The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Rapportive Makes Gmail Better, Integrates CrunchBase And Other “Raplets”
- Going it Alone, Part III: Injection Molding
- Going It Alone, Part III: Inside the Factory Walls
- Delivering Happiness: A Movement
- iFixit Tears Down The iPad 3G
- Facebook, The App Store, And The Sound Of Inevitability
- Dogpatch Labs Unveils New Brood
- CrunchGear Reviews the Panasonic Lumix DMC-G10 Digital Camera
| Rapportive Makes Gmail Better, Integrates CrunchBase And Other “Raplets” Posted: 02 May 2010 07:10 AM PDT
I promised myself to check out their product extensively over the weekend, and now that I did I’m seriously glad to have discovered them as their free software has already made my Gmail experience much better. Rapportive is like Xobni for Gmail. It is a browser plugin for Chrome and Firefox that automatically adds a dynamic widget in the form a sidebar to incoming Gmail messages. Thanks to the extension, you’ll get a much better overview of who’s sending you emails, as the name and email address of the people who do will be automatically cross-checked for publicly available social network presences, pictures and more on the Web, all of which get displayed alongside messages. The sidebar replaces Google’s contextual ads, so that’s a double win, unless you can’t live without advertisements in your Gmail – or if you’re Google. As you can see in the screenshot below, Vohra recently got an email from Spark Capital’s Bijan Sabet and can immediately see what the man looks like in real life, in combination with links to his Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and other social network profiles. At the bottom, he can add a note about Sabet, turning the extension into a basic CRM tool as he’ll see those private notes every time he gets an email from him in the future. Last week, the startup opened up to developers who would like to enhance the sidebar even more. Dubbed Raplets, these extra extensions effectively turn Gmail into a platform, enabling third parties to plug in free or paid CRM tools, social media monitoring applications, accounting software programs and more. One integration that is already in place is with our own CrunchBase, making it easier and faster to look up information about people and companies who can be found in the online database, which is growing quickly. The startup promises to expand its service to other email platforms in the near future. Even if it’s only half as good as the plugin for Gmail, you’ll want to install it straight away. Definitely a keeper. For alternatives, check out Etacts and the more business-focused Appirio.
     
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| Going it Alone, Part III: Injection Molding Posted: 02 May 2010 06:16 AM PDT
The first half of Going it Alone, Part III: Inside the Factory Walls appeared on CrunchGear yesterday. We pick up our survey of how consumer electronics are made with … Injection Molding “One Word: Plastics”. Injection molding is the process by which hot, liquefied plastic is injected into steel (or sometimes other materials) cavities called moulds, under high-pressure. There is a real art to injection molding that includes proper design of the parts themselves, the moulds that form the parts and the various parameters that can be tweaked during the injection process itself. For now, suffice to say that all of the plastic components of your product are made – one at a time – using this process. In the photo at the very top of this post, this would include the white housing components, black belt clip and battery door, translucent LCD cover, rubber buttons and even that tiny, little white spec which is the “Set” button from the rear of the unit. One or two workers typically operate the station. A first worker runs the injection molder, removing each newly molded part by hand. A second worker removes flash – excess unwanted plastic – from the finished part using a knife. The final parts are carefully stacked in bins for transport to the assembly area mentioned above or, if injection is an outside process, for shipment to the main factory.      
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| Going It Alone, Part III: Inside the Factory Walls Posted: 01 May 2010 05:12 PM PDT
Part III of the Going It Alone series will answer the question: What is a factory and how can I tell one from another? I will answer the question from a consumer electronics perspective and I will assume an audience that has little or no prior knowledge of manufacturing. The purpose of this article will be to try to introduce the burgeoning entrepreneur to the basic components of electronics manufacturing in China. I will do this in the context of manufacturing the simple electronic product shown below – a digital kitchen timer that we call the Klip!      
