I mentioned in my last post that mobile is bridging the digital—not to mention analog— divide in India, with almost half as many new mobile accounts being opened just last January as there are Internet users in the entire country.  And there are a host of interesting companies seeking to leverage that network as some kind of rudimentary, literally “dial-up,” Internet that extends far beyond the country’s 50 million or so Web users.

One of the most ambitious companies I met with during my last trip to India in November was Eko, a mobile banking company. There are a few SMS-based bank applications in India, but Eko differs because the phone isn’t just another channel for the account—it is the account. You make payments and transfer money simply by dialing numbers. It’s so simple, you don’t even need to understand SMS to use it.

It’s an ingenious offering that doesn’t try to be everything to everyone. It aims squarely at the unbanked—some 60% of India’s huge population. For now, Eko is focusing on the 1,000 kilometer corridor between Delhi and Bihar.

It’s a textbook case of the how hard it is to build something incredibly simple within a sandbox of tight constraints—yet that simplicity is the same thing many would argue caused Twitter’s 140-character missives to become so universal. There are no extra bells and whistles with Eko’s service because there’s no room for them, and at the end of the day, probably little need for them.

The accounts are actually held by the State Bank of India, which insures up to 100,000 rupees per account, but Eko’s customers don’t ever go into banks. The “tellers” are the tiny corner groceries that dot every neighborhood and street corner in India’s crammed urban areas and expansive rural areas. They are the center of commerce for those living on intermittent jobs, tips and handouts. These stores sell medications by the pill, shampoo in tiny sachets, cell phone minutes by the Paisa, and frequently extend credit when needed. Eko just seeks to give this already trusted, daily-visited vendor one more thing to sell.

The interface is simple enough for anyone to use, regardless of language or literacy. Just like filling out a check requires you to enter the payee, how much you are paying and sign it and Eko transaction has the same three elements. Eko customers type the bank’s short code, then an asterisk, then the mobile number of the person you are paying, then an asterisk, then the amount, then another asterisk. Then comes the signature. That’s the tricky part, but also the most important, because the account is solely on phones, which can be stolen.

Eko’s founder Abhishek Sinha (pictured above amid his signage) wanted to come up with a cost-affective equivalent of an RSA token, so he created a paper version of it. Account holders get little booklets with pages of 11-digit codes. Seven digits of it are random numbers, with four randomly placed black marks, where the person enters his or her PIN. So even if the booklet is stolen, no one knows the PIN number and they still can’t access the account. There’s a VeriSign logo on the back of each booklet. Sinha reached out to VeriSign to see if they could come up with a better solution– instead they endorsed his.

Freedom from always having to carry cash has obvious safety and empowerment implications. But this is a hard company to build out broadly in a country like India. The very strength of the model to truly reach the unbanked—turning those trusted, neighborhood grocers into tellers—inherently makes it costly and time-consuming to build because there are so many of them serving relatively small neighborhoods and villages. Eko has 30,000 account-holders right now. “I thought it’d be a million by now,” Sinha says. “We’ve had a lot of false starts.”

There’s a cost-time trade off. Since the service launched in late 2007, Eko was outsourcing the management of the grocers to a third party who sells multiple things through the channel already. But evangelizing the product takes more hand-holding, so the number of accounts wasn’t growing. Since November, Eko has taken over the management of these grocer accounts assigning employees to each neighborhood and investing in street promotions, blaring its Bollywood-eque jingle extolling the virtues of banking and bedecking stores with in-store signage. Now new accounts are soaring. Eko had just 6,000 accounts before the switch in strategy. It added 10,000 in January and is now adding 10,000 every 15 days.

But costs are going up too. Sinha, who made some money founding a previous company Six DEE Telecom Solutions, has self-funded the venture until now, and in Eko got a $1.78 million grant from the World Bank and The Gates Foundation. But that money will run out this year. He’s working on raising a venture round now—and hoping to get a whopping $10 million. In his previous startup he says he was turned down by literally hundreds of VCs and says that this time it’s going a lot better. Indeed, he jokes, it’d be hard for it to go worse. For one thing, he’s learned a 60 page PowerPoint is overkill.

Like VNL, the solar-powered, mobile equipment company that was 100% bootstrapped by the founder, this is one of those companies that is tricky to build in India. There’s a huge social need and business opportunity if it hits scale, but there’s also a lack of capital to support deals like this. A venture firm is more comfortable in the $3 million-to-$5 million range and a private equity firm would demand a lot more maturity of the business before it would invest. Had Sinha not invested his savings in the project, it likely wouldn’t have gotten this far.

I asked several times if Sinha was worried. What if he couldn’t raise the money? He laughed every time I asked with a look in his eyes of “Do you know how hard it actually is to be an Indian tech entrepreneur?” He says he’s been through enough to know there’s always a way. (Regular readers know there’s a word for that.)

Facebook plans to announce the availability of a firehose of user data at its F8 developers conference in April, we believe based on research. Such an offering could be similar to the firehose that Twitter has shared with large partners and select small developers building the famous Twitter ecosystem of 3rd party applications around the web. A Facebook representative did not offer a denial, saying only that the company would not comment on speculation.

The huge social network was once private by default, then made controversial changes in December that pushed hundreds of millions of users toward publishing their information in public and now appears aimed to complete the about-face at its F8 developer conference by offering up public user data in a huge river that outside parties can consume, analyze and build on top of.

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It's not clear exactly what would be included in this firehose, it could be a stream of low-value Fan Page promotional content, for example. The most likely thing content to be included though is user activity data published under public privacy settings. There's far, far more of that today than there was just a few months ago.

If you've participated in a supermarket loyalty program, you're familiar with the concept of opting-in to sharing data about your activities with outside parties in exchange for benefits. In that common practice, though, consumers gain shopping discounts but get nothing from the analysis of the data they emit.

In the case of the Twitter Firehose, the much sought-after full feed of public user data from across the site, users gain access to all kinds of interesting applications and insights based on analysis of their use of Twitter.

A Facebook firehose would be much bigger. We're hearing that there will be no launch partners in the announcement, but the imagination runs wild thinking about all the mashup possibilities. We learned last week that user location data is coming to Facebook at F8, now picture all this rich data roaring like a river into the data digesting machines of a wide range of developers all over the world.

A firehose of public Facebook user activity data could function like a living, breathing global census. Cross reference that data with any other data set and we may find an ocean of insights into the human condition, around the world, for slices of people, second by second or over time.

This is something we've been calling on Facebook to do for some time. I've sat with founder Mark Zuckerberg and discussed the importance and potential of releasing aggregate user data at length.

That, though, was before last December when the privacy policy changed.

Privacy Concerns

Is the inclusion of public activity into a firehose programatically available to outside developers a case of broadcast that violates user control and thus privacy?

I don't think it's clear either way. In a discussion about aggregate Twitter data analysis late last year, a representative of the Electronic Frontier Foundation told me that Twitter users had no reasonable expectation that their data wouldn't be redistributed and analyzed in bulk because Twitter was a public forum.

Facebook used to be different. It was private by default, our actions were shared only with friends and family that we gave permission to see our status messages and photos.

