Keen On… Silicon Valley: How We Need To Scale Down Our Self-Regard And Grow Up

Oh dear, it hasn’t been a good few weeks for Silicon Valley. Along with the NSA scandal, there appears to be more and more criticism of Big Tech from mainstream, heavyweight American journalists like Nicholas Thompson and Paul Krugman. And leading the charge in this Silicon Valley bashing is the New Yorker staff writer and award-winning author George Packer. In both his new book, The Unwinding, and particularly in his recent New Yorker story “Change The World”, Packer warns that the love affair is over and Silicon Valley has lost its resonance with the rest of America. Packer should know. He grew up in Mountain View when it was a sleepy little town in the Valley of Heart’s Delight, not much different from any other middle class American community.

But now, Packer told me, the “massive wealth” in Mountain View and the rest of Silicon Valley makes it “as far from North Carolina as Burma.” So what needs to change in Silicon Valley, I asked Packer, if it is to make itself relevant once again with the rest of America. Firstly, Packer told me, Silicon Valley needs to develop “daring” and “adventurous” technological advances that solve big problems. And secondly, he says, we’ve got to “scale down” our “self-regard” and recognize that we aren’t essentially different from any other successful industry and thus aren’t really changing the world.

So are we going to listen to the advice of grown-ups like George Packer? Or are we going to continue to build products designed to make life more efficient for privileged 20-year-olds, thereby making ourselves more and more irrelevant to the needs of ordinary Americans?

The Open Source RepRap Simpson 3D Printer Design Reduces Friction, Uses Less “Vitamins”

This is the Grounded Experimental Delta 3D printer, aka the Simpson, a project built by computer science teacher Nicholas Seward that does away with the excess frames, pulleys, and hardware associated with earlier models. Seward wanted a machine that could print itself and used “less vitamins,” namely metal parts that the machine couldn’t create from scratch. There are still motors and controllers, but there are fewer in this model than in any other I’ve seen.

Does it work? In the video below we see the Simpson in action. Seward named his bot after George Gaylord Simpson, the creator of the theory of quantum evolution, and I’d say this bot is an interesting leap forward.

The motion of the arms, in this case, is far more organic than the traditional linear gantry style devices I’ve seen. Because it uses fewer parts it’s far cheaper to make and because it can build itself it is a true RepRap or “self replicating machine.” Seward writes: “I want a machine that can walk or crawl and hopefully scribble its name. Maybe later the machine will run or skydive and make works of art. This is new territory for me and if I am not messing up then I am not working hard enough.”

The absolute best thing, however, is how open the RepRap community has been to Seward’s work. In less than a month, Seward went from idea to actual finished project and he is currently able to build smaller “baby” Simpson arms and hopes to print larger arms over the next few weeks. Rather than tear him down, the commenters are quite kind (“Congrats on getting it going. Such a magical moment when you see your creation actually starting to do what it was made to do, and it actually works!” wrote one with no apparent trace of sarcasm). It is the best of 3D printing, the maker movement, and the Internet rolled into one.

Some Tricks To Keep The Government From Spying On You

By now everyone knows that the NSA is snooping on phone calls, credit card transactions, possibly even Internet communications. What we should all know, though, is that this is not the end of privacy. It's just the beginning of being more careful with communications you consider sensitive. There are a few methods to communicate over the web and over the phone without revealing yourself to the NSA. 1. Burner Companies: Philip Bump of the Atlantic Wire gave a pretty good explanation of burner companies: basically very new Internet chat platforms. Most chats leave the user's computer (point A) encrypted and are then only unencrypted when they reach the object computer (point B). The only way to interrupt this — whether it's the FBI or NSA — is to have the particular platform (like Verizon) provide access to the communications. Usually the FBI and NSA targets huge platforms, not start-ups. So the answer is simple: Find a low-level, new chat company that hasn't yet been gobbled up by the Googles, Microsofts, or Yahoos of the world. The FBI and NSA are much less likely to target a small Internet company. 2. Burner phones: Nicholas Weaver over at Wired has a pretty good breakdown of how to use burner phones and burner computers. For a burner phone, make sure you've left every item that communicates via wifi at home. Then pick a bodega in a shady part of town where they are likely to have old surveillance cameras. Buy a prepaid phone with cash. Take the battery out of it. Go to a small coffee shop. Put the battery in, fire it up, make your phone call, then turn it off and take out the battery. The government would certainly have more trouble tracking a phone that's only on the grid for a couple minutes at a clip. Weaver makes a good point here too: It's of utmost importance to leave your personal phone at home. Nowadays, most cell phones constantly communicate GPS data with orbiting satellites. That data tracks your position at all times — so it defeats the purpose of buying the burner phone if you so much as carry your personal phone with you. 3. Burner computers Cookies. Track. Everything. Cookies on your personal computer communicate your location and when you visit certain websites (among other pieces of personal data). So the idea here is that you want to shoot anonymous emails but can't do it from your personal computer. A personal computer has too much of a history to go untracked and untraced. Weaver advises pretty much the same course of action as the burner phone: leave everything at home, bring cash. Buy a cheap tablet or laptop computer, take the battery out. Walk to a coffee shop, put the battery in, sign up for a new gmail account with an anonymous, non-identifying name, shoot your email, clear cookies, reset browser history, power down, pull the battery out. These three methods for detection avoidance don't remove your fingerprint completely, but they do reduce the possibility of communications getting noticed by the wrong people.SEE ALSO: These 17 agencies make up the most sophisticated spy apparatus in the world > Please follow Military & Defense on Twitter and Facebook.Join the conversation about this story »    

