But online shoppers won’t have to pay sales tax just yet. The measure — which got 69 yes votes and 27 no votes in the Senate — next goes to the House of Representatives, where anti-tax sentiment among many Republicans may make it more difficult to pass.

Supporters of the legislation, named the Marketplace Fairness Act in the Senate, say it is about tax fairness and that it isn’t a tax increase.

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The European Commission said Motorola’s actions ultimately harmed consumers, after the company sought court injunctions against Apple over the use of its patents, instead of properly licensing the technology to its rival. Motorola now has eight weeks to reply to the so-called statement of objections.

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But it’s not all road rage and mayhem. Devour has posted a compilation of the softer side of Russia viewed from the dashboard — strangers lending a hand to fellow drivers, helping seniors and babies out of harm’s way and stopping so cats and other creatures can cross the road safely. Definitely worth watching, even if you have to mute the orchestral soundtrack. (via Kottke)

Gavin Andresen, the 46-year-old lead software developer for the Bitcoin project, is eager to find the answer. “I’m hoping to learn,” he says, whether “a nongovernmental global currency” is possible.

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And in a spot-on send-up of the new technology’s awkwardness, Fred Armisen returned to “Saturday Night Live” last night as tech blogger Randall Meeks, who brought his brand-new Glass to Weekend Update to show host Seth Meyers how “discreetly” they can be used in regular conversation. Instead, his attempts to demo Glass’s head gestures and voice commands ended up demonstrating a kind of tech-induced Tourette’s Syndrome.

Arik Hesseldahl talked about the growing BYOD trend on Southern California Public Radio KPCC, Take Two.

Peter Kafka joined Brian Lehrer on his popular CUNY TV show to talk about Aereo and cable TV (Peter’s segment starts at about 29:30).

And Liz Gannes discussed Google Now for iOS on both American Public Media’s Marketplace (audio) and WSJ’s Digits (video).

The holiday was first celebrated in 2011, but the phrase and the date itself has an interesting history — on May 4, 1979, Margaret Thatcher became England’s first woman prime minister, and the Conservative Party placed an ad in the London Evening News that read “May the Fourth Be With You, Maggie. Congratulations.”

The date is also shared by MCA Day, a celebration of the life of Beastie Boy Adam Yauch, who died one year ago today, and by Free Comic Book Day. It is not, however, shared by Star Wars Day for the San Francisco Giants, George Lucas’s hometown team — that’s on September 8.

Below, some of the best memes of the day, plus a Star Wars Day attack ad, paid for by the Emperor’s Committee to Destroy May the Fourth:

In December, Clearwire’s majority owner, Sprint, offered to buy the rest of Clearwire that it doesn’t own for $2.2 billion, or $2.97 a share. The next month, satellite TV company Dish Network Corp. bid $3.30 a share, and Clearwire shares have traded well above the Sprint offer since. Dish since has bid for the entirety of Sprint, putting its Clearwire bid in question.

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iPad image copyright Skylines

Napster was the first of its kind, providing music fans with easy and free access to albums and tracks and giving them a reason to avoid buying expensive CDs — the lifeblood of the music industry’s business. The ability to share files around the globe reduced the barriers to music discovery and allowed Napster users to find new artists and songs in ways never imagined. It was a truly disruptive service, and it scared the hell out of the music industry.

Instead of embracing the massive adoption of this new service, finding a solution to accommodate the changing landscape or harnessing Napster as a future platform, the music industry held onto its rigid CD-based business, prayed that file sharing would go away and eventually tore Napster down.

Today, you can draw several parallels between the music industry in the late ’90s and early 2000s and the TV industry today. Viewing habits are changing. Just like music in the early 2000s when young adults started turning away from physical media and opting for singles versus complete albums, viewers are “tuning in” very differently to movies and TV programming.

Today, if Netflix were part of a cable package, it would be one of the top viewed networks, according to a Facebook post from CEO Reed Hastings. Meanwhile, Nielsen recently reported that cable cutting is up by 150 percent since 2007, marking a significant shift in viewer behavior. Additionally, Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia is now assuming the role of Shawn Fanning by intimidating the cable companies with a disruptive service that lets viewers access broadcast programs at a much lower cost than cable packages.

But, instead of adapting to changing viewer behavior, the cable companies, Hollywood and broadcasters are holding onto old business models for dear life and calling the lawyers. Sound familiar?

Avoiding a Bad Sequel: Lessons for the TV Industry

Ignoring or fighting digital consumer behavior is a recipe for disaster — resulting in rejection faster than an unpalatable creation by a contestant on Hell’s Kitchen. It’s time for TV broadcasters, content creators and advertisers to innovate their businesses instead of maintaining existing models through threats and litigation.

