Napster.fm Is An Open Source Social Music Player That Can Be Hosted By Anyone In Case Of Shutdown View Staff Page Follow me on Twitter Have a Tip, Pitch or Guest Column? Tell us.X Latest on TechCrunch TV Latest in Gadgets Also on AOL Tech About Subscribe

Anyone who has had a computer and a connection to the Internet in 1999 quickly knew what it felt like to find any song that you wanted, and then listen to it almost immediately. Well, the immediate part wasn’t true, since you had to download the MP3s, which usually took quite a bit of time on a dialup connection.

Since Napster, and it getting sued into oblivion (and then acquired for bits and pieces by Best Buy), streaming music has become the technology du-jour. Napster co-founder Sean Parker is now heavily involved with Spotify, which realized the “any song, any time” dream that Napster introduced us to. Today, a service called Napster.fm popped up, and it’s a web-based music player that has some interesting social features. The best part about it is that it’s open source and can be set up by anyone, in case it ever gets shut down.

Its creator, Ryan Lester, is a student at Carnegie Mellon who is “taking a few years off to work at SpaceX and do other stuff.” A part of the “other stuff” is clearly Napster.fm. How does it work? Well, after going through the quite FAQ (Lester obviously has a sense of humor), he explains that the service is dependent on “minor inefficiencies in YouTube’s piracy-detection system.” Regardless of where the tracks are coming from, the service actually works.

As soon as you visit the site, the song that’s queued up for you is “Never Gonna Give You Up,” which is long-forgotten-once-hated “RickRoll.” The search interface is pretty basic, but once you start adding songs to your playlist, you can share them with friends who have also signed up for the service. Once you’ve done that, you can sync up and listen to exactly what they’re listening to. The “Discovery” tab shows you what everyone has listened to, if you’re in the mood to find something new.

You can even create a group of friends that are using the service and someone can play DJ and decide on which tracks will come up next. Sure, these are some of the things that you can do on other services, like Turntable.fm, but the Napster.fm interface is stripped down and basic, not sucking up a lot of resources. The other nice part is that there isn’t a desktop client to worry about, as is the case with Spotify.

What you’re listening to will be synced over all of your browsers:

It’s nice to see that Lester has brought back some of the old Napster features like “Hot List,” which lets you browse your friends’ libraries, as well as the chat and transferring songs to friends. It doesn’t hurt that it’s free and has no playback limit. Will it stay around? It’s hard to say, especially if it completely relies on a YouTube hole, but if the site itself were to get shut down, Lester has put all of his work on GitHub so that anyone can get another version going immediately.

If there’s any doubt as to whether Lester is having fun with the project, all you have to do is read this FAQ entry:

Will I be sued for using this?

Absolutely.

Holy shit, seriously?

No.

Crunchbase

• NAPSTER

Company: Napster

Website: napster.com

Launch Date: June 1999

Napster offers the ultimate in interactive music experiences, creating better ways to discover, share, acquire and enjoy the universe of music — anytime, anywhere. The Napster service is the easiest way to find, discover and enjoy the universe of music — online, on the go and in the living room. With unlimited, on-demand access to music from a web browser, smartphone and home entertainment devices, Napster lets you enjoy music your way anytime, anywhere. The service is available at...

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Napster offers the ultimate in interactive music experiences, creating better ways to discover, share, acquire and enjoy the universe of music — anytime, anywhere. The Napster service is the easiest way to find, discover and enjoy the universe of music — online, on the go and in the living room. With unlimited, on-demand access to music from a web browser, smartphone and home entertainment devices, Napster lets you enjoy music your way anytime, anywhere. The service is available at...

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Jomi’s Smart Water Bottle Sleeve-Plus-App Wants To Track & Chart Your Liquid Intake To Make You Drink More View Staff Page Have a Tip, Pitch or Guest Column? Tell us.X Latest on TechCrunch TV Latest in Gadgets Also on AOL Tech About Subscribe

Move over HAPIfork. Estonian startup Jomi Interactive is cooking up a pair of smart devices that will remind people to drink more water. Or at least whatever liquid/poison of choice you put in your water bottle. The aim, says the startup, is to encourage healthy behaviour and counteract the mild dehydration we are all apparently afflicted with. No, not just hungover folk; everyone who fails to glug down the requisite 2.5-3 litres of water per day.

Jomi is prototyping a device — or rather two devices — that aim to fix the problem of having plentiful water on tap but never remembering to drink enough of it (perhaps the ultimate #firstworldproblem). So far, Jomi has created design prototypes and 10 milled PCBs for developers to play around with but no final product. It’s bootstrapping development but will be launching a crowdfunding campaign to fund a production run once it has finalised hardware design and testing.

