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Fifth in a Series. Editor: Serialization continues of landmark 1991 book Accidental Empires, looking at younger Microsoft CEO Bill Gates and Microsoft Word 3.0 for Macintosh — proverbial vaporware at the time.

Several hundred users of Apple Macintosh computers gathered one night in 1988 in an auditorium in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to watch a sneak preview demonstration of a new word processing application. This was consumerism in its most pure form: it drew potential buyers together to see a demonstration of a product they could all use but wouldn’t be allowed to buy. There were no boxes for sale in the back of the room, no “send no money, we’ll bill you later”. This product flat wasn’t for sale and wouldn’t be for another five months.

Why demonstrate it at all? The idea was to keep all these folks, and the thousands of people they would talk to in the coming weeks, from buying some competitor’s program before this product — this Microsoft Word 3.0 — was ready for the market. Macintosh users are the snobs of the personal computer business. “Don’t buy MacWrite II, WordPerfect for Macintosh, or Write-Now”, they’d urge their friends and co-workers. “You’ve got to wait for Microsoft Word 3.0. It’s radical!”

But it also didn’t work.

To make the demonstration even more compelling, it was to be given by Bill Gates, Microsoft’s billionaire boy chairman of the board who had flown in from Seattle for that night only. (This follows the theory that if Chrysler issued invitations to look through a telescope at one of its new minivans circling a test track, more people would be willing to look if Lee Iacocca was the driver.)

There is an art to demonstrating a computer program like this — a program that isn’t really finished being written. The major parts of the program were there, but if the software had been complete, Microsoft would have been taking money for it. It would have been for sale in the back of the room. The fact that this was only a demonstration and that the only fingers touching the keyboard that night would be those of the highly talented Bill Gates proved that the program was in no way ready to be let loose among paying customers.

What the computer users would be seeing was not really a demonstration of software but a virtuoso performance of man and machine. Think of Microsoft Word 3.0 as a minefield in Kuwait and Bill Gates as a realtor trying to sell a few lots there before all of the land mines have been cleared. To show how safe the property is, he’d give a tour, steering prospects gently away from the remaining mines without telling them they were even in danger.

“Looks safe to me, honey”, the prospective buyer would say. “Let’s talk business while the kids play in the yard”.

“NO!!!”

That night in Ann Arbor, according to testers back in the Microsoft quality assurance department, the version of Microsoft Word that Gates was demonstrating contained six land mines. There were known to be six Type-A bugs in the software, any one of which could lock up the Macintosh computer in an instant, sending Aunt Helen’s gothic romance into the ether at the same time. All Gates had to do was guide his demo past these six danger areas to make Ann Arbor and the rest of the Macintosh world think that all was well with Microsoft Word 3.0.

Gates made it through the demonstration with only one mistake that completely locked up — crashed — the computer. Not good enough for the automotive world, of course, where having to push the car back from the test drive would usually kill a sale, but computer users are forgiving souls; they don’t seem to mind much if the gas tank of their digital Pinto occasionally explodes. Heck, what’s one crash among friends?

In fact, the demo was brilliant, given that the Microsoft QA department had no idea how bad the program really was. Word 3.0 turned out to have not six but more than 600 major bugs when it finally shipped five months later, proving once again that Bill Gates is a demo-god.

Late night in Ann Arbor brings with it the limited pleasures of any college town — movie houses, pizzerias, and bars, each filled with a mix of students and townies that varies in direct relation to its distance from the University of Michigan campus. Bored with the Lysol ambiance of the Holiday Inn, the pair aimed their rental car into the heart of town, looking for something, well, different. Bill Gates sat on the passenger side, sniffing like a setter the evening air through his open window, a 33-year-old billionaire on the prowl.

The Word 3.0 demo was over, but Gates, now a little drunk, apparently had a few things left to prove.

“Here, stop here!” Gates commanded, jumping unsteadily from the car as it settled next to the curb near a group of young blacks.

“What’s happening!” the pencil-necked billionaire cheerfully greeted the assembled boom boxers, who clearly had no idea who or what he was — this bespectacled white boy with greasy blond hair and bratwurst skin, wearing a blue and white plaid polyester shirt and green pullover sweater.

“Bill, let’s go someplace else”, called Gates’s companion from the driver’s seat.

“Yeah, Bill, go someplace else”, said one of the young blacks.

“Nah, I want to rap. I can talk to these guys, you’ll see!”

This is not just a gratuitous “Bill Gates gets drunk” story. “I can [fill in the blank], you’ll see!” is the battle cry of the personal computing revolution and the entire philosophical basis of Microsoft’s success and Gates’s $4 billion fortune.

This guy thinks he has something to prove. A zillion dollars isn’t enough, 7,000 employees who idolize him aren’t enough — in fact, nothing is enough to prove to Bill Gates and to all the folks like him in the personal computer business that they are finally safe from the bigger, stronger, stupider kids who used to push them around on the playground.

“I can (fill in the blank], you’ll seel” is a cry of adolescent defiance and enthusiasm, a cry as much against the status quo as it is in favor of something new. It’s a cry at once of confidence and of the uncertainty that lies behind any overt need to prove one’s manhood. And it’s the cry that rings, at least metaphorically, across the desks of 45 million Americans as they power up their personal computers at the start of each working day.

