ReadWrite

Google Admits Defeat In Its 7-Year Battle With Amazon And PayPal

Owen Thomas — Mon, 20 May 2013 16:35:00 -0700

Google just announced that is it is shutting down Google Checkout, a Web-based payments system it launched to great expectations seven years ago.

It will continue to offer Google Wallet and handle transactions for apps, games, music, and movies on the Google Play store. But Google is largely getting out of the business of processing payments for physical goods and services.

Google Checkout may have had great expectations, but it delivered little in the way of results. Amazon and eBay's PayPal continue to dominate e-commerce, with a host of lesser-known players also doing the digital scutwork of processing credit-card transactions online. (Two of those, Braintree and Shopify, are offering discounts to former Google Checkout customers.)

Google does billions of dollars a year in credit-card transactions. But most of that is for a purely digital product: online ads purchased by small businesses.

How Google Did Not Get Ahead In Advertising

The theory has long been that Google could use the sheer bulk of these money flows to get into other parts of the payment business, first with Google Checkout, later with Google Wallet.

That theory has not worked out in practice. Where Google has a captive market, as with its ad products or the Google Play store, it's a natural thing for it to handle payments. Where Google has had to compete in payments, it has struggled.

What's Google left with? Google Wallet, a confusingly named product, is now much more of a wallet. In instances where developers use its new mobile-app payment feature, Instant Buy, to sell goods to smartphone and tablet users, Google essentially just stores a credit-card number and passes it on for processing. For Web-based merchants, Google Wallet will store coupons and help drive traffic to online stores.

And in the handful of physical retail locations that take Google Wallet, the tap-to-pay feature available on some Android smartphones will work. Google never actually processed these payments—it just passed on a card number to the merchant, who used some other service to actually handle the transaction.

Missing The Bigger Opportunity

But Google is missing out on a much bigger opportunity—which is serving as an alternative to Amazon.com for the whole world of commerce as mobile, digital, physical, and virtual collide.

It's not clear, for example, what will happen to Google Shopping Express, an experimental same-day delivery service Google is testing in the San Francisco Bay Area. That relies on Google Wallet to process payments for physical goods—exactly the business Google has said it doesn't want to be in anymore. A Google spokesperson tells us Google Wallet will continue to be an option for Shopping Express.

The real prize for Google in being a player in the payments world is data—data about what advertisements and experiences lead to transactions. The risk is that Amazon and PayPal, by handling more kinds of transactions than Google is willing to do, including traditional e-commerce, will attract more merchants. Or that merchants will simply sign up with a payments processor and leave Google out of the equation altogether.

While Google's not completely of the payments game—and one should never count the monolith of Mountain View out—it feels like Google is taking a big step back from the money business. Whether its bet on digital and mobile payments is a tactical retreat or a strategic defeat might not be clear for years.

Updated with comment from Google on its Shopping Express same-day delivery service.

Congress Whacks Apple With The Tax Avoider Stick

ReadWrite Editors — Mon, 20 May 2013 16:21:08 -0700

An 18-month congressional investigation turned up evidence that Apple is a major-league tax avoider, the New York Times reports — one that allegedly sheltered billions of dollars from taxation by moving the money through a web of subsidiaries, some of which had no employees and claimed to be exempt from taxes. Apple CEO Tim Cook will testify before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations tomorrow; Apple has released an advance copy of his testimony.

Flickr Gets A Makeover — It's Been Supersized And Instagrammed

Lauren Orsini — Mon, 20 May 2013 16:06:00 -0700

It wasn’t that long ago that Yahoo stood accused of letting Flickr decay beyond repair.

Today, under the guidance of new CEO Marissa Mayer, the company has given the oft maligned image-sharing community a major facelift. Yahoo’s announcement promises a Flickr that’s “more spectacular, much bigger, and one you can take anywhere.”

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the grid. Here’s what’s new on your Flickr account:

Room To Grow

As recently as yesterday, free Flickr users could upload and display 200 images at a time. Now every user has one terabyte of storage space. For those of you playing along at home, that’s enough for roughly 200,000 photos. Or as the Flickr staff puts it even more dramatically, “you could take a photo every hour for forty years without filling one.”

Following Flickr’s consistently freemium model, you can get even more perks by going pro. Fifty dollars will remove all advertisements. And for the serious professional, $499.99 will double your storage space to two terabytes per year. Or, you know, more than 400,000 photos.

If you already had an original Flickr Pro account, priced at $24.95, you’re getting a heck of a deal. Yahoo has upgraded you to the $49.99 option until August 2013, free of charge. Pro user Aaron Brazell sent us a screenshot of his pro account, pictured below:

Introducing The Grid

The most instantly noticeable change is an aesthetic one. Your photos have enlarged themselves to jaw dropping size and now dominate the screen. Taking a cue from Instagram, your home page is now an infinite scroll through your contacts’ recent photos.

Your profile page has also gone the way of Pinterest and Windows 8, filling the page with a grid of images. Just like Facebook and Twitter, your profile page includes a background photo to offset your profile picture.

I found that Flickr had already put one of my Favorites as my background image, a photo I didn’t even take myself. As it’s not credited, I certainly hope the photographer doesn’t take issue.

Wait, What’s Going On?

A lot here has changed and Flickr power users are still trying to figure out what’s new. Flickr’s most active discussion forum, Flickr Central, is abuzz with comments about the change. Given that these are the people that continued to daily use Flickr even as the rest of the Internet complained it was dead, it’s no surprise they’re unhappy with the change.

“I signed on Flickr to post a story about Yahoo vowing not to screw up Tumblr … and then I see the clusterfuck that is the new homepage,” one user wrote.

Meanwhile, confusion abounds at Flickr’s official Help Forum. I’d be amazed if the staff can answer all 1,100 plus questions that were added in the last hour. It looks like Yahoo might want to update Flickr’s FAQ guidelines, which still link to old news like the ability to pay $24.95 for a pro subscription.

If you're confused, don't add to the backlog. I have reached out to Yahoo for details on when the new FAQ will be up and will update when we know more.

Who Hates The Yahoo-Tumblr Deal? Tumblrers, That's Who

Lauren Orsini — Mon, 20 May 2013 12:13:00 -0700

The Tumblr acquisition may give Yahoo the young, hip audience it’s always wanted — assuming it can keep them. Because Tumblr users aren’t happy, and they’re letting it all out.

“Yahoo is buying Tumblr guys THIS IS NOT OKAY THEY’LL RUIN OUR HOME,” blogged one user in a sentiment repeatedly echoed on the #yahoo, #tumblr, and #yumblr tags on Tumblr, all of which are currently experiencing an overload of activity.

Via the 5EXi Tumbr

Tumblr users’ greatest fear? Change, of any kind. Many have vowed to leave at the first sign of Yahoo involvement. One Tumblr user-generated photo shows a purple, spammy nightmare of what many bloggers fear Tumblr may soon become.

Via the castielmalotovedlucifer Tumblr

These concerns aren’t exactly unfounded, either: Yahoo has a track record of botching its acquisitions. It’s telling that Yahoo’s press release on the acquisition notes that it “promises not to screw it up.” (You read that correctly — that's in the press release.)

Tumblr CEO David Karp assured users in an announcement that “We’re not turning purple.” (Of course, Tumblr has been purple before — back in 2010, it went purple for Pride Day. When it reverted to traditional blue, well, users complained about that, too.)

There are some obvious conflicts a-brewin'. Yahoo is a self-described family friendly brand while Tumblr is infamous for its uncensored pornographic content. As a result, some users worry about a culture clash. "Yahoo buying Tumblr is like having a house party supervised by your Grandma," one user blogged.

