Company culture is a huge competitive advantage: That’s why Zuckerberg obsesses over Facebook’s hackathons and why Yahooers “bleed purple.” Of course, anything that causes people to feel loyal to organizations that encompass thousands of people is a force to be reckoned with, right?

At Foursquare they name their conference rooms after Foursquare badges, like ‘Gossip Girl’ or (Yes!) ‘Wino.’ Twitter has so many projects named after birds that it’s built an internal Wiki in order to keep track of them all.

At TechCrunch we’ve gotten hung up on a “Sharks” metaphor lately; i.e. we’re a team of sharks that devours our prey (news, lol).

And Google, well, Google is kind of random — Aside from the “Smart Ass” ad relevancy system, Google tends to name its projects after animals, like Gmail was “Caribou” and Google Drive was “Duck.”

But not always. Google Plus was coined “Emerald Sea” after this Albert Bierstadt  painting, with the metaphor being that if Google were to sit on its laurels and ignore Facebook’s rapidly encroaching advances, it would get swept up in an Emerald Sea much like the poor ship in the painting. Google Buzz was (inexplicably) called “Taco Town.”

Competitor companies at Google are code-named after countries, like Microsoft is Canada (because it once threatened it would move to Canada) and Aol is Hawaii (because founder Steve Case was born in Honolulu).

The coolest one I’ve heard? That Google’s Project Glass, its endeavor to build Minority Report-esque augmented reality glasses, is called ”Wingman,” because it’s meant to serve as your wingman as you navigate life. You know, like using its facial recognition technology to lookup any potential hookup partners on Facebook … I’M JUST KIDDING (But yeah, the future seriously has so much potential for sketchy).

Carry on.

If you’re following Foursquare on Twitter, you’ve probably noticed that the check-in champions have been teasing the release of the “all new Foursquare” app for the last few days, dropping hints that it was coming soon to app stores near you.

Continuing to use the hashtag #allnew4sq, Foursquare last night dropped the news on Twitter that it will be releasing its big new redesign at some point next week. [Photos below.] Now, while that may seem like a ho-hum revelation for some, this is likely to be the culmination of a new direction for Foursquare.

The burning question: what should we do tonight? The #allnew4sq is coming this week! bit.ly/M8UmVa

— foursquare (@foursquare) June 2, 2012

That is to say, as Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley told Ingrid in March, though Foursquare has seen almost 2 billion check-ins and has added over 20 million users since launching in 2009, its users are turning away from the functionality which initially brought the startup so much attention: Check-ins.

Crowley said at the time:

People are using the app, but they’re not checking in … I asked myself: did we break something? But in fact, it’s because people are using Foursquare to look for where their friends are, to find things, and as a recommendation service. It’s almost like it doesn’t occur to them to check in.

Users are checking-in less, as the honeymoon has worn off. While Foursquare has added millions of users, many still don’t quite see the point of telling people where they are at all times. Foursquare leadership recognized this, and what we’re seeing now is a part of an ongoing transition for the company that’s really been brewing since the beginning of last year.

Foursquare looks to be de-emphasizing check-ins and going full-steam ahead, looking for new life as a recommendation engine. Not only that, but it’s been evolving as a more self-contained social network, passive location detection, adding bios to profile pages, a searchable timeline in a new history page, and restaurant recommendations.

Foursquare has been slowly (and sometimes in leaps and bounds) building its data set, learning the habits of its users, all as part of a quest to offer better recommendations, to help them find destinations that they’ll like — and just better explore their worlds. Oh, and check-in when they need to.

The word “Explore” is becoming a more important part of Foursquare’s lexicon, and as Anthony pointed out earlier this year, the company is increasingly encroaching on Yelp’s territory. (Just as Yelp added check-ins.) It seems to be moving to be a Yelp 2.0 with enhanced map functionality in its new version, allowing users to see what destinations are hot and leveraging its partnerships with sporting venues, concert halls, and movie theaters to make Google Maps more social.

Foursquare has been looking to move beyond the check-in for some time now, and it’s clearly betting that its new redesign will do just that. It remains to be seen if Yelp is losing ground to Foursquare and Google (with Google+ Local) — it’s still operating as at $960 million market cap. But, Foursquare is certainly becoming a more self-contained social network, and a lot of people are finding new reason to use the app now that it offers recommendations through “Explore.”

This could be a big moment for Foursquare, and an opportunity to set itself apart, especially if it has its eyes on an IPO down the road. As Business Insider points out, it may be in a position where it has to significantly improve on Yelp’s user experience if it hopes to outshine Yelp and raise big money along that onramp.

Improving recommendations so that they take your location into account, as well as your interest graph and time of day, along with a map and social experience that competes with Yelp, Foursquare 2.0 could be a whole lot more appealing.

We’ll find out this week.

Woofound, a Maryland-based startup aiming to match your personality to things you want to do, is today launching its iOS application nationwide. The app turns rating activities, places and restaurants into a simple, visual game in order to serve up highly personalized recommendations. You rate things by tapping or clicking “Me” or “Not Me” on the items suggested – it feels something like a “Hot or Not” for your interests, in fact.

In addition to today’s launch, the company is also announcing it has now raised over $1 million in funding, from private investors and angel sources.

The company declined to reveal details about its investors.

Woofound was created by co-founders Dan Sines (CEO) and Josh Spears in April 2011, after being sparked by an idea had when Josh was going on a blind date. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way for friends to match up their interests based on common personality traits? (Well, without paying for an online dating service, that is.)

The company got its start in Baltimore, so a lot of its data about restaurants, nightlife, venues, activities, etc. is currently centered around the Baltimore and D.C. regions. However, the service is now going live in the top 70 major metros areas in the U.S. (For what it’s worth, in my hometown of Tampa, the app struggled to suggest any place or activity I wasn’t already familiar with. Your mileage may vary. And this should improve in time – plans to integrate Eventbrite and Eventful data are in the works.)

The game itself, though, is fun. You don’t feel like you’re training an AI (artificial intelligence) engine, even though that’s exactly what you’re doing. And the app’s design is simple and attractive.

The technology designed to match personality types was built in conjunction with psychoanalyst and psychotherapist Dr. Noreen Honeycutt, who has a private practice in Baltimore. The quiz itself may seem simple, but it can already identify over 300 different levels of personality and preferences. And while its initial use case is consumer-facing – finding things to do friends, see who’s attending events, share event details on social networks – the actual technology powering the app has other potential use cases beyond social.

The University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), for example, will be releasing a second Woofound-powered app this fall which will help students identify their career paths, based on personality types. Woofound could also match roommates (like those sharing college dorms) or recommend products, at some point further down the road.

The startup is currently a team of fifteen based in Baltimore, and is planning to raise between $3 million and $5 million in its next round. (Soon-ish). The iOS app is available today, and the Android version will arrive this fall.

Launched just about a year ago, live streaming site TwitchTV has very quickly established itself as one of the top destinations for e-sports enthusiasts who want to broadcast their gaming sessions to the world. Pretty soon it’ll be even easier for TwitchTV users to broadcast their game sessions, as the company is announcing its first in-game integration. It’s also helping to groom some new competitive gamers, thanks to a scholarship that it is launching in partnership with Alienware and SteelSeries.

At the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), Paradox Interactive is announcing that upcoming game title The Showdown Effect will have TwitchTV built-in. That will let users instantly launch TwitchTV’s streaming dashboard from directly within the game, so they can start broadcasting their gameplay without jumping between applications. Paradox will be showing off the capability from TwitchTV’s booth at noon on Tuesday.

The Showdown Effect, which is slated for release in early 2013, is the first title to be announced with instant access to the TwitchTV platform, but if the e-sports streaming startup gets its way, it won’t be the last: TwitchTV is working with other games publishers on enabling even more direct integrations, which it hopes to announce later this year.

While it’s getting embedded in new games, TwitchTV is also hoping to grow the e-sports market by announcing a new scholarship to help competitive gamers improve their chops. It’s partnering with Dell’s Alienware and peripheral manufacturer SteelSeries on the scholarship, which will award $50,000 to five student gamers.

The 2012 TwitchTV and Alienware Scholarship committee will be made up of industry experts and will review applications based on students’ GPA, gaming prowess, and “passion for playing.” Applicants will need to submit their grade point average, show off their skills through in-game ranking, tournament history, or prizes that they’ve received, and submit an essay on what games mean to them, along with a video explaining why they should be considered for the scholarship.

TwitchTV will accept applications between June 5 and July 15, 2012, and will announce winners of the scholarship on August 15. For a list of requirements and to apply, interested gamers can go to www.twitch.tv/p/scholarship.