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| Delivering Happiness: A Movement Posted: 01 May 2010 05:00 PM PDT
In just over a month, my friend (and Zappos CEO) Tony Hsieh will be launching his new book, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (you can pre-order it here). Reading a preview copy of the book led me to think back about the first time I met Tony, and what an impression it made on me. You meet a lot of people in your life. Think about it for a moment. How many people do you think you’ve met? Count up all of the social events, work, airplanes, school and checkout counters. Out of all of those people, think about who you really remember. Think about those people and then pick out the most memorable five people of all and trace back the steps to where you first met. We sometimes forget those moments until prompted, but I truly feel those are some of the most precious moments in our lives. They are like birthdays. Tiny sparks of joy and connection that sometimes you get the immediate hunch will last a lifetime. That’s how I felt when I met Tony Hsieh. I’ll never forget it and I’m going to guess I’m not alone. Like meeting Tony, I’ll never forget my first Zappos experience. I was working at IronPort and a coworker liked my shoes and asked me if I ordered them from Zappos. I asked what Zappos was and he said proudly, “Only the greatest shoe store online. You can order as many shoes as you like and they’ll send them overnight. You try them on and send back the ones you don’t like. No questions asked.” This sounded too good to be true. It wasn’t. I now own at least 15 pairs of shoes from Zappos and even though I had the option, I never sent anything back. So, on one of my trips to Defcon, I decided it was time to put on a pair of those shoes and take a tour of Zappos. I had left IronPort, which had an amazing culture, but it wasn’t a consumer company. It was an enterprise company hellbent on winning and never sleeping. There were cultural aspects of IronPort I knew I wanted to take with me, but I knew I needed to learn more. I had heard about Tony and Alfred and I hoped I’d like them, because I hoped we could be friends and that we could learn from each other. I arrived at Zappos and received my first smile. The front desk is a bit of a celebration. There’s a popcorn machine, library, seating area, Zappos gear, music and just a lot going on. I arranged my tour with Tony directly and I expected him to outsource that to someone else in the company, but he came out to show me around personally. He picked up a Zappos themed tour flag that he carried the rest of the journey. Tony was curious about my background and when he found out that I ran worldwide support for IronPort, he immediately took me to meet all of his support managers and he let me ask them any question I wanted. We talked openly and I was floored. In the 30 minutes we spent together, I learned so much about how Zappos delivered amazing service. I toured HR, engineering, marketing, purchasing, the break room, the nap room — everything. I asked Tony, “How do you hire so many happy people? How do you hire so many smiling people?” and he responded, “I only hire people who smile.” After the tour was over, Tony asked me about my favorite books and then he picked up a Zappos bag and put two books inside, the Zappos culture book and Made to Stick – why some ideas survive and others die. He told me those were his favorite books. Then, the moment I’ll never forget happened. He took everything out of my hands and he and Alfred Lin walked me to my car carrying it. They put it in the car and took me to lunch. The CEO and COO of Zappos carried my bag. The CEO and COO of Zappos carried my bag! I repeated it over and over in my head. To be honest, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to start Zivity anymore. Part of me really wanted to work at Zappos. Part of me really wanted to be part of the team that expanded that culture from 200 to 1000 employees. However, sadly, I didn’t live in Las Vegas and couldn’t. I settled for a lifelong friendship with Tony and Alfred. Not a bad deal. After the Amazon acquisition of Zappos, I wondered what Tony would do next. A lot of CEOs say they’ll stick around and I believed he would, but I figured he had other fun things up his sleeve. When I found out it was a book, I was excited, but I wasn’t sure I’d have a lot to learn from it after two tours (I went back again!) and years of getting to know him and Zappos. I was wrong. What I didn’t know about Zappos was what I didn’t know about Tony. This book is raw and it is a slice of who Tony is and why Zappos is. You learn about little Tony and his family. You follow him from childhood to modern day Tony and you learn about worm farms, mail-order businesses, pizza, quitting jobs, poker, raves, hikes up mountains, epiphanies and you get a strong sense of why Tony joined Zappos. There’s a great analogy in the book about his worm farm and his first fortune he made from selling Link Exchange to Microsoft. He bet both “farms” and on one he lost his worms and the other was valued