The API-economy is coming and fast

Shutterstock

API concept drawing

Sept. 9 – 10, 2013

San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Byron Deeter is a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. Disclosure: Deeter is an investor in Box, DocuSign, Twilio and SendGrid.

In little more than a decade, application programming interfaces (APIs) have transitioned from relative obscurity to become the “digital glue” that empowers developers to create new software applications, partnerships and even new businesses. This business-to-developer (B2D) market is quickly becoming one of the fastest growing opportunities within cloud computing, and one we’re particularly excited about at Bessemer Venture Partners.

An API is a specification (think of it like a contract) for how two pieces of software talk to each other and exchange data. Web 2.0 companies were the first to recognize APIs, historically used by developers to help teams work without stepping on each other’s toes, as products to be shared with — and sold to — customers and partners. In just a few short years, APIs have become a crucial channel, attracting customers with the ability to extend products, helping partners deliver the value they promised, and growing the ecosystem as a whole.

In today’s world, having a strong API strategy isn’t just good software practice; it’s a powerful business practice. Amazon has built a multibillion dollar revenue business in Amazon Web Services (AWS), leveraging powerful API-based elements such as EC2. Google Maps would be a much smaller business if the only access was through its website directly. Twitter has opened up an entire class of businesses and analytical modules by sharing its data API and platform. Even Salesforce.com, with over 800,000 developers and more than 2.5 million applications on the Force.com platform, proudly states that API calls drive more than 60 percent of total traffic to the site.

---

Editor’s note: Our upcoming CloudBeat conference, Sept. 9-Sept. 10 in San Francisco, will be tackling revolutionary cases of enterprise cloud usage. Register today!

---

Empowering developers to build against your platform doesn’t just create value for partners; the API provider wins as well by expanding the ecosystem, increasing retention, and driving up the value of the platform. Even more importantly, end customers win when all their products work seamlessly together. Take Box — its API-based integrations with popular applications like Salesforce.com, Yammer, Jive, Netsuite, or even custom internal applications make it easy for end users to work with their files wherever they need them. Similarly, DocuSign’s API lets customers design e-signatures right into their workflows. For example, when a rep closes an opportunity in Salesforce, DocuSign can grab all the right data and automatically send out a contract for signature.

To take it one step further, can a business be API-first, or even API-only? Here at Bessemer, we’re excited about this emerging business model, where developers are the customer, and API design is given the same care and attention that Samsung and Apple might pay their latest phones. Some examples are companies like Stripe and Braintree, which make it easy to add payments to your application, or SendGrid, which does the same for email delivery.

Another example is Twilio, where over 200,000 developers have built applications on top of their API-based communications service offering. Opening up for the first time what used to be a completely cloistered world of telecom boxes and copper wires, Twilio gives developers an easy way to use all the communication services we have on our phones (SMS, voice, Shortcodes, etc.) in web and mobile applications. This enables a slew of new use cases, from the SMS alerts you get from Uber when your car is arriving to highly customized call centers for Home Depot and others.

The common thread here is to take something that’s difficult (or just plain annoying) to do and make it easy for the developer to use, at a reasonable price — much like software as a service (SaaS) companies do for the B2B world, and consumer electronics do for you and me.

Companies likethese have shown the value of executing a strong API strategy, and we likewise encourage our SaaS and PaaS (platform as a service) companies to do the same. We’re also seeing more companies finding success with an API-first approach to the B2D market. Layer in the fact that developers are rapidly building a new marketplace of API-driven mobile apps, projected to be worth $25 billion in 2015, and we’re at a key moment in time for the API economy.

On September 9, at VentureBeat’s CloudBeat conference, I’ll be leading a panel with Sam Shillace, SVP of Engineering at Box, Jeff Lawson, Cofounder and CEO of Twilio, and Jim Frankilin, CEO of SendGrid, and we can continue the discussion there.

Filed under: Cloud, Dev

---

VentureBeat is creating an index of the top ‘arms merchants’ of the cloud. Take a look at our initial suggestions and complete the survey to help us build a definitive index. We’ll publish the official index later this month, and for those who fill out surveys, we’ll send you an expanded report free of charge.

The API-economy is coming and fast

Google to hit U.S. gov’t harder with transparency reporting demands

Flickr

Department of Justice granted Google a “stay” on its decision about whether the company can release information about FISA data requests. Google will now hit harder on the issue of transparency reporting with amended demands, according to a source familiar with the matter.

In June, Google formally asked the courts to allow it to publish the total number of requests for user information made under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) as well as the number of people and accounts affected by these requests. Google releases a transparency report that details all of the requests for information it receives from government around the world and has thus far been barred from including this information.

The Department of Justice has pushed off the decision six times, but will pause the process in order to let Google file its latest movement, according to a source speaking with VentureBeat.

“It’s another chance for the DoJ [Department of Justice] to consider the petitions from a different perspective. It’ll be rewritten,” said the source, who could not speak publicly on the matter, and wishes to remain anonymous.

The amendment comes after the government announced yesterday that it will release its own form of a transparency report — something Google, along with the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) and other tech companies demanded from the U.S. in July.

“While the government’s decision to publish aggregate information about certain national security requests is a step in the right direction, we believe there is still too much secrecy around these requests and that more openness is needed. That’s why we, along with many others, have called on the U.S. government to allow us to publish specific numbers about both FISA and NSL requests,” said a Google spokesperson in an e-mail to VentureBeat.

The government’s transparency report, as introduced by Director of Intelligence James R. Clapper, will detail total numbers of national security letters, FISA business records, FISA pen register/trap and trace requests, and “FISA orders based on probable cause.” It will also include the number of people affected by each of these requests.

In Google’s original June filing, the company said it has the right under the First Amendment to:

1. Publish the total number of FISA requests it receives, if any


2. Publish the total number of users or accounts encompassed within such requests

It further said these requests would be published as a range in increments of 1,000 instead of actual totals, and would not state what areas of FISA the request came from.

However, the company likely will model the new demands after those it sought in the CDT petition from July. These included:

1. The right to publish government requests for Section 215 of the Patriot Act, Section 702 of FISA, National Security Letters, and “others”


2. The right to publish the number of individuals, accounts, and devices affected under each specific request-type


3. The right to publish how many requests related to “communications content” and “basic subscriber information” under each request-type

This kind of information would give the U.S. a better indication of what kind of information is being released to the government, and which act is being used most often.

Google and the CDT further noted in that same petition that, “basic information about how the government uses its various law enforcement-related investigative authorities has been published for years without any apparent disruption to criminal investigations.”

The government will likely announce the stay after the Labor Day weekend with more information about when Google must submit its new petition.

Filed under: Business, Security

Google to hit U.S. gov’t harder with transparency reporting demands

‘This space reserved for general solicitation’

Deposit Photo

This post is produced by MicroVentures.

How familiar are you with general solicitation? Well, you better become an expert on it, because your deal flow is about to increase and will be coming from places you never expected. Did you know that in about three weeks, startups are going to be able to advertise that they are raising capital in newspapers, magazines, blogs, billboards, and even on Facebook and Twitter?

General solicitation is loosely defined as seeking interest from the public at large for an offering either through advertising or some type of mass communication. The Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act is a law intended to encourage funding of United States small businesses by easing various securities regulations. It passed with bipartisan support and was signed into law by President Barack Obama on April 5, 2012.

Why is any of this important to you? New rules are scheduled to go into effect September 23, 2013.  One of the more noteworthy new rules is that issuers must verify purchasers are accredited investors. This means that if you invest in a startup that is soliciting its raise online, you will have to provide proof that you are an accredited investor. This would involve sending in two years of W2s and certifying your salary for the current year, sending in bank statements or proof of assets, or getting your CPA to verify your status.

