Iterations: Much Ado About Yahoo!
#SuryaRay #Surya 
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been genuinely surprised by the depth and reach of the reaction to any moves made by Yahoo! As someone who hasn’t been around the this place for too long, my sense is Yahoo!, despite its recent history of countless missteps, is still vitally important to the cultural memory of Silicon Valley. And, as a result, the moves its new CEO makes becomes the subject of ridiculously intense, global scrutiny, armchair speculation and analysis, and a deafening level of peanut gallery twitter blabber devoid of any reason or context. http://dlvr.it/31sgRD @suryaray
Here’s a rather unfortunate development: The proliferation of recording devices and instant distribution is matched by our ability to falsify the information they produce. While they don’t exactly cancel each other out, they do have the awkward effect of turning an age of the most rigorous documentation into an age of jaded (and justified) suspicion. 
Their downside to pet projects is that they invariably teach you something you didn’t really want to know. This time, it was that most of the people who do what I do are doomed. Let me explain. Mostly for fun, I’ve recently built1 a 
The physical world wasn’t built for $500 devices we need every other minute. This is never more obvious than when I strain my back and curse like a sailor because my phone has fallen into the gap beside my car or plane seat. As tech companies obsess over usability, the thoughtlessness that mars the meatspace comes into painfully sharp relief. Excuse my hyperbole and quiet your calls of “first-world problems!” That’s where I live. We’re shifting from stationary matter to mobile 1s and 0s. If we don’t ditch the vestiges of yesteryear, we’re going to end up like awkward platypussies platypi. A decade or two ago, that black hole between your car seat and door posed less of a threat. You weren’t fiddling with critical hand-held objects. Worst case scenario, your wallet slipped into that crumb-filled hell and you got it when you parked. Now, getting to your destination might require the sliver of technology now firmly wedged where no human hand can reach. I have almost run off 280 freeway in a fiery Apple Maps logo-esque disaster a number of times trying to extract my phone. When my only source of music, entertainment, and work slipped beneath my seat-cushion personal flotation device on a recent international flight, I tweaked my back contorting to fish it out. Pants aren’t tailored to fit our phones, and outlets to charge them are located across the room from our beds. Yes, these are whiny little examples, but they’re just symbols of the grander incompatibility between yesterday and tomorrow. So let’s start designing with a mobile future in mind. I bet the first car company to advertise “no more seat crevices” would win some lucrative Generation XYZ cred. Clothing brands and home decorators, heed the call. Otherwise, go out and numb someone else’s pain points. Sew phone pockets onto jeans, sell iPhone charger extension cables, or go work for DropStop, the original patented solution to driver distraction. No matter what you build, put some thought into how to smooth friction for the cyborgs we’re becoming. 
“FOR every reporter employed in America, around six people work in public relations: a few too many, some might think.” So began _The Economist’s_ 
By now you must have heard of Unit 61398 of the People’s Liberation Army: “an overwhelming percentage of the attacks on American corporations, organizations and government agencies originate in and around [their] white tower,” 
A five-minute video? Ain’t nobody got time for that. Not to watch one, or to make one. But the Harlem Shake dance videos are capped at 30 seconds. That’s why we’re so willing to watch just one more incarnation, and why it’s easy to recruit friends to make them. The result is one of the most pervasive gags in history. A “symbiotic meme”, the Harlem Shake has a lesson to teach all content creators. 
The #1 request I hear when talking to founders in San Francisco is: “We are hiring engineers. Know any?” We all know this is a big issue that’s only getting worse, and so do most of the investors. But, I’m now starting to hear this so often, I’m beginning to worry that all the conventional tactics simply won’t work. Early-stage startups that don’t start experimenting with new ideas to source, recruit, and close engineers and other technical hires may end up running out of money or never achieving the product traction they need to get to the next level. I don’t have data to support this, but my intuition is that technical talent is so fragmented right now, all options need to be reexamined and placed on the table. 
There’s a funny thing about the way proponents of Apple (I say this without denigration) cheerlead their champion as it enters (supposedly) the gaming world. In a lot of ways, there’s already an Apple in the games industry: it’s the games industry. Apple is filling the position in the games industry that Android fills in the mobile world. 
It’s not _if,_ but _when_. Between crooks, hackers, and foreign governments, Facebook probably can’t avoid a serious user data breach forever. When it happens, Facebook may never be able to quiet fears that “personal data isn’t safe there”. That could cause a chilling effect on sharing, jeopardize its future in commerce, and cut its lifetime short. 
Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Erica Kochi, the co-lead of UNICEF’s Innovation unit. Her team started UNICEF’s open source RapidSMS platform which has been adopted in developing countries worldwide. She co-teaches a class ”Design for Unicef” in NYU’s ITP Program, is a global partner of Stanford’s New Product Design Innovation course, and has lectured at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia University on leveraging technology and design to improve international development. She previously wrote on TechCrunch about how the future of mobile lies in the developing world. All views are her own. You can follow her on Twitter. You’re a social entrepreneur wanting to change the world, but are having a hard time scaling your promising idea and achieving lasting impact. In my job as UNICEF Innovation co-lead, I come across hundreds of promising and not so promising technology and social innovation startups every year. While this is an emerging space, many social innovation startups face similar challenges. In this piece I want to provide some practical advice for how social innovation startups can increase their chances of success. To frame this advice, let’s first take a look at what the terms scale and impact mean. Scale implies that your idea is reaching a large percentage of your target audience. For example, the mobile money transfer and microfinance service M-Pesa serves over 26 million people across East Africa who could not otherwise easily transfer money to relatives and pay businesses. Another example would be that during the 2011 drought across the Horn of Africa, UNICEF and partners provided access to safe drinking water for 3 million people. Impact implies that your product or service has a positive and transformative effect or prevents a negative effect on even the poorest parts of society. An example of this is Tostan’s work, which has led to over 6,000 communities in eight countries to abandon the harmful practice of female genital cutting. Another example is the effort by a multitude of partners to eliminate measles throughout the world. This effort has led to a 74 percent reduction of measles deaths in the past 10 years. The true skill of a social innovation startup is not just in choosing the right idea, but in using finding and working with the right partners, aligning with priorities and funding, and continuously delivering and communicating impact along the way. 1. Work with the right partners In the social space, there are 
“Technological revolutions happen in two main phases: the installation phase and the deployment phase,” 
For student jobseekers, in these challenging economic conditions, internships still rank as one of the best ways to prevent yourself from joining the growing ranks of the overeducated and underemployed. In fact, 
There’s nothing more terrifying than thinking you crossed the line by taking your flirtatious texting to the next level with a risque photo. Worrying the person you sent a goofy Snapchat or Facebook Poke to thinks you’re an idiot is no fun either. Did they even actually see your self-destructing photo? Ephemeral messaging has a feedback problem, and the solution is obvious. Snapchat and Poke need a Like button. 