Anthony De Rosa

An application that wasn’t even in the app store a week ago just raised $41 million.

We’ve reached the point where simply the idea of an app is now enough to raise multi-million dollar capital. Were any of these folks around back in 2000? Certainly some lessons have been learned the first time around. Most investors and companies are avoiding the same mistakes but that hasn’t prevented plenty of head scratching deals to emerge in the last few months.

The app, called Color, is a photo sharing application that allows you to post and view images by people in the same proximity as each other.

“Not since Google have we seen this,” is what one Sequoia Capital partner told Color Labs co-founder Bill Nguyen when he met with them recently.

Those seven words inspire such an abundance of eye rolling that one has to wonder what the guys over at Sequoia are smoking. Better yet, how quickly can I put together a pitch deck boasting some superfluous social, hyper-local, organic, mobile game changer of my own?

Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, has a rosier view of the current frothiness of the tech market. He’s poised to take LinkedIn public soon, so his motives for such optimism may be a bit self-interested. “If you look at the crop of companies in the growth phase now, they all have very solid economic models behind them. Some at the center of the pack have business models that could live for a long, long time.”

VC money seems to be funnelling mostly to Internet based startups over the past two years. While there are some ridiculous deals being made, there are real companies making real money on the Internet. Drugstore.com was snapped up today by Walgreens for $409 million dollars, raising the stock up 114% in trading this morning. The Internet based drug retailer had over $456 million in sales in 2010, making it the 8th largest online retailer in the U.S.

The good news is that the victims of the eventual fallout of this current hyper-investment in the tech market will hopefully be limited to these private big shot investors and venture capitalists who have only themselves to blame. The underlying victims may be startups with real business plans and an actual solution to a real problem, who after the crash will find it tough to move their venture to market. All the while the Techcrunches and newly launched Beta Beats of the world will be there to assess the carnage.

• Twitter in negotiations to bring back Jack Dorsey as chief product officer – Business Insider
• CNN moves past MSNBC in primetime viewers for the first time in over a year – Forbes
• Magazines can now count iPad and other digital edition sales toward paid-circulation – Ad Age
• Up-to-the-minute updates on aircraft maintaining the no-fly zone over Libya – Guardian
• Chris Tenant out at Vanity Fair after 5 weeks on the job (2nd item down) – NY Daily News
• Flipboard raising capital at a $200 million valuation – BoomTown
• Google exec : We are not at war with Apple – Telegraph

• China tightens censorship of electronic communications – New York Times
• Exploring the options for social content aggregation – Semantic Web
• Useful way to check inventory at Target stores for iPad 2 – Obama Pacman
• Verizon vs AT&T iPad 2 plans, which is cheaper? – CNN Money
• Four lines of code is all it takes for The New York Times’ paywall to come tumbling down – Nieman Journalism Lab
• Aol folds 30 brands, including Politics Daily and URLesque – Forbes
• Great video by self-taught director : AT AT Day Afternoon : Peppermint Riple
• Curated Twitter List of Libya reports – Twitter
• New York Times asks Twitter to shut down paywall dodgers – Forbes

Newsrooms are transforming to a great degree because the way we consume and create news is changing. The first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is check my Twitter. I know I can rely on my Twitter Lists, which I’ve carefully curated to be finely focused by reliable sources, both traditional and non-traditional, from the ground and from newsrooms.

In a highly un-scientific poll, with answers coming from Twitter, which again will skew the answers biased toward the medium of Twitter, I asked folks where they go first thing in the morning to check what happened overnight:

I asked the same question on Tumblr, which again skewed the answers a bit based on the demographic and the tendency of the folks there already to use Tumblr as a news source. Out of 97 responses, the top three were Tumblr (28%), Twitter (18%), and the New York Times (7%), with NPR Radio (5%) and Al-Jazeera (5%) not far behind. Other interesting answers were new email curation tools like Percolate, which look at your social networks, source out the links that are getting the most attention, and email you a digest of them the next morning.

