Now, we've all enjoyed irresponsible games like Rampage where our characters just smash up the city, but well, we as a society will soon be returning to a post-Tron paradigm. And with our economy now so delicate, do we really want to be sending hundreds of digital people out into the virtual streets looking for virtual work? So we ask you, readers of Woot, if you have a chance today, make a difference for these sprites by losing a few games of Block Tetris.

In Block Tetris you'll be using tetromino shaped apartments to create a little community that will vanish every time you make a line. This means when you win, you'll get the joy of victory! But when you eventually lose, you'll get to know that your strangely-shaped building will be a home to all those sprites that otherwise would wind up on the streets of San Andreas and Liberty City. It's a good feeling to make a digital difference. And doesn't it really help us all?

Shawn Foust is head of the video game industry team at law firm Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton LLP.

Facebook Credits are here, and they're sparking quite a bit of debate. Credits are the virtual currency that Facebook hopes third-party game makers will use so that there's a single, consistent currency across all the games in the Facebook community. But if you're going to use Credits, you not only have to pay Facebook a 30 percent cut of any transaction you make with the currency, you also have to keep to some pretty stringent terms dictated by Facebook.

The terms are simultaneously very broad and very narrow. They're broad in the sense that they establish a comprehensive set of regulations governing the implementation of Facebook Credits but narrow in the sense that those regulations only apply to Facebook Credits. The terms do not provide a comprehensive framework for all forms of in-game currency.

That's an important distinction.

The terms only have power so long as Facebook Credits are in play. If you take the Credits out of the equation by exchanging them for your own currency, many of the rules and restrictions are no longer applicable. So the solution for game developers is to accept Facebook Credits but not abandon your own currency.

Specifically, here are a few select things the terms explicitly prohibit you from doing with Facebook Credits:

• You will not (and you will not enable or allow any third party to) sell Credits to, or trade or otherwise exchange Credits with, any third party.
• You may not accept Credits as payment for tangible goods, except in the Facebook Gift Shop.
• You may not accept Credits as payment for a currency or other stored value item that can be used outside of the application.

Further, you as the game developer are not the Facebook Credits mint. That means you lose a lot of practical control:

• You do not control the supply of Credits. That means you cannot offer a sale or giveaway of Facebook Credits (the Terms prohibit you from transferring or trading Credits to a third party). You cannot summarily issue 1000 Facebook Credits to your users to spark interest in your game. You cannot distribute Facebook Credits to the masses and live in a post-currency narco-syndicalist commune. Facebook controls the generation and distribution of Facebook Credits, not you.
• You cannot lock in value. Facebook Credits are a fungible good that can be used in any application that accepts credits. If a person purchases $100 in Facebook Credits with the intention of purchasing things in your application, if they only spend $80, the remaining $20 is free to go elsewhere.
• Credits can abandon you. Facebook retains the right to revoke your eligibility to accept Credits at any time in [its] sole discretion. That means your economy can get up and walk away in an instant.

So why not walk away from Facebook Credits? Well, it's a payment option that resides natively on your lifeline platform. I'm not going out on a limb in guessing that Facebook Credits will quickly develop into a robust and flexible payment services option that will play an important role in the social game ecosystem. You probably don't want to walk away from that.

So why your own currency?
As mentioned previously, the current terms don't extend beyond Facebook Credits. So creating your own in-game currency frees the game developer from constraints while still permitting them access to an important option for payment services.

Since your currency is not subject to the terms, you have full control over its use (subject to Facebook's Developer Policies and Statement of Rights of course). For example, you can permit trading of your currency between players within an application, which is prohibited for Credits. That means Little Jill Jellybean can send Disaster Dollars to her friend so the friend can buy spent fuel rods in Uranium Enrichment City. Perhaps that inspires the friend to play more and convert into a paid user later on.

More importantly, you have control over your in-game economy. If you want to give away Disaster Dollars to a loyal user, you can. If you want to run a contest with an award of Disaster Dollars, there's no problem. None of this is possible if you implement Facebook Credits directly into your game since the only source for Facebook Credits is Facebook.

You also can build in a safeguard from having the plug pulled. If you implement your own in-game currency you can offer your users a variety of options for the purchase of that currency other than Facebook (such as Paypal or Offerpal). Thus, if Facebook decides you are unworthy of Facebook Credits your game still has a viable means for monetization. If you rely solely on Facebook Credits you're at the mercy of the eligibility clause.

Further, offering multiple options creates a greater possibility that a particular user will find one that appeals to him or her. Users with a preference for Facebook Credits may use that option. Alternatively, if a user has a pre-existing relationship with another payment services provider and would prefer to use that provider, they can. Help them help you make money. It's not asking too much.

How do I set up my own currency?
You permit the user to purchase only one thing with Facebook Credits: your currency. Once the users have exchanged Facebook Credits for your currency, they can participate in the broader game economy. There should be no direct purchase of any items or anything other than your currency with Facebook Credits.