First, they need to understand that their viewers are setting the rules and defining the life expectancy of their programming and services. They will decide your fate — not you. Consider the following:

• You Can’t Take Content Away: The outdated model based on controlling distribution is dying. If you force it underground — that is, “illegal streams and downloads” — you’ve lost the battle.
• Adapt or Die: The millennial generation is addicted to YouTube, on-demand and streaming services. They no longer tune in at a specific time and date, and are increasingly shying away from paying for premium cable bundles. With filmmakers and producers spending the time and resources to make great TV programing, like “Homeland,” “Girls” and “Mad Men,” delivery methods should be figured out to get these shows to viewers who won’t pay $150 per month in subscription fees.
• Open the Windows: The “distribution window” is used by Hollywood to define how long a VOD and streaming service can distribute movies and TV programming. The problem? If the window for season one of “Downton Abbey” is about to close from Netflix or your cable provider, and you haven’t watched any of the episodes, you better call in sick to work to get your fill of the Granthams and the Crawleys, or miss the entire season altogether.
• Stop Explaining Business Models: Movie and TV viewers don’t give a sh*t about business models. They just want to watch their favorite shows — whenever and wherever they choose. The music industry followed the same pattern in the early 2000s, explaining why the economics of music streaming and downloads would not support artists and the industry. Guess who won?
• Open Up to Developers: Don’t assume innovation will only come from within your organization. By tapping the developer community, you will be able to move faster and find new ways to use or distribute content, which could result in new monetization strategies. Some of the more forward-thinking media properties, including ESPN, are already doing this, allowing developers to hack ad strategies and sports data.
• Rethink Discovery: As video distribution evolves, there needs to be a corresponding evolution in how people discover new movies and TV programming. If viewers are paying hefty monthly subscriptions (which today support a lot of what they don’t watch), it is critical to provide paths to find what they really want to watch. The current TV guides embedded in our set-top boxes have to be completely rethought.
• Reinvent Measurement: We still depend on a small sample of viewers to rate the popularity of programs and we base all advertising decisions on this data. However, the technology to measure real time usage inside the TV exists today and has the potential to enable more precise measurement and better targeting of advertising.

The TV industry’s fate is as much in the hands of viewers as the next American Idol. Not only accepting, but also realizing that TV programs and movies are easily accessible via proliferating distribution channels such as Netflix and Aereo, the industry can turn the tables and find opportunities with additional platforms and options to reach viewers for their eyeballs and spending. Most importantly, cable, broadcasters and Hollywood have the opportunity to move forward and determine better and more efficient business models to thrive.

Forward-looking networks like HBO have slowly worked toward a compromise by offering specialized content that depends on the Pay-TV ecosystem. However, with cord-cutting slowly beginning to eat into cable subscriptions, the HBOs of the world need to take distribution models a step further and offer everything streaming with direct-to-consumer subscription models, or risk losing their next core audience. If TV viewers are willing to pay for subscription streaming services, then the industry needs to jump on that bandwagon.

Rewriting the Ending: To Be Continued

The nature of distributing media is evolving, and the music industry learned the hard way as it struggled to adapt to a new generation of music fans. More than 10 years after the music industry forced Napster to tear down its P2P platform, the same industry has embraced free, ad-supported services from Spotify, Rhapsody, Deezer and others. In fact, this year marked the first time that the music industry made a profit since 1999.

Instead of struggling against the Internet Age and the connected world, broadcasters, cable companies and Hollywood can capitalize on the audience’s need to enjoy what they have to offer — great TV programming. Content will always be king and the industry creates a tremendous amount of really compelling material. It just needs to keep the crime scenes to “Law & Order” and save the video star by taking a cue from music’s past.

As president of Gracenote, Stephen White has played a critical role in shaping the company into a digital entertainment leader. He spearheaded the development of Gracenote technologies for top entertainment platforms and brands, including Apple, Ford and Sony. Today, he oversees all company strategy and operations, and is responsible for growing Gracenote’s core business and vision.

Alibaba closed the loan deal on April 30, the person said. The nine banks providing the loan are Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd., Credit Suisse Group AG, Citigroup Inc., Deutsche Bank AG, DBS Group Holdings Ltd., HSBC Holdings PLC, J.P. Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley MS and Mizuho Corporate Bank Ltd., the person said.

The financing comprises three tranches: a $2.5 billion three-year term loan, a $4 billion five-year term loan and a $1.5 billion three-year revolving credit facility, the person said.

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Blackboard image copyright Picsfive

Videoconferencing has truly become a part of our daily lives. Technologies such as Apple’s FaceTime or Google Hangouts are easy to set up and use, and are affordable at the consumer level — so much so that video calling is now part of the daily norm for a rapidly growing number of people. It’s this kind of simplicity that explains how and why video has found its way not only into everyday life but also areas like business and education.

