Apple is building a big, visually stunning store in the Stanford shopping center. A few hundred yards from the construction site sits a small, modest Apple location. Last spring, Microsoft opened a flagship spot right next to the small Apple store with a free Maroon 5 concert.

Whether for pure dollars and cents or for appearances (maybe both), Apple has been very aggressive in Palo Alto in the past couple of years. The company had a very nice store on University Avenue in downtown Palo Alto; in October 2012, they moved down the street to an even bigger, more prominent location. Now, this new store in the Stanford shopping center is supposed to become one of the company’s flagship stores.

We’re told that the company tests its retail products at the Stanford Shopping Center and University Avenue locations; when the company began offering self checkout, the engineers who worked on the project were in those stores testing the new systems. This new flagship location offers enormous space for testing new retail products, and makes the nearby Microsoft store an afterthought at best.

Ifo Apple Store reports that the ”store design was completed in 2011 by Apple’s long-time architectural firm Bohlin Cywinski Jackson. It was approved by Steve Jobs about six months before Tim Cook assumed the position of CEO in August of that year.”

The design for the store features a visually floating roof and gives passerby’s wide angles to see the storefront; a large stone wall will reportedly separate the front of the store from the back (Image via Palo Alto Online).

The Palo Alto Online reports that construction is happening seven days a week, usually beginning at 7 a.m. on the 12,000 square feet store. The Palo Alto Online also reported that while initial estimates had the store opening in November 2012, delays may be due to “the sensitive glass design of the building.”

Employees at the University Avenue Apple store told TechCrunch that they don’t know when the Stanford shopping center store will open; employees said that some of them were only given two weeks notice in October before they moved down the street to the new University Ave. location.

I checked out the construction myself, and the store is impressive. While it looks months away from an opening, it’s a massive space and the glass facade will be a striking architectural accomplishment that makes the store stand out even with impressive neighbors.

Less than two minutes after I started taking pictures of the construction, a security guard told me to stop, as taking pictures of any buildings or logos is ”against their policy.” Never change, Palo Alto.

Check out more photos of the construction below:

While most of the construction is hidden behind a large fence, you can see the massive glass panels and early work on the roof in these photos.

Here you can see the scope of the complex, with the glass section in front.

Images via Mary Orlin.

Yesterday, a CNET story that alleged that the NSA disclosed during a secret Capital Hill briefing that its analysts can listen to domestic phone calls “simply based on an analyst deciding that,” got a lot of play in the tech and political blogosphere. Today, however, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released a statement that denounces this story as “incorrect.”

The CNET story was based on a comment by Rep. Jerrold Nadler who, according to the reporter, was told by the NSA that ” the contents of a phone call could be accessed ‘simply based on an analyst deciding that.’” If true, the idea that an analyst’s hunch was sufficient to listen to domestic phone conversations would have been quite a bombshell.

According to ODNI, “the statement that a single analyst can eavesdrop on domestic communications without proper legal authorization is incorrect and was not briefed to Congress.” ODNI states that members of Congress were only briefed about the implementations of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which ” targets foreigners located overseas for a valid foreign intelligence purpose.”

As ODNI stated before, this regulation can’t be used to target Americans. As many pundits have noted, however, the scope of these programs makes it likely that domestic calls and other communications will get caught up in the dragnet, too. The government also just needs a 51% confidence that the target of the surveillance is not American or a legal citizen.

Previously, the U.S.’s Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper, also argued that the recent revelations around the NSA’s PRISM program contained “numerous inaccuracies” and that PRISM couldn’t be used to mine data and ““intentionally target any U.S. citizen, or any other U.S. person.”

Since publishing the original story, CNET changed the headline of its post from  ”NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants” to “NSA spying flap extends to contents of U.S. phone calls” and attributed Rep. Nadler as the source of the main quote. The main gist of the story has remained the same.

Read full story for latest details.

Three of the most popular stocks this past week had one thing in common: they all recorded steep declines, making them hot bargains.

New York has unveiled legislation meant to regulate the 3D printing of guns. Here’s why it’s not going to do anything.

This week Brooklyn democrats introduced legislation that would make it illegal for any New Yorker who’s not a registered gunsmith to make a 3D-printed gun.

