Editor’s note: Leonid (“Lenny”) Kravets is a patent attorney at Panitch, Schwarze, Belisario and Nadel, LLP in Philadelphia, PA. Lenny focuses his practice on patent prosecution and intellectual property transactions in computer-related technology areas. He specializes in developing IP strategy for young technology companies and blogs on this topic at StartupsIP. Follow Lenny on Twitter: @lkravets and @startupsIP.

As software patent litigation ramped up over the past few years, software patents have come under the microscope within the technical community. Many investors and technologists believe that software patents should be abolished all together, while others take the less extreme position that many software patents are obvious over known prior art (“prior art” being earlier publications that show a patent  is obvious or not new). Courts are increasingly cognizant of these criticisms.

Though it is unlikely that software patents are going away any time soon, as the recent summary judgment in eBay v PartsRiver (PartsRiver is now known as Kelora) demonstrates, courts are beginning to do a more thorough job of applying the obviousness standard to software patents.

Kelora claims to have the patent on faceted (parametric) search. The company is a hybrid between a practicing entity and a “patent troll” in that Kelora offers a search product, but has aggressively pursued a licensing and litigation strategy against a wide range of large and small Internet retailers. Though Kelora has not received as much attention from the press as some non-practicing entities such as Lodsys, the Kelora patents have posed a significant threat to the Internet retailing infrastructure. In Kelora’s largest lawsuit, defendants include Internet giants such as Microsoft, EBay, Target, Amazon and NewEgg.

While the named defendants have chosen to fight Kelora, over the past few years, many others have taken licenses under the Kelora patents. Other smaller targets have decided to turn off their parametric search features to avoid being accused of infringement by Kelora. Many targets of Kelora’s patents believe the patents to be invalid over prior art that goes back to as early as the 1960s.

Over the past few years, the Kelora defendants have mounted a significant effort to invalidate the Kelora patents, which were filed in the early 1990s. First, the patents were re-examined by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) over newly found prior art, but Kelora overcame the new rejections by amending the claims to perform the parametric search through a resubmission to a server. When the lawsuit was allowed to continue with the amended claims, the defendants argued that the resubmission component was obvious over the known prior art because client/server architecture was well-known by the early 1990s.

On May 21st, the court granted the defendants’ motion for summary judgment.  The court agreed with the defendants’ position that a server resubmission was obvious in view of other client/server systems of that time. The inventors of the Kelora patent, who still own a stake in the company, argued that when they came up with their parametric search invention in the early 1990s, they did not know of the client/“web” server infrastructure. However, in granting the motion, the judge found that such client/server systems were well-known, and it did not matter that the inventors themselves did not know of such a system.

While Kelora will almost certainly appeal this decision to the Federal Circuit, this result is promising for opponents of software patents. The summary judgment shows that courts are becoming increasingly sophisticated in interpreting the claims of software patents, and in applying prior art under the obviousness standard. While the Kelora defendants already expended significant resources in this case, finding that the patents are obvious at the summary judgment stage of the case saved the defendants the significant cost of a full trial.

Courts (and the USPTO) doing a better job of applying prior art to the claims of software patents is the best news possible for those who hope for a more economical way of dealing with software patents within the current legal system.

The game is over. That game where they get to hire you for 40 years, pay you far less than you create, and then give you a gold watch, and then you get bored, you get depressed, and you die alone.

It wasn’t that fun of a game anyway.

When I had a corporate job I would wake up depressed. I couldn’t move out of bed. The sun would be coming in. A cat on the fire escape staring at me through the window. Even it was more excited to be alive than me. And, by the way, I had the best job in the world. I interviewed prostitutes for a living at three in the morning.

But they were going to kill me in my cubicle.

In 2009 I asked about 10 Fortune 500 CEOs, “did you just use this crisis as an excuse to fire all the people you were afraid to fire before.” Only one said “of course” instantly. The others had to drink more. But then it was admitted: you’re all dead weight and there’s no loyalty.

We’ve entered the “Choose Yourself” era. The era without middlemen. Without The Other telling you your bonus, your salary, your movie can be made, your book published, your company funded, your life validated. The era where you have to always be planning your escape. Where you create your platforms on twitter, facebook, quora, pinterest,  blogging, vlogging, itunes, and wherever else and every day you Create and you Innovate and you Sell for yourself. You Eat what you Kill. And your rewards are commensurate with how sharp your teeth are.

Most people need to begin planning their exit strategy RIGHT NOW:

So here’s the 10 reasons you need to quit your job right now. And below that I have the methods for doing it.

1) Safety. In ancient history you would start as the shoeshine boy, move to the mailroom, impress someone with your go-get-it attitude, become an assistant account executive, move up the ranks, move horizontally to another company, get promoted again, move vertically, horizontally, zig zag across corporate America and eventually retire with your IRA savings. The myth was over in 2008. It never really existed but now we know it’s a myth. You were addicted to the stability. The white picket fence. Getting away from home for ten hours a day. I understand. But it was an addiction. And the fix is gone. Your job was never safe. And it’s less safe now than it was yesterday. A billion people in China need a job and they are gunning for your cubicle.