Then in December the company made a dramatic shift, prompting users to re-evaluate their privacy settings and making "share with everyone all over the internet" the new default for most options. Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook was only changing to reflect the way the world was changing, but we argued that was a disingenous rationalization of Facebook's culture-changing actions driven in part by its own profit motive. We also argued that by pushing users toward being more public the company was reducing user control over data and spreading distrust about making data available online at all. That put at risk the idea of sharing your data in a way that could be analyzed.

Is there a reasonable expectation that online social networking activity set to "public" will not be redistributed in bulk to outside parties? How can a company like Facebook respect user privacy as much as possible while still achieving the incredible things that can be achieved by making aggregate user data available for analysis?

Let's begin to discuss it.

See also: The personal blog of Cameron Marlow, Facebook's in-house sociologist and big data guy.
Related analysis: Twitter 2.0: API Rate Change Could Lead to a World of New Apps & Features
Chewing on the Issues: Twitter Data Dump: InfoChimps Puts 1B Connections Up for Sale

Last night, during Digg's annual SXSW party, Digg's CEO Jay Adelson announced a set of significant changes to Digg. Among the changes Adelson announced are a streamlined submission process, a personalized homepage, an unlimited amount of topic pages, a new commenting system and better curation tools. Earlier this morning, we got a chance to sit down with Adelson to discuss these changes in greater detail. Some of these changes will surely be extremely controversial in the Digg community and might also make some publishers who rely on Digg's traffic a bit nervous.

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It's hard to underestimate the influence these changes will have on the Digg community. Not only did the Digg team create a completely new backend architecture, but Digg is also making a lot of changes to how the site will work from a user's perspective - some of which will surely be controversial among Digg's most active users.

Digg will launch the new site in alpha in a few weeks. You can sign up for an account here. It's important to note that Digg plans to work directly with its users and is looking for feedback from its alpha users. The alpha site, for example, will feature a large feedback bar at the bottom of every page.

Personalized Homepages as Default

On the new Digg, every user will get a personalized homepage which will be populated with stories that are popular among this user's friends and relate to topics this user has expressed interest in. This personalized homepage will become the default Digg frontpage for all users who have signed in to Digg. Users who are not signed in will still see the old Digg homepage. With this, the Digg team is clearly looking to get more users to sign up for the service. Digg will also update its users' profile pages.

Submitters Lose Power

Another major change to Digg - and one that will surely create some controversy among the most active users of the service - is that the new Digg will de-emphasize the power of submitters and put an even stronger emphasis on who votes for stories, as well as on outside signals from third-party services like Twitter and Facebook. Indeed, the new Digg will now allow publishers to auto-submit their stories through RSS feeds and a number of other mechanisms that the company plans to unveil in the next few weeks. Until now, while Digg didn't forbid publishers to submit their own content, this behavior was generally discouraged by the Digg community.

As Adelson told us, on the new Digg, submitting a story will basically mean that you are the first voter. Currently, a relatively small group of submitters has a lot of power over which stories will appear on the Digg frontpage.

Signals from Twitter, Facebook and Co.

While there will still be a role for those users who regularly discover new and interesting content, the new Digg will put a strong emphasis on votes and signals from your friends on third-party sites like Twitter and Facebook. Indeed, Digg will create a social graph for you that will take all of this information into account when it create your personalized homepage. On the homepage, Digg will also expose why a story appeared in your feed.

While Adelson couldn't go into details, it seems like Digg has established a very good relationship with Twitter and has had access to Twitter's firehose feed to almost a year.

Once the new digg comes out of beta, anonymous users will also be able to vote on stories. While the team is still working out the details, it is clear that Digg is looking to get as many signals as possible to augment the current voting process. It will be interesting to see how Digg will weigh all this information in the creation of personalized pages and the new topic pages.

The submission process for stories that haven't been submitted to Digg already will now be a one-click process.

Digg will also soon use third-party sign-on systems, including Google, Twitter Connect and Yahoo to allow its users to sign in.

Working With Publishers: What Will Happen to the Digg Effect?

Obviously, quite a few publishers will worry that the old Digg effect - which would often take sites down because of the huge amount of traffic a story on Digg's frontpage can create - will now disappear. Adelson, however, who also noted that Digg "wants to be a good source for traffic for publishers," thinks that this new system will create a more regular stream of traffic to publishers.

In the long run, Adelson noted, Digg also plans to open up its advertising platform to share revenue with publishers. This project is still in its early stages, but according to Adelson, this could involve using a widget on the publisher's site or by using Digg's salesforce to sell ad inventory on these sites directly.

To make all of this work, Digg completely stripped out the old infrastructure and started over by building a completely new platform. This, said Adelson, will allow Digg to easily make changes to the frontend and react to user feedback during the alpha and beta phase. At some point in the future, Digg might also open this platform up to third parties.

A Completely New Platform

Digg is clearly taking this new version extremely serious. The company plans to hire 50 engineers this year to help with scaling the architecture. Adelson was clearly proud of the work his team has done on the backend architecture. The new site will be "wicked fast," thanks to a complete retooling of every aspect of the site, up to the point where the bottlenecks for Digg are now network speed and latency. This is quite a feat, given that Digg now offers an almost unlimited amount of topic pages and a personalized homepage for every user - all of which will have to be recalculated constantly.

How Will Users React?

It will be very interesting to see how users will react to all of these changes. Adelson and the rest of the Digg team are very aware that this will create some controversy, but Adelson clearly thinks that this is the right way to go for Digg. The topic pages will allow Digg to cater to users who care about every type of news, be it the Boston Red Socks or the latest gadget news.

For anyone in this business who isn't at SXSW in Austin, Texas this week, pretty much every social media channel feels like sitting next to a high school clique loudly talking about a party you weren't invited to.

If SXSW doesn't interest you, or if you're able to rise above it all, then my hat's off to you and your Zen-like transcendence.

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For those of us who still have some lingering envy or a fear that we're missing out on... well, we're not quite sure what, but something really cool... there's actually some soothing relief this year. Check out the Twitter discussion on the #fakesxsw hashtag: if it doesn't bring a grin to your face, well, maybe you don't deserve to be at SXSW.

And if that doesn't help, well, there's always the Sally Struthers approach.

More Noise to Signal.

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Interested in being a ReadWriteWeb sponsor? Our readers are smart, tech-savvy decision makers; 40% have a graduate degree or PhD, and over 45% play a key role in information technology purchasing decisions. More than 1 million people on Twitter follow us to stay abreast of the latest Web technology trends from around the globe. To find out more about our sponsor packages, visit our advertising page or email our COO.

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Skip to info about: Tableau : Data visualization |Crowd Science: Demographic data |Medill School of Journalism: Digital journalism programs |Mashery: API management services |Rackspace: Cloud computing experts |Sproutbox: Start-up investors |Aplus.net: Web hosting |Clickatell: SMS provider |.Me: Domain Registrar |Conduit: Customized components |MyDomain.com: Domain registrar |Toopia: Our iPhone app developer

Tableau

Tableau Public is a free service that lets anyone publish interactive data to the web in interesting and compelling graphs. Download Tableau Public and in minutes, you can create interactive graphs, dashboards, maps and tables from virtually any data and embed them on your website or blog in minutes. Anyone can do it. You don't need to be a programmer or hire one - no language to learn, no plug-ins, no API. Your blog or website will stand out with colorful, interactive data visualizations. Bloggers using Tableau Public are averaging 3 times more reader comments.