at over 1 billion dollars. What I also didn’t realize about Zappos was how many times it almost died. Many people see success and they just focus on that, but they don’t always realize the hard work that goes into it. Zappos took over 10 years to get to where it is today and almost went out of business no less than 5 times along the way. Following along with every pitfall in the book is like watching an Indiana Jones movie. You know everything is going to turn out great, but you never know where there’s going to be snakes. What makes Zappos great are its employees and the culture they created. You hear a lot of people talk about how important employees are and how they are their core asset, but I’ve never seen them live it like Zappos. It is inspiring and infectious, but it didn’t come right away. As a matter of fact, it was quite an evolution. Their culture was a constant iteration and I think they’ve found something they want to stick with for a while. Their brand promise has gone through many changes: 1999 – Largest Selection of Shoes The Zappos boxes used to say “Delivering Service” but now they all say “Delivering Happiness”, because as you’ll see in the book from customer testimonials, their culture bleeds over into each and every customer interaction and it is their true competitive advantage. People love Zappos and Zappos makes them happy. Every box is a unit of happiness. The experience from beginning to end is how each and every experience should be or is how you want it to be when you ride a plane, purchase a ticket, call your cellphone company, order food, etc. In the beginning of this post, I asked you to think about five memorable people. Now I want you to think about every service you’ve ever interacted with. I want you to think about five that were really memorable and made you happy. If you have a moment, share those stories in the comments. If you don’t have a story, share five services you wish could be improved. The book is a call to a higher cause in businesses. To align your passions, profits and purpose. To discover what happiness truly is and to make products, work, life and everything you touch something to remember forever. When I started Zivity, I tried to build a dollhouse. A perfect replica of what I knew in the past. I applied what I thought I learned from Zappos and I failed. We ended up over hiring and letting people go. Reading this book helped me to finally forgive those mistakes, because we figured it out before it was too late and we still have time to get it right. What I didn’t realize until I read the book was that my company wasn’t completely defined by our employees and customers, but also by our 1500 contractors (models and photographers). I focused all of my efforts in the wrong area. I worked hard on trying to build a culture internally and a community externally. Inspired by Delivering Happiness the Book, we’re putting together our own culture book. These will be raw testimonials, unedited of what Zivity means to them. Whenever anyone asks me again what Zivity is, I’ll tell them what I think it is and then hand them the book (which may start out as a pamphlet, who knows). I want Zivity to be truly transparent and I want to be able to always know who we are and what we stand for. You can have a community, but is harder to have a strong culture. Our passion, profits and purpose are all aligned, but our culture was not. If you get a chance, I hope you can read the book and given this blog is read by entrepreneurs (new, experienced or hopefuls), technologists, employees of services and web enthusiasts, I hope that you’ll join the higher cause as well to create amazing varieties of diverse cultures and lasting services that outlast you.      
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| Posted: 01 May 2010 02:47 PM PDT
     
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| Facebook, The App Store, And The Sound Of Inevitability Posted: 01 May 2010 12:42 PM PDT
I’m reminded of this quote from The Matrix as I read headline after headline around the blogosphere about how Facebook and Apple and their (at least relatively) closed ecosystems are going to destroy the fabric of the web as we know it. Me? I’m not worried in the slightest bit. Why? Because it occurs to me that what’s going on now is just a part of a cycle. A necessary cycle. Yes, the web (by which I mean the entire Internet), it seems to me, is cyclical. Just as the United States goes through periods where conservatives being in power gives way to liberals being in power, the web is currently transitioning from open systems dominating to closed systems taking over. Nowhere is this more evident than with Apple’s App Store, and Facebook. The masses, for whatever reason (and there are reasons, more on that later), are embracing these restricted platforms. And obviously, it has some people scared shitless. And while it’s good for some people to worry in order to keep the soon-to-be ruling powers in check, I’m certain that one day in a few years (or maybe less), we’ll be back to the so-called “open” web again. It has happened