The trend seems to be toward audiences looking for someone to tell them what to read. Overwhelmed with the sheer deluge of news and information, people are looking to curators that span news sources to bring them what they need to know. For some it’s good enough to let friends do it, but more and more people are looking to specialized curators who focus on certain topics, like politics, entertainment, auto, tech, etc. I’m more likely to go to @acarvin than anyone else if I need to know what is happening in the Middle East right this moment, because Andy is monitoring everything from multiple sources on traditional and non-traditional media and bringing it to me in real-time.

As the New York Times moves to a subscription model, which will allow free access to links in-bound from social networks, the role of a curator not only becomes a trusted organizer of news but a pathway to getting that news without having to dole out the access fee. It might be wise for the Times to work with these curators who may eventually become the major pathway that leads people to their content.

Is a crisis in education less important than a crisis of our capital markets? At the end of 2008, the federal government took aggressive measures to ensure that a supposed complete financial meltdown would be averted by purchasing troubled assets and restoring liquidity to the largest banks in America. Only a few months following the bailout of these banks, many of them paid out healthy bonuses to the same executives responsible for causing the situation to unfold.

Today, in Wisconsin, we watch teachers fight to ensure they receive a five figure salary. According to The Atlantic, the average salary for teachers in Wisconsin is slightly worse than the national average with starting salaries of $32,642 and a maximum with a master’s degree of $60,036. Meanwhile, the average Wall St. bonus, not salary, fell to a measly $128, 530. Goldman Sachs paid $431,000 on average.

Is it fair to compare the salaries of Wall Street executives to the teachers in Wisconsin? Are the jobs on Wall Street more valuable than the ones in education? It seems like an easy answer, with Wall Street profits reaching $27.6 billion last year. But with our job market thinning and unemployment hovering around 9% it seems wise to invest in education to help build the jobs of tomorrow. The financial sector is but one component of our economy, an economy sorely needing diversification based on how apparent it is now that we depended on Wall Street to create capital and jobs for far too long.

Countries like Japan and China are busy making investments in science, infrastructure and education. It’s already been all but conceded that China will soon have a larger economy than the United States in a few short years. What are we doing to compete?

America is locked in a battle over budgets, and many of the calls for streamlining our government are well intentioned. The problem is not that we are trying to cut too much, but we’re focused on cutting the most minor expenses that help the most vulnerable, the largest base of potential workers who make up the unemployed. The largest personal incomes are being protected, tax cuts for the top 2%.

The teachers in Wisconsin are a microcosm of the misguided efforts to make America more fiscally responsible. How can anyone say with a straight face that we need to get these minuscule teacher’s salaries in line when we dump trillions of dollars into failing banks, essentially tossing out the entire element of risk? If you’re too big too fail, what’s stopping you from making the same risky moves and doing it all over again?

How we reward good teachers and weed out the bad ones is a valid debate. Money alone isn’t going to help bring up the quality of education. It’s not, however, a subject for debate when the quality of the teachers isn’t even being considered in taking away their rights to collective bargaining. This isn’t about quality of teachers, this is about taking away their ability to make a living wage. Even with the rights to collectively bargain, they’ll still continue to be underpaid, but that’s all that they’re asking for.

Anyone who thinks being paid $60,000 a year at the high end hasn’t spent much time around teachers, who work around the clock putting together lesson plans, grading papers and creating examinations, at nights and on weekends.

The double standard we hold our teachers to says a great deal about the direction of this country. If we want to stop rewarding others for failure with no consequences for continuing the same behavior, we should first start by looking a bit further up the financial food chain.

Image: Parents and education advocates demonstrate on the steps of New York‘s City Hall March 2, 2011. The group urged New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to support a progressive tax on New York‘s richest in order to avert proposed cuts and layoffs close to 4,700 New York City school teachers to close the massive gap in education funding left by Governor Cuomo’s budget plan. REUTERS/Mike Segar

Full disclosure: I was a contributor at Gawker in 2009.

How has Gawker’s major redesign altered their traffic? It all depends who you ask and what measurement service you decide to use. They all seem to paint a slightly different picture and everyone you speak to will give you a different explanation for why it is so. Gawker had been using the measurement service, Sitemeter, that they proudly displayed prior to the redesign, and still exists on Gawker’s UK site in the old reverse chronological format they tossed away.

