To Save Itself, The DSLR Market Should Look To Smartphones And Revalue Each Press Of The Shutter

There's mounting evidence that the tendency to favour smartphones over standalone cameras isn't just tanking compact camera sales – it's affecting DSLR and interchangeable lens cameras, too. A new WSJ report claims that DSLR camera shipments could fall 9.1 percent by the end of 2013, versus 2012, according to research firm IDC. It's a sign that going retro might not be the only thing required to save standalone cameras from going extinct. Canon and Nikon, the two leading DSLR camera makers, both lowered their forecasts for the fiscal year in the past month, the WSJ notes, which means that the market is likely hurting as a whole. While those companies see this as a temporary setback due to global economic conditions, it looks a lot like what's been happening to the PC market over the past few years – another phenomenon initially blamed on economic weakness, but more likely tied to the rise of smartphones and tablets as alternate computing platforms. Smartphones likely are probably a culprit when it comes to the declining fortunes of the DSLR market. Image quality from mobile devices is on the rise, and the convenience of those devices is a very compelling argument for consumers who might otherwise buy a standalone camera as hobbyists or for use while traveling. And image quality/convenience isn't the only factor here: there's also the fact that far fewer people are printing photos than would've done in the past, preferring instead to trust their images to digital album services like those offered by Apple and Google. While DSLR makers have been building features into their devices that approximate those employed by smartphones, including Wi-Fi radios, geotagging and social sharing, I'd argue they haven't gone far enough. The reason DSLRs are attractive to their existing audience is that they're tricky, to some extent, so it makes sense to want to keep the manual controls and exhaustive menus in place. But the reason more and more users are satisfied with their smartphones is that they're increasingly making it easy to take great photos with a minimum of user input. DSLRs could have a considerable advantage in this regard. They already have far better sensors capable of taking far better images than any smartphone. What they need now are the smartphone smarts: build in an algorithm for automatically creating the best photo out of five exposures, for instance, like Google has done with the Nexus 5. In fact, Google has all kinds of lessons camera makers should take to heart, with its automatic photo editing features in Google+, which I've found time and again make exactly the kind of minor tweaks I'm likely to do myself in Lightroom or Aperture. Likewise, Apple is making its iPhone 5s camera more intelligent, with behind-the-scenes features that make you feel like a pro even if you're a rank amateur. This is where DSLR makers should be focusing their efforts. They might believe that building front-facing consumer features, like filters, face detection, sharing and other things is what's going to net them an even playing field with the smartphone set, but the real winning advantage would be in an end product that consistently amazes. Gadget development over the past 10 years has been all about spoiling consumers: These days, if something doesn't work exactly as expected 9 out of 10 times, most users will put it down and never pick it up again. Each exposure used to be precious, back in the days of film, when you had a limited amount and couldn't check to see if you'd got a good shot until you were back in the darkroom. Then, exposures were cheap, made so because you have a virtually unlimited amount with digital storage. Now, I'd argue they're precious again, because users want to be instantly rewarded with a great experience on the first try. Nailing every exposure, regardless of an operator's level of skill, needs to be the goal of camera makers hoping to give consumers a reason to buy expensive, often cumbersome hardware, even if that's something that strikes the hardcore hobbyists as counterintuitive. There's still room for dial-laden, finicky beasts that are time-consuming and rewarding to master, but to return to positive growth, Canon, Nikon and the rest need to cast a wider net with features everyday users have come to expect.

