In case you don’t remember, I really got exhausted doing Brazen Careerist. The pressure was insane and it made me nearly lose my mind multiple times. Now Ryan Healy is running the company in DC, and I sort of miss the startup life — sort of like women endure labor and then a year later [...]

SvN Flashback: Top Ten Lies of Entrepreneurs (Guy gets it right)

January 8, 2006 – Face it: Technology is a commodity these days. If you can do it, someone else can do it. And it’s likely they can do it better. What really makes the difference is design, copywriting, execution, clarity, passion, and the overall customer experience. The stuff you can’t specifically define or bulletpoint are the things that matter.

The story of tech is largely about adoption, and adoption often comes into focus in the wake of cultural events. Last Friday's wedding of Prince William to Katharine Middleton was the epitome of an event, bringing together YouTube watchers, Facebookers, Flickrers, Twitterers and even Colorers in a mass collective online experience of the festivities. Taking place at 11 am London time (4 am SF time) the wedding itself was live streamed 72 million times, to people watching in 188 countries. With the addition of rebroadcasts that day, the streams reached 101 million by the end of April 29th.

The U.S. solar industry is banding together to fend off an onslaught of global competition, and to lower the cost of manufacturing solar technology domestically. To make it happen, the newly formed U.S. Photovoltaic Manufacturing Consortium (PVMC) secured a $57.5 million federal grant from the Department of Energy Sunshot Initiative, along with financial commitments totaling $400 million from various state and corporate entities. Today, the PVMC revealed (in an exclusive to TechCrunch) who its earliest members are, including cleantech businesses more often seen as competitors, not collaborators...

Popular commenting platform Disqus, which recently raised $10 million from North Bridge Venture Partners and Union Square Ventures, is adding support for a feature that's both nifty and familiar: mentions within comments. It may not sound particularly sexy, but it could actually help foster better discussions in comment threads (more on that in a bit). If you've ever mentioned someone on Twitter you'll be right at home with Disqus's implementation. Start typing a comment, then type the '@' symbol whenever you'd like to tag someone — this could be a user who has left another message in the comment thread, or a user who hasn't participated. The convention is very similar to the '@reply' system popularized by Twitter, and a small overlay will pop up with autocompleted names drawn from both Twitter and Disqus. Tagged names appear with a gray box around them in the published comment, which looks nice.

comScore's mobile subscriber stats are in for the month and Android continues to top U.S. smartphone share over Apple and RIM. Additionally, during the three month average period ending March 2011, Samsung was top handset manufacturer overall with 24.5 percent market share. Google Android led among smartphone platforms with 34.7 percent market share. The report shows that during the period, 234 million Americans ages 13 and older used mobile devices (this number remained steady from the previous month). But, in terms of smartphones, 72.5 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones during the three months ending in March 2011, up 15 percent from the preceding three-month period.

Ze Frank wants to send us all back to kindergarten. Star.me, Ze’s soon-to-be fully public startup, which raised $500,000 from star-struck investors including Gary Vaynerchuk and Ron Conway, is an attempt to reinvent the kindergarten’s star system of rewards. As Ze told me when he came into the TechCrunchTV studio earlier this week, “stars are good.” They make us human, they allow us to display our emotions and become children again. But the funny thing about Ze is that, in building his new online kindergarten, he’s had to become an adult – fancying an idea, raising capital, developing a business model, leading a team. And, as he confessed to me, becoming the CEO of a funded start-up hasn’t always been as easy as he first imagined when he founded Star.me.

A simple feature request for people who run news sites.

Make sure that the title of each page contains the title of the story that's on the page.

An example of a site that doesn't do this -- the mobile version of Gawker stories. When I'm reading one of their stories on my iPad and want to push it to my followers, the entry box is pre-populated with the title. Which is always the same. "Gossip from Manhattan and the Beltway to Hollywood and the Valley." No matter what the story is. Not good.

Here's a screen shot.

Another peeve is sites that give me a special version of a page for my iPad. That's not necessary or even welcome. The iPad has a full-size web browser. I want your normal version. Another feature request for Gawker. Don't treat the iPad as if it were an iPhone.

