People put a lot of thought and work into having a universal login for the web, whether it’s from a single provider or something more decentralized like OpenID. But we don’t just authenticate ourselves on websites — we also buy things with credit cards, use tickets to get into events, and keys to unlock doors. An ambitious startup named Enole is trying to bring the spirit of OpenID to the mobile environment, by creating a proximity-based platform that developers can build on to get devices to carry their owner’s identity. (The company doesn’t actually have a relationship with OpenID, but it seems like a helpful comparison.)

Enole co-founder Kurt Collins

Enole’s “universal sign-on for the world” API has been live since December, and the first implementations are coming out now. Co-founder Kurt Collins came by our office yesterday and showed me a few examples: In one called Viploc, a Mac is set to lock itself when it’s not in Bluetooth range of its owner’s mobile phone. So when the phone is not present (or its Bluetooth is turned off), the computer logs out of its current session. In another demo, an iPad app called ZapCash, users can send each other money when they are in proximity of each other. This will also work with near-field communications (NFC) chips as they’re rolled out to more phones.

Collins said he is also working on projects with the antivirus provider AVG for a security product, with Hasbro and Disney on a social media campaign around Mr. Potato Head, with a physical retailer on personalized recommendations and services, and with a music vendor on ticketing for a festival. The company currently powers authentication for the dating site Pickv, whose CEO Christina Brodbeck is an angel investor in Enole.

Rather than requiring a mobile app to be installed, Enole uses a unique identifier associated with a phone, such as a Bluetooth ID or MAC address. The company offers developers a REST-based API for identity and authentication using secure sockets layer encrypted transport and public key infrastructure (PKI). And to ensure reliability, Enole has also developed a way to use DNS to authenticate a user’s token should its servers be down.

Enole is jointly based in San Francisco and New York, with six employees who have backgrounds at companies such as Photobucket, Protocall and Clearspring. Advisors include Brodbeck, who was an early employee at YouTube, Jake Fuentes, who leads product development at Visa, and Erick Tseng, head of mobile at Facebook.

Mobile authentication will be a hard problem for a little guy to solve, and the biggies are giving it a hard look as well. (Indeed, Verizon has announced plans to offer “identity as a service.”) But at least it’s a good problem to solve.

For more on NFC and related topics, see my recent GigaOM Pro piece (sub req’d): A Mobile Payments Glossary

Back in January, a healthy comment discussion followed a post in which we looked at the topic of "spec work," or freelance work done for a client before an agreement of compensation is formed. One of the most vocal opponents to spec work is Andrew Hyde of TechStars and StartupWeekend fame, whose blunt opinions sparked a debate over how a marketplace for freelance work should properly function. Today, Hyde and a few friends are launching Pick, a marketplace and directory that connects clients with freelancers. Sponsor

Freelancers in fields like design, development, photography, copywriting, marketing and management can sign into Pick and create a profile to share their portfolio and contact information. More importantly, however, Pick asks freelancers to list their work availability and a price range. This allows clients to narrow their search to find freelancers in the specialty they need based on location, availability and price.

"The [freelance] process is a mess. There are a ton of freelancer sites out there, but freelancers never promote them because they largely exploit the community. I thought there had to be a better way," Hyde told ReadWriteWeb. "I wrote my solution and said someone should build it, and nobody did, so here we are."

Through the creation of Pick and the growth of its community, Hyde hopes to put a dent in other marketplaces which he says are providing platforms for what he calls "exploitsourcing." With a 2008 post titled "Spec Work Is Evil / Why I Hate CrowdSpring," and in 2009's "An Open Letter to 99designs," Hyde has become a leading voice in the movement against spec work and the services he believes promote it.

"It is a major ethical flaw of both parties," said Hyde of spec work in 2008. "Some designers I have talked to have escalated this lack of ethics to be on par with some very serious crimes, while other see it as dumping oil down a rain drain. A lot of people don't take this lightly at all."

On the bright side of the negativity surrounding spec work, Hyde has channeled his passion against the practice into a new place for clients and freelancers to meet without the worry of exploitation. For startups that need design, copywriting or other freelance services, Pick could soon become an excellent alternative to the more common marketplaces.