Once the exchange is made, you've locked up the value of those Credits in your own currency, ensuring it won't move off to another application. You also introduced the user to an economy where you control the rules. And, as most game developers will tell you, few things are more important to a game than a well structured economy. The economy can dictate the tempo of the game and can have dramatic effects on a user's interaction with the content. Normally it wouldn't be something a developer would consider ceding control over.

So there's the case for your own currency. There are arguments against, of course. Some argue that creating a separate currency is confusing and creates additional friction. Others argue that implementing Facebook Credits directly is good for the reputation of the game. I'm sympathetic to these arguments, but I find them unpersuasive in light of the root issue: direct implementation of Facebook Credits without a buffer currency effectively shifts control of a critical aspect of your game (which is often the main source of monetization) to a third party with potentially different incentives. Not good.

A buffer currency allows you to leverage a powerful new player in the payment services space while retaining control and flexibility.

Shawn Foust is an attorney with Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton's Silicon Valley and Century City offices and head of the firm's video game industry team. He focuses on tackling the cutting edge legal issues facing businesses in the entertainment, new media, and technology industries. He handles a blend of intellectual property licensing/litigation and emerging growth finance work.

Tags: Credits

Companies: Facebook

People: Shawn Foust

Working in the mobile advertising business, New York City-based Xtify has been building its platform for brands and other app developers, allowing for geo-targeted notifications most often, ads that are pushed to consumers when they are within a predefined area, say a one-mile radius from a department store. The company has announced it has raised $2.8 million in a first round of institutional funding, which it is using to beef up its product development and team, currently ten-people strong.

Xtify picked up the funding from Acadia Woods Partners, SeventySix Capital and an undisclosed, significant New York-based angel investor. CEO Josh Rochlin says Xtify is looking to raise another sum of money in the fall, due to major announcements and partnerships that are rolling out soon, although he declined to disclose those just yet.

Xtify's platform allows for brands, businesses and anyone building apps for iPhone, Android and Blackberry devices to create and manage push notification campaigns. When users who have downloaded an app for instance, an app for a clothes brand are within a certain distance from a retailer, they will get a notification of a sale or special offer, or a prompt for whatever action the app developer desires, on their cell phone, much like the ones users get now when there are software updates available. The trick is that the app doesn't have to be running in the foreground: Users will be notified even if the app is not currently in active use.

This only applies to the users who have downloaded the app that notifies them, nobody gets spammed, Rochlin explained. Xtify also keeps things anonymous, as no phone numbers or email addresses are collected. Instead, users in Xtify's database are identified with random user keys, which are then paired with information about the device, such as the make and model of it, and its location.

Xtify faces competition from other location-based ad companies, such as San Francisco, Calif.-based Placecast, which runs geo-targeted ad campaigns, for instance pinging users with text messages when they are near a shop. Xtify says that the very fact that they have a background-running notification system is what differentiates them from the competition. In addition, the service is not reliant on getting a phone's location from a carrier, nor is it using SMS, which makes the service cost-efficient, Xtify says.

Founded in 2009, Xtify launched at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last February, and the team is currently keeping its head down, building out the product. The major announcements that the company has in the pipeline in the following weeks will make for a big increase in traction for the platform, Rochlin says.

Tags: geo-fencing, mobile ads

Companies: Acadia Woods Partners, Placecast, SeventySix Capital, Xtify

People: Josh Rochlin

Filed under: App Review

Gallery: American Museum of Natural History Explorer app

TUAWThe American Museum of Natural History's Explorer app for the iPhone and iPod touch originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 30 Jul 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

At their genesis, bike-sharing networks were low on tech and heavy on grassroots, cooperative spirit. But the programs and systems rolling out today for tracking and distributing up to thousands of bicycles in cities from Milan to San Antonio are of another generation one built upon mobile access to the real-time web and GPS chips.

Armed with these IT tools, new and evolving bike-sharing networks fit into the larger trends of smarter digital and networked transportation systems, innovation around providing mobility as a service, and moves by unconventional players (from non-profits to advertising giants to health insurance firms to new startups) to assume new roles in the transportation sector.

Public entities are getting into the act, too, with Montreal's BIXI system being deployed in cities in the U.S. and the UK, while federal and state governments are providing seed money and ongoing funds for some programs. The hope is that the right combination of technology, pricing and convenience will help integrate bicycles into the larger transportation system at mass scale (right up there with buses, trains, ferries and taxi cabs, for example) and spur the growth of some new businesses in the process.

On Friday, the world's largest bike share network will launch in London, with 6,000 bikes at 400 stations. It's an illustration of what technologies like text messaging, smartphones with GPS, and the real-time web are ultimately driving in the bike-sharing market: a shift in scale, as infrastructure costs come down, and growing convenience attracts a broader market.

