Author: Serkadis

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A few weeks after Ken Lerer quit AOL-owned Huffington Post to work on his venture fund Lerer Ventures, I stopped by in his office to catch up and talk about the New York landscape. And during our conversation, he pointed out that New York is still a big media town, except different kind of media. If you stand on Broadway and look above the 34th street, you can see the media of the past. Look down the Broadway, you see the future. What he meant was that it was in Soho, Nomad and East Village (and Brooklyn) where companies like Foursquare, Tumblr and Thrillist made home. They were the new kind of media, one that married technology, social and content.

I was reminded of that conversation today, when the news emerged that Yahoo board had approved the $1.1 billion cash offer for Tumblr, the social sharing platform. It would be one of the biggest exits for a New York-based startup. Sure there have been other exits — Google paid $3.1 billion for DoubleClick, but that was a company that belonged to a different Internet era. There was AOL buying Huffington Post for $315 million, eBay bought Hunch for about $80 million, Skype took out GroupMe for about $85 million and more recently Salesforce ponying up $689 million for Buddy Media. But Yahoo snapping up Tumblr is a whole different league.

The new New York

Why? Because Tumblr, in many ways is a visible manifestation of this new New York, one where startups that combine technology with content (one of New York’s core industries) for a new world. It is a success story that matches the fable like qualities of Instagram-Facebook deal. Of course, a real comparison would have been Twitter and Tumblr — both companies were started around the same time, both are essentially content sharing and amplification systems and both have enjoyed a similar growth curve. Twitter has grown bigger with an eye on an IPO and Tumblr is now going to be part of Yahoo.

But that is a comparison for another day, for New York community is clearly excited about this deal. A Silicon Alley insider who wished to remain anonymous put it best when he described this deal as sign that finally in New York people who build things are getting rich versus people (Wall Street) who take things. A bit hyperbolic, but the point is well made. I think this exit allows the young New York startup community to look up to David Karp in a manner folks here look up to Kevin Systrom of Instagram.

BetaWorking

John Borthwick, who is co-founder of New York-based Betaworks believes that it is an important turn of the cycle and the sale of a social media company of this helps solidify and legitimize the entire New York startup ecosystem. Borthwick’s incubator was a seed investor in Tumblr and that investment will pay handsomely.

Borthwick points out that the knock-on effects of this sale are going to help the new-tech centric New York gain momentum. Just as PayPal helped spawn a series of other companies, many in New York are optimistic that Huffington Post and Tumblr are going to result in many more startups. HuffPo’s progeny include Buzzfeed and Rebel Mouse, and Tumblr’s talent is likely to do more interesting things, he argued.

Lerer, grand wizard of the New York tech scene believes that New York is no longer an after thought. “This is just beginning,” said Lerer who has invested in 150 companies (of which 80 percent are in New York.) And with content being central (something he shared in a conversation at Paidcontent Live), Lerer believes that New York will become a bustling startup city.

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Last night I tweeted a link to this video, about the legendary scientist Nikola Tesla pitching Silicon Valley venture capitalists, and commented that the truth is sometimes funnier that comedy. And I was surprised by the sheer number of people who agreed with that sentiment. I went to sleep thinking about that reaction, and also thinking about it in the context of the decline of long-term thinking in our society.

If Tesla (I assume you know who he is) did indeed walk into a VC meeting, he wouldn’t get the attention or the money for his idea because it wouldn’t fit the time-scale of what venture-capital investments have become. Having followed the business of technology for a long time, I have seen that time-scale get shorter and shorter. I guess it’s the price to be paid for the excesses of the internet bubble of the 1990s.

The Bubble After Effects

During that time the business changed from funding innovation to funding concepts and eventually to projects. The fallout of the internet bubble was that venture-capital firms shifted focus. This shifting time-frame is one of the main reasons we are seeing fewer and fewer investments in hardcore technologies and more of the dollars being shifted to the softer aspects of technology.

Yes, bloggers like me like to harp on the fact that many investors are infected by short-termism. But let’s not forget that some of these folks have taken big risks, and sometimes have failed big, too.

Cleantech has ruined many reputations and resulted in billion dollar loses. Yes, there are a couple rare big bet successes that will come out of cleantech, like Tesla Motors and Nest, but the overall trend has been losses.

