For a startup, a lot is riding on the home page. You might be surprised, then, to learn that startups vary wildly in how quickly and reliably their website home pages load.

That’s especially true when you look at load times on mobile devices. An increasing number of people use smartphones and tablets to browse the web, and yet — for some reason — the mobile versions of many startups’ sites lag far behind their desktop equivalents.

Keynote Systems‘ new Startup Shootout Index provides some insight into the three-screen challenge now facing anyone with a web presence. It’s the first website performance index to measure load times and completion percentages on desktops, smartphones, and tablets simultaneously.

Full story: Startups struggle to keep their sites speedy on PCs, phones, and tablets | VentureBeat.

I really like the operating system in many ways. The Metro interface is frankly charming, with its flipping tiles and integrated hubs. It’s fast, modern-looking, and integrates apps and data presentation in a way that makes the iPhone and Android look dated. Even the “wait” animation is cute: Instead of a spinning wheel, there are five little dots that zip in from one side, slow down near the middle of the screen, then zip out again. It’s the first time in a long while that I’ve been this smitten with an interface.

Battery life has been impressive on both these phones, and their hardware is good (the Nokia is excellent), with gorgeous screens and excellent cameras.

But there are a few issues that are preventing me from loving Windows Phone. Some of these problems are big enough that they present a serious obstacle to anyone considering a switch. Here’s a quick overview of the issues I’ve run into:

Browser text wrapping. This is the big one. On many websites, mobile Internet Explorer doesn’t wrap text properly. It either shows the full column width (in which case the text is too small to read) or lets you zoom in to a readable type size (in which case you can’t read the whole line). In either case, the text is unreadable. Both Android’s and iOS’s browsers handle text wrapping much more elegantly, making them much more usable mobile browsers.

Gmail handling. Another big one for me, as VentureBeat has standardized on Gmail. I can access Gmail from the phone just fine, but I can’t “star” messages for later followup. Since I use my phone for email triage, that’s a problem: I need to be able to review messages, delete the irrelevant ones, respond to the few that need immediate responses, and star important messages for later followup. The Windows Phone mail client has a “flag” status, but it doesn’t sync with Gmail’s stars and I can’t seem to access this status any other way. Another problem: There’s no easy “archive” button: I can only delete messages.

Text wrapping is occasionally a problem in the mail client as well.

Marketplace. It’s obvious that app makers are gaming searches in the app marketplace. The result is that it’s very difficult to find relevant apps. Example: A joke app called “Fart Nukes” shows up in the first few results for almost every search, whether that’s “twitter,” “camera,” “facebook,” “skype,” or “instagram.” (There’s no Instagram app, btw. And I have no idea if there are good photo-editing apps, because I couldn’t find a good equivalent of Camera+ or Hipstamatic.) Another frequent appearance: “Airhorn Ultimate.” It took me several days to find the official Twitter client. Also: There’s no Skype app. That’s just bizarre, given that Microsoft now owns Skype.

Lack of core social features. The “people” hub is nice, in that it lets me see recent Twitter and Facebook updates from anyone in my contact list. Unfortunately, it lacks several key features. For one thing, it doesn’t give me access to the groups or Twitter lists that I really care about, so updates from everyone I’m following drown out those from the few I do want to hear from. I can create my own groups on the phone, but it should sync with the groups I already have. For another thing, there’s no easy way to “like” or retweet items in this stream, making it frustratingly read-only.

CORRECTION: @J4rrod informs me that I’m a joke. In fact, you can “like” or comment on Facebook items, and you can retweet (system retweet, not modified retweet-with-comments) Tweets. However, I don’t think you can repost a Facebook item to your own timeline, and you can’t retweet with comments or favorite a tweet. I stand corrected, partially.

Google Voice. There’s no native Google Voice app, so I can’t easily place calls using my Google Voice number, and I need to use the mobile browser to access voicemails.

Lack of multitasking. Not a major problem in most cases, but it was a noticeable problem twice recently. Once, when the Nokia Drive app was downloading a set of maps, and then when Runkeeper was synchronizing my workout data. In both cases, I had to leave the apps open for the entire duration of the sync operation. If I switched to a different app or to the home screen, it paused the update until I returned to the app. I’m not one of these fanatics who insists on keeping many programs running at the same time, but apps ought to be able to do user-initiated download operations in the background, so that you can continue using your phone during these lengthy processes.