Microsoft Starts Taking Office On The Web Seriously

Earlier this week, Microsoft updated its Office 365 suite with a couple of new features and licensing terms. Overall, the update was very much in line with the other 100 changes Microsoft had made to its subscription-based Office version for consumers and businesses, but one feature stood out. Starting this week, all Office Web Apps will feature real-time collaborative editing – a feature previously only available to the Excel and OneNote web apps. This in itself is an interesting move, but while talking about the update, John Case, Microsoft's corporate vice president of its Office division, told me that this also signals a new way of thinking about the Web Apps inside of Microsoft. Let's take a step back first, though. If you are unfamiliar with the Office Web Apps, just take a look at SkyDrive and upload a Word, Excel or PowerPoint document. Once the file is online, you can view it in SkyDrive, but most importantly, you can also edit it in a light-weight version of Microsoft's flagship productivity apps. The Office Web Apps launched three years ago, but have mostly flown under the radar, despite the fact that they are more fully featured than Google's offerings. Given Microsoft's control over the file formats, it's also significantly better at displaying and saving files without mangling any of the formatting. They also use the same Ribbon menu as the regular desktop Office apps, so regular Office users should be productive in them right from the get-go. Until now, however, these Web Apps were basically companions to the clients, and Microsoft did virtually nothing to promote them. It looks like that's changing now. As Case told me, Microsoft is now finally starting to view the Office Web Apps as standalone services. Case wouldn't say whether Microsoft is considering a move to a freemium model and package paid services on top of the free offering. If Microsoft considers the Web Apps as a standalone version of Office, though - and in the (very) long run, they could become the only version, after all - I wouldn't be surprised if that's something the company is considering. Microsoft always focused heavily on the Office desktop clients. That's where all the money was made, after all. Now that it has moved to a subscription model anyway, adding premium features to the Office Web Apps feels like a logical next step. Case told me Microsoft plans to invest more into the Office Web Apps in the coming months, so we will likely hear quite a bit more about what the company has in the works for these services. If Microsoft starts to invest more heavily in this area, it will also provide an even greater challenge for Google, whose online office suite is still unsuitable for anything but very basic editing. One advantage Google always had, however, was that it offered collaborative editing. That advantage is gone now, but Microsoft has to start emphasizing these features. So far, it probably didn't do this because it didn't want to cannibalize its regular Office sales (the Web Apps are “good enough” for many use cases, afer all). If that starts changing, Google better watch out.

Year Up Helps Give Urban Youth The Training And Connections They Need To Land Hot Tech Jobs

Here in the tech industry, it seems that people are always talking about “how hard it is to hire.” That's something that can sound a little odd, given that there are still so many unemployed people here in the United States. But the reality is, there is often a gap in skills and connections between the many people who are looking for work, and the many hot job openings in tech and business. One organization called Year Up is dedicated to closing that gap, which it calls the “opportunity divide,” by providing one specialized year of intensive training to young adults aged 18 to 24 with no more than a high school diploma. After training is completed, the program provides introductions to companies keen to hire skilled staff. It's working out quite well: 100 percent of Year Up graduates are placed into an internship. And earlier this fall, the White House recognized Year Up's founder and CEO Gerald Chertavian for the impact of the program. It's an excellent nationwide program, and its outpost here in the Bay Area not surprisingly has a stronger focus on tech than on other industries - Year Up Bay Area has placed young people in high-paying jobs at tech companies, including LinkedIn and Facebook, among others. So TechCrunch TV stopped by Year Up's San Francisco offices to find out more about the program and what it's all about. Watch that in the video above.

Instagram Is Down For Some Users Due To ‘System Issues'

A number of Instagram users are currently reporting difficulty accessing the popular photo-sharing service both on the web and mobile versions of the app. At 3:37 pm Pacific Time this afternoon, Instagram confirmed the outage in a Tweet citing “system issues”: We're currently having system issues. We are aware of the problem and are working hard to resolve it. Thank you for your patience!— Instagram (@instagram) November 09, 2013 As of 4:00pm PT, the system still appears to be having problems for many users. Indeed, trying to visit individual Instagram profiles on the web (such as TechCrunch's) is currently turning up a 504 gateway timeout for me. This has naturally resulted in some panicked messages on social media from people desperate to share sepia-hued snaps of their Saturday afternoons - and even more jokes about the absurdity of such first world problems. We've reached out to Instagram and its parent company Facebook for additional comment on the outage, details on what's caused it, and when it should be remedied. We haven't heard back yet, but this post will be updated with any response we receive. Let's all hope it's fixed before the Saturday evening club-hopping hours commence. Those artfully-posed selfies aren't going to post themselves.