There was no urge to fly, to see the world, to win a war, to cure disease, or even to get rich that explains how the personal computer business came to be or even how it runs today. Instead, the game was started to satisfy the needs of disenfranchised nerds like Bill Gates who didn’t meet the macho standards of American maleness and so looked for a way to create their own adolescent alternative to the adult world and, through that creation, gain the admiration of their peers.

This is key: they did it (and do it) to impress each other.

In the mid-1970s, when it was hard to argue that there even was a PC industry, 19-year-old Bill Gates thought that he could write a high-level programming language — a version of the BASIC language — to run on the then-unique Altair hobbyist computer. Even the Altair’s designers thought that their machine was too primitive to support such a language, but Gates, with his friend Paul Allen, thought otherwise. “We can write that BASIC interpreter, you’ll seel” they said. And they were right: Microsoft was born.

When Steve Wozniak built the first Apple computer, his goal was not to create an industry, to get rich, or even to produce more than one of the machines; he just wanted to impress his friends in Silicon Valley’s Homebrew Computer Club. The idea to manufacture the Apple I for sale came from Wozniak’s friend, Steve Jobs, who wanted to make his mark too, but lacked Woz’s technical ability. Offering a VW Microbus and use of his parents’ garage in payment for a share of his friend’s glory, Jobs literally created the PC industry we know today.

These pioneers of personal computing were people who had little previous work experience and no previous success. Wozniak was an undistinguished engineer at Hewlett-Packard. Jobs worked part time at a video game company. Neither had graduated from college. Bill Gates started Microsoft after dropping out of Harvard during his sophomore year. They were just smart kids who came up with an angle that they have exploited to the max.

Reprinted with permission

Cisco’s mobile VNI forecast (the shorthand for Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Forecast), issued last week, is widely regarded as the leading source of information on how the mobile data market will evolve over the next five years.  Policymakers including the FCC use it in their decisions about how to allocate wireless spectrum.

However, like every forecast, the VNI has its flaws — namely that it may overestimate the future demand for mobile data on cellular networks, while understating the need for additional unlicensed spectrum allocations.

Earlier predictions didn’t pan out

Last October, I wrote an article for GigaOm pointing out the dramatic slowdown in mobile data traffic seen in the CTIA’s semi-annual wireless industry survey and asking whether the supposed “spectrum crisis” was a myth. Of course, that didn’t go down well with some people, and CTIA executives lined up to proclaim that It is No Trick – There is a Spectrum Crisis, and asserting that “as Cisco’s data shows… there must be more spectrum to meet demands from consumers and businesses across the country.”

However, Cisco has now revealed its latest VNI mobile data forecast that instead of the originally projected 118 percent growth in North American mobile data traffic between December 2011 and December 2012, traffic grew by only 64 percent over that period – which is to say much slower than in 2011 and far below prior expectations.

So is that the end of the spectrum crisis? Not if you take Cisco’s projections of future growth at face value: They expect 10-fold growth in North American mobile data traffic between 2012 and 2017. Indeed, Cisco actually projects that growth in North American mobile data traffic will be even faster in 2013 (70 percent between December 2012 and December 2013) than the 64 percent it estimated for the last 12 months.

Conflicting data sources

There are reasons to be cautious about the weight that should be given to these forecasts. Cisco has retroactively revised its mobile data traffic estimates, reducing the total estimated global traffic in December 2011 by 13 percent (from 597PB/month in last year’s forecast to 520PB/month in the current model). This is largely due to 30 percent and 23 percent reductions in the European and Asia Pacific traffic estimates respectively, partially offset by a 14 percent increase in estimated North American mobile data traffic. The scale of these revisions indicates that there is considerable uncertainty in Cisco’s numbers, and highlights the difficulty of obtaining real traffic data from mobile network operators.

Nevertheless, at least in the U.S. we can attempt to validate Cisco’s numbers, given that CTIA’s mobile data traffic statistics are based on direct reporting by carriers accounting for 97 percent of wireless connections in the U.S.. In its latest forecast, Cisco estimates that mobile data traffic in the U.S. was 128PB/month in December 2011, and increased to 207PB/month by December 2012.

However, CTIA data indicates that 633PB were carried in the first six months of 2012, for an average of 105.5PB each month. Cisco’s estimate for the U.S. is clearly inconsistent with the CTIA statistics: It is hardly likely that monthly traffic declined significantly between December 2011 and June 2012, and equally implausible that total mobile data traffic in the U.S. then doubled in the second half of the year.

Based on the above analysis, it seems advisable to be rather cautious about the use of Cisco’s mobile data traffic statistics to make policy decisions about the U.S. wireless market structure. That has not been the case historically, with the FCC Chairman often citing Cisco’s projections to suggest that the “skeptics” about the so-called “looming spectrum crunch” were simply wrong. We now have a looming battle between advocates of making more unlicensed and shared spectrum available, and those insisting that all available spectrum (such as that freed up in the upcoming broadcast TV incentive auctions) must be auctioned.

But the most critical piece of data that should be used to inform this debate is how much mobile data traffic will be carried on traditional cellular networks, and how much will instead be able to use unlicensed Wi-Fi spectrum in the 2.4GHz, 5GHz and (potentially) the White Space frequency bands.

Offloading a crucial variable

In previous years Cisco’s forecasts substantially understated the impact of Wi-Fi “offloading” on mobile data traffic growth: Just last year, Cisco estimated that the proportion of data offloaded from smartphones and tablets in the U.S. would fall from 49 percent of their data usage in 2011 to 46 percent of their data usage in 2016. Instead, according to Cisco’s latest forecast, offload is already 60 percent of smartphone and tablet traffic.

