Enstitute is a group providing apprenticeships for college-age people:

How did she catapult from dropping out of college to landing a plum job? She became an apprentice to Hilary Mason, chief data scientist at Bitly, through a new two-year program called Enstitute. It teaches skills in fields like information technology, computer programming and app building via on-the-job experience. Enstitute seeks to challenge the conventional wisdom that top professional jobs always require a bachelor’s degree — at least for a small group of the young, digital elite.

“Our long-term vision is that this becomes an acceptable alternative to college,” says Kane Sarhan, one of Enstitute’s founders. “Our big recruitment effort is at high schools and universities. We are targeting people who are not interested in going to school, school is not the right fit for them, or they can’t afford school.”

Colleges are incredibly expensive, the cost continues to rise, and yet they are increasingly less effective at preparing people to be successful. There’s absolutely value in a liberal arts education (in fact, I think there’s even more value now), but many schools don’t even do a good job of exposing students to a variety of disciplines to make them more well-rounded. Universities crank students through, make them take class after class with lecture-midterm-lecture-midterm-lecture-final, put them tens of thousands of dollars into debt, and leave many of them not much better off than they were before entering.

So new education organizations like this should be welcomed. Perhaps they’re not exactly what we need to replace universities, but we don’t need to replace universities—we need different options, different paths, different ideas that allow people to take a route that fits them better, and places pressure on our bloated, staid education system to change.

If you’re looking for a new RSS feed service, David Smith’s Feed Wrangler looks like a great one.

As always, Federico Viticci (the man, the machine) has a very good look at the service and iOS apps.

Facebook has agreed to acquire Parse:

These steps come in all sizes. Most are small and incremental. Some are larger.  Today we’re excited to announce a pretty big one.

Parse has agreed to be acquired by Facebook. We expect the transaction to close shortly. Rest assured, Parse is not going away. It’s going to get better.

Wow.

You know, if you’d like to build a mobile platform but don’t want to build an operating system, owning the best backend service for mobile developers is probably a good way to do it.

Nest will now automatically tune your thermostat schedule or adjust the temperature for peak usage periods to save money and use energy more efficiently:

Traditionally, Fadell explained, people turn on their air conditioners and leave them on all day, when it gets very hot. regardless of whether they’re home or not. That uses a huge amount of energy, and can force utility companies to power up special plants that often run on coal, or to buy power from third parties at very expensive rates.

But with Rush Hour Rewards, Nest owners can be part of the solution, Fadell argued. The idea is that the system builds a personal profile based on residents’ lifestyles, and then runs the air conditioner in a much more efficient manner, while still maintaining comfort, Fadell said.

They say that during peak periods, they can reduce power usage by up to 40 percent while only allowing the home’s temperature to rise by 3 percent. Incredible.

They’re reducing energy efficiency while saving money for owners. That’s a much better approach because owners will be more likely to actually use the service, and it should therefore be more effective. I love this company.

Dan Frakes points out a trend in iOS app design—the floating button:

In Facebook’s case (left), it’s a pill-shaped “New Stories” button that shows up at the top of the screen when there are new News Feed items to load. In Foursquare’s app (right), it’s a big, round “Check In” button at the bottom of the home screen.

Alexis Madrigal on the missing Sunil Tripathi being incorrectly named as the suspect for the Boston bombing:

The next step in this information flow is the trickiest one. Here’s what I know. At 2:42am, Greg Hughes, who had been following the Tripathi speculation, tweeted, “This is the Internet’s test of ‘be right, not first’ with the reporting of this story. So far, people are doing a great job. #Watertown” Then, at 2:43am, he tweeted, “BPD has identified the names: Suspect 1: Mike Mulugeta. Suspect 2: Sunil Tripathi.”

The only problem is that there is no mention of Sunil Tripathi in the audio preceding Hughes’ tweet. I’ve listened to it a dozen times and there’s nothing there even remotely resembling Tripathi’s name. I’ve embedded the audio from 2:35 to 2:45 am for your own inspection. Multiple groups of people have been crowdsourcing logs of the police scanner chatter and none of them have found a reference to Tripathi, either. It’s just not there.

