The selfie. (Photo: Hashgram)

Selfies are now the most popular brand of pictures among British youth, thus narrowly beating out the sorority squat and pre-gaming action shots.

A new poll reveals that 30 percent of youth aged 18 to 24 have admitted to snapping selfies. However, more men admitted to taking them than women, so we'd like to humbly request that all of the naughty pictures be submitted to Guys with iPhones.

And all those selfies aren’t just ending up on Snapchat either. Two-thirds of the 3,000 respondents use their phones, computers, and tablets to catalog their pictures, thus delivering the final death blow to the traditional family photo album. Unfortunately for Flickr’s redesign, more than half said they prefer to use Facebook for photo sharing.

Of the pictures taken, one in five people said they were shot with the intention of (over)sharing them on platforms like Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, with 10 percent saying they upload those pictures within 60 seconds after shooting them.

But there’s going to be a special place in heaven for 34 percent of survey takers: they admitted to not bother sharing their pictures on social media at all. Then what the hell's the point?

Guess that's what Google+ looks like? (geekword.net)

Wait, so a lot people are actually using Google+? If we're to believe a new report from the not-fake sounding GlobalWebIndex research firm, the Google Ponzi scheme is actually the second-largest social networking site in the world, with 359 million active users. That's up 33 percent since last summer, when it logged 270 million users.

The largest social network, however, is the Social Network itself: Facebook. It registered 700 million users, a slight irregularity from CEO Mark Zuckerberg's claim last October that it had one billion users. Twitter slipped into third place with 297 million users, but is finding success in courting an older demographic. GlobalWebIndex said that Twitter is quickly growing with the elderly, which means your grandma might be a closeted #TeamFollowback member.

Google+’s figures should come with a footnote, though, since it has created its own online ecosystem with its plethora of rainbow-colored products:

Google accounts are ubiquitous, linking massive services like Gmail and YouTube within the same space as its social network.

So, log-in to one service, and you're signed-in to all, like Google+. That's one way to game the system.

(Photo: Dragon Painting)

The Huffington Post and YouGov collaborated on a very important poll of 1,000 U.S. adults meant to measure the attitudes of Americans towards robots. The results are pretty typical, except for one thing: turns out Americans aren't really that into doing robots (or they're lying).

Come on guys, live a little.

HuffPo writes:

58 percent of Americans said that robots will be cleaning our homes by 2030. But only 33 percent said that they'd like a robot servant.... (22 percent) said that they would let a robot care for an aging friend or relative....Forty-eight percent of respondents indicated that they believed robots will be able to fight in the military by 2030.

But when it comes to intimacy, Lieutenant Data and his ilk might be better off bonding with fellow non-humans (or animals). According to the poll, only 9 percent of Americans said they would "have sex with a robot if they could."

Guess you guys won't be having longevity orgasms anytime soon.

It's not just the E-Trade baby who's mastered these apps (Photo: blogcdn.com)

Gather round kids, and set down your game of Tiny Wings for just a minute, because we have some mind-blowing news to tell you. A survey commissioned by Popcap Games and released today reveals that people are addicted to mobile gaming. Yes, that’s right, the Angry Birds Flu has officially infected a majority of the U.S. and U.K. populations.

The survey, conducted by Information Solutions Group, asked participants where and on what device they prefer to play mobile games. Nearly 70 percent of the 2,031 respondents chose to do so while sitting on the couch, and another 40 percent enjoy these complex, intellectually stimulating apps while watching television. Apparently, Mad Men isn’t really doing it for people anymore.

No, you can’t go back to your game yet, because it gets better. One out of every 10 respondents sneaks in a little Fruit Ninja while worshipping, driving a car or watching a movie. We’re not sure who should find this more concerning: God, Steven Spielberg or the person you just T-boned.

Even more worrisome is the fact that 10 percent of those surveyed have missed an appointment, class, ride or flight because they were caught up in a mobile game. Of course, according to the survey, many of these religiously apathetic, Spielberg-haters are young men with enough expendable cash to spend over $50 annually on mobile games. We're looking at you, Harry and Peter Brant.

Let's not fault the eight percent of people who need a little gaming break at school, or the nine percent who use Angry Birds to stay awake during their kid’s Little League game. But to those four percent playing games in the gym, don’t you think you should take a little break to work off those potato chips you consumed while watching Girls and playing Words With Friends?

Giordano Contestabile, the senior director of mobile product and business strategy at PopCap Games, told USA Today that he found these results surprising, likely because he still engages in such outdated activities as reading and face-to-face socializing.

But don’t worry. He will soon be sucked in, as will the rest of the planet.

“We believe mobile gaming is invading the last bastion of video game consoles and personal computers: the home,” said Dennis Ryan, the vice president of Wordwide Publishing at PopCap in a statement.

Looks like Mark Zuckerberg has some competition for world domination.

Mr. Teten

This guest post was written by David Teten, Koen Bremer, Gyorgy Buslig, and Adham Hussein. David is a Partner with ff Venture Capital and Founder and Chairman of Harvard Business School Alumni Angels of Greater New York.  Koen, Gyorgy, and Adham are all Columbia Business School MBA 2012 students and former consultants with McKinsey and BCG.

Even the best VCs and entrepreneurs have a painfully high failure rate.  Lowering that failure rate would be highly impactful on venture capitalist returns, if we could figure out how to do it.  In addition, in light of increasing competition in the startup funding space, a methodology  for helping portfolio companies consistently is a strong competitive advantage.

In an effort to address this, we launched last year a formal study of best practices of VCs in improving portfolio company value. The objective of the research is to define a blueprint for how investors can help portfolio companies succeed through operational (non-financial) support, including  but not limited to facilitating shared services, recruiting, knowledge sharing, and enhancing management skills. To do so, we are working to understand what the best practices in the industry are, as well as what the correlation is between providing this kind of support and start-up success.