10 Things You Need To Know This Morning

Morning. People are still talking about Yahoo's $1.1 billion purchase of Tumblr. For example, here's a great post from Tumblr's first employee, Marco Arment. Tumblr uses 500 Web servers and 200 database servers to deal with 500 million page views per day, and 15 billion per month. Were Tumblr's 2012 revenues even lighter than previously reported? SAP is hiring autistic people to work in programming, testing, and quality assurance. "Regional hospitals, insurers, and grocery retailers are already investigating ways to work together to translate consumer purchase data into health risk profiling insights." Online retailer Fab.com is raising "at least" $250 million. This strange Dutchman in an orange van parked 15 miles outside of Barcelona almost broke the Internet. SoftBank gave Sprint a waiver, allowing it to explore a rival offer from Dish. "HasOffers, a startup that helps mobile app developers see which ad efforts are actually paying off, is announcing that it has raised a $9.4 million round of funding led byAccel Partners." Watson, IBM's computer that won Jeopardy and is working on the cure for cancer, has now been deployed to solve customer service. Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.Join the conversation about this story »    

That Time Marissa Mayer Stormed Out Of A Meeting After A Blogging Acquisition (YHOO)

Influential blogger Dave Winer does not believe all the things Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is saying about letting "Tumblr be Tumblr." The source of his skepticism is a meeting he had with Mayer back in 2003. Back then, Google bought a blogging company called Blogger. Winer and his blogger friends were worried that Google would suddenly start favoring blogs hosted on Blogger in Google search results. Winer says Google promised him and his friends it would not. But then Google included a "BlogThis!" button in the Google Toolbar.  To Winer's chagrin, the "BlogThis!" button only worked with Blogger. Winer thought this was unfair to other blogging platforms. Because he was a big deal back then, he was able to get a meeting with a Google executive to voice his complaints. That executive: Marissa Mayer, then a fast-rising executive engineer at Google. The meeting didn't go very well. Winer writes: All I remember of it was there came a point in the conversation when Mayer had had enough. She just got up and left. I think the people remaining in the conference room were a little embarrassed. Google didn't do anything to change the BlogThis! button." Winer says the moral of the story is that no matter what Mayer or Yahoo are about Tumblr today, it means nothing for the future. "All this is to say that the promises execs make on acquisitions are meaningless." He writes: "They own the thing, they will do what they want to with it. It doesn't matter how many nice sounds Mayer makes on the deal. At the core she cares not one bit what the users of Tumblr think. She's saying what she needs to say to make the deal happen. To avoid a PR crisis on Day One. To make the team at Tumblr feel like their work has value to the new owners. That somehow this acquisition isn't actually an acquisition." (Maybe I'm naive, but I think Winer's wrong on this one. At Google, Mayer witnessed the successful acquisition of YouTube, which was left mostly on its own. She keeps saying that's her model for Tumblr.) Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.Join the conversation about this story »    

GOOGLE-YOUTUBE VETERAN: OK, Marissa Mayer, Here's How To Not Screw Up Tumblr (GOOG, YHOO)

