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After months of speculation, Yahoo has finally announced that it has agreed to a deal to sell a significant part of its 20 percent stake in Alibaba back to the Chinese ecommerce giant. The agreement also frees the US firm to invest in other ventures in China, should it wish to.

The deal is worth $7.1 billion, composed mostly of stock, and will take place in phased stages over the coming period. The official announcement reveals the removal of restrictions on Yahoo making “other investments” in the country, while clarifying that Alibaba will retain the Yahoo China license:

Among other things, this amendment will result in Yahoo! granting Alibaba a transitional license to continue to operate Yahoo! China under the Yahoo! brand for up to four years, while restrictions on Yahoo!’s ability to make other investments in China will be terminated.

With Yahoo reportedly keen to also offload its stake in Yahoo Japan – its joint venture with operator Softbank — the prospect of further investment in Asia is unlikely and would appear to go against its restructuring.

However, China is attractive to many of overseas companies including Evernote, PayPal, Facebook and even Google, which maintains its presence there despite a high profile withdrawal, so the possibility can’t be entirely dismissed.

A possible Alibaba IPO is also cited within the agreement and such an event would see Yahoo’s ownership decrease further still:

At the time of an initial public offering (IPO) of Alibaba in the future, Alibaba will be required either to repurchase one-quarter of Yahoo!’s current stake at the IPO price or allow Yahoo! to sell those shares in the IPO. Second, following such an IPO, Yahoo! has registration rights and rights to marketing support from Alibaba to enable Yahoo! to dispose of its remaining shares, at times of Yahoo!’s choosing following a customary lock-up period.

Other clauses will see Alibaba make a significant upfront royalty payment of more than half a billion dollars:

Alibaba will make an upfront lump sum royalty payment of US$550 million to Yahoo! and continuing royalty payments for up to four years. In addition, Alibaba will license certain patents to Yahoo.

Yahoo is not leaving its stake involvement entirely and will continue to hold a board seat with voting rights at the Chinese firm.

The struggling US giant has enjoy better fortunes in Asia, although its recent culling of 2,000 jobs has affected its presence in the region it once dominated. Most notably, Yahoo laid off the entire product team behind Koprol — the Asian location-based service it bought in 2010 — leaving its future unclear.

So.cl has been around for some time now, but it only recently ripped off its mask, and barred its teeth to the world. Microsoft is spinning the social app as as search-infused project for students, while some in the press are already calling shenanigans on that narrative.

Either way, who the heck built it? As it turns out, that’s an excellent question. Behind the little app is a group called FUSE Labs, with the ‘FUSE’ bit standing for “Future Social Experiences,” according to Wikipedia. It’s a small team, composed of just 23 people, as listed by the Microsoft page on the group.

FUSE was started by Ray Ozzie, back when he was a Microsoft man himself. Leadership has since been handed to Lili Cheng. Microsoft has a decent quantity of copy concerning her on the FUSE page. To wit:

At Microsoft since 1995, she has worked to make future visions a reality. She was previously the director of the Creative Systems Group within Microsoft Research. Lili was also director of user experience for Microsoft Windows, where from 2004 to 2006 she oversaw design, user research, user assistance and advanced development for Windows Vista.

To save time, I’m not going to make a Vista joke. Oh, fine, if you insist: to be frank, who knew that Vista had a team tasked with making the damn software easy to use? Zing. Moving on.

On that same page, Microsoft describes how it views FUSE, saying that it is “focused on delivering new social, real-time, and media rich experiences for home and work. Experiments like Docs for Facebook , Spindex , and Montage from FUSE explore how social information can change and enhance sharing on the web.” Very clear, actually.

Here’s my take: with a team so small that the Windows 8 project could sneeze it out and not miss the personnel shift, I suspect that FUSE is Microsoft’s dedicated Social Ninja Assault Force, keeping the company somewhere near the cutting edge of that niche. Making that point, just go stare at Techmeme right now, which is dominated by So.cl news.

I dig what FUSE is doing, especially this ‘Kodu’ project, designed to help kids learn how to code. Fantastic. So, there you have it, FUSE, perhaps the most important Microsoft team that you had never heard about. Until now, of course, their cover is blown.

Given that it is Sunday night, there is a strong chance that in the past few days, as the weekend came, crescendoed, and now flees, you have attended a party. Good for you. Bonus points if you hosted, of course. However, I bet that at the soiree you attended, balloons were in short supply.

What are we, 12?

However, even if a balloon was to be had, I will make a further point: the balloons were weak. They had nothing, if I may, on these fine selection of meat balloons made for Japan Premium Beef. Holy heck, I’m not even kidding.

To be honest, with a little A-1 sauce, and some other sauce, I could see those becoming problems. Just for fun, here are some of the same balloons, but deflated (like your current mental state, given that Monday Cometh):

And one last one, via Notcot:

 

DMesh, created by Dofl Y. H. Yun, is a simple iPhone app that instantly turns your photos into artistic, triangulated images. Not unlike pxl, this app leads to some pretty wild results, turning a typical scene or portrait into an ultra-geeky shareable.

As you can see below, this isn’t an effect you’ll want to use all the time. But, if you are looking for something wild to experiment with, DMesh is worth checking out for just 99 cents.

The app isn’t 100% intuitive, so note the following:

• To save, swipe up.
• The top slider adjusts accuracy, the far left being the most detailed, and far the right being most abstract.
• The bottom slider adjusts transparency of the triangulated layer, with the far left being absolutely transparent.
• At the moment, you can’t load in photos you’ve already taken

DMesh for iPhone is just one piece of the puzzle for Dofl Y. H. Yun, as there’s also DMesh for the Mac and DMesh Pro, both of which pack some serious editing capabilities. Here’s a screenshot of the Mac app:

➤ DMesh for iPhone, DMesh for the Mac & DMesh Pro for Mac via Creative Applications Network

This is just one of many experimental apps that have caught our collective blogging eyes. For more, check out a few of the awesome projects we found at the Parsons Design+Tech Thesis Show, these video drawing experiments by Kynd and this hacked record player which turns tree rings into music.

“That’s when we first noticed it, with Woody.”

“[Larry Cutler] was in that directory and happened to be talking about installing a fix to Woody or Woody’s hat. He looked at the directory and it had like 40 files, and he looked again and it had like, four files.”

“Then we saw sequences start to vanish as well and we were like, “Oh my god”

“I grabbed the phone…unplug the machine!”"

That’s Oren Jacob (pictured lower right), former Chief Technical Officer of Pixar—then an associate technical director for Toy Story 2—recounting the moment they discovered that the movie was being deleted off of the company’s servers after an erroneous command was executed, erasing two months and hundreds of man-hours worth of work.

You might have heard something about this lately, as a clip from the special features of the movie has been making the rounds after being posted on Tested. It’s narrated by Jacob himself, and the movie’s Supervising Technical Director Galyn Susman.

The story struck me as interesting, so I reached out to Jacob, who is now the CEO of ToyTalk, a digital entertainment startup that is in the process of readying its first project for launch. I wanted to get the story right from the horse’s mouth, to see if the situation was really as dramatic as it had sounded, how the staff coped and whether or not they ever discovered exactly who deleted the files in the first place. As you can hear in the video, Jacob has a hyperkenetic conversational patois and, despite what he says, a great memory for the details of the situation.

A huge chunk of Toy Story 2 was indeed deleted and was only recovered by a stroke of luck and the intense efforts of the Pixar staff.

But what most people don’t know is that the whole movie was actually tossed out again, not by the computers, but by the filmmakers themselves. It was then completely remade with mere months to go before a release date that was set in stone, cementing Pixar’s legacy as a crucible of commitment to quality.

The story that Jacob shared with me ended up containing some interesting lessons for people working with large amounts of technical data, but more than that, it has a lot to say about just how much of what makes Pixar’s movies so great has to do with the people that work there and their insane dedication to making things great.

/bin/rm -r -f *

The story likely takes place in 1998, though Jacob admits he’s foggy on the exact date. The Toy Story 2 crew, about 150 people in the animation, lighting and modeling departments of Pixar, had been hard at work for some time on the movie. Simultaneously another 200-250 people were at work finishing up Bug’s Life, which would be released that Fall.

One day, Jacob was in the office of Larry Cutler, who now works with him at Toy Talk—along with Larry Operly, who was also an associate Technical Director working under Susman. In what is a crazy stroke of luck, they happened to be looking at a directory in which the assets for the character Woody were stored, when they noticed, on a refresh, that there were suddenly less and less files.

“He had an error, I forget the exact [one]. It was like, “Directory no longer valid,” because he’s in a place now I’ve been deleting. Then he thought to walk up [a directory] and he walked back up and then we saw Hamm, Potato Head and Rex. Then we looked at it again and there was just Hamm and then nothing.”

The command that had been run was most likely ‘rm -r -f *’, which—roughly speaking—commands the system to begin removing every file below the current directory. This is commonly used to clear out a subset of unwanted files. Unfortunately, someone on the system had run the command at the root level of the Toy Story 2 project and the system was recursively tracking down throught the file structure and deleting its way out like a worm eating its way out from the core of an apple.

That’s when the panicked call was made to the data center where the main server was located and the instruction given to just yank the power and network connection of the server. This is simply not done in environments with hundreds of clients connected to the machine, it’s as if someone asked you to throw your main breaker to shut off your blender.

“The master machine goes down,” says Jacob. “Some people are animating a shot and they can work for like a minute or five minutes, but eventually you’ll have to pull data from the master machine for some reason or another, which your machine will freeze.”

“Eventually every animator and , every TD, everyone working on the show goes, “Oh, all machines down. Lets go to lunch. Ha, ha.”

The machine was eventually brought up a few hours later and they took a poll of the damage. When a size command was run on the Toy Story 2 directory, it was only 10% of the size it should have been.

90% of the movie had been deleted by the stray command.

“The show’s been trashed”

When this story originally started making the rounds, one of the big questions was ‘how did this happen?’.

I asked Jacob about the ‘how’ and he told me that it was actually largely a function of how a company like Pixar works on projects.