Having just launched, the service is a bit of a ghost town and is currently invite-only, but Hyde hopes to see around 1,000 users by week's end. Freelancers can request an invite and clients can currently visit the site and browse the available profiles. Discuss

In the last few months several startups have asked me how to approach corporate blogging. Judging by the frequency of requests, Gartner was right in suggesting that corporate blogging is rising up the "slope of enlightenment" and about 2 years away from widespread mainstream adoption. The road to enlightenment has been a long one. In the past ten years we've learned that company blogs should not be press releases, sales pitches or plagiarized quotes from Dale Carnegie. You reach enlightenment when you learn to respect your readers. If you want someone to bookmark or retweet your posts, then give them a useful resource. Below are a few approaches you can take to increase the dialogue and comments on your blog. Sponsor

1. The Operations Blog: Many company blogs focus on the internal workings of the startup and how teams have managed to increase efficiencies. For example, marketing teams have dissected their efforts, COO's have talked about their transition to cloud services and HR teams write about their employee wellness plans. Sometimes your story along with links to useful vendors is a great resource for others.

2. The Veteran / Inspirational Blog: This type of post is best suited to the second time entrepreneur, agency founder or well-established investor. It often offers stories about the climb to a position of power as well as some of the lessons learned along the way. If you're attempting this approach you should already be in a position of mentorship for others. You want people linking to your article in the hopes that they're revisiting it as a point of inspiration.

3. The Prediction Blog: Both the iPad and Google Buzz have been huge news stories in the last few days. Your little corporate blog isn't likely to outshine the stories from major tech blogs and media outlets, but you can provide some relevant predictions for your specific industry. For example, if you're a consumer facing web startup with a real estate focus, you could highlight the use cases for Buzz and its geo-locational features.

4. The Research Blog: If your company deals with large amounts of anonymized data or your startup specializes in analysis or monitoring, then the research blog is a good way to aggregate your findings and pinpoint trends. The best way to write this post is to summarize key findings and make suggestions on how others might adapt. If you're not confident in your recommendations then you can ask for quotes from industry veterans. This method is often used by analysts and real-time monitoring startups.

5. The Community / Advocate Blog: This type of blog only really works if you have a large number of stakeholders who need your support and direction. Planet Mozilla is a great example of a resource that focuses on internal events; nevertheless, these internal events help thousands of open source developers contribute to Mozilla projects. If you've got lots of 3rd party developers, designers or contributors, this may be a good option for you.

6. The Coolhunter Blog: This blog is perhaps the toughest one to pull off because not only do you have to be confident in your ability to spot emerging trends, but you also have to make sure that the trends are relevant to your community. On-demand manufacturing site Ponoko does a great job of showcasing design while inspiring community members to build their own pieces. Discuss

Anyone who has been using Facebook for a few years knows that even minor changes to an interface design can cause a wide variety of reactions from a loyal user base. When the popular social network has made design tweaks in the past, there is always some portion of their users that are upset, if not enraged, by the changes made. A couple of weeks ago, we told you how your registration process could be driving potential users away, and a large part of that has to do with the design. Sponsor

These days, the look and feel of a website or product is just as important as the features that it provides. One product with one of the hottest new interfaces available is the new Boxee Beta software which allows for streamlined local and Web media viewing. Whitney Hess is the user experience (UX) designer behind the framework of the Boxee interface, and recently on her blog Pleasure and Pain she described the systematic process she went through to design it.

When Boxee hired Hess to overhaul their UX, she began by interviewing eleven people, some of which were current users of the software, and others who weren't. She asked them a variety of questions about their use of multimedia, including "Have you ever played music at a party you were hosting?" and "Have you ever displayed your photos on your TV?" among several others. Hess then held usability tests with five participants and gauged how they navigated around the software when asked to complete a series of tasks.

From this process, Hess was able to uncover what current users needed to make their experience better while at the same time discovering what potential users would find attractive. Her work led to the inclusion of several UX features and her wireframe submissions certainly influenced the final UI's look and feel. The screenshot below demonstrates how the final design compared to her wireframe shown above.

"Overall, we wanted to provide users with greater ability to discover content across sources, easier ways to sort and filter lists, and quick access to their favorite programming," writes Hess on her blog.