The two devices it’s planning are the Jomi Band, which will be the more basic of the pair (pictured above in an early design concept render, and below right in prototype form). This will attach around a water bottle and remind the user at pre-set intervals to take a sip (presumably by flashing/beeping). The second more pro product — the Jomi Sleeve — will attach to the bottom of the bottle and, in addition to reminders, will periodically weigh the bottle, to figure out how much water is being consumed. The data will then be sent via Bluetooth to a mobile/tablet app so that pro users can geek out over graphs and charts showing their beverage consumption data (and share their relative ‘liquidity’ with friends).

What specifically does the device hardware consist of? “PCB is custom built, it features an accelerometer, MCU, LEDs, and a few other bits and pieces,”  Jomi founder and CEO Andre Eistre tells TechCrunch. Although he stresses they are still at an early stage, with the hardware set to shrink — and the design to be reworked. The software will be open to other developers to hack around with it — so perhaps another app could be made to warn alcoholic beverage drinkers when they have reached a daily safe unit intake level. (Or track soft drink guzzlers’ sugar intake and chart their rising risk of Type 2 diabetes.)

“Designers (from Estonian Arts Academy) are working on the next version of the design model and the design is expected to change drastically over the next few weeks,” he says. “Right now we are focusing on hardware (revision 3) and embedded software of the device… The hardware isn’t final either — it will be a lot smaller than that. Software will be open source — we want people to have fun with the device.”

Eistre says Jomi will 3D-print new silicone molds for the first test batch — due to be handed out to a test group by the end of this month. After that it will be turning to Kickstarter to get the funding ball rolling for a first production run, as it continues product development.

The target market for the devices are 20- to 40-year-old health conscious U.S. consumers who have  a penchant for gadgets — the sort of folk who likely own a Fitbit or Fuelband.

Jomi is partnering for testing the market in Europe with bottle maker KOR water, and is hoping to get similar companies in the U.S. interested. ”Our intended target market is the U.S., where we would like to secure deals with a few larger water vessel producers, like Sigg, Gobble, CleanKanteen, CamelBak, etc,” Eistre says.

It’s also making the most of Estonia’s startup-friendly environment, securing help and small bits of funding (totalling around €8,000/$10,500 to date) from a variety of domestic companies to keep development costs down.

For instance, Eistre says the hardware development costs have been completely funded by local electronic design firm Hedgehog. Other Estonian companies and organisations that have kicked in free services/grants include Trinidad Consulting, 7Blaze, Velvet Creative Alliance and — quelle surprise — local water company Tallinna Vesi.

Jomi is also down to the last eight (out of a starter pool of 100 original “best business ideas”) in Estonia’s “largest entrepreneurial competition” — Ajujaht (aka “brain hunt”) – which has a €50,000 prize for the winner.

Jomi’s water-measuring gizmos can be put into a category (connected objects/the Internet of things) that looks set to explode over the coming years, as more everyday objects are augmented with data-generating sensors, and that data is in turn funnelled into the Internet’s matrix via smartphones and home routers.

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CodeNow Brings Its Programming Class For Underrepresented Teens To NYC View Staff Page Follow me on twitter Have a Tip, Pitch or Guest Column? Tell us.X Latest on TechCrunch TV Latest in Gadgets Also on AOL Tech About Subscribe

CodeNow, a nonprofit program that teaches coding basics to high schoolers (with an emphasis on reaching girls, ethnic minorities, and other underrepresented groups), is in the middle of a significant expansion.

After launching in Washington, D.C., in 2011, the program has now launched in New York City and is currently holding training sessions with its first NYC group. In a few months, it’s going to select participants in its first fellowship program, which will take place over the summer. And later this year it plans to launch in San Francisco.

CodeNow’s curriculum uses tools like Hackety Hack (for programming basics) and Lego MindStorms (for robotics). It involves a combination of weekend sessions and online coursework, as well as a boot camp (held over the longer school breaks or on consecutive weekends) with “intensive training” in Ruby.

One goal of the program is to turn students into programmers. Founder and executive director Ryan Seashore said that of the 10 alumni who have now graduated from high school, three have gone on to study computer science. At the same time, he said that the program has benefits “even if a kid never writes a line of code after our program.” That’s because they’ll have training in how to “think logically” and are “no longer fearful of technology.”

Even though the program started (and will continue) in D.C., Seashore has moved to New York, and it sounds like he can be more ambitious with the NYC program, admitting more students, holding more classes, and launching the fellowship program.

“There was a real need and desire for a program in D.C. — the financial support was just harder to come by,” Seashore said.

