lunes, 30 de abril de 2012

Disillusionment of an Entrepreneur

Editor's note: This guest post was written by Prerna Gupta, who is CEO of Khush (now part of Smule), whose music apps,like Songify and LaDiDa, have been used to create over 200 million songs worldwide. You can follow her @prernagupta.

When I became an entrepreneur at the age of twenty-three, I began in earnest, as do all entrepreneurs, chasing a dream. My dream was clear. I would build a consumer technology company that reached ten million people and sell the company for millions of dollars, before the age of thirty. Then, as the dream went, I would retire to an oceanfront house on a warm Pacific beach and learn how to surf.

I recently had the fortune of celebrating a year in which I saw that lofty goal fulfilled. My company's iPhone apps had over ten million downloads, and a competitor paid a large sum of money to acquire what we had built, just a week before my thirtieth birthday. Dream had become reality.

I took a trip soon after to a secluded surf beach on the Pacific coast of Nicaragua. Sandy-bottom beach break. White sand. House so close to water that the sound of crashing waves made it hard to sleep. This was it. I had made it.

Yet, as I sat dangling my feet off a seven-foot surfboard, missing wave after perfect wave, I saw an unmistakable truth. I was terrible at surfing, and all I really cared about anymore was launching another hit app. Far from retiring, I found myself more in the thrall of ambition than ever before.

Having risked my career in order to escape, at all costs, the Great American Rat Race, this was disconcerting to me. My entrepreneurial intentions had, after all, been pure at the outset. I was drawn to entrepreneurship by the lure of freedom: control of my time, the ability to work on my own creations, no boss, and, of course, the potential for independent wealth. But the purpose of the money was never to buy fancy cars and houses, or to be richer than my peers. I viewed the money simply as a lifelong guarantee of these freedoms. When I had enough wealth to live modestly for the rest of my life without working another day, I would quit. I would stop chasing the dream. And yet here I am, still slaving away. How could this be? I am not one of those miserable over-achieving types who are satisfied with nothing less than better-than-everyone-else. Really. I'm not.

Am I?

You see, a funny thing seems to have happened just before I reached the ten million users mark. That goal of mine nefariously shifted by just a bit, a decimal point to be precise. I have a new goal now. It's 100 million.

This is the disillusionment of the entrepreneur. There is no such thing as success. It is a moving target. A mirage. By the time you attain what you thought was your wildest dream, reality has moved on and left your dreams in the dust. And the desire for success grows stronger still.

I do not like being enslaved, by anything. There are times when I can feel ambition, that greatest of American virtues, imposing its power over me. There are times when I succumb, for a short while. But to allow myself to be driven by ambition alone would be the ultimate failure. I strive for happiness. Not happiness when I am sixty, but happiness now, and tomorrow, and the day after. And although ambition and happiness can coexist, I have found that the first much more readily thrives without the other.  I understand this now, as I understood it at twenty-three, and my values are unchanged. What can then explain the control ambition has over me today?

Many who run in entrepreneurial circles would say that my dream was insufficient in the first place. Indeed, Silicon Valley frowns upon such middling goals as selling one's company for mere millions. We should aim for billions, we are told, or not aim at all. I am loath to admit that I have let that over-achiever's ethos influence my own thinking, but I suppose it is at least partially true.

That's not the only reason though. While my values have not changed, what has changed is this: work is more fun than it used to be when I was twenty-three. Work actually makes me happy. I always enjoyed entrepreneurship, even though I had many setbacks and failures along the way, but it is infinitely more fun now that I have had some tangible success. This is the real reason I continue. Success builds upon itself, and in so doing, makes the journey more fun. That is not to say I won't still have failures, in abundance; I am certain I will. Yet underlying the day-to-day failures is the knowledge that I can never truly fail again, because if success does not exist, neither does failure. I am finally free. I am free of the fear of failure. Perhaps that was my dream all along.

I'll still learn how to surf one day, as soon as I reach that 100 million.

Google Releases Full Report of FCC Investigation Into Street View Probe, Finds That Senior Staff Knew

Earlier today Google released the full report of the FCC's investigation into the collection of  "payload data" from open Wi-Fi networks — aka passwords, email and search history from open networks — that its fleet of Street View cars obtained between 2008 and April 2010. An earlier and heavily redacted version of the report was released on April 15 but today's version only redacted the names of individuals.

The report found no violation of any wrong doing by the company because there was no legal precedent on the matter. The FCC found that Google did not violate the Communications Act citing the fact that Wi-Fi did not exist when it was written. However, the FCC did fine Google $25,000 for obstructing the investigation, which was presumably the outcome of Google refusing to show the FCC what the data being collected entailed because it might have shown that the company broke privacy and wiretapping laws. Google says any obstruction was result of the FCC dragging out the investigation. Interestingly enough, the report did reveal that the data harvesting was not the act of a rogue engineer and that said engineer notified the Street View team of what was going on.

(Wait. What? Google knew this was going on! It gets even better.)

Except that those members of the team told the FCC that they had no idea it was going on even though the engineer in question sent documentation of the work being done to the entire Street View team in October of 2006. The report also found that up to seven engineers had "wide access" to the plan to collect payload data dating back to 2006.

From the report:

In interviews and declarations, managers of the Street View project and other Google employees who worked on the project told the Bureau they did not read Engineer Doe's design document. A senior manager of Street View said he "pre-approved" the design document before it was written. One engineer remembered receiving the design document but did not recall any reference to the collection of payload data.