Yale Adds Another Stop To The College Hacker Circuit

The organizers of the hackathon at Yale this weekend aren't exactly sure how many students turned out for the sleepless grind. Gauging from the depletion of YHack t-shirts, they put it at about 950. That's about 915 more people than came last year, when a group of students organized a mini-hackathon that one participant described as, “Wasn't great.” With about 150 participants making the haul from Canada, a handful flying in from England, and hundreds more arriving from schools across the US, the hackathon that wrapped up this evening was definitely better than that and adds one more event to the circuit of major college hackathons that includes PennApps, MHacks, HackMIT, and HackRU. In the spirit of building the intercollegiate hacker culture, a number of the organizers of those events also came out to help at Yale this weekend. A large part of the motivation to hold a major hackathon on campus is to build a brighter, more cohesive programming environment on Yale's campus. Projects are fractured among the student body or limited to problem sets for class, said Frank Wu, a sophomore and one of the YHack organizers. As far as post-grad career choices go, working in tech is not high up on the list. This weekend's hacks were pretty awesome across the board, and the littered pizza boxes were many. Here are the winners and finalists, as presented at this evening's closing ceremonies. Winning hack: Rainman Created by two Yale seniors, Rainman gives context to news articles. It's a major help for those times when you want to educate yourself about, say, Syria but don't want to toggle between the story and a few reference tabs. The Rainman Chrome extension pulls up relevant Wikipedia articles as a sidebar to the main story. Those articles are pulled based on the keywords in the article, comparing the frequency with which a word appears in the piece to a larger corpus of articles. It's the type of hack that would be incredibly useful in real life and gets at how we read news articles now, in conjunction with other reference materials. Second place: Lux Lux deals with the issue of indoor fluorescent lights that mess with your internal clock and keep you awake long after you've tried to go to sleep. The Yale-based team's idea is that lightbulbs should be smarter and change hue and brightness depending on the time of day with no prompt from the owner, although they can also be controlled with an app. It's like f.lux for real life. Third place: cHat Retro in the best way possible, this hack uses a text interface as a replacement for video chat services that often freeze up. Imagine a wall of text that creates a pixelated, black and white video image and you've got the idea. Text is a simple way to get data across, and as the Carnegie Mellon students who made it said, “The bandwidth is, like, zero.” The other finalists included Leaf, a Pebble-based hack that uses handshakes as a way to swap contact information at networking events; Hacksearch, a Facebook graph search that lets you include fields that don't exist, like popularity and attractiveness; Subtle Glass, an Android app that translates spoken word into text using Google Glass; and Laser Lock, which makes data transference possible through LED light. It's worth noting that the kids on the Laser Lock team MacGyvered part of the hardware for their hack using foam rockets that YHack was giving out as swag and a bunch of Doublemint gum wrappers. And it worked.

How Mobile Alters Traditional Network Effects In Marketplaces

On the web, marketplaces are the stuff of legend. With properties like eBay and Amazon, among many other, an online marketplace harnesses the openness of the web, more efficiently matches supply with demand without too many intermediaries, and leverages network effects to capture economic value during each transaction. A key component for a marketplace to work, however, is liquidity - the comfort in knowing that for each item or request posted, there is a willing buyer at a certain price. Liquidity is what drives the engine of a marketplace, what keeps sellers coming back to list items and what keeps buyers coming back to fulfill their needs, and in order to have it, it requires scale - that lots of people be able to access the marketplace. Investors love marketplaces for obvious reasons: the power and elegance of network effects. I've personally had the opportunity to invest in three so far, and am hoping for more. Yet, even though I'm focused on mobile for work, mobile presents would-be marketplace startups with some thorny issues out of the gate, largely because of fragmentation of users across two dominant mobile platforms (iOS and Android). Early-stage startups often do not have the luxury of time or money to build across mobile platforms at the outset, so any mobile marketplace offering would theoretically be reducing its overall size by about 50%, and this affects liquidity of the marketplace. (There are some startups, such as Threadflip and Tophatter, as examples, which began their marketplaces on the web with an eye to convert to mobile. This can be a controversial approach - using the web to hack mobile distribution - though some, like Rothman, suggest it's a sound path in order to get mobile marketplaces going given general app store distribution woes and the liquidity issue facing mobile marketplaces.) Of course, a few mobile-first startups have cleared the liquidity hurdle presented by the fragmentation of users across iOS and Android. For example, companies like Poshmark, which helps people buy and sell clothes directly from users, companies like Uber and Lyft, which use mobile to aggregate demand and efficiently yet indirectly route that demand to providers who can fulfill the requests. Here, we begin to see a pattern and delineation. One, very few companies are both purely mobile and a marketplace where buyers and sellers are directly interacting with each other prior to a transaction. Two, as a result, newer mobile marketplaces have followed the path carved out by Uber, which collects demand via mobile and then routes those requests to a fleet of willing drivers who are free to take or reject rides. Here, Uber gets around the market liquidity issue presented by mobile by doing the hard work of organizing assets and labor offline and then connecting them to a central hub of demand. This is the new type of marketplace-driven network effect specific to mobile, where demand is generated online (through mobile) and fulfilled offline (driven by services). Therefore, there's good reason why we all hear so many "Uber for X" analogies. Startups like GAIN Fitness, HotelTonight, and many others generally take this approach, putting mobile apps in consumers' hands and offering a promise - tap this button, and with some magic, on the other end someone will present an offer to satisfy your demand. For startups, today's reality raises specific tactical concerns. Assuming the startup will land on iOS first, the company either needs enough capital or revenue to be able to get to some equilibrium in the marketplace's first incarnation so that the product can be improved to a point where an Android team can build for that platform. Second, direct marketplaces present sellers with friction points around packaging and shipping or service delivery, while indirect marketplaces, which usually offer some form of an offline service, require liquidity within a location-specific density to work. It only makes sense to make Lyft available to me as a consumer if I live in an area where Lyft operates. Moving forward, we are already seeing whole new categories of businesses on the "Uber for X" path, and I don't see that trend stopping any time soon. But, what about pure mobile marketplaces directly connecting buyers and sellers, on a more peer-to-peer level? Sure, offerings like Airbnb and others which began on the web have built a large enough brand to play on mobile, but what about companies like Yardseller, which tried to get into the local listings game through apps, or newer apps like Bondsy, and many others I'm sure are out there - and I'd love to hear about them, so please get in touch. In economies which are all undergoing big structural changes and facing many uncertainties, the elegance, efficiency, and dispassion of a marketplaces presents systems which can be incredibly resistant to external stresses. Mobile fragmentation presents a thorny challenge to startups, and some have responded by overcoming the liquidity hurdle or by creating a new business model to subvert the problem. All of this matters as mobile phones continue to proliferate, as economics remain under duress, as many people look for new sources of income, and as phones present a new way to segment consumers by willingness to pay and location. It's unclear if a startup can create a mobile application that puts buyers directly in contact with sellers at true scale, and while some do exist, my belief is for the next few years most of them in the marketplace category will indirectly match consumers with providers, and that's just fine. It's more efficient this way, for now. And, hey, I could be wrong. Maybe there's a new startup launching today with a direct marketplace vision…and I can't wait to see it in the wild.