Speaking of CodeNow’s fellowships, they will be awarded to the best students in the first two NYC cohorts, and they’ll include a full-time stipend for six weeks of software development training and work. Between their initial CodeNow training and the fellowship, Seashore said participants will receive “300 hours of in-person training,” and CodeNow will also try to connect them with internships at “awesome tech companies.”

I haven’t attended any of the sessions, but Seashore sent me a few of testimonials, just to give me a taste of the students’ enthusiasm. An 11th grader named Tahara said her “favorite part of the weekend was waking up for CodeNow.” Mamadou, a ninth grader, said, “My favorite part was attempting and writing codes to get the lights to turn on and off for the arduinos.”

When launching in NYC, Seashore said CodeNow received more than 250 applications, from which the team selected 13 girls and 12 boys. Seashore said CodeNow accepts applicants from all five boroughs of New York, and it provides subway cards to help the kids get to the training sessions in downtown Manhattan.

Interested NYC students can apply here. The deadline is Wednesday, April 17. Adults, meanwhile, can sign up to volunteer.

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Report: To Settle With EU Regulators, Google Proposes To Link To 3 Competitors Every Time It Links To Itself View Staff Page Follow me on twitter Have a Tip, Pitch or Guest Column? Tell us.X Latest on TechCrunch TV Latest in Gadgets Also on AOL Tech About Subscribe

Google’s search results in Europe could soon look a bit different if a number of new reports about the company’s settlement with the European Union’s competition commission are correct. After a three-year investigation into its potentially anti-competitive practices, Google submitted its proposal for an agreement with the EU last week, but the details remained under wraps. According to reports from the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, however, Google’s proposal includes a number of changes to how it will do business (at least in the EU).

According to these reports, Google has offered to “make users clearly aware” when it is linking to its own specialized services and vertical search engines. Every time Google promotes one of its own links, it will also show “at least three links to rival, non-Google sites that have information relevant to a user’s query,” the Wall Street Journal’s Amir Efrati reports. So whenever a search on Google would naturally highlight a result from Google+ Local, Google would also add links to sites like Yelp, UrbanSpoon, TripAdvisor or other relevant sites.

This part of the agreement would at least cover Google’s search services for restaurants, finance and shopping. Results from Google News, the Financial Times says, would “merely need to be labelled and separated.”

Under this proposed settlement, Google will also offer sites the ability to easily remove 10 percent of their content from its vertical search engines (though it’s not clear how this would actually work) and make it easier for advertisers to move their campaigns to other search engines (similar to what Google is doing in the U.S. after its settlement with the Federal Trade Commission earlier this year). Google’s search algorithm itself would remain untouched in this agreement.

If the EU agrees to these terms, Google will avoid the large financial penalties that the EU could have levied against the search company. The proposal, if the reports are correct, would be binding for five years, and a neutral third party would ensure that Google doesn’t stray from the agreement.

Google competitors, whose official complaint started this investigation, were probably hoping for larger changes, and fines will probably not be in favor of these relatively small changes Google is offering to make. Last week, FairSearch.org already filed another complaint against Google in the EU. This time, the organization, which is backed by Microsoft, Expedia, Oracle, TripAdvisor and 13 other search and technology companies, argues that Google is abusing its power “to dominate the mobile marketplace and cement its control over consumer Internet data for online advertising as usage shifts to mobile.”

Even if Google does settle this latest investigation with the EU then, chances are we haven’t heard the last of this.

Crunchbase

• GOOGLE

Company: Google

Website: google.com

Launch Date: September 7, 1998

IPO: NASDAQ:GOOG

Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps, YouTube, and Google+, the company’s extension into the social space. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing...

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Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps, YouTube, and Google+, the company’s extension into the social space. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing...

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Iterations: How Five Real Economists Think About Bitcoin’s Future View Contributor Page Follow me on twitter Have a Tip, Pitch or Guest Column? Tell us.X Latest on TechCrunch TV Latest in Gadgets Also on AOL Tech About Subscribe

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

There isn’t just a bubble in the Bitcoin economy, there’s a bubble in the number of posts about Bitcoin. I’ll pile on, even after this week’s mini-crash, but with a twist. A few weeks ago, I wrote some brief notes on what I thought about Bitcoin, but the over-arching feeling I had was that I couldn’t put my finger on what could become of this currency in the future. Perhaps that’s part of the reason this phenomenon is so fascinating to us all. So, instead of trying to determine future scenarios in a world I don’t understand and because Twitter has turned everyone into armchair professors, I reached out to a number of practicing economists who were either former professors or classmates, or had friends make introductions, and asked them to chime in briefly on a future with Bitcoin. Please note I requested a rather informal, fun submission from them — nothing too serious. Interestingly, most of my former professors hadn’t yet heard of Bitcoin and subsequently elected to pass on this opportunity — perhaps I’ll follow-up with them later in the year. Luckily, I was able to corral a few economists to participate, and I’ve reposted their thoughts below:

Chris Robert, currently a Professor of public policy and economic development at Harvard:

It would really be something if intelligent people chose to invest more trust in a currency system built and managed, in large part, by anonymous computer hackers than they did in currency systems built and managed by governments of the people, by the people. Fortunately, we are not there yet. Today, Bitcoin is mostly just a matter of media speculation arising from the continuing financial turmoil and growing distrust in the global financial system. This media speculation may well lead to a protracted period of financial speculation, however, during which techies are joined by increasing numbers of financial sophisticates seeking a new bubble to exploit.

Compared with corporate securities, futures, or even derivatives, Bitcoin is even less inhibited by any underlying sense of value. The bubble can just grow and grow, so long as demand increases faster than supply — and so long as the network doesn’t crash, a new cryptographic exploit doesn’t unravel everything, the fundamental lack of anonymity doesn’t bother anyone, those who lose private keys and thus potentially small fortunes don’t complain too loudly, improvements (or hacks) to “mining” don’t lead to sudden shocks to supply, etc. Profiting from a bubble of any sort can be a risky business, but our global economy is not at all lacking in people willing to give it a go. Thus, as a potentially exciting new vehicle for financial speculation, Bitcoin may be with us for some time.

Robert McMillan, a former economist with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and Stanford economist, currently Head of Portfolio Management and Director of Quantitative Research at HNC Advisors AG:

Bitcoin is dead. Long live Bitcoin. The value of having an easy-to-store, hard-to-steal, and hard-to-counterfeit medium of exchange is substantial. Especially one which doesn’t lead to the extermination of species (e.g. cowry shells, ivory) or direct environmental degradation (e.g. gold). Unfortunately, as those familiar with Paul Krugman’s writings on liquidity traps know, Bitcoin’s known and finite supply dooms it as a workable replacement currency. Furthermore, as it has no apparent use-value (unlike, say, Platinum), this kills it entirely. Nevertheless, the flaw lies with the implementation, rather than the idea itself. I expect Bitcoin (“BC”) will soon see competition in this space from “Currency 3.0″ entrants that fix the flaws in Bitcoin and thus have a better (i.e. nonzero) chance of achieving the “gold standard” of currency acceptance, namely a liquid market in Forex forwards with another major currency. At any rate, be on the lookout for Awesome Drachmas (“AD”) using newly-discovered prime numbers as units of exchange. They’re costly to “mine”, in infinite supply, and even have use-value (e.g. cryptography). Coming soon to a money-changer near you!

Matthew Bishop, currently the U.S. Editor for The Economist, where he’s been for 22 years:

As I wrote in my recent ebook on the future of money, “In Gold We Trust?“, the resurrection of gold and the emergence of Bitcoin are two sides of the same, er, coin. Both are a response to falling confidence in the soundness of government-backed ‘fiat’ money in an era of quantitative easing. I think the algorithmic approach to controlling the money supply used by Bitcoin and other digital currencies being developed in Silicon Valley could go a long way to creating a sound store of value. The biggest risk to these currencies may turn out to be government action to destroy an alternative to fiat money. But what if a sovereign state was to issue an algorithm-based currency? Would that drive fiat money out of business?

Brett Gordon, currently a Professor at Columbia’s Graduate School of Business:

There are two scopes for discussion about the future of bitcoin.  First, the short-term: if this is a bubble, when will it burst? It’s notoriously difficult to predict the end of a speculative bubble. Those lucky enough to time it correctly can make a lot of money, but that won’t be true for the rest of us mere mortals. The price chart for bitcoins reminds me of the Nasdaq from 1995 to early 2000. Clearly, these are vastly different, but I think the Nasdaq plot is representative of many yet-to-burst bubble prices. The Google Trends chart for bitcoins is similarly shaped, which suggests that when the media frenzy over the digital currency subsides, so too may much of investors’ interest. Second, the long-term: what will the bitcoin market look like in 5-10 years? That’s even harder than calling the peak of a bubble. I think a significant contribution of the bitcoin market is that it serves as a proof-of-concept for a decentralized crypto-currency. Two benefits are that bitcoins are inherently deflationary and transactions are anonymous. Given the recent slew of fiscal crises and increasing concerns about online privacy, these are two strong points in bitcoin’s favor—or whatever future crypto-currency arises.