Cost and cumbersome requirements are no longer barriers. Today, it seems as if every company I talk to already has, or is starting to, use videoconferencing — making the question not if, but what, video solution a company will implement. When making that choice, simplicity is and will continue to be the key for those companies.

Organizations are looking to implement solutions that are two things: Intuitive and obvious. Which is why, looking back to the fireside chat, I appreciate systems like the one from Avaya that can be launched with a single click from any device with a Web browser, or by simply dragging and dropping participants into a conference. Ease of use is paramount. Location has become irrelevant. Now we can include people on a discussion via their smartphones with minimal difficulty. That is the difference.

Of course there are still challenges, but ultimately the technology is finally here, and bridging numerous gaps in the collaboration needs for enterprises.

What’s still missing?

All too often, technology does not cater to the everyday user. Owner’s manuals are too complex; my guess is that most people simply do not use them. The result is that people hardly know how to use their own technology.

I bought a garage door recently. The manuals were difficult to follow, so I finally went online and found a nice video that taught me how to program it. Things like this show how video instruction can be extremely helpful and a great supplement to traditional methods.

Technology for the masses, and the classes

People need better education, and technology should help with that. This is an absolute passion of mine, and one that I have paid close attention to for many years. I always believed computers were going to be able to do great things for learning — and they have, but there’s more to come and still farther to go.

Today, schools with BYOD programs or solutions for providing devices to students are encouraging collaboration with students, teachers, and even professionals — right in the classroom. It’s a real-time, dynamic educational environment, enabled by technology. This instant exchange and feedback model is much more invigorating and conducive to true education and understanding of the world. What a change from the traditional, deskbound, blanket curriculum that forces every student into the same mold.

I have always also wondered: What if a computer could be a teacher? The ability to have one-on-one interaction with dynamically aware computers could completely revolutionize the way we learn. We may not be there yet. Computers still can’t actively engage and recognize emotions and facial expressions, which would be key. However, collaborative and video technologies in the classroom are allowing students to receive individualized attention and learn at their own pace while being actually engaged.

In the modern mobile world, dreams can quickly become realities, due to our ability to instantly connect with other people and their ideas. That spontaneity is due to the availability and growth of collaboration technologies in everyday life, in the classroom and in the workplace. That is where the future of video and mobile collaboration has arrived.

Steve Wozniak co-founded Apple Computer Inc. with Steve Jobs in 1976. After leaving Apple in 1985, Wozniak was involved in various business and philanthropic ventures, focusing primarily on computer capabilities in schools and stressing hands-on learning and encouraging creativity for students. Making significant investments of both his time and resources in education, he “adopted” the Los Gatos School District, providing students and teachers with hands-on teaching and donations of state-of-the-art technology equipment. He founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and was the founding sponsor of the Tech Museum, Silicon Valley Ballet and Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose. Wozniak currently serves as chief scientist for Fusion-io.

Sen. Lindsay Graham just told Fox News that the reason the FBI never realized that Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev went to Russia in 2011 is that “when he got on the Aeroflot plane, they misspelled his name, so it never went into the system that he actually went to Russia.” Meanwhile, the Reinhart-Rogoff paper that has been a catalyst for government austerity policies worldwide since 2010 has, in fact, accidentally left out several countries’ worth of critical data in Excel.

As one blogger sums up scathingly: “One of the core empirical points providing the intellectual foundation for the global move to austerity in the early 2010s was based on someone accidentally not updating a row formula in Excel.”

Taken together, these factors offer a critical lesson here about the power and limits of Big Data today. In both scenarios, data management tools (i.e., the FBI’s systems and Excel) were undone by fairly simple errors: In one situation, a misspelling; in another, a failure to code a spreadsheet properly. And in both scenarios, the results were dire — an awful tragedy, and a potentially misdirected government economic policy in the midst of a recession.

As someone who spends day and night thinking through data management and workflow, these two stories lead me to three observations:

• As a society, we’re hugely reliant on data management platforms for our most critical information.
• Our core data platforms often aren’t set up to handle human error, from basic coding flaws to spelling mistakes.
• The wealth of data in our data tools can mask that human error. Consider: The Reinhart-Rogoff study examined “new data on forty-four countries spanning about two hundred years” with “over 3,700 annual observations covering a wide range of political systems, institutions, exchange rate arrangements, and historic circumstances.”

In such a wide sea of data, a few lines of code can be very easy to overlook, even if they have strong ramifications for analysis.

There are lots of things to take away from these three points, but I’ll just focus on one: The promise of Big Data is that it can make everyday processes — from critical analyses to mundane tasks — work smarter through data intelligence. Ultimately, all that data management translates into an economy and society that lets machines handle the minutiae as humans think through the larger picture.