Finally, in addition to its own announcements, TwitchTV will have pretty comprehensive coverage of the annual gaming expo over the next several days, including live streams of announcements from video game publishers such as 2K Games, Ubisoft, Activision, SEGA, CAPCOM, and Electronic Arts.

Last October, Kimball Thomas and Davis Smith launched Baby.com.br with $4.4 million in backing from an impressive group of Silicon Valley and international investors, including Tiger Global Management, Monashees Capital, SV Angel, Felicis Ventures, Chamath Palihapitiya and Thrive Capital. For SV Angel and Felicis Ventures, this marked the first time that either firm had invested in a startup based in Brazil.

Why the interest from these top investors? Well, for starters, the co-founders had started PoolTables.com with $20K right out of college, were able to turn a profit in their first year, and, since they didn’t raise any outside funding, were able to sell it in early 2011 for what Smith says was “a nice little profit.” But, more importantly, it gave them experience with how to work with international investors (many of which were in China) and how to run an eCommerce site.

But, with Baby.com.br, they’re tackling what they think is a much bigger area of the eCommerce market in a country that’s just starting to see its Internet adoption and Internet-focused businesses take off: Brazil. Forrester, for example, forecasts that the eCommerce industry in Brazil will grow at 18 percent year-over-year, with total sales expected to reach $22 billion by 2016.

It also helps that Smith has been living in Latin America now, on and off, for 13 years. He and Thomas identified Brazil as an ideal setting to launch an eCommerce business based on skyrocketing Internet penetration, the dramatic increase in B2C eCommerces businesses popping up over the last year, and its sizable population (just under 200 million). While the co-founders knew that it was still early to be entering the nascent Brazilian eCommerce space, they still felt that the market was close enough to an inflection point that it was worth it. You have to remember, Davis says, nine years ago, only 8 percent of Brazilians used the Internet. Today, that number has jumped to about 50 percent. Now that’s hockey-stick growth.

After a trip last year to Rio de Janeiro last year, in which Thomas struggled to find diapers for his young son, spending hours in the car and visiting at least three stores before finding a place that sold the right size, the co-founders decided to focus on the online baby market. Smith tells us that they saw a Brazilian baby market that was fragmented and lacked a clear leader, while the demand was high among young parents and disposable income in the country, on the whole was (and is) on the rise.

But growing a business in Brazil is not without its hurdles, which is why, rather than add a whole new variable to the list, they decided to go with a business model they knew would work, and took to replicating the Diapers.com biz model for the Brazilian market. Thus, today Baby.com.br is a full-service eCommerce site that hawks all things babies — toys, strollers, diapers, furniture, etc.

While Thomas and Smith bootstrapped PoolTables.com, maxing out personal credit cards and taking out second mortgages, they knew the second time around that Baby.com.br would be a much more capital intensive business. After all, Diapers.com raised about $70 million in equity before it sold to Amazon last year for $545 million. So, the co-founders (and cousins) decided to focus on raising money from investors that could help them build a defensible business model in Brazil, no easy feat in spite of the growing national interest in eCommerce.

Through their investors, Smith and Thomas got in touch with Angelica, one of Brazil’s most popular celebrities — a former childhood TV star and singer, and the current host of a popular children’s show. Being a young mother herself, she joined the team as the Chief Mommy Officer, recommending products for moms and just generally being a brand evangelist. Her husband Luciano Huck, also a famous TV star in Brazil (who Smith describes as the Ashton Kutcher of Brazil), has also been active investing in startups, like Crunchies winner Peixe Urbano, for example.

Considering both are active on social media (Huck was the first Brazilian to pass 1 million followers on Twitter), Smith says that their mutual participation has been a boon for the startup, helping them increase conversion and jump to 750K followers on Facebook. Although the co-founders aren’t eager to share growth numbers for competitive reasons, they did say that, by their third month in operation, they were seeing one million visitors to the site per month, had shipped 1,000 orders in a single day, and have seen double digit growth every month since. As a result, they’ve grown from a small team to over 100 employees in about six months.

But, again, growing a business in Brazil even with celebrity endorsement isn’t easy. For years, the country dealt with crippling hyperinflation, which in turn destroyed a generation of entrepreneurs in Brazil, Smith says, and leaving not only entrepreneurs but workers and consumers extremely risk averse. As a result, it makes it challenging to compete for talent, and hire away from the big, established multinational companies in Brazil. Not to mention the fact that equity is, generally speaking a novel concept in Brazil, nor does being backed by names like “SV Angel” or Tiger Global — which would likely be recognized in the U.S.

The cost of skilled labor is high, and so are salaries. In the U.S., the payroll tax is about 15 percent, whereas in Brazil it’s closer to 70. Companies generally have to pay at least one meal a day for their employees, they have to pay for transportation, etc. So, while the worker protections built into national policy can make it a dream for the skilled laborer, it’s not exactly easy on the pockets of a startup, when they’re having to pay 100 to 120 percent on top of salary. “Plus, it’s nearly impossible to fire someone, and you can get sued for just about anything here,” Smith says.

So, startups attacking the Brazilian market have to inspire prospective employees with their belief and their mission, they have to be able to explain the value of equity, as well as be aggressive and creative in the ways the recruit talent. The latter, at least, should sound somewhat familiar to startups in the U.S.

Baby.com.br, for example, recently put together a website specifically for a recruit, in the hopes that it would capture his attention and begin a dialogue. You can see the site here. It worked. As can be seen in the ensuing conversation, Henrique was intrigued and a few days ago officially joined the startup.

While this strategy has proved successful for the startup, Smith admits that it’s become a lot easier to recruit talent now that they have some traction, celebrities, and VC backing. There’s still a lot of bureaucracy in the Brazilian system, and bootstrapping is almost impossible, but the opportunity make it worth it, he says, as Brazilians are ready to consume online.

In turn, Brazilians are adopting social media fast and furiously, and, again, while it’s still nascent, the team believes they can help create a new kind of eCommerce in the country, and are working on slowly introducing fCommerce and social commerce experiences into their own model and into the Brazilian lexicon.

It remains tough for young startups to find the traction they need to survive, but the ecosystem is growing and startup networks are beginning to take off, and so Smith and Thomas hope that plucky young entrepreneurs can learn from the Baby.com.br story and, in turn, capitalize on an emerging market.

For more on Baby.com, check ‘em out at home here.

Details are still just mainly technical, but Nintendo just took the wraps off the final version of the Wii U’s controller, now named Gamepad. This came during Nintendo’s somewhat surprising pre-E3 press conference. The controller itself looks somewhat similar to the prototype unit Nintendo unveiled at last year’s E3.

This pre-briefing speaks to the confidence of Nintendo. These sort of details are generally reserved for Nintendo’s big E3 event. It’s sort of brilliant, really. The last few years Microsoft has generally kicked off the festivities with the first major press conference of the show. But just a few days ago, Nintendo announced today’s online press conference, effectively stealing a bit of Microsoft’s E3 swagger with the announcement of the Wii U hardware prior to the start of the trade show.

Now that the Wii U hardware has been unveiled, Nintendo can spend even more time during its Tuesday morning press extravaganza showing off the games. Brilliant.

The Gamepad houses a pressure-sensitive touchscreen along with traditional buttons and directional pad. Nintendo also packed an NFC reader/writer and a gyroscope/accelerometer although the exact use cases have yet to be detailed for these goodies. The screen’s specs weren’t revealed but it seems to be the same 6.2-inch, 16:9 screen used in the original public concept. Price and availability were not announced.

Along with the Gamepad itself, Nintendo also took some time to detail a home theater remote app. This app provides users with a basic number pad and electronic programing guide, but also likely foreshadows a larger home theater announcement later this week.

Nintendo needs to have a good showing with the Wii U. The iPad, and the entire tablet movement for that matter, is eating away at Nintendo’s appeal while reconditioning gamers to think titles should only cost $1.99.

With the Wii U, Nintendo is attempting to merge the magic of the Wii’s motion gaming with the emergence of gaming on tablets. Even the Gamepad itself is some sort of unholy marriage of the old and new. Much like Apple, Nintendo has never been about the hardware. It’s all about the experience and those details will come.

Tune in Tuesday morning as we liveblog Nintendo’s E3 press conference. If today’s announcement is any indication, the event should be epic.

Editor’s note: Location is key to monetizing mobile ads, ThinkNear chief executive Eli Portnoy wrote in a guest post for us yesterday. Now James Hritz weighs in with some further thoughts on the matter, focusing on how app publishers view the matter. He’s a veteran monetization specialist who worked at Fox for years, and is now the Vice President of monetization at Tunewiki.

Interesting and thoughtful mobile monetization article by Eli Portnoy.