Peter Rodriguez, currently a Professor at Virginia’s Darden School of Business:

At first blush Bitcoin is nothing special. Virtually anything can be used as a pseudo-currency. And, there is nothing new about a profound fear of fiat currencies and all manner of efforts to avoid the risk of relying on central bankers. Indeed, the prevalence of fiat (paper) currencies in a post gold-standard world is flat-out amazing. But, when the confidence underlying fiat currencies falters folks resort to recognizable and reliable stores of value and it’s not that hard to manage in such a world. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Russians and others in FSU states resorted to a highly functional trinity of currency substitutes: cigarettes for the small stuff, Vodka for the medium and Cognac for big ticket items.

In some ways, Bitcoin is just a virtual pack of smokes. But in other ways, it’s revolutionary. Cigarettes have inherent value and alternative uses, like cotton and even gold. Bitcoins are valued in and of themselves. They have even less alternative uses than paper currency or baseball cards. So, if they can establish their worth and hold the confidence of investors long enough, the institutions that can eventually convert Bitcoins from a fad-like store of value to a real currency might just begin to develop. And then, Bitcoins could become a reliable medium of exchange and index value that has some real place in the world. Even it they just serve to measure the value of goods ultimately transacted in ‘real’ currencies, Bitcoins will have become something entirely new: a true, stateless, virtual currency rooted in nothing other than confidence in the set of rules that surround them. It could all implode, of course, and that’s not unlikely. But, currencies are always tested and all of them have gone through existential crises. The real question isn’t whether Bitcoin will falter, plummet or take us all on a crazy ride, it’s whether it will actually survive it’s inevitable test. If it does, even at very low values, it will change the way we think about stores of value, finance and the independence of the virtual economy.

Photo Credit: Glen Cooper / Creative Commons Flickr

Crunchbase

• BITCOIN

Company: bitcoin

Website: bitcoin.org

Launch Date: 2009

Bitcoin is a digital currency created in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto. The name refers both to the open source software he designed to make use of the currency and to the peer-to-peer network formed by running that software. Unlike some other digital currencies, Bitcoin avoids central authorities and issuers. Bitcoin uses a distributed database spread across nodes of a peer-to-peer network to journal transactions, and uses digital signatures and proof-of-work to provide basic security functions, such as ensuring that bitcoins...

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Bitcoin is a digital currency created in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto. The name refers both to the open source software he designed to make use of the currency and to the peer-to-peer network formed by running that software. Unlike some other digital currencies, Bitcoin avoids central authorities and issuers. Bitcoin uses a distributed database spread across nodes of a peer-to-peer network to journal transactions, and uses digital signatures and proof-of-work to provide basic security functions, such as ensuring that bitcoins...

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Facebook Home And The Promise Of Android View Staff Page Follow me on Twitter Have a Tip, Pitch or Guest Column? Tell us.X Latest on TechCrunch TV Latest in Gadgets Also on AOL Tech About Subscribe

If you’re an iPhone user, you might be feeling a little left behind, because Facebook launched an application called Facebook Home, touted by CEO Mark Zuckerberg as the “next version of Facebook.” In fact, you might be feeling this way if you’re an Android user, too. For now, only a handful of select devices can even run Home (officially) — devices that users adopt in particular to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to new app releases. Notably missing from the lineup is Google’s Nexus 4, the latest in the lineup of Nexus-branded flagship Android phones.

But Facebook promised that more handsets will be supported in time, as will tablets. Well, only Android ones, that is.

It’s too soon to say whether Facebook Home will live up to the company’s claims and expectations of becoming the new way people interact with the social network, or whether it will go down only as a notable experiment on the social network’s part. If the latter, it won’t be a major loss to the company, as Facebook will continue to have access to data from a core group of heavy Facebook enthusiasts. It will learn what keeps users engaged, what posts and images catch their eye and their clicks, and, eventually, which advertisements do, too.

But to those who can’t download Facebook Home today because they’re using the “wrong” smartphone, it’s of small comfort to think that perhaps the product won’t ever really be as successful as Facebook promises. Because for users, what matters is not whether this grand roll of the dice pays off for Facebook itself – it’s whether you have the ability to participate in the game in the first place.

This is the challenge of the new mobile landscape.

Unlike the web, where the worst thing developers encountered was IE compatibility – and yes, that was bad - it was only a matter of time (and hair pulling and screaming) and energy to bring a new idea to everyone who had Internet access and a web browser. Because the web is built on open standards, this sort of thing is possible.

Facebook wouldn’t even be Facebook had this not been the case.

But mobile is a different story, and a potentially dangerous one in terms of progress and innovation, as Facebook Home today proves.

On the one side, you have an Android ecosystem that’s fragmented by operating system version. In fact, Google quietly changed the way it discloses that fragmentation. Now, instead of telling the developer community how many phones run Jelly Bean or Gingerbread, for instance, it tells them how many of those devices are used by people who download apps. It’s an attempt to paint a rosier picture of OS distribution patterns by focusing on the app-haves instead of the app have-nots. (Spoiler: there are a lot of people running old versions of Android out there.)