Yahoo is already working to defuse such fears, though it's far from clear how successfully. In addition to the company's promise "not to screw it up," CEO Marissa Mayer made a point of offering this reassurance on a call with analysts and press shortly after the acquisition announcement: "We really want to let Tumblr be Tumblr and let Yahoo be Yahoo."

Via thefrogman.me Tumblr

Some of Tumblr's competitors say they smell blood in the water. WordPress CEO Matt Mullenweg, for instance, wrote on his personal blog Sunday that “normally we import 400-600 posts an hour from Tumblr, last hour it was over 72,000.” (Full disclosure, I’m currently a trial employee at WordPress.com.)

Of course, social-media outrage is often transitory. On Quit Facebook Day in 2010, organizers planned to lead a mass exodus from the site in protest of Facebook privacy policy. In the end, fewer than 2% of American users left after all.

Mayer has already begun addressing the culture clash on her brand new Tumblr, which spells “Mayr” without the “e” as a nod to Tumblr’s quirky spelling. Her latest post speaks Tumblr’s language — a spot-on GIF that depicts Mayer and Karp battling it out through netspeak. Mayer's rallying cry: WFH [Work From Home]. Karp's? NSFW [Not Safe For Work].

When Karp announced the acquisition, he signed it with a nod to one of Tumblr’s most viral (and NSFW) memes, “Fuck Yeah.” Even if Yahoo is planning to change an aspect of the site, Tumblr’s salty language and aversion to censorship don’t seem to be one of them.

Lead image via the tinsoftware Tumblr

Chinese Army Cyberunit Apparently Attacking U.S. Targets Again

Brian Proffitt — Mon, 20 May 2013 08:48:00 -0700

Getting called out by the Obama administration wasn't enough of a deterrent for Unit 61398, the cyberattack unit of the People's Liberation Army of China, because apparently they're at it again, working to pilfer information from private company and public government data stores.

The New York Times is reporting that Unit 61398 has resumed operations and is actively engaged in hacking into any U.S. systems that might hold information considered to be of use for the People's Republic of China.

Security firm Mandiant told the Times "that the Chinese hackers had stopped their attacks after they were exposed in February and removed their spying tools from the organizations they had infiltrated. But over the past two months, they have gradually begun attacking the same victims from new servers and have reinserted many of the tools that enable them to seek out data without detection.

"They are now operating at 60 percent to 70 percent of the level they were working at before, according to a study by Mandiant requested by The New York Times," the article reported.

If accurate, then it's clear that the U.S. is going to have to step up its game when it comes to cybersecurity, particularly organizations that have data related to trade secrets or, more disturbingly, infrastructure plans - both targets of Chinese hackers.

Even if this isn't the PLA, someone is hacking these systems, and it's time to stop treating cybersecurity like a game.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

GrubHub, Seamless Merger Brings Bigger Online Food Delivery

Brian Proffitt — Mon, 20 May 2013 08:04:00 -0700

If you like using online tools to hunt and gather your food, take note: Seamless and GrubHub, two of the better-known players in the mobile food-delivery business, announced today that they will be merging their services.

GrubHub, which is privately owned, features the most restaurants of the two services, claiming 20,000 eateries in their online ordering network, compared to Seamless' 12,000. Seamless users, then, are going to get the better end of the deal right away, with the inclusion of GrubHub's additional dining options. GrubHub users should benefit from Seamless overall service, which is generally held in higher regard.

The consolidation might help both vendors overall, with one less mobile ordering service for restaurant owners to have to work with to get customer orders coming in.

This is a big bite of business: in 2012, the two organizations sent approximately $875 million in gross food sales to local takeout restaurants, resulting in combined revenue well in excess of $100 million, today's press release indicated.

No terms of the deal between privately held GrubHub and the public Seamless company were revealed, though Fortune Senior Editor Dan Primack tweeted this morning that "Seamless investors will hold majority stake in combined co w/ GrubHub."

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Blinded By Big Data: It's The Models, Stupid

Matt Asay — Mon, 20 May 2013 08:02:00 -0700

In the Gold Rush to accumulate and put to use Big Data, we may actually be making it harder to actually glean insights from that data. Yet the prospect of data solving all of our problems is so tempting that even the brightest minds of our generation seem confused.

Take, for example, Irving Wladawsky-Berger, a strategic advisor to Citigroup and former IBM executive. Wladawsky-Berger is exceptionally bright, someone whose insights into open source helped me a great deal while he was still at IBM. But writing in The Wall Street Journal ("Spotting Black Swans with Data Science"), he "[gets] the Black Swan idea backwards," as Nassim Taleb, professor at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute and author of The Black Swan, points out.

Completely. Backwards.

Predicting Black Swan Events

Black Swan events are major events that take us by surprise, but afterwards yield clear explanations as to why they happened. Examples include the 9/11 attacks, the rise of the Internet and World War I.

But they can also apply to business, and so there is a temptation to apply Big Data to spot such Black Swans before they happen. As Wladawsky-Berger writes:

This [Big Data] ability to work across data sets and silos could help us get early clues to hard-to-predict, high-impact black swan events, so we can dig deeper into these clues and assess their validity. When experts investigate catastrophic black swan events, be they airline crashes, financial crises, or terrorist attacks, they often find that we failed to anticipate them even when the needed information was present because the data was spread across different organizations and was never properly brought together.

Unfortunately for Wladawsky-Berger's analysis, Black Swans, by their very definition, cannot be predicted by analyzing the data. Yes, Black Swan events always look eminently predictable in hindsight, yet no one ever predicts them.

More Data, More Problems

Equally unfortunate, the more data we throw at the problem, the more impossible it becomes to predict such events, as Taleb highlighted on Twitter:

@mjasay The worse is that abundance of data magnifies statistical errors.
— Nassim N. Taleb (@nntaleb) May 18, 2013

The bigger the data set, the harder it becomes to sift through the noise to find the signal, because we're more prone to fixate on incorrect correlations between disparate data sets. As Taleb goes on to note, "The world has today between 50K and 100K variables, hence >1 billion correlations. So the spurious will be used."

Or as Taleb writes in The Black Swan:

In business and economic decision-making, data causes severe side effects - data is now plentiful thanks to connectivity; and the share of spuriousness in the data increases as one gets more immersed into it. A not well-discussed property of data: it is toxic in large quantities - even in moderate quantities.

Which problem gets worse the more often we look at the data:

The more frequently you look at data, the more noise you are disproportionally likely to get (rather than the valuable part called the signal); hence the higher the noise to signal ratio.

So what to do?

Better Models, Not More Data?

Simon Wardley, an innovation researcher at CSC, suggests we should look beyond bigger data to better models, holding that "Historically, it's been about relative balance and flow between unmodelled to modelled. The value is not the data but the models."

Yet as software engineer Simon Wart reminds us, before the Wall Street meltdown "even low-level IT peons knew the models were a joke [but] our tribal mindset blinded us to the consequences."

Which may well be the problem: we are human. All too human.

Whether in our models, our collection of certain kinds of data, or our interpretation of that data, we bring personal biases to the analysis, which Microsoft Research's Kate Crawford argues in Harvard Business Review. We cannot avoid this bias, and the attempt to look for correlation rather than causation in our data solves nothing.

In fact, it arguably makes the problem worse, because it gives us too much confidence in our data.

A Little Data Never Hurt Anyone

The trick, then, is to approach our data with caution. It's not that data can't help us anticipate the future. It can. Just ask the City of Chicago, which has a very successful predictive analytics platform used to anticipate crime and health trends, among other things.

