Newest TechStars Networ...

Hub Ventures , the San Francisco-based startup accelerator focused on funding entrepreneurs “building a better world,” is the newest member of the TechStars network. The official announcement of its TechStars affiliation will be made next week. For those unfamiliar, the organization’s 12-week program provides companies with typical accelerator benefits like seed funding, mentorship, workshops and access to investors, but what makes this accelerator different are the types of startups it’s interested in. Specifically, Hub Ventures is looking for startups building solutions for things like collaborative consumption, healthy food systems, off-grid energy, clean energy, civic engagement, and other sorts of “change the world” technology. “Our operating philosophy is that business and technology can play a key role in solving some of the issues of our time and to fill the gaps where government and philanthropy are unable to create sustainable impact, which some would say is quite large,” explains Hub Ventures founder Wes Selke. “The world needs more innovative models to solve these tough problems…and we believe our approach is on the cutting edge.” The program is based out of Hub Bay Area , a collaborative workspace with over 1,000 members in San Francisco and Berkley, which is connected to 30 other locations through the Hub network. Before Hub Bay Area opened in 2009, there wasn’t really a physical space where like-minded social innovators could get together and collaborate. Now, Hub Ventures is there, hoping to tap into the emerging asset class of “impact investing” – something which  JPMorgan forecasted  to be a $400B-1T investment opportunity over the next decade. Besides Hub Bay Area, other partners include  Good Capital ,  Village Capital ,  ImpactAssets , and  SOCAP . Many of the group’s growing list of over 40 mentors come from the program’s partner organizations, but some mentors come from mobile-focused companies like Nokia and ngmoco, some are angel investors, and others come from similarly focused startups, like ride-sharing startup RelayRides. Participating companies will receive free and heavily discounted services in PR, human resources, web hosting, business process outsourcing, lean UX design, accounting, banking, legal assistance, and more. They also have access to Hub Venture founders via weekly office hours, and access to $10,000 to $20,000 in seed funding. Hub Ventures officially launched in January 2011 and did a Spring 2011 cohort with 16 impact-oriented startups. Over half have raised money since its Investor Day in June 2011, ranging from $75,000 to $1 million, Selke tells us. Other startups have decided to bootstrap. A few of the standouts from the previous round were MobileWorks , a crowdsourcing platform that doubles incomes for workers in India, Zamzee , a device that combats teen obesity by motivating them to be more active, and SpyGlass , a wireless water quality monitoring platform. The accelerator is now preparing for its second round, which will be smaller – probably 8 to 10 companies this time, says Selke. Interested entrepreneurs can apply now  through March 5th. The program will begin April 16th and will wrap up on July 9th with its Demo Day.

Facebook Still Growing ...

I’ve spent the last few years trying to figure out Facebook’s regional traffic numbers via third party measurement firms and by scraping its ad tool. But now, I don’t have to, because the company has included the breakdown in its S-1 filing today. And what does it show? Across the board growth. Take a look at the graphs below, going back to March of 2009. Contrary to various other data sets, there is literally no month where it didn’t gain users in every single region. As of the end of 2011, here’s how its 845 million monthly active users broke down: North America (US and Canada): 179 million Europe: 229 million Asia: 212 million Rest of the world: 225 million Facebook goes on to explain that Brazil and India are now key sources of growth. The former grew 268% in 2011 to reach 37 million MAU. The latter grew by 132% over last year to reach 46 million. Meanwhile, its first and still largest country market, the United States, still had a strong year even with all of its growth in the past. It increased by 16% to reach 161 million MAU.

Tablet Shipments To Rea...