And, once on the web, anyone can interact with your graph and the data. They can re-embed your work, download the data, or create their own visualizations. Check out our gallery to see some of the cool graphs bloggers have created. Or learn how in our 5 minute video.

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Crowd Science

Crowd Science gives online publishers reports on the demographics and attitudes of their audience. We at ReadWriteWeb have signed up to this new service, because demographic data is something we've struggled to get in the past. It's important for any online business to know their audience, so Crowd Science is a welcome addition to the stats armory that most of us in the Internet biz use.

Sign up to get demographic data from Crowd Science.

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Medill School of Journalism

The Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University offers programs that combine the enduring skills and values of journalism with new techniques and knowledge that are essential to thrive in a digital world. You might have a passion for creating finely crafted prose, or for telling stories using visual tools. Maybe you are invigorated by the possibilities of interactive publishing, or by videography for the small screen. Maybe you are an experienced professional looking to renew and retool your multimedia skills. You can find your niche in Medill's graduate journalism program.

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Mashery

Mashery is a platform for Web services, allowing companies to manage their APIs using Mashery's expertise. At the "Business of APIs" conference, Mashery CEO Oren Michels explained to the audience that while APIs are a technology, their use is a business decision. He went on to say that Mashery has helped customers such as WhitePages.com, Thumbplay, Compete.com, and Calais. Check out the white paper "Five steps to scaling your business development using Web services" to discover how you can use APIs for your business.

You can find out more about APIs and their business use at www.mashery.com.

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Rackspace

Rackspace is one of the world's largest hosting providers, but it's also competing in the cloud computing arena. Rackspace Cloud Hosting offers a suite of services which combines a scalable web and application hosting platform (Cloud Sites) with a cloud storage solution (Cloud Files) and on demand server instances (Cloud Servers). The addition of SliceHost a popular cloud computing and hosting provider and JungleDisk, a favorite online backup service that supports Cloud files, makes the Rackspace Cloud a powerful cloud hosting solution.

Explore Rackspace's hosting and cloud computing solutions.

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Sproutbox

SproutBox is an elite team of product developers, creatives, and business experts that invest their talent full-time in start-ups. SproutBox's new approach to venture capital has helped launch several successful companies including: CheddarGetter, a subscription billing and analytics tool; ScheduleThing, an online scheduling and reservations app; and Squad, a web-based collaborative code editor.

To apply for start-up funding or find out more information visit sproutbox.com.

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Aplus.net

Aplus.net offers a variety of services relating to Web hosting, including shared hosting, Web design, marketing and online advertising services, search engine optimization, e-commerce solutions, and domain registration.

You can register for Aplus.net here.

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Clickatell

Clickatell has over 22,000 customers utilizing our service from small mom & pop outfits to large Fortune 500 companies including Avaya, Oracle, Shell, Barclays, BP, CNN, BBC and more. Here's why you should trust us to mobilize your business: Our SMS gateway offers you wider coverage than any other SMS provider delivering messages to 600 network operators in 200 countries. Our gateway is not limited to SMS text messaging. You can also send a number of other message types including Ringtones, VCards, Binary, EMS, Unicode, Flash SMS, WAP Push, and more.

Clickatell offers you direct connectivity to its core SMS gateway platform via a number of APIs (application programming interfaces) including; HTTP (internet post), SMPP, FTP, XML, SMTP (email to SMS), SOAP and COM Object. Each API has full documentation with sample code where applicable. Learn more about Clickatell here.

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.Me

.Me is a Top Level Domain of a small, south-east European country of Montenegro, which restored its independence in 21st century. Due to its unforgettable meaning and truly personal tone, most of the registration restrictions have been cancelled. Some of the prominent tech and advertising savvies recognized TLD's potential and grabbed their .Me domain name. In less than 20 months 360.000 domains were registered by people from 200 different countries.ME is perfect for "yourname.me" blog or "yourname@surname.me" email address.

It is also widely used as a call-to-action domain (notify.me, retwt.me) and as a social (YouAnd.Me) or community network (Missouri.Me, Oklahoma.Me). One may also choose to send a cool personal message (WillSheMarry.Me). In addition, some of the biggest companies recognized its branding potential and started using .ME for various purposes. Check out Facebook (Fb.Me), Wordpress (Wp.Me), USA Today (USAT.Me), Universal Pictures (Despicable.Me) or Zappos.com (Zapp.Me). It seems that some countries are luckier than others when it comes to domain names. Are you lucky enough to grab your own .ME?

Thank .Me for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

Conduit

Conduit enables Web publishers to distribute their offerings both directly and through its global network of 220,000 publishers and their 100 million users. The Conduit platform is a powerful marketing tool that allows you to offer the best of your site through a custom App or Community Toolbar, send desktop alerts to your users, and much more.

The Conduit platform opens a new world of content sharing. Your site visitors can add your content right to their browser by clicking on a branded 2go button that you place on your site. You can also share your content in the Conduit Marketplace, where all the publishers and users in the Conduit network can grab it.

The platform has been adopted by major brands such as Fox News, iWin, Major League Baseball, TechCrunch, and Travelocity, as well as thousands of small and medium organizations in 120 countries.

If you would like to Conduit your website, go to www.conduit.com.

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MyDomain.com

MyDomain is a leading ICANN-accredited provider of domain name registration and online business solutions. For over 10 years, MyDomain has offered low-cost domain names and free domain services including complete DNS management. Today, sub-$10 domains without the constant upsells you'll find at some competitors are the norm at MyDomain. MyDomain's complete range of solutions include Web hosting and VPS hosting, email, SSL Certificates and more.

Toopia

Nicolas Koenig is the developer who made our beautiful iPhone app a reality. He runs an iPhone development shop from the Netherlands called Toopia. Toopia also created the Thermometer iPhone app, which enables your iPhone or iPod touch to get the current temperature based on your location. The RWW app lets you read us on the go, follow us on Twitter, share stories on Facebook and Twitter, and browse at your leasure using Read it Later and Instapaper. Download the ReadWriteWeb iPhone application here.

Thank Toopia on Twitter for making ReadWriteWeb possible.

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Editor’s note: When venture capitalists invest in early stage startups, more than anything else they are investing in the founders of the company and their ability to lead their employees through the most improbable set of circumstances to take an idea from a germ to a real and profitable business. In this guest post, Ben Horowitz of VC firm Andreessen Horowitz explains the leadership traits he and his co-founder Marc Andreessen look for before they invest in a startup. SOme of their investments include Skype, Zynga, Factual, and RockMelt. Before becoming investing partners, Horowitz and Andreessen co-founded Opsware, which they sold to HP for $1.6 billion, and prior to that Horowitz was an executive at Netscape.

At Andreessen Horowitz, we favor founders running the company. The reasons are many (and will be the topic of a future blog post). As a result, we spend a great deal of time thinking about the characteristics required to be a founding CEO. Perhaps the most important attribute required to be a successful founding CEO is leadership. So what is leadership and how do we think about it in the context of the CEO job? Are great leaders born or made?