For a little more background, let's examine what Alan Eustace, Senior VP, Engineering & Research blogged back in 2010:

Nine days ago the data protection authority (DPA) in Hamburg, Germany asked to audit the WiFi data that our Street View cars collect for use in location-based products like Google Maps for mobile, which enables people to find local restaurants or get directions. His request prompted us to re-examine everything we have been collecting, and during our review we discovered that a statement made in a blog post on April 27 was incorrect.

In that blog post, and in a technical note sent to data protection authorities the same day, we said that while Google did collect publicly broadcast SSID information (the WiFi network name) and MAC addresses (the unique number given to a device like a WiFi router) using Street View cars, we did not collect payload data (information sent over the network). But it's now clear that we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) WiFi networks, even though we never used that data in any Google products.

However, we will typically have collected only fragments of payload data because: our cars are on the move; someone would need to be using the network as a car passed by; and our in-car WiFi equipment automatically changes channels roughly five times a second. In addition, we did not collect information traveling over secure, password-protected WiFi networks.

So how did this happen? Quite simply, it was a mistake. In 2006 an engineer working on an experimental WiFi project wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast WiFi data. A year later, when our mobile team started a project to collect basic WiFi network data like SSID information and MAC addresses using Google's Street View cars, they included that code in their software—although the project leaders did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data.

As soon as we became aware of this problem, we grounded our Street View cars and segregated the data on our network, which we then disconnected to make it inaccessible. We want to delete this data as soon as possible, and are currently reaching out to regulators in the relevant countries about how to quickly dispose of it.

Fair enough. But the following excerpt from the report doesn't quite sit so well with me: "We are logging user traffic along with sufficient data to precisely triangulate their position at a given time, along with information about what they were doing." To be more specific, the last portion about knowing "what they were doing" seems a bit odd.

So how did Google spin this to the media? It said the data mining was "inadvertent" and that Google now has stricter privacy controls than in the past. Oh and the company hopes the release of the full report would allow them to "put this matter" in the rear view mirror.

Crazy, right? Or maybe not! Discuss.

Correction: April 28, 2012 9:46PM PT

An excerpt from the report has been added regarding the pre-approval of a document sent out by "Engineer Doe" to the Street View team that detailed the work being done and included the fact that Google would be collecting such data.

Google Releases Full Report On Street View Investigation, Finds That Staff Knew About Wi-Fi Sniffing

Earlier today Google released the full report of the FCC's investigation into the collection of  "payload data" from open Wi-Fi networks — aka passwords, email and search history from open networks — that its fleet of Street View cars obtained between 2008 and April 2010. An earlier and heavily redacted version of the report was released on April 15 but today's version only redacted the names of individuals.

The report found no violation of any wrong doing by the company because there was no legal precedent on the matter. The FCC found that Google did not violate the Communications Act citing the fact that Wi-Fi did not exist when it was written. However, the FCC did fine Google $25,000 for obstructing the investigation, which was presumably the outcome of Google refusing to show the FCC what the data being collected entailed because it might have shown that the company broke privacy and wiretapping laws. Google says any obstruction was result of the FCC dragging out the investigation. Interestingly enough, the report did reveal that the data harvesting was not the act of a rogue engineer and that said engineer notified the Street View team of what was going on.

(Wait. What? Google knew this was going on! It gets even better.)

Except that those members of the team told the FCC that they had no idea it was going on even though the engineer in question sent documentation of the work being done to the entire Street View team in October of 2006. The report also found that up to seven engineers had "wide access" to the plan to collect payload data dating back to 2006.

From the report:

In interviews and declarations, managers of the Street View project and other Google employees who worked on the project told the Bureau they did not read Engineer Doe's design document. A senior manager of Street View said he "pre-approved" the design document before it was written. One engineer remembered receiving the design document but did not recall any reference to the collection of payload data.

For a little more background, let's examine what Alan Eustace, Senior VP, Engineering & Research blogged back in 2010:

Nine days ago the data protection authority (DPA) in Hamburg, Germany asked to audit the WiFi data that our Street View cars collect for use in location-based products like Google Maps for mobile, which enables people to find local restaurants or get directions. His request prompted us to re-examine everything we have been collecting, and during our review we discovered that a statement made in a blog post on April 27 was incorrect.

In that blog post, and in a technical note sent to data protection authorities the same day, we said that while Google did collect publicly broadcast SSID information (the WiFi network name) and MAC addresses (the unique number given to a device like a WiFi router) using Street View cars, we did not collect payload data (information sent over the network). But it's now clear that we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) WiFi networks, even though we never used that data in any Google products.

However, we will typically have collected only fragments of payload data because: our cars are on the move; someone would need to be using the network as a car passed by; and our in-car WiFi equipment automatically changes channels roughly five times a second. In addition, we did not collect information traveling over secure, password-protected WiFi networks.

So how did this happen? Quite simply, it was a mistake. In 2006 an engineer working on an experimental WiFi project wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast WiFi data. A year later, when our mobile team started a project to collect basic WiFi network data like SSID information and MAC addresses using Google's Street View cars, they included that code in their software—although the project leaders did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data.

As soon as we became aware of this problem, we grounded our Street View cars and segregated the data on our network, which we then disconnected to make it inaccessible. We want to delete this data as soon as possible, and are currently reaching out to regulators in the relevant countries about how to quickly dispose of it.

