Facebook is in what’s called a recruiting sweet spot right now. Out of control growth in users and revenue and a nearly certain IPO run in the near future. That’s when employee growth expands at the greatest rate for a company as it grows from hundreds to thousands and then tens of thousands of employees. And with low priced private stock as currency, companies in that position can generally get anyone they want.

Yahoo of course does more than its fair share of feeding the beast, but they’re everyone’s favorite recruiting pool right now. But plenty of Googler’s are heading to Facebook, too – LinkedIn is tracking 118 of them to date. For some Googlers, it’s paying off just to go get an offer from Facebook and then tell their employer – a counter offer is almost sure to come, and it may be stratospheric.

One recent Googler, we’ve confirmed, was recently offered a counter offer he couldn’t refuse (except he did). He was offered a 15% raise on his $150,000 mid level developer salary, quadruple the stock benefits and…wait for it…a $500,000 cash bonus to stay for a year. He took the Facebook offer anyway.

Sources close to Google tell us that about 80% of people stay when they’re offered a counter to a Facebook offer. But some still leave. Part of that may be that Facebook is quietly telling people, never in writing, that there’s no reason their stock won’t hit $100 billion in total valuation over the next couple of years. No guarantees, yadda yadda, but hey if you get 1/10 of 1%, that’s $100 million in stock. Now it’s a party.

Google isn’t making these kind of counter offers to everyone, but it’s not a one off, either. It seems to me that every Google engineer at least should be taking a personal day to go collect a Facebook offer. Even if it’s just to get a counter offer from their current employer.

Art: Audrey Fukuman

(This post is coauthored by Alexander Thomson and Daniel Abadi)

It is a poorly kept secret that NoSQL is not really about eliminating SQL from database systems (e.g., see these links). Rather, systems such as Bigtable, HBase, Hypertable, Cassandra, Dynamo, SimpleDB (and a host of other key-value stores), PNUTS/Sherpa, etc. are mostly concerned with system scalability. It turns out to be quite difficult to scale traditional, ACID-compliant relational database systems on cheap, shared-nothing scale-out architectures, and thus these systems drop some of the ACID guarantees in order to achieve shared-nothing scalability (letting the application developer handle the increased complexity that programming over a non-ACID compliant system entails). In other words, NoSQL really means NoACID.

Our objective in this post is to explain why ACID is hard to scale. At the same time, we argue that NoSQL/NoACID is the lazy way around these difficulties---it would be better if the particular problems that make ACID hard to scale could be overcome. This is obviously a hard problem, but we have a few new ideas about where to begin.

ACID, scalability and replication

For large transactional applications, it is well known that scaling out on commodity hardware is far cheaper than scaling up on high-end servers. Most of the largest transactional applications therefore use a shared-nothing architecture where data is divided across many machines and each transaction is executed at the appropriate one(s).

The problem is that if a transaction accesses data that is split across multiple physical machines, guaranteeing the traditional ACID properties becomes increasingly complex: ACID's atomicity guarantee requires a distributed commit protocol (such as two-phase commit) across the multiple machines involved in the transaction, and its isolation guarantee insists that the transaction hold all of its locks for the full duration of that protocol. Since many of today's OLTP workloads are composed of fairly lightweight transactions (each involving less than 10 microseconds of actual work), tacking a couple of network round trips onto every distributed transaction can easily mean that locks are held for orders of magnitude longer than the time each transaction really spends updating its locked data items. This can result in skyrocketing lock contention between transactions, which can severely limit transactional throughput.

In addition, high availability is becoming ever more crucial in scalable transactional database systems, and is typically accomplished via replication and automatic fail-over in the case of a crash. The developer community has therefore come to expect ACID's consistency guarantee (originally promising local adherence to user-specified invariants) to also imply strong consistency between replicas (i.e. replicas are identical copies of one other, as in the CAP/PACELC sense of the word consistency).

Unfortunately, strongly consistent replication schemes either come with high overhead or incur undesirable tradeoffs. Early approaches to strongly consistent replication attempted to synchronize replicas during transaction execution. Replicas executed transactions in parallel, but implemented some protocol to ensure agreement about any change in database state before committing any transaction. Because of the latency involved in such protocols (and due to the same contention issue discussed above in relation to scalability), synchronized active replication is seldom used in practice today.

