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In a post shared on the official White House Blog today, the Obama administration expressed its support for Twitter’s move to join the ranks of sites employing the privacy feature, Do Not Track.

The privacy feature, which Twitter now supports in all browsers, allows users to opt-out of third-party tracking cookies, including those used for advertising.

In its post, the White House explained the importance of tech companies adopting the Do Not Track feature, emphasising the importance of seeing the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights become a reality:

As much as people use and love the internet and other digital technology, there has been a growing concern that rapid advances in technology can lead to an erosion of personal privacy. As the Internet evolves, maintaining consumer trust is essential for the continued growth of the digital economy. That’s why the Obama Administration unveiled a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights in February, to give users more control over how their information is used online (download as PDF). Immediately an association of over 500 companies (including search engines, internet platforms, advertising networks and browser developers) committed to expanding individual control with “Do Not Track” technology before the end of 2012.

Referring to Twitter’s move as “an important step”, the White House applauded the tech company for its decision:

In the meantime, the actions of Twitter and others show that when companies are mindful of basic privacy principles articulated in the Obama Administration’s Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights and blueprint as they design their services, the very same creative energy that has led to the development of extraordinary new Internet technologies can also help to protect Americans’ privacy.

In stark contrast to social networking sites like Facebook, which at one point tracked users even when logged out, Twitter will soon be joined by Yahoo and Google who will be rolling out Do Not Track services of their own.

It hasn’t been all good news in Washington as far as Internet privacy is concerned. Privacy activists have been fighting against the ‘new SOPA’, CISPA, which has now made it past the House and is in the hands of the Senate.

CISPA would allow tech companies to hand over traffic information to the US government, under the guise of protecting against cyber threats. The problem with CISPA is that it opens the door to online surveillance, or worse.

That said, Obama’s administration itself has already taken a stance against CISPA, putting the future of the bill into doubt, while simultaneously placing its weight behind the Do Not Track initiative.

The White House post about Twitter can be read in full here.

In a post shared on the official White House Blog today, the Obama administration expressed its support for Twitter’s move to join the ranks of sites employing the privacy feature, Do Not Track.

The privacy feature, which Twitter now supports in all browsers, allows users to opt-out of third-party tracking cookies, including those used for advertising.

In its post, the White House explained the importance of tech companies adopting the Do Not Track feature, emphasising the importance of seeing the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights become a reality:

As much as people use and love the internet and other digital technology, there has been a growing concern that rapid advances in technology can lead to an erosion of personal privacy. As the Internet evolves, maintaining consumer trust is essential for the continued growth of the digital economy. That’s why the Obama Administration unveiled a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights in February, to give users more control over how their information is used online (download as PDF). Immediately an association of over 500 companies (including search engines, internet platforms, advertising networks and browser developers) committed to expanding individual control with “Do Not Track” technology before the end of 2012.

Referring to Twitter’s move as “an important step”, the White House applauded the tech company for its decision:

In the meantime, the actions of Twitter and others show that when companies are mindful of basic privacy principles articulated in the Obama Administration’s Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights and blueprint as they design their services, the very same creative energy that has led to the development of extraordinary new Internet technologies can also help to protect Americans’ privacy.

In stark contrast to social networking sites like Facebook, which at one point tracked users even when logged out, Twitter will soon be joined by Yahoo and Google who will be rolling out Do Not Track services of their own.

It hasn’t been all good news in Washington as far as Internet privacy is concerned. Privacy activists have been fighting against the ‘new SOPA’, CISPA, which has now made it past the House and is in the hands of the Senate.

CISPA would allow tech companies to hand over traffic information to the US government, under the guise of protecting against cyber threats. The problem with CISPA is that it opens the door to online surveillance, or worse.

That said, Obama’s administration itself has already taken a stance against CISPA, putting the future of the bill into doubt, while simultaneously placing its weight behind the Do Not Track initiative.

The White House post about Twitter can be read in full here.

While the iPhone ‘sans cover’ feels much better in your hand, it’s not worth getting a few scratches on the back of your sleek phone. Rather than buy a standard case that looks the same as everyone else’s, with CaseApp, a free download in the iTunes App Store, you can design your own personalized cover, in a matter of minutes.

The app is the brainchild of Dropico Mobile, the Israeli app developers behind Facebook Photo Importer (reviewed here) and Google+ Photo Importer (reviewed here).

The entire process takes place on your phone, from customization to ordering. CaseApp makes it easy to choose any photo on your phone, and preview the case, either using the photo as the entire case, or incorporated into a set of over 20 pre-designed themes. Our personal favourite has to be the one that looks like an old-school Nintendo Gameboy.

Pinch, zoom and move the image around until you’ve got it exactly the way you want, and you can then preview the case in either 2D or 3D. The app will let you know if the image isn’t large enough to use.

The case, which is made of thick coated plastic, will set you back about $30, plus shipping and handling. Thanks to Dropico Mobile, The Next Web readers can take advantage of a special offer available for the next few days. Use the promo code caseapptnw30 when checking out, and you’ll get yourself a 30% discount on your buy, from today until May 25th. Shipping takes about 3 to 5 days.

CaseApp makes it easy for iPhone users to add a personal touch to their phones, so rather than hunt around for the perfect case – why not just design it yourself?

To see how the app works, check out the video below:

➤ CaseApp

Google may have announced its $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility last August and gained approval from both EU and US authorities but it’s taken until today for the search giant to gain clearance in China.

The AFP reports that Chinese authorities approved Google’s purchase of the US device maker earlier today and has since been confirmed by Google spokeswoman Niki Fenwick.

This means that Google will finally be able to close its multi-billion dollar deal for the company, heralding the start of its venture into the device-making market, something the company has not done before.

While Google has offered a number of official devices, it has partnered with HTC and Samsung to release its Nexus-branded smartphones in the past.

Google received approval from the European Commission and the US Department of Justice in the same day in February, however there was some controversy last year when it emerged Google hadn’t initially filed its application when the deal was first announced.

A statement from the company didn’t directly name China as a market where it would need to gain approval, however it was indirectly referenced when Google said that the deal was “subject to customary closing conditions, including the receipt of regulatory approvals in the US, the European Union and other jurisdictions, and the approval of Motorola Mobility’s stockholders”.

Chinese law stipulates that any business which generates revenues in excess of $1.55 billion (10 billion yuan) per year, of which $62 million (400 million yuan) comes from China, must receive government approval before it can be acquired.

With approval gained in China, Google can expect to finalise its takeover in the coming week. Not only will it gain an influential device making business, it will also obtain control of its 17,000+ patents.

Every industry has its own form of a trade show. In consumer electronics, it’s CES. In the startup world, there are massive conferences like our very own The Next Web Conference, Paris’ LeWeb and TechCrunch Disrupt in the U.S. For motion graphics, there’s Siggraph. For food and wine, there’s South Beach. The list goes on.

In fashion, there are numerous trade shows where designers and clothing buyers fly in from all around the world to meet each other. Tickets can cost anywhere from $1,000 to a whopping $20,000 depending on the show, setting boutique buyers and emerging designers back a pretty penny or two. Tack travel, room and board on top of that and the costs are prohibitively expensive for most of the up-and-coming talent. Surely, the Internet can help solve this problem?

Look no further than Boutique Fashion Brokers, an online trade show platform that just launched out of Montreal. Founder Kassondra Dyebo was a model for 8 years before she started buying for a small boutique. Tasked to go to dozens of industry trade shows, she quickly realized how archaically the whole system operated.

Her newly formed company, BFB is looking to take the trade show market, and make it completely digital. On its platform, BFB now has 600 boutiques on board in over 14 countries and close to 100 designers including Obbakki, Muubaa, Language Los Angeles from regions all over the world such as Japan, Brazil, France, Italy, and the US. BFB designers produce women’s contemporary, ready to wear items, running the gamut from simple and classic to high-end and extravagant.

BFB gives buyers access to designers 365 days a year, instead of just at trade shows, which allows retailers to capitalize on trends very quickly. The platform allows their buyers to view whichever designers they want, but designers on BFB can’t search or send emails to the buyers, which protects the stores from being bombarded with emailers looking for store placement.

