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More Super Techies interviews
Marc Benioff taunts the awakened dinosaurs
Benioff takes stock of software shifts

In the interview, Benioff discusses his early work developing games for the TRS 80, Apple II, and Commodore 64, and his turn as a summer intern at Apple in 1984, coding in assembly language for the Macintosh.

Benioff also shares what he learned working alongside Oracle founder Larry Ellison during his 13 years at the company. In addition, he outlines the origins of Salesforce.com, which he started in 1999, and offers some insight into his aggressive marketing strategies and recipe for business success.

See also:

In this Super Techies interview, I talk with Marc Benioff about his career in the software industry. Benioff is the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Salesforce.com, which has led the business software-as-a-service revolution with its CRM-based platform. Salesforce.com is expecting to reach the $1 billion revenue threshold in its 2009 fiscal year, ending January 31, 2009.

“There’s no way to prevent it,” Zdziarski said of the screenshot caching, according to a Wired report. “I’m kind of divided on it. I hope Apple fixes it because it’s a significant privacy leak, but at the same time it’s been useful for investigating criminals.”

The device records screenshots of a user’s most recent action so that it can achieve that cool effect of applications fading away when the home button is clicked, according to Jonathan Zdziarski, who wrote the forthcoming book iPhone Forensics: Recovering Evidence, Personal Data, and Corporate Assets.

The screenshots are presumably deleted after the application is closed, but they can be recovered with forensics techniques just like data deleted from most any storage device can be reconstructed for purposes of law enforcement, he said in a Webcast on Thursday in which he demonstrated how to break into password-protected iPhones.

Apple representatives did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment for this story.

The
iPhone is recording everything users see and do on their devices for caching purposes, an iPhone hacker says.

Meantime, breaking into a passcode-locked phone took him nearly an hour to demonstrate and required creating a custom firmware bundle, the report said. The issue is different from a security hole discovered last month that allowed people to get access to e-mail, text, and voice messages on password-protected phones.

The article, which was briefly available here but is now apparently offline for a while, also makes the argument that full-bore IP and domain blocks may gradually fall off in favor of more refined filtering of actual content.

James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic and a blogging resident of Beijing’s Chaoyang District, has written a good outline of how China’s online filtering apparatus works: “The Connection Has Been Reset.”

Xiao Qiang, an expert on Chinese media at the University of California at Berkeley journalism school, told me that the authorities have recently begun applying this kind of filtering in reverse. As Chinese-speaking people outside the country, perhaps academics or exiled dissidents, look for data on Chinese sites–say, public-health figures or news about a local protest–the GFW computers can monitor what they’re asking for and censor what they find.

Aside from the fact that The Atlantic has made the lovely choice of freeing its content, the news to me was that China’s filtering system is working in reverse:

q&a Last week, business reviews site Yelp (famous for its wild parties and opinionated members) announced that it had raked in $15 million in Series D venture funding–and that the San Francisco-based company would be opening a new office in New York. I caught up with Yelp co-founder and CEO Jeremy Stoppelman over the weekend to talk about a few numbers other than the five-star rating.

Yelp New York, in Manhattan’s West Village, opens Monday. But according to Stoppelman, they won’t be celebrating with one of the bashes that made his site a bit notorious.

You guys just raised $15 million. What was the first thing you did when you closed the round?
Jeremy Stoppelman: (Laughs.) I think it was in the afternoon, so I checked my e-mail. We haven’t really done any celebration or anything like that.

But you’re Yelp! Didn’t you at least do a happy hour?
Stoppelman: Well, we have our events going on. Almost every week there’s an event in some city. So I guess the day after we closed we met with some of the investors and had some drinks, but really it’s been a low-key type of thing. We’ve had greater festivities in the past. I think a greater part of it is just like, for us, it’s not as much of a milestone. It’s obviously a great thing because we need the money so that we can grow the company at the maximum rate possible, but we’re past a lot of the more “scary” stages where it really is like a, “Wow, we made it!” Things have been going really well. We’ve got a lot of traction. The brand is growing stronger and stronger. So this is just like a continuance.

So why did you choose to open an office in New York? Is it for proximity to the ad industry?
Stoppelman: There was the connection to the ad industry; and ad buyers, there are a lot of them there, and then there are all the media industries. And then it’s simply that New York is one of the linchpin cities or key cities in the U.S., and so we feel like it’s going to be our biggest market or one of our biggest markets, and that we should be there physically as well.

Is it your second biggest market after San Francisco?
Stoppelman: No, it’s like San Francisco Bay Area, then L.A., and then New York.

Did you consider opening the office in any other cities?
Stoppelman: (New York) seemed like the logical choice, you know, covering each coast.

