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In her 20s, Meg Jay saw her first psychotherapy client, Alex, who was there to talk about her guy problems. Jay didn’t take the sessions all too seriously at first. But then her supervisor gave her a wakeup call. While Jay said, “Sure she’s dating down and sleeping with a knucklehead. But she’s not gonna marry the guy.” Her supervisor responded, “Not yet. But she might marry the next one. The best time to work on Alex’s marriage is before she has one.”

For Jay, it was an a-ha moment. She realized that 30 is not the new 20. The 20s are not a throwaway decade — they’re a developmental sweet spot as it is when the seeds of marriage, family and career are planted.

There are 50 million 20-somethings in the US — that’s 15% of population. And Jay wants them to consider themselves adults, and know that this period is as important for their development as the first five years of life. Because the first 10 years of a career have an exponential impact on how much money a person is going to earn. Love is the same way: Half of Americans are with their future partner by the age of 30.

“Claiming your 20s is one of simplest things you can do for work, happiness, love, maybe even for the world,” says Jay. ”We know your brain caps off its second and last growth spurt in your 20s as it rewires itself for adulthood. Which means whatever you want to change, now is the time to change it.”

Jay worries that messages in the media about the changing timetable of adulthood, and the 20s being an “extended adolescence,” are trivializing this important decade. These messages encourage 20-somethings not to take action on the things that matter to them most. It leads them to think,  ”As long as I get good job by 30, I’m fine.” Or that dating is just a game, and that they should stay with someone who is just “fun.” The result: they waste valuable time.

Jay also takes issue with the phrase “you can’t pick your family, but can pick your friends.” Because you can pick your family — your own. Jay notices that many people feel pressured by time on this big decision. “Grabbing whoever you’re living with or sleeping with when everyone on Facebook starts walking down the aisle is not progress,” she says. She wants 20-somethings to be as intentional with love as they are with work.

“Too many 30-somethings and 40-somethings look at themselves and say about their 20s, ‘What was I doing? What was I thinking?’” says Jay. “When a lot has been pushed to your 30s, there is enormous 30-something pressure to start a family, have your career, pick a city. Many of these things are incompatible to do all at once.”

So what can 20-somethings do? They can own their adulthood. They can invest in identity capital—courses, skills, friends—that add value toward who they might want to be. They can work on building a wide social network, instead of a tightknit one that doesn’t allow for outside opportunities.

Jay explains, “Twenty-somethings are like airplanes, just taking off from LAX heading for somewhere west. A slight change in course on takeoff is the difference between landing in Alaska or Fiji.”

Freeman Hrabowski is president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), which has made an extraordinary name for itself educating students of all types in science and engineering. “What makes our story especially important,” says Hrabowski, “is that we have learned so much from students who are typically not at the top of the academic ladder.” And they have graduated a tremendous number who go on to PhDs and faculty positions at top universities.

Hrabowski himself participated in Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Children’s Crusade.” He marched and was arrested in support of his right to a good education. As he waited in the prison, at 12 years old, Dr. King came over and said to them, ”What you children do this day will impact children not yet born.” The lesson Hrabowski learned? “Children can be empowered to take ownership of their education.”

UMBC was founded that very year. What made it especially important to Hrabowski is: “It was the first university founded at a time when students of all races could go there.” For him it was an experiment. Is it possible to have institutions where people of all backgrounds can come and learn to work together? They found they could do a lot in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. The problem was the same problem America continues to face: in science & engineering. African American students were not succeeding. Furthermore, ”It’s not just minorities that don’t do well in science and engineering.” Twenty percent of African American students who start a science degree will complete it. But the number for white students is 32%, and 42% for Asian Americans. This is a problem for all of America. He thought, ”So many students are smart and can do it. We need to find ways of making it happen.”

So here are the things they did:

1. Set high expectations. It takes both a drive, and an understanding that it’s going to be hard work. They had one student who made a C in a core course. They made him re-take it, and he went on to be the first black student to earn a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He now works at Harvard.
2. Building community among the students. We tend to think cutthroat when it comes to excellence. But, as Hrabowski notes, “It’s one thing to earn an A yourself, it’s another thing to help someone else do well.”
3. It takes researchers to produce researchers. He says they need scientists to pull the students into the work, and the students at UMBC are actively involved in the research in the labs.
4. Faculty need to be willing to get involved with the students, even in the classroom. Observing every student to see what was wrong with them. One professor wrote, “I have this young black guy in class; he’s not excited about it, he’s not taking notes.” Hrabowski notes that the important part is that the faculty member was observing every student, and, “That young man is now a faculty member, at Duke.”