Then on the other side, there’s Apple. Because of its restrictions, Facebook Home will never be able to run as intended on iOS operating systems. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, to be clear. It’s just a statement. Apple deserves plenty of credit for helping technology become an interest of the mainstream – a group that felt its former interfaces, configurations, and command lines too complicated and confusing. Or worse, simply not fun. The iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone, but it radically altered the way that people interact with – and learned to love and care about – technology.

But if we’re giving Apple credit for sparking this trend, lets give them credit for potentially stalling progress here, too.

It’s only a few years into this new paradigm of computing, and things are already starting to feel a little dated. We’ve become accustomed to, bored with, and finally overrun by mobile applications. So the shift ahead of us is enabling new experiences – possibly those that put an app-centric interface secondary. Android is well on its way to enabling this, with its potential for customizations and widgets, as well as the deep hooks that apps can sink into the underlying operating system.

Apps like Facebook Home.

Facebook Home, however, is but the first high-profile example. A niche group Android users have been doing this for years on their own with third-party widgets, launchers, and replacements for core applications.

Android is not an ideal landscape overall. (See: fragmentation issues above. See also: app quality, developer revenue potential, etc.) In other words, this is a not a statement about who wins the larger war, it’s about who wins on this particular battlefront. That said, in terms of enabling a new mobile experience, Android is now more promising than iOS.

Of course, you may think that Facebook Home itself is a terrible, horrible thing that you would never consider installing on your own phone, and that’s just fine.

The point is, it’s a different idea. It’s not really an Android launcher, it’s only inspired by them. And even if you have no particular affinity for Facebook itself, you might for the next company that follows it. Because someone will. In fact, one already has: Korean messaging giant KakaoTalk just announced plans for a Facebook Home competitor of its own.

More will come.

And later, it won’t be just about direct copycats like KakaoTalk, or the third-party developers promising DIY “Home-like” experiences, either. Facebook Home’s existence speaks to a world where developers will be prompted to think beyond applications and the isolated experiences they deliver. With the layering, and overall well-designed nature of the Facebook Home feature called “Chat Heads,” we’ve been shown the potential to build entirely different ways of interacting with our devices. Period.

This is the path of innovation. Someone takes a bold step forward with a new idea. Eyebrows are raised, pundits opine, testers review, but ultimately a thing dies or lives in the hands of the everyday users. You.

Facebook Home itself might not make it. It challenges the status quo by making other applications less important than Facebook. That’s a radical enough idea that it could easily fail.

But the damage – whether Facebook Home succeeds or not – is already done. Facebook Home is something else. Wired called it an apperating system. That’s perfect. It exists somewhere between apps and phones. It dug out a whole new space, now begging to be exploited, experimented upon, and filled with new ideas.

And it did this on Android.

Asked if Facebook Home could ever come to iOS, Zuckerberg said, “anything that happens with Apple is going to happen with partnership. Google’s Android is open so we don’t have to work with them.”

No one had to “work with” the web, either.

Crunchbase

• FACEBOOK

Company: Facebook

Website: facebook.com

Launch Date: February 1, 2004

IPO: NASDAQ:FB

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...

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Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...

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As Berlin Awaits Its Big Tech Exit Satirical Tumblr Blogs Spawn About The Hype View Staff Page Follow me on twitter Have a Tip, Pitch or Guest Column? Tell us.X Latest on TechCrunch TV Latest in Gadgets Also on AOL Tech About Subscribe

The hype about the Berlin tech startup scene has continued this year, but as 2013 ebbs into Spring, many are asking the same question: When will the hype turn into real results? As many of my contacts said to me on a recent visit: what we need in Berlin for all this hype to be real is a big exit. The most recent evidence that Berlin is capable of producing a decent startup exit is the sale of streaming music tech company Aupeo to Panasonic Automotive, although the financial terms remain a mystery.

And German media giant Axel Springer recently acquired Berlin social TV startup TunedIn, originally founded in New York. No price was released.

Similarly, Senzari, the Miami-based streaming music startup offering an alternative to Pandora, acquired the tiny Berlin-based startup wahwah.fm. Again the terms were undisclosed.

By contrast, London and the UK, where the tech hype has been in full flow for a while, has been coming out with some daily impressive results of late.

London-based Summly famously went gone to Yahoo! for $30 million while, Mendeley has exited for as much as $100 million.

Then there is Cisco buying Ubiquisys for $310 million.