Fair enough. But the following excerpt from the report doesn't quite sit so well with me: "We are logging user traffic along with sufficient data to precisely triangulate their position at a given time, along with information about what they were doing." To be more specific, the last portion about knowing "what they were doing" seems a bit peculiar. Why would Google need to know what they were doing? Seems irrelevant if you're just mapping the location of networks, doesn't it?

So how did Google spin this to the media? It said the data mining was "inadvertent" and that Google now has stricter privacy controls than in the past. Oh and the company hopes the release of the full report would allow them to "put this matter" in the rear view mirror.

Crazy, right? Or maybe not! Discuss.

Correction: April 28, 2012 9:46PM PT

An excerpt from the report has been added regarding the pre-approval of a document sent out by "Engineer Doe" to the Street View team that detailed the work being done and included the fact that Google would be collecting such data.

Achievement Unlocked: Apple Wins Applecom.com And Appleprinters.com After WIPO Complaint

Apple doesn't own iPad.com, apple.co.uk or many other domains that contain its name or the names of its products, but it is now the proud owner of applecom.com and appleprinters.com — two domains that were the subject of a complaint Apple made to the World Intellectual Property Organization about a month ago.

If you now visit those URLs, they automatically redirect to Apple's main site.

The site Domain Tools notes that Apple picked up both applecom.com and appleprinters.com from Mark Monitor, the domain management and brand protection firm that provides services also to Facebook and Google, among others. Apple Inc. now owns "about 1,071 domains," according to Whois records.

Apple has not made many pleas directly to the WIPO, an agency of the United Nations, in its attempt to gain better control over its brand, but in those cases where it has, the outcomes seem to have always gone in Apple's favor.

In November, it complained to the WIPO over seven domain names that included "iPhone" in their names that went straight to porn sites. Now most of those domains are dead except for iphone4s.com, which now redirects to Apple's main site.

It was also a WIPO complaint that helped Apple pick up iPods.com in July 2011.

Despite its ownership of over one thousand domains, there is still a lot of ground to be covered for Apple. For example iBookstore.com currently redirects to the mobile site for Project Gutenberg, a volunteer effort to digitize cultural works and quite possibly the oldest digital library around (very clever, Gutenberg guys — since it's likely that someone using and iPad or iPhone accessing iBooks, a mobile site is exactly where they'd want to go).

iBooks.com seems to go nowhere at the moment, although iBook.com goes to Apple, too.

There is also the issue of trademarks: earlier this year Apple was unsuccessful in getting Wapple, a mobile internet company in the UK, to stop using the name Wapple, claiming the company was trading off of Apple's success (Wapple's argument is that it existed before Apple waded into mobile, and when mobile internet was synonymous with the WAP protocol).

You might well wonder why it is that, given just how many Apple domain permutations there are out there (AppleiCloud, anyone?), Apple went for these two domains. Applecom.com is an easy guess: people mistype without the .com all the time, and a lot of browsers automatically add the .com when that is missing.

Or it could be — as was the case with the seven iPhone domains Apple got last year — because there was something dodgy on those sites ("best to avoid visiting those" wrote TNW at the time when Apple filed its original WIPO complaint for appleprinters.com and applecom.com). I tried looking for a historical view of both, but Wayback gave me no dice.

Or perhaps the Onion did a double-bluff and Apple really is looking at a renewed effort into the world of printers?

Stranger things have happened.


Started by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, Apple has expanded from computers to consumer electronics over the last 30 years, officially changing their name from Apple Computer, Inc. to Apple, Inc. in January 2007. Among the key offerings from Apple's product line are: Pro line laptops (MacBook Pro) and desktops (Mac Pro), consumer line laptops (MacBook) and desktops (iMac), servers (Xserve), Apple TV, the Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server operating systems, the iPod (offered with...

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The United Nations is an international organization founded in 1945 after the Second World War by 51 countries committed to maintaining international peace and security, developing friendly relations among nations and promoting social progress, better living standards and human rights. Due to its unique international character, and the powers vested in its founding Charter, the Organization can take action on a wide range of issues, and provide a forum for its 192 Member States to express their views, through...

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Students Studying Abroad: Take Advantage of Video Job Interviews

Josh Tolan is the CEO of Spark Hire, which combines a video job board and online interviewing platform to enrich interaction between job seekers and employers. Connect with him and Spark Hire on Facebook and Twitter.

Studying literature at Oxford or finance at the London School of Economics; strolling by the Siene or sunbathing on the Italian Riviera coast — these are all possibilities for the college student studying abroad. And these opportunities will give them experiences that will change their lives and memories that will last a lifetime. But is it worth it to study abroad if it means you'll be missing out on employment opportunities back home?

To put it simply, yes! Many organizations are now using video interviews to hire candidates instead of "old-fashioned" meetings, so take advantage of a remote interview. Teresa Tilles, a recruiter for Fairfax, Virg.-based Balfour Beatty Construction asserts, "Companies recruit at colleges all over the United States for positions everywhere. Students and companies are so computer-savvy and it makes sense, especially if students have to pay their way to an interview or are overseas for a semester but hoping to join the workforce when they return home."

Here are some things to consider when you're interviewing remotely. Would you ever do a remote interview while abroad? Let us know in the comments.


Advantages


As Tilles says, "It is often cheaper to record our interviews rather than fly the candidates in, put them up in hotels, add car rentals and meals. And vice versa, if candidates have to incur the expense to attend an interview/career fair, this is often easier on the wallet."

