Structure 2012: Launchpad: Jason Hoffman – Founder and CTO, Joyent, Matt Howard – General Partner, Norwest Venture Partners, Aaref Hilaly – Partner, Sequoia Capital

And the finalists are:

28msec: With offices in Palo Alto and Zurich, this startup aims to streamline the task of writing complex queries against your MongoDB database of choice.

Appscale Systems: This open-source implementation of Google App Engine (GAE) can run on a developer’s laptop, on Amazon Web Services or the Google Compute Engine.

Factor.io; This service lets developers knit together their tools of choice — for source control system, for PaaS, for testing — into a coherent, flexible workflow using an “if-this-then-that” interface.

Metrica: Metrica’s service lets folks use SQL queries against their MongoDB data, cutting the time it takes to create histograms, time series, and scatterplots and other data visualizations.

Saltstack:  This startup tool aims to speed up devops tasks including cloud orchestration or in-house server automation and infrastructure management.

Synapsify:  The company’s text search and analytics capability can help companies find the most important and relevant content for their needs.

Structure is GigaOM’s flagship conference that focuses on the future of cloud computing and internet infrastructure. For the past seven years, it’s convened the most influential speakers, buyers and vendors for two days of discussion, reporting, and debate.

Startups less than 12 months old with innovative technologies in cloud computing, internet infrastructure, or big data applications were eligible to apply for LaunchPad. The finalists will present their business plans on stage at the Structure conference in San Francisco, June 19-20. Follow @GigaOM on Twitter (#structureconf) to keep apprised of new speakers and sessions.

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Today, we launched phase one of our new responsive site design, and the changes we’re introducing to paidContent and GigaOM will ensure that doesn’t happen to you here. At a time when readers are using so many different devices, one big challenge for digital publishers is retaining the quality and consistency of the reading experience not only across devices but also across different operating systems and browsers.

Now, whether you’re on a desktop or a laptop, a tablet or a smartphone, our sites will automatically adjust, rendering the content in the way that best fits that particular environment. We know, for example, that it’s harder to hit a target on the page with your finger than with a mouse, and so if you’re reading us on a tablet, we’ve enlarged the target to make it easier to strike. Similarly, rather than try to cram our entire site onto a 4-inch smartphone display, we’ve removed some content from the mobile view so as to focus the presentation of the most essential information. In all cases, the site simply readjusts to fit the real estate on the screen that you’re on at the time.

Below, you can see how the presentation of an actual story changes as the screen shrinks.

Those aren’t the only improvements that we’ve made. Among the other things you’ll notice about paidContent and GigaOM:

• More curation: If you’re time-stretched, our new “Must Reads” section tells you what you absolutely shouldn’t miss.
• Easier sharing: We’ve made it easier to share not only whole stories and also pieces of content within stories.
• Better performance: Because the pages are lighter weight, they will load faster.
• Crisper display: We’ve added blur-resistant icons and new text-size controls, so there’s no more squinting to read text or straining to hit a small target when navigating the site.
• A cleaner look: We’ve ditched a lot of widgets that had simply built up over the years but no longer serve their original purpose.

For phase one of the redesign, we’ve intentionally simplified the look and feel of the site — it’s more akin to updating the plumbing in a house than redoing the facade. But without reliable plumbing, a house isn’t very habitable. These upgrades pave the way for subsequent phases of this redesign over the next few months that will include more changes in how we present our content.

Finally, I wanted to thank the fantastic team that has been slaving away on the redesign for last several months: our head of product management Raza Zaidi; engineers Casey Bisson, Matt Batchelder, Zach Tirrell and Jamie Poitra; designers Stephen Engert, Arlo Jamrog and Jonathan Koshi; and our product guys Adam Kazwell and Ian Kennedy. They’ve worked long hours — and tested countless iterations in QA — and we think the results are great.

We’d love to know what you think. If you have suggestions or comments (positive or negative), please leave them in the comment thread in this post.