Cisco remains relatively cautious about future use of Wi-Fi: the proportion of traffic offloaded from smartphones is only expected to grow by 1 percent per year between 2012 and 2017 – despite having expanded from 21 percent at the end of 2010 to 49 percent at the end of 2011 and as much as 59 percent today. If,  instead, as much as 80 percent of traffic were “offloaded” (which is in line with the traffic split for current users of Cisco’s Data Meter application), then the amount of data traffic carried on cellular networks might be nearly halved. That’s a major difference in outlook from what Cisco is predicting.

When policymakers consider an appropriate balance between future allocations for licensed and unlicensed spectrum, let’s hope they take into account the likelihood that Cisco’s estimates of a 10-fold increase in U.S. mobile data traffic over the next five years may not be realized, whether because of an overestimate of recent traffic growth or an underestimate of future Wi-Fi offload. But given the challenges of dispelling the myth of the “spectrum crisis” (and the carrot of those supposed billions of dollars in auction revenues), I’m not holding my breath.

Tim Farrar is president of Telecom, Media and Finance Associates, a consulting and research firm in Menlo Park, Calif., which specializes in technical and financial analysis across the satellite and telecom sectors. Follow him on Twitter @TMFAssociates.

Photo courtesy of Alex Garaev/Shutterstock.com

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Yesterday it appeared that WinZip for Windows 8 app was now available for free. Which would have represented a fairly swift change of direction, as it’s not even three months since the app first appeared in the Windows Store with a price tag of $7.99.

But apparently this is not the case. The Windows 8 store may label it as free, and you won’t be told otherwise on installation, but it seems the app is only free for a 15 day trial, after which point you’ll need to subscribe for the same $7.99 a year.

And that’s plainly not something to get too excited about.

Could the app still be worth considering? The interface looks good and works well, allowing you to browse files and folders with a clean and touch-friendly tile-based interface.

It runs on Windows RT, as well as Windows 8.

And WinZip for Windows 8 also provides access to the ZipSend service for sending archives to others, while allowing you to securely share your files via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive and more.

But on the other hand, the app only handles ZIP and ZIPX files, which is fine when you only need to create and manage your own archives, but could be an issue if you regularly download or are sent other formats.

And that annual $7.99 does seem a little much, especially when 7-Zip and other competitors deliver so much power for precisely nothing at all.

If you’re running Windows RT, then, or just like Windows 8′s “modern UI” so much that you never want to leave, then WinZip for Windows 8 may still appeal. But everyone else should probably head off to the desktop, where there are far more archiving programs to choose from.

Photo Credit: olly/Shutterstock

Apple’s (AAPL) GarageBand ($14.99) is a versatile, and cheap, recording program that lets you record song ideas and demo tapes on your Mac. Today I’m going to look at various USB options to plug your instrument into GarageBand. Fortunately, there are a lot of different devices out there that will let you perform this task. That said, I’m going to focus on a cross section of these input devices, not the entire spectrum. While I’m going to use guitars as a frequent reference point since that’s the instrument I play, any of these input devices should work on instruments that have a 1/4″ output.

The devices

Apogee Jam ($99): At 99 bucks, the Apogee Jam isn’t cheap, but it earns high marks for me. The great thing about the Jam is it comes with connectors for the Mac, and a 30-pin iOS cable. I’ve never had a problem with it and the audio quality is very, very good. The chief concern is with the two small, cables it’s easy to misplace them. To avoid that, I keep them both rubber-banded to the body of the Apogee. You can also buy replacement cables if you lose them.

Line 6 Pod Studio UX2 ($199): The Line 6 UX2 is a very versatile device. It will let you record two instruments at the same time (handy if you’re recording with a pal). It also has two XLR inputs if you want to mike your amps instead of directly inputting your guitar. But wait, there’s more: the UX2 also has more than 20 models of guitar and bass amps, and more than 20 models of guitar and bass cabinets. The amp models are based on Fender and Marshall amps. The UX2 is a good piece of gear to start building your budget studio around and is great if you’re recording multiple instruments at the same time.

Ubisoft Rocksmith Real Tone Cable ($29.99): While the Ubisoft Rocksmith Real Tone Cable is primarily designed for the Rocksmith game (not available for the Mac, which is either a good or bad thing, depending on your view of learning devices such as these). I’ve found it to be a pretty decent USB guitar interface given the cost, and while it has no iOS connectivity, that’s not a deal breaker, especially since this article primarily deals with OS X. In the short time I’ve had it, it feels like a decent cable and I haven’t experienced any issues with it.

USB Fender Squier Guitar ($199): Now, admittedly the USB Fender Squier guitar won’t let you plug in any instrument to GarageBand, it being a guitar and all. However. for $199, I’ve found it to be a great guitar. Since the Squier is Fender’s low-cost line, when I got mine I expected it to be extra low-budget, given the additional electronics for the on-board USB interface. Instead, I was quite happy with it and still continue to play it almost four months after I got it. The iOS interface is especially nice if you’re traveling and want to practice. It comes with the cables to connect the guitar to your Mac and iOS device.

Connecting the devices to GarageBand

Obviously step one is connecting the USB cable to your Mac. (Note: for best results plug them directly into your Mac; not into a USB hub.) After that, open GarageBand and go to Preferences and click on the Audio/Midi tab. Select your input device from the pull-down list.