So many students, says Hrabowski, are bored in class. That’s why UMBC puts emphasis on collaboration, on using technology. Not just teaching theories, but letting students struggle with those theories. And it’s needed. For example, there has been a 79% decline in women majoring in computer science since 2000. He believes that what will work to combat that is building community, and faculty pulling students into the work.

Most important, says Hrabowski, “If a student has a sense of self, it’s amazing how their dreams and values can make all the difference in the world.”

Just yesterday Twitter announced a planned app for the Firefox OS phones when they begin shipping, but the company is bringing that same functionality to Windows Phone, so do not feel left out. Today Microsoft’s Michael Stroh did the honors of making the announcement.

The update is not much different than what has been promised for the Mozilla mobile OS. Customers will receive four new navigation tabs — Home, Connect, Discover and Me.

Home, much as you would expect, shows tweets. These can be tapped to expand, at which point it will display in-line photos, video and even web site summaries.

Connect simply keeps you up-to-date with @ mentions, as well as allowing you to see who has followed or retweeted you, while Discover allows you to observe trends, and find new content, as well as browse categories, find friends, or see suggestions for accounts you may want to follow.

Finally, Me simply provides access for users to read and respond to direct messages, but according to Stroh “you can also see your lists and favorites or view and update your profile”.

However, that is not all. Twitter users can also get status updates right on the lock screen, receive better Live Tile support, compose a tweet or search from anywhere in the app, and even use speech recognition to compose messages.

All of this is available now from the Windows Phone Store. If you have Twitter installed already then you should receive the update automatically. If not, it is a small 2 MB download.

An indefinable quality lies at the heart of any successful idea or project … a spark of intuition, genius or insight that acts as the driver of all later action. Our speakers in this session all possess such a spark, from the educator who’s made it his mission to help high-achieving minority students to a young inventor who figured out a novel and effective way to protect his family’s animals from attacks by lions.

Here are the speakers from this session. Click on their name for a recap of their talk:

Freeman Hrabowski creates opportunities for students of all backgrounds to pursue advanced degrees.

Real life begins at 30? Well, no, says Meg Jay. Her research in her new book shows us why 30 is not the new 20.

TED’s own Lisa Bu has built a career helping people find great stories. Now she tells her own story.

Young inventor Richard Turere invented “lion lights,” an elegant way to protect his family’s cattle from lion attacks.

Announcing the TED Prize Winner, Sugata Mitra, and his bold wish, funded by $1 million from the TED community.

The Sleepy Man Banjo Boys is made up of 10-year-old banjo sensation Jonny Mizzone and his brothers Robbie, 14, on fiddle, and Tommy, 15, on guitar.

Watch all of TED2013 Session 3 for free at 5pm PST today: http://tedlive.ted.com/webcasts/2013

See the 2013 TED Prize revealed!

Senior Fellow Taghi Amirani receives the first-ever TED Fellow Hero award from Tom Reilly on the Fellows Talk stage.

Monday on the TED Fellows stage, Tom Reilly did something unprecedented in the history of the Fellows — he singled out one for recognition. Presenting the newly minted TED Fellows Hero award to Iranian-British filmmaker Taghi Amirani, he said, “This person has gone above and beyond in writing, participating, a certain amount of kvetching, mentoring younger fellows, convening Fellows retreats, offering their apartment, and taking them out for the best Persian food. They offer the yarn that helps knit the community together.”

Amirani, a Senior Fellow who is currently working on mounting his first feature film, Coup 53 — the true story of the CIA coup staged in Iran in 1953 — was shocked into uncharacteristic speechlessness. He managed only to croak, “This is a mind f***!” We caught up with him shortly after the session to see whether he’d recovered.

Any words yet?

I am so embarrassed that I didn’t express my gratitude or the depth of my appreciation, or even express my surprise in an eloquent way, for someone who apparently talks a hell of a lot. I don’t even know what Tom said or I said. I was sitting there thinking, “What the hell? It was the craziest kept secret ever.” I’m still shaking, and this probably happened 45 minutes ago. My knees are still wobbly.

