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Posts Tagged ‘Participants’

The Startup Bus: Is This How Outsiders See Startup Culture?

Monday evening I was made aware of a particularly interesting promotion that will be taking place over the course of two days before South by Southwest (SXSW). The event, or tour, is called The Startup Bus, and will challenge 12 participants to create as many tech

startups as possible during a 48 hour bus ride from San Francisco to SXSW in Austin. The question this event raises in my head is whether these “beat-the-clock” entrepreneurship experiments are actually healthy for the broader startup culture.

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This event isn’t the first of its kind; in fact, it closely resembles the Startup Weekend event series, just on wheels and with fewer people. We also reported back in January on an Australian man who was attempting to create and launch a startup in a week with just $500. Going solo is a little different than collaborating with a large group of entrepreneurs with the guidance of experienced mentors, which has helped Startup Weekend produce several success stories from their events. It’s unclear whether The Startup Bus will host a similar makeup of entrepreneurs and mentors, but what is clear is that they will face many challenges on the road to Austin.

The participants will be crammed into a crowded bus for two days – not an ideal environment for constructive thought, at least not after the first day or so. A few years ago I took a two day bus ride of similar length from Madison, Wisconsin to my home in Phoenix, Arizona. I can attest that being on a bus (even a nice bus) for that long is not the most pleasant experience. I could have flown home, but I thought that a two-day bus ride with friends would be fun, and it was, but it was also exhausting. Sleeping, at least for me, was near impossible, and the claustrophobic nature of being packed elbow-to-elbow with 40-60 people (people I would even consider close friends) does not leave your brain in a great state, let alone foster the kind of critical thinking required by great entrepreneurs.

Last week The Startup Bus announced some changes to their original plans, allowing for 40 spots on the bus, which could just be for mentors, investors and journalists on top of the 12 main participants. By more than doubling the number of people riding the bus, its uncertain if they will still be able to secure a motor coach with beds, something they had originally planned. Regardless of the amenities, however, sleeping on a bus doesn’t come easy, beds or no beds.

Issues have risen from collaboration events in the past surrounding intellectual property; when a group of people come together on an idea, who’s to say who owns it? The Startup Bus is tackling this problem by having participants auction off ideas to the highest bidder at the end of the trip, an interesting solution to IP disputes.

But enough about The Startup Bus, this article really isn’t about them. This isn’t meant to be critical of their experiment, or of the man in Australia, or any other startup “challenge” for that matter. In fact, The Startup Bus actually seems like a interesting experiment in entrepreneurship that could leave the participants with lessons they will carry with them into their futures. Additionally, these groups are providing a unique experience that can actually foster good ideas through collaboration of entrepreneurs, programmers and business people.

The real question here is do these kinds of experiments ultimately benefit the overall startup community? Or do they give a false impression about the time, dedication and persistence that are required to start a successful company? Are people outside of the startup culture receiving the wrong impression about the seriousness and validity of startups? Granted, the conclusion of events like these marks only the beginning for a possible company or product, but does the haste in which these groups and ideas are thrown together speak to their overall quality? Eric Woodward of Nambu made his opinion on this matter clear Monday night in his Twitter status below.

Is Woodward right to be critical of The Startup Bus? Or is he missing the broader point? I would argue that events like these do have a benefit, especially to those directly involved. The mentorship received by the participants at Startup Weekend is certainly enough to make it worthwhile, not to mention the potential created by having a large group of smart people all in one room. When smart people get together, good things happen. The Startup Bus could certainly replicate this experience, but the challenges of being on a bus will undoubtedly make things tricky.

However, one could also argue that these benefits come at a price by creating a false sense of what starting a company requires, though I doubt any of these events or organizations are actually trying to belittle these ideals. I’ll be interested to see what kinds of ideas manage to be built and launched by the Startup Bus participants when the group arrives at SXSW in a few weeks. This issue is bound to draw strong opinions on both sides, and that’s not a bad thing. Please let us know how you feel about this issue in the comments below.