Sure, Eli speaks a lot of truth about the current state of advertising in mobile and for advertisers, geo-targeted local ads seems like nirvana. The real challenge is going to be for mobile publishers and the nature of their inventory. Aside from the largest publishers in mobile (read billions of impressions per month and there is only a handful of these guys), local ads are generally a tough proposition because most publishers simply do not have large enough volumes across cities, zip codes, or lat/long coordinates to make demand from local advertisers pay off.

Lets say you have an app with one million US daily active, you’d be surprised by how much of the DAUs reside in a very long tail of locations. Perhaps the first few hundred thousand reside in places like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, etc.(major population centers/designated market areas), but then after that the number of locations skyrocket and the DAUs per location shrink rapidly. Also, the typical app only generates so many impressions per user per day through usage.

So, that means the publisher has a a limited number of chances to match that user with an ad that is relevant to them even if the geo is spot on. This opportunity only gets smaller the lower the DAU/MAU ratio of the app. This means for apps like utilities, that users only use once in a while (low DAU/MAU ratio), it may not be the least bit practical to use local ads as a source of demand for inventory.

Local ads, like most other types of performance based ads, often need minimum volume levels before they start to perform and normalize around the averages. For many apps, the local campaigns just won’t be able to get enough volume to perform as well as garden variety CPC ads for things like games. This puts the publisher in the position of having to waste lots of impressions before ever seeing revenue from local ads.

So, local ads and their potential sound great in theory, but it may be only a small sliver of the app publisher universe that can ever truly make money off of them.

[This post was originally published on Quora. Image via ]

“Where are Facebook’s friends? Stock slide deepens‎,” the Associated Press wondered recently. “Facebook’s flotation: more pokes than likes‎,” The Guardian quipped. “Status change for Facebook’s IPO?,” MSNBC questioned. After all the awful Facebook puns in headlines over the last few weeks, TechCrunch couldn’t hold back any longer — “After Years Of Flirting, Facebook And Apple Set To Achieve Relationship Status In iOS 6.”

But do not fear, dear readers. A champion has emerged to hold the perpetrators accountable. And you may know him.

Former TechCrunch writer and current karaoke competitor Jason Kincaid is taking Facebook pun headlines, marking them up with a digital red editor’s pen (via Skitch, I’m pretty sure), adding a few critical thoughts, and posting the results up on a site called Friends Don’t Let Friends Use Friends/Likes/Pokes/That “in a Relationship” Crap.

He actually started the campaign over a year ago after he found he wasn’t the only one getting upset. He hasn’t kept it up, presumably because he burnt out on blogging in general….

But Kincaid couldn’t stand idly by, he explains, as Facebook went public and took over the news cycle. So what can you do to help him on his noble quest? Email him him links and any scans of puns in print: terriblepuns (at) gmail (dot) com.

Why does all this matter, besides these headlines being annoying?

“The only reason there are puns to be made is that Facebook has gone beyond its own name by becoming a verb,” resident Facebook expert Josh Constine replied soberly, after I asked him to read a draft of this post (he’s working today despite it being his birthday — happy blogger birthday, man!). “It has cleverly co-opted words such as ‘friend’ and ‘like’ such that even conversations that have nothing to do with it conjure thoughts of the social network.”

“This isn’t something to joke about,” he added. “It’s seriously changing the way we live, and the constant puns belittle its impact.”

So, there’s lots of work to be done here, folks. Just do a Google News or Techmeme search with Facebook and any of its verbs and you’ll see what I mean.

Good news, everybody! The iCade Mobile, a Bluetooth case that slides around your iPhone, allowing you to play games using a trackpad and read buttons, is now shipping for $80. The iCade Core, an arcade joystick for the iPad, is also shipping. It costs $100.

Announced a few months ago, folks have been waiting breathlessly to play Megaworm with a trackpad. The devices should be available at ThinkGeek and you can check them out here. You can check out the Core here.

The joysticks support over 400 games, a marked improvement over the first iCade versions, and are presumably great for arcade-style shooters.

Pocket God is best-known as a hit game for iOS and other smartphone platforms, but Dave Castelnuovo, head of developer Bolt Creative, says the story and characters have been embraced in another medium, too — namely, comic books.

Ape Entertainment started publishing the Pocket God comic series (both in print and on iOS) in August 2010, with a total of 16 issues so far, plus a digital-only series featuring bonus content. All told, the series has sold more than 600,000 digital copies, Castelnuovo says, with issue number one seeing more than 200,000 sales.

For an iOS game, those numbers wouldn’t be particularly impressive, but in the world of digital comics, they’re actually kind of amazing. For example, selling 200,000 copies puts Pocket God at roughly the same level as Avengers vs. X-men #1, which was the top-selling comic in March 2012. Castelnuovo says some subsequent issues have sold as many as 80,000 copies, which would place them among the top 10 comics for most months.

And here’s an important distinction: We’re talking about Pocket God’s digital sales, versus print sales for the other comics. Traditional comics publishers haven’t released much in the way of digital sales numbers, but they’re probably only a small percentage of print. In other words, judged purely on digital, Pocket God comics are probably outselling Marvel or DC’s top titles by a considerable margin. (The Pocket God Comics app has even reached #1 in paid books for the Apple App Store, and it’s currently ranked #19.)

One obvious conclusion: Releasing a comic book series based on a popular game in the same app store as the game itself, and promoting the comics in the game, will result in big sales. Castelnuovo doesn’t argue with that, but he also attributes the series’ continuing success to making the right creative choices — even though the comic is written by Jason M. Burns and drawn by Rolando Mallada, Castelnuovo (who is clearly a big comics fan) says he takes an active role in shaping the story lines, so that they’re suitably epic and capture Pocket God’s sadistic sense of humor. (I’ve only read issue number one, but within the first few pages, several characters are killed off gruesomely, then resurrected, for laughs.)

Another key difference: Pricing. The Pocket God app, which comes with issue #1, costs 99 cents, and you can pay 99 cents to download each subsequent issue. Meanwhile, the traditional publishers don’t want to undercut their print prices, so they’re usually charging $2.99 or $3.99 for new issues. (Some older comics are available for considerably less.) Castelnuovo says that’s “just too expensive” for digital comics, especially when they’re competing with something like Angry Birds, which offers more content for just 99 cents. And although Marvel and DC are sell digital collections, Castelnuovo argues that they should be doing more to bundle dozens or even hundreds of issues together, so that readers can “blaze through them” the way that they will consume entire seasons of Mad Men or Game of Thrones.

Revenue from the comics series is dwarfed by what Bolt is making from the Pocket God game, Castelnuovo says. Still, he’s clearly pleased that it exists, and that it’s selling well: “I’d love to continue it indefinitely.”

If Appsplit is any indication, either crowdfunding is the future of everything or there’s a crowdfunding gold rush. I’m going to bet it’s a little of both.

This new service allows programmers to crowdfund their projects. Why not use Kickstarter, you ask? Beats me, but here’s what’s up. Appsplit is first and foremost a place to put your app campaigns. You tell folks what you’re building (“An app that tells you what time it is in Fiji.”), how you want to be funded (an “Open” project allows you to keep the money even if the project isn’t funded), and how much you need. You then do a little marketing, tell your friends, and you’ve got an app.

You can also sell the rights to certain apps or even sell shares in a company. Finally, you can find freelancers who might be interested in working with you on your idea.

The site, founded by Hussein Yahfoufi, recently relaunched as a crowdsourcing play and it’s running a handful of campaigns. Originally Yahfoufi planned the site to be a marketplace for app ownership and source code.

“Appsplit is a new platform meant to help those working and developing apps to move their app business forward. Whether they need to raise some cash, find someone to help them or just sell a piece of their app, appsplit can help. We are a new, small and very dedicated to helping each campaign owner succeed,” he said.

The service supports international creators and takes Paypal and Amazon payments.

Now look: I think this is a good idea but is it really necessary? We have plenty of strong crowdfunding platforms already and one more – even one dedicated just to apps – might be overkill. However, you can presumably set up shop at multiple spots and keep raising money ad infinitum. I’ll give Yahfoufi credit for maintaining razor sharp focus on his niche and sometimes niches are the best places to be. I worry, however, if too many things become the Kickstarter of X we’re going to exit the golden age of crowdfunding and enter the bubble age.

Any.DO, the gorgeous to-do app for Android, has finally made its way to the iPhone and the web today. Developed by the team behind Taskos, one of the most popular to-do list applications on the Android Market, Any.DO launched last November backed by $1 million in angel funding, making a few iPhone users (ahem *clears throat*) jealous of something on Android for a change.