Thanks again for being loyal readers.

Images courtesy of PlaceIt by Breezi.

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• Mobile 2012 and beyond

Today, we launched phase one of our new responsive site design, and the changes we’re introducing to GigaOM and paidContent will ensure that doesn’t happen to you here. At a time when readers are using so many different devices, one big challenge for digital publishers is retaining the quality and consistency of the reading experience not only across devices but also across different operating systems and browsers.

Now, whether you’re on a desktop or a laptop, a tablet or a smartphone, our sites will automatically adjust, rendering the content in the way that best fits that particular environment. We know, for example, that it’s harder to hit a target on the page with your finger than with a mouse, and so if you’re reading us on a tablet, we’ve enlarged the target to make it easier to strike. Similarly, rather than try to cram our entire site onto a 4-inch smartphone display, we’ve removed some content from the mobile view so as to focus the presentation of the most essential information. In all cases, the site simply readjusts to fit the real estate on the screen that you’re on at the time.

Below, you can see how the presentation of an actual story changes as the screen shrinks.

Those aren’t the only improvements that we’ve made. Among the other things you’ll notice about GigaOM and paidContent:

• More curation: If you’re time-stretched, our new “Must Reads” section tells you what you absolutely shouldn’t miss.
• Easier sharing: We’ve made it easier to share not only whole stories and also pieces of content within stories.
• Better performance: Because the pages are lighter weight, they will load faster.
• Crisper display: We’ve added blur-resistant icons and new text-size controls, so there’s no more squinting to read text or straining to hit a small target when navigating the site.
• A cleaner look: We’ve ditched a lot of widgets that had simply built up over the years but no longer serve their original purpose.

For phase one of the redesign, we’ve intentionally simplified the look and feel of the site — it’s more akin to updating the plumbing in a house than redoing the facade. But without reliable plumbing, a house isn’t very habitable. These upgrades pave the way for subsequent phases of this redesign over the next few months that will include more changes in how we present our content.

Finally, I wanted to thank the fantastic team that has been slaving away on the redesign for last several months: our head of product management Raza Zaidi; engineers Casey Bisson, Matt Batchelder, Zach Tirrell and Jamie Poitra; designers Stephen Engert, Arlo Jamrog and Jonathan Koshi; and our product guys Adam Kazwell and Ian Kennedy. They’ve worked long hours — and tested countless iterations in QA — and we think the results are great.

We’d love to know what you think. If you have suggestions or comments (positive or negative), please leave them in the comment thread in this post.

Thanks again for being loyal readers.

Images courtesy of PlaceIt by Breezi.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Ljung said that unlike some other music or performance-focused services, SoundCloud’s focus is not just music but any kind of sound — from audio books to recordings of conference calls like Facebook’s earnings call, or the embedded audio that bloggers like venture capitalist Fred Wilson use. “It’s really natural when you think about it, because sound is a huge part of the way we experience the world,” he said. The company’s mobile app recently passed 10 million downloads on iOS and Android.

The size of the market means the potential opportunity for SoundCloud is huge, Ljung said, but it also means that it’s easy to try and do everything all at once, because there are so many potential ways to create and share sound. In addition to mobile, one of the ways the service is expanding its reach is through partnerships with companies like Apple — which built support for SoundCloud sharing into GarageBand — and Flipboard.

The company is also working on a redesign of the service that is currently in private beta. Ljung said that it is much faster, and also has a range of new features, including the ability to share sounds in different ways and to create collections of sounds that share certain attributes. There is also a continuous play feature so that users can listen to something while they are browsing through other content, and there are real-time notifications of new content.

When it comes to the future of sound, Ljung said he dreams about a day when it is just a standard part of how we experience the web: “When do we get to the point where I can listen to the internet and talk to the internet? That’s kind of out there, but it’s what I like to think about.”

