Dixon explained the difference between consumer Web startups and enterprise companies, discussed technology’s shift from Silicon Valley to “application cities” like New York and Los Angeles, offered his perspective on bitcoin and how the press often “misframes” the technology-slash-currency, and why it’s important for venture capitalists who don’t live in the Valley to build a community through blogging.

The full interview is available for streaming below. We’d like to thank Gravity for sponsoring, and Projective Space for hosting, last night’s event.

(Disclosure: Dixon is a personal investor in PandoDaily and is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz; Jeff Jordan and Marc Andreessen, who also invested personally in PandoDaily, are also partners at the firm.)

Nathaniel Mott

Nathaniel Mott is a staff writer for PandoDaily, covering startups and technology from New York.

Could consumers learn to love a virtual currency favored mostly by venture capitalists, the black market, libertarians, and engineers? An increasing number of businesses, from restaurants and bars to WordPress and OKCupid, are betting that the answer is “yes” by announcing that they will allow customers to pay using bitcoin, the ever-scandalous virtual currency that has yet to cede the hype cycle to a new topic du jour. Now the only problem is figuring out how to get bitcoin into the hands of the masses.

The saying “money doesn’t grow on trees” is especially applicable to bitcoin. Anyone wishing to use the virtual currency must either “mine” their own — which can take quite a while, and is likely beyond the average person’s technological capabilities — or purchase bitcoins from an exchange service. That can be expensive and, as regulators start to examine these exchanges, increasingly frustrating.

Perk, a loyalty and rewards startup that launched its own, custom-built Web browser in April, wants to make it easier for the average person to experiment with bitcoin by offering the virtual currency to users as part of its rewards platform. The feature, developed in partnership with “bitcoin made easy” startup Coinbase, will put bitcoin on the same level as Starbucks gift cards, iPads, and other mainstream products. Welcome to the consumerization of bitcoin.

Other companies are “accepting bitcoin for a service,” says Perk co-founder and COO Adam Salamon. “We want to flip the coin — literally –and do it the other way around, where instead of accepting bitcoin for a service we’re rewarding bitcoin for an action.” (Ah, bitcoin humor.) This, Salamon says, should allow people interested in bitcoin who are unwilling to purchase their own bitcoins due to the currency’s boom-and-bust nature to at least experience bitcoin for themselves.

Bitcoin’s expansion from the insular network of technologically-savvy early adopters who see the currency almost as some form of religion into the consumer realm is less exciting than its constant value change, the scandals and schemes of some of its supporting companies and users, or the potential regulatory crackdown on a currency designed specifically to evade any single entity’s control. But it’s probably going to be good for the currency in the long-term. What good is a coin, virtual or otherwise, if only a tiny number of people are willing to spend or accept it?

Nathaniel Mott

Nathaniel Mott is a staff writer for PandoDaily, covering startups and technology from New York.

It’s hard to tell now, but there was a time — just a few years ago, actually — when the consumer Internet wasn’t seen as a nascent industry just waiting to morph into the menagerie of photo-sharing, social networking, and casual gaming startups we have today. A time when, according to Andreessen Horowitz partner Chris Dixon, people would “literally laugh in your face if you didn’t think that the Internet was stupid.”

Before the Google IPO, Dixon said, the consumer Web was seen as something that would end up something like air travel — a market where a few people might compete but no one would actually make any money. Then, once the search company showed that there might be a little bit of cash available to consumer software makers, the industry started to grow and expand.

“It’s a really different climate now, on the consumer side especially, because there’s so much noise. Back then the supply and demand was out of whack — there was a lot of demand pent up, but there wasn’t enough supply to keep up,” Dixon said. “One of the challenges now is that consumer tech is really good. You go home. You use your iPad. You check Gmail and your Twitter, and you look and everything in the world is really great… It’s just harder to say ‘Let’s take something and make it five times better.’”

Yes, you read that right: One of the biggest problems consumer Web companies face is that everything is just so much better than it used to be. On the list of problems most people would consider “good to have” (which is kinda asinine, given that no problem is really good to have, but whatever) high quality would probably be somewhere near the top.