To a large extent, that vision is already here. But at the same time, more human/data interaction means a lot more room for error (and inefficiency) around increasingly critical data sets — which, as we’ve seen, can have very serious results. Which means that, if we want to make the reality of Big Data match the dream, we need to spend serious time around providing usability that guides human users in the best way to engage with the data, and automation that takes human interaction (and human error) out of the picture for a lot of the basic calculations and tasks — and for some of the complicated ones, too.

If Big Data can’t fit hand-in-glove with usability and workflow, a lot of the promise of big data will be empty data crunching. That’s not just a problem for getting where we want to be in the evolution of computing. It’s a situation that can lead to bad data management — which translates into bad economics and, sometimes, far worse.

Bill Wise is CEO of Mediaocean. You can follow him on twitter at @billwise.

Image copyright Laralova

Professor Lyons’s fundamental mistake was to conflate opposition to data caps with opposition to price discrimination more generally. Price discrimination in broadband pricing is a positive phenomenon. It allows ISPs to create different pricing packages that appeal to different types of customers — from those heavy gamers to the grandmother who only checks her email. My organization, Public Knowledge, does not oppose the idea of price discrimination, and I am not aware of any of our allies that do either. But price discrimination does not require using data caps. And the alternative to data caps is not one price for everyone.

How can I be so sure? Because ISPs impose price discrimination today using speed tiers. And it turns out that speed tiers have a number of positive attributes that data caps lack.

Most people understand speed. While they may not know how many megabytes are in a gigabyte, even the emailing grandma knows that a page that does not load very quickly or a video that constantly buffers is because of a slow Internet connection.

Furthermore, customers realize that their connection is too slow while they are using the Internet. When the video buffers or the page is slow they can ponder, at that very moment, if the delay is annoying enough to justify paying for a faster tier. With monthly caps, a user gets an alert and then needs to reconstruct days, weeks, or even a month’s worth of usage to try to determine what they were doing to get them close to the cap. Then they need to decide if it is worth paying extra to be able to do it again in the future.

Finally, speed tiers are a “gentle” signal to consumers. If your Internet connection is not fast enough, the worst thing that happens is that things happen a bit too slowly for your liking. Go over your data cap and you could be on the hook for significant overage fees.

The gentle nature of speed-based tiers fuel a virtuous cycle. Exploration leads to discovery, which leads to decisions to purchase faster tiers. These purchases provide capital to invest in the network, which in turn brings faster service for everyone. This increased speed fuels even more exploration, which starts the cycle all over again.

In contrast, data-based tiers incentivize sticking to what you know, avoiding trying new things that could cost you overage fees. This is a recipe for stagnation.

But what about the idea that caps are set so high that only those crazy early adopters would ever hit them? History tells us that today’s early adopters are tomorrow’s average user. There was a time when all sorts of today’s common Internet activities — VOIP phone calls, streaming videos, uploading and sharing images — were on the cutting edge. There is no clear mechanism that would force caps to increase over time. That means that caps that appear high today will become problems tomorrow. Unless, of course, people are so worried about their cap that they never try anything new.

And this avoidance of new things highlights real competitive concerns. A 300GB cap may sound like a lot (assuming you are the type of person who even knows what a GB is, and what you could do with 300 of them) until you think about making use of it. Using Comcast’s own assumptions, we have calculated that switching from Comcast cable to an all-HD online video competitor would require 648GB per month. And that’s before you use your Internet connection for anything else. When viewed in that context, these caps are not just about targeting individual competitors. Instead, they target competition itself.

Of course, antitrust law has a role in instances where incumbents are using data caps on the Internet service they offer in order to protect their cable service. But it is not the only answer. Antitrust law does a great job when there is evidence of collusion and price fixing, but less of a good job when incumbents take steps to exclude new competitors. And antitrust alone does not have tools to address situations where incumbents move to adopt a pricing strategy that confuses consumers and slows innovation in the wider economy.

Forcing us to decide between data caps and a one-price-fits-all, dilapidated broadband network is a false strategy. There are ways to create a sustainable broadband price structure that fuels network investment and larger innovation in our economy without resorting to a model that encourages consumers to over-buy and under-use data. If Internet pricing really is the next policy frontier, our first step should be to make sure we understand what we are actually debating.

Michael Weinberg is the vice president at Public Knowledge. Michael primarily focuses on copyright, issues before the FCC and emerging technologies like 3-D printing.

Image copyright LHF Graphics

Okay, so what? Companies are built on people. That’s nothing groundbreaking. But in the startup world of Silicon Valley, where we’re experiencing the highest annual employment growth in more than a decade, we spend more time talking and writing about the product and than thinking about how we can attract and retain talent.

To be fair, it’s hard to avoid hearing about the perks at gigantic companies like Google, Apple, Facebook and Twitter. But most startups can’t offer high salaries, luxury buses, catered meals and on-site laundry services to entice and maintain the most talented workers.

