Long ago Google unofficially abandoned the Don’t Be Evil mantra and replaced it with, no kidding, an “evil scale.” Sometimes you have to chose between the lesser of two weevils, as Patrick O’Brian would say. And frankly, just staying this side of decent is enough for most companies.

So when Twitter CEO Evan Williams said earlier today that one of Twitter’s operating principles was to “be a force for good” I cringed a little.

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned in business, and am still learning, is to never trust anyone who says “you can trust me.” That’s a big red flag that they’re planning something really messed up in the near future. And likewise, a company shouldn’t be out there saying “don’t be evil” or “be a force for good.”

First because it’s basically impossible to balance a profit motive with a goodness motive. And in fact the nice thing about capitalism is that everyone acting in their own self interest tends to be good for everyone else, too, if appropriate government forces are put in place to stop monopolies, pollution, etc. Being a socialist is a great way to get laid in college but it’s no way to run a society.

And second because when people, or governments, or companies start talking about being a force for good, there’s a good chance that a serious amount of self righteousness is brewing behind the scenes. Everyone who fights a war thinks they have God on their side. And some of the most atrocious moments in history were done in the name of good.

What I’d like best is if Twitter just focuses on keeping the lights on, and adds competitive features that keep Google, Facebook and others on their toes. Let others use Twitter to do good things. Twitter should stay goodness-neutral and self righteous free.

Or alternatively try to be a force for good. But just do it, don’t talk about it.

Via [TechCrunch]

Related posts:

1. Smule creates its own “evil twin” company, Smort. They’ve got Zombies in Bikinis
2. Math Alarm Clock Is Evil, Evil Genius
3. Google’s China Stance: More about Business than Thwarting Evil

As Apple goes on the offensive against Android, it risks alienating more and more developers. Today, another prominent developer chose the opposing side. Tim Bray, the well-known software architect and blogger, is joining Google to help rally even more developers around the Android mobile operating system.

Bray is the co-inventor of the XML Web standard, and most recently worked at Sun Microsystems. In a blog post, he explains that he is drawn to Google in part because he hates the iPhone, or at least its closed and controlling environment from a developer’s perspective.

The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger.

I hate it.

He also notes that Android is catching up to the iPhone in terms of sales:

As of now, they’re selling around 90K iPhones per day compared to around 60K Android handsets. It’s a horse race!

In February, Google noted partners are selling 60,000 Android handsets a day, and Apple sold 8.7 million iPhones last quarter, or about 97,000 a day. Android is making steady gains in market share.

Bray’s decision to throw his hat into the Android ring is just the latest example of a growing backlash among developers to Apple’s autocratic ways. Facebook developer Joe Hewitt famously quit the iPhone over similar issues. Apple cannot afford to alienate developers because, given the choice, they will shift their attention and their apps to other platforms.

Via [TechCrunch]

Related posts:

1. Myxer Report: Android Outpaces iPhone Users For Downloading Mobile Content
2. Breaking: Spotify Goes Live On iPhone And Android
3. Google Backs Its Boy, HTC, In The Apple Lawsuit Ring

A trio of entrepreneurs who led online advertising technology company Accipiter to an acquisition by aQuantive – which was in turn acquired by Microsoft for $6 billion in May 2007 – have returned to startup life after serving a variety of roles in advertising and sales at the Redmond software giant.

Jeff Wood, Guy Taylor and Ryan Treichler are today announced their new company, aiMatch, as well as the limited availability for “early adopters” of its online ad technology platform. In addition, the threesome said they have also convinced former Head of Publisher Solutions EMEA for Microsoft Advertising Steve Perks to join the club.

So what does aiMatch do? According to the press release, the company aims to put advertising intelligence (hence the “ai” in the name) in the hands of online publishers, helping them create new audiences and revenue opportunities, while at the same time maximizing the value of their advertising inventory.

The company will provide a solution for online publishers to create, forecast, deliver and analyze online ad products based on an open platform that it says is able to communicate with value-add systems for aggregating data into one actionable view.