Now, most of these problems are probably easily fixable. It may be that there are user fixes I can implement for each of these, and if so, please let me know! This post is my first attempt to outline these problems and I will happily pass along any fixes I learn about.

However, if I can’t easily figure out the fixes in the first couple of weeks of intensive usage, other people are going to be stymied by these problems too.

My provisional conclusion is that if you use your phone to browse a wide variety of websites, or if you rely on Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, or Skype, Windows Phone is not yet quite ready for you.

Other recent news

Speaking of phones, my column this past week talked about how all gadget manufacturers, not just Apple, utilize Chinese factories whose conditions many of us would find appalling:

Dylan’s Desk: You are all to blame for Apple’s factories

It’s not just Apple. Motorola (whose acquisition by Google got a green light this week) and Nokia are doing it. Toshiba, HP, Dell, and Sony all use factories the New York Times reports as “bleak.”

It’s virtually guaranteed that behind every gadget stands an army of underpaid workers and polluting factories.

Your address book is mine: Many iPhone apps take your data

VentureBeat’s Jennifer Van Grove got a hell of a story this week when she dug into the data-handling practices of many iPhone apps, and found evidence that lots of them are uploading users’ entire address books to their servers, often without making that fact clear and sometimes without even encrypting the data. The New York Times cited her story and it even appears to have provoked a reaction from Apple, which announced the next day that it would start enforcing its rule against this kind of behavior.

As everyone knows by now, iPhones and iPads are built in huge Chinese manufacturing plants where tens of thousands of people work 12-hour shifts for little money, have little privacy, and are exposed to toxic chemicals and unsafe conditions every day. We’ve been hearing similar stories across other industries for years, but this one’s on us — the tech community.

That’s right — all of us. It’s not just Apple. Motorola (whose acquisition by Google got a green light this week) and Nokia are doing it. Toshiba, HP, Dell, and Sony all use factories the New York Times reports as “bleak.”

It’s virtually guaranteed that behind every gadget stands an army of underpaid workers and polluting factories.

Read the full story: Dylan’s Desk: You are all to blame for Apple’s factories | VentureBeat.

This week, my column takes a look at the growth of regional centers of innovation. Although Silicon Valley still creates the most software startups and takes home the lion’s share of venture capital, other cities are growing startup scenes of their own.

Take, for instance, Chicago: Home of Groupon and, in 2011, another 128 new tech companies. One of the major players in the Chicago venture capital scene is wealthy Hyatt heir J.B. Pritzker, whose New World Ventures has funded a large handful of local companies including Zinch, Active.com, Aircell and others. But venture capital alone won’t make a company into a Silicon Valley rival.

I had dinner with Pritzker and a group of venture capitalists and journalists recently, where the conversation focused on what it takes to create regional innovation hubs. According to Pritzker, Chicago’s entrepreneurial scene has taken off in the past few years, and it’s not just thanks to the recent success of Groupon’s initial public offering. It’s not just having a rich guy bankroll things, either, though clearly that helps.

Rather, the VCs at that table agreed, what it takes to create a startup ecosystem–whether that’s in Chicago, New York, Salt Lake City, Detroit, or Boulder–is the presence of serial entrepreneurs. Someone has to take that first leap, start a company, recruit talent, and then stick around long enough to do it again.

Serial entrepreneurs can provide capital, by becoming angel investors or even venture capitalists. Their employees form a base of recruitable talent: people who have worked at startups before and understand that the work is not like a job at an ordinary company. Serial entrepreneurs also provide leadership, by serving as an example and as a magnet for talent: Smart people want to hitch their wagons to a rising star, in other words.

Full story: Dylan’s Desk: What it takes to compete with Silicon Valley | VentureBeat.

In other news at VentureBeat, the staff went out for karaoke last night, as a reward for hitting a traffic milestone I set last fall. Not only did the team hit that milestone, they smashed through it, delivering record traffic several weeks in a row. I had promised them that I would sing a really embarrassing ballad if they did well, and, well, I had to follow through. All I can hope now is that my performance does not wind up on YouTube.