Especially irritating are wordpress.com sites, which put up a Flipboard-like interface. I know I can turn it off, but I don't want to be bothered knowing how to do that. I just want to read the news, not be impressed by your programming prowess, or compliance with the latest Silicon Valley fad. I went to the blog to read what they had to say. I find it especially irritating when they do it to one of my own sites. That I pay them to host. Without my asking for it.

One more thing, Apple's insisting that Flash die clearly isn't working. As an iPad user, I miss a fair amount of stuff I care about. Yeah, it's too much trouble to get up and go to my desktop computer just to see what the video says. At some point Apple is going to throw in the towel on this one. Sooner the better.

On Twitter, numerous people recall that the US insisted on trials for Nazi war crimes at the end of World War II. They cite this as precedent that says that Bin Laden should have been similarly tried. But they're mixing things up too much, the situations are not comparable.

Suppose one of the Nazis had escaped or been acquitted. There was no danger of them re-opening Auschwitz or invading Poland again. Germany was defeated and Europe was in ruins. The next thing to do, no matter what, was to rebuild Europe. At most the Nazis could have escaped justice, and therefore would fail to serve as an example for future would-be war criminals. The Nazis were done, and Germany was knocked out.

Pretty sure I don't have to finish this, but just in case. Trying Bin Laden would have created an unprecedented spectacle, and would have given him control of everything until there was a resolution. Bin Laden was a master of media. He would have known what to do with such an opportunity. And since we know his intentions were to kill Americans, that can't help but mean more dead Americans. Maybe a lot more dead Americans.

As a dead man, we hope he remains silent. But that's not likely. He almost certainly left some kind of message to be played on his death. Maybe many. But at least now it's finite.

We did the right thing by killing him. Sometimes being perfect costs too much. This is one of those times when settling for imperfection was the correct choice.

In advance of the upcoming Maker Faire Bay Area, here's a look at two vastly different robotics projects: one aims to change the world while the other wants to roll around (and inspire some healthy creativity).

In the latest Search Notes: Bing is going all out to claim more market share, Google News' personalization features could create an echo chamber, and Osama Bin Laden's death creates a search frenzy.

Ah, robots. When they're not busy planning world domination, they apparently play Angry Birds just like the rest of us. OptoFidelity, a Finnish company that specializes in machine vision and optical measurement technology, in addition to other things I don't understand, recently produced a physical robot that knows how to kill nasty green pigs. It most certainly beats the crap out of this (OptoFidelity 1 - Stanford University 0).

The question raised in the title of this post is fairly naive. He was in the middle of a Pakistani military city. They knew, and they don't mind if you figure it out. It won't be acknowledged in the media. Since they're mostly corporate-owned, no one will ask the question in any meaningful way.

The more interesting question is how long did the US govt know he was there, and how did they pick the moment to kill him?

Before you rush in and say "It was political" -- as the Republicans are -- of course it was political. Everything about Bin Laden, on all sides, is and was political.

And if you accept the US story on its face, we could have gone in there at any time in the last few months. So why right now?

Well, if you were the President, would you have killed Bin Laden in the middle of the revolutions in the Middle East? Wouldn't have been very good timing. Might have hit the reset button on all that. Much better to let it run its course. Bin Laden wasn't going anywhere. Not with the Pakistanis having him so well controlled.

When did the President need the rhetorical high ground to win the war with the Republicans? Who did he fear more, Bin Laden, who was cornered, and controlled by a US ally, Pakistan, or Mitch McConnell, Eric Cantor and the Koch brothers? Again, we don't have a choice but to take things at face-value. Obviously the Republicans were doing a lot more damage to the US than Bin Laden was. A good President picks his battles and fights them on his own terms. Could the President use Bin Laden to win the war with teh Republicans? Well, duh. (Hello.)

And it's working. The Republicans are retreating on all fronts. (But that's probably all theater too, the real war is much more complicated than the battle between two political parties that report to the same multi-national corporate bosses.)

Bin Laden knew it was over for a long long time. According to reports he didn't leave the compound for five years. He probably couldn't get out if he wanted to. He didn't have Internet or phone service. His only connection to the rest of the world was through a courier, and we knew all about that. Did Bin Laden know we knew? I think so. And there was nothing he could do about it. The man was cornered. And he was that way for a long time.