2) Home. Everyone thinks they need a safe job so they can save up to buy a home and also qualify for a mortgage. Mortgage lenders at the banks like people who are like them – other people locked in cubicle prison.  They want to see an income statement. A tax return. A credit check. A stability check. A note from your therapist. Everything that proves you are a reliable human just like them. Well now you don’t need to worry about that. Here’s why you should never own a home in the first place. Save yourself the stress.

3) College. Everyone thinks they need to save up to send their kids to college. Depending on how many kids you have and where you want them to go to college it could cost millions. Well now you don’t need to send your kids to college. So you don’t need to stress about that money anymore.

4) Your boss. Most people don’t like their boss. Its like any relationship. Most of the time you get into a relationship for the wrong reasons. You were too young. You didn’t know what you wanted. You really loved the other girl but she rejected you. Eventually you’re unhappy. And if you don’t get out, you become miserable and scarred for life. That’s why 1 in 2 marriages end in divorce. That’s why you need to quit your job.

5) Your coworkers. Look around. Are these the people you were meant to spend the rest of your life with. You will spend more time with them then you will spend with your children.

6) Fear. We have such a high unemployment rate, people are afraid if they leave the job they are miserable at, they won’t be able to get a job. This is true if you just walk into your boss’s office and pee on his desk and get fired.  But its not true if you prepare well. note that we’ve just had 26 consecutive months in a row of private sector job growth. Much of that is people working at one or two-person companies (i.e. “startups”).  More on that in a bit.

7) The Work. Most people don’t like the work they do. They spend 4 years going to college, another few years in graduate school, and then they think they have to use that law degree, business degree, architecture degree and then guess what? They hate it. They made a bad decision when they were 18. They chose “LAW”. Or “ECON”. But they don’t want to admit it. They feel guilty. They are in debt. A trillion dollars in debt backed by the US government. No problem. Read on.

8) Bad things happen. You start to get depressed and you don’t know why. You start to feel like your life didn’t add up to what it should’ve. SOMETHING WENT WRONG. You start to physically ache. You get nervous about bonuses, promotions, who gave credit to who? You play politics (an ugly game), you fantasize about selling diet pills (Tim Ferris did it!), adults yell at you for irrational reasons, you have sex with another girl at work. Now work is like one big sexually transmitted disease.  And it gets worse and worse. You don’t want to look back at your life and say, “man, those were the worst 45 years of my life.” That wouldn’t feel good.

9) The economy is about to boom.  I don’t care if you believe this or not. Stop reading the newspaper so much. The newspapers are trying to scare you. Bernanke just printed up a trillion dollars and airlifted it onto the US economy. Who is going to scoop that up. You in your cubicle? Think again. And just what is a “Greece”? Is it that tiny country with the economy the size of Rhode Island that other countries have been supporting since Augustus paid all their bills in 20 BC? Just what are they?

10) Your job has clamped your creativity. You do the same thing every day. You want to be jolted, refreshed, rejuvenated.

Note: I will grant some people love their jobs. This is not for them but the 90% who don’t.

But, you say: you still need to support yourself, you still need to support your family, you can’t just walk into your boss’s office and quit.

Good point. You need to prepare. Its like training for the Olympics if you feel now is the time to move on from your job. You need to be physically ready, emotionally (don’t quit your job and get divorced on the same day for instance), mentally (get your idea muscle in shape) and spirituall all ready.

The posts that will help you quit your job. To quit, at least follow the ideas in the first post:

-          How to be the Luckiest Man Alive in 4 Easy Steps

-          What to do if you were Fired Today

-          The 100 Rules for Being an Entrepreneur

In the above link, it’s not about starting a business. It’s about finding what your frontier is, how to explore it, how to test the waters and move beyond it. I’m not saying I can do this. I’ve hit my boundary so many times and bounced off that I have six broken noses to show for it.

Some notes on this post:

Note #0: Why is this on techcrunch? Because all people want to know that they have a choice. That they can eat what they kill. That in the “Choose Yourself” era it’s ok to make the leap into the unknown, in the abyss, do your startup, save the world, deliver value, invent, create, make money, and have fun. You don’t have to do what is expected of you.

Note #1: I get a lot of criticisms from anonymous people in the message boards. Claudia begs me, “Don’t look at the message boards unless you talk to me first.” Because she knows I’m an addict. I tell her ‘ok’ but I know I’m going to look. Because that’s what addicts do. I’m not selling anything. If you want any of my books and can’t afford then write me and I’ll send for free. I’m not pushing any agenda. I have nothing to gain by you quitting your job.

Note #2: Sometimes people criticize the “list” format in these posts. “10 reasons” for this. “10 reasons” for that. About 20% of my posts are lists. Not so much. Read “Happiness this Second”  for a recent non-list post. And Charlton Heston clearly didn’t mind lists when he came down from Mt. Sinai with “The 10 Commandments”, the very first blog post. 3500 years later and still getting clicks.