In the words of Jeff Wood, former VP of Publisher Sales at Microsoft Advertising and now CEO at aiMatch:

“While so many solution providers have been focused on helping publishers monetize remnant inventory, we recognized that publishers invest heavily in their content and need new tools to increase the value of their direct sold products. That is why we are dedicated to offering solutions that leverage advertising intelligence to maximize their return on that investment.”

As mentioned earlier, aiMatch’s online advertising platform is currently only open to some early adopters, with full availability scheduled for June 2010.

Via [TechCrunch]

Related posts:

1. Microsoft Picks Up Another Ad Startup: Rapt
2. HarperCollins Debuts Inkpop, An Interactive Writing Platform For Teens
3. GumGum Launches New Image Licensing Platform

By Andrew Liszewski

It’s not as easy as opening up the App Store and shelling out $2.99, but if you’ve been disappointed by the limitations of other DSLR camera controllers on the market, you’ll probably like the fact that the Open Camera Controller is not only extremely robust, but it’s also free… kind of. Created by the chaps at HDR Labs, in conjunction with Steve Chapman, the OCC is based on a Nintendo DS which is essentially a touchscreen controller with 8 hours of battery life, and is designed to serve as the perfect camera remote, at least for their particular needs.

In addition to providing more robust exposure bracketing, an intervalometer and even the ability to trigger the shutter based on loud sounds, the Canon, Olympus and Sigma-friendly OCC can be expanded with almost limited functionality by other open source apps as they become available. Unfortunately HDR Labs doesn’t plan on selling the Open Camera Controller, but they have provided detailed instructions on how to make your own, in this case creating the interface cable from an old GBA WarioWare: Twisted cartridge. There’s some wiring and soldering involved, so the project isn’t for the faint of heart, and technically it’s far from free, but how many other DSLR controllers let you play a game of Mario Kart DS on your break?

[ HDR Labs - Open Camera Controller ] VIA [ Pocket-lint ]

Via [Ohgizmo]

Related posts:

1. Super Nintendo Controller Gets A Power-UP
2. Wii B.O.S.S. Controller Adds A Little Nostalgia/Adds A Little Bulk To The Wiimot
3. Fifty24SF Controller Hoodie Only Controls How Awesome You Look

Last time I was in India I wrote about the amazing business model innovation that had allowed telecom operators 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 back-and-forth 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. 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 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 effect on the politics of Rajasthan—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 Gandhian 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.

Via [TechCrunch]

Related posts:

1. Why Kyte.tv will kill Qik and Flixwagon in cell phone video space
2. Exclusive: OTOY Goes Mobile, Turns Your Cell Phone Into A Powerful Gaming Rig
3. Quillpill: A Twitter For Cell-Phone Novelists (500 Invites)

This afternoon at SXSW, a panel of Gmail and Google Buzz team members took part in a panel where they discussed what goes on behind the scenes at Gmail. The panel covered a smattering of topics, covering everything from Gmail stickers to site speed, but eventually the discussion turned to the elephant in the room: Google Buzz’s privacy shortcomings when it launched last month.

Google Product Manager Todd Jackson said that Google had learned a lot from the incident, acknowledging that Google was in error when it made the assumption that users wanted to move their email and chat contacts over to their Buzz social graph, and auto-followed them.  To make sure that kind of blunder doesn’t happen again, he revealed that Google may start pre-releasing new Buzz features to small subsets of users.

So why exactly did Google Buzz launch with some key social features missing? Jackson said that while Google employees were testing out the product internally, they never had much desire to mute any of their coworkers, and that their email contact list closely matched the people they wanted to follow on Buzz. Obviously, that wasn’t true for most people once the product was released outside of the Googleplex. Which is why Google is considering pre-releasing new Buzz features to a few thousand opt-in users long before they’re rolled out to the public.

