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Finding
privacy in a
public arena
Bits
Sunday sales
slip at pet
U.K. paper
of Murdoch
JENNA WORTHAM
NEW YORK Some friends were gushing
recently about a new mobile application
called Pair, intended for people in a
relationship.
Initially, I did not see the appeal of
the app, which lets the two partners
send messages and photos back and
forth. First, the idea of adding another
service to the daily routine of Twitter,
Facebook and their ilk seemed exhausting.
And would not it be just as easy to
exchange e-mails, text messages or,
better yet, just flirt face to face?
Curious, I tried it — even though I’m
single. I recruited a friend to help me
test it. And after a few hours, the app
started to grow on me. Something was
thrilling about the secret little notes
that Shaun, my temporary beau, and I
sent to each other throughout the day.
The secrecy was welcome. We were
not cluttering up anyone else’s feeds on
Twitter and did not have to worry about
random high school
The
friends seeing and
commenting on our
combination
exchanges on Facebook.
In addition,
of privacy
and intimate there were gestures
sharing has distinct to the app. It
never looked let us share information
about our loca-
so good.
tions and exchange
doodles, to-do lists
and virtual nudges — all conveying that
‘‘I’m thinking about you.’’
The app highlights the best elements
of social networking — the warm, fuzzy
feeling of being connected to people
you care about when you are physically
nowhere near them. And it says it eliminates
some of the worst — the worry
about who can see the content you’re
posting and how they may interpret it.
Apparently, venture capitalists also
see the point: The company that developed
Pair raised $4.2 million in seed
financing from a group of early investors
last month.
Pair is arriving as many of us are
looking to use the Web and our phones
much as we always have, but outside of
the very public arenas of the social
Web. It is a natural evolution of social
networking, especially as Facebook
and Twitter have swelled.
The combination of privacy and intimate
sharing has never looked so good
— provided that it can be achieved. A
handful of start-ups are appealing to
users who may be tired of the social
spotlight but still enjoy the whimsy of
apps.
‘‘We’ve spent the last decade struggling
with this,’’ said Andrea Matwyshyn,
an assistant professor of legal
studies and business ethics at the
Wharton School of the University of
Pennsylvania. ‘‘Companies are trying
to figure out the relationship of privacy
to users while also trying to provide
personalization and customization of
their services.’’
Even the largest social networking
sites sense a rising tide of awareness
about the need to protect delicate and
personal information that is shared
about users online. Last month, Twitter
announced that it was introducing a
‘‘do not track’’ feature that lets users
keep Twitter from collecting personal
information as they move around the
Web. The feature is not perfect — it
works only on third-party sites that
agree to acknowledge it.
‘‘People can’t always foresee or understand
what could happen to their
data,’’ Ms. Matwyshyn said. ‘‘But they
know they don’t want it ending up in
the wrong hands.’’
Companies that do figure out how to
embed privacy into a social service
could gain a business and marketing
advantage, positioning themselves as
safer spaces to share and exchange information.
‘‘We should encourage Web and mobile
services to lead with their privacy
practices and let users vote with their
feet,’’ Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist
in New York, wrote in a recent blog post.
Mr. Wilson is an investor in Duck Duck
Go, a search engine that says it does not
keep track of a user’s search history.
Gabriel Weinberg, one of the creators
of Duck Duck Go, says it has been able
to carve out a niche audience despite
thedominance of juggernauts like
Google and Bing. Last month, the site
performed 45 million searches, and Mr.
Weinberg predicts that next month the
figure will inch toward 50 million.
‘‘It’s easy to think that no one cares
about privacy because they still use all
the services that keep track of them,’’
Mr. Weinberg said. Switching from services
like Google may be hard for
people who are accustomed to them, or
who rely on them for functions like
e-mail as well as search.
‘‘If the switching costs are too high,
users aren’t willing to make the trade
and that’s not unreasonable,’’ he said.
‘‘But if there’s a viable alternative,
they’re more willing to do it.’’
Many online companies that have
tried to build businesses around their
BITS, PAGE 15
STUART ISETT/BLOOMBERG NEWS
Employees at a Microsoft Store in Seattle playing with an Xbox Kinect, which has spawned its own commercial ecosystem for uses that go far beyond playing video games.
Leader or follower, or was it both?
Kinect evolved quickly
out of the game universe
Microsoft had created
BY ROB WALKER
When the Kinect was introduced in November
2010 as a $150 motion-control
add-on to Microsoft’s Xbox consoles, it
drew attention from more than just
video game players. A slim, black, oblong
wedge perched on a base, it allowed
Winning over the techies
From The New York Times Magazine
a player to use his body to throw virtual
footballs or kick virtual opponents without
a controller, but it was also seen as
an important step forward in controlling
technology with natural gestures.
In fact, as the company likes to note,
the Kinect set ‘‘a Guinness World Record
for the fastest-selling consumer
device ever.’’ And at least some of the
early adopters of the Kinect were not
content just to play games with it. ‘‘Kinect
hackers’’ were drawn to its affordably
synthesizing an arsenal of sophisticated
components — notably, a fancy
video camera, a ‘‘depth sensor’’ to capture
visual data in three dimensions and
a multiarray microphone capable of a
similar trick with audio.
Combined with a powerful microchip
and software, these capabilities could be
put to uses unrelated to the Xbox. Like:
enabling a small drone to ‘‘see’’ its surroundings
and avoid obstacles; rigging
a 3-D scanner to create small reproductions
of almost any object; directing the
music of a computerized orchestra with
PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA
BY DAVID STREITFELD
Men invented the Internet. And not just
any men. Men who idolized Mr. Spock
and cried when Steven P. Jobs died.
Nerds. Geeks. But are these men
trapped in the past even as they create
the future?
That’s the debate that has sprung up
here since Ellen Pao, a junior partner in
her early 40s at the distinguished venture
capital firm of Kleiner Perkins
Caufield & Byers, filed a sexual discrimination
lawsuit against the company
and her co-workers.
The complaint, laced with accusations
of professional retaliation after spurned
sexual advances, has riveted Silicon
Valley, whose venture capitalists generally
prefer media attention for their
businesses and deals, not themselves.
Instead of talking about the New New
Thing, people are discussing an old, old
problem. And they are taking sides.
Although the accusations have yet to
be heard in court, even some of Ms.
Pao’s critics concede that she is exposing
an uncomfortable truth about Silicon
Valley: starting tech companies in
2012 is still a male game, and so is fi-
conductorlike gestures. It has been used
to make animation, to add visual effects
to videos and to control a PC through the
movement of a person’s hands.
At the International Consumer Electronics
Show this year, Steven A.
Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive,
used his keynote presentation to announce
that the company would release
a version specifically meant for use outside
the Xbox context and to indicate
that the company would lay down formal
rules permitting commercial uses
for the device. A result has been a fresh
wave of Kinect-centric experiments.
An object that spawns its own commercial
ecosystem is a thing to take seriously.
Patent-watching sites report that
in recent months, Sony, Apple and
Google have all registered plans for gesture-control
technologies like the Kinect.
But there is disagreement about exactly
how the Kinect evolved into an
object with such potential. Did Microsoft
intentionally create a versatile platform
analogous to Apple’s App Store? Or did
outsider technology artists and hobbyists
take what the company thought of as
a game device and redefine its value?
This clash of theories illustrates a larger
debate about the nature of innovation
in the 21st century, and the even larger
question of who decides what any given
object is really for. Does progress flow
from a corporate entity’s offering a whizbang
breakthrough embraced by the
masses? Or does success now depend on
a company’s acquiescing to the crowd’s
input? The Kinect does not neatly conform
to either theory. But in this instance,
maybe it is not about whose vision wins;
maybe it is about the contest.
Theodore Watson bought a Kinect as
soon as the gadget was available. He
soon acquired 15 more. He does not use
KLEINER PERKINS CAUFIELD & BYERS
Ellen Pao says she suffered from a ‘‘pattern
of retaliation’’ by a colleague for five years.
cause women are quiet.’’ Another male
executive, Chi-Hua Chien, is quoted in
the suit saying women were not being
invited to a big-deal dinner because
they would ‘‘kill the buzz.’’
Neither Ms. Pao nor any of the parties
mentioned in the lawsuit would comment
on it.
Kleiner is an unlikely defendant for
another reason. It is particularly conscious
of its image. ‘‘As Kleiner Perkins
sees it, the Florence of the Renaissance
had the Medicis, the American steel industry
had the House of Morgan, and
Silicon Valley in the late 20th century
has Kleiner Perkins,’’ David A. Kaplan
wrote in ‘‘The Silicon Boys’’ in 1999.
That was when the firm was at its
peak, the money behind Netscape, Genentech,
Amazon and a little start-up
called Google.
‘‘If you believe every allegation in the
complaint, it’s appalling and an important
window into how the valley works,’’
Mr. Kaplan said. ‘‘But I’m somewhat
skeptical. The clichés you hear in the
valley are about the pranks, the obsessiveness,
the Foosball tables. You don’t
really hear about randiness and mistreatment
of women. That doesn’t prove
it’s not there, but that’s not the lore.’’
Of course, it depends on your perspecnancing
them.
Her complaint goes further. It depicts
venture capitalists here as a group of
21st-century men who may be hard at
work building the 22nd century but,
when it comes to dealing with women in
the workplace, are stuck firmly in the
caveman era — or at least in the 1950s.
‘‘You talk to any woman in technology
and she will have a personal story or
know a story where she felt conscious of
her gender in subtle or significant
ways,’’ said Kathy Savitt, 48, the chief
executive of the social commerce startup
Lockerz. Sometimes, she said, it’s as
mild as realizing, ‘‘I’m the only chick in
the room.’’ Other times, ‘‘it’s a lack of
any of them to play games. Mr. Watson
is an artist and a designer who lives in
New York, and his work uses closed-circuit
security cameras, graphics cards
and game hardware ‘‘tweaked,’’ he
notes, ‘‘for our purposes.’’
To use a Kinect with a computer instead
of an Xbox, Mr. Watson needed a
‘‘driver’’ (basically a bit of software)
that did not exist. He joined a small, farflung
and technically sophisticated
community effort dubbed OpenKinect,
which sprang up immediately after the
Kinect was introduced, to write the code
that would make this possible. At the
same time, Adafruit, a hobbyist-focused
electronics company based in New
Innovators outside Microsoft
have learned to love one of its
products. Or if not love, then
at least take it seriously.
York, offered $1,000 to the first person or
group to write the necessary code in an
open-source format.
At the time, in late 2010, Microsoft’s
primary Kinect focus was the mainstream
game market. Its first response
to OpenKinect seemed predictable:
CNET reported an unidentified representative
declaring that the company
did ‘‘not condone the modification of its
products’’ and would work closely with
the law enforcement authorities ‘‘to
keep Kinect tamper-resistant.’’ Adafruit
increased its prize, ultimately to $3,000.
Within days a developer in Spain posted
videos demonstrating that he had made
his Kinect work with a PC.
OpenKinect refined and spread the
open source driver code, and a variety
of ‘‘Kinect hacks,’’ as they came to be
called, proliferated in YouTube videos.
Soon Mr. Watson and his wife, Emily
Gobeille, posted their own video, in
which her hand movements were captured
by a Kinect and translated onto a
screen displaying a computer-generated
bird figure, which she controlled
like a high-technology puppet.
Mr. Watson told me this by telephone
from Amsterdam, where he and Ms.
Gobeille had just presented a polished
version of their creation as an installation
at CineKid, an international conference
for professionals working in children’s
media. The specter of a Microsoft-backed
‘‘law enforcement’’ response to projects
like his had obviously faded. In fact,
shortly after the open-source driver was
finished, one of Microsoft’s top Kinect
people appeared on U.S. public radio and
asserted that OpenKinect participants
would ‘‘absolutely not’’ be prosecuted.
In December 2010, Microsoft’s partner,
PrimeSense, an Israeli company
that created the Kinect’s 3-D depthsensing
chip, released its own set of
software drivers and code for the socalled
hackers to work with. A few
months later, Microsoft announced it
would release its own code kit. It certainly
seemed, as Mashable.com put it,
that the company had ‘‘done a complete
180 when it comes to hacks.’’
The idea of a loosely knit band of outsider
creative coders forcing a huge
company to rethink a major new product
is appealing. Especially when that company
is Microsoft. Fairly or not, Microsoft
is widely viewed not as an innovator
but as a peddler of me-too products
with ruthless business acumen. Open
source zealots point all the way back to
1976, when Bill Gates wrote an ‘‘open letter
to hobbyists,’’ complaining that dis-
KINECT, PAGE 16
LONDON
Sun tabloid unable to fill
the void left by closing
of News of the World
BY AMY CHOZICK
Rupert Murdoch has endured a barrage
of blows in the phone-hacking scandal
at his British tabloids. One setback,
however, is not happening in Parliament,
but on British newsstands.
The Sun, a brash daily tabloid that delivers
mostly splashy sports stories,
topless models and scandalous
celebrity gossip to working-class readers
— all wrapped in a colorful, cheeky
tone — has long been a pet of Mr. Murdoch’s.
Lately, however, sales of the new
Sunday edition, the one created to replace
the shuttered News of the World,
have slipped.
Sales of the Sunday edition have
fallen 28 percent, to 2.3 million in April
from 3.2 million copies sold in the weeks
after it first hit the stands in February,
according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
The News of the World sold 2.7
million copies (or one copy for every 23
people in Britain), in July, when Mr.
Murdoch closed the tabloid.
Analysts estimated that circulation at
The Sun on Sunday would continue to
fall until stabilizing at about two million
copies, below Mr. Murdoch’s hope but
bigger than its closest competitor The
Sunday Mirror, which sold 1.1 million
copies in April.
Why has the Sun been unable to fill the
void left by the 168-year-old News of the
World? British media analysts suggest
that The News, which was known for its
investigative exclusives, transcended
social class in a way The Sun has not
been able to do. Readers who do not buy
The Sun during the week do not see it as
the newspaper for them Sundays either,
said Douglas McCabe, media analyst at
Enders Analysis in London.
‘‘The Sun brand is very much aimed
at the working man,’’ Mr. McCabe said.
ULI SEIT FOR THE NYT
‘‘Having a winning paper is the best answer
to our critics,’’ Mr. Murdoch has said.
‘‘The News of the World was a one-off
weekly picked up by those people but
also by the educated middle class who
buy The Sunday Times.’’
Charlie Beckett, director of Polis, a
media research organization affiliated
with the London School of Economics,
said, ‘‘It’s difficult to underestimate how
unique The News of the World was.’’
‘‘The front page would always have a
sensational story that usually involved
sex, politics and crime and might have
even been true,’’ he said, adding: ‘‘The
Sun hasn’t been able to repeat that.’’
In a recent weekday edition, The Sun
led with an ‘‘exclusive’’ about an obese
teenager (‘‘said to be 63 STONE,’’ or 882
pounds) who had to be evacuated from
her home in south Wales.
In February, Mr. Murdoch traveled to
London to introduce The Sun on Sunday
personally, six months after News Corp.
SUN,PAGE16
Suit raises questions about women’s place in Silicon Valley
relevance, a feeling you can see an end
to your opportunities.’’
With the number of women in Silicon
Valley so meager, a prominent discrimination
lawsuit does not surprise Ms.
Savitt. This place runs into trouble with
women on a regular basis, most memorably
in recent years when the C.E.O. of
Hewlett-Packard resigned after inappropriate
conduct with a former reality
TV actress who was working for him.
Still, Ms. Pao’s lawsuit has injected
talk of sexual politics into a conversation
that generally sticks to money and eyeballs
and business plans, monetization
and enlightenment of the masses. Men in
Silicon Valley may not behave any worse
than men anywhere else, but people here
like to think it’s all a meritocracy.
The shock really stems from where
the scandal is taking place. Ms. Savitt
knows Kleiner well; the firm is financing
Lockerz. She cannot comment on
the suit but expresses her deep admiration
for the Kleiner crew. The firm is one
of the few exceptions to the venture
world’s lack of interest in hiring women.
A quarter of its 50 partners are female.
That fact fits awkwardly with the lawsuit’s
claim that one male executive,
Randy Komisar, told Ms. Pao that women
would never succeed at Kleiner ‘‘betive.
Sandy Kurtzig was one of two female
engineering students in her class at
Stanford University in the late 1960s and
is still in the game, with a start-up funded
by Kleiner. She always tried to take the
valley’s sexism in stride — ‘‘When men
made passes, I just downplayed it so the
guy doesn’t feel he’s being put down
when rejected’’ — but is disappointed by
its persistence.
‘‘I am shocked there aren’t more
women in high positions in Silicon Valley,’’
Ms. Kurtzig said. ‘‘I always thought
the world was going to be gender-blind.’’
While Kleiner has seen its magic touch
somewhat dimmed of late — it came
very late to the money fountain that was
Facebook — a lawsuit like this could permanently
kill the buzz. Already, the suit
has eclipsed the mid-May announcement
of the firm’s 15th fund, a $525 million
investment pot. Which, despite all
those women at Kleiner, is being run by
one woman and nine men.
Ms. Pao, who came to Kleiner with the
dream of helping direct such a fund,
graduated from Princeton with a degree
in electrical engineering. She got a law
degree from Harvard and worked for
Cravath Swaine & Moore for two years
doing international deals. She returned
WOMEN, PAGE 16