Startups can, however, entice them with vision, responsibility and recognition. And once you have the right people in place, all it takes is a little bit of structure to build and maintain the developer dream team.

Who needs free lunch when you have inspiration?
Before founding a startup, I worked as a medical researcher, and if I learned one thing while in medicine, it’s that scientists don’t work in a lab to sequence DNA. They work in the lab to cure cancer.

Doctors give up lunches, time with their families, sleep and whatever else they could be doing during the day and night for even the slightest breakthrough. They give their time and energy because they’re inspired by the purpose.

We might not be so directly curing cancer in the IT industry, but we can affect the technology that helps a doctor make a breakthrough. Because after all, it’s technology experts who built the nanotechnology that enables earlier cancer detection and the identity management solution that protects a cancer research company’s patients.

Too often in the IT industry we focus on technology and tools instead of their higher purpose and relationship to the rest of the world. Giving away free meals might seem nice, but the real key to attracting and retaining talent is that you must give them a higher purpose than the hammer that they’re swinging.

Recognition shouldn’t always be monetary
In addition to providing a purpose, you have to give your employees recognition. There are all types of potential recognition: raises, promotions, shout-outs in company meetings and yearly awards, to name a few. Although employers often motivate their employees with lofty titles, my advice is to put the emphasis elsewhere.

The truth is, there’s always someone who can offer your engineers a higher salary or a fancier title. But no matter how high the salary or lofty the title, positive reinforcement and strong connections are often the things that build loyalty and create a strong community, and that’s ultimately more meaningful.

So if personal recognition through great work is as important as a salary, there’s no need for titles. I would abandon them completely if I could, because in my experience, the best policy is to let compensation and ownership reflect importance and contribution.

And once you place importance on ownership, you should encourage your engineers and technical experts to speak at conferences, teach classes, blog, write whitepapers — do anything more than just write patents. Let them be recognized (and perhaps even become tech celebrities) and known in their respective fields and they’ll become advocates for your company more than if they were to brag about their high salaries or fancy titles.

You need a captain for more than the coin toss
As a founder, CEO, CTO or VP of engineering, it’s your job to provide your employees with the vision and recognition necessary to inspire them in their day-to-day work.

Whether or not you established the company in question, if you’re in charge of a developer team, they’ll follow your lead. If you stay in your office all day, only responding to a select few emails, engaging with a couple of your coworkers or joining the executive meetings when the biggest decisions are at stake, you won’t inspire.

Teams need a captain for more than just the coin toss. They need their best player, too. So if you’re technical, work with your engineers to validate and shape their work and dig in if something’s broken. Work hard and share your vision and they’ll imitate you.

Now all you need is a fire team, and a sergeant
Beyond the lofty job of instilling a vision and culture, you need to establish an organizational team structure to ensure your developers are working to the best of their ability.

Teams are essential to everything we do. And whether they’re teams of cells in your body, your March Madness bracket pick or your company’s team of developers, they function well because they’re designed to do so.

I believe team structures have a basic biological aspect to them. When I was younger, I spent some time on military bases and picked up a thing or two. Army fire teams and squads have an almost tribal structure — that’s the reason they work so well. A military fire team is made up of four people: a sergeant and three team members. A squad is a team of two or three fire teams plus a staff sergeant.

As a leader, you need to be capable of running a fire team and a squad. But you should never attempt to run more than a squad. You need to bring on sergeants and staff sergeants, or in our case VPs and managers, to stay organized. It’s true in the military and it’s true in technology and larger business.

When looking for these sergeants and co-captains — or whatever metaphor you choose to use for your co-manager — consider how they’ll be able to inspire, recognize, instill culture and organize.

I, like most founders I know, know that building and scaling core engineering, product and operations teams is nothing like building your post-work intramural kickball team. There’s so much more at stake: Your funders’ investments, your reputation and most full nights of sleep, to name just a few. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t apply the same team mentality in your workplace. If you continuously give your employees a purpose, encourage and recognize them (and organize your management to do the same), then there’s no need to tempt them with an office keg or ping-pong table — those are really just perks, after all.

Jason Hoffman (@jasonh) is the CTO and founder of Joyent. An expert on scalable systems, Hoffman earned his PhD in Molecular Pathology at The Burnham Institute and UCSD School of Medicine, and MS and BS in Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA.

Image copyright YanLev

I often find myself surrounded by strong, intelligent businesswomen who are more than comfortable with tough negotiations. But the truth is that many women are new to the business world, and negotiating equity is often a mystery for even the most experienced of us. It boils down to the fact that many startup founders think they have more equity than they really do.

As more and more women begin to populate CEO and founder-level positions, and we get closer to income equality between genders, I feel it’s increasingly important that we not only understand our merited assets, but more importantly, we learn how to ink them into our contracts upfront.