Besides the basics of t0-do list management, the app supports gestures, auto-predictive text, and voice-to-text recognition, all of which are packaged in easy-to-use and attractive interface.

Of course, the iPhone is a more competitive landscape than Android when it comes to these things. And being both pretty and useful are (more often) par for the course on iOS, not features to make one take note. (Look, I rocked a Nexus S for a year and a half, but my favorite Android apps let me hack away at the phone – they weren’t necessarily what I’d call elegant. Your mileage may vary.)

Plus, in the time since Any.DO’s original debut, the iPhone has seen new, buzzy-worthy to-do list makers appear, like the heavily-anticipated app Clear, which changed the traditional paradigm by ditching menus in favor of an all-gesture UI.

But unlike Clear, which goes for simplicity, Any.DO focuses on integrations with other services, like Facebook and Twitter, for example.

However, this is a team that knows how to build a product. The company’s Taskos app, launched for “research purposes” only, had topped a million downloads by the time of Any.DO’s arrival. And Any.DO grabbed half a million downloads in just 30 days on Android. It’s now used by “millions,” the company says.

For a seemingly simple to-do app, Any.DO has a ton of investors, including Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Blumberg Capital, Genesis Partners, Palantir’s Joe Lonsdale, Felicis Ventures (Aydin Senkut) and Brian Koo, as well as advisors Erick Tseng, head of mobile products at Facebook, and Elad Gil, VP of Corporate Strategy at Twitter. So perhaps you might guess that Any.DO’s bigger vision goes beyond the mere to-do item. The company is working towards a more intelligent system for helping people actually get things done, but details on what that really means are still sparse.

Also new today is Any.DO for Chrome, a plugin for managing to-do’s from the browser. Note that when you go to install Any.DO for iPhone, there’s another app by that name already there. Make sure you grab the right one: Any.DO is here.

Editor’s note: Charles Moldow is a general partner at Foundation Capital, focusing on consumer Internet companies. He was previously a founding executive at TellMe Networks and at @Home.

The recent Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman got me thinking about the differences between the pitches I hear from entrepreneurs, and why some succeed and others don’t.

Willy Loman’s character did much to lower our society’s already low opinion of sales and selling, but the fact remains that the concept, if not the actual act, of selling is a vital process in our economic system. For example, if you’re an entrepreneur looking for financing, you are selling an idea to a buyer – usually a venture capitalist like me.

Overcoming the Attention Deficit Problem

Everyone with a smart phone is suffering from an attention deficit problem, including VCs. Your future prospects and customers are inundated with too much information and too many choices. Translation: Get to the point. Now. In fact, I should have started this article by telling you that!

It sounds simple… yet rare is the pitch I sit through that includes a concise summary of the mission and values of the company and a one sentence explanation of what the company does. This is problematic, because part of what we look for when investing in a company are people who can chop complexity out of the business and clearly articulate what they do and why it’s important. Often when I ask for clarity on these points, I don’t get clear and simple answers.

The real problem with an inability to nail “the what” is that it suggests that you have not thought through your business sufficiently to explain it in a concise manner. It was the 15th century mathematician Blaise Pascal who wrote, “I am sorry to have wearied you with so long a letter but I did not have time to write you a short one.”

I’m sure you get the point. An elevator pitch is not important because you can deliver it to a guy in an elevator, it’s important because it demonstrates you’ve thought through your business sufficiently to know why it matters.

What really gets my attention is a concise description of why the thing you are most passionate about matters to the rest of us. If I’m listening to four new business ideas each day, they can’t all be good enough to make me sit up and take interest. Make sure yours is the one that breaks through the noise. Otherwise, all of the distractions I have in my life will creep back into my brain and crowd out the message you are trying to convey.

So start with your lead, not your market slide. And if you can’t tell me clearly your company’s value-add, the problem it solves and why your idea is different in under a minute, you shouldn’t be pitching it yet.

Overcoming “No”

The fundraising process is tough, and it’s made tougher by the fact that venture capitalists say “no” most (read: almost all) of the time. Statistically, we fund less than one-half of one percent of the ideas that come through the door. Those are pretty daunting odds. But they’re not unlike the odds of success you’ll face once you’re in business.

The difference between the entrepreneurs who overcome those odds and those who don’t are those who won’t take no for an answer. And that’s a quality we screen from the very first meeting.

Presenting your idea is not enough. You have to sell your idea and passionately convince an investor that you’re worthy of the risk you’re asking them to take—as well as the time and money they will invest in your company.

You also have to convince your investors that you have the courage of your convictions. We want to know if you’re the kind of leader who will break through barriers and keep going despite countless setbacks. You’re going to face a lot of rejection and you need to be fearless.

Now even though I’ve just said you have to break through barriers, the catch is that I don’t want you to be hard-headed.

We want people who are convinced they have an answer, but not operating with the belief that they have all the answers. There’s a difference. Good sales people are good listeners, naturally inquisitive and they actively ask their buyers for feedback. After your next pitch, try asking the firm’s partners what they think.

Surprisingly, very few ask that question, but it is a question that signifies the entrepreneur who is flexible, self-aware, and would probably make a good partner. Don’t be afraid – you might be surprised with what you hear and you’ll probably glean some useful insights that will make your next presentation even stronger.

Finally, ask about next steps and send a follow-up note. I’m always shocked with the lack of follow up from entrepreneurs who have come in and pitched me, but leave it in my court to follow up.

The start-up world lives and dies based on the cash it raises. During its lifetime, the average start-up will likely require several rounds of funding, so being good at raising money is critical. Being a good salesman is also important because the act of selling doesn’t just happen when you’re asking for money – it happens when you’re building a team, when you’re selling your first product, when you’re looking for partners, and when you’re trying to inspire your employees. So be concise.

Show passion. Be fearless in your follow up. And finally, be brave enough to ask for feedback. All of these things will make you more credible, and most importantly, more likeable. Because you don’t want to end up like Willy Loman.

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Mick Hagen (@mickhagen), founder and CEO of Undrip. He was previously the founder of Zinch which was acquired by Chegg last year. He made headlines in the Fall with his rap campaign – an unorthodox approach to fundraising. You can learn more about him at MickHagen.com.

Last summer when I started working on Undrip, I was in a tough spot. I grew up doing web and graphic design so I was a pretty good front-end developer and designer. But I knew nothing about back-end web development – loops, branches dictionaries or functions were all foreign concepts to me. I was a single founder who couldn’t code.

Against the Odds

Every week I get emails from entrepreneurs seeking my advice asking how I did it before, and how I’m doing it now. They find themselves in similar situations in that they’re looking to build a tech startup with little to no technical skills. They’re frustrated by their inability to make forward progress and they usually either give up and fail, or outsource if they have some extra cash (which usually leads to failure).

If you’re a single founder who can’t code, your chances for startup success are near zero. However, there’s still a chance.

And a chance is all you need.

Inspire or Die

There’s only one skill in the world that can make up for your lack of design or dev skills. It’s a skill you have to learn and learn to do well: You must learn to inspire.

Your survival will hinge on your ability to inspire, persuade, and convince makers that they should join you on this adventure. It’s the only chance you have. You know you can’t do this alone. You shouldn’t do this alone. And you won’t do this alone.

Easier Said Than Done

Some non-technical entrepreneurs are so incredibly charismatic, persuasive and charming that all they need is a clean napkin and a wide smile to sell the vison and get people excited. They’re able to attract talent with no problem. If that’s you, congrats. Run with it. As long as you have creators, makers and builders on your team, you’re in the game and able to fight. Give them the equity they deserve (a lot!). Make them owners not mercenaries. Your idea is worthless without them – accept that now and nobody gets hurt.

As for the rest of us, we’ve got more convincing to do.

When I was recruiting people to help build Undrip, I could have just dazzled people with designs. For many folks, that’s all you need to help inspire. But I wanted to take things up a notch. I wanted to personally build something that potential teammates could see, feel, touch and play with. I wanted to share a fully functional product that I would muscle together with my bare hands – Chuck Norris style. So I had to learn to code.

Becoming a Builder

I spent all last summer learning how to code [0]. I practically lived on StackOverflow, Github, IRC channels, and Google… soaking it all in like a sponge and working on a real product that would force me to learn. I had afew friends who answered my dumb questions and guided me through some snags. In the end, I built the first version of Undrip almost all on my own. It was perhaps one of the greatest accomplishments of my life. At the end of last summer, I felt like I could I do anything. It was an incredible experience [1].

It was never about learning to code so that I could be a one-man army. And it certainly wasn’t about creating a large-scale, production-ready web app that millions could use. In fact, not even a dozen people could use it [2]. It was all about inspiration – putting more arrows in my quiver so that I could get out and inspire people to join me. I wanted to demonstrate that I could dig in and learn, and that Undrip was a product worth fighting for.