After that go into your project and add a new track. Select Real Instrument from the selection screen if you are miking your amp, or using a keyboard. Select Electric Guitar if you want to use GarageBand’s built-in amps and effects.

Last, go the Track menu and select Show Monitoring for Real Instrument Tracks. This will ensure you can hear your instrument through the speakers while you play.

Using Amps and Effects

Unless you are miking your amp, you’re probably going to want to play around with GarageBand’s amps and effects. To do that, select the guitar track in the track listing on the left. On the far right, you can choose the amp you want. You can also choose from a number of preset sounds from a pull-down menu in the same area. You can also adjust the bass, treble, etc. from this screen.

How I use them

For input devices, I float between the Rocksmith cable and the Apogee Jam. For the most part, choosing one comes down to which interface I can easily find at the moment. The Jam and the iOS cables may take up permanent residence in my gig bag so I can practice outside the house regardless of what guitar I happen to have with me (I tend to favor Les Pauls over Fender guitars).

I don’t usually use the amps built-in to GarageBand. Instead I use the GarageBand plug-in for Guitar Rig and Amplitube. However, if you can’t afford either of these programs the included amps will do the trick. The presets are really helpful in quickly dialing in a sound.

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At TED2011, Deb Roy shared his talk, “The birth of a word,” describing when he and his wife, Rupal Patel, brought home their baby boy for the first time. The pair sought to shoot a different kind of home video: in every room of their house, a camera recorded eight to ten hours of footage a day. Deb Roy: The birth of a wordAfter three years, Roy had roughly 90,000 hours of video and 140,000 hours of audio. But this wasn’t for sentimental purposes. Instead, they wished to study how a child learns language. The footage became a massive data set for Roy and his research team at MIT. Using unique data visualizations, they were able to track the many subtleties of a child’s learning process that they wouldn’t have been able to do in a lab.

His team wondered: could this kind of analysis be applied to television or, say, Twitter to discover communication trends?

These are the kinds of questions that today’s TED Weekends on the Huffington Post explores. Here, three of the great essays that are available now for your reading pleasure. 

Deb Roy: The Birth of a Word

Three trajectories came together in 2005 and took me to new frontiers of cognitive science (and subsequently, it turns out, the media industry).

• The first trajectory: I began to see an unexpected connection between my research in robotics at MIT and theories of how children learn to talk, leading to studies of child language that I did with my wife and collaborator Rupal Patel over the past decade.
• Second: The era of Big Data was dawning, and the far-fetched idea of video-recording everything that happens in a home had become a practical reality.
• Third, Rupal and I learned that we were expecting our first child in July 2005.

This confluence of events sparked an unusual study of child language featured in the first half of my TEDTalk. Read the full essay »

Gayatri Devi: How Do I Improve My Memory? Forget More!

Do you know what is essential for a good memory? The ability to forget. To completely and thoroughly forget. Forgetting, like breathing or sleeping, is physiologically normal. This is at odds with our modern compulsion to record and remember everything and is a perfect recipe for anxiety.

Deb Roy, a cognitive science professor at MIT studying language, recorded 8-10 hours daily of the first three years of his son’s home life. He compiled a quarter million hours of audio and video, creating a 200,000 gigabyte “ultimate memory machine.” (Most computers store about one gigabyte.) Consider how much information each of us is exposed to in 24 hours, on streets, subways, screens and in sleep. Imagine recording and remembering all this. Thankfully, we were never meant to.

Fact: We are evolutionarily programmed to forget. Our brains evolved over millennia with built-in forgetfulness. Our brain is engineered to remember tastes, smells, voices, touch and visions, not names. Our brain is engineered to solve problems (How do we keep track of cattle? Mathematics; How do I communicate? Language), not remember disjointed facts. A fact not linked to a sense, an emotion, or a concept is quickly forgotten. Read the full essay »

Ben Hecht: Big Data Gets Personal in U.S. Cities

Much has already been said about how big data is dramatically changing the way that organizations make decisions. Today, more data is being created from more places than ever before. Blogs, Facebook, YouTube videos, retailer loyalty cards, mobile phones, and sensors on buildings are producing tons of data daily. Private sector companies, in their real-time data warehouses, are storing, analyzing, and harnessing it to help them to better understand their customers, dynamically alter pricing based on real-time demand, and even change their business models. And, increasingly government is putting the wealth of data that it generates to work to increase efficiency, save dollars, and create more proactive policy. But, as Deb Roy highlights in his TED Talk, the true promise is where the numbers and patterns from this data connect and become personal — enabling us to understand and to respond to humanity and the world in ways previously unimaginable. This type of analysis has infinite potential for improving the human condition on an ongoing basis; and strengthening people’s commitment to our democracy. Already, in U.S. cities, we are seeing many promising signs of the transformative personal application of Big Data:

Mass Personalizing of Government Data and Services: The movement towards open government data in the U.S. has already had huge implications for the relationship between citizen and government. Read the full essay »

When Sam Schillace first crossed paths with Box Founder and CEO Aaron Levie in 2006, it didn’t exactly go how Levie expected. Box wanted to buy Schillace’s document-collaboration startup called Writely, but shortly after discussing it, the team at Writely went dark. A few days later, Levie got to hear from the press that Google had purchased Writely instead.

The rest, as they say, is history. Writely went on to become the foundation the foundation of Google Docs. Schillace went on to lead just about every product that falls under the Google Apps umbrella, leave for a stint to launch a new company, then come back as a member of the Google Ventures team. Box, well, it’s flush with cash and set for a 2014 IPO.

