Read/Write Web

BeyondTrust acquires eEye to Create Security Powerhouse

David Strom — Thu, 10 May 2012 07:45:00 +0800

Virtualization security vendor BeyondTrust is acquiring eEye Digital Security for undisclosed terms. The two companies have leading technology in somewhat different but complementary security market spaces. BeyondTrust plans to integrate eEye’s Retina CS Vulnerability Management and Analytics solutions with its PowerBroker family of virtualization security products. The company claims that this will be the market’s first truly context-driven security and compliance solution.

The deal is an example of how the security world is moving to integrate the physical and virtual worlds, and to offer a common set of tools that can protect both with similar practices. BeyondTrust's headquarters will remain outside of San Diego and the combined entity will have 250 total employees and more than $70 million in annual revenues.

The BeyondTrust product line (see sample screen shot above) involves managing network and virtual machine access privileges. This is a key security component, as many recent security attacks have involved malware that escalate network privileges. If they can integrate their product lines, the two companies will combine to offer a broader range of protection against both insider and external threats, as well as improved security for mobile and cloud-based applications.

The integration isn't going to happen overnight, of course. The combined company will take at least another quarter to put together a complete roadmap, and it will be probably year-end before any real integration of the two products can actually be available. In the meantime, there are no anticipated changes to products or pricing. Here is a sample screenshot of the eEye Retina dashboard:

The two companies have very complementary products, particularly for endpoint security. eEye, for example, sells its Blink product which creates a managed endpoint (you can watch my screencast video here). Both companies have about half of their total staff as engineers, and both also have offshore development groups in different parts of the world: BeyondTrust has teams in India and Ukraine while eEye fields developers in Romania and Halifax, Nova Scotia. All of these teams will remain in place.

Company representatives said that there is some bundling of the two product lines in the works, but no specifics have yet been announced. The executive team of the new BeyondTrust will add some of the senior eEye executives.

First Look: SoundCloud Gets an Overhaul

John Paul Titlow — Thu, 10 May 2012 07:02:17 +0800

The growth of SoundCloud has been astonishing. In only three years of existence, the social sound-sharing service has blown past 15 million users and now has more than 100 employees. It's quickly becoming a sort of "YouTube for audio" with a massive selection of sounds from arists, podcasters and others.

Today, the company announced the next iteration of its Web app, an effort its dubbing the Next SoundCloud. The redesign, which is currently in private beta, is a substantial visual overhaul with a few new features tacked on.

Just over a year ago, SoundCloud boasted that it had reached its three-millionth registered user. Today, that number stands at over 15 million and the growth is continuing unabated. Earlier this year, the company raised $50 million in venture capital funding, money that will undoubtedly be poured into rapid innovation and growing its team. Recently, the company has put much of its focus on converting its default audio player to HTML5 and developing innovative apps for mobile platforms like iOS and Android.

SoundCloud has played an active role in advancing the future of music and audio, not just through updates to its own product, but through active involvement in Music Hack Day and other developer-centric initiatives around the world.

The new design borrows liberally from the company's mobile products and presents things in a much cleaner, app-like fashion. "Every single element on the page has been revisited," said SoundCloud cofounder Eric Wahlfors at a press event in San Francisco today.

In addition to significant visual changes, the new SoundCloud fundamentally alters the way users interact with sounds hosted on the service. Crucially, the site will feature a universal player bar across the top of the layout, which ensures continuous playback of songs regardless of where one navigates on the site. This is a feature SoundCloud currently lacks, and it's a much-welcome enhancement.

The service is also becoming more share-friendly. In addition to its existing social features, such as "liking" and timed comments, SoundCloud will now have a retweet-style sharing button, which allows users to post any sound they find on the site to their own profile. It may seem like a basic feature, but its impact could be huge. Thanks to the update, having one's bedroom-produced demo unexpectedly reshared on SoundCloud by Snoop Dogg is suddenly a possible reality. The implications for independent, budding musicians and other soundsmiths are nothing to underestimate.

One other notable feature being rolled out in the private beta is what SoundCloud is calling "sets." These are essentially user-curated playlists of sounds that exist in a single waveform.

The team confesses to releasing this "uncomfortably early" and fully expects a bump or two in the road toward releasing it publicly. To take the new site for a spin, sign up for beta access at next.soundcloud.com.