Another advantage of a video interview is that it makes it possible for both parties (the interviewer and the interviewee) to accommodate their schedules. The company decides what questions to ask the job seekers and puts them in the interview package. And when it's convenient for the applicant, he or she can open up the video interview module, record responses and submit them.


Are They Effective?


While meeting an employer in-person is the most effective way to make a first impression, video interviews are an adequate way to interface because it still promotes face-time. "It truly feels like an on-site interview, you can see the person, see their body language and see their professionalism," says Tilles.

Jennifer Flaa, the CEO of media training company Vettanna ToGo, agrees. She says that although video interviews are a new addition to the hiring process, the fundamentals of interviewing are the same. Poor body language and careless presentation can ruin a video interview as easily as they can derail a face-to-face conversation.

According to Flaa, you need to be yourself because you still want to project an authentic representation of you, a potential employee.

"Being self-conscious is your number one enemy," she explains. "It makes you nervous and it makes you act fake. Think about the questions, think about the other person, or imagine you are talking to a good friend who is nodding and agreeing with everything you say."


Candidates Can Breathe Easy


Even while abroad, jobseekers can have faith they won't be forgotten about. By utilizing key features such as recording answers to screening questions and creating a profile video, candidates can provide interested companies with a concrete and accessible video they can easily share and keep in place for future open positions.


The Wave of the Future?


"We just started a $1 billion project in Utah and interviewed students from George Mason University here in Fairfax a few months ago," says Tilles. "They met with our on-site human resources director and our company president, then we continued the interview via recordings with the vice president in Utah. He hired two students who interviewed this way and they start this summer."

If you're debating giving up the undeniable opportunities you have to enrich your life by studying abroad so that you won't be the last one in your class to be hired, end your internal argument and go. After all, can you think of a better way to job hunt then turning on your laptop while sitting at a café in Paris, eating a croissant in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower?


Social Media Job Listings


Every week we post a list of social media and web job opportunities. While we publish a huge range of job listings, we've selected some of the top social media job opportunities from the past two weeks to get you started. Happy hunting!

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, TommL

How Much Revenue Does It Take To Be A $1B Public Company?

Editor's note: Patrick Moran is an executive at New Relic, a SaaS web app performance company with over 21,000 active customers. Follow him on Twitter @patrickmoran.

With all the chatter about Billion dollar valuations — like Instagram, Evernote, Splunk —  combined with recent S1 filings and IPOs, the topic of tech company valuation is coming to the forefront of people's minds. Specifically related to the software industry, the growing number of SaaS IPO candidates of late is signaling an important shift in the way that enterprise software is built and sold. It also indicates that the subscription business model is here to stay. What does this shift towards a subscription economy means for startups, investors and the IPO landscape?

First of all – get Instagram out of your mind. The price it sold for is not relevant to us mere mortals who are building B2B software businesses. For all good, non-bubble reasons, SaaS companies need tens of millions in revenue, high growth, and solid business fundamentals. What you may notice though, is that revenue may be lower than what we've become accustomed to during the last few years of IPO drought.

Recurring Revenue is 'worth more' and is more predictable

For the last several years, the magic revenue number for going public was around $100M – but that seems to be changing. It appears that the market will be more tolerant of sub-$100M as long as the company's metrics are healthy, and that the revenue that they do have is 1) growing and 2) recurring. With the recurring revenue that SaaS business models have, investors can better predict growth and model what trajectory the business is on. This makes them favorable bets.

Looking at recent S1 filings, you can see this in action:  Jive Software filed its S1 with a revenue run rate of about $60M last summer. Eloqua filed with about $60M in revenue. ServiceNow looks more traditional with about $92M in 2011 revenue (filed earlier this month). Bizarre Voice filed in August with about $64M in revenue. When Yelp filed (sort of a SaaS play!) – it had $58.38M (first nine months of 2011). All of these companies had accumulated losses, and most of them were still losing money at the time of filing. That does not mean they are not good business models – with subscription businesses, the upfront investment in customer acquisition is relatively high, but the return from the customer takes a little bit longer than the old software licensing model (lifetime value is spread across the life of contract with SaaS, not upfront).

A different kind of Billion dollar club

What's interesting and important to note, is that each of the above companies could all be worth north of $1 billion after their IPO debuts. Jive is already there, as is Yelp and Bazaar Voice has a $1B market cap. Other valuation conversations regarding SaaS have focused on companies like Taleo that sold to Oracle for $1.9B (6.5 times trailing 12-month sales) and SuccessFactors getting scooped for $3.4B (with 350M in revenue). While TechCrunch mostly writes about the private companies that make the billion valuation club – these companies have done it in the public market – in some ways even harder than what Twitter and others have done with VC valuations.

The Future of Business Software is SaaS, Subscriptions, and Pay-as-you-go

SaaS and Subscription Models are the future of software. Period. And according to Ben Horrowitz of Andreeson Horowitz, software is eating the world. So technically, SaaS is the future of the world. TechCrunch readers may already be over this hump, but the titans of enterprise software (Oracle, Microsoft, CA, IBM) are still clinging on to the licensing models of yesteryear – but they'll be disrupted soon enough. Meanwhile, the financial markets are just starting to understand how to value the new business models of the Subscription Economy.

