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SPEAKER_03: Hey, everybody. It's a big news week. Google, Amazon, startups, Concord for private jets, a lot of interesting stuff going on in the world. Liz Gaines from All Things D for now and Declan McCullough are with me to discuss a very jam-packed news week.

SPEAKER_05: Stick with us. It's going to be an amazing episode.

SPEAKER_09: Hey, everybody. Welcome to This Week in Startups.

SPEAKER_05: I am your host, Jason Calacanis, at Jason on Twitter. And we have a jam-packed episode today. We do two shows a week. On Tuesdays at 1 o'clock Pacific, we do an interview show, and then on Fridays at 1 o'clock. Typically, we do a news roundtable. It's been a little while since we've had a news roundtable, and today's is going to be a great one. We've got a lot going on between the NSA and Google with barges and just tons and tons of incredible stuff going on, 3-D printers and private Concord, Snapchat worth $4 billion, Amazon reviewers are getting paid, lots of stuff going on. And with me today to discuss it all is Liz Gaines from All Things D.

SPEAKER_15: How are you, Liz? Good. Thank you. Thanks for coming on the show. I see a little mini Kara Swisher over your shoulder there.

SPEAKER_17: Yes, that's from a cake model. It's not made of cake, though. That's the model.

SPEAKER_18: Break a scoop. Break a scoop. I need a devil or an angel on the other shoulder.

David Friedberg: You put Walt on the other side, and then you should just put a speaker in it, and she should just press a button on her phone like Voxer and just, you know.

SPEAKER_03: Push to scoop. Get a scoop. Get a scoop. And also with me, Declan McCullough, who is on sabbatical from CNET working on a mobile news startup. I understand. Declan, how are you?

SPEAKER_22: Hey. Thanks for having me on.

SPEAKER_23: And I don't have a whole lot to announce on the sabbatical front, but you can take a look at what I've made public so far about it at recent, R-E-C-E-N-T dot I-O.

SPEAKER_22: Recent dot I-O. Go check it out.

SPEAKER_26: I have a feeling it's going to be something special. Declan, obviously, tremendous entrepreneur. I'm sorry. Tremendous journalist, but now entrepreneur, I guess. You're becoming an entrepreneur? They're dabbling in it. Dabbling.

SPEAKER_28: Well, you know how you can go back and forth between the two better than most.

SPEAKER_26: Yeah. It's actually – it works out pretty good. I can – you can report on yourself or you can use your reporting. Anyway, hey, listen. There's a lot going on. Let's start off with Google.

SPEAKER_05: I mean Google is having a tremendous week. They're trying to figure out how to reach the next billion people with the next Android, KitKat. They're getting into the smartwatch contest, which we heard a little bit about at the launch festival actually from Lior, from Motorola. And according to the Wall Street Journal, they're in late stage development of their watch. And there's a crazy barge off the coast of San Francisco. And is there also one off Portland, Maine? And we're finding out that that might be Google X and it's some kind of a showroom and or party boat with a big deck. So, Sergey is going to have some awesome parties next year. And the moonshot approach is – everybody is sort of taking a lot of interest in Google recently. Let me start off with Liz. Have we ever seen a company in the history of technology that's as ambitious as Google is right now?

SPEAKER_30: Google is definitely the most ambitious company right now. I'm sure there have been junctures where nothing had been done before and someone came along and did it.

SPEAKER_32: But at this moment, they're trying to do so many different things on so many different fronts and they all speak to these crazy large-scale goals. I mean it's funny.

SPEAKER_34: They launched a new phone this week, right? This is the Nexus 5. And you didn't even mention that in your roundup of stuff that they've done. They're doing a lot.

SPEAKER_36: Yeah, I mean – and so of all these projects, which one fascinates you, you know, most?

SPEAKER_03: Which one in 20 years do you think will be the most successful? That's sort of two different ways to look at it.

SPEAKER_30: Yeah, you know, I think that it's still really unclear that the moonshots will work. I have to say I'm still doubtful on them.

SPEAKER_32: You know, the self-driving cars, it's cool, but really. And Google Glass, again, it's cool, but really. And – but the underlying stuff that they're doing of uniting everything together is just making them so hard to get rid of in 20 years.

SPEAKER_30: Like I can't think that there's that many other technology companies that you could imagine are going to be around in 10 years. But the work that they've done, for instance, on maps, I mean they've built such a crazy competitive advantage by driving around the world, taking pictures of every street in the world. No one else is going to do that in a couple of minutes.

SPEAKER_41: And that would be an example of a moonshot maybe that they started 10 years ago, correct?

SPEAKER_42: I mean – Totally, and they're at the moon. And they're at the – right, they literally are going to the moon. Is that correct?

SPEAKER_43: All right, Declan, let me send it over to you. I mean you've been covering technology for a couple decades like myself.

SPEAKER_03: Have you ever seen any company this ambitious in doing this many diverse projects?

SPEAKER_46: I think the answer has to be no. I mean the way I think about it is that you have a bunch of computer scientists running the company, founding the company. The long-term CEO until recently was a computer scientist.

SPEAKER_23: That's Eric Schmidt, of course. And so what they're doing is they're looking at problems, big problems like a million people a year, let's say, die in automobile accidents. How can we solve that?

SPEAKER_46: And then treating it like a scientist would instead of like a marketer would or a sales guy would and saying, let's throw technology at this. Is this a problem that computers can actually solve and help us with? And now we're seeing some of the results. We're starting to. In terms of the barge, it was actually more interesting before we knew exactly what it was. And now the latest reports this morning seem to say it's something that can be disassembled, put in a bunch of flatbed trucks and brought around. And so that's not as much fun as, say, a mobile data center. I should point out, by the way, that my CNET colleague, Dan Turdman, was the first to report in detail on this. So you went down the data center as opposed to showroom path pretty far.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I mean it's kind of bizarre to make a floating barge showroom. They would have to have some amazing array of products to make that make any sense. What is the thinking there to have like a mobile floating showroom when you have Apple stores everywhere and they seem to be working pretty well? Did anybody have any insights on why?

SPEAKER_30: Can I just say as a side note that I think it's been so fun to watch. CNET broke this original story, had some details. But like the local news outlets have been all over this. And I love that now, you know, people are just harassing these guards outside this barge on Treasure Island.

SPEAKER_32: You know, I read there was like a – I forget what it was. Times of London today was like there by boat. You know. Wow. People are just swarming on this pile of containers.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah, it's – I guess maybe it speaks to the ambition of Google is so great now with the moonshots and 10x that we expect that that's going to be like maybe a nation state or something they're launching or like a Bitcoin repository like the Franklin Mint or something.

