A whopping 26 percent of employees have left a job because of impolite or abrasive coworkers. In other words, you mother was right — manners are important.

What does bad office behavior look like? There’s the guy who doesn’t say “thank you,” and the woman who won’t even say “hi.” Others bark commands, fail to make eye contact, and occasionally tell belittling jokes. The uncivil–dare we say hostile?–workplace that these habits create can do a pretty rough number on your team.

How rough? Rachel Feintzeig of the Wall Street Journal reports that 96 percent of employees have been treated rudely at the office and 50 percent say it happens at least once a week, according to a continuing study by Georgetown University and the Thunderbird School of Global Management. Those numbers alone should raise management’s eyebrows. But if they don’t, consider this: 26 percent of employees say they have quit a job because of “a lack of civility.”

Beyond losing talent, that kind of turnover generates additional costs for businesses. Cisco Systems estimates that incivility costs the company more than $8.3 million a year. “That figure takes into account turnover, employees’ weakened commitment to the company, and work time that was lost to worrying about future bad behavior,” Feintzeig writes.

Thankfully, Feintzeig doesn’t just deliver bad news. She also offers two possible ways to improve bad manners in the workplace, holding up Ochsner Health System as an example. For starters, Ochsner instituted what it calls a 10/5 rule: Employees are expected to make eye contact with anybody who comes within 10 feet of them, and greet anybody who’s standing within five. Secondly, Ochsner also has a no-venting policy. Frustrated employees must go to designated “safe zones” to vent when frustrated, such as a private office, Feintzeig reports. Adherence to this policy factors into employee evaluations.

Requiring your employees to “be nice” may seem a little like babysitting or playing Big Brother. In an ideal world, you’re hiring people who don’t need to be reminded how to be polite. But given how ubiquitous rudeness appears to have become–and the devastating effects it can have on your talent pool–these kinds of policies may be a smart move.

Related articles
The Gratitude Effect
Checklist: Negotiating Work Drama
How to Fire a Friend

Editor’s note: Cyril Ebersweiler is the founder of the pioneering hardware startup accelerator HAXLR8R (which is now looking for applicants) and Partner at SOSVentures. Benjamin Joffe is an expert on startup ecosystems, angel investor and Advisor at HAXLR8R. Both invest in companies around the world and spent over a decade in China and Japan. This is Part 1 of a series. 

If the printing press was about “anyone can read,” the web about “anyone can write,” the hardware ecosystem changed enough to say today “anyone can build.” This idea – that anyone can build – is the cornerstone of the new “lean hardware startup.”

Yet, despite successes like Square, Jawbone, and Fitbit, hardware startups continue to look daunting to entrepreneurs and investors alike. As investors in over 30 of them through our hardware-focused accelerator HAXLR8R (and in a number of startups outside HAXLR8R, too), we would like to share some ideas on how the landscape has changed for hardware entrepreneurs, and how it is now possible to be “lean” in hardware, too.

Lean hardware

The first challenge for hardware entrepreneurs is to get from your first prototype with 3D-printed parts, duct tape and cardboard to production-ready.

Steve Blank, a key inspiration in the Lean Startup movement, famously said “No business plan survives contact with the customer.” If you’re doing hardware the lean way, “No hardware plan survives contact with a factory” should be your mantra.

Design with the right components

Hardware often starts with a “bag of parts.” This won’t cut its time to hit the factory. Non-standard components make it nearly impossible to manufacture on a larger scale. If you don’t want to be doing all the assembly work by hand with your friends in the style of Steve-Jobs-the-movie, you’d better look for the right parts as soon as possible.

A prototype is ready when it can be manufactured

You got the right components? Great. But you’re not quite done yet: if your prototype can’t be made or even assembled, you’re toast. Luckily, factories often know better what can or cannot be done and can help you figure it out.

Of course, it works much better if you can be on site frequently to discuss it with the people actually doing the work rather than send long emails with specifications. You can thus iterate on the design of your prototype much faster.

Many of our startups saw the design of their products evolve, the sous-vide machine Nomiku is probably one whose changes were the most radical between the moment they joined HAXLR8R and the moment they went into production (read their story here on TC).

Manufacturing ability is one thing but costs are often a determining factor. A quote from Alibaba is not a reliable estimate nor is asking for “Apple quality” for half the price of a reasonable request to a factory. Avoid being overcharged or being laughed at by getting a better sense of your bill of materials and the manufacturing process.