With this in mind, here are five guidelines that I feel will help ensure the highest possible stake in your company.

1. Fight for the Title You Deserve

   You may have heard that it’s not a good idea to be hung up on a title during negotiations, but in my experience, titles are important. This is especially true in regards to how you are treated as an employee both internally and externally, and they’re important for your next career move as well.

   Your title costs the company nothing. If your role is going to include getting the company on the map, shoot for C-Level or Founding Partner. It doesn’t matter if it’s not your idea. If you have been hired to a) create demand for a new product, b) define a new product or c) turn an idea into a revenue-generating company (or all of the above), then you are absolutely a founding partner.

   If you don’t go for that top title, you are leaving room for someone else to swoop in and nab it. I can’t tell you how many times this has happened to entrepreneurs I know (men and women).

   You can point out that with a woman on board at a founding level, the company may in fact be in a better position for success. A study released last April shows that companies that have more diverse teams (gender-wise as well as cultural) in their C-Level and executive roles perform notably better financially and on equity returns.

   Once you’ve defined your value in the company and your business card reflects that, confidence to negotiate a higher financial stake in the company will come much more easily.

2. Up the Salary Ante With Raises and Bonuses Tied to Performance

   Many times when negotiating at a startup, particularly prior to Series A, you will be told they can’t pay you at market rate, but that you’ll be given equity to make up for it. That may be true at the time you start, but it shouldn’t remain true throughout your employment.

   Begin negotiating pre-A to get you where you want to be post-A. If you are willing to put skin in the game and take a risk in joining a startup, you should also benefit along the way by virtue of your performance. So one way to get to your market rate is to take a lower base salary, but request additional equity grants upon completion of specific (and clearly defined) objectives throughout your employment. This is a great way to pull in more equity at a later date and also keep you motivated to hit pre-defined milestones. There’s less risk for both of you in this case.

3. Ask for Earlier Vesting Shares and Options

   Vesting arrangements and rights can also be a little tricky to navigate within a startup.

   The industry standard vesting period is four years, with a one-year cliff. The cliff means you are waiting a full year for a percentage of equity to vest (typically 25 percent), and if you leave before one year is up you get zip. Generally after the cliff, you vest on a monthly or quarterly basis for the remaining three years.

   Four-year vesting is not an absolute. Ask for some of your shares to vest earlier, so that you have ownership earlier. I recommend asking for two years post the initial year, meaning after three years your stock is fully vested, rather than four. That ownership is empowering and motivating.

   You should also strive for the ability to “early exercise,” which essentially means you exercise your options prior to vesting. Negotiate a certain percentage of equity to vest early, or start vesting on day one in order to avoid that one-year cliff.

   In my experience, the tax treatment for this is the same as restricted stock, and you’ll only pay on your gains rather than income tax.

4. Don’t Forget About Anti-Dilution Protection

   If you are coming in as a C-level hire, you will be key to any capital raise. Your reputation and experience will be a vital component that VCs will evaluate during their decision to invest. So ask for an anti-dilution clause for, at the very least, the Series A. If you don’t, you’ll be in for an unpleasant surprise post-A. It’s possible to find yourself with only two-thirds (or less) of what you originally thought was your percentage share in the company once you have closed that first round of funding.

   Companies often throw out a share number that sounds appealing, but you really have no way of knowing its true value without some context. Ask for the percentage their number represents out of the total shares outstanding. If they won’t tell you, then it’s not a lot!

   Once your stake in the company is clearly defined, the anti-dilution clause will protect you from getting washed out in every capital raise. It’s not an easy sell, but you can push for it through the first round of funding. You will not get this indefinitely, however.

   If you are joining post-A, ensure your options are on a “fully diluted” cap table, so you know what you are really being offered.

5. Have a Plan for Your Exit Strategy

   As with most phases of the startup life cycle, “the exit,” whether it is yours personally or the exit event of the company, almost never goes as planned. Of course you want (and hope) that everything will be great at your new startup, but the reality is that the startup ecosystem is a landmine for unforeseen events and obstacles. It’s important to protect yourself upfront from events you can’t always predict, like mergers, joint ventures, new management, changes in company direction, the product not working, crazy CEOs and so on.

   You are taking a risk with your career to join a startup, so try and avoid “at will” employment. Establish a minimum term of 6-12 months guaranteed employment or 3-6 months severance.

   If you depart “due to good reason” (for example, an unfavorable change to your job title, compensation or role) before that term is over, you will still get paid your base salary. Also, try to get some percentage of unvested options to vest upon your departure.

   Protect yourself in case you are terminated “without cause,” and negotiate into your contract full or partial acceleration on options as a condition of an early/unforeseen exit.

Keep in mind that it’s likely you won’t get everything you ask for. But if you aim high, you should find yourself in a much better place in terms of equity, incentives and material wealth.