Today's solution is usually post-write replication, where each transaction is executed first at some primary replica, and updates are propagated to other replicas after the fact. Basic master-slave/log-shipping replication is the simplest example of post-write replication, although other schemes which first execute each transaction at one of multiple possible masters fall under this category. In addition to the possibility of stale reads at slave replicas, these systems suffer a fundamental latency-durability-consistency tradeoff: either a primary replica waits to commit each transaction until receiving acknowledgement of sufficient replication, or it commits upon completing the transaction. In the latter case, either in-flight transactions are lost upon failure of the primary replica, threatening durability, or they are retrieved only after the failed node has recovered, while transactions executed on other replicas in the meantime threaten consistency in the event of a failure.

In summary, it is really hard to guarantee ACID across scalable, highly available, shared-nothing systems due to complex and high overhead commit protocols, and difficult tradeoffs in available replication schemes.

The NoACID solution

Designers of NoSQL systems, aware of these issues, carefully relax some ACID guarantees in order to achieve scalability and high availability. There are two ways that ACID is typically weakened. First, systems like Bigtable, SQL Azure, sharded MySQL, and key-value stores support atomicity and isolation only when each transaction only accesses data within some convenient subset of the database (a single tuple in Bigtable and KV stores, or a single database partition in SQL Azure and sharded MySQL). This eliminates the need for expensive distributed commit protocols, but at a cost: Any logical transaction which spans more than one of these subsets must be broken up at the application level into separate transactions; the system therefore guarantees neither atomicity nor isolation with respect to arbitrary logical transactions. In the end, the programmer must therefore implement any additional ACID functionality at the application level.

Second, lazy replication schemes such as eventual consistency sacrifice strong consistency to get around the tradeoffs of post-write replication (while also allowing for high availability in the presence of network partitions, as specified in the CAP theorem). Except with regard to some well-known and much-publicized Web 2.0 applications, losing consistency at all times (regardless of whether a network partition is actually occurring) is too steep a price to pay in terms of complexity for the application developer or experience for the end-user.

Fixing ACID without going NoSQL

In our opinion, the NoSQL decision to give up on ACID is the lazy solution to these scalability and replication issues. Responsibility for atomicity, consistency and isolation is simply being pushed onto the developer. What is really needed is a way for to ACID systems to scale on shared-nothing architectures, and that is what we address in the research paper that we will present at VLDB this month.

Our view (and yes, this may seem counterintuitive at first), is that the problem with ACID is not that its guarantees are too strong (and that therefore scaling these guarantees in a shared-nothing cluster of machines is too hard), but rather that its guarantees are too weak, and that this weakness is hindering scalability.

The root of these problems lies in the isolation property within ACID. In particular, the serializability property (which is the standard isolation level for fully ACID systems) guarantees that execution of a set of transactions occurs in a manner equivalent to some sequential, non-concurrent execution of those transactions, even if what actually happens under the hood is highly threaded and parallelized. So if three transactions (let's call them A, B and C) are active at the same time on an ACID system, it will guarantee that the resulting database state will be the same as if it had run them one-by-one. No promises are made, however, about which particular order execution it will be equivalent to: A-B-C, B-A-C, A-C-B, etc.

This obviously causes problems for replication. If a set of (potentially non-commutative) transactions is sent to two replicas of the same system, the two replicas might each execute the transactions in a manner equivalent to a different serial order, allowing the replicas' states to diverge.

More generally, most of the intra- and inter-replica information exchange that forms the basis of the scalability and replication woes of ACID systems described above occurs when disparate nodes in the system have to forge agreement about (a) which transactions should be executed, (b) which will end up being committed, and (c) with equivalence to which serial order.

If the isolation property were to be strengthened to guarantee equivalence to a predetermined serial order (while still allowing high levels of concurrency), and if a layer were added to the system which accepts transaction requests, decides on a universal order, and sends the ordered requests to all replicas, then problems (a) and (c) are eliminated. If the system is also stripped of the right to arbitrarily abort transactions (system aborts typically occur for reasons such as node failure and deadlock), then problem (b) is also eliminated.