Handshakes & Smiles

As much as networking sucks, it’s a necessary evil when you need builders. You can’t inspire people if you don’t know anybody to inspire. I’d much rather be working, designing and getting stuff done.

Throughout the summer of me learning how to code, I did everything I could to meet engineers. I would go to python meetups and other hacker gatherings. I would search directories, github and twitter lists for python engineers in the Bay Area who I could meet with in person. It was never about asking them to work with me – that’s the wrong approach. it was always about cultivating the relationship and learning from them as I was doing my best to speak their language (python/django). They felt like they were “giving back” and helping a n00b. I remember meeting Mike Malone, Kenneth Love and so many others at coffee shops in the Bay Area. I drove to a small town in the East Bay to meet Kenneth at a local Starbucks. I was immersing myself into their world and building as many relationships as I could. Inspiration always starts with a relationship.

Money Can’t Buy Everything

When you can’t inspire people to join you, it’s very tempting to use that cash in your piggybank to hire a contractor/freelancer. You wanna pay to play.

That rarely works.

I was a design freelancer in college. I would ask for as much money as possible, and I would try to spend as little time on it as possible. That was the name of the game. Contractors just aren’t invested in the long-term success of your product. They’re gypsies moving from one thing to the next. The lack of ownership and commitment will cost you more money, more time and more heart ache in the long run.

What happens when your freelancer is “done”? We all know products are never done. So soon you find yourself back at square one, having to pay someone to fix bugs, tweak features, etc. That hole in your pocket gets larger and larger.

For most that’s just not sustainable. Sooner or later you’re gonna need to inspire people to join you. You’re gonna need partners, owners, motivated team members. A little contract work is never bad when you’ve got people who can maintain, manage, and build the product where it leaves off.

Only One Way Out

In the end, you’ve got just one path ahead. There’s no other way around it.You have to inspire. You can learn to code. You can learn to design. You can learn to hustle. You can learn to do a lot of things. But all of them should be mere tactics to your end goal: inspiring others to believe in you, your vision and your product. That inspiration needs to be so strong that they leave everything they’re doing to jump on that life raft with you to start paddling.

It’s insanely hard. It’s insanely crazy. And it’s insanely rare.

But it’s possible. May the odds be ever in your favor.

Footnotes:

[0] I started off with the Head First Programming book. I then moved on to Google’s Python Class and MIT’s OpenCourseWare class. I also used Think Python, Learn Python the Hard Way, and Dive Into Python as additional resources. Most importantly, I used friends and the interwebz to get through snags.

[1] It’s not like riding a bike where once you know it, you’re done. I have a good foundation of understanding to work from… but I still have so much more to learn. I’m confident in my ability to learn and progress though. Something special about having ideas and also being able to execute on those ideas.

[2] The entire app would crash when more than just a few people would use it. It was incredibly unstable and shaky. We’ve since had to rewrite and gut the entire thing now that we have experienced engineers – which explains why we’re still in private beta. Nonetheless, I’m still contributing and love it.

Editor’s note: Eli Portnoy is the CEO and co-founder of ThinkNear, which helps advertisers target mobile ads based on location and real-world context.

Mary Meeker’s presentation this week on mobile shone light on the mobile monetization problem and argued that “ad $ follow eyeballs, it just takes time.” However, she failed to address the reason for the mobile monetization issue and missed the clear implications for anyone looking to seize the opportunity.

Mobile is exploding. Over 100 million people in the US have smartphones, consumers are spending over 60 minutes a day consuming media on these devices, and people glance at their phone about 40 times a day. That is a massive and very active user base. You would think that advertisers would be rushing to take advantage of this untapped goldmine of an opportunity to reach consumers. However, as Meeker showed there is a huge discrepancy in the amount of time people spend on their phones and the number of advertising dollars allocated to mobile. The mis-equilibrium numbers vary, but estimates range between consumers spending 10% to 24% of their media time on mobile and advertisers putting only 0.5% to 1% of their budgets there.

To many this is the great mobile opportunity. They theorize that the discrepancy in mobile spend means that advertisers are slow to catch on and that as they do a tidal-wave of money will flow. That is the hope of the Facebooks and Pandoras who are getting crushed in the equity markets because they are living and breathing proof that having lots of pageviews in mobile does not equal lots of money.

I personally disagree strongly that if you build it, they will come. Advertisers and their agencies are not stupid. They all have smartphones, they all live and breathe their iPhones and Androids, and they are paid to understand what is new and exciting. Mobile is taking no one by surprise in 2012.

So why isn’t the money flowing to mobile?

Advertisers know that the golden ticket to performance is relevance, and by that I mean the ability to target and reach your potential customer base as accurately as possible. I live in Los Angeles, and you are going to have a tough time trying to sell me snow boots in the summer. The more you can target the ads, the more likely you can generate the desired action and the more successful the campaign. The current mobile eco-system allows almost no targeting criteria and demands that advertisers take a spray and pray approach to their campaigns. This leads to poorly performing campaigns and unhappy advertisers that are unwilling to keep pushing more money down the rabbit hole that is mobile.

Why are mobile campaigns so lacking?

The answer most people give is that cookies, which are the mechanism used in the online ad world, don’t work on mobile. Without getting into the technical reasons as to why this is the case, I challenge the argument because even if cookies did work I still don’t think you would see an advertising windfall. Fundamentally, cookie targeting lets advertisers build a profile about your browsing history and retarget you based on that data. However, in mobile the use case is different and this advertising paradigm starts to break. Using myself as a datapoint of one, when I am on a computer I tend to research specific items and create a browsing history that is rich with information and clearly paints a picture of my intents. However, on mobile my browsing and app history is sporadic and incoherent. I pick up my phone when I have time to kill, when I want to look something specific up, or as part of my everyday. Trying to create a profile from this activity would lead to few actionable insights.

The answer lies in history

If we look back at the historical evolution of ads on digital mediums, it becomes clear that what we are living with mobile is nothing unique. When the first search engines emerged some 15 years ago, they were all slapping ads on their homepages and not really offering advertisers a great product. It was all about their reach and inventory and not at all about their targeting efforts. Then Overture and Google came along and started to tie the ads to the search terms people were typing in and advertisers finally had a targeting parameter that directly led to intent. And the money started flowing and flowing and flowing.

A few years later banner ads on websites were still struggling along. Advertisers knew people were online, but very little money was spent advertising to them because the only advantage to this medium was scale and reach (and some accountability). And then the cookie revolution emerged and advertisers could target people based on their browsing history. Advertisers jumped on the opportunity and the industry grew, and grew, and grew and is now about a $25 billion dollar a year industry.

So what is the campaign type that makes mobile go pop?

As I think about mobile. the opportunity to close the gap between time spent and advertising spend is clearly in finding the right targeting parameter that gets advertisers stoked. It is not just about waiting and hoping, but about figuring out what really makes mobile work.

Many have talked about location, and the reasons are obvious. Mobile is a device that is portable, that people carry with them 16 hours a day, and that they look at 40 times a day as they interact with the real world. Not only that, but most smartphones have a built in GPS and can provide very targeted location information.

However, most in the industry think of location as a geo-fence. The idea that you can target nearby people with relevant ads based on what is around them. But mobile and location is about so much more. It is about understanding where people are, what they are doing, and what is happening around them.

The guys who understand the concept of mobile best are the street vendors in New York City. They set-up carts on the street corners and they sell all sorts of items like DVDs and sunglasses and purses. But when they feel a few drops of rain, they all quickly flip their carts over and start selling umbrellas. This is a brilliant sales strategy because they are adjusting their marketing based on what people are doing (walking around NYC) and what is happening around them (it is raining) to deliver a message and product that really resonates.

With mobile and the use of location, advertisers now have the same opportunity. Using location capabilities marketers can infer a lot about what people are doing. If they are in an airport they are likely travelers, if they are in a shopping mall they are likely shopping, and so on and so forth. And because the advertiser can know where they are delivering the ads, they can also tell things about the environment and context of the person seeing the ad such as the weather, traffic, and nearby events. This creates a massive opportunity to tailor each and every message and finally begins to unlock the power of mobile ads.

The opportunity is immense, but location is not without its problems. The industry is immature and running these campaigns is not easy. There are privacy considerations that advertisers need to be mindful of. The tools to track and report on metrics are still being developed. But fundamentally, to get real performance from mobile and to unlock the pent up budgets of advertisers, we need to truly understand what makes mobile unique and play to its strength. Location and portability are that opportunity.