Using an Occam's Razor approach, the deal he had with the Pakistanis and the US probably went something like this. As long as there are no major acts of terrorism in the west, and as long as we don't need you to die for some greater political purpose, you get to live. But you have to stay confined to this prison, with one wife and a few kids, a vegetable garden and reefer. Bin Laden's life was a chip that could be cashed in for political gain when needed. On Monday the clock ran out for him.

Could the Pakistanis have stopped us if they wanted? Yeah they could have. But they were in on it.

Raspberry Pi -- the creator of the game Elite has made an inline computer the size of a thumb drive--it plugs into an HDMI cable on one end and USB on the other. 700MHz CPU, OpenGL, 1080p-capable, running Ubuntu. Pricetag: $25. The mission is to supply them to schools. A Budget for Babel (Tim Carmody) -- What would you...

Earlier today, AOL's Head of AIM Products Jason Shellen sent an email to the entire company urging people not to share its contents with people outside of the company. Even though we're a part of AOL, we didn't get that email. Well, that is until someone was kind enough to leak it to us. Hey, we are not outside of the company so that's fair right? And since we didn't technically get the email, I have no problem sharing it. Anyway. AOL is on the verge of launching a "shiny new video chat product dubbed 'AV'". And it actually looks pretty good. It's video chat, but super-simple. You don't need an account to use it. You don't need anything (besides, sadly, Flash installed on your computer). You hit the homepage, start a chat, get a link, and send that to friends. Up to four people can chat at once.

Self-publishing content company Helium has raised another 10 million in debt financing according to a SEC filing from earlier today. Listed on the the filing are President Mark Renalli, and board members Ann Bushell and John Paloian from RR Donnelly, Joseph Farrelly of Interpublic Group, Anne Kennedy of Beyond Ink, Steve Pogorzelski, David Weild IV and William Huff. There is no indication of who invested on the SEC form. Sort of like a proto-content farm, Helium writers get paid to write "How to" guides on subjects ranging from "How to get physically ready for Marine Basic Training" to "How to change back to Yahoo! Mail Classic" (wow).

The buzzword of the year is "cloud," and it carries with it an implication that your data is somewhere magical and safe, and in a way, it is. But there's no getting around the fact that our appetite for storage is increasing by leaps and bounds, whether it's stored locally or remotely. There's always the possibility of catastrophic failure, and of course the flip side of that is that there is always the need to instantly and permanently delete our data. I've always found both necessities, and the methods for achieving them, interesting topics. And with densities increasing and SSDs on the rise, the recovery and security scene is getting more complex by the day. I spoke with Chris Bross, a data recovery expert at DriveSavers, in order to get a feel for what the recovery practices are out there today.

I could give a rat’s ass about silver, the metal. I don’t want to own it and stare at it. It produces no cash flow. It’s a means to an investment/trade. That said, I started writing about and buying $SLW on ‘Momentum Monday’ in the high teens when I bought it and shared it for [...]

Quick thoughts then I have to get back to programming.

Osama shaped the current America as much as any President has.

Like it or not that's a fact.

That he remained at large for so long weighed heavily on us. We didn't know how much. Until the weight was released. Now we know.

It hit me today reading a blog post by Berzerkeley, where she explained how a slow faucet was adding surprising weight to her life.

Then I realized that until this week we hadn't resolved a very important part of 9-11, and it was weighing heavy on all of us. As long as Bin Laden was still alive, we were still under his thumb. There may be more acts of terrorism in the US, but there will never be another one from him.

I don't think you can understand this if you're not an American. And I didn't feel it so much from Calif, where I experienced 9-11, the way New Yorkers and people in DC and Boston do. The closer you get to the human tragedy of 9-11, and don't overlook it was that, the clearer it becomes.

I read a USA Today account of how people died in the elevators of the WTC on 9-11. It was riveting. Whatever you want to say about the USA, the people who died on 9-11 here were innocent. As innocent as any victim anywhere else in the world. And many of them suffered horrible deaths. Unthinkably horrible. Phoning loved ones to say goodbye. Jumping off the building holding hands. Rushing into cataclysm to save others. Waiting in shock to find out if someone you care about lived or died.