The totally unexpected honor Tom and the TED Fellows bestowed on me and the love they so generously showered me with deserves a more eloquent and thoughtful response than the clumsy tongue-tied gibberish I blurted out. So let me say this:

Tom has been a real friend, mentor and even a father figure, a creative and emotional inspiration right from day one. It’s just one of those moments when you meet a group of people, I think it was February 2009, that I just acquired this unbelievable extended family of friends. Ultimately, the most important thing for me is the people — friendships that I know will last beyond any TED conference. As a filmmaker, my source of inspiration, the raw material of my craft, if you will, is people — their stories, hearts and minds. It’s the human relationships that I find incredibly enriching amongst the Fellows, people who have given me more than they can ever imagine. If they have seen any spark in me it’s because they have been the catalyst.

At the risk of this sounding like one of those excruciatingly cheesy and awkward acceptance speeches, let me express my deep debt of gratitude to the TED Fellowship team: the big-hearted Tom Reilly, the beautiful and super-smart Logan McClure, the lovely Sam Kelly and Corey Mohr, the calm and stylish Emeka Okafor, and the soon to be totally amazing friends Shoham Arad and Patrick Darcy. And of course to Karen Eng for editing our words to make sense.

One last word: becoming a TED Fellow made me think big and reach beyond myself. Even though I’ve made some 40 documentaries, making my first feature is like starting from scratch. A daunting prospect. When the super challenging Iranian coup movie project finally gets the backing and support and makes it onto the screens, it will be almost entirely because of the doors the TED Fellowship is beginning to open.

Fellow Fellows chimed in on the roast. Here’s what they had to say:

“If only everyone brought as much exuberance, intensity and joy to life as Taghi does, we’d live in a different world.” — Erik Hersman.

“Taghi is like a cross between Picasso and a Jewish grandmother–his films are ambitious and brave, taking on hugely important political subjects, and he is the consummate host–who will nag you to try everything on your plate while throwing in a witty, eye-rolling joke or two.” — Nassim Aseffi

“Taghi has made my world a better place with his revealing and affectionate films, his whip-smart quick wit, his sexy photos of breakfast, and his under-rated dance moves. There’s a reason why he always looks like he’s got something up his sleeve.” — Candy Chang

“Few people have the guts to say what they want and what they mean without worrying if you’ll agree with them. Even fewer can make beautiful and brave films with that approach. Only one person has all these qualities and a shaved head so perfect it stands as a monument to cranial architecture. That person is Bruce Willis … And when he’s not available, that person is Taghi Amirani.” — Saeed Taji Farouky

“Taghi emanates everything delightful and delicious about the energy of the TED Fellows program, but he also listens. Though serious about his work, he also can take the piss out of it. He’s contemplative but still playful. He’s engaged, generous, humble, and OK with not knowing.” — Jessica Green.

For the 2013 baseball season, Major League Baseball is more than tripling the number of stadiums that will accept mobile tickets via Apple’s Passbook app. This year there will be 13 stadiums that will enable paperless ticketing via Passbook, MLB announced at a fan event in New York City Tuesday night. That’s up from four last season.

The teams that will start accepting Passbook tickets for the first time are the Minnesota Twins, Baltimore Orioles, Milwaukee Brewers, Oakland A’s, Pittsburgh Pirates, Detroit Tigers and Chicago Cubs. The New York Mets, San Francisco Giants and Kansas City Royals, which began accepting Passbook last September, will again offer the service this season. MLB says there are three more teams that will enable iOS tickets this season, but that are not yet ready to make an official announcement.

MLB was among Apple’s first launch partners for Passbook, which went live with iOS 6 when it launched in September. That surely wasn’t a surprise to baseball fans who know MLB as the most tech-savvy league of all major professional sports. Major League Baseball’s Advanced Media Office, which is the digital arm of the league, responsible for MLB.com, MLB.TV and the At Bat apps, is run by CEO Bob Bowman — who’s speaking at paidContent Live 2012 in April. Bowman has made MLB a frequent and early partner of Apple when it’s come to mobile tech.

Last week, MLB debuted the 2013 edition of its At Bat app for Android and iOS, which included more live, archive and embedded video content, and a new deal to include free game audio access.