Enterprise companies have an entirely different set of problems, Dixon said. Where consumer Web companies are forced to compete with their own success and users’ attention spans — “competing against the person,” as Dixon put it — enterprise companies have to compete in a cutthroat market.

Many enterprise startups try to emulate the business model of companies like Box or Yammer, Dixon said, relying on lower-level engineers adopting a problem and then pushing it up the ranks until everyone at a company uses a tool without some decree from the corner office. “That can work in terms of getting some traction,” Dixon said. “But the way that enterprise companies work today, you still need to get a sales force and to get a million-dollar check, which is how businesses actually get to scale.”

It isn’t enough to have a good enterprise product; companies “basically need to become a political campaign” with sales people who act as “political operatives,” Dixon said. Consumer companies are competing with the quality and scope of their competition; enterprise companies are competing with zealous salespeople, stodgy executives, and the category’s arcane customs.

[Disclosure: In addition to being a personal investor in PandoDaily, Dixon is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, the partners of which Marc Andreessen and Jeff Jordan are also personal investors.]

Nathaniel Mott

Nathaniel Mott is a staff writer for PandoDaily, covering startups and technology from New York.

Hardware is becoming an increasingly important aspect of traditionally software-focused companies. Microsoft and Google have both introduced their own hardware over the last year, with the Surface tablets and Chromebook Pixel; Square recently announced the Square Stand, which turns an iPad into a cash register; and Adobe announced its own stylus and a “smart ruler” around the same time it said that its design products would only be available by subscription.

It’s doubtful that any of these companies got into the hardware business just for kicks; despite lower barriers to the hardware business, entering the physical realm is still a challenge. But why, then, are these companies building their own hardware even as they work to increase software’s role in our everyday lives? The answer, it seems, is that hardware is the best advertising platform available for their software.

Take the Surface tablets, for example. Microsoft is said to have sold a scant 900,000 units since the Surface RT was released in October 2012 — hardly a knock-out product that could turn Microsoft into a devices and services company.

But that hasn’t changed Microsoft’s commitment to hardware, with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer recently telling MIT Technology Review that he is “super-glad we did Surface,” adding that “I think it is important—and not just for Microsoft, but for the entire Windows ecosystem—to see integrated hardware and software.” Surface is both a shift in Microsoft’s strategy and an attempt to show consumers and manufacturers that Windows is meant for more than bargain-bin hardware.

Google is doing something similar with the Chromebook Pixel and the Nexus-branded devices it co-develops with hardware partners. The Pixel is the first high-end computer to operate Google’s Chrome OS, and the first step towards creating a true Chrome OS ecosystem. And the Nexus products allow Google to demonstrate the virtues of stock Android, allowing the mobile operating system to reach consumers without being marred by manufacturers’ custom skins.

Sundar Pichai, Google’s senior vice president of Chrome, Apps, and Android, recently told Wired that “Any hardware projects we do [at Google] will be to push the ecosystem forward.” Even though Google is emphasizing hardware more than it ever has in the past, what with Glass, the Chromebook Pixel, the Nexus line, and, potentially, its own smartwatch, these efforts are meant to improve Google’s ability to provide users with information (and ads).

The company underscored hardware’s position in its future during the Google I/O keynote yesterday, where the only hardware-related news involved giving free Chromebook Pixel computers to attendees and bringing a “Nexus user experience” to the Samsung Galaxy S4.

And then there’s Square, the payments company that has had a tumultuous relationship with hardware from the beginning. Square first attracted attention due to its Card Reader, a thumbnail-sized device that took advantage of smartphones’ headphone jacks to simplify credit card-based payments. Then, once it had users’ financial information, it introduced Square Wallet (formerly Card Case and Pay with Square), which promised to allow users to pay with nothing but their faces.

Wallet has largely failed to gain traction, and has suffered from a disastrous rollout at Starbucks. Square simplified hardware so that it could kill it; failing that, it’s decided to “reinvent” the cash register… again. The original Card Reader showed consumers and businesses alike that Square is more convenient than traditional payments processors; maybe the Square Stand can keep those people hooked while Square continues to experiment and try to find ways to do away with hardware completely. (Or, at least, getting rid of registers and fumbling with cash or credit cards — credit cards are probably here to stay, at least in some form.)

