Turning the Tables at a Messy Hackathon

At the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon in New York, April 27, 2013.

There are two kinds of hackathons that I’m familiar with. The first, of which Evernote produces more than a dozen a year, are focused on one (or maybe two) platforms — like the Evernote API. Companies like ours will set up a space for a 24-hour coding spree, invite a bunch of developers, and parachute in a few engineers and evangelists to help out.

Focused hackathons are fun and productive. They’re a chance for us to bond with young (usually) developers, and to learn what these devs are looking for as they bang on our platform. We always get cool projects from these hackathons, like Context Booster from our recent Berlin hack, and Epicnote from one before that in Sao Paulo.

But I’m partial to the second kind of hackathon: the Messy Hack. These hacks, like the TechCrunch Disrupt weekend hackathons that usually precede the official Disrupt conferences, are massive and chaotic. They attract hundreds of developers — the last TechCrunch hack in New York had about 600 — and dozens of API provider companies. I was at this Messy Hack. It was glorious.

At these hackathons, platform companies like Evernote have to compete with other platform companies (In New York they included Twilio, Microsoft, Box, and others) for attention and love from developers.

I spent more than 20 years covering startups for the tech press, and I’m accustomed to watching new tech company CEOs pitch their hearts out to media, funding sources, and potential partner companies. The pecking order is clear: The startups are the supplicants; the established companies and media are the power brokers. I’m used to being in the power seat.

At a Messy Hack, the dynamic is reversed. The coders are in the audience, doling out attention to a string of platform evangelists who take the stage, one after the other, pleading in their brief pitches for the devs to code up apps using their APIs.

It’s a bracing reversal. Personally, I find it fun to pitch for a change, instead of being pitched. But it’s also a great opportunity to refine your business and your message. You can tell, after a few short hours, if your pitch is successful, and by extension if your company’s platform strategy is working. You tell by the number of developers who come up to your table during the hackathon to ask questions, and then you tell, at the end of the event, by the number and quality of the projects presented.

Another great thing about Messy Hacks: Mashups. With multiple APIs being supported at these events, developers are more likely to go off and build apps that bring different platforms together.

Don’t bother trying to leave. Just sit down and code.

Hacking the hackathon

Now, it’s not hard for platform companies to game these hackathons, by offering prizes to developers who use their APIs. We have done that, and it does drum up interest from hackers who come to have some fun and maybe win a few bucks over the weekend. In New York, some companies with serious APIs offered prizes, and they got some decent projects. But at least one company offered a prize that was too big for the value of its simple API (in my editorial judgement) and it got more projects created than it deserved. Hacks created just to win a prize have a lower probability of moving to the next stage of development; the payout is too much and too early.

At the recent New York TechCrunch hackathon, we offered no immediate prizes, and yet we were gratified to see six teams present interesting projects at the end of the event. My favorite was Squirrel, which is creating a nice-looking reading list that’s made up of the articles users clip to Evernote. We also liked the hacks Everslide, which makes quick presentation slides from Evernote notes; and Evernote-Quick Team Manager, which mashes Evernote together with Highrise or Basecamp for group task management.

It was all the sweeter to see these projects given the competition we were up against and the fact that our only prize was far in the future — well-developed Evernote integrations might win our three-month-long Devcup competition and some of those winners might be invited to our Evernote Accelerator. And, to be fair, there were 183 projects at the hackathon, so seeing six Evernote projects didn’t mean we “won” the event by any stretch.

But the developers who built for Evernote did so for the best reasons: They saw value in our API and our base of users. While we’re not above sweetening the pot a bit to encourage developers who are on the fence to to hack at Evernote, in this case, we didn’t even do that and we still got neat projects.

A competitive hackathon where you don’t give out prizes is a brutal opportunity. But the payoff is sweet.

-Rafe

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Our next hackathon

Join Evernote and Honda at our first Design & Build Weekend at Evernote HQ!

Are you ready to share your broadband?

The Karma mobile hotspot is $79, plus pay-as-you-go bandwidth.

That’s the oracular wisdom that Robert Gaal, co-founder of Karma, dropped on me halfway into our interview. Let’s have it sink in for a bit before we continue.

Ready? Karma is the wireless hotspot — like a MiFi — that comes with social sharing as part of the offering. It also has a more sensible pricing structure than competitors. Bandwidth is pay-as-you-go, $14 a gigabyte, and your credits don’t expire. That is a refreshing change from telco access points that lock you in to contracts. Even the month-to-month data plans (like you get on iPads) seem onerous in comparison. So props to Karma for rationalizing the hotspot space.