Check out the rest of our RoadMap 2012 live coverage here, and a video recording of the session follows below:

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Newer models are also more tied into other cars or to outside infrastructure and to the ubiquitous cloud than you might think, according to speakers at GigaOM’s Roadmap Conference on Monday. In that scenario, cars are just one more set of “things” that are part of the “internet of things” scenario. The only issue with that is that cars — the ultimate mobile devices — can go 90 mph and there are obvious concerns about how connectivity effects that. Distractions flowing in from the outside world, or a cloud, are just not a good idea.

In short: Infotainment is one thing. Safety, efficiency and traffic management are another, Paul Mascarenas, CTO and VP of research and innovation for Ford said on a Roadmap panel about the connected-car-as-computing-platform.

“From the Ford perspective, there are different levels of security in the vehicle — there’s partitioning around the power train and safety systems because it does concern our customers,” he said.

It’s great to think of the ability to stream down real-time traffic information or send up car diagnostics to the car maker, but that stream, obviously, has to be segregated from the music and podcasts that the driver or passengers are streaming or downloading to entertain themselves.

“Streaming content is cordoned off from the other systems — Ford has to control the apps and make sure it knows what’s doing on,” said Kevin Dallas, GM of Microsoft’s Windows Embedded effort. The two panelists said this is the fifth anniversary of the Ford/Microsoft collaboration on Sync which brings voice control to some automotive control functions. More on Sync here.

Over time, there might be ways to rationalize all that connectivity. “Right now, the connectivity with Sync is through your mobile device, so you’re using your regular data plan for that but I like the idea of the car being another device on a shared data plan. That might give us flexibility to provide a user experience where your car is like your second home or second office where you seamlessly share content,” Mascarenas said. That scenario would involve a single data account tied to a person rather than to a device or a vehicle.

The key to all of this is simplicity and safety.

If, you’re like many people these days, you’re putting a lot of your content into the cloud, where you can access it from your tablet, phone or PC. “There’s no reason your car should be any different,” said Dallas.

Check out the rest of our RoadMap 2012 live coverage here, and a video recording of the session follows below:

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And I couldn’t walk away from the opportunity to be part of growing something new and vibrant. We were covering the economics of digital media while we were living it.

This summer, we celebrated paidContent’s tenth birthday. The topics we cover are as relevant today as they were then, and, as the evolution of digital media continues, it’s even more important to look beyond the endless launches and the shiny toys to what works, what doesn’t and how to do it better.

Thousands of posts, countless all nighters, numerous events ranging from our first mixer in Santa Monica to paidContent 2012, one funding round, two sales, and lots of great colleagues later, it’s time for me to take on new challenges.

It’s been a privilege to be part of paidContent and ContentNext Media, to work with Guardian News and Media, and then to help find a new home with GigaOM. So many people have helped along the way that I’m afraid to start with names for fear of leaving someone out — thank you all.

When we migrated to the GigaOM Network, I promised we would continue to bring you the same news coverage, smart reporting and insightful analysis of the rapidly evolving economics of digital content. My leaving won’t change that. Building something that doesn’t work without you is a hollow accomplishment. Instead, we built a team at paidContent that individually and collectively lives up to those goals every day — enhanced by the deep bench of journalists at GigaOM and everyone else who makes the journalism possible. Together they should be unstoppable.

As for me, this new phase starts now with my first chance in a very long time to take a deep breath. What’s next? Stay tuned.

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Bringing more focus to the site

These changes reflect our basic editorial mission. When Om started GigaOM, he chose to focus on the most important stories — not necessarily the ones that will garner the highest pageviews, but the ones that have the greatest potential to change technology and how we interact with it. We don’t cover every story in tech news, and we probably never will.

That philosophy has always driven what we cover. Yet, as the site grew to 10 channels, our site’s navigation no longer reflected that focus. We heard from some of our readers that it was a little confusing. We had to agree. We had to simplify.

Our broadband coverage underpins everything else we do on the site because broadband underpins every major development in connected technology. The increasing access to faster, more reliable broadband makes so much of the tech we talk about today — the cloud, big data, mobile apps, etc. — possible.

