At PandoMonthly in San Francisco tonight, Doerr told Sarah Lacy that, since the 2012 presidential election, Republicans have recognized the need to better connect with Hispanic voters. Consequently, the US is now at a moment when “the immigration issue is going to be solved,” he said.

While it won’t be easy to get the labor unions and the liberal Democrats to compromise with the high-tech industry to get more high-skilled immigrants in the country, as well as implement a “startup visa” for foreign entrepreneurs, Doerr believes there has been great progress on immigration reform – and that the tech industry has been effective in making its voice heard.

“The tech industry has done a pretty darn good job of being engaged and getting things done,” he said, noting that that’s good news because immigration reform is important to America innovation and being competitive with the rest of the world.

He also argued that startups can’t afford to ignore political issues. ”There’s this myth that you can go in the garage and start a company on your own,” Doerr said. “That’s dead wrong.”

He noted that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) brought us the Internet, GPS, and circuit advances, and that the government and the US’s universities are still where most of the quality research and development is done in the country. With the exception of perhaps Google, for which he sits on the board, few companies are doing good R&D these days, he said.

In general, though, he feels that startups are well enough engaged with policy issues. And just as well; he thinks they have a leading role to play in the future of the national economy. “The policy makers, the political leaders, and even the nation looks to innovation and entrepreneurship as fundamental to America, and important to get better, more prosperous lives.”

Paraphrasing Bill Gates, Doerr said that entrepreneurs have the potential to “elevate the prosperity of the world.”

At the end of the evening, Doerr said that the best thing the government could do for the country is not spend money on building out infrastructure, but to get high-speed gigabit Internet to the whole country, and particularly in schools. ”I’d like to see a national race to the top for people to do this, and then there would be competitive providers [for gigabit],” he said.

He noted that Google has already taken the lead on gigabit Internet and that cities clamored to be selected as the company’s testbeds. All the government has to do, then, Doerr suggested, “is get outta the way.”

Hamish McKenzie

Hamish McKenzie is a Baltimore-based reporter for PandoDaily who covers media, politics, and international startups. His first name is pronounced "hey-mish" and you can follow him on Twitter.

The two-day-long March for Innovation is drawing to a close, and the tech industry – with some celebrity support in the form of Newark Mayor Cory Booker, former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg – has once again argued the case for comprehensive immigration reform, which would see provisions for high-skilled immigrants and foreign-born entrepreneurs included alongside a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.

As part of the so-called iMarch and at the invitation of the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), I moderated a Google Hangout panel of experts to discuss what the immigration debate looks like today, how comprehensive reform would affect the tech industry, and how the US compares to the rest of the world when it comes to encouraging entrepreneurs and high-tech workers to settle in the country. (Hint: Canada is doing better, and aggressively so.)

Joining me on the panel were Michael Petricone, CEA’s senior vice president for government and regulatory affairs; Mike McGeary, co-founder and director of Engine Advocacy; John Manley, an immigration lawyer; Jeb Ory, co-founder of Phone2Action; and Min Zhang, an immigrant entrepreneur and graduate of the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Here’s the 42-minute discussion.

Hamish McKenzie

Hamish McKenzie is a Baltimore-based reporter for PandoDaily who covers media, politics, and international startups. His first name is pronounced "hey-mish" and you can follow him on Twitter.

Picovico founders Suraj Sapkota and Manish Modi

If you thought it was hard doing a startup in Silicon Valley, try Kathmandu. The capital of Nepal struggles through daily electricity cuts, unreliable Internet, and Maoist protests and strikes that cripple the city’s infrastructure. But, yes, even in Nepal, there is a fledgling startup culture, and just a couple months ago the country hosted its first Startup Weekend.

To an extent, there’s also a bit of cultural isolation in Kathmandu, which is not exactly an integral part of the global tech ecosystem. So, it’s kind of understandable that one of its startups, a photos-to-video animation app called Picovico, wasn’t even aware of its biggest international competitor when it came time launching its own product in beta last year. 

Soon after launching Picovico in beta, the founders realized that a very similar video-slideshow product had existed since 2006: Animoto. The San Francisco-based company, backed by $30 million in venture funding, had something of a headstart.