Facebook's New App Center Promises Quality Over Quantity

Dan Rowinski — Thu, 10 May 2012 06:46:00 +0800

Last September, during the f8 Developers’ Conference, Facebook CTO Bret Taylor said that the company had no plans for a “central app repository” – an app store. Today, Facebook is changing its tune. The social giant has announced App Center, a section of Facebook dedicated to discovering and deploying high-quality apps on the company’s platform. The App Center will push apps to iPhone, Android and the mobile Web, giving Facebook its first true store for mobile app discovery.

The departure from Facebook’s previous company line comes as the social platform ramps up its mobile offerings to make money from its hundreds of millions of mobile users. This is not your father's app store, though.

Let's start with the requirements. Facebook has announced a strict set of style and quality guidelines to get apps placed in App Center. Apps that are considered high-quality, as decided by Facebook’s Insights analytics platform, will get prominent placement. Quality is determined by user ratings and app engagement. Apps that receive poor ratings or do not meet Facebook’s quality guidelines won't be listed.

Whether or not an app is a potential Facebook App Center candidate hinges on several factors. It must

• have a canvas page (a page that sets the app's permissions on Facebook’s platform)

• be built for iOS, Android or the mobile Web

• use a Facebook Login or be a website that uses a Facebook Login.

Facebook is in a tricky spot with App Center. It will house not only apps that are specifically run through its platform but also iOS and Android apps. Thus it needs to achieve a balance between competition and cooperation with some of the most powerful forces in the tech universe. If an app in App Center requires a download, the download link on the app’s detail page will bring the user to the appropriate app repository, either Apple's App Store or Android’s Google Play.

One of the more interesting parts of App Center is that Facebook will allow paid apps. This is a huge move for Facebook as it provides a boost to its Credits payment service. One of the benefits of having a store is that whoever controls the store also controls transactions arising from the items in it, whether payments per download or in-app purchases. This will go a long way towards Facebook’s goal of monetizing its mobile presence without relying on advertising.

Facebook App Center Icon Guidelines

Developers interested in publishing apps to Facebook’s App Center should take a look at both the guidelines and the tutorial that outlines how to upload the appropriate icons, how to request permissions, how to use Single Sign On (SSO, a requirement for App Center) and the app detail page.

This is a good move for Facebook. It will give the company several avenues to start making money off of mobile but also strengthen its position as one of the backbones of the Web. For instance, App Center is both separate from iOS and Android but also a part of it. Through App Center, Facebook can direct traffic to its apps, monitor who and how users are downloading applications and keep itself at the center of the user experience.

Developers: Are you jumping to deploy an app to App Center? Or is this too little, too late for Facebook? Let us know in the comments.

Read/Write Daily: Let's Avoid Black Holes, Okay?

Jon Mitchell — Thu, 10 May 2012 04:47:33 +0800

Today's theme is stellar bodies. Human spaceflight might be in a state of limbo lately, but we're still getting some breathtaking images from our automated explorers.

Whether far away or close to home, it sure is beautiful out there.

One of the most exciting finds this week was a black hole devouring a star. Let's try to avoid that with our star, shall we?

Here's an image of a really old supernova, showing another possible fate for stars.

The Orion Molecular Cloud creates enough water to fill the Earth's oceans every 24 minutes.

Closer to home, new analysis of data from NASA's Cassini probe suggests that Saturn's moon, Phoebe, would have been a planet, but massive Saturn trapped it.

Next month, Venus will transit across the sun as observed from Earth. If you miss it, you'll have to catch it next time in 2117.

Here's an incredible filtered image of our sun by Alan Friedman.

Finally, here's a weird and wonderful shot of last week's "supermoon" sinking below our atmosphere, captured by astronaut André Kuipers from space.

Image via Shutterstock.

Past entries from Read/Write Daily

Sites With Social Reading Apps Sacrifice Readers to Facebook

Jon Mitchell — Thu, 10 May 2012 04:39:00 +0800

There's wonderful news this week. Facebook's frictionless "social reading" apps have seen a devastating decline in traffic. It was tempting to just blame it on how much they suck, but as Josh Constine rightly pointed out, the real story is that Facebook turned off the traffic hose. The lack of control should be reason enough for publishers to abandon them. But the better reason is that they throw readers under the bus.

Anti-Social Reader Apps

Facebook has been tinkering with the presentation of stories from Open Graph reading apps over the past month or so. The most noticeable change is that they've moved from the ticker in the sidebar to a big, ugly blob in the News Feed called "Trending Articles." Of course, these aren't really the most popular articles on Facebook, just the ones people shared passively through social reader apps.