To understand the future of connected technology, you need to understand broadband. Read the stories Stacey Higginbotham and Kevin Fitchard write, and you will begin to see where technology is heading. We decided that there’s no longer any reason to sequester that content off into its own channel. From now on, our broadband stories will appear on our main GigaOM channel and mobile broadband stories will appear on our Mobile channel.

Similarly, Collaboration no longer made sense as a standalone channel on our site. When we launched this channel as WebWorkerDaily in 2006, increasing broadband speeds and greater access to broadband were rapidly transforming the ways we worked. New terms were being coined as we tried to understand this phenomenon and its participants: “virtual workforce,” “web workers,” “freelance economy.” It was enormously disruptive — both to how work got done and to workers’ lifestyles. WebWorkerDaily was launched to address all of that.

Fast forward six years, and these terms have all but disappeared. This once-disruptive way of working has become a matter of course for many companies in tech and beyond. It’s no longer “web work,” it’s just “work.” Work from home policies are viewed more as a standard offering than a benefit. Nearly every cafe you walk into — well, at least the ones with free Wi-Fi — are filled with people tapping away at their open laptops and taking conference calls on their mobile phones. Most of our readers have at least one coworker who works in a different country or at least a different time zone.

Although we will continue to cover this trend from an enterprise perspective on GigaOM Pro, we will no longer have a dedicated channel on the site. As with Broadband, we will continue to write about these issues — whether it’s a new startup, emerging technology, or trend — on GigaOM, Mobile, or another appropriate channel. Looking back at the past six years of WebWorkerDaily/Collaboration, so many people were instrumental in making this site a reality. There are too many to list here, but I’d especially like to thank editors Simon Mackie, Ann Zelenka, and Judi Sohn and two of our top writers over the past year, Jessica Stillman and Terri Griffith.

And there’s more to come

Think of these small changes as another iteration of GigaOM, following on our expansion into the media industry, New York and Europe earlier this year. But there’s more news to come. We’ll always keep our same editorial focus. Our stellar editorial team — which, in my opinion, is made up of the smartest writers in tech reporting — will continue bringing you intelligent takes on the most important stories in technology, telling you not only what happened today but how it will affect the tech landscape going forward. But stay tuned over the next few months for some exciting announcements about new technologies our team is focusing on and new enhancements to our site.

This post was updated at 4:56 p.m. to thank our fabulous WebWorkerDaily editors from the past six years.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user CarbonNYC

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These filters are used by all of the country’s mobile operators, are generally turned on by default, get removed by a minority of people, and are largely unregulated. All of this has meant that as mobile consumption has boomed, the networks have become the de facto censors of the web in the U.K..

The most important thing to know about these mobile filters, though, is this: they are terrible at their job.

Over the years, many websites have found themselves the victim of a phenomenon known as “overblocking”, where the filters seem to arbitrarily censor them from millions of subscribers. The facts were documented in a recent report that outlined the problem: in their zeal to protect children, operators are screening vast amounts of legitimate content from users.

This may sound like a storm in a teacup (who doesn’t want to look out for kids?) but for many website owners, being hit by an overblock can be more than just irritating: it can be potentially threatening to your business.

Over the last month or so, I’ve been documenting the process we’ve been going through after we discovered that Orange — one of Britain’s biggest mobile operators — was overblocking GigaOM and preventing mobile readers from accessing our site. We did manage to get the block lifted, but what became even more frustrating than the overblock itself was trying to understand why it had happened.

But now, it turns out, we may have an actual answer — and it’s proof positive of the totally ludicrous, crude nature of the filtering that goes on.

Here’s the bottom line: Orange’s child protection filter, Safeguard, simply prevents people from reading anything that looks like a blog.

I’m serious.