This kind of strengthening of isolation introduces new challenges (such as deadlock avoidance, dealing with failures without aborting transactions, and allowing highly concurrent execution without any on-the-fly transaction reordering), but also results in a very interesting property: given an initial database state and a sequence of transaction requests, there exists only one valid final state. In other words, determinism.

The repercussions of a deterministic system are broad, but one advantage is immediately clear: active replication is trivial, strongly consistent, and suffers none of the drawbacks described above. There are some less obvious advantages too. For example, the need for distributed commit protocols in multi-node transactions is eliminated, which is a critical step towards scalability. (Why distributed commit protocols can be omitted in distributed systems is non-obvious, and will be discussed in a future blog post; the topic is also addressed at length in our paper.)

A deterministic DBMS prototype

In our paper, entitled “The Case for Determinism in Database Systems”, we propose an architecture and execution model that avoids deadlock, copes with failures without aborting transactions, and achieves high concurrency. The paper contains full details, but the basic idea is to use ordered locking coupled with optimistic lock location prediction, while exploiting deterministic systems' nice replication properties in the case of failures.

We go on in the paper to present measurements and analyses of the performance characteristics of a fully ACID deterministic database prototype based on our execution model, which we implemented alongside a standard (nondeterministic) two-phase locking system for comparison. It turns out that the deterministic scheme performs horribly in disk-based environments, but that as transactions get shorter and less variable in length (thanks to the introduction of flash and the ever-plummeting cost of memory) our scheme becomes more viable. Running the prototype on modern hardware, deterministic execution keeps up with the traditional system implementation on the TPC-C benchmark, and actually shows drastically more throughput and scalability than the nondeterministic system when the frequency of multi-partition transactions increases.

Our prototype system is currently being reworked and extended to include several optimizations which appear to be unique to explicitly deterministic systems (see the Future Work section in our paper's appendix for details), and we look forward to releasing a stable codebase to the community in the coming months, in hopes that it will spur further dialogue and research on deterministic systems and on the scalability of ACID systems in general.

People are increasingly sharing different types of information on Twitter. For example, Tweets point to web pages, photos, videos, hashtags, people, check-ins, and more. Exploring Tweets is a great way to discover new and interesting information. And with devices of all shapes and sizes connecting to the Internet, we’re constantly looking for new ways to make this easier. To date, we’ve created applications for a variety of mobile phones, giving you instant access to Tweets and great content when you’re on the go.

Today we are bringing Tweets to a device that really lets content shine - the iPad. Twitter for iPad takes advantage of the iPad’s fluid touch interface, letting you move lots of information around smoothly and quickly – without needing to open and close windows or click buttons. There are a few things we want to point out that make this app a really fast and fun way to read real-time content.

Panes: Tapping on a Tweet opens a pane to the right. Depending on the content in that Tweet, you’ll see a video or photo, or maybe a news story, or perhaps another Tweet. You can continue tapping on Tweets, opening new panes, and getting new content as long as you’d like to. And, it’s really easy to move between panes by swiping to the right or left.


Media: When you tap a video link or open a web page with an embedded video, you can play that video inline. And, let’s be honest, video is great but sometimes it can take some time to load. The panes in Twitter for iPad let you look through your timeline while a video is loading, and then you can just swipe back to the video when it’s ready to play. You can also pinch on a video to watch it fullscreen.

Gestures: You can pinch on a Tweet to quickly view details about the author and to take actions on a Tweet, such as reply or retweet. Put two fingers together and pull down on a Tweet to peek at the replies, showing the entire conversation leading to that Tweet.

We’ve confirmed that wunderkind Jessica Mah is one week away from closing a hotly anticipated round of seed financing for her banking startup InDinero. Confirmed investors in the round (which still has three open spots reserved for valley VIPs like SV Angel) include 500 StartUps‘ Dave McClure, Microsoft’s Fritz Lanman, and YouTube’s Jawed Karim.

Part of the YCombinator class of 2010, InDinero aims to be the Mint for small businesses and is off to a running start as this latest round is set to close between 1 and 1.5 million. We’ve heard reports that she had to turn investors away, and Mah promises that more “juicy details” about the story behind the funding are yet to come.