Wall Street analysts and Yahoo shareholders are worried that Yahoo is going to screw up Tumblr, its $1.1 billion acquisition. They are worried because Yahoo, and big Internet companies in general, have a history of paying a lot for startups and then killing their momentum. Yahoo's victims are GeoCities and Flickr, among many others. AOL bought Bebo for $800 million+. To assure shareholders she will not screw up Tumblr, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said several times yesterday that Yahoo will let "Tumblr be Tumblr," and allow it to run as a separate company. She says Yahoo is following a precedent established in part by Google, which bought YouTube for $1.6 billion in 2006, and then left it alone. But what does "letting Tumblr be Tumblr" mean in practice? A veteran of Google's YouTube acquisition, Hunter Walk, wrote blog post offering five lessons he learned living through that successful non-integration. He writes: 1. Protect Tumblr from "Helpful" Yahoos YouTube saw a huge influx of meeting requests, collaboration ideas, inbound employee transfer offers, etc. We were the shiny new toy and everyone wanted to play. Much of it was self-interest - some good natured, some more political. But even the useful opportunities still had the risk of hugging us to death. Eric Schmidt, who was an amazing sponsor of YouTube, gave great advice - be very selective about who you bring into the team and just say he gave us permission to turn down the other offers of "help." We complemented this by proactively educating key Google groups about YouTube. I, along with others, visited key stakeholders at Google and their team meetings. Especially legal, policy and pr - we wanted them to understand the magic of YouTube. Beyond cat videos and copyright questions, help them to see education, community, homegrown stars - everything that made this 18 month old company worth the $1.6b price tag. 2. Avoid Locality Bias in Product Development You're part of Google, there's corporate pressure (and perceived quick wins) to work with other Google products. Blogger, Orkut, OpenSocial, Google Video, Picasa. Remember those? We were growing so quickly that if YouTube integrated or heavily promoted them, they could probably hit their quarterly growth target just from our marketing efforts. But guess what, in many cases that wasn't where our growth was coming from. It was coming from Facebook, Twitter, Buzzfeed, Tumblr and the curatorial blogosphere. So that's where we focused. Be where our users are and grow on the back of those ecosystems. Were some of them Google competitors? Heck, some of them were YOUTUBE competitors but overall the goal was to sew ourselves into the fabric of the web. Boy did I take arrows in the back (I still remember Jeff Huber saving me from a few of them) but at the time, it was the right choice. YouTube's partnership with Apple to be a default app on the original iPhone not only helped us make the jump to mobile but it ensured that every other carrier wanted YouTube on their phones too.  3. Stop Short Term Monetization That Won't Scale YouTube was just starting to earn revenue via a host of banner ads and one-off branded campaigns. Neither of these were going to be important longterm and many of the programs put money in our pocket, but passed through little benefit to content creators because they sold YouTube inventory. It took a good 18 months but under the right goals and leadership the cross functional team started sunsetting this stuff for more scalable monetization products which put money in content creators' pockets.  4. Infrastructure (Tech, Process) on Tumblr Terms The YouTube engineering and network team was superb - keeping the site live and minimizing operational costs during hypergrowth. Google engineering leadership helped out by connecting them with teams they wanted to speak with, not by ordering them to migrate systems. The goal was to help YouTube architect even more scalable infrastructure without slowing down feature development. I think search index moved over first, then a set of progressive projects around thumbnail serving, streaming, etc. Treat it as a science fair where Tumblr gets to see all of the cool tech available to them. Pair senior engineers from each side to help build trust and overcome the Not Invented Here pride of status quo. Business processes were similar. We quickly started using Google OKRs but across release schedules, job ladders, bonus formulas, etc had license to experiment. Great cultures need to figure things out for themselves - it made no sense to immediately take everything Google was doing and force these best practices upon a company as young as YouTube. For example, there was a period where, working with Google HR, we changed our bonus multiplier to starve lower performers and give more of their bonus to higher performers. In addition to believing it was the right model, we also wanted to signal internally that YouTube wasn't a place you could transfer to and then just coast. 5. Separate Identity, Separate Space Although YouTube worldwide increasingly colocated staff in Google offices we maintained worldwide headquarters as a standalone building in San Bruno. Coming to an office every day that said YouTube in big letters and was filled w just other folks working on the same goal - incredibly motivating. We would have gotten lost on Google's main campus. We needed separate space and identity. Not because we were better but because we were different. How could we have a community that believed in us if we didn't feel like a tribe ourselves. We had a building, we had a heartbeat.  Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.Join the conversation about this story »    