The social and collaborative part of the product is the connection sharing scheme. Every Karma hotspot is part yours, and part the community’s. “Your” hotspot provides 100MB of data to any and all visitors for free, after which they can sign up to pay for the service just like you. And for every 100MB of data that visitors use, you get 100MB of bandwidth added to your account.

So it pays to leave your hotspot on so others can use it. And it gets even more communal. While Karma won’t let a hotspot owner see traffic from guest users, it does tell you who is using your device and bandwidth. Owners get guests’ names and links to their Facebook profiles. Gaal says that often, when owners see they have a guest, they will try to find that person and be helpful. “It’s all to get guests engaged in the community.”

Visitors to “your” hotspot can get 100MB of bandwidth for free.

Karma is, to a point, a refinement on some other community bandwidth products. It can be compared to Fon, which distributes fixed, ethernet-to-WiFi routers. The model is similar: Owners get priority access, and guests from the network (other Fon users) can use a portion of the bandwidth when they’re not at their own home. Fon is having some success working with carriers, for whom it can help create a better consumer experience. Karma’s Gaal, likewise, thinks that his product can make a carrier’s bandwidth more pervasive and affordable.

I love these communal resource plays.

I’m also closely tracking Open Garden, which turns your Android (or OS X or Windows) device into a community hotspot on its shared WiFi network. In other words, everyone in range of an Open Garden-equipped device can share bandwidth. (And sharing can happen over Bluetooth, so endpoint users can save on battery life.) it is an awesome solution for people with both an Android phone and a tablet. It would be good for iPhone + iPad users too, except getting low-level networking stuff like this into iOS isn’t doable.

And then there’s Space Monkey, which does a communal bandwidth thing with storage: It puts the file storage “cloud” into homes of users. Those who have a Space Monkey storage appliance in their home get half of the storage for themselves, and the other half is encrypted and shared by other Space Monkey users. It’s a mesh of storage nodes, essentially, and it’s elegant and robust.

The challenge with all of these ideas is getting the owned/shared ratio right. Too much sharing will turn off individual device owners, who do pay to run their slice of the community network, either in bandwidth fees or diminished battery life. Too little sharing and the economics don’t work for the provider company. So everyone in this space goes a step beyond feel-good community sharing to give the owners something extra: Free bandwidth (Karma), an extended network (Fon; OpenGarden); or increased reliability (Space Monkey).

And then there’s the danger of running afoul of the network owners. That’s why the companies that aggressively partner with telcos have the best chances of success, even if doing those deals can really slow down roll-outs.

But the real challenge is that all these community plays, while technically beautiful, are fighting macro trends. The costs of bandwidth and storage are dropping; the pervasiveness of wireless is increasing. The economics that may work now will not work forever. Anyone doing a community resource sharing play has to carefully surf very choppy waves, and companies that fall off their boards may have a hard time getting back up.

-Rafe

See also

I interview the Open Garden CEO (CNET)
Space Monkey puts the cloud in your house (CNET)

Audio version of this column

Attention, Developers!

Evernote is launching a one-month long Accelerator for teams building Evernote-connected apps. Learn more.

Hackbright: Women Can Code

Hackbright teaches coding to women.

Some people are born hackers. They’re drawn to computers, take up coding as soon as they learn to read, and they never stop programming, learning, and developing their skills. I work with some of these people at Evernote. You probably do, too. Maybe you are one.

Geeks and natural coders make up the hacker elite, and create many of the apps and services that we use. But you don’t have to be born a geek to become a coder. That’s good, because there aren’t nearly enough developers now, judging by the job boards in Silicon Valley.

That also makes an opportunity. There is money in creating engineers.

There are several organizations that teach the people who neglected to be prodigies or CS majors programming. One of the most interesting is The Hackbright Academy, which runs 10-week programming courses exclusively for women.

I met Hackbright’s Angie Chang at a Girl Geek dinner she organized that we hosted here at Evernote. So far, she told me, she’s graduated all 28 women that have entered her program, and 90% of them are now employed as software engineers.

“Our goal is to pivot peoples’ careers,” Chang told me. But pivoting women into coding jobs is different from teaching men.