But there is a reason most enterprises still use Big Data technologies like Hadoop to solve old problems like ETL, rather than analytics. We're still early in Big Data, and enterprises rightly suspect that Big Data isn't some magic pixie dust that immediately yields insights into how much to charge, where to market, etc. Big Data can help, but it's not The Answer.

And it's certainly not the answer to predicting Black Swan events. To do that, you don't need data. You need hindsight.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

6 First-Hand Tips On How Startups Can Cope With Success

Scott Gerber — Mon, 20 May 2013 07:37:00 -0700

Startups are fast-paced, sometimes hectic places to work. In the early days, everyone wears multiple hats and is expected to lend a hand where needed, leading to close bonds between team members.

But when a startup stars to become successful - and outgrows its all-hands-on-deck philosophy - the founder's job is to make sure that the company can properly scale to cope with the new reality. It's a good problem to have, of course, but that doesn't mean it's easy.

So we asked six successful founders from the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) to share some of their growing pains and errors - and their advice for others in the same (lucky) boat.

1. Implement A Consistent Recruiting Culture

A big mistake is not implementing a culture adept at consistently recruiting talent for all jobs. One summer, we had to hire 20 teachers within two months. Our HR manager felt pressured to hire fast and didn't follow our interview process (blame me). We ended up hiring good teachers - but not excellent teachers. The excuses from the HR manager were pressure, time and the rigid interviewing process. The truth is that we hadn't built a database since our founding, and we wasted time looking for new people when we could have followed up with previously approved, highly qualified candidates. - Derek Capo, Next Step China

2. Let Top-Level Players Focus On Their Strengths

My CFOs and other finance professionals are financial experts and great at what they do. They also have strong client-service skills, but they are not salespeople. Business development is not their forte. When our company started expanding, I attempted to push my top-level players into that biz dev direction. I quickly realized that a growing company will be stronger if you manage your expectations about the strengths and abilities of your top-level team and don’t distract them with responsibilities better handled by someone else. Now, I let my executive team work to their strengths and look for other scalable ways to develop my business. - David Ehrenberg, Early Growth Financial Services

3. Establish A Cohesive Company Environment

Company culture sets the tone for work ethic, creativity and productivity at a company. When our team was 10 people strong, we regularly took company breaks and played soccer tennis at the park. Whenever we took breaks, we did it as a unit - ensuring that no one felt like they were working harder than anyone else. However, when we grew to 20 people, the company departments started branching off and taking breaks on their own and leaving the office at separate times. It eventually turned into a culture where different departments felt like the other departments weren't pulling their weight. The company needs to define the work culture from the beginning and encourage team members to build a fun and productive environment. - Jun Loayza, Reputation Hacks

4. Encourage Ownership

As the beauty salon industry is projected to grow, our clientele and our staff grows. Our company culture has to be clearly defined by our top-level players. During our mini-meetings and mid-year or annual reviews, I always ask, "What do you think (about our training, our team, the support you are receiving, etc.)?" We recently had to increase our work hours to accommodate our clients. Instead of making the executive decision to change everyone's schedule, our top players gave me input on where to add hours. The biggest mistake I made was in hiring new employees without the input of top-level employees. We ended up with employees who refused to be respectful to teammates. Now, I have each employee meet candidates while I interview them to get to know them and ask questions. - Nancy T. Nguyen, Sweet T Salon

5. Offer Opportunities To Lead

Interns test leadership potential and team dynamics. We're gradually building staff, but the seasonal ebb and flow of interns give the staff an opportunity to lead a variety of personalities. Right now, we have 10 interns, but we've had as many as 20 people from every walk of life crammed into every corner of our office, challenging themselves and us in new ways while learning business skills. At this point, my team and I have worked with what feels like every type of individual out there. So even when it came to a direct hire for our Head of Marketing position, we knew that our top contender's enthusiasm, love of ping pong and positive "team spirit" attitude was a great fit. In turn, he's been an encouraging and collaborative leader. - Manpreet Singh, Seva Call

6. Create A Culture of Learning

My philosophy is that no matter how good we are at something, we could always be doing something better. Building a company is going to be messy, and mistakes are going to be made. In fact, if mistakes are not being made, I might argue that you're not pushing yourself hard enough. The goal is to make the mistakes in non-critical situations so those mistakes will be avoided in a critical situation. I'm very transparent with our top-level team about where I've fallen short and what I'm doing to improve my skills as a CEO. This has helped to create a culture where we're all learning together, and admitting you made a mistake is okay. - Anderson Schoenrock, ScanDigital

Yahoo, Tumblr Match Official: Now What?

Brian Proffitt — Mon, 20 May 2013 07:01:00 -0700

Yahoo has officially announced the all-cash acquisition of blogging site Tumblr, picking up the six-year-old company for a cool $1.1 billion.

The move, which was telegraphed by the major tech sources over the weekend, comes as no real surprise, and ReadWrite's Owen Thomas already has insights on the potential directions for the deal. But details are coming out this morning on what -initially - Yahoo has planned.

Rather interestingly, Yahoo will be moving its official blog to Tumblr. And in the very first blog post, right out of the gate, Yahoo explicitly affirms the question that was on everyone's lips this weekend when the news was first leaked:

"I'm delighted to announce that we’ve reached an agreement to acquire Tumblr!," wrote Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, "We promise not to screw it up."

Mayer's post was the epitome of how the two content companies should be able to work together.

"In terms of working together, Tumblr can deploy Yahoo!’s personalization technology and search infrastructure to help its users discover creators, bloggers, and content they’ll love. In turn, Tumblr brings 50 billion blog posts (and 75 million more arriving each day) to Yahoo!’s media network and search experiences. The two companies will also work together to create advertising opportunities that are seamless and enhance user experience," Mayer continued.

Given the type of content produced in some of those 50 billion daily blog posts on Tumblr, it will be very interesting to see how that seamless mesh of advertising opportunities will work, since advertisers are sure to be all over NSFW blog posts.

Image courtesy of Yahoo.

Here Comes Jolla, Yet Another Deviant Linux Smartphone

Dan Rowinski — Mon, 20 May 2013 06:17:03 -0700

Meet Jolla, the smartphone that almost never came to be.

When Nokia decided to jump off its burning platform a few years ago and go with Windows Phone, there were no people more disappointed with the decision than the hundreds of engineers that had been working on the company’s own mobile operating system, MeeGo.

These were developers that had put in countless hours to make MeeGo the platform of the future and the initial results were intriguing. The Nokia N9 was a beautiful phone (its core design would eventually be the basis of the first Nokia Windows Phone, the Lumia 800) with interesting functionality that, at the time, bested Android in utility. When Nokia scrapped MeeGo, these developers were out of a job and, worse, had the rug pulled out from under a beloved project.

So, they banded together to keep the project going. And the result is Jolla, a smartphone from Finland running an operating system called Sailfish, born on the legacy of MeeGo.

What Is Jolla?

Pronounced “yo-la,” Jolla as a company is the continuation of the “Mer” project. The Mer project was initially a fork from the Linux-based MeeGo designed to bring as much of the old Maemo operating system (MeeGo was formed as a conglomeration between two operating systems, Maemo and Moblin) to Nokia’s hardware as possible. Mer was eventually suspended when most of the development resources started going to MeeGo.

When Nokia dropped support for MeeGo, the Mer project was resurrected. It was intended to provide a new environment for the many developers and engineers who had worked on the open-source project, from Nokia or elsewhere. MeeGo itself morphed when it was began being supported by the likes of the Linux Foundation (backed by Intel and Samsung among others) and became Tizen.

