Can President Obama Drive A Sphero Robotic Ball? Yes He Can! {Video}

The Sphero is a clever little gadget. It’s instantly addictive made possible by an incredibly intuitive control scheme. In short the little robotic ball is controlled by simply drawing on the connected smartphone’s screen. Users generally get the hang of it within seconds. Obama did. “…Excuse me, give me some space to drive my ball,” the POTUS said.

Yesterday, prior to an event at Boulder’s Coors Event Center, President Obama was greeting the gathered crowd when he ran into Boulder-based Orbotix. After a quick demonstration, Obama took the controls and had a bit of fun with the Orbotix’s Sphero before getting back to his presidential duties. As with most people who play with the Sphero, he seemed mighty impressed and found the whole concept “terrific.”

The Sphero is a $129 robotic ball that’s controlled by a smartphone or tablet. The company developed a large offering of games and apps around the device, making it a truly multifunction gadget rather than just an expensive cat toy. As shown in the video above with President Obama, it’s a whole lot of fun. Spike TV said it best, though, “It’s a new type of gaming system.”

Socialcam Just Added Millions Of New Users, So It Tweaked Its App To Make Them Stick Around

An Open Letter To Those Not Employed At Instagram

Dear Non-Instagramers,

Sorry that you didn’t get bought out for $1 billion last week. That’s got to be a bummer. Kevin Systrom just made enough money to buy a boat big enough to make Larry Ellison jealous and you’re still living in a studio apartment.

Instagram is a one-off. A fluke. An anecdote that many entrepreneurs will mistake for data. Please don’t be one of them.

This happens about every half a decade. The first mover in a space gets taken out in record time with a ridiculous valuation and the founders look like epic geniuses. Do you remember YouTube? Sure you do. But what about Revver, Metacafe, Guba and Veoh? I didn’t think so.

I know you’re smart and could probably program Instagram yourself in less than a week. Because let’s face it, how hard could it be? It’s just a few filters put onto the iPhone’s camera with some sharing features skinned to appeal to hipsters. There’s just not that much technology involved. Instagram’s competitive advantage comes from being first.

First is important. It’s important in defining functionality, setting expectations and capturing mindshare. It’s important to corporate buyers. Now that Facebook has already made its acquisition it’s unlikely that your consumer tech product, if it’s in any way close to Instagram, will also be bought. It’s a classic winner-take-all scenario. Google doesn’t know what to do with the products it has. Yahoo just purged another 2,000 people. News Corp? Barry Diller? AOL? Please.

And that’s assuming that there even is a market for your consumer technology startup’s product or service. Let’s suppose that you do get Instagram-level breakout and collect 30 million users. That’s great, but only if you (or your potential acquirers) see a viable path to monetize those users. Users aren’t customers. The people who are pissed that Facebook now owns Instagram ultimately have one major concern: that Facebook will find a creepy way to make money off the service.

That’s the thing about consumer technology: it’s easy to rip off, hard to sell to strategic acquirers and monetization is often a mystery.

Compare that to the enterprise technology market, which is typically characterized by real intellectual property, obvious monetization and a plethora of cash-rich potential acquirers. It’s a place to build companies, not just products. Consider a single example. When Nand Mulchandani recruited me to ScaleXtreme his pitch was simple. “My cofounder spent five years building the technology to deliver cloud and server management functionality from the cloud. We’re attacking an $8-billion a year server management market. We’re providing functionality that BMC, CA, HP and IBM can’t at a price the incumbents won’t. You want in?”

Enterprise technology companies are consistent winners. As Quentin Hardy pointed out earlier this year, a bunch of enterprise tech companies have gone public recently and they’re pretty much all trading up from their offering prices. They’re regularly acquired too. It’s easy for corporate buyers to see value in a company that has customers. Success here goes to a wider number of winners.

The thing about customers is that once you’ve got ‘em, they tend to stay with you. That’s important. They’ve not just given you their money. They’ve invested their time considering the competitive landscape and chosen you. There’s real cost in switching.

The Instagramers were lucky. That’s not to diminish what they accomplished. Systrom found someone willing to put out serious money for his startup. It’s every founder’s dream, but the reality for too few in the consumer space.

Enterprise technology has minted many more millionaires. Instead of hoping to score with some new awkward digital tribadism—think Instagram meets Pintrest, optimized for Google Glass—try building a company to solve a real problem with real innovation and serious intellectual property. One that attracts customers, not just users. One that will employ people, make money and maybe even pay income taxes.

Yours truly,

Alex

Alexander Haislip is a marketing executive with cloud-based server automation startup ScaleXtreme and the author of Essentials of Venture Capital. Follow him on Twitter @ahaislip.

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Goodbye Android Market, Hello Google Play

Google’s Android Market has undergone some tremendous changes over the last year or so. What started as just a standalone app store has quickly grown to encompass e-books, music, videos, and now Google feels like the “Android Market” moniker is getting to be too restrictive, too constraining for what they’re really trying to deliver to their users.

That’s why Google is officially putting the Android Market name to rest. Starting today, all of Google’s digital media services have been rebranded to fly under a brand new banner: Google Play. That’s right gadget buffs, despite some delectable new rumors Google Play isn’t a new tablet from the folks at Mountain View, but rather a unified brand that seeks to tie the company’s digital media services together.

According to Google Engineering Director Chris Yerga, the rebranding was something Google has been contemplating for quite some time, but the company felt that this was the “natural time” to pull the trigger.

Google has spent months and months building out the Android Market into a digital media hub, but constantly invoking the Android name seems to have led to a sense of exclusion for some users. There’s nothing about the process of renting movies, purchasing music, or skimming through e-books from Google that requires anyone interested to actually own an Android device. All of a user’s pertinent media is stored in Google’s considerable cloud and accessible from run-of-the-mill web browsers, and Google wants to drive that point home with the new Google Play brand.



Putting all the content under the same name should enable the company to showcase all of its offerings equally, and potentially bring in new customers in the process.

Promotional videos for Google Play drive home that the service is cloud-based, much like Apple’s iCloud can be used to view content on one of your devices, and then pick up where you left off on another. For instance, if you purchase a book to read on your Android phone, you can pick up where you left off on your tablet later on.

Movies can be downloaded and viewed on your computer, but also viewed on your tablet or phone while you’re traveling.

Can We Fix Young America With Technology and Entrepreneurship?

With youth unemployment at a 60-year high and student-loan debt nearing the $1 trillion mark, can anything be done by the technology sector to help young Americans struggling to find work? Yes, says the #FixYoungAmerica campaign, launching Monday.

#FixYoungAmerica is seeking to address a single, nagging question in the U.S.: How do we overcome the twin epidemics of youth unemployment and underemployment?

To that end, #FixYoungAmerica campaign is releasing a book designed to help fix those problems. It’s chock full of ideas from some of the country’s top intellectuals, nonprofit leaders, philanthropists, educators, politicians and entrepreneurs.

Several of the ideas put forward involve technology: teaching kids how to code, requiring technology education in public schools and sparking innovation through entrepreneurial competitions.

The campaign is led by the Young Entrepreneur Council. The YEC has formed a coalition of partners to tackle youth unemployment, including Codecademy, MassChallenge, Venture for America and more.

#FixYoungAmerica is asking supporters to help fund the movement via a crowdfunding effort on IndieGoGo, a popular startup-funding platform. But according to YEC founder Scott Gerber, the campaign doesn’t want to try to solve youth employment by throwing money at the problem. Instead, it’s looking for “actual solutions” and to serve as the “beginning of a conversation” about the economic conditions facing American youth — and how to fix them.

A media campaign launching this week alongside events in 10 cities will spread the word about the campaign’s mission. For social outreach, #FixYoungAmerica asks supporters to “pass the baby” — an image of a tool-belt-carrying toddler meant to represent the idea of fixing the nation’s youth.

The #FixYoungAmerica book releases in May — just in time for graduation.