Does the image you project at work match your true self? If not, it can cost you.

If you’re like a lot of businesspeople, you may feel like there’s more than one of you. There’s the you who wears suits and sits in meetings. The you who knows how to make a great pitch or hire and fire an employee. Then there’s the you who has a spouse who drives you crazy, or has trouble understanding your kids, or wishes you could find your soulmate. The you who still doesn’t feel like an adult around your parents.

Take me. I’m the face at the bottom of this column wearing makeup and pearls, but as I write this I’m wearing an old sweatshirt and looking out the window at a scene so rural that we have to rinse our garbage so the local bear population won’t pull open our cans. The me who writes this column and sits at the head of ASJA board meetings seems different from the me who mourns my mother’s Alzheimer’s, or is a little bit sad that I will never have kids.

We all do it: We bring one part of ourselves to work and leave the rest of ourselves at home. Maybe it’s time to change that.

I had a fascinating conversation on this topic with David A. McKnight, an image consultant and author of “The Zen of Executive Style.” He argues that the best way to project and maintain an effective executive image is to bring at least part of yourself to the table. Though his focus is clothing and visual style, the lesson runs much deeper than that. He offers some powerful reasons why you should bring your whole self to your business image:

1. People won’t follow you if they don’t know who you are.

McKnight learned this the hard way at his first job after graduate school. “I wasn’t very authentic, and it came through in one of my reviews,” he says. “They said, ‘David performs very well, but his team doesn’t feel like they really know who he is.'”

There was a good reason for that: McKnight had been hiding his sexual orientation. “I was coming out as a gay black man in Corporate America, and it was very difficult,” he says now. “The way I hid it was to dress super-conservative, with only navy blue suits and white shirts.” Until that review, he hadn’t realized that his secrecy came off as aloofness, and that was standing in his way as a leader.

Over time, he learned to relax, both personally and in his clothing choices. “I started to feel a little more comfortable with myself and more confident, I found I could really be me, and wear a pink shirt, and be more stylish. I knew my work was always of very high quality.”

2. A fake you will make clients and contacts uncomfortable.

They may not even know why. But McKnight notes that most people have an instinct for these things. “It’s really important that the way you feel inside and your values and beliefs and who you are internally match the external. If the two are incongruent, that’s when people’s antennas tend to go up, and they feel there’s something about you that isn’t authentic.”

3. An honest workplace is a more effective workplace.

Often, people hide their true selves or true concerns because they fear the truth will be detrimental to their careers. “A working mother may be less inclined to say that she can’t make a 6 o’clock meeting because she has to pick up her children,” McKnight says. “She may view it as a hindrance to her ability to get promoted.” In the same way, he says, African-American people may straighten their hair, or those with regional or foreign accents may work to suppress them. “There are so many different ways we cover,” he says.

The problem is that this particular choice to be dishonest makes the workplace or the industry worse for everyone, because it contributes to an environment where no one feels entitled to be human. “When people uncover by choice, they feel more open, and the workplace becomes more inclusive,” McKnight says.

4. You’ll find out sooner if there’s a bad match.

No one likes change, and changing workplaces or industries can be particularly unappealing. But if you’re working in an environment where you can’t be your authentic self, you’re unlikely to succeed, and unlikely to be happy if you do. The time to find out is now, before you invest more time and effort, if you’re in a career where you’ll always be fighting against the norm, and to decide if that’s what you want.

If not, as McKnight notes, there are many rankings out there of the best places to work where people can preserve their family lives and be who they are without fear of repercussion. If your company or industry doesn’t fit who you are, there will be plenty of others that do.

5. You’ll connect better with customers.

“Clients who feel they can identify with you are more likely to do business with you,” McKnight says. “On the most fundamental level, people do business with people they like. If you’re trying to shield certain aspects of you are, people will feel like there’s some invisible veil.”

Lifting that veil gives you the chance to relate to customers with a deeper connection. “If we can be who we are, then people with either like us or they won’t,” he says. “But it won’t be because of something we’re doing or not doing.”

6. You’ll be happier.

McKnight recalls working with an investment banker who was an artist in her off hours. She’d spent her career projecting a very buttoned-down image, in keeping with that traditional and male-dominated industry. McKnight worked with her to let a little of her artistic side show through.

It was a huge boost to her sense of wellbeing in the workplace. “She felt so self-confident,” he says. “She told me she felt like a different person.”

7. You’ll be more successful.

People who bring their authentic selves to work are not only happier, they’re much more productive, McKnight says. It’s easy to see why. “I can tell you from experience that it’s very, very exhausting to pretend to be what you think others expect.”

That explains why he’s often seen careers take off when people become more authentic in the workplace. “People really shine when they are being themselves,” he says.

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How IT consulting company Kyyba used the auto industry’s retrenchment as motivation for strengthening and diversifying its work force.

If you’re not a prepubescent boy, we forgive you for not knowing the story of Seto Kaiba, the Yu-Gi-Oh! antihero — and CEO of his own multinational gaming company — who holds the virtually undefeatable blue-eyed white dragon dueling card. It’s the trump of the anime world, and it makes Kaiba the greatest gamer in all of Japan. He is both feared and respected.

Tel Ganesan didn’t know the legend of Kaiba in 2010, when he asked his son, then a fourth-grader, for help in rebranding his business. He’d started the company — originally known as Vision Tech Solutions — back in 1997 as an independent IT staffing-solution provider for Chrysler, booking $500,000 in revenue. As the business grew, he invested its earnings back into the company, acquiring two smaller businesses in 2007 and 2008. But when Chrysler filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2009, the auto industry was “hunkered down to minimize damage,” Ganesan recalls. “As our customers went down, we went down with them. We were too exposed.”

To bounce back and move forward, it needed a new, unified name. Ganesan had already paid a marketing firm $3,000 to propose 100 monikers, none of which grabbed him. “Perhaps my 11-year-old can do better,” he thought. He was right. Vision Tech Solutions and its new acquisitions were soon reborn as Kyyba.

What’s remarkable is that Kyyba has done far more than minimize the Chrysler damage. From 2010 to 2013, the company grew 123 percent. And with annual revenue near $30 million today, Kyyba is once again eyeing acquisition targets, Ganesan says.

What are the secrets to Kyyba’s continued growth, even in tough economic times? Ganesan offers these three insights:

1. Treat everyone like an entrepreneur.

“I’m not a micromanager,” Ganesan asserts, “because when people are empowered, amazing things happen.”

To encourage employees’ natural curiosity and drive, Kyyba pairs up each new hire with a senior team member and asks them to collaborate on a project. For example, a recent college graduate joined forces with a CPA on staff to implement the cloud solution SAP Business ByDesign. “I tell my employees, ‘Make your own decisions,'” he says. “‘If you’re not creating problems, then you’re not trying hard enough. Just don’t make the same mistake twice.'”

2. Hire for hunger.

“Two to three years ago, I looked for all the standard things when interviewing a job candidate. But even with the great resume and interview, I found a lot of people couldn’t move the needle,” Ganesan says. “Now I look for one thing: Is the person hungry? Experienced people can be complacent. Who cares if they have rock-star experience if they can’t put it to work? In my experience, passion and energy trump experience every time.”