How many people are you going to have in that office?
Stoppelman: Initially it’s just a handful, under 10 people, but then towards the end of the year we’ll be adding a lot of sales folks.

What’s your projection for the number of Yelp employees by the end of ‘08?
Stoppelman: I don’t really know. I don’t have a number for you.

What’re you at right now?
Stoppelman: We’re at a hundred-something, a hundred and ten.

I know that in San Francisco “the Yelper” is almost a cultural figure now, and it’s not always a good image. Are you ever feeling like you’re doing damage control?
Stoppelman: We hear from businesses daily. People are writing reviews, business owners are watching them, (and) sometimes they feel like it’s unfair and so they let us know, in which case we take a look at that review and see if it meets our guidelines. There’s no damage control, there’s always a dialogue around, you know, conversation that’s happening on our site. There’s nothing outside of that that we really actively do.

The other key point is just to say that 85 percent of businesses on Yelp have a three-star rating or above. And so it’s easy to take a single comment personally or get really bummed out about it, and we tend to remember those most vividly. The reality is, the vast majority of comments are neutral to positive.

Where do you see Yelp in five years?
Stoppelman: I guess the first step is expansion in the U.S., geographic expansion, so seeing Yelp to expand to pretty much every major city in the U.S. is the next logical step.

Do you have international expansion plans?
Stoppelman: Yeah. Of course we’ll get to international. I think there’s a timing question of when does that hit, when does that happen, but certainly the formula continues to work all across the U.S. so you would think that this site would be just as well-received in a lot of other countries as well. There’s just a whole lot of engineering work that goes into preparing the site for international (editions) because it would need to be able to handle multi-language, et cetera, et cetera.

Will that $15 million go in part toward server and other hardware costs? Are those going up?
Stoppelman: It’s not changing that dramatically. Our site is fairly low-data-intensive compared to some of the other stuff out there. We’re not pushing a ton of video or anything like that. It’s actually pretty manageable, cost-wise, from a technology perspective.

The 2008 Webware 100 Awards program is under way right now. At this point we’re collecting nominations for your favorite Web 2.0 services. We’ve got a database of several thousand, but we want to make sure we’re not missing any cool site or service. So nominate your favorite Web 2.0 site to make sure it’s included.

Once the nominations close (this Friday), Josh and I will pore over all the entries and select 300 finalists. We’re looking for the most interesting, most important, coolest, and basically most electable candidates. It will take a while, and it’s a tough job. Once we’re done, we open up voting.

In other words, we choose the candidates, but you choose the winners. Here are last years’ winners.

Make sure your picks are in the running. Nominate now.

This post was updated at 9:11 a.m. PST with comment from Nick Denton.

Facebook isn’t too happy with Gawker Media founder Nick Denton over some screenshots of a member’s profile that he posted on Gawker.com on Tuesday, Portfolio.com reports. The social-networking site reportedly plans to send a warning letter to the New York-based digital-media entrepreneur citing several terms-of-service violations–one more, and he’s out.

Facebook representatives were not immediately available for comment.

On Tuesday, Denton–who took over as managing editor of Gawker.com this month after several staff departures–posted a bit of an expose on 25-year-old Emily Brill, daughter of New York publishing figure Steve Brill. Screenshots of the younger Brill’s Facebook profile, featuring glamorous photos of a yachting trip to the British Virgin Islands, as well as excited “status” messages about an impending trip to the Caribbean luxury getaway of St. Barth’s, were juxtaposed with an older photograph of the Brown graduate when she was significantly heavier.

It was just plain mean–meaner than the time when Slate revealed via Facebook screenshots that Rudy Giuliani’s daughter was a Barack Obama fan–but that’s Gawker’s style, and that’s what made the media gossip blog rise to fame.

Facebook, however, considers it a violation of the site’s terms of use, and according to the Portfolio.com blog post, the social network is prepared to give Denton’s account the axe.

Facebook’s terms of use stipulate that members “may not upload or republish site content on any Internet, intranet or extranet site or incorporate the information in any other database or compilation.”

It’s not clear whether Denton and Brill are “friends” on the site, or if it was even Denton (rather than a source or another Gawker Media employee) who pulled the screenshots from Facebook. But both Denton and Brill are members of the New York regional network, so there is a chance that Denton would have been able to view Brill’s profile even without being connected as friends.

Perhaps due to the Gawker incident, Emily Brill’s Facebook profile is no longer publicly searchable. It’s a pertinent lesson: without privacy controls in place, you never know who might come across your photos and personal information. Those “regional” networks are big, and they allow anyone to join; and there are, as we’ve seen, plenty of people on the Web who are willing to circumvent terms of service.