Here are a few other recent stories (not by me) on VentureBeat that I think are particularly good:

• Yelp advertising is a rip-off for small advertisers by frequent contributor Rocky Agrawal
• Famous hackers discuss Zuckerberg’s “Hacker Way” comments — comments from Eric S. Raymond, Richard Stallman and others, written up by Jolie O’Dell
• How Camera+’s John Casasanta made millions off a $1 app — A nice look inside the app economy by Rob LeFebvre

Got news? As always, I’d love to hear from you. You can always reach me at dylan@venturebeat.com or dylan@tweney.com, or tip our news team at tips@venturebeat.com.

At VentureBeat’s offices, the writing staff kicked into high gear and cranked out a series of smart, informed and well-sourced stories on the IPO. Don’t miss Jolie O’Dell’s story about how Mark Zuckerberg has managed to retain overwhelming control of the company he started.

My own contributions included a brief on Facebook’s revenue and another piece on “the hacker way.” Also, I wrote my column this week on Facebook. It appeared the morning of the filing, so it’s missing much of the information that was revealed later in the day, but it’s a good introduction to the basic issues:

The offering will probably raise $10 billion in cash for the company and will value Facebook at somewhere between $75 and $100 billion, making founder Mark Zuckerberg, who holds an estimated 24 percent of the company, a billionaire many times over.  (Update: Zuck holds 28.2 percent of the company.) That valuation is not far off the implied valuation of about $80 billion that the company currently has on secondary market Sharespost.

It’ll likely be priced to pop, unlike Zynga’s IPO. In other words, the underwriters will set a share price that’s slightly lower than what they figure the true market valuation will be, so the stock will pop up to its “natural” level on the first day of trading, like an air balloon held underwater and then suddenly released.

But, like a balloon, what happens to Facebook next will depend on many factors.

Read the full story: Dylan’s Desk: 6 things you should know about the Facebook IPO | VentureBeat.

I was also on KQED radio this morning, on Michael Krasny’s “Forum” show, talking about the Facebook IPO. The high point: when someone called in to say how much he liked VentureBeat and that he spent more time reading our site than he spent on Facebook itself. I couldn’t have asked for a better endorsement of what we’ve been doing.

As the San Francisco 49ers fumbled their shot at a Superbowl appearance on Sunday, you could almost hear the Monday-morning quarterbacks warming up their complaints.

It’s no different in Silicon Valley, where the competitive sport is tech business instead of slamming heads together. Just like in football, anyone who’s not on the field has a strong opinion about how each play should have gone down. That’s especially true for the plays that end badly.

Take Research in Motion, for instance, which this week announced that its two CEOs, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, would be stepping aside. Everyone in California, where software is king, has been chortling about how slow RIM has been to wake up to the new reality. To be honest, we’ve been shaking our heads about RIM for over a year now. At a panel I spoke on at CES earlier this month, the moderator asked us whether Microsoft should buy RIM. My answer was “Why?” I honestly couldn’t think of any reason why Microsoft would benefit from that acquisition.

But it’s easy for me to say that Lazaridis and Balsillie have driven the company down the wrong road. If I were in charge of RIM, what would I have done differently?

Read the full story: Dylan’s Desk: It’s the season for Monday-morning quarterbacking | VentureBeat.

MakerBot from Venturebeat on Vimeo.

Is there anything more American than a robot that can create anything you want out of a spool of plastic and some electricity?

It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that 3D printers offer levels of Jeffersonian self-reliance that our founding fathers only dreamed of.

“We have a consumer product that’s anti-consumerist,” MakerBot Industries founder Bre Pettis told me at CES 2012, where I captured the short video above. “When you get a MakerBot, you have an alternative to buying things. You can download them … or you can design something and make it custom yourself.”

The new MakerBot Replicator is a $1,750 box that can print three-dimensional objects by melting and fusing bits of plastic line, layer by minuscule layer. A version that prints objects in two colors costs $2,000. It’s one of several new, affordable 3D printers that are hitting the market this year.

Read the whole story: Dylan’s Desk: Saddle your horses and fire up the 3D printer | VentureBeat.

CES is and always has been a buyer’s show, first and foremost. It’s where buyers for retail stores like Best Buy go to schmooze with sales reps for manufacturers like Panasonic and Sony. Sure, there are lots of new products here, but that’s hardly the point. The point is to put buyers and sellers together in one big, lavish, decadent city, get them all drunk, and then send them home with new purchase contracts in hand.

The press events are important, but they’re a sideshow, and I think that’s why members of the press like to complain about it: We’re not having our asses kissed quite enough.

