Coffee drinkers, rejoice: Starbucks stores across the U.S. will soon be getting free Wi-Fi from Google.

Google announced Wednesday that it is partnering with Starbucks to enhance the coffee-shop internet experience that many professionals now rely on. It’s promising to make the wireless internet up to 10 times faster than Starbucks customers have previously enjoyed. Google Fiber cities, such as Kansas City, Kan., will get Wi-Fi that is up to 100 times faster, the company said. Google Fiber is an ongoing initiative to build a high-speed internet network using fiber-optic technology.

AT&T currently provides free Wi-Fi to Starbucks customers. But over the next 18 months, Google will replace AT&T’s service in all 7,000 company-operated Starbucks locations across America.

Starbucks chief digital officer Adam Brotman said the coffee giant had not planned to drop AT&T, but was looking for ways to partner with Google and saw an opportunity to improve Wi-Fi speeds, according to a report published today by CNET.

AT&T, however, said it too had proposed 10 times faster network and Wi-Fi speeds to Starbucks, according to the report.

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Companies spent up to $ 4 million in 2013 for a 30-second Super Bowl ad. Although the game provides the most visible ad space in the world — 108.4 million people tune in for the commercial breaks — purchasing a spot is a very strategic move.

Intuit, a company that provides tax preparation software and services to small businesses, is spending millions on its very first Super Bowl ad for the 2014 game. The twist is, the half-minute spot is for a one of its customers. 

“We wanted to do a series of firsts,” CEO Brad Smith told Business Insider. “It’s the first time a company will buy a customer an ad, and it’s the first time a small business will be showcased among all those big national brands.”

As part of the Intuit Small Business Big Game competition, small businesses have until September 22 to write a 600-word explanation of why they deserve the spot. The public will vote for the top 20 and then Intuit’s 8,000 employees will narrow it down to the top four. The winner will be announced December 1 and then start shooting with ad agency RPA, which made the

“The companies will range from mowing lawns and cleaning houses to technology companies,” Smith said. “At the end of the day, the thing that sells best is authenticity.”

Smith says that although the most visible prize in the competition is the ad, Intuit is providing $ 25 million in total value. There are many perks involved in signing up for the competition (like Google Adwords discounts), and the final four will get free business consultations and advice from business experts, including entrepreneur and “Apprentice” winner Bill Rancic.

Since the campaign focuses on small businesses, Intuit won’t only be using social media usual suspects Twitter and Facebook to promote the campaign. It will also use LinkedIn to spread the word.

“We’ve done a couple programs with LinkedIn before,” Smith said. Hired Smart, for example, helps small businesses make good decisions when hiring their first employees.

Even though Intuit’s name will only appear at the end of the ad, the endeavor will certainly raise the company’s public profile.

SEE ALSO: Facebook’s Video Ads Will Cost More Than The Networks Charge For The Super Bowl

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The rise of Pinterest wasn’t all cocktails and cupcakes. It conquered huge scaling challenges to become the world’s keepsake box. Now as the we ditch the desktop for mobile, how will Pinterest evolve to connect us with the things we love? Today Pinterest’s head of engineering Jon Jenkins gave a surprisingly candid look at the past and future of Pinterest journey to build the interest graph.

Now Pinterest is a team of 140, with 70 engineers, $ 338 million in funding, and a massive headquarters in San Francisco. But at the start, it was just the three co-founders Ben Silbermann, Evan Sharp, Paul Sciarra, and a single engineer.

2010: “The Year Of The Creation Of The Business”

Pinterest began as a few guys with a mission “To help people discover the things they love and then do those things in real life. With only one engineer, it was almost lucky that Pinterest didn’t become popular yet or the whole thing could have come crashing down.

