The same smile appeared when I was filling out the brief quiz for True & Co., a new startup that’s trying to rethink how women buy bras. The company asks you a variety of questions that are meant to find out the best shape and size of your bras, and it has put a lot of thought into doing this in an innovative, creative, and tactful way (boobs can be a tricky subject).

For example one quiz question asks “Do your cups runneth over?”, basically asking in a playful way if the bra you’re wearing is too small. You can’t help but laugh at that, easing the tension that is natural when you’re trying to think about the shape of your chest. Email marketing company MailChimp has led the way for using this type of language in an innovative way to develop a brand and an emotion connection and deliver better results.

Everlane and True & Co are creating new online e-commerce experiences, and they’re using emotion and design to do it. Warby Parker has famously grown its online glasses business in this way, too. These are the new wave of e-commerce companies, ones that could rival not only big box retailers but also the first-generation of e-commerce companies like Amazon, or clothing companies that have moved into selling items online.

I think Fab founder and CEO Jason Goldberg put it best in an article he wrote last month on his personal blog:

The third wave of e-commerce is all about bringing emotional purchases online. Non-commodity products. More thoughtful purchase decisions.  I like to call this Emotional Commerce. This is categories like furniture, home accessories, home textiles, fashion, art, and jewelry. These are categories where people care about having something special in their lives.

It will be the Warby Parkers, the Everlanes, the Net-a-Porters, and the Birchboxes that will innovate around using design and UI to get you to part with your money online in exchange for a product that adds a little something extra to you life, your home and your wardrobe. At our RoadMap event in 2012, we highlighted a discussion between Birchbox CEO Katia Beauchamp and Warby Parker co-CEO Dave Gilboa, who discussed some of these ideas. For our next RoadMap event in San Francisco in November, we’ll continue that theme (tickets won’t go on sale until this summer, but you can sign up to get first access here).

The lesson for e-commerce startups, product developers, website designers, and anyone else building something that other people will be using — in the physical world and the digital world — is that the small details matter. A lot. Om recently gushed about well made shoes:

I don’t just love the shoes because of how they look — though that matters — but I also look at where the leather comes from, how it is stitched together and what kind of craftsmanship has gone into it. From shoe trees to little patterns on the toe to the packaging to the font on the label, all of those little things add up to the design aesthetic. And that way of thinking about the design aesthetic extends to other things, including website design. Yes, fonts matter, and the layouts matter, but so does the relative relationship to the kind of content, the speed of the web service and even the screen size and how it all correlates to me.

Design might be a buzz word in the tech world in 2013, and some high end designers might not necessarily like the bastardization of the term and its embrace by the tech industry. But in many ways, designers and design thinking is starting to be valued like never before at tech companies (and let’s face it, all companies are becoming tech companies these days).

This has led to better and higher paid positions by designers and new products that are connecting with us on an emotional level. And that’s a good thing.

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And while Jeff Bezos thinks about the retail experience, some of the younger, more nimble and fashionable online brands are ready to experiment. The first one — Warby Parker, the online eyewear company that is challenging the existing giant Luxotica, which in turn has started copying Warby’s online tactics for its brands like Lenscrafters. The upstarts from New York are not taking it lying down and have just opened their first physical flagship store (beyond its showrooms) at 121 Greene Street in Soho district of New York.

But this isn’t just another retail store, co-founder Neil Blumenthal told me in a conversation a couple of weeks ago. Instead, the company is using sensors, Wi-Fi and other new technologies to understand how people use its retail space, taking that data and marrying it with its online sales trends and other information. As a result it can come up with unique business trends that not only lead to more interesting pricing models but also help give its design and sales teams vital intelligence.

“It is very clear to us who we are,” Blumenthal said. “We are a lifestyle brand that sells chiefly to consumers. It is a hundred year old concept and we use the same traditional metrics, because there isn’t really any fiddling with the business model.” So how should one value Warby Parker? How about like Michael Kors, Blumenthal countered. (The stock market places a value of $11.4 billion on Michael Kors fashions, about 22 times next year’s ending March 31, 2014, earnings of $2.45 a share, or 4 time sales of about $2.83 billion.)