Perhaps the closest we’ve got to a female Mark Zuckerberg, Mah founded her first startup at age of 13, and entered into the Computer Science program at Berekley at 15, where she started internshipIN.com. In raising over a million at twenty, the serial entrepreneur’s got a ways to go before she gets jaded.

Here’s recent video of her explaining InDinero’s usefulness and simplicity.

The World Economic Forum has announced its list of 31 Technology Pioneers for 2011. The Technology Pioneers are its list of up-and-coming startups. Last year’s list included Twitter, Playfish, and Boston Power. The year before, Mint, Etsy, and Brightcove were named.

Joining the pantheon this year are foursquare, Knewton, Layar, Scribd, and Spotify. However, greentech is equally strong on the list, particularly with smartgrid companies such as OPower and Tendril. Below is the full list of infotech companies that made it, with links to their Crunchbase profiles for more information:

Aster Data (big data)
Atlassian (product management)
Foursquare (Geo-location)
GetJar
Knewton (adaptive learning)
Layar (augmented reality)
NetQin Mobile (mobile security)
OpenDNS (domain names)
ReputationDefender (online reputation monitoring)
Scribd (online documents)
SecondMarket (private securities market)
Spotify (streaming music service)
Vortex Engineering (low-power ATMs)

The attrition rate in Ph.D. school is high.

Anywhere from a third to half will fail.

In fact, there's a disturbing consistency to grad school failure.

I'm supervising a lot of new grad students this semester, so for their sake, I'm cataloging the common reasons for failure.

Read on for the top ten reasons students fail out of Ph.D. school.

Click to read more

Apple announced on Wednesday a cornucopia of new hardware and software: sleek iPods, a brand new Internet-enabled video streaming device and new versions of its iOS software and iTunes 10. However, the most impressive to me by far was Ping, the music-only social network that Apple is opening up its 160 million existing iTunes users.

No, I’m not blown away by the 160 million number. What I’m impressed by is the thinking behind Ping.

Ping may function like a cross between Facebook and Twitter for iTunes by allowing you to follow celebrities, create social cliques and get artist updates via an activity stream. I think it could have tremendous impact on social sharing and commerce.

From a content perspective, there are three different types of media we love to talk about: movies we see, music we listen to and books we are reading. These are accepted social norms. In fact, many relationships are made on the basis of collective love of a movie and many friendships have started with mixed tapes.

It makes perfect sense for a music service to be social. I’m not alone: The popularity YouTube, the fast-growing MOG and the sadly defunct iLike and Imeem show that people gravitate towards music as a common, collective experience. A recommendation from friends on Last.fm often resulted in me buying many-a-few music tracks. My friends who listened to Thievery Corporation turned me on to The Broadway Project and Chris Joss, which I ended up buying on the iTunes store or via Amazon’s MP3 store.

This click-and-go-somewhere-to-download model of affiliate links can never match a unified experience. Amazon, for example, encourages bloggers and others to link to things they like and then get a piece of the action. This separates social from commerce and treats them as two discrete activities. On the post-Facebook Internet, I don’t think anyone can afford to keep these two actions distinct.

Ping, from what little I saw during Steve Jobs’ demo, allows a similar level of social interaction. It can tell me who my friends think are cool and the top 10 favorites of people in my social graph. Some of my friends are famous deejays. Others just have eclectic musical tastes. They can collectively sift through over 10 million songs and help with the discovery of music. This social-powered discovery is part of the biggest theme of our times: serendipity. About two years ago, when I wrote about serendipity, I said:

The problem is that there’s too much data coming online too quickly, and the traditional method of search that involves first finding and then consuming the information is not going to work for much longer. There just won’t be enough time for us to do that and still have a life. It’s a problem, and therefore solving it is an opportunity — a very big opportunity.

My belief has only been affirmed by growth in the amount of data available. With 12 million songs and 250,000 apps, the best way for Apple to enhance the iTunes store – aka its shopping experience — is through the use of social. Back in 2007, I argued that social networking was merely a feature that had to be embedded into applications to enhance their value. Apple has done a great job of that, but it’s also gone one step further, not only by adding a social networking layer to iTunes, but by meshing it with its commerce engine, the iTunes Store. And it’s made this experience available on both the desktop and its devices.