As it becomes increasingly common for consumers to have web access on the go and operators can use sensors and real-time communication to flag available docks and bikes barriers to adoption are falling away. It's just plain easier to find a station and a bike that's ready to roll. And with GPS chips that can locate you, a bike, or a parking spot, operators have a tool for tackling the bane of bike sharing networks of yore: theft.

A similar shift can be seen on the automotive side of the mobility as a service market. Whereas car sharing providers have had networks at the city or regional scale for years, often using a nonprofit model, Zipcar has built up a national footprint and begun to extend its reach overseas over the last decade. While the company which filed in June for a $75 million IPO has never turned a profit, its revenues reached $131.2 million last year, up from just $13.7 million in 2005.

Zipcar, which has also grown through acquisitions, developed its fleet technology with a plan to scale it. The company's vehicles carry some essential hardware, including a black box device (a custom circuit board, processor and modem) fitted to a vehicle windshield that allows users to unlock the car they've reserved, and also lets Zipcar remotely monitor vehicles. It's a relatively streamlined customization process, compared with competing systems that require installation of keypads in the dash, for example, or a hands-free calling setup. In fact, Zipcar CEO Scott Griffith has told us that the ideal vehicle for car sharing would be modeled after smartphones, with an open platform that would allow Zipcar to roll new cars into its fleet with little more than a software download.

Zipcar's grand vision is for a subscriber who lives near its Cambridge, Mass. headquarters, for example, to rent a car in a Barcelona or London Zipcar fleet just as easily as in their home network. Might we eventually be able to rent a bike just as easily in any city around the world, with the swipe of a smartcard or by sending a text message? The race is on to find out, as a growing number of operators seek to replicate their systems in other cities.

We put together a cheat sheet on 10 bike sharing networks to watch earlier this year. But the pace of growth in these programs called for an update, so we revamped our guide to show how bike-sharing networks are putting technology to work, who's paying how much, and what you might expect to find in your own city sometime soon. There are dozens more that we couldn't include on our list (tell us about em in the comments section), but here's 20 places to watch as the latest generation of bike sharing systems put chips to work for pedal power.

Related articles on GigaOM Pro (subscription required):

Mobility on Demand Takes Aim at Transport Networks' Last Mile

Electric Vehicles Give Mobility as a Service a Jumpstart

I've never been one to have commitment issues. But my decision to move from the iPhone 4 to the Nexus One just couldn't stick. Last month I wrote about what I saw as the flaws of the iOS platform and specifically the issues I had with the iPhone 4. I also wrote a glowing review of the Nexus One and I stand by (most) of that analysis. But yesterday I sold my Nexus One and will soon be buying an iPhone 4.

When I announced this news on Twitter and Facebook last night I think I stunned just about everyone of my friends and followers. I got a lot of questions like What did Android do wrong? but did get a few statements like I knew you'd be back when I left last month, I didn't intend to come back. But there were a few lingering issues that I just couldn't get past.

Subsidies

The Nexus One I purchased cost me $529 direct from Google. So I take that phone and attach it to my AT&T account and then pay AT&T the same amount of money for my voice, data and TXT messages as I would if I were on a 2-year agreement. AT&T spends nothing upfront and makes a larger profit from me than it does for someone who spends $199 for a iPhone 4. The obvious benefit for me is that I can take my phone and go to another carrier, or cancel my account anytime I want. But here's the kicker my only real choice is AT&T.

Beyond the logistical issues of having every friend and family member I know being on AT&T (free mobile to mobile) and the fact that they have one of the better networks in the Kansas City area Google for some reason designed two different Nexus Ones. One radio optimized for T-Mobile and one for AT&T. So if I decided I was fed up and wanted to move to T-Mobile, I'd basically cripple my phone by relegating it to EDGE network data speeds. And since obviously Verizon and Sprint are on different technologies, they're not even something to be considered. Google would have been wise to use a radio that would work on both types of GSM networks, if that were possible. Realistically, I'm locked into AT&T, regardless of if I have a 2-year contract or not.

So the real question for me was, in order to make the value of owning the Nexus One worth it was my experience with it more than 2.5x better than the iPhone 4?

Basically. No.

Quirks

Here's the thing about reading reviews done by people who purchased the product with their own money we tend to want to make ourselves feel good about the purchase, so things that might annoy an totally objective person are sometimes overlooked (or not mentioned.)