Facebook is notoriously protective of its user data; profiles are only visible to logged-in members who belong to common “networks” or have approved friend requests. For various reasons, accounts are likely banned all the time, but it’s been only recently that we’ve seen some extremely high-profile Web personalities feeling the heat.

Earlier this month, blogger Robert Scoble’s account was temporarily banned when he used a test script from contact management site Plaxo in an attempt to transport his Facebook contacts’ information to his Plaxo account.

(Other community sites have also been known to take terms of service extremely seriously; Wikipedia banned comedian Stephen Colbert when the Comedy Central host pranked the site and crashed its servers.)

For the notoriously unapologetic Gawker Media, having just brushed off the dust from last week’s Gizmodo video incident at the Consumer Electronics Show, this will probably just be a bump in the road–and the site’s livelihood certainly doesn’t depend on Facebook screenshots. The company emerged unscathed from an incident last year in which YouTube banned a Gawker-affiliated account because it had been uploading copyrighted content interspersed with Gawker ads.

But the Denton incident does raise legitimate questions for bloggers and journalists; the Gawker founder indeed went too far by posting semiprivate profile data from someone who was otherwise not a public figure, but can information found behind Facebook’s login wall be used as legitimate source material? It’s a debate waiting to ignite, but if Facebook has anything to say about it, user information will stay behind closed doors.

In an instant-message conversation on Wednesday, Denton passed the Portfolio blog post off as fueled by personal beef. The writer of the original story, Denton said, was “trying to get his retaliation in first, because we’re working on a story about him.”

(Yeah, everything they told you about New York media? It’s pretty much true.)

The New York Times has inked a deal with LinkedIn to deliver targeted headlines to members of the networking site.

A LinkedIn user who works in the energy industry would, for example, be shown articles relevant to that area.

Targeted stories will be displayed on the paper's site

(Credit:
LinkedIn)

Times readers will also be able to share and comment on stories with LinkedIn members in their networks through a tool on article pages of the newspaper’s Web site.

The deal, announced Monday night, will also enable advertisers to target “more Times readers than currently available through the NYTimes.com registration process,” the companies said, though they did not get into details regarding how the targeting would work.

Neither company will share personally identifiable information, they said, and consumers will have the ability to opt out of the feature.

Here is a sampling of
green-tech and energy news over the past few days:

Goldman’s Murti says oil ‘likely’ to reach $150 to $200 — Bloomberg
Oil is now at about $120. Will $200 drive more investment in clean tech?

Grease bandits strike as biofuel demand rises — The Christian Science Monitor
Grease thieves are driving up behind Burger Kings to steal material to make biodiesel. Says a cop: we see it all the time now.

Poet cancels ethanol plant — Greentech Media
The gold rush mentality in ethanol seems to be fading fast. Poet cancels a planned Minnesota plant because of lengthy permitting process.

Will global warming take a short break? — ScienceDaily
Improved climate predictions suggest a reduced warming trend during the next 10 years. An interesting note to this study, on the potential cooling effects of oceans, is how scientists are trying to communicate with a general public: “Just to make things clear: we are not stating that anthropogenic climate change won’t be as bad as previously thought,” they say. Andrew Revkin at the The New York Times’ Dot Earth blog wonders how this study, if it pans out, could impact climate crusaders.

In search of new fertilizer tech (no, really) — Wired Science
Get reacquainted with nitrogen, the Conde Nast publication starts a series of blogs on fertilizers which, along with grains, are shooting up in price and are also being scrutinized for their environmental impact in farming.

Solar power to clotheslines, bills make strides for a greener Hawaii — The Honolulu Advertiser
Hawaii considers a bill that would require new buildings to have solar hot-water heaters. This shows the impact of high oil prices in a state that has to import nearly all of its energy.

‘Sustainable’ bioplastic can damage the environment — The Guardian
Once again, we see that what is “green” is not unequivocally good. The Guardian finds that U.K. stores are bagging a variety of bioplastics, PLA, because they require special yet thinly available industrial composters. Some environmental benefits are questioned.

As gas costs soar, buyers flock to small cars — The New York Times
This and other articles on first-quarter auto sales focus on the shift from trucks and SUVs to
cars, and how poorly U.S. manufacturers are faring. If high gas prices continue, it could boost electric cars such as the Think City, as well as plug-in hybrids.

commentary

Whatever you do, don’t rile the community. I posted an innocuous suggestion earlier today that had this as its basic conclusion:

For those in the commercial open-source world (and that’s most everyone now), we need to focus on finding ways to draw more people into the cash/code bargain without sacrificing the benefits that derive from fee-free adoption of open source.