These old Maemo engineers just won’t admit defeat to their original dream and just realize that MeeGo/Maemo is, for all intents and purposes, dead. So now we have Jolla and a prototype smartphone searching for an audience.

The Jolla Smartphone

The first Jolla smartphone is a 4.5-inch, dual-core, 4G LTE enabled device with 16GB of internal storage and a replaceable battery. It runs the gesture-based Sailfish OS which, presumably, will operate a lot like the old Nokia N9 based on MeeGo Harmattan.

Jolla is now available for pre-order and will be shipped first to European countries. The price tag is a reasonable €399 and Jolla expects to begin shipping by the end of 2013. Basically, Jolla is now asking people to support the project through pre-orders in a very Kickstarter-like fashion, imploring the community to get behind the project, or “The Tribe,” as Jolla co-founder Marc Dillon describes it.

Based on Linux, Sailfish OS will be compliant with Android apps. This will allow Sailfish OS developers (the very small handful that currently exist) to port Android apps to Jolla, much in the same way that BlackBerry developers can port Android package files (APKs) to BlackBerry 10.

The Drawback Of Open Source Democratization

Developers often complain that Android is a fragmented ecosystem. Too many different CPUs on different screen sizes from different manufacturers to make sense of it all. Yet, if you compare Android to what happened to the MeeGo community, Google’s mobile operating system seems tame.

Android always had a champion in Google to keep it on point. This contrasts with the Maemo/Moblin/MeeGo/Tizen/Jolla community that has had so many competing interests and egos that development has never really produced anything tangible other than a few interesting prototypes (like the Nokia N9 and now Jolla).

The Jolla group is essentially the most disillusioned of them all. Some have also called them the most creative and innovative while also being the most stubborn and arrogant. And now this team, finally, has what it wants – its own company and smartphone.

How Amazon's Rising Headwaters Could Threaten Google

Derek Brown — Mon, 20 May 2013 05:59:00 -0700

Guest author Derek Brown is a technology executive and analyst who blogs at One Blind Squirrel.

Jeff Jordan, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz with the Midas touch, recently opined that Amazon’s e-commerce capabilities and successes represent a meaningful threat to Google’s product-search-related advertising business.

I will take Jeff’s thesis — with which I fundamentally agree — one step (maybe even more) further by saying that I believe Amazon is one of the few companies that has the ambition, permission, structure, and, maybe most important, data, to actually beat Google at its own game.

What Makes Amazon Different

As an Internet equity research analyst from 1996-2009 — go ahead... throw your drink on your screen and curse me loudly enough that the barista hears you — I had a front seat to The Show. I covered Amazon from its days as “just” a bookseller and Google when it was still a private company, in addition to eBay, Yahoo!, Excite, About.com, Netflix, Omniture, aQuantive, CNET, E*TRADE, and many other industry-defining companies.

From the earliest days, it was clear to me (and a few others, obviously) that Amazon was no ordinary company, at any level. However, three attributes set it (far) apart in my mind:

Vision and ambition that were orders of magnitude beyond those of others team that I encountered (until, that is, I met Google);
A cult-like dedication to customer experience/satisfaction that permeated every decision made by every person at the company; and,
A business model that not only valued long-term cash flow and absolute profit potential, but also deemed near-term profits and profit margin largely irrelevant.

Individually, these characteristics have been powerful; in combination, they have been revolutionary. Jeff Bezos’ worldview gave his entire team permission — in fact, it gave them the mandate — to think Big, with a capital “B.” Customers’ pure delight with every Amazon interaction gave the company permission to sell (almost) anything to (almost) anyone.

And, finally, management’s clarity of financial intent (i.e., to perpetually focus on long-term potential) has, from day one, conditioned shareholders and Wall Street to expect a business that will forever be amorphous and unpredictable, with razor-thin margins.

The Yin To Google's Yang, Sort Of

Liberated from more typical corporate constraints, Amazon has evolved like few other companies in history — from its humble origins as an online bookstore into: Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute, Amazon Marketplace, Amazon Flexible Payments Service, state-of-the-art warehouses (~70) everywhere, Amazon Cloud Player, AmazonFresh, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Prime, A9, Amazon Simple Storage Service, Diapers.com, Silk, Amazon Cloud Drive, Zappos, Amazon CloudFront, Kindle, and so on.

Sound familiar? It should, because this transformation mirrors that of Google, itself, which began as “just” a search engine company focused on “organizing the world’s information,” and has now become: Gmail, Maps, Apps, Drive, Chrome, Android, Motorola, YouTube, Wallet, Voice, Google Cloud Storage, Shopping, Chromebook, Google App Engine, Google+, and so on.

While not perfectly matching each other solution-for-solution, Amazon and Google now find themselves overlapping across, and competing within, most major categories of Internet-fueled technology and business. SaaS. Hardware. e-Commerce. IaaS. Enterprise. Media. Consumer. Applications. Browsers. Storage. Payments. Consumer. Tablets. And so on.

Amazon's Trump Card: Data

Despite all these evolutions and comparisons and similarities and overlaps, I actually think there’s one final aspect to Amazon’s business with which Google cannot (yet) directly compete, and which may prove to be the difference-maker in this faux-ish battle: Data.

With 17+ years of history and hundreds of millions of transactions across almost every category of goods, Amazon now has massive quantities of data about the actual buying habits of tens, if not hundreds, of millions of consumers around the globe. Not just what people are searching for (Google, though Amazon.com actually has it too). Not just what people “like” (“like” that, Facebook).

(See also: Will Facebook Go Out With A Bang?)

Not just what people want (Pinterest, though Amazon.com actually has it too). Not just what people tweet about (Twitter). But the items that people actually pay for with their own hard-earned dollars!

Armed with this unique transaction- and SKU-specific data, at scale, Amazon.com has the potential to become one of, if not the most signficant advertising platforms in the world, in my view — matching, if not besting, Google.

Look at it this way: if advertisers pay Google $44 billion per year for connecting them with consumers that it oftentimes thinks have interest in their product(s), what might those same advertisers be willing to pay Amazon for connecting them with people they know are interested in their products (or those of their competitors, or those in which they will soon have interest)?

What That Data Might Be Worth

For instance, do you think Volvo, Toyota, Lexus, Ford, et al., might be willing to pay a small fortune to be introduced to an individual in Huntington Beach, CA, who suddenly begins buying newborn diapers by the pallet? What about Gymboree? Gerbers? Whole Foods? Safeway? Fab? Gap? Pottery Barn? Ross? Home Depot?

Similarly, how much interest might be generated among home decor vendors, local service providers (e.g., physicians, athletic clubs, veterinarians), home maintenance vendors, etc., by a change in shipping and billing information for one of Amazon.com’s long-time customers? Say, someone whose pattern of purchases are highly suggestive — remember, Amazon.com has developed one of the best predictive commerce models in the world for its own e-commerce franchise — of a home with at least one child and one dog, an avid athlete/runner/yogini, with a taste for gourmet cooking and a passion for gardening, among other attributes?

And these hypotheticals say absolutely nothing of the extraodinary value Amazon could (theoretically) deliver to its customers/partners by sharing with them relevant online transaction activity that might follow said advertisements, effectively offering a closed loop marketing environment unlike any other.

By some accounts, Amazon has (finally) started focusing on the business potential of advertising. For years, it has run ads on its own sites. Then, in late 2010, the company also began serving advertisements on others’ sites, introducing what is, in effect, a full-fledged online advertising network. But these are just warm-ups in my mind — Amazon methodically experimenting (as is its custom) and purposefully tiptoeing around the edges of its potential.

I’m convinced the day will come — sooner rather than later — when Amazon unleashes its data and announces itself as an advertising powerhouse. And, when it does, I think the gloves officially come off and the real battle with Google commences.