That would stand in contrast to what Google does for many of its major product launches, as Jackson says that the company doesn’t like to preannounce things (it frustrates users when they can’t try the new release out for themselves). But in the case of Buzz, where changes can have a major impact with respect to user privacy, it sounds like Google may be making an exception. Jackson also noted that he had actually asked SXSW speaker danah boyd to give her keynote talk on privacy and publicity at Google headquarters.

Via [TechCrunch]

Related posts:

1. Top Ten Ways To Fix Google Buzz
2. Loud Noises! Google Buzz Is A Broken Instrument Capable Of Beautiful Music.
3. Google Buzz Boosts Sharing On Google Reader By 35 Percent

Via [TechCrunch]

Related posts:

1. Twelve Sided IQ Pentagon Puzzle
2. OGCC Day 14 - Yoda Christmas Lights
3. R2-D2 Christmas Lights

By Andrew Liszewski

It’s not the biggest globe your money can buy, but the 6-inch City Lights Earth Globe makes up for it with some clever tricks. Once placed on its base the globe not only begins to rotate on its own, but it also lights up, providing a glowing view of our planet during the day, or at night. That’s right, at one time or another we’ve all had a poster or desktop wallpaper featuring that mesmerizing photo of our planet’s cities lit up at night, and now you can have a 3D representation of it sitting right on your desk. The product shot is a bit misleading since you can’t actually show both at the same time, it’s either day or night, but for $49.95 it’s a minor misrepresentation.

[ City Lights Earth Globe ] VIA [ The Red Ferret Journal ]

Via [Ohgizmo]

Related posts:

1. OGCC Day 14 - Yoda Christmas Lights
2. R2-D2 Christmas Lights
3. Monopoly City Streets Uses Google Maps As The Game Board

By Evan Ackerman

If you’ve been reading OhGizmo for the last 5 years, you might recognize VirtuSphere from this 2005 post. Since then, not too much is different, besides that VirtuSphere seems to be trying to open up to a new market that’s not the US Army or NASA: gamers.

VirtuSphere is at GDC hoping that someone will step up and port some worthwhile games to their system. Like, you know, Halo 3. Meantime, what they have in the works is a gameshow that (as far as I can tell) involves two people in two VirtuSpheres trying to virtually kill each other or something. If you want to try one of these out, you’ll be able to find it in the Excalibur in Las Vegas in about a month, or if you just can’t wait, expect to pony up about $55,000 for one of your own.

[ VirtuSphere ]

Via [Ohgizmo]

Related posts:

1. Logitech G19 Gaming Keyboard Reviewed. Verdict: Worth Dropping Two Benjamins
2. GDC08: Invisible Gaming
3. Exclusive: OTOY Goes Mobile, Turns Your Cell Phone Into A Powerful Gaming Rig

By Andrew Liszewski

Billed as the “World’s only Apple-certified solar charger carrying case” the new Solar Surge from Novothink for the iPhone 3G/3GS and the iPod Touch lets you harvest the sun’s energy to replenish your device’s less than epic battery. According to the Novothink website, “2 hours of direct solar exposure provides about 30 minutes of talk time on a 3G network or 60 minutes of talk time on a 2G network”, but if the sun hasn’t made an appearance you can always fall back to the included USB cable for charging its built-in lithium-ion polymer battery.

A series of 4 multi-colored LEDs on the back of the case lets you see the battery’s remaining charge, and they’ll also let you know if there’s enough light available to actually take advantage of the built-in solar cell. In fact Novothink has even gone above and beyond the call of duty by providing their free Solar Planner app for either device, which provides an estimate of how long you’ll have to leave the Surge in the sun to maintain your iPhone or Touch’s battery level, depending on the current weather conditions and your location.

Eventually available in 6 different colors, the Surge for the iPhone runs $79.95, while the single colored iPod Touch model is currently on sale for $52.95.

[ Novothink Solar Surge iPhone & iPod Touch Charging Case ]

Via [Ohgizmo]

Related posts:

1. Macally PowerLink 3-In-1 Battery, Sync Cable & Flash Drive For iPhone & iPod
2. H20Audio iPod Shuffle Waterproof Case
3. Case-Mate’s iPhone Recession Case