Now many of the investors that aggressively backed cleantech are trying to find a more cautious approach to cleantech that more closely aligns with the traditional short VC time frame. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Beyers, which lead the charge on cleantech investments only to be left wounded, has recently changed tact in many ways, and in particular to go after social so it can get back into the quick returns on its investments.

That’s the trend that all investors, in some respects are, moving toward. They’re all looking for the next Facebook or the next Twitter, but no one wants to look for the next Juniper or the next Intel or even the next ARM. I am not saying Facebook and Twitter are not great companies and have not scaled dramatically and impacted the world. What I am pointing to is the fact that Silicon Valley funds fewer and fewer silicon companies.

Why are we assuming that we are all done with developing new kinds of chips for uses that we are not even imagining yet? Are we done inventing the routing technologies of the future?

It’s hard to invest in the future

Think of it this way: Had Vinod Khosla not backed Pradeep Sindhu to work on Juniper, we would all be living in Cisco’s vision of the internet future and using its hardware, which it would have made and sold at its own pace and at its own prices. Today, if you need to build a big company like that, you need to have deep pockets. Luckily Andy Bechtolsteim has those and that is why Arista Networks exists and is proving to be a major disrupter.

The point is not to just rant, but to note that there is a lot more innovation to be done. All of today’s stars — from Dropbox to SnapChat to every little hot company that pops up — is built on those basic building blocks, and we have to continue to make better, cheaper and beefier building blocks.

Yes, I understand that there is a chill around chip stocks, and Wall Street investors are showing more interest in pokes than petabyte speeds. I don’t necessarily think that this kind of rational thinking is bad for the investors, but when it comes to fundamental innovation, it points to a a real challenge ahead. And forget what Wall Street thinks, isn’t venture capital really risk capital? Risk, unfortunately, is a four-letter word around these parts these days.

Failure is an option

Forget chip startups, does anyone think that the Sand Hill Road firmament could have funded Amazon Web Services, a disruptive economic force, if they had a chance? Probably not. How about the iPhone? The same story. If you look at those two examples, and add Google’s self-driving car, Google Glass and what companies like Tesla are doing, you understand that patience is a virtue. Unfortunately, patience is in short supply in the Valley these days.

I wrote this on the first anniversary of Steve Jobs’ death, and I want to resurface it:

A dear friend put it best when he said that Jobs allowed himself the freedom to dream big and most of us need to learn from him and supersize our dreams. While that is true of everyone, the Silicon Valley of 2012 needs to pay heed. Silicon Valley of quick flips, petty jealousies and rampant short-termism needs to remind itself of a greater purpose than a public offering. Change is more than a headline. It takes patience. It is more profound. And it is thinking about more than just us.

Maybe this video is a reminder to all of us that while we might be living in great times, the future is still to be invented.

More about the video: The video is in support of a Kickstarter campaign that hopes to collect enough money to build a statue of Nikola Tesla. While to many Tesla might be a car, in reality Tesla was a scientist who worked on difficult things. As an aside, we at GigaOM are fortunate that our New York offices are in the Radio Wave Building, the very building where Nikola Tesla lived.

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Joshua Pearce, PhD, is a researcher at Michigan Tech who rearches open source and low-impact solutions to engineering problems. He is also the founder of the Printers For Peace contest, an effort to bring together clever 3D-printed ideas that have loftier aims. You can win one of two 3D printers if you submit a winning project.

We asked Pearce a few questions about his goals for the project and about the future of 3D printing.

John Biggs: Why Printers For Peace?

Joshua Pearce: I think it is clear that low-cost open-source 3D printing has enormous potential to do real good for the world – particularly for the poor as it radically reduces the cost of high-value products like scientific tools and consumer goods. This threatens a lot of entrenched interests because the average Joe can fabricate extremely complex products at home for pennies, which is disruptive to say the least. I have noticed a clear bias in 3D printing news coverage – any advances on the low-end of the spectrum are generally ignored or vilified. The media frenzy about 3D printed guns is actually having terrifying consequences – and I don’t mean the guns. A California senator has already proposed registration, background checks, and licensing for 3D printers!

Michigan Tech and Type A Machines sponsored the contest to get the more positive truth about 3D printers into the conversation. There are over 90,000 open-source 3D printable designs available and only one low-quality gun. We do not want to lose the baby with the bathwater. Our aim is to raise awareness of the power of 3D printing to change the world for the better.