The LA Times Trolls Innocent Teachers

The once respectable Los Angeles Times is leveraging its dwindling platform to attack individual teachers under the guise of data transparency. The editorial board won a court case allowing them to use a highly contentious, self-designed algorithm to rank the best and worst teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Neither the suicide of one of the shamed teachers, nor the wide-spread criticism of the statistical methods have aroused the editorial board's better judgement. Many school districts, such as the LAUSD, estimate teacher performance based off of their students's standardized test results. So-called “value-added modeling” attempt to estimate a teacher's relative abilities based on how they expect students to do given their past performance. The school district will be forced to release the data on teacher evaluations to The Times for publication. While I'm all for transparency of government data, there's a few glaring problems with value-added scores that the public might not be aware of. 1. Value-added measures are as unstable as a chain-smoker on a flight from LA to Japan. Teacher ratings often swing wildly from year to year and are sensitive to tiny changes in the statistical methods. The University of Colorado at Boulder's National Education Policy Center found that only about half (46.4%) of LAUSD teachers retained their same effectiveness rating under slight tweaks to the model [PDF]. Specifically, the NEPC added measures of school ranking and early elementary grades into their own value-added model to see how it might disrupt the rankings (and it did). There's many reasons why such variables might not have been originally included: adding in past performance and school transfers makes it difficult to know what in the history of student ultimately led to their current abilities. Statistical geeks can debate the best models, but if a series of very reasonable decisions leads to radically different rankings, it's way too unstable to shame a teacher in a national newspaper. 2. Standardize tests suck at measuring the value of a teacher. “Test scores largely reflect whom a teacher teaches, not how well they teach,” notes Stanford Professor Education, Linda Darling-Hammond. “In particular, teachers show lower gains when they have large numbers of new English-learners and students with disabilities than when they teach other students.” The LA Times appears oblivious to this well know fact. In an email, a representative tells me, “Research has repeatedly found that teachers are the single most important school-related factor in a child's education.” False. Parenting, motivation, and IQ are at least as important, if not vastly more important, to the success of a student than a teacher. Teachers can bring out the best in a student, but a child from a broken home and with an abuse parent just isn't going to do as well. 3. It's not okay to shame everyday citizens. Assume for a moment that the LA Times pulled off a statistical miracle and overcame all of the criticisms of value-added methodology, it's still awful to shame people. Here was the Times explanation to me “The Times is committed to reporting on the issues and events that are important to Southern Californians and education is of primary concern to our community. We published the “Grading the Teachers” series and value-added data analysis because parents and the public have a right to some form of objective evaluation of LAUSD teacher effectiveness. The Times value-added rating, which was based entirely on public-record information, should be considered as only one component in overall teacher assessment.” That's a beautiful theory, but in practice the list paints targets on teachers' backs for tiger-moms and paparazzi press. When the New York Post publicized the name of the “worst teacher”, reporters hounded her and family. If we lived in a perfect marketplace ideas where nuance was currency and readers spent more than 30 seconds on a post, The Time's might have a better case. But, we don't, and their sloppy editorial decisions are going to hurt innocent teachers.