“You have like 400 people on the network and they all have to have like pretty massive access across the board to the whole project, so it’s hard to like, limit the damage,” Jacob said. “It could happen from almost any terminal.”

“Pixar being this wide open Unix environment was very promiscuous and at the stage Unix operating environment NFS reaching across everywhere. You could [change directory] ‘slash’, net ‘slash’ or walk across the network and log into Ed Catmull’s machine or Steve Job’s machine if you wanted to. Not that Steve ever did do any work on the film directly, but you could do that.”

The common way to prevent an accidental command like this being run on an entire project is to lock users down with permissions to only the files they need. But, because of the way a project like a Pixar film works, almost everyone working on the show needed permissions to read and write to the master machine. This was their job.

Assigning micro-managed permissions would have eaten up administrative resources, especially in crunch time.

Backup plan

So at this point, most of the film had been deleted or otherwise compromised. But that wasn’t a big deal. Things had been deleted before, it’s just something that would happen from time to time. During the production of A Bug’s Life, most of the ants got deleted and had to be restored, which wasn’t a problem because, of course, Pixar backs up its data.

In 1998, the most common way to back up a bunch of data was on tape, which is the system that Pixar was using. Unfortunately, these backups were not continuously tested, as the company does today and is the universally recommended best practice.

Typically, to make sure your backups are good, you have to use them. Every few days or weeks, you swap your backups with your currently running setup and keep going, in order to make sure that your data is all there. This is a practice called ‘live backups’.

Pixar, at the time, did not continuously test their backups. This is where the trouble started, because the backups were stored on a tape drive roughly 4 gigabytes in size, and the drive was full.The error log, which would have told the system administrators about the full drive, was also located on the full volume, and was zero bytes in size.

This meant that new data was being written to the drive, but it was ‘pushing’ the older files off. But no-one at Pixar knew this yet.

It’s worth mentioning at this point, because some of you may be wondering, that the whole movie encompassed no more than around 10 gigabytes of information. That may seem crazy considering the size of textures for many newer flicks, but you have to remember that the whole backup tape was 4GB and it didn’t become a problem for many months on the project. The entirety of the data for the movie could have been fit on a couple of dual-layer DVDs.

So, they grabbed the backups, went to work and restored the show. Within a couple of days they had what they thought was a completely restored version of the files for TS:2.

To test it, they submitted around 2,000 frames to render, one for each ‘shot’ in the movie (the bits between ‘cuts’). This would effectively pull on every resource involved in the film because those stills would need all of the models, lighting and textures in order to render properly.

Everything looked fine. “We lost a week of a work,” Jacob says. “So those last 10 shots are the last week, but other than that…O.K..”

Fast-forward to the end of that week. The crew has been back at work using the newly restored files for many days now. But, over the course of that week, there had been a few oddities. Weird ‘attach’ errors kept cropping up.

An attach is when a character, like Woody for instance, takes off his hat. The hat transfers from being a part of his head to being a part of his hand, this is a tricky procedure and very ‘fragile’.

“We started doing comparisons of the shots and realized that the show was incomplete. How it had worked for that week and how such renders came out, I can’t explain.”

By the end of that week enough things had broken here and there that the team realized there was a problem. In addition to the attaches, some people working on a version of their shot noticed that the current version was far lower than where they had left off. They were working on number 420 and now it said it was version 20. Something was up.

This is when the tape backup issue was discovered, after a full week’s work.

“That work is definitely wasted, because it’s on top of an unreliable restoral,” recalls Jacob. “Now sadly, what’s happened is that there is zero confidence in any solution, because the restoral is bad, the work on it is bad, the deletion was horrible, and the backup tapes are busted.”

“All possible directions to move are broken and, maybe worse. We don’t quite understand how they’re broken. If only 10 percent of the show is not on the tape, which 10 percent? I don’t know.”

“That was the big meeting, in the conference room back in Bugville. All the big brains in the studio are like, “Uh, I don’t know. Oh my God!”

That’s when Gail (Susman) said, “I have a machine back at my house.”

The $100,000,000 Volvo

Susman, the Supervising Technical Director on Toy Story 2, had given birth to her son Eli shortly before, and had been working from home. This meant that she had a Silicon Graphics workstation at her house. It was either an Indigo 2 or an Octane, pictured right, and it was loaded up with a full copy of the movie.

In order for her to work on the movie while out, they had plugged the machine up to the local network and copied the whole file tree over. Then she would receive incremental updates over her ISDN internet connection. For those not in the know, that was like two 56kbps modems duct taped together (welcome to 1998).

The last update that her machine had gotten could have been as old as a couple of weeks, but at this point the Pixar team had an incomplete backup and a corrupt tree full of files, and they needed anything they could get their hands on to fix the problem. This was the difference between rebuilding every missing file from scratch and, well, shipping the movie on time.

So Jacob and Susman hopped into her Volvo and shot back over the bridge from Richmond to her house to retrieve the computer. They hauled it out to the car and carefully placed it in the back seat, wrapping it in blankets and strapping it in tightly with seatbelts.

“There was nothing else to do,” Jacob says of the session described earlier. “We were dead. We’d been in the meeting for like 45 minutes. There was 30 of us, all the biggest brains Pixar can bring to the problem.”

That’s when Susman remembered her machine at home.

“She and I just stood up and walked out, back to her Volvo, drove across the bridge, got the machine, got some blankets, I hugged it with seatbelts, across the back seat. Drove at like 35 with blinking lights on, hoping get a police escort. No cops saw us, so it didn’t help us.”

At that point, the Volvo had become a $100M machine, as the entirety of the team’s efforts so far on the project were ensconced on its drives.

They made it back to Richmond in safety. “Eight people met us with a plywood sheet out in the parking lot and, like a sedan carrying the Pharaoh, walked it into the machine room.”

They sweated as the machine booted up, as that’s exactly when most drives crash. It booted. They didn’t pass go, they just plugged it into the network and copied the entire drive off immediately, then starting picking apart what they had.

The backup was about two weeks old, but they were able to make it the ‘B’ tree to compare with the ‘A’ backup from two months ago and a third ‘C’ source that was cobbled together out of any local backups animators or modelers had made on their personal terminals, collected by ‘groveling’ for .old, .sav, .bak and any other old file they could find.

They managed to verify about 70,000 files, leaving 30,000 files to check, and they had to be done by hand. “We worked from Friday till Monday morning, nonstop through, in rotating shifts with food and sleeping bags, with about 10 or 12 of us,” recalls Jacob.

“When people came in on Friday, when they showed up. We’d hand them a printout of, “Here are the 500 things you’re checking in the next eight hours. Start running XF commands. Go for it.”

“Quickly, within a couple hours, the scripting nerds had put together scripts that would ingest the list and spawn off XF windows, 20 deep. Close them all, 20 deep. Close them all, so you could look at them really fast.”

They all had to be looked at with human eyes, to see which ones were shorter or more current. They did it over the next few days. The feeling of sympathy and support are what Jacob recalls most vividly. Not just that employees had to sacrifice a weekend with their family and come in on the weekends, staying up late hours and even sleeping on site, but the sense of ‘digging in’ to fix the problem.

“We dug so deep at that point in time who were on the “Toy Story” crew, and people on “A Bug’s Life,” and the folks in the studio at large. That whole community, whether that was supporting people who were working late, or on the keyboards who typing, or folks sending us food by messenger pigeon.”

“At some point, even some of the neighboring small little sandwich shops in Point Richmond would be like, “You need free food today? Guys aren’t sleeping right now.” Like inside the building almost.”

The insane amount of focus needed to pull of comparing those files shows just how deep the dozen or so people on the project had to dig. The experience transcended employment and moved into the realm of true dedication to the movie, to their digital friends and to each other.

“The parts of the weekend that I can remember specifically are the trays of cookies, the lemonade, the pizza, and flowers that were sent,” Jacob recalls. “Somebody hired a masseuse on a Sunday to walk around for a while. Some other person happened to work at an emergency shelter and brought in blankets.”

They then rebuilt and tested the project and it ended up working, sort of. To this day, Jacob can’t explain the fact that more than several thousand files were missing from the tree by the time they were done.

“Where the files went, we don’t know. The fact that it still worked without them is totally unexplainable.”

but the project worked, the frames rendered, Toy Story 2 lived again.

Witchhunt

One of the big questions that I wanted to pose was whether or not it was ever discovered who was responsible, and whether they were punished. Normally when something like this happens, there’s a cry for accountability. Item one on the agenda is typically ‘who do we blame?’ Not so at Pixar.

“There was no attempt to hide it,” says Jacob. “We sent email out like 10 minutes later to everyone in the building. “Help. Holy s**t!”

Aside from the fact that there was absolutely immediate chatter about  who might have made such a dumb move, but the discussion quickly moved right on to how to fix the problem.

“Let’s put the witch hunt away. We’ve got to get the show back first. Let’s not go spend a week of our time trying to kill somebody. Where’s the movie?”

“Obviously, five minutes in the meeting, you’re all sweating and red-faced. And somebody will say, “Let’s go kill somebody and lynch them. Now,” says Jacob, “I support lynching on our agenda. But, number one is, just get the movie back and work on Buzz and Woody again.We’ve lost our friends.”

With this many man-years, or even man-decades, worth of work on a project, the temptation to find someone to blame, to expend effort on hunting down the person responsible, is intense.

But that kind of negative thought process doesn’t help anyone and it just removes focus from what matters most: moving forward.

The systems administrators definitely “went through some deep soul-searching” about the backup plans and came to the big production meeting with a new backup plan in place, which was talked over very thoroughly. But there weren’t any summary firings or screaming matches.

Jacob can’t recall who on the executive staff was on staff the day that the backups were being restored, but he says that whoever was there, Steve Jobs, founder Ed Catmull and the rest of the executive staff were very supportive of the restoral efforts, rather than focusing on slashing and burning staff over the error. They bought the team Pizza that weekend, got them anything they wanted and were generally supportive.

Dring the big meeting over the backup problem Catmull, who is known for leading an ‘incredibly calm and zen-like existence’, simply asked what the team was doing about the issue.

Jacob recalls the exchangeL

“Ed, we’re doing everything we can right now. OK?,”

“You guys keep on that problem?