3. Diversify through acquisitions.

In the IT consulting business, a solid sales team can mean the difference between growth and stagnation. Hiring the right salespeople and getting them up to speed efficiently is perhaps the biggest talent challenge Kyyba faces, Ganesan says.

“By the time I figure out whether a sales guy is really good, a year has gone by,” he notes. Bringing on strong talent — and profitable clients — through acquisitions generally means growth comes faster and with fewer risks, Ganesan says. Plus, acquisitions have allowed Kyyba to break into territories and industries (namely the financial industry in the Northeast and the oil and gas industry in Dallas) that it never could have organically. “That is where we should be, finding people in local markets with contacts and history.”

Editor’s note: Derek Khanna is a technology policy consultant and columnist. He previously worked for the House Republican Study Committee where he authored their report on copyright reform. Hespearheaded the national campaign on cellphone unlocking that resulted in proposed legislation to legalize unlocking your phone. Derek regularly writes for The Atlantic, National Review and Forbes. Follow him on Twitter @DerekKhanna.

On Tuesday, the House of Representatives will vote on legislation on phone unlocking (H.R. 1123). In January 2013, a decision by the Librarian of Congress made it a crime to unlock your phone, with either civil or criminal penalties. Since that time, the resale market has been significantly impacted and websites have shut down that offer unlocking services. In the following month over 114,000 Americans signed a White House petition demanding that this decision be reversed and supported our mass campaign, one of the largest online protests since SOPA/PIPA, and then legislation was introduced that has passed committee.

This legislation cannot be passed soon enough for Alex Koren, an entrepreneur who is attending Johns Hopkins University.

Koren is not your typical college sophomore. After completing his first year at Johns Hopkins, as an intern at Intel, he won a hackathon for designing an iOS application for distributed big data analysis. That app is the basis of an ambitious startup that he claims may solve some of our society’s most vexing problems, such as providing better weather forecasting and even advanced cures to cancer. Koren can be seen here running for student president with a Gangnam Style campaign video:

Koren won for student president but chose to resign to pursue his new venture. He believes that his startup has the potential to revolutionize big data analysis and change how each of us uses our smartphones.

As more Americans are accessing the Internet through their smartphones, web-enabled applications are the new hot commodity in the startup community. Millions of Americans, and soon billions around the world, access the Internet through their phones. Koren saw this as a big opportunity to network those devices into one large networked supercomputer. According to Koren, with such a large networked supercomputer able to utilize the resources of thousands or even millions of devices, it would have “the power to solve society’s most computationally demanding provisions.”

As Koren optimistically explains it, Hyv, the company that he co-founded with Sheldon Trotman, “will revolutionize the way we view and utilize big data.” In other words, each of our smartphones is a relatively powerful device, more powerful than the components that got us to the moon and back, and if many of these devices can all be networked together to operate as a supercomputer, it can create an extremely powerful parallel processing operation.

What could be done with such a massive parallel processing supercomputer? A whole lot. As Koren explains:

Whether we want to better forecast weather patterns, improve the accuracy of medical diagnoses, track the virility of Flappy Bird or analyze financial trends, we have no efficient way of processing the information. Supercomputers aren’t cutting it. They’re a black hole of energy consumption, require hundreds of millions of dollars to build and maintain and are quickly (within half a decade) usurped as new generations of processors are released. Fully understanding our world’s data requires an alternate, more efficient method.

Koren envisions this massive networked supercomputer finding cures for cancer through efficiently distributed protein folding and empowering others to perform advanced genomic research. He explains that “by using the excess processing capabilities in mobile devices, we can crowdsource available research; together, we can actively contribute to a progressive global community.”

Hyv may be able to create a massive parallel processing supercomputer to solve big problems, but it may also invigorate the entire mobile app ecosystem. Currently phone apps have essentially two ways to monetize their products. They can charge either for the applications or their services ( e.g. Uber), or they can give away their services for free and make money through advertising or data acquisition (e.g. Pandora, Facebook, Flipboard, Tinder, Instagram, Snapchat).

But historically, obtaining significant money through advertising on a mobile platform has been tough, there is less screen real estate for advertisements, often users are less willing to engage with advertisements on their phone and advertisements can also use precious data.

Hyv may offer a third model of monetization that could benefit future mobile applications: It could allow users to install an app and, in return, allow for some of their phone’s processing power to be used and sold to compensate the app creator. This form of monetization could supplement advertising revenue to allow new apps to be delivered for free to the consumer.

Does potentially solving some of the world’s most vexing problems and creating entire new mobile app ecosystems sound amazing? Well it was good enough to take first prize with Intel’s hackathon, and now six months later, they are testing a working prototype to ensure Hyv’s efficiency, security and effectiveness. Their idea on using many phones to operate together is not entirely original, but Koren thinks that they have solved the problem. Hyv has analyzed data in battery performance, data usage, computation speed and other key metrics. But a month ago, they hit a roadblock — one that, unlike previous barriers, they couldn’t control.

In order for Hyv to test its technology, it needed to use it on multiple devices and with multiple carriers. In particular, they are paying attention to how much data usage their software would require from users. “Our problem is relatively straightforward,” Koren says. “We must ensure Hyv functions equally well on all mobile phone carriers. However, a recent decision by the Librarian of Congress is barring this necessity.”

Hyv needs to take its devices, unlock them, and test them from one carrier to another. In so doing, the company would still fulfill its contractual obligation with their carriers, continuing to pay month to month, but would be able to see how Hyv operated on each network. As Koren explains it:

For two college students, bootstrapping and developing this colossal product out of our dorm rooms, cross-carrier performance analysis proves too financially demanding. Having the ability to simply unlock our mobile devices would remove our dilemma. Due to the ban on unlocking and unlocking companies, however, we aren’t able to legally do this.

After the campaign on cellphone unlocking, under severe pressure from the FCC, phone carriers agreed to a series of voluntary principles to allow their customers to unlock their devices in certain circumstances. But since Koren was still under contract for a subsidized device, those voluntary principles didn’t apply. So when he contacted his carrier for permission to unlock the device, while still keeping his plan with the carrier intact, they told him no.

Below is an excerpt of that conversation (emphasis and “[AT&T]” added for clarity):

Koren: I’m developing a piece of software that requires me to test across several different carriers. However, I’m on a tight budget and can’t buy devices on each carrier. Is it possible to unlock my phone and switch it to different carriers for testing purposes?
Mark [AT&T]: I understand that your situation Alex and I really appreciate it. Let us check on the account.
Mark [AT&T]: We can request for unlock purposes thru online.
Koren: How is that done?
Mark [AT&T]: http://www.att.com/deviceunlock
Koren: Have I paid for my device in full?
Mark [AT&T]: How much did you get the device [for] Alex?
Koren: I believe I payed around $300 for my Galaxy Note 3
Mark [AT&T]: I understand Alex! It means that you g[o]t it in a full discount price.
Koren: So am I eligible for an unlock?
Mark [AT&T]: Let me explain it Alex! Since your account is still under contract, the process of unlocking your device will not be possible.
Koren: Oh, I understand. Once the contract is over, then I can unlock my device?
Mark [AT&T]: Yes that is correct Alex!
Koren: Which would be October of 2015, correct?