He stays ahead of the tech curve by trying to anticipate what the next generation of fans — the kind that grew up with ubiquitous internet access — will want in a mobile experience and how they prefer to interact with their team. The smartphone “is the first screen, not second screen” for them, he told me Tuesday. That means a mobile offering “has to have everything. [The app] has to be slick. If it isn’t hip, cool and easy to use, [fans] are not going to use it.” That’s why “everything we write and plan this is on the first screen.”

That includes using your phone instead of a piece of paper to get into a game, as well as using it to sort stats or watch classic video. But MLB’s mobile efforts are not all iOS all the time. MLB At Bat is also on Android, a platform Bowman said is growing rapidly for MLB.

Right now, he said, iOS users account for 70 percent of the free version of At Bat. But that’s “shrinking every day” as Android has grown — he says thanks to Samsung’s good mobile hardware and its growing cool factor, as well as the Google Play store being better curated by Google.

However, when it comes to users that pay for At Bat — which is $20 per season — 85 percent are still iOS. But that’s changing too, he said. “Slowly.”

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One of the important ways to make solar energy cheaper is to improve the amount of sunlight that solar cells can convert into electricity. So it’s a big deal to see that First Solar announced on Tuesday that it’s managed to create a record 18.7 percent solar cell, up from the 17.3 percent cell it touted in July 2011.

That 18.7 percent sets a new world record for cells made from the material cadmium-telluride. It represents the best the company could achieve, but to make cells with that efficiency in mass production will likely take a few years.

Boosting the efficiency helps to reduce production costs of solar cells. Efficiency is correlated with how much power a panel of a given size can produce – more power means higher efficiencies. There is a fixed cost and amount of time for making each panel. If the company produces each panel with a higher power rating (in watts) for the same amount of time as it did before, then that panel’s cost-per-watt is lower.

For consumers, a solar panel with more efficient cells also means they won’t need as many solar panels to get the same amount of electricity. Or they could get more solar electricity with the same number of panels. That’s good news for those who have homes with a limited roof space or want to rely less on their utilities for power.

The Arizona company has long built its reputation as a low-cost manufacturer, but it has faced increasing competition from companies that have gotten better at reducing costs. Like First Solar, many of these rivals have built mega factories and developed their own or licensed technologies to cut costs.

A good number of these solar cell makers are based in China, and in recent years these Chinese companies also have gotten strong financial support from their national and local governments — as well as state-controlled banks — to become formidable players. But that help has gotten the Chinese manufacturers in trouble in the U.S. and Europe, where trade complaints have been filed to stop what their rivals say is unfair competition. The U.S. government started to impose tariffs on imported Chinese silicon solar cells last year after investigating such a trade dispute in 2011-2012.

With the new efficiency record, First Solar also wants to show that its material of choice, cadmium-telluride, is capable of squeezing more and more electricity from sunlight for years to come. Most of the solar cells made today actually use silicon, the same material for chips that run computers and mobile phones. But there has been a long-standing debate over when silicon and cadmium-telluride will be close to hitting the maximum efficiencies the materials can inherently produce.

Without switching to a new material — and spending lots of money to replace factory equipment — solar companies are looking at different ways to boost the efficiencies. One idea is to stack another layer of cells on top of the existing layer to induce chemical reactions that help to minimize the loss of electrons in the process of converting sunlight to energy. Figuring out new ways to boost silicon solar cell efficiency is one area where startups might still be able to attract venture capital, especially if the ideas involve licensing the technologies to big producers.

Many investors have shied away from putting money in startups that want to build factories to manufacture the technologies they have developed. Solar manufacturing technology has shown to take a lot more time and money to commercialize than some VCs have the appetite for, and investors haven’t seen enough success stories to want to place more bets.

When solar cells are assembled into a panel, the efficiency of the entire panel is typically a few percentage points lower than the cell efficiency. First Solar announced a 14.4 percent panel efficiency record about a year ago. But the panels that are rolling off its production lines en masse clocked in at an average of 12.9 percent as of the end of 2012, up 0.7 percentage point from 12.2 percent by the end of 2011.

