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It may now be obscured by all the hoopla surrounding Facebook’s going public, but back in November the popular user-generated review site, Yelp, filed to go public and planned to raise $100 million ahead of its IPO (at an expected $1 to $2 billion valuation). On Friday, Yelp filed an amended S-1 that shows that the company plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “YELP.”

But, of perhaps greater interest to those following Yelp’s trajectory is the fact that the third amendment to the company’s S-1 includes full-year financials for 2011, showing that, while the company’s net revenues have continued to rise exponentially since 2009, it was operating at a much bigger loss in 2011 than in prior years. Yelp’s total revenues in 2011 were $83.2 million, up 74.6 percent from $47.7 million in 2010 (and 25.8 million in 2009), but net losses were up to $16.9 million in 2011 — a 74.2 percent increase from a net loss of $9.5 million in 2010. (Adjusted EBITDA losses were $1.1 million.)

The amended S-1 also shows some adjustments in Yelp’s traffic for 2011, as it saw 65.7 million unique monthly visitors for the year (with 5.7 million uniques on mobile), up from 39.3 million in 2010. Yelp users left 24.8 million reviews in 2011, up from 15.1 million in 2010.

As to Yelp’s increasing net losses, most of that was incurred from sales, marketing, and product development-related expenses, as sales and marketing costs increased 61 percent to $54.5 million in 2011. Product development costs, in turn, rose 77 percent to $11.6 million, up from $6.5 million in 2010. Of course, revenues increased right along with losses, jumping to $83.2 million, with the majority of revenues coming from local advertising, which accounted for approximately 70 percent, or $58.4 million, of that total.

Yelp was founded Jeremy Stoppelman, a former PayPal exec, in 2004, and follows the public debuts of both Groupon and Zynga late last year, along with the announced IPO of Facebook last week. Yelp may be operating in the red, but it’s not alone, joining the likes of Groupon and LivingSocial. It’s not unusual for fast-growing companies like these to operate at a loss early on their growth, spending big money on acquiring talent and competitors, or getting their message out through advertising.

In terms of the latter company, Amazon’s updated filing with the SEC recently revealed that LivingSocial had sustained $558 million in losses in 2011, which mostly came from acquisitions, stock compensations, and marketing.

As for Yelp, Goldman Sachs is leading the IPO, with Citigroup and Jefferies pitching in on management of the deal.

Back in 2009, my colleague MG Siegler wrote a brilliant piece titled ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid,‘ which delved into how having a simple and easy to use product is a key formula for winning in the consumer tech space. A few days ago, Greylock Partner John Lilly echoed MG’s thoughts, explaining that simplicity is quite simply very hard to beat. While this doctrine has been applied to consumer technology products like Dropbox, Gmail, Twitter and most famously, Apple; reinforcing simplicity in the product thought process is becoming an ever-present part of enterprise technology as well.

Almost every pitch I receive for an enterprise product, whether it be in the business intelligence, big data, storage, or even virtualization space, includes the key phrase, “this product is extremely simple to use.” Part of this is the fact that many of these products are based in the cloud, which adds to the whole consumerization of the enterprise trend that is taking place.

But the enterprise is taking this a step further than just putting applications in the cloud when it comes to actual design and ease of use in the user experience. Take cloud storage giant Box.net, for example. The startup and its CEO Aaron Levie have been preaching simplicity in the enterprise for some time now. As Levie writes, complexity “serves as an easy – but ultimately blameless – scapegoat for failed deployments and lagging user adoption.”

Box’s drag and drop interface, which allows users to simply store and save files, avoids the complexity of many legacy options. The UI is clean, uncluttered and interestingly, Box hasn’t been in any rush to add bells and whistles to the product besides security and collaboration features. In fact much of the complexity exists behind the product, where the user doesn’t even interact.

Another area where simplicity is ruling is business intelligence. Splunk, which just filed its S-1 for an IPO, has been able to make a real business out of simplifying IT logs. Newcomer to the space, Domo, also promises a dead-simple interface for analyzing massive amounts of IT data.

Accel partner Ping Li agrees that the best enterprise applications in today’s world hide the complexity of the business processes running on the backend. He believes that while Apple has influenced  consumer technology in the design and product areas, the iPhone and iPad creator is also having a big impact on the enterprise. “Steve Jobs made phones and computers easy to use, and we’re seeing the Apple-effect bring simplicity into the enterprise,’ he explains. Li points out that the iPhone and iPad are complex products when it comes to the internal hardware components but on the exterior, are incredibly simple to use.

PandoDaily’s Sarah Lacy recently wrote, there’s a new guard of entrepreneurs who are starting enterprise companies. Sarah says the ‘consumer kids’ have started creating enterprise companies, and are part of the consumerization of the enterprise. And these entrepreneurs are approaching the product for a simpler, more user-friendly point of view.

But developing these basic UIs for complex problems in the enterprise is a huge challenge. As Lilly writes, “It’s devilishly tough to build complex systems like software that actually show as simple interactions.” It’s something that Apple has mastered, and a number of enterprise companies are starting to catch on. Startups like WibiData, GoodData, and Code 42 are providing simple ways for enterprises to perform a variety of important and in-depth functions on the back-end, such as analyzing user data for personalization efforts, or developing hybrid storage solutions.

We’re also going to see more and more startups that are tackling even more complex enterprise interactions like virtualization, and creating extremely simple ways to take care of these problems.

