waderoush writes “Consumer Reports calls extended warranties ‘money down the drain,’ and as a tech journalist and owner of myriad gadgets — none of which have ever conked out or cracked up during the original warranty period — that was always my attitude too. But when I met recently with Steve Abernethy, CEO of San Francisco-based warranty provider SquareTrade, I tried to keep an open mind, and I came away thinking that the industry might be changing. In a nutshell, Abernethy says he’s aware of the extended-warranty industry’s dreadful reputation, but he says SquareTrade is working to salvage it through a combination of lower prices, broader coverage, and better service. On top of that, he made some persuasive points – which don’t seem to figure into Consumer Reports’ argument – about the way the ‘risk vs. severity’ math has changed since the beginning of the smartphone and tablet era. One-third of smartphone owners will lose their devices to drops or spills within the first three years of purchase, the company’s data shows. If you belong to certain categories — like people in big households, or motorcycle owners, or homeowners with hardwood floors — your risk is even higher. So, in the end, the decision about buying an extended warranty boils down to whether you think you can defy the odds, and whether you can afford to buy a new device at full price if you’re one of the unlucky ones.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Editor’s note: Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research and blogs at Techspressive. Each column will look at crowdfunded products that have either met or missed their funding goals.
Good Morning America has 
The results are in for Filipino accelerator IdeaSpace’s startup competition, and the top ten picks have a heavy focus on social projects. A glance at the list reveals a strong emphasis on environmental and health-related projects, especially those that will likely benefit the developing nation’s poorer regions. Armtech – affordable water purification machine for households DateCola – natural date-enriched beverages, a healthy alternative to soft drinks Mirand – low-cost and high-quality total joint implants for the Asian market PGRS – produces electricity via rumble strips installed on high traffic roads PinoyTravel – provincial bus seat reservation system using mobile technologies PortfolioMNL – online marketplace for creative professionals Prodigo – a solution for highly targeted promotions for merchants using Big Data analytics Tech4Health – solution for health monitoring of chronic conditions, including diabetes TimeFree – SMS-based automated queuing system WeGen – new design of wind turbine that is more efficient than current technology When the top 20 were picked, many of them were mobile-phone dependent and appeared to center around developing smartphone apps for urban cities. But it seems that many of those didn’t make the cut for the top ten. One of IdeaSpace’s co-founders, Earl Martin Valencia, said: “All winners are viable business ideas based on science and technology, not just IT. They reflect the market needs of emerging markets such as the Philippines and we believe that it’s a big market also globally.” Jojo Flores, co-founder and vice president of Silicon Valley-based incubator Plug and PlayTech Center, was present at the pitching event all day. He said he is keen to invest in some of them and take them to the global stage as well. The top ten have each won six months incubation support (such as business operations covering accounting and legal services) and funding of up to $ 120,000 (PHP 5 million). IdeaSpace is a non-profit and was launched a little over a year ago. It has the support of various large Filipino conglomerates, and these are expected to provide mentorship to incubated companies. Some academic partners like the Asian Institute of Management and the University of the Philippines-Open University, as well as corporates like Microsoft and Amazon, will come onboard to mentor the winners of this competition.
It seems like every time we make purchases online or in a store, we’re collecting some sort of points or rewards. For the most part, those points go unused, mostly because the companies who give them out don’t do a great job of explaining what you can actually do with them. You know the deal, you purchase a video game and you get some GameStop points that you can use after you purchase three more games, or something along those lines. Inevitably, you forget to use them when the time comes or you refuse to sign up to get their card.
Twitter has done a great job at keeping the whole 
Google Reader turned into a zombie a long time ago and it’s good that Google finally killed it. For years, Google Reader has been sitting on Google’s servers without any appreciable updates. Sure, it got a bit of a facelift in 2011, but it only lost functionality since Google decided to rip out its social features in an effort to drive people to Google+. Its core features hadn’t changed for years, its overall design wasn’t really up to snuff anymore and even after eight years on the market, it would still often take hours before some feeds finally updated. I can’t help but think that a lot of the current outpouring of support for Google Reader is more about nostalgia than anything else. A couple of years ago, ‘shares’ on Google Reader were the equivalent of today’s Facebook Likes and Twitter retweets. It was the hot new way to measure how popular a story was, and a bunch of services ranked stories accordingly. Displaying the number of subscribers to your RSS feed was a point of pride for bloggers. But even then, Google Reader was mostly a tool for information junkies. It never caught on with mainstream users who were barely able to figure out how to subscribe to a feed. As Google Reader inventor Chris Wetherell noted in a post bemoaning the lack of updates to the service in 2011, however, that “market totally exists and is weirdly under-served (and is possibly affluent).” Google – especially under the leadership of Larry Page – simply decided that going after small markets wasn’t in its best interest, so Reader was left to die. For mainstream users, Flipboard, Zite, Pulse and all the other news-reading apps now represent a far superior solution (and they are all mobile-first, while Google Reader never got a chance to do something innovative on mobile at all). And that’s okay. The total dominance of Google Reader meant that nobody else was really trying to improve these “river of news” tools that we information junkies love so much because they give us a relatively unfiltered view of what’s happening. Newsblur, a Y Combinator-backed company, probably got the closest to replicating the old Google Reader when it launched last year (including the “share” feature and comments), but it barely reached a thousand paying users until the Reader announcement last week (now it has almost 3,500 paying users over 11,500