Warby Parker wants to go where no online brand has gone before — toe-to-toe with offline brands. And while the business might be traditional, there is nothing traditional about the Warby Parker approach. The company is slowly bulking up its data group and now with three years of data plus a deeply ingrained design aesthetic, Warby Parker can do things non-Internet native companies like Luxotica can’t do — just yet. (It is one of the reasons we love these guys and invited them to speak at our RoadMap conference in 2012, where the company first talked about its offline-online philosophy. To learn more about RoadMap 2013 see here)

Warby Parker is building the next generation retail experience for a quantified society, one that marries the digital and the physical, data and emotion. I wouldn’t be surprised if 121 Greene becomes the destination for offline companies looking to think differently.

Neil is convinced we are going to see more brands jump from online to offline, giving the old guard some serious headaches. I agree with him and if I wasn’t in love with what I do, I would be building such a business. Blumenthal, who recently raised a boatload of money and signed up folks like J. Crew CEO Mickey Drexler, feels that the recent trend of venture capitalists backing away from commerce is just plain silly.

“More people are talking online today than yesterday,” he said. “There is a lot of money to be made in e-commerce and we are a company that is going to do that.”

Here is my video conversation with Neil, captured on my RX-1 without the help of a mike. ;-)

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Path has been noted for its design on mobile, and both Facebook’s Home on Android and Tumblr’s new Android design share navigation features with the social network. The new Tumblr navigation lets a user tap on the compose button to bring up a variety of options for blogging:

The company has over 200 million visitors per month and 18 billion pageviews, and CEO David Karp will be speaking with my colleague Mathew Ingram at PaidContent Live next week in New York about where the company is headed. Karp spoke at our Roadmap conference in November, where he talked about the challenges of good design on the company’s platforms, saying that it comes down to having a team that would personally want to use its own products.

“Good products are built by people who want to use it themselves,” Karp said at the time, pointing to Apple’s Steve Jobs and Instagram’s Kevin Systrom as examples. Karp also said that for many users, the app’s design serves as a form of self-expression, so it’s crucial for the company to get it right.

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But the story of the year and half-old venture capital-backed Misfit isn’t just a tale about a startup building a coveted Apple-inspired gadget. Though it certainly is that — the company was founded on the day that Steve Jobs died, “Misfit” is a tribute to Jobs and Apple’s ads to think differently, and one of the company’s co-founders is Apple’s former CEO John Sculley (who was instrumental in pushing out Jobs in the 80′s).

Misfit has emerged at the intersection of a few key trends in 2013 that are shaping wearable computing, data, and design. These trends include the emergence of next-generation wearables that have more mainstream appeal, the development of the lean hardware movement that is using crowd funding to experiment, the collection of data that uses narrative and emotion to create an impact, and, most importantly, the introduction of a new type of user interface, which Misfit CEO Sonny Vu has coined as “the glanceable UI.”

Next-gen wearables

Accelerometers and sensors have been around for years. One of the pioneers of the space, Fitbit (see disclosure), is already a five-year-old company. Back in 2008, it was novel to just have a device that could track your movements, count your steps and calories, and sync with your laptop or smart phone.

But in 2013 the hardware for wearable devices has become a commodity, and the success of companies creating wearable computing will depend on the design of the device, the functionality of the software, and how the software and the gadget work together to provide value to the user’s life.

Misfit is part of this second wave of design-centric wearable computing. “We’re very focused on the packaging,” Vu told me with a smile during an interview last week at Misfit’s modest office in Daly City, California. Misfit was founded by Vu, Sculley, and Sridhar Iyengar, who was a co-founder with Vu at his former company AgaMatrix. AgaMatrix created the first FDA-approved glucose meter to work with the iPhone, giving Vu and Iyengar years of rare experience building wearable devices.

While crowd-funding helped fund Misfit’s first run of the Shine, Misfit is actually backed by some of the most well-known investors in the Valley, including Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures. Along with its team in Daly City, it has a group of software developers in Vietnam, and makes its gadget in Japan and South Korea.