MicroVentures, a registered broker/dealer, has raised over $20 million on its platform over the last two years. It has execution experience, adhere to securities regulations, and has always had a seamless process in place for angel investors to fund startups. MicroVentures’ broker/dealer model is unique in the startup funding ecosystem and provides investors with the ability to make educated investment decisions in a regulated environment.

To learn more about MicroVentures and become pre-qualified as an accredited investor, visit www.microventures.com.

---

Sponsored posts are content that has been produced by a company, which is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly marked. The content of news stories produced by our editorial team is never influenced by advertisers or sponsors in any way. For more information, contact sales@venturebeat.com.

---

Filed under: Business, Entrepreneur, Small Biz
‘This space reserved for general solicitation’

Here’s why India is never going to be safe for women

A few days ago, after news of the sexual assault case in Mumbai broke out, someone on Twitter said something that got me thinking. A female resident of Mumbai, presumably, lashed out after seeing the umpteenth tweet asking women in Mumbai to “take care” and “be safe.”

Enough of this patronizing nonsense, she said. Instead of asking women to “take care” it was time that men actually did something to make the city safer for women.

In the days since that attack, such outbursts from men and women alike have become common. And they have been part of a much broader collection of discussion and debates about women’s safety. There are several concurrent threads to these debates: How can we teach our men to respect women better? Is violence against women an expression of social faults, if so which ones? How can these faults be alleviated? How does the portrayal of women, women’s issues and violence against women in mass media play a role in making things better or worse? Should minors involved in sex crimes be treated as adults? What can we do to make our neighborhoods safer? More recently there has been substantial debate on the trivializing of the idea of rape in the form of jokes and in other contexts not directly related to sex crimes.

Essentially, I suppose we are all trying to figure out how India can be made safer and more empathetic for all women. And these lines of questioning are legitimate. They might eventually help us make our cities, towns, and homes safer. But not immediately, not right now.

Right now, make no mistake about it, we need something that forms the foundation of a safe society: a functional law-and-order system. No amount of soul searching, cultural self-flagellation, sex education and behavioral conditioning will succeed unless our streets are well-policed and our courts function with speed and efficiency.

And this is exactly why I am afraid India will remain an unsafe country for women for the foreseeable future. Now I know this is not the message that many campaigners for women’s safety want to hear. Many of them are optimistic that some kind of governmental or non-governmental campaigning will make India safer. But as long these campaigns are divorced from a substantial overhaul of law and order mechanisms, they will not work.

Let us just take the case of of the city of Mumbai, arguably India’s most commercially important metropolis. Mumbai has a sanctioned police strength of approximately 45,000 officers. Around 3,000 of these posts are currently vacant. The effective number police on the streets are even lower. The New Indian Express recently said that Mumbai had a serving police force of 33,000 officers.

Earlier this month, in response to a Right To Information request, Mumbai police revealed that in the first two months of this year 27,740 police personnel had been deployed on VIP security duty, generally meaning they guard politicians. It is unclear if these deployments were short or long term. But there is no question that this substantially reduces the number of police officers the city actually needs on its streets.

An optimistic estimate suggests that, on an ongoing basis, Mumbai police has around 20,000 police taking care of its population of around 20 million residents. Therefore, Mumbai enjoys an effective police coverage of approximately 100 police officers per 100,000. (This number can vary somewhat depending on how you approximate police and population. But by my reckoning, it gets no better than around 165 per 100,000.) The United Nations recommends coverage where a population of 100,000 are served by 220 to 250 police officers.

What about courts? It is common knowledge that Indian courts have millions of cases pending at any given point in time. Yet another Right To Information request, filed by the same applicant in June, found 49,170 cases of crimes against women pending in courts across the state of Maharashtra (Mumbai is its capital). This number has increased by 40% between 2008 and 2012. Of the 14,414 rape cases tried in Maharashtra last year, 13,388 remain pending.

To be sure, better police and faster courts will not solve these problems alone, and columnist Praveen Swami explains this, but I can think of no conceivable solution that does not include better police and faster courts as key elements.

The need for immediate intervention is staring us in the face. So why don’t the people who run Mumbai, Maharashtra or India see this? What prevents them from overhauling the police force and legal system? Why does law minister after law minister lament about the masses of pending cases in Indian courts … and then actually do nothing radical about it?

This situation is doubly ludicrous when you consider that the government is also struggling to create sufficient jobs each year to occupy its exploding youth demographic. The nation is simultaneously drowning in both unemployed youth and undelivered public services.

Is it because these reforms are overly complex?

Cleaning up the courts is admittedly complex. But surely hiring a few thousand policemen can’t be as complex as rolling out multi-billion dollar job guarantees, food security or biometric identity schemes? Those are all initiatives the government has somehow managed to undertake.

Is it too expensive?

One estimate puts the annual budget of Mumbai’s police force at about 6 billion rupees (or $91 million). Almost all of this, around 85%, goes toward paying salaries. Can Mumbai, the beating heart of India’s economy afford to, say, double this? Given that the budget of the city of Mumbai is 280 billion rupees ($4 billion), and the city has a GDP which is at least 10 times as much, an escalation wouldn’t break the bank.

Then why not?

Your guess is as good as mine. But I think it is because overhauling Mumbai’s police or drawing up a radical plan to create new courts and hire new judges is exactly the kind of granular reform that, from a political perspective, Indian governments find difficult to execute. And unless these reforms deliver an immediate return (and one that can be politically leveraged), most stakeholders aren’t going to be interested in at all. In a given term in office there are only so many fights you can fight. So why pick the tough ones?

This is perhaps why the life cycles of legislation such as the Food Security Bill are relatively short, while those of a politically unsexy but economically important nature such as a new Companies Bill take decades.

There is a peculiar pattern that often pops up when “India’s problems” are discussed on social networks or in the comments section of news websites. Somehow while all of India’s problems are all universal—rapes happen in the US also, corruption happens in China also, malnutrition happens in Indonesia also—all the solutions to India’s problems become unique and complex. Police reform is complex, education is complex, food is complex, taxation is complex and on and on.

Not always. Some of India’s problem are simple things with simple solutions that unfortunately have no political capital.

I am afraid the safety of our cities is one of these problems. And I don’t think we should expect major reforms any time soon. Of course I hope I am proven completely wrong and Mumbai, and Delhi, and every other local administration immediately implements steps to improve law and order.

But until that happens—and I have no intention of being patronizing or sexist here—my fellow citizens will have to take care and be safe.

Follow Sidin on Twitter @sidin. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

Here’s why India is never going to be safe for women

Top 10 USA Twitter Trends of the Week, Vol 71 by HootSuite and Ad Age

While Miley Cyrus twerked herself into the tabloids, western powers discussed whether to intervene in Syria against the UN’s pleas. And while Twitterers suggested that their cat could play a #BetterBatmanThanBenAffleck, Microsoft lost a powerhouse CEO that failed to go mobile. Check out this week’s bag of mixed nuts (Miley the nuttiest) that we like to call USA Twitter Trends of the Week.

#1: Miley Cyrus

Unless you live offline (which is impossible because you’re reading this), you’ve at least seen a funny gif, video, Tweet or meme of Miley Cyrus’ VMA performance this week. Her booty shaking and tongue wagging on stage has stirred up a massive controversy over inappropriate public “performances.” Although she stole the show in a matter of minutes, people around the world spent the better part of this week hating on her because of it. But maybe this is exactly what she (and her brilliant marketing team) wanted.

#2: VMAs

Miley clearly stole the show with her questionable twerks and “dance moves” thus keeping the VMAs trending across the States. But, gathering a massive collection of all the hottest young pop stars like Selena Gomez, Bieber, Taylor Swift, Rihanna and Kanye West is bound to gain significant momentum on Twitter. From discussing the awards, performances and, of course, the Red Carpet outfits, Twitterers couldn’t help but stick #VMAs into their tweets all week.