Picovico, started by computer engineering graduates Manish Modi and Suraj Sapkota, freaked out just a little. “We were like, ‘Why will people use our product if they have something which is already popular, which is already good?” community manager Shilpa Singhal recalls. 

They realized they had no option other than to try to provide something different. So Modi and Sapkota worked on making the product as fast as possible, and have now got the video-rendering process down to 15 seconds for a 30-second video. Speed is now Picovico’s chief selling point. The app is free while the company focuses on building a user-base.

Picovico’s homepage

While the six-person company is based in Kathmandu, it is targeting a global audience and has registered as a company in San Francisco. Picovico has so far gone through two accelerators: Bangalore’s The Morpheus and Startup Chile, which it applied to in an effort to get closer to the US market. South America, they decided, was near enough. All the company’s funding has come from those accelerators and numbers in the tens of thousands of dollars.

There’s no sense in underplaying the huge battle Picovico will face in establishing itself with an American market in the shadow of Animoto. The tech behind the app may be solid, but video creation is such a design-driven concern, and, compared to Animoto, on that front the Nepali startup looks decidedly second-class. There may, however, be an opportunity to cater to an Asian market that has different, and sometimes unique, design tastes. Meanwhile, it must also compete with FlixTime, Stupeflix, and ProShow Web, among others.

Even for a startup from a nation of mountain climbers, the incline for Picovico might ultimately be just too steep.

Hamish McKenzie

Hamish McKenzie is a Baltimore-based reporter for PandoDaily who covers media, politics, and international startups. His first name is pronounced "hey-mish" and you can follow him on Twitter.

Computer scientist and author Jaron Lanier has turned his back on the “information wants to free” meme to which he once subscribed, and he thinks advertising as a business model for media is doomed. It’s 

Lanier, the guy credited with coming up with the term “virtual reality,” outlines this thesis in his new book “Who Owns the Future?” which examines the effects network technologies have had on our economy. In an interview with Nieman Journalism Lab, Lanier builds on that case, stating flatly that advertising isn’t a viable business plan for media businesses in the long term. He tells the publication:

It forces everybody to ultimately compete for the same small pool of advertisers. How much of the economy can advertising really be? It can’t be the whole market. Why on earth are Google and Facebook competing for the same customers when they actually do totally different things? It’s a peculiar problem. You’re saying that there’s only one business plan, one customer set, and everybody has to dive after that.

While advertising might work to a limited extent on a local level, Lanier says, it’s not an overall solution. He also argues that the ad-supported system is destroying itself, which could ultimately affect Google and Facebook, too. He says:

The problem is that [online publishers are] dependent on the health of the ad servers that place ads. Very few people can handle that directly. And the problem with that is the whole business of using advertising to fund communication on the Internet is inherently self-destructive, because the only stuff that can be advertised on Google or Facebook is stuff that Google hasn’t already forced to be free.

Short message: This ad-supported thing might not be a great longterm plan. Lanier suggests we can blame, in part, the “information wants to be free” mindset, which has cost us jobs.

The only reason automation leads to unemployment is the idea of information being free. It’s a totally artificial problem, but if journalists are counting the Google model to live on, it won’t work. Google is undermining itself, and there will be no one left to buy advertisements.

He might also have added that ads require very expensive sales teams that are supporting increasingly small editorial teams; that they’re becoming ever-cheaper as online inventory increases, and especially as audiences move to mobile, where, anyway, six companies account for 72 percent of all display ads, and none of them produce news; and that they don’t even work that well online.

Lanier’s suggestion for an alternative model for information-businesses is that humans instead come up with a system in which everyone is compensated for sharing information and contributing data in a peer-to-peer model based on micropayments – kind of like how Flattr allows people to pay others through “faves” and “likes” on social media. For the time being, that theory falls into the “well, that would nice” category, but clearly it’s not going to happen overnight, if at all.

In the meantime, news businesses should heed Lanier’s message and find ways to build revenue streams beyond advertising, a point I made recently while arguing that “Snow Fall” isn’t going to save the New York Times. There are several examples of new media companies that are attempting to do just that, although in all cases it’s too early to know how it’s going to pan out.