Lead image via Flickr user Jorge Lascar, CC 2.0

Dropbox vs. Google Drive vs. Amazon vs. Skydrive: Which One Is Fastest?

David Sobotta — Mon, 20 May 2013 05:05:00 -0700

As cloud computing services become ever more popular, you might begin to wonder how much you can really trust them to perform when you need them? I decided to find out - by testing the top file-transfer/file-storage/file-backup services.

In many ways, getting a file from one computer to multiple computers is the most challenging task for the cloud. And because I like to use multiple computers running multiple operating systems, including Linux, Windows and the Mac, that function is particularly important to me.

Cloud Services Can Lag

I am pretty agnostic when it comes to cloud providers - as long as they are free or close to it. However, as I was moving files around while preparing my most recent book A Week at the Beach The 2013 Emerald Isle Travel Guide I was a little surprised at the lags I sometimes experienced using the big-name cloud-based file-transfer services.

More than once when I wanted to use a file from one computer to another, I was disappointed by my cloud services. There were a few times that I got so tired of waiting for a file to show up on my other computer’s cloud drive that I resorted to sneakernet using a USB thumb drive.

After my book was published, I decided to go back and run some simple tests to see just how long the four best-known file-transfer/backup services actually take to put the files where you want them.

To compare Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon Cloud, and Microsoft’s SkyDrive I started by exporting a 500K JPEG test image from Lightroom on my Windows 8 computer directly to each of the four services.

Fighting The Randomization Factor

After running the tests a few times, I noticed what can only be described as random operating system differences. Sometimes the file would pop up first on my Mac and other times it showed up first on my Windows 7 laptop.

In order to eliminate the operating system differences, I restarted the tests and this time stopped the timer when the file showed up on either my Mac running Mountain Lion or my Windows 7 laptop. I also reran my tests with a variety of sizes and types of files. In all I ran twenty-five sets of tests.

The differences were significant, if not overwhelmingly huge. The fastest synchs took less than 3 seconds, while a few others took several minutes. The biggest chunk of tests clocked in between 10 seconds and one minute. A few synchs never completed. But which service recorded the best times with the fewest problems?

Dropbox FTW!

Dropbox ended up being fastest 56% of the time. Even more importantly, it was slowest only 4% of the time.

Skydrive brought up the rear. It was fastest on 12% of the tests, but but slowest on a whopping 80% of the tests. It also had two files that never showed up on the Mac and one that never showed on the Windows 7 laptop.

The Amazon Cloud slightly outpaced Google Drive - which had one file that never showed up on the Mac and another that took a very long time to complete.

If my tests convinced me of anything, it is that Skydrive is a work in progress and has a long way to go. I even had trouble setting up the tests on Skydrive.

My tests also revealed a number of odd results. When testing files saved from Word, strange extra files sometimes showed up on all the cloud drives except Dropbox. The file names always began with the characters “~$”. Sometimes the mystery files disappeared and sometimes they hung around.

Cloud Drive Recommendations

So here are some quick recommendations:

First, do not treat your cloud drive as one huge dumping ground. Create folders and try to force a little organization on yourself.
If you save a file to the cloud in order to work on it from another computer, quit the application or close the file on the first computer after you have saved the file to the cloud drive.
Make sure you have a local copy of important files in your documents folder - not just the replicated cloud folder on your computer. Interesting things sometimes happen when cloud files get updated or deleted from another computer. When you come back to the computer where you first created a file, you could be in for a nasty surprise.
If you cannot get a cloud folder on your computer to update, trying quitting the cloud application or rebooting your system.

Dropbox and Amazon appear to be the most reliable solutions with only occasional delays. Google isn't far behind, and I can't imagine that Microsoft won't work hard to improve Skydrive - the company's subscription model depends on it.

Even so, I have no plans to throw away my USB thumb drives.

Can Enterprise Tech Avoid The Fate Of The Automobile Industry?

Alan S Cohen — Mon, 20 May 2013 04:04:00 -0700

“Only the paranoid survive”

– Former Intel CEO Andy Grove

Things seem so good in the enterprise technology universe right now it is a little scary. The IT transition to cloud/mobile/social has entrepreneurs and investors salivating, with three significant forces at work:

Real, not PowerPoint, multi-billion dollar opportunities are emerging for new entrants
IT buyers have new productivity options for workers and better values for their operating and capital spending
Incumbents are getting needed wake up calls on their technologies and business models.

So why am I nervous?

The Detroit Syndrome

Forty years ago, the Middle East oil embargo ripped a hole the size of a Buick through the American automotive industry. Over the following decades, the Big 3 automakers suffered huge market share losses, two major bankruptcies and government bailouts. Smaller, cheaper and more fuel-efficient cars from Japan broke the Detroit oligopoly and proved not everyone wanted big, powerful sedans, powered by a Detroit’s V8s.

As David Halberstam documented in The Reckoning, hubris and management blindness led to an enormous transfer of value from American to international car manufacturers. In 2012, the American auto industry had a $140 billion trade deficit. That’s like Apple losing everything.

Tech Drives Today’s Economy

Today, tech is a huge growth driver of the U.S. economy. Millions of jobs – not just in Silicon Valley but across the U.S. – directly depend on it. And that’s just the beginning: Enrico Moretti of UC Berkeley estimates that 1 job in traditional manufacturing generates 1.6 additional jobs, but one job in tech generates closer to 5 incremental jobs.

But the last heyday of enterprise IT crested around 2000, as “CIO as rock star” gave way to “CIO as cost center.” IT spending in the developed world has been basically flat ever since.

5 Challenges For Enterprise Technology

And now, enterprise technology faces an incredibly complex series of challenges and opportunities:

1. Customer Collaboration is Reducing Switching Costs. The IT industry has long relied on vendor-led standards bodies (IETF, IEEE) to ensure interoperability, but the dramatic growth of customer-led collaborative efforts in the open source and cloud movements is reworking the playing field. Rackspace-led OpenStack and Facebook-led Open Compute initiatives are cookbooks for the commoditization of IT infrastructure. If low-cost producers take over the infrastructure business, they will likely come from offshore producers (China, India, etc.) and not U.S. manufacturers. And don’t forget GitHub if you are in the software business.

2. The Cloud and the Rental Economy. The tremendous cost, energy, speed and operational savings presented by Cloud and SaaS technologies are changing how we think about IT. Why buy from HP or Oracle when you can rent from Amazon or Workday? Why let capacity sit idle when you can pay for it as you need it? This is a good thing, as resources will be used more efficiently. But it poses challenges for enterprise tech vendors. “We are one or two amortization cycles away” from the coming drop-off of premise-based IT purchases, warns Lightspeed Ventures’ Tim Danford.

3. BYOD and BYOA. The verdict is in: IT managers are coping, sometimes kicking and screaming, with the influx of customer-purchased devices as corporate computing platforms (Bring Your Own Device). The next wave of mobile challenges will come from BYOA (Bring Your Own Applications), where applications like Evernote and Box replace popular Microsoft programs like Sharepoint or even the Office suite. The classic enterprise software license could be a few apps away from oblivion.

4. The Lean Vendor. User-led IT communities like Spiceworks are replacing how buyers learn about products and services. Tech marketing is becoming a content and education task, not a promotional activity. This is giving the high-touch (read high cost) sales and marketing models of traditional vendors a run for the money. Companies like Ubiquiti Networks are not only taking advantage of this new buying behavior, they are passing on their own lowered selling, general and administrative (SG&A) costs to customers in the form of great technology and user-friendly innovation at lower prices. As a CIO friend of mine once told me: “When you walk into a vendor’s offices and they’re nicer than your own, remember you paid for it.”