SPEAKER_49: Maybe it's kind of –

SPEAKER_30: It's more fun when you don't know what it is. Because I'm a little worried that the reality is going to be like, oh, great, a store.

SPEAKER_05: Does anybody have – I mean whenever we talk about a company having grand ambitions, you know, two things come up. You know, what's the downside? Is there some concern here? Should the government get involved? And then of course are we predicting peak Google?

SPEAKER_26: So if everybody thinks what they're doing is just so extraordinary, does that mean it's all coming crumbling down like it did in a way for Microsoft for a decade? What do you think, Liz?

SPEAKER_30: Did you read the Dave Eggers book, The Circle, yet? It's kind of interesting because it's basically about Google. And his idea about what will bring them down ultimately is that they will – this practice of openness, which I guess is borrowing also a little from Facebook. But the company that he describes sounds more like Google. This idea of openness will just take down the world because there will be no notion of privacy and everything will be done in this kind of happy-go-lucky, the world is better. So they describe – and they actually describe when politicians start wearing cameras around their necks. So he didn't do enough research. He should have just had Google Glass. But they have cameras around their necks recording them. He describes that as going clear, which I think is borrowing from Scientology. It is. And the whole world goes clear. All the politicians in the world go clear and it comes to – it all comes falling down. So it's interesting because there's – I guess I just bring that up because that is one doomsday scenario that someone, a smart guy, recently thought through. I don't know that that's exactly what's going to happen. But it's coming on all fronts. I think the NSA privacy transparency weakness is pretty large, especially internationally.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah. I mean that would be a good segue into this Google and Yahoo servers were hacked. I'm using air quotes for those people listening. There's a latest note in leak shows the NSA broke into links between Yahoo and Google servers, a project called Muscular, separate from the front door limited access. According to the Washington Post, copying entire data flows across fiber optic cables that carry information among the data centers of Silicon Valley giants.

SPEAKER_05: Google statement, we are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone to intercept data from our private fiber network. And it underscores the need for urgent reform. Declan, what do you think of this latest revelation?

SPEAKER_46: Well, I think they should be outraged and we should be outraged. And it also points to the problem with, hey, let the government step in because, you know, when the government steps in, this is the kind of stuff they do. Look at it from the NSA's perspective. If you want to get stuff from Google, there are three ways to do it, the three obvious ways. The first is to go through the front door, send them some sort of legal order, court order, the FISA Amendments Act Section 702 process sets up one of those, and then request it. Those numbers seem to be very small, like a thousand requests a year through this legal process. The second way is to sniff the connections between users and Google, but Google has hardened that a lot. SSL by default, perfect forward secrecy in ways that AOL and Yahoo still have to do, or they're still trying to catch up to. And the third way is what the latest leak this week is referring to, which is, well, Google's data centers sometimes talk amongst themselves. And so if you can sniff those wires, then you're in good shape because not everything is encrypted yet. Google announced in September that they are moving towards encrypting all of those links. But, I mean, it's kind of like you just don't expect your data center links to be encrypted. It's like, let's say that Larry and Sergey and Eric are meeting in a conference room in Mountain View. You don't expect them to have to, you know, go in the middle of the building and draw the shades because the NSA is aiming a parabolic mic at the window. But that's kind of the – this is how far they're going here.

SPEAKER_66: That's the closest equivalent I can think of.

SPEAKER_43: All right.

SPEAKER_03: When we get back from commercial, Liz, I want you to talk about the impact all of the spying is having on our international relations and just the Internet in general, you know, internationally. When we get back from these important messages, hey, this is a very easy, easy ad read for me. Squarespace offers 24-hour, seven-day-a-week support for making exceptional-looking websites. It's easy, everything's drag-and-drop, 24-hour support, as I mentioned, from a support team in my hometown, New York City. And they just recently added commerce to their offering. So no more of that nonsense of having to then go and get a third-party solution and complement your website hosting and your CMS, your content management system, with an e-commerce platform.

SPEAKER_05: No, it's all built in. So that's just incredible, and that's the value of going with a platform like Squarespace, which starts at only $8 a month. They just keep adding more and more products and more and more features to it, and they don't raise the price. I keep telling them to raise the price, but they don't. If you decide, go to squarespace.com and try it out for free.

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SPEAKER_05: And let me tell you something. We had a huge problem inside the company where I'd say, hey, can we get this on the launch hackathon website? We get this on the launch mobile website, whatever. And nobody – we have to go to a technical person.

SPEAKER_43: It was always that slow, slow process. And now with Squarespace, it's a fast process.

SPEAKER_05: And so I just want to thank them for making our lives easy here and supporting the program. For a number of years. It's a great company. If you're looking for a job and you're an exceptional developer, designer, whatever, I can tell you that's a great company to work for. Let's all thank at Squarespace on our Twitter accounts. Okay. Liz, how is all of this NSA stuff impacting technology companies in the Valley, America, just in general overseas? Because it seems to be now I was – we had a couple of technology conferences going on in Dublin and in Berlin this past week. And from what I understand from entrepreneurs, they're starting to hear it over there like, why are you spying on all the leaders? And this is screwing up cloud computing. And maybe we're going to make our own Gmail system in Germany that you can't – the NSA can't get into. Is this going to really impact negatively the American companies doing business overseas, do you think?

SPEAKER_15: Or is that a little far-fetched?

SPEAKER_62: I think it's a little far-fetched because I don't think that anyone has ever won by saying we're more private. You know, that's not a feature that you put in your Super Bowl ad. Right.

SPEAKER_30: But I do think that there's increasing awareness and hesitance around what's going on with the U.S. Internet companies. I mean, just for example, if you look at that Washington Post report from this week, basically what they're saying is that the NSA thinks it's okay to intercept fiber optic cables between data centers because they're not on U.S. soil. So if it was on U.S. soil, it would be clearly illegal. They can't do that. But because this is anywhere in the rest of the world, you can make the assumption under the legal precedent, I guess, that the content that's being swapped around is coming from foreign nationals, not U.S. citizens. That's kind of just like – how is that possibly a justification?

SPEAKER_32: But it's this like weird spy world where there's a whole lot of this kind of like – you know, even at the beginning with a prism coming out, Obama was like, don't worry.

SPEAKER_69: We're not stoppying on U.S. citizens. We're just spying on everyone else. It's like, okay, well, that's not going to make everyone else feel much better.