Skift, for instance, is leading with content but intends to make data services its key source of revenue. Marco Arment’s The Magazine and the titles published by 29th Street Publishing are foregoing ads completely in favor of low-priced subscriptions. This very blog, PandoDaily, carries advertising but is doing better with sponsored series and also sells memberships. PandoDaily contributor Paul Carr’s NSFWCORP relies on subscriptions and a cartoon tower that shows off reader donations. (Read more about it in Paul’s post on how the media industry is doing “freemium” wrong.) Andrew Sullivan is using a metered paywall to fund his ad-free Dish blog. And The Wirecutter makes its coin from affiliate links.

Aside from their beyond-ads business models, these companies share other important characteristics: namely, small editorial teams, and a focus on high-quality, original content and not aggregation (although Skift does some). Perhaps they’ll all fail. Maybe there’ll be some big wins. What’s important, though, is that they’re pushing beyond that “information wants to be free” mindset, and attempting to expand the imaginative scope of the media business to find new ways to make money.

If you believe Lanier’s dire prognostications about the future of advertising, it becomes vital for the media business to pay close attention to these companies.

Hamish McKenzie

Hamish McKenzie is a Baltimore-based reporter for PandoDaily who covers media, politics, and international startups. His first name is pronounced "hey-mish" and you can follow him on Twitter.

The social media-led push taking place on Wednesday May 22 and Thursday May 23 will feature an array of prominent names from the tech industry and beyond, including Newark Mayor Cory Booker and former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, representing a substantial expansion of the initial vision the group outlined in February. Last week, the group also announced that the Democratic-aligned Organizing for America and Republicans for Immigration Reform are also co-sponsoring the “iMarch,” set to be the largest pan-industry digital activism since the effort that squelched the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA). The group will soon announce a host of other high-profile figures from the worlds of business, tech, politics, sports, and entertainment who have pledged their support for the iMarch.

Originally planned for April, the iMarch is instead taking place in what is shaping up to be a busy week for immigration issues in Washington DC, with Republican House representative Darrell Issa expected to introduce an immigration bill to the House on Thursday. A bipartisan group of eight senators led by Republican Marco Rubio has already put forward a Senate bill that contains many proposals approved by the tech industry and startups, including the creation of a “startup visa” for foreign entrepreneurs, and an increase in the number of visas for high-skilled immigrants and specialists in science, technology, engineering, and math. That bill is now going through the Senate Judiciary Committee’s markup process.

The iMarch will kick off tomorrow morning at 8.30am EST with Mayor Bloomberg hosting a Twitter town hall, in which other yet-to-be-announced leaders will also take part. Events will then be taking place on the half-hour throughout the day and up until the last event, a Twitter town hall for Latinos in tech, starts at 10pm EST on Thursday. The iMarch activity will lean heavily on Twitter, but it will also include Google Hangouts, Reddit AMAs, Vines, and live events. Both Mayor Booker and Governor Schwarzenegger will also be hosting Twitter town halls. 

Included among the events will be a “venture capital hour” on Twitter tomorrow at 2pm EST, with Ron Conway, Brad Feld, and Mike Maples, among others, taking part. At 6.30pm Wednesday in New York City, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures will stage a fireside chat with AppNexus CEO Brian O’Kelley, to be followed by a conversation between Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian and FuturePerfect Partners managing director Jalak Jobanputra. Similar events are taking place in Austin, San Francisco, and San Antonio on the same night. All the events will be live-streamed.

The Partnership for a New American Economy says about 10,000 people have so far signed up to the support the iMarch via its website, and more than 2,000 have lined up Tweets or Facebook messages to be published in one big hit via Thunderclap during the event.

Institutional Venture Partners’ Somesh Dash, one of the iMarch’s organizers and key backers, says the group is using a broad array of platforms and bringing in big names from outside the tech industry because it wants to make sure that its messages reach people outside of the tech bubble, and not just those who live on the coasts. “We really did not want to just be a Silicon Valley tech-focused thing on one or two platforms,” Dash says.

He also hopes that the initiative can serve as a template for future tech-related activism. “For the entrepreneurial community, this could be a great opportunity for people to build tools and platforms that allow people to come together around civic issues.”