Sam Schillace (Credit: Google Ventures)

But although their paths diverged, Schillace and Levie would find each other again. In 2011, while still with Google Ventures, Schillace joined Box’s technical advisory board along with then-Facebook VP Jonathan Heiliger, LinkedIn SVP Kevin Scott, then-Flipboard CTO Arthur van Hoff and some other notable Silicon Valley names. (Schillace calls himself “the dumb guy to make all the other guys seem even smarter.”) It was good camaraderie and a lot of fun, Schillace said, and “once a quarter they’d bring all their really hard technical problems to you.”

Then, in mid-2012, Box COO Dan Levin asked Schillace to come on as the company’s vice president of engineering. He actually didn’t want to take the job initially, but when he realized the decision was really between continuing to have conversations with the smart people around him — both on the advisory board and within Box itself — he knew what he had to do. ”I really liked the people and I really liked the team,” Schillace told me.

He officially joined the company in August 2012, and is now bringing his considerable expertise to bear on Box’s very pressing technical challenges. With crushing data volumes and millions of users, Schillace explained, “There’s a little bit of a success disaster we’re having to deal with here.”

Laying the groundwork at Google

It’s a good thing Schillace has some experience dealing with some difficult issues, in both technology and business. When he started Writely, even his co-founders thought it was a stupid idea; web browsers then were so primitive. There was no documentation, no standardization (even around how they handled HTML), and browsers were slow and underpowered. The only solution was to “just poke at the browser until it behaves,” Schillace joked.

“The crown jewel of hard problems … is around collaboration,” he explained. Although the Google Docs team eventually rebuilt Writely as a native word processor, Schillace and Writely co-founder Steve Newman didn’t have that luxury. Because the browsers all behaved differently, they had to write some “hairy” logic to merge changes on the server and then send it back down to the user in a format that particular browser could understand. Sometimes, they’d run into what Schillace calls “edit fights,” where a browser would actually fight itself.

“It was totally Wild West,” he said. “We had to invent a lot of stuff even to get it to even work a little.”

Credit: Google

Schillace also knows how to overcome, or at least manage, the non-technical issues that come as a company grows from a small team into something much, much larger. When he started at Google, his team was about 40 people. By the time he left, it had grown to 600.

But despite its size, Schillace said, Docs was never a huge priority at Google because of its minimal effect on the company’s bottom line.

“The only reason we managed to make Docs happen in the first place, really, was Eric Schmidt was such a big supporter and we were kind of tyrants because we were so feral and so much in the startup mentality,” he acknowledged.

Hellbent on earning every dollar possible from their contracts, Schillace and his team worried much more about continuous execution than about following the rules. “Every once in a while we’d get in trouble and Eric would protect us and get us out of it,” he said. “We just sort of shoved through it and made it happen.”

Fast-forward a few years and there’s “not a lot of room for the feral programmer at Google anymore,” Schillace explained. Because the company is so big, everything you do is under extreme scrutiny and it becomes impossible to recover from even small mistakes (e.g., Wave and Buzz) because there’s so much exposure. And as part of such a large company working on such large projects, it can become hard for individuals to stand out or to see the direct effects of their work.

Building a better Box …

Box, Schillace said, feels a lot like Google did when he first came on board there. It’s a big enough company (with nearly 700 employees) that everyone is doing real work, but not so big that all the problems have been solved. He thinks there’s a good two to four years of really fun stuff to work on, and the company can bring in smart people from places like Facebook and Google to help find the solutions.

For Schillace personally, Box’s size also fits in with his current state of mind: He’s done with the emotional roller coaster of startups after spending more than 20 years building them. “When you’re initially a programmer, you learn to program with 10 fingers,” he said. “And then maybe if you go to management you learn to program with 10 people. And then if you go to the level of management that I’m at, you get to program with 10 teams of people.”

But works that’s “fun” isn’t necessarily work that’s easy. Technologically, he said, the hardest problems at Box are dealing with the company’s scale. From a data volume perspective, it’s growing at 10 percent a month, which means it’s doubling roughly every seven months and growing by about a factor of four every year. Box’s storage capacity is into the multiple petabytes now, Schillace said.

On the infrastructure side, that means Box is always working on the next generation storage of scale-out storage architecture. It takes between 6 and 12 months to build one, he explained, but they only last about 18 to 24 months.

In the case of Box, though, its focus on real-time collaboration means mere storage capacity isn’t enough when designing a database. That’s why Schillace’s team ends up building a lot of its own technology to deal with the company’s unique needs. It’s able to buy a few things off the shelf and use some available open source tools, but, as Schillace said, “every company has its own set of tradeoffs you have to make, so you basically end up having to build this stuff yourself.”

And as Box signs up more deals with companies that have tens of thousands of users — sometimes more — it has to make changes around caching and metadata to account for that many people potentially sharing a folder or a document. ”That does strange things to your product,” Schillace explained. “… All complicated by the fact that everything’s moving all the time.”

A sample of Box’s large-enterprise users.

“The other technical problem is, ‘what’s the next generation of the web app itself,’” he noted. “Where do we go with that and what does that need to be in order to be successful?” At Box, for example, the user interface is starting to show signs of stress because of the number of users, meaning its search has to become more functional and certain pop-up menus and lists are getting too big to present.