Post-PC era? Here we come: According to new data from NPD , tablet PC shipments are expected to grow from 72.7 million units in 2011 to 383.3 million units by 2017. For comparison purposes, worldwide PC shipments for 2011 were 352.8 million, after seeing a 6% decline in Q4. While those numbers are remarkable enough on their own, what’s really interesting is where much of the growth will come from: the emerging market. Emerging markets are expected to account for up to 46% of worldwide shipments by 2017, up from the 36% share in 2011. “The emerging market opportunity for tablets has been flying under the radar mainly because the device brands aren’t household names and there are concerns regarding the sustainability of the market,” says NPD Senior Analyst Richard Shim. But the firm believes that won’t always be the case. “We are beginning to see investments by some of the better known brands in developing regions, and we expect this to not only continue, but to flourish as competition improves,” he notes. The tablet surge won’t be courtesy of the iPad alone, especially in these emerging markets. Specifically, the report cited the introduction of new brands like Aakash in India, for example, as well as older brands like Dell, as contributing the overall tablet growth. China and the Asia Pacific regions are leading in terms of tablet penetration rates in emerging markets at present, but Brazil, India, Russia and other countries are also becoming bigger forces, says NPD. And the key to unlocking this growth comes low-power processors and tablets with price points under $100. In addition to the growth in emerging markets, NPD also believes that other growth will come as the tablet platform itself evolves through technological advances. That evolution comes first from higher pixel densities, then later from higher performance. The changes will segment the market into “premium” and “value” category tablets. (Any guess where iPad will be?) Believe it or not, it even sounds like Microsoft might still be in the running as a tablet competitor, if NPD’s related survey data is to be believed. According to a survey of U.S. commercial tablet owners, 39% indicated that having a Windows OS option as a part of their next tablet purchase was “very important” to them. But let’s wait to see which tablet they end up buying – saying and doing are often very different things.

iNdustrial Revolutions

To paraphrase Otto von Bismarck , “iPads are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.” It’s an ugly story . Over a hundred employees “injured by n-hexane, a toxic chemical that can cause nerve damage and paralysis” because its use “meant workers could clean more screens each minute.” Other workers killed or injured by explosions. All so that iPads can be built as cheaply as possible, so that Apple can maintain its 44.7% gross margins. Isn’t that awful? Yes, of course — but let’s try to maintain a nuanced perspective here. This is hardly a new story, and it’s hardly unique to the tech industry. Think of the exploitation of child labor to harvest Egyptian cotton and Cote d’Ivoire cocoa . Plus ça change; a decade ago it was Indonesian sweatshops and Indian fireworks exciting outrage. Think of the exploitation of Congolese workers to mine coltan , used in electronics everywhere. Show me a country with a large population of desperately poor people, and I’ll show you horrific exploitation of impoverished workers. Please note, though, that the latter is an inevitable symptom of the former; and again, let’s please try to maintain a sense of perspective. It’s awful that a dozen Chinese workers were killed and hundreds injured building iPads–but at the same time, coal mining kills more than two thousand Chinese workers a year (down from almost 7000 ten years ago) and nobody’s suddenly outraged about them . We in the West don’t really seem to care that Chinese employees work under awful conditions and die in appalling numbers — unless they make shiny things that we use. We claim we don’t want people to suffer, but in fact we just don’t want our iProducts tainted by that suffering. Isn’t that more than a little hypocritical? So what? you might say. It’s all horrible! Stop them all, or any of it that we can stop, right now! Right? No. Not necessarily. This is a really complex and difficult issue, and there’s no obvious right answer. Over the last thirty years, trade and export-driven growth have been insanely great for China, and made life enormously better for the overwhelming majority of its billion-plus people. (My personal experience bears out all the data, for what it’s worth: in 1997 I spent a month roaming solo through central China, then came back nine years later. China 1997 and China 2006 were like two entirely different nations, and the latter was vastly better off.) If Apple and other Western manufacturers were to pull production from China to other, better-paid, union-friendlier jurisdictions with stronger protections for worker rights, that would be disastrous for Apple’s profit margins and innovation speed — but it would also be disastrous for China’s people. On the whole, overall, despite the gruesome and heartrending disasters in the spotlight right now, both sides benefit greatly. That’s how and why free trade works. At the same time, we can all agree that no businesses anywhere should be poisoning their workers and/or generally treating human lives like disposable Kleenex. This is especially true in a nation whose government only accepts trade unions which are powerless government puppets . But I would argue that it’s China’s steadily growing wealth — which comes from trade, and especially, manufacturing — that will ultimately transform it into a nation where real unions and real worker rights can and do exist. It’s worth noting that Foxconn’s problems are China’s national problems writ small. Hexane pollution and aluminum dust are scale-model versions of the nationwide poisoned milk scandal, or the ongoing catastrophe of Beijing’s hyper-polluted air , or the major lakes entirely conquered by toxic cyanobacteria. Again, employee exploitation is a symptom, not a problem. The problem is ubiquitous grinding poverty – something that trade, investment, and economic growth slowly, over decades, alleviates, albeit at a terrifying cost to the environment. Think of the West’s Industrial Revolution. That’s more or less the same revolution transforming China right now. Is it possible to have such a revolution without some concomitant Dickensian horrors? The available evidence sadly indicates “probably not.” In the interim, what Apple (and the countless less-sexy enterprises whose products are manufactured in China under similar conditions) can do to improve the lot of those who craft its wares is this: increase their leverage over their suppliers, by making the threat of moving production elsewhere credible. Foxconn wants to keep Apple happy, obviously – but they’d be a lot more proactive about doing so if they genuinely thought they might lose massive amounts of Apple’s business to someone else. A concrete example: Apple shouldn’t get Foxconn to manufacture iPads in Brazil : they should have another company entirely build iPads in Brazil. Right now Apple needs Foxconn almost as much as Foxconn needs Apple. Real competition among suppliers would mean that each of them will jump a lot higher and faster when Apple says “worker rights.” But let’s not get myopic about Apple and iPads, when the landscape of globalization and its excesses is so much vaster and more diverse. Let’s not pretend that the dynamic is purely “rich Western tech companies exploiting poor nations.” And let’s remember that technology, and China’s growing wealth, will probably ultimately solve this problem. Remember that decade-old outrage about child labor in India’s fireworks industry? Well, it’s much diminished these days, thanks to automation and India’s much wealthier society . Similarly, China’s burgeoning online population has pressured its government to pay attention to air pollution … and Foxconn is already roboticizing its assembly lines . Most of all, let’s not lose sight of the fact that the technology pioneered in large part by the very same cohort of Western companies who outsource production to China is, slowly but steadily , lifting China, India and sub-Saharan Africa out of poverty. That, not where your iPad came from, is the most important story in the world today. Image : Smog over Tiananmen Square in 2006, by yours truly. By all accounts it’s gotten much worse since.