As part of the March for Innovation, I will be moderating a Google Hangout featuring Engine Advocacy’s Michael McGeary, Consumer Electronics Association’s Michael Petricone, Partnership for New American Economy’s Jeremy Robbins, finance professional and Stanford alum Min Zhang, immigration lawyer John Manley, and Phone2Action co-founder Jeb Ory. The Hangout takes place on Thursday, May 23, at 4pm EST. More details here. 

Hamish McKenzie

Hamish McKenzie is a Baltimore-based reporter for PandoDaily who covers media, politics, and international startups. His first name is pronounced "hey-mish" and you can follow him on Twitter.

There’s much to chew over in Packer’s piece, which is mostly fair in pointing out that the entrepreneurial “change the world” ethos doesn’t necessarily translate to acting in the interests of the public good, but one particular contention stands out. In the article, Packer argues broadly that the entrepreneurs and startups of Silicon Valley and San Francisco tend to be inward-looking, not curious about the world outside their companies, and intellectually lacking. Packer paraphrases LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman in describing Silicon Valley’s intellectual culture as “underdeveloped.” (Disclosure: Hoffman’s Greylock Discovery Fund is an investor in PandoDaily.)

Just as disdainfully, Packer describes one “aha” moment in his research while interviewing Path founder Dave Morin, who, with his daytime and nighttime iPhones is fast becoming the whipping boy for people looking to fingerpoint the Valley self-unaware. Morin has just finished explaining to Packer the perks of being able to book a room via Airbnb, hire a luxury car through Uber, reserve a table at a restaurant through an app, or get a bike messenger to deliver food to his door using Postmates, when the writer has his realization. 

“It suddenly occurred to me,” writes Packer, “that the hottest tech start-ups are solving all the problems of being twenty years old, with cash on hand, because that’s who thinks them up.”

To an extent, Packer is right: there is some bias towards solving rich white-boy problems in Silicon Valley, which might be why the likes of Airbnb, Uber, Postmates, Lyft, Exec, TaskRabbit, TripIt, and HotelTonight get well funded (although it might also have something to do with their business potential). But to dismiss all the “hottest tech start-ups” in such terms is to ignore the work being done by serious entrepreneurs tackling serious problems. In that sense, Packer falls into the same trap – or, depending on how you look at it, deploys the same cynical rhetorical artillery – as Evgeny Morozov, artful academic master of the straw-man take-down.

It’s easy to point to the likes of Uber and Exec, which lets you book cleaners for your home through an app at exorbitant prices without having to actually talk to them, and scream “First world problems!” It’s unreasonable, though, to use them as evidence for an argument that “Silicon Valley” in general is intellectually narrow and uninterested in the problems that ail the rest of the world. To do so, one must consciously ignore the many Silicon Valley-based entrepreneurs, and founders from other parts of the country, who are starting companies that, all going well, can have a deep and meaningful effect on the way the world does business. 

If Packer wanted to write an article that extolled the efforts of entrepreneurs who are turning to startups to tackle important but difficult world problems, he would have found ample material. He could have touched on startups working in healthcare, for instance, such as electronic medical records company Practice Fusion, or expert medical advice network ConsultingMD (which today announced it has raised $10 million in Series B funding), or, if he were willing to expand the scope to Wisconsin, Asthmapolis, which is using data and hardware to help even the poorest people get their asthma under control. 

Packer might also have looked at charitable giving, where Bright Funds is hoping to make an impact by making it easy for small and medium-sized businesses to incorporate donations to charities into their payrolls. He could have looked at how startups like Zenefits are looking to untangle the mess of buying and maintaining health insurance plans, or at the other startups hoping to take advantage of the Obamacare reforms. He could have looked at how TurboVote and Popvox are trying to add transparency to the political process, while Causes offers tools for political organizing. You’d think that he might have spent at least some time discussing Tesla, or SolarCity, or Sunrun, all of whom are trying to end our dependency on fossil fuels.

The truth is, however, that those companies, and the entrepreneurs behind them, don’t fit neatly into Packer’s narrative about the startuppers of Silicon Valley being an intellectually hobbled, self-interested lot whose rhetoric about changing the world ultimately rings hollow. Packer’s argument, then, is really only half an argument, its well-reasoned points giving way to a blindspot that not only does a disservice to the do-gooders of the Valley, but also detracts from the article’s important point that progress in the tech sector does not necessarily amount to progress in the wider economic, social, or political spheres.