Kathy Leake is co-founder and president of the highly successful intent targeting network, LocalResponse. Kathy comes from a long background in startup entrepreneurship, particularly in the ad tech space (prior to LocalResponse she co-founded Media6Degrees), and as the only woman at the board table for 25+ years, she’s learned a thing or two about tough negotiations and standing up for the title, salary, equity and respect that she deserves.

Image copyright Timur Djafarov

At the basic level, native ads are paid experiences that are complementary to the platform and content in which they are presented. While examples include Sponsored Stories on Facebook or Sponsored Tweets on Twitter, this doesn’t quite do the term justice. Truly native advertising takes things one step further, referring to seamlessly integrating brands into the medium, so much so that the consumer gets more value from the advertising as part of a greater content consumption experience. As Peter Kafka wrote in a recent article, native advertising is about “selling stuff that people want to look at.” This is key to get people to start thinking about brands, without making the ad blatant or disruptive. This can happen on all media from broadcast to digital, print to mobile, using technologies and platforms that engage with native in mind.

With months of speculation, commentary and controversy behind us, it is time to set the record straight. We need not only to reach a consensus about what native actually means, but also strive to help the advertising industry harness the power of this concept to develop compelling experiences that are organic to the content.

If I had it my way, we would only refer to an ad as native if it includes the following:

• The ad is a holistic brand experience specific to the content or medium.
• It is seamless and non-invasive.
• The content of the ad is contextually relevant.
• It is flexible but adheres to the characteristics of the device or screen.

Essentially unexplored, mobile is the next great ad frontier and is where native advertising starts getting really exciting. While most mediums have had years to develop the art of advertising, mobile is still in its infancy. With challenges including small screen size and device/platform fragmentation, there are certainly some hurdles to overcome in order to move beyond the banner and engage with consumers. But mobile devices have quickly become a lifeline for people everywhere — and tapping into the true power of native advertising will be essential to the success of brands from this point on.

There are huge opportunities on mobile to harness that consumer lifeline. Many smartphone users store their lives in their phones. From calendars to social profiles, contacts to photos, brands have the opportunity to add value in the user’s life in real-time through these features, that consumers are actually interacting with. And native ads provide the best platform to leverage these capabilities.

Some of this can be accomplished by pure utility: Creating a branded recipe as part of a cooking app, and enabling consumers to save an ingredient shopping list on their home screen or to easily locate a retailer. But native advertising can also be used to extend the consumer’s focused interest onto a brand.

As an example of a company that has done native advertising justice, Chevrolet recently partnered with Motor Trend to run an extensive, six-part article series — featuring the tech innovation that Chevy is bringing to its vehicles — and was able to place it alongside the Motor Trend news and features that readers are looking for with the Motor Trend app. Chevy was able to offer readers the ability to pin that content/ad experience to their mobile home screens so that they could review it later. By showcasing a seamless app-within-an-app experience and offering a mobile ad that doesn’t bounce you out of the app, as an industry, we just might be able to create advertisements that engage consumers instead of distract them. As a business model, the native environment will also lead to greater engagement and result in more conversions because consumers are impressed and influenced by a truly integrated experience.

Personally, I prefer the term “organic” to “native” because what brands need is a way to offer advertising that is ingrained and complementary to the content consumption experience, and is novel and sophisticated. The mobile platform is ideal for creating a seamless and organic ad experience. When you’re on a desktop computer, you can be doing many other things at once such as looking at various places on a homepage or website. Mobile is different. If you click on a mobile video or engage with a brand experience, you are essentially locked into that choice. Since the eyeballs are there, why not capitalize on that by providing a deeper, more immersive experience for the user. Instead of spending time trying to divert attention (like with most forms of digital advertising), since they already have it with mobile, brands should leverage it to their advantage by going deeper.

Lastly, as an industry, we need to focus more on the overall user experience and less on the ad units themselves because the native technologies have advanced the conversation beyond the typical 320×50 mobile banner ad. The key is to engage the user with depth and to provide multiple, comfortable ways for the user to engage with the brand, not just with a rich media banner that goes away after a few seconds. We have found that if you take this approach, the user will indeed engage deeply, even with long-form content like videos.

Whether you prefer the term “native ads” or “organic brand experiences,” the concept is really about providing consumers with meaningful content when and where they want to consume it.

Ken Willner is the CEO of Zumobi and has been actively involved in the development of mobile as a media platform since 2002.

Attributed to Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in their best-selling book “Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness,” a “Nudge” is a signal — which could be contextual or environmental versus written or verbal — that changes the behavior or decision that a human will make.

The original test of this theory was in a Chicago school district where they changed how food was laid out in the school cafeteria. This had a 35 percent positive impact in the consumption of healthier foods, without actually restricting the overall choices of foods available.