Think differently

For Misfit, design innovation has been fundamental to creating its hardware. The company doesn’t use words like sensors, or accelerometers on its website, and is trying to look far beyond the niche, early-adopter “quantified self” community.

The first aspect of its design innovation is in the materials. While most wearables on the market are made of rubber or plastic, Misfit’s Shine is almost completely made out of metal — a first in the industry. The metal is part of what makes the device so beautiful and also gives the feeling of value to the user. The metal also makes it very durable; the Shine is fully water proof.

There are reasons why competitors haven’t used metal for pint-sized wearables. The Shine might look awesome, but it takes four different factories just to make the various pieces of the shell and the metal also has created some usability restrictions. The Shine has to be placed directly onto (actually touching) the face of the mobile phone to sync it; the wireless signals wouldn’t escape the metal casing without that.

“The next time I think of doing an entirely metal product, someone shoot me,” laughed Vu.

Steve Jobs also famously went to great lengths for hardware design, like the iPhone’s unscratchable glass screen, and the handle on top of the original iMac.

Another unusual design element that Misfit deemed necessary is that the Shine isn’t chargeable. It’s got a coin battery, which lasts 4 to 6 months before it needs to be replaced. Pretty much every other wearable on the market is chargeable and requires weekly, or even daily, charging. “We had an almost religious belief that wearables should not be charged. You don’t charge the buttons on your jacket, or the backpack on your back,” Vu said.

The decision to forgo charging also created usability restrictions, namely power management. The Shine needed bright LED lights on its display, the LEDs needed to shine through the metal casing, and the battery had to run the processor and keep time for up to 6 months. Pairing it with a wireless charging dock would have been far easier and would have enabled far more functionality.

A third counterintuitive design choice is that the Shine is a circle, but uses an inverted edge to connect with various accessories — there’s a sports and leather wristband accessory, a magnet clip for clothing, and a necklace that hangs it from your neck. Vu said that quintessential form choice will make the Shine more accessible for people’s various needs.

For example, many women won’t put anything on their wrist, which means wrist-only devices like the FuelBand or Jawbone’s UP are neglecting a good portion of potential users. From a business perspective, accessories can also add substantially to margins, which, for Misfit, could be tight given the Shine is a higher-end device made completely of metal that is trying to hit the price point of the Fitbit.

These types of design decisions have created a device that is substantially different from Misfit’s larger and older competitors. Vu said before founding the company and designing the Shine, the team read every single negative review of the Fitbit, the Nike Fuelband, and the Jawbone products.

Glanceable UI

Beyond the hardware, Misfit is also innovating around the UI and how the user experiences feedback from the Shine. The design team made the decision to remove a digital screen interface entirely and replace it with a halo of tiny LED lights. They also removed an on/off button. Part of the reason they made these changes was because of the power management issue — there’s no way the device could power a brightly-lit screen and not be a chargeable device.

But the move was also a decision to head in the direction of what Vu called a “glanceable UI.” Designers have for years been focused on UIs for the laptop and cell phone screens, but are more recently just beginning to create interfaces for the very quick glance that is needed for a wearable device.

The Shine takes what the Nike Fuelband started with its colored-LED display and basically pares it down. Shine users can check to see how complete the circle of lights is around the gizmo to determine if they’re meeting their daily fitness goal. By briefly touching the center of the Shine, the lights can quickly configure into a clock to tell the time, meaning the Shine is also a smart watch, too.

If you hear wearable designers and developers talk about user experience, they’ll commonly talk about truncating content. Google’s Glass advocate Timothy Jordan explained recently at SXSW that an app built for Glass, like the New York Times app, has to show enough of a snippet of information to be conveyed in just a look. The New York Times Glass app shows headlines and images, but not full articles.

Likewise, health and body information on a wearable device like the Shine should be able to be conveyed in a second or two. The cell phone app that syncs with the Shine houses the rest of the functionality.