Silicon Valley, after all, is more complicated than Dave Morin’s two iPhones would have us believe.

Hamish McKenzie

Hamish McKenzie is a Baltimore-based reporter for PandoDaily who covers media, politics, and international startups. His first name is pronounced "hey-mish" and you can follow him on Twitter.

Publications such as Matter and Tomorrow, along with other individual endeavors, have partly funded themselves through Kickstarter campaigns, which has led to some hope that crowdfunding can step in for media companies where advertising and subscriptions are faltering.

At the same time, however, Andrew Sullivan has said his crowdfunded venture, the ad-free Dish blog, is likely to fall short of its $900,000 Year One target. It might also be significant, too, that Matter has been acquired by Medium, with neither party disclosing the terms – likely in part because it involved very little money, if any at all. And Tomorrow editor Ann Friedman told the Longform podcast that she doesn’t think Kickstarter is going to save media. The magazine raised $45,000 for its first issue through Kickstarter but won’t be repeating the process because it wasn’t enough to pay people in a sustainable way.

“Trying to Kickstart issue two of anything seems like just the hardest thing,” Frieman told the podcast. Later, she added that crowdfunding isn’t really all that new for media, anyway. “Kickstarter is the public radio model: false deadlines imposed on what is basically just an ongoing subscription.”

Gawker’s “Crackstarter,” on the other hand, is a little bit different. The publication is asking readers for money not to prop up its business model, but to pay for a piece of content that it wouldn’t otherwise have been able to buy and that might be of interest to the public. Yes, it’s a piece of tabloid journalism and more august organs would never entertain the possibility of buying content from a source in a similar way, but, whether you like it or not, it is a common practice in today’s media industry. If it turns out that the crowd-bought video proves a mayor of a major city was not only breaking the law but also lying about it to the public, it could turn out to be important.

The idea of turning to crowdfunding to support a single story is not novel. Spot.us launched with that model back in 2008 and has since been bought by American Public Media, and just today video-news startup Vourno has launched with the exact same intent. But both Spot.us and Vourno are attempting to make crowdfunding the major way to fund journalism on their platforms. What we haven’t seen as much of is the idea of an established media brand looking to the general public to help fund a particular story, or part of a story. The highest-profile version of that to date comes from NPR’s Planet Money, which has raised more than $590,000 on Kickstarter to pay for a story about the life cycle of a T-shirt. 

Gawker, on the other hand, has already published its story on Mayor Ford allegedly smoking crack, as have, now, all the major Canadian news organizations. It is instead effectively asking the public, “Are you interested enough to dig into your own pockets to see more?” That’s where Crackstarter becomes potentially significant. If it is a success, Crackstarter could inspire more media organizations to turn to crowdfunding as a way to augment their existing reporting, perhaps through the use of public-funded videos, follow-ups, profiles, interactive graphics, documentaries, and such like. 

What if, as my friend and freelance web producer Andrew James suggested to me earlier, Upworthy tried a similar approach for the content that its community deemed the most worthy? Perhaps in addition to the “Share on Facebook” and “Share on Twitter” buttons that accompany every piece of content embedded on Upworthy, the site could also offer the option of, “I’d like to pay for a follow-up.” What if the New York Times added a link at the bottom of selected news stories that offered readers the chance to throw some cash towards a follow-up longform feature on the subject?

There are inherent problems with these suggestions, as there is with Gawker’s Crackstarter. For one, it turns certain elements of reportage into a popularity contest. Sure, lots of people would be willing to pay a few bucks to see a video of the mayor getting high, but how many would be willing to fund a line-by-line dissection of a state delegate’s campaign finances? More concerningly, interest groups might take the opportunity to seed stories that damage their competitors. For instance, Gawker’s Crackstarter would seem like a golden opportunity for Mayor Ford’s opponents to end his political career for a bargain.

Those are not easy problems to solve, but perhaps they could be partially addressed by an evolution of our understanding of what crowdfunded content is. In effect, it is sponsored content, even if it is often distributed among more payers than the traditional sponsorship model. Perhaps news organizations should label crowdfunded content as such, and readers should treat it with all the skepticism they reserve (or should) for “native advertising.”