“OK, thank you, Ed.”

The thing about  a disaster like this one is that the technical directors and staff at Pixar had to trust one another to fix the issue, even though there were several mistakes made and one of them was responsible. “If you can’t sit down and calmly engage that meeting, you can’t be in that meeting with them,” says Jacob. ”Because the circumstances were so incredibly unusual. Black Swan events do occur.”

Instead of dwelling on pinning the blame or lamenting the loss of time and effort, the team made sure to alter the backup strategy so that something like that didn’t happen again, and it went about making up for lost time.

Toy Story 2 gets trashed again

After the deletion and restoration of Toy Story 2, the team was likely hoping for an uneventful path to release, but it was not to be.

In the Christmas of ’98, after the release of A Bug’s Life and the promotional tour was done, John Lassiter, Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter and legendary story man Joe Ranft all came to the production team to take a look at Toy Story 2.

It was not a good film. They dedicated the winter vacation to re-writing the project almost entirely from the ground up. Production shut down on December 15th and came back after New Year’s in January, when the story team re-pitched the movie.

Lassiter and Lee Unkrich ended up co-directing the film along with Ash Brannon as it was seen in the theaters.

Among the things that stayed? The main characters, of course. Buzz, Woody, Hamm, Potato Head, Rexx. Andy’s room stayed. The Al’s Toy Barn sequence stayed. That’s it, nearly everything else you see in the film as it is is new.

Jacob explains what was added, including the entire character and animation for Buster the dog:

Effectively all animation was tossed. Effectively, all layout was tossed. So all camera work would start from scratch. Letting it up in the film a little bit, but that was tossed as well. We had to build new characters.

So at that point, Buster showed up, the dog, came into that pit. And that character went from being out to being in the screenplay to in the final screen in nine months.

That’s a fully animated quadriped…On the fly. And most of the humans in the film and show. All the background extras in the airport at the end”

They were all built and assembled then. And all the effects work was added to the film. The opening of the film, which is Buzz, Buzz playing with the robots, which I spent a lot of my time working on, where Buzz blows up a quarter-million robots with that crystal…that explosion. That was all added in that pitch as well. It started from ground zero in January.

So the story, effectively. And the film. And that was probably one of the biggest tests of what Pixar was as a company and a culture we ever went through.

The big deal about re-building the movie? It had a hard-set release date of November 22, 1999. That date was set in stone. A big-budget movie like Toy Story 2 has countless marketing tie-ins, promotional efforts and more that had to be timed perfectly with the release of the movie.

Moving the release date of the movie within a year is insanely difficult. Moving it within 6 months is impossible. This meant that the team had to re-make Toy Story 2 in 9 months. All because they wanted to make the best thing they could possibly make.

Disney didn’t believe that they could do it. But they did it anyway.

“At that point, you’ve still got to go, “How far are we going to take this?” Right?,” Jacob adds. “I mean, that’s balls to the wall.”

“January to September ’99 was an unbelievable Herculean effort to pull that show off from ground up again. That was one of the defining cornerstones to what Pixar as a corporate culture meant to itself inside. And what it could produce was that. Just because of that.”

Pulling a hundred-hour week now and then is tough enough on morale and physical well-being. But do do it for 9 months in a row, that was beyond the call of duty.

Pixar was also an independent and publicly traded company at that point in time. To blow a film like Toy Story 2, not release it on time, would have decimated the studio’s credibility, and detonated the Disney movie economy.

“Save Buzz and Woody. Save the franchise. Save the movie. Save the company. It was an all-in bet.”

Toy Story 2 was indeed finished and released on time. It grossed nearly $500M worldwide, was nominated for an Academy Award and cemented Pixar’s reputation as the studio that wouldn’t compromise.

Lessons learned

In closing, Jacob told me that the most important thing that he took away from it was the sense of camaraderie from the crew at Pixar at the time.

“I’d never really experienced that before, at that level, because it was such a loss that you didn’t need to have a meeting to explain how bad it was. People just knew. And both in the company but also in families and friends around us, and in the people in Point Richmond too. Maybe we got it back as good as we did, as close as we did, because of that. That’s a very emotional thing to say. It’s not technical.”

The thing that I take away about these experiences is that the spontaneity of the communal support speaks to the culture of Pixar the rest of the time. That kind of thing just doesn’t happen all of the sudden. You can’t simply have a disaster and suddenly develop this sense of community and camaraderie and help and support.

It has to seep out. It has to be in the soil. You don’t just go ahead and plant it and watch it grow in one day. It has to be cultivated.

Jacob agrees, citing the focus needed to restore the film. “To be there and not blink for 60 hours straight, while staying sharp, is effectively impossible. But suddenly you find food. You find a blanket, you find someone’s throwing you into a shower and taking you back out again. You’re like, “How’d that happen?!”"

“It just worked out that way, without thinking about it. The lasting memory of the experience is the friendships that were formed through that. That journey together through that was one of the community binding together.”

“I’ll never forget ever being a part of Toy Story two. I was very lucky,” says Jacob. “I had that chance to work on a level of impact that helped keep Buzz and Woody, and “Toy Story” and the franchise, and Pixar all be a thing we talk about today.”

Image Credit

Speed matters online. Study after study has shown that even 100 millisecond delays in load times negatively impact user experience and conversions. So it's no wonder that e-commerce experiences are particularly susceptible to performance as these recent bits of data illustrate.

• The average Internet connection speed around the world was 2.3 Mbps by the end of 2011. That’s down about 14% from the previous quarter. (source)
• If a page load takes more than two seconds, 40% are likely to abandon that site. (source)
• The average impact of a one-second delay means a 7% reduction in conversions. For the $100,000 per day ecommerce site, a one-second delay means $2.5 million in lost revenues in a year. (source)
• Sales at Amazon increase by 1% for every 100 milliseconds it shaves off download times. (source)
• When Shopzilla decreased load time by 4 sec, they saw a 25% increase in page views, and conversion rates went up 7-12%. (source)
• Google Checkout’s mean payment processing time was .26 seconds in a recent study. This makes it the fastest payment gateway online. (source)
• Paypal, the most popular payment gateway, had a mean transaction time of 1.46 seconds. (source)

The growth of camera phones and apps have together changed the way many people eat, or at least prepare to dine. Though tweeting about food was the classic early criticism of Twitter — how many people started out complaining every tweet was about eating a sandwich? — food-related photos seem to account for a sizeable amount of content on Instagram and other photo sharing services.

Burpple is a newly launched iPhone app that is zoning in on this segment, catering specifically for food-snappers with a service that combines elements of Instagram, Path and Pinterest to showcase daily eats, connect people and discover new ideas.

The basic premise of the app sees user post photos of food which are categorized by boxes (which act like albums) to give some semblance of order to the culinary collections. Location (optional) and date is added to each photo to give it some context for other users, helping it to be discovered.

A particularly nifty feature of Burpple sees it ‘remember’ the time and place of photos that are added via the iOS camera album, thanks to a integration with the data stored on the device.

Snaps can also be added from inside the app, using its camera, and Burpple itself adopts a familiar layout which users of other camera apps will be comfortable with.

Users can follow other ‘Burpplers’, comment on pics that have been posted, share to Facebook and Twitter and ‘Reburp’ images that they like. While a Reburp sounds much like a Twitter retweet, it is actually works like repin on Pinterest, as it adds the image to the ReBurppler’s boxes – allowing content to be curated across the service.

The updates flow quickly and with plenty of detail so, after following a few active people, it is easy to become initially overwhelmed with the stream. That’s particularly true for users of Twitter that are used to brevity and short notes over screen-hogging photos and other multimedia.

Early signs of encouragement

Burpple launched May 9, having been in beta for two months, and already its three Singapore-based founders say it has been downloaded in more than 50 different countries worldwide.

Understandably reticent to provide raw user figures at this early stage, the trio behind the app told The Next Web that China, Japan, Singapore and the US are seeing the most usage, right now.

They also revealed a particular impressive stat that is testament to the stickiness of the early user experience.

“We’re seeing that [of the "thousands" of users] close to 50 percent of registered users are active daily users,” co-founder Dixon Chan told The Next Web.

A recent comparison that paralleled Burpple’s early growth, when it entered open beta, against that of Instagram, produced more favourable figures, putting early Burpple adopters on a par with those of the photo service that Facebook scooped up for $1 billion.

“We did a parallel study of our early progress compared to how Instagram first launched and we have the same ratio of users who uploaded more than 50 photos (35 percent), and the same number of people who published more than 10 (15 percent),” Chan said.

Even before the site offered sharing with Twitter and Facebook, demand was high, he added, suggesting that the company is tapping into a market with significant promise.

“We’re surprised that people were uploading hundreds and hundreds of photos [during the beta] without any formal integration with other sites.”

Conceived in the US, baked in Singapore

For the vast number of startups in Asia, a possible move to the US is often the dream to pursue, however, Burpple’s first conception is a notable switch on that paradigm. It’s three founders — Chan, Elisha Ong and Daniel Hum — are proud Singaporeans but their paths crossed, and the idea of Burpple came together, while they were in the US. In Silicon Valley, no less.

While Stateside, Chan worked for Gigya, where he rose to lead the business social media service’s ad operations. Ong also worked at a Valley startup as lead designer for mobile video site Qik.

Hum’s time in the US was spent a little differently as he had been studying at Purdue University, however an internship with Microsoft took him to the Redmond, Washington. His past is particularly interesting, and includes two years as an infantry specialist with the Singapore Armed Forces and he co-founded local daily deal aggregator dealzilla.sg.

They could have stayed in the US, as all three turned down offers of employment, but instead they choose to return home to Singapore with their idea, richer for the experience in the world’s tech capital.

“The valley is inspiring. We each had opportunity to travel and view the world, and that has given us a global mindset for Burpple from day one,” Ong said. ”All three of us wanted to come back home. Singapore has a young and growing ecosystem and we were all keen to be part of the community,” he added.

Smartphone-based photography is hugely popular in Asia — to the point that many shops and restaurants set up ‘stages’ to encourage customers to snap away — and, combined with the region’s passion for food, the service certainly has many of the ingredients (!) to appeal to Southeast Asia and across the diverse Asian continent generally.