Boxee's set-top product, aptly named the Boxee Box, was one of the most popular new products at this year's Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month. One of its most distinguishing characteristics is its beautiful interface design, which was raved about by reviewers on blogs and in the press. The design owes its positive reception to the framework it sits on, a product of Hess's systematic approach to the redesign. Discuss

Just because your college roommate won the university's engineering award in 1996, does not mean he'll perform well in a VP role now. Early-stage startup teams come in many forms and while it's nice to showcase those founders who began with personal ties, more often than not, these teams fail. Speaking as a recent panel participant at the Girls in Tech Conference, Y Combinator cofounder Jessica Livingston revealed that early-stage companies tend to list recruitment as one of their toughest issues. Sponsor

Said Livingston, "Above all else, never hire a B player - B players hire C players and then you find yourself with a mediocre team. My best advice is to always hire someone more competent than yourself."

Echoing Livingston's sentiment, Fast Ignite CEO Simeon Simeonov wrote an excellent guest post for Venture Hacks entitled, When to Fire Your Co-Founders. Simeonov argues that weak teams get built when founders fail to anticipate a pivot from the original business plan or model and when they do not spend the time expanding their recruiting network. He offers ten rules for building agile founding teams including using your investor network to recruit, setting clear expectations and agreements and my personal favorite, "[hiring] generalists early and specialists later."

We've all seen the early-stage company with one great founder / generalist and an entourage of childhood friends who are ill-equipped to help with anything beyond their lackluster specialities. As Simeonov points out, VC's just think, "Shoot, this is a backable entrepreneur and the idea may have legs but the two other founders are B players and a poor fit for the company at this point...Frustrating... this could have been a good seed deal. Now it's too complicated. I'll pass using some polite non-reason."

You can't afford to miss out on funding because your uncle fancies himself a salesman or your cousin lent you money and thinks he can dictate your operations. In addition to today's Venture Hacks post, ReadWriteWeb's articles on hiring an A team andhiring for the company's life cycle will help you get the info you need to make the right recruitment decisions. Discuss

Our startup-minded readers may remember Mike Trotzke, our good friend who, with a little help from his good friends Marc Guyer and Brad Wisler, founded a startup incubator called SproutBox earlier this year.

One of the latest sprouts to emerge from the box is Squad, Trotzke's gift to developers everywhere - and we mean everywhere! This web-based environment allows distributed teams to collaborate in real time, opening, editing and sharing code from anywhere with an Internet connection. Sponsor

It's also beautifully portable — meaning you can work on projects from any location, whether it's your home computer, your laptop, your mom's vaccum tube-era model — any device with a browser can be your portal.

And because it's collaborative, it's great for conducting code reviews or paired programming. And it's a perfect platform for noobs and the poor suckers who have to train them. It's even got a built in chat module so you can discuss changes as they're made.

Parts of this app dimly reminded us of Lowdown, a plain-text collaboration tool for developers to communicate to designers and managers, and even more so of How's My Code, a resource for distributed teams to conduct code reviews and keep all the coders for a project on the same page. But those apps were relatively lightweight contraptions slapped together for the Rails Rumble a couple months ago. Trotzke offers a product of a different caliber altogether.

He wrote to us, "It has a unique approach to realtime interaction that even non-developer types would find interest in.

"Users follow each others actions (tab switching, scrolling, etc.) and then see each character they type. You kind of need to try it out to get the feel, but it's pretty sexy for instructional or code review use cases."

Sounds sexy indeed! Like a developers-only, less-crowded, actually useful version of Google Wave.

Check out the screenshots:

Pricing is competitive and ranges from free to $40 per month for teams of up to 5 users, with additional user support available for $7 per user per month. And the first month is free for everyone on a trial basis.

Squad supports a variety of languages, including HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, Python, SPARQL, Lua and XML. Squad works great as an HTML editor, a PHP editor or a plain text editor.

The startup also plans to add a Ruby syntax mode, enhanced search and replace functions; an offline sharing mode; a show/hide feature on the collaboration panel; and project handling functions.