StartX, the startup accelerator for Stanford University students, held its Spring 2012 Demo Day this past week at AOL headquarters in Palo Alto, California. Seven very diverse startups presented to a room of investors, media, and tech industry folks — the latest batch of StartX startups range from a new method of doing DNA sequencing, to truly educational children’s toys, to a new way for women to buy jewelry, and more.

TechCrunch TV was there, and in the video embedded above you can see the general scene and also our interview with StartX’s founder Cameron Teitelman. We also got six of the presenting companies to give TechCrunch their pitches directly, along with two other companies that were in StartX’s spring session but opted not to present on-stage since they were not raising funding. You can watch those in the video embedded below.

A bit more about StartX: The program, which was started in 2010 (it was then known as SSE Ventures) to give entrepreneurially-minded Stanford students tools and advice they need to actually get businesses off the ground, has seen some impressive growth in the past two years: More than 160 founders have started 60 companies with StartX, and 80 percent of them are funded and still growing.

StartX is unique in a few ways: It’s not exactly a student group, as it’s financially and legally completely separate from Stanford University. But it’s not an incubator in the Y Combinator sense, since it’s a non-profit and takes no stake in the startups that participate in the program. It is a very smart set-up, and it would not be surprising to me if it expanded to other regions or universities in the months and years ahead.

In the order in which they appear in the above video, here are the StartX Spring 2012 companies:

Appfluence (co-founders Hai Nguyen, Pablo Diaz-Gutierrez, and Luis Adarve): Productivity software for the iPad

Genapsys (co-founders Hesaam Esfandyarpour and Leila Restegar): Aiming to facilitate ultra-low cost and fully-integrated DNA sequencing on a mass scale

Gauss (co-founders Siddarth Satish, Milt McColl, and Mark Gonzalgo): An iPad-based mobile platform for monitoring blood loss during surgical procedures

Roominate (co-founders Bettina Chen, Alice Brooks, and Jennifer Kessler): The first product from Maykah, a company aimed at creating toys for young girls that will foster their interest in science, technology, engineering and math

Crowd Jewel (co-founders Courtney McColgan, Janelle Tiulentino, and Deborah van Dam): A community-driven jewelry design platform that brings to market the jewelry designs that win a crowd vote

LessThan3 (co-founders Ari Evans, Bryant Williams, and Josh Bennett): A social website where people can show off and share their music collections

Watchup (co-founders Adriano Farano, Jonathan Lundell and Jessi Rymill): Making an iPad app specifically for watching video news content

Vergence Labs(founders Jon Rodriguez and Erick Miller): Creating “smart, stylish, computer-enabled eyewear” aimed at bringing online content into our everyday lives. We were not able to pull these guys aside for a pitch — they were swarmed by investors wanting to try on the glasses themselves — but you can read TechCrunch’s coverage on them from earlier this month right here.

PicPlz, the mobile photo sharing app that is perhaps known best for being an early and direct competitor with Instagram, will shut down permanently on July 3.

PicPlz delivered the news through a short post on its company blog as well as in a brief email to users that read:

“On July 3, 2012, picplz will shut down permanently and all photos and data will be deleted.

Until then, you can log in and download your photos by clicking on the download link next to each photo in your photo feed.

Thank you for your support of picplz and we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you.”

Visitors to PicPlz’s website now see the following message on the homepage:

This is not a completely surprise move. Instagram began pulling ahead in the filtered mobile photo sharing space more than a year ago and in 2011, PicPlz pivoted into being part of Mixed Media Labs, a broader smartphone app development company. Mixed Media Labs went on to spin out PicPlz as its own independent entity and has since spawned new products such as mobile platform App.net.

When Instagram was acquired by Facebook for $1 billion back in April, some used it as a time to rehash the story of how PicPlz and its investors “lost” the battle for mobile photo sharing. This chatter prompted PicPlz co-founder Dalton Caldwell to take to the Internet and defend his company’s track record.

We’ve reached out for more comment on the shutdown and details on what the future may hold. We will update this post with any information we receive.

UPDATE:

Dalton Caldwell, who remains on the board of directors at PicPlz, said in an email that the team that is operating PicPlz still has other projects in operation:

“As a board member I have been supportive of the strategic decisions they have been making.

In terms of this specific move, as has been stated before, the team that is operating picplz has been bootstrapping (ie not raising money). As part of this bootstapping effort, they recently launched a a paid iPad app for Pinterest users called pinflip: https://app.net/pinflip

pinflip has been doing very well and is currently the #5 paid iPad app in social networking in the US.”

This article has also been updated to clarify the relationship between Mixed Media Labs and PicPlz. Last year PicPlz was spun out of Mixed Media Labs entirely, and it has since operated as its own standalone company led by Ali Aydar.

A couple weeks ago I ran this post showing how one Hong Kong developer, Animoca, tests its Android games. The company, which has had more than 70 million downloads, tests every one of their apps on about 400 different devices. The photo above is from their headquarters and is just a taste of all the Android phones and tablets they use.

Needless to say, that post pissed Android supporters off. Some commenters said it intimidated would-be developers, who might get scared off by Android fragmentation and the perception that you have to support hundreds of devices, screen sizes and densities and versions of the OS.

So, I asked around to see how other mobile game developers do quality assurance testing for Android. This is what I got:

Red Robot Labs: (Backed by Benchmark Capital. Veteran founding team from EA, Playdom and Crowdstar. More than 3.5 million downloads. They currently have the #27 top-grossing game in the Google Play store.)

Red Robot uses about 12 devices in-house and has a quality assurance team of two people. They then use a U.K.-based company called Testology to get further coverage with 35 handsets.

“I applied a common sense filter,” says co-founder Pete Hawley, who hails from EA and has more than 15 years’ experience in the gaming industry. He goes by an 80/20 rule in trying to identify a low number of devices that will cover the widest amount of users. They start with the basic data from Google that shows overall distribution of different versions of Android and screen size densities. Then they look at their analytics to find which devices are most widely used by their players. Finally, they’ll look at player requests and support tickets.

He says it’s good to be selective about which devices to support, especially with all sorts of lower-end handsets coming in from Asia.

“Saying no to players with small, poor, outdated phones or old OSs is important too,” he says. ”Overall, I’d say the process of staying on top of all the handsets, carriers, OS’s and carriers wasn’t as hard as I expected. It’s not a great deal of work to keep the 80 percent well-covered.”

Here’s a snapshot of how Red Robot’s device distribution looked last fall. (It’s a very fragmented pie!)

Pocket Gems: (Backed by Sequoia Capital, Redpoint Ventures. More than 70 million downloads. Newer to Android, but they had two of the top 10 grossing iOS games for all of last year according to Apple’s iTunes Rewind. #35 top-grossing game in Google Play.)

So Pocket Gems’ QA testing is actually run by a former Air Force colonel(!) named Ray Vizzone. They use a little more than 40 devices evaluated in a matrix they explain in the video below. They make sure they include both tablets and phones and then high-resolution and low-resolution devices. They also make sure to include all five major graphic processing units (GPUs) including Adreno, PowerVR, Tegra, Mali and Vivante.

Their QA process is designed to be hyper-speedy as the gaming industry has changed in some fundamental ways over the last few years. Like what Zynga has done in the social gaming industry, today’s mobile games are more like services rather than finished products you pick up off the shelf. So they require constant updates with fresh content every few days.

For the San Francisco-based startup, quality assurance testing is a 24-7 process that involves teams both in the U.S. and abroad. After the U.S. team designs and performs tests during the day, they hand their work to an offshore team that has all of the exact same 40 or so Android devices. This team does extra compatibility testing overnight and files all of the bugs into a defect tracking system, which go back to the U.S. team in the morning.

Pocket Gems tests all features in three phases. They have 1) new features testing 2) integration testing and 3) release candidate testing. Even as developers design new features for their games, Pocket Gems’ QA teams are already at work designing tests for them so they can be checked the moment they’re ready. Once those features are stabilized, they’re integrated into the games and tested a second time.

“As the bugs are found and fixed during integration testing, the product managers and test leads begin their risk assessment as to when to freeze the code base in preparation for shipping,” co-founder Harlan Crystal explains. “Once this decision is made, a full regression test pass is started.”

That final pass involves a full suit of tests that examine memory, performance and device compatibility. “If we don’t find any new or critical bugs during this RC test pass, we bless the bits and ship it!” he says.

Storm8: (More than 300 million downloads. Totally bootstrapped. Four games in Android’s top-grossing 50. Founders are early Facebook alums.)

Storm8 uses between 30 and 50 devices, which they divide into groups of high-end, mid-range and low-end devices.  They intentionally buy devices for each category. After they launch games, they have the apps send back different KPIs (key performance indicators) back to the company’s servers.