There were a few things about the Nexus One that annoyed me from the start, but were not enough to make me dislike it completely. If it was going head to head on price with the iPhone 4, I wouldn't give them much of a second thought and would probably still consider elements on the device and the OS to be superior. But here are a few:

1. Nothing beats iTunes for syncing music. I tried a variety of solutions for Android and was really quite impressed with a program called Double Twist. But the Windows interface was worse than using iTunes on Windows, and the process of syncing tended to take a really long time.
2. The row of home, back and search buttons on my Nexus One were very picky. You have to touch them just above where the actual indicator button is for them to work properly. It's something you get used to, but when you hand the phone to someone else, they tend to have a hard time getting it to work.
3. Battery life was less than stellar. The more I used the device, the more I saw where I was coming very close to not being able to go through the day without a recharge. Since I'm not much of a night owl (I'm usually at home or even in bed by 10PM on a Saturday) it didn't hit me too bad. I did initially purchase a second battery for the device, but I never used it.
4. I found the ear hole for the speaker to be in an old location, at least compared to the iPhone. I had to hold the edge of the phone up to my ear to hear other people clearly. It was something I had to get used to, but found to be somewhat bothersome.
5. The on-screen keyboard was just not as accurate as the iPhone version. In fact I found the touch screen to be somewhat laggy compared to the iPhone. By this I mean, the iPhone screen seems what I would describe as spring loaded snappy and ready to flip from around with ease. On the Nexus One it was common to try and flip two or even three times before the screen reacted.

Applications

Despite what I initially said, the Android Marketplace has a long way to go before it catches up with the App Store. While there were a sizable collection of applications that had been ported, many of them did not function anywhere as smoothly as the iPhone version. The Facebook for Android application was painful to use at times, forcing me to manually refresh pages to see updates or get notifications. This was common for most of the applications that I used, things that seemed to just happen naturally on the iPhone either required multiple menus or buttons to access, or the features were missing.

There is also something to be said for the investment in Apps that I'd made over the last two years as an owner of the iPhone 3G. I have hundreds of Apps in my iTunes library, and I'd paid for a sizable chunk of them. Many of them I could just not find a replacement for in Android. Really, the App Store is one of the smartest things Apple did to insure people stay with the platform.

Photography

Nowhere was this lack of Apps more obvious than in the world of photography, which is my main hobby. Apps like Photoshop Mobile, Best Camera and Camera+ were ones that I'd come to use often on my iPhone, and despite my fruitless searches, I could not find anything similar in the Android Marketplace. They were also Apps that I already owned, and couldn't use.

There is also something to be said for the iPhone 4 camera, versus well, anything in a phone or even most point and shoots.

While not really photography, something else I found ridiculous about Android compared to the iPhone was how impossible it was to easily take a screenshot on the Nexus One without doing a USB tether to the Android SDK, or rooting the phone to install custom applications. It's a simple process of clicking two buttons on the iPhone. Not that I often need to take screenshots, but I do it enough where it was bothersome.

Death Grip

I griped (a lot) about the iPhone 4 and the death grip. Why? Because it really teed me off. However, and I really hate to admit this, the Nexus One had a very similar issue.

While I could never get the signal to drop to the point where I would disconnect calls (which I can do on the iPhone 4) there was a noticeable decrease in signal strength when holding the phone, and the tighter the hold, the fewer the bars. It was not uncommon to watch my signal go from four bars (full) to one bar. Granted, the problem wasn't simply touching a specific area of the phone like Apple seems to have engineered their device for but the issue is there.

Another related issue, was I could never get my phone to remember to automatically reconnect to my home wireless. It had no issues at work, but for some reason when I came home I'd always have to enter the wireless settings and reconnect. It managed to save my SSID and WPA2 keys, so it only took a few seconds but for some reason it would never stick. Same goes for leaving the phone on standby and then waking it up. It would connect to 3G but never Wifi without a little extra encouragement.

Discontinued

It never makes you feel good when you buy something and then two weeks later learn they're not going to sell the product anymore. On the other hand, it made it a lot easier to find a buyer on eBay.

It's Not All Bad

Even with my complaints about Android and the Nexus One. It's not all bad. I still stand by my analysis of the intricacies of the operating systems from my previous review. Things like the notification system and the integration with Google services are really top notch and the notification system in iOS is something Apple really needs to address.

Synopsis

Will I miss my Nexus One? Yes.

Would I buy it again? Yes (subsidized) Would I encourage others to buy it? Yes.

Would I encourage others to look at Android? Yes

But in the end, I just couldn't make it stick. Weighing all the factors, the iPhone, with it's assorted Apps and features was the better choice for me. Forgive me Father Jobs, for I have strayed from the light. Please accept me back to the comfort of the Reality Distortion Field once again. I promise I'll (probably) buy an iPad!

When SeatGeek launched its ticket search service last fall, it had a compelling hook users don't just see tickets from reselling sites like StubHub, they also see SeatGeek's predictions (based on things like the weather and the team's record) about whether the price will go up or down. Now the New York City startup is taking that approach a step further with new team pages.

Previously, SeatGeek focused on individual events, including sports games and concerts. But sports fans might want to make buying decisions for more than one game, say if you're deciding which game you can get the best price for out for the next four or five. So the new team pages track ticket prices over time, across games. It's almost like you're tracking a stock for a company. The page shows data like average price, highest price and lowest price during the current season, and a list of the most expensive games. To see it for yourself, you can check out this page for the San Francisco Giants.