Plus, CES is big, uncomfortable and noisy. It’s hard to get around the town, the hotels are all packed, the taxi lines are impossible, and you can barely walk a hundred yards without someone bumping into you or stepping on your foot.

Still, it’s where the electronics industry shows off its agenda for the coming year, and even with some significant missing players, CES still matters.

Read the whole story: Dylan’s Desk: 6 must-watch trends for 2012 | VentureBeat.

Anyone can pick most interesting phones of 2011, but it takes real foolhardiness to predict the most revolutionary products of the coming year.

Call me a fool. I’m placing bets on these five products that will revolutionize technology in 2012.

I made these predictions recently in a TV segment on Bloomberg West with host John Erlichman. See above if you want to watch the video. And now, on to my predictions. Here’s the summary:

5. Lytro camera

4. Kindle Fire 2

3. Tesla Model S

2. Nokia Lumia

1. Apple’s iTV

Read the full story: Dylan’s Desk: The most revolutionary products you’ll see in 2012 | VentureBeat.

Meltwater Group is 10 years old, and has been almost entirely self-funded. Lyseggen started the company in Oslo with $15,000 of his own money and has been growing it through revenues ever since. The company now employs 900 people, is headquartered in San Francisco and will post $114 million in revenues in 2011, Lyseggen told me recently.

Lyseggen himself is a bit of an unusual character: A Korean-born adoptee with a ready smile, he grew up on a farm in Norway and speaks with a Norwegian accent. He enjoys salmon fishing in his hometown fjords and reading Viking sagas, according to his company’s website, but he also knows how to work a crowd and has obviously inspired his workforce with a charismatic vision of what Meltwater’s culture is all about.

Meltwater has never taken venture capital. That makes it an anomaly among tech firms in Silicon Valley. If Lyseggen succeeds in reaching a billion dollars in revenues, he’ll have done something very few have accomplished. SAS Institute, HP and Best Buy appear to be the only modern tech companies to have reached this milestone unaided by VC investments.

Full story: Dylan’s Desk: Meltwater aims to build a billion-dollar business without venture capital | VentureBeat.

It probably hates you, too.

The breaking point came today when I tried to use my phone to Google the word “Edsel.” Instead of delivering the answer, my phone — a cheap LG model from Virgin Mobile — spontaneously rebooted itself.

I wasn’t exactly surprised, since my phone has a tendency to reboot without warning at least once a day. The irony didn’t escape me, however.

Read the rest: Dylan’s Desk: Android hates me, and it doesn’t like you much, either | VentureBeat.

This column starts with the $3.4 billion acquisition of SuccessFactors by SAP, ties together “the cloud” with mobile computing, throws in a dash of futurism and somehow winds up with a reference to Glee.

Want to give your CEO an iPad? You probably also need web-based applications so she can do something with the tablet besides play Infinity Blade II. And that’s where the cloud comes in.

Of course, it helps that our mobile devices have unheard-of amounts of computing power. As Michio Kaku wrote in his book, Physics of the Future, a musical greeting card has more computational power in its tiny, disposable chip than all of the Allied forces commanded in 1945. A cellphone has more processing power than NASA had in 1969, and the PlayStation 3, which costs $300, has computing power comparable to a multi-million-dollar military supercomputer in 1997.

Kaku’s book came out in March, so those analogies are probably already obsolete by now.

“The old paradigm (a single chip inside a desktop computer or laptop connected to a computer) is being replaced by a new paradigm (thousands of chips scattered inside every artifact, such as furniture, appliances, pictures, walls, cars and clothes, all talking to one another and connected to the Internet,” Kaku wrote. “The destiny of computers is to become invisible.”

Read the whole thing: Dylan’s Desk: Pick up the phone now! Supercomputers are standing by | VentureBeat.

As I write, the VentureBeat offices sit enveloped by a cloud. In all directions, the fog wraps our office building in a soft, gray fuzz, obscuring the views of downtown San Francisco, the bay, and the ocean.

It’s not unlike the cloud of marketing and hype surrounding “cloud” technologies. A fog of jargony words and needlessly ugly acronyms obscure understanding and make everything look like the same, soft grayish fog.

IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, cloudware, private clouds, cloudsourcing, utility computing … even the word “platform” gets overused and abused, rendering it nearly meaningless. What do all these terms mean? It’s easy to get lost in them if you’re not already deeply wrapped up in the cloud.