#3: #BetterBatmanThanBenAffleck

My cat could play a #BetterBatmanThanBenAffleck and other combinations of funny Tweets tended to trend on Twitter after this week’s “big announcement.” You guessed it. Apparently Ben Affleck will be playing Batman in the upcoming Warner Bros. film Man of Steel 2. And although met with unanimous criticism online, some awesome jokes surfaced: “In the new Ben Affleck version, the Batmobile is just a beige Prius.” Whether he’ll be a good Batman or not seems pretty redundant to Twitterers at this point.

Who do you think played a #BetterBatmanThanBenAffleck could? Michael Keaton? Christian Bale? Val Kilmer?

Here’s my personal favorite:

Would still be a better batman than Ben Affleck pic.twitter.com/7aFKFdw3Sv

— Matty (@_MattyyAllen) August 27, 2013

#4: #RIPOneDirection

Possibly created by trolls and 1D-haters, the hashtag #RIPOneDirection started picking up momentum earlier this week. As One Direction fans began defending their favorite pop star boy band, it (surprise, surprise) spiralled out of control.

Our favorite counter tweet was this:

#RIPOneDirection R- Really I- Inspiring P- People http://t.co/FK2Ra1Alm6

— ♡ HAPPY BDAY LIAM ♡ (@Louistrgram) August 28, 2013

#5: Syria

Western leaders have charged this week that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government fired deadly chemical weapons on civilians near Damascus last week. And while world leaders appear to be moving toward a strike against Assad’s regime, the UN chief pleaded for more time as UN inspectors have not endorsed the allegations. Considering that all decisions and information significantly affect everyone around the world, Syria has been a major global topic of discussion in the news and on social.

Here’s what U.S. Secretary of State has to say:

#6: I Have a Dream

As world powers meet behind closed doors to discuss Syria, thousands celebrated Martin Luther King Jr’s ‘I Have a Dream’ 50th Anniversary speech with Obama and Bill Clinton. Now one of the most famous speeches, King’s words are considered the pinnacle of the American Civil Rights Movement. In commemoration of his dedication, the nation’s first African-American president, delivered a speech of his own on the same steps.

Here is Martin Luther King Jr’s speech from August 28, 1963:

#7: Steve Ballmer

Microsoft CEO and former right-hand-man of the beloved Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer announced this week that he will be retiring. For many, this is huge news. Ballmer’s 13 years as CEO has been a rather tumultuous one, with employees leaving for competitors like Google and online sources trashing his every move, including management style. But despite tripling Microsoft’s annual sales (we’re talking billions annually), he could never quite jump the hurdle that is mobile phones, tablets and search in particular. So as one of perhaps the most successful CEO’s leaves the world’s biggest software company, Twitterers around the world are left with the question: what’s next for Microsoft?

Will fresh ideas give the age-old giant the jolt it needs to join the 21st-century world of mobiles and tablets? Your guess is as good as ours.

#8: Today Show

Last week, boy “heartthrobs” One Direction appeared on the Today Show drawing “the biggest crowd we’ve ever had [in Rockefeller Center, NYC].” The boys sang their popular hit “What Makes You Beautiful” to 18,000 screaming teens on the Today Show stage and had the show trending ever since. Go figure.

#9: Prison Break

Last week, Prison Break TV show actor Wentworth Miller came out as gay in a letter to the organizers of St. Petersburg International Film Festival in Russia to explain his decline for attending the event. Since then, the TV show has continued to trend as fans discuss the news, support Miller and tweet about the show itself.

“I am deeply troubled by the current attitude toward and treatment of gay men and women by the Russian government. The situation is in no way acceptable, and I cannot in good conscience participate in a celebratory occasion hosted by a country where people like myself are being systematically denied their basic right to live and love openly” – Wentworth Miller.

Good on you.

#10: Go BERZERK

Eminem just released a new single called BERZERK. Think 90s mashup mix with mediocre hip hop rhymes that are slightly reminiscent of a past Slim Shady. That’s all I have to say.

Check out what trended globally this week.

The post Top 10 USA Twitter Trends of the Week, Vol 71 by HootSuite and Ad Age appeared first on HootSuite Social Media Management.

Top 10 USA Twitter Trends of the Week, Vol 71 by HootSuite and Ad Age

Top 10 Global Twitter Trends of the Week ~ Volume 71

This week, the world was tweeting about the crisis in Syria, the debate over presidential elections and a dose of trivial pop culture. Here’s what the world talked about this week on social media:

#1: Miley Cyrus

People around the globe have spent the better part of this week hating on Miley Cyrus. And unless you live offline (which is impossible because you’re reading this), you’ve at least seen a funny gif, video, Tweet or meme of her MTV Video Music Award performance. Once young and seemingly innocent, Miley twerked her butt and wagged her tongue on stage, stirring up a massive controversy over inappropriate public “performances.” But, in all fairness, she absolutely stole the show and has been on the top of everyone’s minds and charts since.

#2: Syria

Western leaders have charged this week that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government fired deadly chemical weapons on civilians near Damascus last week. And while world leaders appear to be moving toward a strike against Assad’s regime, the UN chief pleaded for more time as UN inspectors have not endorsed the allegations. Considering that all decisions and information significantly affect everyone around the world, Syria has been a major global topic of discussion in the news and on social.

Here’s what U.S. Secretary of State has to say:

#3: I Have A Dream

As world powers meet behind closed doors to discuss Syria, thousands celebrated Martin Luther King Jr’s ‘I Have a Dream’ 50th Anniversary speech with Obama and Bill Clinton. Now one of the most famous speeches, King’s words are considered the pinnacle of the American Civil Rights Movement. In commemoration of his dedication, the nation’s first African-American president, delivered a speech of his own on the same steps.

Here is Martin Luther King Jr’s speech from August 28, 1963:

#4: #HappyBirthdayRupertGrint

On August 24th actor Rupert Grint celebrated his 25th birthday. Who’s that? Harry Potter fans know him as Potter’s redheaded friend, Ron Weasley. Fans celebrated Rupert’s birthday by sharing collages and images in their tweets along with the hashtag #HappyBirthdayRupertGrint.

#5: CNTE

In an attempt to block educational reforms that will introduce teacher evaluations and reduce their union power, thousands of striking teachers thronged Mexico City’s international airport last Friday. #CNTE trended as news sources covered the march and strike and Twitterers offered their support.

Teacher Protests Over Education Reform Paralyze Mexico City http://t.co/lWRNj0uclp PHOTO pic.twitter.com/D4O4Pgjy4B #CNTE

— Global Voices (@globalvoices) August 30, 2013

#6: Batman

This week it was announced that Ben Affleck would play Batman in the upcoming Warner Bros. film Man of Steel 2. Affleck’s association with many mediocre films like Gigli and Armageddon, has Twitterers discussing the big announcement and criticizing Warner’s choice of actor. Can Affleck live up to Christian Bale and Val Kilmer? Will he shave his Argo beard? In the U.S., Twitterers are going as far as saying that “in the new Ben Affleck version, the Batmobile is just a beige Prius.”

But here’s my personal favorite:

Would still be a better batman than Ben Affleck pic.twitter.com/7aFKFdw3Sv

— Matty (@_MattyyAllen) August 27, 2013

#7: Tripoli

Last week, two massive bombs exploded in Tripoli, near Northern Lebanon’s border with Syria. Thought to be the deadliest attack in Lebanon since the end of the civil war in 1990, at least 42 people were killed and more than 400 wounded. Both news sources and the public turned to Twitter to discuss the news and share updates on the attack.

#8: #Rooty

This hashtag stands for Rooty Hill Debates for Australia’s 2013 Presidential Election that have been taking place between Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott. While bookies are betting on who will win, election day isn’t until September 7th. Check out the HootSuite Australian Election Command Center.