Enterprise software is by its nature complex, but the user interface doesn’t need to be. We are all consumers of information, whether at work or at home. Any designing software needs to think about how to make it a joy to use and get people to use it repeatedly. Keep it simple, and we’ll keep coming back.

Photo credit/Flickr/bjornmeansbear

Facebook’s late-comer HTML5 mobile app platform lags way behind the Apple App Store and Android Marketplace. Yesterday I spotted Facebook’s latest effort to catch up — a test showing bookmarks for third-party applications at the top of the mobile news feed. Currently, Facebook buries HTML5 app bookmarks at the bottom of its mobile site’s pull-out navigation menu, and only shows them in the iOS or Android Facebook app’s search bar.

Placing them much more prominently atop the mobile home page could increase engagement — the first step in attracting developers to the platform and earning money on in-app purchases.

The Facebook mobile app platform launched in October to help the social network start monetizing mobile through in-app payments on which it collects a 30% tax. Apps run through an internal web browser within its iOS and Android apps, allowing it to circumvent Apple and Google’s tax.

However, the platform hasn’t gained serious traction with developers or users, and that’s a serious risk the company noted in its S-1 filing to go pulbic. Some developers don’t want to re-fork production to support HTML5 in addition to iOS and the various Android versions, at least not until Facebook’s platform is a proven money maker. HTML5 also needs time to mature before it can handle the most advanced native apps.

With limited choice, and no ads to promote third-party apps within Facebook’s own mobile apps and HTML5 site, users aren’t installing them in the first place. Since bookmarks for the HTML5 apps are only found at the bottom of the Facebook mobile site’s nav menu, and have to be located through the search bar in the Facebook iOS and and Android apps, users aren’t reengaging with HTML5 apps either.

But Facebook has been pulling its punches. It has hundreds of millions of daily active mobile users who first see the news feed where these bookmarks are being tested. Facebook says similarly styled bookmarks on the web interface’s games canvas page have been proven to drive traffic.

The small percentage of m.facebook.com and Facebook for iPhone users in the test could click bookmark and after some confusing lag an internal browser would launch Words With Friends, The Washington Post Social Reader, CityVille Express, Warimals, or another game or app. The test may have run on the Facebook for Android app as well.

Facebook is likely testing to see if users click these bookmarks, and if their presence decreases news feed engagement or session length. If Facebook can get more eyeballs on third-party app bookmarks without degrading the user experience, it may have found a way to leverage its natural assets to begin the steep uphill battle against Apple and Google’s mobile platforms.

Editor’s Note: This post is written by guest author Peter Csathy, who is President & CEO of online video enabler and transcoding company Sorenson Media. Previously, he served as President & COO of online music pioneer Musicmatch. Thus, the following is written from the perspective of a long-time media executive, and meant to be a conversation-starter. Csathy blogs at Digital Media Update.

Apple’s all-in-one physical flat-screen iTV is coming, make no mistake. And, when it does, it will represent Apple’s attempt to reinvent the television experience in much the same way it did for music. But, while media execs were hopelessly naive in Apple’s presence back then, they feel they are ready this time. They are determined not to let Apple rule the premium online video world like they did (and still do) for online music. The question is, do they have the will?

Apple will, of course, follow its established playbook, which most CE companies inexplicably still do not follow, and seamlessly marry its beautiful hardware (the iTV) with its underlying software and services (in this case, movies and television) in the same way it did with music via the iPod and iTunes. Apple’s goal is to be the center of the online movie and television universe for consumers (just like it is for music). Yes, content is king to Apple, but only because content serves as the Trojan Horse consumers ride into Apple’s kingdom of riches (initially Macs and iPods, and later iPhones, iPads and the inevitable iTV).

Ay, but there’s the rub. The content king-makers — motion picture and television studio execs — now know this. They have seen this movie before, and this time they are determined to monetize content more directly for content sake – for themselves. Apple transformed itself into the #1 most valuable global company and juggernaut that we see today precisely because those media execs handed Apple the keys to unlock music value in the online world.

Steve Jobs wooed them with his charms, pitched a great story, and established the rules of the online music licensing game. Apple’s massive growth in the past decade all started there with its iPod-iTunes 1-2 knockout punch. That, in turn, led to the resurgence of Macs, which led to the iPhone, then the iPad. Apple would be a very different company today if didn’t get the music it needed 10 years ago.

And, how did Jobs’ playbook work out for the labels and musicians? Not so well. Online music sales (and royalties) were an asterisk next to iPod sales. Don’t get me wrong. Rampant piracy — and the music industry’s misplaced attack strategy — destroyed significant content value. Nevertheless, the music industry’s negotiations with Jobs one decade ago resulted in a massive transfer of value and wealth to Apple.

So, what lessons have media executives learned from this past decade?

Lesson #1 — Dictate the Rules of the Game, Rather Than Have Them Dictated to You.

Music execs were on their heels reeling in fear when Jobs approached them a decade ago with the promise of iTunes. They had no real experience with the Internet. They certainly had no experience with technology (many still do not) – and how it could be used for both good and evil. Piracy was rampant. Napster ruled the day (the bad one, not the good one). Kazaa’s Niklas Zennstrom was public enemy #1 (now of course he is a media insider with Skype, Joost and others). The music industry was understandably panicked.