Most people define leadership in the same way that Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously defined pornography when he said: “I know it when I see it.”

A better definition comes from former Secretary of State Colin Powell who said: “You have achieved excellence as a leader when people will follow you anywhere if only out of curiosity.” For our purposes, we can generalize this to be the measure of the quality of a leader: the quantity, quality and diversity of people who want to follow her.

So what makes people want to follow a leader? We look for 3 key traits:

• The ability to articulate the vision
• The right kind of ambition
• The ability to achieve the vision

Let’s take these in order.

The ability to articulate the vision—The Steve Jobs Attribute

Can the leader articulate a vision that’s interesting, dynamic, and compelling? More importantly, can the leader do this when things fall apart? More specifically, when the company gets to a point when it does not make objective financial sense for any employee to continue working there, will the leader be able to articulate a vision that’s compelling enough that the people stay out of curiosity?

I believe that Jobs’ greatest achievement as a visionary leader so far was a) getting so many super talented people to continue following him at NeXT, long after the company lost its patina; then b) getting the employees of Apple to buy into his vision when the company was weeks away from bankruptcy. It’s difficult to imagine any other leader being so compelling that they could do these back-to-back and this is why we call this one the Steve Jobs attribute.

The right kind of ambition—The Bill Campbell Attribute

Andy Grove once remarked that a company needs highly ambitious executives in order to achieve its goals. However, it’s critical that those executives have “the right kind of ambition”: ambition for the success of the company rather than the “wrong kind of ambition”: ambition for the success of themselves.

One of the biggest misperceptions in our society is that a prerequisite for becoming a CEO is being selfish, ruthless, and callous. In fact, the opposite is true and the reason is obvious. The first thing that any successful CEO must do is get really great people to work for her. Smart people do not want to work for people who do not have their interests in mind and in heart.

Most of us have experienced this in our careers: a bright, ambitious, hard working executive that nobody good wants to work for and who, as a result, delivers performance far worse than one might imagine.

Truly great leaders create an environment where the employees feel that the CEO cares much more about the employees than she cares about herself. In this kind of environment, an amazing thing happens: a huge number of the employees believe that it’s their company and behave accordingly. As the company grows large, these employees become the quality control for the entire organization. They set the standard of work that all future employees must live up to. As in, “Hey, you need to do a better job on that datasheet—you are screwing up my company.”

I call this characteristic the Bill Campbell Attribute after my friend Bill who is the best that I’ve ever seen at this. If you talk to people who worked in any of the many organizations that Bill has run, they refer to those organizations as “my organization” or “my company.” A huge part of why he has been so unbelievably strong on this dimension of leadership is that he’s totally authentic. He would happily sacrifice his own economics, fame, glory, and rewards for his employees. When you talk to Bill, you get the feeling that he cares deeply about you and what you have to say, because he does. And all of that shows up in his actions and follow through.

Ability to achieve the vision—The Andy Grove Attribute

The final leg of our leadership stool is competence, pure and simple. If I buy into the vision and believe that the leader cares about me, do I think she can actually achieve the vision? Will I follow her into the jungle with no map forward or back and trust that she will get me out of there?

I like to refer to this as the Andy Grove attribute. Andy Grove will always be my model of CEO competence. He earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, wrote the best management book that I’ve ever read (High Output Management), and tirelessly refined his craft. Not only did he write exceptional books on management, he taught management classes at Intel throughout his tenure.

In his classic book, Only the Paranoid Survive, Grove details the story of leading Intel through the dramatic transition from the memory business to the microprocessor business. In doing so, he walked away from nearly all of his revenue. He humbly credits others in the company with coming to the strategic conclusion before he did, but the credit for swiftly and successfully leading the company through the transition goes to Dr. Grove. Changing your primary business as a 16 year old, large, public company raises a lot of questions. As Andy describes in an incident with one of his employees:

One of them attacked me aggressively, asking, “Does it mean that you can conceive of Intel without being in the memory business?” I swallowed hard and said, ‘yes, I guess I can.’ All hell broke loose.

Despite shocking many of his best employees with this radical strategy, ultimately the company trusted Andy. They trusted him to rebuild their company around an entirely new business. And that trust turned out to be very well placed.

So, are great leaders born or made?

Let’s look at this one attribute at a time:

• Articulation of the vision—There is no question that some people are much better story tellers than others. However, it is also true that anybody can greatly improve in this area through focus and hard work. All CEOs should work on the vision component of leadership.
• Alignment of interests—I am not sure if the Bill Campbell Attribute is impossible to learn, but I am pretty sure that it is impossible to teach. Of the three, this one most fits the bill “born not made.”
• Ability to achieve the vision—This attribute can absolutely be made; perhaps this is why Andy Grove’s tolerance for incompetence was legendarily low. Indeed, the enemy of competence is sometimes confidence. A CEO should never be so confident that she stops improving her skills.

In the end, some attributes of leadership can be improved more than others, but every CEO should work on all three.

Editor’s note: The most valuable employees of any technology company are the engineers and scientists, which is why everyone in Silicon Valley does whatever they can to ensure the continuous supply to this talent pool. The size of the talent pool is ultimately determined by the number of people who graduate from colleges and universities with science, technology, engineering, or mathematics degrees. The U.S. is graduating fewer and fewer scientists and engineers, causing concern in many quarters.

While many people agree this is a problem, not everyone agrees on what should be done about it. Former Intel chairman and CEO Craig Barrett is a strong proponent of priming the pump with more undergraduate science, engineering, and math students. Duke/UC-Berkeley professor (and regular TechCrunch columnist) Vivek Wadhwa thinks that better rewards for people who pursue engineering and science degrees is the right approach. So we asked Barrett and Wadhwa to debate the issue of how best to fix technology education in the U.S. Their exchange is below:

Vivek Wadhwa:

Craig Barrett is someone who I hold in the highest regard. Ever since he retired as Intel’s CEO, Dr. Barrett has made it his life’s mission to improve U.S. competitiveness. He believes that the way to do this is to teach more math and science. And he believes we need to graduate more PhDs in science and engineering.

I wholeheartedly support improvements in education and know the value that math and science skills provide. But the problems I see in U.S. competitiveness aren’t related to the numbers of engineering PhDs or scientists that we graduate. American companies are shifting R&D abroad because it makes economic sense for them to be near growth markets, and they can hire talented workers at a lower cost. It isn’t about deficiencies in American workers or a weakness of U.S. math and science education.

We are also graduating enough PhDs in science and engineering. The problem is that the majority of these graduates are foreign nationals (who are now increasingly returning home). American’s don’t consider it worthwhile to complete advanced science and engineering degrees because it doesn’t make financial sense for them to do so. Research by Harvard economist Richard Freeman showed that because salaries for scientists and engineers are lower than for other professions, the investment that students have to make in higher degrees isn’t cost-justified. Doctoral graduate students typically spend seven to eight years earning a PhD, during which time they are paid stipends. These stipends are usually less than what a bachelor’s degree-holder makes. Some students never make up for this financial loss. Foreign students typically have fewer opportunities and see a U.S. education as their ticket to the U.S. job market and citizenship. Hence, 60% of U.S. engineering PhD graduates are foreigners.