#9: Lauren Harries

British media personality Lauren Harries, born James Harries, is an aspiring transsexual celebrity. She’s been trending this past week as Britain’s star-studded reality TV show Celebrity Big Brother picks up momentum. Lauren’s looks on the show have been described as “always sublime, always ridiculous and mostly nightmarish.” Because of this, she’s all over Twitter.

#10: Steve Ballmer

Microsoft CEO and former right-hand-man of the beloved Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer announced this week that he will be retiring. For many, this is huge news. Ballmer’s 13 years as CEO have been rather tumultuous, with employees leaving for competitors like Google and online sources trashing his every move, including management style. But despite tripling Microsoft’s annual sales (we’re talking billions annually), he could never quite jump the hurdle that is mobile phones, tablets and search in particular. So as one of perhaps the most successful CEO’s leaves the world’s biggest software company, Twitterers around the world are left with the question: what’s next for Microsoft?

Will fresh ideas give the giant a jolt it needs to join the 21st-century world of mobiles and tablets?

Check out what trended over in America this week.

The post Top 10 Global Twitter Trends of the Week ~ Volume 71 appeared first on HootSuite Social Media Management.

Top 10 Global Twitter Trends of the Week ~ Volume 71

U.S. to release transparency report with FISA and national security requests

Medill DC/Flickr

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper

The United States government announced today that it will now release its own form of a transparency report, which is expected to debut later this fall.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper announced the change on his office’s Tumblr blog, saying that the decision came naturally after President Barack Obama ordered the declassification of as much intelligence information as possible. The transparency report will include total numbers for national security letters, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) business records requests, FISA pen register/trap and trace requests, and “FISA orders based on probably cause.”

The report was also inspired by the recent surveillance program leaks from former NSA-contractor Edward Snowden, according to an anonymous source speaking with the Washington Post.

Beyond just the total numbers of requests sent out, the report will also include the number of targets being investigated in each of these requests. The numbers will reflect the 12 months prior to the date published.

Google, Twitter, and Facebook all release their own forms of these reports. The companies have requested permission to release this sort of information in their reports, but have thus far been unable to. It seems the transparency report from the government also comes with the caveat that its “ability to discuss these activities is limited by our need to protect intelligence sources and methods.”

Filed under: Security

U.S. to release transparency report with FISA and national security requests

Google acquires smartwatch software maker WIMM Labs, report says

Source: WIMM Labs

Google has acquired Android-based smartwatch software company WIMM Labs, according to a GigaOM report today that cites unnamed sources familiar with the deal.

WIMM makes a Android-based software platform that’s specifically for wearable tech like smartwatches. However, the company went dark last year, and there was some speculation that WIMM had been acquired by Apple to work on its rumored iWatch device.

If true, the news would mean that Google is now joining both Samsung and Apple in its pursuit of building a smartwatch device that could provide functionality on the same level of smartphones and tablets.

Google apparently purchased WIMM last year and also retained a lot of its employees after the sale, according to GigaOM’s report.

We’re reaching out to Google for confirmation about the acquisition, as well as any other information it can share about WIMM, should the report be confirmed.

Filed under: Deals, Gadgets

Google acquires smartwatch software maker WIMM Labs, report says

How Disney built a giant cloud by bolting two together

CloudBeat 2013

Sept. 9 – 10, 2013

San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Disney is supposed to be a magic place. In its movies, people end up getting along.

But when Disney sought recently to build out its cloud infrastructure, it was faced with being the bad guy: Choosing one technology vendor over the other.

The market for cloud infrastructure is a huge one: Hundreds of billions of dollars be spent by companies on this over the next few years. Amazon AWS, a public cloud provider, is fighting against a pack of opponents, such as Rackspace, Google, CloudStack, Eucalyptus, Open Nebula, and scores more for that business — each offering their own flavor of the cloud.

For customers like Disney, there are too many services. Do they want a public cloud, a hybrid cloud, a multicloud, or private cloud? Well, sometimes companies don’t want to be forced to choose. They want to cherry-pick the best from more than one cloud.

This is what Walt Disney did. We’ll be hearing Disney’s story at CloudBeat 2013, our event on Sept 9-Sept. 10 in San Francisco that showcases revolutionary cases of cloud adoption by companies.

A sprawling entertainment and media organization with movies and other operations worth $110 billion, Disney looked at the needs of its business and decided it wanted to build a private cloud. By being private, Disney would own its cloud outright and have greater control.

But according to system architect Peter Lopez, things got more complicated after that decision to go private.

---

Editor’s note: Our upcoming CloudBeat conference, Sept. 9-Sept. 10 in San Francisco, will be tackling revolutionary cases of enterprise cloud usage. Register today!

---

In Disney’s proof of concept work, the service from CloudStack became an early favorite. CloudsStack technology has emerged with some of the largest customers when it comes to the private cloud, including the likes of Zynga and Nokia. Disney’s Lopez said he consistently got CloudStack running the way he wanted it to — and far faster than OpenStack, one of the market’s leading alternatives to CloudStack. Disney found it could deploy the CloudStack service in days but needed weeks with OpenStack. Part of this came down to Disney’s particular set of requirements and the other technology investments it had already made.

So far, so good. But the Disney team also wanted to add an object storage technology to their private cloud. But for this, Disney preferred some tools coming out of OpenStack’s object storage project, Swift. Indeed, one reason why OpenStack, an open-source project, has become so popular is that its many contributors have offered rich functionality. Swift is one example.

So rather than settle for second-best, the team at Disney worked with Citrix, the partner offering the CloudStack technology to make sure they could pull in the OpenStack Swift technology to work with their cloud.

The result, as you’ll hear at CloudBeat, was a crossing of the chasm that sometimes divides these competing open-source cloud projects. Disney, as Lopez will tell us, now enjoys fully functional CloudStack private cloud, tightly integrated with a highly capable object storage from Swift, as offered by a company called SwiftStack.

The lesson: Sometimes the choices that face us in cloud deployment aren’t as stark as appear. Increasingly, cloud providers are moving to offer layers of technology that stand on their own enough that they can be integrated into other technologies. This enables companies to choose the best tool for the job regardless of where it comes from.

At CloudBeat, we’ll hear from Lopez, Disney’s system architect and Sameer Dholakia, the VP and GM of the cloud platforms group of Citrix; and Joe Arnold, the chief executive of SwiftStack.

Notably, elsewhere at our event, we’ll be hearing from executives like Randy Bias of CloudScaling, who believe that such moves by Disney may make sense for now but ultimately they don’t make sense in the long-term. Bias calls the CloudStack-Swift integration a “Franken-cloud” because customized integration between Swift and CloudStack takes work, is not easily replicable and and can not achieve the economies of scale of more seamless integration. He says the Franken-clouds will exist for now, but these will eventually die.

Full event details can be found here, and make sure to register soon. Seats are nearly gone!

Thanks to the following industry leaders for supporting CloudBeat 2013: IBM jStart as Gold Sponsor; Archpoint Partners, SwiftStack, and Totango as Silver Sponsors; CareCloud, Numecent, Norwest Venture Partners, Plex Systems, Scality, Spice Works, and Xero as Event Sponsors; and Talentlms as Contributing Sponsor.

Filed under: Big Data, Cloud, Dev

---

VentureBeat is creating an index of the top ‘arms merchants’ of the cloud. Take a look at our initial suggestions and complete the survey to help us build a definitive index. We’ll publish the official index later this month, and for those who fill out surveys, we’ll send you an expanded report free of charge.

How Disney built a giant cloud by bolting two together

GamesBeat weekly roundup: King sues copycat company, Nintendo reveals the 2DS

Marvelous USA

If your combo meter is full, you can finish enemies off with special attacks called Judgements.

If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best video game stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, a judge allows Rhode Island to continue its lawsuit against 38 studios founder Curt Schilling, Nintendo reveals an new 2D version of the 3DS, and Candy Crush Saga developer King launches a lawsuit over alleged copyright infringement.

