Microsoft’s forthcoming Xbox One console is the company’s vision for living room entertainment for the next half decade. Today at GigaOm’s Roadmap conference in San Francisco, Carl Ledbetter, who led the industrial design of the console, discussed how it came to fruition.

The design of the new console, according to Ledbetter, employs a resin molding technique that makes its appearance more similar to high-end televisions. This is a small point, but one that matters: Microsoft has taken hits from Sony that its console is less game focused than the PlayStation. Perhaps that’s fair. Recall that the Xbox 360 suffered from manufacturing defects at launch that led to the infamous Red Ring of Death. Presumably, we aren’t going to see a repeat of that, but it underscores how badly launches can go.

And as Microsoft increasingly points its console at the broader media market, it also breaks out of the young male-dominated gaming segment. Put another way, according to Ledbetter, 40 percent of Xbox’s users are women. That led to the changes in the Xbox One design. The controller was a simple pain point: It needed to accept more hand sizes. Ledbetter claims that they built nearly 200 models before they settled on one.

The final component Ledbetter hit on was voice. (I presume you are familiar with Xbox Music and don’t need me to walk you down that specific alley.) It’s easy to forget that Microsoft is, through the Xbox One and new Kinect sensor, bringing the first quality voice-control to Windows. The Xbox One, as you know, leans on the shared Windows core as part of its three operating systems.

Microsoft is betting half its new business model on selling hardware. If it can’t build strong devices, the company is about 50 cents short of a buck. The feel of the talk was that Microsoft is confident in its hardware package. In 17 days, we’ll start filling out its report card.

Top Image Credit: Flickr

IPO season is in full swing, with RingCentral, Chegg, FireEye, Veeva Systems and Zulily representing just a few of the names to file or begin trading in recent weeks. Of course, the main attraction this season is Twitter and its long-awaited public offering, which finally rolls into town November 6th.

Twitter isn’t the only company joining the list at the New York Stock Exchange tomorrow, however. Israeli-American website creation platform, Wix, will also be vying for its share of media attention tomorrow, as the company announced this afternoon that it will be setting its opening price at $16.50 per share – the high end of its expected $14.50 to $16.50 price range.

Trading on the NYSE under the ticker symbol “WIX,” the website creator says that it will offer 7.7 million ordinary shares as part of its public offering, with selling stockholders offering 1.9 million of those 7.7 million shares. After filing its initial paperwork back in May, Wix revealed last week that it planned to raise $119 million by offering 7.7 million shares at a price between $14.50 and $16.50.

However, the company’s final filing before tomorrow’s debut shows that it was able to raise slightly more than the expected $119 million figure, with the final total coming in at $127 million. With Wix pricing its IPO on the higher end of its expected price per share range and raising slightly more than its initial target, the company will likely see its valuation boost as a result.

Considering the valuation was pegged at $720 million prior to today’s announcement, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to see that figure fall somewhere in the $750 to $800 million range. All in all, it’s a great finish to the pre-IPO process for the company, especially amidst all the hoopla surrounding its fellow IPO candidate, Twitter.

Founded in 2006, Wix set out to do for website creation what WordPress, Blogger (and later Tumblr) did for blogging and content creation beginning in the early 2000s. Riding the growing demand for “DIY”-style web design and publishing tools, and capitalizing on the maturation of web-based technologies, Wix has since become one of the largest website creation platforms on the Web.

Having raised $60 million from a laundry list of investors, as of this month, Wix employs over 400 people around the globe and is now available in over 190 countries. Today, the company boasts over 37 million registered users and continues to see strong growth in its user base, with its latest filing revealing a growth rate of 34,000 new registered users/day.

According to that same filing, Wix reported a net loss of $12 million in 2012 on revenues of $44 million, with losses and revenue growing to $18 million and $56 million, respectively, over the first nine months of 2013. On the bright side, Wix said in its October filing that it had “achieved 14 consecutive quarters of sequential growth in the accumulated number of premium subscriptions … and 14 consecutive quarters of growth in revenues in collections.”

Breaking that down, this means that Wix generated $9.9 million in revenue in 2010, which increased to $24.6 million in 2011 and $43.7 million in 2012, while collections started at $13.8 million and grew to $29.6 million in 2011 and $52.5 million in 2012, respectively. In turn, Wix generated $34.1 million in revenue during the six months ended June 3rd, 2013, with its revenue increasing to $56 million during the following three months.