Your factory is your most important partner

Okay so you have the right components and you know your product can be made and assembled. Are you going to select the factory and handle the relationship yourself?

It’s easy to make excuses for this one: it’s complicated, it’s in China (or Mexico, or elsewhere), you don’t speak the language, it takes time.… And where to start? Overall, it is scary.

As a result, it is tempting to bring in a third party to handle the relationship with factories. Beyond reducing your margins, the problem is that those companies essentially end up doing both audit and consulting. You know the result of this.

You can’t do hardware for long not knowing anything about manufacturing. So while you might need advice to get started, there is an expertise in project management and quality control you need to grow to succeed in the long term. And if you still have doubts: all the startups that went through HAXLR8R learned how to do it, and so can you. It might be worth noting that our 30 startups work with 30 different factories, to suit their needs best. To each his own!

“Not every product can be made in a toy factory. Your factory will make or break you, so pick wisely. Do not have a third party between you and your key suppliers.” – Zach “Hoeken” Smith, Co-founder, MakerBot (HAXLR8R Technical Director)

Be Memorable
Good products have good technology and design, but also good distribution and good branding. Can your brand encompass your values, mission, product and be memorable in many languages?

As an example, Axio, a company doing wearable tech for your brain and part of the second batch at HAXLR8R, did a thorough rebranding to Melon, revisiting entirely its name, logo, approach, app and look and feel.

Pick the right business model(s)

Pure hardware is at risk of being commoditized fast, and many products now include “smart” connectivity and a service layer. Doing hardware-as-a-service means that picking the right business model is very important.

At HAXLR8R, Spark started off by making open source hardware and software, then a device-based subscription and then licensed both hardware and software. More recently, Vibease, the wearable smart vibrator, added sales of the content of a library of audio recordings to its revenue models.

Changes in the ecosystem have made it much more possible to start hardware companies at a much lower starting cost. Expect to see many new successful hardware startups, as “smart” products gradually come to replace the objects in our life!

With Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates as founders, you’d think FWD.us would focus on building tech tools to push for immigration reform. Yet it’s mostly used money to buy campaign ads for supportive Congress members and run grassroots campaigns. But now it’s hired Darius Contractor as CTO; he’ll be working with volunteer engineers and running hackathons to code the way to policy change.

A Stanford computer science graduate and son of an Indian immigrant, Contractor was the VP of Engineering for Bebo from 2006 to 2009, where he helped grow daily page views from 100 million to 350 million before it sold to AOL for $850 million. Now he’ll be working for FWD.us, a bi-partisan lobbying group funded by Silicon Valley moguls that aims to create a path to citizenship for immigrants and expand the H-1B Visa program.

FWD.us President Joe Green tells me he hired Contractor because he “combines technical background with experience organizing projects, and is someone who is well-connected and thought of in the tech community, and who was passionate about the issues.”

The CTO’s first project was recruiting an army of mentors to help teams of young immigrant “DREAMers” at a FWD.us hackathon this weekend at LinkedIn’s headquarters. These mentors (some who I know personally) include Dropbox head of design Soleio Cuervo, Generator Lab co-founder Jay Zalowitz, open source guru Conrad Irwin, Quora growth product manager Rob Matei, IronPearl founder and current PayPal growth head Stan Chudnovsky, LivingSocial co-founder Aaron Batalion, and a slew of former and current Facebook product people including Arjun Banker, Itamar Rosen, Roddy Lindsay, and Bobby Goodlatte.

The DREAMer hackathon will be hosted by Zuckerberg on November 20 and 21 and see over 20 young immigrants working with the mentors to build tools that teach people about the need for reform, and pressure Congress to make it happen. These could include a way to find friends in states with Congress members who are on the fence about immigration reform, and encourage them to call, write or digitally contact them showing support for the movement. I think a guide to navigating the citizenship process could be a big help for immigrant families.

Contractor tells me he also plans to run “hack days” in the evenings from FWD.us’ San Francisco headquarters, so any talented Silicon Valley engineers, designers, or product people can come lend a hand.

The CTO’s efforts could help repair FWD.us’ battered image if he can produce tools that really help immigrants and make a difference in getting reform passed by the House Of Representatives.

I sat down to write up the new YouTube comment system earlier this week, and before I finished the article, I had deleted my Google+ account – my real one, not the joke one that you acquire during the YouTube signup process. The labyrinth of settings and accounts involved struck me as so absurd, and the process so hostile to comprehension, that they needed to be described as they might have been experienced by an ordinary user, and not from the more meta perspective of a tech writer or web designer. Here’s how it felt like it would go for your average YouTube visitor.