That’s a view that, understandably, Burpple’s founders share, saying that Asia has “lots of untapped potential” and plenty of mobile users to market apps to.

Already Burpple has enjoyed the backing of the Singapore Tourism Board for a campaign they started to help put ‘Kopi’, Singapore’s own brand of coffee, on the global map, after the organisation approached it to promote the coffee.

The founder’s estimate that the “How to Order Kopi like a Pro” infographic — which was also made in to t-shirts — reached more than 2 million viewers since its inception in November 2011.

The campaign has also generated interest in the service, thanks to the subtle but close branding the site has with the creative initiative.

Serving up a unique experience

Burpple isn’t the first dedicated food app but the founders do believe that it is offering something unique to the market with the app, which they say is inspired by Pinterest, Path’s user interface and the Instagram user experience.

With 3 million downloads to date, Foodspotting — which updated its iOS app last week — is probably the best known in the food app category, the Burpple trio argue, their app is complementary rather than a rival.

“We’re not really competing with it,” Chan says. “We’re focused on helping people to journal their food and share it with friends. It’s a different form of discovery to that which Foodspotting offers.”

The founders talk passionately about their belief that the app is about documenting users’ eats and love of food. However, they say, feedback from one user succinctly put their sentiments and beliefs to a neat phrase, which Ong shared on Quora:

Foodspotting is like my travel guide. And Burpple is my Moleskine for food.

Monetisation

While monetisation is not currently a focus at this stage, the team is developing its thoughts on how Burpple might generate income, in time, they explained.

Event-based tie-ups are one element under their early radar, following a successful pilot event that they undertook at Savour Singapore 2012, a gourmet cuisine event that got more than 12,000 attendees.

The app was soft launched in conjunction with the show and, the founders say, it accounted for more than half of all photos from the event shared that were shared to mobile social networks. The team is rightly encouraged by that and is looking into possibilities to build on that promise and help showcase events and get the app in the hands of food lovers.

Another, more obvious option is the involvement of restaurants and other food businesses. Already, Chan says, Burpple has seen restaurants jump onto the service to upload their menus to the app and share them visually with customers.

Given the use of location and the simplistic but effective organisation of boxes, it is easy to see how Burpple could appeal to the restaurant industry. An aesthetic, visually-pleasing menu, combined with discounts for followers or those close-by, could provide an interesting monetisation strategy, which would be beneficial to users.

Future plans

For now, however, the team is working to optimise and enhance the service, specifically by building its user base and providing a quality service for foodies.

“We’re still careful in rolling out new features as we dont want to lose credibility with our users and are focused entirely on the experience of the app”, Hum said.

The Burpple guys are not drawn into specifics on what is in the pipeline but, they say, users can expect the service to centre around the social experience. Upcoming features will build on the journaling aspect, and add to the curative side of Burpple.

The team hints at greater integration with Twitter — perhaps including sign-in via the microblogging site — although Instagram-style filters are a difficult issue. They want content on the site to be as real as possible, which is absolutely understandable. Where’s the fun in turning every meal into a master piece by simply adding a filter.

However, I get the sense that a compromised, with less ‘Insta-looking good’ type filters, could be a possibility in due course.

A more certain addition is an Android app, given the popularity of devices built on the Google-owned platform – which accounted for 50 percent of new smartphones bought in Southeast Asia alone, last year.

Those aside, we’d like to see the search option enhanced to help us find more of the doubtless interesting content that lies in hiding on the service.

For now, searching bring up lists of recommended users, presumably based on the description of their images, but this seems like it is underserving the thousands of photos on Burpple.

While in-app search is considerably more of a challenge that the open web — due to screen size among other issues — it seems a shame that reburpped or commented photos aren’t prioritised based on keywords, location or a Like-style system.

Indeed, there is no clear tally to endorse a ‘Burp’ — in the same way Twitter has retweets number and Facebook has Likes — though we’re sure that a feature to help measure the popularity of updates will be introduced in time.

Overall, we’re certainly a fan of this app, if no reason other than the fact that it stops overly-spamming Instagram pals with ‘about to eat this’ snaps. So, if you’re someone with a penchant for food snaps, new apps or are looking to ease up on overly food-piccing other services, then Burpple is certainly worth a taste (yes, that’s the last food pun for now).

> Burpple | App Store

Google+ rolled out a pretty massive redesign last month, which I actually liked a lot. The only problem was, and it was a big one, the changes that it made to the “Explore” section, which I happen to use a lot.

For whatever reason, the team decided that placing a huge bar at the top of the page, which I called “the slidey thing”, was a good idea. Not only was it obnoxious and full of outdated and repetitive information, you couldn’t close it at all. It just sat there and got in the way.

In case you haven’t been to the site in a while, here’s what it looked like:

This particular section of the site pulls together all of the hottest posts on the network, which I find extremely interesting. I’ve found numerous hilarious videos and photos by perusing Explore. After the update though, I found myself visiting the page less and less.

As I was making my way around the interwebs today, I noticed that I wasn’t the only one complaining about this monstrosity and the team decided to yank it:

I let out an audible “Yay!”. Yes, I’m a geek, but thank you for listening to us, Google+ team.

During the hush of the weekend after Facebook’s IPO bonanza, and Mark Zuckerberg’s wedding, Microsoft unleashed its entry into the social vertical. The site, called So.cl, is positioned as a research tool for students.

The project comes out of Microsoft’s FUSE Labs, a division of the company that is working on other research tools that compliment social networking sites like Facebook. Microsoft definitely wants you to believe that the project was created with students in mind, so much so that the word “student” is mentioned six times in its FAQ page for the product. However, I’m not so sold on this educational mission.

The reason? Also in its FAQ is this gem:

We expect students to continue using products such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other existing social networks, as well as Bing, Google and other search tools

Even though I don’t believe that Google+ is a “social network”, it surely is a social layer worth mentioning. FUSE labs decided not to, so let the competition begin.

Describing the service as a great social tool for students is a brilliant move, as positioning a social product directly at colleges worked in the past. Just ask Facebook. Having said that, Microsoft has chosen this very weekend to make the product live for anyone and everyone, an obvious signal that this project isn’t all about students. It would have been easy to keep So.cl open to students-only, but it chose not to.

The So.cl mouthpiece for Bing

The product, pronounced “social”, lets you socialize your search results and mix and mash others results with what you find. In a way the product is similar to Wikipedia in that you can collaborate on building an interesting social search result for any person, place, or thing:

As a member of the site, you are urged to “riff” on people’s searches, meaning add more relevant pieces of information to the search result posted by So.cl’s users. Sounds like a great way for Bing to build search results, huh?

However, Microsoft wants you to know that So.cl is not a Bing product:

Is So.cl a part of Bing?
No, So.cl is a research project from FUSE Labs in Microsoft Research that is focused on learning more about social search. So.cl uses Bing for search data via the public API, but it is not a Bing product.

I can’t be the only one to read the above snipped (again for its FAQ page) and think that Microsoft is trying to slide this one past us as this altruistic research tool in such a way that makes it obvious that it’s not.

It’s not all research and search though, as So.cl has a feature called “video parties” that feel a lot like Chill’s product in that you can select a YouTube video, or series of videos, and watch them with your friends while chatting:

The nice part about this feature is that once you join the party, you can keep using the site and the sound will play in the background. This however, is not a “research tool” aimed at students like Microsoft would like you to believe.

It’s a trap!

In the same way that I believe Google+ to be the “social glue” to all of Google’s products, including search, So.cl appears to be the exact same play for Microsoft. It’s not a bad idea, but it’s clearly in response to Google’s success in pulling all of its products together with a “social spine”.

However, positioning the product as a research tool aimed at students is such an obvious way of saying “Hey, if this doesn’t work it doesn’t matter, it was a research experiment for students”, and it shows just how early on we are in the social spectrum of the Internet’s evolution.

With So.cl, Microsoft is going to attempt to fight off any of Facebook’s “ankle-biters”, and it’s not a bad idea since the company is so heavily invested in Facebook’s success. In addition, if Facebook ever does introduce a search product, it’s more than likely going to be a collaboration with Microsoft’s Bing.

At the end of the day, this is a smart idea to get people socializing with Bing search results. But don’t be fooled, this is a product for everyone. At least, Microsoft hopes.

➤ So.cl

The first Music Tech Fest took place through the end of last week and part of the weekend at Ravensbourne College in London.

The event gathered artists, performers and technologists who gave presentations and made new things on the spot to address the future issues of music as we plough on through this digital era.

One of the problems being addressed at the event was that of music discovery and how to handle the sheer volume of audio material now available on the Internet. Matthew Davies works for Inesc Porto in Portugal, researching sound and music computing. He presented RAMA, a relational artist map for visualisation and music discovery.

RAMA harnesses data from Last.fm to link together different musical artists and displaying this as a visualisation that, in turn, takes users to videos on YouTube. Maps of varied complexity can be created in order to then make playlists.

“There’s a wealth of information and there’s too much music, basically I just want to listen to the things I like and there are many, many ways of trying to recommend this content,” said Davies. “Sometimes I think that music recommendation can be like horoscopes, you can always find a way to link these pieces of music together and if it works for you, that’s fine.”

“There are big players that dominate at the moment which is good on the whole, for artists after the music industry crash in sales,” he continued. “It would be nice to think that with a steady growth in user base that some applications will push through and maybe RAMA is one of them.”

What does sound look like?

The event provided plenty of ways of participants to be creative and work with experts. Not only were they asked to express themselves but to also consider what might be behind the design and user experience for the next music app.

Peter Kirn, journalist, composer and media artist who runs the Create Digital Music site, presented a workshop exploring the relationship between visuals and music with drawing at a metaphor.

He said, “When you create an application for an iPad or a new electronic music invention you have a blank slate with which to begin and you can go anywhere. So literally start with a blank piece of paper and sketch.”

It appears that from the session there were some shared intrepretations and feelings about graphics and music and Kirn says that people were able to interpret shapes into sound in similar ways.

This could mean that designers should take into account how people react to and ‘read’ music visually when thinking about the design for their next killer app.