Apple received much of this social capability with the acquisition of Lala, an online music service, which as a standalone company used sharing of social objects to drive folks towards paid music downloads. Now Apple is only closing the loop by further sharing what users bought. I wouldn’t be least bit surprised if sales of music on the iTunes store rocket upwards, thanks to social discovery.

Amazon, which recently started experimenting with Facebook Connect, has similar ideas, but its implementation leaves a lot to be desired. On Amazon, I’m reduced to reading reviews from absolute strangers for music. I have a handful of friends who have impeccable taste in non-fiction business books, are all members of Amazon, and they already use email to share new book suggestions with me.

What if they too could share their likes and dislikes via a social layer inside Amazon.com? Or what if I could follow my favorite authors and get updates on their books? Much like Apple, Amazon owns book-based social service, Shelfari, and should find ways to embed the social layer inside of all Amazon products and connect its tens of millions of users.

Like Apple, Amazon too has a lot more data about its customers and their behaviors and could create a compelling discovery experience. I believe with tens of thousands of products in its store, the retail giant needs to figure out ways to surface content and other offerings smartly.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Why Google Should Fear the Social Web

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When it comes to seed investing, New York City is becoming a hotbed. And now TechStars, the incubator that began in Boulder. Colorado and has spawned nearly 40 startups, is coming to New York. This will be the fourth (and supposedly last) city TechStars expands to, according to CEO David Cohen (the other two are Boston and Seattle).

TechStars is accepting applications for the New York City Class of 2011, which will start in January. TechStars provides a little bit of cash ($6,000 per founder for a three-month program) and a lot of mentorship. The list of New York City mentors includes Foursquare founders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai, Tumblr founder David Karp, VC Fred Wilson, Hunch founder and seed investor Chris Dixon, angel investor Roger Ehrenberg, StockTwits CEO Howard Lindzon, Boxee CEO Avner Ronen, BuzzFeed president Jon Steinberg, and Hot Potato founder Justin Shaffer. Jeff Clavier and Dave McClure snuck in there as well, even though they live in California.

TechStars takes a 6 percent equity stake in each startup in common stock (no board seats), and has a decent track record. Cohen and David Tisch will be running the program. They are looking for about ten startups for the initial New York City class.

Webmaster Level: All

You can now use Google search to find SVG documents. SVG is an open, XML-based format for vector graphics with support for interactive elements. We’re big fans of open standards, and our mission is to organize the world’s information, so indexing SVG is a natural step.

We index SVG content whether it is in a standalone file or embedded directly in HTML. The web is big, so it may take some time before we crawl and index most SVG files, but as of today you may start seeing them in your search results. If you want to see it yourself, try searching for [sitemap site:fastsvg.com] or [HideShow site:svg-whiz.com]

If you host SVG files and you wish to exclude them from Google’s search results, you can use the “X-Robots-Tag: noindex” directive in the HTTP header.

Check out Webmaster Central for a full list of file types we support.

Posted by Bogdan Stanescu and John Sarapata, Software Engineers

New York City startup BankSimple today disclosed that it raised its first venture funding in a round led by First Round Capital, Roger Ehrenberg’s IA Ventures, and Village Ventures, along with seed investors SV Angel (Ron Conway) and Nauiokas Park (Amy Nauiokas and Sean Parker), and . But it did not disclose how much it raised. I’ve confirmed that the round was $2.9 million, with an additional $190,000 raised last year in convertible debt (which converted to shares with this round), for a total of $3.1 million raised.

BankSimple has not yet launched. It is trying to develop a better interface for banking, working with financial institutions to actually hold the deposits. “Anything the customer sees is what we do,” says CEO Joshua Reich. BankSimple is creating a new front-end experience for bank customers both online and through mobile apps. The service will simplify their accounts into a single account and gives them a dashboard to see how much they are saving, how much they can spend, and how close they are to reaching financial goals.

The whole point is to simplify people’s financial lives by giving them a modern Web interface and realtime data linked to their accounts. So when you are about to reach an overdraft, you might get a notification on your phone. The first customers will be required to own a smartphone so they can download one of BankSimple’s mobile apps (iPhone and Android will probably be first). They will be able to deposit a check by taking a picture of one with their cell phone camera. Customers will also get a bank card tied to their account.