You’ll also find reviews for Killer is Dead and Madden NFL 25.

---

News:

• The DeanBeat: Can a price cut stop the Nintendo Wii U from sinking?


• Jazz Boatman is back to talk you into buying the Paradox Humble Bundle


• Slender: The Arrival and more coming from Majesco’s new indie-publishing label, Midnight City


• Wargaming’s unified premium account goes live, tying together multiple online games


• Saints Row IV sells 1 million copies in its first week


• GameBrain aims to aid indie devs with its cloud-based development and publishing platform


• Time Warner TV launches on Xbox Live with up to 300 channels


• London goes radioactive in free-to-play shooter Extraction from Nexon


• Sleep now, sweet prince: Update ends Microsoft Points on Xbox 360 today

---

Announcements, patches, and reveals:

• The Last of Us gets a new multiplayer mode in patch 1.03


• Wasteland 2 developer demos the title in 18-minute video walkthrough


• Nintendo releasing Zelda: Wind Waker HD early on eShop; Super Mario 3D World moves to November


• Nintendo cuts $50 off deluxe version of Wii U, launches Zelda bundle


• Nintendo unveils the 2DS handheld, sans 3D, for launch on same day as next Pokemon game


• Electronic Arts ‘no longer makes offline games’ but won’t a require connection


• Telltale expects to release Android versions of its games ‘going forward’


• The Walking Dead shuffles to Ouya this Winter


• Rockstar details Grand Theft Auto V Collector’s Edition digital content


• Google Play Games boss to devs: Android is a ‘party we want everyone to experience’

---

Xbox One vs. PS4:

• Like the PlayStation 4, Xbox One can download content while you’re not home


• Check out how much better voice chat sounds on Xbox One compared to Xbox 360


• Xbox One’s touted voice commands will only work in 5 countries at launch


• Microsoft plans ‘Day One’ bonuses for Xbox One’s Forza, Ryse, and Dead Rising 3


• Microsoft discloses details on Xbox One and Kinect chips — and how they should avoid the ‘Red Ring of Death’


• 340K attend Gamescom consumer show in Germany to play Xbox One and PlayStation 4

---

Mobile news:

• Dig up pixels on your iPhone: Terraria for iOS out now


• South Korea’s Gamevil invests in Relax Games startup


• Funcom piecing together Lego Minifigures Online for PC, mobile


• The cost of acquiring mobile app users soars to highest level in 2 years


• Despicable Me game vaults Gameloft to top of July mobile downloads


• Unity embraces the cloud and blasts out a bunch of tools for mobile-game developers

---

Social, social, social:

• Win rolls the dice to be a player in social casino games


• Facebook expands ties with Unity to make cross-platform 3D games easier to build

---

Planet VB

Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting for the Virtual Boy console.

Tech:

• Digital Storm launches a monstrous HydroLux cooling system for gamer PCs


• Developers can use Mixamo’s Face Plus to capture your facial expressions in real-time


• LG teams with cloud-gaming firm Ubitus for game-streaming service for Smart TVs


• With Playnomics, data science predicts which players will quit a game in the next month


• Autodesk to charge $50 a month for Maya LT 3D animation tool for indie and mobile game developers


• Logitech claims its new wireless gaming mouse has 250-hour battery life


• Street Fighter II for Virtual Boy is red and amazing


• Virtual reality goggles let you simulate skydiving — without falling from the sky

---

Trailer hoedown:

• Final Grand Theft Auto V trailer features explosions and personal submersibles


• Treyarch shows off final Call of Duty: Black Ops II maps in new trailer

---

Ruh-roh:

• Court allows Rhode Island to sue ex-baseball star Curt Schilling over failed 38 Studios game startup


• King sues 6waves for allegedly copying two social games (exclusive)


• Sony apologizes as Grand Theft Auto V assets leak online

---

Uwe Boll

Film director Uwe Boll

All this funding:

• Uwe Boll wants you to give him $500K, so he can make a Postal 2 movie (and give his stars cocaine)


• Over-the-top football game Gridiron Thunder hits Kickstarter goal


• The controversial Shadow of the Eternals fails to hit Kickstarter goal

---

Reviews:

• Killer is Dead’s strong swordplay almost redeems its problems (review)


• Madden NFL 25 is an enjoyable milestone that overlooks its legacy (review)

---

Pieces of flair:

• The GamesBeat community reacts to the Nintendo 2DS


• Ganon’s castle would cost $57 million and be located in Tuscany (if it were real)


• Who’s got game? Yo mamma: 3 out of 4 moms play video games (study)


• Study: Starcraft II might supercharge the brain’s problem-solving agility


• Disney Infinity game guide: Level up every character and unlock every item

Filed under: Games

GamesBeat weekly roundup: King sues copycat company, Nintendo reveals the 2DS

Apply now for the Vator Splash Startup Competition

This sponsored post is produced by Vator.

Vator, one of the largest business networks dedicated to entrepreneurs and investors, is holding its popular Splash event on Oct. 2 at Cafe du Nord in San Francisco (3:30 p.m. to 9 p.m., plus afterparty). The event showcases 10 promising startups (which raised no more than $2 million), who get to present on stage in front of an audience of some 400 attendees in the high-tech space.

Sign up for the competition here.

The Splash winner receives sit-down meetings with August Capital, Freestyle Capital, Javelin Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, and Shasta Ventures. You can’t beat that access. Plus they win other prizes, such as $25,000 in in-kind prizes from Rackspace, Apple, Grant Thornton, Bread & Butter Wines, and more.

Past winners have raised $100-plus million in follow-on funding. Past winners include Thumbtack, Udemy, PokitDok, DogVacay, and more. The investor judges on stage are: Tony Conrad (True Ventures), Sean Flynn (Shasta Ventures), Howard Hartenbaum (August Capital), Charles Hudson (SoftTech VC), Jed Katz (Javelin Venture Partners), Lars Leckie (Hummer Winblad), Charles Moldow (Foundation Capital), Rick Moss (Hub Ventures), Bambi Francisco (Vator), Dave Samuel (Freestyle), Jenny Fielding (BBC Worldwide Ventures), Shanna Tellerman (Google Ventures), and Kristian Segerstrale (Initial Capital).

To get onstage, you have to win an online competition and then a judges’ competition. But it’s free, and it’s worth a shot. Even those who enter get exposure just for entering.

Register here and get 15 perecent off the registration fee by using the promo code “venturebeat15”

There’s nothing like free marketing and you get a professional video of your presentation, as well as a bunch of goodies, including sit-down meetings with Javelin Venture Partners, more TBD, plus in-kind prizes. But even if you’re not fundraising, it’s still awesome exposure!

---

Sponsored posts are content that has been produced by a company, which is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly marked. The content of news stories produced by our editorial team is never influenced by advertisers or sponsors in any way. For more information, contact sales@venturebeat.com.

---

Filed under: Business, Entrepreneur, Social
Apply now for the Vator Splash Startup Competition

100 top computer science students flock to SF for hacker Olympics (exclusive)

SignalFire

100 of the best college hackers from around the country are converging in San Francisco for the University Hacker Olympics (UHO). 

ReadyForce and SignalFire are co-hosting the second UHO from September 13-15 in what they claim is “the most epic university hackathon ever.”

Computer science students from 35 of the U.S.’s top engineering schools competed in a series of regional code challenges over the course of the year. The top students then filled out profiles detailing their technical accomplishments and 2-3 students from each school were selected by a group of venture capitalists and CTOs.

“This is a very elite group of students,” said the event’s organizer Ahmed Siddiqui in an interview with VentureBeat. “You can’t buy your way in here, you have to be pre-selected. The aim is to identify the best talent and get them together with tech companies that want access to these students. They get exposed to real startups and awesome technology and it could make a significant impact on their career.”