“If left unregulated, these would be weapons without histories–potentially no identifying marks or sales histories,” City Councilman Lew Fidler told the New York Daily News. “We wouldn’t even know these weapons exist, until they were fired.”

We’ve debated the ethics of 3D-printing guns before, so this isn’t really a new subject, especially for the “maker” community, which has generally addressed the gun-printing issue by distancing itself as much as possible from the hardcore, gun-printing evangelists like DEFCAD. Makerbot, for instance, which makes one of the more popular 3D printers, removed all gun designs listed on its site late last year.

But do we really need to create legislation for this? The idea of lunatics printing AK-47′s in their basement is terrifying, sure, but to my mind it’s pretty divorced from reality.

First, consider that to make a “Liberator” pistol, one of the more popular gun designs, you’d first need to invest between $1,500 and $8,000 in a 3D printer. Then, you’d have to make sure the plastic thing doesn’t fall apart. And lastly, you’d need to figure out a way for the gun to shoot more than one bullet–because the current design only allows for one shot.

Speculative media articles like “3D printing could make anyone a gun maker” make it sound like we’re on the brink of some 3D-printed gun revolution, where anyone could instantaneously just print out a gun capable of mass destruction. That’s just not true. 3D-printing guns is basically a non-issue at this point–even the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives doesn’t really care about it. Plus, let’s not forget the fact that it’s not totally illegal (and still pretty popular) to make zip guns and pipe guns, which have existed since the 1950s.

Even cops are skeptical that legislation like this could curb any sort of real, menacing threat.

“I don’t think it’s going to be that big of a problem, people making their own guns,” one former detective told The Epoch Times. “Why would you use a cheap gun when you can get a regular one on a black market?”

Good question.

Long load times, blank screens, and customer headaches are a recipe for demotion in Google’s search rankings, warn two engineers. Here’s how to fix it.

Small business owners, beware: If your site isn’t mobile friendly or creates a headache for smartphone users, Google will punish you.

Yoshikiyo Kato, a software engineer, and Pierre Far, a Webmaster Trends Analyst, announced Tuesday Google will start demoting websites who don’t fix their problems. Google also made a jab at Adobe Flash, reminding site developers that neither iPhone nor Android–with version 4.1 or higher–host its content. Matt Cutts, head of search spam, said Google is in the process of readying a speed ranking factor for mobile.

Fortunately, Google pointed out two areas where you might be going wrong: faulty redirects–i.e., when a page redirects users to the same mobile site–and mobile-only errors, which are often blank screens.

The hope is to make the mobile web a better place, which is what Google wanted all along.

These days, mobile is where every company wants to be, with users accounting for one-fifth of all web traffic. In fact, a Google-Nielsen study found 73 percent of mobile searches “trigger follow-up actions, whether it be further research, a store visit, a phone call, a purchase or word-of-mouth sharing.”

Because 45 percent of all mobile searches are goal-oriented, having an efficient website encourages users to explore, which could result in a sale or registration.

Will you update your mobile site this weekend? Let us know in the comments.

Summer is just about here and the time is right for another episode of Cribs, the TechCrunch TV series that takes you inside the tech industry’s most buzz-worthy companies to see what it’s really like for the smarty pants people who work there.

This time we headed over to the San Francisco headquarters of Asana, the company that makes cloud-based task management and collaboration software. You might not think that building and selling enterprise technology products is a relaxed business, but Asana’s office really lived up to its zen name: The whole space had a very peaceful vibe, and yoga, nap and meditation rooms, and calming classical piano are all part of the daily scene to help Asana staffers stay centered (and keep shipping code.)

But amidst all the peace and love, we also came across a couple of elements of danger, mostly in the form of sharp objects — namely, knife-wielding quadcopter flying drones and oyster shucking blades. Deadly stuff, I tell you.

It’s all something that’s better seen than read about, so check it all out in the video embedded above.

Dramatic moves in Japanese bond and equities markets in recent days have raised questions about the long-term viability of the country’s ambitious economic recovery plan.

