As Quora’s co-founder, CEO and also a significant investor, Adam D’Angelo is the driving force behind the site as it expands from Q&A to other kinds of writing. In an interview last week at the company’s new Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, the former Facebook CTO downplayed concerns about the revenue-free Quora growing too slowly, saying he believes he can outlast the faddish companies that come and go by building a high-quality product.

Why harp on growth? Despite D’Angelo’s roots at Facebook, where the -illions of users now start with a “b,” four-year-old Quora had just 2.9 million global unique visitors in April, up from 2.6 million the year before, according to comScore. But comScore doesn’t count mobile traffic, which D’Angelo said now amounts to a third of Quora usage.

Here’s an edited and condensed write-up of the chat:

Liz Gannes: How would you describe where Quora as a company is now?

Adam D’Angelo: We’re about 50 people, and a year ago we were a third of that. We moved to Mountain View. All these startups grew up in Palo Alto — there’s us, there was Flipboard, there was Pinterest, there was Pulse, and most of the other ones went to the city, but we ended up as the only of those startup down here that’s hiring, so it’s been really good for recruiting because it’s different. We’ve become more data-driven. When you’re small, you have to do everything on intuition, but now we’re at the scale where we have a lot of users, so we can run experiments. We have a data team that’s pretty big, actually.

What do you use the data for — is it personalization?

No, it’s more about to make decisions about what to build. We’re looking at whether something’s going to be a good investment of resources. When you’re small, you can say, “I use the product myself, and I’m annoyed by these things, so let’s change this.” Now we can say, “Twenty percent of our users have encountered this issue that makes them less engaged or more engaged,” so we can test it. That’s really important, because then you don’t have to centralize the decision making. So it doesn’t all go through me.

How big is Quora? What are the most important metrics to you — volume of content, how many people use it?

We look at people who use it. We don’t share the particular numbers, but it’s pretty big, and it’s growing.

But are you happy with how big it is? There’s a perception that Quora is not as huge as it could be, or as people hoped it would be.

I’m happy with how big it is now, given it’s now, but I want it to be more in the future. I wouldn’t be happy it if stayed where it is now.

So you’re saying you like growth. Okay. It seems — and I speak as someone who has been using Quora for a while — that you guys have a bunch of growth initiatives, various things you’re trying to get people to log in more, in a way that looks like you’re trying to goose growth. But maybe people just want to read content without logging in, and that’s okay.

It comes back to the data stuff. When we get people to log in, they end up using Quora a lot more, and we can provide a lot better experience for them. We can show them a personalized news feed, we can send them digest emails, and do all this ranking to find some stuff they want to read. There’s a vocal minority that doesn’t want to log in, but most people just log in and have a better experience, long-term. We’re not trying to goose anything. It’s not like we’re about to raise money, and we’re not about to sell the company, so there’s no reason why we would be doing that unless we thought it would be better long-term.

How do you think about the long-term value of content itself? Quora seems to be all about the evergreen content, but isn’t there value in near-term, real-time discussions like what goes on over at Reddit or Twitter?

Compared to other products, we’re much more long-term. Most of the stuff that people look at on Quora today was not written in the last month. You write something really good, and maybe it’s the definitive answer on the Internet for the next 10 years. Maybe it’s only a year, but not like a tweet, where it’s only relevant for a day or a week. On Quora, it takes time for the content to accumulate, but it just builds and builds. That means growth goes a little bit slower than something like Twitter or these viral apps, but I also think it means we have higher long-term value that we’re going to reach.

You’ve introduced a bunch of new content types in addition to Q&A. What’s working?

So we have answers, blogs and now we have reviews. The area we define as what Quora’s good at is long-form text that’s useful over time, and where you care about who wrote the text. Not that you need to be friends with them, just that they’re someone trustworthy.

How do people find things on Quora? What’s the balance between search and social and topics?

I think it’s a third, a third, a third. Search is bigger than you think.

Really? But I don’t even know what to look for on Quora.

It’s not like finding a needle in a haystack like on Google, it’s finding a broad area. It’s probably most useful when you want to do something like visit a new place.

You reformulated the Quora core mission recently. Tell me about that.

Our new mission is to share and grow the world’s knowledge. It’s what we always thought we were doing, but it’s a different way to say it.

If you were to say, Quora is a fill-in-the-blank service, what would it be?

That’s different from the mission; that’s positioning. I would say it’s a “knowledge-sharing” service.

How is Quora different from other companies?

We’re data-driven. We really value execution and getting things done. We do things more frequently than other companies; we have a faster cadence.

Everybody says that.

Everyone says that, but I think it’s not as true. We release code 40 times per day. And we have this thing where code, eight minutes after someone finishes writing it, is live on the site.

Also, I think we’re more focused on the mission, and people at Quora care about making an impact on the world. At a lot of other companies people are trying to make money in a short amount of time; this is their one hop in their Silicon Valley career before they go to the next thing. We talk to people before they join, and say, “We’re not acquisition-focused; you should only come work here if you’re willing to stick with it for a long time.”