This should have the additional benefit for SeatGeek of increasing its rank on search engines. In fact, Compete's data shows SeatGeek's traffic increasingly steadily over the past month, and even overtaking its more-established and better-funded competitor FanSnap.

We chose SeatGeek as one of the most promising startups to launch at the TechCrunch50 conference last fall. It has raised $1.5 million in funding, most recently in a $1 million round led by the Founder Collective.

Companies: SeatGeek

Name: Urban Spoils

Quick Pitch: Urban Spoils aggregates and recommends fantastic daily deals from 100+ social buying websites.

Genius Idea: If you're Internet-savvy and love a good bargain, you've probably already subscribed to a number of daily deal newsletters, like Groupon and LivingSocial, and/or signed up for rush buying sites like Gilt, which posts deep discounts on designer clothing at noon ET every day.

Consequently, your inbox is likely flooded with e-mails promoting all of these deals every morning, which can be difficult and time-consuming to navigate.

Urban Spoils is a 20-person, Seattle-based startup that aggregates all of the group deals from sites like Groupon, Gilt, LivingSocial, BuyWithMe, Ideeli, Tippr and more. You can log on to their site or sign up for their newsletter to easily view the day's best deals at once. The site serves more than 60 U.S. cities and is preparing to go global.

The selections are both human-curated and based on your preferences (similar to the Personalized Deals option Groupon rolled out today), features that should prove increasingly useful as more sites and businesses move into the group buying space.

What do you think of the service? Would you prefer to get deals from select sites, or use Urban Spoils's aggregator?

[img credit: alancleaver_2000]

Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark

BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

More About: bizspark, gilt, gilt groupe, group buying, groupon, LivingSocial, spark-of-genius

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I've just come back from three days in Santa Clara, spending time with some of the brightest people in the Java world - the JVM language summit is truly a fantastic collection of great people. And I was there too

THe goal of the JVM language summit is to collect the people who work with languages on the JVM and have them share their projects, their experiences and their networks - and let them network with the people in charge of implementing the JVM's for different companies. This year, a lot of discussion about JSR 292 and project lambda was on the plate. The presence of hardware and VM people was also more pronounced. I counted principals for at least six different virtual machines in the audience or presenting (Hotspot, JRockit, J9, Azul, Maxine, and Monty).

Among the experienced platform and language people there, some of the notables included Kresten Krab Thorup, Joshua Bloch, Bob Lee, Neal Gafter, John Rose, Brian Goetz, Alex Buckley, Rich Hickey, Charles Nutter, Cliff Click, Doug Lea, Per Bothner and many more. A great collection of people.

As an example of the funny happenstance that can happen in this collection of people, I was sitting rebinding my Java implementations for Mac OS X - and I had remove lots of links in /usr/bin. A few minutes later the person next to me started asking some questions about my experience with Java on the Mac - and it turns out he's the manager for the Apple JVM team. Or at one point Rich Hickey reported on a quite puzzling problem that causes bad semantics when iterating over data that doesn't fit in memory - and Cliff Click immediately opens up his laptop, says give me an half hour and I'll see what I can do.

Another funny anecdote was when Doug Lea pointed out that if you use fibonacci to test performance against yourself or others, it's important that the implementations actually agrees about the first values of fib. Funnily enough, I saw three different implementations of the ground rule in fib during the summit - all of them different. (if n < 2 return 1, if n<=2 return n, if n < 2 return n).

There were way too many interesting presentations and discussions for me to be able to talk about all of them - instead I just wanted to give some highlights.

Charles Nutter

Charles gave a quick introduction to JRuby and Mirah, and what kind of optimizations JRuby is currently doing. He also talked about how far he's gotten in inlining invoke dynamic calls inside of JRuby (and he's gotten very far - it's really cool).

Fredrik hrstrm

Fredrik is the JRockit representative on JSR 292, and way too smart. He presented a solution to how you can use method handles integrated with function types to solve many of the current problems in project lambda. A very powerful and interesting presentation.

Doug Lea

Doug spent his keynote trying (quite successfully) to concinve the room of the hegemony of fork-join as a good solution to concurrency problems. A very good and thought provoking keynote.

Josh Bloch

Last year at the JVM language summit, Josh talked about what he called the Semantic Gap. This year, after being beat up by some linguists, he changed the name of this concept to Performance Anxiety. The basic idea is that in our current infrastructure we have traded performance for predictability. Two examples from his talk about when this happens in Java was pretty interesting. He had one benchmark that consistently showed about the same numbers for the same JVM run, but differed between JVM runs. There was no undeterminism in the benchmark itself, but they benchmark times continued to oscillate between 0.7 and 0.85 depending on JVM run. Cliff Clicks explanation for this is that it is probably the compilation planner, which is a separate thread. Depending on when that thread runs the compilation strategy will be different, and makes a difference in times. And it's really hard for the programmer to take this difference into account.