At the moment there appears to be two main schools of thought as Kirn explained, “There seem to be applications that are built for space aliens that have entirely new, inventive, interfaces and there are applications that are designed to be as familiar as possible. So for a guitarist, things look like a guitar. As people seem to enjoy both and may collect apps of both types, there is plenty of opportunity to explore those very different avenues.”

It was Peter Kirn’s writings that influenced the upcoming release of an app by record label Ninja Tune. Matt Black of Coldcut and Ninja Tune was at the event with a sneak preview of the prototype that will be available in June and should enable users to remix parts of the label’s back catalogue. There was also a jamming session where hackers at the event who had created instruments or applications played with Black as he mixed live for the audience.

Hack all of the sounds

Along with the demonstrations and talks there was a hack event where participants were asked to open their minds to computing and music to create almost anything they could think of. Ariel Elkin, of the London Music Hackspace, was running the hack camp and although he appeared to have had very little sleep, he said that events like this provided great satisfaction in enabling technologists to get projects going that might not otherwise see the light of day.

Lightsabers were hacked to play back new sounds, circuit benders had an old CASIO keyboard open and were creating strange new noises while operating with wires and clips, Phd students wired up a ping pong table that plays music depending on how good your game is, music generated by the bmp of your movements could be produced with new apps and a site for guitarists to share chords more socially were all whipped up in the space of a couple of days.

Avi Ashkenazi, interaction designer, was blowing minds with his presentation at the festival. He created an installation for the even which encouraged people to record vocal sounds which then became part of a musical track and was in turn translated into a grid of images projected onto the ceiling of the venue. He also showed a way for hip hop artists to include the crowd or a remote audience into live performances by looping recorded sounds and playing them back as part of a gig.

In future this could mean that even if you can’t travel to see your favourite artists, you can still be a part of the performance.

The creators of the Listening Machine, which we took a look at last week were in attendance. Not only does the site translate tweets into sound, it looks as though it is set to evolve from its initial incarnation with the music of cellist Peter Gregson and the Britten Sinfonia to also allow users to include field receordings to enrich the music it can express.

Though many of the activities at the Music Tech Festival seemed to be a little esoteric, there were many products for attendees to explore. The strange new experiments that took place may have appeared to be wild but these are the raw processes that may turn up in the next runaway success in musical applications.

To check out the talks and presentations from the event, check back with the Music Tech Fest site where video should be posted in the coming weeks.

Online shopping is wildly convenient if you’re tight on time or live out in the boonies, miles from a mall. But often with convenience, comes compromise – on both quality and fit because it’s hard to tell from a picture, especially of a supermodel, what the clothes really look like and how they will fit you.

Clothes Horse, a New York City startup, is a data-driven platform that helps shoppers find brands that fit them best. The technology enables customers to shop for clothing across retailers with a single user profile, which is why it’s being called the “Facebook Connect for fashion.”

Let’s say you arrive at a retail site and want to buy a piece of clothing. You’re wondering what size you should get and you’re thinking about the size you normally wear in most brands and how this brand compares. If the site is using Clothes Horse, you’re all set.

Simply fill out your Clothes Horse profile with information like your gender, height, weight, body type, bra size and favorite brands. It will then recommend sizes and fit ratings for specific fashion items based on its data set of over 70 brands. As it collects more data, Clothes Horse says it’s building “The Fashion Graph.”

In August 2011, the company launched with men’s clothing store Bonobos as its premiere partner. 5 months later, Clothes Horse released a case study citing that its technology brought a 13% increase in conversion for Bonobos and that customers who interacted with its technology on the site were 4-5 times more likely to make a purchase. Boom.

This study opened a lot of doors for the guys at Clothes Horse, and the startup quickly partnered with a brand new menswear line called Frank and Oak in February. In the future, Clothes Horse will appear on top of numerous retailers’ websites, and recommendations will be generated for the user based first on fit, then price, followed by style and input from the user’s social graph. Next up for Clothes Horse’s algorithms is to tackle women’s polos, blazers…and most importantly, dresses.

Watch this one. There wasn’t a startup I interviewed for our Fashion iPad Magazine that hadn’t heard of them.

It’s that time of week again when we take a look at the latest social media news, and highlight some of the most interesting stories.

You couldn’t avoid news of Facebook’s IPO lately if you tried, and the social network’s historical week ended with founder Mark Zuckerberg tying the knot with long time girlfriend Priscilla Chan. To find out more about this, and other social media related stories, read on.

Facebook: IPO, wedding bells and more

The big story of the week in social media circles has undoubtedly been the Facebook IPO. After confirming that the company would go public at $38 per share, Facebook’s share price was quick to jump to $43, with a 13.6% spike, which was accompanied by the trading of 100 million shares in the first 5 minutes. 82% of that happened in the first 30 seconds.

As the day wore on, the share price dropped to the original $38 coming dangerously close to dipping beneath Facebook’s designated share price, before rebounding.

Facebook shares closed at $38. 37 after the social network broke the record for the most shares traded in the first day, with a total of 500 million shares trading hands. Facebook’s IPO is the largest ever for a technology company and the second largest in US history, second only to Visa.

To put the actual numbers in context, you definitely want to take a look at all the things Facebook made more money than on Friday.

It’s been a pretty good week for Zuckerberg. Not only did his Facebook activity include listing his company on Nasdaq, it also saw him updating his relationship status to married and sharing a photo with his 14 millions subscribers.

The wedding itself was a complete surprise to his guests, according to AP:

“The couple married at his Palo Alto, Calif. home in front of fewer than 100 stunned guests who thought they would be attending a party to celebrate Chan’s graduation from medical school.

Zuckerberg gave his new bride a ring he had designed with a “very simple ruby” to end an incredibly eventful week…”

It hasn’t been all good news for Facebook these past few days. Earlier in the week, GM announced its plan to cut Facebook from its advertising budget,

At the time, The Next Web’s Alex Wilhelm wrote:

GM spends heavily on advertising in every medium, so for it to leave Facebook, noting that its ads were inefficacious, raises the question of the power, and therefore monetizability, of Facebook’s ad platform. Ads are a key Facebook revenue source. If its ad business suffers from other major defections, the earnings growth that is widely anticipated following its offering, may not materialize in line with expectations.

Twitter supports Do Not Track

In an announcement on its official blog, Twitter confirmed that the social networking site supports Do Not Track, a feature which allows users to block tracking cookies used by advertisers and website owners.

Initially opening up support to Firefox users only, Twitter was quick to clarify that the feature is available in other browsers, including IE9, Safari 5.1 and Chrome 17+. The move earned Twitter high praise from the White House itself, which referred to it as “an important step” in a post shared on the official White House blog.

Celebrating its first year of having set up shop in the UK, Twitter shared some impressive figures in the country – which included reaching 10 million users, 80% of which are active on mobile.

Twitter also revealed that now has a very apt 140 million users worldwide.

Catering to that worldwide audience, Twitter has opened up its Translation Centre to 6 more languages: Catalan, Afrikaans, Ukrainian, Greek, Czech and Basque, which are the six most requested languages. Twitter is currently available in 28 languages.

Another new introduction for Twitter is a weekly email digest, which will be going out to all of its members. While many mocked the idea, The Next Web’s Matthew Panzarino had this to say about it:

The new email digest should help Twitter to continue its education process, not to gather new users, which it will do organically at this point, but to keep the ones it has and make them more engaged with the service.

Be sure to read his full post here.

Pinterest raises $100 million

Breaking the news that Pinterest was set to announce new funding, it was soon revealed by AllThingsD that the popular pinning site raised $100 million from previous investors, with one new name thrown in the mix – Japanese ecommerce giant Rakuten.

Previous backers Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital and a few other angel investors also participated in the round.

Speaking about the investment, Rakuten CEO Hiroshi Mikitani said:

“While some may see e-commerce as a straightforward vending machine-like experience, we believe it is a living process where both retailers and consumers can communicate, discover, and curate to make the experience more entertaining.

We see tremendous synergies between Pinterest’s vision and Rakuten’s model for e-commerce. Rakuten looks forward to introducing Pinterest to the Japanese market as well as other markets around the world.”

More ‘ghost-town’ reports on Google+

Ghost town: It would seem that there is no more popular term used when trying to prove that Google+ is already a flop. Fast Company points to a new report which “reveals minimal social activity and weak user engagement”.

Fast Company reports that RJ Metrics‘ study analyzed 40,000 random Google+users, coming to the following conclusions:

The average post on Google+ has less than one +1, less than one reply, and less than one re-share.
Roughly 30% of users who make a public post never make a second one.
Even after making five public posts, there is a 15% chance that a user will not post publicly again.
Among users who make publicly viewable posts, there is an average of 12 days between each post.
After a member makes a public post, the average number of public posts they make in each subsequent month declines steadily, a trend that is not improving.

Of course, any studies on Google+ activity that are not conducted by Google itself has to be taken with a grain of salt, since private posts cannot be accounted for in the numbers, which is exactly what a Google spokesperson told Fast Company.

If RJ Metric’s figures are accurate, it does not bode well for Google. Fast Company places the blame of so many ‘Ghost Town’ labels on Google itself, saying that the company’s refusal to share any engagement statistics, or the number of active users, leaves far too much room for speculation.

Not everyone agrees with that perspective, however. Our own Drew Olanoff says that Google isn’t sharing its numbers because it doesn’t have to, but that was back in December. The question is, how long can we continue to make that argument for Google?

Be sure to check out the complete study over at Fast Company.

➤ Keep up with our weekly updates here, and don’t forget to follow The Next Web’s social media posts on Facebook and Twitter.

Spring is in the air. We can feel summer just around the corner. To celebrate our love of dresses, skirts and high heels we decided to dive into the world of fashion and find out how technology is re-shaping the industry. We’ve spent the last month traveling the globe, visiting New York, London, Amsterdam, Paris, Los Angeles and Beijing in search of the world’s coolest companies for the May issue of our recent TNW iPad Magazine.

In the issue, we asked 7 entrepreneurs in the Young Entrepreneurs Council about the burgeoning digital fashion industry. Check out their answers below!