Ah, yes. That was a quality YouTube video. I’ve never felt the need to comment before, but this bathing rabbit deserves my approbation like none other!

Wait, my name is up there in the bar, and my face is next to the comment field. Ah, it would be a comment with my real name… curses. For reasons I do not care to explain (you can imagine compelling circumstances on your own) I would rather not use my real name or associate this particular video with my official identity or Gmail address.

But I heard there’s a new system. I’ll sign up for an account! Probably I can just click the comment field to – Oh. It wouldn’t have let me comment on the field even though my face was next to it, huh? Weird. Instead, it wants to know whether I want to use my Google+ account with my real name or “create a new channel.” Are those really my only options if I just want to comment? Very well, YouTube, I’ll create a new “channel.”

Ah, now you tell me. This new channel “comes with a Google+ page.” Why do I need another one? I already have one, and it’s because I didn’t want to use it that I clicked this button in the first place! Okay, well, I guess it can’t be helped. I can always delete it later.

Great, now I have a channel. I’ll just check the options just in case – I see I’ve been opted into a number of ads and newsletters! And even though this is a separate account with its own Google+ account, those will go to my Gmail address, I’m sure. Would have been nice to hear about this up front, but no use crying over spilt permissions. Uncheck, uncheck.

On, then, to Google+. Pretty sure this new one is redundant so we’ll just do away with it. Oh, it’s a “page”? How is that different from my profile “page,” or a photo “page”? And why is it associated with my real name account? Never mind, it won’t live long enough to matter. Dashboard, settings… scroll past a dozen or so notifications and other things I’ve been opted into without my knowledge… here we are: the tiniest option. “Delete this page.” Goodbye, page!

What, I can’t delete it? I have to delete the YouTube channel first? Why would I do that? Why wasn’t this mentioned before? I don’t want some random accounts I don’t use or care about! Wouldn’t it have been more accurate to say I was making a Google+ page that “comes with” the ability to comment on YouTube? But the YouTube channel has its own inbox and notification settings and stuff. I don’t need both, do I?

Oh, it says I just have to disconnect it first, that’s fine. Just one more step, and there’s even a link. Clicking that should… nope. This is just the basic settings page. Well, it has to be here somewhere. Ah, “Connected accounts.” Not for long, poor things!

Damn, not there either. Where would I disconnect except in “Connected accounts?” Advanced settings? I see “delete” but not disconnect. More features? If I search exhaustively through these, it will surely appear. No… no….

You know what? Forget it, I don’t even want to comment any more. It was a dumb video anyway. I’ll just post it on Facebook and put my comment there, where my friends will actually see it. Delete… yes, I’m sure. You may have just been a baby, but you had it coming, YouTube channel.

Now for that pesky G+ page, since its lifeline is gone. There’s no link anywhere on YouTube that I can see, but luckily, I know that I can go to plus.google.com to manage this stuff, something that wouldn’t be obvious if you weren’t already a Google+ user. Manage, settings, and delete, and yes, damn it, I’m sure – boom.

Back to square one. What was that other video I wanted to watch anonymously? Oh yeah, the dog. Okay, so now it says “Log in” up there, so I’m definitely logged out. That’s fine, I’ll just watch stuff, that’s what YouTube is for anyway. And I can back out even if I were to accidentally click the comment button or something, like so…

“Use YouTube as…” And the only option is my email address? Not likely, kemosabe! Not even going to click! No x to close this thing, thanks a lot… but I can sure close the tab! Nice knowing you, login box!

Let’s try this again. I desperately need to see that ex-military dog nuzzle its first kitten.

What?! Why is my face next to the comment box! I’m logged in with my email address? I never did that! Sign out.

Hey – why did my Gmail and chat sign out? Get back in there.

All right, one more time. Video URL pasted, and… I can hear the video but can’t see it? It’s just a login screen with one option! Is that a bug? Reload… and I’m logged in again? So wait, signing in and out of Gmail signs me in and out of YouTube and vice versa? In what world does that make sense?

For god’s sake!

It turns out you can view YouTube privately and without logging in only from an “incognito” or “private” browsing window, or if you are not logged into any other services. You can also block cookies on YouTube, though that’s not something mos users would think of. But fiddling around with Google+ and finding how often things I thought were disabled were not, how many settings I thought I’d changed had reverted, and how many accounts were being linked into the service for reasons I found pointless… I just decided to end it.