The other example is simpler (and don'y change your code because of this). In some circumstances it turns out that & is faster than && in Java, because a && will short curcuit, which means it will branch. The single ampersand will always execute both sides, which means the CPU can pipeline both of them to execute at the same time.

All the examples he shown comes down to the same thing - we can't really reason intuitively about the performance of our language constructs anymore. Our systems have become to complex in order to support better performance, and we give up predictability to get that performance. And at the end of the day it doesn't even matter if you go down to C or assembler - you still cannot control exactly what the CPU is doing anymore.

Kresten Krab Thorup

Kresten is the CTO of Trifork, and one of the main organizers of many of my favorite conferences (like JAOO and QCon). The last nine months he has worked on an Erlang implementation for Java, which he talked about. It seems to be a very good implementation, and he's getting surprisingly good performance and context switching numbers. In fact, several of the ideas in Seph will be stolen from Erjang.

Rmi Forax

Rmi showed off his PHP.reboot project, implemented using JSR 292 and getting quite good performance. His JSR 292 backport seems to be really useful and I think I'll use that to make sure Seph can run on pre Java 7 machines. Good stuff.

Rich Hickey

Rich spent some time collecting comments from people in the room of what was problematic with the JVM in its current incarnation. To start us off, he showed one piece of hilarious/horrible Clojure code. Any one wants to guess what it does?

static public Object ret1(Object ret, Object nil) {
    return ret;
}

public static int count(Object o){
    if(o instanceof Counted)
        return ((Counted) o).count();
    return countFrom(Util.ret1(o, o = null));
}

We then went on to a few other things (which you can find on the JVM Language Summit wiki). The consensus seemed to be that tail calls is really very important. Last year, it wasn't as crucial but now that we see how powerful method handles and lambda will be, tail calls turn out to be very nice to have. Hopefully we can make that happen.

JSR 292

The JSR 292 expert group got lots of chances to work on ideas and designs for the future. Lots of interesting results came out of these discussions. Some of the more notable ones are skisses on how method handles and function types can work together, how invoke dynamic and bootstrap method can be used to implement defender methods and several other interesting ideas.

All in all it has been a fun few days, going far out in language and implementation geekiness. I hope to come back to this next year.

Last year, Chris Brogan coined the phrase the audacity of free to refer to the entitlement his friends feel they have about getting free entry into conferences that he and his team spend months to organize. Somehow, individuals forget along the way that costs accrue when considering the venue, food, exhibit hall, and the staff required on hand to run the event smoothly. At the end of the day, contrary to seemingly popular belief, the hosts aren't the only ones pocketing the money.

Yet with social media, there's a perception that it's easy to score freebies. After all, we become easily connected and six degrees of separation is slowly becoming three degrees.

Social media has introduced incentives to the online space, encouraging others to connect with your business. It shouldn't be that way, but that's the way it is. You want something from someone, so you need to compel them to engage or they'd have no reason to. In fact, in a test a colleague of mine ran with sponsored advertisements, the incentive-based campaign was much more successful than the original information-only campaign. But many individuals take this concept too far, expecting a freebie at every turn. And unfortunately, social media is at fault for breeding this mentality and causing it to spread.

Let Me Pick Your Brain for a Bit

Those of us who eat, sleep, breathe, and even bleed social media often get asked out to free lunches so that a friend can pick our brains and ultimately use this free advice to get some material gain out of it. And Chris is right: while seen as a kind gesture by the giver, it's exploitative. After all, hourly consulting fees are typically much more costly than a free lunch plus the travel time it took to meet up.

It's shocking, almost appalling, to see the reactions of individuals who are asked respectfully to pay consulting rates for these free brainstorming sessions, whether over a meal or on the phone. I'm not sure where we've gone wrong here, but something needs to change. Time is money, and inquiries are usually made to those possessing a certain level of expertise that only is available to those who have had years of training, which is also time and money (and even debt for some!). That lunch and the information provided therein will often benefit your bottom line. Making a payment for that should really not be so difficult. However, while haggling is expected in the economy of today, trying to get everything for free is downright unethical, nor is it fair to the person who poured their heart and soul into the advice that you'll merely milk from them without any reservation.

There's a Lot of Value Here Already

I won't deny it: I want Techipedia to be packed with value, to show you what I know and how I can help you. A few high profile folks have even called my readers lucky for getting great content without an up front monetary commitment. (If you want great beginner social media content behind a pay wall, check out Exploring Social Media, a project I am working on with Jason Falls and some other great minds.) This comes despite people asking for more under the assumption that I must be making money on this site and therefore owe my readers more. (Do you see any banner ads anywhere?)

I've spent seventeen years in the social space. That's a long time and before most of you probably even owned a computer that was connected to the Internet. I've been working in consulting for a little less, but it's my job. It's what I do (among other projects). And my fees pay the rent, it helps keep me connect to the Internet so that I can serve my clients, and it covers other expenses such as staff and business expenses. All of this doesn't come for free for me either.