Osama's death was quick. And he deserved what he got. I don't think he suffered.

I'm not a jury, I don't have to be objective about this. Americans who celebrated in NY and DC weren't on a jury either, and they could express their relief however they wanted. That's the glory of the USA.

Yeah, they were celebrating someone's death. And whether you like it or not, for America to move on, Osama bin Laden had to die.

BTW, I sat next to a Pakistani UN engineer on his way to Haiti on the last leg of my flight home from Amsterdam. We had a very interesting conversation about our different perspectives of the unfolding events. Neither of us were home when it happened.

View all of the jobs and internships at the 37signals Job Board.

Programming Jobs

Google is looking for a Front End Software Engineer in New York, New York.

Amazon is looking for a Software Developer Engineer in Seattle, WA.

AT&T Interactive is looking for a Sr Software Engineer in Glendale, CA.

The Nielsen Company is looking for a Lead Software Engineer in Tampa, FL.

View all Programming Job listings.

Design Jobs

MTV Networks is looking for a Senior Interface Designer in New York, NY.

TripIt is looking for a UI/UX Design Lead in San Francisco, CA.

Kansas State University is looking for a Web User Interface Designer in Manhattan, KS.

Kayak is looking for a Senior UI Designer in Concord, MA.

View all Design Job listings.

The Job Board also has iPhone Developer Jobs, Customer Service/Support Jobs, Business/Exec Jobs, and more.

News Corp's IGN gaming and entertainment property has just acquired Hearst's gaming and entertainment property UGO, we've confirmed with the company. And yes, the move is step one towards News Corp. spinning out IGN as its own property sometime relatively soon, we're told. This news was first reported by MediaMemo a few days ago as the deal was still being finalized. I got the chance to talk to IGN President Roy Bahat about the news and he wanted to reiterate that while there's been a lot of talk about News Corp. trying to ditch properties that are underperforming (*cough* MySpace *cough*), this is not the case here. Instead IGN is doing really well, Bahat says, and making money. They will bring in north of $10 million in profit this year, and that number is expected to be significantly higher next year, he says. He also notes that ad revenue is up 30 percent year over year.

Residents of Half Moon Bay California, there's no need to be worried. That large roar you hear is likely the collective cheers coming from GoPro's HQ. The Californian company just announced a new round of funding and that Best Buy is now selling most of its product line based around the popular HD Hero camcorder. The founding comes from Riverwood Capital, Steamboat Ventures, Sageview Capital, Walden International and U.S. Venture Partners. The amount wasn't disclosed, but GoPro's Rick Loughery indicated to me in an email that "it's a lot" and the company is growing rapidly and now employes over 80 people rather than the 14 this time last year. The funding will also be used to take the wearable camcorder to international markets. The HD Hero is already without question one of US' favorite action camera and GoPro's other announcement regarding Best Buy will further expand its popularity here in the states.

Hey, the folks at the Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve is a Department of Defense agency which provides USERRA Law education, mediation, and is a referral resource to help Guardsmen, Reservists and Veterans in their job searches. They announced recently that 148 employers have been selected as semifinalists for the 2011 Secretary of [...]

I've always wanted a way to edit whole websites in a single outline. It would give me a lot of flexibility as an author, and with the memory capabilities of today's computers, it's not such a crazy idea. I already edit outlines that are several megabytes in size. The software handles it without any problem. It's written in C and over the years the CPUs have gotten quite fast, and scrolling through and reorganizing what would have been unthinkably huge outlines when the code was written in the late 80s, is now no problem. The algorithms we used back then have stood up well over time.

Why would I want to have a whole site in a single outline? Well, I manage lots of very small single-purpose sites. Some of them are only a landing page, a place-holder. Others simply document a format or protocol, and are actively worked on for a while and then basically don't change, forever. It's always hard to remember how to make small edits to these sites. It would work best if they were all in an outline that I could expand and collapse and reorganize at will. And the outline structure would also serve as a directory for users to browse. The unifying idea has allude me for years, almost within grasp, but as my mind siezes on it, it slips away.