The web is incredibly powerful and empowering. It can also be incredibly dangerous. Let this be a lesson to all of us (that we should have all learned after Wayne Chiang was falsely accused for the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007) what it can do when we spread information that isn’t verified: it could lead to innocent people being harmed.

I use Instapaper a lot—basically everyday—to keep track of things I need to read and things to post. On my Mac, I just use Instapaper in the browser to make posts, but I’ve hoped for a decent Instapaper client for a while.

ReadKit looks like it fits the bill. It’s simple, supports Instapaper, Pocket, Pinboard and Delicious, but it’s also relatively well-featured. Managing folders in Instapaper through the iOS versions and on the web has always been a bit of a pain, but it’s much easier to do on a Mac—and should be much more useful for me as a result.

Here’s Federico Viticci’s review from January.

If you have similar needs, I’d recommend giving it a look.

Thanks to Ben Brooks for pointing it out.

Want API access to your Nest thermostat? Here’s your chance.

Not at all official, of course, but pretty cool. Bob VanderClay even used it to hook up Nest to Panic’s Status Board.

Megan McArdle on bitcoin:

But bitcoins are not so liquid. Mostly, to buy things, I need to trade them for dollars or another currency. And that is the fatal weakness of bitcoins: at some point, to compete with dollars, it needs to enter the real economy. And if bitcoins become a good way to avoid government surveillance of your financial transactions, then governments will find a way to choke off those entry points so that bitcoins become very illiquid indeed. You cannot have a valuable currency that is good only for the purchase of child pornography and other highly illegal, entirely digital goods.

Perhaps I’m missing something obvious about bitcoin that makes it useful regardless, but that seems true: if it’s illiquid, there’s little chance it can succeed as a means of exchange, and since the government will be able to make exchanging it into dollars (or other currencies) difficult, then its long-term prospects don’t seem very bright.

Khoi Vinh:

No one wants to type more on a multi-touch phone or tablet if they don’t have to, so when they see an app demonstrate that typing can be eliminated entirely, it’s an eye-opening moment, for sure. But is it magic? Almost. To simplify is huge, but what matters just as much is the end result, what the user gets out of the simplification. If the simplified process produces satisfactory results, great. But it’s magic when the software generates a disproportionately meaningful output from that minimized input.

The application that inspired this is called Moves, which tracks your movement throughout the day and tells you where you went, how much you moved and how. It’s really quite clever.

This article keeps popping back into my head because it’s incredibly insightful. The magic doesn’t come from generating a surprisingly large result from a surprisingly small amount of user input; rather, it comes from understanding what the user is trying to accomplish, and then generating that result from as little effort as possible.

Moves is a great example of this, because all you do is enable it, and every day it’ll let you know how much you’ve moved and how. It automatically creates a little diary of your movement without you doing anything at all, because it reacts to what you’re already doing. It takes no additional effort on your part, but it provides you with quite powerful information about your life that would otherwise be only vaguely known to you. It’s actionable information—you don’t need to process it or think about it, and you can change your habits based on it, and then see the results of those changes.

David Pogue asks “why?” for Facebook Home, and answers the question himself:

Facebook’s answer to “why” seems straightforward enough; its research shows that Americans spend 25 percent of their cellphone time in Facebook. (Seriously?) Why wouldn’t we want to save the trouble of opening an app to stay in touch?

Of course, there may be other answers to the “why” — like those ads. It probably means a lot to Facebook’s advertisers to know that their commercial messages can now appear on your phone’s screen even when it’s locked.

Bingo.

Kurt Eichenwald has an excellent look at Facebook’s business model:

Andreessen and others around in those early days of Facebook agree that no one was quite sure how the business would ultimately earn profits. But that was beside the point. What Zuckerberg was building wasn’t so much a moneymaker as it was an asset of unprecedented value: a massive compilation of data about people’s names, locations, behaviors, likes, and dislikes—the kind of information that marketers could not have even imagined being available just a few years before.