Easy to pay & stay, easy to go

Because revenue from each customer is recognized monthly, it takes a lot of customers to grow to sizable, IPO-ready rates. The old method of recognizing revenue from a big license deal doesn't work with SaaS companies. Accountants won't allow it. That means even if you get a big 2-year contract, you can only recognize it one month at a time. Early SaaS companies complained about this, but now we know that recurring, predictable revenue rocks! There a couple of useful metrics to understand here:

Good: The Lifetime Value Effect

The good thing about SaaS revenue? It's recurring. If your product is well received, it grows. More seats, more servers – whatever your model is – your average revenue grows from each account. A good SaaS company will measure and share its growth per account – a rate of 20% more signals a healthy model.

Bad: Churn can kill you, or at least your market cap

If you are building a SaaS business, churn is your enemy. Most public SaaS companies report their monthly churn rate, either as a percentage of revenue or actual customers gained/lost. These rates depend on the type of business – 2% monthly churn is in the "tolerable range" according to many experts.

Bookings, ARR & other early indicators – In private companies, we have insight into quarterly new bookings – as does the management team at public SaaS companies. These bookings paint a picture of what's to come, and provides visibility into future, predictable revenue growth. When you run your SaaS business by the numbers and understand your LTV (lifetime value) and Churn, you learn to love the benefits of the SaaS subscription revenue waterfall.

High Upfront Sales & Marketing expenses – On the surface, S&M expenses look high.  But early on, as you're building your subscription revenue base, you need to invest in these disciplines. Once you understand your lifetime value, you know how much you can spend to acquire the customer and most investors in private firms push you to push that to the max – and take those losses early so you can enjoy larger profits later.

Even if you are not the next Instagram, you can still achieve the billion dollar club status. The conventional metrics of bookings, revenue, licensing don't apply to the new crop of SaaS IPOs getting ready to take flight. The new metrics are LTV, Churn, Customer Satisfaction, and Growth-oriented pricing. While these models tend to look expensive early on (high marketing, product development costs), the smart companies know that building a base early will pay dividends (perhaps literally) thanks to predictable, repeatable, growing subscription revenue. You just need to know what to look for.

7 Easy Ways to Speed Up Your Business Computers

Chris Cope is CEO of SlimWare Utilities. The company is founded on the premise that cloud computing and crowd-sourced applications will revolutionize the performance of personal computing.

Few activities are more frustrating than staring at your old computer, helplessly willing it to move faster. In business, and especially when it comes to small businesses, a slow computer will not help your bottom line. Equally draining are the costs of constant visits from IT consultants and technicians.

While age is a commonly cited cause of slow PC performance, there are usually additional reasons. Many users have no idea that their computers are bogged down with unneeded applications, adware, cookies, and massive amounts of background processes. Left unaddressed, these issues hinder PC performance, decrease productivity, and increase the amount of time spent dealing with IT problems. So what can be done? Here are seven things.


1. Speed Up Boot Time


On average, more than 15% of programs that start automatically on computers are optional, which increases boot time. In addition, because these optional programs continue running in the background, they interfere with the ongoing performance of a computer. Lab testing showed that removing three resource-intensive startups decreased boot time by 41%. That's equal to a 117 second improvement. By using a built-in utility called msconfig (in Windows, type "msconfig" in the search box located in the "Start" menu) you can sort through these startups and decide which ones are necessary, and which can be removed. If you are not sure which of these items are safe to remove, there are free tools available that can identify them for you.

2. Stay on Top of Your Updates


Software makers are constantly releasing new versions of a software you've already paid for. These updates can include enhanced features, and more importantly, patches against vulnerabilities. Microsoft, Adobe, Java, and others put out regular updates that contain bug fixes and help improve PC performance. In fact, vulnerabilities from using out-of-date software are one of the most common ways that malware infects a system. Software updates and patches often pop up automatically. Don't put them off, and when possible, remember to manually check for updates.

3. Keep Your PC Clean of Junk


A computer can become cluttered with junk files, temp files, logs, and browser bloat very quickly. Junk like this can affect PC performance tremendously over time. This is especially true for computers using traditional hard drives (non-SSD). By committing to regular maintenance of your drives, you can save yourself from the hassle of a bogged-down system and the sluggish performance that accompanies it. Microsoft provides a free utility in Windows called "disk cleanup" that can perform some of the Windows-related cleaning. However, there are free tools that offer more options, like scheduling.

4. Get Rid of Extra Programs


Programs take up space, and if they don't serve a specific purpose, they are essentially dead weight. This is also true of browser toolbars, plugins, and extensions. Here too, having a clear sense of what is not necessary, and then removing those items, is a big step in improving PC performance.

5. Defrag


Unless you have already upgraded to a solid-state hard drive, defrag your disk regularly. On hard drives, as you save and delete files, the data gets placed in "sectors" on the hard drive. This causes 'fragmentation' and can increase the time it takes for the computer to find the specific item you are looking for; defragmenting files on the disk will save your computer a great deal of time seeking what it needs.

6. Keep Your Computer Safe


Antivirus software is a critical component of any efficient computer system. AV software often comes pre-installed on new PCs, but it's up to the user to purchase or replace the pre-installed antivirus software. Great free alternatives such as AVG, Avast, and especially Microsoft Security Essentials are powerful substitutes if you are on a budget. Just be sure not to have two antivirus applications installed at the same time — a common cause of computer performance issues and crashes.

7. Accept That Less is More


When it comes to computer performance, one basic principle to follow is "less is more." The less time your computer wastes sorting through unused programs, unnecessary start-ups, empty space, and malware, the more efficiently it will run. If manually maintaining your PC seems like an overwhelming task, there is a range of PC optimization software that you can download, often free, that will automate all of these tasks.