David Friedberg: Yeah. And when you look at this slide, that was – I saw this slide. And for those people listening, I'll describe it as a big Post-it note. Yeah, it was more of a cartoon. That like – it feels like the Dilbert guy made this and it's a bunch of like boxes with arrows explaining like the user has SSL going to the GFE, the Google front-end server and like, ha-ha, SSL added and removed here, exclamation point, smiley face. Like there's literally a smiley face on an NSA slide that was leaked by Snowden. And Declan, is this slide real and what would a slide like this say about like the NSA and their sort of ambition? I just thought this was a fake.

SPEAKER_23: Everything that Snowden has leaked so far or all the leaks that have been attributed to him have turned out to be real.

SPEAKER_46: We've had confirmation of everything else so far. I have no reason to believe this is not real. I also remember Google was moving about two months ago in early September to encrypt precisely these links. One interesting number we don't know is what percentage of the links were already encrypted. This is what I'm talking about, inter-data center links back even before Snowden. I suspect the number was pretty high. Some of the documents that Snowden has leaked, again, all perfectly legitimate as far as I know, but they've been – some of them have been a few years out of date. Here's another thought, though. I mean, we've all been assuming that, oh, yeah, the European data centers, Asian data centers, no problem, no constitutional problems. Well, I mean, that's kind of silly. I mean, if I'm abroad and I create an account in Gmail, a temporary throwaway one, and as a U.S. citizen, then come back home and still use it. I mean, Google thinks it's in an overseas data center. It stays in an overseas data center, let's say. And then all of a sudden you have situations when you're dealing with such large numbers of hundreds of millions of people where you have U.S. citizens' e-mail and phone calls, et cetera, being intercepted. I can't see how this is legal and constitutional. And that's one thing the Washington Post article earlier this week didn't get into, and I wish they would have. Some of these surveillance techniques cross the line, and I think this is one of them.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah, it's truly disturbing, and boy, what a crazy disappointment to the people in Silicon Valley who elected Obama to sort of be the tech-savvy president. I don't think anybody in that group who really helped raise literally millions to tens of millions of dollars each expected that they would raise the money and then have Obama use it – not use that money, obviously, but use his election then to go and do this massive, you know, technologically-enabled spiring. That's just really abhorrent. It's a crazy turn of events. All right, let's move on to Bing's – yes, that's right, Bing's launch of the week. Let's go right into it. Motorola's R&D team has revealed a modular phone project, Phone Blocks, B-L-O-K-S. It's kind of a 1.5 launch. It's led by Motorola's Advanced Technology and Projects Group. I saw this and thought this was crazy. Open hardware ecosystem, modular components, so like your Wi-Fi is one piece.

SPEAKER_49: Anyway, best we just show the video.

SPEAKER_81: So this is a new kind of phone. It's made of blocks, detachable blocks. They are all connected to the base, and the base connects everything together. Electrical signals are transferred through the pins, and two small screws lock everything in place. So if, for instance, your phone is getting a little slow, you can just upgrade the block that affects the speed. Or if something breaks, you can easily replace it with a new one, or update it with the latest version. Another great thing about this is, you can customize your phone. So let's say this is your phone, and you do everything in the cloud. Why not replace your storage block for a bigger battery block? If you're like this guy and love to take pictures, why not upgrade your camera? Or if you don't care about any of this stuff, you can keep it simple, and get a bigger speaker. You can choose the blocks you want, support the brands you like, or even develop your own blocks. PhoneBlocks is built on an open platform, where companies work together to create the best phone in the world.

SPEAKER_43: All right, that's absolutely stunning. That's our first one. Let's show our second one, which is Arion.

SPEAKER_03: Arion is working on a supersonic business jet, sort of an early launch, like a .5 launch.

SPEAKER_86: Let's see the video of that. It's pretty amazing.

SPEAKER_88: We are here showing the Arion supersonic business jet, which features a natural laminar flow wing design, which enables a much more efficient supersonic flight than a swept wing aircraft design.

SPEAKER_90: So what's going to be the top speed, and what will that translate to in time savings, say, if you're crossing the Atlantic? Its top speed is Mach 1.6.

SPEAKER_88: Its cruise speed will be more like Mach 1.5, and that translates into about a 40% time savings compared to a regular aircraft transatlantic mission.

SPEAKER_90: Thinking about the commercial supersonic market, I think a lot of people are going to be reminded of the Concorde. Can you make some comparisons to what this is going to be like?

SPEAKER_88: I think it will be similar in the time savings. You know, you're certainly looking at traveling about twice as fast as what current aircraft do. The difference is, obviously, the Concorde was a 100-passenger airliner, and this is an 8-10-passenger business jet. We don't fly quite as fast as the Concorde, but our efficiency is much, much higher. That's why we're a much smaller aircraft than what the Concorde was and have better range.

SPEAKER_43: All right. Well, that's just absolutely fascinating.

SPEAKER_05: And our third Bing launch of the week, Kickstarter Project Form 1 has raised $3 million for their desktop 3D printer on Kickstarter. It's not Kickstarter's actual 3D printer. It's just called the Form 1. Let's just take a quick clip preview of that.

SPEAKER_97: I've been involved in the field of personal fabrication for five years now, and I've seen what an amazing impact that these tools can have, but I've also realized that these tools are just a fraction of what's possible.

SPEAKER_100: When we were at the Media Lab at MIT, we had access to an amazing set of tools, 3D printing being one of the most important.

SPEAKER_101: For designers and engineers like us, there was simply no solution if you want a high-resolution 3D printer at low cost on your desk.

SPEAKER_103: So, we decided to build it ourselves.

SPEAKER_100: We have a great user experience. We have powerful and easy-to-use software. We've built a reliable and beautifully designed printer, and we're developing materials which will enable our users to make amazing things.

SPEAKER_73: All right, there you have it. Those are the three launches of the week. Let's start with the first one.

SPEAKER_105: When you guys saw this Motorola phone blocks, do you think that this is practical or real? What do you guys think?

SPEAKER_50: I think it's kind of cool because after all these years of people trying to compete with Apple on the iPhone by basically copying and doing kind of a similar thing of the Apple closed system,

SPEAKER_30: someone's trying to actually turn it inside out and be like, well, what would happen if one company didn't control everything about how your phone works? But at the same time, the phones change so much and they're always getting smaller that the idea that one kind of framework, I think they call it like an endoskeleton, could be usable for generations and generations. It's just hard to imagine. I think it would be great for, you know, I feel shitty throwing away phones all the time. I'm not throwing them away, but kind of using them as if they're disposable when the reality is it's just the thing that came out now seems better than the thing you bought two years ago.

SPEAKER_25: And Declan, what did you think when you saw that video?