Buyers can also see ratings of transactions with designers. “This is as much about connecting designers and buyers as it is about the utility of buying,” explains Kassondra. “The goal is to help merge the global fashion markets and make all kinds of designers, available in new places.” The site handles everything: requesting samples of the clothes, digital purchase orders, line sheets, insurance, etc.

BFB is most often compared to Joor, an online wholesale marketplace for the women that launched in 2010, but BFB has quite a few stand out differences including lower prices and a complete backend with insurance offerings. After a 3-month free trial, BFB charges a $25 monthly fee for designers, $15 monthly fee for boutiques and then takes 3% on the transactions.

Brad Feld is an entrepreneur, investor and dinosaur lover. In that spirit, FAKEGRIMLOCK and I banded together to put Brad on the hot seat. While deftly avoiding being eaten by FAKEGRIMLOCK (who consistently mistakes things for bacon), Brad talked to us about startups, marriage and the changing demographics of venture capital.

Allen Gannett: Brad, are you going to invest in the Facebook IPO and why?

Brad Feld: Uh, I am not because I don’t invest in public stocks.

FAKEGRIMLOCK: BECAUSE HIM SMART! FACEBOOK FAIL! STOCK’S WORTH NOTHING TWO YEARS FROM NOW.

AG: I mean would you invest in Facebook if you did invest in public stocks? Where do you see it going in two or three years?

BF: See that’s a theoretical question that has no validity in my universe.

FG: SCIENCE RULE!

AG: There was this big overdramatic expose on Sequoia’s scout program, where they allocate capital to entrepreneurs who don’t have their own money to invest and allow them to invest Sequoia’s money. What are your thoughts on this? And does Foundry Group do something similar?

BF: We don’t do something similar. I think the only thing that I’ve found particularly weird about it was the secrecy. I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about it, and someone today actually asked me about it, and I hadn’t given it any thought, because it’s so antithetical to the way I approach things and the way my partners and I think about stuff, which is just we’re out in the open about what we do, we try to be as simple minded as we can about the approach, we want people to evaluate us on our own merits.

And, you know, if you start to look at it, the idea that there are people who are working with venture firms and are helping expose them to early deals is something that’s been going on forever. That’s not a neat thing or unique. What’s strange is this sort of secret dynamic around it, and in hindsight it would be interesting to see where the debate is. My guess is that it’s a lot of noise about nothing, as many of these things are in the tech universe, but it does challenge sort of the dynamic of entrepreneurs who you think are behaving in one way may be actually behaving in another way, or maybe they aren’t, and so the media gets to say that they’re behaving a certain way but they’re not really behaving in that way….who knows?

AG: I think FAKEGRIMLOCK would be a really good Foundry Group scout by the way.

FG: ME GRIMLOCK VERY STEALTHY.

BF: Stealthy? I’m afraid you’d eat everybody before we’d have the chance to invest in them and that’s not the point!

FG: IT NOT AWKWARD

BF: Actually there are probably a lot of people he could eat that we would probably not want to meet with anyway, so.

FG: NOW YOU GET IT!

AG: Most efficient email filter ever!

BF: Cuts down noise!

FG: MMM SPAM!

AG: So, why are you a venture capitalist? Why makes you motivated to do what you do?

BF: Well, I love being involved in creating stuff and I hate running things, and I found the kind of role where I can do that and I can work with really awesome people that are interesting and that I can be involved in ways that are useful to them while creating stuff basically from scratch.

I also get to invest in stuff that I’m excited about, rather than work on things I don’t give a shit about, and you know, fundamentally I don’t have anyone reporting to me and I don’t report to anybody so, my partners and I all work together on stuff. It’s an intense way to live, but it’s a way that’s very focused on the creative process rather than a whole bunch of other noise.

FG: SO ME ASK QUESTION…TO SUM UP, YOU SAY: IF YOU AWESOME, AND NOT WANT TO GO INTO MANAGEMENT, BECOME VC ONLY CAREER PATH.

BF: I don’t know that it’s the only career path, but I think that if you don’t want to manage stuff, doing things where you’re the primary creator is a way to avoid managing anything.

So at Foundry Group, we made a conscious decision not to scale, so our first fund was $225 million, our second fund was $225 million and our next fund will be $225 million. We do about a dozen new investments a year. There are only four of us. We’ll never add another partner.

We have no junior people. We just aren’t scaling! So we spend no time on the friction and all the bullshit of trying to deal with the organization, which by the way is very interesting to many people but to us wasn’t, and the end result is we’ve configured our world so we don’t have to. I think you can do that and be a writer, you can be an indie game developer. I think you can be any sort of maker, but you’re fundamentally constraining yourself into a world that doesn’t have scale.

AG: Why is venture capital so dominated by white males?

BF: A couple of us are Jewish, does that count?

[laughs]

AG: But seriously…

BF: A few of us think we’re aliens from outer space.

AG: Or dinosaurs…

BF: Yeah, I mean I think it’s a challenging problem. There’s a long-term arc that exists not just in venture capital but across the entrepreneurial landscape. I’ve been chairman of an organization called National Center for Women in Information Technology, which has been focused on getting more women involved in Computer Science. And it’s a 6-7 year old organization that’s starting to have some real impact. There’s a bunch of anecdotal reasons, and then there are some statistical and historical reasons, and one of the things I believe is that we’re probably still two generations away from gender parity in a lot of things, and time just has to pass. I mean, you see it pass over time.

Women need role models, men need to be progressive role models for these women, but women also need to be role models for each other, and it’s not something that changes overnight when you’re at the level of imbalance that we’re at. But, there are some really incredible women entrepreneurs, there are now some incredible women investing, and over time my sense is that, I don’t know whether it’s 50/50 but the population of women and percentage of women involved on the investing side as well as on the entrepreneur side will continue to increase.

FG: ME SAY MORE AWESOME WOMEN ALWAYS GOOD IDEA!

BF: I would agree.

AG: Totally. What do you think motivates an entrepreneur? Is it the game? Is it the money? Is it the culture status?

BF: I think there are all kinds of reasons. I mean I’ve been involved in this for decades. I’m 46. I’ve been involved in this since I was 19 when I started my first company. I think there’s only one reason to be an entrepreneur, which is you’re completely obsessed with something. You want more than anything to create that thing.

FG: MENTAL ILLNESS GOOD REASON!

BF: Yeah, if you’re not so obsessed, so passionate about…whatever word you want to use, don’t do it. So, people that are focused on “I’m going to be an entrepreneur ’cause I don’t want to work for the man and I want to be independent,” that’s a bad driver. That doesn’t necessarily drive to something significant. People who say they want to make a lot of money. Look there are a lot of ways to make a lot of money and there are probably a lot easier ways to make a lot of money. To be cool…I mean, the last time I’ve checked, I’ve never really understood that, and the last people I knew that were cool were people didn’t talk to me in high school, and that was a long time ago.

I mean the reason to do it is you’re so obsessed and so excited about something and you can’t not think about it, and you want to bring it to fruition, and that thing can be an idea, product, it can be the idea of the company. Many great entrepreneurs over time, as they develop their businesses, the company becomes the product that they’re obsessed about, and that’s really powerful as well. So it’s not just a piece of software or a narrow thing, but it’s the thing that you’re creating.

You know my partners and I are pretty obsessed about what we’re doing at Foundry Group, and part of that obsession, for example, is understanding really well what we think makes a great venture capital firm, how it works and defining our universe that way. I think entrepreneurs should take the same lens. Define what you think is incredible. Define what you think is going to be awesome, and do it! And don’t be passive about it; don’t be driven by other people’s ideas of what’s interesting. Make it your idea.

FG: IT TRUE! IMPORTANT TO SUCCEED IN STARTUP. RELENTLESS. OBSESSED. UNSTOPPABLE. BASICALLY SAME AS SERIAL KILLER, EXCEPT KNOW HOW TO CODE.