It’s different for girls

I talked with Sara Gottlieb, one of the Hackbright graduates and now a front-end engineer at Survey Monkey. She told me that her psychology degree was “not helping” in the job market. And while she saw the opportunity for technical talent in the Bay Area, she feared, as many people do, that without a lifetime of experience as a geek, she’d never learn enough to get a job in tech.

Gottlieb told me that her college education reinforced the myth of the natural hacker. Even in Intro to Computer Science at her school, University of Vermont, she says, “Nobody was really starting from zero.”

But she found Hackbright, learned Python in the first five weeks, and then the remainder of the term on a personal project. Landing a job was easy, as Survey Monkey reps came to the demo day at the end of the session.

“There’s still a lot for me to learn,” she says. But she’s doing it now from inside a company.

Another Hackbright grad, Nicole Zuckerman, came from background that would appear to be the most nurturing possible for a budding geek. She told me she “grew up with the sound of a modem in my ears.” She took AP calculus and physics. Her parents encouraged her to pursue the sciences.

But, she says, “I don’t think they could conceptualize this [programming] as an option for me.”

She said the message to girls is different. They’re taught to focus on the intrinsics more than on the things they build. “Girls are raised not to screw up. If you don’t make it, it seems more destructive for girls than boys.”

Zuckerman ended up with a job in publishing, and was moving up the management ladder. But she wanted, she told me, “to feel like I was contributing.” She left her job for a Hackbright session.

She codes at Eventbrite now, which gives her the direct job satisfaction she was seeking. “Like, today, I made a thing happen,” she says.

Before Hackbright, she had only taken a few online tutorials in programming. It remained daunting, “I had heard programmers had to start as kids,” she told me. But Hackbright sounded promising, so she thought she’d give it a shot.

At the end of her session, she says, “There were 20-plus companies listening to 16 grads present.” Good odds for an entry-level developer.

We might be in a jobs bubble for developers. But it’s still a skill worth learning, since if you can’t get a job as a programmer, you can always go entrepreneurial and create your own. I’d like to see more Hackbrights, for groups that might learn differently from the way programming is traditionally taught: Women, inner-city kids, older people, journalists (ahem), you name it. There’s a lot of work to be done, and a lot of people who would like to do it.

-Rafe

See also

Codeacademy
Code School
Thinkful

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Talk about an Opportunity: The Evernote Accelerator

Last year, I left the mainstream tech press to come work at Evernote. Not just because I love this product (which I do), but because I wanted to do more for startups then I could ever do as a writer, and Evernote wanted to give me a platform to do that. The project we’re announcing today — my project — is that platform.

Welcome to Evernote Accelerator.

There are a lot of accelerators, incubators, and seed funds for early-stage tech companies. The Evernote Accelerator is a bit different. For one thing, it’s exclusively for developers who are using the Evernote cloud service or APIs. We want to make sure that if an Evernote integration is right for a product, the product is being built as best it can. At this Accelerator, developers will be able to work alongside Evernote’s own engineers, designers, and product managers to fine-tune that integration. The mentors for our accelerator teams will come from Evernote as well.

As I explain in the official blog post announcing Evernote Accelerator, we’re different in two other big ways: First, we’re not taking an investment in Accelerator participants. Our best outcome, for our users and Evernote itself, is that we help launch successful companies with a great Evernote integrations. We’ll help our Accelerator teams meet investors and raise funding, but our Accelerator doesn’t need to participate in financing or have “exits” to be a success.

Second, the admission process for the Accelerator is integrated into our developer competition, the Devcup. You must already have a compelling Evernote product, and win a prize in the Devcup competition, to be eligible for the Accelerator. Participants will be invited from the roles of Devcup winners.

Why me?

Awarding EverClip to top Devcup prize at last year’s Evernote Conference.

Hustle is business, and it starts at the beginning. Just as developers will aggressively re-think and re-code a product to make it work better, the smart startup team will start beta testing its business model (or at least its pricing) as early as possible. For a product to thrive it needs a business to support it. You’d think that’d be obvious, but an excited dev team can regress to what it’s best at, building product, and put off the business side for too long. I’ve seen this pattern too many times.

And while many startup teams know who their competitors are in the current market, I have a historical knowledge of older, forgotten startups that may have tried to address problems similar to theirs in the past. The technology marketplace is always fresh and changing, but very few of the problems that startups are solving today are genuinely new. We can all learn from the success, and especially the failures, of previous ventures.