I don’t mind when people critique me when they’ve lost, quit, or have been fired from as many jobs as I have. Or lost a home. Tried to raise two kids with almost nothing. Been as desperately unhappy as sometimes I’ve been. This doesn’t qualify me for anything, of course. Maybe it disqualifies me. Who cares?  A lot of people have had much worse than me. And I’ve been very blessed as well. I’ve been able to come back.

Sometimes  you can build back up. And sometimes you just think, “How the hell did this happen to me again”.  My goal in these posts is to help people maybe think for a split second they can reduce some stress in their lives, they don’t have to go through what I went through, they can throw themselves into experience and still come back alive, and at the end of the day, they can use some of these ideas to live a better and more fulfilling life. I’ve had that experience and I like to write about it.

Later tonight I’m going to give my two daughters, ten and thirteen years old, two choices and ONLY two choices. Either they watch “Star Wars” with me or they watch “Schindler’s List”. And if they don’t like either choice then maybe I’ll just sit by the TV with some ice cream and watch all by myself.

The legend goes something like this: as a child, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s father would relentlessly hound him to “Get better”, so Jack eventually banned the phrase from being tweeted. Go ahead and try it, the tweet won’t go through. But the legend? It’s hoax.

See, way back when, Twitter wasn’t a popular smart phone app, it was a way to publish up to 140 characters to the Internet via text message. To let people follow and unfollow each other, change their bio, and more straight from SMS, Twitter created a list of commands that when sent wouldn’t be tweeted, but would trigger actions instead.

So now when you tweet  ”get better”, “get [any single word]“, and several other phrases Twitter interprets them as SMS commands.

If you want more to try, there’s “Fav [username]” to favorite someone’s last tweet, and “Suggest” to receive recommendations of who to follow. Some of the commands still work from the web interface and smartphone apps. You can follow someone by tweeting “follow joshconstine” or just “f [username without the @]“. Others like the mysterious “get” command that spawned the rumor on StackExchange Skeptics which was busted by user DMI, don’t work outside of SMS.

There’s also no evidence Dorsey’s father ever told him to “get better” or aggressively pushed him to succeed. In fact, Mr. Dorsey senior sounds like a very cool dad who ran a pizza restaurant that inspired Jack’s entrepreneurship, and helped Jack ”build a model of a mass spectrometer out of Legos, ball bearings, and magnets when he was 11″ according to Fast Company.

That doesn’t mean the Twitter co-founder and Square CEO doesn’t want you to “get better”, though. When Jack won an award for encouraging others to start their own business, he told the crowd “Don’t just expect the unexpected—BE the unexpected.”

[Illustration by Wes Duvall for Fast Company]

California-based watch maker Devon made a name for themselves a few years ago when they released the Tread 1. The modern looking electro-mechanical timepiece dazzled people with its tread-based system to indicate the time. It was large, highly unorthodox for a high-end timepieces, and a little crazy. A full review of the Devon Tread 1 is here.

Now Devon has released images of an upcoming Steampunk version of the Tread 1. It started as a concept but due to customer demand they will build them. The Steampunk Tread 1 is the retro-futuristic rethink of the standard Tread 1. The case will likely be made with pieces of bronze and oxidized steel. Rivets and lots of exposed screws complete the steampunk look.

No word on price but expect to pay over $20,000 for this bauble.

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — explodes in opinions about Facebook IPO, Facebook privacy or lack of it, Facebook acquisition frenzy-to-be, and more Facebook, Facebook, Facebook. Surprisingly, this one goes on for a record-breaking hour and thirty-nine minutes, proving once again that size doesn’t matter. Except in electronic condoms.

Also discussed; Why G-Tar didn’t win the Techcrunch Disrupt grand prize, why Kevin Marks’ Target knockoff doesn’t come close, and why Keith Teare is a venture communist. No animals or Wall Street traders were harmed in the making of this film. As John Taschek implied, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Did I mention we talked about Facebook.

@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kteare, @kevinmarks, @jtaschek

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

Editor’s Note: TechCrunch columnist Semil Shah currently works at Votizen and is based in Palo Alto. You can follow him on Twitter @semil

If you’re building apps for phones or tablets, here’s a must-see discussion for you. We were able to corral Greylock’s John Lilly (who recently helped lead an investment in Instagram, right before it was acquired) backstage at Disrupt NYC earlier this week for a more casual conversation about the mobile app ecosystem and hardware. In this short talk, Lilly shared his views about the similarities and differences of building applications for mobile devices, taking care to point out that he sees many great entrepreneurs approaching the phone in a similar manner to how they approach the tablet. While the operating systems are similar on iPhone and other iOS devices (like iPad), for instance, the use cases, usage by time of day, and monetization opportunities are entirely different. Lilly encourages entrepreneurs to ask how to get their ideas on the homescreens of users’ phones and tablets.