How has the Internet changed how people view the activity of buying clothes and fashion? Will the brick-and-mortar clothing store ever become obsolete?

“The Internet has helped the awareness of the ‘small guys,’ as opposed to days when the only brands that would thrive were the ones that could afford to open up a brick-and-mortar in the most prominent locations. Now, brands with a personality that resonates with audiences (e.g., Bonobos) can come to life in an interactive way. The Internet also makes it easier to find reviews about products and learn what your friends have purchased. These two factors combine to allow great products to shine through, whether those products come from established or new brands.

Still, brick-and-mortar is here to stay; the attention, care, expertise and relationships delivered by those who do it right can never be replicated digitally. And of course shopping, like eating a meal with friends, is a social activity best enjoyed with others.”

– Aaron Schwartz, Founder and CEO of Modify Watches

“I have been buying and selling clothes online since 2002 — just tonight, I bought a cute dress for $5 from a Craigslist buyer and love it! The Internet has changed how people view shopping online as a timesaver. It is so much easier to order something online when you know the exact measurements than it would be to browse the mall. For fashionistas who love what celebrities wear, the Internet allows them to know who the designers are immediately.

There are more and more designers who only use the Internet to sell their fashion — new designers can start by using eBay, Etsy, Pinterest, and other sites to help bring new products into the market. Will there be less and less brick and mortars? Yes. I own a brick and mortar and can admit that the rising rent and taxes make it difficult to increase profit margins. However, with the combined use of the Internet and brick-and-mortar, I can achieve sales locally and worldwide. Designers will always use their brick-and-mortars stores for fashion shows, networking events, window displays, and space to showcase their products.”

– Nancy T. Nguyen, Ms. Corporate America 2011 and Founder of Sweet T

What’s one hurdle you’ve found as an entrepreneur associated with the fashion industry?

“As a manufacturer, doing business in the fashion industry has a lot of hidden costs that people don’t realize when they first get started. Retail chains, for example, often ask for various allowances and discounts (such as damage or warehousing deductions), which manufacturers are rarely told about in advance of providing pricing. If, as a first-time supplier, you have not included enough margin to cover these costs in your pricing, you can lose money very quickly, and in significant ways. The same thing can happen if you are not fully aware of which tariff codes apply to your products if you are importing them. The duties can be very different depending on the material or the way something is purchased. The cost of goods can vary by as much as 20%, just based on import costs. Failing to calculate this can create price as well as cash flow problems.”

– Vanessa Nornberg, President of Metal Mafia

“One issue that we are dealing with now is that, since we’ve been going strong with T-shirts for so long, we are viewed as a t-shirt company. We actually view ourselves as a community-based design company — there is this huge community of artists participating on Threadless, sending in hundreds of designs a day. We really want to break free from the t-shirt constraint and create meaningful opportunities for the submitted art on other canvases. It’s been really difficult for us to be able to dive into other categories with as much depth and frequency of releases. And I think that’s true for a lot of fashion companies, if you start out making hats or belts or dresses or pants, it can be hard to expand your brand into other products.”

– Jake Nickell, Founder of Threadless

“The greatest hurdle I’ve found as an entrepreneur in the fashion industry is balancing when and how to approach strategic partners — engineering talent, brands partners and potential investors. There are many people who understand either fashion or technology, but few who understand both at an intimate level and getting buy-in as you build your business is critical.

The fashion industry has somewhat of a ‘herd’ mentality, and getting social proof early can be extremely helpful for a young start up. We initially approached our strongest relationships, and garnered support from executives of well-respected brands first, which helped to secure relationships with top retailers even before we started to build out the product. Incorporating feedback from potential users, designers, bloggers, retailers and PR firms throughout product development was important for our company. However, there’s a balance between how early and raw a concept is when you are sharing your vision with people in the fashion industry. The lean startup mentality doesn’t work well for business development, so there’s an art to crafting your story and product development process.”

– Karen Moon, Co-Founder and CEO of StyleMusée

What does the future look like for tomorrow’s fashionistas?

“The future of fashion lies in co-creation and collaborative design. Trends will continue to trickle down from the runways and trickle up from the street. Brands will continue to search for creative ways to attract fickle consumers and stand out. For Millennials, this means giving consumers a glimpse into the fashion production process. Involving users in the creative process is proven to make them value the brand more, engage with the brand more, and shop for it more frequently.

I take inspiration from the innovative campaigns such as Bergdorf Goodman’s Fendi Frenzy Color Challenge, Derek Lam’s crowd-selected eBay collection, and Polyvore’s Rebecca Minkoff Runway Design Challenge, among others. These influencers all point to the fact that co-creation leads to higher brand loyalty and repeat sales. At Stylyt, we let consumers play fashion designer for their favorite brands. This not only gives consumers a real voice, but also provides brands with a visual, interactive and predictive method to find out what consumers want to buy, before anything hits stores.”

– Nina Cherny, Co-Founder of Stylyt

“My work as founder and CEO of Poshly Inc. hinges on a vision of the fashionable future being all about personalized shopping online. We believe it is inevitable and exciting. Poshly is working on understanding and implementing technologies that better target content and commerce to consumers from brands and e-tailers. This is yearned for by fashionable consumers who are already burdened by thousands of product choices and myriad product literature. Personalization is also imperative for brands and e-tailers — and their agencies — in order to access the elevated marketing ROI possible with personalization solutions. Curation-based systems, such as Birchbox or BeachMint, were just the first step.

Fashion is a massive industry, and e-commerce is even bigger. There will be more hardcore technology coming into the space to cater to the whole ecosystem around style shoppers. I believe that products and services online, on mobile, and in-store must cater to the consumer’s unique sense of self.”

– Doreen Bloch, Founder and CEO of Poshly

.shock via shutterstock

London has always been a massive contributor to the international fashion scene. From world-famous designers like Paul Smith, Stella McCartney, Vivienne Westwood and the late Alexander McQueen to the bevy of gorgeous faces like Kate Moss, Lily Cole and Agyness Deyn that grace the runways, London has produced some of the most memorable brands and icons.

In fact, Net-a-Porter and ASOS, two of the most well known sites who’ve led the digitization of the online retail are both based in London. It seems natural then to look towards London’s fashion focused technology startups to get a glimpse of some of the upcoming innovations that are disrupting and evolving the industry.

OSMODA: Enabling emerging brands to rapidly scale their e-commerce offerings

Newly launched in April 2012, Osmoda partners with emerging fashion brands by providing powerful e-commerce solutions to help designers quickly scale their businesses. While many of the world’s most exciting up-and-coming brands, such as Bora Aksu and Craig Lawrence, sell in boutiques in dozens of countries and have thousands of Google search requests every month, they have little to no e-commerce presence due to the online dominance of mega-brands.

Osmoda offers designers a platform that features painless selling, inventory management, high-end photography, logistics, and payment processing, enabling them to focus on what they love best: creating beautiful collections. In addition, Osmoda stays on top of technological trends in e-commerce ensuring that brands are always able to deliver the best possible online experience for their customers.

Osmoda takes a percentage of sales, a model that maximizes the revenue per item sold. Co-founder Will McQuillan, a former investment banker, emphasizes that this is more than just a retail platform, it’s an opportunity to form long-term partnership with some of the most exciting brands and be a facilitator to their growth. “We believe we should work with the brand, sharing both risks and rewards,” he said. “Through this model there is a commitment and investment on both sides to see the brand scale quickly to consumers around the world.”

There are currently 4 designers on the platform, with more added each month. Osmoda was founded by McQuillan, Jonathan Fren and Alex Philip Gough, who were drawn to the commercial opportunity the fashion industry offered. “We are all people who are innately curious and fast learners,” said Gough, who formerly studied as a barrister. “Besides, the skills needed to structure and manage a distribution company flow naturally from law and finance. The ‘fashion’ side is a learning curve, but we’re both highly skilled at finding the right people to support us.” Osmoda counts designers, professional buyers and other industry experts on their advisory board.

Lyst: Socially Curated high fashion

Lyst describes itself as a “social shopping site that helps you discover the best fashion for you.” Founded by Chris Morton, Sebasjan Trepca and Devin Hunt, the platform helps users keep track of when an item shown on the runway is available for purchase. Users can follow designers, specific items, brands, collections, runway shows, and even other users to generate a customized feed of items that appeal to them. The site was released in beta in May of 2011.

For co-founder and CEO Chris Morton, fragmentation is one of the a big challenges facing the fashion industry. “There are thousands of points of purchase for people to buy things online. Even if you know them all, you still have to visit them individually,” he said. “Lyst aggregates all that information for you in one place, and enables you to track various items making it easy to take advantage of a sale.”

Another big issue is discovery: the sheer volume of available stock is quite daunting, and understanding which item makes sense for a buyer can be complicated and overwhelming. Type in “blue sweater” in Google’s image search for example, and you’ll see hundreds of thousands of results. “People are influenced socially rather than rationally when it comes to behaviour so a true algorithm like Google is limited,” he explained. “Users can follow other people who have similar tastes and styles and can help discover pieces that you might be interested in.

This ‘social filtering’ enables my community to help curate the content that’s available and only show me the most relavant pieces of information – that’s what Lyst is doing for fashion.” In November 2010, Lyst raised a £950,000 seed round from Ventrex, SPA, Accel and several New York and London Angels.

Morton mentioned the importance of location when launching a startup, and why his team thought long and hard about the benefits about being based in New York instead of London. “London is the tech center of Europe for startups, there are a lot of VCs as well as other web startups in other verticals that create a very supportive ecosystem that has been very valuable for us,” he said.

Though Morton goes to New York at least twice a month, London eventually won out for two big reasons: ease of access to other fashion hubs such as Paris and Milan, both short flights away, as well as access to talent. “We were able to get developers from around the EU (Spain and Slovenia) relatively easily. Compared to the situation in New York where getting good technical talent is complicated and can sometimes be a bit of a nightmare.”

Lyst, which operates on a commission based business model has helped partners achieve millions of dollars in sales. The company reported growth of 800% in the past 4 months alone and a user base of “tens of thousands”.