SPEAKER_23: Well, I love the idea. I mean, I'm old enough to remember the Apple II days when you could mix and match your monitor and keyboard and storage device and you had expansion slots. And this is kind of a throwback to that in a very good way. You can just add what you need.

SPEAKER_46: If you can do things like have custom medical devices, it's going to be much easier to integrate that. It's going to be a challenge for application developers if you're kind of assuming a baseline, which is one of the good things of the current type of ecosystem. You can assume that everything has an accelerometer, for instance.

SPEAKER_113: So it's going to be a challenge. But if you can overcome that, it's great. I can't wait to play with one.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah. I mean, I always looked at this. And when I was looking at it as a phone comparison, I thought to myself, like, well, you know, the phone is so integrated and well done. As Declan's saying, you know, the software and the accelerometer are all sort of built into it. It's going to kind of screw up the experience there. But if you look at this as, like, to create new devices, right? Like, so I want a device that's, you know, the exoskeleton is X size.

SPEAKER_49: So I'm willing to make, you know, something between a notebook and a phone or an iPad mini. And it really is about having five different cameras on it that have extraordinary battery life.

SPEAKER_03: And I can take five simultaneous pictures with five different types of lenses. Like, I can see people doing really crazy hacks on this. So I was really inspired by it. What do you guys think of the Concorde, which has now been out of commission for, gosh, is it a decade now? And, you know, we've all gone to slow planes compared to it. We haven't increased the speed of aviation for a long time.

SPEAKER_05: Now coming back in private aviation, you think this is at all plausible that people would be willing to pay two or three times as much for the fuel, I'm assuming, to get there that much quicker?

SPEAKER_23: Well, I can try to answer that. I mean, I'm a pilot. The planes I fly are just a slight bit slower than that one.

SPEAKER_46: Cessna 174, yeah. Well, 172s, 182s, maybe a Diamond Katana, but just a little bit slower.

SPEAKER_23: But I don't think well in Mach. I mean, I think in sort of miles per hour, and right now we're flying maybe 500, 600 miles an hour on commercial jets, and Mach 1 might be roughly 800 miles an hour. And this plane can fly about 1,000 miles an hour, so it's not going to change the world.

SPEAKER_46: But hopefully this technology will then trickle down to the rest of us who can't afford these multimillion-dollar private jets, and maybe I can fly one one day. But it's great, because humanity has been slowing down in terms of how fast we can actually travel after the Concorde went away. So, thumbs up.

SPEAKER_73: Yeah, it's pretty fascinating.

SPEAKER_49: Liz, any chance you think Walt will go for swapping out the All Things DG 550 with this, or no? You think it's not in the new budget for the new co?

SPEAKER_30: We'll see. We'll see. I don't know. For me, this sounds cool, but doesn't excite my imagination, because it doesn't seem like anything I would use anytime soon.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it is fascinating that they're trying to get there. I mean, I think I'm going to wait for Elon Musk's electric-powered plane, or the hybrid one. And I've heard that the, it might, this is sort of inside information, that the concept might actually be like an electric hybrid-type plane, where either the electricity-

SPEAKER_05: From Tesla? Well, no, not from Tesla, but maybe just, I think, his latest thinking and other people's latest thinking would be, hey, maybe we use electricity to get up in the air, or once we're up in the air, you know, using some electricity to lower the amount of jet fuel that's burned, and recycling that energy somehow.

SPEAKER_03: I don't know, Declan, if you think that's even possible, but that's, I think, some of the latest thinking, is a hybrid-type plane.

SPEAKER_23: Well, I'm not going to bet against Elon Musk, but jet fuel, which is really kerosene, and is, well, fuel in general, is a very, very compact way to store energy, and batteries are not there yet. So, I'm not going to bet against him, but I'm not going to say it's going to happen right away, either.

SPEAKER_26: All right, then let's go on to this Form 1, you know, it's a Kickstarter project out of MIT Media Lab, or formerly MIT Media Lab members.

SPEAKER_05: They raised $3 million on a $100,000 goal, although people seem to be lowering those goals to make it look even more impressive.

SPEAKER_03: But they wanted to make something super cheap and affordable. I'm not sure, actually, what the price is on the Form 1. But what do you guys think of the latest cheaper, better, faster 3D printer?

SPEAKER_39: Anybody here have a 3D printer, or think that they're going to be, like, an important part of our lives in the future?

SPEAKER_30: I don't have a 3D printer, and I also, the stuff that I have printed with a 3D printer has been in that kind of crappy, cheap plastic. So, if there's a cheaper version, I imagine it's going to be still similar to that, not higher quality materials, which is when it would have a better impact for me. But, I mean, I went to Maker Faire this year, and pretty much, you know, there were rows upon rows of 3D printer startups. So, I guess I'm not surprised to see one more of them. It seems like this one has a pretty compelling pitch if they raise $3 million on it. But, for me, it's not, like, as much of a breakthrough as, like, of course, that's where a lot of energy is going right now.

SPEAKER_49: Declan, do you have any idea of something you would want to 3D print in your life?

SPEAKER_23: Well, I've got a 1-year-old and a 4-year-old, both boys, who are already kind of a hacker mentality with a Lego style.

SPEAKER_46: And so, in a few years, I can see them doing this. I mean, this is maybe more toys and novelty items. If I were in the U.K. or a place where handguns were banned, I might want to print a handgun. That's somewhat of a joke. We saw a news article in the last few weeks about the U.K. authorities getting warned that someone was doing just that. But there's – I don't see a – there's nothing beyond those cases that I can think of that I would want to do because I can get stuff bulk printed so cheaply.

SPEAKER_23: But maybe my imagination is just not good enough.

SPEAKER_73: No, that's what I hear from people.

SPEAKER_03: If you have kids, toys and hacking culture will be the use of this, which is what people said about PCs, you know, whatever, in the 70s and early 80s. All right, so those are our three launches, and that's the Motorola Foam Blocks Project, the Aerion, you know, Private Concord, and the Form 1. When we get back from commercial break, we're all going to hold up a piece of paper at the same time, 3-2-1 style, with our launch of the week. So, okay, Liz and Declan, start right down on your piece of paper. And while I'm doing my ad read, do you want the Foam Blocks, the Aerion, or the Form 1? Okay, listen, Mandrill is transactional email from MailChimp. They've got service all over the world, so delivery is instantaneous everywhere. Amazing real-time analytics, monitor performance. They have an iOS and an Android app to do that.