Adobe’s stylus and smart ruler — dubbed the Mighty and Napoleon, respectively — will likely serve as free marketing for the company’s tablet applications. Adobe has a long history of producing desktop applications; now that the world is shifting towards tablets and smartphones as the main computers in many people’s lives, Adobe needs to show that it can survive the shift to touch-screens as well. Developing hardware that only works (or, at least, works best) when paired with an Adobe-made app is a fine way to realize that goal.

We reported yesterday on Rishad Tobaccowala’s claim that “Commerce has become marketing and marketing has become commerce,” which is best summarized as turning every sale into a potential advertisement for a company’s product — “closing the loop,” as my colleague Erin Griffith put it.

Microsoft, Google, Square, Adobe, and probably countless others are taking that a step further and developing entire products that exist largely so their software can attract more attention. Hardware is, at least for these companies, a way to ensure that software continues to consume the world, of showing consumers, manufacturers, and businesses what software is capable of when it’s housed in complementary hardware.

[Image courtesy Stratageme.com]

Nathaniel Mott

Nathaniel Mott is a staff writer for PandoDaily, covering startups and technology from New York.

Berg, a London-based design consultancy that has worked with Nokia, Twitter, and the BBC, among others, is today announcing the Berg Cloud Sandbox, a platform meant to make it easier for companies to experiment with connected devices and services by covering an entire campus to the Berg Cloud platform. Fabrica, an Italy-based communications research center, will be the first company to roll Sandbox out on its campus.

Sandbox allows prototype devices to connect to an Arduino — an open-source prototyping platform favored by hobbyists and professionals alike — and the Berg Cloud, an “operating system” for connected devices first demonstrated with Berg’s Twitter-enabled cuckoo clock and the Little Printer, a small device that bridges the physical and digital worlds by way of receipt tape.

But that is only part of Berg’s goal for Sandbox. The other part, which will be much trickier than connecting a large area to a cloud platform, is convincing companies that utilize Sandbox to “share their learnings,” as Berg CEO Matt Webb puts it. ”That’s the thing we’re really kind of missing. Berg has spent a lot of time doing R&D with big companies, and what we find is that doing R&D needs to be more accessible and more lightweight,” Webb says. “When different organizations are doing research in the same areas we should really link those people up so they can learn from each other.”

Sandbox, then, is meant to further connected devices and the Internet of Things by encouraging companies to share their findings with one another. This is akin to software developers sharing code so that others don’t have to reinvent the metaphorical wheel, or hardware companies allowing others to use designs and technology deemed standards-essential.

Other organizations, such as the Internet of Things Consortium, have already attempted to convince connected device makers to communicate with each other — the difference with Sandbox, Webb says, is that Berg is supplying the infrastructure to develop these products as well as the place they may share information. It’s a bit like Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC), which is important not just because it often serves as a launchpad for new products and services, but because it encourages the people working in Apple’s ecosystem to communicate with Apple and their peers.

“Nobody really knows what connected products are going to do. We’ve kinda got some ideas,” Webb says, citing Amazon’s Kindle and GlowCap, which reminds people to take their medicines. But if someone wanted to make a connected dishwasher, he adds, most companies wouldn’t know quite what that product might look like. ”Without a way to experiment, these companies just really don’t know what to do. So we made Berg Cloud to help them, and hopefully link them up with the people who are really good at experimenting.”

Connected devices are the most exciting when they communicate with one another, coordinating their signals and functions to evolve beyond something that is simply connected to the Internet and into a truly “smart” platform. Sandbox is Berg’s way of saying that the companies making these products would also benefit from sharing information instead of keeping it all to themselves. Connecting the connected device makers, if you will.

Nathaniel Mott

Nathaniel Mott is a staff writer for PandoDaily, covering startups and technology from New York.

Answer. Converse. Anticipate. Those are the verbs that Google believes will lead to “the end of search as we know it.” Google doesn’t want search to be restricted to a sparse landing page and a specific query. It wants search to become something as ubiquitous as oxygen and as powerful as devices that previously existed only in science fiction.