“This way, we can tell if we need to further fine-tune a certain class of devices, or even specific devices, to squeeze the last bit of performance from the devices,” says chief executive Perry Tam.

Animoca: (More then 70 million downloads. Backed by IDG-Accel and Intel Capital).

After the original post ran, Animoca ran a longer piece explaining why it does quality assurance testing with so many devices. The main reason is because the company has a huge user base in mainland China and other parts of Asia where there is a plethora of lower-end and non-compatible Android devices (meaning phones that are based on the OS but aren’t certified to run Google applications or the official Android app store).

“If we had taken the approach that 90 percent compatibility is good enough, we’d be lacking support for 7 million of [our] downloads,” the company explains. “Several millions of consumers would have had a bad experience as a result of our decision, and our app revenues would probably be short by around 10 percent.”

Keep in mind that Animoca is not exactly a young company. It’s a mobile gaming-centric arm of a more than 10-year-old company called Outblaze that has focused on digital media and apps for years. So they have lots of experience in doing compatibility and quality assurance testing.

The company’s chief executive Yat Siu feels that their comprehensiveness is a part of why they perform decently on the platform, with “double-digit” millions of dollars in revenue per year from Android. Animoca doesn’t have any games in the top-grossing 50 right now in the U.S., but they make up for it with high rankings in Asian markets and in the sheer number of apps they publish per year.

Conclusion: If this still freaks you out, just remember that it was way worse in the days of feature phones. (At least, that’s what Rovio’s Peter Vesterbacka tells us. Rovio says compared to the J2ME/Brew era, Android is actually easy! They had to make more than 50 games before they created uber-hit Angry Birds.)

Just for reminders about how hard it was then, here are two slides from JAMDAT’s original IPO slidedeck in 2005. JAMDAT was the seminal mobile gaming acquisition of the feature phone era when they were bought by Electronic Arts for $680 million. The company had to spend five years building relationships with more than 90 carriers in about 40 countries and it was standard to support about 400 devices.

So while Android fragmentation seems like a headache, your dad’s mobile app maker was trudging seven miles uphill in the snow QA testing with 400 different phones and dealing with business development people from a hundred carriers.

It’s also easier now with specialty shops handle mobile QA testing now like Testology, which Red Robot uses, and uTest. That said, the very biggest developers still want to do most everything in-house.

Editor’s Note: John Greathouse is a general partner at Rincon Venture Partners and has held a number of senior executive positions with successful startups during the past fifteen years, including Computer Motion, Citrix Online and CallWave. 

My son recently tried to call one of our older relatives. He dialed the number and quickly hung up with a confused look on his face. I asked him what was wrong and he replied, “I don’t know. There’s something wrong with their phone, it kept beeping.” I called the number and was amused to hear a landline busy signal, something my cell phone centric pre-teen had never encountered.

My son is similarly unacquainted with cable TV. Other than the occasional NBA game, he consumes his video content via our iPad and Xbox. Most of his online viewing is spent on YouTube. He is not alone.

Mark Suster, fellow venture capitalist and serial entrepreneur, has written extensively about YouTube’s evolution from dogs-on-skateboards to its current status as an entertainment medium rivaling cable television networks. Mark provides an excellent primer regarding the future of Internet TV HERE.

YouTube has over 800 million monthly unique visitors who consume over 4 billion videos EACH DAY. Its evolution has resulted in a new class of entertainment entrepreneur, the creators of professional YouTube content, affectionately known as YouTubers.

Feeding The New Networks

Running an immensely profitable business has many benefits, including the ability to jumpstart an ecosystem which directly drives revenue to one of your core offerings. During the latter half of 2011, Google awarded a number of leading YouTubers and nascent Internet TV networks grants of $1 million to $2 million. Although estimates of Google’s total investment vary, the industry insiders I spoke with believe it exceeded $100 million. Earlier this month, Google announced that it will spend an additional $200 million to promote YouTube content.

Despite the snarky rumors that Google’s content development program was poorly managed at its outset (e.g., some of the money was spent by YouTubers to purchase homes and not create videos), the majority of the funds were properly deployed by the emerging community of professional YouTubers. In fact, all of the most prominent Internet TV networks were recipients of such grants, including: Maker Studios, Big Frame, Machinima and FullScreen.

Before the creation of YouTube networks, a handful of leading YouTubers were generating over $100,000 in revenue per year, simply by running run-of-site YouTube ads. Networks have significantly increased YouTubers’ advertising revenue by negotiating sponsorships and large ad purchases with major brands.

Rather than simply act as old-world talent agencies, Internet TV networks offer their talent a number of differentiating advantages which are difficult for YouTubers to secure on their own, including:

Critical Mass – Even though some of the most successful YouTubers routinely generate several million views per video, large advertisers are challenged to spend efficiently within the medium, because even millions of views results in a relatively small advertising spend. This paradox is aptly illustrated in the following graphic, courtesy of Big Frame.

By allowing advertisers to purchase ads across a cadre of YouTubers, Internet TV networks can achieve their efficiency and reach goals.

Cross-Promotion – The rap industry has proficiently utilized cross-promotions since its inception. For instance, over twenty years ago, Dr. Dre featured then unknown Snoop Dogg on his solo debut The Chronic, effectively launching Snoop’s career. Similar opportunities exist on YouTube, in which YouTubers with large audiences can introduce and promote up-and-coming artists. For instance, Kids React reviewed a video by DeStorm, while the Gregory Brothers incorporated Kids React into their hilarious Chuck Testa video.

Better Content –The average YouTuber is chiefly interested in creating engaging content, not negotiating insertion orders, trafficking ads or tracking down delinquent advertiser payments. Thus, Internet TV agencies not only increase a YouTuber’s income, they also free them to focus on what they do best – create engaging content. The additional revenue generated by each video allows the YouTubers to leverage better (and more costly) special effects, which beget better quality content. Better videos engage more viewers, which attract additional advertising dollars.

Subscriptions and Social Sharing – In the last century, magazine and newspaper subscriptions drove readership, which sold print ads. The same phenomenon is true in the YouTube ecosystem, but with a social media twist.

YouTube allows viewers to subscribe to their favorite channels. Each time a new video is posted by a YouTuber, its subscribers are immediately notified. Although the shareing settings are configurable by user, when most people Like or Tweet a video, the action is broadcast within their social graph.

Such YouTube subscriptions are the engine of a virtuous circle of views, which leads to social sharing, which, in turn, generates additional subscriptions.

Better Ads – Product placement ads have been around since the 1800’s when notable novelists, including Jules Verne, were lobbied by business people to mention their products and technologies in their books.

The effectiveness of product placements was reduced dramatically in the mid-1990s when the practice became so overt and numerous, especially in major motion pictures, it became distracting and, in some instances, outright laughable. Learning from the mistakes of the past, YouTubers have created clever ways to embed advertising messages into entertaining content.

One of the best examples of this integration is DeStorm’s November 2011 video in which he raps about Ryobi tools while running through the aisles at Home Depot. True to the cross-promotional nature of the YouTube landscape, fellow YouTuber MysteryGuitarMan makes a cameo appearance.

DeStorm delivers the Ryobi rap lyrics in an engaging and, from an advertising standpoint, informative manner:

I ain’t afraid to dismantle it,
I can handle it, ‘cause,
I got the tools.
I got the power.
Yea, I got the tools,
To change everything around me.

I can take control of everything ahead of me,
cause it’s all controlled by the same battery.

The pairing of Home Depot, Ryobi and DeStorm is effective because the relatively inexpensive tools, which use a common battery, are targeted at a subset of DeStorm’s young, male audience: young renters and first-time home buyers, many of whom are tool deficient. DeStorm is extremely talented – if you are curious, you can check out the Ryobi video HERE.

Climbing A Mountain With No Hands

I recently spoke with a talented gaming executive who noted that creating a top-ten mobile game is akin to trying to, “climb a mountain with no hands.” It can be done, but it is a grueling process.

However, once you create a hit game, it is much easier to replicate the initial game’s success by launching related titles. The same phenomenon is true in the YouTube ecosystem. With a little help from Google, and a lot of hard work, today’s leading Internet TV networks have reached the summit and are in the process of launching new YouTubers who will benefit from the networks’ high-velocity virtuous circles.

Google’s continued oversight and backing, combined with professionalized content and ongoing ad optimization, will ensure that Internet TV will eventually eclipse its legacy brethren, allowing you to store your cable television in your garage, right next to your landline phone. Soon cable TV will be a distant memory, much like a landline telephone’s busy signal.