Thus co-founders Alex Koren and Sheldon Trotman are stuck. They would like to continue paying their AT&T bill but also be able to test their devices, including the Galaxy Note 3, on another carrier. And until the law is changed, they can’t do so without facing potential legal liability.

While it should be noted that not all phones are compatible from one carrier to another, many phones and tablets are. While AT&T may not like that he’s taking his device from one carrier to another, that should be between Alex and his carrier, it shouldn’t be a federal, civil or criminal matter – but under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and as a result of the decision by the Librarian of Congress, today it is a federal matter.

While many in the tech community often follow a mantra of asking for forgiveness rather than asking for permission – copyright law is not something to be so cavalierly disregarded; many copyright scholars believe that unlocking could place Hyv in potential criminal liability of up to five years in prison and a $500,000 fine.

While Hyv’s situation may seem unique, many startups launch as apps. Presumably, Hyv’s situation of needing to test its app across platforms is not a unique problem; rather, it is a problem that affects many app creators – which is often college students just like Koren and Trotman. One reason there has been so much entrepreneurship in this sector is because the barrier to entry has been so low, but the restriction on phone unlocking creates a brand new barrier to entry for no cognizable reason.

This week, Congress will have the opportunity to vote on short-term legislation, H.R. 1123, which would allow for consumers to unlock their devices until the Librarian rules again in October, 2015 (see my committee testimony here). This legislation would help entrepreneurs like Koren, Trotman and millions of consumers. Additionally, permanent, bipartisan, widely supported legislation has also been introduced, H.R. 1892, which would make these fixes permanent and provide certainty to the private sector.

On Tuesday, the House of Representatives will vote on legalizing phone unlocking, an issue that affects millions of consumers but also potentially small businesses like Hyv. “This ban, on behalf of the carriers, is standing in the way of our ability to make a significant contribution to the progression of our global society,” Koren says. “For many, the ban on unlocking phones is an inconvenience at most. For us, it has inhibited our ability to bring about positive change.”

Image by Shutterstock

If you avoid these common errors, you’ll be more believable and command more respect.

Dressing for success may create good impressions, but people judge your intelligence and credibility based upon what comes out of your mouth. Here are eight verbal habits that immediately mark you as somebody who’s either foolish or shifty:

1. Jargon

Jargon (aka “biz-blab”) consists of hijacking normal words and using them in odd ways to make them sound “businessy.” Example: “We’re reaching out to our customer advocates to leverage a dialogue on…” While others who speak fluent biz-blab might not take notice or care, everyone else cringes and rolls their eyes.

Fix: Use words as they’re defined in the dictionary. Example: “We’re contacting our customers to discuss…” That way you’ll sound more like a professional and less like a cartoon business person.

2. Cliches

These are those metaphors that have been used so frequently that all the juice has been leeched from them. Examples: “out of the box thinking” or “hitting one out of the ball park.” Cliches aren’t just unoriginal but also reveal a lack of respect for the listener. If you really cared you wouldn’t trot these tired and creaky phrases.

Fix: Avoid metaphors completely or use original ones. If that’s too hard, tweak the wording of cliches to make them less cliche-ish. Example: my use of “leeched” rather than “squeezed” in the paragraph above. Worst case, the “proverbial” can refresh a cliche with a pinch of irony. Example: “out of the proverbial ball park.”

3. Prolixity

Using big, impressive-sound words, rather than smaller, common ones, leaves listeners with the impression that you’re pompous and pretentious. Examples: “assess strategic options and tactical approaches” (i.e. “plan”) or “implement communications infrastructure” (i.e. “add wireless.”) Fancy-schmancy wording adds bulk and extracts clarity.

Fix: The core problem here is the need to feel as if your business and your activities are more important and impressive than they really are. The fix, therefore, is a big dose of humility. Business neither rocket science nor brain surgery; it is, in fact, a place where plain talk is both valued and appreciated.

4. Hiccups

This is when, uh…, you insert a word into a sentence when, like…, you’re pausing to think, um…, exactly what you’re going to say. I once heard a guy say “um” over 100 times in a five minute presentation. By the end, the audience was practically tearing their collective hair out in annoyance.

Fix: This one is easy. Simply eliminate the hiccup word and pause instead. When you simply pause in silence, rather than trying to fill the thinking space with the hiccup, you end up sounding wise and like you’re choosing your words carefully. You may need to record yourself a few times to break the habit, though.

5. Upticks

An uptick turns a statement into a question. The uptick can be a raise of pitch at the end of the sentence or, worse, can be signaled by an actual phrase, like “[statement], you know?” or “[statement], eh?” Upticks communicate that you’re not confident of your ability to communicate clearly, hence the constant checking.

Fix: If you’re unsure whether the other person is following your statements, ask a specific question such as “Are you following me?” or “Does that make sense so far?” In other words either ask questions or make statements. Don’t try to fudge them together, okay?

6. Weasel Words

These are attempts to fool employees by disguising ugly facts as bloodless abstractions. Examples: using “development opportunity” when you mean “drudgery” or using “rightsizing” when you mean “firing people.” Weasel words mark you as a coward who’s afraid to face the social stigma of making an unpopular decision.

Fix: Show some courage! You get more respect and credibility in the long run when you tell unpleasant truths than when you tell pleasant-sounding lies. Because–here’s the thing–everyone knows anyway and you’re not fooling anybody.

7. Fake Apologies

This is what people do when they feel socially obligated to apologize but they aren’t really sorry. Common example: “I’m sorry if anybody was offended.” Such “apologies” add the insult of blaming the other person for being offended to the injury of the original offense.

Fix: Real apologies are like: “I apologize for doing xxx. I wasn’t thinking clearly and I won’t do xxx again.” They come from the heart and if you can’t apologize from the heart, don’t bother because you’re not really apologizing.

8. Spray and Pray

This consists of blurting out a stream of facts or observations before finding out which ones (if any) might actually be of interest to the listener. Probably 95 percent of all presentations fall into this category but when it happens in conversation it makes you look like a blathering fool.

Fix: Always think “conversation” rather than “sales pitch.” Ask questions, respond to comments, figure out what’s needed, and only then trot out facts and observations that are immediately relevant.

Pre-order my new book and get an exclusive bonus chapter (for you and a friend) and a signed bookplate.

This fashion mogul may have created a billion-dollar business, but he says that being the boss is about character and muscle, not style.

Culture counts Marc Ecko believes in letting employees “own the vibe” of what they create: “That becomes your culture.”

How do you measure success?

Quantitatively and qualitatively. It’s not an exact science, but typically when people (your team and customers) are happy, you’re successful.

What’s one rookie mistake you made early on?

I still make them. You make rookie mistakes your entire career–hopefully just less frequently. One big one seems to be having too much pride and hubris. They can mess you up.

What was the hardest lesson you learned in your first year of business?

Learning to fire someone. It sucks. Trump makes it look so easy. Unless an employee is robbing you, it is never really that easy.