“Like many of you, I was captivated by ‘Star Trek.’ I dreamt of building that computer one day,” said Google’s Amit Singhal during the Google I/O opening keynote. “Little did I know I would grow up to be responsible for building my dream for the entire world.”

Realizing that dream and building a tool that seems like it should only exist in made-up universes requires that Google master those three verbs and continuously rethink the way so many people interact with the Web and all the information it represents.

Which is why the company today announced that Knowledge Graph will begin to answer Google users’ questions before they ask them; that people will be able to converse with Google via the Chrome Web browser as well as iOS and Android devices; and that Google Now, the company’s virtual assistant, is better able to anticipate what users might want to know at any given time.

Voice-activated search coming to the Chrome browser is perhaps the most interesting of today’s search-related announcements. Google Now — or some version of it, anyway — has been rumored to be coming to desktop computers for months, and its addition to Chrome will aid Google’s attempts to become a ubiquitous aspect of users’ lives.

“People communicate with each other by conversation, not by typing keywords — and we’ve been hard at work to make Google understand and answer your questions more like people do,” Singhal writes on the Inside Search blog. This functionality has been available on mobile devices for a while, he adds, and today’s announcement is about bringing the same capability to the desktop.

People are now able to interact with Google simply by saying “Okay Google” and asking a question or giving a command while Chrome is running. (Whether this means that Chrome is always listening and constantly sending data to Google’s servers, or that it will only communicate with Google once that prompt is uttered, wasn’t made clear during the keynote.)

This means that the 750 million people who use Chrome on the desktop or Android and iOS devices will now be able to converse with Google no matter where they are. Google will stop being a destination and will instead act as a user’s always-available connection to all of the Web’s information — or, at least, all of the information Google has collected from the Web.

Nathaniel Mott

Nathaniel Mott is a staff writer for PandoDaily, covering startups and technology from New York.

Apple was incredibly proud of iCloud when it was first announced. The service, which promises to keep users’ documents, photos, and other data in sync across devices, was described by Apple’s executives as “magical” more than once during its unveiling. Finally there was a synchronization service that would, according to Apple, “just work.” But that was 2011 and now, two years later, we know that the only dependable aspect of iCloud is its utter lack of dependability. Despite all of its promise — and the promises, perceived or otherwise, made on its behalf — iCloud is broken.

Now it’s Google’s turn to make the same promises on behalf of its own services. The company has developed tools and services to keep users’ photos, game data, documents, and other data in sync across devices — and it’s doing so for Android, iOS, and the Web, not just its own products.

Google recently combined the free storage it offers to Drive, Gmail, and Google+ users into a single 15-gigabyte-large “bucket.” This will allow users to keep their documents, photos, and email archives in sync across all of their devices without worrying about arbitrary limits placed on each service. Data is no longer attached to specific Google services, it’s simply attached to Google.

And, unlike iCloud, Google isn’t simply storing this data and making it available on other devices. The company announced at the Google I/O developer conference today that photos shared with Google+ can now be edited and enhanced, as well as backed up, with Google-built tools. Google Keep allows Drive users to make their notes and lists available and editable across devices.

Then there are the new games services Google announced today, which promise to keep saved data and facilitate multiplayer gaming via Google’s cloud. This is similar to Apple’s Game Center, a multiplayer gaming service that sometimes works across the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and iCloud, which also promised to keep game data synchronized across devices. The difference between the two? Google’s services aren’t restricted to its own devices.

Apple developed iCloud for people who want to keep data in sync across their iOS and Mac devices. Besides rudimentary photo-sync support on Windows PCs, iCloud doesn’t allow any data in or out from, say, the Web or Android. Anyone wanting to make their data available on all of their devices without being restricted to Apple’s products must turn to other solutions, and that doesn’t seem to be changing any time soon.

Google is different. Despite operating the world’s most popular mobile operating system, Google is keeping data in sync across iOS and the Web instead of restricting its services to the Android ecosystem. Apple develops its best applications for its own devices; some of the best Google apps are found on the iPhone. Google seems to view data the same way it views software — it’s better when it’s everywhere.