Stylistpick: Subscription-based, curated shopping

Stylistpick is a subscription based retail programme that delivers a personalized selection of curated accessories carefully selected to match each user’s style profile. Members fill out a survey to identify their style preferences, and then Stylistpick’s stylists and experts produce a curated list of items that match their tastes. Members can then select one item for £39.95, either choosing to pay-as-they-go or an annual subscription that provides access to VIP events, free next day shipping, trend reports and each 5th purchase is free. It’s a soft-subscription approach, meaning members are not compelled to purchase anything and can skip that month’s offering within a specific time-frame.

Launched in November 2010, Founder and CEO Felix Leuschner saw subscription based curation as the natural addition to the private sale push model. In looking at other business models including Vente Privee and Gilt Groupe, he realized that the personalization of goods being sold would be “the next step in the evolution of e-commerce.” Leuschner says that customers have given very positive feedback to the subscription model as well. “Customers love the fixed price concept which makes it every easy for them to control their spend,” he said. “They love our beautiful packaging and the idea of a monthly treat.” He emphasizes the importance of the expert advice of his team of fashion stylists as the main draw for the site’s 600,000 members.

In February of 2012, StylistPick raised an $11 million Series B round of funding which will be used to drive the business’ growth as well as expand into additional markets.

Leuschner said that London’s e-commerce market size (the biggest in Europe) appealed to him. “You have a big market, which means that with the large amount of fashion companies you have a very strong infrastructure that makes it an ideal environment to grow a business.”

Covetique: Secondary market for pre-owned luxury goods

Covetique is a secondary market for pre-owned luxury goods. All luxury item Sellers send their products to Covetique which holds them on consignment until they are sold. Holding the goods gives Covetique the advantage of being able to authenticate all luxury items, ensure the item is in good quality, provide consistent photography, make sure the prices are aligned with the market, and guarantee fast, reliable shipping within 24 hours. This delivers a more pleasant and stress-free transaction for both buyers and sellers. Buyers can rest easy knowing they are purchasing quality goods and sellers don’t have to trouble themselves with the logistics of managing the transaction.

For CEO and co-founder Nicola McClafferty, a seamless transaction is essential in today’s online marketplace. “Online buyers and sellers of luxury items are very sophisticated. They are getting smarter about extracting value from their possessions as well as maximizing their purchasing dollars,” she said. “Particularly in the UK, buyers have high expectations. They aren’t willing to compromise on the online retail experience, even if they aren’t paying full price.”

CEO and co-founder Nicola McClafferty

Covetique also has several social curation features including the ability for sellers to create profiles and for buyers to be able to follow specific items, brands or even a particular clothing size. This adds a community element to the consumer experience enabling them to discover, share and shop new items in a personal way.

Along with her co-founder and COO Bobby Devins, McClafferty said she was fascinated by luxury brand orientated secondary markets due to the emerging consumer shifts she saw taking place after the economic downturn. “People are thinking differently about their assets, they want to maximize the value they can recoup from what they own,” she explained. “eBay is clearly a global platform but for certain kinds of buyers and sellers it’s not the right one. We set up Covetique to be the secondary market for pre-owned luxury items.”

McClafferty says she sees a real momentum in the startup community of innovative ideas centered around fashion. “Especially for consignment, which is a new concept here in the UK compared to New York, but we’re seeing a demand for it,” she says. In addition, London’s history with companies like Net-a-Porter has created a high concentration of value sellers who are familiar and comfortable with shopping and selling online. “There is a whole network of individuals who have worked with these companies, and so there is familiarity that creates a strong retail market. London is a great hub of interesting, up-and-coming ideas.”

Covetique doesn’t officially launch until the end of the month, but they did soft-launch their site in November 2011. “It’s quite remarkable,” McClafferty said. “With virtually little to no marketing and soft-launch we’ve already seen a big international interest. We’ve shipped goods to the US, Asia and all over Europe.”

EDITD: Using big data to demystify fashion trends

EDITD is a data focused powerhouse that helps businesses stock (or make) the items that consumers want to buy. “This is something the fashion industry has always struggled with,” said Geoff Watts, co-founder and Director. “The industry has always had problems internalizing things that they learn from business intelligence, because product lines change so often, as well as understanding who their customers are exactly and what influences matter to their particular brand.”

That’s where EDITD comes in. Through careful data analysis, trend tracking, and forecasting, clients can gain insights that can help drive better decision making. “Our customers can do things like, say, understand exactly what price point customers in the US are prepared to pay for acid wash skinny jeans. Or whether the peplum trend is going to sell well for the next quarter. Or when an online retailer usually runs a promotion on footwear,” Watts said. “It’s become essential for merchandisers, designers, wholesale buyers and marketing people.”

Watt’s co-founder, Julia Fowler was a fashion designer who saw tremendous opportunity merging big data with the fashion industry. The founders are both originally from Australia, so the move to London was a deliberate one. “London or NY are the two places in the world you could do this, and London has the rest of Europe on its doorstep, a very strong technical scene, and has been fusing art and commerce, as well as art and science for centuries,” Watts explained. “We’re glad we’re here; though we’re opening up in NY shortly too.”

EDITD is privately held but growing quickly with a team of just over 20 people. In two years, the company has worked with clients across the UK and Europe, the Americas, South Africa and Australia.

Also read: Behind the design: An interview with Not Just a Label.

r.nagy via shutterstock

In a move that is all too unsurprising, Pakistan has blocked social networking site Twitter, over a series of “blasphemous drawings”, The Express Tribune reports.

The crackdown comes just a few months after the Pakistani government withdrew its Web censorship plans, which would have restricted access to over 50 million URLs in the country. It also comes just one day after the Interior Minister had claimed, through a tweet no less, that Twitter would not be blocked in the country.

Ironically, the Interior Ministry’s denials, can now not be seen within Pakistan unless you happen to be using a workaround, or according to some reports, mobile access.

Twitter has reportedly come under fire due to a competition putting out a submission call for depictions of the Prophet Mohammed, making it the second time a social networking site has been blocked in Pakistan for the exact same reason.

Yesterday, a Pakistani TV news channel quoted Information and Technology Minister, Raja Parvez Ashraf, as saying that the government could easily block sites like Facebook and Twitter over a new set of blasphemous depictions, prompting the Interior Minister to take to Twitter to allay Pakistani netizen’s fears.

In 2010, Pakistani Internet users were denied access to Facebook, and later YouTube and Wikipedia, following a court-ordered ban. The blockade, which was later lifted, was in response to a Facebook group calling for users to submit caricatures of Prophet Mohammed as part of “Draw Mohammed Day”.

Speaking to The Express Tribune, Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) Chairman, Dr. Mohammed Yaseen, said that the Ministry of Information and Technology ordered Twitter to be blocked, with the PTA passing the message on to ISPs. At least four have complied up until now, but what remains unclear is how long the ban will last.

Yasseen added that Twitter refused Pakistani authorities’ request to clamp down on what was viewed as inappropriate content, while according to the Washington Post, Facebook escaped the same fate by complying with authorities, reportedly taking down pages that celebrated the anniversary of “Draw Mohammed Day”.

Following the harsh backlash that Twitter saw earlier this year, due to a decision to comply with governmental requests to suppress content locally, it would appear that Twitter may be owed an apology. The social networking site is reported to have responded to the Pakistani authorities, saying that they “cannot stop any individual doing anything of this nature on the website”.

Update:

In a fast turnaround, Pakistan has restored access to Twitter. According to the Washington Post, “Prime Minister Raza Yousuf Gilani ordered Pakistan’s information technology ministry to restore access to the site”.

Welcome to the latest Last Week in Asia round-up, our selection of the key stories and developments from across Asia’s growing technology and Internet spaces.

This week we are testing a new streamlined format aimed at making the round-up more succinct and useful for our readers.  Feel free to let us know what you think of the new format in the comment section below.

China

Top Story: Baidu aims to rival iOS, Android with own smartphone, OS and app store

After teasing details of its upcoming new smartphone strategy a week previous, last week saw Chinese search giant Baidu finally unveil a new smartphone operating system (OS), app store and device.

The company is targeting the sub 1,000 RMB ($150) market with its new Baidu Cloud OS, and the first device powered by the platform will be the Foxconn-built Changhong H5018.

The device, and others built upon Baidu Cloud — its Android variant — will be tightly integrated with Baidu’s cloud services (as the name suggests), which includes a generous 100GB on its Netdrive (aka Wangpan) storage service.

Interestingly, as TechCrunch points out, Baidu is exploring the possibility of ‘forking’ its own operating system from Windows Phone 7 and iOS platforms. The company’s bold move is aimed at making it the layer of choice for smartphone makers targeting the Chinese market.

Also of note:

• China finally approves Google’s Motorola Mobility acquisition, deal likely to close next week: Three months after US and Europe, China gave the controversial deal the green light.

• China’s Tencent focuses on mobile, ecommerce and overseas growth with restructuring: Tencent restructured its business to focus on developing its core strengths to continue its impressive growth.

• Evernote’s new China service sees more signups than US and Japan combined during its first week: User registration numbers for Yinxiang Biji have been “off the chart”, Evernote GM for Asia Pacific told The Next Web.

• China Mobile chief reveals ongoing talks with Apple over the iPhone: The head of China Mobile revealed that the world’s largest operator remains in discussions with Apple.

India

Top story: Second Indian ISP reportedly blocks video and torrent sites, citing a “court order”

Concerns over Indian ISP Reliance’s move to block Vimeo, other video services and certain torrent sites was heightened last week, as Airtel followed suit.

The rival ISP was found to be blocking access to the online video service, DailyMotion, The Pirate Bay, Isohunt.com, Pastebin, Xmarks and others.

The company cited a court order as the reason for the block, which suggests that a further crackdown on the selected sites could be forthcoming in India.

The incident prompted a large scale backlash from Indians, bitterly upset at having authorities rule over which sites they can use. Indeed, the news prompted members of Anonymous to take down government websites in response.

Also of note:

• India tipped to overtake the US to become the world’s biggest Facebook market by 2015: Gartner analyst Shalini Verma predicted that India will overtake Brazil and the US to become Facebook’s biggest market within the next three years.