I don’t mean to rag on Google+, as some people find it useful as a social network, and it’s not as if signing up for an extra account and ignoring it is some huge chore. But its growing position as a sort of hub to be conflated with unrelated services like YouTube is distasteful to me.

It’s not that I find Google or even Google+ itself bad. But the connections between the account, the Google+ profile, the Google profile, the various websites and contact lists, to say nothing of interdependencies with Android – it’s becoming stifling. This little fracas around YouTube comments, and my inability to use the website as I please except by using Google’s own identity-hiding techniques against it reminded me of that. When I imagine my parents or less wary friends undertaking the process, I shudder to think how little they would bother diverging from Google’s ideal plan for a good data-producing consumer, because they would not have the patience to dig through settings, search after orphan accounts, and so on. Google has chosen the method and degree to which these things are connected, and few will have the wherewithal to resist. Sure, it’s their prerogative, but we don’t have to like it, and we don’t have to dislike it in silence.

Simplify, simplify. My online life is already cluttered enough, and I never did like Google+, so I deleted it, and perhaps you should, too. Now there’s one less egg in my Google basket, and I never have to pay attention to anything that has the word “Google+” in it again – just like I did with LinkedIn (stop inviting me, everyone in the world), Pinterest, and a number of other things I had no use for.

My worry is that I’m going to have to double back on my tracks in a year or so when the next few services coalesce under the Google+ umbrella. Hopes that it will be done well no longer seem realistic, so anyone who shares a similar low-key dread about the impending changes would do best to take matters into their own hands.

The organizers of the hackathon at Yale this weekend aren’t exactly sure how many students turned out for the sleepless grind. Gauging from the depletion of YHack t-shirts, they put it at about 950.

That’s about 915 more people than came last year, when a group of students organized a mini-hackathon that one participant described as, “Wasn’t great.”

With about 150 participants making the haul from Canada, a handful flying in from England, and hundreds more arriving from schools across the US, the hackathon that wrapped up this evening was definitely better than that and adds one more event to the circuit of major college hackathons that includes PennApps, MHacks, HackMIT, and HackRU. In the spirit of building the intercollegiate hacker culture, a number of the organizers of those events also came out to help at Yale this weekend.

A large part of the motivation to hold a major hackathon on campus is to build a brighter, more cohesive programming environment on Yale’s campus. Projects are fractured among the student body or limited to problem sets for class, said Frank Wu, a sophomore and one of the YHack organizers. As far as post-grad career choices go, working in tech is not high up on the list.

This weekend’s hacks were pretty awesome across the board, and the littered pizza boxes were many. Here are the winners and finalists, as presented at this evening’s closing ceremonies.

Winning hack: Rainman

Created by two Yale seniors, Rainman gives context to news articles. It’s a major help for those times when you want to educate yourself about, say, Syria but don’t want to toggle between the story and a few reference tabs. The Rainman Chrome extension pulls up relevant Wikipedia articles as a sidebar to the main story. Those articles are pulled based on the keywords in the article, comparing the frequency with which a word appears in the piece to a larger corpus of articles. It’s the type of hack that would be incredibly useful in real life and gets at how we read news articles now, in conjunction with other reference materials.

Second place: Lux

Lux deals with the issue of indoor fluorescent lights that mess with your internal clock and keep you awake long after you’ve tried to go to sleep. The Yale-based team’s idea is that lightbulbs should be smarter and change hue and brightness depending on the time of day with no prompt from the owner, although they can also be controlled with an app. It’s like f.lux for real life.

Third place: cHat

Retro in the best way possible, this hack uses a text interface as a replacement for video chat services that often freeze up. Imagine a wall of text that creates a pixelated, black and white video image and you’ve got the idea. Text is a simple way to get data across, and as the Carnegie Mellon students who made it said, “The bandwidth is, like, zero.”

The other finalists included Leaf, a Pebble-based hack that uses handshakes as a way to swap contact information at networking events; Hacksearch, a Facebook graph search that lets you include fields that don’t exist, like popularity and attractiveness; Subtle Glass, an Android app that translates spoken word into text using Google Glass; and Laser Lock, which makes data transference possible through LED light.

It’s worth noting that the kids on the Laser Lock team MacGyvered part of the hardware for their hack using foam rockets that YHack was giving out as swag and a bunch of Doublemint gum wrappers. And it worked.

The Washington Post broke news this afternoon that the National Security Agency (NSA) is collecting huge numbers of email address books and chat buddy lists for both foreign individuals and United States citizens.