A glanceable UI is about creating a second’s worth of meaning out of important and impactful data. Whether that’s a moment to convey how well you’re doing toward your daily fitness goal or a single blinking light to encourage more movement. As Om wrote recently, as data becomes the world’s currency, data without emotion, empathy or narrative is meaningless. Wearable gadgets can track as much data as they want, but if the user isn’t exposed to the data in a way that impacts their lives, and in a time frame that they can work with, then the device has failed.

Getting to market

Some of Misfit’s design decisions were controversial even within the company, which is why Misfit decided to test out to see if customers would be interested in a metal, non-rechargeable, no-screen, wearable gadget. Turns out, at least on Indiegogo, they are. The company raised over $800,000 from almost 8,000 funders who wanted to buy the Shine early.

Crowd-funding was a way for Misfit to experiment. It’s actually gotten millions from traditional Valley investors to launch its products more commercially. But crowd-funding is becoming a common way for the so-called lean hardware movement to operate. Hardware innovation was front and center at SXSW this year.

Misfit is shipping its first 5,000 Shines to customers in early June and another 7,000 or 8,000 in the second half of June. Shortly after that the Shine will go on sale at retail outlets for around the same price point as the Fitbit, which is around $99.

The Shine is only Misfit’s first product, which Vu calls Product Zero. They’re also working on a device called Mars, or Project One, which will be launched early next year. On the topic of Mars, Vu would only say that it would be a wearable but one that has a longer battery, makes more use of data, and has a different material and different shape.

While Misfit is just a young company, and has yet to deliver its gadgets to its first customers, it’s operating at that the intersection of some of the Valley’s most interesting trends, including the power of design, the next-generation of more mainstream wearables, the importance of impactful data, and a coming era that will feature the glanceable UI.

I look forward to hearing about the first Shine users’ experiences this Summer. In November we’ll be talking more about these issues of design, connectedness and experience at our third annual RoadMap event in San Francisco. Tickets will go on sale this summer, but you can sign up to be one of the first to access tickets.

Disclosure: Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of GigaOM. Om Malik, founder of GigaOM, is also a venture partner at True.

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In case you haven’t seen the documentary, which came out in 2011, Jiro is an octogenarian sushi master who has perfected the art of making sushi at his Michelin three-star restaurant in the Ginza subway in Tokyo. He’s spent decades perfecting simple tasks like selecting, cutting, and preparing the best fish. “Jiro embodies craftsmanship and detail,” said Gebbia, explaining:

One of the responsibilities of designers is to seek out and find the details. If we don’t who else will?

Gebbia, who graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design, says he took his entire product team to Jiro Dreams of Sushi. “At Airbnb we’re trying to build a culture that supports details, celebrates them, and gives our teams creative license to pursue them,” said Gebbia. I’m not interested in the debate about what comes first engineering or design, said Gebbia, “the important thing is designing the farm,” or the environment for these things to thrive.

For example, Gebbia cited a small detail that Airbnb built into its host messaging system. When a host is replying to a guest, the email can be repopulated with a message that the host sent to a former guest, but with the name changed for the current guest. The idea is that a host will commonly be emailing the same things to multiple guests, and the auto population can save them significant time. One host was so happy with the time-saver that they sent a gushing email to the team.

Airbnb might be a $2.5 billion-plus valued company now, but of course it wasn’t always so. Gebbia — who says his first entrepreneurial venture was selling drawings of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to classmates in grade school — remembers the times of rejection quite clearly. Around 2008 we were “staring in the face of rejection,” after attempting to raise funding from venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. “We got 20 email intros to investors, 10 emailed us back, 5 took coffee meetings with us, and zero invested in us,” recalls Gebbia.

Some of the best advice Gebbia says he got in 2009 from Paul Graham, the head of Y Combinator, who accepted the Airbnb founders into his accelerator. Graham gave the company permission to solve problems that wouldn’t scale, said Gebbia, explaining that Graham told his team to “go out and meet your customers.”

The early team started staying in the Airbnb rooms in New York and realized the hosts needed much better photography to show off their housing assets. After spending a weekend renting a camera, photographing host accommodations and publishing them on the site, bookings started growing immediately. The team returned to the Bay Area and reported their findings back to Graham. Graham’s immediate response was: “what are you doing here? Get back to New York.”

Sushi master Jiro is just one newer influence on the design of Airbnb. Gebbia, who studied industrial design at RISD, says his early influences also include Charles and Ray Eames, the furniture and product designer team who are widely cited as helping democratize design. In terms of company culture, the early Airbnb team visited Zappos a few years ago to learn about how to create and maintain a fun company.

Gebbia spoke at our soldout RoadMap 2012 event, which focused on design in the age of connectivity. RoadMap 2013 will take place this coming November and tickets will go on sale shortly. To be the first to know when tickets will go on sale, sign up here.

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As I have often said, hardware today needs to be more than hardware; it needs to marry connectivity, data and design to create a compelling user experience that keeps people coming back. The better the user experience, the more people engage with the device. Amazon’s Kindle, Nest’s thermostat and Sonos’ devices are examples of this new hardware equation.

Wearable computing’s building blocks are sensors, which record a lot of data. In order to make sense of that data, companies needs data wranglers. But to translate those data inferences into human-understandable experiences, companies — big and small — need design and user experience expertise. And with these two small app-makers, Jawbone is getting that in spades.

MassiveHealth was started by well-known designer and UX thinker Aza Raskin and it launched with fanfare, though it failed to attain the scale normally associated with winning apps. The Eatery app did win a lot of critical acclaim. MassiveHealth raised $2.25 million from various venture funds including Greylock and A16z, and a source tells us, that it was sold for low single digit millions.

Raskin, who in the past worked for Mozilla and helped come up with cool concepts for Firefox, is joining Jawbone. He had helped build a top-notch mobile design and engineering team. Visere, a digital design firm that has storied pedigree and is chock-full of talent. It has worked with Nike in the past.

Jawbone CEO Hosain Rahman said that both these acquisitions bring in about 25 new people who will add to its growing software, data and design teams. The company has not decided what to do with the two apps just yet.

Today nearly 40 percent of Jawbone 300-plus employees work on software. “A year ago we had no one working on using data to enhance our offerings,” said Rahman, “Today we have fifteen and that number is going to keep growing.”

Jawbone started life as a company making headsets for mobile phones and about two years ago it has expanded into wearable computers. It launched UP in 2011 but the initial version came under widespread criticism. The company went back to the drawing board and re-jiggered the UP and released it recently along with a new iPhone application.

While these are early days for wearable computing, the market is chock-a-block with a lot of devices and it has drawn the attention of Nike whose FuelBand is a runaway hit.

Correction 2:23pm: An earlier version of this story misspelled Visere.

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The crux of the leadership problem as Maeda sees it is that the hierarchical format with CEOs at the top and layers of management below them has been upended. “That hierarchy has been hurt indefinitely because anyone can talk to anyone else,” he said at the GigaOM RoadMap conference Monday in San Francisco. “You can’t control the flow of information between people anymore. There is a heterarchy and the CEO has been pulled into the middle of that.”

He implied that this opens up opportunities for creative people to become leaders, but he directly stated that creative people could help make any leader in this new heterarchical structure more effective. The secret to effectiveness in this brave new management world is making all of the data a leader has at their fingertips easily understandable, and to use design to connect concepts and relationships amid a mess of information.

So for Maeda, the question is both how do you lead in this new age of the heterarchy as well as how you can use design to support the leader. But in the 15 minutes before he got to that point, he led a fun intro into the importance of typography as an example of how design puts form to content, classified the difference between startup culture and larger company culture (he calls those “end ups” as opposed to startups,) and offered a book recommendation. As as one would expect, his slides were awesome. So check out the video for an entertaining talk and for startups out there thinking about data visualizations, check out his last few minutes to understand visually how design and data can aid leaders. Any company who can build those links will make a mint.

Check out the rest of our RoadMap 2012 live coverage here, and that 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.

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Speaking at GigaOM’s RoadMap conference, Systrom explained how Hurricane Sandy was a huge moment for Instagram (by comparison, people tagged 85,000 photos with the most recent Super Bowl hashtag), where it became a focal point for people sharing their images of the storm.