As this article from Scientific American discusses, the problems are even worse for graduating scientists.

…But today, however, few young PhDs can get started on the career for which their graduate education purportedly trained them, namely, as faculty members in academic research institutions. Instead, scores of thousands of them spend the years after they earn their doctorates toiling in low-paying, dead-end postdoctoral “training” appointments (called postdocs) in the laboratories of professors, where they ostensibly hone skills they would need to start labs of their own when they become professors. In fact, however, only about 25 percent of those earning American science PhDs will ever land a faculty job that enables them to apply for the competitive grants that support academic research. And even fewer—15 percent by some estimates—will get a post at the kind of research university where the nation’s significant scientific work takes place.

So, my argument is that if we create the incentives for American children to study math and science and to complete advanced degrees, the magic will happen. In addition to math and science, we should teach our children about world culture, geography, and global markets. In the era of globalization, these subjects are equally important. And while we fix the incentives for Americans, let’s do all we can to keep the best foreign students who come to the U.S. to study, here, so they are competing on our side.

Craig Barrett:

Economic competitiveness in the 21st Century will be quite different than in the past. With the free flow of information, capital, and people, economies will have to look for new comparative advantages. Most observers of this topic conclude that there are only three things that a country can do to increase their relative competitiveness and provide for an increased standard of living for their citizens. Countries have to invest in the education of their work force (smart people), they have to invest in research and development (smart ideas) and they have to provide the right environment to let smart people get together with smart ideas and create new products, new businesses, and new services. The most fundamental of these three issues is education. Historically the standard of living or per capita income has tracked closely with the level of education of the work force—as education lets workers add value to what they do and as the economy grows the standards of living increase.

Looking forward every major economy has identified the general areas that will drive innovation and economic growth. Japan, the US, and the EU have all listed those technologies (nanotech, photonics, new materials, micro electronics, alternative energy, biotech, etc) that will be key for development, productivity improvements, and growth. All of these areas have the common foundation of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Hence it is straightforward to conclude that work force expertise in STEM will be a determinant of economic growth.

If we look at the US for a moment we can make several observations about the education of our current and future work force.

1. US kids on average do poorly in mathematics, science and problem solving when compared to their OECD peers;
2. Fewer US kids choose to major in the hard sciences and engineering each year (most of our engineering graduate students are in fact foreign nationals).
3. The current 25 year old generation will be less well educated (defined by college graduation rates) than the 45 year old generation
4. Most OECD and emerging economy countries are increasing their college (and STEM) graduation rates

So in contrast to the importance of STEM education for economic performance in the 21st Century we see the US moving in the opposite direction. Certainly our universities are still top ranked in the world in STEM but increasingly the graduates of those universities are foreign nationals who are often choosing to return home to pursue their professional careers. And we are producing no more STEM graduates than we did decades ago.

If the US is really serious about competing in the 21st Century economy we will have to decide to compete. This simply means that you have to create the work force (smart people), invest in R&D (smart ideas) and make sure the environment is attractive to investment in innovation (do something about tax rates, make it easier to form corporations, provide incentives to invest in R&D and make capital investments, etc). Otherwise you will see the continuous flight of capital and jobs to regions of the world where governments have made the environment more attractive. This is not a simple issue of wage rates—corporations chase after the best possible work force in areas where the total cost is most attractive and often the total cost is much more heavily weighted by corporate tax rates and incentives, not wage rates.

STEM education is key for our future. We need a major upgrade in our K-12 education to produce high school graduates who understand and appreciate STEM.

We need more undergraduates majoring in STEM for the jobs of the 21st Century. And we need more STEM graduate students to drive those industries that are key to our future. As a measure of how rapidly things are changing with time, it used to be that many STEM Ph.Ds turned right around and went after faculty positions in our universities. Today, STEM Ph.Ds are the entry level education requirements to get into the engineering and research laboratories of the successful tech corporations in the US, like Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, IBM, etc. It is also certain that not every STEM graduate is going to pursue a limited career in STEM. STEM education is a great introduction to many other professions – the basis of STEM education being problem solving means that this education is a great entry to other jobs. In fact the most common educational background of the Fortune 500 CEOs is engineering.

So at a time when the rest of the world is gearing up for competition let’s refocus the US to do the same. That is unless you believe our future is in low value add services or manufacturing, investment banking, tort lawyers or asphalt ready construction jobs. Somebody has to create some wealth if you want your economy to grow.

Vivek Wadhwa’s Rebuttal:

Again, I wholeheartedly agree that we need to improve K-12 education and I agree about the importance of STEM education. The question is, how do you motivate American children to enter fields like science and engineering that are harder than others to learn, don’t provide the economic rewards, and that aren’t considered “cool”? We can’t force our children to do PhDs in math.

As the article from Scientific American showed, many engineering and science PhDs can’t even get jobs – in academia or industry. This is after they have worked for years at ridiculously low wages as researchers or postdocs. Those that do get jobs don’t ever make up for the financial sacrifice they have made. When American children choose to study science or engineering, their friends call them geeks or nerds – they are made to feel inferior. Their Indian and Chinese counterparts are held in high regard by society and end up at the top of the social ladder. Indian and Chinese engineers and scientists are often national heroes. Here, our kids idolize football players and rock stars.

We can’t also just tell our children that the nation’s competitiveness and standard of living depends on them making sacrifice and completing advanced degrees in math and science. They won’t care. We should improve the K-12 education system as you suggest. Our corporations should also invest in workforce development – which they generally don’t. We should also provide tax breaks for research as you say. And we should fix our university research system (I have written about the big problems with this).

The issue I am highlighting is that even if we did all of the good things you suggest, this would not fix the problem of American children not being motivated to become scientists and engineers. My top students at the Masters of Engineering Management Program at Duke University still vie for high-paying investment banking jobs; they don’t become engineers. It is the same with our top PhDs in math; they become quants at investment banks. Their talent ends up being used by investment banks to find new ways of bilking the financial system.

We need to create the excitement about science and engineering at the national level and motivate our best and brightest to become engineers and scientists. And we need to make it worthwhile financially for them to help our country stay competitive and to solve the problems facing our planet. This is as much a marketing problem as it is an investment problem. An example of a way to fix the marketing problem is what National Academy of Engineering President, Charles Vest, proposed with the Grand Challenges for Engineering program. But this is a tiny first step. We need to do a lot more.

Craig Barrett’s Rebuttal:

Let me respectfully disagree with one point Vivek makes and then give some suggestions on how to overcome his second issue.

First, this is not a financial compensation issue. If it were then every kid who goes to college would choose to major in engineering because a BS in engineering (almost any subject) commands the highest salary of any university graduate. Most kids don’t major in engineering because they don’t have the interest, the aptitude, or they like some other major more. Our young college graduates do not chase the dollar; they tend to follow their interests. In addition, when I look at the unemployment statistics, engineers are usually amongst the highest employment professions in the country. Certainly the percentage of NFL or rock star wannabes or business administration majors or medieval history majors on unemployment is much higher than that for engineers. So can we please move away from the simplistic argument that STEM doesn’t pay?