Here's a typical example of what the Trending Articles box looks like:

Do you think Bill is glad Facebook broadcasted the fact that he clicked on that story?

Facebook Has The Power

In the wake of some easy blog posts about the decline of social reader apps, their defenders (read: the publications who use them) began explaining publicly that this was all due to Facebook's manipulation of its interface. Storify co-founder Burt Herman collected this conversation in an interesting Storify post.

In the mother of all annoying Internet ironies, I learned by clicking on this link from Twitter that Storify had become a social reader app itself.

What a shame! I had given Storify permission to post to my Timeline before, back when I had to share to Facebook intentionally, and it used that permission to share my reading habits automatically.

"Just An Experiment"

Herman tells me that the feature has been there for a while, and it's "just an experiment" to try and draw more attention to the great work of Storify's authors, which, in Storify's case, are its users. But what about the readers? Why should they have to opt out of broadcasting information about themselves, especially on a site like Storify, where people read politically sensitive stories?

The question gives Herman pause. "It's interesting. Do I want everything I read to be broadcasted? To be honest, I'm not sure I always do," Herman says. "Which is why, on Storify at least, I cancel it when it's not something I want to share." Should readers have to be on guard and take that extra step?

And what's the upside of frictionless sharing? Why is this good for readers? "I mean, clearly it's more meaningful when someone decides to actively share something," Herman says. "It would be bad if a share from just happening to read something through Open Graph got the same weight as something that you actually shared."

If that were the case, Facebook would fill News Feeds with passively shared stories as if they were equally important as intentional shares. It is indeed fortunate that Facebook doesn't currently work that way. So should publishers leave that choice up to Facebook and its indifferent algorithms?

In Storify's defense, it's pretty easy to turn off the frictionless sharing, and it's just one part of an otherwise useful set of Facebook integrations. If you're quick, you can even cancel a share from the top nav bar before it goes out to Facebook. But you still have to opt out yourself. It's disappointing to see so many great publishers turn over so much of their user experience to Facebook.

The Attention Paywall

"Social reader" apps are just like paywalls, except instead of money, readers pay with their friends' attention. It's a feature built to benefit Facebook first and publishers second. There's not much left for the user after that.

Instead of a willful act of sharing, which says to your Facebook friends, "This matters to me," frictionless sharing is just a broadcast of your Internet habits. There's no benefit for you except as a kind of vain performance, and there's very little benefit to your friends, since the signal-to-noise ratio goes way up.

In the worst cases, such as the Washington Post's Facebook app, your friends have to install an app, giving the Washington Post access to their News Feeds, before they can even read the article! To call that a "social" app is just a cynical ploy.

These kinds of features are all about Facebook, because Facebook is where the easy eyeballs are. "Facebook has a lot of power," Herman says. "You can't deny that there's hundreds of millions of people on Facebook, right?" When Facebook tweaked the interface for displaying social reader stories, it upended the strategy many publishers had relied on to reach those people with minimal effort. That's not a sustainable way to build an audience.

"Clearly, [Facebook is] doing some tweaking with the algorithm to make it less prominent," Herman says. "I guess they're realizing, you know, maybe these things aren't as engaging as they thought they would be."

Amazon Courts Windows Developers by Adding .Net to its Elastic Beanstalk

Joe Brockmeier — Thu, 10 May 2012 04:06:00 +0800

Microsoft's Azure just got a little more competition from Amazon. The cloud giant announced yesterday that it was adding support for SQL Server to its Relational Database Service (RDS) and added .Net support to the Elastic Beanstalk cloud app deployment and management service.

The addition of .Net to Beanstalk follows PHP support added in March. (Beanstalk's first language was Java.) Amazon is letting developers use Elastic Beanstalk for .Net applications, using Windows Server 2008 R2 and IIS 7.5. Amazon says that Beanstalk will support "any Visual Studio Web project... including ASP.NET MVC projects and ASP.NET Web Forms." This makes it simpler to deploy .Net apps across Amazon Web Services (AWS), and (as with PHP and Java) developers pay nothing for Elastic Beanstalk itself - just for the metered services they use running the applications.

Speaking of Visual Studio, Amazon provides a toolkit for Visual Studio that has been updated to allow developers to publish straight to AWS.

Naturally, if you're deploying .Net apps, you probably want to have Microsoft's SQL Server as well. Amazon has added support for multiple editions of SQL Server 2008 R2. Support for SQL Server 2012 should be coming later this year.