While the above steps will help improve PC performance, all computers eventually become obsolete. When buying a new model, follow these steps to address the same overload issues.

  • Check what's already loaded. Although we assume that a new computer comes clean and ready to go, there are a great deal of items that are just unnecessary. Check to see what's been pre-installed. Where possible, remove anything you know you won't use.
  • Check the antivirus software. Most PCs come some version. Make sure you are comfortable with the product that's on your machine. If not, or you don't plan on paying for it, get a product you feel good about. Some good examples include, Microsoft Security Essentials, AVG, or Avast.
  • Check your drivers. Every new model will have a series of updates that are necessary to help sync your new computer with your pre-existing hardware — printer, scanner etc. Make sure that these connect smoothly and you will save yourself headaches and money.
  • Backup. After you finish cleaning your computer of items you don't need and installing all of the applications you do want, take a snapshot using imaging software and store it externally, so that if the unexpected happens (think hard drive failure) and you need to start over, you have a fresh image with everything ready to go.
  • Image courtesy of iStockphoto, iPandastudio

The TechCrunch Meet-Up In NYC Is Officially Official: RSVP Now

As the days pass, the big moment draws nigh. No, I'm not talking about Disrupt, which is a big moment in its own right, nor am I teasing any other big launch. I'm talking about a party.

A huge party.

We initially called it a mini meet-up — a gathering of New York's tech startup scene, including investors, entrepreneurs and TechCrunch editorial — but its grown into so much more than that. With over 600 RSVPs, ten sponsors, a badass venue, and more TC staff in attendance than we'd originally expected, our mini meet-up is now massive.

It'll be at Bar13 on 13th St. between University and Broadway, from 6pm to 10pm on Tuesday, May 8.

What to expect:

If you haven't gotten the memo yet, you can RSVP on our PlanCast page.

Here's yet another look at our wonderful sponsors, without whom none of this would be possible:

Yext helps provide amazing local search results with PowerListings, a local information hub that syncs listings across a network of premium sites and mobile apps. With Yext PowerListings, small and large businesses can quickly and easily update their business information, photos and specials from one central location. Today, Yext PowerListings syncs information for over 45,000 locations.

Traducto is a powerful and easy to use translation and localization app.
With Traducto users can leverage human translation to translate documents, emails, newsletters, social postings, marketing materials and more. TraductoPro allows developers to convert iOS or Mac apps, into a multilingual application, making the app available to a wider global audience. By making it simple to localize your application and offering 16 different language translations, TraductoPro is designed to reduce the pain typically associated with localization. Our integrated approach combines automating app localization through direct Xcode integration, with a high quality human translation service all within a single application. TraductoPro offers support for content translations, app store metadata and Xcode projects localization.

WhatRunsWhere is a competitive intelligence service for online media buying. It allows you to look up what advertisers are doing online; where they are running ads, who they are buying their inventory through and what exact ads they are using. WhatRunsWhere allows you to see what is happening on any website; who is advertising there, who's selling the inventory for them and what ads are they using. With data from multiple countries and actionable insights regarding the data, WhatRunsWhere quickly allows anyone to dissect advertising campaigns resulting in reduced risk and a higher ROI media buying process.

Parlor® is the creator of unique branded communication applications: GroupCall™, TopicTalk™ and MobiCast™. Our goal is to make useful tools to communicate globally, both efficiently and for free. We will be unleashing these three awesome applications on iOS and Android at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC 2012. Follow us at http://Parlor.fm for news and updates.

Speak to any business in the world with MyGenie™, a location-based 2-way communication platform that allows iPhone and Android users to speak to businesses in real-time! It's free, it's quick, and it's simple to use. No need to find a manager, an email address, or a telephone # to contact. With MyGenie™ consumers send questions, comments, complaints, feedback, and more (can also upload photos) directly to any business they choose via their smart phones. Businesses can immediately respond (and include special offers) via a business portal. MyGenie™, not just ratings, not just feedback, it's anything and everything you want it to be! Free on Apple App Store and Android Market.

Return on Change (RoC) connects innovative startups and investors who are looking to change tomorrow's world today. Entrepreneurs with great ideas need capital funding to jumpstart their businesses, and investors are looking to help fund the next big idea. RoC provides the online medium through which startup companies and entrepreneurs will be able to pool capital through crowdsourcing. For more information about Return on Change, please visit www.returnonchange.com or contact RoC at RoC@returnonchange.com.

PeoplePerHour is Europe's leading marketplace connecting startups and entrepreneurs to freelance talent worldwide and we've just landed in NYC! Project by project we're awakening an enormous latent workforce, from the stay at home mom and the retiree to the moonlighter and the hobbyist, removing the constraints of the traditional 9-5 office. Be it for a quick logo design, building a website, copywriting or a small translation… we're helping businesses keep their core lean and to get the job done fast. Our vision is for this to be the defining factor in the future of work.

TouchTunes Interactive Networks is the largest interactive out-of-home entertainment network in North America. TouchTunes provides entertainment and marketing solutions to 52,000 bars and restaurants. Founded in 1998, the network has become the largest of its kind with 54M monthly users who played more than 900 million songs in 2011. The TouchTunes mobile app allows consumers in bars, restaurants, hotels, retail and arenas to play any song from our catalog without having to leave their seat and is socially integrated. TouchTunes network is the largest digital out-of-home advertising network in the US (Nielsen) and includes TouchTunesTV, a unique screen-within-a-screen interactive television experience that provides custom advertising capabilities, venue promotions and social networking opportunities. TouchTunes is a privately held U.S. corporation with offices in New York City, Arlington Heights, Illinois and Montreal, Canada. For further information, please visit us at touchtunes.com.