As crowdfunding becomes more widespread and media organizations continue to look for revenue sources beyond advertising, these questions will become only more pressing. And that’s why Gawker’s Crackstarter, while skeezy, is actually important.

[Picture by Fashion Graphics]

Hamish McKenzie

Hamish McKenzie is a Baltimore-based reporter for PandoDaily who covers media, politics, and international startups. His first name is pronounced "hey-mish" and you can follow him on Twitter.

The conventional wisdom about New Zealand startups – and even Australian ones – is that they have to look outside of their home country when it comes time to raising serious money. In both countries, there’s often enough capital for startups to get seed funding, but there’s rarely enough for a Series A.

Vend, an Auckland, New Zealand-based retail operating platform, has just defied that logic. The three-year-old startup has just closed an $8 million round, funded by investors in New Zealand, Australia, and Germany. Nary a Silicon Valley venture capitalist was involved.

Vend is talked about in New Zealand as the country’s most exciting tech company behind Xero, which is already six years old and has raised more than $100 million. In the space of three years, Vend has acquired more than 6,500 customers globally. This year it has a run rate for of about $3 million. In total, it has now raised more than $10 million. As it scales and looks to grow its footprint in the US, Australia, and the UK, it has brought in funding from a slew of angel investors, including Craig Winkler, the founder of MYOB, and Paul Bassett and Matt Rockman, co-founders of job-search site Seek.com.au. In New Zealand, the Milford Active Growth Fund also go in on the round, and Berlin’s Point Nine was one of the lead investors.

Vend bills itself as a “point of sales” software company, but really sales are only part of its business. Founder and CEO Vaughan Rowsell calls Vend a “retail operating system,” which means it takes care of pretty much all retail operations aside from payments and accounting, including transactions, inventory, CRM, and analytics. “At some point, we’re going to stop referring to ourselves as a point of sales company,” says Rowsell.

Unlike other retailed-focused startups, Vend isn’t concentrating on payments, preferring instead to partner with the likes of PayPal for those purposes. Like Xero, it also serves as a platform for third-party developers, who can add add-ons that improve the Vend user experience and offer customization for specific business types, such as florists or hairdressers. The platform aspect gives Vend a leg-up over its competitors, including other cloud-based POS services, such as ShopKeep, Erply, and Merchant OS, which offer more tightly controlled products.

The company’s customers, which started off as mainly small and medium-sized businesses but also encompasses companies that have a couple hundred stores, are split among North America (30 percent), Australia (30 percent), and the UK (20 percent), among other countries. Rowsell says there was no specific plan in not bringing US VCs in on its latest round, but he is proud that the company didn’t need to look far for its money. “It’s nice to show that there’s plenty of investment money out there that’s closer to home,” he says. 

Like Xero and Sydney’s Atlassian, Vend considers itself a global company. It is headquartered in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, where it has about 40 staff, but it will be using its latest round of funding to scale the team, especially on the sales and support side in the US, the UK, and Australia. Because of its “zero touch” software-as-a-service sales strategy, it has been able to keep a small and nimble team, although it will hire more sales people to keep customer support at a high level as it builds out internationally. Its pricing plan ranges from $35 a month to $170 a month.

Despite its global outlook, or perhaps because of it, Vend acknowledges that it is a New Zealand company, and that that comes with advantages and disadvantages. “We’re very cognisant of our Kiwi approach to things,” Rowsell says. One of the advantages is that Vend has a good reputation in the job market in New Zealand, which has helped it suck up a lot of the engineering talent around Auckland. In New Zealand, which has a population of 4 million, there is less competition between companies for engineering talent than there is in Silicon Valley.

On the other hand, the company has had to learn how to negotiate American culture, which at first glance seems very similar but is actually very different. New Zealanders, thanks to the “Tall Poppy Syndrome,” tend to be uncomfortable with promoting themselves or their businesses. So when the company has been meeting with investors in the US, it has to switch mindsets, says Rowan Simpson, who is the director of Vend’s board and a former executive at TradeMe, one of New Zealand’s most successful tech companies. “In the US, we have to constantly reinforce each other,” says Simpson, who takes a moment to pound his chest before adding, “You know: ‘Be American!’” The implication is that Kiwi companies aren’t great at hyping themselves up in business meetings.

