If you’re familiar with Jonathan Heiliger’s work, it’s probably because you used Facebook sometime in the last five years. He was the person in charge of keeping the site online as it grew from 35 million to more than 800 million users. Or, maybe you’ve encountered his efforts over the past decade and half when you logged online — because he helped build some of the core technologies and businesses that ran sites like Yahoo, starting fresh out of high school in the 90s.

Next time you hear about him, it might also be because of the next hot company that blows up in Silicon Valley. But this time he’ll be one of its investors. He’s joining North Bridge Venture Partners today, a firm that has quietly distinguished itself by focusing on infrastructure and enterprise startups over the last two decades.

Last week, our writer Devin Coldewey wrote a 3,000-word essay on Google+. It got 114 comments. Comment numbers are a wildly inaccurate metric for popularity in general – some posts get 100 comments because they’re poorly written, sensationalistic, and/or just strike a nerve – but in this case 114 is a good number for a long piece on a relatively boring subject. On the same day we posted a video filmed inside Dropbox HQ with a 298-word post attached and a post about 99dresses that topped out at 501 words. Those got 18 and 41 comments, respectively. I could probably dig into our metrics, but you could argue that all three of those posts were interesting to our audience and that, on a comment-per-word basis, Devin had to write 26 words to get one comment while the Dropbox post needed 18 words per comment. The 99dresses post had 12 words per comment. It’s inexact science, to be sure, but bear with me.

Uber has built a business out of being, in the words of its founder and head Travis Kalanick, everyone’s private driver. But while the company is continuing to expand the number of cities where it operates, it is also building out a network to extend beyond vehicles and taxing people around, Kalanick said today.

In a conversation with Alexia on stage at the London Web Summit today, he also laid out the first hints of when Uber plans to launch in London: it will be before this summer, when London is due to host the next Olympics.

“We are definitely going to be here before the Olympics,” he said but also pointed to how important it will be a challenge and not necessarily one that it has faced before. “That will be a cluster for transportation, so we will have to have our game faces on.”

KISSmetrics, an analytics startup that wants to help you boost your user acquisition and retention rates by providing a more robust picture of how your customers are using your site, is today announcing “KISSmetrics Experiments.” A la Gmail Labs, Experiments enables KISSmetrics users to access and test out experimental new features and help decide whether they become lasting parts of the product.

The first experiment KISSmetrics unveiled today is a visualization feature that customers can use to view data on how their users interact with their site, web apps, and mobile products. The new experiment expands on its so-called “People Views,” which Jason first covered last year, that essentially allow site administrators to drill down into the way that individual users are browsing and using their sites.

Despite the promise brought by the latest round of successful IPOs and rallying public markets, the news continues to be filled with headlines around the possibility of a “false recovery.” Europe’s continent-wide recession and expanding debt issues, rising oil and gasoline prices, an only-modest improvement in the unemployment rate, and the “moderate” growth predicted by the Fed continue to leave people feeling uneasy about the state of the economy. With the underlying and systemic issues still present in the financial sector, some even believe that we could see something akin to the recession of 2008 happen all over again.

But there is one segment that remains very bullish about the future of the economy and where signs of improved growth and economic stability can be found. This “hope” for our economy is in the entrepreneurs who start small businesses — the innovators and dreamers who believe that against all odds they can build something better — create something from nothing, and drive change in the world.

In middle school, my teacher assigned a book by Mario Puzo called “The Godfather.” Yes, it was pretty epic. From that work of art, mass audiences were introduced to Don Corleone and eventually its derivatives Goodfellas, Bugsy, Capone, Casino, Heat, The Departed, and scores of other pieces that romanticized the notion of organized crime across the globe, a world of big bosses, willing soldiers, and internal codes of helping out each other, from family to family.

Silicon Valley is its own best friend when it comes to booking sales. The first dollar in the door for most startups comes from another startup. That’s because startups are always seeking a competitive edge, they can make purchasing decisions fast and are willing to accept the risk of buying from another small company. It works great for most companies in most tech verticals most of the time.

But it also induces market myopia. Selling solutions only to startups slows your growth by limiting your addressable market. That may not seem like a problem if you’ve got customers like Zynga, but even the most amazing and fast-growing startups have but a fraction of the budget of big established corporations outside of Silicon Valley.

200 million connected TV devices will cumulatively ship in the next 18 months, and combined with Xbox (23 million+ Live customers), PS3, Wii, and devices like Apple TV and Roku, about 300 million Connected TVs will be in living rooms in the next 18 months. That’s as many TVs connected to the Internet as Android devices in the market today.

In other words, the Connected TV ecosystem today is in a similar place to the Android ecosystem in mid-2010. Players like Netflix have already built billion-dollar businesses on Connected TV – Nielsen found that over 85% of Netflix streaming customers use Netflix on their living room TV.

Computers have been getting steadily “better” — faster, smaller, cheaper — for sixty years. But they get “smarter” — more capable and more broadly useful — in discrete leaps, the biggest of which don’t happen very often. We’re overdue for our next big leap.

Working with computers is intoxicating. The price/performance curve is always moving to the right. Every year one can do more: Design new user experiences, write new kinds of programs, and develop new hardware. In this context of constant change, it’s easy to focus on the trees rather than the forest. Good engineering is often about incremental improvement. Good business is often about finding product/market fit, while good design is often about giving users an interface that is easy to understand.

Welcome to 1889. The field of photography was just changed forever. Up until recently, the process of taking and developing photos was expensive and cumbersome. As a result photography was available only to professional photographers or rich people.

Then, a guy named George Eastman comes up with a new way to take photos. He develops a special flexible, unbreakable, rolled film that allows people to take photos and then send the film to a factory where the photos can be developed and sent back to the customer’s house. Suddenly, photography becomes available to everyone. Kodak is born.