What’s the toughest part of being in charge?

Being in charge. You are accountable for people, places, and things. It’s full contact. It is also the greatest part of the gig, because it builds character and muscle.

What’s one skill you want to improve upon, personally?

Math.

What’s the best motivator for employees?

Authorship. Let them own the vibe of what they are creating. Celebrate it, quirks and all.

Whom do you admire most as a business leader?

Anyone with authenticity, especially my twin sister [and business partner], Marci [Tapper]. She is compassionate yet firm. She knows how to motivate you while keeping your feet on the ground and your head based in reality. She is an unsung hero.

Gut instinct versus expertise: Which is more important, and why?

That’s like asking “peanut butter or chocolate?” There is no adequate answer, so I’m not even going to try that one.

My crowdfunding campaign is fully funded now and I’m preparing metrics and other measurements to help us both understand some best practices for crowdfunding. But, until then, I wanted to comment a bit on the problems facing crowdfunders when it comes to marketing and sales. I’m a writer and it’s almost as if I’m naturally averse to self-promotion. That is exactly the wrong way to be. It’s fortunate that our own Jim Altucher just posted a great checklist for folks who are trying to sell so I won’t have to go into much of the how-to. Instead I’ll address the conflicting problems facing shy crowdfunders who may find themselves at the precipice of self-promotion.

First off, remember that you are mostly selling to friends and family, at least in the beginning. They will support you no matter what happens. The vast majority of my pledges are from people I’ve met or count as friends. I’ve also discovered that social reach – posts to people who know of me or I’ve met in passing – are weak drivers to success. For example, take a look at this very cursory analysis from brand24.net, a social media analytics service.

The top supporters, on the upper right, are close friends who have done their absolute best to get the word out. So I have a lot of these “golden influencers” or whatever you want to call them. What should I do with them?

In short, I have to sell to them and then sell to their friends. And just writing that line pains me.

Modern crowdfunding is about relationships. If you have a lot of them, you will be successful. If you only have a few, you will not be successful. These relationships can be geographically local or worldwide, but they have to be close. As Sam Beck wrote “if you can’t hit 5% of your goal within your private network, you are probably in a bad spot.” I’d say I sold 50% to friends. I think hometown projects – efforts to open a new green hackerspace or coding dojo or bakery in a certain city – are great examples of this. If no one knows you in town as the guy who makes great cakes, you’re probably sunk.

So here’s the dilemma: I like to treat relationships, online or off, as spin-free zones. I’ve never been “in sales” per se, so I’ve never had to milk my network to get something done. As a writer for some fairly big sites I’ve always depended on the work to bring the audience. This is obviously a false correlation – the outlets I’ve written for have always been amazing in their own right – but it’s how I went about my business. I didn’t care about SEO, for example, because I trusted Google to be a beneficent god. That is another wrong way to be.

Sadly this attitude is one of the main reasons writers love publishing houses. Because publishers can throw a whole team of people towards distribution and PR – and, sadly, this team is increasingly shrinking for most authors – they mask most of the hard work and selling that goes into a successful launch. Unfortunately, when you depend on this network you will find yourself disappointed. The majestic houses can only do so much and each new book is a laugh in a crowded room and easily swallowed up by the next conversation. They’ll through millions at big blockbusters but pennies at the next literary novel.

I don’t want this series to be about marketing but it looks like it has to be. As a crowdfunder or a modern author or a modern maker you must be ready to sell. I created a 5,000 name email list that I use sparingly to hassle business acquaintances and those interested in my work. I post to social media as much as I can, although, as evidenced above, the return is limited. I change my tone from silly to serious when I talk about this work and those who know me as that jerk from the Internet now know me as that jerk from the Internet who is flogging his book. I am, at this point, a small businessman handing out fliers on the street corner.

To the serious artist marketing is seemingly unsavory. But friends, let me tell you: serious artists are the best marketers. Whether it’s by ensconcing themselves in a scene or become the mouthpiece of their genre or style, all the best artists have been carnival barkers for Product Me. There are still ways to become popular without word of mouth and endless boosterism, but that’s far harder than it seems. It’s akin to my own sense that my work grew organically – it didn’t. It grew through the quiet push given it by the platforms on which I wrote. The Pebble didn’t get big because Eric Migicovsky posted his Kickstarter and hung out in Canada waiting for riches. It got big because of outreach, media contacts, and traditional marketing methods.

So what am I doing on that front? I’m looking for opportunities to offer interviews or commentary on crowdfunding to other outlets. I’m reaching out to book bloggers. I’m also just making things up as I go along. I need to grow the potential audience for the book. I think of this as sort of a reverse bullseye of sorts. At the center of the bullseye are friends and family. Further out are “fans” – people who like you. Even further are strangers interested in what you’re selling and this is dwarfed by the rest of the world. We should all be able to hit the bullseye without trouble. Everything else is far harder.

The results are startling and heartening. For example, my buddy Clive Thompson who is selling his own great book about technology, wrote me a nice note when he found out about my funding. I hope he doesn’t mind me posting it here.

“No need to reply, I know you’re busy,” he said. “Just wanted to say congratulations … I’m always thrilled when I see people finding cool ways to fund the creation of awesome new literature.” This makes me feel good and it shows that my efforts, however self-promotional, are at worst a minor nuisance. I respect Clive and his work and it’s great to hear from him in the context of something I’m working hard to build. That he hasn’t yet unfriended me is probably more a tribute to his patience than my skills at sales, but it’s nice to know he’s paying attention.

This is part of a series on crowdfunding, The Mytro Project. For future posts I’m looking for more input from online analysts and other crowdfunding platforms so please email me at john@techcrunch.com.

Culture should drive the business at your startup, not the other way around. Here’s how to keep yours intact.

The most important thing in your business is not what you’re going to sell but what you value. That’s according to Bill Kanarick, chief strategy and marketing officer of consulting agency Sapient, who’s steered his startup through the ups and downs of the digital age.

Culture was so integral that when his company finally reached 49 employees, Kanarick dedicated two of them to keeping it intact. Today, Sapient has a global workforce of more than 11,500 people and culture remains, as ever, an integral part of the business. Here are six values Kanarick has found help his culture remain solid, even as his business has grown.

Always be open

“We can’t ever get better unless we’re actually committed to the idea of openness,” says Kanarick. Even in client meetings that go extremely well, the first thing his team does afterward is ask what could have gone better. Realize it’s not good enough just being good. You need to be open to feedback so the company can always improve.

Let people lead

Kanarick believes there are two forms of leadership: within the company and within the market. Creating a culture of leadership sometimes involves putting people into positions that are a bit of a stretch. Which is a risk but necessary, especially if your business needs several leaders. If things don’t work out, it will be okay: “Our culture creates the kind of environment where people are encouraged to take risks and supported when taking those chances may not always work out as planned,” says Kanarick.

Focus on clients

“This is code for client success,” says Kanarick, whose business lives by a do-or-die deadline. Once, when a large client was running its retail site on an outsourced Amazon platform, they decided to house it internally. Knowing the site would shut down one day, he realized nothing mattered more to that company. And for the employees working with that company, nothing mattered more than that day as well.