The government of Syria uses made-in-California technology from BlueCoat Systems to censor the Internet and spy on its pro-democracy activists (who are regularly arrested and tortured, not to mention slaughtered wholesale.) McAfee and Nokia Siemens have done the same in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Amesys of France and FinFisher of the UK aided brutal dictators in Egypt and Libya. Sweden’s Teliasonera allegedly took up the same cudgel in Belarus, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Georgia and Kazakhstan.

Meanwhile, back in the USSA, Bain Capital recently bought a Chinese video-surveillance company reportedly “used to intimidate and monitor political and religious dissidents,” and Cisco “has marketed its routers to China specifically as a tool of repression.” You can’t help but be impressed by how globalized the oppression-technology industry has become.

So what privacy/surveillance story caused an eruption of outrage this week? Yes, you guessed it: SceneTap, a startup that uses facial-recognition software to (anonymously)track demographics at bars and clubs in major American cities in real time. Forget the dissidents risking their lives for democracy: what matters is that the hipsters are creeped out!

Needless to say, the companies in question tend to dodge responsibility with bland buck-passing PR patter that knowingly turns a blind eye to oppression and brutality: “Obviously what an individual customer would do with a product once they acquire it is beyond our control.” (Apparently it never crossed their minds that it’s eminently possible to build technical controls into their product, to filter the filters.) “It’s a legal business [...] Ultimately people who use this technology to infringe human rights are responsible for their actions.”

This is of course complete bullshit. Whether you’re a company or a person, there’s really no excuse for helping repressive regimes to track and hunt down their dissidents, and “What? Me? Responsible? All I did was give the AK-47 to the psychotic serial killer, how was I supposed to know how he was going to use it?” is almost worse than no defense at all.

The EFF has proposed a “know your customer” process similar to that used for the Foreign Corrupt Practices act and export regulations. It has largely been ignored. Not a good sign.
The oppression industry is bad enough now … but if nothing happens, it’s going to get a whole lot worse.

There’s a desperate information war going on in Syria right now, between pro-democracy dissidents and their international allies on one side, and a shadowy and remarkably sophisticated group of pro-government hackers on the other. Right now that war’s being fought mostly on the desktop. But wait until Android phones become ubiquitous in oppressed nations. (Not iPhones; too expensive.) Unlike desktops, unless they’re rooted, Androids typically are — or at least can be — essentially controlled from birth by their manufacturers and their national carriers … who will naturally be incredibly susceptible to government pressures to install hidden spyware and malware.

Imagine an authoritation nation where everyone has a phone running a government-customized version of Android — indeed, is required to have one, because every phone is an eye and ear of the national surveillance network. (Meanwhile, SceneTap-like software ensures that dissident groups can’t meet in person.) It’s an Evgeny Morozov dystopia, and a disconcertingly plausible one. Right now, carrier bloatware and device control is just an irritation, but look just a little ways into the future, and it’s worryingly easy to envision it actually becoming a serious human rights problem … especially if Western companies keep on selling their oppression technology to all comers.

The auction house Sotheby’s is selling an official memo from Steve Jobs to Atari about improving the World Cup Football game. The pages – stamped and signed by Jobs himself – describe circuit diagrams and paddle layouts. Delightfully, the stamp says “All-One Farm Design” and features a Buddhist mantra, “gate gate paragate parasangate bodhi svahdl.” As you do.

If you’re thinking of picking this up you’d best have about $10,000 to $15,000 handy – although bidding could get fierce. Quoth MacWorld:

If you’re really feeling spendy, you can plop down $180,000 on an original Apple I circuit board, presumably in mint condition. Get cracking and don’t forget: Sabbe satta sukhi hontu.

Last month, the U.S. Department of Justice accused Apple and a number of other large U.S. publishers of conspiring to fix eBook prices and filed an antitrust lawsuit. While most of the publishers quickly settled the lawsuit, Apple decided to fight. Earlier this week, as Ars Technica reports today, Apple responded (PDF) to the government’s accusations. Apple doesn’t mince words in its response. The company’s lawyers call the case against Apple “fundamentally flawed as a matter of fact and law” and say that the idea that Apple tried to reduce competition and fix prices is “absurd.”

In its complaint, the U.S. government said Apple and publishers like Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Penguin and Macmillan, who favor the so-called agency model which allows publishers to set their own eBook price, were colluding to fix eBook prices in their fight against Amazon, which favors a wholesale model that gives it the power to set the price of the eBooks it sells. The DoJ alleges that Apple and the other publishers conspired to eliminate competition in the eBook retail market.

Apple, however, argues that the government “sides with monopoly, rather than competition, in bringing this case. The Government starts from the false premise that an eBooks ‘market’ was characterized by ‘robust price competition’ prior to Apple’s entry.” Before the iBookstore, Apple says, “there was no real competition, there was only Amazon.”