“The way banks work is they shove products down the throats of consumers,” says Reich. The more products you sign up for with your bank, the more fees they can charge. BankSimple will not make money from fees. Instead it will split the net interest margin with its partner banks (the net margin interest is the difference between the rate at which banks lend out money and the rate at which they pay depositors). It is looking to partner with wholesale banks to take care of the back end.

This strategy of focusing solely on the user experience contrasts with Betterment, a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist which also tries to simplify the online banking experience with a single, smarter account, but does hold deposits. Reich acknowledges that “we would certainly get more revenues if we did it ourselves,” but does not want to be distracted by regulatory compliance and managing large pools of money. Plenty of banks do that better than BankSimple could. Instead he wants to focus on what banks don’t do well: building a technology company and making the customer experience less harrowing.

Most of us at Boxee are Apple fanboys. If it is silver and it has the Apple logo on it, we pre-order it. If there’s a line around the block, chances are we’re in it.  And everything stops at Boxee HQ while we unbox the latest gadget to come out of Cupertino.  We were incredibly excited when a couple of developers in the community made it possible to run Boxee on Apple TV (as hundreds of thousands of users have done) and the Boxee Remote for iPhone remains one of the most popular interfaces people use to interact with Boxee. Plenty has happened since then.

Now there is a new version of Apple TV coming out and the Boxee Box is launching in November.

We think people want to be able to watch anything that they can watch on their computer, only on their bigscreen TV.  There is an overwhelming consumer expectation that the content we can consume in our cubicles, our dorm rooms, and in our laps should be available in our living rooms, in full 1080p with a gorgeous interface.  It’s a simple premise, but the challenge is to do it in a way that makes sense in that space, so you can put your feet up, grab a remote and start watching. No keyboards, mice, windows or labyrinthine menus. It should be calm and it should be beautiful. And it *must* be open.

We all watched the Apple announcement. We walked away feeling strongly confident about the space it left for Boxee to compete. We have a different view of what users want in their living rooms.  We are taking different paths to get there. The Boxee Box is going to be $100 more expensive than the Apple TV, but will give you the freedom to watch what you want.

We think it’s worth it.

One of the big announcements at Apple’s event today was Ping, the music social network that Apple has baked into iTunes. But it’s not just on iTunes for the computer, it’s also a part of iTunes on the iPhone and iPod touch. This will be a part of the new iOS 4.1 release which is going out to developers right now, and should be out for consumers next week.

In the demo area after the event, Apple had a bunch of iPod touches loaded with iOS 4.1, so we got to play around with it. It’s a pretty slick experience on the device because it’s so simple. Below find some pictures of how it works.

As you can see, Ping is the new middle button on the iTunes app itself. The main screen that loads when you click on it is the Activity stream, which is populated with music choice updates from the people you follow (both friends and artists).

This account happens to follow 27 people. Only artists are shown here, but again, this People tab includes both artists and your friends.

Here’s a page for an artist showing their most recent activity on Ping. Arists can upload pictures (such as from tours) and videos to this feed. Obviously, there is the nice one-click purchase of music.

You can “Like” or “Comment” on any item in this feed.

The “My Profile” tab is obviously the profile tied to this account (in this case, one Erin Steed). She has 0 followers (sad), but it’s not clear if that’s her own choice — Ping has settings so you can can be followed by anyone, have to accept followers, or be followed by no one.

Fairly standard looking comment page — almost Facebook-like (the iPhone version).

Here’s the one-click-to-buy option in the stream.

You can also stream music previews (only 30 seconds still).

Here’s a regular old album page on iTunes — but as you can see there is now the Like and Post button below the main info.

Here’s what comes up when you click on post (a place to comment if you choose).

And here’s what happens when you post — it goes right over to your profile (and in your followers’ streams).

Obviously, all of this info syncs with iTunes on the computer and vice versa.

Twitter is launching the first native app it’s built from scratch tonight, Twitter for iPad. Aimed at fostering content consumption, the app is designed for new users and power users alike.