Jobs promised a way out – under three conditions. First, Apple must be able to sell individual tracks unbundled from albums. Second, its price for those unbundled tracks must be $.99 each. Third, Apple must define and control the entire online music experience. The music industry capitulated, and these 3 commandments are fundamental rules of the game that still largely rule the day.

Well, those rules haven’t worked out too well for music creators and owners. Lesson learned. So, one decade later, media execs are striving to proactively dictate the value of their content and support multiple online experiences and business models. But, even now, they frequently significantly under-value their content. More on that later.

Lesson #2 — Never Again Put Too Much Power in the Hands of One Distributor.

Prior to iTunes, piracy was rampant, and only relatively small players (including my former company, Musicmatch) played legitimately in the online music world. Amid this backdrop, media execs empowered Apple to be the first and only established online music source and experience. As a result, iTunes incredibly still commands 60-70% of all online music sales. That represents incredible power in the hands of one. It represents a downright monopoly.

Media execs are determined not to allow that kind of power in the hands of any single player in the online video world. They instead are committed to fostering an eco-system of as many legitimate distributors as possible. They actively license their prized motion picture and television assets to all those willing to pay.

That’s why we already have myriad established behemoths in the premium online video game. We have Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Google/YouTube, Comcast. The list goes on and on. Apple too is on that list, but it is behind the curve this time. Those same media execs who ceded control to Apple ten years ago have refused, thus far, to broadly license their crown jewels on Apple’s terms. But Apple — or more accurately, Apple’s massive hoards of cash – can be very persuasive. More on that later.

Lesson #3 — License Broadly & Make the Licensing Landscape as Confusing and Opaque as Possible.

Media execs aren’t panicked this time. They have a decade of learning under their belts. Yes, piracy continues to be rampant, but they now understand that it cannot simply be litigated into oblivion. The best defense truly is a better offense. Support better customer experiences, make your content available broadly to those legitimate distributors willing to pay, and experiment with business models and terms.

That’s why we have over-the-top (OTT) “Internet TV” models in which content is monetized via paid downloads, subscriptions, and ads. We also have big cable’s “TV Everywhere” models in which consumers must continue to pay their monthly cable fees. And, coming soon, Google and others will become virtual cable operators that will also distribute live linear programming like ESPN. Apple too wants to be on that “virtual MSO” list, because that is the kind of premium content that ultimately moves mountains of consumers. Case in point: DirecTV’s “NFL Package.”

This melange is great for the studios. No two content licensing deals are the same. Each negotiation takes place in a black box. No clarity. No certainty. Just the way media execs like it (I know, I have been there). Now THAT’s power! Right? Up to a point. More on that later.

Lesson #4 — Be Audacious — After All, Content is King.

Jobs ultimately taught music execs one fundamental truth – that content is THE key to unlock tremendous value online. The corollary to this is that without content, value is lost. That’s why all the deep-pocketed tech titans are lining up for a chance to play in the premium online video game. Just as it is for Apple, premium online video distribution is strategically central to their business. Apple? Sell its hardware. Amazon? Sell more goods and services. Google? Sell more ads. Comcast? Hold onto those cable subscriptions. Netflix? Survive!

These players have inked a steady stream of significant licensing deals just in the past few months, the financial terms of which are almost never disclosed (remember, just the way the studios like it). But, one telling deal’s terms did slip out – Netflix agreed to shell out nearly $1 billion to stream shows from the CW Network. Think about that – if the CW can command those kind of numbers today, think about the price tag for real “premium” content like ESPN. And, we are still in the early innings of this premium online video game.

Apple – with its head-spinning $100 billion war chest – is a lock to win (or at least be a massive winner in) the online video game, right? Most likely, the answer is yes. The inevitable iTVs will fly off the shelves. But, Apple isn’t alone this time. It is playing on a crowded field with other deep-pocketed and committed players (including CE guys like Samsung). Even more importantly, to really hit it out of the park, Apple’s coming iTV must be an experience. That means Apple must offer an extremely deep pool of compelling video content from the start (including sacred programming like ESPN). Otherwise, consumers will find holes, get frustrated, and look to fill those holes with programming offered by others.

Each frustrated customer represents real significant loss, which is especially magnified in Apple’s case because of its closed product eco-system. For Apple, it’s not just about a single product sale (like an iTV). That sale, instead, marks the beginning or continuation of a long-term lucrative purchase relationship, which is the key driver of Apple’s stratospheric growth. That’s why Apple will be willing to strike very different content licensing deals with media execs this time around.

Of course, Apple doesn’t control the content – the studios do. So, who really holds the cards here? Will the studios be as audacious as Steve Jobs was one decade earlier and demand terms that they believe reflect the true value their content creates for distributors over time? In Apple’s case, one truly audacious idea could be to seek a share of revenue for every iTV sold. Remember, not every license deal must be the same. Value means very different things to different players. If Apple, or any other online distributor, refuses to play, then they lose out. No soup for you! There are many others (including the studios themselves), but only one ESPN!

Or, will media execs instead go for the quick-fix of easy money? After all it’s hard to say “no” to someone writing a big check. If they do go this instant gratification route (which is more consistent with their DNA), at least they should realize that their prized motion picture and television assets will be worth significantly more than they think in the online world over time. Avoid long-term deals!

So, yes, media execs have learned their lessons well. Content is, in fact, king. Apple will continue to wear the crown, however, unless media companies have the will and creativity to take it back. After all, Apple made $46.3 billion this past quarter alone, a number that dwarfs global motion picture box office receipts for the entire year. Apple could buy Hollywood. But, will Hollywood let it?