In 15 years of covering startups (out of 25 covering tech in general), I have collected these and other indicators and patterns, and I want to share what I’ve learned through the Accelerator. I’ll also look forward to helping teams construct sharper pitches and presentations (see my occasional PR tips blog, Pro PR Tips, for a preview).

In addition to whatever it is I have to give, our Accelerator teams will get direct, daily support from the Evernote platform team (there are eight of us), from Evernote execs who will act as mentors, and from the influential Silicon Valley friends of Evernote that I am roping into this new program.

So this is a great opportunity for developers who want to build apps that resonate with Evernote’s 50 million  users. And, honestly, it’s a great opp for me too. I can’t wait to meet our teams, help them flourish, and learn alongside them.

-Rafe

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Outbox un-delivers your mail

Outbox collects your paper mail and puts it online for you.

I have seen some crazy startups that try to bring paper mail into the modern, digital era. My longtime favorite is Earth Class Mail, which I first saw in 2007. It’s essentially an alternate inbox for your physical mail: You have your mail sent to their address instead of your house, and they scan it all and send it to you electronically.

Crazy. But “Not crazy enough,” says Evan Baehr, the CEO of Outbox. And he should know from crazy.

Outbox is the bizzaro service that sends a “reverse postman” to your house to pick up your physical mail after it’s already been delivered to you, whisk it off to the Outbox processing center, and then scan it and send it to you electronically.

If you want a piece of mail for real (like a greeting card from a relative), Outbox can send it back to you. Packages and samples never go to the processing center.

What it adds in delay it’s supposed to make up with customization of delivery, automatic filing, and less hassle in dealing with junk mail.

The service is designed for densely-packed cities, where most customers have mail slots or apartment-style mailboxes, not the suburban mailboxes-on-poles that would be easy for Outbox collectors to open up and access. So Outbox provides new mail lockboxes that literally intercept US mail before it hits the customer’s own mail slot.

It’s worth it, say Baehr. “I’d be willing to give you a whole new front door,” he told me. “This is an inroad to a really vibrant marketplace.”

In other words, it’s not just about the end user. Baehr is trying to pull a Facebook on physical mail. The business is about learning users’ mail habits and preferences, and then profiting from that knowledge with marketers. Baehr even talks about building the “mail graph.”

Outbox watches what mail users open and respond to, and sends that data to marketers. Baehr says that this intelligence is otherwise unavailable. Paper mail is a marketing black hole. He says Outbox can help reduce junkmail and even help marketers “deconvert” people from recipients of paper mail to electronic mail.

Unlike Earth Class Mail’s expensive infrastructure, which involves automated warehouses and robots, Outbox can be run for a lot less money. The trial, in San Francisco, has required so far only about $40,000 in capital, for scanners and cars. Furthermore, Outbox fails gracefully: If the service goes out of business, your mail still comes to your house.

I admire the audacity of Outbox, although I still think it’s crazy. Baehr says I’m the crazy one. Physical-to-electronic messages delivered through the system generate more and better responses than plain old mail, he says. And his real goal, I gather, is to integrate into the Postal Service to improve the customer experience, gather marketing data, and lower costs for everybody.

All he has to do right now is convince users that his $5 a month service that sits on top of the postal service is better than the US Mail itself.

I’ll tell you this: Whether Outbox works or not, the team is going to learn a ton about mail, consumers, and marketing. What crazy idea are you learning from?

-Rafe

Pro Tip: If Outbox is a little too extreme for you but you would like to make your physical mail a little more electronic, I’d recommend trying out the bill-tracking service PageOnce, or, for Evernote users, FileThis, which downloads bills and transaction reports from your service providers directly into Evernote notebooks.

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The 3D Revolution Will Be Digitized

Lynx CEO Chris Slaughter shows off the Lynx A digitizing camera. A stereo camera is on the other side of the slate.

While the 3D printing revolution is clearly underway, really it has barely started. There are several printers on the market, and numerous software tools. But there are still spaces to open up. The next: 3D scanners. Because it’s easier to get started in 3D printing by copying or cloning a real-world object than by sketching it in a modeling app.

At SxSW, Makerbot chief Bre Pettis introduced the Digitizer Desktop 3D Scanner, a turntable-and-laser setup that lets users digitize the 3D measurements of smallish items (8 x 8 inches or smaller). Details on the device — price, availability, and so on — were scarce. But Makerbot isn’t the only company working in this space.