Then I finally figured it out on the flight from Amsterdam to Boston. The world outline is almost exactly what I want. I just need to tell it how to switch gears, how to shift from structure mode to HTML mode. And for that we already have a way to tell processors how to interpret the content of an outline node and its subs -- the type attribute. And I have a processor running to implement this in -- worldoutline.scripting.com.

That's the motivation, now here, in a bulleted list are the elements.

1. An outline with a node with a type attribute whose value is html.

2. When the processor encounters such a node, it gathers all its subtext and returns it.

3. If the processor doesn't understand this type, it does nothing special.

An example of such an outline. If you scroll down near the bottom you'll see a node of type html that has a placeholder page for a site called mageddon.org. If you go to the test section of the worldoutline, the 4th item is the html node. Click on the icon next to it. You should see a page with the HTML on it.

I can edit the contents of this page by editing the outline.

Next steps are to allow you to map a domain to one of these nodes.

A new interactive feature posted at WhiteHouse.gov uses open data to visualize excess federal property. The full dataset is also available for download in a structured format.

The fourth installment of this series, about a Sage Commons Congress on the open-source sharing of genetic research, focuses in on the rights of patients and how they want researchers to treat their data.

Will big data kill the stock exchange? That question was recently explored by Andy Kessler. Plus: How recent security breaches could shape the black market and a look at how "island biogeography" predicted Osama Bin Laden's location.

Michael Sliwinski of Productive! Magazine talks with Jason about business, productivity, team-building, creating, and more. (Warning: shaky camera at times.)

As a teenager, my parents constantly hounded me about where I was going, and when I would return. I didn't have a cellphone, so communication was limited. Flash forward ten years and although many teenagers have cell phones now, it's still annoying for kids and teens to constantly communicate with parents and worrisome for parents to not know of their children's whereabouts. A new app will soon launch to help solve this problem. I'mOK, which is in private beta, is a private mobile application designed to reward kids for staying connected to their parents. By sharing their location, taking pictures, tagging friends, and telling parents what's up, kids earn points that can be exchanged for things parents have agreed to, like allowance or special privileges. The more kids share, the more points they get.

Enterprise social networking platform Yammer, just debuted a brand new iPad app and today is rolling out a new version of its Adobe AIR-powered desktop app. Yammer, which launched as the "Twitter for businesses" at TechCrunch 50 in 2008, offers a multi-platform communications app for businesses. In fact, we use Yammer internally at TechCrunch.

Why We Chose MongoDB for Guardian.co.uk (SlideShare) -- they're using MongoDB's flexible schema, as schema upgrades were pain in their previous system (Oracle). I think of these as the database equivalent of dynamic typing in languages like Perl and Ruby. (via Paul Rowe) Solving Problems with Visual Analytics -- This book is the result of a community effort of...

Dennis Crowley, co-founder of Foursquare, says subtle interactions — like a buzzing phone — could lead to better augmented reality experiences than those provided through cameras and screens.

Online career site operator CareerBuilder has acquired JobsCentral, one of Singapore's largest job portals with over 700,000 registered jobseekers and a growing presence in Malaysia. With the acquisition, CareerBuilder enters the Southeast Asian market, expanding operations to a total of 21 countries worldwide, including the U.S., Europe, Canada and Asia.

Warning: if you are an obsessively clean person, you may want to skip this episode of TC Cribs. For those of you brave enough to tune in, here's a bit of an explanation. Over the last few months we've seen some pretty blinged-out offices, featuring go-karts, gorgeous skyline views, and endless supplies of free snacks and beer. But the reality is that most startups don't look anything like that. Instead, they often consist a handful of founders working (and sleeping) out of somebody's apartment and eating ramen noodles twice a day with the occasional pizza splurge. LikeALittle (LAL) is a lot like that. There's stuff everywhere. Not necessarily gross stuff, but the floor was littered with dolls, photos of Ashton Kutcher, iPads, markers, venture capitalist business cards, and popcorn. In other words, it was a lot like my college dorm. And it's awesome.

It seems only fair they should also get credit for the crappy economy and all the bailouts.

Just read a piece by Scott Rosenberg warning that journalists shouldn't rush into Facebook. He's right, but imho his analogies don't quite capture the danger.