What if Quora weren’t working? Hypothetically, how would you know when to quit?

I have a view that things don’t really decline for no reason. Other companies, when that’s happened, it’s because the users didn’t really like the product. Or that they were gaming Facebook, and Facebook shut them down and finally it caught up to them. I don’t think we’re doing any of this gaming stuff. Or maybe if there were competition, but I don’t think there’s competition for what we’re doing.

I have a view that if you build something that’s good, and you keep making it better, it lasts. A lot of times, companies will make these major changes that make things worse and that will lead to a decline. So if that were the case, we’d figure out what was happening and we would revert it.

Not all of you, just the ones who decided that it was a good idea to start removing women from the category “American Novelists” and putting them into a new category: ‘American Women Novelists.’ You guys. What the hell, man? What’s wrong with you?

– From Amy Letter and Brian Spears, addressing the gradual removal of women from the category of “American Novelists” on Wikipedia

How, pray tell, does a startup get that sort of stickiness? For Learnist, a visually oriented educational app, the answer is simple: Eliminate the biggest barrier to entry, the sign-up process.

Don’t misunderstand me here — sign-ups are obviously important (and they still exist in the app). But the company plans to launch an update to its iOS and Web apps on Thursday that aims to eliminate the arduous, usual upfront process of onboarding users, letting first-timers begin to use the service without needing to immediately sign up to get going.

The idea is pretty simple. Learnist is a Pinterest-cum-Twitter social teaching application that lets users curate different types of lessons in a stream-like feed of content. Instead of forcing its users to hand over all their info off the bat, the app asks you to pick a few topics of interest to follow — people, places, things, ideas and the like — and Learnist will auto-populate a stream of content for users to peruse as they explore the app. From there, it will suggest more things to follow, or more data to add (like your address book or Facebook account, which could help you find more friends on the service).

Think of it as fast-tracked personalization, without the immediate hassle of the sign-up screen.

That, coupled with the new content offerings from partners like Discovery and, as of Thursday, the BBC, will likely fill newcomers’ streams with enough material to keep them engaged and — hopefully — coming back often. At that point, the company thinks, a user will get the value of the service and will be willing to sign up.

Those are the good, “sticky” sign-ups for Learnist, the ones that turn casual visitors into repeat users. All it has to contend with are the myriad other content streams out there seen on Facebook and Twitter, as well as the other edtech startups that occupy the space. Ideally for Learnist, lowering the barrier to entry will make it that much easier to at least give the product a quick spin.

Sign-ups TBD.

Gardner, who had held her role since 2007, said she would pursue advocacy efforts to combat corporate and government control of the Internet.

After overseeing Wikipedia’s effective leadership and participation in the SOPA/PIPA blackout campaign last year, Gardner said the threats to Internet freedom kept coming: CISPA, censorship, walled gardens on mobile devices, etc.

She wrote in a blog post:

I’ve always aimed to make the biggest contribution I can to the general public good. Today, this is pulling me towards a new and different role, one very much aligned with Wikimedia values and informed by my experiences here, and with the purpose of amplifying the voices of people advocating for the free and open internet. I don’t know exactly what this will look like — I might write a book, or start a non-profit, or work in partnership with something that already exists.

Gardner explained that she would stay at Wikimedia for at least six months to help find a replacement. “My leaving is very much a vote of confidence in our Board and executive team and staff,” she said.

That makes sense, given that Apple preinstalls a whole bunch of key apps on iOS (though some of us have stopped using some of them), and gives us little reason to go to its websites.

It’s also pretty clear why people would shop on Amazon and look things up on Wikipedia on the go, even if they don’t do these things on their desktop every month.

The folks who measure how many people visit websites have been slow — sloooow — to count up mobile Web, smartphone and tablet users. But comScore is catching up, with its new “Multi-Platform” rankings that combine desktop, Android and iOS usage by U.S. users. (What would really be great is global numbers, but this is a start!)

These are the same new rankings we wrote about in November, but today is their official launch out of beta. From now on, they’ll come out every month.

The order of the Top 10 U.S. properties are remarkably unchanged when you add mobile, though. The only significant gainer at the top is Apple, which comes in at slot No. 8, with comScore calculating an incremental audience of 54 percent.

ComScore notes that the average Top 100 property adds 38 percent to its audience when you count mobile-only visitors who wouldn’t previously have been included.

The biggest mobile gainers were Groupon at No. 47, with 36.9 million visitors, an incremental percentage gain of 223 percent; Zynga at No. 44, with a 211 percent gain — echoing the company’s bragging about mobile-only users on its last earnings call; and Pandora at No. 19 with a 183 percent gain. Aside from those three, nobody else in the Top 50 had a triple-digit mobile bounce.

There were, of course, the questions on his famously huge Facebook investment many years ago, and why he’s put money in Y Combinator to spur startup innovation.

But it’s clear from his mainstage interview at the SXSW interactive festival in Austin this morning that high-profile Russian investor Yuri Milner of DST Global has been striving to think much bigger thoughts of late.