JB: What do you think will happen now that the 3D printed gun is out of the bag? It was inevitable, obviously, but what does it mean?
JP: The 3D printed gun is a red herring. Anyone who wants a gun can make a much better one using more traditional tools found in any machine shop and many garages — or just buy one. I am, however, very concerned that the debate about 3D printed guns will be used to squash the incredible technological development we are seeing in the open-source 3D printing community.

JB: What’s the coolest Printers for Peace project you’ve seen so far?

JP: The contest just opened, but there are some really cool designs already developed that I think would make good starting points for derivatives. I really like some of the small-scale 3D printed windmill designs – and there is a graduate student working on what looks to be a printable recyclebot. I would love to see a reliable 3D printed treadle pump as this is one of the most successful appropriate technologies for lifting rural farmers out of poverty in the developing world.

JB: What’s next? 3D printed bazookas? 3D printed heart stents? Where do you see this headed, in either direction?

JP: I think it is clear that existing manufacturers will continue to move from using high-end 3D printing for rapid prototyping into actual manufacturing creating entirely new classes of jobs (e.g. automobile parts, human body parts, etc.). This is exciting, but not nearly as exciting as what is happening on the low-end of the spectrum. As open-source 3D printable designs continue to grow exponentially the value of owning a 3D printer is climbing as their quality improves and actual costs continue to decline. Thus, low-cost open-source 3D printers will become ubiquitous household items, which people use to make a wide array of consumer goods, replacement parts, and highly customized products. Following shortly after I hope to see recyclebots become similarly widespread – with people recycling their waste plastic inhome to make their own products. The implications for improving human well-being are staggering.

There’s plenty of buzz about the concept of making our cities “smarter” — that is, loading them up with sensors and data-driven services to improve efficiency and quality of life. Hell, even Google has taken to loading up its event venues with scores of sensors.

Most of the discussion out there deals with how local governments are working toward this lofty, nebulous goal, but a team called Acrobotics Industries is trying to put the onus on the citizens. To that end the team has kicked off a $50,000 Kickstarter campaign for a small sensor array called the Smart Citizen kit in hopes that people will start collecting and sharing their environmental data with the world.

“There’s a problem with the way current cities were built,” Acrobotic’s COO Francisco Zabala told me. “Beijing’s air quality is insanely bad — we think we have it bad in L.A. — and it’s not getting any better.

The heart (or brain, I guess) of the Smart Citizen project is an Arduino-powered kit that gets tucked away inside (or outside, if you’ve got the right kind of enclosure) of a user’s home to track local environmental variables — think temperature, humidity, air composition, ambient brightness, and sound levels. It’s arguably neat enough to keep tabs on the environmental conditions at your home while you’re not there, but the real value here is when a host of users set up their Smart Citizen sensors and fire up them up en masse.

It’s the team’s hope that Smart Citizen kits will sell widely enough that regular people will be able to get an accurate glance at environmental conditions with a finer sort of granularity than you’d get by firing up, say, the Weather Channel app. For what it’s worth, Zabala concedes that the Smart Citizen project is largely geared toward making people aware of climate change and global warming without getting too political or divisive about it.

“I believe that climate is changing for the worse, but our approach is more personal,” Zabala said. “By raising awareness we’re working toward a solution without banging on people’s heads.”

As it happens, a few of those Smart Citizen kits have already been fired up. A quick look at a demo version of the sensor-tracking website reveals that a handful of the little things are live in Zabala’s native Barcelona — the Smart Citizen team ran an earlier, more local crowdfunding campaign (Zabala called it a “proof of concept run”) that saw a number of users in Spain install and fire up their sensor arrays all around the city. Hovering over a bright blue spot displays the latest environmental data (users can define how often they want those updates to occur), while greyed out units haven’t been fired up lately.

Thanks to how the Smart Citizen kit is constructed, users will eventually be able to monitor more than just the environmental criteria this early kit supports. Zabala said that the Acrobotics team is currently working on swappable daughterboards that will allow the Smart Citizen kit to be used for soil and water testing, too — perfect for you city-dwelling gardeners. If you’re suddenly itching to monitor your surroundings more acutely, you’ll be able to lay claim to a fully constructed Smart Citizen for $155 — the more handy among you can save a little money by springing for the $105 unassembled kit instead.

Another week full of tech news means another week of GigaOM podcasts filled with analysis and commentary. Here’s a summary of what you might have missed, along with links to our audio episodes.