Apple says its entry in the market benefited consumers, as it brought is challenging Amazon and provided consumers with choice and “innovative features, such as color pictures, audio and video, the read and listen feature, and fixed display.”

The company also argues that it is giving more power to the publishers and especially to self-publishing and smaller publishing houses.

Throughout the document, Apple accuses the government of selectively quoting Steve Jobs from Walter Isaacson’s biography (“The Government’s selective citation to hearsay from a small portion of Apple’s former CEO’s biography is irrelevant and has no place in this litigation.”).

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TinyTap is a new iPad application designed for kids which introduces a different angle on the “record-your-own-voice” storybooks craze, by offering a playable book or game you and your kids can customize with your own photos, camera shots, music, narration, and more. The resulting creations can then be shared with family and friends. And, for a little inspiration, the built-in TinyTap store offers a collection of pre-made games which kids can customize with their own voice and actions.

The app is targeted at 4+ and up, so I couldn’t really enlist my in-house kid app beta tester (aka my 2-year old kid) to give it a rundown. But in testing it myself, I have to admit that I’m not 100% convinced they’ve nailed it on the user interface. For example, some of things you can add to your story, like photos and questions, are centered as thumbnails within the application’s design dashboard. Meanwhile, the add music option is oddly hovering above next to another add photo button, the sharing option and an edit button. It’s a layout that doesn’t quite make sense.

That’s too bad because if TinyTap’s workflow was more streamlined and simplified, it would be easier for them to add additional elements to the story/game design process.

That being said, TinyTap is still a lot better than much of the kids’ apps crapware out there in the iTunes App Store. And it’s hard not to fall in love with the concept at the very least. Instead of burning up brain cells with the mind-numbing games out there, TinyTap enables kids to become game creators, not just players. 

The idea immediately reminded me of Kodu, Microsoft’s visual programming language for kids, which allows them to create PC and Xbox games – and more importantly, helps them to start thinking like a programmer. But Kodu is not only for different types of platforms, it’s for a slightly older child, too.

The bigger concept with TinyTap is that it could potentially become an entry-level tool for game development, which starts kids young, allowing them to wrap their little minds around the “if/then/else” concepts that go into process of game creation. The building blocks are already there: e.g., if you touch the nose in the picture when asked, you’re right and can go to the next question, but if you get it wrong, the game says “try again.”

There are a ton of DIY app building tools for adults, so it’s great to see someone thinking about building a platform for kids, too.

TinyTap is an Israeli-based company, co-founded in January 2012 by UX designers Yogev Shelly (formerly of Rounds.com) and another (who can’t disclose his name right now, as he’s still employed elsewhere). The team is based in Tel-Aviv and is currently looking to raise.

The app is a free download in iTunes here.

MoPub, an ad serving startup for smartphone apps, is announcing a new way for its publishers to offer their inventory to advertisers — a private marketplace limited to select publishers and advertisers.

Basically, the market creates a more direct relationship, where publishers get more control and predictable pricing, while advertisers get early access. Advertisers will get first look a publisher’s inventory — MoPub compares the marketplace to a eBay’s Buy It Now model, where buyers can skip the auction process and just purchase an item at a set price (in this case, an ad impression). They also get access to special data like demographics, geography, and in-app purchase history.

MoPub was founded by former AdMob and Google employees, and its investors include AdMob-backer Accel.

When I spoke CEO Jim Payne last year, he compared MoPub’s ad serving technology, which helps publishers manage a mix of advertising from a number of sources, to desktop ad companies like DoubleClick and AdMeld, but dealing with the specific issues of mobile. Similarly, Payne says the private market is similar to marketplaces for desktop ad impressions, but it’s dealing with the specific data points that are interesting to mobile advertisers, like latitude/longitude coordinates. Among MobPub customers, Payne predicts the marketplace this will be of most interest to “large publishers with high-quality inventory.”

The company has been testing the marketplace in private beta mode, but now it’s opening it up to more publishers and advertisers. The next step, Payne says, is to make it more sophisticated about what data gets passed to advertisers.

To find out more, you can email info@mopub.com.

There are plenty of ways to get your flight school kicks with your smartphone or tablet — this missile shooting Griffin chopper comes to mind — but few manage to ooze as much style (or cost as much money) as Parrot’s AR.Drone 2.0.

Getting the thing ready to fly is surprisingly simple. Once you’ve popped the battery into place, and turned the thing on, the Drone creates its own Wi-Fi network that the control device connects to. From there, just fire up the FreeFlight app on your iOS or Android device and you’re off to the races.

The big draw for some will be the ability to record the Drone’s aerial journeys. In addition to providing the pilot with an idea of where the drone is going, the small camera pod mounted on the drone’s nose is capable of capturing photos as well as 720p video. The camera’s small sensor means that quality tends to take a hit in low light, but the bigger issue for some is the tendency to see a wiggling effect in recorded video because of the four rotors whirring away.