Excerpt image from SoulInTheMachine.com

U.S. viewers can watch Sunday's Super Bowl on either their Macs or their iPad.

Editor’s Note: This guest post is written by Nir Eyal (@nireyal), a founder of two startups and an advisor to several Bay Area incubators. Nir blogs about technology and behavior design at nirandfar.com.

Reading Leena Rao’s recent article on Techcrunch about the personalization revolution, you get the sense that the tech world is waiting for a bus that isn’t coming. Rao quotes well-known industry experts and luminaries describing what needs to happen for e-commerce to finally realize the promise of personalized shopping, a future where online retailers predict what you’ll want to buy before you know yourself.

Ironically, Rao and her pundits are missing the zooming racecar that’s speeding by them as they wait for the personalization bus to arrive. That racecar is Pinterest and the new breed of startups marking the beginning of what I call the “Curated Web.”

The promise of personalized e-commerce began over 10 years ago with technology pioneered at Amazon. It was then that the mental dye was cast for what eCommerce personalization would look like, an algorithmic solution for matching customer to products. Web watchers came to expect that someday all online retailers would have such algorithms on their sites and the dream of personalized
commerce would finally be realized.

For over a decade, startups took their best shot at making this apparition a reality. Companies like Hunch tackled the data collection piece of the equation, asking users endless survey questions to determine their tastes and preferences. Google’s Boutiques.com tried to crack the challenges of structuring the data associated with personalized shopping recommendations. Ultimately, these attempts failed.

In September, Google shut down Boutiques.com and the founders of Hunch sold their company to eBay, an outcome far short of their IPO hopes. Previous attempts at eCommerce personalization were unsuccessful because those involved failed to realize they were missing one key element, the interface. Curated Web companies are defined by their ability to use new interfaces to collect and structure data better then previous algorithmic solutions.

Users Want it All

While the tech world waits patiently, expecting the solution to e-commerce personalization to look like Amazon ported to other online retailers, “Curated Web” companies like Pinterest are changing the game by changing the interface. Pinterest will be the first company to nail eCommerce personalization because they understand the importance of having an interface, which matches what the user is there to do, discover stuff they like from across the web. Pinterest has cracked personalization right under everyone’s nose by doing the two things Rao says have yet-to-be invented, data collection and data structuring.

Collecting Data, One Pin at a Time.

Pinterest is becoming the web’s personalized mail-order catalog. Each user is presented with a one-of-a-kind visual interface based on their tastes. They are presented with any product, from any retailer, anywhere in the world. The items they see are curated through people and topics they’ve identified as interesting and what is shown to them improves the more they interact with it. Every time they pin, re-pin, like, or comment on an object, the relevancy of the products displayed on their magic catalog improves. This is what personalization looks like, effortless, simple, social and fun. It’s the interface, stupid.

“Big deal?” you say. “Facebook can do this!” No, they can’t. Social media is for selectively sharing information about you and Facebook is built for presenting yourself in the way you want to be seen by others. Facebook is, by design, about creating a network of relationships and sharing with them selectively. This brings up all kinds of privacy concerns, which reduce the flow of content creation and sharing to limited circles (Yes, I said “circles.” Don’t even try it, Google).

Pinterest has no such restrictions. Pins are inherently open and there is no expectation that anything shared is private. It’s a community built on individuals acting in their own self-interest to capture and collect things that interest them. Facebook and Google+ are just not the right interfaces for capturing and collecting products, and attempting to discover new products amid the newsfeed clutter is hopeless.

Making Sense of the Data

To some, the rise of the Facebook “like graph” foretold a personalized future, where retailers could utilize data collected from what users “like” to serve targeted recommendations. Here, Rao is spot on about why Facebook fails to provide useful data on users’ tastes; it lacks structure.

What does it mean if I “like” something on Facebook? Not much. “Liking” a brand or even a specific product, doesn’t provide useful information. If I “like” Babies’R’Us, does that mean I like the brand, a specific outlet, a product I found there, or am I just hoping to get a coupon? From a personalization perspective, it’s pretty low-value stuff. There is no structure to correlate my actual likes with my Facebook “likes”.

However, Pinterest solves the data structure problem brilliantly. You’d think they’d need some fancy photo recognition technology to tag a handbag by color, make, and model, but I doubt they have any such technology. Pinterest doesn’t even try to solve the data structure problem because they don’t have to.

Again, it’s the interface stupid. By presenting users with a dynamic catalog, and tasking users with the job of deciding whose tastes they’d like to follow, structuring image data becomes irrelevant. Pinterest simply has to make sure the magic catalog appears, tailored to each user’s stated preferences. It’s doesn’t matter if Pinterest knows a thing about what’s in each image on a pin board; what maters is that it’s curated by the user and the user likes what they see. If they like the products, they’ll buy them, and Pinterest laughs all the way to the bank.

So while the rest of the web is waiting for the personalization bus to arrive, Pinterest, and perhaps a few other fast-moving Curated Web companies, will be far ahead. It’s clear, given Pinterest’s astounding growth that e-commerce personalization is here to stay, even if it looks nothing like what you imagined.

Note: I have no affiliation or investment in any company mentioned in this post.