The ideas for the hackathon are chosen in advance by attending companies and pitched to students on the first day of the competition, who self-select which team they want to join. They will hack alongside engineers for 24 hours. Ultimately one team will win, but the Ahmed said the real value is the “synergy” that happens by putting young, optimistic students together with more experienced engineers.

Sponsor companies include Amazon, Samsung, Apple, Asana, Pinterest, GoDaddy, AirBnB, Stripe, Google, GoodData, Square, and Lyft.

66 of the students have interned at top technology companies and the average student already has three job offers, even those that are years away from graduating. Recruiting developer talent is highly competitive and a significant challenge for many tech companies, and the top students are in high-demand. Ahmed said that while this is “not a subset of students hurting for jobs,” many of them are not exposed to companies that don’t have armies of recruiters and campus ambassadors. Startups aren’t able to send people searching for talented engineers, and the University Hacker Olympics brings the talent to them.

SignalFire is a stealthy startup that is developing a network of “next generation founders and core engineers” through “exclusive experiential events. ReadyForce is a platform that brings top engineering students together with fast-growing startups. It recently embarked on a cross country bus trip on behalf of 150 technology companies to find talent.

 

Filed under: Business, Dev, Entrepreneur

100 top computer science students flock to SF for hacker Olympics (exclusive)

VMware fires a massive volley against virtualization upstarts

Bipul Sinha

Exhibitors at VMworld.

Sept. 9 – 10, 2013

San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

SAN FRANCISCO — It has been a very good week for the virtualization giant VMware, as it drew a record-breaking 22,000 people to the Moscone Center for its lavish spectacle of a conference.

VMworld was the place to see and be seen for the information technology elite. It was also a hot ticket for indie music fans, with Train and Imagine Dragons entertaining a packed audience of data analysts and IT admins.

The company succeeded in demonstrating that it still boasts serious marketing muscle, massive annual revenues, and an unrivaled network of influencers. It also sent a clear message to the hordes of enterprise startups biting at VMware’s heels: You may have grit, a decent product, and a few million dollars in venture funding, but you are not landing those multimillion-dollar contracts.

At least, not yet.

But there are those who see through the hype, and believe there is far more to the story. Investors believe that VMware needs to innovate, and fast, if it can continue to withstand the competition.

“VMware is confronting a quiet sea change,” said Matt Ocko of Data Collective, an investor and adviser in companies like Splunk, Facebook, and Zynga. Ocko has learned in his 20 years of investing that every Goliath will encounter its David.

To borrow from another classical myth, VMware has an Achilles’ heel: storage technology. Ocko has invested in a number of potential competitors who are focused on this challenging technology problem, including a few open source storage solutions.

In addition, Ocko believes that the largest companies are moving to the open-source cloud framework OpenStack, which poses a major threat to VMware. It has prompted smaller vendors like Piston Cloud to offer customers their services with OpenStack “right away” without a reliance on “any particular vendor,” meaning VMware. Mass cloud adoption is opening up the market to more competitors, and may potentially weaken VMware’s firm grip on virtualization — if not now, according to ReadWrite contributor Matt Asay, but somewhere down the line.

---

Editor’s note: Our upcoming CloudBeat conference, Sept. 9-Sept. 10 in San Francisco, will be tackling revolutionary cases of enterprise cloud usage. Register today!

---

Ocko isn’t the only investor who is seizing on some of VMware’s weaknesses.

“Large and legacy players are really hurting because so many new startups are growing at their expense,” said Bipul Sinha, the resident storage expert at Lightspeed Venture Partners, who sits on the board of fast-growing storage startup Nutanix. Nutanix is a partner of VMware, so Sinha is careful to critique VMware, although it’s evident that he sees new opportunities for younger rivals.

As our own Matt Marshall put it, many of VMware’s recent products have been a defensive play, and not particularly innovative. Even in the midst of VMworld, the company’s stock plummeted about five percent.

VMware and the three-legged stool

The technology is complex, and it’s easy to get lost in all the marketing hype, so I like to use the analogy of the three-legged stool to describe the major components of a modern virtual data center.

The first leg is virtualization. VMware made its mark in the IT world by virtualizing computing resources, enabling enterprises to use server hardware much more efficiently by running many virtual machines in each physical server while creating and deploying these virtual machines when and as they were needed.

VMware is leaning hard on that leg of the stool, as it was an early pioneer of virtualization and remains the clear market leader.

But in addition to servers, the other major components of a data center are storage and networking — and accordingly, the other legs of the virtual data center stool are software-defined networking and software-defined storage. It’s here that VMware faces greater challenges.

“VMware has to innovate in these two vectors before it can offer customers a comprehensive infrastructure,” said Sinha.

VMware clearly understands that it’s under pressure, recently shelling out a massive $1.26 billion for networking vendor Nicira. With this purchase, VMware has the opportunity to take what it did to server virtualization and do that to network infrastructure.

“We’re not done until every app, every database, every big data application, and every physical server becomes replaced by virtual infrastructure,” VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said on stage at VMworld. “That is our passion, and we will continue to drive compute virtualization until it is 100 percent virtualized for the data center.”

To that end, VMware announced a slew of new products this week, including vCloud, a hybrid cloud offering that will compete with Amazon, Microsoft, and other arms merchants of the cloud; VMware NSX, a tool for automating the management of virtual servers; and VMware vSphere, a virtual storage area network.

To guarantee that it has the cash reserves to fulfill its vision, VMware is shedding workers and products. It laid off about 7 percent of its staff this year or about 900 employees. In addition, VMware spun off a number of its noncore business units to focus on infrastructure, rather than applications.

EMC, VMware’s parent company, bundled together a number of these assets to form a new entity called Pivotal. Paul Maritz, VMware’s former chief executive, has been appointed to lead Pivotal and ensure it can deliver on its promise to bring customers next generation big data and cloud products.

---

Editors’ note: Paul Maritz will speak at CloudBeat on Sept. 9-Sept. 10, a rare public appearance for the executive. 

---

But not everyone is convinced that these efforts will be enough.

The bloodiest battleground? Software-defined storage

At one of the dozen or so networking events during VMworld, I asked Accel investor Ping Li for his greatest takeaway from the conference. Without hesitation, Li responded, “storage.”

Storage may not be the sexiest space, but it is one of the hottest investment opportunities in Silicon Valley.

In the storage space, VMware will need to beat out a number of fast-growing upstarts. Among them, Nutanix, which cleared north of $80 million in revenues last year by delivering storage and compute all in one.

Nutanix CEO Dheeraj Pandey made an appearance at VMworld, like many of the hot storage startups. Pandey told me in a phone interview that VMware has plenty of work to do.

“A lot of VMware’s current business is still based on selling virtualization, but that is quickly getting commoditized,” Pandey said. For instance, Microsoft offers a rival product, Hyper-v. “So VMware has little choice but to push into storage,” he said.

Nutanix isn’t the only storage company that is growing like gangbusters. Pure Storage netted a $150 million investment this week and is a strong candidate for a public offering. Nimble Storage closed another $40 million round in December as it gears up to its own IPO.

VMware’s major dilemma, as it moves into this space, will be to build or buy. VMware certainly has the talent to build its solution in-house, and it has a few advantages, starting with a direct pipeline to enterprise. In other words, as Ocko points out, the company still has “channel control — and likely will for the foreseeable future.”

However, it’s possible that VMware will be too late to the storage party.

“As VMware pushes further into the network and storage layers, there is plenty of room left for startups to innovate,” said Dave Cahill, the director of strategic alliances at SolidFire, a company that delivers storage to cloud providers. “While long on promise, VMware’s software-defined vision is significantly diminished without an equally dynamic infrastructure underneath it.”