But of course we are forgetting the Berlin-based Samwer Brother phenomenon, where waves of MBAs are sent into battle to clone the latest thing out of the Valley for a simple exit, as happened with CityDeal and Groupon.

Can we really say that ecommerce deals such as Fab.com acquiring its German competitor Casacanda last year, count in real tech startup terms?

They certainly so if you are thinking about sheer value creation, but purists would argue that ecommerce-oriented companies and technology platform companies are quite different beasts.

Whatever the philosophical arguments, what Berliners are really looking for are exits from some home grown innovators, and some bigs ones.

And while some of the biggest Berlin tech companies, such as Soundcloud and Wooga, appear to be shooting for a major home run, here doesn’t appear to be an exit or IPO on the cards this year for either.

What is to be done? Sit and wait? Many would say, let’s just cut the hype and get back to work. No-one likes the boy who cried wolf one too many times…

Meanwhile, to keep you occupied, we present for you a selection from the hottest startup we found in Berlin lately: a Tumblr blog called WhenYouReallyLiveInBerlin, (for those of you who have tired of WhenYouLiveInBerlin).

At least we’ll have something to keep us occupied while we wait for Berlin to have it’s PayPal Mafia moment.

When someone says berlin is the new silicon valley

When St Oberholz Closes

When someone explains how hard it is to run a million dollar startup

When a startup runs out of club mate

Who people think they are when they work at a startup

When someone tells you about working at betahaus

When you ask someone working at soundcloud about his sex life

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Exit Q&A — Demotix Founder Turi Munthe Gives His Advice On How To Build A Startup View Staff Page Follow me on twitter Have a Tip, Pitch or Guest Column? Tell us.X Latest on TechCrunch TV Latest in Gadgets Also on AOL Tech About Subscribe

Back in November last year image giant Corbis acquired Demotix, the crowd-sourced breaking news picture and video agency which had launched in 2008. We present for you a lighting fast ‘exit Q&A’ with founder and former CEO Turi Munthe, who has since left to pursue new projects.

Demotix sold to Bill Gates’ Corbis, the second biggest picture library in the world, in November 2012. On the way, since their launch in January 2009, they built a community of about 40,000 people in every corner of the globe, providing them with a platform to tell stories that nobody else could – or often would – cover. They broke over 1 million news images, reported 100,000+ news stories, published scoops from Iran to Oslo and sold their community’s work all over the world, shipping hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to a network of freelancers from Haiti to Zimbabwe. Not bad for a start-up in news industry which is haemorrhageing money daily.

I caught up with Turi Munthe the week after he finally stepped down as CEO to ask what advise he would give to other entrepreneurs.

MB: What did you get right?

TM: Our advisors: we (Jonathan Tepper and I) built a team of exceptional people who, despite our thick-skulledness, helped us avoid some of the biggest potholes. The ones we hit were ALL because we didn’t know how to listen to them.

In terms of office culture neither Jonathan nor I have ever had as much fun professionally as starting Demotix. Everyone we hired and kept had the same vision of, commitment to and passion for what we wanted to achieve, and everyone had options (including many of the early interns). We had problems, but we also had a ball and made some great friends in the process.

We were cheap because we never raised the squillions of our competitors in the US, so we had to be. Short, cheap leases; no marketing spend (as Founder, you are the marketing); no headhunters, no consultants, and as few hires as possible. Don’t try to outsource your risk: do it yourself. Oh, and conferences? Only go to the ones you’re speaking at…

We also set out to win prizes. Before you make sales, raise big bucks, and become insufferable, start by winning prizes. When there’s nothing else out there, they validate your story. Plus they dazzle investors and boost the team.

MB: What did you get wrong?

We weren’t geeks, and didn’t bring one in as co-founder. I still can’t quite believe some of the crap we wasted time and money on as a result. Here’s a rule to follow.

Hiring: I’m sentimental, and Jonathan is even worse. When everyone fits, the team fizzes. It takes just one person to skew the dynamic, and I let that happen too often.

Spending equity. When you start, equity is your only currency. You will regret how you spent it whatever happens. So try to spend it measurably (ie. options not shares).

MB: What have you learnt?

The defining feature of a company’s success is the market it’s entering: a rising tide raises all ships and all that… A free-speech news platform? Are you kidding?

Understand your market, even if you’re planning on inventing a new one. Do everything you can to speak to future clients, and then when you’re up and running, to talk to existing clients. If you don’t believe they’re your number one mentor, you’re in trouble.

Moats matter: the news photo business is really an oligopoly (AP, Getty, and Reuters). Oligopolies exist because there are high barriers to entry: your business is figuring out quite how much it’s going to take you to breach those.

Have fun: start-ups are risky as hell and, in almost all certainty, a terrible investment of your time. So really care about what you’re doing and really enjoy doing it: the experience, most likely, will be what’s of most value.