“Sandy was a really interesting event for us,” he said. “People are taking their cell phones and capturing everything.”

Systrom said the storm illustrated for him the participatory nature of Instagram, that people weren’t just interested in looking at photos of Sandy, but actually participating in the news in real time.

“If nearly 1 million photos were tagged with Sandy, imagine how many were taken on the East Coast?” he said. “That’s a really interesting moment in U.S. history because you can look at events and see how it unfolds.”

Systrom said the recent addition of geotagging on Instagram added to people’s ability to share and track photos of the storm. He said the geotagging allowed people to find information during the storm.

“People were actually interested in Sandy in realtime.”

Systrom also commented on Twitter’s addition of photo filters, noting that he’s not worried about it taking from Instagram’s experience, since the company has a good relationship with Twitter and that having filters has become a ubiquitous feature.

“Instagram is a community, not a filters app,” he said.

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Something has to give.

How do we make simple-to-use apps that work with just our fingers, without resorting to making “simple” apps, which severely limit what we can do, or see. We have complex needs that could use smart mobile solutions: Where’s the best coffee in this neighborhood?; Is it going to rain in the next hour? What’s the best route to my destination and how long will it take?

Developers and designers didn’t have to face this paradox on the Web.  They could (and did!) jam more links onto a page, or rely on that trusty search box to bail them out of tricky design problems. Witness the evolution of the Yahoo! home page from the mid-1990s to 2000. It was absolutely emblematic of what people did for a decade with interactive design on the web — make pages denser, and more full of links to click.

But now our fat fingers and our smaller screens make that approach impossible with mobile and tablet apps. Designers and developers now have to make do with just a few tappable targets on the screen. You can include search on these apps, but it often feels more cumbersome and annoying on a phone or tablet than on the desktop.

The answer is in the data

Some of the most interesting design work I’ve seen in a long time is attempting to address this central paradox of touch. A new and inspiring breed of mobile and touch apps are incredibly easy to use, yet enable us to do complex things and answer complicated questions. These apps don’t just win with elegant design (almost all of them have that) they combine beautiful design with a sophisticated use of data that allows them to shine.

Take one of my favorite apps recently: Dark Sky. It’s a deceptively simple looking app that tells you if it’s going to rain in an hour. It’s beautiful, informative, and easy to use. But it’s not a “simple” app. One can make an app like Dark Sky only when you have access to lots of data, and have sophisticated ways to make use of that data as the Dark Sky team has explained on their blog.

Other apps are solving similarly challenging problems with this combination of elegant, easy-to-use touch interfaces and deep data. Foursquare makes use of all that check-in data so it’s easier to explore your neighborhood. Prismatic scans Twitter – all of it – and uses that data to give you a personalized news feed. Flipboard, Zite, Netflix, and Showyou (the app made by my company) all depend on large amounts of data to power simple-to-use touch-driven apps.

With Showyou for example, we’re trying to help answer this broad, open-ended question of “What to watch?” With 72 hours of video uploaded to YouTube alone each minute, hundreds of millions (and maybe billions) of clips to watch, where do you start? We parse through tens of millions of social signals every day, and nearly a billions signals in total, to figure out what to show you. A lot of people comment on the elegance and beauty of our interface, but I always tell them it wouldn’t really matter without the data.

So what’s the answer to our paradox? How do you design for smaller screens that we manipulate with our fingers? You use data. Lots of it, parsed with sophistication and nuance.

Which brings us to Google. It was Google that famously broke through the cluttered, dense, link-riddled web with a single search box that was followed by a results page with ten light blue links. They did this with lots and lots of data and Page Rank.  With Google Now and Google voice search we may be seeing similar efforts for our mobile age.

Is it possible that Google, with its exabytes of data, is even better positioned for the mobile than it was for the web? Or will innovative startups out maneuver the search giant?

We’ll be discussing these issues and more at our RoadMap event on Monday November 5^th in San Francisco. Get one of the remaining tickets here.

Mark Hall is the co-founder and CEO of Showyou, an award-winning and leading video app for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. He started making digital media products almost twenty years ago, back when the CD-ROM was going to be the next great thing.

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