It appears that the NSA lacks Congressional authority to collect buddy lists and address book information in the way that it currently does. As the Post rightly points out, address book data can include physical addresses, very personal information, and more.

To get around that lack of a mandate, the NSA has agreements with non-U.S. telcos and works with other, non-U.S. intelligence groups. So to get its hands on even more information, the NSA avoids the constraints of its provided oversight and legal boundaries, by going to alternative sources of the data that it wants.

That matters because the rules of other countries for tracking the communication of United States citizens are more lax. Recall that the NSA is in some ways slowed from collecting information on citizens of the United States, but not those of other countries.

So, if the NSA is willing to accept data from foreign intelligence agencies that it is not able to collect in this case, why not in other cases as well?

If the NSA won’t respect the constraints that are put in place on its actions for a reason, and will instead shirk its responsibilities and find a way to get all the data it could ever desire, then we have even less reason to trust its constant petitions that it follows the law, and is the only thing keeping the United States safe from conflagration.

The Post continues: “When information passes through ‘the overseas collection apparatus,’ [an intelligence office] added, ‘the assumption is you’re not a U.S. person.’” This means that when the NSA sweeps up contact data, buddy lists, and address sets from overseas, the same rules that keep it from collecting information on United States citizens aren’t likely in play. Minimization, it would seem, would be minimal.

The phone metadata program knows who you called, when, and for how long. PRISM can force your private information out of major Internet companies. XKeyscore can read your email, and tracks most of what you do online. And the above program circumvents Congressional oversight by collecting more data on U.S. citizens by merely executing that collection abroad.

How private are you feeling?

–

Facebook provided TechCrunch with the following statement:

“As we have said many times, we believe that while governments have an important responsibility to keep people safe, it is possible to do so while also being transparent. We strongly encourage all governments to provide greater transparency about their efforts aimed at keeping the public safe, and we will continue to be aggressive advocates for greater disclosure.”

Microsoft repeated to TechCrunch what it had told the Washington Post, that it “does not provide any government with direct or unfettered access to our customers’ data” and that if the above revelations are true, then the company would “have significant concerns.”

Top Image Credit: Zoe Rudisill

From prosthetic limbs to funky jewelry, the advent of 3-D printing has brought huge opportunities.

Imagine you hit a button on your printer, and out emerges a prototype of a prosthetic leg or a component for a space shuttle. The moment has arrived, and it means big things for 3-D printing companies. Though the industry has been around for decades, 3-D printing is gaining momentum. In a recent report, Goldman Sachs named 3-D printing as one of eight technologies that will “creatively destroy” how we do business.

Indeed, companies in many fields are getting creative with 3-D printing technology. One Dutch architect has plans to print a 1,100 square-foot house. The European Space Agency is looking into building a lunar colony with a 3-D printer that uses moon dust. NASA wants to take a 3-D printer into space. In March, a British company, Oxford Performance Materials, printed new bone that replaced 75 percent of a man’s damaged skull. Another company, Organovo, based in San Diego, is building a 3-D printer that can create new organs. Meanwhile, the majority of hearing aids are now made using 3-D printing technology.

Looking to get started? Design your products for the aerospace industry and the medical sector: Those will drive the most growth, with the greatest profit potential. “Companies are going after markets where the volumes are relatively low and the value and complexity of products are high,” says Terry Wohlers, president of Wohlers Associates, a consulting firm.

How big will it get?

By 2017, Wohlers Associates estimates that sales of 3-D printing products and services could hit $6 billion worldwide. It forecasts that by 2021, industry-wide sales could reach about $11 billion.

The market segment that has experienced the greatest growth recently is the personal 3-D printing market, which includes printers such as 3D Systems’s Cube ($1,299) and Makerbot’s Replicator 2 ($2,199). Sales in this space grew an average of 346 percent a year between 2008 and 2011. However, growth slowed slightly last year, according to Wohlers, with sales up 46 percent in 2012.

How much do I need?

You’ll need capital. How much depends on your ambition: It can cost from $20,000 to $600,000 for a commercial printer if you want to make aerospace parts or prosthetics. For the DIY-crowd and 3-D printing hobbyists, the low cost models fall into the range of about $5,000 and less. A simple $500 version may suffice for making toys and jewelry.

Who’s in it?

There are big incumbents. Stratasys controlled 56 percent of the market in 2012, and venture capital-backed Shapeways is the leader in on-demand printing, but the field is getting more and more crowded as the industry shifts to producing real parts and products rather than just prototypes. Wohlers reports that finished parts now account for about 28 percent of sales in the 3-D printing market.