Let’s be honest here — it’s not the most useful thing to have in your gadget closet (doesn’t everyone have one of those?) unless you’ve got a thing for aerial photography or not-so-covertly spying on people. What it lacks in pure utilitarian functionality it makes up for in sheer fun. There’s something terribly fun about tilting your smartphone around and watching this little quad-rotor aircraft dart around in response to it.

It’s even surprisingly easy to fly, provided you start out slow and put in a few minutes of fiddling first. Sadly, our Mobile Editor Matt Burns didn’t take that rule to heart, as he quickly crashed our own Drone at Disrupt. C’est la vie, but be prepared to do your due diligence if you don’t want to screw up a pricy piece of machinery. That said, Parrot has made it terribly easy to wow your friends with some neat aerial tricks — just double tap a button from within the app to make the Drone flip, and take in the applause.

The Drone is a hell of a lot of fun to play with, but there’s always that price tag to consider — it’ll run you a considerable $299. The responsible thing may be to take that money and use it to buy a rock-solid juicer instead, but I think your mental well-being is better served by the ability to explore the skies (or annoy your neighbors).

There’s a growing number of apps based on the idea of sharing between couples: A few months ago, my colleague Eric Eldon wrote about Pair, which launched out of the latest batch of Y Combinator startups and is kind of like Path for couples. Then there’s Cupple, which also lets users share pictures and places and chart memories over the course of their relationships. The latest entrant into the couple-sharing mobile app space is SimplyUs, which launched on the Apple App Store Friday and aims to make couples happier by adding a little organization into their lives.

While other apps built for couples are primarily built for keeping a private collection of photos and memories, and providing private communication tools, SimplyUs takes a whole different approach: It’s focused on improving couples’ lives by helping them to become more organized together. As a result, its main features are built around joint calendaring and list tools.

The idea is that a little organization goes a long way to improving communication and between couples. That idea comes from co-founder Jonathan James’ background in productivity software — formerly at Microsoft, James worked on early versions of its SharePoint application, and found that while he was incredibly organized at work, at home he and his wife had difficulty coordinating schedules and staying on the same page about things they needed to do together.

The app works by keying into users’ existing calendaring systems, allowing them to update and share items either from within the app or from outside applications — like Google Calendar, for instance — and then syncs up all updates between the couples and their calendars of choice. It also has a list function, which enables couples to add To-Dos, as well as grocery or shopping lists. And, of course, it has a photo-sharing capability. All items can be commented on, letting users annotate calendar items or to-do lists as they add or remove items.

James, whose wife just had a baby, says the app has been instrumental in helping the couple get through the typically stressful process. “I’m more convinced than ever that what we’re building is an incredibly useful tool for couples,” he told me by phone. “It brings them closer together, reduces stress, and increases happiness.”

By doing so, James hopes to keep couples engaged and using the app — something which, as a beta user, I’ve actually found to work. While Pair was fun for a few days before I lost interest, SimplyUs is actually a pretty useful tool that I can see myself continuing to use as time goes on.

But there could be a bigger opportunity here: While their first application was built with couples in mind, James says he could see the startup developing similar mobile tools for other groups, such as families, Social Groups, and Small Business Teams, especially as it adds more employees over time.

The SimplyUs team is made up of James and his co-founder, Herman Chan, who are a part of Toronto-based Extreme Startups’ first Accelerator group. The company is in the process of raising money, with the Extreme Startups demo day less than a month away, on June 19.

People don’t want to install and give data permissions to games, they want to play them, so now Facebook is allowing games to be played directly from within news feed or Timeline stories. These previews give gamers a taste and could get them over the install hurdle once they’re already addicted.

Facebook has to keep delivering growth for apps to get developers to stick around, or better yet, build for it first. Feed gaming could be a big selling point that could get devs to prioritize Facebook’s canvas over iOS, Android, Chrome web store, and other platforms that force people to download and install before the fun starts. Some of Facebook’s most popular games are already using this tactic, and you can try it out here for Angry Birds, Bubble Witch Saga, and Idle Worship.

Facebook tested feed gaming with Angry Birds earlier this month, but now any games can publish playable feed stories. They show up with a little play button over a thumbnail image in the feed or timeline, but instead of starting up a video, a flash embed of the game opens up. You can instantly start flinging birds, shooting bubbles, popping penguins or whatever. When the game round finishes, you’re often prompted to click through and install / give permissions to the full version.

You can try out feed gaming here for Angry Birds, Bubble Witch Saga, and Idle Worship.

This is going to work. The friction of having the decide whether a developer deserves your data can’t be understated. It probably drives away a ton of potential gamers. Even though most games are freemium and don’t cost anything to download, the try before you buy option means you don’t have to invest until you’re more sure you’ll actually enjoy a game.

Expect this to become a core part of the growth strategy for Facebook games. Developers will need to decide how to distill their games into a 30-second mini-experience. For some twitch games that will be easy, but for deeper strategy games it will be a challenge. They’ll also need to come up with hooks like “beat your friend’s high score” or “earn extra virtual goods by playing from the feed”.