Excerpt image from ClickeCommerce.com

We went to see The Artist last night. I didn’t want to go; if God wanted silent movies he wouldn’t have invented sound, etc. And black and white to boot. Making a black and white 3D movie, maybe. But inexorably the Oscars loom, and the last thing I want is to endure the withering gaze of my long-suffering wife when it wins Best Picture without us having seen it.

Of course it turned out to be great. And in the process, it showed some leg about today’s movies that could be useful to the technology community. Namely, that purpose trumps moral ambiguity. Take Google’s trampling of our so-called digital rights, or more precisely our sensibilities, with a callous land grab of its search monopoly. The outrage is appropriate: by inserting Google + results into search they’re shoving the social network down our throat in direct contradiction to previous promises about doing no evil.

The Artist parades its conceit at every turn of its familiar romance. We’re doing this no sound thing for you because it’s good for you. Things will work out fine. The dog needs no dialogue. The music tells you what to feel. It’s already half over, and besides, it’s already better than the last five movies you’ve seen.

Google Search + parades its conceit at every turn. It’s free, so we can improve it any way we want. We’re already reading everything you write in Gmail, so now we’re blurring the metadata into one big data pool so we can better read your mind and sell the results back to marketers. It’s OK because Facebook already does this. We’d add all the other networks if they would just let us have their data too. And besides, we’re doing this.

It’s really quite brilliant. Here’s all this noise about user rights to data. Thanks, Mark Zuckerberg, for blazing the trail with rolling updates, partial rollbacks, and commandeering of key language elements. “The kids of today are not worried about privacy. They want to share.” And thanks, Twitter, for dangling global realtime alerts and then locking the door. With competitors like these guys, who needs friends? We can do anything we want and we are.

Why now? Is it another version of Microsoft embedding the browser in Windows to have something to give up while protecting Office and a breakup of the company? What is Google’s real motive in jettisoning the illusion of openness and what’s good for the user? I think it’s less Orwellian and more mundane: they think they can get away with it. I think they can, too.

Part of the reason is they are heading off a Google Spring by creating their own filter of social signals. Search is giving way to predictive caching of answers to questions you haven’t yet thought of, a business process layer whose signature is becoming visible via @mentions and private messages. Remember Gmail and Gchat the next time you look for someone. What Google has done is to decouple content from metadata. They may not use the messages, but the signature of relationships will do just fine, thank you.

Very early in The Artist, in a very funny series of takes in a movie within the movie, the protagonist meets his match on the dance floor. The camera work is precise, waiting for the slate (minus the clapboard – no sound), then this odd moment where you see the Actor steel himself for the role, then almost zen like turn and swim into the scene with the resolute look of the professional. After three or four of these takes, you begin to be transformed into the craft and art of it. Like the bridge in a Beatles song that never returns, you crave for it until the next take. From that point on you realize the Actor and Director are in perfect sync, that each scene and each element of each scene is staged for maximum precision of effect.

Once this realization takes hold, the technology is no longer evident. What was established as silent becomes a tableau where we fill in the colors, the sounds, the dialogue, and the effect it has on us. We are no longer the audience, but now empowered as the director, the actors, the stagehands, the writers, the musicians, all conducted by us as the arbiters of meaning. Silently, invisibly, we change places with the people on the screen.

Whether Google has performed the same magic is to be seen. The power play of erasing the old rules seems arbitrary and calculating, but if somehow the move invigorates Google + conversations and drags Facebook and Twitter into the game, the result will indeed serve users. A good track service and @mention alert mechanism would make the hostage service from Twitter irrelevant, and the realtime conversations more than an adequate replacement for the all-but-shuttered FriendFeed.

In a way those orphaned services are social media’s silent movies, superseded in the rush to determine monetization and protect business models yet to be thought of. It’s easy to see the Google moves as clumsy and sinister, but the problem then is replacing them with some new white hat. Just because we got sound and color and digital effects doesn’t mean that stories are better, studios are braver, or good small shows find audiences.

And whether Jack or Ev or Biz or Doc or Dave runs Twitter won’t change things all that much. Whether Google games their own system won’t determine whether we love it or not. What will make a difference is how we perceive the reality of these back lots, how we flesh out the scenes with wit and rhythm, the precision that defines a calculated leap into the unknown or a pratfall. In this ballet of imbeciles and grifters, we still have to choose our friends and protect our families. It’s not up to Google to not be evil. It’s up to us.

This guest post was written by Richard Price, founder and CEO of Academia.edu — a site that serves as a platform for academics to share their research papers and to interact with each other.

Instant distribution

Many academics are excited about the future of instant distribution of research. Right now the time lag between finishing a paper, and the relevant worldwide research community seeing it, is between 6 months and 2 years. This is because during that time, the paper is being peer reviewed, and peer review takes an incredibly long time. 2 years is roughly how long it used to take to send a letter abroad 300 years ago.

Many platforms are springing up which enable research distribution to be instant, so that the time lag between finishing a paper, and everyone in the relevant research community worldwide seeing it, is measured in hours and days, rather than months and years. Some of the strong platforms are Academia.edu, arXiv, Mendeley, ResearchGate and SSRN.

What about peer review?

One question many academics have is: in a future where research is distributed instantly, what happens to peer review? Will this be a world where junk gets out, and there is no way to distinguish between good and bad research?

Content discovery on the web

Instant distribution is a characteristic of web content, and the web has thrived without a system of formal peer review in place. No-one thinks that the web would be enhanced by a panel of formal peer reviewers who verify each piece of content before it was allowed to be posted on the web.