The iPad app indicates the direction all Twitter-designed apps will be heading, said Leland Rechis, Twitter’s mobile product manager, in an interview at Twitter headquarters on Wednesday. “It’s not about timelines, it’s about consuming information and encouraging exploration.” The iPad app, he added, “is a great place for us to show how important the content is in the tweets.”

Rechis created the app with Loren Brichter, who joined Twitter when it controversially purchased his iPhone Twitter app, Tweetie (which is now Twitter for iPhone, and is actually the same app as the one released tonight, but with different features expressed in the iPad environment).

Twitter for iPad makes use of the device’s touch interface and big-screen real estate by letting users see multiple cascading panels of information. So, for instance, you might click on a person’s twitter handle, open a panel of information about them, then click on one of their tweets, and open another panel that shows the full text of a linked article from the tweet. If users are new or not signed in, the first panel is a scrollable list of recommended users. There are also nice multitouch features, like pinching to see a user’s profile and swiping to see the rest of a thread of a conversation.

At launch, web pages are the only content format fully supported, but Rechis said to expect support for other inline media such as videos. He said Twitter’s mobile group is highly focused on the goal of connecting the Twitter experience to the real world in whatever ways it can. That could be something like location, but it could also be connected to helping a phone or iPad user who’s fiddling with the device on her sofa while watching television.

Twitter for iPad is free, it’s available in all regions, and it should be live tonight. At this point (like other Twitter apps) it does not contain Twitter’s version of advertising (Promoted Tweets).

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

The App Developer’s Guide to Choosing a Mobile Platform

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I've lived in San Francisco for 15 years, which is 15 years more than anyone connected to this ad. San Francisco changed my life. I found a career here. I was married here. I bought property here. I'm never, ever leaving. So I think I can speak to what San Francisco Values really are. Here are a few of them.

Read this post online:
San Francisco Values
By Derek Powazek

TechStars is coming to New York City.  The first program runs from 1/10/11 to 4/8/11.  Applications are open now.  The NY mentor list is stunning and includes the following:

Phin Barnes (First Round Capital), Alex Blum (KickApps), Matt Blumberg (Return Path), Brad Burnham (USV), Jeff Clavier, Dennis Crowley (FourSquare), Chris Dixon (Founder Collective), Roger Ehrenberg, Darren Herman (The Media Kitchen), Jennifer Hyman (Rent The Runway), Alex Iskold (Adaptive Blue), David Karp (Tumblr), Zach Klein (Boxee, Vimeo), Evan Korth (NYU/HackNY), Mike Lazerow (Buddy Media), Ben Lerer (ThrillList), Sam Lessin (Drop.io), Joey Levin (MindSpark, IAC), Howard Lindzon (StockTwits), Eric Litman (Medialets), John Maloney (Tumblr), Dave McClure, Hilary Mason (Bit.ly/HackNY), Jeremie Miller (Telehash), Howard Morgan (First Round Capital), Charlie O’Donnell (First Round Capital), Eric Paley (Founder Collective), Raphael Poplock (ESPN), Alex Rainert (FourSquare), Avner Ronen (Boxee), Naveen Selvadurai (FourSquare), Justin Shaffer (HotPotato), Tim Shey (NextNewNetworks), Andy Smith (Daily Burn), Rex Sorgatz (Kinda Sorta Media), Jon Steinberg (BuzzFeed), Vinicius Vacanti (YipIt), Albert Wenger (USV), Fred Wilson (USV)

David Cohen, who is relocating to NY for January to March of next year, and David Tisch (I’m encouraging him to change his name to just Tisch to save me the brain damage of “which David”) will be running the program.  When we went about setting up the NY program, we evolved our funding model to be as inclusive of the local VC / angel community as we could.  We’ve created a long term funding model, which I expect David Cohen will write about at some point, that we implemented in TechStars Seattle and will be rolling out to Boulder and Boston this year.  As a result, the investors in TechStars NY include many local financial investors such as:

AOL Ventures, DFJ Gotham Ventures, FirstMark Capital, First Round Capital, Foundry Group, IA Ventures, Jove Ventures, Lerer Ventures, RRE Ventures, Social Leverage, Village Ventures, Zelkova Ventures, Peter Hershberg, Josh Stylman, David Tisch, Nate Westheimer, and Kal Vepuri.