A Foothold For HealthTe...

I read with great interest Vinod Khosla’s column two weeks ago that discussed the role of tech in healthcare. But as much as tech has to offer the healthcare institution, its effects are perhaps more reliably trackable in the actual medical devices field. A functioning “Dr. Algorithm” would be great – but a “tricorder” device, like that being chased by this X-Prize ? That would be something else. Until these pie-in-the-sky projects come to fruition, though, more modest advances, but which nonetheless save lives, will be made. Medtronic, a major med-tech company, is hoping that the next big thing will actually be small and cheap: a pacemaker for developing countries. It’s a little different from the “innovation” we’re used to seeing in startups and software, because improving on a medical technology requires significantly more resources and cash than, say, improving on social photography. Such big-money industries aren’t invulnerable — SuVolta is going right up against the likes of Intel — but generally there is pressure from within to keep things fresh, and that suffices to advance the industry. Medtronic isn’t one of the little guys, but they are taking a fresh tack. They recognize that the development of cheaper versions of existing devices (hearing aids, pacemakers, dialysis machines) no longer means producing a lower-quality component. Consider a mobile phone being given away for free at a store. It’s the budget option now, but it’s ten times as powerful and versatile as phones from five years ago. That same improvement comes about in other industries, and while often the result is better, more expensive versions of the same thing (fMRI versus single-MRI, for instance), it can also mean that the original can be made for significantly less money. Medtronic is hoping ~90% less . CEO Omar Ishrak has been touting these plans at the World Economic Forum, and with luck he is just one of many who have dedicated themselves to the spread of technology downwards as well as upwards. Siemens and GE (Ishrak’s former employer) call it “frugal innovation,” and it’s things like basic amenities like light and clean water that are created through cutting-edge techniques but made available for microscopic prices — the only prices impoverished communities in rural Somalia or India can afford. Ishrak hopes to double sales in developing countries over the next few years, and plans to produce a new generation of cheap and modern pacemakers as the first big hardware push. It’s something that can be developed and produce now, as opposed to Dr. Algorithm, who must navigate through a morass of regulations, public distrust, and beta versions. Both will eventually be important, but the devices are definitely coming first. They may not revolutionize the industry, but bringing the industry to the rest of the world in the first place is a necessary first step.