The Quick and Dirty on 3-D Printing

How much? The 3-D printing market grew 28.6 percent in 2012 to $2.2 billion, according to Wohlers Associates.

Barriers to entry: Some 3-D printing businesses can be launched relatively cheaply. Printing products for the aerospace and medical industries will require more start-up capital, technical knowledge, and industry contacts. But those fields have the greatest growth potential.

The playing field: There are some large players in the industry–Stratsys, 3D Systems, Ponoko, and Shapeways–and the space is beginning to get crowded. But there’s certainly room for a newcomer with an inventive approach. One start-up, Occipital, is creating a 3-D scanning device, called Structure Sensor, that snaps onto an iPad. Occipital’s Kickstarter campaign reached its $100,000 fundraising goal in just a few hours.

Ideal prior job? Professor of mechanical engineering.

Buzzword: Makers–the industry’s community of DIY-ers and hobbyists.

What’s the future of small business in New York City? Here’s the vision Public Advocate Bill de Blasio lays out.

New York City is in the midst of a tech start-up boom. It’s home to an increasing number of venture-capital firms, co-working spaces, and business incubators. Mayor Mike Bloomberg, an entrepreneur himself, has helped herald in this era by creating an office of NYC Digital, and, through the New York City Economic Development Corporation, creating NYC Tech Talent Draft, NYC Next Idea, and NYC Venture Fellows. New York City is also home to tens of thousands of small, family-owned, and immigrant-owned businesses that sometimes struggle to keep up with complex regulations and taxes in one of the most expensive cities in the world in which to do business. Nearly a year after Hurricane Sandy hit New York City, these businesses also have questions about the role of government in helping them through disaster–in addition to helping them thrive and grow on sunnier days. There’s a lot at stake for the future of small business in this upcoming mayoral election. So over the past two weeks, Inc. has interviewed four candidates running in the Democratic primary election for Mayor of New York City. Here is my conversation with Bill de Blasio, current public advocate of New York City and resident of Brooklyn, New York. (Links to additional candidate interviews are below.)

What is the current state of small business in New York City? What do you want to change about it?
I think small business is struggling in New York City. It’s a fantastic market, it’s a very appealing market, there’s lots of opportunity, at the same time it’s a very difficult place to build a small business. I think that some of the policies of the Bloomberg administration in terms of a very aggressive approach to enforcement, and a very arbitrary approach to inspections and fines, have really negatively affected people all over the city, particularly in the outer boroughs.

And that and the absence of real facilitation from the city government in terms of small business start-ups, with a few exceptions–there have been some promising exceptions lately–but writ large, you know, the city is sort of quick to fine; slow to help. There’s been very low response to real pressing needs of small business, like access to credit, that got largely paralyzed during the economic crisis. And one of my chief proposals I’m focusing on is really changing the way we do subsidies. A lot of our subsidies are still going to large corporations, with limited positive results for the city, I’d like to alter that and focus on creating a revolving loan fund for small business that’s sponsored by the city. That would allow a lot of our small businesses to grow and employ more people.

What specifically can we do in New York to decrease the bureaucracy one must go through to get started, licensing, inspections, etc.? And should we?
I think we can develop more of the one-stop approach. There have been a few experiments with that that have been very promising, even at the end of the Bloomberg years. For a long time, I don’t think the Bloomberg administration did much to change the balkanization of permitting in this city, but there have been a few experiments lately that I want to build on that to help small businesses deal with one person, one agency, and have that agency run interference with the others.

For example, when you open a business there are some approvals you need from the buildings department, some you need from the fire department, and you often get contradictory messages from the different departments and it’s really hard to schedule them to come and do their inspections. We need to centralize that and make it simpler for small businesses to open up. That should be something the city gets involved with and has a single point of contact and helps each business through the process. And we should be able to do that in multiple languages, too. We are the ultimate international city; we should be able to facilitate in the languages people speak because we want their business open sooner rather than later, because we want the jobs, we want the revenue. So that’s the direction I want to take us in.

How important is the burgeoning tech start-up scene in New York City? Do you think there are changes that need to be made to Silicon Alley?
First of all, I think the tech industry is very, very important to us. We’re last I checked, pushing on toward 100,000 employed in the industry. The big growth in the last few years is multiplied by the fact that I think for every tech job created there are almost four non-tech jobs that are created. So, this is very, very important to the future of the city.