You can follow my startup-oriented Twitter feed here: @johngreathouse. I promise I will never Tweet about celebrities, cable TV shows or that killer burrito I just ate.

Short Version

The Evo 4G LTE is a fine phone. There certainly aren’t any glaring issues: Sense has been considerably streamlined, and it’s really good at what it was made to do, which is entertain. The design language is a little loud, though maybe that’s what it takes to shake things up in the land of Android. (LAndroid.) But unlike the Evos that have come before it, this latest iteration doesn’t really bring any truly special features to the table.

I mean, consider the name. It’s the Evo 4G LTE, yet Sprint’s 4G LTE network isn’t set to go live for another month, at the very earliest. And even if that weren’t the case, LTE is no longer a wow factor. It’s a soon-to-be norm, which means that the Evo needs something more than fast data to be a big deal.

Does it have what it takes? Let’s find out together, yes?

Pros:

• Excellent camera
• Pretty solid battery life
• Thin and light (in a good way)

Cons:

• The plastic on the back gets marked up with prints easily
• It’s a 4G phone, but Sprint LTE won’t be around for a while

Features:

• 4.7-inch 720p display
• Sprint 4G LTE (eventually)
• Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich/Sense 4
• 1.5GHz Snapdragon S4 dual-core proc
• 8-megapixel rear camera (1080p recording)
• 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera
• MSRP: $199.99 on-contract

Long Version

Hardware/Design:

As I mentioned before in my initial impressions post, the Evo feels like business in the front and a party in the back. The bezel is quite thin, which means that HTC managed to comfortably fit a rather large 4.7-inch display onto a smaller frame (thumbs-up for that!), and the top bezel near the speaker grill is finished with soft-touch rubber.

On the back, however, the Evo tells a different story. A strip of shiny red metal separates a soft-touch bottom and a shiny, black plastic top. Within the plastic area, the camera is square in the middle, with a little extra Evo-esque red lining. I’m a huge fan of the soft-touch and honestly wish that the entire backside of the phone was finished in it. It’s comfortable and doesn’t take prints much at all.

The plastic, on the other hand, picks up prints like it’s being paid to do so. It feels a bit like HTC ran out of budgeting dollars and simply said “F&#* it! Let’s just slap some plastic on this last bit.” It’s the only part of the phone that feels cheap, even in the way that it creaks a bit when you stress the phone.

HTC nailed the kickstand, as you can prop the phone up with it in the traditional sense, as well as turn it right over so that the kickstand is resting against the table. Either way it works, which means that you can plug your phone into the charger while you’re kickstanding.

Just as you’d expect, the lock button and 3.5mm headphone jack are up top, microUSB is on the top left-hand side, and volume rocker is on the left. There’s also a dedicated camera shutter button on the bottom right-hand side of the phone.

Software:

As I already briefly covered, Sense 4 is far more attractive than earlier iterations. HTC clearly took a hard look at the UI and realized that too much fluff on top of Android is a big no-no. That said, this streamlined, clean version of the custom overlay offers only what you need.

One nice touch is the ability to drag and drop icons from the lock screen into the circle used to unlock the device. By doing so, you’re taken straight into the dragged app. The less clicks the better, am I right?

At the same time, we’re not seeing anything incredibly new here. No pop-up play, like on the Galaxy S III. No brand new operating system, like on the Galaxy Nexus. But that’s not to say that HTC doesn’t offer up some solid, albeit a bit played out, features.

For one, you’ll get 25 free GB of Dropbox storage with this bad boy, along with Beats Audio integration. I see the former as much more of a selling point. Oh, and Google Wallet comes pre-loaded, as well.

Sprint’s loaded this thing up with plenty of its own content, including Sprint Zone and Sprint Hotspot, and unfortunately it doesn’t seem that you can uninstall them.

Camera:

The camera on this phone rocks. It employs the Sense camera app on the software side of things, which means you’ll have easy access to plenty of Instagram-esque filters even in the viewfinder. A couple of my personal faves are Vintage, Solarize, and Aqua.

There are also plenty of settings for ISO, white balance, etc., and zoom is on the left. Shooting modes include auto, HDR, Panorama and portrait, but there seems to be some sort of auto-burst mode inherent in the app. In other words, when you hold down the shutter, you get a continuous stream of shots.

The shutter button itself is incredibly fast, snapping pictures as soon as you touch it. It’s also very solid — no shakiness or looseness in its socket — and can be half-pressed to focus and then full-pressed to shoot (just like on a DSLR).

Color reproduction was excellent, though I think that HTC tends to blow out warmer colors like reds and yellows to make pictures more beautiful, but not necessarily realistic. Low light shots turned out better than expected, and video recording only takes a second to focus and switch between bright and low light.

The camera app has some nice features to it, as well, like the fact that it goes into a thumbnail mode if you start swiping through pictures quickly. It’s like the phone knows you want a photo that’s way on down the line, and wants to help you get there. The only problem is that it only works like half the time.

Comparison shot between the Evo 4G LTE (left) and the iPhone 4S (right):

Display:

There’s more to a display than resolution or size. It’s the marriage of these two factors, along with the technology behind the screen that makes an excellent display. In the case of the HTC Evo 4G LTE display, this marriage is a harmonious one. The 720×1280 display measures in at 4.7-inches diagonally, which yields a ppi of 312. This is pretty good.

For reference, the iPhone has a 326ppi, so the Evo isn’t far off but with much more real estate. At the same time, the Evo has a TFT LCD display, rather than the more favorable AMOLED-style displays we see on most Samsung phones. I still found the display to be excellent, with little to no differentiation from pixel to pixel and bright, brilliant colors.

I also think it’s worth taking a moment to talk about the size of this display as it relates to using the phone. Most phones with 4.3-inch or greater screens tend to get a bit uncomfortable. It can be difficult to reach across the screen while performing one-handed actions, depending on the aspect ratio.

But HTC has found a way to master slapping giant displays on comfortably small frames. The Titan II is a great example of this, and the new tradition only continues here on the Evo. Well done, HTC.

Performance:

Performance is becoming less and less of a factor. The spec is dead, in many cases. In fact, the only specs I consider useful on a smartphone are the display and camera specs, and even then a solid understanding of the numbers and their context is necessary. But rarely — very rarely — a phone’s performance will be so smooth in real-world use that it’s reflected in the testing.

So is the case with the Evo 4G LTE, and really most of HTC’s handsets lately. The Titan II was an incredibly smooth phone, but on a different platform like Windows Phone it’s unfair to compare. But the HTC One S, another Android 4.0/Sense 4 combo, was also found to be exceptional in browsing, app play, and the like.

Here are the numbers:

In Quadrant, a full-fledged benchmarker with a focus on graphics performance, the Evo 4G LTE scored a 4285. The only phone I’ve had that’s tested better is the One S, with most others staying well below the 3000 mark. In Browsermark, a web browsing test, the phone scored a 90,995, which is again just below the One S’s score of 100,662, but exceeding most others in its category.

Data speeds averaged around 1.4Mbps down and .72Mbps up, but that should go up once Sprint’s LTE network goes live.

Battery:

The new Evo’s battery is considerably larger than its predecessors and really most other smartphones on the market, at 2000mAh. The Droid Razr Maxx, which is basically built around its battery performance, has a 3300mAh battery. That said, the Evo 4G LTE lasted four and a half hours in testing, which includes an always-waking constant Google image search. The Droid Razr Maxx lasted for eight hours and fifteen minutes.

But still, the Evo 4G LTE’s battery is definitely better than most. It would hang with me for more than a full day on some occasions, with easy use. On days I spent fully reviewing the phone, it still got past dinner time, which is sadly very good these days. The battery is not removable.

Head-To-Head With The Galaxy Nexus And iPhone 4S:

Check out our thoughts on this match-up here.

Hands-On Video: Fly or Die

Conclusion

To be quite honest, the biggest issue I have with this phone is its design. I’m not a fan of the bubbly camera sensor that bulges out of the backside of the phone. I’m uncomfortable with this shiny black plastic, and the red stripe across the back is a bit much for me. But that’s totally my preference, and there are probably plenty of people out there who enjoy this type of differentiation.

That said, I can’t find much else wrong with it. The Evo 4G LTE is thin and light, but not so light that it feels cheap. It has a great display with plenty of real-estate, yet still manages to be comfortable in the hand. The camera is excellent, as is the software paired with it, and I never really noticed too much lag or any freeze-ups during a week of testing. Throw in 25 free GB of Dropbox storage and the promise of LTE in the next few months and then ask me: Should you spend $200 and sign a two-year contract for Sprint’s unlimited data? (While you still can?)

I can’t see why not.

Check out all of our Evo 4G LTE review posts here.