The company sent me an official statement explaining their position (my emphasis):

“We would urge websites who feel they have been incorrectly categorised, or those who would like to register a complaint, to use the feedback tool provided on the Orange Safeguard landing page users are presented with when a site is blocked. We will aim to investigate and rectify any problems as quickly as possible.”

“GigaOM was blocked by our third party monitoring system as it was categorised incorrectly as a blog, (and at the moment Safeguard blocks blogs, but it will not block them all when the new Child Safety Safeguard goes live later in the year with a new Light setting) and not a professional tech news site, due to the usage of the word ‘blog’ on the site. This has now been rectified. We would like to sincerely apologise again for any inconvenience caused.”

So, essentially, Safeguard divides the web into categories of content. Some of it is OK: things like news services or big, well-known websites. Meanwhile, pretty much any site that’s categorized as containing user-generated content gets filtered by default — and that includes blogs, forums, chat sites and many more. That’s it.

It’s got nothing to do with what’s on the sites themselves, just what category they fall into. Categorized as a blog, GigaOM was unsafe. Categorized as a news site, it’s available for the whole family to read. Nothing to do with analyzing text, pictures, links or even user feedback.

This is crazy not just because legitimate websites can contain all sorts of murky material that you wouldn’t want your kids to see, while blogs and other sorts of user-generated content can be totally family-friendly. It’s crazy because a blogging platform like WordPress is so vast that it’s now responsible for powering one in eight sites on the web — meaning that, effectively, Orange is making a huge chunk of the web go dark for mobile users and nobody’s doing anything about it.

So there you have it, the real reason Orange blocked GigaOM: because they can’t be bothered to try harder.

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But although we can write reports on how poor mobile content filters are, there’s nothing that brings their inadequacy home quite like being on the end of an overblock yourself — as we discovered a couple of weeks ago.

That’s when we were informed that Orange was stopping users from reading GigaOM on their mobiles due to “restricted content”, something that was clearly ludicrous and potentially damaging.

I got in touch with Orange and complained about the filtering, and — hooray — can now confirm that the company is no longer overblocking GigaOM for its U.K. mobile subscribers.

But even though we got our problem fixed, the bigger issues still remain.

Block overturned, questions unanswered

Here are four questions I asked Orange two weeks ago. The company promised me a response on several occasions, but I have still not received any answer:

As of the time of writing, Orange has so far failed to give me any answers or explain its actions on overblocking.

This is not unusual, says Peter Bradwell of the Open Rights Group, which recently produced a study on overblocking that sparked closer examination of the practice.

“I think they underestimated the number of sites that are affected by this practice,” he told me. “These filters were developed by the Independent Mobile Classification Body [a cross-industry group founded by the major networks in 2005] but they developed a system for walled garden content; the code of conduct for internet content, The networks can interpret that any way they want.”

He also pointed out that while GigaOM was able to get the block removed we are obviously not your run-of-the-mill website, and we have contacts inside the Orange publicity team. Many others who are incorrectly blocked have no easy way to complain or get the block removed.

“The networks have in the past been more responsive at unblocking sites that have a profile,” he said. “And while they’ve been helpful and open with us, they say it’s hard for them to make the changes we recommend.”

Photograph copyright Shutterstock/Pixel 4 images

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One of several Volts on the floor

Electric cars are:

• A). The answer to all of our problems with climate change.
• B). Created by President Obama to irritate House Republicans.
• C). Will blow up if you turn them on.
• D). Evil.
• E). What the heck can you give us some real answers?

If you answered “E” to this surprise pop quiz, it’s a good indicator that you should come check out the Common Wealth’s segment at noon today on Covering Electric Cars, featuring myself, Chelsea Sexton of Who Killed the Electric Car? fame, and Ucilia Wang, Forbes and GigaOM writer. We’ll spend the hour talking about the ins and outs of EVs, and what are the real numbers and public perceptions. The event will take place at the Common Wealth Club’s SF office and it will be recorded for radio and video broadcast. Come hang with us and get on the radio and TV!

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