AG: That’ll be a t-shirt.

BF: You know entrepreneurs, axe murders, serial killers, all of this makes sense.

AG: So does that mean you’ll be doing Foundry Group until you retire? Is this your forever job?

BF: No. You know, it’s very interesting, I never thought about my forever job, ever. I haven’t ever had a plan, nor do I ever think I will have a plan, nor do I think I ever want to have a plan. I regularly re-evaluate what I’m doing and think about it in the context of a long arc.

I tend to think in 10-year chunks. I learned that from my uncle. So, you know when I look at my life and think about my 20s and my 30s and my 40s and my 50s, they’ll be periods of time. But I don’t believe that 30 or 40 years from now I’ll be great at this, nor will I be passionate about it, nor will I be obsessed about it, so the idea that I do this until they stick me in the ground doesn’t ring true. I actually don’t know when they’re going to stick me in the ground. Hopefully it’s 170 years from now, it could be tomorrow. You just never know. So, my goal is just to live every moment as much as I can between now and whenever that is, and constantly be asking “am I getting the most out of this experience and this planet as I want?” and as long as I have to stay on this planet, then that’s what I’m going to be focused on.

AG: Can you walk us through the arcs of your 20s, 30s, and now 40s? What were those…

FG: ALLEN, STOP INTERRUPTING! ME BUSY THINKING ABOUT DEAD BRAD!

BF: Is he tasty? That’s the question…

FG: ME KNOW BEFORE HAPPEN. ME ARRIVE WITH BARBEQUE SAUCE.

AG: More of a ketchup guy…

BF: I’m from Texas, I like barbeque sauce…

Well in my 20s I was very focused on my first company. I built that company with a partner. We didn’t raise any money. We were in Boston. That company was bought when I was 28. I told my wife that by the time I was 30, we would be out of Boston, because she was from Alaska, and I was from Dallas, and neither of us were Bostonians, and two months before I turned 30 she told me she was moving to Boulder and I could come with her, so I spent my 20’s in Boston and I moved to Boulder right when I turned 30.

I started making angel investments in my late 20s, early 30s, I started doing venture capital in my early 30s. You know, my 30s were basically an insane period because I had the front end of the Internet bubble as things ramped up. I had some amazing successes and then the Internet bubble peaked and I had some unbelievable failures. You know, I had some failures where not only did I fall into a giant pit, but then somebody poured kerosene into the pit and on top of the kerosene they blowtorched it till everything was on fire…

FG: SOUNDS LIKE FUN!

BF: …and I crawled my way out of the giant pit then a helicopter fell out of the sky and knocked me back down into the pit, and it all exploded again. I mean it was just a really tough two years.

FG: ME THINK AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF BRAD FELD DIRECTED BY MICHAEL BAY, EQUALS BEST MOVIE EVER

[laughs]

BF: But I crawled out of that fucking pit and I survived. I spent a lot of time in my 30s thinking about how I wanted to do what I was doing going forward. What I wanted to work with. And part of that was Foundry Group coming together when I was in my late 30s with my partners, and really that’s been what I’ve focused on in my 40s. So, those are the main themes.

In my 30s, I also had a pivotal moment—probably about 35—with my wife Amy, where I really changed my focus on relationships and the dynamics of how our relationship worked. It wasn’t that I didn’t prioritize the relationship, it’s that I really didn’t sort out the boundaries particularly well, and this is a woman I was deeply in love with, have a great time with, love spending time with, and at this peak in my mid-thirties, she told me she was done. Of course, my interpretation was she had a tough week and I had a tough week, and it was time for a weekend. Her interpretation was I was a shitty roommate. And, that caused me to really change the way I thought about a relationship in the context of all the work that I was doing. But that was a painful part of that.

I started writing about age 36-37. So, I made that a real significant part of my life, and that’s been a big part of what I’ve been doing for the last 6-7 years. Writing is another example of something I discovered in my 40s. I started weaving these different things together as I’ve gotten older, but kind of stepping back, and you know really it’s kind of the end of every year looking backwards and saying, “What are the things I’ve started to experience this year that I’ve found intriguing and what do I want to do more of next year?”

And some years I have better success with that than others. I have plenty of times where I look back at the end of the year and say, “That was kind of a fucked up year.” But overall, the broad arc, when I look back in segments of decades, has been really satisfying.

FG: OH. ME TAKE NOTES! GET RICH WHEN YOUNG. IF GET MARRIED, WIFE GET MAD, START RUNNING.

BF: Run from her!

FG: YES

AG: I mean it sounds like you’re talking about adding structured routine?

BF: Yeah, some of it. I mean, I’ve written a couple of blog posts about how I came back from the brink with Amy in terms of our relationship. The starting problem was I said to her, I’m an engineer, I think like an engineer, my brain works like an engineer so just give me some rules. Her reaction was “that sucks. Rules aren’t romantic.”

It turns out that they’re actually quite romantic because it causes me to behave in a way that is very focused. So for example, I usually get up at five AM most of the time. She gets up at about 6:30. We have two dogs, so I hear the dogs rattling around, and whatever time it is, whether it’s 6:25 or 6:35, whether I’m in the middle of a blog post or email or whatever, I stop what I’m doing, go upstairs, and I do what we call “four minutes in the morning” which sometimes leads to another four minutes but often times us just sitting around and saying good morning.

And after we do that I go back downstairs and go back to my thing, but that way she doesn’t come downstairs and her first experience of me in the morning is me sitting on my computer typing away at something. And we have things like this that don’t take that long to build into routines. Maybe it takes, I don’t know, a month. You know, this is an example: If I’m going to be home, and I have work to do, I tell her before I come home. So she knew I was going to be on a conference call tonight, she’s upstairs doing something. She’s not annoyed that I’m home and working, and I didn’t come home and say, “Hey I’ve got to do this thing for a while.” So, I have a call time and when I get done I’m done.

FG: ME SAY BRAD NEED TO WRITE NEW BOOK. ADVICE ON RELATIONSHIPS FOR ENTREPRENEURS. THERE ARE AT LEAST TWO OR THREE THAT GET MARRIED.

BF: And survived…

So, Amy and I are writing a book this summer. I have a book coming out called Startup Communities, which is about building entrepreneur community in your city. I have a belief that you can do it anywhere, and then we have a second book that Amy and I are working on. We were calling it Startup Marriage, but we felt like that was too limiting, so we’re going to call it Startup Life and the subtitle–I’ve learned if you’re going to write books you have to have a subtitle–so the subtitle is How to Survive and Thrive in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur. And you know, some of it is this kind of advice, but an awful lot of it is incorporating stuff we’ve observed from having some of our friends that have had successful relationships and what works for them, because if anything there’s not a formula. You can’t say this is what it’s going to be. You have to start to think about it in your own context. And every entrepreneur and every entrepreneurial couple has had their ups and downs because it’s just a hard thing. And, you know you’re going on fine and all of the sudden a robot dinosaur comes after you. You’ve got to really be on the ball. And..

FG: ME GRIMLOCK FIND ROBOT DINOSAUR GREAT FOR ROMANCE. NOTHING LIKE FEAR OF DEATH, PUT SPARK BACK IN THE LIFE.

AG: So, how do you create a startup hub? Not to bury the point of buying your book, but what’s the…

F: YES! BACK TO FIRST MORE INTERESTING BOOK!

BF: So I think there are four principles for creating a startup community. First, is that the leaders should be entrepreneurs. There’s a whole bunch of other things around the startup community. But if the leaders are not entrepreneurs, it won’t sustain itself.

Second, is that those entrepreneurs need have to have a twenty year view and a really long-term commitment to that community. So, if you’re an entrepreneur and you want to create and be involved in and sustain a startup community, if you don’t have the long-term view, you can participate but you can’t be part of the leadership.

Third, you have to be inclusive of anybody who wants to be engaged in the startup community, including robot dinosaurs and including all the categories of people I call feeders: Government, Universities, big companies and investors. It has to be inclusive. Oh and by the way inclusive of any entrepreneur or wannabe entrepreneur or new person that moves to the community and wants to be involved in entrepreneurship.