Here's the question in a nutshell. Suppose you had a story that uncovered an unsavory fact about Facebook. Would you feel comfortable publishing that on Facebook?

Now, what if Facebook made a deal with the Chinese government? Would you feel comfortable publishing a story unfavorable to China on Facebook? Would you be surprised if Facebook altered it, or took it down, or got you fired? What if China owned 10 percent of Facebook?

What if it weren't Facebook, what if it were Exxon or BP running the network? Apple or Microsoft? Would you feel differently?

Would you be surprised if, in a few years, Facebook wasn't drawing from the talent pool of the US government, or the largest banks and corporations and other Silicon Valley firms? Of course they already are.

If Facebook lasts, and if it grows like most companies do, they will hire from the general talent pool from all sectors of government, academia and buisness. The kind of freedom you'll have on Facebook won't be anything special. It'll be a corporate-owned or controlled place like a shopping mall, or the Smithsonian. Subject to all the political pressures of large entities. I don't think that's a good environment for journalism, reading or writing.

It's probably still early days for Facebook. But it's growing so fast, it won't last long.

It would be much better for all of us if the web outside of Facebook thrived or at least held its ground. I don't think there's any question about that. And it would be great if you all helped it.

Sortfolio, our visual directory of web designers, has been helping companies find web design firms (and helping web design firms find clients) since October of 2009.

Sortfolio works

It’s been working quite well for people. In a recent survey we conducted, 45% generated new business through Sortfolio, and 64% said leads were moderate to high quality.

We believe in Sortfolio. It’s still the best way to browse web design firms. It beats Google, text directories, or hiring your friend’s cousin. Browsing by visual portfolio, budget range, and location is the most perfect combination we’ve found to hone in on the right fit for your web design project.

Sortfolio deserves a better home

However, we haven’t been able to dedicate many resources towards improving it or promoting it. Our efforts are focused on our products and our Job Board. We believe Sortfolio deserves to thrive, but 37signals is no longer the best home. So we’re looking to sell it to a company that can give Sortfolio — and its customers — the love and attention they deserve.

Revenues and business model

Sortfolio has been holding steady between $17,000-$20,000/month for quite some time now. Paying customers are billed $99/monthly. They can cancel at any time. Free listings are available for all. Currently there are just under 10,000 total accounts, 195 of those are Pro accounts. We’re sure a dedicated sales person could upsell quite a few people.

Futher, the Sortfolio model could expand into a variety of other verticals including photographers, wedding planning, catering, illustrators, artists, etc. I’d love to see a Sortfolio for calligraphy or hand lettering.

Make us an offer

If you’re interested, make us an offer. We’re open to anything as long as it’s cash. We’re not interested in equity. Maybe it’s all cash, maybe it’s cash + royalties on future sales. Who knows. Come at us with something serious and we’ll consider it.

If you’re interested, or have any other questions, please email jason@37signals… We expect to receive a lot of offers, so we won’t be responding to anything we don’t consider a serious offer. We’re serious about selling so please be serious about buying. We’ll help get the word out whenever you are ready to relaunch.

Socialcam, the video sharing app that was created by Justin.tv, is quickly fleshing out its feature set.  The app — which is a lot like an 'Instagram for video', minus the effects filters — launched just in time for SXSW and had 250,000 downloads in its first month (the total download number is significantly higher than that, though they aren't releasing figures until they reach their next 'big' milestone).  A few weeks ago the company launched a 2.0 release that streamlined the video upload process, and today it's adding another key feature: a web version of Socialcam. Now, in a sense Socialcam has had a website since it launched — every time you shared a Socialcam video via email or Twitter, you sent out a link to a landing page with your video embedded. You could retweet or share that page on Facebook, but that was it. There weren't profile pages, so you couldn't browse through the other videos your friends had recorded, and you couldn't see who was tagged in each video (one of Socialcam's features is a quick way to tag your friends in clips).