12 Funniest ‘Animals Being Dicks’ [GIFS]

Here at Mashable we sometimes get a brain itch that can only be scratched by watching copious amounts of hilarious animal GIFs. If you suffer from the same ailment, let us point you in the direction of Animals Being Dicks, a place on the Internet where it's okay to laugh at our furry friends.

The premise is simple: Animals are perfectly capable of cretinous behavior, and celebrating their wretchedness is a truly funny pastime.

We asked creator and curator John Williams why he thought his Tumblr blog hit the nail on the humor head. "People like to imagine human traits in animals, and I think this idea that animals have the capacity to be petty assholes on purpose is hilarious," he says. "That's why most of the animals have people names like Rick or Janice. Also, my dad used to name all his pets distinctly human names. We had a dog named Dan."

SEE ALSO: First World Problems: 14 Cringe-Worthy Complaints

We asked Williams to curate his top 12 Animals Being Dicks GIFs. You can see his selections — along with his commentary — in the gallery below. Let us know in the comments below your go-to place online for animal-themed chortles.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr, Ryan M.

The Future of Science

Editor's note: 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.

Almost every technological and medical innovation in the world has its roots in a scientific paper. Science drives much of the world's innovation. The faster science moves, the faster the world moves.

Progress in science right now is being held back by two key inefficiencies:

  • The time-lag problem: there is a time-lag of, on average, 12 months between finishing a paper, and it being published.
  • The single mode of publication problem: scientists share their ideas only via one format, the scientific paper, and don't take advantage of the full range of media that the web makes possible.

The stakes are high. If these inefficiencies can be removed, science would accelerate tremendously. A faster science would lead to faster innovation in medicine and technology. Cancer could be cured 2-3 years sooner than it otherwise would be, which would save millions of lives.

The time-lag problem

The first major inefficiency is the time-lag problem for distributing scientific ideas. After you have written a scientific paper, it takes, on average, 12 months for the paper to be distributed to the global scientific community. During that time the paper is going through the peer review process, which takes an extremely long time.

If you read a paper, and have some thoughts about it, and write up a response, it is going to take 12 months for your response to be seen by the global scientific community.

Science is fundamentally a conversation between scientists around the world. Currently the intervals between iterations of that conversation are 12 months on average. This 12 month time-lag represents a huge amount of friction in the circulation of scientific ideas.

Imagine the slowdown on the web if every blog post, and every tweet, and every photo, was made available on the web 12 months after it was originally posted. Imagine if all the stories in your Facebook News Feed were 12 months old. People would be storming the steps of Congress, demanding change.

The time-lag in the distribution of scientific ideas is significantly holding back science. It's critical for global progress that we work to remove this inefficiency.

The single mode of publication problem

Historically, if a scientist wants to make a contribution to the scientific body of knowledge, it has to be in the form of a scientific paper.

Blogging hasn't taken off in science, because scientists don't get credit for writing blog posts. You often hear a scientist saying 'I'm not going to put these ideas in a blog post, because they are good enough for me to incorporate into a paper, which I'll publish in the next couple of years'. Everyone loses out because of that delay of a couple of years.

Most people who share information on the web have taken advantage of the rich media that the web provides. People share information in all kinds of forms: videos, status updates, blog posts, blog comments, data sets, interactive graphs, and other forms.

By contrast, if a scientist wants to share some information on a protein that they are working on, they have to write a paper with a set of two dimensional black and white images of that protein. The norms don't encourage the sharing of an interactive, full-color, 3 dimensional model of the protein, even if that would be a more suitable media format for the kind of knowledge that is being shared.

The future of science: instant distribution

Tim Berners-Lee invented the web in order to make it easier for him and his colleagues to share their research papers. The web has impacted science, but over the next few years, the web is going to entirely re-invent the way that scientists interact.

In 5-10 years' time, the way scientists will communicate will be unrecognizable from the way that they have been communicating for the last 400 years, when the first academic journal was founded.

The first change will be instant distribution for all scientific ideas. Some sites, such as arXiv, Academia.edu, Mendeley, and ResearchGate have brought instant distribution to certain sub-fields of science recently, and this trend is going to continue to all fields of science.

In a few years, scientists will look back and will struggle to believe that they used to exist in a world where it took 12 months to circulate a scientific idea around the world. Discussing the idea of 12 month distribution delays for ideas will produce the same confused look that it produces today, when one asks someone to conceive of 12 month distribution delays to tweets, blog posts, and general web content.

Instant distribution means bringing the time-lag for distributing a scientific paper around the world down to 1 day, or less. This speed-up will have a transformative effect on the rate of scientific progress in the world. Discoveries will be made much more quickly.

One of the reasons that technological progress in the 20th century was so much greater than growth in previous centuries is that there were so many powerful communication technologies invented in the 20th century that connected people around the globe: the telephone, the TV, the internet.

Bringing instant distribution to science will have a similarly transformative effect on scientific progress.

The future of science: rich media

Historically scientists have written their papers as native desktop content. They have saved their papers as PDFs, and uploaded the files to the web.

Over the next few years, scientific content will increasingly become native web content, and be written natively for the web. Scientific content will be created with the full interactivity, and richness, of the web in mind. Most papers are downloaded from the web, and printed out by scientists for reading. The content was written in such a way that it's fully readable in print-out form.