before. You don’t even have to go back that far to find it. In the early 1990s there was no World Wide Web. Well, there was, but no one you know used it because there was no widely-used web browser. Instead, the Internet mainly existed as things such as Usenet, Gopher, and FTP. The system was open. Sure, there was some barriers to entry (such as a modem), but the real barrier to entry was that basically no one knew what “online” was, and even fewer knew how to get there. Then the companies Prodigy, CompuServe, GEnie, and America Online came along. In 1991, all of these services worked on DOS (Microsoft’s operating system before Windows), and offered a relatively easy way to get online. More importantly, it gave them something to do there, such as read structured news in article form. But, in return for the ease-of-use, each of these services had access fees. This was a closing of the Internet — but people didn’t care. These services grew quickly. None grew faster than AOL. A key aspect to their service was a nice user interface that anyone could understand (CompuServe, by comparison, was oriented more towards the tech community). They also put an emphasis on being able to communicate with other AOL members (but only other AOL members) through chat rooms. Usage quickly exploded. Again, a closed system. The fact of the matter is that closed systems are useful in certain circumstances. One key one is mainstream appeal. AOL was appealing to people because it was easy to understand and seemed (relatively) safe. People started using Facebook because it was easy to understand and seemed (relatively) safe. People are now using the App Store because it is easy to understand and seems (relatively) safe. You get the picture. This is the type of system needed to take mainstream adoption to the highest levels. (Notice I only said “take” not necessarily keep them there.) Closed systems can also adapt and change faster than open systems. To return to politics for a second. It’s a bit like how a government under a King is more efficient that one under a Republic. Governing by committee is slow, a King can rule on something and it’s done. But yes, a King can also make mistakes faster — there are pluses and minuses. This ties into what Joe Hewitt, the famed web/iPhone developer (now with Facebook), said yesterday in a long rant on Twitter against the current state of web development. “I want desperately to be a web developer again, but if I have to wait until 2020 for browsers to do what Cocoa can do in 2010, I won't wait,” Hewitt said. His point is that the state of web languages as presided over by the W3C (the Republic) are moving too slow. Cocoa, a framework presided over by Apple (the King) is a good 10 years ahead of it. Maybe Hewitt’s right, maybe he’s wrong, or maybe he’s just exaggerating. It doesn’t matter. The fact of the matter is that something will come along and force these closed systems open again — or they will perish. Speaking of perishing, let’s go back to AOL. By the mid-1990s, it was dominating. Once they switched to a flat monthly fee (instead of an hourly fee — yes, they had that in place for a long time and people still used it) usage soared into the tens of millions. This may not seem like a lot when you consider that Facebook is approaching 500 million users, but this was a much different time. Many people signing up for AOL were using the Internet for the first time ever. By 2000, AOL was so powerful and had so much money thanks to its winning (again, closed) model that it actually bought Time Warner for $164 billion. Then everything started falling apart. A few years earlier, AOL added a feature that would be its eventual downfall, the web browser. Yes, at one point in the 90s, a lot of people were browsing the web from within AOL’s walled-garden. But the web was open, and AOL didn’t block you from going anywhere on it. Content on the web started growing so quickly, and got so diverse, that people started to question if they actually needed AOL at all. When the telephone and cable companies started offering always-on access to the Internet that people could get to directly through a web browser (cutting off AOL), the only reason a lot of people still kept the service was for their AOL email address. This was no longer a sustainable model. AOL’s profits started diving as their dial-up access business did. The open web had won — and in part because AOL gave it a window to operate. But without AOL (or some company like it) you could argue that people would have been slower to adopt the Internet, and the web as we know it today would have been slower to evolve. Does any of that sound familiar? Think about the iPhone. It’s a walled-garden (though much more open than AOL was as third-party developers can work within it, provided they follow the rules), but it too has an open window to the outside: the web. The Safari web browser is the iPhone’s peephole. And Apple even plays that up at times. If people criticize them for now allowing certain apps, they note that anyone can build apps using HTML5 that will work on Safari. Apple