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Macworld 2010: Adam Savage re-enacts the EFF’s history

Filed under: Hardware, Developer, Apple History

We visited a lot of parties last night (and the TUAW bloggers are nursing hangovers because of it), but the best was undoubtedly the Electronics Frontier Foundation’s 20th anniversary bash at the DNA Lounge. It wasn’t strictly Mac-related, but Mythbuster Adam Savage was in the house, and he led a hilarious re-enactment of some of the major moments in the EFF’s history, assisted by various objects and people “found around the club”. Of course, since there were quite a few luminaries in the house (including the founders of the EFF, the crew from Steve Jackson Games, and other tech who’s whos), the re-enactment actually ended up being re-enacted by most of the actual participants. We captured video of the event, and it’s both informational and hilarious — you can catch it in two segments after the break below.

Stay tuned for more from Macworld 2010 all this week — the floor opens today, and we’ll have live streaming video right here on the site, as well as hands-on, interviews, and news from the show in San Francisco all week long.

TUAWMacworld 2010: Adam Savage re-enacts the EFF’s history originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 11 Feb 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Study finds people want more from their Kindles, less from their newspapers

This may come as a surprise to you (although probably not, you smart devil), but it turns out that plenty of people are dissatisfied with their current e-reader options — according to a recent study conducted at the University of Georgia. The study was conducted over a six-month period where participants read the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on a Kindle, then provided feedback. The results were, well — not entirely shocking. Younger adults found the Kindle to be lacking because it had no touchscreen or other applications (though to be fair, neither does the print version of the paper), while older adults seemed more satisfied, but also reported missing the crossword puzzles and comics of a real, live newspaper. Pretty much everyone agreed that the screen was nice and comfortable to read on, but almost no one was a fan of the price. All in all, there’s not terribly much here that we think is overly telling — besides (of course) the fact that paper rules.

Study finds people want more from their Kindles, less from their newspapers originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 30 Jan 2010 22:25:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Become a Test Pilot: Mozilla Wants Your Help To Make Firefox Better

If you want to help Mozilla to make Firefox better but you are not a developer, here is your chance. Earlier this year, Mozilla announced the launch of Test Pilot, the organization’s new distributed usability lab. Test pilots will be enlisted in various usability tests and will be some of the first to see some of Mozilla’s ideas for new user interfaces and Mozilla Labs products. We first wrote about Test Pilot when it was just a “still-in concept platform.” Now, however, you can download the Test Pilot add-on for Firefox 3.5 here and begin to help Mozilla make Firefox even better.

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Editor’s note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we’ll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year – and ahead to what next year holds – we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It’s not just a best-of list, it’s also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

First Tests Are Coming Soon

For now, Mozilla will start the program with a survey that aims to get a better understanding of who is joining the Test Pilot community. The first actual tests should arrive soon after this first survey is complete.

Mozilla stresses that it will take its users’ privacy seriously. Participants have to opt-in and data will be stored in anonymous form. Only aggregate test data will be made available to the public.

Overall, this looks like a great project. Usability studies tend to be slow and costly, yet with Test Pilot, Mozilla will be able to quickly enlist feedback about new design ideas from its large community of users.

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Things Have Changed: Facebook to Open Public Messages to Search

Facebook began as a place for college connections, secluded from the prying eyes of the outside world, but today that era is officially over. Major Facebook investor Microsoft announced this afternoon at the Web 2.0 Summit that it has closed deals to bring status messages from both Twitter and Facebook into the search results of Bing.com. Twitter search is live now, Facebook is forthcoming.

Facebook is opening up to a search engine – that’s very big news. Only content from accounts marked public will be indexed by Bing, but it’s a sea change none the less. Facebook has an explicit, acknowledged agenda to make more people comfortable sharing more information publicly – once they do, that information will be searchable on Bing. This ‘aint your big sister’s Facebook anymore.

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Facebook opened on-site search across user profiles and messages late this summer. The company has been careful to only expose information from people who have opted-out of their own default privacy settings and we don’t expect this Bing deal to be any different. While some people like Facebook because of the privacy settings, a growing number of users like it for the promotional and networking advantages that can be maximized with a public profile.