The web has thrived because powerful discovery systems have sprung up that separate the wheat from the chaff for users. The main two systems that people use to discover content on the web are:

• Search engines (Google, Bing)
• Social platforms (mainly sites like Facebook and Twitter, but also generic communication platforms like email, IM etc)

Both search engines and social platforms are peer review systems in different ways. One can think of these two systems as “Crowd Review” and “Social Review” respectively:

• Crowd Review: Google’s PageRank algorithm looks at the link structure of the entire web, and extracts a number (PageRank) that represents how positively the web thinks about a particular website.
• Social Review: Twitter and Facebook show you links that have been shared explicitly by your friends, and people you follow.

One can think of the peer review system in the journal industry as “two person review”:

• Two Person review: Two people are selected to review the paper on behalf of the entire possible audience for that paper.

The drawbacks of the Two Person review process are that it is:

• expensive: $8 billion a year is spent on subscriptions to journals, which is money that could be spent on more research.
• slow: the Two Person review process takes about 6 months to 2 years to complete, sometimes more.
•  of questionable quality: the two people who are selected as peer reviewers may be biased against the paper, or unqualified, or just in a bad mood, when reviewing it.
•  unchanging: the judgement is fixed, and doesn’t change as the impact of the paper changes
•  a lot of work for the reviewers: it takes a lot of time to review a paper, and the review is not published, so reviewer doesn’t receive credit for their work.

More and more, academics are discovering research papers nowadays via the web, and in particular, via search engines and social platforms:

• Search engines: Google, Google Scholar, Pubmed
• Social platforms: Academia.edu, arXiv, Mendeley, ResearchGate, blogs, conversations with colleagues over email or IM, Facebook and Twitter.

As research distribution has moved to the web mostly, so the discovery engines for research content are the same as those for general web content. The peer review mechanism is evolving from The Two Person review process to the Crowd Review process, and the Social Review process.

But has the research been done to a high standard?

People often say that the formal peer review process helps ensure that all the accessible research is above a certain minimum quality. The fear is that if this quality floor was removed, things would start falling apart: an academic would be reading a paper, and would have no idea whether to trust it or not.

The experience of the web is that this fear is over-blown. There is no quality floor for content on the web. There is bad content on the web, and there is great content. The job of search engines and social platforms is to ensure that the content that you discover, either via Google or Facebook, is of the good kind. The success of the web shows that the discovery engines do a good job generally.

Discovery and credit systems are powered by the same metrics

Peer review in the journal industry has historically played another interesting role, other than powering research discovery. It has helped an academic build up academic credit, which is required to get grants, and get jobs. People on hiring and grant committees have historically focused on how many peer reviewed publications an academic has in order to get a sense of the academic’s level of achievement, and in order to see how deserving the academic is of the grant or job in question.

The peer review system has historically played this dual role, in powering both the discovery system and the credit system, because ultimately research discovery and research credit are about the same issue: which is the good research? Whichever systems are good at answering that question will drive both the discovery system and the credit system.

One new metric of academic credit that has emerged over the last few years is the citation count. Google Scholar makes citation counts public for papers, and so now everyone can see them easily. Citations between papers are like links between websites, and citation counts are an instance of the Crowd Review process.

Legend has it that Larry Page came up with the idea of PageRank after reflecting on the analogy between citations and links. Citation counts nowadays play the dual role of driving discovery on Google Scholar, as they determine the ordering of the search results, and help to determine academic credit.

Academic credit from social platforms

In the case of social platforms, the metric that drives discovery is how much interaction there is with your content on the social platform in question. Examples of such interaction include:

• numbers of followers you have
• the number of times your content is shared, liked, commented on, viewed.

These metrics show how much interest there is in your papers, and how widely they are read right now, and thus provide a sense of their level of impact.

One drawback of citation counts as a metric of academic credit is that they are a lagging indicator, in that they take a while to build up. If you publish a paper now, it is going to take several years for a body of papers to emerge that cite your paper. This leads to academics experiencing a credit gap, where papers they have published in the last 3-4 years hardly impact their academic credit.

The advantage of the kinds of metrics that social platforms like Academia.edu, Mendeley, and SSRN provide is that they are real time, and they fill this credit gap. Academics are increasingly including these real time metrics in their applications for jobs and for grants. The competition for jobs, and grants is intense, and having more data that speaks to the impact of your work helps.

Funding bodies are also eager to see more data about the impact of research, as it helps them make better decisions.

Instant Distribution and Peer Review

The prospect of instant distribution of research is tremendously exciting. If you can tap the global brain of your research community in effectively close to real time, as opposed to waiting 6 months to 24 months to distribute your ideas, there could be a wonderful acceleration in the rate of idea generation.

The web has shown that you can take out this 6 month to 24 month distribution delay, which occurs when research is undergoing the Two Person peer review process, and see high quality filtering of content done by new peer review mechanisms, Crowd Review and Social Review, which are faster, cheaper, and more personalized.

The web is also an incredible place for new ideas to be invented and to take hold. No doubt new peer review mechanisms will emerge in the future that will advance beyond Crowd Review and Social Review.

The future of easy home energy monitoring may be a little bit closer, thanks to a government initiative designed to allow consumers direct access to their energy consumption data.