Books Take Time to Write

Last week, a Twitter user asked a really blunt but surprising question about how to download my book (legally) for free. It was nice to request a legal copy, but there isn't any. My book is less than $20 on Amazon, which makes for a great deal and covers years of practice and training. The investment could benefit your business by a lot more than $20 in financial gain.

Books aren't a breeze to write and anyone who is an author might tell you that book writing is some of the hardest and busiest work they'll ever do. It took me nearly 1000 hours that could have been spent on other clients. Did anyone know that authors make perhaps a dollar off the sale of every book? As much as I've wanted to be an author since the age of 5, I understood why my mother tried dissuading me at that tender and impressionable age: most authors simply don't make enough money. Surprisingly, some individuals who have yet to build any type of relationship with an author still expect to get a break. Whether or not it's my choice and in book publishing, there are other parties involved beyond just the writer it's just the wrong question to ask.

Last week, when the Twitter user asked the question about the free downloadable copy, I gave her a straightforward unemotional-and-without-thought there is none answer, which is typical of the types of responses I provide on Twitter (I'm only wordy in blog posts ). Consequently, I got chewed out both on Twitter and following that on her own blog, telling me that I should have responded nicely and recommended the library. Somehow, people think it's okay to ask an inappropriate question and get a more-than-grateful response.

Life won't always hand you breaks. Those of us who are successful in our space usually have worked really hard to get here. Social media should not continue to give off the mindset that it's easier to get things for free. Sadly, it absolutely has.

I'll Respect My Time. Will You?

Lisa Barone made a really good point last month when she said that her productivity went up as a result of respecting her time. While her specific circumstances were different, the premise is the same. Most of us are busy, and lately, the extent of the busy-ness for me is about helping a business's bottom line. I'd like to help others but feel the need to repeat my stance against giving people who do not know me and who do not even really warm up to me the benefit of a free ride while still charging customers who have been with me for years. And time is too finite to give everyone free advice. I wish the world worked that way, because I love to help businesses. After all, that's why Techipedia continues to provide really great informational content almost weekly. It's why I respond to every comment on my posts. It's why I reply to every email often within minutes. At the end of the day, though, we ALL have families to feed.

Expertise Comes at a Price

I'm sure I'm speaking for all social media consultants (and other Internet Marketing strategists) out there when I say that social media advice has come at the cost of learning through trial and error for us, and the more and more times we're asked to give out freebies, the more numb we get to the request. I really hope this post drives the point home that freebies, even a $50 lunch, don't really benefit anyone but the receiver. (Most of us would be eating lunch anyway!)

Not Everything is Free

I always am fascinated myself by looking at people doing dirty jobs that guy cleaning the bathroom in Madison Square Garden definitely isn't a happy camper and realizing that the only thing that governs people toward these tasks is financial benefit. Almost everything everyone does in the business world, be it a regular transaction, tourism, or travel, has some financial element to it. Money makes the world go round. Chris puts it really nicely when he says, But free is a choice, and it's not your buyers who decide this, no matter what we like to think in social media kumbaya-ville. Free is beautiful, and costs are part of life.

There are exceptions to the rule, of course, and there always will be. But setting up the expectation and making demands for freebies puts unnecessary stress on the giver, and that's just not the correct way to build a real relationship.

Now it's Your Turn

How have you handled the requests for freebies? Do you have any system that has worked? Failed? Sound off in the comments.

Photos provided by Shutterstock.

[ The Audacity of Free: The Products and Services Edition is a post written by Tamar Weinberg. ]

Read more about The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, a primer to social media marketing. Or you can subscribe to the Techipedia RSS feed.

Local deal goliath Groupon is launching a major new feature today: deal personalization, giving the site the ability to send you the deals it thinks you'll be most interested in. Before now, Groupon has always offered one or two deals per city per day to its users. That's still going to be true, but with a twist: the site will be sending different deals to users based on criteria like their gender, buying history, and their interests. The change may sound fairly minor, but it will likely have a big impact on Groupon's bottom line.

Groupon's simplicity has no doubt contributed to its success, but this is one case where it has some very good reasons for introducing a few extra options: personalization will help the site fend off the 500 clones that are gunning for it, it will allow Groupon to offer an unlimited number of deals, and the site can now offer deals from businesses located outside of large cities. Local personalization is rolling out to six cities for now (Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, San Jose, and Seattle), with the rest on the way.

CEO Andrew Mason says that one reason why there are so many Groupon clones is that the site simply hasn't been able to accommodate all of the businesses looking to serve up a local deal, leading the businesses to turn a competitor. Deal personalization changes this, because Groupon can now distribute multiple deals in the same city on a given day. Where Groupon was previously limited to one deal (and maybe a second so-called side deal) per day, it can now offer as many deals as it has eager businesses.