• [PluggdIn] Anonymous Takes Down Congress And Supreme Court Website, Gets It All Wrong: Indian startup and tech blog Pluggdin explains why Anonymous took the wrong course of action in response to the site blockades.

• [The Hindu] India’s proposal for government control of Internet to be discussed in Geneva: In light of recent issues with content control in India, the country is proposing that the Internet should be globally regulated at government level.

Japan and Korea

Top story: Confirmed: Pinterest raises $100 million from Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten, previous backers

We broke news of Pinterest’s latest round of funding the day before it was announced, but the big surprise of the $100 million funding was that it was led by Japanese ecommerce giant Rakuten.

Certain details of the round remain undisclosed — but it is thought to value the site in excess of $1 billion, our source revealed — and it was completed by existing investors.

The participation of Rakuten suggests that Pinterest is looking into the possibility of monetising its red-hot pinning service in the near future.

Rakuten CEO Hiroshi Mikitani said that he sees “tremendous synergies between Pinterest’s vision and Rakuten’s model for ecommerce”, and the Japanese giant will help launch the social media site in Japan and the 17 other markets where it operates.

Also of note:

• Flipboard launches a fully localized edition of its app for Japan: Following France and China, Japan is the third country to get its own version of the smash hit social magazine app.

• Japan’s DoCoMo unveils cloud services, including a translator and 5GB of storage: DoCoMo revealed its projects for the year, including a number of news services and 16 new smartphones…but still no iPhone.

• Japan’s top social network Mixi is reportedly set for new ownership: Industry speculation suggests Mixi’s co-founder and CEO is looking to offload his 55 percent stake in the company.

• Yahoo Japan: CEO change won’t affect prospective sale of Yahoo Inc stake: Yahoo Japan denied speculation that another change at the top might affect Yahoo’s attempts to offload its stake in the Japanese joint venture.

Southeast Asia

Top story: Facebook co-founder Saverin: Renouncing US citizenship “nothing to do with taxes”

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg rang the bell on Friday as the company listed on the Nasdaq, completing the largest Internet IPO ever.

In the run up to the move, that values the social network, the world’s media also cast its eye on one resident of Singapore: Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin.

News that Brazilian-born Saverin had renounced his US citizenship dominated much of the press last week. In response, the billionaire spoke out in a rare media interview in which he denied that the move had anything to do with avoiding US federal taxes.

“This had nothing to do with taxes. I was born in Brazil, I was an American citizen for about 10 years. I thought of myself as a global citizen,” he told The New York Times.

Also of note:

• [Coconuts Bangkok] Bangkok is top town for Facebookers in the world, as Asia fuels growth: Thailand’s capital city Bangkok is now the world’s ‘Facebook capital’ after its total of 8.68 million Facebookers took it past previous top dog Jakarta (Indonesia).

• [SG Entrepreneurs] Singapore’s m-commerce market jumps seven-fold to US$259M in one year: PayPal’s Online and Mobile Shopping Insights 2011 study shows that mobile-based buying has grown massively on the island state.

Startup of the week

Streaming service Spuul brings Bollywood to the iPhone and iPad with new iOS app

Indian video streaming service Spuul launched its iOS app last week, bringing Bollywood and other movies from the Asian country to the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

Spuul includes a number of free films, and its paid catalogue can be accessed via a monthly unlimited fee while its blockbusters are sold independently for a one off $0.99 payment.

You can get the full scoop by reading our write up, or go straight to the App Store.

That’s all for this week until next Sunday – you can keep up with all of our Last Week in Asia round-ups here or follow @TheNextWebAsia on Twitter for news as it happens.

Since About.me set the standard for how to create a splash page, giving users one place to link to their many online profiles, we’ve seen quite a few niche spin-offs targeting musicians, small businesses and professionals. The latest of its kind, Pictually has joined their ranks, with a unique twist which will appeal to photographers and visual artists.

Heading over to Pictually, you have to request an invite to sign up, but the site is actually in public beta, so there is no wait. You’ll instantly receive an email prompting you to create your Pictually profile.

Setting up your page

The process on Pictually is extremely easy. The first thing you’ll want to do is enter your profile information. This consists of a ‘subtitle’, bio, and profile photo. The profile photo will not be displayed on your homepage, appearing instead on a separate ‘About’ tab.

The next step is where you can get all of your social profiles featured onto your Pictually page. Supported services include social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram), blogging platforms (Tumblr, WordPress, Blogger), as well as a list of designer and photographer staples including Behance, Flickr, DeviantArt and more.

The final step is what sets Pictually apart as a splash page option. In addition to uploading a background full screen image, you can also upload individual albums, to be displayed on a separate ‘Gallery’ tab.

The catch here, however, is that you have to find a background image which will not distract from your photos, as albums are displayed one after the other, as a grid of thumbnails over that image.

Individual photos from your albums can also be featured on your front page, if you want visitors to see the very best of your work the minute they land on your Pictually profile.

If we had just one request, it would be the ability to change the background for each tab. That way, you won’t be limited when choosing a photo you want to showcase as a full-screen image on your homepage. Since this is the very first thing visitors are going to see – you want it to be good. A plain or minimalist image would then work best on your ‘Gallery’ tab.

Our verdict

Pictually is a great option if you’re looking for a quick and easy way to throw together a photography or artist portfolio. We’d be a little surprised, however, if a designer opted for a cookie-cutter site rather than come up with something themselves, particularly as Pictually still doesn’t allow users to tweak fonts, colours or layout.

Pictually makes it easy to get an online gallery up and running in a matter of minutes, with the added and essential bonus of linking to all your profiles around the Web. The site can be used to complement a more comprehensive portfolio, by showcasing the very best work you have to offer, while linking to a complete collection elsewhere.

What do you think of Pictually? Let us know in the comments.

➤ Pictually

• Long Page Scrolling Designs That Work
• Dropico Mobile - Developers of Leading Photography Apps.

When it comes to the sophisticated world of typography, some people are purists, while others have a laid-back, do-whatever-looks-good mentality. No matter what side you’re on, it’s important to learn the language of design, especially type — this applies to all designers, curious commoners and even some developers, so buckle up! You’re about to learn something…

Here’s a bit of information that I never knew until two days ago while working with Typecache for our list of 30 alternatives to Helvetica:

“Font” and “typeface” are not interchangeable.

“Typeface”  should be used when referring to the design, while “font” should be used when referring to the file, copy or file-type. For example, there is only one Times New Roman typeface designed by Victor Lardent, but nearly everyone with a computer has a copy of that font. A font is what you actually use.

To dig deeper into this slightly confusing terminology crisis, I’d like to direct your attention to a 2008 article written by FontFeed. Note: the MP3 analogy is particularly important:

The first terminology we agreed upon was in which situations we’d use font and whentypeface. Mark Simonson once recapped it handsomely in this discussion on Typophile. The gist of it is that:

“the physical embodiment of a collection of letters, numbers, symbols, etc. (whether it’s a case of metal pieces or a computer file) is a font. When referring to the design of the collection (the way it looks) you call it a typeface.”

Nick Sherman used an interesting analogy in a comment on Typographica’s Our Favorite Typefaces of 2007:

“The way I relate the difference between typeface and font to my students is by comparing them to songs and MP3s, respectively (or songs and CDs, if you prefer a physical metaphor).”

Stephen Coles agrees:

‘When you talk about how much you like a tune, you don’t say: “That’s a great MP3”. You say: “That’s a great song”. The MP3 is the delivery mechanism, not the creative work; just as in type a font is the delivery mechanism and a typeface is the creative work.’

Update, Nov. 12 2008 – Norbert Florendo commented with this concise explanation:

“font is what you use, and typeface is what you see.”

Of course, some people out there aren’t picky about this sort of thing, but it’s still a good idea to know the terminology. From here on out, I am personally going to make an effort to always use the correct terms, but there will be designers that couldn’t care less.

If you’re still confused about when to use which term, you’re not alone, and this subject is not without controversy. Some believe that “font” or “font family” refers to a collection of typefaces as well as the file, while others argue that “type family” is the proper term. For more, it’s worth exploring these articles by AIGA, Inspiration Bit and Jon Tangerine.

What do you think? Has this become a non-issue, or is the debate still relevant?

In a post shared on the official White House Blog today, the Obama administration expressed its support for Twitter’s move to join the ranks of sites employing the privacy feature, Do Not Track.

The privacy feature, which Twitter now supports in all browsers, allows users to opt-out of third-party tracking cookies, including those used for advertising.

In its post, the White House explained the importance of tech companies adopting the Do Not Track feature, emphasising the importance of seeing the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights become a reality:

As much as people use and love the internet and other digital technology, there has been a growing concern that rapid advances in technology can lead to an erosion of personal privacy. As the Internet evolves, maintaining consumer trust is essential for the continued growth of the digital economy. That’s why the Obama Administration unveiled a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights in February, to give users more control over how their information is used online (download as PDF). Immediately an association of over 500 companies (including search engines, internet platforms, advertising networks and browser developers) committed to expanding individual control with “Do Not Track” technology before the end of 2012.

Referring to Twitter’s move as “an important step”, the White House applauded the tech company for its decision:

In the meantime, the actions of Twitter and others show that when companies are mindful of basic privacy principles articulated in the Obama Administration’s Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights and blueprint as they design their services, the very same creative energy that has led to the development of extraordinary new Internet technologies can also help to protect Americans’ privacy.

In stark contrast to social networking sites like Facebook, which at one point tracked users even when logged out, Twitter will soon be joined by Yahoo and Google who will be rolling out Do Not Track services of their own.

It hasn’t been all good news in Washington as far as Internet privacy is concerned. Privacy activists have been fighting against the ‘new SOPA’, CISPA, which has now made it past the House and is in the hands of the Senate.

CISPA would allow tech companies to hand over traffic information to the US government, under the guise of protecting against cyber threats. The problem with CISPA is that it opens the door to online surveillance, or worse.

That said, Obama’s administration itself has already taken a stance against CISPA, putting the future of the bill into doubt, while simultaneously placing its weight behind the Do Not Track initiative.

The White House post about Twitter can be read in full here.