Nurture employees

“When you hire the best and the brightest, they want more than they had last year so you have to grow the company,” says Kanarick. He had been at Sapient two years before he asked to relocate to London. “You could not have sent a bigger idiot to London than me,” he recalls. “I had no idea how to grow a business in a part of the world I knew nothing about, but they trusted me. We make these decisions daily.”

Inspire creativity

It’s much easier to change a small company than it is to change a 11,500 person company. But creativity remains a core value. Sapient needs a culture that helps it adapt to the marketplace and to achieve that, it has to merge creativity and tech.

Forge relationships

This is the last value on the list but also the first one introduced to new hires at Sapient. Rather than let them figure things for themselves or refer to a handbook, they receive names of contacts. And because of the strong culture, these new hires actually find their way. That is, they forge a relationship. This continues for years, enabling people to accomplish more because they understand their colleagues.

Few things in life are more frustrating than trying to find a new place to live (especially if you’re itching to move to the housing market hellholes that are New York City and San Francisco). It’s no wonder then that so many startups — Trulia, Zillow, Redfin, Apartment List, Rental Engine, Zumper, Nestio, the list goes on — are trying to make it all just a little bit easier.

Of these myriad startups, apartment-centric Lovely has been especially busy these past few months: it closed a (sadly undisclosed) Series A and snapped up automated rent payment startup Rentmatic to help prove its worth to property owners too. So what was next on their agenda? Getting a new Android app out the door, which the company finally did earlier today.

Lovely is hardly new to the mobile realm — it launched an iOS version of the app a little over a year ago, and anyone who’s mucked around with that should feel comfortable taking the Android version for a spin. That’s far from a bad thing when more than a few competing mobile real estate apps are happy to throw everything plus the kitchen sink into the mix. It’s not hard to see why: as stated, finding an apartment is hard and bombarding a user with fiddly options and controls makes them feel like they’re actually getting something done. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t, but the illusion of control persists.

The Lovely approach is to strip out the cruft. When you fire up the app for the first time, color-coded listings appear in location-based groups that expand when tapped. From there it takes a but a few taps to directly contact the property owner, share the listing, or report obvious frauds. If you go on to create an account, even more doors open (I slay me) so you can set alerts when properties free up within specific areas and preload some personal and financial information to put potential renters at ease.

There’s little here that differentiates the Android app from its iOS cousin, but that’s hardly an issue — CEO Blake Pierson said he considers Lovely a mobile-first company that uses what it’s learned from fast iteration on the web to inform the mobile experience. All things considered, this new Android version of the app is a handsome one and I actually found a few interesting leads while I was writing this story (what can I say, I’ve grown a little weary of southern New Jersey).

“Some think of us as purely a search tool,” Pierson noted on the phone. “But our long term vision is to be the platform and THE marketplace for rentals.” What he means is that the Lovely vision ultimately encompasses the renting process from both ends: tools for renters and apartment hunters alike. The team has already starting moving down that path with its Rentmatic acquisition, but we’ll see if they can really balance both sides of that equation.

TechCrunch Moscow today features a whole 38 startups pitching to enter the final on Day Two, which features the main conference. You can catch the pitches live today on the live video stream but here’s a run-down of al the companies, as they describe themselves.

The Startup Alley features over 70 startups that met the requirements of an exhibition participant, being less than 3 years old, and having raised no more than $3M investment. Evan Nisselson (LDV Capital) is MCing the Startup Pitches.

The TechCrunch Moscow event partners are Digital October and Kite Ventures. Follow TC Moscow on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow the hashtag on Twitter.

10TRACKS
A cloud music storage and streaming service targeting owners of large music collections to enjoy their music over Android, iOS, WP8 devices. Our storage system helps to upload music to the cloud 30 times faster, save space and lower costs. Songs can be uploaded to the cloud from iTunes, Winamp and different devices. Folders and subfolders structure are preserved. Music can be listened even without internet access. We offer 3 Gb for free and $25/year unlimited. Sign up right now!

27 FACES
Special application that includes unique computer vision algorithms. It utilizes a video sensor to scan the space in front of a digital display or a showcase, detects human faces and tracks their position. At any given time 27 faces detects from all potential viewers only those who were looking directly on the screen, recognizes their gender and age group. Collected data is anonymously transmitted in encrypted form to a central server for storage and analysis.

3PLET
Music tech company, providing digital publishing solution and platform for music and visual artists to jointly publish, share and monetize their music and art on mobile and connected devices. We turn music, images, text and metadata into a beautiful application called 3plet. 3Plet is a mobile music album and artist-centric sales and communication channel, new industrial standard for music album releases.

ADVERTONE
A platform that integrates all available Advertising Networks (AN) by means of parsing and API methods. Our aim is to provide a system that facilitates the maximization of revenue of publishers. It allows controlling, customizing and making A/B testing any AN from a single interface. It relieves from most of the routine work and the necessity to change promotional codes on a site while changing an ANs.

AGORA
Platform for e-commerce in B2B segment. It enables e-commerce, procurement of products and electronic document flow between suppliers of products, online shops and offline retailers. Agora accommodates more than 2000 companies from different industries. Geography includes all regions of Russia and CIS. Our solutions simplify the time-consuming processes and minimize costs. Agora is an electronic instrument for procurement and marketing needs.

AIRLIKE
Cutting-edge mobile application that makes transferring content from your phone easy and fast, almost like sharing air. You can conveniently send and receive contacts, photos, or videos to and from your friends with a simple point-and-shoot of your smartphones. The Airlike app also creates a personalized account for each of its users, allowing you to carefully choose what you would like to share. Sharing content is almost effortless with Airlike.

AMAZING HIRING
A set of tools for recruiters: browser plugin + search engine, allowing any company to quickly find IT-specialists which are the “best fit” for the company. It allows searching through multiple Internet-sources and unites profiles of a candidate into a “consolidated profile”. AmazingHiring gives an ability to “score” a candidate before interview – based on both: qualifications and “culture fit” for a particular company; ranking search results appropriately.

APPERCODE
Framework for mobile applications development with 100% of common codebase between iOS, Android, Windows. Unlike HTML5-solutions, Appercode provides native interfaces, comparable with the development for each platform individually, but 3 times faster. From May to December 2013 Appercode earned $50k in test sales, won a $60k grant from Microsoft, won the largest Russian tech startups contest Generation S ($80K), and released the product in 10 countries.

APPLICATIX
Platform that allows to crowdfund mobile apps/games launch marketing. Applicatix is a way to publish a finished app/game. It combines advantages of self-publishing and working with traditional publishers. The platform gathers money from crowd investors, giving them a share of future app/game profit in return and then uses that money to market this application. Traditional marketing used at pre-launch and unique marketing quests are added after the application launch.

APPNOW.COM
We automatically convert Facebook and VK communities into iOS and Android apps, resulting in new pages, m-shops, magazines, company pages and intranet-apps. Features: instant App Store and Google Play publishing; free converting to the mobile audience; automatic content generating, YouTube channels, Instagram feed. New features for communities: retention, monetization, m-commerce.