It looks like a great, exciting product, and we look forward to reading users' reviews and seeing what else Trotzke and the Squad team come up with. Discuss

Few companies put as much effort into customer service as they do into member acquisition. However, in order to retain members, community-driven startups need to be conscious of the entire customer experience. No stranger to support techniques, Zendesk CEO Mikkel Svanne spends most of his time perfecting the end-user experience for his clients. Best known for its web-based help desk services, Zendesk launched in 2008 and even then ReadWriteWeb gave the company a favorable review. In 2009, Zendesk continues to establish itself as a great alternative to the traditional call center experience. Svanne offers some helpful tips for our ReadWriteStart readers. Sponsor

Says Svanne, "The good news for businesses starting out today is that the web offers a whole host of easy, affordable tools that can help to ensure businesses have a meaningful dialogue [with their customers]." Some of those tools include:

1. Web-hosted Solutions: Rather than investing in an in-house legacy customer support service, Svanne advises startups to consider a web-based help desk product to eliminate any headaches associated with security, scalability, and ongoing maintenance. Says Svanne, "Keep the human touch in-house but outsource the infrastructure." In addition to Zendesk, companies can look at services like Openbravo for web-based support.

2. Crowdsource Solutions: In addition to a Frequently Asked Questions page, consider incorporating a discussion forum or dialogue tool into your website. These tools allow customers with questions to interact with your best advocates. In addition to Zendesk's forum tool, companies can also look to Get Satisfaction, FixYa or Lefora for help.

3. Social Media: When your customers or ex-customers are going to complain about your company, they'll often do it via Twitter or Facebook. Take advantage of these tools and use them to keep a positive conversation going. Having a dedicated staff person that interacts with customers to answer their urgent questions on Twitter shows how responsive and committed a company is to its customers. Discuss

Think twice about that huge font and those glassy icons: Look and feel is the first thing we see and notice about most web apps and is often critical to an app's user experience, adoption, and ultimate success.

We chatted with a panel of expert aesthetes in the space, including Spymaster designer Eston Bond, veteran creative director Rich Barrett, designer/developer Warren Benedetto, Mike Rundle of 9rules and Beak fame, and the Paul du Coudray Lowdown, the winner of this year's Rails Rumble appearance category. Here's what they had to say about developers doing double duty as designers, trends they'd like to see disappear, and how aesthetics can help a startup sink or swim. Sponsor

Is a web app's look and feel critical to its overall success or failure?

"As a designer, I'd love to say it's the most important element," said Benedetto. "Unfortunately, my experience is that the look and feel is often inessential, to the point of being irrelevant. Some of the most successful things I have worked on, in terms of traffic and conversions, have been successful almost in spite of the design, rather than because of the design.

"If you have a great app that is easy and intuitive to use, it doesn't really matter what it looks like (e.g., Craigslist, Del.icio.us, Google, 37signals' products, the original Twitter design, even Amazon and eBay). By the same token, a great-looking app with poor usability will generally not fly very far. Quality trumps aesthetics every time."

"Execution is everything... and presentation is most likely half of that," said du Coudray. "I used to downplay the role of visual identity in the overall success of an application. It wasn't until I started to design directly within applications that I could respect the balance between designer, architect, and builder, and be able to tell when something was essential (or not), or supportive of core objectives."

For certain apps, said Bond, design is everything. "When I was working on the initial specifications for Spymaster, for example, aesthetics really mattered. In an escapist fantasy, one needs to have the world feel completely immersive, as close to the edge of reality as possible... In entertainment cases you have to pay attention to look and feel to a deeper degree than you do a corporate or heavily-functional application such as Google. One doesn't really care what the Google box looks like as long as you get your search results back as soon as possible." He went on to cite Craigslist as another "ugly" site that does well based on its content rather than its aesthetic.

Another perspective is Rundle's contention. "A web application's overall look and feel plays a very critical role mainly through two main factors: early adopters love beautifully-designed applications and that gets them talking. Secondly, ease of use and quality interface design go hand in hand to attract new customers and users. If the interface is not intuitive then they'll be frustrated and give up (and tell all their friends.)"

A similar sentiment was Barrett's opinion. "There are rare cases where an app's mind-blowing functionality can override any other concerns but otherwise users tend to make a decision about an application's usefulness to them within the first few moments of using it. Aesthetics play a major part in that decision."

