The Review Blog

The process of recruiting volunteers is a pain felt by the entire American electorate: citizens are quick to hang up on complete strangers begging for their time and campaign organizations, as a result, are perpetually short-staffed. Amicus, a Y Combinator nonprofit volunteer-recruitment platform, may have found a clever way to ensure that citizens are only contacted by trusted friends. Amicus scours public and private databases and matches names up with their volunteers’ Facebook friends, assigning volunteer outreach only to those who have a personal bond between the caller. “Amicus’ friend-to-friend connections enhance our traditional outreach program and make it easier to mobilize our supporters online,” said Jared Schwartz, Director of Digital strategies, AFL-CIO, the largest federation of unions in the U.S.

The heart of Amicus is an online dashboard that presents volunteers with a ready made list of friends that need to be contacted, complete with a leaderboard, badges, and other gaming elements to incentivize the thankless job of political and charitable outreach.

Efficiently collecting an army of canvassers is essential for boosting support, as experimental Political Science research has found that face-to-face contact is the only reliable way to increase voter turnout (boosting participation by about 7-10%). If Amicus can reliably get more boots on the ground for campaigns, they’d be a force of nature.

But, does the evidence support Amicus’ assumption that friends are better than strangers at influencing our civic involvement? Solid evidence shows that our associations are indeed influential. One clever study by David Nickerson of the University of Notre Dame found that voting is “contagious” between family members, by measuring whether or not the individual who did not answer the door for a canvasser also decided to vote. Another experimental study [pdf] found that neighboring canvassers are twice as effective at boosting turnout than strangers.

But, perhaps the most interesting research relevant to the Facebook generation is that close friends are much less politically influential than weaker friendships. “Close friends may be close friends in spite of their wrongheaded views, and regardless of their obnoxious political preferences,” write authors Robert Huckfeldt and John Sprague. Our best friends are forged as a result of childhood location, family ties, and life events. Those who we just want to have a beer with are likely chosen because we enjoy their company and conversation.

In other words, the very “friendships” that Amicus finds through Facebook are precisely the ones that are best for recruiting political volunteers (because, who is close with all of their +1,000 Facebook friends?). CEO Seth Bannon says that early results show that Amicus bumps volunteer acquisition by 50%, which jives with prior research. Given the relatively low-cost of their digital solution, and the potential impact of their platform as more organizations begin using it, Amicus is certainly a startup to keep on the radar.

Facebook is taking photo curation to next level. You can now favorite your own photos to make them appear 4X larger in a revamped Photos section of your profile. The redesign that rolls out over the next few days also sees a much better navigation system that first brings you to “photos of you” or whomever’s profile you’re on, instead of a list of albums.

The update doesn’t automatically feature the most beloved photos on your Timeline based on Likes and comments, the way Google+ now does in its news feed on tablet. Still, it digitizes a natural behavior of how we interact with photos in the physical world — making big prints of our favorites.

Today’s redesign brings the Facebook profile’s photos section closer to the layout from before Timeline. Since Timeline launched, when you clicked through to see photos, Facebook forced you to choose between a huge set of albums and buried tagged photos at the bottom of the page. Now the photos section accessible via the “Photos” tile beneath the Timeline cover is sensibly broken into three tabs:

• “Photos of You” or “Photos of [Friend's Name]” – this is the default view
• “Photos” that someone has uploaded individually but aren’t tagged in
• “Albums”

Considering you’re usually most interested in tagged photos of friends, especially when you first become friends with someone, the redesign gives you access to the most relevant content first.

To make sure friends see the photos where you look the best or where you exhibit your photographer skills, you can hover over a photo and click “highlight” to instantly boost it to four times the size in a pretty snazzy little animation. Facebook already had this feature for your Timeline posts including, but enlarging a status update or link isn’t nearly as useful and the feature is a better fit for the dedicated photos section.

There’s no automatic curation by Likes, comments, and clicks, which Facebook could surely do. In fact, Facebook already does this in the news feed, enlarged the most engaging shot when you share a couple photos at once.

An option to let Facebook handle highlighting and have me approve its picks could be great for helping / squeezing more clicks out of friends of those less keen on curation. For now though, you should take a quick flip through your old photos and star the best ones. No need to give those double chins as much space as your best smiles.

Want to know what Facebook’s going to do next? Get the scoop straight from the company’s leaders by attending our Facebook Ecosystem CrunchUp this Friday.

We’ve covered them since before they existed, but now “Factory”, Berlin’s new, vast tech campus, is taking shape. As builders adapt old factory buildings (an area which will cover 107,000 square feet or 10,000 square meters), the privately-funded initiative has announced that Mozilla will become an anchor resident in the facility, which plans to house a number of startups large and small. Jim Cook, CFO of Mozilla also confirmed that Mozilla will be hiring in Berlin.

Confirmed so far are the startups 6Wunderkinder, Four Sektor, Toast, Urge iO, Views, and local tech blog Silicon Allee. But the expanding SoundCloud team will take on a large swathe of the vast amount of space available, which will feature a basketball court, gallery, conference area, cafe and – last we heard – a swimming pool.

Located in the central Mitte district at the site of the former Oswald Brauerei building, Factory borders the former, and infamous, wall which divided East and West Berlin. Comprising of five stories and a total of five buildings, the Factory team hopes the campus will provide a new epicenter for Berlin’s startup scene, which has seen other co-working spaces rise such as Betahaus and Ahoy Berlin.

We spoke to Simon Schaefer, Factory co-founder and Angel Investor with JMES Investments which is backing the project back in April and visited the building site later on with our camera (see below).