When David first talked to me about his idea for TechStars in 2006, if you had asked me if we’d have Boulder, Boston, Seattle, and NY programs up and running by 2010 I would have chuckled (a real chuckle, not my evil laugh chuckle.)  The Seattle program is crushing it already and I’m excited to go spend time up there.  And I can’t wait to see the NY program start cranking.

We’ve got a few other interesting pieces of TechStars news coming over the next month – look out for them!  And, if you are an entrepreneur interested in the TechStars NY program, apply now so you can come to TechStars for a Day on 11/20/10.

It's no secret that Twitter for iPhone (née Tweetie) is often regarded as the gold standard for mobile apps -- it blends functionality, performance, and usability together with a dash of playful quirkiness that works so well Twitter just bought the app and hired developer Loren Brichter in back in April. That delayed the release of an iPad version, but Twitter's finally come through -- and as you'd expect, Twitter for iPad does things just as uniquely as its sister apps on the iPhone and Mac. In fact, we'd go so far as to say a few of its interface conventions will become as commonplace as slide-to-refresh, which was first introduced in Tweetie for iPhone -- but let's not get ahead of ourselves. Read on for more!

Continue reading Twitter for iPad review

Twitter for iPad review originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 01 Sep 2010 23:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Twitter has just announced the service’s official iPad app.

It’s free and comes with a slew of touch interface bells and whistles built right in. The app is intended to allow for seamless navigation between tweets, photos, web pages, videos and other media and updates. It’s also usable even for those who don’t have Twitter accounts.

Twitter for iPad [iTunes link] has a few new UI touches that you haven’t seen elsewhere. These features are custom-designed for the larger screen and touch capabilities of the iPad. It also caters to what the iPad was made for: media consumption rather than creation. Twitter’s Leland Rechis, a mobile UX designer, writes on the Twitter blog that the iPad is “a device that really lets content shine.”

The main interface is a series of panes that can expand and retract based on the kind of content the user wants to access. “Tapping on a Tweet opens a pane to the right. Depending on the content in that Tweet, you’ll see a video or photo, or maybe a news story, or perhaps another Tweet. You can continue tapping on Tweets, opening new panes, and getting new content as long as you’d like,” wites Rechis.

Media viewing is optimized for the iPad, as well. Videos play in-line with other content and can be loaded while you’re browsing through your timeline. You can pinch a video to view it fullscreen, too.

Finally, Twitter has really done some interesting things with touchscreen capabilities in this app. When you pinch a tweet, you’ll see details about the author and have a list of actions you can take, including reply and retweet. A two-finger pull-down gesture will show the entire conversation around a tweet.

It’s a creative way to approach multitouch app building, and we look forward to playing with it ourselves. We’re also really looking forward to what apps may come to other tablets in the future.

The iTunes release is rolling out right now; if you can’t get the latest version of the app right now, wait a bit and try again. And of course, let us know what you think of Twitter for iPad in the comments.

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Withings, the Paris-based company behind the famous tweeting wifi body scale, has just scored 3 million euros from French VC firm, Ventech. It’s the company’s first round of funding and will be used primarily for the development of 2 new products, which should come out within the next 6 months.

For anyone who isn’t already familiar with the company’s first product, the tweeting wifi body scale, it’s a terrific wifi-connected device that tracks your weight. May sound simple but it can recognize up to 8 users and allows you to transfer your weight information to a computer, iPhone or iPad – which is where the Tweeting comes from, obviously. The product launched officially last year on June 25 goes for €129 in France and is a great little way to track a fitness program or diet.

For now, the 20-person company is entirely based in Paris but the product is distributed across several continents. The US accounts for roughly 40 percent of sales – as does Europe – and the rest of the world makes up the remaining 20 percent. With a partner in Japan, the startup it is planning to actively develop distribution in Asia – in Korea and Taiwan in particular.

The team still isn’t releasing info on the number of scales sold-to-date nor details concerning the 2 new products that are currently being developed. But we do know that one of the 2 will most likely be a similar, health-related product and other will be for more casual, everyday use.