So I’ll be honest: Even though VentureBeat has a cloud channel and we’re planning a cloud conference that’s happening later this week (you should go!), I started out as a serious skeptic of all things “cloud.”

Continue reading: Dylan’s Desk: How I learned to stop worrying and love “the cloud” | VentureBeat.

via Caterina.net: Working hard is overrated.

Things you wouldn’t ordinarily think twice about, like incorporating and taking care of our nearly nonexistent finances took up a huge amount of time, as we realized that we were out of our depth. We then spent too long talking with lawyers and accountants who cost way too much. Eventually, we realized we didn’t really need such heavy-duty firepower helping us, but by then we had spent thousands on them.

We were convinced we needed to raise a lot of money, and quickly, so we could “get big fast” and then figure out our revenue model. In reality, that was exactly backwards: For our kind of business, we should have stayed small, kept the company simple, built a product that we understood and could sell, and then grown the business once we had some idea what we were doing.

Eventually, we ran into one too many roadblocks including the dot-com bust and wound the company down. We didn’t make ourselves or our investors rich, but we did return more than half of what they’d invested to them — which is more than you can say about Pets.com or Boo.com.

Read the whole column: Dylan’s Desk: The time to start a company is now | VentureBeat.

I previously described on my blog one simple change I made to the hiring process at my last company. I asked all of our recruiters to give me all resumes of prospective employees with their name, gender, place of origin, and age blacked out. This simple change shocked me, because I found myself interviewing different-looking candidates – even though I was 100% convinced that I was not being biased in my resume selection process. If you’re screening resumes, or evaluating applicants to a startup school, I challenge you to adopt this procedure immediately, and report on the results.

Related anecdote: When I set up a blind submissions system for tinywords, the result was an almost immediate diversification in the number of authors. Instead of reading bylines first, we had to concentrate on the poetry itself. It turns out that even people with respected names can write bad poems — and people with no name could write poems that would blow you away.

Now, many hires are made through recommendations and social networks, so the implicit bias problem won’t go away overnight.

But I think I am going to implement something like this the next time I make a public call for job candidates or interns.

via Racism And Meritocracy | TechCrunch.

Glam Media founder Samir Arora thinks he knows the future of media.

The secret, he is betting, is brand advertising displayed against high-quality, premium content.

That stands in stark contrast to the advertising model that’s worked best for the past decade online, in which increasingly specific text advertising is targeted at potential customers’ immediate desires, largely via search engines.

Glam Media aggregates content from a large network of vertical publishers. And Arora paints an alluring picture that might appeal to many print publishers, that are wondering where their profits have gone in the move to the web.

Read the whole column: Dylan’s Desk: How the Internet is dividing publishers into two camps | VentureBeat.

When Halvor Gregusson got off the stage, an audience full of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors was cheering and the moderator was giving him a high-five.

Pretty good for a two-minute pitch about a time-tracking tool from a Norwegian startup.

Gregusson’s company, Yast, took the top prize in the Fast Pitch competition today at Under the Radar, a conference held in Microsoft’s Silicon Valley headquarters. The competition, co-sponsored by VentureBeat, gave eight startups (selected from a field of more than 100 applicants) just two minutes to make their case before a panel of four judges, one of which was me. The judges then had two minutes to give their feedback. We showed our votes by holding up one of three pictures of David Hasselhoff, ranging from “Oy vey!” to “Awesome!”

Gregusson’s pitch won the near-unanimous approval of the panel. How did he do it? Impeccable timing, a sense of humor and a continuous soundtrack (taken from the movie The Rock, he told me) that was perfectly integrated into the points of his slides, which auto-advanced as he spoke.

Read the rest of the story: Norwegians take top prize in startup competition, with a killer presentation | VentureBeat.

Image via Wikipedia

Minted, a marketplace for community-sourced paper products like custom stationery and wedding invitations, has raised a big pile of the green kind of paper — the kind you can spend.

For anyone whose parents told them to stop doodling Celtic knots or obsessively repetitive graphic designs and focus on doing schoolwork so they could get a decent job, that must come as encouraging news.

“I love the creativity of the community,” cofounder Mariam Naficy told me today.

Read the full story: Art can pay: Minted raises $5.5M to expand graphic design and stationery business | VentureBeat.

The week in review: Jobs’ last words, Siri’s rough week & Google+’s last stand | VentureBeat.