I think people still feel guilty playing Facebook canvas games. These aren’t mobile where you can justify playing because you’re doing so on the move when you’re unable to be productive. These are web games that may be distracting you from your work, or at least communicating with your friends. When you click a link and the first thing you see is a permissions prompt, that guilt is triggered, and you shy away instead of installing.

By delaying the guilt trip data permission until after you’re already having fun, you’re much more likely to speed through the install process to get your next gaming fix. Even the most studious, serious, buttoned down business men are now going to try Facebook games, and some will end up installing and paying.

Disrupt isn’t just a great launch platform for startups. Earlier this week at TechCrunch Disrupt New York, President Obama’s senior technology advisor, Todd Park and U.S. CIO Steven VanRoekel announced five new federal initiatives to get entrepreneurs and other innovators to work on the White House’s new digital road map for open government. Within the 24 hours after the announcement at Disrupt on Wednesday, Park told O’Reilly’s Alexander B. Howard earlier today, the White House received 600 applications for the Presidential Innovation Fellows program and “another several hundred people had expressed interest in following and engaging in the five projects in some other capacity.”

The program is looking for 15 “amazing innovators” who are interested in coming to Washington, DC for 6- to 12-month fellowships. They will work in small teams focused on the five project’s Park and VanRoekel announced earlier this week: MyGov, Open Data Initiatives, Blue Button for America, RFP-EZ and The 20% Campaign. The scope of these projects was chosen so the teams can “deliver significant results within six months.”

Here is how our own Gregory Ferenstein described these initiatives earlier this week:

1. Expand the one-click download program of “Blue Button” to energy, education, security, and the nonprofit sector. Blue Button was an early open data initiative from Park’s previous job at HHS to allow federal medical recipients (Department of Defense, Veterans, and Medicare) to access their health information in an easy, one-click process for use with all of their doctors. A relevant recent extension of Blue Button for energy, “Green Button,” is already in use by iPhone app makers to give homeowners feedback on their energy use. Additional energy info will be coming soon in the hopes that savvy entrepreneurs can make profitable, socially-beneficial use of the new data.

2. Expand Blue Button itself to private sector insurance companies. Right now, only federal beneficiaries have access to the data, yet many Americans would also like an easy way to track their medical history and share relevant results between doctors.

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

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

5. MyGov, a user-friendly website to find government services. Currently, government services are organized by government need, not citizen, making many services difficult to find.

PayPal is expanding its in-store payments technology to 15 new national retailers, following its initial brick-and-mortar rollout with Home Depot earlier this year.  At a press conference held yesterday at PayPal’s San Jose HQ, the company confirmed it is now adding new merchants including Abercrombie & Fitch, Advance Auto Parts, Aéropostale, American Eagle Outfitters, Barnes & Noble, Foot Locker, Guitar Center, Jamba Juice, JC Penney, Jos. A. Bank Clothiers, Nine West, Office Depot, Rooms To Go, Tiger Direct and Toys “R” Us.

The merchants will soon be integrating PayPal technology at their point-of-sale, allowing customers to choose it as an alternative payment option to cash, check or charge.

As with the Home Depot integration, customers can either use a PIN code or a special PayPal credit card that can be swiped, in order to deduct the payment from their PayPal accounts. The solution is appealing to retailers, because it doesn’t require a significant investment in new technology, like replacing POS systems or installing some sort of NFC-based solution, for example. In the future, the vision is to scale the PayPal integration to support more merchant-friendly services, like real-time location-based ads and in-store offers.

PayPal is attempting a massive land grab in the race against buzzy new startups like Square, as well as alternative mobile payments and wallet solutions from startups and established players alike. And time appears to be of essence for PayPal. The company says that it went from a 5-store pilot test with Home Depot to a full rollout to the chain’s nearly 2,000 locations in just two months.

In addition to the new retailers, PayPal also announced deals that will allow it to reach mid-market businesses, which have multiple locations and some sort of point-of-sale solution already in place. PayPal is now making it possible for merchants using POS software providers Leapset, ShopKeep, Vend, and Erply to very quickly enable PayPal within their stores – again, without replacing their current POS infrastructure. PayPal notes that through these customers combined, they reach some 50,000 offline businesses. Some of the POS software vendors’ customers have already switched their PayPal integrations on, though the company did not detail how many or who.

Finally, PayPal also announced deals with VeriFone and Equinox, the #1 and #3 POS terminal manufacturers, respectively. These companies will now integrate PayPal into their payment terminals. PayPal is already working with Ingenico, which means it will now reach nearly 40 million POS terminals worldwide.

PayPal hasn’t always been the most beloved brand in the payments space, but its a well-established player with a significant user base, traction, brand recognition and, as demonstrated, the ability to scale quickly. Last year, the company saw over $118 billion in total payment volume, and expects to top $7 billion in mobile payment volume this year. 2012, says President David Marcus in the official announcement, is about testing and learning what works in the offline retail market.