Again, to users, this won't be readily apparent. When you sign up you'll be asked for your zip code and gender, and Groupon will also allow you to specify if there are any particular types of deals you're interested in. But there's a good chance most people will have no idea that they're receiving a different deal than their neighbors they'll still receive their daily deal in their inbox, and there won't be a button to see the dozen other deals that might be available in that city. Deals will be distributed based on a personalization algorithm (Mason said they hired someone from Netflix to build it).

Of course, that could introduce a problem: you may ask a friend if they've gotten in on the latest Groupon, only to find that you've both got different coupons. To remedy this, Mason says that you'll still be able to send any Groupons you receive to your friends.

In addition to allowing for an unlimited number of deals, the new system gives Groupon more flexibility behind the scenes. First, it can allow companies to stagger their deals, offering it multiple times over the course of a few months to different buckets of users.

It also allows the site to offer deals to businesses from smaller cities. Groupon has historically only offered deals to businesses in major metropolitan areas San Francisco, New York, etc. But plenty of users who might sign up for San Francisco deals live in a suburb, like Palo Alto. Now Groupon can identify which users live in those suburbs based on their zip codes, and send them deals from businesses in Palo Alto. This is going to be part of a broader trend for the site, which is shifting from What's your city? to What's your zip code?.

And all of this has one other nice side effect: the deals landing in your inbox should be more relevant to what you're actually interested in.

Shared by louisgray
Tested today and got more than 20 Mbps on Comcast at our new place in Sunnyvale.

Top ISPs in San Francisco by speed, as of Wednesday, July 28, according to Speedtest.net rankings.

Want to know which ISP is the fastest and best-rated in your U.S. city?

Well, now there's a crowdsourced, Consumer Reportslike way to find out, thanks to the folks who run the online speed testing service Speedtest.net.

The company, which runs more than a million tests a day on its main testing page, updated its broadband statistics site NetIndex.com on Tuesday to let users see comparative results sorted by city. For instance, Los Angeles sees an average speed of 7.2 Mbps, with the Road Runner service slightly edging Charter Communications for the top speed 16.97 Mbps compared to Charter's 16.4 Mbps.

Moreover, since Speedtest.net asks users to rate their satisfaction with their ISP, you can see user rankings as well, with Road Runner clocking a 3.2 out of 5 stars, compared to 2.9 for Charter and 2.5 for third-place AT&T Worldnet.

The point, according to Speedtest.net co-founder Doug Suttles, is to make it easier for people to find a new ISP when moving to town, or when they want to find a better provider.

The speed data is compiled from the previous 30 days worth of data, and is updated daily, while the satisfaction ratings reflect votes placed over years. The rankings aren't particularly easy to find. The best way is to start on the Net Index homepage, scroll down to the state map and click on your state. Then under Cities, click on the tab to change the listing to By IP Address to find your city. The city-by-city data currently focuses on the United States, but will be expanding and there's plenty of international data already.

New York City beats Los Angeles on average speed, with an average of 11 Mbps, raised in no small part because AT&T's Worldnet service in the Big Apple registers an average 21.32 Mbp average, with Road Runner landing just behind at 17.29.

The data, Suttles argues, shows that broadband in the United States is better than many say think.

For the most part our feeling is the ISPs get a bad rap, Suttles said. The government wants people to be convinced that broadband is terrible but we are a pretty sprawled-out country. We are hoping politicians look at this and realize it is not so bad in some places.

Ookla, the parent company for Speedtest.net, is no newcomer to the world of broadband. It was founded four years ago as a spinoff from the ISP Speakeasy and sells versions of Speedtest.net's testing service to nearly all the net's top ISPs.

Speedtest.net was started largely as a tech demonstration, according to Suttles, but has since grown to be the place people turn to when they want to test their connections. And now, the site provides more than half the company's revenue, thanks to lucrative ads like those for Google's Chrome browser.

Now the company is asking testers to tell the company what speeds they were promised and how much they are paying, in order to come up with a ranking of ISPs by value and by which ones deliver the speeds they promise.

The company's preliminary data-crunching results may come as a surprise to some.

Nationally, 93 percent of people are getting the speed they signed up for, Suttles said. That's definitively a different story than anyone else is telling.

The company also has free mobile apps for Android and the iPhone as well, but data from those tests is not reflected in these results. Also not included is data from the testing suites the company provides directly to ISPs.

Some have questioned the methodology of the Speedtest.net tests and whether its tests are representative of the nation as a whole. In its defense, the company points to a recent MIT evaluation of different methodologies that found Speedtest.net was the best of the currently available data sources (.pdf).

Follow us for disruptive tech news: Ryan Singel and Epicenter on Twitter.

See Also:

• Verizon Leads, AT&T Runs Last in Wired.com's 3G Speed Test
• Battle of the Carriers: Take Wired.com's 3G Smartphone Speed Test
• The FCC Wants You to Test Your Broadband Speeds
• AT&T 3G Uploads Still Crawl Despite Promised Fix
• Hey, Google Fiber Losers: Build It Yourselves