The landing page for Bond's viral, social game, Spymaster.

What web design trends have surfaced and dominated in 2009?

"Huge typography seems to be popular this year," said Benedetto. "Usually, that goes hand-in-hand with some ultra-casual copywriting. 'Hi. We're Vacuums.com. We make things that suck. Kind of like your life.' Stuff like that. Google Chrome crashes, and the error screen says, 'Aw, snap.' There's a very nudge-nudge-wink-wink sensibility. It can be friendly, fresh, and funny when done well, but often it just comes across as cliché."

Barrett said he's seen apps become smaller, simpler, and more streamlined - perhaps to be more mobile browser-friendly. "Simplicity is key so that the design can either work on both web and mobile devices or at least be consistent with the simple design of the mobile version."

Rundle noted the benefits of designing for the newer class of Internet browsers. "Although a large portion of audiences still use Internet Explorer, especially in corporate environments, designers aren't afraid to provide Safari, Firefox, and Opera users an enhanced design through the usage of CSS-based rounded corners, shadowed text, CSS gradients, box shadows, etc. I think giving savvy users a nicer design is a good idea and is also rewarding to web designers sick of dealing with all of IE's hassles."

Du Coudray had a few interesting words on the use of what he called "faux" elements. "With the risk of being quoted out-of-context saying, 'Grunge is dead,' I think that this particular trend has found its proper place. Intrinsic beauty in elements usually trumps any trends over time. That is to say, plastic will not try and be wood forever, but will eventually be used in ways which we find plastic beautiful. Maybe pixels will be the same - Who knows?"

A ring-designing app Barrett created for DeBeers.

What elements of web app design should disappear forever?

"Anything that was good about most trends has been suffocated by the mind-numbing sameness of them all," Benedetto summarized. That being said, he still sees value in the GetSatisfaction-style side tab, Digg-esque voting elements, and elegantly designed footers.

"The concept that enterprise software can't be elegant and beautiful needs to disappear forever," said Rundle. "Mailchimp and Ballpark are great examples of smaller SaaS companies with world-class interface design, and the folks designing enterprise software would be wise to learn from their examples."

Barrett spoke to the tendency to flood users with options rather than making decisive design choices. "I think a lot of apps try to be everything to everyone so they overload their interface with features to try to be as useful as possible. I appreciate clean and simple applications, even if it means that you have to direct the user more and limit their choices."

The all-Flash site is another annoyance among many web users and designers, Bond among them. "I'd love to see the 100% Flash site extinct as soon as possible," he said. "In the majority of cases where I've seen sites that are super Flash heavy, it's completely unnecessary. As mobile browsers begin to utilise more advanced rendering engines and mobile usage increases as a way to view the 'real' Internet (I'm looking at you, iPhone), Flash is becoming resource-intensive and restrictive."

An animated section of Vimeo.com.

What design elements are simply overused, and are there still good reasons to employ them?

"The 'Rails' aesthetic," said Bond, "that classic 37signals app look... I've worked on a lot of Rails-based applications over the past year and I had one Flickr engineer tell me at a party, 'Hey, good job on making it look like it's not Rails, if you know what I mean.' That shouldn't happen. That's definitely the sign of a hackneyed aesthetic."

Benedetto echoes the same sentiment. While he claims to have mad respect for the 37signals folks, he also says he's weary of what he calls "The Cult of Basecamp" design aesthetic. He also has noticed recent overuse of the grass-dirt-sky and retro-wood-paneling looks.

And seconding Benedetto's comments on huge type, Rundle said, "People aren't blind; you don't need 72-pixel links in Helvetica Bold to attract attention."

The much-copied 37signals look, as seen at 37signals.com.

Do certain design elements signal to users - and investors and media - the scope, uses, and meaning of an application?

"I think when Web 2.0 first exploded, that was definitely the case for the media," said Benedetto. "'Oh, it has a shiny, plastic logo? And a reflection? A badge? AND IT'S IN BETA?!? Eureka! We found the next Google!'"

These days, he said, some signals still apply. "I think that the prevalence of Basecamp clones in the world of small business apps communicates a certain ethic of simplicity and elegance to users. That may or may not actually be the case once you start using the app, but there's definitely a signal in the design choices that says, 'This is going to be easy to use.'"