Microsoft's version of cloud SQL is "based on SQL Server," but does not require users to pick a specific version of SQL Server. Whether that's a good or bad thing depends on whether developers are looking for features specific to, say, SQL Server 2008 versus SQL Server 2012.

Ever-Expanding AWS

Whether or not Beanstalk constitutes a Platform as a Service, or PaaS (and I still say it does), Amazon continues to branch out at an impressive pace.

This expansion puts AWS even more squarely in competition with Microsoft's Azure and SQL Azure services, though there's some notable differences in how they're set up.

Amazon's pricing is a lot more complex than Microsoft's for SQL Azure. The SQL Azure pricing is based on size of the database. Microsoft offers two types of databases, Web and Business. The price is based on the size of the database, and starts at a flat $4.95 (just call it $5, Microsoft!) per month up to 100MB. After databases reach 1GB in size, it's billed by size, per day. Microsoft does make it a bit complicated by doing a per-day variable calculation. Azure also has bandwidth costs, but they're not specific to SQL Azure. See Microsoft's pricing page for all the details.

Amazon, on the other hand, charges by the size of the database and the size of the SQL Server instance in use, plus data storage, plus I/O rate, plus data transfer out. Amazon's storage rate is much lower ($0.10/GB per month), but you're also paying for the SQL Server instance and more.

If your shop already has SQL Server licenses, Amazon offers Bring Your Own License (BYOL) pricing, too. There's also the option of backup storage, and developers can choose reserved instances at lower prices if the services they're using will run long-term.

Playing with the pricing calculators for both services, it looks like Amazon does well if you're using Express or Web but gets pricey if you add the Standard SQL Server license. A large DB instance runs $0.59 per hour with the Web license but $1.07 per hour using the Standard license.

For developers interested only in Microsoft services, Azure is probably the way to go. But for organizations using .Net and SQL Server as just a portion of their stack, AWS is now the obvious choice.

[Infographic] How People Use iPhones and Androids in China

Dan Rowinski — Thu, 10 May 2012 01:02:00 +0800

Did you know that the majority of Android users in China are on a 2G network? That about 44% of Android users in China use HTC phones? That almost 14% of iPhone users in China have spent $10-$20 on paid apps, with 9% spending more than $50?

China has the largest mobile-phone installed base (by volume) in the world, and just as it is in the U.S., the Chinese market is an Android vs. iPhone war. So how do people in China use their smartphones, and how does that compare to those in the United States?

As it is in the U.S., the top app categories in China are games and social networking, according to Chinese mobile ad firm Guohe. Weibo (the Chinese Twitter) is among one of the most popular apps in the country, while other localized social-networking apps (Weixin, Mi Tech, Miliao, etc.) are driving a large share of app usage. Social apps are becoming more prevalent for younger Chinese users, with 36% of 18- to 22-year-olds saying they use apps more than calling or text messaging.

Also just like in the U.S., content is apparently king in China. It is almost a worldwide maxim at this point: Content is the front-facing data that drives much of the worldwide Internet. In China, popular content apps include Spotify, Pinterest, Turntable.fm and Flipboard. Those should sound mighty familiar to U.S. users.

Android leads in Chinese smartphone usage, with 54% of the market share on Guohe’s network. Users were predominantly male (55%) and earned less than $50,000 a year.

Chinese users love to use their apps, too, which makes the demographic really no different from the rest of the world. U.S. users average about 77 minutes of app usage per day. But the Chinese are in the same ballpark: According to Guohe, 48% of iPhone users and 36% of Android users spend two hours or more with apps.

Interestingly, Android users in China do not pay for apps, while many iPhone users do. Only 23% of Chinese Android users have ever purchased an app, and 90% have spent less than $10. In contrast, 68% of iPhone users in China have spent less than $10, but 31% have spent more than that.

While it is hard to draw definitive conclusions about the overall habits of Chinese smartphones users based on the data of one ad network (in contrast, there are several sources of similar data in the U.S. from the likes of Flurry, Fiksu and Millennial Media), it is nonetheless interesting to note the differences between iPhone and Android users, as well as many of the similarities to U.S. users. Games and social networking drive mobile growth in China, just like the U.S. Many of the same apps (or, at least the same types of apps) are popular in both China and the U.S. Check out the infographic below.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock

Why OMGPOP's Draw Something Game Is Losing Users

Alicia Eler — Thu, 10 May 2012 00:34:00 +0800

OMGPOP's Dan Porter sold Draw Something for $200 million to Zynga on March 21, 2012. The social drawing game was on its way up. By April 3, it struck gold at 14.6 million users. The decline since then has been slow and steady - and it's not the kind that wins the race.