The company also reported its fourth-quarter financial results on Tuesday. It posted $1.1 billion in sales for the quarter, up from $415 million in the fourth quarter of 2011. It generated $154.2 million in the quarterly net income, or $1.74 per share, compared with a net loss of $413.1 million, or $4.78 per share, from the year-ago period. For the entire 2012, First Solar took in $3.4 billion in sales, up 22 percent from 2011, but it recorded a net loss of $96.3 million, or $1.11 per share, for 2011.

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Photo: James Duncan Davidson

In art school, Phil Hansen developed a shake in his hand. He couldn’t so much as draw a straight line anymore. After years of excelling in pointillism, his tight grip of the pen had caused permanent nerve damage.

“To me this was doomsday. This was the destruction of my dream of becoming an artist,” says Hansen in his talk in Session 2 of TED2013.  ”I left art school and, then, I left art completely.”

Hansen was lost. But a neurologist helped him find his way again with three words: “embrace the shake.”

At this unusual prompting, Hansen decided to let his hands do what they wanted to do — make scribbles. He realized that he could create beautiful portraits using this approach. He started experimenting, using his feet to paint or a blowtorch to create faces in wood.

“Embracing the limitation can actually drive creativity,” says Hansen, who describes a moment of unproductivity that came, ironically, when he had all the supplies he needed. “We need to first be limited in order to become limitless.”

Some of Hansen’s surprising works:

• a portrait on stacked Starbucks cups
• a painting done with karate chops
• asking people to tell him stories about life-changing moments, which he then wrote on a revolving canvas
• live worms assembled into an image
• a tattooed banana, created with pushpins
• a painting done with hamburger grease

Hansen also found himself fascinated with the idea of destroying a piece after creating it. Calling it Goodbye Art, he made a scultpture of Jimi Hendrix out of matchsticks — and then burned it. He did works in frozen wine and sidewalk chalk. He also set up images in candles, blown out before they fully existed, and only captured on time-lapse video.

“Destruction brought me back to a neutral place where felt refreshed,” Hansen says. “As I destroyed each project, I was learning to let go — let go of failures, let go of imperfections. I found myself in a constant state of creation, thinking only of what’s next and coming up with more ideas than ever.”

Hansen thinks this might be a good process for others, too.

“Now when run into barrier or find myself creativly stumped, I sometimes still struggle … but I try to remind myself of the possibilities,” he says. “Perhaps instead of telling each other to seize the day, maybe we can remind ourselves each day to seize the limitations.”

Once he finds a suitable topic, Feilding Cage, a New York-based developer and journalist for The Guardian, can easily spend three months generating the source information and designing a visualization for what’s become known as data journalism. The results bring understanding and reader engagement to topics that are otherwise discussed with a lot of words or static numbers. Readers can and do play around with the information, share it widely and discuss it for long periods after it appears online.

The Guardian’s interactive guide to gay rights in the United States

Cage is one of a handful of Guardian journalists who generate reports that say new things about topics that pop up in the news or are just plain old interesting. Cage and his boss, Simon Rogers, editor of The Guardian Datablog and Data Store, spoke about their work at the Strata conference at Santa Clara, Calif., on Tuesday.

Along with The Guardian, a few other news organizations have been putting an emphasis on data-driven reporting and visualizations, apps and even games in the past few years, such as the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and ProPublica (Check out the Data Journalism Handbook for more information on this sort of work.)

Data journalism and visualization stand out for the verification and occasional gray-area explanations that journalists provide. Cage, for example, accompanied his interactive visualization of gay rights in the United States with a blog post explaining his methodology and disclosing his assumptions.

Screenshot from the Zoomdata’s big data analytics iPad app

It’s certainly one way to say something fresh with data, but it’s time-consuming when you consider big data analytics apps that provide users with real-time information users can compare against Hadoop-processed historical data, such as Zoomdata. (That company, which my colleague Derrick Harris covered last year, released the beta version of its iPad app on Tuesday.)

It would be neat to find a happy medium for enterprises that want original insights that every employee can see and use and act on but doesn’t take three months to generate. That’s especially true because the return on investment for work like Cage’s is hard to identify, although it’s possible the content could indirectly generate revenue by driving users to content they have to pay for.

Bridging the gap might be a matter of finding the perfect data scientist for the company. Or it might be a matter of time before the kind of work Cage does is automated. A computer already can write an earnings story, although it might be a few years before computers put wordsmiths out of business.

Maybe it just doesn’t make sense to cross data journalism visualizations with big data analytics apps. But I, for one, would like to play with such a tool.