While the media attention and scale of Wix’s IPO tomorrow will pale in comparison to that of Twitter, Wix represents the latest in a growing list of successful exits and outcomes for Israeli-borne technology companies. According to Forbes, Wix will be the “largest U.S. IPO by an Israeli company since SodaStream International’s debut in 2010″ and follows Google’s blockbuster acquisition of Waze earlier this year.

Israel’s startup ecosystem has continued to grow in stature thanks to the recent flurry of activity, which hasn’t been lost on the growing number of investors in the U.S. that are now pouring money into Israeli-borne startups. Wix, to that point, will only add more fuel to the fire, and its public offering tomorrow stands to make its investors – which include Bessemer Venture Partners, Mangrove Capital Partners, Benchmark, Insight Venture Partners and DAG Ventures – more than a few pennies.

For that reason, Twitter or no Twitter, there will still be more than a few eyeballs on the website creator’s public debut tomorrow morning. If the IPO goes well, Wix could open the door for a growing roster of Israeli companies looking to hit the public markets in the U.S.

For more, find Wix’s announcement here.

We in the tech press are great at covering what it’s like to be a startup founder. But the world does not live by entrepreneurs alone.

One big reason that companies are so keen to tout venture capital fundraising is because the new money enables them to hire more staff – the people who build stuff, who really make the tech industry tick. Ideally, that flashy funding can help them attract some of the industry’s most kick-ass backend engineers, product managers, the UX designers. The top-tier tech people who are on the receiving end of the whole “hiring craze” everyone seems to be talking about.

What do those people actually do? Who are they? It’s something that TechCrunch doesn’t often talk about. But we should.

And that’s why I’m happy to introduce Inside Jobs, a new TechCrunch TV series that covers the work lives of the people who make this whole crazy world go ’round.

For our premeire episode of Inside Jobs, we’re so happy to have Jon Jenkins, who is the Director of Engineering at a little web property you might have heard of called Pinterest. Despite its massive reach (and massive funding), Pinterest is still in many ways a startup at heart, with an engineering team that clearly punches above its weight when compared to other big web names that have engineering teams many times its size.

Jenkins joining Pinterest was one of those hiring coups that was covered by many tech reporters – yours truly included – so it was a big pleasure to have him give us a glimpse into what exactly he does every day, and the challenges and perks that come with his gig.

Credits for Inside Jobs go to producer and production coordinator Felicia Williams, and producer, shooter and editor John Murillo.

Provo, Utah-based video discovery startup i.TV has acquired GetGlue, we’ve learned, as consolidation in the market for second-screen or companion TV apps continues. The acquisition, which is expected to be announced soon, marks a bit of an inglorious exit for GetGlue, which had raised $24 million since being founded and had an earlier deal worth $70 million fall through earlier this year.

GetGlue, of course, was one of the early social TV pioneers, promising to help drive mobile and tablet users to tune into more TV shows and get them more engaged with the content through its app. The idea was that people were already on their phones while they watched TV, so why not try to hook them on a new, TV-based social network?

Leveraging Foursquare-like check-ins to TV shows, the app helped users share what they were watching, hopefully driving others to watch that same thing as well. Later, as the hype around TV check-ins began to wane, GetGlue pivoted to be more of a TV discovery platform.

Last year, GetGlue had agree to be acquired by social TV competitor Viggle, a company buoyed by billionaire investor and chairman Robert Sillerman. But that deal hinged on Viggle being able to secure additional funding from outside investors, and when that funding failed to materialize, the deal was called off.

Since then, GetGlue has apparently continued shopping itself around. It’s also shuffled management while looking for a buyer – over the summer it brought on digital media veteran Evan Krauss as president, and sometime between then and now founder and CEO Alex Iskold stepped down. He still remains chairman of the company, but sources say he’s not involved in day-to-day operations.

You probably know less about i.TV, a company which has also been around for about five years, and was also founded with the hope of connecting mobile and tablet users with TV and streaming content they might find interesting.

After launching in 2008 to give video viewers with a mobile platform for finding and discovering interesting content, i.TV has been relatively quiet over the last several years. While it had launched a few version of an app that provided ways to browse and get more info about streaming video options, as well as a remote control to power navigating traditional TV offerings.