Photo by Anton Nosik

Crunchbase

• DEMOTIX

Company: Demotix

Website: demotix.com

Launch Date: August 2008

Demotix is a multi-award winning photojournalism newswire: a global network for freelance journalists. With a 40,000+ community, over 7,000 active photojournalists around the world, a 1million image archive, and a monthly growth rate of 60,000 pictures, Demotix images have appeared on the front pages of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Guardian and elsewhere, and in print, broadcast and online media all over the globe. Demotix has been called “Journalism for the 21st Century” by the Daily Telegraph, and...

→ Learn more

Demotix is a multi-award winning photojournalism newswire: a global network for freelance journalists. With a 40,000+ community, over 7,000 active photojournalists around the world, a 1million image archive, and a monthly growth rate of 60,000 pictures, Demotix images have appeared on the front pages of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Guardian and elsewhere, and in print, broadcast and online media all over the globe. Demotix has been called “Journalism for the 21st Century” by the Daily Telegraph, and...

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Programmer Creates An AI To (Not Quite) Beat NES Games View Staff Page Have a Tip, Pitch or Guest Column? Tell us.X Latest on TechCrunch TV Latest in Gadgets Also on AOL Tech About Subscribe

Programmer and CMU PhD Tom Murphy created a function to “beat” NES games by watching the score. When the computer did things that raised the score it would learn how to reproduce them again in again, resulting, ultimately, in what amounts to a Super Mario Brothers-playing robot. The program, called a “technique for automating NES games,” can take on nearly every NES game but it doesn’t always win.

You can read his full paper here but, as you can see from the above video (fast-forward to about 6 minutes to see Mario in action), the game does most of the things normal humans would do but consistently uses very difficult tricks to, say, attack two Goombas in rapid succession.

Murphy writes:

Bytes in memory (and sometimes 16- and 32-bit words) can contain interesting game facts like the player’s position in the level or score. The central idea of this paper is to use (only) the value of memory locations to deduce when the player is “winning”. The things that a human player perceives, like the video screen and sound effects, are completely ignored. As an additional simplification, we assume that winning always consists of a value going up—either the position in the level getting larger, the score getting larger, the number of lives, the world or level number getting bigger, and so on.

By giving the program a little bit of training – how to jump, what to grab – the program becomes a coin-hungry juggernaut, stomping turtles and taking no mushroom prisoners. Murphy ran a few other games through it, including Tetris, and found that the program would eventually just pause itself rather than continue playing and lose, a tactic shared by annoying, over-competitive cousins around the world since 1985.

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Songza Raises $3.8M According To SEC Filing, AngelList Names Amazon As Unconfirmed Investor View Staff Page Follow me on twitter Have a Tip, Pitch or Guest Column? Tell us.X Latest on TechCrunch TV Latest in Gadgets Also on AOL Tech About Subscribe

Songza, a free streaming music service that has expert-made playlists and runs on the web and various touch screen platforms, has raised $3.8 million according to a SEC filing. We’ve reached out to both companies to get further detail and will update this post. A quick check on AngelList now names Amazon.com as an “unconfirmed” investors.

In late 2011 the startup closed was was reportedly a ‘seven-figure’ round of financing led by investors including Deep Fork Capital as well as an “undisclosed strategic investor”. Also participating in the round was Geoff Judge, co-founder of 24/7 Real Media.

Falling between Spotify and Pandora, Songza has garnered much praise for allowing users to set up playlists based on day and time (so, work days and weekends), with filters for whatever mood you might be in, such as going to a party etc. and lets you impress you friends with your music choices in a way that having to curate your Spotify or Pandora choices just can’t.

Headquartered in Long Island City, NY, Songza was built by the team that founded crowd-priced MP3 download store AmieStreet.com in 2006 while at university.

Crunchbase

• SONGZA

Company: Songza

Website: songza.com

Launch Date: November 1, 2007

Songza is a free streaming music service that has expert-made playlists for every occasion and makes it easy to find the right one, at the right time. Headquartered in Long Island City, NY, Songza is built by the team that founded crowd-priced MP3 download store AmieStreet.com in 2006 from their dorms at Brown University. Songza is available on the web at http://www.Songza.com and as an application on the iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Kindle Fire and Android platform.

→ Learn more

Songza is a free streaming music service that has expert-made playlists for every occasion and makes it easy to find the right one, at the right time. Headquartered in Long Island City, NY, Songza is built by the team that founded crowd-priced MP3 download store AmieStreet.com in 2006 from their dorms at Brown University. Songza is available on the web at http://www.Songza.com and as an application on the iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Kindle Fire and Android platform.

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