A much less well-funded product may be coming from the makers of the Moedls 3D Model Viewer software. Similar in concept to the Makerbot scanner, the Mobile 3D Laser Scanner uses two small lasers (or just one, but you’ll get blank spots in your scan), a turntable, and an imaging device — in this case an iPhone — to scan items in much the same way as the Makerbot Digitizer.

The Moedls setup should run for about $350 with two little lasers and turntable. As of a few days ago, it’s a Kickstarter project.

And then there’s the interesting free-space scanner from Lynx Laboratories. Hidden in a startup arena at SxSW, I found Lynx CEO Chris Slaughter. His company has crammed a stereo camera setup and a powerful Nvidia graphic card, with custom software, into an ungainly but effective hand-held scanning appliance, the Lynx A.

A Moedls laser, on a small suction mount.

The Lynx A can be used for taking accurate measurements of architectural features — that is, human-scale or bigger — or for creating 3D digitized models of items in the real world. To scan a car, for example, you would point the Lynx’s camera toward it, and then sidestep in a circle around the car while keeping the camera on the car. The software will take the imagery and your movement and build a 3D model. Lynx is also on Kickstarter.

Slaughter says that his massive scanning hardware is a temporary solution. Eventually smartphones will have the graphics capabilities to handle his software.

There will be room in the digitizing market for both the highly precise, controlled laser-and-turntable scanners, as well as free-space scanners that can handle items of any size. There will no doubt be other ways to scan physical objects. Maybe, eventually, we’ll be able to create a clonable 3D model by just glancing at an object while wearing Google glasses (and then wiggling our heads to give the camera some depth data). The point is that 3D printing hardware is not sufficient to create the 3D revolution. We need more and better tools, like digitizers.

The laser printer was introduced in 1984, but it wasn’t until Aldus shipped PageMaker for the Mac, in 1985, that the desktop publishing revolution really started. The pieces of the 3D game are, likewise, still being placed.

-Rafe

See also

I interview the CEOs of Makerbot and 3D Systems (CNET)

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Controlling the Human Pixel, with Light and Sound

The BlinkFX Wink is a light-up wristband for large audiences.

Bluetooth, WiFi and cellular data may be nearly ubiquitous, but there are interesting edge cases where none of these channels will get the job done. One of those is the large music or sports event, where the event runner may want to broadcast some information to attendees’ mobile devices, in order to turn the attendees into pixels that make a light show of the entire arena.

In the old days, you’d just hope that everyone in the audience had a lighter, and then they’d all naturally start waving theirs around when the music got suitably epic. Today, the smartphone replaces the lighter. And the great thing about that, from a production standpoint, is that an event organizer can sidestep the messy job of instructing humans when to light their fire, or do the wave. They can control the device directly.

At SxSW I saw two companies bringing the you-are-the-light-show model to large venues. Both are fairly new and haven’t been used much lately, but you can expect to see them show up more.

Sonic Notify converts the audience’s smartphones to lighting elements.

First up: Sonic Notify. This company has a code library that can be embedded into a band’s or team’s smartphone app. The app listens for audio tones (in the 19 to 20 kHz range) and, when it hears the right noises, it can turn on the smartphone screen in whatever color the app asks for. Or do a lot more… but for the time being, at least when used by groups like Swedish House Mafia, that’s what it does. Assuming the smartphone holders have the SHM app.

The audio channels carry over the noise of a loud concert or event, but not so far that the organizer can’t control screens differently in different zones. So a wave a color is possible, even if pictures and words can’t be displayed as they can if you have a regiment of trained people sitting in seats holding color placards.

Sonic Notify’s solution has the advantage of using existing hardware — users’ phones, and a venue’s speakers — but then it does require that users dig their phones out of their pockets at the right times and hold them up. And some of them are going to get dropped.

Another solution is the Blink FX Wink system. On the user side, it’s a cheap little wristband with a few multi-color LEDs and a battery in it. The wristbands get control data over infrared, which is a very cheap remote communication scheme. Roadies do have to set up IR transmitters, though.

As with Sonic Notify, the system can be controlled by standard DMX lighting controls, and resolution of the mass display is limited to zone control, not individuals — although with this system, you can have some wristbands on different “channels” to create a flickering effect out there in the stands.

Blink FX bands cost about $5 each. They can be sold or given away, and when they’re branded, they become a nice little souvenir with a logo on it. They really don’t do much once they leave the arena, but the company is planning on releasing a home version of the IR transmitter for about $150, so you can throw your own raves.

Infrared or sonic, you can’t transmit a whole ton of data through a non-radio channel. The Sonic Notify people told me they max out at about 200 bytes per second, or “old modem speed,” they say. But you can do cool things like send telemetry or control signals, or use audio tones for local handshake before sending more data over a faster network (that’s what Evernote Hello’s Connect feature does).

There are a few companies working on using audio in these ways; using light as a signal is more limiting. If you’re working on a system that depends on proximity of other devices, it might be worth checking these audio guys out.

- Rafe

See also

Xylobands
Chirp.io
Sonic Share
Shopkick Rewards Shoppers With a Silent Signal
Former Google Wave developers use soundwaves to share data between devices

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How Will the Small Sensor Business Grow Big?

The CubeSensor will tell you how sick your office is.

At the Launch festival last week, Ales Spetic presented an interesting hardware play: The CubeSensor. It’s a small, wireless air quality sensor that Spetic proposed could be used by homeowners to monitor the comfort and health levels of their houses, or for business owners who want to make sure their offices are keeping workers comfortable and productive.

The batteries in the sensors last two months, so the idea is that you can place the cubes in rooms you want to measure, and then mostly forget about them until they send you either an air-quality or a low-battery alert. (The sensors communicate via Zigbee to a network bridge that has to be plugged in.)

It’s one of those products you want to love, since it provides access to a data stream you otherwise can’t get. But as with other cool sensor platforms (like the Node), the business may have to catch up to the product.

Part of that is due to the nature of launching a hardware company: For the CubeSensors, like many first-generation hardware products, the price of the first units is too high, which will kill the product as a consumer play: The cubes are $125 each. Over time, Spetic says, he thinks he can slice the price down to under $50.

Until then, he’s wisely targeting the business market. CubeSensors measure temperate, humidity, barometric pressure variation, and the presence of volatile organic compounds — the chemicals out-gassed from new furniture and carpets. Spetic says that poor air quality, or bad temperature control, or too much (or too little) humidity can drag down workers.

At Launch, he also got feedback from other potential customers. The guys from Space Monkey, for example, thought about placing sensors in their boxes of hard disks that are sitting at manufacturing centers in China awaiting assembly into their enclosures, to verify that their raw materials are kept in the right conditions through the manufacturing process.

Spetic himself said that more than one person approached him about using the sensors in a wine cellar. Someone else said they’d be great in greenhouses.

When you launch a new kind of hardware product, like the CubeSensor or the Node, you might think you know how people will use it. You might well be wrong. And if you focus on how you think people should use it, you might well be dead.

I think Spetic gets this. I know George Yu, the guy behind the Node, does. When I asked him what the product was really for, he just spread his arms and said, “inventing.”

When the first personal computers came out, no one knew what they’d be used for, either.

-Rafe

Further Reading

CubeSensors wins Best Hardware award at Launch Conference (The Next Web)
What Does the Node Guy Know? (Opportunity Notes)

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A new tactic in the stuff storage wars: Granularity

First there was the basement. And then we moved into homes with no basements. Then came the storage facility. But they’re inconvenient. So someone came up with  storage pods — the storage facility that comes to you. It was a great innovation, but if you wanted to add or remove items from storage, you had to have your crate dropped in front of your house.

Here’s the latest thing: Boxbee, an “urban” storage company that will drop off empty packing boxes at your place, whisk your full boxes of stuff away when you want, and deliver individual boxes back to you quickly as well, within two hours of getting the request.

A new consumer storage play lets you get to your excess stuff within two hours.

The pitch is that space-challenged urbanites can store seasonal or occasional-use items (like snowboards or fancy china) and quickly and somewhat cheaply get these items out of storage, and back in, on their own schedule. It’s more warehousing than straight-up storage, since the service is designed to be used at the granular box level. It’s not all-or-nothing, like a moving service or a pod.

The baseline fee is $3 per month per standard-size packing box. Prices for bigger boxes are higher, but fees go down when you store more.

Boxbee itself owns no trucks or warehouses. “We link consumers to warehouses,” says CEO Kristoph Matthews. Boxes are carted by courier companies or even by TaskRabbit workers, depending on the size and weight of the job.

Matthews told me that, “We’re not a storage company. We’re a stuff-management platform.” That is an eye-roller of a mission, but Boxbee does in fact help you manage your stuff beyond simply warehousing it.

The service helps you keep a database of what’s stored where, for instance. This is important for its upcoming per-box services. For example, if you’ve decided that you are tired of paying for the storage of your box of Hummel figurines, you will be able to direct Boxbee to put the collection on eBay. It will transfer your box to an eBay management company. Should the items not sell, you can then ask Boxbee to donate the things to a local Goodwill. Either way, you never have to see or touch the things again.

Boxbee’s granularity and flexibility — the per-box pricing, quick delivery promise, and the disposal services — should drive users to more actively manage their stuff. They should, in theory, be more likely to stop paying for storage they don’t need (compared to storage units, which often go paid-for and neglected for months or years). They should also use the service more, paying Boxbee for each stuff-management interaction.

Boxbee is an interesting re-think of consumer storage. It is more detailed and data-driven than traditional products, but its extra services may actually lead to consumers saving money.

The service is available now in San Francisco.

-Rafe

Further Reading

Boxbee Wins Best New Startup Prize At Launch

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Hold the Line

I was lucky. A week after I got in the line for Mailbox, it was 800,000 people long.

The Mailbox line concept is catching. The new Tempo calendar app has a line. The Web-based email service Mailstrom does, too.

So the line’s the thing, right? And now you’re thinking about implementing a line for your own new app.

I suggest that you seriously consider this option before proceeding. Think about what a Mailbox-like line means for your users, and what you’ll get and give up if you use a line instead of a more traditional beta signup process.

The biggest decision point is to make sure that throttling inbound new users is important, and not just show. Mail apps, in particular, are special: Each new user generates a huge spike in utilization as the service reads in their existing email. Nobody can realistically expect a startup to process a million GMail archives all at once. If that’s what you’re doing (or something similar, like reading in users’ Twitter feeds), you do need a way to keep your load manageable as you grow, and a system that lets users in one at a time might keep you from failing the moment you launch.

Welcome to Tempo. Please hold.

Other apps, where new users start as data newborns, with empty accounts, are much less likely to knock over a server on startup. So don’t fake it. If each new user only adds a touch of load, don’t pretend you’re moving heaven and earth for them.

Here are some more pros and cons of lines.

The big Con: You will get slammed in the App Store
People don’t like downloading an app only to be told they can’t use it. You’re going to annoy a lot of users. A lot. In a competitive market, your low, one-star rating might hurt.

Sort of a Pro: You control when your App Store ratings reset
When you release a major upgrade for your app, the App Store ratings start over. So once you’re done with the line, release a new version to wipe out all those one-star reviews.

Pro or Con, depending: It’s transparent
If you have a massively popular app, like Mailbox, it can be a big marketing coup to say that there are 800,000 people in line to get the app after only a few mentions in the tech blogs. It also looks good if you’re blasting through invites at several spots a second. But if your line gets stuck for days or moves slowly, and there are only a few thousand people in the line and the user doesn’t feel he or she is getting any closer to the front, it can dampen enthusiasm for the product.

Mailstrom uses a line for its Web-based service. That’s new.

Con: You can’t tell people how long the line will be
If you could tell new users when they’ll be admitted to your app, then you’d just tell them, right? The idea of using a software line is that you can slow it town, speed it up, or stop it altogether if you need to as your user base grows and you learn how your service handles the load. That means that there’s no way to give users a Disneyland-like estimate on their time to reach the end of the line. That can be frustrating.

Pro: Believe it or not, you can get away with this now
Before Mailbox, there was no way a small developer could have gotten a non-functional app through Apple. And Mailbox, for users coming in now, is just that: It’s a number on a screen that says, “You’re late, sucker.” But the team at Mailbox, I hear, worked their connections with Apple to get approval for this new type of in-app velvet rope. So now you can do the same thing, too.

But only do it if you desperately need to, and be aware of the numerous ramifications of this concept.

Don’t add a line to you app just to look cool. You’re not running a nightclub. But if you have a mobile app that you expect will have scaling issues, then a line can be a good way to throttle users and keep them informed at the same time. Just don’t forget to update your app to reset those awful ratings you’re going to get.

-Rafe

Further Reading

Mailbox Stops the Email Bleeding (Opportunity Notes)
The Thinking Behind Mailbox’s 800,000-Person Waiting List (Fast Company)
How Long Is The Mailbox Line? (Waxy)
Flipboard’s service collapses on iPhone app launch (ComputerWorld, 2011)
LaunchRock sets up site launch placeholders (CNET News, 2011)
GMail only Shed its “Beta” Tag After Five Years (NY Times, 2009)

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