Despite the competition it faces, it’s impossible to count out PayPal’s potential for success in this arena just yet.

Not everyone loves Facebook enough to give it three, four, or five spots on their homescreen. So yesterday’s launch of Facebook’s third consumer iOS app Facebook Camera could actually end up reducing usage of Facebook’s main app, Messenger, and others by compelling people to consolidate them into a folder. Facebook Camera has shot to the top of the iOS free charts, so lots of people are making the decision of where to put it right now.

This issue isn’t one just for Facebook but for any developer looking to break out specific features of a cluttered omni-app into streamlined standalone apps. Is a lightweight feel worth the risk of app overload?

Facebook’s attempt to cram its entire full-featured web-based social network into a single mobile app hasn’t quite worked out. Many people complain the app feels slow and requires too many clicks to get to core services. Honestly, I think the click friction concerns are blown out of proportion. It takes one click to start uploading a photo and two to reach your messages. It is slow, though, as it has to load a ton of extra features you don’t always use.

Standalone apps don’t have to load anything unnecessary, so at first it makes sense that Facebook would release Messenger and now Camera, its new Instagram-style photo filtering and sharing app.

But where are you going to put them? If you’re not willing to give Facebook three home screen spots, some of them are going to get relegated to your back pages. There could be another terrible fate in store for the apps, though. You might drag their icons on top of each other and create a Facebook app folder.

Suddenly it takes an extra click to get to any of them. Without that big blue F icon reminding me to check my news feed and notifications, I could become a lot less likely to open my main Facebook app so often.

Facebook for iOS app had around 57.5 million daily users growing at 2.5 million per month when Facebook stopped reporting these numbers at the start of 2012, at that rate it would have around 70 million DAU now. Being banished to a folder could stunt this growth.

And what if Facebook doesn’t stop? What if it releases another standalone app for accessing third-party apps on its mobile platform? Or apps for Events or its location service Places? Not to mention Facebook Camera is already competing with Instagram which Facebook has acquired (though the deal still has to close), and it recently launched a separate app for admins to manage their Pages. They could all get buried in the folder too.

[Update: Some like Google's director of product management Hunter Walk think opening a folder and then a standalone app might still be easier than digging through a clutter omni-app for certain features. But there's still the problem of Apple's questionably designed folders. With no featured image, just a grid of teeny tiny icons within the icon, they don't really sing "click me" the way a full-size app icon does. I once put all my photo and camera apps in a folder and found myself clicking on all of them less. People navigate their iPhones visually, and folders don't have the same visual prominence.]

Facebook is reaching standalone app overload — a growing pain of the move to mobile, a medium it wasn’t originally built for. The root of the problem is the sluggish main app. Facebook can’t keep cutting off limbs to make it more lightweight, and it can’t just trim the fat of lesser-used features. It needs to convert fat to muscle so its main app stays the same size, but feels better, faster, stronger.

Check out our review of Facebook Camera to see how it stacks up against Instagram

Sure, UberConference took home the Disrupt Cup and its accompanying $50,000 (giant) check. But it could be argued that Incident, makers of the gTar, had already won. The company’s Kickstarter project skyrocketed from $10,000 in funding before stepping on the Disrupt stage, to a current $220,000.

This is big, considering that Disrupt is a web/software conference and a hardware startup went all the way to the very end. Even Michael Arrington was impressed, which says quite a bit. But none were more impressed or intrigued than myself, which is why I wrangled the Incident guys together backstage and begged and pleaded to play the gTar.

Kindly, they obliged. I have no experience playing the guitar whatsoever, and my greatest claim to musical fame would be completing Free Bird on expert in Guitar Hero. Now, I won’t say my rendition of Blackbird a la gTar is the best in the world, but for having absolutely no practice or experience, my few moments with the hardware should be a testament to the gTar’s potential.

I also spoke with the founders about the difficulties of distribution, and more importantly, music licensing. Eventually the gTar app will come with a content store, from which you can buy different songs. For now however, this is a bare bones iteration that is sure to improve over time.

If you move now, you can get the gTar on Kickstarter for $50 off the expected retail price, at just $399.

Exec, a mobile app that instantly gets people to do your errands, has raised $3.3 million, according to an SEC filing. The company’s co-founder Justin Kan, who is also behind Justin.tv, Twitch.tv and SocialCam, says he’s not ready to disclose investors yet, except to say that there are around 25 different individuals in the round. The filing only shows Exec’s team on it, so it’s hard to tell who the firms or angels in the round are.

What’s Exec? It’s kind of comparable to TaskRabbit, because you can call on people to run your errands from an app. But Exec doesn’t require a bidding process and it calls up ‘Execs,’ or people to do your tasks, instantaneously. It also has a flat rate of $25 an hour. Exec covers all sorts of errands — deliveries, chores, cleaning, even art. One ‘Exec,’ who cleaned my house once, has also coached YC founders on their pitches for Demo Day. Seriously.

“This money is for building out the San Francisco Bay Area market,” Kan said.