You have to view it as this collection of talent continually collecting people, and the leadership has to have that same viewpoint. So it’s not enough that entrepreneurial leadership is static, it’s that there are constantly new people taking different roles in that dynamic and engaging in the startup community.

And then the fourth is you have to do things from top to bottom that engage everybody. So, things like Startup Weekend, things like accelerators, things like TechStars. You can’t just have Chamber of Commerce award dinners and entrepreneur-of-the-year things.

You also have to have rhythm. So, you know, meetups are a good example of having rhythms where everyone gets together once a month. The lean startup movement is another example. You know it’s brought together people across many communities with a common set of themes.

So if you look at those rules: leadership has to be entrepreneurs, they have to take a long term, 20+ year view, they have to be inclusive of everybody, and there have to be things in the startup community that engage everybody from top to bottom; that’s the meat of it, and then there are an enormous amount of tactics that you put around that, but I’ll talk about that in the book.

But, everywhere you look, I mean I hear this over and over again: “Oh, the only place to start a company is in Silicon Valley,” or something like that. It’s all bullshit. I mean you can have a sustainable startup community in virtually any city in the US, and one of the great things about the culture throughout most of the US is that failure is okay, especially within startup communities, so people who want to play for a long period of time and really want to build something meaningful will have their ups and downs, but as long as there’s this notion of inclusiveness it becomes very powerful.   

AG: Mark Suster wrote this post about how you shouldn’t have a co-founder if you are worried about dilution and that you should hire a co-founder or CTO after you have proved some traction.

BF: I actually have the exact opposite perspective. I don’t know if that’s Mark’s holistic perspective, but the specific example, I think that it’s incredibly hard to hire your cofounder. It’s also incredibly difficult to be a solo founder. It works. There are cases of it. My experience is that the best teams are 2-4 founders and product leaning. So at least half the people are focused on product.  They don’t have to be developers but they are ones spending all their time thinking about product. If you have four founders and three of the founders are not working on product, the poor product guy can’t get anything done because three people don’t have enough to do so they just fuck with him all the time. Then they just sit around and talk about how the product guy can’t get anything done in time. So the mix matters.

I’m not a fan of solo entrepreneur going to hire technical person to build product for them because that person that they hire, it’s not their business too. As a solo founder, you need to be challenged. It’s very lonely. You are going to go through very low cycles. Being alone in that context as a founder makes it that much harder.

There are two separate thoughts. There are solo founders that are bad. When I look back at all the companies I’ve been involved in, the solo founder cases are the hardest path to success. Second, there are many solo founder cases by the way which are not solo founder cases, you just happen to hear about one of the founders because he or she is the noisy one. There are often two or three founders in the back.

FG: YES. NO ONE CARE ABOUT WOZNIAK AND THAT OTHER GUY.

[Laughs]

BF: It’s exactly the point. There’s ego sublimation because there is one founder who whether they know it or not is the face of the thing that is happening, or they are the attractor of everybody, or they put up with the public nonsense. But behind-the-scenes you often have two to three people who in the dark room when things are really dismal are sitting shoulder to shoulder trying to figure it out.  And those are rarely people who you hired. It can happen. But it’s atypical.

AG: So Foundry Group led SEOmoz’s $18 million, most public round in history….

FG: ARGH! YOU CHANGE SUBJECT TOO FAST ALLEN.

AG: We can go back! This is the power of editing. Did you have a follow-up question FG?

FG: ME NOT EVEN REMEMBER NOW. ME DIZZY. ME HEAD SPIN. WHAT ARE WE TALKING ABOUT.  IS BRAD ON YET? ARGH.

BF: We have goats!

AG: Do you want to ask another co-founder question?

BF: We have f-bombs.

FG: THAT LIKE METAPHOR FOR WORD ‘FUCK’

[Laughs]

BF: We have gremlins.

FG: THAT METAPHOR FOR NOTHING

BF: Alright, SEOmoz.

AG: Why are you excited about SEOmoz?

BF: A couple simple reasons. One, Rand is awesome. I mean just off the charts awesome and he’s built a company with a bunch of incredible people. The business itself has been built with almost no money, which totally turns me on. And I dig the attitude and approach of SEOmoz, and the culture of the company.

AG: FG doesn’t like their Robot mascot.

FG: ME GRIMLOCK HAVE NO COMMENT

BF: It’s kind of a weeny Robot, but I like Rod.  You guys would be friends actually. You’d like Roger.  He’s very clever. He’s very funny and very cynical at the same time. You know how some robots get that mix together? Remember, Marvin the paranoid android. He kind of reminds me of Marvin a little bit.

FG: ME SAY NEXT TIME I MEET MARVIN, PUNCH IN FACE AND HE STILL OWE ME FIVE DOLLARS.

AG: Not a threat, just a statement.

BF: Not a threat.

FG: ME GRIMLOCK NEVER THREAT, ONLY PROMISE.

[laughs]

AG: Why do you love Boulder?

BF: I moved here because Amy told me she was moving here.

FG: YOU ALREADY ANSWERED. IT COMPROMISE. IT ONE-HALF ALASKA, ONE-HALF TEXAS. COLD AND MISERABLE, ALSO HAVE GUNS.

[Laughs]

BF: C’mon, Boulder is the opposite of cold and miserable. And we don’t have guns, we’re all happy here. There’s a lot of marijuana here, so there is a lot of anti-guns. We moved here and six months in we knew this is where we wanted to be. It’s a relatively small place, it’s beautiful, and it’s a very smart place.

Of the hundred thousand people, there are an incredible percentage of them that are just smart, and people move here because they want to be here. So it’s an opt-in community, and what’s happened over the last 15 or 20 years is there has become this incredible entrepreneurial activity and the density of entrepreneurs in Boulder is incredible. If you take the number of startups and the number of people working for startups  over the total working population, and you constrain for geography so you look at downtown Boulder, my guess is that this density is greater than any place else in the country.

So you are surrounded by other people who are working on startups and young companies and even when those companies become 200 or 300 or 500 people they still have the energy of the startup because they are young businesses.

FG: SO STARTUPS + HIPSTERS = FORMULA FOR SUCCESS

BF: Correct. We have some trustifarians here too. Allen, you know what trustafarians are, right?

AG: Star Trek reference?

BF: No. A trustafarian is that rich dude who sits at a coffee shop and plays on his MacBook all day and pretends to be cool but doesn’t actually have anything to do. So that just gives you some local color.

AG: And also shows that I have no idea about anything related to Star Trek.

[Laughs]

FG: LOOK BRAD, BETWEEN YOU AND GRIMLOCK, ALLEN NOT VERY NERDY.

AG: I just fake it with the glasses…

BF: We need to get you some tribbles.

FG:  YES, ALLEN THIS WEEKEND WE WATCH ENTIRE ORIGINAL SERIES.

AG: And then I get eaten?

FG: OR YOU GET EATEN?

[Laughs]

AG: Such a good deal.

FG: THEN WE MOVE ON TO HARDCORE STUFF, LIKE BABYLON 5.

AG: Well…. Brad, thanks so much. We had a lot of fun and FG didn’t eat us thanks to Skype protecting us.

FG: YET.

BF: FG, Nice to see you man!

FG: NICE TO SEE YOU. OR ELSE.

Want more? Coming soon: Dinosaur and Human, a very silly web show from Allen and FAKEGRIMLOCK.

In the U.S., a standard for men’s clothing sizes was established during the Civil War when the government had to buy uniforms for soldiers in the North. Women’s sizing standards came a bit later in the 1940s when the government had to buy nursing uniforms during World War Two.

Despite a long history of standardization and measurement, are you ever the same size in every store you shop? A 4 in J.Crew is a 2 in Banana Republic, meanwhile you’ll be busting buttons if you try to squeeze into a 2 in most high-end fashion designers.