While he’s gotten a lot of attention for his big bets in the social networking site, as well as with Twitter, Spotify, Airbnb and many others, he’s slowed his investing in the U.S. considerably to focus more on what he and many others in Silicon Valley are calling “moon shot” ideas.

“Somehow, we have lost interest in big ideas,” said Milner, in an onstage interview with Vanity Fair contributing editor Bethany McLean about shifting away from thinking — which he has funded, in part — that has gotten more short-term and pragmatic. “I think we still have a destiny as human beings.”

That has included starting up his Fundamental Physics Prize, which has now become the priciest academic award, last year. And, more recently — with Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and Genentech mogul and Apple Chairman Art Levinson, among others — the launch of the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences Foundation.

As Mike Isaac wrote when that initiative was announced less than a month ago:

“The first round of prize recipients includes 11 scientists from a range of research disciplines, including studies in genetics, cancer research and neural behavior. Each of the 11 prize winners will receive a $3 million award for their work, and Brin, Zuckerberg, Milner and the rest of the sponsors have agreed to a five-year commitment to awarding prizes.”

Milner, who was a physicist in his early career, said onstage that he has been disheartened to see that not enough younger people choose to go into fundamental science anymore. Thus he is aming to make it more attractive via his prizes.

“We don’t have enough heroes who are admired by a large portion of the population due to their scientific achievements,” he said, noting that it will require rewarding individuals in a “disproportionate manner.”

Still, in the Q&A session, the crowd in the Austin Convention Center wanted to know mostly about more earthbound questions, such as what tech company would last 100 years, as IBM has.

According to Milner: Google, Facebook and Wikipedia, due to network effects.

Another attendee wanted to know what he thought it takes to be an entrepreneur these days.

“It’s almost a heroic effort, and kind of goes against set ways of doing things,” answered Milner.

Then someone wanted to know how the political arena could be similarly transformed.

“That, I don’t know,” said Milner.

Moon shot, indeed.

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More than 100,000 websites participated in an online blackout on Jan. 18, 2012, with Google, Craigslist, Reddit, Wikipedia and others directing visitors to contact their representatives about the threat of online censorship; some of them disabled their availability in protest. Two days later, the bills were shelved.

So, some of those same people and organizations have declared that Jan. 18 is now Internet Freedom Day. They suggest taking various actions to honor the occasion. For instance, banding together in memory of Aaron Swartz, the Internet activist who committed suicide a week ago after being federally indicted for downloading academic documents with the intent to release them publicly.

There are also physical get-togethers in San Francisco and Washington, D.C.

And for just $20, you can buy a hard copy.

– The Daily Dot’s Kevin Morris, on a fictitious article that fooled Wikipedia’s editors for more than five years. Thanks to Wikipedia’s Creative Commons license, the hoax still lives elsewhere on the Web and in print.

But here’s one that’s quirky and interesting, and based on unedited data: The most-viewed articles on Wikipedia in 2012.

Wikipedia itself doesn’t actually make its own popularity stats public anymore, but outside researchers can analyze its log files, and Swedish software engineer Johan Gunnarsson has now published a full year’s wrap-up for the first time.

What was the top page on Wikipedia in 2012? In the English language, it was Facebook, with 32.6 million views. In a similar vein, “wiki” was No. 2 and Google No. 9.

As for more novel and timely topics for English-reading users, the big hits were the boy band One Direction, the movie “The Avengers,” and the mommy-porn phenomenon “Fifty Shades of Grey.” Plus, some frequently updated aggregate pages about what happened during the year.

It’s a bit of a headscratcher why a page about Facebook was so popular — far and away the biggest article of the year. Sure, Facebook itself is much used and much discussed. But this isn’t even a very good Wikipedia entry, as far as they go — it talks about competition with MySpace in the present tense, and cites two-year-old traffic stats.

Both Gunnarsson — who is not affiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation — and Wikimedia spokesman Jay Walsh said there are two probable explanations for Facebook’s popularity on Wikipedia, along with articles for Google, YouTube, Microsoft, Yahoo and other top Web properties.

First, that users are typing Facebook into an integrated search engine in their browsers intending to go to the site and end up on Wikipedia (which could be a self-reinforcing habit based on search history). And second, as Walsh put it, “It’s quite possible that these numbers confirm general, high-level interest and curiosity about top Web properties — their history, policies, background, etc.”

Though the English Wikipedia is by far the biggest, Gunnarsson also tracked year-end stats for other languages.

The most-visited page in Japanese is a list of adult movie actresses, the top German article is about cul de sac streets (called sackgasse in German), the top Italian article is about the TV show “Grey’s Anatomy,” and the top Chinese article is about Baidu (okay, that makes a little more sense).

One particularly oddball popular find, Gunnarsson pointed out, is that the Dutch Wikipedia’s top page of the year was about Hua Shan, a mountain in China. He parsed the stats and saw that the page had fewer than 10 page views per day, except for two weeks in July and August with 1 million page views per day. So either there was a big pop culture phenomenon that died down as quickly as it arrived (unlikely but possible), or there were a bunch of bots hitting the page.