SPEAKER_05: If you don't know what transactional email is, it's, you know, all those super important emails you get from places, you know, saying,

SPEAKER_26: oh, your order has been shipped, or here's your UPS tracking, or here is, you know, your order is going to be delayed, or you got a friend request, or, you know, all that stuff.

SPEAKER_05: It's super important. Password reset, right? Thank you, Gina, producer Gina. Password reset, that's an important one. Anyway, we use it for the launch hackathon and everything. It's just brilliant, and, you know, if you are wondering, it's the same company that brings you MailChimp.

SPEAKER_49: But MailChimp is like you want to manage your list, right?

SPEAKER_03: This is for your servers sending out these emails constantly, thousands a day, hundreds a day, whatever it is, 24 hours a day. And you really need to be in people's email box. And you want to test, A, B test, so they do that as well.

SPEAKER_05: The pricing is incredible. The first 12,000 emails a month are always free. That's right. This is straight from the MailChimp playbook. Give people an amazing offer, and they will be loyal to you, and people are loyal to Mandrill. And you only pay for what you get, and there's no feature gating. So all features are available to all users, as it should be. That's like the height of software as a service is to just give everybody everything and charge them based on usage. And, boy, is Mandrill incredibly generous in that respect. Go ahead and sign up at Mandrill and thank at Mandrill app on Twitter. Just think of a Mandrilling, M-A-N-D-R-I-L-L, Mandrill. I would do an ee-e-e, but it's not. Somebody's got to tell me what a Mandrill sound makes, and then I'll do that. I'll do whatever it takes to keep the show running. All right, listen, we had our three Bing lunches of the week, and three, two, one, hold up your papers. What did you guys like best? Let me take a look here. Okay, so I see phone blocks from Liz, and then I see Project Ara, yeah, phone blocks. And, of course, I would say phone blocks. That's a clean sweep for phone blocks. Super inspiring. And I think everybody would try that, right? Everybody would try it, right? Request the same as a regular phone? I think I would try it. It's great. It's a great project. I think it's killer. I mean, I would like to see it more for iPads, right, and those other devices. What do you think, Liz, if it was like an iPad kind of thing? You talk about, like, kids playing with something. That would be fun.

SPEAKER_17: You can't call it an iPad if it's being made by Motorola.

SPEAKER_05: No, okay, I'm sorry, tablet. I just refer to a tablet, like, you know, as a thing.

SPEAKER_03: Okay, let's go back to the news here. Sure, Snapchat is worth $4 billion. Facebook, of course, crushed it this week. Ad revenues were up 66% from last year's quarter. 490% of ad revenue is coming from mobile, which is absolutely astounding since they didn't

SPEAKER_05: really have any ads on mobile just a year ago. But they are declining in daily usage amongst teens. The stock went up 15%, and they came crashing back down once the CFO mentioned that. Great move, CFO.

SPEAKER_03: So, and Snapchat has got a value, according to all things D, of between $3.6 and $4 billion. Liz, what did you think of the Facebook performance and also their issue with teens?

SPEAKER_30: Yeah, I think it's pretty interesting and cool that Snapchat has seen such a crazy usage, especially among teenagers. And teenagers are the leading edge of users. It doesn't right now replace Facebook in terms of all the things that Facebook offers, but in terms of Mindshare, you know, it's doing pretty well. And I can see why people will be excited about it. But valuing them at up to $4 billion is putting pretty high expectations on them being able

SPEAKER_34: to figure out all the other stuff that makes Facebook boring, like a platform and ads and all that. So, it could be hard for them.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and Declan, thoughts on Snapchat's Ascension crazy valuation and Facebook just absolutely rebounding from the debacle of an IPO they had?

SPEAKER_23: Well, I'm going to leave the business judgments to you and Liz. You two know more than I do about it.

SPEAKER_46: But it strikes me that Facebook's valuation is, in part, it's valued for future growth, future revenue, future profits, and especially how much of the younger teen Mindshare commands. And if that's slipping, and it could be slipping quickly, then all of a sudden, Facebook looks vulnerable in a way it didn't just a few months ago.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think it's worth noting that Instagram will soon have ads on it. And if Instagram, you know, reaches that young audience, that could plug the hole there.

SPEAKER_05: Ironically, Facebook launched that Poke app as a Snapchat killer. How's that going for them, Liz?

SPEAKER_144: Does it even exist anymore? I don't know. I deleted it on my phone.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean, absolutely pathetic. Did you guys see this week that somebody made a website called What Zuck Said or something like that? And somebody can look it up, Gina.

SPEAKER_05: Um, it's basically somebody is transcribing and archiving every single thing that Zuckerberg has ever said publicly or privately that they can get access to in his life. Like, so the instant messages between him and his partners he was screwing over, or emails, or any talk he gives, they're going to put in this archive.

SPEAKER_26: What does that say about how people perceive Zuckerberg?

SPEAKER_23: Wow, it's at zuckerbergfiles.org, a digital archive of all public utterances of Facebook's

SPEAKER_21: founder, Mark Zuckerberg. Over 100 full-text transcripts. And apparently this is not even a joke. Wow.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean, I hate to surprise you with something like this, but I mean, it is quite interesting, is it not?

SPEAKER_23: Well, I mean, it's useful for trying to get inside the guy's brain, but wow, I mean, why are other CEOs not getting the same treatment? That is the question. I don't really understand it.

SPEAKER_03: I think it's because people are either absolutely terrorized by him, or they don't trust him, like, or some combination of that, or this is the greatest punking practical joke of

SPEAKER_73: one of his friends. I don't know. What do you think, Liz?

SPEAKER_153: I mean, it's done by some college researchers. It's kind of like establishing a presidential library or something, right?

SPEAKER_30: But it's for a young guy who is still CEO of the company. But I think more than other companies, he is closely identified with Facebook. I mean, I saw something the other week about people were protesting Google for something they had done, and the way that they were protesting it was by changing their profile pic on Twitter to Eric Schmidt's face. So I don't even think, like, Larry Page has no, you know, recognition on a popular level

SPEAKER_155: the same way Mark Zuckerberg is so closely identified with Facebook.

SPEAKER_05: And there is something crazy going on, Liz and Declan, as journalists. Larry Page will not sit for interviews. I think there's...

SPEAKER_26: Did Steve Levy do the only interview of him as the sitting CEO of Google?

SPEAKER_58: There have been a few.

SPEAKER_30: I think there was a Brad Stone one. There's one in Fortune as well. Yeah, there's been a few. He has not sat much, and he also just said on their latest earnings call that he's no longer going to show up on earnings calls, or you can't expect him to. So yeah, he definitely is employing some other strategy, which is probably against anyone's advice about being a public CEO.