Shocking, isn’t it? The vast majority of the world would look at that statement and shrug. “The community?” Well, it’s apparently a shocking thought to want to find ways to sell more of what one produces. Tarus went on a rampage, discrediting everything in his path…except my argument, which he conveniently overlooked. Dana called it “dumb[].” Benjamin Reed inexplicably calls my post “sensationalist,” as if I have something to gain from denigrating open source (??? Benjamin, I work for a 100 percent open-source company - any money from CNET is peanuts compared to my day job).

Guys: Are we reading the same post? I really think you didn’t read a single word in my post beyond “free rider.” Go back and re-read it. Seriously. I don’t think it says what you think it says. I’m honestly bewildered by the responses. They don’t seem to comport to the reality of what I wrote.

Ah, community. They love you…until they don’t. Say the right things, and you’re a hero. Step out of line and you’re, well, flame-bait. But in this case I didn’t even say anything remotely approaching sensationalist. I just said “It would be great to get more people contributing.” I almost fell asleep typing it, it’s so bland.

Savio suggests that “the community” may be hurting open-source businesses. Most days I’d find this simply wrong, but reading the responses to a harmless suggestion that people should contribute more to open-source projects…it makes you wonder.

Benjamin, I was speaking from my own experience (both with my company and those I advise), as well as a decade’s worth of experience following various open-source communities like Linux, Apache, etc. I see you write things like…

In other words, the “free-riders” are not just some abstract pool of people from which you extract cash. In a true open-source project, they are the foundation that makes the project something great. Everyone who is a contributing part of an open-source project was once a “free-rider” who just wanted to try it out. Every person involved in any way at all adds momentum, even if it’s just by asking a question and being answered on the list. That answer goes into the global pool of knowledge (which maybe a future user will find, while googling, and won’t have to ask himself).

…and I appreciate the thought. But you’re speaking of a small minority of successful open-source projects. I would love to see all open source operate like this, but it doesn’t. That’s not my opinion. It’s an established fact. You’re describing an open-source ideal, one that I hold in as high esteem as you do. But it’s very hard to come by.

Regardless, my argument was not that the world of free riders should be pilloried and decimated. Re-read my post. It was simply that we need to find ways to get more code or cash from communities. I’d be ecstatic to never get a penny but get lots of code. Most people, however, don’t contribute documentation, bug reports, bug fixes, code, cash, awareness, or anything else. They just use the software, if they even do that much (I suspect most downloads die on the vine).

Even in that I suggested there’s some positive value. So why were we disagreeing, again? Or were we?

The much-heralded clean-tech revolution needs a bigger army.

The absence of technical and managerial talent in the clean energy sector is putting a strain on the development of the industry, a survey finds.

Research firm New Energy Finance and recruiting firm Heidrick & Struggles queried 75 executives in clean energy companies from around the world and found that the lack of people in the field is a problem.

Thirty-seven percent of respondents said that the recruitment issue is “very serious,” and 59 percent said it was “moderately serious.”

Getting appropriate people, particularly chief technology officers and chief executive officers, is a challenge comparable to getting sufficient capital and regulatory support, according to the study.

Without the appropriate people, leading
green-tech companies will not be able to scale up, which “threatens to hamper the growth of this important industry,” Anita Hoffmann, co-head of the alternative and renewable energy practice at Heidrick & Struggles, said in a statement.

Hundreds of new clean-tech companies have been created over the past five years.

Some of them have gone public and are ramping up their operations, but many are still in the technology development phase and need to test whether their technologies, such as creating biofuels, are cost-effective at a commercial scale.

On Thursday, the New England Clean Energy Council launched a fellowship program to attract entrepreneurs into the clean energy industry. The requirements stipulate that the individual, which will do a three-month fellowship, has been a CEO or business leader in another start-up but not necessarily in clean energy. (See here for more details.)

The fact that the fellowship doesn’t require previous energy experience isn’t surprising. In fact, many people have made the transition from the IT business into green tech. And a number of universities are spinning off companies from research.

But that’s still not enough.

“Now there’s a crisis where we’ve got a bunch of work to do, and given the capital intensity in this sector, what’s missing today is serial entrepreneurs,” Hemant Taneja, a managing director at venture-capital firm General Catalyst Partners, told Greentech Media on Thursday.

The Greentech Media article also notes that job boards in the field have plenty of unanswered listings for clean-tech related jobs, including C-level positions.

New Energy Finance CEO Michael Liebreich said that the rapid influx of capital and strong demand for clean technologies is at the root of the talent problem.

“There is strong momentum behind the growth of clean energy worldwide, with new investment up nearly fivefold between 2004 and 2007, but this is creating shortages not just of components such as silicon and transport infrastructure such as crane ships for offshore wind, but also of human capital,” he said in a statement.