Just in case you were wondering, Hua Shan is a mountain in the Qinling range that’s sacred to Taoism and is said to have one of the most dangerous hiking trails in the world.

The only nonprofit organization within the world’s Top 40 Web sites — Wikipedia is at No. 5 — the site serves 19 billion page views per month. But it operates on a sliver of a budget compared to everybody else.

What’s surprising when you delve into Wikimedia’s annual report, which it released this week, is that it actually does operate on the tiny donations it collects via funding drives through those familiar interrupting banner ads on its site.

Between July 1, 2011, and June 30, 2012, Wikimedia had $35 million in donations and contributions, or 91 percent of its total revenue. There were more than one million donors. But the number of people who donated $1,000 or more is so short that it can fit (in small type, to be sure) on a single page of the annual report.

Wikimedia spokesman Jay Walsh said in an email that the foundation would soon be announcing the results of its current fundraising campaign, which was apparently more efficient and effective than those of years past.

He added that the two big Wikimedia investments of the past fiscal year were Wikipedia Zero, where telcos like Orange, Telenor and Saudi Telecom have waived data fees for customers accessing Wikipedia, and efforts to improve the site’s “visual editor” in order to be more accessible to new and more diverse contributors.

The video project is a collaboration with video start-up Kaltura and Google, and it’s actually been in the works since 2008, but was delayed by infrastructure upgrades, personnel changes and other problems over the past four years.

“Wikipedia has more than half a billion unique monthly visitors, so any new feature that is deployed needs to be really sustainable and fool-proof,” said Kaltura president Michal Tsur.

Today, there are only about 15,000 videos on Wikipedia, a mishmash of beta testing and uploads in an older and more limited format called Ogg Theora. You can see an example of a Kaltura video on the page about polar bears.

But don’t expect to see videos on every Wikipedia page anytime soon. For one thing, sharing videos with the new Kaltura player won’t be as simple as embedding a YouTube video on a relevant page; users will have to upload content directly to Wikimedia Commons. And there aren’t the same sort of reserves of accessible video content as there are for photos, though there is freely licensed content on YouTube in the now-compatible WebM format, as well as on the Internet Archive.

Once videos are uploaded, people will be able to add captions, translations, and more. But some planned features, like mobile format support and full video editing, aren’t available yet.

At an event in New York City, Nintendo’s North American President Reggie Fils-Aime said TVii will let Wii U owners in the U.S. and Canada access content across multiple providers, such as Netflix and Hulu.

But as with many streaming TV services for the home, it is more of a fancy remote control or elaborate directory than it is a replacement for how you watch TV and, more importantly, how you pay for it.

The service will be the most useful for those who continue to pay for cable or satellite TV, along with other on-demand services, making it comparable to what Microsoft’s Xbox provides today.

The Nintendo Wii U will cost $300 for the basic package, which includes one GamePad controller and 8 GB of memory. The deluxe edition comes with 32 GB of storage and the Nintendo Land videogame. The Wii U comes out Nov. 18 in the U.S., and both editions will have access to the TVii service for free.

Using the touchscreen on the GamePad controller, which looks a lot like a tablet computer, Nintendo TVii users can search or browse for content from across a variety of sources, including an existing TiVo account, Netflix, Hulu and Amazon. It will also stream live content to the TV, but only if the user subscribes to cable or satellite TV services.

Nintendo said TVii will support any cable or satellite provider.

When searching for content, users can browse by channel or for recommendations that may be provided by Nintendo or by friends. Once a show starts playing on the TV, the GamePad can then be used to view auxiliary information about the content from Wikipedia or IMDb.com, for example. Additionally, short video segments, or thumbnails, can be viewed from the device, which can be shared with friends via Twitter, Facebook or the Wii U’s social network called Miiverse. The best example for this service was for sports programming, where users could check out stats on the players and then comment on what’s happening in the game.

The service will also have access to free content, such as YouTube.

Nintendo said TVii was developed in close collaboration with i.TV, which distributes a popular TV directory app on iTunes.

Lasting the month of September, “Wiki Loves Monuments 2012” is “expected to be the largest photo contest in the world by a wide margin,” according to the Wikimedia Foundation.

About 25,000 images have been uploaded since the contest kicked off on Saturday.

This is the third year of the competition, though the first was only in the Netherlands, and the second in Europe.

Last year, 5,000 volunteers uploaded 168,000 photos. Perhaps most excitingly for the project, 80 percent of the contestants had never contributed to Wikipedia before.

This year, 30 countries are participating, including the U.S. for the first time. Each country’s winner will compete for the international grand prize of a trip to Wikimania in Hong Kong next year.

To help inspire and solicit uploads, Wikimedia built an Android app that maps nearby monuments and accepts contest entries.

At their core, the Kred and Klout products gauge a person’s sway in the social realm, measuring how much that one voice matters across the cacophony of tweets and shares in the social media sphere. So, if businesses can use these services to, say, unearth the most important tweeters out there, targeting a social media marketing campaign could be a whole lot easier (in theory, at least).

But that isn’t the problem for Klout and Kred. The problem is convincing you, me and every other regular Joe out there that our social influence — the measure of how much what we say genuinely affects others — is something worth caring about. Both have tried offering incentive-based rewards programs, but outside of bragging rights, it has been difficult to prove either product’s actual social utility.

There’s no quick fix to this. Both, however, are trying, by taking a different, more visual tack: Giving themselves makeovers.

Natch, Klout launched an overhauled version of its consumer-facing site last week, boosting the number of influence signals — up to 300, including culling Wikipedia entries as a new stream of data — and introducing a new, less data-centric and more visually appealing site design. It’s what CEO Joe Fernandez calls the most significant update to Klout in the start-up’s history — and yes, it does indeed look much better.

In that vein, Kred — Klout’s largest comparable competitor — launched an update on Tuesday that echoes the push toward mass appeal with its new Kred Story product. Like Klout’s redesign, Kred Story is all about visual appeal. The content of what Kred users are sharing on Facebook and Twitter is pushed to the forefront, laid out in an attractive grid of photos and text. Think RebelMouse meets Pinterest, but with more text.

Previously, Kred and Klout pitched themselves heavily in the realm of quantitation — that is, appealing to the data geeks that they believed resided in all of us. But both companies are made up of data guys, engineers who geek out on statistics, measurement and sifting through the myriad signals that sites like Twitter, Facebook and others provide. My guess is that those same engineers realized that not everyone is as hardcore about data as they are.

Hence the repositioning of the sites. Yes, it’s still about the data — users can click on content in Kred’s Story view to drill down on who has retweeted your thoughts, how often and which categories you’re seeing the most influence in. But, more importantly, it’s our data presented as a narrative, a collection of our thoughts and expressions put out into the social Web. In essence, we are more than just the sum of our tweets and shares, more than an arbitrary score assigned by a social influence start-up.

Will a spruced-up look be enough to convince consumers, or will the scoring system impart feelings of judgement?

That’s an open question. I’ll have to tweet it out to my followers and see what they think.

Klout is a controversial company, in part because it values people’s online activity with a score — but also because: 1) to many, that score did not seem terrifically accurate; and 2) the way the score was determined was not transparent.

The San Francisco-based company obviously isn’t backing away from the whole premise of scoring, but it is improving its efforts to be accurate as well as transparent, by telling the stories behind the scores.

Where Klout looked at fewer than 100 signals before, now it tracks about 400, including the number of Twitter lists a person is on, the number of people who’ve subscribed to them on Facebook, and how important they are on Wikipedia, as determined by a PageRank algorithm.

The company is also, for the first time, factoring in the “+K” its users can give each other as a sort of nomination for influence on a simple topic. But Klout was careful to tell me that this signal is capped to avoid abuse.

One of the criticisms of Klout had been that it seemed to have a skewed view of the world, where, for instance, Justin Bieber was the ultimate — he had a Klout score of 100 — and Barack Obama was hovering down at 94 (he used to be even lower, below tech pundit Robert Scoble). Klout noted that with the addition of Wikipedia edits and other factors, the two have flip-flopped: Bieber is now a 92, and Obama is a 99. Scoble is an 86.

Previous Klout changes had sparked anger at the company by driving many people’s scores down. A spokeswoman for Klout said she expected the opposite this time, as many people’s influence ranking will go up as additional signals are included. If true, I imagine that spoonful of sugar will make these changes go down more easily.

Also, in the coming weeks, Klout said, its scores will get somewhat more transparent. While the company won’t give away the particulars of its algorithm, it will show users a much more visual timeline of moments at which they were most influential.

The new timeline comes with awkward-funny labels such as, “You engaged Joe Fernandez and 18 others in this moment,” as you can see at left.

Sailesh wondered aloud, “How much time do we have for any of these?” “How many of them can coexist?” and “Do we really need them?” My answers were, respectively: “A lot.” “Many of them.” and “No, but we want them.” That dinner discussion prompted some observations that I am outlining here, and I invite you to share your own observations in the comments below.

In a nutshell, the Internet has evolved from being a need-driven utility medium with only a handful of winners to a discovery-driven entertainment medium with room for multiple winners. The necessary and sufficient conditions for this evolution are now in place — broadband, real names and tablets are the three horsemen of this New New Web. As consumers, entrepreneurs and investors, we should get used to the fact that the online economy is increasingly blurring with the offline economy, and in the limit, that distinction will disappear. As a result, just as in the real world, the Web of entertainment will be much bigger than the Web of utility.

A Theory of Human Motivation
One framework for understanding the consumer Internet is Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which Abraham Maslow put forward as a way of explaining human behavior at large. The core premise is that once our basic needs of food, shelter, safety and belonging are satisfied, we tend to focus on things that are related to creativity, entertainment, education and self-improvement. A key aspect of this framework is that it’s sequential: Unless the basic needs are met, one cannot focus on other things. As an example, a study in 2011 showed that humans who are hungry will spend more on food and less on non-food items compared to those who are not hungry. Using this framework, we can see how consumer adoption of the Web has evolved over the last 20 years, and why all of the ingredients are only now in place for consumers to use the Web for what Maslow called “self-actualization” — a pursuit of one’s full potential, driven by desire, not by necessity.

1992-2012: Web of Need
Between the AOL IPO in 1992 and the Facebook IPO last month, the Internet has largely been in the business of satisfying basic consumer needs. In 1995, the year Netscape went public and made the internet accessible to the masses, I was a young product manager for a consumer Internet company called Global Village Communication. We were a newly minted public company and our hottest product was a “high speed” fax/modem with a speed of 33.6 kbps. Back then, using the Internet as a consumer or making a living off it as a business was rather difficult, and sometimes simply frustrating. In the subsequent years the basic needs of access, browser, email, search and identity were solved by companies such as AOL, Comcast, Netscape, Yahoo, Google, LinkedIn and Facebook.

2012-?: Web of Want
Today, the billion users on Facebook have reached the apex of Maslow’s hierarchy on the web. All of our basic needs have been satisfied. Now we are in pursuit of self-actualization. It is no surprise that on the Web, we are now open to playing games (Zynga, Angry Birds), watching video (YouTube, Hulu), listening to music (Pandora, Spotify), expressing our creativity (Instagram, Twitter, Draw Something), window shopping (Pinterest, Gojee*) and pursuing education (Khan Academy, Empowered*).

The Web Is Becoming Like TV
How do we make sense out of a Web where multiple providers coexist, serving groups of people who share a similar desire? Turns out we already have a very good model for understanding how this can work: Television. Specifically, cable television. The Web is becoming like TV, with hundreds of networks or “channels” that are programmed to serve content to an audience with similar desires and demographics. Pinterest, ShoeDazzle, Joyous and Alt12* programmed for young, affluent women; Machinima, Kixeye and Kabam programmed for mostly male gamers; Gojee* for food enthusiasts; Triposo* for travellers; GAINFitness* for fitness fans and so on.

In this new new Web, an important ingredient to success is a clear understanding of the identity of your users to ensure that you are programming to that user’s interests. The good news is that unlike TV, the Web has a feedback loop. Everything can be measured and as a result the path from concept to success can be more capital efficient by measuring what type of programming is working every step of the way — it’s unlikely that the new new Web will ever produce a Waterworld.

Why Now? Broadband, Real Names & Tablets
As my partner Doug Pepper recently wrote, a key question when evaluating a new opportunity is to ask “Why Now?” Certainly, companies like AOL, Yahoo and Myspace have tried before to program the Web to cater to interests of specific audiences. What’s different now? Three things: Broadband, real names and tablets.

The impact of broadband is obvious; we don’t need or want anything on a slow Web. With broadband penetration at 26 percent in industrialized countries and 3G penetration at about 15 percent of the world’s population, we are just reaching critical mass of nearly 1B users on the fast Web.

Real names are more interesting. In 1993, the New Yorker ran the now famous cartoon; “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” This succinctly captured the state of the anonymous Web at the time. Reid Hoffman and Mark Zuckerberg changed that forever. Do we find Q&A on Quora to be more credible than Yahoo! Answers, celebrity profiles on Twitter more engaging than Myspace and pins on Pinterest more relevant than recommendations on early AOL chatrooms? I certainly do, and that is largely because Quora, Twitter and Pinterest take advantage of real names. Real names are blurring the distinction between online and offline behavior.

Finally, the tablet, the last necessary and sufficient piece that fuels the “Web of want.” The PC is perfect for the “Web of need” — when we need something, we can search for it, since we know what we are looking for. Searching is a “lean-forward” experience, typing into our PC, either at work or at the home office. The Web over the last decade has been optimized for this lean-forward search experience — everything from SEO to Web site design to keyword shortcuts in popular browsers makes that efficient. However, smartphones and tablets allow us to move to a “lean-back” experience, flipping through screens using our fingers, often in our living rooms and bedrooms, on the train or at the coffee shop. Tablets make discovery easy and fun, just like flipping channels on TV at leisure. These discoveries prompt us to want things we didn’t think we needed.

Early Signs
This thesis is easy to postulate, but is there any evidence that users are looking to the Web as anything more than a productivity platform? As has been reported, mobile devices now make up 20 percent of all U.S. Web traffic, and this usage peaks in the evening hours, presumably when people are away from their office. Analysis from Flurry* shows that cumulative time spent on mobile apps is closing in on TV. We certainly don’t seem to be using the Web only when we need something.

Economy of Need Versus Want
The economy of Want is different from the economy of Need. We humans tend to spend a lot more time and money on things we want compared to things we need. For example, Americans spend more than five hours a day on leisure and sports (including TV), compared to about three hours spent on eating, drinking and managing household activities. Another difference is that when it comes to satisfying our needs, we tend to settle on one provider and give that one all of our business. Think about how many companies provide us with electricity, water, milk, broadband access, search, email and identity. The Need economy is a winner-take-all market, with one or two companies dominating each need. However, when it comes to providing for our wants, we are open to being served by multiple providers. Think about how many different providers are behind the TV channels we watch, restaurants we visit, destinations we travel to and movies we watch. The Want economy can support multiple winners, each with a sizeable business. Instagram, Path, Pinterest, ShoeDazzle, BeachMint, Angry Birds, CityVille, Kixeye, Kabam, Machinima and Maker Studios can all coexist.

Investing in the Web of Want
The chart below shows that over a long term (including a global recession) an index of luxury stocks (companies such as LVMH, Burberry, BMW, Porsche, Nordstrom) outperforms an index of utility stocks (companies such as Con Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric that offer services we all need). The same applies to an index of media stocks (companies such as CBS, Comcast, News Corp., Time Warner, Viacom) which outperforms both the utilities and the broader stock market. Of course, higher returns come with higher volatility — Nordstrom’s beta is 1.6 and CBS’ beta is 2.2, compared to 0.29 for PG&E. It is this volatility that has cast investing in the Want business as a career-ending move in Silicon Valley for the past 20-plus years. As the Web evolves from serving our needs to satisfying our wants and, in turn, becomes a much larger economy, sitting on the sidelines of the Web of Want may not be an option.

Let’s Not Kill Hollywood
With a billion users looking for self-actualization and with the widespread adoption of broadband, real names and tablets, the Web is poised to become the medium for creativity, education, entertainment, fashion and the pursuit of happiness. As the offline world shows, large, profitable companies can be built that cater to these desires. Entrepreneurs and investors looking to succeed in the new new Web can learn quite a few lessons from our friends in the luxury and entertainment businesses, which have been managing profitable “want” businesses for decades. The fusion of computer science, design, data, low friction and the massive scale of the Internet can result in something that is better than what either Silicon Valley or Hollywood can do alone. It is no wonder that the team that came to this conclusion before anyone else is now managing the most valuable company in the world.

Epilogue
When we go see a movie or splurge on a resort vacation, we don’t stop using electricity, brushing our teeth or checking our email. The Web of Want is not a replacement for the Web of Need, it is an addition. Many of the Internet companies that satisfied our needs in the last 20 or more years of the Web are here to stay. In fact, they will become more entrenched and stable, with low beta, just like the utilities in the offline world. Microsoft has a beta of exactly 1.0 — it is no more volatile than the overall stock market. And for those longing for the days of “real computer science” on the Web, do not despair. Just keep an eye on Rocket Science and Google X Labs — there is plenty of hard-core engineering ahead.

Disclosures: * indicates an InterWest portfolio company. Google Finance was used for all of the stock charts and beta references.

Keval Desai is a Partner at InterWest, where he focuses on investments in early-stage companies that cater to the needs and wants of consumers. He started his career in Silicon Valley in 1991 as a software engineer. He has been a mentor and investor in AngelPad since inception. You can follow him @kevaldesai.

Learnist builds on Grockit’s social teaching concept while adding another element that company founder Farb Nivi claims is crucial: The visual element.

Think of Learnist as something of a mashup between Pinterest and Wikipedia. Users find content from across the Web — videos, news stories, music, Soundcloud links and what have you — and post it to a personal board that other users can follow. It’s ideal, Nivi says, for teachers who want to curate multimedia lessons for students to follow, though without the feel of a stodgy, traditional lesson plan.

Grockit has already garnered a following, attracting more than a million users through its test prep service product alone. But the user pool for online test prep is only so large. With Grockit’s wiki-like Learnist product, the company hopes to spread its reach far beyond the cramming crowd. Facebook integration, which the product indeed has, will only help to further the cause.

Naturally, iPad and iPhone apps are in the works, to be expected in the coming weeks.

Hollywood will be destroyed and no one will notice. Collaborative storytelling and filmmaking will do to Hollywood what Wikipedia did to Encyclopedia Britannica.

– From Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’s keynote address at the Internet Society’s INET convention in Geneva

Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it. But we have a better tool now. The Web site is continuously updated, it’s much more expansive and it has multimedia.

– Jorge Cauz, the president of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., which has stopped printing physical books after 244 years, and will stop selling them when current inventory runs out

On Tuesday, Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. said it would stop printing its namesake books, a sign of how readers in recent years have abandoned printed reference volumes for websites such as Wikipedia and Google.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The activity of skiing goes back a long way in human history. Wikipedia tells me that there are cave drawings dating back to about 5,000 B.C., depicting people on skis. And pieces of wood, thought to have been primitive skis used for transportation and to help hunt wild game, have been found in Greenland dating as far back as the 10th or 11th century.

I didn’t know any of that before I took my first skiing lesson a few days ago. To make a long story short, I fell three times, didn’t break any bones, and had a fantastic time on the slopes in Beaver Creek, Colo.

I also know that I skied a total of 2,830 vertical feet.

What tells me so precise a number is a Web service called EpicMix created by Vail Resorts, of which Beaver Creek is a part. The service tracked my skiing activity and awarded me a set of different badges, in a manner reminiscent of Foursquare. Since it was my first time, I earned a “First Run” and a “Toe Dipper” badge, both for first timers, plus one for having visited Beaver Creek itself. It also tracked how many times I rode up the various lifts.

Central to it are ski pass cards that are enabled with RFID tags. When you get on a lift, your tag gets scanned, making your movements trackable. That might strike some as creepy, but it also makes it easy to track your stats throughout the season and over time.

So, if you want to brag about having skied some advanced black diamond-level run, there’s no disputing it. You can just point your doubters to EpicMix. It’s also really social: You can share your stats on Facebook and Twitter, and friends from both networks can easily be added to your list of friends on EpicMix.

There are also pictures. Professional photographers are stationed around the resort snapping photos of skiers in action or between runs. As long as the photographers get a scan of your pass, your photos show up in your EpicMix account, and you can buy a high-quality download for $20. They only caught me once after my lesson was over for a group shot with my patient and mellow instructor Tom Newman and fellow first-time skier, Claire from London, who took the class with me. As you can see from our faces, it’s probably not the last time we’ll be seen with long, flat things attached to our feet.

Okay, okay, we get it: Morgan Stanley got the coveted left-hand lead position on Facebook’s blockbuster IPO filing. Goldman Sachs is there, too, but in the third-place, always-a-bridesmaid spo,t and is crying big salty tears about the injustice of it all.

It’s hard to feel badly for overpaid investment bankers, and focusing on them is kind of like endlessly discussing the lawyers who processed your mortgage, when the focus should be on the house you’re buying.

Does anyone except a few Richie Rich ZIP Codes in Manhattan care about this one deet of the initial public offering of the social networking giant?

Nope, but there is so little real news ahead of the IPO filing expected today that this is what we are chomping on this morning, as everyone awaits the big doc drop at the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Sources said it is likely to come this afternoon rather than this morning, though. And, perish the thought, all that dotting of I’s and crossing of T’s could delay it to tomorrow, even (unlikely, but mebbe!).

Sigh.

Tidbit: Facebook was actually founded the first Wednesday in February of 2004 in an undergraduate dorm room at Harvard University, like today but eight years later.

Thus, here’s a boring Facebook history timeline chart to look at:

Okay, that was really dull.

What up? The board met, the spinmeisters are at the ready and, most of all, Silicon Valley is stoked to make some more arrogant badillionaires.

Now, hopefully, we’ll get the real news about Facebook.

Namely, who’s getting the big dough in this much-anticipated Web 2.0 gambit? Co-founder and CEO and Hoodie Commander Mark Zuckerberg fer sure, but who else?

Plus all the juicy financials from Facebook, along with stats in usage, growth and just how much the company sticks it to its gaming serf — oops, partner — Zynga and others for the privilege of being on its all-powerful platform.

Me? I pay nada, like other Facebook users, for being able to show off pictures of my vacations and decline friendships from PR people I like, but still … well, you know.

Here is another Facebook financial chart that will not knock your socks off unless you are an accountant:

I am now so comatose waiting for the show to begin that I briefly began a liveblog of my activities this morning.

It went like this:

4:45 am PT: Done with AOL Q4 earnings, which were meh, but better meh than expected. AOL, if you recall, used to be Facebook and now is, um, not.

Note to Zuckerberg: Be nice to people on your way up, since you’ll meet them again on the way down.

4:46 am PT: I check the SEC site and get zip. Click, click, clickety-click over to find out the latest on Demi Moore and her fake-pot debacle.

Who knew there was synthetic cannabis and it is called K2 or Spice? Not me! According to Wikipedia: “It seems likely that synthetic cannabis can precipitate psychosis and in some cases it is prolonged.”

I decide to blame Ashton Kutcher and then wonder if he is an investor in Facebook via BFF-to-errant-celebrities-who-like-tech Ron Conway, also a Facebook investor.

Note to self: Call Ashton! That dude plays village idiots all the time, but I am not fooled by Mr. Pretty Face.

4:47 am PT: I consider email bombing Yahoo’s Jerry Yang, who is probably not so busy right now, and asking him what he thinks about the Demi Moore crisis and also Facebook’s IPO.

Remember when Yahoo was king of Silicon Valley and Yang posed in that purple VW on the cover of that magazine? Better still, remember when Yahoo was going to buy Facebook for just over $1 billion and then borked it?

Just sayin’, Mark — so, keep it reals!

4:48 am PT: I consider going out for doughnuts — and not because of any real weed need. I just would like me some glazed and sprinkled sugar treats right about now. Then, I could post the pictures of them on my Facebook page.

Sweet.

But you-know-who would file right when I left the house on the munchie run. Click, click, clickety-click over to the SEC site and I come up peanuts.

Time to check in on the Kardashians.

You get the idea — so, Facebook IPO, take me away!

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