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Facebook and Twitter stars on Saturday shared lessons learned with young entrepreneurs aspiring to be the next hot technology firm.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone were among speakers at a daylong Startup School conducted by Y Combinator.

“It’s really awesome to be here,” Zuckerberg said as he joined Combinator’s Jessica Livingston on stage in a packed auditorium at the University of California, Berkeley.

“This is, like, my people. One of the things cool about the Y Combinator program is you have these T-shirts that say ‘Build something people want.’ I think that is right on.”

Y Combinator, established in the Silicon Valley city of Mountain View in 2005, takes small stakes in startups in exchange for grooming them and exposing them to investors.

“We prefer groups with a lot of technical depth,” Y Combinator explains at its website.

“We care more about how smart you are than how old you are, and more about the quality of your ideas than whether you have a formal business plan.”

More than 1,600 aspiring entrepreneurs applied to be in the class Saturday at Startup School, which is held once a year.

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A nearly 800-seat auditorium was filled to capacity through the day.

Twitter sprang from a “two-week hack day” at Odeo, a podcasting company that Williams took part in starting after leaving a job at Google in 2004, the founders said in an on-stage chat with Livingston.

“I remember early on someone saying Twitter is fun but it isn’t useful and Ev said ‘So what? So is ice cream’,” Stone said while warning to be wary of skeptics. “We liked it. So we kept working on it.”

Since Twitter was entering new terrain with a microblogging service, Stone and Williams had faith in their idea but a dearth of market data.

“One thing I’ve always admired about Google is they are good at saying this thing is huge and we are going to kick ass and do it better than anyone else; they did it with search and advertising,” Williams said.

“With Twitter, there was no market; no possible way to justify an investment other than it made us laugh and it’s really cool.”

Twitter was able to incubate in Odeo, sparing its creators from pitching what “sounded like a stupid idea” to investors, according to the founders.

Among the questions dogging Twitter today is how the San Francisco firm is going to cash in on its global popularity.

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“We’ve never had any doubt that if you create something popular you can make money,” Williams said.

Twitter’s biggest challenge is capitalizing on its position before a competing technology firm tries to commandeer the microblogging market,” according to Williams.

“Things are going well and the stakes are really high,” Williams said. “We are going to face serious competition.”

Another challenge facing Twitter is preserving the company’s culture of doing social and environmental good woven as the small firm grows, according to Stone.

“Twitter is two years old and in the global spotlight,” Stone said.

“We don’t want to be like the child actor that found fame early and grew up all funky and freaky. Part of working at Twitter is giving back to the world.”

Stone said it is possible Twitter could go public with an offering of stock, but that he is hoping the company will find more creative ways to fund its growth.

“It sounds silly, with no revenue, to talk about going public, but I wouldn’t say that is ridiculous anymore,” Stone said.

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“Our goal is to change the world. The needs of the platform mean growing bigger. At some point going public may make the most sense.”

Zuckerberg said the creation of Facebook boiled down to a Harvard University student with hacker tendencies starting a company with smart friends.

“By the time I got around to building Facebook, I did it in two weeks,” Zuckerberg said.

“Launch early and iterate; Facebook is a really good story of that.”

The evolution of Facebook has been driven by what members of the online social networking community do at the website and their feedback, according to Zuckerberg.

“We pride ourselves on building stuff quickly,” Zuckerberg said. “We have this technology company that is really like a hacker company. My friends are people who really like building cool stuff.”

Zuckerberg told the predominately young audience how he was just 19 years old when he left Harvard in 2004 and went to Silicon Valley to build Facebook into a serious technology company.

“The biggest risk you can take is to take no risk,” Zuckerberg said. “In an evolving world, if you don’t change you lose.”

© 2009 AFP

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Time Inc., publisher of Time, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, People and other magazines, plans to lay off some 540 employees starting next week, or six percent of its workforce, The New York Post reported Friday.