We’re keeping a close eye on stealthy startups like Blue Data and Qumolo, which promise to make enterprise data storage far more flexible and scalable than it is today. If they can deliver, these startups will out-innovate large and legacy vendors.

“Everybody is asking for a pure data box that can run anywhere and be completely virtualized,” said Ocko. “That’s the fantasy.”

Filed under: Business, Cloud

---

VentureBeat is creating an index of the top ‘arms merchants’ of the cloud. Take a look at our initial suggestions and complete the survey to help us build a definitive index. We’ll publish the official index later this month, and for those who fill out surveys, we’ll send you an expanded report free of charge.

VMware fires a massive volley against virtualization upstarts

Does it take imagination to see beyond the Intel and ARM chip architectures?

Imagination Technologies

Imagination Technologies’ tech has shipped in 5B chips.

When there are two dominant computing architectures, with each of them generating billions of dollars in revenues for entire ecosystems of companies, is there any room for a third? That’s a relevant question today as Intel dominates the PC and server markets, while ARM and its myriad licensees dominate mobile computing.

Amid these giants, there are some gnats. IBM is still creating gargantuan chips based on the Power architecture (formerly PowerPC) for high-end servers and supercomputers. Intel is still trying to get its Itanium 64-bit architecture a toehold in IBM’s territory. And Imagination Technologies made its play earlier this year by acquiring MIPS Technologies for $100 million. This week, I attended Imagination’s press conference at Stanford, as well as the Hot Chips engineering conference at Stanford University where architecture was a common point of discussion.

Dean Takahashi

Hossein Yassaie

A computer architecture isn’t a chip itself, or even its blueprints. If you were building a skyscraper, the architecture would be the whole collection of specifications for the nails, windows, beams, and other materials that you could use to build that skyscraper. It sets the rules for what you can and can’t do in designing a specific chip. Intel’s architecture is x86, while ARM has a rival architecture. Intel has only one practical licensee for the x86 in Advanced Micro Devices. But ARM has many licensees, such as Broadcom, Apple, Samsung, Nvidia, Qualcomm, and others. A typical Qualcomm chip has one or two ARM “cores,” or mini brains, as one of its core components.

That creates the illusion of competition, but Hossein Yassaie, chief executive of Imagination Technologies, thinks that the duopoly of Intel and ARM is holding back growth and creativity in the electronics market. That’s why his company purchased MIPS, he said. A lot of people groaned when they heard that Imagination wanted to revive MIPS, which has a toehold in networking and home electronics.

“We didn’t acquire MIPS for the hell of it,” Yassaie said. “$100 mil is a lot to spend on a company, and our aim is to cover all the markets for which the CPU (central processing unit) is relevant.”

For an architecture to survive, it must have support from chip makers, hardware vendors, and software makers. For years, Intel’s x86 thrived because it alone ran Windows software. Backward compatibility of that software drove x86 monopoly, until Microsoft recently decided to add ARM support in Windows. Yassaie said that the acquisition of MIPS by a more stable company took away the fear that ecosystem partners had, that MIPS might not be around ten years from now.

“People feel confident,” he said. “There was a cloud over MIPS’ head, which has gone away. The system vendors are interested in seeing a balance in the industry. What Imagination brings to the party is stability.”

He added, “We have a near-monopoly situation in CPU architectures. I don’t know of any market where a monopoly lasts….This message is about the rise and rise of MIPS.”

The issue is about control. If you’re Dell, you don’t feel like you’re in control of your destiny, particularly if Intel and Microsoft own the platform.

“It’s like there is only one Coca-Cola, and there is no Pepsi,” Yassaie said. “If there is no choice, you can be dictated to. If an ecosystem depends on one source, that one source can raise prices.”

Software compatibility might have held back new players in the past. But the Android operating system has provided an open, neutral platform that could equalize the playing field. No longer is it a big deal to switch architectures, if both can run Android software well, said Kevin Krewell, senior analyst at the Linley Group.

Yassaie looked a little annoyed to be getting so many questions about whether MIPS was relevant. After all, it shipped more than 700 million MIPS-based chips last year alone. Imagination’s technology was used in another 535 million chips last year. And to date, Imagination’s technology, especially its graphics components, have been used in more than 5 billion chips to date and they are used in 3 million more chips per day. Of course, next to ARM, Imagination and MIPS look puny. ARM’s intellectual property has shipped in more than 37 billion chips to date. Intel doesn’t ship as many chips, but the amount it gets per chip is a lot. So Intel generates $13 billion in revenue a quarter.

Dean Takahashi

John Hennessy

MIPS occupies some interesting turf. It has higher performance than ARM and better power efficiency — at least historically — than Intel. Intel dominates high-performance PC chips and servers, while ARM dominates power efficiency. But Yassaie sees some wide open turf that neither dominates yet: wearable computing. Inspired by Google Glass, wearable computers are proliferating. We’ll be seeing smart wrist watches, fitness step counters, connected jewelry, and self-driving cars. In this landscape, chips for wearable devices will be in everything, said Scott McGregor, chief executive of Broadcom, in an interview with VentureBeat.

Yassaie thinks that ARM and Intel may get complacent and fail to go after new markets with gusto. He hopes that, in the long term, MIPS will grab 25 percent of the CPU market. To do that, MIPS will have to pioneer new markets. But it will also have to take share from ARM in mobile and Intel in servers.

It’s a topic that engineers love to talk about. Asked if there was any alternative to Intel or ARM, Bob Colwell, a research leader at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Colwell, who gave a keynote at Hot Chips, was the design chief on Intel’s Pentium II chip, but he hasn’t worked there for 13 years.

“For that kind of machine to exist, it would require someone at a high level at a company the size of Intel to say that there’s a compelling reason for an (alternative) machine and that we can make a whole lot of money making it,” Colwell said. “I don’t see how that’s going to happen.”

I even got a cryptic comment from John Hennessy (pictured, right) , the president of Stanford and the founder of MIPS in 1984. Hennessy, who attended the Imagination event on the campus where MIPS was born, told me he still studies computer architecture when he writes the updates for Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, the seminal work on computer design that he co-authored with David Patterson of UC Berkeley. Hennessy is wicked smart, and he has a knack for seeing things that other people don’t.

Asked if there’s room for more than Intel and ARM in the market, he said, “We’ll see.” He noted that the startup activity has died down around computer architectures. By contrast, the period from 1984 to 2000 was a great flowering of new computer architectures as everybody saw the benefits that Intel reaped for owning the architecture behind the personal computer. Will such days come around again?

“We’ll see,” Hennessy said with a smile.

Filed under: Gadgets

Does it take imagination to see beyond the Intel and ARM chip architectures?

How Google can avoid becoming the next Microsoft, as told by an insider with knowledge of both

The deeper you dig into the causes of Microsoft’s decade of stagnation and the departure of CEO Steve Ballmer, the more apparent it is that the problems Microsoft faced affect all large companies, to one extent or another. Fortunately for the world (and unfortunately for Microsoft) the company’s dysfunction drove away so many talented engineers and managers that they are practically climbing over one another to recount what went wrong in Redmond.

Quartz has already written about how Microsoft veterans who left the company see its problems, and what they think needs to be done to fix them. But the observations of one of the veterans we spoke with are worth writing about separately—because of their implications for Google, the company’s most visible competitor. This person, who requested to remain anonymous, has inside knowledge of the workings of Google as well. Here are some of our key takeaways from talking with them.

1. Too many cooks in the kitchen will kill innovation every time

As a rule, decision-making grows exponentially harder with the number of people involved. In Microsoft’s early days, it was, like most young organizations, fairly flat in structure. A general manager oversaw 50-300 people, and decisions only needed his or her blessing. But in part because graduating into management is the only route to a promotion at Microsoft, the company added more and more layers of management.