2011: “The Year Of Scaling Challenges”

Jenkins says that “traffic was doubling every month and half” and provided this traffic graph, though with no X axis about exactly how many page views the site receives. He explained that the site wasn’t exactly built to last at first. “It was originally written in Python, but when you build a website [for a small user base] you don’t think about modularity very much. And when a million people show up on your door step you’re just trying to keep the thing from falling down.”

2012: “The Big Year Of Mobile”

In August it released new versions of its iOS and Android apps that would serve as the modernized foundation of the future of its business on the small screen. Pinterest began learning how people used the service differently depending on their device. For example, in the daytime it sees a lot of phone use as people try to discover new things. They might walk around the grocery store with a recipe pin open on their phone to help them find ingredients. “Then in the evening we see tablet usage increase significantly as they’re trying to make that recipe” Jenkins says.

2013: “The Year Of Adding A Lot More Value To Pins”

Pinterest this year began showing related pins when you pinned something, and providing pin recommendations via email. It also launched expanded pins so recipes would show ingredients, movies would show reviews, and products would show prices. Most recently, it began using the feed editor to recommend more content to you. With big plans afoot, Pinterest also rewrote its entire site — not to handle traffic, but to let multiple engineers enhance it simultaneously without tripping over each other and causing non-stop bugs. “How can we create modules that let engineers go in and work without screwing over the other developers?” He’s convinced that the new modular Python architecture “will allow the organization to scale.”

The Future

Looking forward, Pinterest has five big projects its working on:

Building The Interest Graph:  Unlike other social networks, Jenkins says that “Pinterest isn’t fundamentally about connecting people to other people. It’s about connecting people to interests.”

For years you had little but your own brain and the boards you browsed to find pinspiration. But now Pinterest is lending a helping hand thanks to a ton of data analysis. “Pins can’t exist unless they’re assigned to a board. Out of those boards, we try to identity interests through collaborative filtering, associative rule mining, natural language processing to provide discovery. I can pin five shirts I like and Pinterest derives my interest in fashion.” Recommendations could make Pinterest even more addictive for hardcore users, and help it retain newbies until they’re hooked.

Scaling Big Data: “Figuring out how we’re going to scale the data repositories for pins will only become more complicated as we grow internationally” Jenkins said. That why he says “we’re hiring pretty aggressively” in areas including machine learning, data mining, operations, and infrastructure.

Making Pins More Useful: Expect more pin types to gain expanded information like recipes did. “Useful” could also end up as a euphemism for “buyable”. Pinterest is renowned for driving traffic to ecommerce sites. If it could bring more of the shopping experience inside its site and apps, it could provide value to users while also arguing that it deserves a revenue share or commission from merchants.

Bringing The Grid Onto Mobile: Pinterest’s best known and most frequently copied element is its masonry grid design which allows for rapid intake of visual information. Now it’s trying to get the infinite scroll part of the grid to work on small screens with limited storage. “It’s easy to load things but your phone gets very angry with you if you don’t unload things”, Jenkins says. There’s also be a bit of bringing the mobile onto the grid, as Pinterest tries to take what it’s learning on mobile back to its website. That could include touch capabilities for touch-enabled laptops like the Chromebook Pixel.

Creating A Platform Foundation: “People keep asking ‘When are you going to release an API?’” Jenkins wouldn’t give a firm answer but did reveal a bunch of details. “We are working very closely with a very select set of partners to figure out what the API is that we should release. We are going to work with content providers to offer extended functionality so they can understand how the content they produce is being used in the Pinterest system. Content providers want distribution. If we can help them understand what resonates they’ll be happier, and Pinners will be happier as well.”

Don’t expect it to be rushed out “I might be overly rigorous in how I think about APIs. I want them to be extremely high quality” Jenkins says. Taking a dig at Facebook and Twitter, and following a similar thought pattern as Google+’s Vic Gundotra, he says ”I don’t want to make mistakes other companies have made where they release APIs and then have to pull them back. I wouldn’t be proud of that.”