5. Distributed Computing Model. Current computing models are built around a central premise: a client (e.g., Microsoft) will talk to a server (x86, IBM) in a single location to process an application. If you own either end of the equation, you can exact enormous value. But the cloud architecture is massively distributed, apps might have to touch dozens of places to process everything, totally disrupting that vendorscape. More significantly, the new in-demand IT skills sets look less like a traditional Fortune 500 corporation and more like Google or Facebook. Distributed computing scientists are this generation’s Einsteins.

3 Ways To Save Enterprise Tech

In Silicon Valley, it’s easy to assume the next generation of giants will grow just down the street. But the rest of the world is working to take advantage of the same trends while eyeing the large and relatively wide-open U.S. market.

I for one do not want to wake up in a decade and buy a book charting the downfall of the American technology industry by the next David Halberstam. Here’s what has to happen for the enterprise technology industry to avoid The Detroit Syndrome:

1. Incumbents need to blow up their own business models before challengers do it for them. The first wave of Detroit’s reaction to the initial oil-shock resulted in half-baked responses like the Ford Pinto, Chevy Vega and AMC Gremlin. And what did the auto industry do when oil prices moderated in the late 1980s and early 1990s? They went back to promoting horsepower instead of fuel efficiency and rolled out fleets of gas-guzzling SUVs that were great for short-term profits but made them even more vulnerable to the next oil shocks.

2. Some of today’s startups must grow into the new giants. While there are many enterprise tech vendors in $500 million to $5 billion range, few new suppliers have cracked the $10 billion run rate as independent companies. Large tech companies play a critical role in the IT economy, but customers must use their wallets to keep their own ecosystems healthy by fostering competition and innovations.

3. Systemic security and privacy solutions must be found. Buyer confidence could be torpedoed by cybercrime and careless data leakage. It will take a range of enabling technologies to give enterprise buyers more purchase confidence to embrace innovation.

Enterprise tech is not the Rust Belt, not by a long shot. There is every possibility that the technology industry will not go the way of the automobile industry. But the seeds of our growth could also be the seeds of our decay. And the ability to thrive requires innovations in our minds as much as our technologies. In the words of Mark Twain: “Circumstances make man, not man circumstances.”

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Buying Tumblr Will Leave Yahoo With The Same Old Identity Crisis

Owen Thomas — Sun, 19 May 2013 21:06:00 -0700

Yahoo is expected to announce the acquisition of blogging site Tumblr for $1.1 billion on Monday, with both companies' boards having agreed to the deal, according to reports in AllThingsD, which first broke the news of sale talks, as well as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

If it goes through as planned, buying Tumblr would be a signature deal for new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer in her effort to transform the aging Web-media company into a producer of habit-forming online experiences. Tumblr has some 100 million monthly visitors, and its users publish 90 million posts a day. Those are some mighty habits, and they promise to offer considerable room for Yahoo's advertising sales team.

Selling can't have been an easy decision for Tumblr founder David Karp. When we last saw the youthful CEO in early April, he was on the campus of Facebook on the same day that the social network launched its Android Home software. As we left, we saw him locked in an intense conversation with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg, early in Facebook's life, also famously wrestled with a billion-dollar buyout offer from Yahoo. We have to wonder what they talked about.

One thing Karp and Mayer will have to figure out is the relationship the combined companies have with their users. Tumblr's users, a young, cool demographic Yahoo has fairly openly admitted it lacks, identify closely with the service.

Unlike Facebook, Tumblr is a place where they can reveal themselves without revealing themselves. The tolerance for provisional identity (and racy content) is a core part of Tumblr.

Yahoo is a muddle. While it was one of the first sites to let users log in and personalize experiences, it has faded as a source of online identity. The fact that you can use a Facebook or Google account to log in to Yahoo is telling.

The one notable exception is Flickr, the photo-sharing site that has seen a renaissance since Mayer became CEO. Yahoo is expected to announce significant upgrades to the service on Monday as well, and one source who has seen the new version of Flickr described it as "stunning."

Will Tumblr become part of Yahoo like Flickr—a distinct service with its own user culture? Or will it become part of the muddle of indistinct Yahoo services like Sports and Weather, more notable for their utility than their expressive nature?

Yahoo nearly crushed Flickr as it first integrated the photo-sharing site and then neglected it. To be useful to Yahoo, Tumblr will have to somehow fit into the rest of the operation. No amount of promises of hands-off treatment will change that reality. (Here's one way Tumblr could help Yahoo: Junk Yahoo's overcomplicated in-house publishing systems and move all of the media operations onto Tumblr.)

Even the question of how users log in to Tumblr, post-Yahoo, will be key. Will they retain a provisional identity, unlinked to their real name and the rest of their online activity? Or will it get folded into everything else they do on Yahoo? That question is crucial, and as Yahoo learned with Flickr, it's easy to screw up.

The difference is that Yahoo spent a few tens of millions of dollars on Flickr. Screwing up Tumblr would be a far more expensive mistake.

Please Don't 'Like' This Post (And I Really Mean It This Time)

Len Kendall — Sun, 19 May 2013 09:01:00 -0700

Editor's Note: This is the last installment of a 3-part series covering Len Kendall’s abstinence from the “Like” button for a month.

If you haven't been following along, in April I decided to commit myself to a simple behavioral experiment. I pledged to not "like" anything on or off of Facebook for a month, no matter how tempted I was (and believe me, I was tempted often).

My hypothesis was that at the end of this 30 day cycle I would be free of likes and that my detox period would be over. That isn't the case. I still actively have to stop myself often from hitting that button, and it troubles me quite a bit. It was so simple and I did it for so long that it has burned into my internet muscle memory far more severely than I had anticipated.

I've learned several things along the way, but when I started this trial I wanted to answer one primary question:

Who exactly is benefitting the most from me hitting the like button?

While this experiment didn't provide me with a direct answer to this question, it did force me to think long and hard about the probable ones. I've concluded that the following parties benefit from those billions (yes billions) of likes each day:

Me: I'm not going to claim I get no value. Facebook has an algorithm that shows me people and information that I'm more interested in based on my like behavior. It's not always spot on, and it irritates the shit out of me when I see this kind of stuff, but nonetheless it has a smart engine that shares timely content from people I care about.
Brands: Likes feed brands who are trying to understand how they can refine their content distribution (copy, timing, targeting). They also increase the visibility of branded content through all sorts of Edgerank-y goodness. The fact of the matter is, I don't care about making my favorite brands better marketers. I care about my favorite brands continuing to make products that I like. In other words, these likes don't help me.
Facebook (Part 1): Facebook makes the majority of its revenue from selling data. Yes, that manifests as selling ads, but in reality the company is selling the data that drives who sees ads and who buys them. Every single time I hit "like", even if it's on a friend's baby picture, Facebook is growing its data stockpile that is being refined for their advertising customers. Sure, you could claim I'll see more relevant ads if I help Facebook understand my tastes, but ultimately these likes don't help me.
Facebook (Part 2): When I give my friends likes, a little Pavlovian red flag goes off in their browser windows and it pulls them back into Facebook. There they spend more time, see more ads, and see more ads, and see more ads. While directly my likes may help my friends' important posts rise to the top, it also trains them to crave likes and potentially augment their sharing behavior to earn them more likes. Again, these likes don't help me.

Above are just four benefits yielded from "like" behavior. The obvious problem is that only 25% of the these items are benefitting me. And that's being generous since I didn't list off countless other beneficiaries. Call me selfish, but the ROI of the like button isn't high enough for me to continue using it. Therefore, I plan to continue abstaining from it.