Entrepreneurs from companies that work with and make visualizations from big data, such as Quid, will speak at the GigaOM Structure:Data conference on March 20-21 in New York.

Disclosure: The Guardian is an investor in Giga Omni Media, which publishes GigaOM.

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As we reported last month, smart grid network company Silver Spring Networks is still moving forward with its IPO, and on Tuesday set the terms for its IPO (hat tip Dana Hull). Silver Spring plans to sell 3.7 million shares at a price of between $16 and $18 per share, which at the midpoint would raise $63 million for the company.

That amount is less than half of what Silver Spring originally planned to raise at a maximum of $150 million. The company first filed to go public in the Summer of 2011. Longtime investor Foundation Capital also plans to purchase $12 million worth of stock at the IPO price, following the IPO, in a private placement.

We’ll see what price per share Silver Spring eventually lands on before it actually goes public, assuming it does make it out. If you only look at Silver Spring’s GAAP revenue and net income, the company doesn’t look all that amazing, which is what this analyst did. The company hasn’t ever had a positive net income, and it recorded revenue of $147 million for the nine months ended Sept 30, 2012, which was down from $176 million from the same period in 2011.

But if you look at the deals that Silver Spring closed in 2012, and the amount it billed its utility customers for, it actually had a decent year last year. The company recorded billings of $219 million for the nine months ended Sept 30, 2012, up from $183 million for the same period of 2011. Billings are how much Silver Spring invoiced its customers, and they are considered deferred revenue until they can be officially counted as revenue.

Silver Spring also had its highest gross margin to date on those billings of 34 percent. The company has a total of $473 million in deferred revenue as of the nine months ended September 30, 2012, and about $60 million in cash for the same period.

Will Silver Spring deliver a successful IPO in a difficult year for clean power and energy efficiency companies? SolarCity was able to go public in 2012 after its investors were able to negotiate the deal, but it was touch and go. We’ll just have to wait and see.

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Out of the hundreds of energy innovations on display this week at the annual ARPA-E Summit just outside of Washington D.C., it’s been rare to find a group actually selling and shipping products. But a startup out of Oakland, Calif. called Smart Wire Grid has quietly begun delivering devices that clamp onto transmission lines and control the flow of power, and it has scored some of the bigger names in the power company business. In a few weeks Smart Wire Grid plans to install its devices on the lines of power giant Southern Company, following a pilot installation of 99 of its devices on the lines of the federally-owned Tennessee Valley Authority.

Smart Wire Grid’s devices — called Distributed Series Reactors or DSRs — can be hooked onto transmission lines and signal to the electrons coming down the line to go elsewhere. It’s a similar concept to how internet infrastructure can allocate more bandwidth when needed or can smartly route around problem areas in the network.

For utilities, such technology can be a low cost way to push power to underutilized lines and to avoid over usage of certain lines that can lead to costly outages. The DSRs can also be networked with wireless technology to create a smart network of power flow and monitoring devices.

Smart Wire Grid’s Senior Engineer Andrija Sadikovic told me that while there are other ways for utilities to monitor and control the flow of power, the company’s devices are a super fast and super-low cost way to do it. It took less than four days to install the devices and fix TVA’s outage management problem, said Sadikovic. And after certain problems have been fixed for a section of the transmission line, utilities can move and reuse the devices on other lines. Smart Wire Grid founder Woody Gibson told a reporter last that year that the company was also having conversations with Bonneville Power Association for a pilot.

It’s probably not a shocker to anyone that it’s easier for startups selling smart-grid tech to reach commercialization, compared to the nuclear power projects or new battery makers hanging out at ARPA-E. While utilities aren’t the fastest moving customers, some of them are willing to test out and trial new IT-based software and hardware, particularly if it can reduce costs elsewhere and improve reliability.

Smart Wire Grid, which is utilizing technology developed at Georgia Tech University, was able to score a $4 million grant from ARPA-E for the pilot project with TVA. The pilot also included partners Boeing, and Carnegie Mellon University. The company will monitor the devices for a year and collect data about how they perform.

Smart Wire Grid closed on a $10 million round of equity financing from investors including new investor 3×5 Fund, which is backed by Arnerich Massena and Rivervest, along with Jane Capital. The company plans to raise another round later this year.