Today, Jenkins says that depending on what external traffic monitoring site you look at “we’re a top 15 site in the US and higher than that in terms of apps.” comScore currently pegs it at 48.7 million global monthly users. And while you might think Pinterest is a big popularity contest, Jenkins says that if you talk to long-time users, “many of them pin for themselves. They’re not using Pinterest to put on a show or posture externally. People view it as an act of self-expression.”

Just because our world is being digitized doesn’t mean we’ve lost our desire to collect. If Pinterest executes on this roadmap, it could build tree big enough for us all to nest in.

“Zepto” is a math term for the very tiny number 10^-21, but for fraternal twins Semyon and Efim Voinov, it would become the name of their game company.

“We were a very, very small lab – just the two of us – so the name ‘ZeptoLab’ made sense,” Efim told us.

“It also sounded cool,” said Semyon.

ZeptoLab first made waves in 2010 with the release of its game Parachute Ninja, which was met in Apple’s App Store with modest success. In an effort to continue riding that success, the brothers got to work on the game that would become a resounding hit, Cut The Rope.

Click here to take a tour of ZeptoLab’s offices >

“We had a physics engine for making ropes that we didn’t use for Parachute Ninja, so we knew the next project needed ropes,” said Semyon. He handled the artwork while Efim wrote the code. They hired a freelancer to create music and design some levels. Before they knew it, they were submitting Cut The Rope to Apple and it was live in the App Store.

“We checked the charts every 30 minutes,” said Efim. “We entered in the two hundreds, but two days later we had the top position in the paid charts. The lite version had the top position in the free charts and Cut The Rope was the highest grossing game in 50 different countries. It was completely unexpected.”

“It felt absolutely unreal,” added Semyon. “It was stressful. We weren’t celebrating. How long would it last? A day? A week? A month?”

In order to stay on top, they knew they needed keep investing in the game to figure out how to handle all this new opportunity. The brothers brought a CEO on board to help. They found office space, hired employees, began work on an Android version of the game, and started an update to the iOS version.

Now ZeptoLab boasts over 60 employees, a number of games based on the original Cut The Rope (Cut The Rope Experiments, Cut The Rope Time Travel), comics, boardgames, and more. It seems like their success is lasting a bit more than a day, week, or month.

The ZeptoLab team was kind enough to invite us to their Moscow offices to show us where ropes are cut and games are designed.

Welcome to ZeptoLab!

Employees skateboard through Moscow for their commute and stash their wheels right inside the front door.

This window is full of bubbly water and overlooks one of the main office spaces.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Amazon is notoriously tight-lipped when talking about its cloud business. It’s cloud prices are cheap and the company has keeps prices low by charging a low margin of profit.

But the folks at cloud computing competitor ProfitBricks say that Amazon’s low margins are a myth. They say that the company is really making 60-80% profit.

To prove that, ProfitBricks cut its prices in half on Wednesday, to a measly 3.25 cents an hour for compute time including 1G RAM (yes, less than 4 cents). And it says at that rate, it’s still making plenty of profit.

This compares to somewhere between 6 cents and 60 cents an hour for Amazon. 

Gauger further explained in a blog post.

“I calculate ProfitBricks pricing on a regular basis … we are a little smaller than Amazon so I am pretty sure that the prices we pay for hardware, data center space or energy are higher than Amazon and the other big players. So here is the deal: if I were to sell our product at the same prices as Amazon or Rackspace does I would have gross margins far higher than the quoted 60% to 80%.”

One caveat: he didn’t include the salaries for the people maintaining the hardware or writing software, he told us, and it’s unclear how Amazon accounts for the expense of its cloud computing people.

But if his calculations are on the money, Amazon’s cloud is definitely profitable enough to validate Amazon’s growing investment in it, including things like building out an new enterprise salesforce, and poaching execs from rivals like VMware and building its first-ever “private” cloud for the CIA, should that deal come to pass.

SEE ALSO: cloud

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