Apple failed to deliver on the promise of iCloud. The service is buggy at best and a “developer’s worst nightmare” at worst — and that’s before you consider the lock-in, which is typical Apple but still frustrating. Google is now making similar promises, and doing so without the restrictions inherent to iCloud even if it were operating perfectly. And, given Google’s experience with managing massive amounts of data and shipping online services that, unlike Apple’s, actually work, it’s easy to believe that Google can fix this problem better than Apple has.

That doesn’t mean that Google will succeed where Apple has failed, however. The company’s executives attempted to demonstrate some of the new games services in front of all the developers and members of the press gathered at the Moscone Center; they couldn’t get it to work.

Nathaniel Mott

Nathaniel Mott is a staff writer for PandoDaily, covering startups and technology from New York.

Software breaks all the time. Applications are huge, sprawling lines of code that will almost definitely cause problems for users, whether that manifests as broken text, incessant error messages, or some arcane problem that defies explanation. Vessel, a Hattery-backed service launching in beta today at the Google I/O Developer Sandbox, intends to make it easier for developers to identify — and hopefully solve — those problems.

Vessel allows developers to track bugs, deploy beta software, view crash analytics, and test their applications so that they might be able to ”focus on inventing and building better mobile apps.” The service, like so many others, is available as a freemium product; Vessel charges anywhere from nothing to $180 per month, depending on how many applications and developers are connected to an account.

The service looks like a cross between Google Analytics and what you might expect from a submarine’s navigation system, giving the impression of a bad ’90s film where intrepid coders must find — and destroy, of course — corrupt software threatening the planet. (Or, at least, that’s how I imagine that scenario. I suspect the reality is much more mundane.) It’s meant to serve as a “command center” for developers, so the aesthetic works; Vessel has done an admirable job of cramming a lot of data into an interface that walks the line between too cluttered and too information-light.

Vessel is the latest entrant into an application development market defined by services struggling to combine extensive features with intuitive interfaces. There’s Xamarin, which allows developers to build applications for Windows Phone, Android, and iOS devices from a single codebase; Appboy, which seeks to help developers manage their customers by combining analytics and support features in a single interface; and Sencha, which has built an HTML5 development framework in an attempt to convince developers to build apps and services that will work on any modern platform.

Each of these companies is promising to help developers by allowing them to see more information at once than other products, which might require a lot of information-juggling and multiple services meant to serve closely-related, yet distinct, roles. Whether or not those products — and Vessel especially — will succeed largely depends on developers’ willingness to switch from established services and learn to use an unproven solution.

“We want to take the distraction out of app building,” the Vessel team writes on the company’s blog. Now they’ll just have to see if switching to Vessel is a distraction in itself, and how much time developers are willing to spend waiting to feel like software-killing machines.

Nathaniel Mott

Nathaniel Mott is a staff writer for PandoDaily, covering startups and technology from New York.

Every consumer tech company is in the business of fortune-telling. It is their job to peer into the crystal ball to identify — and, hopefully, build — the future. That said, BlackBerry’s crystal ball must be a funhouse mirror. During its BlackBerry Live 2013 keynote, the company demonstrated its ability to be both prescient and totally oblivious, surprisingly self-aware and ignorant of today’s technology market.

Besides the typical pandering and borderline-creepiness now associated with BlackBerry’s keynotes, today’s event featured some interesting products and technologies marred by an almost painful lack of showmanship or foresight.

Take, for example, the company’s product demos and announcements. Minutes after announcing the BlackBerry Q5, a low-end, QWERTY-equipped device, the company demonstrated its in-car technology that allows drivers and passengers to video conference with others. The BlackBerry Q5 is meant for consumers in emerging markets, and will almost surely be priced as such; a pre-owned Bentley Continental GT, the car used to demonstrate BlackBerry’s entry into automobile tech, costs more than $100,000.

Or consider BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins’ claim that BlackBerry’s leadership team is truly global, and global creative director Alicia Keys’ announcement that, because there aren’t enough women in leadership positions, BlackBerry will be offering 4-year scholarships to “outstanding women candidates around the world.” Yet the leadership team Heins cites as being truly global consists entirely of old white men. (Not that BlackBerry is the only company guilty of this particular problem.) These scholarships could help the tech industry overcome a past and present dominated by white men, but that doesn’t make Heins’ assertion any less laughable.