For decades, custom apparel meant prohibitively high costs. But today, thanks to ecommerce sites and new technologies, affordable, well-designed clothes that actually fit us are just a click away. Check out a few of the globe’s newest startups leading the way…

Quincy Apparel

The newest custom apparel site to graduate from Harvard Business School is Quincy Apparel, which launched on March 26th, 2010 with 5 styles of custom-fit blazers. The two co-founders Christina Wallace and Alex Nelson met at school and bonded over a shared struggle to find “tall girl pants”.

Quincy has created a custom wardrobe collection based on three key considerations – sizing, design, and fabrication. In addition to measuring bust size, cup size, and torso length, users answer a sizing quiz that helps them understand their measurements to pick the correct size and provides data on the backend to help with forecasting and demand planning.

“Ecommerce play is what makes it possible to do this approach to sizing,” explains Christina. “If we were a brick and mortar store it would be impossible to have all of these size proliferations.”

“There has to be a conversation around the fact that women’s bodies vary more than the dress standard takes into account,” she continues. “Women range from curvy, pear-shaped, hourglass and straight-shaped. You can’t just have one cut of pants that fit them all. Our approach is to offer a couple different cuts based on shape.”

After you set all your measurements, and pick the style and fabric you like best, a custom fit blazer arrives 3-5 days later, which is incredibly quick. Christine tells me this is because the jackets are pre-made in a wide variety of sizes. It’s a different approach to sizing than completely custom, but the startup offers free shipping and free returns (a la Zappos) so if you’re not completely satisfied, you have nothing to lose.

Quincy Apparel will add women’s blouses and dresses in multiple fabrics later this spring.

Proper Cloth

And now for the gents. Launched in 2008, Proper Cloth is a New York City startup that provides customers with various methods for determining size to help them create “the perfect size” for button down dress shirts. Men can follow video tutorials on how to measure their own body, answer a “smart sizes” survey, choosing from a database of other brand sizes, or by just going with simple standard sizes. Founder Seph Skerritt says if you’re going to buy your boy a shirt and you want it to be a surprise, you should sneak into his closet and measure his favorite shirt when he’s not around. “I will gladly send out a measuring tape to help with this,” he says.

Folks in New York City are welcome to drop by their office for a fitting too.

Cut On Your Bias

If you’re looking for clothing with a little more style for casual wear, check out Cut On Your Bias, a new e-commerce-meets-crowd sourcing site that lets customers pick which designs get put into production. The New York City startup, which launched in February 2012 offers a few sketches of dresses, shirts, pants and tank tops for both men and women with voting options for different cuts and colors. Once the votes are tallied, the winning style will go into limited production, with just 15 to 20 pieces on sale a week later.

Carrie Hammer

A few years ago, Carrie Hammer hated what she had to wear to work for her job in digital ad sales. “I couldn’t wear anything fun. Meanwhile, men have a million professional go-to stores. I have 3, maybe?”

So one day, inspired by her her parents, who are both entrepreneurs, she decided to quit her job and launch an affordable, custom dress line. In April 2012, Carrie Hammer arrived.

“Off the rack dresses are built for an ‘average’ 5’6″ woman. But what is average? Womens’ bodies are ridiculously different! I think a lot of our bodies issues come from saying, ‘I have to be a 0, 2 or a 4.’ And at a lot of places, these sizes aren’t true, it’s just vanity sizing.”

Carrie Hammer’s made-to-measure dresses are very Mad Men meets Zac Posen. They walk the fine line between flirty and professional, high-fashion and high-fun. Custom dresses like these usually cost in the $1,000+ range, but Hammer’s dresses cost just $295.

Her collection includes 10 different styles with names like Sarah, Danielle and Pamela (all named after her friends) which can be mixed and matched according to which top or bottom you prefer. (I ordered the Danielle top with the Raya bottom!)

To ensure a perfect fit, Hammer takes 10 different measurements such as dress length, shoulder width and bust size. Online, she asks that you send in these sizes. In Manhattan, her associates will visit people’s homes and offices to measure them. The made to measure dresses are manufactured and tailored overseas and ship in 3-4 weeks time.

Shoes of Prey

Need something cute to wear on your feet with all your new custom apparel? Don’t miss Shoes of Prey, a UK-based startup that offers custom, design-it-yourself shoes ranging from sandals and high heels to snakeskin booties. The shoes come in a wide variety of heels, styles and leathers including soft leather, patent leather and fish skin and can even be made narrower or wider for you. Pricing starts at £100 with deliveries worldwide, including New York, San Francisco, LA, Paris, London, Amsterdam, Auckland, Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne.

ariadna de raadt via shutterstock

Tablets are going to replace computers — or so we’re told. Despite divided opinions over tablet use in corporations, they’re coming… fast. While the screen of a smartphone may be too small for books, documents and articles, tablets bring the best features of a full-size computer to our fingertips. Free of bulk and excessive cords and filled with apps for everything we need, it’s hard to imagine a future in which the tablet isn’t a standard gadget.

Though it’s exciting to view this emergence as a consumer, business owners should be prepared for the technology shift toward the tablet. No matter what industry you’re in, there are small changes that can be made now to prepare for an inevitable frontier. Even more so, by integrating the tablet into your business model earlier than others, you can actually boost your business — now.

I asked a panel of successful young entrepreneurs the following question:

What are some tips for getting the most out of a pricey tablet in your small business?

Here are 14 simple tips for overcoming common tablet handicaps and making the most of the gadget for your business:

1. Everyone Has a Type

“While tablets have pretty awesome keyboards and touchscreens, we’re still very much programmed to type on a regular keyboard. Plus, you can really increase your efficiency while working on a table with a keyboard attachment.”

-Danny Wong, Blank Label Group, Inc.

2. Keep Your Tools

“OnLive Desktop gives you remote access to Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer. It’s perfect for doing work on the go, and along with a Bluetooth keyboard, your tablet can replace your computer when needed.”

-Josh Weiss, Bluegala

3. Pitch the Clients

“Tablets are worth their money when you effectively use them in getting deals done. Make a practice of finding ways to incorporate your corporate tablets into client meetings. For example, if you’re a mobile development firm, you can do app demos on tablet to show the prospective customer how the app works. Or, replace pen-to-paper during meetings and take your notes on the sleek tablet instead.”

-Doreen Bloch, Poshly Inc.

4. Don’t Be Cheap!

“Don’t be afraid to spend “too much” on apps. Applications like Keynote and Air Sharing that hit the $10 price point are worth the extra money. To embrace the mobility that comes with tablets, you need to spend the money and time on creating systems that actually allow you to use the tablet in everyday business tasks.”

-Jennifer Donogh, Young Female Entrepreneurs

5. Limit Your Gigs

“Don’t fall prey to the psychology of getting enough storage “in the event that you need it.” I currently have a 32GB iPad using that theory, and looking back, I could’ve gotten the 16GB and been more than covered. Tablets are ultimately for consumption and display, so content can be accessed via the cloud. Apps like Splashtop even let you access your desktop remotely via your tablet.”

-Pete Chatmon, Double7 Images

6. Plan Ahead

“A data plan can save you time and money. Free wireless access isn’t quite ubiquitous yet, and you never know when you might need the Internet. I’ve been able to easily demo my product for potential investors and business partners in coffee shops and hotel lobbies, thanks to my data plan.”

-Bhavin Parikh, Magoosh, Inc.

7. Pick Your Battles

“I quickly learned that while tablets are great for some business functions, they’re no means a replacement for more robust computers — yet. For instance, drafting a document that requires viewing multiple sources on the tablet is an exercise in frustration; on the other hand, they’re great when you need to focus on drafting one piece. Don’t try to make the tool fit the wrong activity.”

-Charlie Gilkey, Productive Flourishing

8. The Tradeshow Star

“I always invest in having the best iPad available. I love to bring them to tradeshows, walk around and show live demos of my website to prospective clients. Tablets are a great tool for mobile presentations, and people love to geek out on the latest technology too — they may listen to your pitch if only to play with your cool tablet!”

-Eric Bahn, Beat The GMAT

9. Mind Map Ideas

“I love mind maps, and although there are tons of tools to create mind maps on a desktop or laptop, using a tablet to create mind maps allows you to jot down ideas on the go. It also helps to visualize an idea from start to finish — without being distracted by the multitasking environment that a full computer offers.”

-Nathalie Lussier, Nathalie Lussier Media

10. Learn Your Target Medium

“If your customers are looking at your site or product on a tablet, make sure that you’re giving them a great experience. The fact that our online reporting dashboard renders nicely on an iPad is a big advantage for our company over some of our competitors.”

-Allie Siarto, Loudpixel

11. Consume That Content

“Tablets are best for consuming content — downloading books and PDFs and streaming videos — and communicating with others. Make sure your tablet can do all of this, but be clear on its limits. Tablets aren’t computers, so certain features won’t be as good, if even possible.”

-Ash Kumra, DesiYou

12. Get Creative With Clients

“If you have retail business, why can’t the tablets replace the regular menus or brochures? Why not have an in-house sale that’s only available on your tablet (yes, not even on your website)? How about replacing the whole POS for a tablet with POS app. Let clients use and have fun with them.”

-Devesh Dwivedi, Breaking The 9 To 5 Jail

13. Download Apps Wisely

“When people get tablets, they often head for the App Store and download hundreds of apps that just add more confusion, more chaos and more inefficiencies to their businesses. Instead, download the apps that compliment the programs you already use in your business so you can create a seamless workflow, instead of adding more steps to it.”

-Erin Blaskie, BSETC

14. Got a Pen?

“Whether it’s scribbling down notes, making mind maps or drawing crude prototype images, the ten bucks I spent on a pen for my iPad has completely changed it from being solely a consumption device to a creative resource.”

-Sean Ogle, Location 180, LLC

bloomua via shutterstock

Thanks to services like Twitter and Instagram, and the global ‘smartphone saturation’ phenomenon, live reporting from big events has never been easier.

No longer do we have to rely on professionals to deliver content and images from these events, we have our extended social networks doing this for us. And, because so many of these updates get fired into the ‘public’ timeline, virtually any update from anywhere can be found and shared in a matter of seconds.

But, with all of this content creation happening, who is making sense of it, giving it some order and structure? You, of course. But, while we’ve taken to ‘leisurely’ content curation on platforms like Pinterest, ‘real-time content curation’ hasn’t been embraced with the same passion.

With the London Olympics on our doorstep, expect to see ‘real-time photo curation’ explode into popularity and we’ve got some tools to help you be at the forefront of this revolution.

10 ‘real-time’ photo search engines

1. NachoPhoto.com - If you conduct your own search for ‘real-time photo search engines’ this is likely to appear pretty high, even though it doesn’t appear to be promoted as heavily as it was about 12 months ago. Take a look at the example ‘LeBron’ (LeBron James) search as an example of the results you get back. NachoPhoto combines ‘professional’ potography with ‘user-generated’ results better than anyone else out there.

2. Skylin.es – This service takes most of its results from the public Twitter timeline and allows you to pick and choose the best user-generated photos being published in real-time. It also gives you the ability to narrow these results down by location. Boom!

3. Twitcaps.com – If you are after the best of Twitter and Instagram, then Twitcaps is the service for you. While the interface is a little rough around the edges, it delivers a true real-time photo discovery experience.

4. PicFog.com - The unique element of PicFog is its minute-by-minute time-stamping functionality, letting you know exactly when each image was uploaded. This can give you and your curation efforts a big competitive advantage.

 

5. Twicsy.com - One of the best Twitter pics search engines, Twicsy offers a handy ‘in the last hour’ search filter which can help hugely in your real-time curation efforts. You can even get your hands on pre-set widgets which will serve up images from specific user accounts in real-time.

Best of the rest

Here are five other options we recommend checking out:

6. Topsy Image Search - The image-specific section of the popular Twitter search engine.

7. Hashalbum.com - Real-time discovery of ‘hashtagged’ images.

8. TwiPho.net - Aggregates images from the major real-time networks in an easy-to-navigate manner.

9. Flickr Latest Photos Search - A ‘hidden’ search option but one worth bookmarking for Flickr image searches.

10. Social Mention Photo Search - SocialMention.com is one of the world’s most popular general social media search tools but not many people are aware of its real-time image search function. Simply head to the homepage, search in ‘images’ only and then sort by ‘last hour’ uploads and voila!

gualtiero boffi via shutterstock

Iota Partners is a new Chicago-based venture of Rick Robinson and John Cain (with whom Experientia partner Jan-Christoph Zoels once worked at Sapient) that deals with user experience research, sensor-based data, and smart modelling.

The papers section on their website is worth exploring in some depth. Here are some of them:

After ethnography
This paper is based on the transcript of Rick E. Robinson’s talk “After Ethnography,” which he presented at a Telefonica-sponsored conference on user-centered design in Madrid, in December 2010. Bringing together a series of points Rick calls his “tiny arguments” it forms a larger assessment of the state and future of user research.

Nice work
This sample chapter comes from a book in progress by Rick E. Robinson that will bring together many of Rick’s talks and writings on the theory and practice of user research. Based on a talk Rick gave at an internal research colloquium for senior staff members at a major technology company—an audience already familiar with Rick’s previous work at E-Lab—the talk focused on creating an effective research practice and on working with the idea of models.

Valuable to Values: How “User Research” Ought to Change
“Valuable to Values: How ‘User Research’ Ought to Change,” written by Maria Bezaitis and Iota Partner Rick E. Robinson, originally appeared in Design Anthropology: Object Culture in the 21st Century (Springer Vienna Architecture, 2010) edited by Alison J. Clarke, a professor at University of Applied Arts Vienna, and a student of anthropologist Daniel Miller when she did her graduate work at University College, London. It covers a lot of ground. Some history. Some reflection. A healthy dose of unsolicited advice to several different fields of research. Enjoy.

Notonthehighstreet.com, an online marketplace where you can buy a wide variety of unique products straight from over 3,000 small businesses, this morning announced that it has raised £10 million ($15.8 million) in Series D funding.

The round was led by Fidelity Growth Partners Europe, with previous investors Index Ventures and Greylock Partners participating.

Founded in 2006 by a duo of female entrepreneurs called Holly Tucker and Sophie Cornish, notonthehighstreet.com has grown from a network of under 100 small business partners initially to over 3,000 today.

The small businesses sell over 50,000 unique products between them, ranging from interior accessories and furniture to bags, jewelry and clothing. The collection of items for sale gets curated by notonthehighstreet.com staff.

With the additional capital, notonthehighstreet.com aims to broaden its offering, build its brand and invest in technology, the company says.

According to a report from Sky News, the investment values notonthehighstreet.com at approximately £100 million (roughly $158 million).

Felicis Ventures, the super angel investment firm that was founded by former Googler Aydin Senkut back in 2006, has raised $52 million for a new fund according to an SEC filing that surfaced on Friday.

The fund, named Felicis Ventures III, is $12 million bigger than the firm’s previous institutional fund ($40 million raised in August 2010).

According to an earlier article in the Wall Street Journal, the latter fund itself followed a $20 million fund by Silicon Valley investor Ron Conway (SV Angel) and a $8.5 million round provided by another former Google exec, Chris Sacca – who, coincidentally, now runs his own super angel fund, called Lowercase Capital.

Senkut joined Google in 1999 and left the Internet search and advertising company at the end of 2005, a little more than a year after Google went public. He obviously departed Google a wealthy man, and invested in several dozens of startups as an angel investor even before starting Felicis Ventures.

With a relatively small team and by leveraging Senkut’s extensive Silicon Valley network, Felicis has made investments in companies like Aardvark, AppJet and SayNow (all acquired by Google), GeoAPI and Posterous (both acquired by Twitter), Chomp (acquired by Apple), Karma (just acquired by Facebook), Mint (acquired by Intuit), Webs (acquired by VistaPrint), Milo (acquired by eBay), Mob.ly (acquired by Groupon), Powerset (acquired by Microsoft) and Tapulous (acquired by Disney).

As you can tell, they’ve had quite a few exits already.

Other startups in its portfolio that are still flying solo include Angry Birds maker Rovio, Bump, Fitbit, Erply, DailyBooth, Zaarly, Foodspotting, Weebly and DISQUS.

Other well-financed U.S. super angel funds include the aforementioned Lowercase Capital, K9 Ventures, Dave McClure’s 500 Startups, CrunchFund and Floodgate.

The lure of an Apple Store can be so great that local authorities are doing all they can to sweeten the deal for the world’s biggest technology company, waiving rents and taxes in order to have it set up an Apple Store in their area.

New York’s Grand Central Terminal wanted Apple so bad it dropped its leasing fees and in Salt Lake City, authorities are rumoured to have dropped rents completely, to incentivise the opening of a new Apple Store.

Apple’s retail dominance

As a business, Apple’s retail stores are booming. In its second financial quarter (ending March 2012), the company saw sales rise by some 90 percent, breaking records with a $24.67 billion in quarterly revenue and $5.99 billion in profits.

A staggering 71 million customers visited Apple’s retail stores between January and March, an increase of 28 million from a year earlier. Apple’s impressive footfall is proving to be a catalyst for retail spending in the areas in which they are located, pushing the money spent back into the local economy.

A recent ABC News report states that Apple is going to open a new store in Salt Lake City, located in City Creek. The company already has one store in the the Utah city but thanks to what appears to be a massive retail incentive, it may open a new store before the end of the year.

What is the big incentive? According to ABC’s sources, City Creek has offered a “major concession package” that is thought to include five years free rent.

What makes Apple so special?

The truth is, realtors and local authorities know that when an Apple Store is opened in an area, tech savvy consumers come from surrounding areas to view products, seek help and spend money on luxury electronics. Put simply, spending will flow into City Creek.

The rental deal isn’t a one-off either.

While authorities will never confirm it — even City Creek’s Marketing Director said it “does not release the terms of its leases” — Apple’s lease for its impressive store in New York’s Grand Central Terminal is a third of that paid by other retailers and restaurants in the area.

In fact, the lease is costing Apple $60 per-square-foot, where other retailers are expected to pay $200 for the same area, and it has escaped having to share any of its revenue with Grand Central’s operator, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, according to papers obtained by the New York Post.

Apple’s success was directly benefitted other companies in the Terminal. In just seven weeks, Apple’s newest New York store helped one restaurant boost sales by 7 percent — impressive as it’s already co-owned by basketball legend Michael Jordan.

That restaurant – The Steakhouse — directly attributes its increased footfall to the nearby Apple Store with its other co-owner stating: “The jump only happened after Apple opened.”

Moving Forward

Apple is showing no signs of slowing its retail expansion, it’s already seeing an average of 22,000 customers, per store, per week. Of course, it wants to further increase that figure.

As of January 2012, Apple operated 363 stores and has opened a small number since then. In 2012, it has plans to open 40 new stores, including a handful in China, perhaps its most important market.

In order to facilitate this, Apple has allocated $900 million for its new stores, some of which have been confirmed in Germany, Spain, France and Australia.

Apple’s retail success is down in part to its customer service, ease of purchasing, level of detail in its stores — and the quality of its products. However, the company isn’t completely satisfied with its operations, and has brought aboard former Dixons CEO John Browett to drive its retail business forward.

Tim Cook has said that the Dixons exec will bring “Apple to an even higher level of customer service and satisfaction.”

Part of this plan apparently involves automating its sales processes, which includes investment in its ‘Personal Pickup’ service, which allows customers to buy products online and pick them up from their local Apple Store.

Apple also launched a new iOS payment service called EasyPay, providing a simple way for customers to enter an Apple Store and pay for their purchase using their iPhone, without having to seek assistance from a sales clerk.

  

The company is set to release a new iPhone and update its range of Mac computers in the coming months, no doubt incentivising Apple fans to return to their local store to check them out.

As it stands, the company is setting the standard for retail, with other technology companies — including Microsoft — rushing to open similar stores and build rapport and most importantly gain trust from their customers.

Apple might be benefitting from its success, in terms of the money it saves from leases, but companies in the vicinity of an Apple Store don’t seem to mind. It’s difficult to complain that a company is getting preferential treatment when it helps boost your own revenues and increase the number of people coming to the area.

If you’re interested in the upcoming Ashton Kutcher movie version of Steve Jobs’ life, it is set to begin filming in June. The first place that filming will start is the original “Apple Garage”, as well as in the actual house in Los Altos where Jobs grew up.

The movie also has its own website: www.thejobsmovie.com.

Here is the film’s synopsis according to the site (which sports the tagline “Get inspired.”:

“JOBS” is the incredibly powerful and true story of the visionary who set out to change the world, and did.

The film chronicles Steve Jobs’ (ASHTON KUTCHER) transformation of character from the enthusiasm and self-discovery of his youth, to the personal demons that clouded his vision, and finally to the ultimate triumphs of his later life. Steve changed the way we see the world today through his relentless drive, passion, persistence, and the force of his will, and it is through these qualities that we draw inspiration from his life.

Dark, honest, and uncompromising, “JOBS” plunges into the depths of Steve Jobs’ character, uncovering his motivations, his gifts, his flaws, his failures, and his successes. An immensely private tale spanning four decades, “JOBS” is an intensely character-driven story that is as much a sweeping epic as it is a personal tale.

An rousing narrative of Steve Jobs’ days, “JOBS” pulls no punches and does not speculate, only telling the candid account as seen through his eyes, emotions, and ingenuity. The life of Steve Jobs.

The movie is set to be a dark depiction of the “30 most defining years of Steve Jobs’ life”, seen through the eyes of his friends and colleagues. I personally like the name of the movie, jOBS, but the lowercase treatment of the J will certainly bring out some eyerolls.

There is another movie in the works, based on Walter Isaacson’s popular biography. We reported yesterday that Sony has brought on Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak as an advisor for the Aaron Sorkin written flick.

We realize that some of you may have had your fill of Facebook news today, so this is a perfect time to break out some zen thinking thanks to the master of Apple himself: Steve Jobs.

This cool site called SteveTold.Us depicts a very relaxed Steve Jobs with an overlay of his best quotes. Simply refresh the page and you’ll find some new words of wisdom:

There’s nothing more to the site than that, but as usual, the words of Steve Jobs still resonate like they always did. Give the site a go and get yourself some knowledge like this gem:

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

➤ SteveTold.Us

Tumblr is now available in Portuguese for Brazil and Portugal, the company announced on its staff blog today. According to the startup, this means that its platform is now available in 11 languages.

To switch to a new language, all you have to do is to go to your Preferences page and adjust your settings:

Besides its interface, the startup is also launching two new staff blogs, respectively managed by its teams in Portugal and in Brazil. As you may know, continental Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese are quite different, and local users will likely appreciate Tumblr’s decision to keep them separate.

Today’s announcement isn’t a surprise; last February, we already reported that Tumblr would soon be available in Portuguese, as the company was increasingly interested in the Brazilian market. This led the startup to hire a Brazilian social media executive, Gina Gotthilf, who is responsible for preparing the opening of Tumblr’s local offices.

To be fair, the interest is largely mutual; social sites are very popular in Brazil, and this is also true of Tumblr. According to comScore figures, the country is responsible for the second largest number of visits to the site after the US, and Tumblr’s local user base grew by a whopping 209% in 2011.

This is quite impressive, considering that the platform wasn’t even available in the local language, and it wouldn’t be surprising to see Tumblr’s user base in Brazil grow considerably over the next few months. After all, the same happened with Facebook, and the social network is now more popular in Brazil than its long-time leader, Google’s first social network Orkut.

On the grand scale, it seems that Tumblr is prepared to give its popularity an extra boost; as part of today’s news, it has announced that meetups will take place in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and Curitiba. It’s not only about Brazil either; in Portugal, Tumblr is partnering with Vice to celebrate its local launch.

Apple has sent out an email to members of its Mac developer program reminding them that the deadline to implement sandboxing in their apps is still June 1st.