The Post, which is owned by Time Inc. rival News Corp., said the job cuts will be staggered over two weeks.

The New York Times said the layoffs were among measures at Time Inc. aimed at cutting costs by 100 million dollars. The Times did not put a figure on the number of expected job cuts.

The Times said the layoffs announcement is expected to coincide with the release of third-quarter results on Wednesday by Time Inc.’s parent company Time Warner.

Time Inc. cut around 600 jobs last year and has shuttered several magazines recently including Southern Accents and Life.

The frequency of Fortune was reduced last week to 18 issues a year from 25 and between 40 and 60 editorial jobs were cut at the magazine according to the Times.

Time and Fortune declined to comment on the reports of job cuts.

Earlier this month, publishing group Conde Nast, which owns The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Vogue, closed Gourmet magazine and axed other titles including Modern Bride, Elegant Bride and Cookie.

Like other US publishers, Conde Nast and Time Inc. have been facing a steep drop in print advertising revenue, steadily declining circulation and the migration of readers to free news online.

Wall Street analysts expect Time Warner on Wednesday to announce a fall in third-quarter revenue of more than 39 percent compared with a year ago.

Time Warner shares were trading 0.98 percent lower in New York around mid-day on Friday at 30.37 dollars.

© 2009 AFP

Nokia Corp., the world’s top maker of mobile phones, announced on Thursday that it had filed a complaint against Apple with the Federal District Court in Delaware, alleging that Apple’s iPhone infringes Nokia patents for GSM, UMTS and wireless LAN (WLAN) standards.

The ten patents in suit relate to technologies fundamental to making devices which are compatible with one or more of the GSM, UMTS (3G WCDMA) and wireless LAN standards. The patents cover wireless data, speech coding, security and encryption and are infringed by all Apple iPhone models shipped since the iPhone was introduced in 2007, according to Nokia. While the move seems to be rather significant, it is strange that it took Nokia over two years to determine the infringement of its patents by Apple.

“The basic principle in the mobile industry is that those companies who contribute in technology development to establish standards create intellectual property, which others then need to compensate for. Apple is also expected to follow this principle. By refusing to agree appropriate terms for Nokia’s intellectual property, Apple is attempting to get a free ride on the back of Nokia’s innovation,” said Ilkka Rahnasto, vice president of legal and intellectual property at Nokia.

Nokia said that it had created one of the strongest and broadest patent portfolios in the industry, investing more than €40 billion ($60.1 billion) in R&D during the last two decades and built one of the wireless industry’s strongest and broadest IPR portfolios, with over 10,000 patent families. Much of this intellectual property, including the patents in suit, has been declared essential to industry standards.  The company said that it had already successfully entered into license agreements including these patents with approximately 40 companies, including virtually all the leading mobile device vendors, allowing the industry to benefit from Nokia’s innovation.

Nokia has not issued any actual demands to Apple publicly. It is hardly possible that Nokia just wants to make Apple pay for radio-related patents, but the company may be interested in negotiations concerning general unification of mobile phones’ platforms.

Tags: Nokia, Apple, Business

Last week, the Wi-Fi Alliance announced Wi-Fi Direct — a peer-to-peer wireless networking method that could replace what we commonly know today as Ad Hoc networking mode.

With Ad Hoc, we can usually share internet connection of one computer to other computers thru the built-in WiFi. One such example is our tutorial here — How to share 3G Internet over WiFi.

The new protocol (Wi-Fi Direct) will allow any device that implements the standard to connect directly to another device to send and receive data. It feels like the standard it gunning at Bluetooth. Imagine being able to share the internet connection of your mobile phone to all other devices via WiFi? You can also transfer files at the same time.

If Bluetooth has a normal transfer rate of about 2Mbps, WiFi Direct could reach 54Mbps or even higher. On top of that, wireless connections can go even further, in the hundreds of meters perhaps. Only drawback could be the amount of power it consumes compared to running Bluetooth.