You don’t want to be public with your Facebooking? Facebook will respect that, but the company does hope you’ll change your mind.

Facebook status messages used to be entirely closed to outside search engines – and now they will not be. Even these public search results won’t be full participants in the open web, though. It’s very unlikely that Bing will be allowed to cache the Facebook messages it serves up. Facebook prohibits other software from keeping user data in cache because the company says users must be allowed to change privacy settings and have those reflected everywhere around the web that Facebook data could be found. That’s an unusual arrangement for a search engine. It breaks one of the fundamental laws of the internet – that what you publish publicly once is public forever.

Will the company make a similar deal with Google? Probably not. Twitter may have gone both ways, but Facebook’s long term ambitions to challenge Google and the Microsoft backing could mean that the world’s leading search engine will never be allowed to index the world’s leading social network.

Say hello to the new Facebook, now a partial player in one public part of the rest of the web.

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Licensing pact a big step towards fixing EU music stores

Major members of the online music industry, including iTunes and Amazon, have signed an agreement with the European Commission to work towards more even and widespread music distribution across all of Europe. As part of the agreement, the music industry intends to do away with the limitations of the current licensing system so that music fans can have greater choice and clear usage rights, no matter where they are in Europe.

The agreement came after the fourth Roundtable on the Online Distribution of Music held Monday by Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes. Participants included Amazon, BEUC, EMI, iTunes, Nokia, PRS for Music, SACEM, STIM, and Universal. It was the first time the music industry has managed to agree on a common roadmap in Europe, which has been frustratingly segmented for years thanks to outdated licensing and rights practices in the EU.

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What do you do after you start Twitter? Invent a credit card reader.

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Hardware, Retail, Odds and ends, iPhone, iPod touch

If you were Jack Dorsey, one of the co-founders and current chairman of Twitter, you’d want to think about something else big to follow up on your huge success.

While it doesn’t sound like anything groundbreaking, Dorsey’s new company Square is developing a tiny white cube (see photo above) that plugs into the headphone jack on either an iPhone or iPod touch. The cube is a credit card reader, something missing from all of those credit card apps currently in the iTunes App Store.

The Square iPhone Payment System consists of the reader and an app. After a card swipe, the customer uses a finger to sign the iPod touch or iPhone, one of the participants in the transaction enters the customer’s email address, and a receipt with the location of the transaction, the signature, and other standard information is emailed to the customer.

While most online journalists are anticipating that this device and software are going to be used in retail (can you say Apple Store?), I think Dorsey has bigger ideas – let’s face it, the guy doesn’t think small. So why not make it possible for anyone with an iPhone or iPod touch to be able to accept credit cards for payments? Word has it that the card reader’s manufacturing price will be as low as US$0.40, which means that Square could give away the readers and still make money on the transaction fees.

[via Engadget]

TUAWWhat do you do after you start Twitter? Invent a credit card reader. originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 19 Oct 2009 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google Experiments With Product Ads In Search Results

Over the last few weeks Google has apparently started rolling out a new set of advertising formats on its search results page, introducing product listings that include price and other details in the Sponsored Links sidebar. For example, a query for “shoes” is displaying a list of different shoe models, their prices, and retailers directly within the search results, as opposed to the the more general text links we’ve grown accustomed to, which lack such information. Google is also apparently testing these ads with photos alongside the product listings for some queries.

Our tipster says that he’s only seeing the new ads in the developer version of Chrome, but I’m seeing them as well in Safari, though some TechCrunch staff aren’t seeing them in any browser. Google is always switching up ad placement and formats in various bucket tests, some of which are browser-specific, so the inconsistency isn’t surprising.

The new formats are likely part of Google’s Product Ads program, which the company announced back in June. The program allows participants in the Google Affiliate Network to place actual product listings in their ads, complete with photos in some cases. Given the limited distribution of the ads we’re seeing, it appears that Product Ads are still in beta.

Google has apparently been testing these ads for some time now — PM Digital noticed similar ads last month.

Thanks to Ben for the tip.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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