As a reminder, the deadline for sandboxing your apps on the Mac App Store is June 1. We’ve made the process easier with new sandboxing entitlements and APIs now available in OS X 10.7.3 or later and Xcode 4.3.2.

If you have an existing app on the Mac App Store that is not sandboxed, you may still submit bug fix updates after June 1. If you have technical issues that prevent you from sandboxing your app by June 1, let us know.

There are quite a few instances of Mac App Store apps already having implemented sandboxing in their apps. Password helper 1Password (which implemented it last September) and image editor Pixelmator among them.

Apple had previously set the sandboxing deadline for March 1st. By that time, developers that wished to continue selling their apps in the Mac App Store would need to abide by new rules that severely limited the areas of a computer that an app had access to. It later extended it out to June 1st.

Many developers, like Manton Reece and Daniel Jalkut, have recently expressed their dissatisfaction with the limited entitlements offered by sandboxing on the Mac.

Both Reece and Jalkut expressed their feelings that the current freedoms that developers have to access OS X are too limited and its not enough to have faith that Apple will make changes. “We can only make decisions based on what entitlements and APIs are there today,” said Reece “And today it’s not enough.”

Apple clearly wants the Mac App Store to be the primary way that people download apps on their Mac, but it also wants sandboxing to be the foundation of a more secure OS X.

Recently, I posted a tweet about conversion rates.

Conversion rate’s big crime is it focuses purely on pressing the purchase button, independent of the quality of the experience.

— Jared M. Spool (@jmspool) May 13, 2012

Immediately, I received several responses, all of them showing the common misunderstandings that people have about conversion rates.

The conversion rate has become a standard metric for many online businesses. I’ve seen clients watch it every day, looking at the variations they see and asking questions about why it changes (or doesn’t).

Unfortunately, conversion rate is probably one of the most dangerous and mis-used metrics available to site designers to measure how good their site is. They apply it as if it is telling them something and, worse, when they optimize for it, they can create a site that looks like crap and produces undesirable customers.

This is the first post in a series on using conversion rates, hopefully to clear up the common misunderstandings and help designers find better ways to measure their site’s success. In this episode, we’ll look at the basic nature of what a conversion rate is and why it’s such a crappy metric.

Avoid Ratios For Metrics

Conversion rate is a ratio. It’s the number of people who purchase (or sign up or whatever your “call to action” button does) divided by the number of visitors to the site or page. If you have a 15,000 people buy products out of the 1,000,000 people who visited your site, you’ll have a conversion rate of 1.5%.

Ratios are a problem because either the numerator (people who buy) or the denominator (people who visit) can change. Let’s say you still have 15,000 purchasers, but because of a “successful” marketing push, you end up bringing 2,000,000 visitors to the site. Now, you made the same amount of money from those 15,000 purchasers. But your conversion rate dropped to 0.75%.

Because it’s a ratio, you don’t have control over which side changes. The theory is that it should be uniform, but as we’ll see in other posts in this series, that rarely happens.

This means conversion rates often fluctuate for no discernible reason. It can be 1.5% one day, 0.75% the next, and 3.0% the next. This would just be a normal variation based on what’s happening with the visitors being attracted to the site. And this normal variation makes it hard to tell when something is broken or out of whack.

For any e-commerce site, I have the perfect advice on how to raise their conversion rate significantly. All they have to do is stop marketing. Once they stop marketing, the number of visitors will drop to only those who are already loyal customers.

Because those visitors are loyal, they are probably only coming to buy something. The ratio of purchasers to visitors will skyrocket. Sales will likely drop, but conversion will go sky-high.

Sounds great, right? That’s the other problem with the conversion rate ratio: it’s not at all related to the other business operations.

I have a little game I like to play with executives. I’ll put to doors on the screen. I’ll tell the execs that they can choose one door. Behind the first door is an increased conversion rate, but no increase in sales (in fact, a likely decrease). Behind the second door is a decreased conversion rate, but an increase in sales. Which would they like?

Every executive I’ve ever talked to has asked for the increased sales. My next question is then: Why focus on conversion rate then? That’s when I get that deer-in-headlights look, followed by a reduced focus on the conversion rate metric.

In the next installment, we’ll look at why not every visitor is someone you want as a customer.

If you have been following Windows 8 for any amount of time, you must have run across the Building Windows 8 Blog, the official organ of the Windows team. It is not for massive, Internet-bending pieces of non-fiction that pack in enough context that by the time you emerge from them, you don’t know your middle name.

Today, another installment was delivered. In a stunningly large entry, Microsoft wrote much on Windows, its UI, and what Windows 8 will look like. The important parts of it relate to tweaks coming to the Windows 8 desktop UI. The desktop UI is what you currently use in Windows 7, if you were confused.

We’re going to quote extensively in this post, as there isn’t much of a better way to convey what Microsoft is up to, and not muddle it. To wit, here is the issue that needed to be solved, as stated by Microsoft:

We spent a lot of energy carefully considering how substantially to update the appearance of the desktop in Windows 8. We looked at many, many pictures, and considered hundreds of designs. Our primary goal was to bring visual harmony to Windows, while still preserving much of the familiar feel of the Windows 7 desktop and not sacrificing the compatibility of existing apps.

That seems reasonable enough. Here’s Microsoft’s solution:

[W]e decided to bring the desktop closer to the Metro aesthetic, while preserving the compatibility afforded by not changing the size of window chrome, controls, or system UI. We have moved beyond Aero Glass—flattening surfaces, removing reflections, and scaling back distracting gradients.

So, Glass is out, and flat is in. That’s roughly what we expected. Here’s the shot that Microsoft shared from its blog post, that is well worth looking at:

Frankly, I love it. But I’m a Windows fan, so my take is probably pretty tinted. Microsoft calls the final product the application of the “principles of ‘clean and crisp,’” when it came to “updating window and taskbar chrome.” Microsoft promised more in the coming release candidate Release Preview of Windows 8, which will drop in early June.

Windows 8 continues apace, and as it comes more and more into the fore, I have to admit that I like its visual design more and more.

In an effort to attract iPhone users to its network, Sprint has begun offering a $100 credit when you turn in an iPhone from any other carrier.

Sprint sent us the details of the offering, which stipulates that a new iPhone must be activated by July 3 on Sprint’s network and trade-ins must be completed by August 14th. If your phone doesn’t hit the full $100 value, Sprint will match it up to $100 with an account credit, so you’ll get the full hundred bucks either way.

Beginning today, May 18, for a limited time only, customers can bring in their current iPhone from any other carrier to a Sprint store (or online and telesales) and receive at least $100 off the purchase of a new iPhone 4S (excludes upgrades) with a new line of service and two year agreement.

Sprint recently committed to buying $15B worth of iPhones from Apple, that’s around 24M units.

Sprint previously said that it needed to buy some 30.5 million iPhones over the next few years in order to stay competitive with rival carriers. The fact is that the iPhone is driving customer adoption in a huge way. T-Mobile even attributed its recent financial troubles directly to it not carrying the device, mentioning the iPhone 4S no less than 6 times in its fourth quarter 2011 earnings report.

Sprint recently posted an $863M loss in its first quarter selling iPhones, but apparently continues to believe that carrying and catering to Apple’s device is the path to success.

These are the instructions, for those interested in taking them up on the offer.

• Save in store:

1. Reserve your iPhone 4S online at www.sprint.com (excludes upgrades)
2. Bring your old iPhone with you to a Sprint store
3. Save $100 instantly when you activate a new line of service!

 

• Save Online

4. Go to sprint.com/iPhone to buy your iPhone 4S through our online store and open a new line of service (excludes upgrades)
5. After you receive your new iPhone, visit sprint.com/buyback and click Trade in my device to receive a shipping label via email. (Note: If your Buyback value is less than $100, we’ll make up the difference with an additional account credit. You’ll need to activate your new phone by 7/3/12 and trade-in by 8/14/12.)
6. Receive a credit on your bill within 2 to 3 billing cycles. Your credit may be spilt into 2 payments. Please wait the full 3 month billing cycle to receive your full $100 credit.