Drawing can be a social experience, but it is often times best as a solitary, nongameified couple of hours. Not everything needs to involve another person. The danger of these sorts of games is that the user believes they are connecting and communicating with another human.

The most awkward aspect of the Draw Something game? The mechanism of starting to "play" a game with another user, who might either be a Facebook friend, someone you've invited to play via email, or just a random person who is selected by Draw Something.

I Sent You a Drawing. Did You Get It? Oh, Ok.

I was thinking about Draw Something yesterday afternoon, during a haircut in-person with real people (technology has yet to master the virtual haircut experience). I walked into the salon, and the receptionist had his iPhone out and was playing Draw Something. He stopped momentarily to check my name off - I was almost 10 minutes late, but that was okay because the hair dresser was running late and he was playing Draw Something. Then he went back to his game.

I sat down and asked for a haircut. Let's got shorter this time, I said. My hair is feeling scraggly and the summer is coming, so I'd prefer to have it off of my shoulders. As the cut began, I couldn't help but ask my hair dresser about Draw Something.

"Do you use Draw Something?" I asked. We'd already been talking about Pinterest and peoples' pinning habits, so this didn't seem like a far-out question.

Another hair dresser answered for her.

"Oh yeah, I owe you a drawing," she said. "Sorry, I haven't been on there in awhile. I'll get back on and do it soon."

I stopped by a cafe after my haircut and decided to test it out. I invited three friends to play; none of them responded. Then I started playing with a random person, picked a la Draw Something. We played a round. She sent me a drawing of pink. I guessed that it was PINK. Win. Get coins.

I answered back with a river, an easy squiggly blue line through a dense white pixel field. She hasn't replied yet.

Later in the evening, I had dinner with a friend who tends to get into these social games. For a time, anyway. I had invited her to play with me; she hasn't had a chance to check Draw Something in a few days. It's OK.

The Rise and Fall of Draw Something... or Something

Draw Something became No. 1 in the App Store shortly after its launch on February 1, 2012. It has since dropped, and the paid version of the app is now No. 4 in the App Store. People are downloading Draw Something and definitely still using it, but not in the way they were during its initial bump and subsequent purchase by Zynga for $180 million. After the acquisition, Zynga's daily traffic went up 25 percent. That was back in March 2012.

Nowadays, Draw Something is losing millions of users, proving that it is indeed another social media fad. Sure, the game was downloaded 50 million times in 50 days, making it officially the fastest-growing mobile game ever.

As of May 2012, the game has changed. AppData reports that there are four million fewer daily active users than there were last month.

"In a hits-driven business like gaming, stamina is as important an asset as creativity," writes ReadWriteWeb's own Dan Frommer, shortly after the acquisition went through.

Instead, Draw Something went big and is now going home. Its life feels more like a sprint and less of a marathon - but at least the higher-ups at OMGPOP cashed in. So much for stamina.

The Swift Hand of Justice Rebukes Myspace for Shattering the Sanctity of Privacy

Scott M. Fulton — Thu, 10 May 2012 00:02:00 +0800

In a settlement announced yesterday by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the present owners of music-information-sharing service Myspace (now with a small "s") agreed never to do again what it cannot really do now even if it wanted to: share its members' personal identification with a parent company that runs a major advertising network.

Blast from the past

For those who don't remember Myspace, much less this once-prominent case, we need to go back to 2008, before social networks were also platforms, and APIs were things that Microsoft got sued for not disclosing. In this era, the exchange of data between MySpace (then with a big "S") and its parent company in 2008, Fox Interactive Media, took place without the use of extra details such as encryption and permissions. Since MySpace no longer treated FIM as a third-party, it enabled FIM's advertising platform - then called "Fox Audience Network," or FAN - to serve advertisements to a MySpace member by serving up his "Friend ID," essentially a series of decimal digits.

The way you reconstructed that member's MySpace page URL was simply by tacking that Friend ID onto the end of the domain name http://www.myspace.com/. From there, pulling up every personal detail that "friend" already shared on MySpace, including his full name, was a trivial matter.

FIM's assembly of such a powerful advertising network out in the open, blatantly, without members' consent, was once one of the hot-button issues of the Web. It helped make the MySpace brand synonymous with "privacy violation" and may have helped trigger the exodus of users to Facebook, which had grown from an interesting contender to the undisputed social networking champion in the course of 2008 alone.

Justice delayed...