Leveraging a variety of different strategies, such as default settings, information as incentive and right context, companies have proven the ability to change someone’s behavior through a successful Nudge.

Automated decision making: So many decisions, so little time

So why do these Nudges work? Essentially, we don’t have time to process each decision that we make in life. Instead, we use cues and heuristics to guide our decisions — an automated decision making process.

The basis of Nudge theory is to apply an understanding of predicted behaviors to shape and influence that automated process. While standing in the checkout line, most shoppers will not weigh all of the pros and cons of donating two dollars to the charity at hand. The retailer can easily drive the results it wants by predicting that most shoppers will be in a hurry, and willing to accept the two dollar price point.

Now let’s consider how many decisions are made by a mobile user each day. Should I use an app or a mobile site? Should I forward this to my friends? How much should I top up my prepaid account?

Each individual’s decision is a unique, personalized Nudge opportunity.

And herein lies the challenge of applying an understanding of predicted behaviors to the mobile space. Although the traditional Nudge approach, which leverages trial and error, has proven successful for influencing the masses, it does not allow for the creation of timely, individualized Nudges for millions of dynamic customers.

So how can a mobile operator with six million subscribers making 200+ decisions per minute apply the Nudge theory to effectively discover, learn and optimize how to engage with each customer to truly change their behaviors?

Discovering the who, when and how of nudging mobile customers

Leveraging data-driven technologies such as pattern recognition, behavioral clustering, social graphing and predictive analytics, mobile operators are turning to data science and machine learning to advance the application of the Nudge theory — moving from a broad-brush approach to one of micro-targeting.

So how do you determine “who” to Nudge? By understanding how individuals behave over time, we can use pattern recognition approaches to establish fingerprints of each customer and group according to behaviors they have in common — e.g., usage frequency and type, elasticity recharge cycle, social graph authority, etc.

Then, by clustering people with similar fingerprints, discover what’s unique about certain groups relative to others, which indicates desirable and undesirable traits and causes that help describe how you should Nudge them.

For example, we’re working with mobile operators focused on increasing the value of their prepaid customer base, with one objective being to increase the frequency with which a customer recharges. Through automated behavioral analysis, we can determine that customers exhibiting specific attributes — patterns of balance consumption, spend per day, inbound/outbound on- and off-network activity distribution, etc. — have the highest propensity of being influenced by a specific Nudge.

Such highly individualized Nudges can yield double-digit percentage improvements in customer revenue and relative improvement in retention — the perpetual impetus driving marketers and mobile operators worldwide.

Determining “when” to engage is equally important because the context of mobile users — their location, social interactions, activity — is constantly changing. It’s imperative to understand not only the customer’s previous and current contexts but also what they’re likely to do next. This is where the voluminous amount of mobile data becomes an advantage; enabling the discovery of behavioral patterns, sequences and trends tied to specific business objectives.

For our defined group of prepaid customers, we can predict behavioral patterns. For instance, when a subscriber’s balance reaches a specified amount, they are likely to recharge within the next 24 hours, or when a customer misses the opportunity to rollover their current balance, there is a 71 percent higher probability of service cancellation within the next two recharge cycles. This understanding of what a customer will do next enables proactive Nudging — influencing a customer before a decision has been made versus reacting to how they have behaved.

Although traditional Nudge theory is based on influencing the masses, mobile Nudging centers on personalization that can only be achieved at an individual level. By aligning the “who” and the “when” with the right parameters — time constraints, price point, offer value (if any) and the right contexts — we can personalize Nudges and determine “how” to market to each customer.

In the case of our prepaid customer, we found that identifying and changing the right parameter — in this case, shortening the offer’s expiration period — not only results in a positive change for the next cycle, but it actually affects many cycles moving forward, generating significantly higher ARPU and lower churn.

Influencing behaviors that matter

That’s what fuels the application of Nudge — the ability to positively impact business metrics. Every decision that a customer makes, whether to make a purchase, extend service, deepen engagement or recruit friends and family, is a Nudge opportunity and a chance to impact the bottom line.

If mobile operators are applying Nudge to create positive and sustainable changes in customer behaviors that have a real impact on customer revenue and retention, it’s only a matter of time before businesses in other industries discover for themselves that with the help of Data Science, sometimes a Nudge can be more effective than a push or a shove.

Dr. Olly Downs is SVP of Data Sciences for Globys, a big data analytics company that specializes in contextual marketing for mobile operators.

On Monday, in response to a petition that garnered more than 114,000 signatures, the White House came out in favor of the consumer’s right to unlock cellphones once the terms of the original contract are fulfilled (which was followed on Thursday by the Wireless Consumer Choice Act, a bipartisan effort to ensure just that). Ina Fried appeared on The Wall Street Journal’s “Digits” with Simon Constable on Monday to talk about the White House’s decision: