In part six of our video series following three startups taking part in the Springboard accelerator at Google Campus in London, we find out how they’ve been coping with this key part of accelerator life.

The Tears, Tantrums & Tech video series is produced by HAUS Pictures. Many thanks to Springboard and Google for allowing us this regular glimpse into what life inside an accelerator is like. Look out for episode 7 next week.

You can find all the episodes in the series so far here.

Andrew Keen. The writer and broadcaster who managed to irritate a large group of people on the Web with his last book, “The Cult of the Amateur”, was in London to talk about his latest work.

Keen is often drawn out by the media as a counterpoint to tech utopians, someone to pooh-pooh the optimism of the Web. Indeed, his Twitter bio dubs him “The Anti-Christ of Silicon Valley”.

It’s simple to cast a devil in opposition to current theories but this is not always helpful when it comes to discussing the realities of human activity on the Internet.

Keen’s latest book, “Digital Vertigo”, proves that he is a more subtle and thoughtful writer and shows off more of his skill as a historical author looking at our technological progress. It’s probably not going to be a text that people look to for a dose of ire.

We meet at a hotel in London and the author is chipper after a trip to the gym and keen to get into his schedule of interviews with media outlets. Not at all the grumpy luddite that he is often mistakenly cast as.

TNW: So what is this new book about?

It’s a book that tries to describe and expose the truth about our infatuation with social networking with websites like Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

It’s not a positive review of those services but it’s not an entirely negative one either. It suggests that we’ve fallen in love with social networking, but that love affair may end badly.

TNW: That’s a bit of a stark warning, but it would be reactionary to cancel accounts and leave social media en masse. What are the reasons for falling out with these platforms?

I gave up Facebook and it cheered me up enormously. More and more people say to me that they don’t like Facebook and they wish they weren’t on it, so there’s no reason why you can’t give it up.

I’m not a Luddite though, I’m not suggesting we should give up all these networks, I’m suggesting though that we need to use them a little more carefully because at the moment, many of us are doing it in such a way as to reveal everything about ourselves, to turn ourselves inside out and lose something about what it is that makes us human.

TNW: Should we be looking to the past in order to create a better future online?

The book suggests that history is repeating itself. At the beginning of the industrial revolution we had a similar infatuation with the social, with radical visibility, with transparency and one of the men who articulated this love of transparency was the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who invented the Panopticon. This building where we could be watched all the time.

Bentham argued that it would make us more virtuous, more hard-working and essentially happier. Bentham’s philosophy, utilitarianism, is also one of maximising our happiness. I remind the reader that this happened in the industrial revolution, did not have a happy ending and what we’re going through now, with this idea that we should always be visible, always online, watched and watching everyone else is leading us in a similarly dark direction.

I have three fears, about being watched. The first is of course government, the old 1984 argument and governments both in the democratic West and in totalitarian or authoritarian cultures like Iran or China, are using the social web to spy on their own citizens.

I’m also concerned that commercial companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter are aggregating our personal data and one way or another passing that on to advertisers, because it maximises their value. It’s not because they’re evil, but because they’re commercial companies that want to maximise their revenue.

The third group that concerns me is all of us. To paraphrase Walter Kirn, the American novelist, ‘we’ve all become little brothers, spying on ourselves’. So in many ways in the twenty-first century I’m less worried about Orwell’s big brother, and more concerned with all of us, watching each other; a culture of ‘little brothers’.

TNW: How does Jeremy Bentham translate into today’s social media landscape?

The contemporary Jeremy Benthams are American social and media theorists like Jeff Jarvis and David Weinberger. Weinberger is a very decent man, but he believes that transparency will make us more generous. Jarvis thinks that transparency will break down taboos like social unacceptance of homosexuality.

I don’t think that this transparency does make us more generous, it doesn’t break down taboos.

In our culture which tends to be not very generous and tends to be very snarky and often worse than snarky, social media, this perpetual personal broadcast platform is actually in many respects bringing out the worst in all of us.

When you go on Twitter you see lots of examples of homophobia, racism or hatred against a political group or cultural group. I’m not saying that technology makes us bad. Technology is a mirror, but in today’s world the social web is a mirror of who we are as a species and when we stare at it, we’re not looking at something that is generally is very generous, forgiving or attractive.

TNW: Do we not have the personal choice not only to leave social media platforms but also to monitor or adapt the things we do and say there?

I’m not arguing that this is Orwellian, I’m not suggesting that we are literally forced to be on these networks and to give away all of our most intimate details. The truth is that sociologists and cultural anthropologists are finding that people are revealing more and more about themselves and that privacy is increasingly being jeopardised, if not dying.

People say you don’t have to be on these networks if you don’t want to. In some ways that’s right, but in another way these social networks are becoming the de facto platforms, the front doors of the Internet – and everyone needs to be on the Internet.

So Facebook’s attempt, the reason why it’s become a hundred-billion dollar company, the reason why it’s so valued and critical is that we have the shift from what people call the economy of links (which was a Google-centric Internet) to an economy of ‘likes’ (which is a Facebook-centric Internet).

So, to enter this world, to go on more and more of these networks, whether it’s the gaming platform of Zynga or social location services like Highlight or Glancee, you have to be on Facebook.

So, not being on Facebook is a kind of sacrifice. I’m not on it and it’s easy for me to not be on it because I’m making a statement. But for most people it is a sacrifice.

I would argue that there are very few people who can afford not to be on Facebook, either the extremely rich or the extremely poor, but for most of us, Facebook is becoming an essential platform to build our brands, to build our identities and to network; both professionally and personally.

TNW: What are the connections between the discussion you set out in the book and Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Vertigo?

The book works off the central metaphor in Hitchcock’s movie, Vertigo, which is a warning about falling in love with the beautiful blonde who doesn’t really exist. It works off the metaphors of falling in love with a corpse and indeed making love to a corpse, which is what Vertigo is about.

The reason I make Vertigo so central in the book is firstly because it’s set in the Bay Area and it provided me with a series of narrative opportunities to integrate the movie with real life. It allowed me to describe how the Bay Area and Silicon Valley has changed so dramatically in the last 50 years.

But the real truth is I’m a huge Hitchcock fan and whilst I’m a writer about technology, I find straight books about technology very dull. So I wanted to integrate Hitchcock’s Vertigo into my book to make it more interesting, to make it more compelling and to get people to think beyond websites. I think after a while those books get very dull.

TNW: Is there an association between vertigo as a phobia and how you perceive social media?

I’m less interested in the heights phobia of vertigo and more in its dizzying quality. The consequence of having vertigo is that you feel dizzy, the world revolves quicker and quicker around you.

When you’re on Twitter, particularly on real-time media, when you’re watching those millions of tweets flicker across your screen, it does give you a very dizzying sense of the nature of the world. I like the idea of social media making us dizzy.

Somehow separating us from the concrete, from what we traditionally called reality.

TNW: Can creativity survive in a digital social world?

Creativity is critical, not just from an artistic point of view. It’s the key thing in our society, it’s the thing that generates innovation.

The really creative people are the Steve Jobs’s, the Mark Zuckerbergs and the Larry Pages. So the real challenge in an enterprise sense is whether social media is going to trigger the kind of innovation in business that most people would like.

I don’t think that’s the case. I think that companies need to be very careful about how they leverage social media technologies within their enterprise. When employees are watched all the time and everyone’s continually discussing things, when you have endless real time, online meeting through networks like Yammer and Chatter, I think real creativity could be a casualty of all that.

TNW: Is history doomed to keep repeating itself? If this tech revolution echoes the industrial one before it, why can’t we do something to change and avoid past mistakes?

I think some cultures are more sympathetic than others to understanding that history repeats itself. I’m half-English, half-American so perhaps janus-faced in the sense that America is forward-looking and Britain tends to be more backward-looking. The book hopefully is janus-faced in the sense that it’s historical but also futuristic.

I think we need to learn from the past, but at the same time I would argue – and I don’t think that the book suggests that today’s challenges are the exact repetition of the industrial one. Big brother is different to little brothers. The industrial revolution is not identical to the digital revolution. The nation-state of the industrial world is being replaced by the global village of the digital world.

But it does help to understand what’s happened in the past. One of the things that concerns me is that there are some digital utopians who always say the same things. ‘This is the first time this has ever happened in history’, ‘We’re in uncharted territory’, ‘Now we can finally realise ourselves as human beings’…. And the point in my book is that this has been said before, it was said two hundred years ago and it ended in many ways, tragically. We need to learn from history and we need to understand that nothing is ever really new.

TNW: Who is the audience for this book and why are some of the people featured by their Twitter handle while others are not?

Hopefully that added to the entertainment in the narrative. One of the people who is represented by their Twitter symbol is Reid Hoffman who is one of the most powerful, articulate, successful and I think brilliant figures in Silicon Valley. On Twitter he’s @quixotic, so it’s hard to resist using that perhaps slightly ironic title.

The book is designed as a broad introduction to social media. It’s not really for Silicon Valley insiders. It’s written for an audience that enjoys cultural criticism, that wants to understand the Internet and social media in a broader social, cultural context. It’s written for people who like movies and most of all it’s written for people who like a good read. My focus was on writing a narrative that was entertaining and engaging.

TNW: How do you manage a critique of a system that you are part of yourself?

My first book was an attack on amateurism, that was defiantly amateurish. This book is a critique of connectivity, which is intricately connected.

My first book I wrote a book against blogs and my editor said, ‘Oh, you’ve got to have a blog’. So I had a blog and of course it was rather silly because you really shouldn’t write a book against blogs and have a blog of your own. I never enjoyed blogging, I don’t like the idea of giving away my content for free.

This book is more complicated. The narrative is actually partly developed around my own ambivalence to Twitter. The first chapter in particular is about both the temptation to use Twitter, my need as a writer to use Twitter, but also the fact that I’m rather awkward and that it makes me very uncomfortable to be continually on Twitter.

I’m on Twitter but I’m not on Facebook and I made a conscious effort to become a Facebook resister partly because I think that’s consistent with the message in the book and I can avoid those kinds of questions in interviews but also because it just annoyed me.

This book isn’t simply an attack on social media. Though there is an element of that, I do argue that social media is caused by our narcissism and it’s ugly and inane and I’m in some ways as guilty of that as anyone. But it’s not simply that conservative critique.

It’s not just because we are narcissistic, it’s bound up with deeper structural shifts in the nature of our economy and society.

TNW: So what does all this mean for the future of social media?

I think we are going to hit a wall. The issue of how much social media can speed up, how much more data we can consume and reveal to the world is not infinite. We don’t work under Moore’s Law. Humans aren’t chips, our brains are not able to keep up with that kind of technological development.

I think the most interesting thing on the horizon is the increasing relevance of artificial intelligence. I think the next big thing will be thinking machines. Machines that are harder and harder to distinguish from human beings.

That’s the solution to Moore’s law not applying to the human brain. But from a human point of view I’m not convinced that that would be a good thing for human beings when we are dependent on robots to look after us. I’m not convinced that that’s a world I would want to live in.

You can see a summary interview about Keen’s new book recorded at The Next Web conference in Amsterdam earlier this year, below.

Digital Vertigo is not like most technology books. The presentation of information follows Keen on a journey through his thoughts and research on the current state of social media in the light of historical events. The spinning narrative that also entwines the storyline of Hitchcock’s film can make the book a vertiginous read in itself.

One thing is for certain, this book is nothing like the fiery polemic that was the Cult of the Amateur, and so instead of annoying the hashtags off every Web-loving digital utopian, it should provide some room for thought and a deeper consideration of what we all think we’re doing here in this virtual place.

Last month, Facebook introduced a feature called “trending articles” that stuck a slideshow into your news feed of popular news articles via your friends that you might have missed.

It looks like videos are now getting the same treatment, as some users have just noticed “trending videos” in their news feed as well.

Based on what your friends are watching, using apps that are connected to Facebook’s Open Graph of course, you’ll be shown the this slideshow of videos to check out:

This is obviously Facebook’s way of re-surfacing content that you might have missed due to the real-time nature of the news feed.

Some folks were pretty annoyed with trending articles, so it’ll be interesting to see how well this does. It’s great news for apps like Viddy and Socialcam, since its content will be shown more than ever before.

I have no idea what Airtime is, but perhaps Sean Parker will get some mileage out of this feature, too.

It’s safe to say that most of the popular Open Graph actions will get this same treatment, especially music. It’s like trending topics on Twitter…but with actual content.

Was just about to push sn0wbreeze 2.9.4 and Apple pushes 5.1.1 (9B208) for the iPhone 4 (GSM) only. I wonder what changed…

— iH8sn0w (@iH8sn0w) May 26, 2012

This update was previously released on May 7th, and featured a list of improvements including improvement of HDR reliability when using the lock screen shortcut, AirPlay fixes and a security patch for a Safari exploit.

Apple has, from time to time, found issues with iOS builds and re-released them for update to devices. That may be what triggered this update.

GSM iPhone 4 users, that’s AT&T customers here in the U.S., can get the update by tapping Settings>General>Software Update or by plugging their device into iTunes. If you’re already using iOS 5.1.1, then you won’t be seeing this update as it’s a replacement of the old build, not an upgrade.

You can download the new firmware directly here.

I don’t have any words to add to this amazing work of art below. Have a watch and enjoy:

I want need to see this movie right now.

BONUS: Check out this behind-the-scenes footage from the trailer’s filming:

By the way, have you visited the Tetris website lately? It’s kind of cool.

Among some usability tweaks and bug fixes, Airbnb has announced an update to its iOS app which brings a new cool feature: offline access for messages and itineraries.

If you’ve had a back and forth with your host and don’t have access to 3G or WIFI, have no fear. You can now go back to them for reference.

During the handful of times that I’ve used the app, I’ve found it to be a little more than unstable. This update should do the trick.

Here’s the complete list of changes in this version:

• No more crashes! We’ve squished a lot of bugs and thoroughly streamlined the app.
• Access your messages and itineraries – offline. All of your conversations and reservation itineraries will be downloaded and stored on your device. You can access them even when you have spotty mobile coverage, or no internet connection at all.
• Say goodbye to annoying re-logins. Log in once with your email or directly through your Facebook account, and your login information will remain saved for as long as the app is installed. 
• Our push notifications are much more reliable. We’ve updated our servers so that you’ll never miss an important message again.

Its been a busy few weeks for Airbnb, as it announced its new Million Dollar Host Guarantee earlier in the week.

Airbnb for iOS

Yahoo! came at the tech world in a blur this week, launching its new search and browsing tool Axis. Response has been lukewarm, especially since the launch didn’t go completely as planned.

I’ve been playing around with both the desktop and iOS version and I think that Yahoo! might be on to something. I took a dive into Apple’s App Store to see what users think and was surprised to see 891 reviews and a 4.5 star rating. That’s a good sign, right?

As I dug deeper I saw some slightly familiar names sharing their thoughts on Axis. Have a look:

That’s a pretty sweet review…from Yahoo’s Patent Counsel, David Ishimaru.

Here’s another:

Right on, great review…from Yahoo’s Network Operations Center Engineer, Brian Koch.

There are plenty of reviews from regular users though, but before I leave you for the day, check this one out:

Someone thinks it’s an awesome browser! Wait, that’s…Yahoo Director, Product Management, Ethan Batraski.

Keep your Kool-aid nice and chilled this Memorial Day weekend, kids!

You don’t get a look inside Apple’s factories in China all that often. Apple is notoriously secretive about their processes and products. That’s why the video below is so fascinating, as it offers one of the most extensive looks at an iPhone assembly line that I’ve ever seen.

Chinese blog Ynet reports that over 70% of Apple’s iPhones are now made in Foxconn’s Zhengzhou plant, where this video was shot. The video, courtesy of iFeng by way of M.I.C Gadget, shows a Chinese reporter from iFeng and Foxconn CEO Terry Gou taking a tour of the iPhone production line.

Gou first takes the reporter on a helicopter ride in order to show off the scope of the factory’s size. The video also mentions a few interesting details about the factory, namely that it covers the largest area, around 5.6 square kilometers, of any in Zhengzhou and it has the largest living area for its 115k workers.

Gou says that the area around the factory, which he refers to as a wasteland, is being reserved for further expansion of the plant.

The area of the factory that Gou shows off is dedicated to the production of the iPhone 4S and its display. The reporter shows off the iPhone 4S frame and Gou says that ‘his’ factory is better than any of the production in Japan, Germany, the U.S. and elsewhere. They then move on to the motherboards, where Gou says that one section of the parts runs some 148 meters. The motherboard area produces 10,000 units a day.

Gou and the reporter then step through a cleaning chamber and into a clean-room where the cameras are assembled.

The last video look at an Apple assembly line I can recall was shot by Marketplace reporter Mike Schmitz and that was of the iPad. It didn’t have nearly as many shots of the actual assembly, testing and parts involved in the making of an iDevice.

The site cites Mr Li Jiaxiang, the Administrator of the Civil Aviation Authority of China as stating that 70% of the production of the iPhone will go through the Zhengzhou plant this year, producing some 200 tons of international cargo every day.

In addition, there is a video of Foxconn workers being interviewed, but it’s not clear whether they’re working on Apple products or not. The workers are asked about working conditions and respond positively. You can see that here.

We’re working on getting a translation of the video above to see if there are any interesting tidbits. If you’re a Chinese speaking reader, feel free to chime in below!

 Thanks to Josh Ong for translation efforts

The numbers out today from IDC, in regards to European smartphone sales appear to contain good news: Windows Phone grew by more than double in the last year, with shipment of its handsets up some 156 percent. That’s no small figure.

However, there is a softness to the number; the great Nokia roll out has not managed to explode Windows Phone sales numbers. That may appear counter-intuitive, but bear with me. We return to the famous quote from Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, from July of last year: “[in regards to Windows Phone] we’ve gone from very small to very small.”

Yep. Here’s the kicker: Windows Phone, even with that growth, only barely managed to crack 4% market penetration in Europe. Sure, that’s progress, but only on a certain scale.

One important Windows Phone selling point is the money that’s behind it; Microsoft wouldn’t let Windows Phone fade, right, and therefore it will eventually hit scale, and thus become a real player. Endless studies have been published touting the future of Windows Phone, that it will control some large percentage of the market in the coming years.

And yet, the platform appears to be treading water. Nokia’s arrival, that supposedly momentous event, couldn’t even get Windows Phone to the 5% mark. And it’s not as if there is another Nokia-level event in the works. Looking ahead, all that appears on the horizon are the occasional software updates and, of course, new crops of phones before the holiday season.

So you have to ask, how is Windows Phone going to manage to find enough sales velocity to hit double-digit market share? That’s my rule of thumb for the platform, crack 10%, and it will have finally ‘made it.’

People are noticing the slow growth. I don’t see much of a solution to boost the platform, other than something as vague as ‘quality.’ Your move, Microsoft.

When I signed up to make TNW the media sponsor for GLUE Conference I knew that I was getting in over my head. Then, a couple of weeks before the event, I got asked to help sort through the massive list of applications for the Demo Pavilion. 12 teams went in, 1 emerged victorious in a system that let everyone vote for the winner. That team? Distil.it

The Pavilion was an area, graciously sponsored by Alcatel-Lucent, where early-stage startups could demonstrate their product to the people who matter most – those who would potentially be using them. There was a heavy focus on cloud architecture, and graduates of the inaugural TechStars Cloud program were represented en masse.

But back to the subject at hand, Distil is a company that focuses on putting an end to Web scraping. It’s a problem that anyone who has anything online has encountered at some point, and it is increasingly becoming a problem that is costing companies money.

What’s interesting about Distil, versus some other companies who are working on the scraping problem, is that it isn’t focused on just digital publishing. While publishing is an obvious target, there are other industries that have equal problems.

Looking at Distil’s site, you’ll see that they’re branching out their tools to work in a number of different areas. As I talked with TechStars Cloud Managing Direct Jason Seats, he opened my eyes to some other, not so obvious problems. Walmart, for instance, could perhaps hire a company to scrape pricing data from Amazon so that they know how to price their own items.

While that’s just one example, there are many others where direct or ancillary revenue is lost because of the simple act of taking information from one site and placing it elsewhere. Entire businesses are being made based on the profitability of crawling content to scrape information.

The shocking part is how easy it is to get content scraped, and how inexpensive the process has become. A post on the Distil blog breaks it down quite nicely, as the team went so far as to hire someone to do a scraping project (of freely-available, public data) and then blog the results.

GigaOm’s Stacey Higginbotham has a rather brilliant look at the problem at hand today. Essentially it comes down to the differences between those who would do good and those who would do bad, but the difficulty comes in separating them from one another.

“Not all scrapers and crawlers are out to defraud publishers of ad revenue — some are foisting their robots on the web in a legitimate way to offer consumers a service as BlackLocus does, while others use it for academic research. Even journalists scrape data from web sites for their stories.”

So what does Distil do? Depending upon the plan that you choose, you’ll get everything from SSL support to custom headers, dedicated vanity IP addresses and even a sandboxed, private network. Each of these, alone, is an effective method to combat scraping. But combine them and you’ll quickly have an arsenal of tools at your disposal to keep your content safe.

The market isn’t empty, and Distil has its work cut out for it. CloudFlare’s ScrapeShield immediately comes to mind as an alternative. From the talk that I had with the Distil team, however, they’ve got some great ideas going. It will most definitely be interesting to see their approach as it continues to develop.

The GLUE Conference Demo Pavilion competition wasn’t a blowout by any means. But as one small aside, there’s a funny story you should hear. The voting application was put together by Twilio. Its developer was so certain of its security that he issued the challenge for anyone to hack it.

Bad move in a room full of hackers.

Only a few minutes later, suspiciously-padded vote counts meant that the process had to be rolled back to before the challenge, then re-secured, and voting could continue. Fortunately it was pretty easy to track the massive influx of votes to get things back in line, but a good laugh was had by all.

➤ Distil