Editor’s note: Sunil Rajaraman is the co-founder and CEO of Scripted.com, a marketplace for businesses to create content at scale; Scripted has a pool of 80,000 freelance writers and 1,000 customers. Follow Sunil on Twitter @subes01. Like many others, I read the news about Zaarly, reported by TechCrunch’s Rip Empson last weekend, with some degree of shock. Zaarly is a well-funded business with an extremely talented team and ample resources to execute on their original vision, so I cannot understand why they decided to pivot so early in the game. Bo Fishback, co-founder of Zaarly, offers a detailed explanation here, but I can’t help but think they gave up on their original vision way too early. Zaarly’s pivot highlights a much larger point, which is that marketplaces take a lot of time and effort to build. Why are marketplaces difficult to build? The reason is liquidity; Simon Rothman of Greylock Partners writes the best material on the subject. There is always imbalance until you have that moment. People point to Airbnb and Uber as great examples of startup marketplaces, but they’ve only hit liquidity in certain big cities. Try searching for Airbnb listings in niche markets and you’ll see what I mean. oDesk is just about there, but remember it took them 10 years and a lot of resources to build up both sides of the marketplace successfully. Josh Breinlinger wrote a great piece about the early days of oDesk, which provides some perspective on how difficult it is to get the flywheel spinning so to speak. Achieving liquidity is akin to nailing low-cost customer acquisition on both sides of the marketplace. Most companies only have to worry about customer acquisition cost in one dimension, e.g. if you are selling hard drives, the hard drives have a fixed cost associated with production + distribution. Marketplaces are effectively fighting a two-front battle. In his article, Rip noted how Zaarly is doing revenue-wise: At the peak of their “reverse Craigslist” days, Zaarly was processing $ 1 million in transactions a month. Let’s examine this further: $ 1M in transactions * 15% fulfillment * 10% transaction fee = $ 15K in monthly net revenue As a marketplace entrepreneur, you do not want people necessarily making a living off of you. That sounds pretty abysmal, but it illustrates just how difficult it is to build marketplaces. Despite raising ~$ 15 million, Zaarly appeared to have a pretty significant imbalance in its marketplace; I would assume
Editor’s note: Robby Walker is co-founder and CTO of Cue. His previous company, Zenter, sold to Google in 2007.
Attorney General Eric Holder claims critics 
Disruption comes in all shapes and sizes, and benefits people of all shapes and sizes. When you think about global entrepreneurs solving hard problems, you might not think about creating hardware products that aim to save the lives of premature babies.
When Android first appeared I had an inkling that it would be a hit. I didn’t enjoy the early incarnations of the software – the G1 was like a Sidekick on steroids – but generally I expected Android devices to blanket the world for one simple reason: it was free and carriers no longer had to worry about Java stacks and wonky, homebrew OSes. Instead they could sell phones that worked, approximately, like every other Android phone in the world. It was Google’s gift to an industry that was facing competition from all angles.
The government gave the nation’s suit-and-tie mad scientists a tax break again this year, agreeing to 
Biegert & Funk has made a name for itself thanks to its iconic clock design that tells time the way we tend to convey it to one another in conversation – with written words in five-minute increments, spelling out “half past twelve” or “a quarter to five.” After creating a number of wall and desk clocks with this design, the firm made a lot of people’s wishes come true and revealed the QLOCKTWO W, a wearable version of the design that fits on the wrist. One has been sitting on mine for the past couple of weeks, and in that time it has managed to make a strong impression on both myself and my friends and family. With only a 10 x 11 grid of letters making up 110 characters in total (that’s less than a tweet), the QLOCKTWO W can display any time, and even though it only spells out five-minute increments, if you’re more exact, four dots at the bottom of the watch’s face indicate the specific minute, and you can cycle through to a view of the seconds ticking by with a couple presses of the QLOCKTWO’s single button. It also displays the calendar date (and if you’re unaware of the month and year, you likely have more problems than a watch can fix), and is available in English, French and German versions. The QLOCKTWO W comes in three different finishes – polished, brushed, or black stainless stainless steel. The face of each measures 35 x 35mm, which with a square-faced watch wears roughly similar to a 40mm standard round watch. For me, since I prefer smaller faced watches, it’s a perfect size. The square design and the non-tapering wide 24mm leather strap make it appear more substantial than you might expect, however, and it definitely attracts a lot of curiosity from onlookers. Biegert & Funk have done a phenomenal job with the overall look of the case and strap, which isn’t surprising given their history as a design firm. The QLOCKTWO W’s most impressive feature is its display, however. When you activate the display, words light up to reflect the current time. Unlike other watches that use a push-button LED illumination trick to show the time, I found the lighting on the QLOCKTWO to be incredibly even. The letters on the face are relatively small, but they show up clear and very easy to read thanks to the well-engineered backlighting.
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