We have immense competitive advantages here, we are the capital of content in the world, and certainly the United States. Obviously Google and Yahoo made their investments here, so I think we have a lot more potential here. I think the way to address the question you raised is that we have to build tech hubs in each of the boroughs. What’s happening in Downtown Brooklyn is very promising, and in DUMBO. But now let’s talk about Long Island City and the surrounding areas, which I think offer a great opportunity and in close proximity to Roosevelt island and the Cornell Tech campus. There are other locations in the Bronx and Staten Island too, or deeper into Queens or Brooklyn that can also be developed.

I think another piece of the equation is the talent base that’s needed. And folks in the industry have talked to me about their tremendous appreciation that mayor Bloomberg and the city created the Applied Science Center. And I’ve often been a critic of Bloomberg, but that’s something where I agree with him 100 percent and I think it’s a great step forward for this city. But let’s be clear; it’s one piece of the equation. But beyond that, the next frontier is the city university system. That’s what a lot of folk in tech said to me would be the real difference-maker, both in terms of speed with which CUNY could graduate people who are ready to go into jobs right now, and just the sheer volume of people that could be handled at CUNY rather than Cornell. There are a lot of people who grew up in New York City, who would love to get those tech jobs, need the additional training, and could use some help with financial aid. The city can play a powerful role in addressing that.

There are hundreds of small businesses that have been affected by Hurricane Sandy. How would you fix or nurture disaster preparedness?
In terms of planning for the future, as someone who is not afraid to criticize Mayor Bloomberg, I think his plan for dealing with the future and potential climate challenges is a very good plan, I by and large agree with it. What it’s, I think, missing, is the grassroots element. There are community organizations and volunteer groups and faith-based organizations all looking to help, and they are, in a lot of ways, quicker and more agile and more creative than government agencies–and certainly that was true in the days immediately following Sandy. The grassroots response was much faster and stronger than a lot of the government agencies.

How would you propose strengthening response, then?
Well, training together. Certainly, training community groups and individuals and faith-based groups. We’ve been preparing for these things, but training together is important and having some access to resources in the event of an emergency is important. For example a lot of non-profits that were really crucial to recovery and response couldn’t get fuel. They were treated as different than other first-responders, even though they were doing, essentially, similar work. I think it’s about training together and having resources in a time of crisis. More of a team approach rather than two ships passing in the night.

Have you ever started a business?
No I have not, but let me say that running a campaign is shockingly similar to running a small business. People believe it is one of the great entrepreneurial enterprises, you start with nothing, and you need to find backers and investors and there’s no guarantee of victory, and you walk the tightrope, so I think I can relate.

How would the folks on your campaign describe you as a boss?
I’d let them speak for themselves, but what I believe is true is that I’m as a boss very conscientious, meaning I’m detail oriented, and I try to hold myself and everyone else to a high standard, and I think I’m demanding in a hopefully righteous manner. I mean, I think, look, this is very serious work we do and I try to ask of everyone and myself the pursuit of a very high standard. And beyond that I really thing that people have to listen to each other and listen to the people we serve. I think a lot of the best ideas come from the grassroots, I’m someone who does not like a bunker mentality and does not like groupthink. I struggle to keep some objectivity and some flow of new ideas and to keep close to the grassroots. I think I’ve been able to attract fantastic talent over the years without having a whole lot to pay them and I hope that’s because, first, people who believe in the progressive values I have and the changes we want to make in the city and second, the kind of people attracted to an organization that works real hard, and is hard-charging, high-volumes, high-quality–they are a special breed who chooses to be part of my campaign.

How are your tech skills? What sort of apps do you like? Do you do your own social media?
I’d say, imperfect. My Blackberry is pretty much it. I tweet sometimes personally, other times my team does it. I love the MLB app, because I’m a pretty obsessed baseball fan. I don’t use a whole lot of others much. Honestly, my life is pretty narrow in terms of the work I do each day. I am pretty limited, but that does not keep me from understanding how crucial the tech industry is to our future and how fundamental tech is to every aspect of life.

What has running a campaign taught you about productivity? Any tips?
It’s all a matter of prioritizing. There are a lot of different demands on the campaign trail, but what matters most is that you connect with voters and take the time to really hear their concerns. If at the end of the day I’ve done that and I have time for my family, it’s been a good day.

If you were to start a business in New York, what would be useful to you or the community?
There’s a lack of batting cages in New York City. There’s a few that I have frequented over the years and they immediately fill up. The Little League movement is booming in New York City, it’s like growing all the time, we hardly have enough space to accommodate everyone. Batting cages are crucial to the nurturing of little leaguers, and that’s what I would do. That’s be a fun career.