Intel has made an interesting advance in microprocessor technology after years of research, and it seems that 2011's processors will be the first to feature 3D transistors and tri-gate technology. By optimizing the shape of the transistor at a nanometer level, Intel has made it possible to both reduce the size of individual transistors and improve their efficiency. Now, it's important to differentiate this 3D method from others under investigation, like IBM's. This isn't a multi-layer solution, merely a more complicated shape for the single layer of transistors we know and love. I say merely, but of course sculpting things at a near-atomic level is no joke. So what exactly is the advance here, and what will it enable?

TechCrunch Disrupt NYC starts May 23rd—less than a month away. And we are very excited to announce four more guests to our growing list of speakers who will be joining us at this year's Disrupt in NYC: Howard Lindzon, Yossi Vardi, Greg Tseng, and Bradley Horowitz. Howard Lindzon, co-founder and CEO of StockTwits, is a force to be reckoned with. With over twenty years experience in the financial community actingas both an entrepreneur and investor (his sold his last startup, Wallstrip, to CBS), has incredible insight into new media and is also a very active angel investor in the financial and internet business sectors. Yossi Vardi is an award winning Israeli investor, most famous for being the original investor in ICQ. Currently co-founder and board observer of WeFi, Vardi has invested in over 50 tech companies and has acted as an advisor to the World Bank and the United Nations Development Program on issues of energy in the developing world.

The use of strict print design elements in digital content locks readers into systems that aren't user friendly. A little rethinking can go a long way toward solving that problem.

Recently, Attachmate gave their US-based Mono developers the pink slip, there was much ado about mobile, and Chrome puts Java on the back burner.

Students and professors have anxiously anticipated the replacement of analog textbooks with digital options. As it turns out, however, current technology might actually hinder learning.

The third installment of this series, about a Sage Commons Congress on the open-source sharing of genetic research, explores the barriers that keep private companies and researchers from sharing their work.

What’s more, delegating isn’t easy for me. Even though the paperwork and other chores were piling up, I still had a hard time letting go. I have a feeling I’m not alone in this. It’s tough for the person who started the business to begin to let go. For more than a decade, I’ve been involved in every decision at this company, from which hosting company to use to what brand of paper towel goes in the kitchen. When you’re that used to having every decision run through you, it can be a bit unnerving to surrender control. I understand that it’s silly to believe that every small decision needs to run through you. But it’s such a primal instinct when your business is your baby.

—Jason’s latest Inc. Magazine column: How to Hire an Assistant

Chatroulette is plotting another comeback! The Russian website that allows complete strangers to jump from one awkward random video chat to the next was all the rage among the Web’s tastemakers in the first half of last year, but it seems like everyone's now pretty much moved on. The fact that the site was - and is still - frequently used by creeps who couldn't seem to keep their pants on didn't help much in that regard. Anyway, Chatroulette is still around, and despite the existence of sites like YouTube, VEVO and direct competitors such as Tinychat, they claim to be the 'largest video social network' in the world, attracting more than 20 million visitors per month.

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong is betting on the devil. Project Devil, that is. Those are the ad units on AOL properties (including TechCrunch), and now on Hearst sites as well, that take up all the ad spots with one campaign. Instead of 14 different ads on a page, the same space if all given to one advertiser. They are designed to be more engaging as well via the addition of maps, videos, and other interactive elements. In today's first quarter earnings call, Armstrong told analysts: "On every single benchmark, Devil Ads perform better." He then broke down some stats: compared to "industry benchmarks" (i.e. run-of-the-mill display ads), AOL is seeing 6.4X the engagement rate with Project Devil ads than standard ones (10 percent versus 1.5 percent engagement), 1.9X the click-through rate, and 3.4X the time spent with the ads for those people who do engage (47 seconds versus 14 seconds). Project Devil video ads are played twice as much as other video ads.

Facebook is so large that it now accounts for about one out of every three ad impressions in the U.S., according to the latest statistics from comScore Ad Metrix. In the first quarter of 2011, comScore estimates that 1.1 trillion ads were served to U.S. Internet users, and 346 billion of those (or 31 percent) were on Facebook. This percentage is up from 23 percent in the third quarter of last year. No other Web property even comes close to Facebook in terms of number of display ads served. Yahoo is No. 2 (with 10 percent share), followed by Microsoft (5 percent), AOL (3 percent), and Google (2.5 percent). These figures are just for their own sites, and do not include their ad networks.