AVIASHOPPER
How to get to the airport? Where to find the check-in? Where to go while waiting for a flight? These are just a few of the problems happening at your stay at the airport, especially if you’re there for the first time. AviaShopper-the first mobile Guide for airports around the world! Due to special technology supporting the information up–to-date, AviaShopper makes it easy to navigate and to spend time with pleasure in every airport, as well as to solve a lot of tasks for the traveler: buy tickets, booking hotels or taxi.

BEENS
Relationships are deeds. You do good deeds every day, even though you don’t notice that sometimes. You surprise your friends, inspire your colleagues or just help someone. Those who have been touched by that may mark your deeds in Beens. Your deeds build your Beens Index. Beendex shows how good you are in a single number. Something that sets you apart. Get surprises, emotional benefits and a better job. Become better and get more.

BESTFINAPPS
First mobile financial applications Store, compatible with EasyFinance Platform API. Apps are created by independent developers, checked and certificaticated by EasyFinance and its partners, that guarantees user’s financial data security and safety. Apps deployment in BestFinApps enables developers to access to 150 000 auditory, use ready cloud technologies of EasyFinance Platform and to profit from users as well as from corporate clients.

BOARDMAPS
Innovative solution for Boards, Committees and other governing bodies, which facilitates planning and conducting onsite, provides history and access to related issues, tracks why certain decisions were taken and how they have been implemented, generates meeting minutes. BoardMaps improves corporate governance, involves users in the meeting preparation stage, shows required actions with intuitive interface, allows remote and absentee voting, available in local or cloud hosting.

CASHFON
A secure, simple and convenient tool for making instant payments and micropayments directly from any bank account without the need for Visa/MasterCard (or other such plastic!). Payments are made using mobile phone of any generation and/or NFC sticker.

CONNECT2ME
How much does the Product or Service really cost? Connect2me claims that it costs exactly the sum that other users are ready to pay for it right now. Accumulating the user`s money rates for particular products or goods, Connect2me offers the Sellers to agree with the offered average price. If one does not agree with it, there definitely comes another one whom it suits perfectly well. Lowering the margin vs sales turnover growth. What will the members of the market choose?

CROCOTIME
We eliminate workplace time waste. You are the boss and you don’t want employees shopping online or browsing facebook for your bill. We can help you to stop it. Our software tracks usage time of unproductive sites and programs. We provide you with an exact number of wasted hours for departments and individuals. Our software is specially designed for medium businesses and enterprises.

DM LABS
We turn data into competitive advantage by means of state-of-the-art Data Mining. Enterprises discover new opportunities for accurate trend prediction, uncover valuable customer information and reduce their risks. We will make your business smarter!

DREAMROOMER
Online service that allows landlords to find the ideal tenants. To rent out your apartment, register on the website, upload the photos of your apartment and invite tenants to whom you would like to rent. When a tenant agrees, you will see each others contact and from there on come to an arrangement. Realtor free. Therefore, with the help of Dream- roomer you can find tenants that will perfectly suit you and you them. Find the tenant of your dreams!

DUSK RIFT
Protect your city from evil Shadows! Dusk Rift is urban fantasy online game where powerful vampires, lycans and shadow hunters unite to protect shops, restaurants, schools and universities in Moscow, New York, Tokyo and other cities across the world. Gameplay is a blend between ultra popular Candy Crush Saga, innovative Ingress and modern MMORPGs with multiplayer battles. Monetization is free2play: premium account, powerful combat boosts and fashion items. Soon on iOS/Android/WP and web.

FOODROCK
Customer-facing SaaS platform for the restaurant industry. Restaurants directly connect with customers using a network of real-time, integrated services. Restaurants can manage their business more effectively and make more profit. For users, FoodRock is an E2E (end-to-end) mobile app which makes every dining experience more convenient and more personal.

GAMEWELCOME
Unique synergy of extensive database, marketplace and media channel integrated into one of the best specialized social networks. Not only video games fans can develop their community of friends, but also online stores, vendors and media have the option start their accounts in order to get in touch with potential customers. Our strategy is to provide the end user with definite service. You are GameWelcome!

GBOOKING
GBooking is like Amazon for the services market: it allows consumers to search, compare and book services on the web, like car, medical and beauty care. Our algorithms calculate discounts during weak business hours and publish them on partner sites, thus increasing the customer reach and converting tens of thousands of leads into real customers. We integrate with search engines, online catalogs, coupon sites, CRM and CMS systems, empowering them with our optimization and booking widget.

GETSHOPAPP
The GSA mCommerce SaaS/ecosystem helps eCommerce become mCommerce. For the large percentage of non used mTraffic it provides automatic generated native android, iOS, html5, and tablet APPs, 2.5% peer2peer payments and a loyalty system as well as mMarketing to iShops. GSA monetizes with ads, subscriptions, acquiring, and affiliate marketing. Revenue sharing reduces marketing cost. Cooperations with CMS generate thousands of Apps. Plans for the near future: pushes, SmartTVApps, and augmented reality.

GETSY
Digital loyalty program. In each store we set up Getsy iPad, customers download the Getsy App or get the physical Getsy card, checkin his QR code through the in-store iPad each time they buy something, earns points and get special rewards.

GIFTBOARD
We came up with how it is possible to give gifts in a new way: easy, fast and cool. Giftboard is a mobile app that allows you to give a real gift in less than a minute knowing only the phone number or gift id of the recipient. You can give your friend a cup of coffee with the best wishes of a good day or congratulate a colleague on his birthday being on a business trip in another city. Giftboard make it possible to give presents every day not only on holidays.

GLAMCOM
An outlet and a consignment store of new and pre-owned luxury clothing, shoes and accessories at affordable prices. Glamcom.ru provides a simple and safe online service which redefines the format of consignment retail for both buyers and sellers.

HR VALUE
SAAS solution for online recruiting, which solves the problem of low efficiency of mass internet recruitment. HRMarker automates the process of screening resumes, reducing the original set of candidates. Service is self-learning system that learns by analyzing of HR specialist process action. In this way, a knowledge base is formed, that allows to recommend the required information to the next user without using search engine, but through the base of recommendations.

IKTOTAM CONNECTOR – SMART INTERCOM
Device that connects your apartment’s intercom with your smartphone. Guests that dial the intercom can be viewed on your smartphone or tablet and you can chat with them. iKtotam records your visitors and saves video and audio data to cloud storage. As well Connector lets you open the entrance door to your guests with a single tap on your smartphone. Instantly respond to visitors or ignore them. Connector helps you keep your home and the ones you love safe.

KIDERUDITE
We help parents choose reliable, educational applications for children, and provide them convenient reports on progress and achievements. Applications for Kid Erudite undergo a rigorous selection process by teachers and child psychologists. We select the best applications and build a coherent and comprehensive educational system. We will develop applications to cover any gaps in the curriculum with our developers team for platforms iOS, Android, WindowsPhone, and Windows 8.