Read more:
Leadership Pointers From the New York City Mayoral Candidates
Full Interview: Bill de Blasio
Full Interview: John Liu
Full Interview: Bill Thompson
Full Interview: Christine Quinn

Chill, the Kleiner Perkins-backed site where independent filmmakers and other content creators can sell directly to fans, has some new features for engaging those fans even before the movie (or other project) has been completed.

You can see these features in action in the page for Camp Takota, an upcoming film featuring YouTube stars Grace Helbig, Hannah Hart and Mamrie Hart. In exchange for providing their contact information, fans get access to behind-the-scenes videos, photos, and blog posts before anyone else.

“Behind-the-scenes content is not a new concept,” acknowledged Chill co-founder Brian Norgard. What Chill can do, however, is use that content for “community activation.” With this content, creators are offering a lot more incentive to provide your contact info than just a generic message of “sign up for my email list!”

Then, once the movie is done, they can reach out to those fans to preorder the film, and promote it. One point of comparison is Kickstarter, where project backers usually get access to exclusive, behind-the-scenes content, but in this case the request for financial support comes after you’ve been following the project, not before.

Not that Chill expects the content to be exclusive forever, Norgard added. He predicted that a lot of this behind-the-scenes stuff could get used elsewhere, for example posted to YouTube, but the Insider Access page will serve as a “centralized” repository where members should get access first: “You want to reward the super fans.”

There are currently three Insider Access projects on the Chill site — in addition to Camp Takota, there’s crowdfunding documentary Kickstarted and “film noir comedy” Kill Me, Deadly. Those projects have seen a total of more than 70,000 sign-ups, the vast majority (53,000) for Camp Takota.

There should be more Insider Access projects going up soon, Norgard said, and they won’t be limited to movies — Chill is also working with a few musicians. And eventually he wants to make it a self-serve feature for anyone selling content on the site.

The launch of BBM for iOS and Android appears to be imminent, as BlackBerry has accidentally published user guides for its forthcoming mobile messaging apps to its own website: here (iOS) and here (Android). The guides explain in detail how the apps function, how to get started, and their various feature sets.

For previous BBM users from BlackBerry, most of these details are familiar. The apps are designed to allow for real-time communication between contacts and groups, the guides explain, letting users share pictures and messages, including broadcast messages, multi-person chats, and group chats. Users will also be able to create BBM Groups, where they can plan events, track to-do’s, share photos, and chat with up to 30 people at a time, without the need to add everyone as BBM contacts.

BBM will work over both cellular and Wi-Fi, the latter option which is meant to help avoid data charges when traveling.

Each user can establish their own BBM profile, where they can choose a display picture, name, and status that their contacts will see, and they’ll also have a unique BBM PIN which they can access by tapping “Show Barcode.”

The apps will also include support for various emoticons and emoji, but because the guides don’t include screenshots, we’re not able to see a preview of what these or any of the features look like in more detail.

We already knew BBM was to arrive on iOS or Android globally this summer, as CEO Thorsten Heins announced the news at the BlackBerry Live conference in May. The company also began sending out beta invites earlier this month.

This is a major move for the struggling company, as BBM has for a long time been one of Blackberry, and the BB10′s, strongest features. At launch, Heins had said that only messaging and group features will be available, but promised that the rest of BBM will eventually make its way to the Android and iOS versions including screen sharing, BBM voice, and the newer BBM channels.

The question now for the company is whether it’s too little, too late. Today’s app stores have become saturated with a plethora of mobile messaging apps for users to choose from, including Skype, Whatsapp, KakaoTalk, Kik, Viber, WeChat, LINE, Facebook Messenger, Tango, Snapchat, MessageMe, Path, Voxer, Google Hangouts, and many others. Blackberry is banking on its brand recognition and history in the messaging space, but the large majority of its users have since moved on new smartphones and therefore, new mobile applications. Still, BBM may still hold a soft spot in some of these folks’ hearts, and at least some may be willing to give the apps another shot.

Alt links, in case Blackberry takes the guides down, are below. Although that’s probably not the case, as this “leak” could very well be a beg for publicity ahead of the apps’ official debut. (And it worked, sigh). Besides, who needs a manual for mobile messagers, anyway?

BBM_for_iOS-1.0_User_Guide-Beta

BBM_for_Android-1.0_User_Guide-Beta

(h/t: n4bb.com)