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After some iOS apps using HTML5 first-party cookies as a way of tracking users were rejected during Apple’s app review process, a recent report declared the move was the beginning of a broader policy push to get developers, publishers and advertisers to start using Apple’s Advertising Identifier. But that might not be the case.

The apps in question were rejected by App Store reviewers because of a user interface problem, not expressly because of the use of HTML5 cookies in apps, according to a source familiar with the situation. And there is no change in Apple’s policy, no new enforcement and “no crackdown” on cookie tracking at all, this source said.

Techcrunch reported on Monday that the rejections “signaled a push to its own identifier technology” and compared this move to how Apple began enforcing the move away from unique device identifiers (UDIDs) in late 2011. That was when Apple began to reject some apps that were using UDIDs, which are an anonymized number connected to an iOS device that publishers and advertisers could use to track user behavior and better target ads to those users. But UDIDs weren’t as anonymous or private as people thought; with just a bit more information like the user’s birthdate, gender or email address, which some apps were tracking, his or her location and identity could be resolved.

That’s why in September 2012 Apple introduced the Advertising Identifier, which let users have more privacy and gave them more control over what publishers and advertisers know about their use of apps. But Apple, so far anyway, is not forcing anyone to use it.

There are a handful of different tracking methods in use right now, said Craig Palli, vice president of business development at mobile app marketing company Fiksu. UDID has been officially phased out by Apple and few apps continue to use it, but there are five or six other methods also in use, including cookie tracking and the use of MAC addresses.

The apps in question (which have not been officially named and which sources were unwilling to relay) were rejected over clause 10.6 in the App Store guidelines, I’m told. That rule (rather vaguely) states, “If your user interface is complex or less than very good, it may be rejected.” These apps, once launched, briefly kick a user over to mobile Safari before bringing them back to the app — in other words, an experience that is not Apple’s ideal user interface for a native app. The company has “always rejected” apps that do that, this source said.

It is very possible that Apple will eventually want to move all apps over to the Advertising Identifier. But whatever is happening now isn’t really comparable — at least yet — to what happened with UDIDs, according to the source. Developers have not been told specifically by Apple to either use Advertising Identifier or not use other tracking methods like cookie tracking they way they were told in 2012 to stop using UDIDs.

Apple did not comment on whether the company would begin enforcing use of Advertising Identifier.

Palli, who is also quoted in the original story, notes that he personally knows of 10 apps — which he did not name — that use cookie tracking and were approved by Apple in the last month. “Some very large brands have been rejected, but those [app] rejections are not pervasive across the ecosystem,” he noted. In other words, there’s no real pattern yet in the rejections, perhaps other than a user interface rule violation.

Thumbnail image courtesy Shutterstock user Cienpies Design.

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Jay Penske, who bought the century-old Hollywood tabloid Variety in a fire sale last year, has clearly gotten religion about the power of the web — which isn’t surprising, since his Deadline Hollywood site is likely one of the factors that helped bring about Variety’s demise. So it shouldn’t come as a shock that Penske is dismantling much of the existing magazine, including its daily print edition, and is getting rid of the paywall in a move he described as “the end of an error.”

Variety announced the moves early Tuesday, saying the tabloid will drop its daily print edition as of March 1 and publish only a weekly version on paper. The paywall, which charged users $250 a year for access to Variety content, comes down at the same time — Penske called it “an interesting experiment that didn’t work” — and in a somewhat unusual decision, the paper’s editor has been replaced with three editors, each of whom will run different sections of the magazine.

Penske, the son of famed race-car driver and NASCAR operator Roger Penske, isn’t a newcomer to the power of digital: he was a co-founder of Mail.com, which he sold to a German internet company in 2010, and before that helped start a mobile company aimed at children called Firefly.

We're all going to miss Daily Variety in print but now we'll be faster and more nimble. It's a good move.

—
David S. Cohen (@Variety_DSCohen) February 26, 2013

The new owner bought Variety in October from owner Reed Elsevier for $25 million, after the European publishing conglomerate reportedly cut the price it was asking for the magazine — once reportedly valued at more than $200 million — by 25 percent. Penske added it to a stable of online properties that includes the Deadline site and MovieLine.com, as well as the well-regarded technology blog Boy Genius Report and HollywoodLife.com, a site run by former the former editor of Cosmopolitan, Bonnie Fuller.

