber criminals placed 30 percent of their bad software on Yahoo! search results in December, up from 18 percent in June. Bing accounted for 24 percent in December, up from 12 percent in June. And the targeting of Twitter rose to 8 percent from 1 percent, the report says.
Google said it has ratcheted up efforts to identify and scrub attempts at so-called search poisoning, which allows criminals to take control of computers to perpetuate cyber attacks, as well as large-scale banking and identity-theft swindles.
Read the rest here: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-15/google-chases-computer-criminals-to-search-engine-competitors.html
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