SPEAKER_23: Yeah, I mean... Go ahead, Doug. The strategy is, as I understand it, and I think maybe, Liz, you follow it more closely than I do, is you hire your lieutenants and you delegate. And so then you have the head of Google Plus speaking about social, you have the head of Android speaking about mobile, and the head of YouTube, and so on.

SPEAKER_46: And so then he gets his say in the background, and it also protects his privacy a bit.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I think it's a very strategic move of just keeping the dialogue of Google's ascension and ambition quiet. I mean, I'm not a total conspiracy theorist, but I think it's extremely, extremely strategic to make him not available. So there is no Larry Page files like there is the Zuckerberg ones. If nobody can reach him or talk to him, and he's this sort of ghost, and the best you can do is talk to a lieutenant about a very specific project, and nobody can actually thread

SPEAKER_26: together what all 50 ambitious projects actually mean in terms of how they're put together.

SPEAKER_23: But another alternative is that this is actually the way the company is run. I mean, it's really run by these different chieftains, and they will present their proposals to Larry, and then he'll try to decide, or maybe try to manage the disputes. I mean, that seems to me to be more like it, as opposed to top-down.

SPEAKER_46: It seems to be much more, you have a bunch of dukes warring amongst themselves.

SPEAKER_41: That is true. They do run the company that way, but it also-

SPEAKER_131: Yeah, but not without very strong leadership from the top, and vision from the top. And I think, Jason, I have to disagree with you.

SPEAKER_30: I think that their world-conquering vision is pretty transparent, though perhaps Larry Page articulating it might freak people out.

SPEAKER_169: Right.

SPEAKER_05: So you think it is world-conquering, but yeah, he would- But wouldn't Steve Jobs be on-

SPEAKER_170: You don't see Larry Page going on stage doing what Steve Jobs did, like saying, here's the product line, and here's the vision for the company.

SPEAKER_30: Well, maybe he's not good at it. I mean, Steve Jobs was very good at it. Yeah, it's possible. As you can see from Tim Cook trying to do the Steve Jobs thing on stage, it just, it isn't, some people have that talent. I mean, Zuckerberg actually used to suck at that stuff.

SPEAKER_176: Well, he almost had a, he did have a panic attack at the all things D, D5, 6, or 7.

SPEAKER_62: Right, so he chose that as something he wants to work on, and Larry Page- He's gotten better, yeah.

SPEAKER_05: All right, so let's talk about this patent we're going nuclear. The rock star group of people who bought, I guess, the Nortel patents for $4.5 billion has now unleashed all hell on Google. I don't know if either of you are following this, are either of you following it, or-

SPEAKER_178: It just came down this morning, right?

SPEAKER_03: Yeah. Pretty amazing turn of events that Microsoft and Apple, I guess it's RIM is also in there, and a couple of other people, to absolutely try to stop Android through lawsuits.

SPEAKER_15: What do you think, Declan?

SPEAKER_23: I mean, I think it shows that the patent law in this country was written in a pre-internet era and is out of control. I mean, we didn't have software patents until relatively recently in the history of this

SPEAKER_46: country, and the republic survived. I mean, even in the absence of software patents, you still have things like copyright and trade secrets and trademark law, and that was enough to go on until roughly the year 1990, and we were doing quite well in the 1980s in the computer software business. A lot of companies were formed and went public, including Apple and Microsoft going public then. So, it's, I don't see, I don't know how to handicap this, but it's something like this that's going to finally cause people to say, look, Congress, let's fix the system.

SPEAKER_03: While we're on the air breaking news, oh, Liz, did you have anything to add to that, and just a sort of crazy, you know, bullying patent kind of thing, adding-

SPEAKER_131: No, I think Declan has it totally right. This is just taking it to yet another level.

SPEAKER_62: I mean, these are patents that Google wanted to buy itself, right, and now they're being used against them after being bought on the open market.

SPEAKER_59: Yeah, this is, I mean, Google has said that they're going to use patents in a defensive way, not an offensive way, but this is clearly massive offense against Google.

SPEAKER_187: Right. Well, that, I mean, those don't conflict with each other.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah, that's true, right. They didn't win the patents, therefore they're not going to sue everybody. Yeah. Very convenient position.

SPEAKER_150: Well, there's also this sort of sad, it's a bit sad in a way, in that companies are not

SPEAKER_23: competing as effectively as they want in the marketplace. You can, you know, go to Congress and try to get a competitive advantage that way, or you can try to go into the patent marketplace and try to get a competitive advantage that way, and maybe you win the jackpot, and it's a billion-dollar victory, maybe not, but it's, I'd rather see these companies innovating instead of litigating.

SPEAKER_73: So, absolutely, I think everybody feels that way.

SPEAKER_03: I saw Paul Graham just said this was like sort of a milestone event in the technology industry. While we were on the show here, I noticed that CNET is reporting that the first Instagram ad, here it is, from Michael Kors, for a watch, I guess, or I would prefer it be for the macaroons, they look pretty delightful, that looks like a la duree to me. But I guess you see these ads, whether you subscribe to Michael Kors or not, and it's

SPEAKER_05: supposed to be clearly labeled, but I don't know that any of these native advertisements are clearly labeled. You guys have any thoughts on this native advertising, you know, ads made to look like content, and the FTC sort of getting involved in it? I mean, all things D would never do anything like this. I know Walt and Kara are old school, but you see like BuzzFeed and Business Insider and Gawker and everybody just, let's just confuse the hell out of the users and have even some of the content teams write their own, write the ads for the sponsors. Would either of you allow an editor to come to you and say, hey, write an ad for Dell for us because we're putting up a native ad? Would either of you walk or would you stay at your jobs if they asked you to do that?

SPEAKER_196: I don't think it would happen.

SPEAKER_05: You don't think it would happen, Liz, right? Of course, Walt and Kara would never go for it, but if Walt came to you and said, hey,

David Friedberg: I need you to write this copy for this new Dell horrible phone that's coming out. Your name won't be on it, but I just need you to write it.

SPEAKER_32: Zombie Waltz. Kim comes and does that. No, I don't think I would do it.

SPEAKER_30: I don't, I am confused by that as a reader, but I think Instagram is probably the least terrible implementation of native advertising ever because it's a site where you look at pictures or an app where you look at pictures. And if you're scrolling down and you see one that's an ad, you keep scrolling, go to the next one. It's very, it's less work than turning a page in a magazine. And hopefully they make, you know, advertisers post things that are pretty. You can't even post a link on Instagram, you know, now, like it's not as obtrusive as just about everything else.