As you can see it’s quite some project. Startups won’t have to give up equity to be based there, but they will be curated by existing tenants and the investors in the campus.

While the eyes of the world are focused on the global competition in London at the moment, it’s still quite rare to hear of English start-up entrepreneurs able to successfully compete globally with the Yanks. But one London based entrepreneur who might buck this trend is Dan Wagner, the founder of the successful publishing platform M.A.I.D and the current chairman of Bright Station Ventures. Indeed, his latest ecommerce venture, mPowa, has been in the news recently because of accusations from Jack Dorsey’s Square that Wagner’s mPowa has been copying Square’s images in their promotional material. But when I sat down with Wagner in his central London office, he not only rejected the idea that mPowa had borrowed anything from Square but he told me that American entrepreneurs are “slightly parochial” in their approach to the increasingly global Internet marketplace.

Wagner’s ambitious play with mPowa and with Powa, the technology that powers it, is as an international payments platform specifically designed to conform to the needs of local merchants around the world. And while Jack Dorsey announced earlier this month that he intends to take Square international, Wagner remains confident that mPowa is a technological device much more suited to non-U.S. markets. That said, Wagner acknowledged to me that the English digital ecosystem lags behind Silicon Valley. What’s missing, he confessed to me, are angels able to write checks to fund start-ups from scratch. And until this changes, he said, the eyes of the world will always be focused on the U.S. when it comes to successful innovation in digital start-ups.

It’s surreal to see an entire startup engineering team that could double as a crew of volunteer firefighters. Yet, for the growing list of startups that are sending their workforce to the Navy Seal-friendly gym phenomenon, CrossFit, having an entire team of buff employees is surprisingly realistic. “We carry so much more energy throughout the the day after a workout,” says Neverware Co-founder Jonathan Hefter, whose entire team regularly treks down to the Black Box Crossfit Gym in New York. The startup life has “a strong culture around group activity and intensity, and we found that those two things really describe the Crossfit experience.”

Crossfit began as a one-man operation in the lazy-beach town of Santa Cruz, California. It quickly found a following in elite fighting forces around the globe after founder Greg Glassman began posting daily workouts online. Now, in under a decade, the exponentially expanding exercise movement has more gyms than Gold’s, has its own ESPN-aired annual competition, a thriving online community of bloggers, and a multimillion dollar economic ecosystem of suppliers.

To be clear, I’m a big fan of Crossfit. I know there are some folks who have problems with Crossfit, as they should. Not every workout is for everybody.

While each gym is independently operated, there are two elements that define the Crossfit DNA: group workouts and high-intensity functional movements. Everyone, from pregnant soccer moms to SWAT team members, do the exact same workout (with varying weights) at the exact same time at hourly intervals throughout the day. Having experimented with crossfit workouts alone myself, I know that I can’t come close to pushing myself as hard at the end of a workout than when I’m competing with 10 others.

Second, most workouts combine the functional movements of Olympic lifting, calisthenics (pushups, pullups) and gymnastics into 10-20 minute sprints (yes, the entire workout is 10-20 minutes). Here’s a sample of one such workout:

-Carry barbells weighing half of one’s body weight 200 yards,

Then 3 rounds of:

• Jumping on top of a 24″ box 25 times
• 25 Airsquats
• 25 pull-ups
• 25 Burpees (push-up to a jumping-jack)

-Finally, carry barbells another 200 yards

While many startups are splurging on sophisticated digital platforms that bribe their employees to walk an extra half-mile a day, the intensity and popularity of Crossfit demonstrates that our dismal health record might be because our expectations were too low.

“We didn’t pressure anyone,” says Josh Rangsikitpho, CTO of social advertising company, SocialVibe, who has found “very high retention rates” of his team who slowly joined up for the company’s Crossfit time. Of the 22 of who eventually signed up, he estimates that only 6 have dropped out. Rangsikitpho credits the impressively high retention and growth rates to a bit of water cooler envy: seeing your colleagues transform into fitness buffs is a strong motivator, as is the desire to join in on the conversation, “there’s a huge amount of camaraderie and competition at the same time,” he says.

Even better, he gushes, about 50% of his engineering team has stayed true to Crossfit’s rigorous “paleo” diet, a pre-historic nutrition regimen that cuts out all grains, dairy, sugars and chemicals and limits fruits and nuts (basically, it’s local vegetables, grass-fed red meat, and wild fish). Such a diet is difficult to maintain, unless there’s a community at work swapping cooking tips and “razzing” colleagues who they see fall off the wagon.

It should be noted that joining Crossfit isn’t as easy as walking into a Gold’s Gym: it’s expensive (+$200 a month) and quality varies. As the New York Times points out, Crossfit gyms (or “boxes”) depend entirely on the culture and leadership of the crew. Since gyms are licensed out, they’re at the mercy of the coaches and people they recruit to join first. Given the fine line Crossfit balances between intensity and injury, getting a meat-head for a coach can be dangerous. I sampled more than one box before committing.

One way organizations get around the varying quality is simply to build their own gym, if they’re big enough. Reebok, the official partner of Crossfit, is conducting what could be the largest-scale experiment in workplace elite fitness on its own campus. Employee signups ballooned from roughly 60 Crossfitters to 425 in a little over 2 years (or a little more than ⅓ of their 1,100-strong campus). Reebok plans on conducting research on the health and productivity impacts of the experiment, 50-year-old Reebok IT specialist, Cornelius “Corny” Reynolds, has become a fan. “Cross-Fit also helps dispel the myth that all IT people are geeks and pinheads,” he writes, “CrossFit not only changed my routine, but changed my life.”