LIFEPAY
LifePay provides admission of the credit card payments on smartphones with full guarantee transaction security anywhere you have the Internet access. All you need is cardreader, connected by audiojack to a smartphone (based on iOS,Android or WinPhone) and preinstalled LifePay app. Cardreader is free – we subtracted only a 2,7% percentage of each transaction. Operation’s safety meets the requirements of PCI DSS. All of the statistics are accounted in the personal office.

Lightpack
LIGHTPACK
Open-source device, which lightens your computer or TV screen to strengthen the presence effect. The device needs to be mounted on your TV or computer screen and to be connected to your PC, Mac or HTPC via USB. The software analyses what you currently have on the screen and sends this information to the Lightpack device which in turn lightens the surface behind the screen with matching colors using the RGB-LEDs available within the Lightpack device.

LOOKMEDBOOK
A service that helps people organize their health. Now the user can already find a doctor or clinic, to register in online reception, to receive information on diseases and recommendations on who specializes in them, and much more. Website and application available.

LOOKY
TV guide for you and your friends. Information for over 200 channels in 100 different regions. See what’s showing on TV- a brief description, list of actors and the information about them, related tweets, schedule of the following episodes, and much more! Set reminders so that you won’t miss your favorite showб share shows with your friends and discuss them in the chatrooms.

MEDESK
Cloud healthcare platform that captures and securely stores patient medical data from any source or provider allowing integrated healthcare delivery. It is a fully featured ecosystem for the private healthcare market that facilitates the collaboration of all the major players – clinics, patients, CROs, employers, insurance companies, and medical device vendors. Today, the platform serves more than 100,000 patients across Russia.

MEDIAGLOVES
Textile treatment liquid. It is a simple and inexpensive way to make your favorite gloves compatible with touchscreens. We have invented it for all touchscreen device users. So there is no need to take off your gloves answering a call or a text message anymore. MediaGloves is a transparent liquid, unnoticeable when dry, safe for both glove and skin. Inventing mediagloves is our way to create something new something different, make our world a better place.

MICROCRED.IT
Multifunctional SaaS service for automation of business activities of microfinance institutions (MFIs). Allows managing the full cycle of microloans from application for a loan to collecting overdue arrears. Service built on Windows Azure cloud infrastructure and requires no additional software or hardware costs, provides an intuitive user-friendly interface and allows MFIs to start work with minimal financial and time costs.

OBEREG
Telecom & IT service based on a wristband for on-line health control. It automatically monitors heart rate, falls and skin temperature. If your relative feels bad you will be alerted by an SMS or call; it works as a mobile phone. User health statistics are available in an on-line account. Research proved our service fits the existing need of millions of people in Russia and other countries. We hope that TechCrunch will help us find the right partners to expand our outreach and serve more people.

OBMENIGRAMI
Universal and convenient service for swapping and trading used games and accessories for consoles. How the project operates is simple: gamers create a virtual shelf with the games they are offering and they may ask each other for specific games to trade. As the project has a geolocation feature, all gamers see games that are available in their neighborhood. Then the only thing they have to do is to set up a meeting. This service is already accessible in all CIS countries.

OHMYDELIVERY
Service for tracking parcels. It tracks sites of postal and courier services and shows information for all of user’s parcels. OhMyDelivery also allows online stores to integrate tracking of order status directly in user’s account. In addition to this, service will allow to collect feedback about the quality of goods and delivery from users. The application is available in the AppStore.

ORDER KING
Frequently, you are waiting before you’ll be served in most of mid-range restaurants. Average waiting time in Russian restaurants is 20 minutes. You can miss your plane or meeting and you don’t control this time. Using Order King you can place orders directly from your smartphone or tablet. And it will be served directly to your table. Also you can pay for your meal and give tips with your smartphone.

PLAYZUM
Playzum’s mission is to provide a platform that gives gamers the ability to socially interact with other users and friends on gaming achievements, game recommendations. Cool Features: Easy access from any device, Game-based check-in, Social game guide with recommendations and reviews, Game friend finder.

POSTRO.IM
Collective buying platform of the furniture, building materials, tools and sanitary ware. Allows the retail buyers get the wholesale price. This is possible through buying directly from the manufacturer without extra charges of distributors and stores. When buying directly from the manufacturer the Collective buying participant saves up to 40% in construction and 70% in repairs. We use original strategy for group buying China’s model – self-organized and execute. Warehouse clubs function.

RENTSOFT
Billing and management platform for cloud services (SaaS, IaaS). Service providers (xSP) use RentSoft to reduce costs and increase cloud services sales. RentSoft provides such features as recurring and metered billing, cloud service marketplace, client area, services automation, invoicing and payment processing, event notifications, promotions and bundles, statistics, ERP integration, affiliate program.

SKYDNS
Cloud service that keeps online threats at bay. We will ensure your internet surfing is safe and comfortable, with annoying ads, porn, dangerous websites and other sources of trouble securely blocked. At home or on the corporate network, on computers or mobile devices – anytime, anywhere you are guaranteed the best experience and protection from cybercrime.

SKYPORT
Bonus loyalty program for small and medium enterprises (SaaS). The program is installed in the venue and works on an iPad. Each venue that uses SkyPort has its own bonus program (similar to frequent flyer’s program) tied to the industry specifics of the venue. Gamified process of bonus accumulation enables venues to promote certain services, increase average spending and reward their best customers with extra bonuses. Already works in beauty salons, medical centers, fitness-centers and shops.

TAG & FIND
Turns any smartphone or tablet into a professional RFID scanner. Its main use is to find assets, or sound an alert if they are out of range. Replacing the back-cover of your smartphone, it works with RFID stickers and a mobile application. Our lightweight stickers can attach to any object, and need no battery. We offer businesses a professional cloud-based ERP platform, fully integrated with RFID scanning, for hands-free inventory management, effective items location and loss prevention.

TALKSTER
If you’re young and ambitious in Russia, you need to interact with people and ideas elsewhere. Right now, that’s tough. Talkster will change this. We set up conversations between bright, curious people. They’re in English, over Skype, last 45 minutes and cost Russians $15. On the other end are British students. For them, Talkster represents a challenge: can you strike up a conversation with a stranger? Russians pick the conversation topic beforehand and rate their chat straight afterwards.

TELLLER
A mobile blogging platform that will turn the way how people blog upside down. Today, blogging is hard, time consuming and desktop based. We are making the whole process easy & mobile, and what’s important more beautiful without any extra skills required. With Telller everyone can really start blogging or improve their current blog. Telller will be launched as an iPhone app with a content mirror website later in 2013.

TOEVENTWITHFRIENDS.COM
Mobile social network for event visitors and organizers. Services for event attendees: Finding an event, Finding travel- & roommates, Finding new friends, Making appointments. The event app features agenda, address, twitterwall, geolocation services. Event organizers get: Finding or creating events, Customized app, Scheduling appointments. Free on Android and iOS.

TOO.ME
This cartoon messenger is a cross platform messaging service with a twist. It turns your text messages into funny animations. For example, you can choose your character and make it throw a cake at those of your friends. After you have exchanged several messages you can watch the whole dialog as a cartoon.