Yplan, the London-based startup that’s building a platform for selling last minute event-booking on mobile, has closed a $12 million (£7.9 million) Series A, led by General Catalyst Partners. Existing investors Wellington Partners and Octopus Investments also participated in the round, along with a swathe of co-investors including A-Grade, Kevin Colleran and David Morin’s SLOW Ventures Fund, and Shakil Khan, investor and advisor to Spotify and Summly.

YPlan has previously raised $1.7 million (£1.06 million) in seed funding, bringing its total funding to date to $13.7 million. The startup plans to use its new funding to fuel international expansion — with the second city (after London, where it launched in November last year) in its sights being New York. It plans to launch there during the second half of this year, and will then use New York as its North American base, as it looks to expand to other U.S. cities. London will remain as its European base as it looks to expand to other cities in the region, and also for a future push into Asia.

There’s no firm roadmap on which U.S. cities it’ll be tapping after New York but co-founder and CEO, Rytis Vitkauskas, tells TechCrunch that likely candidates include San Francisco, L.A., Boston, Chicago and Austin. “We’ll decide as we go along but the cities that we have in mind are the more densely populated cities with a lot of smartphones,” he tells TechCrunch. “And also with a good density of events… That’s the priority list.”

As for why New York specifically, it’s not hard to imagine why a social events app would settle on the Big Apple. Basically it’s got the right blend of time-strapped young smartphone owners who want to go out, coupled with a steady supply of events to go to, says Vitkauskas. ”New York is a large city, a lot of people but also a lot of our target audience — our core demographic is people between 20 and late 30s, that are typically starved for time, so they’re very busy. For them time is everything, and you also don’t always have time to plan for the last minute or their plans have changed at the last minute,” he says.

“On the other hand there’s a high density of events happening in New York every single day. Plus surrounding both of those is the fact that New York has a great going out culture. People are out four or five days in a week, just actively engaging with social activities and so YPlan essentially just plugs into all the existing trends.”

YPlan is mobile only, which plays to the serendipitous/spontaneous going out niche it’s targeting. It’s definitely not competing with the big web based ticketing platforms, says Vikauskas. The focus is firmly on personalised last minute recommendations for time-strapped folk — so it’s putting money into what he calls its “secret sauce”, aka its personalisation and recommendation engines.

YPlan users aren’t presented with huge lists of stuff to browse through — a model that doesn’t make sense on mobile — rather they are pushed “a carefully curated list of up to 15 events to go to every night”. YPlan is even writing the  snippet-sized descriptions itself, telling its users why such and such an event is a must attend for them. So really YPlan is acting as a personalised filter to flag up cool stuff so its users don’t have to go looking for it. Frankly it’s the sort of feature you could imagine Google adding to Google Now, or Apple to Siri.

Currently YPlan has some 200,000 active users in London, and claims that more than 10% of iPhone owners in the city carry the app (I must be one of the 90% that don’t then). Since launching in November last year it says it has featured more than 2,500 events on its platform.

The startup works directly with events organisers to get their events on its platform, meaning its headcount is already up to around 30 staff — which it says will probably expand to around 100 over the next year and a half. Its business model is based solely on taking a cut of any events booked through its platform — so it’s already booking revenue — with the aim being to keep the monetisation process simple and free of detracting clutter like ads, says Vitkauskas.

Asked what attracted its VC backers to the YPlan model, he says it’s not so much the idea but the execution, with the company having managed to achieve decent traction in the half year or so its app has been in the market.

“The idea of YPlan is not new necessarily. Brent Hoberman and Martha Lane Fox started Lastminute.com with exactly this vision in mind — and what Brent saw, he’s also an adviser to Yplan, and when he saw our prototypes first he said this is what Lastminute.com was meant to be but we were there 14 years too early. And now the time has come. Now the mobile Internet’s fast enough, smartphones are smart enough and GPS technology is up to speed enough and consumers are ready to transact through the phone and they weren’t ready to transact just a couple of years ago,” says Vitkauskas. “Likewise the event organisers are now ready to embrace the developments in technology.”

YPlan is currently on iPhone only, with plans to launch an Android app “later in the summer”. It’s also going to make a dedicated iPad app, tailoring the experience to fit the different use-case of the tablet device. Vikauskas adds that it will also look at whether to launch apps n other mobile platforms down the line.

Read full story for latest details.