But behind the scenes, it seems to be working with various content providers – including Entertainment Weekly, as well as AOL-owned properties like Huffington Post TV and AOL TV – to power navigation and discovery of videos on their apps. A little more than a year ago, it got its biggest deal yet, as it powered video discovery for Nintendo’s WiiU (a device I don’t think anyone actually bought).

The company also has quietly raised some capital. In August, i.TV closed a $9.2 million round of funding, according to an SEC filing. But that funding isn’t going toward the purchase of GetGlue, as we’ve heard that the acquisition was an all-stock deal.

It’s not clear how the newly-funded i.TV will use the GetGlue assets, or who will end up joining the company – if anyone. But this isn’t the first bit of consolidation among social TV, second-screen, or TV check-in apps. In January, Dijit Media – the company behind the NextGuide TV discovery app – acquired the assets of social TV startup Miso.

Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act is one of the most controversial of an already hot-button portion of US law. Section 215 of the act allows for court orders, which can be made secret, to allow the government to collect data  that may be relevant to a government investigation.

The big exception most take to the section is that it provides a much lower threshold for data gathering than a ‘probable cause’ warrant. Under Section 215, the government could force companies like Apple, Google, Yahoo, Dropbox or any other to disclose personal data about Internet usage, browsing habits or other items that it considers ‘tangible things’. And, because of the security requirements, it could force companies not to disclose that they had ever received such requests.

Obviously, this falls under the wider scope of government information requests with regards to user data that Apple spoke out against today, and that other companies like Dropbox have also filed Amicus briefs with the Foreign Intelligence Service Act court about.

But another aspect of Apple’s report today stands out as a bold and clever move. Senior Counsel & Free Expression Director at Center for Democracy & Technology Kevin Bankston, formerly an EFF Attorney, noted an interesting claim in the document. Specifically, Apple stated specifically that it had never received a PATRIOT 215 order.

The very last line of Apple’s report today states “Apple has never received an order under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. We would expect to challenge such an order if served on us.”

The cleverness of this becomes evident when you realize that if it had received such an order, it could not disclose it under current rules surrounding national security orders for user data. This tactic of announcing ‘nothing’ with regards to a government subpoena for data is known as a kind of ‘warrant canary’. Basically, Apple says that at this point it has not received any such order. But, if that phrase stops appearing in future transparency reports, this acts as a ‘canary in a coal mine‘ that indicates to users that it may have been forced to comply with such an order and not disclose it in the future.

Civil Liberties attorney Matt Cagle notes that Lookout Security has also recently stated they’ve never received a national security order for user data.

This tactic was used by offsite backup company Rsync in what is believed to be the first commercial company application. While Apple’s specific application differs from that of an ISP or pure data provider, it shares the ‘silent alarm’ characteristics.

There are founders, and then there are founders. Dwight Merriman is a rare breed of founder. A serial entrepreneur who has helped co-found and lead companies such as DoubleClick, BusinessInsider, Gilt Groupe, and Panther Express. And, as if that weren’t enough, his latest endeavor could be just as big, if not bigger, than the ones before it.

Merriman is one of the main brains behind MongoDB and is a CEO of 10gen, focused on creating a new generation of database technology using NoSQL. The goal is to reinvent online databases, and the insights were derived from the technical challenges he faces while building and scaling a previous company. At DoubleClick, the site could never be down, and that was during a time when computers were slower, it was harder to find load balance, and there were daily challenges with processing, storing, and scaling data, so much so they had to write their own software to handle their specific problems.

It was in these trenches that Merriman had the insight for MongoDB. He asked, simply: “What did I wish I had while at DoubleClick?” A simple question, a simple answer, and a big, big company. The goal with 10gen at inception was to harness the power of the cloud for more efficiency, to scale horizontally, and to make operations easier for scale at development. We talk about all of this, plus how to hire sales teams vs building engineering teams, and what Merriman believes the true essence of entrepreneurship is.

If you’re a technical leader with ambition, there aren’t many people like Merriman to look up to – he’s well worth the time to listen closely to.

Editor’s Note: Michael Abbott is a general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, previously Twitter’s VP of Engineering, and a founder himself. Mike also writes a blog called uncapitalized. You can follow him on Twitter @mabb0tt.