… and re-imagining content for the mobile world

But even beyond building out Box’s current product to handle the company’s scale, a bigger challenge might be figuring out how to build a collaboration application in the age of powerful mobile devices and cloud computing. Schillace said he’s very proud of Google Apps (the couple of times a week he still gets thanked for it probably doesn’t hurt the pride), but it was essentially just a matter of building traditional office applications of the desktop world for the web, and he thinks Google’s anti-desktop dogma is a bit simplistic.

“The interesting challenge is to have one foot in many worlds at once,” Schillace said — mobile, web and desktop, consumer and enterprise. ”We’re just at the beginning of this tidal wave of enterprise going from on-premise to the cloud … . I think all the boundaries and functionalities of that stack are still up for grabs.”

A debate at Box, he said, is whether to build a full suite of editing applications a la Google Docs, or whether that’s “chasing the last war.” Rather Schillace is inclined to look at what a company like Evernote is doing to enable creation and collaboration “outside of that paradigm of word processor, spreadsheet, presentation.”

All of this speaks to the evolution of documents. They used to be more like artifacts — things like properly formatted business letters with high latency, high transaction costs and “all this artifice around the structure of the document,” Schillace explained. Then the web came, reducing the focus on formatting and adding a collaborative element, but keeping in place a certain level or linearity. With the advent of Evernote and the erstwhile Google Wave, documents have become more abstract, mixing images, text, communications, web pages and whatever else onto a digital canvass.

“Underlying all of this, what’s really going on is the business interaction you want to have,” Schillace said. “The point of the document is you usually either record something for yourself or to have an interaction with another human being. And I think we can gradually start peeling away layers of artifice and try to get down to the raw core of that interaction.”

He thinks mobile devices with their small screens, portability and omnipresence in our lives might present the biggest challenge for achieving this goal. Users probably need a native way of interacting with documents that doesn’t involve opening a Word document and trying to read and edit it on a tiny keyboard. The right test, according to Schillace, might be if a co-worker has a question, “could I answer it while I was standing in line at the store in 30 seconds?”

If someone is going to hit a homerun with the ideal mobile collaboration experience, building it probably won’t come easy and might not look too much like anything we’ve seen before. If there’s one thing Schillace has learned building six startups over 23 years, it’s that good entrepreneurs spot obvious, but futuristic opportunities and start building, knowing they “personally are going to suffer an enormous amount of pain because the world is not ready.”

“The really radical stuff always looks stupid and crazy, ” Schillace said, “but the real disruptions always look like that.”

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Kickstarter occasionally has a watch project, but they’re relatively rare, and even when one does pop up, it usually isn’t impressive enough to turn my head. The Coastliner, a project going on right now, is definitely a noteworthy exception. From independent graphic designer-turned-watchmaker Tim Hadleigh working out of the U.K., the retro-cool Coastliner gets its design inspiration from American classic cars of the 1950s, and the result is a stunner.

Hadleigh’s Coastliner marries a mirror-polish stainless steel case with a cream-colored dial, tapered needle minute hands and a sea-foam green second hand that acts like a cherry on top of the 50s-theme sundae. A brown calfskin strap, with green interior lining to match the second hand completes the look. The Coastliner’s appeal isn’t all on the surface, either; the watch is powered by an ETA 2824-2 automatic Swiss movement, visible through the exhibition window on the watch’s case back.

The Coastliner’s face, with its small, sans-serif hour marker and the subtle relief design printed on the center may be my favorite part of the design, but every element comes together nicely. All of the elements of the fully functional prototype (save the sapphire glass and Swiss ETA movement) were designed and built by Hadleigh himself, who got his start in watchmaking as a hobbyist taking things apart, and eventually graduated to building his own designs, and even his own movements, by hand.

The project is set up to fund a limited production run of 50 Coastliner watches. As of this writing, there was just one remaining at the discounted pre-order level of £375 ($592 US), with another 25 available at the full price of £750 ($1185 US). The prices are fair given how much work Hadleigh is putting into the production (a process he describes in detail for a previous watch he built on the Kickstarter page), and given the quality of the components. A lot of collectors hesitate on new or young brands, but if you’re a fan of supporting a new generation of makers trying to deliver high-quality products outside of the heavily entrenched legacy watch brands, the Coastliner is a good pick.

Here, some staff picks of smart, funny, bizarre and cool stuff on the interwebs from this (and last) week:

The true story of Kid President: Watch this behind-the-scenes video of everyone’s favorite new politician. [YouTube] And make sure to watch his pep talk, posted on TED last week.

Michael Specter: The danger of science denialAn absolute must-read by Michael Specter, on the cult of Dr. Oz and the dangers of unverified “health benefits.” [The New Yorker] Don’t miss Specter’s talk on science denial.

Alice Dreger, who gave a talk at TEDxNorthwesternU about her work with people on the “edge of anatomy,” interviews Joe Schwartz, 17-year-old son of New York Times writer John Schwartz, about his father’s new book, Oddly Normal. The book is about Schwartz Sr.’s struggle to raise Joe, who is gay. [The Atlantic]

A gorgeous photo of a man feeding swans in Krakow. [This is colossal]

Clay Shirky: Institutions vs. collaborationClay Shirky gives his rebuttal to Aaron Bady, in defense of MOOCs. [The Awl]. Watch Shirky’s talk on institutions vs. collaboration.

The Scared is scared: A short film that resulted when the director asked a six-year-old what her film should be about. [Vimeo]

Silence, wonderful silence. A blissfully curmudgeon-y piece on the last bastion of quietness in public life: The Amtrak Quiet Car. [The New York Times.] Also check out Julian Treasure’s 5 ways to listen better. (Start with … silence.)