On the GigaOM Chrome Show, Chris Albrecht and I chatted with special guest, Joe Marini. As a Google Developer Advocate, Joe is an expert on the Chrome app experience along with the technology behind it such as Packaged Apps and Native Client apps.

Stacey Higginbotham also had a special guest interview this week on the Internet of Things podcast. Adam Dunkels explains how his early IoT coding efforts helped form the basis for LEGO Mindstorms robots and gave him the knowledge to start his latest company, Thingsquare.

Lastly, on the GigaOM Weekly Wrapup show, Tom Krazit, Eliza Kern, Janko Roettgers and I team up to dissect all of the developments at this year’s Google I/O event, ranging from new APIs for Chrome and Android to the new Google Play Music All Access subscription service.

(Download the GigaOM Chrome Show)

(Download the GigaOM Internet of Things podcast)

(Download the GigaOM Weekly Wrapup podcast)

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When I opened up my first package from online women’s clothing startup Everlane, an immediate smile spread across my face. The company had wrapped the cashmere sweater I bought in a soft, silky Everlane-branded cream-colored bag. It was a very basic choice — not something meant to blow your mind — but a little detail that resonated with me in an immediate tactile and emotional way, and later in a branding way.

The same smile appeared when I was filling out the brief quiz for True & Co., a new startup that’s trying to rethink how women buy bras. The company asks you a variety of questions that are meant to find out the best shape and size of your bras, and it has put a lot of thought into doing this in an innovative, creative, and tactful way (boobs can be a tricky subject).

For example one quiz question asks “Do your cups runneth over?”, basically asking in a playful way if the bra you’re wearing is too small. You can’t help but laugh at that, easing the tension that is natural when you’re trying to think about the shape of your chest. Email marketing company MailChimp has led the way for using this type of language in an innovative way to develop a brand and an emotion connection and deliver better results.

Everlane and True & Co are creating new online e-commerce experiences, and they’re using emotion and design to do it. Warby Parker has famously grown its online glasses business in this way, too. These are the new wave of e-commerce companies, ones that could rival not only big box retailers but also the first-generation of e-commerce companies like Amazon, or clothing companies that have moved into selling items online.

I think Fab founder and CEO Jason Goldberg put it best in an article he wrote last month on his personal blog:

The third wave of e-commerce is all about bringing emotional purchases online. Non-commodity products. More thoughtful purchase decisions.  I like to call this Emotional Commerce. This is categories like furniture, home accessories, home textiles, fashion, art, and jewelry. These are categories where people care about having something special in their lives.

It will be the Warby Parkers, the Everlanes, the Net-a-Porters, and the Birchboxes that will innovate around using design and UI to get you to part with your money online in exchange for a product that adds a little something extra to you life, your home and your wardrobe. At our RoadMap event in 2012, we highlighted a discussion between Birchbox CEO Katia Beauchamp and Warby Parker co-CEO Dave Gilboa, who discussed some of these ideas. For our next RoadMap event in San Francisco in November, we’ll continue that theme (tickets won’t go on sale until this summer, but you can sign up to get first access here).

The lesson for e-commerce startups, product developers, website designers, and anyone else building something that other people will be using — in the physical world and the digital world — is that the small details matter. A lot. Om recently gushed about well made shoes:

I don’t just love the shoes because of how they look — though that matters — but I also look at where the leather comes from, how it is stitched together and what kind of craftsmanship has gone into it. From shoe trees to little patterns on the toe to the packaging to the font on the label, all of those little things add up to the design aesthetic. And that way of thinking about the design aesthetic extends to other things, including website design. Yes, fonts matter, and the layouts matter, but so does the relative relationship to the kind of content, the speed of the web service and even the screen size and how it all correlates to me.

Design might be a buzz word in the tech world in 2013, and some high end designers might not necessarily like the bastardization of the term and its embrace by the tech industry. But in many ways, designers and design thinking is starting to be valued like never before at tech companies (and let’s face it, all companies are becoming tech companies these days).

This has led to better and higher paid positions by designers and new products that are connecting with us on an emotional level. And that’s a good thing.

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For your weekend reading, here’s a recap of five noteworthy stories that appeared on Data Center Knowledge this past week.