This meant that decisions that were once made by a single manager now had to be agreed on by a dozen people. Needing that many more people to say “yes” meant that only the most obvious (or least provocative) ideas got the go-ahead. Born as the product of feverish late-night coding sessions by Bill Gates and a handful of trusted lieutenants, Microsoft became a centrally-planned, Kafka-esque nightmare.

Lessons for Google:

Management is the enemy, decisions that must be made by committee are suspect, and you have to trust key decision-makers to wield broad power over large groups of engineers. Who are, if you’ve hired correctly, self-motivated and entrepreneurial to begin with. (There’s a thoughtful article detailing a startup named Medium’s approach to this issue here.)

So far Google has avoided the trap of building the ranks of management, in part because the company is so dedicated to hiring the right engineers—in other words, the kind that require little supervision—in the first place.

2. Don’t shackle teams to your past successes or your existing business

With the success of Windows and Office, Microsoft made a classic mistake: it tried to force its other businesses to integrate and support its most profitable products. Instead, Microsoft should have instructed each of its divisions to focus on building the best product. (XBox is one example where it got this right.) Internally, Google has a great deal of integration between products, but it’s voluntary. Google Now, voice search and Maps teams, for example, all draw on the company’s enormous internal database of places and things.

Case study: Windows Phone

Microsoft released a smartphone operating system seven years before Steve Jobs announced the iPhone. But rather than empowering the builders of the early “Pocket PC” to create something appropriate for the mobile form factor, Microsoft released an operating system that had a tiny Start menu, so that it would resemble the Windows 98 desktop OS. The result was a terrible user experience.

Case study: MSN.com

For years, MSN.com was sort of a newspaper, but on the internet—what was then known as a “portal.” Lots of people visited the site because it was the default homepage for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which for a time was the most-used web browser in the world.

But with the rise of search, people began switching their default homepage to Google or, if they simply didn’t want to see MSN.com’s noisy, advertisement-filled homepage, nothing at all. Revenue dropped at MSN, and the response was more ads. This turned into a downward spiral, and MSN.com lost relevance. Had MSN been forced to compete on its own merits, it might have been a completely different site.

Lessons for Google:

Products enabled by new technologies must live or die on their own merits, and while there are ways to push people onto your latest experiment, forcing engineers to integrate with your past successes, or shielding them from competition, will only make your products uncompetitive in the long run.

3. The consumer is more important than ever

Companies are having to contend with employees who are newly empowered—by the web and by their mobile devices, which they’re upgrading continuously—to take IT into their own hands. This is driving internal corporate IT managers to use systems that match what their employees are bringing to work, like iPhones and Android tablets, and more than ever, those systems are not made by Microsoft.

Lessons for Google:

The devices that people use at home are the same ones they want to use at work. The success of Google’s Android operating system for mobile devices is perhaps Google’s most potent weapon against Microsoft. Being a web-based company is also a critical advantage, because the web is available across every kind of mobile device. Google must never lose sight of the fact that the web could itself be disrupted by some other system that consumers will flock to before businesses do.

4. But the market for enterprise software is still huge

Spend enough time with Googlers, and especially those who remember the birth of Google Docs (now part of Google Apps), and it becomes apparent that Google built its “enterprise” software primarily to satisfy the company’s own needs for internal communication. While Google is pushing aggressively into the market for productivity software for businesses, and offers businesses cloud computing infrastructure in the form of the Google Compute Engine, Google remains primarily a consumer, not an enterprise company.

Microsoft, meanwhile, is still making billions selling software that manages databases and serves files, and can charge a premium for the superior feature set of its Office suite. Indeed, if it weren’t for Microsoft’s successful focus on enterprise, which helped the company continue to grow its revenue even as consumers have failed to switch to new versions of Windows, Ballmer probably would have been pushed out long ago.

Lessons for Google:

There is a huge opportunity to capture more revenue by focusing on businesses, especially with Google’s productivity software (Google Apps). And while it might be anathema to the “rock star” programmers Google typically hires, figuring out how to integrate with or migrate businesses off of their legacy systems—something Microsoft and its third-party vendors excel at—would also go a long way to growing Google’s enterprise business.

5. Big companies must be comprised of small companies

As companies become larger, rates of innovation per employee go down. And yet the opposite is true in cities—the bigger they get, the more new ideas they incubate.

What’s the difference? Cities are more like coral reefs, their individual members spontaneously self-organizing into neighborhoods, companies and organizations, while corporations tend to have a more hierarchical, top-down structure. What Ballmer should have been doing all these years is organizing Microsoft so that engineers at the lowest levels can move fast and be trusted as experts in their fields.

Instead Ballmer became the decider. If you’re the sort of CEO upon whom thousands rely for decisions, you’re the bottleneck. A more nimble organization is comprised of teams which are granted autonomy to act. Yes, some amount of supervision is necessary—and Google CEO Larry Page’s successful effort to tighten up Google is evidence of this—but what a CEO should be aiming for is employees who require as little of management’s cooperation as possible.

Less oversight means less time spent communicating through the chain of command, and fewer decision makers participating in collaborations

Lessons for Google:

According to people in the know, Google’s business divisions, and the teams that comprise them, still have a relatively high level of autonomy. While much has been made of the “death of 20% time” at Google, what’s more important than the autonomy of individual engineers is the autonomy of the teams of which they are a part. As long as Google’s creeping corporatization stops at the end of 20% time, it’s probably fine. Google X, Sergey Brin’s skunkworks division, which is producing innovations like Glass and self-driving cars, is one smart way to nourish innovation as the company gets bigger, but Google’s leadership needs to stay focused on turning those projects into products, or it could be transformed into an isolated backwater, like Xerox Parc in the old days or Microsoft Research.

6. Stay positive

While at least one Microsoft veteran I talked to said that the company’s apparently-poisonous management policy known as “stack ranking” wasn’t as bad as media reports made it out to be, it’s clear that it alienated many. The problem was that the system branded those who had the poorest evaluations as “below average,” a label that meant they were largely ineligible for bonuses or raises. Because everyone was graded on a curve, this meant even worthy engineers were sometimes given “below average” rankings.

Another problem Microsoft had at the management level was an apparent insecurity about the company’s failure to invent The Next Big Thing. Given that Microsoft only ever employed a small fraction of the world’s programmers, the odds that it would invent the iPhone or Facebook were low. But instead of concentrating on its own potential, Microsoft became a slavish copyist of its competitors, rolling out one late, misbegotten clone after another—Zune (Microsoft’s iPod), Bing (search) and Surface (the iPad).

Lessons for Google:

Something like stack ranking has apparently crept into Google’s culture, but employees are not yet objecting to it strenuously because the company’s internal HR and management policy is evaluation and continuous improvement, not punishment.

Google also needs to recognize that, while it has a history of attracting some of the best talent in the world, no company is cool forever. At some point, talent will go elsewhere, if it hasn’t already, which means innovation that is a perceived threat to Google’s business will arise outside the company. Google is going to have to be selective about which markets it tries to compete in.

So is Google really the new Microsoft?

It’s become almost cliche to compare Google to Microsoft. But in terms of the two companies’ internal cultures, it appears that Google is still a long way from adopting the nearly feudal internal structure of Microsoft.

It’s also a ridiculous comparison when you consider just how different the world of personal computing is now from what it was during Microsoft’s heyday, in the mid 1990s. The internet, mobile devices, Apple’s resurgence and the birth of countless competitors in Asia all happened, and are driving the entire landscape of computing in ways that hardly anyone can anticipate. It’s possible that a Google that resembled Microsoft—resistant to change, with an emphasis on sales over flexibility and innovation—wouldn’t last long in today’s world. Out of necessity, Google may never become “the new Microsoft.” And Microsoft The real lesson here might not be how Google can avoid becoming the next Microsoft, but how Microsoft can stop being itself.

How Google can avoid becoming the next Microsoft, as told by an insider with knowledge of both