We’re now in the midst of surveying VCs and entrepreneurs for this research.  We’ll feature in our published work the most effective firms and practices we identify, subject to the interviewees giving us permission to use their names and data.  We’d greatly appreciate you taking a few minutes to fill out our survey:

VCs please click here.

Entrepreneurs please click here.

The value creation study draws on a wide range of research:  in-depth interviews with over 50 venture capital investors, entrepreneurs, startup incubators and advisory service providers; a proprietary database and survey of VCs’ portfolio value creation practices; a wide scan of academic and practitioner publications focused on the topics of entrepreneurship and venture investing; and the authors’ experience working in venture capital, early-stage technology companies, and strategy consulting.

This study is effectively a sequel to the study David Teten led with Chris Farmer of General Catalyst on best practices of venture capital and private equity funds in originating new deals, published in Journal of Private Equity, Harvard Business Review, Institutional Investor, etc.  Similarly, we plan to publish this value-creation study in a few different major journals.

If you have any questions, you can contact the team at vcbeyondthemoney(@)gmail.com

We’ve summarized below some of our preliminary results. This is the first in a series of articles as our research findings unfold.

Are VCs a different breed of “investors”?

The conventional school of thought argues that investors –generally- should be creating value by selecting the “right” companies, business plans, and teams into which to invest. We argue that on top of that selection function, venture investors have a wider role to play beyond funneling financial resources with a high-risk appetite.

Venture capitalists are financiers of a special nature. They fund highly uncertain projects that usually operate within a very fast moving environment and within consistently shifting technological paradigms. The company teams they work with are usually highly motivated entrepreneurs trying to engage in extensive product and customer development efforts for a product they don’t typically have a full vision of, for a customer whose needs are opaque, and for a use case which is ambiguous. This is a very different world than traditional corporate lending.

Almost every VC will say, “I respond to the CEO’s requests, I put him in touch with someone in my network when he asks me to”.  We view that as the bare minimum.  We think that VCs can add tremendous value by systematically actively supporting their portfolio companies.

So how can VCs help their startups?

We have interviewed over 50 entrepreneurs and some leading VCs around the US about their experiences and pain points while building their companies. Our in-depth interviews have led us to define a framework (TOSCAN) for early-stage investors to systematically support their entrepreneurs, which we believe will in turn increase success and valuations.

-      Team Building: accelerating hiring to help startups build their most important asset; people

-      Operations: minimizing entrepreneurs’ burden in admin, accounting and legal

-      Skill Building: building the right skills, especially for top management, and ensuring they develop inline with the early-stage company’s life cycle

-      Customer Development: identifying the right customers and gaining access to them

-      Analysis: how entrepreneurs measure, understand and report the performance of their early-stage companies

-      Network: helping entrepreneurs building relationships with networks key to their company success

What is important, useful, new, or counterintuitive about your idea?

So far, there are two particularly innovative techniques we found VCs to be using:

• Dedicated teams: Some of the investors we interviewed have started building dedicated business support teams, led by Partner-level experts. We are particularly interested in learning how these teams are organized, their interaction patterns with portfolio companies, and the company’s perception of their value-added.  Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, and ff Venture Capital are all examples.

• Portfolio companies’ networks: Many VCs said that the people who know the most about building a company are the portfolio CEOs.  In order to enable information-sharing, VCs must build very strong online and offline networks between portfolio companies, which organically provide a wealth of knowledge and support to each other.  All of the firms above have online networks for their portfolio executives.

(via richardsummers' flickr.com)

A new report released Monday by eMarketer showed that the average adult consumer spends 65 minutes of their day on a mobile device versus only 44 minutes a day with print media (26 minutes of that with newspapers and just 18 minutes with magazines). This marks the first time since 2008, when the research firm started collecting data, that adults have turned over more of their day to mobile devices than print.

As PC World points out, however, that data doesn't specify how many of those mobile minutes are spent reading the online version of articles that appear in print.

The other unexpected shift in the survey is an increase in the amount of time the average adult spends watching television and video on a traditional TV set, which jumped 10 minutes from last year up to four hours and 34 minutes a day. But, as PC World also points out, this may not bring a sigh of relief to cable companies because the survey doesn't describe what percentage of these TV fanatics are using connected or smart TVs to stream online programming from sites like Netflix and Hulu.

So basically the only thing we can say for certain: we should all probably spend more time looking up from our screens.

Let the slogan t-shirts be your guide.

A recent survey of about 6,700 college grads by the research firm Universum found that roughly one in five listed Google as the most desirable place to work. It was joined at the top of the list by Apple (no. 2), Facebook (no. 3), Amazon (no. 6), Microsoft (no. 8). Even Electronic Arts made it near the top at no. 15.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Google also topped Universum's first ever survey last year. Guess they heard about that food truck giving out knockoff Momofuku cookies at Googleplex East. Either that or the restricted stock units they're doling out like candy.

But the tech sector's popularity may have been the financial sector's loss.

The steepest drop in rank was for Bank of America, which dipped from no. 48 last year to no. 77.  The first financial firm to appear on the list is J.P. Morgan at no. 41. Goldman clocks in at no. 46. Citigroup is all the way down at no. 99 . . . just above the Blackstone Group no. 100. Accounting and management consulting firms also took a dive, with McKinsey at no. 42 and Deloitte at no. 47.

But before the tech industry pats itself on the back for seeding its change-the-world ethos, consider this, "Oil and gas companies grew significantly more attractive, owing to aggressive branding and marketing efforts as well as a robust employment market." The kids, it seems, also want to get paid.