In addition if you look at graduate school and the graduate Ph.D who spends years working as a Post Doc angling for a teaching position at a prestigious university you simply cannot do an ROI analysis on his or her investment to land the faculty position and conclude that no one will be a Post Doc. The individual is chasing that faculty position because that is what they really want to do. Just like an aspiring actor spends years doing bit parts to finally land the big role. You know that because the end point, the faculty position, is not the highest paid option for the Ph.D. He or she can make more money in the private sector and probably have greater resources (capital facilities and research dollars) to pursue interesting problems. The Post Doc pursues their interest precisely because that is what they are interested in. As there are many more Post Docs than faculty positions available we have to conclude that Post Docs are Post Docs because they want to try to become faculty members and that Post Docs do not represent an inherent limitation or barrier to people trying to obtain a Ph.D in STEM. The private sector has a strong appetite for STEM Ph.Ds—just look at the hiring practices of the major corporations.

The real barrier to pursuing degrees in STEM is that we have almost a perfect filter in place in K-12. For a student to want to major in STEM in college they have to exit high school with a strong mathematics background. That means that they need to have a good math teacher in nearly every grade (in addition to having a good physics, chemistry, and biology teacher). We know that about 1/3 of all math and science teachers in K-12 are not certified in their subjects and probably do not do a good job educating and motivating their students. If you assume for a moment that you need 12 good math teachers in a row to exit high school being proficient in math then the calculation of the probability of such an event happening is simple: 0.67 raised to the 12th power shows you what a perfect filter the K-12 system is.

So how about a national effort to get more STEM content majors into K-12 teaching? A few exciting programs have started in this space (UTeach out of Texas, Teach for America, the revamp of the education school at ASU). All we need to do is start recognizing that hiring content experts in K-12 is more important than hiring someone who has studied education pedagogy for 4 years. Just imagine how many folks interested in STEM want to take all those School of Education classes to get their teaching certificate.

On to the point where I want to support Vivek, i.e., the need to get more kids interested in STEM during K-12. This can happen in the class room with good teachers (can you imagine a PE teacher doubling as a math teacher inspiring kids to want to pursue math?) and it can happen outside of the class room. For example I just spent yesterday afternoon in Phoenix at the FIRST Robotics Championship competition—the energy, the enthusiasm, the application of STEM was fantastic. But only about 15,000 kids nationwide participate in this competition. Just suppose we had a FIRST team at every school in the country. Next week I am at the Intel Science Talent Search (the Nobel equivalent for high school students doing research). The 40 finalists will be doing research better than my Ph.D thesis topic. But only about 1500 kids a year enter this competition—what if we had 15,000? Or 150,000?

This is where we need to mobilize the public and private sectors to improve. This is where we can catch the imagination of the next generation and turn them into candidates for those STEM Ph.Ds. There is sub critical mass working in this area – it just needs to be expanded. Suppose we organized the top 200 STEM oriented companies in the US and let them work at the local level to make FIRST robotics, science fairs, and computer club houses really happen across the US. Then we could overcome the tired arguments that our society doesn’t value STEM. There is a movement to make this happen right now. The best thing we could all do is throw our weight behind this effort.

Remember that time when a marketing agency’s labs unit cooked up an application that allowed you to print your tweets in a custom notebook (aka, Tweetnotebook)?

Ok, fair chance you don’t – I sure do because I have one of those lying around here somewhere.

Anyway, it was only a matter of time before they did the same for Facebook – and lo and behold, here’s My Famebook.

Concept is the same as Tweetnotebook: you can create and order a unique notebook, featuring an item from your Facebook feed at the bottom of every page, via the website in just a few minutes. You can make a ‘book of you’ or select the wittiest Facebook status messages from your friends.

Once personalized with a custom lay-out, message selection and cover design, you can preview your Famebook and choose to order the 320-page paperback version for Ђ14 ($19) or go for a 200-page hardcover edition at Ђ18 ($25) – shipping costs not included. You know, if you really always wanted to have your Facebook stream printed on dead trees.

Just a thought: who actually owns status messages posted on Facebook, and is it cool for My Famebook to just print them out? Not that we want to be party poopers, but there must be some copyright issues here, right?

OMGTwitterisdownagain. Or extremely flaky, at least. This time, the problems seem to occur only when trying to access the Twitter website, as the API seems to be fully functional and thus not causing any trouble for third-party clients.

Search also seems to work fine, as you can tell from all the people tweeting that Twitter is down for them – go figure.

We’ll keep it short and sweet: use a third-party client for your tweeting needs or find something else to do (like blog about the fact that Twitterisdownagain).

AFP - Australia Sunday defended its plan to block some Internet content, such as that featuring child sex abuse or advocating terrorism, after a media rights watchdog warned it may hurt free speech.

America’s largest mobile content community FunMobility announces today the launch of FunTweet, a web service which turns any Twitter stream into visual messages that are related to the text. FunTweet allows users to post their tweets, but also makes the most basic tweets inspring, hilarious and fun when the text turns into a matching image. (PRWeb Mar 13, 2010)

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/03/prweb3720554.htm

The world’s premier cloud computing conference names BDNA Corporation a Premier Collaborator for the virtual CloudSlam’10™ event; March 23-25, 2010. (PRWeb Mar 13, 2010)

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/cloudcomputing/conference/prweb3725454.htm

Startup’s leaders will speak at sessions on app porting and mobile “app-vertising;” company’s breakthrough ShopSavvy app a finalist at Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator event. (PRWeb Mar 13, 2010)

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/Big_in_Japan_ShopSavvy/SXSW_Interactive/prweb3725504.htm

The New Jersey League of Municipalities Education Foundation, Inc. (NJLM) will hold a statewide conference on Social Media and its effects, and utilization by local governments. The conference will take place on Tuesday, March 30, from 8:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. at the Prudential Center “The Rock,” located at 165 Mulberry Street in Newark. The general public is invited. (PRWeb Mar 13, 2010)

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/03/prweb3716984.htm

Quest Online today announced that its board of directors has appointed Derek Smart to lead the company as President upon the departure of Dave Allen. (PRWeb Mar 13, 2010)

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/03/prweb3717874.htm

Last time I was in India I wrote about the amazing business model innovation that had allowed telecom operators in India to make money on a paltry $6 a month per average user. That compares to a desired average monthly payment of $50 or more in the U.S.

The results have been phenomenal—550 million people in India have phones, and it has transformed the poorer service economy by giving them an affordable way to be reached and arrange jobs. Just last month, nearly 20 million new mobile accounts were opened. That’s more than double the people than have high speed Internet in the entire country. Even in slums where people live on less than $2 a day, everyone has a phone. If “Slumdog Millionaire” was more accurate, Jamal wouldn’t have had to go on TV to find Latika. He could have just called her, or worst case, called a few friends until he found her number.