If Penske was hoping that his moves would be applauded by his other sites, he doesn’t know veteran Hollywood gossip writer Nikke Finke, who runs Deadline Hollywood: in a scathing post about the dropping of the paywall and the decline of what she called “the beleaguered trade,” Finke said editorial morale at the entertainment trade magazine “is at its lowest ebb and anxiety is running sky high,” and described advertising as “non-existent” and readers as “few and far between.”

Sharon Waxman, who runs a competitor called The Wrap, also warned that Variety could have a lot of work on its hands, since — like many newspapers and magazines — print advertising in the daily edition likely made up a large proportion of its revenues.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / wavebreakmedia and Flickr user Pew Center

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Single sign-on. Universal log-in. It is the Holy Grail of Internet services. Coming into the new century, Microsoft planned to use Passport as a universal, single sign-on authentication system aligned with Windows. Following privacy group complaints, a Federal Trade Commission investigation and subsequent settlement, Microsoft backed off the authentication strategy. A decade later, Facebook emerged as contender; many sites or services request, and some even require, signing in with Facebook credentials. Twitter is another option, and there are other choices, such as OpenID.

Now Google comes calling, today adding Google+ Sign-In as an option developers can include with their apps. I cannot overstate just how bold and disruptive the authentication system could be, or how much Google could — scratch that, most likely will — benefit. If widely adopted, the service could, if nothing else, give Google+ huge lift against Facebook. Welcome to the social network wars, and my money is on the the big G winning because Android, search and other assets offer so much leverage.

Simply put: Google makes authentication a development platform tied to its social network and some other assets. Same can be said about Facebook, which offers authentication and apps platform. Both companies promise developers improved customer engagement and visibility over time.

The difference: Facebook apps run within the social network’s confines, although authentication reaches beyond and pulls users in. Google has Android, which is the dominant phone OS by huge margin, and extends the authentication platform to iOS, too. Combined, the two operating systems had 90.1 percent smartphone share during fourth quarter, based on actual sales, according to Gartner. Google+ Sign-In also supports web apps.

Successful platforms share six common traits:

• There are good development tools and APIs for easily creating applications
• There is at least one killer application people really want
• There is breadth of useful applications
• Third parties make lots of money
• The platform is broadly available
• There is a robust ecosystem

The most important is the fourth. Developers follow the money. Here Google uses one platform, social networking/authentication, to benefit another — mobile apps. The concept: Social engagement drives apps usage and sales, whether direct, additional or ancillary.

If developers sign on, they’re sure to drive more traffic to Google+, which isn’t good for Facebook. Likewise, the search giant offers an alternative to Facebook log-in for apps and some related services.

What You Get

Someone at Google thought out the benefits, by making Google+ Sign-In more than just another authentication mechanism. Among them:

• Support for two-step verification
• One-click install of Android apps from a website
• Interactive Google+ posts for sharing or buying apps
• Hangouts — and so video interaction — become part of apps

Two-step verification. “If you sign in to Gmail, YouTube or any other Google service, you can now use your existing credentials to sign in to apps outside of Google”, Seth Sternberg, Google+ director of Product Management, says about the basic concept. But there’s more, two-step verification, which while a hassle sometimes is an excellent safeguard against intruders. I have the mechanism enabled and recommend everyone using a Google Account to do likewise.

One-click install. “Many developers offer web and mobile versions of their app, yet setting things up across a browser, phone and tablet is still a major hassle”, Sternberg says. “When you sign in to a website with Google, you can install its mobile app on your Android device with a single click”. That means no link to Google Play that takes the user away.

Interactive posts. “When you share from an app that uses Google+ Sign-In, your friends will see a new kind of ‘interactive’ post in their Google+ stream”, Sternberg explains. “Clicking will take them inside the app, where they can buy, listen to, or review (for instance) exactly what you shared”. The developer benefits — and to the social mob — are obvious. Engagement for both, sales for the developer.

Embedded Hangouts. Already, Hangouts is one of the best Google+ features. Third-party apps run within the Hangout, and developers can place a button on their websites to take users to them.

Potential is big, but much depends on how Google executes on the promise and who actually adopts Google+ Sign-In. The demos do impress: Photo Hunt; Scott & Doodle.

Photo Credit: Fer Gregory/Shutterstock