Ultimately, that might also be Vend’s biggest challenge. While it has made an encouraging start, its VC-backed high-growth strategy is new ground for Rowsell, and even his investors, most of whom have seen success in Australia and New Zealand but have not really proven themselves on the wider world stage. For Vend, the next six months will be crucial. Given the growth opportunities in the US and the developed stage of the retail market in the country, Vend will also likely find that it has to “be American” perhaps more than it first intended.

Hamish McKenzie

Hamish McKenzie is a Baltimore-based reporter for PandoDaily who covers media, politics, and international startups. His first name is pronounced "hey-mish" and you can follow him on Twitter.

Just over a year ago, I argued that the future of magazines should look a lot like Spotify, meaning that the magazine stories should be disaggregated from bundles and then distributed on platforms that charge an all-you-can-eat subscription price.

Since then, Next Issue Media has launched, bringing magazines from Conde Nast, Hearst, Time Inc, Meredith, and News Corporation together on one subscription platform for reading on tablets. And yesterday, Zinio, one of the first movers in digital magazines, announced its Z-Pass, which gives customers a choice of three magazines per month, from a selection of 300, for $5 a month.

Both Zinio and Next Issue are moving in the right direction, bringing them more into line with digital media models that are already out in force for music (Spotify) and movies (Netflix), and is coming soon for books (Oyster). But both Zinio and Next Issue’s models are flawed in the same way: They’re stuck peddling content that was never really designed for digital.

It’s true that publishers are getting better at adapting their print products for digital formats, and especially for consumption on the iPad. Tools like Mag Plus and Magzter (a Zinio competitor) are making that process easier and more flexible, while Adobe’s digital publishing tools are also getting more sophisticated. For the most part, however, publishers are using these tools to adapt their designed-for-print products, merely adding in interactive elements such as slideshows, dynamic graphics, audio features, and video, rather than designing for the digital platforms from the ground up.

For proof of that reverse engineering approach, you need look no further than their digital magazine covers, which are for the most part just digital replications of the print versions, complete with text that’s almost unreadable when shrunk down for display in a digital newsstand. At the same time, the magazine file formats are large, taking up precious space on tablets, and take a long time to download. They can also be difficult to navigate, often requiring instruction tutorials for first-time users to get familiar with the layouts and swipe-and-tap systems.

If platforms like Zinio and magazine publishers want to get serious about building for a future in which their products are consumed, and monetized, in large numbers on digital platforms – which just seems a no-brainer – then they should be working together to break the adapt-from-print mindset. If they don’t do it, others certainly will.

Marco Arment’s The Magazine has taken the lead, applying the principles for stripped-back design outlined in Craig Mod’s essay on “Subcompact Publishing,” and 29th Street Publishing is producing beautiful mobile magazines that travel lightly. Startups such as The Periodical Co and TypeEngine are helping publishers produce slick magazine apps for cheap, and with minimum fuss. And that’s to say nothing of responsive design, which opens up possibilities for magazines to go truly cross-platform with all the inherent flexibility of HTML5. Just this week, Pitchfork showed off some of the potential of HTML5 design for magazine-grade layout with a parallax-happy “cover story” on Daft Punk. Vox Media’s The Verge and Polygon are producing magazine-like reading experiences that adapt to any device.

In that context, Zinio’s Z-Pass seems like a stop-gap to help bridge an outdated way of digital magazine publishing with a new media environment that demands more intelligent, digital-native design. It is not so much an exciting development in digital magazine consumption as it is a hack that will soon become a relic.

Hamish McKenzie

Hamish McKenzie is a Baltimore-based reporter for PandoDaily who covers media, politics, and international startups. His first name is pronounced "hey-mish" and you can follow him on Twitter.

If HTML5 “cards” were listed on the share market, you would have seen a sharp increase in their price yesterday. While Google was exciting us at I/O with talk of enhanced photo features, interface-free search, and a new Hangouts app, it also gave a huge boost to cards, a relatively new information-delivery mechanism that are essentially digital boxes of content. As per Google’s announcements, cards are now a

The Google boost for cards reinforces the format’s rise on Twitter, Facebook, which uses a flip animation for status update cards on its iPad app, and Kik, which uses cards for rich media in its mobile chat app, among others.