SPEAKER_43: I think that's pretty insightful that, you know, on Instagram, it's just like, okay, yeah, that's a pretty watch and I dig the macaroon.

SPEAKER_03: So let's go. Uh, and I can turn them off if I want to. All right, Declan, it's your turn. Let's do your ethics test.

SPEAKER_05: If, uh, the Jim Lanzone comes down and says, you need to write this, but you know, Dell smartphone, Jim Lanzone, my friend comes down and says, you have to write it, but your name won't be on it, but you're really good at writing copy. You have to do it or you're fired. That's like the sort of light level of, uh, you know, jumping the Chinese wall. What do you think? Would you do it?

SPEAKER_141: No, no, no. I, uh, then I, then I, then I get fired and I'll, and I'll go to work at a place that respects

SPEAKER_46: that, uh, firewall between the two. I mean, look, if, if I, if I switch jobs and I go into, you know, marketing at CNET and

SPEAKER_23: that's, or ad sales and that's my job and I'm happy doing it, but there has to be this clear delineation between editorial and non-editorial and that, and that crosses the line. Uh, that said, I mean, I have not rise to the defense of Instagram here. I mean, uh, they, um, they need a way to make money and monetize the hell out of it. And, uh, and yeah, you have a few ads for watches. Uh, uh, in my, in my view, uh, is that when we're talking about this as opposed to the

SPEAKER_46: editorial firewall, um, disclosure cures all ill, the ills, they, they put some sort of

SPEAKER_128: disclosure. Here's, here's where this ad is coming from. Here's the fact that it is an ad. I'm happy.

SPEAKER_03: I am, um, pretty concerned about the level of disclosure though, because I think this is what somebody needs to do. I want to, I have to ask somebody in the Jason nation to do this.

SPEAKER_49: Can one of my super fans please record a screencast and get 10 people to look at native advertising and see if they can, with a test, figure out which people have ads that people can tell.

SPEAKER_05: Like, can you tell if their Facebook ads are native or not? Because the FTC or somebody has got to come in and say, there's some guidelines here because I can't tell what's an ad half the time anymore. And I'm in the industry and I can't tell. I find it very weird. Speaking of people selling their souls, let's talk about this Amazon reviewers getting paid

SPEAKER_03: in free product, thousands of dollars worth of free product to make, uh, reviews that you

SPEAKER_05: really can't tell. I mean, if you really had to look, there's like a little notation. Um, let's listen to this audio clip from NPR who interviewed a top reviewer.

SPEAKER_207: Everything from very cheap earbuds to $500 multifunction laser printers. I've gotten spin bike, which is probably valued at close to a thousand dollars.

SPEAKER_211: How much value would you say that you've gotten over the years? Oh my. You've been in this program.

SPEAKER_212: I mean, if you were just to add it all up, it's probably thousands of dollars worth of stuff. Wow.

SPEAKER_26: So, uh, thousands of dollars worth of stuff.

SPEAKER_03: And I'm trying to find how you would know, um, yeah, I guess, uh, how would you know that there's some like tiny little, Gina, look it up and maybe you could send me a URL or something.

SPEAKER_05: There's some tiny little way, um, to connote this. What do you guys think of this paying people with thousands of dollars worth of equipment to

SPEAKER_43: write reviews on Amazon and Amazon's doing it?

SPEAKER_62: I think it's super interesting. I'd never heard of this before now, but I was just looking around and I guess it's actually been going on since 2007.

SPEAKER_41: Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: And they claim it's because they want, the spokesperson said they want more useful reviews

SPEAKER_49: and the rankings are made public to fuel competition among reviewers. They rank reviewers, how many they've done. Members get a monthly list of products to choose two items from and review within 30 days. They get to keep the items, which obviously if they're brand new, they can put back in the

David Friedberg: box and sell on eBay for 60, 70, 80% of it. In other words, if you gave me a thousand dollar item, you basically paid me six or seven

SPEAKER_170: hundred dollars. Does anybody at Amazon have their brain turned on and not understand this? No, no, no, no, no. Let me, let me disagree with you and rise to the defense of Amazon here.

SPEAKER_23: I mean, first, the way we do reviews and travel articles or journalism in this country is a little different from the rest of the world. And the rest of the world is pretty common for an Australian journalist to take a junket

SPEAKER_46: to visit manufacturing plants in, say, Tokyo and then write about them and the manufacturer might pay for that. And so it's actually rather common.

SPEAKER_23: And even in the U.S., I mean, some of my favorite publications are ones like Car and Driver. And, you know, you get a Lamborghini to test or maybe a McLaren 12C to test for a month. Well, what's the value of that? $50,000, $40,000? And that happens.

SPEAKER_46: And third, the reason why we don't like this happening in the traditional editorial business is because it could tilt the reviewer. I mean, if the reviewer writes a lot of positive stuff, then they might be getting more and more free stuff. But if Amazon actually distributes it much more widely and you don't know what you're reviewing and you're going to, and what you write doesn't have any impact on what you get in the future, then it's not as big a deal.

SPEAKER_43: Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I find it such a slippery slope.

SPEAKER_26: I know when we did Autoblog and Engadget Joystick back in the day, we had a no junket policy and all this stuff, and then Gawker accepted them. The New York Times does not accept junkets. And the New York Times, actually, when they do car reviews, they return the cars, they can

SPEAKER_05: take them only for like 10 days or the length of the review requires, and then they have to return them with as much gas in them as they got them. That's how ridiculous the New York Times takes it.

SPEAKER_153: Well, I think that's exactly the issue. There's no problem with a program like this if they have to return the items at the end

SPEAKER_30: of it, if they don't have to return the items at the end of it, it's an issue. They do say explicitly that they're not supposed to sell them on eBay. I don't know if they enforce that. I mean, I'm not an authority on it at all. I just turned out about it. But if you have something and you're reviewing something and you haven't gone through the process of, would I spend this amount of money on this to give this much value to my life, it's hard to do. And that's what professional reviewers do as well. But at the end of it, you don't get the freebie.

SPEAKER_05: I think you're so right, Liz, because I just bought the Samsung smartwatch and, you know, Samsung will send-

SPEAKER_222: The one with like the camera on the side?