Although I started this experiment around a single element of Facebook, it's led me to question the value of the many services the social network provides. Facebook has in many ways become the "big box" store of the internet. And while I do shop at such places in real life for certain commodity items, I don't really want to go there for all my many specialty needs. I don't want to speak for anyone else, but I personally don't want a big-box internet experience. For me, the web is about discovery, being bombarded with choice, and finding niche experts.

Refraining from likes has been a trivial experiment. I know that there are far more important behavioral issues online worth exploring (cyber bullying, crowdfunding, and citizen journalism just to name a few), but I hope that this small example of personal reflection on digital habits encourages you to do the same. Think about how you're spending time on the internet, who its benefitting, and what's worth testing in your own digital world.

And don't like this post. I really mean it this time.

Lead image via Flickr user Djenan, CC 2.0

Google's Flirtation With Being A Hardware Company Is Over

Owen Thomas — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:03:00 -0700

A year ago, I left Google's annual I/O developers conference convinced it was making a major strategic shift into being a hardware company.

As this year's I/O wraps up, I'm left questioning that conclusion.

The message Google is putting forward in 2013 is very different: It's all about what developers can do with the software tools it provides, whether that means broad digital platforms like the Chrome Web browser and the Android mobile operating system, or fungible, ubiquitous services like Google+, YouTube and Google Maps.

A Retreat From Hardware

In 2012, the keynote offered a drumbeat of new hardware: The Nexus 7 tablet! Skydiving Google Glass stuntmen! The confounding, mysterious, ill-fated Nexus Q media device!

(See also: What Google Didn't Announce At I/O)

The overall effect was to show how Google was pushing the boundaries of industrial design and taking control of the complete user experience, from hardware and software to the services that run on top of them.

Call it a strategic retreat, but we heard almost nothing about hardware this year. The closest Google got was unveiling an unlocked Samsung Galaxy S4 running Google's preferred version of Android, which it plans to sell directly to consumers online. Contrast that to Google's past unveilings of Nexus devices, manufactured by partners but branded with the Google logo.

Even Glass, the face-mounted, Internet-connected headset now hitting the market, got sidelined in the keynote. While present at I/O, it wasn't the emphasis.

Learning A Hard Lesson

Perhaps the disastrous Q—never formally cancelled, merely "postponed"—was the comeuppance Google needed, the failure that brought Larry Page and company to their senses. There's also the ongoing agonies of Motorola Mobility, the handset manufacturer Google bought last year but continues to hold at arm's length. That, more than anything, may have taught Google just how hard it is to crack the hardware business.

At recent Google I/O events, the company has handed out hardware to attendees (or units on loan for review to reporters). This year's giveaway, a Chromebook Pixel, was a little sad: It was hardly new, having been announced in February rather than at this year's show.

While the Pixel arguably showed off Google's ChromeOS, a stripped-down operating system focused on apps that run on the built-in Web browser, it's ultimately just a nicely built laptop—a very familiar category of gadget, hardly the kind of game-changing innovation Google CEO Larry Page talked up at this year's keynote.

I suspect that Google will retreat further from hardware—perhaps spinning off or selling Motorola, after stripping it of the most essential code and patents it needs for Android.

Google won't hesitate to build tools that serve its business, like the custom-designed servers and switches that run its giant empire of data centers, or the Trekker backpack cameras it uses to capture the offroad world for Google Maps. And we'll likely see hardware from the Google[x] skunk works, like self-driving cars and Google Glass, where there's nothing off-the-shelf for Google to put its cutting-edge software into.

But smartphones? Tablets? Living-room gadgets? Those are no longer the future of Google. Silicon, Page pointed out, is cheap. It's software where Google will continue to seek its riches.

App Not Working? It Might Be Time To Check The 'Weather'

Brian Proffitt — Fri, 17 May 2013 13:04:39 -0700

If you've ever used the Internet — and you know who you are — you've undoubtedly had apps or various services stop working unexpectedly. For ordinary users, this usually just means no access to Twitter or Gmail for a while. But for developers, whose apps and services rely increasingly heavily on hooks into popular Web services, the problem can be far more complicated.

That's because modern Web services (and the apps that facilitate them) can fail for a variety of reasons. One of the most common problems arises when some other service has gone down — more specifically, when the application programming interface (API) that lets your app tap into that other service stops working. Trouble is, until recently there hasn't been an easy way to confirm or rule out API failures.

You Don't Need A Weatherman...

And that's where API status dashboards, the weather reports of the Web-service world, come in. Dashboards enable developers and administrators to quickly check to see what's going on with the API itself. If the API is slowed or offline, then at least you, the developer, know the problem isn't in your own code. So you can start working with (translate: yelling at) the API vendor to fix the situation.

Zapier, a startup that helps developers integrate APIs into applications, was already using just such a dashboard for its internal purposes. It's now opened up that API weather report for the world at large. Zapier's tool is unique in that it covers a lot of APIs for smaller but still useful services out there, not just their mega-service cousins. It should be a stopping point for anyone who is using one of these smaller APIs.

...To Tell You Whether APIs Are Up Or Down

It might seem a little obsessive to be so concerned about an API's status that we build "weather reports," but it makes good business sense. Like the air around us, APIs are a type of environment, too. They have to work and be available at any given moment in order to enable connectivity to a given web application and service. When they fail, data exchange can slow down or completely halt.

Of course, API failures aren't the only things that can bring down a Web service. The service itself could have bad code, or one of the servers might be on the way to failure. Tracking down the exact failure, though, can take a lot of time, especially if hardware failure is ruled out. That leaves the code itself, precipitating a search that could take hours.

So it's definitely helpful to know right away whether you've got an API problem... or something else. "When a call to an API breaks," says Zapier CEO and co-founder Wade Foster, "you don't always know where the problem is."

But Weather Reports Help

Zapier isn't the only status board around. Watchmouse has an API Status board that monitors the larger API services, such as Google, Twitter, Dropbox and the like. Its technology was so attractive that CA bought the company in 2011 and incorporated the monitoring service into its Nimsoft Cloud Monitoring tools.

Unfortunately, it's not entirely clear that the public Nimsoft page is up to date. The page is currently reporting disruptions for Digg, Dropbox and some Google services. The latter seems inaccurate, since Google itself isn't reporting any issues today.

Of course, if you have an app that depends on Google services, you can always check out Google's API status page. Amazon Web Services has its own API and service reporting dashboard, too.

If you're building an API for your own service, you can provide your users with a quick status dashboard of your own, using the Stashboard code that was open sourced by Twilio a few years ago. Developers can use the code to create a dashboard that can be hosted on Google Apps Engine.

Lead image courtesy of NOAA

Google: Please Fix The Crippling Problem Plaguing Google+

Nick Statt — Fri, 17 May 2013 11:10:00 -0700

Google+ has never looked and felt as it good as it does right now. Alas, looks aren't everything.

A massive overhaul of the service, announced Wednesday during a keynote at Google's I/O conference for developers, has brought it in line with the most modern and functionally powerful Web design principles. It now has a multi-column layout, scrolling menu bars, and enormous images. Google also rolled out an umbrella messaging service called Hangouts, a standalone app for Web and mobile that neatens up the sloppy mess that was Voice, Talk, and Google+ messaging.

All of this is great news for heavy users of Google+ who have been awaiting a design push that looks and feels like 2013. But there's still one giant problem plaguing the service and Google's entire social platform at large: the hub of your Google life is still an email address, and that's a nightmare for users with multiple Gmail accounts.