Some would say Myspace has already served its sentence, with the trimming of its "s" as just one symbol of its penitence. In the settlement agreement order, the FTC commissioners mandated that Myspace must now submit itself to a biannual review of its privacy policies for the next 20 years. It then went into substantial detail in ensuring that mandate is carried over into whatever form Myspace takes in the future, and whichever parent or parents end up owning it.

Despite Myspace's fall, the ruling itself does have some pertinence, particularly with respect to whose pillar the FTC looks to for support. The U.S. currently has a safe harbor agreement with the European Union, which presents a framework for U.S. companies to avoid violating EU law when they exchange potentially personally identifiable data with other parties. The framework mandates that online services notify users when their personal data is about to be shared with others, give them tools for researching how that data may be used and give them the option of canceling such sharing. It's really a trade agreement between governments, but until the U.S. is capable of codifying such language in a law that pertains to native commerce, it's the best the FTC can do. It charged Myspace with violating the principles of that agreement, and it was successful in eking out a settlement.

That fact may give lawmakers cause to continue delaying any serious discussion of hardening U.S. privacy law for yet another term of Congress.

There are plenty of tech-savvy Web users young enough not to remember what MySpace was. At a time when the Internet industry was just waking from the delerium of the "bursting bubble," MySpace was the first great hope for building viable properties again. In July 2005, it was acquired by FIM, which rode its wave of success, at least at first. Then, in a stunning move that may have changed the Internet forever, Google paid FIM $900 million not to launch its own search engine, effectively stunting the service's growth. (No such deal has ever been reached between Google and Facebook, some would say to the latter's credit.)

The service is not dead, however. RWW's John Paul Titlow reported in February that the steep drop in Myspace's user base may have at last subsided, settling at perhaps one-fourth what it was at its peak. Still, the service's diminished status is commemorated today by the fact that Google treats the term "MySpace" in the context of a query as a misspelling of "Facebook."

From Founder to Alchemist, Why Titles Aren't Trivial

Rieva Lesonsky — Wed, 09 May 2012 23:32:00 +0800

The current technology boom is, on most fronts, quite unlike the dotcom boom of the late 1990s. But one aspect that both seem to share is a fascination with titles - both yours and your teams’. Many startup entrepreneurs are returning to the creative titles of the 1990s. Is that really a smart move?

Ranjith Kumaran, founder and CEO of PunchTab (which creates instant loyalty platforms), and co-founder of YouSendIt, where he was the Chief Technology Officer (he’s still on the board) acknowledges the “topic of unique, creative and alternative titles keeps coming up as of late.” Kumaran says it’s likely this trend is “a direct result of founders learning from experience. Too many startups found out the hard way that big titles, too early, forced them to create an organization before the company was ready, and then there was pressure to fill it out.”

That is your job

The whole topic might seem trivial, but according to Kumaran titles can actually affect job performance. He explains, “Titles have never been important to me, because my philosophy has always been that everyone at an organization works for everyone else, and should pitch in wherever needed. Titles often give an easy excuse of ‘That’s not my job’, but it is your job, so get used to it.”

Kumaran maintains that in order to create a successful company, entrepreneurs need to focus on building quality products, and meeting the needs of their target audiences. And, he adds, the startups “that are trying to build teams that iterate, and find the best solutions to the problems they are tackling are trying to recruit people who want to get things done, not find a bigger title. For early-stage companies, it is critical to recruit the right type of people. Every hire is critical, and it’s better not to hire than to hire the wrong person. An easy filter to spot the folks who aren’t willing to roll up their sleeves (and instead think their strength is ‘management’) is to not play the game that everyone’s next title needs to be bigger than their last one.”

From Firefighter to Superwoman

PunchTab not only believes in creative titles, but in free choice as well. “Our entire team of 12 was encouraged to have a one word title that they chose,” Kumaran says. “Some are simple and straightforward, such as Founder or Engineer. But we’ve also got a Firefighter, an Alchemist and a Superwoman. These are actually the titles that are on employment agreements, stock grants, benefits documents, etc.”

For startups, Kumaran maintains, “mixing up titles or being less hierarchical means the company can set different metrics by which productivity and success are measured. It also works to neutralize politics as you grow.”

It all comes down to tone, and as the entrepreneur you’re in charge of setting it. As Kumaran puts it, “What a title represents to the team or individual really depends on the company culture. In certain organizations, they mean a lot to everyone involved. In others (like PunchTab), everyone is measured by their throughput, and our investors are just as interested in hearing from the intern as they are from the founders.”