The new format launched on February 10th, and you can see the massive drop off on that very date. Gawker’s editor-in-chief Remy Stern claimed the Sitemeter was not working anymore. The new format of the site was created in such a way that the measurement could not be accurately detected by that type of tool. So let’s toss out the Sitemeter entirely since it seems incapable of giving us a true look at Gawker’s traffic.

Instead, we’ll look at Quantcast, which shows a steady decline in pageviews for Gawker since  the end of January. Additionally, unique visitors fell off a cliff shortly after February 7th and have struggled to reach their previous levels ever since.

The way the site is designed now, without getting too technical, does not make it easy to be crawled by search engines. This is a pretty serious oversight by Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker, who had been beta testing this design for quite some time. Gawker had to deal with a massive security breach just before the launch, where hackers had wide ranging access to user account data, internal chat logs and the source code for the current redesign.

Stern posted a screen shot of Gawker’s internal Google Analytics to counter what others were saying about Gawker’s drop in traffic, but the numbers he posted are prior to the redesign. Denton even publicly (he habitually “leaks” his company memos) acknowledged that the new design has caused traffic from Google to drop “significantly”.

Denton seems to be pretty sure of himself in thinking that the future of the web is not in blogs but in the magazine design he’s now embracing; a design more suited for an iPad or even a television. Most times when everyone has doubted Denton, like when he reorganized his network by selling off some sites and folding together others to prepare for a bad economy which he correctly predicted would hit the Internet ad marketplace hard, standing by what he believes has paid off.

His sites have grown more profitable and increased their audience since that time. Oddly enough, the editor during the period who followed Gabriel Snyder and helped grow Gawker from the New York City inside-baseball media rage of the creative underclass to the national tabloid it is today was essentially pushed out to make room for the current EIC, Remy Stern, and his site CityFile, which has yet to be fully integrated into the Gawker network. Chris Batty, head of sales at Gawker left the company after an unresolvable disagreement with Denton over the new direction the redesign was taking the network towards.

Denton said regarding the redesign: “We got ahead of ourselves — and now we’re rowing back.”

The question is, will it be too late for Gawker to row back after losing roughly 50% of their audience in the process, and more importantly, was it all worth it? Denton has proved everyone wrong before, with the odds stacked against him, and he’s going to try to do it once again.

Image: Screenshot of Gawker’s redesign of gawker.com.

The biggest surprise at today’s Apple iPad 2 event was the fact that Steve Jobs was there to present it. Jobs walked out to a thunderous standing ovation and stated, “We’ve been working on this product for awhile, and I didn’t want to miss it.”

The iPad 2 is very much a video device. The resolution is the same, the price is the same and the battery life is the same. The new feature is a front and back facing camera which was not available on the original iPad.

The new device can also wirelessly stream video from any app to an Apple TV device (and vice versa), which makes the iPad an even more powerful convergence device than Apple TV.

Additionally, iMovie is now available on the iPad 2, and is specially designed to make it easy to edit videos on a tablet format. Facetime, which has been available since the launch of the iPhone 4, is now available on the iPad 2, too, and can perform videoconferencing between both iPhone and iPad 4 devices. Garageband for the new iPad will allow you to plug in instruments, add effects and record up to 8 tracks.

The device itself is 1/3 thinner, available in white  — they promise white will be available on day one (remember when the promised white iPhone never surfaced?) — and boasts a much faster 1 ghz A5 dual core processor. Apple claims the CPU is twice as fast and graphics are nine times faster and with all of that the battery life is still miraculously the same.

Apple also unveiled a new cover that snaps onto the device using built-in magnets on the iPad2. The cover rolls back and acts as a stand for watching video and to allow for easier tapping. The cover also has a microfiber surface on the inside that helps keep the iPad 2 surface cleaner.

The iPad 2 will be available on March 11th, the same day South by Southwest, spring break for tech geeks, begins so expect the Apple store in Austin to be a mob scene.