Digital Realty Trust Launches DCIM Software – Data center developers provide the bricks, mortar, power and ping to support their tenants. But they’re increasingly finding the need to get into the software side of the data center business, offering tools to make management easier. The latest to do so is turnkey wholesale giant Digital Realty Trust, which today launched EnVision, a comprehensive data center infrastructure management (DCIM) solution.

The Azure Cloud, Exposed to the Azure Sky – The Microsoft data center campus in Quincy, Washington illustrates the evolution of data center design from huge concrete shells to compact modules sitting outdoors on a slab. Data centers have become glamorous, but the Quincy campus is at the forefront of a new minimalist approach offering one vision of the way of the future, and the way of the cloud.

Bloomberg Plans $710 Million Data Center in N.Y. Suburb – Financial media giant Bloomberg L.P. is planning to build a $710 million data center in Orangetown, N.Y., a northern suburb of New York City not far from a major data hub for the New York Stock Exchange, according to local media.

NY Times: Data Centers Acting as ‘Wildcat Power Utilities’ – The New York Times has resumed its critique of the data center business, suggesting that the industry has become a “wildcat power utility” by reselling power to customers at a profit. The Times report examines the use of a common business structure – the real estate investment trust, or REIT – by data center operators, “allowing them to eliminate most corporate taxes.”

IO Immersant Brings Virtual Reality to the Data Center – Ready or not, virtual reality is coming to the data center. IO this week demonstrated a new application that provides a 3D visual representation of a customer’s data center environment, allowing them to “walk through” their data center and check operating conditions, much as players in World of Warcraft explore Azeroth.>

Stay current on Data Center Knowledge’s data center news by subscribing to our RSS feed and daily e-mail updates, or by following us on Twitter or Facebook or join our LinkedIn Group – Data Center Knowledge.

The annual Google I/O event has come and gone, with plenty of news specific to Android. While the event focuses on developers, consumers will see benefits in Android thanks to improvements in Google’s core services and many new APIs for developers to use in Android apps. There was no new Nexus phone, no update to the Nexus 7 tablet, nor a new Nexus 11 tablet. But for those willing to shell out $649, there is a modified Galaxy S 4 coming soon.

Google announced that in June, customers can order the handset through the Google Play store. Instead of the phone running Samsung’s customized TouchWiz software, it will instead run on pure Android, just like the Nexus 4. That means it will get future software updates directly through Google and not Samsung or a network provider.

Of course, some of the newest Samsung features won’t be present on the phone: I wouldn’t expect Samsung’s new camera modes to be there, nor would I expect gestures to work for hands-free scrolling or swiping. Still, in light of no new Nexus hardware, the unlocked handset could appeal to hardcore Android enthusiasts.

So without the release of Android 4.3 at Google I/O, does that mean Android hasn’t improved? Not at all; in fact, Google essentially boosted Android’s software without needing to wait for carriers and handset makers to upgrade the software. How did this happen? A large part of the 3.5 hour Google I/O keynote was dedicated to new Android services and APIs, plus a new application called Hangouts.

The new Hangouts app replaces Google Talk and is Google’s effort to unify its messaging platform. The app supports video calls with up to 10 participants, SMS notifications of incoming chat requests when offline, text chat and works across platforms: You can communication with other users on the web or on iOS devices. Hangouts also highlights a great new feature in Android: Support for synchronized notifications. If you get a notification on one device and take action, the notification won’t appear on other devices or in the Chrome browser.

Google also introduced its music subscription and discovery service called Google Play Music All Access. For a $9.99 monthly fee — $7.99 if you start a 30-day trial by June 30 — you get unlimited access to stream tracks thought the Play Music app and on the web. Human curators surface top songs and albums while music recommendations come from Google’s Knowledge Graph and your Google+ circles.

Gaming got a supercharge in Android as well. Developers can use the new Google Play Games services that allow cross-platform gaming complete with achievements and leaderboards. Game progress can also be saved to the cloud, allowing gamers to pick up where the left off, even from another device.

Android also saw one other big announcement this week, but it didn’t happen at Google I/O. The Bluetooth SIG announced that Android will gain support for Bluetooth Smart and Smart Ready devices in the coming months. That’s likely to be included in an actual Android release as some developers told me that Google will be completely changing the Bluetooth software stack in Android. Regardless, this means widespread support for Bluetooth 4.0 Smart and Smart Ready accessories such as watches, heart rate monitors and other low-powered companion devices.

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