The White House’s new Green Button gives utilities a way to simplify and standardize sharing usage statistics with their customers via a one-click download. Two California providers, Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric, already launched the feature, adding what is literally a green button to their websites. Utility companies in other regions are expected to implement it within the next year. Customers can click the button to download their personal usage information in one place.

The interesting aspect isn’t so much in the download itself, but what can be done with it. Federal officials hope this kind of data liberation will inspire developers to build apps and services that will help customers track and reduce their energy consumption. One study showed that subjects who were given access to their data reduced their usage by 8.7% just by tracking it. At scale, this could mean an annual savings of $32 billon per year on the country’s annual $369 billion power bill.

The Green Button was inspired by the government’s success with its Blue Button initiative, which allows veterans instant access to their health care data.

This is a guest post by Ryan Spoon (@ryanspoon), a principal at Polaris Ventures. Read more about Ryan on his blog at ryanspoon.com.

As an investor, I’ve seen hundreds of mobile application pitches. And as a consumer, I’ve downloaded hundreds more – some out of curiosity and others in the hope that I’ll find something so useful and exciting that I’ll make room for it on my iPhone’s home screen.

From both perspectives, I am rarely excited by download numbers. What gets my attention is engagement: how frequently an application is used and how engaged those users are. This ultimately is the barometer for an application’s utility and/or strength of community. And if either of those two factors are strong, growth will certainly come. Just ask Instagram, Evernote, LogMeIn and others.

Creating great mobile experiences requires dedication to building product specifically for mobile. It sounds obvious, but it’s so often overlooked. Mobile users have different needs, desires and environments; and as the application creator, you have different opportunities to create utility and engagement.  With that in mind – and with the help of my former eBay colleague and Dogpatch Labs resident, Rob Abbott (founder of EGG HAUS and Critiq), we’ve put together 7 design guidelines to consider when building for mobile.

Just like the presentations on leveraging Facebook (both on-Facebook.com and off-Facebook) and Twitter, success comes from building meaningful experiences that are honest to the native environments.

View this document on Scribd

Now that Facebook is preparing the biggest tech IPO in history, it is possible to compare its financials and potential market value to Google’s when it went public. At first glance, all of Facebook’s numbers look bigger. Its pre-IPO revenues of $3.7 billion in 2011 are more than two and a half times larger than Google’s 2003 revenues of $1.5 billion (Google’s IPO was in 2004). Facebook’s $1 billion in profits is ten times larger than Google’s pre-IPO profits of $106 million. And its expected market cap of between $85 billion and $100 billion will dwarf Google’s IPO market cap of $23 billion.

Facebook, no doubt, will be emphasizing these differences. But in many ways it is a false comparison. Facebook is going public after 8 years as a private company. Google went public much earlier in its development, after 5 full years. So, yes, Facebook at Year 8 is much bigger than Google was at Year 5 of its trajectory. A better way to see how the two companies stack up is to compare their revenues and profits at the same points in their histories. In 2008, Facebook’s fifth year of existence, its revenues were only $272 million, and it lost $56 million.

If you chart Facebook’s revenues for the past five years and compare them to Google’s for the five-year period preceding its IPO (see below), a truer picture emerges of each company’s size at similar points in time. You need to compare Facebook as a 5-year-old to Google as a 5-year-old.

Matching both companies year-for-year, its is clear that Google grew faster and was always substantially bigger no matter what year you look at. Year 8 for Google was 2006, when its revenues were $10.6 billion and its profits were $3.5 billion. As an 8-year-old, Google’s profits were almost as large as Facebook’s revenues as an 8-year-old. (Google was incorporated in September, 1998, so I am using 1999 as Year 1 for the purposes of this analysis. Facebook started in January, 2004, which I am counting as it’s first full year).

But which company grew faster? It turns out that the 5-year compound annual growth rate for each one’s revenues during these comparable periods (2002-2006 for Google, and 2007-2011 for Facebook) was almost exactly the same: 89 percent a year (Facebook grew a smidgen faster at 89.22 percent a year versus 88.96 percent for Google, but Google started with almost twice the revenue and thus ended up much larger five years later).

Facebook’s growth is astounding, but it is important to keep it in perspective. In many ways, it is still trying to catch up to Google’s past.

So it’s Saturday night and you’re out with friend. Are they the inconsiderate jerk who can’t stop checking their smartphone? Or is that you?

Either way, here’s one way to make dinner a little more interesting.

I’ve seen/heard this described as both “The Phone Stacking Game” and “Don’t Be a Dick During Meals”. It’s been mentioned on a couple of blogs, but a quick  straw poll of my friends suggests that it hasn’t become widespread yet, at least on the West Coast. Which is a shame, because it’s perfect for folks in tech.

Here’s how it works: At the beginning of the meal, everyone puts their phone face down at the center of the table. As time goes on, you’ll hear various calls, texts, and emails, but you can’t pick up your phone. If you’re the first one to give in to temptation, you’re buying dinner for everyone else. If no one picks up, then everyone pays for themselves.

You can explain the game in a few different ways. Most obviously, it could be a protest against the incessant, unthinking use of cell phones during social gatherings. Or maybe it’s a game that acknowledges the new reality and tests your willpower accordingly. Personally, I like to think of it as a free market exercise. After all, people love to say, “Sorry, but I have to take this.” Do you have to answer it? Really? Is it that important to you? Great, then you can pay.

No matter what the explanation, it could make for a tense meal. And I look forward to defeating MG Siegler.