Rundle also feels that design will always send signals about meaning. "Web design takes cues from all forms of graphic design, especially logo and branding work where colors are extremely important. Blue hues indicate stability (large companies love blue: IBM, Ford, IKEA, etc.), and green means responsible and eco-friendly."

Sometimes, the most important design elements for usability are icons. "The character and tenor of the icons you use can immediately telegraph the nature of the application, who it is aimed at and how sophisticated it is meant to be," said Barrett.

Still, ultimately, said Bond, "No one element is going to be the key of successfully translating your application idea into something an investor or userbase will understand; instead, it's the PRODUCT design - the interplay of aesthetics and copy, interface complexity and perceived latency, core product concepts and functionality, everything intangible that defies any better description we file away under 'user experience,' that really can signal an application's purpose."

Lowdown's landing page.

What's good advice for the team developing and designing The Next Big Web App?

Noting that many developers are also doing graphic design for their applications, Barrett said, "One of the telling differences between an application design that is handled by a designer and one that is handled more by a development team is spacing. Developers don't usually think much about how element should sit on a screen together, so you see a lot of items crammed together or unevenly distributed. This is the kind of thing an average user can't put their finger on, but on a subconscious level, it bothers them and gives them a negative opinion of the application."

Bond cautions teams to always develop and design with the end user in mind. "Especially in Silicon Valley, where it's easy for entrepreneurs to isolate themselves in circles with like-minded techies and fellow entrepreneurs, I feel that a huge amount of startup CEOs and designers that I've talked to fall into the trap of tunnel vision: they have a grandiose idea of building a web application for the mainstream demographic but consistently make product decisions that appeal to their own interaction behaviour with such applications or what they think their friends will find cool. A lot of times this tunnel vision isn't even evident to them because their local frame of reference supports it. Building for geeks makes for great customer immersion if you're building something like (the wonderfully useful) GitHub, but that same process doesn't work so hot if you're building a site for middle-aged moms."

Rundle echoed this sentiment, saying, "The concept of thinking like a user is extremely important. You just have to understand what they're trying to accomplish and then match your design with those goals. Task-based design is especially important in web application design because people use your software to get things done, not to browse around and waste time. Simple things like having the most important function on a page be visually set off from everything else is a start. Grouping similar features together for enhanced comprehension. Being consistent with your interface design paradigms to breed familiarity."

"Know why you are building something and never shift your attention from that purpose," said du Coudray. "If there is not a central design problem to solve, the project will quickly dissolve into a series of individual problems with individual outcomes that are more related to the checking off of tasks then to a total solution."

"If your expertise is development, not design, acknowledge that fact," Benedetto cautioned. Most developers are smart enough to do html, css, and javascript ... so they do. But just knowing how to do it doesn't mean you're good at it. Design is communication, not decoration. Hire someone who understands that. How it looks can be a big factor in how it works. Use design as a means of communicating to your users what to do, where to click, and how to use your app."

The playfully illustrated landing page Silverback, usability-testing software for web designers and develoeprs.

Bonus round! What are your favorite colors and fonts for web design?

Barrett, who cites a theme of simplicity lately, loves strong, bold colors and Helvetica.

Benedetto swears by basic black (classy!), and as for fonts, he said, "Bliss, Swiss, and Fago are all nice clean fonts that aren't Helvetica."

Rundle cites his perennial fondness for steel blue, Lucida Grande, and Myriad.

Bond has been playing with desaturated palettes and a reddish pink, and says his favorite typefaces include House Industries' Chalet and BP Foundry's SangBleu. Discuss

Start-ups are always short on time. Here are some tools that might avoid you reinventing the wheel and save you some valuable time. Tools can include products, frameworks etc. Often we (Songkick) have found that the most useful tools, are introduced to us by other start-ups. This wiki is an attempt to collect some of that knowledge and experience in one place so that companies getting started on new problems have a useful reference. With each tool, we've added a list of start-ups known to be using that tool, so there's a sense of how well tested they are by the community. If no start-up can vouch for the tool it doesn't make it onto the list. This list is maintained by Ian at Songkick but will be a lot better for your additions!