Sheryl Sandberg deems a 3-year-old slideshow from Netflix on office culture and hiring practices “the most important document ever to come out of the valley.” [SF Gate] Sheryl Sandberg: Why we have too few women leadersWatch Sandberg’s talk, “Why we have too few women leaders.”

You can use a 3D printer to print a tiny version of yourself, or you can use it for something useful: like visualizing geometric proofs. Check out some equations turned into objects. [New Scientist] And check out our playlist of talks on the wonder of 3D printing.

Ridiculous but beautiful photos of pigeons, aka “rats of the sky,” accompanying Carl Zimmer’s article on sequencing the pigeon genome. [The New York Times] Also check out Carl Zimmer’s TED-Ed lesson, sure to gross out your child, and probably you.

Neil Harbisson: I listen to colorGE Focus Forward announced the winners of its Filmmaker Competition, and the Grand Jury Prize Winner is about Neil Harbisson, a familiar face at TED. [Focus Forward Films]

For the first time, MIT chemists are able to map the location of proteins inside cells to get a sense of what’s going on. [Web.MIT.edu]

Watch Hello Kitty get launched into space by a 7th-grader. [Scientific American]

“In the 21st century, it may be that no home will be complete without a computerized communications console.” Walter Cronkite predicts the future in 1967. [Kottke]

Ascend and experience London from the top of the Shard with an interactive tool made by the Guardian UK. Look for legendary sculptor Antony Gormley’s flyover about the British Museum. [Guardian UK]

This week didn’t bring any new pricing or availability details for Nvidia’s Project Shield, however the portable gaming device was featured in a new video. The Android-based handheld, designed and built around the company’s new Tegra 4 chip, pairs a 5-inch 720p touchscreen display with gaming controls similar to an Xbox 360 controller.

At the end of the week, Nvidia showed off the Real Boxing game title on Project Shield, focusing on in-game lighting, graphics and general game play:

Nvidia plans a continuing series of Project Shield videos, which will help to keep interest high. But regardless of how excited the Android and gaming communities could be based on demonstrations, success is likely to come down to the handheld’s price. I’m still hoping to see Project Shield debut at $250 or less, but many in the industry that I’ve spoken to expect a price at or north of $300.

If Project Shield isn’t big enough for you, perhaps the LG Optimus G Pro is: Phone Arena captured an image of the phone and  compiled a list of specifications of this handset with 5.5-inch display.

That’s as large as my Samsung Galaxy Note 2 phone, but LG is one-upping Samsung: The Optimus G Pro is expected to have a full HD screen with 1920 x 1080 resolution. Additional specs include a quad-core 1.7 GHz processor, 2 GB of memory, 13 megapixel camera 32 GB of internal storage and high-capacity 3,140 mAh battery. I’d expect the phone to run all day (and then some) on a single charge, even with the higher resolution display.

Unlike the Optimus G Pro, I can’t run all day. When I do run, though, I tend to use mobile apps or a smartwatch to track my exercise. This week, RunKeeper for Android got a refresh that improves on what I think was already a great app.

RunKeeper version 3 for Android has a new look and feel because the team used Google’s Android development guidelines for the redesign. The software also adds some new features including in-activity splits, a tab to view your personal goals and stats, improved audio cues in workouts and workout reminders. Many of these functions were already available in RunKeeper for iOS so it’s good to see the Android version catch up in this functionality race.

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President Obama urges Congress to act to avoid a series of harmful and automatic cuts—called a sequester—from going into effect that would hurt our economy and the middle class and threaten thousands of American jobs. The President urges Congress to find a balanced approach to deficit reduction that makes investments in areas that help us grow and cuts what we don’t need.

Transcript | Download mp4 | Download mp3

Ed note: this post was originally published on Let's Move's official blog. You can read it here

First Lady Michelle Obama launched Let’s Move! on February 9, 2010 to unite the country around our kids’ health and create real support for families to live healthier lives. Since then we’ve seen substantial commitments from parents, business leaders, educators, elected officials, military leaders, chefs, physicians, athletes, childcare providers, community and faith leaders, and kids themselves to improve the health of our nation’s children. Thanks to these efforts, families now have access to more of the information they need to make healthier decisions for their children. Young people now have more opportunities for physical activity in their communities. Food in schools has been dramatically improved. And more Americans now have access to healthy, affordable food right in their communities. 

First Lady Michelle Obama participates in a tug of war competition at an activity station during a “Let’s Move! London” event at Winfield House in London, England, July 27, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Sonya N. Hebert)

Later this month we’ll be celebrating Let’s Move!’s third anniversary by showcasing progress and announcing new ways the country is coming together around the health of our children. Until then, here’s a look back on what the nation has accomplished over the past 3 years.

read more

Snapchat, the hot startup that allows you to send and receive photos or videos that sort-of-maybe disappear afterward, has raised a $13.5 million Series A funding round led by Benchmark Capital’s Mitch Lasky, putting the company’s valuation at $60 million to $70 million. The company’s growth hasn’t exactly been controversy-free, but has demonstrated the intense interest right now surrounding messaging apps that transcend the basic SMS.

The funding news was first reported by The New York Times and TechCrunch and was confirmed to us by CEO Evan Spiegel on Friday evening. Om Malik reported in December that Snapchat was getting funded by Benchmark, the firm that was also one of the early backers of Instagram.