Since the invention of the Web browser, the consumer Web user experience has centered around a body of content that is meant to be consumed from top to bottom while using a mouse to scroll up or down. Blog posts and news stories have long been laid out as pages, with comments and sharing functions pasted below while ad units and links to other content are stuffed into sidebars. Social media, from MySpace to Facebook to Twitter, carried on the tradition, assuming the page-based unit was the most natural way to consume digital content. In many cases on the desktop, where you can use a mouse to move down a page quickly and screen sizes tend to be larger, “pages” continue to make sense. 

But touch screens and, more recently, Google Glass, are beginning to change the dynamics of content consumption. While most apps for smartphones and tablets still ask us to use our fingers and thumbs to scroll down pages of content and poke at buttons, they are now increasingly favoring gestures, recognizing that swiping, pinching, tapping, and even clawing feel more natural than dragging. Take, for instance, HotelTonight‘s diagrammatic booking gesture; or Twitter’s tap-to-dismiss pictures feature for iPad; or Dolphin‘s search-by-gesture functionality. That impulse for gesture controls translates neatly into an Internet media environment that is filled with cards.

If you consider how we primates have used our hands for non-computery actions over the last few million years – holding branches, throwing stones, wiping dust from the table, brushing hair off our cheeks – the move to a gesture-based navigation framework seems logical. However, it took the arrival of the iPad to really spur the development of gesture-based navigation. Now, many of the apps and systems designed for the iPad are starting to influence the way we design for the Web in general. That effect is most visible in cards, which are flippable with a short, sharp swipe, and potentially friendly to voice commands. (Imagine saying to a news story, “Show me the back,” and then being presented with comments and added features on the rear of the story.)

There is something about the action of flipping a card that is satisfying on an elemental level. Perhaps there is a primal satisfaction in sending an object into a spin with just the flick of a finger. Thanks to touch screens, we now have the ability to feel powerful with just the slightest exertion of our pinkies. Part of it also may be that it reminds us of paper, a two-sided medium that is still one of the best content delivery devices ever invented.

Whatever the reason, the advent of cards opens up exciting and perhaps underestimated opportunities in Web design. For a start, by loading contextual content onto the “back” of a card, designers can design a distraction-free front side that well shows off the anchor content. If, for instance, the card is a Google+ status update, the entire card can be given over to the text or image, while hashtag-related content and perhaps other comments could be accessed simply by flipping the card over. This seems like a reasonable way of getting a mix between clean design and deep context.

Many of these HTML5 cards will ultimately be portable, meaning they can be transported intact from app to app, platform to platform without losing their design context or in-built architecture. In that sense, then, some cards will start to take the place of links. Where in the past some links have served as texty gateways to other content, with cards, users can get a more contextual information and a more visual representation of the content being showcased or referenced. 

If similar technology were applied to stories and blog posts, comments could be tucked away neatly on the “back” of the original story, freeing up white space for designers, and keeping the physical length of a story under control. In such a scenario, other information, such as social sharing options, Wikipedia summary boxes, image units, and video slots, among other things, could also be incorporated into the back side of a “card,” giving producers and readers more options for interacting with a piece of content. 

Even if designers choose not to avail themselves of the options for adding content to the back of cards, they at least get to lay out the content in a space that is going to hold its shape no matter where it is on the Internet. As much as the card is an attractive content unit, it is also a frame for the artistry contained within.

What we saw at Google I/O yesterday is likely just the beginning of a wider push towards a card-oriented design philosophy – one that works across all platforms, be it on the desktop, mobile, or on Glass. The advance of cards is a positive development for Web design: it not only serves as a clutter clearer, but it advances the art of adding context while ensuring that content can move freely around the Web in atomic units that retain original design intent.

And besides, it’s about time we found a way to escape comment threads that stretch out below a story for a length even longer than the original piece.

Hamish McKenzie

Hamish McKenzie is a Baltimore-based reporter for PandoDaily who covers media, politics, and international startups. His first name is pronounced "hey-mish" and you can follow him on Twitter.