It’s unequivocally India’s most successful infrastructure achievement —despite some mounting concerns about the effects of all those towers dotting nearly any urban rooftop that can hold one. And a host of exciting applications are being built on top of this invisible thread that connects a disparate country with a vast terrain and even bigger gulfs in language, literacy, income, religion, language and living standards

But amazingly, when Rajiv Mehrotra (pictured below) looked at the existing telecom penetration in India, he saw failure. What about the people who can’t afford $6 a month or live too far to get service? Don’t they deserve to be connected as well? The result was VNL, a company that’s already gotten a good deal of press and acclaim for its dead-cheap, low-maintenance, Ikea-like easy-to-assemble, solar-powered base stations that extend existing mobile footprints into rural villages for a fraction of the price, allowing the remotest, poorest villages to have mobile phones in every household at drop-dead low prices. “We are the bottom of the bottom,” boasts Mehrotra, practically daring competitors to try to play his low-cost, super-durability game.

The World Economic Forum named it one of 26 Technology Pioneers, and just last month VNL won the Mobile World Congress’s Green Mobile Award. Time called it a “Tech Pioneer that Will Change your Life” and Fast Company named it one of the world’s 50 Most Innovative Companies in the world.

I met with Mehrotra at the company’s headquarters in Gurgoan during my November trip to India. This time I wanted to see its technology live in villages and hear first hand what the impact had been. I traveled to a village that had now had phones for about seven months to see how the technology had changed their lives. Of the 500 families spread across this area, almost all of them had a phone—and most for the first time.

The majority of the people I spoke with said the first calls they made were to family members, and that the biggest impact was the ability to stay in touch with family, to know when there was an emergency and be able to respond quickly.

But there have been business effects too. One man (pictured here) has a business operating several trucks traveling between this village and Delhi and before he’d have to ride on a bike between them to coordinate them. Now he can sit at home and just call the drivers. He installed one of VNL’s small base stations on his roof, and he said it had increased his standing among his peers—he is frequently the one called on to settle disputes now. And now they can just call him. Similarly wives will call husbands out in the fields when its time to come in and eat, rather than trudging out to get them, allowing them to focus on kids and the housework.

Another woman (pictured to the below) I spoke with was a widow with six kids and 21 grandchildren. (So many, she actually had to ask someone else how many she had.) As grandkids clambered in and out of her lap, she explained that she gets pension checks from the government, but the delivery used to be spotty. Before her phone she had no recourse but to travel to Delhi to inquire about it. Not exactly something she relishes, having lived her whole life in this village and only been to the big city twice. Now she can call the office and gives them an earful. Not surprisingly, the checks have started to come more regularly.

Another man (pictured to the right) told me he felt more connected to the rest of India as a result of having a phone. This village is surrounded by mountains, and he said that he felt “imprisoned” and cut off, despite being just a few hours drive from Delhi. Now he has a renewed interest in politics and what’s happening in other villages and the country at large. This man had only had his phone for six months, but he expected it would change his life in ways he couldn’t articulate or imagine. “Since the day I got this, my life has already changed,” he said through an interpreter.

Indeed, Mehrotra says it’s already having a ripple affect on the politics of Rajisthan—the state between Pakistan and India where VNL did its first installations. Politicians come through and make promises and villagers demand their cell phone numbers and call to check up on whether those promises are kept. “They have to be accountable,” Mehrotra says. “They can’t wriggle out.”

These phones are not just a nice-to-have, they’ve quickly become a must have for these villages, deeply tied to the way they make money, participate in their government and retain closely important family relationships. And these ripple effects are only now beginning. Think of what the impact will be when there are better programs for marketing crops, saving money and even learning and game playing rolled out on these very basic phones. Life will always be different in a village or a city, but India can at least gain some basic common denominators between the two.

Mehrotra is a big believer in the Ghandian mantra: Change the villages and you change India. He’s a serial entrepreneur who has already built businesses rolling out satellite TV and landlines to rural areas, but he thinks this company will have a bigger impact than anything else he’s done and is the one with the real potential to go global. It bears noting that he’s invested all of his own money in the project—and it’s taken far more than he expected.

This is not a cheap venture—Mehrotra has invested more than $100 million in the last five years and is still investing more. But I’m not sure it could be built any other way. I don’t think there’s the venture capital appetite or risk profile in India to fund something like this and most of the mobile equipment companies Mehrotra talked to back when he started thinking about this insisted it couldn’t be done. Once he built it he’d take equipment and operator executives out to see it and they still couldn’t believe it. They were making calls to test the quality from different areas of the village trying to find pockets without a signal. “They were climbing on the antenna and shaking it like monkeys trying to break it and they couldn’t,” Mehrotra says.

From a business point of view, the operators love VNL because it cheaply expands their existing footprint. The equipment operators aren’t so sure. In theory, VNL isn’t competing with them because they’re not going into the cities. Now that VNL has proved this model works, could a larger established vendor steal the market? The best chance of that would likely come from a Chinese powerhouse like Huawei. That said, any vendor that builds such a low cost solution that’s too good will risk eroding his higher priced systems designed for urban areas. “They’ll say ‘Give it to me in the city too.’ ” Mehrotra says.

All these awards aside, this is the year for VNL to prove it’s really a viable business. And Mehrotra says there are some surprises in store. In terms of market, VNL is already rolling the technology out in other countries and in terms of product they’re not done with just simple mobile access. The countries are likely in Africa and perhaps Latin America, and my guess is the new functionality will entail turning on some kind of Internet access through the existing base stations. Expect much more on this newly minted international do-gooding darling in 2010.

Reuters - Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez, who is criticized by media freedom groups, called on Saturday for regulation of the Internet and singled out a website that he said falsely reported the murder of one of his ministers.

While a lot of the smaller startups like Foursquare and Gowalla are getting much of the buzz at SXSW, Twitter isn’t sitting idly on the location sidelines. Sure, they launched location integration on their site a few days ago, but they’ve also apparently set up a sub-site totally around location for SXSW. But here’s the weird thing: It’s only for stalking their employees.

As co-founder Evan Williams tweeted out earlier, sxsw.twitter.com shows you a Google map of Austin, Texas (where SXSW is held) with tiny Twitter logos overlaid on it, showing Twitter employees at the conference tweeting.

The site, which is clearly tailored for mobile usage (it looks great on the iPhone, for example), has two areas: “Twitter People” and “To Meet.” The Twitter People area is the one that shows the map and the tweets overlaid on it. The To Meet area is interesting because it asks, “Which of these sound like awesome things to work on?” and gives you a few different options to click on.

For example, if you click on, “Making fast and sexy applications” it takes you to a list of various Twitter employees at SXSW that you should meet. If you click on “Partnering with Twitter,” you get a different list. Clearly, Twitter is using this site for both new employee recruitment, platform expansion, and partnership opportunities.

Twitter, while now fairly commonplace in the mainstream (especially the media), first rose to fame among early tech adopters during SXSW three years ago.

We write this for you, the tired, the weak and the weary, the dogged attendees of the South By South West festival in Austin this weekend. We know that you're exhausted, but it's not from the booze, the parties or the product pitches - it's the endless location based check-ins. If only someone had solved this in time, right?

From what we can tell, the folks over at Brightkite have the solution with Check.in, but have yet to release it to the achey-thumbed, smart-phoned masses.