[image via Kempt]

The New York Times released its latest earnings report earlier this week, spurring another round of discussion about the newspaper’s paywall, which was launched near the beginning of last year. The consensus: Early signs are positive, but it’s not doing well enough to offset plummeting print ad revenue.

What’s the solution? Well, if you listen to a number of online media pundits, it’s all about bringing more value to the most devoted members of The Times’ readership. Over at GigaOm, Matthew Ingram suggests, “Regular readers should get more than just a sales rep hitting them up for a monthly payment — the fact that they are a devoted fan should entitle them to earn rewards, whether it’s money off their subscription for interacting with the paper, or offers that others don’t get.” It’s a point he’s made before, as has Clay Shirky, who wrote that “this may be the year where we see how papers figure out how to reward the people most committed to their long-term survival.”

I’m a happy New York Times subscriber, but I have to say: I don’t think The Times is doing a good job on this front, or much of a job at all. It’s odd, because NYTimes.com general manager Denise Warren appeared on NPR’s Talk of the Nation with Shirky, and she seemed largely on-board with his ideas:

I think Clay has outlined it exactly right. I mean, this model was not designed to get everybody who comes to our website to pay. Clay is absolutely right in terms of the distribution of the audience, and I think this is true for most publishers. The vast majority of people come and turn one article or two articles.

But there is a very loyal minority of folks who told us through rounds and rounds of research that they value the New York Times content, they’d be willing to pay to support the New York Times content. And so the key for us in this model was threading that needle – remaining open to the Web, enabling those who are coming to us for that one article or two article, et cetera, to still enjoy the content but at the same time enable those who are very loyal to have some kind of a different experience with us.

Warren goes on to outline some of the advantages of a Times digital subscription — not just access to unlimited articles (20 per month is the limit for non-paying readers, though there are lots of ways around it), but also to the Times smartphone and tablet apps, as well as bonus apps like Politics and Collections, and email newsletters giving behind-the-scenes portraits of the newsroom. Now, as someone who’s constantly reading The Times on both his laptop and his iPhone, I’m happy to fork over $15 a month isn’t a bad price for those features, but I also feel like they’re a missed opportunity.

As Shirky puts it, newspapers “must also appeal to its readers’ non-financial and non-transactional motivations: loyalty, gratitude, dedication to the mission, a sense of identification with the paper, an urge to preserve it as an institution rather than a business.” Those seem to be some of the main reasons people subscribed, but The Times isn’t doing much to encourage that feeling.

The closest it comes is through its newsletters, but those newsletters also have the clearest shortcomings. I’ve been a Times subscriber since the program started in March, and in that time, I’ve received a total nine newsletters. And of those, five are “Innovations” emails, which function as ads for new features on The Times website — useful, maybe, but not particularly loyalty-inspiring. Emails offering “The Story Behind The Story” are better (though a still a little impersonal for my taste), but they show up about once every two months.

Talk of the Nation host Neal Conan makes an interesting comment about this during his interview with Shirky and Warren: He notes that NPR has convinced one in six listeners to donate, while The Times has only convinced one in a hundred to subscribe. He later says, “If you get into the tote bag business, we’re going to have a problem.”

Here’s the thing about those tote bags — they’re nice, but as NPR broadcasters constantly remind listeners, they’re not the real reason to donate. To pick an example from my local NPR station, is there anyone who would pay $144 just because it’s a great deal on a KQED hoodie? (I hope not.) They make the donation because they love KQED, and the hoodie is a sign of their dedication.

Compare that to The Times digital subscription page and pricing model, which are all about functionality — there are three pricing levels, and they reflect different levels of mobile access. That approach has its limitations — from a functional equivalent, it can be hard to justify the price, especially when you take into account the easiness of circumventing the paywall and the low price of other online services. (As a friend pointed out, it’s $15 a month for the cheapest plan, which is more than a basic Netflix subscription.)

To keep The Times in business, however, I’m happy to pay $15 a month, and I’d probably be fine paying significantly more. I don’t think the basic subscription price should change (if anything, it seems a little high), but I suspect the paper could also offer higher price points without providing a dramatic improvement in the product. It just needs rewards that make subscribers feel loyal to The Times, and maybe a little special — the digital equivalent of a tote bag.

USA Today reviewer Edward C. Baig describes his experience using the first Multi-Touch digital textbooks published for the iBooks 2 for iPad app, noting that they are “engaging in ways that were simply not possible with the textbooks I grew up with.” Baig likes the portability, updatability, and low pricing of iBooks 2 digital textbooks and touts specific features like instant search, highlighting, bookmarking, and interactive graphics. Writes Baig, “It’s better to see an animated tour of the genome in E.O. Wilson’s Life on Earth than just to read about it. ”

The latest version of Palringo for iPhone includes Push-to-Talk -- walkie-talkie style voice instant messaging.

Palm, Inc. has taken the wraps off its next Windows Mobile smartphone, the Treo Pro. This device will have 3G, Wi-Fi, GPS, and more.

The number of mobile phones bought by U.S. consumers declined 13% last quarter, but sales of smartphones rose sharply.

A new agreement between Joikusoft and the Wi-Fi community FON has been announced which will lead to software allowing users to securely share their wireless connection.

The mere fact that RIM hasn't announced the BlackBerry 8210 and 8220 -- this company's first smartphones with a clamshell shape -- isn't stopping the online retailer eXpansys from taking pre-orders for them.