Since taking over as CEO in 2011, Larry Page has been talking up the notion of "One Google" to unify the search giant's disparate services. But the reality is that it's very hard as a user to experience a unified Google until Google realizes that a person is a person, not an email account.

At best, the complex process of trying to manage multiple Gmail accounts with Google+ and all the various apps involved slows users down. At worst, it could keep some users from adopting the beautiful new services altogether.

Two Accounts, Twice The Pain

"For me personally, I have two Google accounts: I have a corporate and personal [account], and it is a pain," admitted Seth Sternberg, director of product management for Google+, in a roundtable discussion with reporters in San Francisco Thursday. And Sternberg is definitely not alone. Many people have two Google email accounts—a personal Gmail and a corporate Google Apps account. Those ought to be Google's best users. Instead, they're the most frustrated ones.

And many people set up multiple email accounts for other reasons. Social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn let them associate multiple email addresses with a single personal or professional identity. Google doesn't.

What that ends up doing is disrupting the entire process of laying the Google+ social net atop the Web. Every time a user tries to +1 a link, log into a website with Google+ sign-in, or personalize search, they're confronted with Google's fragmented view of online identity.

So for Google, the email-as-account concept disrupts users' ability to seamlessly use Google+, which in turn makes the network's constantly increasing integration with the rest of the company's apps and services more and more painful with every turn. And for users, it's just plain obnoxious having to use incognito browser windows and all sorts of other workarounds to try and simply manage their online identity.

No wonder Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr are the go-to networks for finding friends and sharing information.

Identity, If And When You Want It

Google says it's trying to get better.

"We sanded off all the rough edges," David Glazer, a director of engineering at Google, said in the recent roundtable event. Google, to its credit, has introduced an account chooser that makes it easier to stay logged into multiple accounts.

But those fixes don't address the core problem—Google's email-linked identity model.

What Google really needs is something above an email address that could be used as an identifier for all of a user's various accounts. This higher-level identifier could be something akin to a Twitter handle or a Facebook username.

This new Google login could have a registered primary email address—the way Apple and Amazon handle logins to their online accounts—but it should sync up your other Google+ accounts.

Separating personal and professional sharing could be simply handled with a strongly established Google+ concept: Circles, or lists of contacts.

(And, of course, you should still be able to establish a Gmail account for an unlinked, throwaway identity—for, say, a Craigslist posting or mailing lists.)

Umbrellas Are Good

Google showcased its ability to neatly fold up services with Hangouts, and the strategy is a no-brainer. It resolves so many problems users face when a company's products are all around them, yet they have no idea how to manage them all and end up just turning away from what they feel they don't need.

An umbrella strategy to Google+ and Gmail is a much taller order, but it's one of the biggest impediments standing between the search giant and a more steady, fuller-scale adoption of its social network. So Google, please give us that umbrella, and you'll likely see more people standing underneath it if its done right.

Yahoo Reportedly Looking To Buy Tumblr For That Magic $1B

ReadWrite Editors — Fri, 17 May 2013 10:30:00 -0700

Yahoo is in talks to acquire the fast-growing blogging site Tumblr for as much as $1 billion, AllThingsD reports. This could be the "big deal" Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has reportedly been looking for.

New 'Social' Businesses Want To Know All About You. No Thanks!

Fredric Paul — Fri, 17 May 2013 08:09:00 -0700

Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com's hyperbolic CEO, has been telling anyone who will listen that the "sudden convergence of cloud, social and mobile spheres" is forcing - and allowing - companies to connect with customers in new ways, and to listen with an intensity never before possible.

I'm sure the benefits of social business are dramatic and undeniable, but am I alone in being totally creeped out at what seems to be an obvious invastion of privacy? I don't know about you, but I'm just not ready for companies - even companies I choose to do business with - to closely follow everything I do and say. Even if other humans aren't involved.

Do You Want To Be Connected To A Machine?

At a recent executive event in San Francisco, Benioff entertained customers and journalists wtih a video featuring Beth Comstock, GE's high-profile CMO, claiming her "core belief" is that "business is social." But she didn't just mean people communicating with people, she also meant people communicating with machines.

The big question for GE, Comstock said, is "how do we connect our customers/employees to our machines?" GE's goal is to combine data from customers and data from its machines - connecting machines to social networks is very big.

The video demonstrated how GE was connecting jet engines to social networks to alert mechanics of their diagnostic status. "If you're in business," Comstock said, "you need social because it will get you closer to your customer… Feedback - that's a marketers dream."

Sounds great, right?

The Menace Of An Internet-Enabled Toothbrush

But consider Benioff's example of the Internet of Things driving social business. He cited Philips' Internet-connected toothbrush that records the time and duration of brushing. With one of these babies, when you go to the dentist and he asks, "have you been brushing" and you answer "yeah," the conversation doesn't end there, Benioff said. The dentist could reply "Let's have a look" and see exactly how much brushing you actually did.

That thought terrifies me. While such a scenario might indeed help keep my teeth from falling out, it's also profoundly creepy and invasive. After all, what if my dental insurance provider got hold of the data, and decided it wouldn't pay to fill that cavity because I didn't brush long enough?

As Benioff correctly noted, the "biggest part is trust." "With all that data about you out on the network, it gets down to another level of trust with the vendors you choose to let be a part of your life."

I trust my doctor with a large amount of intensely personal information - augmented by pretty specific laws and industry practices. For some reason, I'm less comfortable giving my dentist the same degree of trust. Philips and Salesforce? Absolutely not!

How Much Should Your Shirt Salesman Know About You?

Another participant at the event, male-apparel retailer Trunk Club, is also leveraging user information to help "guys that just dont like to shop" said COO Rob Chesney. Trunk Club's goal is to make "it really easy for you to look great" by not just tracking what he's already bought, but whatever other information may be available online. When a customer contacts Trunk Club, "we pull up this guy and find out what is he all about. We see all his social media info. "It's the future of service-oriented retail."

Not for me.

Chesney noted that having this kind of info could help Trunk Club sell higher end clothing to a customer who just got a promotion - an event it might learn of Facebook. That might not be so bad, but what is the company going to do if the customer gets laid off? Offer condolences and try to sell them cheap t-shirts? Awkward to say the least.

Social.com: Salesforce's Facebook & Twitter Tools

Salesforce also pitched its new Social.com tools, designed to help other companies operate this way. Salesforce rolled out the ability to run Facebook campaigns that target users based on what they've posted and linked to on their own Facebook pages.

On Twitter, the idea is start "buying in the moment" - spreading promoted tweets even as the larger Twitter conversation is trending. The promoted tweet shows up any time someone tweets with a relevant hashtag.

To make that work, of course, you've got to be monitoring all the time. "You can't be relevant if you're not listening," explained Facebook's Fergus Gluster (yes, that's his real name).

Jonathan Nelson, CEO of ad agency Omnicom Digital, said that these innovations are a key step toward closing the loop linking real-time advertising to real-time buying. The key, he said, is delviering "the right message for the right person at the right time."

Ironically, in a small panel discussion for journalists, Nelson noted that the "suppression of advertising" when it's not appropriate is "more than half the battle."

That's a key part of reducing the creep factor.

Finally, just so you know, I'm not alone in worrying about these issues. Another panelist, Altimeter Group's Susan Etlinger, admitted that "as a consumer, I don't particularly want to be targeted." The key, Etlinger said, is to build a relationship over time and "be relevant when the consumer needs us, not when we need them."

That's a step in the right direction. But if companies they really care about not being creepy, they'll learn to respond quickly and effectively when asked, and otherwise stay out of my face.

Photos - except for the toothbrush - by Fredric Paul for ReadWrite