Most web content is inherently rich. No-one prints out their Twitter and Facebook News Feeds to read them, or blog posts. The idea of printing out content doesn't make sense for much of the web's content, such as YouTube videos, Facebook photos, interactive maps, and interactive graphs such as those on you find on Quantcast, or Yahoo Finance.

The hyperlink itself is a piece of interactivity built into web content. One reason you don't want to print out a Wikipedia article to read it is that the page is full of useful links, and you want to be adjacent to that interactivity when reading the article to take advantage of the full power of the article.

Historically, scientific papers have cited other papers, but those citations are not hyper-linked.

To citizens of the web, the idea of referring to some other page without linking to it seems an impossibly old-fashioned way of sharing content.

Imagine reading a blog, or a Facebook News Feed, where there were no links, and everything was plain text. Instead, there was a set of references at the end of the page, and those references told you were to find certain other pages on the web, but the references weren't themselves hyperlinked. A citation to a video would something like "YouTube.com, Comedy section, page 10, "Coke bottle exploding", video id = 34883". You would then have to go to YouTube and navigate to the right section to get the video that has that title.

This experience would indeed be a nightmare. The difference between that, and how the web currently is, is the difference between where scientific communication is right now, and where it will be in a few years, when scientists fully adopt the rich media of the web.

Scientists will share content in whatever format makes sense for the piece of content in question. They will share ideas in the form of data sets, videos, 3-d models, software programs, graphs, blog posts, status updates, and comments on all these rich media.

The ways that these content formats will connect with each other will be via the hyperlink, and not via the citation. The citation will look like an ancient concept in a few years.

Science is undergoing one of the most exciting changes in its history. It is in a transition period between a pre-web form of communication to a natively web form of communication. The full adoption of the web by scientists will transform science. Scientists will start to interact and communicate in wonderful new ways that will have an enormous effect on scientific progress.

The future of science: peer review

In a world of instant distribution, what happens to peer review? Will this be a world where junk gets published, and no-one will be able to tell whether a particular piece of content is good or bad?

I wrote a post on TechCrunch a few weeks ago called "The Future of Peer Review", arguing that the web has an instant distribution model, and has thrived. I argued that the web's main discovery engines for content on the web, namely search engines, and social networks, are at their heart, evolved peer review systems.

These web-scale peer review systems, search engines and social networks, already drive most discovery of scientific content.

The future of science: academic credit

Historically scientists have gained credit by publishing in prestigious journals. Hiring committees, and grant committees, historically have looked at the kinds of journals a scientist has managed to get published in as a measure of the quality of the scientist's work. In the last few years, such committees have also started to look at citation counts too.

As scientific content moves to become native web content, scientific content will increasingly be evaluated according to the kinds of metrics that reflect the success of a piece of content on the web.

Web metrics vary, and evolve. Some are internet-wide metrics, such as unique visitors, page views, time on site. Others are specific to certain verticals, or sites, such as Twitter follower counts, StackOverflow score, Facebook likes, and YouTube video views.

As these metrics are increasingly understood in the context of scientific content, scientists will increasingly share content that attracts this kind of credit.

If you can share a data-set, and collect credit for it, you will. If you can comment on a paper, and collect credit for it, you will do that too. If sharing a video of a process is more compelling than having black and white images of the process, videos will take off.

Directing Silicon Valley's resources towards accelerating science

Science is in the process of being re-built and transformed. It is going to be an exhilarating process. The positive impact to society will be significant.

The next wave of science is not being built by scientific publishers. It is being built by engineering-focused, Silicon Valley tech companies. It is being built by talented and visionary engineering and product teams.

Silicon Valley's formidable resources are starting to turn in the direction of science, having been focused for the past 2-3 years on areas like optimizing strawberry credit flows on FarmVille. Venture capital, entrepreneurial talent, and engineering talent is starting to flow into the space, and the future of science is starting to be built.

The ecosystem needs more resources. It needs more engineers, entrepreneurs, and venture capital. The prizes for success in transforming science go to everyone in the world. $1 trillion a year gets spent on R&D, of which $200 billion is spent in the academic sector, and $800 billion in the private sector. There are vast new companies waiting to be built here.

As the extraordinary Silicon Valley innovation engine increasingly directs itself at transforming science, you can expect to see acceleration on a scale that science has never seen. Science will change beyond recognition, and the positive impact on the rate of technology growth in the world will be enormous.

The time to act is now. If you are a VC, invest in science startups. If you are an entrepreneur, hunt for an idea in the space and run with it. If you are an engineer or designer, there is a list of startups trying to accelerate science here.

25 Most-Followed Users on Instagram [PICS]

The big guns on Instagram have seen their number of followers spike tremendously since the startup exited its iPhone-only stage and released its much-anticipated Android app on April 3.

Up until that point, Instagram had been downloaded 27 million times and only two users had more than 1 million followers — pop stars Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez.

Days later, Facebook bought the photo-sharing app for $1 billion, attracting massive attention to Instagram.

Instagram now approaches 50 million downloads, and three more users are in the 1-million-followers club.

SEE ALSO: Meet @TextInstagram — Instagram Without Photos | Animation Mocks Instagram Fans

The gallery above counts down the app's 25 most-followed users, excluding Instagram's account, which has 1.8 million followers.

What are some of your favorite users to follow? Let us know in the comments.

Images from Statigr.am; numbers from Web.Stagram