doesn’t regulate those at all. As Hewitt notes, HTML5 is not mature enough yet to produce apps that are on par with native apps. But some are getting fairly impressive. It could well be that in a few years, HTML5 leads to the fall of the App Store model as we know. I’m not saying the model will crash and burn as AOL’s did — Apple may adapt and take down their walls (or do something else) before that happens. But I do believe HTML5 (or some other technology we’re not even thinking about right now) will lead to an opening back up of the system. Facebook is a slightly different matter. Whereas they were a fairly closed system at first, they’ve been opening up more in recent years. First we got the Facebook Platform, which allowed third-party developers to play within Facebook’s walls. Then we got Facebook Connect, which allowed other sites to play within Facebook’s walls. And now we have the Open Graph, which seem to extend Facebook’s walls to the broader web (at least those sites that adopt it). Yes, the system is still closed in that Facebook still has control of much of the data flowing in and out, but there are parts of it that are open too. I happen to think that Facebook may have found the right mixture of open and closed with the Open Graph. It’s open enough that they can continue to extend their reach beyond their already incredible (nearly) 500 million members. And yet it’s closed enough that some semblance of order is maintained and people (at least for now) will keep using it. Thanks in part to their closed roots where a system of trust was built, Facebook was able to establish and grow the ultimate social graph. Like AOL’s mail and chat systems before it, this is a form of lock-in for users. AOL failed because it was too slow to open up their system and realize that they already had hooks in place to keep users from leaving. Facebook doesn’t appear to be making the same mistake. They already won the social networking wars, so now they can afford to open up and go after the larger web. And Google. So while everyone fears what the Facebook-ification of the web will mean, I’d argue that the only way Facebook can continue to grow and keep their users is if they continue to open up. At some point, I’d bet that it won’t be in their best interest from a business perspective to do that, and that’s when they may start to decline. But there’s a wild-card. If the company can figure out a Google AdSense-type way to make money while continuing the march towards open, they may be able to hold on. In both of these “closed” examples, Facebook and the App Store, they key to longevity is a movement towards open. If either Facebook or Apple resist that, they’ll become AOL. Something will come along and shove them out of way. It has happened before. It will happen again. And it will keep happening. It’s inevitable.      
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| Dogpatch Labs Unveils New Brood Posted: 01 May 2010 11:22 AM PDT
Dogpatch Labs, the self-described “frathouse for geeks” has revealed the new class of start-ups that will inhabit its San Francisco location for the next six months. Starting this Saturday, the residents will have access to free office space, internet, coffee, lunch and other perks like visiting advisers, conferences and workshops. The program, backed by Polaris Venture Partners, features a mix of new and former residents, some of which are pretty notable, including Formspring, Burbn, JibJab, StickyBits, and Animoto. Full list with descriptions (Dogpatch Labs’ descriptions are in italics) below: New San Francisco Residents: TaskRabbit (formerly runmyerrand.com) Wild Pockets AdCru Burbn Recurly FanPop JibJab StickyBits Animoto LearnBoost Millenial Media Current Residents: Formspring Hollrr FanPulse Trazzler Mr. Tweet Egghaus startupSQUARE Formative Labs Twylah Thumbgear      
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| CrunchGear Reviews the Panasonic Lumix DMC-G10 Digital Camera Posted: 01 May 2010 09:38 AM PDT  What is this thing? The rise of micro four-thirds camera is probably biggest potential change in popular cameras since the rise of the point and shoot. Micro four thirds "system" cameras offer the best of both worlds - removable lenses for folks who like to play with focal lengths and primes and a simple interface and low price for entry level users. The Lumix DMC-G10 is Panasonic's latest addition to its G family of m4/3 cameras. It is, in short, Panasonic's attempt at creating a strong competitor to Canon and Nikon's entry-level DSLR line-up and at the same time attack the entry-level consumer who may be in the market for an ultrazoom point and shoot or, barring that, a standard pocket camera.
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One of the startups that pitched the crowd last week at 
Adam Hocherman, 34, is an entrepreneur and founder of the consumer electronics company 
Editor’s Note: The following guest post was written by 
Desperate to see what’s under the smooth exterior of your new 
“That is the sound of inevitability…“
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