Tumblr's First Employee: I'm Not 'Yacht-And-Helicopters' Rich, But I Have 'The Freedom To Work On Whatever I Want' (YHOO)

Marco Arment began working on Tumblr with Tumblr CEO and David Karp before Tumblr was a company. He and Karp had been working together as Website-building contractors for other companies, and between projects, Karp suggested they work on a project for themselves. Yesterday, Arment told the story of how Tumblr grew from there on his personal blog, Marco.org. Today, everyone is passing the post around saying its the best thing they've read about the startup Yahoo bought yesterday for $1.1 billion. Arment says that the Tumblr sale won't make him "yacht-and-helicopter" rich, but that "as long as I manage investments properly and don’t spend recklessly, Tumblr has given my family a strong safety net and given me the freedom to work on whatever I want." "And that’s exactly what I plan to do." Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.Join the conversation about this story »    

It Sounds Like Nick Denton Has Radical Changes In Mind For Gizmodo

Gawker owner Nick Denton hired a new editor for Gizmodo. His name is Geoff Manaugh. According to an interview he gave the New York Times, he spent his 20s roaming Europe and “writing lots and lots of poetry." He's been the editor of site called BLDGBLOG, which today features a record player playing records made out of wood with laser cutters. It sounds like he's going to take the storied gadget blog in a very different direction. Instead of mixing gadget reviews with stories that could also belong in Maxim, Manaugh wants Gizmodo to cover "what technology means." He also wants the blog to focus on architecture and design. He tells the Times: It’s not just about gadgets you carry around in your pocket.… …You might come to Gizmodo expecting to read about an Apple conference, and we will still cover that sort of thing. But if you see a compelling article about 3-D printing or elevator design, I think you’ll be interested in that. It’s taking all of the things Gizmodo is good at and has an audience for, but it’s adding urbanism and architecture and design. You’ll see interviews with architects, coverage of building projects around the world. It’s treating gadgets as design objects. Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.Join the conversation about this story »    

In China, 'Hacking' Is Just A 9-To-5 Job And Nothing To Be Ashamed Of

In recent years US companies such as Google and The New York Times say they have come under attack from Chinese hackers. The US government also says it is also constantly under attack from Chinese hackers. There may be a very simple reason all this is happening. In China, hacking is not something to be ashamed of. It's just a job lots of people do, mostly from 9 to 5. At least, that's the picture painted by a New York Times article by Edward Wong. Wong writes: The culture of hacking in China is not confined to top-secret military compounds where hackers carry out orders to pilfer data from foreign governments and corporations." Hacking thrives across official, corporate and criminal worlds. Whether it is used to break into private networks, track online dissent back to its source or steal trade secrets, hacking is openly discussed and even promoted at trade shows, inside university classrooms and on Internet forums. You really should go read the whole thing. In the meantime, here are some stunning facts from Wong's story: Hackers will actually pitch their ability to break into people's computers out in the open at trade fairs. The Ministry of Education and Chinese universities host hacking competitions and invite talent scouts. Freelance hackers will help a construction company spy on a rival one week, and help the police shut down dissidents the next. Hacking is just a workaday job. American officials say most hacks from there occur between 9am and 5pm Beijing time. Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.Join the conversation about this story »    

Google Glass And Apple iWatches May Seem Dumb – But Then, So Did Wristwatches Once (AAPL, GOOG)

Google's computerized glasses, Google Glass, are so geeky and pretentious-looking that people who wear them are called "Glassholes." Likewise, most people laugh at the news that Google, Samsung, Microsoft, and Apple are all working on computerized watches or "smartwatches." The question people ask is: Who needs a watch or a computer for your face when you have a smartphone? But here's the thing. That kind of question has been asked before. Back when everyone used pocket watches. Reviewing Google Glass, an engineer manager at Adobe named Christian Cantwell, writes: Wristwatches were once widely thought to be a threat to masculinity. It wasn’t until soldiers started strapping their pocket watches to their wrists because it was much more practical than having to remove them from a pocket that wristwatches started to gain acceptance beyond frivolous feminine accessories. Responding to that quote, Google Ventures partner MG Siegler, makes a good point: Will Glass be the product to take off here? Who knows. What I do know is that it’s ridiculous how many times a day all of us reach into our pockets… Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.Join the conversation about this story »