UNICOM24.RU
A unique and ready-to-use credit facility even now engaged in partner sales all over Russia. This is a tool for work with b2b customers interlinking business and banks. Such service has been developed for professional market – real estate agencies, realtors, travel agents, insurance agents, car dealers, and tenant builders. Unicom24 is a fully free service, online access to 30 banks, uniform customer profile, assured feedback, and chance to make money out of every credit provided.

VSEVCREDIT
A solution that allows users to receive loans right at home. The development of our unique software allows integration with any online store, providing reliable technical platform. The project received more than 70M RUR of investment, which allowed us to create a high-tech service, to attract major partners and to become one of the leaders in online lending market. Currently the service has more than 100 partners.

WAYRAY
Multifunctional navigation system projecting augmented reality content right in front of the driver. Thanks to cutting edge technology it expands the boundaries of conventional driving making it safer, more efficient and enjoyable. The route is graphically represented as an AR line repeating the motion path. It lets you track information simultaneously while driving, without eye movement and refocusing. Interacting with urban infrastructure the system enlarges it with digital content.

Westudy.in
WESTUDY.IN
Unique educational project providing an opportunity to get online counseling on all your admission questions with our experts – students and graduates of foreign universities from top-300 universities worldwide. It also provides an extensive database of 3000+ educational programs all over the world, internships and volunteer programs.

YUKTIPRO
A platform for collaboration and knowledge management helping small and medium sized teams to achieve their goals with 50% more productivity. User experiences based on neuroscience and gamification underpin a supportive communication and collaboration environment. It invites to celebrate daily achievements invested into teams’ goals and to praise heroes. This personnel engagement tool helps to analyze who contributed most to which goals, what was discussed, and what appealed to the team.

India’s Unique Citizen Identification project, also known as Aadhar, earlier this week finished capturing demographic and biometric data of about half a billion citizens–the largest biometric project of its kind currently in the world.

It’s been a multi-year effort not without its critics among privacy and security advocates and others. The latest development this week concerned the method that Aadhar is using to capture, store and manage the data, and the role a startup from the U.S. called MongoDB may be playing in it.

MongoDB, a NoSQL database startup, last year raised funding from the CIA-backed In-Q-Tel, an independent non-profit venture backed by the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies.

During past few days, several reports in the Indian media have quoted political parties and activists, raising questions about whether sensitive citizen data is being compromised by Aadhar, headed by the Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani.

Some of the reports have linked the controversy with MongoDB.

Governments across the world are raising concerns over spying by the National Security Agency, and anything even remotely associated with U.S. government intelligence agencies is enough to cause uproar. Moreover, with general elections set to be held next hear, political rhetoric is at an all time high in India.

I took a tour of Aadhar’s offices in Bangalore, and the truth of the matter, according to officials I spoke to, is that while some have alleged large contracts that include sharing data with MongoDB, the reality is that Aadhar is using MongoDB open source code that doesn’t touch sensitive data. The meeting also offered an opportunity to understand how the biggest biometrics database on earth is functioning, and dealing with concerns of security and privacy.

Moreover, in a statement issued on Friday, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), denied having any formal contract with MongoDB and refuted allegations of sharing citizen data with any U.S. agencies.

What Aadhar means for India

To set the context right here about Aadhar, and what it means for a country like India, more than half a billion people have no official ID of any kind, which makes it impossible for them to receive government aids, open a bank account, get a loan, get a driving license, and so on. The citizen database project, which is now enrolling over one million Indians a day, is scheduled to sign up about 1.2 billion people by the end of next year, making it the biggest biometrics database on earth.

One of the biggest advantages of having a 12-digit Aadhar number is that the government can link bank accounts of the country’s poor with it, and directly transfer cash benefits and other subsidies. Already, nearly 40 million bank accounts in India have been linked with Aadhar.

According to research firm CLSA, more than 40% of the Indian governmen’s $250 billion worth of subsidies and other other benefits meant for poor, will be lost to corruption over next few years. Aadhar will remove the middlemen and curb any corruption by enabling direct cash transfer to those who need government subsidies.

But several think-tanks and activists including Bangalore-based Centre for Internet & Society, have been raising concerns about privacy issues and even questioning the effectiveness of the entire project.

Inside the biggest biometrics database on earth

I have been trying to get meetings with the officials at Aadhar to understand security aspects, progress so far and their reaction to the MongoDB allegations.

They finally agreed to meet on Friday in their headquarters across the road in one of Bangalore’s southern suburbs, where both Intel’s and Cisco’s India headquarters are located. From outside, Aadhar’s technology center, which stores all citizen data (now totalling 5 Petabytes in size) does not look like a government building at all—it could pass for as one of the buildings housing Intel or Cisco nearby.

Inside, as I walked into a room with about dozen television screens in the center of it, some twenty young engineers feverishly looked ahead, typing on their computer keyboards, checking the movement of data packets storing citizen information, the setting looked like a very sophisticated command center. The television screens they were looking at showed the journey of these data packets (each sized at around 5MB) from the time they are logged at one of the 30k enrollment centers, through at least three stages of validation. Validation includes running duplication checks for each of the citizen profiles to ensure there are not more than one Aadhar number for the same person.

So, for every new enrollment, a ‘de-duplication’ check is done against all existing profiles, which is over half a billion currently.

Srikanth Nadhamuni, a former Intel engineer who helped set up Aadhar’s technology platform in September 2010, and is now running Khosla Labs in Bangalore, tells me that these data packets are stored behind 2048-bit encryption and capable of self-destruction if any unauthorized access is attempted.

Dealing with MongoDB controversy

So why did Aadhar engage with MongoDB in the first place and will it continue working with the startup?

Sudhir Narayana, assistant director general at Aadhar’s technology center, told me that MongoDB was among several database products, apart from MySQL, Hadoop and HBase, originally procured for running the database search. Unlike MySQL, which could only store demographic data, MongoDB was able to store pictures.

However, Aadhar has been slowly shifting most of its database related work to MySQL, after realizing that MongoDB was not being able to cope with massive chunks of data, millions of packets.

They have already started using ‘database sharding’: a process where data packets are stored across different machines to ensure the system does not crash as volumes rise.

This has helped Aadhar reduce its dependency on MongoDB and instead use MySQL for storing most of the data.

Ashok Dalwai, deputy director general of the tech center, told me that MongoDB has no access to any biometric data.

“We believe in using open source technologies to avoid any vendor lock-in, but that doesn’t mean we are in any way, compromising security,” Dalwai said.

When contacted, a MongoDB spokesperson redirected to this announcement about the company’s funding involving In-Q-Tel.

And more importantly, UIDAI started using MongoDB’s open source software much before the startup received any funding from In-Q-Tel. As this Crunchbase entry shows, MongoDB received venture round funding of $7.7 million from Red Hat, Intel Capital and In-Q-Tel, only in 2012.

So what lies ahead for Aadhar?

Despite all the controversies surrounding it, Aadhar is on track to enroll over 1.2 billion Indian citizens by end of 2014, the officials added. This will create a database of about 15 petabytes in size.

Currently, the project is enrolling around one million citizens a day. Narayana told me that he’s confident of achieving around two million enrollments a day from next year, and that will help bring the remaining 700 million people into the database.

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