SPEAKER_05: Yeah, yeah. So I bought it because I want to be able to speak about these things. And so I do get tons of stuff sent from me for free and I give them either to the fans or to my staff, you know. And I actually sometimes don't even know what I bought and what I got for free because I buy everything. So, but because I bought it and it didn't work the first time and I was sinking it, I was just livid that I spent $300 this watch and you can't pair it to the Samsung S4 or whatever. And it's just, I'm still trying to make it work and I'm tweeting about it. We had somebody at Engadget who we fired in the early days. And then after he got fired, we got an email from, we started getting these emails. Hey, do you have the laptop that this person did for a review? They never did the review. And do you have this phone that they did? And we're like, I have to go back to the person like, hey, you know, you broke the rule. You signed in your contract, you return stuff, blah, blah, blah. The big game was with the car review companies that Declan brought up. They were getting cars for a year, six months, two years on loan from car companies. And so they would have fleets of cars at some of these car magazines and the journalists would take two or three cars home from what I understand from an insider. So they'd have a Mercedes, they have a BMW, they'd have this, they got a Porsche, they got an Audi and that was like massive, massive payments, like $3,000 or $4,000 a month in

SPEAKER_03: payments.

SPEAKER_02: So pretty interesting, pretty interesting.

SPEAKER_187: Well, does it say that any Amazon Vine reviewer has gotten to the cars yet? Does Amazon sell cars? I don't even know.

SPEAKER_05: They don't sell cars that I know of, but I mean.

SPEAKER_169: Because that is really a step up in value from like an exercise bike.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I find the whole thing just so crazy.

SPEAKER_03: It's almost like, I kind of feel like we're the last generation, I mean, I put the three of us in a group, I don't know exactly what everybody's age is on the show today, but I kind of feel like this Gen X is the last generation that actually gives a shit about the, what we used to call the Chinese wall, but some people call the firewall now. I asked some Chinese people if they thought, on Twitter, if they thought the Chinese wall was derogatory in any way, they said no. They said it just shows how formidable the Great Wall of China is.

SPEAKER_15: But what we refer to as the Chinese wall or the firewall in journalism is the line between those two things. Do you guys think we're the last generation that cares about this issue?

SPEAKER_150: No, this is the, this is the elder generation's complaint. All the youngins. It's been, I mean, this has been the case since the days of ancient Rome.

SPEAKER_22: Have some faith. What do you think, Liz?

SPEAKER_15: Are we the last generation to care about this issue of journalism, church and state, et cetera?

SPEAKER_30: I feel like you're, you're getting away with making an old fogey complaint while not calling yourself an old fogey.

SPEAKER_03: Thank you. Thank you. I agree. I am an old fogey.

SPEAKER_30: I don't know how quite all that's possible.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah, exactly. All right. So, hey, listen, we're, we're, we're wrapping up here, but I want to ask one more question, which is, we're, and since I got two great journalists on the line, we're entering the era of the star journalist, the journalist who is able to create their own product. We see that in a couple of examples recently, Andrew Sullivan, Walt and Kara Swisher, Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, they're not married, not by a long shot. And Glenn Grumwald, what do you guys think of this sort of Glenn Grumwald getting the backing of PR on Midiar and just sort of the future of journalism and star journalists being able to break out on their own?

SPEAKER_05: Yeah, Greenwald, right? Sorry. What do you guys think of it?

SPEAKER_23: Well, it's also the case that a competing trend is that you have some billionaires, I'm also

SPEAKER_46: thinking of Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post funding what, what they call innovative journalism or journalism that could have, that could have in that direction. But I think the star journalist has been around for a long time. I mean, you can go back and then there's to the days of especially broadcast journalists. Maybe it's just easier for non-broadcast journalists to head in that direction and to become folks that everyone knows. But I think that this is, I think that you can find examples of you, think about it, going

SPEAKER_147: back at least the last three generations. Liz?

SPEAKER_30: Yeah, I agree. But I would say that I think that there is some considerable flux going on right now. A lot of people going, I'm going to take my personal brand somewhere else and you can shove it when they're upset with their corporate parents. And that's definitely happening in places that I know of.

SPEAKER_237: Absolutely.

SPEAKER_30: But yeah, I mean, I think that it'll be interesting to see how quickly you can build a brand around a publication because building a brand around yourself is one thing, but it's like there's very few people who sustainably can keep that running and have that kind of like narcissistic fire to have themselves be the brand and the company. And I think that the step after like taking your personal brand elsewhere is what happens around you. And that's a whole nother skill set to like manage and push your vision towards other people and let them become stars and all that. And I mean, that always is the case. But I think there's more of that going on than now. I would point though to a couple of examples like, for instance, take The Verge. I think they posted today that's their second anniversary of existing. And they're now a pretty important tech site. So I think you can do a lot with a brand new brand.

SPEAKER_240: It is pretty amazing.

SPEAKER_26: Nikki Fink, I don't know how to pronounce her name, but anyway, she's leaving Deadline Hollywood. And I guess that would be a personality driven brand that is now, I guess, nobody

SPEAKER_05: knows what's going to happen with that. And then you have Huffington Post, same thing. Can you make that transition is a critical issue between being one person versus a team and a brand that stands the test of time. Thanks so much, Liz Gaines. Everybody can follow her on Twitter, L-I-Z-G-A-N-N-E-S, Liz Gaines. Any plugs, Liz? Anything you're working on we should know about? Speaking of Gaines, whatever.

SPEAKER_243: Stay tuned for January 1st.

SPEAKER_244: Ah, yes. Ah, yes. That's when the new co- I will stop.

SPEAKER_131: I'm not promoting the stuff I'm currently working on. No, I'm just kidding. No, come to our site.

SPEAKER_62: We're still breaking tons of news right now. So come visit All Things D.

SPEAKER_03: All Things D for the next 60 days or so. And Declan is working, of course, well, not of course, I just found out about it today.

SPEAKER_220: He's working on, I just had it open. Where is it?

SPEAKER_141: Well, I can answer the question. Yeah, answer. Well, of course, I mean, you can go to news.com wearing my CNET hat to find CNET's excellent.

SPEAKER_23: Journalism wearing my other hat, the idea is to provide an automatically tailored selection of interesting, relevant articles on a minute-by-minute basis for you and sign up to be on the beta list at recent, R-E-C-E-N-T dot I-O.

SPEAKER_03: Looks absolutely fascinating. Great design going on there. Everybody check out recent.io and sign up. So thank you so much to our friends at Squarespace, 24-hour support, exceptional-looking sites.

SPEAKER_05: Use the code TWIST11. And, of course, to Mandrill. Mandrill is absolutely fantastic transactional email.

SPEAKER_03: Thanks again to Brandis, technically flawless today. Thanks to Producer Genia. Great job on the story selection. And everybody at the launch team, we'll see you. Oh, and you can follow us at launch or at TWI Startups. And I'm at Jason. We'll see you next time on This Week in Startups.