Then there’s the news that BlackBerry will be bringing BlackBerry Messenger, a first-party messaging solution that the company says is used to send over 10 billion messages every day, to Android and iOS. The company is hardly the first to turn to messaging this year — the category has grown increasingly popular over the last year — and BlackBerry Messenger’s expansion could help lower BlackBerry’s dependence on its own hardware. It also might have been bigger news a few years ago, before WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and a slew of other apps attracted millions of users uninterested in switching.

BlackBerry is playing catch-up with Apple, Samsung, and Google, and seems to be struggling to reconcile that fact with its former glory. The company’s products no longer have a monopoly on the business elite’s pockets, are no longer representative of true innovations, and are, for all their advances, rooted in the smartphone market of the past.

The company needs to get better at communicating — or even figuring out — what its products are and who they are for before it can cast the perception that it’s left its prime behind. It isn’t enough for BlackBerry to hire Alicia Keys and keep plodding along the same course it has been for the last few years. It’s time for the company to consider what it means to be BlackBerry instead of following the ghost of Research in Motion.

Nathaniel Mott

Nathaniel Mott is a staff writer for PandoDaily, covering startups and technology from New York.

It’s hard to believe, in a Web filled with ads promising “the one tip to losing 20 pounds — fast!” or “the secret to making $100,000 a year in your spare time,” any service or company that promises to help people save money. But that’s exactly what Zact, a virtual network operator piggybacking off Sprint’s national network, is promising to do with its flexible service plans.

Zact is part of ItsOn, a cloud-based service platform that promises to bring smart services to carriers, manufacturers, and consumers. It’s meant as a standalone service — ItsOn co-founder and chief executive Greg Raleigh says that Zact is ItsOn’s attempt to prove that it can “walk the talk” — and as an advertisement for what ItsOn’s platform is capable of.

“The reason we started ItsOn is, we said that we’ve done a great job fixing the connection — the connection is more than 10 times faster than it used to be, and is much more reliable — however the services aren’t great,” Raleigh says, referring to his and co-founder Charles Giancarlo’s work at companies later acquired by Cisco and Qualcomm.

Zact offers customers granular control over their service plans, allowing them to change the amount of voice minutes, text messages, or data usage they and others on their plan are able to access at any time. Like Ting, another virtual network operator on Sprint’s network that started a $100,000 fund to pay customers’ early termination fees with other carriers earlier this year, Zact promises to let customers pay for what they use, not what they might use.

“We want to provide a beacon for the world to show a better model that’s better for costumers and better for carriers,” Raleigh says. The switch to these granular controls, or “smart services” is coming soon, he adds. ”It’s just a matter of when, not if. Now that we’ve come to market and we’re showing the world how this works… I don’t think it’s three years off for everyone doing this kind of thing.”

Whether that’s accurate or not depends largely on consumers’ willingness to pay for unsubsidized devices — a problem that many no-contract services face — and carriers’ ability to adapt to a changing technological climate. Raleigh argues that carriers would implement smart services if they weren’t using 25-year-old technology made for voice calls, not massive amounts of data usage. (I argue that carriers are just fine with making consumers pay for shit they don’t use, defending their consciences with not-so-metaphorical buckets of cash.)

The thing that might truly spur change is the increasing number of devices consumers want to connect to the Internet. It’s no longer enough to have wireless data available on a smartphone; now it needs to be available on a tablet, hotspot, and, preferably, computer and game console as well. Current services, which make it horrendously difficult to manage — or afford — so many connected devices will either force carriers to leave potential business untouched or change their operations.

“Fundamentally, when Charlie and I started the company, we said: Look. The world is headed for a train wreck. Carriers are talking about five or six people in a family group having devices, and each one having five to 10 devices connected to the network,” Raleigh says. “It’s too cumbersome to try and make a phone call, go to a store, or go to a website to do this stuff. It has to be like the air we breathe and the water we drink.”

(Disclosure: ItsOn is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, whose Marc Andreessen, Jeff Jordan, and Chris Dixon are personal investors in PandoDaily, and SV Angel, which is also an investor in PandoDaily.)

Nathaniel Mott

Nathaniel Mott is a staff writer for PandoDaily, covering startups and technology from New York.