“A lot of people looked at Facebook and saw a Web site,” Andreessen remembers. “None of the people close to Mark and the company thought of Facebook as a Web site. They think of it as a data set, a feedback loop.”

There’s been some discussion whether Facebook Home is a precursor to Facebook building their own phone, but that’s the wrong thing to focus on. Perhaps that is the case, but Facebook’s ambitions are much larger than to merely sell a mobile phone.

Facebook’s business model isn’t just to be a place where advertisers can show display ads to people. Instead, they want to be the place where companies connect with customers and potential customers. Not a new broadcast medium, like print, radio or TV, but the alpha and the omega of reaching customers—where companies find new customers, where they interact with existing ones, and where they drive sales to both groups. The place that has, for all intents and purposes, all of the information a company could possibly want about potential and existing customers: their demographic data, likes and interests, activity, travel data, and purchasing behavior.

For that to work, not only does Facebook need as many people as possible on the service, but they need them to actively use it, to “share” their lives with friends. Facebook’s interests depend on people believing that being “open” is a positive thing for them, their friends and society. And they also need to basically become the Internet—the social layer that all websites, applications and services connect to and rely on. As you use Facebook, browse the web, and use applications and services that feed into Facebook, you are building an ever-more-detailed profile of who you are, what you like and don’t like, where you go, what you do, what you eat, what you listen to, what you watch, what you buy. And that data will be (is) used to provide targeted adverts to “connect” with a brand or to nudge you to purchase something.

That’s not a moral judgment (although I do find Facebook’s underlying philosophy, that sharing our lives is a positive thing, highly damaging). I don’t think advertising is inherently wrong, nor targeting advertisements based on personal information people have chose to share. Rather, I think we should all be aware of what Facebook’s business model is, how it works, and what its philosophy is.

Tom Harrington:

This puts software developers in an impossible position. Users hear about how great iCloud is and how apps can use it to sync their own data. They quite reasonably wonder why your app isn’t using it. Syncing data is a great idea, Apple gives you iCloud, why aren’t you using it, dammit? But if you did use it, the app would be so unreliable that users would (again, quite reasonably) complain that it was a steaming pile of shit.

Sigh.

Jake Lodwick argues that an acquisition is always a failure:

I typically refer to the IAC sale as “the worst business decision of my life.” I’m not sure IAC is worse than any other large company in this regard. An entrepreneur is someone who, almost artistically, designs a living entity which embodies the values, beliefs, and ambitions of the creator. It’s impossible for a larger entity to swallow a smaller one without completely reshaping it. When this process begins, a wild visionary – the entrepreneur type – is the most toxic, indigestible actor imaginable. And this is why I roll my eyes when a new acquisition is announced: Because I don’t see it as a triumphant graduation but a sacrifice to an industry that is afraid to dream big.

I started this article wanting to disagree, because while I think acquisitions are rarely the right choice for both parties since they are so difficult to do, I also think that sometimes—sometimes—they are the correct choice. But Lodwick is convincing: the technology industry has created an efficient process not for starting visionary and “disruptive” companies, but rather an efficient process for established companies to hire new talent.

This piece combines nicely, I think, with the Matt Stone quote I linked to earlier.

Dream bigger.

Matt Stone:

“Comedy for me has to be either completely absurdist, or it has to be meaty and dark,” Stone says. “I just can’t do with romantic comedy. Really, you’re going to do another joke about going on a date? I’m like, ‘How do you go to work and do that?’ You’re not touching anything real, anything dangerous.”

The Book Of Mormon, which they wrote with Robert Lopez (Avenue Q), exemplifies the pair’s skill at undercutting audience assumptions. Far from simply mocking Mormonism, it celebrates the human need for myths to make sense of the world, even if quite a few Mormon myths get a proper kicking: “I belieeeeve,” one Mormon character croons in the show, “that in 1978 God changed his mind about black people!”

Can’t this be applied to technology, too? “Really, you’re going to do another social media app?”