“People are looking to communicate in a real way,” Lasky told the New York Times on decision to invest.

The Times reported that Snapchat is now seeing 60 million photos or videos sent per day. Snapchat added video to its product in December, when it was seeing 50 million photos sent per day. Facebook has since rolled out Poke, its obvious competitor to the popular startup in December, but it’s unclear that Poke has really challenged Snapchat’s dominance in the disappearing content realm.

Update: On Saturday, Lasky published a blog post explaining that he’s joined the board of Snapchat and believes the company has real staying power among mobile users:

“We believe that Snapchat can become one of the most important mobile companies in the world, and Snapchat’s initial momentum — 60 million shared “snaps” per day, over 5 billion sent through the service to date — supports that belief. Snapchat’s ramp reminded us of another mobile app Benchmark had the good fortune to back at an early stage: Instagram.”

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The timing could not be better. Yesterday my wife received her shiny new Nokia Lumia 822 and today she can now use it to play music from the streaming service Spotify. Oh, she probably will not because, not her thing, but she could, and that is the important thing because the option was not available to her, or any other Windows Phone 8 customers, yesterday.

Today Microsoft’s Michael Stroh proudly announces that Spotify has now found a home in the Windows Phone Store. The app is still in beta, which means users may experience a bit of a hiccup here and there, but customers can “instantly increases the size of your music library by millions of tracks, making it easy to discover new songs and artists. You can create your own playlists, or browse and indulge in the ones your friends put together”. It also features the ability to download playlists to your handset for listening at times when you are not within range of a connection. Tracks added from the phone app also show on your computer.

The app is free. The service, however, will only be free during your 30-day trial. After that, you will need to cough up $9.99 per month to continue using it. If not, then your feature set will be limited, as it is for other mobile platforms.

Spotify, however, is on par with rival services price-wise — in fact, the same exact price that Microsoft charged for its own Zune service, which is now Xbox Music. Others, like rdio, also charge that $9.99 fee — it seems to be the sweet spot. However, given its popularity, many customers may already pay for a premium Spotify account on their PC, making this a good deal for when moving from the desktop to the mobile environment.

Photo Credit: Regissercom/Shutterstock

There’s some moving and shaking going on at Eucalyptus, a provider of open-source cloud technology. Co-founder Rich Wolski is stepping back from the company to spend more time back at the University of California, Santa Barbara. And, Said Ziouani, the former Red Hat exec who signed on two years ago to head up sales, is gone. Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos (pictured above) confirmed both pieces of news Friday afternoon.

Mickos said Wolski’s transition back into academia was always part of the plan. Asked if there was a shake up going on, he said: “Anytime, Marten Mickos is CEO there is going to be change and adjustments.” Tim Zeller now heads up sales, he added.

The company, which went commercial and closed its first venture capital round in April 2012, grew out of work by Wolski and others at UCSB — the company actually has 7 co-founders.

It may be true that these changes are part of the natural ebb and flow of business. But it’s also definitely true that Eucalyptus competes with CloudStack, OpenStack and OpenNebula open-source clouds, as well as VMware’s proprietary vCloud Director. There are a half dozen different distributions of OpenStack alone from Rackspace; Cloudscaling; Piston Cloud (see disclosure), HP and others. The real question is whether there’s enough market demand to sustain that many choices for the long haul.

In the words of one VC executive, there are too many “me-too” cloud stacks. “Demand is not there for 90 flavors of OpenStack plus Eucalyptus plus these others,” he said.  Perhaps rising demand for cloud computing will float all boats. But it’s as likely that there will be consolidation. Watch this space.

Disclosure: Piston is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Getting local businesses on board with any kind of digital marketing or payment service can be a tough sales nut to crack. But how many people really want to call up a local hairdresser or nail salon to book an appointment if an online booking option existed? In our increasingly phone-averse society, online is usually far more popular.

Which is why one entrepreneur has launched MyTime, a site that lets small businesses create profiles and sync their bookings calendars to allow customers to discover their sites and book appointments through the website, escehwing the potential pitfalls of local deal sites like Groupon.

Entrepreneur Ethan Anderson, who was previously a product manger with Google and then sold his last startup Redbeacon to Home Depot in January 2012, started working on MyTime  about a year ago and just launched the site this week. MyTime has about $3 million in funding from GRP Partners’ Mark Suster, 500 Startups, Brian Lee, Jason Calacanis, David Tisch, and others.

The site, which is starting out with businesses in L.A. but looking to expand, allows businesses to create a page for their company, sync up with Yelp reviews and ratings, sync appointment calendars, and set deals for particular slots to entice customers to less popular times. The service is free to join, but companies that let MyTime promote their offers through dynamic pricing, Google AdWords, Twitter ads, and other solutions give up 40 percent of revenue from bookings that come through the promotions (excluding existing customers). Anderson said about half the businesses so far have taken advantage of the marketing option.

The site exists right now as primarily a desktop website that’s optimized for mobile, but Anderson said developing native apps is up next. He points out that while local review and ratings sites are common (think Yelp, Foursquare, etc.), the actual booking component is well widespread.

“Our vision for the bsuinesses is that you connect your calendar once and then everything is taken care of. We bring your customers back, and we allow you to later connect with your consumers. And for the customer, it’s the ultimate convenience,” he said. “I feel like no one else has brought together the calendar and the pricing and the actual e-commerce experience. “

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