Sponsor

According to the splash page we found at Check.in, the app, which looks to be for both iPhone and Android, will be the "one checkin to rule them all".

"Check.in takes the hassle out of checking in on multiple services," the page reads. And at the bottom, we're told that the service is "made by Martin May, Brady Becker, and Jordan Harband of Brightkite after sever check-in fatigue."

When you take a closer look at the sole image on the page, which depicts a Check.in app on both iPhone and Android, we can see that the service appears to handle check-ins for Foursquare, Gowalla and Brightkite, and we would assume others are on the way. But we have to wonder how it would check in to Gowalla, as the company's API is currently read-only.

Check.in would be the first of its kind in the market and would surely co-opt a large amount of traffic and make the "severe check-in fatigue" that much more manageable.

When we first wrote about this at the beginning of the month, the only response we received was "no comment". We asked again today, but have yet to receive any comment. We've also asked the folks over at Gowalla and they had this to say:

"We currently do not allow write access to our API. For now we're excited to see creative use of the read API while we continue to polish our own native clients."

If this service is in the pipeline to be released soon, it looks like Gowalla would not be included in the check-in service and that would be a shame. It's only Friday and there are a number of days left to SXSW Interactive, AKA "Nerdfest 2010", but wouldn't it be that much more enjoyable if you didn't have to spend the first 10 minutes any time you arrived somewhere new checking in?

With that said, we have to wonder how much we would lose out on the features now offered by these services. Will Check.in also offer tips, photos, check-in commenting and all of that or will it just let us broadcast our location? For now, we'll just have to wonder, but either way, fear not, a solution looks to be on the way.

Today at SXSWi, keynote speaker Danah Boyd took the stage to talk about privacy and publicity, and how they intertwine online. Boyd is a Social Media Researcher at Microsoft Research New England, and has studied this space extensively for years. It was a compelling talk that challenged the notion that personal information is on a binary spectrum of public or private. To help underscore her points, she recalled and discussed a number of major privacy blunders from Facebook and Google. You can find my notes from the presentation below.

Boyd says that privacy is not dead, but that a big part of our notion of privacy relates to maintaining control over our content, and that when we don’t have control, we feel that our privacy has been violated. This has happened a few times recently.

How The Buzz Launch Failed

As a first example Boyd brought up Google Buzz. She says that nothing with the launch was technologically wrong — you could opt out of Buzz, elect to hide your friend list, and so on. But the service resulted in a PR disaster because Google made non-technical mistakes, doing things that didn’t meet user expectations:

• Google integrated a public facing system in one of the most private systems you can imagine. Lots of people thought Google was exposing their email to the world.
• Google assumed people would opt out if users didn’t want to participate. “I can’t help but notice that more technology companies think it’s ok to expose people tremendously and then back pedal when people flip out”, she says.
• You want to help users understand the proposition. You need to ease them in, invite them to contribute their content.

Boyd says that years ago, researchers noticed people in a chat room would often ask “A/S/L” (age, sex, location). So some services, looking to streamlines things a bit, started building user profiles that had this information. What they failed to understand is that this “A/S/L” was a sort of chatroom icebreaker. Users lost that, and putting that information in a profile — even if they would have shared it to answer that chat message — could creep them out.

With Buzz, Google found the social equivalent to the famous “uncanny valley” (where things seem almost natural, but aren’t quite close enough, so they’re creepy). They collapsed articulated networks (email) and assumed it was a personal network.

Boyd then transitioned to talk a bit about the fuzzy lines between what is public and private. She says that just because people put material in public places doesn’t mean it was meant to be aggregated. And just because something is publically accessible doesn’t mean people want it to be publicized.

The Facebook Privacy Fail
Boyd’s second case study was Facebook’s privacy changes in December, when Facebook changed ‘everyone’ to the default. We’ve written extensively on this fiasco, which may take years to really reveal the extent of the damage it has done.

• Facebook said 35% of users had read the new privacy documentation and changed something in the privacy settings. Facebook thinks this is a good thing, but it means 65% of population made their content public. Boyd has asked non-techie users to tell her what they thought their settings were. She has yet to find a single person whose actual privacy settings matched what they thought they were.
• Boyd recounted a story of a young woman who had moved far away from an abusive father. The young woman talked with her mother (who had moved with her) about possibly joining Facebook. They sat down to make the content as private as possible, which worked well. But in December, the young woman clicked through Facebook’s privacy dialog (as most people did) and had no idea her content was public. She only found out when someone who should not have seen the content told her.

Boyd then discussed how different groups of people think about privacy. She says that teenagers are much more conscious about what they have to gain by being in public, whereas adults are more concerned about what they have to lose.

As an example, Boyd talked about a teenage girl who often put risquй, sometimes illegal content online. When Boyd asked why she’d want to do something, the girl replied, “I want to get a modeling contract just like Tila Tequilla”. Her calculation wasn’t about what she could potentially lose, but rather what she stood to gain.

Boyd says that most techies think about Personally Identifiable Information, but that the vast majority of people are thinking about personally embarrassing information. People often share private information with their friends in part because it allows them to bond, it makes them somewhat vulnerable and establishes trust. But when it’s through technology (e.g. Facebook’s public by default setting) it’s a huge technology fail.

Boyd also called out the presence of racism in social media. On the night of the BET awards last year, all of the trending topics were dominated by terms relating to the event and the black community. In response, some Twitter users made very racist comments — clearly even these open communication platforms are still prone to hate.

To conclude the talk, Boyd pointed out some of the challenges we will continue to face with regard to privacy online. She asks whether or not teachers can be expected to maintain a professional, pristine presence online — something that is very difficult to do while leading a normal life.

Ultimately, she says, “neither privacy nor publicity is dead, but technology will continue to make a mess of both.” We’ve been looking at privacy and publicity as a black-or-white attribute for content, when really it’s defined by context and the implications of what we’ve chosen to share.

Buzz, Google's controversial attempt to unseat Facebook as the most mainstream of social activity stream readers, just made some much-needed changes that Facebook could learn from as well.

Buzz users now have more granular control over what social interactions with content trigger an email sent to their email inboxes and explicit explanations for why each piece of content was sent by email to them. These changes are a good start but ought to extended into the body of Buzz as well.

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Just like most Facebook users can't explain the difference between the new algorithmically filtered News Feed and the raw bulk flow of the Live Feed, Buzz too could benefit from explaining the mystery behind the magic. As social networking analyst danah boyd said at the opening talk of SXSW today, privacy online is grounded in user control.

Buzz violated the basic understanding of email as private when it surprised users by layering the new social network on top of their private Gmail. By granting users more control over information, today's changes are a small move in a better direction.

Why Not Give Users The Tools to Drive Their Own Experience?

Might social activity stream participation become more mainstream if users had clear and more complete control over what they see, what they expose and to whom? Many people believe that users are incapable of dealing with too many settings and need these decisions made for them. Perhaps it's just a user experience challenge, though. Nobody said creating the ultimate interface for mainstream users to drive their online activity was going to be easy.

Google's move with Buzz today looks like a nice first start. Hopefully it will be extended beyond the Buzz and Gmail relationship.

See also: How Google Buzz is Disruptive: Open Data Standards